The Hackintosh Guide

An anonymous reader writes "A 'Hackintosh' is a computer that runs Apple's OS X operating system on non-Apple hardware. This has been possible since Apple's switch from IBM's PowerPC processors to Intel processors a few years ago. Until recently, building a PC-based Mac was something done only by hard-core hackers and technophiles, but in the last few months, building a Hackintosh PC has become much easier. Benchmark Reviews looks at what it's possible to do with PC hardware and the Mac Snow Leopard OS today, and the pros and cons of building a Hackintosh computer system over purchasing a supported Apple Mac Pro."

Comments

apple ][ clones

[johnrpenner]

its apple ][ clones all over again..

and look what it did for the popularity of apple hardware.. they got so big, that ibm decided to make its own PC too.. stirring the behomoth into action.

the best thing steve jobs could do on his his death is to open-source Mac OSX (maybe..)

2cents from toronto
jp

Re:apple ][ clones

[morgan_greywolf]

and look what it did for the popularity of apple hardware.. they got so big, that ibm decided to make its own PC too.. stirring the behomoth into action.

This is the truth. According to Jack Sams, IBM Boca Raton started what they initially called 'Project Chess' after noting the success of the Apple II.

However, what made the Apple II successful and what made the Macintosh successful are two completely different stories.

Re:apple ][ clones

[Hatta]

What made the Macintosh successful and what made OS X successful are two different stories as well.

Re:apple ][ clones

[Adrian Lopez]

People have tagged your post as "funny", but it's actually true. The Apple II was released in 1977, while the IBM PC was released in 1982. Other computers may also have contributed (Commodore PET, Atari 8-bit family, Tandy Corporation's TRS-80s, and various CP/M machines, per Wikipedia), but the Apple II was especially popular.

Open Source Mac OS X would be awesome, but I think it's even less likely than Mac OS X losing its ties to Apple hardware while remaining commercial.

Re:apple ][ clones

[Anonymous Coward]

Goldilocks and the Three Bears and Rapunzel are also two different stories.

Re:apple ][ clones

[sexconker]

What made the Macintosh successful and what made OS X successful are two different stories as well.

I disagree.
"Artists and media professionals" and "unique, free-thinkers" are pretty much the same group once you step outside the reality distortion field.

(That group is "technically-illiterate, neo-urbanite, narcissistic hipsters".)

Re:apple ][ clones

[GreyWolf3000]

As are Avatar and Dances with Wolves. Derp.

Re:apple ][ clones

[Anonymous Coward]

OH MY GAWDD!!! You made a joke about how Apple users are hipsters!!! This joke is so fresh and witty that you deserve 5 billion upmods! OMG I'M ROFLING!!!

Re:apple ][ clones

[imthesponge]

It's easy to question Apple's marketing campaign that says "Mac is for cool, young people. If you work for a living or have to get real shit done other than listening to your iPod or fucking around with your webcam, or are older than 25, Mac is not for you."

Re:apple ][ clones

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, if you ignore the fact that countless people are using Macs for video post-production in major movie and broadcast studios and the millions of people who use Photoshop and Illustrator on Macs for graphic design and publishing work. So, yes, you are truly correct that Macs are for nothing but fucking around on a webcam or listening to an iPod.

Re:apple ][ clones

[Hatta]

That's the thing, OS X wasn't made successful by technically illiterate, neo-urbanite, narcissistic hipsters. That was the original Mac. OS X is genuinely superior technically to the alternatives. Unfortunately, that's the only current Apple product you can say that about.

Re:apple ][ clones

[imthesponge]

I agree; the Mac is a great platform for that kind of thing. I was just criticizing Apple's marketing.

Re:apple ][ clones

[doodlebumm]

Well that would be the second best. The best would be to just die.

Re:apple ][ clones

[Omestes]

People often wander into the fallacy (okay, OS fanboy troll) that all Mac users are some sort of image conscious hipster, and it annoys me. Yes, a lot of hipsters own Macs for image and marketing reasons, but this ignores everyone else. I'm guessing less than 50% of Macs are used by hipsters. though this would differ with other Apple products (the iPhone and iPad probably having the highest percentage of wankers).

I've owned two Macs. The first, an iBook, I bought because my college offered a decent discount, and was willing to throw in a free iPod. The main thing that threw me over the edge was a dodgy computer that probably ate up $500 in upgrades and repairs (mostly caused by said upgrades). I was in college, taking rather intensive courses, and didn't really want to have to fuss with Windows or Linux, or fight the temptation of ripping open my box and replacing things that weren't broke. It was a damn good computer, actually, and it did what I wanted it to do. It was simple, it didn't require much work or maintenance, things actually "just worked" (mostly). No, it wasn't the cutting edge gaming rigs I was used to, but that was the point. It did homework, it did media, it did the internet, and it could stream movies to my TV. Thats all I wanted, or needed at the time. Sadly it also played WoW, which didn't help things.

Image never crossed my mind. I also had to put up with wankers telling me that wearing an iPod in public was an image thing, even though one of the first things I did was to get rid of the crappy, and iconic, white headphones. The iPod was actually the best mp3 player at the time. Image had nothing to do with it, it was better than my stupid 1gb flash player, it was free, so I used it.

Later, after my iBook died, and made me curse the fact I didn't really have access to its hardware (fried HDD, which oddly various flavors of PPC friendly Linux could read, and run on, but lacking sound or wifi drivers). So I bought an Intel MacMini. It was a mistake. It was nothing but an underpowered pain (partly my fault, a 1.2Ghz PPC was better than a 1.5ghz Core Solo), which made me wish I had a "real" computer, so I could at least have the performance and comparability to go with the mindless hassle. Image also didn't play a roll, the iBook was a solid, simple, computer, so the Mini would be too.

My Girlfriend also used pretty much nothing but Macs, and she is a "creative type", though completely non-hip. She grew up in Palo Alto, where the only computers she had access to in schools were Apple products. Her parents got discounts for buying Apples. All her parents "used" (in their parently way) were Macs. Basically she managed to never touch a non-Apple computer until she moved out of California. She used Apple products up until my constant bitching about my Mini got to her, and she realized that her MacBook was a certified lemon. Now she's running Win7, and getting a Ubuntu powered netbook, and daily plays with my Linux powered HTPC. Image never really played a roll there either.

Both of us, while being 90% Mac free (the Mini is now heading for the kitchen)

Neither of use are "Apple Hipster" types. I'm a long-time nerd, and she, while being an english/art major is pretty non-hip, VERY non-hip. I don't wear turtle necks, I think fixed-wheel bikes are stupid. I have never worn loafers outside of a work environment (actually, I don't wear shoes outside of a work enviroment), my glasses are real and not thick plastic, I don't wear tight pants. etc...

I don't hang out with "hipsters", and neither does my girlfriend. Though there was a nice hipster bar down the road that served fairly cheap top shelf bourbon, so I supposed I did from time to time. In college when I first got the Mac, I spend more time in the astronomy building than in... where ever hipsters are. The rest of the time was spent in various philosophy related clubs (read; lets go to a bar and argue about Wittgenstein, Russell and machine intelligence while getting hammered on the c

Re:apple ][ clones

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, that's THREE different stories

Re:apple ][ clones

[Lonnold]

What definition of "Apple Hipster" are you using? Your GF is an English/art major from California and you hang out bare foot in Philosophy clubs... you're the very definition of Apple Hipsters!

Re:apple ][ clones

[Omestes]

I'd say the definition of "hipster" is doing things to be seen, and not out of any intrinsic merit of the activity itself. Which pretty much overlays every other inane sub or counter-culture in existence. So I'm guessing the hipster thing is pretty much a blanket term for a class of subcultures of affluent, mostly white, people in their late 20's to early 30s (post college, but prematurity). Characteristics (mostly via internet osmosis, and not actual observation) is a strange cross between luddism and nostalgia and yuppie gadget hording. Riding a gearless bicycle while chatting on your iPhone, for example. Playing old vinyl records while mixing bad music on you exceedingly expensive Apple branded computer. Etc...

There is also something about stupid haircuts and tight pants... That's either hipsters or emo kids, or both, I'm not entirely sure. Its been a bit since I paid attention to what people are doing.

I suppose, if forced to define them in a word, it would be pretentious.

Yes, I wear sandals (which I wasn't aware was hipster garb), and yes I majored in Philosophy (emphasis in philosophy of science and epistemology; which I wasn't aware was a hip area of study). And yes, I hung out in bars (which is pretty common for all college kids) and discussed academics (which might be more rare, but doubtfully uncommon). I didn't do any of this to be seen, being seen by people is pretty damn far at the bottom of my list of priorities.

Pretension is the thing. Yes, a hipster might use a Mac, but they are using it as a fashion accessory, and I might use a Mac but I'm using it for a completely different reason. You, the hipster, are using a Mac for SOCIAL reasons, I'm using mine because I got sick to death of Windows and Linux. Your majoring in philosophy (actually I don't think there was a single person who could be considered "hip" in the program) because it somehow improves your street cred until you flunk out past the 200 level classes (or the first truly analytic class), I'm taking it because I'm genuinely interested in the relation of humans, knowledge, and the real world (whatever that means. I tried psych, but that was terrible). You don't wear shoes because you want people to see your overarching hatred of whatever shoes represent in your subculture, I don't wear shoes because I grew up in the Arizona desert where shoes are really never necessary unless your hiking or your boss forces you to wear them.

Probably the quickest way to see if someone fits into that specific mold is to see their friends. If they all look the same, and share the exact interests, wear roughly the same fashions, music, etc... then you can deduce that the person might be a hipster, or whatever subculture is cool at the moment.

My girlfriend fits the mold bit better, being an genuine artistic-type. But she, sadly, isn't very social, and has pretty much no desire to befriend anyone outside of her limited, and age worn, small group of friends. Being from California is hardly a fashion statement, last I checked you don't have much control over where your born. As I tell her about her California roots, "No one is perfect".

A t-shirt and jeans is part of the hipster ethos (and myriad previous youth cultures), you probably wear a t-shirt and jeans from time to time, so you must also be a hipster, by your criteria.

I feel like its the same as the first step as a 12 step program. Admitting you have a problem. Its an absurd thing. If you don't actually have a problem you won't admit to having one. Being that your not admitting to it, you must have a problem.

Re:apple ][ clones

[elrous0]

Obviously you haven't been to a university lately. Macs are the de facto cool. Owning a PC is the equivalent to showing up to your freshmen dorm wearing bell-bottoms and a "Nickelback Rules!" t-shirt. Technological superiority has nothing to do with it.

Re:apple ][ clones

[Hatta]

I work at a university actually. I see more ipads around than macbooks. Lots of Dell laptops, and even windows netbooks. It's a private university too, so it's not like the kids can't afford a macbook. But this is as it should be, any of those options are sufficient for presentations, note taking, research, etc. If I see an OS X machine around, chances are it's running a $10K+ piece of equipment, or serving the department web site.

