a Mac is no better (or worse) than a decent PC. Depends if you like OSX or Windows. Personally I prefer Windows (I have a macbook and a desktop PC).

Present PC has 8gb ram, quad core Phenom, windows 7. ATI Radeon HD5670 graphics.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-5670,2533.html this one? a $100 graphics card from 2010?

Bang in a modern graphics card and up the RAM to 16gb for peanuts and then clean up windows. Job done, spend the change on a nice groupset or something

Try a Mac before you commit. I just cannot get used to OSX at all-nothing makes sense to me and I just want to smash my mum’s iMac to pieces.

A new PC, spec’d out to the max for photo editing will imho destroy a Mac and you will be actually be able to do stuff like upgrade it. It will be cheaper too.

Agree as well a Retina display is not what you want for serious photo work.

Finally Win 10 is looking really nice and works supremely well even in its current beta guise.

I love snapping windows to screen edges,

Try Better Snap Tool. I can’t remember if it’s on the App Store but it’s a good addition to a Mac if you like the way Windows snap to the edge of the screen and size themselves. With Yosemite reducing the title bar size for grabbing and moving windows it also provides a neat “grab anywhere” solution.

Conclusion: PCs and Macs both can last quite some time if you take a little care of them.

In my experience it requires more regular maintenance to achieve this on Windows than a Mac.

As to the OP, do try and spend some time with a Mac to make sure you’ll get on with it. There’s lots to love but you may find “the Apple way” not to your liking. For example 3 years in with a Mac and I still think the OSX Finder (including save/open dialogues) a ball ache compared to Explorer in Windows. For my needs I have found myself using Google Drive more and more, largely due to the ease of use and cross-platform support. It’ll be interesting to see if iCloud Drive has caught up or whether Apple are still struggling in this arena.

I like my Mac because it looks nice and is a joy to use.

The argument that macs last longer than PC’s is an almost pointless, good quality PC hardware lasts just as long, cheap hardware does not – you pay your money…

Even arguing that Windows needs more maintenance is a subjective argument. I frequently come across very busy and important servers that were racked up 8-10 years ago running Windows Server 2003 (in effect XP). Sometimes I struggle to persuade IT managers they should be replaced – they are running their country wide point-of-sale system on something with less processing grunt than a modern smartphone on an out of support OS but their view is ‘it just works’.

Anyway back to the OP. Your machine is 4 years old and in effect a good desktop not a proper workstation. For a machine I earn money with I would invest in some new hardware, even after a fresh Windows 7 install and more memory a modern workstation (Mac or PC) would offer a lot more graphics and CPU grunt.

If you want to dabble with a Mac to start off with, look for a 2012 Mac Mini with a core i7 CPU. Those things are great, two drive bays and up to 16GB of RAM with a powerful 4 core/8 thread CPU.

Try Better Snap Tool. I can’t remember if it’s on the App Store but it’s a good addition to a Mac if you like the way Windows snap to the edge of the screen and size themselves. With Yosemite reducing the title bar size for grabbing and moving windows it also provides a neat “grab anywhere” solution.

Use BetterTouchTool instead. Same dev, but app is free, includes the basic window snapping which is all most would need, and has a 99 boatload more functionality.

http://www.boastr.net/

I had a look at Better Touch Tool when I got my Mac but for whatever reason went with the Better Snap Tool. I might give it another look. Cheers Jamie

For a machine I earn money with I would invest in some new hardware,

And do it every 2-3 years.
I sell my laptops on and lose very little as the VAT off and a discount means 27% cheaper for starters plus high residuals when selling on.
File sizes and camera sensors get bigger all the time so you need to be up to date to keep your working time down with no waiting time while a computer chugs away, when I did my last upgrade I gained about an hour a day with gains in read/write time and processing time.
People seem to go on about the costs of a mac but if that extra cost is eared in the first day of using it means it’s irrelevant, and having attempted to use my parents PC I don’t care you can self build one faster/cheaper because it’s an exercise in frustration.

I would get a maxed out retina15in from the refurb store and the best Eizo screen you can afford.

they are running their country wide point-of-sale system on something with less processing grunt than a modern smartphone on an out of support OS but their view is ‘it just works’.

Hmm I wonder what their merchant services provider is going to do next PCI scan time? Their processing costs are due to rise quite substantially.

