After listening to my wife and daughters blame their Win98 box for every world woe not already claimed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and hearing very little good about the Windows Vista that would come with a new Dell/HP/whatever, I’m throwing in the towel. Sure, Linux has its points, but I’m trying for something I don’t have to support, so a Mac Mini is looking mighty attractive, but I have some questions:
Will I be able to use my existing monitor? Does the Mini come with a the same DB15 connector or do I need an adaptor?
There is little software they use besides a word processor, browser, solitaire, and MP3 player, all of which have Mac equivalents, but how much trouble is it to transfer their data files? Can I format CDs in Windows and have the Mac read the files? How about thumb drives? And will they have trouble getting the files they create read by a Windows machine?
Any software recommendations? They don’t like Star Office and I can’t afford MS Office but they need to read and write MS Office-compatible documents.
For video, the Mini is designed to use an LCD panel as it’s got a DVI port, rather than a DB15 VGA. I believe Apple includes an adapter to DB15 in the box, if you want to keep your existing old monitor.
For free, have a look at Open Office. Otherwise, if anyone’s a student or teacher, the educational version of Microsoft’s Office:Mac is not terribly expensive at about $130, and comes with three license keys if you become a multi-Mac family.
Moving data is trivial - a CD or two, a USB jump drive, an external hard drive, etc. will do fine, and the Mac will have no trouble with the files. Out of the box, it can work with things like MP3 and JPG files. Other files (such as MS Office documents) will be dependent on having an application that can open them.
It depends on the file format. MS Docs translate well IF you have Office installed. Otherwise, Apple claims it’s Pages program translates them well (but I can’t verify). MP3’s are no problem. Actually, reply back with the file types and it will be easier for us to recommend software.
I’m a mac user but use a PC-formatted thumb drive so I can interchange files with PCs. It behaves like it was formatted for the mac.
If you need MS Office-compatible documents, I strongly recommend you bite the bullet and MS Office. Are the wife or daughters taking any kind of classes? If so, you may qualify for Student & Teacher Version
There’s a version of OpenOffice called NeoOffice that is specifically written to run natively in OS X (no mucking about with X11, which is always a good thing IMHO). It is written in Java and so takes a little while to fire up the virtual machine and get spinning, but I’ve had excellent experience with its stability and a pretty good record of importing things from most Microsoft Office applications. It’s not Mikey’s Office for Mac, but it’ll do for the vast majority of word processing requirements at home or small business, and I frequently use it to write work reports on my PowerBook while on travel.
File transfer is a cinch, and hooking an OS X Mac up to an existing Workgroups for Windows peer-to-peer network via Apple’s version of Samba is automagical, rarely requiring more configuration than entering the workgroup name and setting up sharing configuration/permissions on the individual client machines. I’ve no experience with hooking up Mac to Active Directory, but I’d expect it to be similarly easy. Disk and thumbdrive file transfer is completely transparent; gone are the days when you have to format a ‘floppy’ for one system or the other.
Macs aren’t the end-all be-all of personal computing, but for the average non-gaming user I think they’re substantially easier to maintain and secure than an equivilent Microsoft OS machine.
I use Pages and it can open most MS Word document with no problem. The formatting may not be exact but the data is all there. Another possibility (a good word processor on the Macintosh, excelling at text manipulation) is Nisus http://www.nisus.com/ .
What kind of documents do they want? Spreadsheets, word processing documents, other? If they want the to be able to produce word AND excel documents, and you don’t want NeoOffice, then I would get the Microsoft version for the Macintosh. It’s not a stripped-down version, the Macintosh versions of the Office programs (e.g. word and excel) are just as good as the Windows versions, some say better.
And a word of warning…I don’t know if the Mac Mini comes with a trial version of Office installed, as my MacBook Pro did, but if it does and you DO decide to buy Office, you MUST use the MS uninstall tool to remove the trial version before installing the purchased version. This piece of important documentation is fairly buried, but ba-a-a-a-a-a-d things happen if you don’t do it. A botched MS installation followed by a clean system install that DIDN’T solve the problem and a recommendation from Apple support that I do another clean install is why I’m using NeoOffice.
Anyhoo, I deal with a lot of Windows users’ MS documents and have to create same for others, and NeoOffice is just plain dandy. Have had no problems at all opening MS docs people send me in NeoOffice, and no one has had any problem opening documents I created in NO and saved in the appropriate MS format.
Just a comment that I was idly browsing new computers the other day, and you can still get them with Win2K or XP installed. Or you could just buy your own OS and install it over whatever crap came with the computer. I did that to replace the horrid Windows Me once.
As a recent Mac convert (2 months since I bought my MacBook Pro and I love it!), I would heartily recommend investing in the student/teacher edition of MS Office.
