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When Is There a Good Time to "Switch" to Apple?
AllNines asks: "With all the hype of MacWorld and the compelling keynote given by Steve Jobs about the upcoming Tiger and Spotlight, I am thinking about 'switching' (Linux user since '97) but I am not sure the time is right. It seems like the PowerBooks are getting very long in the tooth and the iPods are due for a major rev. When is the right time to jump on the Apple ship? Am I going to get burned by a sluggish overpriced laptop that is updated next month?"
I had a similar problem a while back - I jumped in and bought my 12" PB just before they speed-bumped it.
To be honest, it hasn't made too much difference, it's still far and away the best laptop I've ever used. Just get enough RAM!!
The thing is really, there isn't ever a 'best' time to buy anything like this. Look at the PC market - we have new motherboards, cpu's etc. coming out all the time.
At least with Apple its fairly regular that they do major updates, usually at MacWorld time!
I think the best time will be very soon. Wait till they release Tiger, and start shipping it on the Minis (or just get one and pay for the upgrade).
The Mini is the cheapest Mac available, and you can re-use all your old monitor/mouse/keyboard etc. Hell, even if you dont like it as a proper desktop, there's still the media-centre/server thing everyone seems keen to turn these babies into.....
The best time to buy Apple hardware is a week after they introduce new equipment... That gives you the longest time between your purchase and the replacement coming out. The week gives you time to check the early adopter's trouble reports too :) Always check the rumour sites, or you'll do as a friend of mine did, and buy a 30GB iPod a week before the 40GB appeared for the same price.
Friends of mine who bought the first model of any product line (G3 towers, Powerbooks, etc) find they get all the teething problems associated with a new release, so if you can, wait for the second revision of anything.
So if you want a Powerbook, check the rumour sites - they are all estimating Q2 shipping. This would suggest a revision anything up to 6 months later (usually just a speed bump, but they tend to iron out the wrinkles too).
If you can't wait that long, buy one now - they're still great machines, even if they're superceded next week!
Following this advice I got a 30GB iPod when it was new (the 2nd rev of the 3G series) and the 17" 1GHz iMac (first of the widescreen ones, but not the first flatscreen), both of which have never given me a day's trouble.
Mark
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...that a laptop becomes sluggish the very moment the next revision comes out ? I didn't know about that, and my 3 year old iBook doesn't know either.
As usual when you want to buy a computer (or quite anything technology-related), you have to know what you need, and jump and buy it... Of course it will become outdated shortly, but do you really need the new one ?
Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.
My iMac G5 arrived yesterday. I haven't had much time to play around with it but so far i'm very impressed with it. OS X is a bit weird at first, but after a short while you'll feel very comfortable with it.
You're probably gonna get a lot of "wait for the new product announcements" or "wait for Tiger" comments, but seriously, why should you wait? New products might be announced next week... maybe the week after that, maybe the month after that, hell you might end up waiting until June. Or you could just buy one now, and you'll be sure that whatever you buy will most likely still run the latest versions of OS X and other software in 4 years time.
I just read your other post, and I think I'll stick with my comment that you are trolling. You installed "thousands of fonts", some of which were obviously corrupt, and then Safari started acting up, which begs the question whether you replaced system fonts with your own. And you blame your corrupt fonts on the OS? Not bad, and even better from a supposed technically inclined user.
As to your Taskbar comment, that indicates a) you have a preference for it, whihc is your good right, but your comment about Expose being a flashy hack immediately brings you down to troll level. Expose allows you to see, as you might know, the current application's windows (F10 by default), all application windows (F9 by default), or the Desktop (F11 by default). All of those can be changed if you like. Added to which there is added functionality such as being able to hide or quit apps from Expose and the Task switcher, drag and drop to the Expose windows etc.
If you don't like that, it's your preference, and mine to disagree, but calling it a flashy hack is simply asking to get flamed as there just as many people who hate the task bar.
Now, if you said you prefer virtual desktops, as is implemented in most Linux GUIs, then I would understand.
As it is, it just makes you look like you don't like the OS works, which says nothing about how good or bad the OS is.
