Danny B

Thinking of making the switch to a Mac and have seen a brand new G5 2x 2.5ghz cpu based system for sale @ £2k.
A lot of dough for a computer I know but I have just started to get into Digital Photography and my Intel P3 600 is grinding to a halt when converting RAW files to JPEGS.

Question,
I work with PC's all day and am quite good with Windows etc, how easy would I find Mac OSX to do my day to day e-mails, office docs, web surfing , photoshopping etc bearing in mind I have NO EXPERIENCE whatsoever on a Mac.

Would I get frustrated and sell up in a few weeks?

Any Mac Gurus out there with some good links that I can read up on?

Cheers

angrynorth

Hi Danny. I moved over last year because my job required it. Wasn't looking forward to it at first but now... well, just look at my posts

Here at www.demomac.com there is a quicktime movie where you can see me messing around on my dual 1.8 with 1.5g ram. Should give you an idea of some of the usability things that OSX has built in. (ignore my spelling)

A dual 2.5 will blow almost any competitor out of the water, especially with your RAW conversions.

Day to day OSX is a zillion times easier to work with. It will take you a couple of weeks to get used to a couple of things that are pretty much polar opposite to windows but once you do you will be so glad you did.

There is a very good community too, so if you do find yourself struggling with something (unlikely) then you won't have any trouble finding an answer - just ask here there are some fellow mac monkeys who will come out of the woodwork to help

The only thing I would say is that Dual 2.5 is £200 cheaper than it should be, be wary of the source because there are few ebay scams on the 2.5's at the mo, added to the fact that the 2.5 is *supposedly* 3-4 weeks delivery here in the UK and they are currently rare as rocking horse ****.

Danny B

Hi Andy,
I have seen them from this bloke on Ebay http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Apple-Mac-S...enameZl2QQtZkm he has a very good reputation and I would insist on collecting from his place in Epsom.

Thanks for the advice, I am sure I will be bugging you over the next few weeks with a few "newbie" questions, hope you don't mind.

Cheers
Dan

Danny B

Just watched your movie very impressive stuff.
I have recently purchased a iiyama 20" TFT screen, would this be compatible with a G5 or do I have to buy a "Mac" widescreen TFT ?
Please say yes as the Apple screens are bloody expensive
Ta

angrynorth

Looked at the seller feedback and he does indeed have a very good rep. I would still send him a quick email to double check whether he actually has one in stock as of now, like I say, they are pretty rare.

Your TFT will work straight off the bat, so long as you use the DVi-ADC connection that should come in the box of your Mac In fact pretty much all the PC stuff you have, printers, routers, mice, phones etc should all work plug and play.

Look forward to seeing what you think, I'm sure you will enjoy it

angrynorth

Forgot to add, with OSX, plug and play actually means plug and play. No messing around with drivers of setups, plug it in and its on!

suba

i was thinking of getting an apple as well. been away from the apple scene years ago! still got my apple quick take digital camera, newton and apple duo notebook

have a look at www.2ndchancepc.co.uk for used/demo apple.

Danny B

Andy,
Sorry one more question
I have a Netgear ADSL wireless router that I curently use, does the G5 come with a wireless adaptor to pick up my netgear router or is this an optional extra?
Must have 54mbps capability..
Is it the Airport Extreme card that I need to order?

I have mailed the ebay bloke, I'll let you know what he says..

Cheers

angrynorth

You would need the Airport Extreme wireless card so it can talk to it. It should just see the router straight away if the card is installed.

Good luck with the ebay guy

GaryK

Danny,

I bought a powerbook at the end of last year and that was my first ever foray into mac ownership having used PCs now since just before MSDOS came along. It does take some getting used to I would say a different mindset, you (well me anyway) always look for the difficult way when on a mac its simple! I spent an hour or so one night looking for an un-installer, turns out all you need to do is drag the files into the trash.

have fun

gary

Danny B

Cheers Gary, jusy waiting for a few things to come through then I'm going to order a G5

In the meantime I'm going to buy a "Mac OS X for dummies" book to see what's what.

Figment

Just had a quick scan of the ebay listing. Have you noted this bit:

angrynorth

There you go then.

You know, the dual 2.0 is a veery fast machine

Danny B

Still haven't managed to get hold of "applemacguy" yet, probably just as well really or I may have ordered one on the spur of the moment.

Yes, I did see the 4-6 week lead time for the G5, must be a popular machine.

Markus

You should not have many problems switching from PC to Mac. Ok it looks different, and the "finder" (Mac version of explorer) can be a bit confusing at first, but you'll get used to it.

Photoshop is nigh on identical to the PC version, so no problems there.

Web surfing, same as PC except, even if using IE, there aren't all those bloody security flaws, plus auto-dialiers won't work on a mac Safari is the std browser and it's pretty good, though I use 'firefox' these days.

Office, well, Office X is out and I think office 2004 is now out, both should be the same as the PC versions.

All in all, it's not a hard transition. I have a mac and pc on my desk and can switch between them with no problems at all.

