Apple Are macs worth their price tags?

I am not sure if I agree that Mac oS X is more stable, I think they are roughly the same.

As for hipness, true, but I think that it really is balancing out. And are you telling me that I feel better than you guys with my G4? All i can say is, HELP! NEED PC!

Plus, is owning a PC that you built yourself or bought from a botique better than a Mac? Yes, for sure.

 

are you high or are you joking? My last windows computer at work would crash somewhere between 2 and 10 times a week. I understand a little bit where some of the instability came from - I had Microsoft visual studio installed (nothing will corupt a microsoft system faster than installing microsoft's dev tools,) and I had a couple of thousand emails in outlook. After doing some reasearch, I found that if you have a thousand or more emails in one folder in outlook it starts to lose track of gigabytes of ram. Still, all of my problems were caused by MS software.

My current work machine - everything's ok as long as I reboot once or twice a day. If I don't, the entire system freezes and hangs. I'm using Java, some proprietary dev tools, and lotus notes. Oh, and IE - there's another problem causing software.

My mac? Before I bought parallels, I would reboot every few days so that I could switch to windows to get some work done. After installing parallels? I don't reboot. Haven't in weeks. No need to. Meanwhile, we keep finding at work with our production windows servers - a lot of our strange weird problems go away if we just reboot twice a week.

And, this isn't just me. It has become standard in the industry to reboot production windows servers once a week for some reason or another. Do people do that with Unix boxes? Or mainframes? No - My company has a mainframe that has been running continuously for more than 8 years. It has not been brought down, even for maintenance, once in 8 years. That's stable. Windows? Not stable - not even close.

How many times do you reboot your windows box a week?

Meh - I'm over it. I've built myself 6 computers in the last 8 years and in the neighborhood of 100 for other people. Home built doesn't seem like a big deal to me anymore.

oh, and for the record - I was saying that 'hipness' was not a factor even though some other people think that it is.

 

Imho it is worth its price tag, if it does what you want it to do. You can do most things on either platform. In much the same way you may apply the same question to the Sony PS3 and the Xbox 360. There are fans in both camps, and you will read convincing and sometimes not so convincing comments about both. As someone pointed out in an earlier post, try before you buy. Pop into PC world or an apple shop if you happen to live near one have a play, and see if you like it. There is no right or wrong in your question, only what you like in the end

 

£700 isn't a lot of money for a notebook PC!

What are you comparing it to? Some Taiwanese clone? Compared to a similar specced offering from a brand just as well known for their notebooks as well as their 'hip' rating i.e. Sony and I think you'll find Apple is more than competitive.

People tend to compare with Dell, but Dell market notebooks to no frills, cheap as chips corporate and business entities where-as Sony and Apple tend more to consumer end-users... think about it.

 

My windows box is really stable, never crashes. Why? I don't have one

Believe me, they are about equal. I have hardly ever had crashes using PC's, but have had LOADS with this Mac. But, clearing some of the dust inside has helped I think it depends. Plus, my next system, a PC, will run Linux too

 

Sorry - can't agree that they are equal when it comes to stability - I have too much experience with both.

Just out of curiosity - what OS are you running? Is it 10.4? I've heard of stability issues with 10.1, but none with tiger. Is there anything else that could be contributing to your stability issues? Dodgy ram? A failing hard drive? My everyday computer at home is my macbook pro, and it never crashes and I never reboot it.

What else can you tell me about your mac? I bet you that with a couple of days of troubleshooting we can get to to be stable as a rock.

 

i havent rebooted my macbook since i bought it, and its running almost all the time im awake, its my message/work/torrent box and it's been serving its purpose flawlessly and perfectly since the day 1

 

It's better now that I've given it a good dusting. Heat could have been the issue. It is an old G4, and SHOULD be stable, but for that reason it wasn't. As for the stability with Mac vs PC, it might have been luck, or some other thing that has caused me to have no issues. No matter what I am doing, on most PC's, do I ever get a crash. Yes, I get a slow moment, but that is only on very old systems.

TBH, I will see what happens when I build my PC in summer. I will do a comparison of the two (Vista against OS X) and see what I find. But, for those who did and still have crashes often in Windows, aka most people, I think that this will become less of a problem in the future (of course, as technology advances).

 

I see where this is going...
The problem is this: (from my observations)

People that buy a PC, goes to Dell and purchase a 300$ laptop with 6 free monitors (or the way around, it's hard to guess), and expect it to work like a super computer, with extremely high quality parts. Therefore expect it to never freeze. I bet if you installed Linux on, it would crash just as much...

So then some of those people switch to a Apple computers, so they purchase a 3k computer... there is never freeze. Install Windows on that Mac, and I'm sure it will be extremely stable (unless improper drivers are installed), like a 3k PC.

