New ibooks and mac minis

Bluehair

http://www.apple.com/ibook/
http://www.apple.com/macmini/

At least the mac mini has sensibly gone up to 512mb ram along with some incremental improvements.

Been fence sitting for a few months but reckon I'll be picking up one of each next month

Do macs work well in combination with Palm OS stuff (say a T5?)

Urban Weigl

A colleague of mine who has Palm Tungsten T3 (almost identical to the T5) wrote the following (below). I since bought one myself, and it works fine for my needs. You can basically either use the Palm conduit with Apple's iSync, you can use Now Up-To-Date, or you can use Palm's client for Mac OS.

"Synchonization
For most people the number one argument when buying a handheld is the ability to synchronize calendars, adressbooks and other information with their desktop PC. If you use a Macintosh, you are probably going to buy a Palm OS based handheld because it offers the best syncronization with popular software like Now Up-To-Date or Mac OS X 10.3's built-in adressbook and calendar using the HotSync and iSync. If you use a Windows PC however, you are probably best served with with a Windows CE based handheld since it should integrate tightly with desktop products from Microsoft."

So basically, yes it will work, but do you really need a PDA? Only get one if you have a good use for one.

flywheel

Urban Weigl wrote:

A colleague of mine who has Palm Tungsten T3 (almost identical to the T5) wrote the following (below)...

"Synchonization
For most people the number one argument when buying a handheld is the ability to synchronize calendars, adressbooks and other information with their desktop PC. If you use a Macintosh, you are probably going to buy a Palm OS based handheld because it offers the best syncronization with popular software like Now Up-To-Date or Mac OS X 10.3's built-in adressbook and calendar using the HotSync and iSync. If you use a Windows PC however, you are probably best served with with a Windows CE based handheld since it should integrate tightly with desktop products from Microsoft."

erm... you can get Palm PDAs working perfectly fine in a Windows environment, out of the box or with various 3rd party apps... on the other front, you can also get your Windows Pocket PC and Smartphone devices syncing ok with your Mac with the help of 3rd party apps:
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=276519

Bluehair

Thanks for the tips, had a Tungsten E for ages and then 'upgraded' to a Dell Axim for the wireless. Great unit but much prefer the Palm OS so thinking of going back to Palm once I bought a Mac Mini, nice to know they work well together cheers

Akula

be careful, palm have dropped official support for mac in their newer products.

There are third party companies that are planning on filling the gap but it may mean paying a premium.

Laguna

Yeah I bought the entry level (€1058) new iBook last week and it's class. Apple have really narrowed the lines between the PowerBook and the iBook now, which leads me to believe the first Mac to get an Intel processor will be the PowerBook in January... mark my words!

flywheel

Akula wrote:

be careful, palm have dropped official support for mac in their newer products.

Palm haven't dropped support in their 'newer products' (e.g. LifeDrive, Treo 650/600, T5), all come with PalmDesktop support for MacOS X 10.2.6 - 10.4 - iSync also supports the Tungsten, Treo and Zire families

when a device manufacturer manages/decides to ship a device with Palm OS 6 (Cobalt), then there may be an issue but it is up to the device manufacturer if they decide to offer a Mac solution, or if PalmSource manage to sort a solution out with Apple...

this article has some more info, in particular the comment from the PalmSource COO

heggie

palm's mac software is awful, theres numerous problems people are having even installing it, so be careful.

flywheel

that's very general...

numerous people have problems with Palm's PC software too! although even more numerous people don't have any problems with ether the PC or Mac...

Palm have a decent enough support / knowledgebase for Mac and are pretty active at outlining known issues and suggested resolutions

heggie

its not really, look at the version of palm desktop for mac, also, it is a much more widespread problem than any problem with the pc version. I've a relatively fresh install of tiger, and palm desktop wont install to it, same with panther, unless i force it with pseudo.

flywheel

dunno - i get more Palm PC issues to fix than Mac ones... although that's more to do with there being more PCs out there

had Palm Desktop / HotSync running smooth on Panther, and have running grand on Tiger now

most issues people come across are covered in Palm's support section... a big one being after installing Apple's iSync Palm conduit which sets the wong permissions on the Conduit folders (Read-Only rather than Read-Write) - Palm provided a fix for that though...