Coursedesign,

I didn't realize the peripherals were so antiquated. These are "institutional" Macs so I'm sure I'm not seeing the most up-to-date offerings. All purely subjective opinion on my part.

As for Final Cut, I guess I'm so used to one-man-show projects in Vegas that the logistics of a feature length project involving many, many contributors sort of escaped me.

Anyway, most people on this forum have forgotten more about this stuff than I'll ever know. I'm not trying to poo-poo one or the other (although I suppose exclaiming I want to chuck the mouse across the room is a bit much). Just chiming in with my limited Mac experience.

Based on machines among the 34 in our department...

as you can see from below my biggest frustration with Macs is the limited hardware expansion possibilities. RAIDs have to be mounted in (expensive) external chassis on the Macs.

Mac Pro:
2 x Optical drive slots.
4 x HDD slots (sata only)
3 spare 4x PCIe slots.

PC:
(depending on the case)
5+ Optical drive slots
6+ or more 3.5" HDD slots
depending on your choice of motherboard there are many expansion slot configurations using PCI. PCIe, PCI-X etc.

regards,

Ottor

Revisionist history - the garage built Apple preceded the IBM PC by several years.

More like the factory built Apple preceded the IBM PC by several years.

I bought my first computer in 1979 .. the Apple II (not a II+ or a IIe or a IIc, but a plain 'ole II) The first IBM PC was released in Aug 1981 (acording to Wikipedia anyway)

RAIDs have to be mounted in (expensive) external chassis on the Macs.

That's always been part of the Mac culture, and there are both pros and cons with having the RAID outside.

I have one $200 RAID enclosure with rocking performance via eSATA, and hardly think that qualifies as being "expensive."


(sata only)

OMG!

Are you getting nostalgic for IDE drives?


[...PCs have] many expansion slot configurations using PCI. PCIe, PCI-X

Are you getting nostalgic for PCI and PCI-X?

If so, you can get a used Mac Pro with PCI-X slots at least.


And do you do mass disk duplication in each of those 34 machines?

Seems better suited for a purpose-built dupe tower with 8 or 12 drives.

(sata only)

OMG!

Are you getting nostalgic for IDE drives?

*****

:) SAS can be very nice to have depending on what you're working with. All my servers have it.

15k SAS drives have been an option for Mac Pro since many years.

You're such a luxe guy!

:O)

>>>>.The RGB LED on the MacBook Pro is certainly a big part of what makes its 1920x1080 matte screen so jawdroppingly good.<<<<<

Wrong answer that proves you don't know the difference.

Macbook pro has a LED screen but not RGB LED screen. Even Dell XP16 or whatever is called has RGB LED as an option and it looks far better than MacBook pro. Mac book pro's screen looks about the same as my 3 year old Sager LCD screen, it looks good, but it's not nearly as nice or accurate as RGB LED screens.

>>>>And if you ever see a Windows-only workstation with a case that matches that of a Mac Pro<<<<

Again I'm puzzled as to what you are even asking. Just pick a case. Like I said you don't need to buy Dell or HP. Just get the best and the most expensive case you can find and build or have somebody build a PC for you using that case. There are far better cases that those on Macs if you know where to look ( you could even get that same mac case for your PC ).

5-14" bays can be useful for removable drive trays. A set of three bays can hold a 5 tray module.

Really, the difference is and always has been the software you can run. If you need things that only run on a Mac then a Mac is the choice.

Hardware is a pretty minor consideration but there might be times when hardware might determine the choice of OS. For instance, we just had a service guy spend a couple of days trying to track down a problem getting volumes of a SAN to mount when Windows boots. (They're supposed to appear as local volumes to the PC.) The end conclusion was that windows' logical disc manager is just plain flaky and unreliable. His recommendation was that we'd be better of with Linux or OSX.

It's ironic because we ran screaming from Apple platforms about 8 years ago because the hardware had us bent over a barrel with our pants around our ankles. They'd blocked any possible upgrade path for the hardware-based edit system we used at the time, and there were no other platform options than Apple.

Rob

Even Dell XP16 or whatever is called has RGB LED as an option and it looks far better than MacBook pro. Mac book pro's screen looks about the same as my 3 year old Sager LCD screen, it looks good, but it's not nearly as nice or accurate as RGB LED screens.

