Which Apple computer should i buy?

After I get my taxes back, I am thinking about buying a Mac Mini. However, I've heard for video editing and dvd authoring it can be kind of doggy. However, I have seen some refurbished G5s on ebay that are not much more than the mac mini. Would a refurb be a pretty safe bet?

I'd strongly recommend taking a look at Apple's refurbished gear. My last 7 or 8 Macs have been refurbs, and I only had one minor problem with one of them, which was fixed and returned inside of three days. For video editing, I'd lean towards a 20" iMac, which can be had for $999 at the moment. The MacMini could work for editing I guess, but I'd strongly suggest running an external FireWire drive, possibly even RAID, for your media. Also, dropping a 2GB stick of RAM in it wouldn't be a bad idea.

I have a MacMini hooked up to my home theatre projector, which does a great job as a HTPC, serving up iTunes to everyone in the house, serving TV/Movies to an Apple TV and my roommates PC's, and running bit torrent. It never hiccups, but the internal drive is on the slow side. I keep all my media files on an external FW drive.

I'd stay away from the G5's, just because they're several generations old now. I have a CoreDuo iMac 20" that's just 2 years old now that I use as my primary machine, for GuitarRig, and have even used it for Final Cut Pro. For the first time ever I haven't been able to come up with any good reasons why I would like to upgrade to a newer machine now that I've hit the two year mark.

Cheers

The Intel processors are way faster than the PowerPC processors. (Unfortunately; I really like(d) the PowerPC architecture.)

I would venture that any Intel-based Mac is going to be faster than any PowerPC-based Mac for most things. Given that the cheap G5s you're looking at are likely to be single-CPU and the new Mini has a Core Duo (effectively two CPUs), I can't imagine that the raw processing power would be more with the G5.

That said, the video processing on the G5 is likely to be a little better. But you're not exactly running Quake doing video editing, so I'm not sure how relevant that is.

I'd still probably choose the Mini, unless the G5 is multi-CPU and has significantly more memory.

I've got a Core Duo Mac Mini at home and a Core 2 Duo Mac Mini at work. They're really excellent machines. The home machine spends a lot of its time running Adobe Lightroom, which is fairly IO and CPU intensive, and performance is quite acceptable. (There are moments when the disks get quiet and nothing is happening on the screen, despite the incomplete task at hand. I blame these on bad software engineering rather than on insufficient hardware performance.)

My home Mac Mini replaced a dual G4 tower. It's cheaper, quieter, faster, and smaller.

For disks, I thought about going the NAS route, but decided to do Firewire instead. I bought two LaCie 1.5TB drives (each has 2x750GB striped), with one as my main media drive and the other as a Time Machine backup. It's not as efficient as a ZFS filesystem with snapshots, but it was painless to set up and performance is excellent.

If (and only if) you also need a new monitor, then I'd consider an iMac. For around the same cost as a Mac Mini plus a comparable monitor, you get a slightly faster computer with a much faster graphics engine and a bigger disk. Also, if you want dual monitors, you can do that with an iMac, but you're out of luck with a Mac Mini. If you can find the previous generation (white) iMac, I'd take that in preference to the current metal version. You get a significantly better matte screen, versus the current glossy thing.

Avoid the G5s at this point. Even if they are dual processor ones, it's a platform that was end of life nearly 2 years ago now. Even if the machine has Apple Care, it's only going to be under warranty for another year at most, and then it will become very expensive to service if a problem occurs with the mainboard or processors. Also, most used ones would come with an older OS and iLife tools, meaning $129 added cost for Leopard and $79 for iLife 08.

Depending on what programs you want to run for video editing, a Mini might not be the best bet. Tools like Apple's Motion are GPU accelerated, and require a non chipset integrated video solution. Also, the Mini will be limited to one monitor, and you may want two screens worth of work area for editing. An iMac would be a good first step as others have suggested, and it can have a second monitor connected to it. Just be careful when looking at refurb units though, some iMacs also have integrated Intel graphics.

I would worry about the disks going into self-preservation mode because they got too hot. The mini isn't exactly the most well ventilated of computers.

This is my external disk going quiet. I'm storing all my photos on the big Firewire drive and I reserve the internal drive for applications and such.

The number one reason not to get a PowerPC-based machine right now is that the architecture has been a second class citizen at Apple since the Intel processors were released. There are more bugs in Leopard for the PPC machines for instance. Optimizing is probably no longer being done the same way it is for the Intel architecture either. When you see people reporting about speed increases in the 10.5 Leopard OS versus 10.4 Tiger, they're talking about Intel machines. On a PPC it's either the same or slower.

10.5 Leopard is also likely the last OS we will ever see for the PPC machines. Apple hasn't officially announced this, but I have it on good authority this is the end of the line. 10.6 was designated Intel-only and that isn't likely to change (could happen but I won't bet on it).

We run Final Cut Pro on Core Duo (not Core 2) Mini's just fine. Even though it's officially not supported due to the Intel graphics chip.

In my opinion, if you want something cheap buy a mini, if you want something unobtrusive buy an iMac. If you're doing a lot, and I mean a lot, of video/picture editing and want some kind of upgrade path, buy a Mac Pro.

For the Mac Mini, is there any way to have a faster hard drive?

You can open it and replace it if you want. Otherwise you're stuck with whatever Apple give you. I can't remember if the larger HD you can specify is actually any faster.

Firewire hard drives can be pretty fast.

