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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.
For someone who claims to hate Microsoft, that is a pretty bad idea. Linux is a fine alternative to Windows for geeks, but Mac OS is the only consumer OS that competes with Windows. Sure it only runs on Apple hardware, and it has tiny marketshare compared to MS, but at least it forces MS to keep improving Windows...
Not that linux doesn't/can't/won't, but Apple does a great service to x86 owners running Windows.
It's certainly true that on a slow news day (if any such thing ever afflicts /.) a good Apple-oriented flame war does wonders for the blood pressure. But both those silly AAPLtalk comparison charts and the (slashdotted) "rant" above deserve some credit for trying to shine some light into the darkness of "why do people care so much?"
Though this forum, populated as it is by many thousands of folks who go neither way in the Apple/MS debate, may not be the most sympathetic place to say it, there are big fat differences between Windows and the Mac OS.
The "MHz myth" and shitty GeForce drivers are part of what sets us apart, but the rationale of the rabid Mac user (I am one, I admit it) revolves around esthetics, both artistic and operational. I'm not talking only about pretty translucent plastic cases or sexy PowerBook curves - but the truth is, these things matter. Gaba's dismissal of the floppy's importance might ring hollow to some, but his awarding of points for the G4's easily-accessed interior is easily overlooked. Design issues have a strong bearing on how people interact with the machines that serve them - whether that relationship feels adversarial or cooperative depends on many small factors that, together, determine quality design.
Easy-access cases are just one of those; clean, uncluttered user interface, reliable hardware (something many people forget is how tough Apple products are), and genuinely useful, user-friendly bundled apps (iMovie, iDVD, iTunes) are all important parts of the Mac design ethic. You only needed to look at an issue of the Mercury News a few weeks ago to sum up the difference: Microsoft made headlines for, again, lobbying John Ashcroft to drop the Justice Department's historic antitrust suit; Apple became one of a handful of companies to begin recycling harmful computer components like mercury and boron.
It may sound simple, but it works for me: everywhere I look, whether at my computer screen, the business pages, or the aisles of a computer store, Apple products are better-designed and better-made. Dare I say, by better people? For a better world? It's easy to laugh, and then turn back to an unrecognizably ugly Windows interface that still reminds me of playing Boulderdash II on an EGA screen.
My means are as tight as anyone else's (more so, I sometimes think over my Ramen noodles), and the Apple premium's a bitch. But we are ever sub specie aeternitatis - and we must do what we can.
Although I believe the bake-offs are honest, I don't claim that the G4 is always as fast as the big boys, just that it is NOT as slow as its Mhz would otherwise suggest. I am quite sure, however, that it is a more efficient and flexible chip design. I would not ever want a laptop with any non-RISC kind of processor in it.
While iMacs cannot be upgraded (in the standard ways), I would say that Apple pro towers with their side opening doors, 4 full-length PCI slots plus AGP 4X, plus the fact that most drives and cards are mac compatible (often without driver voodoo hell), make upgrading even easier than on a PC equivalent.
Yes, you can build a very suitable PC for less than a grand. I don't think you would find it that easy to build one that really compared to an Apple G4 tower (think about the firewire, 1.5 Gb RAM support, Gigabit ethernet, DVD burning options, etc.).
Yup, the high end Apple machines tend to have high-end price margins on them. The same goes for Dell, Sony, HP, Compaq, IBM, or any other brand name manufacture you can think of.
When Thales was asked what was difficult, he said, "To know one's self." And what was easy, "To advise another."
There will always be rants by disgruntled former Mac users, about "What's wrong with Apple."
There will always be rants by the Apple-Ignorant, who don't understand why anyone would NOT want to use Windows. Or why you can only have one mouse button.
There will always be Mac Zealots who think, "If you aren't for us, you're against us." And then rave like lunatics against anyone who dares question them using logic and reason.
In the middle, there's Apple; a company that really seems to be holding a niche market by making good products that are pretty, get the basic jobs done, and are generally easy to use.
Who's right? Everyone. No one. I don't know, I just wish I could read about Apple without any sense of fanatacism coming into play.
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
... certainly hasn't brought the company back to the top of the heap. But Scott has clearly forgotten how things were before Jobs got there. Performa anyone?
The "Value" of computers.
Some people value their computers as gaming platforms, utilizing the latest Athlon processors and (obviously) reluctantly running windows OS. Polygon-power and compatability are the most valuable things to them.
Some people use them as simple web and word processing boxes. Any box will do, and so choice of Opera, Netscape, IE, KDE, OSX, OS9, Be, 98, NT, etc is purely an aesthetic choice, reflecting tradeoffs between simplicity, conformity, and access. To them, the Computer might as well be a television, and occupies an intimate, relaxing space in the mind where clutter is not acceptable.
