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From: rjc@wookumz.ai.mit.edu (Ray Cromwell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Some MAC and Amiga Comparisons.
Message-ID: <11419@life.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 17 Oct 90 17:32:57 GMT
References: <33538@nigel.ee.udel.edu> <11388@life.ai.mit.edu> <84888@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
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In article <84888@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Todd R Johnson <tj@cis.ohio-state.edu> writes:
|Even with lower priced Mac's, Mac software is expensive. So unless your
|a pirate, buying a cheaper system wont help you much.
|
|	Microsoft Word is much better than any Amiga WYSIWIG word
|processor.  With the educational discount I paid $69.  For $75 I
|bought a program that manages references and automatically formats and
|inserts them into the Word docuement by scanning the document.
|With the educational discount MacDraw II costs $45, Canvas $160, Adobe
|Illustrator $265.  Various spreadsheets like Excel, and Wingz are
|priced at around a $100.  My point is that as a student I can get much
|better software for the Mac at much lower prices than inferior Amiga
|software.

 I've never seen MacDraw, but I wonder how it compares to stuff like
Deluxe Paint. I also wonder if Mac has software that is comparable to
the Amiga's turbosilver,Disney Animator, JourneyMan,LightWave 3d,
Scult, The Art Department.  
 For Word processing I use DME (yep) If I want to do fancy formatting
I'll use TeX. Sadly enough, I don't use a Word Processor everyday,
and I don't think many people do unless they are Journalists,etc.
I use Emacs(Unix) everyday, and DME(Amiga). And if they are WYSIWYG,
I don't know what is.

|	When you compare power you need to look at software.  The
|fastest machine in the world is useless without the right software for
|the job.  My Amiga is excellent for TeX, games, and animation.  My Mac
|is good at doing the things that I need to do almost every day.  Sure,
|the Mac is terrible at multi-tasking, and the hardware is boring, but
|it does the jobs that I need to do.  That's the bottom line.

  For programmers I think the Amiga is much better. (especially if
you learn on Unix.) The Amiga's environment is very Unix-like,
and the Mac's OS would be very boring.

|	Finally, the Mac is easier to use.  For non-techie students,
|this is a big plus.

  Yep. But a $500 PC system is also easy to use for Word processing,
and its much cheaper.  I don't think C= needs to worry about Apple.
I think Apple needs to worry about the NeXT. We have our niche
(multimedia), whereas the NeXT is a direct attack on DeskTop Publish
ing(Mac). What happens is remain to be seen.

|	---Todd
|
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|--
|Todd R. Johnson
|tj@cis.ohio-state.edu
|Laboratory for AI Research
|The Ohio State University


-- 
"NeXTs are useless... Mac's are irrelevent.. IBM's are futile. Amiga's,however,
are quite nice!" -Capt Jeal-Luc Amiga      |     Flames to /dev/null
Ray Cromwell   rjc@wookumz.ai.mit.edu      |   //     AMIGA!     \\
"Your software will adapt to service ours!"| \X/      AMIGA!      \X/