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bcwood16

Who likes Macs?

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With Apple it's a love hate relationship. I had to buy an iBook G4 for audio School. I think it's a sweet machine. I'm always interested to see the differences between similar mac and PC software. I really like how you can close the window of mac software and still leave the program running. The key commands I feel are better than windows. I just Love Command W (close window) and command Q (Quit Application). I find that satisfying.

I believe that all of the hatred toward windows stems from windows 95, 98, ME. I think those OSs really sucked. This was before my time but I have to assume Macs were better. I think windows 2k3 or XP are great OSs The superiority complexes for macs just doesn't want to die.

I would like to think that the HFS file system is better. However I have never had a problem with NTFS ether. I was told in school HFS handles fragmentation better. I was also told you should de-fragment your audio drive not your OS drive. I have found the opposite to be true. I can Explain if anyone is interested.

I've vowed never to buy another mac now that they went to Intel. I'm having good results with a 3Ghz pentium 4 Dell as my main DAW Mac now.

Ive been waiting to vent about this one. I mind the control click on a desktop mac. There is no reason a desktop Mac should have a one click mouse. I'm sure there are more two button mouses in the world than there are computers. However I Like the control click on the iBookG4.

OT, sorry, but I must:

I cant stand two button track pads. I'm always unaware where the thumb is and I press the wrong button.

Nothing beets the pointing stick. My 486 Toshiba satellite notebook had a pointing stick. The left click was a large semi circle button on the top and the right click was a smaller semi circle below it. with this system your using 2 muscles to differentiate between left and right click VS. at least 20.

also great for doom single player. It's actually piratical to run using the mouse :)

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If you need to click the buttons on a trackpad either you have an old computer or you're doing it wrong. :p

In the Windows 9x days Macs sucked bigtime. Applications couldn't allocate themselves any more memory while they were running. That really sucked. Not to mention the various MS programs that were commonly added to Macs in work environments tended to crash the machines even more often than Windows crashed.

The shortcut keys you mentioned are pretty sweet. Windows has its share of them too, but they're a bit less consistent (eg. most use the Windows key, but older ones use ALT).

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Aliotroph? said:

If you need to click the buttons on a trackpad either you have an old computer or you're doing it wrong. :p

I still press the trackpad button on my MBP; it's the default setting to require it and I don't like accidentally clicking just by playing with my finger on the trackpad. On touchscreens it's more tolerable.

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The only reason I see to own a mac is for video editing or something similar. The way I see it..would you buy a car that you couldn't change the spark plugs in? A hard drive goes bad and you have to buy a brand new computer? No thanks. Windows is the primary gaming OS too.

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Whosondephone said:

I would like to think that the HFS file system is better. However I have never had a problem with NTFS ether. I was told in school HFS handles fragmentation better.


I don't know about fragmentation, but I recall reading that it supposedly made data recovery easier, since every cluster actually contained a pointer to the next cluster for a particular file, therefore bypassing the problem you have with the "first free block" allocation strategy used on FAT or NTFS.

There, if you delete a file and immediately write something to disk (even if you don't overwrite the actual file data), just recovering the FAT/NTFS entries is not enough: if the cluster chain information is destroyed, and the file was not in one piece on the disk, locating just its starting cluster will do you no good, while on HFS you can hop through incredible levels of fragmentation, assuming the clusters themselves weren't overwritten.

In any case, the fragmentation problem inherent in FAT/NTFS seems to be more due to the simplistic allocation strategy used ("find next free cluster on the disk in an incremental fashion, even if it's ONE cluster sandwiched between two used ones"). The advantage is that you waste almost no time finding a suitable free space for a file. The downside is, well, easier fragmentation.

Most Linux filesystems actually use a more time-consuming strategy for locataing a suitable space ("find enough contiguous clusters for holding the entire file, plus some leeway"). So you need more time to find free space, but the tradeoff is supposedly worth it. NTFS is supposedly a bit smarter than FAT, e.g. it DOES search for large free space for large files, but nowhere near as good the linux/ext strategy.

Whosondephone said:

I was also told you should de-fragment your audio drive not your OS drive. I have found the opposite to be true. I can Explain if anyone is interested.


