PC or MAC

[skitron]

Jesus. He's asking for PC or Mac and we bring BigBrother...

LOL, his question was answered about fifty times before the thread went significantly off topic, but by all means, answer it again.

[Enrico]

LOL again. Pardon me for not reading the whole thread all over again

I just think focus was lost (...ehrm.. at least on page 5...o.O)

[briansquibb]

I used to be a hardcore PC guy but literally I could not save ANYTHING on the hard drive... because once a freaking virus hits... i'd lose all my photos... I got a back up hard drive that mirrored my C drive... My computer got a virus, guess what, my backup got the virus as well... and this is with norton and about 2 other antivirus sotfwares going... I had a second back up i'd drag and drop into... that was good but the instability and uncertainty of the PC killed my photography storage... I bought a cheap Mac Mini and ran PS and did what I needed off that until I had enough dough to pay for an IMAC... I am proud to say I've been virus free for nearly 4 years since the switch and haven't had to pay a penny for antivirus software...  It's expensive but well worth the switch in the long run.

I have never had a virus on a PC in the 27 years I have been using them.

Well you're machine must be one in a million... glad it's worked out for you while I work with my mac...

Amongst my responsibilities it was my job to keep PC's clean. Simple precautions and some knowlege is all it takes.

The biggest threats are the black hat trojans and hijackers - and they work on all machines. The most vulnerable used to be the DEC machines, nowadays it is the routers and firewalls that everyone hides behind (and assumes they are safe there).

[neuroanatomist]

The only problem is, you seem to have an implied faith that some other company who isn't currently suspected of doing exactly that on their stuff won't do the same in the future.

I didn't mean to imply that.  Apple collects plenty of personal information on their customers.  Walmart has low prices because they cut deals with vendors for lower wholesale pricing in exchange for data on their customers' spending habits - including detailed dempgraphic and personal identifying information.  I'm sure there are companies out there that don't engage in such practices, but not for altruistic reasons, more likely they don't have the capability or haven't figured out a way to monetize the data.

A colleague submitted an online morgatge inquiry (major bank, SSL connection) and within 10 minutes got a phishing call.  Coincidence?

There is no privacy.  No illusions here...  But enough OT, back to the flame war discussion that should typify a Mac vs. PC question.   

If you have basic knowledge or better get a PC, if you are a technophobe or you can't figure out how to use a TV remote control, MAC is a good option.

Say...can someone help me with my Betamax player?  It's got a 12:00 on the front that won't stop flashing...   

For example, I bought a new laptop a few months ago from Dell for $2200 and I looked at the comparable MacBook Pro with the same processor, hard drive, video card, and with half of the RAM of the machine I bought and it was $2900 from Apple.

Did the 'equivalent' PC have a slot-loading optical drive? Backlit keyboard? Multitouch trackpad? Digital/optical audio input and output?  7 hours of battery life? A breakaway power connector?  All in a case less than 1" thick?

That's the problem with 'the same computer for a lot cheaper'.  It's not the same.  Of course, for many people those features are dispensable, and the lower cost it preferable. For others (many others, judging by Apple's stock price and market cap), the additional features are worth the cost.

The only thing my MacBook Pro and MacBook Air are missing is the red ring. 

[briansquibb]

I never got into MACs as I used Windows and Unix and mainframes at work - so yet another interface was not desirable

I dont see there is anything to even debate re Windows vs Mac. You just pick the one that suits you. A bit like choosing between Nikon and Canon really ...

[skitron]

Did the 'equivalent' PC have a slot-loading optical drive? Backlit keyboard? Multitouch trackpad? Digital/optical audio input and output?  7 hours of battery life? A breakaway power connector?  All in a case less than 1" thick?

I think Sony offers something at least somewhat along these lines. But I say it as information only...I come from the "choose your app and then something that will run it" camp, without prejudice. If I wanted a laptop for photo-editing I would be willing to run Capture One on either platform since it supports both. It would frankly all come down to the best screen I could find.

[Canon Rumors]

I switched to Mac a year ago and most of it has been fine.

There's one thing I miss a lot, and that's the start menu. I much prefer that to the dock.

Other that, Chrome and Lightroom work the same... except my hardware has a prettier exterior.

[sct69]

So do you suggest the use of glossy or anti glare/ matte screen on a MBP. I would have thought pay the extra for a matte screen seeing I would be using it to edit photos etc. To be honest I only just realised that there was different screen options available.

[willrobb]

I used to use PC and after about 2 years they would be so slow it was a real pain to use.

NOW I use apple and after about 5 years it gets so slow it's a pain to use. Still, for the extra three years I prefer Apple, but I know plenty of people who love their windows pcs for editing. If it works for you then it's all good.

[Cetalis]

I think i'm the only one, but I find mac slower and harder to use as it tries to hide everything useful from me, and can't bother to wait for developers to rewrite stuff for mac. Then again I dual boot so i can game on windows and program on 'nix...

[briansquibb]

I believe PC suppliers deliberately keep the spec of thir machines as low as possible to keep their headline price as low as possible. Usually it seems to be the minimum amount of memory which slows things down. As Macs and Wins share the same hardware nowadays there is no reason why there should be significant performance difference. However if you look at the specs you will find that Macs come with a lot more memory than your average Win PC - and to me that is the crucial difference. Put a Core i7 in a 4gb machine and the performance will not be good - the CPU is the headline that the manufacturers push - a Core i3 with 16gb will probably out perform this.

I built my own PC 4 years ago and it has survived the transition from XP to 7 without a problem and still has more than adequate performance. It has 8Gb memory and a SSD C:, fastish graphics card and 2 26" screens. I would suggest 8gb should be the minimum in a PC that is going to do significant work.

