Mac and PCs

Myranda

holnrew said:

It's like people comparing an iPhone with a sub £200 Android device rather than a Pixel

The retina display on an iPhone is even lower resolution than on many competing phones now. Retina display on Macbooks are lower resolution than on some competitors models... 

Unless there's some proprietary software on the laptop stock work provided maybe Gassage could just use his own laptop and stop trying to conflate using a budget anything to a premium thing.

Having just been part of some Mac software rollouts at work I would not want to be saying OSX is remotely awesome right now. 

prowla

Well, if it's a budget Windows laptop PC being compared against an up to date Mac PC, then it's likely that the Windows one will have a lower resolution, and so the answer is to replace the Windows one with a better model with a higher resolution screen.

As for the Windows/Mac debate, right now I'm on a Mac, but I'll shortly be using a Windows PC and using Ubuntu and Mint Linux in VMs on it; I don't see things as an either-or, nor the need to get religious about brands whose board members and shareholders don't even know I exist.

Looking at the CPU in a PC and using it to say a Mac PC is the same as a Windows PC is a bit like comparing cars by only looking at the engine size, ie. missing the point.

prowla

Gassage said:

Emp_Fab said:

@Gassage What is the make and model of the laptop mate ?

A Dell. Core i5 7th Gen

That's the make and CPU - Dell tend to do different models, with different CPU speeds sometimes and for some they offer different screen resolutions.

The good thing about Apple with regards to this particular aspect is that they do very precisely defined models, so you know the spec.

stickyfiddle

Windows = better Excel implementation and you can play Age of Empires 2
Mac = shit excel but really nice for everything else but it can't play Age of Empires 2

TTBZ

I've worked at 2 tv studios with 24/7 video editing machines both running Windows 7 for quick turnaround editing - if it were unreliable or shit I think things would have come unraveled at both places by now!

Imo Apple is form over function unless you pay a premium and even then you could be getting a better spec for your money.

Axe_meister

MacOS has not really moved on much as an OS. And it does clog up with shit over time. I recently wiped and reinstalled my wife old dual core i5 and it way faster.
I still prefer windows 7 over windows 10 from a look and feel point of view but am running windows 10 exclusively as it is more stable and quicker.

LooseMoose

To attempt to help rather than just re hash the same boring debate: on the laptop, hit the start button and type calibrate - then go through the wizard and reduce the gamma together with playing with the brightness to get it how you like. That should improve things but it won't perform miracles, the actual panel used in most PC laptops is an inferior (cheaper) technology to the IPS screens used in (some) more expensive machines. It's not just about how many pixels...

prowla

revsorg said:

My mum's Surface Book has one of the best screens I've ever seen - 3000 x 2000 pixel 13.5 inch touchscreen and it uses scaling in Windows 10 to get everything to display the right size.

Good luck with that when it goes wrong - we've had a couple of them at work...

olafgarten

prowla said:

revsorg said:

My mum's Surface Book has one of the best screens I've ever seen - 3000 x 2000 pixel 13.5 inch touchscreen and it uses scaling in Windows 10 to get everything to display the right size.

Good luck with that when it goes wrong - we've had a couple of them at work...

 I have one, they were a little buggy when they first launched but with the latest updates, they are rock solid. 

joneve

stickyfiddle said:

Windows = better Excel implementation and you can play Age of Empires 2
Mac = shit excel but really nice for everything else but it can't play Age of Empires 2

The newest version of office on Mac is actually surprisingly good (compared to previous efforts)...it's actually usable now. 

No laptop/PC I've ever owned, despite rigorous and time consuming efforts to keep it clean and virus/malware free, has never lasted more than about 3 years before noticeably slowing down and eventually becoming unusable. 

I've had 3 MacBooks - One original one, that would probably still be with us today, had the wife not got a bit over excited and somehow managed to crack the screen. But that gave me 8 years of use with no problems at all. It's replacement has started to slow a bit, but it's been neglected for the last 2 years or so, as work provided me with a Pro a few years ago, use it every day, and so far, no problems. 

crunchman

joneve said:

No laptop/PC I've ever owned, despite rigorous and time consuming efforts to keep it clean and virus/malware free, has never lasted more than about 3 years before noticeably slowing down and eventually becoming unusable. 

I'm typing this on a 5 year old PC and it's fine.

Jalapeno

The Fanbois won't listen. MAC rooolz !!!!  It's just a computer  - get over yourselves !!!!!!!!!

Thread has gone very predictable ..........

stickyfiddle

joneve said:

stickyfiddle said:

Windows = better Excel implementation and you can play Age of Empires 2
Mac = shit excel but really nice for everything else but it can't play Age of Empires 2

The newest version of office on Mac is actually surprisingly good (compared to previous efforts)...it's actually usable now. 

No laptop/PC I've ever owned, despite rigorous and time consuming efforts to keep it clean and virus/malware free, has never lasted more than about 3 years before noticeably slowing down and eventually becoming unusable. 

