What to buy? Mac vs. PC
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- Philip Smith
- Sr. Rocketeer
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My question is simply this:
With approximately $1800 Canadian funds to spend, what should I buy for a new system? ($1500 US approx)
Details you might want to know:
- Primary software usage will be Photoshop, Fireworks and Dreamweaver. All available for both OS's.
- Primary work will be site design and desktop publishing.
- I will be using the computer 90% of the time for work, the other 10% for personal photos and gaming. If I go with the Mac I will completely forego the gaming since I'm not that interested in that stuff anyway.
Less than two months ago I had purchased a 20" Duo Core 2 iMac (2ghz) from a major distributor and decided to give it a whirl. I played with it for 7 days and decided to return it while I had the chance and give the whole buying process a little more time. After loading on Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc. and copying my 6000+ photo collection into iPhoto, I found the system starting to drag on me a bit. The off-the-shelf iMac comes with a standard 1GB of ram.
Overall I was really pleased with the workmanship of the Mac. It is a beautiful machine. But for me to really be satisfied with it, I believe I would need to order at least 2GB, or maybe even 3GB of ram to make it fly.
SO what are your thoughts? Is a beefed up iMac the way to go? Or for the same amount of money do you recommend getting a PC with more Ram, HD space, etc than comes with a standard Mac?
Thanks for your opinions
Phil - Last Edit: 17 years 10 months ago by Philip Smith.
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- Andy Miller
- Preeminent Rocketeer
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- Web Kahuna
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I think you should of kept the imac
I just bought one for my 4 year old son, and right now it's got bootcamp installed and he spends all his time in windows because most kids games are windows only (or require mac os 9), however, because it's a mac, salvation is only a reboot away. I started off running his games in parallels which is coming along really nicely and now lets you add windows apps to the mac dock so they at least appear to act like regular mac programs. however because these kids games are often really old and originally written for windows95, i had some issues with resolution changes etc, so decided to go the basecamp route. Incidentally running windows on an intel mac via bootcamp is great. bootcamp creates a driver disk for you so after you install windows, you insert the driver disk and it just installs everything in one go! boom, everythign works, wireless, bluetooth, usb, video camera, everything.
Another alternative you might have is to get a refurbished mac pro. You can probably get one for under $2000 and then you'll have a quad processor machine, very sweet.
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- Philip Smith
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 102
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- Do you do your RT design work on an iMac/Mac Pro as well?
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- Andy Miller
- Preeminent Rocketeer
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- Web Kahuna
- Actually i'm still on a 2.7ghz dual powermac, although it's about 2 years old now and i really want to upgrade to a mac pro. I am waiting to hear what's in the pipeline based on the macworld announcements next week, but i'll be upgrading in the next month or so for sure.
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- Andy Miller
- Preeminent Rocketeer
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- Web Kahuna
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btw, i've posted this before, but here's the current list of apps I use on my mac:
osx.iusethis.com/user/rhuk
some good stuff in here.
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- Philip Smith
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 102
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- You wont wait for the new OS release?
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- Andy Miller
- Preeminent Rocketeer
- Posts: 9919
- Thanks: 96
- Web Kahuna
- Depends how long it's going to be. I'll probably have to buy a 'family' license anyway as i'll upgrade the rest of the macs here.
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- Mac (I own several PCs and a Mac). Go Mac.
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- shirster
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Mac ! Mac Mac Mac !!!!!!!!!!!!! OK I'm a religious Mac user I admit
I'm still using a yearssssss old 933 MHz PowerMac G4 with 768 MB RAM, I use it for everything because I don't have a Windows PC. The Adobe CS2 suite runs just fine except when I'm working on 1GB+ Photoshop files... I'm sure your experience will improve once the stable version of the universal binary Adobe CS3 is out.
I'm thinking about upgrading to a MacPro too, but yeah, let's see what His Steveness' got up his sleeves at MacWorld first
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I often see replies from MAC users where they tell about their main machine being old and still running fine and dandy..
Just curious why that is
I mean I have had several PC's over the years and sure I could use some of the old ones and they would run nicely. But for the sake of speed and several applications new machines seems better... hence why I upgrade from time to time.
Is that not an issue with MAC's?
I mean a 933 mhz machine with 768mb ram might run stable and all, but for instance if you compare it with a a new MAC pro with a couple of gigabytes ram wouldnt the old one feel sluggish and slow?
I know it would if I compared an old P3 800mhz 512mb ram with a core 2 dual 2.something ghz and a couple of gb ram...??
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