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HardOCP Spends 30 Days With MacOSX
boyko.at.netqos writes "Hardocp.com has published "30 days with MacOSX" — with the same author from "30 days with Linux" and "30 days with Vista" doing the evaluation. Ultimately he likes the stability and security but other concerns keep him from recommending it. From the article: 'The hardware lock-in and lack of quality freeware makes owning and maintaining a Macintosh an expensive endeavor ... Mac OS X has some amazing capabilities, but you spend a lot of money. Indeed, it seems the preferred method for solving Mac computer problems is to buy your way out of it. Slow computer? Buy a new one. Want to convert a file? Buy a utility. Want to do simple tasks? Buy a commercial program. Peripherals don't work? Buy replacements.'"
it's a flamewar brewin, i tell you what.
What a biased review. FTA, the guy could've been talking about a Windows PC. Subjective. Nothing to see here, move along.
does anyone else find it surprising that they're still trying to push the most expensive computing platform into schools? No wonder some are switching to Windows. OMG I just called a Microsoft product cheaper! Is the problem really this bad?
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Sure, the Mac fanboi attitude is to buy stuff, but remember, OSX is a BSD, and a lot of the same stuff Linux has can easily be ported to OSX and probably has been.
... though that's not for the faint of heart even if it is as simple as ./configure && make && sudo make install
If not - you can always try to do things the "source" way
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Want FOSS install fink, and apt-get install whatever.
... (and that includes a pretty big swathe of Unix software) runs on the Mac, I'd have to say those who pay for their Mac software are aware there are cheaper ways to do things, but their time==money and they can't be bothered. They probably got a Mac to get away from the get-your-hands-dirty PC world. I even know people with both Macs and PCs, and their Macs typically tend to be less cluttered with tools and utilities, because they work more and experiment less there.
Go somewhere random
I RTFA.
I shouldn't have bothered. To save everyone else the time here's a summary:
1. Hate Apple, Apple hardware, and hate the Mac OS X.
2. Review it.
3. Result: Hate Apple, Apple hardware, and hate the Mac OS X.
I have to admit that I didn't expect much, really, when I read in Slashdot's article summary that there's a "lack of quality freeware" for Mac OS X... the author definitely doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about.
Must be a slow news day.
--Richard
it seems the preferred method for solving Mac computer problems is to buy your way out of it. Slow computer? Buy a new one.
Which other operating system can I use that doesn't require me to buy a new computer when this one feels too slow? If it's a lack of RAM that's slowing things down, then I'm just as likely to be able to chuck more memory into a Mac or a PC. If it's the hard drive, then again, I can put a whizzier one in regardless of whether it's a Mac or a PC.
Not sure he's heard of MacPorts:
http://macports.org/
nor Fink:
http://finkproject.org/
nor version tracker:
http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/
Seems like a weak point to criticize on. I mean, I haven't got a ton of money, and I recognize that from time to time I will spend a little more money being a mac user than I would if I were a PC user, but as the report admits that the system is more reliable I don't see why that is a bg deal? Is anyone who is serious about their computer NOT going to spend money on it?
I dunno, I always thought this was why being myserly was a bad thing - you penny pinch, and you end up with things that don't work right.
Everything and everyone is an aspect of Gd. So remember to show proper respect!
I've had no problems finding free software to do most everything I want. In fact, the only commercial applications I have on my PowerBook are GraphicConverter (which came bundled with it), Microsoft Office 2004 (which I wanted for work) and Transmit (which I really don't need, since it duplicates built-in functionality, but I liked the way it worked).
Almost anything on the Mac can be solved with freeware.
"While AbiWord and NeoOffice are both available through X11, neither had the full functionality that we needed, not to mention that we had a hell of a time getting them to work at all."
If I'm not mistaken, NeoOffice is a native Mac app that is as easy to install as any other, and integrates just fine with the OS. Is the author think of openoffice.org?
On one hand it limits the available options and raises prices because of a lack of competition, but on the other hand it makes the product more stable in a sense of no mystery products/drivers that could break something else on the system. The review seemed fair in what I got out of it.
WTF is with the spelling "fanboi"? It's almost more annoying than the fanboy attitude itself.
They characterized NeoOffice as "being available through X11". Methinks they must not have even bothered to download and try it. The entire point of NeoOffice is to not need X11. There are valid criticisms that can be made about Neo's load time, Office compatibility, interface quirks, memory requirements and so forth but needing X11 isn't one of them.
Isn't this what you always do when your peripherals don't work? ;) I use FreeBSD, Ubuntu, Mac OS X, and occasionally windows at home and none of them can magically fix a broken mouse.
Article summary: The UI is pretty, there is less freeware, Minis aren't good for games.
Wasn't all of this known to the author before he wrote this detail-light article?
Not just preferred, but official.
Let me tell you all (again) the story of my Blue and White G3, Revision 1.
This particular hardware has a CMD IDE chip. Apple screwed up implementing it. Various people claim that it is a problem with the chip, but the identical chip is used in oodles of other hardware (including early UltraSparc workstations) and it works fine there. So Apple blew it. What did they blow? If you use UDMA transfer modes with it, most devices will experience data corruption. The problem occurs most when the CPU is heavily loaded (if you have one of these systems, a bit of testing will bear this out) but it can happen any time. And it's easy to load the CPU (even if just for a moment, which is long enough) when it's a ~300MHz G3.
Apple published a TIL (TechInfo Library) document on the subject. Their solution? Either purchase an add-in IDE host adapter, which for the mac at the time cost something like five times as much as for the PC, or purchase software like FWB Toolkit to disable UDMA transfer modes on the disk. That's right; Apple's solution is to spend money to make your computer slower. No logic board replacements were proffered.
That isn't the worst of it, though! When Apple rolled the TIL into their new Knowledge Base (KB) the article was deleted. I used to have the TIL document # noted down and actually searched for that, and could not find it. The information on this problem is available on lowendmac.com, by the way... The point here is that Apple not only treated their customers like shit by selling them flawed hardware, then knowing and admitting they were flawed, and suggesting a ridiculous solution (spend more money) but they then later attempted to bury the evidence of the incident by eliminating the best reference to it on the web.
If this is the kind of company you want to patronize, that's your business. But Apple has never been shy about making users spend money, even when it's Apple's fuckup that you're working around.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
PC security and stability is easy. take the money you would have paid for a macbook and buy 2 dells. then, if you get a virus or any sort of error, you can swap it for a brand new one while you are having the other one fixed. 100% uptime, guaranteed.
i sold my broken dell on ebay and keep my spare in it's case wrapped in $400 cash money like tycho from penny arcade does with his CD player.
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
full of opinion, without any actual facts to back it up... you could almost find and replace OS X with Windows and have the exact same story. meh
course why would you listen to me, I'm an anonymous coward...
Amen to that, buy a mac and you got a expensive brick..till you buy some software that will
actually make it do something.
Got Code?
Well Duh. I'd much rather buy my way out of the situations he names than spend my time scrounging around for semi-adequate "free" solutions a la linux, or borked spyware crap a la windows. Maybe his time is free, but mine isn't.
There is not a single bit of actual information in that article. It's pure, unsubstantiated opinion, and in many cases it's simply wrong. Why do you post crap like that?
The quote in the lead-in seems to be a bit of flame bait to me. How do you answer the questions asked with other platforms where the answer means something to business and not the hobbyist? Obviously, it's a complex answer and there are different answers depending upon how and where you are using the platform and whether or not it's critical to business practices. I'll read the article, but on the surface it seems that the reviewer may have taken more of a home user/hobbyist point-of-view for the review and that would be nice to know in the lead in. Again, I will state my stance for the record, right tool, right job. Being an IT manager I already have answers for the questions, but I'm curious to see what folks say in this thread.
I don't know what he is talking about. I run OSX at home and Fedora at work and it is far from difficult to find freeware for every need I have. I do my coding in Pythonusing ActiveState, I write my articles in TexShop, I do scripts in TextWrangler (which is excellent). I have 11 programs open now, of those only Adobe Illustrator and Pages are closed and cost me money (over and above the OS). The others, safari, firefox (both at the same time, don't ask), terminal, textwrangler, azareus, skype, itunes, preview, and omni outliner didn't cost me a penny. I could go on. Realisitically, whenever I need to do something new, convert a file, edit something that I'm not familiar with, or create a program, I find it is easy to come across quality free programs online. Check the apple.com website, search for software, you'll be surprised.
Peripherals don't work? Buy replacements.
That's what I normally do when my peripherals break. I suppose you could learn how to fix an optical mouse or something, but really it seems like it would usually be more cost-efficient to just buy a new one.
http://xkcd.com/386/
Let the flaming begin!
Does this guy know of google? You don't have to buy software to open windows/linux files on the Mac or any other type of files for that matter. Peripherals don't work? His peripherals must be 10-20 years old? Where do these people come from? Supposedly they are technology experts. Idiot!
One of the reasons why Macs are popular with developers is that the cost of an Apple is cheaper than the time they'd otherwise spend maintaining linux - while just about every linux app can be ported (to darwin not cocoa) or compiled with minimal effort.
The author of that article is a fool.
"Furthermore, the lack of freeware requires either resorting to illegal activity or resorting to paying out the nose for commercial software."
So the only option to get software is to steal it or find some schlep to make you something for free????
Choice quotes:
'And, as mentioned, we couldn't get a hold of a decent word processor and had to do the bulk of our note-taking in a WordPad-like application."--- So on your Windows machine you use what? Something stolen?
"The OS is sadly chained to the anchor that is Apple hardware, and I am less enthusiastic about that."
"Not everyone needs BlueTooth and WiFi - and I would have rather had a computer I could use."
I have never had a problem with a lack of freeware for the Mac. There are a couple pieces of shareware I have paid for because I like the software and want to support the developer, but that was never a matter of functionality. The only other piece of software I have paid for is Apple Remote Desktop, and that could be replaced by VNC, ssh, and shell scripting if necessary. He mentions that he can't find any DVD shrinking software. He must have not looked very hard, as I know Mac the Ripper is just one of many free programs that do just that.
Yes, you do have to pay for MS Office and Photoshop, but no shit. You have to pay for these on Windows as well. He states that the free options like Abiword lack all the features necessary, but that's going to be true of any Office or PS knockoff. So not only do you have the option to buy Office and PS (just like on Windows, and unavailable for Linux), but you have a number of free alternatives, most of which aren't any harder to install on OS X than on Linux.
All told, the author is either ignorant of or biased against Macs. He complains about the Mac Mini lacking a more powerful graphics card and more RAM, but he fails to point out that it's a $600 entry level machine. He also complains about OS X not running on non-Apple hardware. That's a business argument for another day (and one that he would have a hard time winning), but it shouldn't be relevant to a technical review.
Wow. The description is not at all like my experence with OS X. However is frighteningly describing my usual Windows experence.
Saying OS-X has no freeware is both wrong directly (there is plenty of good freeware for OS X) and indirectly (Alot of open source unix apps compile directly, have premade binaries, or have ports going)
Using fink one even has the full apt functionality from debian and debian based systems.
Although things have been changing slightly in the past couple years, freeware for windows is harder to find, and before then almost impossible. Everyone was on the bandwagon of crappy worthless shareware apps, and worse, apps labeled as freeware but require a serial to unlock, by definition shareware.
I'd say only recently has windows even come close to a freeware pool like the OSS crowd has enjoyed, and continue to enjoy under OS X.
No freeware, maybe. But one of the things I really like about OSX is the amount of high quality, reasonably priced useful mini apps there are for it. Things like TextMate (or TextWrangler, which is free!) and Transmit are worth the money. There is a lot of "freeware" for the PC, but a lot of it would be better termed "crapware".
While Apple computers are more expensive up front, you do get quite a bit of bundled software, and a good, standards compliant, OS. I feel the software more than makes up for the extra cost.
Once you've paid for your Mac, you now have the world's most flexible computer. It'll run MacOS, Linux and Windows. With VM software you can run it all at once, with few compromises.
That means you can run freeware for all three operating systems, so the Mac actually has more free software available than any other computer. Many Linux programs build flawlessly under MacOS for instance.
Good stuff!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
To get away from the anal retention on PC.
/enjoy/.
/enjoy/ using Windows XP, even though I knew it so well.
On Windows, I hated shareware with a passion. I would go out of my way to avoid having to pay for anything. Software was something to be hoarded. Things could not be more polar on the Mac. Mac software is often of such high quality, and with great attention to detail, that you want to pay for it. With no spyware, nor viruses on the Mac either, you are not in a constant state of paranoia about what you are installing onto your machine.
The author is stuck in a PC mind set, and it takes longer than 30 days to unwind and realised that life is more important than fighting with Windows shortcomings, even if you sacrifice a little choice for something that you can actually
I never used to
It's the opposite with OS X, and that makes one hell of a difference in the long run.
