Apple has made advertising history personifying a Mac and a Windows PC in its Mac-versus-PC TV commercials as two guys played by Justin Long and John Hodgman, respectively. But not every Mac user fits the profile projected by Justin Long in the ads. The truth is, there are lots of different types of Mac users. And although it seems the assortment of available Mac models has actually gotten smaller in the last 18 months, there’s an ideal Mac—and an ideal Mac-based setup—for almost any different user type. To narrow down the field of possibilities, we thought long and hard about what people use their Macs for—whether it’s work or play. The Mac setups in the pages that follow offer dream configurations for six user profiles: the creative pro, the mobile blogger, the student, the gamer, the “hip newbie” (because using a Mac makes you hip, even if you don’t know GHz from GB), and the entertainment junkie (because no tech company does a better job offering an elegant, easy-to-use computing platform on which to store, manage, and enjoy audio and video content). No matter your type or your budget, you should find the perfect Mac rig to meet your needs. You’ll also meet three real-live Mac users, none of whom look or act like Justin Long, but all of whom couldn’t live happily without their Macs.

 

The Creative Pro

You’re a photographer, graphic designer, video editor, or audio engineer by training and trade. The Mac is your trusted apprentice in your creative pursuits, professional and personal.

The Basics. 

Unless you need to create on the move (in which case you should consider a 17-inch MacBook Pro), most creative pros will need the performance and upgradeability of a Mac Pro ($2,799 and up, www.apple.com). The configuration we’d recommend starting with is a dual 3GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor, 4GB of RAM, a standard 500GB 7,200-rpm hard drive in bay 1, a 23-inch Apple Cinema HD Display, the 512MB Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT graphics card, and an AirPort Extreme card ($5,248 as configured). Leave hard drive bays 2, 3, and 4 empty to start, then add on as your storage needs increase—a solid option is Western Digital’s Caviar line of SATA drives ($229.99 and up, www.wdc.com). Graphics pros will need a photo printer, of course. We like the $549.99 Epson Stylus Photo R1900 (www.epson.com). If you work in Adobe Illustrator CS3 or would just rather use an input device that lets you draw right onscreen, Wacom’s Cintiq 21UX ($1,999, www.wacom.com) puts a gorgeous 21-inch TFT touchscreen display and pressure-sensitive digital pen at your fingertips.

Finally, to keep the colors you’re seeing on your main display as true as possible, calibrate your monitor with Color Vision’s Spyder3 Elite ($249, spyder.datacolor.com).

If only you could afford the entire family of Apple Cinema HD Displays.

Video pros, you’ll want to juice up your quad-core Mac Pro with as much RAM as you can afford—Crucial’s 4GB Mac Pro RAM kit runs $189.99 (www.crucial.com), and a similar kit from Other World Computing is $195.97—and add beaucoup storage too. And in addition to any specialty hardware required for video work (you’ll no doubt have a full complement of pro-level video-editing software installed), you should save your pennies for a 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Display ($1,799, www.apple.com).

Digidesign’s Mbox 2 is as flexible as you wanna be.

On the sound side, audio pros should check out Digidesign’s Mbox 2 audio interface ($495, www.digidesign.com). You’ll also need a microphone—try Samson Audio’s C03U Multi-Pattern USB Studio Condenser Microphone ($224.99, www.samsontech.com).

The Samson Audio C03U mic can plug right into any Mac’s USB port.

To hear your creations, plug in a pair of Sony MDR-7509HD headphones ($265, pro.sony.com) and immerse yourself in aural pleasure.

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The Mobile Blogger

All you need is a light-as-air laptop and reliable Wi-Fi.

The Basics.

When you’re chasing inspiration, it helps to travel light, and the 3-pound MacBook Air makes sense for anyone who works with lots of small-ish files (text documents, email, Web-ready images) or perhaps utilizes some Web-based apps. We’d spring $200 above the $1,799 base price for a 1.8GHz processor, but stick with the stock 80GB Parallel ATA hard drive instead of the $599 64GB solid-state disk—that price still has to come down or capacity come up, and most bloggers don’t need SSD speeds.

