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Mac OS X Switcher Stories
spid writes "Tim O'Reilly posted an interesting article about people switching from other OSes (Mac OS, Windows, Linux) to Mac OS X. The resounding consensus is that most folks appreciate how, compared to these other OSes, Mac OS X 'just works.' O'Reilly also makes an interesting point that UNIX/Linux users, rather than Windows users, would be the best target niche for Apple's 'switch' campaign."
Yes, I see how Linux users may be the more likely candidate to pick up a Mac. Familiar *nix feel, sweet desktop and windows manager, kick ass hardware. What is there not to like?
On the other side, what's not to like? THE PRICE! Most Linux users have a Linux box that isn't the biggest and best machine, just a box with spare parts that you put together (cause, hell, it works GREAT on subpar hardware). Not many get stuff like GeForce4 cards, because the 3D gaming market hasn't really hit Linux hard. Now, to switch, you have to buy a fairly expensive machine. Personally, I'd rather spend the money on a PC, because I'm a gamer, and that's where my cash usually goes.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
O'Reilly also makes an interesting point that UNIX/Linux users, rather than Windows users, would be the best target niche for Apple's "switch" campaign.
As a Linux user, I agree, at least partly: Linux users are the most likely people to switch from Windows to Macintosh. I was never able to live with just Linux, I always used to have at least one Windows partition somewhere. Now I find that having a Macintosh around the house helps me sever my last ties with Microsoft. I'm still not giving up Linux, but Macintosh is a nice compliment to it.
Here I sit, writing on MacOSX IE 6, waiting Software Update to install new version of OpenSSL on the background. I use apt-get (fink), KDE and Emacs, develop software on this iBook and run it on *nix machines over network, be it command-line or X11, thru openssh.
I have not switched. This was, with it's 6 hour uptime, the best *nix-laptop I could afford.
I have not "switched", nor have I to "switch" back when someone puts out a better laptop. I just use whatever *nix is applicable to me. Yellow Dog, yeah, I would try, but I don't need to fix what is not broken.
Apple simply did not break BSD when they created Darwin.
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
I was the same way, but between OSX getting the OS right, following FreeBSD's layout (imho :) and not wanting to worry about hardware anymore, it was a clear winner for me.
As for the minor upgrade thing, $100 a year to keep on the ball isn't bad, especially for a "good" company like apple. Yes, don't bring up quicktime, it's been said and said again. But that is a different argument. Frankly, Apple needs the support. I equate it to giving charity to your favourite free software developer, in the case of Apple.
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
I read an interesting article on Salon.com yesterday about a minister who had been suckered in the "Switch" campaign. The article can be found here.
Apple took a risk switching their entire OS core over and not having 'native combatibility' with older apps (yes I know it can run them but it has to load the whole classic mode which takes a long time). Apple went through a similar change when they went from motorola cpu's to the powerpc ones, and having the older code 'emulated' (although it ran just great anyway).
Apple seems to be much more willing than pc makers and microsoft to switch to new things and I think this is very good as it encourages others to follow. I am mostly a windows user and I must say that OS X is deffinately on par with winXP when it comes to usability and surpasses it when it comes to stability.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
They are going after the windows user base, because it is the biggest! If you are going duck hunting you probably want to go to a lake with a lot of ducks.
I know a lot of windows users (non-geek) who hate windows, but feel that there is no other option, and this is just presenting another (and better) option to windows. Last time I checked windows 98 was the most used version of windows, and it is a piece of sh!t. I hope these Mac ads grab 10-15% of M$'s customers. I personally switched my parents to Linux about 3 weeks ago, because they were tired of Windows.
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
Actually, I'm convinced that Microsoft designed every version of Windows as a self-corrosive OS. That way you're always paying for upgrades and tech support. I bet if you let a fresh install of Win2k/XP sit on a machine running for 1 year with no user intervention and no hardware failures, it would still crash when you checked on it after that year...but that's just my opinion.
