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'Perfect Storm' of Mac Sales on the Horizon?
fkx writes to mention an eWeek article suggesting that, finally, the PC-using public is going to 'get' the Mac. According to the article, the new advertising, increased functionality of OSX, and Intel-based machines are all raising the profile of Apple's machines to new heights. From the article: "However, this cycle isn't your usual processor upgrade cycle that comes every time Intel or Advanced Micro Devices tweaks a process. This is a major shift that affects all parts of the Mac customer-developer-vendor ecology. Longtime Apple watchers can count two earlier events of similar magnitude. The first such transition occurred in March 1994 with the arrival of the PowerPC architecture. The Motorola 680x0 architecture that had served the Mac platform for a decade was quickly supplanted by a set of new, more powerful machines. "
As long as George Clooney dies, I'm all for it. Heck, take Marky Mark too.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Mac Minis making a giant wave, and the boat... almost... makes it...
*Just kicking it does not include gaming.
That's the issue. My parents (in their late 70s/early 80s) decided to get a Mac when they decided they liked the idea of getting a video camera and doing some video editing and DVD authoring. The bundled software simply sold them on the idea. Dad subsequently got a USB music keyboard just because he enjoyed the idea of playing with Garageband.
But yes, their old Windows 98 box was fine for e-mail. I'm not sure about their porn-surfing habits.
I think there's a perfect storm coming for people to stop using the term "perfect storm."
Of course, it's so different that it took me half an hour to figure out how to install Firefox, but that's to be expected I guess. :)
;-)
So, you're telling us that it took you half an hour to learn how to drag and drop?
Good news for you! There is a quick and low cost case mod you can do to get that aluminum-y goodness on a non-pro macbook.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Hmmm... Let's see. Looking at my "old" five-year-old G4 Powerbook.
PC Card interface (PCMCIA)
USB
Firewire
Ethernet
DVI
S-Video
ATA (IDE) hard drive interface
Laptop SDRAM
Yup. That's a closed architecture if I've ever seen it. Not.
The new laptops have standard laptop DDR memory as well. As a special bonus, I didn't shell out for the Airport card; I have a Microsoft-brand 802.11g PC Card wireless interface installed instead. (It was lying around and therefore free to me.) No extra drivers to be installed. It just ran under OS X as an airport device. How exactly could this laptop be any more open? Have you changed your Dell or IBM laptop motherboard lately for a 3rd party replacement? How about the CPU?
And the desktops are even worse! AGP and PCI on the motherboards. What were they thinking? Next thing you know, they'll be moving to PCI-X in the next generation.
The 1990s called. They want their "Macs are a closed architecture" whines back.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
You know, I hate Mac OS X. And I'm not alone. I'm not some Windows-loving Microsoft apologist. I run Linux on my notebook, on my servers, and in a lot of other places. But there's just a lot of things about Mac OS X that bug me. At my university, one of my CS courses had a recitation that took place in the Mac lab. We had iMac G5s running Tiger that I used for 4 hours every week. Frankly, the Macs had the disadvantages of Linux and the disadvantages of Windows:
- Compared with Debian, software selection is rather pathetic. Under Debian, you can apt-get "foo" (or use Synaptic), and there's a pretty good chance that you will find whatever FOSS application you are looking for. "fink" isn't installed by default on Mac OS, and it's kind of a pain in the ass to install.
- Tweakability is severly lacking compared with Linux. There are "binary blobs" everywhere that you "shall not touch". Mac OS is almost as closed as Windows.
- Hardware support sucks. Part of what makes PCs great is that you can choose from many vendors. I can build a PC myself, or get the $150 eMachines PC (Black Friday at Best Buy) with monitor, or get a brand-new $500 laptop, or even get a used PIII box on eBay for under $200. Mac OS limits you to what Apple offers. What if I want a system that's smaller than the MacBook? What if I want a system with non-integrated graphics for under $1000? What if I want an SFF system that takes full-sized drives? What if I want to be able to upgrade my graphics? What if I want to add a TV tuner? Apple effectively has five products - PowerMac, MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMac, and Mac Mini. One of those products still isn't available in an x86 version. And what if I don't want an Intel CPU? What if I want to run x86-64 code? No Apple product can do this currently, but my two-year-old Athlon 64 junker can!
- Paying for OS upgrades sucks. GNOME and KDE get new features with every release. GNOME releases every 6 months, and I can get those upgrades for free. In this regard, OS X isn't really any better than Windows, although at least you have the option of paying for upgrades with OS X.
- The Dock sucks. It moves around a lot, it doesn't have text labels except on mouseover, it takes up a lot of room on the screen (and autohide makes it even more annoying), it's not very configurable, and it doesn't work well with a lot of applications. I ended up dragging the Applications folder to the Dock and using it as a quasi-Start-menu, but once you have done that, you might as well make it a button so that it's not constantly moving around. Moreover, put it in the darn corner so that I can click it easily. Apple users always talk about putting menubars at the top of the screen to take advantage of Fitt's law, yet they rarely talk about having an application launcher / window list that does the same. The Apple menu was far more useful in Mac OS 9 - I have no idea why they replaced it with a menu that is used far less frequently.
I have thought of buying a Mac and running Linux / Windows on it, but what's the point? Why pay more for a Mac unless you really like Mac OS X? I don't, and I know many others who do not. Slashdot users always talk about how great Mac OS X is, but I don't see it. I see a proprietary platform that lacks the openness of Linux and the compatibility of Windows. I see a GUI that is increasingly less consistent and increasingly more annoying. You can do so many things easily with Linux that are difficult to do with Mac OS X or Windows (hostap, anyone?). If I want the broadest library of software and the best hardware support, I run Windows. If I want a platform that is open and massively configurable, I run Linux. Where does Mac OS X fit?
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, "Sure, Mac users are only 10 percent of the market... but they're the top 10 percent."
>you're probably wasting your time on your tools instead of what you do with them
I'm not sure it's wholly a waste of time, if it's also your hobby - and of course, once you get a Mac, you spend half your time evangelising them on the Internet, making up for the time saved in not tweaking hardware / Windows.
'Capitalists of the world, unite! Oh
I don't think I've ever met someone who kept their laptop under their desk.