In what way is a Mac better than a PC?

College Life
21

<p>psydent:

  1. Unless the only language you know is Objective C, you have no reason to use a Mac. Objective C is one of the few languages that have better tools available on the Mac, but Windows has almost all other popular languages covered with Visual Studio. I would choose C# and C++ over Objective C, and I’m sure all real programmers would do the same.</p>

<ol>
<li><p>That isn’t a benefit because we are talking about just the Mac. The PC also has the same capabilities when it comes to wireless networking, if not more. </p></li>
<li><p>A software developer needing customer service… Throughout all of my years as a systems manager I have not ran into any problems that require customer service. Broken computer? Fixed within the hour using common sense. DOA computer part(s)? On the way back to the manufacturer in two days. Need help installing basically anything? Google finds a guide 99% of the time. I cant even think of one reason why you would need help from customer service. Also, customer service varies by company. You can’t just generalize all PC-servicing companies because you had a bad experience in a few places.</p></li>
</ol>

<p>Now, time to provide you with 2 examples in which a PC would be more suitable than a Mac. geek96 already mentioned some, but I will provide specific examples.</p>

<p>Case 1: A college student wants a computer/laptop that can do basic tasks like word processing, browsing the internet, and sharing files. </p>

<p>Since even the cheapest Mac and PC have similar software for all of the tasks that this college student wants, he would obviously choose the cheapest one out of the two. </p>

<p>PC: The college student can buy the Acer Aspire One AOD270-26Dkk for $250.
Mac: Cheapest available Mac is the MacBook Air for $1000.</p>

<p>Case 1 conclusion: There is a wide variety from PCs to choose from, low end PCs that cost as low as $200. The Mac only has middle/high end laptops to choose from, making it a waste of money for the average user. </p>

<p>Case 2: A college student has $1000 to spend on a laptop. Out of the 2 $1000 laptops, the college student will pick the one with better specs. </p>

<p>PC: The college student has over 20 PCs to choose from, but only 1 Mac.
Lets take the one I would buy - Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 Intel Core i5-3230M 2.6GHz 15.6" Windows 8 Notebook for $1000(This PC can be purchased for a lower price, but so can the Mac.)
Mac: MacBook Air for $1000</p>

<p>Spec comparison(Mac specs are first):
Intel Core i5 1.7GHz Turbo Boost up to 2.6GHz vs Intel Core i5-3230M 2.6GHz Turbo Boost up to 3.2 GHz
PC wins by far. </p>

<p>11.6" 1366 x 768 vs 15.6" 1920 x 1080
PC wins. </p>

<p>4GB DDR3 vs 6GB DDR3
PC has 2 more GB of RAM.</p>

<p>64GB SSD vs 1TB HDD
PC has way more space but much slower. I would rather have more memory because HDDs have a longer lifetime and not many tasks require faster transfer rates.</p>

<p>Intel HD Graphics 4000 vs Dual NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M SLI + 2GB video memory
PC wins by far. A single 650M would have already been overkill when compared to the Mac but two of them really put even the high end Macs to shame.</p>

<p>The Mac weighs less because it is smaller overall. Not much of a difference because heavier usually means sturdier.</p>

<p>The mac has a longer battery life because it uses less energy. Not much of a problem for the college student if he is always close to an power source. </p>

<p>The PC has a bit more features that the Mac doesn’t have, so we cant compare them. </p>

<p>Case 2 conclusion: For the same amount of money as a Mac, you can buy a PC that is much better. A PC with the same specs as any Mac generally costs 35% less. I would make a third case showing a high end Mac vs a High end PC, but we all know where this is going. No matter what Mac you want to buy, there will always be a better PC for hundreds of dollars less.</p>

22

<p>^Great answer
Are we talking about Macbooks vs Ultrabooks or iMac vs PCs or both?</p>

