Mac?

Posted by: Dustysox on 13 February 2010

Hi,

Forgive my ignorance. Can someone explain the "whole" Mac thing ref Naim equipment?

I have always used PC's, but I don't understand in conjunction with DAC why everyone keeps talking about Mac.

I use a Logitech Transpoter, is it another way of getting music and hi-res music into the DAC?

Is there anything else I'm missing?
Posted on: 13 February 2010 by pcstockton
jesus Garyi. Axe to grind? I can understand you preferring Macs, and disliking PCs. I feel the exact opposite way.

But why do you spend so much effort hating PCs?

For what its worth, my Mac came with a ton a shite I didnt want installed on it. And to address your other point, when shit goes wrong on a Mac you are probably bringing it in somewhere to get diagnosed and fixed. I have NEVER ONCE had to reinstall an entire operating system. I know dozens of Mac users including myself who have.

There both have their merits. But in my opinion the Macs are not the best Apple has to offer.

Lastly, how and why do you only equate a PC with a Windows OS?

In my estimation there is no comparison between an Apple Macintosh computer, and the rest of the personal computing world at large. Shit, even Apples have gone so far as to allow Windows to be run as the OS? Is the opposite true?
Posted on: 13 February 2010 by winkyincanada
Macs...chock full of appley goodness.
Posted on: 13 February 2010 by rich46
quote:
Originally posted by winkyincanada:
Macs...chock full of appley goodness.


if it wasnt for the ipod they would not be in business now
Posted on: 13 February 2010 by winkyincanada
quote:
Originally posted by rich46:
quote:
Originally posted by winkyincanada:
Macs...chock full of appley goodness.


if it wasnt for the ipod they would not be in business now

Perhaps true. Doesn't make the Mac any less good, though.
Posted on: 13 February 2010 by rich46
quote:
Originally posted by winkyincanada:
quote:
Originally posted by rich46:
quote:
Originally posted by winkyincanada:
Macs...chock full of appley goodness.


if it wasnt for the ipod they would not be in business now

Perhaps true. Doesn't make the Mac any less good, though.
no . but there are more expensive spec for spec. design looks good.

ive tried streaming/storage with mac and pc. i settled for seperate ripper/nas. the quality of this is far better than pcs via naim dac.
Posted on: 13 February 2010 by garyi
Bloody hell patrick, I laid the bait hours ago and you have only just got to it!

Posted on: 13 February 2010 by garyi
Incidentally what was the tonne of shit that came on your mac you did not want?
Posted on: 14 February 2010 by Aleg
quote:
Originally posted by garyi:
Aleg I have a new (december last year) siemens PC at work with 3 gigs of ram and core 2 duo. Its shit, I cannot imagine running 14 apps at once on it, and even if I did I would have no idea I had that many running due to the overall hideousness of Windows.

I accept in windows 7 they copied the dock thing so in that regard its easier to see whats going on so thats a plus point*


*Yes all manufacturers steel from each other and apple is far from innocent in this regard


Garyi

I will accept that if you buy an off-the-shelf PC without any technical knowledge, you are in for a bigger risk then when buying Apple. Though there are PC-manturers that are just as reliable as Apple in that respect, but also with them you have to pay for it. With pre-build low-cost PC's you get low cost components and they are just not as good as high cost components (looks a bit like Naim, doesn't it? Winker ).
I can't vouch for the quality of Siemens (which is actually the japanese Fujitsu).

Apart from my very first PC, I have never bought any off-the-shelf PC's. I always build them myself from carefully selected good quality components (from motherboard to memory chips and processor cooler). I now run Vista 32-bit on 2 Gbit RAM with an early Intel Core 2 Duo processor and I can tell you I don't have any problems running 15 applications at all(depending on your definition of application, I have even more running in parallel when counting certain background programs).

So your experience with PCs doesn't have to be like that all.

-
aleg
Posted on: 14 February 2010 by Joe Bibb
quote:
Originally posted by garyi:
Bloody hell patrick, I laid the bait hours ago and you have only just got to it!



LOL



Mind you if there was one person on here who I would have put money on having to re-install OSX......Patrick would have been the man.

To get PCs to Mac standards of build, quiet operation and ease of audio function you end up spending similar cash.

Joe (2 Macs, 2 PCs)
Posted on: 14 February 2010 by ferenc
quote:
Originally posted by pcstockton:
jesus Garyi. Axe to grind? I can understand you preferring Macs, and disliking PCs. I feel the exact opposite way.

But why do you spend so much effort hating PCs?

For what its worth, my Mac came with a ton a shite I didnt want installed on it. And to address your other point, when shit goes wrong on a Mac you are probably bringing it in somewhere to get diagnosed and fixed. I have NEVER ONCE had to reinstall an entire operating system. I know dozens of Mac users including myself who have.

