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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.
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.
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.
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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."
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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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.
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