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Loading ...Why I WON’T be buying an Apple Mac
edarch
Creative professionals have for quite some time been spoilt for choice about how to best go about creating the work that defines their business. On the one hand you have PC’s, instantly familiar to millions and reasonable value for money even at workstation level. You can even make ‘render farms’ - computers dedicated to providing all their power to image generation which, although may be way out of the price-grasp of a mere student like me, still give you a huge amount of kick for your quid. Or you have Apple Macs.
You, like me, may have seen the poster adverts scattered around the country, particularly on the trains and London’s Underground. They tell you that Mac’s are made especially for film and Digital Content Creation, and that PC’s are made for people with clipboards and no dress sense or data analysts as I like to call them. This is partly true. Regardless of their respective origins, Apple Mac have made a reputation for themselves in the realm of media production, graphic design, 3D animation and architecture as a force to be reckoned with. They have a reputation of being able to boost production, being more efficient, more powerful and not crashing unlike PC’s which are often viewed as slow, cumbersome, full of software you don’t need, break down more often then the cast of a Shakespeare tragedy and wanting to not work more than a post office worker on valium. This isn’t entirely true.
If you have the misfortune to buy a PC from somewhere like PC World then yes, you’re asking for trouble. But you can become equally frustrated if you get a Mac as well. I own a PC, it has, over the past several years, undergone a number of cosmetic and technical changes but it is in essence the same machine I bought three years ago, It’s not the fastest of beasts by any means, the Athlon 64 processor is three years old which, in computing terms means it’s about the same age as Bugatti Atlantic, but unlike the 1936 Italian wonder, this isn’t a collectors item worth millions. The processor is a socket 754 which only accepts 2Gb of RAM but, as I have found out recently after upgrading it from 1Gb, isn’t actually that bad to work with. The graphics card is an nVidia 5950 which is, like the processor, three generations old but still gives me good performance and has, touch wood, never let me down so far. I’ve just upgraded my hard disk to a Samsung model which, although not purportedly the fastest on the block, is still a huge improvement on the Western Digital model that preceded it. Carefully selected cheap and cheerful upgrades over the past two years have kept it going strong, I’ve been careful in selecting the right parts for it after a little research and this has paid off because it works very well at what I want it to do which is more than blokes with brown beards and brown suits want theirs to do. It renders images well, CAD is a breeze, even in 3D, I can do good 3D work with it in Maya quite quickly as well, and I can also do a spot of video editing which came in handy for one of my assignments last year. It also plays all the games I want it to very well (again extra RAM helped on this, as did the faster disk), the games, admittedly might be limited to SimCity 4 and Battlefield 2 but it still does both as well as I do cups of tea. So for the most part, it works extremely well and most of the time when something’s gone wrong, I know that it had something to do with me.
The PC I have is equipped with Windows XP. I am familiar with Windows XP. I know what to do when things go wrong and most of the time, that isn’t much because Windows sorts it out for me by closing the naughty program, but even at the worst, when a program goes really ill it will attempt to save what I’ve done regardless if I have or haven’t done it myself. I have also made my PC efficient, I’ve re-organised my start menu completely from the ground up so it’s even easier to navigate and find the program I want to use or the game I want to play. I’ve organised my system folders in a similar manner, which isn’t as time-consuming as it may seem. This makes it quicker for me to find files, which helps just as much. There are little shortcuts I know of that make it simple and effective for me to perform tasks This is all fantastic but it isn’t without fault or frustrations. Like anything, it isn’t perfect. The general look of it can be a tad dull and the ‘theme’ packs you can download aren’t that great either, at the moment I’ve got a ‘silver’ theme on which makes everything several shades of grey but this is better than the standard blue theme but I can’t customise it any better to make it easier on my eye. It can take a while to load up and even when windows is loaded, it can still take a good few minutes to load everything else like anti-virus programs. it can sometimes, pause to go to the toilet leaving me with an hourglass that doesn’t say “I’ll be back in a minute” but says “umm, your guess is as good as mine really, fancy a Grolsch?” this can be terribly frustrating, especially if you haven’t saved your work because at times like these, Windows isn’t going to do it for you, it simply doesn’t care. It’s like having sex with your girlfriend in the woods, if someone’s dog comes along you’re not going to pull up your trousers and pretend to be making an in-depth study of the sub-ecosystem of moss patches. No you’re going to wave your hands about a bit while saying “bugger off, go on, get out of it, quick, go go” and usually the dog gets the message and runs off to find another tree to piddle on.
