Powerbook or Windows notebook?

[DownByFive]

DownByFive, it occurs to me that if you're buying the machine now that you plan to travel abroad with, you should really take into account where you're going to live, and whether you will be able to find a place to get your computer serviced, should it need it down the road.

Yeah, I've thought about that a lot....When I was going to school in Malta last year, my hard drive died. I ended up buying one cheap online from a US retailer and had my mom ship it over with some other junk. Popped that baby in, and I was back up and running. But not all service is quite that easy....

[Arctirus]

Wow! Someone else who has been to Malta!

[DownByFive]

Wow! Someone else who has been to Malta!

Oh yeah! I was there for nine months. I freaking loved that place. Sure it's just a hunk of limestone floating out in the ocean, but it has a certain charm.

[Arctirus]

I was only there for 3 days, loved it though. I think it had the best public transportation of any country I ever visited and Pacevile (I think I'm spelling it right, pronouced pachaville) was just fantastic on a Saturday night. I'm headed to Cyprus for my honeymoon in May!

[Seb]

My Sony Vaio notebook (P3 1ghz, 512mb RAM, 60gb HD) is starting to show its age. As much as I'm not a huge Apple fan, I've been looking at the Powerbook G4, mainly because I've heard they are excellent for photo editing, and the build/ergonomics are freaking sweet. I'd want the 15" version with 1gb of RAM and a 100gb HD. But I honestly prefer Windows (some may want my head for saying that...) and I'm sure I can find a sweet Windows notebook for way less than a Powerbook. So my question is...Do Apples perform photo editing (I use PS CS) appreciably better than a well equipped Windows machine? By appreciable, I mean, is the extra cost worth it? I honestly can't imagine that being the case, but maybe some of you out there have experience with both...

Oh yeah, it has to be a notebook...Lord willing, my career after graduation will involve extensive travelling/living abroad, so a nice desktop won't really work for me.

Interesting question. It's just too bad that I step in it so late (I haven't been arround for the past few days).

I am a Mac enthusiast at heart and I have almost exclusively owned Mac's (I owned an IBM Thinkpad as my main personal computer from 1998 to 2002...) but I have been working on both platforms for the past 15 years.

Here are few things to consider: If you are a gamer forget about the Mac, the game offering is marginal at best.

Mac's do are easier to use. Obviously, the difference isn't nearly as dramatic as it was in the DOS days but MS windows XP remain a so-so copy of OSX.

Mac are way more logical. Operations are straight forward and just make sense.

The integration of Software and Hardware with Apple is totally seamless, allowing for a global experience that PC's simply can't match.

Mac's arent any faster than PC's and they never really were maybe except at some point in the 90's. Moreover, Mac's and PC's provide an highly similar level of "raw power" for a given computer category (workstations vs workstations, laptops vs laptops and so on...)

Apple obviously care about design and the artsy aspect of their products but their price tag also have a lot to do with craftmanship, care for small details, actual built quality. I am not saying that you can't have that on a PC but it comes to a price (I am thinking about Alienware here for instance....).

Considering all that, the Powerbook and a PC laptop will both bring you from point A to point B but they will do so in a different way. If you try the Powerbook, you are likely to like it very much.

Few more thoughts:

To Photo-John, you said:
"Now, my guess is that Adobe is probably putting more into the Windows versions of their software than the Mac version. There are way more PCs out there and money talks."

I am by no means a software engineer but I don't see your point here. I mean, Photoshop is Photoshop, Adobe have adapted a version to OSX and another to Windows but this is basically one single software. Also, the ratio of Mac owners who are likely to use Photoshop is much higher than it is with PC's owners.


To Michael Fanelli: I don't see why art houses would want to switch from Mac to PC's. I mean, if it's aint broken don't fix it. I don't see the advantages that PC's would provide them over Mac's and/or the disadvantages from using Apple products.


best regards to all

Seb

[DownByFive]

Yeah, you definitely pay dearly for stylishness. I'm not a gamer, so I don't really care about that, and I was a computer tech on Windows servers and workstations, so I feel totally comfortable with Windows software/PC hardware issues. Ugh. Decisions, decisions...

