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PC or Mac?


Chaos

PC or Mac?  

140 members have voted

  1. 1. What's your OS of choice on your primary computer?



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Hmm, what issues do you have with iTunes, Chaos and lyssie? I personally like it a lot. The only thing that I don't care for is the method of creating playlists. It would be easier if you could just drag songs to the sidebar instead of right-clicking and going through the menus.

As for Windows or Mac, I really don't have a preference. I use Windows but mainly because that's what my parents use. I have next to no Mac experience beyond playing on one at an Apple store, so I don't have strong feelings either way.

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Hmm, what issues do you have with iTunes, Chaos and lyssie? I personally like it a lot. The only thing that I don't care for is the method of creating playlists. It would be easier if you could just drag songs to the sidebar instead of right-clicking and going through the menus.

Uh... you sure about that? Because I just built a playlist through dragging and dropping in that exact manner.

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I have to go with windows all the way for the pure and simple reason that 90% of my computer usage is gaming. Also I like being able to troubleshoot my own computer and over the years I've gotten used to windows so I can fix most common problems, I tried troublehooting a mac once and it was one of the most frustrating experiences of my life (right after reading a book within hours of its release and then knowing you have to wait another year or so for the next :P) I will say that that is almost entirely due to my inexperience with macs but I just don't have the time to get used to the system, maybe someday.

I also have various linux distros on my legion of desktops and ubuntu on my laptop but that's mostly just because I always feel like some day I'm going to get used to it, I don't mind it but once again, gaming is my main use of my time so it's a bit limiting.

Edited by Voidus
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Hmm, what issues do you have with iTunes, Chaos and lyssie? I personally like it a lot. The only thing that I don't care for is the method of creating playlists. It would be easier if you could just drag songs to the sidebar instead of right-clicking and going through the menus.

As for Windows or Mac, I really don't have a preference. I use Windows but mainly because that's what my parents use. I have next to no Mac experience beyond playing on one at an Apple store, so I don't have strong feelings either way.

You have to realize that the way I listen to music is very atypical to, like, normal people. I often listen to a single song multiple times in a row, then go into the next song. I don't use shuffle, and I rarely use playlists. I listen to the song I want to listen to. I do this thing with Winamp that has it always on top of the screen. Right now, it's on my second monitor, and it works excellently and very fast.

There's lots of reasons why I dislike iTunes. Firstly, when I originally installed it for my iPod Touch, iTunes decided I wanted every media on my computer in my library. No thanks. I happen to know what media I want in my library, and I already have it organized like I prefer in my folder system. I am perfectly competent enough to find the song I want to listen to on my own. Thankfully, I did eventually find the Drop to iTunes Library folder, which helped, but honestly, I don't need a freaking iTunes library. Maybe I just want MP3's without the necessity to add everything to a library.

I think the interface is just... really bad. The options I would want are hidden. It's pretty slow. It incessantly wants updates. I loathed ever opening the program, to the point where I'd have bought music and didn't put it on my iPod simply because I hated iTunes that much.

And the music I really want to buy (Japanese pop music) isn't on iTunes to my satisfaction. Now, it's not on any American digital music service, so I'm not going to knock iTunes for that. However, if iTunes had such music, I might actually be compelled to use it or buy something from there, but it doesn't, so I'm not going to.

Quite simply, there is absolutely nothing about iTunes I like, and it's just not how I want to listen to music.

Now, I have no idea if things have gotten better since I uninstalled it last year. I don't care to find out. Uninstalling iTunes after I sold my iPod to Kerry was exhilarating. I'm not going to install it ever again, unless I'm under extreme duress. (I suppose I may have to install it to test and see if ShardCast gets on iTunes, but I will not enjoy the experience).

You also need to realize that I have a longstanding bias against iPods which stems from requiring iPods to sync with iTunes. I remember the days when I could use my MP3 player as a flash drive, which was really useful when I needed to transfer files to and from school. But with iPods, you couldn't do that. I still think that's completely idiotic. And post-iPod, every other MP3 player manufacturer wanted you to install software before using it, thus making them less useful in the process. I do not need help freaking moving music to a device. Drag-and-drop is much quicker, and doesn't require additional crappy software for it to work. And that's the whole thing: I'm sure iTunes works great for people, but it's forcing me into a paradigm that is ultimately not as useful for me. I had gotten an iPod Touch for free, and it certainly is the best pure MP3 player, but now I use my Galaxy Nexus with Google Music across all my devices. I'm much better for it.

Uh... you sure about that? Because I just built a playlist through dragging and dropping in that exact manner.

That may be a difference between Mac and PC versions. As far as I know, the PC version is slower than the Mac one as well.

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Chaos levels against iTunes and the iPod the two beefs that every iPod/iTunes hater I've ever met has against them: they want to organize their own music by hand, and they want manage what goes onto their MP3 player themselves, manually, by hand.

