How can I justify buying a Mac?

[18thTomorrow]

My reasons for using Apple computers over Wintel (since you asked):

1. Very Stable, Very Beautiful operating system
2. Think of all the time you'll be saving in antivirus and adware scans, software updates, defragging and other maintenence, lost data from crashes, lost time from crashes, etc. Yes, I will grant that WinXP is a pretty stable operating system. But I still say OS X is better. (I work in both everyday.) I purchased an iBook two weeks ago and haven't had to reboot since I first started it up. Others on this forum have probably gone much longer. Now that's cool.
3. the iApps are way, way cool in terms of user-friendlyness and sheer value for the price. I had no interest in sound/music editing until I started dinking around in Garageband a while ago...now I can't get enough of it! iPhoto is simply the best photo catalog out there, IMO.
4. The sheer coolness factor. My iBook and my blue/white G3 are two cute-looking machines.
5. Hardware that stands the test of time. My G3 is several years old...I bought it secondhand for $150, so I don't know how old exactly...and it was the best purchase I've ever made. It is so upgradeable, a lot more so than its wintel equivalent. I can (and have) put more ram in there, a better video card, I've heard you can even update the processor.

Good luck, whichever 'book you choose--Wintel or Mac. And let us know!

Britt

 

[papersushi]

One morning I walked into a Starbucks to get myself a Mocha. I saw a guy sitting at a table kind of showing off his 17'' Toshiba laptop. Man, that thing is HUGE and bulky, almost 3 inches thick. And he was talking with another girl who sits next to him about how great it is, kind of hurting my ear.

So I decided to sit right in front him and facing him, then I pulled my 17'' PowerBook out of my Brenthaven backpack. Didn't say anything, but I notice that the Toshiba guy was quiet suddently. He left within 5 minutes.

 

[psingh01]

Is this your first year? If it is maybe there is another document that shows that you enrolled in the school or have been accepted? If it isn't then show them your spring schedule. Maybe you can email whoever is in charge of the developer connection and ask what would be an acceptable document.

Actually they will charge you the $99 before you are accepted. It is sort of like a gift certificate. Anyone can buy it, but only a student can actually use it. Presumably if you were not a student, you would purchase it then transfer it to a student's account.

 

[MikeLaRiviere]

I'll tell you what I tell my friends: with a Mac you don't need to worry about viruses, spyware, adware, malware, or complete system disintegration. I've seen it on my friends' computers, and there were some cases where neither I nor BestBuy could fix the problem. I take stringent care of my family members' WinXP Dells, performing maintenance and updating weekly, and I still find malware and problems.

You're probably saying that you're a "computer person" and that won't happen to you. What it comes down to, though, is the fact that Macs can't run .exe executables or download ActiveX controls, so you never have to worry about malware. OS X has such a low market share that no one bothers to write viable viruses for Macs.

Final thought: Mac notebooks are expensive, and they seem more expensive than their PC counterparts. If you look at the ports, build quality, and compactness of the units, however, you are really getting a deal. For instance, the cost of an ultralight aluminum PC notebook with an internal DVD/CD-RW drive and five hours of battery life would be egregiously expensive; just look at the Vaios. Be sure to consider all the aspects of the system when saying "comparable."

Mike LaRiviere

 

[Brother Michael]

Final thought: Mac notebooks are expensive, and they seem more expensive than their PC counterparts. If you look at the ports, build quality, and compactness of the units, however, you are really getting a deal. For instance, the cost of an ultralight aluminum PC notebook with an internal DVD/CD-RW drive and five hours of battery life would be egregiously expensive; just look at the Vaios. Be sure to consider all the aspects of the system when saying "comparable."

Mike LaRiviere

That really is the truth. I just bought a G3 iBook online. I researched it, it's a late 2001 edition. It has 2 USB ports, 1 firewire, Airport ready (sadly no card) a touchpad, and is running Panther.

I looked at the PC counterparts, well...lemme tell you I was embarassed for ever thinking I should get one that old.

