Cool, another Mac VS PC debate. Been a few years since I've joined one, so why not?
It never freezes or slows, I can run different things at once, and the computer still runs great.
Nothing special. Multitasking has been around for over a decade. Plus, you never mentioned what you're running, which is what performance will be relative to. You can run 15 different apps smoothly if they have small memory footprints and so on, or be bogged down by one resource intensive program.
What I would really need is for Mac to be installable on my new PC. It's a homemade jobber (to save $$) and I think that MacOS can still only be installed on Apple hardware.
I just checked prices at the Apple website minutes ago. Their desktop price came out to $3800, almost identical price as similarly configured Dell, but about $1800 more than I spent to build my own.
In the past it's also been more difficult and expensive to upgrade Apple computers (propietary motherboards, graphics, RAM, etc.). Hopefully the new direction Apple is taking will address that as well.
Bob, OSX can run on PC's. It's been a while since I researched it, but it has been done using various programs such as virtual machine and even natively if I remember correctly.
www.neowin.net would have all the info you'd need.
Their steep prices and as you mention the low expandability options keep me at bay too. Why would I pay twice as much for a machine that will become obsolete much more easily and be more difficult to expand functionality-wise through either hardware or software? There simply isn't the userbase, and thus the market for products for MACs that there is for PC's.
Why on earth build your own, buy a 2 year old mac desktop and it will still out perform any windows machine in the real world.
Interesting claim, considering Apple's desktop have never, to my knowledge, been sold with the most cutting edge hardware. A quick look at their site shows an "upgrade" option of a 2.33ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, despite these CPU's being sold at speeds up to about 2.9ghz and with faster FSB clock speeds too I believe. This has always been the case with apple. You can get damn good hardware, but not the
best, so your claim is awfully ignorant considering you cannot even purchase a computer from Apple that competes with the best build-it-yourself PC I can make myself, and probably for cheaper despite the better on-paper performance.
Penny for penny, Macs and the EQUIVALENT PC are priced about the same. The highest end fully decked out pro Macs are slightly cheaper than the equivalent PC counterpart.
As someone that has been building custom configuration towers for others for about a decade, I can call false on this too. Apple has always demanded a premium for their hardware, this is common knowledge. The debate is whether it's worth it or not. It would be worth comparing if you meant strictly pre-built PC's from big-name companies like Dell, but as you did not specify I was unsure which you meant.
I'm not a gameplayer so the "there's more software out there for pc's" argument doesn't work with me. I have all the software that I need to accomplish what I need.
Software isn't limited to games. Software powers the Os you're running, the server hosting these forums, the forum architecture itself and so on. This area might not affect you, but for many others it does. A lot of the work I do, as far as I know, would not be possible using a MAC and existing software written fo rthe MAC platform. An example would be creating custom dashboard skins for my modded XBox. This isn't as big as a problem as it used to with how advance emulation has become as well as the hardware that supports it, but you will still find specific areas where people are affected by this and either have to keep working on PC's or code the programs for MAC themselves.
Try what seems natural and it will usually work. I remember installing fonts that would work for both a mac and a pc. The directions for the pc consisted of two paragraphs of complicated steps. The mac directions said something like "insert disk. click icon."
Here's another arguement I don't understand. The last problem I had with a computer was network related. What did I do? Only what seemed natural. Check the physical connections, check the network status, check logs and so on. Last time I installed a font, how did I do it? I opened the folder where windows stores it's fonts and pressed two keys down at the same time (Control and V) and I was done.
My experience has been though that those not familiar with the alternative to the PC get very defensive when discussing the Mac (pride?). Yet I have yet to meet or hear of someone that have used these new machines for any length of time and not walk away impressed or swayed.
I get defensive in these discussions only when I hear people perpetuating things I feel are false, which is when I step in (Like right now). I'd do the same if people were attacking Macs. I use PC's for the flexibility they offer, the wide range of apps and hardware and the ability to customize things more easily, frequently and creatively than I could on a Mac. I've used Dos, Windows 2.0 - Vista, about 10 Linux Distro's, OS7 - X and a few other less popular OS's. Neither of them impressed me so much over anohter that I felt utterly compelled to stick with that OS.
The Macintosh is now just an OS; it runs on the same hardware as a PC. It's not about the computer hardware anymore. There was a time the Mac had better hardware but that hasn't been true for years.
They haven't had superior hardware since about the Windows 3.1 days, correct? That's how I remember it at least....early on in the pioneering days of a Home PC they were ahead, but fell behind pretty quickly. Either way, one of their strengths was always how their OS would only be run on a small, select number of CPU's, motherboards etc. With Pc's, the OS designer has to take into account the jungle of PC hardware the OS might be asked to communicate with.
it's also true that you can build an excellent pc for less than a dell. If you're ordering the parts for it yourself, you'll always beat out a manufactured one, so it's a silly argument.
Not really, because in the end you're still going to be able to custom build a PC equivelent to a 4, 000$ Mac for 2.5 grand or so. There isn't much of a market for custom-built MACs, is there? It's not like with PC's how I can pay Dell a premium or build it myself, my options are much more restricted. This is one reason why many "techies" use Linux on a PC architecture rather than buy a Mac.
I still have a hard time believing that one can build a piece that can hang with a Mac for a grand; especially since I am running BOTH Windows XP and Mac OS AT THE SAME TIME on my iMac. Oh well.
Recon, this is funny because it illustrates the point of someone you just openly mocked. Durban, while not using the best tone in his writing, pointed out that many Mac fans appear less than proficient when it comes to the technical sides of computers and you just proved him correct. You claim running multiple OS's as a way of stating your machines power. I'm running an old PC that I'd be hard pressed to sell to someone for more than a few hundred dollars and not only can I run multiple OS's, but I can do so through software emulation which is worlds more stressful on the PC's resources than running them natively like you do. I ran OSX on this computer before you ran Windows on yours, and my hardware is laughable compared to yours. I have a 1.4ghz athlon, you have a 2.xghz dual core CPU. No comparison. I would be very interested to obtain a full spec sheet from you for your computer, or the exact model name so that I coul dlook up the specs. That way I could go make a shopping cart at a PC parts website and show you that I could very easily do what you doubt.~
So now i have the best of both worlds, huh?