Hi,

Having just bought an iPhone and being the impulse buyer that I am, I would like to buy a mac notebook (really soon)

Never used a mac before, have plenty of windows notebooks and pcs in the house.

Would be used primarily for web, email, itunes, spreadsheets, word processing, and downloads via usenet

I have been attracted to the macbook air, I dont need a cd drive, I like that I could easily use it on the lounge (some of my windows notebooks are quite chunky)

How does the air go with graphics? Not that I do anything too full on but wouldnt mind if it could run photoshop for some of the basic editing I do, do from time to time, would the air have any problems?

I assume my current USB HDD's and network drives will be accessible just like on my PC's?

Any other suggestions for a mac notebook for a first timer? Any major problems with the air?

Really appreciate your time.

Hi there, im a newbie as well, I just purchased one of the new macbook's with 4gig of ram, 2.4Ghz processor and 320gig hard drive, its a 13.3 wide screen display, totally beautiful machine, trust me get one, I will never go back to a pc again, very easy to use, just took me a couple of hours since I am a regular itunes user, things are easy to pick up.

Cool, I'm a bit of a w*nker when it comes to gadgets and things that look cool (hence why I just bought an iPhone despite using MMS and video callign quite a bit on my previous phone)

So the air really appeals to me, just curious how much I may regret it after the thin novelty wears off

For usenet look no further than Unison by Panic Software

Spreadsheets and Word processing - check out iWork by Apple

Photoshop work I've no experience off on my Macbook. It will probably be a wee bit clunky on a MacBook Air.

As for your USB drives and network drives, if the drives are formatted in NTFS then they will be readable by OS X but not rightable.

I don't have an Air, but If I had the spare cash I'd be swapping my Macbook for an Air as my Macbook is not needed for heavy cpu lifting stuff.

Really? hmmm, I have about 5TB in Network Storage plus another 3TB in USB HDD's around the place...................

This does put a dampener on things....

I had a MacBook Air for a bit and it was fine with all the basic Photoshop functions I needed. It is a bit on the slow side, but it is comparable to one of those entry-level Windows notebooks out there.

Being a recent switcher (8 months) you may be underwhelmed with OS X out of the box. I was so used to having to find Apps to get Windows to do exactly what I wanted it to, but with OS X things just sort of fall into place. USB HDDs will work the same, but if they are NTFS you'll need to reformat them if you want to Write to them instead of just Read (there is a NTFS driver out there that lets you do this to, but it costs some money). Network hard drives should show up fine as well.

The main thing I noticed about OS X is that most of the Apps you use are Free! That's it, MacTalk is a great forum and everyone here will help you out if you have any questions.

The thing I am concerned about is that my NAS setup is fairly well up and running and I add to my collections of movies and tv shows daily, If I can only read from them, is there anyway to continue to add to them seeing as they are all NTFS.................If I were to download onto my air then I need to transfer to the NAS (as the air only has 80GB HDD)

As I said, it's readable - just not writeable, you'd have to reformat it to FAT32 or HFS+ to use with a Mac. If you go FAT32 then both Win32 and Mac can read it. However Win64 is NTFS only, from what I remember.

Hmmm, ok well may have to just settle for my iPhone, waaay too much data on the NAS drives to even consider formatting

Thank You so much for the info. Was so close to just buying a macbook tomorrow.

An affliction that can be cured. Read on ...

Not a drama - apps for all those tasks are available on Mac OS X.

Apart from an average level of colour accuracy -- a problem that afflicts every laptop on the planet today -- it is more than adequate, especially in terms of speed. If you want the best on-screen colour accuracy possible, you should invest in a small hardware colour calibrator (the Spyder is a popular one, and not expensive either).

Just to clear up a bit of confusion from above ...

Mac OS X can read and write FAT32, read (but not write) NTFS, and read and write to SMB shares. Provided your NAS box makes its shares available via SMB (the default file & resource sharing protocol for Windows) then Mac OS X can work with them perfectly.

To give Mac OS X the ability to write to NTFS volumes, you can either use MacFUSE and ntfs-3g (free, but it is a hack sitting on a hack and some users have had problems) or Paragon NTFS (commercial, but uses code licenced from Microsoft).

Being based around Intel chips, the Air (and all modern Macs) can run Windows XP SP2 or greater, and this can be accomplished in several ways. Apple provide each new Mac with a program suite called Boot Camp, which gives the machine a dual-boot capability (run Mac Os X or Windows), or you can spend a bit more and buy one of the popular virtual machine suites such as Parallels, VMware's Fusion, or Crossover Mac. Fusion is the most popular at the moment. With Windows in a VM and OSX as the host OS, you have access to both platforms simultaneously, and your Windows install does not suffer from any real performance loss by running as a virtual machine.

Don't forget the new comer.

Sun's VirtualBox. Free.
VirtualBox

Works well, too.

thanx for the info guys...i am a new comer too in mac!hope u alll can guide me using this beautifull machine.cheers!

If it's NAS - share it over SMB (windows file sharing) and the Mac will read and write to it fine. If it's a locally attached disk (USB/FireWire) and formatted NTFS, the Mac will not write to it.

It will read it won't it? Just not be able to write to it...

But yeah, any network attached NTFS-formatted drives you'll be able to write to just fine. I have 2 Macs and a PC on the same network and shuffle files back'n'forth between them constantly.

Oops, my mistake. Too early in the morning to be posting