Aside from the Air’s svelte exterior (Apple barely ever mentions this, but it’s actually quite thin), highly mobile techies benefit from its backlit keyboard, which uses an ambient light sensor to illuminate the letters just right. It’s as handy as it is chichi in dim cafés and airplanes. Likewise, both useful and gee-willickers is the extra-large multi-touch trackpad, which recognizes iPhone-like gestures such as pinch, rotate, and swipe, that speed up some tasks when you don’t have a mouse handy. The built-in iSight can be used with iMovie or even Photo Booth for quick vlogging (video-blogging) sessions.

Spare your Air from dings with a soft sleeve like the luxurious Marware CEO Envi ($89.99, www.marware.com), and save a little room in your laptop bag with the Microsoft Notebook Mouse for Mac ($49.99, www.microsoft.com/hardware)—it’s Bluetooth, so it won’t use your Air’s precious USB port, and its 2 AAA batteries last quite a while. Speaking of that one lonely USB port, give it some friends with Belkin’s Swivel Hub ($29.95, www.belkin.com), which has four USB ports and stays out of the way of other cables. 

The shockproof Corsair Flash Voyager (www.corsairmemory.com) flash drives range from 4GB to a whopping 32GB—which lists for $399 but can be found online for as little as $135—can handle the abuse of the road. Your home base needs an external drive for backups, too. We like the size, style, and price of the Western Digital My Book Studio ($299.99 for 1TB, www.wdc.com). Illustrate your blog posts with the Nikon Coolpix P60 ($229.95, www.nikonusa.com)—you can shoot 8.1-megapixel stills, tag them with voice notes to yourself, and even try time-lapse photography and video.

For software, you can do a lot with what you’ve got—TextEdit, iPhoto, GarageBand, iMovie, all packed in. Web apps like Google Documents (docs.google.com), Photoshop Express (www.photoshop.com/express), and Backpack (www.backpackit.com) let you work and store documents online, keeping your Air’s 80GB hard drive relatively uncluttered. (If you miss those dozens of gigs of music, there’s always Pandora.com.) 

Extras.

Since bloggers rely so much on the Internet, IOGear’s Wi-Fi Finder ($34.95, www.iogear.com) can detect wireless hotspots anywhere. If you can’t find an open Wi-Fi network to join, a wireless broadband card can get you online through a high-speed cellular data connection. We like the USB-based Sierra Wireless Compass 597 ($49.99, plus $59.99 per month for service, www.sprint.com) from Sprint.

Raise your screen to a comfy height with the super-portable iRizer.

While it’s currently experiencing some growing pains, Apple’s MobileMe service ($99 per year, www.me.com) is a handy way to keep an online backup of your work, host websites and photo galleries, and access your calendar, contacts, and email.

If you work at a desk often, invest in a stand and keyboard to prevent backaches. The Matias iRizer ($39.95, www.matias.ca) 
folds flat to stow in your laptop bag, and the ultra slim Apple Wireless Keyboard ($79, www.apple.com) is easy to tote and uses Bluetooth. Also check out the $99 external SuperDrive (www.apple.com) for ripping and burning discs. And since the MacBook Air comes without an Ethernet port, an AirPort Express ($99, www.apple.com) is an easy and affordable way to set up a new wireless network from an existing wired connection.

Apple’s Wireless Keyboard won’t hog any of your precious USB ports.

Once Your Blog Takes Off...

If you’re one of those lucky bloggers whose site pays the rent—or even allows you to throw money around like it’s nothing—tear out this list of handy (but not necessarily cost-conscious) add-ons for your Mac-centric blogging rig: Apple’s Time Capsule ($499 for 1TB, www.apple.com) works with Time Machine to keep your MacBook Air backed up wirelessly and automatically, and you can attach your external drive to it to offload files to the network as well. Pick up a MagSafe Airline Adapter ($49, www.apple.com) if you’re the kind of high roller who flies in the expensive seats with the power hookups.

