“Despite having been a life-long Mac user, I’m actually thinking of switching sides. Mac to PC. Freshen things up a bit,” Paul McKenzie reports for The Independent. “My iBook G4 (circa 2004) has seen better days.”
McKenzie tried the following PCs:
• Sony Vaio Z31 series running Windows Vista Business
• Hewlett Packard Pavilion Notebook dv3-2100 running some flavor of Vista (we assume; McKenzie neglects to say)
• Dell Studio 1555 with Windows Vista
Then he tries a new Apple MacBook Pro: “This is the Rolls Royce of laptops. All the software I know and love has been updated – and how! Safari has a few new tricks, iMovie is unrecognisable and the face detection software in iPhoto is straight out of ‘Blade Runner.’ The Leopard operating system is as good as it gets. Navigating through my various files, pictures and documents couldn’t have been easier, because of the new cover flow set-up and the MacBook Pro’s ability to split screen. There’s also seamless integration between emails and calendar dates.”
McKenzie writes, “One thing that I’ve learnt is that, although Apple has only a 10% share of the market, more PC users wish they owned a Mac than vice-versa. I think I can see why. Having used a Mac for all of my journalistic life, I’ve seen nothing on the other side that could make me switch – although the Dell Studio 1555 gave me reason to think. I also feel that too much is made of the ‘Macs are expensive’ argument – given the relative high cost of some high-end PCs. In both cases, you get what you pay for. So I’m going to treat myself to a MacBook Pro. Why? Because I’m worth it.”
Full article, including McKensie’s oft-funny descriptions of the various craptops he tried before coming to his senses, here.
MacDailyNews Take: This exercise was obviously concocted to generate a newspaper article because everyone knows: Once you go Mac, you never go back.
Mac OS users have made a conscious technology choice and are therefore typically better informed than their peers. – Paul Thurrott, December 06, 2004
I tried once. Didn’t work out so good.
http://www.atpm.com/9.09/hello.shtml
You seem to be confused. Paul McKenzie wrote the article, not MDN.
Or do you think it’s a conspiracy?
Wow, this guy is good!
It’s like he’s a regular reader/poster here at MDN.
Hey “Monkey Boy” u Hear That ?
May You Stay @ the Helm of Microsoft Forever.
I gotta say, I thought it was a good piece. It’s about time someone compared a Mac to a barrage of PCs with an open mind. MDNis wrong thinking everyone knows Macs are best. I spoke to a kid last week who said “Windows is better than the Mac” the poor deluded kid was a chemist so he was obviously intelligent enough to figure out he was wrong. He had a chemistry degree for gods sake.
People like this kid I met need to read pieces like this one to make them think. If articles seem pre biased then they just make people think “fanboy!”. This article would have had me thinking “this plonked is going to switch to PC” if I hadn’t read the MDN editorial first.
Good article, great conclusion!
That word should have read “plonker” not “plonked” LOL oops!
Learnt?
– Apple dictionary –
learn |ləːn|
verb ( past learned |ləːnt| |ləːnd|or chiefly Brit. learnt |ləːnt|) [ trans. ]
– OED –
learn
• verb (past and past part. learned or chiefly Brit. learnt)
The guy was a *Pom and like me he would have learnded that at skool.
*Pom, Pommy |ˌpɒmi| (also Pommie)
noun ( pl. -mies) Austral./NZ, informal offensive
a British person.
NEWSFLASH:
Can a Mac lover switch to Windows PC? No.
Can a Leopard change it’s spots? No.
Can a Windows user change colour. You betcha.
Are you well endowed and erect. Well thanks to nude Windoze technology you can still be a Microsoftie. A little trim here, a little trim there, some tonal adjustments and removal of most of your brain.
Read allll about it here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8221896.stm
A friend of mine got a macbook last year, for uni, and she likes it, but will get a windows PC next time. So, once you go mac you never go back isn’t exactly true, as some do go back.
One thing not mentioned in the MDN is the writer’s impression of vista business premium in his review of the sony: ‘pretty neat’. If he comes back and does another review in six months or a year, I wonder what his opinion of windows 7 would be.
