/Computors

[Advent Children]

lets vote on how many people like PC or MAC..

[postalblowfish7]

for anyone who answers "MAC" - please see the following thread:

The Official Macintosh Users Thread!!

[Advent Children]

i like mac but i also like the pc too

[Blacksmith]

Well I'm a nerd and hardly know anything abouts macs but the fact they can't play any games, (good games), just makes me shake my head and gives them a thumbs down. I mean I know PC's are easier to get a virus on, but with good protection and smart choices of where you go it is extremely easy to keep your computer safe. Plus I just find PC's more appealing that macs with the stuff you can do.

My dad did build a G4 though and it is pretty awesome too. But mine is still faster

[postalblowfish7]

it's true our game selection is slim - but i'm a console gamer mostly so it doesn't really bother me. I still have all the Blizzard games, and as far as PC games go there isn't really anything else i give a damn about (besides CivIV and EQII - PCs also have mad hacking/emulation abilities that i wish i could be involved with. i always have to have my friends burn me dreamcast discs with emulators on them as NERO is PC only.

gaming aside, NOTHING that i use my computer for could i do better on a PC. Audio/Video production, graphic design, anything involving the web - the Mac is the artists machine, by artists for artists of all mediums. so for me - Macs all the way. that and i'm rabidly passionate about Apple (see my thread on the subject) hehe...

EDIT: this is hardly a word game - could a mod please move it, its placement is weirding me out...

[Cyanide]

I dunt treust me those Pee Cee's...

[hellbred]

I use PC's due to the haste I can design/code web sites in. I've attempted on Apple's while working for certain companies and I just can't work in the same time frame.. don't know why, just some kind of handicap I have.

I will agree that Apple computers are far superior in my opinion to the PC when creating graphics/vecters/3d. I believe most standard design software's are first made for MAC anyways, then written for PC's.

[Daddy]

Personal computers are hot.
Most graphic design applications are written for PC first.
Why?
Market share! Wasting development time on an application whose demograph only holds 10% of the market is frivolous.

[hellbred]

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure graphic suites by big name software developers like Adobe, Alias (now Autodesk), E Frontier, Corel, etc have always made software for Macintosh first.. least that's how it use to be because I'd always be waiting for the latest PC versions of Photoshop and Poser when they already hit Macintosh. I don't think the common user is in mind upon product launch, but more so corporations who are buying hundreds or thousands of licenses at a time.

[LocoColt04]

That's because the publishing industry, for the most part, uses Apple computers. For THEIR SPECIFIC MARKET, yes, they design for the MacOS first.


I use both, so I can't really vote on the poll one way or the other. I own PCs, but I love Macs. It wouldn't be fair to run either way, I think.

[Omega]

I use PC and own PC. I have used MACs in High School, but this is my first computer and hopefully one I will own for a very long time. I have no problem with MACs, they are alright computers, I just remember alot of errors playing games and it was kind of frustrating.

But they are both good computers I bet.

[Knivez]

........p.c

[Sarah]

As I can run Linux on either type of system, I really don't care. As long as it's a decent machine that WORKS PROPERLY, I am happy. Windows' OS's and Mac OS's have far too many issues for my liking.

Cheers to open software.

[Secret Azn Man]

As already mentioned, Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark, Flash, Dreamweaver and even Microsoft Word was created on the Mac first and ported over to Windows later.

If you'll notice, Microsoft Office ships a new version for Macs on even years while new version for Window gets released on odd years. Why is that? Microsoft themselves admit they often use the previous Mac version's features and incorperate them into the next Windows version of Office.

There has been three separate occasions where ATI and nvidia debuted their flagship GPU on the Mac.

So, don't think just because Macs only get blockbuster PC games ported over somehow means Macs are second class computer citizens stuck with left-overs. If anything, it's the other way around.

