I hear you!

Love the comment from Steve the Fleming about still being exiled in PC land. A horrific state of affairs.

Really enjoyed a very reasoned ‘dicussion’ from Ben and Michael about the merits and bad points of PC vs Mac. I cannot believe it took this long for Ben to chime in as he said

I look it in a far simply manner. PCs look shocking. Who an earth in their right mind ships laptops with stickers on? I’m so more productive on a Mac, and for me, the execution, ease of use, look and elegance of OSX makes Windows anything look like it is out of the last century.

Not too mention the low-hassle, it just works daily bonuses of using a Mac.

Sermon over

PS And the way everything works seamlessly together ….

MacPro to MacBook Air to iPhone.

In my working world I been through all the incarnations of the IBM compatibles, from green screen MS-DOS machines through the whole Windows OS’s. I had dabbled with a few Mac’s in my time, (LC’s and the first iMac) but never really took to them.

When I left the Council to study for a career change I bought an Acer Laptop with Vista OS. I thought the OS looked ok but it was so slow.

I hated the “Fanboys” at Uni who always went on about the superiority of Apple without any substance or reasoned debate apart from Microsoft being evil.

Going into a design industry I thought I best buy a Mac to get myself comfortable on both platforms, even if I was gonna keep it a secret from the “fanboys”. I went for my cheapest (student) portable option which was a Macbook (i’m on it now). My Macbook looked better than any laptop i’d used before and the performance was exceptional. It has been my most reliable machine to date and it cost less than my Acer (then).

As someone who has been on both sides I would say use the tools that are best for the purpose you wish to use them.

Hopefully I will never have to use a Windows PC for design/web again. If I get a job in an office with WinPC’s then I will ask for any objections on me bringing my 27″ iMac into the studio.

I’ve kinda been bitten by Apple products now and have really sold out. I have had 2 iPhones, just waiting on a new release in June. I am also considering getting a MacBook Pro whilst I can take advantage of educational prices, and once I’ve had an iPad in my hand I will have to try hard to resist starting a Mobile broadband contract for one of those (I am still underwhelmed).

What can I say, like Mr Moss I’m a sucker for beautifully designed and manufactured products, It’s a good job Bang and Olufsen AV equipment is well out of my reach.

I agree Open source is great for servers and blogging platforms, LAMP/MAMP/WAMP is all good – although LAMP is the only really open system lets be honest.

Are Apple anymore underhanded than Microsoft? Remember the anti-trust lawsuit?

I’m also not sure about “most Apple developers fuming” – I see a lot of Windows and Open Source people pointing and stirring but @Gruber et al seem pretty happy about it.

I totally understand why Jobs wants to stop cross-compiling from CS5 – he wants to help people make money for themselves and for Apple and wants to secure that. Allowing Flash to come in at the top of the pyramid would be an insane business move.

Apple want to send good stuff via HTML5, Canvas and Quicktime – you don’t need Flash for YouTube or iPlayer… you just need it for annoying adverts.

Again Apple have their own hardware and they know what will run best on it, have a look at the iPhone ‘Call of Duty’ game, it’s awesome because it goes right to the Apple hardware without a Flash layer. See also Quake2 in HTML5 – try doing THAT in Flash.

Unity3D looks promising and, as far as I can see, doesn’t fall foul of the ‘cross-compiling’ clause.

As for system file access, bash in Terminal will do the trick.

I cant accept your comment on closed systems, the very blog your commenting on is powered by an example of the wonders of open source. Please don’t take that as me saying that Windows is open source, but its certainly closer to it than OSX. Your right though, in the sense that its the closed nature of apple that means they can spend time creating software that works perfectly on 4 or 5 bits of hardware, and not have the worry like Microsoft does of ensuring software will operate on a unknown amount of different hardware configurations across the planet. Thats why the comparison is wasted really, OSX and Windows are totally different things, that take totally different approaches to solve a common problem. They cant truly be compared.

