Good money after bad? The Mac experience for a would-be Windows convert.

Question

I was seduced by the striking design of the MacBook, but am fast coming to regard the whole Apple experience as being an ongoing nightmare. One of the mainstays of my computing life is use of Quicken for personal accounting. I have been using it on Windows for eight years. I bought the MacBook expecting to be able to upgrade to Quicken for Mac but now find that Intuit neither support nor sell the product in the UK. Worse, I can find absolutely no other product available for Mac that comes half way to being as good as my current Q2000 Basic - iBank is so cumbersome and riddled with errors that it's unusable, and as far as importing eight years of Q data goes; forget it. The other main use of computing is for digital photography. As well as suddenly deciding that most of my uploaded JPEGs were unreadable, iPhoto refuses to see my camera as an external drive, insisting every time that it downloads whatever is on it. MacBook can obviously see it, but refuses to put it on the desktop as a drive. Anyway, I digress slightly.
I read, before buying the MacBook, about Bootcamp, and assumed that I'd be able to load Windows to get over the difficulty I had with MS-centric software. Unf. this requires an XP disk that includes SP2 on the same disk. My PC was early XP and I upgraded by download to SP2 - what joy that was as it put me off-line for about three weeks while I struggled to re-configure the networking aspects of my PC.
Anyway, I am now considering buying WinXP SP2 on a single disk to try the Bootcamp route. Anyone had experience of doing this from a newly purchased OEM XP SP2 disk (about 60 quid from Amazon).
I'm pretty disillusioned about Mac. I can't see what all the excitement is about. It's different for sure, but better? Even the Cinema 23" given to me for a birthday present is nice looking but I needed to buy a £15 adaptor to use it with the MacBook - mean or what. It's not like you can use the **** thing with a PC so it sits beside my other flatscreen that I use with my essentially retained PC. The Apple store guy said it just needed a simple adapter to convert it for PC use, but they didn't have one in stock. Now I find that no-one actually makes one because the screen has an Apple exclusive interface.
I'm beginning to think, no, I'm convinced, that Apple is all about style over substance and that the benefits are only visible to those who work in the graphic design industry where styling has rendered Macs 'industry standard', and the nerdy types who inhabit the Apple stores and have time to spend dissecting operating systems and discussing the finer points of elegant coding, instead of lives.
I have a feeling there's going to be a MacBook going cheap on eBay soon, together with a nice 23" display. Pesuade me otherwise, please.

Answer 1

I just ditched my last Windows PC, and one of my major hesitations was that I have years of Windows Quicken data that I didn't want to lose. I didn't want to convert it to Quicken for Mac because Intuit was quite up-front about the difficulties of that process. I took the route of running Windows on Parallels instead of using Bootcamp. I - like you - had an early Windows XP CD, and I've loaded it on Parallels and upgraded it to SP2 without having to re-buy a new SP2 CD. Quicken for Windows runs perfectly within this environment, and I'm continuting to run it and have kept my years of data.
You may not want to go down this path, but it does work - and beautifully! The sad fact is that most Mac users will probably have a need to run at least some Windows applications, which makes the switch to Intel processors such a great move. Most Quicken reviews do state that the Windows version is preferable, for example. But for things like photos, video, and other creative applications, I'll never use a Windows app again. Just wanted to offer my two cents, and I hope you learn to love that Mac!