I am completely baffled by these criticisms. I don't understand them at all, because I am exactly the opposite. I love that I don't need to construct a folder hierarchy for my music, nor care about how my music is organized into folders. Drag music into iTunes. Drag music out of iTunes. Simple.

I love that I don't need to manually manage what goes on my iPod. Plug iPod in. Music flows from computer to iPod. Simple.

Thinking back to my own history in using digital music, I can see why my habits and preferences evolved the way they did. My first forays into digital music were made with Cassady and Greene's SoundJam, which Apple purchased and used as the basis for iTunes. The library/ID3-based management idiom makes such perfect sense to me because it is what I have always known.

Likewise, my first MP3 player was a 4th-generation iPod, so I never experienced the joy of needing to manually manage the content on my MP3 player.

Allow me to engage in the hubris of superimposing my own experience onto Eric's. I'm betting Eric started on WinAmp. He's always organized his music himself, and considers it no great hardship, so he sees no need for a tool that will take that control away from him. What is to me a liberating delegation of responsibility is to Eric a coercion into an undesirable workflow.

So, I guess I understand where he's coming from. I'm still absolutely convinced that the iTunes model is better, but I can at least understand how we came to this divide.

That is not at all to say that I find iTunes to be without fault. On the contrary, I find it more bloated than a week-old roadkilled deer. All I'm currently asking of it is that it play music, and for some reason it claims 170MB of RAM to accomplish that task. Should I load up the store, that will balloon to over 300MB - and stay there even after I switch back to my library. Every iteration adds more and more crap. Oh, and its video management features suck.

I can't tell you how I'd love a return to a quick, low-footprint, playback-focused player. But in the meantime, iTunes is still the best solution for me.

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I like both systems. My very first computer was an Apple IIci (Don't laugh. They were cutting edge back then). In high school we upgraded to a HP with Windows XP Office. Even though I really liked XP, a couple years ago I returned to the flock and bought a MacBook Pro. I have no regrets.

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Ryan, I can't speak for Eric, but I did start on Winamp. However, my folder-mongering ways began long before that. It's a long story, an old one, filled with excitement, adventure, and alphabetizing. In those days, men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

I'll, of course, regale you with the account. That is what old people do, isn't it? Anywho, back then, if you wanted to play the latest "Video Game," such as the seminal Scorched Earth or the ethereal Commander Keen: Marooned on Mars, you had to put in its own dedicated floppy disk (as in actually floppy, the 8-inch kind) so it could run. There were lesser games, and you might be able to fit like 30 of them on a disk, but these colossal games were where it all started. Anywho, the problem there is that these marvels of modern programming were too large to put on your computer, so you'd have to store them elsewhere. Keep in mind, these were the heady days when 640kb program memory was supposed to be all the computery ambrosia one would ever need.

There was the conundrum: how to arrange all these floppy drives and their associated war-and-peace-like instruction manuals so that one could easily find them? Filing systems, of course. Sure, we might not have (usually) been using actual file folders, but the concept was the same. In my disk storage case I had a game section, which was divided into sections for big games and for small ones. Then there was the... well, okay, I was young, so I only had the games section, but my parents had more sections that they used for things. Not sure what.

Thus, when computers became fancy enough that they didn't need external filing systems for all the floppy disks, that filing system was more or less copied over onto the computer itself. I still have a "games" folder, the practice of which originates to this period, and it feels wrong when something like Terraria or Project Zomboid gets installed on my computer but not in that location.

My folder-mongering essentially expanded to other areas of computing that I use regularly. I don't save any work-like documents in the "My Documents" folder. That's gibberish. I make my own folder system that is neither new nor fangled (especially fangled: I hate fangled things). That's the way I've always done it, and I's likes it that way. Music, then, is just a single branch of this.

Of course, there are plenty of reasons to dislike iTunes besides my above ramblings. There's the annoyance of iTunes thinking that a soundtrack is dozen or so different albums because the artist for each song is different. But, as Chaos said, it’s nonsensical for them to prevent iPods from being proper storage devices. I know that my entire musical library (as of several years ago) is on my iPod, but if I want to get those files onto a different computer, I either have to rip them again, or use a storage device that isn't needlessly restrictive. I stopped using iTunes and my iPod when cloud drives became common, since it is easier to just have my music library on one of those. Not the iCloud, of course. I'm old, but I'm not senile… despite the fact that the above rambling speaks to the contrary.

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It incessantly wants updates. I loathed ever opening the program, to the point where I'd have bought music and didn't put it on my iPod simply because I hated iTunes that much.

The updates are the worst. They make the computer work sooooo slow. Also opening the store is a pain. I actually prefer buying songs on my dad's iPad because it works so much faster, and can sync quickly.

