[Closed] The poll about Macs and PCs

Apologies. I've just re-read my post and realised how dull it all sounds 😕

the title's misleading too, but never mind 🙂

I had to lure you in somehow 😆

Apologies. I've just re-read my post and realised how dull it all sounds

don't worry about sounding a bit dull, it'll become 2nd nature in no time at all 😉

Some good stuff here....

http://www.apple.com/in/pro/tips/

I thought as a newbie to Macs who has already had "issues" I would be a refreshing change to the fan-boys. You've got to try and break these toys you know. I seem to have succeeded, which is actually a great shame

Move along, nothing more to see here 🙂

I found that quite valuable as someone who is thinking of changing.
Do you have an ipodphone or an ipodpad? Do you find that having a mac offers you any more integration (cool stuffs) than with a PC?

I bought a 27in iMac on Saturday. I've been saving 7-8 months for it.

Firstly, 100% agreement on the trackpad. I like pads on laptops anyway, so this was a no brainer, and it's brilliant.

Secondly, unless you REALLY need a wireless keyboard, go for the full size wired one. It's nicer to use and has arrow keys, a seperate delete key and 2 USB ports in it. Handy. AND I got a refund on the wireless one.

Thirdly, I (i)honestly(/i) thought after many years on a PC that it would take weeks/months/forever to get used to the Apple way of doing stuff.
I was sitting on the Mac setting everything up, with my (Pretty decent) laptop behind me. After a short time on the Mac, turning round to use the laptop was like stepping back in time to a ZX81. It's a massive difference in speed and ease of use. And the screen is a revelation.

What went wrong?
It took me AGES to work out that the menu bar doesn't always sit in the window of the program you're using.... It sits at the top of the screen, seperately. That flummoxed me in iTunes for quite a while!

I'm the keyboard shortcut king. Some of them are quite different, but mostly they make sense and are easy to google.

Password! Every time I left it alone for 2 minutes, I had to put the password in again! Arrggghh! Took me quite a while to find how to change that setting!

On the whole, after a days' use, I was pretty much up to speed. It's a LOT slicker and more intuative IMO.... And I hope mI never have to use a mouse again! 🙂

Do you have an ipodphone or an ipodpad?

I have an iPhone and there is no doubt that it work betters with a Mac than a PC. On my old XP PC I struggled to get the photos off the iPhone. Both Windows image transfer and Picasa crashed when trying to import. As such I very nervously had 600 odd pics on my phone that I couldn't transfer and was in constant fear of losing them. With the iMac and iPhoto I plugged in the phone and the rest was a doddle.

I went for a wireless keyboard BTW. Part of the move to Mac was a cosmetic one and I didn't want wires. I thought I'd miss a numeric keypad but so far so good. I have a USB extension cable gaffer taped under my desk as my USB "hub".

Totally agree with PP about the menu bar. I think this is Mac's achilles heel. It seems so counter-intuitive that the menu bar bears no relation to where the program you are running is located on your desktop. I'm getting used to it...slowly.

PP, do you not find the 27" Mac a monster? That's a big old screen

Yeah, it's big. But I knew I'd regret not getting the big one (Fnarr-Fnarr!) Best thing is that you can have 2/3 windows open all on the same screen. I've worked with 2 screens before, but this is better. 🙂
I doesn't look that big until you sit in front of it, TBH.... 🙂

Made the leap to but won't be getting my Mac Book until beginning of next month.

I find multiple desktops means I don't need to have so many windows on the same screen and then I can flick from one to another easily. I love the fact I can drag locally running Skype into a desktop where I'm accessing a remote computer. Very convenient.

Excuse the encroachment in to this Mac love in.

I am under pressure from a daughter, who looks like she is heading down the art / design route in collage, to get a mac of some sort. She wants to get in to photoshop and no doubt other stuff that will also be expensive.

If we have a joint windows and mac household can you just transport stuff between computers on memory sticks. i.e. photos or are they completely different beasts.

uwe-r - use dropbox, seamless and a good way of backign up stuff, to boot.

I agree about iphoto - gave up trying to set up a single library that multiple user logins could access from the same mac.

The solution was to get divorced - although this might be a bit extreme for you

3. Decide if you can be bothered to re-learn an OS.

+1.
The mrs keeps telling me how she hates the iMac because it doesn't do what she wants, but she resolutely refuses to learn anything about how OSX works 😐

re the iPhoto issue. I got it working across multiple accounts, but its not straightforward at all, some command line fettling is required, I'll have a look to see if I can find the tutorial i used

can you just transport stuff between computers on memory sticks

Yes. The only thing to be aware of is that whilst the files will copy from PC to Mac with no problem at all (I just connected my machines to the same network), metadata may not. So, if you have a load of pictures in, for example, Picasa, that all have tags or faces assigned, they will not transfer by default (and may not do at all).

