Just bought our first iMAC!

[TheForce]

With the weekend sale price on Apple stuff and the FL sales tax holiday, decided to take advantage and we went and bought a new iMAC to replace the wife's Dell laptop on the kitchen. The Dell is on it's 3rd hard drive and now the battery is dead so it only works when plugged in. It's 8 years old I believe. She will be the primary user on the imac. It's very fine quality and was easy to set up. I also got the Microsoft Office with Outlook and that is about all she will be using these days.

I'm still a little unsure on how to best use the Apple ID and itunes as I also have two ipads and an iphone all under my email address, not hers. But with the iphone, she can still poll our email server for her email and download it. I assume I'll be able to transfer all her email outlook folders from the PC to the new iMAC with the *.pst file. Open to any suggestions on how to do this better. How to deal with itunes account more efficiently. Tips on using the icloud system to tie together the imac wi9th ipads and iphone.

 

[mperdue]

Welcome to the dark side. I moved to an iMac a year and a half ago and eliminated the few remaining Windows programs that I use about 6 months back. I have far fewer computer problems these days.

 

[jayn_j]

I upgraded to an iMac back in 2009 and have never looked back. I took the opportunity to clean my .pst files so I kept the windows machine running for about 6 months while transferring important individual messages and addresses. That also allowed me to find alternate programs for stuff i used regularly, like putty and win-x. It is all available, just not easy to find.

Transferring data was a piece of cake over internet. The biggest thing I found was the memory was inadequate. Ram upgrade was pretty easy on the 2009 unit. I hear reports that it is very difficult on all 2012 units and the 2013 21" model. You need to totally disassemble the unit including removing the screen. Might be best to have Apple do that job. The 2013 model 27" unit has fixed that problem.

4 years into it, the DVD drive is starting to fail. I am not too concerned for two reasons. First, I almost never use it these days and second, an external USB drive works perfectly and that covers the few times I need it.

 

[TheForce]

I got the lowest cost model. Yes, it is really well sealed and I kicked around the idea of the upgrade to SSD to eliminate the mechanics for longer life but then at $600 for Apple to custom build that I passed. I'm pretty sure I can do the repair when that day comes. I did the upgrade to a macbook pro which was about 500 tiny screws until I got to the hard drive.

I don't agree that everything can be done on an iMAC. There is nothing at all available to duplicate the performance of Vegas Pro for 3D editing in real time on a mac, even using parallels and windows 8 loaded on the Mac. It just doesn't have the workstation performance necessary for 3D. But I do agree that most people will be better served if they aren't running these specialty professional level applications. If all I did was 2D HD video I could use the iMAC with Parallels. And while the cost would be slightly higher, it does work well.


I got my wife's Outlook folders and archives transferred over and it all worked well. For the most part this minimal iMAC will be great for her needs once she learns the slightly different ways and how to navigate. For me, I have a few technical issues to get resolved like so far I can't see my other computers on the network so transferring files has been through using a small SD card. The iMAC saw and installed my network printers but doesn't see my network 2 TB hard drive for backups. Still have these kinks to work out.

 

[Neutron]

I got the lowest cost model. Yes, it is really well sealed and I kicked around the idea of the upgrade to SSD to eliminate the mechanics for longer life but then at $600 for Apple to custom build that I passed. I'm pretty sure I can do the repair when that day comes. I did the upgrade to a macbook pro which was about 500 tiny screws until I got to the hard drive.

I don't agree that everything can be done on an iMAC. There is nothing at all available to duplicate the performance of Vegas Pro for 3D editing in real time on a mac, even using parallels and windows 8 loaded on the Mac. It just doesn't have the workstation performance necessary for 3D. But I do agree that most people will be better served if they aren't running these specialty professional level applications. If all I did was 2D HD video I could use the iMAC with Parallels. And while the cost would be slightly higher, it does work well.


I got my wife's Outlook folders and archives transferred over and it all worked well. For the most part this minimal iMAC will be great for her needs once she learns the slightly different ways and how to navigate. For me, I have a few technical issues to get resolved like so far I can't see my other computers on the network so transferring files has been through using a small SD card. The iMAC saw and installed my network printers but doesn't see my network 2 TB hard drive for backups. Still have these kinks to work out.

