Throw away your PC Laptop

One advantage that the Macs have always been ahead of PCs are with multi-media editing software like photo and video editing software. But for the same price a PC will be able to keep up with a MAC in these areas as well. You guys should check out Alienware and Dell Gaming XPS gaming setups. You would see a very capable PC that would be at par with Macs in Multi-media as well as be better in everything else.

 

I did the PC thing. I started as a young kid in the DOS days. I've used almost every flavor of Windows but Vista. I'm not going back to a PC anytime soon.

 

Good to hear that you've found your ideal OS/computer mate. As for me I'm not about to jump ship just yet. I've just researched boot camp and quite impressed with it's ability to run Windows w/o using more resources.

However I'm a gamer and I don't think I will switch to a mac. I would rather get a high end PC that would perform better with games as well as the ability to upgrade my hardware for new technologies.

Oh yeah, been using a PC since DOS days too. And that's even before MS DOS, and to this day I still have no reason to switch to a MAC. As they say - "What ever floats your boat."

-Cheers!

 

That advantage mostly died when Apple went to intel based chip sets. With either OS, the weak link is the bus speed.

Mark

 

Knowing that you are a gamer I'd never recommend a Mac to you.

The vocal majority of gamers love to tweak their systems to get the most frames per second their budget will allow. They would never be happy with a Mac.

My father used to build his systems from scratch, I would be right along side him learning what he was doing. Piecing a system together can be very fun and very frustrating at the same time. The quality of equipment you buy has a lot to do with this.

The average computer user these days couldn't replace a dead CD/DVD drive if they had to, and they don't want to be bothered with learning how. They would rather just use their machine until they feel it was getting old/slow and replace it.

These days I'm more like the average car owner, I just wanna turn it on and and have it work without doing any maintenance. However, I do enjoy piecing together my own cars...

I have an old B&W PowerMac G3 that lives at a friends house. It has been upgraded to a G4 and as I slowly find parts for it I upgrade it some more. It's sole purpose is to run Garageband so him and his other housemates can record their music. I like their music so maintaining/upgrading a 7-year old Mac is a small price to pay for that.

 

Lumberman, you hit the nail on the head. I can take a PC apart and put it back together and have built my systems from scratch (except my laptop) but would never recommend a gamer get a Mac. Gamers are a whole different ballgame and definitely should stick with PCs.

 

Not sure, don't know anything about Macs. But could it be the Intel-AMD wars got to a point where bus speeds and other technoloies have improved to a point that it could almost match the bus speeds of the former Mac? If this is correct then I think Macs did a wise decision on switching to PC based processors for lower cost and basically let another company deal with development.

 

A lot of it also had to do with heat, power consumption and future upgrades.

The Motorola PPC chips created a LOT of heat and required serious cooling systems to run at full speed. Most Intel mac are so quiet you have to put your ear up to them to hear them because, the PPC machines were much louder.

They also gobbled a ton of power, this is the reason we never saw the G5's in a notebook. A 2 hour battery life wouldn't make anyone happy.

I think the real kicker was future upgrades. I don't think Motorola could keep up with what apple wanted to do. They had been talking with Intel for many years before the switch, Intel always delivered what they wanted but then apple backed out and stuck with Motorola. Eventually Intel could deliver something MUCH better than Motorola so they switched.

 

A mac is 3x more than my laptop with vista. i could upgrade the hardware and ram and still have money left over