There's a saying that goes, "If you wanna know what PCs will be like in two years, look at today's Macs." Right from the Macintosh's unveiling, it was lightyears ahead of other consumer PCs. It had a GUI, a mouse, it could display color and lets you paint and draw in it. It can read text out loud. In fact, Steve Jobs made it a speech and it read it to an audience and then proceeded to run a video showing off it's "Insanely Great!" capabilities while playing "Chariots Of Fire."

That was back in 1984.

Today, Windows users are finally getting around to dual core processors (Hyper Threading does NOT count) and 64-bit computing. But here's the kicker, Windows XP Home does not recognize multiple processors. XP Pro does but only has rudimentary support for only two processors and it's scheduler is barely optimized for smoothly managing processes for both processors. It would allocate processes unevenly filling up one CPU and barely touching the second. So, all those hardcore PC users with there bleeding edge dual core Pentiums, Athlons and Core Duos THINK they're gettiong major performance boosts from two cores, when in reality, that second core ain't doing shit. Especially when very few Windows programs are multi-threaded.

But for us Mac users, ppftt, we've had dual PROCESSORS, not cores, but two separate processors running on Macs since late 1990s. My old ass Quicksilver G4 bought in 2001 is a dual processor machine. And because Macs have been familar with multiple processors for awhile, just about every Mac apps that can benefit from multiple processors were multi-processor aware and were multi-threaded. Even if an application such as a text editor isn't multi-threaded, Mac OS 9 and X is. Both OS can evenly and smoothly distribute processes to each processors. So, no matter what I do, both processors will always be utilized roughly equally.

One good example of the benefit of having a dual-processor machine with a multi-processor aware OS back in 2001 was that I could burn a DVD WHILE encoding a raw rip into DivX and still be able to listen to iTunes and chat and browse the Internet. You couldn't even burn a CD and surf the web on PCs back then. Even today, just last month, I was visiting a forum that had a topic consisting of about 120 very large screenshots of Dead or Alive 4 ALL embedded so the browser has to fetch and render each one. My Safari took awhile to do it but it never froze. I could just open a new tab and browse something else while still listening to iTunes. Why? Because Safari is multi-threaded. While one tab was busy rendering a gigantic-titanic page, it simply started another process for another tab. And of course my OS was unaffected. Nothing froze. When Safari was done and after I enjoyed those wonderful screenshots, people posted a second topic complaining how the previous topic caused their PCs to freeze, crash, or even shut-down.

If you think two processors is nice, the current top of the line PowerMac G5 has two 64-bit processors and each processors has two cores. That's right. A four core 64-bit machine running at 2.5 GHz PER core with a 1.25 GHz FSB PER processor. Can you say, "power?" And because OS X supports more than two processors, it can see all four cores and make full use of each. Can you say "true power?" And because the processors a 64-bit with backward compatibility with 32-bit and OS X supports 64 bit, the machine can hold up to 16 GB of RAM, run both 32-bit and 64-bit apps natively. Try kludging around with 64 bit version of Windows and its drivers. Good luck. Hope you find 64-bit apps too. While OS X 10.4 already supports both 32 bit and 64 bit and many scientific programs were recompiled to 64 bit.

In addition to having dual-processors, Macs enjoy one of the strong points of of the PPC architecture: Altivec. It's basically a floating point and integer SIMD instruction set that was and is vastly superior to MMX, SSE1, SSE2, SSE3, and perhaps even SSE4 when it is fully implemented in x86 processors. Altivec is the main reason why a 1 GHz G4 can beat the crap out of a 2 GHz P4 in Photoshop and other applications that uses Altivec. And yes, the PowerMac Quad G5 runs Altivec as well and smokes the Xeons and Opterons in those types of calculations. I admit, we will miss Altivec when Macs switch to Intel and hope, pray, and wish that SSE4 is as good as we hear it's supposed to be.

