HoopsMcCann said:
that 5th ave. store looks incredibly cool, too
i want to go just to check out the store itself
When my iPod died with like 5 days left on the warranty, I decide to walk into the Apple Store in SoHo with it. I got there before 10 in the morning and at the "Genius Bar" they told me I had to make an appointment--the rub being that they only do same-day appointments and the earliest appointment they had left (remember, it was 10 a.m. when I walked in) was at 9 p.m. I went back at 9, waited an hour till 10 and I did walk out of there with a new iPod.
I luse a Mac Desktop G5 for some work I do and I like OS X and obviously all of the software you might need from the MS suite for writing to Quark to InDesign, Photoshop etc. runs on the mac. The one thing I will caution is that Apple is selling overpriced hardware to people who want their operating system. You can get a comparable computer with the same power as one of the new macs running the Intel Duo Core processor for a fraction of the price, but the machine will be running windows, not OS X. Apple's business model is that people want the apple software bad enough to overpay for the hardware. It's a personal choice you have to make.
As an aside, when Apple decided to build its new machines with Intel processors, instead of on the Motorolla processors they had been using, they opened a can of worms. They had to rewrite OS X to run on the Intel architecture, and the minute those early versions of the operating system were released to developers the hackers got to work on it. You can actually now run OS X--hacked, patched versions that are easy to find--on any Intel-based machine. If you want to go to the trouble, you can build a machine with very comparable parts to the new Macs--same processor, components, etc.--and minimize the chance that some components don't work with the hacked operating system. The machine you build will cost a fraction of the price of what Apple is charging. I know most people aren't going to go to that kind of trouble, but I am running OS X on an old Dell laptop that isn't even optimally set up for it, and it runs fairly well. I did it just because I could.
The flip side to that, is that since the new Apple computers are build with Intel processors, it is easy to install Windows on them and dual boot them so they run OS X and Windows, which is kind of handy.
One thing to keep in mind if you buy one of the newer macs with the Intel processor--a lot of the software developers have not yet come out with new versions of their software to run on the new Intel architecture. So the Intel version of OS X runs an emulation program called Rosetta that translates the code, which was designed for the Motorola architecture, so it will run on the Intel-based machine. The net result is that some programs might run kind of slow on the new Macs until new versions meant to run on them are developed. This happens with the Adobe CS 2 products--photoshop, illustrator, indesign, etc. They run slower on the new macs than they do on a G5, for which they were designed, because of the extra layer of the computer having to run the instructions through the emulator. Just something to keep in mind until all of the software catches up with new Intel-based OS X versions.
