[Leica] OT: Mac wannabees

[spencer at aotera.org (Spencer Cheng)]

Guys,

Let's avoid religious flame wars please unless it is about Leica, or at 
least photography related topics.

There are good (and less so) reasons why some prefer Macs or PCs. Whatever 
turns your crank.

Howard is talking about an iMac which is quite compact and fully integrated. 
Jayanand, you are probably talking about a mid-tower or even a full tower PC 
with a separate monitor. Very different beasts atheistically, power 
consumption, S/W,....

Whether a Mac is the right machine for you only you can decide. I use a Mac 
now but I use to use Dell laptop(s) for work many moons ago. The H/W was OK 
but Windows was a piece of xxxx (my opinion, you can borrow it if you like). 
Dell use to have good service but now? Apple still has quite decent service. 
Really good service if you are near an Apple store like Mark. Even when I 
did not have an Apple store near by, I used a Mac by choice - it's not a 
religion.

Tina, if you cannot justify the price of a Mac, stay with the PC. You've 
learnt what weirdness you have to deal with using Windows. There is a (much) 
smaller set of weirdness one have to deal with as a Mac user but there is 
still some. In the 10 years I've owned a Mac, I've had to re-install the O/S 
exactly once. I forgotten how many times I had to reinstall Windows per year 
when I had to use it for work but it is greater than 1 and less than 10. I 
use to carry the Windows CD with me when I had to travel for work, just in 
case.

[And whoever was complaining about the Mac keyboard, just buy a USB Windows 
keyboard and plug the damn thing into a Mac. It will work fine. You get to 
figure out how to map all those special Windows keys into something you 
like. It's not hard.]

Mac's are different because of the effort Apple put into industrial and 
usability design. It shows up in the design of the machines (iMac as an 
example) and in the user interface. If this is not important or not to your 
liking, please don't buy/use a Mac. If you don't like your Mac, by all 
means, sell the thing or use it for target practice.

Windows has more S/W available for it. If you use/need those Windows only 
S/W everyday as critical tools for your photography, then it doesn't make 
sense to buy a Mac. For me, just about all the S/W I need, or care about, is 
available for Macs. For the other 1% of the time, I run Windows in emulation 
mode (Quickbook to keep my accountant happy). Good enough for me.

And for all you Mac users, let's drop this topic please. The saloon keeper 
seems to be napping. Let's not make so much noise that he starts paying 
attention to us riff-raffs.

Regards,
Spencer

PS. And we are NOT going to get into a flame war about emacs vs. vi, OK? 
Emacs is way better. :))