Note: this was a reponse to my sister-in-law Ida's question about the state of the Mac world. Figure I'll post it since I spent a pretty long time writing it and it might help others...

Hi Ida - Yes I got both Jen and me new Macs. I am super happy with mine (I got the MacBook Pro laptop) and Jen is slightly less happy with her Mac Mini but I have been able to address most of her problems the past couple days so it's working out a bit better. She was really used to Windows and the "out of the box" stuff on the Mac did not work as well as the programs she was used to so we had to go get some add on software to make her life easier.

The big question these days for mac buyers is whether you want a PowerPC or Intel chip in it. This is a somewhat geeky issue but it bears directly on your questions so bear with me for a moment. Macs traditionally had chips made by IBM called PowerPC as their CPU (central processing unit -- what makes the whole thing go). You will see this on the different machine specs as "G4" or "G5" - these are successive generations of PowerPC chip and generally higher = faster and more expensive. The latest PowerPC macs are G5s at around 2 Gigahertz (there are no 3 Gig macs so that spec from your computer guy won't translate directly). In January however, Apple announced that from now on it'd be making new Macs with Intel chips in them instead of PowerPC. On the specs for various machines these have names like "Core 1.5Ghz" and "Core Duo 1.8Ghz" -- hah hah, Apple Core get it? Again, no 3ghz systems but for various reasons they don't need to be that fast to be enjoyable.

See more ...