Free alternatives to software piracy

Of course, there is one last option here: Apple Mac.

If it's going to cost you over a thousand pounds to get up to date on all your software, why not just buy a Mac and have the vast majority of stuff pre-installed?

You'll get the same friendly Windows-like experience, without having to dabble with Linux.

Obviously, you get the operating system included on a new Mac. But Apple includes a lot of standard tools for getting work done with its OSX operating system, too. The idea is that you can buy a Mac and immediately get started without having to go grab loads of extra software.


You get a mail client and PIM tools that are easily usable and pretty comprehensive in terms of featureset. Indeed, some might argue that the combination of Mail, iCal and Address Book actually provides more functionality than Outlook itself.

Photo editing software is included in the form of iPhoto, which allows you to catalogue your photos and perform simple retouching tasks. If you want more sophisticated image editing, GIMP is also available for Mac.

The included TextEdit application is a more sophisticated version of WordPad. It's not awesome, but it includes some features like spell checking and comprehensive formatting tools that WordPad lacks.

If you want full Office-like functionality, Apple's iWork suite is a heck of a lot cheaper than MS Office. iWork includes Pages, a word processor and Keynote, a presentation programme. Both of these are easy to use and have included templates and wizards that create good-looking documents with minimum hassle. It costs just £59. Even better, if you have multiple Macs, you can get a 5-user license for only £69, which is rather better than buying 5 copies of Office.

All Macs include iLife, which not only has iPhoto (mentioned above) but iTunes, as well as sophisticated movie creation software (iMovie HD) and foolproof DVD authoring software (iDVD). It also includes iWeb, an easy to use website creation / blogging / podcasting tool.