[Germanicus]

I used the search function and there were some threads that somewhat touch on this issue but they are several years old and don't explicitly tackle the debate about Mac vs PC technology. So I figured I'd make a thread dedicated to that exact topic. I also figured Lifestyle was a good place for this topic as choosing which brand to use is a kind of a lifestyle choice.

So I'm needing to buy a new laptop. My i5 Asus is approximately five years old and on its last legs. Up until about 3 months ago it was running very well. I've done what maintenance I've could but now it's like an elderly man slowing succumbing to death before my eyes. It might survive to 2017 but definitely not much longer than that. To replace it I'm leaning on getting another Asus but I started thinking maybe now is a good time to jump ship and buy an Apple laptop. I don't know much about Apple computers.

My intended uses would be a lot of multitasking-- using a word processor with two or three documents open while web surfing with up to 20+ tabs, Youtube vids and/or music playing in the background etc. The old Asus handled that with no effort and no slowdowns. I play few games and definitely nothing of the newer stuff-- Civ 4/5 and a few older military strategy games. Hearts of Iron 3 is the "latest" game I own and even then, I'm not playing any of them more than once in a blue moon. There is a way to run them on Mac OS? If not, that wouldn't be a deal breaker.

My choices:
1) an 12GB Asus, 15.6 inch screen, 1 TB HD with an AMD FX 7500 chip in it for $800 Canadian.

2) an 8GB Asus, 15.6 inch screen, 1 TB HD with an i7 6500U chip in it for $900.

3) Some sort of Macbook. Generally 8GB with 13.3 inch screen, 128- 256GB SSD and varying in price between $1200 - $1600 Canadian between the various models depending on exact specs and Air or Pro versions. The 15.6 inch screen Macbooks start at $2500 but I ain't biting at that price.

Cons against Apple:
Price-- I'm trying to keep costs low. I can afford the extra payment for the Macbook, but I would grumble. I'm all about value for money, though. I hear Apple has better longevity and if I could expect a solid 5-7 year run out of it I wouldn't grumble.

SJWism -- I'm somewhat reluctant to hand money over to Apple CEO and leftist narrative, anti-gun, open borders advocate Tim Loves Cock, I mean Tim Cook.

I have a bad track record with Apple products -- Years ago I had a classic 80GB iPod and an iPhone 3GS. The iPod randomly refused to play about half of my audio book files I loaded on to it for no apparent reason. The iPhone mysteriously up and died 3 days past its 365 day warranty and Apple customer support told me too bad and they wouldn't do anything for me. That didn't exactly endear me to the company.

So what's my best bet? Is the Macbook worth the extra money? And if I go Apple is Apple Care worth the extra money on top of that?

And after you've answered my question feel free to use this space to continue on the debate of PC or Apple being the better tech.

[jibj]

apple is better, not b/c it can do more, but b/c the company respects your privacy. I've read on multiple sites that windows 10 is a giant personal information sucking machine, even if you try to toggle the settings to maximize privacy.
you can run parallels or other programs on mac that will let you run windows programs that are not made for apple as if they are native programs. The only time when you need to go windows over mac is if you are a hardcore gamer. I also dislike the sjw-ism of apple, but that's better than the corporate privacy invasion of windows.
bottom line, both computers do pretty much anything you need them to (unless you have specialised needs), but macs are nicer, overall more enjoyable to use with a better warranty.
Applecare is a very low cost high quality insurance that is a must buy. The customer service is great.

[storm]

Anything made in the last five years with 8gb+ ram and an SSD will do it for you germanicus. Yes you can do all of the things you described on mac os. The game you describe will run on any Intel CPU even without a graphics card so long as it is a i5/7 - 5xxx or newer, even on mac.

I would recommend you stick with the os you know and spend minimal time on learning a new system because it is easy to spend 200+ hours (I.e. more than a month of typical work) learning a new os.

[TonySandos]

I have a Surface 3 tablet and a Compaq laptop. I bought the Compaq in 2009. If I didn't make the mistake of leaving it in the care of an irresponsible person, it would be running near new today. It was running near new and fast until 2014. The problem is that it's practically split in two pieces. The screen is peeling away from the back, the top and bottom are only connected by wiring and the battery and hard disk were damaged in this persons care also. I believe it was crush under furniture. Surprisingly still it boots and runs to a decent degree.

I highly recommend the Compaqs. A handful of friends have one, the rest have Asus, Acers or Macbooks. All last very well, but the Acer is the cheapest route in quality I believe. All of these last longer than Dell's and HP's other builds. Based on what I've seen first hand and from asking acquaintances about their CP/Asus/Acer systems, it seems Compaq and Acer last longer with less maintenance.

