Seriously, what is with those Mac ads?

It's kind of odd that this thread came up. I watched the documentary "Macheads" yesterday and today I had a conversation with a guy with an iPhone about Macs and PCs. And I was about to write a thread about some problems I'm having with iTunes.

Apple users just tend to live in a bubble where Apple can do no wrong. I had a Creative Labs MP3 player and I bought an iPod. I transferred the songs to my PC, transferred them to my iPod, then deleted the files from my PC. But iTunes still references the songs as if they're still on my PC. If I try to delete the references, iTunes says it will delete the songs from my iPod, too. Lovely.

So I sent an email to a Machead friend of mine, thinking I'd probably made a mistake in the settings or maybe I wasn't doing something right. He told me that the problem was that I wasn't using iTunes properly. I'm supposed to use iTunes in the way Apple intended it to be used. Huh? I just wanted to transfer files. I had no idea I'd done something wrong, but apparently it's my fault. Apple doesn't make mistakes, the users do.

Today a friend of mine was showing his iPhone and I mentioned the iTunes issue with him. He goes into a speech about how PC's have too many kinks for iTunes to run properly. Huh? The problem isn't a glitch, it's in the way iTunes was designed. Then he starts telling me about how unreliable PCs are, bring up crashes and viruses and stuff. It's like these guys have a set speech they give or something.

But this isn't 1995. I use XP and I've downloaded just about everything on earth, installed programs from 3rd parties, switched out hardware, etc. My system never crashes and it isn't infected with viruses. Naturally he says he has a PC but he can't touch it anymore because there are too many viruses for it to even run. At that point I realized I was talking with a guy who was basically just making stuff up.

Macs are great products. If I were rich I'd get one to pay around on. I love the hardware. If I could get PC ease with Mac hardware I'd buy it. But if you talk to some Apple people and say anything bad about any of their products they literally take it personally. I just wanted to get rid of some file references in iTunes and I get a lecture about how I'm misusing the software and another guy tells me his PC is about to bring about the end of the world.

So...like...what's the deal with that?

 

First and foremost, Apple doesn't create any hardware. They simply pick parts they are going to support. The CPU's in Macs are made by intel, the GPU's are generally made by nvidia, the RAM is generally made by Mushkin, etc etc. They are more like Dell or HP in that they pick parts, put systems together with those parts, put their OS on that system and simply sell those computers as Macs. The only difference is their OS only officially supports the parts they pick. In fact, the Mac OS is hardly 'proprietary' like their OS's before OS X. It's based on BSD Unix, so... Apple is basically picking out hardware and putting Unix wrapped in a pretty wrapper on that hardware. From my perspective, I'd much rather pick out my own parts and the OS I want. If I want "Unix", I'm going to just get Linux because it's free and good. I run Windows on my main machine because I enjoy games. You'd be hard pressed to find a Mac as powerful as my PC for a decent price, much less a Mac that is simply as powerful as my PC regardless of price.


Second (and this goes back to your first post), windows errors can generally be traced to user error. Not all the time, but most of the time. Your issues with windows are anecdotal and prove very little in the grand scheme of things. Same for my evidence, but I've been running Windows Vista since it came out and I've never had any problems and I'm probably running one of the most exotic setups on this forum (nForce chipset, SLI'd GPU's, Core 2 CPU and DDR3 RAM). The only time I had trouble with Vista, it was entirely my fault (I got a couple BSOD's while overclocking, which means I wasn't getting enough voltage somewhere in my system). Funny thing, I also ran XP for over 5 years on an Acer laptop and never had a single BSOD. I never had to reformat my system either. This is MY experience with Windows, and as such is anecdotal and is not representative of the entire Windows user base. In essence, it means very little.


I guess my main point is, comparing a $2000 Mac built with some of the best hardware in the industry to a $400 Acer built with some of the cheapest hardware in the industry is a little unfair. Compare a $2000 Mac to a $2000 custom built PC, and the Mac starts looking a lot less appealing because a $2000 PC will probably provide more performance for that price than the Mac.

 

QFT.

You know who makes MACs???? Foxconn does....

They also make the logic board for their ipods, and iphones....

Same place where Dell gets their motherboards built, and other PC OEMs.

If you compare a Mac with a certain CPU speed, etc. with a PC with the same hardware specs... Chances are the mac will have more quality components than the PC, even though the PC will be priced cheaper.

But, there have been times where Macs had major issues, some of which Apple won't admit to as factory defects and issue recalls...

 

There's one very important thing that's being over looked, JG: iTunes is by far the biggest hunk of shit on the market in terms of MP3 software, and maybe the worst turd Apple has made. They could do so much better (yet refuse to).

 

I use Mac, have done for years - this is due first and foremost for audio production - CoreAudio Stack + Logic Pro etc is bliss for music production. The sheer quantity of configurations available for Windows means that introducing a new interface could totally bork the signal, provided you had low latency anyway.

I chose Mac because of this first and foremost, I also use CS4 for work on both my Mac and work's computers - Mac feels more stable but maybe that's just the halo effect?

I personally HATE the Mac ads and legions of fanboys for either camp. It's a computer, it aids you in your job - if one does it better than the other, use that - simple as.

But, I suppose, as long as people are stupid enough to respond to this stupid, contentless advertisements they'll keep running

+ I dont find iTunes that bad, kinda miss Milkdrop in Winamp though