which do you prefer, Mac or PC? (non violent thread) (1 Viewer)

[Chocohead]

just wondering. I use both, but I find I have to spend less money on the mac .. ie, its got a half decent soundcard built in and even the under €1000 600mhz iMacs have tons of power to run anything like retro, reason, unity etc. I get better software as well.
anyone? (to avoid unneccessary explainations dont go down the '1.2ghtz is better than 600mhtz route, cus it isnt)

 

[slimer]

yeah this is something im really interested in too, whats the best platform to work on in regards to cost and performance

got a bit of money and i was gonna get a nice new souped up pc, should i be looking at a mac instead?

 

[Pantone247]

I use a Mac, mostly cause I use them in work, so I'm used to them

and the fruity colours

I think they handle large files better

BUT looking at the specs on the recent Dell machines, and what you get for your money, if I had to do it all again I think I might go PC

...god help me

 

[Chocohead]

ironically i use a dell PIII 1.6 ghtz thing at work but I dont notice much of a difference. I do notice silly things like I can only sporadically post here using it (windows is the prob there) .. ealier today i could post once and after that every time i tried I was on a merry go round of posting, straight to log in, log in, post, back to log in etc. hasnt happened me so far on the mac. probably will with this post.

Though in saying that, i know people who wouldnt swap their PCs even for a G4, which realistically kicks ass of virtually any intel machine, but everyone to their own.

Still, if the Dell was noticably faster than the iMac, i'd say it, but it doesnt seem to be.

Have you tried OSX yet? fecking deadly. Its got BSD (UNIX flavour) and an Apache web server built in. great for web development with mysql and php and all that malarky.

 

[herv]

i prefer pcs, for music at least. my experience of macs is somewhere between slim, and none. i just find pcs are more flexable, and its far easier to get freeware for them.

 

[Speed Racer]

PC's are much better value (25%-33% cheaper) for money powerwise. (Dell are v.good) Easier to find software and hardware for and have better support. Wndows 98 and ME are shit operating systems which crash alot. Windows 2000 and NT are very stable and reliable workstations.

Mac's come in lovely colours and are aesthetically more pleasing, apparently have more power, but crash like bejayzus when you multitask and push them. So you pay all of that money for a prettier box. They are a standard with Designers in the industry because they had the first drag and drop operating system, (which Bill Gates ripped off and called windows for PC). So they've been buying Macs so long that they think they are 'specially' for 'professionals'. Which is poop. A machine is a machine. Loads of the programmes run exactly the same between the two.

 

[Pantone247]

hhhhhmmmm

I think my Da's PC crashes way more then my Mac.. way more... in my experience

Mac's are popular with the Graphics crew because the OS is designed to handle large files (like the 400mb photoshop image I've crunching thru as I type), I honestly couldn't imagine any PC's I know dealing with big files like Mac's do. BUT PC's do the simpler day to day tasks a 1,000,000 times better... word processing on a Mac doesn't happen... also for all their iTHIS and iTHAT Macs don't do the internet very well at all..... things like that.

I would think that as Mac OS is built as a workhorse for large files it would do audio a treat.

But with cost and avalability of software you gotta fancy a PC

*cry*

Chocohead, I ain't tried OSX at all... I'm a bit cynical... you reckon its the bomb yeah??

 

[Chocohead]

yep, OSX is the dogs, and very stable. damned cool interface too.

I'd like to give a mac users view of a few of the responses, just from someone who uses a mac and a pc alot.

"PC's are much better value (25%-33% cheaper) for money powerwise. (Dell are v.good) Easier to find software and hardware for and have better support. Wndows 98 and ME are shit operating systems which crash alot. Windows 2000 and NT are very stable and reliable workstations. "

I have to disagree a lot. PCs were better value, but in the last few years Macs offer much more power per euro. At the minute prices start at about $800, and for that you get a machine just a usable as a reasonably priced PC. also, the PCs I have (ive about 3) have aged much much quicker thean the macs. I still use macs I bought 5 years ago (first generation PPcs) and the imac I bought three years ago can still handle and process 200mb music projects without a stutter. All my friends use windows and intel, and all are more 'powerful', but none can handle mixing down 20 stereo tracks on one go, which I can do on the 600mhz.

