Persuade me.
Hello.
Before we begin, I would like to state that I am not anti microsoft, linux or apple.
I'd appreciate it if you didn't start filling this topic with groundless claims that any of these can do something one of the others can better or that your friends friend had one and it exploded, covering him in fire and burning him and leaving him deformed to such an extent that he hid away from the world and set to work trying to take down the evil that caused him such pain.
Anyway, I have used a computer for years, and I can't imagine life without one.
Even when I'm off of mine for any length of time, I always have my PSP or phone there which can connect me to the net in an instant (though it's my PSP 99% of the time sinc it's no more expencive than turning my PC on thanks to my broadband and WiFi network).
Anyway, I'm a gamer, but not a PC gamer for the most part (I have a ps2, xbox, psp and 360 for gaming), so I don't need a PC with a GPU that's got half a human brains worth of memory (since a human brain in a PC wouldn't need to control some of the stuff a human does, that would be a lot if it were possible) and I don't need some creative teeth rattler pro 9000 sound card.
The one thing I am though, is a geek.
I'll openly call myself one since there's little of the origional stigma surrounding that word in my opinion.
We have thinkgeek, which is just awesome for useless gear and we have stuff like sourceforge, where I get half my software from.
Speaking of software, that's something I am interested in.
I have been programming in Delphi, PHP and SQL for a few years now after learning to punch myself with QBasic many years ago and becoming somewhat proficient with web markup languages (HTML, XHTML, XML and CSS).
Most of my coding is done for web development purposes, so it's portable most of the time, which is fine and I don't do a hell of a lot of Delphi programming now since I tired of that (mainly due to the fact that the language is so simple that there's few challenges left for me).
Here's the horrible truth, I'm an XP user with a HP system (yeah, laugh all you want CBG, I'm cheap and I admit it, even my linux distro is free!).
Yes, I have linux as a dual boot OS (Ubuntu), but due to some hardware problems under linux, I can only actually get online with windows (which also means I have to fart about to get drivers for my spriner / scanner which aren't included with ubuntu).
I don't use windows purely by choice, it's virtually a requirement caused by linux not liking my gear despite the fact that it should work (tried the linux wlan drivers for prism 2.5 cards and ndiswrapper, neither work, not even with visual inerfaces doing the script work).
I prefer the linux desktop environments (mainly KDE and gnome), but linux is still in it's infancy when it comes to getting around the more technical side of things that I'd rather avoid when all I want to do is check my emails and a few forums.
The thing is, my current PC is a bit dated.
It's a few years old and there's almost none of the 40GB of HDD space free (I deleted over 2GB of apps and files a few weeks ago, but after downloading an avi file today and trying to unzip it, winzip told be that it couldn't fit it in anywhere).
True, 256MB of DDR is enough to keep it plodding along reasonably enough to run delphi 7 and scite, but it's not enough to prevent any more recent development environments from falling down dead and when coupled with a 2.5Ghz Celeron D CPU, XP is taking a while to get to a usable state where it's not firing up my virus scanner, network connection or some message telling me that it can't do something or that I should do something that I generaally don't need to.
When I consider my current problems with windows and linux, there's only two plausable options:
1) Upgrade to a better system.
2) Go down the shiny white road and buy a cheap mac.
This is where it gets somewhat iffy.
As I said, I have no anti apple feelings and I'm quite open minded.
My only real qualm with apple is the price issues that have been floating around for some time.
Many have said that apple's macs and power pc's lack the amount of software that bog standard x86 systems get and that you can get a faster system for the same price.
To some extent, I believe that they are correct.
Windows does have more applications than osx or linux and a windows PC can be cheaper for similar specs, but then I have to ask myself, how many of those applications are useless junk that will never be of any use... Loads I'd bet, and is that hardware going to be some generic low cost hardware rather than something like corsair, crucial, nvidia or seagate... possibly.
As an example, let me take a look at my system.
It's got the basics needed to run Sims 2 with it's 2.5Ghz CPU, 256Mb or RAM and 64Mb GPU (I know, laugh some more, please do unless you have less than 2Mb broadband), but still, Sims 2 ran unbearably slow and sim city 4 loads slow but is at least playable.
I found out why, and it's because I have an intel extreme GPU which doesn't actually support T&L and which leaches off of my RAM normally and when emulating T&L, it uses even more (ARGH!).
Now, I have had little contact with apple systems in the last few years.
The only place I really got near one was in college when they wanted us to design a poster advertising some health spa or something, but that was for a very short time, we were supervised and it was beyond old (we're talking grey box, not brightly coloured funky plastic, beefy hole filled steel or pretty white), not to mention that we could only actually get near photoshop 2 or something equally as low quality and those were classed as "special" systems that we couldn't mess around with like we could with the small HP satan in a small black desktop things.
From what I understand though, osx's interface is much closer to linux (actually, if you took the opened app bar out of my gnome setup and replaced it with a dock, it'd be identical) than it is to windows, which I just never found overly intuitive without needing to tinker (adding a dock with quick access to my apps or setting up the quick launch or a custom menu system via XP's desktop toolbar that you can put on the start bar).
For what I use a PC for, it'd be nice to have a system that starts up quickly, has my server (apache or similar) ready and waiting and doesn't end up with me mining through meny's to find out where the hell my applications are.
With linux, I get this, but as mentioned, I have some issues with it that would only really go away with upgrades.
With osx, I presume that I could set up the dock to contain my most used applications and that I would get the decent things Iget from Ubuntu such as it's ability to auto mount drives and such (ubuntu plops an icon on the desktop as soon as it finds a USB pen drive or a loaded optical drive).
I'm seriously considering a mac as XP crashes a fair bit (though it's better than older versions), it's not the fastest and I have a few other problems with it (apps closing sluggishly, apps opening sluggishly leading to me thinking I didn't start it and things like firefox starting to play up with scroll wheel use so I end up doing it manually).
The thing is, the fact that it'd be £800 for the iMac G5 which only has a 1.9Ghz CPU and isn't as flexible to upgrade does bother me a little.
I am now more serious about looking into buying a mac than ever now though and the inclusion of an inbuilt webcam, inbuilt bluetooth (I would make use of this as I do with my current bluetooth dongle), inbuilt 802.11b WiFi (my current network uses this kind of wireless networking) and that pretty, pretty mouse would offset those problems a bit.
Yes, there's the mini, but that's slower still, doesn't come with a keyboard, monitor or mouse and it's hard to dispose of a PC without those (unless I do what I did last time and give the old one to my grandad... his monitor is my old LG pro CRT, which was bigger than my curreny 15" LCD, but pretty much ate my desk).
The reason for me not considering the power mac series is that it's a fair bit bigger than the imac series because it's a full tower system and even so, with all the thermal zoning, I wouldn't imagine you could go overboard and fit extra optical drives and other stuff as easily as on a pc (note to self, actually removed hardware from current system but didn't add anything because it was put together in such a way that it made you cry).
The other thing about the power mac series is the price.
I don't have £1399 to spend on something like that, especially when I don't own 2 monitors, don't need it to be gaming capable and won't be using it to create sentient programs which will take over the internet and again with the no monitor and such.
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