The Wide, Wide World of Apple

[DontSayBanana]

iOS 7 looks alright, but not groundbreaking.  Of course, we won't be getting AirDrop on the iPhone 4S, which is the main feature worth rolling out.  Siri's kinda useless, though, so some expansions would be welcome.

[fhdz]

iOS 7 looks alright, but not groundbreaking.

They appear to have borrowed liberally from both Android and Windows Phone, which in my mind is a good thing. Apple's UI was getting reeeeeeally long in the tooth.

[DontSayBanana]

They appear to have borrowed liberally from both Android and Windows Phone, which in my mind is a good thing. Apple's UI was getting reeeeeeally long in the tooth.

I'm not a huge fan of the aesthetic.  You can do flat, you can do rounded, but when you do both, it starts looking a little cartoony and just kinda sad.  If the rounded corners were less extreme, I'd probably have less problem with it.

[Barrister]

I liked the old "skeumorphic" design.

[DontSayBanana]

I liked the old "skeumorphic" design.

Skeuomorphs are teh devil, at least according to the graphic designers I know.  Good riddance to the Games Center and Newsstand ones in particular.  I wouldn't consider the glossy finish skeuomorphic, since it wasn't really designed to mimic any specific material.

[Barrister]

I liked the old "skeumorphic" design.

Skeuomorphs are teh devil, at least according to the graphic designers I know.  Good riddance to the Games Center and Newsstand ones in particular.  I wouldn't consider the glossy finish skeuomorphic, since it wasn't really designed to mimic any specific material.

Yeah, well graphic designers can get lost.

Sometimes it was over the top (Games Centre's green felt was bad), but I liked that the ntoebook app took notes on yellow paper.  Made it seem friendlier.

[Josephus]

So my PC finally bit the dust. Thinking of getting a new one, but not sold on Windows 8. I suddenly had a thought about getting an Imac instead. Pros? Cons? And what's this about not having a Disc Drive?

[DontSayBanana]

So my PC finally bit the dust. Thinking of getting a new one, but not sold on Windows 8. I suddenly had a thought about getting an Imac instead. Pros? Cons? And what's this about not having a Disc Drive?

It's so thin that there was no room for an optical drive.  Apple offers their own external disc drive, but at $80, it's an absolute rip-off, when you can get a decent LG drive for $25: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827136261

The biggest cons with iMacs are service.  Apple voids your warranty pretty much as soon as you take the back off, so file it under "almost no user-serviceable parts."  Even when you can take them apart, as I can, they've actually crammed things in there tighter than many laptops, so they're not really fun to work on.

[Josephus]

is the geforce GT 640m, a decent card for playing, say Paradox games and simialr things?

Is it higher tha a Geforce 7300?

[Liep]

It seems our IT finally decided on iPads for us as a "digital backpack", it'll replace the 3 books (rules, infrastructure plans, etc) we are required to bring with us while driving.

They'll be making special apps for it, but judging from the official apps they've put out (ticket apps) it's going to be disastrous. None of them have more than 2 stars rating, and from personal experience they crash more often than not.

[katmai]

is the geforce GT 640m, a decent card for playing, say Paradox games and simialr things?

Is it higher tha a Geforce 7300?

Yes

and yes the Nvidia Cards went from 4 digits to 3 so a 560 was little higher than the 9600 iirc. So 780 is top of the line.

[Barrister]

So my PC finally bit the dust. Thinking of getting a new one, but not sold on Windows 8. I suddenly had a thought about getting an Imac instead. Pros? Cons? And what's this about not having a Disc Drive?

iMac is a beautiful computer - if that matters to you the iMac wins, hands down, compared to any PC.

Beyond that though, Pros and Cons come down to OS X - the Mac operating system.  Surely if you're in newspapers you have some exposure to Macs?  What do you think of them?

I find my time with OS X is much nicer than under Windows.  Just little things, like dramatically faster load times, and very few worries about security.  However, the major downside of course is software - a lot of what exists for Windows doesn't exist for Mac.  If you're a big PC gamer a Mac may not be thte computer for you.

Disc drive - honestly the disc sitting in my computer right now is for Skyrim, a game I haven't even played in a year.  So much now has moved to digital distribution you might find you don't miss a DVD drive.

Depending on what your current monitor is, you might want to consider getting a Mac Mini as a much cheaper introduction to Macs.

[garbon]

So my PC finally bit the dust. Thinking of getting a new one, but not sold on Windows 8. I suddenly had a thought about getting an Imac instead. Pros? Cons? And what's this about not having a Disc Drive?

I'll be having a machine shortly with win 8 on it. Been doing some homework on how to make it function more like older versions of windows in the event that I hate it.

[DontSayBanana]

I'll be having a machine shortly with win 8 on it. Been doing some homework on how to make it function more like older versions of windows in the event that I hate it.

First thing I've come across is that Win8 logons are evil.  Your user account's supposed to tie into your Windows Live account, and everything wants to tie directly into your user account.  It's already caused me to ditch Skype for Windows 8, since I have a couple Skype accounts I need to switch back and forth between.

[Josephus]

Hey thanks Kat and BB. Yeah, beeb, I do use a Mac at work and do like it. I've previously been a die hard PC er at home mostly for games and such, but as I get older I'm slowly moving away from that...don't have as much time anywhere. But I see PDox is releasing EU4 for Mac anyways, and so between that and footie manager, it should keep me busy for a year in any case. I play skyrim on the ps3.

I'm leaning towards the imac. There's a company  who supplies macs for work I can get one from. Not much different in cost than going to an Apple shop, but he can load it up nicely with all the microsoft and adobe stuff I'll need. So that's a nice plus.

The disc drive is more of an issue cause I'd like to load my CDs (music) on, but I can get an external pretty cheaply, so that's no longer an issue.