Don't say "Dell XP16 or whatever is called." Give me an actual model number I can check out and recommend as being superior.


Three years ago there were no LED screens in any commonly available notebook, so you're saying your old Sager is better than today's MBP LED screens? Can you post a screenshot? :O).


And you're saying that MacBook Pro notebooks use LED screens, but they are not RGB LED.

Do you think they are YUV LEDs?

Or perhaps CMYK LEDs?

:O).

There are different colors of LEDs used for lighting, but AFAIK not for displays (other than the inferior White LED displays which have a smaller color gamut).

Who says otherwise?


>>>>And if you ever see a Windows-only workstation with a case that matches that of a Mac Pro<<<<

I haven't found anything matching from Dell or HP, even in their workstation ranges, and I had no better luck finding any deluxe cases that matched the quality of the Mac Pro case. All others I found were made out of thin sheet metal, while the Mac Pro has a heavy duty, sound absorbing ~1/8" aluminum chassis.

Please educate me where I can find these better cases, I am humble enough to think that there could be many vendors I have overlooked.

One will of course suffice to prove your point.

I remember when they soldered their boards in to keep anyone from tampering with them.

As a tech person trying to maintain machines, that kind of foolishness drove many of us away never to return. And I had my fill of Jobs after the NeXT fiasco. I'm sure many here don't even know what that is.

Dell XPS studio 16 is one that uses RGB LED screen, Soni vaio WA or something like that is already dicontinued and has had RGB LED screen while Mac book pro still doesn't have a RGB LED screen. Behind the times as usual. When Macs move to RGB LEDs PC side will already be be another step ahead.

For cases Lian - Li, always had aluminum cases, even back when mac was made of cardboard with motorola chips. You can find many good, bad and the ugly cases. Forget about Dell and HP, they are Apple equivalents in the PC world and I'd never buy from them. You can do better than that.

I see a MAC-PC thread, and notice Desux is the last one to comment. I click on it and sure enough, he has nothing good to say about Apple.

Such a insecure, predictable douche.

Yes, unlike such fine upstanding citizens like you who are oh so secure and unpredictable, so full of surprises we never could have guessed your fine contribution would be another name calling post and no facts to back up any claims you may have ( not that you have any )

Let's just agree here that Macs have "CMYK" LEDs and are made of cardboard, and everything will be fine.

I suspect they buy used "K" LEDs from the PC manufacturers and put them into new Macs.

Sigh.

***
Forget about Dell and HP, they are Apple equivalents in the PC world and I'd never buy from them. You can do better than that.
***

Well,

I have about 900 installed Dell workstations, about 200 laptops, and about 300 HP servers. All have 24/7 service and 4 hour replacement guarantees. That is required in my business. And I don't remember seeing Lian, or anyone else of that ilk offering that kind of service. I also don't remember too many other systems on the Avid approved vendor list and since I'd like support from my vendors, that is a significant consideration.

So what you can "do better than", is greatly dependent on needs.

I remember when they soldered their boards in to keep anyone from tampering with them.

When was that? And how did the soldering keep anyone from working with the boards?

As a tech person trying to maintain machines, that kind of foolishness drove many of us away

Some of their antics drove me away too, but it wasn't the hardware which I thought was quite a bit ahead of the PCs of the time.

When Apple switched from System 6 to System 7 in order to support Internet access, I helped a lot of Apple owners upgrade their OSes and find&install 3rd party drivers.

This was during the Pepsi boss era when Jobs had been banished to the forest for being a geek, as the board wanted a bean counter to manage Wall Street instead.

I couldn't believe my freakin' eyes how clueless Apple was about the Internet at that time. Even Bill Gates had just ceased to pooh-pooh the geeky new "Inter-Net" as being some temporarily popular college prank.

So Microsoft provided all Windows drivers for Internet access, and it was easy (for its day) to set up).

Apple on the other hand really wished for this new complexity to go away as quickly as possible, and that could have led them to permanent oblivion.

Except universities across the world developed the necessary bits and pieces and provided them for free to computer users. You had to download the transport protocol from one university in Germany (Erlangen?), the session protocol from a UK university, and so on, bits and pieces downloaded via 9600 baud dial-up.

