Are Apple Computers really as good as it is hyped?

Hi, I am sure that this question has already been asked before but couldn’t find it.

I have been using Windows ever since and now I am thinking about shifting to Mac. I am not sure how they are both compared to each other. Currently I use a Vaio SZ series and I am thinking of going to a MacBook Pro. Will there be any issues/complication?

My main use is Music production but I use equally all the features that Windows has to offer.

Besides graphics I don’t know where all Apple beats Windows. All suggestions are welcome.
ArtDeRue

With Apple, everything is made by one company. This means it all just works. You plug it in, and there’s no fiddling. Poof. It works.

PCs, by contrast, are made by everybody. There’s no one company overseeing who writes drivers and who makes devices. Some things conflict with others. Being a windows user, you are probably more than aware of these pains.

Being made all by one company, Apple’s only competition is the PC, a completely different platform. While they do have some incentive to keep the price down, they don’t have the incredible competition that exists in the PC world to make the absolute cheapest parts. Overall, macs tend to be more pricey than PCs.

Early macs had much better sound and graphics than early PCs. Heck, Commodore computers that were an entire generation behind the PC had better sound and graphics than early PCs. Early PC’s sucked for sound and graphics. Early graphics design programs and sound related programs therefore naturally went to macs, and the PC has been playing catch-up ever since. If you do graphics design, you want a mac. There’s lots of great music software available for the mac. Whatever software you are using on a PC won’t work on a mac, though, so you’ll need to get new software.

Macs are not windows compatible, unless you run windows on a mac (and then, what’s the point of having a mac) you won’t get windows features.

Windows has something like 80 percent of the market. Macs, linux, and everything else fights for what’s left. Having only a fraction of the market means that if someone is developing something, chances are they are going to do it for the PC first. There’s lots of hardware and software out there that won’t run on a mac. There’s lots of web pages that won’t work on a mac.

Having something like 80 percent of the market, and Microsoft constantly acting like the Evil Giant, means that almost all virus makers target windows. There have been mac and linux viruses, but they are so rare that you can pretty much run a mac without any virus protection and not have to worry about it.

You get the functionality and ease of use of a Mac’s operating system, but can still run your Windows apps?

And there is what’s known as “virtualization” software for new Macs, which allows you to run Windows and OS X simultaniously—it’s a new field, granted, but not a dead end.

But hey, as in many things, this still boils down to the needs and preferences of the user. YMMV.

What’s available for the Mac that’s not available for the PC?

I’ve just recieved my copies of Photoshop CS3 Extended and Flash CS3 Pro this morning. I’m sure they will work perfectly well, when I get round to uninstalling the older versions that I have currently. I’m also using The GIMP on my other work PC (as I write this infact) and it too is working perfectly well. What would a mac be able to do that these PCs can’t?

Can you look at a digital picture and tell which platform it has been created on?

Why does it matter that the Mac was originally (20+ years ago) better suited to graphics work?

Moved from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.

Gfactor
General Questions Moderator

That may be true, but in the 9 years I’ve owned Macs, I’ve encountered a grand total of one. And- whaddaya know- it’s a Microsoft page.

Before this gets into an OS Holy War, let’s get the right answer out there:

It depends what you want your computer to do.

If you plan on using a computer largely for media applications, a Mac is the best choice.

If you plan on using a computer for extensive gaming, a PC is the best choice.

If you plan on using a computer for business applications, a PC is usually the best choice, but in some businesses (such as graphic design) a Mac is the best choice.

If you need a computer that is as simple and easy as possible for an inexperienced user to use, a Mac is the best choice. If you want a computer that a hobbyist can dig around in and upgrade at home, a PC is the best choice.

Many people with sufficient means prefer to have both. If I had a bundle of money, I’d have both.

I’m not sure anything is quite as good as Apple Computers are hyped. Not sex, not 40 year old scotch, and not even a shiny new MacBook Pro.

But their hardware is good. They don’t put out entry-level crap at all, their non-“pro” line is solidly good middle-of-the-market hardware, and their “pro” line is nice premium equipment. The pro stuff is expandable, the middle-market stuff not so much. They don’t cut corners on all the little stuff.

