[jimbo123]

Hi all.

I'm about to jump to the Mac world shortly but what is every ones opinion on value for money?

In the windows world the hardware is far superior to what Apple can offer at the moment. For £699 I could quite easily pick up a fast pc with a 19 inch display.

I'm going for a 20" iMac once revisions are done and hope they change the GPU.
Reasons being I like the iMac concept and since I only want to program and touch up photos I feel this will be adequate. The main driving force to buy is OSX which being less prone to problems especially viruses etc.

It's a shame Apple are not the driving force anymore for hardware I think they should ditch IBM for the CPU's and go else where.

Incidently has anyone know how good the VPC 7 is and if it will run Java Builder 3 on it?

Thanks

[Wraven]

VPC 7 is fine if you have a fast processor and LOTS of RAM (at LEAST 1GB). On an iMac G5 with 1+GB of RAM it should be fine (even running Java Builder 3 on it).

As for the rest of your post, I'll let others jump all over it (though I agree with you on the anti-IBM part).

[Koodari]

Originally Posted by jimbo123 In the windows world the hardware is far superior to what Apple can offer at the moment. For £699 I could quite easily pick up a fast pc with a 19 inch display.

Apple lacks headless mid-range desktop but in their own fields I feel Apple's products are competetive. Especially laptops and mac mini, but also how much will you have to pay for the PC equivalent of the dual 2GHz Powermac?

iMac, I feel, only has the unique form factor ace to play. The price sucks. The worst that Apple has is the low end SP Powermac and high end fully loaded mac mini - both essentially demonstrate what is missing in between.

Displays aren't too hot either, but they are basically a commodity.

[jimbo123]

Apple might sell Dual 2Ghz power Macs but the rest of the system ie graphics card is sub standard, a computer is only as fast as a collective of parts eg GPU/ram/Bus etc

Apple in terms of price fall down here?

Bare in mind I've not used a Mac for over 10 years!

[Bryson]

It's been said before, but: Raw numbers don't actually matter as much as people think. What matters is your user "experience" and I find I can work faster on the Mac, for what I do.

Most of that, I'll admit is not having two hours of each day saying "well why is the f**king thing doing that?!" as I used to on a PC. That's worth a few MHz in my book...

[jimbo123]

Well I'm now considering a Power Mac instead as I see that the iMac will have a very limited life span. Possibly Dual 2.0 and but a cheap 17" TFT for the time being.

Do people think this is a good idea bare in mind my budget is £1800 ?

[holbox]

Originally Posted by jimbo123 Well I'm now considering a Power Mac instead as I see that the iMac will have a very limited life span. Possibly Dual 2.0 and but a cheap 17" TFT for the time being. Do people think this is a good idea bare in mind my budget is £1800 ?

You bet!

The Dual 2.0 is a great machine. Get the best monitor you can afford.

[jimbo123]

In term of performance will I notice the difference in speed compared to say a single G5 processor. At the end of the day all I'm going to do is programming,digital photos surfing net etc.

Dual processor over kill?

[ironlung]

for what you want to do an ibook will suffice!

[RowdyScot]

The iBook would suffer a ton with VPC7.

[FFL]

the dual 2.0 and a 3rd party LCD will definitely give you the most bang for your buck. You probably want to BTO it with a better video card than the 5200. Then install more RAM (I added 2 GB to mine) yourself.

[jimbo123]

I went down to my local apple Centre and had a play on all the range apart from top end PM. I was impressed by how:
a) How small the i book Power books and mini were.
b)The speed of the PM.
c)The looks of the iMac also the power it has considering the size.
d)The Apple displays.
e)Even the eMac
d)Far better looking machines than any PC I've ever seen.

Bad points:

a)ibook and Power books too slow but I think that for all laptops anyway.
b)Price
c)Not enough ram as standard.


My problem is my Mrs will let me have an Apple Mac on the condition it matches the room! So it looks like I have to go for the iMac...

Apples don't give you value for money in terms of performance but you do get something special which has the wow factor. The OS alone is worth the money and for what I do a mid range PC will suffice but everyday I switch my PC on you are always battling against spyware/viruses and general crappy problems.

So I'm looking foward to join the Mac community and I can still do my University work on my Mac because of VPC 7 It will be like having two computers rolled into a 20" screen which is only 2" thick. Amazing realy when you think about it, with all the hardware Windows based vendors have I don't see a solution which even comes close.

[Brad]

Originally Posted by jimbo123 a)ibook and Power books too slow but I think that for all laptops anyway. c)Not enough ram as standard.

C probably caused much of the perception of A.

So I'm looking foward to join the Mac community and I can still do my University work on my Mac because of VPC 7 It will be like having two computers rolled into a 20" screen which is only 2" thick.

What kind of work? What applications are you using that need Windows?

[jimbo123]

Programming tools such as Java Builder 4.

[euain]

Originally Posted by jimbo123 Programming tools such as Java Builder 4.

I'm not sure what Java Builder is... but there are plenty of tools native to OSX (or pure Java so they'll run in the Apple JVM)- Eclipse, Borland JBuilder, Oracle JDeveloper (I think), ...

These'll run far better than anything in VPC..

Euain

[Mac+]

Can't you use X-Code to do Java programming as well?

(Actually, I'm not 100% certain that the Developer Tools are included with the OS these days ... if not, you could ask the Genius Bar folks to throw you a copy. I know a rep in Sydney posted a copy of the Dev Tools to me, in Melbourne, when I picked up the education version of Jaguar.)

[Brad]

What euain and Mac+ said.

That's kinda what I thought anyway. Most tools at university are cross-platform or at least have compatible alternatives. Make a list of what you need (and describe each thing briefly) and we can help you find their Mac counterparts.

JBuilder Downloads - note that everything but the enterprise and mobile trial is available for Mac OS X.

You'll be much better off using a native set of tools even if there's a slight learning curve. You'll be kicking yourself all night long if you have to use VPC for work like this. If you're going to spend most of your time in VPC anyway, why bother getting a Mac in the first place? The VPC environment is prone to the same spyware and viruses and crap that regular PCs get. It's essentially a self-contained PC running on your Mac. Though, no, any spyware or viruses or such will not affect anything else on your Mac, just the VPC environment.

[jimbo123]

Good point there.

The reason I need VP7 is all software given to me by Uni is PC only so that means all text,books etc are geared up to that particular software...its the crappy Windows culture we have here in the UK. I don't want two computers in the house and desperate for a Mac which no one can be-grudge me!

I know I can use JBuilder 4 for Mac but I get all my software free with Uni.
WOuld I see a diference running VPC on a 2.0 PM over a 2.0 iMac(pending update) both running with 512 of ram ?

[ghoti]

There are a lot of tools - especially for Java - that are free (e.g., eclipse, XCode, ...). And the differences between the tools is really small, so it should be no problem to use something else. It's still the same language, and what you write on the Mac will equally work on the PC. So using a native tool would be a much better idea than running your computer artificially slowly, which will only cause you frustration.