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Thread ID: 54424	2005-02-12 01:22:00	Will Apple Replace Microsoft?	vinref (6194)	PC World Chat

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
324257	2005-02-16 07:59:00	[QUOTE=Powerslave]Hmmm....The 'average' user might not be concerned with what platform there email program is running on,But they will be concerned with the price they pay to do something as simple as run an email program. After price then suport is a big consideration,Does anyone in their 'group' know anything about a mac? Support for new users is very well taken care of and I've not come across any that charge. I've always found the Apple stores I have visited to be very helpful too. Far more helpful than most places that sell PCs. The Warehouse anyone :xmouth: sorry. The Main Apple Discussion board is a good start. http://discussions.info.apple.com/ plus most good Mac online forums now have a special mini users / new Mac owners section and plenty of members willing to help too. Take Care out There.	Sue (33)
324258	2005-02-16 08:05:00	I would rank Noel Leemings (who as i said are the only retailer in this small center,and in many other small centers whom retail Macs) as on par with the Warehouse. As for the support forums, I figured as much, But was reluctant to call a confused penshioner a nub who is lacking in Google-Fu.	Powerslave (7265)
324259	2005-02-16 08:11:00	I am interested in the comment that a Mac is better at Media creation then a PC, Seeing as both are available in powerful configuartions(with the PC having the edge) then it must come down to software.....of which excellent examples are available on both platforms.In dumbed down and advanced versions.Things have evened up a lot in this market, I will say that - but that said most of the professional design/music/video software tended to originate from Mac backgrounds. Back in the day when I was doing music composition, every package I located/acquired/even the ones I bought for a PC could not even come close to the performance of a well configured PowerMac - I was a PC gearhead at the time (and still am, just with a *nix twist*). The software on PC interfaced poorly, was difficult to operate midi with, and had a lot of limtations I never experienced using Mac software for the same. When I pushed him to nominate a favourite he told me his preferred format was a pencil and paper.Incidentally as was mine, but limitations in clarity and handwriting quality (and sometimes even noting down whatever in the hell I was playing) was perfected by using the ole Mac. After price then suport is a big consideration,Does anyone in their 'group' know anything about a mac?Price isn't that bad, particularly now with the Mac mini. Though even an eMac can be picked up for around the $1500 mark which is pretty reasonable - OS, monitor, kb, mouse, modem and most of a software suite included. As far as support is concerned, sure, less "friends" et al are going to have specific Mac knowledge as Windows is the de facto standard - sheer statistics cover that one. But like any computer, Windows or Mac - when used basically and with basic precautions (like AV etc where Windows is concerned) there isn't really a significant need for support for either platform. My parents (God bless 'em) had a PC Company W98 boxen, it ran flawlessly for about 7 years - they did intarweb, a lot of e-mail and basic word processing/desktop publishing stuff - they wouldn't know a modem from a monitor and had no problems. The machine is still going fine, however they have since been upgraded to one of my hand-me-downs. There are a lot of people in this situation. The more I think about it, the more people I think of that have computers at home that just tick along as good as gold and never need anything done to them - unfortunately when you get in the IT industry, particularly on a helpdesk, or come to forums like this all you see is people with problems. But for every one person posting a problem there's probably 100 (probably more) perfectly functioning machines not needing intervention - people won't come and post here to tell you their machines running hunky dory. A Mac PC is likely to need less support as it is less susceptible to the foibles of virii and spyware - whether this is security by design or security by obscurity is largely irrelevant - regardless they are less prone to these things so by proxy can be considered more reliable. Basic config is little different to a PC - after all, Network, Dialup and Mail settings are much the same from any OS.	ninja (1671)
324260	2005-02-16 09:25:00	Hmmm....The 'average' user might not be concerned with what platform there email program is running on,But they will be concerned with the price they pay to do something as simple as run an email program. After price then suport is a big consideration,Does anyone in their 'group' know anything about a mac? Round these parts the only seller is Noel Leemings,about as helpful as a blister...and as painful.Nothing worse then seeing a comp spend 2 months away under Warrenty for a configuration issue. All the Mac user's I know are currently left high and dry,and ignored by the retail channels that sold them there expensive gear in the first place.One even complained Apple tried to charge to access a help and suport forum...I have no idea if this is true or not,Just what i was told. Support for Macs is excellent and there is no shortage of sites even in NZ where you can get information and help. There are also Macintosh user groups which are active in many centres Don't believe it if you are told Mac support is hard to find. http://nzmac.netfirms.com/ www.welmac.org.nz http://macguide.co.nz/ www.monarch.net.nz http://www.nzmac.com/ www.apple.com.au http://www.macfixit.com/	Safari (3993)
324261	2005-02-16 09:43:00	Wow - nearly 600 views on this thread, wonder what that means. Is it indicating a concern by Microsoft addicts or a genuine interest in learning more about Macs by others.	Safari (3993)
