#1 best feature of the Mac.

Hobbes

Ever watch "Curb your enthusiasm" where Larrys mom dies and he uses her death for an excuse for everything.

Found this works with the Mac too.

I switched my family over the Mac mainly because I used one for a while and didn't have to deal with "spyware de jour" every 1-2 weeks from peoples machines.

Got to the point where I had relatives asking me the same thing, or friends of the family or neighbors wanting me to clean their machines. Apart from straight out refusing they would keep coming back with "ahh go on" or "sure you owe me one", etc.

Now the conversation goes like this.

"Ahh! I just downloaded some random windows freeware game from some dodgy site and now machine says I have a virus and all my files are damaged"

"I have a mac"

"Oh, ok I'll see who else can help"

It's great!

cornbb

I've done that too

Sad Professor

God I wish I'd had the good sense to use this excuse when my uncle got a Dell a few years back. He hounds me with problems.

Recently his whole Vista installation got hosed. I spent about 8 hours over the last two days trying to get everything working again. Absolute f**king nightmare!

Red Alert

I still have to do the de-facto tech support both at home and in the office I work in - I don't even use Windows at all anymore!

Dublin_Gunner

Well the PC problems are less to do with the PC, and more to do with the idiocy of the majority of users.

In offices, people should really be required to do some basic training before being allowed sit in front of a PC.

I work on both Mac & PC in the office, (designer) and do tech support on all the PC's also. Its a pain.

I have to say though, being a PC enthusiast, and working on an 8 core Mac Pro - PC's allocate the available computing power a lot better than Macs do.

The single best thing about a Mac in my opinion though, is the dock.

The PC virus thing is just about education. Its not the PC's fault that there are many more of them around than Mac's, leading to the inevitable virus coding, if it was the other way around (more Mac's in the world) we'd be saying the same thing about them.

At the end of the day its about personal preference.

I love the style of Macs, I love the configurability & raw horsepower of PC's.

If anything, Mac's should be the defacto office standard computer (they're harder to break for the regular technophobe), and PC's left for those in the know.

If there wasn't such a cost difference for a basic machine, I would advocate Mac's as the computer of choice for any type of office content creation.

babypink

classic!

Dublin_Gunner

babypink wrote: »

classic!

????

babypink

Dublin_Gunner wrote: »

????

the following:

"Ahh! I just downloaded some random windows freeware game from some dodgy site and now machine says I have a virus and all my files are damaged"

"I have a mac"

"Oh, ok I'll see who else can help"

Dublin_Gunner

Ah right!!

Talisman

Dublin_Gunner wrote: »

I have to say though, being a PC enthusiast, and working on an 8 core Mac Pro - PC's allocate the available computing power a lot better than Macs do.

Macs don't require the raw power that Windows thrives on, that's one of the things I love about the system. The average end user doesn't need it either.

Dublin_Gunner

Talisman wrote: »

Macs don't require the raw power that Windows thrives on, that's one of the things I love about the system. The average end user doesn't need it either.

Do they not?? Why?? Do Macs have some alien technology built into their PC parts that allow them to do the same things with less computing power?

Encode video on a Mac, or open large photoshop / indesign files and you can see (at least in my experience) that Windows allocates the power better.

My dual core PC was as fast at encoding as my Mac Pro. I will admit however, that this has as much to do with the software developer, as it does the OS allowing the use of the resources.

I would argue that the average end user on windows only needs Win XP, a single core celeron and 512mb ram with built in video too...........

Hobbes

Dublin_Gunner wrote: »

Do they not?? Why??

I think what he means is that OSX will perform better even with lower settings. Mainly due to different architecture.

For example if your an average user and had only 100MB left of free memory you are not going to notice it on OSX. On windows everything will slow to a crawl. That isn't a failing of windows, just different systems.

cornbb

Dublin_Gunner wrote: »

Encode video on a Mac, or open large photoshop / indesign files and you can see (at least in my experience) that Windows allocates the power better.

But that is no indication of how the power is allocated, it all boils down to the software being used... I think I'd have to agree that it's the responsibility of the developer. You'll notice that Windows not the first OS of choice for many users who are doing serious number crunching - Linux/UNIX would tend be used by meteorologists/physicists/researchers, Mac OS would be used by CGI artists/video editors).

You'd need to use proper benchmarking techniques to do a realistic comparison between platforms. Unfortunately the web is awash with conflicting results given that fanboys testers tend to be heavily polarised/biased towards one platform or the other, and this shows in their findings.

Dublin_Gunner

But I'm talking from an end user point of view, and a cross-comparison of platforms, using the same software, which is arguably apples to apples.

Sure, the developer plays a part, but look at it this way; if my PC runs an app twice as fast as the Mac runs the same app - then surely the PC is a better platform for that app.

I think the reason most video editors use Mac is down to one main thing - FC Pro.

As far as Windows not being the OS of choice for high end number crunching - I never said it was, or intended to sound that way, I was merely comparing it to OS-X.

And another thing, FB-Dimms used in Mac Pro's are a fair bit slower for memory intensive applications.

Just a quick check, my Mac is currently using 2.44GB of the total 4GB system ram, with PS, InD, & Firefox (4 tabs) open. Thats pretty equivalent to a 4gb Windows machine with the same apps open.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to put Macs down here, but I'm just advocating that for some things, Windows is better, and vice versa.

iamhunted

Dublin_Gunner wrote: »

The PC virus thing is just about education. Its not the PC's fault that there are many more of them around than Mac's, leading to the inevitable virus coding, if it was the other way around (more Mac's in the world) we'd be saying the same thing about them.

ive heard this a lot, and I have to say I cant agree with it. I agree it isnt the PCs fault - its the OS its running thats at fault (as in windows).

Unix and BSD machines (which OSX is based on) have been around since the late 60s/early 70s and quite a few webservers run on that software. If it was as easy to engineer viruses for those systems as it is for windows then I'd assume there'd be as many viruses around considering the money to made from planting viruses on web servers and capturing CC details etc.

Such things do happen obviously but on a *nix server its got as much to do with the software the hacked site is running on top of the server software as much as anything else. Inthe windwos server world on the other hand, not only can the server itself be compromised from the OS side, but IE even helps in steathily downloading trojans. Dont even get me started on Outlook.

i think the whole 'not popular enough to get a virus' argument is a bit of a red herring - though either way it makes no odds to me as I dont use any windows flavours.

iamhunted

Dublin_Gunner wrote: »

Encode video on a Mac, or open large photoshop / indesign files and you can see (at least in my experience) that Windows allocates the power better.

Defintely encoding video on a mac is pretty slow, though i think that depends what software you;re encoding from (iDVD is apparently pretty crap, though I find premier pretty slow as well). Same time, I cant remember the last time I tried encoding video from a windows machine so I cant compare.

I have though alternated from a mac to a dell running XP for photoshop and in my experience, the mac has always run much smoother. In fact, the reason we first got a mac at work was because none of the PCs could handle one particular photoshop job without crashing and I had to do it on my little iMac at home. It took a while but at least it was stable (plus had about a quarter of the processing power and ram that the work machines had)