Switch Side Story Pt 1

I expect a lot of of you are clamouring to tell me how wrong I am in doing this. I imagine that your arguments will be along the lines of:

“They’re too expensive”
“You can’t upgrade them”
“There’s no software”
“They’re not very fast”

I’ll try to address these points to some degree here:

Expense. Yes, Mac’s are expensive. The Powerbook I’m purchasing is only just on the cheap side of £2k. And I can’t deny there are cheaper alternatives when it comes to buying a laptop. But in my opinion these cheaper alternatives both look and weigh as much as bricks, or they have a battery life matching the attention span of a goldfish. The Centrino based X10 that Mrs GOO uses to slay monsters with is the closest thing I’ve seen to a x86 based machine that has the style and battery life of a Powerbook. And that cost £2K when it was bought last year. My opinion is that if you want the looks as well as the functionality, and don’t want to be tied to the national grid all the time you have to be willing to stump up the beer tokens – no matter which camp you’re in.

Upgradability. Well, when you’re talking laptops, this is a moot point. About the only thing that is readily upgradeable on either a Mactop or a Laptop is the memory and the hard drive. Desktop machines are a different matter, and something I can’t comment on. I really can’t see a lack of upgradeability as being a problem for the machine I’m getting, for the reasons already outlined above. It’s not going to be canned or over clocked or pushed to its limits doing what I want it to do.

Software. No Software? I’d refute that. Microsoft produces MS Office for the Mac – and from what I’ve seen of it, they’ve done a better job on it on the enemy’s platform than on their own. There is (to my Mac neophyte eyes) a thriving Mac software industry, both commercial and shareware. There are, of course, oodles of Graphics packages out there - it being a traditional Mac stronghold. The biggest revelation is the number of top flight, ‘heavy-weight’ games out for the Mac: Halo. Unreal Tournament. Warcraft III. Medal of Honour. Dare I say it, Dungeon Siege. (I hope Mrs GOO was out of earshot…) And that’s to name a few. All genres of gaming are represented, and of course, the list is getting longer. UT2004 is about to join the ranks. Did you know that DOOM III is coming out for the Mac? I didn’t until recently.

Speed. There’s been a lot of rhetoric during the past couple of months over the situation of the G5 performance claims. I can’t say if Apple is right or the Nay Sayers are – I simply don’t know. It’s true that Mac processor speeds haven’t matched the stratospheric rise of the PC equivalents, but this seems to be due to the fact that it hasn’t needed to. The IBM PowerPC CPU series that Apple call the G4 or G5 utilise RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) technology, which clock for clock is more efficient at executing code than a CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer) processor. And as everyone knows, looking at the Ghz isn’t a real indicator of speed these days - something that the both AMD and Intel have finally admitted themselves. In my case, speed isn’t an issue anyway, in much the same way as the upgradeability argument can be dismissed.

Of course, I can only stress that these are my opinions, and my opinions as of now. They may change, after I’ve used the Mac in anger for a few months.