Does iChat work well with the Mac Mini since it wouldn't be using the integrated iSight camera? also, since i am thinking about the possibility of buying a Macbook instead of the Mac Mini, are those better for video editing and dvd authoring than the mac mini?

iChat will work with any Firewire camera, or any USB video device class webcam. Keep in mind the USB one is a recent standard, and many older webcams do not support it, instead relying on proprietary drivers that rarely are coded to work on OS X. The XBox 360 camera works with iChat, though you will also need a microphone too. No Mac comes with a mic input onboard, only a line level input.

A MacBook (non pro) is going to be about the same as the Mini. They do offer slightly faster processors, and a slightly faster integrated graphics solution, but the difference will be minimal. The Mac Minis are long overdue now for an update, while the MacBooks were recently upgraded (see the buyers guide here.)

has anyone seen a dock that would enable me to just drop the macbook on it (holding it vertically and out of the way) and thus automatically hooking the monitor and other perhipherals to it? I've seen one that is kind of likea big brick that goes on the side, but costs way too much money.

Unfortunately, none of the Apple laptops has a docking connector. It's actually remarkable how few laptops have them at all these days. Pretty much only Lenovo, Dell, and HP.

You probably found this. Thats the only company I know of that makes full port replicating docks for the Mac laptops.

Beyond that, you can look for "universal" docks to just set the laptop out of the way. What the universal ones tend to do is have a USB cable that plugs into the laptop, then the dock has an internal USB hub with a USB sound device, sometimes USB ethernet and such that your system will see as separate devices.

Random factoid: earlier in this thread, I said that the Mac mini was sufficient for Adobe Lightroom duties. That's true, so long as your raw photos are coming from a 6 megapixel Nikon D70 (typical file size is 5MB). For the weekend, I've borrowed a friend's D3. Raw files are maybe 15MB and it's a 12 megapixel camera. These significantly slow Lightroom down, to the point where usability is suffering.

Conclusion? If I were to buy one of these cameras, I'd need to upgrade the mini to something more powerful. What I'd really like to know is exactly how much more powerful. Do I just need more RAM? Faster CPU? Faster disk? All of the above?

Not that it really helps with your question (just buy a Mac Pro, they're lovely ), but how come twice the pixels makes for three times the file-size? Is it just more noise on the fewer-photons-per-pixel sensor? Or perhaps the D3 has a greater bit-depth, forcing Lightroom to use different, slower algorithms?

Peter

I'd say more RAM.

Is it one of the older non-intel Mini's?

D3 RAWs are 14 bit, D70 is 12 bit.

Also, if the D3 was set with 14 bit RAW + JPEG then it will include a ~4MB jpeg, whereas the D70's normal jpegs with raws are only about 1.5MB.

And the final point that makes the difference is that the D70 NEF RAW files are lossy, which saves about 20-40% of size on the RAW sensor data. The D3's NEFs are by default lossless.

http://terrychay.com/blog/article/lossy-raw-compression.shtml

This is a Core Duo (not Core 2 Duo) mini, with an otherwise maximum configuration. When chunking through D70 raw images, there's a noticeable delay when you zoom in beyond its cached preview image, and the initial image import is chunky but tolerable. With the D3 raw files, the delays are well past tolerable, getting onto annoying.

As to file sizes, the D3 offers several choices in raw files. You can get "compressed/uncompressed" and "lossy/not lossy". And the raw sensor is 14 bits per pixel. (I'm using the "compressed/not lossy" setting.) The D70 only gives you one choice, "compressed/lossy" and it's (ostensibly) 12 bits per pixel.

2GB ram is the max for the Core (non 2) line of Macs due to the chipset used. You can have 2x1gb sticks, or 1x2gb, but go above 2gb in some way and the machine will refuse to boot. I tried it on both a Core Mini, and Core MacBook Pro.

As for what is causing your slowdown issues in Lightroom, run Activity Monitor and check the System Memory, Disk Activity, and watch CPU usage of the process. That should help point out RAM, CPU or disk speed issues. If CPU usage never goes above 100%, Lightroom is not going beyond one core of CPU usage. For OS X, CPU time max is 100xNumber of CPUs. So 800% is a 8 way Mac Pro running all 8 cores at max.

Okay, according to Activity Monitor, when I'm slamming it, Lightroom is using 600-700MB of real memory and up to 1.7GB of virtual memory. Watching a rendering task run, I got to watch my free memory quickly dive to zero, then back up again, and dive again. Looks like Lightroom was pushing other apps out of real memory. Both cores were slammed at 100% the whole time.

If I'm reading the tea leaves correctly, Lightroom would definitely be happier with more memory, but it's got enough going on to take advantage of more CPU power if I had it. Part of the issue seems to be slow memory leaks, since it runs much better when you've freshly started.

OAlthough I don't have a Mac yet, but was wondering if anyone knows if they ever came out with a widescreen version of the themes that were first included with iDVD? Specifically, I was looking for a widescreen version of the 'red curtain' theme and the 'drive in' theme.....I assumed not, but was just wondering.....

All themes with iDVD 06 and above are widescreen, but none of the older ones were converted over. Choosing an older one will warn you that it will be switching to 4:3 for it.

is it just me or does the LCD look waaaay better on the Macbook air than it does on the regular MacBooks? I know it is probably because of the LED backlight in the air, but still it looks much better. The MacBook looks very washed out...

It would make sense that the LCD technology improves in the newest models. LCD screens have been getting better and brighter and clearer and more contrasty with each successive generation.

