The stupidest question ever asked...

[flexy]

ok, just for your information, before i started building my own PCs (years and years ago) i already had a long history w/ Amiga, the best computer ever for it's time. And i am owning and building PCs now for many, many years.

I never owned ANY MAC <-----

It is/was my assumption that MacOS *very likely* is better than any flavor of Windows, as well as that the MAC hardware architecture is better than the PC architecture.

Now, on another forum i heard people raving about how great their macbook pro is.

Just out of curiosity i checked out the apple site.

The first thing which surprised me is that MACS obviously use the same hardware as PCs, Intel Quad CPUs, Nvidia GT, PCI bus.

So..here is the magical question:

WHAT THE HECK is the difference between a MAC and a PC if the core hardware is the same???

So is the only difference the OS and the filesystem?

 

[vailr]

Since Apple switched from Power PC to Intel CPU's in 2006, their Mac hardware has been almost identical with comparable PC's.
The main difference being: Macs use a more advanced EFI bios, which therefore also requires a compatible EFI video card firmware.
In the Hackintosh, the EFI bios is emulated in software. Thus enabling running (a slightly modified version of) OSX 10.5 on non-EFI hardware.
http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/EFI

 

[flexy]

vailr,

ULTRA interesting.

Aside from the legal questions....is this all more an emulation or does a hackintosh run at 100% the speed??

 

[vailr]

100% speed. The EFI emulation is mainly used only during the boot process.

 

[Blain]

A Mac is a "PC" (Personal Computer). :thumbsup::roll:

BTW, Your question is by far NOT "the stupidest question ever asked" on this forum.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Yeah, Thanks for asking 🙂

 

[Fox5]

Originally posted by: flexy
ok, just for your information, before i started building my own PCs (years and years ago) i already had a long history w/ Amiga, the best computer ever for it's time. And i am owning and building PCs now for many, many years.

I never owned ANY MAC <-----

It is/was my assumption that MacOS *very likely* is better than any flavor of Windows, as well as that the MAC hardware architecture is better than the PC architecture.

Now, on another forum i heard people raving about how great their macbook pro is.

Just out of curiosity i checked out the apple site.

The first thing which surprised me is that MACS obviously use the same hardware as PCs, Intel Quad CPUs, Nvidia GT, PCI bus.

So..here is the magical question:

WHAT THE HECK is the difference between a MAC and a PC if the core hardware is the same???

So is the only difference the OS and the filesystem?

Yes.
And as far as the OS and file system go, the OS tends to fall way behind the development of real *nix's (except in graphics, where apple develops from actively, and also pays nvidia and ati for quality drivers) and their file system sucks.

 

[vailr]

One hardware difference is that Intel Macs don't include any PS2 ports.
They only use USB ports for keyboard & mouse.

 

[fatpat268]

Originally posted by: vailr
One hardware difference is that Intel Macs don't include any PS2 ports.
They only use USB ports for keyboard & mouse.

Well a lot of that is that Apple doesn't really support legacy hardware... which is either a good thing or bad thing, depending on your needs.

 

[Eureka]

Well Mac doesn't really support hardware in general... Apple is a hardware company and the Mac OS is tuned to help them sell more systems.

 

[Winterpool]

Flexy, as they've indicated above, with the Intel Macs, yes, the essential technology (cpu, motherboard, graphics, memory, etc) is the same. The software is the key difference. Thus the 'Hackintosh' phenomenon...

That said, consumer products, especially at the more expensive end, aren't solely about the essential bits inside or pure 'function'. The outside counts too, and Apple's design is regarded as second to none, certainly in aesthetics. With the new 'unibody' construction, the build quality is pretty high as well (not ToughBook strong, but nearly unmatched for notebooks this thin and pretty). Go to your local Best Buy or Fry's. Pick up a MacBook Pro, examine the lines, the fit and finish, etc. Now pick up generic Windows notebook. Mmm.

Customer service is a part of what you buy as well. Apple isn't perfect, but I'm not aware of any major survey that rates its support less than number 1 in this industry.

Of course much of this doesn't apply for the classic gamer / geek / enthusiast who's building his own desktop computer. But notebooks are a different matter, where self-repair is more problematic, physical build quality more compelling, and generally even the most utilitarian user spares a thought for aesthetics. Not to mention the rest of us who have to look at your machine. 🙂 (There's a reason why in Hollywood's reality, Apple market share seems to have switched places with Windows.)

