Mac vs PC

[jimtron]

I'd be curious to see a PC equivalent of a Mac Pro for less money. But truly equivalent (minus the stylish case is fine); FW 800 ports, optical audio, dual ethernet, same number of ram and hard drive slots, etc.

eta: and yes, the addons are way overpriced at the Apple site (adding memory, bigger hard drives etc). Most of us go for the minimal configuration and add that stuff ourselves, which can be done very simply. So how about a comparison with basic Mac Pro vs. PC with same or better specs.

 

[tesscaline]

I don't know was up with your computer or what version of Windows you are using, but I've never had any of the problems you've described. Actually, Vista/7 automatically installed the drivers for every USB device I have as soon as they were plugged in.

I am not, any longer, using a windows machine. However, every personal friend of mine who does own a windows machine, no matter what version of windows they happened to be using, has had the exact sorts of complaints and problems. In fact, every windows machine I've ever been near (including those in offices that were managed by a skilled IT department) have had those exact same issues.

My mother made the switch to mac after she got sick and tired of having to do a full reformat and reinstall her OS every time she upgraded a component, or even made a change to which peripheral was plugged into which USB port (WinXP, for reference). And this is a woman who'd been custom building and upgrading her own PC for 20 years.

 

[dtugg]

Have you actually looked at the design of the case? It's not just about looks. It's functional. Custom air flow design, specialized heat zones, ease of access to components, custom connections that eliminate the need to dig through layers of ribbon cable...

I've seen it. Sure it's nice, but certainly not worth the outrageous amount of money that Apple charges for it.

Macs are not for people who want to waste their time putzing around trying to get junk to work. It's for people who actually want to spend the majority of their time on their computers, well, using their computers.

I haven't wasted very much time at all "putzing around trying to get junk to work."

I really think that the people saying they could do better than Mac for cheaper haven't actually looked at what Mac is really providing. They're not providing a toy to be rodded out and have fins soldered on.

Yeah. They're computers. Overpriced computers.

I think this whole Mac vs. PC thing is pretty stupid.

You're welcome to stay out of the debate.

If you want to screw around with your computer and risk botching it up so badly that you fry the motherboard, don't get a Mac.

Never done anything where this is likely to happen.

If you want a computer that you don't have to futz with every five seconds to get it to operate properly, and just want something that will do what it says it will do when it says it will do it, then Mac is probably more your style.

Funny, you just described my PC.

The only reason this Mac vs. PC thing goes on as much as it does is because some people think that every computer on the face of the earth should conform to their personal preferences, and think that every other person on the face of the earth should want the exact same things out of a computer that they do. Sorry, the world doesn't work that way.

In fact, thats pretty much the only reason I end up involved in these stupid debates -- because someone comes along and says that anyone who prefers what I happen to prefer is stupid, or wasting their money, or just interested in how the thing looks. I don't care if you personally like Mac or not.

I don't really care if people buy Macs. I'm just voicing my opinion that they are overpriced. This is a discussion forum at all.

But I don't think it's cool to go talk crap about the people who DO happen to appreciate Mac -- especially to the degree that they think its a good idea to derail a thread just to bash someone who has already made their choice over the head with how wrong that choice is.

I never talked crap to any Mac owners.

 

[dtugg]

You were already given one.

I don't think that Apple being douchbags is really a legit reason.

 

[jimtron]

dtugg: Where'd you get the $1,000 figure? I'm still curious to see a Mac Pro/PC price comparison.

 

[tesscaline]

I don't really care if people buy Macs. I'm just voicing my opinion that they are overpriced. This is a discussion forum at all.

Please provide actual evidence that they are then.

I never talked crap to any Mac owners.

I don't think that Apple being douchbags is really a legit reason.

Funny, the above two quotes are at odds with each other.

 

[fullflavormenthol]

To be perfectly honest. I never upgrade my Mac with things from Apple. When I added ram and a larger hard drive I went to a third party company. Than again I have been doing that since I upgraded my Mac Mini.

 

[McHrozni]

Macs have one or two real advantages and one small advantage - fewer people use them, therefore they're safer from viruses, that mostly attack the most common system, the PC. They're also more stable, thanks to their console design. The minor advantage is their better looks.

PCs on the other hand are substantially cheaper and upgradable. Since the main advantage of Macs would be lost the moment they became widespread, and the second one would be lost the moment they would become upgradable, I'll stick with the PC for the foreseeable future or at least until I start to secret money.

