Mac me.

[Thasifrew]

In these times of fire
Comes mac...

I'm a few heartbeats away from buring my microsoft products and switching to a beautiful, serene Mac G5. But before I pour kerosene on my hard-drive--are there any mac threshers out there who can convince me not to ? Or steer me towards / away certain makes (like the mac mini, which is refurbished laptop components in a new pretty box... ick.)

--reysan

[Alban]

Well first let me say that while I am a major Mac fan, I am NOT a Mac evangelist (except in a tongue in cheek fashion in order to annoy my friends and co-workers).

That said, I would ask you what you will be using your computer for? Because there are certain things that I would totally recommend Mac for, but others, it doesn't really matter.

If it's lots of multimedia production, graphic design, video production, or that sort of thing, then I would definitely recommend Mac.

At the company I work for, all of us who do that sort of work use Macs because we couldn't cope otherwise. Some of the software we use isn't even available for Windows. But most of the other people just use Windows, because they don't need Macs.

As for the G5, I'm using one right now and it is a wonderful machine. Very fast. Mac OSX has a user interface which is very easy to learn and use and there are many cool features (some you need to install on your own) that just make it a lot of fun to use.

Macs do have a reputation for freezing up a lot. I used to have this problem a lot on the G3 and G4 and iMacs, but the G5 never freezes or crashes. With my G4, I had been just stressing it to the limit with too much simultaneous video production, audio production and graphic design.

On the other hand, when Macs do freeze up or have some software problem, it's just really easy to find the problem and fix it. In many years of maintaining Mac systems for video and audio studios, I've dealt with some seemingly insurmountable problems, but I was always able to fix them and have never had to initialize a hard drive and have never lost any data.

One other little benefit -- there just doesn't seem to be many viruses or spyware for Mac.

As for burning your Windows stuff -- don't! There are many incompatibilities between Mac and Windows, and since most people use Windows, you will be so glad you have that Windows machine standing by for those documents and applications you can't open or run on Mac. I have my XP Professional just three feet away here at work, and at home, same thing with an old Windows 98 machine. For one thing, Mac and Windows have different gamma settings, and colors look brighter on Mac and darker on Windows, so if you're doing web design (or graphic design for the web) on a Mac, you have to check it on Windows to make sure it's not too dark.


Alban

[Alban]

So no sooner did I post the above message when I get a call from the owner of a video studio whose system was completely down -- his Mac wouldn't boot up and kept getting the "bomb" icon, and he had a bunch of TV commercials to get out. So I spend two hours at lunch trying all the usual fixes, running diagnostics, etc. to no avail. He is using a program (Media 100) on system 9.2, although he has OS X on the machine (a G4 with tons of extra RAM, an array of 22 partitions, and a bunch of Firewire drives).

So in my screwing around I got it booted in system 9.0, whose system folder still happened to be hanging around. This was bad, because it then didn't recognize the other two systems installed on the computer. By this time I had to go back to work, so he called Apple Care and they told him to reinstall OS X. When I came back after work he was still trying to install it, so I did it for him and it was still screwed up!

Well after four and a half hours and a few Scotches I finally found the problem. Software? No! It was one of the routers for the Firewire drives. Argh! Why didn't I check that first?!?

Alban

[Bael]

As an owner of a G4 powerbook, a major gripe entirely relevant to this forum and community is the complete and totaly lack of an even *REMOTELY* decent mud client for OSX. They simply do not exist. You basically have the choice bet a crappy, half-finished Rapscallion port... and a crappy (but at least still supported) Savitar. Personally, I'm entirely tempted to buy a copy of a Windows Virtual Machine *JUST* to run MUSHClient. Honestly, it'd be worth the investment for me. But just something to think about, since we all know you're going to be using it for Threshing. Unless anyone knows of a version of WINE that works for X11?