mac or pc?

[rolf]

A windows computer will be cheaper in general, but a macbook will last longer. (from experience). Macs are also better integrated and run smoother because of that.

If you compare a 1500$ macbook with a Dell Latitude or IBM Thinkpad, the latter one won't die easy on you either. And they're equally expensive for similar hardware.

 

 

Oh and Linux beats everything else, hands down. There is no argument against that.

You really mean that linux is better than Windows or Mac?

 

Linux is good for a number of things: ls, grep, head, cat, echo, etc and some less-one-idea applications like SSH and GCC. Basicly, commandline. For all other things it is complete crap. Developing under Linux is crap, since there is no good IDE. Drivers are somewhere between awesome (for irrelevant hardware) and crap (for relevant hardware). Sure, linux has some advantages, but none in the world of usability as desktop environment.

 

 

 

Mac ftw I can check my soccer and basketball scores easier than a PC.. lovin my dashboard tricks lol

The Mac shortcut key's are awesome if you know them, otherwise they're complete retarded. But that's the same for Windows. (and not for Linux, because they don't have dashboard tricks )

 

But I don't think its fair how so little games are for the mac and how there's no COD switcher for it .

Why is that not fair? There is no market for it. People don't buy a mac for gaming. Secondly, _many_ games are developed in DirectX. Guess what, there is no native DirectX for MacOS.

 

I'd take a $500 i5 PC over the equivalent $1500 macbook. I just don't get it. My sister is not someone that I would consider up to date with PC technology. Guess what, she only uses macs along with her designer trendy stuff. I don't see why anyone would want to limit themselves on available software and hardware by using an MAC OS. And you can install a MAC OS on a windows PC so what is worth extra $$$?

I would only do the same for the price. A $500 laptop is completely different (see above), at least compare it to a IBM thinkpad or something.

 

Besides, if you only use applications that run on a Mac, why not buy a Mac? It's fancy, modern, things like that. And it works perfect once you get used to it, that is worth a lot of $$$. How many hours have you spend in the night working on why that $thing doesn't run where you only discover that it is some weird configuration issue? You don't have that on a Mac. Of course, if you want to do that small configuration issue you have another problem, but for many noobs mac's are sufficient.

 

i always hear that you cannot play games on a mac. is this actually true? for instance, can i play skyrim on a mac? how about battlefield 3 or mw3?

Yes you can run games on a Mac, but it is not officially supported. As I said somewhere above, MacOS does not support DirectX natively (nor does Linux). So, some people dediced to make an layer between the game (or OS) and the hardware, s.t. you can use DirectX. Some people say it's even faster, but it is *NOT* supported officially.

 

I guess I like shiny things then. Who doesn't.

 

There are several reason to develop an operating system for specific components only, none of them include overclocking I'm afraid. I rather prefer quality over a cheap price and alleged lifetime warranties. And I'm willing to pay more for good products.

It's the same quality. Do you really think Apple builds different chips?

 

The CPU's, memory, etc, are all the same. They have(had) a deal with Intel about one chip, but that was already 2 years ago (and other companies had the same chip implemented a month later, I believe it was a low voltage CPU for the first MacBook Air)

 

OS X combines linux with a rich GUI. You don't have to see an advantage in that, I do. I have yet to find a program I need which doesn't run on my system. If I would find one, I would simply run it in a virtual machine. Of course a 4.5GHz machine would definitely outdo a Mac, even the most expensive and expandable state-of-the-art Apple server systems.

First of all, OS X is not based on Linux. The Mac OS kernel is based on BSD, developed in Berkley a few decades ago, and BSD is a variant of Unix. Linux is also started from Unix.

 

The main difference, other than the kernel, is the user licence, which is unbelievebly strict for Linux (GPL, I hate it, if you use a single library and publish your app, then you have to publish the sourcecode) and very freely for BSD (only modifications to the kernel require distribution of source code). Do you really think that MacOS is running Linux with it's GPL? Hell, MacOS is more closed-source than Microsoft (too lazy for examples).

