PC Vs. Mac

[Motterman]

OK, the last Apple I worked with was an Apple II E.

My fiance and I have been looking at laptops and I looked at loads of them like Dell, Gateway, Compaq, HP, Sony, etc.

However, she mentioned the G4 Mac laptops.

Now, I have nothing against Mac's. I don't even have a problem with Mac users claiming how superior they are over PC's.

Any other longtime PC users switch to Mac, and is the software gap overblown?

I'm mainly interested in doing desktop publishing and digital video editting and I know that Mac's excel at these tasks, but what about software to view MS Office documents - is there Word and Exel viewers for Mac so I don't have to plunk down $300 for Office For Mac?

Thanks!

[skipshady]

I'm mainly interested in doing desktop publishing and digital video editting and I know that Mac's excel at these tasks, but what about software to view MS Office documents - is there Word and Exel viewers for Mac so I don't have to plunk down $300 for Office For Mac?TextEdit, which comes included with OS X opens and saves Word documents. Excel files, I don't know. I'm sure you can get a freeware/shareware to open them, but I am not going to be of much help to you.

[Dante]

There was a thread started a few weeks ago regarding the very same topic. I would recommend reading through it, a lot of your concerns are probably addressed in it.

Here's the link http://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?t=168077

[stopper4]

http://www.openoffice.org/

[skipshady]

http://www.openoffice.org/
Ah, forgot about that... which reminds of Gimp (http://www.gimp.org/). I installed it a while back but haven't gotten around to actually using it. I'd like to drop Photoshop for it.

[IntheNet]

I'm mainly interested in doing desktop publishing and digital video editting...

If this is your prime concern about whether to choose Mac or PC, I think the decision is already made: buy a Mac. There have been numerous discussions here on this point...

The Adobe suite of software, in addition to the Apple OS and the numerous Apple iLife tools, make "desktop publishing and digital video editting" much easier and efficient on an Apple Mac platform.

Go to http://www.apple.com and check resourses on this point... Apple also maintains a Discussion Board if you wish to ask questions of users before committing your $...

IntheNet

[Achtung]

Any other longtime PC users switch to Mac, and is the software gap overblown?

I suppose if you could call it a "switch". I got a 12" Powerbook last summer, and have been very pleased with it. But my desktop computer (which I had at college), as well as the one I use at work every day are both PCs. I didn't have any problem learning the ropes, and I too hadn't really used an Apple since the old IIe's. In terms of the software gap, I haven't run into any issues, and pretty much any major program on the PC is either available on Mac, or there is a similar program that creates PC-compatible files. One example would be OpenOffice (though MS Office is also on Mac), which creates documents, spreadsheets, etc that can be used on any PC.

I'm mainly interested in doing desktop publishing and digital video editting and I know that Mac's excel at these tasks, but what about software to view MS Office documents - is there Word and Exel viewers for Mac so I don't have to plunk down $300 for Office For Mac?

Thanks!

In terms of digital video editing, I've found iMovie to be straightforward in conjunction with my video capture box. If you need more options, you can always go for something like Final Cut. And iDVD works well for DVD authoring--I did after all use it to make a DVD of the Arsenal v United match. ;)

And as has been said before, OpenOffice is a quality freeware office suite, though its not "OS X native", which basically means its not as pretty as something designed specifically for OS X. I still like it. Shame that Apple didn't include a spreadsheet in its new iWork package, but rumor is that it'll be added soon enough. The other option there is AppleWorks, which is kind of an office suite lite, like the similarly-named Microsoft Works. A search in this forum will yield tons of information on the subject of switching. And you can get more info on the MacNN forums (http://forums.macnn.com/).

I would absolutely recommend it though. Something about the Powerbook is just so... nice. Can't really even explain it. I love using it.

[Scarecrow]

Macs are great hardware wise, and OS X is based on BSD Unix. SO the OS is stable. You can do alot with a Mac, you can even triple boot it with OS X, WinXP, and Linux.

I think one aspect of Macs that hurt it is the cost.

I am one of the few who like macs, like PC's and like Linux. Cost is the only reason why I don't own a Mac right now, and also when you look at the business world, Windows has that market.

The nice thing about it nowadays, is that with Linux and OSS you have quite a few programs that will run all that Microsoft has to offer and you can get them for free.

[HiJazzey]

The Office situation is a weak point. I have "Office:mac" and unfortunately, it has some serious weaknesses. For instance, it incorrectly renders non latin text, which is a big problem for me, since I need to open Arabic word documents. It's kind of embarrasing that I have to open them with text edit (which loses some of the formatting).

OpenOffice is the open source version of Sun's StarOffice. It's has the ugly and archaic interface you get with pre kde/Gnome unix apps, but it is well featured and powerful.

My favourite is kOffice, KDE's office app. Unfortunately, there's no release version for mac.
You can get an alpha version for it from here though: http://kde.opendarwin.org/
Apparently a more up to date version is available on fink, if you are willing to compile.