Some people run servers, where Linux / Unix / BSD is essential. Some people restart servers, obvious NT users. Bandwidth, ram, requests per second are all valuable.
There are graphics professionals. Some use windows and some use the Macintosh. Many things that previously could only be done on the Mac can now be done under Windows, leveling the playfield quite a bit. Still, though, graphics professionals also appreciate the aesthetic qualities of the internals of the tools they use, and if anyone has opened their windows folder in the past 10 years they know just how unappealing it can be.
Then, of course, there is business or specialized software composed soley to run on a single platform. That user much is buying a system for a killer-ap, so anything that may optimize that (or reduce costs) is essential.
Finally, we have the pundits, ranters, and corporate iconographers who bask in the reflected glory of their chosen OS, and staunchly support it as a lifestyle representation. Their macs, windows PC's, Linux boxes, dusty old OS2 machines are symbols for other people to judge them by. It's distinctly possible that these are the people who say that coke is delicious and pepsi is undrinkable crap, but I haven't done any research into that connection. Scott "Damage" Wasson appears to fall into this category, though I cannot tell if he's a wintel pundit or a disgruntled mac pundit. We here all know that the evidence is in favor of the G4 and Athlon architectures and against the P4 marketing device, so why is this hardware guru ignorant on the subject if not either a sworn enemy or a lover scorned?
Computers have gotten to the point, thankfully, that the question of a single overarching "performance" measurement is irrelevant to most people. Most people have objectives, preferences, skills, and a budget. None of these rubrics have yet to take into account, for example, people's preferences for a quiet computer, or one that doesn't waste a lot of space. People want webcams, DSL, DVD / CDR drives, and big moniters. They want their particular cherished trackball or mouse to work, they want something that gets their work done, and they want it so that it doesn't become obsolete right away. I doubt anyone cares anymore if their cpu is 800 mhz or 900 mhz. Long gone is the day where that is the most important factor.
-Wintel machines would be great if it wasn't for the Win part.
The ______ Agenda
If that's what you want then buy it, but the typical mac user doesn't care. I've seen more and more people buy TiBooks than Dells recently, simply because of the "fashion statement". It's the reason why people go to Bannana Republic instead of Wal-Mart. I use both PC and Macs, I don't care about games, I just want a nice graphics editor, word processor, and browser. If I sit down at a computer I want to be able to use it. That's pretty much a preference. It's not about worth it's about choice. Don't forget, that the Mac has the same marketshare as Linux too.
m.kelley
life is like a freeway, if you don't look you could miss it.
Taking that to the logical conclusion: I'm confused by all of these buttons on my keyboard. The right choice is obviously to reduce them. I want just one big key. (It could say "Duh".)
Seriously, though: might a better approach be to label the two (or better, three) mouse buttons, just like keyboard keys?
Okay, sure, Apple has a great OS. But there are lots of people who, for reasons valid or not, want a Windows-based computer. But, as the iMac has demonstrated the last couple of years, there are also people who want a computer that just looks cool, and Apple can clearly deliver in that area.
Yeah, Dell and Compaq and other vendors have started making their own versions of cool-looking computers. They're okay, but I'm guessing the designers at Apple could build something that would blow them all away visually. It seems like it would be a good money-maker for Apple (and could help fund their non-Windows efforts), and Windows users could finally have a stylish-looking computer (on the outside, anyway).
Well, it's just a thought...
"Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!"
Hemos, please don't feed the trolls. God, let's see if we can take a look at this argument in a slightly more rational light.
Mac guy sez: Mhz don't matter. Look at my Photoshop benchmarks!
PC Guy sez: My 1.8 Gigahertz monster will crush your 866 Mhz weenie machine! Photoshop sucks.
I say: Apple has a point. If Mhz was everything, Sun would be sticking Pentium 4s in all of their boxes instead of sticking with their 900 Mhz UltraSPARC III. The G4 is an awesome processor, but for many functions raw Mhz will carry the day. If you're doing vector calcs all day then use a Mac, but for Linux I'll take a dual Athlon setup any day of the week.
Mac guy sez: My box is pretty! Your box is a boring beige bland POS.
PC guy sez: Your fruity colored box looks like a toy. Behold my case mods!
I say: A pretty case does not necessarily make for a better computer. Yes, the iMacs look like toys. On the other hand, what's wrong with having a good looking machine? The Cube was one of the most elegant computers in ages.
As always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. For christ sakes people, let's stop this nonsense and get back to arguing about Linux vs. Windows.
This
While it is true that most G4 to pentium bake-offs are done running photoshop filters, I don't think it is a particularly unfair test. After all, Photoshop really is the only standard application in existance that:
a) has the same version and capabilities for both the PC and the Mac, and:
b) can actually tax a current machine's processor.
Other eligible apps (ie: Office) fail on both these counts.
