Mac Special Offer

Rollo Tamasi

Hi Guys,

I can avail of a special offer that my company and Apple are running. Apple are providing staff with up to 20% discount on Apple goods. The iMac G5 has really grabbed my attention. It looks amazing. The most affordable spec available is an iMac G5 17" 1.8Ghz / 512mb / 160Gb HD / 128mb Radeon / Combo DVD RW all for E1240.25 including VAT and delivery. Its next day deliver, by the way.

Does that price and spec sound good? I could also get a Mac Mini for £506.99. (1.25ghz / 256mb / 40GB)

now i have never really touched on Mac's myself, but i am into macromedia and flash design and development. I would defo be looking at Mac's for the future, maybe when i finish college and have some spare cash...but is this offer too good to refuse? would you turn it down?

(i posted this message in the Mac forum but thought i might as well post here to get different opinions from mainly PC users, plus the Mac forum is quite today!)

Hank_Scorpio

Excellent price. Just keep upgrade the ram.

Shouldn't be too expensive.

Enjoy it you luck S.O.B. I work on a mac doing graphic design and they are fair superior to PC's and windows for handling graphics imo.

roamer

I am a graphic designer and personally I dont find macs to be superior in
any way than macs.

There slower and rigid, theres no right click either.
Font delection must be done with the mouse, on Windows you can scroll your fonts using the arrow keys on the keyboard.

Why do people think macs are better for graphics or is it just an urban legend?

heggie

Rollo Tamasi wrote:

I could also get a Mac Mini for £506.99. (1.25ghz / 256mb / 40GB)

thats more than they used to cost on apple's site or atleast in 3g, also they have since been upgraded - i seee they are 539 now with the 512 mb, and wifi

Hank_Scorpio

Macs are gned fo rdealing with graphics. Pc's are designed for word processing and number crunching.

Basically with macs the processing and handling of graphics is dealt with a lot more efficiently than a pc. The way the memory is allocated to each programme is far better version than the way the pc does it.

There was a law suit against Windows for copying Mac.

I agree with you that the font selection is easier but essentially that's not really important when dealing with graphics.

Never had a problem with fonts on Mac. I use ATM and I can turn on and off the fonts at will.

I use a PC sometimes too to do work but when you have several programmes open it drags along and that's with a gig of ram and 3.2 ghz processor.

I use a G4 with 720 mb ram and it flys along no problem.

So to me the MAC is better equipped to deal with High end graphics and multi-tasking.

Khannie

roamer wrote:

I dont find macs to be superior in any way than macs

What now?

Ah no, it's not an urban legend. Macs /are/ supposed to be easier to use if you're new to computing. You sound like you've been thoroughly Microsoftised (as I have) so the switch becomes difficult because you have to unlearn old stuff as well as learn new stuff.

Khannie

Hank_Scorpio wrote:

Basically with macs the processing and handling of graphics is dealt with a lot more efficiently than a pc.

Now THAT is urban legend.

PC memory and (in particular graphics) accessing is very efficient now. Especially with the advent of DirectX and AGP.

The Mac uses a RISC CPU and they are generally considered favourable over CISC chips (like Intel / AMD X86) in a lot of ways. The motorolla processors that macs used to use had a far superior architecture to x86 clones, but they've been replaced with PowerPC's AFAIK. PowerPC's are also a better architecture than x86, but x86 chips advance at a tremendous pace. Basically, in terms of raw bang for buck (it's very difficult to compare like with like here) PC's will tend to win out from what I understand.

At the end of the day though, what's really important is how productive the user is in their environment. For most people only a small percentage of actual work time is lost to processing delays anyway.

Oh, and Hank, can you reduce the size of that sig image please? About half its current height would be nice.

Rollo Tamasi

apparantly the first offer is only a 8%-10% saving

roamer

Khannie wrote:

Now THAT is urban legend.

PC memory and (in particular graphics) accessing is very efficient now. Especially with the advent of DirectX and AGP.

The Mac uses a RISC CPU and they are generally considered favourable over CISC chips (like Intel / AMD X86) in a lot of ways. The motorolla processors that macs used to use had a far superior architecture to x86 clones, but they've been replaced with PowerPC's AFAIK. PowerPC's are also a better architecture than x86, but x86 chips advance at a tremendous pace. Basically, in terms of raw bang for buck (it's very difficult to compare like with like here) PC's will tend to win out from what I understand.