Upgrade your point-and-shoot to an Olympus E-420 ($599.99, www.olympus.com). Billed as the world’s smallest DSLR, it packs pro features into a compact, 13.4-ounce package. Want to record in-person interviews, start podcasting, or just make notes to yourself? The Zoom H2 Handy Recorder ($199, www.samsontech.com) includes a 512MB SD card that can hold nearly 6 hours of audio if you record as MP3.

For software, Photoshop Elements 6 for Macintosh ($89.99, www.adobe.com) is a good middle step between the free online Photoshop Express (www.photoshop.com) and Photoshop CS3 ($649). Scriviner ($39.95, www.literatureandlatte.com) can help organize your research, notes, ideas, and in-progress blog posts, with special features to encourage creativity and beat writer’s block. But, of course, it’s impossible to buy what every blogger really needs—more time to blog.

 

Zen and the Art of Blogging

Name: Leo Babauta
Occupation: Blogger behind zenhabits.net
Gear: Aluminum iMac and MacBook Air
Minimalism is Leo Babauta’s credo—and the driving force behind his blog, Zen Habits (zenhabits.net), which is in Technorati’s top 50 and has been around since early 2007. Author, freelancer, runner, father of six, and devoted Mac user, Babauta walks the talk, keeping a clutter-free Desktop on his iMac. “Basically, I have a very simple setup,” Babauta says. “No icons on my Desktop, Firefox for almost everything, TextEdit for some very focused writing, and Quicksilver to access anything. I also have a MacBook Air, which I bought for its coolness, but also to get out of my house, where I work, and to be able to do some work at a library or coffee shop.”

Babauta’s unflagging dedication to living a simple life extends to dreaming about the Mac he’d buy if suddenly he could have any Mac he wanted. When asked how his Mac setup would change if money were no object, he simply says, “It wouldn’t. I have the perfect setup. I’m a very simple person. I just need a text editor to write, and Firefox to do everything online. My whole world is online, including all of the software for my blog and business. And, of course, Quicksilver. So my iMac and MacBook Air are more than enough for me.”

Babauta keeps his Desktop totally free of icons (but he does rotate his background image), and he eschews the Dock altogether to use Quicksilver instead. 
”I have the Dock on auto-hide, to keep my workspace as simplified as possible.”

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The Starving Student
How to get your dream Mac without blowing your entire college fund.

The Basics.

If going to school is your full-time job, you’ll need a Mac that can go wherever you do. That’s a laptop, of course, and for the typical starving student, we’d recommend a MacBook to start. At press time, the 2.1GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook (www.apple.com) came with a bare-bones price tag of $1,099, but we have a hunch that by the end of the year, you might see the MacBook’s base price inching closer to $999. If possible, we recommend starting with a 2.4GHz processor and 250GB hard drive ($1,499 as configured) and bumping the RAM up to a total of 4GB after the fact ($49.99 from OWC, www.macsales.com; and $51.99 from Crucial, www.crucial.com). Although Apple makes some of the comfiest notebook keyboards around, Apple’s Wireless Keyboard ($79, www.apple.com) and Wireless Mighty Mouse ($69, www.apple.com) come in supremely handy—especially if you’re usually using your notebook on a desk.

Desktop use is the other reason we recommend the Rain Design mStand ($49.90, www.raindesigninc.com).It keeps the notebook stable and lets you raise the screen a bit so there’s room on the desk for a wireless keyboard and mouse. Of course, the beauty of the wireless keyboard is that it can communicate with the MacBook from afar, making it possible to control the ’Book sitting on a desk from across the room while you’re, say, lying on your bed or lounging in a beanbag chair. Meanwhile, LaCie’s USB & FireWire Hub ($89.99, www.lacie.com) magically multiplies the number of ports on your MacBook, giving you spots to plug in four USB and two FireWire devices. It also sports a tiny desktop fan for when your dorm room gets too stuffy. You’ve most likely got a pair of earbuds for your iPod already, but to listen to music at any hour without bugging your dorm mate, Sennheiser’s PX 100 collapsible headphones ($69.95, www.sennheiserusa.com) are compact but comfortable, and you can fold them up and stow them in your backpack for use with your MacBook at the library or coffee house. Since you’ll need to use your Mac setup to print papers, a sturdy printer is in order—and reliable inkjet printers, such as the HP Photosmart D5460 Printer ($99.99, www.hp.com), are refreshingly affordable. 

