Looking at getting a computer for the kids (age 8 and 4). I made the mistake of calling into PC world on the way home. After playing with the imac for 10mins, the PC's look bloody awful. The imac looks like a much nicer, friendlier option. I have some questions…

If I put a file on a memory stick on a mac, will a pc read it and vice versa?

Are there many cool little applications for the mac, like you can get for ipods which the kids might like?

Are they reliable, and if they go wrong, how bad is the bill likely to be?

The computer is going in a playroom / spare bedroom, so it would be good if it looked nice ;-). I am pretty OK with dull PC's for work, but the imacs look much more inspired for the kids to use. Thoughts?

If I put a file on a memory stick on a mac, will a pc read it and vice versa?

depends .jpg .pdf .rtf yes as long you have the readers installed things like word files you'll need word or a reader, and thing like autoCAD i believe only work on a pc you'll be able to look at them with a .dwg reader but maybe not alter them, but you can always dual boot it so you have a mac and a PC. Not that much of this will concern the young'ns

Are there many cool little applications for the mac, like you can get for ipods which the kids might like?

yep you can download stuff from the apps store.

Are they reliable, and if they go wrong, how bad is the bill likely to be?

they are known to be more reliable, but they do sometimes break, harddrives, RAM are easy enough to change other bits are harder. You could buy apple care which covers you for 3 years.

Personally I would buy a macmini, as if the screen goes you still have your system.

[*]

(make sure its the latest imac, i dunno if Pc world would have the latest ones in yet as they were only released last week!)

PC world did have the latest ones in….27" screen…looked ace 😉

All the apps in the apps store looked like they were for the iphone, do they run on a imac too?

It's likely that your kids will be using a PC when they go to school.

you can definitely download things like timezone, currency, measurement calculators as well as weather apps don't know about games??

Yes CAD, audio, word etc all covered. Same as PC's.
yes There is more than just the apps store. same as pcs.
very the same as a PC repair. Electronics fail so rarely its not even worth considering.

You'll go through about 4 pc's for the lifespan of one mac. And a whole lot less reinstalling of operating systems. My 9 year old mac has had about 3 clean installs mainly at major OS upgrade times.

My work PC has had 3 in 1 year and only deals with email and a few word docs and is professionally maintained. It crashes and freezes.
The mac is barley looked after, thrashed with video and graphics and internet and is only recently unable to keep up with modern web content. But its still working.

Mac minis suffer with their shared graphics memory. But for a couple of kids would be ideal.

There is no problem with kids being able to use both a Mac and a PC. Surely a major skills advantage! And they will never lose their homework with time machine. And their slide shows will be much better. Have you seen the wee PC girl on the telly – her slide show is pish!

We have an iMac.

My kids love it. They seem to spend all their time making movies and songs on the built in software (iMovie and Garageband).

They've not had any problems with having a PC at school.

Are they reliable,

We've had ours about 4 years. No issues so far. Only a 20" screen though.

…the robustness thing is quite important. I work away from home, and I don't want to be fixing the computer every time I get home. They use my PC at the moment and I have had to reinstall the O/S from scratch after they had been using it.

Mac minis suffer with their shared graphics memory.

What does this mean i have only recently taken a interest in the computers insides and understand a far bit. So in the real world what would shared graphics do?

i'm sure the same can be achieved with a PC – but with a mac its very easy to create an admin account (yours, password protected) and then separate accounts for the kids

you can then control which applications they are able to use etc – and they won't be able to add new applications. I'm no expert but this should prevent them from killing it

as mentioned above – get an external hard drive at the same time (I have a 1 gig MyBook, which seems pretty good), and you can use the included "Timemachine" software to auto back everything up, which should make any problems easy to fix

use up your ram for processing graphics. a dedicated graphics card uses its own memory.
basically a dedicated card is much better if you are planning on doing graphic heavy work with photo/video processing, gaming etc If you are just planning on using the thing for word processing, music etc it will be fine.

