I briefly looked at Mac notebooks when I was looking to replace my gaming machine a little over a year ago. One of the last things I want is portability -- I'm already tethered by a notebook for work and 24/hr on-call.
My primary performance driver (gaming) is very specific and any machine that meets them will meet everything that I do. So, I went AMD based PC (AMD consistently outperforms Intel for gaming applications) and even with SLI and 2x256Mb video cards and 2Gb RAM, I paid a little over $1000 for tha parts. It took me about 30 minutes to get it all put together and another hour or so to get the OS installed (mostly waiting). Even adding a normalized billing rate for my time I came in less than $1200. And I have an upgrade path that is easy, cheap, and self-service.
The only thing I found in the Mac line that gave me a comparable performance profile (in side by side comparisons with people who actually owned them) was the Mac Pro ... and it's way more expensive. (Minis aren't expandable and the only real improvement I get in an iMac for more money is a bigger monitor... which I don't need.)
I think the Macs are good machines. I like the OS a lot. But the lack of licensed 3rd party hardware and Apple's tendency to insist that one can't muck around in the machine's internals annoys me.
All that being said, 90% of the population (possibly to include Bill) would probably be fine with some flavor of Mac and Macs may have the edge on power in portability (I haven't paid that much attention) and I would *definitely* suggest Mac for home recording (ProTools is the way to go and while they have a PC based version they have a lot more history and industry acceptance in Mac-land.)
But for my needs it came down to $1000 (PC) vs $2500 minimum (Mac Pro).
And, on the same hardware when I go Linux, I get about a 30% performance boost.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2007-04-12 20:32 (UTC)My primary performance driver (gaming) is very specific and any machine that meets them will meet everything that I do. So, I went AMD based PC (AMD consistently outperforms Intel for gaming applications) and even with SLI and 2x256Mb video cards and 2Gb RAM, I paid a little over $1000 for tha parts. It took me about 30 minutes to get it all put together and another hour or so to get the OS installed (mostly waiting). Even adding a normalized billing rate for my time I came in less than $1200. And I have an upgrade path that is easy, cheap, and self-service.
The only thing I found in the Mac line that gave me a comparable performance profile (in side by side comparisons with people who actually owned them) was the Mac Pro ... and it's way more expensive. (Minis aren't expandable and the only real improvement I get in an iMac for more money is a bigger monitor... which I don't need.)
I think the Macs are good machines. I like the OS a lot. But the lack of licensed 3rd party hardware and Apple's tendency to insist that one can't muck around in the machine's internals annoys me.
All that being said, 90% of the population (possibly to include Bill) would probably be fine with some flavor of Mac and Macs may have the edge on power in portability (I haven't paid that much attention) and I would *definitely* suggest Mac for home recording (ProTools is the way to go and while they have a PC based version they have a lot more history and industry acceptance in Mac-land.)
But for my needs it came down to $1000 (PC) vs $2500 minimum (Mac Pro).
And, on the same hardware when I go Linux, I get about a 30% performance boost.
- Jeho