Episode 85 : Mac vs Pc
Posted on 30. May, 2009 by Ali in Podcast
What’s up with college kids with macs … they all now have macs … along with blackberries!? do they know what a mac is to buy one or it is just a hip and they will realize a mac is not something they can use!! or macs have really made their way into the young cool Kuwaiti generation??! well, listen to our show this week and you’ll know the answer.
Bashar
01. Jun, 2009
Did I chose the right time, or right episode to comment back? I’ll let you decide.
Mac Vs PC.. huh… I’ve been using PC for most of my life, and couple of years back I noticed how low the price of Mac dropped, I loved the hardware of it, and what really pushed me for it was the TextMate editor used by top programmers in the world. How can Mac not serve my purpose I said?
My first Mac experience was terrible with lots of problems like keyboard hanging, after major update things got a lot better. In general now, I am very happy with the Mac performance, stability, hardware quality, and some of the smart easy ways to do some tasks.
I’m not an Apple fan however, I just see it outperform all Windows laptop who seem to manage failing instantly. They’re slow, noisy, & crappy.
That said doesn’t make Apple’s side all clear and shiny. When people accuse Microsoft and Bill Gates of monopoly, I wonder if those guys are thinking for one moment of Apple. iPods & iPhones only work with iTunes. You can only buy through it. Apple decides what gets in and what doesn’t, and before you start developing for their device, you have to pay them! And they even take a 30% byte of all your profits. If they didnt like it or wanna compete with it, they can just ban it without any reason given. Their iPhone ofcourse is operator locked, and they also take monthly profit from each one. Yes ppl unlock it everywhere, but that doesn’t mean it’s not contractually locked!
Sometimes I feel Apple would jump at you and say “Hey, we just noticed you sold a stock with profit by calling your broker using our iPhone. We would be happy to give you 50% of the profit you made!”
The over-praised Time Machine is another disaster. I have a network attached storage of 1 TB mirrored for high availability. By default, Time Machine does not write to NAS devices, I had to activate it. And even then, I keep getting errors I could never get it to work even after I gave full admin permissions. If it can write, Time Machine simply assumes it can consume all your drive or volume storage until it gets full. You cannot set it to use maximum size of say 200 GB only! They assume a dedicated storage for their backup. They want you to buy their external storage device. I ended up buying another external device (not apple) to do the Time Machine backup. Data is valuable, what can you do?
As for keeping it simple. Yes, Apple keeps things over simple that you cant configure some simple things, like the Time Machine. They’re also silly sometimes. Take keyboard layout for instance. The distribution of all keystrokes is the result of years of research and study, spreading keys according to their use frequency. So why on earth would the Enter button be a File Rename command rather than file open? To do file open, its Command + Down Or Command + O. Whats ten times more common, opening file or renaming it?
As for software lacking, I personally did not feel it at all. Most software I need are available or have alternatives. So far if things dont change, my next laptop is definitely a Mac as well. Not cause I’m a fan, but cause it’s the best laptop I used so far. Windows laptops are also deteriorating in quality not improving. I got Toshiba for both of my brothers, they both seem unhappy, one even regretting.
Bashar
01. Jun, 2009
Ooops… You can do that as a guest post if you like
Musaed
03. Jun, 2009
as always Bashar, great insight
Q8GEEK
06. Jun, 2009
Basher,
What you said was great and all, but the “Windows laptops are also deteriorating in quality not improving” is something I’ll have to disagree with you…
Yes, the Microsoft’s improvement curve since dark ages till probably 2003 was a huge mess… Things started to improve a bit (unnoticed) in the 2003~2005 period…
Now, when Steve Balmer took control of Microsoft, you REALLY gotta hand it to him and how he did improve things…
.NET framework now works on both Windows and Linux (using mono)… Which means, you can write a program there and run it here (and the other way around) without mentionable issues…
Windows7, I bash Windows Vista but I love Windows7… I’m running virtual machines on it (Microsoft Virtual PC), Folding@Home, BattleField Heros, Team Fortress 2, Visual Studio 2008 Express, Photoshop and Lightroom, and a LOT of softwares… Literally, I’ve been abusing it and it never crash so far… I actually wanna crash it but I couldn’t so far (Trying the normal-user way… Not going to install malwares and all) and it’s still in RC stage… Bad thing I don’t have good specs or I would’ve ran Crysis…
They’re really opening up more for developers… Providing closed standars to public so they could write more software whether they’re free or not…
I’m a Microsoft Fanboy, Yes… But I respect every single OS because, well, I’ve studied how hard to make a multitasking OS… And it’s almost rocket science… That is why I respect Mac OS SUCKS for being an OS… Nothing more… Nothing less…
The only 2 reasons I can come up with to understand why people would buy Mac are:
a) Whether they need the multimedia publishing softwares which they’re superior to other softwares in PC
b) They just want to spend ALOT of money on something hip’n'cool… Then again, Mac isn’t so special anymore… Alienware will steal its thunder at any given time and place
Note that I avoided discussing Linux because, well, it’s basically for developers…
Boy, I wrote too much as a comment… I should reward myself with cheezburger
Musaed
10. Jun, 2009
we’re buying