I bought a Mac Mini in Mid December 2008
and a 24 inch iMac mid June 2009

There is a lot to like about a Mac, the things impress me most are:

1. Very low power consumption. The Mini is best for this. Using a "Watts UP?" it only consumes about 25 Watts. This does not include power consumed by the monitor or any peripherals. And in "Sleep" mode it is less than 1 Watt!

   The iMac, which includes the 24 inch display takes about 76 Watts when running with the screen brightness turned all the way down, which is still brighter than I would prefer. And about 1.6 Watts in "Sleep" mode.

2. Sleep mode is fantistic. It powers down in about 1 second, and takes a couple seconds to wake up and have you right back where you were before.

   I have both Apple's wireless mouse and keyboard. When I leave my computer I first power down the keyboard, then use the mouse to put it in "Sleep". To wake it up I touch the keyboard's power button, and wala I am right back where I was. Of course with the Mini I have to turn the display on and off separately.

   I almost never Shut Down or Restart. In fact, using the Terminal uptime command right now on the iMac, I see it has been up 10 days, 17 hours and 49 minutes.

   I have it set so if no keys are pressed it turns off the display after 10 minutes, and goes into Sleep after 15 minutes. If I notice the display going off I have 5 minutes to touch the mouse or shift key to bring it back. This sometimes happens during a lengthly down load. I try not to just walk away and let it automatically go into Sleep because my keyboard and mouse would be on; and just the act of turning them off will wake the computer.

3. Terminal Mode puts you into the UNIX command world which is very powerful. But, you do have to learn the commands. The reward for learning even just the most basic UNIX commands is: Many things can be done much easier and faster than by using the Mouse point and click. Remember, the Mac OS X is all implemented and run under UNIX. Which is a much better base than anything Microsoft has ever had or used. Why wouldn't you want to access it?

   It is not my purpose here to teach UNIX, but I can't resist giving a couple examples for those who own a Mac and have never tried Termini mode.

   • First you need to find "Terminal". It is in the /Applications/Utilities folder. Yes, I found and copied and pasted it here from a "Terminal" window, because it was easier and faster than using Finder. I suggest you use Finder and drag/drop Terminal onto your Desktop or Dock.
   • When you open the Terminal window simply type cal and press Return. You will see a calendar of the current month.
   • When I type: cal 1934 and Return I see calendar for the year I was born, and can see I was born on Friday. cal will give you a calendar for any year up to 9999.
   • You can look at the "manual page" for any UNIX command with the man command. To see the manual for cal type man cal and press enter. The "cal manual" is more than one page, press the space bar to see the next page. Press the letter "Q" to exit the man display.
   • One more fun command: uptime try it, you can also see its manual if you like. Lastly, I should point out UNIX is case sensitive, and most commands are in lower case.

   There are many books and web pages about UNIX, if you want to see a good Mac Unix Tutorial, I have a link here.

4. Apple's packaging always looks great. Even the boxes they come in look proud. Way back when they made the Apple II it looked better than any other computer you could buy then.

   But, even then and until now Apple has never addressed getting rid of the heat. When I feel the top of the iMac it gets hotter than I like. As far as I know, Apple has never made it in the "process control" area where 24 hour reliability is a must. Overheating, and failures it causes is something Apple needs to address.

5. I haven't called Apple many times, but when I have I have been very favorably impressed. Except when I tried to call Apple's Store in Las Vegas, and couldn't get the person I spoke with to tell me their location, or if they had a Mac mini in stock. This call caused me to delay 4 months before I bought my first Apple product.

However there are a few considerations before you buy a Mac

1. The iMac is OK for using Google and I like Apple's Safari browser better than Microsoft's. However, much of Apple's software is terrible. In my opinion Apple tries to be too cute. For example:

   iPhoto tries to take over all you photographs storing them in its own format not .jpg which you need to include them in an email. Yes, iPhoto tries to help you send them in Apple's Mail; but I want to use Gmail. Further, it puts photos in different folders if they were taken on different day; but I want all my trip photos in the same folder. Even worse: It has ton's of code to try to recognise people's face, so you could find all photos with Nancy's face; but this is an inpossible task for software--age makes faces change, maybe even grow a beard.

   To make a long story short I have been trying to find a simple editor I can use mostly for updating the HTML files for my web pages. Apple's TextEdit won't let me see the source files, I downloaded "Opened Office", "Text Wrangler", and something called "Plain Text Editor". I haven't tried to use the Doccument features enough in Opened Office to even get to where I wanted to try their spelling checker; but the other two both claim to have a spell checker. And it is in their drop down menues. I suspect they are both linking to the same Apple code? Anyway, neither is usable. Worse! Spastic as all hell. Sometimes they seem to work then hang up and won't function at all???

2. I tried to print out the "TextWrangler User Manual" which is a 270 page .pdf file, and the company (Bar Bones Software, Inc.) does not sell a printed copy. I have a HP deskjet 5650 printer, and the Mac has a driver for it--the installation was trivial. But, I assume this was written by HP, and it is full of bugs. It took an entire day to get it printed out--and wasted lots of paper in the process.
3. It is obvious, when companies are producing software as part of a product, they have to make it work on Windows, then as a side note if they have nothing better to do they will try to make it work on Apple computers.

   Even the hackers with evil intent make their stuff work on Windows first. However, as Apple computers become more popular, it is logical to expect more and more software to be written for the Intel based Mac's. Further, because both Linux and Mac OS X have their roots in UNIX it is relatively easy for programs to work on either. Lastly: If Micorsoft's Win 7 isn't a REAL winner. More of us would rather switch than fight.

For surfing the Internet the Mac is great.
But, if you only have one computer it is best to stay with the main stream.

Dedicated Apple people, will say you can run Windows on a Mac. They are probably right, but with the price of PC's why not have both?

Snow Leopard on my iMac -- problems
2009 September 2 09:02 I installed Snow Leopard

The installation took about 45 minutes and was complete after a restart at approximately 2009 September 2 09:00 I did nothing ie. took defaults all the way. At first I was quite impressed. I exited the Administrator and went to my standard working user which I feel is less powerful and safer. I checked "About this Mac" and it appears almost all the software had been updated to use the 64-bit Intel processor. I suspect Apple simpley recompiled using a compiler set to use 64-bits.

It appears in original Snow Leopard it appears Apple took support for all the older printers out, and made it go get the proper drivers as needed. The problems I had disappeared. ?Possibly after the first update--I don't remember for sure. But my Mac's have been working fine for several months now.

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