 

I just don't like people judging about things they've never used and form an opinion based on wrong facts they've read on the internet.

I've used it, but not long. If you're used to Windows and Linux, every additional OS is a pain in the ass.

 

anyway: I can't judge about mac (and os X) : almost never used it, somebody an idea how I can test a os X without having to buy a mac (bit expensive to just test)

 

linux distro's: I just download and run in virtual machine's, can you do the same with os X ?

 

probably not because of:

 

- closed sources

- hardware specific if I'm not wrong

Yes you can, google supplies more than enough examples. And closed source is completely irrelevant, since Microsoft is that too, but you can run it in Virtual machine

 

 

 

edit:

Apparently there is a double-post merge as well as a quote-section limit of 10. Gonna have to wait for the second reply/part until that double-post merge can be avoided (which, I guess, is by a reply).

[TulsaGeoff]

Good post. BTW Customer support from Corsair is amazing. I had a ladies personal telephone and they cross shipped my replacement part RAM with a lifetime warranty and paid for shipping both ways. Amazing company. EVGA goes out of its way an will upgrade your parts if your product dies years later. They upgraded my 285gtx to a 295gtx to a 480gtx. The 480 sold for $280 and paid for most of my 570GTX. I like fast computers and lots of frames per second

[rolf]

Thnx for the post, now I can post my second part

 

There are ways to run OSX on a PC, but it's not legal unless you own a OSX license. It could get you in trouble and from what I read a long time ago, hardware support is hit or miss.

According to the OSX Licence you don't really have to own it, but it may also be only installed on MacOS hardware. That being said, no-one will sue you if you want to try it in a virtual box.

 

 

I'm not a computer nerd but I go on my mac for 3 things. Basketball scores, Chat, and COD. And mac runs pretty fast. So mac has it's advantages and like Kruaer said, None of you probably used a mac before.

If you want to do only things that (also) run on a Mac, then great. And yes, it's easy to use if you're used to it. But I promise you, it also has disadvantages.

 

And, "none" is just making as many assumptions as many others in this topic.

 

 

 

 

My understanding is Microsoft has generally always had a large marketshare and strived for backwards compatability through generations of operating systems. It's possible that a virus designed for Windows 98 could infect and thrive on Windows 7.

Bullshit.

 

Yes, a virus can exploit a but that was in windows since 98, but do you really believe that any operation system rewrites it's code every 10 years? If you follow Linux developments, there was a bug in telnet which excisted for over 10 years (and telnet is currently not used anymore since SSH became default a few years ago).

 

Apple has generally ditched older generations of technology once they figure it's life cycle has ended. It's quite likely then a virus written for OS X 9 or OS X 10.4 wouldn't work on OS X 10.7.

Assumptions based on nothing. Bugs won't be removed until they're discovered. Viruses exploit bugs.

 

The beautiful thing is that a virus written for OS X 9 exploits a bug, and Apple fixes it. That is the only reason why those virusses don't work anymore. But that same thing holds also for all other operation systems.

 

Also OS X is build around the more robust UNIX operating system (like Linux). Plus why take the time to code a virus for 12% of a computer market when you can target 75%?

Unix contains also bugs.

 

Secondly, don't write virusses for clients but for servers. Yeey, you stole the password of my hotmail. Useless. Break in into the Playstation 3 network and get creditcard info, that is useful. Most virusses these days are from scriptkiddies, and are generally easy to block if you don't use keygens or open attachments of mails.

 

This is just a nerded up Chevy vs Ford argument. Guys like you are not their target market. Their targeting people who want something thats easy, intuative and reliable. I doubt your sister thinks that milling out a water block for a CPU is the bees-knees (wish more girls did though *sigh*). More than likely she just wants something that she can turn on, update her iCal from her iphone, backup her emails/music/photos, surf the web, shoot some emails out and be done with it. The form factor just makes it more appealing to the eye. Plus if you'd ever had to deal with Apple's customer service, they are %1000 better than any PC manufactuer I've delt with (HP, Dell come to mind). Apple isn't just selling a computer, they sell an entire platform that is designed (key word here) to work seemlessly (though it certainly doesn't all the time).

