Why don't PC users buy Macintosh?

I get asked for computer advice all the time. Having recently been converted, I now make sure that the first model of computer I suggest (when asked about buying a new computer) is a Mac. Typically I get all sorts of answers from people about why they don't want a mac.

1) $$ - to expensive. The could buy a pc desktop for about $400
2) Afraid that they won't be able to do work (ie Use M$ Office) on a Mac.
3) No Games
4) Can't upgrade (meaning processor & motherboard w/o buying an entire new computer)
5) Can't build your own
6) No floppy drive
7) Single Button Mouse
8) No software for Agriculture (all those poor farmers are stuck on Windoze...any software people out there want to liberate them?)

Most of these reasons are fairly easy for me to combat. And for the most part when I actually show them OSX, they consider getting a mac and about 35% actually do (on a side note the remaining 65% haven't, at the time I'm writing this, purchased a computer yet).
 
Originally posted by fryke
Oh, and Tigger: The iBook is right now here in Switzerland the cheapest notebook you can buy, period. You may find old models of no-name brands that are about the same price, but basically: Apple is the cheapest notebook maker here in Switzerland.
I wouldn't say it is the cheapest here in Gemany, but if I wanted a notebook, I would have taken a iBook. They are simply the best. :)
But the Powermacs are too expensive. Period.

For switching back and forth Mac and PC, you are not quite right:
If you use expensive software like Photoshop, Quark and all that stuff it can get really expensive... :(
 
The reason windows users boast so much is because they do not realize pc means personal computer. Which is what our mac is right?
However, there new names should be
WU'S which is short for wintel users.

The truth is you can upgrade a Power Mac.
Most of these WU's do not address this at all which is why they do comparisons with say an iMac that is an all-in-one computer.

Should apple support divx? a non standard formart.

The productive situation does hold water.
film, cartoons, news networks, print, design, commercials, unix and photography
are still fields where the macintosh is needed.
Which is what makes them successful.

Microsoft wouldn't have succeded if it hadn't of exploited the Mac OS
Most of the reason WU's hate the mac is because it is the past coming to bite them in the a$$.

Soon to be WU's want a computer that is new and cheap.
Experienced WU's buy the more pricey systems
and than tell the new WU's to keep buying cheap cause those mac's are wayyyyy too expensive.
So the cycle goes on and every three years those new WU's have to upgrade to a different computer. While the experienced WU's are gouging out eyes to get the latest.

Meanwhile your sitting outside being mocked by that same WU who just bought a new $3,500 machine telling you your $999 ibook is too expensive.

right.

good day gentlemen
 
I'm primarily a PC user, but I own a Pismo PowerBook running Jaguar. And I really do love my Pismo. It's the Stealth Bomber of laptops: black, curvy, sleek, and it kicks lots of ass. It's perfect for writing or just surfing the Web while at Starbucks sipping coffee. Yet as much as I love my Pismo, there's nothing that can make me switch my desktop to Mac.

Why I like the PC:

1. It's less expensive, and when it comes to truly upgrading a machine, you can do it for cheap. You can't on a Mac. "Upgrading" on a Mac is maybe getting some more RAM or a new graphics card. Upgrading on my PC (which I did last month) is as follows: I managed to go from a Dual P3 system on a 100 MHz FSB to an Athlon XP 2100+ on an Nforce2 motherboard and 512 MB 333MHz DDR RAM. Total cost? Less than $400, most of which I recouped by selling my old parts to SMP fans (I did have an advantage in that I was using a Dual CPU PC system, which depreciate less over time). I carried the rest of of my existing components over, including my powerful GeForce4 Ti video card. I practically rebuilt the guts of my machine and got a system that can give the top-of-the-line Macs a run for their money for the fraction of the cost of buying a new system, PC or Mac. If I had been willing to spend a couple of hundred of bucks more, I could have sprung for the Athlon XP 2700+, and I'd be willing to take my multimedia benchmarks against the best of the Mac crowd.

2. Windows XP SP1 is an extremely stable and fast operating system. While I like the look and feel of both XP and Jaguar, I have dislikes with both. But when it comes to pure "responsiveness," XP wins hands down. It's a much more modern and advanced kernel than the Mach kernel at the heart of OS X. (Admit just how frustrating it is to see the spinning beachball of frustration whenever you try opening up a simple text document, even in Jaguar!) And XP does not crash. The only blue screens of death I have ever encountered running XP and XP SP1 were due to some beta SoundBlaster drivers I had installed. I learned that lesson and just went back to some older drivers and stability heaven again. On a PC with good hardware and good drivers (not cheap, no-name hardware or any of that proprietary stuff some system manufacturers load down on you), Windows XP is as stable as it gets. That's the double-edged sword with PC's though. You have a lot more options when it comes to hardware, but it can bite you in the ass if you're not careful. Apple eliminates this problem on the Mac by tightly controlling all the hardware, but your range of choice goes down dramatically.

