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Artist of Life
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Mac vs. PC
This thread is for the sole discussion of which is superior, and why.
I'll start
13 good reasons Why You'll Love a Mac:
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It just works.
Your toaster doesn’t crash. Your kitchen sink doesn’t crash. Why should your computer? Think of the countless hours you would save if your PC worked on your time — not the other way around. Then think about a Mac.
If you spend more of your precious time figuring out why your PC crashes than you spend taking out the rubbish every week, you need a Mac. Still not convinced? Just ask the millions of people who use and love a Mac why it’s become such an integral part of their lives, and most will tell you the same thing: it just works. Letting them do what they want to do. When they want to do it. All the time.
That’s because a Mac offers absolutely flawless integration of hardware and software. Only with a Mac do you get a system built by the same people who make the OS, applications and the computer itself.
Take a Mac out of its box and you experience that hand-and-glove fit from the get-go. Plug it in. Turn it on. And you’re ready for anything. With a Mac, you’ll find all of the essentials built right in. USB. FireWire. Ethernet. Every new Mac comes with built-in antennae for wireless networks, so getting on the Internet from anywhere is a mere matter of turning on your Mac. No reconfiguring your network settings. No plugging in some clunky wireless card.
The real secret behind the Mac’s crash-resistant performance lies deep within the operating system itself. Beneath the surface of Mac OS X lies an industrial-strength UNIX foundation hard at work to ensure that your computing experience remains free of system crashes and compromised performance. Time-tested security protocols in Mac OS X keep your Mac out of harm’s way. Most Fortune 500 companies, governments and universities rely on UNIX for their mission-critical applications. And now, so can you.
Of course, should you happen to experience the occasional hiccup with your Mac, you won’t get the runaround. Because Apple makes the whole kaboodle, one phone call — or better yet, one visit to the friendly Genius Bar at your local Apple Store — can solve both hardware and software problems in one fell swoop. And when you add the AppleCare Protection Plan, you extend your support options to include three full years of free telephone help and comprehensive repair coverage. That ought to save you some time and sanity, too.
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You can make amazing stuff.
If you’ve ever wanted to make a movie, publish your own podcast, create gorgeous coffee-table books, produce a Hollywood-style DVD, state your views in a daily blog, make beautiful music, or any combination of the above, you’ve definitely come to the right place.
To iLife to be exact. A suite of stellar applications, iLife consists of iPhoto, iMovie HD, iDVD, GarageBand, iTunes and iWeb. Every one’s a winner. And everyone can perform magic with them. What’s that, you say? On the PC, you can find any number of photo applications, music software, DVD authoring packages, jukebox programs and Web creation tools. And if you don’t like the wares of one developer, another one has a package with just as many features. Maybe more.
And therein lies the problem. You can purchase lots of separate programs from different PC developers, and any one of them may have similar features to those you’ll find in one of the iLife applications. But how many of those applications work hand in glove together? How easily can you transfer photos you used in a photo book to burn onto a DVD or incorporate as a still in a movie or quickly add to a blog? They may work pretty well apart. But how well do they work together?
Seamless integration. That’s the telling difference between iLife and all the great pretenders out there. Independently superb, the iLife applications work together to let you easily create practically anything you can imagine.
For example, thousands of people just like yourself have created movies using iMovie HD. They may never have edited a movie prior to using iMovie, but iMovie put all the necessary tools at their disposal and made the entire editing process drag-and-drop easy. Once bitten with the movie-making bug, those filmmakers are now screening movies shot in high definition and showing them on widescreen displays. How many PC applications do you think can do that?
That’s not all. Thanks to the integration built into the iLife suite, those filmmakers are also incorporating voiceovers recorded in GarageBand; effortlessly plucking high-res photos from their iPhoto libraries; scoring their movies with tracks out of iTunes; adding chapter markers that iDVD uses to create scene selection buttons; and with a single click, using iWeb to publish those movies online for the world to enjoy.
In iLife, creativity rules the day.
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Design that turns heads.
From its breathtaking industrial design to its elegant desktop icons to everything in between, a Mac delivers a computing experience to savour. And the more you get to know it, the more you’ll want to spend time with it. How many things can you say that about?
