One thing that struck me about your experience and some of the other comments here is that many of the issues are the result of clinging to Microsoft. Installing Windows on the Mac, using the Mac version of Office, and generally wanting the Mac to be like Windows. Apple has promoted the Mac’s Windows capabilities to lure users away, but personally I think it is best to make a clean break. iWork is file-compatible with Office and iLife is a thing of beauty. There are Mac equivalents for the essential apps and hopefully since Macs are selling so well developers will make Mac equivalents for all the niche apps people need. Well I’m off to have another drink of Kool-Aid now.

I do have to give major kudos to apple, as my Time Machine backup worked pretty much flawlessly. I think that the little glitches that I have encountered, like the empty WiFi indicator, may be because I backed up from an MBP and restored to an Air.

I’ve been using both Windows-basee PCs and Macs for years now and I’ve generally have better luck with my Macs. My current MBPro has been rock solid as was the Macbook I had before it, but, of course, not everyone has the same experience.

Your experience about finding “comperable” software titles, is pretty common though. You end up doing things differently, rather than trying to match like for like. It’s not necessarily a better or wors thing, just different.

I also agree with the comment you made about mindlessly advocating the platform. I advocate it for it’s positives, but, as people who’ve asked me can attest, I’m also pretty fast out of the chute to point out the flaws.

Parallels and VMWare, for example, while good solutions, aren’t flawless, and both make significant changes to the Bootcamp partition, and I’m not entirely comfortable with those changes.

There’s still no good equivalent for MS Visio. You can get kind of cloe with ConceptDraw, but it doesn’t support all of th Visio file formats (I suspect due to an MS licensing or reverse-enginering type issue).

Quickbooks isn’t the same in the Mac version – it’s missing features found in the Window’s version (or it was last time I checked).

And the list goes on. All of this shouldn’t detract from the generally excellent hardware and, for me at least, the overall experience has been very positive. I hope you experience gets better as well!

If you know you can just swap back to a Windows box at the first sign of trouble, then you won’t stick with it.

@Alison – I am still not 100% sure that I am going to keep the Air, but so far I like it a lot. I have a weird problem where the wireless indicator shows as empty and I have to manually restore my network connection after restarting the computer (ever since backing up from Time Machine), but I’ll hopefully figure out how to fix that soon.

@doogald – Thank you for the tips on setting up Money. Once I get my MBP back, I will partition that drive again (but with a smaller GB amount this time) and back it up as you recommended.

I tried Wesabe last night, and I think it will be handy this week while I wait for my MBP. But putting aside any online concerns, it is definitely not as robust a solution as what I need. :-/

Anyway, you can stay with Money and still have Time Machine (or, say, SuperDuper) back it up. At the very least you can set Money to save your back up files to your Mac partition using something like the network path above.

Thanks for sharing your ordeals; they are certainly giving me something to think about.

Now here’s the question: how come we don’t hear more people complaining about their Mac experiences? I mean, I was almost feeling like I was the lone goober out here having a bad time with a few issues.

Now, not all of the trouble has been with Macs – my HP 17″ notebook suffered from a motherboard crash, requiring it to be sent in for repair. I did a web search after attempting to speak to too many people for whom English was not their first language, and managed to find a number for and speak to an HP Case Manager, who monitored my attempted repairs, and ultimately arranged for a replacement when after 3 weeks they could not provide an ETA for the repair. The replacement arrived with a bad graphics card. Another replacement-2 was ordered and the replacement-1 being shipped back. All was well until about 5 weeks after using replacement-2, when suddenly the display would not power back on. Hmmm – back to where I was in January – a machine with a bad motherboard. Back in for repairs again, which fortunately only took a week this time.

In all of that, I basically learned that having an Apple store is nice, because, at least at the one I went to, they were very willing to make sure that I had a usable machine when I left the store, and that shipping computers is an iffy prospect, since HP is claiming they never received the replacement-1 I shipped back to them. (Which I suspect was swiped at the Fed-Ex Kinko’s I dropped it off at – who knew you were supposed to watch them scan it before leaving???)

But, even though Apple was better at replacing the units, I’m kinda over the whole Mac thing. I don’t like the interface for Word or Excel, even the 2008 versions or Pages & Numbers for that matter, and I use Word and Excel a lot – not finding the interface fun makes my work a challenge. Boot Camp is a fun idea, but causes more problems that it seems to solve – up to and including the fact that it would not load Windows XP from the original Windows CD, I had to burn a copy of it to make it work! (Google that one – I swear, it’s a real problem!)

I’m used to my Windows programs, and seeking out Mac alternatives is like buying the generic peanut butter – close but not the same.

I even paid the extra money to get Apple’s One to One, and found out that was a major bust too – I’d go in with a list of questions, and have a trainer that had no clue how to answer them and then have to do a survey of other people in the store to guess at answers.

So, the MacBook is going up for sale, and I’m gonna check out the HP TX2000Z tablet and see how that works out for me.

Kevin

At least you have something to work on.

As for the Money data, I switched to Wesabe several months ago. Obviously the user experience is different (there’s no reconciliation for one thing) but as long as I keep it up to date, I can check my balances from anywhere I can get a wifi connection.