Mac? yes or no

R

ronnie/emo{RD}

Rookie
Joined
Feb 15, 2008
Messages
64
well i am in need of a new comp.
i was thinking of a mac and using lepord to run windows to game, and i was thinking the mac cuz i am really into gfx disign and all that and next year i hope to be in a university class for it. so i was thinking the imac, and i am not going to be gameing like crysis on max i will just play tf2, dod css, cod4 and the occasional wow ( :P ) but on the other had dell has some really nice xps 720, so i am leaving it to the people to give me some advise.


now this is a thread to bash on apple or dell plz keep the posts away from that.


thank you
rOnnie
 
Poll options don't really fit the question. :P

But other than that, consider what you're going to be doing the most.

If you're more into graphic design than gaming, grab yourself a Mac, otherwise grab the dell.

Also don't forget that you can get most Adobe programs (Photoshop, ImageReady, etc) on windows as well.
 
which kind of graphic design are you going into? are you going to need a rendering powerhouse i would suggest a pc, for portability i would suggest a macbook pro. what exact concentration do you plan on going into for graphic design?
 
I wouldn't, if you're a gamer.

Mac is notorious for being a pain the get regular PC games on a Mac from what I've heard. I've heard it's graphics are nice but I never hear what kind of card it is. Personally, no.
 
I work in design and post so I use a mac in my work BUT in my house a have a hackintosh (I buyed an aditional tiger license just in case) and my gaming pc, the hackintosh works really well with every mac apps (FCS, AE and PS) so I just use it when I bring work from my office or check my mail. I chosed this way because buying a mac for my home it doesn't justify the cost, my advice is: get yourself an imac (or a hackintosh ;) ) for work and a midrange pc for gaming or you cang go for a pc for both (don't worry about the learning curve, the shortcuts are the same for adobe apps). If you need help PM me.
 
So here's the deal. Despite Apple's PR machine ("It just works" doesn't hold up when you read Apple's bewilderingly unhelpful support forums), you can do everything on Windows that you can do on MacOS. You also get the added benefit of not having to use a Mac.

Perhaps I'm a bit jaded, but after forcing myself to use a Mac at work as my primary machine for a year in order to be sure I had a sense of perspective, I decided I never want to use a Mac again.
 
Mac for design so Ive heard, but if you port Windows to a Mac, you expose it now to all the Windows viruses.
 
It really depends on what you think you're going to do the most. You can generally get more bang for your buck with a PC, though, so the PC gets my recommendation.

On top of it all, I have a hard time recommending an iMac or Mac Mini to a gamer due to their lack of upgradability. A great way to extend the life of an aging gaming PC is by purchasing a new video card. A $200 investment can sometimes extend the gaming life of an older PC by another year or two. To my knowledge, you don't have that choice with an iMac. I've been away from the graphic design world for a while so I can't really speak from recent experience, but I can say that back when your choices were OS 9, Win 98, or Win NT4/2000, then OS 9 was the way to go. OS 9 was much more stable at handling extremely large photos and extremely large layout documents in Quark.

I'll have a better opinion when I start my new job at an Ad agency in a couple of weeks. But it might be information enough to inform you that all the visual design people there use Macs.
 
I think it's telling that Adobe, the gold standard in graphic design software publishers, used to do all of their initial coding on Mac and then port it to Windows. About five years ago (if I have my dates right), they switched. Now everything is designed on Windows and ported to Mac.

Take a careful look at all of the Mac hype, and you'll see that the majority of it is, sadly, just that. It's a fine OS, but it's not somehow magically inherently better, easier to use, or more stable. In fact, its niche status is (to my mind) a weakness.

I can recognize that MS is evil. I have no issues with that, and given the choice I'd actually switch completely over to Gentoo Linux, but so much of what I like to do (TF2, anyone?) runs on Windows only - or best on Windows, that it's a no-brainer for me.

As to the idea of running things in a VM or emulating, that may work, buy why bother? You're going to lose performance and stability by emulating, so why not just go native like the rest of the world?
 
If you're a gamer don't go with Mac. If your something else go for it. :P



Pc Forever. :) / Mac :((
 
Flippy, as usual you are right, but for me it makes more sense build a hackintosh just for Final Cut Pro and Shake because I can't find better substitutes in windows world, I trying alternatives like Edius (replaces Final Cut Pro) and Fusion 5 (replaces Shake) but for now I'm sticking to my pc for gaming and my hackintosh for work.
 
I have likes and dislikes about both platforms... but that said, I'd go with Windows if you game AT ALL. You can run all of the same graphics apps on PC, and they run just as well. However, you're not going to be able to game very well on Mac at all, and you will have to pay out the nose for the machine, support, and upgrades. Apple's closed platform may make them a lot of money, but it's one of the reasons that I will simply never buy a Mac using personal money. (If work bought me one, I'd use it... maybe.)

3/4 of my office runs Mac, and my boss who is a recent convert from PC to Mac has been complaining for the last several weeks. He had originally been all starry-eyed about the transition, but now he's coming down to earth and realizing the deficiencies of the platform for his needs.
 
Well at my school we have mostly macs around the school i cant stand them. They all seem to freeze up and do stupid stuff almost everytime i use one. Id reccomend getting a PC cuz as others have said you get better performance for the price and ability to upgrade later as needed. Also in our school we have PCs set up to run cad and i forget the other program but they use it set up pics to be sent to our laser engraver and they also have photoshop on them and run great! and ive tried one of the emulators for windows on a mac and it was crap it couldnt even run q basic that well but of course that mite have been the fault of our IT department.
 
it depends... If your in the price range of a mac book pro, then get that. If not then get a pc. The pro has enough power to play tf2, and your other games and macs a famous for their graphics and whatnot.
 
MAC is really really bad for games, its more required for profissinal 3d aplications (like maya, 3ds max, XSI) and 2d (Photoshop)

No :)
 
[quote1205772898=Fd]
MAC is really really bad for games, its more required for profissinal 3d aplications (like maya, 3ds max, XSI) and 2d (Photoshop)

No :)
[/quote1205772898]


not really, you can run parelles and run xp or vista on dual boot, and run you games from there, and after that its just a pc

you can do this now because they now run of intel processors
 
oh i didnt know that!

i heard a lot of bad thing about mac with games, thanks for correcting me
 
I have both, my G4 PowerBook and my Vista 64 desktop I just put together recently. Honestly, I love my Mac, but it's still a PPC processor so I can't dualboot it and Windows. The software issue is pretty much irrelevant these days since you can boot into OSX or Windows and it's just like using a "regular" Windows box.

That said, there have been some hardware compatibility issues with the Mac Pro series and newer high end video cards that I've read about, and the cards they ship with aren't exactly cutting edge. As far computing power for your money, with gaming being considered it looks something like this: Apple < Dell < Custom Build

I spent $1500 roughly on my machine, and the same thing would have cost me $2500 minimum through Dell. Apple's prices are steep, but for some people they're more than worth it. I've owned 2 Apple laptops, and honestly I don't see me owning any other kind of laptop since mine have been so dependable.
 
The Imac imo, is way cooler than the xps. The xps isn't that strong anyway. I vote for the imac.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Latest posts

Back
Top