Now what?

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Feek said:
What's the score with buying internationally? Could I buy from the USA and take advantage of the rather excellent exchange rate at the moment?
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Yes. And as they come with no keyboard you wouldn't need to worry about not having a £ sign. :)
# is on a key combo, I would mash buttons to say which one but that won't help on a PC. :)

Not sure how you'd dodge customs with that one though. Unless of course it still comes under the cost of buying one here.

It'd be over the 'gift' limit, and, if you took a quick flight it would be somewhat odd: "Yes, I took my desktop computer with me..."
 
WotDa said:
It'd be over the 'gift' limit, and, if you took a quick flight it would be somewhat odd: "Yes, I took my desktop computer with me..."
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There are services available where somebody buys the item for you in America and ships it via USPS to you marking it as a "gift".

Apparently shipping via the US Postal Service makes it less likely to be inspected by UK Customs.

Go figure and go Google!
 
WotDa said:
Yes. And as they come with no keyboard you wouldn't need to worry about not having a £ sign. :)
# is on a key combo, I would mash buttons to say which one but that won't help on a PC. :)
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Option + 3 is # on UK Macs, but don;t that mean that Option + 3 is £ on US Macs? I'm sure the £ is in their keyboard somewhere, and seeing as Shift + 3 is # for them, that leaves Option + 3 open for a £ sign right?

The pos of the # really ****** me on the mac actually, I use the # a lot for my job, and Option + 3 is not ideal, and I don't want to swap keys cos then it wont be labelled correctly and that would annoy me too :)
 
keogh said:
The position of the # really ****** me off on the mac actually, I use the # A LOT for my job, and Option + 3 is not ideal, and I don't want to swap keys cos then it wont be labeled correctly and that would annoy me too :)
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:o It doesn't bother me too much, don't use it as often as you though. :p
 
Feek said:
What's the score with buying internationally? Could I buy from the USA and take advantage of the rather excellent exchange rate at the moment?
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Yes, but you are liable for VAT when you bring it back into the UK, and you will still have to pay local sales tax which isn't inclusive in the USA. Should still save a bundle on say an MBP, I saved a couple of hundred when the rate was $1.70. Warranty is international too, so no worries there.
 
As the unladen European Swallow flies, Skully is around 140 miles away from me on a heading of approx 290 degrees.

In other words, he's both north and west.
 
keogh said:
Option + 3 is # on UK Macs, but don;t that mean that Option + 3 is £ on US Macs? I'm sure the £ is in their keyboard somewhere, and seeing as Shift + 3 is # for them, that leaves Option + 3 open for a £ sign right?

The pos of the # really p*sses me on the mac actually, I use the # a lot for my job, and Option + 3 is not ideal, and I don't want to swap keys cos then it wont be labelled correctly and that would annoy me too :)
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On my US MBP:

Option+2=™
Shift+2=@ ("is by enter/return)
Option+3=£
Shift+3=#
Option+4=¢
Shift+4=$

HTH
 
I'm not sure I could purchase an expensive Mac and trust a third party to ship it to me.

Never mind that it'd be sent through the regular postal system :eek:
 
Right then. This is a major bump.

After the above, I kinda forgot about Macs and OS X for a few months because I had no real use for it and I ended up spending the cash that I'd got together to buy something Mac related on a much needed kitchen appliance of some kind that had broken and Mrs. Feek would have never forgiven me if I'd not replaced it.

So nothing happened. I didn't buy a Mac.

It never completely slipped my mind though, there are two people at work who have Macs (one I don't think I knew about and the other lives too far away) and there had been various comments about them. One day back in March the boss who owns three Macs (Mac Pro, iMac and Mac Mini) mentioned that he'd been looking at Hackintoshes and that we should have a play because one of the laptops we use at work is a good model for it.

Now I know that talking about hacks isn't generally done on here and I'm not going to go into any details about how to do it etc so bear with me.

We're both old school in that we'll do stuff basically because we can. Making a laptop into a Mac was a challenge which couldn't be ignored.

It took me three days to do it, and at the end of those three days I had a system running Leopard 10.5.2 which was fully patched and everything worked. I had to use a USB wireless network card to get it onto the network, but it worked.

Over those three days I probably installed OS X more times than most real Apple hardware owners! I learned a huge amount about the workings of the operating system itself and the back end but not much about actually using it.

So I went home on the Friday of that week with the plan of doing the same thing on my home PC to see if I could make it work and actually play with the OS itself to see what I thought of it.

I've put other operating systems on my PC in the past but none have survived longer than a week or so before they've frustrated me and I've gone back to Windows.

So, I got home on the Friday evening and started installing OS X using the skills I'd learned during the week (at work!!). An hour and a half later it was on, patched and all working. It so happened that the hardware I have is perfectly suited for it.

Please don't shout at me again just yet. I know full well what I was doing was against the licence conditions but I still had the urge to try OS X and see what's so great about it. I fully expected to be back with Windows within a couple of weeks.

I wasn't.

I had to put the Windows drive back into the PC a few times to copy data off and just to grab stuff that I needed but since that day back in March, I've been an OS X user. I've upgraded to 10.5.3 and then onto 10.5.4. It's great, and I really like it. Using OS X on PC hardware is indistinguishable from the real thing. Totally. I would challenge anyone who says differently to sit in front of this PC and not know that it wasn't Apple hardware under the desk.

So to repeat the original title from this thread.

Now what?
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"Now what" is simple. "Now what" is me buying a second hand 2008 model Mac Pro tomorrow, driving straight to an Apple Store and buying an 8800 video card to install along with a copy of X-Plane and then when I get home, going online and ordering an extra 16Gb of memory to load it up with :)

My PC is sold. Although I'll still be running a copy of XP in VMWare for various legacy apps that I need, I will no longer have a PC under my desk.

All this from originally playing around loading OS X onto a VM under Windows. And I bet you all thought that I'd never do it :D
 
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