advice needed

My 10 year old son seems to have a flair for IT having taught himself html and made a couple of website as well as other stuff that I don't actually understand myself. We have a 5 year old imac G3, 350 Mhz, OS9.1 on which he has learned all he knows.

He is complaining more and more that this machine is not able to do what he wants and cannot take software, downloads or otherwise, that he wants to use.

Is it time to get a new machine (which one?) or could we upgrade (how?).
Either way he seems devoted to Mac, (could that limit him when he goes to seondary school?).

Independent advice would be very gratefully recieved.

The Mac Mini was designed just for him. You don't want to break your budget, but at the same time give him a more up to date system...

1.25GHz PowerPC G4
512MB DDR333 SDRAM
ATI Radeon 9200 with 32MB DDR video memory
40GB Ultra ATA hard drive

$574 - www.apple.com

I wouldn't expect his knowledge of Macs to limit him anyway in the future. If he is already computer literate, he'll have no problems picking up the basics of a Windows system.

timu said:

Is it time to get a new machine (which one?) or could we upgrade (how?).
Either way he seems devoted to Mac, (could that limit him when he goes to seondary school?).

Independent advice would be very gratefully recieved.

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You might be well advised to ask your question on a number of different forums to get a wide range of opinions, for a start..

On this Mac forum the majority might say your son wouldn't be disadvantaged at school by using a Mac at home, but personally I suspect a PC would be a better choice simply because PCs are much more widely used in the world of work, and in schools.

It depends on what he is wanting to do in secondary school, what classes he will take. Some will want him to use Macs if he is doing web design / design etc, while others will want him to use PC's, accounting / CAD, etc etc. I know for my son I would get him a nice Mac, probably an iMac, or if it needs to be portable an iBook or PowerBook and then throw virtual pc on it so that he can run PC and Mac programs.. While PC.. if one of his classes needs a Mac.. then he'll have to use one of theirs instead of his own, since so far PC's do not have a decent emulator for the Mac OS.

All the basics are portable between operating systems. HTML is HTML on any system, as are most of the scripting languangages and whatnot being used for web development. OS GUIs are pretty much the same or are similar enough that anyone above the "literate" stage can figure stuff out after a minimum of time, so if he prefers a Mac then you should probably stick with it. Also, the heart of OSX is Unix which is very nice for people that like to hack around with their OS. You can allways pick up a cheap no-OS PC from dell ($300 or so from the small buisness store) and install linux on it too, but that can be quite a project for someone new to that sort of thing.

The Mini is nice (and cheap) but if you have extra money to spend a powermac G5 would probably the best choice (cheapest being $1500), but either way since you may not have an extra monitor around you might have to pop for one of those as well.

Also, if you pick up either a powermac G5 or an iMac G5 you can save a few bucks by getting it with the minimum memory and then buying more from crucial or the like at a much better price than Apple charges.

Don't worry about the fact that work/school etc usually use PCs. It really isn't difficult to know two systems, especially when you're raised with computers from a young age. I went from Amiga to DOS to Old Windows (3.1) to New Windows (95,98...) to Linux to Mac. Once I'd learnt the Amiga, I picked up each new OS (except maybe Linux which seems deliberately overcomplicated) within a day or so. Also almost anything - documents etc - are compatible between them so there shouldn't be any difficulty there.

Talk to him anyway and see what he's comfortable with - I'd be surprised if he hasn't already used PCs in primary school and formed opinions on which he prefers.

dan828 said:

The Mini is nice (and cheap) but if you have extra money to spend a powermac G5 would probably the best choice (cheapest being $1500), but either way since you may not have an extra monitor around you might have to pop for one of those as well.

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Although very smart, this is still a 10 year old kid we're talking about. I would think for the sake of mom's budget, a G5 isn't something he really would need yet. I'm sure he'd appreciate the more expensive system at a later time in his life.

Doh, thanks Avid, I didn't see that he was 10 Yeah no doubt about that.. the mini would be nice He probably would not be learning accounting, CAD, etc and at that age.. yeah whatever he wants and is in the budget that you've set aside

Avid6eek said:

Although very smart, this is still a 10 year old kid we're talking about. I would think for the sake of mom's budget, a G5 isn't something he really would need yet. I'm sure he'd appreciate the more expensive system at a later time in his life.

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LOL. Yeah, although when I was 10 I badgered my parents into buying me an Apple //e for about 2K for my birthday.

Thank you all for your thoughts on this. The mac mini seems to fit the bill in giving him extra capacity without breaking the bank although we'll need a monitor.

Thanks again.

Avid6eek said:

Although very smart, this is still a 10 year old kid we're talking about. I would think for the sake of mom's budget, a G5 isn't something he really would need yet. I'm sure he'd appreciate the more expensive system at a later time in his life.

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My 8 year old son has an XP2200 system & an iMac, he is quite happy flitting back and forth between them although he isn't into programming either yet. At school he pretty much teaches the IT classes.

My 13 year old daughter has a 1Ghz G4 eMac which she loves.

Amen-Moses

timu said:

Thank you all for your thoughts on this. The mac mini seems to fit the bill in giving him extra capacity without breaking the bank although we'll need a monitor.

Thanks again.

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If you go the Mini route and later find he needs a PC for some specific school course you can later add a cheap barebones PC system for about 200 pounds. I predict that later on this year/early next year when the nano-itx becomes available there will be some tiny systems coming out, you could probably get one of those and a KVM switch snd still have plenty of desk space available.

Oh a word of warning on the monitor front, the really cheap flat-panels (i.e less than 150 quid) can be far too slow for FPS gaming, if you have the room I would suggest sticking with CRT for now as you can pick up some really cheap 17"-19" models now.

Amen-Moses