Apple Talk Thread

[---]

I have a PC, I like it, but after starting my Graphic Design course just over a month ago, I've started to see why 99% of designers use Mac's. I had never really used one before course, but after a couple weeks I had it pretty much figured out. Things seem alot easier and cleaner, and the things I use a computer for just work better on the Mac's at the college. My PC is fine, I can do most of the things I wanna do, but I barely do any design work at home anymore because my course demands industry standard work and I just can't do that here. It's a pain working with large 300dpi images in Photoshop or working with fonts on the PC I got.

The only advantages I see with PC over Mac for me is playing games and compatibility. I only play Madden every now and then on my computer, and I haven't touched NBA Live in a long time. The game is dead anyway. Gaming isn't a concern for me. Compatability isn't much of an issue for me either, because the computr will be mostly used for surfing the interenet and doing design work. If it can do that and I can watch movies, listen to music, etc. I'm happy.

I bought my computer secondhand not too long ago for $800. The Mac I'm looking at is this one and is $1,900.

# 20-inch widescreen LCD
# 1680x1050 resolution
# 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
# 1GB memory (1 x 1Gb SO-DIMM)
# 250GB Serial ATA hard drive
# 8x double-layer SuperDrive (DVD+R DL, DVD±RW, CD-RW)
# ATI Radeon HD2400XT with 128MB memory
# Built-in AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth 2.0
# Apple Remote
# Two FireWire 400 ports; 8 watts shared
# Total of five USB 2.0 ports: three on computer, two on keyboard

I cant afford that at all, but if I sold my computer for around $600 I could save for it, plus I can use a loan of $1000 for course related costs which I haven't touched yet. I checked out the prices on newegg.com and they are about the same after the currency is converted, so I figure that the pricetag on this Mac is probably what it's worth anywhere. I have a bunch of things I could sell and along with saving I could possibly save

Anyway, I got some questions for you guys.

1. Is it worth it?
2. What's your opinion on 2nd hand Mac's?
3. Mac's and viruses - I'm sick of reformatting my computer, having it slow down so much over time
4. For Cy especially - will this computer (or the one above it) still be great for design work come 3-4 years time?

Thanks.

[Ty-Land]

Check on the Apple NZ website to see whether you can get a student discount. When I got my macbook I got 10% off cause I was a student.

A mac is very good, meets my needs perfectly. But would I put my self in debt to get one when I have a PC? I would be very apprehensive of using a loan to pay for it, as you'll pay more in the long run because of interest rather than saving.

If you get one, go brand new. Spending that little bit more to get the security of a warranty is well worth it, not to mention the latest specs etc.

In regards to viruses, never had a problem. Get a little adware etc., but that's just in my browsers cache so I just dump that every now and again. My macbook is as fast as when I got it 9 months ago, and I use it for several hours everyday for study and recreation.

In terms of gaming, I believe Macs will be more able to play games now due to the intel chips. There are a few decent games out there such as Age of Empires and Football Manager. I've tried to keep my mac seperate from gaming, just so I can escape that distraction when I'm using it.

Also worth noting, no sopcast on Macs (unless you get XP on it), so you are limited in what basketball you can watch.

[Sacke12]

Sacke12: Leopard is definitely worth the upgrade, but personally, I would wait until version 10.5.2 or later as they usually get most of the bugs fixed by then. I think they're at 10.5.1 right now, so it's only a matter of time.

Ok, thanks for answering. Yeah, and as I said, I gonna have to save some money first so... I think I will go for the later versions.

[benji]

Leopard is the new Vista

I'm not sure what ticks me off more about Leoptard (I can't take credit for that nickname—some Brit coined it): the fact that so many of the semi-important changes don't work, the fact that Apple turned a stable OS into a crash-happy glitz fest, or that the annoying, scruffy Live Free or Die Hard actor infecting my TV (and our Web site, by the way) is pretending that Leopard is better than Vista.
...
A month of using Leopard with the same software I had under Tiger and the OS has dumped six times. That's six cold reboots for Oliver. Apple isn't even honest enough to admit that Leopard is crashing: The OS just grays out my desktop and pops up a dialog box telling me I've got to reboot. Like the whole thing is my fault. I even snapped a picture of it. After all, I HAD PLENTY OF CHANCES!

[cyanide]

1. Is it worth it?
2. What's your opinion on 2nd hand Mac's?
3. Mac's and viruses - I'm sick of reformatting my computer, having it slow down so much over time
4. For Cy especially - will this computer (or the one above it) still be great for design work come 3-4 years time?