True, that is the advantage. And the disadvantage. If you hate one application (and iTunes crosses my mind), then you're f***ed.

 

Most people that use Apples don't want to screw around with the registry. They just want something that has a quick learning curve and just works for their needs. Sure building a PC is fun and self rewarding, but screwing around with Windows because some website was hosting ad's that contained malicious code and now you have to reformatisn't my idea of a fun afternoon. I can honestly say from the time I bought my Macbook Pro in 2007 til now I've had zero problems with it. I realize its not the case for everyone, but it's the best 2g's I've spent in awhile.

Apple uses a /etc/ as other Unixes, not a register

 

Besides, everyone can install Windows these days. Or linux, which is just as easy, clicking at the right moment and think about partitions, although even that aint necessary. It is not the case that Windows or linux are installed the same way as 10 years ago, with floppy disks and typing your own stuff.

 

Ow, and as comparision, my 4.5 year old Dell Latitude works fine too. Sometimes it needed to be reinstalled, but that was because my harddisk was full (60GB, and then WinXP + Visual Studio + VMWare + + + + ). Battery is death, but that's the only issue. Windows PC's aint worse if you look for a similar product.

 

Translation-It's more difficult to steal the OS due to hardware incompatability. It's easy to install Windows on a Macbook though.

That aint the problem of Windows, but actually it isn't a problem. Besides the awesome hardware, fancy design, you still pay a few bucks for a nice Apple logo on the top cover. Not a problem, if you know that you're paying for it. If you don't want to, there are enough laptops in the sea which works quite as well on Windows.

 

 

------------------

 

Anyway, I've used Windows, MacOS and Linux, although MacOS not that much. Linux is great, it's like a swiss knife if you're in the forest. But if you're at home, you don't need that knife, because you have luxury. If you want to go for simplicity, which for a server you want, and you see that you can do everything with the knife, great. When I'm at home, I don't want that. And then MacOS falls right in between those two. And in my opinion it fails in both. It is a pain in the ass to work with it (although I'm more familiar with Windows, so this is probably biased), due to the restriction apple gives you (iTunes). Furthermore, many applications are not available for it. Games for example, a good office package, you can use LibreOffice but that sucks, and MS Office for Mac is not complete (I've checked, getting an Excel axis logarithmically is either impossible or impossible to find). And as swiss knife it just too large.

[Deathshead]

The MAC is too expensive.I've always been a PC user and gamer.PC is much better for me.

[ajnl]

If you compare a 1500$ macbook with a Dell Latitude or IBM Thinkpad, the latter one won't die easy on you either. And they're equally expensive for similar hardware.

 

 

 

You really mean that linux is better than Windows or Mac?

 

Linux is good for a number of things: ls, grep, head, cat, echo, etc and some less-one-idea applications like SSH and GCC. Basicly, commandline. For all other things it is complete crap. Developing under Linux is crap, since there is no good IDE. Drivers are somewhere between awesome (for irrelevant hardware) and crap (for relevant hardware). Sure, linux has some advantages, but none in the world of usability as desktop environment.

 

 

I'm talking from experience. I've built and used windows running computers my whole life. And 2.5 years ago I got my macbook. I've installed linux, google chrome OS, windows 7/vista/xp on my macbook. And every time it has run well. I've even run Crisis on my macbook and beat the game with my xbox 360 controller. Anyways, point is, macbooks are built better. And before, when they made their own processors, macs also ran a lot cooler.

 

I love my windows 7 computer, I wouldn't want to game on anything else. But I wouldn't say that my windows computer run smoother than my macbook, even though it has more ram, processing power, and a way better video card. I've had more problems in the past 2 years with my windows computer, compared to my macbook. I've actually only ever had problems with my macbook when it ran windows vista, I got a bluescreen. My gaming computer has gotten a bluescreen about 3 times.

