[hongkongstuey]

Just got a rather nice bonus from works as a result of headhunting someone so gonna take the plunge and switch from my old knackered PC to a nice shiny new iMac

As a result I'm gonna need to resource a mountain of software (the usual Adobe Stuff and Dreamweaver being the main ones) so if anyone has hints on where to find cheap (i.e. free) stuff, please let me know.

Any other hints / advice for a Mac virgin will be much appreciated

[slackline]

It ain't photoshop, but you can use The GIMP for photo editing (although you may well find it strange/lacking if your used to photoshop).

[Falling Down]

I use open office on my mac for word processing, spreadsheets etc.

[Will Hunt]

Ive got iWork '08 but they just released iWork '09. Got the mac equivalent of Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

iWork '08 costs £50 for the full package. Just MS Word '07 costs something like £65.
 

[slackline]

Ive got iWork '08 but they just released iWork '09. Got the mac equivalent of Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

iWork '08 costs £50 for the full package. Just MS Word '07 costs something like £65.
 

And OpenOffice is free 

[Will Hunt]

Touche

[vivahate]

Seems so hard to get Adobe stuff for free now due to needing telephonic confirmation of license codes. A good search of the web might find you somewhere but I haven't be able to get good mac stuff for a while. GIMP is good though

[slackline]

Seems so hard to get Adobe stuff for free now due to needing telephonic confirmation of license codes.

  why should you get it for free, its proprietrary code and a product sold by a company?  Do you walk into shops and grab whatever you fancy just because you don't want to pay for it?

Personally I made a conscious decision some time ago to stop stealing software and embraced

[GCW]

Thread Resurrection!!!!!!!!!!!

I just wanted some advice about Macs really.  My super computer which I built for myself a long time ago for video editing is about to die.  Basically the kids downloaded all sorts of games plus nasties, the main drive died and it's had to have an OS (XP) reinstall.  I, being paranoid, have 3 x 750GB drives with two mirrored for data I need to keep so I didn't lose everything.  This PC is now knackered, so we are looking at a replacement.  My wife likes Macs, so I have had a little look.  I'm currently a student (ha ha) so should be able to get a discount too.

If I were to go for an iMac (can't afford a Pro!!!) there are a couple of things I'd like to know:

Would the standard spec (3.4GHz quad core + 8GB RAM + NVIDIA GeForce GTX 775M 2GB GDDR5) suffice for HD video editing? 

Would you be happy with the single 1TB SATA hard drive, or (like me) would you think about some form of back up too?

Would my HV20 work properly via the DV - Thunderbolt interface?

Is Final Cut Pro X any good?  I'm used to Premiere Pro.

Are Macs OK for running M$ Office on nowadays, as I'd still need to do work stuff.

I know about Flash etc, but I don't mind if the kids can't go on YouTube and games 

Any other things I'd need to think about?

[slackline]

I know nothing about Macs other than they are expensive for the hardware (but your guaranteed to get good components that complement each other) and that OSX is based on BSD.

However,

Would you be happy with the single 1TB SATA hard drive, or (like me) would you think about some form of back up too?

No, always back up.  If you can't expand the drives within the computer then consider a NAS/cloud storage/external USB.

I know about Flash etc, but I don't mind if the kids can't go on YouTube and games 

Most video sites are moving towards HTML5 these days (certainly YouTube is already, I think Vimeo is too).

[GCW]

Cheers.  As I say, I've always mirrored drives for backup- is there any Mac option, or is it just external backing up?

The less YouTube the family watch, the better.......

[slackline]

Guess it will depend on the number of spare bays internally.

Generally with RAID arrays you need to have identical drives (or its best to at least, if you have a 1Tb and a 1.5Tb then you effectively lose 0.5Tb on the later).

This might be useful once you've sorted that side of things out Step-by-step to setting up RAID on Mac OS X

[cheque]

If I were to go for an iMac (can't afford a Pro!!!) there are a couple of things I'd like to know:

Would the standard spec (3.4GHz quad core + 8GB RAM + NVIDIA GeForce GTX 775M 2GB GDDR5) suffice for HD video editing? 

That's what I have but I maxed out the RAM (myself- God knows who pay the Apple RAM prices on the one model they make where you don't have to!) and it works brilliantly- never tried it with less so can't comment on how well it would work with 8GB.

Would you be happy with the single 1TB SATA hard drive, or (like me) would you think about some form of back up too?

I have the 1GB SATA (Never tried the optional solid state drive, I'm told it's amazing but I couldn't afford it) but have an external drive and another external backup drive, both USB. The backup software "Time Machine"is built into the OS and works fine with virtually zero effort into setting it up.

Is Final Cut Pro X any good?  I'm used to Premiere Pro.

I like it. I've never used Premiere pro though.

Are Macs OK for running M$ Office on nowadays, as I'd still need to do work stuff.