Oh, one other thing, viruses. Get a mac and most if not all of your virus worries go away. None of this having to put an anti-virus program on your machine and setup firewall before plugging the mac into the net (though it is still a good idea). I've got a few macs here which are connected directly to the net, no firewall, no antivirus, and I've not had any problems with viruses, dialers, pop-ups, spyware ,or any other crap like that.
The PC next to me? put it on the net (on a portion of the network outside the firewall) within 5 seconds it was infected with blaster (we did put norton on beforehand), then after about an hours surfing around it was infested. Search&Destroy found all kinds of nasty things, as did Norton. Yuk! lol

Oh, I'm one of the other mac guru's, if you hadn't guessed.

Danny B

Cheers, I'll bear that in mind in a few weeks when I'm struggling to connect to the internet with my new Mac

So what e-mail client do you recommend? currently using Outlook 2003.
Thanks

Markus

Depends what you want to do when it comes to email.

There is Outlook Express for Mac, plus if you have Office X/2004 then you have Entourage (kinda like Outlook, only not).

Personally I use Apple Mail (or Mail.app) Ships with OS X, seems to handle my rather large emailboxes pretty well.

angrynorth

LOL Just wait

Apple's own built in Mail is now very good, it was a bit flaky up until the last build, but there is built in mail bouncing, junk mail filtering, threaded messages...

There is Microsoft Entourage as well if you are used to the Outlook way of doing things, but the Office X version of Entourage was also very dodgy so if you do use Entourage go for the Office 2004 version as so far it looks to have ironed out all the problems.

angrynorth

Double post eh Markus

SwissTony

iTrader: (19)

If you are after kit then just PM or drop me an email
chris@gensystec.com
Apple Reseller so all at normal price, but maybe a scoobynet discount thrown in sir!!
failing that Allen B at Macwarehouse will always sort you out

Figment

Swisstony - seeing as the call I was promised last Monday has not materialised, would you care to quote for http://bbs.scoobynet.co.uk/showthread.php?t=352840 ?

Danny B

Cheers for the e-mail Chris.

AllanB

Hi there. Re switching you won't have a problem. I lent a PowerBook to David Medcalf ( used to post as Shark on here) who ran Lavender Hill Garage and he loved it and wanted one.

You will love the stability and simplicity of it all.

Re the stock I'd love to speak my mind but can't or won't but Apple are not too popular in the channel at the moment. Enough said.

Nobody has G5s and with 70% of Apple kit in constraint I don' think you'll see one for at leasr 2-3 weeks. There may be a way of queue jumping which I can fill you in on if you want. I'd prefer to discus this offline ;-). BEst email me at work at allan.bayman@eu.mwhse.com

Of course there would be a Scoobynet discount but please bear in mind the margins on Apple kit are shameful ( ave 3%) so won't be much to shave off.

If you want to see the Apple kit in action I may have some places for a nice corporate event at Lords Cricket Ground on 17/9/2004 PM and Apple will be there so you can ask questions and see the stuff being used by people with some idea of the capability. Food and drink laid on too.

Let me know if you want to come along. I think one guy from Scoobynet is already coming.


AllanB

Figment

Allan (sorry to thread hijack!)

I've registered for that event, but have not received a confirmation of any sort. Should I have?

Cheers

AllanB

Email me with you full details and I'll check it out


Allan

blip

Cut my graphic-design teeth on Macs years ago then got into web design and it became a hassle doing certain things on them and I had to run a PC alongside my Mac to test properly. Now I work primarily on a PC (WinXP) and just use an old Mac for testing. BUT after another bout of virus/trojan/spyware hell on the PC I am getting very tempted to step back to Mac world.

I'm well out of touch with the latest MacOS, but the simplicity and security of them is very appealing. I am losing so much time these days troubleshooting on the PC and I don't think I'll ever know the inner workings of Windows as well as I used to know the MacOS.

Most of the apps are virtually identical on both platforms now too.

Plus Macs look gorgeous, and I am an unashamed gadget-*****

Be interested to know how you get on anyway. Good luck with the switch!!

angrynorth

blip, web development and design these days on the Mac is the same as is is on the PC, the only thing is that flash runs marginally slower on OSX than for PC, but that's about it.

Unless you are a full time actionscript monkey then you will appreciate the move back to Mac, I certainly did.

RichB

anyone here develop using web objects?

blip

I used to find that I was forever switching from Mac to PC just to check my layouts would display properly in Windows browsers (as most web users are Windows based) at every stage of development. Eventually it just seemed more logical to work directly on the PC so I was effectively testing as I developed.

Cross-browser/platform issues are the bain of all web designers' lives though. Are the browsers that are available for OSX fairly close to their Windows counterparts now in terms of how they interpret HTML?? The old Mac browsers were a joke

angrynorth

Well, you have got Safari, which is standards compliant and outputs HTML and CSS perfectly. There is the normal old IE which is pretty close to the PC version. You also now have the choice of going into Mozilla/Firefox, Opera... which display pretty much the same as their PC counterparts.

I check my outputs firstly in Safari, then I have an ol' windows laptop next to my G5 to windows test, this has multiple IE versions installed because as you will know, not everything that works in IE 6 will work with 5.5 etc

Overall though, the time I save by not constantly fixing things and messing around wondering why the hell IE 6 doesn't know that css dotted doesn't mean dashed, really does make up for the 2 seconds it takes for me to swizz my chair round to look at the site on the laptop run off OSX's built in Apache server