Me and my Mac

Posts Tagged ‘mac’

My new place of awesomeness!

Last week i’ve expanded my room a bit and made the brilliant move of buying a new desk also. One that fits. One that is pretty and one that is awesome!

Behold!

With a neat window to signal for food to the outside world… And did you see the desk? It’s awesome!

How upgradable is your pc? Compared to a mac…

In my experience, a computer is as good as it is put together. In other words. A mishmash of parts put together to form a pc if done wrong is a horrible pc. Even if you got the best quality parts. If they don’t play nice with each other it’s just shit and misery.

A mate of me keeps telling me to get a pc. Even though he never even tried a mac, he seems fixated on the idea that PC’s are infinitely better because they’re “upgradeable” and are “not limited”. In his words:

Its an extremely limited and expensive pc!

Perhaps. There is not much to upgrade to the hardware. Where-as a PC you supposedly can upgrade all you want.

But then my point of view. By the time you *need* to upgrade something in your PC. All you can really do is expand the ram and perhaps add a new video card. If you want a new CPU, you’re often stuck on some outdated socket. Which is not desirable, if at all still available. So you need a new mainboard as wel. But then you probably run into a slot issue with your ram, so you need new ram, too. Making it a much more expensive upgrade. Not to mention lots of issues with your Windows license in terms of validating and re-activating. So really, is a PC a better upgradable computer? I think it’s not.

By the time your mac *really* needs upgrading it will probably either be 3 to 4 years old. And you will buy a new one. Migrate your software and done. Easy peasy. Whereas for a PC you need to check if your new parts are compatible, put it together, hope it works. It probably will. Then mess with more drivers and updates than you can shake a stick at. In that process it’s very likely that you run into issues with conflicting or crappy drivers for days before it works a 100%. Not to mention trying to keep windows alive during that mess.

And that’s just my experience with upgrading PC’s over the past 10 or so years. Every time i wanted something new i had to buy a new PC, except when it was just the videocard or harddisk. I’m sure with Windows 7 it got a lot easier. I use Windows 7 and can tell it made big advances in hardware management. Still, it remains windows… And comparing my windows ease of use on a mac compared to a PC. The mac side of the story is much prettier.

So, seriously, how upgradable and unlimited is a PC? And do you need it? Really?

How a Mac compares to a PC in terms of quality

Why is a Mac better? Is it? Really…? In a way i think they’re better, but not better quality per se.
From a hardware point of view a Mac is just a computer. Like any PC.

The big difference here is how the parts are put together, where a PC follows a certain de-facto standard for parts. Most Macs do not. My type of videocard is readily available at most stores. It’s a mere ATI Radeon HD 4670. The Wifi network card in my laptop? Made by Broadcom, Broadcom is also big in PC’s. My Ram? Samsung and LifeTime. Also brands that work in a PC. The CPU? Intel. Sound, Cirrus Logic and Realtek. Harddisk, Fujitsu and Western Digital. Most, if not all, brands that Apple uses are also found in PC’s.

So you could say a Mac and PC are not all that different. There are some fundamental differences between them ofcourse. But the parts mostly come from the same or similar suppliers.

Often i come across people who firmly believe a Mac cannot and will not ever break. Imagine their surprise that a Mac repair shop is a booming business. Even more when they end up there for a repair.

How can my hard drive break? I never mistreated it…

Why is my video card broken? It’s 3 months old!

Heatsink needs replacing? How can that break…

Questions often heard. And easily answered: Every computer breaks. Simply because we use them and they’re just that, computers.

Hard disks spin around, they wear out. Get bumped around if in a laptop, and therefor eventually break.
Video cards can overheat. Sensors can fail. DVD drives won’t eject discs.
How does this happen? Sometimes it’s simply because of age. Other times misuse by the user. In a rare case a design flaw. This is not different with any computer.

So how is a Mac better than a PC?
I think the way a Mac is put together is much better. Not just because they look pretty… But the way it feels when you pick them up. Or how it looks when you open them up or just look at them.

Lift up any PC laptop and hear the plastic croak. Feel the bottom compartments slightly shift under its own weight. Then lift up a MacBook Pro or MacBook. It’s a solid thing, maybe it slightly bends but it makes no weird noises and feels sturdy.
Look at your PC, slots and doors everywhere. Silly ‘smart’ design on the front resembling a face or something futuristic by the way air vents and buttons are placed. And look at a Mac Pro, with it’s perforated front.

Where a PC Case seems built around its mainboard, which is always square with a Power supply above it, harddisk and DVD on the right. A mac’s Logicboard (mainboard) is fitted to the case. Ever seen one from an iMac? It has a crazy shape to fit in the case.

There certainly is a difference. But in the end Mac and PC are just computers that break sometimes.

Is it worth it?

I’m tempted to finally buy Coda from Panic Software. But it’s a tad bit expensive. However, for that amount ($99) i’m getting FTP, SVN, editor, books/manuals on scripting languages and much more neat features that the free Smultron and Cyberduck don’t have. So yea. It is worth it? I could also keep on using Smultron, Cyberduck and buy Versions instead for SVN… But Smultron is no longer actively in development. and 39 euros for “just” an SVN client is a bit over the top i think. Even though Versions is a very nice app. Still it’s too expensive.
Coda is also expensive… But it does so much more. Hell, it even suggests code or tells me if PHP functions are real and how they use while i type them. Which is really neat. Syntax highlighting is actually fast and works properly and overall it feels like a proper app.

Where’s Carddav support for the iphone?

Not sure what went wrong earlier but i have Snow Leopard Server working now. However with all the greatness of the Address Book Server… Where is the Carddav support for iPhone… Now i can sync all my mac their address books but not my iPhone

Boohoo! Always something…