Mac computers

[Merlin]

Ok so this may be a dumb question and I know there are some strong feelings out there on the PC Vs. Mac issue. I would like to know a few basic things if someone could help me sort them out that would be great.
My wife just got an I Mac with Intel Core 2 Duo 3.06 . This thing is completely contained in the monitor. There are no fans, no 4x6x10" PSUs, no obvious speaker panels....and no noise! The back of the monitor is a little warm but not even close to as hot as her Dell laptop got. The only thing my PC has that could be said was better is the Vid card but hers is not much lower end than mine and the picture on her MAc is MUCH better than that on my PC.

Why is it that my PC, to have the same capability as her Mac, has to have 257 feet of cables coming out the back, it needs six fans to cool it, and it has the monitor and a case that is about 4x larger than her whole computer, then I have to have my speakers which has a subwoofer and two satelite speakers. Why is it that PCs are soo far behind Mac in terms of simple elegance and user friendly design? Why can they keep a Core 2 Duo cool with no fans no water no super expensive Zalman heatpipe setup that takes up lots of space and PC has several spinoff industries just to make them usable? Her Mac cost $1200 including the wireless mouse and keyboard as well as the wireless lan card and the 21" high def monitor. I know its a bit more than a PC but not all that much considering.
Lastly we also got a wireless printer with it and we installed it on her Mac and also My PC via network. I got 4 new desktop Icons for the all purpose printer and she got none. My system now has to run two more background processes unless I disable them, while hers runs none for the same hardware??

[kenc51]

The CPU is a E7600 built on 45nm so runs very cool anyhow. There's no need for a bulky psu as the GFX and CPU don't pull much power.
Most people could run their pc on a ~350W psu, if it's good quality.
It's only the higher end GFX cards and cpu's force us to get high wattage power supplies, just cause we need that extra power when gaming and folding etc. and since those mac's aren't designed to game, there's no need for a high wattage psu.
Since OSX is for macs the required software and drivers were already installed, though it is silly that we need to install a bunch of crap with windows.
You can buy PC's from Dell and others that have everything built into the monitor, but the main advantage of going ATX is expandability.
You can't stuff an iMac with a bunch of HDD's and SLI, leaving space for watercooling so you can overclock it.
You also don't have to be a beta tester for the vendor; have you seen how many firmware updates there are for Mac's?
There's firmware in everything, with things like their "superdrive" DVD-ROM's getting tons of them; not to mention their keyboards ;)
http://www.macworld.com/article/.../key ... ility.html
http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/b ... -PAPER.pdf

I'm not even sure Leopard enables the firewall by default, it didn't used to.

[DeusEx]

cant compare a "PC" to a mac. Compare a specific company. If you got an HP or Dell (mainly the older ones) then what do you expect? But if you buy from other companies Like Sony. Not to mention that you arent including any specs or details about your PC vs the MAC. MACs dont have any magic hardware or design to make them better... Its mostly style and quality of materials used.

In any case, provide detailed specs for each... How old is your PC? Older technology tends to run hotter, consume more power, and perform less efficiently. If you build your own PC, it will always come light years ahead of any mac for any given price.

[Beatmaster180]

Don't be fooled by the Mac's aesthetics. PC's have far more advanced technology available than MACs do especially in the notebook area. I'd be willing to sacrifice some brushed aluminum for raw performance.

[kenc51]

According to me Mac is more secure than Windows PCs. Viruses, adware and malware designed for a Windows-based processor simply will not run on a Mac.With programs like Bootcamp or software emulation, you are able to install and run Windows on your Mac and switch between the two OSs easily.

OSX is known to be riddled with holes. Some people are now turing to exposing these holes now.
In the last 12mths the number if "0-day" exploits for macs have increased a lot.
You can be sure 2010/11 will be when we Apple overtake windows on the number of vulnerabilities found.
If you have a look at what the hacker communities are all talking about at the moment, it's osx for mac and iPhones.

Windows 7 is actually quite secure in it's default config. There's a lot of new security measures added to stop buffer overflows and even if they run, they can only efffect that running process and not the whole system, denying the "hacker" the opportunity to do a DoS attack when all else fails.

[xstayxtruex]

Not to make this a flame thread, but PCs as they are are exactly what their name stands for. Personal Computers. PCs are meant for customization, even when its a HP, Dell, or any other brand named manufactured computer, you can still customize it in whatever way you want without any dremel surgery or extreme case modding. Macintosh seems to have taken the personal aspect out of the computer and replaced it with ready-made shiny boxes that cost anywhere from $300-500 more than a PC with the same system specs if not better specs. All in all it comes down to your preferences, what you would like to have, and what you want to expect out of your system. Some people would sacrifice the aesthetics of a Mac for the customizability of a PC. And some people like shiny ready-made boxes from which you couldn't upgrade the HDD without either getting out the power tools or sending it off to have someone else do it.