My PC died - should I get a Mac?

http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/ukstore.woa/9201809/wo/cB2pxPUb4Kud2c7cW712o0vE2LN/0.SLID?mco=A9B2084&nclm=MacBook

I didn't know intel were loathed. I still don't know that they are.

the evolution from OS9 to OSX and the inherent abandonment of so many of the original principles of the macintosh proved to me, in an unguarded moment, that we mac-lovers are a bunch of saps who have no real rational basis for our adulation ;)

that said, i had to use a windows machine for a few minutes the other day and it managed to suck, blow and honk mightily in a whole range of ways i wouldn't really have thought possible.

Price-wise, how do yr iBooks (or whatever they're called) compare with entry-level Sony VAIOs? We're very happy with our VAIO (had to get a PC as there's little, if any, subtitling software available for Mac).

I am not into making software or screwing around with graphics or video particularly. I'm not a "computer enthusiast", I'm a computer user.

Yes.

The education discount in the US is typically $100 off computers and $50 off iPods.

Where do you find normal Intel PCs lacking, currently?

right deny it all you like thats my reason

well: the notion that everything should be do-able through the GUI, for a start. far too many apple knowledgebase articles require you to start fucking around in unix.

don't get me wrong: i'm writing this on an OS9 machine at work and i would give both testicles and at least half an arm for OSX. but a lot of the essential "macness" - the uniform look-and-feel, the simplicity - was sacrificed in the name of power.

stet is very good on this stuff. i assume he'll turn up here soon.

ALSO WTF IS THE WIDGET?

Fuck it, and fuck that company. NEVER AGAIN. NOT IN MY NAME.

If I could somehow get a pre-OSX Mac that actually worked and could be made powerful, made again, we have the technology, etc, I'd take that shit in a heartbeat. But these new ones can go fuck themselves. Whoever said stop deluding yourself that they're the anti-Microsoft is correct.

xpost the widgets thing is asinine.

i thought they all worked with everything above 10.3.4. my boss bought her husband a nano for xmas and i ended up having to upgrade her iBook from 10.3.2 for it to work ... it was perfectly happy with 10.3.9. coo ur. which iPod do you have, ally?

xpost grimly I don't have the thing in front of me, because it's broke so why bring it to work. It's not a recent one, like a couple years old now, but if you do a search on google on the issue it wasn't uncommon when 10.3.9 came out for your computer to eat your iPod if you did not have a newer model iPod. :(

good point :)

and yeh, IDSTR something about 10.3.9 being teh mighty suck and knacking things. but then very soon everybody was too busy going "O GOD NO" at 10.4 to worry about it any more, i s'pose.

You really need to get a Mac if that's the the case. The word processing is at least equal to what you're used to (you can get Word for Mac) and probably better (Pages is top). Internet access is another world -- no viruses, malware or spyware... none -- the iPod speaks for itself and iPhoto is plenty fine for loading photos.

Go out and get an iBook now, before the intel switch. The new intel McBook has a battery life of under three hours; the iBook will do more than six, and is more than beefy enough for what you want to do. But get at least 1GB memory. That's important.

(Don't worry about all the Mac user infighting going on either. It reminds me of once seeing two Christians fighting about some esoteric differences between their sects. When a heathen came along they just dropped it and tried to present this united front. You're seeing the quibbling over sects here. Oh and intel sucks balls)

xposts: iPod people, you need the new updater that came out yesterday. That'll fix those problems.

though, if i had neither, i'd probably get a pc notebook and wipe it clean and install linux

which might help to actually learn something about linux

linux isnt very good with wireless though is it?

i dont like ipods, at all. horrible things.

it seems you cant format an external drive in fat32 if it is bigger than, oh! 32gb?! i never noticed that 32 thing, is that what the 32 stands for? surely not?

ive been using a program called 'toy viewer' recently? ive never heard anyone mention that before, but its a basic tool for cutting images, its alright!

no, fat32 can support up to 2TB. Your problem goes back to certain engineers being cunts

I have a Linux desktop PC with a wireless chip on the motherboard. I didn't deliberately buy one that I thought would work - in fact, I was rather surprised when it came, because it hadn't been mentioned anywhere in the machine specs. Nevertheless, once I'd installed the driver (a single command) and told it my network name and encryption key (no worse than doing it on Windows), it Just Worked.

