considering a mac

[punio75]

Right, one of my mates is adamant i should lose my laptop and buy a mac (macbook pro he waffles on about!)

What are the pros and cons? I know nothing about these things
Dont need a gaming machine, just the usual web surfing, office etc...

I do need to go from my home machine to the one at work (which is a xp laptop) so any problems here?

Any unbiased opinions welcome!

[Brad]

You won't get any unbiased opinions! However, here is my opinion:

I've used windows in my job since windows 286 up to the present day. I find almost everything about it to be a hateful mess. I've had macs at home since before osx was out and found them to be an utter delight by comparison.

Now and then i need to run windows for work related reasons and these days I run windows 7 in a virtual machine and that works great.

My home macs are a 2 ghz MacBook with 4 gig ram (lovely) and a mac mini with 1 gig ram (too slow due to lack of ram).

My work pc is a dual core 3ghz dell with 4gig running vista.

I have Microsoft office 2008 on the macs and there is no problem exchanging docs with our work machines that use office 2007. I cannot really comment on any other compatiblity issues I'm afraid mate.

[CMcK]

If you don't need a Windows box to play games then you would be daft to not have a Mac. I use a Mac at home and Windows at work. And that's how it should be.

[kernow]

I dunno, I've had no problems with XP personally, I like it enough, don't even run any virus or spyware protection. turn automatic updates off etc. Plus it runs fast and the hardware is cheap

[gunrock]

I dunno, I've had no problems with XP personally, I like it enough, don't even run any virus or spyware protection. turn automatic updates off etc. Plus it runs fast and the hardware is cheap

Unless your machine is off the net, or behind some kind of super spy grade firewall, I'd say it's probably part of some botnet.

[fishbowlhead]

Unless your machine is off the net, or behind some kind of super spy grade firewall, I'd say it's probably part of some botnet.

Hmm year im a bit suspect of that, i had a work pc off the net for years (XP), with virus, malware and a good firewall, and still managed to pick a virus up through transfer of documents.



But to answer your question Punio, you will utterly love using a mac, had my imac (2.6 duel core, 4 gig of ram, 256mb radeon graphics card, 20 inch screen) for over a year now, and not had a single problem with it, nothing. its also still as fast and responsive as the day it came out the box, suffering none of the OS degridation ive experienced with every version of windows ive used going back to pre 98 versions.

Compatibility is now a non issue as well for the everyday consumer, youve got built in PDF capabilities built right into OSX itself (very reliable as well it is, OSX will pdf literally anything for you).

iWorks is very good value at only ?59.99, witch gives you a page layout and letter program, spreadsheet and presentation. Ive even used Pages to design some brochures and catalogs and its produced some decent results. Numbers is not as good as excel for hard core data crunching, but its certainly not far off, and the presentation program is actually much better than power point, you can even make flash animation in it. You also have the ability to pdf from any of these, or export them into office files, ie a pages document into a word document etc.

Office for mac was apparently designed by a mac team as so is obviously 100% compatible with its pc counterpart, but with the added bonus of being designed around how a mac works instead of juyst being slapped together.

Plus as others have said if you really need to run windows for a specific program, you can run them in boot camp (duel boot into OSX or windows on start up) or you can run something like parallels where windows is run as a program on your desktop (with all the functionality as well).

[Brad]

Additionally if you install boot camp but want to access windows without actually rebooting then something like the Parallels VM software will let you use the actual bootcamp windows partition as a VM as well. Obviously it's not quite as fast as booting into the real thing but it's well handy.

If you have kids at school you can probably get the full version of Office 2008 for about £30 too though SoftwareForStudents.

[punio75]

Favouring the imac at the mo! Sounds impressive!

Any downsides apart from cost!

[fishbowlhead]

Just the cost really, some of the super drives have problems burning to certain makes of dvds ive heard, on other places and the thread on here (known issure im sure). Although i personally haven't had any problems with the superdrive on my iMac or my Macbook, and my Macbook gets hauled to work every day with me so id expect that to go first if it did.

You also wont ever have to worry about viruses or malware again with a mac, always a good thing, although you can still pass them on to windows users, which personally i thinks quite funny

[Ginger Tosser]

The cost is still the biggest obstacle for most, I didn't mind to be honest. The extra bit of cash has bought safety and stability. That said my PC's on XP we're mostly fine, it's just really annoying when the explorer shell dies/pauses.