I made the switch about 5 years ago when my windows PC finally gave up the ghost after about 3yrs and many rebuilds and many hours of maintenance to keep it chugging along with some level of usefulness. I got a base spec Macbook and it is still going strong 6yrs on, with absolutely no intervention from me in terms of maintenance or fixing it. In all that time its never frozen, crashed or got a virus (i’m not running any protection other than the OSX firewall). I’ve kept unto date with all the latest OSX updates and it has not negatively affected its performance other than boot up and shut down times, which are still a fraction of Windows 7 PC’s i’ve used. Granted i’m not doing anything particularly challenging with it, i’m certainly not video or picture editing.

So i’d say go for it but…..OSX works completely different to Windows. You have to completely re-learn. The intuitiveness is different to Windows and does take time getting used to. You can tweak it so it behaves more Windows like, but i personally wanted to learn the OSX way. It has pros- and cons relative to Window’s but on balance its pretty slick once you’ve got used to it.

To those who say why change, i’d say why not? Windows is not the only gig in town and has always been hugely flawed since day 1. It staggers me how people withstand such a poor quality product, if windows was a car you’d soon have dumped it back on the dealership forecourt and demanded your money back.

SO if you’re willing to pay the Apple premium then go for it. Actually though Apple products are expensive they do last so over time work out to be cost effective. I dread to think how many windows PCs i’d have got through over the last 6 yrs.

The argument that macs last longer than PC’s is an almost pointless, good quality PC hardware lasts just as long, cheap hardware does not – you pay your money…

Exactly this. Comparing a £1500 Mac to a £300 PC is apples and oranges, it’s an unfair comparison.

Even arguing that Windows needs more maintenance is a subjective argument.

Quite. I’m not really sure what this is referring to. Sure, older systems were clunky, but I do so tire of hearing arguments that were valid over a decade ago. XP came out in 2002, we’ve had three major releases since then and times have changed. Windows will auto-update if you let it, with the only user inconvenience being having to wait a little while once a month whilst patches install. Flash and Java, the two biggest causes of exploits, auto-update these days too, simply requiring a user to click ‘yes’ when prompted. Defrag is a scheduled system process. Many OEM systems come with their own update routines which will update the machine-specific software in a single pass. “Not installing any old shit” isn’t really an OS issue, it’s a user problem. Registry cleaners and their ilk aren’t necessary (and never have been) – your registry isn’t dirty, leave it alone. AV is integrated into the OS (from W8 onwards) and will update itself as part of Windows Update. Full reinstalls shouldn’t be necessary in normal usage unless you’ve got some sort of infection, and if you have it’s almost certainly because you’ve clicked on a phishing email, downloaded something scabby off a torrent site or not allowed the software to apply their updates.

In the six years I’ve owned this laptop, it’s been rebuilt twice; once to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7, and once more when I bought an SSD because I wanted to change from 32-bit to 64-bit Windows at the same time. In fact, technically that’s only once, the Vista upgrade was in-place rather than a wipe and rebuild. It didn’t even need rebuilding when the original hard disk failed; Vista was robust enough to cope with the multiple failures and hard reboots caused by bad sectors on the drive and survived a cloning to its replacement drive. The installation of XP on my OH’s desktop is easily ten years old. When I decommissioned its predecessor circa 2006 it was running the same installation of Windows 98 SE I’d built it with.

So what exactly is this time consuming maintenance, then? What the hell are you all doing to the poor things? I’ll concede that Macs may well be more intuitive or forgiving for users who aren’t particularly technical, I don’t really know as I’ve not really used one in anger but this seems to be what people assert. But I reject this prevailing attitude that some people seem to have where they wear their own ineptness like a badge of honour. Learn. You don’t have to become an engineer, but everything I’ve mentioned here is basic stuff, it’s not hard and the Internet is dripping with helpful people if you’re not sure. You wouldn’t jump into a car, stove it into a wall and then jump out laughing “oh, I know sod all about cars, me.” You don’t need to be a mechanic to take a few driving lessons and learn where you need to put the oil when the little orange light comes on.

And take **** backups.

But I reject this prevailing attitude that some people seem to have where they wear their own ineptness like a badge of honour. Learn. You don’t have to become an engineer, but everything I’ve mentioned here is basic stuff

I have had to use terminal once or twice (in 15 years of mac use) but at the end of the day what’s to learn? Just the basic folder structure and where the preferences live and how to trash them if needed plus what not to touch when digging around.
If you need to go beyond that then it’s like employing a builder v DIY sometimes it’s better to just earn the money and pay somebody to sort it.

