Mac vs PC

chrisaonabike

daviesee wrote:

ChrisAOnABike wrote:

I can't justify 2-3k for a desktop PC when I really only need to spend less than half that much.

Phht. Imagine basing a purchase purely on need. It's getting what you want that counts!

Well, when I get my Hackintosh working on my old 'puter, I'll have something to compare with. Who knows, I could become a raving Mac evangelist.

tiredofwhiners

ChrisAOnABike wrote:

I can't justify 2-3k for a desktop PC when I really only need to spend less than half that much.

Use the same justification you use when buying a bike

VTech

I understand whats being said, the simple fact is that Mac's are outrageously overpriced.
A 16gb upgrade on the MBP was around £1200 at the same time I could get it for less than £200 online.
I have just purchased 16gb for £68 !!!!

Daz555

jamin100 wrote:

You also fail to mention that your £1000 mac will probably still be worth £300-£400 in 4-5 years time. Your £1000 PC wont..

Really? £400 for an old piece of tin?

Blimey these fanbois will chuck their money at anything.

tiredofwhiners

VTech wrote:

the simple fact is that Mac's are outrageously overpriced.

No, by definition something is overpriced if it doesn't sell. Macs are always in short supply so by any rational definition, they are priced competitively. The real 'fact' is that you don't agree with the price and think that your view has some bearing on reality. No doubt there are hundreds of Mac users out there who could educate you on the 'outrageously overpriced' bike and gear you claim is good value

People buy second hand Macs because they are cheaper than new ones and still perform well. People avoid second hand PC's like the veritable plague.

thegreatdivide

As I stated on another page - I've essentially purchased an identically spec’d Dell laptop to the top of the range Powerbook – it’s even built inside a big slab of s3xy aluminium. It was a grand cheaper than said Powerbook. The only difference is the OS and Retina display, however the Dell is full HD and edge to edge. So is it worth paying an extra grand for Apple’s OS (which stops you getting a virus when you've been on the mucky websites) and a few more pixels? Is it feck. I bought a mountain bike, a new carbon crankset, a Garmin 800 and some leather riding gloves with my change

The old laptop is about to be stripped down to just a bare hard drive and Windows 7 and it’ll run Traktor and just Traktor – it’ll do the job admirably until it eventually dies of old age.

VTech

tiredofwhiners wrote:

VTech wrote:

the simple fact is that Mac's are outrageously overpriced.

No, by definition something is overpriced if it doesn't sell. Macs are always in short supply so by any rational definition, they are priced competitively. The real 'fact' is that you don't agree with the price and think that your view has some bearing on reality. No doubt there are hundreds of Mac users out there who could educate you on the 'outrageously overpriced' bike and gear you claim is good value

People buy second hand Macs because they are cheaper than new ones and still perform well. People avoid second hand PC's like the veritable plague.

Overpriced can mean when something is priced above competitive items or equivalent items (this in the general term of computer equipment).
I stand by the fact that apple products are overpriced and they live off hysteria in the most as not many users use them to their potential (I use mine hard).
You won't go Into any apple store and view an item thinking "wow, that's a bargain" as inevitably it will be cheaper to buy similar elsewhere.
I am a mac fan, I like the fact that the items work, they work well and as I can claim almost everything back it means the cost isn't much am issue.

Also, bringing in the fact I think bike ow era are taken advantage of is an odd thing to say as most Mac ow era are aware of the fact they pay over the odds for the equipment, my comments were due to bike owners in general being oblivious to it.

Charging extortionate prices for things is something I see on a daily basis, I'm certainly not new to this concept.
I purchased 8 pieces of carbon today for nearly £45000 !

VTech

thegreatdivide wrote:

As I stated on another page - I've essentially purchased an identically spec’d Dell laptop to the top of the range Powerbook – it’s even built inside a big slab of s3xy aluminium. It was a grand cheaper than said Powerbook. The only difference is the OS and Retina display, however the Dell is full HD and edge to edge. So is it worth paying an extra grand for Apple’s OS (which stops you getting a virus when you've been on the mucky websites) and a few more pixels? Is it feck. I bought a mountain bike, a new carbon crankset, a Garmin 800 and some leather riding gloves with my change

The old laptop is about to be stripped down to just a bare hard drive and Windows 7 and it’ll run Traktor and just Traktor – it’ll do the job admirably until it eventually dies of old age.

