about apple/mac

Swansen

Swansen

The Ninj
yeah so this kid in class did this really bad speech on PC vs Mac and he mostly made it seem like its a mac as a whole which are better not just the OS on it, and vise versa as he made no mention of Linux. Anyways i did some research, and really current Macs, from what i have gathered, are just like any other custom PC distributor/manufacturer, only they come with their own OS as well. If i'm wrong or don't really have that straight feel free to correct me.
 
Nope you're right on. It used to be that Apple worked with companies like Motorola or IBM to produce some propietary components and then relied on standard hard drives and a few basic video cards from ATI and nVidia (that kind of sucked). There were a ton of arguements about performance and it was only really stuff like Photoshop or some Mac based programs that showed a consistent speed advantage over PC hardware.
But now they're built around Intel Core Duo and Core 2 Duo processors and everythings hardware wise is what you'll get in a standard PC package, perhaps even a bit better in some cases (though you'll pay for it). There's not a lot of customization options but at least you can actively compare the performance now.
So the difference as you suspected lies in the OS. You can now install Windows on a Mac if you so desire with programs like Boot Camp or Parallels but most people wouldn't bother. A common misconception is that Mac's aren't able to get viruses. They do, it's not common as the user base is so small so hardly anyone bothers but despite slightly better security they're still able to get them in rare cases. Other than not having a bunch of stupid pop up messages and bad driver handling though OS X on Macs isn't monumentally different than XP for instance, though it's a lot easier to go from Windows to OS X than the other way around.
 
yeah thats what i was figuring, not sure how performance would be better, as you can get better components for a PC. Yeah seems like they are something like Falcon Northwest or Alienware nowadays. On that, OS X and other series, are built of Unix, from what i understand, so in a sense they are just like Linux, only a lot bigger and corporate of coarse. LOL, yeah i'm going to print this out and give it to that kid, he doesn't have a clue...
 
Mac OS X has a deep Unix background, so is totally different to Windows. Some universities use iMacs for programming in a Unix environment, so they do have some major advantages over Windows.

The difference used to the the proprietary hardware as Exfoliate said. But in the PowerPC days, you could still put Linux onto it. After all, Linux and GNU ran fine on the PowerPC architecture.

Nowadays, with x86 based CPUs that Macs use they're not all that different from PC, apart from the OS.
 
yup, thats what i'm saying. It just bothers me when kids are all uuuhhh MACs are so much better than PC's, but have never even heard of Linux, nore do they realize its the same, with maybe worse hardware in a Mac
 
I've never heard anyone say Mac's are better actually. It's always "Mac's figgin' suck!" or something negitive. Kind of odd really.
 
Apple's OS 9 and earlier were very limited in what the user could do. It's much more simple, which isn't necessarily bad, but a lot of people simply don't understand the finer points of Windows, so therefore it must suck. I don't know about OS X, but I don't think it's default tweaks are as robust as Windows or your average Linux distribution. Yet it's a *nix derivative instead of Apple's own coding.

Mac are much more of a controlled environment computer. There's many more variables with PC's due to the wider range of chipsets, GPU's, CPUs, sound cards, etc. As, such, there's more room for something to go wrong. This isn't to say Macs are perfect, but the volume of problematic combinations is less.
 
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