Friday 6 January 2006

Macs versus PCs

That old question crops up now and again. It's a bit like
- vegetarian or carnivore?
- are women better than men? (I really don't want to open up that can of worms)
- how old's Mae West? (classic line from Hitchcock's 'The 39 Steps')

It's right that Macs cost more, but then quality comes at a price.

I've owned Macs for 8 years and have had 2 viruses in that whole lifetime, both in Microsoft documents. I used a 2.5Ghz Dell at work and it ran SLOWER than my old 533Mhz Mac at home. I've seen inside another PC whilst the IT bloke opened it up at work and it looked a complete mess. My friend had a brand new PC for under half a year and the motherboard sizzled out.

It obviously sounds like I'm PC bashing, but I can only go by my own experience. I'm sure a good PC is great, but an over-priced Mac is superb.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

if Mac architecture was truly better than it would be used the world over in servers, but it isn't. It's not the architecture that is inherently slow it is the manner in which the Operationg System handles the CPU rings. It also entirely depends on the manner in which the user maintans their machine. Mac has traditionally taken a handholding approach to users which has meant the OS has kept the machine in a good state. Windows takes the approach of "I'll let you do what you like and if you screw your box then so be it".

Of course, Linux and BSD are different matters entirely (note that OSX is BSD with a pretty gui wrapped around it, Apple decided they wanted the stability that BSD (which runs on PCs) provides. Fair play to them I say.

So is Mac better than PC? Depends entirely on what you want to do. If you want to do DTP, graphics or sound editing than Mac is probably better (although in graphics recently Windows and Adobe have come leaps and bounds and the top end AMD chips are far superior in speed and price to the Motorola MAC one). Of course Apple have decided that there next lot of machines will be PC's, you know that right? OSX on a PC is out there and available.

phil

p.s. yes, I am a geek.

Anonymous said...

Apple is moving to PC architecture and has released OSX for PC. Argument over.

Anonymous said...

First PC Mac released last night. Brave New World Pangloss! Brave New World!