McHrozni

 

[portlandatheist]

I would encourage you to do some heavy research into exact price comparisons for equal machines instead of just noticing that you can get a bargain basement tower system from dell for $399, whereas mac's cheapest machine is $700. Yes, if all you look at is the lowest price available, mac seems more expensive. If you actually look at what you're getting hardware spec wise for that money? Not so much.

The very first thing I did when I bought my mac was to upgrade the HD from 250 GB to 320 GB and the RAM from 2GB to 4GB. I bought both from 3rd parties. When I was putting my mac together, those upgrade options where extremely expensive, nearly 2X as much as they should have been and I saved myself substantial money by choosing the standard MacBook options and upgrading myself than buying one with those options.

How about monitors? Samsung makes high quality monitors, compare their prices to the cinema displays for a MAC for the same size and resolution. Its not an insignificant difference. Whether its a RAM chip, a hard disk, display, or any other component. MAC is more expensive and it has always been that way.

To Apple's credit or discredit: they have much less hardware they support. This is both good and bad. It means that things are much more likely to work with less hardware conflicts and bugs, but also means there are less options and less available to the open market place of 3rd party vendors which are competing for better prices. Which is better? That is a value judgment.

 

[not daSkeptic]

I don't think that Apple being douchbags is really a legit reason.

Please explain. Are you suggesting there's something wrong with being particular about who one has as a customer?

 

[McHrozni]

I concur--it's a matter of personal preference. Yes there are differences, each has pros and cons, but both are quite capable. I happen to prefer Macs, and believe there worth the extra money, for the hardware design alone. If you find Macs to be overpriced and like PCs, get a PC. It depends on your personal preferences and priorities. I really don't think one is significantly better than the other.

I concur, though if I can get the same for 320€ or for 600€, I'll go with the lesser price

McHrozni

 

[SezMe]

My mother made the switch to mac after she got sick and tired of having to do a full reformat and reinstall her OS every time she upgraded a component, or even made a change to which peripheral was plugged into which USB port (WinXP, for reference). And this is a woman who'd been custom building and upgrading her own PC for 20 years.

Aw, c'mon, that's not even close to being true.

 

[jimtron]

I concur, though if I can get the same for 320€ or for 600€, I'll go with the lesser price

McHrozni

I'm still curious to see some comparisons...anyone?

 

[moopet]

PC != Windows. And all that implies.

I don't like MacOS because I think it's as intuitive as a box of bricks. Example: yesterday I used a mac to copy a photo off my phone and mail it to someone. The bluetooth part was fine. Clicking the photo to open it and then choosing to send by mail resulted in a mail window where the send button was greyed out. No information, no help, just grey. The mail client turned out to not work that way, you had to start it from the dock then attach the photo. So why was there an option to send from the photo viewer? Why did it open the mail client but not work? Who knows? I certainly don't, and the feedback given to me by OSX was nil. So that took about 15 minutes of flicking through settings until I tried the off/on approach.
Also, the Mac in my office (which is the newest machine) crashes more often than all the others, which are Vista. Which I also hate.

Actually, all software sucks. I'm going back to bed.

 

[tesscaline]

The very first thing I did when I bought my mac was to upgrade the HD from 250 GB to 320 GB and the RAM from 2GB to 4GB. I bought both from 3rd parties. When I was putting my mac together, those upgrade options where extremely expensive, nearly 2X as much as they should have been and I saved myself substantial money by choosing the standard MacBook options and upgrading myself than buying one with those options.

Extras being more expensive is not exactly the same as the entire package of the computer being more expensive.

How about monitors? Samsung makes high quality monitors, compare their prices to the cinema displays for a MAC for the same size and resolution.

Again, an extra (if you're talking about a mini, a pro, or a second display for a laptop). If you're talking about an iMac, how many monitors can you buy outside of Apple that house the computer as well?

Its not an insignificant difference. Whether its a RAM chip, a hard disk, display, or any other component. MAC is more expensive and it has always been that way.

So far you've talked about extras. How about comparing base model to a completely equal machine from another manufacturer, or built totally from scratch? Everything being equal, including case quality and compactness?

To Apple's credit or discredit: they have much less hardware they support. This is both good and bad. It means that things are much more likely to work with less hardware conflicts and bugs, but also means there are less options and less available to the open market place of 3rd party vendors which are competing for better prices. Which is better? That is a value judgment.

There's nothing stopping 3rd party vendors from building to Apple's standards. That's the only thing holding back vendors from being compatible with Apple. But most vendors refuse to agree on, or follow, open standards... That's not Apple's fault.

Yes, the limits are a value judgement. Which is why I see arguing about some vague and subjective idea of which is "better" rather pointless. What is better for me will not be what is better for someone else.

