is MAC better than PC for music?seriously

robin · Post by **robin** » Mon Jan 22, 2007 3:53 pm

maybe

forge · Post by **forge** » Mon Jan 22, 2007 3:57 pm

uh-huh-huh

forge · Post by **forge** » Mon Jan 22, 2007 4:00 pm

aboxofjosh · Post by **aboxofjosh** » Mon Jan 22, 2007 11:14 pm

yoshitosser wrote:Macs are clearly shite, they don't even have a right click.

Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) has native support for right-click contextual menus, and Mighty Mouse (included with all Macs except the notebooks and the mini) is in fact a two-button mouse.

http://www.apple.com/mightymouse/

freqn · Post by **freqn** » Tue Jan 23, 2007 4:36 am

get a mac!

mechcon · Post by **mechcon** » Tue Jan 23, 2007 5:21 am

to be quite frank, its not about what tools you use, its the way you use them, and how they feel for you.

I dont know what it is about macs? but everything I do on them doesn't feel like a chore.

Dont know what it was about windows that made me feel like it was a chore.

Any psychologists out there?

djadonis206 · Post by **djadonis206** » Tue Jan 23, 2007 6:14 am

The debate lives on...does anyone honestly believe it matters?

I think we should get all the people on this thread to produce some music on their respective machines and we can judge which system works better / sounds better / etc etc

so what do you say?

Machinesworking · Post by **Machinesworking** » Tue Jan 23, 2007 6:41 am

djadonis206 wrote:The debate lives on...does anyone honesylt believe it matters?

I think we should get all the people on this thread to produce some music on their respective machines and we can judge which system works better / sounds better / etc etc

so what do you say?

I remeber a really funny thread where some jerk tried saying that macs sounded better......

I'm die hard mac all the way, but I don't care for the elite hipster schtick attached to macs, makes me ill. As someone who grew up poor, I envy the fact that some 20 year old can put together a PC for peanuts, and use Live on it, and it works just like it does on the G5 here.
My problem is I'm partial to OSX, but that doesn't matter much. Sure a few goodies in Core audio that make life easier for an advanced user, but you can buy third party stuff for windows that does pretty much the same thing.

musick · Post by **musick** » Tue Jan 23, 2007 7:01 am

I think the "Home Made Movie" add from the Mac TV ads well describe the difference between a Mac and a PC for creative work

noisetonepause · Post by **noisetonepause** » Tue Jan 23, 2007 7:20 am

Personally, I have a largely negative attitude towards the switch cos I'm more interested in innovation and will take low power usage over raw muscle any day of the week. PCs have always won on raw muscle. A comparably priced 1984 PC would do twenty times as many calculations per second as the original Macintosh I read somewhere, and this continued all the way up to PPC switch, maybe even further... But the Macs had other things going for them: self-configuring NuBus slots when PC-compatibles had jumpers coming out their arse, fast SCSI, later FireWire... Built in sound that didn't suck!.. Battery life and weight in the laptops, built-in and easy to set up serial networking, then firewire target disk mode, all these things. Apple might never have had the most powerful hardware, but they've always had more interesting hardware.

This might not matter to someone who only runs IE, Office, and Live, though... but computers are a hobby of mine, so it matters to me.

meatfestival wrote:(about PPC advantages)
Such as? Is it more efficient? easier to optimise for? better at scaling to multiple cores?

It's all very well saying it's "superior", but I find it hard to believe when PPC is getting its ass handed to it in every benchmark. I think you mean WAS superior.

Cleaner, nicer, less hampered by 386 compatibility. AltiVec optimisation is good (5-10-20x speed increase for adding vectors of numbers), although SSE compares nicely AFAIK. They're also cheaper. The Core architecture is actually nice, clean RISC internally - but it has to wrap that in an x86-compatible ISA to be compatible with the Pentiums. It's a bit messy, but I suppose they're decent chips, and Intel seems to have their priorities straight with the performance/watt ting. As forge says this isn't very relevant in the real world cos the available PPC chips aren't really geared for the desktop (not that this is going to stop geeks from complaining, mind!). PPC is doing better than every, though, in embedded markets, game consoles, etc...