3. Games, games, games, games, games. I read some Mac magazine's Switch story, and it said that you counter your PC friends' games arguement by saying 7 of the 10 Top-Selling PC games are on the Mac. Unfortunately, when 5 of those games are The Sims or expansion packs of The Sims, you're kinda screwed if you don't like The Sims. Yes, Mac does get some of the good stuff as well, like Ghost Recon and Jedi Knight II. But they get them months after the PC gets them, if they're lucky. Also, I really like games, and the vast majority of PC games never get ported over to the Mac.

4. Speed. Apple has some nice hardware, but a lot of that comes from the PC, i.e. Nvidia graphics cards, AGP, etc. What advantages it does have with the G4 CPU are nullified by an inefficient OS and laziness on Motorolla's part. PC's may use more "primitive" hardware, but whatever defeciencies from that are solved thanks to pure horsepower: faster CPU speeds, faster FSB speeds, faster memory speeds, etc. Thanks to Intel and AMD pummeling each other, we're already at 3GHz and we're screaming to the next big thing, which could potentially be ClawHammer, the 32/64-bit chip from AMD. Also, prices for near top-of-the-line CPU's drop rapidly. In a few months, I'll be able to buy that Athlon XP 2800+ CPU for less than half of what it costs today.

5. Sense of ownership. Apple owners get possesive of their systems but PC owners do as well, especially those of us who built our own. I'm not like the guys who "trick out" their PC's though. No big case windows or mods for me. Just a biege box that sits under my disk. But it's mine: I built it from scratch. I tweak it for performance. It's like the love affair some guys have with working on their cars. I like the choice and options a PC gives you, the whole "wide open" nature of it all. You don't get that with a Mac.

6. It's a PC world. It's the truth. And I use a PC at work and I have several PCs (desktops and laptops) at my home. Jaguar's made some leaps toward Mac coexisting in that world, but while I can now share documents with the PC's in my house, I still can't print to the PC network printer. Some of you would say I've been assimilated by Bill Gates; I'd reply that you guys were brainwashed into Steve Jobs' cult of personality.

In other words: it's apples and oranges folks. Or in this case, Apples and PCs. Choose the one that floats your boat, but don't try to be an elitist snob over whichever you choose.
 
sirfulcrum....
i've only had the PM6100 but last time i checked you can upgrade the processor. It all depends on what model the card is compatibile with.
Windows XP does run quite well. It's not swell on the classic Window 9.x compatibility though. I've been using it to scan 500 pictures a day and it hasn't caught on fire yet.
But i'm not sure it's the blue screen of death people really worrry about. It's that fatal exception error. But it's a gui and security preference for me. Plus i know OS X is getting upgrading more often and people on these boards give me the good or bad news.
Not to sound offensive, but i only play window games when i'm depressed. I've always thought console games were more effective.
Mac games are quicker at getting ported thanks to aspyr or those developers sending stuff to us from DOS. But you are right. Usually any game that comes to the mac platform is uncomparable to the window one.
But you haven't thought of all those yet to be created os x games have you?=D
as much as you'd like to think it's not 90% pc world. it's just a tolerable 60% trying to be 90%
see ya..
 
When you swap in your new processor, how much choice do you have? Can you go with a new motherboard? How much selection is there? It's nowhere near on the scale of the PC. I'll admit that it can be daunting trying to sort out what to get, but it allows a great amount of flexibility to whatever your budget is.

Oh, don't start about "console games being better than PC games" nightmare thread. It's all relative to the user. Some games and some gaming audiences are best served on the PC. Others on the console. Some games are meant to be social and played on the couch, others are meant to be played up front while you're sitting at your desk. I like PC games. There are a lot of folks out there like me who like PC games as well, it's a multi-billion dollar industry. If you want to play PC games, you need a PC. Not a Mac. You get a Mac, and you play a few PC games that are ported over to the Mac. But you can't play a lot of cool games that aren't ported to the Mac, or the Xbox, or the PS2.

As for all those games being made for OS X, well, they'll be made for PC as well. And usually first.

