Mac vs Windows PC

-
For most of my career I have been in circles where people would debate a Mac vs Windows PC. There were the years where Apple had dropped so far in market share that it seemed like the debate was over, but then Jobs returned and the debate started all over again. The debate is always on the personal level though. I have never seen a large corporation use Mac's as their primary computers. I have always worked on large corporate networks where Windows is king. Every now and then I would see a couple of Mac's in a marketing department, but that was about it. 

Several years ago I started working on doing mobile development, and I had to get a Mac to compile my code. Even if you do hybrid development, you can develop and test in a Windows environment, but you have to compile on a Mac to get your app in the app store. I can see how a Mac would be easier to use for an average user, but from a power users perspective, I found it very cumbersome. 

The biggest problem I have run into is that the Macbook Air I bought for a grand doesn't have enough power, memory, or disk space. The disk space is the biggest issue, and unlike my Windows laptop, I can't buy a solid state drive and swap it out because they are proprietary. I am definitely not their target user, but I do really find the lack of power frustrating. 

Since I only use my Mac to compile, having a laptop is really unnecessary, and since I was running out of space on it, I thought maybe I would get a desktop instead. I started looking into cheap desktops and found the Mac Mini. I thought that would be perfect except that they are really expensive considering the hardware hasn't been updated since 2014. I finally decided to just keep my Macbook Air and get an external hard drive for it. 


I read through the article, and all the reasons for buying a mac made sense for an average user. If all you are doing is reading email and surfing the web, the Mac is easy to use. The limited number of models makes it so you don't have to do much research. I really was thinking there would be one argument that would say technically why they were better, but the only thing that came even close was that some of them have really nice screens. 


This article basically said everything I was thinking. You get much more bang for your buck on a Windows PC than you can on a Mac. For the money I would say the new Dell XPS 15 is the hottest laptop out there. They aren't cheap, but the specs are really out there.

I know a lot of you swear by Macs. Even at developer conferences I will see a number of people using Mac notebooks, and I have always wondered if there was something I am missing. If you are a die hard Mac fan, let me know in the comments if I am not getting something here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Asp.Net Core with Extended Identity and Jwt Auth Walkthrough

-
Image
  Quite often I think of an idea for an app where I would have a website and a mobile app that share the same functionality. Every time I start to prototype something like this I get stuck on authentication. When you build a web application in Asp.Net Core, it is really easy to set up the built-in Identity platform to allow users to login, but if you want to allow a mobile app to access APIs on the same site, that takes a lot more work. Of course, you can use a cloud-based authentication system like AzureAd or Firebase authentication, but if you arent housing any sensitive data, that's a lot of extra plumbing that takes away from building your application.  This walkthrough will show you how to create an Asp.Net core site with Asp.Net Core Identity for authentication and authorization. We will be extending the identity to include additional user information and roles. We will also add jwt authentication and authorization, so SPA's and mobile apps can use the API's and share
Read more

File Backups to Dropbox with PowerShell

-
Image
I have had a number of instances where I had a virtual server somewhere, and I wanted to have a backup strategy, but the paid plans were overkill for what I needed. I have all my source code in Github, so everything can be rebuilt. I just need to be able to archive database backups and uploaded files. I decided to use a Dropbox account and set up a scheduled task that calls a PowerShell script that accesses the Dropbox web API. Setting up Dropbox You will need to have a Dropbox subscription set up and then you can go to the developer's section at the following link: {% embed url=" https://www.dropbox.com/developers " %} On the main page, select create apps. On the following page, you will have the option to select the scope of the app. Here you can decide to only access a single folder or give access to all of the Dropbox functions. Either option will work, in my example, I used the full access scope, so I would have the option of putting different file types in different
Read more

Dynamic Expression Builder with EF Core

-
I was recently working on an ASP.NET Core MVC project where the end user wanted to have a search form with several fields with drop down boxes and a couple of free-form text fields. One of the requirements was to be able to put "*" at the front or the end of a search term in the text boxes to indicate a wildcard search. That was the way a previous application worked and they wanted to maintain the same functionality. Since I was working with Entity Framework Core using a generic repository pattern, I wanted to be able to dynamically build the filter expression that I passed to the repository. I created a static Expression builder class with static methods for creating each type of expression needed. public static class ExpressionBuilder { public static Expression GetStringExpression ( string dataModelProperty , string dtoProperty , Expression combinedExpression , ParameterExpression parameterExpression ) { if ( dtoProperty
Read more