[Curtis Rutland]

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You're free to conclude that Apple is some sort of magical marketing machine, but that's not why I buy them and it's not why anyone I know buys them.

Everyone says "marketing doesn't work on me." And yet, somehow corporations pour literally billions of dollars into advertising every year. You think you aren't affected by it, but you are.

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perceived as expensive

ARE expensive. Fixed that for you.

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I think the PC is priced and made too cheaply.

Reality check: not everyone can afford an expensive machine. Making them cheap enough where 90% of all households can have a computer is a good thing, no matter what you think.

---

All this aside, I do own a MBP. I just haven't lost my mind in the propaganda like some people on this page have.

[creativecoding]

Why does everybody have all of these problems with windows? Seriously, treat your computer well and it'll treat you well. I know I haven't been using Windows machines for that long (A little over 4 years), but I've only had one serious problem with windows. Somebody else in the house installed a virus on our family computer causing the internet to only work on Internet Explorer. Avast/Kaspersky couldn't find it/clean it and system recovery didn't work. We waited until Windows 7 came out and installed that, with no more problems.


IMO when I see mac users list off problems they've had with windows, I think they should be using a mac. I would highly recommend a mac to anybody who looks like they won't get along well with windows.

[dorknexus]

I'll say this continuing the emerging topic of this thread:

I prefer most *nix systems to the alternatives for a multitude of reasons. If you feel your chosen system is superior in some fashion other than "I'm too lazy to learn a different way of doing things" then let's get it on.

Also, 1GB != 4GB. So what, a lay user was wrong about something they don't know much about. Surprising?

This post has been edited by Dark_Nexus: 20 September 2011 - 04:12 PM

[SixOfEleven]

Macs are generally more stable for one reason. They are closed systems, unlike other PCs. A Linux or Windows machine are open systems. Providing the main board supports it you can plug anything into a PC. You can't with a Mac. They are closed systems and very limited on what you can do with them, in terms of expansion. You can't go out and buy the latest and greatest video card and dump it into a Mac like you can with a more generic computer. Windows, and Linux, suffers because of the multitude of hardware and when you plug in internal devices you expect it to work. If the drivers for the device don't work and your operating system freezes it isn't because Windows or Linux are bad OSes. It is because it is the drivers that caused the issue. They aren't 100% compatible with the new hardware. A Mac is a closed system compared to an open system where Windows and Linux are concerned. That doesn't mean that the latest external devices don't work on a Mac but Apple controls the drivers from them and they are good with closed systems.

[fromTheSprawl]

Macs are optimized for video editing, I've read somewhere that they are the choice of hardware for indie film developers.

You know with your friend, if he keeps on insisting 1 GB of PC = 4 GB of Mac let him be. He'll accept the truth somewhere down the road, usually in an embarassing situation, just don't be the one to embarass that poor guy. Be there for the laughs though.

[dorknexus]

macs are not optimized for film editing. they just have decent film editing software.

[hookiethe1]

That's really what it comes down to, choice of software. Back when Apple was packing Motorola chips they might have been able to claim some hardware differences, but now it's all about which software you prefer. I've heard that multimedia developers love Macs because their software is good for that type of work. From my experience it seems like people who want a true workhorse that's ultimately tweakable, even if a little cantankerous, they go with Unix. Most people are happy to stick with what they know and are comfortable with, that's a proven solid performer and can do most things without complaints, and that's Windows, whether we like it or not.

This post has been edited by hookiethe1: 21 September 2011 - 05:52 AM

[jackfrost]

I would like to point out that a Mac is a PC which is an acronym for personal computer. That being said the argument should now be titled Windows vs. OS X.

[Curtis Rutland]

Apple chose to draw the battle lines with their commercial when they did the "I'm a mac, and I'm a PC". No matter how "technically right" you are, Mac vs. PC is well known and an entirely valid way of describing the topic.

[jackfrost]

Mac vs. PC is not a valid way of describing the topic because it's simply wrong, which describes Apple's campaign to say they have a better product than PCs oops I mean Windows.

This post has been edited by jackfrost: 22 September 2011 - 10:43 AM

[modi123_1]

Ah, semantic trolling how I missed you!

[dorknexus]

I feel it is a valid point that when people argue "Mac vs. PC" it's misleading because the mac is simply a specific instance of a PC. Even when it was on a motorolla/ibm/apple based chip it was still a PC.