@cougar

definitely agree with parts of that – especially about comparing a cheap PC with an expensive Mac. But i think other things you mention – like AV being incorporated into Win8 will have to take time to filter through. Anyone (like me) who migrated to OSX and felt a weight lifted off their shoulders will probably still imagine ‘Windows’ as being ‘Windows XP’, still asking you what type of encryption the wireless network you’re trying to connect to uses. Eventually people will start giving windows another chance, and maybe see the leaps and bounds in usability that it must have made? My only experience of Windows since XP was when my then-GF bought a brand new Lenovo with Vista which, about once a day, crashed so badly that you had to remove the battery to reboot it. So it will take time to rebuild people’s trust!

Can’t agree that ‘learning a bit of technical knowledge’ is such a minor thing though. The average non-technical user neither wants nor should need to know about file structure any more than a bus passenger needs to know about internal combustion. And some people just aren’t technically minded. I rapidly realised that I actively enjoyed not having to think about all these extraneous factors when i just wanted to write music. If you add in that a lot of people buy a Mac for work (like all the photographers in this thread!) then a day of figuring out a load of technical stuff effectively costs you a day’s wages. And nobody wants to pay that!

The simple fact is that Windows is so full of legacy support the code is a warren of inefficiencies and potential exploits. Apple had the guts to bin off all legacy support years ago, Microsoft still suffer from it today in Windows 8. This is what separates the two OS’s in my view, oh..and the fact that just about every Windows PC you ever buy from a high st retail outlet is subsidised by a ton of crap that has been installed that you do not need. I’m a total and utter IT expert me, binned Windows as soon as I could and will only ever run a unix kernel on my desktop or for my servers.

But I reject this prevailing attitude that some people seem to have where they wear their own ineptness like a badge of honour. Learn. You don’t have to become an engineer, but everything I’ve mentioned here is basic stuff, it’s not hard and the Internet is dripping with helpful people if you’re not sure. You wouldn’t jump into a car, stove it into a wall and then jump out laughing “oh, I know sod all about cars, me.” You don’t need to be a mechanic to take a few driving lessons and learn where you need to put the oil when the little orange light comes on.

x 100

As head of IT at my company (as well as my main duties) it is almost like people are being deliberately obtuse about their computers. They seem to refuse to take on board even the most basic tasks, despite the fact that they use computers 8 hours a day, five days a week. It’s a bit like a chef not knowing how to use a knife, or an oven.

Every day I have to answer questions like: “how do I move this file?”; What do I do with this “update” message I keep getting?”; “how do I find a previous version of a file?” etc etc.

and the fact that just about every Windows PC you ever buy from a high st retail outlet is subsidised by a ton of crap that has been installed that you do not need.

Mum mum bought a £1k Sony Vaio. She rang me almost in tears saying all she wanted to do was go online, but things kept wanting to update, trial offers of software kept popping up etc.

Sent it back to Sony, and ordered an iMac for £1k.

Plugged it in, turned it on, created an Apple ID, and opened Safari. Took about 5 mins.

…given that Sony has binned it’s laptop dept, temporarily at least, this may just be a Sony issue.

just about every Windows PC you ever buy from a high st retail outlet is subsidised by a ton of crap that has been installed that you do not need.

Yep but that’s not really the fault of the OS and not that hard to sort.

The simple fact is that Windows is so full of legacy support the code is a warren of inefficiencies and potential exploits. Apple had the guts to bin off all legacy support years ago,

A luxury you get when you are not supporting most of the world….

Mum mum bought a £1k Sony Vaio. She rang me almost in tears saying all she wanted to do was go online, but things kept wanting to update, trial offers of software kept popping up etc.

A classic example of someone not knowing basic computer skills. All that stuff is so easy to deal with a get rid of it’s ridiculous. Plus, it’s not the fault of the OS.

Anyone (like me) who migrated to OSX and felt a weight lifted off their shoulders will probably still imagine ‘Windows’ as being ‘Windows XP’

Sure, that was pretty much what I was getting at.

The average non-technical user neither wants nor should need to know about file structure any more than a bus passenger needs to know about internal combustion. And some people just aren’t technically minded.

No, but, I’d expect your average bus passenger to know to wait to let people off before boarding, how to pay, where to sit, which bus to get on to go where they need to go etc etc rather than clambering out of the window going “ee, I know nowt about buses me,” all proud of themselves.

