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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.
Well, if the value metric is how well your computer complements a black turtleneck sweater, then a Mac has to win hands down. :-)
I swear that I must be the only one that remembers the days of impenatrable Mac cases. the whole point of the apple case design way back when was to make it so the end user wouldn't be able to easily get into it. they wanted you to go to a certified apple repair tech (like I was at the time.) the really, really old macs required torx with 12" shafts to get open without breaking or forcing anything. anyone else remember those days? of slowly removing the power supplies just so you could add memory? what a pain.
Sometimes I think everyone forgets that apple's "easy access" case design is a complete about face from their previous efforts. I don't always think pulling a 180 is good, since that means you were going half-assed to start with.
that, and from an old crusty apple tech... pretty cases do not a powerful impressive machine make (apple OR x86.)
EOM
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.
> tomorrow zdnet stories will be posted ad nausem
Not exactly, they'll somehow manage to mispell a few words and probably give an unsupported opinion
as well.
Don't read this sig cause it's not worth it.
Read the parent again. He's saying that Apple will have cause to worry when x86 boxes can do it. Which, incidentally, they can, if you're willing to buy some pretty expensive hardware.
Did you read the GNOME usability study posted here a while ago? Average users, even after years of computer use, still have lots of trouble with two button mice. Not including one is still the right choice -- if you want one, go buy any USB mouse and plug it in. OS X has native support for multi-button mice, and even scroll wheels, although that's a bit incomplete and buggy still.
As for games, OS X has Quake 3, Alice, The Sims, Tony Hawk 2, and a bunch of other stuff. Not bad for a 4 month old OS.
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NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
In my case, it has to do with what I do with computers.. Being that I develop web applications, I'd typically have a Linux box, which I do my development on, a Windows box, mostly for testing browsers, and a Mac box, for Photoshop and the like.. Admittedly, I could use Photoshop in Windows, but it's a matter of preference. Additionally, I do DV in my spare time, so Firewire is a must. And then there's the problem of portability.. I can't be carrying 3 machines around with me all the time, laptop or not, and reducing it to 2 by using VMWare is not something I want to do.
So, with all those things in mind, the perfect platform for me ends up being MacOS X. I get to use all the unix tools I'm used to (in a better GUI), I have IE, Netscape and Mozilla all in the same box, and I have Photoshop and all my DV tools. Throw that into a tiny notebook (the iBook) along with Airport, and I have a pretty kick-ass all-in-one solution.
The value of a computer depends on an individual's needs.. It just so happens that a typical user can get everything he or she wants in a cheap PC (albeit less aesthetically pleasing), for less than your average Mac.
Sure. Dnetc. I believe that has been heavily optimized for this P4 here at work (at least, according to the changelogs).
And this beautiful 1.7GHz P4 does around 2.6Mkeys/s. My 400MHz G4 at home does 3.6Mkeys/s.
That give you a nice benchmark?
ls:
(A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore?
-- John Carmack (2001-06-04)
-jfedor
What will happen if we flame macs out of existance so that MS is able to pick up its megar market share? To the common user, Macs have a high market share to Linux (I believe this is true, mod me down if I'm wrong.. I have no data), and so MS will effectively have the entire monopoly. This will screw linux users because then new hardware will be even more MS (read not=Linux) friendly. (ie, Plug and Play, winmodems)
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It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
To what degree do you disagree with Damage? His argument against the article he references is pretty convincing. The "Decision Matrix" the guy uses in the original article is full of mistakes and far from an objective comparison of Macs vs. PCs. The original article's author is also one of those people who *still insist* the G4 is faster than the Pentium 4 (and he conveniently "forgets" about the Athlon!) Damage calls the guy to the carpet over these things, and it's hard to find holes in what he says.
So, how do you disagree with him?
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
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."
I'd have to argue on your definition of 'web development'. Personally, as someone whom uses no flash or other animation type stuff on my web sites, I prefer to stick with either using BBEdit for the Mac, or as the need arises, vi.
