I have joined the dark side
 

After many years as an anti-mac IBM guy, I have finally succumb to the temptation. It wasn't so much the OS that tempted me, or the software. I see flaws in both but there are certain benefits I'm sure. But rather, it was the design of the all-in-one solution that is elegant, sophisticated and packs a solid machine underneath. None of the PC manufacturers have come close. So I have gone from building all my own machines, to a machine that I can't modify. But, as many of you know, I use my machine in my living room so I am looking to reduce the clutter of wires and want something that looks good. I can appreciate good design, and apple nailed it.

I went with the 24" with the wireless keyboard and upgraded the HDD to 500 gigs.

We'll see how happy I am with the move in the long term.

Welcome to MindHead. Welcome to MindHead. Welcome to MindHead. Welcome to MindHead. Welcome to MindHead. Welcome to MindHead.

I've never really gone the PC route, I'm a Mac lifer for better or worse. I hope you'll be happy overall. Nothing's perfect, but some things are pretty damn slick.

Welcome!

Pretty!

Oh is that all - I thought you were finally coming out of the closet. ;)

Yep !! I was hoping that Mr lost trousers had finally earned his Toaster-Oven. ;)

LMAO!!!

As to the Mac, it's a nice machine -- personally tho since I do PC gaming, it is completely useless. But for everything else it seems to work real nizzzzzze :)

With how buggy Vista is, I kinda wish we'd made the same move, but we couldn't resist the fact that we could spend far less and get much more storage and speed.

I'm curious what buggy you're having with Vista. I've been running it for quite a while now and haven't run into a single one and at one point had the machine running for 48 days before a software install required a reboot.

I do like the concept behind the Mac that NM bought and when we moved recently I did look into something similar for PC without success (we've gone back to computers in the living room). But in looking at it in person at the Apple store I don't care for it visually in person. Something about it just looks toylike to me.

Plus, the irony would ignite the house if, now that Lani has made the big switch from a lifetime of Apple usery to PC, I were to go the opposite direction.

You are dead to me now.

The biggest issue we've had is with the photo gallery, especially as to how it deals with networked served image files. It's more performance inefficiencies than bugs, per se, with extreme lag despite no network congestion. However the keyword tagging through Windows photo gallery does seem to be buggy, but that may again be related to the general network/sync problems it seems to have. The OS is overall sluggish and tends to hang up on context switching between users. A 3 year newer, significantly more powerful machine is performing like (or worse than) our old laptop. It's frustrating.

We're also running Vista on the server machine, which doesn't see much day-to-day use from us users, and with that I've been very satisfied. It has never crashed and, as you said, requires reboots only for updates.

Welcome to the dark side, I've been a Macaddict for life, never use a PC unless I'm at my in-laws house.

Screw you all, Linux pwns!! :D

Having worked with Macs, Windows, several flavors of Linux, AIX, Solaris, and several Unix implementations...whatever. They all suck.

My experience is:

If you don't know how to use the system, they all suck.

Once you are adept with a certain system, then all the others suck.

Perfection was abandoned when they moved away from punch cards.

I used to live by, "Don't compute with fruit.", until I started editing.

Now, I have a Mac G4 laptop and the ultimate Apple geekware - an 8-core Pro.

And, I'll never allow Microsoft products to taint my fruit. I run that stuff on the PC. I love my PC for office stuff, but Mac owns the graphical world.

Welcome to the dark side - I'm sure you're going to enjoy it. :D

Is the current Mac OS super searchable like Vista is? As slow as our laptop is (and it is. slow. very. slow.) I'm already getting used to the neat capabilities.

Did you ever drop your deck while rushing to get them in the queue?

Talk about a blue screen of death.....

Except Netware. Netware sucks. Period.

I have been a lifelong Mac user starting with my SE Pro back in 89. I have been forced onto a PC at work (which I spend a lot of time on) and will say that there are advantages and disadvantages to each platform. For what I do, I would not want a Mac at work. And I will never have a PC at home. I am not interested in PC gaming.

One of the areas where a PC kills the Mac is in file management abilities in dialog boxes. At work, I am CONSTANTLY moving, copying, renaming, etc. files in dialog boxes. Also, I am constantly moving between open documents in the same program - something I can do on the keyboard on a PC (Alt-Tab) but I have not figured out to do this on a Mac (you can use the keyboard to move between PROGRAMS, but not files).

I have been using Vista for a few months now and do not like it. It is, in my experience, less stable than XP (and I keep it up-to-date). While I do not do anything fancy on my 'puter (Word, Excel, Outlook, and Act remain open constantly and Acrobat Pro is used quite a bit), I am on it constantly throughout the day. RAM management is buggy, forcing me to reboot at least once a day.

I do not have the very latest Mac OS (Leopard, which came out Friday), but the search functions are fairly similar in robustness and speed.

