Hesitant to switch to a mac
 

I've been reading articles, searching posts, looking at pics (of macs of course) and checking out everything I can. (ok maybe not everything). I don't have a $1000 or $2000 to plunk down on a mac. But I would like to buy a mac and run one of the new os (tiger maybe?). I've been searching for macs on ebay and have seen a whole range of macs that also range in price. I'm willing to spend about $500 give or take, but I'm not sure which I should get. The best bang for the buck so to speak. I've been a pc user since the IBM xt. I like windows, but from everything I've heard or seen mac is alot easier to work with media, i.e. pics, movies, sounds, etc...
I know more ram, hard drive space etc... (I'm a pc tech for 10 years) will allow it to run smoothly, faster, better, etc...
I guess after all this rambling, I'm wondering if any of you currently work with both vista/xp pc and macs. your likes dislikes, anything at all. And convince me to get a mac. PS.. if I like the used mac that I get, I will spend more to get a newer mac. Thanks for your time and consideration ahead of time.

pss... I own apple stock, so I might use it to buy a new mac. the irony of it I know.

You can, for not much more than your $500 goal, get a Mac Mini. It doesn't come with a display, but any standard vga or dvi monitor will connect with no problems, as will any USB keyboard and mouse if you don't want the Mac product. As a PC tech, you probably have those things laying around. If you buy it new, it will come with the latest OS installed. If you hunt around on eBay, you may well find a good deal, but be sure you get the original installation disks as a part of the transaction.

I use various OSes, including XP, Windows 2000, Windows 2003 Server, Macs of various configurations, and a few versions of Linux. While I am somewhat less of a die-hard convert than many, I think the Mac is a very serious machine these days and the OS X is a first-rate operating system. Despite the small size of the Mac Mini, it is quite a capable machine and priced at a level that you can reasonably give it a try.

Joe VanZandt

If you are buying used, just make sure you get an Intel Mac. If you buy a iBook, PowerBook, or early iMac or Mac mini that still has the PowerPC CPU, you won't have the option of running Windows easily or quickly or natively.

I won't be running windows on the mac. Most likely have a pc reserved for any programs that are a must.

If you know anything about computers and not just Windows, adjusting to the Mac will be a snap. You know you want to get one, and you know it will be better than what you have now, so do it.

Do yourself a favor though, and get a Mac with enough power for what you intend to do with it. You don't want to save a few dollars on the box and then pay extra for upgrades, or worse, need to sell a Mini so you can get a Mac Pro. I'm not saying a Mini won't be fine for you. It's a good, fast machine. I'm saying that you should figure out what you need and then go get it.

By the way, if there's an Apple Store within driving distance, I recommend you go to it and try some of the Mac models there. There's no better way to get a feel for Macs than to use them.

I will have to check and see. I'm not sure about the apple store location. What I want to do but I'm not very proficient at it as I've really never worked with applications in media, is :
to work with media for presentations in church, youth group, etc... (I'm the youth pastor).
also to edit videos of our trips to make them interesting. and possibly recording original music (I play guitar, good but not great) or to edit music previously recorded (not copyrighted music) I work with pictures alot on the pc. mostly to crop, and enhance. Would like to do a little more with that.

what are you looking for specs wise?

well, at home I'm using a 1.8 ghz with 1gb ram and 80gb hard drive. 2 dvd burners one with lightscribe. I also use an hp ipaq pda, not sure on apple compatability on that. zyxel 330w router though that shouldn't be a problem. I also use xbox360 any help on compatability there? I'm going to do more checking as that was just a last second thought.

Any Mac can do all of the things you want, but the question is, how much performance do you want/need? I have a Dual 2.0 Ghz G5 that probably isn't as fast (it does have a faster hard drive & a gig of RAM) as a new Mini overall, but it's plenty fast enough for most of the things I do. Video editing could be faster, but I don't do to much of that anyway.

I hope there's a store nearby for you, or maybe one of the Best Buy's that's carrying Macs.

well for that sort of thing id say get a mac mini, my brother got a intel core solo 1gb ram with a superdrive for like £400 on student discount. It'd be cheaper on ebay. Considering your budget id say get one from ebay, i saved £300 on my mac and it was in mint condition aswell :d

I'm looking for decent performance. I'm not into professional editing, but I don't want to have hiccups and I don't want to have to wait for eternity for applications to make adjustments or to switch back and forth between them. I would like to find a machine that's decent and can show me pretty well what mac can do before I jump into buying a new one and then finding out that it doesn't work well, with my stuff. From everything I've learned video editing is suppose to be easier on the mac. I've been trying to use movie maker & nero showtime. I think that's the name of it. Pretty steep learning curve there.

here's a mac mini that I found on ebay in my budget. Does this sound right or anything that's out of the ordinary? I checked out the mac mini on apple website and it doesn't have some of these things listed.

1.42 GHZ
80 GB HARDDRIVE
512 MB DDR SDRAM
DVD R/W, (DVD±RW/CD-RW)
BUILT IN AIRPORT EXTREME (based on 802.11g specification; IEEE
802.11b Wi-Fi certified)3
INTERNAL BLUETOOTH
SUPERDRIVE CD/DVD BURNER
HEADPHONE/ AUDIO LINE OUT
OSX 10.4 TIGER
ATI RADEON 9200 W/32MB of DDR SDRAM W/ AGP 4X support
ONE FIREWIRE 400 PORT; TWO USB 2.0 PORTS; DVI OUTPUT;
VGA OUTPUT (ADAPTER INCLUDED)
BUILT-IN 10/100BASE-T ETHERNET

YOU WILL RECEIVE:

MAC MINI PRODUCT # M9971LL/B
MAC WIRELESS KEYBOARD
MAC WIRELESS MOUSE

FACTORY OEM SOFTWARE BUNDLE INCLUDED:
iLife ’05 (includes iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie HD, iDVD, GarageBand), Mail, Dashboard, Spotlight, iChat, Safari, Sherlock, QuickTime, iSync, iCal, DVD Player, Address Book, AppleWorks, iWork (30-day trial), Classic environment, Quicken 2005 for Macintosh, Nanosaur 2, Marble Blast Gold, Zinio Reader, and XCode Developer Tools

I don't think any of the newer machines will give you any problems, but perception of performance needs is subjective, which is why I recommend using different models before buying. Whatever you do, get an Intel Mac at this point, especially since you're thinking of trading up if you like it. No sense in getting PPC applications only to switch over in 6 months or a year to Intel.