Re:apple ][ clones

[Hognoxious]

If you work for a living or have to get real shit done

countless people are using Macs for video post-production in major movie and broadcast studios and the millions of people who use Photoshop and Illustrator on Macs for graphic design and publishing

You think you refuted him?

Re:apple ][ clones

[Hognoxious]

It's sounds like ONE pr0n film.

One I do not want to see, I may add.

Re:apple ][ clones

[drsmithy]

OS X is genuinely superior technically to the alternatives.

No, it's not. At best it's on par, and even that's only been true since Snow Leopard.

Re:apple ][ clones

[imthesponge]

I agree with him. Apple evidently does not agree with him.

Re:apple ][ clones

[uninformedLuddite]

the best thing steve jobs could do on his his death is to open-source Mac OSX (maybe..)

You're just trying to stir up trouble now aren't you?

Re:apple ][ clones

[Anonymous Coward]

-1: Criticizing Apple

Re:apple ][ clones

[Phoghat]

And why IBM is out of the computer building business today. Too much competition from IBM clones.

Re:apple ][ clones

[Anonymous Coward]

So I bought an Intel MacMini. It was a mistake. It was nothing but an underpowered pain (partly my fault, a 1.2Ghz PPC was better than a 1.5ghz Core Solo), which made me wish I had a "real" computer, so I could at least have the performance and comparability to go with the mindless hassle. Image also didn't play a roll, the iBook was a solid, simple, computer, so the Mini would be too.

Um... I don't know quite how to put it, but it is utterly insane to say that a 1.2 GHz G4 (which is what would've been in a 1.2 GHz iBook) was in any sense better than a 1.5 GHz Core Solo.

Perhaps your impression was based on trying to play WoW on the two machines? The Core Solo mini had Intel GMA graphics, of the vintage when they'd about doubled performance from their previous generation and it was still a joke, while the iBook had a real discrete GPU. Not a great one, just a Radeon 9200, but still. So it's plausible that it would've performed better in any application which was mostly bottlenecked by graphics performance.

But definitely it would not beat the Mini on anything mostly dependent on CPU performance. The G4 was not a very fast CPU.

Re:apple ][ clones

[Omestes]

Perhaps your impression was based on trying to play WoW on the two machines?

Actually that is one of the areas where I didn't notice any difference. WoW was playable on medium settings with a decent FPS, and on both it made me ponder if playing a bit longer than an hour would set the computer on fire.

It was more a general feeling of slowness. Programs took a bit longer to open, there was a very slight increase in interface lag, multi-tasking became a bit more of a pain (actually this was the big one). It wasn't as "Zippy" feeling as the iBook.

There are probably tons of reasons for this, and not just the processor. Rosetta being my favorite thing to heap untold amounts of blame on, also the other components on the board could have been inferior to whatever they used with PPCs. The fact that most of the Intel software were new ports and many bugs didn't quite get weeded out yet. Etc...

I also ponder if when they moved over to dual core architecture if they slightly gimped the single cores, so the Core Solo was even worse off than a normal 1.5ghz Solo.

Also, I really can't tell the difference between 1.2 and 1.5Ghz, at that point the improvement is a bit too incremental to notice. And the actual clock-speed isn't quite that important anymore, so it isn't the only judge of performance.

   

Re:apple ][ clones

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you get paid by *word* on every /.turf you pretend to shove our asses?

Re:apple ][ clones

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know quite how to put it, but it is utterly insane to say that a 1.2 GHz G4 (which is what would've been in a 1.2 GHz iBook) was in any sense better than a 1.5 GHz Core Solo.

*cough* Altivec?

It's not "the" guide

[Artifex]

It even says on the first page,

This is not a detailed guide on building your own Hackintosh; it's a description of my personal experience building one, and how the result compared with my existing Mac Pro. If you want to build your own Hackintosh, there are many comprehensive resources on the Web. I've found Insanely Mac to be very useful.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[morgan_greywolf]

Bah. Who needs to build a Hackintosh? I have Snow Leopard running in VirtualBox.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[sgtstein]

Yea, I completely agree. I'm a software and web dev and I need multiple environments to test stuff out. I run Win XP, Win 7, Leopard(10.5) and Snow Leopard(10.6) running in VirtualBox very well. All on Fedora 13 and an encrypted hard drive. No issues at all. Why build a dedicated rig and even dual-boot when VB works so much better?

Re:It's not "the" guide

[slim]

Bah. Who needs to build a Hackintosh? I have Snow Leopard running in VirtualBox.

What's AV performance like? One reason it would be nice to build a Hackintosh is to have a cheap, fast box to run something like Logic Pro on.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[Elbowgeek]

Same here, and it runs quite nicely, albeit a bit slow. But it's fun to play with.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[jedidiah]

AV performance? I get better performance out of AirVideo running in a single CPU VM (WinXP) than I do from a dual core Mac running on bare metal.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[nschubach]

Actually, it's telling me:

Pardon our server... it's being serviced at the moment. Please refresh this page (F5) or use your browsers "Back" button.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[copponex]

Yeah. Mac hardware is nice. Their software, however, is turning into bloatware.

There is a social network inside of iTunes.

There is a social network inside of iTunes.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[morgan_greywolf]

About the same as the AV performance of any other OS running in VirtualBox. Definitely inadequate for doing professional or even prosumer level A/V production. I agree that you'd definitely want a dedicated box for that. Dabblers with sufficiently fast CPUs and lots of RAM would be able to see what Logic Pro can do, though.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[slim]

Good to know.

I should have mentioned, what really matters for audio is latency -- for example, if you're playing an electric guitar through GarageBand or Logic's amp simulators, latency in the sound card can be very noticeable (I've had issues even with GarageBand running natively on a G4 Mac Mini).

It "feels" as if a virtualised OSX would introduce extra latency, but I don't want to jump to conclusions. Does anyone have experience with doing latency-sensitive audio work in VirtualBox?

Re:It's not "the" guide

[Americano]

Just play a little faster, jeez. :)

Re:It's not "the" guide

[Cwix]

Not trying to be a troll or anything, I'm honestly curious. I thought the entire point of buying a mac was the software. I was under the impression that "Mac hardware" is basically the same thing as PC hardware. What exactly makes Mac hardware nice?

(Note: Apple has done some interesting things, like the iphone. I even own one apple product, a first gen 16gb touch.)

Re:It's not "the" guide

[copponex]

What exactly makes Mac hardware nice?

The industrial design of Apple computers is simply the best in the world. I don't know of anyone who disputes that -- at least someone who can point to a computer manufacturer who has anything better.

As far as functionality is concerned, their mice are crap, keyboards are great, and their laptops are good for everything except 3d acceleration. Multi-touch trackpads without buttons are the best design out there, along with their island style keyboards which are also without equal. iMacs are the best looking desktop computer, bar none.

Is everything overpriced? Yes. Is their OS better than Windows 7? Depends on what you use it for. But now, iTunes takes as long to load as Photoshop CS5. Spotlight is broken for all practical purposes, even though I rebuild indexes every couple of weeks. Steve will soon release an iMac that runs iOS as well as OS X, and you can see where it's going from here. In order to improve the user experience, Steve is going to prevent his users from running unsigned processes. He'll lose all of the nerds who switched to OS X, but that's such a small number of people, he's not going to care when the reward is 30% of all software sales.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[uglyduckling]

What exactly makes Mac hardware nice?

Uh... have you used any Mac hardware? I understand that lots of people have a problem with Apple's "closed" model on the iPhone (although I'm personally quite happy with it) but I've never heard anyone claim that the hardware isn't nice. Try to find a PC laptop that's have as nice as a MacBook Pro. There are a few offerings from the likes of Sony and the top end of Dell's hardware, but really if you don't mind parting with the cash there's not much else at the top of the market.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[RocketRabbit]

Clearly you have a configuration problem then. Or you are just flat out lying.

However, looking at your post history, you never miss an opportunity to bash Apple products, and even when your posts smack of untruth your low UID magically gets you modded up.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[adisakp]

FTA: "Full disclosure: I worked for Apple in the late 1980s and am the author of "MacPaint 2.0". I use Macs for all my serious work and consider PCs to be best suited for video games."

The author shows a bit of seriously incorrect anti-pc attitude in this statement dismissing Windows. That statement might be true for him personally but it's not true for the majority of people out there.

70-80% of PC's sold today have some sort of integrated display chipset that can sometimes slowdown trying to handle the "enhanced" desktop experience of Vista / Win 7. They are certainly not "game machines" unless you like playing the latest games in low resolution at 8-12 Frames Per Second.

Nope, many of those systems are sold to do general purpose office work (primarily e-mail) but also Office (with a capital "O" as in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint). And an awful lot of people buy them for basic home use, like browsing the web and looking at flash videos. The cheap little non-video games are ubiquitous because you can buy a full system including a monitor and printer starting at $400 or less where the cheapest all-in-one mac is $1200 and the mac mini - which doesn't even have a keyboard - now starts at $700.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[adisakp]

Bah. Who needs to build a Hackintosh? I have Snow Leopard running in VirtualBox.

Maybe you could write a guide to virtualizing the Mac under Windows / Linux (or whatever you are using).

Re:It's not "the" guide

[Cwix]

Exactly what makes this hardware any better then a regular pcs hardware. Lets ignore things like keybards and trackpads.. Im interested in the CPU, motherboard, RAM, video card, etc.

I built a PC about months ago, its a dual core Phenom 2 overclocked to 4Ghz, 4g of RAM, with a nice feature rich Gigabyte board. I only spent a few hundred dollars for everything minus the dvd burner and hard drive, which were recycled from an earlier computer. What makes an expensive Mac Pro better?

I also have a rather nice HP dv-5 laptop, 2.2ghz dual core Intel proc, with 4g of RAM, and an 8hr battery. I bought it over a year ago for 600 dollars. What makes a Mac book pro's hardware any better in this price point?

In other words. If MacOS is no bueno (as implied by copponex), why should I pay a premium for the hardware?

Re:It's not "the" guide

[Cwix]

The industrial design of Apple computers is simply the best in the world

Ok, so esentially they are really good at putting the components together, but the components have no real difference from PC components?

I get the impression that they are just more asthetically pleasing, with some nice peripherals.

Again, I'm not trying to be a troll, just trying to understand the rabid fanbois.. I mean the software isnt the best, the basic hardware is comparable to a PC's... Is there a reason I should consider Apple computers in the future... Will I get what I pay for, or will I pay for the privilege of being locked in a walled garden?

If there is a good reason to look into Macs, I will consider them the next time I'm purchasing a computer.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[GreyWolf3000]

Wait till they bundle emacs with iTunes.... our heads will asplode.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[rsborg]

Exactly what makes this hardware any better then a regular pcs hardware. Lets ignore things like keybards and trackpads.. Im interested in the CPU, motherboard, RAM, video card, etc.

