Advice on Mac Specs

Coffee Lounge
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I love my macs, and always have. BUT, here are some hard truths for me personally to admit.

When I started using mac back in the day, there were no such things as laptops. You had a PC or a Mac desktop machine to choose from.

Back then, we are talking pre-ethernet, a mac came with everything you needed to get up and running, there was no need to buy anything additional, or configure a driver for anything to work as it was meant to, and most of the hardware included was pretty high end stuff. It had Coaxil for networking.

While is PC counterpart, needed everything, you wanted networking, add a coaxil card, you wanted sound you need to buy speakers, you want better sound buy a sound card, you wanted firewire 400 buy a firewire card, optical sound buy a card, better graphics, buy a card. Once you purchased the cards you wanted, there was a driver setup that went along with it, and sadly some drivers broke other drivers, and in many cases you would finally have the perfect PC setup and windows would do an update and the drivers were now obsolete and you needed newer drivers.

The reality is, those days when i made a distinction in my head that Mac was superior to PC, is now over, gone are motorola chips, coaxil networking, etc.
From a hardware perspective i would dare say the PC has some far more powerful options than the Mac if you are prepared to spend the money, the drivers are hardly an issue these days, and mac always needed added extensions to run third party hardware anyway known as kexts these days, it was just less commonplace before to need to add anything to a Mac besides RAM and larger hard drives. But if you did, and you needed to load extensions, Mac had its fair share of issues booting the new extension too.

The only thing for me personally that still exists is a comparative of Operating System, I just happen to love the Mac OS, as it is what I am most familiar with. But in all honesty if you took the potential virus/malware rubbish away from Windows, it would be a very close match up on operating system too.

Just my personal thinking from a Mac loving freak. Windows is catching us though, thats the sad sad truth, my next laptop could even be a PC im afraid to say.

EDIT: I am still unhappy Mac did away with Ethernet, my gigabase full duplex network is still better that wifi, bad Apple, bad bad Apple.

2 Likes
62

Interesting feedback Paul

while we come from different directions, we seem to meet in the middle.

Fistly, don’t get we wrong, the Mac seems a perfectly capable system and I have little negative to say about it.

However, as we all know, basically the internal hardware is now identical, everything is basically an Intel hardware platform. In the days of Motorola chips (68000?) , mac’s had a big advantage, especially on memory use where the 32 bit 80386 restrictions did hold the windows platform back.

Now that has all changes, windows is 64 bit, both platforms use the same chipsets and the only significant difference is the Operating System

Apple enjoys a closed environment, basically the OS will only run on their approved hardware, trying to run it outside that is a hack.
Windows is about as open a platform as can be and has to support a huge number of 3rd party hardware
The restrictions to the Apple OS allows them to tie the os in a tighter fashion than windows can for that reason. This will have some performance benefit.

The negative is their hardware is, by comparison, expansive and difficult to expand without using Apples own components.

Having a few years under my belt, i remember the 70 and 80s when every computer had it’s own OS, hardware, software etc and there was no compatibility between them. Changing you computer basically meant starting again. I had system from Apple, Nascom, Sinclair, Radio Shack (Tandy), BBC, Amstraad, and Atari (6800 based!) before my first 80286 based PC with MSDOS.

Windows followed soon after and became the obvious direction which i followed

I never want to be tied like that again. Since IBM PC standards and Windows I have been able to use the same hardware platform for over 25 years.

So yes, Apple systems may perform slightly faster, in a money no object world, may be better but for the above reasons I resist going down that route

I think you are correct Paul, the performance difference is becoming smaller all the time, driver issues are pretty much a thing of the past and the dreaded Blue Screen of death is a scarcity.

Since the addition of inbuilt virus and malware scanning in windows 10 via defender, I have not seen any real issues in any system in a long time. I use Defender exclusively now, I never use 3rd party virus software and I have had no issues at all.

