Mac and PC

[The_Interloper]

Maybe the easiest way to look at it is this; when people refer to a Mac or PC, they commonly mean:

PC - a computer running Microsoft Windows*
Mac - an Apple computer running macOS

This is even the convention Apple used themselves in their "Mac vs PC" ads.

*Yes, I know a PC can also run Linux etc but this is usually not for the masses.

 

[millerj123]

What you can do with a PC but not a Mac and what you can do with a Mac but not a PC?

I am thinking if I should change from a PC user to a Mac user.

My desktop PC is failing recently and I am going to buy a new computer for my home use. It will be used for part-time freelance work and entertainment. However, I have never used a Macintosh before.

I think I am not going to get an Apple laptop because I really do not like typing with laptop's keyboard. I like typing with my old-school mechanical keyboard.

I also have a computer screen that is fully functional.

Is getting a mini Mac good start? Is using a Mac a lot more restricted than using a PC?

These are all excellent questions, and have generated 2 pages of responses.

 

[theluggage]

Is getting a mini Mac good start? Is using a Mac a lot more restricted than using a PC?

...getting back to the actual topic ( sorry )

The Mac Mini is great and will almost certainly do what you need (no promises on the quality of the Mac version of GIMP, but it exists and there are plenty of alternatives)

...but it's probably the laptops that are the real showcase for Mac, particularly with the switch to Apple Silicon processors - you can get PCs that are faster, but not comparable if you factor in size, weight and battery life. They're also well regarded for the quality of displays, the trackpads around (only laptops where I haven't needed to carry a mouse around) and keyboards (apart from a little horror story called "the butterfly keyboard" that ran from 2015 to 2019).

If you get a Mini, it's worth checking in the Mac Mini forum whether your particular display works & what adapter you will need. Your keyboard will almost certainly work, but there are some keyboard layout differences between MacOS and Windows - some do have markings for Mac (e.g. the mac "command" and "option" replace the "alt" and "Windows/Start" keys and do slightly different things). It's a bigger pain in some countries - e.g. there are more differences between British PC and Mac keyboards than US ones & a limited choice of Mac-friendly British keyboards (and that's between two English-speaking countries!).

A laptop, or 24" iMac, will give you the "seamless" experience and you can still plug in your own display and keyboard if you prefer.

You might want to check whether any printers, scanners or other peripherals are Mac compatible - some are, some aren't.

In terms of which user interface you prefer - MacOS or Windows - that's very subjective. Personally, I'd say that it is now 50/50 (unlike the 80s/90s) but at least Apple haven't put ads on the Start menu (yet).

Personally, I prefer MacOS because it is Unix under the hood & I make a fair bit of use of Unix-style command-line tools. That's probably not a mainstream reason...

 

[bj097]

GIMP certainly runs on Mac, but I'm not sure how good the Mac version is because its an open source package and relies very much on volunteers giving their time to work on the Mac version for free. Libreoffice is similar, but AFAIK the Mac version of that is fairly solid. Those are both open-source, cross platform packages that started out on Linux - very powerful but not always the most polished or easiest-to-use, even on Windows.

The Photos app included with MacOS will manage your photos and do basic adjustments, filters, cropping etc. If you need a "proper" photo editor, GIMP is certainly an option but, Pixelmator, Pixelmator Pro and Affinity Photo are popular, affordable and generally more user friendly than GIMP and will probably make better use of an M1 (I'm not going to say "more powerful" because last I looked GIMP was insanely powerful if you didn't mind the vertical learning curve).

Same story with wordprocessing/spreadsheet - "Pages" and "Numbers" come with MacOS and will most probably do what you need, Libreoffice for Mac is free.

Frankly, though, your workload barely needs the power of a Mac Mini and could probably be done with a cheaper PC. That shouldn't stop you buying a Mac if you like it, just being realistic.

What you will be hit with is that some things are "just different" - conventions as to how the user interface works, how the control keys on the keyboard work etc. Switching operating systems is always confusing (speaking as someone who has bounced between MacOS, Classic MacOS, Windows, VMS, Unix/Linux and RISC-OS, sometimes all of them in the space of a day) so there will always be a frustrating adjustment period.


That's one of those pedantic statements that is technically correct but practically inaccurate and misleading. Sorry pedants, colloquial English is ambiguous, dictionaries don't define the language - they document usage - and words mean different things in different contexts. Seeing "Mac and PC" in a title should make it pretty obvious what is actually meant (Don't seriously diasagree with the rest of your points, though).

Hi. Then is there any official alternative for GIMP and LibreOffice on MacOS that would be more suitable to run on MacOS? Does MacOS itself have something that would do the same or better than GIMP? I am a GIMP addict.

 

[JoeInMilwaukee]

Here's all you really need to know:

View attachment 2114760

Let's try "Apple Silicon," not "Apple Silicone."

 

[Basic75]

Hi. Then is there any official alternative for GIMP and LibreOffice on MacOS that would be more suitable to run on MacOS? Does MacOS itself have something that would do the same or better than GIMP? I am a GIMP addict.

As somebody else has mentioned in another response, Pixelmator Pro and Affinity Photo 2 are excellent image editing applications with a very fair price for what they offer. There is no serious image editor included with macOS, though Preview and Photos can do some basic photography processing like cropping and colour correcting.