PC or MAC?

[miss sexy j]

please please please can someone who knows, help me!!!

i am sick of going through looking at laptops and sorting out the best. ive narrowed my search down to 2 laptops, both fairly similar but can someone please tell me which 1 to get because i cant decide? im getting mixed reviews for everyone.

i want it for music, films, and photos, its got to have a large hard drive & at least 1024 ram.

choices:
SONY VAIO FE11S
NEW APPLE MACBOOK PRO, 17" with a 2.16 GHZ processor

please help!

[miss sexy j]

doesnt anyone actually help in this forum?

[Oroshi]

MAC!!!

Mac rulez!!

[sally]

WINDOWS

[azraelle]

Considering the two choices, I'd go for the MAC. Especially with unix-based OS-X 10.4, it's clearly more versatile for graphics, especially for digital video editing (Final Cut Pro is the S***!). Get the newest MAC with the Intel-based cpu.

[Rachel xxx]

A Mac every time

[azraelle]

At Microsoft, failure is not an option--IT'S BUILT IN!!

[curlypaul]

I have never owned a mac but thats what I'll go for next time for the very good reason that very few virus's will work on a mac, and with unix installed even fewer will

[J_R]

I have a mac and have used macs for years so I'm a little biased. But for work, film and video editing, I go between the two platforms all the time.

Your pro's and cons are these.

Windows based machines are far cheeper, a bit faster (tho the mac book pro is an intel based machine and is rather fast), and have loads more hardware and software for them and it's all cheeper. Against they are fiddly to set up, the OS is very unintuative, tho if you're used to is not so bad, and prone to doing things that you didn't ask it too. Like mac it is Unix based and fairly solid (you have to go to pure unix machine like silicon graphics to get the real benefits - stick a graphics heavy front end like windows and mac OS-X and you're always going to get problems).

Macs have a great opperating system, well thought out and solid. Very robust against virus and other horrors, tho get some deacent security software pronto. Essentially they are really really really easy to set up and use. They just work!. And hey they look really nice too. But this comes at a price both money and in terms of the amount of hardware and software that will work with them. This will change with the new intel duo core chip which is essintially a P4.

At the end of the day, it's a tool for a job, and as soon as you buy it it is obselete. I bought my laptop about two years ago and it is a bit of a dinosor now in terms of speed etc but I've cut a movie on it!

If you are seriously wanting to make music, video and do graphics then go for a mac. The software that the pro's use was all designed to run on a mac. (I will take issue with the azraelle...Final Cut Pro is okay..I've used everthing from film onwards, it does some things very well but its media management is utterly hopeless, and the design is fiddly and it is slow to cut on - bitch over - Avid is still a better cutting tool tho FCP is a better finishing tool and hey both run on a mac!)

If you can afford the mac and the software and want a serious tool then get it. If its just something to watch movies on and run itunes (mac hee hee) then get the sony. You should be able to get 2gb of ram in both and as firewire drives are getting so cheap (a lacie 1terra byte is only about £500! thats 75 hours of DV video or 500+ or DVD video!) the size of the hard drive for bulk storage isn't an issue. Both have about 100gb on them.

So horses for course either way those are both good machines. I'd go for a mac but you can save some pennies on the pc.

[azraelle]

(I will take issue with the azraelle...Final Cut Pro is okay..I've used everthing from film onwards, it does some things very well but its media management is utterly hopeless, and the design is fiddly and it is slow to cut on - bitch over - Avid is still a better cutting tool tho FCP is a better finishing tool and hey both run on a mac!)

Never had the opportunity to work with Avid--saw it run once on a dedicated machine, and it looked great. I learned to use FCP-3 at college a couple of years back, and from 3rd hand sources (including 2 instructors) it beat the hell out of Adobe Premiere 6.0 (what they had been using the year before for teaching digital video editing). I hear that Premiere 7.0 is at least as good, if not superior, to FCP-3, have no idea how it compares to FCP-4, but it doesn't run on Windows 2K, only XP, which I don't want to invest in.

In case you were wondering, I do not own a MAC (not enough money), but do own one of what you would call a dinosaur, no doubt--a home-built n-Force2 chipset mobo(Shuttle)/AMD XP-1700+ slightly overclocked to 1900 equiv, ~280 GB HDD, 512 MB RAM, Quadro FX-500, Lite-On single density DVDR/CDRW burner. I have unofficial copies of AvidXpressDV and Premiere 6.5, but have not attempted to use them yet.

[Valcore]

Depending on what you are familiar with, I would go with that.

If you are used to a MS Windows environment, choose the Sony.
If you are used to a MAC, then choose that.

There are pros and cons to both, however for my own opinion, unless you plan on doing high end image editing, i would choose the SONY.

May people throw out general statements such as 'graphics are better on a mac'. Well, thats not entireley true. It is only true in the sense that, MACS are designed for video/image EDITING and PUBLISHING. However if you're just going to be viewing pics, videos, listening to music, an Intel based platform will serve you just as well as a MAC, and will have more compatibility with everything else you may want to use it for.

Basic home computing = SONY
Graphics & Video CREATION = MAC

thats my $0.02

[michaelcarpenter]

Oh my god how cud anyone say Mac????????????????????? There only about looks and thats it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! PC every single time u wud b crazy not too!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[mostirreverent]

XP makes me almost literally sick. it looks like Fisher Price designed it.

And is is not just about looks. it is about simple things that affect your daily workings. just look at the search function in windows. IT BLOWS. if is so annoying to use. it tries to be simple but makes things more complicated. the mac has a google like space that starts searching the moment you add a letter... infact most things just work smarter.

sorry, but most things about the PC just irritate me. it is so clunky.

unless you need a CAD program, there is not much else not on the Mac as well. let that be the deciding factor for you.

[Big_trousers]

God, don't people who use macs make you sick ?

If I hear one more veggie moron blather on about how "creative" they are with their mac I'm going to hurl chunks.

When that mac virus arrives that wipes all those c*n*s out, I'll laugh my F****** head off.

[pheromoaner]

unless you need a CAD program, there is not much else not on the Mac as well. let that be the deciding factor for you.

I do quite a lot of production CAD work on my mac G5, from design work through to full archi site modelling - there are some great cad programs that are mac only - vectorworks & form•z are my daily staples - they both exchange dxf & dwg formats with autocad (which is also available for mac - but suffers from clunkiness worse than windows whatever environment you use) - the big plus here is that once the thing is designed you have access to all of the visualisation benefits of the mac - so rendering a movie flyby or even just animating a walkthrough is halfway done before you even start putting it into lightwave or FCP.
Also all macs come with hardware graphics so you can render in openGL or quickdraw GX and edit or construct in real time on a fully rendered image complete with transparency, lights and shadows, textures and bumps.

Vectorworks even exports materials quantities lists and has a structural analysis tool, so you can see if your design will work under stress.

By the way I like the Fisher Price analogy - wonder if thats why windows fanatics love to take them apart so often?