5 Reasons to Ditch the Mac For a PC

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If you want to hear five reasons why you should switch from a Mac to a PC, you don’t need a smarmy commercial to help you decide, you just need to hear it from a full time professional Mac user and Mac developer. His number one reason for the switch? “Productivity trumps religion.” Amen brother, amen.

"Between four and six months ago, I switched back to Windows," he said. While Apple's installed base is growing, he left the camp he had once espoused to others. He also now advocates that his company's engineers get Windows machines. Even at his home, Apple's role has changed.
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It is nice to see somebody take a step back for a moment and realize the most important thing there usablity. Look at all your opinions and decide on a machine/OS based on how well it will meet your needs not on how it looks or how "cool" it makes you to use it.
 
Seeing as the article is dated April 1, I take it with a grain (or 30) of salt.
 
Great article, I am glad to see someone sees the error of their ways. Macs are just dumbed down PCs, thats all they are. Oh and shiny plastic or aluminum, I can't forget that. :p
 
Unfortunately the guy's SOL on the heat/battery issues, but he could have kept his windows apps on the same box with a Parallels/VMware virtual machine. I have a 20" imac that I use as a utility box and it's handy to have both environments running although 90% of the work is done in the windows vm. Advantages like blowing something up and being to run directly off external firewire backup while restoring are pretty handy besides all the fancy crap you can do in a VM like freezing and rolling back.... Ok, basically it's just a toy to fart around with and all my other machines are windows or lunix. :D
 
Really? I mean really? There needs to be an article on how nearly his entire company supports a different platform then his choice and there are issues with compatibility that made him switch? I hope this is an April 1st leftover.
 
Exavior said:
It is nice to see somebody take a step back for a moment and realize the most important thing there usablity. Look at all your opinions and decide on a machine/OS based on how well it will meet your needs not on how it looks or how "cool" it makes you to use it.
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well said
 
az_max said:
Seeing as the article is dated April 1, I take it with a grain (or 30) of salt.
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The arguments made by the article are still valid; I wouldn't automatically dismiss them just because of the date.
 
Is it going to be All Fools Day all month long?

Once you go Mac you're obviously on crack.
 
Thats all he could come up with, come on now. How about not being able to upgrade anything but the RAM? Man I could sit here all day with lists of why Mac is a bust. Despite what people claim, Macs are not reliable in the least. I constantly hear stories about how my friends Macs crashed (ie the harddrive straight died) and other horror stories. At my old job we had 3 macs crap out in like one year, no problems with the PCs. The fanboys are just in denial.

Here is my biggest gripe with the Mac platform and no one can argue this point: Macs can only exist as a niche within the PC market. Apple's business model (with closed hardware) cannot support the wealth of vendors in the PC space. The PC (windows/linux) can exist on its own. There are many companies, OEMs, system builders, etc. that rely on readily available 3rd party components. Apple does not support the free market and their business model would not scale if they somehow "won the war". That is the one major reason why Apple can never win.
 
"But ultimately, instead of productivity gains, dealing with compatibility issues between the Macs used by the engineers and the PCs running Windows used by the line-of-business people in the office slowed down work and resulted in communications issues, he said."

The first four of his five points relate to using Macs in a predominantly Windows environment which will of course have issues.

He does NOT say that Macs are less productive as a whole, just you lose time and productivity trying to shoe horn a Mac into a Windows work environment.

But that applies to running a Linux or Unix machine in a Windows environment, or running a Windows laptop at Red Hat developing Linux.

I'm disappointed that Steve would post such a clearly biased comment ("His number one reason for the switch? “Productivity trumps religion.” Amen brother, amen.") when clearly the intent of the article wasn't to bash Mac's productivity but to highlight the need to find the right equipment for your office environment.
 
