Another Computer Question

Just wondering if any of you guys in your thoughts on PeeCees ever thought 'stuff it I am getting a Mac'

If not why not?

I am genuinly interested as many people here at work haven't even heard of an ipod (Which I am flabergasted by)

 

I'd love to buy a Mac, but the PC is so much cheaper to build (epecially if you don't have to pay for the software I mean of course the open source variety ).

Seriously if I could open all the documents in ever-changing MS office products using a Mac or Linux, I'd be happy to use a Mac or a Linux machine. MS just have too much of a strangle hold at the moment I'm afraid.

 

I have Microsoft office on my mac, all picture formats are cross platform, so far no issues what so ever.

 

Dev, have you tried OOo ?, it is free, open source and does most if not all the MS Office functions I require.
It also seems to work on a lot of machines and in a lot of languages.

 

Not yet. The only version of open source I've managed to install successfully is SuSE 8.2. I use it as my FS to backup my files. I've tried to open older Office documents with OO v1.1.0 with some success. I've not had any issues with it at all except for the following 2:-

1) Getting Mozilla plugins to work. The problem is with the softlinks, I've been told. I think they are like the path statements that we all know and love .
2) The installation of SWAT did not seem to have copied all the files into the correct directory. Consequently I cannot use a browser to configure SAMBA. However, I have managed to configure it by updating the samba.conf, so hardly a problem.

I've tried Red Hat V9 and the installation failed with my PC hanging. Hardware conflict I guess.

Lately I've been looking at Gentoo, which I've managed to install but doesn't bootup properly, complaining about file system check failure. I was going to enlist the help of a colleague who's on holidays at the moment, but if I manage to get Gentoo working I'll try OOo v1.1.3. I assume it'll work with 2.24 kernel.

 

What happens when MS change formats as they done in the past? Although it looks like they are less likely to do this in a hurry.

To be honest, a PC running Linux is so much cheaper, if only I could get it to work

 

Take a look here:

http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2232

Quite an interesting read.


Chris

 

A mate of mine recently was about to upgrade his PC and bought a G4 Powerbook instead. He's thrilled with it. It lives in the living room, hooked to his broadband via his wireless network in the upstairs study. I'm very impressed aswell.

TBH, I've often considered getting a Mac. I don't need a PC for work anymore as my office gives me a laptop (PC) so for personal use a Mac would be fine. Only showstopper for me is they don't play games and even though I play very few games on my PC I couldn't do without them and a PS/2 or XBox is cr@p in comparison.

Michael.

 

I can only afford one computer. There are some things I want to do with computers that I cant do on a Mac. I like to fiddle - thats why I chose a PC. Nothing against Macs at all TBH, but when budget is an issue then PCs simply offer higher specification for the cash.

 

Mike what games do you play?

I have unreal which in a live online game runs at around 80fps at a res of 1900x1200.
I have Halo, Medel of Honor, LAro Croft thingy, black and white, Oni, Max Payne. For those into classics I have a snes emulator with 200 games, an sega emulator with 600 games as well as Mame (Emulates arcade games) with around another 200 games.

I can't argue that all games on PC will be available on mac, because they won't but all the important ones seem to be there including all the sims and stratagy games. Doom 3 is on its way apparently (horrah)

 

Paul you are right PCs are cheaper. So is an Aiwa midi system in comet.

The hardware of a mac is clearly superior to anything on the market (Although give sony their due they do have a go)

The bundles software with mac is also awsome compared to PC, iDVD is worth the money alone, I have created a DVD for my wedding, my borthers wedding and a mates kids birthday.
iSync allows me to syncronise my handheld, mobile phone, ipod, online data base and the computer with iCAL and my address book, this is all automatic and free, so for instance my phone can call me 15 minutes before an appointment.
iphoto stores upto 25,000 photos, all can be resized at once in real time. itunes, well you all know about itunes.
Imovie will take any movie data via firewire from and digital cam with fire wire, you can edit crop add music and text etc etc and then output to iDVD for a DVD or back to camera.

Mail and Safari utterly rape Explorer and outlook express.

iCAL keeps a track of any appointments and puts into iSync.

Address book keeps track of all addys from mail, the phone and the palm and sync with the rest.

The software goes on and on and is built to run with the hardware, seriously it just is not this way on PC and all part of the package.

I havn't even mention garageband..

