Page 3 - Is Mac OSX the 'best' choice?

I'm in a similar position. The original point of the post was I've been thinking of Mac alternatives, and as you say Mac IS more expensive.
After weighing the options though I think I will stick with the Mac - although it was helpful to hear your 2 machine alternatives and experiences. I don't really know much about Windows, and I had been wondering about running Linux or something and Photoshop, but I didn't really know what was possible.
I agree with a $1000 eMac with 128MB of RAM being a bit useless. I was thinking more of the $800 G4 800 and adding 512MB to get 642MB RAM if someone was really looking for a sub $1000 machine.
I've been using Photoshop for more years than I care to remember (at one stage with 6MB RAM!) and now I'm having no problems with a G3 400 with 512Megs, so I know the eMac would be a possible choice.

I know that for the same price you will get a better piece of hardward in terms of chip speed with the Windows machine, but it seems somewhat like having a Ferrari in Tokyo versus a Mini. You always have the power in reserve, but the Mini is just a fast in real life use and the Ferrari is a bugger to park In the end that was what made up my mind - do I need that extra power and the answer for me was 'no'.

Anyway, thanks for the alternative suggestions.

I'm sorry if I came off like a mac-basher, I'm actually not. What it comes down to is how you work on a machine and how productive it will be for you. It sounds like you'll be happy with your purchase. Best of luck

cheers

Stinkfist, for someone making so many difinitive claims, you certainly stretch the truth to fit your postulates a lot.

Lets go back to your "pc whips mac" tests from digital video.com You imply that its a $5 mac vs a $3k pc. Its not. It's a $3500 mac vs a $3000 pc.

Not to mention those tests are already quite old. Before many of the bugs of osX were even worked out, and some of them directly related to speed. Not to mention you can now get a dual 1.42ghz mac for ~ 2600.

And in reality, PC's aren't cheaper. How old of a PC can you have right now and be reasonably running winXP, and have photoshop, illustrator, a good text editor and 4 or 5 other random programs open without crashing? 2 years old? 3 on the *borderline*? If you're lucky?

I have two macs. Once a g4-400, and one's a g3-300. I keep one in my office and one at home. I'm self employed and I work a bit at both locations.

I have OSX on *both* machines and generally have a dozen programs open at a time. With out a problem. Without it being slow.

My g3 is six years old.

That means if I paid THREE TIMES for my G3 what you paid for a PC 2 years ago, I still got a better deal. Hell, in six years you had to buy at least two computers. Or do *major* upgrades.

Plus at the end of the day, I find the macs more pleasant to work on. When you are at a computer 30 hours a week, it matters.

There have been *many* studies (go have fun with google) showing that in large computing environments that macs are cheaper then PC's because of a) less downtime & problems b) need to be replaced or upgrade less frequently.

I've got a PC. It's a nice lil Dell pentium4. It was just around $1000. I need it for my work. But in my opinion, the programs just suck, with the exceptions of major ones like Photoshop.

I can't find a single text editor on PC that compares to BBEdit for the price range for programming. And FTP clients? CuteFTP is ok, but Interarchy blows it away. Lets not forget iTunes, my iPod, built in colorSync and *vastly* easier font handling then on a pc. Fonts on a pc are a joke.

So, your refrain of "Its cheaper, you save so much money" is hollow at best, and only rings true if you decide not to think any deeper then the surface.

#Erik

that's the kind of feedback i love to see. so often the mac v. win discussion ends up being platform bashing...and doesn't really advance anyone's cause.

i'm glad the dell / suse option works for you - sadly, linux still isn't ready for prime-time for the non-technical user (and there are a lot of web developers who are remarkably non-technical, beyond html / php / asp coding).

it is a shame there's such a cost disparity between apple hardware and others, and that so much of the apple hardware is non-upgradable; i'm hopeful that apple can create a revenue stream such that they are not as dependent on hardware sales, so that they can open up os x to intel hardware...

ErickSean, I'm sorry that I offended you. you seem like a happy mac user and there's nothing wrong with the platform. That said, I'm not going to get into a Chevy vs. Ford argument with you. That's like the Special Olympics, no matter which one of us "wins" we're both still retarded

suffice to say that people work productively in different environments. I'm just as productive (actually moreso) on a PC as I was on a Mac.

I've no problem with you having an opinion; you're entitled to use whatever makes you happiest, and if you are more productive on your PC, more power to you.

However, I get annoyed when I see people making apples to oranges comparisons, or worse yet, presenting blatanly false data to make an argument (which you did in quoting that article while claming the prices were 2k apart).

My other irratant, the "cheaper" refrain is probably me transfering anger toward my ex-parter who bought quite a few PC's for our office. We had to replace them quite a bit earlier then the "too expensive macs" and to this day people who don't factor in "price/productive life" factors irratate me, and I'm sorry I dropped that on you.

If you're going to try to make your case, try to stay factual. If you're not trying to make a case, then don't start :-)

Actually I admitted that my original statement (the $5000 remark) was hyperbole but I in no way distorted the truth when I said that a mac is handily whupped by a PC in performance/price ratio.

The article that I linked compared both the new 3 ghz Dell and a 2.53ghz Dell against a dual 1.25ghz mac and the 2.53 ghz Dell beat it in every benchmark except after-effects.

