Comments on: Microsoft's 'Lauren' ad follow-up disses Mac power

Among the things that feel somewhat scripted, Giampaolo, the hipster star of the newest anti-Apple ad from Microsoft, says, "Macs to me are about aesthetics more than they are the computing power."

[MissionMan22]

My wife has had PC's for 10 odd years, I got my first Mac a year ago and in the next couple of weeks she'll also be getting a Mac, through no coaxing from me. Its based on the amount of hassles she has had vs the amount of hassles I have had, or the lack of hassles should I say on my side.

You'd can say a $1000 pc has the same spec as a $2000 macbook but at the end of the day, its like comparing a 2 litre daihatsu with a 2l BMW or Mercedes. You get what you pay for. The quality difference between a $2000 macbook pro and a $1000 PC laptop is massive...plus, you can run windows on it if you really want to or need to.

[cp256]

Macs are great if you are a computer idiot or had the bad fortune to first learn computing on one. If you are a hardware and software geek who doesn't want to waste money and likes choices, you can't beat a PC. Don't get me wrong, I loathe M$ and have always hated windows and its innovation stifling desktop monopoly, but macs have always been so simplistic that it drives me crazy trying to use them when I have to.

I spend all day every day on windows workstations and notebooks that I use mostly as ssh terminals to unix boxen and browsers and I grudgingly have made peace with the wintel world to do what I have to do. I first started in computing at 11 years on a teletype into a mainframe, then on a Wang mini, then an HP mini, then a Data General mini (all were horrible) and finally got my own first computer back in 1980, an Atari 400 with 16K of ram. Got an Atari 800 with 48k of ram soon after and then graduated to an Amiga 500 in 1987. Along the way I had used some Commodore 64's and Apple ]['s and then the Mac classic with the dinky screen and as soon as I found I couldn't put a MacPaint image into a MacWrite document I lost interest in that one mouse button simpleton's computer. Now that lowly 512K Amiga 500 was something else, I was stunned by its capabilities at the time. Over the next 9 years I owned virtually every Amiga released, all the way up to a 68060/PPC A4000T and even though I had several PCs and DEC Alphas, I used an Amiga as my daily driver right up to the year 2000. If the C= execs hadn't looted the company and left it for dead, we might still have Amigas today that put macs and peecees to shame.

I do buy a lot of the latest stuff every couple of years, a year and half ago I got Q6700 notebook and a few months later built a QX9850 SLI RAID XP, Vista64 and FreeBSD monster that runs at over 4ghz, but I still use my liquid cooled and overclocked 8 year old KR7A-RAID XP2100+ based win2k box as my daily driver, albeit with a 30" HP flat screen, 2G DDR 333 and 2TB of storage. It's super comfortable and has 8 years of OS customizations and software that I don't think I'll ever be able to replicate on XP, Vista or w7 and have it as rock solid as this original 8 year old OS install is. The QX9650 runs flawlessly, but the only time it gets fired up is when I need number crunching power or when I am building a new unix install for the server farm. I have about 10 win peecees of all speeds and flavors, four win notebooks (running, about 10 that don't!), 9 unix peecee servers and a gaggle of Amigas and DEC Alphas that I don't user anymore. I gave away my last Mac years ago, I never used it and never liked it.

Back on topic, macs have their niche in DTP, video and the artsy fartsy world as well as the clooless user simpleton market, but for absolute power users who care about a buck and not the packaging, pc's rule the roost. All the power user evangelistic "mac guys" I have personally known throughout the years have switched to windoze, even a professional video producer who used nothing but macs up until about 5 years ago. That says a lot to me.

I guess the bottom line, and what I tell my customers and friends, is use what you are comfortable with and like the best. If it is mac, so be it, if it is peecee, fine. All that truly matters is that you are happy with your machine(s). For me, macs suck, but I'm totally OK with it if you like yours, but I do take some small satisfaction that today's macs are peecees running linux that masquerade as macs with ridiculous price tags :)