Thinking of getting an Apple...

Marty_J

alexjohnson wrote: »

If you don't know what ExpressCard is you don't need to know what eSATA is.

Isn't that like saying "if you don't know there are faster ways to transfer things than USB, then you don't need to transfer anything faster than USB?".

It's nice to have options.

Marty_J

alexjohnson wrote: »

There is a difference. You show people what you are doing and you have to ask them to show you what they are doing. (Yes, I think "that" is the major use!) On a PC these options are not obvious and they are buried. You have to do something different again to get sound. It is klunky and most people don't know how to make it work. It is not video chatting and if you're dealing with people who won't switch to Jabber or Skype they're not going to work out how to do it.

It is a bit clunky, but less so than spending £50 on Parallels Desktop and however much more on a copy of Windows just to run Messenger.

We need video chat on Messenger.

I'm very happy with Skype. I find Messenger for Mac annoying to use, so I doubt I'd use it even if it had webcam support. I used to use jabber with an MSN gateway through iChat for instant messaging; now I just use Adium.

Marty_J

alexjohnson wrote: »

That wasn't my point. OP was responding to being told eSATA was "crucial." (Or rather ExpressCard was for that reason.) Plainly, it isn't unless you are in small group of people and you will know if you are in that group.

It's a nice thing to have; more and more external HDDs are coming with eSATA connections.

About the only thing I ask of a Mac, connection-wise, is that it has FireWire.

Marty_J

alexjohnson wrote: »

I couldn't agree more but you're preaching to the converted. I I want to speak to my family members who have MSN, the fact that I prefer Skype or iChat is really neither here nor there, is it? Many, many people who got a Windows XP machine at about the same time they got broadband for the first time signed up for MSN and this creates a network effect. If you are one of these people, or, crucially, if most people with whom you might like to have video chat use MSN, you cannot do that (to all intents and purposes) with a native app on the Mac and no amount of Skype being better will make it so.

Yahoo Messenger for Mac supports both webcams and MSN contacts.

Is it possible to use one with the other?

And, for (some) Switchers, this is actually a big deal - of a certain age shall we say I know several people who would be very disappointed indeed to find that their shiny new Mac meant they couldn't use video chat with their friends and family any more.

I guess that explains why Microsoft aren't in a rush to provide it.

Classic Microsoft really; roll out a service, but cripple it on platforms other than Windows for no reason in particular.

Marty_J

alexjohnson wrote: »

Marty I am not disagreeing with you. But you are being obtuse. Someone told the OP that ExpressCard was crucial. Not "nice", crucial. It isn't crucial unless you work in a field like video production and if you were one of those people, you would, by definition, know. "Crucial" means "don't buy a Mac unless it has this", i.e. the 15" MacBook Pro, and nothing else. As advice, frankly that sucks. That is the start, middle, and end of my point.

The OP is leaning towards a 13" MacBook Pro and from all his (?) other posts that seems a fine choice.

Well, I think the OP is capable of deciding what is crucial and what is not.

So, there seems little point in arguing about it.

Leopard did say to the OP "your own priorities might be different".

timmmers

I met powermacs ages ago and they rock for video and graphics work.

I can't build or repair one using components I choose, they don't really fit in well with most developer's software...every person I know with anything Apple has at some point struggled for something. I suspect most that aren't industry pros just liked the look of them. !!!!!! would anyone buy a machine that is thin and has no disc drive at all ..if not for it being "pwetty" at the expense of funcionality?

Certain people would really benefit from Apple gear...most wouldn't. Hence the % market share they have already.

I have a love of open source softeware...so no Mac for me anytime soon.

t

Marty_J

timmmers wrote: »

I can't build or repair one using components I choose, they don't really fit in well with most developer's software...every person I know with anything Apple has at some point struggled for something.

I would struggle under another OS; Macs are just too good for audio work.

I suspect most that aren't industry pros just liked the look of them.

Apparently, 90% of people who buy a computer that costs over $1,000 just like the look of them.

!!!!!! would anyone buy a machine that is thin and has no disc drive at all

Ask the millions of people who own a netbook.

if not for it being "pwetty" at the expense of funcionality?

At the expense of some functionality. It's light enough to carry around in a bag wherever you go and not even notice it, so in some ways it's more functional. A beast of a computer won't do you much good if you need to use it, and it's at home and you're not.

Certain people would really benefit from Apple gear...most wouldn't. Hence the % market share they have already.

I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact most people buy cheap computers, and Apple don't make any of those.

I have a love of open source softeware...so no Mac for me anytime soon.

Apple do lots of open source stuff, not to mention CUPS and WebKit.

They've just released Grand Central Dispatch, a major new feature in Mac OS X 10.6, under the Apache licence.

Leopard

culchied wrote: »

It's my understanding that the Time Capsule is a wireless external drive? I imagine that I don't need to keep it next to my laptop or connected via a cable for me to be able to store stuff on it? Or am I wrong?

You are, in essence, correct. Think of it as being an Apple Airport Extreme Base Station (namely, an Apple dual-band wireless router) with a hard drive built into it.

