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Is this answer true?

tech4all

tech4all

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Jun 13, 2004
3,399
489
NorCal
On another forum someone asked what the difference between a Mac and PC was. Here is an answer someone gave them:

"You can't use Apple products w/ anything but other Apple products most PC components are compatable with other pc components...plus u can only by Apple stuff from Apple so they get all the money while Microsoft and IBM are more just about supplying ppl their stff at a reasonable price..."


Is any of that true? I know PCs have more hardware/software that is compatable, but they're making it sound like you could only use Apple stuff on a Mac. I know its a basic question, but I'm just curious to what you guys think of it.
 
Yeah if your talking only about the motherboard proccessor

I mean sheesh,

You don't have to get ram from apple. Use Crucial.com! Nvidia and Radeon make video cards for apple, and they aren't apple ^^, you can use cd drives that aren't made by apple. Keyboard mouse and all that stuff you can use just about anything a pc uses. I use a samsung monitor with my G4, thats not apple. (though they often work with apple, samsung) Though of course you really can't buy only a motherboard and case with apples.

Koree
 
That's largely a load of FUD, most Apple peripherals (keyboards, mice, iPod, Airport Express etc.) work with Wintel PCs. And a lot of Wintel peripherals are compatible with Macs, though the company making them would have to write Mac drivers for them (and in some cases firmware) which is the cause of most incompatibility.

Internal components like hard drives, optical drives and memory are standard designs which work on either platform.
 
Once upon a time, it was more or less true. But now Apple have switched to standards across the board.. USB (instead of ADB/Serial) so you can use PC mice, keyboards, USB hubs, digital cameras etc. without installing any drivers. Firewire (instead of SCSI) lets you use external hard drives, digicams etc., again without any drivers. VGA, then DVI (instead of Apple's original video connector and ADC) means you have a much greater choice of monitors, and you can use Apple monitors on PCs. IDE (instead of internal SCSI, because it's cheaper and more common.)

That answer is out of date! ;)
 
tech4all said:
Is any of that true?
Click to expand...

In a word: No.

In a phrase: Not so much anymore.

Full out sentences: As described above, it *used* to be true. Everything Apple was proprietary from the cases, motherboards, RAM, peripherals, software... you name it, Apple had it made especially for them. On a side note, that's one of the things Steve Jobs "fixed" when he returned to Apple. He essentially killed of all existing products (over the course of a year or so), and then, Apple released the iMac; which was the first massmarketed PC to include USB. From then on, Apple has supported standards quite often. It's a 180 degree turn from their past... then again, they had no money, and now they have $5 Billion in the bank. I guess they made the right decision! ;)
 
Okay, everybody else has covered the hardware side. On the software side, there is the original operating system provided with each. Most PC's ship with Windows (you can get them with some variant of Linux as well), Mac's (which are Personal Computers [PC's] as well) ship with Mac OS. Both machines can run various other OS's. Programs written for use in one OS will not work on a machine running a different OS, unless it is also running an emulator (running Windows programs on a Mac using Virtual PC).
 
tech4all said:
On another forum someone asked what the difference between a Mac and PC was. Here is an answer someone gave them:

"You can't use Apple products w/ anything but other Apple products most PC components are compatable with other pc components...plus u can only by Apple stuff from Apple so they get all the money while Microsoft and IBM are more just about supplying ppl their stff at a reasonable price..."


Is any of that true? I know PCs have more hardware/software that is compatable, but they're making it sound like you could only use Apple stuff on a Mac. I know its a basic question, but I'm just curious to what you guys think of it.
Click to expand...

"Power Mac G5 dual 2Ghz : 1.5GB ram : 20" Apple Cinema Display : OS X 10.3.4"

With a signature like this I have a feeling you alrerady know the answer. ;)
 
People use apple things with their mac because they are simply the best. Why get a NEC monitor, when the apple monitor is better?
Nuff said.
 
Some people are implying that before USB on the iMac *everything* had to be from Apple. This is so not true.

I have been a Mac user since 1986. I have used third-party mice, keyboards, hard disks, RAM, zip drives and video cards in a variety of Macs that predate the iMac.

In fact my first Power Mac came with a third-party ADB keyboard, Apple only included the mouse at that time.

There were a ton of video card makers, scanner makers and other peripheral products for the Mac, far far more than today even with USB/FireWire.

ADB was much better than PS2 in that you could use more than one device per port (rather like USB). SCSI drives didn't need drivers most of the time unless they were formatted with some off-beat software for encryption or compression features. In fact SCSI drives had a hidden partition just for storing drivers so that they could be bootable. Zip disks did this as well.

About the only real issue was with Parallel Printer interface devices that lacked a serial port or PS/2 peripherals which were more commodity/cheap than what the elite Mac crowd used anyway. And any special device made with a standard interface but no Mac software/driver support.

PCI was standard in Macs long before Jobs returned. Video moved off the motherboard onto video cards as did the CPU before Jobs returned. Apple even had a UNIX-based OS before purchasing NeXT.

The Mac world of today is a thin shadow of what used to be. The Mac used to be the dominant platform for a wide range of industries. We had so many specialized products and software for doing so much stuff it was insane that anyone could make money off their sales.

Things are getting better now, but we are still a generation or so behind Wintel (USB 2.0 took forever to get on the Mac side as did Serial ATA, better AGP graphics support).

We still have virtually zero Audio support for 5.1 or better from a third-party addon. Graphics cards are still weak and limited (no workstation-class cards at all, no All-in-wonders).
 
"Proprietary" Apple computer features which had good excuses:

SCSI : PCs used IDE which was slow and crappy, so Apple used SCSI instead

NuBus: PCs used ISA which was slow and crappy, so Apple used NuBus

DB-15 Monitor: PCs used the old school VGA, which couldn't handle jack **** for bandwidth, so Apple used low density DB-15. High Density DB-15 (today's standard VGA plug) hadn't been invented yet.

SCSI (instead of Parallel ports): SCSI was way faster, and could handle anything from external drives to scanners to printers in a daisy chain with no hub.

No excuses, Apple was just stupid:

PowerPC instruction set: x86 works fine, though the risc/cisc argument was alive and well back then.

ADB: Again, PS/1/2 worked fine. In fact, PS/2 was about 9 billion times better than ADB.

On-board Video cards: This was a common tactic back in the early 90's to save money and make more money later when people were forced to buy a new computer to upgrade the video card. PC manufacturers ended up not benefitting from the latter, but since Apple used proprietary cards, it did this until 1998.
 
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