Panasonic, Gateway, Toshiba, Sony, Samsung? I don't know about these brands. Most of the folks I know are very good at making frugal purchases and haven't explored these brands. Do not buy Lenovo. It's always trash as everyone I know that bought one was shortly buying a replacement. I think Toshiba and Sony might be worth looking into.

As for the benefits of the 3 dependable systems I mention:
HP pushes down free software upgrades for any system it's software is installed on.
Microsoft does similar practices. I've been granted all of Microsoft's latest office products (free until 2019) and over a year of 100+GB cloud storage for buying one of their later systems recently (my tablet).
You can spend less than $600 on a Compaq and still know you have a state of the art system. Maybe you want a higher graphics care or larger accessible memory. All that would cost is around $100 more if you didn't already get it with your initial purchase. HP is really good about low pricing for up to date equipment. My laptop purchase was just under $400.


Now on Apple.
I've owned four iPhone devices (the first, 3, 4, 4c). One thing that always disappointed was no matter how quickly you bought the device, how much money you shelled out for extra add-ons or how many programs you installed on it; there's just a lot of things it can't do when it comes to the internet or utilizing specific non-Apple programs that are most used in the business world. I asked my Apple owning associates about these problems being encountered on platform systems that Apple puts out. Their answers where that you either can't, or you have to risk corrupting your system by installing freeware programs made by amateurs. The simply answer is that Apple products face a lot of solid walls when it comes to versatility on the net and in using familiar programs and applications all for a supposed bolstered immunity against viruses that's declining as Apple has become more popular. Apple spies on you as much as Google. Read their end user agreement in full and you'll see what I'm saying. These arguments may be measured and disputed, but they don't manage to out shine Microsoft based systems when you compare the large prices of Apple products over the many options of Microsoft systems.

[chicane]

I run Linux, so either would work for me. I'm sort of looking for a new notebook, my 6 year old netbook is reaching end of life. It's an ASUS and it has provided excellent service.

I suggest buying something that you can easily upgrade the memory and disk/SSD in. That rules out Macbooks. 8GB should be plenty of RAM for the next year, but you want to be able to upgrade and recommend something that can be upgraded to 32GB. A smallish SSD is fine for now, the prices are dropping steadily and in a couple of years you should be able to upgrade so something 4x the size.

I also run Fedora for a desktop, I like it a lot better than Ubuntu. I'm using Xfce for a window manager because my netbook is old and slow, you would probably be happier with Gnome or KDE (I'm a KDE fan).

[Cattle Rustler]

Dude Frys is running a sale on RAM, 16GB for 50 bucks for 8GB for $30....it's cheaper to upgrade and your laptop will put out for another 2 years.

I'm tempted to buy 32GB RAM for 100 bucks for the fuck of it, it's so cheap.

[XPQ22]

Wipe Windows, install Linux, and never look back.

My main laptop is a $299 Acer Celeron N2840 dual core, with 4GB RAM and a 250GB SSD, running Xubuntu. It can do 20 tabs plus word processing, Spotify, etc. no problem.

It's very light, I take it everywhere and it's had the shit beaten out of it because I'm kind of clumsy - it's had its back panel cracked, LCD smashed, keyboard wrecked. The replacement parts for all those wasn't more than $50 on eBay; everything's easily replaceable. It's basically indestructible.

[Touchmybanana]

^^ I will do exactly this. I am in the same dilemma with the OP. I need a mac or linux os but Mac is expensive.

@xpq22 do you recommend any link on how to go about removing windows and installing linux. i know about dual booting window + Linux but not removing windows entirely. Did you have speed issues? Like freezing, tabs taking time to load etc

[TonySandos]

XPQ brings up an important point;

If you want to stay with the times on processing power after a few years, getting something with 4GB of RAM or more is essential. I'd say go above 4 if you can. I'm running 2GB on a powerful core system right now and I only see limitations when running specific programs or pages at the same time. In a few years the limitations of this low RAM will catch up, but I have plans to buy faster hardware before it becomes a burden.

Sidebar- does anyone have strange speed issues when browsing twitter? I can game on the internet while having web pages open AND in voice chat without issue. Any ideas?

[roberto]

I'm not sure I'd expect modern Apple stuff to last 7 years, although it has in the past for me. Would be technically outdated after 7 years for sure, although it may still do what you want. For me Apple just works, and I curse every time I have to use a cheap Windows laptop.

The Apple stuff holds it's value. Example using UK prices- base Macbook Air £750. After three years if you look after it (and at the end of the warranty period) it's still worth £400.

[Leonard D Neubache]

Apple are pricks. Don't reward them burning you by giving them more money.

I mentioned this in the everything-else thread.