Extras.

A backpack to tote your ’Book—and your books—is a must-have for any student, starving or not. Finding the perfect pack can be a subjective endeavor, but the Timbuk2 Underground Daypack ($85, www.timbuk2.com) comes as close as we’ve seen to perfection constructed from ballistic nylon. It holds your MacBook, textbooks, iPod, a sweatshirt, and so on, while two large exterior pockets put other necessities (wallet, keys, mints) in easy reach, and there’s a water-bottle holder too.  Without assuming too much about “the kids these days,” we’re betting it’s not a reach to take it for granted that the typical student is already packing an iPod of some variety. So although it’s not a Mac add-on per se, the Griffin PowerDock 2 ($49.99, www.griffintechnology.com) has slots for two iPods (or an iPod and an iPhone), and juices them up simultaneously—so if you’re feeling generous, you can offer to charge your dorm mate’s ’Pod, too.

Keep your ’Pod family charged up and ready to rock.

Step it Up A Notch.

If you’ve got about a grand more to spend on your rig, you’ll want to step up to a 2.4GHz 15-inch MacBook Pro with 2GB AM, and a 250GB 5,400-rpm hard drive ($2,049 as configured, www.apple.com). Just as we did with the MacBook, we’re going to advise you to step up to a total of 4GB of RAM after your ’Book arrives ($49.99 from Other World Computing, 
www.macsales.com, and $51.99 from Crucial, www.crucial.com). This setup will work well for business travelers too, and for that user profile, we also recommend adding the Apple MagSafe Airline Adapter ($49, www.apple.com). A pair of earmuff-style headphones will stand you in good stead whether you’re a businessperson doing a lot of airplane travel or a student rocking out at all hours between study sessions. Check out the Sennheiser HD515 ($129.99, www.sennheiser.com), which combine the perfect balance of comfort (they weigh a mere 9 ounces) and sound quality.

Sennheiser’s HD515 Gaming ’phones have shiny chrome accents.

Stash all your digital stuff on the My Book Home Edition.

In the printer department, the Canon Pixma MP620 Photo ($149.99, www.usa.canon.com) is a capable all-in-one that even lets you print photos taken on a camera phone wirelessly via Bluetooth. If you’re a typical student, you spend more than you probably should buying MP3s—the key word there is buying—so you’re going to need plenty of storage for all that digital property. The Western Digital My Book Home Edition 500GB external drive ($159.99, www.wdc.com) can house music library without burning up too much cash.

A Physics Geek and His Mac

Name: Andre Bach
Occupation: grad student in physics
Gear: 15-inch MacBook Pro (2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM)

Someday, physics grad student Andre Bach might be responsible for discovering what governs the particles that make up everything on Earth—and he uses a Mac.

Andre Bach is a physics grad student at UC Berkeley doing research in Switzerland at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which just happens to be the world’s leading lab in particle research. Bach works on a project with the James Bond-ish name of the ATLAS experiment. ”We aim to discover the Higgs boson,” Bach explains, not really clearing things up for us physics know-nothings (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson). “The Higgs boson,” says Bach, “is the only thing in the standard model of particle physics that hasn’t yet been seen.” The goal of the project is also “to uncover evidence for new theories and phenomena.” They want to know more about the fundamental laws governing particles that make up everything on Earth and in the known universe. To do so, the team at CERN working on ATLAS speeds up protons to almost the speed of light, smashes them together, and analyzes the particles that result.