Why not? Isn't that the primary goal, A stable OS, that is easy to use and configure. I don't have ANY problem with MS using a BSD/UNIX/LINUX kernel. I have a problem with MS and their method to create a proprietary PC platform.
IMHO - The majority of /. users disgust with MS is not the OS, but the desire to make the computing platform proprietary, and non standards compliant.
Don't flame me for supporting MS. I am not supporting them, just making a point.
www.oobersworld.com - For those that ride.
Don't get me wrong - i use Linux for server applications because it's rock-solid.
Having said that, i don't know why this campaign of "It just works" isn't raising more eyebrows.
First of all - OS9 apps don't "just work" on OSX - there's a lot of cajoling to get older OS9 apps to run properly under X.
And, correct me if i'm wrong, Apple is still limited in the number of applications that are developed for the platform. Sure if you want to wait 6-8 months after the windows version of a game or app is realeased to have it ported to Mac, that's great - but i'm impatient.
As far as hardware is concerened - well at least NVidia cards work. But you certainly don't have as wide a variety of hardware available that's Mac-compliant - completely disregarding the hardware that the OS runs on!
OK. Make the campaign "It doesn't crash as much" or "You don't have to restart all that much anymore"...but say what you want - Windows 2000 and XP have taken Windows stability a long way since 95/98. Sure there are still some annoying points that i wish would go away (which is why i don't use Windows in a server environment) but on the whole i rarley encounter crashes anymore. And who leaves their machine on 24x7 anyway - i doubt all of those mac-usin' graphic designers do. They're all the artsy, crunchy, lets'-preserve-our-electricity types.
Bottom line is this - "It Just Works" is misleading at best.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
Your story sounds similar to mine, except that I switched back yet again. I've been running Linux since spring '94 and FreeBSD since '97 and decided to go the Mac route about a year and a half ago. I bought a PowerMac G4, took it home, used it for two weeks and took it back. I spent a few months after that looking for the perfect computer without much success. One day, I was walking by the Apple Store in Tyson's Corner, VA and decided to give the Mac another try. This time, I shelled out a bit more money for their "Fastest" model. Instead of the puny 15" LCD that I had with my first Mac, I bought a 21" Sony top-of-the-line CRT. I purchased a the optional GeForce 3 to make Quake 3 perform at par. This time around, things worked a lot better. 10.1 was released the week after I bought the Mac and OS X became much more usable.
As for reasons to switch from a free *nix to Mac OS X, here are mine:
1) Asthetics - from the look of the desktop, the beautiful anti-aliased fonts, the built-in PDF capabilty, and (of course) the beautiful hardware, it's hard to compete with a Mac when it comes to a slick user experience.
2) Support - Like *BSD and Linux, you have a great community that will provide informal support, but you also have AppleCare to rely upon.
3) Hardware - the hardware, as I'm sure you know, is top-notch. You pay an arm and a leg for it, no doubt, but compare a top-of-the-line Dell case to any Apple case and you'll see what I mean.
4) Microsoft Office - I know this sounds a little odd but Microsoft Office on OS X is just fantastic. I've never seen a better office suite, commercial or open source. If you use your computer for business and your job title is something other than "programmer", chances are that you will need MS Excel. MS may be the devil incarnate but they sure do make a good spreadsheet package.
So anyway, my advice to you is to give it another shot, preferably once Jaguar is released. Two weeks really isn't enough time to get familiar with the little niceties of OS X.
Good luck.
Chris
...because other (former) Linux users are doing the job for them. Between Tim O'Reilly, plenty of folks here on / and various others, it would be difficult for geeks not to know that OS X is "Unix Inside (tm)".
I whole-heartedly agree.
I've been playing around with DV-editing and (S)VCD creation under Linux and let me tell you, it has been an uphill experience all the way. It -can- be done, but mere mortals won't have the time nor patience to futz around with all the pre-1.0 libraries and stuff you'll need to do it. You can do it--get Kino, brave the command-line mess of transcode, or the jungle that is Cinelerra--but it is a nightmare, plain and simple.