Uninstalling iTunes after I sold my iPod to Kerry was exhilarating. I'm not going to install it ever again, unless I'm under extreme duress. (I suppose I may have to install it to test and see if ShardCast gets on iTunes, but I will not enjoy the experience).

If all you'd do is check to see if the podcast is up, just let me know and I can check for you, so you don't have to re-install. Bit if it's any more technically complicated then that, I may not be much help. I'm only a high schooler after all :P

That may be a difference between Mac and PC versions. As far as I know, the PC version is slower than the Mac one as well.

Nope you can chalk this up to ignorance on my part. I'm going to blame my parents on this one, they told me that you had to do it the long way.
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Chaos levels against iTunes and the iPod the two beefs that every iPod/iTunes hater I've ever met has against them: they want to organize their own music by hand, and they want manage what goes onto their MP3 player themselves, manually, by hand.

I am completely baffled by these criticisms. I don't understand them at all, because I am exactly the opposite. I love that I don't need to construct a folder hierarchy for my music, nor care about how my music is organized into folders. Drag music into iTunes. Drag music out of iTunes. Simple.

I love that I don't need to manually manage what goes on my iPod. Plug iPod in. Music flows from computer to iPod. Simple.

Thinking back to my own history in using digital music, I can see why my habits and preferences evolved the way they did. My first forays into digital music were made with Cassady and Greene's SoundJam, which Apple purchased and used as the basis for iTunes. The library/ID3-based management idiom makes such perfect sense to me because it is what I have always known.

Likewise, my first MP3 player was a 4th-generation iPod, so I never experienced the joy of needing to manually manage the content on my MP3 player.

Allow me to engage in the hubris of superimposing my own experience onto Eric's. I'm betting Eric started on WinAmp. He's always organized his music himself, and considers it no great hardship, so he sees no need for a tool that will take that control away from him. What is to me a liberating delegation of responsibility is to Eric a coercion into an undesirable workflow.

So, I guess I understand where he's coming from. I'm still absolutely convinced that the iTunes model is better, but I can at least understand how we came to this divide.

That is not at all to say that I find iTunes to be without fault. On the contrary, I find it more bloated than a week-old roadkilled deer. All I'm currently asking of it is that it play music, and for some reason it claims 170MB of RAM to accomplish that task. Should I load up the store, that will balloon to over 300MB - and stay there even after I switch back to my library. Every iteration adds more and more crap. Oh, and its video management features suck.

I can't tell you how I'd love a return to a quick, low-footprint, playback-focused player. But in the meantime, iTunes is still the best solution for me.

Agreed. And I don't at all doubt that it is a better solution for you, however I would take to task the comment that "the iTunes model is better". Better means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. The beauty of choice is that everyone can find solutions that work best for them. I don't think any software is "better" objectively; instead, it's all subjective in what a user wants out of their software, and people have their own needs. There's no right or wrong way.

Well. Let me backpedal. I think we can all agree IE6 is the worst thing ever, and there are plenty of objectively better pieces of software than that :P But knowing what is objectively bad is different from, like, saying what is objectively "right" for someone. I think there are relatively few instances where the majority can agree that something is total crap, though. So while I despise iTunes totally and completely, that doesn't mean it's bad for everyone.

IE6 though, man. Jeez.

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  • 1 year later...

Why am I on a Mac?  I began on a Mac when the very first version of it was offered to consumers.  How many others remember this?

 

old-mac_zpsa0399889.png

 

(Whatever happened to that original, rainbow sticker is beyond my memory.)  Anyway, I then had a Mac Plus, a Mac Quadra, and a Mac PowerBook.  Then, I met some folks in tech who worked in Silicon Valley (just over the hill, as we say here) and was introduced to a PC through a friend.  I went through a Compaq, then a Toshiba laptop (both of which had been given to me) and finally met a friend who works for Apple in Cupertino.  My loyalty to Mac was reignited.  When my iBook G4's motherboard crashed, she took it in to Apple and had it replaced for me ... free of charge (to her and to me).  When that laptop began to be obsolete (because it can't handle today's operating systems, etc.), she offered me a MacBookPro that had belonged to her son.  This is the current laptop from which I type even now.  (I've kept the iBook G4 because it has Photoshop, Roxio, Word, Excel, and Office on it which are older versions I can't transfer to my MacBookPro.)

 

My brothers gifted me with an iPad almost 2 years ago, so I take that with me everywhere (even though I require independent wifi to go online with it).  I have every RJ book from New Spring to The Gathering Storm on it (and got these for free as well from my friend at Apple through her son).  Currently, I'm on Knife of Dreams ... the last novel in WoT that RJ wrote.

 

I'm now waiting for my cell phone to die on me or become - in some way - unable to be charged any longer so I can get an iPhone.  Granted, the longer my current phone lasts, the greater the developments in iPhone tech.

