TechTV Screen Savers Host Tries "The Switch"

lwbecker2 writes "Patrick Norton, from the TechTV show 'The Screen Savers', and an admittedly loyal Windows/PC user, recently borrowed a iBook from Apple and has written an article about his three-month experience with 'The Switch'. It seems like a well-though-out review and IMHO provides some balanced coverage of the potential issues and experiences involved in switching from Windows XP to Mac OS X."

Comments

Re:f1rst p0st

[Anonymous Coward]

Must be a slow day, if I can get first AND second post. Can techtv.com really be slashdotted already? Before comments are even posted? I can't load the page in any case.

s//exec dada/e

He's not the only one

[eviljolly]

I work for an ISP of which name shall remain unknown, and no not AOL, but anyways I have noticed that a lot of the techs there are also very loyal to their OS X. I even admit that I have tampered with it a little and the interface really is kind of nice. If I could afford to buy one I might even do that, maybe some other time...

Kind of old, isn't it?

[diverman]

This was on TechTV in January, I thought. It was around the time of the MacWorld SF.

Did someone just come across the article in an archive?

Patrick is pretty good about giving in depth, objective feedback on things... although he does have his pet pieves and strong opinions on some things.

-Alex

It's worth it...

[Midnight Ryder]

I've already decided my next computer will be a PowerBook, once I can afford it.

It's worth it. I bought one for my wife, and for me to port some of my game projects over to (since the Mac has a smaller, but less cramped game market). I now need another Mac - she loves it, and I would really like to have one o' my own after doing some work on it. I bought the 12" Powerbook - very nice.

I disagree. I think many of us are in the same boat - seriously interested in a Mac but without the funds to buy one.

I've been hearing that from A LOT of people lately - "My next computer will be (insert Apple product)." Heck, part of 'em I know have picked out exact model and specs. Something about the platform really tends to grab people after they play with one a bit, and not within just a certain grouping - geeks and non-geeks both.

I think Apple's sales strategy should be this - give everyone a Mac to play with for a week, then take it away. Treat Mac OSX like a drug - the first hit is always free ;-)

I like how he jumps though every hoop...

[Cerebus]

...to avoid having to mention that the web browser that sucks so bad is Internet Explorer. And then he blames Apple for it!

I'm flabbergasted. What a moron.

Re:I like how he jumps though every hoop...

[tbmaddux]

...to avoid having to mention that the web browser that sucks so bad is Internet Explorer.

He was very clear about it on the TV show. Of course, we already knew that and switched long ago to Chimera, Mozilla, or Safari.

He was quite positive about his experience on the TV show, surprisingly to me given how negative he was on the show at other times about Macs even while he was using it for the past few months. He did gripe about the speed of his iBook. My guess is if he had a faster tower, he'd have griped about the price.

Also, he erroneously states in his review that MacOS X comes with Quicken. It doesn't. His iBook does (and so does the iMac), but if you buy MacOS X retail (or a PowerBook or Power Mac) you won't get Quicken.

Comments from a recent switcher

[Greedo]

With regards to the 3 main peeves:

OS X needs a fast, free Web browser that's stable. The latest beta release of Safari makes big strides in this direction.

Hey, Windows needs a fast, free Web browser that's stable too. Yes, Safari is nice. So is Mozilla. Etcetra. My point is that I sure hope that Patrick wasn't referring to MSIE.

One of the most important applications TechTV uses has no Mac version. Avid iNews basically provides the backbone of our show. Everything about the show is managed using iNews. I finally understand the feelings of Mac users in a world dominated by PCs and Windows.

Can't really comment on this one ... although doesn't Avid make their other software for the Mac platform too? I imagine if there was enough demand, they'd consider making an OS X port.

Later on, he says that the iBook is great and comes with all the software you might need, unless you need something "odd" like iNews. Well, how many Windows laptops come with "all the software you need"? At the least, most people are going to have to purchase MS Office or some equivalent. And how many come with iNews? You're going to have to buy iNews anyway, no matter what platform rocks your boat. His argument is a bit thin.

(And hey, he could always follow his own advice and use VirtualPC.)

For the money, the PowerPC processor needs to speed up or get shipped out.

Depends what you do with your computer, doesn't it? Yeah, the iBook is using a G3. Why didn't you try out a Powerbook? Or an iMac/eMac/G4 tower? And isn't Apple due to move to a new PPC chip this year anyway?