I recently install XP on bootcamp so I can play HalfLife2. Which runs fine in my MacMini.

I did run ClamAVX the other and found 4 suspicious files, must of accidentally downloaded pr0n.

[Strolls]

I would (now) plan to buy from a UK retail store, rather than Apple's online store. I was really unlucky with my G5 PowerMac - multiple hardware failures - and if you buy retail you have a clear case under the sale of goods act.

I wasn't really aware of the sale of goods act until recently, but two customers of mine have since got out-of-warranty computers replaced under it. Admittedly, the Applecare 3 year warranty (which I've bought for my Mac laptops in the past) is very good indeed, but on top of the ?1400 for my G5 I just found it too expensive to consider.

If I had known about the sale of goods act when my G5 failed, I could probably have got it sorted with a nasty letter to Apple (possibly I would have had to have filed a small claims court claim), but the Apple Store online is based in EIRE, which might complicate matters.

I'm really happy with OS X, and I'd probably say that the 5 or 6 years I've been using it have been the happiest & most pain-free computing experience of my life. However I'm feeling well burned over my G5, and following these hardware failures I can't justify the cost of a MacPro.

For me, I absolutely have to have dual monitors - I have a nice pair of matching 1600x1200 TFTs that I bought a few months ago, they're good monitors with narrow bezels and they're just perfect together. The idea of an iMac with a second screen is just a massive turn off, so for me my big gripe with Apple is the cost of their tower form-factor systems. There's just no way to get proper nice dual-head (as I want) without spending silly money. I absolutely understand why Apple structure their pricing this way, but if all I want is a decently CPU and dual-output graphics card a MacPro is a heck of a lot more money (than say a quad-core Dell). The MacPros are so expensive because they use Xeon processors, but I don't need that.

Moving away from OS X is a real dilemma for me, because it is just so easy to use. There's a lot I like about Linux's desktop environments, but I know that if I installed Linux instead I'd have to spend just frikkin' hours tinkering with it, because there'd be all these niggling little annoyances. Windows' registry is actually kinda a problem for me - I can't believe that if you reinstall the o/s you have to go through and do all your settings by hand again. With OS X, you just copy the contents of your ~ directory over to the new machine (or individual files from Library/Preferences if you prefer) and a new machine is immediately all set up just the way you had the last one. I can't imagine any other backup system being as easy to use as Time Machine, and I don't want to have to spend hours futzing with silly stuff like that. Buying a Mac is never having to worry about drivers.

There's actually a bunch of stuff I don't like about OS X, but you should view my negative comments in a positive light - I don't know how I could manage without OS X. Perhaps I'm just a cynic, seeing all OS X's flaws, because all the alternatives seem a bunch worse!

I should finally say - this doesn't sound like it's the case for you, but don't buy a Mac just because your colleague is bullying you into it. OS X isn't for everyone, and I've seen more than one sold with only a few days use. You should buy a Mac because you've been thinking about it for a while and it seems to make sense to you and because you've been thinking about it for a while. This is the impression I get from your post, so go for it.

The move to a Mac is successful for people who have been through this thought process and who are prepared that things will be a little different. If you are ready to learn a slightly different way of doing things then the reward is worth it.

Stroller.

[randombs]

I've been thinking about getting a Mac now, too. All the cool guys at work have them and now I've been tinkering with Ableton and piano and stuff it seems to make more sense.

I gave up on desktops about four years ago and have had laptops ever since so I've lost interest in tinkering and upgrades which are some of the draws of PCs. Plus, all I use my PC for is MSN, internet and music stuff (no games at all).

And as fishbowlhead has mentioned, you can run Windows just fine on a Mac (either virtually which is only marginally slower or as a full dual-boot install for maximum speed) and I imagine once you get one you'll wonder how you managed without one.

Regarding viruses, as more people buy Macs, the virus/malware writers will start to turn their attentions to Macs also. Remember, it's all about financial gain, so if there's money to be made they will find exploits. While at present these things are not common (last I heard, a leaked copy of iWork '09 had a trojan inside), expect things to change as Macs get more and more popular.

[Ginger Tosser]

I heard, a leaked copy of iWork '09 had a trojan inside, expect things to change as Macs get more and more popular.

Think it was on a torrent version of iWork, also Photoshop CS4. You should be safe so long as you get apps from a reliable source.

[fishbowlhead]

OSX is a different beast security wise compared to windows anyway.

[punio75]

Any recommendations on sites to buy from?