Mike

 

[itsumo]

Final thought: Mac notebooks are expensive, and they seem more expensive than their PC counterparts. If you look at the ports, build quality, and compactness of the units, however, you are really getting a deal. For instance, the cost of an ultralight aluminum PC notebook with an internal DVD/CD-RW drive and five hours of battery life would be egregiously expensive; just look at the Vaios. Be sure to consider all the aspects of the system when saying "comparable."

This is spot-on. I spent over a year looking for a suitable notebook. In the PC world, if you want something light, you have to trade off on functionality. If you want power, you get a brick. Generally. There are nice, powerful light PCs coming close to the Apple specs out there, but look at the prices. They're easily as much or more than the Apple notebooks.

With my PowerBook I'm happily running as many things as I want, it's got a beautiful big screen, effortless wireless connectivity, light enough to carry around. And it looks GREAT. I've tried all sorts of applications on it and it scored in every category. I have a very powerful PC desktop, but I hardly bother with it now. Windows is such a chore, and so SLOW...

 

[Mechcozmo]

Old Mac Quality

Hmm. The education discount doesn't seem to work on the special deals. Does anyone know the quality of refurbished apple products? Is there any way to tell what revision they are?

An old Mac's lifetime is somewhere around...oh...never. My aunt teaches Special-Ed at a school, and her collection of computers includes: 2 LCs, 1 iMac, and 2 Wintels.

The LC series, in short, were low-cost (hence LC) Macs. They are REEEEEELY old, but still quite usable. The only trouble was a PRAM battery, and that was fixed by zapping it. You wouldn't have this problem, because you wouldn't have Special-Ed kids yanking out the power cable, pulling the keyboard out, or overall trashing it.

The iMac is the original iMac, with a tray-loading CD drive. It could run OS X with a memory upgrade, but that would mean the various games that the kids play on it would have to run in classic mode. It is plenty powerful enough to run the last version of Word for OS 9.

The two Wintels don't work. They are running Windows 2000 for the security needed (so the System Folder isn't trashed...that happened to the iMac, but thank god my aunt had a restore disk), so it takes about 4-5 minutes to start up. Then, another 3 to log in. By that time, the special ed kids have done untold horrors. While the Macs can have their keyboards re-pluged back in, if they have already started, not so for the wintels.

Basicaly, because I will assume that you can take better care of it than the Special-Ed kids...
Any Powerbook G4 should do. The last revision of the 15" is pretty good.
You can use www.everymac.com to learn about, well, every mac.
Also, check out ebay for good deals on old macs that someone used a few times.

 

[answer348]

Well, I e-mailed Apple to see what I could use as proof of enrollment seeing as I haven't started college yet so I have no current or past schedule. Their response didn't answer my question at all.

So what can I use as proof of enrollment? Will my admission letter work?

Also, how's compatibility between Macs and PCs? My dad's worried that there will be issues. Any cold, hard facts on this issue?

 

[mcs37]

I'd say go for a 15" PowerBook and spend the $2200 or so with the discount. I just used my discount yesterday to buy my first Mac ever, a 12" PowerBook, on which I am typing this message.

I thought about this purchase for a while and came to the conclusion that the 12" PB was a great desktop companion (not a desktop replacement--I do development often so 12" ain't much room for hardcore dev). Now hear this. I had the option of using my sister's old 1.2 GHz XP laptop--for free! But I chose to drop $1600 on a souped-up 12" PB.

Why?

The OS is great as everyone says. The reason there's little to no spyware/viruses is that the OS X population is so small compared to Wintel--we're less than 5% of the world. So virus writers wanting to obtain highest impact are not going to write for the Mac--why would they? I also think virus writers are often frustrated individuals, and who could be frustrated using a Mac?

The OS, again, has a solid UNIX foundation, and from a computer science point of view, that's awesome. It's like Linux except beautiful and easy to use! Ha!