Yeh, starting a 1920s car is like this. Once I get the crank out of the boot (a single move), set the choke and the fuel mix (no worse than starting a cessna) it Just Worked. That's not "just working". Turning the key and going is just working. Clicking the wee icon on the menu bar once is "just working". That's the whole point

xpost: 12". Same number of pixels, more compact, cheaper.

Around Xmas time you could get the 20G for $199 (normally $299) at the grocery stores here.

I see the pros and cons of both machines and like them both equally. I've often had to use both systems at the same time.

If I had unlimited money I'd probably buy a powerbook. but as I have virutally no money I'll take what I can get. And I got a new PC notebook for Xmas so I'm happy.

So Macs are clever enough to connect to your wireless network without having to type in the key? Well, I suppose it makes it easier to crack your neighbours' networks.

point out what functions in OS X actually conform to this lofty spec

i used my first mac in 1993. i now own three: a 1996 PB5300, which still works perfectly despite a ceiling falling on it; an iMac DVSE and a 12" powerbook. i also have an iPod shuffle and a 20GB second-gen one. all of them work beautifully. the only apple product (please, guys: "mac" is a computer, "apple" is a company) i've had that's ever failed is my original iPod, which i, er, dropped on a stone floor.

i guess the message is simple: YMMV!

At my last job, I had to deal with OS X Macs, and their main selling point seemed to be the shiny cases. The OS shell was lovely, so long as you stuck to doing the sort of things Apple expected you to do.

* Appleton Tower, Fourth Floor Lab - the best thing about it being, you couldn't see the building when you were inside it

x-post: AAARGH, GOD, NOT THE FUCKING APPLETON TOWER FOURTH FLOOR. please don't ever speak of that again, FP :)

(another thing I remember: surfing the Web in black and white on the Library Macs)

Well, yeh, If you're using an Apple basestation thanks to integrated software. Though you will have to if you use a third-party basestation.

Tombot: Er, the Airport menu item. Apache sharing. Firewalling. Connection sharing with local DHCP. Rendezvous networking. They're all one-click numbers.

Well, yeh, If you're using an Apple basestation thanks to integrated software.

So what stops your Mac-using next-door-neighbour from connecting to your basestation, then?

You can set a password, no?

my linux knowledge is hugely limited, so all i can say to this is: OT fuckin' M, tombot.

Actually, I preferred the Main Library Fourth Floor lab, but it was a bit pokey. All my first and second-year essays were written on Word 5.1 on those machines

you could always find me on level two, where the classics were. later, when i spunked a huge amount of my loan on the powerbook, i'd go there 'cos it had the old-style appletalk connectors, rather than coax-style ethernet things, so i could just hook my own machine straight into the university network. ah, happy days.

(as an aside: FP and beanz, did you *ever* pay for your printing?)

if it's your network. if it's a random network, a window pops up asking for the password.

Fortunately, the ending of honesty-box printing payments coincided pretty much exactly with me getting my own PC and printer.

(xpost)

if it's your network

But how does it know!?

There's no link to system preferences in my dock, Tombot. And the "all guis turn shit on/off" is bollocks. It's the "shit" that's the point -- set up internet connection sharing from a modem to built-in WiFi on Windows, then try it on Mac.

my girlfriend spent hours, phone calls and nearly tears seting up her housemates to access her wireless i turned up turned my ibook on and it worked...

but then there was no password

xpost: I already did, Tombot.

2. How else do you measure "just working"? You plug something in, click one or two buttons == it just works. You plug it in, and click 50 buttons == it don't work. And what don't you like about Pages?

i'm not trying to stir shit here, but i don't think that's true across the board. it certainly didn't happen to me when i updated (nor to quite a few other people i know with macs).

One thing to note about mac evangelists: their shit never works as well at home as they claim it does. It's just that it's so much better in this subjective well-i-paid-more-for-it sense than you can spend YEARS before you actually notice that it's silly to keep pretending Macs are so great when they're honestly no more or less a huge pain in the ass than any other kind of computer. YMMV, I'm an idiot.

arses, that ended when "operating systems" and shared APIs came in, like early 90s, so nearer 15 years.

