Frustrated Mac User

Actually it is true. The notion that Avid for XP or any windows platform outsells Avid for Mac requires that you take a tiny slice of their market and compare them in a vacuum. Mostly its just initial sales of low end XP pro for people who want to run software only. Avid sells dozens of products in for dozens of media applications to the tune of close to half a billion dollars a year, the overwhelming majority of which run on Macs. I have never seen a professional Windows suite.

Thats a bigger engine/lighter car comparison, though. Clock speeds don't correlate. My Powerbook is every bit as fast as any PC at its price point and even the G4s are comparable to their Pentium equivalents. PC beats Mac mostly in variety of systems and budget alternatives. You can get a disposable E machines box with eveything mounted on the motherboard for a lot less than an iMac or eMac, but its also a lot likely to turn into a paperwieght before its obsolete. Youre not going to see a G5 chipset in a no frills, cut corners generic box, though.

Honestly, I just don't understand what you are saying here so I can't really retort, And I have seen quite a few very nice full Media Composer and DS (which was PC only) suites. But I doubt either of us has seen a meaningful sample size, so it don't really matter.

Megahertz != performance. It's all that Intel marketing propaganda they've engrained into people's heads to the point that everyone else has been forced to play their game (ie. AMD with it's 1700+ and such ratings). The true measure of performance is straight-up execution time - SCREW everything else. That comes with the components of clock rate, instructions / clock, and the instructions issued by the program (I'm not counting memory or I/O here). But, people are generally idiots when it comes to something as complex as computers, so they just want some aggregate number like "megahertz" to gauge which computer is faster than another. If anyone ever MENTIONS clock rate in saying whether x86 or PowerPCs have better performance, I'll just go nucking futs!

And I like Macs simply because 1. they don't run on little endian crap! (I have a vendetta against little endian machines now, already had one against Alphas though) 2. fairly good UI 3. UNIX without all the typical headaches of UNIX (ie. hardware compatibility & drivers) 4. less power consumption and better battery life for portable computing 5. they have far better design concepts than most PC manufacturers 6. I can port a lot of code I write for PowerPC directly to embedded systems (like those FPGA boards that utilize PowerPC chips for certain operations)

But here's the thing folks, if I run Linux or OpenBSD on my x86 boxen, I'll be just as stable as those Mac fanboys if not more and know the software from the inside-out. Sure, it might take a little effort to get some devices working, but how many devices work with Macs out of the box anyways? 60%? 70%? I dunno honestly.

The whole thing in the end still boils down to the same old truth that everything has advantages and disadvantages.

Fuck the double post... somebody's gotta fix the submission mechanism...

[Edited on Sep 23, 2003 by djk29a]

yea, the old megahertz myth, of course Apple made their own little offshoot with the "Gigaflops"
And yes, UNIX on an x86 or Alpha is stable, and I love Solaris on my SPARC proc. BUT what I love about Apple is Virtual PC runs windows on Mac OS, pretty flawlessly too, apart from some TCP/UDP issues.

W00T! DOUBLE POST!

yea that is a strange and confusing sentance and I feel a funny tingle when i read it.......

and as for programming, im not quite sure what you are talking about, but for web the majority of servers are still UNIX/LINUX which you *could* program on Windows, but that would be a non-sequiter wouldn't it? Business servers are slowly becomming vastly Windows oriented, especially with Server 2003s release. If you work for an application or gaming producer then the odds are it will be windows based.
Now what I did was embedded technology, which is almost propriatarily written based on UNIX/SOLARIS.
Notice MAC isnt anywhere in here.

So...MY POINT BEING, which I dont know why I typed any of this other crap, yes a PC (in the sense of an x86 platform) is a must for a programmer, but even the egg farmer comment is incorrect.

WHAT IT SHOULD HAVE SAID IS:
"If you are an egg-farmer, a chicken coop is a must, since almost all cats are dogs."

What do I know, I'm just an egg-laying cocker spainel farmer.

I right click in OS X all the time. I also clickity with my thumb button and use my mousewheel with glee.

This is mostly subjective. IF you like the windows UI better, spiffy. Use what you like and/or what's familiar. Personally, I have a desire to fly to Redmond and strangle their UI engineers.

Wow! You must have seen some totally bad-ass unicorns! ( http://www.apple.com/powermac/design.html )

-r

[Edited on Sep 23, 2003 by r3v]