To iMac or not ?

[climbing_vine]

...and I don't get viruses either.

Since I used to support users (faculty/staff/students/alumni) at a University with 70k active folks, and still work closely with the support services (where my wife works), I'll say this about that.

You're right that, as of the last two years or so, it's much easier to run without getting viruses on Windows (XP only). They finally closed some of the most brain-dead openings, such as no default firewall, LANMAN hash vulnerabilities, etc.

There is a huge caveat here, however. Unlike a Mac (for whatever reasons, I won't get into the debate about marketshare vs security models vs etc here), one has to take active steps to remain clean on Windows. I can't tell you how many people come to us and say "Oh, those Mac users are full of it, I've never had a virus." And then it turns out that the reason their machine and network connection are so slow is that someone turned it into a spam-pumping bot.

It's a rare bit of malware these days that makes itself known on your machine. It's not about people crashing every computer they can to get their name in the news--it's about making billions. They're stealth, and you may not notice it until there's a deterioration in performance, or someone installs a keylogger and empties your bank account. ;P Absolutely, not clicking on stupid stuff in email is a major key to staying infection free but there are still plenty of actively exploited holes that require little to no user action, more all the time. This situation may get better with Vista and the new and improved Internet Explorer, but we don't know yet. And once you do get infected--most of the modern malware puts in roots so deep you have no choice but to wipe clean (or pay an expert $100 an hour for uncertain results). Just one slip can cost you invaluable hours and days, not to mention data loss.

I hate sounding like a zealot, and hope I don't. I'm just pointing out that, for the moment in the real world, keeping a Windows box clean requires a proactive user and a non-zero cost of time and CPU cycles, and the same is not true of Macs. It might change, but that's the current state of the world.

 

[climbing_vine]

You MAC guys are 10 years behind the times, just like Leica. Yes, plug-and-play. Windows has done that for years. I have dual monitors, a Skype USB phone, a Davis wireless weather system, and 2 USB printers plugged in to my Shuttle PC, among miscellaneous digital cameras and an iPod, and they were all literally plug-and-play.

Again, having dealt with a very large sample (as well as one-on-one experience) I can say that Plug-n-Play is a far less confident proposition on Windows. However, I don't really consider this a Microsoft problem (except inasmuch as they sometimes have "issues" with API design). It's more a function of the fact that Windows software, being the (by far) largest market in software development, attracts the most programmers and thus more than its share of the average and below. The people writing the installers and drivers are more likely to be schmucks than those doing it on other platforms. Same as any other arena, those serving the standard or lowest-common-denominator (in a literal rather than perjorative sense) tend to need lots of warm bodies and the bar is consequently lower.

 

[drewbarb]

Wow- I almost feel sorry for Ira, trying so damn hard to justify the PC to us. It's cool, man, I'm sure it works just fine. There's room here for everyone.

As for old Macs, it's true they almost never die, short of weird anomolies. I still have four of the suckers, while my girlfriend has gone through three Dell laptops in two years- first a logic board died, then her hard drive got fried by spyware or something, which eventually took the whole thing down in flames. She dumped a beer on the third one, so I guess that's her fault, not the computer.

Anyway, here's an idea for your old but still plugging along Macs- wipe the drives, re-install the latest OS, and use it as a jukebox. I have a ten year old G3 tower with nothing but iTunes and Firefox. We use this in the kitchen, wired to speakers in the living room and kitchen, and it's our house e-mail machine, recipie look-up at meal times, and our music system. We use our other machines for all other tasks. Whenever we get new music, we load it into the old Mac, and put the discs away. I maxed out the memory, added a 120GB external drive, and we just fill it. Probably four hundred CD's loaded into it, plus a couple hundred songs downloaded, and still tons of room. When we want to hear anything, we tap it up on the keboard and hit play- the CD's are all tucked away safely if we want them. Just make sure you get speakers that are optimized for digital music systems, as digital musci through older regular speakers can sound like crap.

 

[Topdog1]

I'll just let this go. Like I said, you MAC guys win.

/Ira

 

[Topdog1]

If you really felt sorry for me, you'd give me a free rangefinder!

 

[photogdave]

Wow- I almost feel sorry for Ira, trying so damn hard to justify the PC to us. It's cool, man, I'm sure it works just fine. There's room here for everyone.