So yes, Macs may squeeze a little more performance out of their hardware due to the restricted hardware support of the platform but I will stick to more open standards which keeps prices down due to stiff competition.

.

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63

Thanks for the feedback on Windows Defender, I am still doing this the old way, install windows, and then as fast as i possibly can get ESET on it, i never realised i could even run without it now. Im going to try it out, Thanks Brian.

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Yes, protects against virus and malware

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I was even waiting for defender for mac. Unfortunately it is just for enterprise. Hoping they release publicly at some point.

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What’s this? I see a shiny new toy on the horizon for @Hyperbytes !!

On sale tomorrow !!

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$249 dollars!!!, easy as milking a cow

Sensible people would use these

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Hmm, not really a good comparison there. Those have a play time: 3-5 hours, versus the AirPods Pro which have a play time of 24 hours or more.

Also, those are charged by a wired connection, whereas the AirPods Pro can be charged wirelessly.

And those don’t let you share what you are listening to to other people wearing AirPods Pro.

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Never worn any type of ear piece for more than about one hour

Is connecting a wire that difficult

And you do that how often?

Sorry but what you say actually re-enforces what i think about apple products, overpriced gimmicks

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Meanwhile I need to add 5 usb devices to my mac mini so I have tried 7 different USB 3/2 hubs on it to allow me to exceed the 4 USB connections, I move my KB and mouse to the hub, neither recognised by the hub

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Never worn any type of ear piece for more than about one hour

You've never listened to opera through an ear piece? You're missing out !! :slight_smile:

Is connecting a wire that difficult

Yes, when you can not find the wire. :slight_smile:

And you do that how often?

The technology has not been present to do that as of late, so I have not tried yet. :slight_smile:

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Nope, 1000 watt surround sound is the way to do that although personally i prefer rock

Or you loose the very expensive apple wireless charge, got lots or wires, wires are cheap

Sorry Mate, you will never convince me, i work too hard for my money to pay that sort of price for a toy, that's not much more than I paid for my core i5 mac mini!

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73

I'll dig up the hub I bought off of Amazon later today and share it with you. I've used it on my iMac for five years now with no issues.

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I have ordered another one but compatibility issues like this should not happen in 2019. It’s all Intel chips, clearly this is Apple trying to stop 3rd party products working with their kit to stifle competition

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We have at home(from most useful to trash):
2 Iphones
2 Macbook Pros
1 iMac
1 Apple TV
2 Ipads
2 Apple Watches
1 Airpods

Worst buy of all? Airpods. Nice piece of engineering yes. But batteries are not there yet. You will wreck your battery in less than a year. Meaning that after a year of use you will be lucky to enjoy 1 hour and a half of reproduction before you have to charge them. If you want to change batteries in both of them it is cheaper to buy a new set.

Second worst buy? Apple Watches.

Rest of products not a single complaint except price of course :wink:

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@Hyperbytes have you had the pleasure of interacting with an Apple ‘Genius’ or their support yet? I have a friend who is currently distraught at the lack of support she is getting after blowing close to four and a half grand (€) on a Macbook Pro with FULL Apple Care. I’ve sat and listened to her calls and been there in the store while she is belittled and essentially insulted for not understanding the total BS they spout. Three months now and no fix, offer of a solution, or any kind of sensible resolution to her issues.

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No i have not Dave and I guess never will. Dipping my toes into the Mac world was an experiment and I see nothing but good reasons for sticking to the windows platform and saving a lot of money.

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The last time we used her Macbook was as a paperweight to stop documents blowing across the office while the windows were open. For this use case it worked flawlessly.

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Lol Dave, for me it is just that to do anything other than the basics you need to drop back into the command line (Terminal). It like going back to the days of DOS

If I want to spend my life typing Sudo … then i will just stick with Linux (which i do use) and save a fortune.

Have lots of Linux boxes, re-purpose old machines for that purpose

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80

Soooooooo many haters out there :stuck_out_tongue:
Anyway. To each his own.

Whatever makes people more productive.