is apple computer good?

[AtomSmasher]

 Once again, I'm not sure where you get your information, but just did a quick price check and Vista Ultimate edition is only $280, not $500.  And I didn't need to fudge the price since its the full top of line retail version of the OS.  I see that OSX is only $115, so it is significantly less expensive, but when you add in that you'll be buying it 3 or 4 times for each one time you buy a windows OS, it adds up to a fair amount more.

Both get the job done, some people prefer more incremental releases for a smaller price and some prefer longer releases with free updates that charge more.

Fair enough.  And I'm not trashing on the company, all I said is that it's something thats always bugged me about OSX.  Since you like OSX so much, I can understand why you'd be willing to pay a bit more for it in the long run.

I actually paid $50 for my version of XP six years ago (bought from a special promotion directly from MS, it also came with a bobble head, baseball, and a pack big league chew  ), so paying every year or two for a new OS is not something I'd be willing to do.

[Blanka]

Problem with Mac is that most developpers hop on to the next OS very quick. 10.3 or 10.4 are very stable and very good OS-es. Leopard is more eye-candy than it ads really usefull new stuff. And even if you want to support Leopard-features, it does not mean you have to trash 10.4 or 10.3 support as a developer. Yet many do this. Guess >50% of all new software for OSX is Leopard only. It's horrible. Some good exceptions though. With little effort you can both support Time-Machine and other Leopard stuff yet make the program work on 10.2 Jaguar.
With Windows, software developpers support a way longer lifespan of OS-es. Many new programs still work on Windows 2000! That is a 8-year old system. Try to find support like that on a mac. So not only OS-upgrades are cheaper on a PC, all your software is cheaper on a PC, as you can work longer with older products, both old programs on new OS-es and new programs on old OS-es. 10.3 is from 2004 yet almost no new software runs on it! Don't even think about using modern stuff on 10.2 (2003) 10.1 (2002) or 10.0 (2001).

Fun exception, Macromedia Freehand 10 for example was ported to Cocoa immediately with the release of OSX. The program still runs pretty good on Tiger and Leopard. Adobe CS on the other hand still uses Carbon code which has origins in OS 9 which gives way more compatibility issues. Some open source developers still support 10.2 and up. Support for 10.0 and 10.1 is not needed BTW. These releases were very immature OSX-es. Since XP an Apple user was in a way forced to spend 3x129$ on new OS-es. You can buy pretty much Vista for that (especially if you take into account the low OEM price you pay if you buy a new DRAM module along with Vista).

[Demon-Seed]

Hey
Wow.. I was away for a week and come back and bang loads of discussion!  I can not believe how confusing this decision is.

For a computer.. cosmetic is important but not as important as function.  There is way too many opinions...on here..  some say apple rocks. others say no.... some say its overpriced others say no..... I guess it is a matter of opinion, however that being said why do so many swear by apple, and say they would never go back to a pc?  I do not like somethings a mac has such as the updates your talking about. The other thing is I have not used a mac much.  My brother has one and loves it.. I will try his.

On the other hand, they seem a little more expensive, for the cost difference I could go to dell and order a better machine.......It seems that there is many opinions on here,however is there anywhere to find a non bias comparison?

thanks for all the posts.... keep em coming....links etc would be helpful as well.

[Grasshopper]

Historically, Apple machines have generally been considered to be more stylish and functional than equivalent PCs. However, I was looking at new Laptops a few days ago and I’m coming to the conclusion that these days Apple is perhaps more about style over substance.

The Apple Laptops still looked just that little bit nicer than the Windows ones I looked at (although the aesthetic gap has closed somewhat). They had a pleasing air of minimalist elegance about them. Somehow they're just more tasteful. The designers at Apple realised long ago that sometimes less is more. Unfortunately, most PC manufacturers and Microsoft still seem unable to grasp that simple concept.

However, when it comes to functionality, I’d say that if anything ordinary PCs are now a better bet. In some respects Apple is now being different just for the sake of it. For example Apple mice look cool but Apple still stubbornly clings to its one button design even though two button mice simply work better. The same goes for keyboards. The new Apple flat keyboards look awesome but they’re less comfortable to type on than even the cheapest no-name brand full travel keyboard.

