PCs are Better than Macs for Home Users
For years, Macs and PCs have been competing for home users. Apple has recently released the new iMac, and the notebook version of the iMac - the iBook. Even though several years ago, Macs were better than PCs, now, PCs are better than Macs for home users in terms of performance and expansion options. To some consumers, performance is often the most important factor in buying a computer. Performance doesn't necessarily mean how well the computer performs potentially, but only on specific tasks. Both iBook and iMac are designed for home users, most of whom neither care about number of floating-point operations per second, nor know what it means. Very few home users will pay $500 for Photoshop 5.0 to edit photos on their PC. The more likely uses for home computers are: word processing, browsing the Internet, and 3-D gaming. Since the most popular word processor is developed by Microsoft and allegedly optimized for Windows, it would be unfair to compare the Mac version of MS Word with the Windows version. However, comparing the performance in 3-D games and the Internet is fair.Even though PC Magazine specializes in PCs, it reviewed the iBook as soon as it came out. The article focused on performance of the iBook and compared it
Unless users add an USB hub they cannot upgrade further, because a keyboard uses one USB port, and a floppy disk drive will take up the other port. Computers from eMachines look exactly like the blue iMacs. The main reason for iBook's and iMac's popularity is their appearance. Since there are no new IBM-compatible notebooks that match iBook's specifications, PC Magazine decided to use the notebook they believed to be closest to iBook - the IBM ThinkPad iSeries 1480. As mentioned earlier, the Internet performance is one of the uses for home computers and should be thoroughly tested. Almost all IBM-compatible notebooks come standard with the ports mentioned above. Apple does not give users a lot of choice for expansion - users can only add external devices because there are no PCI slots. This means that in order to add a printer, the user will have to purchase a sixty-dollar USB hub that will match the tangerine case. Generally, PCs are faster than Macs at most commonly used tasks. Among the things that need to be added are: speakers, because the sound is "horrible" (Hill 53); a DVD drive, because the 24X CD-ROM is outdated, and a floppy disk drive, which doesn't come with the system. PCI is an internal bus that runs approximately ten times faster than USB, and supports many devices such as SCSI controllers, that USB does not. QuickTime should not be used to test the computer's performance for several reasons: it is rarely used, and is most likely optimized for Macs. The PC Card slots can accept many devices including multimedia cards and SCSI controllers (Perry 351; Norton 418), none of which will be available for the iBook. The ThinkPad impressively outperformed the iBook with the a score of 43,766 versus just 23,872 (Hill 53). Since neither processor is top-of-the-line, and both notebooks are in the same price range, it is safe to conclude that the two notebooks are comparable.
Common topics in this essay:
PC Magazine,
PC Card,
Turbo Pro,
Sony Slimtop,
PCs Macs,
LCDs IBM-compatible,
MHz RDRAM,
ThinkPad's Celeron,
TV-tuners CD-recorders,
PC PCs,
video accelerator,
pc magazine,
home users,
hill 53,
disk drive,
floppy disk,
floppy disk drive,
rage 128,
expansion options,
rage 128 vr,
home computers,
3d games,
rage turbo pro,
pc magazine 1,
1 dec 1999,
|
Acceptance Essays
