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Is the Dell XPS One Better than the Apple iMac?
An anonymous reader writes "The Apple iMac is probably the standard all-in-one desktop computer. Great operating system, built-in software and design around solid, but pretty normal, hardware guts. According to Walter Mossberg, there's a new kid in town that not only matches it but is 'sightly ahead': the Dell XPS One. His latest review is already causing the usual suspects to weigh in. Mossberg says it is a better machine, but Vista and its built-in software make it inferior than Apple iMac's Leopard and iLife suite. Would you choose the better hardware of the Dell XPS One -which is more expensive- or the elegant design and software of the Apple iMac?"
Of course most Mac users are sheep, most people, in general, are sheep. People buy ipods because that's what everyone uses. People buy Windows also because that is everyone uses. At least the Mac sheep spent some time and made a conscious decision to buy something that most of the other sheeple didn't; so there is some hope for them.
For most people computers are just appliances. My wife introduced me to Macs. She bought one solely because she loved her iPod, and when she went to Circuit City, she looked at both PCs and a Mac, and because of her experience with her iPod she bought an iBook (this was many years ago). She's a smart cookie, but doesn't have an interest in technical stuff, so she said to her self: if the iPod works well the Mac must too; and for her it has; she now has a MacBook.
When we started dating, I started learning OS X on her machine. I was kind of amazed of what she was doing with her computer. Sure you CAN do everything she was doing on Windows, but no-one in my family had ever figured out how to do it. She was doing it on her Mac without really thinking of it. That got me intrigued.
For me, I'm a developer, a *nix developer to be precise. I had never been interested in Macs pre OS X, as the OS was kind of lame. But I felt right at home in the Terminal in OS X; I did have to learn the BSD way of doing things, but that was very easy.
I bought the cheapest Mac Mini to play with; ripped it apart, upgraded it, installed and reinstalled everything, etc. I then started to KVM between my Linux workstation and my Mac Mini. The mini was slow, but I started using it more and more. My next computer was a MacBook Pro; at that point I had my Mac laptop and my desktop Linux workstation.
When my Linux workstation was getting long in the tooth, I debated between a new shiny 4 core PC, or a 4 core Mac Pro. I had just built a very nice 4 core Linux workstation for a co-worker, and that worked really well for him. In the end I decided on a Mac Pro, and I've been very happy; I now have no PCs for workstations, only servers. OS X makes an excellent Unix workstation, and a great development environment. I'd be happy with a Linux workstation too, but I really like that the things I don't want to mess with (music, creating movies, etc) "just work" on the Mac, and things I really care about (development, the command-line, unix environment) work really well on OS X. Plus little things like OS X is 64 bit, and I can put 16gigs of memory in my Mac Pro; you really don't have to think about it (yes I know the 64bit versions of Windows and Linux can too, but most people aren't using those)
So I think my wife and I show two ends of the Mac spectrum; it's not as easy as saying "Mac users are non-technical sheep" because there are many people like me who need high powered unix workstations. And there are many people like my wife, who just want to do what they need to do and get back to what really interests them.