Umm, also, to upgrade from System 6 to System 7 you had to reformat your ONE hard drive after transferring your user data to, um, what???? Another Apple machine of course, as there were no external drives at that time, and even if there had been, the 5MB drives cost a fortune.

And then it turned out that the internet support features in System 7.0 didn't work, so 7.0.1 was rapidly followed by .2, .3, etc., and after each install you had to tinker with the drivers from universities all over the world.

Right at that time, Bill Gates really got it, and Windows provided an out-of-the-box internet experience, while Apple had their heads totally stuck up a dark place.

Apple came out with the PowerBook laptop which was amazing for its day, and I thought they had reformed, especially since they were my customer. But it was soon apparent after a year of visits to Cupertino that the employees were walking in the wilderness and nobody could make any forward-looking decisions.

So I bailed on Apple and got a Compaq "ultralight" of the day (only 12 lbs.!) and didn't look back.

Then in 2006 I received a new MacBook Pro (the first Intel machine) with OS X 10.4 Tiger and I was blown away by how good it was, both the hardware and the software.

And let's not forget that the highly priced (and praised) advanced NeXT technology made the modern Mac possible.

I had many lunches with NeXT owners who were touting how this thing blew away everything else, and I was very impressed, just wishing that it didn't also blow away your wallet quite that far.

As for Jobs, he was just celebrated as Best CEO of any company for the last 10 years, Best Marketer of the Decade by AdWeek, and has been given many more kudos.

Just like many other top achievers, he is a "sociopath with a vision" (meaning the first part in a non-scientific way, sociopathy a bit more complicated than that).

Jobs understands the value of good people in the same way Bill Gates did.

Bill's successor OTOH seems 100% content with just having a name, any name, in every box on the organizational chart, and as many boxes as possible.

Some of MS's top technical guys (non-manager types) interviewed recently talked about how 10 years ago they had six layers of bosses between them and Bill, and now they have 13 layers between them and Ballmer.

The end result of that is of course Windows Mobile that is not even mentioned as a contender anymore, an Office Suite that while very good is stuck in a rut and under attack from "free" and "cloud" suites, and Windows 7 that while very good, per one of its project managers is "very much inspired by OS X" (alas with some things copied without understanding WHY Apple had made some of the choices in the UI, so it got cocked up in the end), etc.

But I'm doing all I can to support Microsoft, because I see a huge dark cloud on the horizon in the form of Google.

Google's press alarm about getting hacked by the Chinese government was just cover for their people being seen going in and out of NSA offices.

Imagine a day in the near future when all your e-mail, all files on your hard drive, your browsing history, your address book, all documents you create, all books you read, the music you listen to, all your phone calls, your voice mails, your medical history, etc. are all subject to interpretation by private and government computers.

That is exactly what Google is setting up to do, and they're doing it on a worldwide scale. They say they want to "own the world's information," which will of course give them enormous power.

Their "do no evil" motto? I suspect it was a Freudian slip.

Look at what is happening in Iran right now. The internet is slowed down or turned off completely to suit the government, Facebook and other sites are banned, mobile networks are throttled where there is any dissension, and anyone who is supporting the opposition risks being tortured. And since the rulers report directly to God, nobody can stop this.

In this country, it could be much more efficient. Anyone making a post like this would be immediately visited by storm troopers and transported away to a remote prison, or even to another country outside American jurisdiction (think Gitmo which was used for exactly this reason).

Well,

I was with you until the Gestapo part, but ok.

The Apple hardware non-tampering stuff was when I was at University. Late 80s. I was doing supercomputer support back then (Control Data ETA 10, VAX & IBM mainframes, modifying code that would later become Internet Relay Chat, and using the internet daily before Al Gore invented it.) I had a Sun workstation on my desk before there was Java, and some years later would own a NeXT as did my partner. They were the heart of our all-digital music post studio.

We had Apple IIs in the library when I was in middle high school. I wanted a 2e to take to school but even then the price was stupid expensive. I remember going into the little Apple reseller in my town in 1987 to look at them. Later on at University, they were the standard computing platform in campus. And with the student discount, they were only twice the cost of PCs. I was an engineering student and I need to run Autocad. So I had a PC. But I still had my handy Apple OS source code, and my Motorola 68080 programming book should I need to do any heavy coding on the Apple side.

