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Would you choose Apple over PC?

#22
Blisshead said:
You are officially a fanboy. :smug: Macs never break. :eyebrow: Tell that to the imac users. Better yet, call everyone who bought a cube and ask how their applecare experience went.

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I don't know about the older G3 iMacs, but my 20" flatscreen G4 has been rock solid, and my G4800 Quicksilver in the music room has been freeze and crash-free from the start, even when recording 8 simultaneous channels of audio through a MOTU interface into DP4. I'd say that's a pretty clean track record, no? :)
 
#23
Chris Fitzgerald said:
I don't know about the older G3 iMacs, but my 20" flatscreen G4 has been rock solid, and my G4800 Quicksilver in the music room has been freeze and crash-free from the start, even when recording 8 simultaneous channels of audio through a MOTU interface into DP4. I'd say that's a pretty clean track record, no? :)
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Chris, my p4 is rock solid as well, with more than 8 channels of audio through my EMU. Always. No crash yet. Same machine I'm typing on now. As I said before, I think the Mac is a good machine, but let's not blow smoke up people's a$$'es. :)
 
#26
MISSLEDHERALD said:
No smoke intended - just relating personal experience. :)
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Let me walk you through it:

1) You quoted my reply to Robot and you mentioned your own personal experience by way of respone. Unless you accidentally quoted my reply to Robot?
3) I told you why I replied to Robot the way I did. :cool:

No big deal. I think everyone should try both anyway. :)

FenderBender, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It's a money maker for me.
 
#29
Blisshead said:
Let me walk you through it:

1) You quoted my reply to Robot and you mentioned your own personal experience by way of respone. Unless you accidentally quoted my reply to Robot?
3) I told you why I replied to Robot the way I did. :cool:

No big deal. I think everyone should try both anyway. :)
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No worries - we're cool. I never messed with the G3 iMacs, but have heard they didn't kick nearly as much @$$ as the G4's. Truth be told, I'm a little wary of the G5's, simply because they are still "new". Also, even though I think my experience shows an amazing track record, I may also:

1) Simply have gotten extremely lucky over the years;
2) Have had absolutely horrible luck with the PC's that the university puts in my office at school (virus, pop-up, spyware, and crash central);
3) Not have pushed my machines very hard. I never play video games, which I hear causes trouble with freezing, etc., and I've always kept my "MacCondom" on the music machine by never hooking it up online. :)

So like I said, it's all good. :)
 
#30
Chris Fitzgerald said:
No worries - we're cool. I never messed with the G3 iMacs, but have heard they didn't kick nearly as much @$$ as the G4's. Truth be told, I'm a little wary of the G5's, simply because they are still "new". Also, even though I think my experience shows an amazing track record, I may also:

1) Simply have gotten extremely lucky over the years;
2) Have had absolutely horrible luck with the PC's that the university puts in my office at school (virus, pop-up, spyware, and crash central);
3) Not have pushed my machines very hard. I never play video games, which I hear causes trouble with freezing, etc., and I've always kept my "MacCondom" on the music machine by never hooking it up online. :)

So like I said, it's all good. :)
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:cool:

-just please don't call OS-X users "Unix users" and we are OK. I'd have to go find the Allodox if that happened. ;)
 
#31
Ok...here is my input. I've been a PC user for years and years. So has my family. We have all had numerous problems. I have a degree in Computer Science from one of the best Universities in the world and part of my job is to provide support to research computing facilities that receive grants in the millions of dollars. We support a 120 node cluster that is ranked in the top 500 worldwide in terms of power. I'm prefacing this to justify the fact I am quite a knowledgable user.

I just recently gave up fighting Windows. I have been running 2000 and XP for the last few years and I was tired of having my computer seem like it was working more against me than for me. I got a dual 2.5 Ghz Mac G5 just a week or so ago and so far I am thrilled. The speed, the interface (the fact it is built over Unix is pretty cool. If you don't want to touch it though you don't have to), the *reliability*, everything about it so far has been a joy. I just got Pro Logic 7 as well as a Motu 828 mk 2 and am already able to to do more wiith it than I was with my Windows box and my Emu 1820M. To put it briefly, my Mac is now making doing music at home *exciting* instead of a chore.

This isn't a bash on the PC or anything, after all if it weren't for Microsoft our group wouldn't be making nearly as much money ;) After all our Mac users NEVER need help! :p However, I feel my current system is so far superior to the PC that I will most likely never go back unless MS gets their butt in gear. IMO there really is no comparison, and anyone who thinks a Windows based PC is just as capable as a Mac is fooling themselves. Unless of course you're discussing which platform will give you the most headaches.

Oh yes, I don't use the Mac mouse either. I agree it is crap, that's why I use a standard PC two button mouse with a wheel. Works great! :)
 
#32
Jared Morante said:
Ok...here is my input. I've been a PC user for years and years. So has my family. We have all had numerous problems. I have a degree in Computer Science from one of the best Universities in the world and part of my job is to provide support to research computing facilities that receive grants in the millions of dollars. We support a 120 node cluster that is ranked in the top 500 worldwide in terms of power. I'm prefacing this to justify the fact I am quite a knowledgable user.

I just recently gave up fighting Windows. I have been running 2000 and XP for the last few years and I was tired of having my computer seem like it was working more against me than for me. I got a dual 2.5 Ghz Mac G5 just a week or so ago and so far I am thrilled. The speed, the interface (the fact it is built over Unix is pretty cool. If you don't want to touch it though you don't have to), the *reliability*, everything about it so far has been a joy. I just got Pro Logic 7 as well as a Motu 828 mk 2 and am already able to to do more wiith it than I was with my Windows box and my Emu 1820M. To put it briefly, my Mac is now making doing music at home *exciting* instead of a chore.