100% right. As I have said, the mac being overpriced makes it bad value unless your really using it to its potential which in 99% of the time it isn't.
The del laptops are top the tree and should t be compared to the likes of Sony vaio etc.

chrisaonabike

tiredofwhiners wrote:

People buy second hand Macs because they are cheaper than new ones and still perform well.

Not disputing this in general, since I have significant experience of exactly one Mac.

However, that one Mac is a iMac, about 4 years old, and it is appallingly slow. I do a bit of photo editing on it (Elements 10 or 11), a bit of internet, and it's just horrendous. I'm not talking, btw, of attempting to load a 70 MB TIFF and expecting it to be instant - little JPGs is all I'm talking about here.

It belongs to a family whose computer housekeeping skills are a bit rudimentary, admittedly, but whereas I would expect a Windows machine to slow down a bit over several years and benefit greatly from an OS reinstall from time to time, it's claimed that Macs don't suffer from this.

daviesee

thegreatdivide wrote:

The old laptop is about to be stripped down to just a bare hard drive and Windows 7 and it’ll run Traktor and just Traktor – it’ll do the job admirably until it eventually dies of old age.

Anecdotal point to consider.
Everyone I know has at least one portable hard drive out of an old Windows laptop.
All the Mac hard drives that I know of are still working in their original machines.
Just saying.....

thegreatdivide

daviesee wrote:

thegreatdivide wrote:

The old laptop is about to be stripped down to just a bare hard drive and Windows 7 and it’ll run Traktor and just Traktor – it’ll do the job admirably until it eventually dies of old age.

Anecdotal point to consider.
Everyone I know has at least one portable hard drive out of an old Windows laptop.
All the Mac hard drives that I know of are still working in their original machines.
Just saying.....

The hard drive will still be in the laptop - I need to carry it to gigs. It's all good ;-)

VTech

ChrisAOnABike wrote:

tiredofwhiners wrote:

People buy second hand Macs because they are cheaper than new ones and still perform well.

Not disputing this in general, since I have significant experience of exactly one Mac.

However, that one Mac is a iMac, about 4 years old, and it is appallingly slow. I do a bit of photo editing on it (Elements 10 or 11), a bit of internet, and it's just horrendous. I'm not talking, btw, of attempting to load a 70 MB TIFF and expecting it to be instant - little JPGs is all I'm talking about here.

It belongs to a family whose computer housekeeping skills are a bit rudimentary, admittedly, but whereas I would expect a Windows machine to slow down a bit over several years and benefit greatly from an OS reinstall from time to time, it's claimed that Macs don't suffer from this.

If the mac isnt super quick there is something wrong, check cache and download a free app called memory scope to see whats what. A 4 year old mac should whoop a new pc.

tiredofwhiners

VTech wrote:

If the mac isnt super quick there is something wrong, check cache and download a free app called memory scope to see whats what. A 4 year old mac should whoop a new pc.

Yup - spot on. Check the hard disc as well, as Apple did a recall on a whole bunch of iMac hard discs a while back which you may have missed if you didn't buy it from Apple direct.

By the sound of it, you may also have a lack of memory issue (the iMac has that is ) as doing gfx applications can be massively improved by having the right amount of memory. My iMac is three years old and will still thrash most PC's (IMO).

VTech

for your info, on all the macs I have, both at home and the office, we upgrade the ram to the max, you can use places like Mr Memory who are awesome and their customer support is out of this world, prices are fantastic too.

Then you could look at going SSD or hybrid. Ive just updated my MBP to a seagate XT 750gb hybrid for £80, the best money you can spend on an upgrade.

chrisaonabike

VTech wrote:

If the mac isnt super quick there is something wrong, check cache and download a free app called memory scope to see whats what. A 4 year old mac should whoop a new pc.

Have to confess I'm smelling something of a rat with these claims that Mac performance is colossally better than Windows.

There's this comparative review, for instance, which suggests to me that they're not a million miles apart, with Windows 8 a little ahead.

There's this older one, which has the Mac ahead on a number of tests, and Windows 7 ahead on others.

Neither of which surprises me - you'd expect there to be pros and cons.

It's hardly an exhaustive survey of the 'literature' on the matter, but seriously, if Mac performance was consistently as far ahead of Windows as you implied with your crypto benchmark, it would be common knowledge, and all the willy waving would have gone away long ago.

