Questions for Mac owners

Recently I’ve been thinking of getting a mac when I have the money for one. I’m not completely unexperienced with Macs as I use iMacs to edit video with iMovie at a tech program I’m in. I have however, been wanting some input from some Mac owners.

Are they really as good as Apple advertises? What other hardware (except the iPod) and or software do you think I should buy with my Mac?

I’m not sure even sex or nirvana would be quite as good as Apple would have you believe the Mac to be, but for most of us, the Macintosh is to the PC as a good back rub is to poking yourself in the eye with a sharp stick.

Mostly they just work and are flexibile enough to allow you to do whatever you want to do and last for a long long time before they become obsolete. There are apparently a few lemons out there, but I’ve been using Macs since 1986, and I’ve only owned 3 of them, two of which are still mine and in active use. (this msg typed on a 1998 vintage PowerBook that’s still my latest and greatest, used both as my work machine and my home machine).

Things you should get, hardware:

Extra hard drive. You can get an external FireWire cheaply. When one volume gets sick you boot from another and fix it. Having an external is also nice for tossing in a drive from anywhere (your old PC, your best friend’s sick computer that won’t boot, etc) to get files off of it.

Second monitor and card to drive it. Life is too short to confine your computing experience to just one screen.

Nice 3-button USB mouse if you’re an old Unix X11 user; nice at-least-2 button USB mouse if you’re an old PC user.

Things you should get, software:

QuicKeys. Macros, baby.

DefaultFolder. (shareware). Life without DefaultFolder is more pleasant under Panther than it was in earlier OS X versions but it’s still on my indispensable list. Try it.

FruitMenu. (shareware) Whether you’re an old Mac user who customized the Apple menu or an old PC user who customized the Start Menu, you’ll want this. The Dock is no replacement for a customizable menu.

Things you should know about:

MacOS X Panther Unleashed, John and William C. Ray.

MacOS X Hints which has a very helpful message board.

I have been using Macs since 1984. I have had to use PCs at my employers’ with different versions of Windows since 1991. Macs are just more pleasant to use. They work and I don’t fight the machine as often as I tend to with PCs (even XP seems pretty second rate). I work in corporate IT, and am aghast by the PC horror stories that my peers share with me almost daily. Viruses, incompatible hardware drivers, and the cruelity of being indebted to Microsoft for just about everything adds up to more hassle than fun.

I think it boils down to your personal requirements. If playing games is the most important, then get a hot PC. For just about anything else a Mac is worth the money and as AHunter3 stated, they tend to provide value and functionality far longer than PCs do.

Get a real nice photo printer and a scanner. A good pair of headphones for both the Mac and your iPod. A better mouse than the one that comes with most Macs, preferably a multiple button programmable number. Maybe a USB hub, or a memory card reader if you use a digital camera.

Software, I agree with Default Folder X and FruitMenu. Sound Studio if you like to edit and digitize audio on the cheap. Adobe PhotoShop Elements for lower cost but powerful image editing. Roxio toast for more sophisticated CD burning than iTunes. Unison for Usenet. MS Office for the rest of the universe.

Have fun.

I started out as a PC user (and still use a PC), but “switched” to Macs four years ago. I use a Mac as my primary machine.

I really like it. I don’t have to think about updating my virus definitions every damned day, I don’t have to worry about worms and spyware and all sort of stuff. Granted, I keep all my virus software updated on the PC and I like my PC well enough, but I have a special place in my heart for my Mac.

For a while there (before I bought this new PC), I hardly turned on my (old, creaky) PC at all. I probably went for 6 months or much more without using it more than a few minutes at a time. So, when I got the new PC (last year) and started browsing the Internet with it, I was shocked (SHOCKED! I tell you!) at how intrusive web browsing on a PC can be. All sorts of icky things trying to install on your computer, popping up, nasty, nasty nasty. Naturally, there are things that can help block these things (AdAware), but with the Mac, there’s no need for any of that.

