PC vs Consoles

Which platform is home to you?

  • Total voters
    62
One of the big problems I have with mac is the price, but also the fact that if your power cord fails or gets destroyed (pretty common when you have cats) you HAVE to buy an Apple power cord, which wouldn't be an issue if they didn't cost an arm and a leg. My wife had to buy a new one for her iMac and it costed 80 bucks!

Compare that to my PC Laptop, where I can buy any after-market one at Best Buy for 10-15 bucks.

Upgrade a Mac? Good luck taking it apart, especially the laptops.

PC? No problem I can buy whatever motherboard and Ram chips I want and I essentially got a new computer for far less than buying a new mac.

Gaming? Even though there are more Mac compatible games than before, its library is still much shorter than PC's.

And as far as how long they last, this PC laptop that I'm currently using now is 6 years old. It's not meant for anything other than facebook twitter forums, etc, so there's no reason for me to upgrade.

We also had an old macbook OSX that was 2001 model, it lasted only 5 years before the motherboard crashed.

And then lastly, much of the college stuff that uses computers requires PCs.

Only downside? PC's get viruses like mad, but this is only because 95% of the internet users use PCs, why not program for the biggest common denominator?
 
CaptainHook said:
One of the big problems I have with mac is the price, but also the fact that if your power cord fails or gets destroyed (pretty common when you have cats) you HAVE to buy an Apple power cord, which wouldn't be an issue if they didn't cost an arm and a leg. My wife had to buy a new one for her iMac and it costed 80 bucks!

Compare that to my PC Laptop, where I can buy any after-market one at Best Buy for 10-15 bucks.

Upgrade a Mac? Good luck taking it apart, especially the laptops.

PC? No problem I can buy whatever motherboard and Ram chips I want and I essentially got a new computer for far less than buying a new mac.

Gaming? Even though there are more Mac compatible games than before, its library is still much shorter than PC's.

And as far as how long they last, this PC laptop that I'm currently using now is 6 years old. It's not meant for anything other than facebook twitter forums, etc, so there's no reason for me to upgrade.

We also had an old macbook OSX that was 2001 model, it lasted only 5 years before the motherboard crashed.

And then lastly, much of the college stuff that uses computers requires PCs.

Only downside? PC's get viruses like mad, but this is only because 95% of the internet users use PCs, why not program for the biggest common denominator?
Click to expand...
I have several points to make since you're regarding laptops...
1. You can't change your laptop's motherboard for a different model. That laptop will only take that certain Motherboard. You also can't pick w/e RAM you want, you're limited to mobile RAM.
2. Every time someone gets a virus it's because the end user didn't have the correct add-ons on their browser to protect them from such threats on unsafe sites or the correct anti-virus.
3. If viruses are such a big issue you can just put Linux on your computer if you aren't going to play games. You'll never get a virus on Linux.
 
CaptainHook said:
One of the big problems I have with mac is the price, but also the fact that if your power cord fails or gets destroyed (pretty common when you have cats) you HAVE to buy an Apple power cord, which wouldn't be an issue if they didn't cost an arm and a leg. My wife had to buy a new one for her iMac and it costed 80 bucks!

Compare that to my PC Laptop, where I can buy any after-market one at Best Buy for 10-15 bucks.

Upgrade a Mac? Good luck taking it apart, especially the laptops.

PC? No problem I can buy whatever motherboard and Ram chips I want and I essentially got a new computer for far less than buying a new mac.

Gaming? Even though there are more Mac compatible games than before, its library is still much shorter than PC's.

And as far as how long they last, this PC laptop that I'm currently using now is 6 years old. It's not meant for anything other than facebook twitter forums, etc, so there's no reason for me to upgrade.

We also had an old macbook OSX that was 2001 model, it lasted only 5 years before the motherboard crashed.

And then lastly, much of the college stuff that uses computers requires PCs.

