herschel writes I know that for Mac worshipers you can say nothing bad about anything with an Apple on it... but! I have used Macs for a long time. Back when they were American machines and as robust as a rock. My G5 power PC tower is great and I still use it... except none of the new software works on it. It's been left behind in the dust. I run a school with a 40-computer inventory of Chinese-made Macs... iMacs, Macbooks etc. We have 25 iMacs in the lab and there are always at least 4 in the shop getting stuff fixed. Drives that die... chips that overheat, displays that pop up green or don't come up at all, filing systems that get corrupted... It's a nightmare! I have never had so much student work lost. They are troublesome, unreliable and have forced me to think seriously about changing to windows for the first time in 15 years. But hey... they sure look good and are incredibly trendy and well branded. I have a friend who works in a mixed PC/Apple architect firm who monthly sends me his tirades about how massive the apple patch downloads are compared to windows - he's gone from fan to no fan at all .. One of the most annoying things Mac users found about using windows machines IMO, is those troublesome, cryptic messages that pop up when things go wrong - for someone who takes a little time to jot those details down and go hunting, the solutions can make a windows machine rock steady. The other thing is the confusing array of choices available - due in whole to the former 'Evil Empire' of IBM who in a fit of decency made it possible for other players to emulate their hardware, thus spawning a bajillion clones to the market. Had IBM kept things locked up, as well they could have, there would probably only be IBM's and Apples today. Now the original concept of the IBM machines as far as history tells me, and one that continues to this day is that machines were/are designed to be built for specific purposes, so you have available whole load of components which you bung together to make up a box that does what you need .. and you kinda need to know what it is you need before you start. This means buying a swish looking Dell in a computer shop isn't going to work really well for say file serving if the machine isn't built to do the job. Most of those things in the PC store are built to satisfy the needs of the *maximum* number of buyers for specific purposes - home office, general cheap get-me-on-the-web boxes, kiddie gamerz etc.. you wont find any over the shelf PCs that are purely dedicated to video editing for example, you may find a few that will 'do the job' - but that's a bit weak. Want a PC that consumes less than 15 watts (!!) - then you'll be reaching for a VIA EPIA motherboard the size of a CD case with a SSD hard drive.. need FireNet networking? bang in a few firewire cards .. whatever, there are components beyond counting suitable for an optimised machine specific to your task. The problem here is, what operating system could possibly work with the myriad components available? That is where Windows comes out king (and to a lesser extent due to the work of dedicated individuals and groups world wide, the various Linux distros). Yes drivers will cause issues from time to time, but that is a price you pay using computers - I have at least a dozen or two peripherals which will not work on any Mac no mater how glossy or pretty it looks - the manufacturers built these devices and only ever released windows drivers. (thus, Apples would have 'driver issues' with these things too) The purpose of my computing is to undertake various tasks, and these peripherals are the best available for those tasks, and the computing machines are secondary. If the Windows OS dropped support for them, then fine, I stick with an older Windows OS which, fortunately, I can load easily on modern hardware. I keep citing my wonderful A3 pulsed xenon 3 colour scanner as used by NASA and National Geographic. there's no way I would simply discard the beast 'coz it's pretty much the best ever made, yet driver wise it's stuck in the 1990's ;) Another issue I have is that buying PC parts I know what is going on in my machine - Apple sources their hardware from others and may mix and match as they see fit. This becomes a problem some times - the digital lab at the college I worked at had rows of macs for digital photography .. with LCD's - and even the mac dedicated staff simply could not get continuity or conformity in the colours on those screens - the simple reason is that the screens were made by a number of different vendors - Apple sourced from 12 different LCD makers at that time so I was informed. How could one justify using such screens that varied so much? In a Windows environment, if I chose to buy a whole crate of Panasonic monitors, I'd get a whole crate of Panasonic monitors, and I could calibrate them to look and behave the same way. And hard drives - my lord, apple have bought some total dog drives over the years.. Now Apple is using Intel processors and such, the difference has narrowed - (and mac enthusiasts are seeing some real speed, so I'm told) and software which was once slow on PC's because it was never optimised for the Intel architecture has been. But prices are still astonishingly high for Apple components which are to all intents and purposes the same as the 'Windows' components.. And Apple users who really want the best possible on-screen image possible for their photographic work may now once again stick Matrox cards in there machines.. Apple has some stylish products, I'll grant that. And some pretty interface options (all my 'pretty settings' have been turned off from day one on my machines ) So I tend to view the Apples as I do a Mont Blanc fountain pen, very pretty, premium price .. but still a fountain pen. Yes, using windows means I have to do a lot of reading, asking questions, experimenting and learning, but I see that as just part of owning one of the most complex devices known to man. Sometimes we forget that.. Before computers, a carburettor, camera, radio or TV were probably the most complex things we ever owned - and for most we found ourselves utterly helpless when they ceased functioning. There were always those who nonetheless spent time learning how these things worked and how to fix them.. they just weren't the majority. Me? I'll buy a good nib and jam it in a comfortable pen to make the best pen I can for me - it's not just because I'm 'cheap', it's because I can make a better pen than any I could buy over the counter that way., that's kinda how I do things.. and Windows is kinda like that for me. karl
