The Great Mac vs. Windows Debate

[renor27]

Just wondering what systems are being used by members and why?
Am using Windows my self right now but after the semester is over going to jump to Mac.
David

 

[Hemingway Jones]

I am MAC guy at home. I find them much easier to use and much more reliable. I have an iMac desktop and an iBook laptop that is brand new. I use my iBook for surfing (this sort of thing), watching DVDs when I travel, word processing and doing work from home (it recognizes windows programs). My roommate and best friend, who has signed on here as Daisy Buchanan, has an iBook as well.

Currently, I am at work. Here, I use Windows.

 

[scotrace]

Don't get me started.

I used Windows for years. Used it, supported it in a network. But "switched" to Mac in 1999. That was it. I am now president and founder of a 100-member Mac User Group, own stock, and take the Apple Koolaid via a pressure washer. I provide unlimited 24-hour free support to any friend who buys a mac. I have yet to be taken up on it (the support, not the switching). They just don't have serious problems. They're also cheaper, by far, long term. If I'm still using a 6 year old mac daily, I got my money's worth. And never had to pay someone to rid it of popup spyware.
This thread threatens to become a monster because people, oddly, have deep feelings about it. I never participate in Mac vs. Windows debates as they're pointless.
But you can PM me any questions you might have, renor27.
By the way, I have a G5 iMac and older graphite bubble iMac at home on an Airport Extreme network, and a four year old G4 Powerbook at my office plus an seldom-used Dell with Win 98 I have to rebuild every six months or so. I was foolish and bought the first 5G iPod the week they came out... won't do any of the fun stuff the new ones do.

 

[Brad Bowers]

My first computer back in the early '80s was an Apple II, long before the first Mac. But since then I've switched to Windows, though it has little to do with the software. I enjoy building and maintaining my own PC systems, something Apple doesn't allow, as far as I know. If a part goes bad, I know how to replace it. Windows-based PCs are much cheaper to build and maintain than Apple. I suppose sometime I will get an Apple again to see what all the fuss is about, but for people who like to tinker, it doesn't seem to be the way to go.

Brad

 

[Twitch]

I was in the printing industry for a long while and Macs are used exclusively for graphic design. Business apps and entertainment software is pretty much dominated by DOS/Windows. Don't expect to find the new King Kong game out for Mac, for example.

I run Windows XP and it is the most bulletproof version yet. Can't recall any "last crash" like previous Windoze versions. Macs can do more with less hardware power. With PCs it seems like the next version of software always requires a beefier machine. Compared generally PCs are way cheaper than Macs though. A lot of Mac software is more expensive compared to PC and a little harder to find at first.

Mac is quite worthwhile if you don't desire to feel the need to buy an newer machine in 1 1/2 years. It will still be plenty able to runn newer apps. PCs are so low now you can almost afford to through them away in 2 years.

The professionally-used programs are pretty equal in price for Mac or PC.

I don't believe you'll be disappointed with Mac unless you have some special or esoteric PC software that is not available for Mac.

 

[Doctor Strange]

I started on Unix systems almost 25 years ago, used mostly Macs for a number of years, but have been pretty much exclusively on the PC/Windows side of the fence for almost a decade now.

There is *no question* that Macs are more innovatively and elegantly designed, and fun to use, in terms of both HW and SW - but they are not the de facto standard, Windows machines are. Unless you are an artist, it's awfully hard to justify a Mac nowadays - PC/Windows machines have caught up pretty well, for most purposes.

And yes, I feel guilty about having jumped the fence from the better system to the standard one! But it's hard to be an iconoclast in *every* phase of one's life...

 

[Vladimir Berkov]

I had to use Macs at school for a number of years, I have always had a PC at home. I personally find using Macs annoying, possibly because I use PCs more frequently and because I have been involved in programming and I like tinkering with my machines/software which is something pretty much verbotten on the Macintosh. PCs are also a much, much better value than a Mac. You would think that Steve Jobs plates the things in gold for the prices they charge. They are getting a bit better than they used to be though...

 

[shamus]

I use a PC windows 2000 at home and a Mac at work. Plus I have a mac to edit on at home too.

Macs are indeed easier to use. But once you've gone back and forth, in the end.. they're just computers.

Mac does have that "cool" factor. They're almost like vintage cars in the way of style.

 

[Hemingway Jones]

I'll tell you why I stick with Mac. I bought a Compaq laptop. After a year, it died. I bought an HP laptop, after a year and a half, it died. I bought an IBM laptop. It got a virus they could not purge and it died. I just had terrible luck with it.

Five and a half years ago, I bought an iBook firewire clamshell. I almost didn't buy it because it didn't have a floppy drive. The man online at the Apple site told me I wouldn't need one.

It had a Firewire port. I asked him what it was for an he said, you'll see. Someday all sorts of devices will run off of this.

I bought it. Six months later I updated the 64 Ram to 320. It had a 10 gig HD, BTW. I retired it last month, though it still runs.

