No, not that team!
This evening, I placed an order through the Apple Education Store for a brand-new 20-inch 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac with iWork ’08 preinstalled. I have been eying this thing for months as a replacement for my Compaq Presario R3000 laptop. The old girl is still chugging along, but her memory is failing and she can’t keep up with all the apps I need to run at the same time.
I decided to go for a desktop since that’s really what I need at home now. The Presario worked okay as both my desktop and portable laptop, but it’s heavy, and the keyboard isn’t comfortable for long-term use. A Macbook would be lighter, but the keyboard thing would still be an issue. And, since I have a laptop at work, I won’t need to have something to cover the portability thing. In any case, I mainly needed it for work-related things such as taking notes at conferences and staying connected to work while on the road.
I waffled for a while between getting a Windows machine or getting a Mac, but in the end I decided that I’d get more bang for my buck with a Mac. I’m sure there will be a few applications I’ll miss from my PC, but from what I understand, there are more and more equivalent or better applications to do the same thing on a Mac, plus there’s the whole Parallels thing if I want to bother with it.
I’m not going to get rid of the ol’ Presario anytime soon, either. I’m pretty sure it will take me a while to transfer all my important files, and I may just turn her into my dedicated music server, depending on whether or not my external hard drive containing all my tunes will work with the iMac or not.
Welcome to the Dark Side! As the saying is, “Once you Mac, you never go back!”
Seriously, though, you shouldn’t have any problems with your external hard drive, if it’s Windows formatted—Macs speak to most Win storage devices with no problem. The problem will be if you reformat your iPod for the Mac (or get a new iPod)…. Windows machines will say, “Dude, wtf?” if you plug a Mac formatted iPod into them (as with any other Mac formatted storage device, of course—I have this issue with my 3g Nano and one of my flash drives).
But yes, my friend, welcome to the Dark Side (red lightsabre sold separately).
oh, i did that at work last month. so far i’m 98% happy. the 2% is just weird institutional hard drive image issues, which would be easy to fix if i just gave up an hour of my time for them to reinstall.
but yes, SO fun and cool! congrats.
Always been on the Mac team but I just upgraded to the very same machine you did. You will be happy! Congrats!