What My New Mac Will Be …?
Until the speedier iMacs became available this morning, I was pretty well set on going for a Mac notebook—either a Macbook Pro or a Macbook Air. But I tell you … that top-end iMac, buttressed with 4GB of RAM [that I'd buy third-party, natch], that’s hard to pass up. Why?
- If I’m honest with myself, I don’t use a laptop that much. My iBook gets some use around my house, and some use when I leave the house, but I don’t seriously attempt to work from it, unless I’m on the road with work. Which leads me to …
- The fact that I’m about to have a work laptop [sadly, a Windows machine], which obviates any “need” [being such a relative term when we're talking about $2000 machines while people starve on far less per year in Africa; yes, I want cheese with my white whine] for having a personal laptop for quasi-work purposes. Here I ask myself: on a business trip, am I going to carry two laptops, one for work and one for personal use? The answer is, of course, no.
- I don’t yet merit a Mac Pro, although I want one. My budget for this endeavor is largely the $2500 biennial computer purchase money I get from corporate [you'd do this, too, if you got the money interest-free]; the only machine I could see myself outspending this for is a Macbook Air with a solid-state drive, which I’d get based off of Alex’s experiences with his MBA. The top-end iMac fits in my budget, although I’ll have to be the one paying for the RAM [which is fine; I'll just get some software I'd buy otherwise pre-installed to offset that cost].
That said, I’m gonna go until at least the end of the week on this decision, because I don’t wish to act rashly just because Apple put out a new play-pretty today. [Lunch break over, back to the salt mines.]
Posted April 28th, 2008 in Fooftatsic by Geof F. Morris.
1) I’ve used the nice iMacs and they’re pretty nice. I thought I’d hate the formfactor, but it seems to work alright.
2) You probably want to make SURE that the display issues which have been killing Apple recently aren’t affecting these boxes… you do enough photography to need the bitdepth. I don’t know one way or the other if it’s a problem with these systems… it seems to be limited to laptops though.
3) Do you REALLY want to upgrade the monitor when you upgrade the system, and vice versa? Not that apple leaves you much choice short of a Mac Pro.
4) How will you handle external disks (while keeping them pretty)?
April 28th, 2008 at 13:44Get the iMac and one of the new 8.9″ Eee PCs when they drop in the next couple of months. Then throw Leopard on it and be done. To hell with Apple’s “you can only use our software on our hardware” attitude.
April 28th, 2008 at 13:45Jason: I hear you on all points. You’ve summed up why I have only bought minis to date.
Will: I don’t see the point in putting Leopard on a machine it wasn’t designed for, when the Linux community is really going to go out of its way to support the Eee.
April 28th, 2008 at 15:11For no other reason than to say you did it. What more reason do you need?
April 28th, 2008 at 15:58More reason to not put Leopard on an unsupported machine? How about:
– no support from Apple
– no Software Update
– driver issues
– no upgrade support
– a lack of documentation
Sure, you could do it to say you could, but what’s the point? If you’re going to run OS X, run it on fully-supported Apple hardware. Otherwise you might as well run Linux — at least there’s a greater chance of it working.
Geof: Any rumours floating around that the Mini is going to be updated any time soon? Or is “any time soon” too late for you?
April 28th, 2008 at 16:06Yeah, when I wrote “… when the Linux community is really going to go out of its way to support the Eee,” the driver support and software updates is really what I meant.
April 28th, 2008 at 18:22Oh, and to your other question, Brad: any new mini is not going to have the horsepower that this iMac will have, and if I’m going to spend more than $1000 on a new Mac, I’m going to get something with either lots more juice than the mini [MBP or iM] or a killer form factor and more juice [MBA].
And as to Jason’s keep-it-pretty question: I’ve been considering replacing my aging Linksys router with a Time Capsule, which would give me wireless switching and a place to dump Time Machine towards. Also, I expect that my mini will stay on my desktop, and I’ll be back to two machines. But then I’m close to building my new desk and making that work for me.
April 29th, 2008 at 00:30