Opinion of the Mac from a Mac user

[who]

I've been using Macs for about 4 years now and while I generallly love my Mac, I'm really questioning whether I want to buy another one. The main reason being the lack of number-crunching power considering the price.

You see, when I decided I needed a new computer I made a point of keeping an open mind and looked into PCs. I found that you can build an incredibly powerfull computer for very little money. (Check out www.tomshardware.com if you don't believe me.) I then began to read the windows PT LE forum and was amazed at how many plugins they were able to run. For example, one person running an Athlon was able to have 24 tracks plus 16 auxes and over 200 plugins! I have yet to hear about any Mac exhibiting anywhere near that kind of performance.

I know that there are many more plugins available for the mac and the windows version lacks some functions that the mac version has, but considering the sheer power that PCs (specifically the Athlons) have, I'm having a hard time justifying 3K+ on a new mac.

Are there any other mac users feeling the same way?

[coaster]

yep. i think about it everyday.

i have an 8600/300 (g3 400 upgrade) running 9.1

very nice, but it cost 3 times what a g4 does now and is slower.

a very good working pc with windows is a nice thing. i use pc's everyday, and occasionany build them/upgrade them for people. i do not own one but must use about 6 different ones.

let me tell you why i still use my mac for everything; have you ever had a problem on a pc? installing software? hardware? upgrades?

i can tell you, even with my open mind and experience, that macs are easier to fix when something goes wrong. i am sure pc people feel the opposite way that i do as well.

but in my experience, the pc's have more trouble being reliable (more so with many users) and take longer to do things mac users take for granted like installing software/using it within 7 minutes.

buy a pc. have both. i would find a use for one if i had one. they are fun to tinker with. its really easy to spend a little $$$ to add something fun to do with them. macs cost a lot of $$$ to do the same.

last week i built a pentium 1 @ 233mhz (used) for a family member out of parts i found/take off upgraded computers. we have non musical machines that require a pc interface to run the software so a computer this slow is fine. someone put 128mb ram in it of all things. it was a little hard to put a hard drive in it though. the hd was bad, and only 540mb, so i bought a 20gig (the smallest i could find - i only need like a 2 gig for this one) for $100 and found it incopatible with the motherboard.

i had install a strange driver on the hd to get the mb to recognize the hd. this requires i get on the internet (via macintosh) download the driver, format a pc disk and make the transfer.

have you ever installed windows on a new drive?

know how you put the cd in the mac; hold "c"; and press one button to install?

on a pc you need a boot floppy (made on my mac via virtual pc), plus a cdrom driver for dos so the computer can see the cd rom.

THEN you can DIR and FDISK so you can command line style reformat the new HD.

then command line into C: and type SETUP.

walk through an endless barage of popup windows that dont ask questions.. like "windows has installed a neccesary file - press okay".

restart the computer. hope the new cdrom drivers work. sometimes on a new machine they wont right away.

windows installs updates, looks for new hardware, yadda yadda.

restart the computer. THIS time, you can begin seeing if everything works. sometimes if you have a different mouse you will have to load the mouse drivers. to do this you will need to restart the pc with a mouse that works. other wise, you cant always get to/through the installer.

once the basic stuff is done, you may have to alter irq settings, adjust dma settings, you may have drives that dont work well together, software that wont get along with the video card, etc etc etc.

forever. everytime i install BIG software it is an adventure, and always costs $$$.

compare that to a mac. hold the C key down and press "install"

7 minutes later the computer restarts and you can begin using it.

id still take a pc, i just wont pay for one. i am saving up for mac stuff!!

[PDupre]

From a life long PC user... There is no PC that can hold a candle to a G4 equipped PowerMac in pure raw MFLOPS (millions of floating point operations per second) These machines rival the power of supercomputers of the 80s at prices of 10 - 20 million dollars. Yes PCs are cheaper (I own several) but if you want rapid screen redraws and uninterupted audio playback. Get a PowerMac. I have no experience on machines before the G4 but this machine is well worth the money. By the way, the machine I bought is a G4 533 with 384 MB Memory and a 60 Gig drive plus a studio display for under 3000 (including shipping).

[Sugarite]

I had considered jumping into a GHz PC one day, then I realized I'd have to USE it...

[lwilliam]

Personally, I'd rather have five high-quality plugins working reliably, than 200 so-so quality plugins.