Ever since my Windows7 laptop downloaded the "constantly nag you to install Windows10" update my processing speed just went to crap, to the point I started believing that these updates were deliberately lagging out my machine in order to force an upgrade.

I installed Linux (Zorin Lite) and wouldn't you know it, my crappy old laptop is booting up in the blink of an eye and doing everything I used to expect of it.

The best way to give Zorin or one of the other alternative operating systems a try is to make a boot disk on usb stick. You'll be able to run Zorin from that USB stick (2GB minimum, like you can find smaller these days anyway...).

Run your machine from the boot disk without deleting Windows straight up. This will allow you to check that it recognises your network card, drivers etc before taking the plunge. My only mistake was nuking Windows without first learning the minor variations on how to use the new OS, but as long as you can open a web browser then you can learn how to use linux on the fly. Zorin is pretty easy. A tad more ugly than Windows but who cares.

Options for making boot disks on USB sticks can be found here.

http://unetbootin.github.io/

Even if I bought a new machine I wouldn't use Windows.

[The Black Knight]

I would visit http://www.wirecutter.com and read their laptop reviews as a starting point.

When it comes to laptops, I find the specific model and not the brand matters much more. You want to focus on that specific model and read as much as you can about it on various forums and review websites. You will see with some consistency with problems/issues that are mentioned if there are any.

Seems like every brand has good models and shit models.

That said, the Dell XPS 13 is fairly popular these days and fits what you are looking for. It's basically the Windows version of the Macbook Air and is $200-300 bucks cheaper.

Something to keep in mind if powerful gaming matters is Thunderbolt 3 and eGPU (external graphics) capabilities. Dell owns Thunderbolt 3 and my hope is that they enable TB3 ports on their laptops (via BIOs updates) to run eGPUs in the very near future. It has been a few months since I've looked into this stuff so you need to investigate if your particular model can run a eGPU unit or not. Basically, a eGPU allows you to use a full sized graphics card with a laptop. This is very new tech in the retail space so keep in eye on it if its something that matters to you.

[Valentine]

Highly recommend Lenovo ThinkPads. You can buy $1500 laptops for ~$300 used on Amazon and they're brilliant.

Super easy to upgrade e.g. I upgraded mine to 8GB RAM and added a second SSD in less than 5 minutes.

Also fast, cheap and they have military-grade durability.

Regarding OS I still use Windows 7 and may use it until security updates stop in 2020, but likely at some point when I get some free time I'll switch to Linux before then.

[XPQ22]

(08-03-2016 12:21 AM)Touchmybanana Wrote:  

@xpq22 do you recommend any link on how to go about removing windows and installing linux. i know about dual booting window + Linux but not removing windows entirely. Did you have speed issues? Like freezing, tabs taking time to load etc

The installer for most Ubuntu distributions is pretty sophisticated, it will give you the option on install on how you want to set up the partitions on the drive and what to format, or if you want to install Linux alongside an existing Windows installation.

The only tricky situation is if you wanted to install Linux alongside a pre-existing Windows installation when it's installed on a RAID array; I don't think that's supported out of the box.

Doing a full format of the primary partition will assuredly wipe Windows from the machine...

On most modern laptops you'll also either need to disable the "Secure Boot" feature in the BIOS or add a security certificate to install a Linux distribution successfully:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/627416/ac...-dual-boot

For just everyday browsing/work I don't have any speed issues. A cheap Celeron netbook runs the Windows 8 like a pig, but installing a lightweight Linux distribution like Xubuntu actually turns the machine into a useful computer. I have ~30 tabs open in Chrome right now, plus Spotify in the background and my email client, and it's not sluggish at all...with the SSD it goes from power on to a usable desktop in about 15 seconds.

You can do some light gaming on the integrated Intel graphics, something like Civ 4 should run fine, but for running modern games or doing something like audio production you'd definitely want a machine with better specs, at least an i7/whatever the AMD equivalent, graphics card, and more RAM. I don't really play PC games anymore, and for audio editing I use a custom desktop.

The browser does freeze occasionally, but that's usually due to misbehaving scripts on a page, and it's not like I recall Windows where a frozen application can take down your whole machine - you just use the keyboard shortcut to kill the process, reload the tabs from the session manager, and are up and running again in a minute. To my recollection a frozen application has never managed to make the whole system unrecoverable.

[MrFish]

I'm using a MacBook Pro right now for three reasons:

1) I fucking hate Windows
2) Linux does not support all software and peripherals
3) my employer pays for it full

OS X is a shitty OS, but Windows is much, much worse in my opinion. I'd love to run a version of Ubuntu on a system I could easily upgrade, but after using Linux for 3 years I have to conclude that it's not ideal for desktop use. There are just too many pitfalls in regards to driver, software and peripheral support. I came close to compiling my own kernel a few times just to get my stuff to work. With OS X everything basically works out of the box.

