Man, I tell ya, nothing makes Mac aficionados look bad like a Mac aficionado.

At least they’re not straight-up insane like the three guys still fanboying Amiga!

I hate Macs with a passion and I always will. I came this close to smashing one during my graduate studies. It’s BULLSHIT.

Well, that second video certainly did nothing to refute the idea Mac users are snobs.

I’ll be honest: I want a Mac.  But then, I literally want god-damned near everything that lights up and blinks or takes a battery or has a keyboard or plugs in or…

So yeah, it’s much more of a general gadget lust than it is “Oh I would like to live my computing life in the Apple universe.”  Because I don’t.  I like to tinker and experiment and break shit and I don’t like companies forcibly shoving hardware down my throat just to experience their OS.  Bad enough I bought into the closed system that is the iPod/iTunes relationship.

Some folks just wanna drive a car, some folks like to get in there and see what they can mess with.

I’m a PC.  Always have been, always will be.

True Story:

When buying computers for the computer lab at my place of employment…a high school…the mac snobs insisted on a section of iMacs.  I protested saying that they weren’t able to be upgraded nor do they have an external drive for the kidlets to save their work on…

The solution to the second was to create servers for every teacher (over 100) and student files vaults for students to save their work in online.

The second was poo-poo’d as being somethign down the road we would not have to deal with, why didn’t I know macs never need to be upgraded?  Mr. X was still using his Mac Plus at home to do his grades?

Two years later…

We throw out (trade in) 38 iMacs in various states of disrepair for Ugly beige machines running Win XP, plus our student server crashed an even dozen times with data overloads…switched to an IBM server farm and it hums along for six years now with only a single hiccup.

It really all just depends on what you need to do with the computer. For someone like me who works in protools and photoshop pretty much every day, stability and speed are huge and macs (generally) perform better in multimedia applications. I would love to have a mac.

However, XP SP3 with a fast processor and a good amount of RAM gets me 90% of the performance for 50% of the cost. So yeah, I’ll stick with my pc and let all the arugala munching hipsters have fun with their iLife at twice the price.

I’m a Mac Guy, but I also own a PC.  I don’t mind having one foot in each platform, but I’ll tell you this much - I know from personal experience that each system has its flaws and strengths.

For the Mac - I don’t have to do a whole heck of a lot of software maintenance, fixing permissions here and there to speed things up, but for the most part, runs like a fine tuned engine, which is nice given that I work for the most part in multimedia graphic stuff, and I rarely get the spinning beach ball of death.  HOWEVER, in the year and a half since I’ve owned it I have:

Replaced the Mother Board
Replaced the Hard Drive
Replaced the Battery
And Replaced the MagSafe Adapter.

All in all, I’ve had almost an equal amount of new parts put in the machine that I spent when I bought it.  (Oh, it’s a MacBook Pro, by the way).  I’ve said to many of my friends - I LOVE the Mac OS, but their hardware sucks.  Thank God for AppleCare - it was worth the investment.

My PC is a Sony Vaio, and aside from a few minor virus attacks, I’ve kept up with routine maintenance and it’s run pretty well since I bought it close to five years ago.  It’s not the worlds fastest machine, but it’s a pretty solid war horse.

If I had to make a comparison, I’d say the Mac is a sleek sports car that gets pretty crappy gas mileage, but the PC is a reliable Sedan that gets moderate gas mileage but still gets the job done.  I love them both, and refuse to jump ship either way.

I’ve been an Apple guy since I was three. Hell, my career is with Macs. That being said, I try not to be snob or any of that bullshit. I know that a Mac isn’t a end-all solution for everyone. Different strokes for different folks and all that. I run XP on mine for when I need it and use OS X for anything else. I can say that Apple knows how to build a good, usable interface most of the time, certainly more than MS. That being said, MS does have the upper hand in many arenas, particularly the server market. Server 2008 knocks OS X Server silly in almost every arena. Hopefully Apple works on that.

That being said, the gap in Apple’s lineup right now is a good midrange tower (the Mac Pro is a workstation and is priced as such, so please don’t compare it to a commodity tower) and that’s killing me. My next computer may well be a Hackintosh. If you folks want to try out some OS X but don’t want to spend for it, give that a shot. You can hack OS X onto most commodity hardware with varying degrees of success. It’s not exactly simple or easy, but it runs well enough once you get it going. I’m going to replace the wife’s PC (which is a hunk o’ junk all of it’s own) with a Hackintosh and see how it goes. I might sell off my iMac and build my own if it goes well.

And as for Mac snobs, yes, I hate them to. They make sensible guys like me look bad. I tell them to shut the hell up when they get assy, but I’ll also point out bullshit if someone’s firing off against Apple. Too much shit from all sides, sadly.

