mac vs pc

[Shadowlord]

lets start at the beginning:

1. PC's are FASTER, despite what people are claiming, Macs aren't even close to the same speed as PC's, now, before you guys start jumping on me saying that "the macs are just as fast because their piplines are built differently", Refer back to the tests that were done by PC world, Cnet, and all the other computer magazines when the G5 came out last year. The dual G5 was beaten by pentium 4s, and especially AMD by a fairly large margin.

2.as for gaming, macs suck, they fail to pump out good framerates, they can't handle the complex operations in the processor as well as the PC's, and besides that, there are few games that are made for the mac. (at least good games)

3. price, they are overly expensive. The parts are not worth the price they charge, you are only paying for the looks, i could build a computer that would destroy the macs for half the price.

4.tech support, generally, the macs DO have better tech support, but then again you'll need it.

5. reliability, despite what all those employees from apple say, macs are very unstable and can crash on the most simple tasks. I don't care if you say " mine doesn't do that", when you are browsing the net and open up a flash video, and then the computer freezes and has to be restarted, or suddenly reboots, then you'll believe.


on a final note:

you may all say that " i don't like PC's cause of Bill Gates", understand something. you think you have escaped Bill Gates by switching to a Mac? WRONG, Bill Gates owns a large portion of Apple's stock, he has ever since he bailed them out of bankruptcy in the early 90's, so if he sells his shares, apple goes under. for all those people who have bought a mac, i hope your happy with your overpriced piece of trash, because in the end, thats what you have. I have owned macs, and i have owned PC's, PC's are better, hands down.

on a good note, I will commend Macs for one thing. This is the only thing that they are good at (if they can stay stable doing it) image and video manipulation. There is no doubt that they are better for that than PC's.

[Lexander]

Originally Posted by Mr. Bushido

how about in the notebook area? cuz i believe i would be getting a notebook rather than a desktop.

iBooks are quite sexy and they are pretty quick. My friend purchased one and wow ... it's excellent. Only thing is ... it's kinda pricey in my opinion, but hey if you can afford it go for it.


As for PC vs Mac: i prefer pc, macs seem to have smoother graphics (more pleasant to use for me) but whenever i've used one it crashes for no reason (and yep I'm talking about the new ones), whereas my pc bailed on me only one time because my idiot a$$ installed the wrong motherboard drivers. Despite what people say about windows xp, I find that it is very stable. Plus most people that say PCs suck have hardware problems (either bought crappy parts from unknown brands or ended up with an incompatable set)

[Mr. Bushido]

http://spl.haxial.net/apple-powermac-G5/

PC gains a point! The Mac website is misleading!! G5 dual processor is slower than the Intel 3.0 ghz!

i have a question: how is the battery life of these notebooks? I heard Dell notebooks average 3 hrs on one battery. Thats wat the sales rep told my dad when he ordered his dell. i thought it would be at least 12 hrs.

[Cruzz]

Originally Posted by Mr. Bushido

http://spl.haxial.net/apple-powermac-G5/

PC gains a point! The Mac website is misleading!! G5 dual processor is slower than the Intel 3.0 ghz!

i have a question: how is the battery life of these notebooks? I heard Dell notebooks average 3 hrs on one battery. Thats wat the sales rep told my dad when he ordered his dell. i thought it would be at least 12 hrs.

Around 5 hours would be my guess, but that's not really based on any factual knowledge so the number might be slightly off. Macs used to have a lot better battery life than PC notebooks, but with the Pentium-M things have changed so don't expect that much difference. Pentium-M notebooks can do 5 hous on one battery too.

12 hours battery life? Well, it's not totally ridiculous but it's more or less a pipe dream with current battery technology unless you're willing to haul an additional battery pack around with you.

[SirJeannot]

Originally Posted by ashibaka

Let me summarize my opinion... let's pretend that all the popular OSes are free. (In reality, Linux and BSD are extra because they're free, but let's forget about that for a minute.)

Then:

Solaris < Windows < Mac OS 9 < BSD < Linux < Mac OS X



No, wait... something's missing...

