Importing an iMac

[ChamberSA]

I'm looking at buying an iMac as i do a lot of video editing. I checked out a lot of prices and importing it from the States really is by far the cheapest option. My question is this: If i do buy one in the States and import it how does that effect the software that I'll use (regioning etc.)

Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

 

[PaulMark]

It doesnt affect the software at all.

You should be aware though that only Apple's laptops have international warranties so if you have any problems with your iMac you will have a tough time getting Core to honour the warranty.

Also you will have to pay duties and taxes when importing an iMac and that will add to the price you see on the website.

 

[PeterCH]

I'm looking at buying an iMac as i do a lot of video editing. I checked out a lot of prices and importing it from the States really is by far the cheapest option. My question is this: If i do buy one in the States and import it how does that effect the software that I'll use (regioning etc.)

Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

It doesn't.

My Mac Pro was purchased from ZA Store in 2006. It uses a mix of software bought locally (imported by Core from UK) and software bought in the US from places like Toolfarm or directly downloaded after purchase - eg Adobe Photoshop CS4. It all works together.

Your DVD drive can be made region free or if impossible you can make it region 1 - USA if you want and keep it like that.

 

[2handy]

I own a 2007 model 24" iMac. (I live in Oz)
It has done 2 hard years of work for me, I had a noisy optical drive replaced under warranty.

I dual boot OS X & Arch Linux. I prefer Arch to OS X, as it allows me near total control of my setup, whereas OS X has many limitations in that regard.

I wrote an installation how-to which is on the Arch wiki, you probably won't be interested in it, but I'll post the link anyway:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/IMac_Aluminium

Good luck with you iMac. They do cost a little more (probably depends on where in the world you are as to how much more), though they are incredibly space efficient, & the display quality is great.

I recently upgraded my 320GB HDD to a 1.5TB WD Green HDD, cloning it (file systems were fat32, HFS+, Ext3, JFS) with Clonezilla. Not a problem. If you ever need to get inside of your iMac give me a yell & I'll tell you what I know.

 

[PeterCH]

You can clone the HDD including system disk (Macintosh HD) with Carbon Copy Cloner without any unmounting. I recently put in a 160GB Intel SSD as my boot disk and used CCC to copy the files and folders (including user accounts and hidden folders) across.

 

[2handy]

You can clone the HDD including system disk (Macintosh HD) with Carbon Copy Cloner without any unmounting. I recently put in a 160GB Intel SSD as my boot disk and used CCC to copy the files and folders (including user accounts and hidden folders) across.

Does (or can) CCC do a raw copy? Can it handle Ext3 & JFS?

I used Clonezilla as it handled the variety of file systems that I use in a variety of ways, Clonezilla is interesting like that as it incorporates a variety of other pieces of FOSS & uses specific tools for specific file systems.

Due to my having another machine, & the fact that I had to R&R the internal drive anyway, it was quite easy to just stick the source & destination drives into the 2nd box & boot with Clonezilla. Though I had to use SATA -> IDE cable adapters on the two drives to be able to use the old tech' 2nd box.

It took about 3.5 hours to clone the original drive which was pretty full, holding close to 300GB of data.

 

[PeterCH]

Does (or can) CCC do a raw copy? Can it handle Ext3 & JFS?

I used Clonezilla as it handled the variety of file systems that I use in a variety of ways, Clonezilla is interesting like that as it incorporates a variety of other pieces of FOSS & uses specific tools for specific file systems.

Due to my having another machine, & the fact that I had to R&R the internal drive anyway, it was quite easy to just stick the source & destination drives into the 2nd box & boot with Clonezilla. Though I had to use SATA -> IDE cable adapters on the two drives to be able to use the old tech' 2nd box.

It took about 3.5 hours to clone the original drive which was pretty full, holding close to 300GB of data.

I can't say that. I cloned my Macintosh HD - the 300GB drive which has my OSX 10.5.8 (Leopard) installation and Applications and user accounts. It copied it over to a 160GB Intel SSD. Now I had only 120-odd GB of data on my Macintosh HD partition but Drive Genius Partion Clone would not let me clone these 120GB to a 160GB SSD - that is it said it was possible - but it failed because the source drive was too badly fragmented. I think CCC does a file copy then but copies everything because my Adobe Photoshop CS4 works and so does the rest of my installed stuff with all the activated plugins and all. Some people here have a better product than CCC, look in the sub-forum - I can't remember the piece of FOSS bwana and others raved about but apparently it's even better than CCC.

What was nice about CCC was that I had booted from the drive I would be copying. I didn't need to boot from a different drive. It simply copied my entire system partition while it was active.