Mac Users: Enlighten Me...

I rarely need more than two because I use the keyboard and trackpad. Both are excellent on my MacBookPro (and I used to use external on the Dell laptop I used to use).

I am especially happy with the Mac's track pad... it's awesome.

 

I think that any comparison between PC and Mac will always be biased by the person doing the comparison, but TFP is of cause a place for people to air their views and opinions with out getting flamed or attacked. There are couple of things I want to comment on or add to this thread.
So just to make it clear I'm not an Apple follower and I love to hate Microsoft. People should use what fits the task and suits them.

Even I have to give Apple credit for design of their laptops. When comparing Mac laptops to other laptops they have to be compared to products in the same price range and there their superiority isn't certain. It's not a difficult task to get more bang for the buck in a pc than Mac. As for durability the Mac's lead is challenged at least by Toshiba and Lenovo. I have always disliked Apple's fondness of proprietary standards (hardware, connectors and etc).

When comes to operating systems people have to keep in mind that the biggest challenge for Windows and Linux is the colossal selection of different hardware and hardware manufacturers that they have to support where as in Mac the specs are set by Apple. This is a huge thing in testing and quality control. This applies also to the mobile world. Windows 7 is probable Microsoft's most secure and stable Windows available but there is room for improvement. Mac users are in for a nasty surprise when the number of unprotected Windows computers on the Internet has fallen sufficiently to make Macs a profitable target for malware and viruses.

 

This is apropos...

 

Hey BG - just last night I was scanning pictures so I had 1 USB port occupied by the scanner, 2 with the wireless mouse & keyboard respectively. This used up my available (3 ports) that are on my admittedly dated, but still perfectly useable Toshiba laptop that I purchased in 2005. I was wishing that I had more ports because I was moving pictures onto a usb key as well. Not a real hardship, all things considered, but it's great now that these ports are being provided in an abundance.

 

I have an iMac from late 2006. The lack of sufficient USB ports is a pain. I have 2 external HDDs and find I have to eject them to use a memory stick.
At least my printers are wireless.

 

Most recording engineers I've met swear by Mac. Some have used Pro Tools on both platforms and claim the advantage is monumental. Several photographers of my acquaintance feel the same.

I wouldn't know. My work software is half Unix based, half Windows based... and the worst of both worlds.

 

The Mac is an extremely powerful Unix system hidden under a seriously attractive outer shell. This is not unlike an expensive sportscar. The terminal window is like the hood. You can decide to never open the hood, but you'll never see the jewel of engineering it is hiding.

 

For me, it's like Charlatan said. It just works. I don't waste time with blue screens or memory issues or anything like that. I can render a heavy project in Avid while working in photoshop and after effects and protools all at the same time and there's never even a hiccup. I'm pretty sure my blood pressure has been a lot more stable since I made the mac switch years ago.

I think all of these things are dependent on what you do. Hardcore gamers aren't going to want a mac. Video/Photog/Audio pros probably are. IT pros.. probably not because they'd rather have linux and a pc box to help them move around where they want. :shrug:

 

I consider myself an IT pro. With VMWare Fusion, I have Windows XP, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Red Hat Fedora Core on my iMac. My other machines have Windows 7 and Ubuntu. I rarely bootup the other machines unless I'm making a backup with SuperDuper and want to play on the 'net while I'm waiting. Usually, I let Timemachine back up my files.

 

The only reason I have a mac in my house is because I and family members used it for Digital Imaging. I have never really liked using them, hence why I bought a laptop for all other uses like coding among other things.

I just never felt like it was something that offered anything to me. It is fancy and flashy but for my needs it was really lacking.

 

I think my favorite thing about Mac is the OS. I started with a PC, using the Mac computer lab when my Gateway wasn't working right and fell in love with the ease of the OS. Everything was so easy to find and use, from the first time I sat down in front of one. When I was finally able to buy one, it was a iBook (PPC) running Tiger. And that computer ran for 7 years. Never froze, however, it did start to slow down after in the last year. But with 512 RAM and 40 Gigs HD - can't complain too much - because the machine still runs good enough to start learning Unix and Java on.