Solaris < Windows < Mac OS 9 < BSD < Linux < Mac OS X < Osaka

you're misunderstanding solaris... it's not a popular os since you need a sun machine to run it at its full potential. too bad sun messed up :/ , but at that time, it was from far the best available os for servers (i.e. sun machines)
and mac os9 doesn't deserve a place in your top5
imo, bsd is better than linux ... but well, it my own humble opinion

[Cammie]

I'm going to have to side with PC. I work with MACs all day long!!! OSX and the Jaguar program are highly overrated!! I do have to say one good thing about MACs. They are kid friendly and easy to learn. The iBooks are very cheaply made in my opinion. The keys pop out, freezes all the time, battery life stinks, and the mouse pad is difficult to use most of the time. Over all MACs are high maintance computers.

[Mr. Bushido]

Originally Posted by Cruzz

12 hours battery life? Well, it's not totally ridiculous but it's more or less a pipe dream with current battery technology unless you're willing to haul an additional battery pack around with you.

havent used a notebook too much before, and when i did it was plugged in. I thought the batteries were lithium ion, and every lithium batteries i have used lasted at least 15 hrs. SO thats why i thought these things ran for that long.

wat do u think of a G5 dual processor on an ibook or powerbook?
can Virtual PC run every PC program?

[Cruzz]

Originally Posted by Mr. Bushido

havent used a notebook too much before, and when i did it was plugged in. I thought the batteries were lithium ion, and every lithium batteries i have used lasted at least 15 hrs. SO thats why i thought these things ran for that long.

wat do u think of a G5 dual processor on an ibook or powerbook?
can Virtual PC run every PC program?

I think that I'd like a laptop which you can actually use without having it plugged in an outlet. A dual G5 laptop is would be insanely power hungry and would also produce immensive amounts of heat. But anyway, it's not like you could actually buy a G5 laptop right now so it hardly matters.

Notebook batteries are mostly Lithium-ion (or Ni-Mh), but the components (particularly the screen and it's backlighting) suck up a lot of juice.

[durrem]

Hmm, for comparison, I have a Dell 600m with 1.6 GHz Pentium-M, 640MB memory, 40GB 5400 RPS drive, Radeon Mobility 9000 w/ 64MB memory, and a 1024x768 14" screen. In power saving mode, watching anime, the battery only lasts about two or two and a half hours. Same thing playing a dvd movie. This is because it is constantly accessing the hard drive or CD drive, which uses a lot of battery life.

A couple of things about the 600m specifically. The left wrist wrest gets really warm, to the point of being minorly annoying. This is where the HD is. Also, the memory gets really hot, such that it hurts if you hold your finger where the memory is (bottom, center). The upper left area, where the video card and cpu are, does not get warm, as there is a quiet fan there.

If you are going to purchase a laptop, the most important thing you should do is check out the different resolutions for the screen before you buy it. My sister has an IBM T23 with a 1400x1024 14" screen and when I checked it out I hated how everything was so small.... so when I got my laptop I didn't upgrade the screen to 14x10 and I have no regrets in that regard.

I did look at one of those ibooks for a few minutes at the store, and to tell you the truth, I didn't like the construction. It felt like heavy plastic that would shatter (this is my opinion, just from a few minutes). And I didn't like how the touch pad felt. Also, it was heavier than my laptop (5lbs). I really like how my sister's IBM is constructed. Everything is really solid and feels just right. If they weren't a generation behind in graphics processors I would have gotten that instead of the 600m. Also, they have larger batteries (more cells) than the Dell, so I think they could go for 4 or 5 hours browsing, compared to 3 hours for mine.

On a side note, I wish OSX was available for x86. I'd be the first one down at Fry's with my credit card to check it out if it was.

[SirJeannot]

Originally Posted by Mr. Bushido

havent used a notebook too much before, and when i did it was plugged in. I thought the batteries were lithium ion, and every lithium batteries i have used lasted at least 15 hrs. SO thats why i thought these things ran for that long.

wat do u think of a G5 dual processor on an ibook or powerbook?
can Virtual PC run every PC program?

its ridiculous ....
i have a small s ony laptop here, designed to consume the least power possible
with the largest battery available (which is large), i get 9h battery life time, what is already uber long!
check the size!
http://uvsqstpi.free.fr/0x/c1-1.jpg
http://uvsqstpi.free.fr/0x/c1-2.jpg
http://uvsqstpi.free.fr/0x/c1-3.jpg

[Keitaro]

Originally Posted by Mr. Bushido

wat do u think of a G5 dual processor on an ibook or powerbook?
can Virtual PC run every PC program?

lol that battery would probably die in an hour or less if a laptop was equipped with twin G5's or any processors currently available on the market. Maybe Intel's new Mobile processor could do it. Who knows though you don't see any dual proccessor laptops around. Maybe in the future will see em. When we have some newer type of longer more powerful batteries. Anyways I don't see any major advantages of a dual processor laptop. Usually dual processor PC's work best as servers or for powerful workstations that do a lot of video editing or CAD.