After pulling out my hair getting it all to work on linux (and creating shell scripts to automate the process), I went to my friend's place with my digital camcorder. I plugged it in to his iMac and was amazed--it all "just worked". OS X didn't ask for "driver disks" and then to be rebooted a zillion times (like windows). No kernel recompiling was needed (like linux). My camcorder was recognized and BOOM! iMovie worked like a dream. iMovie alone is reason enough for me to dump Linux and get a Mac for video editing. There are no decend video editors under Linux (Cinelerra is a jungle, BCAST 2K crash-prone and buggy, Kino far too limited), and the ones I've used under Windows were just plain junk.
After seeing the how darned EASY it was on the Mac I seriously questioned all my effort to get things going under Linux. Sure it can be done, but at what cost? It works so easily on OS X, and with no effort at all.
So yes, I've considered switching. Considered it very seriously.
What I don't like about it:
The dock. The dock was a cool thing ten years ago, but the start menu/taskbar style of user interface is, IMHO, far better. (Apparently the KDE and Gnome folks think so, too.) OS X's dock is just...bizarre. I've used it for seven months and I'm still wondering why it works the way it does. Yeah, you can resize it, you can hide it, you can change the magnification levels, and it has animated icons. That's all well and good, but all the dock is really good for is *lauching* programs. It pretty well sucks for controlling those programs after they're launched. Want to close a running app from the dock? You have to click and hold the dock icon to pop up a menu, then select the menu option to close the app. Maybe it'll close, maybe not, in which case you have to mouse all the way up to the top of the screen, pull down the Apple menu, and do the Force Quit thing. I'm sure there may be keyboard shortcuts for these things, but the whole point of a graphical user interface is so people don't have to memorize keyboard shortcuts. And we won't even discuss using the dock to keep track of any open windows an app may have...
The menu bar. I hate, loathe, and despise the way OS X always puts the menu bar at the top of the screen. You can have an app that runs in a 320x240 window in the bottom right corner of the screen, but if you want to access that program's menu bar, you have to mouse all the way up to the top of the screen. Change window focus without meaning to? The menu bar at the top changes, which means the menu bar you wanted to access when your mouse pointer finally arrives up there may not be the menu bar you needed to access. Keep the menu bars with the window, not as a separate entity.
File permission strangeness. I have seen cases in OS X where I, as the only administrator of a machine, did not have permission to do things I needed to do, such as, but certainly not limited to: deleting folders, taking ownership of folders, and changing permissions on folders. Example: I run Mozilla nightly builds on my OS X box. After upgrading to a newer build, I was not able to delete the folder containing the old build through the finder. So I popped open a terminal window, did a cd to the directory containing the Mozilla folder, and did an rm -rf Mozilla/. Permission denied. I tried to do an su. Wrong password. (My account has admin privs anyway; I shouldn't need to do an su at all.) WTF is the root password on these OS X boxes, anyway? I tried to do a chown -R. Permission denied. I tried to do a chmod -R ugo+rwx. Permission denied. I do an ls -alF on the Mozilla directory. Turns out the owner of this directory is some obscure number (undoubtedly the UID of the user that did the build on another machine far, far away). So I've got this directory I can't delete. I've worked with UNIX variants for 12 years; this shouldn't be happening.
You can't really customize the user interface. Just because it works for somebody at Apple doesn't mean it works for me. 'Nuff said.
Touchpads and the general lack of a second mouse button. Okay, this really is more of a hardware rant than an OS X issue, but come on. There's a reason almost all modern mice have at least two mouse buttons; that's because a second mouse button improves the usability of the interface. Apparently they don't believe that at Apple, and thus I have to do a lot of clicking-and-holding to open up context menus. And whoever came up with those damn touchpads will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
What I like:
It's based on BSD, and the iBook is very small and light.
IMHO, the cons outweigh the pros.
I switched only because I needed a new video editing PC. After several years of building my own boxes with Windows NT and 2000 and 3rd party hardware, Adobe Premiere is still not easy to learn, nor is it very stable, nor is it very fast. And the 3rd party hardware makes me shudder with revulsion: buggy drivers and a lot of vendor denial.
