Apple advice please?

I’m thinking about purchasing an Apple desktop and would like someone’s advice on which one as well as when to purchase.
I would rather not spend my money today to find there is a new model in the shop next week so a heads up would be appreciated if they are planning to change again soon. My budget is around 40~50,000, unless for a little more money I can get a lot more computer.

And are there any must have programs that they don’t normally come with?

I would like to play multi region disks, movies in all formats, editing family DVDs. I would also prefer to be able to use the same external drives on both my windows and Mac (I believe that’s just a question of formatting in windows first right?)

I have a family’s contact which is a distributor and I think would upgrade a few things if I purchase so I’m hoping to learn what to ask for first.

I’ve never had a Mac before.

First up, why you switching to Mac? Is it for the vid editing?

Sula, i use mac’s and any info i needed to buy one i got from this site:

ehmac.ca/

also if you’re looking to buy one and want to spend a little less on it try:

store.apple.com/us/browse/home/s … co=MTE3NjY

i bought my laptop this way and there isn’t anything different than a normal brand new one, plus it has the full one year warranty when you get it there. as for your programs, you can switch between windows and mac osx on the new intel machines and iLife has most of what you want/need.

another heads up is that apple is coming out with a new operating system shortly (september maybe?), and it’ll have some new things to play with.

hope this helps

You can use this guide to see whether now is a good time to buy a particular model.

I’ve had a iMac and then a Macbook Pro. As to DVD region coding, for the iMac I only had to use VLC to play discs from different regions, but for the Macbook Pro I had to flash the firmware of the DVD drive.

You might consider the Mac Mini. They recently upgraded the onboard graphics to NVIDIA 9400 which doesn’t suck nearly as hard as the last integrated graphics chipset and there’s a Firewire 800 port on it as well. If you’re going the iMac route, I’d go with whatever the middle-priced one is.

I’m not sure about sharing drives between Windows and OS X. I know for flash drives formatted in FAT32 it’s not a problem, though you will see a bunch of random .trash files in all your directories after you plug a flash drive into the Mac. OS X can read NFTS, but can’t write or format to it without 3rd party add-ons like this.

I’ve got a Hackintosh, which would be awesome for video editing (25000NT worth of computer that can hold multiple drives and that’s faster than the iMac), but which is vulnerable to getting borked by any system update.

He finally figured out that PCs are the psycho-xiaojies of the computer world.

The green ones, while excellent for pie and apple dumplings, can be a little sour when eaten raw…

I’d suggest building a Hackingtosh as well, way cheaper and possibly a lot better for the money.
Google for iDeneb, download it and find an install guide and a hardware support guide some where.
It works great if you have the right gear, but there are of course some limitations as to what bits you can use, since all PC hardware doesn’t work with OS X.
I was lucky, the system I have worked 100%, although my sound card isn’t supported, so I had to use the onboard sound of the motherboard for OS X.
Even my web cam and MFP printer works.

He finally figured out that PCs are the psycho-xiaojies of the computer world.[/quote]

Precisely, and very well put. And one assumes why the OP probably doesn’t want a high maintenance, “it’ll probably be okay” hackingtosh! :laughing:

HG

He finally figured out that PCs are the psycho-xiaojies of the computer world.[/quote]

Precisely, and very well put. And one assumes why the OP probably doesn’t want a high maintenance, “it’ll probably be okay” hackingtosh! :laughing:

HG[/quote]

You’ve hit it right on the head there.

I have a wife who prefers Chinese only she can’t operate a windows OS and I’m sick of trying to understand all the gobbldygook in Chinese. She has her computer which is a Shuttle as she only really goes online, but the Chinese OS is really sucky!
My five year old P4 board finally gave up the ghost and I’m replacing it, but I feel that it wasn’t worth the total 9,000 for a new CPU too, so I’m just having it fixed and not upgraded.
I felt 9,000 is a good chunk towards a computer that actually works and doesn’t need a degree in rocket science and psychology to be able to fix, patch and wrangle every other week.
Besides any Mac can run Windows if I ever need it to and they last so much better without getting bogged down with new updates unlike their bodgit and scarper cousins.
I have never actually paid for a certain rich man’s software before and I try to support alternatives when I can so an Apple upgrade is putting my money where my mouth is so to speak.

Thanks for the advice chaps, I’m checking out those links as I speak. I’ll let you know what happens.

Can I purchase refurbished iMacs in Taiwan too? :ponder:

store.apple.com/tw/browse/home/s … co=MTE3NjY

Oo! Thanks!

Well I finally got my iMac home yesterday. I ended up getting a 24" 2.66Ghz iMac for 50,000 with all the extra software thrown in including Office, Final Cut Pro Toast Titanium and all the other usual stuff.
I will probably have a few questions about some basic stuff, but the first one I have is which compression tool should I use to package pictures off to clients? I send a lot of pictures over gmail and its much easier to compress them in one file before sending, but I must bare in mind that others may of course not all share the same types of computers or compression-decompression programs. Any advice?

I already have StuffIt and Dropsuff but I don’t know if these are useful, or even how to use them yet.

