Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

New Apple Column on Ars Technica

Posted by pudge on from the yet-another-apple-pundit dept.

Steve Cowan writes "A new Apple column by Eric Bangeman, called Mac.Ars, debuted at Ars Technica. The first edition is an insightful, unbiased take on the current state of Apple and its offerings. The author discusses Panther, the G5, consumer hardware offerings, Premiere, Microsoft Office, the 'Switch' campaign, the effects of Apple's relatively recent purchases of products like Logic and Shake, Apple's position in the server market, and lots more." What's the fun of being a Mac pundit unless you are biased?

5 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Where's the beef? by WatertonMan · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Did anyone else notice that all the columns seemed to be summaries of active discussions in the Ars Forums? Not that this is a bad thing, but there was strong sense of deja vu to the whole thing.

    I was kind of hoping for more along the lines of Hannibal's amazing 970 guess work or the insightful analysis of the OSX Finder. There are plenty of other things open to analysis.

    I'm hoping for more than Forum summaries that aren't too terribly novel or informative.

    How about an analysis of the StartUpItems method of startup scripts and the still present bug that stop commands don't work at shutdown! How about an analysis of the upcoming UI in Panther along the lines of the guesswork Hannibal did to the 970 and was done for OSX as a review? I can name a half dozen such things that I could have written.

  2. Apple isn't offering Panther or G5's yet. by BoomerSooner · · Score: 1, Interesting

    However they will be shortly. Until I can run to the local (dallas, tx) Apple store and pick up a G5 running Panther, it is a future offering.

    Just come out with the new powerbooks already. I'm probably just going to buy a notebook from PowerNotebooks instead since I've already got a 900MHz iBook and a G4 Tower. I was looking forward to a new powerbook. Oh well...

  3. Yes, because ArsTechnica are *never* biased... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Like their operating system poll:
    "Now, a number of people were pretty amazed to see such high OS X numbers, and some even alleged that the ballot box was being stuffed--either from a third-party site encouraging Mac votes, or by "multiple voters" or some other evil scheme meant to over-represent what must surely be a dying breed *cough*."
    The moment many of their readers claim to use OS X, and they suddenly accuse Mac users and other Macintosh sites of ballot-stuffing!

    So they follow it up with data from their server logs:
    Windows - 66.42%
    (unknown) - 15.06%
    Macintosh - 11.46%
    Linux - 6.49%
    And potentially, a huge chunk of that unknown value are Mac. They even state that themselves:
    "I suspect that a significant number of the "unknowns" are either Mac users, or Opera users on either platform."
    So they begin doubting the poll results from their readers, so they check their server logs. They're then shocked to find that there really is (potentially) over 30 percent of their readers using Macs.

    They then pull out their server's browser logs, which show that Safari is the second most used browser by their readers (unsurprisingly trailing Internet Explorer).
    "I do think it's pretty interesting that, when analyzed as combos of OS and browser, the next biggest combo after IE on Windows 2000 and XP is MacOS X and Safari, even ahead of Mozilla on Windows, or on the Mac."

    It took all this trawling though their logs, and yet they still wouldn't admit that the poll's results could be somewhat accurate. Perhaps this new section is Ars actually admitting, in a very backwards way, that many of their reader do actually use Macs. Not they they want to admit it.

    Say what you will about other sites, but claiming that ArsTechnica are unbiased is a joke.
  4. Re:Ars Technica IS Biased... by cbuskirk · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This particular artical seemed biased to my but do not judge Ars Technica as a whole. It consistantly had the BEST coverage of OSX. I did not use OSX as my primary OS until about a year and a half after it came out. But I hit the ground running, because 2 years prior I had read Ars's in depth analysis on all of the Developer Previews and I practically knew the OS Inside and out. Thier 10.2 analisys was spot on as well.

  5. Re:can't figure it out by gruber · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Pudge, was that a shot, or just good-natured ribbing?

    Surely it was good-natured ribbing. "Biased" isn't necessarily pejorative. Heck, "unbiased" often means "boring", so I'm pretty sure he was trying to pay me a complement.