Re:It's up now.

[King Babar]

He didn't mention Moz or Chimera ...

Yes he did, on page 3 [techtv.com] of the article.

But, alas, he mentioned that Chimera had hung up. More seriously, there *is* a point here about the slowness of browsing on an iBook with either the stock MSIE or Mozilla, compared to what you can do with MSIE on even a cheap WinTel notebook. That's why Chimera was started and why Safari will probably take over the Mac world. Unfortunately for him, most of his review time was with the earlier betas of Safari, which I suspect did unexpectedly quit more frequently than one would like. (So, for example, if you go to a lot of sites that are like devcenter.netscape.com, you could rapidly get annoyed.)

Re:But are they really worth the money?

[sporty]

You dont' have to buy the monitor from Apple. That's if you want the shiney one, the flat pannel cinima one. I picked up a sony (yeck) trinitron for $50 at a company sale. Works nicely.

Mind you, you don't need the fastest system. Apple's "mid-range" systems are still hella fast. My 400mhz runs all my apps, 'cept java ones (they gotta speed up the jvm), perfectly. I'm doing medium photoshop on my machine w/o problems. Heavy maya and photoshop users, those heavy duty guys would want the 1.4ghz. Java compiles are still fast on my system. As a developer, who doesn't need every millisecond on medium source code, I don't notice the diff between my wintel 1.5ghz and my 400mhz mac.

But you are right, it still is more expensive than the PC equiv. But a 1ghz machine and monitor (~$1600 total) for a non-hardcore gamer, like myself, would be just as fine.

Re:But are they really worth the money?

[jo_ham]

You get a lot of bang for your buck in the PowerMac range.

Remember, Apple doesn't sell bargain basement systems like Dell "$599 for a 3Ghz PC!" which ends up costing $1500 when you add extra memory, dvd, powerful graphics etc.

As a gaming machine, either the 1Ghz or the dual 1.25 would be more than adequate. A dual 1.25 gives you a couple of Ghz to play with, combined with a fairly meaty graphics card.

The 1Ghz machine is comaprable to a PC with a similar speed of CPU. My battered old Athlon 500 with 32Mb GeForce 2 can handle pretty much any 3D game i throw at it (although I think it would stuggle with the latest incarnations UT2003, Doom3 etc) and the SP G4 is twice as quick as that with a better graphics card.

The unseen extras come in the form of software. Not only will you get Jaguar, but a slew of excellent apps to get you started, and a unix core that you can mess about with all you like (ok, so it's BSD 4.4 so a bit behind the curve, but it's rock solid).
The fact that I can have the terminal open while running OS X essentially giving me two operating systems to work with has been a godsend.

You can also use your box as a webserver with Apache, a mail server, or any other purpose that you'd use a unix box for.

The case pulls open with one little handle on the side and opens out so the MB is horizontal with the cables routed near the hinge. It's upgradeable up the wazoo with any parts you care to pick up in BestBuy. The only proprietry parts are the cpu(s) and motherboard itself.

As an example, we're using a Dual G4 450MHz with a Rage 128 card to run a professional video company using Final Cut Pro 3. We can capture and edit full frame DV without any hitches (via the built in firewire ports from our pro DVCAM camera).

It's more than fast enough for our needs. Add a Radeon 9000 or a GeForce 4 and you'll be well away to a stellar gaming machine.

Just remember there are fewer games out for the Mac, but still a fair number. You'll get OS X into the bargain too.

Perception Counts

[Go Aptran]

Journalists that aren't already Mac zealots will, unfortunately, highlight every little problem that they encounter when they use a Mac... even if it's not Apple's fault... but if it's on a Mac... it's going to be perceived as a Mac problem.

I think it's a fair article but it seems to end rather ubruptly. I share some of his concerns.

After five years with a Windows laptop (then desktop) last December I splurged and bought a 1 Gigahertz 15 inch TiBook with a Superdrive and after using both my PC and Mac for a few weeks... now I just turn on the PC to play games while my Mac burns DVDs!

I'm extremely happy with my choice but something things are inexplicably slow on the Mac... moving a large group of files for example feel slower on a Mac than on a PC. I say FEELS because you have no indication of how long the process will take. Just a rainbow swirl that lingers on for a really long time.

