New to mac need help

[plop]

I'm new to macs but looking to buy one very soon. Is there a difference between getting a mac with the current OS compared to getting a mac with the upgraded OS? Basically, is it better to wait til mid to late July to get a mac with Lion installed on it or get a mac now and do the upgrade?

thanks very much

 

[8CoreWhore]

The only advantage to waiting is you won't have to upgrade. But upgrading is free and very easy to do, so why wait?

 

[plop]

Coming from the PC world to the Mac world, all I have to draw on are my PC upgrade concerns that may or may not apply. But, here are my concerns:

1. Major vs minor releases. Major new release upgrades seems to run heavier (slower & doesn't feel as tight) than the major new release. Although, small incremental upgrades don't have any noticeable difference in performance and do fix some bugs.

2. Recovery. When restoring after a hard disk crash on a PC you have to reinstall the OS from the DVD or CD to the lastest full version then layer all of the incremental upgrades one by one to restore the OS. This is tedious and sometimes difficult because if you don't put the layers down in the right order the OS isn't fully functional.

3. Psychological ease, having Lion cleanly installed from the factory on my new system puts me at ease knowing that I won't be lugging around extra unused "dead code" and obsolete features eating up hard disk space.

4. Training. I just want to learn one version (10.7) of the OS.

5. Patching. I'm sure Lion will have it's issues when it first arrives and I'll probably have to install multiple bug fixes early on, so I just want to keep track of one version of OS and have to worry about past compatibility issues with the HW, OS, nor applications.

 

[nonamelive]

Well, I suggest you buy it right now. You can just play with the current OS (Snow Leopard), and also use your old PC at the same time. When Lion is released, you can have a refresh install and use it as the main OS, because at that time your Snow Leopard would be a mess and there's no really big difference between Lion and Snow Leopard. Just my $0.02.

 

[baryon]

Coming from the PC world to the Mac world, all I have to draw on are my PC upgrade concerns that may or may not apply. But, here are my concerns:

1. Major vs minor releases. Major new release upgrades seems to run heavier (slower & doesn't feel as tight) than the major new release. Although, small incremental upgrades don't have any noticeable difference in performance and do fix some bugs.

2. Recovery. When restoring after a hard disk crash on a PC you have to reinstall the OS from the DVD or CD to the lastest full version then layer all of the incremental upgrades one by one to restore the OS. This is tedious and sometimes difficult because if you don't put the layers down in the right order the OS isn't fully functional.

3. Psychological ease, having Lion cleanly installed from the factory on my new system puts me at ease knowing that I won't be lugging around extra unused "dead code" and obsolete features eating up hard disk space.

4. Training. I just want to learn one version (10.7) of the OS.

5. Patching. I'm sure Lion will have it's issues when it first arrives and I'll probably have to install multiple bug fixes early on, so I just want to keep track of one version of OS and have to worry about past compatibility issues with the HW, OS, nor applications.

No need to worry, these are Macs not PCs
You won't have any of the above problems if you buy a Mac now. All of the OS gets updated when you get Lion, so no dead code.
Lion is very similar to Snow Leopard, so you won't need to learn new things other than Mission Control, but that's seriously simple.