PC vs MAC

its the burning question, whats better a PC or a mac, personally i think PC's they r cheaper more powerful, a much broader range of products, amoung other reasons, the only arguements i hear 4 macs are: they r better for digital editing, but in terms of power the pc beat the mac flat out a dell with a 3.06 a gig of 1066 rd vs a dual g4 1.25ghz processor, but the dell was almost 700 less, so that ends that arguement in my mind, then they have less problems well duh all the things r made by apple but thats y u pay more there is no competition for them, so ne one put in your 2 cents

 

Well PC Generaly has Windows on it, and Mac obviously has mac os. Now Mac os is unix based, which equates to stability. But the simple fact is. for conventional use, you can do the same on both, and a well kept PC is just as stable for a gamer. PC. for a photo editor, Probaly mac. But if you've mastered Photoshop and Picture it! then you think you'd realy change

 

In my opinion Macs are more stable and simpler than Windows, meaning it's harder to mess it up.

Updating through the apple website is hell. I had to figure out when my i-mac was bought, what color it was, and how big the hard drive. Makes you appreciate the Microsoft Windows Update site.

I miss the days when I could just glance at the model on the front and instantly tell you every detail about the components inside them. I appeared to be a computer genius knowing the inside of the computers at my school.

My last experience was with MacOS 9, so I don't know how MacOS X or later works.

I agree with Lamien about the Photoediting. Everything I have ever heard about why macs still exist is becuase they are good systems for photoediting and the sort.

I'm not sure if software developer support has gotten any better in the last few years, but I bet you can't find many free utilities for Macs that equate to the programs available on this website.

If you want the newest technology, or plan on upgrading often, I wouldn't buy a Mac. But if you want to just type your Appleworks documents, occasional surf the net, or do some major photo/video editing, then I would go buy the latest i-mac. Just remember to go to the Mac section of your local computer store and first see what Apple computers has to offer with their proprietary hell.


PS. I once owned a macintosh performa that was a mac and Windows 95 computer combined. It was fun switching between the two OS's with a few simple keystrokes, and enabled the mac of the computer to read document created in the Windows environment. The performance of the computer sucked with a hard drive less than a gigabyte.

QUOTE]Originally posted by CLarKEY
...in terms of power the pc beat the mac flat out a dell with a 3.06 a gig of 1066 rd vs a dual g4 1.25ghz processor...

Don't compare apples to oranges. with some older Macs (1995) I used during school, you could have a faster processor but still get slower performance. These computers came with a wopping 75-100 MHz CPU! Just like AMD chips might be slower than an Intel chip, it can perform much better than an Intel chip at that same speed because of optimizations and tweaks in the CPU.

 

I agree that macs are more stable because now because the new OS is UNIX based making it automaticallly more stable, i kinda like the new OS X its friendly and all but i hate macs because they are jus mac compatible i couldnt put a mac os on a pc its worthless they would b really good machines if they could run on PC componants, but no apple is a cheap company.

 

Mac has alwasy been unix based
Its all a matter of what you do. Not gona repeat it cause its all been said.
Only other thing is at least windowsa doesnt have those horid comercial

 

Also macs use RISC arch so 1 gigahertz mac is like 5 gigahertz intel

 

I've done photo-editing, graphic design, and CAD on several different PC's. I've also had to deal with software compatibility issues between PC's and Macs, even with simple photo sharing. I've watched pro graphic designers do their thing on their Macs, and have listened to them tell me "blah blah blah Mac this blah Mac that blah PC's are lame blah blah". But honestly, *IF* there's anything graphical that can be done on a Mac that cannot be done on a PC (big big if), then it's only because the software doesn't exist (yet) for the PC. That's it. If you want to do large Photoshop projects, get a PC. If you wanna do ILM-style CG graphics, get a PC. Well, that's what ILM does, anyway. IF Macs are so much better for graphical stuff, then why don't these guys use them instead??? Until recently they used PC based on SGI computer components, using IRIX (unix) OS I believe, not Windows. However now I think ILM have updated their computers to Athlon-based systems. Not sure if they're using Win2K, NT, unix, or what, but they ain't using Macs.

On the other hand, if you wanna do large professional graphics projects at a slower rate, and pay more money, then of course feel free to invest in a Mac.

All that said, I do NOT hate Macs. They're very nice computers but they are in no way that I know of better than a PC.

Vlad, I suggest you look into the latest article in Maximum PC , where they compared dual CPU systems from Apple, AMD, and Intel. The 1.25GHz Macs were absolutely smoked by the 2200+ Athlons and the 2.5GHz Pentiums. The Athlons, I believe, were running at about 1.8Ghz, not too much faster than the 1.25Ghz Macs. There was no contest whatsoever between the two, so that old RISC vs CISC argument is showing its age.

