[CompleteAnarchy]

Im sure you get this alot, but, im posting any way......


Ive been looking at getting a laptop for the last year or so...

last year, i was totaly hooked on a ACER that i had seen...


but latelyt (the past 3 months or so) i have been checking out apple...

And, im starting to see a few things in them that i like better....but the best way i can explain this is to put it this way


Im a freshman in high school, and all that our high school has are crappy windows machines that are locked down so tight taht you cant even right click (isnt taht one of the MAIN things for windows...lol)

any way, i hate that, and to be able to have a comp of my own their would be GREEAT......

so, at the moment, i own an old gateway, 400mhz, 256 megs ram....40 gigs hdd space, which, i have fedora installed on at the moment....so, its obvius its time to upgrade....

So, the few things that have been STOPPING me from going to apple.com and buying one right now, are a few annoying questions.......(ohh, boy, another person asking questions....yippee....)

1. im a student, as stated b4, and im looking for a notebook that i could possibly use THROUGH college....and the mac im planning to get is the 2.0 ghz, 2 gigs ram model.....so, how far in the future would you say that i would be able to use this thing

2. does mac work with Office, or, does it have its own productivity software....and if it has its own, am i able to save in windowz formats, so taht i can open my stuff at school.

3. how hard is the learning curve of OS X, like, for people that have switched, have you found it easier to use mac over windows (or linux)....and, what have your problems been

4. Should i bye now, or wait till lepard comes out?

well, thats bout it, if any one could answer the questions, i would greatly appreciate it

EDIT

Came up with a few more questions...

5. Im an amature film maker, and i use a Panasonic PV-GS31, how well is this thing gunna fuction with OS X.

6. Im currently a customer at Verizon, and i own a Motorola RAZR V3M, and i know it has modem abilities......will i be able to sinc this (blue tooth or usb) and be able to surf te internet with my phones modem abilities. And also, i am able to transfer music to the phone through Windows Media Player, am i gunna have to use Boot Camp so i can still do that (it requires WMV formats...)

[mduell]

1. All of the current portable Macs are going to become limited by memory capacity before anything else. How long the current portable Macs (with 2 and 3GB memory ceilings) will last you depends on what you're using it for; if you're doing HD video in Motion they're going to be obsolete a lot sooner than if you're just writing papers in Word.

2. Microsoft Office is available for OSX; the current version (2004) is written for the older PowerPC Macs, but it runs through emulation on the Intel Macs. Microsoft has announced Office 2008 for OSX, which will be native on the Intel Macs.

3. A lot of people are going to say it's easier, and I don't disagree with them, but I don't agree with them. You'll may find some "limitations"/"features" in OSX that annoy you and can't (easily) be changed. Personally I find the laptop-must-go-to-sleep-when-the-lid-closes behavior to be incredibly annoying, but there's no way to disable it without getting into hacking the OS manually.

4. I'd wait for Leopard and Santa Rosa (new chipset from Intel). Both will be available this spring, and I expect Apple will implement Santa Rosa immediately.

5. It looks like that camera uses minDV and has IEEE1394, so it should work with iMovie/Final Cut Express/Final Cut Pro.

[CompleteAnarchy]

Wow, thanks for your reply....

It sounds to me like i have my mind made up.....


Thank you.....

[uicandrew]

3. i switched to mac about 1.5 years ago and i haven't looked back. it took me about a week to get everyday functions down pat. the toughest thing is that the "apple" key is called "Command" key. everything else will fall into place and you'll say, "that makes sense! it's so intuitive, why doesn't windows do that?"

the stability of mac OS and the sleep feature is great. i leave my mac on for days at a time without incidents. and closing the lid and opening it is MUCH faster than hibernation.

you'll love macs.