For comparison, I bought a copy of XP and added 512 MB of RAM to my old Windows 98 box (1.7 GHz P4) 3 years ago. Microsoft does not charge me for my security updates (and at this point there are probably fewer updates to XP SP2 than there are to OS-X) and will continue to support XP for some years yet. My XP system still runs my legacy executables, such as Math Rabbit, that I am using for my second set of children.
Apple makes elegant and expensive consumer products. In many respects, they are what Sony should be. I don't value, nor play such conspicuous consumption games.
I guess they haven't heard of Freemacware.
My girlfriend uses Windows, which I also use at work. I've got OS X 10.4 at home on an aging PPC mac mini. Frequently I'm asked "can I do that on my machine", and my response is... you have to buy a program. Everything on my mac, I got for free (except little snitch), and there's _lots_ of quality freeware and shareware out there. And then there's fink.
Indeed, it seems the preferred method for solving Mac computer problems is to buy your way out of it. Slow computer? Buy a new one. Want to convert a file? Buy a utility. Want to do simple tasks? Buy a commercial program. Peripherals don't work? Buy replacements.
I couldn't agree less.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I'll admit you can't beat Linux for the shear range of freeware available, but the Mac has its own share of freeware, donation ware and cheap solutions. There are certainly solutions that you have to pay for and if they are worth it you will contribute to the development, by paying a few dollars, but if they aren't worth it then they are left to die and you quickly search out an alternative. What ever you have to say about buying software, at least you aren't promised free software only to pay out of your teeth, or the privacy of your computer, which I see happen too often on the MS-Windows side.
MacPorts and Fink provide access to a large range of open source solutions, but they are clearly aimed at the IT savy. As for replacing hardware when it is no longer good enough, well this is not different to replacing your video player when it no longer does the job. If you have a non-compact computer then you can upgrade it all you like, but a compact computer such as a portable will always have limited upgradability, and the target audience really doesn't seem to mind. What makes a good computer depends on who you are and what you are doing with it, but the greater public once something that just works, and does not want to play around with the innards of their system unless they are forced to.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I don't really care that you have to apply money to the problem. I don't rebuild my car or do more than the simplest of large appliance repair either. I don't understand why this is a negative. Shouldn't it just be a buyer decision like purchasing an extended warranty?
I am now Windows free for 3 years, loving OSX.
I am sadly disappointed in the support that apple has given the open source community. there are a LOT of free applications that do work well on mac osx, but apple does not seem to care. there is almost no official support for integrating open source applications. dports, fink, etc. - none of them really work well. you walk into an apple store and they say "if you are typing into a shell, we don't want to (read:can't) talk to you," literally. selecting and promoting open source software would be a way for apple to take a commanding lead in the os market, but they don't.
apple should have a marketing campaign like: "set yourself free" or something like that and let people choose them as a real windows alternative.
As a musician who uses Macs almost exclusively (disclaimer: I use other platforms for other stuff, not a rabid Macboy), I've constantly over the years been both rewarded and punished by the platform. He gets it right when he complains about the hardware upgrade schedule. It's only been recently that I've found a nice balance between my OS, hardware, and all the intensive stuff that my software needs to do, without having to upgrade one of those three things in a six month period.
Where he gets it wrong though is about the freeware. I've found a wealth of freeware and tinkering advice for getting more into/out of your Mac--I'm always amazed at how much is actually out there, considering the relatively small user base. And that doesn't even count projects like Fink, if you want to do real tinkering. So he's right and he's wrong, but it seems he entered the argument with his mind made up, and that's the real mistake.
u-bend
He didn't have the budget to provide hard evidence: [blockquote]We also ran into problems in trying to get work done. I really should have, as a reporter, been able to show you the difference in quality between VLC and Apple's DVD Player. I couldn't because the OS would not let me take a screenshot while a DVD was playing. And, as mentioned, we couldn't get a hold of a decent word processor and had to do the bulk of our note-taking in a WordPad-like application.[/blockquote]
Come to think of it some people around here think anything remotely negative about Apple constitutes flamebait.
Hardware lock in; repeat after me, Apple is a hardware company. They sell machines. The OS is just PART of the idea of bying a mac.
Paying your way out: ok, so teh Mac mini is a bit small, but the rest of the line up are made the same way that PCs are made. Want to replace a harddrive, do it, you dont need a mac-hardrive, a PC one is just the same. Nedd to replace RAM ? use PC-RAM, its the same RAM.
Paying your way out part2, the software: www.macupdate.com and www.versiontracker.com All (free) the utilities you need.
Oh, and does your Vista Dell computer come with MS Office ? I think not.
I'm far from a whiny Mac fanboy, but the linked article is heavy on generalities and short on specifics.
Just what ARE his Word-processing requirements - if he won't buy MS Word, doesn't want to pony-up for the cheaper iWork, and can't stand TextEdit - AND he doesn't want to bother test-driving the WONDERFUL Nisus Writer:
http://www.nisus.com/
Shareware / Freeware? Christ, here's a whole heap of goodness, neatly organized and searchable:
http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/
And what the FUCK is wrong with making a computer that is supposed to run as sold - e.g., so you can't take the OS off and slap it on another piece of hardware?
And every bloody peripheral I own works without drama. Plug it in, the hard drive mounts, the scanner scans, the digital camera disgorges its pictures.
The one real issue he mentions that drives me crazy is the wonky memory-management issues in OSX. When it has enough memory, all is good. When it runs dry, bad things happnen - rather, nothing happens and the machine grinds to a halt. Let's hope Leopard sorts this out.
The article writer should have spent some time doing actual RESEARCH before he even started on OS X.
Freeware? The Mac community has always had an abundance of high quality free and shareware. VersionTracker anyone? Besides, what's wrong with shelling out a couple of dollars for software that's oh, I don't know, USEFUL??? Shitty attitude that everything has to be free. You miss out on soooo much.
Adding RAM to a Mac mini? Gimme a freakin break- I've installed RAM in dozens of minis (former Mac Genius here) and it requires two putty knives and a small screwdriver. Five minute task; instructions easily found via Google.
I don't get the bitching about Office and Photoshop. DUH. Either use a version of OOo or pay for MS Office. Same as Windows. And Photoshop...well, either pay, or limp along with the GIMP or Elements.
In short, this article is piss-poor and the author needs a swift kick.
I used to have a high-quality Epson flatbed scanner (ES-600C I believe it was?), purchased for over $800 in the late 90's. When Microsoft released Windows 2000, it was deemed "no longer supported" by both Epson and Microsoft, because it used a parallel port, and they didn't feel like developing an updated driver for it. My only solution? Purchase a whole new scanner, and relegate this one to the junk pile.
I also had an expensive Diamond Stealth 3D video card at one time, which was never supported with working drivers in Windows 2000 or XP. XP would "auto detect" the card, but selected an unusable driver each time -- and an exhaustive search for an alternate driver turned up nothing but frustrated users who had to junk the card, or save it for old Windows '95/'98 machines.
These things happen all the time in the computer industry, unfortunately. In the case of the rev. 1 B&W G3, a class action suit was probably in order - just like people did with Toshiba a few years back, when they discovered they used a defective floppy controller chip in almost ALL of their laptops, which could cause incorrect data to be written to diskettes when the system was heavily loaded.
But one such situation doesn't make me say "Never buy an Apple product!" -- just as Toshiba's big floppy controller screw-up doesn't make me necessarily avoid all their products today.
So you're telling me that an author from HardOCP, an overclocking website, considered the task of adding memory to a computer to be too daunting to bother with? Come on. It tells you how to add memory to the computer in the manual.
I guess they didn't install macports? :-)
While I will agree that OS X suffers from the the same syndrome WIndows (and DOS before it) does - that is, anyone who can write a line of (Objective) C deserves $20 for their pet project - I don't find it to be a much of a problem. First of all, OS X is far more functional out of the box than Windows, IMO. So I don't need to download (and possibly pay for) all kinds of extra utilities to get up and running comfortably. Of course, I'm coming from a Linux background so maybe I may have a very different idea of "functional." For one thing, you've got the full commandline suite. There's a decent terminal program (although free alternatives exist). There's archive file management. You've got disk image manipulation. PDF reader built in. Etc.
Aside from the initial investment of $1800 for my Mac Book Pro, the only other thing I've paid for is TextMate. Everything else was free. I don't really know why this cost myth keeps perpetuating. The only valid "con" that I think the reviewer has is the hardware lockin/limitations. But what can I say other than that is the price we pay for solid hardware/software integration. I am reminded just how valuable that integration is every time I hear a Windows or Linux user complain about their video or sound drivers. Or every time I see a PC boot that BIOS from the 1980's.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Wtf? If my external drive ceased to work, and it did so on anything I plugged it into across multiple other OSs, I would blame the drive, not the OS. This guy is grasping for reasons to blame OS X for stuff and for ways to give it a bad review. Typical FUD: my drive died, while using OS X, so Im cautious about using any drives with it cause it obviously kills drives!! heh. His other complaints are just as laughable, blaming OS X for making people buy hardware? Name the last Windows version that did not require a Major upgrade in hardware over the previous just to run? Name an OS that wont go faster without buying more ram or faster processors? It like saying "my car wont accelerate any faster unless I replace the engine with a bigger one, so I must be a crappy driver." And the comment on lack of quality free software, how many quality free aps can you get for windows? Almost anything from the Linux/Open Source/*nix world will compile on OS X, there's even this project called Mac Ports that makes bringing normal FOSS stuff into the native OS X environment easier. Gimp is a prime example. If you look around, there is plenty. This guy is just spewing FUD, looking to complain about everything, riding the thought that to get better viewer ship for his articles he has to be negative, just like the major TV news is these days.
Blah
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
is about the only decent bit of pre installed software. Just what % of users really spend their time making podcasts or home videos? There is a darn sight more freeware for windows than there is for the mac. It's better quality and more UI consistant. I am a Mac convert as well.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
This is not an isolated situation. It is simply the best example.
Even Microsoft doesn't delete knowledge base articles that make them look bad. So while I don't trust Microsoft, I find Apple to be even less trustworthy.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The main 'faults with OS X' the reviewer finds are:
The MacMini only has 512Mb ram (because I configured it wrong)
The MacMini has Wifi and bluetooth with I don't need instead of more ram (because I configured it wrong)
The MacMini isn't expandable (I bought the wrong machine)
Which product was he supposed to be reviewing?
Why does the MacMini suddenly turn into a MacBook when he tries to return it?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I've been working in IT/Programming for 12 years now, while I was growing up we always had multiple computers at home...
I use a Mac now (6 months or so, ditched the dell for the macbook pro), now some of his points are somewhat valid, there are a lot of commercial utilities for macs which in the windows world, you can probably find and inferior replacement as shareware or freeware. However, you can compile and run a lot of open source software on OS X, more than in windows I think. Also, the cost of utilities and even full blown powerful software seems to be much lower on the mac. For example Parallels, what is it $80? Virtual PC from Microsoft is $300. Apple Works (which is a nice little office suite) is like $99, MS Office, $500. For what I need and do, Apple Works does everything I need.
As for the "buy a new computer" line, how is this any different? If you have a PC for > 2 years and now its "slow" yeah, you can upgrade the PC maybe a little easier than the Mac, but I've never seriously done it. After 2 years, its a whole new CPU generation, with a different socket. You're buying a new motherboard to upgrade the CPU, now you need new RAM, and unless you're terribly lucky a new video card. The video card problem might be getting better now, with PCI Express, but from 1998-2005 with all the different revisions of AGP it was nearly impossible to reuse your video card. Now, you probably replaced your sound card with the motherboard, and if you're lucky your power supply has enough juice for the new mobo, CPU, RAM. You can probably reuse your hard drive, but you might not want to, while you were in the store you saw a 500GB drive for $140, you might as well replace your 80GB drive. Besides, since you changed so much stuff, you're reinstalling windows anyway, might as well start fresh.
So in the end, you get to keep the same cdrom drive, and maybe the case. You just replaced everything else (except maybe the power supply). And you get the added bonus of spending hours in the computer store picking out replacement parts, making sure the RAM is compatible with the Mobo, and you get to bring it all home and go through the tedious chore of putting it all together and reinstalling windows. Good job saving $50 on the case.
Macs are just like any high end car like a BMW or Mercedes, they look nice, have a few fetures that kick ass, and is a status symbol, but are the company that makes it is pretty much bending you over on the price. Windows is like a Ford or a Cheavy, not the best looking or most powerfull cars, but they get the job done for 90% of people that use them, of course everyone bitches that they breakdown way to much. Linux is like a street racing car, a million diffrent flavors, and yea you may have pimped it out with twin turbos, and converted ever bolt to metric, but that still isn't right for everyone. So fanboys quit argueing about it already because your just spinning your tires and just enjoy what you use instead.
"Want to do simple tasks? Buy a commercial program"
And what's so wrong with that? Is it better to download a 'free' screensaver that gapes your hard drive's ass to the entire Eastern block? $15.00 gonna break your porn budget?
If someone can't work out how to install NeoOffice on a Mac then they don't deserve to be reviewing it.