Easier to find software? it depends where you look. I do graphics web and music and I have as good, and in most cases better, software than anyone i deal with in the same areas using a pC .. except for web stuff obviously.

I use NT and 2000, and I have to say they should have left NT alone, cus 2000 is quite buggy ..expecially using IE and dont even think about using it as a proxy (ours at work gives a lot of shite .. we're moving back to NT)

Mac's come in lovely colours and are aesthetically more pleasing, apparently have more power, but crash like bejayzus when you multitask and push them. So you pay all of that money for a prettier box. They are a standard with Designers in the industry because they had the first drag and drop operating system, (which Bill Gates ripped off and called windows for PC). So they've been buying Macs so long that they think they are 'specially' for 'professionals'. Which is poop. A machine is a machine. Loads of the programmes run exactly the same between the two.

all i can say is, you;ve never used a mac have you?

true, a machine is a machne, but i prefer one that just does the damned job and one that i dont need a specialist to maintain. They have more power too btw. I dont think theres a wintel about to compare to the high end dual processer g4's. But thats just my opinion (sticking to the non violent theme )

also for all their iTHIS and iTHAT Macs don't do the internet very well at all..... things like that.


I do a lot of web stuff since i do nixers at home on the mac and work as a web admin using PCs and ive never had a problem using themac for surfing or developing for the web. I have had to quit and restart explorer on the PC to see changes etc though, and it gave me jip trying to post here (first i couldnt post, then i could, then i couldnt etc), but thats windows 2000.

Anyway, theres different machines for different people, and I do agree that in an office environment windows rules, but i think MS is leaving the web wide open when they produce web server sofware etc considering how insecure (and damned slow) IIS is. As creative musicians, i just ask you consider a mac at some stage as you could well be surprised that they arent like the anti-mac hype we all hear.

 

[Alex]

If you need to use Pro Tools, a guy who works for Digidesign strongly recommended us a Mac since it's much more reliable (you're going to need a g4 800 if you want to it to run smooth). We just got it and didn't try yet, I'll let you know soon.

For all the rest I think it's more or less the same, as long as you have a lot of memory and a big fast HD, I prefer PCs but just because I'm used to them.

It's true windows '98 sucks, NT rocks and Windows 2000 is between the two (but I think is not as bad as Chocomilk said )

 

[#10-7]

pc
win 98 best win xp second best win me third

network
win xp professional best win nt second best win 2000 third

 

[Chocohead]

Originally posted by Alex
(but I think is not as bad as Chocomilk said )

chocomilk??

seriously, I have to use mozilla to post in here when Im using windows 2000 (like right now)

 

[Speed Racer]

Originally posted by Chocohead

all i can say is, you;ve never used a mac have you?

I used a Mac for a year and a half while doing a degree in college, and everytime I ran Flash, Director and Photoshop together the fucker would crash. And it was the latest G4 at the time. Internet was awful on it too. I was told it was soo powerful yet it gave me so many problems. I did alot of animation 3D and 2D, maybe it just can't play animations very well or something. Photoshop alone worked very well, especially with big files, but when I had alot of work to do it fucked up, and I'd lose some work. I had nightmares with the Mac interface too, but thats just coz I came from a PC point of view. I still say Apple are over exaggerating how powerful their machines are, coz even here in work when it comes to the crunch, my PC running win 2000 works faster than the G4 in the next room.

 

[Chocohead]

thats a bit weird. I usually have flash, photoshop, itunes, ie and outlook running at the same time and i never have a crash.

