NOT starting a flame war - APPLE vs WIndows

[multiweb (Marc)]

Gee that didn't take long. How old are you guys? 5?....

[LewisM]

I don't find that BASHING - that's COMPARING. Was there any derogatory remarks? Any inflammatory ones? Only for thin-skinned or someone with a really sensitive eco-system.

Really surprised by the reactions of but a few to open minded questions of simple comparison. Doesn't matter- one PM answered all the questions I needed to know, VERY informatively and without emotion or feelings of persecution...

[Colin_Fraser]

Originally Posted by multiweb

Gee that didn't take long. How old are you guys? 5?....

Golly Dad, were only having a bit of fun

[marki]

Woohoo Apple fan boys Vs PC fan boys, where's the popcorn .

Really guys, use what you prefer and be done with it, if you like it, it must be the best for you, simple really.

Mark

[Andy01 (Andy)]

Sorry Lewis, not sure where you're getting your facts from, re: professional photographers using macs.

I've been one for 30 years, and I have my own studio, full of macs and so do almost all of my professional colleagues.
As former national president of the ACMP and 5x master of the AIPP I can assure you that our members are predominantly Mac users.

Maybe we could survey the membership : )

Cheers
Andy

[LewisM]

Maybe it's a regional thing then

[FlashDrive (Poppy)]

Let's all ' Kiss ' and make up ..

[LewisM]

I thought you said "Let's all kiss in make-up"...

THAT is a regional thing !

Apples and Oranges...Aye Carumba!

[LewisM]

I also apologise if anyone's hackles got ruffled. Not my intention. I wanted a comparative debate, not a flame war.

[Octane (Humayun)]

Mac rules.

UNIX 4 lyf.

Colin: there is left- and right-click on the Mac -- by default, it's disabled. Just go in to settings, mouse settings and enable it.

Also, you are not locked in to iTunes for video/music. There's nothing stopping you from installing VLC Player, or a plethora of other audio/video players.

H

[FlashDrive (Poppy)]

Originally Posted by Octane

Mac rules.

UNIX 4 lyf.

Colin: there is left- and right-click on the Mac -- by default, it's disabled. Just go in to settings, mouse settings and enable it.

Also, you are not locked in to iTunes for video/music. There's nothing stopping you from installing VLC Player, or a plethora of other audio/video players.

H

Thanks H ....I'll talk to Aimee ( daughter ) see what she has been doing with her Media ....iTunes or otherwise.

Flash ..!!

[Poita (Peter)]

For me the reasons are multiple.
I have to use Windows and MAC computers simultaneously and often.
The big advantage on the MAC for me is applescript, automator and the full unix shell. It allows for workflows that are nigh on impossible on the PC, and it doesn't require any extra software to set it up.
I find when I go to another office, if they have windows machines I often have to download some other bits and pieces to get my jobs done, but 9 times out of 10 what I need is already on the MAC as it is part of the OS.
Things have improved on windows since Win7 came out, but there are still a few holes when it comes to automating complex workflows.
Mac font handling is far superior, as is integration with USB and firewire, no dicking around because windows has reassigned a USB port etc.

It basically comes down to niggles and being able to get down and dirty under the hood, which is harder on the PC than on the Mac. It is kind of what you would expect when one OS has to handle an almost infinite range of hardware configs, and the other only a handful.
I do have my Windows PC running well, but it took a long time, and a lot of fiddling, and a lot of that time spent could have been time working and making money.
Generally, when I want to tinker, I use windows, when I want to get a job done, I use the mac.
Either can do the job, but I tend to get the work done faster on the mac, despite the fact that I have had a few years mac experience versus having a PC since 1987.

[Poita (Peter)]

Originally Posted by FlashDrive

Thanks H ....I'll talk to Aimee ( daughter ) see what she has been doing with her Media ....iTunes or otherwise.

Flash ..!!

Yeah, there is a huge range of Media players, I used to use XBMC and VLC mostly on OSX.

[LewisM]

Ahem Peter... IPEC man, IPEC

Wife's getting antsy about that 7 ft long parcel in the garage...

[multiweb (Marc)]

Originally Posted by Poita

The big advantage on the MAC for me is applescript, automator and the full unix shell. It allows for workflows that are nigh on impossible on the PC, and it doesn't require any extra software to set it up.

Applescript is super cool. MS needs something like that.

[tonybarry (Tony)]

I am a Mac developer in science and engineering, and I see a lot of Macs in use by science people. Very few in use by engineering people.

The science folk like the Unix underpinnings, but would seem to be moving away from Mac and towards Linux due to the changes since Snow Leopard. This is not just my opinion - I have canvassed other scientists and they report the same.

The engineering folk like the Visual Studio environment, and the absolutely huge amount of applications developed for Windows. I see some eng switching to Apple hardware and then booting to Win for eng. work, but going back to OSX for net banking and other stuff where security is more of an issue. While Matlab is available cross platform, I know of one Mac dev and a whole lot more of PC devs for Matlab.

The security issue is thorny for both Mac and Win. Both platforms can be compromised, although Win has vastly more OS exploits. The Mac world has a few social engineered trojans and some OS vulns. In general, Microsoft is much better (proactive) about security patches than Apple. Linux is the clear winner in security.

As a dev who has coded for Mac since 1991, I can say I prefer the Apple world. The $100 security certificate needed for Mountain Lion development is not much fun, and I honestly do not know if it will make a difference to malware dissemination on the Mac (or not).

