Post #15
andy+katie wrote:never knew what the difference was betewwn macs and pc`s. can anybody explain?
In short hardware wise there's nothing different now. A Mac used to have it's own style of hardware, prefering RISC (reduced instruction set computer) archetecture over the CISC (complex instruction set computer) which meant that the ddata travelling round a MAC was steamlined by the chipset on the mainboard and then processed using a basic CPU. On a PC the CPU had all the work to do, hence they ran hotter and were noisy. Now you can get the same effect from the current rangte of Intel based kit Apple just don't bother. They've stopped designing their own hardware standards and just buy in the processors from Intel. This means that a Mac will run Windows quite well (though the difference in mouse/keyboard is a bind)
The Opperating system is the only difference now. The Mac OS is based on Unix and is pretty solid. It's still reasonably restrictive and desiging software for it is harder than a Windows enviroment, meaning most software is still designed for Windows. Most companies outside of the artistic sector will still use PCs for this reason and that of cost, a Mac is a substantial amount more than the equivilent spec PC. They have some nice features (the screans are always ahead of those on a PC) but cost is a big issue.
Fans of the Mac will bang on, almost constantly, about how reliable it is and how you rarely get a problem, which is pretty acurate. They never seem to mention, however, that if you do have an issue it's always difficult to solve and you can rarely bodge your way around a problem.
I've owned Mac's in the past, I would probably use them over PCs as Helen is a musician and that would be her preference, for home it's pretty much equel. At the moment I work in IT with PCs so I go with whatever I'm given as a home system (HP Elitebook at the moment, it's quite lovely!!)
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