I also have to say that Apple’s build quality has always been a bit suspect. The Apple keyboard I looked at felt superficially sturdy but it had a couple a keys missing. Once you get beyond the elegant appearance, it doesn’t appear to be any more durable than a typical laptop keyboard, and they’re notoriously flimsy.

However, the main reason why I probably won’t buy an Apple laptop is simply that they don’t sell low end models. Maybe their prices are now comparable to similarly specified PCs (I haven’t checked) but I don’t really care. I just don’t understand why anyone would buy an expensive laptop when the cheapest ones are so damned powerful, and generally far better value for money.

Even the bargain basement models now typically come with 2gb of memory, and 160gb (or bigger) hard disks. That’s an awesome amount of computing power for surfing the internet and doing basic office tasks. And the handful of tasks that require extra power are mostly the types of thing you wouldn’t want to do on a laptop anyway.

[protokatie]

I have a different view than many here, and the reason is thus: Computers have for a long time been much faster than what they are needed for. Basically, the biggest push to make faster and faster machines has traditionally been games (say for the past 8+ years or so)

Example: Get an old 800 Mhz P3 (cost $0.00 if you look), throw in some really cheap extra ram, wipe the HD and install TinyXP Ultimate and throw in a 250 GB second HD. Other than playing games, that old-assed machine will still be able to do pretty much what ever you want. Granted there are a few CPU intensive utilities out there (3D rendering, Mpeg transcoding) but for the most part you would be able to do pretty much everything you can do with a modern machine (including running most of today's applications). And yes, even photoshop will run just fine on that old machine (as long as it has a decent amount of ram), some of the special effects may take a few seconds to finish as opposed to being instant tho.. (woop-de-doo).

Example2: I still use my Amiga 1200 (w/ 28 Mhz and 10 megs ram) and it works just fine for Word Processing, sound editing, and Raytracing (Imagine 3.0). Although the later means walking away from the machine come render time.

Basically my point is, get a computer to do the work you need the computer to do. (IE look at the software available for it and see if the hardware can support it). If you are just doing spreadsheets and wordprocessing, get GEOS for the commodore 64 and you will be doing fine.

[Demon-Seed]

Hello
I currently run a 2.8 ghz P4 with 512mb ram, and it will NOT run my HDTV movie software very well at all. I wanted to upload the movies then edit them, add text, sounds etc.  Thispc will not even play the uploaded videos well... very choppy.. no chance to even edit them.
Funny thing is ppl say an apple is the same hardware wise however why does this camara recommend a 3ghz chip and 1-2g of ram for  a pc and only a 1.25 and 512-1g  ram for apple?  that is odd....my brother tells me its the OS X as it runs on UNIX and it will only run the specific apps you want,not like xp that runs many processes at the same time?

thx
Jim

[slycrel]

Once again, I'm not sure where you get your information, but just did a quick price check and Vista Ultimate edition is only $280, not $500.  And I didn't need to fudge the price since its the full top of line retail version of the OS.  I see that OSX is only $115, so it is significantly less expensive, but when you add in that you'll be buying it 3 or 4 times for each one time you buy a windows OS, it adds up to a fair amount more.

I didn't check recent prices, I was going off of intial release.  I've not kept up with microsoft's price as it's always a bit tricky to find the "good deal" what with their tiered pricing scheme.  I remember finding out that Vista was $499 at release (which I didn't bother to look much further after that either), that's what I was going off of.  IIRC the ultimate edition could have been had at OEM prices for $349 or so at release if you got it from the right manufacturer with a HDD.  Again, that's just what I remember, but I believe the standard price was $499 retail for the ultimate (i.e. everything) version.  Please, correct me if I'm wrong here, it looks like as far as current prices I am incorrect.  I'm not trying to mislead here, just state the differences.  The different release cycles are not as black and white as people like to think.