If you're ignoring the major interfaces to your device, then you're not Apple's target market. As you can tell by their quarterly earnings, it's clear they're moving towards mobile (laptops/tablets/iPod/iPhone) away from desktops as their revenues show.

If you don't appreciate design and interface, then by all means, I recommend you to use Linux (it's quite mature and usable these days for desktops/servers) and/or Windows (if you must have games).

For those of us who want a nice laptop (where things like trackpad and keyboard usability matter a LOT), Apple has the best kit in town, even if you want to run Windows/Linux.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[nine-times]

Meh, I really don't think it's a big deal. There has been an HTML render built into their OS that has been used in iTunes for a while. My understanding is the "social network" built into iTunes is still HTML, and therefore it's not like you're adding a lot of code to iTunes itself. So yeah, it's "bloated" in the sense that it has features that many people won't really want, but on the other hand it probably didn't add a lot of "bloat" in terms of new code or inefficient code.

Meanwhile they just released an update a year ago that stripped out a lot of legacy code, optimized the rest, and added few new features. I'm not sure it makes sense to call their software "bloated", at least not in a general context. At most, I'd probably say that iTunes could use some refocusing and reorganizing.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[Cwix]

Thank you for the good answer. BTW my hp has a rather decent keyboard, I prefer to use it for large amounts of typing over my desktop. The only thing I wish it did have was backlit keys.. which I hear MACs have.

I'm one of the people who would not mind having my computer in a beige box. I have no taste.. I know this.

I already run a mix of Win 7 and Opensuse. (Win 7 has temp become my main OS, as Ive been having issues with three monitors in Opensuse)

Re:It's not "the" guide

[bill_kress]

Just my personal experience.

I've never had a PC laptop that suspended/resumed nicely. If you see people walking around their office with their PC lids open, this is why. Around here, suspend/resume/dock/undock are the leading cause of windows crashes and hardware failure (all dells, but I've literally NEVER seen a windows PC suspend and resume correctly over the long-haul). On top of that, hibernate is a complete fail.

The mac, however, is fantastic. I can close the lid and leave it sitting there for a whole day then still open it and it is ready to type before I have the lid fully open. I honestly can't tell you how valuable this simple feature is, you have to experience it.

Also, when you close it, the light stays on solid for about 10 seconds before going out. What it's doing is dumping the contents of ram to disk--then it goes into "Suspend". The thing is, Hibernate is "Auto" and "More Magic". Nobody knows this unless they have had to use it, but if you yank the battery from a suspended mac then replace it and turn it on, it resumes to where you were, magically reverting to a Hibernate you didn't even know you had!

Now, I thought this was all because of OSX, but after buying my mac I put windows on a Bootcamp partition and loaded the Bootcamp drivers. My WINDOWS partition now acts a lot like the Mac. It has a pretty darn reliable and quick suspend/resume!

Honestly I can't tell you if the difference is hardware or software, but if I was going to get a new windows laptop PC and had any choice in the matter, I'd get mac hardware and either dual boot or run Windows in a VM.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[Lumpy]

Let;s see that VM run a nice complex render from motion...

VM's are great for playing, they stink for high horsepower and Graphics work.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[Anonymous Coward]

I personally prefer Lenovo design due to the ease of replacing components. Apple products come fused closer together which gets you a tiny bit smaller and lighter (and thinner, if you've seen the macbook air), but when it comes to quality of hardware (and overpriced), Lenovo matches them.

Every time I buy a new computer (Linux) it's hard for me to decide between the latest portables from Lenovo and Apple, but Lenovo always wins by a thin margin for ease of upgrades and repairs.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[Anonymous Coward]

Mac Pro is pure Workstation Grade equipment. If You ever build a WS for AV You learn that it's more complicated to get the propper parts together (MB/RAM/CPU).
In these days You don't need physical SMP anymore, but it is still quite hard to build a fast (and clean) physical SMP machine for the same money U drop on a small Mac Pro.
The very valid point the partent made: most other BTO WS from HP/Dell are messy inside the box. No pleasure to dissassemble a complete Mac Pro, but it looks like
somebody gave a fuck You could peek inside. The OS is crappy as all other desktop OS, but the machines are beautiful, considered it's just far eastern electronics.
(equipment sold as PRO, get's a dose of fog to save the market and the margins - cater the OEM bunch, but screw the small time builders. there are not much real WS
sales these days, so the few left must bring the $.)
Face it: the Mac Pro is the Ferrari of the commercial WS, all the looks and the power. You just gotta love it. It might have it's quirks, but if You really own one You can life with that.
Unless it makes buzzing noises or whistels ;).

Re:It's not "the" guide

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to disagree. iTunes launches pretty quickly on a cold start here (mac mini).

Re:It's not "the" guide

[uglyduckling]

If you look at the bare spec of processor speed, RAM and number of cores, a Mac is never better. But by that measure my Ford Mondeo is no better than my friend's Audi which has the same size engine and cylinder count.

At the workstation end of the market, the Apple 'premium' is worth it for the same reason that the Dell workstation premium is worth it: superb build quality, stable PSU, proper SATA drive bays (4 of), ECC RAM which can be upgraded very easily... basically everything that makes your computer the reliable thing it needs to be if you depend on it for your everday living. If you're producing e.g. video, the cost of the machine is negligible compared to the time you save on keeping it running reliably.

For laptops, there's nothing on the market that has the convenience of Apple's two-part "unibody" design, the MagLock power supply is superb, the backlit keyboard is great. Again, there's no one killer feature, but if you use your computer on the move all the time then a MacBook Pro is hard to beat, and certainly the 'Apple tax' is a myth when you compare it to similar specced (in terms of industrial design, not just raw processor speed) machines from other manufacturers.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[tunapez]

Maybe you could write a guide to virtualizing the Mac under Windows / Linux (or whatever you are using).

And perhaps highlight how you got it to network(Nat, Bridged, Host-Only). I never could get VMW or VB to network or access shared folders when running OSX guest. 10.5 I think, maybe it was 10.4.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[swb]

Will it support the E1000 NIC? Most of the more modern VMware versions will support a virtualized Intel E1000 network card.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[gutnor]

"just trying to understand the rabid fanbois"

There is nothing to understand in a rabit fanboy of anything. Unless you want irrational reasons.
If you want actual reason, the GP is spot on. The main difference between Apple and the rest of the world is that they sell a complete package.

• The package that Apple sell is polished at most levels. That is their selling point - they took care of designing everything so that it all works together - and you feel it when using their product.
• The price is not bad especially after a refresh. But you get a very limited set of options, that means, overall, it will be more expensive: for example you cannot buy the 17in laptop with a crappy graphic card or a slower CPU to save a buck. Generally, however, Apple does not make unusable machine. If you buy the cheapest one, it will still give good user experience. That means the cheapest Mac is generally way more expensive than PC equivalent. But it is a "safe" buy.
• Apple makes crazy decision about tech supported (get rid of floppy, ...) and software aswell (walled garden). Since there is only a single Mac provider, people get pissed about that. But well, nobody force you to buy - and you know it in advance - it is not hidden in the fine lines !
• Apple stuff are available soon after they are announced. You can actually buy the stuff ! Similarly, they do not promise stuff. People that bought the first iPhone knew they wouldnt get the MMS, Copy-Paste, ... You get what's on the box - no surprises or false hopes.
• Apple is fashion. Something the geek does not care of, but the rest of the world does.

Remember, the vast majority of people do not buy a Mac. No need to scratch your head for a reason to buy one. No need to feel superior if you don't buy one either - you are just following the majority.

You can get pissed at people that buy a Mac and try to convince you it is the best thing since sliced bread with ads level arguments - they are annoying - but well they are the same guys that, long ago, were trying to convince you that Win95 was the best thing since sliced bread. Get over it.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[rsborg]

Thank you for the good answer. BTW my hp has a rather decent keyboard, I prefer to use it for large amounts of typing over my desktop. The only thing I wish it did have was backlit keys.. which I hear MACs have.

One thing I've yet to find in any Windows/PC laptop is a decent touchpad or trackpoint... I'm not a fan of lugging a mouse with me when I'm running to a meeting or on the couch at home.

Every single trackpoint (my favorite input device until I got a Macbook) has a "ghost movement" issue (less these days, but still a major issue). Every windows-based touchpad (especially in cheap laptops/netbooks) is close to unusable due to false touches (ie, hand resting on pad). My Macbook (and later MB Pro) had the first really usable touchpad I ever used... I instantly became a convert... I'm pretty sure that Apple took what they did with their iPod clickwheel/pad took it to their laptops touchpads, and then made it into multitouch on their iPhone (which is the gold standard for mobile touch these days).

Re:It's not "the" guide

[adisakp]

their laptops are good for everything except 3d acceleration

FWIW, the majority of PC laptops (with the exception of high-end and gaming laptops) have integrated Intel GFX hardware. This is significantly slower than the Mac laptops -- *ALL* of which are shipping with a discrete 3D chip that provides at least decent if not game-rocking 3D performance.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[stewymcstewstew]

Spotlight is broken for all practical purposes, even though I rebuild indexes every couple of weeks.

I have been using macs for long enough to certainly remember when spotlight came out and I can safely say I have never had this issue. I have a feeling there are a lot of people who would agree

Steve will soon release an iMac that runs iOS as well as OS X, and you can see where it's going from here. In order to improve the user experience, Steve is going to prevent his users from running unsigned processes. He'll lose all of the nerds who switched to OS X, but that's such a small number of people, he's not going to care when the reward is 30% of all software sales.

Do you have any links you can provide that would indicate that is the case?

I don't think there is any evidence that macs will stop using osx and began using a desktop friendly form of ios. Maybe they will borrow UI elements but full on signed binaries only? I fail to grasp how that would even work in a modern desktop operating system, let alone why they think it would be reasonably popular/profitable. I could see some sort of "app store" for the desktop as well, but I would be shocked if they every stopped using a full featured and relatively open Operating System.

I am not apple apologist and agree that there are significant criticisms that could be made regarding apple, I just don't think that is one of them and am frankly baffled why it is modded +5 insightful.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[tibit]

I agree about suspend/resume -- I also love this feature on our desktop iMac. Losing power when the computer is asleep is no more a problem -- it just restarts from hibernation (this had to be enabled as it wasn't on by default on the desktop). It's also great to have a desktop computer that's ready to use in a couple of seconds after you tap a key on the keyboard.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[TClevenger]

The mac, however, is fantastic. I can close the lid and leave it sitting there for a whole day then still open it and it is ready to type before I have the lid fully open. I honestly can't tell you how valuable this simple feature is, you have to experience it.

