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May
01
2011

Buying a New PC, and Wondering About Macs vs Windows

Category: about me,apple,dell,social media,tech opinion — jmacofearth @ 11:36 am

UPDATE 5-1-11: Actually it does matter. Having spent most of the afternoon with my MBP, I just opened and fired up my Dell Latitude. It’s a crappy machine when compared to the Mac. As I wrote this post, most of my time with with the Dell was at my desk, where the computer is docked to two large monitors, a keyboard and a mouse. As a laptop this thing feels plastic-y and flimsy. It takes much longer to boot up. And the touchpad is a generation or two behind the Mac’s. So while WIN 7 is a vast improvement, the actually machines are still a long way apart. And I believe this Latitude is in the same price range as the MBP.

See also the hilarious LinkedIN discussion of this topic here.

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It was about a year ago that Apple released the iCore Macbook Pros. At that time I bought an i5 15-inch machine and upgraded it to 8 gigs of ram and a 500 gig hard drive. And last week Apple ups the processors on all of the units. And some part of my need-to-have-the-lastest brain is trying to figure out how to sell last year’s model and buy the smaller and faster 13" MacBook Pro. But why…

So I’m taking stock of what Mac vs PC means to me. Last week a friend of mine, a computer phobic friend, asked me to go to Best Buy with them and help them sort out the choices of computers available. (Us computer folks get this request a lot.) Combine that with my new job which has provided me with a very nice Dell Latitude running Windows 7 and I have to say the lines between the two operating systems are getting blurry. I don’t think I will ever get over being a Mac, but my Windows 7 machine, with the Adobe Creative Suite and dual 17 monitors is pretty sweet. I always come home and fire up my MacBook Pro, but there’s less and less to be hyper about.

That said, the decision at Best Buy was a pretty simple one. My friend had returned an Acer due to the warm palm rests that would start bugging her after an hour or so of intense computing. So at Best Buy we simply walked around and felt the palm rests on all the machines. And there were only two non-macs that didn’t suffer from the, hard drive in the front left side of the computer heating up the palm rest" problem. One was a very nifty Toshiba Satellite. The other was a very white Sony Vaio. But since my friend had just had her Sony die on her, the simple choice was the Satellite. The Mac was not an option.

So what is it about the Mac that has me so often fanatical? People ask me all the time, should we pay extra and get a Mac? Is it worth the extra money? Will it run everything we need it to run? And now a days I really have to think about my answer before responding.

For the most part, I do believe the Mac is worth the extra money. But in the case of my friend, when she was set on getting a Windows machine, it was not the usual torture experience. (Remember trying to figure out what Vista machine to buy?) And now it was more one of comfort and aesthetics rather than performance and megabytes.

So we plunked around in Best Buy for a few hours and I never once suggested we go look at the Apple section. And day after day when I fire up my Windows 7 machine, I have to say I’m pleasantly surprised. And the Dell is a solid machine. Not as many buzzers and bells as the Satellite, but the i5 hums right along and gets the job done. The more the things change, the more they begin to look the same.

@jmacofearth

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