What is the difference between mac and laptop?

Welcome to Macrumors!

Firstly, what you have to understand is the basics about Mac and Windows.


Mac is an Operating System from Apple and Windows is an operting system from Microsoft - the two companies are IT giants and sell many many computers with their own OS installed.

A 'PC' is a general term for any non-Mac computer - but more commonly a PC is reffered to as a larger tower machine running Windows. A tower machine is usually sold with a monitor screen, a keyboard, mouse and set of speakers.

A 'PC' laptop is a laptop which is a smaller single piece 'all in one' machine which is a keyboard, with a swing shutting screen running Windows also.

An iMac is similar to a windows PC tower except everything is built in to thw back of the screen rather than in a large tower shaped machine.

A Macbook (mac laptop) is exactly the same as a PC laptop except for the design and the fact that it runs Mac OS.

Microsoft sell Windows into a lot of different makes of machine for example Acer, Dell, HP etc whereas Apple build Mac OS into ONLY Apple products, meaning you can get Windows on machines built by ANY manufacturer and you an only get Mac OS from an Apple store, on an Apple machine.

Hope this insight helped.

S

Just to add to that, some people will call a mac a PC, since the abbreviation "PC" stands for Personal Computer, which a mac is too.

One important difference is the keyboard. If you connect a usb "windows" keyboard to a Mac, some keys aren't labeled properly. On a Windows computer you have a "windows key" and a "menu key" a "ctrl" key and an "alt" key and of course there are shift and caps lock keys. On a Mac you have a "command" key, an "option" key and a "control key".

Sometimes command works like alt and sometimes command works like ctrl. Its a LOT easier if you have a Mac mini when you use a Mac keyboard so things are properly labeled. Also on Mac laptops, function keys have extra functions like show mission control, volume up, volume down, brightness, etc and these are fairly standard across models. More here.