I'm a heavy computer user, I'm on my computer at home and school (remote desktop).
My computer NEVER NEVER blocked, hanged, or freeze, not even a blue screen. commuter was purchased Jan 2006. Windows XP Pro was installed once. All driver and OS updates was performed. Windows Vista Beta 2, RC1 and RC2 were installed, on a second partition.

 

You make interesting points -

However, I've had issues with $3,000 - $10,000 production servers running xeons and ecc ram. Lots of issues.

I think these days if you have a good stable proc (any core proc from intel for instance,) a stable motherboard (like the ones dell has manufactured with intel chipsets (intel used to manufacture them for dell, but I think someone else does it now,)) and some middle of the road or better ram (and, decent cooling of course,) that you should not have any hardware related stability issues.

 

I'll admit that my PC does get spyware occasionally but I my system only ever hangs when it's too hot and I only ever reboot when I install something or i've shut it off for the night because it's hot outside.

/smoke time/

 

Hmmmm, you've gone and gotten me started now DreamTheEndless, here we go.

Are Macs better than PCs? It depends wholly on what you want to use it for. For media editing, Macs are absolutely, 1000% better than PCs. Not just in the software, but also down to fundamental things like harddrive usage (Windows will fragment your hard drive 10 times quicker than OSX when dealing with things like multiple none compressed large photos). The integrated software works well and the systems are catered to media editing of this kind.

For games, obviously PCs, Macs are shite at games, always have been, always will be. You need an absolute beast of a mac to run most games, even with parallel desktop as this is a complete memory whore. Just don't even bother with games and Macs.

Office work? Pretty similar actually. Given (IMO) you can't get much better than Office 2007 (I was so, so pleasently surprised by that), you can run it on both PCs and Macs with impunity. Open Office is good for being free (it is isn't it?) but barely compares to Office 07 in functionality and looks. Think Office XP basically.

However, the big comparison is the operating systems and the stability. OSX might have more functionality than XP, and runs on less resources than Vista, but IMO is horrible to look at and actually doesn't really make much sense. It just feels wrong to use, I actually get angry using OSX, it just pisses me off. Don't ask me why, just personal opinion, but personal opinion shouldn't be ignored. Just because something looks good on paper doesn't mean it's going to 'feel' right to you, so test drive the OS before you use it.

As for being more stable? Ok, this is where the sheer ignorance of Mac uses shine through. Just because YOUR Mac, which you've never added any extra hardware to or played around with the settings of, that cost you many hundreds of pounds, doesn't crash doesn't mean all Macs are totally stable. My girlfriend's mother's XP laptop cost her £300 new four years ago. It's never crashed, never frozen, never bluescreened, nothing. Ever. My girlfriend's laptop is the same, though it's only two years old. My PC is the same actually, it's about 6 months old now but I look after it, despite constantly tinkering with it and adding bits and bobs it runs fine. People don't tinker with Macs, people rarely play around under the hood, hence they last longer. However, don't say all Macs never crash, that's pure ********. I've seen brand new Mac laptops sag after three days and even carefully looked after desktop versions struggle and crash two or three times a day. Plus, I've never seen an OS that runs SO SLOWLY when there's lots going on. When you overload XP you know you have, it becomes juddery and jumpy but at least you can just Alt-Ctrl-Del and kill the offending Process. OSX? N'ah, it just freezes. And stays frozen for as long as it fancies until it's finally, finally finished doing what it wants to, then unfreezes. I think that's what pisses me off most about Macs, the phrase "Fisherprice" just jumps into my head. Their computers for those who can't stand up for themselves, who need to have their hands held by their OS and guide them through everything, their kiddie's computers basically. Overly harsh critique? Quite probably, but it's the feeling I just can't shake when I use them. It's not just Mac owners who are pointlessly smug and arrogant, the OS is as well when you use it. It's just got this inbuilt feeling of "no no, you don't understand, let OSX work it all out for you, you just sit there and make a photo album, there's a good boy".

Ok, well yeah you get my opinion on it, all I'm really saying is try one out before hand, don't shell out £700 before you've used OSX, find a way of giving it a good proper trial or you might find you've wasted you're money, it just might not sit right with you, that's all I'm saying.

oh and PS: There are mac viruses, and you can bet your bottom dollar more are on the way, just because everyone keeps spouting that Macs are immune from viruses.

 

I have a truly overloaded windows XP PC which is solid as a rock. Its on 24x7 and has been for 40 days now, i only turned it off then to install a RAID card, before that it was on for 78 days none stop.

And it isn't just sat there doing nothing, it has two users running at all times, one on the screen using a vb.net media player I wrote on a touch screen for listening to music in the kitchen. This sessions also sees some web browsing and solitaire use.