HA HA

oh noes computers they are too complicated. STOP THE FLOW OF TIME

:)

Thing is, with Apple it's always ten people going "god, they're great, I moved from PC and it's amazing" to one person going "wuaaaggh!". With Dell and Microsoft and the like, it's ten people going "the service was shit and mine arrived in pieces oh and how do you do X???" to one person going "yeh, I like it OK. It's better than my Mac was, anyway".

Pages looks awful, yes - that's why I didn't pay for it and don't use it. I use the same copy of Office v.X I bought from the university computer store three years ago for $5. (If I can find it, else I'll be forced to go down there when the semester starts and pony up $5 more.)

iPhoto looks useless for heavy-duty usage - so I don't use it.

Dashboard is just silly - so, again, I don't use it. I installed an Asteroids widget, played for five minutes and have never accessed it again.

OTOH, I have no problem using spotlight/the finder to find all the apps and files I could ever want or need.

So what do you do when you add a computer to the network? That was the original situation we were talking about.

One thing to note about mac evangelists: their shit never works as well at home as they claim it does. It's just that it's so much better in this subjective well-i-paid-more-for-it sense than you can spend YEARS before you actually notice that it's silly to keep pretending Macs are so great when they're honestly no more or less a huge pain in the ass than any other kind of computer.

This is indeed what I've found when dealing with Mac evangelists myself. Particularly, a former boss, who seemed to think anything Apple did was wonderful and anything any other OS did was terrible, even when it was the same thing. Given that his computers were the only Macs in the building, any problems he had were always blamed on the other computers not doing things in the Right Way.

Fan got louder, then the damn thing just went dead

Uh-Oh! I've been putting off looking inside mine for a while now... tedious task but innards of current machine > new case & power supply is something I should be able to do ok. Sigh, another job.

Er, you bosh in the password :) (though it is a lot friendlier than a huge string o' hex in most cases).

But you were originally talking about using linux and how all you had to do was install drivers, type in the netname/pass, and I was trying to contrast that to the Mac, where I don't think I've ever installed a driver yet, and where you just choose the network name from a list, then type the password. It's the same basic stuff, just more nicely implemented. As JWZ points out in my link in the other thread.

This is indeed what I've found when dealing with Mac evangelists myself. Particularly, a former boss, who seemed to think anything Apple did was wonderful and anything any other OS did was terrible, even when it was the same thing.

TBH, *all* evangelists are like this. Our current head of IT is trying to force Windows PCs on the mostly-Mac company, and will brook no opposition to this mighty plan, even when the suppor-horror-fest that is our forever-down, PC-using ad department is pointed out as Exhibit A.

Most notable is that even the massed ranks of hacks, who really aren't Mac evangelists, get all arsy when told we're moving to windows, and start kicking off. It's not all down to fear of the unknown either -- some of these folks bought PCs to use at home, and still moan about the thought of using them at work too.

I've been wildly didactic in this thread, Sick Mouthy, most of it in retaliation to people who Macs almost as much as I do Windows, but all Cult o'Apple: get one ibook. Ask Mickey about his experiences too, he did the same a few months ago.

1. I cannot bear the thought of becoming a mac evangelist. A little inconvenience is a small price to pay for not joining those ranks.

2. The mac evangelists' insistence that OSX is better than OS9 because it crashes less. Now, I'm sure I remember back in the old days before OSX, mac evangelists assuring me that macs hardly ever crash. I have stopped believing that macs are as stable as their supporters like to claim.

3. I have only used a mac regularly once, and that was about a decade ago. The thing crashed about every 20 minutes.

4. The only organisation I know of which has macs firm-wide have horrible computing problems.

5. I haven't had a crash on my (old, clunky, grossly overstuffed, constantly-used) work laptop PC for at least 18 months.

6. The difference in ease of use between mac and pc appears to be little more than the odd click here and there. I'm never going to worry about operating systems and the likelihood that I'll ever customise my interface (oo-er) is small at best.

7. iBooks look better than PC laptops but the point of me moving from my very old desktop to a laptop is so I don't have to look at a pooter the whole time anyway.

8. Given the above, macs and PCs come out about even and PCs are cheaper.

Therefore I'm going to be getting a PC laptop unless I can get a really really good deal on an iBook.