Depends on the Mac hardware. My old 12" Powerbook G4 was amazingly good at this. When I opened the lid, before I could get my password in, it had already reconnected to my WiFi and even reestablished my open SSH sessions to my Linux box. I only rebooted that thing when I needed to apply security updates. My first-gen Macbook Pro, on the other hand, would frequently never turn on the screen, and I would have to close the lid, wait 30 seconds for the light to go back to "pulsing", open it again, and maybe repeat once or twice more before it would show the password prompt.

I don't buy into the "superior hardware" bit. Apple has their share of problems, from cracking Cubes to "brown" white iBooks to failing silver Power Mac G4 power supplies to Power Mac G5 fan problems to iMac/eMac video failures to capacitor problems to early Macbook Pros that would flex to the point that optical discs wouldn't eject. The difference is that you're stuck with one vendor for parts, and they still charge eight prices for repairs.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[jedidiah]

...this is why I would rather run MacOS on my Quad Core frankenbox than on a real Mac. Sure, the little
minis are great as cheap-ish HTPC boxes. However, for serious number crunching they kind of suck. Sure
they run better than Windows but that's not saying much. The hardware is still underpowered compared to
what you can buy in terms of a non-Apple PC at the same price.

      That's a big part of why AirVideo runs better under a VM than a real Mac.

      The real Mac is kind of sad.

      You can buy a LOT more PC at the same pricepoint.
     

Re:It's not "the" guide

[jedidiah]

> If you look at the bare spec of processor speed, RAM and number of cores, a Mac
> is never better. But by that measure my Ford Mondeo is no better than my friend's
> Audi which has the same size engine and cylinder count.

It is exactly THIS sort of approach to technology that typifies the mindless Apple fanboy.

The correct comparison is between Ford, Lincoln and Mercury as all of the Apple parts
are coming off the same assembly lines in China. Quite possibly, they are coming out
of the same exact factory and put together by the same abused workers.

Apple has a different boot mechanism and an incompatable partition scheme that does
a lot to keep Apple separated from Linux and Windows (and anything else). The rest
is bog standard and indistinguishable.

This is why there are hackintoshes.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[jedidiah]

Why should I have a "configuration problem"? That's absurd. It's a Mac.

Apple gear has always been underpowered. This is just yielding to reality and cold hard mathematics.

Skipping the "superior industrial design" pays for a lot of RAM, CPU and disk.

Of course you fanboys don't want to hear this and you don't want anyone else to hear it either.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[Mr. DOS]

I've never had a PC laptop that suspended/resumed nicely.

Really? Because I almost never turn off my Windows 7 desktop and Ubuntu 10.04 laptop. Both have been known to have weeks of uptime, and generally only get turned off/rebooted is if some other application mucks up something. I'm sorry, but decent power management is a fairly standard thing these days, and if yours won't work, it's much more likely to be you doing something wrong than the operating system. (I will concede the “better battery life” card to MacBooks, though.)

I can close the lid and leave it sitting there for a whole day then still open it and it is ready to type before I have the lid fully open.

I'll also give you this one for most people, this would be useful. (Not so great for me personally because I've got to type in my password anyway, which I can't do until it's fully open and ready to go anyway, but as I said, that's me personally and not everyone.)

Nobody knows this unless they have had to use it, but if you yank the battery from a suspended mac then replace it and turn it on, it resumes to where you were, magically reverting to a Hibernate you didn't even know you had!

Hate to burst your bubble, but Windows 7 does the same thing.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[log0n]

Not exactly the answer you're looking for, but I've done guitar tracking in Samplitude 11 Producer running under Parallels 6 running on 10.6.4 (so a DAW inside a windows VM under OSX). Running around 6-8ms roundtrip, which is definitely decent. Reaper might be a little lower but I haven't tried it.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[jedrek]

Apple stuff are available soon after they are announced. You can actually buy the stuff ! Similarly, they do not promise stuff. People that bought the first iPhone knew they wouldnt get the MMS, Copy-Paste, ... You get what's on the box - no surprises or false hopes.

Yeah, I'd expand on this: everything that they promise works well. This is a pretty big deal in the world of mobile phones - if you look at a list of functions, the Nokia I had before my iphone was a superior product. In practice, apps crashed, I got the GPS to work once and using T9 would crash the phone regularly. Everything I've tried to use in my iphone 3G works.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[copponex]

Uh, no. I just bought a refurb Lenovo Y560 with a 1GB ATI 5730 for $700. If you'll recall, the cheapest MacBook Pro with a discrete video card is $1700, which is the same price as brand new Alienware gaming laptops.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[copponex]

http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1764528&cid=33355652

Last week, we also hosted a live chat featuring several developers whose apps were picked for our Ars Design Awards for Mac OS X. We asked them what they thought about the future of Mac OS X and Apple's development platform during the chat, and then followed up on their thoughts about languages and APIs. While current Mac developers aren't nearly as concerned as our own John Siracusa about the Objective-C language in particular, they do see new and improved APIs coming down the pike. Developers are seeing iOS influencing Mac OS X instead of the other way around.

The developers on our panel unanimously agreed that Mac OS X will eventually be subsumed by iOS, but that the Mac has plenty of life left. "Mac is the awesome old grandma, whose kids (iPhone & iPad) have left home," Atebits' Loren Brichter said. "Not dead; not really dying. But it's our job to keep her comfortable until she's gone."

Re:It's not "the" guide

[Stormwatch]

I mean the software isnt the best, the basic hardware is comparable to a PC's... Is there a reason I should consider Apple computers in the future... Will I get what I pay for, or will I pay for the privilege of being locked in a walled garden?

It's a bunch of stuff that just "clicks" on you, I guess.

First, the interface is far superior to everyone else's. When I use any other OS, or even some badly ported apps, it's clear that they got the design wrong -- not having a fixed menu bar, closing a window closes the whole application, dialog boxes with non-verb buttons. When you stop and think about it, Mac OS is designed in a way that just makes sense.

Second, it is a compromise between avoiding that cesspool of vulnerabilities called Windows, and still having a decent library of commercial software. Of course, unless you need "that one specific program", or you're a hardcore gamer, you can also give Linux a try. In fact, despite some rough edges, I think most users would be better off using it.

And, of course: Macs look good! You're not paying more just for the Apple logo, you're paying for something that looks good as a whole. Compare them to almost every PC out there: featureless black boxes, some with cheap-looking chrome details, and the worst of all, pointless neon lights. Hell, even back in the day of beige boxes, Apple's beige boxes looked better than everyone else's beige boxes.

The point of a hackintosh is to get some of these advantages without the disadvantage: Macs are quite overpriced (or underpowered, depending on your perspective). But in my case, it's worse: down here in Brazil, due to insane taxes and import tariffs, Macs cost twice as much as in the USA. Steve Jobs agrees, Brazil is nuts.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[drsmithy]

FWIW, the majority of PC laptops (with the exception of high-end and gaming laptops) have integrated Intel GFX hardware. This is significantly slower than the Mac laptops -- *ALL* of which are shipping with a discrete 3D chip that provides at least decent if not game-rocking 3D performance.

This is not true. All but the high-end Macs ship with an integrated GPU just like Intels. Faster, yes, but still not discrete - they're using system RAM.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[toddestan]

Not true. Most Mac laptops use integrated nVidia graphics. Granted, they are better than than Intel's integrated graphics, but they are still integrated graphics.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[Achromatic1978]

FWIW, the majority of PC laptops (with the exception of high-end and gaming laptops) have integrated Intel GFX hardware.

Hmm? As soon as you hit the heady heights of the ~$450 range, Dell laptops (for one) are offering ATI Mobility Radeon as their standard video card option...

Re:It's not "the" guide

[Achromatic1978]

reestablished my open SSH sessions to my Linux box

Strange ... there I was thinking of that little KeyRegenerationInterval parameter - and just how an SSH connection would be re-established following a key mismatch. That is, of course, following the whole issue of the ClientAliveInterval, by default 5 minutes - no response received, connection dropped. Methinks your mind might be deceiving you ...

Re:It's not "the" guide

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're using a Synaptics touchpad, which most PCs use and I'm sure even Apple uses, look for a setting called "PalmCheck" and adjust it accordingly to your needs. There is no magic behind this.

Also try installing Synaptics Scrybe. It add a lot of gesture and multitouch functionality to most existing Synaptics touchpads.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[TClevenger]

Maybe... or maybe it wasn't actually going to sleep (that happened too.)

Re:It's not "the" guide

[morgan_greywolf]

Yes. The E1000 is the default.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[morgan_greywolf]

Someone else already did. This is the guide I followed, but note that you do not need to patch VirtualBox if you're running 3.2.8 or later as this version includes support for OS X out of the box. You tell it you're running OS X Server, not FreeBSD as the instructions state.

Pay special attention to the directions for getting the NIC running; they're toward the end.

Note that there is no support for desktop effects.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[RocketRabbit]

Steve has specifically said that you will be able to run whatever you like on the Mac in the future. Whether or not you believe him, is up to you, but ease let us know where your doom about OS X comes from.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[ukyoCE]

Did you call getting rid of the floppy disk a crazy decision?

I got an HP with Windows Vista 2 years ago that still had a PS/2 keyboard and mouse rather than USB. THAT is what's crazy.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[indi0144]

While I agree with most of your post, I think a Thinkpad looks better than any Mac, because, you know, everyone seem to have different approaches to what they see as "good looking" slick, boxy, black and matte are my choices. I just don't see myself buying white or UFOwannabe hardware. And I can't see any industrial design merit in Mac Books since others are doing things like this:

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:W700ds

Double Screen, RAID, WACOM and Colomimeter in a laptop.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[Anonymous Coward]

Steve will soon release an iMac that runs iOS as well as OS X, and you can see where it's going from here. In order to improve the user experience, Steve is going to prevent his users from running unsigned processes. He'll lose all of the nerds who switched to OS X, but that's such a small number of people, he's not going to care when the reward is 30% of all software sales.

Please, give me a break. This is just stupid. Stop believing tech pundits and paranoid forum posters who are afraid that Steve is going to kill the Mac.

Give Apple a little credit: they know why what they did with iOS works in that space, and why it wouldn't be such a good idea on a general purpose personal computer.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're ignoring the major interfaces to your device, then you're not Apple's target market. As you can tell by their quarterly earnings, it's clear they're moving towards mobile (laptops/tablets/iPod/iPhone) away from desktops as their revenues show.

This is not Highlander. There can be more than one. As you can tell by looking at their quarterly earnings reports over the past few years, their full-computer business is quite healthy. It has grown a lot in recent times, whether you're using revenue, units, or profits as your measuring stick.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[arth1]

Let;s see that VM run a nice complex render from motion...

VM's are great for playing, they stink for high horsepower and Graphics work.

