Unable to decide between PC and Mac

I've been having the Mac vs PC argument for a while now with a good friend who has IT experience. He hates Mac because "it is a closed system" - that is if you want the Apple O/S you have to purchase from Apple and ONLY what they have to offer. While the PC is an "Open" system - Microsoft allows anybody and everybody to build PC's with the Windows O/S.

My argument is the "Open" system is Microsoft's greatest advantage AND disadvantage at the same time. It is a great advantage because it allows manufacturers to build at any quality allowing for much more diverse pricing, but a disadvantage because some (Not All) manufacturers build garbage, deceptively selling it as quality.

Case in point I just decided to stay permanently with Mac recently due to the failure of two Tower PC's within three years. I purchased the best CPU, GPU, RAM, etc I could find and these two towers advertised as such. Unfortunately the SSD drives used were absolute garbage. These were no cheap systems but not being an IT guy I could only replace them. In short, if you are an IT professional or gamer and know how to repair a Windows system and upgrade as needed or build your own, that's a fantastic advantage. But if you are an average consumer it's buyer beware!

I have to agree though that purchasing an Apple system, it is closed - again buyer beware - you must be knowledgable enough to purchase accordingly based on current and future needs, The price is high, but the system will last 10+ years and generally outperform the Windows systems. I still have a MacBook Pro version 2013 that I prefer over the 2 year old PC Laptop I had for work.

A lot is personal preference, but for me, when I purchase an Apple system I cringe at the price, but I am very comfortable that I got excellent quality and will be able to use it for many years to come. I would never say that for a PC product.

Our IT guys told me that Mac's consume about 5x more resources in support than PCs. I don't buy them because of the closed system (it's a moral issue) and because I've seen so many problems with them with regards to compatibility. I'm happy to say Apple has never received a single dollar of my money. That makes me happy because I like standards, and Apple opposes them.

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Really? I've been building my own PCs since 1998, usually with 2-3 drives each, which for the last 4 years have been SSDs and have never had one fail yet. Nor, for that matter, any other major component. I lost a motherboard due to lightning 15 years ago, but every other piece of my set up has lasted until I chose to upgrade (and sell) it, which is generally around 3 years. When it comes to ram and SSDs, incidentally, I swear by Crucial, both for speed and stability.

Jobs was fired by Apple and went off and formed NeXT. The OS was based on the Mach kernel - a Unix kernel developed by at Carnegie Mellon based on BSD Unix. Jobs was targeting the education market but he NeXT ended up sell more devices to the US defense department and Intelligence Community for their network communications that the education market. It was expensive and they never got to the economy of scale.

www.wired.com/1993/06/steve-jobs-and-the-next-big-thing/

As it became obvious that Apple made a mistake and just because their current CEO could run Pepsi Cola did not mean he had a snowballs idea how to run Apple. Apple fought NeXT and brought Jobs back. Because Motorola was going broke at the time with the Iridium debacle - Jobs pushed Apple toward the Intel family of processors, trashed the OS on the Macs and ported over the NeXT OS. The rest is history.

You can go underneath the hood on Mac OS just the same as you can on any Unix based platform. It is a Unix system at its heart. You can do the same thing on a Mac that you could do on a Sun workstation - simply bring up a terminal in a window and go down to the MacOS or SunOS Unix commands. I regularly operate my Mac from a terminal. The "desktop" GUI is not different than the one on a Sun or on a Linux workstation running KDE desktop GUI.

I use both and my 'go to' the majority of the time is PC.

I asked. It's centered on several things. The first is lack of interoperability - they take a lot of config to run standard software and interface with standard hardware. Second, a lot of the Mac users don't know how to use computers (which is why they choose Apple - they think it's easier) so they need more support. Finally, they are hard to repair and the parts are expensive.

Repairability and especially upgradeability are important to me. There is nothing on this PC that I can't fix or upgrade myself in a few hours at most, using readily available commodity parts from multiple, competing manufacturers. I don't depend on any single source, and previous builds have provided me with spare parts aplenty.

Having said that, my previous build ran flawlessly for six years; replacing it was mainly a matter of "I felt like building a (partly) shiny new PC". Partly, because a majority of the components were reused from previous builds. But it feels brand new! 😉

This is exactly what Bob was taking about - a Microsoft house which regards anything on windows as “standard” software and interchanging the term “interoperability” with “windows compatible”.

The true reason most IT departments hate macs with a passion is they’re so much harder to lock down into the same admin-friendly, user-unfriendly way that all their windows boxes are locked into. They see this as a problem, in reality it’s a huge boon for the user and a major plus for actual productivity.

Well that’s just some patronising bunk that either they or you have snuck in there. Macs are easier to use because they’re better designed and that’s a great reason to choose them, but the idea that they generate more support requests is nonsense. Most people I know using macs at work do so because they’ve been using macs at home for years anyway.

Again, when you say “don’t know how to use computers” what you really mean is “aren’t familiar with windows” (or likely wanting to be).

You can bet they fail less often though.

I'll take that bet all day long, certainly if the PC was put together properly from quality components.

Thanks for that detailed information. The results are very good.

That's surprising. I'd have thought the M1 will be a lot better than an i5 based PC. Of course, the GPU may be the contributing factor there, more than the i5.

Thank you for the details.

You have a good point for anyone who needs a laptop for personal use and not too constrained in budget.

Otherwise, the advantage PCs have is lower cost for low-power users. Then PCs/Windows also have larger presence in corporate world. That will take a long time to change, I think.

Familiarity with Windows at work is why lot of people buy a simple laptop for their first computer at home. Apple has done a lot through discounts for schools and such to build that familiarity for young audience. They are still expensive after EDU discounts.