The ultimate showdown

Things have been far too busy recently for me to do any substantive posting. But I have noticed that our discussions of topics such as race and gender and interpretations of quantum mechanics are far too genteel and rational for my tastes. (Seriously, why is it that people just cannot resist the temptation to argue with people who say outrageous things, even if they know perfectly well that those people are absolutely immune to reason?)

So I’d like to broach a more controversial topic. I’m thinking of buying a new laptop. Tell me: Mac or PC? I’ve used both quite a bit, so I’m not a fundamentalist either way. The Macs are of course Linux FreeBSD-based, which is useful if you’re a scientist. And there’s the fight-the-evil-empire business. But one cannot deny that there is useful software that isn’t available for Macs. And the variety of laptop hardware is much more diverse in the PC world, including attractively thin ultralights. So — reasonable cost-benefit analyses on either side? Your thoughts are welcome.

And play nice.

95 Comments

95 thoughts on “The ultimate showdown”

  1. Also, Virtual PC is like vmware. It’s an emulator, so you’re taking a performance hit. If your machine is well-equipped (to borrow the car manufacturers’ term), you’ll probably not care too much, or you might still be slowed down intolerably. Again, I emphasize, it depends on an individual’s needs, not what zealots of any stripe pronounce in emulation of the Oracle.

  2. Linux — posting to a board for support for every damn little things, and hunting for that one particular device driver.

    This really isn’t as big a problem as it used to be. I’ve been running Linux for almost six years, on a variety of completely random Frankenstein boxes, none of the hardware within which was ever selected for compatibility with Linux, and I’ve never had a driver problem. Display drivers, sound drivers, cameras, ipods, wireless cards, on board wireless, dvd drives and burners, tv capture cards, laptops, desktops. No problems.

  3. I have lots of experience with Windows XP and with OS X on a Powerbook, and find that OS X is much less fatiguing to use than XP, and that’s important for anyone spending lots of time on computers. And I’m very happy using TeXShop in conjunction with BBEdit as an external editor, using an Applescript from the editor that saves the file and tells TeXShop to typeset it. The company that makes BBEdit also makes a free product called TextWrangler which is BBEdit minus special HTML features. And these editors can be configured to color syntax LaTeX in such a way that $ … $ strings are a single color: now all those errors caused by forgotten closing $ are almost a thing of the past because their absence is obvious.

  4. If you want a Windows laptop that feels as elegant as Macintosh, I’m only aware of the Sony Viao line, and that is expensive too.

    With Apple going to Intel hardware, instead of staying with the much-smaller volume Motorola/IBM PowerPC market, the days of Macs being behind the hardware curve will be over.

    (Actually, if you care about elegance even in the invisible innards of your computer, then you’ll be sorry that Apple is giving up on PowerPC).

    I have to use Windows machines at work; Windows while workable is clunky.

  5. For what it’s worth, according to Sitemeter, about 55% of CV readers are using some variety of Windows, 37% are using Mac, and 8% Linux. At the moment, anyway.

  6. Just FYI, Sean, I’ve got TTH running on my 15″ PowerBook via Virtual PC with no problems. There’s something in the emulation that seems to run the CPU pretty constantly, so it’s not a good way to kill time during a flight (well, not a long flight), but other than that, it’s fine.

  7. Ryan, that’s the most useful piece of information yet. I suspect it’s TTH itself that is running the CPU constantly; that seems to happen on my Windows machine.

  8. @todd:
    I started dual booting when I bought a laptop last year (FC4 on Acer Aspire blah blah blah). It is very much still alive and well, even Knoppix has a large board. I suspect you’ve been very fortunate to have a lot of hardware supported under Linux by the companies making your gear (hats off, I wish I could say the same — Acer’s implementation of ACPI is broken, and it uses SBS, which I haven’t gotten around to compiling in the support for). What’s your distro(s) of choice?