For graphics, I stick with Photoshop, again, on the Mac side.
That's not to say, however, that I don't check all of my sites in Netscape & IE for both Mac & Windows.
I have no idea what macromedia did wrong [it may be writing non-thread-happy code, as they're handled a little differently between macos and windows, which was why so many java programs ran like shit on a mac]. However, to say that all web development on a wintel box is better than a Mac is a great disservice to those of us whom don't use point-and-click interfaces for web page creation.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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?
People have been picking cars for years differentiating between power, features, styling, and cost.
I think they can do the same for PCs.
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
Two types of administrators will be coming to ten. The Mac weenie, and the Unix weenie. The mac weenie will enjoy his GUI tools. A portion of the Mac weenies will think "Wow this my oppurtunity to learn some Unix." The other portion will sit their and bitch and wine. The portion that does not bitch and whine will learn shell, perl, and python. And learn that they know have a OS with a GUI that Grandma likes. And the ability to write a python script that can run as a cron job and fix her computer every night. The Unix weenies will rejoice at having Unix and MS Office on the same computer, and push Apple to include features found in other Unix's. These two groups will meet up at a weenie roast, and the Mac users will be telling the Unix users of all these great features that Darwin has, and the Unix people will simply respond with a resounding "DUH, where have you been!!!" PS. All VMS weenies will still be pissed off after the weenie roast.
Then the curious statement is made that the G4 is faster than Pentium 4 despite the slow clock speed because the G4 RISC instructions do more per cycle. Clearly the several people who made the statement would fail their comp arch course.
Well, I don't see any IA32 instruction while will multiply two floating-point registers, add a third register to the result, and then store the whole thing into a fourth register. PowerPC's been doing that forever. Seriously, translate some moderate FP maths into IA32 and PPC assembly, and you'll surely see that the "CISC" IA32 code has a lot more instructions to perform..
Don't even get me started on how much Altivec spanks MMX, 3DNow and SSE..
So before you make a blanket condemnation of the claim that a G4 does more per cycle, please do keep in mind that the "complex" part of the IA32's CISC architecture is the number of stupid, deprecated instructions that nobody ever uses anymore..
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.
;) 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.
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
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.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
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
This is silly.
Apple uses the PPC architecture.
IBM uses the PPC architecture in their RS/6000 and AS/400 boxen.
IBM even provides some of the PPC chips to Apple for their boxen.
If you've ever considered serving with AIX, OS/400, or Linux running as a virtual server under OS/400, then there ought to be nothing wrong with buying a commodity box from Apple and serving with Darwin / OS X.
Yes, the photoshop benchmark gets dragged out against windows, because it's a real world use.
I wonder what you -one-mouse-button haters would say to an AS/400-RS/6000-G4-dual athlon bake off.
Having covered Apple and the Macintosh community with a top-three visited Macintosh resource site and run my own Mac OS X site, I find it silly that the inference is that this discussion doesn't take place every single day.
Discussions amongst people who find Mac vs. Windows, RISC vs. CISC, Apple vs. anyone else cuz Apple sux, or any of these types of completely "to your own taste" topics are really sad when they are cast as "a good discussion starting piece" when the starting point is years in the past, and the journey has been beaten to death.
The G4 vs. Pentium tests are not for /.ers, and you all know that to be true - they are for the Mac zealots (zealot, n. - one who engages warmly in any cause, and pursues his object with earnestness and ardor) and for such magazines as PC Magazine where Apple efforts to keep its moderate mindshare by using the trade show equivalent of the "bully pulpit."
When "[Adobe Photoshop 6 is] an application highly optimized for the G4 and known to have problems on the Pentium 4" is used against the G4 and its apparent ease of exploitation and quality of performance at particular clock speeds and the article gets /.'d, it makes me wonder how low the individual requirements of objectivity and lack of bias have shrunk amongst the "digital learned"...
I was thinking of getting a Mac, but it is hard to find a decent mother board, CPU that I can buy off the self... Any suggestions?
