Bleeding Apples!

OK, just so we are clear. This post is somewhat of a rant. And I don't expect many of you to agree with me. But if one more person tells me how brilliant Macs are....

The person in question is referring to them specifically as replacements for the PC's that the Music department have here at work. Now admittedly, these PC's (whilst they have the nice E-MU404 Soundcards in) are old, and slow, and starting to fall to bits. Since they were factory built education machines and are at LEAST six years old, this is not amazingly surprising.

The argument starts with the statement "Well, Macs are industry Standard nowadays" which for Music is probably true, and if this was the crux of the argument, then I would have no objection to attempting to replace these PCs with Macs. However, the cost of replacing all the PCs with Macs is (approx) £17,000.

That's a lot of cash for 15 machines (& Software licenses)

All I suggested was that it might be worthwhile looking at the cost of upgrading the machines, and keeping the best bits (like the soundcards) whilst replacing motherboards/processors/RAM to make the machines go faster and work better.

I might have well suggested we all go out and shoot babies for the shocked look I got.

"But Macs are better" came the response. To which my answer was, "Why?"

"Because they're better for Audio"

"Why?"

"Because they do all the audio stuff we need"

"So can PC's"

"Those ones can't"

"They're six years old. A six year old Mac would have trouble doing what you want"

"Well Macs are better"

"They're harder to fix though"

"But they don't break"

"Yes they do."

"No they don't"

"And you can't upgrade them"

"So?"

etc. etc.

I'm not typing out the rest of this conversation, because it would take all day, and I have better things to do like eat my lunch. However, my point is this. I never said that Macs were a bad idea, I just said that you might be able to get reliable machines cheaper if we used PC's. I was then bombarded with statements like "Well I've had my Mac for over two years and it never goes wrong"

So what? I've had my Audio/Video PC for 7 years (and bits of it for longer than that) and it doesn't go wrong. Because I set it up right.

Don't get me wrong. If you like Macs, get a Mac (like my ranting would have stopped you anyway). But don't tell me they can magically do things that PC's cant. Because that's rubbish.

Oh, and never buy a Mac just because it looks nice, or I will have to hurt you.

My last statement on this, is that I swear this is all Microsoft's fault. By progressively creating versions of windows which eat up more and more processing power and RAM, they make all PC's (as bought by normal people) seem slow and sluggish. If the Mac continues to rise and the PC continues to fall, I shall blame Microsoft.

To clarify - I am not against Macs. Personally I'm not a huge fan of them, but I don't think they're bad for any specific reason. However, this culture has now sprung up where people maintain that if you are doing anything with any Media, video, audio or graphic, you should do it on a Mac. And that, my friends, is pure and utter bollocks.

End of rant.