The Institute (協会)

MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACC!!!!

I have a Mac Powerbook (last one before they went to the macbook). If you want to test drive and get a tour, holla.

Way more user friendly, more reliable, uber sexy, faster, and all around better.

One of the best functions (that I know you will appreciate) is the hard drive search engine called spotlight. It is the most efficient search program out there and is a huge resource for anyone who does a lot of writing and needs to keep track of material. Again, I can give you a tour.

Got to go with a Mac. We have two in our home and we're never switching back. I love the way the software is made to work with the hardware - a product of the two being developed in conjunction together and by the same people. I've never had anything major happen to my computer and when there has been a problem I speak with a person in America not re-routed to India (like Dell). Plus they are cool.

Buy a Mac! Buy a Mac! Buy a Mac!

I am incredibly happy with my iBook. My parents have a mini that they love. And they look good.

Neither...go for Linux. Dell is now selling laptops and desktops with the Ubuntu Linux distro pre-installed.

I used to work for Apple and they most definitely outsource some of their tech support to India.

Apple computers are built better than factory PC's (Dell, HP, etc). Making the switch can be difficult at first, but once you grow accustomed to it you'll never want to turn back.

Linux is awesome, but you'll have to do your own software support.

Bradley, I just purchased a MacBook last week and I couldn’t be more pleased with it. Just to name a few advantages of Macs: 1. Macs run graphic programs (Photoshop, Indesign, etc...) much better than PCs. 2. Macs come stock with all sorts of sweet gadgets like built in airports and tiny cameras on the screen, 3. The world of education is slowly moving over to Mac. 4. And lastly, Macs are just sexier.

Here's what I did, Anthony . . . I was a pretty hardcore PC user (an IT professional, in fact), but was converted to Mac when I joined my church's staff briefly. Still, I wasn't quite ready to let go of PCs completely, so . . .

When it came time for me to take the plunge, I purchased a Mac mini, along with Parallels Desktop. It allows me to run Windows (and other operating systems) on my Mac when needed.

Overall, Macs have provided just a better user experience for me. I'm definitely a switcher.

Anthony, for a guy with style like you, this is a no-brainer. Get a Mac.

I initially switched three years ago because of functionality (multiple crashes a day, viruses, etc on both my Windows machines), but the style is a great bonus. Macs are beautiful.

Warning: You may look at pricetags and be tempted to get a much-cheaper PC. Don't. You get what you pay for.

Apple has a refurb store called Apple Outlet at their official site where you can get full-warranty Macs and save a few hundred bucks.

Okay, I'll go ahead and give a plug for the lowly PC. I have a couple of reasons why you should consider sticking with the PC

1. Flexibility. PCs are established, and there's a huge base of software available for them. You can find free, or very inexpensive utilities to do just about anything you want to do. I know there's a user development community for macs, but I don't think it's as extensive.

2. Expandability. I can change out nearly any piece of hardware on my PC, from memory to the motherboard. Consequently, you can space out upgrades to your machine over time, instead of having to buy a completely new machine every few years.

System crashes are rarely something I worry about; if you use a firewall and anti-virus, stay away from internet red-light districts, be picky about the software you download, and "sweep up" periodically, Windows XP is actually a pretty stable platform. I can usually run for days without rebooting. I will definitely concede the fact that Macs have the advantage in hardware/software integration: Keeping development of both in-house definitely helps keep down interoperability problems.

Interoperability is something you should definitely consider. If you'll be sharing documents or collaborating with others on a regular basis, figure out what the majority of them are running. Even trading around PowerPoint docs between PCs & Macs inevitably requires some amount of reformatting and tweaking to get it looking/working correctly again. If you're in a networked environment, you might talk to the guy in charge of the network for his advice : macs and PCs are better at talking to each other now, but it helps if the admin has some experience with a mixed system.

And just to nitpick: Spam doesn't care what OS you're running. If you're bothered by spammers, changing email addresses will do a lot more than changing computers. I'm not familiar with any mac anti-spam measures, but I would assume that both macs and PCs have similar types of spamkilling software available.

I hope this is helpful, and hasn't caused your eyes to glaze over with geekspeak. (To all the mac users here: don't hate me! Many of my friends love their macs! I just happen to prefer PCs, and hate to see them get a bum rap).

First off, you should really consider your needs. Having sat in a class with you, I know you need something that does video well (projector) and can run office applications.

At the same time, I think your time is perhaps, like many of us, the most valuable commodity you have. Sending your computer off for 3 weeks or having it crash all the time. That's one major factor that got me off and over. I have used Macs and PCs in networked environments for the last 8 years.

Wireless is much easier on the Mac. I have a MacBook Pro and the Apple Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. No wires, and I just press a key and it instantly connects. I also print wirelessly through my Airport.

