Mac or PC?

[Calico_Jack73]

PC

With VMWare Server (which is free by the way) I can use it to run any OS I want without having to rebuild the dang thing every time.

I'm a Windows System Engineer by trade so it kinda makes sense for me to stick with what I know. I'm running Vista Ultimate at home and haven't had any problems with it. If I were to run into a problem I am far better equiped to troubleshoot it than if I had a Mac. The biggest reason though is that I'm a gamer and until games start hitting the Mac first and then releasing to PC years later I'll stick with my PC.

 

[Merkuri]

With VMWare Server (which is free by the way) I can use it to run any OS I want without having to rebuild the dang thing every time.

Oh, VMWare is a godsend! I use it at work all the time so that I can have any version of our software at my fingertips when customers call to ask about older pieces I'm not familiar with. Plus I can do anything I want to them and just hit "revert to snapshot" to undo it.

Sorry for the thread derail. Back to your regularly scheduled Mac vs PC argument.

 

[Mercule]

I can't think of an easy answer. Only that overall, after several hours of use, I am less likely to be frustrated by MacOSX than Windows. It is even a pleasurable experience. Your mileage may vary, especially if you have been heavily trained under Windows. The workflows are quite different.

I think this pretty well nails it, with one addendum: Different people think in different ways.

When I was growing up, I worked on both Commodore computers and Apple II series machines. The little bit that I knew about IBM PCs gave me a pretty bad impression, so I avoided them.

When I went off to college, I was introduced almost simultaneously to DOS, VMS, Unix, and Mac, with Windows 3.1 following a couple years later. I had to learn some VMS and Unix just to get my email because the dumb-terminals were the only thing we could get at the dorms. DOS was (in my mind) very similar to those, because they all worked at a command prompt, though I found the DOS commands to be a bit more intuitive. I assumed I'd like the Macs because I'd always liked the Apple II computers in my high school.

Man, was I wrong. The way the interface was set up was just plain painful for me. It was downright non-intuitive for me. X-Windows and Windows 3.1 (with Norton Desktop) were both much easier to use, though 3.1 was slow enough that I still favored DOS over either Windows or Mac. I found Windows 95 to be much, much improved in usability and was a hands-down winner over the Mac UI, for me.

As I said before, though, I haven't seen the new OSX (or later). It's possible it'd kick XP/Vista butt. I doubt it, though. Over the years, I've just discovered that most of the things Apple does that its fans rave about just turn me off. I was just having a conversation last night about the wheel control on iPods and how clunky I think it is. Pretty much everyone else I'm aware of thinks the wheel is great, but I'll probably never own an iPod just because I hate the way it drives (though the new touch screens are a different matter).

It makes me a minority, and there's absolutely no logical reason for my preference. Still, I apparently just can't think like Steve Jobs (yes, I know he doesn't personally design the interfaces). Anyone who has ever managed a project or done brainstorming knows that people just think/work differently.

 

[Plane Sailing]

PC

With VMWare Server (which is free by the way) I can use it to run any OS I want without having to rebuild the dang thing every time.

Hey, that is news I didn't know about! I've been using the free VMware player, but VMWare server free will be excellent.

(goes off to download it)

Cheers