I use windows 2000 here at work on a brand-spanking new Dell and though it isnt slow, it certainly doesnt offer a major speed or performance difference to the mac i have at home. In fact i find the mac works quicker and more stable. Windows has too many quirks for me. the one thats really bugging me at the minute is that I cant post when Im using explorer .. to post on here I have to open up mozilla.

I've never had any web issues either...in what way was the internet awful .. sure it just wasnt your network?

Also, was the machine being looked after properly? dud/unnecessary extensions can cause a lot of crashing and use up system memory.



everyone to their own though.

 

[Speed Racer]

Originally posted by Chocohead
thats a bit weird. I usually have flash, photoshop, itunes, ie and outlook running at the same time and i never have a crash.

I use windows 2000 here at work on a brand-spanking new Dell and though it isnt slow, it certainly doesnt offer a major speed or performance difference to the mac i have at home. In fact i find the mac works quicker and more stable. Windows has too many quirks for me. the one thats really bugging me at the minute is that I cant post when Im using explorer .. to post on here I have to open up mozilla.

I've never had any web issues either...in what way was the internet awful .. sure it just wasnt your network?

Also, was the machine being looked after properly? dud/unnecessary extensions can cause a lot of crashing and use up system memory.



everyone to their own though.

You could be right about the Network problem in college at the time. I've always used 2000 on thumped and never a problem. Maybe you've got a network problem too. I dunno. When I used a G4 on the internet it would freeze sometimes when I got Popups. Drove me nuts. Anyway yeah, each to their own.

My band are currently saving for a Pro-tools setup and are contemplating the PC or Mac issue. If the Mac handles very big audio files solidly then we might swing towards a Mac. But the money? Oh...the money.......its painful.

 

[Chocohead]

i suppose the ultimate setup would be a good machine, protools, decent monitoring system and desk, but the machine i'd say would be the least expensive bit. we do reasonable quality but badly produced material using a simple desk - computer setup outlined in a different thread. Depends where you want to go with it, i cant afford perfect but i need to get things recorded and demoed decently and i find a mac, a desk, a good stereo system and good headphones does the job as well as possible.

do you have material online?

 

[dubh in seattle]

religion is a less divisive topic

...MAC. I'm totally mac-centric 'cos when I started doin audio (adopt crusty old man voice: waaaaaay back before the turn of the century...)it was the only option. Been using the cheapest available Digidesign/ProTools models for 10+ years, and I've made a buncha records for people using the Digi001 on a G3 450, more recently a G4 450. Crashes are no longer an issue, only because I've sussed out causes for about every possible crash (and lost 1000 hrs sleep as a result!)and was trying to make old versions do things they were never meant to, and the software/hardware are finally fast enough to deal with reality. Over the years I've set up many home and studio rigs on macs, and once you've got all yer extensions set correctly, yer good to go. It really doesn't seem like nowadays one is better than the other; mac prices continue to drop, and I'd still opt for ProTools Digi001 or 002 on a G4. The main things that ever cause problems are extension conflicts (DON"T use your audio-app startup disc for internet, it's better to have a diff. startup partition for net stuff) there's also tons of unneeded extensions you should disable. But less rigamarole than windows! Let the flaming begin

 

[nine]

Originally posted by lorcanzo
pc
win 98 best win xp second best win me third

i cannot agree with that lorcanzo.i was running 98 SE for a while and it was thew worst for everything from games to music.
it eventually caused a big problem,and i brought it back to the shop to get it re-formatted and they kindly burned a copy of win 2000 for me.ever since i have had no problems.....

except this one:every time i turn the computer on,i am presented with the blue screen saying "KMODE EXCEPTION NOT HANDLED" (i think).But if i reset the computer it boots fine.So it only works when i restart it.Anyone????

 

[pete]

Originally posted by Chocohead
the one thats really bugging me at the minute is that I cant post when Im using explorer .. to post on here I have to open up mozilla.