  9. Forget Virtual PC. The new Intel-based Mac laptops will be able to dual boot OS X and Windows. Score!

    I’ve been a Windows/Linux/Unix user since I learned to type my name, but I’m going to get one of the new Mactels (or Macbooks, if you want to be all boring with the name) when they come out. I’ve heard very few negative things about the switcharoo from PowerPC to Intel (I’ve been looking, as I’m wary of “first generation” bugs). By most accounts, Apple seems to have done a bang-up job making sure things work seamlessly. My dad is a software engineer working on new versions of programs for Macs, and is impressed so far.

    Obviously this is secondary to the actual functionality of the machine, but seriously: in an aesthetics contest, I’ve seen very few PC notebooks that beat the Powerbook/Mactel look.

  10. I don’t really mean to imply that the boards aren’t alive, or useful. But then, so are the ones where you find out what your Windows XP BSOD error codes mean. My favorite trip to those boards was when Windows installed an “updated” driver for my ATI chip, which reintroduced a bug I had already worked around months before.

    My distributions have been RH’s 7-9, then FC’s 1-4. Also, gentoo, from time to time. And I try to keep a copy of Knoppix around, mostly for fixing busted Windows installations.

    In all honesty, I should say that there is one thing I want that has not worked out of the box: portrait mode, which my lovely monitor supports, but which my display driver (the FC4 “nv” nvidia driver; I have yet to try to official “nvidia” nvidia driver) does not seem to want to do.

  11. Now would be a good time to buy one of those Intel-based MacBooks. Apple say you ought to even be able to run Windows in a dual-boot installation. (Not clear to me why you’d want to do that; maybe I just don’t understand.)

    Personally, I’m not looking forward to the inevitable switch to a new processor architecture.

    For the past 5 years, and 3 hardware upgrades:

    Golem II (a PowerMac G4) → Golem III (a dual-processor G5)
    Hard drive upgrade on 12″ iBook G3
    12″ iBook G3 → 14″ iBook G4

    I’ve been able to get by mounting the new machine in Firewire Disk-mode, wiping the hard drive clean, and cloning the old hard drive onto the new one.

    When I reboot, every file is just where I left it, all my applications are intact (I think I had to re-enter my Mathematica password, but that’s about it). Actually having to manually transfer files, reinstall software, … Yuck.

    Of course, here I am advocating that you jump Operating Systems as well. I guess all I can say is that it’s worth it …

  12. NeXTStep! Urr, I mean… Mac!
    Macs have been great ever since NeXT bought Apple for a negative amount of money. And with the Intel Macs you’ll be able to slum it and run windoze software if you must.

  13. FYI, everyone thinking about Win Mac dual booting. We don’t know any such thing yet, it depends on the EFI implementation in Vista and exactly what Apple has done/will do under the hood to differentiate itself from everybody else using the same hardware ::cough::Dell::cough::. I would like to triple boot (or more, now that Solaris is being open sourced and BeOS is around, but I digress), but it ain’t happening this year. Patience…

    And I understand firewire is on the way out, at least for this and maybe the next revision, so it depends on if Apple can do a USB target disk mode.

    (Geez, I’m starting to sound like a summary of Ars…)

  14. And since this thread started with a purpose, Sean, what will this lappy be used for (which programs, what sort of computing)? Until we know that, we’re all talking out of our nether regions when we offer advice. So far it looks like only one commenter has offered advice I would consider useful (and tweren’t mine).

  15. Is Firewire really on the way out? I’ve read those rumours, too. But I’m not sure I believe them.

    Though there’s no FW 800, both the Intel iMacs and the MacBook have FW 400. Since the whole iLife thang is centered around being able to plug your digital video camera (among other things) into your Mac, phasing out FW doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

    That there isn’t (I gather) a FW 800 chipset for the Intel motherboards is another matter. Most digital video cameras are FW 400 anyway. And, clearly, there is a FW 400 chipset.

    (Also, while it’s true that the iMacs and MacBooks have built-in iSight cameras, eventually, there will be Intel-based PowerMacs and Minis, and you’re going to want to be able to plug an external iSight camera into them. USB2 is less-than-ideal for real-time digital video.)

