Mac vs PC

[tpt]

And if you've just run through all the back and forth above, you'll see what I mean about this being a political issue.

1. Most general business applications are Windows based (by "general business" I mean word processing, accounting, presentation and desktop publishing programs used in small offices.

2. Many specialized programs used in TV and in some areas of radio use Apple or even proprietary systems (because of the amount of data manipulation involved).

3. Most radio automation programs use Windows, because of the initial equipment costs. While I would agree that there can be increased costs to maintain Wintel based systems, compared to Apple, then again, there may not be, since many young employees have enough familiarity with Windows to "work around" problems.

4. Many large institutional and corporate users still use UNIX or may be going to LINUX for a wide variety of reasons.

My point is, and referring back to the original questions, it really doesn't matter which is better (in the question Apple or Windows based equipment) it is what you will need to work with the OS decided upon by that institution. Hence AM/Fm will need to shell out for an Apple notebook if that is what the school has decided on, for whatever reason, logical or completely murky. OTOH, maintaining expertise in Windows-based applications will be helpful if you plan to work in radio, considering the large number of stations with an installed base of Wintel machines.

Even if the only time it comes in handy is to rescue the office manager when the presentation she is working on for the boss crashes her machine!

 

[Andy_Brown]

History of multimedia

> When Commodore introduced the Amiga in 1985, it was a decade
> ahead of PCs and five years ahead of Macs in terms of its
> audio/video capabilities and operating system. In fact, it
> was the first true "multimedia" computer, years before that
> word was even invented.

Actually, the word "multimedia" appeared as early as 1962 according
to Webster's.

The Amiga was indeed ahead of it's time. There were, however, in the
mid 80's other (albeit spendy) solutions for modern graphics and video
that were found in those TV facilities that could afford them. The 80's
was quite explosive in this regard. Many of these solutions were closed
operating systems designed only to support the job of the included hardware.
Obviously, a lot has changed since then.

The first "multimedia" system was developed by Paul Nipkow, a German, who in 1884 at age 24 developed the first video disc. Nipkow combined his video disc with Guglielmo Marconi's radio components yielding the Nipkow system, which endured well into the 1920's as the standard for research.<P ID="signature">______________
Electricity is really just organized lightning.
~George Carlin</P>

 

[westlife]

Re: History of multimedia

> The Amiga was indeed ahead of it's time.

Please use apostrophes correctly. "It's" is a contraction for "it is". The word you intended to use, "its", is the possessive form of "it". Sorry to be a nit-pick, but today I saw a sign advertising "Christmas Tree's" and that helped to provoke my annoyance with people who fail to grasp the basic concepts of English spelling and punctuation.

Anyway, I would be remiss to mention that while the Amiga found widespread use in animated graphics and video, one similarly powerful home computer which also hit the market in 1985 found widespread use in music production: the Atari ST series, which was the first personal computer with built-in MIDI inputs and outputs. The ST and its successors (including the STe, Mega STe, TT, and Falcon) found its nice in music production, just as the Amiga found its niche in video production.

Atari quit the computer business in 1993 to focus their efforts on the Jaguar, which was the world's first 64-bit video game system. However, Atari's Jaguar was quickly overshadowed by the introduction of the Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation in 1995, and it was cancelled in 1996. Following numerous sales and mergers, Atari has only recently introduced a "new" video game system: a budget-priced re-release of the classic Atari 2600, with a collection of built-in games.
<P ID="signature">______________

"This is the New York Emergency Broadcast System satellite channel. They took the crosstown bus."</P>

 

[Andy_Brown]

ST

> Anyway, I would be remiss to mention that while the Amiga
> found widespread use in animated graphics and video, one
> similarly powerful home computer which also hit the market
> in 1985 found widespread use in music production: the Atari
> ST

The ST was my first personal computer.

> > The Amiga was indeed ahead of it's time.
>
> Please use apostrophes correctly. "It's" is a contraction
> for "it is". The word you intended to use, "its", is the
> possessive form of "it". Sorry to be a nit-pick, but today
> I saw a sign advertising "Christmas Tree's" and that helped
> to provoke my annoyance with people who fail to grasp the
> basic concepts of English spelling and punctuation.

Sorry we can't all be as perfect as you.

>found its nice in music production, just as the Amiga found its niche

nice? you meant "niche" ... see, you got it right the second time
at the end of the sentence. Or maybe you just didn't read the paragraph
you copied and pasted into your post as close as you should, according to
yourself, that is.

ROFLMAO
<P ID="signature">______________
Electricity is really just organized lightning.
~George Carlin</P>

 

[RadioMan203]

> >
> > Back On subject. If your staying with Radio.. stay with a
>
> > Windows based PC.
> >
>
> You will not find a full featured broadcast automation
> software for a Mac. The closest thing would be a Moble DJ
> software called Megaseg and its not really geared towards
> Radio Broadcasting. Mac lacks in that area so a PC is your
> best bet for broadcast automation (even if windows has its
> moments)
>
> Mac's are popular with high end audio production folks
> though and TV as people have said here, and I notice a lot
> of bands carry a Apple Powerbook with them and not a PC. It
> just all depends.
>

Simply put, there are strengths and weaknesses with both platforms. That being said, this is what I've discovered:

For those of us who do heavy duty production (or, in my case, heavy duty restoration of vinyl sourced material) the Mac is far superior to various flavors of Windows. As far as traffic and on-air automation goes I'll gladly use a Windows-based system. I use several different automation systems and I don't think you'll find comparable software on the Mac.

