MACrastination!

Julian - I would not pay for the 3.06. I do not believe for what you are using it you would see any diff.

Only thing I would watch out for is mac world or whatever they call it in jan sometime where they will announce new products and may upgrade the imac spec.

As for snow leopard, it will be reasonable cost to upgrade if leopard was anything to go by.

Macworld Jan 5-9

See this

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/12/23/next_gen_...uary_says_paper.html

Apple have all but pulled out of macworld and this January will be the last, and Jobs is not giving a keynote.

As its so close though may as well wait and see if they bring anything new out. However if they don't you could find yourself on that train of thought that ensures you never ever buy another computer.

One other thing when you take the plunge do not purchase additional ram from them you can get 4 gigs put in it when it gets home for much much less money. And its very easy to do.

Thanks guys, given that it is so imminent I think I'm best off waiting a short while.

quote:

However if they don't you could find yourself on that train of thought that ensures you never ever buy another computer.

Gary. I have been putting off a new desktop PC for over a year now; the time has come to sort it out. I would put the RAM in myself. I can't see it being a difficult job!

Cheers, Julian

I think the bigger screen is much more important than the faster processor since you aren't doing major graphics. Jump from Windows to Mac and you won't go back. You'll slap yourself in the head and think "gee, I coulda had a Mac" years ago.

I'm not upgrading till my old one dies because I'll have to upgrade all my other software. Tho since I"m not doing graphics anymore I can probably survive well enough with downloaded apps.

Julian

My imac is 2.16Ghz with 24" screen and works fine with photoshop and aperture. I don't use any video editing software which is where I suspect I would tap my fingers away!

I have only used my scanner twice for batch scanning slides - same scanner as yours with the optional feeder and I experienced no problems. Must confess to not having gone into the finer details of the software to look for issues.

One thing I might consider if I were to renew is the screen size. The 24" screen looks great in the apple store however mine sits on a fairly shallow desk and I think a 20" monitor would be much more appropriate 90% of the time.

If you have waited this long, another month won't hurt but be warned, some mac launches can follow a very long time after the rumour mills suggest!

Happy New Year All.

Peter

I bought the 24" iMac a few months ago, to replace my old Dell PC. It has been great and I've never regretted the switch from XP. I have the 2.8ghz model, and unless you're playing games or doing video editing it would be more than adequate. I put 4gb RAM in myself, wich I bought from Crucial.com for about 1/10 the price Apple were charging. Keep hold of the original RAM though - if you ever need to send the iMac back for repair, and they see you installed non-Apple RAM, they could say you have invalidated your warranty.

Can't specifically comment on the Imac as I have a mac pro.

I can add fuel to those who have said you won't look back!

my XP'd Asus laptop will be the next to go!

Thanks chaps; I am convinced that iMAC will be my next computer, just awaiting any announcements next week before I go for the 24" 2.8Mhz model.

Peter, I look forward to continue using the scanner. I do not use it much but would not like to be without it completely.

Julian

Get the 24 inch as the 20 inch monitor is not millions of colours so no where near as good as the 24.

Adding your own ram does not invalidate the warranty, the manual that comes with the mac actually shows you how to do it.

now I'm feeling the urge to upgrade. tho my G4 is still humming away nicely and I know there really is no reason to do it. Ah well, save my money till it dies

One thing you may want to do before moving over is to buy a copy of VMWare Fusion for the Mac.

It allows you to run other OS's, e.g. Windows on your Mac.

One great tool it has is a convertor. You run it on your old PC, copy the file off it generates and then you can run your old PC in a window on your Mac. Great if you forget to copy something over, or there's a certain application that runs only on PC's that you want to use now and again.

Mac's are brilliant, so it'll be rare that you'll want to do this.

Roy.

Hi Julian,

I bought myself a 24" 2.8Ghz iMac from John Lewis a couple of weeks ago. After nine years in Bill Gates' back yard, it's a bit of a learning curve, but .......... an absolute no-brainer in every way. It works instantly from 'Sleep' - no apparent clanking/whirring of the hard drive and delay whilst the system or the anti-virus updates itself, is virtually silent in operation and has lots of beautifully displayed and useful applications and 'widgets'. The display quality is absolutely superb, and the 24" display is really useful for having several overlapping windows open at once, to easily click between them.

And it's providing me with music via a Lavry DA-10 from my CDs ripped into iTunes in 'Apple Lossless'. This set-up has replaced a CDX2, and sounds better to me.

John.

quote:

Lavry DA-10 from my CDs ripped into iTunes in 'Apple Lossless'. This set-up has replaced a CDX2, and sounds better to me.

I heard that

Glad you like the Mac - John Lewis are very good with the two-year warranty and 90 days software support - always thought AppleCare was a bit expensive, but Apple gave me excellent service on the odd occasion I had to use it.

If you are not already so doing then consider using the free program Carbon Copy Cloner to keep a back-up of your system. You'll probably never need it, but it is a comforting thought to know you can recover a build in minutes should you ever need to.

ATB Rotf

Used in the way intended TimeMAchine should be perfect for the average mac user. I am afraid the whole concept of cloning is from PC land where viruses etc etc could posibly destroy an OS.

For the average mac user the loss of a file, photo etc will be more likely and timemachine is just right for this and built into the system

Hi Gary

I've used CCC successfully for years - its is a front end to the OS X ditto utility provided by Apple to create and extract archives. It is more flexible than asr.

Mike Bombich, who is a highly respected Apple developer, wrote CCC to make this easy to use. The use of the Disk Image framework is fundamental to OS X and is the way that Apple's own software restore programs work.

I used to use a low level dd copy from source to target, which has been a standard way of backing up a root file system on a Unix machine since I first used one back in the dark ages; but Mike's utility makes life very much easier.

I just feel safer if I have some bootable images of my computer in the cupboard.

I would definitely recommend it - it'll work with any spare disk you have and can connect directly to your Mac - I have a very cheap WD firewire disk and I'm still running Tiger, but I hope to move to Snow Leopard when ADC releases it: so I may invest in a Time Capsule at that juncture.

ATB Rotf