And if they're claiming that NeoOffice is a "WordPad-like application" then so is OpenOffice, and just what freeware Office suite were they using on Windows that had a "decent word processor"? Hey, they only used it for a month, they could have used the Office 2004 Trial.
Bluetooth? Does he have a mobile phone? Even my technophobe parents have a bluetooth enabled photo printer, and got it working in seconds with their iMac. It's useful.
Wireless? Not having wireless would make ANY modern computer system WORTHLESS to most people. We can't all choose where the internet comes into the house, and living with cables strung across the house "because we don't need wireless" would make people laugh at you.
Not only is there tonnes of software available on the Mac, a lot of the payware is still cheap, yet developed with care and is good, and there's equal "freeware" as any BSD or Linux. Adium makes Pidgin look weak (interface wise), yet offers far more integration than MSN Messenger. Or there is Skype.
The only argument against Mac OS X is the lack of modern games. Oh well, install the cheapest Windows you can then.
One won't get far using a Macintosh from day-to-day without a word processor, for example, and the effective choices are limited to the iWork and Microsoft Office suites. Only the latter has features that professionals find themselves using with regularity (like edit tracking).
So we all need edit tracking?! How many of us really need the feature-creep of Office 2007? There are some, and there are some who really are doing DTP with a word processor, but the vast majority of people do not. Most of us would be well suited with TextEdit.
While AbiWord and NeoOffice are both available through X11, neither had the full functionality that we needed, not to mention that we had a hell of a time getting them to work at all.
AbiWord works like a charm and does not use X11, nor, IIRC, does NeoOffice. What functionality does this author 'need' that exists in Word for Mac but not AbiWord or NeoOffice? The Microsoft logo?
From time to time, there are small, niche apps that cost you - like the DVD shrinking software or the WMV converter - which have a freeware equivalent on both Windows XP and Linux.
How about HandBrake? While I've always been annoyed at the 30 dollar QuickTime fee, the same libraries for conversion, etc, are freely available on Mac so many free alternatives exist. Which WMV convertor for Linux are we talking about? If VLC, it also exists on Mac.
Not everyone needs BlueTooth and WiFi - and I would have rather had a computer I could use.
What is this doing in the article?
Dual-booting on a Mac brings the Mac platform an ability to play the games that were once the sole province of Windows. This should have been a net bonus for Mac but the limited and underpowered graphics solutions coupled with the inability to upgrade them negate that advantage.
So he tested on a Mac Mini and found that it couldn't play games well since they didn't cram an 8800 into the fat sandwich case. Great. Now, try the brand new MacBook Pro's video card or the iMac or the Mac Pro and see how that goes. And, the Mac Pro is upgradeable.
Furthermore, though people complain about DRM in Vista, the DRM of an Apple computer puts it to shame. There is no technical reason why Mac OS X can't run on other hardware, and even where technical compatibility is a problem, no one is asking that Apple have any sort of support for third-party hardware. Third-party drivers can take care of that, but we want to be able to have a user-friendly, stable OS to use on any hardware that we want without Apple actively preventing it.
Vista and OSX DRM issues are quite different. Apple has an understandable rationale for not wanting OS X to run on any hardware. If you don't agree with it, it is not at all impossible to subvert as a quick peek at Pirate Bay will show.
It is also expensive. The OS is sadly chained to the anchor that is Apple hardware, and I am less enthusiastic about that. It means that to use Mac OS X, you need to spend at least $600 on a new computer, and more for a computer that actually runs well. It also means that unless you go for the absolutely top-of-the-line Mac Pro line, you will need to replace your entire system when it starts to become outdated, rather than gradually solving bottlenecks by upgrading components.
600 dollars. Tragic, isn't it? If that is a problem, buy a used Mac. One of the effects of Macs being excellent, consistent 'package' computers is that they are very loved in the resale market, both for buyers and sellers. If only they would let me but this 600 dollar graphics card in the Mac Mini though...
Furthermore, the lack of freeware requires either resorting to illegal activity or resorting to paying out the nose for commercial software. Don't get me wrong, comme
Hax-fu?
Could you please post the other examples then? I have found Apple no worse than other manufacturers when dealing with manufacturing defects. I have actually found them better: when my then-new Pismo needed an Apple-spec'd part replaced after about two months, Apple sent me a Fed Ex box, which I dropped off at the closest Fed Ex store. Four days later I had my machine back, replaired and cleaned.
I know Apple has had some problems with iBooks (the G4s?) but they don't seem to be worse than Dell or HP or Epson or any other company.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
uncover a sto8y of FreeBSD sh0wed for the state of
Recently bought my Grandmother an ibook, her first computer. I kinda wish I'd just gotten her a cheapo laptop with Linux.
And uh, where's focus follows mouse?
Couldn't find a way to change the mouse color to make it easier for her to see.
The Apple store sold me an ibook with a glossy screen that has terrible glare and my Grandmother is stuck with it (macular degeneration or not). I didn't even know they made glossy screened macs.
So cool machine but..
Small, light, fast. That is all. ;-)
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
Aside from that: the operating system is simple, stable, secure, well designed, and well built. Check, check, check, check and check. It is also expensive. Check.
I've never before spent so much money on software aside from games. However, I've never before consistently felt like it's worth it. True, there's a lot of freeware on windos and Free Software on Linux. However, let's be honest, 99% of the windos freeware is crap wrapped in last year's newspaper. Lots of Free Software is in permanent beta and has never been touched by anyone knowing anything about user interface design. On the contrary, many $20 Mac apps are excellent in reliability and user interface, and easily beat comparable $100 windos applications.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Are you kidding me? Mac OS X has more free solutions available than Windows by a LONG shot. It seems every single program on Windows is crippleware, whereas most of my utility and internet programs are free as in beer. Thanks to the BSD heritage, we have a billion programs that put a great user interface on top of existing Unix/Linux projects (things like Transmission and Camino come to mind).
Seriously, look at http://www.macupdate.com/ and filter by "Free". Have fun.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
OpenSourceMac should get you started on freeware...
This guy really seems to want to slag off the system and certainly has personal biases. Even more is sounds like he made the review without try to learn the system, since there is no such thing as zero learning curve. A few excerpts:
One won't get far using a Macintosh from day-to-day without a word processor, for example, and the effective choices are limited to the iWork and Microsoft Office suites. Only the latter has features that professionals find themselves using with regularity (like edit tracking). While AbiWord and NeoOffice are both available through X11, neither had the full functionality that we needed, not to mention that we had a hell of a time getting them to work at all. A new Mac user can expect to pay $400 for the Office Suite, and more for Adobe Photoshop if they want to do any serious photo editing.
Office is expensive where ever you are and while there are alternatives if you are working in an office environment, then it is the defacto standard like it or not. I would certainly appreciate a different pricing for home users, but that isn't going to happen. The Mac comes with iPhoto which does the basics, though there is Graphic Converter which will allow you to essential editing and Gimp, though the latter still has an awkward UI. Then again with words like 'serious', well then you are never going to be satisfied with anything less than Photoshop.
We also ran into problems in trying to get work done. I really should have, as a reporter, been able to show you the difference in quality between VLC and Apple's DVD Player. I couldn't because the OS would not let me take a screenshot while a DVD was playing. And, as mentioned, we couldn't get a hold of a decent word processor and had to do the bulk of our note-taking in a WordPad-like application
If you limit yourself to the Apple screen capture then you will have issues, but there 'Snapz Pro' that will do the job and you actually get the video image, rather than a green zone as has happened on some Windows systems.
At the end he makes the conclusion:
But Scot and I are very different computer users (and perhaps members of very different tax brackets). For myself, I can't justify the cost of buying an expensive new system that does less than my ugly, hodge-podge, dual-boot Windows/Linux system, no matter how pleasantly it does the tasks it can.
Is this any different than having bootcamp with Mac/Windows? No OS is going to do everything and you are never going to satisfy everyone. The fact that not everything is available for free should not be an issue and it should be noted that you can get a lot more free for any given OS, MacOS X included, than trying to accessorise your car in the same way.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I'm a Mac user and a fan of FOSS. I like OS X because it's easy to use but also because I can set up a MAMP server and have a fully functional portable development environment. I use NeoOffice, Gimpshop, Scribus and Inkscape because the price is right for what I use them for. I also use Transmit, Unison and TextMate because I haven't found FOSS software that's anywhere as good. I've also paid money for Rogue Amoeba's stuff because there's nothing in the FOSS world that touches it, and very little in the expensive world for that matter. How much are these apps? Transmit is $29.95 and Unison is $24.95, TextMate is EU39, AudioHijack, which is an amazing piece of software if you do stuff with audio, costs all of $32.
There is an undeniable overhead in developing for the Mac because you have to use dedicated hardware, but it's not that much, and the quality of the software is very high, so I think it's worth my throwing my pocket change at them. That Coda sure looks purty too...
Disclaimer: I own an iPod.
This must be one of the worst OS reviews ever.
I'd say he spent like one or two days at the most using the computer. There's no way in hell a computer savvy person can't find anything else than the Wordpad-ish editor he used to write the article in "30" days.
By the time the Linux server died I decided I liked OSX so I went out and bought a Mac Pro desktop. It sits at home and does all the things my Linux server did -- it serves my web pages, it accepts incoming mail, it handles my phone system and it acts as my name server. I've purchased a grand total of three pieces of software for it, all games -- after a decade of Linux it was somewhat unique to be able to actually buy a game for my operating system of choice.
Since then I've upgraded my notebook to a Macbook Pro. I use it daily for work and it can also serve as a soft phone on my asterisk system (The built in mic works great as long as you use headphones or ipod earbuds to avoid feedback.) All the applications I use on it are free or come with the OS. If you're so inclined the Apple mail client will talk directly to an exchange server, too.
Admittedly I don't have to deal with Word Documents often, but Neo Office seems to handle them when I do. I've installed a fair amount of software on my systems off Darwin Ports or from free sources but "buy" never really entered the equation. I suppose if I were an artist I'd probably insist on some expensive software but for my needs anyway I could have purchased these systems and never spent another dime on software.
My main complaint is that the video card on the Mac Pro desktop gets freakishly hot when I fire up 3D games. This caused the system to crash frequently until I figured out what was going on. It seems to be an extremely common complaint on the Internet but there's not a lot of advice on fixing it. I'll probably end up slapping a third party cooling system on. So yeah, I suppose I am buying my way out of a problem...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Sure, the Mac fanboi attitude is to buy stuff
All three operating systems have groups of people obsessed with upgrades, people obsessed with buying the latest and greatest, and people happily using several year old systems. I recently saw a high-level exec (major healthcare group) with a very beat up first-generation Powerbook G4. He's perfectly content with it. On the flip side, I see plenty of PC people who obsess over spending gobs and gobs of money on things like video cards that cost as much as a 1-2 year old Mac, because that card gets them 2-3 more FPS in their favorite game. To each his own. I don't see many mac users installing ram with purple anodized heatsinks in their machines...
OSX is a BSD
It's a Mach 3.0 microkernel running a derivative of FreeBSD 5, with a NEXT-based configuration setup (Netinfo), and a Finder user interface.
I don't agree with the shameless self-promotion aspect, but Stallman's point that "Linux" is just the kernel applies equally to MacOS X, in that you cannot characterize it as "BSD" because it runs a FreeBSD based kernel.
Please help metamoderate.
As I write this using FireFox downloading PostgreSQL using Azureus, while chatting on Adium about writing a perl script I'm testing on my desktop. This was of course after I updated my time-sheet spreadsheet in NeoOffice.
If you're not happy with the Lack of Quality freeware Apple would love to help you get some. Blue Apple in the upper left hand side --> Mac OS X Software...
Yeah because 'selecting and promoting open source software would be a way for apple to take a commanding lead in the os (open source) market' and put a strangle hold on the 500 people who would actually make a purchasing decision as a result.
Consumers like to buy things. Open Source/Free Software folks DON'T. So who does it make more sense to market to? Your answer will dictate whether or not geeks belong in the upper echelons of corporate management......CEO, CIO, CTO, CFO...etc positions.
Are you smoking some bio-engineered weed or just a lot of the regular stuff?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
http://finkproject.org/
http://www.apple.com/opensource/
Whatever
And how, exactly, is this different from the situation in the PC world?
"Many ill-fated customers who upgraded have yet to get their PCs back to perfect working order" it says here and in many other places. Vista broke quite a few hardware drivers. And if your device is more than a few years old, the MBAs who decide these things are likely to decide against spending development money just to please loyal customers, so in most cases the simplest option is... to buy your way out of it.
Conversely, there are many things Mac OS X can do that Windows can't do unless you locate commercial products or shareware. I just found out yesterday, for example, that, unlike Mac OS X, Windows XP has no built-in way to check the S.M.A.R.T. status of a hard drive. And, of course, as far as I know there's no way to create a PDF file on a Windows machine without installing extra software.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
As an OSX user I have to say that my mac mini doesn't feel any slower than when I first bought it and when I bought a new OS upgrade my computer got a little faster rather than slower.