The reason PPC chips (supposedly) aren't up to the job is also cos Jobs is a fucking cunt who treated first Motorola, then Freescale, then IBM as though they existed solely for his personal pleasure. In the end they just got tired of making custom chips for Apple when Jobs would badmouth them in public... and stopped doing custom chips. Apple was offered the Cell, Apple was offered the chip that's in the Wii (Cheep! Low power!), and they knew about several other PPC chips and SystemsOnChips that are doing things you aren't really going to see in x86 land (as that architecture's raison d'etre is "RUN WINDOWS" and Windows changes slowly - 64 bit, BIOS etc), and they could've built amazing products out of them, but for whatever reason, they chose not to.

There's a nice quote in here:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/columns ... 050710.ars about halfway down.

Ah well, at least they didn't fuck up the Switch as badly as they could have - too bad Adobe, NI et al are such incompetent twats...

Machinesworking · Post by **Machinesworking** » Tue Jan 23, 2007 8:44 am

noisetonepause wrote:The reason PPC chips (supposedly) aren't up to the job is also cos Jobs is a fucking cunt who treated first Motorola, then Freescale, then IBM as though they existed solely for his personal pleasure. In the end they just got tired of making custom chips for Apple when Jobs would badmouth them in public... and stopped doing custom chips.

i think it's safe to say we really don't know the ins and outs of those relationships. I'm not disagreeing that PPC chips are great, honestly the dual 2.5 G5 here works at least as good as the dual 2.16 intel macbook, but I just think it was always a risk to use basically third party manufacturers for personal computer chips in the first place. It was never any real advantage to IBM or Motorola to spend a ton of money on beating Intel and AMD at home computer chips, so the playing field was always skewed towards PC's
That, I'm sure had to dive Job nuts, and I personally don't see that as any reflection on his personality, just what any of us might go through thatching the competition edge your computers out by a fraction, in speed tests over and over.
That said, a friend lamented the transition on the basis of the simple fact that now there wasn't any real difference in hardware besides the cases.

zappen · Post by **zappen** » Tue Jan 23, 2007 9:00 am

Think Different!
Get a Pc!

djsynchro · Post by **djsynchro** » Tue Jan 23, 2007 10:09 am

Macs tend to have more high frequencies, depending on the type of music you make that can be a good thing, or something you need to be careful about.

PCs tend to have a bigger bottom end, which makes them more suitable for dance music.

eyeknow · Post by **eyeknow** » Tue Jan 23, 2007 10:20 am

Machinesworking wrote:
noisetonepause wrote:The reason PPC chips (supposedly) aren't up to the job is also cos Jobs is a fucking cunt who treated first Motorola, then Freescale, then IBM as though they existed solely for his personal pleasure. In the end they just got tired of making custom chips for Apple when Jobs would badmouth them in public... and stopped doing custom chips.
i think it's safe to say we really don't know the ins and outs of those relationships. I'm not disagreeing that PPC chips are great, honestly the dual 2.5 G5 here works at least as good as the dual 2.16 intel macbook, but I just think it was always a risk to use basically third party manufacturers for personal computer chips in the first place. It was never any real advantage to IBM or Motorola to spend a ton of money on beating Intel and AMD at home computer chips, so the playing field was always skewed towards PC's
That, I'm sure had to dive Job nuts, and I personally don't see that as any reflection on his personality, just what any of us might go through thatching the competition edge your computers out by a fraction, in speed tests over and over.
That said, a friend lamented the transition on the basis of the simple fact that now there wasn't any real difference in hardware besides the cases.

If I understand this correctly there is really and truely one major reason why mac went intel. The biggest "shit" apple took when going G5 was that there was no way there was ever ever EVER going to be a laptop. NOT for any amount of money, not under any circumstances (not going into all the tech, but if they could have.......they would have.....right?)

So along the chip path.......here comes the "m" pentium (centrino is a concept, the chip is actually a pentium "m") which lay's WASTE to all other lappy's at the time......it's so good, people are willing to fork out good bucks to get them in desktops!

OK, so when apple decides "hmmmmm, what the fuck are we going to do to get out lappy's up to speed"......some einstien decides (lightbulb) "hey, let's go intel!

That leads us.......to the main reason apple went intel. Had it been for desktops......I guarantee it would have been amd or sticking with motorola.......that is a fact-JACK!