And then there’s the nice little day out to the Windows Update website, and I mean, day out. I had to re-load XP when I got my new hard disk and because this is the copy that came with the original incarnation of my PC, it doesn’t have Service Pack 2 built in, I have a separate disk for that. So I have to install XP onto the blank hard drive, then I have to restart my machine. Then install Service Pack 2 from the CD (which takes just as long as installing XP itself), then I have to restart my machine. Then I have to activate XP, which is also annoying because for some reason, the activation program enters a product code automatically and this is always NOT the product code on the back of my old case or on my certificate so it’s no wonder that “the product code does not appear to be valid” because it’s just been made up, so after this (other) mild annoyance) it’s a merry trip to windowsupdate.com where I have to first download the update installer program and the genuine verification program and install those. Then I have to restart my machine. Then, and this is the good bit, then I have to download and install between 75 and 85 additional updates for Windows which takes, on average, about as much time as it takes a milk float to ride along the entire length of the Great Wall of China. Sorry but what happened to the Service Pack 3 CD? It’d still be just as annoying but at least you’d be able to install everything in Service Pack 2 as well as the half a million other updates at the same time. And it would be nice if we could get an option on this SP3 CD which updates we want to install, like on the website.
Then there’s another side to this whole installation business. Windows has an interesting feature called ‘Plug n Play’ which works like this. Basically Windows installs drivers - bits of information that are programmed to recognise peripherals such as printers cameras and other bits and pieces that you connect to your computer. Some of these bits and pieces are necessary like hard disks, DVD drives, and other key components, but others are not only not necessary, let’s face it, they’re not even likely to be necessary. You own a Kodak camera for example, which you’d probably plug in to your PC to copy your photos to. You probably have a printer made by Mr Hewlett and Mr Packard which you print your pictures on to paper. So it’s handy then that Windows has a driver for your Kodak camera and your HP printer so you can just plug em in and away you go. But you’re more than likely to only have one printer at a time and more than likely one camera as well. But Windows doesn’t just have drivers for one printer, oh no, it has drivers for a staggering 2,482. You heard it 2,482 printers. And I know it has this many because I’ve just spent the last twenty minutes counting them.
And before you go any further with that thought yes I do have a girlfriend.
HP are the driver kings with 269 drivers, Schlumberger only have one but I’ve never heard of it and I probably never will. But even big companies who run big offices with lots of computers and lots of printers aren’t going to have 2,482 different printers. And most of them you’ll never own anyway, I mean, have you heard of Iwatsu? Have you heard of Schlumberger? Have you heard of adibidibidur? Nope, neither have I but Windows has drivers for all of them just in case you buy one. I’m not going to tell you how many drivers it has for cameras because I have other things to do this weekend but I bet the figure is about the same. And it doesn’t stop there, you have display adapters IDE controllers, Fire wire adapters, Imaging devices, infrared devices, modems, multi-port adapters, network adapters, PCMICA adapters, flash memory devise, portable devices, ports (why you’d need a bit of software for Dover is beyond me but it’s there), SCSI controllers, sound, video & game controllers, system devices, tape drives, USB devices and the mysterious VSO devices.
So there’s a lot of stuff there that you don’t need, so much so that I’ve now decided to write another article all about how bad this is because if I put it in this one, I’d die before I finished it which means you wouldn’t be reading it, so I’ll spare both our suffering. For now.
I must hate windows you’re thinking, but no, I’ve decided to write the additional article to actually help Microsoft, but that’s another story. My world was turned upside down when I started work at an architects practice last month and found out, to my surprise, that I’d be working on a Mac. My reaction was a mixture of admiration based on what I’ve seen and heard about Macs and awkwardness at the fact that I’d have to learn how to use a computer all over again. As I’ve said before Macs have a reputation, to me anyway of being super-reliable, efficient and wonderful machines that make PC owners ashamed to even stand in their vicinity. And I’ll have to be honest, my initial response was that of awe. Macs run an operating system called OS X and when you switch the machine on, it takes about 30 seconds to load. Compare this to my average 3 minute wait for XP to fully load and you begin to appreciate both the power of the machines and the skill with which the software developers have made this thing run. Once inside, I looked around at the interface and learned what button does what and the basics of how to navigate around and it all seemed pretty promising.
