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Why I Ain't Buying A Mac
gphat writes "An article at Rush Magazine details why the author isn't buying a Mac. This is in response to Apple wanting our input last week."
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it's one big rant about Apple's shortcomings, padded with small praises to lighten the impact.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
I like to tinker and I'm a Mac owner.
The result is a dual 550mhz G4 Cube - really!
Off topic but I'm pretty chuffed as we put it back together a few hours ago and it's still alive.
It does have a (extra low noise) fan now but it's still almost silent.
Hope it keeps going:)
Let's take a purely mathematical approach. Entropy S = k ln W where W is the mulitplicity of the configuration: W = N!/nl!nr!. Now, if we let N be the number of MacOS machines in existence with nl = number that have been cracked and nr the number that haven't been (yet!), we can plug in some numbers and find that the likelihood of break-in is roughly 87.3%.
YMMV, obviously, but even in the case of simple home usage I don't like to risk my data to such an insecure OS. That's why I stick to Windows95 which, despite what some MS-bashers like to say, hasn't had a single break-in attributable to design error ever.
For a while there, it seemed like Apple was learning to cope with this kind of economics. They no longer have so many proprietary interfaces and components. (They even used to have proprietary disk drives!) But now they seem to be doing it all over again -- not with the basic technology, but a silly need to be Cool. So we get all kinds of physical gimmickry that raises the price of the product. Sometimes these actually add value, like the easy-to-setup iMac cases. But mostly they're just pandering to the Distintive Brand and Design cult. All the little things they could do to extend their market breadth (rack systems for example) they just refuse to get into because it doesn't fit their image. This is a formula for irrelevence.
You spoke true when you refered to apple, the horse I am beating as "dead". Mac died when it hit less than 10% of the market. OS X and the G4 iMac is just a hollow company rallying its zealots. Very similar to Enron's actions before they were exposed as frauds. Apple is dead. I'm just kicking it's corpse.
If you can't make it fast, make it pretty. Miata has done rather well. Perhaps Apple may yet survive.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
My friends say that "Apple would rather do it right than do it fast", since they use the Risc chip that is more modern design(?).
The RISC design isn't keeping up with the times. In the 1980's, it was a great idea to simplify chip design - hence RISC. But today's PC chips are more complex than ever, and faster as a result.
RISC makes sense for CHEAP chips like the ones in a game console or TiVo. But on the high-end, Intel/AMD have been beating the hell out of RISC for five years now.
I do not like Windows XP. It is slow and made by criminals.
Well guess what, Apple's monopolistic tendencies are just as bad. They sell computers with ridiculous markups, severely limit third-party hardware, and arbitrarily force their customers to upgrade (source: www.pbs.org/cringely)
Apple's philosophy is to sell exclusively to the incompetent user. Thus, they can manipulate their user base even worse than Microsoft does, and they control their market segment even more tightly.
Their new operating system - OS X - is based on tight, fast BSD code and yet requires 192Mb to run. They do not do things "right." They do things however they want, and then paint the computers different colors.