Their OS is the only other commercial OS to speak of. The MacOS is a very nice platform, essentially a port of the old 1990s-vintage MacOS’s user interface (and some of its APIs) to an offshoot of BSD Unix. It’s solid as an anvil, a very robust multitasking OS, very good integration of features, a bit RAM-hungry but other than that a joy to use.

It’s not Windows and not a Windows clone, it’s different; it “thinks different” (to coin a phrase ;)) and people who are entirely accustomed to Windows and who don’t like change can find the transition awkward. People accustomed to the Mac, on the other hand, tend to be fiercely loyal to the MacOS way of doing things. (I know I am. I can’t stand the way Windows handles windows, for instance, and I hate adding or removing plug-n-play hardware on a Windows PC).

Macs stay in use longer, they stay viable as a person’s computer (or “number one best computer” for people who keep their old ones or keep multiples boxes up and running) for more years. The older computers will generally tend to run whatever the modern release of MacOS is, and do it adequately, up to 6-7 years after initial purchase.

Until recently, Apple’s hardware was very different — it did not utilize the same CPU architecture as the PC, and therefore could not also boot a Windows OS; it could only run Windows (and other PC operating systems) in emulation, taking a large speed hit in order to pretend to have an Intel-compatible CPU while actually executing all those Intel instructions via a software program. That’s not true anymore, as Apple has switched to Intel, and a modern Mac can have Windows installed on it and can boot from Windows natively like any other PC, and can also run Windows within a “virtual machine” environment that takes full advantage of that Intel processor while still running the MacOS at the same time. The performance of the Apple as a PC is zippy-fast, as good as a comparably-priced PC for the most part.

Why?

I keep seeing this being said, but no one ever justifies it.

Yes, they are as good as they are hyped. Get one and never look back.

Nothing is ever as good as the hype.

But, Macs are good. I bought a MacBook Pro four months ago after my home-built PC fried and I don’t regret it at all.

With the current Intel-based Macs, you can still have Windows programs, and Windows itself, if you want them. You can also run Linux. There’s the Mac OS by default. And if you go to the command prompt, there’s a full X11 and Unix system looking out at you, with developer tools that come on the OS install CDs.

All that choice gives you the maximum flexibility to run the programs you need.

IANAGD myself, so someone may correct bits of this, but as I recall…
a) The MacOS was originally structured around a 72 DPI display. Of course, screens now come in all sizes and resolutions, so “inch” doesn’t mean inch in any useful sense, but there is apparently some kind of useful fallout for the MacOS from that 72 DPI origin. (Windows was structured around 96 DPI) Sorry, I don’t know the details. Something having to do with pixels and picas and whatnot.

b) The MacOS has better color calibration and control. Unless Microsoft has caught up, at any rate.

c) Some of it is a consistency issue. If the graphics world is Mac-centric and you produce your graphics work on a PC, all kinds of inconsistencies may crop up, ranging from font kerning to transparency layers to printout appearance from the different print drivers. If you produce your work on a Mac, you (and they) don’t have to deal with those kinds of problems. Admittedly, this isn’t an inherent strength of the Mac; it’s the equivalent of someone saying that if you’re producing lots of business materials for your company in Office applications you should use a PC, not because the Mac Office applications aren’t good but because the rest of the business folks are most likely Windows users and if you do your annual report on a Mac the fonts may wrap slightly different, the line weight on the graphs may look different, etc

d) Automated routines. Lots of Quark/Photoshop places are AppleScripted. AppleScript is a nice (and Mac-only) way to do lots of complicated, repetitive tasks that involve several different applications. Tell the Finder to make a new folder on the server, within the folder of the client in the current FileMaker database record, and then tell Quark to create a new document, with bleed and safety at x% of the width obtained from the current Photoshop image which has been resized to fit the specs obtained from a calculated value within FileMaker, then color-correct the Photoshop image as per the saved profile which was generated from ColorSync and save it to one subfolder of the new folder using the following calculated name, then tell Quark to place that same picture in a picture box, then save the Quark within a different subfolder, then tell the Terminal to set the permissions on those files to read-only for all but the account of the artist, then tell the Finder to copy the fonts from the client-supplied fonts folder on the local HD to a third subfolder. Then save low-res emailables to yet another folder, and tell FileMaker to run the script that sends an email to the client with the low-res pix attached.

