Post Switch Era: I am now many months into my life as a switcher (PC to Mac), and have even come to terms with Mac at home and PC at work dual mindset. I like my little iBook a lot, and I like OS X, and in general all the areas where people say the Mac is superior are true. Stuff really does just work. Keeping anti-virus and spyware products up to date is a non-issue. It is a very pleasant environment to work in. But there are some caveats for those of you who are thinking of switching to bear in mind:

(1) You lose certain keyboarding abilities. I miss accelerator keys badly. Accelerator keys are the ones underlined in the menu of Windows apps. These keys let you cruise through the menus without reaching for your mouse by holding the alt key and hitting the letter. Mac has none of this. The most of the important menu functions have hot keys, but they are not visible unless you have accessed the menu, you have to remember them. This has been a difficult adjustment.

Along the same lines, maneuvering through dialog boxes is trickier. Let's say you have a dialog box with three buttons, Add, Edit and Cancel. And let's say the system is designed with Add as the default. In windows you can use the arrow keys or tab to move around to different controls, and most will have accelerators which is even better. In the Mac you get the tab key, that's it. And I have yet to figure out how to use the keyboard to drop a list from a dropdown control or to mark a. All of which were second nature with the keyboard in Windows.

And while we are on a keyboard rant. My iBook has no backspace key. The delete key behaves like a backspace key in Windows and if you want to delete a letter to the right of the cursor (a 'delete' in Windows) you have to hit fn-Delete (a key combination). That is the single most consternating thing I have encountered so far.

(2) Limited on-line music options. iTunes (the Mac music player) and iTMS (iTunes music store) are second to none when it comes to building a library of music, whether it is ripped mp3s from your CDs or downloaded ones from the store. It's really great stuff. But the problem is that if you are going to use iTunes you are very much limited to iTMS. iTunes is great. I have a Roku sound box -- a wonderful little device that connects to my home stereo and which, through my home wireless connection, can take the output from iTunes and play it through my nice sounding stereo, instead of requiring me some how hook up iBook directly to the stereo to it's own set of speakers. It's pretty sweet.

But I don't want to have a big old library of mp3s. Broadly speaking, I don't want to own any media at all. I want an on demand subscription service. I want to pay $xx.xx dollars a month and be able to construct various playlists of music. Then I can just pick which ever of my playlists I want to listen to and have it streamed to me. Or better yet, I would like to be able to pick a detailed genre (say 'female jazz vocalists' or '90s Japanese pop' or whatever) and have the service compile a playlist for me. Such subscription services exist, but they are only for the Windows world. The best I can do is store up live365.com streams and play them through iTunes. Not really a bad solution as there is tons of stuff at live365, but not a match for what would be available in Windows.

Actually the perfect solution would be for Last.fm to play through iTunes.

(3) The one button mouse. It is really quite silly and deeply annoying. It's an easy fix on a desktop machine, but you can't replace the integrated device on a laptop.

I have focused on the negative, but balance I am a happy switcher. In fact, I can even see that most of the problems I have mentioned may go away. OS X is clearly going in a direction that will allow you to run Windows applications, which means I will be able to run Windows Office (which I like better than Mac Office) and will likely solve some of my keyboard issues.

Somebody already has a beta product that allows Last.fm to play through iTunes. And I am really hoping that Apple will implement a similar service themselves. This is the future of radio, so to speak.

If somebody would come up with a two-button integrated touch pad replacement I'd be all set.

I figure I have another year, if not two, with my iBook, then I will re-evaluate. For now, I'm cool with my Mac. If you're tempted to switch -- do not fear.