Mac or PC user? Pro - Semi Pro - Amateur?

[SPLASTiK]

BTW you Macfolks will get addicted very soon, the Intel Conroe that will fuel your new desktops outruns the fastest AMD Athlon at this moment at lower clockspeeds.

Got a link for that? COuld be an interesting read.

I recently was reading a review on the new MacBook. They decided to test benchmarks between an Powerbook G4, the new iMac and for kicks tossed in a Dell running the cracked PC version of osx86. The Dell did better in a few categories actually, though overall the iMac was the best.

Another interesting review comparing the the new models to a dual 2.0 G5 doing practical tasks like copying files, converting to MP3, video rendering, etc.
The G5 actually was the best in 6 out of 9 tests, same OS version and amount of RAM.


Oh and to answer the thread. I'm semi-pro I guess, 4 years, and I use both PC and Macs. Preference for Audio is Macs but only because I learned ProTools on one so I get around easier on it (though I can reprogram a PC Keyboard to keep the shortcuts the same) but I've never had any problems with PC's for audio and I've never had a Virus or spyware problem on any of my PC's for the past decade+. So I wouldn't say because more pros use them they are better. That's like saying because more pro studios use ProTools that it's better than Digital Performer or Logic or Nuendo or whatever.

For Non-Audio applications I generally prefer PC versions, especially stuff like Internet browsing.

 

[006]

I use ProEngineer software for 3D design and it is not available for a Mac. Simple as that. Hence....I am a PC dude.

Sketchup does the same exact thing, but easier, and is available for PC and Mac. Have a nice day.

I think if you grew up with Mac's, you will use them. Vice versa for PC.

Not true. I grew up building custom PC's for my dad's little business he had on the side, which he did a TON of. From the ages of 10 to 16 I built and setup some monster PC's (for their time) and all I had ever heard about Macs was from my dad, and all he had to say was "there is no software for them, and they are lightyears behind PC's and the Windows operating system." I hadn't touched a Mac, or even seen one in person until I started working at the studio at age 17. All it took was 10 minutes with it and I was sold from then on.

I guess the main reason I do not own a mac is because you cannot build your own from scratch using any combination of hardware from any manufacturer to build a totally custom rig and being able to addon/upgrade/change/modify at will with absolute ease and relatively inexpensively.

My boss says the same thing. Who cares? A Mac just works. It performs just as well/better than your custom built PC out of the box. Who cares what's in it? Why question the inconsequential? If it ain't broke, don't fucking fix it, as they say. It's been proven time and time again with countless studies from reputable research groups. Macs outperform PC's. It's just been proven. There's no possible argument to that. Why does it matter that you can build it yourself? Why? So you can put together various third-party parts instead of a company? So that you are the one assembling a bunch of parts that are not designed to access the full potential of each peice it works with? Yeah, you got a point, I'd rather be the one causing the bottle-necking in my system, not some greedy company like Dell or anything. Who needs every part in that case to be designed alongside each other in the same place? Why would you want everything to work perfectly with no bottlenecks in the data flow? Stupid me.

I really don't want to...but I'm gonna bust it out anyway. Microsoft used Apple computers to develop, in it's entirety, their flagship, ground-breaking, multi-award winning game, Halo. Now...if PC's are sooooo great, and Windows is sooooo much better, why didn't Microsoft, a company that has more money than the United States Government (no, I'm kidding), use Macs instead of custom built PC's running Windows, to develop this game with? HMMMM???? A company that can afford to build a batch of super-rediculous maxed out, overclocked, balls to the wall, off-the-charts PC's for it's programming team, bought a handful of Macs instead. Gosh, it just boggles my mind why they would do that.

I'm not trying to say that Macs are rediculously better than PC's. But rather, you can't deny (after the countless tests and research studies proving it) their performance and reliability increase over Windows based PC's. I'm so sick of hearing about this crap I could scream. It's all been proven. I fucking hate PC's. I love Macs. It's a preference. But I don't go around talking about every time I got on a Windows 3.0 system and it crashed. Who cares? Fuck a IIc in it's ass and move on with your day. How about talking shit about the new G5's, MacBook's, and Mac Mini's that are utilizing the new Intel Conroe chips to further whip the absolute shit out of PC's yet again, huh? No comment on that, eh? Funny. I can't wait until those studies come out....just more glory for us Mac users.

~006

 

[RemoWilliams]

After using both, neither have changed my life or made my days. Plus this argument is getting off topic. Geez

 

[SPLASTiK]

It's been proven time and time again with countless studies from reputable research groups. Macs outperform PC's.

There's also vice-versa though. Unless you have some magical link from a reputable research group that is better than all the others and I haven't seen it yet...

Gosh, it just boggles my mind why they would do that.