I like to describe my Mac experience as “peaceful.” It is, on so many levels. OS X is elegant and stable. I love the iApps (especially Garageband) and things just work well for me.

Speaking of Garageband, if you have even a smidgen of interest in creating music (perhaps as a score for some iMovie projects) then this is the app for you. You don’t have to know how to play a musical instrument (or really have much musical experience at all) to be able to put together some pleasing tunes with this app. It comes with (if memory serves) about 1,000 loops, and Garageband communities are cropping up all over. This is an amazing program.

I’m sorry, this isn’t as detailed and technical of an explanation as the others here. I’m just trying to say that switching to my Mac has been a satisfying experience. Not that Macs are perfect—no computer is—but I think they’re dandy.

Thank you all for your help! :slight_smile:

Would you recommend getting the Apple Protection Package?

Does anyone have any experience or know of really good image editing and web design tools but don’t cost as much as Photoshop and Dreamweaver?

You can also get a firewire shell that lets you swap hard drives. I picked up one at CompUSA for about $50. This lets you swap internal hard drives in the external case. Also download CCCloner.

I switched to apple about 4 years ago - on my third one (sold one and 17" imac flat panel and a 12" powerbook).

I’ve had three Macs, and have never had a lick of hardware trouble with any of them. Very little software trouble, for that matter.

One really neat thing about my Mac running Mac OS X: I have an old PC here that just died on me several years ago. Unfortunately, I had a ton of personal files on the D: drive - mostly Japanese Idol scans, to the tune of about 6GB of stuff. With the PC completely unbootable, and my unwillingness to stick this hard drive into sombody else’s PC to retrieve the files, I was ready to just write the files off. So I decided to just take the D: drive out of that PC and install it in my Mac, planning to just reformat it to provide more storage space. Imagine my surprise when Mac OS X mounted the PC-formatted drive, and I found all of my files intact and readable! I was able to copy everything onto my Mac’s primary drive before reformatting the PC drive.

Software recommendations:

DragThing - This has been an utterly indispensible application-launching program. I’ve used it for years. Shareware.

QPict - If you do much work with media files, this is the program to use. It’s shareware, but it’s superior to any commercial products I’ve tried, including Apple’s own iPhoto.

TexEdit Plus - $15 shareware text editor, second only to the commercial BBEdit. I own both. I use BBEdit for HTML coding, and TexEdit Plus for everything else. I have MS Word, but rarely launch it. TexEdit does everything I need.

The authors of all three shareware products have been extremely helpful and responsive when I’ve needed support and when I’ve submitted bug reports. I even got a feature suggestion added to the latest version of TexEdit Plus.

Xan:

e: image editing: Will totally free and awesome do?

There’s a catch – you have to install X11, which takes some patience, and then you need to use Fink to download the source code for The GIMP and build it. But The GIMP is, if not QUITE eyeball-to-eyeball with full-blown Photoshop, still a damn good image editor, superior to (for instance) Paint Shop Pro.

In many ways I like it better than Photoshop. It’s interface and look and feel are more akin to Photoshop 3 than the sprawling mass that Bloatoshop has become, and it doesn’t create a new fricken’ layer every time you paste something. Nice: it can open Photoshop files, zillions of layers and all. Not quite as nice: it can’t save in that format, although it has its own native multi-layer format.

To install X11, go to that MacOS X Hints site I referenced earlier and study up on it a bit.

Adobe makes a “light” version of Photoshop called Photoshop Elements, it’s about $90, and often comes bundled with things. My dad, who teaches photo editing courses with it, claims it’s very good. As AHunter3 says, there’s also GIMP, but if you’re going to use something with an interface that’s actually painful, why use a Mac at all? (Even GIMP’s fans admit that it’s interface is horrific, the new 2.0 version is supposedly a little better). If you’re an artist, though, or doing any significant amount of art work, I’d suggest springing for the whole Photoshop shebang – some stores sell (overstocked) older versions at a substantial discount. Photoshop really is a miraculous program – the fundamental tool of the trade for digital artists, as critical as Word or Office is for business.