I'm sure there's a DIY website that explains how to upgrade the hard drive to an SSD yourself. Welcome to the Mac!!

 

[dont24]

I may be able to help you out with some things. For your Network drive, pulldown on Go / Connect to Server. afp://<IP address>
Time Machine is picky as far as backing up to a network drives.

We use one iTunes account in our household. All music is stored on our iMac. My wife and son each have their own iCloud account, but they use the same single itunes account.

 

[TheForce]

Got it all figured out. Things started working one step at a time. One secret was to use the prefix smb:// and then for DHCP do not list the IP address but use the name of the user@computername.pc This allows the Mac to find the computer regardless of the IP address. The second secret that prevented me from accessing the PC from the Mac was I had my PC's all in auto bootup mode with no password. Mac didn't like this so as soon as I added a PC password for boot up the Mac immediately accessed the PC's fully shared drives.
What I really need to do is assign myself a single adminID and password for all my PC's and Mac Devices.

Question- I started out with using my Apple itunes account user name with my e-mail address. Can I setup my wife as a user now and still give her admin privileges and have it all be compatible with my current username.

Question2- Can I change my username to the one I want to be standard on all my PC's and Apple devices?

I'm concerned about messing up how Apple contacts me since the account is under my name.

 

[dont24]

I also use SMB:// to access shares on my corporate Macbook Pro at work.
I'll assume you're trying to have you and your wife use the same iTunes library on the iMac, each with your own logins? If so, http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1203?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

So you want to change your iTunes login account?

 

[TheForce]

So you want to change your iTunes login account?

I don't think I need to do that, just would like to have her log in to the iMAC with her own user name and PW, but when she wants to install some app she can do it with admin privileges. Plus still use the itunes account with my email address. Does that make sense? Maybe all I need to do is set up her login with read / write rather than just read only.

 

[dont24]

Wife and I are setup the same on our iMac. We both have our own user and PW logins. Both of use are Admins to install software. Your actual login locally on the iMac is different than your iTunes account

 

[TheForce]

Thanks, I plan to duplicate what you have done then.

Now that I own an iMAC, I want to stop using my windows machines to sync the two ipads and iphones we have with itunes. I'm betting that the iMAC will be much better at this task, right? I'd love to just dump itunes altogether from my windows machines. I'll keep quicktime however.

Let me know if there are any gotchas I need to consider before proceeding to set up our idevices sync with the iMAC. I plan to study the YT videos on this too. Still have much to learn about the i device infrastructure.

 

[dont24]

When you plug in your devices to your iMac for the 1st time, I suspect it'll say it's synced to another computer. You may need to wipe it out. As long as your copy your iTunes library over from your Windows box, you should be all set. You can also wirelessly sync/backup your devices to your iMac. Not sure if that can be done from Windows.

 

[TheForce]

Thanks. Not sure what you mean by "wiping it out."

 

[dont24]

You should see a pop-up stating the device is synced to another machine. ( or something like that ) Not sure if that's still the case. What I meant was it would remove all content on the device
and would then sync from the system you have it plugged into.

 

[TheForce]

Been watching videos on how to open up the iMAC. I can't believe they are still using scotch tape to hold stuff together in the Mac. They use double stick tape to hold the front glass in place. Last year's model used magnets but they cheapened the newer ones with scotch tape. There is a company that makes a $20 pre cut tape kit custom shaped to fit. The good news is once inside upgrading to a 500Gb SSD is pretty straight forward. Would need to buy the tape kit and "superduper" hard drive clone kit. Plus the SSD. Reports claim the Samsung SSD really speeds up the 21.5" iMAC.

 

[dont24]

Very good info. My 24" iMac from 2007 is still going strong. Only issue I had was an HDD failure a couple of yrs ago. I paid a local Mac shop to replace. Restored all my data from my TM backup and was back up and running in no time. I may end eventually replacing with a mini. But for what we use the iMac for, plenty fast enough.