You haven't used virtualization products in a long time, I see.
These days, you can give the VM direct access to the hardware. (And even in a "hosted" VM, you get 3D hardware acceleration these days.)

Re:It's not "the" guide

[RocketRabbit]

Apple products have not always been underpowered. Sure, you can build a faster PC at home, but this is the case whether you compare it against a pre-built machine from Apple or a Dell or a Supermicro.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[Anonymous Coward]

The author shows a bit of seriously incorrect anti-pc attitude in this statement dismissing Windows. That statement might be true for him personally but it's not true for the majority of people out there.

Humor is just completely lost on some people. Maybe I should have put a smiley icon after that sentence.

Re:It's not "the" guide

[Uberbah]

Uh, why are you comparing the price of a refurbished PC laptop to a new Mac laptop?

Mac vs. PC

[ReneeJade]

A mac is a personal computer. PC stands for personal computer. Can we please stop using the terms as if they are mutually exclusive? It makes you sound ignorant, and renders the term "personal computer" useless as a means of differentiating a computer for personal use from any other kind of computer. K thanks.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Pojut]

While I agree with your point, separating them into Mac and PC labels makes it easy for conversation regarding the two. It's a convenience thing.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Worse still, it reinforces the idea that a "PC" is a computer which runs Microsoft Windows.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Never seen the commercial?

"I'm a Mac"
"I'm a PC"

Therefore Apple agrees with us and disagrees with you.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[CohibaVancouver]

Can we please stop using the terms as if they are mutually exclusive?

No.

They're in the vernacular now. Can't speak for other languages, but in English, to say "My PC is busted" generally means "My windows PC is busted."

"My mac is busted" is straightforward. When further differentiation is required on the PC front we say "My Linux PC is busted" (although more than likely, we'd say "My Linux Box is busted.")

A parallel is saying "I'm American" - While not technically correct, this is understood in the vernacular to mean "I'm a citizen of the United States." Canadians like me have to say "I'm Canadian" even though I live in the Americas. It's the understood vernacular.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[broggyr]

Macs and Unmacs

Re:Mac vs. PC

[McGiraf]

Sheesh, you sound so much not ignorant, I am in awe.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[CajunArson]

A mac is a personal computer. PC stands for personal computer. Can we please stop using the terms as if they are mutually exclusive?

  I can tell you are an old-school Mac fan from the 1980's - pre-Jobs '90s from the pedantry. Now please go tell Apple what you just told us since they just finished a years long "Mac vs. PC" ad campaign that flies in the face of what you just said. I'm not even going to bother with the YouTube links at this point.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[rrossman2]

Yes, but the term PC initially was used to identify the IBM PC. Then the PC clones came out (that mimicked the operation of the IBM PC), hence the term PC. It wasn't saying it's the only personal computer, but was used in reference as IBM PC clone/compatible. It's just like you don't Xerox something, you copy something, but the term Xerox was used in that manor

Re:Mac vs. PC

[chemicaldave]

The hardware certainly isn't "personal" whatsoever. I would think that is the first test to determine if a computer really is "personal."

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, this pisses me off constantly.
All computers are PCs. Running OS X does not make a piece of hardware into a magical dream machine that is not somehow a computer.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[justleavealonemmmkay]

The United Mexican States ?

Re:Mac vs. PC

[ReneeJade]

Can we please stop using the terms as if they are mutually exclusive?

No. They're in the vernacular now. Can't speak for other languages, but in English, to say "My PC is busted" generally means "My windows PC is busted." "My mac is busted" is straightforward. When further differentiation is required on the PC front we say "My Linux PC is busted" (although more than likely, we'd say "My Linux Box is busted.") A parallel is saying "I'm American" - While not technically correct, this is understood in the vernacular to mean "I'm a citizen of the United States." Canadians like me have to say "I'm Canadian" even though I live in the Americas. It's the understood vernacular.

Yeah I know, you have a point. I guess I'm just stubborn and obsessed with semantics. If I was Canadian, I would happily say that I was from America, and let people interpret it however they like. But the term "American", when referring to people, is quite exclusively reserved for referring to people from the USA. At least that's my understanding of it."PC", on the other hand, is not used exclusively to refer to a personal computer running Microsoft Windows. It can just as easily refer to any personal computer. One of the meanings is logical and useful, the other one isn't. Not that I really mind. I sort of enjoy calling Macs PCs and then watching the inevitable rage or confusion that follows.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Gaygirlie]

A mac is a personal computer. PC stands for personal computer. Can we please stop using the terms as if they are mutually exclusive? It makes you sound ignorant, and renders the term "personal computer" useless as a means of differentiating a computer for personal use from any other kind of computer. K thanks.

PC is and has been for a long time a synonym with IBM PC-compatible. If you really want to be anal about it then sure, we can start using PC for Personal Computer, but how do you separate Macs from non-Macs then? And how exactly do you define a Personal Computer nowadays when absolutely everything IS a computer: your phone, some TVs themselves, consoles, a tiny plug that can just be plugged straight into wall, hell, even some watches are Personal Computers nowadays if we go with the traditional definition.

The problem is, the traditional definition of Personal Computer is WAY too broad for today's computing landscape. Even arbitrary limitations like e.g. "it must have a keyboard" don't fly: touch interfaces are becoming all the more common every single day, and I do definitely consider a computer I use for personal business a personal computer, no matter what input device it actually employs.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Tyler Durden]

I feel the same way about RAM versus ROM being used as mutually exclusive terms. It's not often you come across Read-Only Memory where you cannot randomly access the data. But unfortunately these are the labels we're stuck with since RWM is not pronounceable.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[ReneeJade]

A mac is a personal computer. PC stands for personal computer. Can we please stop using the terms as if they are mutually exclusive?

I can tell you are an old-school Mac fan from the 1980's - pre-Jobs '90s from the pedantry. Now please go tell Apple what you just told us since they just finished a years long "Mac vs. PC" ad campaign that flies in the face of what you just said. I'm not even going to bother with the YouTube links at this point.

LOL. Actually I'm 20 years old. And the only computers I've ever owned are a Dell laptop that has run a variety of different Windows and Linuxs, and a home built gaming machine that dual boots Linux and Widows. But nice try.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the term PC was originally used to identify person computers. Those were made by a variety of companies, not just IBM, and in fact IBM was a bit late to the PC market.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[blackraven14250]

Well, its history is derived from "I have an IBM-compatible PC", rather than "I have a Personal Computer" proper. IBM PC had a history of being used to describe PCs compatible with Windows.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Anonymous Coward]

You're still missing the point. But nice try.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Registered Coward v2]

A parallel is saying "I'm American" - While not technically correct, this is understood in the vernacular to mean "I'm a citizen of the United States." Canadians like me have to say "I'm Canadian" even though I live in the Americas. It's the understood vernacular.

A well kept secret is how many Canadians like you have immigrated to America... Maybe we should start a swap program - say 1 Canadian for 2 Americans? You still have a lot a of space...

Re:Mac vs. PC

[netsuhi.com]

Back when I was a kid we had these definitions: Micro computer: 8 bit computer Mini Computer: 16 bit computer Mainframe: 32 bit computer Super Computer: 64 bit computer. Nobody talked about PC apert from IBM PC (or IBM PC-compatible) which has now been shortened to PC. However wouldent the Mac adds be funny if it was Mac verses PC when PC stands for Police Constable? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_Constable

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Luyseyal]

dual boots Linux and Widows

I've heard widows are fun but this takes the cake!

-l

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Registered Coward v2]

"PC", on the other hand, is not used exclusively to refer to a personal computer running Microsoft Windows. It can just as easily refer to any personal computer. One of the meanings is logical and useful, the other one isn't. Not that I really mind. I sort of enjoy calling Macs PCs and then watching the inevitable rage or confusion that follows.

If confusion follows then you are not using the word in its commonly accepted fashion. Languages evolve - and words take on new meanings. There are plenty of words whose modern meaning differs from the older meaning; or whose meaning is very context specific.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[speculatrix]

can I use xerox in my house, not just in a manor?

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Unkyjar]

Used to be the Dominion of Canada, until they dropped it in 1982. Why? Probably something to do with Hockey or Lumberjacks.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[CohibaVancouver]

Maybe we should start a swap program

I'd be fine with that, were it not for the fact that too many of your fellow Americans are crazy.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Jeremy Erwin]

All computers are PCs.

You must be very wealthy.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[RulerOf]

While I agree with your point, separating them into Mac and PC labels makes it easy for conversation regarding the two. It's a convenience thing.

Saying "OS X" and "Windows" works quite well too. See, a "Mac" is a computer made by Apple. "Macs" run Windows (and Linux) quite well.

The problem is that a massive breakdown occurs in your differentiation when one runs Windows on a Mac instead of running OS X on a Mac.

• "Hi, I'm a Mac and I'm full of all the same problems I constantly berate the overweight bastard in the suit for. I'm also utterly full of shit an won't give said fat bastard the satisfaction of calling him by his real name."

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to be fair to CohibaVancouver, he didn't seem to have his knickers in a twist.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Moridineas]

Yeah I know, you have a point. I guess I'm just stubborn and obsessed with semantics. If I was Canadian, I would happily say that I was from America, and let people interpret it however they like.

That seems somewhat silly, and I actually think you're wrong about the semantics.

What does "America" mean? The most obvious answer (and ignoring the handful of towns around the world named America) is that it's an abbreviated form of "The United States of America." To what else could it possibly refer? North America? No, that doesn't make sense because if you say "America" referring to a continent, how do you differentiate between North and South America. Likewise, if you're referring to both continents it doesn't make sense, because they -- the landmass as a whole -- is referred to as the Americas (pl). It's possible that in a historical sense "America" (s) could be used to refer to the entire landmass, but this is most certainly not a modern usage. Deprecated!

So, if you were a Canadian it would make perfect sense to say you were either from North America or from the Americas. Neither statement is particularly useful nor descriptive but they would be accurate. Saying you were "from America" would mean you were from the United States of America (unless as I said earlier you were from the handful of towns or cities around the world named America).

So is this a pedantic semantic argument? I guess so, but I don't see how you could possibly justify that usage of America.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[jythie]

Just because an acronym literally meant something at the time of its creation does not mean that it is being used that way today. Regardless of what the initials stand for, today 'PC' means an intel (or AMD) based consumer level machine running a Microsoft OS.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM got trademark for the PC. IBM PC was first PC and later there came PC-compatibles. Then Compaq reverse engineered the PC BIOS and they opened the markets for PC-Clones.

All that times, Macs (Macintoshes, LISA etc) were own branch of the personal computers while (IBM's) PC's were own. Both (PC&Mac) belonged to personal computer markets where were at same time many other personal computer (!=PC) manufacturers as well.

PC got popular because IBM understanded that get success for personal computer, it needs standards and compability between software vendors and hardware manufacturers. PC was exactly that, big company bringing standard for messy personal computer markets with the PC.