Do take heed of my warning with iPhoto. It is a lovely piece of software to use but fundamentally flawed in how it handles photo libraries. Picasa does work on a Mac but without the fab navigation you get using a Magic Trackpad in iPhoto.

uwe-r - Member
Excuse the encroachment in to this Mac love in.

If we have a joint windows and mac household can you just transport stuff between computers on memory sticks. i.e. photos or are they completely different beasts.

Yes, you can. Both OSs understand all the common file formats, or they would be useless. Surely easier to just transfer stuff over your home network though assuming you use wifi at home?

I did the jump a few years back, picked up a Powerbook G4 about 6 years ago, i boxed the Mac about 2 years back as the battery had died, the "Y" key has fallen off and it was starting to fall behind in the spec's.

I went back to PC, 2 laptops later which have died i dug out the mac, yes i can't currently connect my iPhone, but as a web surfer its great, and has out lived 2 PC's, i wish i had not bothered getting the other laptops and invested in a new mac, but ive learnt the lesson, going to hold out with the dying mac and get a new mac mini to replace it with next year.

some command line fettling is required

That's the conclusion I'm coming to following my research. I'm not afraid of getting my hands dirty with computers, but one of the reasons for moving to a Mac was that I hoped I would not have to. As a Mac newbie I'm not (yet) up for getting into command line stuff. I'd still appreciate having a look at the tutorial though.

Uwe-r

Yes you can move files between Mac's and PC's with out any issue or problems using a memory stick. You can also connect them to the same network wirelessly to share files or use dropbox as wwaswas suggests. Its free and great to ensure you have hassle free backup

Use dropbox all the time to keep all my work and home computers in sync.

There is really very little difference between osx and windows 7. I've got osx at work and windows at home and there are parts of both that I prefer.

So I've installed cinch on my mac to give me aero snap from windows and a similar program to give me expose on my windows machine.

The only thing with a mac is that you can't buy a cheap one. Most people who are mac vs pc are comparing a 5 year old £400 pc with a brand new £1200 mac. There is never going to be any competition there.

My approach is simple - if someone else is buying I'll have a mac (ie. work can't under spec it too much or buy a low quality one), if I'm buying it'll be s pc.

this is the tutorial i used ( i think, its certainly similar) you only have to do it once, and I've never had trouble with is since setting it up a year or so ago.

[url= http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050904072808460 ]linky[/url]

Most people who are mac vs pc are comparing a 5 year old £400 pc with a brand new £1200 mac

I think you're probably right. In my case though I got a new home iMac at the same time as a new work Win 7 laptop. It put me in quite a good position to compare apples with apples (pun intended).

Cost was the main reason I put off buying a Mac for so long

Thanks Warton. I have seen that article before, but was a bit worried about getting into terminal stuff so soon. Will it also work across multiple devices? I.e. can the same library be viewed/edited on an iPad for example?

Having a shared library is not the holy grail here. The main thing I'm trying to achieve is for photos added by one user to appear in another user's library with minimal (read: no) effort. For example I take some photos of the kids and import them into my iPhoto library. When my wife logs on she sees them in her library. Picasa does this so easily that I'm seriously thinking of using that instead.

work Win 7 laptop

Ah, but that's my point, that's the wrong way round to compare it. You get rubbish pc's, but you don't get rubbish macs. If work haven't spent enough money or have it so locked down that you can't tweak the settings and programs to your liking then the mac that cost more and and you have control of will win hands down.

The only thing with a mac is that you can't buy a cheap one. Most people who are mac vs pc are comparing a 5 year old £400 pc with a brand new £1200 mac. There is never going to be any competition there.

And herein lies the problem, for the mostpart Apple hardware is still very expensive...

Sent from my Quad Core Hackintosh PC that's as fast as a current i5 iMac and cost me about £300 to build yet I'm still running OSX natively on it!

😉

Apple hardware is still very expensive...

Yep, and it looks it too. That's the big appeal 🙂

Finder is still absolutely shockingly shit. Tries to be too minimal and ends up removing functionality.

* owner of MBP and Mini *

I don't see the appeal on Macs. I could just build a PC which is higher spec than a Mac and install iOS on it. Then it would be superior in everyway.

Finder is still absolutely shockingly shit. Tries to be too minimal and ends up removing functionality.

I use quicksilver. Ctrl + space, type what you want to find, be it a file or software and it brings it up, then you can perform actions on what you've found

I'm on a hackintosh here, does that count as being in both camps?

