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Return of the Mac
Ben Gutierrez writes "Paul Graham has posted a new essay on the Return of the Mac which begins with: 'All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs.' Tim O'Reilly said some similar things in Watching Alpha Geeks . From the article: "My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the mid 1990s. They're about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get."
That said... BSD is dy^H^Hthriving.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Since around 1993 I've been messing with Unix. SCO, Slackware (1.0-ish), RedHat (pre 4.0...on Sparc!), Caldera, Irix, SunOS, etc.... both in userland, on the desktop, on my own servers, and a professional sysadmin.
I've got a mac now. The first of my life, from someone who wasn't ever a mac guy (and was probably more 'anti-mac' than most.) My g/f has one too -- more than once I was like 'just open a terminal and do....'
The fact that she doesn't need to know what the terminal.app is? That's the best part..... I get what I need, she gets what she needs.
Last year's Usenix conference was full of Powerbooks. Most of the top dogs in the industry. That prompted me to buy a PowerMac. It's the best computing decision I've ever made.
at least at my university, it seems as if apple have changed their image. No longer for graphic designers - it's for people who wanna 'get stuff done' with their computers
Also, their laptops are pretty much class dominant, and compare favourably on price with the high-end thinkpads in the powerbook range.
Business Voyeur
just do what I do - get a console and save hundreds on CPU and GPU upgrades.
as strange as it may sound, I bought my Mac to do work.
Most /. advocacy seems to stem from the following:
Macs aren't Microsoft (unless you used Word or something on them)
You can install Linux on them (not that you can't even an electric toothbrush these days)
They were an underdog, which made those really cool Apple ][ computers back in the day (some of us have the emulators installed on our PC's and still fiddle with them.)
They had a sense of style, which the monolithic PC companies still can't seem to get (PC's, seen them lately? Was Dell/HP styling inspired by pinching a loaf?)
They were evolving, which always inspires some hope.
did I miss anything?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Are you sure about that? Think about messing around on the Internet. Ten years ago that was just getting popular in universities and now it's perfectly normal in the home.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Here's the obligatory rebuttal. You're forgetting the software. You can put Linux on it for free, but you're not getting nearly the user experience you get with a Mac. Or you can pay for Windows and the software that runs on it. That will bring up the cost of that $450US system. Still, not the same user experience. With a Mac, it's the compete system your paying for, not just the hardware.
Cepstral: Quality TTS for OS X, Linux, Windows
Google - 2 PhD students at Stanford
...
Linux - 1 grad student at Helsinki University
GNU - bunch O' long hairs at MIT
You were saying something about the author being on crack? Those are 3 examples off the top of my head that have not only influenced but re-defined the software industry. I'm sure there are probably at least a couple more out there
They call me the working man. I guess that's what I am.
I bet you also voted for whoever your favorite actor told you to.
Sheep. Baaaaaaa! B-a-a-a-a!
Sometimes taking unspoken advise from those whom you respect is a conscious choice, not mindless groupthink. There are developers out there who are better than I am, and when they speak, I listen. I also pay attention to what tools they use. This is neither blind nor foolish, when not taken to an extreme.
Obligitory "Me to".
The mac mini HAS to be as serious turning point. Finally, you can buy an economy mac without paying for redundant hardware you most likely have (monitor, ram, hard drives). It's as close as you can get to being able to buy a PPC motherboard, G4 CPU, copy of OSX, and do with it as you please. I got my mini last week and was pretty much able to take all of my old PC hardware and shuffle it over to the mini thanks to a USB 2.0 HD enclosure, spare ram, exisiting monitor and USB mouse.
I've been one of those fence riders for a long while about buying a mac, but damnit, now there is no reason not to. If you were like me and liked Linux for the *NIX'ness, but also wanted mainstream apps like Photoshop, etc with a GUI that beats the snot out of Windows, get one of these mini's. It's the best of both worlds. You can be a geek with a crapload of terminals open and still be chic.
"The Wright brothers were the first to fly with a heavier-than-air machine, but boy did they have a lousy plane"
One reason Apple is more streamlined than Windows is that it refuses to keep backwards compatability.
...
... have you even used a Mac in this century? Or are you just busting on them because people are migrating from the platform you like and you don't: understand why, fear change, fear being a follower or that you just plain like what you're using and get a funny feeling when others find something they like better.
Not flaming you (although I think that's what you want). Most anti-Mac folks I run into these days haven't touched a Mac since the System 7 days and continue to carry that prejudice.
Stating that Apple refused to adopt backward compatibility is ignoring the fact that you can still run ancient software in Classic layer and will be able to for some time.
Can't use a floppy?
I haven't missed it, but I can go buy a USB external for peanuts.
No two-button mouse?
Never mind, I'm not going there
Seriously
Anyway, I guess I don't understand where you get "Apple thinks it's customers are idiots" out of any of this.
All I can say is fear not, there is enough room in this town for two OS's.
They can switch. I'll stick with *nix and free updates, and save myself $140 every other year in upgrade costs.
Too bad, those $140 (sic) upgrades are friggin' awesome.
Four weeks, Twenty papers, that's two dollars
What amazes me most is how short of a time it took for OS X to get put together.
What really made MacOS X work is that Apple already had a very secure decently sized niche market for Macs. That is, there was a guaranteed devoted userbase that:
(1) Hardware manufacturers bother to write and include drivers.
(2) Software companies bother to release OS X versions of their applications.
That means that "things just work" - hardware works, and there is enough software, all built for the specific platform, that it all plays together nicely.
Imagine, for a minute, that there was a Linux distributor (Call them X) that standardised on a fixed platform (say GNOME for example), and had enough guaranteed userbase that Adobe wrote a version of the Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) for GNOME, Microsoft released MS Office for GNOME, and lots of other serious software companies also wrote GNOME versions of their commercial applications. All of a sudden distribution X would be a viable platform that had all the software you need, and it all works seamlessly together inside GNOME. Presuming you also have hardware coming with distribution X drivers, dsitribution X would be quite reasonable competition for OS X - it would certainly have the "it just works" factor.
You can redo the whole gedanken experiment with KDE if you like, you'll get similar results.
What made OS X really work was the guaranteed userbase and the fact that it could run old mac software to ensure a smooth transition of that userbase and an immediate supply of software. Honestly, if a small startup company wrote a brand new OS that was as good as OS X but lacked the userbase, and hecne software and hardware support, it would just potter along and probably eventually die or get bought out (see BeOS, NeXTStep etc.)
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
However, my powerbook purchase brought the joy of computing back into my life. I frequently read the comments of those who decry the overpriced Mac when compared to constructing your own box (which I used to do - and I still believe that a Mac is equivalently priced with Dell/Gateway/IBM hardware, when all things are factored in properly) and while true on one level, it misses the mark on the total picture. That is depending on your interests and usage desires:
Life got a lot simpler when I replaced my wife's Win XP box with an iMac. No more weekly degunk sessions, antivirus, malware consternation and constant admonitions for her to be vigilant about keeping her machine clean were necessary. And she took to it like a charm -- things were unfamiliar (and still sometimes she stumbles on a Win -> Mac how-to-do question) but she is enthralled with it now and spends more time on email/web browsing than she ever did on the Win box. The iLife/iPod deal is just gravy and really we've experienced firsthand on how much more hassle-free life became after the Mac switch.
So, I'm not swayed by saving a couple hundred dollars. Just like I wouldn't buy a Kia or a Yugo, I'm not going to opt for a bargain basement PC over a quality machine like a Mac. No, it's not perfect and presents its own set of flaws, but at this juncture, it seems to be the product of greater quality for me.
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