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This is my personal computer that I built myself.

Just to preface this article, I want to let you know that most of this is completely based off of my opinions and thoughts. I honestly don’t favor Windows over Apple or vise versa, but I do however look for the best ratio of price to what you get for the price. Lastly, before you get into this mess of nerdy techy stuff, I would like to say that I’m completely open to constructive criticism or an argument back if you’re against my thoughts and opinions. If you’d like to argue with me and leave feedback, just leave a comment down below in the comments section.

Manitou Springs District 14 has completely obliterated the use of Windows and has switched to using just Apple products. Is this necessarily a good thing? Well, hearing someone ask, “What is Windows?” or “Who uses Windows anymore?” has inspired me to write about this and inform you all that Windows is still huge, and tons of people use it on a day-to-day basis.

First, the most hotly debated subject would be what you pay v.s. what you get. I’m speaking about the ratio of how much money you’re paying and what build quality/components you’re getting in your computer. Let’s start off with Apple, or “Mac.” When you purchase a Macintosh computer from Apple, you’re really paying for the brand name, aesthetics, and in most cases, a nicer looking computer. When you look under the hood of what you can get for purchasing a fully upgraded Mac Pro for $6,678, it includes a 3.5GHz 6-core Intel Xeon processor, 64GB of DDR3 memory, 1-TB of PCIe-Flash Based storage, and dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM each. This system is incredibly powerful and would be great for any computer user, but now it’s time to blow it out of the water. When you purchase a Windows computer, you have hundreds of names to choose from and you can customize your computer to the nth degree. I went to Origin PC’s website, one of the top professional customizable computer companies, and matched it to the price of the Mac Pro (I went up about $100 dollars, just because it was almost near to impossible to match it 100%.) Regardless, a computer from Origin PC customized to cost about $6,775 includes a sealed liquid cooling system, an AMD FX 8350 Octo-core (eight cores) CPU clocked out to 4.0GHz, triple 6GB NVIDIA GTX Titan Black GPU’s, one of the highest rated graphic cards on the market, 32GB of DDR3 memory which can easily be upgraded to 64 at any time, 11 terabytes of mechanical hard drive space, and also a 240GB SSD drive which is the fastest type of hard drive on the market due to the flash based memory system. Clearly, each system has something that the other doesn’t, but just to show you the Windows based computer blows the Mac out of the water in terms of what you get for what you pay.

Next, a huge downside to buying a Mac is that you’re paying over a $1,000 dollars for a computer that you can’t upgrade past the RAM and the hard drive. However, with Windows you can upgrade just about any part that you want to. Many sites like Newegg and Tiger Direct offer single computer parts that you can buy to build your own custom machine, which is incredibly easy thanks to YouTube videos,  saving you quite a bit of money; building a computer is also really fun to do. Also, when your parts become outdated or they start malfunctioning, you don’t have to replace your entire computer, but instead you just go back to one of those sites and purchase a new version of whatever part you’re replacing. It’s a very painless process. Yes, they do also sell Macintosh RAM and hard drives for you Apple users.

Both systems do allow you to run multiple operating systems on one single computer. Apple allows Macintosh users to download a program called “BootCamp” that allows the user to run Windows, including all versions from XP all the way to 8. This program, if you’re interested, can be found on Apple’s website here. On the contrary, Windows does not have any licensed programs to easily boot Mac OS X, although if you have an Intel based system, Apple’s choice processor company, you can create what is called a “Hackintosh.” A Hackintosh is looked down upon by Apple, but there are no legal consequences for creating one unless you are distributing them. You can either buy a retail copy (which I endorse) of Mac OS X from Apple and install it on your computer, or you can download an .iso file made by someone else that allows you to customize the drivers and kext (yes, kext) files you install, which is technically easier to do. Custom computers built with Windows-based components can also be configured to have multiple boot drives, or called a double, or even a triple boot computer. You can load Mac OS X, Windows, or any operating system such as Linux, Ubuntu, or etc. Even though you can run the opposite operating on either system, you would get more processing power if you chose to build your own Windows component based system.

Lastly, is Windows really obsolete compared to Macintosh? Well, actually, no. Windows currently holds 92% of the world’s operating systems market, while Apple only holds a mere 5%, and Linux and others holds about 3% (According to Ninia Krimly via Hongkiat.com.) Windows is obviously the dominant operating system in today’s world, but Apple is the most valuable brand and it did outsell Windows-based computers back in December for that quarter. Even so, more big corporations tend to use Windows than Mac. Macintosh computers, according to various articles across the web, are used in/by: home office users such as authors & lawyers; start ups such as Twitter & Monster Designs; accountants such as Nelson Accounting Professionals; according to Nina Krimly. Krimly also collected data in the same fashion for where Windows is used and reported that they are used more in/by: home offices, IT Professionals, developers, business owners, schools, hospitals, and banks.

In conclusion, both operating systems are as popular as ever. While one dominates the market, the other dominates “The Most Valuable Brand” title, given to Apple by Forbes. Either system is just as good as the other and they are both wonderful operating systems, although I do prefer Windows for the affordability, quality of parts, and endless customization options, but Mac does offer better build quality, simplistic designs, and according to some, an easier user-interface. All in all, Windows is not obsolete, Apple is overpriced, but they do, in some cases, look better aesthetically, and both are crowned the two most dominant operating systems across the world.

If you would like to see a video relating to this article you can check out Techsource’s channel here.