For Jillian: The Moral Dilemma

(This was an email response to our friend Jillian. She's considering a new PC or Mac laptop. I cleaned a few lines of thought up and added some missing pieces for posting purposes.)

Mac vs. PC is a matter of personal preference, or a religious war, depending on who you are. :-)

Our iBook occasionally gives us some "spinning beach balls of doom" but partially because it's using old technology and I tax the heck out of it. If you got a new Mac, that wouldn't be an issue. The Macbooks that Apple replaced the iBook with are really nice machines. The default $1099 configuration is reasonably fast, is pretty solid and you wouldn't need to do much customization (and can’t) as you might by going with a PC.

You can get a cheaper PC, definitely, but when you configure a comparable PC to what Apple has to offer it's not much cheaper than the Mac.

The main concern if you switch is that you'll have to shell out for new software (read: Microsoft Office). The other consideration is that if you can wait for a few months (October?), you can get a Mac with the new upcoming OS X "Leopard" operating system, and sometime this fall Microsoft is releasing Office 2008 for Mac. We bought our iBook right before they released OS X “Tiger” and it has burned me up ever since.

As Rachel said, we don't run antivirus software and don't get infected with anything, so if you really just don't want to worry about it, then a Mac would be good too. (Mac = Small Target, Windows = HUGE Target.)

That being said, I'm pretty sure you can get a discount through Dell as a Federal employee also and their new laptop line is pretty nice -- especially if you want one in Pink or Yellow (or Red, Green, Blue, Brown, Black, or White). If you're comfortable sticking with Windows or don't want to learn a new system I think you'd probably be best served by getting a Dell. With Dell you'll definitely get more “bang for your buck,” so to speak. AMD’s “Turion” processor is somewhat cheaper but the Intel Core 2 Duo is much faster than the Turion even at the slowest clock speeds.

Go mess with the Macbooks at the Apple Store if you haven't already and you should get at least a feel for OS X – and the absence of a right mouse button. I’ve gotten pretty proficient with the Ctrl+Click but it isn’t the same. For when you’re at a desk, make sure you get a scroll mouse with 2+ buttons. I recommend Logitech or, oddly enough, a Microsoft mouse.

The new Macs can run Windows these days, but you really need a large amount of RAM (and $$$) to do it.

For me, I'm beginning to lean against the Macintosh, but that's mainly because I'm a geek who likes games and programming. :-D

-Kal

p.s. The next installment in my sermon series is a discussion of the iPhone.

UPDATE: Actually, tech columnist John C. Dvorak (a fairly well known Mac skeptic) actually did a column about his use of the Mac for PC Magazine. Check it out here.