strongly considering getting a MAC. help me.
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I purchased a Mac for Final Cut, which runs great but I could probably get by with Vegas or Premier. In the end, Fincal Cut + a Macbook Pro came to around $2000, which I probably could have used to build one monster of PC instead.
What I'm saying is that if you have the money to buy a Mac just buy a PC instead. They're considerably cheaper and they're is very little now that a Mac can do that a PC can't.
What I'm saying is that if you have the money to buy a Mac just buy a PC instead. They're considerably cheaper and they're is very little now that a Mac can do that a PC can't.
To upgrade to the current Mac OS, Lion, it costs only $30. I'm pretty sure that a Windows OS upgrade is more than $30.Hoplon said:
The only thing Macs have that Windows doesn't is Final Cut, arguably the best video editor around, however the Macs that are really speced for that cost 1-2 thousand dollars more than their windows equivalents.
As far as design, Adobe is the king of the hill with Illustrator, Indesign, and Photoshop; all cross platform applications, and Adobe's Dreamweaver still dominates high-end web development. (not there aren't comparable alternatives...)
There is no reason to buy a Mac unless you plan on doing something that is mac specific. IE become an iOS app developer (because xcode only works on a new Mac). But again, there are applications that mimic xcode for those of us not blessed with the ability to over spend on an inferior product.
I have a Mac because my job site is providing me one, and they are very nice machines with a solid OS. But for the price of a 17" MB Pro I'd rather have the Razer Blade and just dual boot a Hackintosh 10.7 OS.
As far as design, Adobe is the king of the hill with Illustrator, Indesign, and Photoshop; all cross platform applications, and Adobe's Dreamweaver still dominates high-end web development. (not there aren't comparable alternatives...)
There is no reason to buy a Mac unless you plan on doing something that is mac specific. IE become an iOS app developer (because xcode only works on a new Mac). But again, there are applications that mimic xcode for those of us not blessed with the ability to over spend on an inferior product.
I have a Mac because my job site is providing me one, and they are very nice machines with a solid OS. But for the price of a 17" MB Pro I'd rather have the Razer Blade and just dual boot a Hackintosh 10.7 OS.
I want a Magnetic Accelerator Cannon [http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Magnetic_Accelerator_Cannon], too. I can see why you have so much trepidation, especially considering how difficult it is to find somewhere to put it. But, just remember, when the Covenant come calling, nothing can put a round through a capital ship quite like a MAC!
Seriously, though, everything you said can be achieved easily on a PC, too, and the website thing has very little to do with operating system. Really, if you want to achieve a professional-looking website, you need to either hire someone or acquire the skills yourself.
Seriously, though, everything you said can be achieved easily on a PC, too, and the website thing has very little to do with operating system. Really, if you want to achieve a professional-looking website, you need to either hire someone or acquire the skills yourself.
Ok, so you have roughly (not really, more like 30% more) power than my PC. Cool. Well, mine cost me about $1200 (including everything, OS, monitor, mouse, printer, etc). I did have a DOA PSU, and the GFX gave out after a few days. No problem, simply RMA'd them and got replacements. Everything's great now. I don't have any data on this, but I'm pretty sure that Apple has similar numbers of DOA equipment in their assembly plants (should be obvious, of course, manufacture is inherently flawed), and non-zero DOAs when the final product gets to the consumer. In other words, I simply do not buy the quality control issue. Besides, you mentioned you work in programming, so I expect you to know how to diagnose basic problems with your machine. And really, who the hell buys pre-built for serious work?AlphaLackey said:I purchased a top end Mac Pro - dual hexacore, 16GB RAM, 27" LED monitor and 1GB solid state drive. Close to $9k. If you upgrade your ram yourself by buying it third party (and there is absolutely no reason not to given how much easier it is to get at the hardware in a Mac desktop) you avoid a lot of the "Apple tax". Nevertheless, I couldn't be happier. I'm sick of buying a "cheap" PC made with parts that have zero quality control, and spending the first five hours having to scrub the system clean of bloatware. Plus, the aluminum is pretty. So sue me.
One technical reason to favor the Mac Pro: If you do computer programming in C++ that requires hard core multi-processor work (i.e. statistical calculations or random simulations), the libraries that Apple has developed that work natively with multi-core processors (Grand Central Dispatch) are far easier to use than OpenMP and outperform it to boot.
