Opinions on new Intel-based Macs? 2

[sfeld]

Our business just upgraded to the new Intel-chip-based iMacs and I'd appreciate hearing from anyone else using them in a business setting. We're a small newspaper and have both our Creative and Editoral staff on them using mostly MS Office and Adobe products. So far we haven't had anything unusual happen, but a forewarned tech is a calm tech so anything of note can be helpful--thanks in advance.

Suzanne

 

[jimoblak]

Isn't this a question that is asked prior to purchasing? How is anyone's opinion going to influence you now?

 

[sfeld]

I had no say in the decision to purchase, in fact I was hired after the fact and now get to deal with them during the System 9 to OS X upgrade. Besides, I never said anything about influence, I asked if anyone had experience they wanted to share dealing with them.

 

[jmgalvin]

With the newness of these things, I kinda doubt that you’ll get much actual feed back at this time – especially in a production environment.

An awful lot of companies are loathe to try anything that’s brand new – allowing early adopters suffer any negative consequences. We needed some new basic machines when they were introduced, but we bought 20in iMac G5 factory refurbs because we still have to run some OS9 apps like Quark 4 and Fireworks 4 and thought we’d be beter off with the G5s.

It would probably be helpful if you post any problems you come up with. Probably the biggest question people would have would be how they handle the PPC apps under the emulation, especially any performance hit compared to PPC.


Using OSX 10.3.9 on a G4

 

[jimoblak]

I apologize that I misread your post. The title seemed to indicate that you sought opinions, which are often polled to influence one's own thoughts.

See Adobe's tech paper on this:

http://www.adobe.com/products/pdfs/intelmacsupport.pdf

Try going to the Adobe Mac Photoshop forum and searching for 'intel'. You will see plenty of discussion.

http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx?14@@.ee6b362

 

[sfeld]

Well, so far so good; we've mostly had configuration problems. We changed network drive connections to SMB and that worked better than any other protocol, and speed seems to be good on the Adobe apps. But remember we're going from System 9 on G3s to OS X so there's quite a speed increase just there. It's been quite a learning curve going to OS X but I think that once the users quit freaking over the difference and just start using the OS they'll like it a lot better.

 

[jmgalvin]

Here's one little trick that assuages some - a little. If you put the dock on the left, rather than bottom, they look on sort of the old Apple menu. Also in the widescreen format of Apple monitors, it doesn't intrude on teh bottom of teh page or icons stashed on the desktop.

One thing you'll eventually encounter is corrupted font caches. Unlike 9, OSx creates a cache of a font as it's used so that, if the program crashes, the actual font doesn't get hit - just the cache.

There's a little shareware thingy called Font Finagler that clears the caches on macs. It can be found at versiontracker.com. However, the Adobe apps create their own caches. You have to use Find in Finder and search for "afobefnt". Use Contains as the search parameter. You'll get results like "adobefnt.lst" and adobe07fnt.lst". Just trash anything with th e.lst extension. It's good practice to clear caaches regularly.

Using OSX 10.3.9 on a G4

 

[ObviousTroll]

I would suggest using Linotype FontExplorerX rather than Finagler - it seems to be aware of Adobe fonts; and it lets you do various dynamic things with fonts to keep them from clogging up your system.

 

[notbrilliant]

My only thoughts on the Intel-Macs and Adobe (and other creative software) is that Adobe's tools are not Intel ready and will only run under emulation. Which means they will run slow until Adobe release CS3 in 2007 sometime.

From what I've heard theya re stable enoughon the Intel chips, but I have just bought a PowerPC enabled Mac for precisely those reasons.

My ramblings;

http://www.technicallybrilliant.com/