To Mac, or not to Mac, that is the question.

I used Macs for years and then bowed down to the MicroBloat God for business reasons. Is it worth it to go back to Mac?

I like the HW, I like the design, I really like UNIX-based Operating Systems. I like the philosophy, and I like the integrated nature of all of Apple's products. I'd like to buy into their "infrastructure" (phone, tunes, TV, etc).

Now take into account that SL is one of my priority applications (email, web, SL, large document word processing, some programming). I usually keep SL running in the background even if I'm doing "real" work. And I will still have to interact with the Windows World.

If the forums are to be believed, it looks like many Mac users have even more problems than Widows users! Now that is IRONIC.

It becomes particularly ironic when I read that some Mac owners have a better SL experience running XP or Vista on their Macs....

I realize that SW developers have to aim at the biggest target, and that's Windows, to keep their customer base as large as possible. But it does seem faintly ridiculous that SL, which is based on open source SW and standards, runs best on the most proprietary OS!

Okay, enough ranting.

Switiching to a Mac: Worth It Or Not?

i believe not my friend. After upgrading the ram on my imac from 512mb to 2gb, the performance got worse, to the point of crashing every 5 mins. Hence, i am moving back to PC, far more reliable in my opinion for running the SL client.

There have been some releases that have been horrible (crash, crash, crash), but overall I have no problems running a MacBook Pro with SL and many other apps open. It does sometime feel like the testing for a new release for Mac is less than Windows - but once they get it right I seem to have less problems than my friends with Windows.

I've also run mutliple SL accounts at once with no crashes. I have left my account logged for several days without a crash. I have also had the issues of crashing every five minutes - but usually I find many other people having the same issues - windows or Mac.

From what I've heard over the past year or so, sometimes the PC client is better, sometimes the Mac. Whenever I do have problems, it seems to either be that *everyone* is having that problem or it might be a Mac specific problem & an update has come out fairly quickly. That being said, I'm curious as to the current state of comparison and will be trying SL under W2K on my MacBook Pro soon to compare. The PowerPC client definitely crawls. Once I moved to an Intel Mac, I've generally been happy with the performance.

I use both a mac and pc...
I like both...
the SL client crashes on both systems for different updates...
I have come to the conclusion that my mac and my pc are stable...
it is the SL client that isnt...
will I stop playing SL?
you got to be nuts...

Thanks for the reasonable and balanced answers.

Has anyone now had experience with running SL on a Mac, first under OSX then under Windows, XP or Vista?

Agreed witht the last point--Macs and PCs are both pretty stable, it's the SL client that is unstable.

Being an optimist, however, I consider SL to be Refreshingly Beta...lol

I used SL on a Mac, first on an iMac G5 20" (not bad at the time) and later on a dual G5 2Ghz with Radeon 9800 (very nice experience). Then for several reasons, I had to go the PC route. First XP then Vista. I can't say my SL experience improved one hoot. I have other bugs creeping up on me, especially since I moved to Vista.

If there isn't a burning need to go PC, I'd strongly consider going Mac.

Disclaimer: as my summer job, I work as a Apple tech. My opinions may be lightly coloured

PS: I still use both platforms. Just wish I had the money to shell out for a powerful new Mac