And I don't know what about that "fatal exception" error you cite. I never get it. As for the GUI, I like it. It's clean, and the taskbar lets me multitask many seperate tasks efficiently. I like the OS X dock as well, but it has problems just like the taskbar does. Other OS X users have launched gigantic threads debating the dock. But when I'm power crunching on XP, the system allows me to keep about 3-4 browser windows, a couple of Word windows open, Outlook, and my MP3 player, and whatever else I need open at the same time. And the taskbar lets me fly between applications, and most importantly, certain types of the same application, with ease. I don't like the way it'll consolidate all the IE windows into a single taskbar button; so when the taskbar gets too crowded, I'll just resize it on the fly and make it two- or three-rows deep and that takes care of the crowding.

Do my programs crash? Yes. Does my browser crash? Yes. Does it take down the OS? Never. Do my programs crash in Jaguar? Yes. Do my browser crash in Jaguar? Yes. Do they take down the OS? No. But which system is more responsive? The XP system. The kernel is more efficiently plugged in with the underlying hardware; MS built NT with x86 specifically in mind, and they have been honing it for the past eight years for that platform. Apple ported over the Mach kernel for its architecture and they have a long way to go. They've made impressive strides, but I've seen lots of honest criticism from Apple fans that there's a lot of work still left. Jaguar is still a bit sluggish, even on the newest hardware. I spent an hour in CompUSA the other day toying around with a DP tower, and while it was impressive, there were moments it also slowed down a bit too.

And speaking of compatibility with older programs... Jaguar doesn't even come close to Windows XP in terms of backwards compatibility. At least Windows XP users don't have to install two versions of Windows on their machines to use their old programs, the way OS X users have to put OS 9 as well if they want to use their legacy apps. Yeah, a lot of DOS stuff, mainly DOS games, are unplayable, but most of those are, at a minimum, 7 or 8 years old. Seven or eight years old... ancient history in computing terms. It was impressive that MS could support them for so long with the Win 9x series, but the price of progress to a stable, secure, and reliable kernel meant finally burying DOS. Still, MS does good work at letting you use older programs; with the Compatibility Mode that's built in Windows XP , you a good chance to use Windows 95-era apps.

What I'm trying to get to is the PC is a very potent machine. You get one with good hardware and XP, and it can go toe-to-toe with Apple's finest, easily.

Case in point:
http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/11_nov/reviews/cw_macvspciii.htm
These guys took the fastest single processor Dell and the fastest Dual Processor Mac and took them head-to-head. The Dell absoloutely destroyed the Mac, usually by cutting the Mac's best times in half. And the Dell cost $630 less than the Mac!

So you get a machine from a good manufacturer running Windows XP, and you have a machine that's less expensive than a Mac, faster than a Mac, and just as stable as a Mac, if not moreso. Plus you have much larger hardware and software support, including games. It's compatible with the PC you use at work, with the PC you have at home, and your friends' PCs. And XP is a good operating system, and the most credible operating sytem that Microsoft has ever put out. It's fast, powerful, stable, and it is easy to use. Maybe not as easy as a Mac, but it's easy.

So to answer the question of the thread: THAT'S WHY PEOPLE CHOOSE PC'S.

--------------------
Self-Built Athlon XP 2100+, Nforce2 motherboard, 512MB DDR, GeForce4 Ti 4400, Windows XP SP1

Mac PowerBook (Pismo), 192 MB RAM (soon to be 512!), Mac OS X 10.2.3.
 
I am a recent "Switcher" before I switched I used to hate the following...

1. I love Msnbc.com for news... I use to like the sleek pop out menus that had even more news... With Mac I can't get the pop outs to work at all...

2. The State of Florida is anal because it won't let me a common Floridan/customer buy Apple Care because something about Steve Jobs, has to come down to Tallahasse and sign a special form.

3. Overpriced... Why buy a PowerMac... 867mhz computer for 1699 when I can get an intel pentium 2.5ghz for that price.

4. upgradabiblity... plug and play in XP...

5. Programs...

6. Games.

Of course that was a few... but I've seen the light.
 
Originally posted by ApeintheShell
going toe to toe with a 128k mac at 8mhz?

sounds fun!

but i'm sorry

the princess is in another castle!

That's the problem with Mac fanatics... they're in perpetual denial.

Try reading the friggin' story. The most expensive Dual G4 Mac got wasted by a machine from Dell that cost $630 less. The Dell did everything the Dual G4 Mac did in half the time. Half!

Or you can go and stick your head in the sand.

That's a wake up call to Apple. Everyone knows they need faster CPU's and faster tech, because Intel and AMD are kicking the G4's ass, even if it is "superior technology" to the CISC-based x86.
 
Originally posted by MacLuv
Hey guys, I really love you all, but let's not make this into a mac vs. pc war, dig?
Sorry MacLuv, looks like the beast has been unleashed.
 