1. Yes and no. If you can afford it, it's worth it, but if you can do it on a PC, then there's no rush. I didn't get a Mac until after I graduated, and yeah, if I could do things a little differently, I'd get a Mac while I was in school, though it's not a do-or-die requirement. The two biggest things I've noticed that was important, though, was how the OS renders the fonts and color accuracy. At small sizes, the fonts are much more crisper which translates to better accuracy when it's printed out. I love Linotype FontExplorer X, which was exclusive for the Mac until only recently. The color on an iMac or Apple displays are deep and rich, crucial for any design work.

2. 2nd hand Macs are great, but with that, there's a higher resale value, which means they're still expensive. They work great, though.

3. It's not necessary to reformat under Tiger (or Leopard), or even do a reboot. The OS is separate from the applications, so I've never personally experienced slowdown where I had to restart. I think there's a discussion about it somewhere on macrumors.com. Yeah, no viruses. .exe or .com files aren't recognized by Macs, so they just don't do anything.

4. Yes, the above computer you mentioned will be great for 3-4 years for design work. There's people still using PowerPCs (the non-Intel Macs) and they still get the design job done. The only thing I'd suggest is to go for higher RAM (at least 2GB of RAM). I'd recommend getting one from macsales.com (where I bought mine) or crucial.com. If I were to keep the computer I have right now, barring drastic hardware or software changes, I can't see myself replacing this for 10 years if it was used for design and not for games. An Xbox 360 is worth the switch especially since NBA 2K8 is the greatest basketball game ever made.

Leopard is the new Vista

Like Vista, Leopard is a new OS, and bugs are inevitable till they release the next 2-3 updates. It doesn't compare to my experience with Vista, though. The first time I tried it at a CompuSmart, two programs crashed on me and it took forever to open them. Looking at the GUI, it is strictly eye candy, cosmetic, and sadly, does more to clutter than to aid usability. I'm not surprised with people going back to XP, because Vista's one hell of a train wreck. Leopard, on the other hand, you'll notice a more simplified GUI that is clean, and that's the way it should be.

[cyanide]

The fastest Windows Vista notebook we've tested this year is a Mac

[Joe']

Speaking of Vista, have any of you fellow Mac owners tried BootCamp?

I'm really looking forward to playing Assassin's Creed when it comes out for the PC platform, and since Parallels can emulate only up to 64 MB VRAM and VMWare, well, VMWare's just a piece of crap, the only way to do it is by installing Windows on another partition using BootCamp.

Have you guys got any experience with BootCamp? Is the performance of the computer running it affected in any way when running Windows?

Thanks in advance.

[Joe']

Check on the Apple NZ website to see whether you can get a student discount. When I got my macbook I got 10% off cause I was a student.

A mac is very good, meets my needs perfectly. But would I put my self in debt to get one when I have a PC? I would be very apprehensive of using a loan to pay for it, as you'll pay more in the long run because of interest rather than saving.

If you get one, go brand new. Spending that little bit more to get the security of a warranty is well worth it, not to mention the latest specs etc.

In regards to viruses, never had a problem. Get a little adware etc., but that's just in my browsers cache so I just dump that every now and again. My macbook is as fast as when I got it 9 months ago, and I use it for several hours everyday for study and recreation.

In terms of gaming, I believe Macs will be more able to play games now due to the intel chips. There are a few decent games out there such as Age of Empires and Football Manager. I've tried to keep my mac seperate from gaming, just so I can escape that distraction when I'm using it.

Also worth noting, no sopcast on Macs (unless you get XP on it), so you are limited in what basketball you can watch.

There's a way to run Sopcast (or TVAnts, TVU, etc.) on Mac without the need of installing Windows (via Parallels, BootCamp, etc).

There's this applications called Crossover that lets you install Windows apps on Mac OS X without actually having Windows installed on your Mac.
Search for it, there's a tutorial out there that explains how to install SopCast through it.

[cyanide]

Finally upgraded to Leopard (for free), and while I wasn't expecting much of an upgrade from Tiger, I thought it was definitely worth it. The whole GUI unification and polishing is just sliiiick. While the GUI differences between Tiger and Leopard might not be much to the casual user, but as a designer, I see subtle changes everywhere, and I love the new look. They improved Mail vastly, and Safari is blazing fast. Everything just seems extremely responsive and I just love the new Downloads folder and grid stacks. Just a niiice upgrade.

[Joe']

Hey Cy, do you know if there's any way to add search engines to the search bar in Safari? At the moment I'm using shitty Firefox just because of that feature. I just can't live without it.

I tried googling it, couldn't find anything. I even downloaded Camino but turns out it's not as good a browser as they say it is, so I just wanted to know if you knew anything about this.

On a side note, just a few weeks until MacWorld. What are your predictions?
My guess is they're upgrading (or discontinuing) the Mac Mini, and of course introducing the brand-new, much-acclaimed full-size-multi-touch-device. I also heard a rumor they were gonna upgrade the Cinema Displays which I hope is not true because they're truly beautiful.