This isn't a bash on the PC or anything, after all if it weren't for Microsoft our group wouldn't be making nearly as much money ;) After all our Mac users NEVER need help! :p However, I feel my current system is so far superior to the PC that I will most likely never go back unless MS gets their butt in gear. IMO there really is no comparison, and anyone who thinks a Windows based PC is just as capable as a Mac is fooling themselves. Unless of course you're discussing which platform will give you the most headaches.

Oh yes, I don't use the Mac mouse either. I agree it is crap, that's why I use a standard PC two button mouse with a wheel. Works great! :)
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Give me one real example of what your MAC at home setup can do with music that my PC at home setup can not. I understand that you bought a fancy interface, RME has them too. I need to know how I'm fooling myself. Also, please explain to me how I, a comparative literature major, can keep a PC trouble free for years and years while you, a computer science major, can not do the same. I am truly confused.
 
#34
The G5's are so good that even Microsoft is using them in the next X-Box.
So, i'm pretty sure there's no problem with the G5's except for a hefty price tag. But you will soon be able to buy a $1299 (i think) G5 iMac which should be perfect for audio editing and such.
(btw i'm typing this on a 17" G4 Powerbook)
 
#35
Ozzyman said:
But you will soon be able to buy a $1299 (i think) G5 iMac which should be perfect for audio editing and such.
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You can buy those now, I've played with them at the apple store, garageband ran flawlessly on them. They are starting at $1300, which is a great deal considering how much power you're getting from that g5. However, they come with 256 RAM standard, which is unacceptable, you'll want to upgrade to at least 512, more like 768 or 1 GB though, and that'll set you back $150 or so.
 
#36
Ozzyman said:
The G5's are so good that even Microsoft is using them in the next X-Box.
So, i'm pretty sure there's no problem with the G5's except for a hefty price tag. But you will soon be able to buy a $1299 (i think) G5 iMac which should be perfect for audio editing and such.
(btw i'm typing this on a 17" G4 Powerbook)
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Heres the story on that, for those interested:

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#37
An interesting side point with MS using the ppc 970 for Xbox2 is that now means that all three major next gen consoles will be running on POWER PC (and PPC derived) chips.

Particularly when mac gaming is virtually nonexistent(though it has gotten vastly better in the past 2 years)
 
#38
Qualifications statement: My day job is as a system and network admin for the Feds. I've been doing it professionally for over a decade and I've had the (mis)fortune of dealing, in various professional capacities, with most of the versions of MacOS and Windows which have come out since 1990. I've also dealt with the hardware associated with it.

As a result I am a diehard Unix fanboy, and have been since long before OSX.

In terms of audio software, there is no comparison between Apple and Windows. I have spent a lot of time using the audio software on both platforms and they are both equally capable. It doesn't matter if you're recording or composing or producing. In a battle between a marginally savvy Windows user and a marginally savvy MacOS user, the tiebreaking issue will be their creativity. Not their choice of tools. This was not the case five years ago, and a lot of people will still maintain that outdated idea that you have to have Apple or you aren't doing it right. But there is a whole lot of Windows-based audio hardware and software out there which proves them wrong on a daily basis.

I've been using Windows 2k or XP in my home studio for a few years now and I have no plans to switch. My home built PC is rock solid and I never have a crash or even general weirdness, even though I don't turn it off. I reboot every month or two as a safety precaution, which is something you should do with any workstation operating system IMO.

That said, I've gone through a lot of problems getting to this point. The audio hardware I use (MOTU 828) has drivers which were written for Macs and then ported over to Windows as an afterthought. This has caused me no end of problems, but I keep it because the firewire interface lets me plug it into laptops to do field multitracking. Of course it doesn't work with my current laptop, but that's another story.

So if I had my house burn down and got a decent insurance check next week and was going to start over? I'd use PCs. I've invested a decent amount of energy into knowing what I need to buy and what steps I need to take to get up and running with a PC in short order. I'm very familiar with Sonar (my DAW software of choice) and I know that the plugins you can buy for Windows are four-letter-word good. It would take me a lot less time to be up and running with PCs than with Macs.

If I was having any of my musician friends start from scratch building their own studio? I get asked this a lot and I always tell them to pick Apple. I can tell people how to make their PC work great all day, but in the end it takes more than just a couple of emails with instructions. The problems associated with PCs in a pro-sumer environment have very little to do with the OS and a lot to do with what hardware you're running it on. With Apple, you don't really have that problem. Apple's brand of hardware socialism sucks, but the upside of it is that 95% of the time you know you're getting something that is a very nice machine. There's a reason Macs cost so much compared to PCs, and it has very little to do with Mac's hipster image. To top it off, Apple has control of both the hardware and the software. This, to me, is priceless. No, Apples aren't crashproof. No computer system is. But the number of problems you'll have are small in comparison to what you'll find with PCs if you aren't a computer geek to begin with. And maybe even if you are.

By the way, to the person who threw out the quote that they've never seen a PC user who has said they love their PC: I love mine. A lot of PC users do. A lot of Mac users hate theirs.
 
#40
Extra superb^^

I find that I have no problems with my PC as long as I'm the only one using it. But of course my wife and daughter start screwwing with stuff and thats when it starts to slow down and crash.

What I'll probably do is just get another PC for the family stuff $800-1000 will do , And dedicate my PC just for me and the few programs that I want to use for music related work.

I really think (just my guess) that when you have 50 programs all running and grabing up memory blah blah, especially with XP and 3 accounts all going at the same time, stuff starts to bog down.

I'll just clean this Pc up and see what happens.

But the Apples are so damn cool!!!! But I really need to spend money on a "modern sounding" bass to add to my tone arsenal . Need to win lotto, is what I need!
 

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