The MAC community has a much higher percentage running on 10 year old hardware than the windows community for the simple reason that the software bloat doesn't exist to the extent that it does in Windows.
Seriously when you OS feels bloated and you need to buy new hardware..........Is he really talking about Linux or OSX? Sounds like Windose to me.
The response shows that a lot of mac users should get a thicker skin. If this were about a windows pc, pc users would largely just shrug and say "I like what I got, so who cares". I have never understood the mac user penchant for taking such things so personally.
It's a computer, that all, regarldess of hype etc.
* HP 1020 printer -- This is a bargain basement printing solution that HP made reliant on Windows in order to keep it under $100. It clearly states on the product page that is Windows only. Yet he somehow blames Apple and MacOS X for not supporting it. HP chose to make the product this way and he chose to buy it.
* Canon CanoScan LIDE 30 -- Another bargain basement device; it's worth all of $25 now from various camera shops and is listed as being compatible with "MacOS X 10.1 and higher". This means it's been around since 2001 and that Canon did not upgrade the drivers on an obsolete, low-end product. And somehow this is, again, Apple's fault instead of the manufacturer's or the buyer's.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
I just bought a Mac to replace my dead XP box. This is my second trip to the land of mac, having lived there from the 512 to System 7.6. Now that most of the outside world compatablity issues are moot, I can't see buying another XP, or Vista, while in it's first incarnation. I've been too beat up by Microsoft to buy anything new. The best MS system I ever saw was Win 98 on an "educational system", after XP came out... Yes, the Mac is more expensive. So is BMW. So is Rolex. The construction quality of the iMac is better than most of the boxes I saw in stores. It was up and running in my application in a whopping 20 minutes, 10 of which were due to a disconnected DSL line. No, the Mac is not perfect. I was defacto sysadmin on the old Mac systems, so I don't suffer from total fanboy-itis. I'm not a programmer, but can normally figure things out. Going from System 7 to Win 3.1 was a major buzzkill, but now, the look and feel are close....but OSX is what XP wants to be when it grows up. If you have heavy use by non computer savvy folks (read:family for which you are tech support), the OSX means less tech support, fewer things to be picked up while looking for IM icons, and less time fighting with a computer while said family member stares at you to "make it work". I respect unix folks, but don't have the time to take it on. I am, like the 99% of the world, depending on store bought, so I have two choices. OSX is better, overall (not perfect) for someone who really does not care to resolve driver conflicts, port issues, malware, worms, and such.
Main problem with Win 3.1 GUI: Scrollbars not proportional. Could never live with that.
Not sure where they're getting their information from, but I use sites like
i esi fty-os-x-apps-list/a ge=macintosh
http://www.freemacware.com/
http://osx.hyperjeff.net/Apps/
http://www.opensourcemac.org/
and have never had any problem finding the right OSS or freeware tool to do a job.
I also enjoy perusing individual people's lists such as
http://wiki.43folders.com/index.php/OS_X_Inventor
http://generaldisarray.wordpress.com/2006/02/11/n
http://www.digitaldarknet.net/thelist/index.php?p
http://macskill.com/softwareupdate
and getting some great recommendations for apps to try out.
It seems like the author simply didn't do enough research before making his report.
Hope these links can help others find stuff they might otherwise not have known about.
I use: Solaris, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows (2k3,xp,vista) on a daily basis. Each has their strong points.
The biggest Mac Gotcha is that their "Real" Warranty (Applecare) is an optional add-on. This is to keep the prices competitive. Dell does the same thing. However it's not really optional because if your logic board dies on the 368th day after you bought it, you're out a whole lot of money to get it replaced.
That's really it. That's the one big drawback to Macs at this point.
Macs can actually run MORE software than a comparable Windows machine because they can run anything a standard PC can run (in a VM like Parallels or VM Fusion, via WINE, Crossover Office, Boot Camp) plus any specialized Mac Apps that you desire (Logic Pro Audio and Final Cut Studio HD come to mind).
In terms of free software, most everything "just compiles" If you don't want to compile, use Fink for "Debian Style" package management. Installing Support for X is actually very easy. You go back to your OS CD and do an optional install of just X windows. No conf files, no fiddling. It "just works", with multiple video cards, multiple monitors, with whatever.
Macs are generally fast, reliable and come with the only Unix desktop implementation that my mother can use without asking me for help. I'd say that's an accomplishment. Shockingly, they're not for everyone. Just like Linux isn't, just like Windows isn't.
Use what makes you productive and creative. Use what you like and what makes you happy. Over the life of a computer, a few hundred dollars spent or saved is probably a whole lot less important than the experience you have when you use it on a day to day basis.
The DRM module in OSX does one thing and one thing only - it keeps you from running OS X on non-Apple computers. It's no different from the CD-Key you need to install Windows, and FAR less of an imposition than activation, "Windows Genuine Advantage", Secure Audio/Video Path, DRI, signed drivers, and everything else that Windows imposes on you.
Having to buy Apple hardware to run OS X seems to be about 90% of the author's complaints, and it's a valid one, but the fact that on *some* Macs (and not all) this uses a DRM chip to enforce the lock-in doesn't mean that this is DRM, any more than using a Power PC rather than an intel chip was DRM in the previous generation. The only actual DRM in OS X as shipped is the barely-honor-system-quality encryption that iTunes uses... and that is hopefully on the way out...
He wrote the submission like it came from somewhere else, but the submitter wrote the article:
Author: Brian Boyko
Hey, look at the controversial article I wrote. Come visit my website!
It's mostly flame-bait, and now our friend boyko.at.netqos is trolling everyone who disagrees with him.
Buried as lame. Oh wait -- moderators, you can at least bury the troll.
Please help find my missing daughter: FindSabrina.org
Yeah, and ultimately you end up running the X server a lot, which is a bit of a memory hog on top of the already memory hoggy OSX.
I use osx, x11, xp (parallels), firefox, thunderbird, itunes, etc all day long on 1GB w/ a 2GHz MB. The last time I saw the pin-wheel was during bootup sometime last week.
BUT.. if we want to complain, Linux and Windows is always still there for the taking. I, personally, just think it is nice to have so many tools available in such a newbie OS without needing a credit card. Mind you, this is getting outside the realm of what the OP was driving home:
The guys over at HardOCP are just being the idiots they can't help but be. Whatever opinion is 'cool' in the gaming community, at any given moment, will be what they blindly repeat and get all opinionated over, and instantly dislike anything that doesn't "fit" with the "scene".
Things the author missed that were so painfully stupid are all over the article. Just like the whole deal with Windows having ready access to openoffice. If these chaps knew anything about this free software they need and support, then they should know there's a branch named Neo Office which works just dandy with OSX. Just like how the author could not find a "wordpad-like" program.. TextEdit anyone? It's Wordpad on steroids, and it's built into the operating system. Don't get me started on the simple things missed, like Dashboard and Spotlight. Spotlight should have been the first thing he clicked on when unable to find things.
Don't trust these articles for anything, really. The only reason Linux didn't get a complete thumbs down is due to it being "cool" in the "scene" (note above), ever since Carmack did some fps dev under Linux back in the day. So, regardless of how little he understood, how much trouble things were to get done, Linux had to have a good review or else he would not fit in with his gamer buddies. That's the impression I get when OSX gets knocked for having some of the exact same tools, with same level of knowledge needed to make them work in either OS.
30 days with OS X? It reads more like 30 minutes.
The white zone is for loading and unloading only. If you need to load or unload go to the white zone. It's a way of life
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
I'm a recent switcher, going on 6 months now, and I have found a free app for everything I've needed to convert. There are WAY more free apps for OS X than Windows, and the OS X ones do their jobs well and look damn good.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Wow did these morons even try to get beyond their preconceived beliefs? Three years ago I was a Windows devotee when I was given a Powerbook and I never opened my Toshiba laptop again. Sure there's some software out there I can't run with out Windows but I wasn't running it on the laptop anyways. The dedicated stuff like Milestone Enterprise, software for my pcr1000 (needs a real serial port) and some utilities all ran from a dedicated XP box. Today with a MacBook Pro they all run on the mac using Parallels. As for X11 and Open Office come on I walked my 65 year Father (who breaks O/S's be entering the same room) through loading the Apple dvd, installing X11, downloading OpenOffice and running the program. Take them off my list of test sites.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
I'm definitely not a Mac 'fanboy' but the review seems undoubtedly slanted against Mac. He also claims:
"Virtually unusable" with 512MB RAM? I have one of the first Mac Minis with only a meagre 256MB RAM, and I use it all the time for many kinds of tasks and actually pretty seldom run into any performance problems. Yet with horrendously over-dramatized hyperbole he states Apple has "blood on its hands" for releasing a machine with "only" 512MB RAM?
Either he is a serious power-user with intensive day-to-day tasks (in which case his criticism has no relevance for the man on the street), or he is outright lying.
He also criticizes that its X support is not great. But Windows comes with all of absolutely no X support!? He also points out that if you want to do serious photo-editing you need to pay for Photoshop - gee, I didn't know the Windows version of Photoshop was free. And there is GIMP for Mac so he can't complain that its because Photoshop is the only option or something.
Either the reviewer is trolling for ad-views for his website, or he is a corporate shill for MS, or he is biased and using different sets of standards to evaluate the Mac vs. (one can only presume) Windows.
my ass. There is plenty of high quality freeware/shareware available for Mac OS X. HardOCP either doesn't know where to look or ignored what's out there. Check out Apple's download section or macupdate. Shoot, just do a Google search for OS X Freeware.
http://www.bynarystudio.com
See, OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice both were incredibly easy installs for me, and both work incredibly well on my MacBook. Personally, I'm confused when the article talks about problems with them, as I had absolutely no problem with them at all.
TRHOnline - Staggering Towards Brilliance
Throughout the article, he was testing things on both a Mac Mini and a MacBook. The MacMini he's stuck with, I guess. The MacBook he returned to the place he bought it.
The Mac is not about free stuff. It is a high-end system for people with money. That's one of the reasons you only see it in the wealthiest countries. If you have a Mac you can afford to spend some money on software. As a developer, it has occurred to me that the Mac might be a good thing to get into. I'm currently using C++ and I've heard that OC is much better, and the dev tools are very good. But more importantly, its got by far the wealthiest users (who are accepting of high margins) and comparatively little free software available.
Lots of people are pointing out that a lot of Linux freeware can be used on the Mac, but that's only for hackers. If you want to build a real OS-X app that anyone can use then you will find that you have to write a new app from scratch. OS-X is not designed for easy software portability. It is a real headache for the cross-platform software and frameworks. Note the problems that open office and wxWidgets have had. But again, this shouldn't be a surprise. The Mac is about lock-in, not about openness and portability. These are the reasons that, in the end, I probably won't make the switch to developing for OS-X. It would be a good career move, but I really care about cross-platform and I really don't like lock-in.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing against the poeple that say that OS-X is a great OS, but it can't be everything to everyone and you have to be realistic about how it is positioned and what Apple's business strategies are.
This review is much belated given that the current version of OSX is going to be retired in October. I agree about the upgradeabilty concerns. Apple has a terrible record on point. One example is the absolute headache to upgrade ram on an after market mini. However, the design of those low end systems makes up for that deficiency. The mini and the imac are compact and unobtusive that free up space on the desk. The ports are plentiful yet concise and easy to use which simplies setup of the computer and adding periphereals later on. Moreover, plently peripherals exist that can be used with OSX. There are scanners, printers, cameras, mp3 player, dvd drives, hard drives, and flash drives. What specific peripheral does not work? As with freeware, the need is purely subjective. So call "freeware" is really not that free on windows. It is usually accompanied with spyware or advertisement which I personally could do without. Moreover, I could count the open source software I use with my pinky finger. It is SAMBA and comes built into the OS.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Why does the MacMini suddenly turn into a MacBook when he tries to return it?
He started with a Mini, then returned it and bought a MacBook. From the first page:
"As I got into the testing, it quickly became apparent that the Mac Mini was sluggish and underpowered. Everything kept coming back to the same cause - there was not enough memory in the machine. Since I didn't want my experiences with the hardware to taint my results evaluating the operating system, I returned the Mac Mini to the Apple Store after performing as many tests on it as possible. I then headed over to Fry's Electronics in Austin and left with an open-box MacBook"
I'm wondering what kind of tasks he's performing whereby 512MB was definitely far too little, because they definitely weren't ordinary everyday tasks representative of what the 'man on the street' does with his/her Mac. He's full of BS. I have an early model Mac Mini with only 256MB RAM and I have to be doing quite a lot before it even starts noticeably swopping, it's very smooth most of the time, and I do quite a lot of different things with it.
Along these exact lines, ages ago my dad bought an Olympus slide scanner (we're big Olympus fans, he has two OM4s and I still have my OM1Ns!) and it worked well with the Win98 box he had at the time. Then he got a new computer with Win2K ... and Olympus didn't have new drivers for the scanner. It had been EOLed and their response was simply, "buy our new scanner."
phooey. So he keeps the Win98 box running, just for the scanner, and it's a simple matter to send the files over the network to his main machine.
