The Apple Mac is amazing...

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This has blown me away. You know when you switch from one Windows PC to another (i.e. upgrading), you have to spend about a week re-installing all your apps, setting up all your plug-ins and preferences all over again, hoping you haven't missed a setting?

I just switched from an old Mac mini to a new one (double the RAM and hard disk, faster graphics etc) and restored the user folder from my Time Machine hard disk backup. 98% of my entire working environment (files, folders, icon placement) got put back straight away on the new machine. I was stunned.

But there were a few "?" icons on the dock, where a few of my third party apps were missing (Handbrake, Seashore, Audio Hijack Pro, Cyberduck). So I installed them from the latest versions off the web. And you know what? ALL of their settings, preferences and plug-ins were just 'there', stored in my user folder. There was ZERO work to do on any of them.

Upgrading to a new computer used to be a nightmare for me, once every two years or so. This last Mac to Mac transition has been an utter revelation. Kudos to the OS X engineers.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I have to agree Steve, it sure is. My MacBook Pro was the best work investment I have ever made. The amount of time wasted using the old Windows environment is beyond stupid, and endless problems with driver, updates, and error boxes. The Mac just works, just like the iPhone 4.!
9:22 AM
Unknown said…
That's good to know- am considering moving from a Mac Mini to an iMac and this is reassuring.
9:25 AM
brianlj said…
Part of the reason for 'upgrading' Windows is to regain some of the speed lost by accumulated detritus over the years. Does the Mac suffer from speed degradation in that way? And, if so, and if the Mac upgrade is so easy, does it then remain as slow as it was before?
10:22 AM
Unknown said…
Welcome to the world of *nix. That is how I can have Ubuntu, Debian and Centos all installed on one PC, share a home folder and have the apps all nicely configured between each OS.

Having BSD as the basis for OSX was the best move Apple could have made.
10:46 AM
Unknown said…
This comes down to the *Nix way of doing things vs the Windows registry. In Linux or Mac, each user has a "home" folder and all the settings are stored there in text files. This is way more easy to deal with than the Window's binary blob that we call the registry, horrible thing that it is :-)
12:24 PM
hockstylin said…
Indeed its easy to migrate on Mac. Not sure if I should do it for the 64GB Macbook Air though, it might not have enough space to hold everything!
3:00 PM
aaronblog said…
OK, if you Mac fans want to use it., fine. But for me personally Windows fits much better than MacOS because of several reasons. I just hate so many things on the Mac.
And you can do similar things like restoring your stuff on a Windows PC as well with the right tools (and how often do you really do it?)
3:01 PM
Me said…
As per comments above, I was amazed when I first had to do this with my Linux machine; to have almost everything except for some apps ready to go and then when the apps are reinstalled to have all user settings retained is just brilliant.

What Apple with all their UI expertise have done is just make it simple and automatic, it comes at a price but I can see why so many love it and are willing to pay for it.

I was looking a macbook air today, what an absolutely beautiful piece of engineering that is, and it looks like out would last forever.
8:47 PM
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