VTech

What you have written to a certain degree is correct but the problem is that like for like, a Mac is better and you could attribute a lot of this to the quality of components.
A decent spec laptop, made to a level of a macbook will set you back around £2000-£3000 so similar to that of a Macbook, the problem is that most people go for a £300-£800 laptop which is in most cases made up of tat and not capable of any kind of quality work.

To really view power of a computer you can look at 2 sectors,

1) hacking, almost always done using a mac, for various reasons that I wont go into.
2) video editing, almost entirely done using macs, I doubt you will find any movies made on a pc.

So with that in mind, it really is common knowledge already.

chrisaonabike

VTech wrote:

To really view power of a computer you can look at 2 sectors,

1) hacking, almost always done using a mac, for various reasons that I wont go into.
2) video editing, almost entirely done using macs, I doubt you will find any movies made on a pc.

What you're doing is taking two very specific, CPU intensive tasks, both of which I'd expect to have highly optimised code. It may be that some specific things are much faster on Macs, but given that they use the same basic architecture as Windows machines, I don't believe there can be intrinsically much difference, given that it's all the same microcode under the covers, or would be if it was written.

As for quality of components, no one would dispute Apple build quality, but don't expect me to believe that the main boards, memory, HDDs, SSDs, GFX cards etc that Apple put in their boxes are from some different planet compared with non-Apple.

Anyway, Mac is fine, if that's your bag, equally fine. Just not for me - I don't need it, I'd rather spend the money on bikes, I don't look at my PC often enough to care about how sexy it is. It's a near-silent, 24x7 workhorse that does the job I need it to do, at a very reasonable price. And I much prefer the matte screen of my laptop to the glossy MacBook ones I've seen, so there we are, horses for courses.

VTech

Im actually with you, I was one of the original WinBeta team way back in my youth so Ive always been a PC guy and only turned to Mac 3-4 years ago due to the code I run killing laptops for fun, I was going through a new laptop every 6 months and so I purchased a Mac and instantly the issue was resolved, ive since not looked back but as you rightly say, unless its a CPU or software code intensive system your after I would certainly not try and get anyone to buy a Mac, they are just way to pricey.

chrisaonabike

VTech wrote:

... due to the code I run killing laptops for fun, I was going through a new laptop every 6 months and

Just out of interest, why on earth were you running that sort of thing on a laptop at all?

If you're hammering the CPU and memory I'd have thought it would be better to run it on a desktop box with proper cooling. When I built my current* box I thrashed it with Prime95 and MemTest for about half a day each to make sure it was stable.. I don't think the CPU temperature went above about 50.

* Just to show you how sad I am, I even took some pics .. so ner to Apple build quality...

VTech

My work means I need to travel so although we have desktops at the office, im often on the road with only a laptop to do the coding. At the moment im breaking 4mb code daily which is massively cpu intensive and almost completely in the field.
The only PC laptop thats ever held its own (and I still have mine) was a CF-18 toughbook but they are like £5k+ so making the MBP look cheap !!

thegreatdivide

VTech wrote:

What you have written to a certain degree is correct but the problem is that like for like, a Mac is better and you could attribute a lot of this to the quality of components.
A decent spec laptop, made to a level of a macbook will set you back around £2000-£3000 so similar to that of a Macbook, the problem is that most people go for a £300-£800 laptop which is in most cases made up of tat and not capable of any kind of quality work.

To really view power of a computer you can look at 2 sectors,

1) hacking, almost always done using a mac, for various reasons that I wont go into.
2) video editing, almost entirely done using macs, I doubt you will find any movies made on a pc.

So with that in mind, it really is common knowledge already.

This is total rubbish. You've obviously never met anyone that makes movies then!

VTech

thegreatdivide wrote:

VTech wrote:

What you have written to a certain degree is correct but the problem is that like for like, a Mac is better and you could attribute a lot of this to the quality of components.
A decent spec laptop, made to a level of a macbook will set you back around £2000-£3000 so similar to that of a Macbook, the problem is that most people go for a £300-£800 laptop which is in most cases made up of tat and not capable of any kind of quality work.

To really view power of a computer you can look at 2 sectors,

1) hacking, almost always done using a mac, for various reasons that I wont go into.
2) video editing, almost entirely done using macs, I doubt you will find any movies made on a pc.

So with that in mind, it really is common knowledge already.