Plus, don't forget that every time you upgrade your OS, you recoup $200 of your Apple tax
Oh yeah, I'm a grad student, and I don't do heavy duty calculations at home. I can just send my jobs off to the computing complex at my university. I don't know if you have similar options, but that would be the first thing I would research before buying half of a new car's worth in circuitry.
Anyway, since you made 7.5 times my investment and only got an additional 30-40% power out of it, how would you like a business proposal? See, I've got this bridge in New York to sell...
This. If you continue to feel these urges after taking the above prescription, then drive to your nearest mental institution, walk up to the front desk, and calmly ask to be put into a padded room in a straitjacket for 24 hours, or until you cease wanting to purchase an Apple computer. Whichever comes first. The go to Newegg and find something that costs half as much which you can install OS X on to, since the only reason to OWN a Mac is to use their OS. You can buy OS X 10.6 for like $50 I think. Mac OS isn't really expensive, unlike Windows. Then install it on your non-Apple PC, and be glad you saved the extra thousands of dollars just so you could use an OS.Lyri said:OP, this should help you.
Copy the image URL and read it if you can't see it.
See, I guess I failed to make this clear, but what I do for a living, I don't have a computing complex to send off to -- I *am* the computing complex. Specifically, I perform a mathematical analysis of new casino games and slot machines. When the game is a poker derivative, the number of iterations can approach 10^15 or higher. Now, my poker evaluator is pretty fast, it can convert a vector of 7 card numbers into a hand ranking approximately 11,000,000 million times a second. Needless to say, that still leaves a whole lot of work on my end. If you're going to count your school's computing complex as part of your computer's ability, I'm counting your tuition as part of its pricethethingthatlurks said:
Next, I don't know how fast your computer is, but there are two things to point out.
#1) My CPU use display lists two graphs for each core, and the final run time using parallel programming is a hair over 23x faster than using one core. I don't know if your PC can run two threads per core. I was never able to get more than 4 threads on my Vista single-quad-core computer, but maybe I was doing something wrong.
#2) I noticed you failed to factor in the 1 TB of solid state storage in your performance. Sometimes, in order to get my calculations done in under a day, I have to create massive lookup tables of intermediate results, in the realms of hundreds of GB, far more than my RAM could handle. I'd hazard a guess that disk IO (part of my price) has an impact on performance, as opposed to just being quiet.
Finally, what makes you think that just because I work in programming that I am a hardware guru? Do you get a general checkup from a veterinarian? Hardware's my Kryptonite. I cannot tell you the wasted hours and the wasted tears. I have had this Mac Pro for about four months with literally no grief whatsoever.
EDIT: P.S. did you really get a 27" LED (not LCD) monitor included in that cheap price? Even a 3rd party LED monitor should be four digits, no?
At the time of 10.4, the pound was a hair over $2 CDN. Our dollar has rebounded fairly strong, it's now only $1.62 today as per XE.comHoplon said:
Ah, that's quite a difference, but even with a 1TB SSD I could get a Windows or Linux based system for a couple grand less than that computer of yours. A couple grand. That's bloody insane. I can get a car for that money and have money to spare. Apple's pricing is crazy, this illustrates that perfectly:AlphaLackey said:
And that's what makes me so sad, because Apple preys on hardware illiterates like that, woos them into paying way too much for regular computer hardware with clever add campaigns, and they get away with it.AlphaLackey said:
It's not the products themselves I hate, they're just computers with a different OS, it's their way of doing business.
It's quite rich to point out the high price of the Mac Pro (in that graphic, for example) and use that as "proof" that all Macs are overpriced to exaggerate it. The Mac Pro *is* enormously overpriced, but it's not the Mac that most people buy.
If you ignore the Mac Pro, which is somewhat ludicrous in cost, the consumer Apple stuff is more expensive (for sure), but not that much more than equivalent PCs - it only looks worse than it is because Apple don't make anything on the bargain end.
The MacBook Pro and iMac are pretty good value (for example, a large part of the price of the iMac is the IPS panel - a fact that has been touched on here, but is often overlooked, with people posting links to non-IPS panels on newegg for $150 as "proof of the massive overcharging by Apple".
I am certainly not disputing that Apple machines have a premium attached, but it's not absurd (except for the Mac Pro) when compared with PCs of the same spec, especially considering things like the physical case (oh how I detest creaky plastic laptops), and things like the screen (sure, a 27" non-IPS low res panel is cheap, but it won't drive at 2500+ pixels across).
