Jobs vs. Gates UFC cage match

[t4mh]

Chevy vs Ford...

I've done the world of PCs and now I'm doing the Mac thang! I guess that puts me on the fence with the crows!

Keith

[mazz]

I've never had a mac so I can't comment. But I love PCs because I'm a fiddler...I love buying new parts and building new PCs from components. Can you do that with a mac? (genuine question)

Apple took an entirely different approach to the Mac, which was to essentially build a closed system. Apple controls the hardware specs and makes the machines and as such, can construct an operating system that is designed to work with that specific hardware. In my experience, this made for a much more "solid" platform as opposed to the much more "open" spec of the PC platform which encouraged entire industries of board and chip makers, but was rife with incompatibilities, etc. But, of course, this also meant that the PCs were cheaper and more easily serviced, upgraded, etc. There are tradeoffs in both directions, IMO. The price of Macs has always been higher, but the tradeoff, at least in my experience, was that it worked almost flawlessly from day one. These days, the OS has gotten as bloated and top heavy as Windows so there seem to be more issues at times, but overall, I tend to have less problems with Macs, and I use a Windows machine at my day gig all the time. It's an HP laptop and I've never used a bigger piece of s**t for a computer than this thing. When I close the lid, it refuses to wake up when I re-open it, I have to do a hard boot, when I connect it to a projector, the image on the laptop screen becomes the size of a postage stamp, the wireless networking setup is enough to make me want to throw it on the ground and stomp on it. On the other hand, my personal Macbook pro has none of those issues. That's just my experience. I'm not opposed to Windows, I just prefer Macs because I like to be productive and just waiting the 7 minutes for a Windows XP machine to fully boot up seems like something that shouldn't be taking place in 2010 (I'm referring to my crappy HP laptop at work).

Now, Macs use Intel chips and compatible motherboards which makes upgrading things like RAM much easier and cheaper. You still can't go swapping out motherboards on a Mac Pro, but you can change out video cards and add other types of PCI cards, as long as they are Mac compatible. In fact, changing the RAM in a Mac Pro is dead simple and takes about 5 minutes, literally.

I don't think either Jobs or Gates are saints, by any stretch. I've not been enamored with Microsoft's parasitic business practices of basically buying up companies with innovative technologies and then layering those technologies on top of Windows willy nilly and creating a huge, unwieldy mass of mediocrity known as Windows and Microsoft Office. By the same token, Apple, by playing so close to the vest, has shut out the business market almost completely as far as computers go. Business tended to go with the path of least resistance and bought into Microsoft early on, even though it may not have been the best thing going, it just happened to get the upper hand early in the game. I honestly think that if Apple had done things a bit differently, they'd be the top dog, because aesthetically and productively, they had the better system for a long time. When I call our company tech support line (and when I started it was all mac, as soon as we switched over to mainly PCs, they had to staff an entire building of tech support people), I invariably mention Mac, and they all agree to a person that they prefer Macs, but they have to support the PCs because they are what is used because of the business software we are running.

I'm used to Macs and I seem to have a good relationship with them, they pretty much have always worked very well for me. I use my Mac for the heavy lifting in the studio and the PCs for streaming samples and nothing else. It's not a match made in heaven, but so far it works out pretty well. I use them both, I prefer Macs.

I'd like to see Jobs and Gates slug it out. Either one getting knocked down or knocked out would be alright with me.

Cheers!

Mazz

[t4mh]

These days, the OS has gotten as bloated and top heavy as Windows so there seem to be more issues at times

I agree with Mazz on most of this except the OS thing. I haven't seen or used Windows 7... I can however task manager down all processes on my Vista machine, down to the basic OS and I find that my Snow Leopard 10.6.3 machine is occupying about 1/3 of the system resources that Vista does. I lose somethings like, right clicking stuff, but hardware being almost the same these days, the "lite-ness" of Snow Leopard is obviously one of the Macs greatest performance gains! UNIX has always been a more efficient and more powerful language than DOS. To tell you the truth, I was skeptical that Apple could command the swap file better than Microsoft with all their years of experience but Apple sure seems to have it goin' on!

Don't get me wrong, there are Windows machines out there that will blow right by a Mac in pure data handling performance, just about any Mac for that matter, but they will cost you more $$$ than a Mac and the optimizations are extreme! For the money I spent I am quite pleased at this point.

Keith

[mazz]

If you get a two button mouse or trackball, you can right-click in Mac OS, no problem.

[t4mh]

I've never had a mac so I can't comment. But I love PCs because I'm a fiddler...I love buying new parts and building new PCs from components. Can you do that with a mac? (genuine question)

That's not really the target market for the Mac. Apple has always just made really cool stuff that works easily. In order to do that, they have to control as many variables as they can, including who built the hardward and what's in it.

This is sort of a modern day myth. My MacBook came from Shanghai where it was built. I'll betcha, your HPs, Dells, Acers and a host of other common machines come from the same factory and I know they all have the same CPU chipsets. There's not really much difference between machines anymore than the case, my MacBook is Aluminum, my Alienware is Magnesium, and the OS.