The cost for the PC hardware I wanted was about 2700.00 USD. Then I looked at my other PCs: one is very stable, one does not work with any version of Windows but runs for 100 days with Linux, another one was sort of flaky until I installed OpenBSD (this is why it's good to have many OS choices; if it's a hardware problem, it should die under ANY OS, like my Thinkpad with a bad motherboard used to do).
When I looked at the Power Mac dual G4 1GHz, I saw the tradeoffs: slower bus, less MHz in the CPUs, and so on. But, I get 2 firewire ports digital video out and OSX all included. I also saw several movies in the past 2 years with a credit to FCP. The price was $200 over what I would pay for a tricked out PC.
I went to the Apple store where they showed me how to download and edit footage right in the store. I have never seen a PC store with a setup like this.
I was surprised at how fast the Mac replaced my Windows PC for everything I do: Office, e-mail, software development. The hardware is not the latest or sexiest, but it works better. The computer _feels_ faster, because I never have to stop working to appease some sudden need the OS has.
I think that the world of cheap commodity hardware and all-compatible software is still a dream; believe it or not, Intel, Motorola, Sparc, they're ALL using proprietary technology that locks you into a vendor's plans, whims, and mistakes. Get used to it. When buying the Apple, I chose a different route: pay a premium for "commodity" hardware with a lot of added value. Dell and Gateway have gotten so big that they cannot afford to lose any money; maybe being the biggest company is not always the best thing to do.
About me and technology: I work in a Windows NT/2000/Solaris 7-8-9 shop. By day I am a systems architect building Solaris, Windows, and OpenBSD systems for security and business automation. I program in python, perl, java, and C++.
As a Linux user of 4 years now, I bought a new iMac a few months ago and have to say I have been nothing but impressed. I have a beautifully configured Linux box at work, but the thought of going home to the same thing after a 9 to 10 hour day didn't fill me with joy, plus I was concerned that I would be forever recompiling KDE betas when my wife wanted to check her email, which wouldn't lead to a happy family life. Yet I refuse to have a dull Microsoft box in the house.
The iMac has proved a superb compromise. Both my children are addicted to the various DK educational software the shop on Tottenham Court Road threw in. iPhoto is superb and the integration of Digital Cameras and Camcorders with the rest of the OS is seamless, my four year old can now take the camera and edit photos on the box without much help. And underneath it all is UNIX, it connects easily to my broadband connection, and all my IMAP, LDAP and SSH sessions to my corporate network work fine, making it the perfect machine to use for working from home (and it looks good too).
So I wouldn't described myself as someone who has switched from Windows or Linux, rather Apple achieved a sale where nothing would have been bought in it's place. I am confident I am not alone in this market segment, one of my friends with children the same age has bought an iMac for exactly the same reasons, and I know of others considering it.
I didn't so much "switch" as fall into OS X's loving embrace.
;-) (It's not like they're much, I think the most I've for shareware far has been US$20).
... man, that program *rocks*. I'd "switch" to OS X from Linux just for that. The inbuilt PDF stuff is also very cool, and the fact that I can run Photoshop and the (surprisingly excellent) MS Office brings OS X a suite of much more stable apps than are available under Linux.
;-) I didn't think it would ever come to that, but I've taken the sweet delicious Apple bait, hook, line, and sinker.
Having seen the Titanium PowerBook G4s on display in the Apple shops, that drool-worthy stop outside the display window became a regular pausing point on my way home from Uni. The student discount price made it even more attractive, so after a while of saving up the sweet silvery sexiness that is a TiBook was mine.
A Linux user of 4 years, I used to boot into Windows to play games like Baldur's Gate II, knowing that I would be able to combine the excellence and stability that I'd come to take for granted with Linux with the ease of use and hardware integration that Windows offered, but with a much sexier look and feel, and no hideous Start bar, I was hooked instantly.
