So who's using an Apple Mac?

scottyd

scottyd

Wizard
www.fz1-forum.com
I'm currently on an Apple Mac Mini intel i5 2.5ghz dual core with 4gb ram.

It's quite a handy little machine for internet, email, photo, itunes...

I like the latest version of osx lion too.
 
Have not had one issue with it in a 1 1/2 of owner ship. Not one. It takes some adjusting but once you become familiar with the way the operate you will never go back.
 
I like the physical look and feel of Apple products but dislike their software. I've given their products a college try but I can't break away from what I enjoy with a PC. The quality of what they produce is hard to beat though
 
Before buying the mac mini I thought I was going to get rid of all PC's and just run apples. But after using this for 4 months I think I will keep one PC for gaming, and we'll go apple for the rest.
 
scottyd said:
Before buying the mac mini I thought I was going to get rid of all PC's and just run apples. But after using this for 4 months I think I will keep one PC for gaming, and we'll go apple for the rest.
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I had a Mac mini in my entertainment center for a while and enjoyed it. However, mine definitely crashed from time to time. In safari of all things! :) Anyone who says Macs never crash is full of it. :poke: I have not tried the latest OS other than to setup the Citrix receiver for my clients.

Apples are great machines, no doubt, but I will always still prefer regular PCs. Gaming being one of my main reasons for that.
 
I have attorneys all the time who go and buy a mac and they say, "Did you know you can play music on it?" "Did you know you can edit video on it?" "Did you know you can make DVD's with photo slide shows and videos on it?" "Did you know it is all included and I did not have to pay a dime?"

I say "yes" and you had all that on your PC too. Also for free. The difference is when they get that new interface everything so fresh and new that they actually explore what they have. People use to windows think they know everything there is to know and never explore what they have.

Again, not knocking macs. I think they are great machines and definitely have their areas of superiority (video and photo editing with the high end apps.) I just will not buy in to all the "hype" side of their marketing.

P.S. If you work remotely a lot the Citrix receiver is no where near as reliable on a Mac as it is on a Windows PC. It just does not recover from hiccups on the internet as well on a Mac.
 
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Hey Brad, I've bought a Netgear NAS (the NV+) and I'll be filling it with 2gb HDD's and setting it up in my home network with my Mac Mini in there and my LCD tv's will have apple tv on them to share my movies from the NAS.
The NAS works stand alone? and doesn't need a separate computer to run it?
I'm going to keep my 3ghz core2duo as a gaming machine now, so I have the option of Mac or PC in the network...
 
Hail said:
I have attorneys all the time who go and buy a mac and they say, "Did you know you can play music on it?" "Did you know you can edit video on it?" "Did you know you can make DVD's with photo slide shows and videos on it?" "Did you know it is all included and I did not have to pay a dime?"

I say "yes" and you had all that on your PC too. Also for free. The difference is when they get that new interface everything so fresh and new that they actually explore what they have. People use to windows think they know everything there is to no and never explore what they have.

Again, not knocking macs. I think they are great machines and definitely have their areas of superiority (video and photo editing with the high end apps.) I just will not buy in to all the "hype" side of their marketing.

P.S. If you work remotely a lot the Citrix receiver is no where near as reliable on a Mac as it is on a Windows PC. It just does not recover from hiccups on the internet as well on a Mac.
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This.


I've yet to have any die-hard Mac person tell me one thing that their Mac can do, that my PC can't. For the specs of my current laptop that I paid $900 for, I'd have to spend ~$2k on a comparable Mac... so my question is... what does that computer with the same specs do $1100 better than my PC?
 
va_rider said:
This.


I've yet to have any die-hard Mac person tell me one thing that their Mac can do, that my PC can't. For the specs of my current laptop that I paid $900 for, I'd have to spend ~$2k on a comparable Mac... so my question is... what does that computer with the same specs do $1100 better than my PC?
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Yeah I'm not going to try to tell you that a mac is much better. I've worked out that for me at the moment a mac mini does what I want to do and seems to have a far more stable OS for just surfing the web, email, a few low end games , itunes and taking pics off my camera as I compare it to my computer at home running windows 7 (I must say that windows 7 was very good when you compare it to vista. I couldn't wait to get rid of vista)

The thing is that I had the money at the time to buy it and it wasn't that much more over a comparable laptop.
But I didn't buy a high end Mac either. My mac mini was $900, and yes I had to fork out another 200 for a monitor but that was my choice.

I was going to buy a high end iMac, but now that I know what games I can and can't play on it, it's not worth buying one just for that when there are more that I want to play that need a PC.

If every computer game was made for mac and pc - like it was back 10-15 years ago then I would be dumping the pc for a mac straight away.
 
scottyd said:
Hey Brad, I've bought a Netgear NAS (the NV+) and I'll be filling it with 2gb HDD's and setting it up in my home network with my Mac Mini in there and my LCD tv's will have apple tv on them to share my movies from the NAS.
The NAS works stand alone? and doesn't need a separate computer to run it?
I'm going to keep my 3ghz core2duo as a gaming machine now, so I have the option of Mac or PC in the network...
Click to expand...

This is what I am using at home:

[ame=http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00439GMJ2/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=B0047FL85U&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1FMNCNAGMT72SAGHRXW0]Amazon.com: Western Digital My Book Live 2 TB Personal Cloud Storage Drive: Electronics[/ame]


It is absoutely awesome. All 4 of my PCs backup to it real time as I work using Western Digital's software. Restores are super simple. I know because I had an HD die recently.

It also has shares that can be setup for photos, music, videos, and documents. You can securely access those shares over the internet from another computer, iPad or iPhone. This is what they call their "Personal Cloud Storage". (I hate the term "cloud". It is just a rediculous marketing term.) Those shares are also available as an iTunes server. For the price this is the most amazing NAS devices I have ever used. Works with Mac and PC.
 
