December 7, 2001

Answer to PC vs. Mac depends on needs

Edi­tors note: This is one of sev­eral columns that I wrote for the Colum­bia Mis­sourian. They were orig­i­nally called Your Dig­i­tal World

If you’ve decided to take the new com­puter plunge this hol­i­day season, whether for your­self or others, you must ask your­self one question.

Mac­in­tosh or PC?

It’s the great debate, bigger than the cola wars, and the fuel for many a fight in techdom.

But I have unrav­eled the mys­tery, researched many hours, tested sev­eral plat­forms and come to one unde­ni­able answer. The answer is … it depends.

Wait, before you call the Mis­sourian demand­ing your 50 cents back, there really isn’t a hard and fast way to decide which is better, each has its own advan­tages and disadvantages.

PC — It’s a big world out there and a lot of people are using com­put­ers, most are using PCs. That’s the platform’s biggest advan­tage, it holds the major­ity of the market share. So when you’re going to look for soft­ware, there’s a very good chance there’ll be a PC ver­sion. This is espe­cially true for games; most are released for PC, and then if pop­u­lar enough, ported to Mac.

Along with PCs comes Microsoft. Unless you’re deter­mined to run Linux on your machine, you’re prob­a­bly going to run some flavor of Win­dows. For some people, putting up with Microsoft’s shenani­gans isn’t worth it. For exam­ple, many people aren’t upgrad­ing to Win­dows XP, the latest ver­sion, because it requires you to reg­is­ter with Microsoft or it shuts down after a cer­tain period of time.

The PCs ubiq­uity can also be a draw­back. There are hun­dreds of PC ven­dors with many dif­fer­ent makes and models, many dif­fer­ent proces­sors and a lot of options. If buying a new com­puter seems daunt­ing enough, let alone trying to tell a sales­per­son whether you want the Pen­tium 3, Pen­tium 4, or Celeron proces­sor, then you might con­sider Apple.

Mac­in­toshes — It started the com­puter rev­o­lu­tion and cre­ated adver­tis­ing his­tory. But today Apple holds less than 10 per­cent of the com­puter market, mean­ing that if you buy a Mac, chances are your friend doesn’t. Unless you’re a graphic designer. Macs are still con­sid­ered a stan­dard in that indus­try. All design soft­ware comes in a Mac ver­sion, and so does most pro­duc­tiv­ity software.

With the advent of Mac OS X, which is based on a Unix core, there’s a good chance a lot of good Unix and Linux soft­ware will be ported to the Mac.

Macs, I still believe, are a bit easier to use, so they may be the choice for a com­puter novice’s first dig­i­tal foray. They also don’t come in many con­fig­u­ra­tions, but a lot of colors. Apple has set its strat­egy on two types of users and their two types of machines: pro­fes­sional and home users on desk­top and portable machines. You want a pro­fes­sional desk­top, G4 tower, home desk­top, iMac – portable: the Tita­nium Power­book and the iBook are the choices.

Cost is also an issue, for a sim­i­larly con­fig­ured PC, you’re usu­ally going to pay more for the Mac. For exam­ple, my fiancée and I recently bought an iBook, but could have gotten a com­pa­ra­ble PC laptop for a little more than half the cost of the Mac.

What to do — Why’d I pay that much for a note­book? Because my fiancée and I are both graphic design­ers, and she works in an office that uses Macs, so it made sense to buy a Mac.

Sim­i­larly, if you’re con­sid­er­ing buying a new com­puter, you’ll want to decide if you’re going to need to bring work home from the office, or if you’ve got kids that need to bring work back from school — think about get­ting the plat­form there.

If you’re a graphic designer, con­sider a Mac, gamer, a PC. It really depends on how much you want to spend and what you want to do with it.

If you’ve thought about all this, and still can’t decide, e-mail me at yourdigiworld@yahoo.com. I’m here to help.

Filed under: Technology

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Comments

Willem Sijpheer – April 20, 2004 #

We are look­ing at the iBook for our jour­nal­ism pro­gram. At the moment we use PC. I hear that in the future the PC and Mac will be com­pat­able. Do you think chang­ing over to Ibooks might be a good thing? We are using PC lap­tops and Mac desktops.

Chris Heisel – April 28, 2004 #

I’d highly rec­om­mend a switch to the iBook. I use one now (along with a Mac Desk­top at work).

They’re easy to use and admin­is­ter, they’ll save you money in the long run because they last longer, and need less suppport.

In fact, the Uni­ver­sity of Mis­souri Jour­nal­ism School (my alma mater), is switch­ing to an all-​Mac envi­ron­ment, and at my job at the Atlanta Jour­nal Con­si­tu­tion the news­room is all-Mac…