More Mac vs PC thoughts. 

I kinda kick myself for continuing to think about this, and yet, I think the current swing in the Mac vs PC war is really interesting to study, even if it’s not just for my personal purchasing decisions.

I took a quick stab at calculating “time lost” on a PC due to whatever issues (initial build + config, troubleshooting). So far I’m at 20 hours or so. My original mac “premium” calculation was $1000 (custom PC vs Mac Pro), of which, some was offset by things I would actually want on a mac, so say $700. So far $700 for 20 hours. I’ll have to see how this number rises over time. But I expect somewhere in the neighborhood of a year, it will start to be worth the extra cost. 

I don’t know if it’s the marketing, or just the uninformed masses, but people keep claiming that the Mac is faster, and I just don’t see it. Even after extensive use of my work macbook pro, I don’t see how it’s faster. Win7 definitely feels faster on similar hardware. There are tons of posts out there by users of Adobe software claiming Windows is way faster. Games seem more peformant on Win across the board. The only place where Mac stuff is on-par perf wise is for the Apple-written software. Kinda makes sense, actually, since the mac client platform is a bit of a moving target, and so 3rd parties are less likely to keep up with the optimization. Maybe that will change as they ship more macs and more ISVs start to care. Maybe it won’t matter with the web.

Perf on the 2009 Mac mini sucks. Like, “I don’t know how I lived with it” level of suck. Maybe it’s the lack of SSD. Safari just beachballs all over the place. Don’t know why. It’s not even using all the system memory.

So even if I did have to put 20 extra hours into it, I still feel like I’m getting more perf value out of the PC. 16GB of ram and a good gpu and drivers to go along with it. Why does it seem so hard to get the same combination out of a Mac Pro? I’d be much more willing if they would just demonstrate a good track record of good gpu drivers and up-to-date gfx perf.