We received the following in an email from Tino. It does not
represent the position of Low End Mac (duh!), but does represent a
common view of the Mac from the Windows side of the street. We believe
it's important to understand Windows users, not casually dismiss them
for having made the "wrong" choice. We will publish our response to
Tino's letter on Friday.
I read through the article PC Users
Are Not the Enemy, and I believe you have missed one thing that
makes PCs attractive to many. Choice. See until recently, Apple
hardware was limited. You basically got what Apple gave you, had
limited choices for things like 3D cards, graphics controllers and SCSI
controllers, etc.
Only recently have things changed there, but it's still not the
same. Consider my system for example (you decide if its inferior PC
parts):
- Full tower Antec 1030SX case with 300W power supply - swapped it
for a 430W enermax since I had the choice to do so and it didn't really
cost that much. I paid a little extra in the store and they pulled one
supply and gave me the other.
- Microstar K7T Turbo motherboard. MSI makes very stable boards and
some of the best AMD boards. Anyway the MSI was the choice I went
with.
- AMD Thunderbird 1.33 GHz with a Copper cooler (thermalright SK6).
Thermal interface compound is Arctic silver. I decided I don't mind
running the system a little harder, so it's running at 1.45 GHz with
only a 1 degree increase in CPU temp.
- 512 MB CAS2 PC133 SDRAM
- ATI Radeon 64 MB DDR with video in/video out (retail 183 MHz
core)
- Phillips Acoustic Edge sound card (a notch above the SB Live)
- Adaptec 2940UW controller controlling only HD's
- Tekram SCSI controller for all narrow devices (nice to have dual
channels for SCSI)
- Intel 10/100 ethernet controller
- Quantum Atlas 10K II UW drive (9.1 gig) as startup, 2x IBM 18 gig
7200 RPM UW drives as data drive (stripe set using Win2k
Professional)
- Pioneer 16X SCSI DVD drive
- Ricoh 6x4x24 SCSI Burner
- Onstream 50 Gig SCSI tape backup
- Samsung 900NF 19" monitor
- Umax 1200S scanner
- HP 952 inkjet printer
I know that many of these items can be added to a Mac, but try to
order that Apple without the IDE CD-ROM or say that you don't want the
onboard sound because you'd rather throw a kickass sound card in there
anyway so why even spend that extra $10 (I'm sure the cost of the
onboard sound added a few dollars to the cost of the system
anyway).
Also consider that for many years (before OS X) multitasking on
the Mac was pretty pathetic if nonexistent. It was cooperative, similar
to Windows 3.1. For someone like me who downloads while listening to
MP3, cuts a CD while doing that, and then jumps into a game of Unreal
Tournament, multitasking may be important. Heck, I still don't make a
coaster even while running Unreal and my MP3s in the background.
Testament to the multitasking capability of NT/Win2k. As much as many
may hate Microsoft, Win2k is a very good product. It's stable as a rock
and pretty damn fast, too.
Anyway, I understand that a person like me may not be the norm. I
consider myself a power user, but I know many who like to have this
much flexibility. I know that if someone does not know what they
are doing, they can put together a really poor PC system that is cheap,
unstable, and a poor performer. Apple regulating its hardware has made
it safer for the average consumer but made it more difficult for power
users like myself. I won't bother speaking of prices. My system was not
cheap, so I won't lie and say I built it for $1,000, but a Mac with
similar configurations would be easy double the price. While true that
I don't have tech support and I'd have to do my own warranty work,
that's okay because it's easier for me to pull out a dead CD-ROM and go
to the store and exchange that piece while under warrantee than to drag
the whole computer somewhere for warranty work. My choice again. My
grandmother could not do what I do, so obviously she would need a
computer with warranty and tech support.
As for performance. I believe that 99% of people who own an Apple
product have been brainwashed by Apple into thinking that their
computer is much faster than any PC out there. Heck, even the
sales guy at a local Mac shop backed down from a PSBench head-to-head
test. Funny that he was confident that his new 867 MHz G4 would take
down anything until he found out that I'm running an AMD and that I was
not worried.
I've tested this machine, and my scores in Photoshop 6 exceed that
of an overclocked 1 GHz G4 (I think it was on MacSpeedZone) by a
good margin. I won't bother comparing to dual CPU systems, because that
would not make sense. The reason I also chose PSBench was because it's
most fair for Apple. I mean, I have run the Cinbench and Raydream
benchmarks and have trounced the G4s pretty good, so I guess my point
is that PCs are not slow just because they are PCs. PCs are slow
because the majority of off-the-shelf PC's use crap hardware with
BIOSes that have not been optimized for aggressive RAM timings, etc.,
and therefore they will be slow. Even Compaq, Dell, and IBM machines
are slower than similarly configured custom machines that use quality
parts...
I know this was a long email, but I just wanted to show that just
because it's a PC doesn't mean its going to have inferior parts, poor
configuration, instabilities, or poor performance.
Share your perspective on the Mac by emailing with "My Turn" as your subject.