To answer the original poster, you don't need a Mac to do any of the things you are asking about - a Windows box will do them all with the appropriate software. Sure a Mac can automatically create PDFs from any app that can print without any additional software, and has some really nice and easy to use consumer software, but a Windows box will serve you just fine if you don't want to change over.
The image that whatever troll decided to create (not sure of its source) should really say "Don't get a Mac Pro" - it is subtly trying to paint all Macs as equally absurdly priced by picking the major outlier in the bunch. I'd also say "don;t buy a Mac Pro" at the moment because the updates to them have been delayed due to Intel's delay on the newer Sandy Bridge CPUs Apple wanted to put in them. I would wager that they will go right to Ivy Bridge when the update actually happens. As it stands right now, it's very long in the tooth.
If you ignore the Mac Pro, which is somewhat ludicrous in cost, the consumer Apple stuff is more expensive (for sure), but not that much more than equivalent PCs - it only looks worse than it is because Apple don't make anything on the bargain end.
The MacBook Pro and iMac are pretty good value (for example, a large part of the price of the iMac is the IPS panel - a fact that has been touched on here, but is often overlooked, with people posting links to non-IPS panels on newegg for $150 as "proof of the massive overcharging by Apple".
I am certainly not disputing that Apple machines have a premium attached, but it's not absurd (except for the Mac Pro) when compared with PCs of the same spec, especially considering things like the physical case (oh how I detest creaky plastic laptops), and things like the screen (sure, a 27" non-IPS low res panel is cheap, but it won't drive at 2500+ pixels across).
To answer the original poster, you don't need a Mac to do any of the things you are asking about - a Windows box will do them all with the appropriate software. Sure a Mac can automatically create PDFs from any app that can print without any additional software, and has some really nice and easy to use consumer software, but a Windows box will serve you just fine if you don't want to change over.
The image that whatever troll decided to create (not sure of its source) should really say "Don't get a Mac Pro" - it is subtly trying to paint all Macs as equally absurdly priced by picking the major outlier in the bunch. I'd also say "don;t buy a Mac Pro" at the moment because the updates to them have been delayed due to Intel's delay on the newer Sandy Bridge CPUs Apple wanted to put in them. I would wager that they will go right to Ivy Bridge when the update actually happens. As it stands right now, it's very long in the tooth.
Hey, I'm not going to deny that Apple memory and Apple storage is where their heftiest markups are at, nor am I going to deny that Apple is a luxury brand of computers, if you will. If it makes me any less insane, I got my Mac at a third-party dealer that provides their own memory and storage at noticeably reduced prices and installs and services it themselves, to the chagrin of the shiny Mac Store across town.Cowabungaa said:Ah, that's quite a difference, but even with a 1TB SSD I could get a Windows or Linux based system for a couple grand less than that computer of yours. A couple grand. That's bloody insane. I can get a car for that money and have money to spare. Apple's pricing is crazy, this illustrates that perfectly:
Also to be fair:
* As stated above, I certainly will notice the difference between 2.9GHz and 2.2GHz processors, that's about a 33% speed boost, which means my jobs get done in an afternoon instead of overnight.
* Six more inches doubles the price because 6 more inches means about 55% more screen real estate.
* Apple's hardware-specific parallel programming library is much easier to use (and outperforms) the nearest open source version, OpenMP. Far from just "being glossy", specifically using Apple hardware makes my job easier to do. Of course, XCode is shit for non iOS apps, but that's what Eclipse is for
You call it "preying on", but even for a computer-aware person like myself, I have literally had zero grief with my Mac's hardware. I can actually quantify the cost of time wasted swapping out video cards, sending them back in, pulling my hair out, blowing a whole dust-bunny worth of grime out of my computer every two weeks, digging through a rats nest of wires inside, etc. etc. that I haven't lost with this Mac Pro.
Fundamentally, I see no difference in the way they do business versus the way Starbucks, Louis Vuitton, Lululemon or Mercedes do business. You overpay for the tangible differences because you can, and the rest of the value comes in the experience.
By all means count my tuition as payment for my uni's computing services, and those as part of my computing power. Tuition is only 500 euros, while said computing complex is the LRZAlphaLackey said:See, I guess I failed to make this clear, but what I do for a living, I don't have a computing complex to send off to -- I *am* the computing complex. Specifically, I perform a mathematical analysis of new casino games and slot machines. When the game is a poker derivative, the number of iterations can approach 10^15 or higher. Now, my poker evaluator is pretty fast, it can convert a vector of 7 card numbers into a hand ranking approximately 11,000,000 million times a second. Needless to say, that still leaves a whole lot of work on my end. If you're going to count your school's computing complex as part of your computer's ability, I'm counting your tuition as part of its pricethethingthatlurks said:
Next, I don't know how fast your computer is, but there are two things to point out.