  16. Macs are a lot more difficult to fix and they cost more.

    I readily disagree. I mailed them my laptop on Thursday and recieved it back this morning (Mon) working wonderfully (my primary RAM port died.) I love the service that you get from Apple. They’re very helpful and I have never been disappointed in the service I recieve. They really want you to be happy with their product. I am a Mac customer for life. (1 year warranty that you can extend to 3 years)

    Go MacBook. I went Mac earlier this year and I am never going back. I’ve never loved a computer before, it’s strange.

  17. @Distler:
    If the reports are to be believed (and the Ars fora among others are ever full of naysayers and contrarians), then firewire-based target disk mode has not been removed. Score one for the policy of maintaining that I am not infallible!

    However, some reports contradict that, e.g., the continuing rumors of the death of firewire on Apple and final comment in this thread. Basically, at this point, we don’t know for sure for sure, but Apple is saying it’ll still be there.

  18. Also, target disk mode is good, but so is simply buying a cross-over cable and improvising a LAN by sharing hard drives (not a patch cable, which is what you use to connect to an existing LAN — they look the same, so be careful). This, however, does not address the camcorder issue brought up.

    Just a quick and handy tip. It also works for sharing between XP and OS X boxen =).

  19. @agm:

    at least with ppc macs, you don’t even need a crossover cable – the hardware is clever enough to internally switch the wires so it works with a patch cable.

  20. Ponderer of Things

    after reading so many mac testimonials I will be less skeptical of Macs in the future. Clearly the type of computer work, software needs and collaborative aspects are quite important issues to consider before making a purchase.

    Through my limited anecdotal experience, Macs don’t quite live up to the hype. They ARE prettier and it is nice to have unix platform. Stability is overrated – days of clunky Windows systems and blue screens are long gone.

    As someone who has ready access to numerous remote unix servers, I do not suffer too much from not having unix prompt on my laptop.

    Collaborative angle, combined with software availability, and compatibility with other hardware are the deciding factors in favor of PC for me. My former advisor is a Mac person and I wish I had a dollar for every Word or Powerpoint file he would send that included “Quicktime compression” error instead of a figure or a plot. This would naturally result in a flurry of emails with the “can you see it now?” question, attempting yet another way to make things readable.

    Clifford – in many places people figure out the problems with connecting Macs to the projectors, but I have seen too many mishaps to convince me that if I got a Mac, at some point this type of problem would happen to me too.

    Several examples – we are having a collaboration meeting with ~10 people, someone decided to show us some recent data they collected – using a Mac. Someone else says – why don’t you project it (we are in a conference-type room). Of course he needs a special Mac adapter cable for projector which he doesn’t have. So he goes someplace to get the cable. He comes back 10 min later, tries to set it up. To cut a long story short, after another 10 min of fiddling with settings someone got out their IBM Windows XP laptop, and within 30 seconds his data was projected on the screen (using USB key to transfer the data). The same guy had once a problem giving a colloquium using his Mac (I had to lend him my PC laptop) – so perhaps it says about his ineptitude of using Macs – but he had that computer for over a year now and if it takes that long to figure out how to give talks…

    My advisor who was a Mac person had troubles many times with some of his tables or figures not showing up properly during presentations. Something about the contrast. This happened embarrassingly too many times, using different projectors. At the same time other people didn’t seem to have problems.

    Maybe if the entire world switched over to Macs these problems of incompatibility would go away. But the problems of inherent vulnerabilities and viruses and complaints about Macs from inexperienced users would skyrocket if Macs were 90% of the market. I do not believe engineers writing Windows software are inherently less smart than those writing Mac – there’s certain amount of problems that come with being the most popular platform.

    If our entire collaboration used Macs we wouldn’t worry about converting Canvas-generated pictures to Corel Draw, and search for unix hexbin or binhex converters. And you could say the problem with presentations is not the Macs but Windows-friendly projectors and evil Powerpoint. But it doesn’t mean the problems will go away. And I don’t want to deal with these problems – including minor but irritating things like having to unmount CD drive “properly” instead of just pushing the button.

