Porsche Enthusiasts Club Forum

Guys

Should I buy an Apple Desktop now that my old one has died?

I had two hard drives in my old Philips, hopefully my documents should be intact on one of them. Will they plug straight into the Apple? I know I will need to buy Microsoft Office to convert them.

Ta

One word why? If you want a proper PC I have a discount code here you can use.

Hi Sean

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Two reasons...

1, They are DRASTICALLY overpriced for what they are ...

2, Try finding the nearest place to get one repaired !! Until recently as an example the nearest to me was 60 MILES AWAY!!! you cannot just pop a Mac into a local Pc shop...we wont touch them with the proverbial barge pole, mainly because they have a lot of mac only parts and even need some very weird tools that only work with macs...

For the same money as a Mac you will get A twice as powerful PC...

All the best Brett

Get down to Aldi........

Sean, you know it makes sense. Apple all the way. How many people had to go 60 miles to get theirs fixed? None, 'cause they don't break! Why is there 1 million small P.C. repair shops in Britain? 'cause they always break!

Only kidding, it depends what you want and what you like using. No point in buying a Rolls Royce when you only ever go to the shops and back, unless you want to go in style. There is a reason they are that price and they still sell so many, but that is only what I think. No point in buying something that will require you to replace all your software, MS Office etc. unless you have a good reason. I use Apple at home and P.C. at work.

Let us all know what you buy.

If you build your own with quality components & a good cool running case with lots of fans they last forever. Cheaper too. Try Overclockers for quality kit. Brand names are a rip off. They always come with cheap power supplies & insufficient cooling. Probably because a case fan costs 75p but if you producing thousands thats a big saving.

Absolutely not Sean.

Buy a Mac laptop instead. 15 inch Macbook Pro will suit nicely. Buy it at John Lewis and you get a 2 year warranty I believe.

PCs may be a little cheaper (not by much these days - Macs use identical parts and processors) but the difference is worth it in termsbof a massively superior comouting experience. Everyone who has taken my advice to switch to Mac is delighted, and amazed that computing can be so elegant, easy and problem-free.

I have to use a Windows laptop at work and am astonished that it can be so poorly thought out and frustrating an operating system. It is like going back to the 1980s compared with Apple stuff.

Do yourself a favour and switch. Yes all your Office docs can be read on a Mac. I ran a business for 20 years on Macs constantly exchanging files with clients most of whom were using Windows, and can't recall a single peoblem. Windows is a horrible kludge of an OS really. Good enough for late 20th century but now embarrassingly poor.

Hi

Sorry but you are wrong.... A Macbook Pro STARTS at £1499 and thats just for a dual core ...there is NO justification for that price technically apart from filling Steve Jobs bank accounts... for £1500 its overpriced junk.....

You can buy a decent PC Laptop for around £400 to £500.....for £1500 you would get a Quad core with gamers graphics.....and a LOT of other stuff....

I do not sell either at my Company so this is an unbiased opinion.....

All the best Brett

Hi Brett,

We will have to agree to disagree here!

I believe the price premium for Apple is well worth paying for in terms of an elegant, easy, and pleasureable user-experience. I am far more productive on a Mac than a PC, so that premium has been repaid countless times in my business.

As with cars, it's a question of personal taste. I find the PC more like an appliance, where it's a bit of a struggle to accomplish what you want to do, and I seem to be constantly assailed by silly dialogue boxes and endless pop-up messages of gobbledeygook. In contrast the Mac doesn't get in the way. Things which should be easy - like waking up from sleep properly, connecting to networks, connecting to printers and so on - seem mined with problems on a PC. On a Mac they just work.

The screen/font/interface design on a PC also is just plug-ugly. On a Mac someone has sweated the details - every pixel is carefully judged so the thing looks nice. This isn't just eye candy - it makes it easier and a pleasure to get stuff done. This is a very personal thing - I don't mind paying for aesthetics and elegance and realise others will have a more rational approach.