I tried for a while running rootless X in order to have my favourite Linux apps (XChat for one - available through the rather excellent 'fink'), but soon gave that up because even with the "Aqua-esque" themes, GTK and the WMs I was using just didn't quite make the aesthetic grade. I've since found an XChat-alike (Snak) and either ports of or apps that are similar to the ones I used to use under Linux. Sure, you have to pay for some of them, but I found that I didn't have a problem with this (I'm not really in the FS philosophy camp, preferring the BSD license anyway) and figured that if the programs I used regularly under Linux were shareware I'd probably pay for them too
There are, of course, plenty of excellent free (and Free, for those who care) apps available for OS X.
However, the best point of OS X is all the excellent bundled software that comes with it. iTunes is simply divine, iPhoto is
Don't get me started on the *hardware*. The networking is as simple as a very simple thing, wander between WLAN and traditional cables and OS X doesn't miss a beat. Not to mention that the Airport cards are seriously kickarse. Great range (due to the aerial being lined up the screen), and fantastic integration with the OS. Under Linux I'd be fiddling around with ifconfig and routing tables and such - not so under OS X.
Turn on Apache with a checkbox, ready to go. FTP? No problem, another checkbox. SSH? Certainly! Check that box too! I hear 10.2 has a seriously nice firewall configuration tool coming with it, I'm looking forward to *that*.
The display is something that has to be seen to be believed. Never have I seen such luscious crisp images on a laptop LCD. And the machine is *quiet*. Unless you're doing something graphics-intensive or spinning up the seriously kickarse combo drive (CDRW/CDROM/DVD), it's virtually silent. A fan kicks in when there's some excitement happening, but in my experience it's only when I've been playing games/watching DVDs or using the combo drive a lot.
And yes, you *can* use a 3-button mouse.
So where does that leave my trusty desktop Linux box? Acting as a local mail server and backup machine
I hate comments like this, because "computer gurus" is a loaded term. The implication is that someone who knows what they're doing would never use a Mac; it's only a system for people who do art and make web pages and want to edit their photos. And even if someone using a Mac writes Perl and Python scripts and so on, then you are still superior to them.
Enough of that please. That's the kind of elitist attitude that perpetuates the horrible reputation that Linux users have garnered. I do hardcore software development. I love languages like Lisp. I write Perl scripts to automate tasks, but then I get pegged as a compute newbiew because:
I use a GUI.
I don't have serious objections to Windows of the Mac.
I still find an 800MHz processor more than fast enough for commercial software development.
I don't have an obsession with buying every new $400 video card that comes along.
Maybe it's the faux "power users" that need a condescending term for them? They're certainly a loud segment of the computer using population.
I was in Target the other day. While the wife was looking for lightbulbs or something I checked out the software. I couldn't help overhearing two teen-aged boys who were also looking at the software, while they weren't kicking and pushing each other. One boy said, "We're getting a new computer -- we're getting a Mac." Often when I've heard teenagers say things like that, they will spit it with venom, but this boy didn't. The other kid said, "Yeah? How come?" and the first boy replied, "Because our PC SUCKS!" I think that if the economy picks up just a bit, Apple could have a real hit on their hands -- I wonder if there isn't a substantial number of people who bought a PC, discovered that it SUCKED and have decided that, if they ever buy another computer there's no way in hell that they'll buy a PC again.
No, you miss what apple does. They don't dumb it down, they mask it over. It's sort of like a car. You don't have to know anything about how the engine is put together, how the windows roll up and down, how the radio connects to the speakers and how the gears shift. You can just drive it, and you never have to see the guts. But if you want to, just go beneeth the shiny covering and there it is for you to play with.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Yeah, I'm a recovering MCSE and the only reason I can see to move tools around is to drive revenue in the training division.
My other Win2k gripe relating to Active Directory is that, by design, you HAVE to use their goofy-ass DNS server. Further, said DNS server must be on the domain controller.
Why in the world does DNS have to be on the same box as the domain controller? I mean, if you're running a huge enterprise, having iron to do both functions simultaneously and also buy a redundant box that gets expensive. Tell me how much Dell stock Gates owns, anyway?
Who did what now?