PC vs. Mac

-or- the suit vs. the slacker

Published on May 23, 2006 By BlueDev In OS Wars

By now, I am sure most of us have seen the new round of Mac vs. PC commercials. You know, the one with the middle age, sort of uptight looking, fuddy-duddy dude in a suit representing a PC, and the young, hip, cool, laid-back dude in old jeans and a T-shirt representing a Mac.

I have seen a couple of variations, but they all focus on the same thing. They all are trying to convey the same message: Macs are just cool and "work", whereas PCs are out of touch, laborious and problematic. Of course, I find it odd that so much of the advertising lately is on the hardware (considering I am typing this entry on my Windows laptop with Intel Core Duo processors, an pretty nice ATI graphics card, more RAM than a Mac Book and a larger HD than a Mac Book, at easily a few hundred dollars lower cost).

Nevertheless, I am not a Mac hater. In fact, I fully anticipate owning a Mac someday, when I can afford to have one IN ADDITION to my Windows computers. But I have to admit, I really don't care for these new ads. They just seem like such a faulty use of details, that honestly, I think they are embarrassing. In that spirit I share the following (sorry, can't paste the image myself as it is not mine and I don't have permission to be pasting it):

An alternative comparison between PC dude and Mac dude.

I found this quite entertaining.

Comments (Page 2)

ZubaZ

on May 23, 2006

See . . you started off witha rational, balanced veiw, "use both" to Fanboydom. -=sigh=-

It might be a record though for the amount of time it took.

cactoblasta

on May 23, 2006

I've got both - an old 12" ibook and a 2 year old PC. The only reason I use the ibook more often is cos it's tiny and portable, has iLife, has around 4-5 hours of charge when I'm just typing or surfing, and runs word with the really handy sidebar thing that my pc doesn't have. Since I've had the ibook the only thing I've used my PC for is games. Looking at how geriatric it's getting I think I'll probably upgrade to one of the slimline iMacs rather than buying a completely new PC.

The disadvantages though of a Mac is that nothing designed for PCs works on it. For example Hotmail is changing its service to some LiveMail deal - Safari can't handle it. Safari can't deal with GoogleTalk without an external program. And then there's a ton of other websites that don't render properly in Safari, so I have to have three internet programs on the one computer just to deal with the lack of Internet Explorer, which is a bit excessive I reckon.

BlueDev

on May 23, 2006

Cactoblasta: I think you bring up a good point. From your post, it sounds like you use your Mac mostly due to personal preference (perhaps with the exception of the battery life part). I think that is the point, it is all about preference.

Jafo

on May 23, 2006

I have an Apple...one of these...with all the extras [printer, mouse, etc]....cost me $5.
Fairly good deal, considering what its limitations are. It turns on - just doesn't have any OS disks....

Mac's?

Over rated...

ZubaZ

on May 23, 2006

I have an Apple...one of these

I have one of those too . . . And once or twice a year I break it out and play some games.

I wrote a lot of papers on the ][e. Maybe it should be surprising to me but that lil' guy did everything I needed it to do.

It's all about the bits you need to push. Ya know?

Dr Guy

on May 23, 2006

I have an Apple...one of these

Sorry, I started on an Apple II.

BlueDev

on May 23, 2006

My father purchased one of the original 512k Macs back in 84. It embarasses me to admit how long we used it, but let's just say I was still using Mac Write to write papers for my AP Enlgish class my Senior year in High School (I graduated in 1994!).

ZubaZ

on May 23, 2006

Sorry, I started on an Apple II

My father says his Apple ][ has a three digit serial number. It's mine when he dies.

Jafo

on May 23, 2006

'Starting' for me was in 1970 ....no such thing as a Mac OR a PC back then.....

Punchcards and paperclips....

Tominated

on May 23, 2006

I am getting a mac, for free mind you, and it's gonna be a 20" intel iMac or a 17" Macbook Pro. I am fed up with my pc, I fiddled with it's settings too much. Having a life threatening desiese does have it's posotives.

messybuu

on May 24, 2006

Kias are probably cheaper than Ford hybrids, but some people actually prefer Ford hybrids to Kias and might even argue it's more cost-effective. Unless you compare the two computers feature-to-feature (including FireWire, webcam, and whatever else I take for granted on Macs), as well as the fact that it could run both Windows and OS X, then one might as well say criticize Alienware computers for not being as cheap as eMachines. Is that comparing two computers with the same features (i.e. firewire, webcam, etc.?). If not, then one can argue that I can find a cheaper computer than yours on eBay. Sure, it'll be a P2, but it'll be much cheaper! Hell, Kias are cheaper than Ford hybrids. After all, you didn't need to spend all that money on the notebook you bought. You could have probably bought a much cheaper P2 one on eBay.