Apple designers and engineers agonise over every millimetre of every new Macintosh model and every pixel of the user interface. The result: ergonomic products that are the toast of the design world. You can see obsession with detail wherever you look: the orderly layout behind the removable back cover of the iMac, the pint-sized perfection of the Mac mini, the anodised aluminium alloy enclosure of the MacBook Pro, even the elegantly simple Mighty Mouse.
About the user interface, the more said the better. It starts with the desktop. A unique, friendly background image welcomes you, and photo-realistic icons on the Dock and in the Finder beg to be clicked. Launch the Dashboard and marvel at the colourful widgets — small applications that are as elegant as they are functional. Start a multi-person video conference using iChat and a built-in iSight camera and see an astonishing three-dimensional view of all participants. Enjoy pristine video quality in QuickTime movies.
No detail is too small. Window title bars possess the eye-pleasing look of brushed metal and brightly coloured buttons that immediately signal their functions.
So throw out your pre-conceived notions of how a computer should look, then take a closer look at a Mac.
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114,000 viruses? Not on a Mac.
By the end of 2005, there were 114,000 known viruses for PCs. In March 2006 alone, there were 850 new threats detected against Windows. Zero for Mac. While no computer connected to the Internet will ever be 100% immune from attack, Mac OS X has helped the Mac keep its clean bill of health with a superior UNIX foundation and security features that go above and beyond the norm for PCs. When you get a Mac, only your enthusiasm is contagious.
Connecting a PC to the Internet using factory settings is like leaving your front door wide open with your valuables out on the coffee table. A Mac, on the other hand, shuts and locks the door, hides the key and stores your valuables in a safe with a combination known only to you. You have to buy, configure and maintain such basic protection on a PC.
On a Windows PC, software (both good and evil) can change the system without your even knowing about it. In order for software to significantly modify Mac OS X, you have to type in your password. You’re the decider. You approve changes to your system.
People attempting to break into computers may disguise a malicious program as a picture, movie, or other seemingly harmless file. You might download such files from the Web, or get them via mail or chat. A PC just blindly downloads them without a peep. A Mac, however, will let you know that you may be getting a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The Mac Web browser, Safari, can tell the difference between a file and a program, and alerts you whenever you’re downloading the latter.
A Mac gets much of this out-of-the-box protection from its open source UNIX heritage. The most critical components of Mac OS X are open for review by a worldwide community of security experts. Their input helps Apple continually make Mac OS X ever more secure. And it’s simple to update a Mac with the latest advances. By default, a Mac checks for updates weekly. For pure peace of mind, you can set a Mac to download security updates automatically. Apple digitally signs the updates, so you can be sure they come from a trusted source.
To get a sense of just how big the virus problem is, search for “virus” at both Apple and Microsoft. Compare the number of results. What’s more, the 100 most virulent attacks cause 99.9% of damage from malicious software. None of these attacks work on a Mac. Don’t you deserve such protection?
Numbers from Sophos, a world leader in integrated threat management solutions, developing protection against viruses, spyware, spam and policy abuse for business, education and government. The Sophos Security Threat Management Report 2005 [links to white paper after form] outlines the number and kind of attacks, while the March 2006 Top Ten reports the latest number of threats. More info on viruses may be found at http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/. A Mac running with factory settings will protect you from viruses much better than a PC, but it’s never a bad idea to run extra virus and security software.
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Next year's OS today.
“Want to see what the future of personal computing looks like?” asks Computerworld’s Michael Gartenberg. “Don’t wait for Microsoft to show you; go out and get yourself a copy of Apple’s latest operating system release, [Mac] OS X Tiger. It’s that good”.
He isn’t alone. From Walt Mossberg — “The best and most advanced personal computer operating system on the market” — to David Pogue — “The classiest version of Mac OS X ever” — to Eric Convey — Tiger can “revolutionise the way you go about your computer business” — one highly respected tech pundit after another has lavished praise on Mac OS X v10.4 “Tiger”.
And for good reason. Mac OS X, the most advanced operating system in the world today, delivers a platform of features designed to make the time you spend on your computer a wholly pleasant and entirely productive experience.
