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Mac or PC?

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#61
I'd say pc all the way and then do a dual boot with hackintosh on one side if macs would provide something the pc doesn't.

I'd never pay for a new mac, or even the going market price for used ones, even though I do like them for some stuff, mainly audio. Can be done just as well on a pc though. It's just that hardware wise macs are way overpriced and usually made of pretty mediocre components. If I can replicate the computer but with parts that I've come to trust over the years for about half the price of a real mac, I see no reason to get a stupid expensive computer that is usually worse in terms of upgradeability and reliability. Same applies to brand pc's even though they usually aren't as ridiculously priced as macs are.

I think mac os did pull away from the competition for a while, mainly due to the initial failure of vista and XP's long lifespan. But now that 7 is out, I do find it a lot more comfortable to use and I actually haven't been able to crash my 7 platform once - very much unlike the snow leopard macbook pro I had for a while which did go down at least once a month. Also it doesn't slow down any more than the snow leopard did. However, the using preference can be because most of my mac experiences come from macbook pros and I still hate using laptops.
 
#62
I wonder if the Mac vs. PC argument in relation to price would carry over to Sadowsky vs. Fender/Squier? They're both essentially the same thing, but one could argue that the Sadowsky is built better.
 
#63
I must say I am chuckling at all the responses for Macs without an explanation or for Mac because it's better with audio and video. For a biology student :D

Having used both and worked IT I'll expand on my experience with the software she'll use:

Office: Word is the same on both versions. Power Point is better on OS X but decks will have issues with Windows machines that don't have the right drivers installed (hint: most don't). Excel on OS X is an extremely NERFed version of Windows'.

SPSS (and every Java applet for that matter): Doesn't like OS X. Rainbow pinwheels everywhere.

SAS: Won't run on OS X AFAIK

As for bio software, she needs to get in touch with the department and whichever professors she's interested in working under. Whatever software they use in their labs will ultimately determine which one she needs.

Bootcamp: Almost every bit of software you can run on OS X you can run on Windows, so if you're going to be using BC for "Windows specific" software why not just buy a Windows machine in the first place?

Repair: Easier, faster, and cheaper with a Windows machine. You can do most repairs yourself. Changing the RAM and HDD on a Mac is easy but beyond that you have to send it to an authorized Mac tech or to Apple.

Resale: Pretty much the same for the first year. After that Macs definitely have the better resale value.

As I said, get a PC. You can get an Asus laptop with better specs and very high build quality for a fraction of the price of a Mac. Don't let her experience with HP be the benchmark for all Windows machines.
 
#64
Just a note on the ability to change hardware in a mac, you can no longer buy normal hard drives for mac, as they switched to their own 7-pin SATA instead of the industry standard 4-pin.
 
#65
SoonerMatt said:
Office: Word is the same on both versions. Power Point is better on OS X but decks will have issues with Windows machines that don't have the right drivers installed (hint: most don't). Excel on OS X is an extremely NERFed version of Windows'.

SPSS (and every Java applet for that matter): Doesn't like OS X. Rainbow pinwheels everywhere.

SAS: Won't run on OS X AFAIK
Click to expand...

I'm afraid this is mostly silly in the context of actual biomedical lab and academic work. Word is dandy, PowerPoint is too (although Keynote smokes it), and we run our entire biomedical engineering lab operation with massive amounts of data using Excel for OS X. Don't feel NERFed...

SPSS 11 runs just fine under OS X and other Java applets (most notably Image J from the NIH which is standard fare for image analysis of histology, chromatography, etc.) run like a charm on our machines.

While SAS for Mac was discontinued, SAS produces and continues to enhance JMP for Mac and Linux: a *very* strong data exploration and statistics package that is our core lab tools for data analysis under some pretty complex experimental designs and models.

** Let's face it, people tend to defend what they know and disparage what they don't, and extrapolate to another area of endeavour what they think they know in theirs. It doesn't matter what IT at a university thinks, other than the continuing dumb decisions they make about site licences and (God save us) the "enterprise-class" software that is inflicted on the institution for mail, arranging meetings, etc.

Before your daughter starts school, just find out what platform/software the Biology Dept. supports or recommends and go with that as a starting point. That'll do for a couple of years.

If she gets more involved with laboratory or field research, her decisions will tend to be shaped by what actual investigators (like me) use to get the business of bioscience done. We're cash-strapped pragmatists who don't just blow steam over fashion or image in these things; we have grant-driven work to do and find the right tools to do it--whatever nonsense IT is feeding us at times. IT managers want standardized technology they can control and administer. Actual researchers hate that sort of management since almost everything we do is one-off and unique and conforming to standardized, "supported" platforms just slows us down.

In teaching courses and labs, we sometimes make other choices. Our biomedical instrumentation teaching labs are PC-based as we teach LabVIEW, Matlab, and Solid Edge etc., all of which are PC-optimized. But our students are pretty much all Mac-based in their personal work as undergrads and grad students. There's no incongruity here, it's just what works best *for them*. ;)
 
#66
Cohacq said:
Just a note on the ability to change hardware in a mac, you can no longer buy normal hard drives for mac, as they switched to their own 7-pin SATA instead of the industry standard 4-pin.
Click to expand...

