Goodbye PC, hello Mac: Day 1

I got my first com­puter in 1979, the year the Cow­boys were robbed of Super­bowl 13 by crooked Steeler officials (no, of course I’m not still bitter). I started on an Atari 800, moved on to a TI-99/4A, and then joined the pas­sion­ate owners of an Amiga. It was during high school my par­ents got seri­ous and bought a used IBM PC. I have used a PC in some form ever since, my last being a mon­ster Dell XPS. But after enduring 23 years of application crashes, ill-​timed BSOD (that’s blue screen of death), non-​stop secu­rity updates, and an increas­ing level of PC rage, I decided to buy my first Apple com­puter, a Mac­Book Pro. I’ll blog my expe­ri­ence as I dis­cover if the Mac really lives up to all the hype and enter­tain­ing commercials.

Day 1: I just bought a Mac, now what?
The pur­chase expe­ri­ence was fine, the Apple store hip­sters that know Steve Jobs will take away their Radio­head tick­ets if they are any­thing but help­ful. I researched what I needed before­hand, so the whole expe­ri­ence took less than 45 mins. I walked out with 15″ Mac­Book Pro, Office for Mac, and a free iPod Nano thanks to an Apple pro­mo­tion.

After watch­ing the start-​up movie and per­son­al­iz­ing my new laptop, I leaned back and thought, “Okay, now what?” I had all these files on my PC, but had no idea how to trans­fer them. For­tu­nately, Apple has some help­ful migra­tion links here and here. I decided to start with some­thing easy and tack­led iTunes first.

The Mac oper­at­ing system is called OS X (because it’s ver­sion 10), with the latest ver­sion 10.5 (called Leop­ard) and is branded with purple pic­tures of space con­stel­la­tions now present on every Apple com­puter.  OS X already comes with iTunes installed, so the only task was moving the music from my PC. For­tu­nately, I could con­nect to my old PC through the Wi-​Fi and copy my iTunes folder over directly. Unfor­tu­nately, 12GB of music over a wire­less con­nec­tion took 5 hours to complete.

I decided to let Mac do it’s thing while I went out and tried a few pints of my favorite summer brew, Sam Adams Summer Ale. Next: Get­ting more use out of my $3000 iPod.