Before You BuyEstablish Your Needs

Are you a Mac or a PC?

Are you a Mac or a PC? The answer depends less on your hardware preferences and more on your computing philosophy.

Apple's ads depict the long-running "platform wars" as clever banter between two clearly different people - a hipster Mac guy and a buttoned down PC user. As it turns out, that's not a bad analogy - each system attracts a different type of personality.

The differences between the two machines, though, are less clear. From a hardware standpoint, they're about the same. They use many of the same components from the same manufacturers, including microprocessors, memory, graphics cards, and hard drives. Price isn't the determining factor, either. If you outfit the systems similarly, they cost about the same.

Today, the true differences between the systems lie in the way the hardware is packaged and the software is implemented. You need to decide not so much between platforms as between computing approaches. If you like a clearly delineated product line and close integration between hardware and software, you're probably a Mac. But if you want the freedom to choose from a wide range of system components, peripherals, and applications, you're most likely a PC.

So how do you know which you are? Consider the factors below.

The Hardware

The Processor: When you get right down to it, a PC is nothing more than a box of components - circuit boards, memory cards, hard drives, and so on - that together help you accomplish tasks. Your PC needs a centralized controller to coordinate these components, and that's the role of the processor - the core chip that executes commands and handles computations. Processors go by other names, too, including microprocessor, CPU (central processing unit), and sometimes just "the chip."

Both Macs and Windows PCs run Intel processors, with two critical differences:

• Macs offer only mainstream Core 2 and high-end Xeon processors, and only those running at speeds of 2.4GHz to 3.2GHz (the higher the speed, the faster the PC).
• Windows-based PCs offer a much wider variety of processor, including:
  • The same Intel chips that Apple uses, but at speeds ranging from 1.06GHz to 3.2GHz.
  • Intel CPUs that Apple doesn't offer, such as Pentium and Celeron chips, which cost less, netting you a lower-cost PC.
  • CPUs from Intel competitor AMD, which are compatible with the Intel chips but cost less, also resulting in a lower-cost PC.

Apple Product Breakdown:

Apple's overarching approach to computing is simplicity. The company applies this philosophy to all aspects of your computing experience by controlling the development of the system and the software that runs it. For example, no other company can produce a Mac or its operating system, and Apple dictates how other developers write programs for the Mac. In this way, Apple ensures that the disparate parts of its PCs work together as seamlessly as possible. This Zen of simplicity is reflected in the company's product line. Apple offers just three tiers of product: high-end, mainstream, and basic systems in either desktop or laptop versions (see the table "Apple Product Breakdown").

Apple's high-end systems revel in superlatives. They include the fastest processors, the most memory, the best graphics cards, and the most data storage. The ultra-small systems trade computing power for physical size. And the mainstream machines balance power and price.

Apple's least-expensive Mac costs $1200 with a monitor.

The very narrowness of Apple's product line may make it easier to decide between buying a Mac and a Windows PC. If Macs offer too little or too much computing power for your needs, consider a Windows system.

Dozens of Windows PC makers - including big names like Dell, HP, Lenovo, Sony, and Gateway - make almost any combination of processor and component you can think of. Some systems match Apple's models, striking a similar balance in size and power at the same price. But there are countless other variations - systems that use lower-cost Intel chips like the Pentium and the Celeron, for example, or even cheaper processors from AMD - mixed and matched with components of just about every capacity.

A low-end Dell system, suitable for everyday tasks, costs $500.

As a result, your range of choices in the Windows world is much wider than in the Apple world. If you do undemanding tasks like e-mail, browsing the Web, and word processing, for example, all you need is a basic system. The cheapest Macintosh PC with a monitor is a pretty potent machine: an iMac with a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 1GB of memory, and a 20-inch display (see photo) for $1,200. On the Windows PC side, however, you can buy a system more closely matched to your needs. A Dell desktop with a 2GHz Intel Celeron processor, 1GB of memory, and a 19-inch display (see photo) runs you only $500.

Windows PCs also offer more raw power than the Mac lineup. Companies like Alienware (now owned by Dell) and VoodooPC (owned by HP) specialize in state-of-the-art gaming and entertainment machines. Also, all the big-name manufacturers offer PC "workstations" with core hardware that often exceeds even the beefiest Mac Pro.