Can you say that about your computing life in Windows?
If you’ve ever tried to find a file you know is hiding somewhere on your hard drive, wait until you try Spotlight. Built into the very fabric of Mac OS X, Spotlight puts lightning-fast search capabilities at your fingertips, quickly showing search results as you type. And Spotlight searches most of the file types, including images, emails, contacts, calendars and applications, you have on your drive. Duly impressed, David Pogue says it’s “like Google for your hard drive”.
Has Microsoft delivered such functionality yet?
Vista, Microsoft’s future operating system, promises to bring gadgets to the Windows desktop. Small, highly focused applications ideal for accomplishing discrete tasks, gadgets are a truly great idea. But why wait until 2007? Since it began shipping last year, Mac OS X Tiger has offered a bounty of Dashboard Widgets. Right now, you can use Mac OS X widgets to review your stock portfolio, check the weekend weather, track flights, take screenshots, play Sudoku or conduct research in Wikipedia. That’s technology you can put to good use today.
And here’s another example: Really Simple Syndication. RSS makes it easy to quickly scan the latest headlines and article summaries from thousands of Web sites. Unfortunately, if you use Internet Explorer, you need two applications to take advantage of RSS — both IE and a news browser. On a Mac, Safari offers built in support for RSS, letting you see, at a glance, when the latest news items appear. So you never have to leave your Web browser to check your news browser because the latter is built into the former.
There’s more. Tabbed browsing in Safari. Crystal clear video conferencing. Parental controls. Easy DIY scripting with Automator. Mail with built-in spam blocking. It all comes with Mac OS X, and there’s nothing extra to buy. In fact, even buying Mac OS X is easier because one version gets you everything. No need to choose among a myriad number of versions. You install the same version of Mac OS X on your laptop as you do on the desktop you use at work or at home. If you do have multiple Macs, you can purchase a Family Pack that allows you to install Mac OS X on up to five Mac systems. And without any nasty activation codes to contend with either.
With Mac OS X, the future’s right before your eyes.
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The latest Intel chips.
Living proudly inside most new Macs is a microprocessor that offers an entire collection of revolutions — shrunk into an unimaginably small space. It’s the Intel Core Duo, the most advanced Intel chip on the market today.
With an Intel Core Duo, plus other engineering leaps, your new Mac will do all those things that only Macs can do — and do so at astonishing performance levels. We’ve measured new Macs to be up to five times faster than previous generations. And it’s not just theoretical performance. You’ll notice the speed for all the things you do: from enhancing the family photos to rendering special effects for a feature film, even launching programs and scrolling long Web pages.
What is this new chip? The result of massive R&D effort involving thousands of engineers from the world’s leading chip maker, the Intel Core Duo represents an order-of-magnitude leap in processor design. It’s actually two processor cores engineered onto a single chip — offering virtually twice the computational power of a traditional single processor in the same space.*
As the Intel Core processor powers your Mac, it does so in a most extraordinary way: by consuming less energy. That’s due to the way the cores work together to share resources, and how they are designed to conserve power when their functions aren’t required. Because Intel Core processors perform so efficiently, new Macs can be both super-powerful and elegantly slim. Like the MacBook Pro, which is just 2.59 cm (one inch) thin and as little as 2.54 kg (5.6 pounds) light. Or the iMac, which packs the entire computer and a huge widescreen display into a space previously reserved just for a monitor.
What’s an Intel chip doing inside a Mac? A lot more than it ever did inside a PC.
* Even the Intel Core Solo — the same powerful chip but with just one processor core — delivers seriously impressive performance in one of the two Mac mini configurations.
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Instant video chats.
Think of it as the next best thing to teleportation. On a Mac, video chatting with friends, family and colleagues the world over is even simpler (and sometimes faster) than dialling a long-distance phone number.
Only a Mac is so ready to video chat that it brings along its own camera. The built-in iSight camera on every new iMac, MacBook and MacBook Pro lets you start a video chat (or join one) at a moment’s notice. There’s nothing extra to buy, nothing to attach, no cords to fumble with, no software to install or configure. Simply start up iChat AV, click your buddy’s video icon and you’re ready to chat with sight and sound — with up to three friends at once*.
