Yep I did it, I made the plunge, I am now a MAC maniac! My work provided me with a shiny new MAC book Pro 15.4”with 4Gb of ram about 3 weeks ago. Here is my conversion story so far… To date my MAC experience has been unlike anything I could have predicted. It has been easy and relatively painless. Sure some of that is because the excellent IT MAC build included most of the internal apps I needed. But installing the other apps I needed has been a breeze. And the new trackpad gestures like the four finger swipe to get to expose, desktop, and applications has been incredible. I was really missing the alt-tab windows feature until I figured this out. The two finger scrolling is one of the most natural feeling mouse gestures of all time. Whenever I move to my PC I find myself doing it to no avail. Unfortunately I’m not completely off of Windows yet. Some apps just don’t work on a MAC. For those I use Fusion 2.0.1 with a corp build of Windows XP. Here are the apps that don’t work on MAC but I need. -Cisco ASDM -Almost every non-browser based Cisco app on the planet -Webex Connect -MSFT Visio -Internet Explorer for certain websites So far that’s it. Not to bad. If anyone knows how I can get rid of any of those and run them natively on the MAC please do share. First, I Encrypted my drive using FileVault and locked down the MAC Firewall as much is possible (which is not much). Then I installed Apps. Here are the MAC apps I’ve installed so far -Microsoft office MAC 2008 -Adium IM -Firefox (of course) with my favorite plug-ins -VMWare Fusion 2.0.1 -VirusBarrier X5 (come on I’m a security guy, I don’t buy the MACs are secure hype) -MAC Pilot – gives me access to all the hidden MAC nerd knobs in a easy GUI -Default Folder X – It gives a bunch of flexibility to open and save dialogs (still figuring this one out but I can see the benefits already) -DropFix – A free and very slick image resizing and conversion tool for my blog images. -Metasplot Framework – Can’t live without it for IPS and CSA demos. Runs much better on MAC OS than Windows. -Ettercap for MAC – security swiss army knife -Flip for MAC – Allows me to view WMV videos in quicktime. Works great! -Rapid Weaver – html and blog authoring software. Haven’t had a chance to learn yet. -RDP client to connect to windows boxes -Cisco IPSEC VPN Client -Cisco anyconnect SSLVPN client -Little snitch – outbound connection monitoring and control -KisMAC – wireless stumbler and cracker -Several dashboard widgets -Proxify – to get though annoying URL filters -accuweather ski report – gotta know when it’s a powder day! -Yellow pages widget That’s it so far; I’m only 3 weeks into this so I’m sure I’ll have many more apps as time passes. If you have some favorites let me know, please. Why did I make the switch you ask? First off, I have never used a MAC before this. Sure I have tried MACs before, but was always turned off because I couldn’t use my Windows tricks, shortcuts, and expertise. I am (was) a windows guy, I’m an MCSE, I’ve been a Windows Admin in the past, and I like to think I’m somewhat of a Windows expert. Bottom line is I know my way around a Windows box. So moving to a MAC never appealed to me, why learn something new if what I knew worked just fine. Well all that changed, albeit slowly, throughout this year. It started with my huge disappointment with Vista. I loaded it on my PCs and within weeks uninstalled it and went back to XP. XP is way faster all around and Vista is just clunky. The next shoe to drop was a flurry of tech support issues with my PC. It has been chronic throughout this year. I never used to have that many issues, and I’m not sure what changed this year, but something did. I’ve had to rebuild my system from scratch 3 times in 2008 alone! Before this year I would only rebuild about every 1 ½ years. Why did I have to rebuild you ask. Well, the performance would come to a crawl and I couldn’t get anything done. Boot times would sky rocket to 5 minutes or more, opening up outlook took another 4 minutes, and when I ran my VMware images you would have thought I was working on a Intel 386. It was totally ridiculous. I noticed that my Mcafee AV was hogging all sorts of memory and resources, especially when it kicked off its daily scan, forget about it. So in a nut shell I am fed up with Windows, I’ve had it up to here. So when my boss mentioned that we would soon be able to purchase MACs instead of PCs for business I jumped in line. My boss hooked me up and I got in on the special MAC pilot. Our IT department is still coming up to speed with officially supporting MACs. Rogue MACs have been around for years but it is only in the last couple months that IT has decided to get trained on supporting MACs and build a special OS X build just for our company. The support is just hardware support for now, for software stuff you’re still on your own. The large MAC user underground that has formed at Cisco over the years has built a great grass roots user based Technical Support framework. It includes a mac-trolls alias, a MAC wiki, a MAC forum, and several other MAC support resources. All of it is home grown and supported by other internal MAC users. I’ve found it a veritable treasure trove of useful MAC information, how-to guides, and other MAC users willing to help. I’m well on my way to being a Apple disciple, I have an IPOD nano, IPhone, Itouch, and now a MAC book pro. I’m addicted to all of them, especially my IPhone!
The opinions and information presented here are my personal views and not those of my employer.
More from Jamey Heary: Credit Card Skimming: How thieves can steal your card info without you knowing it Cisco enters the crowded AV and DLP client marketCisco’s new ASA code allows you to securely take your Cisco IP Phone with you anywhereCisco targets Symantec, McAfee with its new antivirus client Google’s Chrome raises security concerns and tastes like chicken feet a>Go to Jamey’s Blog for more articles on security.*
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