Originally posted by: Siddhartha
Originally posted by: freedomsbeat212
This is bugging me, since I *don't* feel the need to support apple, as many mac zealots do. I had to post a quicktime video of some DV footage I edited, and the exports outs (quicktime and divx) from both Premiere Pro and Avid where pixelated and HUGE (even using the Broadband - Low preset). Frustrated by the quality, I plopped down the bucks for quicktime pro and the exports look prestine and are 1/10th the size. The program worked exactly as it should, while the others I used didn't.
This has been my past experience with Apple in general. I didn't want to support them and made the leap to Creative MP3 players from iPod and the Nomad that I bought had a hard drive failure, while that dusty iPod still works, years later. Why can't other companies just test their damn products more?!?!
I think you should change the title of this thread to: "My experience with two or three Apple products have been very positive."
I personally would hesitate to make a general statement about all Apple products based on such limited experience.
Well, I've owned other mac products - my G4 worked as advertised, never had to deal with a crash or buggy software/drivers/ etc. I hooked up a printer and it worked. I hooked up a new scanner and it worked. Though driver installation isn't a big deal to me and my pre-made Dell works very well with very few crashes (crashes due mostly to poorly written freeware software not anything substantial). So I can't say Mac desktops are "better" - I love my PC and consider it a great value.
Laptops - I use a toshiba satellite laptop and hate the boot up time (even on a core duo chip) and it has issue fairly often. It was a low end one at $899. The $999 Mac Books that I've used are awesome. Fast, responsive, stable, and a bit more feature rich. It works, right out of the box - as things should. The toshiba has been a pain, my gateway laptop had issues as well. I've had to do clean installs on my roommate's Asus 3 times (though it was $600). I love IBM Thinkpads but they're more expensive than mac books.
Software - Avid was not cheap, I got a deal on it but it cost me $300. Premiere was free with some hardware I bought. Still, Quicktime Pro worked flawlessly while those other programs resulted in pixelated and huge file sizes. Yes, these are different beasts (quicktime is strictly a player/encoder while avid's a full fledged NLE) but I've used Sorense Squeeze and Cleaner - both are meant to compete with quicktime pro - they cost more and the results just aren't the same. Winamp vs. itunes - a friend wanted a print out of all of my albums. Couldn't figure out how to do it with Winamp/Windows Media Player... Itunes: hit PRINT and you get a listing with all the cover art and track listings.
MP3 players: iPod - I kinda want an underdog to win so i've gotten archos players (great! but they cost more), creative (buggy software, prone to lock ups), Toshiba (fair, but I have to use their annoying software), and always returned to the iPod. It just works. They force me to use itunes but iTunes is actually helpful in organizing my music... Combined, everything just works.
I'm not patting apple on the back here - I'm just wondering why other companies can't get their acts together. I'm cheap - I'd like to buy a competitors product that could kick apple's but.. but i just don't see it happening. the iPhone is so tempting right now because my samsung phone tends to lock up or just die on me randomly while my windows media iPaq has issues multitasking (listening to music while running an app causes stuttering). I'm thinking the iPhone will just work, so i'm very tempted.
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