I bought and used iWork to finish my thesis (my laptop is a Powerbook Pro) but subsequently had to switch to Office since that's what my coworkers use. The iWork word processor, Pages, is aimed a little more at making brochures, posters, etc. (i.e. catering to the artistic types as Apple tends to do) but isn't any less powerful than Word, at least at the level I was using it at. The interface is well designed; you don't have to look too hard to find out how to do things. And if you use styles to format your text, it's more intuitive and easier to do with iWork than Word. I have a slight preference for Pages but not enough that I'm upset that I can't use it.

The iWork presentation creator, Keynote, is much better than Powerpoint. It is easier to use and has a lot of nice pre-designed templates, slide transitions, etc. It also has basic spreadsheet functionality and very nice graph tools. I still use it to do any presentations I need to do. If you do a lot of presentations, iWork might be worth picking up for Keynote alone.

The worst part of iWork is that it has no real spreadsheet program. I've read internet rumors that the next version might have a spreadsheet app but who knows.

And as far as Office on Mac versus Office on Windows, I don't think there's any difference other than the aesthetics of the interfaces.

If you own a Mac bought in the last few years, you should have an iWork trial in your apps folder, 30 days to try anything. After 30 days, you can still use all the features, just not save your work.

Right now, iWork contains Keynote and Pages. Keynote is the very app that Steve Jobs uses to give his keynotes speeches. Compared to Powerpoint, the slideshows from Keynote are much nicer and look more professional. If you are a traveling professional who gives a lot of presentations you'll find better results from less effort. The files are also huge compared to pps files, and Keynote doesn't have a lot of the finer features of Powerpoint.

Pages is the Apple word processor. Pages is to Word what iMovie is to Final Cut Pro. Pages is for everyday typing, Word has the capacity to do just about anything you might want to do with a word processor. If you are the kind of person who thinks Word has become bloatware, or you find yourself mainly typing letters, resumes, and basic "papers" less than 100 pages or so, Pages is made just for you. It has "templates" for newsletters and the like which you can easily customize on your own. Unfortunately, Pages doesn't run like a stripped down word processor because of all the graphical things you can do with it. It's strength is ease of use.

Apple has no equivalent to Excel. No spreadsheet app.

Apple's answer to Access has always been Filemaker, which isn't a part of iWork. If you want a powerful database application you'd do yourself much better to use Filemaker than Access, on OS X or Windows.

Interesting that you brought this up right now, Apple's agreement with Microsoft is set to expire in a few weeks. We'll find out soon if the next version of Office for Mac is the last one.

Any chance you can hint us about an iWork '07 release souldaddy . I've been waiting for an update on the software for quite a while. Especially a spreadsheet app would be nice and allow me to finally kick OpenOffice from the HDD.

WRT MS Office: They just announced they are going to push the release date back into 2008...

Whoops. I just posted in the other thread about this. I hear the iMacs are getting a redesign - Brushed aluminum and maybe a new keyboard like the Macbooks?

I'm going to replace mine with a new one, but probaby will wait until Leopard is included.

And iWork 08 announced today.

Macs tend to be a little underpowered on the graphic side, but the ATI drivers are generally considered to be much better than the ones for NVidia chips. I personally had endless trouble with the 7300GT; running WoW on the Mac Pro with 4gb was guaranteed to crash eventually. (It looked like it was an issue with 32-bit address spaces, and I think it was eventually fixed. ) With the 1900XT, it was flawless. (and much faster.)

The reason, apparently, is because Apple writes the ATI drivers themselves, and they do a better job than NVidia does.

Hopefully ATI will get up to par before too long. This generation appears to be pretty bad.

I think they had those. I think they recently upped the specs at least.

Actually they did do a spec upgrade on the Macbooks in ~May 2k7. Upped the hd a bit and the cpu & memory too. I think that was it.

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The 2600 Pro has horrible performance, perspectively. Malor is right, iMac have never had the option for a really kick-ass video card. From the reviews of the PC cards I've seen, we used the 2600 pro because it's low-heat. Still, my 18-month-old iMac 20" has a slower card and it gets decent fps in WoW, 30 fps in town and 50+ in raids. New PC games cripple it, I can't run Supreme Commander with any settings that look decent, Stalker runs fine on the lowest lighting setting. Direct X 10 games supposedly run at <10 fps on a 2600 Pro with Vista, but that wasn't tested on a Mac but a PC so who knows?