Let's buy a new computer (again) CONTAINS MAC FANBOYISM

[doppelkorn]

My dad needs a new desktop and monitor. Last night I went through it all with him on the phone and he eckoned there were deals for towers at about £100. I had a quick look and for a tower with 4GB memory and a 500GB HDD you're looking at £250-ish. He asked me what sort of spec he should be looking at and I said office desktops basically reached a point of being powerful enough years ago, they're just getting smaller!

 

Any recommendations in that arena? It's been years since I bought a computer.

 

Which brings me on to point 2.

 

____________________________________________________________________________________

 

I'm after a new computer.

 

From runner is the Surface Pro 4 when it lands but they're effing expensive and I don't like the Microsoft account bollocks. I'd mainly be using it for sit-down browsing in front of the TV, MS Office if I had to do work from home and possibly some messing about with music/coding/puredata, although I might retain my old Dell Studio as a music-only machine once I've cleaned it up.

 

I'd also possibly like a docking station so I can run it over dual screens and with a trad keyboard/mouse if needed.

 

My other option is...da, da, daaaaaaaaaaaaa! A MACBOOK.

 

I never thought I'd see the day when I say this.

 

Truth is, I'm now a married man soon to be 30 and I bring home a decent-ish wage. The wife just got an iPad at the weekend and I feel I'm lagging behind. The lead dev at work has a Macbook. They're nice machines, sure. The sad fact is I know I'll need to use Office on them and I've heard the Office experience is a bit bonk. I suppose if I did get one I'd use it for everything (browsing, work, music etc.), so I could fully ditch the Dell, but what about docking stations ans secondary monitors. Questions, questions.

[Steve]

What's your dad going to be using the computer for?

[doppelkorn]

Office stuff and browsing so 4GB ram and a i3 ang 500GB HDD will be fine...he works/runs his business from home.

 

I tried to sell him on the benefits of all these other form factors but he just wanted to get a new tower. He does travel for work but he said that when he's away he likes to be on the shop floor or meeting people and not disturbed.

[Steve]

I'd probably just go with a Dell machine. They have decent prices and he should be able to get a solid enough machine with a monitor for £350 or so, unless he wants to go big on the monitor then it'll be a bit more. They do some mini and micro towers now too, so you might be able to tempt him into going with something more compact.

[doppelkorn]

Yeah Dell was my first port of call but I have a shaky relationship with that company. I wonder if he can blag a processor upgrade by phoning them up...

 

I'm finding it hard to see past the Surface Pro 3/4...

[Chris]

Here's my Mac take:

 

First off, Office runs fine on Mac although it's got its quirks (enormous Excel spreadsheets are tremendously inefficient and can make you feel like you're using a dodgy Windows PC, plus the superb scrolling isn't nearly as superb). The brand new Office 365 with Office Mac 2016 has just come out though and I haven't tried it yet. I imagine it's pretty spot on although I could be quite wrong on that. HOWEVER, I tend to use Pages and Keynote if I'm doing things for myself because they're dramatically better at page layout and typography than Word and Powerpoint, and Google Docs if I'm doing something for someone else to look at. Admittedly I still use Excel because Numbers is more 'my first spreadsheet' and Google Sheets isn't as powerful either, but I rarely use Excel anyway.

 

MacBook Pros are unbelievable in terms of build, display quality, connectivity and power. No PC based laptop comes close to them in terms of build and keyboard/trackpad quality, and similarly powered ones are more similarly priced than you'd initially assume.

 

The price premium - because there definitely is one - does leave a sour taste (especially as they tie performance to storage size, so a 512GB 13" model is £400, ie 40% more than a 128GB model for a very minor speed increase), but if you're prepared to swallow it you won't be disappointed by the overall experience. The 15" top-of-the-range model is incredible, but at £2k it had better be. The £1600 15" lacks the dedicated graphics, but is still a better buy than the £1500 13" as the quad i7 is significantly faster than the dual i5 and double the RAM makes a difference when you're using the machine for the kind of things it's designed to be used for. The only thing you'll want for is the 512GB drive, as I've found that 512GB is my lower limit on a primary drive BUT that's because I have (most of) NI Komplete installed and I've done the odd video directly on the machine, so your mileage may vary a little there. USB3 and Thunderbolt will give you very fast storage that you'll be able to use for most things (certainly in terms of video editing performance it's better to go external for your scratch disk, and to an extent hard drive audio is better than SSD too).

