Windows PC to Intel iMac and back again.
Here's my Apple Experience:
Was always an Amiga man, and used old Apples in the early 90's at uni, but then got my first PC in 1998. Started building my own gaming and video-editing systems right up until February this year, upgrading so often it makes me giddy thinking about how much I spent. Started to get a bit sick of building PCs and
something not being right... usually the bloody noise they made!
I work in IT at a university and earlier this year I got a tax rebate and spent a fortune building an AMD X2 system... which I then never touched! Because in the same month I bought a basic Apple Mac Mini (PowerPC G4 processor) to teach myself OSX as so many staff at work have Apple laptops.
I was so taken by OSX and iLife (especially Garagaeband) that within 10 days I sold the AMD X2 system on ebay, took the Mac Mini back to the store and upgraded it to a 1gb Intel-based 20" iMac.
I was so chuffed with it at first - it really is a thing of beauty, very very quiet, the 20" screen is so excellent and OSX felt like a breath of fresh air. The Dashboard is great, the window effects very satisfying and the general experience very appealing - stuff, like wireless and bluetooth, just worked. Mostly.
However, I soon developed a few niggles - the DVD-RW drive was noisy and clunky and slooooow, the headphone output socket was plagued by interference from the optical mouse, and, well, I started to get annoyed by certain software and OS issues. Things like the built in iSight not working with any messenger software apart from Apples own iChat which is tied to having a £68 a year .mac account or having an AIM account... yuck. Also, a lot of software running in PowerPC emulator mode so running slower than on previous-gen G5 machines... also things like my printer drivers not properly working, iMovie crashing, not being able to view streaming Windows Media, games for Intel iMacs being non-existant etc etc.
I ended up using my one year old PC laptop quite a bit more, even to do stuff like low-end video editing. I actually got to the point, after 3 or 4 months, where I was considering selling the iMac... and then I discovered BootCamp.
It was so easy to setup XP on the iMac in a dual boot configuration. The one-click drivers disk that BootCamp creates was brilliant and it did all just work.
First thing I did was install Half-Life 2 via Steam (my disk was knackered) and I was amazed that I could play at full rez 1680 x 1050 with all settings maxed (though FSAA & AF turned off) and it was as smooth as butter without any stuttering like I used to have. Awesome!
I tried loads of other games - Doom 3, Far Cry, Eve Online, Myst V, Tomb Raider Legends - all playing at 1680 x 1050 with good quality settings... the only games that I had to reduce everything for were Oblivion and FEAR, which were playable but not too pretty - lowish settings, no shadows or HDR, 800x600 rez.
Then, a few months later, I started to realise that I was hardly booting into OSX at all, maybe just to doodle in Garageband, and, er... play music using Front Row.
So I thought about this and realised that the £1300 I paid for it was too much money for what had become basically an aesthetically pleasing mid-spec PC that I couldn't upgrade.... so decided to sell it, and put the proceeds towards a high-spec PC so I could play Oblivion as it's meant to be played.
I sold it for £1000 a month or so ago. I read about these new Intel Core Duo 2 chips and thought I'd wait a few months for prices to drop and build that new PC, making do with my laptop... but I've now gone for it and built myself a Core Duo 2 Media Centre PC with 2gb RAM and an X1800XT with a 19" DVI monitor for less than £900. It's been a pain to build - I received a wrong compontent from OcUK, plus incompatible DDR-800 RAM so I had to downgrade to DDR-667, plus SATA & IDE problems etc etc. But I got there and though it's not pretty and is a little bit noisier than the iMac, it's awesomely brilliant at Oblivion - smooth as you like at 1280x1024, all settings maxed, HDR, all water reflections enabled in the .ini file etc etc.
So, to summarise, I must say the experience of owning an iMac was very refreshing and (apart from the niggles I had) I thought it a lovely machine... just so nice to switch on and go, no mucking about in the BIOS, installing millions of drivers, banging your head on your desk after swapping non-working memory, endlessly configuring settings for optimum performance.... but ultimately it just didn't cut the mustard - it just didn't have the power I needed, the compatibility or the upgradeability, and I felt it way overpriced (I must have had a screw loose when I paid the £1300!).
I do miss that 20" widescreen though. And Garageband. Maybe I'll go get me a cheap G4 Mac mini on ebay... oh, here we go again
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