Bach uses a Mac at the lab and at home for his personal computing. His needs run a little heavier on the horsepower than the average student, considering his area of study, which is why he uses a MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM and two displays (“courtesy of our tax dollars”). “One big advantage to using a Mac in the field of particle physics is that all of the dedicated servers/supercomputers we use for storing and analyzing data are totally Unix, so the *nix background of the Mac makes interfacing with them effortless,” Bach says. “I get all of the compatibility and command-line power of a Linux personal machine with all the ‘it just works’ quality and shininess of the Mac.” Besides Mac staples like Apple Mail, iTunes, and Mozilla Firefox, Bach runs a cadre of physics geek tools, including Mathematica, a Mac version of GNU Emacs called Aquamacs, Terminal, X11, and a specialty data-analysis package. For his personal stuff, Bach uses Aperture to organize and process photos shot with his Nikon D40. If money were no object and he could have his true dream setup, Bach says he’d double up on Macs, plunking an eight-core 3.2GHz Mac Pro with at least4GB of RAM, the GeForce 8800 GT graphics card, and “all the fixings,” plus an Apple 30-inch Cinema HD Display on his desk. While he’s visiting Fantasyland, he’d also throw in a 1.8GHz MacBook Air with a solid-state drive for travel. Back in the real world, Bach says his MacBook Pro provides “the requisite balance of power and expandability.”

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The Gamer
All work and no play makes Mac a dull boy.

The Basics.

The Mac Pro ($2,799 and up, www.apple.com) is the best bet for a serious gaming Mac—its tower configuration and PCI Express expansion plots make it the most versatile, and its two Xeon chips give it plenty of processing power too. Modern “hardcore” games (twitchy first-person shooters, eye-candy-filled strategy games, massively multiplayer online worlds, and so on) require a speedy processor and the best graphics card you can get. We would configure our gaming Mac Pro with two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon CPUs and the standard 2GB of RAM and single 320GB hard drive, and then we’d upgrade to an Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT graphics card with 512MB of video RAM (VRAM) and the AirPort Extreme 802.11n wireless card, for a grand total of $2,999.

If that’s too rich, the 24-inch iMac can be had with the same GeForce 8800 GT graphics card and 2GB of memory, plus a 500GB hard drive, built-in monitor, and AirPort wireless for just $2,199. The only catch is that an iMac’s graphics can’t easily be upgraded later on, while a Mac Pro’s can. The 24-inch iMac is also a better value than the 15-inch 2.5GHz MacBook Pro ($2,499), which has a game-worthy Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT with 512MB of VRAM, but only 15 inches of screen real estate.

As great as the Mac Pro is, it doesn’t come with a display. Apple’s Cinema Displays are an attractive option, if a bit spendy, but their response time is 14 milliseconds. While that’s plenty fast enough for most computing tasks and entertainment, hardcore gamers might look for a snappier-responding LCD, like the 24-inch Samsung SyncMaster 245t (www.samsung.com), which has a 6ms response time and costs $799, although we found it online for $700. (The 23-inch Apple Cinema Display is $899, so the Samsung will save you two bills that you can spend on more games.)

A sturdy gaming headset is essential. Good sound fidelity will add to the immersive gaming experience, plus you need a microphone for taunting opponents and coordinating with teammates. We like the comfortable Logitech Precision Gaming Headset ($29.99, www.logitech.com) for its cord’s volume and mute controls and the noise-canceling microphone designed to keep game sounds from bleeding into our conversations.

We’ll stick with the Mac Pro’s packed-in Apple Keyboard for now, but the Mighty Mouse doesn’t live up to its name for anything beyond casual gaming. Instead, try the Razer DeathAdder Mac Edition ($59.99, www
.razerzone.com). If you like sports or driving games, pick up a Logitech Dual Action Gamepad ($19.99, www.logitech.com)—heck, pick up two in case you “accidentally” throw yours against a wall someday.

Then it’s time to get your game on. On the Mac side, try World of WarCraft, The Sims 2, Heroes of Might and Magic V, Need for Speed: Carbon, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Second Life, Madden NFL 09, and more, without even dipping your toes into the deep end of Windows gaming (see “Extras,” below).

Extras.