I believe that's a G4 Mini. Unfortunately, Mactracker is missing the product # for the late 2005 Mini, and that number doesn't show up in any of the other versions.

Go with the Apple Refurb Store. Good quality stuff, you can still get Applecare.

It's easy to create movies in iMovie, there's always GarageBand for music (not 100% sure how to use it, as i don't record/make music much), iPhoto to organize

You get the whole iLife bundle with your Mac.
http://www.apple.com/ilife/

Photos and music are organized by iPhoto and iTunes. Plugin a camcorder and iMovie can import the video.

Everything is pretty integrated, so all of your music and photos from iTunes and iPhoto, will automatically appear in iMovie, so you don't have to switch back and forth from program to program. Then you can export to iDVD and make a DVD of your video, if you want.

Take a look at http://www.apple.com/getamac/whichmac.html for all the latest Mac models.

If what the gentleman wants is a cheap way to see how Macs perform, I see no reason to insist on using an Intel Mac PROVIDED the Mac he gets is adequate. The main deficiency I see in the one he lists is that it has 512 MB of RAM; would be better to have 1 GB. But for casual use, 512 will certainly do and give you the 'Mac Experience". The newer Intel Macs are certainly faster and more capable of video editing and the like, but the fundamental structure of the PPC Mac isn't any different from the Intel Mac, as least as far as usability goes.

Joe VanZandt

I'm real proficient with firefox. haven't used IE since about 6.0 came out. so no problem there. Now I just need to find out about this HP iPaq pda to see if it's compatible or what? probably what?. Thanks for all the input. If any one else has anything to add, I'd be grateful

I don't really see any benefit to switching...

If you will be using iMovie to edit video you need to be aware that it is primarily designed to work with the DV format. So if other people are going to be giving you clips that they have shot for you to edit then you very well may run into problems unless it is in DV format (or be faced with a long conversion process).

Also, a lot of the OSS apps that have been ported to Mac are not really particularly user friendly. OpenOffice/NeoOffice are pretty clunky on the Mac and image editing/layout apps such as Gimp and others are usually ported to Mac using the Unix X11 environment which does not offer a Mac-like user experience.

Again, I don't understand why anyone would switch to Mac and then use Firefox. FF on Mac does not take advantage of most of the MacOS features such as Services (which allow you to interact with certain other apps from within another) native Apple Spelling, the Keychain, or iPhoto integration...
Then again, the default browser (Safari) is not supported by many websites, so in the end you may end-up needing to use an inferior browser such as FF anyway.

The Mac is all about compromise and marginalization...

I suppose if they're going to give you WMV files, this is true.
If by "not really particularly user friendly" you mean to say that they behave like Windows applications, I agree.
Firefox isn't bad. It's not my favorite browser, but I can see why some people like it.
Yest there are some Microsoft centric sites that don't work well with Safari, but that's no reason to always use an inferior browser.

No, it's about quality over quantity.

the mac on ebay looked good, but ideally you want atleast 1gb of ram. MORE RAM IS GOOD!!

Roadkill,

If you do need to convert video, check out 'major' at videohelp.

See:

www.videohelp.com/forum/archive/t123730.html

Filter is called "ffmpegX."

Best,

eValuone

I think the bottom line is.....

A Mac will offer you a very well rounded OS with some great software packaged with it, it will be stable, secure and should do everything you need.

You wont get all the software nativly on OSX that is available on Windows because Mac OS has a much smaller market share.... but if you have a Windows box thats not a problem... you could control your existing PC from your Mac via RDC..... or even use virtualisation software should you wish.

what have you got to loose?.... with a Mac and a PC you can have the best of both worlds.

The key things to remember are:
DONT expect Mac OS to be just like Windows.... its not.
DO buy as much ram as you can afford, I tend to do 1.5gigs
DO ask loads of questions on this forum
DO be open to new ways of working

as for wanting a quick(ish) Mac..... remember that a Mac Mini is an entry level Mac, and probiably wont blow your hair back, the iMacs are very good mid level machines.

...and then theres the dream of the 8 core mac pro wit like 4 displays :p

May I ask a question? Why would a pastor choose 'roadkill' as a user name? Are you of the Church of the Flattened Squirrell?

He's the YOUTH Pastor. "Roadkill" is a lot cooler than "cuteadorablepuppy" as a nick.

Joe VanZandt

I figured it was a good name since I live in South Alabama and I do have 8 vehicles on our property though only one runs. (insert redneck joke here) But I'm not a complete redneck, I'm not even from here, and besides none of these cars are on concrete blocks.
Another thought, I'm also a gamer and the youth all think that's cool. I also love the Lord. So what else could be better.
Just because I'm a minister doesn't mean I have to be drab and boring. God never intended that.
Anyway enough of that before this get's closed.
I looked up some info about hooking up my ipaq pda to a mac, and apparently there is a program I can download that will allow it to sync up. I forget what it was now. I'll have to look again.