iMac or PC

Titus213 wrote in post #14399824
My desktop is a $900 i7 quad with 12 gig of memory.

My monitor is a $900 27 inch hi-res IPS panel.

They just happen to be in the same box and that box has an apple on the front.

When I got it I took it out of the box, plugged in the power, and within 10 minutes I was up and running on the internet. There was no un-ordered software to be deleted, no trial packages, no virus sales pitches, and no issues with transferring data from my PC. What was installed worked as advertised. And as a long time PC user that was more than enough to convince me that my move to an iMac was good for me.

When the new OS X Lion system came out I bought it online, downloaded it, and installed it. No reformatting my HD and no loss of data.

When my HD died it took the folks at the Apple store 2 days (one of those a Sunday) to get it fixed and back to me. It took another few hours to bring all the backup information in from my TimeMachine drive and I was back up to where I left off.

Are they trouble free? Get real, what is today? Expensive? Yup. Worth it? You bet!

I can honestly say that all of my Macs HAVE been trouble free (with the exception of one hard drive that needed replacing) and that had to do with someone else playing with the insides of my macbook and doing something incorrectly.

Macs are great...but you can build one if you know where to begin

AAphotog wrote in post #14399821
They last! yes, Mac might be twice as expensive, but when you have to trouble shoot the PC atleast twice in the first year while the Mac can be used without issue for YEARS to come, that alone is worth the hefty price tag.

Funny...I have used all my PC's for years and they never needed troubleshooting. I usually keep laptops around 5 years too. On my 3rd Dell and never a lick of trouble with them.

Numenorean wrote in post #14400401
Funny...I have used all my PC's for years and they never needed troubleshooting. I usually keep laptops around 5 years too. On my 3rd Dell and never a lick of trouble with them.

WOW! you better knock on wood. Thats the first time I've ever heard that

AAphotog wrote in post #14400415
WOW! you better knock on wood. Thats the first time I've ever heard that

No need to knock on wood. It's quite common as long as you don't buy the $299 Walmart special.

AAphotog wrote in post #14400415
WOW! you better knock on wood. Thats the first time I've ever heard that

Well here's you second time hearing it. PCs are a lot like cars: If you buy the cheapest one you can find and abuse the heck of it, it'll eventually break. If you buy a decent one and use it properly, it'll likely last for years.

I use Macs and PCs at both home and at work. I prefer PC's. Thats all it really is. Preference. Nothing more. The Mac vs PC argument is as futile as the Ford vs Chevy or Canon vs Nikon argument. There is no right answer. Everyone's mileage will vary based on personal experience.

To the OP I would say that if budget is an issue you will get more bang for your buck with a PC.

/typed on a MAC

One thing that I would advise if you do look at going with a PC:

I'd buy a Tower, and between the tower and the motherboard,make sure the tower has plenty of "space" for adding things like drives and I/O cards, and make sure the motherboard is "upgradeable" both as far as an OS goes and as far as things like the CPU and memory go. For example, we currently are using Win7, well, make sure that you can upgrade to Win8 (which is in Beta). And, whatever CPU you get now, make sure that your motherboard will support at least one level of upgrade.

For example, when I built a PC, gosh, somewhere 5-7 years ago, Vista had just came out, but I didn't trust it so would use XP. Quad core processors were out but very spendy.

So I went with the "known" and installed XP and a duo core processor, but I made sure that the motherboard would support a quad core processor anda 64-bit OS upgrade, including memory that would support it. Plus, I have enough drive bays so that I could have three internal hard drives and two DVD players (one R/W). And I have enough I/O bays to pretty much put whatever I want in there, switch things around, whatever.

So, over the past 1-2 years, I upgraded to a quad-core CPU, doubled the RAM, upgraded to Win7x64 (so I can now handle LR4), all costing much less than replacing the motherboard, box, etc would cost.

Oh, and make sure that you get a physical disk for your OS install. There are those occasions when, yes, you may need to troubleshoot a problem, and putting a bootable OS disk in there can pull you through unexpected problems.