Moral of the story: never assume new drivers will be available for old hardware. Vista, anyone? Signed drivers? G-d help us.
Yep. It's so hard to find good freeware for the Mac. I mean, there's only Adium, Quicksilver, MacFusion, Firefox, PandoraMan, Chicken of the VNC, CocoaMySQL, Eclipse, iStat and Kismac.
Oh, wait. Those are only the freeware apps I have installed on MY MACHINE.
This reviewer doesn't know what he's talking about.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Actually an iMac mini is much easier to upgrade than a normal iMac or Mac laptop. You only need a putty knife, a couple of screwdrivers and thermal grease. I bought a $580 iMac mini and upgraded EVERYTHING inside:
1) The CPU from Core Duo 1.66GHZ to Core 2 Duo 2.16 GHZ
2) Upgraded from 512 MB RAM to 2GB
3) Upgraded from 60 GB HD to 250 GB HD (as far as I know Apple does not ofer 250 GB 2.5 inch drives yet - they are available from neweeg for $240)
3) Replaced the combo drive with a superdrive (by far the hardest component to find - got it from ebay for $90).
It all took about an hour, thanks to the detailed instructions available on the internet. I used the replaced components for building a cheap laptop I bought an Asus Z62FM barebone laptop for $460 and stuffed in the replaced components from the iMac Mini. By the way the Asus laptop runs the MacOSX beutifully, only the soundcard does not work (use USB audio -Griffin iMic)
The iMac Mini looks as if it was specially designed for easy upgrade. I also opened two or three iMacs, for my friends, I HATE upgrading them. Everthing is covered in a metal wrapper which breaks easily, the components are very heavy and hard to handle, the screws which hold the LCD screen are deep down inside and hard to put back. Dont even get me started about the rubber cement needed for connecting the motion sensors to the optical and hard drives, it takes for ever to dry up, etc, etc.
I also upgraded two Macbooks by replacing the optical drives with second hard drives; it was harder than working with an iMac Mini but easier than working with an iMac. Macbooks/Macbooks Pro have the CPU glued to the motherboard and unlike the case of iMac Mini cannot be upgraded
"While not a particular resource hog in the classical sense, the OS does get very finicky when it doesn't get enough RAM to run. Swap load times can make a computer feel unbearably slow even when it may be absolutely fine the rest of the time."
So does every major OS.
"The operating system is also very particular about the type of hardware it likes to connect with. There were a couple of peripherals that I simply could not get to work no matter what I tried."
Erm, what were they? Likely someone's figured these out.
"Although Apple chooses to include support for X11 and Windows apps, the actual applications can be difficult and confusing to install, and they don't work well with the native Mac programs. In general, our efforts to get our X11 programs working more often ended in failure than success."
What - boot camp NG? X11 is known to be a lousy choice - see neooffice vs openoffice.
"The hardware lock-in and lack of quality freeware makes owning and maintaining a Macintosh an expensive endeavor."
Owning? It's within 10% the same price for a feature matched PC. It's more than a bare bones PC than no one wants anyway.
"While AbiWord and NeoOffice are both available through X11, neither had the full functionality that we needed, not to mention that we had a hell of a time getting them to work at all."
Neo Office. It's on 20 machines here and works just fine.
"A new Mac user can expect to pay $400 for the Office Suite, and more for Adobe Photoshop if they want to do any serious photo editing. "
Unless you use the perfectly good PS Elements for OSX that ships with just about every scanner, tablet or just costs $75.
"From time to time, there are small, niche apps that cost you - like the DVD shrinking software or the WMV converter - which have a freeware equivalent on both Windows XP and Linux. There are numerous other examples of this."
Now we're getting miniscule, and Microsoft lets you - actually WANTS you to download Flip4Mac becasue it just works.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Okay, the example *I* know about, from back in the OS late-6.x or early-7.x era (I forget exactly which model and OS it was, but close enough):
This particular Mac was touted as being THE new-age multimedia solution (then meaning primarily audio). But as shipped it could not do its prescribed multimedia tasks due to some sort of firmware error. Apple WOULD NOT ALLOW its programmers to create and release the very simple firmware fix. Apple's *official* solution for its customers was "Buy a whole new machine."
This isn't hearsay; it's straight from a friend who was one of Apple's core OS coders at the time.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I own a powermac G5 Dual Core w/4.5GB of RAM. I dual boot Linux (Gentoo) and OS/X. OS/X has plenty of open source applications!
Where is this guy coming from? Does he have an internet connection? Gee.. talk about FUD! Gotta love blender. I'll be really happy when the reverse engineered drivers for NVIDIA 3d support are complete. The hardware itself is pretty quick, and I bought the box
because the Macpro was here and I am a huge 970MP fan and wanted one while they were still available.
Hmm.. GIMP, Blender, Open Office, FINK.. what about fink? A ton of Linux apps were ported to OS/X fink!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
hmmm... this dude shouldn't be writing about stuff he does not understand.
I spend a fair amount of time at the HardOCP forums when I'm looking for PC info. It is one of the most virulently anti mac websites I've encountered in the last ten years. It is rare for any post concerning the mac to receive anything other than a tidal wave of antimac troll posts.
There are plenty of intelligent people over there, but when it comes to the Mac they behave like a bunch of fucking baboons, and this "review" should be taken with a very large grain of salt.
I am not sure what this guy thinks should be _free_... but there is a tome of freeware, shareware. Heck, Apple machines can even run Open Office.
The apps that come with the OS are exceptional by themselves.
I have to agree with the author here. I've been using OS X as my primary desktop at home for the last 4 year and I like it, but I've found myself going back to my Linux box more and more lately and the reason is applications.
:). But it doesn't have nearly as wide of a selection of free software as other platforms, and there are a few important categories where I haven't been able to find any freeware or reasonably priced shareware that I am happy with.
:).
The OS X ports of open source desktop software, like the Gimp, Inkspace, Open Office, nearly always sucks. It isn't just that they look different than native OS X programs or the fact that you can't copy and paste or the fact that printing doesn't work from most X11 Apps. It is the fact that they are clunky and buggy compared to the Linux (and sometimes even Windows) version. You can run all these applications on OS X but you don't want to. In the end I prefer running these applications in Linux even if it means running them on my slow neglected 800Mhz Via Eden box rather than my much more powerful G5, and even if it means foregoing great OS X features like expose.
Which isn't to say that OS X is completely devoid of Free Software or freeware. Adium is a great chat client. VLC is my favorite media player on any platform. Textwrangler is a very competent text editor. The apps that ship with OS X are also nice. Mail.App is the best (graphical) email client I've ever used (mutt is still better
Office is one of these. On windows there is Open Office or Gobe Productive, on Linux there is Open Office or KOffice, but I haven't been able to find anything that I like for the Mac. Open Office sucks, and while NeoOffice is a huge improvement over that it is still a pain to use. Pages is nice, but I need better MS Office compatibility. I can't wait until the KOffice native port stabilizes. And I haven't liked any of the half dozen shareware spreadsheet applications that I've tried. Pixel graphics (Photoshop replacement) is another. On windows I'd use Paint.NET or Paintshop Pro, on Linux I'd use the Gimp or Krita. On the Mac, again I haven't found anything that I like.
On top of that I have been getting increasingly annoyed with several other continuing problems that Apple just doesn't seem to care to fix, like the Finder and crappy SMB support. I get to buy a new Linux box this summer and I can't wait to get it up and running with the Beryl expose clone and other features that my current machine can't handle, so I can get it up to par with my Mac (just in time for Tiger to up the ante
OS X definitely has more to offer than Linux in the way of professional applications, but for people like me, who neither need the features nor want to pay the high price of pro-grade software, Linux offers a wealth of good free mid-level software that IMHO the Mac microcosm just can't beat.
I log in this morning and it's yet another piece of rubbish review about an OS written by a hack that turns into a revision of an OS holy war.
I have a question to the person who wrote the article:
Q: If every review that you do is merely comparing itself to your experience with Windows XP and 2000, then exactly how can you claim to be objective?
Basically your reviews are this:
- Take a new computer.
- Cram on all the Windows applications you can find(Office and such)
- Look around for exact copies of the same windows programs you are used to and complain when there are no 100% identical replacements.
- Complain that your outdated email client doesn't work right.(Who uses only Outlook these days, anyways? Email is email is email to 99% of home users, afterall. Your inability to adjust to a non-proprietary email format is your own fault.
- Proclaim each OS other than XP to be flawed and not as good.
My point is that, this, like so many other reviews, is basically a "how well does this emulate Windows?" diatribe. Yet, if you really understood computing in a larger sense, you would see that all OSs offer advantages and disadvantages over the others. Each one is a unique experience that cannot be judged based upon how well you can try to cram it into the Windows cookie-cutter mold. As it is, I'm getting tired of seeing you blather on and on about how poor a job it does. You want to run Windows apps in on a Mac? Dual boot or run an emulator and there you go. Problem solved - all of your stuff runs like you want it.
Case in point: I can think of a dozen or more things that you can easily do on a Mac, even a pre OSX model, that would be extremely difficult to do on a Windows box. The same holds true with Ubuntu/Linux/etc. Shoot, try copying 20,000 tiny files in Windows to a server and back. Now try it with Linux. Or for an easier example, open a window in Windows with 20,000 items in it. Now do the same in Linux.
Could you please write a review next time from a neutral standpoint and actually compare specific generic tasks that show the strengths and weaknesses of each OS. One that doesn't use Windows as the control/litmus test?
The average user does not upgrade their machines. We are not average users. I am tired of this old argument. And further, when anyone in my family takes their computers in for 'upgrades' it's typically more trouble for them in the end than it's worth. Can I see my mom installing a new motherboard? No. She'd take one look at all the connectors from the case and give up. Would I trust my dad trying to install a new HD and transfer everything over? No. The average person would be just fine on a mini, iMac or macbook. Where I will completely diverge from this statement is that if you play games (as do I as well) then a PC always seems to outperform for the same value at the lower end of the value spectrum. Not to mention, some games just don't appear for OSX. Now, if a game comes out for OSX, I am SURE my MacPro will scream with it :)
Well, this is because all-in-one devices are almost universally shit.
I concur. This is why I advocate, at a bare minimum, one wife for cooking & cleaning, one for intellectual discourse, one for sex, and one for bearing children. Those all in one models just don't cut it.
I think that - although biassed and with some suspect statements (NeoOffice requires X11 and is impossible to install? WTF??) there is a grain of truth in what he says. OSX is not the worlds greatest platform if your main requirment is GUI-based Open Source.
I certainly share the impression that there is less native free (beer) ware than Windows - and that although most of the FOSS stalwarts have been ported they do often rely on X11. This is rather second-best, Since the Unique Selling Point of OSX over Linux/FreeBSD is its GUI, many of the advantages of which disappear under X11, this does rather defeat the object. There's quite a lot of reasonably priced shareware though, and I get the impression that things are stepping up a bit post-Intel.
So, basically, if you want a totally free ride, use Linux or FreeBSD - its no great revelation that OSX is aimed mainly at people who are either going to use iLife + (maybe) Office or shell out $$$HOW MUCH!? for professional creativity gear.
I've been using OSX for web development (targetting Linux servers) using Eclipse, PHP PostgreSQL and its largely great - proper unix filesystem (unlike Windows - what's ths point of living if you don't have symlinks?) better/more responsive GUI than Gnome/KDE, easy testing on Firefox & Safari & fire up parallels for testing on (multiple versions) of IE. However - I've had a few issues with the PostgreSQL/MySQL GUI tools not being up to snuff on the Mac.
PS - last time I looked there were multiple sources for Apple-compatible RAM - which isn't so much non-standard as not-the-cheapest (e.g. SODIMS instead of regular sticks). Crucial and Kingston will even arrange - for far less than Apple's price - for the traditional seventeen virgins to journey to the summit of Mount Fuji laden with gold and crushed lotus blossums and obtain from the ancient and venerable hermit therein the rare and valuable FB-DIMM chips coveted by the Mac Pro.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Ok, this guy is a journalist. Not a geek so he is speaking from the average user point of view and doesn't need your credibility card. All he was trying to do is see if an average business USER would be able to use the OS effectively.
****
The problem he has is that he isn't a true novice. He lives and breathes Windows and uses it all the time for his work, so everything is filtered through a "is this like Winodws or not?" lens.
Read all three reviews. It's clear that he's anything but a typical home user or average person.
Now, my parents - they are. My mom can't figure out how to scan a photo and attach it to an email half of the time. So I recommended a Mac precisely because all they had to do was buy a copy of MS Word and an antivirus/firewall and the rest of the machine came with the basic apps to run everything. (Okay I cheated and downloaded thunderbird for their email for free).
