Switching to Mac

[DaveB]

Ok, next question. Can I get one cheaper anywhere else other than the Apple Store? Is ordering one from the US a viable option given the price differential and the value of the £ atm?

[scooterscot]

I had the same thoughts before purchase. In the end I caved in and bought from the apple store. Business expense anyhoe - probably why my profits are low and apple shares are up.

[DBA_bloke]

Linux. Easy when you think about it. I recommend Centos. Never, ever looked back, etc.

[daviejones]

Ok, next question. Can I get one cheaper anywhere else other than the Apple Store? Is ordering one from the US a viable option given the price differential and the value of the £ atm?

Computer Warehouse are slightly cheaper...

[FCSimmo]

Call Apple direct on the business line and haggle.. I got a wireless mouse and keyboard thrown in with my macbook pro... if that doesn't work, try haggling on the standard customer number :]

I've had a Macbook pro and an Imac for a year or so now and to be honest, Macs are not that much more stable than Vista. Safari crashes on me on both machines too often for my liking and in terms of useabilty, I don;t think Mac OS X is any more usable than Vista or XP.

But it is fantastic for media and peripherals etc...

Vista on Bootcamp runs ok but I plan to run Parallels soon as it's less clunky!

[daviejones]

[QUOTE=FCSimmo;320778]I've had a Macbook pro and an Imac for a year or so now and to be honest, Macs are not that much more stable than Vista. Safari crashes on me on both machines too often for my liking and in terms of useabilty, I don;t think Mac OS X is any more usable than Vista or XP.
QUOTE]

I would disagree with you there, and I am pretty sure most other Mac users on here would also disagree. I have never had Safari crash, unlike IE, which generally throws up some error every now and again.

And Vista being stable...not a word I would associate with Vista!!!

[Peter Loew]

Apple also offer student discounts. Now if you know a student or have access to a university all you have to do is go order your mac from within the university domain to get your discount...

I got 15% off my Macbook Pro...

P

[Pete Cullen]

I would say Parallels too, I have a 20" iMac that I bought earlier this year, and run everything in OS X with the exception of Outlook 2007 that I run in Parallels.

Don't buy a memory upgrade from Apple though, they charge an extortionate amount of money for their RAM. Go for the standard memory and then buy a 4Gb upgrade from Crucial or another reputable RAM manufacturer. Provided you want that much RAM of course!

[Moscow Mule]

I would say Parallels too, I have a 20" iMac that I bought earlier this year, and run everything in OS X with the exception of Outlook 2007 that I run in Parallels.

Don't buy a memory upgrade from Apple though, they charge an extortionate amount of money for their RAM. Go for the standard memory and then buy a 4Gb upgrade from Crucial or another reputable RAM manufacturer. Provided you want that much RAM of course!

Oh yes - MORE RAM!!!!!!!!!

On a more serious note, if you've any intention of running more than one instance of Parallels or Vista under parallels at all, seriously consider maxing out the RAM.

[NickFitz]

I've had a Macbook pro and an Imac for a year or so now and to be honest, Macs are not that much more stable than Vista. Safari crashes on me on both machines too often for my liking and in terms of useabilty, I don;t think Mac OS X is any more usable than Vista or XP.

As somebody who's been using Macs since the early 90s and OS X since 10.1, and also used all versions of Windows since 3.11, I have to say that the Mac wins hands down in the usability stakes. It's not the big things - there's only so many ways the core features of a GUI can work, after all - but the small details that make the difference.

To take one example, consider a submenu. As one moves the mouse sideways across the main menu towards the submenu, there is a tendency to also move it downwards slightly, partly because of the way the human arm works, and partly because one is almost certainly not heading for the top item of the submenu, and therefore aims down slightly towards the thing one wants.

Realising this through user testing when the Mac was first being designed in the early 80s, the Mac engineers worked out a technique whereby the active region within which the submenu will stay open isn't rectangular but cone-like; this allows the pointer to move down slightly as it heads to the right, even to the extent of going into the next menu item down, without closing the submenu. This greatly increases one's chance of hitting the submenu correctly, rather than having it close, and maybe having a submenu from the next menu item open instead. (It also doesn't interfere with the case when you paused but then started heading for the next item - that will still respond straight away, as you are heading pretty much straight down.) The extent of this region downwards is also dependant on the speed with which one moves the mouse; a little experimentation will allow you to see just how effective it is in making the menus easier to use.

On Windows they identified the same problem, but instead used a very short time delay before activating the item below the one you were initially on. This is much clunkier: it is more likely to lose the menu you wanted, or to fail to open the item below that you were really aiming at quite as soon as you expect. Although happening at an almost subliminal level, this leads to a slightly frustrating sense of lag in the responsiveness of the UI, and causes a gradual buildup of minor irritation during the course of a session using the OS.

This has been a problem in Windows in all versions, and despite tweaks over the years, it's still there and still not-quite-good-enough in Vista.

It's this kind of thing that people mean when they describe Mac OS as having better usability than Windows: a dialog box behaves virtually the same way in both systems, but you can use a Mac for a long session and still feel relaxed, while the same period on Windows will build up a slight undercurrent of tension as all those little things niggle away.

As for crashes: I hardly ever see anything crashing on my Macs, although I have to say that Win XP SP2 is also extremely stable in my experience. I've found that most people who have crashes on their Macs turn out to be using things like Quicksilver, which supposedly enhance the usability of the system in various ways; as these things have to plug into the OS at a very low level, and use APIs that aren't documented or supported by Apple, they easily make the system unstable and can become even more unreliable when minor OS updates are installed. I'd never bother installing something like that; the supposed benefits (which I can't actually see myself) aren't worth the price of making your system unstable by randomly interfering with its normal mode of operation.

YMMV and so forth