Resolved: PCs are better than Macs

I wish good luck to my opponent.. I don't really think we'll put the issue to rest. Look how fast the world of technology changes. Irrelevant, though. I'll start with rebuttals. Rebuttals: C1. Affordability I will concede that macs are more expensive than the cheapest of PCs before anything else is taken into consideration. Here is an account all can read of a person who has used both mac and PC. He complains about the viruses that PCs get.[1] I have also used to use both and find the same problem. I used to use my grandparents' PC before they got multiple macs. I'd go over for a weekend every so often and by the time I was seven or eight I wouldn't even bother asking to use the computer for a simple LEGO game because I knew it'd crash. At the same time, I was learning how to play StarCraft on a 2-3 year old mac desktop. I've never seen a mac crash and I've used some really old macs. Back to the article, it would cost this guy $345 every year to fix his PC if he had to pay for it. That's $1,035 in three years, the average time between replacing macs in my experience. Add that to the original cost of the PC and it loses to the mac. Then take into consideration you can run macs that are 10 years old (I've done it with no problems), and you theoretically have even more money saved. I know it's unrealistic to say someone can use a computer for 10 years. While it can be done (seen it happen. It's now about 16 and I believe they're still using it), technology is just moving too fast to expect someone who uses their computer a lot to stay with one for 10 years. So we'll stick with three. While the price for the computer itself is less with a PC, it's not less once you factor in viruses. C2. a) Just because you have a large variety doesn't mean any of them are quality. I've only seen one mac ever have issues and I've been using it since it's repair. That problem was being kicked off my father's lap. Apple doesn't need 80,000 different models. Plus, they're one company. There's a reason everyone knows their name whereas dell, toshiba, and hp are basically the only known PC brands. All three of which are terrible. Physical appearance has nothing to do with the quality of the computer, so the fact that a computer’s pink has nothing to do with whether or not it will do what you want. Personally, I'd think you'd want the mac for a higher quality computer. If the internet crashes every time you try and open it, then it doesn't much mater that you saved money on the computer. What 8 year old writes book reports, honestly? They're in 1st or 2nd grade. Even if they are writing a book report, they can use paper and pencil at that age. They need to learn some sort of penmanship. b) You can toy with a mac and change it. Plus, building your own PC doesn't mean it's customized. That's like saying you built a swing set from a box means it's customized. I'd also like to point out that macs were originally built by the buyer. It's just that anymore it's pretty hard to do all the high precision work needed to make sure a mac is up and running to the standards of Apple. C3. Hardware The site you built this argument off of is highly untrustworthy. Many things that people are saying is good with the PC and bad with mac or vice versa is just untrue in my experience. Mac finishing is certainty not gritty. It has no problems opening the servers mentioned, and the gestures are not hard to learn on a mac. It took me five minutes when I had never used them before. This is my personal experience, though, so whatever. It would have been a more accurate test with more subjects. Plus, they should have taken kids who haven't yet used computers and therefore aren't biased one way or another. I saw some definite bias in there. “no removable batteries” This was said in reference to macs. I'm removing the battery of the mac laptop I'm using right now. And now I'm typing with it out. I’m sorry, but without a reliable source backing this argument up, I'm not addressing it any further. C4. Software First of all, a mac can run windows and the OS out from Apple at the time. Second of all, you can't decide what computer to buy based off of one game. Finally, I am not aware of this file sharing issue. I share files for school with PC users all the time. C5. Safety It is known fact there are more viruses for PCs out there. Perhaps that is why I never worry about opening anything. There are going to be 1 million viruses for PCs at the end of 2008. [2] What do you think that speaks to now? The issue of operator being more important than operating system is false. As previously stated, I don't worry about clicking on links. I haven't for years now. I also rarely update things. The computer is less likely to get a virus even if for the sole reason that there are less viruses out there for macs. On that last point, once again, I've never seen a cautious mac user and never seen a mac get a virus. I'm probably one of the least cautious people out there when it comes to computers, and look, no viruses. Arguments: Macs are favorable to developers People in software development prefer macs. There is one big reason for this. The software development equipment available on a PC was too hard to work. The person (this is from the first comment) switched to LINUX because it was easier and better. When everything was incompatible with LINUX, the programmer switched to a mac because they “wanted something that just worked”. Every developer this person knows uses macs because they don't have all the annoying little bugs of PCs. “My off-the-cuff reaction is that most people will deploy applications to unix-type servers, and Mac OS X is closer to any flavor of unix than Windows is. Therefore a lot of your configurations are going to be the same or similar, and subsequently you don't need to go through the hassle of making things work on two entirely disparate systems” Just another reason why they're better from another programmer. Since most people don't use MSFT stack, but rather OSS/Linux, Macs are a much better dev environment for that. “In addition, you have the Stanford effect - with a lot of startups coming out of Stanford, where Macs "rule" and all high-level CS classes are on Sun/Linux (or at least used to be the case), you have a lot of affinity to Macs as a development platform. And add your usual Unix is better for development than Windows list of reasons: case-sensitive paths, better handling of spaces in filenames, better system logging/debugging, Unix-based tools like grep/awk/sed for text munging, etc...”[3] Macs are favorable to professionals “It's mostly because it just runs without the viruses, spam, crashes and constant need for support, reboots, upgrades, defrags and maintenance without which Windows simply stops working after a few weeks. I only have to reboot my desktop Mac when I return from a trip during which I turned it off! It runs smoothly for months at a time.”[4] Macs just work. They don't have all the hassle that PCs have. They don't need constant support, have less risk of a virus, and many other things. “Your office and big business use Windows because many IT departments who choose the computers protect their jobs by selecting Windows precisely because Windows requires so much upkeep. This keeps them employed.””When I'd ask our tech support people why they wasted our time with Windows systems, they'd freely admit that most of them would no longer have jobs if they upgraded to Mac.” So windows isn't used because it's better. It's used because it's worse. Macs would allow for many people to get laid off, so those people at risk won't switch.[4] [1] http://open.salon.com... [2] http://www.pcworld.com... [3] http://www.quora.com... [4] http://www.kenrockwell.com...