Mac vs. PC

<p>Some very good advice for the OP in this thread.</p>

<p>- Get the Applecare 3 year warranty. <-- good idea. It's cheap insurance and you get phone support for any question you might have for 3 years. I've had great experience with this.</p>

<p>- Get the $99 One On One <-- another good idea. Though I haven't done this, I have heard it is a very good way for PC users to transition to Mac, and get the most from their purchase.</p>

<p>I have 3 Macs that I use regularly. A mid-2009 24" iMac that I absolutely love. Use it for all my photography. It lives in my home office. A late 2006 black Macbook that goes with me to school and on trips. Wonderful machine. And a mid 2010 Mac Mini that is my music server and general web browser. It lives in the living room near my stereo, and I play all my music from it into my stereo via USB for great sound quality (with an outboard DAC). It also connects to a USB keyboard for piano practice.</p>

<p>I also have a couple PCs in my home, a tower and laptop. Wife uses these more than me (she didn't drink the Apple koolaid like I did). Though I spent more money on the iMac than I did on the PC tower, I still feel the iMac is a better value, mainly because it takes up so little room on my desk, has such a gorgeous IPS LCD panel, and runs the magnificent Apple OSX.</p>

<p>Mark - good point. Lotus 1-2-3 was not available for Mac until 1991. So the OP should opt for a PC if he is a business user.</p>

<p>But realistically, in 2011, is there anything your average Photo.net reader will run that is only available for Windows and doesn't have a good substitute on Mac? I can't think of anything. There's one big one I can think of that's Mac only, which is Aperture. Software availability is not a factor.</p>

<p>Most readers are never going to install a PCI card in their PC - people use externals for most peripherals now, even I don't have any cards in my tower except a PCIE video card and I used to run out of slots, so being able to install cards isn't much of a factor. All the commonly used external peripherals work with all the commonly used computers, so that's not a factor. Almost all CPUs in computers people actually buy that aren't ultraportables are powerful enough for almost all tasks. The selectable options on major brand computers are as close to a custom build as most people want to get.</p>

<p>So what's left that actually is a decision making factor? Personal preference, price and customer support are all I can think of. So I ended up with a Mac for my large laptop (personal preference and service outweigh the higher price) and Windows for my desktop and ultraportable (price differential for what I wanted was too high).</p>

<p>Thanks for all the responses everyone. I know it isn't going to change the level/quality of my work as an art, but it will allow me to speed up my workflow, have better viewing of my images while I edit, etc. I was more concerned with operating issues that I might have switching from one system to the other(ex. multiple external harddrives being converted to work on Mac, losing images that were edited on PC)</p>

<p>Thanks for all the input.</p>

<p>Oh, right, one thing, actually on topic:</p>

<p>There are three main hard drive formatting systems you could be dealing with. Apple has its own, which Windows will not recognize - a hard drive that's been set up to be able to be a system disk on a Mac won't work if you plug it into a Windows box. This can be solved by installing a program called Macdisk on the Windows box.</p>

<p>Windows has two formats: FAT and NTFS. If you format a large hard drive in Windows it will make it NTFS because Microsoft didn't give Windows the ability to format FAT drives over 32GB. BUT it is possible to have very large hard drives, formatted by other software, over 32GB - a Mac can format a large FAT volume, and external drive manufacturers will often preformat them in FAT. Mac and Windows can both read and write on FAT disks, no problem.</p>

<p>NTFS, which is what a Windows box will use whwnever formatting a large hard drive, is read-only on a Mac, but you can add 3rd party software to make it read/write. I've used this before: http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/</p>

<p>Michael, Congratulations. I'm a big Mac fan. There's no learning curve to be concerned about; Mac is so intuitive. I really like my 27" iMac. Enjoy and make great images. Larry</p>

It's a strange discussion to have in the week that Steve Jobs passed away. :-(

 

Apple made "personal computers" before the "IBM PC" was released. Apple, as everyone knows, adopted the

graphical user interface before PC's did. The Microsoft attempt at a GUI was extremely unreliable for many years (

until Windows 95). Apple adopted USB and other hit swappable technologies first.

 

Our entire idea of what a computer is and does has been influenced heavily by Apple and it's innovations.

 

One thing that I enjoy is that my Mac is up and ready to use in less than a minute after I power it on. PCs take a

while to "warm up". It's a small detail, but it can be important when you need something in a hurry.

 

PCs are very stable and easy to use today. You might say that they've become Mac-like. ;-)

 

Thanks for all of your great ideas, Steve! PC users and Mac users alike have benefitted from your vision and your tenacity. Well done!

<p>There's a lot of viral "PC" lore on this thread. Lotus 1-2-3 is and was irrelevant. Visicalc was first done on an Apple ][, Excel was originally a Macintosh program, just for one part of it.<br>

From the Wikipedia article on Excel:</p>

<blockquote>

<p>first version of Excel for the Mac in 30 September 1985, and the first Windows version (numbered 2.05 to line up with the Mac and bundled with a run-time Windows environment) in November 1987</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Has DOS/Windows outsold the Mac OS? Yes. Are many of those PC-only programs really all that original or cover areas not available on the Mac? Not many.</p>

 

<p>Great wandering thread. I agree with getting Applecare©. They're great. But I think after all the discussion, the decision needs to be made on more than feelings and emotion. My thought is that it's wiser to make a machine that runs software you write than it is to make software for some else's machine. Smoothness of operation is a big difference in platforms. But the answer to your question, which has already been noted, is that no system will take your work to the next level. That's your burden and yours alone. Good luck.</p>

<p>"The Microsoft attempt at a GUI was extremely unreliable for many years ( until Windows 95)."<br>

It was never particularly unreliable, except to the extent that all operating systems without memory protection are unreliable. The reliability issue was solved with NT in 1993, if you used it. Also, the least reliable OS I ever used was a dual processor Mac running OS 9 in 2001. What a piece of sh1t that was. Apple's OS didn't have memory protection until OS X. Really archaic stuff.<br>

What the early versions of Windows were was unusable. The first usable Windows version (ie one you'd actually want installed on your machine and run all the time, without bailing out to MS-DOS when you actually wanted to get something done) was 3.1 in 1992 as I recall. 3,0 was very close, but fell down accessing network drives and resources.<br>

I use OS X mainly because I prefer a Unix-based OS to Windows, and still want to run some commerical apps that aren't available for Linux. There are of course a lot of tradeoffs, no matter which of the three you pick. Frankly I'd probably be happier if any two of them died and I didn't have to worry about what OS to run. It's sort of ridiculous really. They all do fundamentally the same thing.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>What about monitor clarity? I find Macs to be far superior when needing to look at an image vs Windows?</p>

<p>They should look the same, assuming everything is set up correctly. You're probably used to PC monitors that aren't set up well.</p>