The mac $$$

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renegadewill

renegadewill

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I was on fry's the other day and saw a hp with 3Gigs of ram and a 500gb hard drive for 450 bux. I went to look at the cheapest mac desktop at they start at around $1000 and are about half as fast and big as the pc. What is the mac magic that makes people buy them? I have had the same dell since 2001 and am still cutting and typing this thread on it. Yes, I have souped it up a bit, but it only has a gig of ram and is old enough to act like pentium 4 is a big deal. Why do people buy mac when pc's are cheaper and work fine. I have had a G5 mac pro lock up FCP a bunch, so what the big deal?
 
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This thread is dangerous.

In this industry a big part of it is FCP. If you want to use FCP you have to be on a Mac by default. I was a PC guy for years, never even imagining myself with a Mac, but two months ago I needed a laptop and wound up with a little MacBook. This thing rocks pretty hardcore, and I would put the user experience of OSX way above
any Windows OS (and I actually know what I am doing on Windows, if you are the average Joe User I think OSX would be even more appealing). That said, it comes with a steep price.

I would never buy a MacPro just because they cost so damn much. I have a four year old P4 I still cut on just fine. When I go HD later this summer, I'll drop in a new Mobo, CPU, and some ram and be running for significantly under a grand. I also don't mind getting under the hood and tweaking out XP so it flies, I enjoy that stuff but a lot of people don't.

Really they are just tools, some people work better on Macs and some work better on PCs.
 
It's only dangerous because some Mac users act like being a Mac user is a religion. It's a machine. It costs more and I'm personally agnostic on which OS is better. I like Vista, XP and OS X.

But for some of us, a Mac is a necessary tool. I use FCP out of both necessity and preference and it only runs on a Mac. So I use a Mac. It's that simple really.
 
I feel that same way I can cut on both and sufficiently run both, but the cost difference is too much to look past. I understand that pc may need more maintaence, but I maintain mine and it runs gloriously. I also understand that apple invented the firewire/cheap video editor, but they are not the only one out there. I dunno I have ran into to many people most are my close friends who seriously bought their mac books for the name. They don't use any form of ilife except itunes and they act like they are using their machine to their fullest ability. They coudl easil do all of their nonsense on a machine costing half of what they paid for their mac book. I also ran into a guy in my video production class that thought FCP gave you better cuts than Premiere. He was dead serious. I am not biased to either OS, but money is a big issue. Isn't money a big issue with most people?
 
They are not always inane, and it is an issue to a certain extent.

To the point. Poewer speed etc is a bit inane, you can proove the point either way. A PC mag did an article about the time Mac went Intel and the conclusions were that price was about even, when you compare copmerable machines. I also was a PC guy for a long time, switched because the app I needed only ran on the Mac (I do sound the app was ProTools). I felt the PC was a little like my old VW bus in that "the good news is it's easy to work on, the bad news is you have to work on it". I went through three or four motherboards quite a few CPU's, new card busses etc. It was very stable and I had no problems. My G3 B&W lasted me five or six years (a relative is using it now) and other than adding some RAM and a few harddrives I never worked on it at all. The only big plus I have for the Mac (well two) is that all of the ones I have had are SO MUCH quieter than any PC I ever owned, or have used. And if you do have to get into them it is very easy. Just plain better case design than any PC I have had experience with. But I moved for the app and would move again for similar reasons if they came up. Of course now one could just reformat the drive and install Windows and keep the nice and quiet Mac.
Use the box that runs the tools that you want to work with, it's not a religion.
 
PC Magazine also did a test that said the fastest Windows machine is a MacBookPro running Bootcamp. But these facts are all available to anyone who wants to take a little time to look them up. What I find inane are posts like the one above that say things to the effect that anyone who doesn't agree with me that [insert platform of choice] is better is talking "nonsense" or just has money to throw away.
 
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