Mac Computers

[Sara Micelli]

What can they be used for? What's the difference between a Mac and a PC?

[I am Roboto]

Originally Posted by Sara Micelli

What can they be used for? What's the difference between a Mac and a PC?

Nowadays, not so much. Once upon a time, like up until last year, Macs were powered by a completely different architecture known as PowerPC, which made them unique in their own right and gave them a set of strengths & weakenesses vs their PC counterparts.

Last year however Apple made the move to x86 by transitioning to the Intel "Core" and Core 2 line of CPU's, which are the exact same chips sold by Intel for "PCs". Minor quirks aside, Apple computers are roughly the same as their counterparts nowadays, the main difference being the O/S - Macs run "OS X" a descendent of BSD/Unix, while most PC's run Microsoft Windows. However, with the move to Intel, architectual limitations to running Windows are now minor, and it can be done natively with Apple's blessing using their new "BootCamp" software.

Unless you really like Mac OS X as opposed to Windows, there really is no reason to purchase an Apple computer anymore. They are basically PC's with 200% markup for the "Apple" name. Even if you like OS X, I'd strongly urge you to go with teh PC and run a version of Linux instead. It's much better from a value standpoint.

[Chelsea]

Except of course that from all my experiences OS X tends to be significantly more average-user-friendly than Linux is. Also, OS X tends to be quite good for audio/video things and other "creative" type endeavors.

I honestly wouldn't recommend Linux to anyone I'd have to recommend an OS to - the vast majority of linux variants just don't seem to have fully accounted for ease of use.

At this point, I only recommend Macs for creatives or people absolutely fed up with Windows yet don't want the hassle of learning Linux' quirks.