James

they are known to be more reliable, but they do sometimes break, harddrives, RAM are easy enough to change other bits are harder. You could buy apple care which covers you for 3 years.
BAsed on what, based on the fact that everyone you know has had acomputer, and they broke, if everyone had had a apple they all be complaiinig about them.. ffs
I would suggest you need the apple care cover, as there fecken expensive when they break (logic board, not memory or hdd), and go with the idea when it does break & it's not covered you buy a new one. Having taken one to bits for m8 to see if anything could be done, and then had him take it back to the apple approved repair shop. Logic (motherboard) board failure, [which I did diagnose for him] a nice £400 wasted on a 3 year old machine, but being as he's paid around £70 for the apple shop to tell him that, he felt oblided to have the repair.
If you don't believe me about failures, try a quick search on ebay for 'broken' mac's being sold for spare parts…

They use my PC at the moment and I have had to reinstall the O/S from scratch after they had been using it.
Then lock it down, give them their own accounts without admin rights & password protect your account, it's not rocket science.

My work PC has had 3 in 1 year and only deals with email and a few word docs and is professionally maintained. It crashes and freezes.
I'd suggest you kick you IT guys up the arse or allow them to buy decent machine in the first place, none of may machine (3 year leased) @ work need 'regular' rebuilds.

Don't get me wrong, i think they look and work brilliantly, but don't be sucked in to thinking they the answer to "life the universe and everything".

try a quick search on ebay for 'broken' mac's being sold for spare parts…

thats because PC's hold little to no second hand value, so yeah broken macs get sold for spares where as PC's get binned. 😆

If nothing else, getting the kids a Mac will allow them early access to that smug Apple fanboy world which will prove invaluable in middle class circles for years to come…

🙄 @ tails,

😈 @ crikey

They use my PC at the moment and I have had to reinstall the O/S from scratch after they had been using it.

No worries there then. Trojans, viruses, poorly written software, these don't exist on Mac's.

You don't want them to play games on it do you? Good, get a Mac.

The guy who I share an office with has just installed Windows 7 on his PC at home.

I witness a very lengthy and complicated telephone conversation that he had with his wife telling her how to connect the computer to the internet. He was banging on about all kinds of complicated stuff deep inside control panel. He is a computer whiz, she obviously is not.

I switch my MacBook, it connects to the internet, every time, without fail.

It just works.

Office for Mac produces files which are compatible with PC files, provided you save them in the correct format, much in the same fashion that you might save files in an older format if you work and home PCs are of a different age.

I was slightly nervous about compatibility issues when we bought our Mac 3 years ago – those fears were completely unfounded.

Get the iMac installed with Parallels or VMWare when you buy it. Then you can install what ever flavour of Windows 'ware for the occasional app that won't run on OS X, like some games, and so's you can use mapping software like Anquet or Tracklogs. Those are about the only things that you'll need Windows for, Office is available for Mac, and a lot of docs will open natively anyway, and you can always go the PDF route. Hell, even my iPhone opens Word docs without any hassles. It's worth noting that the top of the range 27" iMac uses quad-core desktop processors for the first time; previously they all used laptop processors due to heat issues in the small case. It'll even take up to 16Gb of RAM, if you feel the need for some HD movie editing… 😀

Me and the wife were recently talking about the truly good stuff we spent our money on, the mac came very high up the list, 3 yrs on I would have to buy another tomorrow if it broke.

PC's in general are for companies to run databases on, or geeks to soup up. Macs are for people with life's, your kids will love it.

Buy one, you won't regret it!

O and just buy whatever the basic one is these days and get an external hard drive to back up and store. The mac will easily than act as a server for any wireless laptops pc or mac.

He is a computer whiz

A computer whiz would have left it in a state where it just worked, just like all my windows PC's have done for many years. I never have to talk my wife through anything with my computers because they just work.

For the OP, I'm sure either will be great, if you really want an expensive computer for your kids then get an imac, but as you say, kids are prone to installing all sorts of crap on there and killing it.

Me? I'd buy the cheapest thing I could get my hands on, actually I'd use an old PC that I'd replaced and give my kids that, like I have. The exception being warcraft which needs a bit too much grunt than my sons computer has. I'm not sure how a mac will inspire kids to do computery things more than a PC will mind but each to their own.

