Mac's and PC's :-)

[Miniwhisk]

...

I had the bluescreen of death about 8 times yesterday and it got to the point (a point i never thought i'd get to by the way) of considering a mac Now i've got nothing against macs but i can get a lot of PC for the price of a mac, ........

My thoughts are that you get a lot of rock solid OS and software for the price you pay. Think of a mac as; akin to substituting plastic with titanium - but that is only my humble opinion of course.

 

[Draven]

Firstly, mac Hardware:
All the hardware in a mac works perfectly with every other piece of hardware. They're all made to go together, unlike PCs where the parts are made to be as interchangeable as possible. In my experience, there's simply no such thing as a poor quality mac, unless it's a QC anomaly. As for PCs, I'd say at least 50% of them are poor quality, probably considerably more. The speed at which macs run when doing processor-hogging tasks is astounding. As I test I found that if I turn on "Spaces" (up to 16 seperate desktops you can move between to keep things organised) with 4 desktops I can watch a full screen movie in each one at the same time with no noticeable lag. Bit useless to actually do that, but it shows that they run well. The hardware is incredible, and they put it into a beautiful and compact machine. The downside to this is that replacement/upgrade can be a PITA and expensive. But the hardware upgrades aren't nearly as appealing as they are on PCs.

The operating system is tried and tested, it works, works well and is more than rock solid. I've never had my mac reboot on me. I can run it for weeks, more than a month on end without resetting it and it still responds just as well as it ever did. Downsides to the OS is that while it's very flashy and runs extraordinarily well, there is a bit less refinement than windows; for example, there is no simple drawing program on mac that rivals MS Paint. Paintbrush is horrible. Generally things just behave a little bit differently than windows, and it gets a bit annoying. I do miss Windows Explorer, even though it didn't run worth a damn. It is great, though, that on a Mac as long as you have an admin password you can do whatever you want. I got really sick to death of windows telling me I couldn't look at a folder on my own bloody computer

Mac updates are also faster than windows. For me at least, windows took eons to download an update, eons to install it and generally things ran worse afterwords.

Also, mac viruses are practically unheard of compared to windows viruses.

In short: Macs are very fast, very reliable, with great hardware. There can be some compatibility as some software is still unavailable on Mac, but you can still run Windows on an intel mac with Boot Camp.

PCs are generally slow and unreliable (IME) with everything ranging from extremely poor to great hardware. Just about any program can be installed on windows, including every virus under the sun. I expect you would have to pay more than a mac to get a PC of the same quality though I don't know about laptops and macbooks.

Just my thoughts!

Pete

 

[Miyagi]

Macs are for hairdressers and art students.

That's just jealousy!!

 

[TomBartlett]

A lot already said about the Mac hardware. They also come with a lot of bundled software. To get a microsoft laptop bundled with the same kind of software would bring the price difference between the two down considerably. But this all depends on whether you're interested in using the software...

 

[Tony]

MS software isn't an issue for me as i've got a partnership with them, I hear what you're saying though. Umm, i'm being swayed..... Just a cost issue .

 

[Draven]

MS software isn't an issue for me as i've got a partnership with them, I hear what you're saying though. Umm, i'm being swayed..... Just a cost issue .

Try second hand! My dad got a good macbook for a few hundred squid, less than my windows laptop which ain't good for much more than swattin flies!

Pete

 

[Trunks]

Macs are for hairdressers and art students.

Funny that, I am an art student

 

[maddave]

I just can't justify MAC prices. Being a tecchie helps as my machine is always at the top of it's game. If you're PC "savvy" then you shouldn't get many problems.

 

[verloc]

I just can't justify MAC prices. Being a tecchie helps as my machine is always at the top of it's game. If you're PC "savvy" then you shouldn't get many problems.

There is no getting away from it - macs are more expensive. But It depends on what wether or not you want to spend X amount of time in front of your computer or (X-the time making it work properly) and I definitly spend less time on a computer since getting a mac. If i am in g33king mode then its always going to be a thinkpad with debian on it or pull out the old sparc box for solaris. If your happy spending your time maintaining a box and dont mind having to do some major fixes every so often (original post " in fact the machine i'm using isn't' very old (2 months) and i rebuilt it with windows 7 Ultimate etc") then stick with windows and cheap hardware. If you want to be freed from your housekeeping duties then consider a mac. I mean this can go around in circles but the one thing that is always true is that mac is more mullah. Its more computer (take computer as OS+software+hardware+HCI bits = computer) but it is more pricey.

 

[Tony]

I just can't justify MAC prices. Being a tecchie helps as my machine is always at the top of it's game. If you're PC "savvy" then you shouldn't get many problems.

