StormBerlin

So, I've been a PC user all my life and I am considering getting a 12" powerbook (the brand spankin new one) for school come fall. Is this a good idea? I plan on using it just for school, and maybe some limited gaming on the side. The boyfriend kept bringing up how limited I would be, but I can't think of how. The reason I'm going with it is because of its size/weight, battery life and I just think it looks cool Am I going to have any trouble learning Panther after using windows for so long? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

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iamnormal

Sounds good. Vary good


I have no idea on the powerbook

BigGov

Well, you aren't really limited in many areas anymore, it's just a little harder to find some programs to solve your needs because Mac is still only a fraction of the PC market.

The one thing I should say is don't get your hopes up too far on the gaming, Mac's historically haven't been the greatest for it.

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One day an Englishman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman walked into a pub together. They each bought a pint of Guinness. Just as they were about to enjoy their creamy beverage, three flies landed in each of their pints. The Englishman pushed his beer away in disgust. The Scotsman fished the fly out of his beer and continued drinking it, as if nothing had happened. The Irishman, too, picked the fly out of his drink but then held it out over the beer and yelled "SPIT IT OUT, SPIT IT OUT, YOU BASTARD!"

Kadath

Learn to love Blizzard games.

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Fallon

Also, ambrosia games, hopefully they still have them. Escape Velocity...oh god, I wasted many classes in HS on that game.

Edit: forgot to add what I thought
As for the actually getting used to it, I just played with an iMac the other day. It was kinda nice, I'm definately not used to it. The hardest adjustment for me was the no scrolly wheel on the mouse. Generally though, it probably won't be that different unless you do lots of stuff with it. I tried programming on the mac, and man did that suck.

Re-edit for another suggestion:
What you might want to do is go to a dealer and see if you can play around with it for awhile. I know down here, at CompUSA they have an Apple dealer where you can look at the computers and i think they let you use them and what not. So try it before you make your choice to see if you think you can get used to that.

Dilbert1234567

Escape Velocity was the best game EVER!

i used to play it for hours on my old quadra 700 (that was a workhorse) ambrosia makes good games for the mac, they just branched into the PC games too.

about switching OS, it takes somegetting used to but it can be done, i used to use a Mac, but now i use PC's

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sailor

You will be fine. There isnt as much readily available software for the Mac, especially games, but for 99% of users, its fine. Not to mentions OSX pwns.

Basically, for surfing the internet, email, typing papers, etc, you will be more than fine.

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flamingpeach

OSX is one of the best OS i've ever used. Its very easy to learn, stable, and has the best little perks.

I'm addicted to installing programs on my ibook because I love dragging them places

The only advice I can give is to make sure you have "applecare". Things probably die, and you probably will have problems. (ie: power adaptor etc) Getting a new adaptor for free or whatever else you may or may not need beats paying for it

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merkerguitars

Jeez marathon and happyweed aren't good mac games?

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Speed_Gibson

I would like to acquire a Macintosh one day. Games are completely off my radar on basically any OS, but support for diverse audio codecs (Wavpack/MPC/Ogg-Vorbis/FLAC/APE/AAC/etc) is vitally important.
Openoffice.org, The Gimp, and Opera would be perfectly adequate for me for everything else.

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hulk

Jeeze, the mac gaming scene IS NOT THAT BAD! Heh. The general opinion seems to be that we have none. Untrue. Cruise here for a decent idea of how it looks.


Basically, almost any 3rd party USB mouse will work on macs, either straight out of the box or using 3rd party apps. Anything by Logitech works well, too. The quality of other applications is way up there as well, using it for school would be fine. The powerbooks tend to be a more professional option, iBooks are better for people new to the scene, but it's not that much of a gap. And generally, it will take you a week at most of normal use to get used to the MacOS. That's partly how they designed it.

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Fallon

as an aside, they have Escape Velocity for PC's now....damn fun game. I bought an old mac for this game a few years back...

brandon11983

I couldn't recommend the switch more myself. I just did it a few months back to a 15" PowerBook. It has been the best computer move I have ever made. I'm also not a big gamer, but after a brief look at the selection at the Apple Store, I found everything I would want to play. I also wouldn't be worried about learning Panther. I had it down in less than a week.

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JStrider

also... if your going into a computer intense field... you probably wanna match OS/software with what theyll be teaching you on... a friend of mine had a mac laptop... and had to buy a PC so he could program at home and have stuff work on the schools compilers...

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punx1325

If you do end up getting a Mac, there are Windows emulators for Macs. I am not sure how stable they are, or how well they work, but they do exist. The only reason I would ever own a Mac was if I went into the field of video editing. I have used both systems and Windows just works better for me.

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Jolt

Everyone I know who has gone from Windows, Linux, or Unix to an OS X PowerBook hasn't ever wanted to go back.