With support for video chats between up to four people and a stunning, three-dimensional view, iChat AV practically puts your friends and family in the room with you. See their faces reflected into space, just as though you were sitting around a (very polished) table together.
You can even record your video chats for podcast. The included GarageBand software simultaneously records the audio from your chat and assigns different tracks to each participant — identified by buddy name and icon — for easy editing. GarageBand even captures a real-time still image every time each guest speaks, for the podcast artwork chat. Great for pros and aspiring talk show hosts alike.
* Multi-way video chats require a broadband Internet connection; fees may apply. To chat using iChat AV, you must have an existing AIM account or sign up for a free .Mac trial account.
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More fun with photos.
That’s what you get with a Mac and iPhoto. One place to find everything you need to create the photo books that set the standard for elegant simplicity.
Sure, you can create a photo book using a PC. If, that is, you can juggle. One application to manage your images. Another to edit them. And let’s not forget the time you’ll spend uploading or emailing your photos to the Internet.
Compare all that to the integrated and robust experience available on the Mac where iPhoto does it all. Easy to use, iPhoto offers an intuitive environment for everything you want to do with the photos you take. Even if you have thousands of them, iPhoto makes it easy to find just the ones you want to share. It also offers you a rich assortment of Apple-designed themes and a complete set of built-in tools that make it easy to customise your book from the first page to the last. Add pages, change themes, crop or rotate images, resize your photos, add effects, insert captions or other copy, drag photos from one page and drop them in another.
Suddenly remember a photo you’d like to include in your book? On a Mac, you simply drag it in from the library. Two seconds, tops, and you pick up right where you left off. On a PC, you’d have to stop what you’re doing, start up another application, find the photo you want, transfer it to an editing app for finishing touches, export it, then upload it to the Web site of the book vendor you’re using. What a hassle.
iPhoto, in contrast, offers a one-stop solution, even providing a simple formula for ordering books. Click one button and your book is whisked off to the advanced digital presses where it’s professionally printed and bound. “Sensational” best describes the results. Razor-sharp photos. Vibrant colour.
With iPhoto, it’s so much fun to create a book — not to mention calendars, greeting cards, slideshows and Web sites — that you won’t hesitate to make another.
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One-click Web sites.
With a Mac, you can create your very own Web site — complete with video, podcasts and photo galleries — in the time it takes a PC to churn out a single text-only blog entry.
Say you want to create a video blog. Well, it so happens that a MacBook, MacBook Pro or iMac comes tricked out with a built-in iSight camera. That’s right. A fully-featured video camera, nestled at the top of the screen. To film the first entry for your blog, just launch iMovie HD. Then record your latest rant, rave or rumination. Or hold the cat up there for a few seconds. Whatever suits your fancy.
Once you’ve recorded your entry, export it to iWeb. Pick a Web site theme in iWeb to match your mood (or the cat’s eyes). Your movie appears in a brand-new template, all ready for you to personalise with clever commentary. And when you’ve wrapped up your entry for the day, iWeb lets you hit the Web in seconds. Click “Publish” and your brand-new video blog goes live, complete with index and archive pages.
And that’s only one example of how everything in iLife works together to give you a one-way ticket to webdom. Got a photo album you’re dying to share with the family? Click the little iWeb icon at the bottom of your iPhoto album and voila... Instant photo gallery. Or start with a blank slate in iWeb and use the iLife Media Browser to drag in all your stuff. Add a graduation photo to your latest blog entry. Post the family reunion podcast you recorded at your grandmother’s house. Everything you create in iLife appears in the Media Browser, ready to make its Web debut.
Which is where .Mac comes in. Open a .Mac account* and you can publish your Web site with one click. iWeb and .Mac take care of all the heavy lifting. No html coding, no messy file transfer, no wrestling with Web servers. What you see is what you get. And what you get is a great-looking site.
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Amazing pocasts.
You’ve practised your radio voice enough. Time to set up the recording studio. With a Mac, that’s as easy as opening GarageBand in iLife. With a PC, well, keep practising your radio voice.