There’s a little bar at the bottom of the screen which appears when you have the cursor over the necessary area, in it you’ll find links to basic common programs and you can just drag n drop shortcuts to programs into it, making it fully customisable which makes it very efficient indeed as you are literally one click away from your necessary program. Then I found the system thingy which tells you what’s in the box. I work on a Power Mac, which is the Holy Grail on the crown of the Apple. The basic model will set you back £1,509, for that you get two dual-core processors, 1Gb of RAM in the flavour of 2 512Mb sticks of 667MHz which is pretty damn quick, a 250Gb hard drive, a keyboard, a mouse and that’s it (the screen comes separately and we’ll get to that later). Buy a top-of-the-range one and there’ll be a £7,086 dent in your bank account. My one doesn’t have two dual-core processors, it has 2 1.8GHz single-core processors, which is still double what I’ve got. It doesn’t have 1Gb of RAM, it has 4Gb, which is also double what I’ve got. It doesn’t have a 250Gb hard drive either, it has a 74Gb one, whereas I have a 500Gb drive. But before you start thinking that to be a good thing, the one in my PC is a Samsung, which although a lot faster than the Western Digital Caviar I had before, it’s no match for the Western Digital Raptor that sits inside my Mac. The Raptor is officially the fastest drive in its class and will often out-perform drives in classes above it. That’s like the Mitsubishi Evo FQ400 racing a Lamborghini Murcielago, The Lambo might win but the Evo will be nudging its tailpipe every step of the way. Compared with any other Serial ATA (SATA) drive and it’s like racing that same Evo against a Daewoo. People who review computer hardware for a living often test hard drives and they almost always put a Raptor in the tests. It’s a benchmark of performance, but when they’re reviewing SATA drives, they don’t mention that it beats the competition, they don’t’ have to because everyone knows nothing will keep up with it. It’s called a Raptor for a reason, it’s fast, vicious and unforgiving to almost anything you throw at it. The graphics card in my Mac is an nVidia 5200 which is the basic model of the 5000 series, I have the then-top-of-the-range 5950 but there isn’t a huge amount of difference in them when there’s an extra processor, two more Gb of super-fast RAM and the fastest SATA drive on the planet sitting alongside it. But I was in for a shock.
First there’s the interface. Yes it looks lovely and all brushed aluminium-like but Windows is Pimp My Computer compared to this. There’s hardly anything you can change about it, apart from what colour the highlights are and whether the general look is brushed aluminium or slightly blue brushed aluminium. Then there’s the buttons, yes doesn’t it look pretty having traffic lights on the top-left corner of your window, one closes it, one makes it disappear, one makes it bigger, but you double-click the top of it and, it disappears, so either there’s no point in adding that double-click feature in or one of the buttons is pointless unless you think its cool having traffic lights on your screen and there’s probably some graphic designer out there who does.
Then there’s probably the biggest problem I have with Mac’s to date. USB drives, they are a godsend, no more floppy disks or re-writable CD’s (which are crap anyway), I’ve got a little rubber thing smaller than my thumb that holds 2Gb of, whatever. It reads writes, deletes reasonably fast and the one I have is encased in rubber and is so tough that if someone chucked it in a pond, fished it out, then ran over it with a Jeep several times it would still work. If I were the bloke from the Fast Show who walked around saying how brilliant stuff is, I’d be doing it about these little things, you can now get one that hold 16Gb which is 4 whole DVD’s which is fantastic, even though it costs £80 but given the fact it’s still smaller than my thumb I’ve have to tip my hat to Corsair for doing it because it’s fantastic being able to carry around all my uni work and whatever else I want in the condom pocket of my jeans and still be able to fit a condom in there as well. But with Mac’s they’re dangerous When these things first came out, I was told by people that it’s a good idea to ‘eject’ the drive before removing it, that way I wouldn’t lose any data stored on it. But being young and ignorant I’ve always though “pah, it’ll be fine” and it always has, until I did it with a Mac. Luckily I only lost a few document files which I have on my PC at home so no real loss there, but I’ve had project files that I’ve backed up to the USB drive go missing because of it and files like this that I’ve typed up. I’ve learned to be more cautious and always ‘eject’ the drive but I shouldn’t have to. Then there’s another aspect of the interface I don’t like, when you select a file using the arrow keys on a keyboard and press “enter” the file opens in whatever program it’s associated with or whatever you’ve associated to it (you can’t do that on a Mac either), when you do the same with a Mac, it asks you if you want to rename the file, which you can also do by clicking it twice slowly (which happens in Windows too) so there’s another no-brainer. Then there’s the dashboard which is a little display which tells you things like the weather. Which is nice but if you think weathermen and women are hopeless at predicting the weather accurately wait till you see this turkey. It was raining outside and grey-sky stuff stretched as far as you could see, when you could see that far, but the dashboard assured me that it was sunny with clear skies and about 10degrees warmer than it actually was. Useless.
