Hanley

and all I can say is...WOW!!!

I can't beleive it's taken me this long to switch.

Having owned an iPhone for less than a year I quickly became very impressed with the smooth interface and began looking at Macbooks, my wife kindly offered to buy me a Macbook Pro for Christmas as our friend is a student and she gets the 15% student discount.

Firstly, I'm sure the guy in the Apple Store has under charged me, I bought the following:

13inch Macbook Pro, 2.2gGhz
RAM upgrade to 4GB
MobileMe subscription
3 year Apple Care warranty

I'm sat at the till as the guy rings everything through the till and he says 'right that comes to a total of £764 please'

Now bearing in mind the Macbook itself is £899, RAM upgrade is £80, MobileMe is £58 but comes with a £15 discount (student discount not used as the £15 off was greater) and the 3 year Apple Care worked out at £50

So with 15% student discount that's £764 for the Macbook, £68 for the RAM upgrade, £43 for MobileMe and £50 for the Apple Care it should have come out at £925.

So I gave him my card and got out of the store as quick as possible

Thankfully my wife didn't make me wait until Christmas so I've been playing with it all weekend and I can't believe how amazing it is.

Snow Leopard came pre-installed so set-up took around 5 minutes, I was slightly worried about a 13inch screen but when you're using it the quality is so good that's not a problem.

Now I've never used a Mac before so I'm discovering new things all the time, for most of the weekend I've been importing my pictures from my iPhone and PC into iPhoto and I'm amazed this software comes as standard.

I was slightly dubious about the face recognition and how accurate it would be but it's fantastic, so much so that a pic of me in our living room picked out my face and recognized me but in the background there was a small canvas print of my son on the wall and it recognized that too.

The Places feature is really good too, especially when uploading pics from my iPhone as it knows the GPS co-ordinates of each picture and puts that information directly into iPhoto.

I haven't started using iMovie yet but I'll be doing that next, the Genius in store showed us a quick demo and it looks very good for a home user like me, I'm sure I won't need anything more advanced.

Importing my e-mails from Outlook into Entourage initially looked like it was going to be a pain but I bought some software called MessageSave for around £25 and it was extremely easy.

Anyone know a decent Messenger app to use that can use an MSN account and also do video chat?

Also what's the best forums to join?

I know there's a lot of people who think Apple are way too expensive compared to Windows laptops, and I'd probably have categorized myself that way a year ago, but having used one for a few days I think you get what you pay for with a Mac, build quality and a user interface that's second to none.

I'm sure there'll be problems along the way but I haven't experienced them yet and I'm an extremely happy bunny.

ScoobyDoo555

Welcome to the fold

FWIW, Imovie is ****. Get yourself (under the student discount) Final Cut Express. MUCH better

Microshaft Orifice is very good on the mac, as is iWork09. Once you've used Keynote, you wonder how you ever functioned with Powerpoint.

Get your time-machine up and running, and it gets even easier.

My Macs are pretty much the essential aspect of my work - and I always use more than one screen. Get yourself a mini dvi to vga/DVA adapter and run a second TFT monitor.
I've got the 2.66 15.4 model and have an additional 20" Acer. MUCH easier to use.

Websites, MacRumours is good, as are the support forums at Apple. The best info is on here

And well done with your purchase!

Dan

Hanley

Going to pickup an external drive today to set-up Time Machine.

I'll have a play around with iMovie, it might be okay for me as I'm not doing anything really advanced.

Markus

Agree about Time Machine, you want to make sure you are backed up in case anything bad happens.

As for a messenger client, I'd suggest Adium. I've been using it for many years and it's rather good. It handles more than just MSN addresses too, so if you happen to have MSN, Yahoo Messenger, GoogleTalk, AIM, ICQ and most other chat client accounts, it'll handle them all. It does NOT do video or audio however, but then the official MSN Messenger doesn't do video (not sure about audio, wouldn't shock me to find it did not though) on the Mac.

If you're after video/audio then Skype is probably worth a look, and of course iChat as well.

As for forums, well, here obviously As Dan says, Macrumors is good as is macosxhints (both the site and it's forum), plus the Mac section on avforums is pretty good too.

Hanley

Is there any way of configuring Time Machine to backup to a network share on a Windows box?

I don't really want to have an external drive plugged into my Macbook all the time.

JackClark

There are loads of tutorials online, but they all look a bit horrific. Just plugging the drive in now and then would be easier.

iMovie is fine by the way, a large step up from Windows Movie Maker.

Markus

Quick answer: No

More detailed answer: Not by default. For network backup Time Machine is, I believe, expecting to be able to access a share via AFP (Apple Filing Protocol), and your windows box is very unlikely to be supporting AFP, unless it's a server, prior to Server 2008, and you have explicitly installed Services For Macintosh, or a third party AFP Server, for example GroupLogic's ExtremeZIP.

From the tutorials I've read, you basically need to enable a hidden option in TM to allow it to show unsupported drives, and then you need to manually create a sparseimage file on the share. This seems to be a pretty good tutorial.

So it is possible, but takes a bit of work. What you could do is look at getting a Time Capsule, as that's basically Apple's network Time Machine disk thing.

ScoobyDoo555

Nope, I still stand by my statement that Imovie is sh1te.

Granted, it is a VAST improvement over Windows Movie Maker!!

It's just sooooo long-winded. FCPro or FCExpress just do the job better and less confusing.

BUT, I suppose that I can concede that Imovie is free, so it can't be that bad

Dan

Trout

iTrader: (1)

Welcome - I had a similar post to yours a couple of years ago. I got lucky as well and picked up a Macbook Pro 1 half price from PC World!!!!

Once you are into them they are great. I also have to do a lot of Office stuff for my clients so run XP/Parallels as well. XP runs better on my mac than my desktop (soon to be replaced by an iMac).

So it is all good (even though I was very annoyed with Snow Leopard) the overall experience is second to none.

Enjoy