(And please, how is the Font manager in the OS bad? Which other OS has a better built in Font manager?)
You're missing the point. A useful computer is not one with a stable OS or one with a GUI interface (computers have had those for ages, even back to Windows 3.1. Well, maybe not the stable OS bit.)
The main benefit of Mac OS X is the quality (and integration) of the applications. You can drag-and-drop any file onto any application, and (if it understands the format) it will open it. You can use any application's print command to get a PDF, which can be searched in the same preview window. Hell, in Tiger, you'll be able to look for a phrase anywhere in any document of the system. Want to know the signature of the Runtime.exec() method? Type in 'Runtime.exec()' in the spotlight bar, and it will bring up the JavaDocs and PDFs that have that phrase on your system.
All Cocoa apps have access to text-to-speech synthesis (thus; it's easy to use a remote phone to dial up and have it read your e-mail contents over the phone, which is very useful if you're a road warrior) via the built in services. You can open a URL in any application with a single keystroke, or send a file to a bluetooth device.
It syncs with your phone, your printer is discovered automatically, and if you've got a SlimServer running on your network it's already in your browser's bookmarks.
Oh, and you can get hardware that works. No, you don't have to google across multiple websites to find supported hardware, or see what the initialisation string you have to hard-code in a config file. You plug it in. It works.
Problem with your system booting up? Boot it and hold down Command+T, then plug another Mac box in with a firewire cable; you can browse the mac as a very large and expensive firewire disk.
And for those of you that love multi-button mice; yes, they work out of the box. No config file changes, no having to configure apps for each key combo. It just works.
As an operating system, Mac OS X and Linux are very similar; Unix was designed to be.
As a user experience, Macs Just Work.
iPods are only about 3 years old. They have had multiple generations already with different wheels, button configurations, and improvements. Why would they be in need of a MAJOR revision? Probably because in such a short amount of time they have achieved HUGE market penetration and its hard to image what life was like with those crappy pre-iPod mp3 players. What other product has had so much success in such a short amount of time? Perhaps sliced bread... Powerbooks are getting long in the tooth? Do you mean just the fact that they still use a G4 or the design? The current model of Powerbook was introduced 2 superbowls ago, IIRC, replacing the titanium models. Do you want a G5 laptop? Well you'll have to wait. Intel doesn't launch a new processor and have a laptop immediately available. Why should the expectations be different for Apple/IBM. Speaking of IBM, has the thinkpad design changed drastically at all over the past TEN years? Maybe a little lighter, but I would say that laptop is much longer in the tooth.
Now, how about the fact that you are considering migrating from linux and an MP3 player is one of your major deciding factors. Who deserves that credit? Would you be paining over a Creative 64MB rio mp3 player?
Apple has changed the way people consider their computers and accessories so much over the past 3-5 years, that sometimes people lose track of time and perspective. If you want to migrate to apple here is my advice. Do it today. If it doesn't go well, you can go back immediately. That way you won't lose another night sleep pondering what life would be like in OS X vs. KDE/GNOME (yes I know OS X runs X11, I use it.)
When is the right time to jump on the Apple ship?
In general, the time to switch platforms in any direction is when you've finally got everything running smoothly on your current platform of choice after some major disaster. I'm sure that seems illogical at first, but it stems from the fact that you do not want to switch when you're in the middle of an emergency. If things have always been smooth, there's no need to switch at all. If things are becoming a reoccurring mess, resolve to switch, but then still clean up the current mess! It'll make the switch that much easier when you're not trying to transition all the mission critical stuff a once.
Am I going to get burned by a sluggish overpriced laptop that is updated next month?
Only if you're a fucking idiot. If you think a Mac is sluggish today, why the hell would you buy it? It doesn't matter if a vendor is updating their systems next week or next year. Either what they're offering today meets your needs or it doesn't, and if it doesn't and you still buy it, then you should probably be fired (or beaten by friends and family). The march of technology still guarantees any purchase you make is an expense, not an investment. Stop pretending you can wait to "buy low" because you will never, ever be able to "sell high".
