I want a Macintosh...

Unfortunately, I'm in the same boat, but there is no way I'll ever get one within any short period of time.

I use them in one of my classes at school, and just those few hours a week I spend with them is a pleasure... It aggravates me everytime I go home and sit at my laptop and wonder how many more times I'm going to minimize Photoshop or Dreamweaver until they are no longer responding a short while later and then I'll have to wait for that lousy 'send error report?' prompt to pop up and in the meantime blahblahblah run-on sentence cont'd...

And yea, the displays are ridiculously nice, too.

One day. Hopefully.

Icepick, I sympathise with you. I use Macs at work and I have PCs at home but if I had the sheckles I'd so get a Mac. Don't listen to any propaganda--listen to users, preferrably those who use both platforms. Mac OSX can be aas simple or as complex as you want to get into. Some people NEVER touch the command line stuff and others revel in it. Theres a strong and fervent homebrew community and they are constantly porting LINUX apps and other stuff to the OSX. OSX has elegance, functionality and stability. Have you had an opportunity to play around with any of the new macs? The single button mouse is like a Mac signature or something but you can buy dozens of multi button third party mice--me I'm used to the control click meself. I use my PC primarily for games and the Mac will probably never be as good a gaming platform but the Mac users do a lot of other stuff--graphic/web design (what I do in part), system administration, file/web serving, programming, music editing. You should save up for the CPU and then buy the monitor(s) later--you can get some older displays cheap nowadays.

Yeah, really. All I use my PC for nowadays is Morrowind and Worms. Hehe. I do everything else on my Mac.

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Originally Posted by Icepick

How about you just paraphrase the radio shows and tell me whats wrong with Apple.

Please tell me its something new and original, not the same tired old crap.

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The Host goes on several rants on how great the system runs out of the box and then as time moves on the system just becomes sluggish, and tempermental. How the same box they edited a feature lenght documentary now has issues with a simple VCD for no aparent reason other than the passage of time. And this is from a guy is pretty much exclusively a Mac user and has been for years.

Some Mac users will have you believe its some magical wonderland where everthing works always, all the time, and never a problem comes about and pink fluffy bunnies dance in thier dreams every night.

Its a frickin computer, guess what? They crash. I dont care if its Windows/Linux/Mac/Free-BSD whatever. You want something that never crashes? Get a pen and some paper and start writing letters.

Damnit, bring back the Amiga. :)

BTW my XP machine here at work has been up for nearly 6 months now without a crash. My home system nearly 3 months since the last crash, and that was becuase I was messing with some Beta Drivers for some uncommon hardware I play with.

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Originally Posted by Wildkat

The Host goes on several rants on how great the system runs out of the box and then as time moves on the system just becomes sluggish, and tempermental. How the same box they edited a feature lenght documentary now has issues with a simple VCD for no aparent reason other than the passage of time. And this is from a guy is pretty much exclusively a Mac user and has been for years.

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I wonder if he was updating the operating system. Gasp! My 3+ year old G3 doesn't run nearly as fast as it did when I got it... but that's because all the applications I run require faster processors and more RAM! BLASPHEMY! WHY DOESN'T IT WORK AS WELL AS IT DID WHEN I GOT IT?!?!?

My old machines still behave perfectly. Hell, I bought up some old Macs a few years ago, too. A couple Mac IIsis and a few other pieces. One had a Radius monitor, it'd be killer for shooters if it was color. Funny, they function just as well (?) as they ever did, running the old system and programs with no problem. Macs don't have some kind of magical expiration date system that's exclusive to them. All machines will experience peformance drops, especially after years of accumulating files and shit without cleaning up and taking care of it. My 6+ year old PC chokes on just about everything, when I used to play Unreal Tournament just fine on it. Go figure. Maybe my neglect caught up with me. Anyway, the user can take some control over that. Not a valid argument.

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Some Mac users will have you believe its some magical wonderland where everthing works always, all the time, and never a problem comes about and pink fluffy bunnies dance in thier dreams every night.

Its a frickin computer, guess what? They crash. I dont care if its Windows/Linux/Mac/Free-BSD whatever. You want something that never crashes? Get a pen and some paper and start writing letters.

