Why Mac?

Some people say that you "pay a premium" for the mac. I don't mind that. Unfortunately, apple don't actually offer a single viable solution for video editing with Adobe Premiere CS5 anymore as they have now effectively dumped Nvidia graphics from the entire range and CUDA enabled Nvidia cards are essential. I can't even spec a Mac Pro from Apple's website to do this and we are talking about a £2.5k system!

There's paying a premium and there's paying a premium. This will always be an issue with a single manufacturer having complete control over a system.

THEY make the decisions for you as to what you want. If they don't have it in their range, the entire ecosystem is a no-no.

This is the big difference for me between mac and pc. I can never quite get what I want in an Apple computer. It's a real shame, as I like the os and the product design and would love to buy one.

And things are getting worse if the Macbook air and its integrated hardware is anything to go by.
 
I was thinking that. I had to build and set a PC up yesterday as my son wants a gaming rig (my daughter has a mac). Windows 7 home premium cost me £120.

To be fair Windows 7 is a big improvement on Vista (the last OS I used) but it was a painful experience compared to setting up a Mac. Not so much the OS but all the drivers and configuration afterwards.
 
So long as you can connect to the internet off the bat with Windows 7, windows update should find the drivers without a problem unless you have some ridiculously obscure piece of hardware.

That said, the last Windows machine I set up, the driver provided by the Windows 7 install was crap for the card I had installed. It wouldn't let you connect to WPA2 networks, but WEP was fine. Not Windows fault, but Netgear for providing a shoddy outdated driver. It was just a matter of switching the router to WEP to download the latest driver from Netgear and then switching the router back to WPA2. After that, any drivers required Windows update found. Any device plugged in, Windows update found the drivers.
 
vonhelmet said:
In related news, the start menu in Windows 7 is hilarious. Overengineered beyond all belief. Icons, scroll bars, text boxes...
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i find it useful to have a quick look whats in the windows tbh. and its not hard to change it to the old look. the OSX one certainly aint nothing special
 
vonhelmet said:
In related news, the start menu in Windows 7 is hilarious. Overengineered beyond all belief. Icons, scroll bars, text boxes...
Click to expand...

Press windows button / type usually the first few letters of what you're after, hit return. Same thing I do in OSX with spotlight only there I have to press CMD + Spacebar to open the search. Windows win :p

Tbh I use Macs because I have too. I don't really care much for either Win7 or OSX, nearly all the programs I use are essentially the same once open. What I do care for is lack of choice. Unfortunately I can't use a PC for some of the things I use a Mac laptop for, not because the PC couldn't do it, but because the client would wonder why I wasn't using a Mac. This means I have one choice, a 15" Macbook Pro, with a matte screen upgrade, and one price point, which seems to be steadily rising. It's a fantastic machine, one of the best portable laptops on the market without a doubt, but it irks me something rotten that I don't really have any other choice. And with the way they hold value, getting something second hand is just daft!

That will always be the main bugbear for as long as Apple are a premium company. They have a product to offer no-one else can, so they can do what they like with it. I think they royally take the **** with some of their products (Quad Mac Pro for £2k being a prime example, remember the days you could get a 2.8ghz Octo for £1800?), but they'll keep doing it as long as they're selling in record numbers. Which, at the end of the day, only leaves the consumer to blame :)
 
Spyhop said:
The thing about prices is that Apple clearly do command a hefty margin on their hardware, but is that a cynical duping of customers, or simply the natural benefit of being at the top of the tree and making the best gear?

I know what most of the neon-clad PC folk on OcUK would say :D
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Take the casing off my iMac and it's just a run of the mill Intel PC with stock parts? I paid next to nothing for mine almost brand new as it was bankrupt stock. I doubt I would ever pay Apple's list price though - sheer madness if you ask me.

That's my take on it anyway - makes a difference when you don't feel you have to validate a very expensive purchase.
 
Faustus said:
Take the casing off my iMac and it's just a run of the mill Intel PC with stock parts?
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There's one important difference - Intel Macs do not have a BIOS chip. Apple have their own custom firmware running via EFI (which should eventually replace the BIOS for windows users), hence why you need to install Boot Camp to run Windows.

Intel Macs might share 99% of their parts with a generic Wintel PC, then again humans share 99% of their DNA with a monkey.
 
Quite a pointless fork of discussion to put the iMac's striking design and fact that it runs OS X aside, since they are its whole appeal and unapologetically so.

I'm not interested in defending it since I haven't cared about desktop-only computers for a while.
 
What on earth has processing power got to do with screen quality? one of Apple's "things" is that they only use top notch glass, and that is something which is very well received overall...
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Yep I will testify to that, I can really see my own reflection perfectly, even on a cloudy day. :rolleyes:
 
MagicBoy said:
There's one important difference - Intel Macs do not have a BIOS chip. Apple have their own custom firmware running via EFI (which should eventually replace the BIOS for windows users), hence why you need to install Boot Camp to run Windows.

