Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
Should I go Mac and never go back?
Posts
It sounds to me like, by far, the best reason for you to get a mac will be that you don't have to worry about spyware/virus problems. Web browsing, light gaming, image editing... all those things are going to be the same on a PC laptop as a mac laptop (in fact some PC laptops will be better for image editing if you intend to use the internal display, as all macbooks have cheapo LCDs, whereas for PC laptops the LCD quality will vary by manufacturer.)
The biggest reason not to get a macbook is budget. Does budget actually matter to you? They're expensive machines, and for how much they cost they're graphically underpowered. So is budget a concern for you? Because you can buy a comparable PC laptop and still have money left over to build a gaming rig, OR you can buy a much faster machine for less money.
To chime in about Vista 'aging' as an OS, it doesn't seem to have the same issues as XP in that regard. We haven't had the OS long enough to really say if that will stand true in five years, but I can vouch for Vista holding up well after two years with high use whereas an XP install with high use is pretty sluggish after two years if you don't maintain it.
So I would say, if budget isn't important for you, and you've had virus/spyware/malware trouble in the past, the mac sounds like a good fit for you. Diablo 3 isn't out yet but given Blizzard's design methodology for hardware, you'll almost certainly find it playable on a MBP. A regular MB is a considerably slower machine graphically, and I wouldn't count on one cutting it for D3.
I like my iphone. It's got the most capable web-browser right now, and works well for reading PDFs or office documents. It's utterly crippled in a lot of other respects (like, want to record a video? NO. Text someone a picture? NO. Copy and paste anything? NO.) But if mobile browsing, document viewing or e-mail are what you want out of a mobile phone, it's a good machine. If you want a PDA that's also a phone, skip it, because it's one shitty PDA. Also don't count on it as a media player, the battery just doesn't cut it for media AND phone duties unless you have it charged in all the time. Also, expect to charge it every day, because you will.
The keyboard works well for me by the way, I can text faster than I could with my w810 --but what I don't like about it (or any screen-input phone) is that you can't text without looking. With my w810 I could just compose a message without looking at my phone as I did whatever it was I was doing. For obvious reasons, that doesn't work on an iphone. Mostly it was nice while driving, since I could just write out a message using my right hand (stick shift) without ever looking around. Again, I don't know how many people actually write texts without looking at their phone, but I used to.
To sum, if budget matters, I don't think you want a mac. If it doesn't, it sounds like a mac would work really well for you.
I personally think Daedalus is ahead of the curve in terms of pairing netbooks with desktops. IF you really want mobile gaming, that's not what you want. But if you want a great portable system AND still want to be a gamer, it's a great combo.
PS: someone mentioned snake oil. You know snake oil actually works, right? Relieves joint inflammation.
edit: well I'm late to the party, this thread seems resolved.
If only Itunes would run in windows better, can you re-skin it for Vista? I have seen some desktops that have music players looking purdy
Those desktops are probably running foobar2k.
I don't think iTunes can be easily skinned in Vista. Is there a reason you need to use it?
Yeah, make it all about someone's capability. Yeah, I guess if you're a drooling moron, you can use a Mac.
1.) You shouldn't have to do any of the things you mentioned to just use a computer. It's shit. If regular maintenance is needed, it should be built in and automatic.
2.) Even with all the maintenance you can give a Windows machine, XP WILL eventually fuck up under normal usage patterns. Windows rot is real. You can stave it off for a while by refraining from installing things and using third party utilities, but eventually you will get a real benefit from reinstalling the OS.
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
More like 1 year old & not out of date. That doesn't change the fact that there are Mac trojans in the wild. The issues is that most people don't notice they're infected with them because they're designed to be that way.
As for your other comment that is why people like you are referred to as Mac fanboys. And are not liked by most people because you're just being assholes.
There is a smaller selection of software for Mac than there is for windows. So that means it is limited. Then take into account that the software suits that run on both platforms take longer to get the updates for the Mac. Adobe would be a good example of this.
As has been said before, don't bother with a desktop replacement. Getting good performance on a laptop costs exponentially more than on a desktop. If your laptop is all you're going to be using, settle for 'okay' performance.
Most people who buy MacBooks really like them. However, I would never buy one, because theres too much windows-only software I need to run.
Addendum:
Itunes is the worst media player I've ever used. God, I hate it so very much. Songbird is much better.
GT: Tanky the Tank
Black: 1377 6749 7425
I've heard so many good things about Songbird 1.0. Does it work with iPhones/iPod Touches?