Me? I love my games. I run Windows and Linux. Can't live without either right now. But I've also used almost 20 different OSs over the last 28 years. So I have a very broad perspective on what a good OS is and what isn't. I've been using Windows for 7 years now, btw - and yes, that leaves 21 years, or 3/4 of my time computing, using other OSs.
Wrong#2
...s Wow, this is so far from reality! I've lost count of the number of peripherals I had problems with (or couldn't get to work altogether) on either of my WinXP PCs that are now being used by any one of my Macs (ethernet card, Old Ass AGP Voodoo III card, usb card reader, usb hub, SDRAM chips!!, Kodak EasyShare dock, Sony Digital 8 firewire video camera, HP all-in-one printer/fax/scanner, to name a "few".) In one of the sickest ironies of all time, my preferred mouse on my Intel iMac is a Microsoft optical mouse that XP just refuses to recognize. In all of 1 second (plug in usb cable), I was using this mouse on my iMac. Another 30 seconds I had all the buttons programmed to do cool Exposé tricks.
The last part I'll chalk up to being "wrong" is his claim that OS X is somehow DRM laden. Even it if were, a few examples would give credibility to this claim. I know there is the whole "trusted platform" thingy that prevents easy hacks for installing OS X on a PC, but to a Mac user, name ONE instance where the DRM is even a noticable issue? Is this because it is such clever DRM, or the fact that there probably really isn't any underlying ominous DRM, other than a bit of code to prevent using OS X on other hardware?
Enough with my anecdotal evidence already and get back to the overtly biased 'net articles!
Of course what you're saying is true, but I was responding to the comment that the choices are closed software, closed software AND hardware, or neither.
That's not all it comes down to.
I generally recommended Macs, which is how I usually got to the truth of the question; not which computer to buy, which Windows PC to buy. So it's not just this journalist; most people using computers at work are using PCs, so that's what they want at home.
My sole success in convincing someone to buy a Mac was an independent artist and his wife, both in their late 60s at the time, and they didn't already have a computer. They got an iMac, and were thrilled with it. They were friends of my parents; and when my parents visited these people were showing off what they learned to do in very little time.
My dad wanted to know why I didn't recommend an iMac to him. The answer is because he had a lot of legacy Windows only software, and the single most important program he uses is Windows only (TaxWorks, he's an accountant).
So my point isn't that you only have to decide whether you want closed software, closed software and hardware, or neither... the first decision is what you want/need to do with the computer.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Okay, the example *I* know about, from back in the OS late-6.x or early-7.x era (I forget exactly which model and OS it was, but close enough):
So, you pull 16-year-old example from out of your ass that you can't name specifically, and that's supposed to be an argument against Apple?
In case you hadn't noticed, Apple is a little different place these days - and there's no problem like the one you're talking about that I can recall. The only firmware revisions people complained about Apple not shipping were the 32-bit "clean" ROMs - and software patches were made available to patch the ROMs at boot time instead.
From the article's summing up:
And here's the really crazy part of the hardware issue: Apple designed the hardware and the software, and still, somehow, the Mac Mini was a mess. If the company has sole province over how the OS should run on a limited set of hardware, you'd think that it would know when 512MB of RAM isn't enough.
This is exactly true. I bought an original Mac mini with the base amount of RAM. This is sold as a "plug it in and go" computer; almost an appliance. It was basically unusable. The GUI would freeze up for ten seconds at a time. Fortunately, I'd ordered a 1GB stick from Crucial the same day I ordered the Mac -- I was just saving a few pounds by not paying Apple's RAM prices. The extra RAM fixed it, but I don't think it would have been unreasonable to send the machine back as unfit for its purpose.
The Mac Mini was also marketed as an iLife machine -- the implication being that you get iLife, and a machine designed to run it. Yet GarageBand can't manage to record more than a few bars of live input before bailing out in a very inelegant manner. iPhoto slows to a crawl with just a couple of thousand photos.
It's a nice machine if you stay within its capabilities (I now use mine as a Web browsing machine, a Bittorrent client, an iTunes library and a media server). But its marketing certainly implied it was suitable for jobs that it just isn't up to.
The newer ones may very well be more powerful. But has the software's demands increased to fill the gap? I don't want to pay to find out.
God ever help you if you have to open one of those PC cases to upgrade your RAM! Did you even try or not? You pop the cover off, put the memory in, pop it back on. End of story. Cripes.
"Tell me, how sound is this?"
/mentioned/ does NOT mean that it was given a chance, nor was it properly researched, nor..."
About as sound as you saying "Not sure he's heard of..." before bothering to read the article where he mentions them.
"Also, just b/c something is
This point is just a stupid attempt to save face for your previous ignorance. Now you're flailing and you look even more stupid.
Just admit you didn't read the article, made a moronic assumption, then acted even more ridiculous in a weak attempt to avoid looking like an idiot.
An attempt that failed.
- "The hardware lock-in and lack of quality freeware makes owning and maintaining a Macintosh an expensive endeavor."
- "While AbiWord and NeoOffice are both available, as is OpenOffice through X11, the none had the full functionality that we needed, not to mention that we had a hell of a time getting anything in X11 to work at all".
- The Mac Mini I purchased originally would have been fine to complete this test if it had come with more RAM, but replacing the RAM was so daunting a task due to the ultra-compact form factor, I didn't bother."
All I can say is that this "review" is at least misleading (though I personally think its just BS).WTF? What are they evaluating? What is a "quality freeware"? Dude, this is *nix, you can get most everything, just try Fink.
Sorry guys, NeoOffice does NOT use X11! It is native, that's the reason there is NeoOffice in the first place.
OK so I guess they didn't bother in doing a proper review either.
Didn't you read the article? You have to buy a new keyboard and buy a new terminal emulator. There are no other choices. Sheesh.
The difference is that the mac is as fast or slow 2 years later as it was when it was new. By contrast, a windows machine actually slows down over time as it accumulates crap in the registry, spyware, viruses, etc, etc, etc.
I'm glad OS X has less apps since overall the quality to noise ratio is 10x higher than PC and leenucks. I'd rather pay 10-30$us for something that is really good than waste a week trying out 20 freeware/5$us programs. OS X is currently an OS for people that value their time and don't mind paying for quality. Let's keep it that way.
There a lot of opinions about software, some like free, some like open, some like to look at developer communities. I like it when people create my products and care bout them, and this is not restricted to software. X11 allows most things to run, when you have the knowledge to do so. Complaining about it not working is like complaining that Linux just doesn't work out of the box. Duh!
But, paying people for cool software allows more of it to be made. It allows my needs to be met. Developers listen. Stuff like BBEdit, Transmit, Coda, and graphics tools like VueScan allow me to do the things that I would like in the way that I would like. It may not be worth money to somebody else, but making a living is always a nice thing. If I had a choice between a computer and a car, it would be the computer, so paying for it is kind of necessary.
Additionally, VueScan for example allows me to purchase the software once for its life span, and avoid the upgrade hell of Epson and Silverfast (%$$##%@!). Everybody wants something for nothing which is how MS became such a dominant player. Crime begins at the personal level in my opinion, and so does anti-competitive business behavior. Free is not always good, but open is.
I'll take a little scroll through my dock and put a star next to every free application down there:
*iCal
*Stickies
iRooster
*Synergy
*Burn
*VLC
Quicktime Pro
*iTunes
*GarageBand
*Photo Booth
Photoshop
Illustrator
Dreamweaver
Flash
*iPhoto
Final Cut Express
*iMovie
*iDVD
*Mail
*Camino
*Safari
*Firefox
*Opera
*sshfs
*Cyberduck
*Azureus
*iChat
*Chicken of the VNC
*NeoOffice
*Windows Remote Desktop
*TextWrangler
*iBackup
*Terminal
*FinkCommander
*X11
*iSquint
*Handbrake
*Senuti
*Eclipse
Parallels
That's a sh*tload of stars, and that's just the stuff I use regularly (hence why it's in my dock). I'm not even going to start listing *NIX tools I have through Fink - it'd take way too damn long.
Damn, how hard is it to take five minutes out of THIRTY DAYS to check Google or VersionTracker?
"..we had a hell of a time getting anything in X11 to work at all."
Well, that's not really OS X specific, is it? Think of being a noob and trying to get anything done on a Linux box (been there for 10+ years).
"Mac user can expect to pay $400 for the Office Suite, and more for Adobe Photoshop.."
These are free for others?
"..no technical reason why Mac OS X can't run on other hardware, and even where technical compatibility is a problem, no one is asking that Apple have any sort of support for third-party hardware."
Why? These machines are all nice and beautiful. Not like your avg. HP/Acer/Dell laptop, for examples.
"..had to do the bulk of our note-taking in a WordPad-like application."
Use Emacs?
"..you will need to replace your entire system when it starts to become outdated, rather than gradually solving bottlenecks by upgrading components."
How many of you "upgrade" your PCs, instead of just buying a new box every few years (you can of course take the hard drive with MP-3s along but that does not count).
"..the "good" freeware seems to only be available/fully functional on Windows and Linux."
Really, please be more specific. What kind of software are we talking about here?
Everyone that buys a Mac is a fool, huh? Of course, this idiotic statement is coming from someone who calls himself drinkypoo.
With all the arrogant, cynical bitching, it appears nobody read the title.
The guy spent 30 days with OSX. This doesn't claim to be a definitive expert review. These are reflections on his experience after 30 days of using a new system from a regular end-user's point of view.
Not that it really matters; I'm sure the only reason the article got linked on Bitchdot was to give everyone something to whine about over coffee.
To kill the dashboard in Tiger (issue in terminal):
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
killall Dock
No, you're just pretending you read an article that you didn't actually read.
I don't think your 800wpm (bullshit) matters when you're flat lying anyway.
There are tons of Freeware for MacOS X. In fact, most programs and tools I use in everyday life are freeware.
So... ?
system. People do not want to be tied to the screen in a AIO + they use laptop parts.
Get rid of the mini and replace it with this you start at the mini base price upping the ram to 1gb going to desktop parts.
$600 - $1700 or more ? the mini starts at $599 with desktop parts you can boost the base ram up to 1 gb at that price.
use desktop cpu cpus that cover the full range form low to high end
on board video with a pci-e x16 slot with x1 slots?
or 2 pci-e x16 slots 8x, 8x in sli / cross fire mode with x1 slots?
or x16, x4, x1 set up with on board video?
or some other setup like the ones I listed
4 ram slots
put firewire 800 on the pci-e bus if you have a free lane if not put it on the pci bus.
For the mac pro apple can add more quad-cores and push down the price of the dual dual-core.
The mac pro should move to a new chipset with 2 full pci-e x16 with a x16 slot in x4 mode maybe even have 2 of them.
firewire over the pci-e bus
maybe have on board pci-e sas / sata hardware raid or make it easy to use the disks in the case with a pci-e card.
no FB-DIMMS DDR 2 ECC / or DDR 2 ram.
2 cpus.
maybe have pci-x at the cost of 4 pci-e lanes.
The xserve can have FB-DIMMS.
Parent is right. If you don't know what you're talking about, don't talk. If you're guessing, say so, or find out for sure.
It's really not that hard to figure out that NeoOffice is not an X11 app. If he knew enough to comment on the existance of X11 in the first place, he certainly knew enough to figure out whether a particular app was X11 or not.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
First off, don't forget that most people peruse the article long enough to find something glaring they can point out and snag easy karma for. Don't let it ruffle your feathers. That said, I agree 100% on NeoOffice/OpenOffice. Terrible, buggy, unstable piles of raptor dung imo.
There's more quality freeware than Windows.
Hardware lock-in? it's not like you could possibly be blind to that. Apple makes some good hardware. The author is very biased and says there's no reason why Mac OS X can't run on other hardware. True there's no reason why, but Apple would have to charge $300 or more for the OS then. It would fall over more due to bad hardware/driver implementations. There would a lot of unsupported hardware like Linux.
Life is just easier with the hardware and software made by one vendor. Nobody ever moaned about the Amiga OS running only on Commodore hardware and people like running Solaris on Sun hardware for example.
People buy Macs and keep them 4-5 years, so expandability and upgrades aren't an issue. You buy a good machine that brings you good service.
When you buy a PC it can be hard to avoid paying for Windows, unless you self build. So running Linux means you suffer the Windows lock-in.
Mac OS is no different to Linux in low memory situations. It swaps and slows down. Windows has had to have good VM performance as a huge number of users run it with paltry PCs.
A Mac Mini is just that, a mini computer. You don't buy a BMW Mini or any other small car then complain you can't get a sofa in the back of it.
If you buy entry level then you can't expect much. It still plays HD video files, so it's not that bad.
http://linux-noob.com/review/ubuntu/7.04/
This just came in via the firehose. A real review by the looks of it. Vote for it. This is the sort of review that most of us are interested in anyways.
6400 Towermodel?
"Indeed, it seems the preferred method for solving Mac computer problems is to buy your way out of it. Slow computer? Buy a new one. Want to convert a file? Buy a utility. Want to do simple tasks? Buy a commercial program. Peripherals don't work? Buy replacements.'""
