This is a letter that I sent the other day in response to a letter from an old college friend who has a dying Windows XP machine.
The ironic thing is she copied another techie friend who has a XP machine. He came back with essentially the same recommendation as me, buy an iMac.
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In other news check out this post on a potential Mac Tablet for use with Electronic Medical Records.
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Dear Sally,
I use both Macs and PCs every day. I writing this on my Vista HP laptop. I have been using Vista since Oct 08, and our desk computer at work is an ancient XP Dell. I also have an inexpensive Zonbu Linux miniature desktop. It is also in use every evening.
My personal opinion is that Vista is not very good software. Windows 7 will likely be better, but if they add some of the eye candy that they added to the latest version of Office, it might not be better at all.
Recently I wrote on a post on this comment from John Dvorak who is not known for pro-Apple views. This is his recent comment on Windows.
I'm tired of dealing with Windows malware, patch Tuesday, and the never-ending deterioration of the OS as it clogs up like a drain in a greasy-spoon restaurant. I can't take it anymore.
And there's something else that always bugs me about Windows. I have an iMac that I use at the office, and a few times every month Apple has some patch that it sends out. With few exceptions, each time a patch is installed with the Mac OS, the performance of the machine improves. With Windows, the performance always declines.
I don't think Microsoft has ever sent out a patch that improved the performance of the machine. Ever.
I actually agree with him 100%. My Windows laptop is very good hardware. However, Vista has made it a pain and is not good software. There is rarely a week when I don’t have to do a couple of reboots. It does not sleep reliably, often waking up in a weird video mode that cannot be fixed in the control panel. Rebooting Vista often takes over three minutes. Waking a Mac laptop from sleep takes under 10 seconds, and it always works. Even when it works right in Vista, it takes far longer than that.
Having said all of that, a Mac, especially a laptop will cost you more at least in the short term. If you want more details go to my Applepeels blog where the debate happens daily. Read some of the comments from the most recent post.
If your interest is mostly pictures, email, browsing the web, and communicating with Mollie, I think that a Mac will be a better choice even if Mollie has a PC. The tools that come with a Mac are far better than the tools that come with a PC. There is nothing close on a PC that matches iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD. In fact I am headed to Morehead City this afternoon to pick up just over $100 in Adobe software so I can show a reasonable comparison product to iMovie in a seminar that I am giving on making movies with PCs and Macs.
The Macintosh also has very good backup software, Time Capsule, built-in.
My recommendation would be for you to buy an iMac and add an external firewire drive of the same size so that Time Capsule can do automatic back-ups. MS Office is even available at a reasonable price if you want to add that or you can get by fine with NeoOffice, a free open-source alternative.
I do not like giving Steve Jobs money, but the reality is that OSX is really good software that just works and keeps getting better. The three ladies in our family are all using iMacs that were bought in early 2003. They are doing fine and none of those machines even have a gig of ram. The current Apple software would work great on them, but they have been fine using a previous version.
The current iMacs and all of the Mac laptops have cameras built-in. The camera works well with Apple’s iChat and Google’s Gmail Chat. Gus and I have video chats occasionally from his iMac to my HP laptop which also has a built-in camera.
Both Jon and Gus bought iMacs this past winter. Jon got a 24” iMac. I believe it is what he uses for DVD movie watching.
Apple has done a great job of integrating iMovie with YouTube.
As for other things, the only thing that I cannot get to work on my Mac is our ancient Konica copier at the office. It worked fine until they installed some security software to track how much people were printing.
I don’t like having a built-in monitor on the iMacs but they seem very reliable, and I have yet to talk to someone who doesn’t like the system. Of course if you want to, you can run PC software on your Mac these days, but I have yet to find a piece of PC software that is better than what I have on my Mac.
I also hate having to pay for security software for my Windows machines. You still do not have to worry about that on Macs. If you have any more specific questions, let me know.
You should be able to get iMac through the college for a reasonable price. The one in the sweet spot, the 24” model, should go for around $1,399. It has 4 gigs of ram and a 640 GB drive.
The only weakness you will see on a Mac is high end video cards for gaming. On another note, if you decide to go with a PC, make certain you get 4 gigs of ram.
Apple also has a really useful piece of software called Pages which I use to print tri-fold brochures. If you can get an educational deal on that software, it is worth it for any specialized printing. If you want to go with a laptop, the least inexpensive Mac laptop is at $949, I have been using one of those for three years. It hooks up nicely to my 19” Samsung screens. It has been very reliable.
On one of my posts I figured the cost of time that I spent over a year on my Windows system. Conservatively it came out to almost $700 per year in my time which I value at $40 per hour. If you have lots of time, get a PC.
But remember $600 PC plus $700 in your time, plus security software plus decent photo software at $100 equals $1440, the Mac is cheaper even in the first year.
