I recall that some time ago there was a brief discussion on UKC by people planning to buy a new Mac computer; so ? has anyone got anything to say about their new Mac ? good or bad?

A few months ago I bought a new Mac: Mini i5 CPU, 8GB RAM, 512GB SDD running 10.15.7 Catalina.  I bought the Intel version over the newer M1 version as I needed the extra ports to add 2 printers, scanner, DVD, etc. and as printers were getting on a bit and I wasn't sure about M1 driver availability at the time.  I must say it is very nice, and am very pleased with it.  It'll run DaVinci Resolve using HD videos (haven't tried 4K yet) on the base spec (can shovel up to 64GB RAM into it if you so desire).  The M1 version is a much faster beast though - plenty of reviews on YouTube.
Next Mac I get will probably (OK, almost definitely) be an M1 laptop of some variety to replace my ageing mid-2012 MacBook Pro that still works fine, albeit I upgraded the HDD to a SSD and RAM to 16GB

Will it run Word?

rhychydwr1 said:

Will it run Word?

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Yes, MS Office will run on a Mac.  However, as an alternative, OpenOffice does most of what MS Office applications do for general day to day activity, has similar look and is free.  Macs also come bundled with their own Apple equivalents of Word, Excel and Powerpoint among other applications.  I tend to use Open Office most of the time, but that's personal preference (also available for Windows).

Thanks for your reply, ZombieCake; what sort of monitor do you use?

At the moment I've got it attached to a Samsung Full HD TV (1920 x 1080 pixels), about a 22-24 inch screen, via the HDMI port.  Works fine, although I'd quite like to get a 4K monitor in due course. 

I've bought several of the new Apple Silicon M1 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models this year. They all behave pretty much as expected, but with the added bonus of much extended battery life when compared with their Intel predecessors.

I've also bought a number of Dell Ultrasharp screens (mostly in 27 in) which I like a lot. The ones I chose have a USB-C connection and include a power source and a network socket (Ethernet) so a single USB-C cable from the computer to the screen provides video, charging power and network connection to the computer. There are also four standard USB-A ports on the screen which means you can attach USB peripherals to the screen and the computer will communicate with them over the same USB-C cable. The screens also have HDMI and DisplayPort connections.