Bushido I would suggest you get a Dell notebook. There a lot cheaper then Apple laptops and Dell has the best customer tech support. But if you still insist on getting a Apple ibook or powerbook then go for it. Only you can decide which is right for you.

[Rheinhard]

Originally Posted by Mr. Bushido

can somebody who has used both macs and pcs (preferably the newer ones) tell me how they are different and what they are better at? For example what has better hardware, speed, and etc.

please consider that macs can run windows, and for pc linux can be used to compare.

I hate this kind of question. How do you define "better"? It all depends on what you want to do and what factors are most important to you.

If you're a die-hard gamer who absolutely must play the latest hot game as soon as it comes out, yes, get a PC. Game support is getting better for Macs but still the Windows world is the focus of PC game development.

If you want to work in digital video/DVD creation, the Mac is it, hands down. At Anime Expo last year at the Music Video panel, there were several panelists who were Mac-based, such as Brad deMoss, and several who were Windows based. When talking about how to get video into your computer, on the Mac you can just hook up a digital camcorder via firewire, or use an analog-DV bridge, and you're off. The PC guy talked about installing video input cards, but admitted that even he, a seasoned Windows user, had never been able to install and get a PC video card working without a couple of system crashes and reboots.

For graphics, it's harder to say. For years Apple was the center of the desktop publishing world. Now it's more mixed. A lot of top web comic artists (such as Ian McConville of Mac Hall, Mohammed Haque of Applegeeks, and Piro of Megatokyo) use Macs for Photoshop type stuff. Ian and Hawk also do animation stuff with Maya, etc. Hawk has commented how well Maya likes the multiple processors of the Apple desktops. I've never been an artist so I can't talk authoritatively about this, but I think many of these same programs also run on Windows.

For basic Internet stuff (web surfing, email, chat, etc.) either platform is fine. Same goes for standard productivity stuff (MS Office, etc.), which has versions on either platform (though I can say from experience with both, that I like the Mac OS X version of MS Word lots better than the Windows version. I have heard this same evaluation from others as well).

Now I am an old-time Mac user. I've used Macs since 1985, long before Windows even existed. When Windows first came out I couldn't belive how f**ed up it was, because they had no conception of the desktop metaphor. It was just a GUI slapped on top of MS-DOS. My experiences with Windows include many of the famous "blue screens of death", and there always seems to be something that just doesn't quite work right in the Windows 2000 Servers we are forced to use for some tasks in my work. For these reasons I am an Apple advocate. I won't say Macs never crash or have problems, but in my personal experience it's far less frequent on average than in Windows.

For me, since I work on software that runs in a Unix environment, I adore the current version of Mac OS, since I can have a Unix environment including XWindows, as well as the mac environment. This means I can use all the mac apps as well as a lot of open-source code created for Unix/Linux. Just today I shipped home a small C program I wrote in the office and was able to compile and run it on my Mac with no problem. This may not be a big deal for many of you, but for me it means I can have everything I want to do with computers all in one box.

[Mr. Bushido]

Originally Posted by SirJeannot

its ridiculous ....
i have a small s ony laptop here, designed to consume the least power possible
with the largest battery available (which is large), i get 9h battery life time, what is already uber long!
check the size!
http://uvsqstpi.free.fr/0x/c1-1.jpg
http://uvsqstpi.free.fr/0x/c1-2.jpg
http://uvsqstpi.free.fr/0x/c1-3.jpg

i use to stare at the small Vaios. are they any good?

Originally Posted by Rheinhard

I hate this kind of question. How do you define "better"? It all depends on what you want to do and what factors are most important to you.

didnt i answer this question?? maybe it was in the megatokyo forums.

im gonna do mild gamming. mostly stradegy games rather than the super graphic types.
programming. (im planning to major in it)
anime
internet/IM/download
hw/take notes at college?

