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Mac OS X x86 Put To The Test
stivi writes "ZDNet has tested Mac OS X x86 on a Toshiba laptop. The article discusses installation process, performance and power consumption comparison and has a thorough photo gallery as well." From the article: "Mac OS X will not be available on any old x86 PC, though, as Apple wants to retain control over its hardware platform. From the company's point of view, this is an understandable position, as the margins on Apple-branded computers are much higher than is usual for standard x86 PCs. Were Apple to put the x86 version of its operating system on general release, Dell would begin to manufacture Apple clones. This would put enormous pressure on the price of Apple's own computers -- something the company is naturally keen to avoid."
I'm not sure I agree with the author's positions at all...
Mac OS X will not be available on any old x86 PC, though, as Apple wants to retain control over its hardware platform. Right, Apple wants the fastest, smoothest and most gorgeous OS. It won't run on any old X86. You don't see V12 engines in Hyundais either. You don't see marble floors in Section 8 housing. You don't see big, soft seats in coach class.
From the company's point of view, this is an understandable position, as the margins on Apple-branded computers are much higher than is usual for standard x86 PCs. Which allows them more money to develop the next OS, more money to pay employees and more money for risky R&D. If you sell $500 cost hardware for $500, you're left with nothing for the future. Yet profit isn't the only motive. By restricting the base hardware, Apple spends less on supporting what ends up being dumb users. My MS helpdesk team fixes 90% of problems that can be assessed as "sub par hardware" and "user is a moron and bought crap."
Were Apple to put the x86 version of its operating system on general release, Dell would begin to manufacture Apple clones. And lose MS' favor? I highly doubt it. New techs needed, new marketing, a bifurcated customer base? Keep bullshiting, ye who know not business.
This would put enormous pressure on the price of Apple's own computers -- something the company is naturally keen to avoid Right. Every business wants to avoid competition. Even the one the editor (or his parents) works for.
I see intelligent thought behind Apple. Lexus makes a great car, with a ton of room for third party add-ons and third party service. But their smooth engine and user friendly console won't fit in a Hyundai. Are Hyundai drivers mad?
No producer of high quality goods should listen to cheapskate NewEgg buyers who don't care for quality and future development.
For instance, when setting the time zone in Windows, you must select it from a list; with Mac OS X you simply click your region on a map of the world. I shouldn't even comment on the quality of reviews like this.
Mac OS X x86 also runs on the AMD platform. ???
Final versions are generally considerably faster and less resource-hungry than beta versions. Or, "it'll run better on the required hardware, which is more than just a processor."
I'm actually excited for this move by Apple, but it changes nothing for me. I haven't seen a Mac in nearly 6,000 work orders.
"Put to the test?" = Installing pre-release software on hardware it wasn't developed for?
Can't we just wait until Apple ships a mac with intel inside? I love Apple and everything, but this barrage of useless Apple articles has got to stop.
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
I think Apple will put a toe in the x86 water by locking OSX to their own hardware, so they don't compete head to head with Microsoft. If it works well for them though, I suspect they'll start to sell the OS alone.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
"Steve Jobs might not approve, but Apple's latest operating system can be installed on any x86 hardware."
That will last as long as it takes Apple to DRM the hell out of it. Or worse, dispatch it's army of lawyers armed with cease and desist orders to anyone who dares to suggest a method to install on a non Apple box.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Apple sees how much Microsoft pays in supporting what ends up being other manufacturer's problems. MS isn't innocent, but if Video Driver #16 works where #1-15 crashed, why did MS have to handle 500,000 phone calls?
Its not really fair testing Beta software for performance. Apple may still have lots of debug clutter in there amongst other things. I know everyone is excited about x86 OSX, but honestly, its only a few months away, wait for the real deal.
So... Apple has a developer version that can install on any machine, but they'll restrict it to Apple-only at release.
Apple is playing with fire. Those developer releases will certainly get out in the world. I'm also certain someone will find a way to get around the Apple-only requirement once the x86 Macs start shipping, cutting into Apple's hardware revenue.
OS X will not be available on any old x86 PC
Good. This means that, like the hardware in my Powerbook, OS X should play well with the hardware of their x86 PC. Better than trying to support all odds and ends of hardware for all x86's. Things are much more stable in the Powerbook, than the Linux desktop with the Nvidia graphics card (on which X.org crashes and freezes up the screen after 5 minutes of use).
Hey, I'm a huge fan of Linux, but sometimes, you just want things to work the way they were meant to and not spend 3 hours setting something up. This is how OS X spoiled me I suppose....
