Apple Macbook Pro Laptop

It’s perhaps the greatest battle of them all: Mac vs. PC. With so many people weighing in on each side, I hardly doubt my opinion will change anyone’s mind, but this week’s Gadget of the Week allows me to give my own personal testimonial, demonstrating both the positives and negatives of a PC-to-Mac transfer. This week, we’ll take a closer look at the Macbook Pro, one of the most prevalent gadgets in the world of electronics, and hopefully you’ll come to understand whether or not it’s for you.

As a dedicated PC user, it took a while to get used to the Mac interface, so let me first describe the experience that Snow Leopard offers the user. Instead of a start menu, arranged in the lower right like with all Windows machines, the Mac operates out of the “dock” system, which provides a toolbar at the base of the computer screen. Built-into this toolbar are a host of Mac programs, including heavily used programs like iTunes to the relatively less involved Time Machine. The Mac pre-installed programs offer a host of features intended to give you an intuitive user experience. Some, however, are better than others. It took a downloadable update to prevent iTunes from having brief skips during song playback, and the arrangement of photos in iPhoto doesn’t translate into an intuitive filing system for other use, but the features that come on such programs will be exciting and fun to play around with.

Seeing as I used my PC version of Microsoft Office quite heavily, I decided to see how the Mac version of these Microsoft programs translated into a PC-dominated computer world. The results took some getting used to, but for the most part, both versions of Office are workable and the files can easily be shared, so long as you remember to save in the correct format. The major annoyance comes in the lack of similar toolbar structure between versions. While editing a cell in Excel for the Mac, for example, the formula does not appear at the top of the screen, making it sometimes difficult to know exactly what edits are being made to the numbers. While this takes some getting used to, the program functions much the same, although some features in the PC version, such as statistical analysis, are not available in their Mac counterparts.