Mac now or wait

[v gese]

Have been shooting 4x5 for over 20 years. Shoot color and have had prints made by WCI and have been very pleased. Have sold a few. Goal has always been to make my own prints though with a Mac, Photoshop, and Epson or Canon printer, from drum scans done by WCI or someone else. The info on this website has been very helpful. I am very new to this digital stuff (technologically challenged old fart per my wife) so want to jump into all this in a sane, logical fashion. Plan to start with a Mac Pro (likely a 2.6 duo with 4G ram) and get PS CS3 and start a long learning curve.
Apple was to release the new OS (leopard) in June but now looks like October. Some previous threads on this site have suggested that the leopard OS will be more compatible with PS CS3. I am very concerned about messing up an expensive computer. What advice would you folks provide:
1. Get the Mac now and start learning PS, etc and then buy the leopard upgrade in the fall.
2. Wait until October to jump in so as to avoid having to do all the gyrations involved with upgrading.
Any advice, suggestions will be very much appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Vance Gese

[Bob Salomon]

Buy it now. Upgrading the operating system on a Mac is uite easy. No gyrations just follow the simple instructions. Plus you would then have the option of a experienced OS like 10.4.9 and could wait for 10.5.1 rather then starting immediately with 10.5 (Leopard) if you want to see what other users experiences are with it first.

[Brian K]

I'd go for it now for a few reasons. First the new Leopard OS is bound to have a few bugs and will need an update or two, let others act as the beta tester. Buy Leopard about a month or two after it's released. It's no big deal to do an upgrade from the current Tiger to Leopard, the only downside is that you'll most likely have to pay for the Leopard update, however Apple may have a deal where the update is free if you buy Tiger in a new Mac and Leopard comes out right afterwards. Updating Mac OS is really simple, this is not a windows machine.

I would consider getting more than 4 gig of RAM, I'd get at least 6 gigs of Apple installed ram. I'd also consider buying a second built in drive as large image files eat up a lot of space. Good luck

[Ken Lee]

What Bob and Brian said !

[Kirk Gittings]

I did what Bob and Brian said on my MacBook Pro for similar reasons.

[Doug Dolde]

I wouldn't (and am not) buy now. It's been one of the longest periods now without any model updates on ANY of the models. They're too busy with the phone thingy.

[Eric James]

Doug, I thought everything was updated a little over a year ago.

Dive right in Vance - I'm sure you'll be up to speed in Photoshop in no time. Have a look at Real World Adobe Photoshop CS2, and the new dead tree version of Adobe's CS3 manual is a good investment for $12.

(PS: BDS at ANMC is a Mac geek and may have insight into new models on the horizon. It’s too bad that you’re living in sales-tax land these days.)

[JW Dewdney]

Hint: you can frequently get new machines at lower than street price at the apple store with a full warranty;

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPL...ecialdeals/mac

Even though they're called 'refurbished' - they're not. They're new... just leftovers from boxing mismatches or whatever...

[archivue]

buy it now... life is too short, and anyway it's never the good time to buy a computer, because the next one will be better... and so on !

[Ted Harris]

Like everybody else .... buy it now. Not to mention, I am waiting for the ful version of CS3 to arrive but have been running the beta version since it came out and I don't see compatibility issues to speak of. One thing I can tell you, CS3 is much faster on the Intel Mac machines than CS2. Also, what JW said about shopping at the Apple Store online. We have a MacBook, iMac, G5 tower and two Mini's here and most were purchased as "refurbs" from the Apple Store online.