How I sold two Macs this week

All these "stories" are exactly that. They're anecdotal and not scientific. Show me the survey that shows the percentage of PC users willing to switch to Mac because of Boot Camp?

If there was one, I would assure the number wouldn't be too high. A revolution isn't started by a couple of friends that switch to Macs. It takes time. We just have to wait and see what happens, but for the next few years MS is still king.

OK... a brief "What's so great about iLife" for the uninitiated:

First of all, iLife is only of value if you enjoy working with digital music, photos, movies, and slideshows, and easily pulling all of the pieces together into a podcast, DVD, or website. If you don't work with music files, photos, movies, music, or web pages, you won't get much out of iLife. Assuming you DO like those things, then iLife
1. Allows amateurs to make professional looking photo books, websites, DVD's, podcasts easily and quickly, with no training other than what Apple provides in its help documentation and website resources.
2. Provides integration for all your digital files. What does this mean? It means, simply, that when you are working in, say, iPhoto, and you want to add a soundtrack to a slideshow, you don't have to switch to iTunes. You'll find a media browser within iPhoto that you can use to pick the song from your iTunes library. Same thing if you're in GarageBand, iMovie, iDVD, iWeb, etc.
3. Provides a comprehensive package of top-quality software for working with virtually every kind of digital file you have in your home life today. iLife is not about the office... it's about your personal life... capturing inspirations in music or photography. Capturing important moments in your child's life and easily sharing those with others. Each year, Apple has added a new application, so that now iLife has--FOR FREE with a new Mac--the following components:
- iTunes (digital and streaming music, and music sharing over a network, or create an iMix to share in the iTunes store)
- iPhoto (digital photos and photo sharing over a network. Easily creates photo books, slideshows, and simple websites, or just writes to CD or send via email)
- iMovie (digital movies. Import and easily edit your home movies. Add professional quality effects and transitions. Add soundtracks or photos to the mix.)
- iDVD (prepare professional-looking DVD's with cool navigation menus for sharing your movies, photos, music, etc.)
- GarageBand (record live music and/or vocals, or create digital music from scratch. Mix and remix existing tracks. Huge library of loops and effects. Latest version has podcast studio built in and can pull all the pieces of a podcast together.)
- iWeb (pull all the pieces of your digital life together in a website, and add your own thoughts on a web log. Provides professional-quality templates, and third parties provide many more.)

If you had to go out and buy Windows software that did all of this, you'd end up spending a heckuva lot more than the $79 that iLife costs retail ($99 for a family pack for five). And you'd end up with a bunch of unrelated pieces, not a beautifully integrated, easy to use product. Again, iLife is for budding to advanced amateurs in these areas. Most pieces of iLife have professional-level equivalents in Apple's lineup of software--FinalCut Pro (iMovie), Soundtrack Pro and Logic Pro (GarageBand), Aperture (iPhoto), DVD Studio Pro (iDVD). So you can move seamlessly up to more professional software if you get to that point.

I'm also a big fan of iWork. Unless you do serious word processing on very long documents, Pages is wonderful. I use it every day at my Windows-only office, and my Windows colleagues don't have to know my Word documents are made in Pages. Pages is that good at translating and exporting to Word. The latest version even handles simple spreadsheets. Pages is much easier to use than Word, in my opinion. You can pick up iWord for only $79, so don't feel you have to go buy Microsoft Office if you just need Word and PowerPoint.

Keynote runs rings around PowerPoint by now, in its 3rd version. It's fantastic. I export presentations to interactive QuickTime when I need to give a presentation on a Windows machine. That always works great, and the quality--though not as good as if I were using Keynote itself--is more than good enough for people used to PowerPoint's lousy graphics and color schemes and cheesy transition effects.

I hope Apple will come out with Numbers soon, because spreadsheet work is still something you have to rely on Microsoft or another company for. I use Ragtime Solo, a German product that I really like. It easily imports and exports Excel, and it's very fast and just as flexible and powerful as Excel. Ragtime is more than just a spreadsheet, but that's all I use it for. It's free for personal use.

And I said this would be brief...! Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Leland

i hope they do sell alot of computers too. i've always had windows pc's before, but when the macbook pro came, i could'nt help it, i HAD to have one :p so i sold my asus laptop and got me a 1.83 120GB 1.5GB and i love it. GREAT design, and OSX is so much better than windows.

@ Enrique:
I use iTunes and iPhoto to keep my music and photos organized. Increasingly, I also use iTunes to keep my downloaded or ripped videos organized. I think FrontRow may have a little better automation for this.