"Were Microsoft to not put the internet explorer version of its browser on general release, Netscape would begin to sell people their browsers. This would put enormous pressure on the price of Microsoft's own browsers-- something the company is naturally keen to avoid."
;)
Of course I now expect several comments telling me why this analogy is wrong. They will range from "Microsoft is a convicted monopolist!!!" to "Apple needs to control the hardware to create the best user experience". Bottom line is, Apple wants to keep its hardware prices high and doesn't want Dell to undersell them.
To address the second issue MS would argue that they need IE on Windows to control the Windows experience. That it wouldn't be the same without it. (This is true, it would probably be much better without it). To address the monopoly issue...everyone's gotta start somewhere
When they tried that before, what happened was that Mac users just bought the cheaper Mac clones, cutting into Apple's profits, and PC users continued to buy PCs. :)
Everyone else seems to be harping over how Apple will lock out unapporved hardware. I'm interested in the opposite. Will Apple companies to make hardware that Apple has approved but also works for other x86 platforms? This is interesting because I can forsee "Apple Approved" being a quality standard for x86 hardware. That could potentially be a very good thing regardless of your OS or computer manufacturer.
Were Apple to put the x86 version of its operating system on general release, Dell would begin to manufacture Apple clones. This would put enormous pressure on the price of Apple's own computers -- something the company is naturally keen to avoid.
While this is undoubtedly true, perhaps the bigger risk to Apple is that without maintaining their traditionally tight control over the hardware/software integration, the Mac OS X user experience would be likely to suffer, and thus so would Apple's reputation for quality.
What would piss Apple off even more in such a scenario would be when software vendors were slow to adopt new hardware characteristics specific to Apple models simply because those features were unavailable in the clone market.
So it's not necessarily so much about a loss of revenue for Apple (which they could, after all, potentially make up for with some appropriate licensing scheme) as it is about a loss of control, which is, after all, something Steve Jobs obviously values very highly.
If Apple loses their hardware business to clones and their software business to CheapBytes, how exactly are they going to keep making OS X? Their going out of business may be good for everyone but them (although I'd disagree with that) but that seems like an odd calculation to expect them to make.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
What you don't seem to understand is that Apple is not driven culturally to be the biggest, they have a burning desire to be the best.
The positive changes in their market cap and bottom line are the rightful reward for their mission.
By monopolizing the hardware Apple is just as evil if not worse than Microsoft. The one great thing about the x86 platform was that we could put what operating system we wanted on it.
Apple is bringing to the x86 world that it is okay to lock consumers into your own brand of hardware. This is not the direction we need to go.
too many people excuse Apple's actions just because they are Apple. After what Apple did to the original Mac clone makers it makes one wonder how anyone can excuse them. Perhaps its just "correct" to continue to excuse their obviously monopolistic activities because a lot of geeks think they are cool (and all so not Microsoft)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
It's tricky. This may have been a move by Apple to increase marketshare, but I don't think that's a real motivating factor. I'm inclined to believe Steve when he tells us the switch was to appease those demanding faster chips (and therefore more of a retaining move to keep the profits in the Mac platform). I'm a Mac user and its reasonable to say that the design-factor of hardware is a compelling sway factor in their favour. So assuming that this is a retaining move then why should Apple make a general x86 release? Many of us that have Macs (misguided elitist people that we are, and proud of it) find the idea of installing OS X on a Dell box somehow horrifying. Regardless of what the cracking world does the Apple faithful will probably not be moving to beige boxes in droves because they are cheaper. Regardless of whether or not it's a sane way of thinking, brand name means a lot.
[1] Unit profit, ignoring R&D costs.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You know Apple hardware is way less expensive because???
I'm sure it's because you've combed their financials and you've figured out what per unit profit is after removing cost/profit associated with R&D, retail, distribution, software sales....
Or did you simply decide this because you did the most obvious thing, you compared them to Dell? You figured a G5 is pretty much the same thing as a P4 even though Apple has to buy a relatively low volume processor from a different company, and they have to design and contractract the fab of their own system controller and motherboards, and they have smaller economies of scale, and they make a nicer box (there's about 10lb of Aluminum in just the G5 tower shell)...
That's how you know that Apple charges way too much, right?
Of course every kid knows this.. that's why the average ACT score is like 13.
I'm not feeling witty so bite me
I'll preface this by saying I'm not an Apple pundit, and while my current machine is a Powerbook, my last dozen were all PCs (of the AMD kind).
