Mac, what's the deal?

but u use that dell for hl2, no?

i'm waiting to buy a mac till tiger comes out.

Yes, I brought it home this and last weekend to play games. Finished Half Life 2 and most of Far Cry this weekend. So yeah, if you're into gaming, the PC is the only option. You can play World of Warcraft on the Mac at least though.

it looks like my work is done here ;)

dek and others have covered it pretty well, the only thing i'll really add is that macs are truly plug-and-play. case in point: my buddy has his nikon D70 with him a few weeks ago (which is absofreakinlutely gorgeous btw) and we wanted to view the shots he'd taken. we plugged it into my iBook, opened iPhoto and *boom* we're importing photos. no drivers to mess with, no installing and restarting, nothing, just plug and go. beautiful. i will admit it took me a few minutes to install a printer driver onto a powerbook in my friend's office a few weeks ago because they didn't have the cd and i had to track down the driver online, download, then install it, but it was also a print/fax/copier that needed a specialized driver.

is the os different? yes. if you're a proficient windows user it'll take you an hour or two to be able to get around ok, a week to get pretty proficient, and about two weeks til you never want to use a pc again ;) i still have my pc at home, it sits there and doesn't do much unless i need to play with after effects (which i haven't transferred to the mac yet). i'm more of a console gamer so not having the pc for games isn't really an issue.

as far as laptop vs desktop, now that i'm able to sit on my couch and check my e-mail i'm not sure i'll ever go back to a desktop again :D i would love a g5 and for that reason have thought about getting a g5 iMac at some point but love being mobile. i love my iBook and its great for some things, i have no speed probs in photoshop, flash, dreamweaver, etc. i am running into its limitations when it comes to other apps tho, for shake, motionbuilder, and final cut i could really use more screen resolution (ibook is limited to 1024x768). i'm hoping to be able to score a powerbook at some point and i'll prob get the upgraded graphics card when i do, but for general everyday use and casual design an iBook would be perfect for you. plus you'll have this certain elitist attitude when you're using it in starbucks looking around at all the guys on these huge ugly clunky pc's ;)

chris

fig did a good promo...

but just to ballance it out, my girlfriend's PB's iphoto didn't import pics well w/ my coolpix3100... in fact to this day it doesn't work (i/she didn't bother getting drivers...we just burn CDs from the PC and copy -- drag and drop -- to the pbook.)

I plugged my Powershot G2 through the USB port on the front of my computer; WinXP automatically installed the appropriate drivers and I can just open and view the contents of the CF card in the camera like it was an external drive. No extra program to fumble around in. :p

You can do the same thing on the Mac, moochan. It's mounted to the desktop as a disk image. So you can browse the file structure and drag and drop files, or use iPhoto or Image Capture to transfer them.

Still, I want that iBook. I'm prolly starting my own firm soon. So I'll wait until then to get a PB.

The nice thing about the PB's is that you can run a dual display with them. Just plug in an external monitor and use the laptop screen as a secondary one. The iBooks only do mirroring. Without a hack anyway. I think there is a firmware hack to make them do dual.

yea there is and it requires you to just double click a script and thats it ;)

The issues with camera drivers and such are really no longer an issue. Most new cameras you simply plug into the computer (if you are running Windows XP) and your hear a "ti-ding" sound. Then you get a little magic menu asking what you want to do with the photos, whether you'd like to print them, view them, copy them to your computer, burn them to a CD, etc. Of course, you can disable the menu, and you'll simply get a new drive in "My Computer" (F: for example) where you can browse the files on the camera as if they were on your computer already.