Edited: Dvorak is a professional curmudgeon, ie someone who trolls for a living, and I've never quite believed his anti-Apple prejudices (I suspect he overplays this to harvest page views -- he is a pro after all). Nevertheless, he recently admitted that the MacBook Pro 'actually impresses' him, and if he were going to buy a notebook, he'd join his son in getting the MacBook Pro.

 

[TheStu]

For a portable, there is in my opinion, and based on my experience, almost nothing better than a Mac. They are light, powerful, have good battery life, have great keyboards, have great trackpads (if you are in to that sort of thing), usually adopt new technologies first, tend to put more under the hood, non-spec sheet things into their systems (motion sensing hard drives in all portables for the past 5 years at least meaning that if you drop your laptop you won't trash your drive, slot loading optical drives, wireless, and 802.11n, full size firewire ports, LED backlighting, webcams, all that).

They are built very well, have good customer service, have the Apple stores to back them meaning that there is likely an Apple owned service location not too far from you, tend to hold their value pretty well, and the OS itself is pretty well suited for lower resolution screens (at least for me, I definitely find that I can get at more information, more quickly in OS X on my MacBook than in 7, and 7 is the best thing out of Redmond in a long, long time).

However, that is just for portables. Unless you are looking for exactly what Apple sells in the desktop, you are better off building a Hackintosh if you want to play with OS X. The Mac Pro is insanely powerful, and a great workstation, but it also has a $2500 cost of entry. The iMac is a fantastic All-in-One, it is stylish, powerful, the 24" has a gorgeous screen, and works well, however if you want to increase your hard drive space, or switch GPUs, you are SoL. The Mini is a cute little HTPC system, or entry level space saving desktop, but it uses laptop components and is still $600 base.

 

[glugglug]

Originally posted by: flexy
ok, just for your information, before i started building my own PCs (years and years ago) i already had a long history w/ Amiga, the best computer ever for it's time. And i am owning and building PCs now for many, many years.

I never owned ANY MAC <-----

It is/was my assumption that MacOS *very likely* is better than any flavor of Windows, as well as that the MAC hardware architecture is better than the PC architecture.

Now, on another forum i heard people raving about how great their macbook pro is.

Just out of curiosity i checked out the apple site.

The first thing which surprised me is that MACS obviously use the same hardware as PCs, Intel Quad CPUs, Nvidia GT, PCI bus.

So..here is the magical question:

WHAT THE HECK is the difference between a MAC and a PC if the core hardware is the same???

So is the only difference the OS and the filesystem?

In the 80's and early 90's, Mac hardware was way better than PCs.
The original 68000 had 8 32-bit address registers and 8 32-bit data registers, all general purpose, and you could even use any of the address registers you wanted as an extra stack. PCs didn't have 32-bit registers until the 386 (ok, not long after the mac, but the OSes didn't really take advantage until the 90's!), and didn't have 16 registers like the original 128K Mac until 2003 with the Athlon 64! Having a separate data fork and (structured) resource fork in each file, with free resource editors to customize applications however you wanted is really cool on the Mac - however, having all your binaries forked means they are essentially 3 files each (data, resource, and info (metadata)), and gives you double the disk seeks making it seem like the filesystems for it suck.

Also, from 1984 until about 95, the macs all had SCSI drives (they got cheaper and started using PC components with pressure from Win95 I think). The Apple branded color monitors before this point were almost all rebadged Sony Trinitrons. (with custom connector, apple just has to be different...) Also, even the original mac could do multi-voice 8-bit sound samples, basically equivalent to the original Sound Blaster.

The interface was WAY better than Windows 3.1 could ever dream of, especially in System 7.0-7.6. But Microsoft leapfrogged them on that front IMO with Windows 95. Also, Motorola abandoned the 680x0 architecture for the PowerPC venture with IBM. The last 680x0 in a mac was the 68040. The 68060 is targeted for embedded systems only and doesn't include an MMU, so it can't be used for a protected OS.

