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With iPad it makes sense to have an iPhone then with iPad and iPhone you begin asking shouldn’t I go the entire way?

I am sure many iPad and iPhone users are asking this question. So, perhaps it will help you if I tell you how I found the journey, the pitfalls and joys.

This is how my logic went:

1. I do a lot of PP presentations. It is so much better carrying an iPad around than slogging a laptop. Also, during the presentation I wanted to avoid having to move back to the iPad to change slides. So, Keynote remote on the i Phone is the answer. But then you need to use Apple’s Keynote presentation software instead of Power Point.
2. Then you want to create the presentations in Keynote right from the beginning in order to keep your formatting. So this is when the question became imminent for me: Why not move over entirely to Mac?
3. The big caveat was what always kept me away from Mac, I really think the laptops are outrageously expensive.
4. A friend then suggested; If you have iPad you don’t need a laptop, why not buy the Mac mini? This little box comes in at below R,7000, you must supply your own screen, keyboard and mouse. This clinched the deal.
5. Three things became apparent, you had to have Office, by far too cumbersome to save  Mac’s own files in Office compatible formats. Secondly, I needed Outlook because receiving invites from people on Outlook proved to be cumbersome if not impossible.  But I must confess that I did not want to spend hours decyphering issues. Thirdly it was quite obvious that Apple’s OS X Lion  was not nearly as intuitive and convenient as OS for the mobile devices. I had a series of important presentations to make and the Mini Mac, iPad, iPhone system delivered for me, but otherwise it clearly was a better option to have waited for OS Mountain Lion that fully integrated iCloud with the Mac and delivered a seamless update between the devices.

I also find that I use Outlook calendar only for accepting invites on the mini Mac, they show up immediately on the Calendar on mini Mac, but I have manually to click on the calendar option to make them visible on the other two devices. I am beginning to think that I don’t anymore need Outlook at all. Then I will have to switch to Apple’s mail client as well. If you do this, remember to download an windat app to convert some attachments that you receive from MS Office.

So, what are the outstanding features of the migration?

1. After OSX Mountain Lion, you really are myopic if you don’t make the switch when you already have an iPad and an iPhone.
2. The software is so cheap! This is the other side to Apple’s pricey hardware, the inexpensive software !  I always need a good vector graphics package. Sketch Book Pro is as powerful as Corel Draw on the PC at about 20% of the price 4% of the price. I have bought a professional 3D animation design package for designing my sculptures for less than R300.  The entire App store is open to you on the Mac at really amazingly cheap prices.  Your productivity is taken to a different dimension.  By the way the upgrade to the new OS was for less than R200. You are forced by the cheap software to recalculate when considering the cost of a Mac.

Final conclusion: I can’t see me going back to PC and Microsoft was just too late with Windows 8 to catch me. And if Windows 8 is such huge shift from the present, you could just as well now move to Apple and get it over. With OS X Mountain Lion Apple has also defended against Android, because now for the first time yo can have all your devices running off the same operating universe.

Oh, and final, final:  What I have seen on large IT transformation projects holds true here as well.  Don’t make an immediate clean break! Do a gradual transition. I kept the PC laptop next to me for some three weeks and even now I have a mobile hard disk with the PC’s content plugged into the Mac Mini. I did not go to the trouble to import my Outlook from the PC into the Mac and it is only when looking up old emails that I still use the PC.