No, SATA connectors have always had 7 pins. Maybe you're thinking of the old Molex 4 pin power connectors that older PC power supplies come with. You need adapters to connect SATA drives to those.

It is not true that Macs use non-standard connectors for internal hard drives. It is true that it is difficult to open and modify most Mac models. However, I changed the 500GB drive in my MacBook Pro to a 1TB drive without any major hassles. Non-technical users will be happier buying a computer of any type with enough capacity to last 3 to 4 years, by which time newer models will generally blow the doors off it.
 
#67
I'm a software professional with 30 years experience who has Windows, Macintosh and Linux computers at home. I use all three on a regular basis. I keep them all up-to-date with the latest operating system revisions. I always recommend Macintosh to people who just want to use their computers. Windows 7 and Ubuntu 11.04 are both great operating systems, but either one requires more technical expertise than most people have in order to be used effectively. It is very unlikely that a college student will run into a requirement to use Windows on a personal computer, but if that happens it is possible to run Windows on a Macintosh. Yes, Apple hardware is more expensive on average than PC hardware, but mostly because it is higher quality. (Yes, there is still a slight premium on top of the extra hardware value, call it the design and software premium.) The simplicity of file backups using Time Machine, and the fact that viruses, although theoretically possible, are simply not a factor for ordinary users, are reason enough to recommend a Mac for anyone who does not want to make a career of computer maintenance.
 
#68
Neon Scribe said:
No, SATA connectors have always had 7 pins. Maybe you're thinking of the old Molex 4 pin power connectors that older PC power supplies come with. You need adapters to connect SATA drives to those.

It is not true that Macs use non-standard connectors for internal hard drives. It is true that it is difficult to open and modify most Mac models. However, I changed the 500GB drive in my MacBook Pro to a 1TB drive without any major hassles. Non-technical users will be happier buying a computer of any type with enough capacity to last 3 to 4 years, by which time newer models will generally blow the doors off it.
Click to expand...

Firstly, Mac all the way. :) I use both (PC at work, Mac at home) and vastly prefer the time I spend in front of my Mac. There's just something intrinsically slicker about OS X over W7 - everything just seems to be one less click away, and, with Lion and its gesture-driven interface, it's even easier. But you can get under the hood and fiddle with the nuts and bolts just as easily as you can with any Windows PC - the UNIX console is only a click away. Plus, nice industrial design goes a long way - I hate cheap, plasticky laptops and am happy to pay for something that looks and feels much, much nicer. Although, I must admit to being quite partial to the keyboard on my old Lenovo ThinkPad. :)

But, regarding Cohacq's post about SATA connectors, it's true that the latest revision of the iMac does use a non-standard pin configuration for its 1TB drives. This is because Apple weren't happy with the data throughput of the standard SATA interface, so they designed a new drive controller - so it's not that it's a non-standard SATA connection, it's that the drive itself is no longer a regular SATA drive. Apparently, for the models that also come with an SSD drive, there was too much of a performance disparity between the SSD and the hard drive, and Apple have worked to minimise this bottleneck. The net result is that they now have a 7200RPM 1TB drive that runs at an equivalent speed to one that spins at 10,000RPM. Although, right now, this only affects the latest-revision iMacs - every other HD-based Mac still uses standard SATA.
 
#69
Rusty Chainsaw said:
But, regarding Cohacq's post about SATA connectors, it's true that the latest revision of the iMac does use a non-standard pin configuration for its 1TB drives. This is because Apple weren't happy with the data throughput of the standard SATA interface, so they designed a new drive controller - so it's not that it's a non-standard SATA connection, it's that the drive itself is no longer a regular SATA drive. Apparently, for the models that also come with an SSD drive, there was too much of a performance disparity between the SSD and the hard drive, and Apple have worked to minimise this bottleneck. The net result is that they now have a 7200RPM 1TB drive that runs at an equivalent speed to one that spins at 10,000RPM. Although, right now, this only affects the latest-revision iMacs - every other HD-based Mac still uses standard SATA.
Click to expand...

That's not true at all. The extra pins are for an internal temperature sensor (well, really so that you have to pay them for their overpriced drives), not some special extra-throughput controller - a 7200 RPM drive can't hit the 3Gbps SATA bottleneck.
 
#70
I don't know a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo, but I can tell you that I have had 3 PCs and an iMac. All of my PCs had issues after a couple years whether it was spyware, viruses, blue screens, or other things. They all died after a few years.

I've had my iMac for over 3 years now, and it hasn't given me a single problem, not once. In fact, it works as good, or better, than the day it was new. I also have mine set up with Bootcamp and Windows 7 for those hard to get Mac programs.
 