At the end of the day though, what's really important is how productive the user is in their environment. For most people only a small percentage of actual work time is lost to processing delays anyway.

Oh, and Hank, can you reduce the size of that sig image please? About half its current height would be nice.

Defintely agree, if you read up about the osx86 project, you will find that osx runs alot faster on a pc. (x86). Although apple have the argument that its a beta version and thats why its faster, I have my doubts.

heggie

with regards fonts, i use extensys suitcase, which is much better on the mac than pc.

aidan_walsh

Khannie wrote:

Ah no, it's not an urban legend. Macs /are/ supposed to be easier to use if you're new to computing.

MacOS has a history of being far more capable of following good UI design practises than Windows has. The interface on WindowsXP in some cases is a joke (I mean, whose idea was it to give out vital information in a tooltip, FFS). As you can see, the Vista team obviously know this, hence the adoption of many Mac design features in their default UI.

Now if only the Linux GUI developers would get off their asses and read some of those books as well, it might actually one day be a capable desktop contender.

Hank_Scorpio

Just did a test there.

Loaded up my PC and MAC

PC Specs - 1gb ram, 256 mb xt 7800 graphics card, 3.4 ghz processor

Mac Specs - 800 mb ram, 128 mb graphics card (not sure of make and too lazy to open and check).

Opened the same programmes (quark, illustrator and photoshop) and the exact same files.

Did minor changes to the files in each programme and resaved.

To save the files and close down the programmes it took:

PC: 8 mins 56 seconds (with virtual memory warnings every 2 seconds)

Mac: 3 mins 32 seconds

Hank_Scorpio

Sorry if I am interupting your thread.. this is annoying me.

How the hell do I put a pic into my sig without it being on the web???

po0k

Hank_Scorpio wrote:

Macs are gned fo rdealing with graphics. Pc's are designed for word processing and number crunching.

Basically with macs the processing and handling of graphics is dealt with a lot more efficiently than a pc. The way the memory is allocated to each programme is far better version than the way the pc does it.

There was a law suit against Windows for copying Mac.

I agree with you that the font selection is easier but essentially that's not really important when dealing with graphics.

Never had a problem with fonts on Mac. I use ATM and I can turn on and off the fonts at will.

I use a PC sometimes too to do work but when you have several programmes open it drags along and that's with a gig of ram and 3.2 ghz processor.

I use a G4 with 720 mb ram and it flys along no problem.

So to me the MAC is better equipped to deal with High end graphics and multi-tasking.

Awww...aren't you just the cutest! Didn't know they still make ones like you.

Rollo Tamasi

it has to be on the web. use www.sendmefile.com to store the image and then link to it from your sig

po0k

Hank_Scorpio wrote:

Sorry if I am interupting your thread.. this is annoying me.

How the hell do I put a pic into my sig without it being on the web???

you can't.

http://www.imageshack.us/
http://photobucket.com/

po0k

BeOS

Anyone seen Myth lately actually?

Jorinn

Khannie wrote:

Now THAT is urban legend.

PC memory and (in particular graphics) accessing is very efficient now. Especially with the advent of DirectX and AGP.

The Mac uses a RISC CPU and they are generally considered favourable over CISC chips (like Intel / AMD X86) in a lot of ways. The motorolla processors that macs used to use had a far superior architecture to x86 clones, but they've been replaced with PowerPC's AFAIK. PowerPC's are also a better architecture than x86, but x86 chips advance at a tremendous pace. Basically, in terms of raw bang for buck (it's very difficult to compare like with like here) PC's will tend to win out from what I understand.

At the end of the day though, what's really important is how productive the user is in their environment. For most people only a small percentage of actual work time is lost to processing delays anyway.

Oh, and Hank, can you reduce the size of that sig image please? About half its current height would be nice.

Just a number of inaccuracies there AFAIK.

Firstly AMD chips are also of the RISC type of architecture.

Secondly, both Motorola and IBM made PowerPC chips since the early 90's, in the same way that the architecture of said PowerPC chips has changed just like AMD and Intel chips.

All chips advance at a tremendous pace, be it x86 compatible, Sonys cell development programe, ATI's graphics processors or the PowerPC family. Saying x86 compatible chips advancee at a tremendous pace is slightly misleading.

