Apple

[mel]

I think I'm abit out of touch on the whole mac thing as I always had them dismissed as the tool of choice for arty farty designer types and people who wore sandals, but do I need to do some catching up? What does all this talk of "windows compatible" mean ? can I just use any windows software that I already have? things like sage, autocad plus ms office? or would that just slow down the whole mac thing?

It's just I always hear people who use them rave about how good and how quick they are but had always thought they were a bit betamax video, i'e technically better but always destined for the redundant cupboard and you could never get the good titles on them?

So what are pros and cons of a modern mac laptop and are they worth the extra dough?

[mmm-five]

The lastest Macs are based on Intel chips and can therefore run Windows natively & at full speed (fig. 1) - as long as you use Apple's Boot Camp beta to set up a Windows partition and provide you with the drivers needed to run the Apple-specific components of the computer.

Review from PCPro

Fig. 1


Alternatively you can run Parallels (fig. 2) - which is a Virtual Machine within the Mac OS and runs at about 75% of the full speed and also has to share the computer's resources as the Mac OS is running simultaneously. This has the benefit of letting you run many other operating systems than just Windows though.

Fig. 2

[thepassenger]

mel said:

I think I'm abit out of touch on the whole mac thing as I always had them dismissed as the tool of choice for arty farty designer types and people who wore sandals, but do I need to do some catching up? What does all this talk of "windows compatible" mean ? can I just use any windows software that I already have? things like sage, autocad plus ms office? or would that just slow down the whole mac thing?

"Windows Compatible" means just that. The Intel based Mac's will run Windows; you can either use a Virtual Machine system, Boot Camp to dual boot or their are guides on-line about replacing Mac OS X with Windows XP... although it's a bit iffy and if you want to utterly replace OS X best to wait until Vista's released.

Oddly enough Microsoft do have a version of Office avaliable (Office 2004) and it's actually better than O2k3 on the PC, not sure if if has Access on it though as I didn't pay that much attention during install. Same with MSN, the OS X version allows for two seperate sign-ons, one to the internet MSN and one to MS's business server that you can buy... rather than being an either/or situation. It wouldn't surprise me to find that most Microsoft business software also has a Mac version.

But to answer your question, yep. Once XP is running on the Mac your old software will run just fine.

mel said:

It's just I always hear people who use them rave about how good and how quick they are but had always thought they were a bit betamax video, i'e technically better but always destined for the redundant cupboard and you could never get the good titles on them?

From a technological standpoint I wouldn't say the PPC macs were any faster than their Intel or AMD counterparts when you actually tried to do something grunty with them; obviously now moving to Intel this is even more the case. The 'speed' generally comes from the fact that the OS is completley tied to the hardware platform, so avenue of enhancment has been explored.

As for being resigned to a cupboard, not really. Having stopped playing games and doing a lot of work on text, images and video I actually prefer using my very slow (compared to my XPS laptop) G5 imac as the screen is utterly superb.

mel said:

So what are pros and cons of a modern mac laptop and are they worth the extra dough?

Cons.
1. Cost
2. Need to jump through hoops to get Windows working.
3. Perhaps not as speedy as other laptops in the same price range.

Pros.
1. Apple's waranty department is excellent. It breaks, phone the nice man in Ireland or drop it in to an Apple store.
2. OS X is one of the best operating systems I've come in to contact with, simple to use and when it's font rendering is combined with #3 it's very good.
3. Apple's screen's tend to be slightly lower res than the others but are very readable, easy on the eye and good to work with for long periods of time.
4. It looks like it cost £x. Seriously, sit a MacBook Pro next to a same priced Dell.

Currys or whatever they are calling themselves, do sell Apple laptops and the one in Portsmouth high street had them out sat next to the others... if the other stores are the same I'm sure a salesman will login on it and let you play.

As an aiside I hung around outside the Bluewater store a while back and the amount of trade they were doing was INSANE; G4 laptops, iMacs, iPods, even huge ass screens... people were just walking in and walking backout with bags full of goodies.