PlopNofear - I doubt you'll be installing iOS on your PC... OSX perhaps?

PlopNofear, if you don't see the appeal of the exceptionally nice design of a Mac compared to a PC, then you're quite right to build a higher spec PC for less money. I've yet to see ANY PC/laptop running windows that looks as good as an iMac. Very subjective stuff.

It's like oohing over Mercedes as opposed to Ford. Except that Mercedes owners whilst appreciating their cars don't go around insisting everyone should buy one, cos they appreciate that not everyone can afford it or wants to spend that much cash... 🙂 And we live happily side by side.

So you purely buy a Mac because it looks nice?

[i]So you purely buy a Mac because it looks nice? [/i]

People buy bikes on the same basis 🙂

So you purely buy a Mac because it looks nice?

If you translate 'looks nice' into 'solidly made' then it's not as crazy. Macs are very well built. The inside of my mac pro at work is beautiful, certainly a lot nicer than the mess of zip tied cables in my windows machine.

If you look at the mac book air there is no windows laptop top that matches it on the combination of spec, price and build quality.

Having carried my iMac through Reading on Saturday, I can confirm that they are very solid. Very solid indeed. That hurt that did!

she resolutely refuses to learn anything about how OSX works

To be fair, resolutely refusing to learn anything about how PCs work is at the root of many people's problems with PCs. That and of course the seemingly random grab-bag of often shoddy hardware that Apple usually manages to spare its users from.

So you purely buy a Mac because it looks nice?

I'm a PC user but to me that's as good a reason as any.

To be fair, resolutely refusing to learn anything about how PCs work is at the root of many people's problems with PCs.

Just don't me started about the person at work who insisted macs were much more intuitive to use and that they had to buy themselves a macbook pro only to end up asking me how to do things.

Just don't me started about the person at work who insisted macs were much more intuitive to use and that they had to buy themselves a macbook pro only to end up asking me how to do things.

That's just stupidity, nothing to do with the Mac. All you have to do is Google it. Not hard.....

@ PP, iMac's ain't that heavy, you want to try carrying a Mac Pro far... They might as well be a solid billet of Aluminium, almost 30kg's bare!!!

Anyway... People buy Mac's for all sorts of reasons. Some purely for aesthetics, some cos they need to for using specific software, some cos they prefer the way they work etc etc. Any reason is valid in its own right, just that for many of us who don't really care what a computer looks like cos (in my case) it sits in the corner of my bedroom under a desk, Mac hardware is pretty expensive. It is undoubtedly exceptionally well made, but I needed a lot of performance quite cheaply, and have to use OSX cos I need it for software that I use (I also have another PC running windows too). That's the main reason I eventually just built myself a Hackintosh and learnt a lot more about how OSX works to boot... Would have loved a Mac Pro, but £2k for even a base version that's no faster than the machine I built for £300!

All you have to do is Google it. Not hard.....

On a daily basis I find myself thinking this. Unfortunately every indication from the sample I have available to me is that this is not true and it is in fact really hard.

So you purely buy a Mac because it looks nice?

I built my hackintosh, as I'm learning how the 'inner workings' of OSX all fit together.

I find it more intuitive and easier to use than Win, which is strange, considering I'm fairly tech-savy about Windows stuff.

I got a Macbook Air a couple of weeks ago, 'cos I wanted one and I could

I love it. Works very well, nice and light, looks so, so nice.

Using Aperture 3 rather than iPhoto. Taking a bit of getting used to, but getting used to it very, very quickly

Piedi, what does Aperture do that iPhoto can't? I looked at the "headline" features on the App Store and couldn't see much if any difference.

This has some of the differences shown

http://www.apple.com/aperture/iphoto-to-aperture/

I don't see the appeal on Macs. I could just build a PC which is higher spec than a Mac and install iOS on it. Then it would be superior in everyway.

You could build a computer, a lot of people - me included - cannot, or are not confident to do so. And then once you'd done it, it still wouldn't be a Mac. I remember when I had a Dell, when something went wrong and I looked for answers, there would always be discussion about what motherboard it had, what sort of bus, what other hardware configuration I had. A Mac is a Mac - and that's a lot of variables eliminated when you look for problems. And anyway - unless you're very skilled at metalwork, I din't see you building an enclosure like a MacBook.

One of the reasons I originally went for a Mac was that I could then use all the UNIX commands I'd learned doing my thesis work in order to tinker, whereas DOS was a hidden code.

Aperture - that link is a good list of the main differences. Aperture is way more powerful, and quite cheap on the App Store. Also, using Aperture allows you to use a bunch of plugins (Photomatix HDR, Nik Software, Noise Ninja, etc) for more powerful editing.