As for old Macs, it's true they almost never die, short of weird anomolies. I still have four of the suckers, while my girlfriend has gone through three Dell laptops in two years- first a logic board died, then her hard drive got fried by spyware or something, which eventually took the whole thing down in flames. She dumped a beer on the third one, so I guess that's her fault, not the computer.

Anyway, here's an idea for your old but still plugging along Macs- wipe the drives, re-install the latest OS, and use it as a jukebox. I have a ten year old G3 tower with nothing but iTunes and Firefox. We use this in the kitchen, wired to speakers in the living room and kitchen, and it's our house e-mail machine, recipie look-up at meal times, and our music system. We use our other machines for all other tasks. Whenever we get new music, we load it into the old Mac, and put the discs away. I maxed out the memory, added a 120GB external drive, and we just fill it. Probably four hundred CD's loaded into it, plus a couple hundred songs downloaded, and still tons of room. When we want to hear anything, we tap it up on the keboard and hit play- the CD's are all tucked away safely if we want them. Just make sure you get speakers that are optimized for digital music systems, as digital musci through older regular speakers can sound like crap.

That's exactly what I was going to do but I got Airport Express with AirTunes. I just need to figure out how to have my iTunes library separated on my external HD so it's not cloggin up my tower, and my iMac can be donated to someone.

 

[nightfly]

Just make sure you get speakers that are optimized for digital music systems, as digital musci through older regular speakers can sound like crap.

This is entirely OT, but what do you mean? What exactly are digitally optimized speakers?

I've got my iTunes hooked through an Airport Express to a Rotel amp and some Swan tower speakers and they sound awesome. Before I upgraded it was an Onkyo Receiver and some Infinity bookshelf speakers and the sound was good too. Sure compressed audio doesn't sound as good as uncompressed audio but Apple's Lossless codec seems to do a pretty job (much better than mp3).

However as far as I know, speakers are speakers. Probably the cheapest stereo receiver you can find and some decent bookshelf speakers are going to sound better than any sort of "computer" speakers and be cheaper to boot. Besides the various forms of processing (Dolby whatever) the basics of amplifiers and speakers haven't changed much in probably half a century though I have seen some interesting iPod docs with tube amps to warm up the sound a little which seem intriguing but expensive.

 

[LeicaM3]

I just need to figure out how to have my iTunes library separated on my external HD so it's not cloggin up my tower, and my iMac can be donated to someone.

iTunes/Preferences/Advanced

change location of iTunes Music library



Difficult, eh?

Andreas

 

[Jamie123]

I recently had to buy a notebook for university purposes and thought about the MacBookPro's. However, everytime I had a look at apple's website I remembered why this wasn't an option: They're insanely expensive! If you want a reasonably price Mac notebook you have to buy a MacBook and they only come with 13'3 screens.

What also bugs me about Apple is that everything's so damn expensive. I mean...what did the only available webcam for Macs cost? $150+??

Apart from that there's not much one can say. I'd like to have one but would never make a complete switch.

 

[drewbarb]

This is entirely OT, but what do you mean? What exactly are digitally optimized speakers?

I'm not exactly sure what the deal is here- :bang: I just know that my digital music sounded pretty lame when I it was hooked up through the old stereo system- but once I upgraded it sounded fine. I was told by the salesman (for whatever that's worth) that the new systems were optimized to process digital signals better, and that it was due using older speakers and amps that were not able to process the signals as efficiently that the old system sounded so bad.

 

[MelanieC]

Macs are expensive (sort of -- compared to comparable Windows machines I think they are not that much more expensive) but they also last much, much longer than PCs. Every Mac I've ever owned ran for years with no problems. This includes my 1990 Mac Classic (2.5 MB of RAM!) which is now in Benin being used in a Peace Corps school, my PowerBook 165c (the first ever color monitor PowerBook) that got donated to the Philadelphia school system, my PowerBook G3 "Wallstreet" (I used it a few years, took it into the field, and then it got my brother through law school -- still kicking except that the battery is dead), my original titanium PowerBook "Mercury" (got my brother through a clerkship and is now my mother's), and my current aluminum G4 PowerBook that I'm typing on now.

