Why I Ain't Buying A Mac

gphat writes "An article at Rush Magazine details why the author isn't buying a Mac. This is in response to Apple wanting our input last week."

Comments

Re:Why *I* am not buying a Mac

[garren_bagley]

You cannot do everything on a PC that you can do on a Mac. I bought my first Mac a month ago for the quality of entry level video editing. Within one day I had burned a DVD of my most recent ski vacation with edits and a soundtrack. I tried this for a long time on my PC which was supposedly more powerful and was never satisfied with the results. At one point I upgraded my PC to Windows XP and found it was incompatible with my Microsoft Mouse!

It is also not possible to do this on Linux, I tried that to. After finally getting firewire to work I found that there were too many incompatible file formats. Maybe you can get it to work but I'm tired of tinkering every night.

My SGI Irix machine worked fine. HELL! it is just 1 180MHZ RK500 and still seems faster than my PC but I could only get a 4 gig hard drive.

Everything else I've discovered that I love (iTunes, iPod, iPhoto) is just gravy.

Re:Some problems here...

[coolgeek]

A comparably equipped Gateway, of course with a 2Ghz P4, is a mere $300 less than the G4/933. Both with large flat panel displays, of course. Being a guy who has purchased a whole glut of commodity hardware, and built my lab of 7 Pentiums $200 at a time, I have to say I was never able to appreciate the value of a Mac until I bought one and started using it as my "daily driver". For example, said G4/933 has 2MB L3 cache running at 1/2 clock speed. More than enough to keep your average loop-calls-several-nested-subroutines close at hand, and scads more than the what 0K (of L3-cache =) stock on a P4. The SuperDrive extracts CD audio at about 11-16x, ripping a whole CD in 2-4 minutes. Power management that really works. Or, on my TiBook, I actually get about 4-5 hours battery life when writing/testing code. Why? because Apple developed a power management chip that keeps all system clocks running, but idles the CPU down when the system encounters idle time, then bounces back to full speed in a few milliseconds. That kind of developement will never happen in a commodity PC market. And my VAIO never passed the 3.5 hour mark with TWO batteries.

And all that "fancy" design is more than just good looks. I can reach under the middle of my 17" Studio Display, and plug a USB device into one of the ports on the back, without moving anything, and without having too see ugly USB outlets all the time. There are many other subtle benefits resulting from Apple's design efforts. Suffice it to say, one cannot truly appreciate them until actually using them.