23

<p>In the above examples I know the comparison was somewhat unfair because the Macbook Air would be considered an ultrabook, but my point was that you don’t have many Macs to choose from at the most common price range of a regular laptop. Basically, you can buy a workstation PC laptop for $900, but a workstation Mac with similar specs would cost twice as much in some cases. I might make a fair comparison between software later on.</p>

24

<p>Like others, I am trying to make a similar decision for a laptop. My school offers either Apple or Lenovo. How does the Lenovo X1 Carbon compare to the MacBook Air? The specs look very similar except for lcd size (X1-14", Air 13") and the X1 has a slightly better battery life. Both seem to have good build quality and good track pads.</p>

25

<p>After a day of playing around with my Mac, I came to the conclusion that software ports from Windows to OSX generally come with a 15-40% performance decrease. Of course, I didn’t stop at just obtaining benchmarks, I decided to find the reason behind it. I used IDA to find out that: </p>

<ol>
<li><p>Video card drivers on the Mac are somewhat disorganized when it comes to splitting resources, resulting in a decrease in performance in all hardware accelerated tasks and almost all visual related programs. </p></li>
<li><p>All programs that I have tested show that they are not running as efficiently on a Mac. At first I thought that the programmers failed, but then I realized that even my own programs seem to have unexpected effects in IDA. I double checked all possible places that could have affected my program in any way, but found no reasonable explanation.</p></li>
</ol>

26

<p>IMHO, it depends on what field you’re going into. People in the graphic arts tend to use MACs. You’d be odd-man-out if you weren’t on a MAC.</p>

<p>People in just about every other walk of life use PCs.</p>

<p>Engineering uses PCs. Much of design software we use is not even available on the MAC.</p>

<p>People in business tend to use PCs because of a number of reasons. First is probably the security flexibility PCs offer IT. Apple has their own view of security… kind of like the original Fords… you could have any color as long as that color was black. :wink: A close second would be Microsoft products, like Outlook, Powerpoint, Excel, and Word, have become standards in the business world.</p>

<p>Apple products are not nearly as well accepted as some people would like you to believe. They account for a very small minority of the computer market. They are a small minority in the mobile market as well, with Android commanding about 70% of the worldwide market. Apple has danced with the 20% worldwide market share area a few times over the years, but consistently falls back into the teens.</p>

27

<p>The problem isn’t who, its why. Why use a Mac when you can get a better PC for the same price? Why use Mac software when there is better PC software for basically everything?</p>

28

<p>You are right about the price factor but it is completely dependant on the buyer. If one lives in the apple ecosystem, one would prefer a mac. Nobody wins or loses here. One might find Mac better than a PC Or PC better than a mac.Being better is relative and dependant on the user!</p>

<p>PS I am a PC user as it is Best for my needs</p>

29

<p>I don’t think Macs are objectively better than PCs, but I do prefer my Mac, and here is why.</p>

<p>-I like the operating system better. I feel like I can run programs more quickly and move around more seamlessly within the operating system.</p>

<p>-There are many applications available on Macs that are better than their Windows equivalent, or that have no Windows equivalent. For example, Scrivener is an invaluable resource for writing but until recently there was no Windows equivalent. I’ve noticed that there are few examples in the reverse - there’s always a Mac equivalent for Windows programs, and the Mac equivalent is usually at least as good as the Windows program. My Firefox, Chrome, Microsoft Office, Zotero, Wunderlist, Skype, VLC, uTorrent, and Evernote programs work just as well on my Mac as they did on my PC. But that’s not always true for Windows programs. For example, I hate Microsoft Outlook and I think that Mail is just so elegant a mail client. iCal is also a great calendar program but there’s really no equivalent on Windows (or maybe there is now, but there wasn’t when I was using it).</p>

