PCs are Better than Macs for Home Users1
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
The RAGE Turbo Pro is a 64-bit video accelerator, whereas RAGE 128 is a more advanced 128-bit graphics accelerator. Also, the memory expansion is limited in terms of memory types. Apple made a poor decision in selecting the graphics card for their computers and installed an even worse video card on the tested PC. Almost all IBM-compatible notebooks come standard with the ports mentioned above. The iMac offers slightly better expansion options that the iBook. 1 inches, the iBook is extremely large and heavy. Generally, PCs are faster than Macs at most commonly used tasks. Comparing the iMacs with IBM-compatible desktops creates the same problem - finding the PC that is comparable to the iMac. Home users do not care about Photoshop performance because they will never use a photo-editing program designed for professionals; however, performance on the Internet and in 3D games is important. 9 fps on a 400 MHz Mac is a noticeable improvement over 22. According to i_Bench tests, ThinkPad outperforms the iBook on almost every test (Hill 53). There are also other advantages that PCs offer, for example expansion options. 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.
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,
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Acceptance Essays
