Join the movement

Given the Mac’s impressive features, students are buying Mac in droves — many of them for the first time. Apple is growing at a phenomenal rate.

Embrace standards

So how is the switch? Great. Macs use standards, which makes your life a whole lot simpler. All those Microsoft Office documents, your JPEG pictures, your music collection, PDFs, AVIs and QuickTime files work just great. You can share these things with ease as well. Need to send files to a tutor on a PC? Your options are many — send an email, burn a CD or DVD, or use your school’s network — the choice is yours.

Here’s some more good news: many supposedly Windows-only peripherals work just fine with the Mac. That’s because the Mac ships with drivers for most everything you’re probably already using. (Oh and Mac OS X doesn’t scream “hardware detected” every time you plug in something as basic as a keyboard.)

Awesome out of the box

Sure, a new PC comes with software. It’s just not software you’d ever want to use. A new Mac, on the other hand, comes with lots of really great stuff. So you can make lots of really great stuff. Bring home a new Mac and you bring home more than 200 built-in features — including Dashboard widgets, Mail and iChat AV, among other cool things — and the award-winning suite of iLife applications.

Know iTunes? You know Mac

Many people are pleasantly surprised to find that a Mac works just like their iPod and iTunes on their old PC. Organising your photos and files will feel instantly familiar. Many programmes feature the same sort of library collection, playlists and search capability as iTunes, though they may go by different names. So you’ll see groups of addresses, albums of photos, folders of mail, types of calendars and so on. All with the powerful and near instantaneous search mechanism you’ve grown accustomed to in iTunes.