<p>-Hardware. I loved that the Mac was lighter weight than most PCs (you can get lightweight PCs, but they cost about the same or more as the Mac). I liked the SuperDrive without the pop-out tray. I like the MagSafe adapter and the backlit keyboard (again, not a standard feature on most Windows machines, and models with the backlighting usually cost as least as much as a Mac.) I love the touchpad and how intuitive the gestures are to do things on it. I liked the function keys and I especially liked the battery life, which is better than literally every other PC I’ve owned with the notable exception of my Toshiba netbook (which had a 9 hour battery life…but it was a netbook, not a full-sized PC). My Mac has an average battery life of 6-7 hours…for real, even with WiFi on and the brightness at a reasonable level. My PCs usually advertised 5-7 but realistically, I only got about 3 hours out of them.</p>

<p>-Support. With AppleCare, if this expensive machine ever gets froggy with me I can drop it off at the Genius Bar. When I had a PC, I didn’t really know how to approach hardware issues - campus IT? Manufacturer? Store I purchased it at? Often one would shuffle me off to the next. (I also got an education discount on this Mac, so the Apple care was like $185, which is a steal for 3 years of protection.)</p>

<p>-At the time, I also had an iPad and an iPhone, so the integration and iCloud support was awesome. While I now use an Android phone, I still like the integration between my iPad and MacBook.</p>

<p>-Aesthetic. I mean, this is the last consideration on my list, but I was attracted to the fact that the Mac is a sleek machine. I also liked the variety of skins and covers available for it.</p>

<p>I also agree that my Mac crashes much less frequently than my PC and I spend much less time trying to fix it than my PC. And although my Mac is only about 2 years old at this point, I feel like it still runs like it’s new (and looks new, too). My PCs at age 2 were usually stuttering at least a little bit if they weren’t completely freaking out, and that includes everything from the $600 Dell to the $1200 Sony Vaio.</p>

30

<p>juillet: Most of the things that you have mentioned have already been said by someone else. </p>

<ol>
<li><p>The OS feels better because the Macs use fast SSDs, while the laptop for PCs use mostly high capacity HDDs. This does not mean that the Mac is better, it just means that they use different hardware. Most PC assemblers allow you to choose some of the parts that go inside of your laptop, and from there you can choose a SSD. With a SSD performance in windows will be similar to OSX in terms of speed, but this still doesn’t make a tie between both OS. If you read post #25, I pointed out a few problems with the OS. I came to the conclusion that no matter what software you use, there are more things that will hinder it’s performance on a Mac. If you prefer the OSX look, you can always get the OSX skin/theme on a Windows computer.</p></li>
<li><p>If you don’t like a certain software, don’t use it. “programs work just as well on my Mac as they did on my PC.”- So you are claiming that the hours I spent reverse engineering software yesterday was pointless? The whole result of that experiment was that similar software on the Mac performs 15-40% slower than software on the PC, and it is not always because of a poor software port. Also, please talk about the present only, not the past. Many software engineers are realizing that they don’t make as much money making Mac software, so they port it over to the PC. The same doesn’t happen for the Mac unless it is ported by a huge company.</p></li>
<li><p>That section contained too many buzzwords. Please refer to previous posts regarding Foxconn’s hardware. Also, if you haven’t noticed, the PC requires more power because it has better components. Of course, an i7 at 2.8 GHz will use up more energy than an i5 at 1.7 GHz, just like 2 GTX 650Ms will take up a lot more energy than the integrated GPU in the i5. The Mac’s generally have much worse specs than a PC at the same price, and for that reason alone they have a longer battery life. I’m not even going to mention ultrabooks because they go against the point of owning a durable PC.</p></li>
<li><p>“I didn’t really know how to approach hardware issues”- That instantly tells me what kind of computer user you are. You are basically arguing for the Mac without even basic computer repair knowledge. I repair all kinds of computers every day, and I can tell you that you are overpaying for a simple service that you could have done yourself. People with very little computer knowledge need support, and if you fit in this category you shouldn’t even be talking about the PC. People like you say that the Mac is better because “it just works”.</p></li>
<li><p>The PC has better software for cloud computing and home networking.</p></li>
<li><p>So you pay more attention to the looks of the computer instead of the performance? ok.</p></li>
</ol>

