no, i'm being serious and i freely admit that i don't know much about this topic. just in my experience, macs seem to be way better built and they seem to last way longer, they don't get viruses, the display seems, i don't know, wider or fuller if that makes sense. things just seem to work better on a mac than on the pc's i've had. and when i've had to do real work like video editing, sound recording, or when my wife does her graphic design, it seems backwards to not do them on a mac.
so in layman's terms, what is the appeal of an average pc over an average mac, aside from price? i'm not being snarky, i'm genuinely curious.
What you're doing is mixing your opinions and perceptions and treating them as facts.
1. "macs seem to be way better built and they seem to last way longer"
They're just machines. Apples are built by people under Apple's umbrella. PCs are built by any company who wants to manufacture the components or assemble the components. You can get superior components or inferior ones, depending upon who you buy from and how much you want to spend. With Apple, the variation is much smaller - they're built to be pretty much the same. PCs aren't built by PC, Inc. but by lots of companies. You can get a rock-solid PC that runs for many, many years without problems if you buy better components. Buy the cheap shit and take your chances.
2. "they don't get viruses"
Yeah, they do, but the difference is Windows is something like 80% of the computing universe, so it is the target for virus scripting and testing. If you're writing a virus to make you money somehow, would you target 10-15% of the available machines, or 75-80% of the millions out there?
3. "the display seems, i don't know, wider or fuller"
This is not a Mac vs. PC issue that I can figure out. There are different sizes of monitors, different video cards, different ways the OS uses the screen, but they all go edge to edge and they are the same sizes or resolutions. I'm in the dark on what you're meaning here.
4. "things just seem to work better on a mac than on the pc's i've had"
Again, this is your feeling and your perception and that's part of why people buy what they buy, because they're comfortable with how it works for them. Also, see #1 - you buy cheap stuff, it might not work as well as something built with better parts.
5. "when i've had to do real work like video editing, sound recording, or when my wife does her graphic design, it seems backwards to not do them on a mac"
There's two things at work here. One, this is what you're used to, so it will seem comfortable to you. I've used PCs since 1982. I'm totally comfortable getting under the hood with them, I can rebuild them, I can build them, I can fiddle with the programs, the operating system, the individual components, none of that bothers me at all. I understand the way they work and it's what I'm used to. I was comfortable with them when it was DOS and I was comfortable when they were trying to force Windows to act like Apple's OS, despite the underlying differences. Now, they are much, much closer in many of the ways that the programs work on both systems.
That being said, I am frequently completely lost when I use a Mac. It seems to me that it has been dumbed down so much that I guess I just don't have any idea what an instinctual action would be for someone on a computer - I know very well how to do things, how to approach tasks on a program, but it never occurs to me to dumb my approach down so much to do something on a Mac. What I take for simplicity must still be far too complex, because I am pretty much stonewalled when I sit down to use one. I hate that, it's infuriating that I can't figure it out after 30 years of serious PC experience.
The other part of that is that Macs used to be much more efficient in allocating and using memory for media tasks, it's how they were designed. Since then, that gap has closed because PCs changed their approach and offloaded most of the computations to chips and cards and removed that from the CPU. The differences now are more of software that runs on the OS, and there have to be some similarities because a lot of the more popular programs are built for both platforms.
At any rate, I don't know how you get from there to "macs are the significantly better computer in every way, and that their company is far more technologically innovative." Macs are built by Apple. No one company builds PCs, so you can spend a little and get a really fine one or spend $250 and get something questionable but cheap as hell. Either way, it's significantly less money than you would spend on an Apple, because it's a closed architecture and built by one company.
Macs have better styling. They are closed though, meaning that you are unable to modify them or go outside of Apple's approved partners for anything complimentary to the machine itself. I find that sort of limitation to be a deal-breaker. I also have a huge problem with the whole 'Genius' appellation. Ugh.
So, for me, the differences are 1) price, which can be significantly less for a PC; 2) closed system, which I abhor - do NOT limit my ability to do something with the machine I paid for; 3) what I'm comfortable with - I am completely at a loss with Apple's OS. If you like the styling and you're comfortable working with a Mac and don't mind paying more for a comparable PC, then hey - enjoy it. They're pretty much two sides of a coin though, the differences aren't staggering by any means.