I'm also crossing my fingers for the promised Leopard 10.5.2 update (which, by the way, is supposed to completely fix almost every single bug reported to Apple since 10.5.0. Some say it's gonna be as heavy as 350 MB).

[cyanide]

Hey Joe,

I'm happy with Google as the search bar in Safari, but what do you use other than Google to search with? Normally I'd just make a bookmark folder called Search Engines and select whichever I need to visit. With Wikipedia, I use the Dashboard one.

I'm not sure what to expect in MacWorld, I haven't been following the predictions, but I wouldn't be surprised if they released a touch screen display to replace the Cinema Displays. I'm very happy with the Cinema Displays that they (and I) currently have, but I wouldn't be disappointed if they improved it for the better

I thought the 10.5.2 update was already released, but apparently it's coming out in January. I haven't encountered any bugs yet, but it's pretty quick how they're coming out with the second major update. Looking forward to it.

[Joe']

I've got a lot of search engines on my search bar in Firefox: Google, Yahoo (although it's useless) Search, Amazon, eBay, IMDb, Wikipedia (not just the English one), YouTube, a few newspapers, Flickr and a couple torrent sites to name a few.

It really speeds things up; for instance, instead of typing "youtube" on the URL bar and then typing whatever it is I wanna search for in the YouTube search bar, I just select YouTube from the droplist of the search bar and type what I want to search for.

As for the Cinema Displays, I don't think they're gonna go that big for a multi-touch device. Every rumor site has predicted it's gonna be a laptop-sized device, and besides, just the production of such big device would probably cost a fortune.

I haven't encountered major bugs either but there are some minor bugs, for example the inability to add folders to the Dock the old way (it automatically creates a Stack) or the fact that when, for example, I'm previewing something with QuickLook in a determinate folder, if I, by mistake, click a file or a folder on the Desktop, QuickLook changes its view to that file or folder I just clicked. This can be annoying sometimes.

[cyanide]

Apple released the MacBook Air:

Big picture of the MacBook Air

Pros:
Ultra-light, ultra-thin, perfect for travelers, multi-touch

Cons:
No optical drive, RAM is soldered on, battery is built-in

[Jackal]

Click for some more details.

[J@3]

That thing looks awesome. Too bad it can't run any half decent programs, but still, looks great.

[benji]

Also only one USB port.

[J@3]

O'll gove yiu a USB pirt

[benji]

Sorry, couldn't decipher that.

[J@3]

JT? Bit of help?

[JT_55]

Damn...got beat by one minute. I had to delete and re-post.

Anyway, benji, switch the "I" and the "O" . While you're at it, visit the "Laugh it Up Thread"



In case anyone asks, my original post:

:lol:

Apparently someone just checked out the "Laugh It Up" Thread.

[Joe']

Looks good aesthetically but I seriously can't imagine it being a successful product. I mean, if I had to choose, for 200 more bucks I would definitely get a MacBook Pro and have the benefits of a full-sized laptop. I think most people would.

[cyanide]

Looks good aesthetically but I seriously can't imagine it being a successful product. I mean, if I had to choose, for 200 more bucks I would definitely get a MacBook Pro and have the benefits of a full-sized laptop. I think most people would.

Most people would rather get the MacBook Pro, but I can understand why they created this product. I can see this product being aimed toward businesspeople or casual computer users that rely on commute. It's a really nice thing to have when you're frequently flying for business meetings or always on the run. It's meant to be portable, and I can see how this product can capture another market when the Pro already captured the media and graphics market.

[shadowgrin]

I wonder how many stomps it would take before I wreck that thing.

[Joe']

Woah, this thread died. I've been looking for it for a few days and I was surprised I had to go to page two to find it.

Anyway, I'd like to ask you fellow Mac users if there's a way to upload a website I made with iWeb to a "non-dotmac" domain through FTP or another method.

Also, in the past month I've been looking for a more professional web-design application for Mac OS X, but I've found only Sandvox, which doesn't look very nice, and RapidWeaver, which is very similar to iWeb.

I haven't found much info on these apps though and I'd like to know if any of you ever used either of them or another website creation application on OS X.

[cyanide]

Anyway, I'd like to ask you fellow Mac users if there's a way to upload a website I made with iWeb to a "non-dotmac" domain through FTP or another method.

Also, in the past month I've been looking for a more professional web-design application for Mac OS X, but I've found only Sandvox, which doesn't look very nice, and RapidWeaver, which is very similar to iWeb.

I haven't found much info on these apps though and I'd like to know if any of you ever used either of them or another website creation application on OS X.

If you're able to get the html files (ie: index.html), then you can upload the pages via FTP to a domain host. For a professional web design application, use Adobe Dreamweaver, though it's not freeware. Hope this helps a bit!