theres 3 types of people in this thread
The PC person, who hates macs and think theyre stupid (ignorant)
the MAC only person, who thinks pcs are full of spyware and viruses (ignorant)
and the Person who realizes the benefits of both PC's and MAC's...understands that pc's need a couple fixes to make them basically spyware/virus proof quite easily, and that macs osx is a work of art as well as their machines.
Guess which one I am.
I'm an Apple Certified Tier 2 Mac Tech that loves his PC, and loves his G5.
I don't argue really, I just like to set things straight. I mainly use these forums to provide tech support, but occasionaly I'll drop by the Switcher Hangout, and often times read something ferocioulsy inaccurate. Many Mac users and Apple itself find it necessary to lie to consumers to bring them over to Mac.... I mean I can unerstand why Apple does it, but I'm not entirely sure why Mac users do it. I'm a serious advocate of educated consumerism and while I do think Macs are great and definitely have certain advantages over PC, they are definitely not everything Macheads make them up to be.
Nope. A single G5 1.6GHz is much faster than a dual Xeon 3.4GHz. It is, because I say so.
Talk about your "infantile."
I'd say that Mac hardware has lower failure rates, ie, it lasts longer and needs replacement less often.
A Mac's advantages dooes not lie in its performance. PC's generally hold the performance title somtimes by a very large margin.
A single 1.6GHz G5 is faster? How? What unbiased benchmarks do you have to prove this? Please don't show me Apple ones, we all know how notoriously inaccurate they are. It's very hard to fairly and accurately cross-platform benchmark. Benchmark code is optimized better for different proccessors. There's already enough real world controversy over AMD vs Intel benchmarks. Game for Game, App for App here are a few generalized cross-platform averages formed by the community itself:
WoW (FPS) More=Better-
Dual 2.5 G5 w/ 2GB RAM & 6800 Ulta: 40-45 FPS @ low res, low detail.
Single AMD Athlon FX-53 (2.4GHz) w/ 1GB RAM and 6800 Ultra: 90-100 FPS @ high res, high detail
Protools LE w/ Digi 002 DaveC Test (Tracks) More=Better -
Dual 2.5 G5 w/ 4GB RAM and 7200RPM 8MB Buffer SATA HD: 31 Tracks
Single Pentium-M 2.0GHz w/ 512MB RAM 4200RPM 2MB Buffer HD: 32+18 Tracks
Photoshop CS Filter Test (Seconds) Less=Better-
Dual 2.0 G5 w/ 1.5GB RAM: 224
Single 3.6GHz Pentium4 (Presccott) w/ 1GB RAM: 171
Single 3.6GHz Pentium 4 (Northwood) w/ 1GB RAM: 159
And who said Apple hardware has a lower failure rate? I mean I'm not really sure what you mean but Did you test this yourself? They both use the same type of memory, optical, and storage hardware... so do you just keep a few older Macs and PCs always running occasionaly testing the degradation of the silicon, transistors, and capacitors on the mobo and processor?
XP Pro costs $72 OEM and OEM software is not hard to find even for "ordinary people." SP1 and SP2 are free OS upgrades (not updates). Apple charges for it's upgrades (i.e. 10.2 to 10.3)
Windows XP is rock-solid. It's not inherently any less stable than OSX. Ironically Microsoft took the initiative to find and hire many of the top Linux coders to assist in making XP. Internet Explorer is also great and the security vulnerabilities often attributed to it actually lie with Active X which will always be intrinsically vulnerable just by virtue of what it is.
Microsoft, however, has done a great job in keeping the vulnerabilities to a minimum. Even Apple engineers will admit that SP2 does a pretty amazing job. Even so: Spyware and Viruses are not valid reasons to go to Mac. Macheads refuse to admit that their precious OSX only exercises approximately 6-7% of the entire OS market. XP takes it's 90% chunk.
7% vs. 90%: who’s got it harder? You can't blame Microsoft for all the angry 13-year olds able to code in C with a nasty itch to wreak some havoc. It's not like its impossible to code a virus in Cocoa. It's just simple logic: "What could I do to cause those most damage?" The answer is definitely not "Code a virus for OSX." LOL.
Any Tier 2 Agent will tell you that OS X has it's weaknesses. The file system (HSF+) is not as "godly" as any crazy machead would like you to believe. For video editors, its a nightmare: the increased fragmentation is atrocious and there is no real immediate defragmentation solution. You can use Norton Speed Disk, but it isn't recommended as it isn't perfect, and horridly supported - those who do serious disk-intensive work such as video editing that used Speed Disk have already noted several problems. Because of this, if you call an Apple Tech because it takes 45 minutes for a waveform track to load in FCP, their first and only answer will be to format - Avid editors have been laughing at Apple editors for years.
OSX's backwards compatibility is a shame... Classic does it very few favors.
As far as the "Microsoft steals from Apple" accusations are concerned, they are a joke. Apple steals ideas from Microsoft as much as Microsoft steals from Apple. What about Ctrl+Alt+Del? What about Alt+Tab? These were amazing features Microsoft had built into Windows since '95. Apple just recently implemented them (Alt+Tab JUST came with Panther). Fast user switching? It's just practical business strategy. Why would either company avoid implementing a successful feature just because the other one did it first? Imagine if Apple was like "Screw it, we can't have a Force Quit, Windows already has it. Our customers will just have to deal with it."
Apple did know what do to. They were the superior product. Windows 1.0 flopped. (even though it was copied directly from Macintosh, leading to a furious legal battle down the road, but anyway.) Microsoft eventually coerced all the computer manufacturers into adopting their software, and it worked. They aren't a business, they're the schoolyard bully for christ's sake.
And who can forget what Jobs did to Xerox.... at least Gates paid for DOS.
Apple hired Microsoft to code Mac OS, Gates then used several of the key design elements in Windows 1.0. Key design elements Apple stole from Xerox. The never-ending joke is that Apple sued Microsoft for trying to steal what they stole first, and in America, you can do that - thats Capitalism.
In the end of course Gates and Microsoft came out on top, which is why Jobs has always been known as the great marketing visionary, and Gates has always been know as the great business visionary.
In the early stages of the computing industry - easily the most cut-throat industry of it's era - you'd better expect the ones on top cheated a little.
All is fair in love and war... Hollywood, and Silicon.
A great quote from Gates about him and Jobs:
"We both had a rich neighbor that left his doors unlocked and went out of town. I just got there first and I got the loot!"