frisby

Fancy buying a mac but always had a pc so a completely new area to me. What are my options out there?


regards

Stu

SwissTony

iTrader: (19)

your first bit of advice is not to buy the one off freelance badger

give us a little hint of what you are after, want to do first and we can point you in the right direction

Markus

All of the new Macs are Intel based, which means you can use Apple's BootCamp product to dual boot the machine between OS X and XP SP2. There's also some Virtual Machine options, such as Parallels Desktop for Mac which allow you to run XP at the same time as OS X.

So, if you just wanted to run XP on a new mac, you could do that.

Of course I'd recommend not doing that and just using OS X. As The Swiss one said, what exactly do you want to do with the machine?

mattbeef

if its something specific your doing then post up what you'll be doing with it.

If its general stuff then go and check out the iMacs

RichB

If you have a usb keyboard and TFT screen and are on a budget and dont do any major processing - look at the mini

If you want an all in one powerfull machine that will pretty much do everything 90% of users need then look at the iMac

If you need expandability and power and want to drive multiple big screens then look at the MacPRO

If you want a notebook and are not into games then MacBook.
The MacBook Pro for me doesn't offer that much of an advantage, it does have its own graphics card I think and a bigger screen 15" or 17". MacBook is 13".
Although hold on a little cos we are expecting Core2 Duos shortly in the laptop range.

mattbeef - Marcus - Anyone heard any rumours about the C2Ds yet?

Markus

Rich,
All the iMacs are now Core Duo 2. Apple updated them when they launched the 24" iMac. As for Mac Mini and MacBooks, I've not seen anything indicating that they are about to be updated to Core Duo 2, but it might happen at the first expo of 2007, which is where I also suspect we'll here more about 10.5's top secret features.

RichB

Knew that Marcus - Was referring to the Mac Books/MBPs

frisby

hello folks,

thanks for the input so far. I'm looking to do a bit of video editing - final cut pro, or maybe the lite version, graphics and the usual web sufing.

Any further cecommendations would be great.

regards

stu

AllanB

Stu why not come along to the Mac Expo show thats coming up before you by so you can speak to people face to face to decide who you want to buy from and see the products in the flesh and get to use them too.

Home

Come along to the MacWarehouse stand and ask for me Allan or if I am not aroud speak to a guy called Bill Gallop. What he doesn't know is not worth knowing and hes one of the most highly qualified Apple technicians in the country.

The first thing to decide is is you are going to be editing for std or HD and whatr sources you are capturing from as this will help you work out the amount of data you are going to manipulating. Working in HD would benefit from a powerful machine like a Mac Pro with the upgraded graphics card option but more basic work would be within the capability of the iMac. Howver long term the iMac only has the ability for a single internal drive so expansion would be external where as the Mac Pro can be configured with multiple internal drives for maximum data throughput.

I'd strongly suggest you come along to the Expo and chat with Bill, he really is a bit of a genius or if you wanted to do it sooner drop me an email at allan.bayman@macwarehouse.co.uk

If you are anywhwre N London I can perhaps see if you wanted to pop in although our demo room is a bit barren at the moment as we are in the middle of refurbing it.


AllanB