#1) My CPU use display lists two graphs for each core, and the final run time using parallel programming is a hair over 23x faster than using one core. I don't know if your PC can run two threads per core. I was never able to get more than 4 threads on my Vista single-quad-core computer, but maybe I was doing something wrong.
#2) I noticed you failed to factor in the 1 TB of solid state storage in your performance. Sometimes, in order to get my calculations done in under a day, I have to create massive lookup tables of intermediate results, in the realms of hundreds of GB, far more than my RAM could handle. I'd hazard a guess that disk IO (part of my price) has an impact on performance, as opposed to just being quiet.
Finally, what makes you think that just because I work in programming that I am a hardware guru? Do you get a general checkup from a veterinarian? Hardware's my Kryptonite. I cannot tell you the wasted hours and the wasted tears. I have had this Mac Pro for about four months with literally no grief whatsoever.
EDIT: P.S. did you really get a 27" LED (not LCD) monitor included in that cheap price? Even a 3rd party LED monitor should be four digits, no?
Anyway, I based performance guesses on premade applications, not self written programs. Yes, your baby would kick mine's ass handily there, no doubt about it.
Cool, that makes a bit more sense. I studied applied math as an undergrad, and went on to theoretical work in science in grad school. I'm quite curious what sort of algorithm takes over 100 trillion iterations before reaching convergence? It's really the iterations that get me, not some astronomical number of operations. I plan to work in quantum chemistry, and while billions (or trillions) of operations are perfectly normal in high accuracy methods for large systems, I think only a few (tens-hundreds) thousand iterations are typically required. Aside from that, why is it necessary to store intermediate steps? My lectures sadly never really covered that problem (my prof assigned "think about how you could do it WITHOUT storing stuff" as part of a hw once).
Still seems like you got suckered though. If raw power is all you required, couldn't you simply have set up a server?
Here's the first thing that google spit up: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/775/index.html#soai
They sadly don't publish the price (presumably to not scare away potential customers), but that would still have been something I would consider before getting a $9000 mac.
Now those last points:
A check up is not a medical procedure. Literally anybody can do as well a job as a real MD. Well, anybody who knows what those blood pressure numbers mean anyway. Bad example. How about an architect building a home over a construction crew?
I've got a 23" (or possibly 23.5", don't remember) LED I picked up for 150euros. No, those things are not expensive, and I really can't complain about picture quality.
There's a reason why everyone with a PC isn't running around with OSX, the hardware that it uses isn't inline with what the vast majority PC's are currently using. Also, you can't just straight up install OSX on a Windows computer without a handful of hacked installation files. On the other side of the spectrum, all Macs come installed with Bootcamp, a program used for seamlessly installing Windows so you have the option of booting into either Mac OSX or Windows.Cowabungaa said:
Neither have I with my Windows-based computer. The things you describe too have nothing to do with a Mac being a Mac. A rats nest of wires can happen just as well inside a Mac if it's cables aren't put away properly. And you too have to blow out 'a whole dust-bunny worth of grime' out of your Mac when you put it in an incredibly dusty, filthy place.AlphaLackey said:
That Mac of yours isn't some kind of wonder machine, it's just a computer, just like the Windows machine I have under my desk. Apple's marketing schemes make you believe that a Mac is some kind of completely different product. They're not. If a Mac has an i7 Intel CPU, it's not different from, say, the i7 in my friend's Windows computer. A Mac can have the exact same technical specifications as a Windows or Linux PC
And that's why I hate Apple, for marketing their products that way. It's basically lying. Worst is that not only they get away with it, they get filthy rich of it too, all because of the ignorance of many people. A little hardware education would save you so much money. Not just in the initial purchase, but in the long run too.
As for the hardware prices. Yes of course you notice the difference in CPU speeds, it's not about that, it's about the price difference between the two, that's what's ridiculous. Same goes for doubling the damn price for 6 extra inches in screensize. I've put together two PC's now and shopped for a lot of parts, believe me; Apple is fucking you over with those prices.