The main reason I'm building a hackintosh is that Microsoft seem to have really jumped the shark since XP, and as snow leopard is lots cheaper than Win 7 it seems like the right thing to do. I would have though there was an OSX version of picasa though? Please?

^Oliverd not sure what you mean about Microsoft jumping the shark, Windows 7 is miles ahead of XP. I even prefer Vista to XP, I'm one of the few people who seemed to get along fine with it.

PP, do you not find the 27" Mac a monster? That's a big old screen

I had a "practical interview" using a 27" iMac for Final Cut and it was so nice for that sort of thing. Loads of screen space stops big projects from getting cluttered. Going back home and using my 20" monitor was horrible 😆

^Oliverd not sure what you mean about Microsoft jumping the shark, Windows 7 is miles ahead of XP. I even prefer Vista to XP, I'm one of the few people who seemed to get along fine with it.

I just find it horrendous I just want a nice, easy to navigate file structure and control panel accessed from the desktop. Oh and not having everyting in the hardrive duplicated to fill up my SSD would be nice too. It's total bloatware, reminds me of prog rock.

Doesn't take much to put a shortcut to the control panel on the desktop or task bar, does it? Plus the file structure is very simple. Documents -> your files...

Not sure what you mean about having everything duplicated though.

One of the reasons I originally went for a Mac was that I could then use all the UNIX commands I'd learned doing my thesis work in order to tinker, whereas DOS was a hidden code

Could've gone for Linux..?

Not sure what you mean about having everything duplicated though.

Oh that one.. yeah it's not ideal, but I emptied mine out a few times.

Oh and not having everyting in the hardrive duplicated to fill up my SSD would be nice too.

The WinSxS folder is the only location that the component is found on the system, all other instances of the files that you see on the system are “projected” by hard linking from the component store. Let me repeat that last point – [b]there is only one instance (or full data copy) of each version of each file in the OS[/b], and that instance is located in the WinSxS folder.

I don't understand

I don't want to any more. That's why I'm playing hackintosh.

PlopNofear - Member
So you purely buy a Mac because it looks nice?

Well I now have an MacBook Pro bought in late 2009 using a student discount. I think with student discounts though you really save a lot of money on the software, not so much on hardware but it all helps.

I was really frustrated the first month which took a lot of shine out of the purchase, but that was me getting used to the OS again. I used a Mac at Uni in 1989 and in my first job from 92 - 96.

I was gutted that using a video camera can be dire - my camera "didn't work" and you have to do all sorts of nonsense to get sound to work even on just the basic software. This got me really down, as I had bought the Mac thinking that it was meant to be good at media and video and stuff, but it just isn't and the Apple helpline was hopeless in telling me how to get video to work.

Good things are that it is seriously fast to switch on, and I have never had a blue screen of death.

iTunes is just horrible horrible, but its not the end of the world.

I just wish I had a budget to but the MacBook with a larger screen, as it can be a bit frustrating at times say reading a pdf. I don't have the budget to buy a large screen for when I am home.

I wanted to buy something that would last a long time. It seems great for the basics, and so far does not seem to be slowing down as many PCs do over time.

Overall I am very happy, apart from a few niggles on various bits of software.

Simon have you tried Songbird? I thought it was much nicer than iTunes. There was another one I tried as well but can't remember what it's called. Nice minimalistic layout.

I havent tried it but I normally try not to load too many apps onto the laptop.

Also, in my humble opinion, when I had my laptop, I bought a Zen tiny little player, and it just blew the ipod out of the water in terms of sound quality. To be honest, people rave about the ipods, but to my ears they sound tinny and terrible and I feel we have gone backwards in sound quality.

I remember my first sony walkman with tapes, and maybe I am wrong, but that was just awesome (minus the hiss) compared to digital music today.

Or maybe I am just grumpy and wrong!

I think you can up the quality of the recordings but that is no use now that I have done all my CDs!

Nah it's quite well known that iPods don't have the best sound quality. Lack of a customisable graphic EQ is really bad as well. Not sure if newer models have this (I only have an old mini) but I would hope so.

Just bought myself a MB air to replace a windows laptop that broke. Lion with the touch stuff and a big trackpad is really very good (get better touch tool though, apple firmware is shit), but the best thing is the size and the weight. All my other machines run Linux, but I think a laptop needs to be designed a bit more thoughtfully.

The only other mac i've had was an 8-core mac pro that cost the thick end of 10k a few years ago, which ended up running red hat linux.

i've got a fancy mac and a fancy pc, cos i can and I am great.