I'm getting ready to buy my first mac computer. Currently i've always used acdsee to organise my photos and do basic edits. It seems to me that iphoto is fairly similar, although i'm not sure i like the default organising system that does photos by 'events'.

I am thinking of buying aperture 3 at the same time.

Would it be best to get this from the outset and not use iphoto?

I understand so far from my research that aperture 3 does quite a few things that would mean i don't need to get photoshop. Is this the case?

Are there any comments in general about using either iphoto or aperture 3?

Personally, I would recommend Lightroom over Aperture. LR is faster and has a better feature set and fewer gimmicks. I did try Aperture for a while, but much preferred LR, and the latest version 3 has some useful improvements. Runs great on a Mac. With either program you should find they cover most of your photo processing needs, very rarely do I use Photoshop.