As for extended warranty packages, I don’t usually take them except occasionally on small, portable devices that take a lot of abuse (PDAs, iPod, that sort of thing - probably a PowerBook). It’s just insurance, and like all insurance pays out less than it takes in: on average, you’ll lose on it. Financial people tell me it’s almost never good financially to buy insurance unless the loss would be financially crippling (like a house or car). If you can afford (even with effort) to replace/repair the item, better to save the money and eat an occasional loss yourself.

Also, you don’t need to make the decision right away; if you register the machine, Apple will try and sell it to you a couple months before the built-in warranty expires. I’d take it only if you’ve had trouble with the machine during the regular warranty period. Generally computers (Mac or otherwise) tend to fail either right away or not for years; “wear” failures tend to be things like power supplies (not usually a problem on Macs) or hard drives, which are comparitively cheap to replace.

Your hardware and software requirements largely depend on what you do. The only addition I’d really insist on is a better mouse. Mine has a scroll wheel, two buttons, and is cordless and optical. Life is much better with it.

I do a little image editing mainly for personal website creation (mostly creating logos and banners). I’m not really an artist. I have used GIMP in Linux and didn’t really like it all that much. I also do the usual of chat, surf the web, and read/write e-mail.

I’d agree with you on the mouse thing. I loathe the mouse on the iMac. I need two buttons, damnit! :stuck_out_tongue:

Agreed. It makes sense for a PowerBook, or even an iBook, because something like screen repair (a common issue problem) can be horrifically expensive, but you really don’t need it for non-portable items.

As for MacOS X software, I use X-Assist (freeware) to handle application switching etc. like the old Apple Menu used to do (and I guess FruitMenu does now).

The bottom line: Macs work. No fear, no futzing around, no worrying about nefarious virii taking control of your computer.

(I meant, the bottom line for me, not for this discussion.) :slight_smile:

Hopefully it will be the bottomline for me once I get the money for the PowerBook I want.

  1. If you’re getting a laptop, then yes you should get Apple Care. If you’re getting a desktop, the situation depends on your expertise at troubleshooting and fixing.

  2. Get Graphic Convertor here (shareware, free to try) if you’re into image editing. It handles an amazing number of basic editing needs (beyond iPhoto obviously).

  3. There are other forus you may wish to check out…try the ones at dealmac.com or macaddict.com for overall Mac content.

40 For web development, Freeway is a cheaper WYSIWYG alternative ($90) to DreamWeaver et al. Or check out shareware alternatives at versiontracker.com, like PageSpinner ($30) .

Most folks have already covered the highlights, so I’ll just toss in my own two bits:

  1. When it comes to spending my own money, I’ll buy Macs all the way. No muss, no fuss, plus quality software and amazing industrial design to boot.

  2. Applecare is recommended for anything you buy with an LCD screen, IMO.

  3. Photoshop Elements is highly recommended. 90% of Photoshop for 25% of the price.

Also note that Apple announced new Powerbooks and iBooks today. No major changes, just some minor speed bumps, but if you’re willing to buy the previous versions of the hardware, you can probably get a nice deal (say, $300 off a new Powerbook) from either Apple itself or from the various third-party resellers.

sunfish

Nice to see other X-Assist users around! Yeah, it’s a great combo of application switcher and “OtherMenu”- style application launcher.

I switched to Mac about six months ago and so far find it far superior to using a PC.

One thing that is more or less inescapable is MS Office. I held out for several months, but finally broke down and got Office for Mac and life is much better now. Mac Office for students and teachers is a little more than $100 on Amazon. While the “i” applications are great, AppleWorks (the built in Mac office package) is pretty weak, IMO.

BTW, if you are an AOL user, their Mac product is really several years behind their Windows versions. But they just opened their email standards, so you can use any IMAP complliant mail program you like now (I have yet to test this).

igloorex:

Oh, really?! Fascinating. (about time!) What would one put for the POP (acutally IMAP I guess) and SMTP server to send and receive AOL mail using a standard client?