Apple computers are so yesterday!

[sandbender]

According to this Wired article, the ratio of PC to Apple sales has now dropped to the lowest point in years. For every fifteen PCs purchased, one Apple is purchased.

Which I suppose isn't bad for a company described in 1998 as a 'niche supplier' that held a tiny part of the market, that was mainly of use to 'designers and arty types' and that would probably go out of business within months.

Anyway they are too mainstream for me now, it'll only be a matter of time before each machine is stuffed with trial version software set to launch every time I start up and the casing will be plastered with near impossible to remove shiny stickers.



What will the next cool thing be?

 

[Retired Member southey]

Potato powered calculator pigs FACT!

 

[Biker]

Potato powered calculator pigs FACT!

I heard the mobile easy to carry version involved Ferrets. But don't quote me on that.

Never owned or used an Apple so can't comment on them, though I hear they are pretty reaible when it comes to software crashing issues. Always had a PC and saw no reason to ditch it in favour of something else. And I'm the "arty type" too.

 

[swright81076]

I've used PC's since DOS 4, and 3 years ago made the leap to Mac. Tbh, best move I've done. Super easy and initiative, all the software I need is available. They just don't crash or break down.
I'm not an apple fan boy, as we have 2 other windows 7 laptops and about a dozen android devices.
I mainly use the mac for downloading, everything else I just use my phone.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

[spandit]

I prefer Linux but the Apple hardware is so much better designed. I bought my MacBook years ago and it's still a useful device when a PC would be horribly out of date. My sister has just bought a retina display MacBook Pro but £2,200 is a bit much for me at the moment

 

[HillBill]

I have an Imac. Better than ANY PC i have tried. I mean seriously waaaaaaaaay better. Much faster, we have a laptop with almost same specs and its not a patch on this bad boy. Took a while to get used to the way the commands are laid out, but the interface is simple and intuitive. Build quality is far beyond any PC i have seen. The whole thing is milled from a single block of aluminium. I would never switch back to PC. Only downside of a Mac is that is not a gamers computer. Not that thats an issue for me.

 

[resnikov]

I do like Apple hardware but its the Apple users I have a problem with having had to support them in a commercial environment. Their holier then thou attitude that it cannot be the Apple hardware or software that is at fault it must be everything else.
I got reported to my boss once by one of them for not being able to fix their problem. It was a known issue with part of the Adobe suite on the Mac. I had spent days researching the problem asking questions on every forum I could find and reading articles about it. The answer was always the same "Known bug, no fix at the moment". I told the user this and they said why cannot I rewrite the code so it works!!! I politely told them that was not possible as I was not a developer and even if I was it would be illegal to do so as it wasn't our application. This was when they reported me.
　
When I showed my boss what I had done to try to resolve the problem he was more then happy with my work but to keep the peace he and I went through all the steps I had done but with the extra one of ringing the Adobe support line to be told what we already knew.
He then went about chewed out the Mac users boss about wasting the IT departments time.
　
Rant over

 

[AndyJDickson]

I must say a work colleague of mine just purchased the new Mac book air and its stunning. Takes about 5 seconds to boot up as it doesn't have the normal 'spinny disc, hard drive that is in most laptop and it also has gesture technology which is hard to get used to but pretty freakin cool. Dont get my wrong I probably would swap my acer for it any time soon but its a pretty cool piece of kit.

 

[udamiano]

Been using both Mac and Linux for years now. wouldn't go back to PC. to unstable, and the way the memory is used :yikes: , not to mention Dll's and kernel based programme computing :yikes::yikes: no no no !!!

Sorry bit of a tech rant there LOL

 

[sasquatch]

Can't be beat for making music and graphic arts. Fact! The 'designer and arty' types know what they like so I reckon they'll plod along just fine...I can see why some people are anti Apple from a world domination corporate stance but are Microsoft any better? I've got a mate that makes music for a living and he's got what would be considered an antique Apple computer, he wouldn't get rid of it for anything in the world!

 

[Biker]

You fella's are really selling me on the idea of a MAC now. Looking towards buying a laptop unit in the near future, naturally considered going with a PC but if those macs are as good as you're reporting and outlast the specs on a laptop, I'd be a fool not to cross over to the light side.

I have a nieghbour nearby who uses MAC's think I'd better pay her a visit and see what she can do to impress me with it.

 

[Bucephalas]

As a photographer I'm one of the few out there that doesn't use a Mac although there is no doubt they do a far better job than any Pc.
For me it's always been a business decision as I can't justify the stupid costs vs Pc's. A number of my friends complained that every time a new mac operating system came out they were unable to run existing software and when photoshop and lightroom alone costs many hunderds of pounds it's not a chance I'm willing to take.
Mac's did set many standards in technology though. Friends of mine had cd writers on their macs a decade before they came out on Pc's for example.

If my lottery numbers come up though........

 

[AndyJDickson]

Biker - the price of a mac equivalent could be a put off but if you shop around there are decent deals and the Apple site do good deals on repair items for sale (they are in great working order and all the warrantys etc but just second hand) http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals

 

[Biker]

Thanks for the info Andy. Bookmarked for later reading.

 

[IanM]

Compare like for like when pricing. By the time you buy all the extras for a PC firewall, virus checker, hardware, software, repair costs, downtime, loss of information, shear frustration, time doing upgrades and maintainance and so on I suspect the price gap has narrowed or reversed.