I'd like a new Intel MacBook (even though I hate the name, "MacBook") but honestly, I could keep using what I have now for years, still be able to upgrade my software, and still be able to keep up with everyone around me (both PC and Mac users) in terms of the work I can do on this thing. There's something to be said for that, in addition to the never crashing and no viruses and that I don't have to spend hours trying to convince my laptop that it has a new printer attached to it, etc.

I've had to use PCs for years in the workplace and for various school things, so it's not like I'm unfamiliar with PCs or Windows. I've used some pretty good PC machines too and I liked them. I'm not a PC hater, I just prefer Macs.

 

[nightfly]

Interesting.

I would bet maybe some newer systems do some sort of equalization or signal boosting on digital sources or something. Basically either the sound is there or it's not but probably empahsizing certain frequencies and cutting others can mask this to a certain extent.

Certainly if you music is digitized in something compressed (like low bit rate mp3s) that it will sound crappy but that just means that your old system was accurate. In fact a better stereo will make compressed files sound worse because it will reveal the limits of the compression.

The biggest bummer about purchasing digital music is that you really aren't getting all the music if you buy it compressed. You have to trust that the iTunes store or whatever is selling you quality files. That's why I still buy music I care about on CD or better vinyl (yes I'm one of THOSE people). I've sort of been agonizing about putting all my CD's on a big hardrive but don't know what compression to use that is both high quality and iTunes friendly. Some of the geekier compression algorthymns only work with obscure plug ins and such.

Carry on with the jihad.

 

[rool]

My gf uses a Mac, I could never understand what it is all about. I feel like they interact with me as if was totally stupid. I could never get used to the OS either.
I am PC all the way, I have much more control on everything. No viruses also.
Mac people haven't realized the progress PC have made in the past years.

Like Leicas, Macs are over-rated in my opinion. Oh well, they are pretty for sure...

 

[climbing_vine]

My gf uses a Mac, I could never understand what it is all about. I feel like they interact with me as if was totally stupid. I could never get used to the OS either.
I am PC all the way, I have much more control on everything.

You may be more familiar with how to exercise control on Windows, which is cool. You're used to it, it works for you. But for years now the Mac OS has had a command-line (a true one, not the semi-crippled modern incarnation of DOS that Windows keeps around) with a large range of Unix tools, and exposed advanced settings of apps via that and/or direct editing of XML library files. If one is so inclined, it offers better control than is usually possible in Windows (at least without editing the registry, which can destroy the machine).

I preferred Windows for exactly the reasons you're talking about up until about 1996 or '97, when hobbyist-produced tools for tweaking the old Mac OS became widely available to do all the things I wanted. With the Unix base of OS X, I was hooked.

This is totally off-topic, just letting you know that if that's the sort of thing you're into, it's available.

 

[drewbarb]

Mac people haven't realized the progress PC have made in the past years.

Funny- I'd say the same thing about PC people. But this is a silly debate, as the two systems are getting more and more like each other, and ina few years will be pretty much totally cross- platform compatible, like most things are now for Mac users with Intel machines.

Anway, back to the OT audio thing- nightfly- you have some good thoughts there. I wish I understood the digital world better- I bet I would not have had to spend so much to make my digital audio system sound decent. I, too, buy music I really want on CD (and yes, even vinal when I can) and make my own files as I said earlier. It doesn't sound as good as when I sit down with the records on the old turntable, but then again, it's far more convenient to tap out a few keys, and not fuss with anything physical other than a keyboard and mouse, or an iPod or tiny Mac remote. It makes everyday listening so damn easy. (Right now I'm listening to a Crooked Fingers album my Dad gave me for Christmas!)

 

[climbing_vine]

Macs are expensive (sort of -- compared to comparable Windows machines I think they are not that much more expensive) but they also last much, much longer than PCs.

Like-to-like price comparisons get harder all the time because of trends towards tiering differntiations.

On the high-end laptops, Macs blow away anyone else in price. For example, compare a 17-inch MBPro to a 17-inch Dell XPS. At a given configuration, the Apple is anywhere from a couple hundred to $400 cheaper--and that's with a longer life battery, a slightly faster processor (2.33 vs 2), and all the software. The Dell doesn't even come with basic disc burning software, which is generally important to folks like us. Bump the processor on the Dell up to the same one as the Mac has, and the difference is now $700--in favor of the Mac.

