On Tue, 2005-09-27 at 18:47 +0800, Rick Armstrong wrote: > Dear Mac Users, > I have a frustrating debate with a colleague who swears that a PC can do > anything that a Mac can do but cheaper and faster.
Well, each platform can do the vast majority of things the other can. There are specialist domains where one beats the pants off the other, but they tend to vary as time goes by. As with most things, it depends on what you need. Somebody who insists that there's a single better option all the time, for everybody, is usually not actually considering that others have needs different to their own. I tend to side with your colleague on "cheaper and faster" in the hardware department. Software is less clear-cut. Anyway, it depends on the user. For someone who doesn't know how to lock down a Windows box and keep it secure, they'd better count their wasted time and repair costs in that price. Do note that BOTH OSes break in bizarre ways at times, and there's not much to be done about that. > Could someone give me a > short reply (PC owners can't understand anything more then a paragraph). If you're looking for reasons why you can't bring this fellow over to your point of view, you're staring at it. If you won't respect his views at all, why should he in turn listen to you? > I am in the graphics industry and use all Adobe software and QuarkXPress > software. Ditto. I'm also a system administrator, UNIX geek, and C++ & Python programmer. > I have no ambition to compare a Mac with a PC and the mention of > processing speed not clock speed doesn't get through. ... which is odd, since it's just as important for x86 systems these days. A 2GHz P4 is somewhat lame ; a 2GHz Opteron is very much not, and a 2GHz Pentium M is also pretty darn respectable. Anyway, for many tasks a decently fast disk and a whopping amount of RAM is more important than CPU power anyway. It's important to note that while clock speed isn't an especially useful measure of performance by its self, that doesn't necessarily mean that the lower clocked CPU is faster. All things being equal, the higher clocked one will still be faster. Clock is important, it's just not overly useful without knowing the real clock-for-clock performance of the CPUs in question. All evidence I've seen to date, for example, suggests that Pentium M is both faster clock-for-clock, and higher clocked on average, than the mobile G4 used in PowerBooks. A rather more useful measure for most people, anyway, is performance per dollar. Even then, who cares if all you really want is a nice small, portable laptop for word processing and 'net access, and don't actually care very much if it happens to get 20 or 30 frames per second in some program you'll never use. *drools over 12" iBook G4*. > I am starting to doubt the power of Macs now. From a Mac user forever. Well, don't stress - you'll get to use your favourite OS on what I suspect are cheaper, more powerful CPUs soon. Whether that translates to lower hardware prices remains up in the air, but that's not really why you buy them anyway, is it? It's not about "belief" or "doubt", it's about using what you prefer, and what suits your needs better. -- Craig Ringer
