Scientists Switch to Mac OS X

Adam Q Salter writes "A Boston Globe article quotes many scientists and engineers who have switched to Apple workstations or have immediate plans to do so. Craig Hunter, an aerospace engineer at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia, said 'OS X, I think, is the best Unix I've seen come along, ever.' Scott Sneddon, a senior scientific fellow at Genzyme, is quoted as saying 'OS X is a better Unix development environment than Linux or Silicon Graphics Irix.'"

Comments

Matlab for OS X out for awhile

[spicyjeff]

Matlab has been out for OS X for awhile now. Latest version is 6.5, same as all other platforms. Spec page here.

Re:MacOS X has problems

[DavidRavenMoon]

1. The GUI is not the OS. They are separate entities.

I have to disagree with this. People use OS X (or any Apple OS) because of the GUI. If you want a generic UNIX you can run Linux or *BSD and any of the awful WMs in X11. And you can do this on Apple hardware too. But do you notice none of the scientist quoted in the article are doing that?

People use Macs because of the OS, especially the GUI.

2. MacOSX is not synonymous with Mac hardware. They are separate entities.

One again, wrong. Darwin is NOT OS X. You might as well run FreeBSD, unless you really want the Mach kernel. But I remember how much Linux users hated MkLinux because of the Mach kernel being slower.

A quote from the article:

"If I put together 64 G4s, we'll get the same performance as the Cray for a lot less money," he said. Indeed, Hunter's department has purchased seven Apple XServes -- rack-mounted Macs designed for use as servers -- to link in a high-speed computing cluster.

If Apple hardware is so "slow" and "overpriced" as everyone here seems to think, then why would they do that?

Bottom line is, you don't get it. Some people like OS X, AND its GUI. You don't have to.

Also, I'm running OS X 10.1.5 on a 466 MHz G4 with a gig of RAM. It's not all that bloated and not slow at all. Sure, OS 9.2 runs a bit faster. But it's not the GUI. OS 9 is much older code, and has been optimized more over the years.

Any who has used Macs for a while knows that each OS release since 8.0 got faster than the last, even thought they added more features and the OS used more RAM. "Bloat" does not always equal slow.