Ok, so I’ve been feeling the need to upgrade my proper computer (old acer laptop) since upgrading the OS to Win7 which has caused the cpu fan controller to go haywire.
In fairness it has had a hard life and could do with a bit of a speed upgrade too.

Since getting an iPad and having an iPhone in my pocket, the laptop is only really used for backups and photo/video editing, kindle book pilfering, music ripping and then the odd ‘work’ based things.

I’ve been looking at Macs – in particular the 27″ iMac non retina version – but I’m still not entirely convinced I could live without windows, I see you can run VMplayer in OS X, but will the USB ports recognise such oddities as serial converters etc.? I’d prefer not to have to put a fresh install of xp onto the laptop and keep it laying around.

Anyone else made the move the fruit based computing?

Sorry wrong forum – mods could you move it please?

You’d have to do a good bit of research on each oddity, plenty of Mac forums about.

Seems silly not to get a Mac if you have an iphone and ipad.

Mac Mini, decent monitor and 16gb memory.will do it all.

I was actually looking at them to plug into the telly box rather as I don’t actually have a computer desk as yet…
Will a Mac mini really be up to the task when it comes to HD video editing?

Dual boot in to Windows?

I’m Mac only so never use Windows. If there is no software that is Windows only that you need then you can live without it. Both Windows and Mac will do more or less the same just in different ways so it’s just a case of picking one and sticking with it.

I switched back to Mac a few years ago with a 27″ iMac c2011 (non retina) quad core. It’s amazing, updated to Mavericks no stress, haven’t tried Yosemite yet but don’t think it’ll be a problem.

There are one or two niche things that I need to use for work that are windows only (zinc/swfstudio) so I run parallels, which you can install one or more copies of windows on, and run virtual machines. It’s fine for bits and bobs but doesn’t seem super stable, though I know developers who work on a VM on Mac most of the time.

I’d never go back to wintel, ever. I’m not an apple fanboi though and considering the cloudification of everything think that chrome os will look much more appealing over the next couple of years.