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How to Switch from a PC to a Mac

You've decided to "think different" and become a Mac user. Here are the things to consider and steps to take as you make a big change to your computing lifestyle.
                        
They finally wore you down. Your friends' and co-workers' tales of the MacOS –an operating system with such elegance that anyone could master it, so safe that viruses barely exists, and with powers and abilities far beyond those of, well, Windows—have convinced you to switch. There's no better time than the holidays to make the leap, when you could receive a brand new Apple computer of your own as a gift.

One little problem: After you boot up your shiny, new Mac, you might not have any idea what you're doing. How do you move over your files? Can you use the same applications? And for the love of Jobs, how do you move your iTunes from Windows to Mac?
If you have any proficiency at all with Windows, it's more about unlearning old ways of doing things. The devil, however, is in the details. The Mac differences, while plentiful, should be easy to overcome, so don't fret, because we've got you covered.

Packing for the Move
First thing you need to do is backup all your important files for transfer. Luckily the days of file formats working on one OS platform and not the other are long behind us. Your video, pictures, music, and documents should make the switch-over without issue.

If you're already using a backup and synchronize service like Dropbox, SugarSync, Syncplicity or even Apple's own Mobile Me on your Windows PC, they have Mac clients as well. You can get your important data transferred instantly that way. Unless you have a lot of files, then it won't be very instantaneous.

Of course, a massive collection of files could also be transferred to external storage, from a USB flash drive on up to a multi-terabyte NAS on your network. Either should be equally accessible from your new Mac when attached to your home network. (Let's not even go the route of backup to a CD or DVD, or that whole direct-cable-connection stuff. Spend a few bucks on a router if you don't have one, it'll make all the difference to network your computers and no one should be using a broadband Internet connection without one).

Things get a little trickier with specialized data like stored email messages. If you're using Mozilla's Thunderbird, which already uses the mbox file format, you can just take all the files and put them on your Mac and import them to Mac OS X's Mail or the Mac version of Thunderbird. For other email software, you may have to export the data to mbox format. If you used Microsoft Outlook, you might have to buy third party software like MessageSave to do the conversion.

Better yet, just convert over entirely to using a Web-based email like Gmail or YahooMail, and then you can access your messages anywhere. There's even a complicated way to get your Outlook file into Gmail.

Tablets vs. laptops

So your laptop is getting old: Should you buy a new one or change horses and try out one of these tablet computers?
That all depends on what you want to do with it.

It's still the case that laptops and smaller netbook computers are tuned for production — word processing, e-mailing, number-crunching, more complicated tasks that often require a lot of text and switching among several windows running different applications.

Tablets, lacking a mouse or a keyboard, are better for tasks that have simpler tactile and visual elements — like paging through a photo gallery, checking online news or blogs, or reading a digital magazine. In other words, they work better for consumption, and thus can stay on for quite a few hours on one charge.

For social media addicts, tablets will be excellent for browsing through Facebook for the latest photos or links that friends have posted, or checking out Twitter to see what the digital hive mind is buzzing about at that moment.

The iPad in particular has become a hit for casual gaming. Video games like Angry Birds, in which the player tries to knock down rickety structures by shooting birds at them with a large slingshot, can be played with a single fingertip. No complicated controllers required.
When it comes to more serious applications, though, tablets are likely to lag behind netbooks and laptops for the foreseeable future: The devices are not sophisticated enough to seamlessly run multiple programs at once or to allow users to find and install the endless variety of software now available for PCs.

There is a thriving community of iPad "app" developers — the device has close to 40,000 small programs created for it, by some counts. But no such group yet exists for tablets running on Google's Android operating system, which will constitute most of the new offerings in coming months.