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Help me choose an iMac
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<blockquote data-quote="Gwiwer" data-source="post: 1323369" data-attributes="member: 222073"><p>It's been nice to hear both sides of the argument here. I'm still not sure where I stand on the matter. In many ways, I kind of find myself agreeing with the people who went with the cheaper iMac and then added memory and an external hard drive. I'm kind of leaning towards that at the moment because I'm also going to probably need Word and Microsoft Office for Mac runs around $100+ or so, it seems. I'll probably pick that up and use the remaining money for memory, an external hard drive, and other software. I might try and make do with Open Office, or one of its variants, if I can, but I'm not sure how that's going to work out. I've had mixed results with previous versions for Windows. I'm also seeing conflicting reports about how it runs on 10.7, so things are looking a little sketchy at the moment. I'm probably going to end up with Microsoft Office.</p><p></p><p>I'm not too concerned with the graphics card. It's been my experience that software often runs just fine even with unsupported or underpowered graphics cards. My Windows 7 computer is actually a two year old laptop that just has the horrible Intel mobile graphics card that's essentially worthless. Regardless, I run quite a bit of software on here just fine that technically shouldn't run at all. I experience some slow downs and the occasional error message from doing so, but the software usually works alright for the most part. My father's iMac is probably about 5 years old and is still pretty fast. Sadly, it's probably even faster than this laptop. It's hard to take from that anything particularly relevant though since the only programs he ever seems to use are iTunes, Firefox, and iPhoto. </p><p></p><p>I'm always a wee bit suspicious of what people say on forums about the performance of different programs. It's hard to tell what their frame of reference is. When someone says something like, "Photoshop takes FOREVER to load!" it's hard to know if their definition of forever is measured in seconds or minutes. It's also hard to know how well maintained their system is and what other programs they might be running that could be slowing things down. I mean, the latest version of Photoshop can occasionally take a minute or two to start on this computer and will sometimes be a little sluggish for the first few minutes it's running if I have certain other programs running alongside of it. I find that annoying, but relatively tolerable. Someone else might consider it to be totally unacceptable though. </p><p></p><p>I think the bottom line is I'm going to head over to the Apple store some day next week and talk to the people working there. If they could lay out a convincing argument for buying the more expensive iMac, I'll probably do so. If not, I suppose I'll settle for the cheaper one. I'll try and remember to post a reply in this thread to update it regarding what the people at the Apple store say and which one I ultimately decide to get.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Gwiwer, post: 1323369, member: 222073"] It's been nice to hear both sides of the argument here. I'm still not sure where I stand on the matter. In many ways, I kind of find myself agreeing with the people who went with the cheaper iMac and then added memory and an external hard drive. I'm kind of leaning towards that at the moment because I'm also going to probably need Word and Microsoft Office for Mac runs around $100+ or so, it seems. I'll probably pick that up and use the remaining money for memory, an external hard drive, and other software. I might try and make do with Open Office, or one of its variants, if I can, but I'm not sure how that's going to work out. I've had mixed results with previous versions for Windows. I'm also seeing conflicting reports about how it runs on 10.7, so things are looking a little sketchy at the moment. I'm probably going to end up with Microsoft Office. I'm not too concerned with the graphics card. It's been my experience that software often runs just fine even with unsupported or underpowered graphics cards. My Windows 7 computer is actually a two year old laptop that just has the horrible Intel mobile graphics card that's essentially worthless. Regardless, I run quite a bit of software on here just fine that technically shouldn't run at all. I experience some slow downs and the occasional error message from doing so, but the software usually works alright for the most part. My father's iMac is probably about 5 years old and is still pretty fast. Sadly, it's probably even faster than this laptop. It's hard to take from that anything particularly relevant though since the only programs he ever seems to use are iTunes, Firefox, and iPhoto. I'm always a wee bit suspicious of what people say on forums about the performance of different programs. It's hard to tell what their frame of reference is. When someone says something like, "Photoshop takes FOREVER to load!" it's hard to know if their definition of forever is measured in seconds or minutes. It's also hard to know how well maintained their system is and what other programs they might be running that could be slowing things down. I mean, the latest version of Photoshop can occasionally take a minute or two to start on this computer and will sometimes be a little sluggish for the first few minutes it's running if I have certain other programs running alongside of it. I find that annoying, but relatively tolerable. Someone else might consider it to be totally unacceptable though. I think the bottom line is I'm going to head over to the Apple store some day next week and talk to the people working there. If they could lay out a convincing argument for buying the more expensive iMac, I'll probably do so. If not, I suppose I'll settle for the cheaper one. I'll try and remember to post a reply in this thread to update it regarding what the people at the Apple store say and which one I ultimately decide to get. [/QUOTE]
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Help me choose an iMac
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