I don't have another MacBook to compare to, but I gotta say that the MBA lcd is really great. The other thing that concerned me about the screen, being glossy, hasn't been an issue either. While it is somewhat glossy, it seems significantly less glossy than other notebooks, but still has rich, vibrant color. Not sure how they did that, but I like it!

The MBA monitor is an amazing thing. I've got it side-by-side with my 23" Cinema HD display, and the MBA monitor is brighter and whiter (which is to say, traditional LCD monitors have something of a yellow cast to them that's completely fixed by the LED backlight). It's staggeringly pretty.

Meanwhile, in non-related news, remember the problems I was having with my MBA battery drain? When Apple replaced the battery, it didn't solve the problem at all. Now, Apple has now sent me a replacement machine. After much agony, I got everything migrated over, and I'll be shipping back the original.

Agony? I just wish Apple still had Firewire on the MBA. Restoring from a Time Machine share, over a network, seems to simply not work. The relevant button in the UI is greyed out and there's nothing you can do about (despite a thread that holds out false hope). The only working solution was to have the Time Machine USB hard drive and a USB optical drive hooked up at the same time via a USB hub.

Also, strangely, despite restoring the backup "correctly", a number of things weren't restored properly. The screen gamma was set to the default (1.8) rather than where I want it (2.2 -- the PC standard). Likewise, Time Machine is now backing up to a different file on my network server rather than the original file. I suppose I'll delete the old one once I'm confident the new one is stable. I'm still discovering bits and pieces that aren't quite right, but overall the migration wasn't as painful as, say, moving from one Windows box to another. That's pure hell.

It appears my MBP is leaking electricity too. I can charge it up to 100% then disconnect it and leave it sleeping overnight and when I come back to it, it's lost 1/4 of its charge. I'm wondering wether it's not actually going to sleep, it keeps getting woken up. The only way to tell what it's doing would be to open the lid, which wakes it up anyway.

It's getting on for 2 years old, so I'm probably not going to bother apple over it.

You might try installing Deepsleep. This lets you put your machine directly into hibernation mode. If your computer is still leaking battery, then something is definitely wrong (as it was for my MBA).

My powerbook G4 (still my main computer at home!) battery was one of the ones which got replaced due to the fire risk, I however never bothered to send the other battery back to apple. Infact I never actually unpacked the battery, it sat in the box from apple for about a year!

I then had to take a trip to Australia and QF specifically stated that dell or apple computers with affected batteries could not be operated inflight, so I figured now was the time to dig out the new battery.

I was amazed at the leap in battery life when I switched over to it! I think because the battery life had diminished slowly over a long period that I never noticed it.

However, it keeps plodding along and the powerbook still does everything I need it to do. I suspect I won't need to update until the PPC of obsoleted by the version of OS X that no longer supports that architecture.

Adrian

Sorry to derail the thread at all, but I wanted to add that I'm also considering taking the plunge and going Mac. It won't be a complete shift, because I'll certainly be running Boot Camp at the very least, probably Fusion or Parallels. I just had a few questions because at the moment, the number one obstacle is cost. I've concluded that I'm going to have to get nothing less than a baseline Mac Pro (I already have a cheap laptop that wouldn't scare me if dropped, and an iMac would make my 30" monitor kind of unnecessary).

Now, if we compare the same computer selling on Amazon and Apple's stores, I can get in on Amazon for about $250 less (I didn't think you could get anything Apple sold for less anywhere). Is that the best I can do? I'm certainly never going to let Apple add RAM to a machine (at what looks like a 500% markup), but is there anywhere else I can shave off the price? I've looked at the refurbs, and it looks like I can either get last year's model, or spend $4100. That's not going to happen.

I have two questions as far as longevity of my purchase (since I've never spent this much on a computer): 1) does anyone see any major advancements coming in say the next 6 months that would suggest holding off for something better or a price drop? 2) How easy is it to overclock the dual 2.8GHz quad-core Mac Pro?

Then I have one more question relating to computer use: when it comes to computers, I am a man who lives and dies by his folder structures. That's simply how I have to organize myself. Given that I have almost next to no experience with the Mac OS, do you think it will still be conducive to my computing habits? Here's a good example: will iTunes allow me to organize my files on the Mac just as it does on the PC?

Thanks for the help, and sorry for derailing this thread

The only significant discounts you can get on Apple hardware are student discounts. If you have a friend or family still in school (or a teacher), it might be worth it to look.

The iMac can take an external monitor, FWIW. Up to 1920x1200 for external digital monitors. I don't know what resolution your 30"er is, but probably more than that.

MacOS has hierarchical folders just like Windows does. It just doesn't have the "drive letter" concept. I can't tell you for sure about iTunes (I don't use it on either platform) but I'd be amazed if the Windows version had a capability that the MacOS version didn't. (I did use iTunes on a Mac for a while ages ago, and you could definitely keep your mp3s in their original location and not have to put them all inside iTunes' datastore.)

Why not consider the Mac Mini? It's not as fast, but it's certainly fast enough, and it's far cheaper. Oh, it only supports 1920x1200, too.

The key thing to do is to make sure you try to do whatever tasks on OS X first, otherwise you are going to just run Windows on the machine and not bother migrating. If gaming is a concern, use Boot Camp to install Windows, then Fusion or Parallels can just boot the Boot Camp partition. No need for dual installs, and no need to have apps installed twice. I reboot to play games, and do everything else Windows specific in Fusion.