Why do people get all worked up about OS X being hardware locked? If it were my OS, I'd do the same thing -- not just to secure my profits (though they are entitled, it is THEIR operating system), but to actually standardize on a reference platform that can be supported.
How much of any OS developer's time is wasted trying to account for instabilities in your cheap ass, five dollar, no name, Korean sweat shop motherboard? I don't care if Intel just botched a huge batch of boards, it happens, but trying to accomodate a hundred different chipsets and video cards and ram types and people messing with voltage...
We complain about how this industry has been around for so long, and how computers still aren't that stable? It's because there are N! possible combinations of hardware and software to try and get working together nicely, which is a lofty goal at best.
Call me crazy, but I'm at an age where I just want it to work, and my Powerbook at home always does, and my Powerbook at work always does. Part of that is the quality of the OS, and that's reflected in the (relative, not concrete) stability of the reference platform it's built on.
"All I ever wanted was to see Larry Wall give Bill Gates a Perl necklace."
http://www.eisenschmidt.org/jweisen
They would like you to buy a $2000 tower every 3-5 years, and then buy OS upgrades every year and a half or so at $130 a pop.
And so far, they've been providing enough value with thier OS to get a lot of Mac users to agree to exactly that.
Apple appears to have very little interest in appealing to people who run Linux (or pirated Windows) on $300 AMD systems. If you don't have enough use for a Mac to at least justify the cost of a Mac mini plus yearly upgrades, then OS X is not for you
...yet.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Just about any USB stick or camera you plug into your computer will also be formated FAT16.
Try to add a static network mount. Just drop it in fstab, and it'll all be there, right? . Sorry yet?.
/etc/sysconfig/network, doesn't work on slackware though...
:) And I can assure you from experience, getting your unix app to run on other varients of unix is not usually a piece of cake either.
... with a spiked hammer.
... but yet, Mac OS X is one of the harder common platforms to test on due to the need for special hardware and the lack of developer / "lite" OS versions.
:)
You create static network mounts by editing the fstab? Er...
BTW, mac os x can be configured to use the same files as any other unix, by default it's just set up to check netinfo first. You can modify the lookupd configuration to change this. Yeah, apple does things differently. But hey, different unix systems do to. I mean, I'm used to editing my
Now look at the syntax in `ld' for linking "framework" libraries, and hell, the fact that "framework" libraries exist. If you haven't worked on build systems, you won't understand the horror of that one.
This is a product of apple's development environment. They provide and promote their own dev environment that is not unix based. Well, sort of but not really unix based. Frameworks to me are a better solution than libraries, because they are far more flexible. Your framework can include multiple libraries for different platforms (say, um, x86 and PPC), it can include translations for multiple languages, it can include graphics and help files, etc all in one neat little package. How do you do this with unix systems? You end up with files spread all over the place, requiring installers and multiple archives for different platforms. I can easily delete everything associated with a framework. Deleting everything installed by a library is not so simple.
And of course mac os x supports plain old shared libraries as well.
If you haven't given up yet, try starting a GUI app from the console. Tip: You have to use the special "open" command, just executing it isn't enough.
Not true, you can start an app from the console just like you would on a unix system. Hint: the actual binary is not the yourapp.app folder, it resides inside there.
It goes on, and on. None of these things are all that bad (well, except for the retard who chose to ignore all compatibility and use "-framework name" instead of "-framework,name" in the linker options) but they're all very frustrating for someone developing for UNIX.
They're much less frustrating than getting your unix app running on windows
They're also good reasons to inform any Mac user who claims that "Mac OS X is just UNIX on the inside" just how wrong they are
Depends on what you consider unix... I mean, os x is unix on the inside. However, like many unix vendors and linux distros, they have their own way of doing certain things. At the core though, you have a unix kernel. That doesn't mean that your linux app will just compile and work (although many do just fine if you have the right libraries installed and use X11 for display). Now if you want your unix app to use apple's GUI components and other tools, well then, you're going to have to do more work, as you're leaving the compliant unix layer and using apple's own additions.
All these sorts of issues make it crucial to test on Mac OS X
I'd agree with that, but really it shouldn't be that hard to test. A mac mini costs less than $500. There are also a large number of mac os x hosting companies, not sure but I would think that someone out there probably offers some sort of full account where you could do VNC or something. Maybe... It'd be a good idea at least
I think that a lite version of OSX would not be worth apple's time though, I mean the resources to maintain a sepearate crippled release probably wouldn't benefit apple any. And if they just offered a developer version that is fully featured but runs on cheap x86 boxes, well, I think that would be abused pretty quickly.