There is not really a mature Outlook offering for the Mac, though. If you are using Outlook to sync with Exchange server, you can do it through Mac Mail, but it will take some effort.

But the addition is what you can do with a Mac that you can't do with a PC...all the creative stuff that is so much harder.

Lastly, stability. I reboot my machine maybe once every two weeks. No way on a PC. Very occasionally I have a program quit (and I usually can figure out why). But most of the time it just runs. I also run Windows on my Mac with Parallels. I have to because of my job. I have a post on my blog about this.

A nice feature is called Coherence. It lets you run a PC application as a Mac program, so it shows up in the dock and everything. I have noticed that keyboard shortcuts for the most part work, but you have to use PC (Ctrl+) on Windows and Mac (Cmd+) on OS X in order for them to work properly. Speed is excellent (but I do recommend you max out the RAM as you can afford).

Backing up is super easy! I highly recommend a Mac for this. Anyway, that's more than plently of reasons to switch.

I switched about a year ago, after a long time as a PC user and owner. I can't believe I waited that long. Just in the simplest of things, never mind the techie stuff, Mac wins, hands down. (GarageBand vs. ANY music software I've tried for the PC is no contest, for example.)

I have a 15" MacBook Pro and I love it. I need more RAM (who doesn't?) but with the Core Duo Intel setup, it's kind of like the best of both worlds.

I had an older powerbook for 5 years that I never ever had to do a hard reset (frozen so bad you just have to hit the power button). Last year I purchased a MacBook Pro while my neighbor bought a 599 PC laptop special at Best Buy. I spent around 2000. He has been back up to Best Buy 6 times for problems and is now on his 4th laptop because they were so messed up the company just had to replace them. His crashed again a couple of weeks ago and he lost everything; had to have me email him files and pictures that I happened to have copies of. In the time is money category, he has spent way more than I ever will.

I have a desktop PC and a Mac laptop. My husband has a PC, and I used to have an HP laptop. My parents also have a PC, as do my husband's parents. All of those computers crashed ALL THE TIME ("crash" to me means everything from a single program freezing entirely to the computer shutting down). Granted, there are a lot of PCs out there that won't do that so much, but it has been my experience.

I just bought my MacBook a few months ago, and it has been getting some heavy use--everything from writing papers to watching videos on iTunes. It has never crashed. Firefox freezes every so often, but it also does that on my PC, so I don't know if that's a Mac problem or not. If you do get a Mac, I suggest staying far, far away from Microsoft Office. I use the Mellel word processor, and it's a beautiful thing once you get used to it; it's especially wonderful if you ever need to use different scripts and switch back and forth between them within the same document (I use Hebrew and Syriac, and when I switched from Word to Mellel it was so beautifully easy that I cried.).

The Mac comes with a lot of the software you'd have to buy on a PC. My laptop came with the latest version of Mac OSX; I don't think PCs ever come with Windows. I've never needed tech support for my Mac, but from what I hear, it's a thousand times better than most of what you'll get with a PC.

My favorite thing about the Mac is that it's a completely different thing, but it's so easy to figure out. Most of the little tricks are really intuitive. If I'm trying to figure out how to do something on it, I'll just hit the buttons that I think would make sense, and it works.

So, in short, I'm crazy about my new computer. If you want something fun and reliable at the same time, I'd go with the Mac (it also comes with some excellent music- and video-editing software if you're into that). The PC is probably more familiar, and if all you're going to be doing on it is writing, I don't see that there's a huge difference. Just make sure you hit save every three seconds. I can't tell you how many pages of papers I've lost on my PC over the years.

One other thing. I know this wouldn't work for, say, PowerPoint, but when I need to send a Mellel document to a Word user, I just go to print, and there's a tab that says to save as a PDF. Granted, if you want someone to be proofreading it and sending it back to you electronically, that does make it harder, but it's a nice trick anyway.

I sound like a commercial. Oh my goodness.

Prof. Bradley,

If you are worried about presentation software, Apple makes a better product than Microsoft PowerPoint: it's called Keynote and it comes with a word processor in a bundle called iWork. (If only Dr. Douglas would use it!) The bundle costs $80 with a new Mac and is fantastic. You can both open and export Word documents (i.e., take your document and convert it to .doc or .pdf so non-Mac folks can read it). I bought my Mac right before finals, and writing papers was very easy.

While Mac isn't totally stable (I've had the Mac internet browser crash on me once), it is much more stable than my Windows XP PC. And you would probably never have to pay for antivirus software again. Apple keeps their prices high so that demand is lower--thus lessening the incentive for spammers and the like to create Mac-specific viruses and spyware.

I highly recommend the Mac, but disagree with one post above regarding running Windows on your Mac with a program called Parallels. Unless you cordon off Windows in your Mac, it will pick up spyware and viruses like any other Windows-based computer. Instead, leave Microsoft to flounder in their own problems. The only potential problem would be finding a spreadsheet program. (Google has begun offering spreadsheet documents online for free.)

