Long term mac user considering changing to PC..

snow patrol · 18 Apr 2016 at 11:32

Hi all,

so i've had my macbook for about 8 years and a 27" imac for about five years. They're great machines (i've added ssd drives to both) and i find them very intuitive and easy to use.

However, they're a bit long in the tooth now...no USB 3 is a bit of a bummer for example, and obviously they don't have the clout to play games much (not that mac seems to get many games any way).

So I recently found out that lots of PC motherboards now have thunderbolt ports (i have lots of thunderbolt devices) and I'm considering building a high spec PC to essentially replace my iMac. I'd probably buy two dell 27" monitors to run on it as well.

I used to be a pc gamer and loved old ww2 fps games...i kind of want to have that option again and be able to play up and coming games and go back over my steam catalog etc and obviously gaming isn't much of an option on the macs.

I haven't used windows since windows 7 though - how is windows 10, is it easy to 'get into' for someone coming from a mac background?

Akagi · 18 Apr 2016 at 11:34

Going from Mac OS to Windows 10 would ordinarily be a massive shock to the system, but if you have experience with Windows 7 it shouldn't take too long to adjust. It isn't much different to use at all compared with Windows 7.

bennys · 18 Apr 2016 at 13:59

You shouldn't have troubles. Win10 is very similar to Win7.

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Orcvader · 18 Apr 2016 at 16:46

You could download the ISO from here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10

And use the bootcamp feature on your MB to natively run Windows, and have a little go on how 10 works. Unless something's changed you should be able to use Windows 10 as normal for 30 days until it starts pestering for a product key.

snow patrol · 19 Apr 2016 at 19:11

thanks folks. Seems like win10 is a step in the right direction and has good usability and features. Not looking to do this until august any way - i'm completely out of the loop, pc hardware wise, but i'm assuming they'll be some nice new hardware available soon

philip2009 · 19 Apr 2016 at 19:44

snow patrol said:
So I recently found out that lots of PC motherboards now have thunderbolt ports (i have lots of thunderbolt devices) and I'm considering building a high spec PC to essentially replace my iMac. I'd probably buy two dell 27" monitors to run on it as well.

I say go for it ...

I spent a lot of money on a dual Xeon Mac Pro tower back when exchange rates were good(and I've owned eMacs, iMacs, and MacBook Airs). Great machine and OS X was still more polished than Linux - *nix heaven. But here's what happens with Apple, the years pass and your AppleCare ends, your machine starts to get long in the tooth and there's relatively little you can do about it. Then maybe things start to fail and since you've got a proprietary machine it gets expensive to repair. You can avoid this of course by putting yourself on an eternal upgrade treadmill, selling your old hardware and buying new machines with new AppleCare. You essentially become a slave to Apple.

I sold my Mac Pro and switched to commodity PC hardware, it's brilliant(no more flying in spare power supplies from California and wondering if the motherboard would fail next and how much that might cost me!). You can spend as little or as much as you want, you can have pretty much anything you want, if something fails you can get it replaced easily and cheaply - AppleCare not required. And if you select your motherboard carefully(or pick one specifically for a separate Hackintosh machine) you can run a Hackintosh easily - I actually have specialist Quo motherboard(KickStarter - got mine cheap from eBay) in one of my machines designed to be Macintosh compatible.

Basically, unless there is some real need, don't waste your money investing in proprietary Apple hardware, the hardware and OS war is over PC architecture and Windows won(on the desktop). I like OS X but if Apple disappeared tomorrow the loss of Apple computers really wouldn't matter much in reality.