Andrew Raynor - Mac or PC for your business

Andrew Raynor - I'm a Mac guy, lets just get that out there for everyone right off the bat so this article is slightly biased. However I would like to share with you why I chose a Mac over a PC for music production and web design, there are some very real and important reasons. I will also outline some of the cons of choosing a Mac over a PC.

The Good -

I have a Mac Pro (think black trash can) 6,1 with 12 cores at 2.7 and 64gb of RAM - it also has a 1tb SSD card. So its a pretty beefy machine. But its the I/O (input and output) that I am really after. As I mentioned I dabble in music and web design, so I need lots of IO.

When it comes to music production, the industry standard is Mac and they further cemented that role with the introduction of thunderbolt technology. Thunderbolt is similar to USB in that you can plug in external drives, monitors etc but that is where the similarity ends. Thunderbolt is on average 4 times faster than the current USB class 3.0 - many PCs are still using 2.0 which is a measly 1-2 gigs per second. Thunderbolt can achieve an astounding 20 gigs per second of IO.

When I use an external sound card like a Focusrite - the sound in my Mac has to have no (or very minimal) latency to sound on time. Over a traditional USB connection - there is often a great deal of latency due to the small transfer size of USB 2.0 or 3.0. When I use my thunderbolt enabled interface however, the latency is so minimal that you cannot hear it. The bonus is that their is plenty of bandwidth even after that to run a 4k monitor. With the Mac Pro you can connect 6 thunderbolt enabled devices or docks - this is a ton of IO.

There are very few commercially available PCs with thunderbolt enabled.

Macs have a closed system, meaning developers must have their code approved before they can develop applications for Apples system. This leads to greater stability overall because when compared with Windows developers - the code is generally less sloppy. "By having cleaner code, Macs have less CPU pressure and instability that is generally caused by sloppy code." Andrew Raynor

This feature of Macs is also a key ingredient in the battle against viruses, many of our computers are internet connected now - and as a result they are targets of malware, ransom ware and any other kind of ware there is. Fortunately for Mac users, because of the code control that Apple takes, there are very few Mac viruses.

From a graphical, or music perspective Macs take the cake, however there are areas in which a PC or windows based computer can excel. "I can think of two applications that I view as core strengths for Windows - PC gaming and enterprise computing." Andrew Raynor

Mac gaming is terrible and poorly supported - again likely because of the rigors of getting your code passed, but this means Apple users are relegated to the Apple store or very large game developers. This is less than ideal if you are an avid gamer.

The other area in which Windows is heads and shoulders a better pick is in enterprise computing - specifically servers. Windows owns corporate and although there is some competition from Linux and Linux based OS, Windows Server 2012r2 is the 800 pound gorilla. You get a free hypervisor and 2 VM's with one license and 2012r2 has been kicked around for years. Its one of the very best server OS's there is currently.

Picking between Macs and Windows comes down to a business preference and use case - and for me, I chose Mac for front end and Windows for my servers. Andrew Raynor