Intel Macs might share 99% of their parts with a generic Wintel PC, then again humans share 99% of their DNA with a monkey.
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Yep, and I think in many cases the monkeys are more intelligent. :eek: Now what was the point you were trying to make. :D
 
MuGeN said:
What on earth has processing power got to do with screen quality? one of Apple's "things" is that they only use top notch glass, and that is something which is very well received overall...

when you say better do you simply mean faster?

is a stripped out twin-turbo Toyota MR2 "better" than an Aston Martin? - cuz that really is what it comes down to, PC owners only look at specs and are not phased by aesthetics and thats fair enough, mac owners however, look at the whole offering and decide the premium is justified ;)
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Perfect Example.

You could take a £1000 toyota supra and spend enough money on it that its faster than a ferrari.

So the ferrari is slower, ludicrously more expensive, driven by posers, gets you lots of unwanted attention, so you'd be stupid to buy one right ?

So why then do they sell by the lorry load.

Because sometimes a premium product is worth a premium price. Even if thinking about it logically it doesn't make sense.

The imac is a glorious

When you look at what the competition looks like



it doesn't even come close.

The 27" LED cinema display is a glorious monitor, and to have a Core i7 processor built into the back of it with half decent graphics makes it in a class of its own.

For me, the real killer in making the decision was iLife.

There is simply nothing out there on the PC market that can touch it.

A package that does movie editing / photo editing / music editing / dvd authoring and a web page authoring programme. All for £46 or included free in every PC.

Even if you paid £100 on a PC you couldn't get a package that good.

It helps as well that the wireless keyboard and mouse are pretty much in a class of their own too. There's nothing like as good looking on the PC.
 
There are some really retarded comments in here, I like my Mac but frankly they aren't all they are hyped up to be. OS X is brilliant and all but the hurr durr crowd making remarks about Windows complicating things, or PC requiring more upkeep. It's a load of rubbish.

Drivers - Don't have to worry about that. Stuff just works
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You don't on Windows. I don't see why you would worry about it either, is clicking next a few times on an installer difficult? The only drivers that really need to be updated more often are graphics drivers if gaming.

Not that Mac users would really ever have to worry about that, considering every single game that has a Windows equivalent runs awful on OS X compared to Windows.

It's very annoying having to run boot camp all the time purely because OpenGL sucks so badly compared to DirectX. Double the framerate at times.

vonhelmet said:
In related news, the start menu in Windows 7 is hilarious. Overengineered beyond all belief. Icons, scroll bars, text boxes...
Click to expand...


Lol? The start menu is excellent, I press my Windows key and type the name of an app, it shows up instantly and any related files/folders. It has one text box and one scroll bar when you expand the menu, as for icons then yes it has application icons...so what's the issue?

Why do Apple users have to pick apart tiny things about Windows that function fine? I don't get it. OS X isn't perfect either. (not that I'm saying your 'complaint' about the start menu has any weight, it's dumb)

My favourite thing about OS X is spotlight, I'm glad Windows has a similar thing with the start menu so I can launch apps fast. Both are excellent features.

I'll tell you one thing though, I'd never want a Windows based laptop again after having my Mac one. I truly think the laptops are brilliantly made.
 
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Myself and a colleague are working on a C++ project at the moment - him on a macbook pro, myself on a 3 year old dell laptop with ubuntu.

His machine has been a HUGE hassle getting up to speed as a programming environment. Firstly, you need to sign up for xcode, which is a hugely bloated pile of crap. Secondly, the compilers have a load of non-standard behaviour which makes our code behave very differently on his machine to mine. In the end we settled on using gnu compilers.

For the record - the package manager is fabulous in Ubuntu. It just works blah blah blah.

It seems to me that the "it just works" tag is getting less applicable as Apple grow. My housemate can't connect to our home network as it can't do WPA2. Come on, even XP has a hotfix for WPA2.
 
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Margaret said:
It's very annoying having to run boot camp all the time purely because OpenGL sucks so badly compared to DirectX. Double the framerate at times.
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I think you are a little confused as to what the 2 frameworks of OpenGL and DirectX do because in truth, they are not interchangable constructs.

OpenGL is, at its core, an API to allow the operating system to interact with graphics acceleration hardware.

DirectX does a simular job but with extensively implemented and optimised techniques and procedures built on top

The OpenGL programmer must do everything from scratch. The DirectX programmer can simply call on the Microsofts implementation of the Vector storage container, as an example.

Therefore, the problem with OpenGL ports is not the API itself but the sudden drop of functionality felt from losing DirectX.

It is worth of note that this is a deliberate manipulation and the primary reason Windows is considered the 'gaming operating system' for the PC market. Microsoft, by establishing their own framework as the industry standard and refusing to let the other industry members play created this problem in the first place.
 
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