The iMacs have gone up £30, and now are only able to cope with 2Gb of RAM.

Only? It's an iMac... not a powermac.... 2GB is a decent amount for an iMac.

And £930 for a high spec desktop is awesome value for money - I'm gonna buy me one when I can afford it.

EDIT- clumsy thumbs

You guys havent played with iLife 06 and iWork... its needs more mem.

Bleh, Anandtech's Yonah desktop is better than that silly iMac.

...No...it doesn't. Two gigs is, in Mac terms, one gigs to the PC alternative because mac programs destroy RAM.

Trust me, if you can't cope with 2 gigs you've got MAJOR issues.

Mac programs target stock 32-bit x86, not 64-bit (like PowerPC apps). You're going to see significant memory efficiency improvements with one of the new Macs.

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]Except you pay money for games...not for security. Unless you buy into the whole "Norton actually works" crock.[/QUOTE]
I haven't used retail Norton products in years since I was dissatisfied with their customizability and flexibility, but Symantec's enterprise solutions are quite nice. McAfee's AntiVirus Enterprise edition is also really nice...RIT provides it for free, and I think ITS made a good choice.

I hear people discrediting all sorts of antivirus and security software all the time, and they rarely can provide a good reason and actually back it up their claims. Often times power users mess with their system so much anyway that THEY end up screwing it up, and blame it on a virus because they're too arrogant or stupid to think they did it themselves. Then they blame their antivirus software for not protecting them. Then they discredit that entire company and swear that their products are total crap. Happens to Microsoft all the time. I can't say how many times I've had people kick and scream and swear at Microsoft because of a problem with the pre-keyboard interface. Boycotting an entire company or product line is also just silly to begin with.

Oh, and I'm not pointing fingers, these are just my observations.

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]...No...it doesn't. Two gigs is, in Mac terms, one gigs to the PC alternative because mac programs destroy RAM.

Trust me, if you can't cope with 2 gigs you've got MAJOR issues.[/QUOTE]

ohh you really havent had iMovie HD and iDVD 6 open yet...remember were I work.

Oh... "were" do you work? I hope to god it's nowhere that does anything with video production... because... you know... both of those programs focus on that sort of thing... and in that case... you shouldn't be using iMovie or iDvd. Final Cut Pro 5 and DVD studio pro would be the programs of choice... even though they both suck.

I think he's saying he works in an apple store.

Oh... you work in an apple store....

Out of curiosity.... (I promise this is totally unrelated) do you wear eyeliner?

and square, thick-framed glasses?

long-sleeved black shirts?

Long sleeved black shirts are rad.

Out of your mother's basement?

Seriously though, I don't care where you work, you don't need more RAM for those programs unless you're doing something heavily industrial. We're talking Spielberg industrial here. Even for something like film school (hi Bill), they'd still probably be more than fine. Though...I don't know why you'd use a mac for movie editing when Adobe Premiere (to my knowledge) is PC only. And really, Premiere is the only thing out there worth investing REAL time and money into.

I want one beause they're small and purdy.



(and because I've seen the light - OSX is teh sex)

I don't boycott Norton. Their corporate solutions MAY work--but how does that help me? I use Ghost, and nothing else from them. Their consumer products blow, and everyone knows it. If I want a firewall, I'll go for Trend Micro--they're MUCH better.

I wasn't directing that at you.

I'm waiting until they fall to buy a MacBook (so then there'll hopefully be a 12" model.) It'll be my first jump into the OSX market, while I've been messing around with the G5 we have at work (love GarageBand), I've never really sat down and used a Mac for an entire day. I imagine I'll still be using my PC for more hi-end things though.

Yeah, 12" lappys are the way forward: "THAT'S TINY" everyone says.

This is something I DO NOT suggest. I'd get an iBook before you take the (probably ~1500-2000) plunge for a macbook. Not only are they much smaller, more portable, and more compatible (at the moment), they'll give you a good feel for OSX and the like. Trust me, I loved OSX at first...but growing with it I found it's not all that. There are problems with it I don't take too well to. I ended up preferring windows, despite my initial reaction to OSX.

I'm iffy about iBooks, they're pretty weighty and I'm not a huge fan of the white plastic look. By the time I'm deciding on which to get I'm sure they'll have the intel iBook out, so maybe the style will change by then.

My 12" powerbook was £1200 - not cheap by any means.

Exactly. Macs are a plunge into a new world--of positives as well as negatives. I'd get more experience with macs.

I'm glad I've made the move - so far I'm still riding high, and do prefer OSX to windows. Because I'm mainily using this for office-y type tasks (browsing, internet etc) it's lovely. I would be struggling with tougher tasks, but mainly because I've not got off my arse and learned how to do things - in fact, could you give me a quick explanation of how to mount a network drive from a windows laptop on my network?

Windows - Gaming and stupidly easy to use, and has the most software/hardware support.

Macs - Incredibly beautiful interface, but damn near useless software nowadays. (Premiere is gone, more and more people use Photoshop on Windows, Final Cut Pro is losing its following... at least from what I see) Back in the day they were the graphic designer's computer.