This PC v Mac thing has been going on for 25 years now so I doubt we will resolve it here! The market has voted with its wallet by giving PCs a much larger market share, though Apple has made a very strong comeback in the past few years as people have realised that the extraordinary simplicity, intuitiveness and elegance which they have experienced on their iPod or iPhone (I suspect you have given the latter a wide berth too, in favour of an android or windows mobile device) is also available on their computer.

In short you have to look beyond initial purchase price to work out the total "cost" of the computer, and factor in the value of things you can now accomplish (Sean and Hayley would probably get a lot out of the free iLife suite), and the cost of time spent otherwise sorting problems on a PC. As with cars again you have to look at whole-life cost.

For a start just add the cost and time of buying/using anti-virus software. Viruses are simply not a problem on the unix-based Mac system. Whether that's because people don't attack Macs because there aren't so many of them, or the system is inherently more secure, is another matter for debate but the end result is the same.

Happy New Year!

Hi

I agree with a lot of what you said.... Macs are very good bits if kit, but there is no excuse technically for the price..none whatsoever

On a side note, we fix viruses (on PCS) ...A LOT OF THEM....but for the last 6 months or so we are getting an average of 1 or 2 people a week asking if we fix viruses on their Macs, which we dont.... all we can do is point them to the Norton Internet Security for Macs at £160 from their website...

Its the new generation of Russian viruses,,,,they infect Macs as well....

All the best Brett

Hi Brett,

That's interesting about Mac virus requests you've had.

I'm a regular (daily) visitor to the most popular Mac news sites. I haven't seen any mention of a virus problem since Macs used 800K floppies! If there was a real and growing problem, it would have had extensive coverage and user posts but I'm not seeing them. I wonder if your enquiries are coming from people who have a genuine virus infection, or are mistaking some other problem for a virus?

On cost we're back to the whole debate about price and value. I bet if you took a new 997 apart then there's no way it would technically justify the cost, yet people will pay a great deal for the tangible and intangible satisfactions of driving a Porsche. I'm sure you are correct that the component costs of a Mac give them a bigger profit margin that a typical PC manufacturer. I'm saying I'm happy to pay that premium because I'm not buying a box of parts, but a means to enable business and personal activities for at least a few years using software that uses the parts. That's what I'm happy to pay for, but I can understand why a man like you who is an expert on PC parts/components would think Apple is making too much profit on said parts. I think it's called capitalism!

Cheers,

Adrian

PS Sean I bet you regret asking a simple question now! Do let us know what you decided in the end, and your experience after a few weeks of buying whichever make you finally chose

Hi Adrian

I dont mind paying for quality, I just paid £430 for a new graphics card from my big gamers pc...

Regarding the Mac viruses , I dont know what they are as we dont look, but it seems to have the same symptoms as the PC ones...i.e a "pretend" virus program appears and asks the owner to go to a website and pay and download a program to fix it... it wont of course even if you pay... or as you say it may be something else.

To be honest, the "invulnerability" of Macs to viruses is more a historical myth I would think these days as ANY operating system "can" be infected and now Macs are getting a larger proportion of the world market, it seems inevitable that it will happen

All the best Brett

I have been sat in the lounge using my company IBM thinkpad for the last few hours trying to make sense if it all. I'm in a quandry because my current desktop at the time was all singing all dancing and relatively expensive.

Thanks for the replies and please don't fall out on our account.
Jim has generogusly given me a code for a discount from Dell and with their New Year offers I can buy a well spec'd Studio XPS 8100 for a smidge over £500.

I like the idea of the Mac, but don't want a laptop for the study or a PC which has a built in screen even though the quality of the new LED screen is very good.

Apple do produce a midi desktop system for £600 but it is a bit lame on the technical side and although I don't use the PC for gaming or video editing it is probably powerful enough.

Aghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Slightly biased but that sounds a good deal to me! As we said earlier for mail, internet & looking at por... web pages what more do you want?

Noooooo don't by a Dell. Thas the only PC that you can't repair except from Dell as the components are all made to there own spec & nothing else will fit. Never buy a Dell.......