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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."
I'm at university, and I know a lot of computer scientists (particularly of the theoretical sort) and scientists of various other disciplines around here that love OS X. Just like using a functional language like Lisp versus using assembly, using OS X takes some of the responsibility for mundane, largely unnecessary tasks out of your hands and frees you to do the computing work that you need to do.
Sure someone well versed in systems or operating system design would be able to get more out of Linux if they took the time to optimize it, but most "hardcore hackers" I know around here sure don't have that sort of time.
In soviet russia, You ask not what country do for you, but what you do for country!
Oh wait...
The hardware is beautiful. It's well thought out, well laid out, lasts forever (battery wise and durability) and *gets girls to come over to your table look at it*. The alternative, at least for laptops, is IBM... at twice the price.
Now they even have a working scroll implimentation (which was a crippling omission, my NEC had a scroll stub for ~3 years before Apple thought of something).
And yes, your brand new very pretty computer will work well with Linux just fine, so there seems to be little downside at all*.
*Apart from lack of 3D card support, and for some reason Apple use crappy propriatery 802.11g cards with no Linux drivers. Mystifying.
Beep beep.
I work at a development house that makes network security products. Three years ago there were a couple people with powerbooks running OS X. Today it is about half of the company. Last week a senior developer was talking to me about our latest hire. He's an experienced, professional coder. It had taken him a week to get the thinkpad we gave him up and running the Linux distro of his choice and configured to work with all our servers and testbeds. Thats 40-60 hours of work gone. How many powerbooks could we have bought him with a corresponding amount of cash. He was considering mandating powerbooks for all new hires unless they had a good reason to use something else.
OS X is making some huge inroads into the computer security field. It has certainly gained a huge amount of penetration here in just 3 years. Even some of the the managers have switched after looking over a developer's shoulder for a bit. You'd never guess Apple had a 5% market share from a walk around this office.
Yes, I've noticed this too. I've just gone back to grad school in CS. It's interesting to me to hear how many of the profs and students love their Macs and how those who'd got Intel based machines wished they'd gotten a Mac. I used to think that raw processor clock rate was everything, but I've seen the Macs run circles around Intel machines with half-again as much clock rate. And this on CPU and numerically intensive tasks. And the folks who are using the Macs are hard-core alpha-geek types too. I've also heard very good things about the dev tools from them.
/etc files like in Linux either. I'm there to study, do research and write some code and go home. From this point of view, the Mac wins.
When it came time to pick a machine for myself for the lab, I ended up going with the Mac -- and I'm someone who's never had a Mac before. Part of my motivation was the "getting stuff done". I don't care if it doesn't play games like my home Wintel box. I need good Unix/X compatibility for when I deal with the big iron. And I don't want to have to futz with dozens of
But I'll admit that the design and prettiness of the environment doesn't hurt. If I'm going to be spending hours every day looking at the screen, it might as well look good. (No badly aliased, bitmapped text in Emacs windows, thank you.)
What amazes me most is how short of a time it took for OS X to get put together. Most everyone agrees that the first release was more of a public beta, but even X.0 was an amazingly mature product for something completely new that had been started mere years earlier. I heard a report that as many as 10,000 engineers had worked on OS X at some point in the course of its development years.
I'm sure it didn't hurt to have NextStep to build off of.
If you mean "they sent an email to a colleague (perhaps talking about tuning R.E.D. values)" then maybe. Yes- pointless websites existed 10 years ago (did you mean WWW as opposed to the internet?)- but so did printing out stereographic images from the internet (can you see the sailboat? Stare at it longer!). I haven't seen anyone doing that in ages. I also haven't seen too much quicktime VR (although some realestate web sites to have virtual tours like that).
So ten years ago, they were using what was intended to be a research tool to communicate with their friends and download pointless and silly bits of entertainment, and you don't think they were ahead of the game?
Linus doesn't like Mach, he says it is inheritly slower than "his" kernel. I think he is probably right, but not by an amount that really matters. Apple has been focusing on "micro-locking" critical sections in Mach for Tiger (and I assume even more for the next rev). This trend started as FreeBSD 5 tried to catch up with Linux 2.6, enough though the FreeBSD 5 kernel is unrelated to Mach. Why are they doing this? They are preparing for the day when there will be n cores, for n = 4, 6, 8... I remember an statement (was it Minsky?) that an n-way multiprocessor sysstem has performance of order n/log n. This does not have to be true in the future, and even if it is - we still win.
Also Apple has IOKit and "prebinding" which remove the need to keep multiple old copies of the *nix libraries for every binary you don't want to rebuild with every new release, and every device driver as well. Even Windows has this to some extent, this was an esssential feature for the non-hacker to use MacOS X, and damn nice convenience for hackers, too!
> 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.)
:)
Me 2. I couldn't agree more.
Three of my good friends who are power users (they used to run Linux on the desktop and server) have all switched over to Macs. Apple has one thing that Linux lacks -- consistency. But that's the advantage of "commercial" software.
For power users:
Pre OS X felt like such a straight-jacket. I used to ridicule the "menu bar at the top" GUI. Now that I've done some dev on it, the whole Mac experience is just more consistent, then the half-baked Windows UI. Apple really has taken the best from Next, Mac, and Windows. Is it perfect? No, but for the most part, things seem to "just work." Ever try coping multiple files totaling over 1+ Gig across on a Windows Box with some of the files already there? Where is the "No to all" button? It's all the "little" UI touches that Windows misses. It all adds up.
For developers:
XCode - doc markup, version control, and a half decent IDE "free" on the 4th OS CD. This is a great way to "win" Window's developers. Microsoft learnt this long ago -- without developers, your OS is going no where.
My next PC is going to be a Mac.
The 17" PowerBooks are sweet -- the next revision should have great 3D performance. The current ones have "good" 3D performance. Gaming is the only real reason to stay away from Macs.
--
XCode tip - trying to add a file that doesn't show up in the file dialog? (Stupid Mac File Dialog
Press '/' and you can type in any path you wan to add any lib(s) you want.
" In other news, open source fanatics dislike Microsoft."
No exactly. Everybody dislikes microsoft the open source fanatics are doing something about it.
evil is as evil does
But lets be honest, if I can get an AMD system with a 15inch LCD screen, Sempron 2200 proc, and half a gig of ram for about 450usd
Show us this marvelous machine that costs $450 and includes a complete operating system and equivalent software to match iLife and AppleWorks (or iWork for another $80), and an LCD monitor that won't make your eyes bleed, and 512MB of RAM that's worth having. Seriously, show us this machine. You were talking about something with no software, right?
how am I gonna convince my wife that I should buy a 600usd mac mini
That's easy, just sit her down in front of one for a few minutes.
, plus 250usd for the monitor, plus the keyboard and the silly one button mouse?
(1) Odds are you already have a perfectly good CRT monitor at home or you can get one for $120. If you want a decent LCD, you'll pay for it whether you get a Mac or a PC. Any monitor with a standard VGA or DVI connector will work with the Mac mini.
(2) Odds are you already have a keyboard. If not, USB keyboards go for about $25. You do not need to buy one from Apple. Any USB keyboard will work with the Mac mini.
(3) OS X has been around for what, five years now? And for five years now, OS X has had context menus and support for mouses with two or more buttons. Mine has 5 buttons including the scroll wheel/button. You do not need to buy a "silly one button mouse" from Apple. Any USB two-button scroll mouse will work with the Mac mini.
In the end, as so many of us have realized already, the cost is now very low, and very well justified.