So, no, unfortunately.
GT: Tanky the Tank
Black: 1377 6749 7425
Eh, it figures. I wish my Touch weren't so tied to iTunes...
I recommend the MacBook since Apple's laptop design is easily way better than most other PC laptop manufacturers and it will serve all of the functions mentioned the OP with great efficiency and minimal maintenance (except for Diablo 3 most likely, alas... but you never know with Blizzard).
Unless you really hate OS X or own a lot of expensive Windows software, then it gets a little harder to justify.
There may be Mac trojans but at the moment it would be pretty damn near impossible to catch them without typing an administrator password somewhere. Running and maintaining antivirus software on a Mac is a pointless waste of CPU cycles and sanity. I still think it's way too early to mandate extreme measures to protect yourself from the internet "wilderness" on a Mac the way some paranoid folks in this thread seem to be.
It's like a fucking Hydra of vista rumors.
For me, upgrading to Vista actually cut my battery life by 1/2, but that had more to do with my video card drivers, so I went back to XP.
GT: Tanky the Tank
Black: 1377 6749 7425
The Aeroglass effects may or may not hurt battery life depending on your graphics chip, but they can be disabled if you want.
I wasn't taunting you or anything, just being goofy
My MacBook Pro pulls 4-5 hours on OS X of "light use" (web browsing and music-listening). Under XP it gets 2 hours at best under the same conditions. XP's (can't speak for Vista directly, maybe it's better) battery conservation/optimization is fucking terrible and there's no excuse for that.
Just wanted to address that with some real-world numbers. Again, this is *XP* I'm talking about. Vista may or may not be much better in this regard, but OS X rocks the battery optimization front.
EDIT - I've also clocked it with Warcraft 3. The OS X side routinely spanks XP, although not as badly as the lighter-use scenario. It seems to get closer the more pressure the machine is under, almost as if XP is just terribly optimized for idle performance.
Vista has pretty comprehensive power management, including dynamic processor management, hard disk/USB settings, etc.
GT: Tanky the Tank
Black: 1377 6749 7425
That's good to hear. I <3 OS X's power management options. XP definitely seems a little anemic in that regard.
Sounds like the best choice. I think the netbook and desktop solution is as flawed as the desktop replacement solution. All your data in one place, and a games console. I have a /macbook pro and a 360, and although the former plays PC games acceptably, I hardly ever do it (last time I played anything on it was Crysis back in January, and the occasional round or two of TF2).
As an aisde, although I'm not a fan of Windows, Microsoft's hardware division is fantastic. Sent my two year old Red Ringing 360 in last Wednesday and a brand new free replacement literally arrived while typing this post.
Not to get up in your grill, but Apple's drivers for Bootcamp are absolute shit. If Apple actually wrote optimized drivers for their Bootcamp software, the Windows side of things would perform much better (See: graphics, audio, battery life, the time glitch, etc.).
So while I understand what you're trying to get at, it's really just not a good example.
I'm surprised Apple even supports Bootcamp.. It's just not their usual thing.
Backloggery XBox Live 3DS: 1805-2274-4550 (Jonathan)
I think you could make a good argument that they don't support it since their current set of drivers hasn't been updated since April and they were terrible to begin with.
Honestly, I think their idea was to make the Windows experience on their hardware as miserable as possible so that no one actually wants to dual boot.
Wasn't bootcamp originally an open source hack? Why haven't the guys that made it put out newer versions with better driver support/etc? Were they bought out by apple?
Backloggery XBox Live 3DS: 1805-2274-4550 (Jonathan)
OSX tried to sleep with my wife. Fucking pretty-boy OS.
You shouldn't be too surprised. Apple makes pretty beefy margins on its hardware sales, and uses the fact that only OSX will run on that hardware to make people buy it. Therefore they are absolutely fine with people buying their overpriced hardware and running Windows on it. It's when you start trying to get OSX running on normal PC hardware that is priced at competitive levels, that you see Apple start suing everyone.
I wouldn't be so quick to assume that. I found this article (I'm linking to the google cache because the site is being flaky at the moment):
http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:_4w665Hk1A8J:www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx%3Fi%3D3435%26p%3D13+battery+life+windows+mac+%22macbook+air%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us
Now, this article supports what I found, drastically better battery life on OS X. Now, granted, these tests were done on Vista as opposed to XP like I was using, but it still lines up with my experience pretty well.