Yeah, I've noticed the occasional memory leak (though to be fair, that's more likely the fault of some software vendor who incorrectly uses Vista's memory management interface than Vista's fault itself).

I'm hoping that SP1 (currently in beta) will address the performance issues I've seen.

Curious about what led you to think that, as it was quite the opposite for me. The real aluminum fascia, aluminum stand and glass screen with piano black bezel made it look more solid and industrial than any other consumer PC product. The cheap-o plastic cases that IBM-clone makers are still using really eventually drove me away.

It was the visual quality of the iMac, especially the new Al one that really sold me. That and the aluminum keyboard is pretty trick too. A couple PC makers (Sony & Gateway) have tried to develop a similar solution, but they don't match the performance of the iMac and still lack the elegance of the Apple design.

And I am certainly no fanboy of apple. I am one of the few that god forbid thinks the iPod has flaws.

Cherny - Yeah. Apple for some reason, even with an Intel-based chip, can't seem to manage decent game performance. I don't get it. But, I haven't played a computer game since college so it didn't weigh heavily into my decision.

From the reviews I have read on Cnet,the search capability in Leopard is supposed to be far superior to Vista. FWIW.

I may dual boot with Vista/Leopard, though I have been hearing some not so great things about Vista lately. Ah if only Windows 2000 was still supported. Or even better, NT 4.0.

Chicken and egg scenario. Because it's historically not a game system, no one is spending much time, money, effort to develop for it, even if the system architecture might be catching up/have caught up to PC.

Also, try a program called Parallels. A co-worker has it installed on his Intel Mac here at the office and it seems to work well.

My old roommate has a Vista PC and a iBook he dual boots (with XP). He hasn't had any issues with Vista and loves the dual boot feature of the Mac.

If you don't have your heart set on Vista, you could probably still find a copy of XP around to dual boot with.

My next computer will be a Mac. I love my XP Dells (desktop and PC) but I am not going to take the Vista leap for a bunch of reasons; stability being one of them.

And I am still hopping back and forth from one foot to the other. Looking longingly at the Macbook and a Dell XPS (or 1721 inspiron). Since I am working more in graphics (book and website) and podcasting, it would seem to make sense for me to go with a mac. I can run word on a Mac, right? What about outlook? What graphics program can I use? I have used, almost exclusively, Paint Shop Pro. I know I will have to invest in bunches of new software once I do make the leap, either way. (BTW, Kevy I just invested in the full version of AVG and fired McAfee, it's great!)

Well that's the odd thing. Now that you can run Windows on a Mac, you can run PC games. But they don't perform well. And the system architecture is actually stronger for less money than comparable all-in-one pc systems nowadays.

I don't know, it is just a general response. But I generally don't respond well to the Apple design aesthetic anyway. We were in an Apple store the other day and saw that new small wireless keyboard and simultaneously Lani said "wow, doesn't that look great" and I said "wow, that is ugly."

Mac design, in my view, just looks like it is trying to hard to be hip.

That much isn't surprising at all. It may be more similar to PC architecture, but it's still got plenty of proprietary stuff that is not optimized to run PC-programmed software (or, from a different view, PC-programmed software is designed to take advantage of different efficiencies than are available in Mac hardware).

Okay, I'll be the first to admit that this discussion left me in the dust long ago. (He said, confidently typing away at his ten-year-old, Windows 98-equipped Gateway PC) My experience in this debate is purely anecdotal.

The decay of my marriage can be traced to the day my wife bought her first Mac. Suddenly, I found myself in a mixed marriage, like a Mormon married to a druid. Her new circle of friends was strange to me - insular, elitist, superior and not a little stand-offish. Their commitment to this equipment bordered on fanaticism. I was baffled. It was just a computer!

Suddenly she and I spoke different languages. She had extensions. She was unimpressed by my ability to right-click. We rarely interfaced. The whole experience left me with an undeniable axiom.

A PC is a tool. A Mac is a lifestyle choice.

Damn cult.

(I now remove my tongue from my cheek before I hurt myself:rolleyes: )

The funny thing is ozron, is that what relate is not too far from the truth :D

I disagree with the poultry assessment. Back in the old days, Apple was deliberately game un-friendly. They were directly responsible for the lack of Apple games and it's only snowballed since then.

I too am a gamer and have no use for a Mac. In addition, I absolutely despise the way Macs handle mice/cursor acceleration. Yes, I know it can be adjusted, but no amount of tinkering has ever helped.

But what I really hate about Macs are Macolytes. The religious-like fervor too many Mac users display makes me want to gag!

And you want to gag on Wally.



ETA: Interesting thought: what if Wally was a Macolyte?