That being said, I would never pay the ridiculous amount of money Apple asks for it's products. Even second hand they sell for way too much. It is, however, the best desktop experience I've had thus far.

My advice:
- If Linux does everything you need (do proper research in advance), go for that. i5, 8GB, SSD and decent video card will perform outstanding.
- If Linux does not suffice and you don't share my hatred for Windows get a i5 or better, 16GB, SSD and decent video card and be ready to completely reinstall everything a year later after your system gets insufferably sluggish.
- If you don't mind the crooked price to quality ratio Apple offers and just want the best, go for a MacBook Pro.

[evilhei]

I own both Macbook Pro and Dell Vostro. They are about the same price, Dell was 150 euros cheaper I think, bought both of them new. Well Dell is made from plastic, build quality is low, out of box some keys on keyboard werent working, Dell's touchpads have always been really bad. Windows itself is not that bad although not good for developers work. I have no issues with Macbook at all, everything works perfect. I wouldn't own Windows machine if SAP would have client for Mac.

[Space Cowboy]

I have an ASUS with an i5 processor. Great computer for a great price, but something that people will overlook is the keyboard. Unfortunately, this baby has one of the worst keyboards I've encountered and decreases the ease of use.

[The Beast1]

Neither, they're both different brands of screw drivers and do their jobs relatively the same.
I spend too much time getting them to do things I want, I don't have a personal preference.

[hydrogonian]

There isn't any reason Windows has to get sluggish over time if you regularly run a good cleaning program and delete any autorun programs that you don't need. I also think that running your OS on an SSD helps.

What usually gets me, though, is some type of virus. Like other computer repairs, I can estimate the amount of time until I'll get one. On average, it's once per year. That being said, I believe that the frequency is becoming less. Getting one always mandates a fresh install.

The primary issue with windows, for me, is the eroding privacy that had already been compromised long before Windows 10. I don't think that I will be able to bring myself to migrate over once support for older OS versions expires.

Linux is too rough for modern users to be anything but a secondary OS, in my mind.

That leaves Apple. I have no experience with it. When I eventually migrate to it, I'd like to be able to build a hackintosh.

Though, admittedly, modern processors (and maybe even routers) probably compromise your privacy to the degree that worrying over the OS is a futile exercise in any attempt to preserve it.

[XPQ22]

(08-03-2016 02:47 PM)hydrogonian Wrote:  

Linux is too rough for modern users to be anything but a secondary OS, in my mind.

If you haven't checked out one of the major Linux desktop distributions in the past couple years, I'd invite you to boot up from one of the USB key installers available - you can try it without installing anything. You might be pleasantly surprised how far it's come.

I feel no urge to go back to Windows or OSX at this point. There's a application called WINE for Linux that's an API translation layer so many native Windows applications will run fine, even faster than on the native OS in some cases.

For anything else you can always run a virtual machine. In fact, these days with a fast enough processor and SSD option, running Windows in a virtual machine on top of a lightweight Linux distribution all the time is a completely reasonable option if you're paranoid about security. Have the machine make "known good" images automatically every week, and if you have trouble just immediately revert to the image. All your work files remain safe, saved to a locked-down folder on the underlying OS.

Windows 7 is perfectly usable in a virtual machine under Xubuntu, even on a dual-core Celeron. Hell, you can even run a copy of OSX if you want.

[dispenser]

You get more IOIs using an Apple laptop in a cafe than using a PC.

Having said that, I use Ubuntu on a random PC laptop.
It does everything I need it to do - document stuff and internet browsing. The specialised apps are a little thin on the ground, though.

The only thing I miss is Photoshop, as opposed to the horror that is the GIMP.

[Cattle Rustler]

We should ask LINUX about what he thinks about Linux.

[kaotic]

Apple respects privacy ?



Yeah right.

Linux can be cool, you can also dual boot to Windows

I'm running Win 7 Pro - no updates. Fucking Windows 10.


Also:

Get an SSD HD for to install your OS. Install software that you use often on this drive.

Have a 1TB drive to store data and software you don't use often.

SSD load times are faster, I love my Samsung SSD.

[Mr. D]

I have a PC that's running a Maverick OSX.

[XPQ22]

(08-03-2016 03:14 PM)dispenser Wrote:  

You get more IOIs using an Apple laptop in a cafe than using a PC.

Oh good grief. Every twee hipster and wannabe "producer" sits around in Starbucks geeking out on their Macbook, nobody pays any attention. The iPhone is the most powerful cockblocking device ever made; I'd rather not give them a penny, simply on principle.

Go down the "prop game" line too far and before you know it you're this attention-whore:



I have actual work to do.