Why use a G4?

[Lo-Fi Massahkah]

Anyways. All I can really think of off the top of my head is the security (Windows quite simply is NOT secure, unlike OSX) -Paws

I hope you will enjoy the virus front to.....Someday they all gonna work on mac in the studio! Let's see in a couple off years.....Apple here we come!xzusa8ky

The reason that Macs appear more secure than PCs are simply that virusproducers can't be bothered to write virii to attack Macs since to few people use them. That would make them seem safer in a practical way, but in theory they're not. A hacker, if motivated, would attack and ruin Macs and OSX any day. As well as PCs and Windows...

So, what you Mac freaks should do is calm down and not try and speak for the Mac, but against it. This way you can remain the exclusive cult that you are, and not be bothered by virii and worms.

Grand, eh?

[vince watson]

The reason that Macs appear more secure than PCs are simply that virusproducers can't be bothered to write virii to attack Macs since to few people use them.

thats absolutely not true.....

before the release of panther, 12 high end prgrammers spent 8 weeks in stockholm attacking darwin until they coulnt be bothered anymore....not becasue they market share is 5-6%, but because they had exhausted all ideas....

sorry but no virii will attack it successfully....

the only problems i have ever had on osx since panther was with microsoft products i.e entourage...a little ironic dont you think

[Amberience]

But if it helps, I use G4's at uni. I can't use them for long because I'm just not a MAC person. They crash a lot, but that could be because everyone is using them, thus resulting in less stability.

Crash as in kernel panics? Or crash as in software bailing out?

I'd hazard a guess that your system administrator doesn't know what he's doing..

-Paws

Or you could just accept that Mac's aren't as stable as the hype leads you to believe.

He knows what he is doing.

[sqook]

There's nothing more frustrating for me than having a burst of creative inspiration only to have it be ruined by windows crashing, not working properly with my hardware, or pestering me with a bunch of worthless dialogs and shit. .

- That is an absolute flat out blanket misinformed or utter bullshite statement (having used both a 12" PB and My Toshiba on XP pro.)


Why do some people STILL carry on like this is OS9 and every PC user uses Window's 98 or ME .

Psssh, give me a break. Actually, I'll give you a break. Here's a touching, heartfelt story about a boy (me.. heh) who tried to write a song in windows XP just the other day:

I keep all my samples on a RAID'd nfs server running openbsd, so I can see them from my dual boot xp/linux box and my ibook. Oh shit, well, XP doesn't speak NFS (like every other fucking os out there), so I have to install samba to get it to work. Well, I guess there's MS's services for unix package, but when we ran that on our work server it fucked up all of the unix permissions... and it was tranferring files at 1/4 the speed as the unix clients. Fuck it, I'll just build samba on my server and use windows filesharing, which is still slow, but functional.

Samba 2.2 is being a whore on obsd, so dl the 3.0.10 release, ./configure, make, sudo make install, and we're good to go. Fuck, authentication isn't working, because the guest account is being bitchy. Damn, now I can get in, but windows won't remember my login credentials because the usernames are different, so I have to manually reconnect the network drive every time. Shitty, but not the end of the world.

Sweet, now I got my samples and I'm ready to compose some music. Fucking MSN messenger nagging me again from the taskbar. "Oh, yes, PLEASE close MSN messenger by right clicking->exit, even though family and friends may not be able to get ahold of me". Ugh, remind me to uninstall that so it doesn't waste resident memory and network connections... fuck, to do that, I'll have to edit c:\windows\inf\sysoc.inf and alter the "msmsgs" line so I can uninstall from add/remove software. But wait!? Would you like to take an exciting tour of windows XP? Thanks, but no thanks! More new updates are ready to be installed! Oh my god! My computer could be at RISK because of my security settings? Noooooo, I would NOT like to enable windows firewall... openbsd does a great job of that for me, thanks. To hide these icons, click on THIS bubble popup! Oh, hi there quicktime! Good to see you again, buddy! FUCK, I thought I disabled the quicktime monitor service! GO THE FUCK AWAY!

So now I need some sound.... fuck the factory onboard; I'll at least use my old USB card. Wow! Windows has detected new hardware! Would you like to search online for a driver? SORRY! No drivers were found! Well, at least we tried. =( So, just go to creative's website, hunt around for a driver... NO, I would NOT like to recieve product updates via email, mmk thx.. installer... next... next... accept.. next... next... next... finish... reboot. OK! We're ready to go!

Why is my sound being all dumb and staticky? Ohhhh, firefox is running a flash plugin in the background. Well, that's no good... I guess I should close EVERYTHING down (did I mention this is a 2600+ with 700Mb ram?). Fuck, now incoming sound isn't working in cooledit, so I can't record. That's a bummer... what's wrong? Ohhhh, windows doesn't like having TWO sound cards at once (even though it seems to be showing both)... that's really confusing!! So, time to uninstall that driver, reinstall "Unknown Device" from start->control panel->administrative tools->computer management->device manager, and reboot again! Woo-hoo! Now we're off to the races!


....


Any of this sound familiar to you?

Forgive me for the rant, but the same software, network protocols, and hardware work just fucking great under every other OS that I use. I use openbsd, linux, solaris, windows xp, and osx on a daily basis for my job, and xp is the only OS among these that gives me this type of shit for no reason at all (well, maybe solaris is a close second place ).

I do NOT think I am making a "flat-out uninformed statement" here. I've been using windows for 12 years now, and it just hasn't made the types of improvements that computer users should expect, though most don't out of ignorance. Microsoft needs to copy apple again, but instead of poorly imitating their os design and graphics, they should steal their idea of completely re-writing their OS from scratch and start out with a clean slate.

