Mac or PC? Options

[Mr.Scruff]

title pretty much explains this topic. give me your input why you like which one more, etc.

[steel]

I'm sorta floored that this topic would come up, it's typically just a catalyst for a forum war. Por tem..

I've been using both from the beginning of their inception, as well as UNIX machines and I have a home-brew Linux machine that I tinker with as well. Going farther back, I was a big Amiga fan until it finally finally died. Actually, I first worked with an Interdata 8/16 and did my first real programming on a PDP-11. But I digress....

My choice in a home computer is the pc. I build all of my home computers from scratch, and in a pc, I can make it exactly how I want it with the knowledge that still some 90+% of all components, apps and utilities will work on it.

I built a home-brew Mac a few years back and found that my only real choice was to build a "franken-Mac" - meaning, from pieces from other Macs, there really wasn't an alternative to built the machine from scratch.

There's also some basic feeling I have that I can't get as deeply under the hood with a Mac as I can with a pc. I'm reminded of all the trouble I had trying to debug a problem with a Powerbook Pismo battery recharging problem I tried to solve a couple of years ago, I mean, I couldn't get into the code at all. It was like, I either had to find something that I could point-click-install and it runs and works, or else, I was hosed. In this case, I was hosed. I didn't/don't like that feeling.

On top of this is the expense. You've really got to buy whatever the basic Mac is that you want to use off-the-shelf, you can't build it, and it's all expensive compared to what you can do with a pc. That's not freedom in my book, that's somebody controlling what my technology is going to do at the price-point they set. I'm not comfortable with that.

And one other thing I'll mention. In my line of work, as an engineer who does tech-writing, those in my career field who only know Macs are looked down upon in the industry as not having too many technical smarts. This may not be fair, but it's professionally true, so I don't ever want to put myself in that position in my career field.

I have one particular co-worker who I feel is perfectly great in her work, but she has insisted on using a Mac for her whole nearly 20 years with my company. She has been passed over for promotions and raises endlessly and I know it's because she insists on that Mac. I've discussed it with her a ton of times, but she's dug in her heels about it. And what's worse, I know that on those times when she's needed to use a pc for lab work or demos, she's not been able to "get under the hood" the way we sometimes have to, to solve last minute problems. In other words, she's crippled her own career because of her Mac, and she's got a Masters in Electrical Engineering from UT!!!

So yes, I like the new Macs, my friend mentioned above has shown me the latest-greatest ones, she always has a full suite of them and all their gadgets and so forth. Nice. Great that it can act like a pc now, but not exactly, and etc. Wonderful. She's still never going to get promoted or get a raise.

So yeah, I'm pc for the most part.