I want to build it myself (hobby of mine), but pricewatch.com doesn't list any parts. Can I get some pointers on where to look for Mac parts? Do PowerPC motherboard fit in standard ATX cases? If not, any links to Mac cases I can get?
Thanks.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
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.
(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.)
--saintTaking 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?
Really, we like that kind of stuff at K5. And, while you're there, check out Bubba.
Best Slashdot Co
Take it as you will, but although this is a problem for some, it's a blessing for others.
Yes, as there aren't as many people developing hardware for the Mac, there's a less competition, and there were higher prices. But they're not using NuBus and ADB anymore, so you can make use of PCI, USB and FireWire/iLink devices, if you so choose.
Hard drives have come down significantly as they've switched to UDMA, which many of the mac purists are still pissed off at, as they don't do tagged queuing, so there's inheriently more contention for disk I/O when doing multiple tasks. But you still can't get a machine with no hard drive, and put in one of your own.
Is this a bad thing? Well, for the sake of people who want to put in some drive that apple doesn't sell, yes. For those people who already have a nice drive that they want to move into the new machine, yes. However, in exchange, you get a hard drive with the software preloaded [okay, not a big deal], but more importantly, it's been tested. You're not going to get a DOA HD.
Memory's a similar issue. Yes, Apple charges too much for memory, but it's pre-tested, so you don't have that 'My machine came in, but I have to wait 3 more days for my new memory to come in' problems.
With the restrictions on hardware, there's better testing for interoperability. Personally, I wish I never had to learn what an IRQ was. For those who've always been Mac users, and never strayed, they've never had to worry about 'em. In all my years as a mac user, I've only had one piece of mac hardware that I ever had problems with. [NuBus video card for a Radius Color Pivot...had to get a new ROM when I went to MacOS7] I've lost count of wierd wintel interactions I've had. [eg, modem cards that just 'don't support' IRQ 4 when used in combination with a certain kind of video card, and other crap like that].
With every new piece of Mac hardware I've bought, I've plugged it in, and it's worked out of the box. And the simple reason is, that Apple's not as open with their hardware development.
I'd also argue your comment on 'It took them ages to finally put several expansion slots in their boxes', as anything since the MacII line [1987], other than the 'all in one' style boxes had expansion slots. Many of the 'all in one' boxes had expansion slots, but they couldn't be accessed easily, however, those boxes were intended for a drastically different market.
Not every item in the world, even computers, were designed for you. If that were the case, we'd all be driving the same sort of car to our same sized house, so we could watch the same TV while sitting on the same style couch. What's a problem to you may be a benfit to others, and visa-versa. [And yes, it still pisses me off when I'd let someone drive my car, and they'd completely deflate the lumbar support]
[And for those wondering what I use at home... a wintel box... because I play games, and try as much as possible not to do work from home these days. I do have 5 pre-1995 macs that make decent terminals, but they were taken down to make space for game machines]
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
i cant believe this actually got posted on /.
the ranter is unhappy with some irrelevant, biased, uninformed articles, and counters with an irrelevant, biased, uninformed article of his own. newsflash: the web is full of irrelevant, biased, uninformed articles. why are we posting scriptkiddie flamewars on /.?
apples official position is here. there is nothing wrong with it. as they point out at expos, they use photoshop benchmarks because it is the app their customers use most (they actually use real jobs their customers have done, like movie posters, etc).
as anyone who knows anything about benchmarks can tell you (hopefully all of /.) different benchmarks tell you different things. use the benchmark that applies to your job/situation. yes, the g4 is much faster at floating point. yes, the pentium runs office apps much faster. whoop-de-doo. whats new here?
i will leave all the inaccuracies of the article to other posters (no, photoshop /is/ optimized for sse)
the animal doesnt even have opposable thumbs, focker!
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!"
There are always problems when comparing apples to oranges, like what always happens in the computing world. Hell, they were having discussions much like this back when the transition from 486 to Pentium was going on. A fast 486 (which was probably cheaper) was faster than a slow Pentium. You can't even compare Athlons to Pentium III or IV chips very easily.