How many times did it crash? Not once.
How many times did it seize up? Not once.
Now that is value.

I have nothing against the Windows system though. I use them at work. I just find that I am much more productive on a reliable machine that feels warm and responsive.
I paid $1,500, tax included, for an iBook G4 with a gig of RAM and 80 gig of HD space, running the newest operating system: 10.4, I think.
I have never been happier with a machine.

 

[Kt Templar]

Well I'm a graphic designer so I'm going to be biased. It's Mac all the way for me. There is nothing I want to do that I can't do faster and easier on a Mac.

OSX is a good couple of generations ahead of Windows and Longwait is still well, stillborn... if you haven't used a Mac recently there are a couple of things you should to get a Mac user to show you... i) Expose (you will never look at your clutter of open windows in the same way again) ii) Spotlight (find anything you want, intelligently).

But if you still want to use Microsoft Office you can, though I must admit I only use it as a conduit for data beween Windows users and the design software I use. I find the software badly designed and chock full of feature creep for the sake of it. And the way MS position commands and menus are unintuitive and seemingly willfully obstructive. Commands you never use are at the top level and things you frequently need are hidden several menus down.

Apple software is fantastic, iTunes, Safari, iDVD, iMovie, iPhoto even Mail is great. Simple where it needs to be simple and powerful when it needs to be powerful. Then there is the Pro software Motion, Final Cut Pro, Aperture, Shake.

Don't get me started on viruses. Zero OSX viruses. And it's not lack of interest. It's built better and if vulnerabilities turn up they are plugged quickly.

I run a Powerbook at home and a G5 Quad at work. If you want to play games get a console, they cost less than the graphics card you need to play the games anyway.

Ok sorry if I ruffled a few feathers. The Mac is so good it's hard not to tell people about it. (And now even Hem thinks I'm a MacNutter)

 

[BellyTank]

I'm using a PC at present- after 5 yrs of Mac and I find the experience somewhat clunky and rather infuriating. Still seems like something dressed up better than it is...

Those who have never been a Mac user just don't know the joy...

Macs are built as a true system, rather than the sometimes random seeming assembly of parts-in-a-box. PArt of the joy of the Mac is that all the components are either designed or chosen to work optimally together- that and the foolproof platform and SW.

My 400mhz G4 with a half gig and OS9, from 1999 seems faster and more capable than this 2.8 P4 with a full gig and XP Pro from 2004... I had 5 yrs of trouble-free motoring out of that Mac- I really should unpack it and fire it up.

I'm a Mac person in PC limbo...

B
T

 

[boomerchop]

Macintosh for almost 20 years. Got my first one, a Macintosh 512, in grad school in 1986. Upgraded through several machines over the years. Currently the wife has an eMac and I am using an iBook G4, and we're on an Airport network. I use and tolerate PC's at the school where I work, and with the advent of Windows, find they are pretty similar in operation. However, I can never find anything on the PC's and trying to adjust settings or whatever seems to just be a nightmare. There's no doubt in my mind that I'll always be a Mac person.
Paul

 

[Baron Kurtz]

I've been a PC user since high school. I got married and my wife got an eMac for the house. It infuriated me for the first year or so. So many different ways to do things. No right mouse button. Then i got used to it and now i much prefer it to PC. It all seems to be alot simpler and intuitive than the PC. And it never crashes! And virus free!!!!

I still use PCs at work - my boss refuses to switch to mac though i keep pestering him about it. My main argument is that if we were using macs we wouldn't get so many viruses destroying all our data (our whole department network was pretty much obliterated three times over the last year - funnily enough all the labs using macs didn't even know there was something going on). And since macs run all the windows programs there's really no need to stick with PC.

bk

 

[Lalla]

Neither. LINUX. FEDORA CORE!! This whole site should have been created by Red Hat Fedora with a name like Fedora Lounge. Why is it never mentioned as an option? Somehow it seems relegated to the realm of uber-geeks. I am not an uber-geek, I am an air-brained floozey who did not even know how to use the internet five years ago. Open Source is free, wonderful, generous, a place of Utopian ideals. And never once comes under the attack of viruses.

 

[Nathan Flowers]

.

We're a hybrid household. I am a DIY amd/windows machine guy simply because I want to play Quake and Battlefield 2 with my buddies from time to time. However, 90% of my surfing, web stuff, and MS Office stuff is done on a 12" Apple PowerBook running Tiger. My wife exclusively uses a Mac Mini, and will not touch a Windows machine unless she absolutely has to.

At work, I literally have a G5 on my right, and a Dell on my left (I'll have to take a picture sometime tomorrow to show you guys). I use the G5 for Flash, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, BBEdit, Final Cut, Remote Desktop, and Office, which amounts to probably 70% of my usage. I use the Dell for handling certain apps that are required by my job (namely, the SQL-based electronic card catalog).