Well seeing that Microsoft didn't develop the game and Bungie did which has a long history of Mac games (anyone remember playing Marathon on the old Apples in 1994ish? I do, awesome game by the way and the company was making games long before that for the Mac) It doesn't really boggle my mind.
I have friends who do/did game testing at EA and depending on what the developer gives them is how they test. It might be a PC, a G5, or the console.

 

[EtherForBreakfast]

Simmah simmah simmah down, 006!!! =)

I never said X is "better" than Y and I am certainly not anti apple.

Personally, my self built AMD PC's run *flawlessly* and I think Cubase SX3 is an outstanding host.

I have absolutely no desire to ever use a Mac - ever. The fact is, I genuinely *like* PC hardware. I like the smell of new motherboards and freshly pressed PCB's. I think CPU's look fucking cool and I genuinely enjoy building and tweaking and overclocking and all that shit.

It's just as simple as that. No need to get all panty-bunched about it, son. I much prefer "super strats" over Les Pauls, but I certainly would never try to claim that a Les Paul is "better" than a Strat. A Mac will never be "better" than a PC, and vice versa.

Simmah.

 

[006]

Point #1-
They don't seem skewed to me. When I have performed tests myself on my boss' PC which is a complete monster against my dual 2.0 G5. Using PhotoShop, ProTools, converting WAV to MP3, archiving files...stuff that actually matters because it pertains to our financial survival...the Mac owned. We're talking a $4k completely custom built, overclocked to the max, balls to the wall PC, like I mentioned in a previous post....came in two steps too late for every task.

Point #2-
But unless it was completely necessary, don't you think Microsoft would've anticipated some kind of slap to the face for using the Macs, and went with PC's instead? I'm sure Microsoft would've been so much more glorified for using their own OS on a PC to develop such an "amazing and ground-breaking" game....but instead, you never really hear about the Mac usage.

~006

 

[SPLASTiK]

Point #2-
But unless it was completely necessary, don't you think Microsoft would've anticipated some kind of slap to the face for using the Macs, and went with PC's instead?

No, because Microsoft didn't make the game... Bungie made the game, Microsoft only sold it. I'm sure Microsoft doesn't really care, I'm sure most people could care less who made it. It's the end product that matters, and sells. I think Microsoft's servers even run on Linux if I recall correctly from a posting I read recently somewhere, also recently a Microsoft presentation failed using Powerpoint or something and they opened the presentation on a backup computer in OpenOffice (great free Office Alternative) which saved their asses. Beyond a few chuckles from the alternative OS crowd that's all that happens. As long as Microsoft is maintaining market stability I'm sure a few little things like that don't really concern them.

I doubt a Apple was a must have necessity, maybe the software they used was (which was probably custom made and proprietary which is common in the gaming industry, at least according the people I know at EA and I've spoken to some people who work at Radical) but Macs and PC's really aren't that much different beyond the OS. Hell, I wouldn't put it past them that they didn't even look into what computers they were using. Many developers use Apples to make their games, and many PCs.

That's like saying Microsoft would freak out if all their commercials didn't use a PC for the audio and video when it was most like made in a professional post production studio which was running on Apples

 

[Hammer Bart]

Sketchup does the same exact thing, but easier, and is available for PC and Mac. Have a nice day.

 

[Torniojaws]

Amateur, 22, PC, Nuendo

6 years in recording stuff with a PC. Originally on Acid 1.0a, then Acid 3.0, Acid 4.0f, Acid 5.0, the the big plunge into Nuendo.

Oh and 15 years of PC usage Computers were a big part of our education at my original school when we were kids.

 

[SPLASTiK]

I almost replied to that part but didn't. It's funny he assumes exactly what you need.

 

[STINNETT]

Sketchup does the same exact thing, but easier, and is available for PC and Mac. Have a nice day.

You've got to be kidding me... ..I don't think so my man.

I'm talking about plastic injection mold design and advanced product design.
Plus Pro-Engineer is an industry standard software that also happens to be a requirement for working with many of my customers.

I don't even understand why you want to argue this? I wasn't taking a stance about the superiority or one or the other...just explaining my reasoning for using PC's.

Mac's rule! Does that make you feel better?

 

[deathtotaliban]

18, between am and semi. been recording for about 3 years. I know enough to get local bands good demos so i get paid for that but its nothin too great. enough for cables everynow and then,ha. my landscaping company is my main source of income,hopefully in a few year recording can bring more money in for me.

SHITTY PC, Dell Dimension 8200, 256 mb ram, P4 2.4 ghz (it blows, but luckily im going back to Mac,the new macbook this summer, cant wait) oh yea i use nuendo 2

Jordan

 

[Mulder]

Splastik, here's the link.

006, concerning Halo: the Xbox 360 runs on powerpc's from IBM. Before Microsoft had a working model of the 360 they demo'd a game running on a dual G5, having the same cpu's. People noticed that cos of the slow speed, the total lack of AA and... Because there was a G5 hidden away in a box under the table...