 

Linux is better than windows and OSX. If you don't know how to use it, then it sucks. Even the military uses a version of linux to operate their important stuff. I know this because I have family and friends who are in the intelligence, air force, army, etc. Also, it is free, which makes things better. (i'm dutch what'd you expect).

Linux and macbook are both based off of unix. Its what makes them better than windows.

 

In the end the operating system is only as good as its user. I talked to a good friend of mine who teaches programming and hacking at a University. He also developed games for windows and tablets that run windows. The lucky bastard gets free tablets, before they are officially released so he can test games on them.

He bought a macbook pro for his daughter. He tried it out and he said he wished that he could just use macbooks because "it runs way better than windows."

 

 

The 3 most important things to think about when buying a computer.

-- What do you prefer (windows, OSX, Linux, google chrome OS)

-- What are you going to use it for (gaming, entertainment/video editing, music, documents, internet)

-- How much are you willing to spend

*Most people only need a computer which can connect to the internet, play music, and make/edit documents. So a $300 netbook would do just fine*

[Krauersaut]

rolf, there are some IDEs for Linux, such as eclipse or Netbeans for Java development. They also run on Windows and are some solid programs. It's pretty obvious that you can't run Visual Studio on Linux though if you meant that.

 

I never mentioned chips when I was talking about the quality. I meant the build quality. There is quite a difference between a aluminum-body MacBook and a plastic-body HP notebook. Again that doesn't work if you compare it with a ThinkPad or similar, but that wasn't my point.

 

I neither said that OS X is based on Linux or running Linux. I said it combines Linux with a rich GUI, because Darwin is built on Unix (or BSD, if you're really into hairsplitting). Needless to say that having that under the hood is quite an advantage if you're familiar with Unix derivates.

 

And as ajnl said, Linux could be ways better than OS X or Windows, if you know how to configure and use it. I myself am a fan of Debian and Ubuntu and don't have any problem with these either. It always depends on the requirements and what you make out of your system. Of course it sucks when you just install it and never ever touch anything other than Firefox, but so does Windows and OS X.

[rolf]

ajnl, krauersaut: good points, but I'll focus mainly on these.

Linux is better than windows and OSX. If you don't know how to use it, then it sucks.

That is not the case. For linux, it's developed by developers who only want to develop. The user interface has never been as good as Windows or Mac OS. Developers usually don't think about it. Configuration in linux is best done by commandline, that is not (end)user friendly.

 

I know how to work with Linux. Last year, I had to work for 4 courses on Linux (out of the 5 I was following, the 5th was with MS Word...). I know my way in Linux, but every time I use it those small things annoy me. Mainly the user interface.

 

rolf, there are some IDEs for Linux, such as eclipse or Netbeans for Java development. They also run on Windows and are some solid programs. It's pretty obvious that you can't run Visual Studio on Linux though if you meant that.

Eclipse is, well, let's say this politely, "not what I look for an IDE". I must say I've never used Netbeans, after the fun of eclipse I worked my way round with developing under Windows, writing a makefile and deploy under Linux.

 

I never mentioned chips when I was talking about the quality. I meant the build quality. There is quite a difference between a aluminum-body MacBook and a plastic-body HP notebook. Again that doesn't work if you compare it with a ThinkPad or similar, but that wasn't my point.

So you compare a 1500$ laptop with a 500$ laptop. That is comparing apples and oranges.

 

And as ajnl said, Linux could be ways better than OS X or Windows, if you know how to configure and use it. I myself am a fan of Debian and Ubuntu and don't have any problem with these either. It always depends on the requirements and what you make out of your system. Of course it sucks when you just install it and never ever touch anything other than Firefox, but so does Windows and OS X.

That is the only moment it is great. The moment you start installing applications, and you discover dependencies synaptics cannot handle, then you're screwed. And no, I don't run Linux as a regular user. For example, LaTeX aint easy to use under Linux (Ubuntu 10.10, installing new packages), something that I really expected (needless to say when you're studying computer science, that's the moment that you reinstall your PC to a different OS). Thank god we have Miktex which works great.

 

Also, it is free, which makes things better. (i'm dutch what'd you expect).

