MacBook vs. Other Laptops???

[Swimalie]

Keep the replies coming...I'm learning a lot here! Another big question...how about creating power points, excel spread sheets, and word documents? Do you have to download Microsoft Office or does Apple have its own software for that. I do a LOT of power point presentations.

Microsoft Office for Mac does the same thing on a Mac as it does for Windows.

 

[dazzlegirl03]

I love my Mac.... It is true once you go mac you'll never go back! We used PC's in our house until my hubby started working for a school that only used macs... He got his own laptop and I fell in love! Our PC died so we bought a macbook and I LOVE IT!!! We have 3 macs in our home now!

Stephanie

 

[Minnie]

Love my MacBook Pro for home use and plan on purchasing an iPad soon

For work though - lots and lots of spreadsheets - PC

 

[pennymom]

Microsoft Office for Mac does the same thing on a Mac as it does for Windows.

I use Word and Excel every day on mine! I used a Mac for many years, and then tried a PC laptop for a few years and had problem after problem. Two years ago DH got me a new MacBook and no problems since then. We're definitely a Mac family!

 

[tinatark]

I got a MacBook Pro in April. It replaced a 4 year old Dell. I like it, but I don't love it.

Simple things (for a PC) aren't simple with a Mac. For example, my Christmas card list is in word, for printable labels. In word, you go into a page/options, and the label options are there. For Mac, I will have to go to a vendor website, download the software and re-enter my addresses. Or just print them using the old laptop. Mac doesn't have clip art preloaded - you have to go online and find what you want and drag/resize it as needed. I've had issues transferring my AOL mail over - I end up going to AOL.com to read/save mail, so I can keep my old mail and folders.

Still need to get my files/photos transferred.

OH! The most important thing! If you have ATT internet and a 2wire router/modem at home, it's not compatible with a MacBook Pro! We had intermittent service loss from the time I bought the Mac - ATT said it wasn't their issue, Apple said it wasn't theirs (THOUSANDS of web posts about the issue). We finally fixed it by moving our internet to Charter.

 

[windycitymom]

I got a MacBook Pro in April. It replaced a 4 year old Dell. I like it, but I don't love it.

OH! The most important thing! If you have ATT internet and a 2wire router/modem at home, it's not compatible with a MacBook Pro! We had intermittent service loss from the time I bought the Mac - ATT said it wasn't their issue, Apple said it wasn't theirs (THOUSANDS of web posts about the issue). We finally fixed it by moving our internet to Charter.

Oh no! Is this a problem with all ATT customers? I never heard that before. I have an ATT 2wire router at home, and wanted to go with a mac book pro, but now I wonder??? My neighbor has Comcast for her internet, but it seems her internet is always going out on her so I hestitate to switch to Comcast. Anyone else with ATT have a problem with their macbook pro?

 

[Swimalie]

Oh no! Is this a problem with all ATT customers? I never heard that before. I have an ATT 2wire router at home, and wanted to go with a mac book pro, but now I wonder??? My neighbor has Comcast for her internet, but it seems her internet is always going out on her so I hestitate to switch to Comcast. Anyone else with ATT have a problem with their macbook pro?

I have a MacBook (not pro) and my parents have AT&T. I bring my lap top to their house and use their wireless network without problems.

 

[fauna74]

Simple things (for a PC) aren't simple with a Mac. For example, my Christmas card list is in word, for printable labels. In word, you go into a page/options, and the label options are there. For Mac, I will have to go to a vendor website, download the software and re-enter my addresses. Or just print them using the old laptop.

You can easily print labels from the Address Book on your mac. You may be able to import your addresses from your word document. Even if you can't, and you have to re-input them to your Address Book, it's worth it.

I have really found that if I'm trying to do something on my Mac and I can't find an easy way to do it - I google it. And pretty much always find out how to easily accomplish that task.

 

[MUFFYCAT]

Thanks so much for this thread!! My college DD is thinking of a Mac. where is the best place to buy them?
I know nothing about Macs.

 

[DebMcDonald]

My husband was a Mac user much earlier than I was and I joined kicking and screaming all the way - boy was I wrong. I initially started with the regular macbook and now have the macbook pro, their programs are just meant to run together and boy do they run together smoothly. I have built a website both on a PC and on a Mac and on the mac it was simple. I have burned and made my own DVD's and again simple and I will add I'm not the most computer literate. I'm now back in the working world and on a PC everyday, but I still much prefer my mac. And the viruses are just an added plus.

When they say you take a mac out of the box and it's ready to go, they are not lying.

One thing I would highly recommend is getting the one on one training. I think it's $99 for a year of weekly training, I probably only did only 5 or 6 sessions, but it was well worth the price and what I learned from them I would have never picked up on my own. There is a learning curve in the beginning, but with their help I quickly overcame that.

Also, I purchased a service plan with my initial macbook and I admit I got a lemon, but I will also admit that Apple stands behind their service plan. Two years into my plan my macbook hardrive crashed and my husband went in with all our service receipts (and we had alot) he said at what point do you just give us a new computer and they asked why and he showed them and two days later I walked out with a macbook pro for no additional cost other than a new service plan. The reason for the upgrade was the my inital macbook had firewire and the new one doesn't so because of that reason I was upgraded to the pro. Have never had one issue with the new macbook pro, but even with all my headaches of the first one, I never regretted that purchase.

We are now a family of two macbook pros and an imac.

 

[dawson5]

My husband was a Mac user much earlier than I was and I joined kicking and screaming all the way - boy was I wrong. I initially started with the regular macbook and now have the macbook pro, their programs are just meant to run together and boy do they run together smoothly. I have built a website both on a PC and on a Mac and on the mac it was simple. I have burned and made my own DVD's and again simple and I will add I'm not the most computer literate. I'm now back in the working world and on a PC everyday, but I still much prefer my mac. And the viruses are just an added plus.