Dismissing "Multimedia" apps out of hand is naive. Almost all the CPU intensive work done today is digital video and audio, two tasks that the G4 design permits it to do rather well. There is hardly difference between using a 1.8 Ghz Pentium 4 and a 500 Mhz Pentium 3 when surfing the web or typing a paper in Word.
Check out the ArsTechnica take on G4e design compared to the Pentium 4.
btw: How come I don't see many touting that the 1.2 Ghz Athlon is some how lacking in ability when compared to the 1.8 Ghz Pentium 4?
When Thales was asked what was difficult, he said, "To know one's self." And what was easy, "To advise another."
The Mac will still continue to sell as long as it retains its appearance.
Speaking as an Amiga owner (though not a user anymore), I can say that Macs will sell as long as Apple stays in business to sell them.
I've met many Mac users who did not care that the performance was lower, they just liked the thing because it looked cool.
I've met zillions of Windo... er, make that ... Intel based PC users who didn't care that the machine they were using couldn't even run Windows 95. My next door neighbor finally replaced her old computer. A Mac classic.
I'd be surprised if as much as 15% of computer users care enough about their computer's performance if it means buying a new computer. That's just the way it is; I've learned it takes two or three generations of new computer hardware to come and obsolesce before most people even consider buying a new computer.
Well, it's not true that Macs run slowly; that's a sweeping generalization. It's not even true that the fastest Intel running Windows can run Photoshop faster than the fastest Mac.
Now that is the truth.
"Where's my other sock?" - A. Einstein
Is there somewhere he proves his point that I missed? Saying "That's dumb. Macs are slow, and people who like them suck." in various creative (?) ways doesn't amount to anything close to proof. Even if I can accept his rant as an "anti-proof" (which is impossible, of course) he doesn't even offer the alternative - that of course being some benchmarks that disprove the pro-Mac analysis.
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This is not the problem. The problem is that people expect a benchmark to make their decision for you. If they just went down to their local CompUSA and tried out the darned machine, found that it was sufficient for their needs, and felt the price was reasonable, instead of just looking for the best deal, you would get a lot more people happy with their machine cause they TRIED IT OUT, and cause they prolly found a slower machine would do just fine.
I hate the benchmark approach to purchasing a machine.
You've been hawking Adequacy pretty hard lately. Do you get kickbacks or payola?
Mac users will be confused by more than one mouse button. I mean, it's all these mouth-breathers can do not to try and speak into the mouse, or use it for a hockey game, or try to eat it and then sue Apple for including a piece of poisonous plastic in their product.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
This flamewar seems to show up every time someone makes a performance claim about the Macintosh. It's aggravated by the fact that the Macintosh doesn't run the SPEC benchmarks and no-one seems to be submitting SPEC results for similar PPC based systems.
From everything I've seen about the PowerPC architecture, back in the day (usually RS/6000 machines), PowerPC machines of a given generation ran a little faster than similar Intel-based machines running at the same clock speed. So, a 604e system at 450Mhz outperformed (slightly) a Intel-based system at 550Mhz.
Granted, SPEC benchmarks are hardly perfect, but they are a much, much better measure of overall CPU performance than a couple Photoshop filters.
Using one application (particularly Photoshop filters) is practically what is known as a "microbenchmark", particularly when it isn't necessarily a broadly chosen set of uses of Photoshop but a carefully culled set of highly optimized filter operations that are written in beautifully crafted PPC assembly. If you want to claim that your machine is better for designers, then you'd need to try an array of applications being used in plausible fashion, not a couple features out of a single application.
The amount of drivel posted about the miraculous ability of the PowerPC to get so much done per cycle is amazing. When the PPC chips get their maximum instruction level parallelism they're pretty damn good, but this doesn't happen much in real code. Yes, it has a shorter pipeline than the equivalent class of Pentium. Yes, the Pentium has to translate out of a ISA that is a total dog's breakfast. Nonetheless, in most comparisons, while the PPC gets more done per cycle, we're talking 1.2 or 1.3, not 2x or 3x. Remember that the performance of most real applications are determined chiefly by memory subsystems and cache speeds, not ILP trickery or branch-mispredict stalls.
If you want to buy a Mac, buy a Mac. They have decent performance and run a few applications (Photoshop, some video authoring tools) very well. They have an interface that many people find delightful. But spare us all the corrupt micro-benchmarking and utterly ignorant "armchair microarchitecture critic" gibberish. If you want to talk about that sort of thing, read Hennesy and Patterson and the last year of Microprocessor Report and hit the SPEC web site before sounding off, please!
I hate to break it to him, but clock frequencies are never a good indicator of overall processor performance when comparing against different processor families. There can be some truth to the claim that a G4 at a given MHz is faster than a P4 at the same MHz -- after all, when I took my Computer Architecture a few years back, the PPC 603 had a much shorter pipeline relative to the PPro, and from what I've read since then, nothing has changed in that respect.
