Originally Posted by
pred02
This is the complete opposite of what I used to be, a gamer, a developer, a person who would always try the newest version of everything. Right now I need the Web, Office, Adobe for music, pictures, video streaming to TV, Internet and voila. The more web applications, the better.
The unibody MacBooks, the ones made from a single block of silver-colored aluminum, has mini Displayports, the new thing. You'd have to get a mini DP to DVI or HDMI cable or adaptor to hook up to an HDTV.
The cheaper $999 white MacBooks may still have mini DVI ports. You'd probably need a cable for that as well.
That wouldn't strictly be streaming though, it would be a direct connection from the laptop to the TV.
But I know people do stream from Macs to say PS3s which are hooked up to TVs. You have to really fiddle though to make that work.
The hassle free approach would be getting an AppleTV to complement the Mac (or PC, they work with iTunes for the PC as well).
As others have noted, you can run Office for the Mac or you can install Boot Camp (you need your own copy of Windows) which comes with the Mac OS 10.5.x or you can buy Parallels or VMWare Fusion. Then you can install the Windows version of Office or whatever else you want.
Boot Camp boots Windows natively or Parallels and Fusion run Windows within virtual machines.
As for Adobe, I believe there are Mac versions of Photoshop but of course it's not cheap. Nor is Light Room.
On the Mac side, you get iLife with your Mac, which includes iPhoto 09, which is a great photo management software with RAW support, face-detection and tagging, geotagging, syncing with Flicker or Facebook.
It also includes iMovie for video editing, Garage Band for learning to play music or playing with music composition, iWeb for simple web page composition.
Aperture is a competitor to Adobe Lightroom, which costs about the same. Final Cut is for serious video editing, which competes with Adobe Premier.