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PC Users Switch to Apple
JHromadka writes "Apple has setup a special website with real users explaining why they switched from the PC to the Mac. There's a full compliment of commercials, Mac OS X reviews, the works. Now we know why they didn't renew that agreement with Microsoft. :)" I like the commercials, they're funny, though probably not so much intentionally. Apparently the commercials begin airing this week.
CNet. The ads appear to be called "RealPeople" ads. Probably because their now using a RealOS :-)
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Be sure to upgrade to 10.1.5 ASAP as it yields big speed increases, at least in my testings (PBG4, PMG4, G3 iMac, and a shop G3 iBook)
I don't think it's any more deceptive than any of the marketing proclaiming the stability of Windows over the years. They may have finally gotten it right, but they made assertions in the past that weren't backed up in reality.
As for OS X, my Titanium PowerBook G4 has functioned without needing a reboot for over five weeks at a time as a shuttle it to and from work, from my wireless network at home to my LAN at work. I put it to sleep with impunity -- something the people at my office using Dell laptops won't trust, because suspend always causes them troubles.
No, it's not infallible. I don't think any consumer operating system really is, because there's software out there that won't follow the rules. (For instance, the only thing that crashes my computer is having Diablo II as the foreground app when I put it to sleep. I've forgotton twice in the past couple of months.)
By the way, Google returns 80,200 hits on "Windows XP Crash".
Here are some interesting performance benchmarks (using lmbench) comparing Darwin (aka Mac OS X), NetBSD, and Linux. Can you guess who came in first place? ;-)
lmbench 2.0 summary
cpeterso
You are getting a biased sample because you talk to the traditional Mac developers and maybe some OpenStep developers. People who don't use Carbon or Cocoa for applications development have no need to talk to you.
I don't think you realize how much of a drag X windows has been on UNIX, despite the heroic efforts of SGI and others to make it usable.
That statement makes no sense. X11 is the equivalent of Quartz. You could put the current Mac UI on top of X11 and the only user-visible difference would be that it would run a whole lot faster than Cocoa on Quartz and that it would be network transparent. Furthermore, X11 won the UNIX market because of end user preferences; if it had been up to the workstation vendors, we'd be using DisplayPostscript, OpenLook, or something similar.
Nothing but the quality of the UI, which after all is a principal competitive advantage of the platform..
The quality of the UI doesn't depend on Quartz, Carbon, or Cocoa. The quality of the UI depends on user interface guidelines that people follow no matter what graphics API or toolkit they use.
There won't be a mass conversion to Cocoa. It's just not going to happen. Even assuming for the sake of argument that Cocoa is a good API, people just don't have the time or interest to develop to such a niche platform if they can just as easily use a toolkit that will work on all the major platforms. A large fraction of OSX applications, commercial, open source, and in-house, will be developed using cross-platform toolkits or X11, whether Apple likes it or not. The only choice Apple has in the matter is to help those toolkits and X11 to look their very best on the OSX desktop.
X11 and UNIX toolkits are crucial to the future of OSX. The more and the better you support them, the better the end user experience will be. If, on the other hand, you try to force people onto Cocoa, you'll just lose again many of the recent converts to OSX. As an OSX developer, I can only hope Apple won't make that mistake.