I bet you're using IE6. It's got new privacy features that mean it won't accept cookies if the site you're browsing has no privacy policy available. And i can't get the W3C privacy policy thing working.

At the moment the only options are:

• Click Tools : Internet Options : Privacy : Edit & type 209.204.240.222 into the box and click Allow

or

• Go into the User Control Panel and change the setting for "browse board with cookies"

When I get a chance i'll get that W3C privacy shit sorted....

 

[Chocohead]

mozilla has become my browser of choice at work now ...

 

[snap-apple]

unbiased rant

ahhh the ould mac vs pc debate... at the moment i mainly use a PC in work and at home but have a Mac in work also. I think the biggest problem the Macs face is PC-user-ignorance. I'd never used one until 3 years ago and hated the feckers but now I'm familiar with them I can make a good comparison. Someone who's only ever used PC's and then sits at a Mac for the first time or even for a couple of times a week will probably never get to know the Mac properly beacuse they'll be thinking like they do when using the PC. unless you use both PC's and Macs intensively over a long period of time then you can't make a fair comparison.

i think it'd be fair to say most of ye with bad experiences on either side would be coming from the point of view of one particular machine you'd be using or a particular setup that was on the machines. i've been working in tech support for 4 years now and have seen squillions of problems on macs and pcs both, enough to tell you that if you've been using e.g. a G4 in college and not finding it works very well it is very likely to be realted to the way it was setup by the computer services people or whoever administers it.

on the hardware side, macs are based on RISC processors (reduced instruction set..?) but pcs on CISC (complex....) and from there the differences stem. on the whole macs are definitely much better at handling graphics (from a hardware and software point of view) and prolly better for audio too. this is why even the design guys in Intel and DELL use Macs to create their graphics etc. (i'm not lying). this also leads to incorrect comparisons between the processor speed - a 600MHz G4 Mac is as capable at most operations as a 2GHz PC. You cannot directly compare processor speeds from Mac to PC because they use completely different processors.

for software however if you want flexibility then the pc's yer man up to a point. The old Mac OS's weren't multitasking. this meant that for example if you had Flash, Director and Photoshop open and only one of them didn't have enough memory allocated to it or if it ran into some other problem then all the apps. would be buggered (pre Mac OS X you had to allocate memory to applications yourself in order to get full performace - the Mac could have 60MB RAM free and still crash an app. if it didn't have enough memory allocated - something most Mac users have never realised). Now with Mac OS X you have multitasking and I can tell you that if you get a guy that knows his Mac stuff (not me) he will make a new dual processor G4 with Mac OSX make any DELL mulit-GHz mutil-RAM PC running Windows XP (what i run at the mo) look fairly poor.

OS wise on PC, Windows 98 is a nightmare if you don't know how to troubleshoot it. I've said it a few times here before but if you go to start-run-msconfig on a Windows 98 PC and go to the startup tab you'll see all the processes that start when you start the machine. disabling some of these quite often solves your problems. not a week goes by that i don't have to do this for someone 'cos their Windows 98 machine was slow/crashing. i've even just got back from a job doing it for someone and their machine is running like clockwork now. (yay me)
don't use Windows NT - it is end of life with microsoft and so the computer manufacturers aren't providing support or drivers on new products. Windows 2000/XP are stable (XP is way way better if you're getting a Pentium 4 machine with 256MB RAM or more) but watch out for compatibility issues with old DOS based and other Windows 95/98 progams especially with Windows XP.

i guess at the moment if i was looking to get a machine for purely recording or design (with the odd bit of internet and word processing) it'd have to be a mac. the old compatibility issues are nearly irrelevant now. where I work (a university) there is a 70%/30% split of PC's/Mac's (over 5000 machines in total used for as wide a scope of things as you can possibly imagine) and I can't remember the last time I had a compatibility issue to deal with. however if i wanted a machines for flexibility - games, internet, music, word processing, complicated number crunching etc etc then it'd be a PC.