[Hidden-tech] Mac or PC?

[Chris Hoogendyk]

Dina Polizzi wrote:
> I'm a graphic designer and have been using Macs since the late 80's 
> when they were developed. My latest Mac was a G4 Titanium Laptop, 
> which I purchased about 6 years ago. I  spent the last 3 years doing 
> marketing and events, with only side graphics jobs. Now that my 
> graphics works has picked up again, I realized I have to buy a new 
> laptop.
> My question:
> Is the Mac still superior to the PC in graphics, audio and video editing?
> I know the Adobe Pro suite and the Macromedia suite are cross 
> platform. Many people are using PC's for audio and video editing. And 
> everything for Mac is more expensive.
> I have to update soon, I'd love to hear some feedback.

Absolutely. Definitely. Mac.

Go visit the Apple store in the Holyoke mall, just to look around, poke 
at them, and have someone talk to you. I took my daughter's 4 year old 
iBook there 2 weeks ago because it was having trouble running. I thought 
there might be something wrong with the hard disk -- either that it 
might be failing or that it might have bad sectors in just the wrong 
place. The guy at the Genius Bar pulled out a power cable and an 
external disk drive and booted it from the external drive. He ran a 
bunch of diagnostics on it, did some repairs, and then rebooted off the 
internal drive. He called someone else over to check some other stuff. 
Then he tested it for a while running streaming video, web, iTunes, and 
some diagnostic tools all at once. It worked beautifully (and has 
continued to.) After it was done, I asked how much I owed, and he said 
that diagnostic work at the Genius Bar is free. Woohoo! I have never, 
ever, experienced a computer store that comes within a league of the 
Apple stores.

That's just a side story. But it adds to the good feeling.

I've had Macs exclusively as my personal desktop both at home and at 
work (through 8 jobs) for 23 years. That is in spite of being 
responsible over the years for managing PCs, Novell servers, WinNT 
servers, Digital Unix, Solaris, OpenBSD, Linux and so on. At present 
Apple is gaining market share, and their laptops are considered the best 
in the industry. They just updated them this month. I bought my younger 
daughter a black MacBook in late August. I suggested she wait, because I 
expected updates, but she really wanted it before classes started. She 
got it totally set up herself without ever asking me for help. When we 
bought it, there were student rebates on the laptop and a printer. They 
processed those for me, online, on the spot, and I got the checks within 
a couple of weeks. Also far better than any other rebate experiences.

I'm also really glad I don't have to deal with zero day exploits such as 
hit Microsoft last week. Emergency updates and a new worm out in the 
wild exploiting peoples' PCs. By far the largest number of security 
issues we have to deal with are with PCs. We've worked hard to keep our 
servers secure and haven't had any compromises. We also have not seen 
any Mac compromises. But PCs are a headache. There's always something to 
worry about.

You'll be much happier staying with a Mac.


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Chris Hoogendyk

-
   O__  ---- Systems Administrator
  c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geology Departments
 (*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center
~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst 

<hoogendyk at bio.umass.edu>

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Erdös 4