Apple's design is elegant and reliable from the top down for hardware and software. Apple pushes the whole experience as a product, not just hardware or software. They even push third party manufactures to follow their example. All those made for mac products, are designed to be consistent with the Apple experience. Those are the products the Apple consumer purchase.
Do you see third party hardware being consistent with Dell's design? NO. That's because Dell doesn't design their hardware to esthetically please anyone. It's all about pushing out product. This approach also attributes to the huge number of returns on Laptop that Dell has. They don't care about the design as long as the fucking thing useable.
If I were Apple I wouldn't want to push my OS through Dell's shitty boxes that might be returned 5 times before a useable one ships. That would hinder the experience. I also wouldn't want receive support calls for someone's homebuilt fuckjob with a crappy ECS mobo and cheap ass video card so they could save a few bucks, that's what linux is for. Apple puts top quality and tested hardware in their system to go along with their top quality OS.
I could see OS X Server edition making it's way onto third party hardware before the desktop version. However, small shops are still better off with Apple's hardware as XServe, xSan and Xraid hold their own very well when consider price and features.
Apple only sells around 10 different Macs, but Dell sells countless different machines with constant spec changes for each type. Consequentally, Apple probably sell more base spec Minis than Dell does of any given spec, so economies of scale are actually a lot more in Apple's favour than those calling their hardware 'exotic' might think.
Secondly, Apple won't be paying the Windows tax on it's x86 machines, and everybody else (except Linux vendors) will. This gives Apple a price advantage, they could actually undecut Dell if they chose to.
Why does everyone assume we'll be paying a sizable premium for an Apple machine? Because G5s looked more expensive than X86s? That's (if you'll pardon the pun) Apples v. Oranges. Now we are moving to a situation where Apple can be compared a lot more easily to other manufacturers, I think they will either be forced to be competitive, or be revealed to have been competitive all along. Certainly going with IBM/Motorola for CPUs was a big expense for them, or they wouldn't be changing to Intel, so they should have more room for price cuts when they are with Intel.
I think that a big and often overlooked factor in Apple's decision to stay a hardware company is that becoming an OS vendor would quickly shift them above Google as the number 1 target for Mircosoft's wrath, and Microsoft could seriously damage them (without even breaking too many laws this time) just by saying "No more Office for OS X". The general public don't know a CPU from C3PO and are probably going to percieve a x86 box without Office as less compatible with their Windows machine than a G5 with Office was.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Static mounts:
/mountpoint
/mountpoint
/Network/<sharename> and without the 'net' option) isn't actually static, it's still mounted on first access, and this breaks some applications that seem to use access mechanisms that don't trigger the automount. The mounts also appear in a different place (/Network/<sharename> or for dynamic mounts /Network/Servers/Hostname/Sharename) than they would if the user had connected to the mount manually (/Volumes for a Go->Connect to Server mount, somewhere else in /Network otherwise).
... but neither of those seem to be true.
;-)
.app bundle - I *write* apps for Mac OS X. Hence most of the issues I outlined - I'd hardly be bitching about linker options otherwise. The problme is that unless an application is started by Launch Services (not sure that's the right name), some things are not properly set up. This results in many apps not getting their own global menu bar but instead interfering with the menu bar of Terminal.app, not getting their own dock icon, etc. The problem is confined to "real" Mac gui apps (Cocoa / Carbon) and Carbon/POSIX hybrids that use Aqua; it doesn't affect X11/POSIX apps. This w
Yes, I eventually discovered how to do this with NetInfo. It wasn't too easy to find good documentation, and there were some unpleasant complexities. For example, you can't use vfstype=afp and name=afp:///blah (even though you CAN use vfstype=nfs and name=host:/path for NFS mounts), you have to use vfstype=url and opts=url==afp://blah . This is despite the fact that:
mount -t afp afp://host/path
works, but
mount -t url -o url==afp://host/path
fails, claiming there is no mount_url command (and well, there isn't). Just to make things even more fun, a static mount (ie in
umount also deletes the mount point, but mount does not create it. fstab isn't used as it is on UNIX, but is instead merged into NetInfo on boot, where it's interpreted with entirely different semantics to what the fstab file has. Fstab is a table of static file system mounts, not an automount map. That's what automount maps are for. The `umount' and `fstab' man pages don't document these quirks, but instead refer to the conventional BSD behaviour.
