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Is Apple Doing All It Can to Beat Vista?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the both-barrels-double-shotgun-explosive-bullets dept.

aalobode writes "The New York Times is running an article on the narrowing window that Apple has for beating Microsoft's Vista. According the Times, not enough has been done to capitalize on the Mac user experience versus the 'world of hurt that is Vista'. It also points out that that restructuring of Apple leaves ambiguities about Apple's exact commitment to the computer end of its business. The article calls MS Vista's certified vendors, developers and driver writers a flywheel that takes a while coming up to speed - and then becomes unstoppable."

4 of 773 comments (clear)

  1. Re:world of hurt? by Carewolf · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Mac Mini's are way to slow to be acceptable for any real work. When you add the unnecessary animation delays built into the Mac OS X, then you need a world of patience to stop your self from throwing it out the window and go buy a PC.

  2. Mac user persona by JackMeyhoff · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2002/20020712l.gif

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    http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
  3. I dunno about that. by seebs · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    My house has two Windows users. I bet that in two years, they'll be on Macs. They've had crashes, "time to reload again", and all that stuff for so long, and Vista is full of delights like "throttle network when you listen to music".

    We switched to OS X Server for my home network. Now, I'm not exactly unable to run servers conventionally; I ran a number of BSD servers of various sorts for years, I've done SysV, I've done Linux. I did tech support for BSDi back in the day; I do know how to do this.

    OS X Server is, for my purposes, just enough less work to justify (for me) the cost. Their GUI works well and mostly handles the quick "hey, did I remember to set up both Samba AND NFS for this" stuff. It does all three types of file sharing I need out of the box, without me having to mess around with them. It has taken over DHCP, and having administered an ISC dhcpd for years, I like OS X a lot better. (Admittedly, less flexible, but frankly, I can live with that in exchange for the ability to push a button labeled "restart".) I have a Mac Mini with most of a terabyte of disk drives sitting on it. It's nearly silent (one of the enclosures makes noise, though) and it Just Works. I've never even SEEN a PC that small and quiet.

    My laptop's a MacBook Pro now, too. I had a ThinkPad, dual-booting Windows and BSD. It worked fine; I still use NetBSD as one of my main desktops. However, Windows was a nightmare. It took, from running the restore CDs, roughly two hours to patch the system up to current, during which time it was at significant risk of getting owned. Every time I rebooted to Windows, I had to run software update and then reboot again. I need either Mac or Windows for printer drivers and art software, for now, and a Mac works better for me than dual-boot did.

    I know very few people who are interested in Vista, and a lot who are seeing it as a compelling reason to switch. The big advantage of Windows has been that they're already using it. If they're going to learn something new, they would rather learn something more stable -- and given the history of the Mac (now on its third CPU architecture and third or fourth kernel architecture), it's scary that the Mac has to be it.

    --
    My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
  4. Re:service pack by corychristison · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    (disclaimer: I'm a Gentoo person)

    A few months ago my girlfriend was looking at buying a computer. Me always wanting to get in on a Mac, made the suggestion of buying a Mac Mini. She needed something basic for school so she wasn't hogging my system (I do web design/development for a living). The Mac Mini seemed to fit the bill quite nicely.

    The first thing we tried to get working was a network share (NFS) so we could share documents and media. No matter what I did, I could not get an NFS share to mount on her system. I tried everything (BTW, who's idea was it to get rid of /etc/fstab on OS X!?) but to no avail. We simply could not get it to work. The next was that she wanted to be able to view videos on the net (using Firefox -- she got annoyed with Safari quite quickly). For some reason we had more problems than any other OS I've dealt with. We had to use the MediaPlayerConnectivity plugin, which worked fine on my system. For some reason it would not detect VLC on OS X. Which was a pain.

    Anywho.. my point. OS X is okay for a lot of people. But I have found that some of the very easily accomplished tasks (such as setting up NFS or watching video's on the net) seem to be a pain in the rear. In the end we dual-booted it with Gentoo (w/XFCE and lightweight apps) to make life easier. NFS? No problem. Add portmap to the default runlevel and add the line to fstab. MediaPlayerConnectivity and VLC? Worked right out of the box.

    And that be my tale of my adventures with OS X. :-)