Maybe you noticed that when we configured our Mac Pro, we didn’t upgrade the single lonely hard drive, or the standard 2GB of RAM. Let’s do that now, but let’s save tons of cash by buying the RAM and hard drives separately and installing them ourselves. For RAM, check out Crucial’s helpful Memory Advisor Tool at www.crucial
.com. We found a 4GB pair of fully buffered DIMMs for $229.99—Apple charges $500 if you buy the same 4GB with your Mac Pro. And since we bought our Mac Pro with 2GB installed already, that’s a total of 6GB after this upgrade. Not bad. Other World Computing (www.macsales.com) has good deals on hard drives; at press time, 1TB Hitachi 7K100 7,200-rpm SATA drives were $199.99 each. Grab one for each of your Mac Pro’s four hard-drive bays; that should hold you a while.

Take your gaming to the next level with a clean copy of Windows XP Home Edition ($189.99 on www.amazon.com) to play Windows games over Boot Camp. Or try Codeweaver’s CrossOver Games ($39.95, www.codeweavers.com) if the games you want to play are on its supported titles list. CrossOver Games lets you play Windows software on your Mac without owning Windows at all—see the full review on p83. If you do go with the Windows/Boot Camp option, make sure to get some antivirus software—Norton AntiVirus Dual Protection ($69.99, shop.symantecstore
.com) will watch over the Mac and Windows partitions of your hard drive at once. Once you’re ready for some Windows games, check out Gears of War, Diablo 3, Quake IV, Half-Life 2, and Call of Duty 4.

If Money Is No Object.

Program the Belkin n52te to control all your favorite games.

So, you’re starting to resemble the South Park kids in the “Make Love, Not WarCraft” episode? Time to get crazy with the 1337 gear. Baby yourself with the booming bass and comfy fit of the Razer Piranha headset ($79.99, www.razerzone.com). If you’re a speed fiend, ditch the analog sticks on your trusty gamepad for a real driving experience. Logitech’s MOMO Racing Force Feedback Wheel ($99.99. www.logitech.com) features gas and brake pedals, an 11-inch rubber steering wheel with programmable buttons, and lets you shift gears with paddle shifters or a manual knob.

The Logitech MOMO Racing Force Feedback Racing Wheel also comes with gas and brake pedals for under your chair.

If you prefer RPGs, first-person shooters, and real-time strategy games, the Belkin n52te Game Controller ($69.99, www
.belkin.com) has 15 programmable keys and a thumbpad, plus four shift states, for a total of 105 actions at your fingertips when every second counts. Logitech’s G15 Gaming Keyboard ($99.99) is considered the best of the best. If you run into any USB gaming peripherals that don’t come with Mac drivers, pick up a multipurpose device driver called USB Overdrive ($20, www.usboverdrive
.com). Finally, grab a case of super-caffeinated Bawls G33K B33R ($32.99 for 24 bottles, www.thinkgeek.com) to stay awake and twitchy during all-night fragging sessions.

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The Hip Newbie
Whether you’re a stay-at-home mom or a recent retiree, being new
to tech doesn’t mean you can’t join the digital revolution in style.

The Basics. 

For years, computers have been marketed on technical specs, but the reality is that for average computer users, processor speeds and other technical measurements are largely irrelevant. When you’re using a Mac to check email, create text docs, store photos, and manage the music collection on your iPod, any Mac would do the trick, and some of the more expensive models like the Mac Pro and the MacBook Air are overkill. For most day-to-day tasks, better technical specs don’t translate into a better user experience, and in fact for people who are a bit new to the whole technology thing—but still care about design and a streamlined interface—simpler is probably better.

Ease of use is probably the key feature to look for in a Mac. For that reason, the all-in-one nature of the iMac makes it perfect for people new to the platform, as well as for users looking for a general-purpose family computer. Straight from the box, the iMac has almost everything you’ll need for day-to-day tech tasks, and with a few extras, the iMac becomes your hub for family photos, music collections, and other personal data.

As the core of a home Mac setup, the entry-level 24-inch iMac is a great value at $1,799 (www.apple.com). The 24-inch model represents a slight performance bump over the lower-priced 20-inch models, but—more importantly— the larger screen offers more flexibility, especially when using your iMac with iPhoto or to watch videos. To that, we’d add a few accessories, including a digital camera and photo printer, an external drive for backup, an iPod (of course!), and a small, ultra-portable video camera.