Based on your likely choice of a Mac Pro, I'd recommend Fusion. It offers 2 processor SMP to the guest OS.



Refurbs change daily, so check often. They are a good value, but you have to wait for what config you want, and it may not be exact. As for ways to get a discount, check to see if your company gets one. Beyond that, if you are a student somewhere, you can check what your school discount is, or go a step farther and pay $99 to become an Apple student developer. Student developers get a one time discount on hardware, and it will be more then enough to make up for the $99 paid. Developer pricing can be seen here.

I bought RAM for mine from OWC. RAM for a Mac Pro is going to be pricy compared to others, since it is server/workstation class RAM with error checking and correction. Also, the Mac Pro is very fussy about RAM heatsinks. Going with something not specifically designed for the Mac Pro can cause it to rev up the fans to an annoying level in an attempt to keep the memory cool. The machine is near silent in most situations, so adding non standard ram will be noticeable.



Apple doesn't price drop equipment over time, it simply discontinues it, throws the leftovers on the refurb store, and starts selling the new configs. Looking 6 months ahead puts things right on the edge for Intel's next architecture change, where the memory controller will be moved onto the CPU similar to what AMD did a while back. Odds are this will be more then 6 months out for availability, and Apple would probably push new Mac Pros out with the chips next January.

As for overclocking, I haven't looked deeply, but really have to question why. Doing so will void the warranty, and to me the warranty is a big reason for buying a complete desktop from a vendor like Apple over building it yourself.



iTunes for OS X is feature for feature identical to the Windows version. Defaults are a little different, but iTunes can be set to not organize your music. As can iPhoto for photos and such. However, I'd question your methods on OS X. The point of manual organization is to make finding information easier for the person who organized it, and to work around limitations of the system. OS X has Spotlight, and it works very well. I haven't bothered keeping my documents folder clean on OS X since Spotlight finds what I want nearly instantly. Same for my mail. It mostly all stays in the inbox, but a series of smart folders makes it easy for me to group messages, and Spotlight works well to find one particular message quickly. As for photos, iPhoto holds them all, and since I can find the events or keywords I want quickly, I could care less how the underlying folder structure is laid out.

Quite possibly impossible. These things have the 5000X workstation/server chipset in, not the 965 or other desktop chipsets. Intel's workstation chipsets aren't designed to make overclocking easy, because (with the questionable exception of the Mac Pro) the machines they go in are rarely bought by people interested in overclocking. You're best off just buying one that already goes as fast as you need. (Which might not be hard. Even my previous-generation Mac Pro, 1333FSB, 2x2-core, is hooning fast.)


Which, depending on why you're making the switch in the first place, wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing: you'd still be using one of the best-engineered Windows workstations there is. I can't remember when I last booted mine into OS X (from Linux), but it could easily be a year ago.

Peter

Thanks for the responses, guys.

Believe me, I'm going to try my best to use the Mac OS as much as possible. There's simply some Windows programs that I've used day in and day out for years now that I can't/don't want to give up. I'm sure there are Mac alternatives to some of them, but many of them have Windows alternatives that haven't swayed me. Still, my plan was exactly as you described, Tom. I'd use Parallels or Fusion to boot the Boot Camp installation, and just boot into Windows for gaming (I don't game much now but I might if I had a beast of a machine like this one).

One of the biggest reasons I want to switch is to get into an environment that's actually friendly for video editing. I'm so sick of playing the codec game in Windows, and the software that's available has never impressed me. I hate Adobe's UI on all their programs, except for Audition (but they didn't make that - I loved Cool Edit Pro). I've been looking at Final Cut and even iMovie and they both look like better alternatives. Hell, even when it comes to basic video conversion, it looks like Visualhub beats the pants off any Windows app out there.

Bitt - yeah, I ruled out the Mac Mini a long while ago because of the resolution limitation. My 30" is native at 2560x1600, and the Mac Mini, iMac, and MacBook cannot do that. Only the MacBook Pro and Mac Pro can. Plus, I need some decent processing power for video stuff.

Thanks for the student discount links. My brother in law is in college right now, so maybe I'll work something out with him. It certainly looks like the big savings come when you start adding a lot of stuff, so I'll figure out if it's worth the hassle (at the base it's $200 cheaper, so that's pretty good because I can't customize the Amazon box).

Thanks again for the info, folks. I think I'd be happy with the longevity of the purchase for sure. I really don't care about overclocking but I thought I'd ask to be thorough. Thanks for all the help, and now I have to find the cash to drop on this bad boy.

Your marks.tar.gz file is corrupted. It's got a bunch of NULs at the beginning and end, and doesn't seem to have all its data there once they are removed.

Out of curiosity, what are they? I had a few apps I though were like that, till OS X versions grew on me.



If gaming is going to be something you do on the box, make sure to upgrade to the 8800 GT option ($150 more on the normal pricing). It's a noticeable step up from the default ATI 2600 card, and will help to keep the machine a viable gaming machine for how long it will also likely be a viable video editing box.



I'm curious to see how long I stretch out the use of mine. I went with the 8 core config at 2.8, and threw in 4 more gigs of RAM on top of the 2 that it came with. I still have 4 RAM slots open, so thats not going to be a limit anytime soon. Down the road, I'm betting the video card will be bumped once at least, but that should be easy enough as the Mac Pro has the just recently released PCIe 2.0 slots in it. Processor wise, my hope is that apps continue to become more and more multicore optimized, so that they can just grow into the 8 procs I have rather then needing a faster one. This is the first true desktop I have had since the Pentium III days, so that alone is taking some time to get used to.