I also feel that it is a valid point that when most people argue "Mac vs. PC" they are really bickering about their operating systems.

I would like to point out that when people think they are arguing operating systems, they are usually just arguing the differences in their user lands.

From the wikipedia article concerning that ad campaign:

http://en.wikipedia...._a_Mac_and_a_PC

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Differentiating between a Mac and a PC
Many computer experts have argued over the definition of PC, or personal computer, which can raise questions about the actual differentiation between a Mac and a PC. Editor in Chief of PC Magazine, Lance Ulanoff states in a 2008 column in PC Magazine:
“ Of course, the ads would then be far less effective, because consumers might realize that the differences Apple is trying to tout aren't quite as huge as Apple would like you to believe.[12]

This post has been edited by dorknexus: 22 September 2011 - 01:44 PM

[jon.kiparsky]

Lemur, on 19 September 2011 - 11:20 AM, said:

Hardware is hardware. Software does not make hardware magically multiply.

This is true, but it's also true that bad software makes the same hardware run a lot slower.
In my experience, while calculations take about the same time on one machine or the other, manipulating the device is a lot slower on my work machine (running Windows XP) than it is on my Mac. Windows just seems to have to stop and think about stuff a lot more, and it gets confused if I have, say Outlook and Exploder and Eclipse and Oxygen open at the same time. The Mac doesn't seem to have this trouble. Programs that aren't doing any work don't slow down the machine, they just sit and hold their state. This isn't fanboy talk, this is just what I see using the two machines every day.

[BetaWar]

@jon.kiparsky - See, I see something completely different. I see the mac having a pin-wheel of doom when I attempt to do something like fire up the interface builder. That should be a simple task. Furthermore eclipse has the loading bar regardless of the machine I am running on and microsoft office applications load markedly faster on a windows machine.

Personally, I have been using a Mac for the past week now (my Windows laptop hard drive is dying...) and I can't say it runs much if any better than my Windows machine does normally (when not in the process of going to the loony house). Additionally, my Linux laptop seems to run better than the Mac for most cases (and I would be using that if it has the silverlight support I need for some online applications I use -- that and Kindle for <device name here> so I didn't have to use the web reader...).

What it all comes down to is preference and ads. Apple spends a ton to show themselves as the top-of-the-line product, but in reality they are just a closed system that spends a lot of money on aesthetics. Windows spends its money making sure it can work on anything, and delivers an open system that you can get cheap. Both attempt to be intuitive for their users and be simple, but I am not sure that their markets are the same at all. Windows is removing more and more of the options power users like, Mac just makes it so you can't customize anything and goes from there. It is all up to the end user as to which is "better".

[jon.kiparsky]

I only use Microsoft applications on the Windows machine, so I can't make the comparison there, but I don't see very good performance on the Windows machine using any of the Office products, or Visual Studio (which, honestly, I don't use very much at all).

It's true that Eclipse does take some time to load on all of my machines, which I suspect has more to do with Eclipse than with the OS. I was talking more about the OS's ability to handle running applictions. Typically in my workday, I'm working on several things at once, only one of which is actually writing code. The rest of my day, I'm writing documentation, generating images for documentation, or researching documentation - I'm a tech writer who also writes code. All of this means that I'm typically switching back and forth between applications a lot, and for this I see a marked drag on the Windows machine. This shouldn't surprise anyone, Unix was written from the beginning to deal well with multiple processes, and it does it well. I should point out that this isn't about anything Apple has done, except for choosing a good existing tool rather than reinventing a wheel.

That being said, I do find that Apple has created some nice interface sugar to facilitate working in multiple applications. This is a minor technical achievement, and it has nothing at all to do with the speed of the computer, but because they've done some good design I find it easier to work across several programs on the mac than I do under Windows, and it feels faster to work on the mac. I don't have to break my train of thought to move from writing the document to editing the graphic that goes with it on the mac; under windows, I do. Again, this is not an issue of the processing speed or how well it's used by the OS, but it is an issue of good design, which actually is important to getting work done.

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Mac just makes it so you can't customize anything and goes from there

I'm honestly not sure what you mean by this. What's difficult to customize on the mac? Specifically, since we're talking OS and not machine, what's difficult to customize under MacOS?