Problem with Mac is that most developpers hop on to the next OS very quick. 10.3 or 10.4 are very stable and very good OS-es. Leopard is more eye-candy than it ads really usefull new stuff. And even if you want to support Leopard-features, it does not mean you have to trash 10.4 or 10.3 support as a developer. Yet many do this. Guess >50% of all new software for OSX is Leopard only. It's horrible. Some good exceptions though. With little effort you can both support Time-Machine and other Leopard stuff yet make the program work on 10.2 Jaguar.
With Windows, software developpers support a way longer lifespan of OS-es. Many new programs still work on Windows 2000! That is a 8-year old system. Try to find support like that on a mac. So not only OS-upgrades are cheaper on a PC, all your software is cheaper on a PC, as you can work longer with older products, both old programs on new OS-es and new programs on old OS-es. 10.3 is from 2004 yet almost no new software runs on it! Don't even think about using modern stuff on 10.2 (2003) 10.1 (2002) or 10.0 (2001).

Fun exception, Macromedia Freehand 10 for example was ported to Cocoa immediately with the release of OSX. The program still runs pretty good on Tiger and Leopard. Adobe CS on the other hand still uses Carbon code which has origins in OS 9 which gives way more compatibility issues. Some open source developers still support 10.2 and up. Support for 10.0 and 10.1 is not needed BTW. These releases were very immature OSX-es. Since XP an Apple user was in a way forced to spend 3x129$ on new OS-es. You can buy pretty much Vista for that (especially if you take into account the low OEM price you pay if you buy a new DRAM module along with Vista).

From a developer standpoint there are a number of reasons for this happening.  Some of it is laziness on the developers part, some of it is apple's fault.  What it boils down to is that the way apple would prefer to go development-wise they can't just jump to because all of the developers would leave.  Adobe and some others actually pushed apple into staying with some of their older APIs (carbon) longer than intended.  (This is somewhat hearsay, but that seems to be the feeling in the dev community, true or not)  If Apple had had their way carbon wouldn't have existed, or would have existed for a very short time for the transition to OS X.  However without carbon OS X would have died out of the gate.  They've taken the longer and harder road of incrementally doing away with all of their old stuff while trying to stay backwards compatible so that the developers could keep up with the new changes and stay in business.  For the uninformed, there are two major APIs to develop for in OS X, the carbon set of APIs (C/C++ based) and cocoa APIs (Objective-C based).

This has it's own problems as you've listed above -- new developers jump right in with current APIs which have just come out.  Older developers sometimes abandon their old code once it's rewritten for the new APIs.  And then there's companies like mine which are 99% carbon based, still using OS 9 events and will be in real trouble once apple drops this old tech (when they get rid of rosetta) come 10.7 or 10.8. 

For the curious, Apple generally does under the hood/developer changes in the even releases and the glitzy user stuff in the odd releases.  10.2 and 10.4 both had major API changes and you could see that reflected in the program requirements.  The current developer tools don't even install support for building things less than 10.4, and it's an optional install for 10.3.9 (which is my company's minimum OS version).  10.6 will also be more of this.  The current build they handed out at apple's developer conference last week only ran on intel machines, none of their older G4/G5 PPC machines will run it currently.  They're moving forward, but it's got it's issues.  Better that than not being able to do it though.

Oh, and to keep things on topic, if your primary goal is to do non-gaming stuff and video editing, I'd check out the video editing software that comes with a mac from your brother.  It sounds like you're already familiar with the PC way of doing it, so just get informed on the programs taht are out there to do it and have a look.  Both a PC and mac can do the job (and depending on your price both can suck or do it well), so it's just personal preference.  We can't make this decision for you.   

Good luck.

[AtomSmasher]

I didn't check recent prices, I was going off of intial release.  I've not kept up with microsoft's price as it's always a bit tricky to find the "good deal" what with their tiered pricing scheme.  I remember finding out that Vista was $499 at release (which I didn't bother to look much further after that either), that's what I was going off of.  IIRC the ultimate edition could have been had at OEM prices for $349 or so at release if you got it from the right manufacturer with a HDD.  Again, that's just what I remember, but I believe the standard price was $499 retail for the ultimate (i.e. everything) version.  Please, correct me if I'm wrong here, it looks like as far as current prices I am incorrect.  I'm not trying to mislead here, just state the differences.  The different release cycles are not as black and white as people like to think.

At launch, Ultimate edition was $400 retail and dropped in price pretty quick (it was down to about $330 less then a year after launch and is currently $280 as previously mentioned).   And since you brought up OEM prices, OEM Vista Ultimate is currently only $170.