Viewing preferences seem to switch back to the default almost at random... in some folders but not all.

I wish that the Free Space Left on Your Hard Drive problem would get fixed. It's very disconcerting to empty your trash can and see LESS free space on your hard drive and not MORE.

I'm sure that future versions & upgrades of OSX will smooth these problems out. I'm keeping current with upgrades and have already seen some of my pet peeves eliminated. These are not catastrophic problems... but for someone who is on the fence between OSX and XP, this makes the system appear less "finished" than it really is.

Re:But are they really worth the money?

[wayneh]

I just had to chime in on this one. We had a PC sales rep (either Compaq or Dell, I can't remember) stop in at the University IT Department I work at. We are on a three year replacement cycle for the roughly three thousand machines on campus (only about five hundred Macs right now, the rest are Dells). He happened to be listing off some figures to a fellow employee. His statistics listed the useable lifespan of the average PC at 2.1 years whereas the average useable life of a Mac was 3.8 years. I'm not sure what these averages were based on, but I thought this crowd might find it interesting.

PARENT IS NOT FLAMEBAIT

[tres]

Damn, and I had mod points earlier today.

Anyway, I just wanted to respond to the valid question posed.

I've worked with everything from Debian on SPARC systems to Windows XP and I've never been as productive as I am with my Mac.

Until Mac OS X was released, I laughed at Macs. I wouldn't waste my time with them. With OS X that changed. OS X offers the stability and tools of a robust UNIX environment, as well as the software applications that I needed to stay productive.

Back when I had the time and the inclination to "mess about," building my own was great.

If you've got the time and the inclination to make your PC hardware work (whether that be with Windows, BSD, or Linux) then that's probably the right choice for you.

When you're ready to get work done, look at Macs.

Detecting Bias

[Amiasian]

This was a very biased article. I only read the article itself, granted, and did not click any of the links therein.
However, he is constantly complaining about the Mac having fewer VERTICAL market applications - such as that iNews, or whatever it was. The funny thing is, Apple created (NeXT created) Cocoa for just that purpose! Vertical market business applications. It has expanded since, of course.

He never actually seems to have USED the Mac. And what I mean by that is, he never really points out what's unique about it. Right then and there, there's bias. How? Simple, he babbles about how unique the PC's vertical market applications are a holdback for Apple, and yet he doesn't mention that the Mac has applications not available on the PC, et al.

I found it particularly interesting that he gave a MS app -
"How can Apple throw in this painfully slow browser, Internet Explorer for Mac 5.2, on the iBook, or any other Mac? This is the company that gives you a solid office suite in AppleWorks, a killer video editor in iMovie, iTunes for your music, iPhoto, a free DVD player, and a rock-solid open operating system."
A negative review.
In fact, the Safari negative reviews can only help Apple - consider this article's only true function as a Safari Bug report by someone unable to diagnose the bugs.

Games and Macs

[Theaetetus]

You know, the main complaint we see among the geek population about Macs are that they don't have enough games...

I'm a Mac person, but I admit, that issue gave me cause to consider going dual platform.
However, thinking about it, I think you really have to look at _what_ games you play...

For instance, I play:

• Basic solitare/minesweeper/killing time games... which are all available on every platform.
• Massive Multiplay Online Stategy Games... which tend to be browser dependent rather than platform dependent - i.e. check out StarSphere
• First Person Shooters - which honestly, I don't play many of them. I only like the ones you can play online, not against the computer, and even then, I get bored of 'em. But here, you really need a computer of some sort for the keyboard... but wait, doesn't the PS2 have a USB port? Yes! And most of the FPS games on the PS2 let you map a keyboard. :)
• Cool, fast, advanced games - i.e. GTA3:Vice City, Mark of Kri, The Getaway... which are all console games.
• Occasional strategy games - i.e. Civ III, Alpha Centauri... but those are both Mac and Wintel.

Suffice to say, my Mac plus my PS2 really covers all my gaming needs and my work needs. The Mac for work and strategy games, the PS2 for all other gaming - and it's signifigantly cheaper than a comparable PC system (since you'd have to add in a DVD-ROM, kickass video card, USB controller, etc., and still not get all the good games... but you're also paying for things you don't need, like a floppy drive and a modem)

I think, with consoles as advanced as they are, the 'games' reason for having a PC kind of loses steam. Even more so when the PS3 comes out.

-T