Mac Vs. PC
You know the commercials, in fact whether you are a Mac fan or not you probably like the commercials. They are funny, but are they true? Are PC users stuffy overweight dorks while the Apple user is a hip youngsters with a sharp wit? Well Popular Mechanics put the issue to the test. Not only did they test the performance of the machines but they tested what type of people preferred what type of machine as well.
The results of the test may shock you a little as PC held it’s own weight when it came to the which system was preferred by users. The user ratings came back with Mac only scoring a half a star higher than the PC. Mac’s “famously friendly” user interface ended edging out Microsoft’s Vista in the end but all users found both operating systems to be easy to use and enjoyed them as well. Oh and it wasn’t only stuffy fatties that liked the PC while not all of the hipsters preferred the Mac. So maybe the commercials don’t exactly reflect the truth.
The results of the speed tests, well those are a different story, Mac crushed Vista in the important categories such as startup and shutdown and launching the browsers. Vista did alright on installation times and program launching by keeping up and even beating Mac in a few categories. But when again it came time to test the heavy duty stuff Mac pulled ahead by taking about half the time to launch CS3 with a high stress level on the processors.
So I guess Macs can be considered the better computer. The results of both speed and user performance came back favoring the Mac. If you would like to see the exact stats go grab yourself the May 2008 copy of Poplular Mechanics. They also have the benchmarking software available for download on their site so if you want to perform the test yourself go out and grab the software.
In the meantime tell me what you prefer and why. Because I am a PC guy and Mac users often rub me the wrong way. Pretentious is generally what comes to mind. However it seems like that stereotype may be just as wrong as the commercials.
If you are awesome subscribe to my rss feed. If you like emails subscribe via email. Remember only you can prevent forest fires help me achieve my goal of 100 subscribers by June.
4 Comments
Adam on April 14th, 2008
Adam 2,
That is actually one of the issues of that they brought up. That PC users believe these Mac people just like their overpriced toys. However they were testing on 2 notebooks that each cost $1500. The Mac was smaller and had less bells and whistles. The Mac had a slightly smaller duo core chip and way less ram than the pc and still beat it in the testings.
Ned on April 14th, 2008
Mac Hardware is much nicer to use than PC Hardware - especially when it comes to laptops. I have been using Macs forever and although I find little reason to own a desktop, I think their laptops are amazing. I hope they come out with a small format laptop like the Asus EEE sometime in the future. I don’t think Jobs is a fan of the format but it really is a nice size for portable computing.
Ned’s last blog post..Rockin the Asus EEE on the bus!
Adam 2 on April 14th, 2008
The programs might run faster do to a many number of things that could be software related. For example OSX is based off a BSD distro of Unix. This fact alone can show the difference in kernel CPU schedulers. A more accurate comparison would be to compare OSX with Vista. However to compare the same hardware just in a fancy new case seems odd. Mac’s software is very cool and I’d love to put OSX on my crappy $400 computers. Hell, I’ll even put together one from the exact same hardware mac uses… but wait, because it doesn’t have the Apple©®&tm; BIOS I’m screwed. Here’s a link to some people who were trying to do something similar http://www.macrumors.com/2008/04/14/openmac-promises-399-headless-mac-but-not-from-apple/ but their site was shutdown before I could finish reading the article. Sigh* I guess I’ll be forced to make do with Windows or Linux.
Adam 2 on April 13th, 2008
I wonder what would’ve happened if Microsoft only allowed Vista to be install on certain hardware and not allowed any additional drivers. There’d be less bugs (like the macs) but I doubt it would be as creative looking. Still, I’d love to buy OSX and put it on my $1500 PC with the same hardware as a $4000 Mac.