#71
Kwesi said:
Fix'd. With a theoretical maximum transfer speed of 10GB/s it's more a matter of when, not if. Be very careful about sounding so sure about technology based on what is available now because tech is always moving forward and very quickly at that. Also, take note that Apple, as proprietary and expensive as it is, does not invest in failures. They only put money in when they see themselves making more. Look at the ports on any Mac machine before Thunderbolt came along and tell me which ones are not some sort of established standard? I won't say that Thunderbolt will be the next USB 2.0 but I doubt that it'll go unsupported for much longer.
Click to expand...

Hahah, Newton, PING and AppleTV called.

Thunderbolt will not catch on. It will always be in the niche markets like firewire. USB 3.0 will rein supreme simply because it's already ubiquitous and it's backwards compatible.

I'm a software professional with 30 years experience who has Windows, Macintosh and Linux computers at home. I use all three on a regular basis. I keep them all up-to-date with the latest operating system revisions. I always recommend Macintosh to people who just want to use their computers. Windows 7 and Ubuntu 11.04 are both great operating systems, but either one requires more technical expertise than most people have in order to be used effectively. It is very unlikely that a college student will run into a requirement to use Windows on a personal computer, but if that happens it is possible to run Windows on a Macintosh. Yes, Apple hardware is more expensive on average than PC hardware, but mostly because it is higher quality. (Yes, there is still a slight premium on top of the extra hardware value, call it the design and software premium.) The simplicity of file backups using Time Machine, and the fact that viruses, although theoretically possible, are simply not a factor for ordinary users, are reason enough to recommend a Mac for anyone who does not want to make a career of computer maintenance.
Click to expand...

Not even remotely true. All Intel mac's use off the shelf parts you'd find in any PC. Now if we are talking pre-intel era with IBM/Freescale processors and motorola boards, I might agree with your assessment.
 
#74
Spencer! said:
That's not true at all. The extra pins are for an internal temperature sensor (well, really so that you have to pay them for their overpriced drives), not some special extra-throughput controller - a 7200 RPM drive can't hit the 3Gbps SATA bottleneck.
Click to expand...

Not what I read. I'll dig out the link. I may be wrong - you know what the Apple rumour mill is like. But that's what I read.
 
#75
Reliability data:

Invalid Link Removed

In my view, none of the competing systems are perfect, which always makes it a matter of trade-offs. "Quality" is subjective, and is easily influenced by marketing. Many of us have chosen our favorite platform based on shortcomings of the other systems that we refuse to put up with.

Note to self: I will make sure that my kids can completely tear down and rebuild a Linux system, blindfolded, before they turn 16.
 
#77
why pay 3 times the price of an equivalent hardware PC for a Mac you ask?

because it isn't really an equivalent hardware (Apple's hardware tolerance against declared specs is the most demanding of any company) and frankly you can't really compare the two without weighing in the Mac OSX - a Unix based OS that's going to get more performance from your hardware (ever wondered why the Mac versions of programs seem to demand a "lesser" hardware than their PC version?) and a user experience that doesn't involve format and reinstall every once in 6 months, late night hardware driver hunting sessions, lots of guest appearances by PC oriented malware and the occasional epic blue screen.

besides, a screen that can compete with my 21.5" iMac's screen and a similarly speced PC with quality parts wouldn't run much cheaper than my iMac.

edit:
forgot one more thing - new OS versions can be downloaded for 29.99$ and you don't have to backup and format your hard drive prior to installing.
 
#79
air_leech said:
System Preferences>Mouse>Secondary Click


you're welcome
Click to expand...

Yeah if you're an experienced user you google any questions you have about how to do anything. Doing so would probably find the post right above mine.

My experience took me down this path, 1st computer 1997, garage sale 486 - DOS

1999 first windows computer
many home built machines until 2009, windows wasn't ever a problem for me, I paid attention a little bit and had a lot of reliability and fun.

Mid 2009 - Hackintosh=ed my gaming rig on a lark wanting to see what Garage Band was like, quickly fell in love with OS X, Garage Band not so much. Mac built products in my home at this time? 1 Ipod touch, and aprox 6 windows boxes from laptops to gaming rigs to spares to media centers seeing daily use.

2010 to Current: Mac products in my home 9 !!!!, MacPro, Macbook Pro, Imac, Mac Mini, Ipod touch, 2 iPads and 2 iPhones. All excpet the laptop see daily use between my wife and I, the mac mini is a media center rig.

3 PC products in my home, 2, a couple spares I can't bring myself to bin and an old windows laptop I run band in a box on because I don't want to pollute my macs with parallels and Windows OR buy a current version of BIAB lol.

I drank the koolaide and it tastes good. I don't care what they make PC's out of, what they do to the OS, or how cheap they are. I'm over it. I spend my time using the computer now rather than chasing down fixes.

Thank god I learned how to fix em,clean em, and build em from the very beginning and haven't had to chuck money down that hole. (Except for the constant upgrading that goes with gaming) Instead I sit comfortably at the entrance and direct people to hand it to me to fix theirs. Keep it up MS, Love ya wink.
 
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