There is no free lunch
Dec 12 '06
The Bottom Line For basic home or office use, the Mac is better hands-down. For specialized software, buy the one you need. For specialized hardware, PC wins.
I’ve been at this Mac vs. PC thing for years, 13 to be exact. I use both on a daily basis, with my law office running on a mixture of PCs (3) and Macs (2), with another Mac at home and the whole mess served on a Window (PC) server. For the most part, both systems are very good. For the most part, both systems are infuriatingly bad. It really depends on what you are trying to do at a given moment.
I’ll start with where Macs are terrific. There are almost no viruses or other malware for Macs, at least for OS X, which if you aren’t running on your Mac, then you really need to get with the times. OS X has no malware except for a few “Proof of Concept” attempts, which is another way of saying some idiot wrote a virus and showed it to the world in hopes of getting Mac users to buy antivirus software. I’d be willing to bet that most of these people work for companies like Symantec or McAfee, so they have a vested interest in proving the concept of a Mac virus. Windows is riddled with malware attacks to the point that I run a hardware firewall, a software firewall, antivirus, antispyware and anti-adware applications in the (vain?) hope of keeping it clean. For the most part, I keep the crap out, but the worry is always there.
Macs are very stable. OS X is based on FreeBSD, an operating system renowned for its stability. I’ve yet to have OS X crash in the 4 years I’ve been using it, and I use it HARD. Applications crash, but not once have I not been able to recover from a crash. Windows on its own crashes once in a great while, but its much better than it used to be. That said, when an application crashes in Windows, sometimes its impossible to kill or relaunch it. You can go to the task manager, but sometimes a frozen application gets so frozen that it just won’t go away.
Everything works smoothly. I added a second video card and a second monitor to a 7-year-old G4 Power Mac and didn’t have to configure anything except for how I wanted the displays positioned relative to one another. OS X always remembers those settings, and every time I power on the computer, everything is just as it should be. In Windows, its not always so simple. I use two monitors on my Tablet PC and if booting fresh, everything works great. If I am resuming from hibernate, however, I often have to go in and reconfigure my dual monitor settings manually. Windows just doesn’t understand all the time (it does sometimes) that when docked the big 19” LCD is the PRIIMARY monitor and the small 12” laptop LCD is the SECONDARY monitor.
There are some things that Windows does MUCH better than OS X. I back up my documents folders quite frequently to a USB drive, and in Windows, I can copy back from the USB drive to the PC and Windows will prompt me to replace older versions of each file in each subfolder with the newer versions. OS X is goofy in that it will just delete everything in the old folder and paste in the new folder. With OS X’s method I have lost data, whereas Windows always leaves me with the newest version of each document.
Then there’s the hardware. Apple hardware is gorgeous. Apple hardware is (mostly) well-made. Apple hardware is powerful. Apple hardware, however, was designed for the sake of design, with function sometimes (not always) taking a back seat. Apple’s MacBook laptop is a wonder example of Apple both getting it very right and very wrong.
Here is what’s right. The MacBook is barely an inch thick, which for a full-featured widescreen laptop with an integrated optical drive, is amazing. The MacBook is also gorgeous, with uninterrupted smooth surfaces and a magnetic screen latch so brilliant you would think it would be on every laptop since 1990. It has one of the best keyboards ever installed on a portable, a glossy screen with almost none of the compromises of a glossy screen, and a compact size that except for width, is about as small as a laptop can get without being uncomfortable to use. The slot-loading optical drive is a revelation, every portable computer with a built-in drive should ditch the tray and follow Apple to slot-loading bliss.
Now for what’s wrong. The MacBook is heavy. Its 5.2lb weight is more in line for a 14” than a 13” laptop, and considering its small size and the lighter weight of 13” PC laptops, Apple clearly could have given the MacBook a diet. There is no PC card or Express Card slot. How hard is it to add a slot? Even the tiny ultralight PC laptops have card slots, and it is the card slot that makes a laptop a good long-term investment, allowing the easy addition of emerging technologies such as EVDO networking, which is getting popular. The battery life sucks. Apple advertises 6 hours, but in real world use you are lucky to get three. Apple (and just about everyone else) lies about battery life, but not usually by half. Competing models with the same processor and similar hardware and battery specs run an hour or more longer, which suggests Apple could spend some more time tweaking how OS X handles power management. Finally, where in the name of whatever diety you look to is the second mouse button? Come on, even Apple has abandoned one button mice for its desktops, is it that hard to make a second mouse button? The single mouse button on the MacBook is huge, and a separate second button or even a single button that can sense where you touch it would not destroy the clean lines, but would greatly improve the user experience. No, two-finger tapping, while a cool addition to a single button touchpad, does not come close to the real thing.
OS X is great on laptops, and has the wonderful ink application from the old Newton. Inkwell technology has been a part of OS X since Jaguar, so why aren’t there any Apple tablets? In contrast, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition isn’t fancy, just XP Professional with handwriting and speech recognition added on, but it works well and is well integrated. Windows Vista seriously raises the bar on handwriting recognition and show just how far Microsoft has pulled ahead in the pen computing area.
There are other hardware categories where Apple chooses not to play. A high-end Mac Pro is undoubtedly a better graphical workstation than its PC competition, even if used to run Windows, but where are Apple’s low end models? If you want a cheap computer for casual internet surfing, email and word processing, Apple’s cheapest Mac is $600. Yes, the Mac Mini is yet another example of Apple’s gorgeous industrial design (I’ve got last year’s), but it has very limited expansion capabilities and takes a performance hit on account of its laptop-sized hard drive and optical drive, as well as its low-brow integrated graphics. Yes, a cheap PC will also have low-brow integrated graphics, but it will have a fast desktop-sized hard and optical disk, and in most cases an AGP or PCI-E slot that you can use for a fast, modern video card if you decide later than you need one. Oh yeah, those cheap PCs start at about $300, or half the price of the cheapest Mac Mini.
My point is that most of these Mac vs. PC articles are just flat wrong. They are either written by a PC hobbyist who finds the closed nature of the Macintosh system (you cannot legally build your own Mac) limiting, or by the Mac evangelist who thinks that because PCs are vulnerable to malware that they are junk. The truth is that both are right and both are wrong. PCs (a Mac running Windows IS a PC) can be a great value, have a far broader assortment of hardware and software that they support, and come in far more shapes, sizes and configurations than Macs do. On the other hand, Macs tend to be more stable, can be used online without all of the intrusive protection measures, and generally have a more polished user experience. In fact, their interfaces, despite looking completely different, have borrowed and stolen from one another (more Microsoft from Apple, but its gone both ways) so much over the last 20 or so years that most of the shortcuts and tricks for one will also work on the other, usually with just a simple change from Apple’s “Command” to the “Control” key on a PC. Personally, CMD-C and CNTRL-C are pretty much the same, are equally convenient, and make a good example of how similar the two interfaces really are.
So, what it comes down to is which system’s advantages float your boat more? Which systems disadvantages really tick you off? Finding the happy medium where you get the most function with the least hassle will tell you which system to buy. Or, you could be like me and find both about the same in daily use. I honestly don’t care much whether I’m viewing websites on a Windows or OS X computer. I use MS Word almost exclusively and likewise don’t care much if its Word for Windows or Word for Macintosh. My email messages read the same in Outlook for Windows or Entourage for Mac, and yes, even iTunes and my iPod don’t really care which platform they happen to be on.
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Epinions.com ID:
lawman67
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 in Computer Hardware |
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Member: Andrew F
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Reviews written: 199
Trusted by: 65 members
About Me:
Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl but she doesn't have a lot to say.
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