I'd be happy to get a PowerPC system in certain situations, though. It's generally considered to be a cleaner architecture. PPC systems aren't restricted to less than 15 interrupts like Intel systems. They make good laptops, if you only need one mouse button..
My problem has always been that Apple doesn't like to let other people inside their boxes. It took them ages to finally put several expansion slots in their boxes.
I doubt that I'll ever go out and buy a pre-built `consumer' desktop system. I will probably always go from parts. If I want to do that with Apple hardware, I think Steve Jobs will have to keel over first.
The OS X version of Giants is using Cocoa's MP-aware multithreading on Tim Wood's dual-processor Mac. Good point about the GF3, but I don't find it hard to believe that Giants is also processor-bound. Elsewhere in the article he describes the Athlon running at 20fps.
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."
But, the mousewheel works fine on my mac. What are you talking about? Works fine in Q3A, actually.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
Apple is beginning to support two-button mice. Read this article. Or, copy and paste:
, 00.html
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,39773
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.
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
You may have a point there. The Windows machines (running 98) mostly have 64M. My Mac has 128, though I invariably have PhotoShop, QuarkXPress, FreeHand, Distiller, Acrobat, Outlook Express, IE, and NiftyTelnet open.
Though 98 is cleverer about virtual memory than OS9 (what isn't?) so one would expect better results.
The PS files are in the 20+M range (lots of TIFFs, though what really seems to slow it down on the Windows side is documents with large numbers of fonts.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
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
I have never seen a post that even compares to this article in the flame bait arena.
Everyone knows that the only Good Endian is a Dead Endian!
The Mac Team's machines run our game noticably slower than the guys running hard-hitting Athlons, but I have a (dual) 800Mhz P3, and the G4 450's seem to keep pace with it reasonably on our game builds.
One thing I will say it this: the Mac GUI feels faster to me than the Explorer Shell on Win2K...
Must be a really slow news day.
What next? Big endian vs. little endian? Vi vs. Emacs?
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.
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
I use my linux box quite a lot, since I'm a student of computer science and wannabe developer. The free tools are there, and they work well. I also have Visual Studio on my windows machine, but I'm not much of an end user application developer. I also serve some webpages off my dsl, and like to do geeky things... the linux box is great for that
I use my windows machine to play games. It also has the software support for my TV tuner and DVD player, and thus it is used as somewhat of an entertainment unit in my bedroom. However, things like web browsing and general computing (IE, word processing), are more a matter of OS taste and 1.4GHz vs 500MHz really doesn't make a noticable difference.
The Mac is great for photoshop, flash... all those creative things. That's what people buy macs for. Those who are buying the top of the line G4 are the professionals who spend most of their time in apps like photoshop and use a lot of filters. Joe User is just gonna web surf and word process, and the only useful comparison in that area between the 500Mhz iMac and the Gig+ PC is just a matter of OS preference.
This story was just flamebait, pure and simple. People should spend less time ranting about what platform is faster, and just pick a computer that fits their needs.
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
Obviously there are some games for the Mac. But as a multi-platform game-lovin' guy myself it is crystal clear that Windoze is the superior game platform. You can play Civ II until the cows come home; you'll also be missing out on MOST of the new releases.
I use my Mac for webdev and desktop publishing, for which purpose it puts Windoze to shame. But you aren't going to win any game arguments by trotting out Civ II and Quake. Please, from one Mac user to another, concede this one. PCs have more games to choose from. Period. (And the MacOS doesn't have native mousewheel support, which makes FPS games blow!)
At least you can play X-COM in Virtual PC.
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.
Has somebody actually sat down and benchmarked a piece of code that was FULLY OPTIMIZED FOR SSE2 versus a piece of code that was FULLY OPTIMIZED FOR ALTIVEC? Not to my knowledge. Sure, altivec optimized versus stock x6 (i.e. maybe optimized for PPro, if they're using VC++6) Until that happens, you're making shit up.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Are you aware that a Mac can already render MPEG-2 video in real time? Steve demonstrated it in iDVD 2 at Macworld.
