Cringely: OS X on Intel

sti writes: "Cringely's column this week argues that Apple should port OS X to the Intel platform. He makes an interesting case for it. I would definitely favour this. I've always had this warm spot in my heart for Apple but rarely had the money to pay for their overpriced hardware."

Comments

Overpriced?

[Pengo]

I don't find it to be any more overpriced than any name brand Intel kit such as Compaq or Dell, HP, IBM.

FUD FUD FUD

Re:Overpriced? YES !!!!

[chicobaud]

But still as far as price, the towers start at $1500, which isn't so bad for the quality you get. Nice things are expensive.

Oh Boy, $1.500 is not so bad... I consider this price as an insult from Apple.

I would rather have a dual Athlon MP with 1GHz Registerd DDRAM than a G4 high end.

As far as the 15" monitor... well I'm using a 19" on my G4 Tower, so I agree, +
Old iMac keyboards... they have been shipping with the newer Apple Pro keyboard and ProMouse (not the stupid round one) for a while now .

Good thing that as a Apple user you didn't lost the vision tottaly.

Re:Overpriced? YES !!!!

[chicobaud]

My poor old father got suckered into buying a Presario two years ago on which he can't run anything other than Win98. It's utterly unstable with anyting NT-based, and don't even try linux/*BSD on it. This SUCKS!! But it's the reality out there. Joe Sixpack doesn't buy beige box-PC's, but goes for the prepackaged OEM deals.

That is way Apple is not finished yet. Nor wintel pre-packaged PC companies. Too sad that 80% of humans are so... helpless.

Re:Wouldn't be the same

[aussersterne]

I have a Beige G3 300 and as I've posted to Slashdot before (every time this discussion comes up) the OS X I paid so dearly for works about like shite. Here's what Apple tech support says:

- Don't use the SCSI on Beige G3's under OS X, it's likely to lock your system up, especially if you are using a SCSI hard drive.

- Many Apple CD-ROM drives won't boot the OS X CDs. If you suffer from this problem, buy a new CD-ROM drive.

- Onboard ATI video on a Beige G3 is not accelerated 2D *or* 3D, that's why window resizing is almost impossible (nearly freezes the display), scrolling is sluggish, and games do not play at all. Accelerated drivers for Beige G3's are not planned.

- If running OS X on a Beige G3, you may want to have 256-384MB of RAM to account for the slowness of video and CPU.

- OS X will be slow on a Beige G3, consider upgrading to a G4.

Thanks, Apple. Wish you'd said all that on the box.

NOT FUD

What the hell is he talking about?

[flegged]

OS X is faster, smarter, prettier, and easier to use than any version of Windows

Has he even used OSX for more than five minutes? I mean, to actually get anything done, rather than just oohing and aahing at the wibbly bits of the UI?

I won't reiterate everything I've said before, but lets just say the OSX is the reason I run Yellow Dog Linux on my computer at work.

"Faster"? Try resizing a window. Any window. That is such an omigod simple fscking thing to do in any windowing system you would expect it to happen at least within the same aeon as you began dragging the corner.

"Smarter"? The Finder is useless compared to Konqueror or Nautlius (Nautlius's icon stretching with previews is sweet). And have you ever noticed how there is no "find" option in the Finder (apart from starting a completely different app, Sherlock).

"Prettier"? Apples notion of prettier, that is. Which means transparency everywhere and NO CUSTOMISATION. There are two colour schemes - Grey or Blue. The windows are striped which hurts your eyes after twenty minutes. The animation is sooo annoying. Compare this to my KDE setup, where I have the Luna theme, so it looks like Windows XP. This actually illustrates a fundamental difference between Apple and the rest of the computing world; Apple like to dictate everything about the users environment regardless of their personal preferences, whereas any other system would be configurable.

"Easier"? Easier as in having to click the "ignore" button twice on two dialogs in completely different places on screen after inserting a CD-R before you can write to it using the app you want to use. Easier as in having to drag disc icons to the trash to eject them, rather than having a big button marked "eject" in front of the drive (how can that be 'unintuitive'?)? Easier as in having no useful keyboard navigation (finally appeared in OSX 1.1; but still not actually useful)? Easier as in having only one button on the mouse - what next, a one-button keyboard?

What would actually be far nicer is if Microsoft ported Windows to ppc hardware. The NT HAL actually makes this relatively easy. Then Microsoft would have competition with Apple for operating systems. But Apple wouldn't allow it -look what they did to Be.

And besides, Apple would never release an OS for even a wristwatch if they didn't have complete control over every single component and couldn't disallow anyone else from making that hardware. This is how Apple make their money. It is also how they keep their zealots happy.
</rant>