Personal computers has been in markets since 1949. PC's (PC + PC-compatible + PC-clones) just from 1981.

Today all PC's are clones. Mac is still manufactured by original maker. Even that a while Apple licensed Mac system to Mac-Clones manufacturers but it withdraw (read: Forced) them to drop off the licenses so Apple got the control back.

People has lots of problems to understand that PC was a registered trademark what IBM invented for their personal computer. The whole trademark was "IBM PC". But people just talked about PC's as it was the standard (PC-DOS, periphelals, PC-compatibility etc). And it really got out of the hand when the PC-clones came to personal computer markets.

Then there are other "nicknames" as "Wintel" as well what means Windows + Intel CPU and MS monopoly.

IBM tried later to get back the control of the PC markets with IBM-AT, IBM-XT and PC Jr. But it failed because PC-Clones were already saturated markets by HP, Compaq and many other clone manufacturers. No one cared about IBM quest to get control back.

Apple did something what not even IBM could do (Mac-clones).

And since then, Apple has strictly controlled Mac markets as it is the only manufacturer. There is no competition but it is not problem because Mac is Apples own personal computer line what it does not offer others and it is not open for competition. PC's in otherhand is all about competition and Microsoft is the key player in that arena. It controls every PC manufacturers success as hadrware and software for personal computer is useless without a OS. Without OS operating the hardware the software can not run. OS controlling all the processes, offering low level networking, filesystems etc, none of the programs or libraries would work in multitask. Their development would be impossible as they are now as every hardware command codes should be written in every software itself and if you change the hardware, you need to rewrite everything.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Americano]

If I was Canadian, I would happily say that I was from America, and let people interpret it however they like.

I sort of enjoy calling Macs PCs and then watching the inevitable rage or confusion that follows.

So you value pedantic correctness over effective communication with your fellow humans? That says volumes about you, and very little of it positive.

But the term "American", when referring to people, is quite exclusively reserved for referring to people from the USA. At least that's my understanding of it.

It is exclusively reserved for referring to people from the USA only by informal convention & long-standing usage, not from some inflexible rule of language. Just like "Macs" are "Macintosh PCs" and "PCs" are "Windows PCs," in long-standing usage and informal convention. This is mindless semantic argument, made solely for the sake of argument. What is the point? You know what's meant, I know what's meant, and everybody else reading knows what's meant by the "Mac" vs. "PC" distinction.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[murpium]

"Great Scott! PC stands for Personal Computer - I just this moment got that. It's alright if you want to laugh." -Killface

Re:Mac vs. PC

[gnola14]

[I know it's offtopic]

[...] the fact that USAians are called americans and no one else[...]

Could you please get out of your bubble and travel down to South America? You'd see that NO ONE there call USAians "americans" since that term is used to refer to themselves (USAians are usually called "yankees" or "United Statians")

Re:Mac vs. PC

[TheRaven64]

Micro computer: 8 bit computer Mini Computer: 16 bit computer Mainframe: 32 bit computer Super Computer: 64 bit computer

Those are so painfully wrong it hurts. A microcomputer is a computer with a microprocessor (i.e. a single integrated circuit as the CPU). It has nothing to do with the address space. Minicomputers were multiuser machines that were smaller than mainframes (one or two cabinets).

Re:Mac vs. PC

[LWATCDR]

It does but it doesn't
Back in the day they where called Microcomputers and or HomeComputers.
You tended to call computers like the Atari, C64, Vic20, TI99/4a, Apple II, and RadioShack CoCo Home computers. You had them at home and could play a lot of cool games on them they had color and often sound. They would run their own OS and didn't use a Z80.
Computers like the Kaypro2X, Osbourne, TRS-80 Model II, and the Zenith Heathkit line microcomputers. They usually ran CP/M the Model II could run CP/M and where serious computers. They also tended to have Z-80s.8080s, and or 8085s for the cpu.These where used for business.

You did have a lot of cross over with the very early machines like the PET, Apple II, and TRS-80 model 1.
When IBM came into the market they wouldn't call their computer a home computer. And they wouldn't call it a microcomputer since it was 16 bits so they called it a personal computer or a PC.
Since then PC really meant to just about everybody a Intel computer running MS-DOS or windows.
For a while Atari STs, Amigas, Macs, and Intel running OS/2 tried to get their computers called Personal Workstations to show just how much more advanced they where then the old 8088/DOS machines. That didn't last long plus PW makes a bad acronym.
So while PC has come to mean all desktops and laptops it traditionally means Wintel it's forefather Intel+MS-DOS.
If you honestly think it is generic then why was their ever the term PC Compatible to describe a computer?
Frankly they are all still microcomputers unless you have something using old bit-slice tech sitting on your desk.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[dintech]

Fashion Accessories vs Computers. I had to buy brown clothes just so they would match my Zune.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Daniel Dvorkin]

One of the meanings is logical and useful, the other one isn't.

Logical? You're pushing for natural language to be logical? You might want to spend your time on more useful pursuits, like tilting at windmills. There is in any case a historical reason for this usage.

As far as "useful" goes, it depends on context. "Mac vs. PC" was certainly a useful way to distinguish the two major desktop OSs at a time when the Mac OS and DOS, then Windows, were about the only games in town. Nowadays, with the rise of Linux, maybe it doesn't make that much sense; but again, neither does natural language in general. Programming languages can make sense, although this seems to be more a matter of theory than practice. ;)

Re:Mac vs. PC

[dintech]

Because it sounds scary.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Canadaians? Mexicoians?

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Local ID10T]

Maybe we should start a swap program

I'd be fine with that, were it not for the fact that too many of your fellow Americans are crazy.

Why do you think we want to trade them away?

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Unkyjar]

Nothing paired with the name "Canada" could ever be frightening. Try it in your head. The images it conjures up tend to mix John Candy movies with Southpark.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Anonymous Coward]

if you're referring to both continents it doesn't make sense, because they -- the landmass as a whole -- is referred to as the Americas (pl).

Really? We still tend refer to it as 'the new World' when talking about it as a whole :P Otherwise America is indeed a reference to the continent*, we refer to the US as 'the US', surprisingly.

*

how do you differentiate between North and South America

Strangely enough, prefacing 'South' or 'North' in front of 'America' is usually enough to get the message across...

Re:Mac vs. PC

[multipartmixed]

> If I was Canadian, I would happily say that I was from America, and let people interpret
> it however they like.

I guess that's why you advertise your non-vegetarian diet by telling your friends you are a murderer?

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, RWM is pronounceable. Since the W is descended from Omega, it's pronounced a bit like Aw. So you would pronounce RWM "rah-m", which is more like ROM than RAM, unfortunately. So it really doesn't help, and will only lead to more confusion.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Angostura]

The problem with the usage dates back to the 1980s and IBM's launch of its original personal computer (called the PC). Within very few months PC had dual meanings - 'Personal Computer' and 'IBM PC -compatible'. That confuses continues to the present day.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, most memories of America by anybody overseas is mostly deprecated, anyway.
From my findings it's pretty spotty... Colonization, lots of stuff gotten, wars, and somehow the whole branch into another country >200 years ago is considered a temporary thing... then again, democracy is considered an "experiment" by some too, so I guess we can't expect miracles from non-Americans.

I agree though. Once something is done for long enough to be engrained in society, it's basically how it is. I mean, we call a tomato a vegetable LOL

I guess if we want to pull the whole name precursor card, we could say that France is technically Gaul.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Anonymous Coward]

If I was Canadian, I would happily say that I was from America, and let people interpret it however they like.

If I was Canadian, I would lie about being from America too.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Moridineas]

Talk about completely and utterly missing the point!

Really? We still tend refer to it as 'the new World' when talking about it as a whole :P Otherwise America is indeed a reference to the continent*, we refer to the US as 'the US', surprisingly.

Ok, that's fine and dandy, however when using the word "America" the singular refers to the USA, the pl refers to both continents. You can call it the New World, India, that-place-across-the-pond -- whatever you want! Doesn't change the meaning of America et al.

Strangely enough, prefacing 'South' or 'North' in front of 'America' is usually enough to get the message across...

Yes, that's exactly the point I was making. When the OP tried to make a new usage of the word America (eg, a Canadian saying "I'm from America") that requires a meaning of "America" to refer to North America. That doesn't exist. You use NORTH America or SOUTH America to refer to the landmasses. That's what gets the message across.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Anonymous Coward]

If I was Canadian, I would happily say that I was from America, and let people interpret it however they like.

No you wouldn't. If there's one thing that Canadians are proud of, aside from hockey, beer, wearing flannel nightgowns, and managing to get rid of Celine Dion, it's that we're not Americans. We'd never say "I'm from America," and let someone interpret it however they like, because we wouldn't want it interpreted incorrectly, and be considered an American. There's a reason we sew Canadian flag patches on our backpacks, you know. If we wanted to be mistaken for being an American, we'd... um... we'd... sew goatse patches on our backpacks. Or something.

IIACA (I am a Canadian, Eh?)

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Anonymous Coward]

In addition to that (and still completely off-topic), what would you call someone born in the United States of America? A United-Statesian? Sorry, that might mean you were from Mexico. (United Mexican States - Estados Unidos Mexicanos) The United States of America is the only country with America in its name, and the only moniker that makes any sense is an American.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that there is no continent named "America", any more than there is a state in the United States of America named "Dakota" or "Carolina". So using the phrase "I'm an American" to mean "I'm from North America" is simple incorrect.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[base3]

Apple using the term incorrectly doesn't make the incorrect usage correct.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[nine-times]

The only thing is, I have a Mac running Windows. I have another Mac running Linux. They're Apple Macintosh computers, but that really only tells you the manufacturer, in that you could say, "This is an Apple Macintosh," in about the same way as you could say, "This is a Dell Optiplex."

Re:Mac vs. PC

[nine-times]

But Macs are now also IBM PC clone/compatible, too.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[scharkalvin]

The term "Wintel" has sometimes been used for "pc's" but that isn't even right since it ignores AMD (who invented the 64 bit standard now used by BOTH Intel and AMD processors). "Linux box" describes ANYTHING that could run Linux from a single board embedded appliance to a hunking IBM mainframe.

IBM coined the term PC, but today's machines don't have ANYTHING in common with the hardware that IBM introduced (It's evolved too much).
Then again, so has the MAC platform.

So just give it up. As the Bart said, "A rose by any other name ....."

Re:Mac vs. PC

[MMC Monster]

A parallel is saying "I'm American" - While not technically correct, this is understood in the vernacular to mean "I'm a citizen of the United States." Canadians like me have to say "I'm Canadian" even though I live in the Americas. It's the understood vernacular.

I'm Brazilian, you insensitive clod!