 

I have to admit that I enjoy being surrounded by my laptops/iPad when I'm at home!  (I can hardly wait for my iPhone!)  When I'm online, it's for fun.  I'm only online at work when I have access to wifi and, even then, it's still for fun.

 

Uh, oh!  I think my MacBook G4 just crapped out on me!  whew-1.gif  Nope.  I think Grandma just got tired and decided to go to sleep.

Edited by Tamzin Ashevai
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I used Linux for a few years in college, because Windows 98 was crashing several times per day and ruining my productivity. But I went back to Windows in 2000 because the new version was stable enough, and I trust Windows Update to apply security updates. It's been something like 15 years though; I might try Ubuntu one of these days and see if the user experience isn't better than what I remember.

I find Apple products extremely creepy. :blink: I get the feeling that Apple is trying to make the user experience "fun and rewarding", in the same way video game and junk food companies try to engineer products to be addictive. I doubt it's harmful, and maybe I'm just weird for getting this impression, but it creeps me out and I don't like it at all. I prefer something more straightforward.

Edited by Morsk
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  • 5 months later...

100% Mac all the way, but then, as Peter can attest (since I've helped him and Brandon out of an iBooks snafu) I work for Apple so how could it be any other way? I started on CDC Cyber 6000 mainframes, Arpanet and Cray 1-S back in 1979, got my first home computer, a Compaq Deskpro in 1985, then my first Mac in 1989 and never looked back. What a long strange trip it's been.

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  • 2 months later...

I would like to say Linux, but I still have to go back to Windows for a few programs like Photoshop or some games and normally I don't want to restart the PC just to use a different program, so I start up in Windows right away.

 

Mac OSX isn't really an option. Don't like the handling, don't like the optics, don't like the company behind it.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I use Windows 7, but I have a preference for Mac. I passed an opportunity for a MacBook Pro, regret that decision. I would most definitely switch to Mac after having a look at the next iteration of Windows, since 8 isn't working for me.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Windows for me.  I'm a bit of a Microsoft fan, but I occasionally dabble in linux, Ubuntu mostly.  I also don't get what people have against Windows 8, I like it because the desktop environment got a lot of great improvements, and I much prefer the start screen because I can organize it much better than I ever could with the old start menu.

 

As for my phone, I've got an ancient Samsung Focus with Windows Phone 7 (Blame 3 year contracts and bad timing on my part.  I've still got nine months left before I can get a new contract with a phone that wasn't made in 2010.)

 

If I was to buy a tablet, I'd want a Surface Pro, but since that's slightly out of my price range, I think I'd go with Lenovo's new 8 inch Windows tablet.  I also have a Kindle Keyboard which I like a lot and will be using again once I get around to sending it in on warranty.

Edited by SirVarrock
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I also don't get what people have against Windows 8, I like it because the desktop environment got a lot of great improvements, and I much prefer the start screen because I can organize it much better than I ever could with the old start menu.

 

As a user: The two-form factor schism between desktop and metro mode is a terrible idea, and feels clunky. The spacing and use of metro mode as a touch interface doesn't jive well with keyboard and mouse, and feels too clunky for me to like it. If they would have changed the start menu to be more like the slide out menus they have, instead of having this metro start screen, i would be OK with this, and it would help to merge both mouse/keyboard and touch interfaces rather well without creating a jarring two-form factor OS like they did. Also: RUN METRO APPS IN A WINDOW (yes i know it's coming, but WHY this wasn't a feature/option from launch, i have no idea)

 

As a software engineer: the multi-framework environment just to code for one OS is a terrible idea. The fact that i have to choose to make a metro app or a "legacy" app is a terrible choice when it's one OS, make it all one framework. The should have added the core metro app functionality as part of the .net framework and been done with it, and then you can choose to create metro/desktop modes for your application. The fact that they are now endorsing their HTML/javascript environment as a preferred development platform is a huge slight to the .net community, which, IMO, .net is probably the best thing to ever come out of MS in terms of programming support. In fact, they should have just left silverlight within .net and used silverlight as the basis for their metro apps. That would have been an outstanding decision, IMO.

 

 

 

That said, this is all personal opinion, which what it all comes down to anyways. I look forward to the rumored windows 9 to see how they will be cleaning up and improving upon windows 8, and until then i will continue with windows 7.

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  • 2 weeks later...

My choice is Chrome, and it's not in the list. I have a Surface Pro that I barely use and do my best work online anyway, so I tend to just use the Chromebook for it. 

 

Those any good? I've never used one. Not sure how i like the idea of EVERYTHING being cloud-based.....

 

Also, technically, i think that falls under the "linux" umbrella, because i'm like 90% sure the OS is linux based :P

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