Switch to Mac in Switzerland

[swissfondue]

I live in Switzerland and have owned Macs since February 2003.
My current set-up is:
MacBook Air 1.6 GHz, 2GB RAM, 80 GB HD
upgraded iMac 17" FP G4 1GHz, 1.5GB RAM, 320GB HD, 16x DVD-DL Pioneer 111D
(both run Mac OS 10.5.4)
iPod Nano 4GB, iPod mini 4GB, 2x Apple Express "g", 1 Apple Extreme "n" base station, 4 external HD (500GB, 250, 250, 100), Nikon D40, Canon DV cam.
twitter account: Twitter / swissfondue

I've written a review of my MacBook Air here: MacBook Air: User Review | notebooks.com

and this is my switch-to-Mac story:

Before the switch in 2003:

Self-assembled PC:

HD:Athlon Thunderbird 800, Asus A7V, 512 RAM, 25GB HD, Diamond Viper V770, Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, Firewire PCI card from IntroDV by Digital Origin, old Dell display and CD player.
SW: Win 98SE, Microsoft Office, IntroDV, Ulead Photoimpact

Home usage: internet access, email, photo composition, home video editing, games.

My first contact with an Apple Mac was as the editor of a weekly financial publication where we used Quarkexpress 3.11 with Mac OS 8/9 to layout the newsletter before sending it off to be printed.

A few years later I bought my first home computer. Inexplicably I never thought of buying a Mac, probably because I associated it mostly with professional page layout applications rather than home usage and gaming.

In my new job I was using PCs with a Windows operating system. At home, brochures for cheap PCs were filling my mailbox. So I eventually decided to buy a Dell PC, being already familiar with the Windows environment.

After the birth of our first child, I bought a digital video camera and realised I needed to upgrade my computer to be able to handle photo and movie editing.

Confident that my PC knowledge was sufficient and feeling the need for a technological challenge, I set about building a PC from scratch using old parts from the Dell.

The self-built PC came out cheaper than acquiring a new model, but it didn't come cheap with regard to the time invested in getting the hardware components and the software to work together.

In fact, I never stopped troubleshooting and tweaking the PC during its lifetime.

Some years later, my multimedia editing needs had once again outgrown my PC's capabilities. The harddrive was full. Keeping the PC in working condition had become a chore. Happily, the loud fan noise generated by the PC helped me convince my wife to buy a new computer.


The switch:

In order to make an informed choice, I read PC magazines and various internet websites. I was looking for a quiet computer with multimedia capabilities. Above all, the computer should just work; allowing me to use my time more productively.

The Apple iMac fulfilled all my requirements and came with iLife: a suite of multimedia applications which work together perfectly.

I received my built-to-order iMac two weeks after ordering it. It took only a few minutes to set-up the Mac. The user experience was awesome: a beautiful screen, intuitive user interface, amazing applications. A secure operating system without any hardware or software conflicts.

For the first time, I actually looked forward to using a computer. The Mac is the only computer that has ever made me just smile.

Migrating my documents and emails from my PC to the Mac was painless. But there were some surprising moments in my Mac experience: I signed up for broadband access from my cable company and received an ethernet cable modem to install. After connecting the cables and powering up the cable modem, I selected the "ethernet" option in system preferences. Nothing happened. No system messages were shown nor did any pop-up windows come up. I rechecked my hardware and jiggled the cables. Eventually I just started the Safari webbrowser and noticed I was already online! It does take a little time to get used to the fact that things just work.

For a long time, I was the only one using Mac in my neighborhood and despaired of convincing anyone to switch. But in the last year, many neighbours have switched to Mac and/or have bought iPhones.

[baseballboy828]

Welcome to the Mac and TAB swissfondue!

[Yuiichi]

Welcome to the TAB forums, swissfondue! Hope you enjoy your stay!

Great story you've shared with us!