Mactallica versus Megadell

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

There's no basic computer thread and, since I'm on the market right now, it's in my interest to create one.

As with almost every time when it comes to buying a new computer, I'm pondering giving Mac a go for the first time (first time as owner, that is - I've used them a fair bit).

What do y'all think? As far as I can make out, the argument basically boils down into one major for Mac (supposedly give decent performance for more years) and one major for PC laptop (significantly cheaper for equivalent specs). That is presuming, as is my case, that software compatibility, etc., isn't an issue.

I'm looking at a MacBook Pro which would set me back €2450 (including a university staff reduction). I could get slightly better specs (i9 rather than i7, 1TB rather than 500GB) with, say, a Dell and for about €200 less. So, then what it comes down to is somewhat anecdotal evidence that, 4+ years out from now (i.e. after support warranty has run out), the Mac will perform better for longer because of better build and design quality.

The joker in all this (for me anyway) is Sepultunix; I'm fairly convinced that if I had the free time to really get familiar with how Ubuntu, etc., work, then I could get a win laptop to work beautifully for many's a year. But I don't have that time.

Anyway, royal rumble geeky metal folks; pick up your chairs and desks and throw your weight in here!

[Juggz]

What do you actually need it to do?

I use Windows 10 on a 6 year old laptop (it was a decent spec (i7, SSD, 16gb RAM) 6 years ago, it might actually be older than 6 years now that I think of it), which started out with Windows 7 and I upgraded to 10 when it came out. I use this for general day to day shit like internet, videos, DVD, music and it gets patches and updates and it still perfectly fine. I see no reason to replace it for at least another 5 years unless the hardware shits itself.

I also have a PC I built a few years ago (i7, SSD, 16gb RAM) with Win 10 on it which I use just to run ProTools. I never connect to the internet as it does exactly what I want it to do now and I have no need or desire to change anything about it, so no patches or upgrades or anything else. There isn't a reverb calculation big enough to knock it.

Windows is fine if you can avoid filling it up with shite you don't need. I think a lot of the bad reputation comes from a few areas - Windows ME, 8, etc, there have been some shit releases but Windows 10 is bang on. People tend to buy cheap, shit laptops which Tesco, Harvey Norman, etc sell and then complain about the performance of Windows when, really, they're just running Windows on cheap, outdated and underspec'd machines. Apple don't sell hardware which will make their software look bad. Microsoft don't have that luxury. More often than not, a Windows laptop comes crammed full of resource-hogging shit software nobody needs which the hardware manufacturer is paid to include so they can lower the price. These are the Windows problems.

If I were buying today, I would go with a fuck-off spec Windows system and the first thing I would do is erase the drive and install a clean MS version of Windows 10. Disclaimer, I work in IT, primarily Windows server support, so I am very familiar with Windows going back to the 90's. When I was studying sound engineering there was a lot of pressure to adopt Mac but I didn't see any reason to, there were no real performance or stability benefits over a decent Windows system other than being able to say "Brah, you're not using a Mac? OS X, brah, OS X!"

To compensate, and to show I am not anti-Apple, I do use an iphone.

I tried Ubuntu for a while, not worth the hassle.

[Ducky]

More or less what Juggz said (bar the iPhone bit, yuck! ).

If you're just using it for office work, even a mid-spec Windows setup would see you good. I paid €750 for a Dell laptop 10 years ago (a third gen - I think - i5, 1Gb ATI graphics card, 4Gb of RAM) It is built like a tank (the battery is long dead and I replaced the screen myself because I dropped it) and I can still use it for basic office stuff, data and media management.

I haven't felt the need to replace it (I'm a "use until it breaks - then try to fix" kind of guy), but if I did I'd absolutely go for Windows again, preferably with a custom built desktop PC - that way you can upgrade the bits that need to be upgrade instead of the whole kit and kaboodle.

Personally, Apple is too "handholdy". A lot of the features of iOS feel like they're tailored to people that don't want to use a computer without so much as a cursory know-how and when shit goes wrong the default position is to pay someone to fix it, rather than dig in yourself.

[pete]

I went MacBook for my personal laptop about 7 years ago, having never used a Mac before that. Have really enjoyed using them since.

Currently have the MacBook 12inch. The track pad, sleep/wake, battery life and how well the hardware and software work together is fantastic. (Going by reviews, Microsoft are still not quite there with the Surface lineup?). 

Not sure what you will be using it for but as a software developer it's great using it as it is UNIX based. Working with Docker / Ansible is a pleasure and even with things like NodeJs / Spring Boot - chances are if you're cloning some project from Github the person at the other end was using a unix based OS. And it's more popular in the cloud computing space too with AWS etc

[pete]

Personally, Apple is too "handholdy". A lot of the features of iOS feel like they're tailored to people that don't want to use a computer without so much as a cursory know-how and when shit goes wrong the default position is to pay someone to fix it, rather than dig in yourself.

Apple's laptops use macOS not iOS - so you wouldn't have the locked down issue that you would with iOS.

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

I have never owned a computer I didn't feel crapped out on me too soon, and they were all Windows based, except for one custom build laptop (the one I'm on now) which I bought without OS, installed Ubuntu on, which I ran for about a year but eventually swapped for Windows because it was giving me software headaches that used to take days of research to surmount. The laptop's been painfully slow for two years now, but that's been kind of okay because I've been in work so much using the PC there. Basically, I've never gotten more than 4 years of decent life out of a computer; I've never bought super cheap (I used to work for Dell, so two of them came from there), but nor have I ever bought super expensive either, always a solid build though, just never the top of the range gen in chip or graphics card.

What I need it for is work, which involves lots of basic usage stuff, but also data crunching, plotting, etc., via Python and with not enormous but large data sets.

[Pedrito]

What do you actually need it to do?

Is wanking to porn an incorrect answer? 

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

There are no wrong answers, just wrong people :p

[pete]

I think Apple offer 14 day return for any reason. see here https://www.apple.com/ie/shop/campaigns/shipping-and-returns it mentions "Return any product for any reason". Might be worth asking a local Apple Reseller if they offer it.

Two weeks trial of it might suit you if it was easy to do?

[Yung Led Zeppelin]

In a similar position there myself, serendipitous thread.

Have no allegiance in terms of systems (imagine getting football-fanboy level over fucking tech firms lads, I'm really not interested in that discussion) and able to get either for similar price. Comfortable using either and my work is generally compatible with both as is, but the trackpads etc on the new MacBooks are the tits, having tested a few. They're very nice to use, in my limited experience.

BUT, and it's a big but, there seems to be no definitive answer as to whether the big issues with audio and audio devices caused by the T2 security chips have been sorted. Some people on forums claiming they've had no issues and some still swearing against them. Grand, but I can find fuck-all official info on Apple from the matter, so I'm wondering have people working with audio just been avoiding these altogether and thus the lack of info? It's a dealbreaker for me as that'd be my primary use for it, and it seems like there's a level of ambiguity around it.

If anyone has experience with these newer (2019+) MacBooks in an audio/music application, do shout. If it generally behaves that's good enough for me.

[hellfire]

The main advantage for Mac is audio and video editing. Otherwise i would go for a Lenovo thinkpad. Linux Mint or Ubuntu are great, but I'd check to make sure that all the software you need is available on them. Playing games on Linux is a hassle a lot of the time. I would go the lesser money option really, but it's up to you. If you go with Mac, you're basically using Unix anyway. From the command line it looks a whole lot like FreeBSD.