Oleron said:
I like what I'm hearing here, things have obviously moved on a bit since I last had a look.
I think what I need to do is pick up a cheap mac (!?) and stick it on my network to see what I can and can't do with it.
So, how do I get hold of a modern mac at rock-bottom prices?
2nd-user OK.
BTW I am based in UK.
Couple of points, you want one that can run the latest version of OS X so check that out first.
I would also recommend at least 512Mb of RAM, either buy one with that or be prepared to upgrade.
You could go down the route I did and get a Mac Mini, I just love mine for the design and the fact such a little box is a fully featured PC.
It is interesting that since buying my Mac Mini (March of this year) my view hasn’t really changed about Macs. I still maintain that OS X isn't as user friendly as its reputation would have people believe (my original views on this were as a result of training people on both Macs and PCs back in the good old say e.g. Windows 3.1 and whatever Mac OS version(s) that was at the time). It is frustrating to try to get it to connect to a wide range of hardware compared to the PC, now this isn’t necessarily an inherent problem with the Mac but Mac support for many devices is not very good from the hardware vendor's side, plus there are still some major issues for mainstream users (printing a borderless photo for example!). A good example is that my PCs are connected to a wireless router (but via Ethernet) during the night the router seems to have died to I've had to connect the PC and the Mac directly to the my ADSL modem/router, the PC (in the middle of running a test run for the upgrade of this forum) picked up where it left off without a glitch (apart from the firewall stepping in and asking did I want to connect to the "new network"). However it took me about 15 minutes to persuade the Mac to use the other router, nothing complex, nothing too difficult but just not quite as "plug and play".
The pre-installed package (i-whatever), well I like iTunes for the simple reason they've kept it simple, iPhoto is a complete joke, slow, cumbersome and not user friendly at all, the rest are rather hit and miss.
(I do like Pages - it's like going back to what word processors used to be like around the days of the Atari ST and Amiga, and I mean that as praise. Keynote presentations just look so much nicer then PowerPoint ones, even if PowerPoint does have more “featuresâ€)
However I do forgive the Mac a lot because it is nice, the only bit that Windows does nicer is display text on the LCD screens I use (I presume that is because of Cleartype).
I set my Mother up with a Windows XP PC a couple of years ago and she's managed well with that (not bad considering it's her first PC and she is in her sixties!), given a choice however I would have given her a Mac, because I would be confident that once configured it would do what she needs with no intervention from her. That hasn’t been the case for the Windows XP PC, especially with some of the required updates to the OS (like service pack 2).
It's really back to the old "horses for courses", but as I say
currently the Mac doesn’t offer anything revolutionary that I think is required
now to get people to move over to the Mac/OS X combination.
Perhaps if Apple did release a stand-alone cheap upgrade for the millions of PCs already installed with a Windows variant then it could make an impact, however I just don’t think Apple would have the capability to produce such an upgrade. (It's not a dig at Apple but the backwards compatibility that MS has maintained with the various Windows is a truly incredible feat, I still run an old complied Qbasic program from MS-DOS days in Windows XP. Albeit maintaining the backwards compatibility has also caused quite a few problems, for Apple to duplicate that from a standing start just wouldn’t be practically possible.)
(Edited for words.)
