The sheer beauty of Macs....

[wildbeeste]

I have almost moved over to the dark side as well.

Bought a macbook pro today who is for son at University.
He got a free ipod as well.

I feel that he may well have to fight me for it as it so good to use.

I know his education is important but he just would not appreciate it

 

[cookie]

I Tunes has just crashed my Ipod and PC

 

[Bigtwin]

I Tunes has just crashed my Ipod and PC

I think I know the problem - it's the last two letters of that sentance.

 

[mikepg]

But why would you want to, unless you enjoy messing about with pooters? Macs come out the box, plug in, work perfectly, and do everything that about 99% of normal people want. In a nice logical sensible compact and tidy way that suggests intelligent design, rather than an effort to spawn a massive necessary support indrustry?

heheh - isn't that what they said about the R12 GS!!! ( have one of them too!)

- it's a big myth, inside a shiny PC case, it's just a 'logical' set of bit's and bobs that plug and play together - and the same is true of a MAC (which is basically the same old stuff in a fancier case with a sexier O.S.). The good thing about PC's are that they are as cheap as chips to make the equivalent of a Rat bike - but maybe one day, MAC's wil be a tad more affordable.

 

[Bigtwin]

but maybe one day, MAC's wil be a tad more affordable.

Got mine used, but as new in its box, for £220 off dat dare fleabay. Can't say fairer than that.

 

[Captain Pugwash]

I've just installed Leopard on my MacBook Pro and it is utterly brilliant.

Makes a Mac even more usable than before.

If you have 15 minutes spare (Bigtwin,that'll be next Sunday between 9 and 10 pm ) watch this tour

Just need Mapsource to become OSX compatible imminently and I'll hardly ever have to reboot into shitty old XP ever again.

 

[Bigtwin]

If you have 15 minutes spare (Bigtwin,that'll be next Sunday between 9 and 10 pm )

No way Jose - you have converted me to the joys of watching that terrible shite and then moaning like buggery about it. I'll still be doing that when you are watching the repeat in frame-by-frame slo-mo

 

[geek]

They are just SOOO brilliant.

particularly when you have one of those Apple Cinema Display 30" LCD attached to it i have had it for about two weeks, it totally and utterly rocks. my only problem is that i might want another one and my desk isn't big enough.

 

[geek]

Just need Mapsource to become OSX compatible imminently and I'll hardly ever have to reboot into shitty old XP ever again.

A while back you used to be able to get Route 66 for the Mac which did much the same thing. But I agree, the lack of decent mapping / travel software is annoying (google maps does do an enormous amount now).

 

[ianf]

There's programs out there on the garmin blog pages to do the map transfers natively on osx. I have it all set up on a mini at home. All they need to do now is get the general browsing/route building bit of Mapsource ported. Nearly a year late though...

Bill's right though, Apple computers are stable because they control to a very large extent the hardware the os has to deal with. Because you can pop in any old taiwanese pci card in a pc, and load their code into Windows, it's exposed to a lot of poorly designed/tested driver code, which will easily take the lot out if the wind blows the wrong way.

The company I work for makes fault tolerant servers, and we can really only control uptime by being VERY specific as to what hardware (basically our own hardened driver versions of intel networking / qlogic Fibrechannel) goes into them.

I use a mac because I don't want to fanny about fixing things when I could be on here. - plumbers don't run around their house soldering bits of pipe every weekend, and IT professionals shouldn't have to bugger about with patching up computers in their spare time

The price differential is getting less these days. The software is also a lot cheaper (5 licenses for the MAC version of 'Ultimate Vista' - £129 ta. )

 

[Redboots]

Given that Windows runs on a total mish mash of hardware and has to cope with an infinitely large combination of dodgy software and non-standard add ons, it does bloody well.

Macs are just so limited

The dodgy software is brought about by the requirements of the dodgy OS.

The day Microsoft get rid of the registry, they might start to get somewhere but until then, its fatally flawed.

When they first started to develop Windows, it was developed on an OS called OS/2 that was jointly written by Microsoft and IBM. Had both companies continued down that road, I think there would be a fine product by now. Alas.

However, I use Windows because I cant get all the apps I want in Linux/EcomStation/Macs or whatever.
Sad state of affairs aint it?

J

 

[Gas'd Off]

Why not, out of interest?

For my limited knowledge a mac is too restrictive. I like to tinker. And, I don't like all this lock you into OUR product business such as itunes. Smacks of corporate nastyness e.g I like to share my music if I so choose or download a multitude of freeware to play with

 

[Bigtwin]

For my limited knowledge a mac is too restrictive. I like to tinker. And, I don't like all this lock you into OUR product business such as itunes. Smacks of corporate nastyness e.g I like to share my music if I so choose or download a multitude of freeware to play with

Nowt to say you have to use iTunes Although it is good.

I have to say that when in comes to restrictive practices etc, the Courts seem to have awared the medals to Gatezzzz and his stuff on that one.

 

[Eunuch]

I've had my iMAC a month

I've been a Gates/Windows man for nearly 20 and wanting a 2nd PC decided after receiving a £70 discount email from Apple (bought a couple of ipods over the years) and 3 visits to Apple stores took the plunge.