Wait, I have another question...Does anyone have a Lowepro Computrekker? If so, what computer do you have and how does it fit? My computer just barely fits in my Computrekker, so a widescreen notebook may be too tall. But I'm wondering if the notebook wasn't as wide (or deep I guess), maybe a widescreen would fit, since it's the depth dimension that makes mine a tight fit up at the top of the compartment (did that make sense?)...I guess I can always take it into a computer store and check it out...

[opus]

Seb, or Michael, or whever asked the art house question:

In my experience, if a company is primarily about business, meaning numbers, excel, word processing, etc., they will have invested in PCs, and if they move towards graphics they will invest in more PCs.

If a company started out with graphics as their primary focus, they invested in Macs, and they will mostly expand their offices with Macs running excel, word, etc.

Some Mac houses might have a PC or two in the accounting office or in HR. Perhaps some business firms will have a Mac or two in their advertising departments. But if a company starts out on one platform, they'd have to have an awfully compelling reason to switch platforms mid-stream. Some do, but most don't.

[Michael Fanelli]

Seb, or Michael, or whever asked the art house question:

In my experience, if a company is primarily about business, meaning numbers, excel, word processing, etc., they will have invested in PCs, and if they move towards graphics they will invest in more PCs.

If a company started out with graphics as their primary focus, they invested in Macs, and they will mostly expand their offices with Macs running excel, word, etc.

Some Mac houses might have a PC or two in the accounting office or in HR. Perhaps some business firms will have a Mac or two in their advertising departments. But if a company starts out on one platform, they'd have to have an awfully compelling reason to switch platforms mid-stream. Some do, but most don't.

This was years ago, but the graphic arts facility I worked at was a strict Mac shop, creating the Yellow Pages. One of Apples largest customers by the way. They hated the idea of Windows because they knew nothing about it. Windows 2000 was out and they thought you still had to use command line to get work done.

The company wanted to dump the Macs because of the high cost and continual maintainance. To make a long story short, the artists who tried out all their apps (Illustrator, PhotoShop, etc.) on the Windows machines were amazed. The Macs crashed quite a few times a day, they thought that was normal for a computer. When they changed application sets on W2K they didn't have to reboot the machine. The applications all looked the same and worked the same way. The W2K machines were faster. There were lots of things they really liked. When it came time to change to Windows, there were fights: not to save the Mac but to see who was more important and deserved the Windows machines more.

Naturally, the choice is much closer now that OS X has come along. I doubt that it makes much sense to switch these days. But there is no longer a Windows/Mac split along business lines. Both machines are chosen for all applications.

Start Rant

The problem I have with Macs is not due to the Mac itself. It is the religious nut cases that prayed to Apple every hour on the hour. These people allowed Apple to fall far behind after the late 80s by screaming "All is well! All is well!" just like that poor sap at the end of Animal House. Apple got very lazy, only now has it caught up. Windows people complain, whine, and scream at MS all the time, nothing is good enough. All sorts of wackos attack Windows with everything they have, exposing flaws. This leads to constant change.

End Rant

Don't worry, this is it for me in this thread! I just couldn't resist this one last time.

[Seb]

This was years ago, but the graphic arts facility I worked at was a strict Mac shop, creating the Yellow Pages. One of Apples largest customers by the way. They hated the idea of Windows because they knew nothing about it. Windows 2000 was out and they thought you still had to use command line to get work done.

The company wanted to dump the Macs because of the high cost and continual maintainance. To make a long story short, the artists who tried out all their apps (Illustrator, PhotoShop, etc.) on the Windows machines were amazed. The Macs crashed quite a few times a day, they thought that was normal for a computer. When they changed application sets on W2K they didn't have to reboot the machine. The applications all looked the same and worked the same way. The W2K machines were faster. There were lots of things they really liked. When it came time to change to Windows, there were fights: not to save the Mac but to see who was more important and deserved the Windows machines more.

Naturally, the choice is much closer now that OS X has come along. I doubt that it makes much sense to switch these days. But there is no longer a Windows/Mac split along business lines. Both machines are chosen for all applications.

