I see these topics popping up all over the place on almost every single forum I have ever visited.
On the topic of pc's having more mouse buttons (that has no relevance on whether pc's or macs are better or worse) A basic user who has no use for a two button mouse is happy. A big part of the user base does
NOT spend 24 hours a day playing halo, call of duty, or any other games for that matter. And also 2+ button mouses are not necessary to get work done.
I've played games in the past using the standard apple mouse and it worked perfectly fine. Anyone who thinks it's the end of the world if you have to use a 1 button mouse should be gagged and backhanded for such a stupid statement.
Sure multi button mouses are useful but if your not high end developer and you just needed a decent computer to play around with then you really don't need the extra mouse button or scroll wheel. and for your information there are plenty of choices for 3+ button mouses that are in fact mac compatible (I use a 5 button mouse from Kensington on my apple iBook G4 and the 5th button is also the scroll wheel)
If I had no use for a mouse with 2 buttons I would rather not pay the extra money to get the extra buttons. And if you didn't already know, there are plenty of commands on the keyboard that you use with a click of a single button mouse that does the same thing as a left button on a 2 button mouse (Ever think of ctrl + clicking?) If you have no idea what ctrl + click means, then you have no place in arguing against a mac
Anyone who uses both macs and pc's will realize that macs have a ton of strong points going for them and they actually don't have many weaknesses other then the fact that developers don't want to re-write their code to use
openGL to make their games mac-compatible. Macs do have a small gap in graphics card options but it's not as big as it used to.
A lot of pc users associate the lack of games as a lack in gaming capabilty on the mac platform when they are wrong. If they were to test a G5 tower to play any of their favorite games (Any that are cross-platform) then they would be happy to continue using the G5 but again developers wait long periods of time before porting their games to mac. When they do finally port the games, in most cases they find the cheapest game porting companies around and well you get what you pay for in terms of quality. Most mac ports end up sucking because the developers hire the worst people to port their games.
I wish more companies would be like Blizzard. All their games are released as hybrid cd's which means that the game cd's contain both the mac and pc versions so that you don't have to buy 2 versions in the store just to play a game over your LAN network between your mac and pc.
Another thing people often overlook is microsofts way of business. A lot of developers have been bought out by microsoft and forced to sign contracts saying that any games they make are to be made exclusively for pc or they are forced to keep it exlusive to pc for a certain length of time (depending on what the developers agreed on.) Most people don't even know that Halo originally was going to be made for mac and pc from the start but microsoft bought out the company (Bungie) and forced them to make it exclusive to X-box (Later to be ported to mac and pc). Bungie also made other titles in the past before halo that came out on both mac and pc as well. Names off the top of my head would be "Oni, Myth the Fallen Lords, and Myth 2 Soulblighter."
Edited: When bungie was bought by microsoft, the myth license was sold to another company so Myth 3 was made by someone other than bungie so I removed it from the list.
If it weren't for Microsofts endless supply of money and monopolizing practices, there would be far more developers making cross platform games. But now as more people are learning of how good macs are, there are begining to be more and more people switching over to macs whether they are video editors, graphics designers, or simple college students looking for a fast reliable computer to store notes and such.
rowenlemmings wrote:With the Macintosh, only Apple can create the hardware, so they decide exactly what will be in each of their computers. You can't swap out processors or video cards because they're built-in by the manufacturer, whereas the PCs are more capsulized.
Thats not true actually. Small Dog Electronics carries a pretty good selection of parts for upgrading various apple systems from G3 to G4's
They sell video cards, processors, hard drives, memory etc.
the link is:
http://www.smalldog.com/
Apple does buy parts from other companies they don't manufacture everything themselves. But the difference between apple and every other pc company is that apple doesn't have a billion factions making their own Macintosh computers.
Apple is also extremely careful when buying parts from companies for use with apple computers unlike a ton of pc companies who just pick what's cheap so they can sell more pc's to people that aren't aware that it is a piece of crap computer.
I know that apple is careful because we've owned multiple macs in the past and each one outlived our pc's each time. Long ago we had a Performa (A really old mac back when computers barely had 100MHz processors and 8MB's of RAM) And it lasted us about 5 years. We had an old 233 MHz blueberry iMac G3 (rev A) that endured life through school which has lived 6 years before the monitor finally started dimming to the point of no visibility. And also had a 333MHz blueberry iMac G3 (rev B) that we sent back once we got better ones. Currently we have a 350, 400, and 500 Mhz Indigo iMac G3's which are my brothers, and my moms computers while I have my 933 Mhz iBook G4 and 2.7 Ghz HP Pavilion desktop.