Dude, how *did* you manage to do that? My dad was able to erase EVERYTHING on my first comp (about 13/14 yrs ago). I had to call the shop and tell them that the dog had bitten the start-up disks. I gently told my dad that they wouldn't buy that excuse.

i'm not a mac evangelist, but the missus is a designer so she is. fuck it, nick, purty is good.

I mean, there is a nightmare where I buy a mac, am completely won over by its beauty and simplicity and stability, and this new knowledge makes points up currently-unknown frustrations in my PC-based working life, rendering it even more miserable than it is already. That sounds rubbish.

X-post - I'm assuming Cozen means the people who are frothing (i.e. Tom and Ally).

FWIW though i work at a MS/PC-centric place as a mac admin we are more and more getting ppl asking for advice about what mac to buy at home

I'm thinking I need an external DVD burner too, colette. Can I ask which one you bought? They seemed v.expensive when I looked.

My understanding is that the more people begin to use apple products, the more likely it is that the "no viruses" thing with macs will become a thing of the past. Am I wrong?

it was weird because the description says it's OK for macs, but the box didn't. although i haven't had time to burn any DVDs with it yet, it connected up fine to burn a CD.

tim, i use a PC at work and it's not a big deal going back and forth. i'd imagine it's harder if your job is 'computer stuff' rather than 'office stuff that happens to use a computer'. and i have soulseek on my computer, no problem.

So, yeah, Sony VAIO - bottom of the range is about £650-700, WinXP, 80GB, 512MB RAM, multi-format dual-layer DVD burner, X-Black LCD screen (which is better than anything else I've seen on a laptop), WLAN, etc. Three months in and not a sniff of a problem.

Yes, the "ooh, you'll be wanting to do this now - lemme help" popup bollocks is annoying but you can turn all that crap off.

Pam still yearns for a Mac though.

(How true is the "fundamentally more secure architecture" thing anyway? Especially the "fundamentally" bit? Why write viruses to attack machines that so few people (relatively speaking) use?)

(a) there won't be much difference in terms of utility between the two and I'll have wasted money going down the mac route, or
(b) the mac will be loads better than my work PC and that will turn using my work pc into a litany of miseries. The MacHeads here at work seem to resent even havng to turn their PCs on, it seems to be a source of much sadness to them. My work is miserable enough already, without adding frustrations. I reckon I'll probably be just as happy believing that all computers kind of OK, rather than spending 40 hours a week knowing I've been excluded from the promised land.

They are incredibly badly put together, using non standard components that break after a year. I have never known anyone be happy with one in the long term.

you can use nicotine or SSX, which do exactly the same thing on exactly the same network.

Slightly less annoying answer: get an IBM Thinkpad, which will cost you more, but last you much longer.

Hopefully not annoying at all answer: Toshiba seem to strike a good balance between price and quality.

Thanks Ricky.

i had a bad experience with a dell laptop, and when i moaned about it, everyone said 'oh, well of course, dell laptops are CRAP,' but i don't know if that's true generally or if i just had a lemon.

I don't get this. Can't you just get a Mac and then be quietly smug about it? Or are you afraid you'll suddenly start preaching to people about how much better Macs are?

2. The mac evangelists' insistence that OSX is better than OS9 because it crashes less. Now, I'm sure I remember back in the old days before OSX, mac evangelists assuring me that macs hardly ever crash. I have stopped believing that macs are as stable as their supporters like to claim.

It's all relative. Back when those claims were being made they were being compared to Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. For all that OS 9 crashes, it crashes a hell of a lot less than that pair.

4. The only organisation I know of which has macs firm-wide have horrible computing problems.
We have them firm-wide apart from one department, and that department takes up 70% of our IT department's time. The only reasons we get papers out is because we use Macs: our support staff for Macs is non-existent, so it's a good thing they keep working.

6. The difference in ease of use between mac and pc appears to be little more than the odd click here and there. I'm never going to worry about operating systems and the likelihood that I'll ever customise my interface (oo-er) is small at best.

There's more to it than that, but it's hard to put across. It's like the difference between the iPod interface and all those MP3 players with 1,000,000,000 buttons: it's only a few clicks, but it's a different world, interface-world.

ally, have you tried acquisition? it is great.

hahah x-post!

