Are you a Mac or PC?

[Vihzel]

Walk up to the next person who gives you a BS line of crap about "macs having higher quality construction" and I want you to slap that person as hard as possible.

Thing is... anyone who says that today is talking about the unibody aluminum MBPs.

I also used to be like you and was only concerned with the performance of a laptop. Once I concerned myself more with aesthetics, portability, battery life, and my needs as a college student... everything changed.

Also... a quad core doesn't make sense to be in a laptop unless you planned to be plugged in all the time, which kind of defeats the purpose of a laptop. It makes the battery its bitch.

I easily get at least 6 hours out of my MBA on a single charge, which would be impossible with a quad core notebook.

 

[mikedt]

My laptop is a 3 year old HP that runs over 100c now.

So you can't possibly be using this hot coal thing on your lap then? If not, it's not much of a 'laptop' then is it?

I have put millions of hours onto that thing from gaming. It runs and has always run hot. I took it back and forth to school every day for a long time.

What is the battery life on it, 30 minutes at most?

Using OSX (sadly, I am actually getting more use to doing the more I am around her) is a PITA.

I had exactly the same thoughts about Windows Vista three years ago. Which is what made me buy a Macbook Pro, this has been all over the world with me and is still working just fine. Windows 7 on the other hand is good. I use this on my netbook.

 

[DaedalusxX]

I have a PC. HP laptop dual booting win7 and Kubuntu.

I work in IT and though I know the ins and outs of windows and am very familiar with linux, but I feel just as comfortable with the Mac OS (compared to linux)...

 

[ElasticNinja]

Just tried the MacBook Air in the first time since ages ago
Lovely device if I could get Windows7 on it

 

[icemncmth]

I have at home Macbook Pro, Laptop with XP Pro, and one with Win7..but the computer I use the most is the dual boot Win7 with Linux Mint on it.

I also use the Macbook a lot and I use it mainly for the Linux programs that can run on it.

As for what is better. Whatever does the job at hand is the best.

 

[jamespayton]

Torn between the two! Want either a high powered macbook are high powered laptop running windows 7 for graphic design!! Anyone care to throw their opinions my way?

 

[alextop30]

I have only one question why is Linux not included. We are the android nation which is build exclusively on Linux. My primary system is Linux Ubuntu 10.4 Karmic Koala loaded on pc. There I am an open source lover.

 

[ElasticNinja]

I have only one question why is Linux not included. We are the android nation which is build exclusively on Linux. My primary system is Linux Ubuntu 10.4 Karmic Koala loaded on pc. There I am an open source lover.

TBH, I prefer Ubuntu 10.10 better than any other OS except Windows 7

Ubuntu is probably better engine wise, is neater and more organised, but it lacks a lot of little things, which are what W7 IMO does best
Little power saving things, Aero peek, Aero windows, tabs on top etc

They get them implemented and I would likely switch
also I love the W7 taskbar

 

[vasilip]

I love my Incredible phone but I love my macBook even more

 

[Vihzel]

So after a day of playing around with the Adamo... I'm returning it back. Even though it's only 4lbs, it feels much heavier when you actually hold it because the vast majority of the weight is on one side. The weight distribution is terrible.

The keys also for some reason feel cramped, but they do work and the font and backlighting work well. The screen just doesn't match up to the Air's screen because due to the lower resolution, it is definitely noticeable looking at regular font on websites and how much you can see all at once. The Air's screen looks crisp due to its 1440x900 resolution. It also has a higher contrast ratio so blacks are blacker and whites are whiter.

I can already definitely tell that the Adamo's battery life isn't anywhere near the Air's after 2 full drains. It's a bit of a disappointment because I expected it to last longer than 3 1/2 hours. Also, the speakers on the Adamo are not that great. For some reason, the speakers are on the back and they don't have a high volume. The Air's speakers are astoundingly amazing for a laptop of its size. It can get loud and sound relatively full as long as you're not expecting heavy bass.

MAJOR problems with my unit: 1) The LCD screen ripples on the very left side (as if the pixels are shifting) if there's movement of the laptop, such as typing on the keyboard or gently hitting the table. I've never seen this before and found it really annoying. 2) There's static coming from the speakers during songs that have certain pitches. 3) The fan turns on a bit too quickly, even when just watching Youtube videos and is loud enough to be an annoyance. 4) The front middle side of bottom part of the notebook kind of... "popped off". It's not like you can actually see anything in there but there's a big bend when it should be secure. Now if I shake the notebook, there's a rattle inside. NOT good!

Anyways... my impressions of the Adamo are negative. The positives are that it's a beautiful laptop with a very unique look and design. The SSD enhances performance, especially with boot times.

Calling Dell tomorrow to send it back for full refund.

 

[aescott]

openSUSE 11.3 - not a MAC, not a PC....so what is it?