However, I believe Waves is porting their plugins to the RTAS for PC format. I don't know when they'll ship.

If the UA or TC plugin cards ever work with PTLE, then look out...



------------------
LW

[thumbolt68]

MAC
All the way... MAC
Much Friendlier and easier to troubleshoot.

[who]

First, thanks to everyone who replied.

Coaster- I sense that you have struggled with this decision too. For me, my opinion changes daily.

PDupre- Please don't take offense to this, but I don't buy Apple's marketing BS. I believe they are falling seriously behind and the price they are asking is far too costly for what you get. If someone reading this has a 733 and can prove me wrong, please do, but I highly doubt it can even compare to the performance one can get from a 1.4 gHz Athlon.

Sugarite- I have to agree that after working on a Mac, working on a PC can sound very unappealing

LWilliam- You make a good point about the plugins, but Waves is working on the PC as is Bombfactory. you would think that between these two bundles, I could make due.

thumbolt68- Yep, Macs are easier to troubleshoot.

Are there any other mac users who agree that Apple is falling behind in terms of performance? I want to run Reaktor and PT LE with enough power to run plenty of plugins.

Thanks again.

[Maverick]

I considered the option a year ago also. What made me change my mind is mostly the following. This is just my opinion and I may not be right with everything I mention but this is how I see it.

If you want stability, Mac is where to stay. Just think if you are considering a PC most of them run on Windows of some sort. I have been told that Window's OS is running on DOS OS. If I am wrong about anything, I would like to know the truth if there is anyone that knows. If you have an operating system running on another operating system, I don't think that this would be very stable.

Some PC's use a lot of different manufacturers to put together the many different pieces of the box. Mac is put together with part made for Mac, not Dell, IBM, HP or what other brands of PC's there is.

The way I see it is that PC and Mac is like buying a car. A PC you can soup up and buy parts from your corner store worrying about compatibility and stability when you get it on the road. Mac is like a brand new Cadillac where as you have to pay through your nose to own one. If you need parts then everything is made to fit the one manufacturers specifications (APPLE).

Don't get me wrong, some PC's are good for certaing things and may be better than Mac for some of them, but I'd rather go with a Cadillac than a souped up Mustang.

Lots of PC friends have told me that if they had the money, they would buy a Mac. It also depends on what kind of uses besided Hard Disk recording that you want. If you work with any sorts of graphics, video or audio, then Mac is where it's at.

PC's are good for those who prefer them and are much more widely supported for software at the moment, but Mac is coming back getting a lot of support from software companies. I used to use a PC and still do on occasion but am now a full blown Mac user.

The only consideration for me to buy a PC would be for Video Games. PC has Mac beat with the industry and this will probably be the last thing to change.

My computer:

G4 400mhz AGP
20 gig
256mb Ram

Enough said!

Mav

[ June 12, 2001: Message edited by: Maverick ]

[PDupre]

Don't believe the hype believe the benchmarks. I have been a computer scientist for 18 years. It is not all about the processor. It is about bus speed and word length. It is about OS overhead (big issue on Windows). PC with 1.4Ghz chips are like dumping a waterfall through a funnel into a garden hose. You will only move as much water as the garden hose can handle. Add to that the way a velecity engine works. It uses something called vector processing. Without getting into a lot of detail, it take a calculation (graphics and audio does alot of floating point) that has several steps. The velocity engines do not view these as a number of single steps but as a single calculation or vector in 128 bit words(2-4 times faster than a PC). This increases the speed of a G4 tremendously . I could go on and on here but the real message here is: Don't believe the Microsoft/Intel hype. The only way that they can address their aechitecture issues is to keep coming out with faster chips. By the way, faster chips will speed up a PowerMac exponentially because of its architecture. Not so with PCs. Obviously the hype is working because they have you believing that a 1.4 Ghz machine will necessarily run faster than a 733 or 533 G4. The UltraSparc II processors in my SUN E3500 are only 400 mhz.

Wanna Race? [img]images/icons/wink.gif[/img]

[Johnny Blade]

I think that right now Mac software is lagging behind the Hardware....
example alivac and dual processor support in Protools 5.(?)

Or OSX...?

Yup, a buddie of mine upgraded his PC and got the audiomedia card and can run more plugs than I can on my G3...was I P*%$#ed...yup.