There both have their merits. But in my opinion the Macs are not the best Apple has to offer.

Lastly, how and why do you only equate a PC with a Windows OS?

In my estimation there is no comparison between an Apple Macintosh computer, and the rest of the personal computing world at large. Shit, even Apples have gone so far as to allow Windows to be run as the OS? Is the opposite true?


There are ways to install a Snow Leopard if you want on your ordinary PC...

For what it worth, but we are selling PCs and Macs to broadcast television stations and pro audio customers since 1992, and I think we regularly have to reinstall Windows and I know only a very few case when we needed to reinstall Macs, usually because of an upgrade which required clean install of the OS and I can not count how many times we had to reinstall complete systems and recover terabytes of shared storage content from the back - up because of virus infections. High-end editing and post - production does not really tolerate Norton Antivurs and other software against viruses, when you need to handle few HD streams in real-time for post. A television/video post-production system like Avid which we are distributing since 1991 uses all the available OS resources and sometime more because of the special hardware they need. By the way an HP z800 in an ideal config for Avid editing will cost considerably more than an 8 core similarly configured Mac.

There are situations where a Mac is better solution and sometimes a PC is better for the customer.


So there is no general answer, but I think if somebody is not really IT and computer friendly, and have some difficulties to program a DVD recorder, then the Mac is usually better solution for a home audio system.

Would you be so kind to share what was the "ton of shit" what came with your Mac and you did not need it?
Posted on: 14 February 2010 by js
quote:
Originally posted by garyi:
Actually I think windows 3.11 (I think one of the first ones) was around the same time as the original mac os. Perhaps its agreed the whole GUI thing was developing around the same time for a number of companies.

Without doubt the hardware and software coming from the same building has up sides and downsides. PC users would argue that freedom is lost because they cannot for instance easily change hardware. Mac users would argue all we want is for computers to work. Sorry but Mac works better than PC.

Also I really hate how PC manufacturers have to put stickers all over their PCs to tell dumb people about whats in them. That annoys me. And all the trial shite software that is installed on them. Does one PC manufacturer actually have the balls to sell a Laptop without stickers and shite trial software on them>
Was Windows stolen? http://yedda.com/questions/win...uters_8624453911712/ Not definitive but it seems covered. Of course some say both stole a lot from Xerox.
Posted on: 14 February 2010 by garyi
I am getting a toshiba laptop next week for my son. I have Windows XP on disk and want to wipe the thing and install XP.

Genuine question BTW, how the hell do you do that?
You may need to reinstall OSX once in a while, but inserting a disk and clicking install seems a lot easier than PC method.
Posted on: 14 February 2010 by js
If it comes with 7. Leave it. If Vista, XP it is. Winker Sometimes you can remove bloat and virus software by reinstalling the OS from the partition and deselecting options. You can usually do this without a wipe as it overwrites and just wipe the free space after the fact if there's stuff you don't want on the drive. From scratch, the XP disc should boot from bios and install in a straight forward manner but it's been a while so maybe another opinion would be good. Smile Time of cold install varies a lot depending on what drivers are on the disc and which need to be downloaded automatically or otherwise.
Posted on: 14 February 2010 by garyi
Its an old one at least 3 years I should imagine. So no windows seven.

I am not about the bios bit, if I insert the DVD will it install? Do I need to go into bios first?
Posted on: 14 February 2010 by scottyhammer
Had dozens of pc's all my life - im now 52 and every single one has slowed down or packed up.
now gone to Mac and will not be going back.
The difference with pc/mac is simple....Macs just work. end of !
Posted on: 14 February 2010 by js
quote:
Originally posted by garyi:
Its an old one at least 3 years I should imagine. So no windows seven.

I am not about the bios bit, if I insert the DVD will it install? Do I need to go into bios first?
I'd make sure that the bios has not disabled the boot from that drive and all should be well. They always come defaulted to boot from there. You really shouldn't have to and can always check the bios later if it doesn't load. Again, it's been a while since I've built from disc so you may want to double check. As I said earlier, it's likely that there's an XP installer in a partition on the drive that will install for you with the right boot up. Will overwrite whatever's there. You can usually do a selective install and opt out of the bloatware.
Posted on: 14 February 2010 by garyi
Cool. The last time I tried that was on an Asus laptoop and it was having none of it, all you could do was restore from a partition which had all the shit they put on there, trial antivirus and the like.
Posted on: 14 February 2010 by js
Now, I believe you can usually opt out of the trial crap if you don't go automatic.
Posted on: 14 February 2010 by garyi
We will see, its all part of a cunning plan. I shall give said laptop to my 4 year old son who currently 'owns' a mac mini with DVI equipped dell monitor attached.

I shall steal away the dell monitor and hook it up to my imac as a secondry and the mini shall become the server for my drobo.