I can technically dual-boot into W7, but I haven't used it in ages.

 

[ElasticNinja]

3) The fan turns on a bit too quickly, even when just watching Youtube videos and is loud enough to be an annoyance.

in power config change proccessor to passive

 

[ElasticNinja]

Well I certainly see what Mac users say about viruses
The one time I didnt have RT AV on W7 I got a virus which corrupted my boot sector
Now I see why it should be on a seperate partition

Off to buy a SATA enclosure on the third

 

[Snow_Fox]

I easily get at least 6 hours out of my MBA on a single charge, which would be impossible with a quad core notebook.

Who said anything about quad core notebooks?

What is the battery life on it, 30 minutes at most?

2 hours.. which was spectacular when I got it many years ago :/

Especially since it was not only my "bring back and forth to school" computer.. but, more or less the only computer I was going to have to do anything at all with.

Now keep in mind its probably degraded some due to lith ion batteries and time. But, I could get 2-3 hours on it no problem back in the day.

Thing is... anyone who says that today is talking about the unibody aluminum MBPs.

:0 @ price...

For the 17" macbook pro

Not only could I rebuild my desktop (quad core WITH crossfire)..

I could probably also repay for the monitor, the mechanical keyboard, death adder mouse.

AND throw in a netbook! my god..

I Can't really comment on the 13" or 15" seeing as I have fallen so out of loop with laptops these days.. but, man.. thats steep..

Shame none of them have a 1gb video card.. oh well mac, is has been and may always be a generation behind on graphics.

Anyway.. If they ever bother to differentiate... Then I will give them credit for doing so..

But, a lot of people using "its got better construction" intentionally as a blanket statement towards apple products :/

I am not defending windows or android or anything else here.. but, my distaste of apple is pretty well grounded over time for a pretty good reason...

 

[NightHawk877]

I hate Apple more than I hate our government. I've always been a Windows guy, but not just a Windows person. I'm also a Linux nerd and hope to make a career out of it. In fact, I'm typing this up on a 6 year old computer running Ubuntu 10.10.

 

[mbell75]

Mac for me. I have 2 iMacs, a MacBook and typing this on an iPad ran windows for over 20 years before switching to Mac 4 years ago. One of the best decisions I ever made. Have not once missed windows and all the freezes, crashes, bloatware, spyware etc...and if I ever do feel the need to run windows, I can just instal it and run it on my Mac

 

[icemncmth]

Torn between the two! Want either a high powered macbook are high powered laptop running windows 7 for graphic design!! Anyone care to throw their opinions my way?

If you are going into graphic design..better get a Mac..that is pretty much what that industry uses.

 

[icemncmth]

Oh...I'm still rocking my Amiga!

 

[ShadowUlcer]

A PC is a 'personal computer'
Last time I checked this was computers made by Apple, Acer, Dell, HP, and the list goes on...

What I see debated here is what PLATFORM, or OS you use.
But otherwie I have used all kinds of PCs, which were made by Apple, or dell, or HP.... or ones I have built myself running various operating systems and platforms.

What really gets me going is this 'Mac vs. PC' debate when they are actually the same thing.

I must say...what was the point of this? I mean, it's not like you didn't know what anyone was talking about, just live with it.

Anyway, I'm a PC and I just upgraded from Vista to 7 Last night. I'm happy indeed.

 

[IOWA]

W

If you are going into graphic design..better get a Mac..that is pretty much what that industry uses.

Wrong.

I do graphic design all day and especially if your using adobe products, pc all the way. Why? Because we can use better state of the art GPUs, for gpu acceleration. and mac, your stuck with what they give you. Even photoshop uses gpu acceleration now. Not to mention you get alot more cpu horsepower with a high end pc as well.

And if your using premier, flash, or animation software (blender rocks btw) having that high end gpu is a must.

 

[mrspeedmaster]

I hate Apple more than I hate our government. I've always been a Windows guy, but not just a Windows person. I'm also a Linux nerd and hope to make a career out of it. In fact, I'm typing this up on a 6 year old computer running Ubuntu 10.10.

That is very strange. You say you are a Linux nerd yet you prefer Win7 over OSX. Most Linux users I know prefer OSX over W7.

Every Unix (old school BSD/Solaris/AIX/Irix) system admins I know all use Macbook Pros.

You have the ability to run Photoshop/Office and for power users, they can drop into a terminal and run Python, SSH, do X11 forwarding, compile GNU and have mac ports. Mac Ports is the equivalent of using Ubuntu's apt-get.

There is zero learning curve between Ubuntu 10.10 and Snow Leopard especially for people who grew up and live/breath UNIX.
If Ubuntu had Photoshop, Office, Dreamweaver, Final Cut Pro, etc, more people would be using it. I use all the OSes but OSX is the perfect balance. I run 3 Ubuntu boxes at home and even my wife uses Ubuntu on her laptop 100% fulltime but the Macs always get more attention. My son runs QITMO and LinuxKidx (custom Linux distro for children under 5).
I have faster quad core boxes with 24GB of RAM running Ubuntu in my living room but my choice will always be a Core Duo MacBook w/ 4GB RAM.

