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Mac or PC?

Today it can be very confusing, should I buy a Mac or a PC? Between what my closest friends advise me to do and the clever Television ads I am still not sure which direction to go. We will visit this topic with the hope to bring clarity to this everyday question in the Mac and PC

computer world.

I have been blessed throughout my career to have had great exposure to MACs and PCs and will attempt to shed some light on the subject.

Let's start with some historical facts:

The first MAC was released on January 24, 1984

The First IBM PC was released on August 12, 1981

Macs and PCs today actually use the same hardware:

This makes it very easy for them to co-exist at the home or office. In fact you can even run Microsoft Windows on a Mac if you wish; I am currently running the Mac operating system and the Windows Operating System. So what makes them different is the Operating system they come shipped with. The Operating system is the software code that allows us to communicate to the hardware.

· The current version of the operating system for the Mac is OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

· The current version of operating system for the PC is Windows 7.

Virus and Spyware vulnerability:

Is it true and if so, why don't Macs get viruses as easily as PCs do? There are a couple reasons for this. Up till recently Apple only had 5% of the market share so there weren't as many evil people creating viruses for the MAC. Also the Mac OSX series of operating systems are built on a very secure operating system called UNIX which is very hard to hack into. With a PC you can protect yourself with additional Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware, and Firewall software to aid in Virus protection.

Cost:

What cost more a MAC or a PC? This depends; we have to make sure we are comparing apples to apples, (hee hee hee). If you take a low priced PC and compare it to a MAC then it will seem like a MAC costs more. You really need to look under the hood and take a close look at that parts that are used to build the MAC and then compare it to the PC to make sure there is a fair analysis. Apple tends to use higher quality components in their computers with the expectation to have greater performance and have lower failure rates.

Ease of use:

I found it very easy to get around in a MAC, in fact it may seem hard at first if you are an ex-pc user but that's because it's actually easier than you think to perform routine everyday tasks on a MAC. If you haven't used a computer for a while you will get the swing of things relatively fast.

Exchanging documents between MACs and PCs:

What about all my existing word, excel, and power point documents? Will I have to recreate these from scratch? The answer is not at all; you have a couple options. If you like you can still purchase Microsoft Office for the Mac or you can purchase iWorks, Apples equivalent to MS Office which will create, open, and save these same documents with ease. There are also all sorts of migration tools to convert e-mail, address books, and website book marks back and forth from MAC to PC.

What about my old Camera, Printer, and Scanner I was using on my PC?:

Chances are if your hardware was purchased in the last 5 years Apple has drivers for the pc hardware and you should be able to utilize existing PC peripherals. You can always check first before you buy a Mac to know what you are getting yourself into by going to apples website and looking up the hardware to make sure it will operate with OS X.

I hope this article gives you a little more insight Macs and PCs.