I guess it depends on the software you use, and its read/write patterns. E.g. Audacity stores many small files (more prone to fragmentation), other programs may save larger continuous streams etc.

The OS disk is ALWAYS under pressure (millions of R/W I/O on small files everyday), so of course it needs more defragging...unless it's ext3/4, of course.

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esselfortium said:

What? No I don't.


Well maybe I am wrong but my basic understanding of a mac is that if something breaks you have to go through mac to get a replacement part or you have. to buy a new computer in general. I might be wrong though. I have never seen parts for a Mac on store shelves. If I am not mistaken you can't even take the battery out of an IPhone.

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Hard disks and RAM modules for desktop models (iMacs and Powermacs) are not any different than standard PC parts (though you might have to jump through some hoops, e.g. iMacs use laptop SO-DIMMs!). On PowerMacs you can even use standard PCI and PCI express expansion cards and video cards (driver support is another matter).

Even on the old G3/G4 lines, you could use PCI cards, IDE hard drives etc. with only Apple's proprietary video bus being somewhat of a PITA.

However with Macbooks it might be nontrivial to upgrade/replace the RAM yourself, but I think hard drives are pretty standard 2.5" SATA ones. Now, iPods, iPads, iPhone etc. are laden with custom embedded hardware, but you wouldn't expect to be able to hardware hack an Android or Windows phone, right? The only thing you might want/have to replace is the 1.8" HD on older iPods.

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iMacs use laptop everything.

Every Mac model except the new Retina Macbooks have easily replaceable RAM, even with tabs and levers to make life easier (check this out: https://support.apple.com/kb/ht1270#link1)

HDD replacement is a breeze on everything except the new iMacs and thin Macbooks. I'm noticing a nasty pattern here :-(

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Ribbiks said:

I do agree with this though, I'm going to keep using 10.6.8 for as long as humanly possible

Yay, that's the OS I just happen to have. Every once in awhile I have to do something on my Boss's computer which is 10.7 or 10.8 and I am just totally lost as it's much different and file management seems nearly retarded. But overall, for me, the OP's post is a bunch of nonsense, sans maybe pen drives (but it's not that much slower noticing them than a PC). My mac is very fast and only bogs down when I get careless (don't clean up my desktop, have too many big programs open simultaneously like InDesign and Photoshop). Desktop is a lousy place to keep files anyway, so seems hardly worth complaining about. The only real complaint I have with a Mac is you don't see the unstability coming the way you do on a PC. Often it will just suddenly be laggy and freezing up with little warning. You do learn to detect the warning signs, tho, they're just more subtle to PCs (but they occur later). I still like to complain about Macs as someone who used PCs for decades, but the better I get at using a mac, the less I can complain about it. I've never used modern PC OSes though (Vista is the latest I go and only a little--primary PC OS is XP).

I have a macbook pro i bought in 2011.

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^ That sounds like a great OS to stick with. I'm running 10.4.11 and am just blown away by the support software developers still have for it. I can still watch U-tube videos. Not to mention play doom with software rendering via Odamex.

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Yea most parts in Apple laptops are exactly the same as any other laptop, think the only unique thing is opening the product up, Apple try to make this hard and try to come up with creative ways to hold the various parts of the main body together. Sometimes its pretty smart, most of the time its just stupid.

As for parts, hard drives and memory modules are no problem, their generic. Other parts you can often fix your self, but obviously depends on nature of fault.

Things like super drives, batteries, keyboards etc you can get on eBay, however, they are really expensive! Thats why I have taught my self how to fix most of the common faults (if possible) at home.

For other things that I cant do or cant get replacements for I go to non-genuine Apple specialists as they know more and are cheaper, though not by much!

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My older (early-2008) MacBook lives to the reputation that Macs are stable and never crash. My newer one (mid-2012), not so much. I just experienced a Windows 98-like system freeze today. Good thing that the system has been designed not to lose anything on crashes (everything autosaves and opens untouched on next startup) and I have a SSD so all it takes is 10 seconds. But I'd rather have software that never crashes, than software designed around crashes which are expected to happen often. I hope it's a software bug causing this, not my laptop melting for whatever stupid reason.

Still, that's not enough reason for me to sway to other laptop brands (eww), and it's just one case, not enough to generalize.

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