Already the jump above my MacBook Pro is noticeable. Handbrake DVD encodes ran at about 20-25 FPS on it with the machine maxed out. The Pro is running them at 130-140 FPS with the same settings, and has enough processor power left over to allow World of Warcraft to still run full speed.

I know the question wasn't addressed to me, but I'll throw one out there.

I use iTunes to organize all of my music (and buy much of it). After purchasing in iTunes, I strip off the DRM and convert to mp3 so I can use my music on all my devices.

Then, I tag them with a program called MediaMonkey. The reason I use MediaMonkey is that it can automatically grab the album art from Amazon and embed it in the id3 tag. iTunes doesn't embed the art in the tag, so when you copy some files to another computer or device, you have to re-download all of the art. Dumb.

Once I've tagged my files with the art, iTunes will happily read the artwork from the id3 tag (although it won't write it to the tag.)

Are there any suggestions for native Mac tagging utilities that will pull album art automatically and embed it in the id3 tag? If not, I'll just run MediaMonkey with Parallels.

Again, I don't use iTunes, but there are a variety of utilities that will do that:

http://www.widget-foundry.com/widgets/amazonart.htm
http://www.aric.org/fetchart/index.html
http://kleinware.net/software

are the first ones I ran across.

BTW, VersionTracker is a fairly complete index for Mac software.

Lets see...I'm looking through my overstuffed program files list...

PSP 5.1 - For some reason, I simply love version 5.1 of Paint Shop Pro. It's ancient at this point, but I'm just so used to all the keyboard shortcuts and the layout that I use it all the time. I even have PSP 7 installed on my computer, but I rarely use it. I also love that somehow, my version of 5.1 is portable.

DVD-lab Pro - I've preached about this program before, and I'll do it again. I haven't met a DVD creation program I've liked more. And believe me, I've tried about a dozen of them. Naturally, I haven't tried any Mac software yet. The thing I love about DVD-lab, though is the philosophy. It's an incredibly advanced program with a lot of pro-level options, but it's simple and straightforward to use without becoming dependant on wizards and crap that bogs down stuff like Pinnacle's software.

THE Rename - A batch file naming utility. I'm sure there are ones available for the Mac OS, but I've been using this one for years (at least four, I think), and I just love it.

VideoReDo Plus, Tivo Desktop Plus, and pyTivo - The first two are my only two essential applications that I paid for (I mostly use free software), and the only two that frankly cannot be replaced by the Mac. Tivo Desktop is on the Mac, but I don't believe the Plus (paid upgrade) version is. And VideoReDo is fantastic for removing commercials from Tivo recordings, mostly because it can re-save into the Tivo format, retaining all the metadata. So at the moment, I have every episode of Lost from this season on my Tivo without commercials, so it takes up about 3/5 of the space. It's great if you need to go back and see something from a previous episode (which we've done many times). I don't know if pyTivo will work on the Mac or if there's an alternative to it, but it's the primary way I get stuff onto my home theater. However, I'm hoping to get an Apple TV, and having a Mac would make it easier to convert video for it.

MP3-Tag Studio 3 - My favorite tagging software. I've tried others and just don't like them. Granted, I haven't tried any for the Mac...

uTorrent - Strictly for Linux ISOs and game patches I really like the slickness of this app, but I used Azureus before this one which was fine, and that works on Mac. Oh yeah, and Revision3 has bittorrent downloads...

Picasa - What can I say? My life is in Google's hands. It's a dangerous dependancy that may bite me one day

Openoffice.org - I believe they're working on a Mac version, though.

GMail Notifier - Essentially I use this every minute of every day. Is there an alternative on the Mac?

Applications for USB peripherals - Just did a quick check. Supported: Logitech MX-1000 mouse, Griffin Powermate, Canon photo printer, and naturally my various external drives (which I'll slowly start to format for the Mac file system of just make FAT32). Unsupported: Sony Ericsson phone suite (no big deal, I'll be moving to a smartphone soon anyway), Casio Disc Title Printers (this is a big one - I use these all the time).

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So, that's my list. I suppose that some of these programs have Mac alternatives, but I just don't think I can give some of them up, and in the case of the Tivo and some of my USB devices, I don't have much of a choice.

I'm also missing a bunch of portable apps that I use all the time like Scanner. Most of them are utility programs, though, that have clear Mac alternatives.

I'll address your full list later when I have more time, but some quick ones I can address with little research:

THE Rename - A batch file naming utility.
OS X equivalent: Terminal and the many unix commands to do this. Learning how is a great way to get used to Unix commands in general, and the knowledge is highly portable. With Cygwin on Windows, such info is even usable there. I haven't used a GUI app to mass rename files for a long time.

Sony Ericsson phone suite
OS X equivalent: iSync/Address Book/iCal. Built in, and iSync has always supported SE phones very well. The old T68i was also the phone Apple used to always demo iSync way back when.

Openoffice.org - as you already noted, has an OS X version. Give the trial of iWork a shot though, it's really nice in a lot of ways, and is also compatible with all the MS formats along with spitting out PDF and such.

Picasa - Exists for OS X now, so transitioning should be easy. Give iPhoto a shot, but it all really depends on what you need out of a photo app. iPhoto can upload to various services with plugins if thats your big tie to Picasa. Really the only big benefit I can see in migrating beyond the native OS X app feel is the iLife integration. Photos in iPhoto show up in iWork for quick addition, in iMovie and iDVD for slideshows, and so on.
*edit* Looks like Picasa for OS X is not out yet, but news from Macworld in January did say it is coming. Google provides the Picasa web album uploader for iPhoto now.

uTorrent - OS X version I believe, but look into Transmission.