Being technically minded is nothing to do with it. I have absolutely no problem with people not being technically minded, everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses; but some people just revel in their own incompetence, blaming the tools rather than wanting to learn how to use them effectively. Any other pastime, whether it’s driving or playing golf or knitting or whatever, people would expect a learning curve; they’d ask friends, get coaching, read guides, look up instructions on YouTube. Why is using a computer effectively any different? But no, some folk are happy just to sit there going “well, this is shit.”

If you add in that a lot of people buy a Mac for work (like all the photographers in this thread!) then a day of figuring out a load of technical stuff effectively costs you a day’s wages.

a lot of people buy a Mac for work (like all the photographers in this thread!) then a day of figuring out a load of technical stuff effectively costs you a day’s wages.

This is what I’m not understanding. What is there to figure out on a PC that there isn’t on a Mac? I can only assume that sitting in front of OSX for the first time isn’t wildly different from someone coming cold to (say) Windows 7. I should really give it a proper go myself at some point.

it is almost like people are being deliberately obtuse about their computers.

“It says ‘press Enter to continue’, what should I do?”

or the ever popular,

“I got an error message.” Oh, ok, what does it say? “I don’t know, I’ve closed it, I don’t understand that technical stuff.” Yes, but you don’t have to understand it, you just have to tell me what it says. You can read, can’t you? (is what I’d like to answer)

A classic example of someone not knowing basic computer skills. All that stuff is so easy to deal with a get rid of it’s ridiculous. Plus, it’s not the fault of the OS.

That as may be, but I was simply responding to this comment:

and the fact that just about every Windows PC you ever buy from a high st retail outlet is subsidised by a ton of crap that has been installed that you do not need.

I ain’t getting involved in this, predictably predictable, Apple vs Oranges vs PC vs Amstrad bunfight.

No, but, I’d expect your average bus passenger to know to wait to let people off before boarding, how to pay, where to sit, which bus to get on to go where they need to go etc etc rather than clambering out of the window going “ee, I know nowt about buses me,” all proud of themselves.

😀 This is the Mac’s strength – they cater for people like this. FOr most of the rest of us, they’re a total waste of money.

A couple of weeks ago a friend rang me in panic, after I’d Linuxed her netbook. Trying to unmount a pendrive but got “Volume is busy” warning. “But I’m not listening to music”, she explained.

rather than clambering out of the window going “ee, I know nowt about buses me,” all proud of themselves.

😆

Excellent! May I steal that one?

A couple of weeks ago a friend rang me in panic, after I’d Linuxed her netbook. Trying to unmount a pendrive but got “Volume is busy” warning. “But I’m not listening to music”, she explained.

That reminds me; years ago working in support I got a call from a woman who was both distraught and furious. She was demanding that we send a courier to collect her PC before the police arrived. Transpired, it was because it’d reported that “this program has performed an illegal operation.”

Excellent! May I steal that one?

Fill your boots.

That reminds me; years ago working in support

your view of how people should interact with their computers is therefore skewed, not everyone wants to work in IT or be able to fix and maintain computers to the level of an IT support worker.
to many they are just a tool that every now and again doesn’t function as it should so like a lot of equipment you turn it of and on again and if that doesn’t work you call somebody. (like an IT support person 🙄 )

not everyone wants to work in IT or be able to fix and maintain computers to the level of an IT support worker.

And I don’t expect them to. That wasn’t what I was getting at. I’m talking about the very basic skills (and not being all smug and proud and arrogant if you don’t have them). I wouldn’t expect every car driver to be able to strip down a carburetor but I would expect them to know how to put petrol and oil in it (and find out if they didn’t) rather than going “Fords are shit” the first time it runs dry.

You lot should search out the early keynote speech by Steve Jobs when he pretty firmly put down a room full of the sort of nerds who tell jokes about users who don’t know what a busy drive means. ( I don’t and I’m quite techy, suspect the average person doesn’t and doesn’t want to).
He basically told them if they were half as clever as they thought they were they would build machines that normal people could operate effectively.

Some of them got upset having nerd tantrums walking out etc and some stayed and built macs.

Maybe a daft question

but why haven’t more people come forth building hardware designed/capitalised to work with Apple OS?

surely a cheaper device running OS-X is an obvious niche?

Maybe a daft question

but why haven’t more people come forth building hardware designed/capitalised to work with Apple OS?

surely a cheaper device running OS-X is an obvious niche?

Because Apple won’t let you. They have tight control on the BIOS and will come after you if you copy it. A clean reverse engineer of the BIOS would be possible but very expensive. (I think)

As I understand it (and it’s not an area of expertise), OSX expects Apple hardware; conversely Windows is designed to run on any old cobbled together tat with help from third-party drivers and software. The strength of the Mac is that it’s a closed platform under full control of Apple, it’s the same as the iPhone / Android situation.

