Hope I've posted this in the right place, and apologies in advance if not!
Not a topic intended to start a Windows -V- Mac war, but serious questions for Mac geeks before I dish out a sizeable chunk of money to jump ship!!
If you've jumped ship yourself from Microsoft to Mac. so much the better!
OK, some background!
I've been using Windows since the early 90's when I cut my teeth on DOS, then worked through Win 3.11 – 95 – 98 – XP, The Vista travesty and now win7, which I have to confess is the best of the lot, But, I'm now sick to my back teeth of spending hours a week downloading and monitoring updates and rebooting ad nauseum for Windows software, malware programmes, anti-virus programmes and everything else programme intended to foil crackers and hackers finding holes every which way in Microsoft's virtual sieve!
The final straw was dished out during our last holiday in France where I'm stuck with dial-up, when it hit me that the updates and numbers of programmes 'calling home' had become so frequent and frankly, bloody huge and intrusive, that I had to resort to sitting in supermarket car parks scrunched up in my car hooking into unsecured WiFi networks to be able to download all that (admittedly necessary) crap to render my laptop useable for a while, And remain solvent!
So, after 3 decades of suffering the foibles of Microsoft products, I've had enough and thinking of jumping ship to a Mac! I'm not very happy getting my sleeves rolled up to fiddle around with Ubuntu, and I'm at the point I just want to switch on my computer and use it for the purpose I bought it.
My questions: are Macs worth the expense? Will they make my cyber life blissfully bearable again?
Are Mac operating systems fairly easy to get your head around, I didn't find Ubuntu particularly easy to use so won't be going down that route!
Do Mac's suffer similar endless cycles of updates and scores of hidden service connections calling home?
Are you able to just power the things up and use them to do the job they were intended to do (compute) without all the time consuming interference, not to mention huge consumption of bandwidth (I'm on 10gig per month limit here)?
How many of you Mac users use antivirus and malware products (I know Mac's are not immune to trojans and virus attacks even if they are immune to Windows variants)!
Is there anything similar to MS Office for Macs that works as well and doesn't need updating constantly?
Please, I don't want to hear rabid Microsoft bashing, but I do want to hear all views about Macs as an alternative and why you think they're better!
Most importantly, will I be able to go online to get my emails and browse a few web pages on dial-up without having my connection crippled by all the damned programme updates hogging the pathetic 3kB/S connection I get out there!
Honest opinions will be very much appreciated!
John