I've had 3 MacBooks - One original one, that would probably still be with us today, had the wife not got a bit over excited and somehow managed to crack the screen. But that gave me 8 years of use with no problems at all. It's replacement has started to slow a bit, but it's been neglected for the last 2 years or so, as work provided me with a Pro a few years ago, use it every day, and so far, no problems. 

Office is much improved, but excel is still a mess for advanced users (i'm someone who spends half their working life coding complex financial models in excel). You can do it in the Mac version, but the keyboard shortcuts are all wrong, making it a huge pain. Also the function keys have system uses by default, which slows you down hugely. I should make it clear this is all MS's fault, not Apple's. There is absolutely no reason for everything not to be absolutely as equivalent as possible, only switching Ctrl for Cmd. 

For everything else Office on Mac is just fine, but Excel is just not there. 

ToneControl

ahh I see the problem, @Gassage has been given a cheap laptop from work
that itself is bad: usually you get better machines if they care about you

anyway: I too have a lower spec machine from work. When at home, I run it through a 27 inch screen, and all is fine

to briefly address the latest iteration of anti-windows comments:
my PCs all run for days without problems, I much prefer them to my Mac
the Banks I have worked for have thousands of windows PCs in use as servers, none have Macs. Same with Government depts, etc, etc. These are high-availability resilient machines, it's a fantasy to imagine that windows machines are discredited

Anyone is welcome to feel free to believe that windows is "not an OS", or "flaky", but you risk looking like a flat-earther to anyone who knows about IT

Jalapeno

ToneControl said:

ahh I see the problem, @Gassage has been given a cheap laptop from work
that itself is bad: usually you get better machines if they care about you

anyway: I too have a lower spec machine from work. When at home, I run it through a 27 inch screen, and all is fine

to briefly address the latest iteration of anti-windows comments:
my PCs all run for days without problems, I much prefer them to my Mac
the Banks I have worked for have thousands of windows PCs in use as servers, none have Macs. Same with Government depts, etc, etc. These are high-availability resilient machines, it's a fantasy to imagine that windows machines are discredited

Anyone is welcome to feel free to believe that windows is "not an OS", or "flaky", but you risk looking like a fla9t-earther to anyone who knows about IT

Word.

(And I own a MacBook, an old heavy, dual core one, and a core duo MacMini - with 16Gb of RAM that macOS only sees 4Gb of )

joneve

stickyfiddle said:

joneve said:

stickyfiddle said:

Windows = better Excel implementation and you can play Age of Empires 2
Mac = shit excel but really nice for everything else but it can't play Age of Empires 2

The newest version of office on Mac is actually surprisingly good (compared to previous efforts)...it's actually usable now. 

No laptop/PC I've ever owned, despite rigorous and time consuming efforts to keep it clean and virus/malware free, has never lasted more than about 3 years before noticeably slowing down and eventually becoming unusable. 

I've had 3 MacBooks - One original one, that would probably still be with us today, had the wife not got a bit over excited and somehow managed to crack the screen. But that gave me 8 years of use with no problems at all. It's replacement has started to slow a bit, but it's been neglected for the last 2 years or so, as work provided me with a Pro a few years ago, use it every day, and so far, no problems. 

Office is much improved, but excel is still a mess for advanced users (i'm someone who spends half their working life coding complex financial models in excel). You can do it in the Mac version, but the keyboard shortcuts are all wrong, making it a huge pain. Also the function keys have system uses by default, which slows you down hugely. I should make it clear this is all MS's fault, not Apple's. There is absolutely no reason for everything not to be absolutely as equivalent as possible, only switching Ctrl for Cmd. 

For everything else Office on Mac is just fine, but Excel is just not there. 

Ah yea, fair enough. I only use excel for relatively basic stuff...so the fiddiliness of of the shortcuts is bearable. 

webrthomson

I've got both and use both for home and work purposes, but I spent about the same on them, and the spec is pretty much identical - at that point there are zero real differences in performance or screen etc.

And I get the same amount of OS crashes in the mac OS as windows, anecdotally about one per year for each OS.

If you have similarly spec'ed hardware there is very little difference.

crunchman

webrthomson said:

If you have similarly spec'ed hardware there is very little difference.

This.  I suspect a lot of the problems some people report with PCs are because they are using budget ones with cheap hardware.

digitalscream

ToneControl said:

Anyone is welcome to feel free to believe that windows is "not an OS", or "flaky", but you risk looking like a flat-earther to anyone who knows about IT

Bingo.

chrispy108

stickyfiddle said:
There is absolutely no reason for everything not to be absolutely as equivalent as possible, only switching Ctrl for Cmd. 

For everything else Office on Mac is just fine, but Excel is just not there. 

This! I've just got a Macbook Pro from work, and it's great, screen is quality etc etc, but it's taking me time to get used to when I need to use Ctrl or cmd in Excel. It can't see any pattern to it.