Recording your very own podcast on a PC may seem the stuff of dreams. After all, just getting started requires downloading the right recording software, buying a professional microphone and compressing the audio yourself. By the time you do all that, you may be left speechless. With a Mac, you can go from zero to “on the air” in minutes.
GarageBand — included on every Mac as part of the iLife ’06 suite — requires no more than a built-in microphone and your sparkling wit to record a professional-sounding podcast complete with sound effects, jingles and an artwork track. Provide colour commentary on the baby’s first steps. Record your diary instead of writing it. Or just roll it stream-of-consciousness style. With a Mac, you can even record iChat sessions for an interview-style show. Virtual family reunion, anyone?
Start talking and you’re halfway there. GarageBand’s Speech Enhancer improves the sound of your voice, going so far as to simulate a professional mic — even if you’re not using one. Then you can browse the GarageBand jingle library to find the perfect theme song. A happy, sunny tune for your daily Weather Report. Or something a bit more raw for your rant against The Man. Don’t worry that the music will detract from your message. GarageBand also lets you add a dynamic “ducking” effect to automatically reduce music volume when you speak, so everyone can hear the talk above the tunes.
And if you want your listeners to see what they’re hearing, just drag in images to the podcast artwork track. You might choose your smiling (or smirking) face as the cover art, then show everything from your latest political cartoon to your holiday photos as you talk about them.
Of course, it takes more than a sound file to achieve podcast stardom. You have to get your message out. Lucky thing the Mac you recorded the podcast on, the software you used to produce it, and the largest repository for podcasts on Earth — the iTunes Store — were all devised by the same company. In just a few clicks, you can submit your podcast to iTunes for all the world to hear.
So, are you ready to become a podcast celebrity? Only if you have a Mac.
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Hollywood-style movies.
Any computer can play movies. But only one comes with all the software you need to make blockbusters. Every new Mac features iMovie HD, iDVD and iWeb — three easy-to-use essentials for importing, editing and sharing mouth-watering masterpieces. Part of the iLife ’06 software suite, these applications work seamlessly together. Try finding that on a PC.
No matter what you shoot — from MPEG-4 to HDV video formats — you can import everything to the Mac smoothly. How smoothly? They call it “plug-and-play” for a reason. Just connect your standard or 16:9 video camera to the Mac via FireWire and iMovie goes to work.
iMovie gives you moviemaking power you never imagined. Each iMovie theme contains consistent design elements, including backgrounds, motion graphics, titles and effects. Acting as building blocks for your project, professionally produced scenes with drop zones allow you to easily add videos by drag-and-dropping them. Then just type in your titles and select optional visual or audio effects. iMovie does the grunt work. And thanks to iMovie’s seamless integration with the entire suite of iLife applications, it’s a snap to add photos from iPhoto and music from iTunes or GarageBand, too.
When you’re ready to share your jaw-dropping movies with friends and family, iDVD and iWeb have you covered. Make professional-looking widescreen DVDs with ease. The beautiful themes, polished menus and smooth transitions in iDVD will dazzle and delight your toughest critics. Your friends will hardly realise they sat through holiday photos and home movies.
The sharing doesn’t stop there. Get your movies online. Fast. Just drag, drop and design Web pages using your choice of templates in iWeb. Access all your iLife content — movies, photos, music — without leaving iWeb. Drag an iMovie project into the template and with one click publish to .Mac. It’s that simple. You can even use iMovie and iWeb to create video podcasts, complete with chapter markers and live Web links.
If you decide you want to move onwards and upwards to more complex video projects, only the Mac gives you a smooth transition from iMovie to Final Cut Express HD. You’ll be thanking the Academy in no time.
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No hunting for drivers.
When you bring home a new hard drive, printer or gamepad, it’s probably because you have something you’d actually like to do. Back up your photos. Print the proposal you just finished. Play a few games.
You shouldn’t have to waste your time trying to banish a nasty error message from your screen. You shouldn’t have to restart your computer simply because you connected a new printer. And you shouldn’t have to go off on a scavenger hunt, searching doggedly for device drivers, so that your computer can see and get along with that shiny new peripheral.