Last week I upgraded and got a MacBook Pro. There are a few things I am disappointed with (ex: the changes in Finder's search and the addiction of App Store and Launchpad) I am mostly just reminded why I will never buy an PC. And if this machine works as good as the last one, I might not never need to buy a new machine.

 

Another big point in favor of Apple: they don't preload dozens of useless, stupid shit onto your computer. I recently had to deal with a family member's HP laptop and after reaching the limit on free plays, Wildtangent's fucking piece of shit preloaded Scrabble game was causing bluescreens literally every half hour trying to write to an inaccessible memory location.

 

There is software called Decrapifier that will delete the crap that comes with new PCs. Google it.

 

I have a new Macbook Air and had a Macbook Pro before that and I can't believe people still spout this. On both of these machines I've had several kernel panics from opening and closing first party Mac software. I've been forced to reset my PRAM, since the introduction of 10.7.1, my Air has become incredibly hot (80-90C) when waking from sleep longer than an hour (the fix to this is to put it back to sleep and reopen it, which I had to tell a clueless 'genius' and he satisfied with that 'fix'), and I've had severe problems with any wireless network randomly dropping me after about 5-10 minutes over and over again, which does not happen at all with my cheapo Toshiba laptop (the fix to this is to turn off and turn back on the WiFi every time it happens which is like I said every 5-10 minutes and this was also deemed an appropriate 'fix'). These are all really well known problems with Lion that a lot of people are complaining about but Apple refuses to acknowledge. I am a part of the developer program and have been seeding 10.7.2 for awhile now and these fixes have not been implemented and any bug reports me or any other people submit are met with silence. Apple has an incredibly hard time admitting that their computers don't 'just work' and will just completely ignore anyone who points out anything otherwise. That haughty attitude really needs to go.

The one thing that really annoys me is that Apple people always lie and say, oh you have to restart your PC all the time when you install anything...well guess what, almost any update to OS X requires a restart as well. I've had to restart my Air more after installing things than I ever have in Windows 7 (glad my Air starts up in about 15 seconds!)

I'm becoming more and more of an OS X fan but I still like Windows better for a lot of things. Mail is a really poor program and iPhoto, while it's getting better, is still a horrendous photo organizer. Quicktime is a terrible video player (so glad VLC is available).

Overall, my experience with OS X has been great, but then again so has my experience with Windows XP, Vista and 7. They seem to be about on par with each other in terms of issues (but the wifi issue in Lion is by far the most annoying I've ever had to deal with), so people really should stop with this 'it just works' nonsense.

 

I have been using Apple computers since before Macs. I love them so much. They are consistently more reliable and user-friendly than Windows PCs, and I love the creativity and innovation with which Apple approaches both software and hardware design.

I owned one PC laptop during rabbinical school, back before Apple started using dual processors that let you run Windows applications on Macs if necessary (the best Hebrew-language software is written for Windows, because Apple really only started making a dent in Israel a couple of years ago). It sucked. It crashed repeatedly, and froze constantly, and even though all my PC friends were raving about XP and how awesome it was, I found it incredibly clunky and ham-fisted compared with Mac OS X, which I had on my desktop at the time-- an iMac. I had more trouble from that damn PC laptop than I've had from all the Apple computers I've ever owned, combined.

Now I have a MacBook Pro, and I love it. I don't find the sound quality bad at all, and if I'm ever using it as a stereo, I just plug in some speakers (less than $50 on eBay, great quality), and go. Similarly, yeah, I wish it might have come with more than two USB ports, but I got a fine USB hub on eBay for like $20, and it works great, problem solved. I write on my MacBook, I design posters, and stuff for selling on CafePress, I make educational flowcharts, all easy, great visual interfaces, smooth operation, no problem. And easy interfacing with my iPhone and iPad.

 

I like how stable Vista and Win 7 have been for me. I have not seen a single bluescreen that I can recall now at least since being forcibly upgraded from Win XP and 2000 due to my 2001 era systems dying, and I leave my desktop on for days at a time without rebooting.
With that in mind, I have wanted to add a Macintosh system to the mix for years but spending that kind of money on something I do not need by any definition of the word has not feasible so far. I would love to be able to say I am knowledgeable with those systems rather than give a blank stare or "give me a minute or two and I can probably figure it out" kind of answer if anybody were to ask me a question about them.