 

In terms of secondary monitors, docking, etc, there are some very elegant solutions for MacBooks... although I think the same can be said for PC.

 

If you can get away with 128GB on the 13" model then you'll likely find it'll suit you just fine. You'd have to do a degree of micro-management on your storage though, because you'll want to keep a good 25GB free and the OS takes up 10GB, and the 128GB probably formats to about 119GB - so you've got probably 70GB to play with for apps, documents, and media files.

 

 

Your dad would be daft to go with an iMac/Mac Mini though, as it's likely much more expensive than he'll see the benefit in for an iMac and the Mac Mini is dramatically underpowered compared to a Windows box. That is unless, of course, he wants to go for a second hand 21" iMac - if he's prepared to switch to OSX that is. £400 would get him an entirely serviceable model that'll be a little less powerful than he'd get a PC/monitor combo for at the same but it looks good and has a less messy user experience than Windows (although I suppose that's down to preference).

[doppelkorn]

This is an interesting comparison: http://www.trustedreviews.com/opinions/microsoft-surface-pro-3-vs-macbook-air

 

Gives me a lot of food for thought. I'm really reluctant to be drawn into the dreaded Mac ecosystem though. How pervasive is it? Can I avoid using iTunes, for example?

[Chris]

I only use Spotify nowadays. You don't need to use iTunes if you don't want to, there are other media managers, but iTunes on Mac is a completely different experience to iTunes on Windows. On Mac it actually works properly, smoothly, and integrates well with the system and your devices.

 

I wouldn't get an Air if I were you - the screen is so last year, darling. It doesn't seem like it at first, but after a week with a retina screen you'll wonder how you ever survived with a standard res one.

 

As far as pervasiveness... if you avoid iCloud you're free to leave any time. My laydee has an iPhone 6 and a recent model MacBook Pro, but I still got her using Google because it's flat out better. I use Android now, and to be honest my phone and laptop never meet, I just have Google Docs and Drive etc set up. The main factor against moving away will be how much better mouse input is on Mac than Windows - there just isn't even a comparison to using a Mac trackpad and Mac scrolling. I'd probably have switched back a while ago if it weren't for it and the other ergonomic niceties, in fact.

[doppelkorn]

I'd quite like to be able to trial a Macbook for a few days to see if I get on with its workflows. For example I'm a big keyboard shortcut user and I suspect that'll be harder on a Mac.

 

E.g. looking on this MacbookPro keyboard I can't see Home or End keys. I use them a LOT.

[Guest rasteri]

If you're so desperate to avoid the Mac ecosystem, why not just buy a Mac and install Windows 7 on it? Then you can have the worst of both worlds.

[doppelkorn]

windows 7 is ace

[Chris]

I'd quite like to be able to trial a Macbook for a few days to see if I get on with its workflows. For example I'm a big keyboard shortcut user and I suspect that'll be harder on a Mac.

 

E.g. looking on this MacbookPro keyboard I can't see Home or End keys. I use them a LOT.

 

Most shortcuts are exactly the same on OS X as Windows except you use Cmd instead of Ctrl. IIRC Fn+Left/Right is home/end. OS X also has system level macro control for commands, so if you can get somewhere via menu you can program a button to do it, even between programs (although doing things between programs is done differently, with the built in script editor - it is horrendously powerful though if you do the same longwinded thing over and over).

 

You could set your function keys up with a load of unique shortcuts and hide the default stuff like brightness/volume behind the function layer. (I don't know whether you can do this in Windows, maybe it's not a unique feature).

 

I used to use the F13/F14 keys to move messages out of my inbox and into a to do/no action folder I'd set up in Mail when I was getting 200 emails a day and it really helped, for instance. If you wanted to you could do something like press a button to pull all the images out of a folder nest, resize them exactly X pixels tall, name them by date created, zip them up and put them into Dropbox.

[Chris]

I'd quite like to be able to trial a Macbook for a few days to see if I get on with its workflows. For example I'm a big keyboard shortcut user and I suspect that'll be harder on a Mac.

 

E.g. looking on this MacbookPro keyboard I can't see Home or End keys. I use them a LOT.

 

Most shortcuts are exactly the same on OS X as Windows except you use Cmd instead of Ctrl. IIRC Fn+Left/Right is home/end. OS X also has system level macro control for commands, so if you can get somewhere via menu you can program a button to do it, even between programs (although doing things between programs is done differently, with the built in script editor - it is horrendously powerful though if you do the same longwinded thing over and over).