[andreX]

So many arguments on both sides....

For me its definitely no question. Music is not my profession and so I want to do all things on one machine and for me there is NO WAY around MacOS X!
I do everything I can imagine without rebooting my machine for weeks, on the internet it´s bulletproof, it´s reliable what ever I throw at it.

Some users have a PC only for Ableton Live.
Maybe this is a way to go, but I´m travelling a lot and I off course want to be able to make music wherever I am. It´s that easy to me.

My girlfriend switched from a PC to Mac and even though her Powerbook is slower than her old PC desktop, she´s perfectly happpy with her decision and would never want to go back!

Performance wise, I don´t have such a big problem because my music is rather minimal and I never use reverb ;o)

And it´s definitely a different user experience. I use Windows 2000 at work and can only agree to someone´s saying that the difference between Windows and MacOS is similar to the difference between a colleage in the office and a good friend ;o)

[noisetonepause]

Or you could just accept that Mac's aren't as stable as the hype leads you to believe.

He knows what he is doing.

Multiple useres => less stability stems from a poorly setup UNIX or some pretty serious & malicious hacking efforts. You can't get around that.

-Paws

[Sandor Vennink]

Why is it that when it comes to these questions you all go insane and talk stupidity?? You are all talking like you designed the friggin' thing.. WHY? Why do you all get so frustrated??


Really, I can understand you like them. It's a good product. Usefull for me? Not really..but they are nice

To sum up:
It is clear to me now there is no real reason for using Macs on stage other than a user's history with Macs and/or bad experience with windows.

Live runs better on windows and thats a fact.

The onboard sound of a Mac is supposed to be better than a PC laptop (which I don't believe)


My questions are answered and thanks to everyone who cleared this up for me. I'm going to avoid this thread now because it's going nowhere...

[ultrasource]

both sides get just as frustrated. it's only natural! stop by again!

[sqook]

My questions are answered and thanks to everyone who cleared this up for me. I'm going to avoid this thread now because it's going nowhere...

You started this thread with a very closed mind, asking us to "prove" the worthiness of OS X to you, and when all of the ranting zealots on both sides of the fence (self included, heh) showed up, I'm sure this didn't help to sway your opinion.

You're more than free to choose whatever OS you like for music production. But instead of asking such explosive questions like "why is it useful", perhaps you should just spend a week working on a mac and tell us what you think yourself.

[AdamJay]

if osx ran on x86 hardware, i'd be running it right now.

and while there are good aspects to Apple being a software company as well as a hardware company, the bad thing is the evolution of the software has stifled the advancement of the hardware.

i'm willing to live with security measures to keep XP running great more than i'm willing to live with poor performance per $1 that locks me out of apps like Reaktor and StylusRMX (hell even Operator).

[Amberience]

Or you could just accept that Mac's aren't as stable as the hype leads you to believe.

He knows what he is doing.

Multiple useres => less stability stems from a poorly setup UNIX or some pretty serious & malicious hacking efforts. You can't get around that.

-Paws

Wasn't that what I already said.

[drush]

i'm willing to live with security measures to keep XP running great more than i'm willing to live with poor performance per $1 that locks me out of apps like Reaktor and StylusRMX (hell even Operator).

this thread should be killed. not that i'm helping.

anyway: i don't have any problem running any of the above mentioned apps on my 1.47G4. yes, they definitely run more efficiently on the PC when Live is the host but the mac does not lock me out of them.

just use what you're comfortable with people.

[4rest]

this makes me and my PC very happy
.........>http://www.litepc.com/xplite.html

i am an old mac user from back in the day (appleII) switched to pc awhile ago and haven't looked back!

i really get a kick out of my friends protools/mac setups that "never crash"....yeah good one

[malarky]

i'm perfectly fine with my athlon 2400 pc laptop that i got for under $1000 nearly two years ago. i even use speedwitch to underclock the cpu throttle down to 1300mhz to run it cooler because i've rarely ever come close maxing it out at that setting.

i totally agree that an *out of the box* XP machine can be a bit of a chore to get setup and optimized for audio, install drivers, get rid of msn messenger!, etc... especially for a novice user. but once things are setup and working right, all you really ever need to do is turn on the machine, click on whatever app you are going to use, and there you are.

i have no real first hand experience with macs, so i can't comment too much on them. i wouldn't mind owning one sometime down the road - if only to gain knowledge of another OS and to be able to use mac only apps. the major problem i have with macs is that i couldn't even afford one if i wanted to. my low end pc laptop was difficult enough to work into my budget - but manageable.

to be honest though, i don't feel like i'm missing out on anything. what i do know is that if i were to use a mac, i certainly would miss not having to worry about maxing out my cpu. i also know that i would miss the hundreds of free pc-only plugins that i've aquired - and the thousands more that are available out there.

the major annoying thing about XP is that it comes with way too many apps/services/settings/pop-ups enabled by default - in some attempt by MS to try to accomodate every user under the sun (and also to try to force feed MS software upon people). unfortunately, most of these things have no bearing on people who use their computer for more specific tasks, like making music. for these people it's just a matter of disabling/uninstalling the things you don't need. there are even plenty of tutorials out there that provide step by step instructions for optimizating XP machines for music.

basically, XP may take a bit more time for the initial setup, particularly for a novice user. but the end result is a much faster machine for a heck of a lot less. plus you might end up unintentionally learning something about computers.

use what you want. there's no need to argue about it. i'm just pointing out that i'm very happy with what i have, and the price i was able to get it at.

also, that xplite app looks neat. : )

[Komplex]

this makes me and my PC very happy
.........>http://www.litepc.com/xplite.html

Thanx for the link