AdamBowers.com

Mac vs PC?

Created on Thursday, 20 May 2010 05:00

Let's get one thing straight. Macs are PC's. These days, Macs use the same internal hardware as PC's. So what makes a Mac different? Not much. I can think of three things:

1. Fashionable design
2. Operating system
3. Price

Fashionable Design
I think PC's have mostly caught up in the design realm. I greatly prefer my black and stylish HP to a plain black MacBook Pro, but that's just a personal preference.

Operating System
The operating systems are pretty much equivalent. I prefer the structure and customization options of Windows 7, but neither is better than the other in every way. I find Windows 7 to be much faster and more stable than the Mac OS. It's rare for a program to crash in Windows 7, but when it happens, I just kill that program and restart. On a Mac, I usually have to restart the whole machine.

Price
The most important comparison for me is value. I've considered purchasing a Mac several times. It seems that every couple of years a friend gets the Mac bug and tries to convince me that Macs are really better than other PC's. I'm not a Mac hater. The day Macs are a better value than PC's I will switch immediately. So every time I do my research and, so far, that hasn't happened. Not even close.

An Example 

Mac: $3,425.00
HP:   $1,680.08

I have an HP quad-core laptop with 8GB of RAM, a 1GB video card, and a 500GB hard drive. I compared this with a Macbook Pro and matched the specs almost exactly. For every spec difference, the HP has more powerful components than the Mac. Yet the price for the Mac is $3,425.00, while the HP is only $1680.08! (A couple hundred cheaper with my student discount) The HP has a year longer and better warranty and a much larger screen (1.6 inches larger).

Can someone please explain why I would buy a Mac? I get so much better performance for half the price!

Want another one?
My wife's laptop costs $1316.45 from HP. (Again, a little cheaper with the student discount.) The Macbook Pro with identical specs? $3015!

Security Problems
Macs are even less appealing to me because of their numerous security problems. Macs have always relied on security by obscurity. No one attacked Macs because they were such a small percentage of the market; not a worthy target. But each year, Macs are the first to fall at the PWN2OWN security competition. Windows and Linux machines show far more security but cost so much less! The winner this year is the combination of the Google Chrome browser and Windows. Charlie Miller, the only person to win three times at PWN2OWN, said:

"There are bugs in Chrome but they're very hard to exploit. I have a Chrome vulnerability right now but I don't know how to exploit it. It's really hard. They've got that sandbox model that's hard to get out of. With Chrome, it's a combination of things - you can't execute on the heap, the OS protections in Windows and the Sandbox."

So the more popular Macs get, the less secure they will be. And Apple's security record is not great. Known security holes take anywhere from 3 weeks to a year to patch.

Conclusion
Based on price and security, I'm sticking with Windows and HP for now!