As for why I'd say OS X is better than Windows XP, here are my reasons: Spotlight, AppleScript, the uniformity of it all (I believe Brushed Metal, Aqua, and Polished Metal compliment each other quite well), Expose, the cleanliness of it (even troublesome programs [or just very big ones like X11] on OS X can be uninstalled without as much residue as the average program leaves on Windows XP especially with that awful registry, but most programs uninstall quite fine, even big ones), and the whole integration of it all. I haven't used Windows in quite a long time, so it's hard for me to compare and contrast, but last time I checked, XP didn't include something like Spotlight or AppleScript and Luna didn't quite cover everything. Oh, and Automator. That's been a blessing too. I know there are programs that can give such functions to XP, but then it lacks that whole integrated and part of the OS feel. That's probably what makes OS X so great: the fact that it feels so integrated.
But to show that I'm not a complete Mac bigot, I'll acknowledge that I never had much of a problem with XP. In fact, it's quite a beautiful OS.

dynamaso

on May 25, 2006

I have PC's in my life. My brother, a journalist/writer/academic has Macs. We have these pissing contests (jokingly, of course) about which is better. He keeps telling me that Macs are the industry standard in publishing houses and good recording studios around the world but everytime I talk to anyone else about my requirements, virtually none of the software I'm using in my home studio will run on a Mac. So I'm sticking with PC's

Sure, the Macs look cool and funky but that doesn't make up for the impracticality.

starkers

on May 25, 2006

Okay, so it's not likely to happen any time soon, and maybe it'd p!ss some fanboys and purists off, but it would be good if MS and Apple combined to make Wac or Mindows OSes, to offer the best of both worlds, greater variety, better options.

No, I'm neither a purist or a fanboy....and maybe the third party software developers would have a few problems, but they'd adapt to remain viable, popular, in business.

APM0138

on May 26, 2006

You typed it up on your Windows system, well, I type this up on my x86 Debian/KDE system in Konqueror using the KHTML engine. So what? Across from me my iMac sits watching text scroll by on it, as two make jobs compile Mac-on-Linux on Gentoo. A FreeBSD system is routing my connection from both these machines to the internet.

PPC32, PPC64, x86, x64, who cares really? What Apple SHOULD mean to say is that Mac hardware is better selected, leading to only purebread systems instead of the mongrels in the PC world. And almost any BSD system can make the same claim, as BSD is 99% Standards-Only.

Anyways, I hate misinformation so:
Viruses - The macintosh design is pretty insecure. So is Linux. SELinux is pretty good, but requires "manual intervention." Non-Point. Security-by-obscurity has been debunked, multiple times.
Crashes - Well, if you have an administrator who installs unknown software, from unreputable sites, which links statically to libraries, and frequently uninstalls them, there will be trouble here no matter what. AppDirs are great Macintosh thing that self-contain those statically linked libraries. Klik, 0-install, etc. are all solutions for other operating systems. Even vmware player is a solution. Point exists, but not to the extent advertised.
Device Interoperability - If everything works according to the standards, then everything works with Windows, Linux, Macintosh, or other obscure OS. Non-Point.
Software - Who really cares what's bundled with the System? Apple tools are generally "easier" to use, but there is a wealth of free, or non-free software out there for Windows. Heck, the GNOME project is even easier than Mac OS X, IMO. iLife may be so simple a brain-dead monkey could use it, but if it weren't for Anti-Trust laws Microsoft could bundle applications with Windows to give it equally good "out-of-the-box" software. Non-Point.
Music - iTunes sucks. All hail Quod Libet and Amarok. Ok, I'm biased. Point exists. iTunes is a 100 times better than WMP. Extremely good interoperability, IFF you use other iLife products. Apple should provide a drop-in interface for selecing alternatives, similar to how the KDEPIM project did [a bloody fantastic job].
Pictures - am I the only person who hates the Mac OS pictures app? F-Spot is my tool of choice. Point exists, when compared to Windows. But even then, Anti-Trust ruling are hampering Microsoft here.
Networking - please tell me someone has tried to set up an NFS connection on a Mac. You know, the Unix one? Instead on SMB, or CIFS, the Windows one. Sure, it's possible, but it might as well not be. Non-Point.
Restarts - Ok, so the Windows Kernel can not load/unload sections at a time. It's monolithic. So is Linux. Mach is a microkernel. Wow, that just means so little. Windows only needs restarting when its kernel crashes. Here's the problem - ignorant users who assume a program locking up makes for a mandatory restart. The pinwheel-of-death is an instance of Mac's "crashing." Just because a Mac has the equivalent of xkill means nothing. End Process works in Windows. Non-Point.

So, in my opinion, in six ads, they made three points [and not just one point per ad]. The rest was just factoids or "look what we come bundled with." Pathetic. And the style was completely below what I expect from Apple, unless they were targetting business users. Which they weren't. Apple's stylish ads have always been "Hmmm, what's that?" to get your curiosity peaked, then in an article, a website, or something, an elegant description of smooth velvet. Followed up with an otherwise excellent product except it overheats and has bad capacitors. That, IMO, is good advertising. Information is not what people are interested in these days, unless they look it up themselves. Evolution of TV advertising - first it was all text, then it was emotional concepts with no product, now it's curiosity-peaking elements followed up by smooth detailed text with no intellectual requirements. Seriously, that's how ads have gone [1990+].

@ #27, that's why vendor lock-in sucks. And Apple is a worse offender than Microsoft. (I REALLY HATE Apple business practices. More than Microsoft, by far.) Unfortunately, the only solution to Vendor lock-in is something people don't like, as the geek stigmata is associated with it - Free [as in Freedom, but you all know this] Software.

Tominated

on May 26, 2006

wtf?

I must admit, apple is a bit cheeky with the ads and stuff.

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