Re:Mac vs. PC

[MightyMartian]

Actually, the official name of Canada is still the Dominion of Canada. The Constitution Act, 1982 eliminated the need for the British Parliament to sign off on constitutional changes, it didn't change Canada's name.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Unkyjar]

But they don't use it in any official capacity anymore to belay the snickering of their peers. (grin)

Re:Mac vs. PC

[asynchronous13]

So is this a pedantic semantic argument? I guess so, but I don't see how you could possibly justify that usage of America.

How many continents are there? It seems like a simple question, but it really depends on where you are from. In most English speaking countries, we are taught that there are seven continents. In most of the rest of the world, including most of Europe, S.America, and Latin America, the answer is six. What we call North and South America, most of the world refers to as simply America. How could one possibly justify that usage of America? If you grew up in Brazil you would ask the same question but with entirely different meaning.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[asynchronous13]

Ok, that's fine and dandy, however when using the word "America" the singular refers to the USA, the pl refers to both continents.

No, the word "America" in the singular refers to the USA only in the common usage in the USA. In most of the rest of the world, this is simply not true.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[DrgnDancer]

Or the fact that DSL bridges and Cable Internet routers are universally called modems despite not modulating or demodulating anything. People think of the thing that lets them talk to the Internet as a "modem" and it was easier to continue with the terminology than to try to explain the difference to a bunch of people who wouldn't understand or much care. Fifteen years from now "modem" will be the term for "gateway out of the house" and no one will know why except a few pedantic old timers.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[QuantumBeep]

Since the W is descended from Omega, it's pronounced a bit like Aw.

I'm curiws abwt that. Can you tell me more?

Wlso, I'm tempted to pronwnce RWM as "roohm".

Re:Mac vs. PC

[QuantumBeep]

In their defense, not knowing South American vernacular isn't "living in a bubble". It is another subcontinent, after all.

I do agree that it's foolish to make such a specific assertion unless you actually know it to be true.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[falsified]

Travel down to South America, where English is not spoken? They also spell color "color" - does that mean spelling it as "colour" in English is weird?

And on a more funny note, many Latin Americans will say "norteamericano" to mean someone from the United States. Whatcha think of that, Canada?

Re:Mac vs. PC

[falsified]

Damn right.
I'm from the US. There isn't another non-slang word in English to describe me except "American". USian is something that nerds on Slashdot write. In some languages, like Spanish, such words exist (estadounidense/a). But, in other languages, the English pattern prevails - in Persian, the word for "someone from the US" is "Amrika-i".

I don't know why people are so shocked that we would try to get some beginnings of a pattern going and tend to call the US "America" for short when it's not in doubt what was meant.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[jeff4747]

PC stands for personal computer

No. In this context, it stands for "IBM PC-Compatible", or "IBM Personal Computer-Compatible" if you want to expand the acronym a bit more.

So a modern Mac is indeed a PC, but only because a modern Mac is compatible with the IBM PC. Not because they are both personal computers.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[jeff4747]

All computers are PCs

So these are personal computers?

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Until very recently, the official name of the country was the United States of Mexico.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[tibit]

DSL bridges and Cable Internet "routers" are modems. What made you think otherwise? Do you think you have a digital bitstream in the raw on a DSL wire pair, or on the coax? A DSL or Cable modem has everything a phone modem has and then some -- heck, they are far more complex modems than phone line modems, typically. Even gigabit ethernet cards are almost-modems -- they do a fair bit of signal processing to compensate for the propagation characteristics of the medium; while they don't use a single-frequency carrier of any sort they still digitize and process the voltages in each pair. In the baseband, a gigabit ethernet card's signal chain has quite a few elements you'd find in a modem: digitizer, equalizer, (de)scrambler, (de)coder.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Moridineas]

That's certainly not my experience either in South Asia or the Middle East, or indeed the more limited parts of Europe I have been in.

Where are you from that it is not understood that "America" is the abbreviated form of The United States of America?

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Moridineas]

How many continents are there? It seems like a simple question, but it really depends on where you are from. In most English speaking countries, we are taught that there are seven continents. In most of the rest of the world, including most of Europe, S.America, and Latin America, the answer is six. What we call North and South America, most of the world refers to as simply America. How could one possibly justify that usage of America?

That's rather Eurocentric, is it not? Europe--a mere appendage of Eurasia--is its own continent, but two massive landmasses, separated by a continental divide and on two different tectonic plates are just "America?" Interesting.

In any case, though it does seem like some some European countries use this worldview (though not all from what I've googled, and as I mentioned elsewhere, certainly not in my direct experience in the Middle East and South Asia), that doesn't change the fact--everybody in the world knows that if you say America or "I'm from America" or "I'm an American" you are referring not two the two continents, but to the United States of America. Or are you really claiming that somebody, somewhere, is confused by what "America" means if somebody were to say "I'm from America?"

(just so I'm clear and this doesn't dissolve into an EVEN MORE pedantic (!) discussion, you are definitely right that in some countries "America" can mean the two continents combine. Nonetheless, I stand by my statement that there is no ambiguity, and from my experience, no confusion as to what the phrase "I'm from America" means. Since Europe isn't really a continent but "I'm from Europe" has a meaning, it's clear the difference is political rather than geographic.)

If you grew up in Brazil you would ask the same question but with entirely different meaning.

Which question are you referring to?

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Anonymous Coward]

....er, you're kind of forgetting the over 550 million people south of the Rio Grande who call the continent "America", as well as most of the rest of the world who also does. The use of "America" as a short for USA is one of those giveaway traits that only evidences the inherent imperialist ideology ingrained on the average USA citizen's mind.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Moridineas]

Hey, if 'Azzam al-Amriki (that's Adam Gadhn AKA Azzam the America) isn't right, who is?

Re:Mac vs. PC

[LateArthurDent]

Which question are you referring to?

I lived in Brazil for a few years as a child, and we used to be taught there were 5 continents. They didn't count Antarctica because it's not populated, thus "entirely different meaning." They were in the process of changing that while I was still in school, as newer books seemed to include Antarctica. I think everyone would answer 6 these days, but I'm not sure. Haven't talked to anyone from there in a very long time. They definitely didn't consider "south" and "north" America to be separate continents, though.

everybody in the world knows that if you say America or "I'm from America" or "I'm an American" you are referring not two the two continents, but to the United States of America.

Well, I don't think so. Again, things may have changed, but whenever I said "I'm from America", Brazilians seemed confused, and asked which country in America. They figured either the US or Canada, based on the fact that I spoke English, but they didn't know which I meant. They understood "I'm American" just fine though, as that is their word for someone from the US. That is unlike most other countries in Latin America where the word for "American" is "North-American", and some get offended if you just say "American"...which is ironic, because North-American is still ambiguous if you applied their reasoning.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Anonymous Coward]

"Fashion Accessories vs Computers. I had to buy brown clothes just so they would match my Zune."

All you had to do is rub shit all over them or roll around in the mud.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, Canadians don't like to associate themselves with UniteStatesOfAmericans, and so would never say they were "American" as that would be denigrating. UnitedStatesOfAmericans on the other hand, would have no problem with Canadians referring to themselves as such, as long as the aforementioned UnitedStatesOfAmericans were unable to differentiate said Canadian from other UnitedStatesOfAmericans.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[dintech]

That would be "I'm a Mac"

Re:Mac vs. PC

[wringles]

... "My Linux PC is busted" ...

<stallman> It's GNU/Linux PC!!! </stallman>

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Smurf]

[I know it's offtopic]

Mmmmmmhhhhmmmmm...

Could you please get out of your bubble and travel down to South America? You'd see that NO ONE there call USAians "americans" since that term is used to refer to themselves (USAians are usually called "yankees" or "United Statians")

Or "Gringos". While in its origin the word "Gringo" was used as an insult, it has lost that connotation a very long time ago. Sometimes it is used to refer to people of other English speaking countries, but that is very rare.

Or "North American". Of course that is technically incorrect as Canadians and Mexicans are also North American, but still it is frequently used to refer specifically to people from the US.

But you are right, the term "American" would be used to refer to people from South, Central, North America, or the Caribbean, not only from the USA.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Spugglefink]

Where are you from that it is not understood that "America" is the abbreviated form of The United States of America?

People in South America get especially pissed off about this. From their perspective, they're Americans (americanos) and so are we in the USA. We're all Americans, not just people in the USA. They call us estadounidense instead of americano. If you translate that back into literal English, it would be something like Unitedstatesian.

I tried pointing out to some of my friends that calling us Unitedstatesian is a bit strange when there are other United States in the world besides the USA, but they stuck to their estadounidense guns.

Personally, I submit that a lot of bad blood between our people could be alleviated if everyone understood "American" (pertaining to the USA) != "americano" (pertaining to anything in the continental western hemisphere, more or less) the same way "actually" (really; in fact) != "actualmente" (right now) and so on like that. That argument didn't get much traction either, and my friends south of the equator pretty much think I'm an asshole for calling myself an American.

Oh well. I'm an American. Doesn't the world expect me to be an asshole anyway?

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Smurf]

That seems somewhat silly, and I actually think you're wrong about the semantics.

What a coincidence, I think you are (very) wrong about the semantics!

What does "America" mean?

From the New Oxford American (oh the irony!) Dictionary (emphasis mine):

America (also the Americas):
a landmass in the western hemisphere that consists of the continents of North and South America joined by the Isthmus of Panama. The continent was originally inhabited by American Indians and Inuits. The northeast coastline of North America was visited by Norse seamen in the 8th or 9th century, but for the modern world the continent was first reached by Christopher Columbus in 1492.
used as a name for the United States.

Note that the definition of the landmass precedes the definition of the USA. Similar precedence will be found also in Wikipedia, Merriam-Webster, and most other authoritative sources (admittedly not all, although all will acknowledge both meanings).

The most obvious answer (and ignoring the handful of towns around the world named America) is that it's an abbreviated form of "The United States of America."

Not obvious at all since the term America precedes the existence of the USA by over 270 years. In Waldssemuller's map the label "America" is well entrenched in the South American part of the generally unexplored territory (hint: third row, first column, near the top), and there was a reason for that (hint: first row, third column, right at the top: the guy who charted the South American coast but never visited North America). Even in much more modern maps that do include most of the territories the label America is placed next to South America (but probably only for layout reasons).

Of course, in the 1770's the people of a very small percentage of America gained independence and decided to call that small strip of land "The United States of America", a name as brain dead as calling a very small country in the middle of Africa "The Central African Republic".

Why is it brain dead? Because now Central African refers to either someone from that country, or from any other of the adjacent countries that by some criteria are located in the center of Africa. In fact, the case of the USA is even worse, as the new "America" wasn't even close to being near the center of the old America.

To what else could it possibly refer? [...] Likewise, if you're referring to both continents it doesn't make sense, because they -- the landmass as a whole -- is referred to as the Americas (pl).

