As I did, five years ago, I sought to make an informed consumer decision about my next purchase. Not being a computer scientist, I read everything I could get my hands on for about a week. As I did five years ago, and five years before that, I took a serious look at Macs. People like them. They get good reviews. But they're overpriced for what you're getting. Say what you want. They get their hardware from the exact same gargantuan corporations that cookie cut this shit in some factory in China. They just put some brushed aluminum on it, and put the apple logo on it, and mark it up about 3 times what they should.
stratology wrote:Initial cost of Macs is higher than PCs, cost in the long run is an entirely different story.
I've heard the argument that the reason for more viruses on PCs vs. Macs is the higher number of PC users before. Check the numbers: there are 114,000 Windows viruses, there is not a single OS X virus out in the wild. Compare this to the number of Windows users vs. Mac users, it's totally out of proportion.
Windows shipped for ages with network ports open, ports on OS X are closed by default. Security flaws in MSIE and Outlook were widely published. OS X requires an admin password to install any softs. (no Spyware, ever...). The Unix foundation of OS X is open source, which means over 20 years of time to find and fix possible security holes.
This doesn't mean that viruses on Macs are impossible, just that there's a better foundation.
About AMD, no doubt these are good chips. I guess the reason that Apple went for Intel instead of AMD is that they wanted to avoid the problems they had with IBM, who were not able to deliver enough processors, and failed to meet targets for clock speed. And they have details about Intels roadmap. But all of this is speculation, nobody outside of Apple knows the real motives behind their decisions.
Real world performance is not the same as processor performance. Antivirus software, for example, always causes a performance hit, as all files written to the HD have to be scanned, and apps have to be monitored for unusual behaviour. So if you use a machine that does not require antivirus software, you'll see and advantage that does not show up in processor benchmarks.
The only valid way to compare performance on Macs to Windows boxes, IMHO, is to use them side by side in a real world situation. This includes installation of OS and audio apps, how well peripherals work, stability, track count, fan noise, and lots more. If you isolate one single thing, for example speed of file search (in which Windows of 2006 lags far behind even Mac OS 8.6 of the 90s, regardless of processor type, clock speed, memory, front side bus, speed of hard disk,...), you'll get results that are not too meaningful.