My plan could fall to bits, on the basis that the little git has got rather good on the mac, knows how to put to sleep, load up cbeebies/kidzui and the like and is currently learning about the alphabet at an alarmingly good rate.

I get annoyed when I find various pictures printed to my xerox solid ink printer as well. They pick it up very quickly.

The toshi might not be up to the task.
Posted on: 15 February 2010 by goldfish
My experience is that Macs make you forget how hard some of this stuff really is… I work with Windows all day, then come home to my Mac… it's such a relief!

If I'd come from a situation of no wireless streaming music in my house, I'd have been blown away when my NaimUniti arrived, and seamlessly connected to my computer's hard drive with UPnP.

Unfortunately, I'd already been spoilt by iTunes and Airport Express, and become accustomed to controlling both song and volume (playlist, artist, whatever), either via the iTunes front-end or the iPhone remote app.

In comparison, using the Uniti's streaming is a pretty hideous experience, navigating hierarchical folder structures to get to my music.

The downside of Apple is that they don't make it easy for companies to use their technology. So whilst my holy grail would be for the Uniti to functionally replace the Airport Express (albeit, without the printer USB port Winker ), I'm not certain Naim would ever be allowed to do that. An iPhone app would help, but full iTunes integration would be way better.

I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Simon
Posted on: 15 February 2010 by Guido Fawkes
quote:
Originally posted by js:
and no doubt that original Windows was a huge theft of the MAC OS.
If it was they left the good bits behind - not seen or tried Windows 7, but the versions I have been forced to use because of work up to XP are atrociously poor - the amazing thing to me is why people settle for such a badly designed and written product - good marketing I suppose.

The Macintosh has a vastly better OS than Windows - I can't see how anybody who looks under the bonnet can question that. The Macintosh is far from perfect and there have been better options, but none have done as well because of the lack of good service from their proponents (where are you Commodore).

That said there is some good PC software that is triumph despite the underlying OS (not because of it).

So I wonder - why are we obsessed with Graphical User Interfaces? These are a big overhead and do not really do much that we couldn't do with a simple text prompt/menu.

> Play Beatles <CR>
>> which title?
> Pen <CR>
>> Penny Lane (Yes)
> <CR>
Posted on: 15 February 2010 by james n
quote:
So I wonder - why are we obsessed with Graphical User Interfaces? These are a big overhead and do not really do much that we couldn't do with a simple text prompt/menu.

> Play Beatles <CR>
>> which title?
> Pen <CR>
>> Penny Lane (Yes)

I'm sure if i had a BBC model B as my user interface then the above would be great - but things have moved on. The iPod GUI is rather good which is why the remote app with iTunes makes music browsing so enjoyable and easy to use.

James
> <CR>
Posted on: 15 February 2010 by js
I dream in pictures, not in words. Smile
Posted on: 15 February 2010 by u5227470736789439
I keep my iTunes in a list form in aphabetical order of perfortming artists, which may not instantly seem an intuitive way to use it.

However the search aengine will find what ever I am after by composer, and put any duplications of repertoire up with the performances displayed by artist in alphabetical order.

I could wish for nothing finer. Effectively it becomes a three way card index for composers, for individual works, and for artists - with access only a mouse klick away.

Finding music I want to listen to has never been more successful.

I still have not investigated shuffle play after six months!

The screen is a 19 inch widesreen format - readable even with my eyes.

ATB from George
Posted on: 15 February 2010 by pcstockton
I cant remember....this was years ago.

There was some photo software, and some other stuff i didnt want, need or ask for. Honestly, Im not sure if I knew what some of it did.

It is really irrelevant.

The issue is so tiring, I cant even believe I "took the bait".

All I know is that most people I know that would rather use a PC, have no issues with using a Mac if they have to. While those I know that use Macs, do so exclusively, and liken using a PC to wearing really uncool clothes out on the town.

Im not sure why this is the case though.

I would prefer to use a PC, but I have a Mac lapper and iPhone. I will probably buy a 2nd hand iPod touch or 1st Gen iPhone to control Foobar. But for music playback, ripping and general computer use I am simply more comfortable with a PC.

But I have friends that try and try and try to do things on a Mac that just dont work well, and will NOT consider using a PC even if it is in a closet running headless. To even suggest it results in a look of horror.

I still cannot understand why Mac users seem to be very concerned with the status of being a Mac user. And define themselves as anti-PC. It is pretty funny to me. Like my buddy who lives in New York that would NEVER EVER wear a pair of shorts outside of Costa Rica. No matter how hot and muggy it is in the city. Although I guarantee that he wants to. It just isn't cool to make a appearance unless he is wearing really tight jeans and a Helmut Lang t-shirt and shoes.

I digress..... I apologize for even continuing the discussion.