If you buy educational-discount software online, you have to go through some arduous verification process. However, when I bought my MS Office with the Mac at CompUSA, no questions were asked (though my wife is a teacher).
The main reason why I want nothing other than MS Office is because it is the standard. What do you do when your kid brings home a PowerPoint presentation that he is working on with a group of kids or your colleague sends you an Excel spreadsheet to edit?
Sure, OpenOffice and its bretheren can open 95% of MS Office docs flawlessly, but there’s always something a little bit different.
Making original documents in OpenOffice and ensuring that they are faithfully represented in Word/PowerPoint/Excel is fiddly too.
Though I only gave OpenOffice a few days, my colleague at work, ever the rebel, has been trying to convert to OpenOffice for ages and he still doesn’t like it. You will always feel that you aren’t using the Real McCoy.
Well, I’m not ENTIRELY new to fine Apple products–I still have an Apple IIc buried someplace and used to own a Lisa and a Mac Plus. Gave the Lisa to my BIL, who gave it to someone else who either junked it or put it on eBay. Sold the Mac Plus because I didn’t have a printer for it back then and couldn’t read the 800k disks on anything else. But I found Guten Print/Gimp Print so, with a USB to parallel (or serial) adapter, my Laserjets will work, even without my Postscript cartridge. Still want a Mac SE/30 for myself because the unitary Macs are, I dunno, just right somehow, and that one will probably want the LJ with serial and Postscript so the wife gets the other one.
BTW, the iWork application KeyNote can open and save PowerPoint presentations. As you say, though, it is probably not 100% compatible. On the other hand, since Keynote is different, you will be able to include some default layouts or effects that will make the Powerpoint person ask “how did you do that?”
All I gotta say is, just spring for office. The substitutes are okay, but the end result is that the more of the finer features you use, the more problems you’ll have. This also goes for the differences between the XP and OSX versions as well. There are some holes here and there. If you try to use some of the integration abilities (excel charts in Word) then you’ll start to see the problems. It all depends on what level you intend to use though. If your progeny want to use it for writing reports for History class, then there’s no problem.
If you’re using embedded spreadsheets in Word, you’re already flirting with the Devil, IMHO. And anybody who links external files into a Word document is an utter tool. I love opening a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint presentation from a subcontractor only to find out that the pertinent information is stored in a seperate file that they didn’t bother to send me.
Uh you can easily get machines with XP and with some basic anti malware you can have a great running machine for years.
Win98 is not all that great of a benchmark to judge current windows versions by. I just converted one of my main shop machines to vista so I could get more hands on experience using it. Its growing on me so far even thought as someone who works in the biz I am always waiting for problems to crop up.
IF you want to drop the extra cash for a machine that is not fundamentally any better, go for it. Also remember, harder to find software, more expensive to repair, harder to find parts.
If you compare machines with identical specifications, the ‘extra cash’ bit is not really true.
Not fundamentally any better - that’s ridiculous. OS X is fundamentally superior to Windows in many ways - a more consistent user interface, drag and drop integration, better application management, better security, not to mention the Unix core. Just about the only advantage Windows has is its ubiquity.
Harder to find software - no, not really, unless you need something very specialized, you can find an equivalent on the Mac.
As for ‘more expensive to repair, harder to find parts’ - give me a break. We’re not talking about a Ferrari vs. a Kia here. Macs use exactly the same parts as PCs do. Ten years ago, they may haved used proprietary interface connectors and so forth - no more. Nowadays, if a part fails in your Mac, you can buy a replacement from any computer shop, without even needing to tell them that the part is for a Mac.
Welcome to the dark side.
Our last 2 purchases - for kids going to collge - have been MacBooks.
Appear to be a fine technology.
I would not be at all surprised to find in a couple of years our house to be entirely PC free.
I bought my first Mac in 1993. Nubus ports, ADB ports… nothing was Mac compatible. All of my software and peripheral shopping was done in little dingy Mac specific shops or over the phone.
From the time I bought my PowerMac G4 tower in 1999, that ended. USB ports, Firewire ports, PCI slots… very little Mac-specific hardware needed. All of the productivity applications have OS X support. My entire setup consists of four Apple products - an AirPort, a G4 tower, a MacBook Pro, and a PowerBook G4 - everything else is from a third party vendor and worked out of the box. I can also use the peripherals with the Dell Laptop in the house as well.
If you want a computer for gaming, well, the PC wins for the most part. If one is buying a laptop to last 4-5 years, I say the MacBook line is unbeatable. Amortize the price over 4-5 years, and the slightly higher cost becomes negligible. MacBooks cost a good chunk because they are very good computers. Apple doesn’t really have a “budget line.” And as someone who operates on the user end with PCs and Macs all the time, it’s easier and easier to share files, peripherals across platforms. For the most part, Macs just work.