My Mac runs for months on end with no problems, I only turn it off if I am away for a few days to save electricity (Mac electrical costs are lower too).

 

[HillBill]

Aaron, you can also run windows on a mac, but you cant run OS X on a PC So a mac is both a pc and a mac, while a PC is nothing more than a PC.

2 computers in one really. Any one who says a PC is better, obviously dont know this

 

[rik_uk3]

I've two nephews who are graphic designers, much to their dismay the company switched from mac to PC a couple of years ago... they are now PC converts.

There are good and bad with Apple machines, they are very pleasing to look at and the OS is designed for a simple user experience but, you can't really upgrade them, your stuck with a model until Apple launch a new one, they are no faster than a PC, they are more expensive than a PC, lot less software available, software compatibility issues etc. I doubt there is a mac on the market any quicker than the PC I'm typing this on, not sure many if any mac lappies are faster than my Sony Vaio? Plus if your like my lad, they are poor gaming machines.

I've setup Windows 8 preview on a spare PC and its nice, quick, a refreshing new look and I'm happy with the metro interface. The Microsoft ARM Surface Pro tablet looks to be the bees knees and I'll be in line on day one of launch for one. http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/46151/microsoft-surface-pro-windows-8-tbalet that will be my new toy for xmas

Windows 7 is fast, less resource hungry than previous editions and I've had two absolutely trouble free years running it and I've slowly upgraded the rest of my home network to it, again problem free.

I allow myself a £1000 a year budget/indulgence for home I.T. (as I told the wife, its cheaper than golf) and that normally (not always though) is enough for me to keep up with changes, I'd perhaps need more to do the same with macs for no improvement in performance.

Just my view from the Windows camp.

 

[sandbender]

Biker - the price of a mac equivalent could be a put off but if you shop around there are decent deals and the Apple site do good deals on repair items for sale (they are in great working order and all the warrantys etc but just second hand) http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals

That link is for the US store, here is the UK store link.

http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/specialdeals

Another vote for the 'Special Deal' section from Apple. The last two powerbooks I have purchased were 'reconditioned' machines from the UK Apple Store, one purchased in 2006 the other in late 2007, the former worked fine until about two months ago when the hard drive gave up the ghost, not the end of the world and (in that machine anyway) easily replaced. The machine from 2007 has had a much rougher life, has been to far off parts of the world, different climates, bashed about film sets and building sites. It works fine, one of the 'apple' buttons is missing but still works if I press hard enough, I could get a replacement for it (or indeed almost any other part from http://www.thebookyard.com/ if I felt the need.

"...I do like Apple hardware but its the Apple users I have a problem with having had to support them in a commercial environment..."

This is true, I remember turning up to various gigs back in the late nineties early 2000's and the look some of the IT folk would give me when I pulled my old Apple Pismo out of my backpack said it all, I always tried to be nice though, but you could tell that the 'cult of mac' had caused them no end of problems in the past. I don't get that so much these days though.

"...you can't really upgrade them, your stuck with a model until Apple launch a new one..."

I don't doubt there are probably applications that I could be running (Autodesk perhaps?) that may have required me to upgrade my machine, but I run a browser, I check my email, I write documents, I listen to Radio 4, play music and I backup and view my digital photos. My laptops have been doing this happily since 2006/7, no upgrades required.

I only recently installed the all new all singing OS 'Lion' which theoretically should be pushing my machine to its limit. It isn't, it works fine, the only thing I have noticed that is a little slower is start up time for the default image viewing software, but I use Picasa so that doesn't matter. However the next OS upgrade which seems to be mostly a tidying up of the current OS will not run on my machines (not officially anyway). So if I want that upgrade, yes I'll need to buy a new machine.

But I won't, these ones work just fine.

 

[sasquatch]

The great thing about a mac is they keep going and going and don't need to be upgraded every other year like a pc. They do what they're meant to do and do it well. When using a pc for music they stall and sputter and grind to a halt to have their nappy changed on a regular basis for no real reason. Every year the specs get better on pc's but each year the software gets more and more demanding. I still see the same problems today running a pc as I did when I first got one to record music on 12 years ago. Mac all the way if you've got the coin for one. We've had the same mac for 8 years at my work for designing and it's still going strong. 8 years!

 

[sandbender]

"...I must say a work colleague of mine just purchased the new Mac book air and its stunning. Takes about 5 seconds to boot up as it doesn't have the normal 'spinny disc, hard drive that is in most laptop..."

It is perhaps worth mentioning that whereas a 'spinny disc' is in itself a truly terrifying thing to rely on for storing all your irreplaceable digital images and files, when they fail (and they will) there is still a very good chance that you will be able to recover your stuff.

The flash drives used in the 'Air' and the new flagship Macbook can fail and leave you with no chance at all of recovering what you had stored on them. Flash drives can fail too (and will).

Apple provide a fairly intuitive back up program as part of the OS 'Time Machine' but it does require you to plug your machine into another hard drive now and again. Alternatively they also sell a range of wireless routers (the box that allows you to surf the internet from your sofa or bed) which will allow you to plug in an external hard drive for use with the Time Machine program. Not so sexy as a new laptop but worth adding to the basket if your buying a new laptop.

Or regularly backup your files online to google/Dropbox/Amazon etc.