But don't you get sick of having to play with it? I think it's just because i want things to work now, years ago i didn't care if they broke, i could always fix them but now i've become more of a user and adopted a users attitude Dave, you need to move to West Wales mate and you can tinker with mine

 

[dave k]

But don't you get sick of having to play with it? I think it's just because i want things to work now, years ago i didn't care if they broke, i could always fix them but now i've become more of a user and adopted a users attitude Dave, you need to move to West Wales mate and you can tinker with mine

I work in IT, and I have done for 12 years. Yet I just had to give up trying to install a game on Vista, as it just did not want to work properly. I must have spent at least 20 hours trying to get it to work, complete with a rebuild. I don't want to have to muck about for 20 hours to get something to work that only has 12 hours of gameplay!! Just like Linux and Solaris - if I want to play about, and spend hours mucking about getting stuff working, compiling, downloading I use linux. If I just want something that works out of the box with everything there, I use Solaris

 

[Tony]

I didn't know people built mac clones...http://www.preloved.co.uk/fuseaction-adverts.showadvert/index-1032504929/527764a2.html

And are G5's any good?

 

[tobes01]

I didn't know people built mac clones...http://www.preloved.co.uk/fuseaction-adverts.showadvert/index-1032504929/527764a2.html

And are G5's any good?

If you go down the Hackintosh route you'll be having to assemble custom OSX builds every time there's an update, fight your way through to find new drivers, and generally lose all of the benefits of a Mac. Great fun, but it doesn't address the basic issue of getting away from the housekeeping.

G5's are fine, but you're going to struggle for power if you want to use the machine in anger, the C2D has been the norm for several years now.

Do you have any friends who can lend you a recent model for a proper play?

 

[rik_uk3]

When the mac v PC topic comes up the 'with windows your always needing to mess with it, or blue screen of death, or virus attacks' etc but not on a mac'.

Well I must be a truly lucky fella; I've four PC's on the home network, three now run 7 Professional and my lad is still on XP Pro but (I hope these are not famous last words) we don't get problems at all, the whole lot runs smooth and very fast and operate trouble free (two quad core and two dual core). Media Centre to the main flat screen TV, 150+ films and 1000+ music tracks on disk to choose from,,,life is good

Set your machine up well to start with and only install/download programmes you need and will use, keep your virus checker up to date and you should be fine.

The gap between windows and the mac operating system has closed a lot with the introduction of 7.

http://gizmodo.com/5285452/os-x-snow-leopard-vs-windows-7-the-final-countdown

 

[Tony]

I've always shunned the mac's because i can do the windows, my laptop had little problem over 3 years. You are lucky to have all of them work well for all that time.

 

[Mikey P]

Forget about the price and forget about it "doing the same thing". There is no comparison between a £300 laptop and a Macbook or MacbookPro. thats like trying to compare a kia piccanto against a BMW 5 Series, they both do the same thing but very differently.

The mac hardwares are very well built. If you were to compare it to a win machine then it would be akin to a thinkpad / toughbook etc. OS X is great great OS. Built on a BSD with a very friendly user interface it is superb.

Now I am not a Mac fanboy. I hate my ipod and only bought it because my Rio Karma died, I refuse an Iphone and generally have more nasty things to say about apple corps than good things, but you cannot get away from a company that is putting its own OS on it own hardware really really works.

I have a first gen macbook which has never been reinstalled, has had the crap kicked out of it, and has led a very hard life. it still fires up and works A-OK. I find macs allow much more productivity as I don't have to spend time sys-admin'in my own computer and it actually means I spend less time using it - which again is good.

I have used pretty much every OS out there on many different platforms for many different tasks, and all in all OSX and apple hardware are the best combination at the moment for a multi use desktop machine.

Just my tuppence worth

Aye, I'm with you on that. You get what you pay for with Macs - there is a big quality leap and once you're used to the new OS, it's incredibly stable.

I agree, they're not for everyone and are still second in line when it comes to software availability (everything comes with PC drivers) but the pros outweigh the cons. Once you've had a Mac, you'll never go back.

Note you can also get MacOffice via Microsoft, and it's durt cheap if you work for an organisation with a Home User Programme (MoD, NHS, etc).

 

[Mikey P]

The gap between windows and the mac operating system has closed a lot with the introduction of 7.

Only because they keep nicking the best ideas from Apple! It's quite simple to see that, over the evolution period for Macs and PCs, who has been the innovator and who has merely jumped on the bandwagon.

 

[rik_uk3]

Matters not who invented what first, the fact is that Microsoft have at last got their act together and produced an OS that is pretty much on par with the mac OS and the hardware needed is a dam site cheaper.

In terms of PC hardware failure, off the top of my head in fifteen years I've had one hard drive go and the PSU on a monitor fail.

The bottom line is use what you want, I'm very happy with 7 so I'll stick with it; I've got Ubuntu on an old 1.6 laptop and its OK but took a heck of a lot of messing about to get it connected to my wireless network so in all honesty won't be using it again (life's too short).

 

[Tony]

Ahh, nearly bought a macbook air second hand, but when i pushed it had an atom CPU so i looked further and it was a asian copy..........

 

[Jus_like_that]

if you want a machine, that won't crash, is blinding fast and will last buy a mac, I switched about 6 months ago, and i'm still impressed. I haven't come across one compatibility issue, there and mac software is CHEAP! compared to microsoft. there are almost no documented cases of virus infections on them (I think the only ones were actually created by apple).

I have grown up and worked with PC's all my life, I just wonder now why I was so afraid to switch!

Good luck with you comp

ATB