NeilT

Hi

Thinking of buying a new PC for home to replace my aging P4 and as its only used for Email, web, word pros, pictures, video editing etc, was thinking of an Imac running OSX

Anyone got any experience of the Imacs on here and are they a better buy £for£ than a Windows PC?

Any opinions appreciated


Neil

SwissTony

iTrader: (19)

you will find tons of mac heads on here mate
old hands and newbies or switchers....

cant go wrong with an imac running OSX if all that you are doing are the tasks you mentioned..bit of a small learning curve at the start and then after that easy and you will love the benefits you will get from having the ilife suite etc.

Price wise, the initial cost may seem higher but when you put all the extras needed onto the PC for the same spec,not much in it.
only other outlay will be the mac versions of office etc

Markus

I assume you're talking about switching to one of the new iMacs, if so then they are intel based which means you can run OS X *and* XP/Vista (only the 32-bit versions currently) on them in a dual boot setup, or, you could use a Virtual Machine package such as Parallels Desktop for mac to run XP/Vista whilst running OS X at the same time.

My setup is an early 2006 Intel iMac, 1.5GB RAM. I have used the beta of Apple's Boot Camp software to allow me to run OS X and XP/Vista in a dual boot setup. I also have Parallels Desktop for Macintosh installed (that's the VM solution) and it's configured to use the Boot Camp partition as it's hard disk. This means I have the same data and applications regardless of wether I boot up directly into XP/Vista, or whether I fire up the virtual machine.
I had previously been running XP SP2 for about a year, and within the last month I upgraded to Vista Ultimate. I've not used Vista that much tbh, but it seems to run very happily indeed.

Office for Mac is available, as is the Adobe Creative Suite, so word processing and photo editing apps are there. If there is a specific PC app that isn't available for Mac, well, as said above, it's not really an issue as you can have a mac and pc in the same box.

As the Swiss one says, they are initially a bit more expensive to buy than a PC, but at least now they are intel based there isn't any of this megahertz myth crap (PowerPC chips that were previously used would have a lower mhz/ghz rating than the intel/amd versions, and people would think they were slower, not true, the quad core G5 Tower was a very very quick machine indeed) so it's easy to see how powerful they are in comparison to a normal PC.
I personally find that Macs tend to last a lot longer than PC's. I've got a couple of G4 Towers that are seven years old and they are still humming along nicely and until I got the iMac I used one of them for daily use and it was fine.

As is probably obvious, I'm a bit of a mac fanboy, but I'm not one of these zealots who won't even entertain the idea of getting a PC. I own and use PC's and have built them in the past.

I would hesitate in the past, prior to the intel macs, to recomend a mac to people, simply as they would be used to the PC way of things and the mac is a little different, and getting a virtual machine running at a speed to actually make it useful, rather than painful, was difficult unless you had a very powerful PPC machine. These days I have no hesitation at all suggesting people looking for a new machine go for a Mac. As said above, if you want to wean yourself off XP/Vista, then dual boot and/or Virtual Machine things. The PC OS will be there when you need it. If you want to use it all the time, and a few do, then go for it. Once you're ready to just use OS X then you can remove the Boot Camp partition along with XP, or you can leave it there, which is what I'd do, makes a lot of sense to have XP lurking in the background in case you need to use it, rather than having an old box taking up space.

RichB

They are more £ but you wont be disappointed. Plenty of support on here, just ask away.