Oooh a Mac vs PC thread. I should probably preface this with a disclaimer: I'm browsing on my Macbook Pro right now--BUT I'm on my XP partition for playing with DarkGDK.
I'll quote this too:
Quote: "Amen to that. It is, at the end of the day, a machine: and you should buy the one that fits your needs, not the one that bows to the preconceived opinions of the "crowd""
Simply because I find little significant differences between all these operating systems. At my software engineering internship this summer we had to wait for PCs to come in and the IT guy for our room to install RedHat on them, so in the meantime we decided to write part of the solution in Java (everyone gets a PC with XP Pro in their cube automatically) then migrate the code over to our Linux workstations once they were good to go. Simultaneously, other members of the project had to wait for Sun Workstations with Solaris 10 on them--and in the meantime wrote part of their solution in Visual C++ Express 2008 with macros that would easily let them switch from WinSock to Berkeley sockets once the Sun machines came in (they were writing code for a real-time system that HAD to conform to C99).
So, in the end, you can get the same thing done with whatever you have available. However, I jumped for a Mac because although you can produce music just fine on a Windows machine, I've found that there is a certain advantage that Macs provide to musicians.
First, the "it just works" mantra worked for my midi keyboard. I connected my Korg X50 to my macbook via USB, and the Audio/MIDI Setup utility automatically recognized that a Korg X50 had just been plugged into the USB port and I could start using it with MIDI applications right away. XP Home, on the other hand, required a slog through Korg's website looking for drivers. A minor nuisance, but still nice.
Furthermore, the Audio/MIDI Setup utility is a really easy and quick way to adjust global settings for ALL of your music production programs. Also, I have a Digidesign Mbox, and being able to visually connect the Mbox to an older MIDI keyboard without USB, then send a test byte down the line both ways without having to open up Pro Tools or Sibelius was quite nice. I also went and bought the academic version of Logic Studio ($150, schweet deal) simply because the sheer amount of stuff you get with it is amazing. Pro Tools is still the best for recording and sample-smoothing editing, but the fact that Logic came with 40 gigs worth of samples and virtual instruments was a dream come true. I'm tempted to move my recording over to Logic because I simply don't want to pay for the plugins for Pro Tools.
That being said though . . . it's not all good. I've tried to learn Objective-C and it does seem a little counter-intuitive. And maybe it's just me (or Microsoft spoiling me with Visual Studio 2008), but Xcode is a real pain to use. For Mac, I've given up on Obj-C, and really C++ too, in favor of Java. NetBeans is a wonderful IDE. In fact, the rare occasion I do feel like writing a console C++ program, I'll usually do it in NetBeans or Eclipse CDT. Really though, I can't express enough how much I've grown to love Java in the past few months.
Quote: ". . . on the Mac I was told to install 3rd party drivers which never worked anyways. "It just (doesn't) work"."
I ran into a similar problem. There are virtually no external USB numpads that work with a Mac. Step-input on Sibelius revolves around the numpad, so it's vital for me. I had to go hunting on Amazon until I found a numpad by Genovation that would somehow work with Apple's default drivers.
Quote: "It's great though, because instead of a feature, we can have a blurry translucent bit where a useful feature could be left lying. GUI's should concentrate on being functional, fast and neat looking, they don't have to go to these lengths - I'd rather see a neat and compact GUI, allowing me to fit more on my screen."
I'm with you there VanB--my dock is shrunken and hidden lest it decide to start magnifying icons when I'm in the middle of a painfully precise edit. It's just painful and unnecessary--I ended up just installing an app called Butler that gives you what is essentially a Vista-like run menu. It's just faster to type Alt-Space, ff, Enter to open up Firefox rather than move away from the keyboard, pull the dock up, mozy over to the Firefox icon, and click. Although, I do find Expose extraordinarily useful for managing my workspace.
In the end, I find that Mac and Unix(BSD, Solaris, etc.) and Linux are so obviously similar that the argument of Mac's viability isn't even worth it. OS X really ticks me off sometimes (especially Finder), but in the end I like it because I found Logic Studio's interface and value too good to pass up, and because it's BSD I can still be a power user via the Terminal (Go go MacPorts). As soon as I can afford a copy of Windows 7 though, I'm totally bootcamping that--it looks fantastic.
