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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.
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
There will always be rants by disgruntled former Mac users, about "What's wrong with Apple."
There will always be rants by the Apple-Ignorant, who don't understand why anyone would NOT want to use Windows. Or why you can only have one mouse button.
There will always be Mac Zealots who think, "If you aren't for us, you're against us." And then rave like lunatics against anyone who dares question them using logic and reason.
In the middle, there's Apple; a company that really seems to be holding a niche market by making good products that are pretty, get the basic jobs done, and are generally easy to use.
Who's right? Everyone. No one. I don't know, I just wish I could read about Apple without any sense of fanatacism coming into play.
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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.
(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.)
--saintWhile 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?
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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.
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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...
Is there somewhere he proves his point that I missed? Saying "That's dumb. Macs are slow, and people who like them suck." in various creative (?) ways doesn't amount to anything close to proof. Even if I can accept his rant as an "anti-proof" (which is impossible, of course) he doesn't even offer the alternative - that of course being some benchmarks that disprove the pro-Mac analysis.
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I hate to break it to him, but clock frequencies are never a good indicator of overall processor performance when comparing against different processor families. There can be some truth to the claim that a G4 at a given MHz is faster than a P4 at the same MHz -- after all, when I took my Computer Architecture a few years back, the PPC 603 had a much shorter pipeline relative to the PPro, and from what I've read since then, nothing has changed in that respect.
However, that doesn't mean that I think the G4 really is faster now, even if Intel's push for more MHz is mostly about marketing. After all, back when I took that class, we all thought RISC chips would eat CISC chips for lunch because the simpler instruction core for RISC chips would let them be run faster. Meanwhile, Intel figured out a way to engineer themselves out of that hole (using a form of microcode on the Pentium Pro, if I remember correctly), while Motorola couldn't engineer itself out of a paper bag (with 500 MHz written on it) for quite a while, as he mentions.
Anyway, as a proud new iBook owner (and an NT and Solaris user at work), I don't care who is faster, as long as I can do what I need to do.
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.
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