Thanks for all the advice so far chaps, it has been very helpful in making decisions.

[quote=“sulavaca”]Well I finally got my iMac home yesterday. I ended up getting a 24" 2.66Ghz iMac for 50,000 with all the extra software thrown in including Office, Final Cut Pro Toast Titanium and all the other usual stuff.
I will probably have a few questions about some basic stuff, but the first one I have is which compression tool should I use to package pictures off to clients? I send a lot of pictures over gmail and its much easier to compress them in one file before sending, but I must bare in mind that others may of course not all share the same types of computers or compression-decompression programs. Any advice?

I already have StuffIt and Dropsuff but I don’t know if these are useful, or even how to use them yet.

Thanks for all the advice so far chaps, it has been very helpful in making decisions.[/quote]

Congrats on your new purchase!

I assume you’re on Leopard. Just choose all the photos you want to compress [Apple + click]. Then right click and select “Compress”. It will automatically archive all the pics into a .zip file for emailing.

I use this method all the time and have never heard of any compatibility issues on the recipient’s PC.

Hey, great trick! I didn’t know that one.

Of course, there’s lots of Apple tricks I’m yet to learn… for instance, how to set up a virtual private network.

sulavaca, congrats. I’ve been trying to ween my wife away from her aging Windows machine, and one of the draws of the Mac is how easy it is to switch languages.

your current budget will only allow you to buy the 2.66GHz, 20 inch Imac. And if your adding a little more 3000 nt, you can get a 2.66GHz, 24 inch Imac (With an upgrade of from 2g mem to 4g, doubled hard disk memory, and a slightly better graphic card).

The 2.66GHz, 20 inch is: 41,900NT

THe 2.66GHz, 24 inch is: 52,900NT

I would definite recommend the expensive one, with promising upgrade.

[quote=“rocky raccoon”]

Congrats on your new purchase!

I assume you’re on Leopard. Just choose all the photos you want to compress [Apple + click]. Then right click and select “Compress”. It will automatically archive all the pics into a .zip file for emailing.

I use this method all the time and have never heard of any compatibility issues on the recipient’s PC.[/quote]

Brilliant. Cheers.
The next things I’m stuck on are where the bloody hell has the real “delete” button gone? I have a button called delete but it is in fact backspace. The keyboard is a mini type and doesn’t have the right numberpad half any longer.

Other things I’m frustrated with are:

  1. in iPhoto I cannot seem to change the filenames of photos, only add comments, and I can also not export photos with comments.
  2. I cannot seem to figure out a way of changing file names of pictures unless I am viewing them on the desktop in tiny thumbnail mode which is frustrating when I can view them all very nicely in iPhoto but can’t change the fielenames there.
  3. I cannot find a way of checking to see what the filesize is of any file. Properties would be nice, but where are they?

I hope these are just teething problems.

I like the overal usability of the Mac, but the little old right mouse button options in windows I am missing.

Once you Mac you never go back they say. That being said, I would miss the right mouse. Iv never gone Mac because Im used to windows (shitty as it is). I heard the interim solution for us windows junkies is to use Ubuntu instead? My bud who i installed Ubuntu 9.04 for a month ago just loves it. Far superior to windows he says. Provided you dont need Internet Explorer or Yahoo Messenger with full features.

Most college students I see around Berkeley use Macs tho. Must be something in the water, or it looks cooler or something.

By the way the OPEN OFFICE from openoffice.org is fantastic. NEver have to buy Microsoft Office anymore . It opens all Mike office programs , and can edit them as well. And people with mike office can open your files made with openoffice stuff. Way cool and easy download.

Seriously consider buying Applecare to go with your new Mac. Although it is expensive it is worth it.

On a three year old Mac Book I’ve had:

A new hard drive (replaced while on holiday in England, hassle free!)
Plenty of telephone support to deal with minor issues
And, just at the weekend, a replacement PSU.

All of this would have cost way more than if I hadn’t bought the insurance.

Don’t want to scare you into thinking that your new Mac will blow up, but better safe than sorry.

Welccome to Mac, suddenly computing just got simpler!

:discodance:

You can plug in any standard USB mouse and have two or more mouse buttons. Also, if you’re only working with one mouse, you can hold down Ctrl and click to give you a right click and you should see Get Info.

I’m not familiar with iPhoto (I use Aperture, which I think is fantastic), but I’m guessing that its model for managing filenames is similar to iTunes: you’re not supposed to care about the actual file name.

As to Applecare, you can still purchase it up until the one-year warranty expires.

Actually, Windows is the only desktop OS left on this planet that is still monolingual. If languages are a concern, one should use anything (and that even includes Solaris) but Windows…

Sulavaca, since you already purchased a Mac and had problems with Windows, you could have someone near you install Linux on the old Windows machine and set it up to look like OS X. Keyboard shortcuts would still be different (This is something I don’t really like about the Mac), except someone even changes the keyboard mapping a bit, but if you mainly use cross-platform software (Firefox, Opera, OpenOffice, Thunderbird etc), you may not need to “switch” to a different handling when you use the other computer. Makes life a bit easier…