My transition to Mac’s was a gradual one.

I was tired of hearing people talk about Mac’s in extreme positive and negative. That got me curious. For a while I thought of building a Hackintosh. I am always a bit weary about some of these hack solutions only because I don’t know what kind of Trojan might be hidden inside it… somewhere. Plus the fact that there is something about giving people their due…

Since I didn’t know much about Mac’s at this point of time.  I thought the best thing to do is to enter at the cheapest entry point. I was basically trying to minimize the risk. So I picked up a Mac mini. It was a Core duo with 512M of RAM and 60 GB HDD. This was during the fall of 2006.

Of course, being what I am… the first thing I did was to bump up the RAM to 2GB and the HDD to 320GB. (see notes on how to).

I started using it and was loving it. Now all my media was on this device. Then came the next logical thing :-). I had to figure out a way of getting all my songs to my Home Theater system. So I  got an airport express so I could beam my songs from my mac to my home theater system. That was the happy life…

Then came the iPad. I picked up the refurb previous gen iPad, just on a whim for the kids. Loved it so much that I sold it and got the new one :-). Still loving it. Now I can web-chat with my family with this nice hand held device.

Then when apple came out with the new apple TV, I thought lets check it out, so I did. It is nice. I use it to beam my avi’s from the mac to the big screen as well as rent movies from itunes. We don’t do it so often to need a netflicks subscription, so this works out perfectly for us.

Then my old router finally died, so I thought might as well get an airport extreme, since I have to get one anyways. This has a usb port that supports HDD’s as well as printers. Allows me to access these from any of the machines at home. A real plus.

And then my mini become un-upgradable (32 vs 64 bit os) and was not able to handle the kid’s videos, so I had to upgrade it to the imac J. I debated laptop vs desktop for a while. I finally settled on the desktop as it has more bang for the buck, and more horse power for the same specs.

There you have it. It was a 4 year process…

I am happy to say that there are no win machines in the house any more!!

One of the things I will say (and you will notice too): with a win machine you are always made aware of the hardware and the OS while you are doing things… but when you start using a mac you will see that you never even think of the hardware and the os… it is all about the apps. A very different experience. Much better of course…

MISC NOTES

Upgrading HDD on a mac mini is basically 3 steps.

1) clone the HDD to the new HDD using SuperDuper
2) make sure the new HDD is working by booting into the USB drive
3) switch the HDD