posted
I like Macs because my Mac has fewer hardware issues and actually connects to wireless. I like Macs because lots of other Astronomers (including my boss) use them to run IRAF and other software on the built in unix, and support is a lot easier that way.
PCs have a lot more gaming software, but who cares because wasting my time on Hatrack for freee is so much more fun.
Posts: 1757 | Registered: Oct 2004
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Great for tinkering, gaming, up-to-prosumer-level editing/graphics, a variety of freeware software/plugins/etc.
Mac's
Great for graphics and audio applications. Fast boot-times. Dominating the film and sound recording industry AFAIK.
Cons of PCs
1. If you're an average user (read: vulnerable) virus/spyware can easily get on your system. But if Mac's were used most, the same situation would apply IMO. A symptom of being the most widely used OS I'm afraid.
2. Can become bloated. Not the best usage of RAM in my experience. Slow bootups.
Mac's Cons:
User's are just as evangelical. System still crashes for no reason. Few games. Right-click functions exist, but lack imo.
Overall: If everything boils down to "anything you can do I can do better"...Macs and PC's win and lose at the same time.'
It just depends on what you're planning to use your machine for. If you want to play games AND ___, go with a PC. If you want to ______ really well, go with a Mac.
Posts: 1236 | Registered: Mar 2002
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posted
How about you do less dictating and more discussing yourself, Blayne?
First, don't presume this is the first Hatrack discussion on such subjects. Second, don't toss out strawmen (even if as counter-arguments) in the first post. Instead, give your own personal examples. Even better, give examples for both (good and bad for PCs, and good and bad for Macs).
I like the customizability and games availability for PCs. However, I often find the disparate custom UI for installing things (particularly hardware) to often be poor and confusing, and often times just plain broken.
I like Macs because I appreciate the eye-candy and more consistent UI, as well as the Unix-y guts (with all the well-known conventions that entails). I dislike Macs due to their price premium, and some specific UI choices.
posted
That works out to about 60 percent more expensive. While that's pretty significant, I don't think I'd call it "nearly twice as expensive."
My own completely subjective thoughts on the matter: I like PCs. I'm familiar with them and enjoy the flexibility and price. My Windows XP Pro system at home hangs a lot less frequently than my iMac at work (neither system really ever crashes). I've done a fair amount of layout work on both Macs and PCs, and I've never seen much advantage, if any, to doing it on a Mac.
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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posted
All other things being equal, I'd say Macs win over Windows PCs in pretty much every way other than price (though some models have very competitive pricing).
Things start to get fuzzy when you talk about switching from one to the other: most computer users are so timid, uncurious, and afraid of change that the grass will never be greener on the other side, no matter what. If you haven't already gotten used to the quirks and general attitude of Windows, OS X is a lot less weird. Taking the time to understand why OS X is so different only makes it seem better designed.
Many of the most annoying differences between PCs and Macs stem from the fact that the platforms have developed similar solutions from completely different starting points.
OS X started as the unix-based, pervasively object-oriented NeXTStep operating system, which was toned down to be more familiar to the existing Mac and Windows markets. Things like 3-button mouse interaction and the advanced Dock features were cut, and the application menus were somewhat crippled for the sake of familiarity. However, the document and application oriented paradigms persisted.
Windows, on the other hand, has evolved gradually and inconsistently. Microsoft has done a spectacular job of retaining backwards compatibility, but at the cost of having an idiosyncratic environment. They have never been fully able to eat their own dog food, and that has set a bad example that third-party developers have followed. For example, none of the Office suites of the past decade have used the native widgets of the operating system: they draw their own buttons in their own style. This means that Office 97 on XP or Vista still looks like a Win95 app. Not only is this a horrible case of re-inventing the wheel, it has led to a complete lack of consistency in look and feel (enough that most windows users can't even discriminate between look and feel, and consequently will bash OS X for inconsistent looks when it has perfectly consistent feel.)
With that in mind, it seems to me that OS X users have no reasons to switch to Windows that don't stem from Microsoft's monopoly history. Windows users, on the other hand, can often get real technological and usability improvements if they invest the time and money to switch.
Posts: 145 | Registered: Apr 2007
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quote:Originally posted by Jon Boy: That works out to about 60 percent more expensive. While that's pretty significant, I don't think I'd call it "nearly twice as expensive."
Dells are pretty pricy in terms of PCs though. I'm pretty sure a comparable HP or Toshiba machine would be considerably less expensive.
Posts: 1594 | Registered: Apr 2006
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
quote:Originally posted by Bokonon: How about you do less dictating and more discussing yourself, Blayne?
