Congratulations! You won't look back.
Sharf, you leave me confused.
Since I screwed up finding the exact link of my post on my experience as a new iMac owner I'm must copying and pasting my thoughts on being a switcher.
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Okay, before I change my username I figured I would take a moment to express how satisfied I've been with my 24" 2.8, 3GB ram (2GB easily user installed) iMAC. I am of the feeling satisified iMAC owners quietly go along with their business and the people with problems seem to be the squeakiest wheels.
I've been skimming these boards for well over a year as I agonized about a purchase. My delay in purchase was 2 fold. 1) was first a function of waiting for the best configuration - Rumors that Apple was going to move to Intel... Rumors of a re-designed iMac.. Rumors/Delays of the new operating system.. 2) Delayed a few more months, and almost backed out completely based on these boards and the exhausting Dead Pixal rants, Glossy Screen, Backlight bleed... posts - nearly talked me out of it. Although I think it's wise to wait a while on any new platform lauch for the kinks to work out, the ratio of negative to positive reviews was huge.
I've been a computer hobbiest all of my life, and am used to DOS prompts and micromanaging/ customizing pretty much every aspect of my PC's. It was a leap of faith that OSX was everything that was promised. Although not perfect (what is?) I find it extremely intuitive and the few nuances there are were picked up fairly easily. Probably one of my biggest adjustment was that the files (pics,music, videos) were "There somewhere" and I didn't need to structure my folders/subfolders/directorytree in such a fashion that made sense to whatever software was using it - but structure things/folders by what worked for me.
Another hobby of mine is editing home videos for sharing amongst family and friends. I have to air a little frustration about the 600meg of AVI files that Pinnacle (PC video program) imported over the years that seem basically worthless right now to my MAC. I understand there are converters, or I may just re-import my movies from the original tapes - but either way I know there is a solution that I will eventually get to... I use Final Cut Express and final burn with iDVD. Steep learning curve in FCE, but reading the manual (a must) and pinging various user groups I'm bumping along fairly well. The performance of the iMAC is impressive rarely seeing a beach ball, rendering speeds are great, multitasking not a problem. Looking forward to seeing what "Spaces" can do for me.
I have downloaded the trial version VMwares Fusion. One of the reasons I wanted to move to a MAC - the ability to run XP whenever I needed to. So after 3 weeks, I spent the most time installing XP - Not a function of Fusion whatsoever, but a function of my version of XP is SP1 and about 200gajillion megs of upgrades and countless virtual reboots. Anyway to my suprise, I haven't had any reason to run XP at all, other than to show my Father-in-law how cool it is that you can do it.. Maybe a reason will pop up somewhere, but I'll probably let my trial period expire in the meanwhile.
Now about the unit itself - No Dead Pixals. No Freezes. Backlight Bleed/Color shift? I don't know. I haven't noticed. When I opened a full screen white page and I stared, I did notice one area seemed brighter than another. I have never noticed it unless it was the 1 time I actually dug for it. Glossy Screen? I have 3 windows to the right of the screen that go along my right shoulder.. A room over more windows. While my machine is running I don't have any glare issues whatsoever. Had to turn the brightness down, and found that Adobe's RGB profile was most pleasing. My photographs don't print out as brilliant as they look on the screen, so people making a living on photography should take note and take the time to calibrate further..
Did my family's Christmas cards in iPhoto in a matter of about an hour. Ordered them online and got to my house in 4 business days. Can't wait to do a book of our summer vacations by the lake.
I don't use Safari because Firefox let's me view some more windows-based videos (i.e. msnbc.com..). I have to run Firefox in Rosetta mode (or whatever it is called in options) because my kids like to run shockwave games at their kid's websites.. Seems slower to load Firefox now in OSX than it is to load websites into Explorer in VM Fusion. I'm sure this will pass in time..
Forgot to add, .mac is pretty cool. When I take pics of say a holiday gathering - I use iPhoto to put them online and I send an email out to family with the URL (password protected) so they can download whatever they want. Also haven't had a use yet for Time Machine, but I'm sure I will someday. Really awesome and easy way to backup.
I'm an extremely satisified iMAC owner and find myself slowly turning into an apple evangelist converting folks... Looking forward to being a productive member of this board as my knowledge increases.
Thanks for listening.
