Its white, it looks pretty good and Apple people buy them cus there the sort of people that have money to burn, thats the impression i got from working in the Apple related trade.

Personally, i hated my experience with them, after 6 months i still preferred PC for everything i do. The added bonus is less Virus/Spyware or should i say hardly existent on the Mac as most of that stuff is aimed at the PC and Windows.

The OS looks quite tasty as well, but its annoying to use when you have been using PCs for 15 or so years.

Last week while I was in Denver a couple of friends and I were in the local shopping mall and called in to both the Apple and Microsoft stores for a play with the latest gadgetry.

I hate the Apple phenomenon, where people run out and buy the latest Apple gear because its new and has an apple on it. I really wanted to hate the Apple stuff, I was looking for holes to pick in it. Ive got to admit, the only thing wrong with it is a somewhat inflated price. In so far as I could tell from a brief play the Apple kit does everything it says its going to and looks good while it does it.

In contrast the M$ software had some really good ideas (most of which Im pretty certain were done by Linux, MacOS or both some years before), most of which dont quite work as advertised.


Id still rather spend half the price on a machine including exactly the specs I want with Linux on it, MacOS isnt even close to better than Linux enough to justify the extra outlay. But take Linux out of the equation and assume I actually have the money for a Mac and Id be down the Apple store like a shot.

When I was a student at uni I volunteered for some tests that students were doing in terms of "Human Computer Interface" etc. Basically this meant they got me to perform the same task in Windows and on a Mac. I have to admit at the end of the tests I was always pleasantly surprised by the ease of use of the Mac and how straight forward things were. Considering they were my first experiences of an OS different to Windows, it is rather intuitive

Can you give some examples of the software being better? As far as I can see all the industry standard apps (i.e. Adobe CS, Quark, etc) are available on PC and work exactly the same.

Adobe CS...
Short cut keys are easier and not so clunky, where for some reason they are 4/5 keys on PC they are 2/3 on the mac.
Hardware acceleration options just work better.

My only experiences of Macs are that they are a bit different for the sake of being different

General response from people who have glanced at Macs.
Not different to be different, just have more ability to design and produce better more rich interfaces. You should see some of the iPad Apps. I do not want an ipad but the apps rolling out are not only very very useable and well designed they just look very lush doing so.

and I wouldnt want to spend the time learning the interface for a marginal productivity difference in the OS.

Since going to a mac at work I am LEAST 3 times faster.

Can you give some examples of the software being better? As far as I can see all the industry standard apps (i.e. Adobe CS, Quark, etc) are available on PC and work exactly the same.

Adobe CS...
Short cut keys are easier and not so clunky, where for some reason they are 4/5 keys on PC they are 2/3 on the mac.
Hardware acceleration options just work better.

My only experiences of Macs are that they are a bit different for the sake of being different

General response from people who have glanced at Macs.
Not different to be different, just have more ability to design and produce better more rich interfaces. You should see some of the iPad Apps. I do not want an ipad but the apps rolling out are not only very very useable and well designed they just look very lush doing so.

Pressing space bar on any file like a pdf and open it up to quick read or preview it is something the PC very much lacks, very easy to find and preview files that you hunting for, search is a lot faster and simply due to the nature of the design and same spec machines as a pc the Mac will boot faster and an app will load faster.
One of the guys at work has a faster PC then the mac I am on in every aspect yet I boot mine after his and I am up and running before him. Same apps boot faster and run smoother.

 The whole single mouse button thing for instance, theres no way you can make a single button design more efficient than a dual-button design for one handed operation

Shows your out the loop by quite a few years mate, lol.
The mac mice have both a right and left click and have done so for some time. PC mice work on them (I use a logitech at work) and have done for some time.

In Windows you can just go to the C:\Windows\Fonts folder and copy it, but it seems to me Apple dont like you to change their OS at all and make it very difficult to do simple tasks like this, they just want you to run applications and browse the web, not do any kind of maintenance or tweaking. I had to go and get a number of programs and read countless guides to get the font files and then to convert them into what I would consider a standard format.

Again, When was the last time you used a mac mate lol.
I dragged and dropped a font in the font folder on the mac today - installed and was away. The preview was better.

In terms of the hardware/software marriage, I work from home and have my computer running literally 24/7. The only time I reboot is for software updates and it has been running for months without a crash - the last one I can even remember being caused by a graphics driver glitch. Can you Mac owners honestly say that or is the OS still as buggy as it used to be? You can defend the quality of the Mac hardware/software all you want, but Mac users that accuse PCs/Windows of being more prone to crashes because the end user doesnt know what hes doing or manufacturers dont release quality drivers, thats rather unfair. Windows 7 is pretty faultless in terms of stability. At the end of the day for me, Id rather have a custom spec, high peformance PC and my nice top end Dell 24" screen which altogether probably cost me less than £800 new, than go out and pay the rediculous prices for shiny Apple hardware which I cant change or upgrade as necessary, when for my day to day work there is no perceivable software usability difference. In fact, I couldnt do my job with just a Mac because for web compatibility I need to use a range of browsers - all of which are available on PC including the Mac equivalents.

Bar idiot fan boys mac users actually do not diss PC users, often they use pcs, play games on (still the best option by a mile)
Like was said - stack up a same spec mac vs PC and there is not that much of a price difference.
Mac go Hi end market and nothing else, look for Hi end PC and the prices are very similar.

