Should I go Mac?

[Ethan3.14159]

^ He has some fanboyism himself, you know. Last time I posted an Asus G-series to demonstrate the price/performance difference between them, his arguments against it were so ridiculous and unfounded that I just gave up on the thread...


Macbooks are damned expensive for the hardware you get, IMO, but they are among the best on the market for battery life/performance, and their screens are great for photo editing once you calibrate them properly. Apple is rated a close #4 for reliability, behind Asus, Toshiba, and Sony, so they're pretty good there.

He may or may not be a fanboy, but at least he knows what he's talking about. Which is more than can be said for most of the people in this thread.

You can't really compare any Windows based laptop to a Macbook Pro. None of them have IPS LED screens or a glass multitouch trackpad. (a lot of really lame attempts at multitouch, but almost all PC laptop trackpads are far too small) Now you're seeing all of these laptops pop up with aluminum chassis and their version of multitouch. Take the 13" HP Envy. It's not even unibody, and costs more than a 13" Macbook Pro, and all you get is a shitty ULV Core 2 and lesser hardware than a Macbook Pro.

It's not just about the hardware, it's how well that hardware is matched for the software. And it's a well known fact that Mac OS X manages resources far better than Windows. So, when your Asus laptop with higher specs has slowed to grinding halt over 4 or 5 years from new releases of Windows and the infamous "Windows Rot" the Macbook Pro with lower spec will still march on just as fast as the day it was bought for another 4 years.

Another thing is design. The Macbook Pro is a very thin laptop, yet still sports an 8 cell battery. Yet many PC laptops are almost 2x as thick with a 6 cell battery. How? Apple redesigned the actual battery cells and instead of a cylindrical shape cell they have a flat, space saving cell. It's the little things like the battery design, backlit keyboard that's activated depending on how dark the room is, bluetooth, firewire 800, aluminum unibody chassis, etc etc... that really really add up to pretty much the best notebook lineup on the market.

 

[iGeekOFComedy]

EVERYONE STOP, the truth is mac is more overpriced for the hardware so go for a PC if you need the latest or greatest because if you do your wallet will stay open as technology grows everyday, Apple choices specific hard ware as they build codes (VERY stable) Drivers for each piece of hardware and make sure theres no conflicting to stop crashing (I'm a fan that will open my wallet at anything with a apple logo) but i pay because it's easier, the ram is kengisinton ram not apple so you think kengisinton is crappy, The hard drives are western digital, they are very good in my opinion, never crash, they have the most advanced intergrated graphics on the new 13" the 320m, apple didn't use core i5 or i7 because if they did it would require the intel HD which would not make it PRO and on a 13" Book i don't see the M11x alienware use i5/i7. Back to the easiness, one big thing is the dock, on the pc counterpart you need rocket dock but then you don't have stacks which I use all the time, trust me it's a lot easier than the start menu because you see huge icons and if you get the entire adobe cs5 suite all those big icons you know the difference between AI PS AE PR etc. Plus i love being able to play, music, watch videos and look at photos without opening any applications like, preview, itunes or quicktime player, you press on the item of choice and hit space. Also you can even read .txt files , .docs .pdf and iwork files without opening the applications required like word,preview etc. AGAIN ease of use and thats the base operating system, when you use aperture for photos or final cut for video editing it's so easy they can add lots of advanced features where on the pc counterpart avid or corel video studio 11 it would require to hide the mid level features in the places advanced features should be place, i never even figured out how to change the aspect ration of/or cropping clips in sony vegas and adding layers etc, can someone link me a video

 

[diduknowthat]

^ He has some fanboyism himself, you know.

yes, but he does a good job balancing out all the people who hate apple for no reason here.

 

[Geoff]

My mother's a teacher and they loan out Macbooks to all the employees. Within the first year of having hers, her motherboard died, webcam worked intermittently, and battery quit holding any charge. This was a brand new Macbook. The next year, the DVD-RW would jam up when inserting disks.

I know someone else; a friend of a friend, who got a macbook. Apparently a key or two just quit working on the keyboard. I'm thinking some other things happened, but I know she's said she now wishes she'd gone with some other brand.

Another friend of a friend got a macbook more recently. She said her screen now looks like it has water behind it, but she know's it's never been exposed to water.

Needless to say, I'm not too keen on the idea of Macintosh. On top of all this, out of warranty work is exceptionally expensive and they are quite difficult to work on.