First, don't presume this is the first Hatrack discussion on such subjects. Second, don't toss out strawmen (even if as counter-arguments) in the first post. Instead, give your own personal examples. Even better, give examples for both (good and bad for PCs, and good and bad for Macs).
I like the customizability and games availability for PCs. However, I often find the disparate custom UI for installing things (particularly hardware) to often be poor and confusing, and often times just plain broken.
I like Macs because I appreciate the eye-candy and more consistent UI, as well as the Unix-y guts (with all the well-known conventions that entails). I dislike Macs due to their price premium, and some specific UI choices.
-Bok
Lawl, have you had your happy juice recently? By the looks of it I say not.
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quote:Originally posted by Bokonon: How about you do less dictating and more discussing yourself, Blayne?
First, don't presume this is the first Hatrack discussion on such subjects. Second, don't toss out strawmen (even if as counter-arguments) in the first post. Instead, give your own personal examples. Even better, give examples for both (good and bad for PCs, and good and bad for Macs).
I like the customizability and games availability for PCs. However, I often find the disparate custom UI for installing things (particularly hardware) to often be poor and confusing, and often times just plain broken.
I like Macs because I appreciate the eye-candy and more consistent UI, as well as the Unix-y guts (with all the well-known conventions that entails). I dislike Macs due to their price premium, and some specific UI choices.
-Bok
Lawl, have you had your happy juice recently? By the looks of it I say not.
That's just stupid.
Posts: 1236 | Registered: Mar 2002
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posted
People who frame this discussion as a battle are part of the problem, not the solution.
I've been trying to convince my girlfriend that using a mac isn't going to hurt her for about three years now. But all the hyperbole and overzealous bashing of one or the other just makes people more resistant to giving the other side a chance.
I have a mac and a PC at home and use a PC at work. I prefer the mac interface.
Posts: 3580 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
I have a Mac running OS X, PC running Windows and Ubuntu and a Mac running Debian.
I use all three for different things. I use Ubuntu as my primary for programming, document editing and all net stuff. I use my mac for media, music and movies. I use my windows boot for gaming. There's nothing wrong or evil about just using all the available operating systems only for what they are best for. It's not that hard either and these days doesn't really even require more than one computer: mac hardware triple booted. Perfect. Posts: 3295 | Registered: Jun 2004
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
quote:Originally posted by Earendil18:
quote:Originally posted by Blayne Bradley:
quote:Originally posted by Bokonon: How about you do less dictating and more discussing yourself, Blayne?
First, don't presume this is the first Hatrack discussion on such subjects. Second, don't toss out strawmen (even if as counter-arguments) in the first post. Instead, give your own personal examples. Even better, give examples for both (good and bad for PCs, and good and bad for Macs).
I like the customizability and games availability for PCs. However, I often find the disparate custom UI for installing things (particularly hardware) to often be poor and confusing, and often times just plain broken.
I like Macs because I appreciate the eye-candy and more consistent UI, as well as the Unix-y guts (with all the well-known conventions that entails). I dislike Macs due to their price premium, and some specific UI choices.
-Bok
Lawl, have you had your happy juice recently? By the looks of it I say not.
That's just stupid.
Explain to me how someone taking my obvious tongue in cheek phrases in a complete negative way and critizes me in also a completely way doesn't deserve a nice witty retort about how obviously he has had a bad day and simply taking it out on me. Obviously your idea of what is "stupid" clearly is lacking in this situation.
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quote:Explain to me how someone taking my obvious tongue in cheek phrases in a complete negative way and critizes me in also a completely way doesn't deserve a nice witty retort about how obviously he has had a bad day and simply taking it out on me.
Explination #1 -- it was not obviously tongue in cheek.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
Agreed, I'm personally heavily vested in Mac vs. PC issues, but I have no desire to participate in debates where acrimony and fanaticism are the main catalysts for discussion. Luckily for us the more erudite than average members of Hatrack are more interested in comparing the relative merits of the systems rather than giving in to Blayne's not-so-subtle, not-so-erudite desire for a verbal slugfest.
The fact is they're both good for different things, and the deciding factor in which is 'better,' is what you need it for.
Posts: 959 | Registered: Oct 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Blayne Bradley: Explain to me how someone taking my obvious tongue in cheek phrases in a complete negative way and critizes me in also a completely way doesn't deserve a nice witty retort about how obviously he has had a bad day and simply taking it out on me. Obviously your idea of what is "stupid" clearly is lacking in this situation.
1. I don't care if he deserves a retort. 2. Believe it or not, it may not have been personal. Hypersensitivity isn't a virtue.
