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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.
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.
-- John Carmack (2001-06-04)
-jfedor
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."
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?
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.
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.
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
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."
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.