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Chapter 1: Why Switch? Demystifying the Mac Mantra

“Macs are not expandable”

Since the earliest days of the IBM Personal Computer, PCs have come in big

boxes that a user could open to install expansion cards or to add memory

and hard drives. Steve Jobs horrified the techie end of the PC world when he

built the original Macintosh as a self-contained unit that users weren’t sup-

posed to open. Although Apple offers a model with expansion slots (the top-

of-the-line Mac Pro), and although memory slots on current Macs are easy to

access, Apple encourages expansion by hooking up accessories with easier-

to-use high-speed cabling. Apple invented FireWire, a blazingly fast expansion

port that lets users attach high-performance devices without opening the

box. The PC world responded by developing its own fast expansion port,

USB 2.0, which Apple then adopted.

Now Apple and Intel have jointly developed an even faster way to hook

up accessories: Thunderbolt. (It’s not easy to top a name like FireWire.)

Thunderbolt packages on a wire the same PCI Express technology used in

modern PC expansion slots. It’s a game changer, with speeds up to 20 times

faster than USB 2.0 and 12 times faster than FireWire 800. You can connect

more than one device to a Thunderbolt port, and it even doubles as a Mini

DisplayPort so that you can hook a large video display to the end of that

Thunderbolt daisy chain.

All new Macs offer Thunderbolt and USB 2.0 ports, and many include a

FireWire port, allowing a wide range of accessories to be attached just by plug-

ging them in.

See Chapter 2 for an introduction to the Mac models now available.

“Macs don’t comply with

industry standards”

Early in Apple’s history, Steve Wozniak, a co-founder of Apple and its engi-

neering genius, came up with a clever way to squeeze more bits onto a floppy

disk (an early form of portable data storage). Unfortunately, this design made

floppy disks written on early Macs unreadable on IBM PCs. That gave Apple

a reputation of being an odd duck from a standards standpoint. Apple has

never been able to shake that reputation completely, even though it later

added PC-compatible floppy drives and is now exemplary in sticking to indus-

try standards. Indeed, Apple was the first to popularize now-ubiquitous com-

puter industry standards such as Wi-Fi wireless networking and the Universal

Serial Bus (USB). Other standards gobbledygook that Macs support include

Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth, IEEE-1394 FireWire, PCI Express, Thunderbolt

(see Chapter 3 for more details), and the Intel microprocessor architecture.

The Apple web browser, Safari (also available for Windows), carefully follows

the latest HTML5 Internet standards — more so than Microsoft’s Internet

Explorer does.

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