I have 2 Minis for the kids – one thing is the benefit of the OS with built in options for a "restricted" access to all of the internet – and a log to check up on teenage activities (computers in lounge! but still…)
Actual best benefit is the fact that the mini can be very quickly unplugged if there is bad behaviour – DIRE CONSEQUENCES as far as a teenager is concerned – no MSN!
Timemachine as mentioned is good and very happy with all performance of wireless built in for home network. Easy. Oh and allows restriction to log on times and length of log on – have a look at the apple website under parental controls.

I hate this myth that macs are bullet proof, its so far from the truth. I used to work for a firm where everyone uses macs, without fail. I'm still friends with the boss and he is always complaining that at least once a month one of the macs is getting fixed. its normally the logic board and its always bloody expensive. One of them is 6 months old, been in to be fixed 3 times.

I've had my Dell for 3 years, never had one problem with it, ever…

I thought macs were kids computers!

i have had a mac for about the last 8 years. the first one i had was getting long in the tooth, and i was asking alot of it running 4 or 5 250mb photoshop files all at once and the internet etc. i'd had it 3yrs and i dropped it and the logic board failed, cue £600 repair, i didn't bother because i got a brand new MacBook for £930 through the student store, and it's been going strong for another 4 years, only had the inverter cable changed under warranty.

Defo buy the apple care, in my experience the system is much better/reliable than any PC i have ever owned, but, new born babies die, fluffy bunnies get run over, far worse tragedies happen in the world, i can accept that my mac will break once in a while.

If you can buy from an apple store (that has a genius bar) then that is by far the easiest way to 1) buy your mac 2) have it repaired, especially if you have apple care.

As for windows compatibility, all new macs are intel based, are all set up to run windows dual boot on a windows partition. when you want to switch to windows, just reboot and hold alt and it will let you pick windows. I run dual boot just to use a single cad package, and nothing else.

save yourself some money, but a PC and stick Linux on there. It's effectively the same OS as Mac, and negates all the issues people have with PC's.

jon1973

very good point, people won't though because they're lazy!

Stop trying to fool us the Mac is for you more than the kids, kids wold be happy with £250 laptop. Which would be fine for what kids want to use them for.

crikey – Member
If nothing else, getting the kids a Mac will allow them early access to that smug Apple fanboy world which will prove invaluable in middle class circles for years to come…

Congrats. You are now 'that guy'.

Macs are for people with life's

That made me LOL. Sound's like you've really bought in to the power of the Apple advertising machine. They've managed to convince you that your Mac is a way of life.

save yourself some money, but a PC and stick Linux on there. It's effectively the same OS as Mac, and negates all the issues people have with PC's.

Assuming your time has no value. Alternatively, buy a Mac. It's effectively the same OS as Linux, and negates all the issues people have with finding drivers, tweaking system settings etc that people have with Linux.

They've managed to convince you that your Mac is a way of life.

On the contrary. They've convinced me – through experience – that my life is better spent doing other things than dragging and dropping files onto my MP3 player, installing obscure system add-ons, and the countless other things that Windows users spend their time doing instead of enjoying their lives.

Assuming your time has no value. Alternatively, buy a Mac. It's effectively the same OS as Linux, and negates all the issues people have with finding drivers, tweaking system settings etc that people have with Linux.

Bundled Linux builds take about 30 min to install and work out of the box – I needed no drivers for my 2 year old dell laptop when I installed Ubuntu – in fact it recognised external HDD that Vista didn't. It's not true that Linux needs a lot of tweeking now.

Much cheaper option than the premium of several hundred pounds you pay for a mac.

dragging and dropping files onto my MP3 player, installing obscure system add-ons,

I don't do any of that, ever. I use i-tunes and my PC automatically installs he system upgrades.

What I don't have is the hassle of the disk images and mounting that you do on a mac!

It just works

Of course they do, try googling "help with my Mac" and 131,000,000 sites come up!

Thats a lot of online help for something that "just works"

Yay, a PC Mac War thread, perfect for a friday at work 🙂

Get a PC, set up separate users for an admin + kids account (even one account per kid), install a free antivirus and off you go. Cheaper, and they'll be able to run all the software that the other kids at school play with.

Just give 'em an abacus, never did me any harm.

I remember when all this was fields etc etc….