I agree that it is difficult to measure all the features of such different platforms, but the pointsystem he uses is totally screwed.
Example: The Apple-box gets 2 points for 2MB L3 cache, but the pentium-boxes only get 0.5 point extra for 400MHz System Bus against Apples 133MHz. What is the need of L3 cache when you have a such fast system?
And that he gives points for both hardware and software in the same test isn't quite the way to do it. He gives points in the range 5,5-7,5 for major software included, while giving 2,5-3,0 points for the size of the harddisk.
Those things aren't exactly in the same area. He should rather have done to test, a hardware, and a software. But nowadays, what software you can run on the computer is less important, because you can do what you want no most computers today anyway. So I would say that hardware alone is a better method of comparision.
Though, in the earlier days, the major problems with running different architectures and platforms, was that you didn't have the same programs, they were quite incompatible with eachother, and there was major differences in performance in similar programs.
I know I bought a Mac because it looked good and felt good, and that has no bearing on MHz or performance.
That is a much better argument to buy a Mac, than because "it is better (because I read it in a test...)" :)
"The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages." - Tao of Programming
This is probably a bit off-topic, but how does a story like this (someone ranting about Mac) get posted, and the article I submitted last week about PCI 3.0 (only the future of next-generation I/O for PC's) doesn't get posted? I believe the gods of priority for "News for Nerds" and "Stuff that matters" have sold out. Sorry for the additional rant, but it is a bit frustrating to be reading something completely and totally useless where something more useful and informative should belong.
Anyway, rather than running comparisons of emulated vs native code, why not something like Python, Java, or Perl benchmarks, on the assumption that none of those languages are native, all of them are widely available, and most of them are very utilitarian/useful?
GPL Deconstructed
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!
Oh yeah! That's SO much more intuitive.
Um, so you click to get the regular action, and ctrl-click to get the other actions, except when you hit the apple key, or both, or double click, but only in these revisions of the OS...
I'm amazed that Mac users are proud of using a platform that was crippled for the slowest potential users.
I've *NEVER*, and I've done tech support, met anyone who was unable to learn the concept of the right button. You just tell them that if they click on something with it, they'll get a different set of actions.
They may view this as a bit magical, and not note the pattern of which icons give which options, and in which cases, but they'll know it's there and when they're looking around, they'll remember to use it. If you're looking for a teaching tool, use Minesweeper, most people have played it, and they'll understand how you left-click to open a square and right-click to mark a mine. Tell them that the right button performs other actions like that in various places around the OS.
Sure, they may not understand it from the beginning, but if you take someone who's never used a computer, it's the smallest of the issues.
A guy writes a propaganda chart, saying an L3 cache is four times as important as a floppy drive, and other dubious, yet totally subjective claims. He says, "If you don't like my results, come up with your own chart. YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY."
./ and they put it up saying that the 'some guy' is flaming the outrageous claims of Apple.
/. actually thinks someone flaming Apple is newsworthy, and the utter lack of investigation, in thinking the referenced piece is a flame against Apple, and not some other guy's homegrown opinion.
Then, some other guy writes a piece saying how wrong he feels this post is.
Then some third guy (Hemos) posts the 'story' to
The only thing newsworthy about this article is that
Get a grip. There's plenty of cloning stories to post about before we let drivel like this make it to the top of the page.
Kevin Fox
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.
The rant lays out a good question, then. What do you use to gauge value if not Photoshop benchmarks and CPU MHz?
My first intuitive guess would have to be dollars, but then people have the unfortunate habit of trying to get the absolute damn cheapest product out there, which does nothing for quality and performance.
We would need a value per dollar metric to compare systems, then. What value?
Features? That gets hard to compare, as different people value different options, and some people don't even know what features they value until they grow into the system.