I am happy to pay for things that are good. Like food, (the servers of) FA, hardware, OS. A crappy CoD4 server is useless, even if it is free. Paying for Windows was a problem when I didn't understood the value of it, luckily now I do

[TulsaGeoff]

Theres a low of 26 here tonight and a high of 60's the weekend!

 

Yeah HP laptops are the worst. Everyone that asks me to fix their PC always has some HP crap. I had a Thinkpad T60. Really nice laptop. Titanium and magnesium harddware cage, all metal body, good keyboard, etc. I think it was somewhere between $1500-2100. I just doesnt see the value in expensive laptops anymore. I currently own a $550 Gateway i5 laptop that I bought because there was a deal for $550 (at the time they were $700+). Why pay alot for something that cannot be future proofed? My desktop on the other hand has around that cost in its watercooling parts alone But again, I've had most of those watercooling parts for 5 years now and they always have a resale value and will always be re-usable.

[Anton Chigurh]

I guess lots of people bought besides there $1500 Mac also a copy of the biografie of Steve Jobs

 

btw i have apple stuff but no Mac. If you are not an apple addict or designoholic its pretty useless.

It works very well with anything programmed for MAC and thats about 1% of all business software?

[ajnl]

Don't feel like quoting right now.

 

Rolf, ur right I completely agree with u. Linux is not user friendly. But that's not the point of Linux either.

 

Let's agree to disagree on some points, button line of windows vs Mac depends on the person.

 

Personally I can't choose, so that's why I get and run anything. Including google chrome os, it's pretty awesome.

[NoGooD]

Assumptions based on nothing. Bugs won't be removed until they're discovered. Viruses exploit bugs.

 

The beautiful thing is that a virus written for OS X 9 exploits a bug, and Apple fixes it. That is the only reason why those virusses don't work anymore. But that same thing holds also for all other operation systems.

Your correct about the point of virus exploiting a bug, but my point was that Apple completely broke away from it's legacy OS's. You can't natively install OS9 or any of the legacy OS's from Apple on newer generations of hardware. Theoretically you could install windows 98/2000 on a newer system and have it run natively (I haven't tried, but my windows 98 disk has been gathering dust for awhile now). Granted why the hell you would do is is beyond me, but I'm sure there's some old codger out there that's tried it. Damnit..now my windows 98 disk is peeking out of the disc holder.

 

I will soon be known as "Old Codger"

 

 

Secondly, don't write virusses for clients but for servers. Yeey, you stole the password of my hotmail. Useless. Break in into the Playstation 3 network and get creditcard info, that is useful. Most virusses these days are from scriptkiddies, and are generally easy to block if you don't use keygens or open attachments of mails.

I just quoted this because I wanted more people to read it. My biggest fear isn't my PC getting malware. It's my routers firmware or the switch my ISP uses getting hacked.

 

True, that is the advantage. And the disadvantage. If you hate one application (and iTunes crosses my mind), then you're f***ed.

Can't argue with you there. If theres an essential component of a platform you hate, then it's harder to work around. However having a system of computer, phone, tablet and TV all designed to work together is a major bonus to me. As an example it took about 10 minutes to get my iphone, my gf's iphone and both of our macbooks to sync calendars True it's possible to do the same with a windows based computer, but not nearly as easy as I am currently finding out.

 

Ow, and as comparision, my 4.5 year old Dell Latitude works fine too. Sometimes it needed to be reinstalled, but that was because my harddisk was full (60GB, and then WinXP + Visual Studio + VMWare + + + + ). Battery is death, but that's the only issue. Windows PC's aint worse if you look for a similar product.

You actually gave me a prime example of why I like my MacBookPro better than a comparable Windows laptop. It wasn't until earlier this year that I actually reformatted since I wanted a clean install when I upgraded from 10.4 to 10.6. I never had the need to. When my harddrive was nearly full, I simply pulled it out, put a bigger one in, put the old one in a dock, then transferred the disk image to the new drive. It took about 2 hours to replace a hard drive and have my computer fully up and running with all of my programs/data/etc ready to go. WIth the exception of having the dock, you could have someone that knows almost nothing about computers do the same thing with similar results (hey, it worked for me so how hard can it be).