Those are days thankfully long gone by. I have zero interest in writing hardware drivers, or being under the hood to that degree again. I had my fill of it. I've watched Apple nearly bungle themselves out of existence, leave customers stranded on the NeXT and Lisa projects, etc.

Oh, and for those NeXT owners who claimed that it blew things away, I'll have to tell you a story about them. They were good, but believe me, in their market, they were not even considered average. I nearly shamed the NeXT rep who came to campus hawking the thing into leaving with his tail between his legs. Everything they claimed before launch was total BS and I had to show him on the projector in front of the University staff and several Nobel Prize Laurates. They cleaned up their act well enough for us to buy a few '040 NeXTs and then they were abandoned. Great idea, crappy execution. It had become Job's SOP at the time.

Anyway, that's enough of a walk down memory lane.

Reply by: PerroneFord, Date: 2/16/2010 7:31:28 AM
(Control Data ETA 10, VAX & IBM mainframes, modifying code that would later become Internet Relay Chat, and using the internet daily before Al Gore invented it.)
LOL! This must have been before he invented Global Warming we're going thru right now!


Look, The bottom line is MACs and PCs are just TOOLS.

If you're not a techie and need software that only runs on a Mac then get a mac.

If you can do what you need to do on a "cheaper" PC then get a PC.

Now, if you are a techie there are hacks to get a PC to run Mac software.

Bottom line, You "can" get more bang for the buck and a much better more powerful machine than ANY off the shelf PC or Mac if you know how to build your own. I.e. look at my system specs. I've over clocked my i7 860 2.8 to a moddest 3.3gHZ people who really know what they are doing are overclocking their machines to 4+gHz.

>>>There are different colors of LEDs used for lighting, but AFAIK not for displays (other than the inferior White LED displays which have a smaller color gamut).<<<

And that is exactly what your mac book pro uses, white LED display. Unlike RGB led they cannot display colors accurately and are not any better than a good plain LCD.

Put your mac book pro next to one of these and it will look like a $3000 washed out pile of crap.

Tom's Hardware:

A handful of notebooks such as the new 17” MacBook Pro and Dell XPS Studio 16 use RGB LED displays, but the majority of shipping notebooks with LED backlit technology use an array of white LEDs.

Unfortunately the Dell XPS 16 only comes with a glossy "shaving mirror" type screen, so that leaves the MacBook Pro where you get to choose whether you want glossy or matte (the latter of course being superior for large screens).

mac pro:
quad core xeon 2.66ghz
3gb RAM
640gb HD
Geforce GT 120
$2500

parts from neweeg:
quad core xeon 2.66ghz(same one) $1k
MB: $250
6GB RAM: $190
640gb drive: $70
Nvidia GT 240: $120
Windows 7 64-bit Pro: $130
$1760

PC's let you save $$ if you want to put the time/effort in to it. Mac's don't. Most people don't so it's a non-issue. That $$ could be applied to something else. IE you could buy an extra monitor, etc. You could get an AMD for less them that & it would perform just as good, or get an Intel iX CPU that performes just as good with editing vs the xeon for less.

Does the iX work with ECC RAM?

That is becoming an issue with 64-bit NLEs and of course After Effects that really needs 2 GB per core to work properly.

I think you need to add a $250 case (Zalman or Lian Li) and a $250 1kW PSU (like in the Mac Pro) to the $1760 for the home-built PC, so that adds up to $2260.

The Mac Pro comes with a pro keyboard and mouse, so for comparison you should add say $140, so the total adds up to $2400.

Beats $2500, at least if your time is free.

:O)

(Hey, I like building computers too, have been doing it for more than 30 years. There is an extra ounce of satisfaction in building your own, just like the transceiver rigs I used to build as a ham (0.09 uV@10 dB S/N for SSB & CW on the 144 MHz band, 0.14uV for 20dB quieting on 144 MHz FM, both measured with a calibrated Boonton signal generator, as well as 432 MHz and 1296 MHz rigs I didn't have instrumentation for)).