Pros & Cons of migrating from Windows to Mac.

I don't know what the point of that post was, but I'm constantly amused with those who use the whole "fanboy" term because their own fanboyism ends up showing, and such an arguement is just stupid.

The point that Cashmonee was trying to make is that Windows had years to make it better, and hes fed up with it and thats one of the reasons why he uses OS X.

 

Well, it couldn't possibly get worse, right? So it stands to reason that each new release would be the "best Windows OS ever."

Touche. Someone's being awfully defensive of the Win OS on this Mac forum...

 

Look up the term fanboy and then look in the mirror. It's a form of ignorance. If one cannot give credit where credit is due because of the company, they are a fanboy.

Didn't realize this was the Apple forum. I will leave. No good will come from any future replies.

 

Why would I need to look up the term fanboy? I know I'm a fan of Apple, take a look at my signature it even says 'Apple Fan', and I support Apple.

Windows deserves no credit anywhere, and I'm far from ignornace in anything with computers, I'm college educated in Information Technology as well as I hold certifications in various fields of computer technology. From my experiences Apple stands its ground with valor and has yet to fail me. So really it comes down to experiences with the platform, and I gave windows since 1992 to fix their issues.

Now I think about it, Windows does deserve credit in its monopoly, and that their office software is decent. Personally I think they should leave the OS market and stick to business software, it appears to be the area they excel at very well.

For future references it might be wise to check out what forum your in, you'll get an better idea of what replies to expect, it'll help you greatly.

I certainly would not go into another forum and imply such things, I'm also a forum poster in other parts of this forum, and help windows users with their issues as well, but I don't imply such things.

One last thing, I'm still running Windows XP machines in my household, as well as Gentoo Linux.

 

I looked through your post history and your posts in this forum, and I think if anything defines a fanboy you do it well. It should also be said that when one gives credit where it is not due because of company, then they are also a fanboy.

 

Sorry it seems your thread may have been hijacked. To answer your question, graphics acceleration has little to do with image editing. The MacBook should edit images just fine. The only caveat being if you use Photoshop, it isn't a universal binary yet. The good news is that it will be and that will likely come the beginning of next year. In the meantime, Photoshop is not painfully slow, just a little sluggish and iPhoto is ok for minor manipulation, so that may be an option to tide you over. Other than that the MacBook would be just fine. I am unsure if they offer a 7200RPM drive. If they don't and you really like the MacBook over the MBP, then an external drive will fill the need nicely. HTH! Anymore questions feel free to ask! Hopefully the next thread won't be hijacked!

 

The MB doesn't offer an 7200RPM upgrade through Apple, its something you'll have to upgrade yourself. MBs are user upgradeable for both memory and harddrives without voiding warranty.

I concur with the external one, I have an external drive I use for all my large files, although its connected via Firewire 400 it does its job well (I don't recommend using a drive through USB 2.0, but I HIGHLY recommend one using Firewire 800)

 

Huskyfan23,

Was there really such a big change from Win. 95, to 2000, to XP? Frankly, we were made to believe so but in the end the changes I bought into weren't really there.

Do we have Plug-And-Play? Do we have a secure platform? And this is just the tip of the ice-berg. I could go on about what we were promised and never got.

True, every new iteration of Windows gives something new and somewhat better, but I never seem to be convinced that Windows will get there with Plug-And-Play. We still have to fiddle with lousy drivers and incompatibility.

Vista, I have tried, and yes does seem an advancement over XP, but that is a given. Every new product would "usually" be a better development of the one it replaces, but sometimes what is being delivered is just not enough and to me I am at the end of the road with Windows (unless I run into a situation where I have no choice).

And now that I have read GeorgineVJ post above sums it rather well. As Windows was so bad it had to only get better.

Actually, the only one OS that I have tried that was A LOT WORSE than Windows was IBM's own OS2 (anyone recall that). To give you a brief about it, it came out before Win. 95 and promised true Plug-And-Play, and true multi-tasking and multi-threading. I bought in to it (at the time I had an IBM laptop) and IBM staff couldn't for the life of them get OS2 installed on my IBM laptop. After days and night of tweaking I managed to get it to install but the numbers of crashes per day made it useless. Luckily, very soon thereafter M$ came out with Win 95; and of course we all know how badly OS2 died.