You forget I do Web as well mate and I have IE running on my mac from wine and the all the other browsers installed as well. Very easy to duel boot windows Out of the box on a mac as well.

Ill just point out that despite my ramblings Im not an Apple hater or anything like that, each to their own and I think the iPhone is very good for what it does - but nothing they make is the be all and end all - I just cant stand the elitist fanboy attitude of some Apple users that their products are automatically better than everyone elses (definitely not suggesting that is you Goblin, despite me countering mostly your points).

But it is interesting that due to SOME Idiot apple fan boy attitude and Apples self centered arrogance actual apple products good or bad just get a bad rep from people who not actually know much about them just because of what they hear and see about Apple the company and the fanbase mania that comes with them.
I mention Iphone in threads and before even thinking people have gone off on the apple rip route not actually reading much into what was said. Just common reactions.

I thought Mac was a sh*tstorm till I actually started using it and seeing it.
With the mac sleep how it is on a macbook pro and the nature of the hardware and OS I barley need to fully shut down. Open the laptop and its on and I am away.

Quote from: Clockd 0Ne

Can you give some examples of the software being better? As far as I can see all the industry standard apps (i.e. Adobe CS, Quark, etc) are available on PC and work exactly the same.

Coda (text editor) and Transmit (FTP), both from Panic software.
Versions (SVN)
Pixelmator (if you dont want to spend millions on Photoshop)
iMovie/iPhoto
Omnifocus/Omnigraffle
Delicious Library

Is coda better than text pad?
Who uses SVN outside of their IDE ? (Ie, were all using subclipse inside eclipse).
If you dont want to spend millions on photoshop - in your first post you said you must compare side by side otherwise a price comparison is unfair.

Dont know what the others are.

Sounds like youve picked a pretty obscure list of software.

Is coda better than text pad?

Yes. Also better than Ultraedit which I used on Windows for many years.

Who uses SVN outside of their IDE ? (Ie, were all using subclipse inside eclipse).

I rarely do, but for heavy lifting stuff a dedicated program is a no brainer.

If you dont want to spend millions on photoshop - in your first post you said you must compare side by side otherwise a price comparison is unfair.

Its an example of a different pixel pushing program that is also beautifully designed. Amazingly enough, you can also get Photoshop on Mac.

Dont know what the others are.

iMovie - Video editing for normal people. Miles ahead of Windows Movie Maker.
iPhoto - Photo management. Miles ahead of anything, including Picasa
Omnifocus - GTD app.
Omnigraffle - Visio type thing. But good.
Delicious Library - for tracking all your media collection (both digital and hard copy). Nothing like it on Windows that I have seen.

Sounds like youve picked a pretty obscure list of software.

Only if youre not a Mac user.

Coda (text editor) and Transmit (FTP), both from Panic software.
Versions (SVN)
Pixelmator (if you dont want to spend millions on Photoshop) - GIMP?
iMovie/iPhoto
Omnifocus/Omnigraffle
Delicious Library
Im with Sam here. A text editor and FTP software are hardly great examples (TextPad is awesome in Windows btw). There are Windows equivalents for SVN Im sure.You cant tell me Photoshop is any better on a Mac than a PC for instance. Liam, keyboard shortcuts dont count at all when you can easily change them in the preferences, they are hardly good examples of making the program 3x more usable

Examples of "different for the sake of it"?
The examples I used such as the cursor interface, the fonts, filesystem, etc. Theres no need for a lot of these things to be different (or at least to lack support for inter-platform compatibility). Microsoft manage it pretty well.

My Magic Mouse and MBP trackpad have zero buttons, yet I can still left click, right click, middle click, scroll in any direction, use 2, 3 and 4 finger gestures, move back and forward in Finder and browsers, rotate images. Macs support as many buttons as your mouse has.
Well obviously its moved on now, but they could easily make those real buttons, so why not?

Main Drive > Library > Fonts. Majority are in TTF format. Just because you dont know where something is does not make it hard. You could also have used the included Font Book app to find the ones you wanted.
That wasnt the main problem, it wasnt too hard to discover where the font library was. The main problem was getting it off the Mac - the font being Zapfino if youre interested - onto a PC and in a working format (converted to TTF), hence spending an hour reading guides. Then I had to use Yousendit to transfer the file as I couldnt simply copy it over the network.

You are more likely to get duff drivers on Windows purely because of the number of configurations possible, but the situation is much improved from XP.
Again, not arguing this point, but the inference could be taken here that PCs are inherently more unstable, which simply isnt the case.

Id rather have the time. I cant be arsed messing around with hardware these days.
Mesh, Dell, Alienware, etc? Speccing your own machine doesnt necessarily mean doing your own build. You can also lose the crap you dont want and save a bit of money over the Apple specs I would think?

Windows in a VM does the same. You, however, cannot test the same browsers as a Mac uses as they do have rendering differences to their Windows versions.
True enough, but then why would I want to spend the time configuring a virtual machine with Windows to render sites in the worlds most used browser, when I can cater to the 5% of Mac Safari users rendering issues with good CSS knowledge and browsershots.org? Seems like a step backwards in your time saving there


I will admit Ive not used a Mac properly in many years other than a play in the Apple store, so I know Im out of the loop, but these are valid points Im probably not alone in the mindset of, which Im glad to see you two answering.