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The Nation of Macintosh?
Devon Avenger writes "A new short British film has been released according to this article at Wired depicting a cult of Macintosh fanatics who are organised in a manner reminiscent of the Nation of Islam."
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So it stars an "an original Macintosh, the 512K," huh? The original Mac had a big bad 128K of RAM. (and a 400K single sided 3.5" floppy)
They should try Amiga users, they're several times worse Mac users. Really.
Actually, what the article is referring to is the Nation of Islam group - not Islam in general. If you're not familiar with the Nation of Islam you can find more information here.
Those who will sacrifice Freedom and Security will get Windows...
Hopefully, this is just an issue of absorbing the R&D costs [fool.com] of their new O/S. I'm not a Mac user, but some of my best friends are ...
Read the earnings report yourself. They actually posted a 7M profit before one-time non-recuring changes due to an internal reorg and recent acquisitions.
Given this, they actually met their predictions. This is pretty good while other hardware manufacturers plummet.
With more than 4 billion in cash reserve, a net loss of 47M is just a good tax evasion for the next quarter.
I'm getting tired of this old chestnut. More expensive than what, exactly?
Yes, the retail cost of a new Mac is more than your average clone, or built-it-yerself project, but this is not where Apple is positioned.
When I decided to get a Mac to replace a Windows box to run commercial applications, I decided to do an accurate price compare with other high-end vendors. That means I only looked at higher-end Compaqs (or whatever they are now), IBM (when they sold desktops), and anything from Sony. I did a build-your-own run on dell.com, making sure to choose all the "extra" items that came standard on a new G4.
Plainly put, I found that a Mac was less than $500 (Canadian) in most cases.
If I was building a super-deluxe gaming box, I would have built my own Intel/AMD box (again) and been done with it. This would not have been an economy solution either, based on the numbers I racked up pricing out an AMD godbox.
Look, a modest off-the-shelf or built-to-order Intel/AMD box running Windows is probably good enough for most people. If you want or need anything more, however, any top of the line brand-name box is going to be siginficantly pricier. Apple is not alone in this.
The bottom line is that, for what I wanted a home computer to be (semi-pro music production, web development, modest amount of gaming, software development) a Mac fit my life perfectly. I get a commercially supported OS, standardized equipment and a deep well of user experience I can draw on.
And I don't have to use Windows. I get enough of that at work.
If you want to criticize the Mac platform, a better place to start is the lack of cheap or free software. There isn't the same culture of freeware as in the BSD or Linux world, and the commercial apps tend toward higher prices. I attribute this to market-share.
This is changing, however. Anyone who uses OS X (and who doesn't) has access to Fink for opensource love.
If it's fanatical to choose a platform that allows you the benefits of a commercially-supported platform with the pleasures of a nice UNIX GUI, then go ahead and call me a fanatic. I don't know from anything earlier than OS X, so cannot comment. People tend to get attached to their first user experience. Heck, I have a soft spot in my heart for the TRS-80 Model I and Northstar minis.
From my experience though, if you fairly compare a recent G4 with a recent offering from Sony, add the DVD-RW/CD-RW and Gigabit ethernet (ok, this last is a bit spurious -- who can use 1000 mbit devices to the fullest right now?) you'll find the price difference almost meaningless. Add a $500 tax for running Windows (that's only a dollar a crash), and the price ends up the same.
-- clvrmnky
I got so much trouble on my mind
I refuse to lose
Here's your ticket
Hear the drummer get wicked
The crew to you to push the back to Black
Attack so I sat and japped
Then slapped the Mac(Intosh)
Now I'm ready to mike it
(You know I like it)
It's written exactly like that in the liner notes too.
FWIW, Chuck D has gone around helping indie rapper set up Mac-based ProTools studios for quite some time.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.