You should simply be able to connect that camera, printer, gamepad, camcorder or phone to your computer and use it. That’s certainly the experience you’ll enjoy on a Mac. Millions do now. And you can join them.
On a Mac, a USB, FireWire or Ethernet cable’s all you need. Plug one end into the device. Connect the other end to your Mac. And you’re good to go. You can have absolute confidence in your Mac because it comes prepared with all the drivers you’re likely to need for the peripheral devices one generally connects to computers. Thanks to Mac OS X, they’re all there, so you don’t have to give it a moment’s thought.
In fact, the packaging for the product may not even mention the Mac, but if it connects to a computer via such industry-standard methods as USB, FireWire, Ethernet or Bluetooth, it’s likely to just work. And on those rare occasions when the Mac doesn’t have a driver for a particular device, you should be able to find it quickly simply by visiting the manufacturer’s Web site or by Googling for it. Just type “Mac OS X” and the name of the product in the Google search bar (conveniently located at the top of the Safari Web browser in Mac OS X), and a few seconds later, you’ll have your driver downloaded and installed.
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Awesome out of the box.
Sure, a new PC comes with software. It’s just not software you’d ever want to use. A new Mac, on the other hand, comes with lots of really great stuff. So you can make lots of really great stuff.
Unpack your new PC and you’ll be amazed at what it offers. A bundle of mismatched software and that nagging feeling that your desktop has just been sold to the highest bidder. Of course, it does have that cool calculator. Oh, and a clock. That’ll come in handy when you’re ticking off the hours it takes you to uninstall all the software you don’t want and buy all the software you do.
Bring home a new Mac and you bring home an OS with more than 200 built-in features — including Dashboard widgets, Mail and iChat AV, among other cool things — and the award-winning suite of iLife applications.
All that makes the Mac the centre of your digital life from the word go. Just ask Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal. “Out of the box”, says Mossberg, “the Mac has better photo, music, video and DVD-creation software than any Windows computer I’ve seen”. That’s because Apple’s iLife applications are built upon the same technology as pro applications like Logic Pro and Final Cut Studio. And unlike some media management software that only offers standard issue clip art, iLife features gorgeous, professionally designed themes and templates that truly complement your baby album, holiday movie, family podcast, pop culture blog — anything you create on your Mac.
And creating stuff on your Mac is a mere matter of plug and play. Connect your digital camera, and iPhoto automatically launches and begins importing your photos. Open iChat and instantly start your own video chat with your iMac or MacBook Pro’s built-in iSight camera. Watch crystal-clear, HD video — no installation required — with QuickTime. Compose your own songs using nothing more than your computer keyboard and GarageBand loops. It’s all there, right from the moment you turn on your Mac. (Before that, even.)
So forget the fine print. With a Mac, fun is not sold separately.
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But what about those programs you need that can't run on a Mac?
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You can even run Windows software.
Which means, of course, that the Mac may very well be the only computer you’ll ever need. In fact, the Mac’s flexibility — its ability to run both Mac and Windows* — has both customers and columnists very excited.
As Computerworld’s Scot Finnie points out, now you can forget about having “to choose either the Mac for its superior design or Windows for its wealth of available software”. That’s because “you can have both operating systems on the same computer — the best of both worlds”. Mac OS X and Windows XP side by side. One great computer. Two operating systems. Many, many programs to run.
Talk about a win-win situation. Now you can take advantage of all the benefits of owning a Mac but still enjoy the convenience of starting up your Mac in Windows XP and running a Windows-only game or productivity application when needed. Third-party software solutions such as Parallels Desktop for Mac help make it possible.
That’s a prospect that has the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg very excited. “You can run any combination of Mac and Windows programs at the same time, on the same screen”. For example, you could “simultaneously download your corporate email in Outlook using Windows while editing a home video in iMovie using the Mac OS”. Or how about this multi-tasking example from Mossberg: “I was able to do email in Apple’s Mail program while simultaneously watching a baseball game in Internet Explorer”. How’s that for opening up a whole new world of possibilities?
If you’ve ever wished you could enjoy the best of both worlds, now you can. With a Mac.
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IMO, Mac outshines the PC. |