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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.
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
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.
"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?
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.'"
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.
I love my new iMac, but I have a one year old Canon laser printer/scanner/copier that won't work with it. One year old, not 10-20.
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.
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
Yup, or MacPorts, and "port install" whatever you want. But shh, there isn't any open source software on the Mac, this guy says so, so it must be so.
Other things he is completely wrong about:
* NeoOffice is the Mac port of OpenOffice, it does not require X11 to run. It works well, IMHO.
* There are plenty of free open source apps, just like in Linux and Windows: Handbrake and MacTheRipper for DVD ripping, etc.
* The model between the Mini and MacPro is the iMac
I use OS X and Linux a lot, and there are some real issues with OS X, that's for sure. But this article didn't go into any of them. I could go on, but I'm sure this thread went from 3 comments to 200 by the time I hit submit.
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
SecretRabbit: Not sure he's heard of MacPorts:... nor Fink... nor version tracker.
SecretRabbit, not only have I heard of MacPorts and Fink, but each one of them gets a seperate page in a 13 page, 14,000 word article.
I used to work for NetQoS. I no longer do, but want to keep the excellent karma attached to this account.
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.
Ever try the Gimp Print Drivers?
-nick
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.
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
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
>>It's pure, unsubstantiated opinion, and in many cases it's simply wrong
Right at home on Slashdot, I would say...
They actually did the same sort of article on Vista and on Linux a while back, so they are giving everybody a chance to complain.
As I mention elsewhere:
* NeoOffice is the Mac port of OpenOffice, it does not require X11 to run. It works well, IMHO.
That is a typo, and it is being corrected. The line: "While AbiWord and NeoOffice are both available through X11," should be "While AbiWord and NeoOffice are both available, and OpenOffice is available through X11,"
* There are plenty of free open source apps, just like in Linux and Windows: Handbrake and MacTheRipper for DVD ripping, etc.
The issue is not that there is no freeware, in fact, I used Handbrake and Transmission and Colloquy in the article. However, DVD Ripping, BitTorrenting, and IRC chatting are all secondary compared to WordProcessing and Graphics Editing - and NeoOffice/AbiWord/OpenOffice(X11)/GIMP all had significant problems with either stability or ease of use. BitTorrent is nice to have, but word processing is mission critical. That's the lack of quality freeware I was talking about.
* The model between the Mini and MacPro is the iMac
I don't know what you're referring to here. I say that there is no consumer-priced model from Apple that has easily accessed components, like the former PowerMac stand-alone tower line. To get to upgradability of that nature, you need to go all the way to the MacPro - is that what you mean?
I used to work for NetQoS. I no longer do, but want to keep the excellent karma attached to this account.
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?
Also, just b/c something is /mentioned/ does NOT mean that it was given a chance, nor was it properly researched, nor..
Why don't you just admit that you didn't read the article? He specifically discusses Macports, and goes into excruciating detail about his attempts to use Fink, which he concluded was just too hard to use (matching my own experience exactly). He also goes into great detail about the shortcomings of X11 applications run on OS X.
Find free books.
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.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
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.
It is true though that when your mac is old and slow you have to buy a new one. Not like a PC. if your PC is slow you either wave your magic wand over it to make it faster or better yet you install the new Windows OS and its like your hardware is brand new.
I guess his complaint is about upgrading your computer. Of course I use a laptop most of the time so I hardly notice the lack of upgrading. But I thought the new Intel macs had upgradeable CPUs (didn't someone upgrade one to an 8 core before apple released one?) and you can upgrade the ram and the hard drive. I admit I know nothing about upgrading video cards on the mac these days (laptop again) so that might be an issue.
I don't get it. Sure maybe the mac is a little less upgradeable than the PC, but very few people replace their motherboards these days, its easier to just buy a new machine. This sounds like hyperbole to me.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
I see...
I like my GUIs like I like my women: small, light, and fast!
I like my OS like I like my women: low maintenance, easily customizable, and an appropriate reaction to the three finger salute.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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.
Yeah, that's an annoying conclusion. I almost never upgrade any of my computers anymore aside from RAM and hard drives, something that's pretty easy to do on Macs and most laptops (PC or Mac). My home PC, which I use to play games mainly, is running some older ASUS board with an Athlon 2400+ (as in the K7 core). I bumped it up to a gig of RAM and put in a GeForce 7600GS a couple months ago, but that's hardly some monster update.
To make the machine modern (PCIe, SATA, etc.) the whole machine has got to get replaced. The case is about the only thing I could keep. With all the CPU socket changes, a motherboard rarely survives more than one or two MINOR upgrades anymore.
In a Mac I can upgrade easily: CPU, video card, RAM, hard drive and optical drives. Oh yeah, and on the laptops at least, the wireless is really easy to upgrade as well.
So what if I can't upgrade the motherboard? Even in the PC world with a new socket coming out all the time, it's just about the same. This argument was much more valid a few years ago. Upgrading was also a much different realm when everything was on a PCI card. But now? My motherboard costs $60 - $120 (even more sometimes) and has everything but video and if I'm not a gamer... everything on it! New motherboard practically = new machine.
And when my machine gets slow? For everything but gaming and video (neither of which are things I do a lot of) how fast does your machine even need to be any more? The ONLY reason I'm not still using my G4 PowerBook is virtualization. That's it. Having quick access to IE6 and IE7 on my work machine is just too convenient to pass up. But, really, that's all.
All in all, the article was weak. Never trust a gaming centric site to give a decent review to anything but Windows based machines with the latest in "penis grade" hardware (like $500 video cards). For those of us who do work on your computers, many understand the relative strengths of Windows, Linux, OS X and whatever else appeals to our needs. Not everyone needs a $2,500 and a video card that requires its own power supply.
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.
