Good reason not to buy a Mac.
Unix printing has always been on the basis that the application never talks to the printer directly. Most cheap printers pretty much rely on the application talking via a tightly coupled driver directly to the printer. Thats te first priblem.
The second one is PostScript. The original Apple Laserwriter had about 4 times as much processing power and RAM as the apple computers that drive it. And cost more.
At some level the printer subsytems has to either hope that the printer understands Postcript, or do the conversion. The paucity and quality lack of CUPS drivers for many printers to do that, means its a bit hit and miss as to whether half of the cheap stuff out there will ever work with a Mac.
When buying printers for a Mac, expect to spend twice as much, and if possible get one with native postscript and a built in network connection. That at least means its capable of talking postscript without a particularly direct connection to the host machine.
Macs are wonderful at typesetting, IF you spend the money to get a top quality printer. If you don't. they are utter crap, and since typsetting is the only thing a mac does well, apart from looking cute, unless you are in the graphics business, or have no needs beyond word processing/spreadsheeting web and email, and of course medai s**te like phots and itunes, don't buy a mac.
This MAC here, was my wife spare machine, sio I thought 'lesy see what Macs can do'
It turned out to be 'not much'
I bought loads of RAM - twice as much as the PC, and a new hard disk to put OS-X on. Ok ebay was cheap enough.
My plotter and scanner were simply not useable.
The printer got a postcript upgraded..fortunately that was cheap on ebay. It still occasionally loses its mind and starts printing out pages of raw postcript.
I couldn't find a CAD program worth a damn that would match Corel Draw for what I wanted. After weeks of very heavy cinfiguration, I know more about Mac fionts and OS-X than I ever wanted to learn. To no avaiul.
It runs mail, browser, ms office, and thats it. It IS a bit nicer to pull camera stuff off, due to te fact that the keyboard has a USB plig in it.
Its slower than an equivalent PC, even after turning off most of the ditzy graphics and detuneing the graphics down to 16 bit rather than 24 bit..uses twice as much ram, and a replacement keyboard was twice as much.
I DO like the onscreen appearance, and the fact that it doesn't throw flashy carp at you irrespective, like XP, and teh fact it crashes a bit less, but crash it does. I Hta eteh fact that you need to click once typ bring a window intop ficus, and avgain to actually use the window function. I hate the fact that you cant resize windows except in the bottom corner, or that an application with several windows may hide the one you want behind another one, and there is no way I have found to change that order, other than minimizing the one on top. I hate the way that bad typing cause s all sorts of strange windows to pop up, or the fact that when typing there are two cursors..in some applications..one where you last were typing, and the other one where you just clicked to edit. I hate the fact that when you boot, if there are issues, you get NO feedback whatsoever, just an apple with a rotating dial.. . No Macs are designed for people who have a lot of money, and know nothing about computers.
You only have to look in the NGs to do with macs..its never 'you do this, go there. edit that'
Its 'take it back to the shop' 'reinstall'
All fur coat and no knickers.
I know have a PC dedicated to do all the things the Mac cannot do. Sure it looks cheap, but it runs faster on less RAM, drives my peripherals and runs the code I need.
If All you want is a desktop to run standard apps, use Linux.
If you want a fashion statement, and can afford it, buy a mac.