Then there is the hard to even see metric, quality . Fit, finish, durability, ease of use, etc. Short of using a system for a couple of days, most laptops/PCs are superficially the same, until you need to open the box, swap video cards, add a new hard drive, etc.
Performance? At least you can use time as a measure, but what would you be measuring with time? Photoshop? Office? It would be twisted, but how about comparing a Windows benchmark running under Virtual PC vs a Windows benchmark on a Windows machine? Given that the virtualization would take a performance hit, you could apply some scalar or multiplier to try to normalize the scores.
I dunno. I know I bought a Mac because it looked good and felt good, and that has no bearing on MHz or performance.
GPL Deconstructed
With respect to processor speed, faster is better and necessary, as always, is a myth. I run a 400 MHz G4. At my last job I ran a 600 MHz or so Pentium. MS office on both machines ran about the same. Netscape on both machines ran about the same. SETI@Home ran faster on the G4. For most of my purposes, the platforms are to close to call. The clock speed for Windows machines needs to be fast not only for hardware reasons, but because MS, unlike Apple, has a tendency to shamelessly waste cycles.
The same is true for hard disk space. By current standards I have a very small hard disk on my G4, around 9 GB. With MacOS 9 and a very full compliment of programs and data loaded, including Virtual PC, and 640-MB virtual disk, I still have 3 GB left. Again, MS like to waste space, so a machine that runs windows needs a larger hard disk.
I may get a Windows machine if I use it regularly. The hectic upgrade and patch schedule has kept from acquiring one in the past. Likewise, I need to get a *nix machine up and running again. I just haven't had the spare hardware. Until then, my trusty G4 will serve and protect me for the evil empire. It costs more, but what can you do.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Trying to declare that your machine isn't really slower isn't very productive, even if it's true. First, it isn't something most users will ever hear about, or understand. Second, it's just far too easy to rig the game in your favor, so performance claims by either side become pretty worthless. But third, and most importantly, performance just doesn't matter anymore to the vast majority of users. Everything out there is more than fast enough. Nobody (almost) buys a car based on top speed; most people don't even buy based on engine power -- people buy cars based on design, comfort, handling, safety, gas mileage, extra features, etc.
Apple clearly wants people to buy computers the same way. The great industrial design and things like iMovie, iTunes and OS X, with its stunning user interface, make this clear. Apple wants people to buy based on user experience, and on what they, as non-geeks, can do with their computers. Sure, it's possible to edit digital video on a Wintel machine. But is it as easy as iMovie? The capability is worthless to an average user if it's too difficult to use.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
PC Guy sez: My 1.8 Gigahertz monster will crush your 866 Mhz weenie machine! Photoshop sucks.
:)
What does the PC Guy say about the dual G4/800?
PC guy sez: Your fruity colored box looks like a toy. Behold my case mods!
The stuff isn't so fruity at the moment -- take a look at the Ti PowerBook, the new G4 tower, and the iBook. These things are just flat out sleek. Only the iMac is colored at the moment. Of course, this will all change eventually.
Yes, I realize this was all in fun.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
K5 has it's problems, but so does slashdot. It's not like one site is unquestionably better than the other.
It is not a bad thing when someone hits a group right bang smack between the eyes with the facts causing them to gibber impotently as their ideological sacred cows are slaughtered.
McWeeniedom is much like membership of Scientology they take all your money and give you something in return that only members of the cult call 'advanced technology'.
The laughable comparison chart is as ridiculous as the folk flaming "go do Comp Arc. 101 and learn about the difference between CISC and RISC". Then the curious statement is made that the G4 is faster than Pentium 4 despite the slow clock speed because the G4 RISC instructions do more per cycle. Clearly the several people who made the statement would fail their comp arch course. The RISC strategy was to reduce the complexity of individual instructions, specifically avoiding the type of complex instructions that cause pipeline faults. The other part of RISC was to simplify design to allow faster to market exploitation of the latest Fab.
