Mac vs. Pc

[littledog]

I'll admit right up front that I don't have a lot of PC experience, but I still think "plug in and play" is more of a reality on the Mac than the PC. When I buy virtually any USB or Firewire device (hard drive, CD burner, etc.), on a Mac you just plug it in and it's ready to use. PC's usually require installation of some sort of driver and maybe some other configuration techniques.

Maybe not a such a big deal...

 

[bubbagump]

If you actually pay attention to what you install on it and are not incompetent in how to maintain an OS, then Windows XP is a great platform!

Sweet... free desktop wall paper with a funny quote of the day.... Gotta click.

Gah! This pop up message says I might be infected!!!! Better trust it and click.

But I don't know anyone from Romania.... well, let me at least see what these pictures are they attached.

users.....I run Linux, the BSD flavors, Windows, and Macs and honsestly the line is very blurry any more. In a well maintained (aka no porn dialers or stupid cartoon pointers are installed) PC that is devoted to DAW use... I find it just peachy. I can crash the Mac BSD flavor and all the others routinely by doing dopey stuff or getting carried away with crap software from SourceForge. (Don't try to parse GB XML files using PHP) Most folks just don't know how to get to the guts of a Mac to really screw it up (and no Active X! See above....) However, Windows will have really made it when they can get a packaging system like RPM, DMG, or Debian's. Sigh... as we spin off into geekery.

 

[VonRocK]

I have a new AMD 64 3700 with 2 gigs of ram, and a 7800 GT vid card running Win XP 64 bit. It's a good combination of hardware, and the games scream on it.

I also bought an 17 inch intel iMac a couple of months ago. I punched up the Ram to 1.5 gigs.

I've been a Windows guy since windows began.

I now do everything on my mac. I like the OS better. It feels right to me, and I don't have to worry about hardware and driver support. It was the right choice for me and my DAW needs.

Make sure that you take peoples opinions as opinions. Make sure you that the opinions that you put some value to, are based on facts and experience, not speculation and heresay.

Since I've gotten into the mac world, I've heard an awfull large amount of negative comments about Macitosh computers, often based on an experience with an AppleIIe from 1989.

So, to summarize. I HAVE both OS's running on new machines, and I prefer the Mac. By a long shot. I think that it is a way better Operating system. Dollar for dollar, mac is a smarter buy.

My mac has never crashed. I don't think this PC has, but I maintain it, and am a very educated end user (and only use it for games nowdays). I also have a ghosted image of the PC hard drive, just in case. I do expect it to crash eventually. I don't expect my iMac to crash.

 

[dgatwood]

It all comes down to how the OS is taken care of. My PC desktop is a machine that I built myself. It constantly runs at a temperature that is higher than is good for it, it only gets restarted maybe twice a month, WinXP was installed on a PATA drive, which was later cloned over to a SATA drive (without reinstalling), I have no anti-virus and only my router's firewall. It runs everything from Office to Quake 4 to Sonar 5/Ableton/Reason. The thing is stable as a rock and has crashed only once in the past year, and that was due to a bug in an ATI video driver.

Of course, you know how to build machines reasonably. You chose decent parts and put them together right. One of the big reasons that Macs get a better rep than PCs is that there are so many of what we refer to as "SBBs" (s**tty beige boxes) that were build by joe schmoe after drinking one too many six packs, with hopeless compatibility problems, poor choices of which cards to put in which slots, bottom grade RAM (read "defective"), underpowered power supplies, woefully inadequate cooling, and the most cheap-@$$ motherboard you can get (complete with fundamentally broken IRQ steering from the factory).

A well-built PC and a Mac should be similarly stable, viruses/spyware/malware notwithstanding. Just be sure that if you buy a PC, you buy a well-built PC and not an SBB.

 

[OhSh1rt]

The G5 ate P4 for breakfast. Core Duo is a much more even match, and does so on a much reduced power budget. It's not a case of Apple changing their minds about the architecture. It's a case of Intel getting some real competition from AMD and dramatically improving their CPUs.

G5's where nice, although the benchmarks are optimized based on what apple wants show. I'd have to say the main reason why Apple switched to Intel is not only the "new core duo's" but that IBM no longer planed on spening more on R&D for the 970's and shifted the resources to developing PPC for Microsoft, therefor Apple realized it's time to move on and go to the standard in the PC market.

public computers are impossible to maintain, regardles of platform.

A good 'ol Windows Active Directory domain can keep any public computer in line with locked-down-to-hell policies.


-jeffrey

 

[Monkey Allen]

Yeah, it's preference. Personally I reckon PC's eat Apples.

boom tssss!!

 

[dgatwood]

G5's where nice, although the benchmarks are optimized based on what apple wants show.

That may be, but a single G5 is pretty comparable to a P4 for the most part... and four of them in one machine... is really freaking fast. Graphics tests notwithstanding, benchmarks show it pretty much spanking most current desktop AMD/Intel offerings.

I'd have to say the main reason why Apple switched to Intel is not only the "new core duo's" but that IBM no longer planed on spening more on R&D for the 970's and shifted the resources to developing PPC for Microsoft, therefor Apple realized it's time to move on and go to the standard in the PC market.

IBM is continuing to design Power chips for their workstations and stuff, and the PPC970 series is just Altivec glued onto one or two Power 4 cores. Not saying that there might not be some truth to that, but if there is, I'm sure it's not quite as black and white as that.

 

[altitude909]

I'm sure it's not quite as black and white as that.

As of Dec'05 there were 500K G5's sold total since they apple started using the 970. Microsoft sold 400K Xbox 360's out in 30 sec in 2005 with expected sales figures in the 2-3 million units for 2006 alone. Kinda an obvious choice if your a CFO at big blue