WiredBoot – Your Daily Feed of Technology

Apple’s popular Mac vs Pc ad’s have painted the picture in stark terms: There are two types of people, Mac people and PC people. And if the marketing is to be believed, the Mac people are a hip, sport-coat-and-sneakers-­wearing type of guy who uses his computer for video chatting, music mash-ups and other cool, creative pursuits that starchy. Then there are the business-suited PC users could never really appreciate unless they tried them on the slick Apple interface. Then again, Windows PC enthusiasts probably think that Mac guy is a smug slacker with an overpriced toy that can’t do any serious computing anyway. Funny thing is, both are wrong. With a 7.5 percent market share, Macs are no longer just the computer choice of artists and unemployed writers. (Apple is, in fact, the fourth largest computer manufacturer in the world.) And now, more than ever, the guts of both platforms are remarkably similar. Both types of machines use Intel proc­essors (although some PCs can be configured with processors from AMD). Both buy memory, hard drives and graphics cards from the same small group of suppliers.

Yet what makes the platforms feel so obsolete is their approaches to these applications. Internet Explorer versus ­Safari, Windows Media Center versus Front Row, Photo Gallery versus iPhoto, Backup and Restore Center versus Time Machine—these system components from Microsoft and Apple are designed to accomplish essentially the same goals. To users, however, the position and movement of the virtual knobs and levers make all the difference. It is all personal preference and what they may be used to using.

These things are largely matters of preference and style, but you can still make a reasonable attempt to quantify them, and I did. A while back my friends and myself tested two all-in-one desktops one Mac and one PC. Our “testers” were asked to set up the computers right out of the box and explore the machines through everyday tasks such as Web surfing, document creation, uploading photos, downloading Adobe Acrobat files and playing music and movies through Media Center and Front Row (the entertainment software suites integrated into Vista and Leopard, respectively). Our “testers” were instructed to detach themselves as much as possible from their previous technological preferences and rate their experiences with each computer.

Our computers were closely matched, but in the interest of full disclosure, we’ll spit out the caveats: The Gateway One PC had a processor that runs 400 MHz slower than its iMac competitor (not a heck of a difference in this age of dual-core chips), but it also had two extra gigabytes of DDR2 memory.  All that extra RAM may seem to give an advantage to the PCs. Vista, however, is a noted memory hog, so throwing more RAM into PC computers is probably less of a perform­ance booster for manufacturers than it is a new baseline hardware specification.

Before they started I made sure all computers work and everything and have no viruses, just so we get a full result!

These benchmarks are reliable indicators of performance, but the numbers feel somewhat meaningless to ordinary users. Which is why we created our own suite of tests to meas­ure the speed of everyday tasks. We logged boot-up and shutdown times, and launch times for the Internet browser and media player built into each operating system, as well as for common applications such as Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop. We tested how long it took for each computer to rip a CD and install a few big software suites. Finally, we put all four computers through a stress test. We ran three video sources (a YouTube clip, a DVD and an .avi file), DivX encoding, instant messaging, Word, Adobe Acrobat and a spyware scan simultaneously—then retimed our launch of Photoshop, so pretty much we see how they run under crazy circumstances that ordinary uses should never get close to.

The results gave us a clear winner in the performance categories, but the big surprise was how little difference we found in user preferences. Turns out, both platforms are capable and easy to use, but only one was the victor.

iMac | $1499

SPECS
Hardware	20-in. screen, 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 DUO Processor, 1 GB DDR2 RAM, 320 GB hard drive, built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, 8x CD/DVD burner, remote control, ATI Radeon HD 2600 graphics card.
Software	OS X Leopard, iLife ‘08 (iTunes, iPhoto, GarageBand, etc.), Front Row, iWork (30-day trial).
USER RATING
Design
Ergonomics
Internet surfing
Digital photo management
iWork
Front Row (movies, music, etc.)
Overall

Gateway One | $1800

SPECS
Hardware	19-in. screen, 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 DUO processor, 3 GB DDR2 RAM, 500 GB hard drive, built-in Wi-Fi, 8x CD/DVD burner, remote control, ATI Radeon HD 2600 graphics card.
Software	Windows Vista Home Premium, Microsoft Works 8.5, Media Center, Microsoft Office (60-day trial).
USER RATING
Design
Ergonomics
Internet surfing
Digital photo management
Works
Media Center (movies, music, etc.)
Overall

The FINAL Verdict:

Mac: In the desktop showdowns, Apple’s computers were the winners. Oddly, the big difference didn’t come in our user ratings, where we expected the famously friendly Mac interface to shine. Our respondents liked the look and feel of both operating systems but had a slight preference toward Mac OS X. In our speed trials, however, Leopard OS trounced Vista in all-important tasks such as boot-up, shutdown and program-launch times. We even tested Vista on the Macs using Apple’s platform-switching Boot Camp software—and found that both Apple computers ran Vista faster than our PCs did.

PC: Simply put, Vista proved to be a more sluggish operating system than Leopard. Our PCs installed some software faster, but in general they were slower in our time trials. Plus, both PCs showed weaker performance on third-party benchmarks than the Macs. Our biggest surprise, however, was that PCs were not the relative bargains we expected them to be. The Gateway One actually costs $300 more than an iMac. That means for the price of the Gateway you could buy an iMac, boost its hard drive to match the Gateway’s, purchase a copy of Vista to boot—and still save $100*.

APPLE WINS! Go Mac!

I would like to add a small note, for me I have both a mac and a pc, even though i prefer my mac in looks and performance speed I seem to always be on my PC, I think this is because my mac is old and can not support Parrallels, meaning i can not play many game i enjoy playing. Macs at the moment do not have many Free online games that work, it is normaly all for PC, but this is starting to change, many top gaming websites are starting to get a version of the games to work on a mac. While you wait for these i suggest you go out and buy a CD game as a magority of all CD games are compatible with MACs and PCs, I hope i have helped you choose a new computer!

*= Not an actual amount, it was roughly come to without finding the average price for everything, and with time going on the prices should be getting lower. <AKA, This Figure May Not Be 100% Acurate For You>