Declaration of interest: I own a lot of computers, and support even more. Most of them are either GNU/Linux boxes (both those I own and those owned by customers) or Windows XP boxes (owned by customers, I own no Windows boxes). I own one Mac but I hardly ever switch it on, maybe once every couple of years. (I only bought it so that I could support a customer in LA, they needed their Website to work with the Mac browser without fail. That project was finished long ago.) I never really got on with the Mac, probably because I used it so little, but it worked fine and the operating system installation was by far the quickest and easiest that I've ever done in my life. I've probably installed more operating systems than many of you have had hot dinners.
It's time to change our PC
Why?
why is a mac better than a pc?
They're just different.
Pretty much all the software you'll ever see for a Mac was designed for that Mac. That's not necessarily true for PCs, which is one reason why there are many horror stories about problems running software on them. Another reason is that PC hardware comes in a bewildering variety from a huge number of suppliers, and getting software to run on the practically infinite number of possible permutations and combinations of all that equipment is technically challenging. Also, in my opinion, PC software from third parties is in general of poorer quality than Mac software. Having said that, in historical terms software is in its early stages of development, a bit like the "spinning mule" was in the 18th century. We don't really know how to do it right yet, and what we do know about doing it right is largely ignored by the people who do it because they're mostly still wet behind the ears.
Some PC hardware (especially some power supplies, discs and fans) is utter rubbish. When you buy a Mac you know what you're getting and you can get support from people who know both the hardware and the software. When you buy a PC you're taking a risk unless you buy from the likes of HP. Chances are if you nip down to the local PC shop with a PC you've bought mail order, the guy in the shop will never have seen some of the components before. If it's a software fault that probably doesn't matter so much, but if it's a hardware fault it could be an issue.
I've seen people comparing the prices of PCs and Macs but my view is that the comparisons are meaningless unless you actually take the hardware to pieces, look at the components and start asking about Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF). I have a couple of Hewlett-Packard DL380 servers which when new cost in excess of five grand each. As far as the hardware is concerned they are essentially PCs, and not even very powerful PCs by today's standards, but they've been running 24/365 for ten years, either in Cambridge (120 miles from my office) or Sheffield (30 miles from my office) so as you can imagine I don't want to have to keep nipping out to fix them. They run GNU/Linux by the way, not Windows, and typically they get rebooted every year or so. Not many PCs that you'll buy for a couple of hundred quid will live as long as those servers. Many of the components in typical low-end PCs have MTBFs in the order of 3,000 hours of operation. So if it gives six hours of service a day for a couple of years you can think yourself lucky. That's not even what I'd call "commercial" grade, never mind "industrial" or "military" grade. When you support a lot of computers you can soon find that buying cheap can cost you an awful lot of time.
There are in the wild over a million viruses, trojans, rootkits and other malware designed to attack PC software (it generally attacks the PC software, not the PC hardware itself). There are three, to my knowledge, for the Mac, so essentially it isn't a problem on the Mac.
And perhaps as importantly, what will it not do that a pc will?
Not a lot, but if you have to use 'vritualization' to get a Mac to run some bit of PC software then the performance probably won't be as good as it could be.
I know it used to be the OS isn't compatible with pc ones so excel and word etc wouldn't work, has that been sorted now?
More or less. Windows and the Mac OS are very different, but all operating systems need some way to talk to other operating systems (and to you!) or you could never send electronic mail, or browse the Web, or even type "hello world" on the keyboard so that it appears on the screen. You don't talk to the OS directly, you have to use some intermediate software. That software is what gives the 'look and feel' that you know, not the OS itself. In general terms it's called the 'user interface' but it might have another name that people use when they talk about things specific to that user interface -- for example when they want to change how it behaves. I use something called fvwm2 for example, it's kind of minimalist which suits the way I work on computers.
It's essentially meaningless to talk about 'compatibility' between operating systems, you really need to think in terms of 'software portability' (which means that a piece of software will run on more than one operating system) and adherence to world-wide standards. Microsoft has historically been out of step with the rest of the world's standards for much of the time, partly because it's been delivering software before adequate standards have been developed (so it had to make it up as it went along) and partly because Microsoft would rather you use its software exclusively in which case you don't need to worry about standards other than those created de facto by Microsoft. As time goes by Microsoft more and more has to toe the line.
If people start to talk about "text-based" operating systems and "graphical" operating systems then stop listening because they're talking out of their, er, hat. What they're talking about is a user interface, not an operating system, and many operating systems these days can work with several alternative user interfaces, ranging from simple text to fancy graphics with pointing devices. The fancier user interfaces consume a lot of computing resources.
There's a reseller in Oxford but before I go in to the 'big smoke' I want to know a little more about it please...
A reseller isn't necessarily going to give you unbiased advice (I should know, I am one.
) but you probably know that already which is why you're asking here.
Have you considered putting Debian or Ubuntu on your old PC just to try it out? You can run both Windows and GNU/Linux on the same machine, either separately ("dual boot") or even at the same time if you wish ("virtual machines").