There are tons of photo printers on the market, and in recent years the print quality of even low-priced color printers has increased dramatically. In keeping with the simplicity theme, we like compact photo printers like the Canon CP760 ($99, www
.usa.canon.com). A compact dye-sub printer, the CP760 will print images up to 4 by 8 inches. It’s not the fastest printer on the market, but for printing snapshots to share with friends and family, it gets the job done at a great price.

For a photographer more interested in capturing moments than the art and science of photography, a simple point-and-shoot model is the way to go. Nikon’s Coolpix S210 ($179.95, www.nikon.com) is an 8-megapixel camera with plenty of automatic options and electronic image stabilization, perfect for low-light situations, including indoor shots. And while the Nikon also shoots 640-by-480-pixel video, for ease of use and portability, you can’t beat the Flip Video Mino ($179.99, www.theflip.com) a completely self-contained video camera that weighs half what even the smallest still cameras do, and captures up to an hour of video between trips to offload the footage to your computer. And the plug-and-play nature of the Flip can’t be beat, which is one of the reasons the Flip family of cameras have recently become the best-selling video cameras in the United States.

Of course, no starter Mac rig would be complete without an iPod. For new users, the iPod nano ($149 for 4GB; $199 for 8GB; 
www.apple.com) represents a good balance between price and capacity. For less than 200 bucks, you can carry around 200 or more of your favorite albums, and it even plays videos.

As our lives become increasingly digitized, the need to back up data becomes even more important. While storing all your family photos, videos, music, and personal documents all in one place is incredibly convenient, it’s also extremely dangerous. Hard drives fail, which is why making frequent backups of all your data is a crucial part of your computer setup. Since the iMac’s form factor doesn’t allow for secondary internal drives, a high-capacity external drive is a must-have. Western Digital’s My Book line of drives ($99.99 to $299.99, www.wdc.com) combines ease-of-use with simple case designs that blend in with the rest of your home decor.

Name: Miriam Goodman
Occupation: Stay-at-home mom/volunteer
Gear: iMac, iPod, AirPort Express, HP all-in-one photo printer

Miriam Goodman knows what she wants for Mother’s Day: an iPhone 3G or a MacBook Air.

When she’s not attending a volunteer meeting or shuttling one of her daughters somewhere, Miriam Goodman, a stay-at-home mom and volunteer from Thousand Oaks, California, is glued to the family iMac, firing off emails or working in iPhoto to create photo albums, while she enjoys her favorite iTunes music piped through several rooms of their home, courtesy of an AirPort Express. Her volunteer efforts focus on a project affiliated with her synagogue called Re-Imagine, which assists synagogues throughout the country in restructuring their religious education programs from the ground up.

A mother of two, Goodman says her iMac is an indispensable part of her digital toolkit. Apple’s bundled apps come in handy, although she wishes the company made software for managing her family’s finances (psst, Miriam, check out Quicken for Mac). “I cannot live without iPhoto, iMovie, and iTunes,” she says. “At the moment there is far too much on my Desktop…I should probably figure out how to tend to that.” Maybe she should check out Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits blog.

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The Entertainment Junkie
Whether you’re into music, movies, or TV, your digital media hardware should have an Apple logo on it.

The Basics.

Ever since the iPod made its debut in 2001, the Mac’s status as a great media machine has been well known. Despite all the kicking and screaming on the part of the music and movie industries, it’s become clear that the future of media is digital, and that more than anything, consumers want choice and portability in how they consume entertainment. Thankfully, between Macs, iPods, and a plethora of third-party gear, we’re now in the best position ever to control what entertainment we consume, wherever and whenever we like.

