Ah, the old Mac vs. PC debate. Having worked in the tech industry 20 years in my previous company as a technology provider for the PC OEM industry including Apple, Asus, HP, Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, Toshiba and virtually every vendor out there, I will add my own .02 cents.
Both PCs and Macs have their advantages and their flaws. Macs are no better nor worse than a PC. The hardware that Macs use is the same h/w that PCs use. The CPU, the graphics cards, the wireless chips are all the same. The only major difference is the OS. Now, with that said, Apple has done some pretty good stuff with the OS. However, the one big advantage Apple has is that they are a niche supplier running only about 10% of the PC installs. This is important to understand because it makes them significantly less of a target for malicious hackers that want to inflict harm to the widest audience possible. Therefore, they target Microsoft PCs. If Apple had such a large audience, they would be equally targeted by idiots that write virus code.
Now, in the PC space, you have a range of good designs and bad ones. The more you are willing to spend, the better the h/w you will get. I currently use the Asus UX31a and it is a great laptop but it also cost $1K. I also have an HP Pavillion laptop that I spent about $500 on...the quality of the experience is night and day.
On a side note, I also have a side business building mobile apps. To service this, we also have Macbook Pros. The Mac is a good PC but I would not say it is any better than the Asus I have. Quality of h/w, construction, s/w experience is about the same between both machines.
The advantage of the PC space is that the abundance of s/w available and the installed infrastructure is huge.
Therefore, in the end, both are good platforms but you must be willing to spend the money to get to the nicer h/w specs. Lower end PCs are exactly that, lower end PCs.
Regards,
Jay T.
JavaJack
Dave