I don't think there's any excuse for this sort of behaviour. If the documentation was accurate, and NetInfo / lookupd / autodiskmount / whatever did less behind-your-back magic, that'd be OK
It's all fine if you ignore the not-really-UNIX-like underlayer - there's nothing inherently wrong with most of this behaviour. However, it's incorrectly documented and looks just UNIX-like enough on the surface to suck you in before it beats you up.
I still haven't found out how to get Mac OS X to do a _genuinely_ static mount (connect at log-in time or boot-time) of a network volume without hacking the startup scripts. Even that has problems, apparently due to some issue with Carbon and Cocoa apps needing volumes to be "registered" with the "VolInfo database".
On Mac OS 9, I can just tick one box ("connect at next boot") and it just works. Well, at least 80% of the time
Frameworks:
I didn't want to write a massive speil on this. I don't think there's anything wrong with framworks, and think they solve some significant problems, especially for an OS with a drag-and-drop software installation interface as opposed to an intergrated package-manager based one. My issue is solely with the way they completely ignored the way the linker command syntax works and made up their own that breaks piles of build tools. It's a minor issue, but it's really annoying, and it's a strong point in terms of why you need to be able to test software on Mac OS X if you want to have any hope of being able to build software that'll compile there.
GUI apps from a terminal:
Yes, it is possible to launch a GUI app from the terminal. I know the real binary is inside the
>> Why did Apple choose Intel over AMD?
What Apple needs right now is a decent chip to put into laptops. The G5 is fine for desktop machines at the moment, and it will probably be competitive for a year or two.
AMD is ahead of Intel in the area where Apple doesn't need a replacement for PowerPC. But in the area where Apple is behind and needs help, it is Intel that is ahead.
But once OS X runs on Intel, there is nothing to stop Apple from using AMD at any time in the future.
The difference being that even with technically (I mean, by specification, not including whatever funky copy-protection nonsense is on there) identical hardware, Apple wishes to restrict their base.
First, the technically identical hardware is temporary, its convenient, it may be a good feint, etc. Switching to an Intel PCI chipset and Intel CPU *does not* mean you will have PC/AT compatible hardware. Apple has the expertise to design their own motherboards and chipsets. They could do anything from take their current proprietary design and replace the PowerPC with a Pentium to take a stock Intel PCI chipset as a reference and incorporate some of their custom chipset work, or simply leave out legacy PC junk that they have no historical dependency on but the currently shipping Windows does. Apple *did not* say that the current version of Windows would run on their hardware, they said they would not prevent Windows from running on their hardware. This suggests Windows will need to be ported to Apple's x86 hardware. Look back in history, once upon a time MS-DOS machines were not IBM PC compatible, the IBM PC was merely one of various MS-DOS machines. These machines had Intel CPUs and other similar hardware and benefitted from commodity parts as a result. However these systems were fundamentally incompatible, you had to adhere to the MS-DOS API to be safe. I'm leaning towards a repeat of history over a standard off-the-shelf PC design plus a DRM chip.
Secondly, Apple does not wish to restrict their user base, they wish to ensure that they survive in a meaningful sense. Apple fundamentally is a hardware company, they are famous for their software but that software is largely a tool to get people to buy their more expensive hardware(1). Their software is not really their core business, it is their core marketting to some degree. To run Mac OS X on generic PC hardware would kill their hardware business. They tried growing the Mac market by introducing alternative hardware vendors and it nearly killed them. The market did not grow, Apple's sales were cannibalized as existing Mac users flocked to the Mac clones. You can look to Linux as another example. Sun once had a thriving desktop business selling generic (with respect to the functionality that the user needed) unix boxes. Once a generic unix (Linux - again, only addressing people who needed generic unix apps/tools) could be run on inexpensive hardware Sun's desktop market evaporated. Apple would suffer a similar evaporation of their hardware market, suffer a devestating loss in revenue, and be a ghost of their former self. So a PC user may benefit from Mac OS X on generic PC hardware but what is in it for Apple. It has to be a mutually beneficial deal for it to happen, it is not, it won't happen.
(1) I have to note the mini as an exception. Unlike other systems it is pretty damn price competitive, or maybe its just that Apple's proportionately higher markup is being applied to such an inexpensive machine that the difference between the mini and a comparable PC is insignificant. Or maybe the mini's margin is much less than other Macs and the mini is being used as a "loss leader" to draw users into the Apple family. If enough people buy a bigger Mac as their second Mac whenever it comes time to upgrade Apple may have made a very good long term versus short term tradeoff.
