galanter wrote:I've repaired my own Macs and have found Apple to be fast, reasonable, and helpful in terms of parts. It could well be different in the UK.

Point is, if the motherboard/logic board goes in your Mac it is very expensive, if your PC motherboard goes it's dirt cheap.

Relative to what you get Macs are worth the price. Having control over the hardware is part of what makes Apple's software do-able.

Why is it? OS X supports many types of hardware as it is, from PPC G4/G5 processors through to the newer Intel processors. With the right hack you can even run OS X on the old beige macs. This aside, a PC release which only supports a limited range of motherboards/processors would be an alternative idea.

A recent trade review came to the conclusion that the best Windows laptop you can buy is...a Mac.

I like the idea of the whole dual booting thing too, however, in my experience the build quality of Apple's laptops is piss poor.

Problems/things I've encountered with my G4 Powerbook include:

It gets ridiculously hot unlike most PC laptops.

The resulting sweaty hands cause the aluminium palm rests to corrode.

After 2 1/2 years careful use I had to replace both the hard-drive (stupidly positioned directly beneath the trackpad!) and the optical drive.

Keyboard not fixed in well, it flexes

Slightly wobbly LCD hinge, will probably break one day

The only time Apple tried to support 3rd party hardware was also the time they reached their low point as a company.

That's a logical fallacy. Just because something similar went wrong once, doesn't mean it would now. If Apple approached it the right way, they could wipe Windows off the planet. Vista is appalling, with the possible exception of the speech recognition.

Until some other company comes up with an overall better product than Apple's, I'm not going to second guess what they really should be doing.

And nothing mentioned so far justifies ripping off Mac OS software.

Doesn't justify it, but it is basically why people do it.

Of course, you're right and it's never going to happen, but it's a nice dream.

sunset_gun wrote:Quark document

Um, your problem is stated right there.

mr.arrison wrote:

sunset_gun wrote:Quark document

Um, your problem is stated right there.

I'm actually surprised at how well Quark is still doing. I thought InDesign would eventually render Quark obsolete and run it out of business, being available in the CS and all. We are seeing lots of designers using Quark 7, and truthfully, it's not all that bad. They enabled PDFs to be imported, which is huge the way the industry has gone.

Personally, I prefer Quark 7. InDesign CS3 still has no auto re-linking feature.

galanter wrote:Until some other company comes up with an overall better product than Apple's, I'm not going to second guess what they really should be doing.

I agree. I am posting on this forum (forcing myself to use Windows Vista more) on a widescreen T60 Thinkpad with Vista. Complete ass. I want my Mac Book now..

sunset_gun wrote:

mr.arrison wrote:

sunset_gun wrote:Quark document

Um, your problem is stated right there.

I'm actually surprised at how well Quark is still doing. I thought InDesign would eventually render Quark obsolete and run it out of business, being available in the CS and all. We are seeing lots of designers using Quark 7, and truthfully, it's not all that bad. They enabled PDFs to be imported, which is huge the way the industry has gone.

Personally, I prefer Quark 7. InDesign CS3 still has no auto re-linking feature.

Quark 7 is much better. I guess if you hit rock bottom the only way to go is up.

90% of the designers and graphic artists where I work love and prefer InDesign, flaws aside. From an IT perspective we have 1000% fewer issues with InDesign CS2 and CS3 than Quark 6.52. I doubt we will upgrade to Quark 7, instead saying "sayanora" to Quark altogether. They dropped the ball and sucked for waaaay too long to justify giving them another chance.

And the DRM of their Quark Licensing Server: draconian bullshit, even with version 7+

sunset_gun wrote:Apparently you've never had to network them...

Today, my G5 at work decided to forget the extensions to a Quark document and 3/4 of all the type faces in the folder we needed for a customer's piece. At least it didn't crash trying access the RAID server today.

You using Leopard?

I have never had any trouble networking over 400 OS X.4 Macs to a huge Active Directory with over 10,000 users. They are equally as good as PC's for the Enterprise now, if not better due to inherent stability under the hood.

If your admins know what they are doing and servers are kerberized, Macs work impressively well on large corporate networks, even Windows based ones.

That was, until OS X.5 came out... sigh.

mr.arrison wrote:

sunset_gun wrote:Apparently you've never had to network them...

Today, my G5 at work decided to forget the extensions to a Quark document and 3/4 of all the type faces in the folder we needed for a customer's piece. At least it didn't crash trying access the RAID server today.

You using Leopard?

Tiger. And we aren't talking about a huge network here either - two PCs, thee Macs (OSx/OSx/OS9) and two server drives.

Our server is Apple too. The PCs are only used peripherally for file work, nothing but email is stored on them. Our PCs never have an issue, it's always the Macs. This was my experience in school as well. We were under the constant threat of them crashing when saving to the server.

My experience tells me Macs are horrible in networking situations.

mr.arrison wrote:I agree. I am posting on this forum (forcing myself to use Windows Vista more) on a widescreen T60 Thinkpad with Vista. Complete ass. I want my Mac Book now..

I see on the internet many fellows who have, with much surgery, transgendered thinkpad to mac. Is possible? -- yes. I myself experiment with toshiba-to-mac, but toshibac, she don't work with the network so good.

Unless you work at the burger place, it is cheaper to buy the mac.
Imagine: $15/hr * 40 hrs (approx getting pc-to-mac surgery working time) = $600! You can buy a mac for such pricing. OK so I fudge figures a little.

you fudge a lot my dear.

sunset_gun wrote:
Tiger. And we aren't talking about a huge network here either - two PCs, thee Macs (OSx/OSx/OS9) and two server drives.

Our server is Apple too. The PCs are only used peripherally for file work, nothing but email is stored on them. Our PCs never have an issue, it's always the Macs. This was my experience in school as well. We were under the constant threat of them crashing when saving to the server.

My experience tells me Macs are horrible in networking situations.

I'd take a deeper look at your network infrastructure. Saying that Macs are horrible in a networked environment is just plain silly. If anything, have you tried dropping that OS 9 machine from the mix? And what do you mean by server drives? Are they NAS or are they actually some other machine running some sort of file sharing protocol.