Although certain subsystems are sourced (CPU chipset, firewire interface, etc), there are many components such as capacitors (specifically) that can have a high failure rate. I have seen this borne out in a serial failure of Dell systems once they reached a certain age (about 1 1/2 – 2 years) from capacitor failure. This was company-wide, and the behavior was exhibited in a large majority of like-aged systems.

So when people say “Macs are more reliable” it is probably due, in part, to using better components at all levels throughout the physical system. I would imagine that systems by Rain and other more “premium” systems would share this attribute.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say Vista is a major improvement for A/V work. We haven’t really seen huge performance dividends from any of the changes. I would say it’s reasonably well supported at this point. That’s a huge change from where it was even a year ago.

Yeah, here here on Amiga … and Be, and Atari and a whole bunch of boxes that focused more effectively on multimedia. (Amazing, this thing called “progress.”)

I don’t use Vista, and would like to have a chance to at some point, but it still seems like folks are downgrading from it with old copies of XP/2000 or with OEM setups. I haven’t seen a lot of Vista penetration in the workplace. If it is a stable and well supported OS for A/V work, I’ll take your word for it.

Now… where is my Amiga?

Defrags: Now automatic on Vista. And there’s no demonstration that this is any different on *any* modern OS.

Virus/malware: Is this really still an issue for anyone? Basic precautions seem fine. The only issue I’ve had is crap like Norton slowing down machines — currently recommending Avast and/or Comodo, both lightweight and free and easily disabled during gigs, etc.

Registry: Be careful what you install. Run Revo Uninstaller to remove apps, not the default uninstaller (it’s free). And anyway, Mac OS and Linux have file maintenance issues of their own — the Mac has some bizarre UNIX issues.

Cloning a drive: Well, getting a PC to boot off of Windows, I’ll admit, is a pain; I use Linux for rescue situations. But cloning isn’t terribly difficult.

Regular reinstalls: Quite frankly, again, this can be a problem with any OS. It *shouldn’t* be a problem, but it is — there are so many variables that sometimes a clean install is the quickest way to speed up a system. (And, literally, I’ve watched this happen with Mac OS and Linux as well as Windows. On Mac, my tool of choice is Onyx.)

I hear you, and of course I hear horror stories. I’m just currently not having any more difficulty maintaining my main Windows box than my Mac box. Both are working just fine. Like I said, I don’t want to start another OS war, but I have to state the obvious here: despite all our gripes, these OSes have matured. If we’re going to hold these problems against them, I think they have to demonstrably *current* issues.

Also… ever try to clone an XP system drive? It is enough to drive me back to the freakin church. I have a complete, bootable, external FW drive that I can actually run from if my internal were to die. I refresh the backup once a week. When I replaced the drive in my iBook… I duped it to an external drive, swapped in the new unit, booted from the external, cloned it back, and went on with my life. OS X is a real OS, and Apple doesn’t assume that I want to spend my evenings watching a progress bar. My old iBook is currently living a life of leisure at my mom’s house, quietly displacing her ancient 586 machine. My MBP has been a rock of reliability, and it does… just work.

I’m happy to have a XP Pro machine on my desktop at my job because some IT intern gets to deal with that junk while I go on about my day, and I keep getting paid. But at home, in the studio, at gigs… my time has been paid back in spades since I stopped trying to beat back the tide with a broom on a PC. Sure, I could have a commodity PC for less. But I’ll put my TCO (i GOTS to get paid) up against that M$ lifestyle any day of the week.

I think the late-model aluminum MacBook Pros are a really solid machine. The new generation, of course, still a bit new to call.

The aluminum case can make a big difference … it’ll scratch and dent if beat up, but remains structurally sound and protects the stuff inside. So it is interesting Rain has gone to the aluminum.

There are definitely PC makers, at least, that are roughly on par with Apple (to the point that I wouldn’t give either an edge), and it’s well worth going with them for their numbers. Particularly take a look at actual, quantitative return rates … *not* customer satisfaction reports, even on reliability, because that’s a qualitative measure. I know Lenovo does well even in the post-IBM era, I’ve been impressed with lesser-known brands like Asus and MSI… now I have to go pull up those numbers.

I would love to see a PC laptop with the kind of reliability that I’ve gotten out of my MacBook Pro. If Rain has made that laptop they have won a fan out of me! I was just pointing out that you can’t tell how good a laptop is by features, or at launch. You have to wait some time and see how it performs. That’s what I was trying to say rather than touch off a pointless mac vs. pc debate.