When Apple Geeks own Thugs!Follow

eMacs were bottom end ... Apple desperately trying to gain entry into the entry-level PC market. Same with Minis.

The only cool thing about a mini, IMO, would be the ease with which you can use it as a peripheral w/ your TV.

The fact that Apple continues to refuse to offer even basic video card options on the Mini (as well as the MacBook) leads me to believe that they will continue to attain the same luke-warm response.

If I could get a Mac Mini with a half decent graphics chip, I would already have one next to my TV. But, alas, I can't ...

I may use a MacBook Pro as my laptop, but my gaming PC is, and probably always will be, a good old fashioned home made windows box. I upgrade it over time and currently I'm running:

Core2 Duo E6750 @ 2.67 GHz
2 gigs of RAM
n7950GT 512mb

Cost me less than a thousand dollars easily. I'd need a Mac Pro or a $2500 iMac Extreme to match it's performance.

In laptops, however, I just don't see anything else touch the quality of a Mac. The fit and finish. Comparing them to Dells is like comparing a Chevy Cobalt to a Mercedes Benz C-class ........ More money for a similar size/utility product, but in the end don't you get what you pay for?

... Oh please let maintenance end!

Faster doesn't equate to quality. Some hard drives are crap. Sure they might be faster than a more reliable one but they're still crap.

You can't tell me you'd trade speed over volume to increase quality. Most users won't even notice the speed difference. Speed differences are more important in high end systems like real time video editing, servers, etc. And if you buy a faster drive without consideration of quality in those situations you can easily lose thousands if not millions of dollars.

Also your specs vs the same cost mac and same cost pc were very even. You also go on to claim that mac doesn't list their specs (jord linked otherwise) but you realize Dell uses generic crap for hard drives, cd/dvd drives, sound cards, etc. The fact that they hide the information from you is sad.

I've used Macs and I've used dozens of PCs. In the end you really do get what you pay for. Hardware is hardware and it all comes to the same general cost. The price difference mainly comes in how they're put together. You can say Mac has crap all you want but you can't deny that Dell and many other big and smaller pc brands have in fact sold a lot of crap. Part of the difference is Mac was more limited to what they accepted as hardware. This lead to better stability. PC are more generic and a much broader range of hardware. This leads to cheaper parts available but also less quality.

Like Jord said Mac is trying to get a piece of the pie that PC has held onto for so long. In order to do that they have to lower their standards. The reason these new macs are crap is because they're targeting a crap market.

Don't get me wrong there's some great value in PCs and I use them all the time. I actually prefer PC but when it comes to certain things I also prefer a mac over a pc. I use both. They both have their pros and cons. You can claim that mac is overpriced and you're just buying a brand name but that's not where the majority of the higher price comes from. There's a reason it's a brand name. And you can't say that PC doesn't have overpriced junk, what about Windows?

Like I said before, you get what you pay for.

Simplicity is just plain and simple good design. Try designing User Interfaces and Functionality in a program. It might seem condescending but anyone good at making interfaces will avoid complexity. Apple has been really great about this. Oh and you can get mice with more than one button for mac.

I have a bigger problem with their advertising than their products.

Well, it's not exactly simpler when doing things that require right clicks. I know there's that thing about doing two fingers and blah blah but yeah. Simplicity and minimalism are two different things. Like I said, it's an issue I have with using them. I like to feel like I am in control (not that any of us truly are) but I just feel more in control with a PC than a Mac.

I have seen the two button mice. I have to use one if I am going to be working on a mac for more than a few mins.


I don't like itunes much myself. It seems to like to get into things I didn't want it to. I know for a while there, you had to get itunes if you wanted quicktime. Eventually they made it stand alone but we had to give up on quicktime moves and just went with more MS stuff.

Edited, May 13th 2008 1:59pm by MrTalos

Let us not forget that the new Intel Macs "claim to fame" was the ability to run XP. 95% of the people I know who switched, did so because of that. Apples most ingenious marketing move was that they could emulate a PC. You get the beauty of a Mac plus all the functionality and backwards compatibility of a PC. It can't get much better than that.

As far as programing goes, I'll give you that one but it's kind of like comparing apples and hot dogs though.

Apple actually has a huge advantage with their much smaller market share. Added to that, the almost xenophobic way they handle hardware and software makes it a very stable OS.

As hardware and software go, Apple is like pizza place that only serves cheese pizza. Now they will serve the cheese pizza in all kinds of neat and exciting ways. Cool shapes and neat delivery systems but it's still a cheese pizza under the fluff. They don't have to deal with out side distractions or putting something on it that turns out to be bad or anything like that.
PCs would be the pizza place that offers the customer any kind of pizza they want. Now because of the insane variety of options they offer, often less than stellar ingredients get mixed in and can ruin the whole pie. That also includes the ice cream and anchovies requests that can only end in disaster.

All you have to do is swing by the technical support forum at blizzard and you can see the mess that PCs have gotten themselves into. The umpteenth thousand combinations of hardware and software running on a computer can be great for the end user who has limited funds or who wants to do things their own way. For the person trying to support software or hardware to accommodate that end user, it's pretty crappy. A single version of Windows is probably designed to handle more hardware/software combos than every version of any Apple OS combined (total guess). Apple has almost always kept hardware and software on lock down. You will buy what they tell you and for what they tell you. It makes it 1000Xs easier to design the software.

It's a double edged sword for Apple. The smaller they are, the more they can focus on providing what they want when they want it. As they get bigger, they will start having much greater pressure put on them to allow greater flexibility and options. Unix makes that possible but it's kind of the opposite of all that Apple seems to focus on.

I look forward to the day when Apple is forced to support software from 10+ years ago and also has to contend with lots of user created crap software. They will wish it could go back to a time when it was a smaller company.

how? i want to load up Diablo 2 but cant cuz it uses old mac stuff.

yeah its kinda BS. my co-worker has an older version of photoshop, cant use it on his new comp. wtg.

I didnt have any problem playing D2 on my vista machine....

My post was in jest.

True, but can you force it into a better resolution with the Nvidia graphics utility? I haven't tried before.....maybe this calls for experimentation.

By the way, this thread has gone very off topic hasn't it?

ok enough with this crap, somebody tell me how to load up my oldschool D2 on my mac przthx.

i have the disks right in front of me as we speak.

Edited, May 13th 2008 1:23pm by KTurner

Wow, just wow. I might switch to a Mac if somebody bought me one of those beasts