And let me quote Waves here: "Even the most well-equipped studios have a limited supply of outboard EQs, which limits the channels you can put them on. That limitation disappears with Q-Clone. It’s like opening a closet and finding stacks and stacks (e.g. up to 24 instances of Q-Clone on a Mac G5 dual 2.5 with Pro Tools or 25 instances of Q-Clone on PC P4 3.6 with Pro Tools) of your favorite box—enough for every channel and more."

I have similar experience here. I luvved Mac until the OSX.2 shit, after almost a year I lost my patience and made the switch to a diy pc with raptors, healthy PSU, good videocard with a low pci-latency, stuff like that. Picked a cpu that was a EE with a broken level 3 cache so it was sold as a 2.8 P4, easily running at 3.5 all the time. I like tweaking, it's part of the job for me. WinXP runs great. One partition for stuff like this and one for work. My wife runs 10.4 on a powerbook and has loads of trouble, simple stuff like printing pages in order go wrong.. So for me her annoyances are a constant reminder to keep to my config, it runs great. And it was half the price of a slower G4, at that time the competitive model. But according to Waves even a dual 2.5 G5 has trouble keeping up with my lowly 875based P4.

Anyway, what I would like the most is a retrun of OS9 on an intelbox, don't need all the glitter & gimmicks of OSX. And OS9 is so deadsimple, so easy to manage.. Always worked for me. Running Logic and 7 PTmixfarms on a 9600, no problems whatsoever. OSX(2.8) has been one big source of constant irritation for me, due to mismanagement at Apple. Lots of people left Logic (and Apple) because of that. But like I said, I still own two powermacs (G3/4), three if I count the little powerbook 5300 I still use to read ebooks. They all have their use, but for the industrial stuff I do I turn on the intelbox. Anyway, you will too in the near future.

 

[MKS]

I’m currently an amateur but about to become semi-pro with my first paying customers. I use a PC currently.

Software: Sonar 5.01
Age: 32

I’ve been working in the PC industry since 1993 and been using PC’s since 1987. I’m completely comfortable with a PC because that is what I’m used to. I’ve also used MAC’s since 1991. I never really like MACs for one simple reason. It was always hard to find any cracked software. Yes, that’s the truth. Until recently, my entire software catalog was warez. The only reason I started buying software is I wanted my studio to be 100% legit.

Honestly, the fight between PC & Mac is pointless. There is no true base for comparison. It&#8217;s like a battle between MS Word and Word Perfect. No matter which one you prefer, they both can accomplish the same thing but have different steps to get to the end result. On average, MACs have higher quality but they only harness <5% of the market share. MACs are not cloned like PC&#8221;s so they have the advantage of sticking to their quality assurance standards, whereas 80% of the PC&#8217;s have substandard components.

However, there isn&#8217;t that big of difference overall. I&#8217;ve spent weeks in Taiwan watching MAC and PC notebook production lines and you would be surprised how many similar components are used.

Finally, only real men use copycon! That&#8217;s for you true PC geeks!

 

[John Haddad (Shiva Industries)]

30 years old pro with full time studio running Mac - Logic 7 - Trident series 75 console. 4-5 years studio expierience. Trouble paying the bills from time to time like NOW!!! Actually! Still learning however, I think we all are cause nobody knows everything about anything.....

 

[Black neon bob]

Im a rookie i guess.. started recording about 1,5 year ago, and i am still loving every second of it.. in fact, it's getting more interesting every day!


I'm 23 now.. in ten years, i would like to be filthy rich, have a lot of cars, and have lot's of unbridled sex with strange women just like James and Andy do...

During the daytime when im not mixing, i clean toilet pots, worship David Hasselhoff. and i am a true master at arranging flowers!!

i use a PC, saving up for a mac to get one at some point later on.. need something more stable.

software.. nuendo and a shitload of plugins.. nuendo is amazing!

oh and PC sucks, MAC sucks.. gameboy is where it's at suckers!

 

[kev]

Not to stray of topic, but anyone use Linux at all?

 

[LydonB]

I am a noob with a Mac running Digital Performer. I hope to be a professional one day. We will see!

 

[evilmanny]

"when i was 7 a Mac exploded and burned down my family home, killing all our pets"...

Macs killed my father and raped my mother... (to paraphrase family guy).

Pro...
PC loaded with Creamware and Korg oasys cards
Sonar.
oh... I'm also 28

but I program midi on an AMIGA!
you knows it...

 

[Glenn Fricker]

35 years old running SawStudio on a PC, in my second studio: An RFZ concept based around a design by John Sayers. It's a great place to work.
Under Razorjack's criteria, I guess I'm "semi pro" looking to go full time pro in the next couple of years.
Currently, my day job pays waaay too much money and has an amazing benefits package. That makes it far too hard to walk away from.
PC or Mac, use what you like. The sound coming out of the speakers is what counts.