 

It seems I need to reformat Windows XP at least once every 6 months to keep it running fast. It wasn't until recently I even bothered with Win7 (which I am currently liking) after trying out Vista and hating it so perhaps it does a better job of managing rouge registry entries.

 

I haven't tried any Linux distros in about a year, but they are looking more and more tempting to switch over to. Perhaps Rolf will turn me into a Linux convert.

 

The entire point of my reply boils down to this. For people serious about computers, Mac's are likely not a great investment unless it's needed for a specific application. However for individuals that want a computing solution that is easy, fast and relatively safe and pain free then an Apple product is a good choice that offers better support than ~95% of OEM's. There are downsides to every computer, but my experience with Apple products has by far been a positive one.

[rolf]

Don't feel like quoting right now.

 

Rolf, ur right I completely agree with u. Linux is not user friendly. But that's not the point of Linux either.

 

Let's agree to disagree on some points, button line of windows vs Mac depends on the person.

 

Personally I can't choose, so that's why I get and run anything. Including google chrome os, it's pretty awesome.

Ow, I agree with you too. And I disagree with you also.

 

It's a matter of personal favor, where two things are really important: What do you want to do with it, and what have you used to last decade. For me, I can work with both Linux and Windows, but Mac OS just feels strange to me. And I have no reason to get myself in agonizing pain trying to find out how Mac OS is brilliant, since with two OS'es I can do what I want. I've tried to be a bit subtle to not directly shoot Windows, Linux or Mac OS down, all are brilliant in their own field, with a lot of overlap.

 

And yes, let's agree to semi-disagree-agree I think, these discussions can take forever in real life, I don't expect it here to be reduced to a single reply

 

 

Your correct about the point of virus exploiting a bug, but my point was that Apple completely broke away from it's legacy OS's.

The main reason for that is that they switched from PowerPC to Intel x86, just a hardware change.

 

It seems I need to reformat Windows XP at least once every 6 months to keep it running fast. It wasn't until recently I even bothered with Win7 (which I am currently liking) after trying out Vista and hating it so perhaps it does a better job of managing rouge registry entries.

I had the Win7 RC1 running until 1 week before it was on shutdown-issue-policy. Not a single problem so far, the only other reasons I have reinstalled ever since was because my hard disk was full and because of some driver issues (latest NVidia drivers doesn't support Blu-ray well, while the version of ~1.5 year ago did it fine...). Windows has improved a lot since XP

 

I haven't tried any Linux distros in about a year, but they are looking more and more tempting to switch over to. Perhaps Rolf will turn me into a Linux convert.

I think not. I can list 100 reasons why you should be running Linux, but so far I have no-one got to linux-only so far, not even myself. There are so many other things you could say "I want to try / learn that instead of whatever it is I'm using now", but you will most likely miss things and go back to where you know everything.

 

The entire point of my reply boils down to this. For people serious about computers, Mac's are likely not a great investment unless it's needed for a specific application. However for individuals that want a computing solution that is easy, fast and relatively safe and pain free then an Apple product is a good choice that offers better support than ~95% of OEM's. There are downsides to every computer, but my experience with Apple products has by far been a positive one.

Mac OS is just working. Doesn't take a lot of effort to keep it running, which is a great point. Within FA, I think most of us are capable enough to do just that bit of extra work to get Windows just as easy running as Mac OS (which, honestly, for Win7 ain't that much). And then you get the advantages of Windows, as support for many applications. On the other hand, Mac OS has an amazing cloud service. But I don't really care about that

[Jefke]

by reading I getting tempted to true OS x, shame it's a pain in the ass to get it running on a pc (I searched it in google and found some ways)

 

and still not sure if I'm even allowed to do it (if I get somehow a legal copy ofcourse, otherwise I guess it's totally not allowed)

[speedfact]

[DirtyShadow]

PC