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I've owned my 15" MacBook Pro since July '08. Since then it has followed me to Iraq and Afghanistan and the only things I've done to it were replace the back right fan because of all the sand corrosion and upgraded to a 750gb hard drive. Other than that it has been able to handle everything I throw at it. It even impressed me when I partitioned my hard drive to install windows 7. I feel it runs it better than my friends pc's. And I'm able to play windows games with them with my graphics on a higher setting and during our LAN party's I always have the lowest ping. On a 3 1/2 year old computer! If that's not quality I'm not sure what is. So you can complain about the price as much as you'd like. I'll stick with my Mac till I lay in my grave. Best money spent. If your excuses for not owning one is because of the marketing hype. Thats digging pretty deep in the barrel. Welcome to the world. It's stupid sometimes. Don't let it influence you to be the same.


---
I am here: http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=32.881720,-117.125039
 
Hail said:
This is what I am using at home:

Amazon.com: Western Digital My Book Live 2 TB Personal Cloud Storage Drive: Electronics


It is absoutely awesome. All 4 of my PCs backup to it real time as I work using Western Digital's software. Restores are super simple. I know because I had an HD die recently.

It also has shares that can be setup for photos, music, videos, and documents. You can securely access those shares over the internet from another computer, iPad or iPhone. This is what they call their "Personal Cloud Storage". (I hate the term "cloud". It is just a rediculous marketing term.) Those shares are also available as an iTunes server. For the price this is the most amazing NAS devices I have ever used. Works with Mac and PC.
Click to expand...

Ah nice brad!
I think for me 2tb won't be enough... thats why I bought the 4 bay NAS so I can put 4 2tb's in there :)
 
va_rider said:
This.


I've yet to have any die-hard Mac person tell me one thing that their Mac can do, that my PC can't. For the specs of my current laptop that I paid $900 for, I'd have to spend ~$2k on a comparable Mac... so my question is... what does that computer with the same specs do $1100 better than my PC?
Click to expand...

Ya know what, in the 4 months of using this mac mini, I have not had one instance of the OS locking up and having to reboot.
Even my C2Duo running windows 7 would lock up, once a month maybe... but it still does it.
Also it's not a case of what the apple can do that a pc can't, I don't know why someone would try to claim that anyway.
The Mac just does it so much better, the software runs faster and there's not as many background apps running to clog up the system.
I was sick to death of trying to run iTunes on my PC, I even had to take my Brand New iPod to the apple store to have the software reloaded because somehow windows stuffed around while itunes was updating it and it locked it up, where iTunes was meant to run on an apple and it does it well, thats just a fact.
 
My Win 7 never "locks up" and makes me reboot. Absolutely never. I rarely even shut my computer down. It stays either running or in sleep mode for literally months at a time. I don't have a bunch of crap running in the background at all times slowing me down....

What I'm about to say here may come off a bit harsh... but it's in no way supposed to be... PLEASE do not take any offense... but.. Apple seems to be a company entirely geared to people who know nothing about computers. They offer a very intuitive product, I'll give them that. This is why you can give an iPad to an elderly person or a 2 year old, and they fall in love with it.... iPads are amazingly popular with extremely young children, and it's not because of the marketing. It's because the product is so intuitive. As an added bonus, since Apple controls all of the software available for their devices, there's a certain amount of quality control.

All of that said, someone that knows what they're doing with a PC can have a much smaller investment and have a much more powerful machine. I don't have crap that runs in the background because I removed it.

It seems that a lot of Mac users had a bad experience with a PC one time, and took that opportunity to jump ship. Whenever I get into this conversation, I hear the same thing from the Mac users... my Windows machine did this.. it did that.. it had problems here... ... Well, people think they know what they're doing on a Windows machine when it's actually a somewhat complex device... Conversely, on a Mac, that intuitiveness makes it so anyone can use it, regardless of their computing knowledge.

When I was working for the newspaper, we had an office full of iMacs. They were all several years old and were networked horribly. Every once in a while, one iMac would get the spinning pinwheel, and it would rapidly spread to every computer in the office, locking them all up and not allowing you to get any work done. Do I blame the machines for this? No. It was a network issue caused by the network admin being a moron. When you took a machine off of the network, it was slow, because it was several years old, but it wasn't entirely unpleasant to use. The glossy display is horrible for glare... and the keyboard and mouse were constantly dirty... but that's because a bunch of newspaper people are collectively filthy.

Here's my take. I'm sick of hearing Mac is so much better... and then having no solid reason to back it up. If you take two machines, one Mac, one PC, both with the same specs, one is not inherently "better" than the other. As above, I'll agree that the Mac is easier to use for the novice computer user. It's better for the user that isn't willing to take a few minutes when the system is new to remove some un-needed software and clean up the system processes. For me, is a Mac better for what I do in a single way? No. Not one.

So, since we've now decided that one is not better than the other.... let's agree that they're different. One, to use a two wheeled analogy since this is a motorcycle forum, you hop on, twist the throttle and go. The other requires you to pull in on the clutch and do a little shifting of the gears. The Mac is a scooter. The PC is a motorcycle.
 
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I just bought a new Dell e6220 with i7, 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD with 3-year warranty for $1200. It is their interpretation of a Mac book.

My first computer was a Commodore Vic-20. This is my 4th Dell and not only best computer I ever owned, but best I have ever seen.

One mistake people make is to not upgrade their home network. I recently installed a Cisco E4200 n router (best on the market) and Motorola 3.0 docsis modem. Keep stock settings right out of the box for maximum performance. With that combination I went from 12 Mbps DL to 22 Mbps!
 
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