I have to deal with hundreds of Mac's at the schools I work at, and while what you stated have occurred on a few, it's very easy to have it fixed/replaced under warranty, they usually have it back to me in 2-3 days from when I ship it out. Sounds like you just got a bad one, which happens in every industry.

I fail to see how that edit is true? PC has more functions than a Mac.

My opinion Macs are overpriced pieces of fasion hardware the only useful thing i have found to come from a Mac is its editing capabilities such as Image, Video and music editing.

Use a PC for everything else and there cheaper. I could go on but knowing this it would turn into a flame war..

I'm not comparing Mac's to custom computers that you and I build, I'm referring mainly to MacBook's in relation to Toshiba, Dell, HP, and other pre-built laptops. I have an Asus gaming laptop and while it has high specs and does pretty well in gaming, I never use it for anything else. Once you get to know Mac's you appreciate their layout and features such as multitouch, large trackpad, and are smaller and lighter then their Windows counterparts.

 

[tlarkin]

macs are for editing and music stuff. pc's are for everything else. macs are overpriced and have generally shitty parts in them for a ridiculous price

and...

exactly! see? macs suck. HARD

Sorry, but you are a retard. Please leave the thread or actually provide facts to back up any ridiculous claim you are about to make.

Macbooks are damned expensive for the hardware you get, IMO, but they are among the best on the market for battery life/performance, and their screens are great for photo editing once you calibrate them properly. Apple is rated a close #4 for reliability, behind Asus, Toshiba, and Sony, so they're pretty good there.

Again, you are so wrong. Build me a Laptop that is spec for spec, feature for feature better or comparable to the Macbooks and Macbook Pros and prove to me it is cheaper. Don't forget to add in every spec, including IPS screens and also every feature that a Mac has out of the box. You won't be able to do it.

Where's tlarkin, there's so much misinformation and fan-boyism being thrown around in this thread it's not even funny.

It's cool bro, I always end up on the Mac threads....


To the OP:

Yes! Buy a Mac! They are fantastic machines. I have been in IT for a decade, and I have used, serviced, maintained and repaired and owned, ever single manufacturer of laptop there is. I can tell you hands down, my Macbook Pro is the best laptop I have ever owned.

If you have any specific questions let me know, and ignore the other people on this thread who have touched a Mac twice in their entire life. I have been using Windows since I was like 9 (back when it was DOS) and Linux and Macs since I was a teenager. I have many more years experience and I work with computers professionally. So my opinions are heavily biased, to that of a power user, not your average user.

 

[tlarkin]

^ He has some fanboyism himself, you know. Last time I posted an Asus G-series to demonstrate the price/performance difference between them, his arguments against it were so ridiculous and unfounded that I just gave up on the thread...

*sigh* I am not a fanboy, I use FACTS to back my claims. You cannot find a laptop that compares. You don't even read into specs, features, and most importantly overall cost of ownership.

You just lost the debate, quit being all butt-hurt by it.

I have said many times that both Asus and Lenovo make some bad ass PC laptops. The problem is, you can't find me something that is actually comparable. Size, weight, and battery life are HUGE factors when spec'ing a laptop.

 

[JlCollins005]

meh, Tlarkin i do think your a fanboy dont get me wrong you alwas have facts but you always support mac.

its all personal preference.

As i said to the op we could easily show you a laptop with great specs that would cater to your needs and be cheaper than a macbook

 

[tlarkin]

meh, Tlarkin i do think your a fanboy dont get me wrong you alwas have facts but you always support mac.

its all personal preference.

As i said to the op we could easily show you a laptop with great specs that would cater to your needs and be cheaper than a macbook

If I were a fanboy I would use 100% mac. At home I have 3 custom built PCs running things for me, and only 1 of them runs Windows. I am also an advocate of Linux and Unix on their own. If anything you can say that I am not a fanboy of Windows, but a fan of everything else.

I like PCs a lot, but after Vista and Windows 7, I just really dislike Microsoft's direction.

Also, I have to defend Macintosh more than I can criticize them on this forum, because people don't use facts in their claim against Apple. So, your perception is that I am a fanboy, but trust me, when I go post over at the Mac specific forums (which I have been a long time member of) I call people on their PC bashing all the time.

If you actually knew me, you would know that I am not a fanboy. Since so much misinformation goes on here I have to defend Macs tooth and nail against ridiculous and frivolous claims. Now, if people actually debated properly and used facts then I would not have to always be on the defense of the Mac.

Hopefully you understand what I am trying to say.