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Very valid. People like that ought to be smacked. But it's true. Things work better on my Mac. They generally are done faster and with less difficulty and trial and error. A friend of mine comes to my college every weekend, and at some point we'll always watch anime or movies on a TV in the common room on one floor. Setting my Mac up for TV-out usually takes less than a minute. The PC, running XP, usually requires a lot more fiddling. Once you learn how to use Mac OS, generally, things do go smoother. I plug hardware in and it usually works. Things do seem more seamless, and it's no myth. But do people overemphasize this? Yes. It's not perfect. Though, I've never seen a full OS X system crash on this machine or the G3 I had before it. Kernel panic? Nope.

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Damnit, bring back the Amiga. :)

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If you had any valid points I am now pretending I never read them.

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BTW my XP machine here at work has been up for nearly 6 months now without a crash. My home system nearly 3 months since the last crash, and that was becuase I was messing with some Beta Drivers for some uncommon hardware I play with.

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Funny you mention the Mac performance degrading at the top of this. When I first installed XP on one of my x86 boxes, it ran like a dream. Rock solid. Nothing could bring it down. I had an uptime of a couple months, and I'm talking heavy use. Plenty of emulators, occasional gaming, AIM, ICQ, Outlook, IE, programs crashing all the time but not bringing down the OS. Tons of Photoshop and Painter work. And performance didn't suffer much. Except, a few months later, the machine suddenly turned on me. It'd report corrupt files on boot. It'd hang on the shutdown screens and not let me get a full shutdown. It'd hang and crash for no reason. It became a nightmare.

Eventually I realized my work was generally safer on my Mac. And the rest is history, heh.

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Originally Posted by Wildkat

The Host goes on several rants on how great the system runs out of the box and then as time moves on the system just becomes sluggish, and tempermental. How the same box they edited a feature lenght documentary now has issues with a simple VCD for no aparent reason other than the passage of time. And this is from a guy is pretty much exclusively a Mac user and has been for years.

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I can vouch as I've heard the same series of shows and it was funny as hell to hear a Mac fanatic bitching about "those damn Macs" week after week. And these are computer and technology oriented shows ( they publish 2600 magazine, "The Hacker Quarterly" ) so it's not like they are morons or anything. He basically stated that Apple's answer to his problems was to "go out and buy a new Mac".

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Originally Posted by Despair

Apple machines are way too overpriced.

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Unfortunately, this lie continues to go around. The truth is, it isn't true. Serious comparisons have been done between Mac hardware and equal PC hardware, and the Mac hardware is typically the same price or just slightly more expensive. Yes, Macs USED to be grossly overpriced - they aren't anymore, and anyone who says that they are hasn't done their research.

What exactly are you building that you're getting it up that high? You might have already answered that - I need to go read the rest of the thread.

I have nothing against Macs (I'm quite fond of my dad's G4, actually) but I'm wondering exactly what these people are doing to their Windows XP machines to make them crash so often. I've had next to no trouble in the past year or two, and am a little curious...

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Originally Posted by shidoshi

Unfortunately, this lie continues to go around. The truth is, it isn't true. Serious comparisons have been done between Mac hardware and equal PC hardware, and the Mac hardware is typically the same price or just slightly more expensive. Yes, Macs USED to be grossly overpriced - they aren't anymore, and anyone who says that they are hasn't done their research.

What exactly are you building that you're getting it up that high? You might have already answered that - I need to go read the rest of the thread.

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Are you kidding me? The cheapest G5 is $1,999. I could build a PC that would beat the living shit out of that for much much less.

i have to agree that Apple computers are expensive and the reason behind this is quite simple--Apple is in charge of manufacturing these machines--they have no "clones" there isn't a mass availability of cheaper interchangeable parts like a PC would have. In all honesty there really isn't as much customization in the building of a Mac--think of it like Sony could sell future Playstations cheaper by using an off the shelf video card/components instead of making there own, etc. What you do get is quality and guaranteed compatibility. It's ironic that Apple's campaign is "think different" and be an individual when Apple itself is pretty autocratic about the machines they make. But, hell, I love Macs anyway.