But, if you want a 15-inch monitor there aren't really comparable systems. Dell offers 15 inchers with processors up to 2GHz, whereas Macs start at 2.16 on the 15-inch models. You're going to pay a few hundred more for the Mac than for a somewhat similarly configured Dell (with a slower processor, inferior LCD that Dell uses for their cheap laptops, and small hits on the graphics card and other stuff--and again the lack of software). If you're willing to cut back to a 13-inch screen, though, and compare it to a 12 or 14 on the Dell side (they don't offer a 13), the Mac is hundreds cheaper, again, for a similar configuration. And again with the Dell's deficiency in the LCD, battery, and software.

It's a really difficult across-the-board comparison. You have to decide what you want, and then do a comparison that's relevant to you. PCs are generally cheaper than Macs these days for the very bottom end, which Apple doesn't compete in; and the sweet spot in the absolute middle, where economies of scale are at their best. The more affordable side of the middle ground, and the high-end are going to be far cheaper in Apple-land even before you get to the 'intangible' differences like parts (dwindling) or software (growing).

 

[rool]

Yeah, in the end I like cameras, not computers. I don' really care, I use what works for cheap.
I won't judge you depending on which computer you use, that's for sure... might be different when it comes to cameras though! ;-P

 

[MacDaddy]

Macs are NOT more expensive than comparable windoze PC!

Macs are NOT more expensive than comparable windoze PC!

PC Magazine, PC World and numerous other windoze oriented (and biased) magazines have done the math over the last year and—comparing systems configured as closely as possible— Macs have actually been cheaper; even the laptops! And that without the "Intel discount" you mentioned getting!
A VERY elegant solution would be to combine a 24" iMac with Dell's 24" widesreen monitor (which I have) using the $17 DVI—to—DVI adapter from Apple, for an astounding 48" of monitor space! With EDUCATIONAL discounts, mine was under $3000 total, including Microsoft Office 2004 (latest) and Adobe Creative Suite CS2. As with others, I've used Macs for 18 years, supported them as a Sys Admin and Network Admin and wouldn't have any other system in my home or business! It IS true, "Once you go Mac, you'll never go back!"
And as has ALSO been pointed out, I would wait until after the Steve "JobNote" next Tuesday before ordering a system, as that is the likeliest time for Jobs to intro new consumer systems.

 

[bafonso]

My gf uses a Mac, I could never understand what it is all about. I feel like they interact with me as if was totally stupid. I could never get used to the OS either.
I am PC all the way, I have much more control on everything. No viruses also.
Mac people haven't realized the progress PC have made in the past years.

Like Leicas, Macs are over-rated in my opinion. Oh well, they are pretty for sure...

There comes a time in life where you really want to work and don't care about details that you shouldn't have to care about. Btw, using a Mac you actually have much more control due to its unix-based underlying SO (FreeBSD-based kernel...). I'm glad I was given the chance to buy whatever laptop I wanted and I have yet to regret having bought a powerbook. I simply don't want to spend 20-30% of my cpu cycles on anti-everything out there plus registry-hell/windows FUBAR after 1-year of everyday usage.

Of course Macs also crash and have their problems but they're 1% of what I've experienced with PCs for over a decade... So, I have indeed realized the progress of PCs... but I have also realized how OS X is simply a more elegant and technologically superior solution to every windows every made. And no, I don't feel the need to try Vista...

Just try a Mac, you'll enjoy it. Some things are different, to better

ps: yes, macs are over-priced. But some things in life are priceless such as time, patience and free-time not fixing redmond's screwups.

 

[bafonso]

I have been looking at the new Apple Cinema displays since I need a new monitor. However, they are so expensive1k for a 23" monitor. However, I can get an iMac with an Intel employee discount for a good price. The question are ... I'm a windows/PC guy, how will this new iMac affect my work flow. Also, is the display as good as the stand alone apple 23" monitor?

I just wanted to state that you shouldn't buy into apple cinema's hype. They're stylish and cool, but there are much better priced displays out there that work perfectly with a Mac Pro (you need to get a mac, there's no discussion here...). It just depends on how serious you are about getting a regular display or a more professional one. Whatever you are after, there are better options than Apple's. Apple's displays are pricey due to design and cool-factor... just compare specs.

peace
ba