I note a whole lot of comments about how Apple "ought to do clones so that I could homebuild my own Mac," and Apple sux or Apple rox or whatever.
The real interest in this article is that Apple is moving forward to increase its market share. They're a hardware company and they also write software that makes their hardware really sparkle, though I have read a number of articles that suggest that their OS software created so much overhead that it's not a great server for a back-office application
But from the user's perspective -- a GUI tool to partition a hard drive, imagine that! Easy installation that starts out with a simple GUI, gosh, that's neat! -- Apple's operating system generates a user experience that sets it above many others. Apple has "done design" on its hardware and they have also "done design" on their software.
A great follow-on article to this would be a research project to teach 10 students to use Windows, 10 to use Apple's OS X, 10 to use a popular and easy-to-use distro of Linux, 10 to use BSD, etc. Then submit a survey to them after they're up and running on their computers and try to elicit how each user feels about the experience of using the operating system and the applications they would use to do regular work, like write term papers, do finances, research things on the Internet and so on.
From my own experience of having used Windows and Apple's System 7, 8 and 9 as well as OS X, I'd say my personal experience on a Mac is an easier one. I think I am more relaxed on it. I think less about computer problems than I used to and now think only in terms of getting the sork accomplished.
Apple won't allow clones because when they had clones, it almost took down the company. They need the high income stream to continue to innovate. Sorry about all of you homebrew computer enthusiasts out there who want to build your own Mac but this cannot be helped.
And there are cheaper Macs out there; the Mac Mini is being sold for as little as $499, "nicely outfitted" at $998, plus the cost of a monitor. But remember, you're not buying "homebrew." You're not buying an Acer heapy-cheapy clone from some box assembler that does not innovate. Apple should be compared to HP in terms of price because HP actually does put innovation in their computers. IBM used to but they sold out to Lenovo and now they'll fast besmirch the name. So price comparisons need to take reality into consideration -- one should not rank Apple's price with a lower-tier manufacturer.
Also, the Apple computer I purchased in 1999 is still going strong and very useful. I know of no pee cees that can last that long. This probably cuts into the perceived market share for Apple computers because, if you buy a good one, it'll last longer than the equivelant pee cee. Look at the user-installed base to see Apple's true market share. I even know of people who are still using Apple's old System software and have not transitioned to OS X. One, in particular, does audio mixing with Digidesign's Pro Tools and not Avid's because the old software that ran under the old OS meets all current and future needs -- until his Mac finally bites the dust.
Intel makes processors and motherboards. Apple went with Intel, presumably because they had something more to offer than IBM.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
>> Yeah, but I think deep inside one of the things that motivates Jobs is that he wants to beat Bill Gates.
Wrong. Steve Jobs _has_ beaten Bill Gates. Bill Gates doesn't know it yet, but Steve Jobs and most of the world knows.
And in a smallish engagement on the side, he has beaten Michael Eisner.
It's hard to argue that the iMac is "well priced" when I can get a 3Ghz machine with 1GB of RAM and an LCD for the same price.
Very true! Especially to people who don't care about how the OS works, how the machine looks, how QUIET it is and how many features it has (Firewire, USB 2.0, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, 802.11g, DVD+_RW DL, digital monitor connection, SATA, Gigabit ethernet, built in camera and remote). People who only shop for a computer based on cost or on its ability to run MS Word, play MP3s and surf the net are never going to be convinced that Apple computers are worth the slight increase in cost.
What really annoys me about some BIY PC owners is that they don't consider the warranty of the machine, the superior OS (Mac OS X), the lack of searching for/fighting with drivers, noise level, power consumption, astetics and sometimes feature sets, when they claim that their BIY PC cost them up to a couple hundred less than a Mac.
I'm surprised that Apple is even porting to X86 specifically, rather than having Intel design a PPC variant or license the PPC processor from the current manufacturers/owners of the design.
Why would they do that [Put OS X on X86/Generic Hardware]? Unless Steve J is trying to copy (for once) the marketing techniques of Bill G and co; and just get everyone (who knows the difference) to pirate Mac OS X instead of pirating Windows. I refer to south-east asia, mostly.
It's not often you'll hear me say this, but for once the proprietary nature of Apples product(s) - I think - make those products "better" than those that run Windows, and even Windows itself.
[In case you are wondering, I use 4 different OSes daily, so I'm confident that there is *some* legitimacy to my opinion].
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