If you're saying that in relation to clock speed then you're going on the myth of frequency = power. Thats complete crap, advance in clock speed rates doesn't really mean anything in terms of power. For example the 1.7Ghz laptop I'm currently typing this on will comfortably outperform my AMD desktop and even a 3.2GHZ Pentium 4 desktop in a lot of benchmarks. Indee a lower clocked AMD chip will also outperform a high clocked Pentium 4 chip that has rapid clock speed advances. So much for progressive advancement, advancement in marketing tactics perhaps, not much else.

In the end what you said is true though, it mostly depends on how productive the user is.

dearg_doom

roamer wrote:

Defintely agree, if you read up about the osx86 project, you will find that osx runs alot faster on a pc. (x86). Although apple have the argument that its a beta version and thats why its faster, I have my doubts.

Mac OS emu's on PC's have shown thta PC's are far faster than Mac's for YEARS.

Mac's were superior waaay back before the interweb and all but have struggled for ages. But it doesn't really matter because most of us never even touch the full potential of our computer's power(I'm talking about JoeAverage who emails granny and surfs the web here:))


If you do a search on Google, you should be able to find an old blog from a guy who designed MacOS emus that explained it all really well. He loved starbucks and the simpsons too, so that should help your search.

heggie

hmm think your wrong there. firstly any mac os thru an emu u may have tried would be like getting dos running on osx.

Virtual pc + windows xp are FAR faster than Pearpc and OSX, says more about the emulators than the hardware, but still rubbish's what your saying.

Khannie

Jorinn wrote:

Just a number of inaccuracies there AFAIK.

Firstly AMD chips are also of the RISC type of architecture.

I'm gonna have to correct you on your correction

RISC stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computing. If AMD make x86 (CISC) compatible chips, then they're CISC too. It's to do with the number of instructions a processor can support in hardware, not the underlying implementation of processing capability. Unless AMD's x86 chips are implementing more complex instructions through emulation (they're not), they're defo CISC.

Jorinn wrote:

Secondly, both Motorola and IBM made PowerPC chips since the early 90's, in the same way that the architecture of said PowerPC chips has changed just like AMD and Intel chips.

Architecture changes are all well and good, but they have remained low MHz (relatively) RISC chips. PowerPC's are used in embedded applications all over the world in preference to x86 for this very reason (lower MHz with equivalent voltage and capacitance means lower electrical power).

Jorinn wrote:

If you're saying that in relation to clock speed then you're going on the myth of frequency = power.

Not me. Never. All I said was you can't compare apples with apples. My AMD 64 CPU runs at 2200 MHz and outpaces equivalent 3.3GHz (150% clock speed) Intel CPU's. I've a good understanding of clock speed != compute power.

Jorinn wrote:

In the end what you said is true though, it mostly depends on how productive the user is.

I think that's the key point. OS or processing power on their own aren't really that important.

Mutant_Fruit

Although apple have the argument that its a beta version and thats why its faster, I have my doubts.

Aren't beta's usually slower and unoptimised? So shouldn't it get faster the closer it gets to V1.0? I think apple know that...

aidan_walsh

Mutant_Fruit wrote:

Aren't beta's usually slower and unoptimised? So shouldn't it get faster the closer it gets to V1.0? I think apple know that...

They haven't finalised slowdowns in the System Idle Process yet

luckat

Roamer, the Mac equivalent of right-clicking is alt-click.

That Mac deal sounds good. But yes, get more RAM.

aidan_walsh

luckat wrote:

Roamer, the Mac equivalent of right-clicking is alt-click.

Heeeeere I come to save the daaaaay!

Just in case there was someone in the world left who hadn't heard of it.

MrPinK

Khannie wrote:

Unless AMD's x86 chips are implementing more complex instructions through emulation (they're not), they're defo CISC.

I don't know about the more recent AMD cores, but this was actually what was done with the K5 and K6. Cisc instructions were converted on-chip into risc instructions.

Mutant_Fruit wrote:

Aren't beta's usually slower and unoptimised? So shouldn't it get faster the closer it gets to V1.0? I think apple know that...

Apple say it's only faster because it doesn't implement everything yet and it's leaving large parts of the kernel out.

roamer

luckat wrote:

Roamer, the Mac equivalent of right-clicking is alt-click.

I know but its handier to be able to right click

Cabaal

Rollo Tamasi wrote:

apparantly the first offer is only a 8%-10% saving

Actually its between a 4-17% discount, read your benefits handbook
I'm guessing here..... :cool: