Moving from PC to Mac - Issues to be aware of?

SimonTALM

SimonTALM

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I've been toying with making a move to Apple for a while now and obviously the massive price difference between PCs and Macs is a factor but I can look at that over a period of time and it becomes more acceptable. One area that concerns me in particualr is the issue of S/W Licences that I have for the PC, I'm hesitant I'd hate to findout that I have to fork out again for my main software.

Does anyone have any experience in moving S/W from PC to Mac and in particular whether Adobe allows you to move from PC to Mac and keep the same licence (I use Photoshop CS4 and LR3 btw).

What other issues should I be thinking about in advance if I go ahead?

What are the best sources of information out there for Macs and the issues I may experience.

P.S. I'm not interested in starting a Mac vs PC debate, I just want to know about things that might make a move from PC to Mac difficult or add additional costs.
 
Adobe will let you shift your licenses for their products once only from windows to mac. You can also go in the opposite direction but obviously you can't go Win-Mac-Win!
 
menthel said:
Adobe will let you shift your licenses for their products once only from windows to mac. You can also go in the opposite direction but obviously you can't go Win-Mac-Win!
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Cheers, that's a relief but it does mean that if I make the move I have to make sure it is the right decision :bang: :bang:
 
I made this move about 3 months ago. No real issues at all. LR3 is licenced for PC and Mac anyway, and I had to pay about £4 to transfer my CS5 licence to cover shipping me a new version
 
As said LR3 licence will work on both Mac and PC. However you can only transfer the current copy of Photoshop from one platform to another. Adobe will supply you with a current copy of CS5 for the price of an upgrade.

You need to contact Adobe customer service for the necessary paperwork. You'll need to provide proof of purchase, plus sigh a letter confirming destruction of the original Windows disk. Whole thing takes about 10 days.
 
Chappers said:
You need to contact Adobe customer service for the necessary paperwork. You'll need to provide proof of purchase, plus sigh a letter confirming destruction of the original Windows disk. Whole thing takes about 10 days.
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I didn't need to do that. I had to confirm existing licence # and confirm destruction, they sorted it all out for me in one phone call.
 
boyfalldown said:
I didn't need to do that. I had to confirm existing licence # and confirm destruction, they sorted it all out for me in one phone call.
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Looks like they've streamlined their systems since last year.
 
If you have large external drives like I do, most of them are NTFS system as Windows uses it, OSX can only read the format but cannot write without plug in. Still need to test my older FAT32 drives, but I think they should work as Linux had no problem with them so OSX should be fine as well.
So now I ended up with 1TB of data that I can read only lol :) Still need to work on this problem by reformatting the drives and making back up on DVDs.

Lightroom2 that I have didn't need any change, just installed the program and it worked.

So far the move from Windows7 to OSX was one of the best things I done lately :)
 
kokakaste2 said:
If you have large external drives like I do, most of them are NTFS system as Windows uses it, OSX can only read the format but cannot write without plug in. Still need to test my older FAT32 drives, but I think they should work as Linux had no problem with them so OSX should be fine as well.
So now I ended up with 1TB of data that I can read only lol :) Still need to work on this problem by reformatting the drives and making back up on DVDs.

Lightroom2 that I have didn't need any change, just installed the program and it worked.

So far the move from Windows7 to OSX was one of the best things I done lately :)
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There are a couple of options for writing to NTFS from OSX. You can use NTFS-3G, or enable the built in but disabled OSX NTFS writing utility - http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090913140023382

No need to start a PC-Mac war but going Mac a few years ago was a very pleasant experience.
 
If you have bought and installed a windows version then migrate to a mac do they supply a new program for mac?
 
TaffyTim said:
If you have bought and installed a windows version then migrate to a mac do they supply a new program for mac?
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If you are referring to Adobe programs , then the answer is yes, they supply you either with a new CD or in my case it was a new boxed version of Photoshop. But as I said earlier Adobe will only upgrade the current version of their software. So if you have CS4 you will need to upgrade to CS5 for the standard upgrade price. For that you get a new Boxed version of CS5.
 
I did this recently, and now work almost exclusively on my MacBook pro.

I must admit to buying parrallels to run the PC software that won't run on macs (one note for example) but apart from that it's fantastic.

Office 2011 for mac is a lot better than 2008 too.

I'm running ligghtroom, cs5 and office business on the MacBook.

I did find that it only 2gb of memory parallels brought the whole machine to a halt, but added another 2gb and it now works absolutely fantastic.
 
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