 

[JlCollins005]

i understand what you are saying.. like i said it all falls back to personal preference.

whats wrong with windows 7 i have liked it so far vista did suck but 7 is fast with great looks.

i find macs to be a pain in the ass work on and parts for them are pretty expensive
and i could never really get used to mac os

 

[tlarkin]

i understand what you are saying.. like i said it all falls back to personal preference.

whats wrong with windows 7 i have liked it so far vista did suck but 7 is fast with great looks.

i find macs to be a pain in the ass work on and parts for them are pretty expensive
and i could never really get used to mac os

my problems with Windows vista/7:

1) UAC
2) Registry - still a single point of failure
3) ungodly amount of RAM usage - no other OS needs or eats up that much RAM
4) revamped network security policies in SMB (which aren't needed) broke almost all open source networking with non windows platforms. NTLMv2 is a huge pain in the ass, and SMB went from sending a few packets per an authentication session to thousands of packets, why? IF IT AIN'T BROKE DON"T FIX IT! Sorry for caps
5) Huge flaws in memory protection and memory dumping. In both 7 and Vista. If I let my torrent client build up and seed over 15 to 20 items at once it is a huge memory leak. Firefox, loves to eat up over a gig of RAM sometimes. Sure, this could be partly third party's fault, however I run the same apps in Linux and in OS X and they don't have the memory leak issues.
6) DRM, Windows is filled with DRM and WGA is also ultra damn annoying. Why can't windows play a freaking DVD out of the box with WMP? You still gotta download Codecs, and this is 2010 damn-it!
7) last and my main reason I don't like Window is the cost. I just rebuilt my HTPC and I wasn't about to fork over $150 for an OS. That is just dumb. So I loaded Linux.

I agree it is a personal preference, but the kids who say, "Macs are a rip off," are the ones that don't use facts to debate the cost versus the value of a Mac computer. If they were to simply say, I don't like it, well you can't argue with that. That is personal preference.

 

[iGeekOFComedy]

I think people just have to try Mac. Not just for 10 mins but for at least 2 hours or better yet 1 - 3 days and don't use PC inbetween each time you use a Mac then when you come back to the forum / PC your opinion will deff be different

 

[tlarkin]

I think people just have to try Mac. Not just for 10 mins but for at least 2 hours or better yet 1 - 3 days and don't use PC inbetween each time you use a Mac then when you come back to the forum / PC your opinion will deff be different

Sorry it took me about 2 years of using OS X 10.1 and 10.2 to really fully understand exactly how OS X worked.

Your average user needs to really spend at least 6months to a year to get 100% comfy with how everything works and operates. I would say at least 6 months.

 

[CrayonMuncher]

i agree that around 6 months would be adequte time to get comfy with the ui and to understand better how it works
but to start off with, the first time you touch a mac it really isnt that hard to understand the basics, first time i played around with a mac withing 5 mins i was installling various drivers and what have you so i find it hard to understand how someone can say they cant get used to it.
my main thing i love about osx is the way you feel that as a user you have control and you'r almost appreciated by the os and the way it handles the tasks you set it to do, in very slick and well cool way
i believe in a way apple cared much more about the end user expierence than microsoft did for many years, however i find the interface slightly better in vista and much improved in 7.

as i said before macs are good if you have the money to spend and the software works exceptionally well with the hardware and because of the design it is in many ways superior to windows, but the lack of compatibilty i would find frustrating, but (to the op) if you have the money to spend and are of a slightly technical mind then this compatibilty problem can be over come but using boot camp to run windows on the mac.

i would personally still buy a windows computer as technically i could get a model with great specs for the same price and shy away from apple mainly for their corporate policies and the fact that i really dont like steve jobs, these things affect my decisions

and im not fussed about reloading the os as i dablle in using various linux distros and do this quite a lot, the fact the apple has (to my knowledge) refused to adopt blu ray i find annoying i dont want to pay that much for a laptop and i cant even use it as a blu ray player for a hdtv, and this constant battle he has with full flash support, fair enough to be behind html 5 but for the mean time it would be nice to have full flash support

and to iGeekOFComedy

apple has adopted the intel i5 and i7 and is using intel hd in the macbook pro models with the larger screen i assume you were aware of that

regardless of if tlarkin is a fanboy or not he has raised very valid points for every subject he has been questioned on so the fact of fanboyinsm really is irrellevent to me, but i do agree it is down to personal choice

 

[tlarkin]

Jobs just wrote an open letter to Adobe on Flash

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

Also, what exactly is not compatible with your mac? There are a few things that don't run on a Mac but if you absolutely needed them you could run virtual machines, cross over or dual boot.