In the astro world (I don't do photoshop processing, just basic imaging and occultation work) I have found PC applications outnumber Mac apps by a long way. There are exceptions - Astroplanner (cross platform); Nebulosity (cross platform, but has a much bigger selection of cams on Win); Equinox (Mac only); Astro IIDC for FW cam control (Mac, now sadly gone out of business); ImageJ (cross platform Java) ... the list for Mac is not great.

In the end, I've found that experience on a platform counts for an awful lot. If a person is experienced on Win and then moves to Mac, it is a hard slog. Same in reverse. The intuitive Apple urban legend is true only for people who are computer naive and have a tutor to show them the basics. The easy-to-crash Windows urban legend is also just that - newer versions of Windows (7 in particular) seem to be quite robust, and the issues tend to be more with buggy device drivers than the OS. The Win 8 interface is not a great advantage, but it's early days yet. It may get its mojo together.

In response to Lewis's OP ... the Mac world is very nice - but if you have any kind of agenda or bias, or if you need a particular app that only exists for one platform, then the reasons to be Apple or PC are much less these days.

Regards,
Tony Barry

[CDKPhil]

Originally Posted by pluto

I hope you're not referring to me as a Mac basher!.

No not at all, and your right Apple did not make things appear out of thin air, but they sure do a good job of presenting them.

I just think it is funny that there is so much tension over this topic.

It all comes down to personal experience, what works for one may not work for the other.

I think if you wanted to find out what is better for your needs get a Mac and PC of equivalent speed side by side and battle it out. This is the only way to know what is going to work better for you.

Hey I am bias so get a Mac

Phil

[multiweb (Marc)]

Originally Posted by tonybarry

I am a Mac developer in science and engineering, and I see a lot of Macs in use by science people. Very few in use by engineering people.

The science folk like the Unix underpinnings, but would seem to be moving away from Mac and towards Linux due to the changes since Snow Leopard. This is not just my opinion - I have canvassed other scientists and they report the same.

The engineering folk like the Visual Studio environment, and the absolutely huge amount of applications developed for Windows. I see some eng switching to Apple hardware and then booting to Win for eng. work, but going back to OSX for net banking and other stuff where security is more of an issue. While Matlab is available cross platform, I know of one Mac dev and a whole lot more of PC devs for Matlab.

The security issue is thorny for both Mac and Win. Both platforms can be compromised, although Win has vastly more OS exploits. The Mac world has a few social engineered trojans and some OS vulns. In general, Microsoft is much better (proactive) about security patches than Apple. Linux is the clear winner in security.

As a dev who has coded for Mac since 1991, I can say I prefer the Apple world. The $100 security certificate needed for Mountain Lion development is not much fun, and I honestly do not know if it will make a difference to malware dissemination on the Mac (or not).

In the astro world (I don't do photoshop processing, just basic imaging and occultation work) I have found PC applications outnumber Mac apps by a long way. There are exceptions - Astroplanner (cross platform); Nebulosity (cross platform, but has a much bigger selection of cams on Win); Equinox (Mac only); Astro IIDC for FW cam control (Mac, now sadly gone out of business); ImageJ (cross platform Java) ... the list for Mac is not great.

In the end, I've found that experience on a platform counts for an awful lot. If a person is experienced on Win and then moves to Mac, it is a hard slog. Same in reverse. The intuitive Apple urban legend is true only for people who are computer naive and have a tutor to show them the basics. The easy-to-crash Windows urban legend is also just that - newer versions of Windows (7 in particular) seem to be quite robust, and the issues tend to be more with buggy device drivers than the OS. The Win 8 interface is not a great advantage, but it's early days yet. It may get its mojo together.

In response to Lewis's OP ... the Mac world is very nice - but if you have any kind of agenda or bias, or if you need a particular app that only exists for one platform, then the reasons to be Apple or PC are much less these days.

Regards,
Tony Barry

Alleluia! First concise and informative post. Covered it all.

[LewisM]

It sure did - and VERY nicely,and VERY similar to the PM I received from another Mac developer.

[pluto (Hugh)]

Originally Posted by CDKPhil

I think if you wanted to find out what is better for your needs get a Mac and PC of equivalent speed side by side and battle it out. This is the only way to know what is going to work better for you.

Funny you mention that as I did just that last year when we happened to get a Mac Pro and a PC with identical processors, same video cards (except for the extra bits Apple tacks on) and the same amount of ram. We ran Geekbench on both and, on the PC, both Windows 7 and Fedora 11.
Predictably Linux was out in front but I was surprised that Windows just edged ahead of OSX. Historically I've always thought Windows was fairly inefficient, especially for memory management, so this was a bit of a suprise and certainly a sign of the improvement that Windows 7 represented over XP (and Vista... *shudders*).
Although the OSs were fresh installs and had just been rebooted before the test I don't know what was running on OSX and Windows that could have affected those results and I also noticed that re-running the test would give very similar but slightly different individual results so the whole test isn't very scientific. I also can't remember the version of Mac OS that was on it.
Also worth noting was the prices of the two boxes, from memory the Mac Pro was about $11,500 and the PC was just over $8k. Although Mac prices have come down since then and I do think the current Macbook Pros are good value relative to other premium laptops on the market.

Of course in the test of which case was prettier the Mac won hands down