In short to defend the G4 the traditional RISC/CISC argument is turned back to front. You go to RISC architecture because it allows you to push for higher clock speeds faster.
There are plenty of good benchmarks around. SPECMarks, CERN Units, MFlops, etc. and most of them are cross platform. Any benchmark that fixes on a particular piece of code that was hand coded in assembler for one platform is utterly bogus.
The biggest flaw in the article however is that the majority of the marks are given for allowing the user to select their own configuration. The whole point about the PC is that you get to choose exactly the configurtation and price point you want.
So scoring 1 point for a crappy Iomega Zip drive I would never use is beside the point. Anyone who wants to pay Iomega for their overpriced faulty trash can do so. Compact Flash is rapidly approaching the cost of ZIP disks, is smaller, more reliable and has capacities up to 1Gb.
Other folk have pointed to the bogosity of giving the Apple 2 points for L3 cach and the PCs 0.5 points for a 400MHz system bus. But the fundamental error is that the processor ratings are on the basis of benchmarks that test the whole system but are then applied to the processor alone. So on the basis that an Apple was found to be equivalent to last years model of PC on a dubious benchmark the Apple gets 12.5 points and the PCs get 10.5 or less.
The 802.11B scores are also bogus, to enable the apple you need to buy an extra card, to enable the PC you need to get an extra card. The only difference is that only Apple can supply the card for the G4.
The stupidest of all is the 'virus' line. The only reason that the Mac has not been plagued is that the population of Macs is too low to allow contagion to spread. If the Mac ever became popular again it would be slaughtered. All this reflects is the fact that virsu writers have abandoned the Mac along with almost every other software maker. If you really want to be guaranteed Virus free go run Open Genera or Multics.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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.
This is why PPCs do well at photoshop- heavy number crunching on moderate numbers of variables many of which can just sit in registers, unlike x86 that screams 10x as fast but spends most of the time twiddling its architecture >:)
This is not entirely correct. IBM for the most part uses POWER processors in the pSeries and iSeries machines. The POWER line is a direct descendant from the arch that spawned the PPC. The processors used in these boxes are 64-bit implementations of the ISA and for the most part are a LOT faster than the PPC's that Apple sells. These machines have numbers listed on the spec.org (the only benchmark organization who's sole goal is to provide a cross platform level playing field) page. You would do well to
look at SpecINT/SpecFP if your interested in processor bound workstation type system loads.
I don't really know why this needs to be an argument, though. It is really good to have variance in the industry. If we were all running the same OS and processor and software, worms like Code Red would have the potential to take out the whole internet. (don't get me started...)
Let's let the Mac folks be Mac folks. If they say their stuff is faster, who cares? There's no point in getting upset. It's not as if you actually designed the Athlon processor, and need to feel offended that someone says their potentially inferior favorite chip is better than the one you poured your heart and soul into designing. All you did was read Tom's Hardware Guide or Ars Technica. Every side has its own propaganda, and it's easy to convince someone of anything.
Tell them that you'll believe it when you do benchmarks on your own apps. Use the standard compilers and see which one wins. Until then, speculation is only wasting all of our time!
They DID try to beat Apple at their own game. Well, um, some of them like Daewoo tried to outright copy Apple's game and stick a PC inside of it, but there were some PC makers who did try to come up with striking new designs etc. The trouble was, they were stupid clumsy ugly designs that sucked, and they failed horribly :)
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.
K5 doesn't nearly have enough linux news, linux advocacy, first posts, hot grits, and Jon Katz. And everyone knows that's all that matters.
Could someone honestly complement another person by saying "Right on the money Weasel Boy!!"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Come adding up dozens of subjective measurements does not make you objective. Those numbers are totally arbitrary. And the machines come out almost the same in the end. Tweak any one of the measurements and you could have any box you want 'win' by a large margin.
It doesn't, and shouldn't, convince anyone who isn't already convinced.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
No! That's what started this whole - rather pointless - argument. Photoshop is not representative. Didn't Adobe and Apple work closely so that Photoshop could handle multi processors even when the OS as a whole couldn't? Doesn't this indicate that Adobe and Apple have a legitimate business reason to work together closely to ensure that Photoshop is highly optimized for the Mac?