Session 2 is the remote desktop session which is constantly running:
UTorrent
Apache
MySQL
PHP scripts
ASP.net scripts through mono
FTP server (filezilla)
SSH server (CopSSH)
Proxy Server (privoxy)
AVG virus checks everyday
Backup routines (2 a day)
Motherboard Monitor
Adpatec RAID monitor

And then its a file server for the house as well. Its a P3 with a fan zip tied over it, 1.2Ghz, 512MB RAM, Hardware RAID 5, 5 HDD's and a cheap Enermax MATX PSU. All crammed in a small MATX case in a wooden box in the kitchen.

Its a miracle i tell you!

 

As for the bulk of this, yes, macs are better for media work, yes, they're not as good for games (though in windows, my mac book pro outperforms my previous AMDX2/ATI based machine, and my mac pro destroys it hands down). as for office suites... I can go buy the $80 iWork package, and do everything that you can do with office, and in most cases, make it look better. Pages and Keynote are ridiculously powerful if you know how to use them. only function it lacks, is MS Access, but pretty much everyone is stepping away from access at this point anyway (I rarely use it at work)

as for stability, i've found if you let windows run 24/7 for continuous amounts of time, it eventually shits itself, as it doesn't like to release resources it's using to free up stuff for other things to run, there's also a lot of variability in stability of hardware and drivers. It's a pretty common fact in the IT world, windows needs time to refresh itself at least once a week. as for OS X, I've been running my mac pro since I got it, 24/7 (screen shuts off, but system never sleeps), for damn near 9 months now, with the rare restart for updates. (I restarted once last month, and haven't yet in april)

as for stability because i've never upgraded? i've upgraded the video cards, hard drives, optical drives and several processors on past powermacs, and had 0 issues, since the mainboard stays the same, and OS X has fully integrated drivers (hell i've swapped makes on video cards in my macpro now), there's never a stability issue. especially since most of the drivers are written in house by apple to work right the first time.

being based on unix, makes the system more stable in general, and the default user level (even though you're slated as admin) isn't able to drastically change the structure of the operating system without a lot of effort... messing with windows? easy as regedit

yes, there are mac virii, but they're proof of concept, none of the ones in existance at this point are detrimental to the system, nor are they infective of other computers.

opinions are like assholes, everyone has one

yes, it's true some people just don't "get" os x, but it is significantly more powerful than windows, and 50% of mac users never actually realize the full potential of the OS and the included software.

 

Really? I found WoW to run pretty well and there are a lot of WoW gamers out there! I boot into Windows XP and run anything I want.

You are confusing things a bit here.

1. OS X likes a bit more memory than Windows, you will find the OS sluggish on the low specced Mac.

2. You can quite easily quite any application you want in OS X like you say you can do in Windows with ctrl-alt-del. Ever heard of 'Force Quit' or unix `kill` commands?

3. Finder is the main application that is likely to cause you serious lockups that you mention. If finder is broken you can't open Terminal to kill something that you can't Force Quit. However it is rare that Finder will have such a serious issue. Remember, we're talking about Unix here, the process management it very good.

4. Fisher Price? That's a great description. The obvious come back would be to remind you of the Teletubbies XP skin but let's not go down this route. I agree that the OS X GUI can be a bit over simplified in some areas but if you really are a pro and you want to do something clever just load up Terminal.

 

True my experience of OSX is rather limited and I don't know the ins and outs of the system well enough to make a good judgement, I was just trying to point out that it's often useless to recommend an OS simply on features, as if you just don't like the feel of the OS, all the features, good performance and stablility in the world isn't going to make it an enjoyable experience.

@cderalow:
Ok, you've done loads to your mac and it hasn't crashed, but it still flabberghasts me that people honestly believe OSX is totally stable and never crashes, this is simply not true. I have heard time and time again about people struggling with macs being unstable, the head of IT at my local college once told a story about how his set of a dozen (quite good IIRC) macs needed restarting at least three times a day just to stay stable, he ended up getting rid of the lot of them. From my experience It's almost like comparing football to rugby: football is like Windows, there are lots of little injuries and people are always going off, having a week or two to recoup, and coming back again. Macs are like rugby: when they work, they work, and they keep working, but then one day they stop working and at that point you know you're screwed, it's a smashed leg and you'll never play rugby again. (this analagy proably isn't true, but damnit I like analagies) No OS is totally stable and never breaks. OSX certinaly is more stable than Windows, XP or Vista, but it's not totally stable by any means.

@Jamie
To be honest, having to switch OS simply to play a game doesn't strike me as being very efficient at all.

