Mac Or Pc, Help, is mac better for music? Options

[jd222]

I know its a biased forum, but is there any advantage to getting a Mac over a PC. I was set to buy the G4 15" powerbook w/ 512MB of RAM for about USD$2600 ot use with cubase sx, but I realized that for the same price I can get a pc with twice as much memory and a processor with double the speed, and I I've herad that cubase runs much better on a pc. But, mac users swear by their computers. Any thoughts.

[manexmachina]

I can't believe I'm going to walk on these coals... but here goes.... (first know that I'm a mac user who started on APL, then to DOS, then to Apple, back to DOS, then to Mac... there ever since... though I've done a little work on windows and a little work on UNIX too).

Anything I'm about to say can be disputed.

Mac users are generally people who respond to the aesthetic experience of their machines while PC users often find the toolings of the machines of more interest. Macs, being an all-in-one-box concept tend to avoid being as unexpectedly unreliable as PCs - YET - that comes with a price - Macs cost more. The Intel chips now are faster than Mac chips for mathmatical processing which happens a lot on midi apps. It's true that you can't compare gigaherts evenly between macs and PC's, but if you have to crunch some numbers, the equivalently priced PC often does it faster and the possibility of going even further. HOWEVER, wait until six months from now and start hearing about the new IBM chips which are supposed to emerge for Macs... this could be a huge tipping point.

I'm a designer and musician and for me, I really care about the entire fluidity and aesthetic experience and I don't want to have work to hard to fix something when it goes wrong. I like the interface and homogeny of the mac world.

Does cubase SX work better on a PC? Well, it was CERTAINLY true that the steinberg apps worked better in windows than in OS 9. However, Steinberg writes in UNIX and then ports to Windows and OSX simultaneously. one man on each platform... so I am not sure that this is the case any longer. I've not pushed cubase sx on the mac, but I have not found it to be notably buggy or crashy.

All this said... I know some people going from Macs to PCs, others going from PCs to Macs. Use what works for you. If it were my Mom, I'd beg her to buy a Mac for it's simplicity and the fact that there are just so many wonderful extras like the iLife package and things that make common desired tasks so easy.

PCs have one big advantage... they are more common and thus... more software options will show up... for now... and you don't really need every piece of software... just the things that work for you and there's plenty of stuff that works very well on the Mac platform.

So - that's as level headed a response I can give.

This post has been edited by manexmachina: Thu 10 Apr 2003, 05:12