GMail Notifier - I've seen some. Look for one with Growl support for an array of notification options. GMail over IMAP to Mail is always a possibility too.
*edit* Google has their own too. http://www.google.com/mac/

PSP: Yeah, I haven't found a good cheap image editor for MacOS. Personally, I really liked Paint.NET for Windows, but I think your best option under MacOS is The Gimp, which ... well ... yeah.

pyTivo: Yeah. It'll work under MacOS. Better than under Windows. MacOS comes with the Python interpreter.

uTorrent: Yeah, uTorrent really is the best torrent client available. Transmission is a pretty good torrent client. As long as you want to download all the files in the torrent. If you don't, it'll waste hard drive space when it writes three bytes to files you don't want and allocate all the rest of the space for that file. You can use Azureus, too. It's still a good client. As long as you don't mind your computer running at the speed of a TI 99/4A.

Openoffice.org: NeoOffice. You can also run the X-Windows version of OO.o, but I don't see any reason you'd want to do that.

GMail Notifier: Google Notifier

I don't believe that either uTorrent or Picasa is available for Mac. If you know otherwise, I'd be interested.

It does sound like a great way to learn, but I don't think I'd use it in practice. With THE Rename, it takes me about 10 seconds to set up a process that will look at a directory and batch rename after doing a find and replace on each file, both with extremely specific instructions (example rename: only find and replace a string 2 times and start from the left while matching case, then add a three digit counter to the end of the name starting at 101 with a step of three, then add specific text to the beginning of the filename based on the folder the file is in). I like the GUI interface for this kind of stuff

Cool! I wasn't aware that they had finished the Mac version of OpenOffice.

I may try iPhoto, but I use Picasa for pretty much the reasons you gave for iPhoto. I use Google for everything, included online photo sharing.

Thanks for letting me know about the SE support. That sounds great. Much better than Windows.

Despite lots of messing about I never could get iPhoto to import more than a third of my 30GB+ of photos before it fell over. Picasa on the other hand has no problems with that amount of data.

But that was a couple of years ago, maybe iPhoto has got better at handling large datasets now.

Speaking of Macs and Google integration (thread-hijack mode on):

Apple just came out with the OS X 10.5.3 updater. I installed it. Allegedly, one of the new features is the ability to sync Google contacts with Apple's address book. My address book, however, doesn't have the option in the preferences. Any ideas why?

EDIT: The Google support is only enabled if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch. Grumble.

Looks like I'm just remembering an old beta post about uTorrent from here:
http://www.tuaw.com/2007/06/27/utorrent-for-mac/
A quick check didn't find any public beta out still. Transmissions has been fine for me though on OS X, though my torrent activity is pretty light.

As for picasa, I updated my post shortly after submitting that it is coming sometime this year. The iPhoto uploader has been out for a while at google.com/mac .

I was a big Picasa fan, and not having it on the Mac is a definite bummer. The rumormill says Google is porting Picasa to the Mac, so hopefully we'll have it soon. Meanwhile, I ponied up for Adobe Lightroom, which is overkill for most things, although it is pretty powerful. It's unfortunately nowhere near as fast as Picasa.

Check this out.

Read the comments in that thread. It's not all quite there. Yet.

I actually really like Transmission, except for that one (IMO) major problem.

To be clear, here is the issue, spelled out:

If you have a Torrent that contains multiple files, you can tell it to only download a particular subset of them. Chances are, however, that a torrent block at the beginning and one at the end of the file you're interested in cross over into the previous and next files, respectively.

The correct thing to do here, IMO, is to either store that extraneous data in a cache somewhere or just throw it away (which means that you would no longer be able to provide those blocks to other peers).

What Transmission does, though, is write it to the deselected files anyway. First off, that's just irritating. I don't want partially-written files lying around my filesystem pretending to be valid.

But, more importantly, the MacOS filesystem, HFS+ will allocate space for a file up to the last byte written, even if there is no data written prior to it. So if the file in the torrent before the one you're interested in is 500MB, even if Transmission only writes a few kilobytes at the end of the file, all 500MB get used up.

Even better, once you go and delete those files out from underneath Transmission (and it's not exactly trivial to find those partial files), it notices that those blocks you partially deleted are now corrupt, so it downloads them again.

I've submitted bug reports to them about this, but they seem mostly uninterested in resolving the problem.

I think most Torrent clients will do that. Hopefully they'd do it as a sparse file but they'll create a file even if you don't want anything inside it.

uTorrent doesn't do that. Azureus doesn't do that. Not sure about others.

HFS+ doesn't have sparse files. Period. And since MacOS is one of the major focuses for Transmission, you'd think that would be an issue to them.

You can use iTunes. I'm starting a new thread about iTunes just to keep the info easy to find and try to avoid cluttering this thread up more...

http://empegbbs.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=310760#Post310760

Pixelmator - there are a few other compositing/retouching applications available that also get high marks. Seems like all of the good ones came out in the last 6 months.



With most new Macs you're going to get iDVD, so give that a shot. Up from there you have Apple's DVD Studio Pro as well.



The terminal is great, but not for infrequent batch renaming use. Too cumbersome generally speaking. Try Name Mangler - I just got this one last week and it has promise. There are a few others people swear by though.