Enough about CPU. Let's talk about GPU. Rather, the implemation of GPUs. Windows Vista, the next version of Windows that MIGHT be released this year after so many delays, touts a new "revolutionary" GUI called Aero Glass that treats each window as a 3-D object and leverages the GPU to composite the GUI. It could do transparencies... oooh... true drop shadows... aaahhh... vector scaling... and other neat graphic effects. And it's coming soon!!

Except Mac OS X 10.0 treats each on screen object as a 3-D texture and supports full alpha channels, scaling and has been using it in its Aqua GUI since it's first release five years ago while XP users gets to look at guady playskool "Luna" GUI. Two years ago, Mac OS X 10.2.4 gave us Quartz Extreme, the technology to shift all the graphical compositing from the CPU to the GPU. So, we get sexy eye candy and smooth sexy eye candy. You need to see the cube spin on OS X when you switch users or desktop. Or see Exposé in slow motion. Mind blowing. Or see Shiira, a Mac OS X browser take advantage of CoreImage and actually turn the page everytime you click a link to another page. It's like reading a book and turning the pages. It sounds cheesy, but if you see it in person, you'll be clicking links all daty and showing it off to everyone. Best of all, us Mac OS X users are enjoying this NOW while Windows users gotta wait till Vista to come out.

Another new "revolutionary" feature that Vista USED to boast but forced to drop in order to ensure a 2006 release, was WinFS. A new file syste that has an extensive database of metadata that allows for very fast and easy file managent. Basically, you can search stuff faster. Seriously, have you tried searching your hard drive in XP? You might as well go do something else while it searches. Mac OS 9 and X had a pretty decent search feature, one that's actually usuable, but it could be so much more. Mac OS X 10.4 introduced Spotlight. Basically, you can not only search by file name, creation date, file type, etc, but file contents as well. Need every file having to do with a vacation trip? Search it and all you emails, blog entries, tagged photos pertaining to that trip shows up. Fast. Spotlight has find as you type capability. And the single most biggest feature I like about Spotlight is the ability to launch apps and open files from it. For example, say I want to run Dreamweaver. I can invoke Spotlight by pressing two keys, then type "drea" then press dowbn and Enter. Boom, I launched Dreamweaver in just over a second. Try navigating through My Computer > Programs > Macromerdia > Dreamweaver in about a second. Try mousing Start > All Programs > Dreamweaver in a second. Mac OS X 10.4 users are enjoying Spotlight NOW while Windows users gotta wait for Microsoft to get around to bolting on Win FS maybe next year or whenever after Vista is out.

One feature that I must mention is that while dictation software exists in both Mac and PC, on the Mac, you can actually give voice commands to your Mac. I mean you can say, "Reload" and Safari will reload the page. Say "Forward, Back, Home, Page Down, Page Up" and will do just that. Ask "What time is it?" and the Mac will respond "It is 12 o' clock P.M." or whatever. Say, "Tell me a joke." and it'll tell you a lame Knock-Knock joke. Say, "Bring Photoshop to front" it'll switch Photoshop to the front. Say, "Copy, cut, paste" it'll do it. Say, "Open Mail." it'll launch Mail. It's fairly accurate too. If you thougt commanding your puppy in Nintendogs was cool, this is even better. With the Mac Mini, you can put it in your car, add an LCD display, and dictate to your Mac in the car. The potential is amazing.

Bottomline is really, Macs allows you to be more productive. Get more things done. With multi core, Altivec, Quartz Extreme, Exposé, Spotlight, and a whole lot more other things I can't fit in here, they all allow me to do what I want to do. C'mon man, if I can control my Mac with a Blutooth phone for business presentation, that's more money in my wallet. If I can do graphic works without worrying about instaling drivers, security patches, running virus scans, I get more done. I have never, EVER cursed at my Mac in anger. Never had the urge to punch it in frustration because it refused to do what I want it to do for no reason. I get a headache just LOOKING at people using their PC. Windows requires too much effort. Life is too short to be stressing about Windows.