For years I’ve been a PC fan, I’ve had this argument countless times, but its only recently that I have seen just how underhanded Apple are as a company, and I now find myself not only disliking there systems, but also there very ethos and the way they operate.

The lawsuits on HTC being a classic example – why not just go straight for google? Because they know they cant win, its a scare tactic, to try and slow down the development of android. That doesn’t scream confidence in there own system to me, they know it cant compete, that android knocks spots of iPhone OS, and its only the “cult of mac” that keeps there smartphone success alive, and guarantees a certain level of success with the iPad.

The recent announcement regarding code languages for app development is total nonsense, way to lose the developer community Steve, because there mostly fuming.

Starting fights with Adobe, A company who one of apples “target demographics” – creatives – also feel very attached too, just seems really odd to me. Especially considering the situation was born out of Apple not wanting to support flash, they threw the shit at adobe first, who were quite happy to work with Apple to iron out the issues with flash on macs, until Apple started to publicly badmouth them, the “cult of mac” jumped on this, and now I see at least 5 new blog posts a day about how “flash is dead” and “flash is bad – use HTML5″ from people that clearly don’t understand, or have done sufficient research – why? Because Jobs said so.

As a designer, I don’t actually like the OSX GUI, I find the dark grey bevels windows pretty depressing to work with, I cant stand the dock, and I like to be able to get into the system files etc. without feeling like I’m a spy behind enemy lines.

Fact is closed systems work, they work very reliably without the need for drivers and updates and blah-de-blah. The quality of iPhone apps is MUCH higher than the Android equivalent. It’s closed, you need to by the SDK to join in, but I’ve yet to hear of an Android App millionaire — closed is good for business and good for developers (in many cases).

If I were a hardcore gamer of course I’d spend my money on a high-spec PC. But for day to day (and business) use I choose Mac (I have Windows and Ubuntu and I consistently choose my Mac).

Apple say Flash is buggy but yes recent developments clearly show it is their walled garden they are trying to protect. And why not, they’re a business.

I think it’s wrong to compare ‘PCs’ with ‘Apple’ – PCs can be all manner of things from a low powered Acer Revo or Advent PC to a monster home-build and yes, of course, you can build something under the umbrella of ‘PC’ that’ll knock spots of an Apple — but it’s not a fair comparison at all.

Of course one could build a monster PC Hackintosh that had all that power and would boot into both Mac and PC happily. Games from PC partition. Work on Mac OS-X. Perfect.

As a switcher I can honestly say I only ever go back to Windows for old software that hasn’t been ported and the odd game. I’m in OS X 95% of the time and it knocks spots off XP, Vista and Windows7.

Oh yeah, and it’s a Unix box too

I’m firmly in the PC camp, as a PC gamer and enthusiast, I have always found myself reading, learning and upgrading various PC over the last few years.

I don’t like Apple, I cant buy into there closed system, I don’t like top be restricted on how I use my devices, and I don’t like putting all my eggs in one very control freakish basket. Apple don’t play nicely with others (adobe, google, htc) and they spread lies to save face (flash is fine on a PC, the problem lies with Apple, why not just be honest, Jobs, and admit the only reason your scared of flash is because it would stop people using your app stores).

I also have issues with the”my pc was crap, my mac is awesome” argument that I get form the Apple side of the fence all the time. Chances are your comparing some 500 quid Advent PC (quite often the “family computer”) to your new £1000+ Mac, how is this a fair comparison? Anyone who has used high end PC hardware, to the same level as that you get in your Apple, will know that a “speed” related argument is not valid.

Good to hear work supplying a decent machine !

At home, we’re a bit all over the place. We have two desktop PCs, one running XP 64 bit, one running Win 7 64 bit, and 3 laptops of varying ages, one running XP home and the other two running Ubuntu (8 and 9). I really like Ubuntu and have found it really easy to install and run since version 8. Would probably run it on everything at home if it wasn’t for Adobe creative suite……