 

You could set your function keys up with a load of unique shortcuts and hide the default stuff like brightness/volume behind the function layer. (I don't know whether you can do this in Windows, maybe it's not a unique feature).

 

I used to use the F13/F14 keys to move messages out of my inbox and into a to do/no action folder I'd set up in Mail when I was getting 200 emails a day and it really helped, for instance. If you wanted to you could do something like press a button to pull all the images out of a folder nest, resize them exactly X pixels tall, name them by date created, zip them up and put them into Dropbox.

Btw just so we're all clear, I'm not trying to get you to buy a Mac for the sake of it. How good value they are comes around in waves and right now isn't the best price/performance ratio for them BUT the overall quality if you have decided that money isn't the most important thing to you is better than any Windows laptop. Definitely try one though, because if you don't agree then there's no benefit to having one. The best way to do it is to go to an Apple store and sit down for an hour or so, really have a play. Do as much trackpaddy stuff as you can, scroll in all directions, use multitouch gestures, etc. Oh, and check software you know you'll want too. There's some brilliant programming tools available for Mac, obviously XCode is free, and there's lots of very pretty (and smart) text editors too. The other thing that's undeniably better on Mac is audio performance... or at least undeniably less fussy and more resiliant.

If you find you really don't care you'll save a chunk of money to put toward a really slick docking station or get a PS4 for the living room or something.

[Deft]

I've often mulled over getting a Mac, mostly because although they are generally for cunts it can be tough to find a well built PC laptop or all-in-one. In the end I have stayed with Windows because I am too old to try learning another O/S.

[Acts_One]

I personally delved into the world of Apple in 2009. I was PC guy as well... actually more of a PC gamer (counter-strike) and avid pron watcher.... as you can see my PC ran like shit after a while. Anyway, after owning the iphone 3G I caved and bought a 13"MBP. That was in 2009. Never looked back. The MBP was actually one of the biggest reasons I got into DJing. I liked DJing before but never really got that into it because I never really collected Vinyl or Music. I had some CD's and such but I didn't have the nack for collecting anything. But what my buddy showed me with Serato back then I was hooked. No need to find physical copies of music. Mind you I'm kinda pissed I didn't start collecting Vinyl but whatever.

 

I still use my 13" MBP. I swapped the HD for an SSD a couple years ago and it really rejuvenated it. It's slightly more sluggish with the newer OS but it's my workhorse. Music, browsing, movies, photos(not photoshop), Word etc.... handles everything with ease. There was a learning curve but I consider it minimal. It's just about 6 years since I got the thing and I haven't had any major issues with it. Hasn't crashed at a gig, yet... I would like one of the newer MBPs but the price is just insane. 2K for 15"! I don't even do heavy shit with my current 13". The fixed storage and RAM are big turnoffs. But since USB3.0 and Thunderbolt its kind of quelled that argument for me. Until my current one dies, I continue to bank for that new new. Personally, it was more of an investment. But trust me you'll get sucked into the ecosystem getting a MBP. If you're already proficient with PC's you'll be surprised how easy it is to buy other Apple products and literally turn the switch on and shit just work.

[djdiggla]

If you like PCs I'd get a dope ass Dell Precision laptop or an XPS. Or buy a Mac.

[doppelkorn]

Weird, I swear I replied to that last post Dirk, and your post Acts...

 

@d1rk: I would if I needed the pure grunt, but I don't really.

 

@Acts: I could say pretty much the exact same thing (dates and all) about my Dell Studio. I'm never convinced by stories like yours because it's often people who have poorly- maintained, sub-£500 PCs switching to c. £1k Macs and going "OMG it's so much faster!!". Not saying your story is necessarily the same...

 

Aaaaaaaaaaanyway - the other night (when I thought I replied to the above posts) I did some online research as to exactly why people say Macs make them more productive. I always hear about how the "workflow is so much easier" and "it's intuitive" but I wanted to know what that actually meant. I found this long post form a web dev saying what specific features make him more productive in Windows (and discovered a few useful shortcut keys myself). This counter-argument for Mac falls a bit short for me because things like Expose just seem like a complicated version of the windows taskbar. I dunno.

 

From having watched some music SW tutorial vids where the demo was on a Mac it looks like the internal midi/audio connectivity on a Mac is natively much smarter, like Chris says. That's a plus.

 

I''ll have to go and have a play at the Apple store and have a proper mess with Win10. The lead dev at work has a Macbook so I'll also ask him what he sees in it...