On Behalf Of planty > Im glad somone has opened this can of worms. > I have been using a pentium 2 350 mhz (win 98) for 5 yrs now and it's time > for a new machine. > Im temped to jump ship to a Mac but Im not 100% sure if the old "macs are > better for colour management/graphics/calibration at system > level" etc still > applies now windows xp is here,plus i have a lot of software and a library > of 300 cd's with tiff and jpeg files on. > Can anyone enlighten me?
Hi Simon, Having been a 100% PC user for a long long time, I recently purchased an iMac G400. Whilst I would stress that this machine was really just for me to get some experience with Macs and 'open my eyes' to some things I knew I was missing out on, I'm afraid I've not been that impressed. I will admit that I am a) totally untrained and inexperienced with the mac and b) it's not a majorly well specced machine compared to the G4's etc BUT I would say that the transition to the Mac has not been so straightforward. With Windows, I happen to know where a bucket load of configuration items are - they may not be 'common sense' - but I know them. The iMac is undoubtedly beautifully engineered physically and some items of the gui are beautiful, but I can't help think that glowing buttons are slowing down the whole caboodle. So I know that for many of you the Mac is intuitive... well it may be to you... but it is alien to me. One simple example: on my PC, if I want to know if a CD or disk is being accessed - I look on the box for the relevent flashing light, and the way it flashes tells me something too. To me, that is useful information. I have no idea how to find the same out on the Mac - other than perhaps listening for the disks! I have also been intrigued recently by some comments about how intuitive the Mac is when it seems there are several magical keyboard shortcuts you can and occasionally must use when the OS starts, to rebuild the desktop and such. As a PC user, you would be surprised as the PC actually tells you things like 'Press Delete Now to enter BIOS configuration', 'Press F8 now to enter Windows Setup' and so on. It may not be intuitive per se (and the Mac way of starting up is certainly pretty) - but alot more useful than no information at all. One thing I am so far missing out on is the major application (Photoshop) experience on the Mac. If I upgrade my PC, I can keep Photoshop on there, or move it to a newer PC. I can't do that with the Mac (unless there is some Adobe disk-swap I am not aware of)... and this applies to many many major applications (possibly more software issues than hardware swapping!). I'm not sure I can justify a Mac Photoshop purchase just for a few trials and screen shots. For me, this is roughly equivalent to the reason that my next camera purchase will likely be a Canon EOS rather than a Nikon or Contax or whatever. I am impressed with the Macs ability to switch monitor profiles (and therefore presumably monitor LUTs) on the fly (Windows requiring a reboot I believe), and once again, there are some beautiful things about the machine and OS - but for now, it looks like I shall mostly be sticking with my current software, right clicks, middle-mouse-scroll buttons and mostly-beige boxes ;) Enjoy... whatever you are using! nij =============================================================== GO TO http://www.prodig.org for ~ GUIDELINES ~ un/SUBSCRIBING ~ ITEMS for SALE