I have a lot of good feeling and support for M$ and Windows, after all they were one of the very first to deliver a multi-tasking / multi-threading OS, they developed standardization for a jungle of the world of PCs that existed before the M$ / IBM / Intel collaboration and the explosion of PCs as we see today is a result of, in part, their efforts (of course Apple is another major player to this too, so too is Sinclair, Radio Shack, Tandy to name a few).

So yes, M$ are well above exception when it comes to being able to make a product and deliver; but there does seem to be a better OS out there and it seems that Apple have it. So the question, why settle for the lesser one?

I have waited for Windows for over a decade, read so many books about the various iterations of Windows that I have nightmares about it, and frankly I can't wait to get to Apple. My only fear is that I may be over-expecting from Apple; but from all that I recall about Apple (from past use) and from what I read from the various forums it seems I was "dumb" not to shift back years ago.

But then, better late than never.

Just for the records, I am a fanboy of M$, Apple, and Mercedes to name a few.

 

Now, back to my actual question.

I do use photography applications a lot actually, I don’t do any photo-retouching as I think that is not "real" photography, but I do some cropping and "blowing-up". I tend to have the most processor intensive applications and for that I always try to get the maximum amount of RAM, and the fastest processor. As for the hard-drive, I don’t change the ones that come built-in so as not to void the warrantee (I do have 2 Matrox external hard drives connected my home server and they are lightning fast in terms of rpm and connection - over Firewire).

Sadly, the current offer from Apple doesn’t allow me to get a faster hard drive, and even the ones for the MBP only goes to 7500 rpm (I know there are faster speed drives but I am not sure if they exist for laptops – there are some that go up to 12000 rpm if I am not mistaken.

So, here I am now contemplating which one of the two to get? The MB with 2GB RAM; or the MBP 15" with 2GB RAM and the 7500 rpm drive. The sad part is that the MBP is then twice the price of the MB and not as sleek!

 

Wail,

The MB is both Memory and Hard drive upgradeable without the risk of voiding your warranty, yes things have changed since your last Apple. The MBP however doesn't enjoy the same freedom as MB does in terms of self-user upgrades, I believe memory is the only one?

Now I understand you want the fastest processor speed as well, and the 2.0 GHz is great but remember its also Dual core. if you want that extra 10-20% increase in speed go with the MBP then.

SO really you could get 2GB of ram, and then whatever size HDD and 7200RPM as long as its SATA. The thing I want to say is if you go that route, its a good idea to keep those 'old' memory/hdd on hand as Apple still wants to see it in it when you send it in for repairs or when they talk to you on the phone.

Check those Maxtors as well, because Maxtors are weird with their externals, such as some of their models have OS X support and some don't.

Oh and before I forget, there is rumors that some Apple products are due for a hardware spec revision after Labor day, so hold out on purchasing one until then.

 

I say go for the MacBook. You will probably be wasting money if all you want the MBP for is a 7200RPM drive. As xbandaidx said, upgrading the hard drive does not void the warranty, and if you are worried, take the preinstalled hard drive and put it in the box your new hard drive came in. Then if you ever have a problem you can put the old one in and send the unit to Apple. It is really easy to replace.

Other growing pains you will have is that your Mac won't write to the externals if they are formatted in NTFS. I know of two ways around this. One, format the drives into FAT32. This limits the size of files you can use to 2GB(I believe), but both the Windows machines and the Mac could read/write. Another option is format the drives as HFS+ and get MacDrive for your other systems. This way the Mac obviously can read/write, but so can the Windows machine because of MacDrive.

 

Yeah, as long as your sure its not your user installed HDD thats not causing that problems that its or else it wouldnt make sense to send it in to apple

Second, the limit is 4 GB file that can be written, this only bugs people who want to save backups of their DVDs or something and stuff, but photos usually don't go that large even in RAW.

Now it comes to the issue of this, are you going to be using aperture, Apples professional photo program, I have read some people got it to run on their Macbooks and stuff, but they usually had to scroll around in the program to get to stuff as the program opens a window far larger than MBs max res, and Aperture isnt (officially) supported in the MBs. Now if you use Adobe suite for everything you're fine and just go ahead for the MB and do the upgrades, now if you want aperture you might want that MBP than.