Hmm, that's an interesting perspective to put it in. I'm not sure I agree that choosing to gear all graphic hardware and software optimization towards the design end of things necessarily constitutes a deliberately hostile move towards gamers. Certainly deliberately not catering to them, but it was no more "deliberately game unfriendly" than PCs are "deliberately graphic artist unfriendly". Simply a business decision to target different markets.

Maybe "chicken and egg" isn't a perfect analogy, but I can't think of one any closer. I conceded that it's precipitated by Apple's non-game focus in the architecture, but, as NM points out, with the introduction of the Intel chipsets, that becomes a far less concrete barrier. So at this point, it's a matter of software developers saying, "There's no market on Mac for games, so we're not going to rewrite everything to optimize for the new Mac architecture...besides, it may be closer to a PC, but it's still not a PC." While Apple says, "No one's writing game software for Mac because no one wants it, so we're not going to bother taking advantage of the gaming optimization available with the Intel chipset because it's not worth our time."

I worked at a gaming company from 1990-1998. We did port over a few titles for the Mac but really the sales were very low so we quit doing it.

In the office we started out all Mac as we were doing more graphic design at the time than game stuff. Once we bought the game company and that was our focus we had to switch over eventually because of various compatability issues.

Actually when I started we were doing bundles for the Amiga.

I stand corrected. According to their website they currently have one Mac title avaliable. For a title that was first released on PC in 1997. There were two additional verisons of the game released for PC but apparently not on Mac.

I am a reformed gamer who likes the opportunity to play games if I want to. Now, I haven't touched a game in close to 4 years, and despite attempts by co-workers, boyfriends and friends, I have no interest in playing WoW, or the SIMS or any other game out on the market. But I like knowing that I could if I want to. Does that stop me from wanting a Mac? No. Will it sway things more in that direction if they become gamer friendly? Sure. Would I start gaming again if Mac was conducive to it? Highly doubt it. My interests are elsewhere now.

I agree with GD completely. It is all about the market segment that they choose to go after. They don't need to go after the gamers. PC and Mac will compete until pigs fly, but they cater to two different markets, and until one can do what the other does, better, they will both be around.

On the topic of Macolyte's, I find that they aren't around as much, or as vocal as they once were. I used to swear I would never own an iPod, or buy a Mac (BE can attest to this), however, times change, market segments change, people change and the economy changes. A Mac, or an iPod is no longer a "status" of sorts. Sure, there are people who define themselves by their machines but that falls on both sides of the "war". Macs are now available to the "common man", and are being marketed to them as such (see Mac vs. PC commercials). If one stops looking for the Macolyte's, they pretty much cease to exist.

Funny that you bring up the commercials. Those were actually kind of a risky move on Apple's part as a similar tactic many years ago, in the early days of the Mac vs. PC war, really backfired on Apple. The year after the now famous "1984" commercial (directed by Ridley Scott, featuring Anya Major as the heroine), Apple put out a commercial during the next Superbowl showing IBM users as lemmings, which promptly pissed off the business world.

Doh!

I remember those commercials and hearing about the fallout. I think the difference between then and now is this: the "lines are drawn". Those businesses that deal in graphics and graphic art gravitate towards Mac. Those who don't gravitate towards PC. Office for Mac helped bring Mac's into the business world, although it doesn't seem that Mac will ever replace PC. But who really knows what the future holds.

*I* didn't take the new commercials to be targeted at businesses (even though some used business as a backdrop). I took them to be targeted at the person who still has a hard time with a PC (getting viruses, blue screen of death, etc...). We're a pretty tech savvy group and we associate with a lot of tech savvy people. But there are a lot of people who can barely figure out how to turn their computer on, or get online.

Actually, a fair amount of SMALL businesses (not creative types) are buying Macs. If I had more time, I would find the article that talked about that.

Apple has been experiencing a good growth by having people come into the Apple stores to buy an iPod and walk out with an iMac.

That lemmings commercial really was awful and offputting. The PC vs. Mac ads, on the other hand, at least make the PC incredibly lovable. As far as personalities go, I'd much rather hang out with John Hodgman than that younger hipper guy.

Well duh! ;)If Wally was a Macolyte I would just have to deal with it. Much the same way I deal with Metallica being His favorite band. :rolleyes:
I would agree that now C vs. E is a reasonable metaphor because of the market saturation for PCs and game(r)s. I really just meant to call to light the fact that this situation was a result of decisions Apple made in the past, not random chance.

I went in to an Apple store for the first time last night.
I looked at a few of their boxes, and they're sleek and all, but not MY style.
A salesperson asked me if something was wrong- I simply said "They all look the same, where's the fun in that?" - He reacted like I'd spit on a crucifix at the Vatican. Sorry, but I don't like going into a computer store where I'm made to feel like a heretic because I'm not of the "gabba gabba one of us" mindset.

I had a friend who sold OS/2 back in the day. Talk about a cult.....