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The Ultimate MacDate
Hack Jandy writes "Anandtech - the PC hardware site - took the Apple challenge and tried a Mac out for a month. The result was the most indepth Macdate I have even seen. As quoted by Anand, 'In the end, Apple has developed a very strong platform.'"
i rid myself of all WinTel PC's in my home (still need them for my job)... but since going to the Apple side i have to say i have had pretty painless computing. My Apple iMac just works and the apps that go with it. People argue that it is a single vendor platform but there is something to be said for that. The tight integration between the hardware and software makes things work smoothly. No mucking around with silly patches or resource settings. Personally i feel that Apple will be gaining a lot of ground in the 'market share' department in the next 3 years.
While Anand has done an excellant job of descrbing the Mac platform to people like me who have never used a Mac but always wanted to, he does not tell us how a cheaper Mac, say a $1500 Powerbook would compare to a $1500 Windows machine. I am considering buying a Powerbook, but am hesitant because I don't want a $1500 system that feels slower than a $1200 system. So all you Mac users, please help. Is there a significant/noticible difference between a Powerbook which costs $1599 or $1799 and a similarily priced Windows laptop?
I'm not surprised either. I used a Mac back in 1985, but then ended up on DOS/Windows boxes until about 18 months ago. Having switched and used a Mac for this period of time, I would NEVER switch back to Windows. Heck, I made it a requirement of accepting my last job offer that I have a Mac, not a PC.
Why? Because the Mac gives me the best of both worlds - a Unix box (BSD no less), and a fantastic UI. I've been a Unix guy for a LONG time (1980). Linux is great, but when it comes to Unix-like boxes, I'll take the Mac any day as a user environment.
I've switched my whole family - we now have 4 macs in the house. I got my pastor to switch to the Mac, and when I was a consultant, several comapnies I supported took my advice and switched. EVERYONE is happier than they ever were on the Windows box.
I applaud Anand for taking the time to thoroughly put the G5 through its paces. If Apple were still running the 'classic' OS, I seriously doubt Anand would have even bothered to look at the platform, let alone review it. OS X is the main reason why I prefer Macs. It doesn't get in the way of what I want to do. At work, I have a G5 on one side, and a HP XW8000 on the other. Both have their advantage, but as far as OS intuitiveness goes -- the Mac wins hands down.
The PC Weenies:Tech toons with a byte!
The PC Weenies: 11 Years of Online Tech 'Too
Even Mac apps that don't use installers need to put various pereference files, support files and the like in certain directories, such as the user's Library folder. THis is actually done at first launch. The Anandtech guy apparently thought that they were installed when he dragged the app file over; that would creep me out, too, if dragging one one file actually dragged a bunch into seemingly random locations. But the file system isn't that magical; the application just created those files/folders as needed. No mystery here, no need to feel disconnected.
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
My father seems to have recently (sort-of*) switched. He recieved a PowerBook because a company he is doing work for wants the development on the Mac. The stability and the interface seem to really impress him. Now, he even has an iPod and an AirPort Express. (Okay, so both of those are good even without a Mac.) He said that he (and the family) has a Mac before, but he switched to a PC because Macs were lagging in some areas at the time.
*I say "sort-of" because he still has Windows desktop and laptop, but he hates the spyware and other junk that gets on those. He seems to prefer the Mac.
Last week, I got my 20" iMac G5 and decided to shut down my Windows box and my debian server and see how it went.
:)
:) )
Moving the Linux stuff to the iMac was a breeze. I was mainly using the linux box for running Squid, for acting as a shell server for IRC, and for a general purpose file server. The iMac does all that and now does easy print sharing for me as well. With BSD under the hood and the power of (a href="http://fink.sourceforge.net">Fink, anyone used to Linux can probably easily move their stuff over to OSX painlessly.
Moving the Windows files was painless using the built-in SAMBA on OSX. I installed OpenOffice (under X11) for times when I need compatibility, but I'm intentionally staying away from MS Office on OSX for now, just to see if OpenOffice is good enough. I'm giving up gaming on the PC, which I'll miss a little, but I've got a GameCube and PS2 which can get more use now.
The real strength of OSX is in iLife. My wife really had a lot of trouble with Windows and the complexity of all the different apps we had to use to manage media (ThumbsPlus, Premiere, etc.) With iLife, she can publish or email or get prints of photos out of iPhoto very easily. iChat and iTunes are nice too. I've had quite a few MP3 players, but the iPod plus iTunes is the first one I didn't have to manage for my wife.
As an aside, the iMac G5 is a beautiful machine too and it's totally silent. Spookily silent. When I walked into the home office after shutting down the windows and linux box, I thought we had a power outage.
I think Anand's review is accurate and very fair. The only thing I would add is just a comment that for anyone non-technical or anyone with a lot of digital media, I think an apple machine makes a lot of sense, especially with the low cost of the new iMacs.
(disclaimer: apple employee
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
I'm an astronomer, and my work involves a lot of coding (and running) CPU-intensive C programs, as well as intensive image processing. In the 1980s, a lot of people in our field were using VAX systems, but in the 90's they began switching to Sun/Solaris platforms because of their speed and stability; that's what I used throughout graduate school. In the late 90's, Linux-Intel became a player, because it could offer such a dramatic cost reduction compared to Suns, which were exorbitantly priced (at its most disparate, I believe a Linux-Intel system with comparable performance to a given Sun cost 25% less).
