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MacBook Pro Reviewed
phaedo00 writes "Ars Technica has an in-depth review of the MacBook Pro that compares performance with a Dell Inspiron running a hacked version of OS X 10.4.4: 'Yes, you read that right. We at the Orbiting HQ were able to have some benchmarks run on an acquaintance's Dell Inspiron 9100 with a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 HT chip running OS X 10.4.4, and decided that including the benchmarks from this machine would prove to be both interesting if not illustrative of what non-Apple x86 machines may be capable of if they could run Mac OS X (legally). Please keep in mind that the data from the Dell laptop is for illustrative purposes only and that no one at the Ars Orbiting HQ hacked a machine. As David Letterman says, this is not a competition. No wagering.'"
I just FP'd!
One thing i don't understand about hacking OS X to run on beige boxes is:
wouldn't it be simpler to try to run it on a Virtual machine?
ie, make the computer boot Mac OS X, instead of making Mac OS X boot on the computer (and re-thinking your hack for every update of OS X).
does it run World of Warcraft nicely?
Apple and innovation?
Apple is regarded by its supporters to be an innovative and forward looking company. They claim Apple invented most things from the GUI to Desktop publishing. Almost always the supporters make the innovation claims with restrictions like "in the field of personal computing", "over the entire product line", "affordable solution" or "as a standard feature". They also like to blur your vision when equaling "popularized" and "introducing" with "inventing". Apple supporters always maximizes the importance of Apples involvement in an innovation (even if it's very slim) and at the same time downplay any other companies involvement.
Case in point "USB":
When the supporters speak about how innovative Apple is they talk about how iMac was the first computer utilizing USB. This is arguable, but if you tell them they counterattack with something like "over the entire product line". And now they are correct. In reality Apple had absolutely nothing to do with the technical creation of USB. Intel invented USB as an answer to Apples pay-per-port licensing of firewire. Apple was one of the first companies to use USB but strictly (or not so strictly) speaking that isn't innovation. They just used an of the shelf product that where developed on the PC market.
The same can be said for a lot of products Apple supporters claim Apple invented, of course with "additional restrictions" (see above). Some of these innovations are: Audio, SCSI, Ethernet, long file names and Floppy drives. In reality Apple invented none of those products.
A nice place for looking at these "innovations" is an older wikipedia page describing the Macintosh on which of course Mac users gone totally mad in describing the Macintosh as a very innovative platform. Almost all of claimed innovations are in fact just off the shelf parts licensed from other companies or already old products used in a slightly different manner by Apple. The wikipedia page has since been revised and is now more in line with what Macintosh actually brought to the table of computing.
It is however true that Apple are fast at picking up new technologies invented outside Apple and as a result the Macintosh is a faster evolving platform than the PC. This is a design decision made by Apple to keep the Macintosh computer interesting and "fresh". This however has some lowdowns. Every five year or so the Macintosh developers and users have to adapt to a completely new platform or a new operation system (68k->PPC, legacy Mac OS->OS X, PPC->x86, soon x86->x86-64). In the PC world this would be suicide, too much money are tied up in legacy technologies. Macintosh are mostly used by home users and small companies who don't need a homogenous environment, or have so few computers and programs they can invest in new technology every so often. The PC platform is used by everybody, small and large. It would be almost impossible to "twist and turn" the Apple way. Intel tried to introduce Itanuium for 64bit computing but in the end had to back down to a backward compatible x86 solution.
Conclusion:
All things considered, when the dust has settled. After decades of innovation and jumping between CPU families and platforms the Macintosh has transformed into nothing less than an ordinary PC, at least in hardware and mostly in software. Linux x86 booted within a month of the x86 Macintosh release using the standard EFI bootloader and Gentoo Linux distribution. Windows vista will probably boot out of the box on the Macintosh without Microsoft putting any effort in testing on the platform. On all important fronts the innovation by Apple has been nothing short of a straight copy of the PC platform. O
If the picture of the women in the photo booth demo is the reviewer, the damn she is CUTE!!!.
Hello from my bedroom, where all the magic happens.
I, for one, welcome our new Pr0nCam overlords.
I love where her mind is. If she is reading this, my name is Hank. I love long walks on the beach. I am into exercising, science, and computers. Though I am geek, I am considered cool amongst other geeks. Also, I am tall, dark, and handsome.
PS: The review was great- so in depth.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
X is pretty great, yes. I hear MacOS X is great too though, and you can reportedly run X on MacOS X even easier than on Windows. MacOS 1 : Windows 0
I've always thought you should be able to mod just +1, -1, or None, and attach a single word of your choice to describe why, or choose from a list. The choices we have a are crap. I often want to mod someone down for an "unsupported reason" and basically just have to lie.
Currently hooked on AMP
such a dork... you must be a LUSER. Enjoy your hobby...
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
It doesn't bother me if you stick with Windows because you want to spend extra time getting X going. I do that myself on my work machine. But don't look down on those of us who prefer MacOS X's user-friendly X integration. Far be it from me to criticize somebody's OS choice, but you might want to keep your anti-MacOS X thoughts to yourself on a site populated by computer geeks, some of whom will gleefully rip your anti-MacOS X opinions to shreds.
This is good. I'm replying on my brand new MacBook just came yesterday and wondering where I lost you... X for me is OS X... X-Windows would be the other X ;-p or X-W, I just don't feel like typing out OS X every time... sorry for the confusion... and I'm also trying to popularize the meme of using Win'r (as in oooohhh you're such a Win'r) for Windows user, LUSER (short for Linux User - from the prior LUG or Linux User Group) and of course the rest of us who use OS X (we don't get to make up our own label... though I've heard Zealot is popular and machead and X'r would fit)
oh well, it was pretty late my time when I replied so probably wasn't the most lucid thought process happening.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
The term "luser" is already in widespread use, and not in relation to Linux.