This may all sound terrible but the biggest shock of all was yet to come. The practice I work in uses ArchiCAD which I won’t go into right now for sanity reasons, but we use it nevertheless. We also use Photoshop and Sketchup. When I open ArchiCAD, it takes a while to load, fair enough I thought, and when it tried to turn a project I was working on from a 2D view to a 3D perspective, it took a while which I also thought was fair enough. But then I tried to do the same with a larger five-floor project made in a template file with loads of pre-set paper sizes and scales already drawn up on each floor. It just wouldn’t do it. My turbocharged V8 Mac had crashed. A little box came up saying it would have to close and I’d lose my work and it did exactly that. When I load object libraries into ArchiCAD it takes days and if I want to save an ArchiCAD file as an AutoCAD file I’d better do it at the start of my lunch break. If I do this in Revit on my PC however, I open the five-floor file, with the same templates on every floor, then I click 3D and guess what? It thinks about it for about five seconds then all of a sudden I have a 3D view of my project in front of me with lots of templates around it, if I load object libraries into Revit it again takes half the time. Just to add icing on the cake, I got a demo of ArchiCAD from the publishers website and loaded it up on my PC at home and it did it quicker than on my Mac and that’s for all the things I’ve mentioned above, loading the program loading files, libraries and of course 3D views. Another big shock came when I went to open Photoshop. Now Photoshop is a rather big and complex program with lots tools and adjustment features so you can play around with images. Virtually every photo, book cover, album art, poster and advert graphic will have gone through it at some point making it probably the most-used software tool in the world. It takes quite a while to load it up. I’ve recently upgraded my PC a little, giving it 2Gb of RAM (the most it’ll take) and that Samsung drive I mentioned earlier. My PC is now quicker and slicker than it was before but the biggest surprise to me is that Photoshop CS now takes a hell of a lot less time to load, it really is that much of an improvement. When I loaded it up on the Mac however it was about as slow as it was when I only had 1Gb and a crap hard drive. How can this be? How can two processors, 4Gb RAM and the Lamborghini hard drive be beaten at this by my Toyota Corolla? The Mac should’ve shone through but it just didn’t’ and what makes it even more disappointing is the fact someone else in the office keeps having it crash on him, which I never do on my PC. Sketchup is also a nightmare, pausing every ten minutes to think about something or other which is equally annoying but it doesn’t do it on my PC ever.
I’d hate to think how much my boss has spent on Macs over the years and I must now talk about the biggest turn-off about the Mac, its price. The basic version of it will cost a snip over £1,500 but for the money spent on that basic Mac with two dual-core processors 1Gb of RAM a 250Gb drive and a DVD drive but I can build myself a PC that may only have one dual-core processor, but will have 8Gb of RAM (the RAM being faster than the Mac’s), one of the Samsung hard drives, one of the Raptor drives (larger in capacity than the one on my Mac at work), a top-of-the-range graphics card, a stylish case and all the extra bits for only £958. If I want 8Gb of RAM for my Mac it’s going to cost me £1,349 whereas if I get that for my PC it will cost me £278 and considering the RAM for the PC is faster, I don’t see where that extra £1000 is going. A 500Gb hard drive will cost you £209 whereas my 500Gb drive cost £60, and I can get one that performs even better than my Samsung for £5 more. Even if I wanted an extra processor it’d only add £150 to my price. Now if we talk about screens the story is still the still worrying, An Apple Cinema 23” HD display will set you back £600 but I can get a Benq 24” HD display which is fully adjustable and has HDMI inputs and USB ports £450. So it seems Mac’s aren’t really all they’re cracked up to be. Despite what the posters tell you, they do crash. Despite what magazines and PR people tell you they can be slow and the interface can be just as annoying as Windows and it seems that once you look past the fact that OS X loads up like lightning there really isn’t much in it. You can build yourself a top-quality PC that will easily out-perform it for a fraction of the price. Remember the top-of-the-line Mac costs over £7,000 and the price of it really isn’t justified when you look at similar components for a PC. I’ve seen high-end workstations that give you more for about a third of the price. Even the screen prices don’t add up. Even the software costs more just because it’s for a Mac. Photoshop for example, costs £30 more. It just doesn’t make sense.
So when it comes to buying myself a new powerhouse to pump out renderings and images for my second year coursework I’m going to do the sensible thing, I’m going to spend £960 on a self-built extremely powerful PC and spend the £549 change in the pub.