Colette: Dell's build quality is wildly variable, as far as I can tell. Some of their machines last forever, others go clunk after six months and then never cease clunking until you finally throw them out in a fit of rage.

1. I dunno, the Macophilia on the threads over the past few days has rubbed me up the wrong way, made me not want to be part of that.

2. Yes but clearly we're splitting hairs aren't we? None of us are experiencing lots of crashes. Isn't the world wonderful?

4. I'm sure you're speaking the truth, but then so is my friend whose mac-only place is a mare. It sounds as though both have been outrageously badly set up, to me, and therefore the stories kind of cancel each other out. Our windows-based environment doesn't go down very much, if at all (I can't remember it doing so but maybe I'm forgetting).

5. "It's a different world" I've used mac interfaces, and frankly there's not *that* much difference as far as I'm concerned. I don't have an iPod but I hate using them, that horrid little wheel thing, ugh. I bet I'd get used to it after a while.

USB and DVD (even hastily banged-together pre-build DVD-Rs from authoring houses, which *never* used to play on our hopeless WinME desktop) all present and correct on ours... So far.

I think somebody else mentioned that, but it's probably because you're only trying to do PC things with it. I like how on the Mac you can drag just about anything anywhere -- highlight text on a web page and drag it over the icon for a word processor and it'll be pasted into a document -- whereas on Windows if you try to drag something to the task bar, it gives you a warning that you can't, and tells you how another (clunky) way to try. So: WIndows knows what you're trying to do, but won't let you do it anyway. That's the difference in thinking.

That said:.
My work is miserable enough already, without adding frustrations. I reckon I'll probably be just as happy believing that all computers kind of OK, rather than spending 40 hours a week knowing I've been excluded from the promised land.

is a killer argument. I know farmers mangled in crashes because they get out of their tractors at the end of the day and then drive everywhere at 110mph.

BOTTOM LINE: IF ANY OF YOU WERE SO SERIOUS YOU'D BUILD YOUR OWN COMPUTER. THINK ABOUT IT.

i work with stet, and trust me: he's telling the truth.

i was going to post a lot more here but it would involve making defamatory statements about the company i work for, so i won't :)

x-post: my mate built his own computer. it was shit. but he also built a seven-chamber bong that incorporated three chambers of differently flavoured water, so who gives a fuck? :)

crosspost

RJG, I don't feel limited at all -- what feels limiting?

(huggles!)

Seriously. I think Apple should use'em as testbunnies.

I think I feel like I know where things are, more, w/ a PC and there is less I can't access, etc, or something

Why do you want to access things you don't understand... YOU'LL ONLY BREAK THINGS. (There are ways of getting at all the guts)

mysterios mac problems :D
http://pc59te.dte.uma.es/cdb/series/marvel/bitmaps/mysterio.jpg

(maybe Ally and I didn't run into so many bombs with Netscape because we weren't trying to hose up somebody else's webserver.)

I received an email from ebuyer yesterday they have fantastic deal going till Friday 5pm

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* External bays: 2 x 3.5, 2 x 5.25
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* PS/2 Keyboard and Mouse
* Stereo Speaker Set
* Linux
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* Software Included
* AntiVirus Software; Audio Player

PRICE £129.99
£152.74 inc VAT

they are some great deals on ebuyer

Actually I did build my own computer when I was going through my Linux phase. SUSE was my fave of all the distributions.

Anyway, SSX for Mac soulseeking works great, especially with the last August build.

I don't understand this thread at all btw

-- tissp! (impossibleshortestspecialpat...), January 12th, 2006 2:51 PM. (later)

Stet, will you tell the story of why Macs don't get viruses please? It think you would tell it better than I could.

Viruses/Spyware/etc on the Mac are just like this. The users are so vocal and arsy, as soon as something even slightly malware appears, everyone goes mental until it is fixed. There was a possible hole appeared in OS X last year and -- even though there had been no exploit of it -- there was such a hullabaloo you think Jobs had stolen their babies. It was fixed. Quickly.

Yesterday, the new iTunes came out. It sends data to Apple about what song you've clicked on, to update the new mini store pane. There have already been zillions of sites kicking off about it, even though it's a tiny, low-grade potential privacy hole. Apple had to issue a clarification (they don't keep the data).