I’m not being dismissive of mac’s hardware features and design. My unibody macbook and 12″ powerbook are the most solid and capable notebooks I’ve ever owned, and make using my commodity windows portables feel like living in a third world country.
But as much as I love my multifunction trackpad and the solid, luggable design, those are features I came to appreciate only after buying a mac. What got me to switch was the never ending streams of malware being released for XP and having to buy protection that slowed my computer down almost as much. Vista’s early compatibility and driver problems have been a marketing and PR disaster for Microsoft. It received so much bad press that quite a few people I know looked at macs as an alternative when their older pc’s died or became obsolete. Windows 7, running on a wide variety of machines that can be (gasp) easily customized, may staunch the flow of people streaming into the apple store IF it provides the security, stability and ease of use that it promises.
Another valid point brought out in the article is the whole ‘gaming on the mac is rubbish’ argument. Putting in low powered graphics cards in order to keep consumer designs anorexic runway model thin without overheating is an example of apple putting form over function. In today’s economically uncertain times, the ‘get a game console if you want to game’ counterpoint makes less sense. It seems that apple sometimes wants to go out of its way to keep its market share at 10%
Competition is good. Apple’s laptop price reduction and Snow Leopard pricing are steps in right direction.
I am a Mac guy, but have been forced to use Windows at the prepress department where I work. I can tell you I have seen Windows do things that have NEVER happened on a Mac, even before OS X. I have seen Windows make files disappear, mangle process and spot colors. I watched our IT department take 6 hours to get a new printer up and running. The only way Windows got to where it is is by catering to the ‘cheaper is better’ crowd.
The few stories of random Apple users switching back to Doze are meaningless in the overall picture. The overwhelming, VAST majority of those who switch to Apple NEVER go back to M$.
@ clyde2801,
If you used XP you’ll remember how the OS’s performance deteriorated over time. What looks pretty slick in August will not work nearly as well next March.
Vista and Vista SP2 (Windows 7) may look good out of the box but over time they fall apart unless you rebuild constantly or revert to a pristine copy every few months.
Either way, Windows is a pain in the ass and, Mac OS X is not.
Universal grammar checker in Leopard! Cool.
Just a dumb waste of my stupid time……. as if he was really going to switch….
“A friend of mine got a macbook last year, for uni, and she likes it, but will get a windows PC next time. So, once you go mac you never go back isn’t exactly true, as some do go back.”
That’ll be the day….
SKY LARK
Thanks for the “Brit” input …
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And yes, I already knew about the etymology of “learnt”
But just couldn’t resist the chance for Bubba and Honey to stop by for a visit …
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Now, what’s probably known by only a few …
(yep, can usually count on me to tell Folks what they don’t know and could probably care less, smile)
According to some linguist and other language experts (ty, tyvm)
That accent, that sound, has deep roots reaching back to Shakespeare’s Elizabethan English.
Wiki covers this in general http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_American_English
But they don’t address the main problem – we don’t have any recordings from 200 years ago to know for sure what it sounded like.
Are others who say .. (sorry, no easy online references at the moment)
The “Old Southern Accent” – not today’s Bubba and Honey ‘Bama type or Larry the Cable Guy – but the Refined Elegance of someone like a Senator Sam Ervin of Watergate fame and other OId School Educated Southerners who have since passed away in the latter part of 20th Century (Lewis Grizzard the humorist is one of the last great examples
) … that “sound” had remained fairly constant over those 200+ years because of the nature of Southern Culture in the Plantation Era with its desire to keep many parts of their English/British background as pure as possible, especially in the midst of the “Uncivilized Northern Yankee take over of USA” (so to speak, smile)
This same “sound” in British Accents was lost long ago with Cockney and other regional dialects, but would probably be consistent over the Centuries with Upper Classes and Royalty. So, as this concept goes, we could assume The Queen and Scarlet O’Hara (the real one, not the actress in 30s) would find each other’s accents fairly close to one another.
Now, is all this a valid hypothesis ?
Maybe, maybe not – we’ll never know for sure without those Recordings from the Way Back Days™
But we can know this for sure – much can be learnt from our past …
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BC