Both the Time Capsule and the Apple Airport Extreme Base Station have Gigabit LAN ports. This means that – in addition to its wireless capabilities – it will act as a router, at Gigabit speed, between Gigabit-capable devices plugged into it physically by Ethernet cables (such as other Macs and, for example, a Sony Playstation 3). This is much faster than what it can achieve wirelessly.

The Apple Airport Extreme Base Station has a USB2 port. A conventional external USB2 hard drive can be plugged into that, giving it the same functionality as a Time Capsule, which has a hard drive inside it.

Leopard, what does this mean? I don't understand techy speak...

Remember that an ExpressCard port is crucial: it can provide an eSATA connection.

Why is an ExpressCard port so important? (In layman's terms, please!)

See later *, in this posting.

Also, thanks for pointing out that specific model. In truth though, it's just not for me. I don't want one as large as 17".

No problem. I understand. It was for illustrative purposes and I did add that you may have different priorities.

Again, what does this mean;

I've always assumed (but have never verified) that the advantage of a Time Capsule would be that it can process data directly to and from its internal SATA hard drive via its Gigabit LAN ports; whereas attaching an external hard drive to an Apple Airport Extreme Base Station – which one would wish to have with an Apple laptop – gives more flexibility and access to the drive itself but throttles the flow of data because it has to pass through the USB2 ports.

Thanks to everyone for your advice, particularly about MSN etc. I think I'll go and swot up a bit more!

With a Time Capsule, the hard drive is inside it. It's a SATA drive and the Time Capsule has Gigabit LAN Ethernet networking ports.

The Apple Airport Extreme Base Station also has Gigabit LAN Ethernet networking ports (well, the recent ones do). But the data flowing through its LAN ports also has to pass through (much slower) USB2 ports to reach the external hard drive.

What I was stating is that I've always assumed (but have never verified) that the latter process of reading and writing data to the hard drive would thus be slower than with a Time Capsule – which can process the data directly between the Gigabit LAN networking ports and the SATA ports on the hard drive – because it wouldn't be throttled by having to pass through the much slower USB2 ports.

But, if you're only going to be doing it wirelessly, there would be no difference because even 5 GHz wireless networking is slower than USB2 anyway.

alexjohnson wrote: »

Time Capsule does three things.
1. It is a clever 802.11n router, much better than the free one your ISP will give you. (You may not care.)
2. It is a network attached hard drive, so yes,you can put stuff on it, and yu can (for example) put a shared iTunes library on it.
3. It does back up. But, it does this without your ever having to remember to turn it on or plug it in. It's a Mac clich!, but "it just works." Yes, an external drive will be cheaper, but it is completely useless if you never get round to using it to make a backup. You can achieve much the same thing by plugging a hard drive into an Apple Airport Extreme base station, but it doesn't look as smart. Mine lives in my living room so I care. If it lives in a cupboard under the stairs you probably wouldn't. Time Capsule is said to use "server grade" hard drives, i.e. ones designed to be on 24/7.

What would have been extremely helpful, alexjohnson, since you've actually got a Time Capsule, would have been if you'd clarified whether the speculation above – about the relative reading and writing speeds between the hard drive and the Gigabit LAN ports, with a Time Capsule as opposed to an Airport Extreme Base Station with an external hard drive attached to its USB2 port – occurs in fact.

But, sadly, you didn't.

Time Machine - the software that does the back-up - is really worth using. Time Capsule is particularly useful if you have a laptop - which it seems you would have - because a back up approaches uselessness if you need to remember to make one. Time Machine runs every hour, and backs up everything. It keeps incremental changes, going back hours, days, weeks, and months - so you can find that version of your document you saved a week ago and have ill-advisedly edited, for example.

I did have a full backup, happily, but I bought a Time Capsule when the hard drive of my MacBook died, under warranty, suddenly, massively, and irrecoverably. It was good luck it happened after I'd done a backup, not before. Time Capsule takes luck out of it.

But it's expensive and there are cheaper ways to do it, for sure.

For our own household's Time Machine backups (and a host of other stuff as well) we use an old (2003) 1GHz Apple G4 "Mirrored Drive Doors" Power Mac, running Mac OS 10.5.8, with (currently) four 500 GB IDE 7,200 rpm hard drives, attached – like our Apple Airport Extreme Base Stations and a bunch of other devices – to our wired Gigabit Ethernet network.

Our Apple laptops can connect to it either wirelessly (through the Airport Extreme Base Stations, at 5 GHz) or, when docked, through Cat5e and Cat6 Ethernet cabling.

This works cheaply (the Power Mac cost me only £100 via eBay), automatically, 24/7, and extremely well. I then back up the Power Mac manually, once or twice a week, to a RAID-1 twin hard drive through its Firewire 800 port.

*

No, it isn't! If you don't know what ExpressCard is you don't need to know what eSATA is.

I think that's extremely patronising. And how you then explain it is both incorrect and misleading.

(It is a way to connect a hard drive which is slightly faster than the FireWire a MacBook Pro already has. If you are producing TV programmes on your Mac you will care passionately about this. If you're not, you won't.) You can also use it for modems but in the UK these are almost invariably on a USB dongle now. And that's about it.