Now we are at a point where many people at my institute are switching to macs. The top reasons are: 1) Hate to/don't have time to RTFM. Need a situation where hardware you buy just works. 2) High-end mac prices are now comparable to high-end intel prices 3) Any document can quickly be made into a PDF (a standard in our community)
As a fan of free software, I feel guilty about this. However, I do think many of Apple's products are aesthetically pleasing, and things like iChat works with amazing simplicity. Clearly they put a lot of thought into design, and I agree with a lot of choices they've made, so I feel OK about supporting them.
I wish Linux would eliminate the RTFM. Some of us just don't have time for that. But I still have an Intel laptop, and I intend to see how far things have come since RedHat 9 by installing sarge when it is out.
I can relate to all of what you said. I used to be a PC/Windows use because of the broad Software selection and ease of use (Point n click has some advantages), I was a also a PC/Linux user because of the stability security powerful server apps etc... OS.X is an acceptable compromise, even on my G4 PowerBook (which incidentally makes any PC laptop I have yet seen look like a brick when you see them side by side). Plus OS.X beats both Linux and Windows hands down when it comes to ergonomics (I am relly hooked on Exposé for example). Another boon is immunity to Worms/Viruses and best of all it integrates 95% into the windows network at work. My only gripe is that I wish Apple would increase the stability of its OS and the Window manager instead of adding so many 'eyecandy' features. In eight months of using OS.X have had one Kernel panic and five window manager crashes which is only marginally better than my experience with Windows XP, considering what I paid for the Mac I expected the stability of OS.X to be greater.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Aren't DLL supposed to be registered somewhere with pointers to all the apps that use them
Yep. It's very simple. You're supposed to dump all your DLLs in c:\Windows\System32, then all apps can access them. Amazingly simple and beautiful (*gufaw*) isn't it?
That's actually where the term "DLL hell" comes from. And now you know, the rest of the story.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
With Windows, you have no doubts that there is going to be an application out there, already written, somewhere in cyberland...
Perhaps, but there's no guarantee that it will work very well.
I'm not talking just about dinky little shareware apps, mind you. I fired up Microsoft Word the other day after not using it very often for quite a while. Word must be the most intrusive program I've ever used! It kept moving text around on me, reformatting it, and telling me that I'd misspelled things. A long look at the preferences failed to reveal a way to turn off many of the features which were getting in my way.
Unfortunately, Word does the same sh*t on the Mac. But fortunately, most other programs don't. Using both platforms, my feeling is that Mac programs present a much more consistant interface. And there's more than enough Mac software out there that outside a few very narrow, very specialized fields, anyone will be able to do their work on a Mac.
Not that I disagree with you, but I saw AppleScript as extension of HyperTalk. Apple indeed did not have an equivalent of shell scripts and users had to rely on third party solutions to automate repeated tasks. It was a welcome addition to the system when it came around. But just like everything else from Apple, when something shows up first, it's dog slow. I mean slooooow (remember Opendoc/CyberDog anyone?), and didn't have the cleanliness of HyperTalk. I don't think great many people used AppleScript. I personally realized that general users don't write scripts. Those who write shell scripts are not exactly your grandmas. I highly doubt that there will be a day when people actually start writing scripts however it may become simple. It's not their thing.
Oh, nice thing about AppleScripts in these OS X days is that we have do shellscript (or sometihng).
Of course the MacOS also comes free with the initial hardware sale.
You are right that the MacOS is pricey. On the other hand, every release of the MacOS to date has included slick, glitzy features like Expose. And every release of the MacOS has worked better with existing hardware than before.
For example, I have a PowerBook G4 400mhz. It was the first of the G4 PowerBooks, introduced in January 2001. This system flies under MacOS X Panther. I remember feeling it was sluggish at times when I first bought it but now it feels reborn. That's an OS upgrade that delivers real value!
In contrast, consider the upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, which confused the heck out of users by changing the options completely around, and managed to slow down even machines that were lightning fast under 2000.
Microsoft hasn't introduced an upgrade since XP, not because they're not greedy enough to want our money, but because they have been slow in improving on the now ancient system. I'm not so sure that's a good thing.
By buying MacOS upgrades, you're financing an innovative development team that continuously produces wonderful surprises. Sure, we have to pay for them, but at least they come, and they delight us.
That's not so bad.
D
Bells and whistles? The main thing that keeps me on Windows are the games. :|
And even then. Since consoles are really starting to come into their own, and Microsoft is encouraging the usual Windows games developers to develop for their console, you really have to ask yourself whether you still need a PC for your games?
With the games argument assigned to the consoles, you no longer have to include that as a major requirement when buying your computer. Because of that the Mac becomes more appealing, as does any other non-MS-Windows solution.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Automator is an interesting new feature of Tiger (10.4), due in the first half of 2005. It's basically a graphical way of writing scripts. I'm sure app developers will also be adding Automator plugins to ensure that their apps are easy to script visually. I think that's really going to broaden the appeal of AppleScript, to the point that your grandma just might be writing scripts, even though she might not think of it that way, since it looks to be so intuitive (for some things). I'm keeping a close eye on that one, and hope that it pushes more app developers to add native AS support.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)