Only downside? PC's get viruses like mad, but this is only because 95% of the internet users use PCs, why not program for the biggest common denominator?
Click to expand...
actually for a mac mini you can rip out the ram and everything, and stick more in. and for upgradability you have the mac pro. the laptop ram is all soldered in, but if you're really worried about upgrading your laptop anyways, then you should probably just get a desktop. besides its not uncommon for laptop ram to be soldered in anyways: my samsung laptop that im talking to you on right now has both the ram and the battery soldered in.

btw all macs that dont have their ram soldered in use standard low profile DDR3 ram, which you can pick up at futureshop and bestbuy if you're so inclined.

Gaming? if you are having that much trouble installing your games on OSX, you can just install Windows7 on your Mac. OSX isnt the hardware, its the operating system, and you are free to swap that out as you so please.

Then thats fine for you. but some people, especially people like me, who are computer science university students, spend 8 hours a day on their laptops writing programs for class. its not for everybody, but you get what you pay for, and i'll pay for longer battery life, a stronger processor, and a *nix based system anyday..

also old macbooks were awful. over the past 13 years however, apples product quality has increased substantially to the point where carrying around a macbook is like carrying around a portable desktop that never runs out of power.

and that depends on which university you go to - my university has an apple store built into it, and we only use mac computers there (of course, i have linux on my laptop, so i dont bother using any of the computers anyways. but if i had a macbook, which i will soon, then id use OSX just as happily, because the only thing that is different is essentially the GUI - I can access all standard *nix functionality one way or the other through the CLI).

also you cant really say PC, because its WINDOWS. not PC. OSX or Linux could be installed onto that same PC, and it would still be a PC. Macs are literally just closed system PC's. there is no hardware difference - infact you could go and buy the parts to build a mac replica if you want, even though its incredibly illegal to install OSX on a non-Mac computer. However, Linux is completely free, and you can buy computers with Linux pre-installed on them, even if you have to look kinda hard to find them. Closed hardware systems isnt an OSX issue, its an Apple issue. but with closed systems also comes much greater performance and stability for the hardware, leading to a higher quality product anyways. With an open system, you get the freedom to do whatever you want to it, but at the cost of that performance and stability.

Windows IMO is far from being the best and most fitting operating system for most jobs as it doesnt provide the powerful system utilities that a *nix system does without paying for proprietary programs that provide functionality which should ALREADY BE BUILT IN. the only reason people develop for it is because it is so popular(and infact, any sort of important software, INCLUDING most games, is either ported to OSX, or can be run in WINE anyways, which also makes Linux a viable option...), and the only reason it is so popular is because 20 some-odd years ago it offered something that other operating systems didnt. but nowdays, every single desktop operating system you could install can do all of the same things as eachother; it doesnt matter if its Windows, OSX, Linux, FreeBSD, Minix, Solaris, etc. its just a matter of whether you are willing to pay for that or not, and whether you want to spend alot of time working in configuration files or not - which is different for each operating system. infact even on windows you will have to much around in config files sometimes to get it to do wht you want, so no operating system is a stranger to this process.

That being said however, *nix operating systems were HUGE in the world of computer science at one time for the exact same reason.
http://www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/

also with the direction Windows is going, well, all Microsoft can hope for is that because Bill Gates is back, he'll turn the company around with his monopolistic tendencies, because while they still are the head of the market right now, they have lost a fair bit of ground to OSX and Linux in recent years. So why program for a system that is losing ground?

How about instead of seeing it that way we focus on cross-platform programming. So why program for every single operating system? Because a) it promotes widespread distribution of your product, b) cross platform programming takes alot of quality control in order to keep it portable unless you use a high level language (which suffer from performance issues anyways) and c) it doesnt alienate consumers.

Im not saying you should buy a mac because mac > windows. im just saying you should do your research before making such broad claims and judgements about a system that you lack modern experience with.

you also cant base your judgements on any type of technology based on its past iterations of how it was back in the day. do you know how quickly technology actually evolves?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top