An ExpressCard port is an expansion slot in the side of some MacBooks Pro (but not the 13" nor the current 15" :mad: ) into which can be inserted all sorts of ingenious expansion cards. Among these is one which provides the MacBook Pro with the ability to connect directly to devices (including hard drives and optical drives) which have an eSATA port.

eSATA is a much faster connection than USB2 or even Firewire 800.

eSATA devices are also cheaper (already) than comparable USB2 and Firewire 800 devices and will become more so.

It may not (yet) be crucial to have an eSATA device but if you do have an eSATA device it is crucial to have an ExpressCard port on your MacBook Pro in order to be able to use it. Which is where word "crucial" entered into it.

alexjohnson wrote: »

That wasn't my point. OP was responding to being told eSATA was "crucial." (Or rather ExpressCard was for that reason.) Plainly, it isn't unless you are in small group of people and you will know if you are in that group.

That "small" group of people is going to become ever larger as eSATA devices become more commonplace.

Connectivity is important and so is future-proofing when you're buying a computer that isn't cheap. The reason my G4 TiBook remains viable is because its CardBus port enables USB2 devices to be used with it. My G4 Cube, on the other hand, is restricted to Firewire 400 and USB1.

asininity

Damn these threads grow quick!

Marty_J wrote: »

Well, some people value quality. A computer that is well built and attractive is very pleasant to use. If you use a computer a lot, such unquantifiable things as the user experience can be very important. If your computer is in a dusty spare room and you use it once a fortnight to check your emails, it's less so.

I didn't say I didn't value quality. My PC (desktop) is very pleasant to use so is my acer laptop, trust me I use them a lot.

I know if I had a job that involved me driving a lot, I'd be looking for a car with comfortable seats first and foremost.

Wish you'd speak to my employer on the computer and vehicle front, you'd probably bankrupt them but I'd be comfortable while you did it.

Also, they have an excellent resale value. You can buy a MacBook Pro for £1,000, and then 2 years later, turn around and sell it for £600. So, that "really expensive" computer cost £400 to own, and you now have £600 to put towards a newer model. Once you've made the initial investment, they're not really very expensive.

I'm not arguing against that, but macs offer me nothing I cant do cheaper and it cant offer me anything for gaming which is what I build my desktops for.

alexjohnson wrote: »

I am not doubting you - some people can do this, and as you note you make sure you don;t buy things you don't value that way. But most can't. Which makes sense - who has more purchasing power, one customer, or Dell? This is (unsurprisingly) true of almost every manufactured product.

I really dont think I'm alone in building computers. Not sure what the rest of the above means???

And your Tiny PC may have done the job but it was butt ugly and probably had fan noise like a wind turbine. I would no sooner have one of those in my living room than I would have a Lada on my driveway, no matter how good it was at getting me to the supermarket. Horses for courses.

It was no uglier than any other pc of the same age, it was white and blue in colour. Silent actually, passively cooled as it was. Ran very well as an internet machine and more recently as a damn good firewall. But as you say its down to opinion and your opinion is just as baseless as mine from an objective view point as is everyone else's..

kinlongso

A Macbook Pro is definitely a good choice, using iMac right now but i've got no doubts it will suit your requirement. Typically Macs last much longer than PCs and I personally believe they are much more durable. The only thing you'll be missing are softwares you're so used to using on your PC, but that feeling won't last long as you'll soon discover the amount of free apps for Mac is incredible. But for things like Office and Photoshop, they've got Mac versions anyway.

You're right on the MSN issue, but there is a MSN app for Mac by Microsoft though I would recommend Adium instead which is also free. But overall a Macbook Pro should do everything you need from a laptop, they simply just work.

culchied wrote: »

Hey everyone,

I've a laptop PC that's coming to the end of its life and am thinking it's time for a new one. I've always toyed with the idea of getting an Apple Mac but have never been daring enough to take the plunge. I like the look of them and have heard they're pretty reliable but I wondered if anyone had any thoughts on their suitability for my needs.

A couple of things I want from a new computer;

1. That it's preferably a laptop.
2. Good performance in terms of running multiple applications (e.g. Word, Internet, MSN, simultaneously.) I know MSN isn't the same on a Mac but I'm not entirely sure why...
3. I've loads of quality photos (by quality I mean high resolution, the actual images are rubbish!) so a pretty decent hard drive.
4. All of my music collection is now on iTunes so again a decent hard drive. I've also a few videos that I'd like to store on my computer too so that's an added factor.
5. Durability. My last Sony laptop has been prone to overheat and go really slow. Someone told me a solid state hard drive is better but I don't know if that's any better for combatting the slowness.
6. Office Software (preferably Microsoft Office), Adobe Photoshop and some video/audio editing software. I currently use Photoshop Elements and Adobe Audition.

I've looked at Mac Book Pros and the Apple Time Capsule. Am thinking of a Mac Book Pro as my main computer and using the Time Capsule as storage for all my larger files.

Anyone any views on my requirements and the Mac v PC debate?