hamm3rhead said:
Unfortunately the guy's SOL on the heat/battery issues, but he could have kept his windows apps on the same box with a Parallels/VMware virtual machine. I have a 20" imac that I use as a utility box and it's handy to have both environments running although 90% of the work is done in the windows vm. Advantages like blowing something up and being to run directly off external firewire backup while restoring are pretty handy besides all the fancy crap you can do in a VM like freezing and rolling back.... Ok, basically it's just a toy to fart around with and all my other machines are windows or lunix. :D
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I don't care for either Parallel or Fussion. We have 1 mac on a network of 100 windows boxes. Of course 90% of the software that person needs to run is Windows software so he has to run windows along side his mac. I think it is stupid for him to have it, but he is upper management and I can't really argue with what he buys himself for a computer. Started off with Parallel beta then went to final. Windows ran slow although this is on a 1st gen minimac so that could be why. He has a excel doc with macros and it would not work correctly under any version of office running under parallel other than 2003. Under 2000, XP and 2007 it would take forever for you to do anything in th file. Installed the first upgade to Parallel and it screwed up so that he couldn't use windows anymore. So we uninstalled Parallel and left him with just boot camp. Later we went to Fusion. That seemed to work a little better working with his bootcamp partion than Parallel did. However after installing the patch for Fusion windows again no longer wanted to work correctly. VMware's help for fusion is horrible. Since my only experience with the software has been on that single machine I don't know it it is just that, user error from the person using it that keeps updating the software on his own, or the actual software.
 
Wow, almost 20 posts without someone coming in to complain about Steve's "Obvious Bias" against Mac's :eek:

I'm sure they'll be along soon :p
 
DaLurker said:
clearly the intent of the article wasn't to bash Mac's productivity but to highlight the need to find the right equipment for your office environment.
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Exactly. It shouldn't be called "5 reasons to ditch a Mac" but rather "5 reasons why you or your business shouldn't migrate to Macs". If your business is already 100% Mac, then similar arguments could be made as to why you shouldn't migrate to Windows (interoperability wise anyway).
 
Meh, I still think "Because chicks will think you are cool" is a perfectly valid reason to own a Mac.

haters.
 
#2 and #4 are the strongest points from my perspective. The other points only seem to elaborate on those two.
 
Raxiel said:
Wow, almost 20 posts without someone coming in to complain about Steve's "Obvious Bias" against Mac's :eek:

I'm sure they'll be along soon :p
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See post 16, 3 above yours.

Lurker, it's called humor, not bias. Besides, lets face it, 90% of Apple ownership are NOT due to productivity or want of technology, but rather to "be different". It's a fricken religion.
 
It's easy to fall in love with the aluminum cases used in Mac hardware and the slick interface design of the Mac OS X, Keanini said.
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This guy hasn't seen the magnificent choices PC hardware nuts have had for years in the form of aluminum cases. I had my Lian-Li for years before the G5 came out.

Speaking of the G5... There was a designer at my job, who like the others, used a G4 for their work. You probably wouldn't be deemed artistically or creatively savvy it you weren't on an Apple machine of course. Anyway, they eventually got a few G5 machines in and I swear no lies this guy continued to do his work on the G4 whilst having headphones plugged into the G5 to listen to music.

Macs are good for those who are happy with them. There are still people today who recite the ancient proverb "Macs are better for graphics!" Correct these ill-informed sheep at all costs. ATI & NVIDIA are good for graphics buddy.

Crapple's commercials suck btw!
 
Well according to what I see on TV from Apple the reason why I don't want a PC is that so many different things can work with the Windows and that causes problems. If I just bought everything from Apple I'd never have an issue.:rolleyes:

When I saw that ad I almost lost it, what a pile of crap.
 
I love windows for gaming but at work I could write an article much longer telling why you should ditch it and go to macs. Since 1990 we have spent countless hours and thousands of dollars trying to get the windows machines to work in our desktop publishing department. At first the programs were only for mac but over the years that has improved. Windows machines always seemed to have trouble with postscript and fonts as well as being very hard to configure on the network using DOS or Windows 386. Then don't get me started on the 640 memory limit and expanded vs extended memory.

Keith
 
Based on the title of the article, the author is drawing illogical conclusions from his own experiences. The moral of the story is not that PCs are better than Macs, nor am I asserting the opposite. The moral of the story is that it is better for your organization to be built around one platform that meets its needs.

Like an earlier poster said, this could easily have been written the other way around (and could have been written, without the hyperbole by any IT worker worth his salt).
 