I'm betting that if Adobe released its Mac and Windows user demographics you'd find that a much smaller percentage of windows Photoshop users are power users who regularly rotate 10 megapixel images .3 degrees. They are spending money on the resources who do that sort of tuning where those resources will do the company the most good - on the Mac where the high end Photoshop users are. If they did the same optimization on Windows, it wouldn't give them the same return on investment. There are good reasons that Photoshop is better optimized on the G4 than the P4, without even considering conspiracy (as I know many of the pro-windows factions are apt to do).
I think the performance argument has said only one thing definitively: if you want the best photoshop performance, get a Mac.
I think all the original aapltalk article said is that for $2500 you can get a Mac that is at least as good as a $2500 PC for running Photoshop.
If someone was trying to convince the public at large that the G4 is faster, well... The same public that finds having two mouse buttons confusing, also finds clock speed an easy value to remember when comparing two computers. If there were some independently administered number representing the relative speed of program execution, the unwashed masses would be just as happy to accept it... But neither the geeks nor the corporate entities not making the chip currently at the top would endorse such a benchmark (see SPECint and SPECfp).
People know that a 1.0GHz PIII is faster than a 500MHz PIII. It fits their world model. Asking them to accept that an 867MHz G4 is faster than a 1800MHz P4 is a good fight, but not one anybody is likely to win.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
PPC systems aren't restricted to less than 15 interrupts like Intel systems. They make good laptops, if you only need one mouse button..
*sigh* why do people who have no idea about what their talking about constantly feel the need to talk anyway?
The Intel ISA has 256 interrupts and 256 exceptions. There is a limitation on Interrupt Requests but that was a limitation of IBM's original PC design (just two cascading Interrupt controllers) for the CPU/pretrial interface.
While IRQs are still around for compatibility, modern machines don't have any problems anymore (PCI and USB devices can share IRQs)
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
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.
who would unscrew a pulugged in and powered mac?
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I was in MicroCenter just this weekend looking at a loaded G4 with the gigundo LCD display. 30 seconds into clicking around looking for something that would play a movie so I could see what the LCD looked like with moving pictures on it, the system locked up.
Ahh, takes me back to the old days of Mac lockups with no chance of recovery, not even the chance that the BSOD is an overreaction, just hit return and keep working.
Every time I've tried to buy into the Mac hype, I've spent a few days using one, and the lockups chased me back to PCs or UNIX.
This time, brand new in-store HW chased me out before I even had a chance to get an impulse to buy.
Macs are pretty computers for pretty people who don't use them very often or for very long.
--Blair
Carmack put this in his .plan file shortly after beginning development mac development of q3a.
I rebooted my mac system more times the first weekend than I have rebooted all the WinNT systems I have ever owned
-- john Carmack
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
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
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.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
... but rather those of rabid Mac zealots, who take Apple's reality-defying marketing hype and inflate it to ridiculous extremes. I met one fellow in my Usenet days who actually claimed that a G3 processor was faster than the fastest Alpha chips. Yeah, right. In PhotoShop?
:)
One of the reasons, I think, why Macs are considered to perform so much better is because MacOS (pre-X) is a compact, well-designed, well-modularized little OS whereas Windows is a bloated mess. If your OS stays out of your way, you can get more done, it's that simple. Also, from a more technical standpoint, if you can bogart the CPU in a CMT environment you will get more performance than a PMT environment where your timeslices are enforced by the kernel.
OS X is significantly more heavyweight, of course, and I've seen some fast Macs stutter on it. (Not like it isn't sweet, though.)
I really don't care about the platform wars, I've used both. I'm just sick of the hype and BS, and people flaming each other over nebulous and inconsequential issues. I'd like to get a new Mac sometime soon... well, maybe when the prices come down a teensy bit more. Till then it's Athlon all the way.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!