Learning a new OS is a bit of a chore but at least the applications are very intuitive. I particularly like the appls out of the box that let me do everything I want to do with audio, video, photo, email & surf. The 20 inch screen on the iMAC is just superb - I bought a Sony Alpha dSLR a few months back and finally I can see what these photos can really look like. Easy to set up and manage the 9000 photos I have on the mac, have 2 different itune libaries set up for SWMBO and I and am generally a very happy bunny.

Even better I managed to order Leopard for £6.

4 weeks vs. 20 years isn't a good comparision, but its right on the money for what I wanted in a sexy well mannered package.

 

[Fanum]

Nowt to say you have to use iTunes Although it is good.

I have to say that when in comes to restrictive practices etc, the Courts seem to have awared the medals to Gatezzzz and his stuff on that one.

That's cos they go for the big players first.....Apple will be on their list, but not yet.

And yes, most of us here know you can get around Itunes, but how many 'average users' do??

 

[Bigtwin]

That's cos they go for the big players first.....Apple will be on their list, but not yet.

And yes, most of us here know you can get around Itunes, but how many 'average users' do??

Probably true, but my point was that seem to me to be a funny reason to have it in for Mac and favour PCs. Especially when almost anything for Mac can be had for free.

There's nothing special about my user ability I can tell you, I'm neck and neck with a luddite idiot (I have an "O" level in computing from 1984 and that's it) - but the Mac community being as it is, a few mins on google and you can sus most things. And the fact that they compliment a deductively logical approach get you a log was straight off the bat with most things.

 

[geek]

For my limited knowledge a mac is too restrictive. I like to tinker. And, I don't like all this lock you into OUR product business such as itunes. Smacks of corporate nastyness e.g I like to share my music if I so choose or download a multitude of freeware to play with

sorry mate, completely the other way. Mac OSX, underneath the hood is an operating system called Unix. much of the software it runs "inside" is open source which means you can download, change, rebuild it as you see fit. you can download the "source code" to very large parts of the system from Apple and tinker with it. Microsoft platforms don't come anywhere close to letting you do this.

 

[Carl]

For those who have upgraded to Leopard, are the extra features worth the upgrade?

Just to add my two penneth to the debate... I bought my G5 2 years ago primarily for photo work as I find colour management much better on the mac. In that time its been wonderful, it very rarely gets switched off and although no longer a fast machine by todays standards it still blazes through everything Photoshop and Aperture ask of it.

It also gets used daily as my internet machine and I have never had to run any anti-virus or anti-spyware software on it. Only around 1% of all viruses affect macs and much less still affecting OSX, of those viruses that do affect macs the majority are due to Microsoft software and are in the form of word or excel macro viruses. This may well change as Apples market share continues to grow, but at the moment Apple has the advantage here.

As for iTunes; well, other programs are available but why would you want to use them? It does everything most people need.

As for price, yes they may cost a little more but IMO they are better quality, the case of the G5 is all aluminium and look inside and you are hard pushed to see any wires. It looks like some care and thought has gone into it producing it. Also when you come to sell it you can still get a decent price for it.

The major downside is if something goes wrong with it, you cant just nip down to Maplins and pick up say, a power supply of the shelf for a few quid.

I have enough dealing with PC issues day to day at work, so last thing I want to do in my free time is have to fiddle around with my own computer... but; its all horses for courses and competition in the market place, be it Apple or MS, is all the better for us.

 

[Captain Pugwash]

For those who have upgraded to Leopard, are the extra features worth the upgrade?

Just to add my two penneth to the debate... I bought my G5 2 years ago primarily for photo work as I find colour management much better on the mac. In that time its been wonderful, it very rarely gets switched off and although no longer a fast machine by todays standards it still blazes through everything Photoshop and Aperture ask of it.

It also gets used daily as my internet machine and I have never had to run any anti-virus or anti-spyware software on it. Only around 1% of all viruses affect macs and much less still affecting OSX, of those viruses that do affect macs the majority are due to Microsoft software and are in the form of word or excel macro viruses. This may well change as Apples market share continues to grow, but at the moment Apple has the advantage here.

As for iTunes; well, other programs are available but why would you want to use them? It does everything most people need.

As for price, yes they may cost a little more but IMO they are better quality, the case of the G5 is all aluminium and look inside and you are hard pushed to see any wires. It looks like some care and thought has gone into it producing it. Also when you come to sell it you can still get a decent price for it.

The major downside is if something goes wrong with it, you cant just nip down to Maplins and pick up say, a power supply of the shelf for a few quid.

I have enough dealing with PC issues day to day at work, so last thing I want to do in my free time is have to fiddle around with my own computer... but; its all horses for courses and competition in the market place, be it Apple or MS, is all the better for us.

Yes,Leopard is brilliant.

Quick Look,Cover Flow,Stacks all very very clever.

Chnages to iChat let someone else share your system over the net and file transfer is a click away.

Get it !

 

[ScottyKM]

I recently got the wife a macbook 2ghz basic number to replace the same spec dell with vista that we both hated,
she likes the mac, I love it and cant wait to have the cash to swap this tower and cable mess for a nice simple imac 24, or possibly a 17 macbook pro, esp after seeing this,
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,136649-page,3-c,notebooks/article.html



and much as i hate to copy the ads, it really does, just work, straight out of the box, powers up and logged into messenger/ opening email in under 30 secs