Integrated Equipment: While Apple's range of product is narrower than that for Windows PCs, its systems can be more robustly outfitted than their Windows brethren. iMacs, for example, offer built-in monitors, video cameras, microphones, wireless networking, and more. Apple laptops consistently include a built-in camera and Bluetooth capability. And those peripherals come integrated into the hardware and operating system, giving you out-of-the-box access to a range of computing tasks. You'd pay extra for these components in some Windows PCs, and then you'd have to install them yourself.

Plug and Play: Macs have always had comprehensive Plug and Play capability. Plug in just about any peripheral or connect to a network, and the Mac automatically "sees" the new equipment or environment - no input from you required.

Windows PCs do an admirable job in this department, too, which wasn't always the case. Vista, the latest incarnation of Windows, includes some 12,000 drivers for various peripherals - printers, optical drives, scanners, and so on - and it succeeds in hands-free installation far more often than it fails.

Apple's Mac Pro includes slide-in drives. Its laptops use a magnetically attached power cord (inset).

Design: The whole point of buying a computer is to get more done with less effort, but looks count, too, and the Mac's design is part of its appeal. From the sleek, all-white iMac to the wafer-thin MacBook Air, Apple's machines dazzle the senses in ways PCs rarely do. As one expert put it, "Apple has fetishized product design."

So, does buying a Mac for its design make you shallow? Maybe not, since Apple applies the same streamlined sensibility to the inside of its machines as it does to the outside. Apple's Mac Pro desktop, for example, has slide-in memory cards and slide-in hard drives so you can upgrade your system in a heartbeat. In two of its laptops, the display and backlit keyboard change intensity in response to room lighting, thanks to a built-in ambient light sensor. Its laptop power cords attach magnetically, so if you trip over them, the cord pops off while the machine stays put. On a laptop touchpad, you scroll through documents line by line when you use one finger and page by page when you use two.

Apple doesn't have a stranglehold on looks, of course, and you'll find Windows PCs with innovative designs as well. There's the Sony Vaio Desktop, for example, with its floating-glass display (see photo). Game systems from Alienware and VoodooPC boast aggressively styled, colorful cases, while Lenovo has mastered the art of the laptop keyboard, with soft-touch keys that duplicate the feeling of a desktop keyboard and an eraser-like cursor control.

Sony frames its Vaio Monitor in glass, making it appear to float.

But when you look beneath external cosmetics, Apple brings all its pieces - both the outside and the innards - together like no one else. A Mac feels less like a sum of separate parts and more like an integrated whole.

The Software

The Operating System: A lot of what you'll experience when you buy a new PC comes by way of its operating system (OS) - the software that coordinates how your hardware and programs interact. Both Windows PCs and Macs come with operating systems - Vista for Windows-based PCs and OS X ("oh ess ten") for the Mac.

You may have heard that the Mac's operating system is flawless and Microsoft's is hopeless. Neither is true - both OSes have their advantages and weaknesses.

Windows is an old operating system - the first version was released more than 20 years ago (in 1985), and the kernel for Windows Vista first appeared in Windows 95 (back in 1995). To be sure, Microsoft has enhanced and upgraded the OS, but parts of its design and operation reflect this older kernel.

By contrast, Apple's current operating system is relatively young. First released in 2001, it was a radical departure for Apple, built on a new "core," one that allowed Apple a fresh start in design and operation.

The Interface: OS X has long been admired for its looks, and there's no denying that its graphics and text are impressively crisp, thanks in large part to the way the OS processes images, relying less on hardware and more on programming. As a result, OS X's icons and labels look sharp and elegant even if you have a middlin' graphics card. Add OS X's image-shading and translucent screen elements, like buttons and scroll bars, and you have an interface that dazzles, especially if you're used to working in Windows (see photo).

Microsoft's answer to OS X is Aero, a new-age interface that sits on top of Vista's plain - vanilla front end. It, too, entrances, with a floating, translucent 3D look and sharp images (see photo). But that beauty comes at a price. Windows based PCs require some muscle to power Aero's advanced graphics: a minimum of a 1GHz processor, 1GB of memory, and a decent graphics card (specifically, a Direct3D 9 card with at least 128MB of RAM). Anything shy of that, and you're back to using Vista's basic mode, which lacks Aero's veneer. What's more, Vista - even in basic mode - can be painfully slow on low-end or even midrange hardware. That's a serious drawback if you want to buy a low-cost Windows PC.

Vista's Aero interface adds crisp graphics with 3D detail (shown with Sidebar active).