Previously, that wasn't the case. It's almost as if they took 18 years to accomplish what they originally set out to do with the Mac.

The only thing I can't stand is thateven though the OS natively supports almost all 2- and 3-button mice, the PowerBooks' touchpads still have only ONE BUTTON...which means you have to hold down a key to emulate a right-click...DUMB and ANNOYING!

BigGov

Ok, let me clarify my gaming comment.

The Mac gaming communittee has some great games, and is growing in numbers. However, I forgot to mention, this is on a 12" screen. That is tiny. REALLY tiny. This is also on a laptop, which also isn't exactly the best for gaming. Yes, it is possible, but it isn't going to be the best in the world.

Meanwhile, I can't wait until a few years when I finally bite the bullet and get a Mac myself. It would be nice to see how my T40 stacks up against a Powerbook.

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One day an Englishman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman walked into a pub together. They each bought a pint of Guinness. Just as they were about to enjoy their creamy beverage, three flies landed in each of their pints. The Englishman pushed his beer away in disgust. The Scotsman fished the fly out of his beer and continued drinking it, as if nothing had happened. The Irishman, too, picked the fly out of his drink but then held it out over the beer and yelled "SPIT IT OUT, SPIT IT OUT, YOU BASTARD!"

StormBerlin

Yeah, that's where I work here in SL and he doesn't have anything for me right now. Even if he did, it would only be a 12 inch iBook, and it's one of the older ones. I'll just play on the powerbook that's on demo at work when there are no customers Thanks for all the advice guys. Keep it comin. I don't know if I'm allowed to ask this, but is Mac software harder to obtain than PC software on the internet?

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StormBerlin

Yeah, I sell Applecare at Comp, but I'm just gonna go with our warranty thingee because it covers accidental damage (to the screen too) and all that cool stuff. And it's much cheaper than Applecare

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hulk

Once you know the websites for purchasing the software, it's exactly the same as PC stuff. There's just less places to get it from, but that doesn't mean you get worse values. Games can usually be bought from the publishers, anything else generally comes straight from the developers. There are also quite a few reseller sites that have the whole bunch.

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Redlemon

Spend $15 bucks and buy a scroll-mouse. The right-click ability is also very worthwhile in OS X (otherwise, you have to hold down a control-key while clicking to get the context menus).

TheDave87

I cant agree more. I made the switch myself recently. I bought an old Powerbook G3 and loaded panther on it. It took me less than a week to feel comfortable with OS X. Also, something everyone overlooks is that you can buy Virtual PC for the mac and run any other OS from inside of OS X. This includes any version of windows as well as Linux. So should you need a windows laptop, roughly $130 for a copy of Virtual PC will get you running windows on a mac. Also you can use Windows Remote Desktop Sharing on the mac. I do highly recommend a two button mouse though, but holding the ctrl key and then clicking isnt nearly as big of a pain in the ass as everyone will have you beleive. Also, the more RAM you throw a powerbook, the happier it is. And hey, if for no other reason to switch, iChat rocks so much harder than plain vanilla AIM.

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Redjake

If emulating Windows or running Windows programs and games is so great, why not just use Windows to begin with? From the Macs that I've used, and I've used a lot (I work in a computer lab that has all different sorts of Macs and PCs), I've found that they aren't any more stable than PCs.

Plus, when you get into the more interesting aspects of the computer world, and by "the more interesting aspects of the computer world" I mean stuff the moderators don't enjoy you talking about here, PC is always the best and more advanced route. If you don't know what I'm talking about send me a PM and I'll have more than happy to explain.

Don't expect to game at all. Learn to like Blizzard like an above person said. They usually port to Mac. But for the majority of games you are screwed.

If you are using it for school and that's it, it's a healthy choice. But the daily chores and processes I do on my computer leave Macintosh in the dust. They just can't keep up with what I need. The "not being able to keep up" problem is a combination of the OS, the software available (or not available) for Macs, and the limited hardware resources (and upgradeability).

But, like I said, if you want to type papers and surf the net and chat with your friends it's a wise investment. They sure do look cool.

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TheDave87

I'm not saying that runnig a windows emulation prog is great at all. I dont use one, and i dont need to. I do everything i need to do on my mac. Everything i do on a PC i do from my mac, and i have no complaints.

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StormBerlin

I was told by a tech that I would need to upgrade to a Gig of RAM in the powerbook (to run windows), and the windows simulator will cost me around $200. That puts me over the top of where I want to be money wise. The main reason I wanted the powerbook (it was between the powerbook and a toshiba with a Centrino processor) is for the bang for the buck I Felt I was getting. The Toshiba only had 32 MB video, and quite a slower processor. Not to mention it was about 3.5 inches wider, and 3 lbs heavier.The Toshiba would cost me about 1600, but I wouldn't be needing ANY additional software. Whereas the powerbook , I would have to obtain a copy of (at the very least) Mac's version of Office XP. The Apple Rep said he could totally lend me some software to get started. Now, we have an entire server full of shit that is all PC based. I would basically have to start over from scratch in order to utilize that Mac like I do my PC desktop. Any more advice would be greatly appreciated.