But the biggest reason is the simplest: it just works. I still use a 3.0 GHz XP machine for games (UT2004) and development (VS.NET), and it's a solid machine since I built it myself (for cheaper than this PB, by the way). But I always feel like using the XP machine is a chore rather than a pleasure. With the Mac, it feels like it's all been streamlined to present a fantastic user experience where you actually feel like the machine is a friend. It even has a pulsating light that gives you the impression of a heartbeat when it's sleeping. So you feel like it's a buddy of yours rather than just a machine.

That's what made the difference for me. I bought this knowing that my existing PC that I built for $1000 was faster than my new $1600 laptop, but I went ahead for the solid OS, the great user experience, and perhaps as these forums demonstrate--the community. There aren't PC forums I'm aware of where you can post that you just bought a new machine and people respond "Congratulations! Enjoy your new computer!" On PC forums, it's more of a "that's great--do you want a cookie? Piss off." There's no community around PC's. Not that this is Microsoft's fault really. Mac's smaller size really gives it the advantage of community building around a few million users rather than Windows, which is used by a few hundred million users. Trust me, if Macs ever somehow dominated the market with 80% share, the sense of community would fall as happens in every human society. Standard population-community inversion relationship.

Anyway, buy your PowerBook and enjoy it. Your time in college on your computer will be spent happily cranking out documents, listening to music, and writing e-mails.

Plus it is a great conversation starter if you're in a coffee shop or library and a girl comes up to you saying "wow, is that a powerbook?" The glowing Apple is a nice touch that really stands out in a crowd, unless you're in an Apple store, but even there I feel I can go up to anyone and start up a conversation with impunity.

 

[slughead]

This thread has, right now, 33 replies, 855 views.

Some of you must not be very secure...

 

[matthew24]

Putting it in a different way:

How can anyone justify not buying a Mac?

or: How can anyone justify buying a PC!

(Except for lack of money, but even then.)

 

[applebum]

This thread has, right now, 33 replies, 855 views.

Some of you must not be very secure...

So what is your security issue - seeing as how you are now one of the replies and obviously one of the views?

 

[fartheststar]

Also, how's compatibility between Macs and PCs? My dad's worried that there will be issues. Any cold, hard facts on this issue?

Not to Worry. There's mac versions of Office, all adobe products, mail works well with PC's, etc etc. Browsers browse your website just like on a PC (Safari, Firefox, IE, Opera to name a few)...

Compatibility between MS Office Mac and MS Office (pc) is almost almost seamless. I had a presentation once on Powerpoint that flipped one picture on it's side, but other than that it's been great.

You will save yourself so much time by not repairing your PC, and just using your mac, it's worth it! Go for it!

 

[psingh01]

Well, I e-mailed Apple to see what I could use as proof of enrollment seeing as I haven't started college yet so I have no current or past schedule. Their response didn't answer my question at all.

So what can I use as proof of enrollment? Will my admission letter work?

Also, how's compatibility between Macs and PCs? My dad's worried that there will be issues. Any cold, hard facts on this issue?

I'm not sure if that will work, you can try. If not you will just have to wait until you register.

As far as compatibility goes, it really depends on what you will be doing with it. For instance, most of the good applications are available on the mac as well as windows. Games always lag behind, but honestly if you want to play games it is best to get a pc. I share files/folders across the network at home between my pc and macs. At school I do the same with the unix network drives. I also get into the school's wireless system and surf get access to the internet.

Getting along in a windows world with a mac is really easy. Unless there is something SPECIFIC that you absolutely need on a pc, you will have no problem with a mac. Maybe if you let us know what you expect out of your mac we could think of some types of problems.

Hell I even program on my mac for work, then pass it over to the pc to add it to the "official" project which is done with visual studio. We use mostly opensource tools so moving between is quite simple. Sometimes there are tools that are windows only and I get stuck there, but mostly it is no problem at all.