And if you guys want to see some REAL out-of-touch asshats, go check out the fucking FOSS/Linux zealots. You know, they’re the basement dwelling fatties that live in Richard Stallman’s beard and can’t understand why anyone beyond their very narrow circle of “friends” doesn’t give a fuck about open source or even know what that is.

Who the hell is Richard Stallman?

Who the hell is Richard Stallman?

Old hacker. GNU creator. Total privacy wackjob, to the point that he refuses to browse the web and instead uses wget to email himself plain text html from URLs he wants to read.  Yells at people who call Linux by its name and not GNU/Linux.

Brilliant, but deeply flawed old-school hacker-geek, basically. Wiki his ass. You can get lost in his nonsense. And his beard.

P.S. That redhead in the ad? She has Teh Qute™.

I’m a fan of the idea of Linux. The problem is in the execution. It’s as stable as the others, it’s free, and the GUI can look awful pretty. Linux really should be just as popular as Leopard or Bobcat or whatever Macs are running now. The problem really is lack of support from… well, pretty much everyone.

Case in point, I put together a new machine and wanted to try out Linux ubuntu on it for my small recording setup. Installed easy, connected to the internet, and then I spent two days trying to get the OS to interface with the audio hardware. Oh, and I couldn’t use a single program that I was used to and comfortable with. Which is the case with EVERY program on Linux.

I love tinkering and hacking but I also love to get my shit done with as little hassle as possible. Shit, I just want to get shit done, period.

Where I would definently use Linux though? Netbooks. For surfing the net and running really lean and fast it’s great.

I’ve heard that the way to get support for Linux is not to go on a Linux forum and ask about the problem, because then all the beardy jerks will tell you to go and read twenty different books.

The trick is apparently to go in and say “Man, Windows can do X so easily, and Linux can’t do X at all.” You’ll immediately be inundated with twenty different messages giving you exact instructions in three different ways how to do X in Linux.

I think about 20% of Mac users get one for some technical reason, either exclusive software or the ‘stability’ of a Mac.

True.. I’m a unix geek and was finally won over with OSX after 10.3 came out.  The seamless integration with my linux stuff (and occasional solaris) at work is a huge win. 

That, and I’ve used MS stuff since DOS 2.x days and couldn’t stand how much time I had to spend continually fixing shit that just degraded over time, which does not happen on my unix/linux hosts nor my macs. 

I’m not one to say macs/apple stuff is perfect either.  I have an issue with my Mac pro where it locked up once in a rare while.. usually related to multi-stream downloads from itunes movie store while there’s a disk in one of the DVD drives (not sure why).  Also while I love my AppleTV, it does lock up on me due to overheat sometimes (I upgraded the hdd though), but if I run a fan on low pointed at it, it works fine.

I’ve told family though that if they buy another computer and get another windows one, I won’t help them anymore.  I’m tired of cleaning up their busted shit.  My dad has had a macbook pro for about 2 years now that I only had to “fix” one time.. because he moved /Applications under his homedir (still not sure how).. which worked perfectly as soon as I moved it back.  My mom has an iMac now and aside from the “it’s different and taking some getting used to” bits.. she hasn’t had any problems.

Apple doesn’t even try to compete on the sub-$1k market though really.. so making an “ad” that focuses on that is/was a piece of cake.

Heh.. some of the Linux comments are dead on.  There’s still a lot of the old school “I spent the time to figure this out, get off your ass and learn a little too” that happens.  Hell, I still do it, but only to the other “admins” at work that are being paid to know this shit.  It does drive me fucking nuts when someone who’s supposed to know the basics of Unix admin skills still expects me to hand them high-level answers when they could learn it in a few minutes if they’d get off their asses.. and also because it really won’t help when they haven’t spent the time to understand the why that goes along with the how anyway.  But for regular folk at home.. I help people out all the time.

Linux is now the de-facto powerhouse OS at work now.. EDA compute farm we run for IC designers.  Solaris used to be dominant but x86 (and especially x86_64) flew past SPARC so fast that Sun is barely hanging on in the niche market anymore (see the recent IBM/Sun talks).  Solaris x86 could’ve been the powerhouse, but Sun had burned the ISVs too many times with the 2 or 3 previous aborted solx86 releases that they weren’t willing to put any time into another one as sol10x86 came out.  They barely give it a few token releases per each huge release calendar anymore.  They’d already put too much time into moving to Linux a few years ago and aren’t going to add another OS now.

By pure numbers.. yeah, the company has far more windows hosts then anything else.  Because it seems like even a janitor gets a PC with windows.  Most of those are likely >90% idle if you looked at it.  We do have several thousand linux boxes in our compute farm now that are all pegged basically 24/7 anymore.  About to throw in several hundred more (even though we’re supposed to not be spending any money too.. go figure).  Linux usage on the desktop for engineers is growing fast too; especially with more work ongoing related to android.

Oh yeah, and Stallman is quite the nutter at times.