Originally posted by brianleahy
In all seriousness, what are some popular agriculture software packages?
I will try to get you the titles of the agriculture software packages, I don't remember the names off the top of my head...time to go talk to our friendly farmland foke.
 
sirfulcrum..where is your sense of humor? of course i am a mac fanatic. It's written all over my forehead. But if you will remember i said "gui and security" plus "more updates". I feel good that
they designed my interface instead of rehashed it. That if there is
a security hole they will address and not deny it in a press conference. That Apple will at least listen to some of us
regarding updates to the operating system and programs.
I compare microsoft to the talkback app that comes with Mozilla.
Not alot of help but there anyway.
You may also notice i did not address speed, cost, and little about the game arena. That's because i constantly hear about those three subjects from mac and pc users. What they say is all factual information but they and you and me are not Apple. The future isn't written yet and things could still change for the better or worse.

Your a wise person, but it is only a compatibility mode. You'd have to downgrade. Where as i can just restart in Mac OS 9 for some photoshop work. Also we can emulate the windows operating system. The current operating system you are using.
I haven't even seen a successful mac os 9/X emulation on windows yet. Of course the windows emulation is dog slow but the fact of the matter is we can have all kinds of operating systems.
Am i ignoring Virtual PC for PC? nope. it's slow too. It is also
a redundant name.
I do not deny that Windows has the upperhand over the Macintosh.
Yet i will never comply on the three categories above that Windows is better than a Macintosh.
Thank you for replying to all my posts and i hope your hand doesn't hurt from typing too much. Have a nice day!
 
the warz have begun...

But keep this in mind,
attack and counter intellegently,
and follow the board rules, else u get kicked

** we don't make rules, but discover them**
 
tell ya the truth i don't think the wars have really ended.
There will always be some reluctance towards people who
use other platforms and a right to defend your own.
I am not saying my computer is better i just beleive there is a place for macintosh in the world and prefer not it to be a pc world.
So whether my words are regarded as "them's fighting words" is irrelevant. I already have answered the question stated in the thread and i feel my posts were justified.

I do not consider anyone a rival on this forum which is idiotic in it's own right. Rather since this is a forum i like the discussion.
Even if it can be aggressive and cruel. Still i am not limited by other people's opinions of my being a fanatic and will continue to be one as i see fit.
 
sirfulcrum pretty much summed it up. I just purchased a Powerbook G4 and am absolutely in love with it but Apple has a long way to go before I will purchase a Mac desktop. The main issue for me is probably games. I don't play a lot of games but the games I do play, like Fifa and F1-2002, I play a lot and unfortunately they aren't available for the Mac. I don't really have a loyalty to either one as I think they are both great products. After buying this Powerbook I doubt I will buy another Windows notebook but at the same time I have a hard time believing I will ever buy a Mac desktop.
 
I guess games does make a big difference in the choice of platform. I am very thankful that Unreal Tournament is making its way to Macs really soon, and since it might be running on OpenGL, it means better graphics!
 
Why PC users don't buy Mac:

First of all, some people think that Windows is the only operating system in the market. Or they might not even know that Windows is a operating system at all, they might suspect that the computer is windows. They simply don't understand even the basics of computer's.

Secondly (as somebody have noticed the same thing), most of Wintel users are stuck on that GigaHz thing, and honestly I won't even bother try to explain these things, because most of Wintel users don't want to believe that the Ghz is not the only 'feature' that matters.

Thirly, most of people who says that Mac is bad, have not ever used Mac! I mean really used!

Personally I have started to get interested more and more about Mac and MacOS X! This is because of I'm tired of Wintel world. It is true that you can upgrade your system, but there are so many of those vendors, and that makes things complicated. I mean, if you buy a Mac, you get a package which contains hardware and software which are designed to W O R K together. But on Windows world, it's always fighting with those drivers etc. This is why I'm using Linux on PC world; you can actually affect to OS, and you don't have to reboot every time you add something to your system.

And what becomes to gaming, I have my GBA for those purposes :). I also prefer some console for gaming purposes for same reason; hw & sw work better compared on wintel gaming!

--
Stakk
 
In my personal experience, the main reason people buy PC's is because they want to run a particular app that is not available on the Mac. In my extended family, many of which are now buying Macs, they still maintain their PCs. Not because they like them, but because they need to run specific physician database programs. Those that don't are not interested in knowing anything more about the machine than what it takes to send email and do taxes. Since they are forced to use PCs at work, its the devil they know. No learning curve whatsoever, and no compatability issues with friends, etc. The logic is unassailable.

Apple is doing the right thing right now by focusing on design because the only thing that can overcome cold logic is irrational desire. They are tapping into the same impulse that makes people buy SUVs and luxury cars. Logic dictates we all drive Yugos. The BMW of computers indeed.
 
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