On Windows however, you need a huge exploit like the WMF, or something truly awful like the Sony rootkit before it permeates the general user's awareness. Windows effectively has more than one Broken Window. Hurrah for puns.

(Of course, there's also the market share argument. But since the Mac is *never* going to have a 95% market share, it's always going to be safer, innit?)

But it's technical, and this thread's too heated for me to tell it without actually researching and shit, and I'm lazyvery busy.

crosspost

But I really should keep quiet about how swell they are, aye.

(not any more asking for trouble than I did when I was talking about "widgets")

This has what I was saying above about crapware and the mac and -heh- broken windows far better than I said it.

and Grimly Fiendish. Who's like the guy who was in the bar before they did it up and gets to keep his mouldy barstool.

I suppose the alternative is windows pc + hd-ready plasma.

1. *nix/BSD is architecturally different, which is a pretty hefty factor, admin vs. root and what you can do with it and how to attain those privileges being very different across platforms. I mean to give yourself root on a mac is frankly a pretty huge pain in the ass even with physical access to the device. To get root on a protected school laptop kids have to buy spare RAM, for fuck's sake. Of course, to run as, say, a daemon's userid, all you have to do is exploit an application, hence Linux webservers all over the world being defaced and misused just as readily as their MS counterparts.

2. When you cast a net over 95% of the population, you catch a lot of idiots who don't care to know anything about how to safely operate a computer or what visiting a bad web page can do to you. Really, you do the same when you cast a net over 5%, but since the 95% is already out there, why would anybody bother writing exploits to specifically target them? Nigerian 419 scam mail isn't written in Icelandic. It's written in English.

Install well-known firewall and anti-virus software that both update automatically, ensure that windows updates is enabled - and that's about it?

this is brilliant, and worryingly spot-on.

and Grimly Fiendish. Who's like the guy who was in the bar before they did it up and gets to keep his mouldy barstool.

hey! you cheeky ... where was i? ... ooh, yes, a hauf and hauf would be lovely, son.

In any case, after my laptop was stolen I got a work laptop, an IBM Thinkpad T42, and it's my far the best laptop I've owned -- build quality is great, tons of free backup tools and cool things like hard drive shock sensors (same kind as on the Powerbook). Plus personally I think right now is a pretty bad time to buy Apple products -- all the ibooks/powerbooks are pretty antiquated by now and who knows what the first Macbooks will be like.

Also Jon, feel free at any time to actually try to engage any point I've made instead of continually insulting me. If I was the only person to have had any of the problems or concerns I've had, it'd have been a helluva lot more difficult and time consuming for me to fix them, but thanks to thousands upon thousands of posts to Apple-related messages boards bitching about the same thing, I solved dilemmas like "the computer update just ate my iPod" within an hour. I would still like to know what in god's name is so difficult for you to comprehend about the simple fact that you and I are aiming to do two different things with our computers, and by Apple changing certain things/not keeping up with other things in favor of doing what you want to do better, they do what I want to do worse. It's fantastic that you feel you have more developer stability now. But it'd be nice if you could acknowledge, ever, that people might have a valid reason to disagree with your sudden 180 on Apple without them being retards or idiots or etc.

But then you wouldn't be so charming!

(oh and anyone in the market for a PC Laptops the Samsung ones are a great deal and pretty solid)

http://www.apcmag.com/apc/v3.nsf/0/64E7EA353646669ECA2570F50012430B

Call me crazy, but if I were a virus writer, I'd probably see all the "Macs don't get viruses, their architecture is fundamentally more secure" taints as a fucking great challenge. Surely there are some anti-Mac zealots out there who'd love to wipe the smug smiles off all those faces.

Get fame as the man who brought down OS X!

This from Mrs. lick my asshole? Please

Most Linux and Unix compromises are more complex than this. Usually, you manage to get local (shell or something aproximating one) access to something under a daemon's uid. Then you exploit something that requires local access to get root.

I am going to bed now!

Bastard.

I'm philosophical about it.

-- Sick Mouthy

Spoken like a good mac user =)

Mine arrived with a failing hard drive fwiw.

Day one; cracked screen.

Day two; not picked up yet by courier.

hahahah!

