The age old argument that has been going around since the dawn of time, which is best – the apple or the PC and in this sense we mean either a computer running Windows or it could be Linux of course. For the Tech savvy end user, building your own machine can be cheaper, much more powerful and more upgradable than the Mac range of computers. On the other hand we have a beautiful all-in-one that is the iMac and nothing can beat the one plug professional looking box which also happens to have the 27″ screen of course. I wanted to use this post not to go through the age old arguments but to ask the question of “why should I spend all that money and buy an iMac”
The iMac is very expensive
If you take a look at the 27″ iMac on the apple store, the price is mind blowing, if you were to take that same money that it costs to buy just the i5 model for example – you could build or buy one hell of a windows box out of that money that would have the Core i7, more storage, much better graphics card and so forth. What most people do not take into account though is the 27″ screen and if we wanted the same screen for the Windows box, we need to spend at least £650 on the Dell Model.
Now that have removed £650 from the £1400 price tag – we only have left £750 to play with, maybe not such a mega amazing machine now right? The whole point of the iMac anyhow is that it is a machine that has everything ‘most’ people need with one plug, boots very fast indeed and very easy to add and remove software and generally does not slow down as fast as say Windows does.
Resell value
Like a good car, you can sell the thing and get a good price back, if you were to take let us say a Acer Desktop, you will be lucky if you get that much at all for 2009 model of the computer. I want to add that you can buy for example Apple Care at any point in your first year, right up to the point of the last day and get the extended cover, normally you only get sold the cover when you are buying something in the store and most of the time the cover they sell if not of any use.
Anything Apple can do, windows can do just as well
I have been through most windows operating systems, from DOS to Windows 3.11 and all the way up to Windows 7. I have used and worked with most Linux installs in my time and I have only ever worked on Mac OS X but not the versions before it. I can tell you that any of the operating systems out today can do whatever it is you ask of it, the only difference is how easy, how much and how much effort you are going to put in to find the required software.
If we were to talk about Video editing (for the normal people that is), iMovie is very easy to produce a good looking video, very easy to get the exact bit you needed on the time line and it seems fast enough to output the end video. Movie Maker on the PC is not as good and missing a lot (in my eyes) and if you step up to Sony Vegas, not only does it cost a lot of money but the interface is not as easy to work with but you can do a lot more than say iMovie – it’s all relative.
Boot times
My job is to do IT Support and I have seen a lot of windows boxes that take so long to boot and be ready that you can go and make a coffee while it starts. Even a Core i7 with 9 GIG ram can still take some time to boot and even though the desktop comes up, it is still not useable at that point in time. Mac OSX (even on a hackintosh) is very fast to boot which means I can power the computer on, check my various things and power down.
Multiple screens and other goodies
In OSX we had spaces which is now called Mission Control and this lets you quickly jump from space to space. Linux has had this for areas also with the cube and such and also why I like using Linux sometimes. I can set my programs to start on whatever screen and when the computer starts up, I have all the programs to hand without my screen been cluttered with programs.
Bottom Line
I am not here to convince you all that you should hit the apple store and get buying a new computer but you do good a decent machine for the price especially as I did and buy a decent refurbished machine. If you are a hardcore gamer then whilst most games run fine, it will never compete with the latest and the greatest of the pc world. Maybe give a virtual mac a try or hackinitosh your current machine to see if OSX offers anything you may like.
