After using my MacBook Pro on a daily basis for several months, I started buying other Mac systems for our home office. (We have a small video business that we run out of our home.) I had originally thought that the transition would be much more painful, but it has turned out to be reasonably easy.
I started by getting my wife a new MacBook Pro for Christmas. My fear was that she would kill me for spending so much on her, but she was excited and I got to live. She transitioned to the Mac with some initial hesitation, but now loves it. She still goes back to a Windows system to access her old Microsoft Publisher files from time to time, but new ones are now created using Pages on her Mac.
Next, we picked up a 24" iMac specifically for the video business. (The screen on the iMac is beautiful) We are using the latest Final Cut Suite for video production. Again, there was a learning curve in switching from Sony Vegas Video on Windows to Apple’s Final Cut Suite. It wasn’t a painful experience at all. Final Cut is a pleasure to work with and has already streamlined some of our processes. We are both quite pleased.
Using Final Cut Suite on the big iMac prompted us to buy a couple of copies of Final Cut Express for our laptops. We don’t really need the full suite on our laptops, and Final Cut Express fits all of our mobile needs.
I recently picked up a 20" iMac. I figured this would be a good system to use as a general purpose desktop. We grabbed Final Cut Express for it also, and it also has iWork and some other utilities on it. We have our scanner and InkJet disk printer connected here as well.
Finally, my old Frankenstein server decided to die. I managed to save the data to an external USB drive before it completely fell apart. I used a Mac Mini (very basic model) and installed Leopard Server on it. Again, this was the first time I had ever touched the Mac Server product, so I was nervous that I might not be able to quickly figure it out. What I’ve found is that this is a very sweet set up. Leopard Server performs quite well on the Mac Mini for our small office. We mainly use it for file sharing services, but I am looking forward to configuring the iCal server and other collaboration tools. If it works well enough, I may pull our e-mail service back from Google and run it on the Mac Server instead.
As it stands now, we are down to one Windows XP system. It is a decent Dell workstation that is about a year old. We are using it to run all of the “old” software that we use from time to time when accessing old projects or files. I know that I could virtualize XP on one of the Macs and completely eliminate a workstation, but I have room for it and it is new enough that I don’t want to let it go yet.
I’ll keep you posted with my ongoing progress on the server.