324262	2005-02-16 11:01:00	Well said Ninja. I can't believe how shrill some of the posts have been here, well maybe I can but it doesn't make it look any better. Attack appears to be the most popular form of defence, consequently, IMO, not too much reason is being applied. Ok. it's only natural to for most of us prefer what we have and know, to want others to see our point of view, we all get caught up in that game and it's not necessarilly the wrong approaxh every time. But, the shriller it gets the less defensible the position is. The barely veiled attacks on the Mac and it's users are missing the point of the thread topic "Will Apple Replace Microsoft". I assume this means something that may happen in the future so, current hardware, pricing, user base, software, support, etc, is surely not relevant to the proposition as the AMD vs Intel discussion could be if you if you apply it to todays PC offerings. Anything could replace MS's OS's and other software as the system of choice on x86 or some other desktop chip 5, 10 or 20+ years from know. Hell, MS could be running on proprietary hardware within a few years (look at Trusted Computing, DRM, NX, certified this and that [not standard], Xbox, etc). Maybe the question could have been put 'Will MS be replaced' but it wasn't. Anyway, it's an interesting question because if you know a bit about the history of Apple/Mac, you'll know that some horrendious mistakes have been made by those running the show, but for those cockup's, Apple could be in a much stronger position than it is today. So lighten up on the Mac users, we may need them to hang around to answer our questions :eek:	Murray P (44)
324263	2005-02-16 11:02:00	It means its about as popular a thread as the poll about whether people leave their comps on at night or not.	Powerslave (7265)
324264	2005-02-16 22:00:00	Hmmmm......Didnt seem to shrill to me, Most PC vs Mac threads on other forums desend into madness and death threats....and this was always destined to be an PC vs Mac thread. As it would if you went to a Holden site and casually asked if Ford were going to totally dominate in the comeing years,Then set about outlining the glouirios benifits of ones chosen brand. Anyhow, Any fantastical claims are easily countered, Many good points have been raised. Verdict so far. PC 8 Mac 1	Metla (12)
324265	2005-02-16 22:36:00	Truth be told, I only (initially) swapped fro Mac to PC for my own use for two reasons. 1] price and power - this was back in about 92 when the price differential between Mac and PC was a sight to behold. I'd trained on Macs at university and at ATI and was using them for graphics work from 1988. You just couldn't do the same stuff on a PC until about 92 without suffering significant loss of software features. When we switched from using Macs to PCs on PCW that year (for layout) we dropped back one version of Pagemaker. At that point leading graphics/DTP software was published first on the Mac, later on the PC. But it began to change rapidly from that point so that fairly shortly afterwards a PC user had the same functionality as a Mac user. I'd spent a whole lot of cash on my personal Mac and peripherals and couldn't afford to upgrade it again to the power I needed. By contrast, I could get more power on a PC for much less. Most ad agencies/designers at the time (and frankly, to this day) did not believe a PC could do the same job and refused to look at them. At that point, and at assorted times over its history since then, the leading Macs offered less real power than leading PCs. At work we measured this by the fact that when we moved to PCs (486 50MHz) we went home at 5pm on deadline day as opposed to 7pm, due solely to the higher grunt of the PCs spooling the Postscript files to disk that much faster. I think it was ultimately to Apple's detriment that this fact was disguised for many years by the fact that its core media/design audience simply didn't know they didn't have the same computing power as PC users, and so gave Apple a bit of a free ride on this front. We had great difficulty even years later convincing the rest of our design department -who were all still on Macs - to switch to PCs. Many believed the PC was slower and less capable and had to actually get a PC on their desk before they would accept that what we were offering them was actually faster than what they had. 2] Games. At this point I had two PCs, my Mac and a 386SX which I bought solely to play games on. Yes, some games were available for Mac, but not the ones I wanted. Once I found I could do the rest of my stuff on a PC too, I ditched both in favour of a 486 50MHz. But I really loved my Mac. Apple certainly nailed early the "mystique" of using a well-designed interface. It was both fun and easy to use. Not that crashes didn't happen -- the old bomb symbol was a constant friend back then. If Apple had managed to keep pace with the price/power level of PCs I probably would be maintaining two PCs to this day. But in the real world, I had to evaluate what I really needed against the money I could spend, and at that point the Mac couldn't compete.	Biggles (121)
324266	2005-02-16 22:58:00	I too was forced to shift from Mac to PC for work reasons rather than personal preference . There were two reasons . First, in my work, I send a lot of documents as attachments to email to various education providers . Sending them from a Mac caused significant problems at that time because most of the recipients could not handle the way Mac always attached a resource fork to the email (sorry, I cannot recall the exact details now) . It seemed to cause considerable problems with PC dominated networks . Secondly, at that time, Mac fonts were sufficiently different from PC fonts that a carefully paginated document would look awful when viewed on my clients' PCs . It doesn't take much in terms of font size or spacing for layout to go to pot . Apart from that, I have only found one advantage from using a PC over a Mac, and that is the economics of being able to upgrade component by component (my current PC is like George Washington's axe), whereas with the Mac, it involved upgrading to a whole new model . Maybe things are different these days in that respect . I saw a friend's "all in one" G5 the other day, and dribbled excessively - unbridled lust as far as both hardware and software is concerned . MacOS is incredibly sophisticated now, and networking is automatic rather than the struggles many of us go through with Doze . My friend simply plugged another computer into the network, and it was connected automatically - no configuration necessary . And the hardware design is a dream . My wife has a Mac Powerbook provided by her work, and again, I hover around enviously when she is using it at home . My retirement present to myself will be to ditch my PCs, and buy myself a Mac for enjoyment in my twilight years (sob) . But then I don't play any games that are more sophisticated than Solitaire and I only use word processing, internet, iPod music, and photography . If I was obsessed with game playing and graphics, maybe I would make a different choice, who knows?	John H (8)
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