But the really interesting part is where they compare the MacBook Air running OS X to the Lenovo X300 running Vista. That test shows pretty much the same OS X/Windows difference in battery life, which rules out lousy Boot Camp drivers. Now, they are two different machines, so some differences are involved, but they're close enough in specs, size and battery power to make it a fair comparison, I think. Either way, read into it whatever you like, but I just thought it was a pretty interesting benchmark.
Oh, and offhand, Boot Camp drivers are lousy? I mean, maybe at first, but I don't see any issue on it with the latest updates my unibody MBP. Except for the sound being a little odd... It SOUNDS great, there's just no quiet volume. it goes straight from mute to moderately loud. Still haven't figured that one out.
EDIT: Live non-cached site is working again: http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3435&p=13
I would like to see it run with Vista set to power saver rather than balanced. I don't know what options OSX gives you for power management, but not even exploring that option seems odd. If you want battery life out of a notebook, aren't you going to go for the power saver setting?
Backloggery XBox Live 3DS: 1805-2274-4550 (Jonathan)
Definitely true, which is why that test isn't any sort of hard evidence. Just an interesting example. For what it's worth, even with OS X set to the least power saving possible, I've still never seen anything nearly as low as 2 hours with light/idle usage like they describe. I have to be actively doing something intensive to get down to the 2 hour mark on a decent battery in my MacBook Pro, or even on my old MacBook or iBook for that matter. At the moment, my MBP has been sitting on a table for almost the last 2 hours, playing music with me occasionally hopping online, and the battery is at 68%, down from a full charge (with an estimate of another 2:30 remaining).
So, is it Vista? Or just energy saving prefs in Vista? Or just that particular Lenovo?
Forget the strawmen, use your brain about install/uninstalling, and voila! all is well.
Or summarized: Install light, uninstall heavy.
I bought a MacBook Pro in September 2007. Actually I bought it in August 2007 but it took five weeks to deliver. In February, the cable connecting the display to the system board broke. Green lines appeared on the screen and it would intermittently go black. This necessitated replacement of the entire lid under warranty, which took a week and would have cost $800 if the problem had developed out of warranty.
A month later the fans failed. The machine would overheat and freeze and a strange noise was emitted from below the keyboard. I again had to fix the laptop under warranty, but fortunately this only took about half an hour to do.
In June, the battery died. It would only charge up to about 50%, and the thing would just shut off without warning once the battery was drained to 10% or so. This, too, had to be replaced under warranty.
The other day I turned on my Pro. The startup tone was played, the DVD drive made the familliar buzzing noise, and the fans spun up -- but nothing appeared on the display. Either the screen or the graphics card has failed. This is just a couple months out of the standard warranty period. It's being looked at by a service centre who are charging me $50 just to find out what the problem is. If it's the graphics card, because apparently Nvidia shipped a few million bad GPUs, it will be fixed for free. Otherwise, I'm fucked.
Some will say the moral of the story is to spend $260 on an extortionate warranty for your laptop. But actually I have a better idea: buy a PC. Asus notebooks, for example, come with a two-year warranty out of the box, and from what I can tell are far less failure-prone than Macs. Avoid these overpriced status symbols unless you really, really, really want to run OSX.
Hey, I never claimed they were identical. I even stressed that they are different machines with differences in specs. I still think OS X in general seems better *in my experience* at providing good battery life. I just linked to the article because it showed a pretty big discrepancy that isn't totally accounted for, even when you factor in a 30% difference in battery capacity.
No, I don't think Apple has secret battery wizardry. Otherwise my iPhone would make it more than 48 hours of light use before dying on me.
It works both ways. Anecdotal stories about one person's bad luck with one manufacturer or another don't explain anything other than the fact that all PC components have failure rates, and some humans have unfortunate luck.
Dell makes some solid laptops, Asus makes some solid laptops, and Apple makes some solid laptops, but you'll find horror stories about all three all over the place. Just be careful when you purchase. Make sure the built-in warranty works for you, and if it doesn't, go with the extended. Shop smart, shop S-Mart.
[edited for clarity]
Wasn't trying to imply otherwise
Yeah, the way I wrote that kinda sounded like I was contradicting you. I get what you're saying and was more or less going along with it. Just wanted to make it clear that I'm not all about shitting all over one brand of computer or another.
Apple care would have been worth it though. You can buy it any time before the 1-year warrantee expires. I had a couple problems in my second year of ownership of my own MBP and that was some fucking slick service.