Do you know Ubuntu has more in common with OSX than Windows 7? Do you know OSX is 100% Unix 03 certified from the opengroup (Register of Open Branded Products).
It isn't a "unix-like", *nix derive OSX. It is the real deal with posix and the ability to compile any Unix Apps. Installing mac-ports is like running apt-get install on Ubuntu.

I find Windows 7 very frustrating because I *do come from a UNIX background*.
I like the fact I can run OSX headless with just the terminal. You can SSH in, SCP your files, compile, restart dameon processes, make cron jobs, analyze logs,etc..
Like UBUNTU, you can drop into a shell, run scp, mount a NFS volume, do X11 forwarding all natively straight out of the box.

No need to install Cygwin, Putty or any other 3rd party hacks like you do on Windows 7 to talk to other Unix machines.
You can compile every one of your fav Ubuntu apps or use a port repository. Heck, you can launch full GNOME with Nautilus on OSX natively (without virtualization or dual booting).

I use Ubuntu quiet a bit so I speak from experience. We run customized tweaked 2.6 kernel from the Canonical source tree. Our servers run heavily modified Ubuntu and a custom Apache builds.
I manage a farm about 40 Linux/Unix servers from a Mac.

When I first started my UNIX career, I was an NT adminstrator. I had install a bunch of ported apps to Windows and they didn't work. I remember paying $600 for an X11 client and another $300 for a NFS client to talk to a Solaris box. Sure, it has changed now but with OSX, you don't have any of that nonsense. Many of the open-source stuff comes out of the box. You can even kill the OSX gui/Aqua and run GNOME/Nautiliys natively without reboot or virtualization on a mac.

There were custom shell scripts and you can't really run them on Windows. For example, there are ports like ImageMagick, Nmap, ethereal,etc but many of them wrap them around a Windows GUI. Then whatever scripts you wrote for Windows had to be re-written for other OSes.

Like today, I needed a script to search the contents of a hundred PDF files and import the text into mySQL. I also used Ghostscript and PHP to make jpeg thumbnails over 1200 pdf files.
With the mac, I compiled a xpdf, ghostscript and wrote a Python script to handle the import. I had a batch job that then rsynched the files to a Linux server.
I could not every imagine using Windows for it. My shell scripts on the mac transfers over to Linux with a few environment variable changes like /opt/bin to /usr/bin and thats about it.

You are entitled to your OS preference but I just find it odd that you claim to be a Linux nerd yet prefer Win7 over OSX.

 

[IOWA]

E

That is very strange. You say you are a Linux nerd yet you prefer Win7 over OSX. Most Linux users I know prefer OSX over W7.

Every Unix (old school BSD/Solaris/AIX/Irix) system admins I know all use Macbook Pros.

You have the ability to run Photoshop/Office and for power users, they can drop into a terminal and run Python, SSH, do X11 forwarding, compile GNU and have mac ports. Mac Ports is the equivalent of using Ubuntu's apt-get.

There is zero learning curve between Ubuntu 10.10 and Snow Leopard especially for people who grew up and live/breath UNIX.
If Ubuntu had Photoshop, Office, Dreamweaver, Final Cut Pro, etc, more people would be using it. I use all the OSes but OSX is the perfect balance. I run 3 Ubuntu boxes at home and even my wife uses Ubuntu on her laptop 100% fulltime but the Macs always get more attention. My son runs QITMO and LinuxKidx (custom Linux distro for children under 5).
I have faster quad core boxes with 24GB of RAM running Ubuntu in my living room but my choice will always be a Core Duo MacBook w/ 4GB RAM.

Do you know Ubuntu has more in common with OSX than Windows 7? Do you know OSX is 100% Unix 03 certified from the opengroup (Register of Open Branded Products).
It isn't a "unix-like", *nix derive OSX. It is the real deal with posix and the ability to compile any Unix Apps. Installing mac-ports is like running apt-get install on Ubuntu.

I find Windows 7 very frustrating because I *do come from a UNIX background*.
I like the fact I can run OSX headless with just the terminal. You can SSH in, SCP your files, compile, restart dameon processes, make cron jobs, analyze logs,etc..
Like UBUNTU, you can drop into a shell, run scp, mount a NFS volume, do X11 forwarding all natively straight out of the box.

No need to install Cygwin, Putty or any other 3rd party hacks like you do on Windows 7 to talk to other Unix machines.
You can compile every one of your fav Ubuntu apps or use a port repository. Heck, you can launch full GNOME with Nautilus on OSX natively (without virtualization or dual booting).

