I'm not a fan of any particular product, but rather believe that the best product should be used for the task at hand.
I'm with you there. When I went shopping for a 30 inch monitor to go with my Mac Pro I decided to go with the Dell model, it was a bit cheaper than the Apple Cinema Display but it had better rated picture and was HDCP certified. I didn't mind that it wasn't silver.
Business: Macs look really cool but you do pay extra for them. In terms of functionality I am sure that you could do business work on both a Mac or PC and your software preference would be the determining factor.
Why do people always mention the appearance when speaking about Macs?
For business you would require something that is reliable; most studies show that most Tier 1 brands have a similar failure rate across the range. So HP/Dell/Mac should all have similar reliability, across the ranges; and higher when compared to tier2/3 vendors (clones etc).
Yes, but Apple does not make low end notebooks. Note that the failure rate is not the same across the entire range. A R37,000 Lenovo (yes you can buy those) will have decent build too but it won't be better than a top of the range Apple Macbook Pro, unless it's customised for CAD/CAE hardware - say a mobile Quadro card. However bottom of the range, entry level products will not be as good in quality as the mid-range and high end products. Mac notebooks occupy the mid-range and up category.
Windows PCs require slightly more maintenance in terms of patches and Antivirus, but in two years I have never had a virus, and use free AV, so it need not be a determining factor.
That is a major problem. You need a very clued up user and many older people I know - namely friends' parents and my own grandparents are not very clued up in that regard. I run Comodo Firewall Pro with very customised rules as well as SpyBot and an AV but to get CFP to learn everything properly is no easy task.
For games: Again, its preference. Look at the list of games available for both platforms and see for yourself.
Good point, agree.
Macs are more expensive, and in my opinion do not offer significant real benefits to justify the extra price; however if price were not an issue, then I would buy a Mac....
I half agree here. For someone like you who has all his ducks in a row, and is happy to do what you're doing on a setup you've lovingly customised - a new computer and operating system is probably not the way to go. However, for most people, especially those who are not clued up, Macs with better quality of build and components, better support (maybe not in SA but in the US and EU iStore support wins awards), and pretty powerful hardware (depends also on the refresh cycle but at each refresh cycle the Macs are slightly ahead of mainstream PCs) and of course the powerful OS with no viruses to steal your credit card details (if you don't DL warez) a Mac is probably better. You just spend less time monkeying around.
And if you have apps like FCP or Aparture, well Macs are definately better. These apps are first class, they're cheaper than PC equivalents and often you can run the same copy legally on the notebook and desktop machines,
plus they're usually loaded with printed manuals and free class coupons.
I actually have my machines organised pretty well too. XP is fast, works well if patched/with Firefox/with lots of security apps and a I'm a user who knows what to run and what not to run - Win 7 won't give me any benefits other than cost and reduced performance. Win 7 has security benefits over XP but those can be negated by a locked down system with 3rd party apps and viruses do exist for Win 7.
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