Start Rant

The problem I have with Macs is not due to the Mac itself. It is the religious nut cases that prayed to Apple every hour on the hour. These people allowed Apple to fall far behind after the late 80s by screaming "All is well! All is well!" just like that poor sap at the end of Animal House. Apple got very lazy, only now has it caught up. Windows people complain, whine, and scream at MS all the time, nothing is good enough. All sorts of wackos attack Windows with everything they have, exposing flaws. This leads to constant change.

End Rant

Don't worry, this is it for me in this thread! I just couldn't resist this one last time.

Michael,

I will partly agree with you here. Apple did went lazy at some point in the 90's mostly during the era where Steve Job was gone. Not that there was actually something fundamentally wrong with the products but they made quite a lot of bad business/marketing decisions which hurt the company. That being said I find that Microsoft and PC's makers were lazy too at that time. Feel free to disagree but historically, Apple launched a whole lot of innovations that were copied by PC's makers sooner or later and oftenly later than sooner (of course there is the OS,they have been using usb ports years before PC's makers learned to spell it, firewire, the first 64 bits personal computers and the list goes on and on and on). A thing that changed over the past few years is that PC's makers oftenly seems to be more prone to quickly include new technologies in their higher end machines. For this reason, Apple don't hold an edge over the competition as clearly as they used to do for years. Now, Windows XP is a rather good OS but frankly, I don't have much respect for Microsoft as a company. Do you trust Explorer? their Service pack 2? Their software suffer from several weakness and they just don't seem to really do something significant about it.

About the Mac crashing, I won't argue with you there but I must say that I am rather surprised. Mac's aren't flawless but cases of unstable/unreliables machines are quite rare to say the least. I am done with my rambling for tonight

regards

Seb

[TEMPESTboy]

I'm interested in the Computrekker too, anyone!?

If you are going with the PowerBook for sure, keeps some things (rumors) in mind. The new version of OSX (aka Tiger) is supposed to come out anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 months from now. Then you don't have to pay for the upgrade (if you want it) when it comes out. If you go for an iBook (I'm waiting to get my iBook), there is supposed to be a memory upgrade too, where all Macs get at least 512mb of RAM. Rumor here: http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2005/...10143159.shtml.

[opus]

Start Rant

The problem I have with Macs is not due to the Mac itself. It is the religious nut cases that prayed to Apple every hour on the hour. These people allowed Apple to fall far behind after the late 80s by screaming "All is well! All is well!" just like that poor sap at the end of Animal House. Apple got very lazy, only now has it caught up. Windows people complain, whine, and scream at MS all the time, nothing is good enough. All sorts of wackos attack Windows with everything they have, exposing flaws. This leads to constant change.

End Rant

Don't worry, this is it for me in this thread! I just couldn't resist this one last time.

Hi Michael,

I agree with you there! However, you can't fault the product for the behavior of a few users. And I may be making a blatant generalization/stereotype here, but at that time I think computers mostly remained in the realm of the Geeks, who are possessive about their toys and passionate about being Right. Many of the evangelists blindly supported their product much as fanatics support their religion.

I worked in a Mac house in the 90s, when Apple went through CEOs almost as often as they released new models of beige boxes. My poor boss, who started with Apple in the early eighties (and paid $10,000 for a Quadra 950, which two years later was worth a push out the window), had the right idea when she believed in the product but couldn't stand seeing the company constantly shooting itself in the foot.

I'll bet if Apple had retained Steve Jobs through that time, or at least had made good upper management decisions, that today all the viruses would be made for Mac and the PC users would be lamenting a lack of good games for their platform.

This is fun to talk about.

[DerekSom]

Hello everybody. If you are interested in a laptop that combines a presentable look and good functionality, then you cannot do without a comparison of the prices and functionality of the laptop. Recommendations are important, especially if you need a laptop for work. When I was buying myself a laptop, I first looked into computer deals where I found great recommendations for the best laptops. I now have a laptop with a high quality graphics card and 8GB of RAM.