(btw that dell just dropped in price to $599 and the apple dropped to $1999)

The advantage of the mac is workflow and what I see as a very superior operating system. Depending on what you use your computer for the processing speed might not be important (especially if you can keep a computer around for 3 years without upgrading).

in the beginning, i hated macs and loved pcs. but it changed when started to use linux then freebsd, i started to hate windows for its crappyness and buggyness. @ this time i still tought that macs were crap mainly becuase of the os not the different hardware, since they moved over to osx, i have become very interested in them. Moving their base OS to unix is probably the smartest thing they could ever have done, there was no way they could compete against microsoft in building an OS. They simply dont have the resources, not even MS have the resources to compete against the open source community

Sorry for bringing up an old post, but I had to give a little FYI for those of you who don't like Apple's interface.

When you're starting OSX, you can hold down a key sequence (I think it's either command-S or control-S) and startup directly in the command line without starting the GUI interface. I think you may have to restart to use the GUI interface though.

A little tip I got from my MacAddict magazines. (I'll try to remember to look up the exact key sequence tonight when I get home)

I have OSX on my Mac at home, and Windows NT at work. I have Virtual PC for whenever I need to run Windows binaries. However I haven't needed to run Windows on my home computer for well over a year now. Everything I need I can get native for my Mac.

There's been a few times I've thought about getting a cheap $200 PC to install Linux on, but every time I think about why I want to do that, I can't think of anything I couldn't do on my Mac anyways. OSX bins are about as common as Linux bins.

I will have to add another anecdote to my limited Mac experience:

I just spent a couple days helping someone with one of the new XServe servers, and I am quite impressed. It's default shipping configuration struck me as being even more secure than most default Linux distributions. Almost as secure as the FreeBSD default configuration.

From the command line, about %75 of the things were exactly where I would expect, based on FreeBSD, and the rest was quite easy to find. Mac makes liberal use of symlinks to make the filesystem appear Unix-ish, which still placing many items in a more verbose directory path for the GUI users.

The initscript concept was completely different, from FreeBSD, but very easy to figure out. It is kind of SysV-style, but everything is a shell script in its own directory (AFAIR it is under /System/Library/Startup), with another file for associated parameters.

I had absolutely zero trouble recompiling Apache/PHP/MySQL and only one small glitch compiling PostgreSQL (fixed by running ranlib on one of the PsotgreSQL header files). Other than that, the system seems solid as a rock.

The guy has 1.4 TB of hard drive space on the system, and 2 GB of RAM. Nice !! In a couple of weeks the system should be running the new version of www.photographers.com (Coming soon; right now he is still using his circa-1996 setup).

And how much did it cost?

I wasn't involved in choosing this server, but I would suppose it cost about $8-9,000. Obviously, it's not the sort of thing I would choose, because FreeBSD does everything I need and more.

All I am saying is that from a tech perspective, the machine itself is pretty nice.

I switched to an iBook last year (top of the line 14.1) because I needed a little bit of everything for home use and was replacing my VIAO Z505 slim laptop after 4 years of good solid use.

I was tired of having Windows crash all the time, I was leaving the US to spend about 6 months working and studing in Germany, so I wanted something that worked. I did a little video editing, some 3D work, and mainly PHP/MySQL development.

I had been using my tower with dual SuSE/Win 2kpro boot, but that was not going to Europe with me. After a year, I still love my laptop. Battery life is still about 2.5 hours playing a DVD, down from the just over 3 when I first got it, and it does everything I need.

I was working part time as the server admin for a local Architecture & Graphics firm. I had been for 2 years. And they used older Alpha boxes with NT4 for rendering because they did use Autocad. Now the Graphics folks switched to Maya about 18 months ago and had tons of problems with the program crashing during long renderings. So when it came to time to replace their boxes, they elected to go with OSX and the dual 1.25Ghz G4's and we did see a 10% decrease in rendering time compared to a Dual p4 1.8Ghz Xeons. However, total rendering times decreased by 12.5% because of fewer crashes during those long rendering projects. Some animations for local businesses could take a 6 computer renderfarm about 27hours to render in 8 pass 16:9 HDTV settings.

We had switched to macs a year before that for video editing because of the POS known as Primere 6.0 for Windows (mac wasn't any better). We starting using Final Cut Pro 3 and loved it.

Anyway, I just started a new job as IT director for a small start up in town. My first request was a new Powerbook 15" 1Ghz G4 although I am waiting for 10.3 to be release. Last summer I purchased this iBook with 10.1, and 6 weeks later 10.2 was out and guess what, no free upgrade. Not doing that again.

Anyway, just got the new old file/printer server (PII 400) installed and up with FreeBSD. Yep, I went from working with a 100+ Renderfarm (with over 30 Alpha Boxes) to working with PII 400's as a simple office file server. Oh well, the pay's better...

all i can say is that i used to work in a media production lab which had all g4's and dual g4's with the latest version of max osx.

they performed well in terms of video editing, but it was full of bugs. i know people say windows is buggy, but i for one have had win2000 at home for 4 years and never had one single system crash...ever.

using the macs at work, we consistently had problems. weird, random problems like not being able to cut and paste files, or other hard drive errors. completely random errors. i remember trying to do something on final cut pro...i never completed it because something always happened during the recording. i must have spent hours upon hours wasting time recording only to have it fail for some unknown reason. the people taht used the lab (it was at a college) always had problems too.

after a while it was funny to watch these liberal arts hippies get so mad at the macs. watching some guy in a tight t shirt, forward spikey hair, jeans and a jean jacket with thick rimmed glasses cussing at a computer is pure entertainment.

i know everyone is like "whoo hoo unix" in regards to OSX, even people who know nothing more about unix than it being an industry buzzword, but i think OSX is incredibly unstable. the hardware im sure is fine, after all it is a RISC machine.