[Goz]

I'm a software developer as well and for home use I set out a few weeks ago to see what it would take for me to migrate from XP to OSX and I have to say that it wasn't complicated at all to convert. The only drawback to running OSX is the lack of games. More popular games are ported over to OSX and there are emulators for everything on OSX so no classic gaming missing, but for my everyday non  development tasks I couldn't be happier with the experience. Try out your brothers Mac and see how you like the OS, but if your main goal is to play new mainstream DirectX 10 games then definitely stick to Windows.

If you have any specific questions and want an unbiased opinion feel free to PM me.

[Blanka]

and there are emulators for everything on OSX so no classic gaming missing

Very important for home arcades: Mame is not on par with Windows/DOS/linux versions. MacMame was a great program, yet the development has stalled at 0.103 and was PPC only. MameOSX still lacks basic features like good OpenGL overlays, easy screenshot handling, screen rotation, good vector rendering, an easy GUI without all auditing crap.

[slycrel]

I didn't check recent prices, I was going off of intial release.  I've not kept up with microsoft's price as it's always a bit tricky to find the "good deal" what with their tiered pricing scheme.  I remember finding out that Vista was $499 at release (which I didn't bother to look much further after that either), that's what I was going off of.  IIRC the ultimate edition could have been had at OEM prices for $349 or so at release if you got it from the right manufacturer with a HDD.  Again, that's just what I remember, but I believe the standard price was $499 retail for the ultimate (i.e. everything) version.  Please, correct me if I'm wrong here, it looks like as far as current prices I am incorrect.  I'm not trying to mislead here, just state the differences.  The different release cycles are not as black and white as people like to think.

At launch, Ultimate edition was $400 retail and dropped in price pretty quick (it was down to about $330 less then a year after launch and is currently $280 as previously mentioned).   And since you brought up OEM prices, OEM Vista Ultimate is currently only $170.

Thanks for the correction.  That's what I get for not looking it up.  I look much more like an apple fanatic. 

[Demon-Seed]

Hey
It is funny when I said I would play games, I really only would ever play classics, Ie)mame, snes, genesis, nes  etc..... what is available in apple? I am inprocess  of googling..

other that this computer would be used for video editing, downloading via torrents internet,browsing, email and home apps such as word etc...  I am not a huge new pc gamer, If I decide I will buy a xbox or ps3.

I spoke with my bro last night and he said I could borrow is macbook i think its called... to test drive it.

[AtomSmasher]

Hey
It is funny when I said I would play games, I really only would ever play classics, Ie)mame, snes, genesis, nes  etc..... what is available in apple? I am inprocess  of googling..

other that this computer would be used for video editing, downloading via torrents internet,browsing, email and home apps such as word etc...  I am not a huge new pc gamer, If I decide I will buy a xbox or ps3.

I spoke with my bro last night and he said I could borrow is macbook i think its called... to test drive it.

In that case you should be fine with the software available on the mac and it just comes down to personal preference on which type of computer to get.  Its really good that you get to borrow your brothers computer since it will let you try out the OS and decide whether or not you like it better then windows.

[Level42]

Enjoy and be open minded. Something need a little getting used to. Sometimes you have to unlearn stupid things that you got used to because of Windows. Like removing a program. It was so simple that it took me a while to find out how to do it....

[Demon-Seed]

Hey
My next question is which mac book should i get? also where in canada is a good place to buy?

[Zero_Hour]

If you are dead set on a laptop, I'd spring for the MacBook Pro. The 13" screen on the standard MacBook, is just too small - especially for something like Video editing. If you have access to a larger external monitor for when you are editing, that might make the entry level laptop a bit more workable. I'm definitely biased here as I use 3 monitors on my primary machine.

FWIW, I'm a recent adopter of OS X, though I'm running it on a machine with Vista 64 bit, XP 32 bit, and OS X 10.5.

Best of all worlds for what I do, which is a little bit of almost everything, except coding.

[slycrel]

A few months ago I got the low end macbook pro.  For the money I think it's the best value for what you're looking for -- has good power but not the higher end price.