I use the Apple versions "Pages", "Keynote" and "Numbers" (each is a £14 download)- seems fine and is Office compatible but I don't use them much to be honest. I had Office on my old Mac and it was fine.

I know about Flash etc, but I don't mind if the kids can't go on YouTube and games 

Flash works on Macs, it's iPads and iPhones it doesn't work on.

[Paul B]

Cheers.  As I say, I've always mirrored drives for backup- is there any Mac option, or is it just external backing up?

If you've got the drives then NAS devices are pretty darn cheap. I also think it's not bad to have them separate from the computer in question. Also if you like to get your geek on (and you did build your own PC  ) then there are lots of useful* things you can do.

This gives you a little more defense against viruses (although Crypto could detect network shares), and theft (if you put it somewhere less obvious. Mine sits on a bookshelf, fairly obsucred by guidebooks, the 7+8 guides are almost the perfect size).

Although I think I'd still weigh up online backup options in the future (my most important stuff resides in various Gdrives, Dropbox accounts etc before anyone points out the failings of my system) .

I actually ran out of space on my NAS and at the time I wasn't prepared to fork out for 2 x 2Tb drives. Instead I bought a couple of cheap caddys (<2FAs ea.) and set up a software RAID using Syncback. It works a treat, but it is slow.

*useful is a term used loosely (as you might tell from the Slack--bot type blurb above

[a dense loner]

Office is about £120, at £14 each for the apple versions you'll spend £42 and then buy office anyway

[GCW]

I've already got Office   

[Bazza]

Recently bought a macbook pro, switched from windows.  Mac Office is full of bugs, beware before you buy... Also, a lot of programmes are not compatible with retina screens so if for example you got an older version of final cut, you'll likely have issues.

[Jaspersharpe]

I'm genuinely amazed about some of the things people pay money for. Ok, not everyone understands software but paying for hardware made by Apple and then paying for their software?

Or paying a third party for software that Apple allows you to use on the device you paid them for when if you weren't using an Apple device the software would be free?

Anyone with an iPhone got Swype yet? It's only about five years old. Wanna buy a charger? I've got ten that work on every phone apart from yours. Amazing.

Backup wise it's much more sensible to use a cloud based system rather than relying on your own hardware. Also means you can access everything anywhere which is useful.

It's not even funny because it's so fucking stupid.

[a dense loner]

I resisted apple products for years. They're brilliant

[slackline]

 

[tomtom]

To a large extent you get what you pay for in Laptop hardware...

The macbook pro retina (for example) rocks in at about a G, but has a retina display (which is now setting the trend for most other high end laptops), fairly large SSD, decent Haswell CPU's and (generally) very good hardware that lasts a long time and works well.. If you want a similar spec Windows machine it'll set you back a similar amount.

I love the hardware - but need to use Windows for most of my work - so have never seen the point of putting windows on it etc...

Otherwise - what Dense said...

[GCW]

I was talking more about the desktop, tomtom, but the same applies.
Jasper, I know what you're saying but I work hard and I quite like nice looking things that function well  It's not like I'll upgrade over the next 5 years.
The discount seems to knock about £250 off anyway.

[tomtom]

I was talking more about the desktop, tomtom, but the same applies.
Jasper, I know what you're saying but I work hard and I quite like nice looking things that function well  It's not like I'll upgrade over the next 5 years.
The discount seems to knock about £250 off anyway.

Ah - OK. Keep an eye out on some of the iMacs - (the ones with all the shizzle in the screen) as they had a rep of running hot and burning out some components (HDD's notably)... I think it was restricted to a few models - but worth a forum check before purchase etc....

[GCW]

Cheers, I'll check it out.

[slackline]

I really don't care if people want to splash cash on Apple products...if they can afford to, but the "cult" that surrounds it means you have people like the woman in the video who are in awe of the products with out knowing why they want them, probably can't afford them ("But what if its more than $200?" "Thats ok, I've got a credit card!") and almost certainly don't get any benefit from having them over anything else but end up tied into Apples services on top of that.

One could question whether that is exploitive business practise.

Also people laud Apple for being innovative, they're not, they're no different to any other hardware/software company and have shamelessly ripped off others ideas, sometimes just borrowing, sometimes improving on them, just like every other tech company.  Jobs is on record saying so.  Apple ripped off the Xerox PARC yet when the tables were turned he wasn't so happy, famously saying he'd go "thermonuclear war" against Android.  You can't have your cake and eat it Steve.



You could also make the case that Apple software isn't that great anyway, but that people are used to the crap of older M$-Windows incarnations, which leaves a lot to be desired, so when they go to Apple they think "Oh this is wonderful", but as with the original Macintosh building on Xerox PARC, again OSX is built on BSD....a Unix like operating system  .



I guess more than one button can be confusing at times.