Wanna bang that out real quick in visual basic?

What I’ve found with regard to graphics applications is kind of hard to explain. The mouse-screen interface for a Windows machine doesn’t work the same way as it does as a Mac. It feels like it doesn’t have the same sensitivity. I’ve even found it applicable with an ordinary application like Microsoft Word. If you’re trying to select portions of text with your mouse (to cut, copy, drag-and-drop, etc.), it simply works better on a Mac.

I bought a MacBook Pro about 3 weeks ago, so I’ll give you what I’ve found so far.

You can buy an application package for your Mac that will open Office-based files, such as documents and Excel spreadsheets, but I’m not sure how much it costs. We received a one month free trail with the MacBook and while they look similar to the Office versions, they are fairly different, and different looking.

Downloading videos, TV shows, movies, etc., required different programs to view. For instance, since the default video viewer is Quicktime, a lot of files you find online won’t open in it. You’ll need to download another program to run .avi files, etc.

I can’t video chat with my family on MSN because Microsoft won’t create an upgrade for Mac users to video chat. afaik, I can easily chat with other Mac users via some Mac program on my computer, but there are very few platforms I can use to chat with PC users. I think I can use AIM, but my family doesn’t really want to open yet another account with another chat platform.

MacBook specific, it gets really hot when I have it sitting on my lap for any amount of time.

Eh, I’ve been a professional graphic designer for 11 years and I only use PC. :slight_smile: I’ve used macs, not in love with them. They’re losing their death grip on graphic designers, though they’re perfectly nice computers. But it’s not like you must use macs to do graphic design.

Thanx a ton. that was great help!!

[hijack]VLC Player is good to have for this, regardless of OS. It has most of the common codecs built in, making it a lot easier to set up than some other programs.[/hijcak]

Just to clarify, I often find when people compare the price of a Mac to a PC, they tend to forget to include a lot of stuff that comes as add-ons to PCs, but are standard on the Mac. If you have a real, truly part-for-part comparison, you’ll find them to be about the same.

Problem is Apple doesn’t really make a real low-end machine. You can put a 320 GB HDD in a PC for less than you can in a Mac, but there’s a difference between a Seagate Momentus and something made by Acer.

Again, just to be clear, a lot of hardware won’t work on a Mac, but there is nearly always a version (by another manufacturer) that will. It’s not like “No, you can’t have a video-in card!”. It’s more like “No, you can’t have that video-in card… you want the Eye TV”.

Last time I’m going to call you out [QUOTE=engineer_comp_geek, because on all other accounts you really know your stuff…

However, I think you meant to say “There’s lots of web pages that won’t work on a mac**'s native Browser Safari, but if you run Firefox or Camino, or Opera, or Netscape, or Sea Monkey, etc etc.**”

Not sure if this is what you’re referring to but when I bought my MacBook a couple months ago, I also bought iWork '08 for $79. It includes a word processing program (Pages), a spreadsheet application (Numbers), and presentation application (Keynote), each of which open MS Office files. I believe that in each of the 3, you can also save new and opened files as the MS counterpart; at least that’s the case w/Pages. Haven’t played with the other 2 that much.

Pages isn’t as robust as MS Word, but it’s been able to do everything I’ve needed so far. I imagine the other two programs are similarly scaled back, but that’s not such a bad thing. The Office applications are packed with a lot of extremely specialized, generally unused crap anyway.

I was a PC user forever. Two years ago I bought an iMac, and I’m completely converted. I’m not a programmer or a gamer, so I don’t know about that stuff. I just know that using the Mac is easy; the OS hardly ever gets in the way of me doing whatever I’m trying to do.

Example: When I bring a PC into my home wireless network, I have to open up the little wireless card’s app, pick a network, etc. When I brought the Mac home, I plugged it in, turned it on, and began browsing the Web. It was literally that easy.

I’ve had one problem with it: When I first got it, the OS was apparently installed incorrectly, and a few days after I brought it home it refused to boot. I had to spend several hours on the phone with Apple’s tech folks and reinstall OSX. This was not fun, or easy. But since then it hasn’t given me one moment’s trouble.