So I’ve bought a Mac. A 20″ Intel iMac to be precise. I’m not totally sure what made me decide to take the plunge. Maybe it was the adverts (although I really don’t think so). It certainly wasn’t this article by Charlie Brooker. No, it was just finally losing my patience with PCs. I’ve had my fair share of them and it seems that for every hour of use you get from a PC, you spend another hour tinkering with the damn thing to get it to work: scanning for viruses or spyware, or defragging the hard drive, or downloading yet another ton load of Windows security updates, or restarting it for the third time in an hour because somebody walked past it and sneezed, or trying to get your wireless router to talk to it until, eventually, there’s just a weird clicking noise coming from inside and it stops working altogether. Enough! So, needing a new desktop computer and not fancying more of the same, I thought I’d see what these Apple devotees have been going on about.
Well, it looks great, and I’m really enjoying using it but by Christ it’s confusing. Having been reared on Microsoft and knowing my way around the Windows environment as well as most people, suddenly making the change to an entirely different operating system has proven to be a bit daunting. No right click on the mouse? No CTRL short cuts? No Start bar menu system? Where is everything? What’s the short cut to copy and paste, or italicise or make something bold? Confusing. All of a sudden I feel like an old woman using a computer for the first time, terrified that if I touch anything an air-raid siren is going to go off and the whole machine will just melt in front of my eyes. Even blogging proved a challenge: usually I write in Word, then past it all into Blogger. Obviously cannot do that. Then it turns out that Blogger doesn’t work properly on Safari (the default browser on a Mac) either, so I’ve gone scurrying back to Firefox (having first downloaded the PC version in error, of course).
This is going to keep me busy for a while….
Centrist. Atlanticist. Dry liberal. Anti-totalitarian. Post-ideological pragmatist. Child of The Enlightenment. Toucan.
Citizen Sane 
It’s the lack of a 2 button mouse that puts me off getting a Mac. Like you though I find PCs bloody annoying to use, even though I am trapped in front of one for roughly 80% of my waking life. However, the 2 button mouse is so engrained in my modus operandi now that whenever I come to use a Mac, I just find myself flapping because I just can’t do everything the way I’d like to.
However this might be the way forward. However, what happens if you right-click ? Maybe this page could help…
Oh well, I can’t get a Mac anyway, no matter how sexy they are, as it’s not compatible with my work needs and also I like to be able to mess around with the inside of my PC (translation: upgrade every 12 months or so) which I couldn’t with a Mac.
But I really wish Apple had have won the OS wars back in the early 90s, because Apple’s OS is *much* better than Microsoft’s. Oh well, doesn’t the worst technology often prevail – thinking of betamax and VHS, also of hemp – have a look at this . And that’s enough links for one day – enjoy your Mac !
Thanks. The Mac comes with that ‘Mighty Mouse’ as standard (although not the wireless one you linked to) and there is a right click, but it doesn’t do anything by itself. You have to press Control and right click, but even then you don’t get the same context menu that you get in Windows. It’s all a learning curve I guess.
But you’re right, an iMac isn’t suitable for your real IT enthusiast as it isn’t really servicable. You could always buy a Mac Pro instead, which is much more like a regular tower PC. Plus all Macs can run Windows now, although that kind of defeats the purpose if you ask me…
Well, you don’t have to use it; OS X is better for any Mac user, but for people who are too scared to “make the leap” it’s a good stepping stone.
For right click actions, I’m pretty sure it works… I’m not sure if you’re doing it right? If you want to do it manually you hit the Apple key + whatever, it’s the same as it is in Windows. Command + C = copy, etc.
Blogger’s full text mode has a problem with Safari but if you’re using the HTML view then it works fine.