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Fallon

Why not get both?
Get the Centrino laptop and get this
http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/
You'll have to buy OS X but this project is for putting OS X on a non-mac platform.

If you'd like to know more, I can look it up or try to explain it a bit better.

Also, going on what TheDave said about a student discount, you could buy Panther, repartition the harddrive and dual boot, which I think I might try eventually...

TheDave87

have you looked into apple's student discount? it cuts about a third to half off on software and is a pretty decent discount when it comes to hardware.

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skinbag

I own a Mac G4 and a Dell Inspiron 8600, and the Mac is waaay more stable in terms of uptime and unexpected lockups and shutdowns. Even though the G4 is a 3 year old 733 mhz (and 640MB RAM) and the Inspiron is a 1.5 Gig Pentium M (384 MB RAM) the Mac wins hands down. Every night I "sleep" the Mac and every morning it wakes at 7. I only restart after updates to OSX, (which happen less frequently than on XP thus far, and have never caused a problem). I suppose I could restart, but why?
On XP I perform weekly cleanups, defrags, and Adware purges. The updates are shaky and I have had one trojan horse virus in 8 months. None of these "routine" tasks take much time, but collectively they could be considered a pain in the ass. Luckily I actually like dinking around with my laptop, but I doubt most users do.
Although I respect the above posts, I just don't see any truth to the notion that the two OS's are equal in terms of stability. XP rarely locks, and OSX has only locked on me when I erased the master password file then restarted (imagine that..) or while I was running Explorer for Mac. OSX has not hung up once since the debut of Safari.
And on the rare occasions I want to be a "Power User" the Unix core of OSX is soooo much easier to use than the DOS commands in XP. DOS is poorly documented, and I have yet to find any use for it other than reformatting the drive, while the man pages on Unix are self-explanatory for the most part.
The small keyboard on a 12" powerbook might brive you nuts, and I would get a REAL mouse straightaway. (I can't understand the single-click logic either..How can Apple make such a great OS and stick to such a pain in the ass input device is beyond me!)
If you restart often as you carry your laptop around and you don't mind maintaining your OS, XP is functionally adequate, but to say XP is as stable as OSX is simply not true in my experience. I keep my computers in my living space and see a difference in stablity that is probably not apparent in computer labs or little "test drives", so no offense to above posters, I think they just don't LIVE with but OS's enough to notice the stability thing.

Redjake

I live with them. We have 10 Macs and 40 PCs in the lab, if anyone has any problems, they come and get me. So anytime any of them lock up, I know. I work around 20 hours a week, so that's 20 hours I have for them to lock up. I'd say 20 hours is more than what some computer users do per week. And most of the "lock-ups" occur from the Macs. I'd say it's around 65/35 (percentage wise, Macs/PCs) for system failures. And no, the PCs aren't exponentially better than the Macs or more recent. They were purchased at the same time.

I'm not going to argue about this subject. But I stand by my belief that Macs aren't anymore stable than PCs. It just depends on who's using them. I can crash a Mac in 5 minutes if I try to do tasks at the same speed as on a PC.

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StormBerlin

Now the Mac's locking up, is that because of normal use and it's just having a bad day, or do the Mac's only lock up when someone does something that they know the Mac won't react well to? In my experiences, PC's lock up even when you are doing the most mundane thing and not even pushing it hard at all.

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BigGov

I believe the keyboards are the same on all three powerbooks.

__________________
One day an Englishman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman walked into a pub together. They each bought a pint of Guinness. Just as they were about to enjoy their creamy beverage, three flies landed in each of their pints. The Englishman pushed his beer away in disgust. The Scotsman fished the fly out of his beer and continued drinking it, as if nothing had happened. The Irishman, too, picked the fly out of his drink but then held it out over the beer and yelled "SPIT IT OUT, SPIT IT OUT, YOU BASTARD!"

Fallon

My previous experience with macs was you touch the damn thing and it'd lock up. You'd look at the thing and it'd scream in terror. Now this was in a high school environment with older versions of the OS so I can't really compare that to the current, but just tryin to point out that the lockup issue and mundane tasks isn't proprietary to Windows.

hulk

No, but it's far more frequent. Macs are for the most part more stable. The amount of buggy macs is a greater percentage than the amount of flawless PC's, I'd wager =) If that made any sense. I think it did.

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"'There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person,' says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex."
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