PC or Mac? Part 1
Writing by stickman on Thursday, 14 of June , 2007 at 4:20 pm
Part 1 - Does it really matter anymore with Intel Macs?
I recently had the PC or Mac discussion with my sister. She was looking for a new laptop and knowing that I had a MacBook Pro, asked me if she should get one. The catch was she has nearly always been PC (Microsoft Windows), except when 7 years previously she bought one of the first PowerBooks while visiting me in the States.
Unfortunately it was a very early release of OS X and while the potential was obvious, it did yet have the stability or features she as a computer/apple novice required. I admit I had guided her towards buying it - it is only human to make mistakes! Luckily, a few months later it broke and she was able to claim for it on her insurance and buy herself a PC laptop. Phew, the pressure was off!
With that bad apple in the past and her interest renewed in Apple after me showing her my new MacBook Pro, running Windows XP, Outlook and OS X at the same time (thanks Parallels!) she asked me PC or Mac?
As you can imagine, after the previous bad experience I had to think carefully about this for oh at least 5 seconds! Seriously the fact that I was using my MacBook 12+ hours a day every day with no crashes and thoroughly enjoying the experience made it a no brainer.
The next issue was that she wanted to migrate slowly from Windows to OS X, so the first step was to work out whether to use
a) Boot-camp (an free Apple program that lets you switch between Windows and OS X but requires a reboot to switch)
or
b) Parallels which allows you to run Windows under OS X (either as a smaller windows or full screen and you press a key to switch between).
Because she wanted to eventually switch over to OS X completely (or virtually) and therefore wanted to use certain feature of OS X from day one (Safari, iTunes, etc.) we decided to go for option b) Parallels.
As I have yet to come across a Windows application that does not run under Parallel, I saw no potential problems (okay, just one application, the Blackberry client, which runs but does not see the Blackberry at the end of the USB connection).
So after she bought the MacBook Pro 15″, I set-up OS X (so easy) and then installed Parallels (easy) and then installed Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Office 2003, Symantec Anti-Virus Software and three or four more windows applications (relatively easy but I want 3 hours of my life back!).
You may be interested to see that I installed Symantec, but after all it is a Windows computer and while it is virtually impossible for it to infect the OS X, it itself is susceptible to all the normal Windows viruses.
And that was that, with my sister happily running Windows XP, Outlook, Word, Excel and Powerpoint all at once in Parallels and then using Safari and iTunes on OS X. She plans on moving away from Outlook first, to run Apple Mail instead, then slowly move the other applications one by one and maybe one day remove Windows from her Mac.
To summarise, the PC or Mac question really does not matter anymore, with the new Intel Macs happily running Windows and/or OS X. In Part 2 of this article I will take a look at the actual hardware, comparing MacBook, Macbook Pro and iMac versus equivalent PCs to see if there really is a price / quality / speed difference.
Category: PC, Outlook, Microsoft, Office, Windows, Apple Laptops, Apple, MacBook Pro, MacBook, Laptops, Apple MacBook
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