System Utilities: For years, Apple and Microsoft have tag-teamed each other when it came to system utilities - the operating system's basic housekeeping programs. Where Windows offers Search for finding phrases in a file name or within a file itself, Apple has Searchlight; where Windows revives a crashed PC with System Restore, Apple has Time Machine; and where Vista displays everyday applications like a clock and calculator in the Sidebar, OS X puts them in the Dashboard.

There are differences, of course: Vista offers Shadow Copies, which retain previous versions of files so you can roll back a document to an earlier time. Apple, for its part, offers a built-in, fast-loading Preview application for a quick peek at files, like photographs, that would otherwise require a full-fledged application boot-up. But by and large, both OSes offer a comparable set of basic system applications.

System Operation: Vista improves on earlier versions of Windows in many ways. It offers beefed-up security for one - long a source of frustration for users - and it includes built-in functions, like background defragmenting (where the hard drive recombines split files to improve performance) - a long-admired feature of OS X. But it doesn't always work as intuitively as Apple's OS. On a Mac, for example, you both launch applications and switch among them using the Dock (see photo). In Vista, those same tasks require two tools: you start an application using Quick Launch, then switch among them from the Windows Taskbar (see photo). Point: Mac.

Apple's Dock lets you both launch and switch amog applications. Active applications display a glowing light.

But OS X, too, has its lapses. Take the Dock/Taskbar example above. If you download a file from a Web site, both OS X and Vista open a new window showing your download progress. Vista, in addition, adds that window to its Taskbar, which turns out to be a boon. Say you go off and do other tasks, then want to check your download progress. In Vista, you do so by clicking on the download window icon in the Taskbar, which brings up the download window. But you don't really even have to do that, since Vista displays the download progress ("70%", for example) within the icon itself. OS X, on the other hand, gives you no hint of the window's location, nor of the download progress. If you switch back to the original Web page hoping to see the download window sitting on top of it, you'll be disappointed - OS X has confined the window to the ether, and it's enormously frustrating. (You can get to it, by the way, by hitting the F3 key, which displays mini-windows of all open applications onscreen at once.)

But Apple shines in hiding much of OS X's underlying complexity. That's what people mean when they call the Mac OS "intuitive." Take uninstalling a program: In Vista, it's a many stepped process. You select Start -> Control Panel -> Programs -> Programs and Features, then wait for the resulting window to populate with a list of installed programs. Once that's done, you select the program you no longer want and go through a dialog box that asks you to confirm the uninstall and, sometimes, to confirm that you want to delete all its associated files, too.

In Windows, you launch applications with the Quick Launch toolbar, then switch among them with the Taskbar.

To do the same thing in OS X, you drag the application's icon to the Trash and that's it. OS X deletes both the program and its associated files without further fuss.

So which OS is better? You'll likely find things you love and hate about each one. For overall smoothness of operation without a lot of extra hardware, OS X is a great option. But if you're used to Windows' look and feel, a switch to the Mac might rock your boat.

Network Setup: Both operating systems make setting up a network easier than ever before, whether you want a simple Internet connection for a single PC or a home network that links a couple of PCs and peripherals together. Both detect wired and wireless networks; both offer seamless ways for you to add PCs or peripherals to your network; and both systems can "see" each other on a network (handy when you want to mix Macs and Windows PCs on a home network to share files, peripherals, and an Internet connection).

OS X takes you through network setup step-by-step. For its part, Vista's interface is vastly improved over earlier Windows versions: it detects and displays networks and their PCs and peripherals so you can connect them with point-and-click simplicity. Even so, Vista sometimes shows its ugly side. What OS X does with one click and one window, Vista may do with multiple clicks and multiple windows. For example, if you want to change your IP address (your PC's unique identifier on the Internet), you have to open Windows' main network window, open a list of network connections, right-click the correct one, select the "Properties" option from the resulting menu, and wade through a list of network protocols. On the Mac, that same task takes just a couple of clicks.

Apple also offers "multihoming," which automatically detects which available network is the fastest and connects you to it without any action on your part - really useful for laptops. If you're connected to a docking station (a box that connects your laptop to a full-sized monitor and keyboard), OS X uses your wired Ethernet connection. If you're roaming around the house, OS X connects you through AirPort, the Mac's built-in wireless network card.