However, that doesn't mean that I think the G4 really is faster now, even if Intel's push for more MHz is mostly about marketing. After all, back when I took that class, we all thought RISC chips would eat CISC chips for lunch because the simpler instruction core for RISC chips would let them be run faster. Meanwhile, Intel figured out a way to engineer themselves out of that hole (using a form of microcode on the Pentium Pro, if I remember correctly), while Motorola couldn't engineer itself out of a paper bag (with 500 MHz written on it) for quite a while, as he mentions.
Anyway, as a proud new iBook owner (and an NT and Solaris user at work), I don't care who is faster, as long as I can do what I need to do.
Everyone knows this debate has been beaten to death. Arguing one way or the other isn't going to change anyone's mind anyway.
The fact of the matter is that in today's market both Mac and Windows offer perfect solutions for 90% of consumers. Combine Microsoft Office with an email client and a web browser and you solve the needs of MOST people out there.
The pros and cons of each are quite minor. Speed differences matter little considering how fast most common tasks get done anyway, MacOS and Windows are equally easy to use and stability seems to depend on individual configurations, MacOS has higher quality in exchange for fewer options and higher prices, Windows has more software in exchange for lower average quality of software.
There are many INDIVIDUAL reasons to choose one platform over the other, but there is no clear superiority.
In the past I chose a PC because I wanted to play more games and have an easier time programming. More recently I choose a Mac for BBEdit and Mac OS X.
In short, I think the best thing is to have both, or at least use both, and make an informed decision for yourself. Rants like the one posted are just ignorant and pointless.
I had a blast on the MacNN forums pointing out all the flaws in the guys scoring formula. No matter WHAT systems were compared, he rigs the scoring so the Mac always wins. Example: he compares the iMac ($900-$1200) to Dell's cheapest offering and declares the iMac the winner. Would he have claimed the same results had he compared it to Dell's Pentium IV 8100, which can be had for under $1000? That Dell destroys the iMac, which is probably why he didn't mention it.
Likewise, in his "$2500 tower shootout", the G4 has similar components to the Dell. Yet when I configure the Dell using their website, it's $1899! If I jacked it up to $2500, I get double the memory of the G4, bigger hard drive, GeForce3, two optical drives, etc. Yet he can't seem to configure the same system on his end, even after I sent him a URL containing the shopping cart!
Other errors: earlier iterations of his charts claimed "each PC loses a PCI slot, because you have to add a USB card to make them equivalent to the Mac". Bull SHIT. Every PC has USB on the motherboard. He knows it's wrong, and prints it anyway.
I could go on and on... the whole 'comparison' is such a joke, it's not even worth ranting over. I believe in honest comparisons - this one is not, and is no better than those created by PC people that slam the Mac without knowing the facts. Pure FUD.
No, it doesn't, because on every one of his charts, he always compares the best mac you can buy for the money against a PC that is NOT the best PC you can buy for the money.
I've sent the guy email about this, on several occasions even customizing a system at Dell.com, noting the price, and sending him a link to the shopping cart. He doesn't care about making it accurate.
If the G4 in the comparison is "equal" to the Dell using his scoring system, how well would it hold up if you ACTUALLY COMPARED the best Dell system you could buy for the same price? Not very well, I imagine, since that Dell would have double the memory, bigger hard drive, GeForce3, and 2 optical drives for the same price. (And yes, that's accurate, anyone can go to Dell.com and configure an 8100 in their home store).
This, and similar items have been pointed out to the chartmaker multiple times, he doesn't care. He is not concerned with accuracy, only with propping up the mac.
I'm frustrated that, in price/performance comparisons, no one brings up a Mac's benefit to video production professionals. Today's G4 with SuperDrive, Final Cut Pro, and DVD Studio Pro costs about $90,000 less than the comparable solution in recent history. These are the people Apple's really shooting for, and Apple's pleasing them.
A few months ago my sister, who's in grad school, finally broke down and bought her first computer. She got an iMac. When it came she called me up at work to have me talk her through setting it up. Here's how the conversation went:
SISTER: Okay, I got it out of the box. So how do I...? Oh never mind, I see.
ME: ...
SISTER: Oh, now it wants... Oh, okay. And... Okay, it wants the phone number to dial the internet. Do I just put in the number the university gave me?
ME: Yes.
SISTER: Okay, oh... And now... Oh, I see. Okay. It's working! Did you get my email?
ME: Yes.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
And what does matter is an endless number of posts trying to decide just how wrong the k5 FAQ is, how evil Christians are, and general wanking about how stupid Americans are from the viewpoint of people who have never been to America, or even met an American.
Oh, and k5'ers are highly intolerant of spamming. Of course, regular k5'ers would never spam other sites about k5...um, nevermind.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.