 

I can see where this is headed already....

Hows that then? I just read the article posted above, and they state that the memory is some of the slowest on the market, it comes loaded with a cheap ass graphics card, a small hard drive, and the processor, although dual, seems sluggish (their words) compared to a similar priced PC.

Right, but you can do those things on a PC. You havent mentioned all of the hardware that simply isnt supported on OSX out of the box. Again, read the article above. You simply cannot argue that you cannot do certain things on a Mac than on a PC, because that would be bllshit.

The article did say that this guy prefers the Mail program. As for Safari "raping" IE, is that why it was 35% slower at rendering pages than IE? It must have used up all its energy by anally molesting IE?

Anyway, I am not going to address the other points. I will freely admit that I read the article, and I will confess that the operating system looks nice. However, XP also has its strong point....

And if I may ask: Why are Mac fans so anally retentive and zealous about their choice of computer. I am not zealous, I have nothing to be threatened about or be jealous of. After all, for around the same price as your now out of date Radeon 9800, I have a graphics twice as powerful.... but of course, PC hardware sucks doesnt it?

On that note, I am off to play Doom 3.... pity you cant sample this particular delight eh?

 

Gary - the games I've played recently are Splinter Cell (1 & 2), Half-Life (the original) and various flight sims and motor racing games. I don't dispute that there are some games avaiable for the Mac, as there are for Linux but neither can be taken seriously as a gaming platform. When the only reason I have for upgrading my PC (at the moment) is to get the extra horsepower required to play the latest games then it would be silly to switch to a Mac instead. Currently my PC is quite fast and powerful enough for anything else I use it for.

My mate who switched to a G4 powerbook doesn't play games on his PC. He was fed up with endless spyware and popups and fed up with not being able to easily manage his digital photo and mini-DV media from his digital camera and camcorder. It was all just too painful on the PC. I have to say, the way that iPhoto and iMovie just "work" with digital imaging equipment is very impressive. They are fantastic bits of software and they're included as standard on a Mac. I would dearly love to have something even half as good as iPhoto for the PC. Of course you can get all this kind of software for the PC but it costs a lot and it simply isn't as good and easy to use as the Mac stuff. If you have a Mac and a mini-Dv camcorder, ALL you need to do is just plug the firewire cable from the camcorder into the Mac. iMovie takes care of the rest and it is just so incredibly intuitive to use. On a PC you'll first be popping down to PC-world to buy a FireWire card, then you'll have to install it. Then you'll connect up your camcorder and, if you're lucky, it will be Plug'n'Play recognized but you won't be able to do a great deal until you've bought some movie editing software. It's all just such hard work.

With my digital camera, of course I use my PC but I've been manually copying the .JPG files to manually created folders on my harddrive which I've tried to organise with some semblance of a strategy. I've used 3 or 4 (shareware and paid for) image organizing packages and none have been a patch on iPhoto.

There's absolutely no doubt that for doing anything related with digital media like audio files, digital images, movies etc a Mac is head and shoulders above a PC in quality of software and ease of use. That's a strong draw to a Mac for me as I'm doing more and more digital photography and using my PC more for photo work.

There are things I find irritating on Macs (the one button mouse for starters) but I think many of them are a question of getting used to them.

I read the Anandtech article linked above and I have to disagree with the writer on a number of things. First of all, the speed of Safari. I simply don't know how he managed to get those figures but it isn't remotely mirrored by my experience with Safari. IME it's just as fast as IE on a PC, if not faster. There are things I don't like about Safari, but rendering speed is not one of them. Also, the guy complained a lot about scrolling being choppy or slow and that simply isn't the case. I've noticed no difference at all to using a PC. I just don't know how he could possibly be having the issues he mentioned with a Dual G5 Mac. My (recent) Mac experiences have been with my mate's G4 powerbook which is a lot less powerful and the impression you get is of a much faster machine than any PC I've ever used (such as the 3.0Ghz P4s with 1Gb of memory we have at work). I would go so far as to suggest the guy has some kind of hardware problem with his machine.

Gary - your zealousness for the Mac doesn't really do it any favours. Suggesting that Safari "rapes" IE is just silly. IME there's not really much to choose between them. Safari has popup blocking and tabbed browsing which are a plus (as they are on FireFox) but in they are both very good browsers.

