Reply #67: Are the waters warm enough yet? [View All]

[Not a robought]

I guess it's time for me to jump in.

Having done high end graphical and effects work for motion picture and television, I've used all variety of hardware and operating systems including PC's, Macs, SGIs, Windows, OS9, OSX, Unix, Irix and Linux.

I don't hate one over the other, I use the appropriate tool for what suits the purpose. To say one is generally better than another is also generally BS.

For a long time, Apple had the best design applications cornered while software companies producing lower versions for Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 to test it out.

Microsoft then started buying some of these design software manufacturer companies to port the code over to Windows and prove that PC hardware and Windows were fully capable of doing anything you could on the MAC, which was proven correct.

A few years later, Apple are now playing the same tactic. There is a piece of software called Shake which has grown in popularity for doing to motion picture what Photoshop has done for still pictures. Originally the software was designed for PC but now that Apple has bought the software, it is being ported to the MAC EXCLUSIVELY, leaving PC users of the software out in the cold.

Every variant of computer and operating system has its pros and cons. For example as coolio as iBooks are, they can run very hot and people have complained of burning their laps. Meanwhile my Windows laptop goes through a litany of virus attacks -- but I have McAfee viruscan so I suffer nothing from it.

While XP and OS X do crash almost never, they still DO crash on a blue moon if the stars line up incorrectly. Nonetheless, my most recent computer purchase was a second windows XP laptop. All of my software is for windows, I'm not lacking anything or any features I would find on a Mac. I know if I want to upgrade the PC, I have a variety of manufacturers from which I can pick and choose hardware pieces - unlike Apple who tend to build islands from which I know I have to replace the entire thing in a couple of years.

So by going PC instead of MAC with my laptop purchase, I got a faster comparable computer for a thousand bucks less which I simply couldn't justify spending had I gone Mac. How would you justify it?