I'm not playing this anymore. Posts: 1236 | Registered: Mar 2002
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posted
I wasn't having a bad day. I was taking your first post at face-value (which should be considered something of a compliment, since many people often view your posts with their own pre-conceived notions of you), since you have posted stuff like this before, but actually have been serious.
Sorry I misconstrued your post, but my criticisms were fair and not personal, unless pointing on basic netiquette is a personal attack. They are rules everyone should follow.
posted
Dude man, I even put in a smiley "^-^" it was obviously tongue in cheek.
Also Dante, explain how my first post in anyway encoruages fanatical verbal slugfest? I had explicitly stated that with a smiley that such arguements were not productive.
Seriously, when someone reads someone's posts online check for smilies, read it once or twice over again and see if possibly its meant to be taken seriously or if the author is trying to be funny.
Honestly some of you need to take a break.
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You can say it was obvious all you want, but if there were people who didn't pick up on it, it wasn't obvious.
Also, the emoticon you used is not one that is used on this board much at all. I know that I didn't notice it until you called attention to it. You might want to stick with the graemlin smileys.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
That's not a smiley that I've ever seen. To me, that's reiterating what exactly is spirited (it's pointing to the prior point). And even if it was a smiley, the most I could figure out without your clarification was that you were being sarcastic when you said spirited, not that the whole post was a joke.
No biggie, and I apologize for the misunderstanding on my part, but I don't think the post is particularly well targeted for Hatrack (other forums, perhaps).
I still think had you followed with your own examples (whether jokes or not as was your intent), it would have cleared up much of the confusion.
posted
I love hatrack as an online forum, but I think the average quality of discussion has made quite a few of the users really stuck up about the way some people post.
Who cares of Blayne actually believed this was the first mac/pc discussion ever? I don't believe he did, but so WHAT if he did? And why is it a rule that an opening post for a discussion has to be researched and sourced?
That's ridiculous. This is a place for discussion, and sometimes people just want to open up a discussion.
Maybe Blayne's posts aren't as sophisticated as you would like. That is no reason to be so abrasive.
Don't kick someone off the swing swet just because they didn't put on their black robes and ascot before they came outside to play. When I first came to Hatrack, I posted some stupid things. You know what people did? They didn't post in my thread. Unless someone is saying something hatemonging and broadly offensive, what is the point, when your most effective action is inaction?
If you don't have anything nice to say, etc.
In these cases it is those that protest that come off sounding childish. That could be simply my own perception, but if them's the rules, then peace out.
Posts: 3936 | Registered: Jul 2000
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posted
porc, I sympathize. I'm not out to get Blayne. Rather, I'm out to help him rehab his image here on Hatrack, based on some early faux pas. He has shown appreciation and positive feedback to getting some support in the past. If he doesn't want it any more, that's cool, I won't post anything.
I hope Blayne realizes that I thought I was being constructive in the vein of prior threads. (If not, I hope he gets the irony given my confusion of the intent of his first post here ).
Commodore Pet is where it's at. You don't have to buy esoteric media like discs and USB drives and whatnot . . . you can use the very same cassettes you use to record music off the radio and play in your Walkman! You don't have to buy a separate monitor: it's built in! No worrying about losing your keyboard: it's built in too! No confusing peripherals like laser printers, scanners, mice, video cards, coffee warmers, whatever. My Commodore Pet has never crashed once! Can you Mac and PC people say that? Also, no Commodore Pet has ever gotten a virus from the internet. They are absolutely spyware and malware proof as well. With my Commodore Pet, I can be sure it's absolutely impossible for my kids to access inappropriate websites or chat with creepy perverts!
Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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posted
And the graphics are way old skool!
Posts: 4393 | Registered: Aug 2003
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
well with my friends we use ^-^ alot because its cuter. I'm sorry Bokomon for lashing out you since you were trying to be helpful but please, please please ask if I'm being joking.
Also I'ld think the sheer obviousness of the strawman arguement in a forum of generally erudite people, the presence of a smiley (albeit one none of you has ever seen), would have at least slightly pointed out that I'm being playful in the post.
I do want a serious discussion I've heard and considered most of the arguements already so I would rather have other people discuss it, and watch them discuss it and see if I learn anything new.
Also a friend of a friend was getting a new computer, the PC specs of it would have costed 350$, the Mac version on comparison was 1000$.
Obviously thats more then double and depending on the store it might be less, but looking around at futureshop I have seen some ridiculous prices for something that I could do better and cheaper on a PC.