 

Jimmy, no it's not . SGIs are still commonly used (but IRIX is getting old and vulns on bugtraq are lowering because so many ahve already been found ). Truly I don't believe that magazine, I wouldn't believe it until I did it myself...

 

i have no idea why people keep saying the mac os is more stable then windows. previous windows os were crap. but windows xp sp1 is rock solid.
just the other week i was at my g/f house and she was on her mac making a spreadsheet. all of a sudden this apple of death came up on the screen saying this program was terminated or something. luckly she was running ms office and it had saved her work. i laughed for about 10 min.
for the same price of your beloved mac you can get a dual xenon system from dell that is at least 1 ghz faster with hyperthreading.

 

Think of your computer as a car. Do you think a golf-cart is going to break down more often or need more maintenace than a Ferrari? My experience (mac os 7-9) has been that the Macintosh operating system does not give as much moldability as windows. That's more because Macs are Proprietary. It has been shown throughout history that proprietary items don't last long (can you say betamax?). I don't think Macintosh computers will be around very long because of their growing irellevance. Apple will last some time because of all the apple computers in the public schools right now, but PC manufacturers are making computers even cheaper now enabling schools to look at PCs.

 

Silenze, exactly! The program crashed, but the OS didn't.... You notice the program is MICROSOFT made? You see what you are saying here?

 

Vlad, you can choose to believe or not believe whomever and whatever you want. Nothing changes the fact that Macs aren't any faster than PCs, which is one of THE arguments Mac lovers have used to justify their snootiness. Then there are still the two points that PCs have much greater flexibility and compatibility with popular (and unpopular) programs, and that you can do anything on PC that you can do on a Mac, and for less money. Honestly, if you'll do your own comparison, as "fairly" as possible, I'd certainly be interested in seeing the results. But I don't have the resource to test the latest from all three major CPU providers, so until then I'll just have to rely on the tests of those who do.

I occasionally have programs crash on my Win2k system, but the only time I've ever had the system crash was when I was tweaking my video card with PowerStrip, or there was some kind of hardware problem. And I've used Win2k for many kinds of applications on many different computers, including CAD, graphic design, and you name it. In my experience it just plain works, and it's easy to use, and it's compatible, period. That's why I use it and not XP or any 9x version. I'd be happy to use Linux and/or Mac OS (and hardware for that matter) if they were as user-friendly AND as compatible with the hardware and applications I use. But they're not so I don't.

As for Irix and any Unix-type OS, the more popular they become and the longer they're around, the more vulnerable they become to bugs, or viruses, or whatever. That's because over time hackers are able to learn of any vulnerabilites and instabilites, and exploit them. The same can happen with Mac's newest unix-based OS. It's just a matter of time. Also, the more complicated one makes an OS (*ahem* M$), the more likely it'll develop quirks, bugs, and instabilities. Same can happen to any OS, in my opinion, not just Micro$oft's or Unix. My point about ILM was that they do not use Macs; they used to use SGI and Intel but now use Athlons. I'm willing to bet that if you look into many other first-rate visual effects groups, you won't find too many using Macs. Why not? Well, "why" is still the question to be answered, IMO.

 

The comptability issue is not fully true because of WINE. Also although UNIX can fall to vulnerabilties as easily as M$, look at OBSD. It has recieved grants from DARPA because of it's _great_ security, it has developed many ways to stop attacks in it's OS. On the release of 3.3 applications should be chrooted by defaulted and measures to stop buffer overflows have been taken, DARPA gave Theo (creator) 2.3 million and 2 years to do certain things in the OS, he has done everything already, in 3 months. As you see, vulnerabilities are a different issue here, most M$ based remote exploits are based on not following RFCs' or just carelessness in coding/just plain carelessness, ie MS03-006

 

All depends on what you want. The Mac is more or less a dummy proof system. That means if your not very good with configuring scripts or adjusting settings in your system, you want to get a Mac. If you like making adjustments to your computer, and you like being able to tweak you OS (or other componets) then you don't want a Mac. You can still do these with a Mac (With OS X) but a PC is much more adjustable. PC and their componets are much cheaper. I can build a very good machine for under $1000 in the PC world, not so with Mac. Last but not least, there are thousands of third party software developed for the PC but only hundreds developed for the Mac. When I advise people on what to get, I always advise the techno-challaged person to get a Mac. Everyone else I advise to get a PC.

 

EDIT:

Why did someone dig up a 7 month old thread?

 

*screams*

not a PC vs Mac thread!!