 

[Oldbones]

Re: sounds like sour grapes

> What you fail to acknowledge is the cost of operating a
> Wintel machine with it's susceptability to many problems
> Macs are just plain immune to this.
>
> Not to mention that some of the most popular windows
> programs were originally developed (some by Microsoft) for
> the Mac.
>
> Not to remention the fact that it isn't politics to say
> independent organizations have voted Apple's customer
> service/tech support the best in almost every category.
>

So why then is the Mac's market share under 5% and falling? I question your statement that Macs are "immune" to viruses, etc...wouldn't you say that given their nearly insignificant numbers few if any hackers want to be bothered with them?

Agreed that the users that have them really love them, but it's more of a cult following. If not for the Ipod, how long would Apple be around?

 

[Andy_Brown]

Re: sounds like sour grapes

> So why then is the Mac's market share under 5%

Apple doesn't try to compete in all computing market segments. You may as well critique sports cars or riding mowers for not having the same marketshare as SUVs.

>and falling?

Not.

Apple Computer's market share of the U.S. computer market climbed to 4.3% in the September quarter, according to market research firm IDC. That's an increase from 3.3% from the year-ago quarter. Apple was the number five vendor in the U.S. market, behind Dell, HP, Gateway, and Lenova (formerly IBM's PC division), and the company showed a steeper climb in U.S. unit sales, 44.6%, than any other company in IDC's report.

> I question your statement that Macs are "immune" to viruses,
> etc...wouldn't you say that given their nearly insignificant
> numbers few if any hackers want to be bothered with them?

First off, even a small market share is not "insignificant" in terms of raw numbers. As far as the immunity to viruses, trojans, etc. the facts are out there and they all point to weaknesses in the Windows code. Microsoft is the champion of cutting corners, and especially putting software out in the mainstream before it's really finished. The vulnerability of their product is their own fault. If you really believe what you wrote, you are very uninformed with respect to the facts, and just regurgitating stale anti-Mac rhetoric.

> Agreed that the users that have them really love them, but
> it's more of a cult following.

> If not for the Ipod, how
> long would Apple be around?

People like you have been repeating this kind of baseless rhetoric for years. The death of Apple has been predicted so many times, yet they are still here and flourishing. As the industry changes, so do the players. In those fields where you find Apple machines (media creation: hardly a cult industry, education: hardly a cult industry, scientific research: hardly a cult industry) you find high productivity and copious amounts of satisfaction with the Mac platform.

Do some fact checking before you post any more drivel, especially if you want me to comment on it.


<P ID="signature">______________
Electricity is really just organized lightning.
~George Carlin</P>

 

[westlife]

> As far as loading the Mac OS X on a PC, Apple and Intel both
> have said there will be no way the Mac OS will run on
> anything other than the specific CPU/chip sets that Apple
> uses in its machines.

Although I'm not sure why all the Mac clones died out in the late '90s, the Power Computing PC on my desk is testament to the fact that Mac OS -- or at least pre-X versions of it -- can run perfectly on a non-Apple machine.

<P ID="signature">______________

"This is the New York Emergency Broadcast System satellite channel. They took the crosstown bus."</P>

 

[RockManAC]

> Although I'm not sure why all the Mac clones died out in the
> late '90s, the Power Computing PC on my desk is testament to
> the fact that Mac OS -- or at least pre-X versions of it --
> can run perfectly on a non-Apple machine.

Apple bought NeXT and Steve Jobbs came back to the company. He was against the clones so he put a stop to it. Plus, Apple bought Power Computing.

I once did a network of Mac clones. The budget was something like $10,000. The options ended up being the clones or el-cheapo PCs but the PCs would have required purchasing all new software and training everyone how to use them. The office was already running on Mac Centris 650s and Mac Pluses so it made more sense to use the Mac clones. IIRC we bought 4 clones and then recycled a couple of the 650s to "light duty" machines (ex: the secretary since all she did was run Word)

-A <P ID="signature">______________

</P>

 

[westlife]

> I once did a network of Mac clones. The budget was
> something like $10,000. The options ended up being the
> clones or el-cheapo PCs but the PCs would have required
> purchasing all new software and training everyone how to use
> them. The office was already running on Mac Centris 650s
> and Mac Pluses so it made more sense to use the Mac clones.
> IIRC we bought 4 clones and then recycled a couple of the
> 650s to "light duty" machines (ex: the secretary since all
> she did was run Word)

Since Apple hung onto the same 680x0 chips for so long, a lot of pre-OS X software for Macs is highly backward-compatible. I bought a Mac LC (16 MHz 68020 chip) for $2.00 at a flea market and just for giggles, I took the hard drive out of my PowerMac 8100 (110 MHz PowerPC 601 chip) and plugged it in. Viola! The same exact installation of Mac OS 7.6.1 booted right up on the old LC, automatically and flawlessly detecting all the differences in hardware between the two machines. I could even run Microsoft Office on the LC without any trouble. Of course everything ran much more slowly, but it was still surprisingly acceptable, and I never got any error messages, except for a few newer applications which were designed to only run on PowerPC-based Macs.

In the PC world, this would be equivalent to taking the hard drive out of a Pentium machine and trying to use it in a 286. In that case, you probably wouldn't even be able to get it to recognize the hard drive, let alone boot from it, because of major hardware and BIOS differences between the two platforms. And even if you could get the hard drive to work, Windows 9x refuses to boot on anything less than a 386.
<P ID="signature">______________

"This is the New York Emergency Broadcast System satellite channel. They took the crosstown bus."</P>