New to Macs; Need some help with software

What do you plan on doing with the macbook?

You can also look at NeoOffice. Office 2008 is just about out, pick that up if you need to do alot of office related files.

Acrobat Reader really isn't needed unless you plan on filling out lots of PDF based forms or things with other advanced functions. Otherwise Preview will serve you fine for this purpose, and comes installed.

MSN Messenger? I personally would go for a third party tool like Adium which I believe does connect to MSN IIRC.

Open Office does work, though for the regular Open Office version you would need to install an extra package from your install DVD. The package is X11 and is an environment used often by programs ported from Linux.

As Mentioned NeoOffice works fine, it is a slightly older version of Open Office usually, but wrapped in Java to make it blend much more seamlessly with the Mac OS environment. I would reccomend this in most cases.

That being said, OpenOffice 3.0 will likely be fully mac native from what I have seen(Yes I know, we have heard this before, meaning you won't need to install X11, and it will blend with the desktop better. So keep your eyes open for it, I am waiting with anticipation myself.

iMovie, you may want to download the older version of. The new version of iMovie I am not happy with myself, but the older version is a free download for owners of the new version. Main difference is the older version has a timeline, which I find much easier to do editing in, whereas the new one lacks any sort of useable timeline for editing.

That being said, I invested in Final Cut Express. Not nearly as easy to use as iMovie, but more flexible. Really I only recommend this if you feel limited by iMovie. I don't recommend FCP unless you know you need the feature set to pay for that several hundred dollar extra charge.

In as far as photoshop, how detailed work do you do in it? For one thing there IS photoshop that you can buy, I believe IIRC that CS3 runs native on the Mac again. There is also iPhoto that you can do basic editing in. I also use Gimp myself which is comparable to Photoshop in my experience, so long as you are looking at keeping things in the digital domain(Aka not printing). The print domain you would need to go with photoshop if you need that flexibility it affords. But if you don't need the flexibility, iPhoto may suit you fine. All depends on what you do.

Seablade

Yup Photoshop CS3 runs natively on the Intel Macs