When they say you take a mac out of the box and it's ready to go, they are not lying.

One thing I would highly recommend is getting the one on one training. I think it's $99 for a year of weekly training, I probably only did only 5 or 6 sessions, but it was well worth the price and what I learned from them I would have never picked up on my own. There is a learning curve in the beginning, but with their help I quickly overcame that.

Also, I purchased a service plan with my initial macbook and I admit I got a lemon, but I will also admit that Apple stands behind their service plan. Two years into my plan my macbook hardrive crashed and my husband went in with all our service receipts (and we had alot) he said at what point do you just give us a new computer and they asked why and he showed them and two days later I walked out with a macbook pro for no additional cost other than a new service plan. The reason for the upgrade was the my inital macbook had firewire and the new one doesn't so because of that reason I was upgraded to the pro. Have never had one issue with the new macbook pro, but even with all my headaches of the first one, I never regretted that purchase.

We are now a family of two macbook pros and an imac.

Did you have to import anything to the mac from a word document? I help out my neighbor, she runs her own corporate editing company. One of the accounts she has is an advertising company. They design displays which they usually enter into a contest in January. My neighbor is strictly mac and they, I assume, are pc and using word. She (neighbor) has the software to use word (office) on her Mac. We keep running into the same issue when they tweak her copy and send it back. They have no issues with opening and editing, but when we upload what they've edited to the contest site, some of the characters (I want to say quotation marks, apostrophe and something else) don't transfer right and end up being something else. Curious if you've ran into this. We will be starting up again in January, wondering if there is something she and I are missing. (It's only when we upload to the site, not between computers. The document can go back and forth, with no errors, only when it is uploaded do we see this problem.)

 

[DebMcDonald]

Did you have to import anything to the mac from a word document? I help out my neighbor, she runs her own corporate editing company. One of the accounts she has is an advertising company. They design displays which they usually enter into a contest in January. My neighbor is strictly mac and they, I assume, are pc and using word. She (neighbor) has the software to use word (office) on her Mac. We keep running into the same issue when they tweak her copy and send it back. They have no issues with opening and editing, but when we upload what they've edited to the contest site, some of the characters (I want to say quotation marks, apostrophe and something else) don't transfer right and end up being something else. Curious if you've ran into this. We will be starting up again in January, wondering if there is something she and I are missing. (It's only when we upload to the site, not between computers. The document can go back and forth, with no errors, only when it is uploaded do we see this problem.)

When I bought my mac originally we purchases, pages and whatever else goes along with that suite, its sort of Mac's version of office (very easy to work with) but if I am not mistaken I could open word document's in pages, but not make any changes, etc. I also ended up getting the microsoft suite for mac (via a friend) so now I have it all.

When I bought my laptop I brought in my CPU and they took everything off of it for me and put it on my mac at no cost.

I'm not sure if I answered your question or not , but I hope so, if not just ask again.

 

[dawson5]

This happens with what I guess is the MS suite for her mac, I call it office.

She creates a format to follow in the word/office on her mac (we have five separate pages to fill in, the format creates consistency for us). Anyways, she sends what she has written to the advertising company and they "tweak" it. I am assuming they are using pc's. These are attachments, one for each entry. She will edit for grammar, spelling and punctuation if it's needed. We just run into a problem if we copy/paste from it. Something as simple as "Hershey's" will become "Hershey%^&s" (something like that, can't remember the actual characters).

I've never ran into this before and we're coming up on the project again. I didn't know if there was a solution to it, if anyone else encountered this problem. I quoted you because you created a website using the mac, didn't know if you had word doc's that were transferred and if you ran into this. We don't see the problem until we upload though, it looks normal until then.

Thanks for trying to explain/help. She is pretty adept at this and hadn't encountered it before either.

 

[mill4023]

Thanks so much for this thread!! My college DD is thinking of a Mac. where is the best place to buy them?
I know nothing about Macs.

Apple offers some pretty good education discounts.
http://store.apple.com/us-hed/findyourschool


I've always been a PC guy, but I bought a 13" macbook pro last year and I don't think I'll ever buy another non-mac laptop. The touchpad alone is enough to convince me to stick with mac. It is so much better than the IBM, Compaq, and Dell touchpads I've used before. Battery life is also great and I love all the little touches like the magnetic power connector.

With the education discount, I got my MBP for just over $1000 and got a free ipod touch included. For a solid, sturdy, reliable, user-friendly, well designed laptop, I think that's a pretty good price.

 

[tinatark]

Oh no! Is this a problem with all ATT customers? I never heard that before. I have an ATT 2wire router at home, and wanted to go with a mac book pro, but now I wonder??? My neighbor has Comcast for her internet, but it seems her internet is always going out on her so I hestitate to switch to Comcast. Anyone else with ATT have a problem with their macbook pro?

Do a google search - thousands of hits about the issue. I bought my MBP in April, had no issues with internet outages until I got the MBP - I started experiencing intermittent outages - many times every day, the red lights on the router flash, internet goes down then it comes back up, usually after 30-45 seconds. I have 2 brand new 2 wire routers and one USB internet connector from AT&T - they couldn't understand the problem was the 2wire! AT&T offers a Motorola router/modem for business customers, but will not send it to residental customers - I tried for 6 months to get them to send me one, since the problem was the other one! Charter is more $ and not as fast as AT&T was, but we haven't lost service since we switched - not one time!

I have a MacBook (not pro) and my parents have AT&T. I bring my lap top to their house and use their wireless network without problems.

It's not the regular MB - my husband has had one for 3 years. It's the MBP.

 

[d96j97]

How about Black Friday on the Apple Site??? I heard that they offered 15% off select items from the Apple.com website last year?