Normally, I just stay out of the computer wars, since (a) Mac people tend to be so vehemently evangelical and since (b) – even though I’ve been using ’em since my dad bought a TRS-80 back in the day (on which I used to play the hell out of a game called “Sword of Zedek,” which for some reason I can’t find anything on the web about )- I’ve never been much more than a moderately informed user (which, in blog circles, makes me ridiculously uninformed.) That being said, every time I catch one of these annoying new Apple ads, I become ever deeper entrenched in my fondness for PC’s. “Using my PC was like being stuck in a bad relationship?” Please. Like I want to wait an extra eighteen months for new games to get a Mac port.
While I did have an Apple IIc as a kid (Mmmm…”Old Ironsides,”) I didn’t really use Macs until I was forced to in high school and, to cut to the quick, I thought they were crappity crap. When a PC goes down, even a rudimentary user like myself can try to ascertain the problem in DOS. When a Mac went down…well, you were stuck looking at that stupid icon. It’s a glorified calculator. It’s no doubt true that the Windows OS is and has been a complete facsimile of the Macintosh, but I’m kinda hoping we move past GUI’s eventually. Ok, I’ve probably betrayed my ignorance a few times over in this post already, so I’ll close it up. Suffice to say, those Apple ads irk me to no end.
I’ll not argue with your assessment of older Mac OSes, but have you played with OS X? Nowadays when something goes wrong (which is almost never), I can just call up a unix terminal and kill whatever process has gone bad. They’re not calculators anymore. And yeah, we’ve got to wait an extra six months for the latest port of the Sims, but at the same time, I’ve got thousands of free *nix programs I can run. I now use the Gimp for all my image manipulation. (The grand that I saved from not buying Photoshop is better incentive to switch than any commercial.) It was also pretty novel to have Apache, PHP, and MySQL set up on the machine pretty much out of the box. Yeah, yeah, here I go being evangelical. But I felt the same way you did about Macs back in high school. They *were* crap. But now even my linux-obsessed boyfriend wants to play with my new iBook. Just try it, if you get the chance. All the stuff power users need and a pretty GUI to boot. 🙂
Dude, seriously, just play with one of the new Macs. Apple lost its way during the mid-Nineties but started kicking some serious ass again around 1998, transitioning to full-on taking-names mode with the release of OS X.1. And X.2 is on the horizon.
Yeah, it’s true my experience with ’em is at least a decade old at this point. And it’s not like the PC 286 was all that.
Umm….it still sucks. When I play my games, open websites, ect… I want no lag or wait time whatsoever. No rough graphic edges…nothing. With macs lagging behind in processor speed, I could not survive off an athlon xp 2200+, 1024 ddr, 126 Radeon 8500, ect.. And when you make them yourself, save the pentium bs (as I have), then you have a great system that owns any mac twice over for half the price or more. My system originally cost $300 to build, then payed $130 on ubid for a 19″ monitor. For poor college kids and adults alike who want performance with unprecedented price, go for the athlon/radeon/ddr combo. Can’t be beat.
p.s. Windows xp professional owns you
True enough, but nobody’s ever claimed that the Mac was a good gaming machine. In terms of “opening websites” though… Are you talking about how long it takes to fire up your browser? Of course PCs are going to win there. It’s not very difficult when your browser is “integrated” into the OS and thus always present in memory. Disregarding the Carbonized version of IE that shipped with OSX (because it was complete crap), browsing on OSX is a complete dream. OmniWeb fires up in about a second. And as for “rough graphic edges”… you were talking about gaming there, right? Because almost nothing in OSX is rough. It’s all smooth, lovely anti-aliased-ness. It literally hurts to read text on a PC anymore. Like I said, you’re right about gaming. We’ve got a purpose-built PC in our apartment to handle all the games. But for surfing, developing, word processing, ripping mp3’s, manipulating images… the Mac does all that stuff great.
I’ve always used Macs. I’m still trying to figure out what a “crash” is.
That said, I’m also not a gamer. I understand if videogames are your thing, go PC.
Oh Kevin, Kevin, Kevin. *shakes head*
OS X is a thing of beauty. Now, I’m a dual (or triple) platform chick. I use both a PC and a Mac, and I’m a Unix-girl from wayback. And having Unix accessible within a Mac interface is just a dream.
I’m not going to wait 6 months to a year for Warcraft 3 or Neverwinter Nights to come out on Mac.
‘Nough said…
To be honest, now that I’ve been regaled with the same print ads all over NYC the past couple of days, my initial contempt for the ad campaign is returning. “Think Different” was ridiculously pretentious (Einstein, Gandhi, and Margot Fonteyn used Macs?), but still relatively innocuous. Now we’ve got these Ordinary-Hipsters-Just-Like-Us complaining about “fighting all day with a PC” and how great it is “just to have a computer that works.” That’s garbage…I’ve used PC’s all my life and never had any serious problems with ’em (knock on wood.) If Apple is offering significantly better product these days (which I can’t really attest to, as per above,) it’s not because PC’s are notoriously unreliable. It’d be like Burger King running a campaign with folks getting nauseous from Mickey D’s. As for multiple platforms, my PC handles all my word-processing/gaming/rudimentary web work/picture manipulation needs, so having a Mac around would just be overkill.
Amen……especially with Windows XP professional running the VERY STABLE windows 2000 kernel you can’t go wrong. Hey Kevin, do you play Warcraft 3 or Neverwinter nights?