For what it's worth.

SDG,
Barrett

Prof. Bradley,

If you are worried about presentation software, Apple makes a better product than Microsoft PowerPoint: it's called Keynote and it comes with a word processor in a bundle called iWork. (If only Dr. Douglas would use it!) The bundle costs $80 with a new Mac and is fantastic. You can both open and export Word documents (i.e., take your document and convert it to .doc or .pdf so non-Mac folks can read it). I bought my Mac right before finals, and writing papers was very easy.

While Mac isn't totally stable (I've had the Mac internet browser crash on me once), it is much more stable than my Windows XP PC. And you would probably never have to pay for antivirus software again. Apple keeps their prices high so that demand is lower--thus lessening the incentive for spammers and the like to create Mac-specific viruses and spyware.

I highly recommend the Mac, but disagree with one post above regarding running Windows on your Mac with a program called Parallels. Unless you cordon off Windows in your Mac, it will pick up spyware and viruses like any other Windows-based computer. Instead, leave Microsoft to flounder in their own problems. The only potential problem would be finding a spreadsheet program. (Google has begun offering spreadsheet documents online for free.)

For what it's worth.

SDG,
Barrett

MAC

Barrett, your contention about running Windows via Parallels only stands if one takes no security measures (ie: no antivirus software, no anti-spyware, etc) on that Windows installation. Windows doesn't just "pick up" these things . . . they come in because someone leaves the door open.

Also, the main reason Macs have remained relatively virus-free is because of their ever-diminishing obscurity. In five years, it'll be a different story. The main problem (at least in security terms) isn't with Windows itself as an operating system. It's with its ubiquity. User vigilance is key.

Here's a reason why I'll never switch back to PC. I bought an iBook 3 years ago and purchased the extended AppleCare warranty. A month ago, just before the warranty ran out, I start having problems with my logic board. They tried to repair it twice, and nothing. So then they just said, 'Okay, this is unacceptable. We're sending you a new computer." Then they sent me a new, up-to-date, MacBook, with a processor twice as fast, 20 gigs additional HD, and more RAM than before. And they threw in a new warranty.

But, even before that, I was really happy with the switch. There's been a bit of a learning curve, so it's not like it was costless to switch. But, it's plug and play, too, so I could do everything I needed to immediately, and then gradually as I learned more about the Mac, I could tap into more of the computer's strengths. It's a very stable operating system, so it never crashes. No problem with virii or security. And, I've been able to duplicate any PC software with open source software with only a few exceptions.

If you can get some of the educational discounts, which you should be on staff at Covenant, then it lowers the cost significantly. When I bought my iBook, I participated in "cram and jam" which threw in a free iPod and a free printer. Bundling programs like that make it more worth it, since there is a bit of a price premium to Apple.

Anthony,
Please do yourself a favor and check out
Ubuntu Linux ! Keep the PC you have and change the OS , I have been running Ubuntu Linux for 2+ years and would never consider anything else. NO viruses and very stable. Regular updates and upgrades. It has a great migration tool for keeping all those old windoz documents and probably 20,000 plus software applications available....FREE
regards,
glenH

wow... passionate forum. I still miss my Atari 130XE... but that's an era long gone.

As a geek, I'm sticking with the PC. It doesn't fail on me, but that's mainly because I know how to treat it. If you need to fall in line with the business environ - stick with the PC. Those who doubt this are likely contributing anecdotal arguments. In 12 years of business only about 5% of the work environments I've encountered have had Macs - those usually being schools or creative firms.

As a home user/school user Macs are very easy to own, and if counseling a family member I'd likely advise them toward the Mac even though Steve Jobs is an arrogant ass. It's has a good compliment of home oriented apps and is straight forward enough for even the novice user to operate easily. Though a bit pricey for what you're getting, it’s still likely worth to save some headache for the casual user.

If you're up for a challenge and like to hang out with true counter culture types than the Ubuntu movement is your bag... You’ll likely spend countless hours on obscure forums, but that can be fun if you’re the pioneering type.

Mac is the way to go, if you can afford it. I used to think they were only better than PC if you were doing the audio/visual thing, but they just make more sense in how everything is set up, and what Mac's will let you do, like drag, drop, burn. Plus all their software is linked. You can pull up your photos, music, or whatever in any other Mac program. Get iLife when you buy your Mac. I just got a promo today that said they are giving away a Nano with a computer purchase. You can talk to Adam Hecker or Cleveland Brown at the West County Mall Mac store. Those are the guys I deal with. Tell them Bailey from Covenant sent you. Also they have this one-to-one training that I go to every week. For $99 a year, you get one hour a week one-on-one training on any software they make for Mac, even Photoshop and Pro Tools! Do I sound like I should be a Mac Cheerleader? Have you watched my video yet?