Customer Reviews

Mac Box Set Family Pack [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you have more than one Mac at home buy the Family pack of Mac Box Set for $199... you can install upto 5 systems.

Who gives operating system and work suite and digital work suite for $199 and also for upto 5 computers ...

This is how things should be done: Offer a comprehensive set of tools and software to families for a price that will not cripple us. With a license for up to 5 computers for all of the included applications (Leopard, iLife and iWork) this is the perfect purchase for anyone with more than one Mac in their life. Pricing software reasonably is something Apple is known for, and this is another example of their family friendly approach. It's much appreciated, especially in an economy like this one!

LEOPARD
Leopard is easily the best of the best when it comes to an OS (Operating System). It is stable, fast, and as intuitive as any OS I've ever used, and I've used every single Windows or Apple offering to date. If you don't have Leopard, now is the time to jump in, the water is warm!

iLIFE 09
iLife is probably my least favorite part of this package, not because it is bad, but because I actually much preferred the old iMovie HD with it's greater level of control over audio files. Sadly, iMovie 09 lacks a strong set of features when it comes to adding and editing audio in your movie files. Thankfully, I found a way to have both on my MAC at the same time, so that's not an issue anymore. iPhoto is good, and does what it always has, and does it well. The newer features (face recognition, tagging locations) are ok, but face recognition doesn't really work very well and tagging locations manually (assuming you don't have a GPS enabled camera that does it automatically) is a bit of a pain, but really cool if you spend the time to do it right. Garage band is very, very good, as it always has been, but there aren't any real major changes from the 08 version to 09. iWeb I've not really spent much time using so I can't speak from personal experience, but it appears that most people (from talking to a few friends and reading reviews) are having good experiences with it. iDVD is virtually unchanged since the 08 release.

iWORK 09
iWork is a very nice upgrade from 08. Pages is the most improved with the ability to easily import and export as .doc files for Office compatibility very easily. You can also now export as a .PDF which is very, very useful. Numbers has also been upgraded, as works well across the board, but it still isn't Excel. If you don't use very complex number tables or special functions, you'll likely never miss Excel, but if you don work with tilt-tables, macros, etc., Pages will not be an Excel replacement, at least not in it's current permutation. Still, iWork isn't as comprehensive or as powerful as Office yet, so if you really need professional tools, you might consider getting Office 2008 instead. If you're using it for general tasks (word processing, writing papers, etc.,) it is more than capable and very worth the purchase.

CONCLUSIONS
Overall, this is an amazing value with a suite of tools that are remarkably good almost without exception. While some of the new features are not as useful as they might be, Leopard is still the best OS out there, iLife serves its purpose, and iWork has been improved immensely. If you've got some updating to do, now is the time to make it happen.

I have a MacPro desktop, my sibling has a iMac, and my other sibling has an iMac and a Macbook Pro. Two of their computers are still running Tiger, but not anymore. I already have Leopard, so I just installed iLife and iWork '09 on my system, and they installed both suites on all of their systems.

We're all up to date, I'll be purchasing a new Macbook soon, and have I'll an iWork license leftover for it.

I'm happy that my whole family of "Apples" are working at full top capacity.

This product is worth the money if you have multiple systems, and you get to install it in up to five computers. It's a deal if you're not flying solo.

Great value for the money. the iWork and iLife upgrades were effortless. I did have some issues upgrading a MacBook from Mac OSX 10.4 to Leopard. There were issues with the Safari upgrade and the Mail upgrade. I found the answers by searching on Google, but I was a little surprised that Apple hadn't included these configuration fixes in the upgrade process. Once the upgrade and fixes were complete Leopard is now running fine.

With Amazon's price on this, there's just no reason not to buy this if you have more than one Mac. We have a few Macs floating around the house, and one of them was still on Tiger--which I want to get upgraded to Snow Leopard when it comes out in a month, so getting Leopard on there was an important step for that. Plus, we have a Time Capsule and I wanted to be sure the floating laptops were getting backed up to it.

It's nice to have the latest iWork and Leopard on fresh disks not tied to any Mac, and the ability to install onto 5 family computers.

I was also excited about the Flickr integration with iPhoto, though it turns out to be nearly useless--you can only upload new photosets, no replacement or tweaking of privacy options. But while that detracts from the iPhoto '09 value, this is still a great buy.

This upgrade went smoothly, just as one would anticipate from Apple. Love the new iLife and iWork software, too, and Amazon sells it cheaper than the Apple Store. It is good to keep up with the new versions of stuff, and Time Machine is worth the cost of the upgrade all by itself. Smooth, automatic backups written by Apple, not by some third party software ported over from the Dark Side... Sweet.

It's an Apple product, so it works great - what more need I say. The new OS speeds up machine performance incredibly. A must buy if you enjoy machine performance. I life and I work are great as well. And you can load the programs on all ofyour Macs. It's a great deal for three great products.

I was disappointed that I spent so much on this and a newer version came out immediately. :-(

If you're still waiting to upgrade from Tiger (perhaps you have a Power PC which cannot use 10.6) this is the best value for your money. Either the single user or family pack (which allows up to five installs for each software suite) includes Apple's OS X Leopard as well as the most current versions of iLife and iWork. iWork is Apple's simplified alternative to Office while iLife is a suite of programs that work together to manage your digital files and channel your creativity.

Consider that the cost of this box set beats the individual upgrade prices for each of these programs.

Fantastic deal to have all this new software and OS for our old Macs in one reasonable package! Install was a breeze and now we've extended the life of the family's machines - plus have a couple upgrades left in case we buy something used that needs it. We're set!