Thoughts on a Mac: Page 2 of 4

Thoughts on a Mac | Tech Tips Podcast by PcCG

Even if you do go with an all-Mac lineup, things will still go wrong. Computers are incredibly complex devices. Quite frankly, its amazing they work at all. Just the other day Rush Limbaugh, a huge Apple fan, was ranting about Siri not working. My customers who buy into the Apple marketing inevitably call me out to help with things not working. It just happens.

One of my favorite “Computer Nerd” videos is this Parody on the old Apple Commercials (Caution: Video contains a little profanity)

Crash Different! That about sums up this entire article in two words.

The company my girlfriend works at is all Mac-Based (except of course they have to run Windows Virtually for applications they need that doesn’t exist on Mac). The owner’s personal laptop hard drive crashed. The computer probably wasn’t more than a year old. Again – things can, and DO go wrong in the Apple world as well.

I grant you things tend to go wrong more frequently in the Windows world, but it usually isn’t because of a Microsoft shortcoming. Much of the time, because PC’s offer such a broad range of products, both in quality and price, the problems are due to bad third-party equipment or drivers. If you buy super-cheap knock off things on the PC from unknown companies – you may get a deal, or you may get a lemon that causes the “blue-screen of death.” (On a side note, the infamous BSOD is something that rarely happens anymore – and there is a MAC version of this… the stupid sad face that provides no useful information.) It is also more difficult to ensure there are no software or hardware conflicts with hundreds or thousands of different companies making products. There is absolutely no way to test every combination of every product, unlike the apple world where you have 6 choices.

So the lack of competition can be a good or bad thing depending on how you look at it.

Of course that takes us into the price of the computers.

Apple hardware costs literally 3-4 times as much as the EXACT same hardware in the PC world. I hope my Apple-fans are sitting down. The hardware inside your Mac is the SAME hardware that is in my PC.

Back in the day Apple used to have its own proprietary hardware… hardware they claimed was far superior to the PC’s feeble little stuff. But then something happened… Apple redesigned their OS to run on an intel processor, the same processor used in PC’s. And behold, over-night, the Apple OS nearly DOUBLED in speed. Like literally, over-night. When this change happened, the Mac became a PC with a Mac interface. I can take most of the hardware out of a Mac and use it in a PC, or visa-versa.

The hardware in your Mac is the same as in my PC, yet you pay up to FOUR times as much for it. That’s not going to work for me.

So, to recap: The Apple OS was jacked from Unix, and the hardware jacked from PC’s to get us the modern day Mac. How ironic, from a company constantly screaming how everyone is jacking them.