 

[tesscaline]

Aw, c'mon, that's not even close to being true.

Actually, it is quite true. Both my sister and myself were totally stumped over the whole thing, and even attempted to help her on several occasions before we each threw up our hands in frustration and stalked off.

I don't know if she was buying crap components or if her BIOS was fubar or what... But every time she would unplug anything from that thing, the OS would eat itself. She even bought a new HD to try and solve the problem, thinking it might be disk corruption... But it wasn't, and that didn't fix it.

 

[dtugg]

I'd be curious to see a PC equivalent of a Mac Pro for less money. But truly equivalent (minus the stylish case is fine); FW 800 ports, optical audio, dual ethernet, same number of ram and hard drive slots, etc.

eta: and yes, the addons are way overpriced at the Apple site (adding memory, bigger hard drives etc). Most of us go for the minimal configuration and add that stuff ourselves, which can be done very simply. So how about a comparison with basic Mac Pro vs. PC with same or better specs.

OK:


Intel Xeon Quad-Core W3520 2.66GHz: $320.75
ASUS P6T WS PRO LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Core i7 / Xeon Intel Motherboard: $299 (I have no idea what motherboard that Mac uses-they don't say- but this one is good)
Kingston 3GB (3 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Unbuffered DDR3 1333 Server Memory Model: $79.99
EVGA 512-P3-N954-TR GeForce 9500 GT 512MB 128-bit GDDR2 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card: $59.99 (the GT 120 that the Mac Pro has is just a rebranded one of these)
Western Digital Caviar Green WD6400AACS 640GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive: $59.99
SAMSUNG Black 22X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-ROM 2MB Cache SATA DVD Burner: $30.99
Antec EarthWatts EA650 650W Power Supply: $79.99 (I have no idea what kind of power supply the Mac Pro has so I just picked one).

Grand Total: $930.70

Plus Windows 7 and a decent case: $1140.68

However, if I were building a computer, I would choose an i7 processor/motherboard because they are virtually identical to the Xeons and a little cheaper. Plus, I am not sure if the Xeons are overclock able.

 

[fullflavormenthol]

PC != Windows. And all that implies.

I don't like MacOS because I think it's as intuitive as a box of bricks. Example: yesterday I used a mac to copy a photo off my phone and mail it to someone. The bluetooth part was fine. Clicking the photo to open it and then choosing to send by mail resulted in a mail window where the send button was greyed out. No information, no help, just grey. The mail client turned out to not work that way, you had to start it from the dock then attach the photo. So why was there an option to send from the photo viewer? Why did it open the mail client but not work? Who knows? I certainly don't, and the feedback given to me by OSX was nil. So that took about 15 minutes of flicking through settings until I tried the off/on approach.
Also, the Mac in my office (which is the newest machine) crashes more often than all the others, which are Vista. Which I also hate.

Actually, all software sucks. I'm going back to bed.

I have no idea how that didn't work for you sending the photo. I have never done that before and I managed to email myself a photo. Preview automatically opened up mail and generated the image into the program. It may have been more of an issue of settings than a flaw in the program. As far as help goes...well help brought up the information when I clicked on the help tab and typed "photo" and "mail" in the subject line. Again it is probably settings or something. As far as "crashing" I would suspect disk permissions are the culprit of that one.

 

[tesscaline]

PC != Windows. And all that implies.

I don't like MacOS because I think it's as intuitive as a box of bricks. Example: yesterday I used a mac to copy a photo off my phone and mail it to someone. The bluetooth part was fine. Clicking the photo to open it and then choosing to send by mail resulted in a mail window where the send button was greyed out. No information, no help, just grey. The mail client turned out to not work that way, you had to start it from the dock then attach the photo. So why was there an option to send from the photo viewer? Why did it open the mail client but not work? Who knows? I certainly don't, and the feedback given to me by OSX was nil. So that took about 15 minutes of flicking through settings until I tried the off/on approach.

Wow... That's a weird one!

Also, the Mac in my office (which is the newest machine) crashes more often than all the others, which are Vista. Which I also hate.

Personally, I'd send that Mac back. They're not supposed to crash like that.

Actually, all software sucks. I'm going back to bed.

This I totally agree with. Pretty much every piece of software in existence sucks horribly. Bug ridden and crap GUI's... There are very few exceptions to that (thankfully our company has some of those very few exceptions in our portfolio!).

 

[dtugg]

Please provide actual evidence that they are then.

See above.

Funny, the above two quotes are at odds with each other.

Do you think that "Mac owners" and "Apple" are synonymous?