I will second that, OEMs made PCs to different classes.....and totally for $299 what do you expect!

Funny to read some these comments about PC vs. Mac. whatever float your boat, want to pay top dollar for that Apple logo that's ok.

From what I experienced from my job and such, I mostly have conversations like" Mac Rocks and PC sucks...." from AVERAGE users, never heard that else where. I have been in Computer Engineering for 6 years now and this is just an honest testimony.....

I just hope we can accomplish something and help the person decide what machine to invest in, without brand loyalty or non sense arguments …..
Cheers guys!

mike_d wrote in post #14400863
Well here's you second time hearing it. PCs are a lot like cars: If you buy the cheapest one you can find and abuse the heck of it, it'll eventually break. If you buy a decent one and use it properly, it'll likely last for years.

Great advice!!!

tonylong wrote in post #14401050
One thing that I would advise if you do look at going with a PC:

I'd buy a Tower, and between the tower and the motherboard,make sure the tower has plenty of "space" for adding things like drives and I/O cards, and make sure the motherboard is "upgradeable" both as far as an OS goes and as far as things like the CPU and memory go. For example, we currently are using Win7, well, make sure that you can upgrade to Win8 (which is in Beta). And, whatever CPU you get now, make sure that your motherboard will support at least one level of upgrade.

For example, when I built a PC, gosh, somewhere 5-7 years ago, Vista had just came out, but I didn't trust it so would use XP. Quad core processors were out but very spendy.

So I went with the "known" and installed XP and a duo core processor, but I made sure that the motherboard would support a quad core processor anda 64-bit OS upgrade, including memory that would support it. Plus, I have enough drive bays so that I could have three internal hard drives and two DVD players (one R/W). And I have enough I/O bays to pretty much put whatever I want in there, switch things around, whatever.

So, over the past 1-2 years, I upgraded to a quad-core CPU, doubled the RAM, upgraded to Win7x64 (so I can now handle LR4), all costing much less than replacing the motherboard, box, etc would cost.

Oh, and make sure that you get a physical disk for your OS install. There are those occasions when, yes, you may need to troubleshoot a problem, and putting a bootable OS disk in there can pull you through unexpected problems.

There was a time when the Apple vs PC in image processing was a solid argument due to the architecture of the CPU. Back in the day Apple cpu has had more L2 cache to handle all the images so editing was much faster since the CPU could supply the person with data much faster. However, theses days there isn't a difference since both run on an Intel. Granted, now you can make the argument which OS handles images better in memory...Mac OS X or Windows or Linux. Again, I'd say it's negligible. You're better off building your own machine from scratch. I mentioned Linux since it offers gimp, though I am not familiar with the kind of support that's offered and the steps you go through these days to configure it. It used to be a headache to get gimp working on Linux --properly. In the end I'd say what which UI do you prefer?

Sorry if someone said this before...by the time I read all posts I'd forgotten everything people said

samir.b wrote in post #14406273
There was a time when the Apple vs PC in image processing was a solid argument due to the architecture of the CPU. Back in the day Apple cpu has had more L2 cache to handle all the images so editing was much faster since the CPU could supply the person with data much faster. However, theses days there isn't a difference since both run on an Intel. Granted, now you can make the argument which OS handles images better in memory...Mac OS X or Windows or Linux. Again, I'd say it's negligible.

That depends on the app and the resources used. For example, OS X has had OpenCL integrated since Snow Leopard and thus applications that use it gain a tremendous speed advantage because they can use the gpu, which often has dozens to hundreds of processing cores, to do work. Examples of this are Aperture and Pixelmator, which are substantially faster at certain tasks than are Lightroom and Photoshop. Certainly Adobe could write their apps to take advantage of FireStream or CUDA, but they seem slow to do so. I don't know if Win 7 has OpenCL built into it for access to the gpu for general computing.

Tony-S wrote in post #14406739
I don't know if Win 7 has OpenCL built into it for access to the gpu for general computing.

LOL are you trolling or are you serious?

I don't troll.

Then you obviously don't know enough to give advice on the subject.