As to your points:
I meant I've seen OSX totally and utterly freeze quite regularly when it gets overloaded, as in nothing at all works, not even force quit, unlike XP which at least allows you to try. As for fisherprice (which is a wonderful adjective), I was talking about the feel of the OS, not the look (which I'll freely admit for XP is as fisherprice as it gets). But yeah it probably stems from my relative lack of experience of OSX, just how everything feels... stodgy. I don't really know how to describe it better than that to be honest, probably just my own opinions.

In conclusion I really don't want an OS flame war, and I won't try to pretend that Windows is (on paper at least) a 'better' operating system than OSX, cos it aint, but I will argue that a) OSX isn't perfect by a long a shot and b) no matter how good technically it looks, that doesn't mean it's to everyone's tastes.

 

How convenient.

The main issue i have with OS X is that Finder doesn't seem to run at high enough priority. When things go tits up in windows, just alt-ctrl-del and boom up comes task manager. From my limited experience with OS X it can take time to finally force quit a program if its using 100% cpu...

 

There are plenty of times in Windows where I ctrl-alt-del and tell a process or application to terminate and it just sits there doing what ever it wants, alternatively there are plenty of times that doesn't happen.

The same can be said of OS X. The majority of the time I can quite happily kill/quit/forcequit anything that is causing me problems. Sometimes this is not that case and I have to hard reset.

Now we're all agreed, nothing is stable.

 

Yeah, but unlike Windows' "end task," "force quit" actually works. Not 100% of the time, but I'd say at least 95% of the time. I'd say end task works 20% of the time if I'm lucky.

I've found that when OS X gets effed up, it does it right - totally gone, hard reset required. But it's extremely rare. My MBP is sitting on a 13-day uptime, and my OSx86 thinkpad has about three weeks I think (and I think reboot that was caused by the battery dying since standby doesn't work properly on it, understandably enough). Windows tends to screw up a LOT more often in my experience, but it's often more recoverable.

It's partly luck if you ask me. Windows can be stable, and OS X can be unstable. I only have two uses for Windows now, though - gaming and Minitab (stats software, and that need will end in about two weeks along with the semster). I hardly spend any time gaming anymore, and since putting Vista on my PC, it seems less stable anyways. Some games outright refuse to run, others are flaky. I'm 99% sure it's a driver issue, but for some reason, XP won't go back on. Maybe I need to burn another copy of my backup... the discs are awfully old and scratched by now.

I will say that you tend to need more RAM in OS X than in Windows. But it also uses that memory much more efficiently (I guess it's better in Vista than XP though; I've barely touched Windows since last May when I got my MBP). Last night was really raping my system, but it's otherwise quite happy. I can (and often do) run Aperture, Photoshop CS2 (which runs under emulation... must upgrade to CS3), and Parallels all at once, each of which love RAM. In addition to everything else that I use. Azureus and Firefox are typically open, both of which are also notorious for their RAM use. Except for when I was transferring a couple hundred RAW photos over a seriously over-used USB bus and messing with a network share over a slow wireless connection, it was quite content to do my bidding.

Not sure about the earlier comment about disk fragmentation though. Maybe it's better when you keep enough free. I'm known to fill it to having a few dozen megs free, and it gets nasty then. That plus a slow notebook drive (5400rpm) can induce the beach ball more often than is really necessary. Again, combined with a slow network share and a molested USB bus. My only real problem is that there's no good OS X defragging tool that I know of - I'd love an equivalent of Diskeeper (nightly defrags of a Raptor can keep things pretty snappy in XP).


So, fairly long story short - both systems have their faults. I've been using OS X enough now to make some fairly good judgment on it. I really feel that most of the issues I've had (which are generally few and far between) stem from using a notebook rather than a desktop, specifically one with a small and relatively slow hard drive. I promise, some day, I'll get a proper Mac desktop (and "fix" my fileserver the same way I "fixed" my thinkpad) and see if that's really the case. In any case, the software is fantastic, and makes up for the hardware's shortcomings (Mac hardware is incredibly overrated).

Also consider that, while this post seems a bit whiny, I always am immediately and immensely thankful that I switched whenever I have to deal with Windows. The mere lack of Quicksilver and TextMate alone would do it. But in daily use, OS X is just so much better.

Macs aren't really more expensive, they just start at a higher price point. When you compare an equivalently specced PC, the price is about the same. Considering Macs can now run Windows, but not vice-versa, it makes little sense IMHO to get a PC.

Whatever. Time for class; there's my few cents.

 

@Bauul

There were a lot more stability issues with OS 10.1 and earlier versions, but anything post OS 10.2 has been pretty rock hard when it comes to lockups etc.

I think I've had 1 "blue screen" (kernel panic) on my MBP since I bought it last year, and I intentionally caused it.

They do happen, but they are significantly more rare than blue screens in windows (i think in vista it's a black screen now?)

@ Firehed

there is a modded version of minitab to work in OS X somewhere on the web (I used it in college that's for sure)