On the whole, I think both PCs and Macs have a lot going for them. It wouldn't take a great deal to make Windows XP as easy to use as a Mac. However, Microsoft are running into trouble for just including a browser with the OS, can you imagine the uproar if they also included equivalents of iPhoto, iMovie, iDvd, iCal etc? Many of the issues that PCs have have more than a little to do with the popularity of the PC platform.

Michael.

 

Windows XP comes with 'MovieMaker' which seems to just work with a DV camcorder. Most PCs have Firewire onboard, and if they don't you were ripped off...

I've found that Explorer thumbnails and the picture viewer are adequate for images, again XP just works for viewing what's on your camera, downloading images etc. but you obviously need a proper app to manipulate them. Can iPhoto do the cropping and compression stuff?

Paul

 

The Mac OS X mail app is very good. Safari is quite poor, however, IME.

Macs are good for home users who don't want a lot of complexity. They're nice to use, and externally look very good. I like my Powerbook. The internal construction and componentry is, however, no better than that of an equivalent spec PC or laptop, and in many cases Apple use the same OEM parts as everyone else does anyway.

I haven't spent much time with XP, but from what I've seen of it it looks like a reasonable step forward for home users over earlier versions.

I still use PCs a lot because I make a living from IT, server-side computing especially, where Macs are largely irrelevant. Despite the BSD core of OS X, it isn't a candidate for a serious server OS as it stands.

-- Ian

 

Spot on Ian, with particular emphasis of the word "equivalent" - it seems a standard Mac owners trick to mismatch the comparison. Of course the components of a £1449 (well overpriced for the components IMHO) G5 are going to be better than a "PeeCee" - if its being compared to the type of PC that costs £300 with on board everything from a local computer fair. Try putting it up against a £1500 PC workstation and see what happens – one things for sure the PC certainly wouldn't ship with a 64MB graphics card and 256MB RAM

What's happened to the design team as well, first the G5, which is just a big featureless (and heavy) chunk of aluminium, and now the iMac which is just a big featureless (and heavy) chunk of Perspex....

As an x-owner of a Mac G4 (With OS X) I can honestly say that compared to Windows I found X to be quite unintuitive TBH. And in use I found it to be “just another OSâ€Â, it does it's job. Is it better than XP, in some ways yes, but XP also has it's own advantages. Are they as miles ahead of the PC as Gary makes out - errrr, no.

 

Actually it was the other way round with me. I thought stuff it, I'm not getting shafted by Apple any more, I'm going to build myself my own PC. This was in about 1997. I haven't looked back since.
BTW, I have also been using SoundForge and Vegas for several years on PC (as well as Illustrator and Photoshop) and have never had any particular problems editing DV, sound files or graphics files.

 

Have I considered a switch from PC to mac, sort of, but its the cost thats the biggest factor that puts me off trying a mac apart from the lack of gaming support - as a student I'm not exactly awash with cash, besides I don't exactly have space for 2 computers in my uni room. Even a laptop would be a bit of a squeeze!

The learning curve would be quite steep too, having hardly used a mac, as opposed to a good 5 years of using a PC properly, knowing how to assemble them, use the software properly and so forth. I've used a G4 for a bit (a guy who lives up the road is a total mac fanatic and has tried to convert me!) and it was just difficult because of the fact is was new. Theres something to be said for familiarity!

Both macs and PCs are better than each other in their own ways, theres no clear winner, personally for my uses a PC is probably superior and the ability to customise and upgrade a PC to a greater extent than a mac over time is a big draw for me, so thats what I foresee I'll be sticking with for the future unless I come into a lot of cash so I can afford to experiment by buying a mac, or start using my computer for things where the mac starts to become a lot easier to use.

 

That thought crept into my mind a couple of hours ago but I resisted the urge and settled for some sushi but I still had a craving for the fries and a jumbo shake

 

Sure, at that level then there's really not much to choose between them but for the average home user it's all sooooo much easier on a Mac. The software bundle you get with a Mac is really beyond compare.

Paul - iPhoto can do all the cropping and compression stuff. In fact, most of the tasks that the average user is ever likely to want to use. PC equivalents are things like ACDSee but I've found them all sadly lacking in comparison. I know what you're saying, it can all be done on XP aswell and you're basically right but it's somehow just so much easier on a Mac. I can't really pin down what it is, everything somehow just seems to be a much more natural and obvious process.

Michael.