Thinking of buying a Mac. Suggestions?
 

Hello everyone!

I've been a PC user all of my life. I've only encountered Windows and Linux up untill a year and a half ago, when I started Media Studies at my college and we used Mac's to edit video.

The thing is that it seems Apple have no intentions of releasing Final Cut Pro on Windows, so it leaves me pretty much in a dead end when it comes to moving in closer to the industry.

The only solution I could come up with it buying an iMac or a Mac Pro alongside my PC but with a student budget, it will have to be worth every penny.

Anyway- Down to the point. Is it worth me spending all of that money (About £800-1000) on something I will only use to edit video on? As much as I think Mac's could be more productive, I cannot give PC up all together, as I am a gamer also :]

Just for the record, I really dont want any flame wars against either Mac or PCs, I simply want to discuss the pros and cons of owning either or both.

Thanks,

Oliver

Re: Thinking of buying a Mac. Suggestions?
 

You could run XP on your mac (if you buy an intel-mac)

http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/

(but I don't know how well this works)

Re: Thinking of buying a Mac. Suggestions?
 

It seems like there are specialist fields particularly the media area where the Mac is the computer of choice. If that is the area in which you are training and in which you expect to carry out your vocation, you can either go out on a limb and maybe have problems being non standard, or you can conform, accept the costs and perhaps compromise on other versatility, and follow your chosen industry's norm.

Re: Thinking of buying a Mac. Suggestions?
 

Well, there are people who can help you. Happens to the best of us. The illness seems to affect multimedia types the most. But with the right therapy/drug combination, you'll be looking at PCs again in no time.

:p:

Re: Thinking of buying a Mac. Suggestions?
 

What can I say? I did suggest dual boot (which is what I intend to do when my macbook pro arrives :) )

Re: Thinking of buying a Mac. Suggestions?
 

hehe I do multimedia. I loves mac, that are great. The cost is not that much and you have to consider the lack of maintance and upgrades needed into that cost.

If its just video, then I am not sure. But you may find you start using it for other stuff as well

Re: Thinking of buying a Mac. Suggestions?
 

From what i have heard for multimedia editing a mac is far superior to a pc- there is of course the dual boot option mentioned above as well if you can't give up pc completely.

Personally, i made the switch to mac about three years ago- started with a mac mini in addition to a pc and now i just have an ibook g4.

I prefer the mac for a lot of reasons, but admittedly it did take a bit of getting used to. There is no reason why you cannot use the mac for other things as well (email, browsing etc) although the gaming will be a weakness.

Personally, i would go for the mac :) you never know... you might like it ;)

Re: Thinking of buying a Mac. Suggestions?
 

Wow, thanks for the replies everyone! They've helped a lot!

I'm still on the fence with this one. I think its all down to what sort of 'claimage' I can get on the student loans and burseries, as I start Uni this year. If its not what I expected, i'll cut down on the pub allowance :(.. It'll be tough though!

I think in conclusion though, I WILL buy a Mac eventually. Like Rob said above, Mac is the OS of choice in the industry, so I best go with the flow!

Thanks again everyone! :]

Re: Thinking of buying a Mac. Suggestions?
 

Use the Apple Education store and enjoy a 9% discount just for being a student :)

http://store.apple.com/Catalog/uk/Im...utingpage.html

Re: Thinking of buying a Mac. Suggestions?
 

It also happens to be a awesome OS! :tu:

Out of intrest, what uni you going to?

Re: Thinking of buying a Mac. Suggestions?
 

We're running:
2 PCs of which mine is 6 years old that I wish would curl up and die... a laptop from hell cos is looks awful and *is* awful, but for the purpose of what I need it for, it handles pretty well (about 5-6 years old) and a mac mini...

If you think about all the noise 3 PCs can make on a good night.. the mac is whisper quiet - which makes it great to work with on that level and yes, I too edit stuff on the mac but... i'm not a gamer... well... not with my pc I'm not a gamer!
I've veered for the 'worms' series... which sort of goes right the way you didn't want right? you want serious games.. well, some games ARE both mac and PC which means yes, you do have to look hard for a multiformat game. But they do exist.
And yeah, a lot of macs these days as I've seen anyway on some websites, do come installed with bootcamp OR win XP aswell (dual-boot stuff) and these have made my ears prick up some hehe! but having both means the best of both worlds.. just ensure you get some kind of external hdd to ensure that you don't expend too much internal hdd space for stuff... (believe me, we need an external hdd!)
Forget looking in PCWorld for a mac tho... so little choice and the staff know beggar all about 'Airport Extreme' and wireless router configurations....(man, did we have some probs there the other day when making enquiries!)
But yeah.. it's probably well worth going for a mac! :D

Re: Thinking of buying a Mac. Suggestions?
 

Just get a good PC and be done with it :)

Re: Thinking of buying a Mac. Suggestions?
 

You would get the intel ones so thats cool, also in a few months Apple release their next OS. Apples OSX is always a step ahead of windows, even now dispite the arrival of Vista.

The main downside is the lack of games and some software. But as far as software goes most of the big players (and all of the big media software) is on the mac. In the case of Adobe and Maya, its better on the mac. There is also a good software community for the mac and some excellent shareware because of the cocoa framework and the fact that the development enviroment is part of the OS instead of a add on as is the case with Visual Studio

Re: Thinking of buying a Mac. Suggestions?
 

www.BuildYourOwn.org.uk is a p.c. builders forum I use were you can get a lot of good info from people who use both. It does tend to be weighted towards p.c.'s obviously but, as long as you're aware of that, you can sift the data you receive.

As an all-round bit of kit I prefer p.c.'s.
But I also do a lot of music creation / editing and the same with graphics.
If I were only using it for that, I would definitely get the Mac.

As video editing is your priority, I would suggest the Mac will perform the task better than p.c. and you'll just have to take the hit with your other interests where a p.c. might have been the normal choice.

Re: Thinking of buying a Mac. Suggestions?
 

Get a decent Mac laptop, he says from his Mac laptop. These days:

1) It's a PC, so you get plenty of performance for your money - Intel's latest chips are spiffing beasts.
2) It's a Mac, so you get excellent design
3) It runs OS X, so you get an operating system that gets out of your face
4) It runs XP, so you can game (got Boot Camp on here and it's just another XP PC after you get it running, albeit without a ****ing right mouse button)
5) It's rather expensive, so get a paper round

I'd suspect that you'd end up using it for a lot more than just Final Cut, tbh. I split my time between my Linux laptop and this beast, and there's only one transition I miss things on, great though Ubuntu is*.

* Except the ****ing right mouse button.

Oh, and I replaced my old FreeBSD server with...a Mac mini. Smaller, faster, quieter, uses less power and you can watch DVDs on it, too, while it runs Apache, IMAP, PostFix and all the other open source goodies without a hitch. The Macs coexist much more happily with Linux than Windows, of course my old PC is plugged in the back of the Mac mini, for when I need stuff, which isn't that often, as it's awfully noisy in comparison.