In my server room, we have 27 Windows-based servers, and 1 lonely Xserve doing web server duty (highly recommend an Xserve for running multiple web sites), but it's going to have another Xserve to play with in a month or so, because I'm getting one to do software update/ldap for the 19 mac minis we have acting as public book search terminals.

I have found that I am way more efficient when on the MAC, especially when using Office, or Photoshop. I account this almost directly to how convenient Expose makes it to swap windows and programs extremely quickly. I also like the clean interface, and relative security (somewhat through obscurity) of the OS.

If a novice computer user, or a more advanced user that is tired of spyware asks me for advice about a new computer, I almost always point them to Apple.

 

[Siirous]

I used to be totally against mac, being a tinkerer I'm always swapping parts and accessories out for the new and the better, and playing with new software people develop. Plus, for school I am always running AutoCAD, Matlab and MathCAD, which are all for windows, not to mention the games. I always considered Mac a novelty, but now that it has the Unix kernel in it it really seems to have picked up, and I've noticed more software has been coming out for them in recent years. If I was a graphics guy I'd switch in a heartbeat, but since I'm not I'm still not convinced macs are good for my kind of work and recreation I would not buy one. However, I'm always keeping my eye on them to see where they're going. If they put out one that's better for me, I'm not loyal to windows alone.

Sincerely,
Rob

 

[matei]

I really like Macs. The hardware, the OS... it is very well thought out. I'm a Linux / Windows user, however I'd take MacOS for day-to-day stuff any day of the week. It is straight ahead and simple, I like that...

I was all set to jump ship but at the last minute the Finance Minister changed her mind. I had planned to get a PowerBook and use it as a laptop-based digital studio with a Digidesign Mbox 2, but... I've since ordered a cheaper Dell laptop. :cry:

Maybe in a year or two... right now the figures just didn't add up.

That being said... since I work in the IT industry, at the end of the day I don't really want to go home and fiddle with the PC to get it to work the way I want - I just want to get on with my life. I find that I tend to tinker a wee bit too much in Windows.

I have an old clamshell iBook running Ubuntu linux, and with that I do what I need to do and don't mess around... which frees up time for other interesting activities!

 

[Steve]

I'm a Windows user, but not completely by choice. I love everything Apple makes, but to get a computer comparable to the one I use now it would twice as expensive as building my own Windows machine. The computer I use at this point is one I built myself in the sense that I hand selected all the component and installed quite a few of them on my own. I've been lucky with it, my WinXP machine has been the most reliable computer I've ever owned.

 

[matei]

Making the switch to Mac!

Hi all,

Anyone else out there who has made the jump from Windows to Apple? I've wanted to do so for ages, but it never seemed the right time.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Windows basher per se (they've got some stuff that works well, and some that doesn't). I've always liked their kit.

We ditched our PC infrastructure at home (save for my wife's laptop) and got a Mac Mini (to use as a wee media centre) and a MacBook Pro for me. I plan on using it for everything - especially some dabbling in recording music (got a Digidesign Mbox 2 to use with it).

I am using at the moment an old iBook running Linux. It is adequate for simple things, like surfing the 'net, email and documents, but it is a bit long in the tooth, and Linux for PPC has some serious shortcomings.

I'm curious to hear from anyone else who might be a Mac convert, or Mac enthusiasts out there.

Thanks!

 

[Salv]

Good choice matei...

My first home computer was one of the original Bondi Blue iMacs (Rev. B) and I'm currently using an eMac as the desktop machine, and I also have a PowerBook that I bought in the US a couple of years ago. I've been considering selling the eMac and getting a new 17" iMac, but there's really no need as the eMac still does everything I want it to. Some of the newer games (Call of Duty 2 for example) need faster processors and better graphics cards, but they're still playable.

You'll find that, despite claims that there's no software for the Mac, you'll be able to do anything on a Mac that you can do on a Windows PC - it may take a little hunting to find the software but it's out there. The apps that come bundled with a new Mac are all excellent, but Apple really need to produce a good new office suite. AppleWorks is still very useful and includes word processor, spreadsheet, database, art and drawing modules, but it hasn't been updated for a few years and is no longer bundled with new Macs. If you want a copy let me know (nudge, nudge, wink wink, say no more squire...). Alternatively the version of MS Office for the Mac is generally considered to be better than the Windows version (Word and Excel were originally developed for the Mac) and the education version can usually be picked up at your local PC World without having to provide proof that you're actually in full-time education.

A few useful websites:
http://www.macfixit.com/ and their excellent forums (fora?) http://www.macfixitforums.com/

http://www.macrumors.com/ and their excellent fora http://forums.macrumors.com/

Apple's own discussion pages - http://discussions.apple.com/index.jspa?categoryID=1

VersionTracker for OS X - all the freeware and shareware you could possibly want - http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/

I actually re-trained as an Apple engineer a few years ago after being made redundant from a mainframe support job, and worked for a while at an Apple dealer up your way - M R Systems in Liverpool Road.