iMac 27

InsideInsurance

buglawton wrote: »

So we plumped for a used 20" with a TB of disk on it and 16 GB RAM.

Buying RAM from Apple is insanely expensive. As RAM is the one officially user upgradable component you can save yourself a packet by buying the lowest ram available for the machine you want and buying the extra ram from Crucial.

The exception to the above is the MacBook Air where the RAM isnt upgradable as it is soldered to the logic board

buglawton

Yup, but even the 1 TB disk option was at a high premium compared to 500GB. Hence the decision to buy used.

WilliamO

Notmyrealname wrote: »

Macs are cracking machines. They have superb build quality and are beautiful to look at. Everything is seamless in how it works. Are they better than a similarly priced Windows machine? Not really. Dell, HP and Lenovo all make computers a similar price built equally as well. The problem with Macs is that people don't compare like for like and will compare a £1000 Macbook Pro with a £400 laptop from PC World and they'll say the Macs are better quality or they're overpriced for spec depending on point of view. I sell solely ex-corporate laptops that were £1000 or over when new and the build quality is the same as my Macbook Pro. However I have a Macbook Pro because whilst the aforementioned are built just as well, being corporate machines they're !!!!!! to look at.

I would strongly suggest getting "Mac OS X Lion for Dummies". OSX is OSX and she'll either like it or hate it but you can put Windows on it if you want and Apple provide the tools to do so. OS X is far easier to get to grips with if you stop thinking of it as being like Windows because it looks similar. Sadly the included documentation is quite sparse and there's some Linux/Unixy type stuff you do such as needing to "eject" a pendrive or downloaded dmg file. OS X is very powerful and has a lot of usability tweaks in it which people don't get to know about because its not documented. But she'll get the hang of it all. Keyboard shortcuts are similar to Windows for copy, cut, paste etc but using the CMD key instead of CTRL.

There is Microsoft Office for OS X and there is OpenOffice too. Chrome is available on OS X, MSN Messenger, most stuff is available or has equivalents. Apple computers are primarily used in multimedia industries so photos and videos are not a problem.

Thanks for an honest view. It's nice to read something that isn't windows vs mac whereby one opinion is taken in favour of one computer only (i.e. one computer is better than the other). You also make some good points about chrome and msn being available on the mac. Nice post.