By: Judith Hurwitz, CEO, Hurwitz & Associates Published: 2nd March 2008 Copyright Hurwitz & Associates © 2008

The last time I used an Apple computer was the Apple Lisa when I worked at John Hancock Life Insurance many decades ago. Hancock was the type of company that liked to try every new technology. I was lucky enough to work in the department that was in charge of trying out any new innovation. But when it came to my personal productivity, I stayed with the PC.

After more than 20 years I have broken the old habit and moved to the Mac. However, over the past few years I have watched my colleague, Robin Bloor, use his Mac as the foundation for his personal approach to information management. Finally, I decided to take the plunge. I have to say that I am happy with my decision. Since I am typically very critical of customer experience mishaps and poor customer service, I am pleased to report that I have actually had a great Mac experience.

I wanted to share some of what I have experienced with Apple. First, when I started thinking about switching platforms I went to the local Apple store in my area. It was swarming with people. I anticipated that I would have to wait to talk to someone who would be impatient with my long list of questions. To my surprise, someone helped me right away. The young woman who was quite knowledgeable about her product, spent at least an hour with me answering questions and introducing me to the Mac environment. I never felt rushed. I never felt as though she was waiting for my order.

What I found about the Mac that made me decide to buy was the integration of functions and the ease of use. I loved the fact that Apple treats sound and motion as though they are a natural part of the computing experience. There is thought behind how the user moves from one function to another. Initially the Mac is intimidating as anything that is new and different from the old ways. But after that first hour I began to appreciate the elegance of the platform. It felt to me as though someone looked at the functions in a holistic system rather than a set of independent functions.

I didn't buy my Mac that day. I did, however, come back the following week and purchase my MacBook. Here are a few of my observations after my purchase. Like any system, I had a few problems. I couldn't quite get my mail working. I called and got an appointment at the store with a "genius" (I actually think this guy might have been a real genius!). In about 20 minutes he got everything working like a charm and was able to explain and fix a dozen other things that I hadn't figured out yet. When Microsoft Word wouldn't open, I called customer service and only waited less than five minutes. I just reinstalled the application and was back in business.

The last experience I wanted to mention related to the newest version of the Macbook Pro that was introduced this week. When I read that a new system had come out with almost twice the disk space that I had purchased for the same price, I was upset. Why didn't they tell me about the impending product introduction? I happened to be in the store and explained what happened. The sales rep told me she would have to talk to the manager. OK, I thought, now these guys are going to start acting like a normal company. They proved me wrong. Within two minutes the sales rep returned and told me to bring in my Macbook and it would be exchanged for the new model. I would just have to pay about $20.00 fee.

So, I am a convert. I now understand why people who love the Mac are so devoted. It is not just about a well engineered hardware and software platform. It is about an attitude towards the customer that is respectful. It is the fact that the customer experience actually makes you want to do business with the company.

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2nd March 2008: 'JH' said:

Thanks for an interesting viewpoint. I have never visited an Apple Store (we don't have them in Finland), but if the customer service generally works like you described, it is certainly going to bring more business to Apple. Visiting a typical PC store is so much different - I have bought quite a few components to my iMac recently, and there was little if any customer service available.

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2nd March 2008: 'Marlo' said:

Welcome to the world of apple my friend. Like you I converted 5 years ago and love the whole experience of this wonderful Mac community. Owning a Mac is an enlightened experience that PC users won't understand till they try it. Hope your words of encouragement inspire more Windows users to try the Mac.

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2nd March 2008: 'Skittou' said:

I Judith,

well, that's a very positive experience you had!
But it's true Macs and Mac OS X are really good products, no question about this.

I'm just wondering how many stores would have exchanged you "old generation" MacBook Pro for a brand new one for just $20! At least here in Europe, this would just not happen...I guess!

Greetings,

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2nd March 2008: 'Dave' said:

Isn't it great to discover a computer that "just works" that you can buy from knowledgeable, respectful, and friendly people?

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2nd March 2008: 'Fluffy' said:

Personally I can't see why anyone would need, or would want, to look any further than Microsoft's Vista OS. It is solid, performs well and has many commercial applications. I would be interested to see regular posts on the subject to see how you fare with the Mac. Like Jon Collin's experiences with Ubuntu Linux. Will it be just a passing fad? Or is it really what it is cracked up to be?

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2nd March 2008: 'Michael' said:

Fluffy: "passing fad"? Um, the Mac has been on the market for 24 years. HTML and the World Wide Web were developed by Tim Berners-Lee on a NeXT workstation, running the direct ancestor of Mac OS X, almost two decades ago. Microsoft Excel was developed for, and ran on Macs, long before there was such a thing as Windows. That doesn't sound like the Mac is a fad to me.

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2nd March 2008: 'Peter' said:

Actually, Fluffy, I've always found it depends on what you're doing.

I'm a long time Macintosh user (my first Macintosh was a "Macintosh"--9" screen, 128K of memory, etc.). Contrary to popular belief, there is plenty of software available for Macintoshes. However, it requires more work to find and more "faith" to use.

Consider Computer-Aided Design. What software would you buy for Computer-Aided Design? Well, obviously, you'd buy AutoCAD. Everybody knows AutoCAD. Everybody uses AutoCAD. So that's what you'd buy--after all, Everybody can't be wrong!

(Obvious joke: "Manure: 10,000 flies can't be wrong!")

But if you were using a Macintosh, you'd be out-of-luck. No AutoCAD for Macintosh. "Well," you'd think, "I guess Macs can't do Computer-Aided Design." Of course, you'd be overlooking VectorWorks and Ashlar-Vellum's suite of applications, to name two. But, of course, who's ever heard of them, right?