Sorta true, that's why I dislike most of those brands just as much. The fact that people gladly overpay for sometimes inferior products, all because of an 'experience' that's only there thanks to clever marketing is bad for everyone. No one should accept being extorted that way.
I know that, but you can easily look up which hardware that is, buy it yourself for way less than what Apple makes you pay and then install OSX. That way you still have a "Mac" but for half the price. That's what I was trying to say.Chased said:
Not even close. You can easily find a decent 27" LED-Edge Lit LCD screen for ?270-ish. ?570-ish if you want a deluxe IPS panel for, say, graphical design.AlphaLackey said:
See, that's what Apple does to you.
What I'm trying to say is that success rate of building a Hackintosh is very slim. Even if you have the right hardware there's loads of issues with drivers, especially with Bluetooth, track pads and keyboards not working. A lot of time people end up having to buy more hardware than they initially intended.Cowabungaa said:
Also note that you CAN NOT use Bootcamp on a Hackintosh to duel boot into Windows and the process itself is illegal.
http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12546&Itemid=8
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/04/six-months-with-a-hackintosh-netbook-it-aint-pretty/
http://techie-buzz.com/gadgets-news/hackintosh.html
Really? Well, that only makes me hate Apple even more, making OSX so horribly limited.Chased said:
Now, let me once again post this disclaimer;
It's not like I hate OSX itself. I've used it, if sporadically, before, and it doesn't seem to be bad or anything. It's just another OS as far as I can see, not that insanely different from Windows. It's not like I do anything crazy with an OS, be it OSX, Windows or Linux. I just detest Apple as a business.
I actually wholeheartedly agree and regret getting a Macbook. I'm just trying to steer people away from building a Hackintosh because it will probably end up costing them more than an average Mac.Cowabungaa said:
The thing I dislike most about Apple is their attitude and overall lack of support towards gaming.
Consider a standard Texas Hold'em based casino game like "Texas Hold'em Bonus".thethingthatlurks said:
To figure out the house advantage, you need to iterate through every possible hand that can be played. So, you basically wind up iterating through the entire game space, which is:
* You get two hole cards (52 * 51 / (2 * 1) = 1,326)
* Three cards come on the flop (50 * 49 * 48 / (3 * 2 * 1) = 19,600)
* A fourth card comes on the turn (47)
* A fifth card comes on the river (46)
* You then see what the dealer's hole cards are (45 * 44 / (2 * 1) = 990)
The total gamespace is 1,326 * 19,600 * 47 * 46 * 990 = 55,627,620,048,000
The problem is, because there's four strategy decisions during the course of the hand, you really can't do such calculations by random sampling. You'd basically have to play a "slice" of about 10^9 iterations at random and optimize for strategy just to get the expectation of one starting hand accurate to about 0.01%, which is generally the tolerance wanted. You would have to go a long time, a lot longer than 10^6 rounds, to get a similar accuracy.
Of course, there are reflections (i.e. if you start with the ace-king of spades, your chances of winning are the same as if you start with the ace-king of clubs) and the number of iterations winds up being about 7-8% of that.
Almost always good advice. However, consider a very specific problem: How do you convert an array of seven integers into an integer value that represents the best five card poker hand that could be made from those seven cards.
Well, the first thing you might think is sort it, then count the number of cards of each rank, then check for five of a suit, bla bla bla. For something you're going to repeat 10^12 times or so, that's way too slow. Basically, I have to make a giant lookup table, storing one 32-bit integer (I have to encode the overall hand rank [straight, flush etc.] as well as an ordinal within that rank) for each possible hand. I do all this in advance, then load it from a file at the start of the run into a giant lookup table. Then, when I have the array of seven cards, for only the cost of seven nested array lookups, I can get the answer. One thread can look up about 11 million poker hands a second doing it this way.
Now, for a seven card poker hand, you're only looking at (52! / (45! * 7!)) = 133,784,560 entries or so, times 4 bytes per entry, that's only about 535 MB. Granted, there's some trimming done before hand, but it's on the order of that size
But, in a game like Chinese Poker or bridge, where the player gets 13 cards in his hand, you're looking at (52! / (39! * 13!)) = 635,013,559,600 ( * 4 bytes = ~2.4 TB) for that intermediate table before doing some trimming. I can get it to about 600 GB though, but again, reading four bites from a random access file on an SSD blows away any heuristic algorithm.
Yes, but I also wanted a Mac
That has to be worth something, right? How about getting a prostate exam from a gynecologist?
Does it have camera and microphone built in?