Re: [MLUG] apple?? mac?? Opinions please???

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Thu, 5 Feb 2004, liz wrote:

[snip]

> Last night I'm cruising ebay and bought a thinkpad for another
> kid.  I saw a snow white apple imac and fell in love.  I looked @
> the processors etc and said hey this is goooooooooooood.  I didn't
> get the imac but wondered if you all had had experience with the
> mac os and apples.  I don't play intensive games but I want things
> to WORK.  I don't like freezes or slowdowns or having to reboot or
> spending all day trying to figure out why printer won't install.  
> (needed to reset printer bios settings, duh)  I want to surf and
> send email with the best of em basically and run an accounting
> program and a couple graphics programs if I ever get the time.  
> If things don't work I tend to get obsessive about them, I think I
> spent 2 months trying to get windows xp home and knoppix which was
> really unstable debian to network happily.  I finally did a vpn
> and said enough.
> 
> So is the mac os really more stable than windoze???  I'm not
> giving up on linux but those imacs are pretty and someone said you
> could install linux on them too???  And they are actually fairly
> cheap.  Opinions????  Pleeze?? Thanks, Teresa

Mac OS X is certainly more stable than Windows 98, NT or 2K (in my
experience).  Win XP is the best of the Windows lot so far, and I
think it can be made to be pretty stable.  But out of the box, I'd
say that Mac OS is about the easiest and most stable thing you're
likely to see.  In the last five years, I think I can still count
the number of honest-to-God, have-to-restart crashes on two hands,
and at least 3 of those were due to a bug in Keynote that has since
been fixed.  For web-browsing, Safari is very nice, as is your
favorite flavor of Mozilla.  Mail is a decent email client (although
I still use pine).  The pervasive use of PDF is incredibly handy
also.  Also, iPhoto, iMovie, and iTunes are basically the best
programs I've seen in those niches. Plus, OS X can be as unixy as
you like.  You can also install linux on a Mac, and that's probably
a pretty good idea for some of the older hardware (especially
hardware that isn't supported by OS X).

If you do buy a more recent Mac (post-2000 or so), there have been
many improvements in the OS over the last two versions (Jaguar and
Panther) and I wouldn't recommend using anything older than 10.2.
Ebay probably has a decent selection of used Macs, and there are
also refurbs available (with warranty) directly from Apple.  The
best deals in the new Mac line-up these days are the eMac (you can
actually get a new one for about $500 if you're an MU student) and
the 12-inch G4 iBook.  The LCD iMac is very nice, but I can't say
it's cheap.

Hope this helps.

jking


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