So, what Macintosh software is missing--especially for those who are used to the PC world--is the "brand name." "I need QuickBooks to do my accounting. I need Microsoft Access for my simple databases. I need Microsoft Project for Project Management." You're not looking for a particular product which does a particular task, you're looking for a brand name.

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2nd March 2008: 'Fuzileiro' said:

Fluffy,
A number of reasons come to mind. There is only one version of OS X - Leopard. No need to decide whether I want the home, business, ultimate, etc. There are very few commercial applications that do not have a Mac equivalent and for those you can always install windows on your Mac (Linux and any other OS as well) - very painless with Bootcamp or Parallels or VM Fusionware. Mac has been around a very long time, predating your Microsoft OS (liberally copied OS I might add) so I doubt very much it's a fad. Your mileage may vary however. Semper Fi

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2nd March 2008: 'brich' said:

I have the good fortune of using Win XP and Mac OSX every day for work projects. Certainly, there is a learning curve for anyone who is already familiar with Windows; however, the Mac OS environment and integrated ecosystem is quite reliable and elegant in my experience, and well worth the effort to gain an informed hands-on preference. Props to Judith for sharing her experiences.

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2nd March 2008: 'DanD' said:

It would be interesting to ready why Judith was provoked to switch in the first place. It seems Fluffy is happy with his PC and feels that the Mac is a fad.

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2nd March 2008: 'mark' said:

Welcome to the Mac community! Glad to hear that your experience with Mac and the Apple Store have been a good one. I too have had nothing but good experiences with Apple Stores (replaced my broken key for free, fixed my iPod, fixed some driver issues, etc). Now I just wish that the company I work for will switch back to the Mac, so I can use a Mac all the time, not just at home.

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2nd March 2008: 'REB' said:

I've used Macs since '88 and your experience with new models coming just after a purchase stems from Apple's secrecy policy. You'll learn to anticipate the advent of new models and keep up with Apple news, etc. at web sites such as MacSurfer.com. It aggregates all sorts of news and has links on a second page to many more of all kinds focused on Apple users.

There are so many features to OS X that require reading books on the subject to find. An example is that you can zoom a window's contents using the Command key with either + or - keys. It had just slipped my mind for the longest period. So when a website's fonts are difficult to read use this function. I find Apple's website has enormous amounts of information including 1/2 hour videos on some of their software, or on their color management system for example. Finding them is too difficult IMHO and I hope Apple will address this soon.

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3rd March 2008: 'George' said:

Will we ever see a single desktop that will sit on any architecture? Forget MacOS, Windows, Linux - let's make one desktop that everyone can use! Imagine how much money we could save on development, training, technical support ... IT Utopia

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3rd March 2008: 'CookieMonster' said:

i have been an IT professional for 25 years. My last Apple before my current macbook pro was a Mac back in 1990. I'll never go back to a PC. From a developer standpoint, the computer management simplicity and UNIX certification just blows me away. Its a great development platform, and although I run Parallels for some old XP stuff, I hardly have any legacy software at all. I use parallels primarily now for appliances (servers - LINUX) testing.

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3rd March 2008: 'john simonds' said:

A Lisa? Let's not date ourselves...I worked on that also

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7th March 2008: 'Dale Vile' said:

Hi Everyone. I have been a Mac user for less than a week. I'll be blogging on it soon, but still don't have a viable system for mainstream business use. Current issues:

1. The MacBook won't authenticate against my main wireless access point. Have installed an old 802.11b access point temporarily as a workaround. Apple support not much help, so any thoughts on how to troubleshoot Airport gratefully received.

2. Entourage 2008 keeps losing the connection to our exchange server and asking me to re-authenticate every few minutes.

3. Entourage 2008 does not appear to sync contacts with Exchange, which means it is not that useful to me at the moment.

4. Embedded charts not rendering properly in either PPT or Word, so I cannot work with any of the documents in our research library or make use of our company templates.

5. Need to go through the rigmarole of putting the machine to sleep then waking it up again by plugging a USB mouse into the port in order to redirect the display to my 24 inch external monitor and have it work at a decent resolution. There is no equivalent of the switch monitor function you find on PCs.

I realise 2, 3 and 4 are Microsoft issues, but I don't have the luxury of immersing myself wholly in the pure Mac world as we are fundamentally a Windows shop, as are most of the clients that we need to exchange Office documents with.

I'll echo Judith's thoughts about design, elegance, etc, but at the end of the day, I still need it to do the job in a mainstream business environment in which you cannot get away from Windows and MS Office.

Any help gratefully received.

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9th March 2008: 'Miles' said:

Dale / Judith, welcome aboard the Mac community!
Brian and I have been using Apple Mac's for some time now and really can't fault them. The only barrier as Dale mentions can be integration with other business users. Early on I invested in a copy of Parallels Workstation to run XP as a virtual machine on the Mac, however I find myself using it less and less these days. If you need any assistance, don't hesitate to drop us a line.All the best,Miles

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1st August 2008: 'Clif' said:

Dale... if Entourage isn't syncing your contacts off the Exchange server it just isn't configured properly. By default it will sync calendar, contacts, and email. Check out the incredible tips/tricks over at entourage.mvps.org for more solutions that you can imagine on Entourage and Exchange support.

For Airport, I'd recommend the discussions.apple.com forums. Lots of great community members there.

For external monitors, it should auto-adjust, but if not, go into Sys Prefs -> Displays and check off the "Show displays in menu bar". That should allow you to use the "Detect Displays" command to pick your external and switch resolutions w/out need to sleep/wake.

Embedded charts I can only recommend having those sending check to ensure they are using a command format - try .pptx and .ppt formats to see what works best.

Best of luck!

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