My pc is already having it's own problems. The first week after hooking up my pc I found that once in a while at random the computer will just reset and boot up without asking me first. and no I do not have a virus because I didn't even download anything yet, the shared folder is buggy so I can't send files to the designated shared folders for movies, pictures, etc. If I upload a picture from my mac into the shared picture folder on my pc, then open the shared picture folder on my pc to retrieve the file, the finder (or windows explorer if you care so much) gets an error and has to reload itself.
Some people seem to pick the most useless things when trying explain why pc's are so-called "superior" to macs but in truth if you were to build a pc to be fast and stable you will in fact be spending approximately the same price as you would if you were to buy a G5 tower. Don't believe me? look at alienware's website at this link:
http://www.alienware.com/alx_pages/area51_alx_sli.aspx
The Alienware System: Area-51 SLI
Intel® Xeon™ Processor @ 3.4GHz
OS: Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional Edition
Memory: 1GB DDR PC-3200 Registered ECC
Hard Drive: 148GB Western Digital® 10,000 RPM RAID 0
Graphics Processor: Dual NVIDIA GeForce™ 6800 Ultra 256MB DDR3
Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster® Audigy®2 ZS High Definition
And for the grand finale the pricetag at
$6,073.00
Now for the G5 Tower:
Dual 2.5 GHz Power PC G5 Processor (totaling 5 Ghz)
1GB DDR400 SDRAM (PC3200) - 2x512
2x250GB Serial ATA - 7200rpm (Total 500 GB of internal Hard Drive storage)
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL (with 256MB GDDR3 SDRAM)
Airport Extreme Wireless Internet card
8x SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW)
And last but not least, a 20 inch Apple Cinima display (Flat Panel)
So how much does this Apple beauty cost? The Pricetag comes at
$5,402.00
Check it for yourself at apples website by clicking the following link:
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/W ... 11.1.0.6.3
Also the G5 is able to get an upgrade to 8GB's of RAM which is perfect for high-end Graphics design, video editing. While PC's still contain the 4GB barrier.
So much for the theory of the smaller userbase causing prices to be higher.
Now tell me again that a high end pc is oh so inexpensive or do you mean to say you could fork out that much easily.
Also macs do handle multi-tasking way better then pc's in plenty of cases. A PC running windows allows any program to take full control of the CPU which means that any program can literally trash your computer in an event that something goes wrong and also due to the lack of cpu restraint by the OS it makes it a major pain to switch between programs when one of them also happens to be a high processor sucking hog.
Macs running OSX on the other hand will limit how much of the cpu that a program is allowed to use so that the OS is still able to function properly. It in turn leaves us with a little bit lower performance in games but we don't get stuck worrying that a program crash will trash our drives.
I have both an apple iBook G4 933 Mhz and a 2.7 Ghz HP pavilion desktop pc. My pc can't handle very many programs running at the same time without some degree of slowdown while my apple laptop can effortlessly run Adobe Photoshop 7.0, Strata 3D Pro, iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, Quicktime, Mail, and many more at the same time that I also happen to be surfing the web using Safari (one of the best web browsers ever made also made by Apple, the creators of the best portible music player "
iPod" ever made)
Sadly most of the people who choose to bash the macintosh platform in actuallity have little or no knowledge of the system in which they choose to criticize. Now on some rare occations they can put a few good points in but in pretty much every case of mindless bashing I see the same trend that I noticed in the bash of Religion vs Science in which I see one side just making up stuff as they continue argueing. In most cases the exact same trend goes on with the Mac vs PC Debates.
Fournine wrote:Though, seriously, ALTIMIT should be developed and released. We need self-accomodating OS's with built in A.I. for running the whole thing. Wouldn't it be cool if you could just talk to your computer like in Star Trek?
Yes it would be awesome if Altimit was developed. And yes it is probably possible to be locked into a coma if your brain was directly linked up with a video game such as in .hack. I would be mainly concerned of what would happen in the case of a power outage while your mind is still locked into the game though. but you know those virus infected monsters can really wreak havok once they erase your characters existence when your still in the middle of play. I mean seriously Orca just got raped bigtime in mere seconds.
If it weren't for my lack of Money I'd continue on with the story beyond disk one. My characters are at lv 30 already so even the enemies that are at power lv 30 provide 1 exp when I need 1000 for a single level.
Nice to see another .hacker around
Anyways I'm getting a headache and I'm tired of typing now so i'm off.