Sticking with OS X on a Mac

Posted on 23 Feb 2012 at 11:12

Bought a new Mac, but not sure whether to stick with OS X or install Windows? Let us help you decide

It’s a perfectly reasonable course of action to forget about Windows altogether on your Mac, and persist with the preinstalled OS X. Indeed, many Mac enthusiasts would insist that it’s the only reasonable course of action.

There are several good reasons to stick solely with OS X. The Apple operating system is much better tuned to the bespoke Mac hardware than Windows, a fact readily revealed by our battery benchmarks, where OS X delivers around 1hr 30mins more of light use on the 13in MacBook Air than Windows 7 does. Touchpad gestures and the layout of the Mac keyboard – complete with dedicated buttons for features such as Launchpad and Mission Control – have also been tailored specifically for OS X.

Dual-booting from Boot Camp or installing Windows in a virtual machine will take up a sizeable quantity of disk space, which isn’t a small consideration when the hard disks on the base model of the 11in MacBook Air start at a meagre 64GB. Although it’s possible to boot Windows from an attached Thunderbolt-equipped drive, currently this is a ferociously expensive option.

Perhaps the best reason for sticking with OS X, however, is the strength of the operating system itself. As we stated in our recent six-star review of OS X 10.7 (Lion), the operating system includes several superb features that you won’t find in Windows, including advanced autosave and versioning, AirDrop – a simple way to transfer data between Macs over an ad hoc wireless connection – and the option to recover the operating system from the cloud. As we concluded: “since Lion resolves several major gripes that have traditionally put off Windows users – including any-edge window resizing and full-screen applications – we suggest anyone curious about switching should take a look.”

Nevertheless, moving lock, stock and barrel to OS X can be an intimidating prospect for someone who’s spent their entire computing life working in Windows. Will you still be able to run your favourite applications? Will it be possible to share files with PCs across your home network? Will things just work? Let us put your mind at rest.

Compatible apps

The crossover between Windows and Mac has never been stronger. Of the nine software packages on the PC Pro A-List, eight of them offer a Mac version or equivalent.

The elephant in the room is that you’ll almost certainly need to repurchase software you’ve already installed on your PC. Very few software packages come with both Windows and Mac installers in the same box – Adobe’s Photoshop/Premiere Elements and Lightroom being notable exceptions – so you won’t be able to pop old discs into your new Mac. Not that laptops such as the MacBook Air come with an optical drive; Apple would rather you download software via the App Store, giving it a 30% cut in the process.

For those who prefer open source software, there’s also plenty of choice. Everything from the Firefox web browser to the LibreOffice productivity suite, to the GIMP art package, to the Audacity audio editor supports OS X, meaning there’s no need to compromise on your principles (bar working on a closed OS) or pay for software if you don’t want to.

Sometimes there are significant differences between Windows and OS X versions of popular packages, however. Office 2011 on Mac is a different beast to Office 2010 on a Windows PC. The ribbon interface sports an entirely different design, which is something of a halfway house between the old icon-strewn menus and the Office 2010 ribbon. Buttons and options are located in various places, which takes getting used to.

The make-up of different Office packages also varies between Mac and PC: Office 2010 Home and Student includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, while Office 2011 for Mac Home and Student omits OneNote. There’s no Professional version of the Mac software, either, so OS X users can’t get Access or Publisher – worth noting if your business is dependent on either.

Also take care if you’re purchasing software from the Mac App Store. The “special edition” of Photoshop Elements 10 in the App Store doesn’t include the powerful Organizer that’s included in the boxed version of the software. Given the App Store download costs £55 and the full boxed copy costs only £1 more on Amazon.co.uk (at the time of writing), we’d opt for the latter.

While many popular office and productivity applications are available for Windows and OS X, be aware that some specialist ones are still restricted to one platform. Sony Vegas Movie Studio, for example – our A-Listed video editing package – is PC only, and offers no convenient way to share projects with Mac software.

Conversely, if you’re tempted to try out Apple’s widely praised creative software – such as Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro or even GarageBand – remember these applications are locked into OS X. Again, there’s no support for working on your projects across multiple platforms, unless you count GarageBand for the iPad.

Games

Gamers are the one constituency that’s traditionally been warned off switching, but the days of The Sims being the pinnacle of the Mac gaming experience are long gone. While it’s true that high-end releases often don’t make it to the Mac for many months, if at all – there was no Mac version of Modern Warfare 3, Elder Scrolls V, or Assassin’s Creed Revelations at the time of writing, for example – there are plenty of decent titles on offer.

The Grand Theft Auto titles, Batman: Arkham Asylum and older releases from the Call Of Duty stable are available for download from the Mac App Store, alongside budget titles ported from the iOS App Store, such as Angry Birds, World of Goo and Reckless Racing. Other leading titles such as FIFA 12 and Football Manager 2012 are also available for OS X.

PC gamers can also easily transfer their previous purchases to the Mac if they’re members of the Steam distribution service. Members just download and reinstall games they’ve previously purchased on their PC, provided that there’s a compatible OS X version. In our experience, it’s the smaller independent titles that are multiplatform on Steam, as opposed to the huge blockbusters.