    Software choice could be a serious issue to some of us too. I happen to use plenty of specific data analysis software (crystallography for example), about 80% of which is simply not available for Macs. Almost all of it is either unix or PC, and a lot of it is shareware from some time ago and will not be written for Mac, as it’s very low-key almost amateur type hobby projects. Hopefully someone some day will write something better, but within the narrow specialty and not that much market, one would have to wait a long time for it to happen.
    So using a PC laptop works fine for me – I can run unix software on one of my servers remotely, or use my PC to run PC software. Switching to Mac would mean saying goodbye to majority of very useful analysis gizmos.

    Another thing people fail to mention is the lost efficiency due to having to learn how to do some even basic things on Mac vs. Windows. I am one of those people who has to play with settings all the time, and moving to another platform is sort of like moving into another town – you need some “settling” time.

    Maybe this Mac-Windows war means a better product in the end, but for collaborative users like myself it’s a sheer nightmare. I’d much rather live in the world where everyone else fights it out, but my entire collaboration uses the same platform – be it Mac, Windows or Unix. As long as we are all self-consistent.

  21. Apples will become faster and more efficient once this company fully switches to Intel processors which may very well happen soon.

    Apples are nice. They are symbols of anti-capitalist people because of a reason that is not clear to me, many people think that Steve Jobs is less capitalist than Bill Gates. My admiration for both…

    PCs are more compatible with the leading file formats and in most aspects, you have much more software and support for them. Better internet browsers, better media players, better and more numerous games, among other examples.

    There are exceptions to this rule. Presentations with LaTeX are probably easier and nice with Keynote at Apple than with PowerPoint.

    Summary: a politically unbiased person who still wants to do all kinds of things with a computer should choose PC.

  22. In our small high-tech company I was the only person using OS X a few years ago. The others were impressed that I was not having the level of issues they were with their machines — all computers have issues, but the scale and frequency of mine were less.

    Over the space of 18 months all of them switched to Macs … most were running Windows (XP or 2000) and Linux with a few running just Linux or Windows. Everyone is very happy – some to the point of being evangelists.

    When I look at some of my Summer students, I think many are happier with Linux/Windows — they enjoy the games on Windows and mucking around with the kernel on Linux. At this point I really prefer just getting things done and am happy to have moved into a somewhat more efficient world.

    If you do get a laptop or tablet of any kind, I recommend an extended warranty – the bounces of travel lead to much higher failure rates than desktops. Consumer Reports claims that, in any year of their life, nearly 20% of laptops require repair.

    The hardware choice, of course, is much more limited. I’m not a fan of superlight laptops as they tend to be flimsy (my brother-in-law went through 3 replacement Sony Vaios in a year before giving up and moving to a more rugged Sony). Some people love tablets, but I find that I can type much faster than I can write and the process of entering sketches into a tablet is problematic ( I’m an amateur artist and use a high end wacom tablet for sketching — this is much better than any windows tablet, but is a poor substitute for a good pencil and paper).

    have fun with your search!

  23. Windows: like Ford or Volkswagen – sorta works, but is no fun to use. Clumsy and dull; just right for the masses. Occasionally problematic, but you get spare parts everywhere.

    Mac: that’s the Mercedes. You step in and go from point A to point B in the most efficient and comfortable manner.

    Linux: a sand buggy. You can change the color of your steering wheel every day! There are also kits available to completely rebuild the engine on your own. The new models even have 4 doors now!

  24. firewire-based target disk mode has not been removed.

    That was the most likely thing to go, since it needs to be supported by the BIOS, and is not just a matter of having a FW chipset for the motherboard. It’s great that it works!

    Also, target disk mode is good, but so is simply buying a cross-over cable and improvising a LAN by sharing hard drives

    Not for what I do, which is wipe the internal hard drive clean and clone the hard drive from the other machine onto it. (My neighbour, who works for Apple’s Support division turns white as a sheet and starts to splutter when I explain that’s how I do hardware upgrades.)

    But, for most ordinary people, mounting the hard drive as a shared volume over the network would be sufficient.

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