Moved: Diplomacy For Mac
This discussion has got to happen. And I'm afraid that I am very, very biased.
I DETEST PCs with every ounce of my immortal soul. We have a Mac-only household. I had previously worked on PCs since Win 3.0 (1990?) but two years ago our last PC was binned and since then we have only had Macs at home (a Netgear network running three MacBook Pros, a Mac Mini and two iPhones) and I refuse to use the PCs at work - no matter how carefully you back up, there is a major data loss at least once a month, the machines crash, and updates only fix problems by slowing everything down. My wife's work has recently adopted software that will only run on a PC, and they have given her a laptop to use at home, and I have been reminded of just how crap PCs can be. Yes, they cost half as much as Macs; and yes, by not being tied in to Apple they offer so much more versatility. But you need tech support and HOURS of your life to keep the stupid things working. Here's a simple statistic: Time spent troubleshooting 4 Macs in 2 years: none.
Time spent troubleshooting 1 PC in 1 week: 2 hours. Connecting a new Mac to my home network is this simple: turn it on; enter password into the pop-up window that tells you it has found a network. Connecting the PC took two phone calls to tech support. And the network was designed for PCs, not Macs. And no-one can help me find out why a f.ing PC can't find a Samsung printer on a Netgear wireless network.
The printer that is apparently shouting ' Hi guys, I'm here!' To every Mac in range is invisible to PCs. Samsung, Netgear and Compaq tech help cannot work out what is wrong - but the b.ds still charged me £1 a minute to tell me. If you bought a car, but were told that you needed to know how to adjust the ignition timing and reinstall the clutch before it would work, and even then the car ' couldn't find' the wheels, you would go apes.t and demand a refund.
You would also appreciate the fact that a car that started without fail every time you needed it, and took you to your destination without breaking down, is better than one that doesn't - no matter what luxurious extras it has included for the same price. Grumpy, I take back all of the bad things I did not write about you yet I have 3 Macs and 3 PCs running, and 1 PC not running. If I could run mac only I would. My experience mirrors yours, while there is not as much variety on the mac side, in the last 3 years I have no tech problems for my macs that a hard restart did not take care of. I've only had a problem with 1 peripheral (a printer) that I've brought into the network. On the PC side I've had several blue screens of death, significant repairs, 2x HD failure, and more OS reinstalls than I can count. Sadly, even saying that I do have to use a couple of proprietary PC software packages in what I do so I have to have the PCs to make my living and I can't get away from em.
Sorry to say Grumpy, but the way you stated it, you're saying all your Personal Computers (Macintosh AND Windows) have failed on you miserably? Since you 'DETEST' Personal Computers so much, why have one? You could always just use paper and pencil.
Moved Diplomacy For Mac
You probably meant to say Windows instead of PC. From what I know, Macintosh is good in all fields except one, gaming. If you're going to game (DotA, WoW, WC3, SC, HL2DM, TF2, etc.) then Windows is the better option, now this goes for the Operating System only though. The only reason it is good for gaming is because of the way many game producers have their games Windows only, and many programs that support these games are Windows only.
So, gaming, Windows. Everything else, Macintosh. =) Another thing with Macintosh, too cramped. You have to take it to a professional Macintosh editor to open it up and add RAM, change your graphics card, new fan and what not. But Windows, normally they come in big boxes (Talking about a desktop right now) that you can slide open and edit to your own whim. Just a few days ago I opened mine up and easily added some more RAM, no time wasted at a shop and no money spent there either.
Also, I personally have never had 'Time spent troubleshooting 1 PC in 1 week: 2 hours.' Or 'a major data loss at least once a month' so maybe just bad luck? The most I've ever troubleshooted was the internet, took 2 days when they sent out a person to fix the DSL (Which is caused by external problems). So, my final answer to this question, I'd pick PC over Macintosh any day, it gives me the option of bringing Macintosh AND Windows together for my full customization.
Now doesn't that sound great? No - I mean 'PC' because a Mac is not a PC. The platform is significant. I suppose I could run Windows on three of my Macs (they are Intels) and according to independent bench tests, - so the question is, why would I want to? Fair enough with the point about upgrading hardware for games.
I don't need to do that, so it's not an issue for me. What is an issue is that after 18 years of computer ownership, I have had one reliable PC (the Compaq Contura Aero) out of about 10 machines, and 4/4 reliable Macs. The disadvantage of Macs is also their advantage: everything is integrated. Buy anything, and you know it will run.
Add anything to your Mac, and it will integrate smoothly. You know what it is like when you buy a new PC? You open the box, turn it on, and then go and watch a movie while setup.exe runs. Meanwhile, when Apple says Macs run 'out of the box' they mean it. My attitude is this simple: upgrades and versatility are the benefits to PCs. However, the cost in time and trouble is just too much.
Macs are more than capable of doing anything you want (nobody actually needs to overclock their processors, do they?) and have a level of reliability that is light years in front of the rest of the pack. I think that you are stretching semantics beyond breaking point there. A personal computer may indeed run Mac OS, Linux, Windows or whatever. However, when expressing the term as a proper noun rather than a common noun ( by using capitals, hence 'Personal Computer' or 'PC' for short) and using it in terms of distinction from other non-Microsoft operating systems, the vast majority of people understand what it means. I also have to add that I am not a fan of neuro-linguistic manipulation in discussions. The distinction I made between PCs and Macs was unambiguous and instantly recognisable - not least because it is a distinction that has been made in advertising and across the internet for many years now.
Attempting to redefine the terms I used in order to create ambiguity in my point is not appreciated. I'd like to add 2 points to this discussion: 1. If you're really used to one operating system you're going to get seriously annoyed when using another one, simply because it will not act the way you're used to. I don't know if mac os x still does that, but in the classic mac os if you'd click and drag the window border that would move the window, where as in windows (and gnome and kde) it would resize it. Neither behavior is intrinsically better than the other, but it's seriously annoying when you're expecting one of them and are getting the other. Macs aren't really that much more expensive than PCs - it's just that apple only sells high end computers. It's true that you generally get better build quality from a $n.2 mac than from a $n pc, but if you'd invest the same amount of money in a high end pc you could also get the high build quality there.
The simple truth is that although the products are there, most people (including myslef) prefer to pay half the price and get the cheaper variety. I don't need it to live more than about 5 years anyway (other than my laptop I also have a 9 years old pc and an 11 years old umax mac clone, both of them work and I almost never use either). If you really want to get the most bang per buck, buy a used PC on ebay- a 3 years old PC costs about 4 times less than it did when it was new, and it'd be plenty fast for most uses (you can also upgrade it on the cheap and still pay very little overall). You can also get one for free from places like freecycle or go dumpster diving if you're partial to such things. I got cheap/free computers and parts on more than one occasion when companies I worked for needed to get rid of old computers they had in storage.
Posts: 144 Joined: 06 Apr 2008, 11:13 Location: Vienna, Austria (where the beer is even better than in Cheshire!) Class: Diplomat All-game rating: (1000) Timezone: GMT+1.