Apple Are macs worth their price tags?

I have owned some sort of Windows computer for 8 years, never thought that much of Macs but somthing over the last few days makes me want to try one. Are they worth it? if i bought one i would be looking for a price tag of about £700. Talk me into it or out of it, what do you think?

 

Might be worth it... the spellcheckers on them seem to be much better than whatever you're using now..

 

700 what?

for (US) $700 all you could really get is a mac mini - bottom end, not good for much.

for £749.00 you can get a macbook. Fully functional laptop good for everything except 3d gaming. It would include a core 2 duo cpu and a 60gb hard drive. If you are a student, you can do even better. As a student, you can get the same laptop for £703.83. Note - all of these prices are "including VAT" - whatever that means.....

With that laptop, you could run a stable secure operating system with world class apps without having to worry about crashes, viruses, etc.
(To avoid flaming, I will mention that no OS is bulletproof - however, in 6 years, not one single bullet (virus) has managed to infect OS X.)

If you really needed to, you could install windows on a partition of the hard drive or even on an external drive for those times when you must run something in windows. (Microsoft SQL server in my case, along with some development tools.) When booted into windows through bootcamp, the machine is a full speed fully functional windows machine - with all the good and the bad that that comes with.

I don't know what else you want to know....
Is it true that:
...macs don't crash as often as windows machines?
*yes, absolutely. As in, never or almost never. I have not had a 'system' crash in about a year.

...when an application on a mac crashes, it does so gracefully without taking out the rest of the system?
*More or less... Again, I have never had a system crash. I have had some beta software freeze my machine pretty well, but I learned "top" and "kill" pretty quickly. (They are a little more bulletproof than "Force quit" - terminal is your friend.) Almost all application crashes (and, they are rare,) happen very gracefully with the OS politely letting you know that the 3 or 4 year old PPC shareware game you were playing has terminated.

...macs handle multi user security well?
*Um - yeah. Perfectly. You could share 1 laptop among a family of 10 including little kids, teenagers, and adults and except for hard drive space, you wouldn't have to worry about anything, like little Johnny doing things you don't want him to or your (non-admin) dad changing any of the system settings. You can even turn on file encryption for each user.

...they handle multiprocessing better than windows?
*OK - you didn't really ask this one, but yeah. (I know, you didn't really ask any of them, but I'm trying my best here......)

Any more questions?

 

nice...

Oh yeah - firefox style spellchecking built into the OS - so that it works in iChat, textedit, safari, etc...

 

What good software are avavaible on Mac, i was thinking of a MacBook for Photo editing with adobe photoshop cs2, video and normal uses like e-mail, internet, word.

 

final cut studio at hefty pricetag of $1299 is an industry class video editing suite, there's also adobe creative suite that will run on intel macbook natively (cs3 release date - April 20th), for photo editing and RAW processing there's my favourite one - Adobe Lightroom, it does everything you could ever imagine done to a photo - should suit all your RAW processing needs and more

 

for video editing, unless you are a professional, (and by professional - I mean really - it's what you do every day,) most likely the built in iLife suite should be plenty for you. It includes iMovie and iDVD in addition to garage band (audio authoring). They are really really good apps that are just shy of pro level.

cs3 for photo editing, and if you need to manipulate raw files, Lightroom or aperture.

mail is the email program that comes with it - it's full featured and integrates with everything else, but I still prefer gmails web client to any full client.

internet - I use firefox in order to have a consistent UI between windows and OS X.

Word - Well, besides the price, there's nothing wrong with microsoft office. Neo Office is free and feature rich. I've heard good things about pages, but haven't used it yet.

Anything else?

 

It's worth noting that the macbook and mac mini are pretty similar except for that one's a laptop. Both are great for general web browsing, email, etc., and light graphics work. They are relatively powerful computers with the glaring exception of the video card (integrated video sucks...a lot, but it doesn't matter unless you are doing graphics work or gaming). So unless you need the graphics card, or windows programs, I would entirely recommend either system, but then again I'm a mac whore. Your best bet is to find someone who has a newish mac and try out the OS (while I love it, it's not for everybody). The hardware is solid, it's the software you should be thinking over. Anyways, you can find a program on OSX for just about anything, except really specialized stuff.

 

And, just to re-iterate - for that really specialized stuff, just start up parallels workstation or reboot into windows.

Sorry man - there's nothing bad I can say about 'em.

 

I think Dizman is right about the software, can i run my windows programs on my Mac mini.

 

Yes.

 

Depends what you do. I used a mac mini for a few months and found OSX to be very bloated and damn slow at times. Then again I was on a low end machine. As far as the OS itself goes it has some nice features, but equally fustrated me in various ways.

I would deffinity recomend you have a proper play with a Mac before splashing out the cash for one.

 

VMs are a great way to utilize other operating systems with the same efficiency as a host OS. Too many pluses to name here. Though size your box with enough horsepower to run two (or more) instances of an OS (host and guest).

I have not used Parallels, but understand that it is the best for VM environments. If you go this route, please take the time to securely configure Parallels. The default configuration allows the VM (guest OS) complete access to read, write, or delete files on the host OS.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2007/02/perils_in_parallels_1.html


And depending on the reason for the VM, this should be treated with equal importance as the host OS. Patch, configure, etc....basically lock down the guest OS as you would your host OS.

 

I cannot believe some people are still idiotically saying you need a high spec video card for graphics work - photoshop and illustrator, imovie, final cut pro... all specify fast CPU's and lots of RAM. They certainly don't need a high spec graphics card.

The only thing the macbooks and mini's cannot do that iMacs, Mac Pro's and MBP's is play demanding games at a comfortable framerate.

I think a mac is worth the price tag purely for the integration of the software with the operating system - everything has its use and fits together perfectly. It integrates... iTunes goes hand in hand with garageband, garageband goes hand in hand with iMovie and FCP. It's poetry in motion I tell thee..

 

Parallels works great in my MBP. The best way I found to run it is to attatch an external monitor, drag the app over to the extended desktop and run it full screen. Then you still get to run OSX for most things but can easily open any windows programs that you need without having to switch back and forth. the latest version is supposed to run the Windows program in its own window but I found it a little buggy.

 

If you need to find whether there is a OSX equivalent to your Windows software I found this website handy when I was returning to the Mac about 8 mths ago.

http://www.pure-mac.com/

 

Parallels looks cool, but I couldn't get it to boot from my bootcamp partition... apparently there was more than one lol

 

Hm - I've had no problems running it from my bootcamp partition and also no problems running it in coherence mode.
(Maybe I haven't had problems because my bootcamp partition is fat32 instead of NTFS? Don't know....)

(Also - could TheEclipse or a mod please change the spelling of the word "Price" ("Orice") in the title? It's been slowly driving me crazy for days now.....)

 

IF any of you have switched from a PC to a MacBook tell me how easy you thought the change over was? and would you use a PC or a MacBook again from your experince.

 

they're not a life changing experience, but they are nice machines.

if i was in the market for another laptop it would be another mac, for sure. but desktops, i dunno. i don't really like the proposition of an iMac as it's just a laptop with a nicer screen, and mac pros are too expensive for me, so i would go with a PC.