Why buy a Mac?

Going back to Adrianr's quote regarding the slow iMac.

Education facilities, colleges and universities have always gotten stripped down Macs, for a cut of the usual RRP.

My guess it that the hard disk is chock-full of useless crap, the RAM is stock (i.e. 1GB at most) and probably never been cleaned out in it's life.
 
I've read the whole thread, and despite some inevitable spats, some useful opinion was posted

I'm in a similar position to the thread starter. I'm due to upgrade the pc and presently have access to buy a discounted new Mac.

I've had no problem at all with my Dell/XP set up in the last three years. So I'm trying to figure out if there's 'really' any benefit in switching to Mac for what I do(Word, Outlook, Browsing ect), other than cost saving ?
 
Seraph said:
I've read the whole thread, and despite some inevitable spats, some useful opinion was posted

I'm in a similar position to the thread starter. I'm due to upgrade the pc and presently have access to buy a discounted new Mac.

I've had no problem at all with my Dell/XP set up in the last three years. So I'm trying to figure out if there's 'really' any benefit in switching to Mac for what I do(Word, Outlook, Browsing ect), other than cost saving ?
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Surely you'd be saving money getting another PC not a Mac.
 
Well yes, exactly. But some part of me is steering me towards a Mac. Not exactly sure why!

There's a time limit on the Mac offer, so I have to consider the issue greatly.
 
Seraph said:
Well yes, exactly. But some part of me is steering me towards a Mac. Not exactly sure why!

There's a time limit on the Mac offer, so I have to consider the issue greatly.
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Yup, I've been thinking the same thing for the last week. And I've been pricing up a Mac and PCs and trying to decide what they offer. And I just can't justify the price of an Apple machine, considering you can do everything exactly the same on a PC.
 
I'd be in the same position if it weren't for the discount opportunity.

I just can see myself getting a Mac and then running it in Bootcamp all the time. In which case, is it really worth it.

Think I preferred Macs when they couldn't run Windows, then you HAD to make that transition to Mac software!
 
I was in the same boat as you chaps being undecided. I tried a Mac Mini 1st and after using OSX I decided that it did everything i wanted in a much "nicer" way than Vista. After spending many months and a lot of money on trying to make a PC silent (think laptop quiet) I finally decided to bite the bullet and order a Mac Pro as everything I'd read said they were extremly quiet and to be honest they weren't lying...

I know what you say about it costing more etc but if you compare it to the equivalent Dell with the same range of processor (The Precision Workstation) as these as Xeon class CPUs with the 1600FSB on them then its actually a good price. With the addition of the 8800GT and what seems to be a possibility of getting a GTS 512 to run then you have a fast games machine, a monster for video and other encoding, something which is quiet and also something which can dual boot to Windows or run a load of VMs of just about every OS you can think of.

Just my 2p worth, one other thing its done is cure me of the "serial upgrader" bug ;)
 
WotDa said:
Please fell free to tell me how I stop Windows nagging me every 5 minutes when it feels the need to restart...
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Click on the popup and choose "remind me in 4 hours."

I've set my automatic updates to manual, so I never get interrupted and only update when I'm ready for it.

Running Thunderbird for email and Firefox for browsing; got a good cable modem, a solid router and the Eset suite for security. Never had a serious problem, and only experienced crashes when trying to overclock my graphics card too far, or running old software with compatibility issues (like the Homeworld series).

PCs are as stable as you want them to be; the best part is that the choice is yours. Even Vista doesn't fall over every 5 minutes unless you go out of your way to do something really stupid.

I can't think of any reason to buy a Mac, though I acknowledge that they are superior to PCs on a number of levels. IMHO you want genuine plug & play, go for a Mac; if you like to tinker, overclock and upgrade, go for a PC. You'll find limitations with both.
 
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Evangelion said:
PCs are as stable as you want them to be
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That has always been my experience (when I was heavily in to building PCs) :)

Evangelion said:
I can't think of any reason to buy a Mac, though I acknowledge that they are superior to PCs on a number of levels. IMHO you want genuine plug & play, go for a Mac; if you like to tinker, overclock and upgrade, go for a PC. You'll find limitations with both.
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Nice to see someone from the PC side actually be rational about it, and I think you've hit the nail on the head; there's a choice, get what's best for you.

It's just a shame that most people see the word "Mac" and treat you differently. I dare not post in the PC forums anymore, for fear of a flame-fest breaking out.

I would like to see the whole notion of "Mac = overpriced, underspecced toy" put to bed :)
 
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