And this is different from using the most recent versions of Vista and Office for Vista in a mixed XP/Vista setting how?
(scratches head)
No freeware/shareware? I guess I imaged Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper, Onyx, Lemke Graphic Converter, etc...
Did he do any research before doing this?
>>one for sex, and one for bearing children
I don't know if I should be the one to tell you this... but those two are directly related!
- http://coolosxapps.net/
- http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/
- http://osx.iusethis.com/
- http://osx.hyperjeff.net/Apps/cats.php
- http://www.macosxapps.com/
All of the above sites list a multitude of software ranging from commercial, to as-free-as-can-be. I wouldn't expect anyone to find every single program they need within 30 days, as 14 years later, I'm still discovering fantastic Mac apps. Take what you read with a grain of salt. Just because one person doesn't see something, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.RTFA and learn some English.
... "the other choice was NeoOffice, an OpenOffice.org fork for Macintosh, and running OpenOffice.org through an X11 environment."
... running NeoOffice OR running OpenOffice.org through an X11 server.
He said, and I quote
He basically highlights 2 choices
I actually found TFA to be spot on.
I'm in love with TextWrangler.
No matter how great Mac OS X is, it's still closed source. I'm never going to support non-free software when there are good free alternatives.
Maybe if the vendors of the cheapo throwaway hardware such as most printers would just invest the time to write the drivers for other platforms (OSX, linux) then the cheapo product wouldn't be such a worthless pile of crap in a non windows world.
I'm looking squarely at you HP.
Ocean is land, covered with water.
I run mostly freeware, I will concede that sometimes its not easy to find on the first page of a google et al search but if you set up a newsletter on macupdate or versiontracker, and various mac user websites (iusethis.com) you can find nearly any kind of program you might need. Or gasp, compile open source code in Xcode. Finding freeware for the Mac or windows is just like looking for something good in the Linux repositories you have to look around, sometimes for more than thirty days or camp out on an IRC channel. IMHO I dont think this guy took much time searching for the software he wanted.
Hah, it's not as if a site on hardware overclocking would ever say "You know what, Apple's are better." Their whole business is overclocking hardware (thus the name Hardware Overclocking Place)!
Apples are basically the only computers that aren't overclockable (for all intensive purposes). They don't even use the same videocards as Windows, Linux, Unix machines. You can't even change the video cards in all Macs but the Powermacs, let alone overclock them.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
I always wondered why Apple thinks that an (arguably) poor segment of society (artists) would want very expensive computers.
As unofficial computer fix-it man for my friends, I can say that I hate having to fix apple problems. Mostly it's because I don't have any clue how to do it at first, but also because the answer I get from the knowledgeable apple-types is typically "it won't work." Bad answer man...
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Buy a new one... With your page views.
I don't think you understand the vast plethora of freeware that is out there for a Windows machine. Compared to that, there really isn't much for a Mac. And for a lot of things that I would like to do on my Mac, which I can readily do on my PC, I haven't found a freeware equivalent. There's no equivalent to the simple and versatile photo-viewer functionality that IrfanView offers, for example. Yes, I tried the X11 based XNView, but I have not been able to make that work on my Mac at all. There isn't a more sophisticated text editor available for free, the way there is for a Window machine. There are no freeware Personal Information Managers, unless one resorts to web 2.0 applications. Even when there is a freeware application available, such as GIMP or Inkscape, that's only two graphics software that I'm aware of, compared to the four or five that you can find for a Windows machine. If there is a freeware option, there's usually only one or two choices, potentially forcing you to live with usability issues that you may not like, unlike the many choices there are for the Windows world, where you can search around and probably find the exact utility and application that suits you the best. I haven't found anything that for free that can do what Wink does (create flash files). The same is true for CD rippers (not everyone is in love with iTunes and trying to use the .ogg format on a Mac took me many extra steps and extre $$ that I didn't need to go through on my PC), DVD rippers, freeware video editors (should you want to do something in a format other than .mov or .dv), and money management software. No matter how simple a utility I'm hunting for in the Mac world, I'm continually amazed at how much of it ends up nibbling away at my pocketbook, each taking $10, $15, or $20 at a MINIMUM. It all adds up to quite a sum of money, and that expense is simply not there on my Windows machine.
I have both a Mac and a PC at home, and found this guy's review to be pretty much exactly the same as my experience, including the mysteriously disappearing and reappearing external hard drive. The hit or miss functionality with peripherals has been the same, too. Thankfully, I bought a Mac Mini with 1 Gig of RAM, so I didn't have his RAM issues, but I agree that it's stunning that Apple would sell a system that's substandard. (How different is that from MS creating Vista to be a resource hog?) The whole "it just works" thing is a myth, as far as I'm concerned. Worse yet, is that when you do have a problem, there isn't a good resource for finding a solution. At least on a Windows machine, the odds are very high that there's no problem that someone somewhere hasn't already encountered and resolved, and will share the solution with you.
I agree that for artistic types, the Mac works seamlessly, and the iLife suite is great. But art, especially music composition, is not my forte, and I want to be able to write, correspond, and blog on my machine. I need to be able to run spreadsheets from work at home, and to be able to edit heavily formatted legal documents. I'll be damned if I'm going to buy TWO versions of Office just to be able to do that. NeoOffice works fine on my Mac, and I use it for casual writing, but it doesn't work with the documents I use for my work. (My NeoOffice is Java based, so I don't know what the author was talking about X11, although I, too, have problems with X11 based software.) In short, my workhorse remains my PC, while my Mac is an expensive toy that I use when I need to do some casual video editing. I'm even willing to sacrifice and deal with the constant security vigilance that a Windows machine requires, rather than have to deal with the frustrations of using my Mac for my normal daily tasks. As for stability, XP has always been rock solid for me, so the much vaunted stability of OSX is a moot point with me.
In short, I came to the same conclusion about OSX that the writer did, that it is designed to take money out of my pocket, and that it may be a stable system, but it doesn't "let" me do the things I want to do with it.
It's amazing because, if anything, I would say that because of Mac OS X's *nix underpinnings, there is an enormous amount of free, in almost every sense of the word, software out there. And if it's not already ported from *nix, it's not that difficult. Look at Fink or MacPorts, there are literally thousands of free pieces of software.
Now I would certainly agree that there is a philosophy that seems to persist, mostly I think amongst long-time Mac users, that if you have a problem that needs solving just buy a little app to do it for you. But amongst the newer converts to Mac OS X, especially those coming from a *nix background, they're comfortable with shell scripting and embrace the idea of solving these issues by themselves or with online help.
I'm posting this from OSX 10.4.9, fully-updated, fully-functioning, and happily running on my Averatec AV4270. It's not "beta," it's not unstable. It's my only computer and it works wonderfully. This notebook is even white, so you can barely tell the difference!
If only Steve Jobs would get a clue, I could be doing it legally, too. I've never paid for an OS, but I'd pay for OSX. Heck, didn't Michael Dell come out a year or two ago and say he would love to pre-load OSX on Dells? And he's shown recently that he's not afraid to try something new.
http://www.osx86project.org/
The article is a very good troll--thus the score 9 out of a possible 10. It's long, presents lots of facts (some correct, some flawed) and lots of unjustified opinions. Nearly every opinion and many of the facts can easily be argued with. So everyone can argue over almost every point. I'd consider giving it 10/10, but I save that score for trolls who actually intend to troll, and I'm not convinced the author is that clever.
I especially enjoyed how one of his biggest gripes, a lack of a free MS Office clone on the Mac, hinges completely on the fact that he discounts NeoOffice due to not being able to italicize Helvetica text. I've used NeoOffice for many purposes, and I use it instead of Pages due to an annoying Pages bug with section numbering (2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2 would become 2.1, 2.2, 3.3, 3.4 when you loaded the file, but would correct itself if you made edits in section 3). I'd never run across the italics problem with Helvetica and Courier he ran into because I don't italicize much, and notice he didn't in his article either. Apparently if you avoid those 2 fonts you won't have a problem with italics in NeoOffice. The Mac has many other Courier and Helvetica fonts which you can use--just the ones with the exact names Helvetica and Courier appear affected. I had to use the comments here to even figure out which fonts are susceptible since my first attempts worked fine.
First:
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"We'd start testing on Apple's lowest-end computer, a $600 Mac Mini. We wanted to see if a low-end computer could handle the Mac OS X operating system. We would then move to a higher-end $1500 MacBook."
Both are the bottom of the barrel for performance in their respective classes of machine. One in the desktop category, the other in the laptop category. He didn't even hit "mid-grade" in the performance curve of the overall Apple hardware lineup (presumably because he couldn't afford them), but complaints about performance in the article must fall on deaf reader's ears who understand that Apple has ALWAYS under-powered their lower-priced machines.
Second:
"Additionally, each program does not terminate when you close all its windows. To do so, one has to either choose to quit the application from the menu bar, or right click on the icon in the dock to quit it. This is a boon when you want to keep an application resident in memory because you know you'll use it frequently, and a bane when you close out the windows and forget to close the application."
A skill learned by most regular Mac users is keyboard shortcuts. (Truthfully, by any user of any OS... if they're smart.) A simple Apple-Tab (analogous to ALT-TAB in Windows and in virtually the exact same keyboard location, not much "learning" to do there) and Apple-Q to Quit the application selected, and it's gone in two keystroke sequences.
Just like Windows... ALT-TAB, ALT-F4.
Plus, the OS will swap out anything that's not truly running/doing anything... any modern OS will -- it's not sitting in active RAM making your machine sluggish, unless you left the application DOING something...
Third:
"Yes, there is right clicking in Mac OS X - there has been for some time - and Apple even sells two button mice now. If you're on a notebook without a mouse, holding Ctrl while clicking the trackpad works as well. Right clicking in the dock brings up a list of commands, which include quitting an application. Holding down the alt button while doing so brings up an alternate list of commands - including a "force quit" option for misbehaving applications."
He also never read the manual or looked at the online help -- all Mac laptops today ship with touchpads that understand multiple finger-presses. Drop two fingers on the pad, and hit the single mouse button, instant "right-click" functionality. (Working on my wife's older iBook which doesn't have this functionality or my work IBM/Lenovo laptop that also doesn't have it drives me crazy now...)
Fourth:
"Though the Mac Mini does not have a DVD burner, there was an option to save it as a disc image (an
You can buy Mac Mini's with DVD burners, or add external ones. No brainer. Apple's consistent use of "Combo Drive" for CD burning drives, and "SuperDrive" for DVD burners, is a bit obtuse, I'll admit. Clicking and reading the specs on the two choices for Mini's makes the option abundantly clear for anyone REALLY shopping for a Mac.
Fifth:
"Had Apple sold a computer configuration that was easily upgradeable at a lower price point than the quad-core Mac Pro line, I probably would have made the decision to go with it for my evaluation."
He completely disregarded the iMac, probably on aesthetic, not technical merits. Then complains that there's no "mid-range" machine he could have purchased.
Summary:
He didn't do a very good job for a professional reviewer... but we're all used to that from tech writers these days.
+++OK ATH
This guy couldn't find a good cheap word processor for OSx? Let me see this is tough now. I go to the apple website and I buy Appleworks for $79. This software does 100% of his target users and $79 is too much? Duh maybe I should google Appleworks. Wow hey look I could buy the last version for $25. OOO the Mac is so expensive. Appleworks includes DataViz too for most of the free file conversions he is whining about. And by the way TextEdit is one hell of a free app. With type as you go spell check and grammar check combined with the character palette and keyboard viewer it kicks hell out of anything that comes with windows. OOO is reading the help too advanced for a 30 day trial?
my only problem with iBook is that everything I need works flawlessly to that extend that I got a old free computer and shoved Gentoo in it just to stop my brain from rotting. there's only so many error-less days you can take, u know?
You know what I absolutely hate. When people talk like there is no good freeware(or close enough) on every single platform that ever existed.
On my Win XP box I use Trillian(IM), MIRC(IRC), Notepad++(text editor), uTorrent(torrent client), SmartFTP(FTP), IrfanView(image viewer), blah blah blah. All of them very nice and all of them more configurable than I'd be able to handle but it's nice that it's there. Then there's my linux box. More blah blah. On OS X I have most of the ones you have but I'd like to have a nice free file management replacement for Finder. Finder is craptacular. Even Windows Explorer is a far better fit as file manager. But thanks for Xee. I've been looking for a replacement for Preview. Xee seems to fit the bill nicely.
The Mac Pro is a great machine for use when you have serious needs, both for power, and maintainability. The slide in hard drives, the slide out memory cards, all make for easy maintenance. If I was responsible for a workgroup of expensive engineers and downtime was a bad thing, the Mac Pro would be a no brainer. I have one and I have never been happier with any machine I have owned. I have upgraded almost every aspect of it, and I only have to spend several minutes with the side panel open for any operation. That is one beautiful hardware design. I am so tired of digging through a forest of cables in the average machine, and finding that one came loose after the cover is back on. The coolest feature in my mind is the slide in hard drives (no cables) which make for easy switching of boot drives and data drives. If yo just want to get on with your engineering and stop messing with the hardware, Mac Pro is my answer.