Bundled Software: Both operating systems offer a range of bundled applications that include everything from e-mail programs to Web browsers to multimedia tools. Windows, once far behind the Mac in the bundled applications game, took a big step forward with Vista, which includes a lot of new or upgraded programs. For example:

• Movie Maker lets you edit raw footage, and DVD Maker writes that footage to disc.
• Photo Gallery lets you view, organize, rate, and edit your photos.
• The Sidebar displays a floating panel of your choice of single-purpose programs (called "gadgets") like news feeds, weather reports, stock prices, and virtual lava lamps.
• Complete PC Backup takes a snapshot of your hard drive.
• Windows Fax and Scan adds those business capabilities to your system.
• Windows Mail, the e-mail program formerly known as Outlook Express, now has a spam filter.

Mac OS X comes with several dozen useful programs, too, everything from Mail (for e-mail) to a 3-D, voice-activated Chess game. It also includes iTunes (Apple's multimedia player and music storefront); iChat for instant messaging; iCal calendaring software; and the famous iApps, which include iPhoto for managing and editing digital pictures; iMovie for building your own mini-films; and iDVD for burning multimedia onto disc. In classic Mac fashion, related programs (like iMovie and iDVD) work in tandem.

Mac vs. PC - Piece by Piece

While Vista is more robust than previous versions of Windows, it still gives you somewhat less than OS X. For example, it doesn't offer an equivalent to the Mac's GarageBand (which lets amateur musicians record and edit tunes), or to iWeb (which makes it easy to build Web sites). And what's there may seem a little less complete. For example, iPhoto lets you create and order books, calendars, and brochures graced with your own pictures, but in Vista you'd have to export your Windows Photo Gallery pictures to another program to do so. And you can set up custom search parameters for the Mac's e-mail client and use them anytime thereafter, but you can't do that with Windows Mail.

Variety of Third-Party Applications

If you don't like what you see in your bundled applications, you can find replacements in third-party programs. The variety of third-party applications that run under Windows is exponentially larger than that for Macs - especially for games. But the software gap isn't as wide as it once was. For every Windows application, there's usually a Mac version as well, whether it's an e-mail program, word processor, spreadsheet package, photo editor, or inventory software. In addition, the Mac has long run Microsoft's ubiquitous Office applications, including Word and Excel.

On top of that, the long-term trend in computing is toward "cloud computing," where you access applications over the Internet rather than on your computer. In other words, both the software and your own information reside at the hosting company's Web site. A big advantage of cloud computing is that you can access your information and do your work from any computer - Mac or PC.

In fact, you've probably seen this in action with e-mail programs without even knowing it. When you use a Gmail or Yahoo! Mail account, you're computing in the cloud.

This remote-application trend will grow. Google, for example, now offers Google Apps, a suite of programs with Web-based word processing, spreadsheet analysis, calendaring, photo-organizing, and e-mail capability.

The Purchase

Price: There used to be just one school of thought on the price of Windows PCs versus Macs - Macs cost more. But that's no longer the case.

When you take two machines identically equipped, be they desktop or laptop, Windows PCs and Macs cost about the same, sometimes a bit in the PC's and sometimes a bit in the Mac's.

Mac vs. PC User by User:

In addition to the base price of a system, you need to consider ongoing costs, like the following:

• Every Windows-based PC needs antivirus software, and that requires an annual subscription.
• Both companies release an OS upgrade about once a year. The Windows update is free; the Mac's is not (the most recent one cost $129).
• Windows' frequent bug and security fixes take time to download and install, a blow to your productivity (and, in all likelihood, your patience).

Warranty: Almost all PC manufacturers—whether for Windows PCs or Apple—offer a year of parts and labor free. Apple's warranty also covers personalized service at its "Genius Bars", staffed help desks at their 200 retail stores. Make a reservation online and show up at the agreed-on time, and an Apple rep will be there to help you.

Apple's phone support, however, lasts only 90 days, after which you have to pay $49 per call for live troubleshooting. Most Windows PC makers offer free phone support for a year.

You can buy an extended warranty for Windows PCs for $200 to $400 for three years of parts and labor. Apple's extended warranty, for three years parts and labor plus phone support and Genius Bar service, costs $249.

The Decision

So where do you go from here? A good first step is to visit an Apple store and then an electronics retailer to test-drive both types of system. (Or better yet, go to a store that sells both Macs and Windows PCs; Apple is expanding its relationship with Best Buy stores, so more of them across the country will have both systems for you to try.)

Check out how much flexibility you have in customizing your system. Can you order more memory, for example, or add a second hard drive? Talk with a store representative about the kinds of things you want to do - video editing requires far more horsepower than word processing. Put each OS through its paces: boot up the system from scratch, load an application, browse the Web, check out the bundled software. Which feels best to you?

Then go home and think: Am I a Mac or a PC?