An OEM would have to build clone hardware which pretended to OSX to be something it wasn’t. By the time they’ve done that to the degree that the OS is stable, a) they’ll have spent a fortune and b) you’ll have defeated a big part of the point of having a Mac.

Arguably, if you want to run OSX on PC hardware, that’s what Linux is for.

A clean reverse engineer of the BIOS would be possible but very expensive. (I think)

… which is exactly how we have IBM PC clones now. The IBM BIOS was copyrighted, so teams of people worked out what it did without looking at the code and wrote their own code to do the same thing.

Conversely Apple do not sell their OS any more so it would be a nonsensical business model to make it open to any hardware. The argument is also that they have tighter control to ensure that it performs better, whereas put the wrong component/driver in a PC and windows performs like shite/crashes etc..

Thought Macs ran on the same intel chips as PCs nowadays? Or are there more differences?

Thought Macs ran on the same intel chips as PCs nowadays? Or are there more differences?

Same processors, and if you dig deep enough, same memory, i/o controllers, graphics chips, hard drives etc.
The difference is in the O/S (and BIOS).

Apple don’t permit OSX to run on non-mac hardware but you can do it:Hackintosh guide

Macs don’t have a BIOS exactly the same as a Windows PC as most of you are thinking of, they use a UEFI. If you are considering building a hackintosh you select components like an ASUS motherboard that has a UEFI and a UEFI enabled graphics cards. Windows 8 can also boot from UEFI so its slowly pushing out the BIOS of old.

As far as windows drivers causing crashes you are either thinking of the bad old days or are too keen and installing uncertified crap onto your systems. Even if you do the Windows kernel will no longer allow an unsigned driver to take down the whole system. I haven’t seen a BSOD due to a driver issue since switching from XP to Vista. Since then I’ve had more Kernel panics on OSX than I have seen BSOD on Windows machines, and the ones I have seen have been down to faulty or incorrectly inserted RAM chips.

clambering out of the window going “ee, I know nowt about buses me,” all proud of themselves.

heheheh nice
😆

Any other pastime, whether it’s driving or playing golf or knitting or whatever, people would expect a learning curve;

i think this gets to the heart of it though – for many, computing isn’t a pastime. The pastime is looking up their ancestry or photo editing or music making. And the computer is just a necessary evil, that at best offers very little resistance to this pastime, and at worst prevents them from doing the pastime until they have completed this learning curve.

but i couldn’t agree more about people who just panic and click on everything in sight. just stop it and read for a second!

a lot of people buy a Mac for work (like all the photographers in this thread!) then a day of figuring out a load of technical stuff effectively costs you a day’s wages.

This is what I’m not understanding. What is there to figure out on a PC that there isn’t on a Mac? I can only assume that sitting in front of OSX for the first time isn’t wildly different from someone coming cold to (say) Windows 7. I should really give it a proper go myself at some point. [/quote]

it’s not so much that it’s wildly different.

but from my own experience, I bought a 2nd hand music keyboard for my XP machine. Couldn’t get it to work properly. Downloaded drivers, reinstalled it, downloaded firmware, looked on forums, downloaded manuals, fannyed about with IRQs and control panel – nothing worked. Every few weeks I’d sit down and go “This time i’m gonna crack it” before wasting half the afternoon to no effect. Then i got a Macbook, plugged it in, and it worked straight away. I was like “this can’t be right – I haven’t “installed the new hardware device” yet!” All that time spent trying to make it work on the PC was just pointlessly lost working hours. i was a convert there and then.

that said, the way the apple walled-garden has been going these last couple of years (and the direction of Logic X), i am seriously gonna do some headscratching as to whether my next computer should be a mac or not….

Macs don’t have a BIOS exactly the same as a Windows PC as most of you are thinking of, they use a UEFI.

Ok, I’m learning now, so way can’t you sell a Mac clone if it’s just based around UEFI compatible bits?

Ok, I’m learning now, so way can’t you sell a Mac clone if it’s just based around UEFI compatible bits?

Well you can, but I wouldn’t give it very long before the letters threatening legal action appeared if you included a copy of OSX ‘hacked’ to run on non apple hardware.

– OSX does a check to see what hardware it is being installed on, if its not official apple the install will not proceed, if you stick a mac HDD in a PC it will refuse to boot all the way. To get it to run a couple of files have to be ‘modified’.