"Allan Rosen-Ducat" writes: : This is the old MAC vs PC issue. in a way, it's as you say, in another way it's not.. : In the end Apple constantly produces products that : have the lowest number of warranty issues. warranty 'issues' can be hardware or software related - my experience is both mac Vs Wintel/AMD/Other has been overblown : Their customer support is ranked the highest in the business : and the learning curve is the shortest as well as a system that : is rock solid. : He just spent a week reloading his system after his : Microsoft system was so screwed up he couldn't use his desktop any more. : My father in-law has abandoned three PC laptops simply because they : has system issues that no one could ever figure out. Mac users I've known have been generally the type who do not 'upgrade' their OS, tweak furiously or generally modify the computer they bought out of the box. I see Wintel/AMD/Other users regularly upgrading a driver here, installing much of the myriad aftermarket software there, fiddling constantly to the point where something goes wrong and they lose a critical driver then they reinstall the OS, lose a sound driver or somesuch and the machine becomes yet another 'system issues that no one could ever figure out' btw, I've helped people here on the other side of the world from me to fix such issues when their own techs have failed repetitively. There are techs and there are techs. I've encountered many a tech I would not employ to pack screwdrivers away safely, yet they hold qualifications and cite many years of experience... Oh some of the stories I could tell <chuckles> There is a BIG difference between an OS designed to integrate seamlessly with hardware made by the same vendor (mac), and OS's & hardware made by many, many different manufacturers (windows/intel/amd/nvidia/matrox/radeon/liteon/LG/creative/Via/IBM?GigaByte /etc etc ad infinitum). Sure a lot of modern Apple PC's use parts from these same vendors and to date it's either been the case that they're made slightly different (to Mac specs) so cross swapping wasn't possible and Mac users have been forced to pay premium rates for the tiny variation Apple introduced to maintain an assured customer base, or they (more recently) DO use generic parts - but only a limited number and that minimises the risk of 'system issues that no one could ever figure out' such as PC tamperers encounter. As Apple users have recently discovered with the introduction of macs with Intel hardware, those chips actually DO have a speed advantage, something apple constantly fought a media war to deny.. in time as the OS becomes non-CPU specific and not locked to certain hardware, users will discover the same annoyances Wintel/AMD/Other have experienced with lack of driver suport, lack of OS support and the same situation where the OS is found not to be capable of being all things to all hardware ;) You haven't been able to whack a Matrox RT2500 in any mac so far - as a decision made by a college here discovered when he bought 20 for the apples in the video edit suites here discovered (!!) - costly mistake! - An architect I know is locked to *old* macs as he's facing a 40 thousand dollar bill if he upgrades to newer machines as he'd be fored to replace the software *entirely* - why? because the dongle interface doesn't exist on the newer macs :( He's decided after being a Mac loyalist forever that he's switching to AMDs .. it was cheaper software license-wise going cross platform than going from early mac to later mac. Sad. : After all wether it's a mac or a p.c. it will be obsolete in a couple : of years anyway. obsolete - funny term .. it will probably still work precisely the way it was designed to do, but newer models will have made the old one look obsolete :( my 2c worth anyway k