Linux - Still for servers and geeks (unfortunately). Just doesn't have the periphreal (sp) hardware support required. Tons of opensource software available for nearly any use though.

[QUOTE=Cool Matty]Windows - Gaming and stupidly easy to use, and has the most software/hardware support.

Macs - Incredibly beautiful interface, but damn near useless software nowadays. (Premiere is gone, more and more people use Photoshop on Windows, Final Cut Pro is losing its following... at least from what I see) Back in the day they were the graphic designer's computer.

Linux - Still for servers and geeks (unfortunately). Just doesn't have the periphreal (sp) hardware support required. Tons of opensource software available for nearly any use though.[/QUOTE]
Macs are much, much better at photoshop than PCs. Sorry, but Photoshop and Illustrator, pretty much 99% of adobe products (except premiere, obviously) are better on Macs. Using a G5 that really isn't that great compared to my computer I get stupidly fast performance. There really is no match to a fully loaded dual core G5 with 2-4 gigs of RAM to do this stuff. Seriously, it rapes all PC faces.

Ok.... Yoshi.... allow me to explain something to you.

Most video editing is done via mac. They use Final Cut Pro... which is better than Adobe Premiere... but that's not saying much... because Premiere sucks (and yes... it is made for Mac as well).

Premiere is the least used pro-level editing software. It's really the only program that Adobe makes that no one really uses. There are MANY alternatives.

As said before... Final Cut Pro is pretty good... but not as good as everyone says.

Sony Vegas is really nice stuff.

Avid is the best editing software out there (thank's, lucas).

Anyone claiming to use iMovie to edit anything substantial.... well.... they're lying. Same with iDVD. Nobody that doesn't live with their parents uses those programs!

Oh... and yeah... he's sort of right. 2GB of ram will not suffice for video editing on a Macintosh. We have Dual 2.5ghz G5's with 2 gigs of ram... and they chug with video stuff... especially HD video. You would need at least 8 gigs to have a really nice video editing machine with Macintosh.

And there are other reasons to buy a Powerbook (which is what I will continue to call it. **** macbook). The iBook has major heat problems. And... for that reason... at least I think that's the reason... it runs very slowly. The powerbook runs really smoothly... and is about the same as a G4 desktop. The Macbook... with the titanium shell should be the same way.... plus since it's using the new Intel based chip... the heating problems should be even lesser.

But... regardless of all that. I still prefer windows.

A. Premiere is not on Mac anymore, hasn't been since Premiere 6.5.

B. Premiere isn't exactly an industry-level program. That's why it costs hundreds, not thousands. So of course you don't see "professionals" using it all the time. But it's a helluva lot more advanced than any amateur program like Windows Movie Maker, or iMovie.



And as for Yoshi somehow going into an argument from my post about Photoshop being faster and better on a mac:

So what?

I never said anything remotely to the point you are arguing. I said people are using Photoshop and Illustrator a lot more on Windows than on Macs nowadays, which in my experience is true.

Alright... and on that note... Illustrator and Photoshop, from my experience run much faster on PC. After Effects, as well, has been proven to run faster on PC.

Check your benchmarks again. I don't know about After Effects, but Illustrator and Photoshop DEFINITELY run faster on Macs.

I'm not talking about benchmarks. I'm talking about experience.

Check your experience then. Or some ****.

**** this, I've gotta stop posting under the influence. :|

Well guess what. I've done alot of work in Illustrator especially.. At school we have dual 2.5 g5's with 2 gigs of ram. I have a athlon 64 3700+ with 760MB... or whatever 512 and 256 is.... And render times are less than half when I'm at home. Trust me here. The comps at school should be more than twice as fast... but mine runs laps around them.

Sure they do. Check your benchmarks again.

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]Sure they do. Check your benchmarks again.[/QUOTE]

I hope you aren't going from those old Apple benchmarks: http://spl.haxial.net/apple-powermac-G5/

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]**** this, I've gotta stop posting under the influence. :|[/QUOTE]

This proves it. You've got to be high if you think Mac's any good.

Drunk, but ha. Ha.

No, I've seen benchmarks that actually test FX-55s and whatnot against Macs.

Best laptop I've ever used.

*shrug*

(*gulp*)
(**burrrrp**)

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]Drunk, but ha. Ha.

No, I've seen benchmarks that actually test FX-55s and whatnot against Macs.[/QUOTE]
Sorry, no, the G5 is a slow and hot piece of trash with barely enough processing power to make OS X boot. Not to mention that OS X and its applications are compiled using GCC -Os. GCC -O3 is bad enough, but -Os? ALTIVEC is the only edge PowerPC has, and GCC can't even effectively target it because GCC does single-pass optimization. Advantage gone.

Windows apps are almost universally compiled using Visual C++, which is second only to ICC for optimization. CISC processors also require lower memory bandwidth and, because they're 32-bit, much less processor cache and RAM.

Apple's old benchmarks are a steaming pile of hooey.