This is total rubbish. You've obviously never met anyone that makes movies then! An example is my best mate and riding partner who's a freelance cameraman and short film maker. He's part of a team that have won two Baftas and are about to head off to Tirreno Adriatico to begin filming 'Being David Millar' (even though he's not racing due to a bust hand). They all use PC's to edit.

I dont want to offend you and I dont need another battle on here but your wrong, plain and simple.
Most, almost all movies are made with Mac, its just the way it is.
The industry standard is FCP

tiredofwhiners

FYI after 20 years working with corporate marketing types who subcontract all their video production to third parties, I have never seen a non-Mac video editing suite other than at the BBC/ITV. All the SME and one man bands used Macs exclusively. I am not a video producer by any stretch of the imagination but it was my understanding that for years beyond count, the de facto standard software package for video production in the private sector was an Apple only product (final Cut Pro), but I am happy to be proven wrong.

If your mate wasn't using FCP, then he wasn't really very good

thegreatdivide

There's this software called Avid Media Composer...

Daz555

What is odd about the Apple Mac is that despite Apples incredible global brand and domination of the tablet market the good old Macs are still only picked up by about 6% of computer buyers (double in the US). It has been growing slightly as Mac sales have remained steadyish but it would seem PC/laptop buyers have been cutting back on new purchases.

I am genuinely surprised that Apple still can't shift Macs. Maybe it is simply a matter of price.

thegreatdivide

...

estampida

bompington wrote:

estampida wrote:

bompington wrote:

estampida wrote:

and on the PC side windows takes too much of a cut, a £300 laptop, just slightly less than 50% goes to windows for the OS license, its like printing money

Looks like Mr Dell should be heading down to PC World to pick up a few discs for a heck of a lot less then?
Or maybe your figure is a bit fanciful...

I am quoting Lord Sir Allen Sugar, when he was talking about the early days of Amstrad and meeting bill gates (circa 1982)

The cost of windows 1 was £1 per machine, but once people got used to software being provided windows ramped the cost up

How much do you think the bare bones of a laptop actually costs?

considering you can buy an andriod tablet for.....

http://www.androidtabletbay.com/mid-7-i ... g0kjufusr7

that was the comment of a true d1ck......

You claim an OEM windows licence costs somewhere near £150
I provide you with a link as evidence that it's actually more like $60-$80, i.e. £40 upwards. That's a fairly significant difference, don't you think?
Never mind that windows 8 costs well under £100 retail, hence my weak joke about PC World.

All done in a pretty mild manner using neutral language.

How on earth does that justify your little ad hom swipe at the end?

so after a few days off I came back to see that there was no response to my input....

so you agree that windows and office is approx 50% the cost a low cost PC then?

or just ignoring the truth, at almost 2 posts a day you should all over this like a rash...... or is there another way to appear superior?

thegreatdivide

...

bompington

estampida wrote:

so after a few days off I came back to see that there was no response to my input....

so you agree that windows and office is approx 50% the cost a low cost PC then?

or just ignoring the truth, at almost 2 posts a day you should all over this like a rash...... or is there another way to appear superior?

There are many ways to appear superior, lots of them involve picking pointless fights on web forums. There are far fewer ways to be superior, and I'm fairly sure none of them involve picking pointless fights on web forums.

After you called me a d1ck for no real reason, then made some weak effort at backtracking, I came to the conclusion that this is well up the scale for pointless arguments and decided I had better things to do.

But if it will really offend you if I don't reply:
"windows and office 50% the cost of a low cost PC"
- I'm not sure what Office has to do with this, as that is entirely optional software; you might as well say that "windows and a VMWare VSphere Acceleration Kit is approximately 3000% the cost of a low cost PC"
- windows is available for under £50 OEM, you can certainly argue that this is too expensive, but it's nowhere near 50%.

Please feel free to continue this debate on your own, and call yourself all the names you like.

VTech

FCP is an industry standard. Avid is almost certainly the best rendering design package available but it is t the I distort standard as only elite use it so my comment stands.
Also, does he use avid on a £300 desktop running windows 7 ?

Ok, so now things are calmed back down, there is no need to attack every comment wastin your valuable time trying to fight people. I for one am not just some guy on a forum with no idea. At work we use video editing to cinema quality doing press launches on an almost weekly basis during season so before posting I ha already asked the guys in the video department.