The original PowerPC was quite a bit faster than the original Pentium (at 66MHz), so macs were still better hardware-wise in the early-mid 90s, but PCs have been doubling in power every year or 2, while the PowerPCs growth curve has been ridiculously slow. I benchmarked a mac emulator on my old Athlon 1GHz, and it was 3x faster than my brother's real Mac G4 running which was high-end back in 2003. This ridiculous gap is why Apple switched to PC hardware a couple years later.

IMO its cool that OSX is UNIX based, but I really hate the OSX interface, and Windows is better than people give it credit for. And somehow Apple manages to get less multitasking efficiency than any other breed of UNIX, including the BSD their OS is based on, at least that's how it seems to me.

 

[bendixG15]

All differencies stem from the fact that
the PC is an OPEN System and the Mac is a CLOSED System.

 

[Fox5]

I benchmarked a mac emulator on my old Athlon 1GHz, and it was 3x faster than my brother's real Mac G4 running which was high-end back in 2003. This ridiculous gap is why Apple switched to PC hardware a couple years later.

Was the athlon emulating a G4? It seems unlikely it would outperform...is the PowerPC architecture that straight-forward? I could see it maybe having 3x the performance with native code, but x86 doesn't even emulate x86 fast enough to run full-speed DOS.

 

[flexy]

well in the meantime, i installed me a hackintosh and i have to say i VERY much like that OS. Still playing around with it.

Yes glugglugg, way back i was actually developing on 68000..i know that CPU in and out.

Not that i want to start a flame-war, really, but at first glance i have the impression that Leopard is like 1000 years ahead of windows...i mean, even the screensavers are super cool....i really like this...fresh wind so to speak 🙂

What actually is the exact reason they abandondened PowerPC? Economical?

 

[Fox5]

Originally posted by: flexy
well in the meantime, i installed me a hackintosh and i have to say i VERY much like that OS. Still playing around with it.

Yes glugglugg, way back i was actually developing on 68000..i know that CPU in and out.

Not that i want to start a flame-war, really, but at first glance i have the impression that Leopard is like 1000 years ahead of windows...i mean, even the screensavers are super cool....i really like this...fresh wind so to speak 🙂

What actually is the exact reason they abandondened PowerPC? Economical?

Expensive, they basically funded development of their own PPC derivatives, and slow. They quickly fell behind x86 commodity hardware.

 

[Eureka]

Originally posted by: flexy
well in the meantime, i installed me a hackintosh and i have to say i VERY much like that OS. Still playing around with it.

Yes glugglugg, way back i was actually developing on 68000..i know that CPU in and out.

Not that i want to start a flame-war, really, but at first glance i have the impression that Leopard is like 1000 years ahead of windows...i mean, even the screensavers are super cool....i really like this...fresh wind so to speak 🙂

What actually is the exact reason they abandondened PowerPC? Economical?

Mac OS is just designed to be user-friendly. But other than just being good packaging it fails to impress me. Just a polished unix derivative..

 

[glugglug]

Originally posted by: Fox5

I benchmarked a mac emulator on my old Athlon 1GHz, and it was 3x faster than my brother's real Mac G4 running which was high-end back in 2003. This ridiculous gap is why Apple switched to PC hardware a couple years later.

Was the athlon emulating a G4? It seems unlikely it would outperform...is the PowerPC architecture that straight-forward? I could see it maybe having 3x the performance with native code, but x86 doesn't even emulate x86 fast enough to run full-speed DOS.

Yes, the Athlon was running an emulator, but it was emulating a 68040 so it ran System 8 instead of OS X - the emulators for PowerPC were very immature then. The performance gap between PowerPCs and x86 had really gotten that huge.

Also, the Macs didn't even upgrade to DDR memory until the G5. The G4 uses PC133 further bottlenecking its slow CPU.

 

[Fox5]

Originally posted by: glugglug

Originally posted by: Fox5

I benchmarked a mac emulator on my old Athlon 1GHz, and it was 3x faster than my brother's real Mac G4 running which was high-end back in 2003. This ridiculous gap is why Apple switched to PC hardware a couple years later.

Was the athlon emulating a G4? It seems unlikely it would outperform...is the PowerPC architecture that straight-forward? I could see it maybe having 3x the performance with native code, but x86 doesn't even emulate x86 fast enough to run full-speed DOS.

Yes, the Athlon was running an emulator, but it was emulating a 68040 so it ran System 8 instead of OS X - the emulators for PowerPC were very immature then. The performance gap between PowerPCs and x86 had really gotten that huge.