In Windows my favs were a combination of Dr.Tag and Tag&Rename. A lot of people swear by Mp3Tag (not Tag Studio) and I found it does quite a bit, but the interface is shite and the program is buggy. On the Mac I use iTunes exclusively, along with some AppleScripts. This can easily handle all the standard tags supported by iTunes. See my other thread and I can post up the names of every script in my collection as well as my workflows for different situations. If I had a choice I'd rather use a really great stand-alone program for most tagging, but iTunes has been getting the job done.



I feel Torrents suck in general. There are a few programs for Mac OS with all that nice Mac OS glitz, but the whole decentralized Torrent concept is the pits as far as I'm concerned and I generally won't touch a torrent for any reason. A number of providers also packet shape the hell out of torrent traffic. Anyway, there are a few programs you can try out as mentioned by others. Bitrocket is another.



Skip iPhoto and test run Aperture and Lightroom. iPhoto is really lackluster in every possible sense and is next to useless for even a moderately sized collection of photos in my opinion (it gets really slow and its management abilities are quite week). Aperture will run fine on the machine you're looking at. My biggest reason for choosing LightRoom was its far simpler, yet far superior DAM (superior to Aperture, not as robust as iMatch for Windows).



I just use the real MS Office. NeoOffice performed terribly the last times I tried it. However, as Tom mentions, you might be able to get by with the Apple products here, depending on your requirements.



You will want to NOT install any Logitech Mouse or Keyboard software for the Mac. Not ever. They have never released anything that is not truly horrible in functionality and performance. Do get SteerMouse instead for all your mouse button mapping and tweaks. Much better in my experience than USB Overdrive and some other alternatives.



I keep all my externals formatted to HFS+, even those I use mostly with Windows. That's because the slowdown I get from using a third-party driver to access them in Windows isn't as significant as the slow access to FAT volumes in Mac OS.



You might have to move to new hardware if this is a function you will eventually really want to use from the Mac side.

Thanks for the advice, Bruno. Especially on the Logitech software. Button mapping is the only reason I have it installed on my computer, because IMO their software sucks in Windows too, but I can't live without the double-click button I have mapped (I also have one for Ctrl+Tab, Ctrl+W, and the Start menu).

I'll probably check out the others you mentioned, although I'm a big fan of free software, so MS Office and Aperture would run me quite a bit, especially after spending at least $2600 on a computer.

And really, "buy new hardware" isn't the best option. There really are no other printers like this, unless you jump from the $120-130 for the Casio to one the $2000+ devices. The only other comparable model I've found is this one, but it looks terrible and appears to barely have Windows support, let alone Mac.

But this is getting nit-picky. If I get this Mac there is no question I'm going to be running Windows on it in some form (sorry, purists ).

I'm in the anti Logitech software boat now too, after seeing their software cause strange issues like breaking Growl. Though I still run it at work, because I haven't found any Mac mouse driver software that supports the MX Revolution scroll wheel yet.

For the photo stuff, I know a lot of people have voiced opinions against iPhoto, but honestly give it a shot. It's going to be on the Mac anyhow, and for me it has never given me problems. I think it all depends on your photo workload. I personally am a point and shoot guy, and I don't take a ton of pictures. My library after 7 years is possibly smaller then what some people take in a few months. I've looked at Aperture at the Apple Store, and just don't see a use for it for everyone. Not knowing your specific photo demands, I'd say iPhoto should do just fine, especially if you are happy with Picasa. That is assuming you aren't bringing over some massive DSLR shot library with hundreds of photos a month over to the Mac.

With the office stuff, the $79 for iWork was worth it to me, but probably the limit of what I would pay for such apps. I have Office 2004 from an old home use license, but I can't ever see paying retail for what Microsoft is asking for 2008. The road to Office 2008 is a really good article series going into each piece of Office 2008 and comparing it to iWork. Probably work a look to see exactly where your needs are, as iWork is still very basic in some areas. For me, iWork fit perfectly with my occasional and personal use of office apps. But if you have a strong need to exchange MS formatted docs with people a lot, it may be worth it to spring for the full Office 2008 suite.

That's just the thing, I don't really want to pay anything for it, given the amount of use I'll get out of it. That's not Apple's fault, but if there's free software out there as an alternative, I'll use it.

I'm going to wait for OpenOffice to release its Mac version. Frankly, I got along fine for a few years without needing an office suite at all (and some of those were during college). I would just use whatever free word processor was popular at the time and call it a day. Lately for the very limited times I still need an office suite, OpenOffice is far more than I need.

*edit*
I was going to mention a third option, which was to find a friend or family member with a student email address, and spend $59 on Office 2007 Ultimate. Unfortunately that offer has ended. Shoot.

Is there a reason you don't just download NeoOffice?

Because I don't have a Mac just yet, and they might have Openoffice by the time I do. I'll give that one a try, though, if it can read files made in Openoffice.

I don't want to make too big a deal out of most of these points, though. The fact is I want a Mac, I'm going to run Windows on it for a few things, and I know that I'm going to love it. The only things in my way now are lack of support for my disc printers (small issue), and money (huge issue)

VMware Fusion seems to have the ability to connect USB printers to the VM. I guess you could do it that way?

Yea, I forgot about that small detail!

NeoOffice is basically OpenOffice. Same thing in essence. I don't know the 'politics' of it but for some reason there is some bickering among the developers that started with the decision for OpenOffice to make a OSX version rather than just let NeoOffice continue to be the sole port of it.