[hak]

isnt OSX basically a modified freeBSD platform? iono anyway OSX is definitedly pretty good but i still prefer linux over it cuz penguin > an apple

[Rheinhard]

Originally Posted by Mr. Bushido

im gonna do mild gamming. mostly stradegy games rather than the super graphic types.
programming. (im planning to major in it)
anime
internet/IM/download
hw/take notes at college?

Well, based on that description, I'd go with a Mac. Since you seem interested in a laptop, take a look at the iBook. (Powerbooks are sweeter, but also more $).

For programming stuff I'd want to based off the mac or Linux. However I don't have any idea how much support there is for games on Linux (I suspect even less than the mac). Also for programming, the mac comes with a cd of developer tools including C/C++/Objective C compilers, Java, etc.

Also dunno what IM support there is under Linux, but I know there is iChat on the mac which is compatible with AOL IM, as well as the native AIM client. I have a coworker who also uses Yahoo messenger on mac. And of course there's several IRC clients.

As for anime, it probably doesn't matter much. I watch all downloaded anime with VLC (all-in-one player, no fiddling with codecs), which is available for every major OS out there.

Originally Posted by hak

isnt OSX basically a modified freeBSD platform?

Well, although the kernel of the OS is based on BSD, calling it "just a modified freeBSD" is a gross understatement. The amount of development on the Aqua interface and developement environment, as well as the key applications, is considerable.

[hak]

for games:

all the newer games come with linux support im pretty sure, but for the older games just get wineX which basically will emulate the win binary inside linux, and it works VERY well...
but id still keep a windows partition just in case there is trouble.

for IM: gaim for all, its an amazing chat client for all the major IM services. It also looks very nice and has a lot of really good plugins/ features.

but thanks for clearing my statement up rheinhard

[Mr. Bushido]

Originally Posted by Rheinhard

Well, based on that description, I'd go with a Mac. Since you seem interested in a laptop, take a look at the iBook. (Powerbooks are sweeter, but also more $).

For programming stuff I'd want to based off the mac or Linux. However I don't have any idea how much support there is for games on Linux (I suspect even less than the mac). Also for programming, the mac comes with a cd of developer tools including C/C++/Objective C compilers, Java, etc.

Also dunno what IM support there is under Linux, but I know there is iChat on the mac which is compatible with AOL IM, as well as the native AIM client. I have a coworker who also uses Yahoo messenger on mac. And of course there's several IRC clients.

As for anime, it probably doesn't matter much. I watch all downloaded anime with VLC (all-in-one player, no fiddling with codecs), which is available for every major OS out there.



Well, although the kernel of the OS is based on BSD, calling it "just a modified freeBSD" is a gross understatement. The amount of development on the Aqua interface and developement environment, as well as the key applications, is considerable.

im planning to use this computer throughout college, and a notebook seemed more appropriate. about how long does it take for PC games to be ported to mac? im currently into the microsoft/EA stradegy games.

is Virtual PC really good? like can u run every PC applications and programs on it? Finally, i heard that the mac is a form of Linux. is this true?

im also hoping to learn linux , and running 3 different OS would be difficult? Probably why im leaning more towards a dell computer.

thanks everyone for the replies btw. I am complete OS and hardware noob.


EDIT: how about running windows and running Fedora linux on virtual PC/wine?

[hak]

well mac is a form of freebsd which is a flavor of unix and linux is a flavor of unix also. They're all related but not the same. If you do indeed get a dell, you will easily be able to a window/linux rig. You'll be able to choose which os to go into at setup if you install on seperate partitions. Im not sure if macs support dual Oses.

Not sure bout microsoft and ea games, but most other game companies make their games compatitble with osx also.

[Shii]

The new Mac OS is a form of UNIX. It's easier to use than your regular Linux, but if you want to learn Linux/UNIX you can fire up the Mac OS console and play around.

Sorry, I don't know the answers to your other questions :|

[Mr. Bushido]

Originally Posted by ashibaka

The new Mac OS is a form of UNIX. It's easier to use than your regular Linux, but if you want to learn Linux/UNIX you can fire up the Mac OS console and play around.

Sorry, I don't know the answers to your other questions :|

dammit! when i saw ur name as the last poster i thought "finally an answer!"
i always thought u were one of those OS "l337" ones.