Yesterday we rang customer service at 8am, ad they agreed to send a courier ad dispatch a new iMac. At 9.30 Emma, in a fit of jealousy, ordered herself an iMac (she's sold her Mac Mini in preparation, so it's planed rather than a jealous spasm, to be fair). Anyway, 26 hours later, her iMac arrived. Mine's still in bloody Shanghai!? So she's give me hers and will have the replacement one herself when it arrives in a couple of days or so.

So my new iMac is all set up and on its new desk and so on, and is lovely!

Just one question - is there an "end" key like on a PC keyboard to whip me right to the end of a line of text? Likewise a "home" key to get to the beginning?

Hmm, that didn't work.

However, Gmail is not working properly via either Firefox or Safari (can't send mails - and couldn't upload a picture to Photobucket earlier either = problems sending things outbound? No problem downloading things - three widgets, a big Jpeg from a friend to use as a desktop background, and an M4A too), and mac.com wont open properly either. Mind you, lots of things wont work on various PCs in this house because, presumably, of my dad's shitrty network.

the latest in mac technology?

I really don't trust mac anymore. I think they have a problem making good hardware. Maybe the intels will be a nice change.

Mac lets us down again!

also home and end work for me in some apps, like firefox. do these not exist on laptop keyboards or something?

For text editing, I suggest using Pages. You have the "old" version (they just came out with a new version about a month ago that seems pretty much exactly the same) on their right now as a 30 day trial. Go in Finder and go to your applications. That's my favorite. I purchased an educational copy for around 50 bucks.

2) widgets - i never use these

3) errr word by default, since everyone uses it. for strictly text editing i use BBEdit.

4) don't know nuthin bout iWorks

5) yes; from any word processor or text editing program, do "save as" and then choose "text file" from the drop-down menu, and append ".txt" to the end of the filename. now you can email that file, burn it to a disc, etc and a PC will be able to read it

quicksilver and sidenote are wonderful. i also like the gmail notifier (download from within gmail settings).

VLC = handy cross-platform media player, plays .avi files.

P2P client:

FFView is an okay .cbr/.cbz viewer if you read any comics on your computer. It's not perfect, but it's good enough for me.

Can I just save with .txt? I have been using .doc and sometimes if I save something in the Macs crappy AppleWorks program and try to send it to someone with a PC they *claim* they can't open it.

Does Pages have a Powerpoint application?

Why can't everything just work with everything else?

Because that might open up a way for software companies' rivals to compete with them!

ihttp://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/the%20next%20album/AppleiMac003shrunk.jpg

Family pack has 5 install licenses, but does this mean that the regular has only one? Or does it have two? Two would be great...

FileMaker Pro.

(I like O'Reilly stuff myself)

I checked Mac books on Amazon, and it seemed highly recommended, so I bought it. I got the Tiger Missing Manual too.

Mark - it may seem basic but, well, I've NEVER used a Mac before, so basic is where we start.

I'm pretty sure the regular version has two licenses, but can someone confirm that? Seems like I had no trouble installing final cut on more than one machine...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6553260189868317794

Plus, after this, it will be much more awkward to edit the file again. This is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on whether you want to be able to.

(or whether you want other people to be able to)

(have I told you story of the dumb manager who was convinced that the editability of .doc files and non-editability of .pdf files persisted even when you were faxing the files to someone?)

do ... not ... feed ... the ... AAARGH, CAN'T STOP SELF ... look, it's very simple. some people don't like certain things. if somebody's got enough time on their hands to make silly videos, good on them; personally, i think they need to get a life.

but please, PLEASE: the company is called apple, okay? and the computer is "a macintosh" or "a mac". lower-case. so: "a commercial for apple, about why the mac is crap". or similar.

thank you.

I nearly bought an iBook (is that right?) on Saturday, primarily because I just couldn't face making the choice of which PC laptop (is that right too?) is best (how am I supposed to know, or trust the salespeople?) and I figured the iBook could do the job. But the man in the shop told me to wait a month or two for the intel chip version to come out and I got confused.

Square one, kind of.

because otherwise we sound like dicks?

"i bought IPOD the other day!"

"i'm drinking cOLA-cOKA!"

"i drive an Escort FORD."

if you've got a point to make, using the right terminology helps people take you seriously.

as for your laptop, tim: i'm not sure about this headlong rush to intel, principally because there are bound to be teething problems. can't the shop dude give you some kind of discount on the last-in-line "old" iBook?