<p>You only make claims but never look into the issue yourself. Right now I can think of plenty of reasons why the PC is acting differently, and none of them involve the PC itself, it involves YOU, the user. Take better care of your computers, learn the basics of computer maintenance and your PC should be able to outlast any Mac.</p>

31

<p>Chronology, So whats your point in starting this thread when you have a sole opinion of PC being better than Mac. You,me and many others find PCs better and use it.julliete, on the other hand, likes Mac more and it is perfect for her.Its her choice, if she likes she can use it.It doesnt mean that she might be a primitive User. different persons have different opinions and we should respect them. Mac vs PC argument is never ending and leads to nowhere. Ultimately, You should choose what suits you the best regardless of what others use</p>

32

<p>My goal is to find out in what way a Mac can be better than a PC. I already know that the PC is better than the Mac, and I am not here to start a Mac vs PC argument, I’m just disproving popular myths about the Mac, and looking for real reasons to own one instead of a PC. So far, Mac users were unable to prove how a Mac is better than a PC because each one of their arguments for the Mac were either completely incorrect, misleading, biased, or just contradicting with known facts. I respect other people’s opinions as long as they are reasonable, but nobody managed to provide enough proof to back up their belief.</p>

33

<p>You won’t ever get a perfect answer about this.If you fit into the apple environment you may find Macs better
Some people like MacBook for their Retina Display which is much better than HD.Some like the Design of MacBook Air or Pro and their lightweights.The New iMac is so thin than many people would like to invest in it.Some may like the interface of Maca better than Windows.and a few might want to try something new besides windows.Bottomline is that you should use what you like.</p>

34

<p>Apple products work with the PC too. Retina Display is just a buzzword for high PPI display. High PPI is not exclusive to Apple, they are just the only ones doing it on a large scale so far. The PC has ultrabooks just like the Mac has its lightweight design. However, they break much easier and are unable to fit a lot of hardware inside. I see no benefit of owing a thinner laptop unless you travel a lot and don’t have any sort of carrying case. Liking something without reason doesn’t help me. Its funny how I find a perfect counter to almost everything the Mac users say, but the Mac users cant even formulate a proper argument for the Mac, let alone attempt to challenge some of my counterarguments.</p>

35

<p>Chronology, are you just looking to argue for the hell of it? If you’re mind is already set that you prefer Windows-ready PC is better than a Macintosh PC, why do you feel the need to start a battle. Are you just looking for some reinforcement that you have a superior computer also, are you so stubborn that you can’t believe that a single reason might exist for why Apple computers are better than Windows-ready computers? </p>

<p>Just enjoy what you have and let others enjoy their machines.</p>

36

<p>I already explained my intentions when I made this thread. Read post #32. I already found one reason why a Mac might be better than a PC. Read post #11. </p>

<p>“Just enjoy what you have and let others enjoy their machines.”
So I’m not allowed to ask questions or recommend the PC on a forum section designed for that specific purpose? Come back when you can actually contribute to the topic instead of feeding me a red herring.</p>

37

<p>Just as with colleges, there’s no absolute better, but rather what’s better for a specific person. If you prefer the features of a PC, that may be what’s best for you, since you likely won’t enjoy the Mac’s features. And vice versa.</p>

38

<p>You can give your suggestions about a PC but there’s no reason to argue with people using Macs.I myself use a PC because its my choice.I dont go and argue with persons using Mac saying that they have wasted their money investing in it.Just because you dont feel the worth of Mac, it doesnt mean that its bad. And if you arent satisfied by answers here, you should argue at apple store or the apple executives</p>

39

<p>None. All Mac software is available on PC one way or another, so benefit in that. Only time a Mac would appear pleasing would be whenever you dual-boot.</p>

<p>Other than that you get to enjoy a glowing, already bitten into apple.</p>

40

<p>Mac vs. PC = like discussing religion – either side has NO chance of converting the other–based on well-entrenched beliefs.</p>