I have 2 other PCs doing other jobs, emails and storage management so that my main PC doesn't get clogged down. These are my previous PCs so have only 4Gb and run 32bit win7, however they have more than enough power for what they are asked to do.

I have cabled my network through the house rather than use wifi (although we do have wifi). Wifi takes a lot of power to drive from the home routers and I have found that 2 laptops on wifi will slow the network down to the point where web access becomes unacceptably slow. The only regular wifi usage now is by our phones, which use insignificant capacity.

[smithy]

Put a Core i7 in a 4gb machine and the performance will not be good - the CPU is the headline that the manufacturers push - a Core i3 with 16gb will probably out perform this.

The i7 would still easily outperform an i3 in that situation.  More RAM accounts for some performance increases (it takes the load off the usual bottleneck in a system, the hard drive, due to fewer page writes to disk), but not enough to overtake a significantly faster CPU like the i7 in most situations (remember the i7 has 4 physical cores and 4 virtual cores, totalling 8 effective cores - twice as many as the i3).

I would suggest 8gb should be the minimum in a PC that is going to do significant work.

I agree.  And RAM is so cheap now that there's really no excuse for having less than this in a new system.  Unless you buy your memory from Apple, in which case you'll pay 2-3 times more than you should...

I have cabled my network through the house rather than use wifi (although we do have wifi). Wifi takes a lot of power to drive from the home routers and I have found that 2 laptops on wifi will slow the network down to the point where web access becomes unacceptably slow. The only regular wifi usage now is by our phones, which use insignificant capacity.

Wi-fi performance can be hindered by trying to have too much range.  Wi-fi routers can broadcast to multiple computers at full speed simultaneously, but can only receive data from one client at a time.  So if you have a laptop with a weak signal (which in turn means that it has a slow connection speed), then all of your other wireless devices have to 'wait' for the slow laptop to talk to the router at terribly slow speeds before they can have their turn.  In other words, the slowest computer wi-fi connection essentially dictates the speed of your entire wi-fi network.  Hard-wiring your network is a good solution too. 

[Jettatore]

IRT SMITHY

The i7 would still easily outperform an i3 in that situation.  More RAM accounts for some performance increases (it takes the load off the usual bottleneck in a system, the hard drive, due to fewer page writes to disk), but not enough to overtake a significantly faster CPU like the i7 in most situations (remember the i7 has 4 physical cores and 4 virtual cores, totalling 8 effective cores - twice as many as the i3).

Photo-editing is heavily RAM intensive and is a very important consideration for anyone doing serious work.  8GB or better is recommended, especially for higher resolution edits.  Relying on HDD cache and a fast CPU (which I realize no one here is actually suggesting) would probably be a painful environment to work in for RAM intensive tasks.  The slower CPU outfitted with an adequate supply of RAM might very well be the faster setup in this scenario.  It' all depends on real world situations and we are speaking abstractly.

[briansquibb]

Put a Core i7 in a 4gb machine and the performance will not be good - the CPU is the headline that the manufacturers push - a Core i3 with 16gb will probably out perform this.

The i7 would still easily outperform an i3 in that situation.  More RAM accounts for some performance increases (it takes the load off the usual bottleneck in a system, the hard drive, due to fewer page writes to disk), but not enough to overtake a significantly faster CPU like the i7 in most situations (remember the i7 has 4 physical cores and 4 virtual cores, totalling 8 effective cores - twice as many as the i3).

Consider that every thread requires memory, so doubling the number of active threads in a PC increases the demand on memory. An i7 with its multiple cores will try to run more threads than a i5 with half the number of cores. As soon as you exceed the available page pool you invoke the memory manager which will page memory out to hard drive - stopping the other processes using the hard drive - this is a serial activity. Further more if the page fault is on a page that has been written to the hard drive then you will also get a page read .

You will find that in low memory systems the less cores you have the faster it will process due to the lack of interruption from paging. In addition the effectiveness of each core reduces as it increases due the overhead of the workload scheduler - so twice the number of cores does not mean twice the effective workload that can be processed

I have run many tests of this type on servers over the years - there are two performance curves:

1. The base memory curve with memory vs throughput. This is usually an elbow curve where increasing workload suddenly means no extra throughput, this is moved by adding more memory.

2. The oversupply of memory being used as cache - this is particularly important in spasmodic load workloads such as webservers where more memory than conventionally expected increases the responsiveness of the server. There is a limit here where the increase in processing power required by the memory manager offsets the reduced page reads.

A balanced system is what is needed - so for i7 systems perhaps 12 or 16gb is needed to maximise the workload throughput.

Me, I have a Core 2 duo @3ghz with 8gb which can happily run my workload.

[JR]

I have run many tests of this type on servers over the years - there are two performance curves:

Have you been able to determine which hardware component is the most effective to run Lightroom?  The one thing I found with lightroom and when you clici on an image to view it at 100% zoom, it always takes a few seconds to create the view.  It does that on both my Mac Pro and my PC. 

In an attempt to make my system instanteneous recently (yes I am very impatient!) I built my self a second PC and went all in! (i7 3960, 64Gb or RAM, SSD drive all the way and a R6990 graphic card, and on top of that I overclock the CPU at 4.5Ghz, so cant do mare than that!).  While this last system is wicked fast, there are still some occasion where there is a small delay in building the 100% image in Lightroom (ok, ok now I am being picky now!).  I just cant figure out which portion of the hardware is causing this.  I dont think it is the graphic card, I have tons of ram, so could it be that I would need a server setup instead with multiple CPU instead of a single 6-Core i7?

Anyway to get the same performace from my Mac Pro I would have had to pay over $10k so I am happy with my home made kick-ass PC, but just curious to make it even better!