Jza said:
There are still people today who recite the ancient proverb "Macs are better for graphics!" Correct these ill-informed sheep at all costs. ATI & NVIDIA are good for graphics buddy.
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Perhaps you're ignorant to the fact that when they say "Macs are better for graphics," they are not referring to the type of graphics card they have (even though Macs use ATI and Nvidia).
 
chew63 said:
Perhaps you're ignorant to the fact that when they say "Macs are better for graphics," they are not referring to the type of graphics card they have (even though Macs use ATI and Nvidia).
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That argument don't hold water anymore in the light of the false color fiasco and the fact that PC's are multi-threaded and can handle heavy duty graphics and rendering applications as easily as a Mac's gigaflop processor of yore (which incidentally has been replaced by Intel processors).
 
Azhar said:
That argument don't hold water anymore in the light of the false color fiasco and the fact that PC's are multi-threaded and can handle heavy duty graphics and rendering applications as easily as a Mac's gigaflop processor of yore (which incidentally has been replaced by Intel processors).
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I was not making that argument. I am a Mac user at home, a PC user at work, and a Mac/PC user when working from home.

The argument that I want to make is: C'mon people, just use what you like and quit carrying banners for companies that don't care about you (unless, of course, you work for one of the two, in which case feel free to tote).
 
I love that this is one of the few tech sites on the internet that isn't fervently pro-Apple! Thank you!!
 
kdw1975 said:
I love windows for gaming but at work I could write an article much longer telling why you should ditch it and go to macs. Since 1990 we have spent countless hours and thousands of dollars trying to get the windows machines to work in our desktop publishing department. At first the programs were only for mac but over the years that has improved. Windows machines always seemed to have trouble with postscript and fonts as well as being very hard to configure on the network using DOS or Windows 386. Then don't get me started on the 640 memory limit and expanded vs extended memory.
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This isn't 1990 any more and Networking hasn't been an issue with Windows since Windows 98 :rolleyes:

The whole thing I don't get is how vocal people have to be about Macs...I got a MacBook Pro March 1st and its a great machine, but I'm not going to tell everyone to go out and get one, when you can get a perfectly fine Dell or whatever laptop instead for less and do the same thing.
 
kdw1975 said:
I love windows for gaming but at work I could write an article much longer telling why you should ditch it and go to macs. Since 1990 we have spent countless hours and thousands of dollars trying to get the windows machines to work in our desktop publishing department. At first the programs were only for mac but over the years that has improved. Windows machines always seemed to have trouble with postscript and fonts as well as being very hard to configure on the network using DOS or Windows 386. Then don't get me started on the 640 memory limit and expanded vs extended memory.

Keith
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Write an article then and get laughed at. Welcome to the 21st century...

Also, how can you trust a company that can't code? Case in point: Quicktime. You can test this to confirm, but on Vista machines, if you are thrashing the harddrive heavily, Quicktime will write to the boot sector and cause BSODs and more.

So really, Apple isn't any better than all the other developers out there that can't write stable programs for Vista; it was RTM back in 2006... here we are, 2 years later, apple still can't write an update for their software play nice with Vista?
 
Folks, just some points on the differences between Apple and PC from a video editors perspective...

Apple handles video and graphics better due to it's OS architecture from a memrory management perspective, you have the option of using Final Cut Pro Studio, which was designed by Apple for Apple. Final cut rivals if not better in many areas than Adobe's production studio and AVID systems, quicker snappier response overall.

On the PC side, again major memory management issues, leaks and crashes, believe me, as aan editor using Premiere and After Effects etc. I can tell you that's it's painful to work long hours on a project without a crash or two. I ones left Photoshop open, sitting idle for a few hours, and when I closed it, it took 30 seconds of hard disk thrashing and CPU utilization just trying to close it, looking at Task Manager, you can see that the memory utilization was extremly high. Maybe it's the fault of the application itself, I blame both the applicaiton and the OS.

On the photography side, it's always a delight to work with Photoshop on a 24inch iMac. you still need to calibrate the monitor using Spider, but the results are quick snappy response and fluidity in how it operates, not as much the case on a PC.

Anyway, I primarily use Windows XP, I have two editing stations and another just for browsing and e-mail, don't know if I would buy an iMac, I would probably migrate to a 64 bit version of Windows be it XP or Vista and see how it goes.

As to the article, I think he is looking at it from a business perspective more than anything, and he's got a point there. Though the question to you all, have you ever used Apples version of powerpoint? It simply rocks :)

Cheers!
 
chew63 said:
The argument that I want to make is: C'mon people, just use what you like and quit carrying banners for companies that don't care about you (unless, of course, you work for one of the two, in which case feel free to tote).
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/signed
 
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