What lack of quality freeware? He IS talking about the same Mac OS X that I use, isn't he? On my Mac there are 4 paid application suites, the OS (hey, I upgraded, so sue me), iLife (upgrade again), Final Cut Express (iMovie is OK for home movies...) and Office (I use NeoOffice, but the kids refuse to, "We have to use Word for schoolwork, we're not allowed to use anything else." Bollocks, but have you tried to tell a teen they're wrong?) Every other function on my iBook is freeware, from AU plugins I use in Garage Band, Audacity (quality freeware!) and FCX, to NeoOffice, to Audacity, to my songwriting management software, text editors, development web server, and the list goes on. What a blockhead, sheesh.
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1
I must comment on your first point. While you say that the reviewer chose low-end systems and see that as a flaw. It doesn't negate the point he later makes that the systems should not be sold with an OS that they cannot run. He also makes the point that that folly is not good in the Windows world either but that MS can point to the system builders. In the case of Macs, Apple is soley at fault. " but complaints about performance in the article must fall on deaf reader's ears who understand that Apple has ALWAYS under-powered their lower-priced machines. " Now seriously, because Apple has always done something stupid makes it ok, or means that we or anyone else shouldn't complain? It is reprehensible that the sole owner of the ip and hardware should release such mismatched products which are further compounded by great difficulty when it comes to upgrades. Your second point shows that you may know more about macs than the reviewer, but looking in from the outside I really cannot consider the macs' system wrt closing programs to be intuitive. Most well written Windows programs do exactly what they say when you hit that close icon in the window (or at least they are supposed to :) ) and when they are not supposed to they will often give a popup (which can be disabled)telling you that the program is still there or you will see it in the system tray. The Mac's system from reading the review and what you posted doesn't sound at all geared to the mac-neophyte or basic computer user. Many of whom will have the programs consistently running and eating into the already paltry ram on their cute entry level systems.
For me the biggest issue for anyone considering a Mac for non-gaming use (we know it cannot go there) is the fact that there is not nearly as much free or opensource decent software that can easily be found. I use alot of such stuff on my XP and Linux machines (I'm a linux n00b :) ) so I know what a big deal this can be. I found it surprising considering how close OSX is to Unix and BSD, why is it that there are not more programs? Is it difficult to write them, does Steve Jobs frown on free stuff? Or is it just a marketshare thing?
Those machines are not targeted at the crowd this reviewer was intending to reach, is my point. My wife's iBook is FAR slower than those machines, and yet -- for the things she does: E-mail, web, quicken, word processing (with NeoOffice, by the way -- which as many others have pointed out, works just fine), and photo/music/other media storage and organization... in other words, a "regular user" type of experience... it runs fast enough that she doesn't care.
If the reviewer was going for the technical crowd, buying the absolute lowest-end machine (well "borrowing" it from the Apple store because he obviously has no budget for hardware, I would agree with him complaining about performance issues. But when you buy/borrow the BOTTOM of the line of anything, you never expect it to be a speed demon.
Example from the PC world to make the point: If he'd have based his opinion of how "sluggish" WinXP feels to him, and then borrowed the cheapest Celeron or Duron type machine with minimal RAM to even load the OS, let alone run applications... and THEN complain about performance problems -- His review would have been laughed out of existence.
OF COURSE the PC geeks would say... those systems SUCK.
But if I say the same wording, but now related to Mac hardware -- OF COURSE, the bottom-line Apple machines performance numbers were horrible. What'd he expect?
+++OK ATH
Again while I get the point you are trying to make this is exactly the point i am complaining about and he stressed : " If he'd have based his opinion of how "sluggish" WinXP feels to him, and then borrowed the cheapest Celeron or Duron type machine with minimal RAM to even load the OS, let alone run applications... and THEN complain about performance problems -- His review would have been laughed out of existence. " No problem with that at all, he would also be considered silly if he put it together but if he bought it the system builder would rightly get thrashed. Problem is, that the system builder is Apple who should fully know that their cute entry level machines are sluggish even on basic tasks. And that is the key, if the reviewer bought a lowend machine of any make and complained that he couldn't run several benchmarks and watch HD content at the same time and then blamed it on the OS we could then call him silly. But from what I saw it was basic tasks and Apple as a company deserves the blows that they get for their mismatched hardware. Again the point that the reviewer made is that Apple has no excuse considering the absolute control that they have over their products. People who like macs and use them should be leading the charge against the practice otherwise it will not stop.
So you're saying that because Apple makes the OS, they're not allowed to sell underpowered machines, like everyone else does on the low-end of the price scale?
I still don't get your point. Cheap = slow. He bought cheap. He got slow. He didn't even bother to try to get to halfway up the price scale to do a review, and the review was supposed to be about the OS, not the hardware.
You don't see people doing Vista reviews on 1.0 GHz Celerons and complaining that Dell didn't make a good machine, or that the OS manufacturer did anything "wrong".
The two simply don't relate. Buy the hardware speed you need for your own computing experience to be as fast as you like. Many people don't need fast machines, and Apple knows this. They give options from the low-end ("sluggish") machines to the screaming fast with options in-between also.
Your arguing a point that's just not there. He's wrong to decide that Apple is somehow at "fault" for the low-end machines being "sluggish". Apple's under no obligation to make the cheap end of the spectrum perform as well as the high-end. In fact, it'd hurt their sales of the high-end.
+++OK ATH
" So you're saying that because Apple makes the OS, they're not allowed to sell underpowered machines, like everyone else does on the low-end of the price scale? " 1/ Everyone doing it doesn't make it right. 2/ it is not because Apple makes the OS, it is because Apple makes Everything! (Or at least they choose everything) "Cheap = slow." Agreed, but how slow is the question, my fundamental problem is that I don't think that computers should be sold with OSes that they cannot run. Again, I do not expect screaming fast gaming and number crunching but at least the ability to perform simple 2D tasks. Lets at least agree that it is something that would be the ideal or should be happening in the market place. "You don't see people doing Vista reviews on 1.0 GHz Celerons and complaining that Dell didn't make a good machine, or that the OS manufacturer did anything "wrong"." 1/ I just went to Dell's site where their lowest end computer the Dimension C521 is $359 without monitor and has 512Mb ram and is coupled to a Sempron 3400+ and Vista Home Basic. I doubt that this performs basic 2D tasks sluggishly. If someone went and manually configured the system to have Vista Premium and found Aero to be slow ......... it would definitely be their problem and not Dell's (and definitely not Microsoft's). With that said if there was a review of such a lowend pc and I am wrong and it performs basic stuff poorly, then Dell needs thrashing too. Incidentally for $439 you can have a model with 1GB and a dual core AMD X2.
2/ Although he set out to use and review OSX, I see nothing wrong with him complaining about the total package, especially since that is how you get OSX,legally. It would be a poor reviewer who doesn't mention the problems with hardware mismatch or cost of ownership issues. with that said from what I recall of the review, he more blames Apple for selling machines with mismatched hardware than OSX for being a bad OS.
"Many people don't need fast machines, and Apple knows this."
Agreed, this is something that I preach, when my computer was down for a while I used a friend's Celeron 533 on an Asus CUSL2 with XP Pro plus a 32mb 1st gen Radeon and it was quite fast and responsive for all basic tasks. Word processing, the desktop, internet surfing, listening to music and watching movies (standard def)were all quite satisfactory.Of course high end gaming and heavy multitasking were quite different from my other system. I have also used computers with Pentium IIs that once they have enough ram run XP happily, for basic tasks. So I understand that one does not need a quadcore processor to get decent performance. The problem here is that Apple goes a bit too low with their hardware choices, especially considering the OS choice. They need to make more Ram standard, or have the older OS or a stripped down OS for the lowend.
"Apple's under no obligation to make the cheap end of the spectrum perform as well as the high-end. In fact, it'd hurt their sales of the high-end."
1/ I agree that Apple is under no obligation but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't make entry level systems that run basic tasks acceptably.
2/ Apple's high end sales should not be hurt at all. the highend should be targetting basic-plus, advanced functionality, heavy multitasking abilities, not to mention 3D which is a different kettle of fish. One should not have to go highend to get reasonable performance in a basic word processing task. Just have a look at Dell's web site and how the different categories of systems are marketed, highend machines target different areas.
3/ It is in our power as computer enthusiasts to encourage OEMs and even more so Apple (who has full control)to release better lowend machines, in fact if they do I think it would help Apple tremendously as people try to switch. Lets face it people will compare any new machine with their previous machine or their friend's machine in the same price range. If it runs basic tasks sluggishly while another machine at the same price range doesn't you know what sort of conclusions Joe Public will come to. If people don't lobby Apple on this they will continue as is and Joe Public will think that dollar for dollar Apple sucks. ( which doesn't have to be)
Sorry about the big paragraph, it was formatted difeerently and had seperate paragraphs, I didn't know that when submitted it would look like that, I will try again below.
......... it would definitely be their problem and not Dell's (and definitely not Microsoft's). With that said if there was a review of such a lowend pc and I am wrong and it performs basic stuff poorly, then Dell needs thrashing too. Incidentally for $439 you can have a model with 1GB and a dual core AMD X2.
" So you're saying that because Apple makes the OS, they're not allowed to sell underpowered machines, like everyone else does on the low-end of the price scale? "
1/ Everyone doing it doesn't make it right.
2/ it is not because Apple makes the OS, it is because Apple makes Everything! (Or at least they choose everything)
"Cheap = slow."
Agreed, but how slow is the question, my fundamental problem is that I don't think that computers should be sold with OSes that they cannot run. Again, I do not expect screaming fast gaming and number crunching but at least the ability to perform simple 2D tasks. Lets at least agree that it is something that would be the ideal or should be happening in the market place.
"You don't see people doing Vista reviews on 1.0 GHz Celerons and complaining that Dell didn't make a good machine, or that the OS manufacturer did anything "wrong"."
1/ I just went to Dell's site where their lowest end computer the Dimension C521 is $359 without monitor and has 512Mb ram and is coupled to a Sempron 3400+ and Vista Home Basic. I doubt that this performs basic 2D tasks sluggishly. If someone went and manually configured the system to have Vista Premium and found Aero to be slow
2/ Although he set out to use and review OSX, I see nothing wrong with him complaining about the total package, especially since that is how you get OSX,legally. It would be a poor reviewer who doesn't mention the problems with hardware mismatch or cost of ownership issues. with that said from what I recall of the review, he more blames Apple for selling machines with mismatched hardware than OSX for being a bad OS.
"Many people don't need fast machines, and Apple knows this."
Agreed, this is something that I preach, when my computer was down for a while I used a friend's Celeron 533 on an Asus CUSL2 with XP Pro plus a 32mb 1st gen Radeon and it was quite fast and responsive for all basic tasks. Word processing, the desktop, internet surfing, listening to music and watching movies (standard def)were all quite satisfactory.Of course high end gaming and heavy multitasking were quite different from my other system. I have also used computers with Pentium IIs that once they have enough ram run XP happily, for basic tasks. So I understand that one does not need a quadcore processor to get decent performance. The problem here is that Apple goes a bit too low with their hardware choices, especially considering the OS choice. They need to make more Ram standard, or have the older OS or a stripped down OS for the lowend.
"Apple's under no obligation to make the cheap end of the spectrum perform as well as the high-end. In fact, it'd hurt their sales of the high-end."
1/ I agree that Apple is under no obligation but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't make entry level systems that run basic tasks acceptably.
2/ Apple's high end sales should not be hurt at all. the highend should be targetting basic-plus, advanced functionality, heavy multitasking abilities, not to mention 3D which is a different kettle of fish. One should not have to go highend to get reasonable performance in a basic word processing task. Just have a look at Dell's web site and how the different categories of systems are marketed, highend machines target different areas.
3/ It is in our power as computer enthusiasts to encourage OEMs and even more so Apple (who has full control)to release better lowend machines, in fact if they do I think it would help Apple tremendously as people try
Lots of words to try to justify your concerns, but none of them hold any water. Apple's allowed to make "the whole thing" and still sell a slow low-end machine. If you don't want that machine, you buy a faster one. Just like car companies make low-end cars that can't reasonably be used to drive in the mountains around here, and barely get out of the way in regular rush-hour traffic.
+++OK ATH
Well I guess we will have to agree to disagree, I don't think that it is right to sell machines that you know can't do basic stuff irrespective of the vendor/maker. You don't seem to have a problem with it. Case closed.
Yep. No problem. Plenty of underpowered products out there.
Just take a look at the nutritional value of fast food sometime... but it sells by the billions.
LOL! Take care...
+++OK ATH
Cool :)
Heh, that last cent part was really good; real nice, man. -Will go down as a classic..
(..Umhh, wouldn't happen to have a spare cent, btw?..)
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.