I use Ubuntu quiet a bit so I speak from experience. We run customized tweaked 2.6 kernel from the Canonical source tree. Our servers run heavily modified Ubuntu and a custom Apache builds.
I manage a farm about 40 Linux/Unix servers from a Mac.

When I first started my UNIX career, I was an NT adminstrator. I had install a bunch of ported apps to Windows and they didn't work. I remember paying $600 for an X11 client and another $300 for a NFS client to talk to a Solaris box. Sure, it has changed now but with OSX, you don't have any of that nonsense. Many of the open-source stuff comes out of the box. You can even kill the OSX gui/Aqua and run GNOME/Nautiliys natively without reboot or virtualization on a mac.

There were custom shell scripts and you can't really run them on Windows. For example, there are ports like ImageMagick, Nmap, ethereal,etc but many of them wrap them around a Windows GUI. Then whatever scripts you wrote for Windows had to be re-written for other OSes.

Like today, I needed a script to search the contents of a hundred PDF files and import the text into mySQL. I also used Ghostscript and PHP to make jpeg thumbnails over 1200 pdf files.
With the mac, I compiled a xpdf, ghostscript and wrote a Python script to handle the import. I had a batch job that then rsynched the files to a Linux server.
I could not every imagine using Windows for it. My shell scripts on the mac transfers over to Linux with a few environment variable changes like /opt/bin to /usr/bin and thats about it.

You are entitled to your OS preference but I just find it odd that you claim to be a Linux nerd yet prefer Win7 over OSX.

When your dealing with commercial software and hardware, for me its. Large format digital, a laser engraver, and embroidery machines, it's simply better to use windows. It's this little Thing called compatibility. If linux went mainstream id be using mint all day. Ans. Putty isn't bad.... I us it all the time to ssh into my vps

 

[mrspeedmaster]

E

When your dealing with commercial software and hardware, for me its. Large format digital, a laser engraver, and embroidery machines, it's simply better to use windows. It's this little Thing called compatibility. If linux went mainstream id be using mint all day. Ans. Putty isn't bad.... I us it all the time to ssh into my vps

I totally understand your point about software/compatibility/etc. Thats why it is nice we have Virtualization. That solves all your Win needs if you need it. You can run a Windows guest OS in Linux and Mac but running a Mac guest is much more complicated. I have about 6 operating systems on my macbook pro. I run XP on rare occasions when I need to access a certain device w/ win only drivers.

I like Mint too, preferring it over Ubuntu and would use that all day long if Photoshop and various video/audio software was available.

For me, the biggest deal is running headless; being able to access the computer without using VNC/Remote Desktop,etc.. I can use a 6 year old Nokia MID and remotely control a mac for all my needs and the apps I want. I can't imagine running VNC on a phone to control a desktop computer.

Putty is really horrid. You should consider CygWin. Developed by people from Redhat to give you GNU apps in the DOS console in Windows. I hate having to click on an App to run something I can do naturally via the shell. It is counter intuitive especially if you want to launch an SSH connection from that 6 year old Nokia phone I mentioned earlier. Either way, you're still sloppily piece-mealing add-ons to get functionality natively built into macs.

 

[IOWA]

I totally understand your point about software/compatibility/etc. Thats why it is nice we have Virtualization. That solves all your Win needs if you need it. You can run a Windows guest OS in Linux and Mac but running a Mac guest is much more complicated. I have about 6 operating systems on my macbook pro. I run XP on rare occasions when I need to access a certain device w/ win only drivers.

I like Mint too, preferring it over Ubuntu and would use that all day long if Photoshop and various video/audio software was available.

For me, the biggest deal is running headless; being able to access the computer without using VNC/Remote Desktop,etc.. I can use a 6 year old Nokia MID and remotely control a mac for all my needs and the apps I want. I can't imagine running VNC on a phone to control a desktop computer.

Putty is really horrid. You should consider CygWin. Developed by people from Redhat to give you GNU apps in the DOS console in Windows. I hate having to click on an App to run something I can do naturally via the shell. It is counter intuitive especially if you want to launch an SSH connection from that 6 year old Nokia phone I mentioned earlier. Either way, you're still sloppily piece-mealing add-ons to get functionality natively built into macs.

I've tried virtualization, and it's just easier having windows 7 box's.

 

[mikedt]

That is very strange. You say you are a Linux nerd yet you prefer Win7 over OSX. Most Linux users I know prefer OSX over W7.

Every Unix (old school BSD/Solaris/AIX/Irix) system admins I know all use Macbook Pros.

I can see why some would hate Apple more than the government. It's Steve Jobs, he's just a control freak.

I can see the next major version of OS-X, OS-XI, or whatever been a completely locked down OS, just like the iDevices. With approved apps only available from the Apple dictated 'App Store'. Steve Jobs would love this to happen. Apple having complete and total control over their Macs.