 

[CrayonMuncher]

yeah im aware of that letter and i understand his points but until html 5 kicks off big time it would be good to have the support

i mainly talk about games for compatibilty

i have no mac btw i use my friends mac pro and other firends macbooks quite alot and since i dont own one so to take a game to a friends and it wont work plus any other compatibilty you might run into, i find it a bit much to run a dual boot or virtual machine to overcome this at a friends house

i also remember i had to overcome so kind of issue when burning a disc in windows to ensure compatibilty with a mac, im not sure if it was ever an actual issue but i had to ensure it was compatible

 

[tlarkin]

yeah im aware of that letter and i understand his points but until html 5 kicks off big time it would be good to have the support

i mainly talk about games for compatibilty

i have no mac btw i use my friends mac pro and other firends macbooks quite alot and since i dont own one so to take a game to a friends and it wont work plus any other compatibilty you might run into, i find it a bit much to run a dual boot or virtual machine to overcome this at a friends house

Just because it doesn't run on OS X doesn't make it non compatible though since you can technically run Windows on a Mac. The games I agree on, and if you are wanting to game a lot, then get a PC. That would fit your needs better.

I think gaming will come around though, now that Apple has over 20% of the consumer market share in the USA. Steam is releasing their client and converting all the Valve games to the Mac platform. Others will hopefully follow.

 

[CrayonMuncher]

apple is definatly rising, didnt know it was upto 20% tho, nice to see something rising instead of windows continuly dominating

 

[tlarkin]

apple is definatly rising, didnt know it was upto 20% tho, nice to see something rising instead of windows continuly dominating

well world market share, about ~7%, US consumer market share it is now over 20%.

Not sure how it fares in Europe.

 

[CrayonMuncher]

in the uk (where im from) its 5 % which is up from 3.8 % last year
sales increased 26.8%
this seems to be quite a jump for one year

im not sure about europe overall

 

[Drenlin]

*sigh* I am not a fanboy, I use FACTS to back my claims. You cannot find a laptop that compares. You don't even read into specs, features, and most importantly overall cost of ownership.

You just lost the debate, quit being all butt-hurt by it.

I have said many times that both Asus and Lenovo make some bad ass PC laptops. The problem is, you can't find me something that is actually comparable. Size, weight, and battery life are HUGE factors when spec'ing a laptop.

I know damned well they aren't directly comparable. One is mostly geared for aesthetics and battery life, and the other for performance. I was simply arguing that Asus was offering a laptop of equal-or-higher caliber for a lower price.

And no, you did not always use "facts" to back up your claims. In fact, in a couple of cases, what you said was completely wrong or somewhat irrelevant. This was your argument. Responses in red:

IPS Screen
You say this as if the screen on the Asus is low quality, but it isn't. It's higher resolution than the macbook's default screen, and has great color reproduction. If the Macbook's screen is a 10, this is easily an 8 or 9.

no A radio support for wireless
I fail to see why a new device should have this.

No multi touch track pad
Like all Asus notebooks, and indeed any newer computer with a Synaptics touchpad, it has multitouch with programmable zones and gestures. It also has buttons.

No SMS (sudden motion sensor)
This only protects the hard drive, and only in certain situations. This is more a marketing feature than anything.

no back lit keyboard
It does have a back lit keyboard, like every other G-series.

no ambient light sensor
And I need this why? Again, this is a minor issue.

no firewire
no firewire 800
Agreed, this would have been useful, but most people don't use firewire...

2.5 hour battery life
Considering the fact that the Asus is 2.5 to 3 times as powerful, and the Macbook runs a lighter OS and has a battery that takes up ~2/5 of its interior space, is it any wonder the battery life is worse? You can't really compare them directly on this basis. All things considered the Asus is actually pretty good.

over 2 inches thick, where the MBP is just under 1" thick
Only at one end, because of the massive cooling system needed to keep it at ~70C when overclocked. Again, this is one of those areas where you can't really compare the two directly.

no aluminum unibody
No, but like many high end laptops, it has a magnesium chassis, which typically has better mechanical properties but must be finished. The rest of it is most likely some sort of polycarbonate. It's doubtful that there's a whole lot of difference in the overall durability of the two.

Also, Apple's use of the term "unibody" is a bit misleading, since like most laptops it is separated into several parts..

It lists the weight as 7.5 lbs on that Asus
See above