Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Mac vs PC, With Something Left Out

OK, I will tell you the something right up front. Vista has proved such a disaster for me, I have switched exclusively to Ubuntu Linux. Before I ran a combination of Linux and WinXP, but after suffering Vista for six moths, during the beta test phase, and then verifying after final shipped, I switched.

So you want the cheapest and the best, then load up Ubuntu on any PC and be happy. Any clone brand will do, just pick one you like, or even build your own. Ubuntu is cheap as well, it's free.

The article on Popular Mechanics try's to take a average user view of the contest, Mac vs PC, but ends up just extolling the virtues of Macs. OK, I admit, Macs are probably fine, but they just cost too much for most. They are nicely designed. The piece ends with this 'graph ...
The Verdict: Apple
Mac: In both the laptop and desktop showdowns, Apple’s computers were the winners. Oddly, the big difference didn’t come in our user ratings, where we expected the famously friendly Mac interface to shine. Our respondents liked the look and feel of both operating systems but had a slight preference toward OS X. In our speed trials, however, Leopard OS trounced Vista in all-important tasks such as boot-up, shutdown and program-launch times. We even tested Vista on the Macs using Apple’s platform-switching Boot Camp software—and found that both Apple computers ran Vista faster than our PCs did.

PC: Simply put, Vista proved to be a more sluggish operating system than Leopard. Our PCs installed some software faster, but in general they were slower in our time trials. Plus, both PCs showed weaker performance on third-party benchmarks than the Macs. Our biggest surprise, however, was that PCs were not the relative bargains we expected them to be. The Asus M51sr costs the same as a MacBook, while the Gateway One actually costs $300 more than an iMac. That means for the price of the Gateway you could buy an iMac, boost its hard drive to match the Gateway’s, purchase a copy of Vista to boot—and still save $100.
Read the whole thing here, it's pretty good for what it is, if you are interested in Macs.

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