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posted
That's the thing though, Blayne: withholding your opinion in a thread like this is a little unfair. Why should we bother, when you won't? You can still learn things even after given your opinion (opinions are allowed to change, after all), and it makes people feel more comfortable that they won't get nit-picked by the "Arbiter of the Thread".
posted
There are only a few macs that can be made to cost around $1000, the Macbook, the Mac Mini, and the iMac.
It is not possible to get a laptop feature-comparable to the macbook for less than half as much (even discounting things like the built in iSight).
It is not possible to get a computer feature-comparable to the iMac for less than half as much. The screen alone would be fairly expensive for the size (and it is not a low-quality LCD).
So what you must be talking about is the mini. The mini is not aimed at people looking for a cheap computer, it is aimed at people looking for a small computer. It uses laptop parts, and they are engineered into a very small form factor. This is more expensive. Was the computer your friend was buying anywhere near as small as the mini?
In other words, the Macs are not priced at anywhere near twice as much for a comparable machine. If you take a machine that Apple has made out of the same sort of parts, for the same sort of audience, it is only somewhat more expensive (and arguably not at all in some cases, such as the Macbook).
If you're going to try to knock apple's prices, try to approach things with at least a little thought.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
I believe iMacs also use a lot of laptop components, which makes a direct comparison to desktop PCs rather difficult. The most even comparison I could think of was a PowerMac against a similar PC workstation. With a little customization of options to get them as comparable as possible, I was able to price a PowerMac at $4700 and a Dell at $3500.
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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posted
Oops. I should've said Mac Pro, not PowerMac.
Yeah, I chose 20" flat panels. For the Mac Pro, I upgraded to a Quadro FX 4500 because it was the closest thing to the Dell's FX 3500. Of course, it's a better card, but I'm not sure how much it affected the total price.
Edit: I went back and double-checked the specs, and it looks like a comparable Dell would be $4200, not $3500. I must've missed something the first time. And that $500 difference could very well be the graphics card and other little things.
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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posted
I haven't exactly done any research on this, but it seems to me to also depend on when you do the price comparison. It doesn't seem like Apple updates the products or price points as often as the PC manufacturers. So when a Mac line is updated, often times it seems like the prices are much better than a comparable PC, but the comparison eventually levels off, and then by the end of the Mac product cycle, the Macs are more expensive.
Posts: 1256 | Registered: May 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank: People who frame this discussion as a battle are part of the problem, not the solution.
I've been trying to convince my girlfriend that using a mac isn't going to hurt her for about three years now. But all the hyperbole and overzealous bashing of one or the other just makes people more resistant to giving the other side a chance.
I have a mac and a PC at home and use a PC at work. I prefer the mac interface.
It's a fundamental worldview thing:
Coke is good; Pepsi is bad. (RC is ridiculous)
PCs are good (even when they're bad); Macs are bad (even when they're good). (Linux is alien, and therefore not even in the equation)
Betamax was bad (despite the better picture); VHS was good.
Hatrack forums are good; Ornery forums are bad.
The list goes on and on. As Elliot S! Maggin said on more than one occasion, "There's a right and a wrong in the universe, and the distinction isn't hard to make."
Posts: 12266 | Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
It will almost always be better to buy the equivalent Dell UltraSharp monitor instead of the Apple monitor (or a lesser quality one if that's okay). At least at one point they were using the same screen suppliers with the same quality cutoff, and they're very comparable, but the Dell monitor is cheaper (especially if you're a school with a big Dell deal) and has a better stand.
Looks like that knocks $200 off the Mac Pro comparison price (20" Cinema display is $599, 20" UltraSharp 2007WFP is $399. Monitors should still be included because other vendors will often include them with a system for cheaper, but there's no reason to assume someone buying a mac will buy a monitor from apple.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
On that note, there's no reason to assume someone buying a PC will expect it to come assembled, so all comparisons should be priced against purchasing comparable parts at the best possible prices.
Posts: 4313 | Registered: Sep 2004
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posted
There's plenty of reason to expect someone buying a PC will expect it to come assembled. Notably, if you buy the parts, you aren't buying a PC, you're buying parts and making a PC, if we want to be pedantic.
If we want to be realistic, buying parts is not part of normal shopping for a computer, but possibly buying the monitor elsewhere is.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
Meh, all you're doing when purchasing a PC is picking which parts come pre-installed. Most people are okay with their monitor, keyboard and mouse not coming pre-installed. I don't think it's unreasonable to move the line a little further back, especially since that's one of a PC's greatest strengths.
If we want to be realistic, most everyone I've ever seen buy a mac has also purchased a mac monitor. :shrug:
Posts: 4313 | Registered: Sep 2004
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posted
"Assembling a PC from pieces" is moving the line a LOT further back from "plugging in your monitor and peripherals."
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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