My brother uses GarageBand to create songs that occur to him and his roommate. Nothing fantastic -- he's not getting signed anytime soon -- but he sends them to me over iChat, along with his latest photos.

I use iMovie more frequently. For example, I went to an Apple Festival and took some pictures and recorded sounds with my Samsung camera. The next weekend, I figured I'd put together a little slideshow. iPhoto and iTunes fed the elements into iMovie, and a couple hours later, I had a nice little piece.
(If anyone's interested, you can see it by clicking my name below. If you think it's stupid, don't bother letting me know).

Two weeks ago, my mom was on the road during her birthday. An eCard would have been fine, but I wanted to put some thought into it. I filmed short video clips, again with my camera, of purple flowers and blossoming trees. I recorded some sound of birds and animals. I brought those into iMovie, added titles, then uploaded the final product to the public folder on her iDisk with her .Mac account. She pulled it down onto her 12" G4, and it just about made her day.

I'm not going to make tons of (or really any) money from what I make on my Mac. But it feels good actually to create things, then easily to share them with people. Maybe Windows has a suite of programs that coordinate this easily -- I wouldn't know. I do know that iLife brings those functions together simply and that I have fun using the apps.

- Ben

P.S. Don't limit yourself to Word/AppleWorks/Pages. There are *plenty* of word processors out there that will more than suffice for most home and basic business needs. As a writer, I especially like Ulysses.

you don't get ilife for free.

there's no such thing as a free meal.

AJ - thanks, that was the kind of thing I was looking for.

As far as an MSOffice replacement try out OpenOffice on your Windows machine. If that works great for all of your needs there is a version of it that runs native in OSX via Java called NeoOffice. It is actively developed (they just released a new universal version) and runs very well on anything with a processor over 500MHz (though my girlfriend uses it on her 400MHz PBook G3 just fine after a less-than-snappy startup). You can set up the preferences so that it saves all files in the Microsoft formats. I currently use it at work, creating and editing Word and Excel files amongst actual Microsoft Office apps on Windows and Mac with no problems.

iLife is the equivalent of Windows software that would cost approximately $500 to buy separately, and you get it for free with every Mac.

iPhoto = Adobe Photoshop Elements ($100-120). Fantastic digital camera handling (no drivers or weird proprietary software needed), decent colour correction, effects and retouching tools, easy organization capabilities (Spotlight-style searching of tags/keywords or by date), easy sharing via .Mac, easy burn to CD, and photocasting (i.e. a photoblog that can be synced/subscribed to via RSS).

iTunes = we all know what this does, same as the Windows version, essentially.

GarageBand = Cubase SE ($100-120) or Cakewalk Music Creator 3. Music composition with MIDI-based software instruments, multitrack audio recording, and a large library of loops. Exports to AIFF or MP3 (and even directly to iTunes), projects can be imported into Logic if you step up to more professional software. Version 3 adds a podcasting studio with extensive "radio" style ducking and compression effects, plus the ability to easily create an image track. Easy podcasting with .Mac, burn tracks directly to CD.

iMovie + iDVD = Adobe Premiere Elements or MS Windows Movie Maker, Sony VEGAS. Easy import of DV digital video and still images direct from a camcorder, clip naming and sorting, drag-and-drop timeline assembly, dozens of crossfade and animated title effects, direct access to iTunes library within the program for backing tracks, direct recording of voiceover track or video from a connected camera for short bits. Easy transfer of project to iDVD, easy creation of sophisticated menus with animated scene previews, menu backdrops, more. Easy to export to QuickTime for sharing on the web or via .Mac. Third-party themes and plugins available.

iWeb - WYSIWYG web page editor with dozens of page themes, drag-and-drop image placement and text editing, blog creation (now with comments). I don't know of any equivalent PC software that does this. Again, integration with the rest of the iLife suite so your iPhoto pics and iMovies (not sure about iTunes tracks) can be easily accessed and integrated into your site (esp if hosted with .Mac service for some of the back-end features, media streaming).

Are there better commercial products out there? sure, but you'd pay a lot for them. Individually these programs are worth anywhere from $50 -$100 each so it's about a $500 value in my estimation, and if you value time saved having things "just work" well...it's priceless.

haha. Yea thats just like my friend. He came over to my house one day and we played around with my Mac and I alos showed him how I could boot into Windows. Ive been doing this to alot of friends and family since i'm the only one in my family that likes macs. ALL the time, when I ask whether to boot in Mac or Windows, its always Mac. I think cause they think its much cooler, I even got one friend to buy a Mac. He IM ed me one day and said, i'm getting a Mac like youres too. Well hes getting a 20" iMac. Yup thats my little story.

right, it's amazing... but what about it is so amazing?