You say this:
Finally gave up and sold the printer to a windows-only relative.
But earlier you said:
I love my new iMac, but I have a one year old Canon laser printer/scanner/copier that won't work with it. One year old, not 10-20.
So which is it? Is the fact the Canon printer works only with Windows a problem with the printer or a problem with the Mac?
Of course, we could go on with this all day...
I like my women like I like my monitors: thin and fast [easy] to turn on.
I like my women like I like my mice: ergonomic and easy to hold.
I like my women like I like my peripherals: plug and play.
I like my women like I like my keyboards: touch sensitive.
Women can jump in here any time...
Stupid sexy Flanders.
The thing is, if you are upgrading your motherboard and your video card and your processor and maybe buying new ram (or even new hard drives to match your mother boards new built in controller) at what point are you pretty much just replacing the whole system. Sure its nice to keep that DVD burner around but how much are you really saving? And if you were on a Mac Pro you could buy a new one that didn't have the high end optical drive, or the largest hard drive available, and just put your old ones in your new computer.
Sure, its not the same, you cant build your own mac and Im not going to claim that you can, but I think the difference here is not as great as the article makes it out to be. And for the vast majority of users its practically no difference at all.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Look, I'm usually the type to be accused of being a Mac fanboy more often than a critic, but the reviewer is right about this. You can argue all you want that upgradeability isn't, or shouldn't be, important, but this guy's writing for HardOCP, and we all know perfectly well that this guy and most of his audience are probably among those who upgrade and swap components all the time. Clearly upgradablity is important to him. And he gives a great example of where this IS important right in his review- the Mac Mini comes with an unconscionably low amount of RAM for OSX, and it's a huge PITA to upgrade compared to nearly any similarly priced PC. Yes, the Mini is little and cute and built like a laptop, which would make it hard to give it 4 easily acessible RAM slots like many similarly priced PC's have, but the fact that it's a relative PITA to upgrade stands, regardless of there being good reasons behind it.
Yes, the Mac Pro towers are some of the most gorgeous, easily upgradeable computers available anywhere- he admits this, but they start at $2,500. What this guy's asking for is what Apple used to sell from the release of the Beige G3 tower in 1998 until the release of the G5 tower in June 2003- an easily user-upgradeable machine for something around $1000.
Some of us like computers and mess around with them and, as he said, like to pop in new components to relieve bottle necks with some frequency, rather than always replacing the whole thing at one go. I had one of those G3 towers, and I bought it as a 266 mhz G3 with 32 MB RAM and a 4 GB HD, and I sold it 6 years later as a 533 Mhz G4 with 768 MB memory and over 100GB of HD space. Along the way it stepped up from a CD-ROM to a CR-R, it gained USB 2 and firewire ports through a PCI-card, and it went from single monitor support to much faster 3 monitor support with a Radeon 7000 PCI card. That machine cost about $1,000 new, maybe $1,200. Now, while the price of PC's has fallen dramatically since 1998, the price of the cheapest upgradable Mac has doubled. I still think the Mac Pros are a great deal- if you price something similar at Dell, you'll pay $1,000+ more. But regardless of whether they're a good price for what you get, they cost an arm and a leg. Minis, and more particularly iMacs, are great machines, but they offer extremely limited ability to upgrade compared to PC competitors. Apple has abandoned the market segment for people who like the flexible tower form factor but don't want to pay an arm and a leg, a segment that's very well catered to by nearly every other PC manufacturer.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
I used to do the same thing, but then the cycle just got too fast. Upgrading the video card meant either picking a lower end card to support older technology, or buying a new mother board to support the new graphics card. Buying new RAM didn't see any boost until you bought a new motherboard, and recently, the purcahse of a new processor has dictated the purchase of a new motherboard as when you're going to spend a hundred or so anyway, you might as well be upgrading. Modular is nice if you want to stay where you are (and even then, only for so long) but if you want to upgrade, everything is relying on everything else, so it doesn't matter. The hard drives are the only things in my years of upgrading that I can say I've kept around long enough to be worth the frustration of the upgrade path, but even then, if I had to get new ones as part of a whole machine purchase, I could put together a nice big array of all the old disks.
Here's what happend to me. My home built athlon machine died. Processor or motherboard, I'm not quite sure which, but it was one of them. I could buy a new processor to test it out, but then I'm out the cost of the processor if it doesn't work. So I went to buy a new motherboard, figuring I would grab one with some expansion room so that if I needed a new processor, I could up it just a little. Turns out, there aren't many boards like mine anymore, at least not at the shops. Sure I could buy it online, but I need this today. Of the options, none appeal to me, not for the money and because the few ones that are worth the money are unuseable for me because they only have PCI E and not AGP. In the end, I settled for an upgrade to both the CPU and the motherboard, but as I didn't want to upgrade my RAM at this time, I was limited a bit even in that selection and I still need a PCI E graphics card. When I'm all said and done with this, I'll have put about $400-$500 into this computer, and even then, I won't have a great machine, just one that I can say is better than what I had before.
By contrast, my father just had his old mac tower die (processors). He found used tower that was a generation after his, swapped out the various expansion cards and harddrive. Same general idea as my repair about $500 for a computer that's better than what he had before, but no where near top of the line. In the end, in my experience, it's about the same, PC or Mac. If you want top of the line, you'll pay thousands, no matter if you upgrade or buy outright. If you want to move up a little, you'll pay a couple hundred, no matter if you upgrade or buy it outright. If you want to stay with the exact machine you have, that's the only place I've seen upgrading do any reall good.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Complaining that the mac mini is not upgradeable enough for a power user is like complaining that a geo metro is unsuitable for towing a boat.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
No freeware for OS X? Look around in here and you'll see most everything you need - without spyware:
http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/
Most of the stuff on