 

[arrowhead]

Hi,

I am looking into buying a new laptop, and struggling to decide whether I should get a PC laptop or PB 15". I am a software engineer (Java and C/C++, and looking into C# a bit. thinking of trying Mono) and planning to use this new laptop to do some software development. At home, I currently use iMac 17" (1Ghz w/ 768 MB) running Panther and installed Eclipse (v3.0) just to try it out on Mac. I must admit that it is pretty, if not painfully, slow. I use a 3-year old IBM Thinkpad at work using the same IDE, and seems to respond a lot better than my iMac. But, I DO prefer Mac OS to Windows XP for its stability and Unix core, and not to mention Apple's hardware build quality and its beauty. I understand that PB 15"'s got faster processor at 1.5 Ghz as compared to 1 Ghz in my iMac, also twice as much L2 cache (512k vs 256k). Also, faster memory (PC-2700 vs PC2100) and system bus (167 MHz vs 133 Mhz). But, slower HD (4200 RPM (or 5400 RPM) vs 7200 RPM). All in all, will the set of newer and faster overall hardware configuration be able to run all the development tools that much faster on PB than iMac? Or, should I just get a PC laptop? (I do prefer a wide screen.)

I don't think it's necessary to say that PC laptops are pieces of crap. They aren't. And Windows doesn't suck. A PC laptop running Xp will serve you just fine.

However, as someone who works on Wintel laptops all day long doing Java and applications development, and as someone who plays evenings on a G5 and carries a crappy old 1999 G3 PowerBook around on weekends to sue with my Bluetooth phone to surf while my wife runs errands, I can tell you that the crappy old 1999 G3 PB is much more fun than the 2003 Dell Inspiron with the 15" 1920x1200 screen. The Dell's screen is superior to any Apple laptop screen. Period. The Dell is faster.

OS X makes all the difference in the world. By itself, it makes the "crappy" 1999 PB better than the newish 2003 XP Dell.

Plus, no viruses.

Plus, a better community.

Plus, for new PBs, excellent bundled software.

 

[broken_keyboard]

How to justify?
Don't you know you only have one life in this universe...do you really want to spend it using a PC?

 

[jaromski]

I was able to get a 1.33 12" p.b. combo + extra battery + 512mb mushkin ddr memory + 20gb ipod for about 2100 using the education discount. but that was 3 months ago. well, actually my wife is a full time student so _she_ got the powerbook.

I still think the 12" is better than the 15.2" but that may be a religous argument. I think the screen resolution is the same for both (could be wrong on this one) and if that is true then the 12" will look sharper. it won't pixellate as much as the 15" due to the same number of pixels stretched over a bigger screen "canvas". plus i don't know if the 1.5 ghz is really that much faster than the 1.33 and really it depends on what you will be using it for in college. if you need games, don't get a mac. or get a mac and buy a ps2/xbox.

I think they have a deal right now called cramjam or something that if you buy a pbook/ibook + ipod you get 200 off in addition to a student discount.

Here we go:

• 256MB DDR333 (256MB built-in)
• 60GB Ultra ATA drive @ 4200rpm
• Combo Drive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW)
• AirPort Extreme Card
• Keyboard/Mac OS - U.S. English
• iPod w/Click Wheel (20GB)
• 1.33GHz PowerPC G4
• NVIDIA GeForce FX GO 5200 with 64MB DDR Video Memory
• 12.1-inch TFT Display
Subtotal $1,668.00

Make sure you throw in some good quality memory (e.g. mushkin.com) and your powerbook will be quite usuable for years to come.

Plus if you are a programmer/tinkerer there is UNIX under the hood. I mean that is just COOL. So dump Linux and use a real UNIX desktop without having to muck about with kernel compilation, xserver configuration, and other library/dependency nightmares that exist on the Linux platform.

Mac is better than Linux, in the desktop space. But I still would probably custom build a Linux/BSD box for any server stuff. You get more bang for your buck in that environment for small setups. But if you have a few million you too can build your own mac supercomputer.

Or wait another 10 years and we all can have supercomputers on the cheap. And with higher speed copper or fiber coming into the home we could grid all of them together and start harassing governments and corporate organizations worldwide.

There is a brave new world coming, but somehow I feel I have wandered off topic as usual...

JaromSki