Theoretically, you could have always upgraded a Mac the same as a PC but the OS might not recognize the device and driver support might not have been there for a Mac. But why did you ( and me ) upgrade your PC? Because Microsoft came out with a new OS and you had to have twice as much RAM to run it? It cost less to upgrade than buy a new machine? I guess what I've always heard about Macs is that they lasted longer because there were fewer updates and OS changes. Personally, I'm sick of buying a new machine every few years...

Keith

[t4mh]

If you get a two button mouse or trackball, you can right-click in Mac OS, no problem.

Right Mazz, and thanks for the help! What I mean is, and I do have a two button mouse, if you go to like Finder, you can't hold Ctrl and and select a lot of different things like you can in Explorer. In Explorer, you select things in whatever order you want, then right click for task oriented handling, easy. Macs you can only select a range. The right click in Finder is almost meaningless for me and I have to go to the menu bar for a lot of task handling. Small hair splitting stuff I'll admit but it was a disruption of my work flow in learning all about Snow Leopard. Like no backspace key... Double clicking... That sort of thing. Its just different. I'll gladly put up with it when compared to the performance gains especially since I've gotten used to that stuff! Its obvious to me that Apple has never really bloated the OS with all those easy user functions and has opted for a leaner and liter OS. Also, by way of comparison, if you take a brand new Mac and Vista machine, side by side, you'll find the Mac OS occupys somewhere about 10% of the space on the drive that Vista resides in.

Keith

[t4mh]

Just to get my point about the two OSs, when I bought my Mac I also got EWQL Composer's Collection which I promptly installed, INCORRECTLY, and had extreme trouble with. Duh... I don't think Windows will let you install incorrectly. I needed to uninstall the software and reinstall. I had no idea how to uninstall in SL. And I'm not sure even right now that it is really possible in an easy way. In the bloated Windows environment, this is easy, Control Panel> Programs and Features> find the title in the list and click uninstall. Windows wacks everything out of the registry and even creates a restore point for you in case you screw up. These are easy user functions but contribute to the bloat. Well, E/W Tech Support and I went round n round for a while until they sent me an uninstall program that wacked their software so I could install clean and now eveything is great! Different OS was my main problem. What do you want? There is a lot more I could say but a choice between SL and Win7 is really the issue.

BTW, I think E/W posted the uninstall program for all Mac users on their support page...

Keith

[elser]

I've never had a mac so I can't comment. But I love PCs because I'm a fiddler...I love buying new parts and building new PCs from components. Can you do that with a mac? (genuine question)

In my experience, this made for a much more "solid" platform as opposed to the much more "open" spec of the PC platform which encouraged entire industries of board and chip makers, but was rife with incompatibilities, etc. But, of course, this also meant that the PCs were cheaper and more easily serviced, upgraded, etc. There are tradeoffs in both directions, IMO. The price of Macs has always been higher, but the tradeoff, at least in my experience, was that it worked almost flawlessly from day one. These days, the OS has gotten as bloated and top heavy as Windows so there seem to be more issues at times, but overall, I tend to have less problems with Macs, and I use a Windows machine at my day gig all the time. It's an HP laptop and I've never used a bigger piece of s**t for a computer than this thing. When I close the lid, it refuses to wake up when I re-open it, I have to do a hard boot, when I connect it to a projector, the image on the laptop screen becomes the size of a postage stamp, the wireless networking setup is enough to make me want to throw it on the ground and stomp on it. On the other hand, my personal Macbook pro has none of those issues. That's just my experience. I'm not opposed to Windows, I just prefer Macs because I like to be productive and just waiting the 7 minutes for a Windows XP machine to fully boot up seems like something that shouldn't be taking place in 2010 (I'm referring to my crappy HP laptop at work).

Mazz

That's one of the things I've always wondered about having never spent much time with a PC. I know that's the hype, that 'they just work' but I've always found that to be an exaggeration, I've run into plenty of bugs and incompatibilities and when I ever I speak with someone who's thinking of switching to Mac I'm quick to point out that they're not frustration free.

Still, it sounds like in comparison to Windows they probably are relatively frustration free. I'll bet Apple's obsession with aesthetics goes beyond just the case and the user interface and is there in the technology as well. I'm sure Keith is right when he points out how much more streamlined the OS is.

Another thing I think Apple may be ahead of the curve on is the Cloud technology. With a .me account and iDisk my 2 computers and my iPod Touch are always in sync and it's really hassle free. Plus the seamless integration with iTunes and the iPhone which are huge on both platforms is another incentive and obviously a huge selling point for people switching to Mac.

I'm surprised I haven't heard anyone telling Jobs to 'eat my shorts' or something along those lines. I think that sentiment comes mostly from gamers, probably not many of those around here.

[mojobone]

Yep, Apple has the edge in product integration; you can use an iPhone or iPod Touch to remotely control software running on your Mac Pro. I think the iPad will have this capability soon, if it hasn't already.