An older gentelman in the woodworking club is currently running an old Intel box (400mhz) and is looking to upgrade to a Mac. His primary use is browsing the web, email, and working with digital photography (nothing fancy). Can someone recommend a Mac to sit his needs.
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mac mini would be my advice -
No, it's difficult to upgrade the internals-- very compact. It is basically a laptop without a screen. The best thing to do is to order it with an upgraded drive. Don't forget extra RAM too. 512MB won't cut it.
(One can easily add an external FireWire drive, but that kind defeats the purpose of a small, all-in-one machine.)
Does this person already have a good monitor he'll be using with the new Mac? If not, a MacBook might be a good choice.
To confuse matters even more, once you start adding options to a Mac mini, you start approaching the price of an iMac. So think about that too.Comment
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The mini comes with a 60G drive for $599, but can be upgraded to 160G at time of purchase for an added $250. Just a little less than an iMac.
See:
http://tinyurl.com/yzbhvm
for the mini's options.
But, upgrade the drive and the 512 memory, and you may as well purchase an iMac.Comment
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Here's a review of the iMac: http://tinyurl.com/utgvq
We're real happy with our Mini, whose RAM we upgraded ourselves to 2GB. Didn't need more than the default 60GB drive, and planned to share its keyboard, video, and mouse (KVM) with an older OS 9 Mac, so we didn't want the iMac's all-in-one configuration.
I'd probably go with the iMac, and get the AppleCare extended warranty.- David
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” -- Oscar WildeComment
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I am quite happy with both my iMac and my MacBook. I guess the deciding factors would be if the machine should be mobile or not, and if he already has a decent display or not.Comment
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When the mac mini came out, I purchased the low end one to check it out (longtime CP/M, DOS, Windows user) and I fell in love with it. Now my wife uses it and I have the new top of the line dual processor mac mini with all of the bells and whistles and I love it even more.
One thing that I have to suggest to all of you is getting Parallels so that you can run Windows (or Linux, DOS, BSD, etc) on your mac. It isn't very expensive and runs fast. This isn't using Boot Camp, but running Windows in a virtual machine. Great stuff. You can check it out here.
Hope this helps,Ted KitchComment
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My choice (slightly biased because I own one, would be the imac with the 21" monitor. I had a non-intel chip version for about a year and never had a problem with it. It has enough power (1gig memory chip added) to handle the heavy Photoshop compositing I do. Also a small footprint (one piece) and unless you're into developing video content, you can't go wrong.
Bruce
Oh, and no matter where you buy one, the price is the same, so no lenghty price shopping."Western civilization didn't make all men equal,
Samuel Colt did"
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Since his needs are fairly modest, would a used iBook or PowerBook fill the bill? If not, I'd suggest the iMac mentioned before.
Was hoping Santa would bring me a 17" MacBook Pro. Nothing doing....
Been a Mac user since 1986.
g.Smit
"Be excellent to each other."
Bill & TedComment
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