The foundation of a great media machine is in raw processing power. While every Mac all the way down to the Mini does a fine job ripping your audio CDs, for converting large amounts of video, you’ll appreciate the power of the Mac Pro ($2,799 and up, www.apple.com). Without additional software, Macs aren’t able to do anything more than play back most commercial DVDs. With the widescreen displays available—and video playback capabilities available on the iPod touch and iPhone—this seems like a ridiculous limitation. Fortunately, a variety of apps exist to help you consume your video content on devices of your choosing, although using apps like HandBrake (free, handbrake.fr) or MacTheRipper (donationware, dig into the forums at 
www.ripdifferent.com for the overly elaborate download procedure) is still legally questionable. (For a tutorial on ripping your purchased DVDs, see “Make a Backup of Your Movie DVD,” Apr/08, p28.) Once you begin ripping your own video into more flexible formats, you’ll appreciate the additional processing power of a Mac Pro.

If music is more your thing, an iPod classic is the way to go. Topping out the iPod line at 160GB, the $349 classic 
(www.apple.com) lets you store more than 7,000 songs in Apple Lossless format and up to 40,000 tunes in 128Kbps AAC, depending on where you fall on the audiophile scale. For movies, however, the 32GB iPod touch ($499, www.apple.com) offers the most storage in a widescreen device, although there’s no way you’d get through that much content without taking several battery-recharge breaks. If you end up with more than one iPod, a charging station like Griffin’s PowerDock is the perfect solution for charging them all at once ($49.99 for PowerDock2, $69.99 for PowerDock4, www.griffintechnology.com).

And since we’re talking about music and movies…do yourself a favor, and dump Apple’s mediocre—though iconic—white earbuds. For on-the-go listening, we prefer in-ear models by Etymotic, like the brand-new hf5 ($149, www.etymotic.com), although to be honest, virtually everything but the cheapest pair of replacement earbuds would be an improvement over Apple’s bundled ’buds. For at-home or other more stationary listening, Grado’s SR60 earphones ($69, www.gradolabs.com) offer a tremendous bang for your buck.

Replacement ’buds—the best iPod upgrade.

If you’ve got a bunch of tunes—or movies— hanging around inside your Mac, backing them up is not negotiable. Sure, you’ve got hard copies of CDs and DVDs, but when a drive bites it, the last thing you’ll want to do is spend endless hours re-ripping your media. We highly recommend taking advantage of those four drive bays in your Mac Pro, and mirror your data onto a second drive, either by setting up a RAID, or using a backup app like SuperDuper ($27.95, www.shirt-pocket.com) or ChronoSync ($30, www.econtechnologies
.com). If you have some extra dough, Data Robotics’ Drobo ($349 USB, $449 USB & FireWire, www.drobo.com) is probably the simplest in set-it-and-forget-it backup, featuring hot-swappable drives that you can replace as drive capacities and your storage needs increase over time.

Drobo: Like the Jetson’s Rosie, except for your data.

With your Mac chock-full of media, you should consider the Apple TV ($229 40GB, $329 160GB, www.apple.com) to pipe your music, movies, and photos through your network onto your other AV equipment, including your HDTV. With the Apple TV, you can pull media from anywhere on your home network, in addition to movie rentals and purchases from the iTunes Store via your television. If that’s more than you need, check out the iLuv i1255 ($149.99, www.i-luv.com), a combo DVD player/ iPod dock that charges your iPod, and feeds your iPod’s audio and video to your home theater gear, in addition to playing standard DVDs. If you’re just looking for music streaming, Apple’s AirPort Express ($99, www.apple.com) features wireless streaming to speakers throughout your house (although if your Mac is close enough to your entertainment center, a stereo mini-plug to RCA cable is a more reliable connection, and will only cost about three bucks at your local electronics store). 

Sonos puts all your music at your fingertips.

For a high-end, highly customizable music solution—with a price tag to match—check out the Sonos line of wireless music products ($999 for Bundle 150, www.sonos.com), which allows you to set up different music zones in every room of your house and stream different music to each of them, all controlled by Sonos’s Wi-Fi remote. Of course, for iPhone or iPod touch owners on a more limited budget can wring similar—if less elaborate—Wi-Fi remote capabilities out of their device running 2.0 software by downloading Apple’s free Remote application from the App Store.