I believe they already have.

Cheers

Well, it requires that you run it under X11. It works, but it's just not very Mac-y. NeoOffice just works better. And yeah, it did used to be a dog, but I've had no problems in recent years.

Pixelmator looks nice, but given that I do about 30 minutes of photo editing work every month, at most, $60 is just too much. I'm not saying it's not worth it; I'm just saying it's not worth it to me.

Others I have run across (but have yet to try) are Acorn, Iris, Pixen, Seashore, Naked Light, Chocoflop.

I've used Seashore, and it's not worth the price ($0). It's like using the GIMP without having any real features.

OK...a former co-worker of mine has a MacBook Pro he is selling. It is 2.2 ghz, 120gb hard drive, 2 gb ram. It is about a year old and in good condition. He wants $1250 for it. Is that a good price?

There are similar machines in past ebay auctions that went for more.

The apple store is down, but you should be able to pick up a refurbished MBP for not much more than that. I've never heard a single complaint about Apple refurbs, and they sell a lot of them.

It's not an inherently bad deal though, the last revision of macbook pros (penryn) were generally considered to perform about the same as the previous revision (santa rosa). Penryn has been around for ~190 days, which is about average. You'd be missing out on a graphics card update, and maybe some battery life.

Complaint time. Out of two MacBook refurbs I know of, both had issues. The one I bought for my wife had to be returned for a replacement keyboard. Apple didn't cover my shipping costs whatsoever even though the machine arrived like that and the problem was phoned into their technical support within 10 minutes of me siging the waybill. The closest service center is a six hour drive from here.

The second one belongs to my sister-in-law and has trouble with the screen. It flashes between bright and dim (ie brightness level when plugged in and brightness level when on battery) at random times. Sometime it will do it for a few seconds, other times it will do it for a few minutes.

She also had a Refurb 2nd gen Nano that would repeatedly lock up.

Rene

"Refurb" used to mean "refurbished", as in polished up and cleaned, consumables replaced, bearings/hinges lubed or replaced, etc..

Now it simply means "used", or "rejected by first owner". Often for a good reason, but sometimes just on a whim.

Cheers

Ok...now i have a dilemma. I was all set to buy a used MacBook pro (2.2ghz 120gb ram 15" screen) from a former co-worker of mine for about $1250 (he bought his in Nov. 2007) before they came out with the new MacBook Pros. Then when they did come out with the new ones, the prices dropped greatly and I told him this and got him to drop it down to $1000. However, now at my work i can order a newer version (has multi-touch 2.4 200gb hard drive - but not the ones that just came out recently - for $1299 (plus tax.) Which do you think I should get? I have the $1000 saved up, but wasn't sure if it was worth it to pay a few hundred bucks for a bigger hard drive. However, it would be a brand new battery on that one.....what would you recommend?

Save up and buy the new one. You'll get a warranty, new battery and bigger HD.

Just to notify folks, it looks like uTorrent is available for Mac now. Great news! This program is just fantastic.

Actually i use utorrent on windows and http://www.transmissionbt.com/ on mac, and i like transmission so much that i would like a version of it for windows.

Picasa for the Mac.

I'll give it a shot when I get back from vacation to see if it has anything to pull me away from iPhoto.

Sweet.

I think the best thing about Picasa for windows is the screen saver. I can add anyone's web albums to it and it will show their photos in the screen saver slide show. I have my friends added to it so I can see all the new photos they add to their web albums. I also really like the picasa web albums. I pretty much just use Picasa to upload stuff and fix red eye.

Been running Picasa/Mac for a while now. It scanned my whole library quickly. I got it to crash by randomly clicking on things while it was importing, but it's been generally quite stable.

It recognized the Picasa.ini files laying around from before I switched to a Mac and did the right thing, although it apparently writes out new metadata as ".picasa.ini" (note the leading period) which means it's slightly annoying to go back and forth from a PC to a Mac using the same filesystem.

About the only annoyance is that it doesn't know exactly what to do with the "Originals" subdirectory made by Picasa/Win to save originals when you make some changes like red-eye reduction. Picasa/Mac just shows you the Originals directory. It doesn't figure out that it shouldn't show that.

Picasa Mac installed a GoogleUpdater service without (apparently) telling me about it.

Bad form, Google.

And when I put iTunes on my PC, it installed an Apple updater service without telling me about it. What's your point?

That's Apple conforming to the status-quo of Windows software installs. Mac software installs aren't supposed to put crap all over your drive and hidden items unless it's Adobe's software.

Seems like iPhoto 09 gives a new reason to try iPhoto again. If they've managed to get rid of everything that sucked about iPhoto previously (essentially everything that was in the whole program) they might have a winner. To be fair, what sucked the most was the management aspects. Which seems to be what Picasa seems to handle better.

I'll be giving it a quick look to see if it adds any benefits for me. I'm already using Lightroom as my primary management app.

One of the many problems with iPhoto is that it doesn't scan folders for new pictures and have it automatically add it to iPhoto. I have been trying to find a plug-in that someone might have made that would do that, but I have had no luck finding one.

Picasa does this quite well. Under Tools -> Folder Manager, you can tell it where to look, and it's actually pretty good about picking up on new images within seconds of their being written. Picasa tries to pay attention to your load average, so it will (sometimes) delay scanning new pictures if your computer is busy doing something else.

sorry...had Picasa on the brain...i actually meant iPhoto doesn't scan new photos....