About two years ago we helped a small firm we know switch its day to day office IT from Windows to Mac. We weren't actually Mac users ourselves at the time (if anything we were a little anti-Mac) but we were 'IT people' and the firm was run by some good friends so we pitched-in and helped. Very much to our surprise we quite liked Mac OS X, it was all-new & no longer just a tool for 'creative professionals'.

The experience persuaded us to take the same route shortly after. Two years ago I'm not sure the benefits would have been clear enough to be worth the upheaval for others unless there was a particular need. I'm writing this article now because that's all changed with the latest release of Mac OS X which has a couple of features that I'm sure will cover the costs of going Mac many times over.

First I'll cover the general benefits we experienced a couple of years back:

1. Security. There's no such thing as totally secure computing but there are very few viruses for apple macs, partly because of the lower number of users but also very much because it's Unix base was built for networking & the internet - it's a tough machine to hack. We generally don't bother running anti-virus software on our mac machines except for when we receive Word or Excel documents from clients - we'll check them for windows viruses before sending them back.

2. Ease of use. This is a hard thing to quantify but Apple's tagline 'it just works' really does sum it up well. I switch on my Mac, it's up and running really quickly with no anti-virus updates, no warning pop-ups & nothing else going on in the background to distract me. The experience lets me concentrate fully on the task at hand, I get my work done, then switch it off. When I'm finished I don't have a headache and my blood pressure is just where it was before I started. I'll make a poor attempt to 'quantify' this by pointing out that despite using my Mac exclusively for work, mentally I have it in the same collection of positive things that I use for leisure; TV, DVD Player, CD Player whilst my Windows XP machine is very much a work item with all the negative connotations that go with that. If, like me, you associate pain with using computers then you're the kind of person that will benefit from using a Mac.

These are the features that will save you more time and money than you'll ever spend on purchasing a Mac:

1. Spotlight. This feature will index everything that can be indexed on your machine - and I mean everything - making anything easy to find. When I first upgraded my Mac to a version that included Spotlight I searched for three emails and a word document that I'd failed to find despite hours of prior searching. I was pretty convinced they'd been deleted. Spotlight took me straight to them - and that was the early version, it's got a lot cleverer since then.

2. Time Machine - I've left this to last as it really is a killer feature for a small business. Time machine will make very regular backups of your computers and will let you go back, search and view those documents very easily indeed without having get an IT guy like me in to fetch it. It's a complete no-brainer, like Mac OS X, it just works. Most of my career has been project based and I know how much money can be lost when documents are deleted or accidentally lost.

Having covered a few benefits I'll go over a few typical concerns.

1. Compatibility - Microsoft Office exists for Mac too and its Word and Excel documents are perfectly interchangeable. Mac doesn't have Internet Explorer but it does have other web browsers such as Safari, Firefox & Opera. They're generally perceived as more secure and with a better user experience than IE. If you use specialised software such as an accounts package then that's something you'll have watch out for. But remember that Macs and Windows exist perfectly well side by side on the same network. There's no reason why you can't have a group of happy users producing quality work on Macs with a Windows computer running your existing accounts package.

2. Cost - The cheapest Mac is a little more expensive than the cheapest Windows machine but that's because Apple don't produce computers that scrape the bottom of the barrel. If you take a Windows computer of similar quality & specification to a Mac then the price will be about the same and quite possibly more. Remember that Apple are the fourth largest computer manufacturer in the world, they have no problems achieving economies of scale.

3. Training - Both Mac OS X and Windows are fundamentally the same thing. The difference, as well as the devil, is in the detail. With a half-decent handbook the average user should be up and very much running on a Mac within an hour.