Now bear with me here… This is slightly geeky. I went on a tech forum recently to try and find out why a PC server firewall was blocking attempts from a Mac to use a certain file transfer protocol (told you). It was a long and complicated and fairly dull forum with various IT literate people talking about ports and clients and unix and so on… Halfway down this very useful but interminably dull thread was a comment from a “Mac Head” who said, "Don't use Microsoft shitty firewall. Use one frm Apple cos it will be loadz better NEway”. And this made my heart sink and my eyes wither and my balls retract and my knees ache and my teeth grind. People like this guy are the main reason that all my PC using friends tut and roll their eyes when I tell them about doing some work on a Mac. And my Mac friends tut and look down their noses when I tell them I have to use a PC.
It's really quite simple. If you're one of the aforementioned forum mangling people then read the following and see if you can keep up, you fudge brained goit.
PC's are multi-purpose systems designed and built with the sole purpose of total flexibility, ease of upgrade, ease of modification. This flexibility is why they are used for cutting edge scientific systems, cutting edge graphics systems (Avatar or any other big SFX movie? PC.), complex network administration, etc. Unfortunately this flexibility is also why they crash on a far more regular basis - as mentioned in a previous blog, the main issue with PC’s is crappy Microsoft software - not the machine itself. But it does mean that software and components are plentiful and cheap. It does mean that you can get a screwdriver out and prod it until it works. It does mean that anyone with a soldering iron can create hardware optimised for a specific task without having to go round to Steve Jobs house and kiss his i-Willy. I believe it's what is known as a horizontal business model and it is the main reason for the success and versatility of the platform. It does also mean that lots of people mod their machines and you can't buy a decent case for your hardware anymore - they all have stupid plastic flaps, swooshes, blue lights and little plastic windows on the side so you can marvel at your CPU fan spinning as you try in earnest to repress the part of your brain that is screaming at you to go outside and get a girlfriend.
Mac's are part of a vertical business model. Apple design the hardware and the software and they nobble it so that you can't easily get in and overclock the CPU or take it apart and swap some tiny circuit board for another tiny circuit board (I'm not saying you can't do this, it just isn't easy). They want to protect the "user experience" so they make them look nice, perform nice and behave in a fairly predictable fashion. The upshot of this is that if you buy a Mac to do a specific job (music, film editing, print media) then you can be pretty sure that when you turn it on, it will make that little noise that WALL-E makes and a minute or two later you are getting on with your work. Oh sure, you can crash a Mac. You can get plenty of freeware software for it - although not nearly as much as for the PC. You can even play games on it - although I wouldn't really recommend it. PC's are still better for that because you can tweak them to run games better. Mac's are improving in this area but are still years behind. I've got a couple of PC's. I use one for games and internet stuff. I use the other one for image editing and animation. I've also got a couple of Mac's. I've got a Mac Pro that is set up solely for music. It's connected to a network but internet access is disabled - unless I specifically turn it on to get an update. There are no games on it, no photo's, no iTunes, no funny bits of software that make pretty photo collages out of phone pics. It does one job and it does it very well. Far better than any PC I've used for the task. The other Mac is the little thing I'm writing this on. It's great for word processing, internet stuff, a few basic Steam games, basic image and video editing but that's about it. I know I can do other stuff on it if I want but I don't see the point. You buy a tool for a specific job. You don't buy a hammer and then use it to varnish a wardrobe. You don’t buy a chainsaw and use it to assemble a flatpack dining table. Unless you've got a vital bit of your brain missing, that is.
The simple fact is that Mac's are (these days) much better than PC heads will believe and PC's are much better than Mac heads will believe but they are both very different beasts - better at different things and they do it in different ways. Like a bike and a car are different. Like men and women are different. Like horses and pigeons are different...
Anyway, a PC is a toaster and a Mac is a kettle. You don't make toast in a kettle. Get over it.
No comments:
Post a Comment