[normhead]

Must be luck. M uses & swears by Macs and talked me into getting one, although one of her little Macs suffered two battery and one hard drive failure. At the time, the MacBook Pro was high end, so I expected great things of it, and the Aperture program was OK, at first, and so was the machine. But jeepers, failure of battery, hard drive, and disk drive in just two years, and the battery was very little used. I have another DELL that dates from about `98 that is still working fine, and I use it for some things, especially a photo/images/clip art program for which I have been unable to locate a satisfactory replacement that will function on Windows 7.

The Mac that's on my desktop right now has two issues. The CD -Rom quit working, and 7 days after the extended warranty expired the sound quit working. I bought an external CD-Rom for 40 bucks, and have my speakers hooked up to a USB sound port I bought 10 years ago. But, long story short, it used to be if you bought an Apple product and it got through it's first 6 months , it would last until you died. One of mine actually remained in use with various poor students as a word pro/email machine for almost 16 years. But I'm not convinced the current Apple is the same company. Having these kinds of issues on a 3 year old machine is unheard of in Apple land. Most of my old Apple product has gone to recycling still working 100%. To have two issues on one machine in three years, tells me something has changed.

[WPRESTO]

The Mac that's on my desktop right now has two issues. The CD -Rom quit working, and 7 days after the extended warranty expired the sound quit working. I bought an external CD-Rom for 40 bucks, and have my speakers hooked up to a USB sound port I bought 10 years ago. But, long story short, it used to be if you bought an Apple product and it got through it's first 6 months , it would last until you died. One of mine actually remained in use with various poor students as a word pro/email machine for almost 16 years. But I'm not convinced the current Apple is the same company. Having these kinds of issues on a 3 year old machine is unheard of in Apple land. Most of my old Apple product has gone to recycling still working 100%. To have two issues on one machine in three years, tells me something has changed.

Another thing annoying about my MacBook Pro is the video output port. An incredibly elaborate plug that is suppose to give better transfer to a monitor, but I cannot see that any monitor except those made by Apple have ever used that connection. On the other hand, the Mac does not have a VGA output plug, a standard design present on virtually every TV, monitor and projector made by other manufacturers for decades. So I need a converter to change the Mac plug to a VGA, but it transmits only images, not sound. The Mac has four output ports, or maybe they're input, or maybe both - I don't know because I've never used them for anything, but there's only one USB connection which must serve scanner, external hard drive (for the "VAULT"), printer, and thumb drives. The DELL has three USB ports, and a VGA, and an HDMI. I find Macs, both mine and my wife's, sleek, creative and elegant. I find my Dell PRACTICAL, RELIABLE and suitable for just about every software program I want or need. Both Lightroom and Photoshop load and are ready to use faster than Aperture despite having more than ten times as many files. Having worked with two versions of Aperture, three versions of Elements, two versions each of Lightroom and Photoshop, I'd select the most recent versions of the latter two without a moment of hesitation.

[Bigdomino]

Thanks to all for the replies. My primary question dealt with people using Aperture and their experience. I really did not mean for this to be a dump session on Apple hardware. Aperture experience comments are much appreciated.

Steve

[boriscleto]

This is a very useful knowledge base article.

Aperture 3.5: Set "Share XML with other applications" to "Never" for better performance and faster quit times

[BakDinitzen]

This is a very useful knowledge base article.

Aperture 3.5: Set "Share XML with other applications" to "Never" for better performance and faster quit times

Thanks for this tip - very helpful

Best John