To Mac owners...
- Thread starter Kurogane
- Start date
MrChom
School Idol
I chose my Mac because at the time it made more financial sense.
I wanted a powerful laptop, it had to be small and light, and it had to be inside a budget of £1,000.
At the time (some 3 years ago) as now PC laptops were seemingly mired in big bulky 14" frames, most of which creaked and groaned through being poorly put together. If I wanted a 12" or less laptop I lost a LOT of power, and the price rocketed up to beyond £1,300. Meanwhile my 12" powerbook was £900 with its 756mb of RAM...it was light, well made, and looked the mutts nuts. I needed absolute portability as I did a lot of train travel and needed my laptop with me for my work. At the time too it had features like built in wireless and Bluetooth that most of the slimline PC equivalents lacked even at a higher price point.
I came to love Mac OS later for its surface simplicity and powerful BSD back end accessible through the terminal, and continue to love it for things like Expose, and the well implemented networking modules. It even works better with my 360 due to the fact it sends out my iTunes and iPhoto library.
It saddens me that Apple axed the 12" models, but I don't think I'd every buy a laptop from anyone else ever again.
I wanted a powerful laptop, it had to be small and light, and it had to be inside a budget of £1,000.
At the time (some 3 years ago) as now PC laptops were seemingly mired in big bulky 14" frames, most of which creaked and groaned through being poorly put together. If I wanted a 12" or less laptop I lost a LOT of power, and the price rocketed up to beyond £1,300. Meanwhile my 12" powerbook was £900 with its 756mb of RAM...it was light, well made, and looked the mutts nuts. I needed absolute portability as I did a lot of train travel and needed my laptop with me for my work. At the time too it had features like built in wireless and Bluetooth that most of the slimline PC equivalents lacked even at a higher price point.
I came to love Mac OS later for its surface simplicity and powerful BSD back end accessible through the terminal, and continue to love it for things like Expose, and the well implemented networking modules. It even works better with my 360 due to the fact it sends out my iTunes and iPhoto library.
It saddens me that Apple axed the 12" models, but I don't think I'd every buy a laptop from anyone else ever again.
MrChom said:
You were ultimately bound by lack of a good range then?
I'm looking for reasons why you found the Apple model in question superior for reasons other than it's physical dimensions.
Portability is a given with any laptop really, but the specification you described for the price tag was an example of Apple's '1lb of **** in a 10lb bag' trade off in processing power for appearance and branding.
I'm not going to bother researching right now, but I'm sure you could have gotten a laptop with similar, if not better power, for a smaller pricetag.
But of course, if you're buying a new machine based off of one property, then obviously you're going to buy with that in mind.
I've been using Macs for 20 years (really). When I used to use them at home, I would go to school and use the diabolical competition and wonder endlessly why it was more popular when it sucked in comparison.
Windows is actually usable now, but all these years of knowing and loving Macs and their software (Apple and third party) has left me unable to enjoy the Windows Experience. I see it as a means to an end, not a seamless interface with my data. I use Windows every day at work so it's not just assumptions and I consider myself a power user. But I don't enjoy it.
I see no real reason to pick a PC over a Mac unless you just enjoy the familiarity, are building one out of parts to save money/experiment, or are a PC gamer. The latter mostly. I hate PC gaming (only play consoles or Blizzard games these days, which are better on the Mac), so the biggest draw of the Windows platform is lost to me.
R
Windows is actually usable now, but all these years of knowing and loving Macs and their software (Apple and third party) has left me unable to enjoy the Windows Experience. I see it as a means to an end, not a seamless interface with my data. I use Windows every day at work so it's not just assumptions and I consider myself a power user. But I don't enjoy it.
I see no real reason to pick a PC over a Mac unless you just enjoy the familiarity, are building one out of parts to save money/experiment, or are a PC gamer. The latter mostly. I hate PC gaming (only play consoles or Blizzard games these days, which are better on the Mac), so the biggest draw of the Windows platform is lost to me.
R
Oh and incidentally the power of Mr Chom's Powerbook cannot be so easily compared to an equivalent premade Windows laptop, Kurogane. The PowerPC chips coupled with OSX perform on a different level to the "PC" equivalents of the time. You can certainly complain about price or software support if those are barriers to you but processing power is something I've never felt short changed on with my Macs (and I do some meaty video editing as a hobby).
My main box is a 2004 dual G5 2.5GHz with 4GB RAM and it's not yet showing a single sign of age. My web/ventrilo/media server is actually a 400MHz G4 Powermac and is still going strong too at full speed. Frankly I'd have thrown a 400MHz Pentium in the bin years ago as useless.
R
My main box is a 2004 dual G5 2.5GHz with 4GB RAM and it's not yet showing a single sign of age. My web/ventrilo/media server is actually a 400MHz G4 Powermac and is still going strong too at full speed. Frankly I'd have thrown a 400MHz Pentium in the bin years ago as useless.
R
MrChom
School Idol
Kurogane said:
I did a lot of research at the time, and PC laptops just weren't in the same league. I got a 1.5ghz G4 processor in this and most of ultra-portables (13" or less) in the PC range were clocking in at 750mhz-1.2ghz, and this was with either custom processors or off-the-shelf stuff inside. The money I paid for my Mac I got the better styling, more power, and a better price.
Admittedly now, yes, you can get ultra portable PCs in that bracket...but for a 12" model you're STILL looking at £1,000+ with a similar spec to the one I bought three years ago for £100 less....mainly because the market for anythign less than the budget 14-17" laptops is quite small. For the money and the size you're looking at something like a 1.2ghz Centrino, 1gb of ram, 80gig HDD, and not much more (And yes, I am looking new because I do not buy used computers).
Like I said, my list was size, power, budget. Anything beyond that, like the OS, was secondary. I'm no big gamer whe it comes to computers (Games belong on a console for me) so I lost nothing by looking at Linux boxes and Macs...and Apple gave me the best deal.
After 3 years being a Mac user I'd find it hard to buy another PC laptop again purely from the standpoint of the lack of problems I have with with this. In three years the OS has crashed TWICE. Two Kernel panics in three years is a damn fine record to my mind given how much I use my Mac. Power wise it still copes with what I need it to do (although I am considering bumping up the RAM to 1.2gig when I have the cash), and I still (when using it on the train) get people walking past gawking at it. The expose feature is a must for something this size given the low screen real-estate it has, and that's something the PC lacks off the shelf, as it also lacks a powerful text based interface to really fiddle with the guts of the OS (now that REALLY bugs me).
Don't get me wrong, I've got a PC, I build the damn things, and I work with them every day. I spend half my time fixing problems with people's PCs....and I suppose that's the key, really. The problems they're having just simply don't happen on the Mac. Stupid networking problems, crappy adware, viruses, machine crashes/hangs, services packs that break everything, and infamous things that disappear on reboot.
well not here anywayI own 2 macs, 1 mac notebook, and 1 pc desktop. On my pc desktop I dual boot with ubuntu and xp pro. Soon, I will get a new pc I will do a quad boot with ubuntu, xp, mac osx and vista. This is because, I will have ubuntu (My favorite; too bad it doesn't work with games without fiddling with terminal for hours) for internet and general, xp and vista for gaming, and osx for design.
I don't know why mac users don't just use ubuntu then, it's great D:
I don't know why mac users don't just use ubuntu then, it's great D:
Spyro201 said:
Yah, I hate vista passionately. It turns good pc's, into crappy, 100% cpu, over heated, pieces of crap - Damn resource waster >_<.
But seriously, ubuntu is WAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY under rated. Has anyone tried it here? I feel like hugging my monitor everytime I minimize a window; It's so smooth D:
