Mac Rants

There's a piece by Scott Wasson regarding the claims of Apple, of late, and his...feelings on it. It's a pretty ranty piece, as he says in the beginning, but it's a good discussion starting piece - even tho' I disagree with him to a degree.

Comments

Yadda, yadda, yadda...

[Powercntrl]

I primarially use PCs, but recently obtained a second-hand iMac (Rev C. 266MHz G3, 6GB, 32MB RAM) to get familar with the platform and possibly port some of my Windows programs I've written to it. First thing to go was that stupid urinal puck mouse, I replaced it with a USB trackman marble.

Opinions about Windows aside, 98lite runs at acceptable speeds in 32MB of RAM. Sure, RAM is cheap, so there really is no excuse to have *that* little amount of RAM... On the Mac however, 32MB with OS 8.6 is unusable. With virtual memory disabled, you get "Out of memory" messages left and right - with it turned on, the system swaps, and swaps, and SWAPS. Yuck. Okay, time to buy more RAM.

The system didn't seem terribly stable for web browsing... Browsing the web with the latest IE or Netscape would frequently crash every few hours or so, Force quit almost never worked, usually it just brought up the dialog box and left the system in a frozen state. Overall, MacOS 8.6 seems roughly as stable as Windows 3.1. I hope OS X is a lot better.

Performence widely varied with the task being performed. Forget about good performence Divx ;) playback, cause "it ain't happenin' mon!" While even on a measily PII 233MHz you can play MP3s in the background with Winamp with no skipping or noticable performence hit, the iMac's MP3 playback via Quicktime skipped and slowed the system to a crawl. Yuck. As expected, Photoshop was fast and stable. Connectix virtual game station (PSX Emulator) ran at roughly the speed the PC version does on a PII 350MHz... Not bad, not bad at all. SNES9X seems to perform better than the PII 233MHz, but not as good as the PII 350MHz. Shockwave web animations seemed sluggish, but no worse than the PII 233MHz. Web pages seemed to render much faster on the PII 233MHz, though. So much for the Mac as a browsing platform.

Overall, this wasn't a bad system... Not cutting edge, but at least as useful as my low end PII PCs. Well, it *was*... Then it got an Invalid PEOF error after an application crash and refuses to boot from the hard drive unless I reinitalize and reinstall. I can boot from a MacOS CD, but it refuses to let me eject it so I can insert one with Norton on it. If the damn thing only had a floppy drive... Eventually, I'll get around to buying a bootable Diskwarrior CD so I can get the damn thing working again without reformatting.

All things considered, it has been a nice learning experience; however, PCs are still my platform of choice.

you're a little behind the times.

[saintlupus]

(hardware that, except for VirtualPC and Linux, has NO alternative operating systems), because of Windows licensing costs? "Nazism?" I'm not Windows fan, but what kind of logic is that? You don't even have third party choice of hardware for the Mac, let alone software diversity.

current apple hardware will run linux, netbsd, openbsd, darwin, os x, and os 9. older apple hardware will also run things like beos, a/ux, developer releases of rhapsody and copland, etc. so you're wrong on that point.

as for third party hardware, its true that apple produces all the full systems. but i've got a ton of third party hardware in my machines, ranging from IBM drives to no-name PCI cards for USB and ethernet.

try looking at some reasonably recent statistics before you make sweeping claims, eh?

(incidentally, this whole "story" is flamebait shite, in my ever humble opinion.)

--saint

Submit it to K5

[wiredog]

Really, we like that kind of stuff at K5. And, while you're there, check out Bubba.

trying to be objective

[tbone1]

Okay, I'll admit, I'm a bit biased towards the Mac. I bought my first one at a time when you still had to pay M$ for the Windows license whether you had Windows or not. I'm a capitalist, but that struck me as being closer to Naziism. So I got a Mac and didn't look back.

I read the rant, big whoop. He's citing a comparison by someone I've spoken to on a Mac forum from time to time. The point of his comparisons (he's done several) is not that the Macintosh will solve world hunger or anything. He was trying to debunk the myth that Macs are expensive in a bang-for-your-buck method. In other words, he tried tricking out systems from various windows OEMs and Apple's online store, compared prices, and guess what? The Mac came out even and sometimes ahead of the others.

This, apparently, caused an uninformed rant that /.'s dieties decided was newsworthy. Boy, this place has gotten so far downhill I may have to turn to NFL Fantasy League boards for higher levels of erudition and intellectual stimulation.

Re:At the risk of pissing off... well... everybody

[raju1kabir]

They're okay, but I'm guessing the designers at Apple could build something that would blow them all away visually.

My Macs are under my desks; I don't particularly care how they look.

Where I see the elegance is on the screen, and selling Windows machines won't help with that.

For instance, all the Photoshop benchmarks in the world can't explain why I vastly prefer the Mac for Photoshop: The mouse movement is much more smooth and natural. I can't do any fine-detail work with a mouse in Windows (as an experiment, try moving the mouse pointer in a little circle repeatedly as fast as possible with both machines. On the Windows machine, if your hand is anything like mine, the circle tracks across the screen and takes on a NW-SE ovoid shape). Worse still, when you have the mouse speed/acceleration set to any reasonable levels on Windows, it actually SKIPS PIXELS even when you're moving it as slowly as possible. So you end up having to zoom way all the time to get things done.

And don't even get me started on fonts, default locations for open/save dialogs, etc.