I forget which rumor site says it, but the best time to buy a computer that fits your needs now is now. I don't see any reason not to buy today. Products scale incrementally except for processor change like G4-G5, which don't come along very often. Even if Apple released a G5 PowerBook today, it'd be better to wait a few months for Apple to work out the issues. They won't leave you out in the cold if you buy a computer with problems, but it's annoying to have to get it repaired, even if you don't have to pay for it.
I find that it's best to wait until a product comes along that makes you want to upgrade. Anticipating specific future products leads to long waits and disappointment when the final product isn't what you expect. If the PowerBook is compelling to you now, you should buy it now. You won't regret it. If it's not, then wait until Apple releases something you want to buy (if you're waiting for a PowerBook G5 specifically, you could be waiting a long time).
you consider it stable when "every once and a while AQUA" crashes? isn't that like arguing that windows is stable but it's the explorer that crashes and as such it's not a biggie?
Well, lets look at this for a moment. People get pretty defensive both of their purchases and their hardware/software choices. So when ever you hear soemone talking about stability, you have to take it with a grain of salt. Personally I run OSX, Linux, Win2K, and NetBSD. I find Win2k has the most crashes while the others are about the same, which is to say I remember one or two crashes for each system. Back in the early days (beta and some of 10.0) of OSX I remember a few times the window server locked up and I had to ssh in and restart it. I had the same problem with one redhat release. One nice thing is that you can ssh in and fix the window server. On windows it means a reboot and is indistinguishable from a system crash and you have to restart all your applications and services. I have not had to restart the window server on either linux or OSX for at least 2 years though.
Any production machine, where new software is installed on a regular basis will have some bugs. I've noticed that OS X, like the other BSD systems, had a few stability issues in the early days, then became pretty indestructable. The only person I know that had serious stability issues (a crash or 2 every month) eventully traced the problem to cheap, 3rd party RAM and the system has been fine since its removal.
Personally, I am thankful that OS X is so stable and that it has a capable CLI so that if I do something stupid (like hack the UI) I can recover from it without a reinstall. I wonder what OS you might run that would be more stable. I rank OS X 10.3 about the same as NetBSD, maybe slightly more stable than fedora, and better than anything else I have used by a significant margin.
This was typed on Win2k and boy am I missing my spell check service.
Spotlight has its hooks into the OS. Any app that saves a document automatically updates the spotlight metadata store. Every app gets access to search this database via a spotlight API. It seems to use Apple's own high-performance v-twin search algorithm.
. html.
/. because while it's a pretty intelligent community, nobody has a clue about usability. GIMP is not yet a viable alternative to Photoshop. You can't just put translucency and shiny rounded buttons on KDE or XP and say that you're achieving the UI of OS X. Ogg is great but only as useful as its acceptance. You can't piece together a $500 Dell system and achieve the elegance and functionality of the Mac Mini. openoffice sucks on os x not just because it's ugly, but because it is practically a platform unto itself with its own UI and fonts. OS X is usable with a 1-button mouse. iPod is great because it's small and sexy, so even if it doesn't play format x, it actually fits in my pocket! In the real world intangibles like productivity outweigh tangible specs like processing power.
Also, software developers are welcome to develop their own data types which will automatically be indexed by Spotlight.
From a UI and functionality perspective it seems Beagle is trying to do something similar. But under the hood they are very different. Check out Apple's developer info for this at http://developer.apple.com/macosx/tiger/spotlight
I'm finding myself becoming more and more frustrated with
Until geeks can wrap their heads around these concepts, people like you will continue to post links to 'version 0.0.5' open source projects (which depend on other packages to do stuff like indexing) and say that it's going to be just like something that Apple will put out in a few months.
I'm not knocking Open Source. But let's call a spade a spade here. When it comes to underlying OS features and UI enhamcements, Apple these days is innovating at a pace that OSS (and even Microsoft) is having trouble keeping up with.
Oh, and how about a ... taskbar! I don't know how people can work without a clearly understandable, clickable list of running windows. Expose you say? sorry, but that is just a flashy hack to cover up the fact that eyecandy is more important then usability and effectiveness.
I find expose and the doc far easier to use than the task bar. It's easier to think in apps than in windows, especially when there's a pile of windows open.