 

I'm also planning to replace the standard HD with a 7200rpm HD. Does it produce more heat? And how does the battery last with a 7200 rpm HD?

 

Funny that you mention Aperture, a few days ago I was discussing this with a friend and we were at odds as to if the MB would support Aperture or not. From everything that I've read, it doesn't, so that is a handicap; but, since I never used it I can always find my way around it by using another application – how does Adobe Photoshop fare here?

As for the hard-drives, I will keep the standard one installed, or maybe just have it upgraded to the maximum that Apple has to offer (I am not too keen on customizing my machine as there is hardly any support for Apple where I come from). What I do have is a good home set-up on a home server and that is where I "dump" all my photographs and projects, etc.

About Labor-Day, sorry but I think that is a US thing, could you please tell me when is that? And when are the "updated" MB due – I don't want to seem ignorant of your culture so please don't take offense.

 

It's going to be a marginal difference, you might shave off an additional 3-5 minutes having that, and I wouldn't think the increase is temperature wouldn't be that much, it all depends on the brand and quality of the product.

like I said I've seen some people say in reviews on Apples site for aperture saying it worked on their macbook, but if apple doesnt state it's not supported, its probably wise not to take a risk and get it.

Adobe photoshop is currently not Universal as well as the other adobe software on the new Intel Macs, I believe Adobe stated that in early spring 2007 that a Universal version will be out. Now I have Adobe photoshop suite, and I can run it fine, but you can notice that it takes a tad bit longer to do things, but its certainly fine to use through rosetta.

Don't worry about the whole US thing, I usually ask where people are from if I don't see a country in their username area, but I forgot too here. In the United States labor day is September 4th (Labor day is always the first monday of september in the states) anyways there is rumors going around thats when the new updated stuff will be. Please take note its a 'RUMOR' and no one knows for sure which products will recieve an update, and the MB might not even get one, or for that case any of them.

 

Personally, I would go with the 15" MBP. I would upgrade the RAM and HDD myself - it's MUCH less expensive.

The reasons I would go MBP: screen real estate and better graphics card. I believe that a high res RAW image manipulation would be better handled by a MBP's graphics processor - especially if you get into a pro quality or even semi-pro quality photo editing software. You could start with a base MBP and still be a bit ahead of the game than the MB because of the GPU. Why put yourself in a smaller box at this point of the game when camera resolutions are getting higher and you actually are a real photographer? What if you shoot a 10 MP shot and want to apply a filter to it and print professionally as a 24X36 poster or something? I think you might be disappointed at the performance of a MB over a MBPro if you use a ram intensive photo editor along with a high res photo.

Just my two cents. I'm a scrapbooker and I have a decent camera and I like to have multiple pictures open for batch processing. It can occaisonally get RAM and GPU ram intensive.

 

I am torn between the two choices, MB or MBP 15"? I want the extra processing power that comes with the dedicated GPU but I also love the size and sleekness of the MB. Then again, if I am considering the MBP why stop at the 15", why not go all the way with the 17"? It is really not that easy for me to decide.

I guess I will hold off until mid ~ late September since there is rumor running about. Which ever I get I am sure to have it with 2GB RAM.

 

Its funny to see people fight over Mac or Windows. Its not that serious!! lol

I personaly like windows for it's customability. Don't have a Mac but I played around with macs alot. It is odviously better in the media production department. And the OS seems to be cleaner.

I might get a MAC around next summer, but I'll never get rid of Windows.

I can't see myself living without windows.

 

You can't self-upgrade the HDD in the MBP, if you do it voids your warranty. Only the MB's HDD is user upgradable.

 

You sound exactly like I did around December or so. I will tell you that my Windows machine is used to play games, that is it. Playing with a Mac in the store and forcing yourself to use it at home for a week or two are completely different. You will fall in love very quickly.

 

True 'nuff. I guess I'm not thinking clearly since I actually got a 160 GB external HD.

I'm still in love with my new Mac btw. What a gorgeous machine.

 

Aperture does work on Macbooks; it is probably listed as not supported since the resolution of 1280x800 is somewhat low. It may be somewhat (as in very) choppy, specially with stock 512MB RAM.