Also, the Macs didn't even upgrade to DDR memory until the G5. The G4 uses PC133 further bottlenecking its slow CPU.

Oh, you mean both were emulating another processor, that makes a lot more sense. Well, the Athlon was a beast of a cpu for its time, offering performance in a commodity x86 chip that at the time you'd have to go for more expensive non-x86 from other vendors to get the same kind of performance. The G4 was a good P3 competitor, and I wonder how much PC133 really bottlenecked it. It simply was outdated for how long Apple used it, but at least it was low-power.

 

[rudder]

Originally posted by: Eureka


Mac OS is just designed to be user-friendly. But other than just being good packaging it fails to impress me. Just a polished unix derivative..

But look at battery benchmarks on apple notebooks. When OSx is running they get much more life versus running vista on the same hardware.

 

[Denithor]

Originally posted by: rudder

Originally posted by: Eureka


Mac OS is just designed to be user-friendly. But other than just being good packaging it fails to impress me. Just a polished unix derivative..

But look at battery benchmarks on apple notebooks. When OSx is running they get much more life versus running vista on the same hardware.

1) Batteries may/may not be equivalent.
2) OSX probably doesn't juggle threads around to different cores constantly like Vista does.

 

[mmntech]

Originally posted by: rudder

Originally posted by: Eureka


Mac OS is just designed to be user-friendly. But other than just being good packaging it fails to impress me. Just a polished unix derivative..

But look at battery benchmarks on apple notebooks. When OSx is running they get much more life versus running vista on the same hardware.

OS X is more finely tuned to specific hardware. At least that's the general reasoning. Apple has supposedly custom tuned the hardware drivers for better power efficiency. Vista is a resource hog though, more so that Leopard. I find my Macbook runs noticeably hotter under Vista.

Mac will general benefit media professionals, students (because of battery life), and those looking for a simple "out-of-the-box" experience. The systems perform well and are generally more durable than comparable mass produced Windows boxes. They also hold onto their value better than PCs; so you'll get more money should you choose to sell it in the future. Other than that, it all boils down to personal preference. There are some things I prefer about Mac and some things that I prefer about Windows 7. IMO, Windows 7/Vista Media Center is better than OS X's Front Row for example. Overall, I generally use my Mac more for everyday tasks. The Windows system sits for things needing more processing power such as gaming or video encoding.

 

[sindows]

Originally posted by: mmntech

Originally posted by: rudder

Originally posted by: Eureka


Mac OS is just designed to be user-friendly. But other than just being good packaging it fails to impress me. Just a polished unix derivative..

But look at battery benchmarks on apple notebooks. When OSx is running they get much more life versus running vista on the same hardware.

OS X is more finely tuned to specific hardware. At least that's the general reasoning. Apple has supposedly custom tuned the hardware drivers for better power efficiency. Vista is a resource hog though, more so that Leopard. I find my Macbook runs noticeably hotter under Vista.

Mac will general benefit media professionals, students (because of battery life), and those looking for a simple "out-of-the-box" experience. The systems perform well and are generally more durable than comparable mass produced Windows boxes. They also hold onto their value better than PCs; so you'll get more money should you choose to sell it in the future. Other than that, it all boils down to personal preference. There are some things I prefer about Mac and some things that I prefer about Windows 7. IMO, Windows 7/Vista Media Center is better than OS X's Front Row for example. Overall, I generally use my Mac more for everyday tasks. The Windows system sits for things needing more processing power such as gaming or video encoding.

Macs will only fetch more money because they cost more to begin with. Its a fact most people conveniently ignore when these types of threads come up...

 

[Fox5]

Originally posted by: Denithor

Originally posted by: rudder

Originally posted by: Eureka


Mac OS is just designed to be user-friendly. But other than just being good packaging it fails to impress me. Just a polished unix derivative..

But look at battery benchmarks on apple notebooks. When OSx is running they get much more life versus running vista on the same hardware.

1) Batteries may/may not be equivalent.
2) OSX probably doesn't juggle threads around to different cores constantly like Vista does.

OSX has better battery life than Ubuntu or Vista too.

My guess, maybe OSX underclocks/undervolts (well, it's known that it underclocks) or issues more idle states? It consistently benches worse than Vista in most things, so it wouldn't be unreasonable.