There don't seem to be any discounts on the current iBooks knocking about yet, but I'm waiting to see. There's no particular hurry, though it would be convenient to have a functioning pooter at home. If someone points me at a good, reliable PC laptop at a decent price I'll buy that instead, I guess. We'll see.

Samsung X series laptops are very good, I have one for work, which is pretty decent. Don't buy any PC laptop with Intel Extreme Graphics or any Nvidia graphics with 'Turbo Cache'.

(Thanks Ed!)

Thanks though.

(I recommended it cos a friend bought a £2000 machine on there for £900 and I was dead jealous. His might well have been a D3ll, though)

(I shall be ordering a MacBook Pro just as soon as the virtualisation issue is clarified)

If virtualisation is enabled (and it should be but there was some talk of it not being so on early Core Duo chips) then I have a fair stab of being able to run my work apps on the Mac Book Pro and condense two computers into one.

It's not essential but I'd feel a right idiot if I bought one of the first series of Macbook Pros only to find out that only from the second batch on it was enabled.

Probably won't affect you in the slightest.

I thought Apple always capitalised "Macintosh".

pedant :)

mixed-case, i mean. ie not CAPITALISED in that REALLY FUCKING ANNOYING WAY ppl do.

might interest you if thinking about making the move

You're not going to the states any time soon as that may be better than the educational discount you'll get.

Apparently we are now on Rev D MBPs with a lot of the teathing troubles ironed out.

it does seem like quite a no-brainer to go with one of these rather than a pc, although i'm a little worried about the size of it - it doesn't feel too heavy, but it just looks huge!

If I had the cash and wanted a new laptop, i'd be getting a MacBook Pro.

(xpost Games?)

i think a 17" model might be a bit too big, the existing one seems fairly huge to me.

but really it's hard to imagine NOT getting an Apple computer at this point even though I hate them but really with the gentoo/osx/windows bootloader they've devised there's absolutely no better hardware for hedging your bets

Unfortunately there is none, Basically I want a Core Duo Duo (Duo 280c was pretty much my favorite Mac ever). I've been on other forums requestion such but no actual speculation other than the rumors of a MB thin.

Basically I'd like a thin and light laptop with a doscking station, what would be great is if they could extend the PCIe bus to the docking station (the Duo one had a NuBus slot IIRC), so I could have chunky graphics whilst docked (and a chunky fast HD) and low power, long battery life optimised graphics on the move and some clever software to keep the dock's HD and MBThin's HD synchronised, but with ceratin things left off (iTunes style tick boxes in the finder for example), because I don't want all of my work or tunes or whatever on the move, only what is necessary. What would be even smarter would be if the dock could run a lightwieght server so if you forgot anything, it could be retrieved over the internet.

Apple should give me a job.

I run some pretty heavy software and it always ALWAYS handles it.

So, the decision.... Ultimately yours.
My suggestion TEST DRIVE ONE - Once you've MAC you'lll NEVER go back.

Enjoy

I run some pretty heavy software and it always ALWAYS handles it.

So, the decision.... Ultimately yours.
My suggestion TEST DRIVE ONE - Once you've MAC you'lll NEVER go back.

Enjoy

We've been street-teamed!

(also - genuine question - can you test drive a computer, like, borrow it and see how well it suits your needs?)

Markelby -- not from Apple, but you can lounge around the Apple store all day, doing pretty much whatever with the macs ther.

VT is already here with parallels and is very good.

http://twit.tv/49

Around 13:45, if you're interested. Maybe I misunderstood what he was saying.

At work I have an IBM box which runs 2 virtual servers with AIX on, it's sexy.

Oh and Tracer, I tried your little txt trick, but the text turned into squiggly lines.

The *reason* Word 5.1 for Mac was so much better than later versions is that it was the last version written specifically *for* the Mac. Later ones, from 6.0 onwards, were ported from the Windows version, and performed terribly.

5.1, though, was a descendant of the original Mac version of Word, which was practically the only non-Apple application you could buy when the Mac was released.

(the reason Word for Windows had a big jump in its version number up to 6.0 was to match Word for Mac's version numbering).

if you just want to read power point presentations, you can download a free viewer program from microsoft, i recall.

current real word is pretty bloated yeah, but it runs decently.