The term "The Americas" was introduced into the English language precisely because of the conflict with the use of "America" to refer to the country.

It's possible that in a historical sense "America" (s) could be used to refer to the entire landmass, but this is most certainly not a modern usage. Deprecated!

Nope. As I showed you that definition of "America" is not only historical, but still in use. The fact that many Canadians and pretty much anyone from the rest of "The Americas" consider themselves "American" should clue you that the revisionist definition for the word is actually held by the minority worldwide.

So, if you were a Canadian it would make perfect sense to say you were either from North America or from the Americas. Neither statement is particularly useful nor descriptive but they would be accurate.

So when a German says he's fro

Re:Mac vs. PC

[drsmithy]

Yeah I know, you have a point. I guess I'm just stubborn and obsessed with semantics. If I was Canadian, I would happily say that I was from America, and let people interpret it however they like. But the term "American", when referring to people, is quite exclusively reserved for referring to people from the USA. At least that's my understanding of it."PC", on the other hand, is not used exclusively to refer to a personal computer running Microsoft Windows. It can just as easily refer to any personal computer.

It's an interesting comparison, because it underscores the point nicely, though not in your favour. Much like "Americans" is used pretty much exclusively to refer to citizens of the USA, "PCs" is used pretty much exclusively to refer to x86-compatible PCs that aren't Macs. The only people who pretend to be confused about "Macs" not being "PCs" are smug, anal, semantically-obsessive nerds. This has been true for the better part of three decades, pretty much since the first Mac was released.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[drsmithy]

If confusion follows then you are not using the word in its commonly accepted fashion. Languages evolve - and words take on new meanings. There are plenty of words whose modern meaning differs from the older meaning; or whose meaning is very context specific.

Though this is not an example of that. The contextual meaning of "PCs" has been essentially unchanged for 2-3 decades now.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[drsmithy]

IBM coined the term PC, but today's machines don't have ANYTHING in common with the hardware that IBM introduced (It's evolved too much).

Actually - and in some senses, sadly - they do.

Pretty much every PC on the planet, until it boots some modern OS, acts just like that first IBM PC did back in 1981.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[toddestan]

Actually, no. You can't natively boot DOS on a Mac because they lack a BIOS.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[stevesy17]

"PC" is far too ingrained into the vernacular to be changed at this point (thanks in part to a certain once-clever ad campaign) but that doesn't mean that more clarity can be added.

If "PC" means personal computer, then we need to add "NPC"--non-personal computer. So with "PCs" and "NPCs" all we need is to differentiate between subordinate and administrative machines, and since PCs are obviously controlled by people, then administrative machines shall be controlled by Digital Masters, or "DMs". "PC", "NPC", and "DM". Is that simple enough for you?

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Anonymous Coward]

We just call you guys gringos, that is how we solved that

Re:Mac vs. PC

[gcalvin]

At the risk of getting way off-topic and pedantic, I'm pretty sure DSL is indeed modulated and de-modulated, so "modem" is perfectly appropriate. I'm not so sure about cable, but I would suspect that many cable network interfaces still involve modulation and de-modulation.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[drsmithy]

No, the word "America" in the singular refers to the USA only in the common usage in the USA. In most of the rest of the world, this is simply not true.

Which "rest of the world" are you talking about ? Because pretty much everywhere I've ever been (Australia, New Zealand, a good part of Western Europe, Japan), "America" refers to the USA. No-one would ever use "America" and expect to be inclusive of, say, Mexico or Chile.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Registered Coward v2]

If confusion follows then you are not using the word in its commonly accepted fashion. Languages evolve - and words take on new meanings. There are plenty of words whose modern meaning differs from the older meaning; or whose meaning is very context specific.

Though this is not an example of that. The contextual meaning of "PCs" has been essentially unchanged for 2-3 decades now.

Actually, it has changed quite a bit since its early usage - from a discriptor to delineate small desktop machines from terminals and big iron to today's use as a generic term for Windows based machines.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[gnola14]

Or "Gringos". While in its origin the word "Gringo" was used as an insult[...]

It's still used as a pejorative term, though you're right, it's not only an insult anymore.

Or "North American"

True, forgot about that one. It's basically the same misnomer as "american" to refer to a citizen from USA.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[gnola14]

Your point being? I didn't say Latin Americans would use the correct term when talking about USA citizens, but rather pointing out how you couldn't say "[...]USAians are called americans and no one else[...]" because that would be blatantly false.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[gnola14]

In their defense, not knowing South American vernacular isn't "living in a bubble". It is another subcontinent, after all.

I agree, but as you said, it's a whole friggin' subcontinent; one should be wary when doing assertions at a global scale.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[drsmithy]

Actually, it has changed quite a bit since its early usage - from a discriptor to delineate small desktop machines from terminals and big iron to today's use as a generic term for Windows based machines.

"PC" has been used almost exclusively to refer to x86-compatible computers since the mid-80s. It has never, ever been a commonplace term for a Mac.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Registered Coward v2]

Actually, it has changed quite a bit since its early usage - from a discriptor to delineate small desktop machines from terminals and big iron to today's use as a generic term for Windows based machines.

"PC" has been used almost exclusively to refer to x86-compatible computers since the mid-80s. It has never, ever been a commonplace term for a Mac.

Never said it was - just that the term "personal computer" has morphed in meaning over time; it was even applied to the HP-65 at one point.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Anonymous Coward]

At the risk of getting way off-topic and pedantic, I'm pretty sure DSL is indeed modulated and de-modulated, so "modem" is perfectly appropriate. I'm not so sure about cable, but I would suspect that many cable network interfaces still involve modulation and de-modulation.

You're wrong - only in that you should have written "all cable network interfaces...". :)

Re:Mac vs. PC

[drsmithy]

Never said it was - just that the term "personal computer" has morphed in meaning over time; it was even applied to the HP-65 at one point.

The person you originally replied to was, which is why I'm in this thread.

Further, my point is that it hasn't really morphed over time - it's remained basically stable for ~25 years now. For the majority of the time the term has existed, it's been a synonym for so-called "IBM Compatible PCs".

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Registered Coward v2]

Never said it was - just that the term "personal computer" has morphed in meaning over time; it was even applied to the HP-65 at one point.

The person you originally replied to was, which is why I'm in this thread.

Further, my point is that it hasn't really morphed over time - it's remained basically stable for ~25 years now. For the majority of the time the term has existed, it's been a synonym for so-called "IBM Compatible PCs".

I'm not sure why you don't believe it hasn't morphed - the term personal computer has been around long before IBM introduced its PC; and even today PC refers to the OS (Windows) that a program requires rather than the underlying architecture. It just so happens that is most likely an Intel x86 variant. Even then, for a good bit of it's life PC's that ran Windows were not necessarily IBM compatible.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure why you don't believe it hasn't morphed - the term personal computer has been around long before IBM introduced its PC;

Not really, maybe 5 years. And once the competing architectures to IBM and Apple died off, "PC" came to mean only IBM PCs or clones.

and even today PC refers to the OS (Windows) that a program requires rather than the underlying architecture.

Nope. It refers to the machine itself. I'd like to see any evidence otherwise. "PC running Linux" is a perfectly common term.

It just so happens that is most likely an Intel x86 variant. Even then, for a good bit of it's life PC's that ran Windows were not necessarily IBM compatible.

Care to name one that isn't? I'd argue that any Windows-capable machines that aren't IBM architecture are workstation-class machines, not "personal computers."

Re:Mac vs. PC

[drsmithy]

I'm not sure why you don't believe it hasn't morphed - the term personal computer has been around long before IBM introduced its PC;

I don't believe it because it hasn't happened. "PC" has been synonymous with "IBM compatible PC" and "x86 PC" since the mid-80s, and the only slightly vague muddying of the term during that period has been with the recent introduction of x86 Macs.

and even today PC refers to the OS (Windows) that a program requires rather than the underlying architecture. It just so happens that is most likely an Intel x86 variant.

The is simply flat-out wrong. Essentially the only media that makes "PC" and "Windows" synonymous are Apple's ads. Pretty much everyone else uses the term "PC" to refer to an x86-compatible home computer [that isn't a Mac], then further differentiates with "Windows PC", "Linux PC", etc, as necessary. This has been true since the mid-80s.

Even then, for a good bit of it's life PC's that ran Windows were not necessarily IBM compatible.

Which PCs are you thinking of that have been around for "a good bit" of the last 25 years, ran Windows, but "were not necessarily IBM compatible" ? You do realise that even the newest, flashiest PC today starts up looking nearly identical to the original IBM PC, right ?

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Registered Coward v2]

I'm not sure why you don't believe it hasn't morphed - the term personal computer has been around long before IBM introduced its PC;

I don't believe it because it hasn't happened. "PC" has been synonymous with "IBM compatible PC" and "x86 PC" since the mid-80s, and the only slightly vague muddying of the term during that period has been with the recent introduction of x86 Macs.

and even today PC refers to the OS (Windows) that a program requires rather than the underlying architecture. It just so happens that is most likely an Intel x86 variant.

The is simply flat-out wrong. Essentially the only media that makes "PC" and "Windows" synonymous are Apple's ads. Pretty much everyone else uses the term "PC" to refer to an x86-compatible home computer [that isn't a Mac], then further differentiates with "Windows PC", "Linux PC", etc, as necessary. This has been true since the mid-80s.

Well, most games say PC on the front to indicate it runs on Windows (and ads /Mac for the handful of dual OS games), for example. When someone asks - will it run on a PC or work with a PC they aren't saying "Will it run on x86 architecture," they mean "Will it work with Windows." PC has become, in general usage, synonymous with a Windows box. Given Linux's tiny fraction of mind-share, most people wouldn't recognize a Linux PC if it hit them on the head, so they are unlikely to confuse a "PC" with a Linux box.

Even then, for a good bit of it's life PC's that ran Windows were not necessarily IBM compatible.

Which PCs are you thinking of that have been around for "a good bit" of the last 25 years, ran Windows, but "were not necessarily IBM compatible" ? You do realise that even the newest, flashiest PC today starts up looking nearly identical to the original IBM PC, right ?

I realized, after I posted, I meant to say MS-DOS - there were plenty of machines that ran MS-DOS but were not IBM compatible.

Re:Mac vs. PC

[Anonymous Coward]

> I realized, after I posted, I meant to say MS-DOS - there were plenty of machines that ran MS-DOS but were not IBM compatible.

Uh, no. MS-DOS relied heavily on BIOS system calls that were defined by IBM. MS-DOS was born from porting QDOS to IBM's PC architecture.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[NiceGeek]

Until (relatively recently) you *couldn't* run Windows on a Mac.
Saying Apple has a monopoly is absurd. That's like saying Commodore had an monopoly on the Amiga OS because it only ran on their hardware.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[DurendalMac]

Yes, a monopoly....of their own computers that own less than 10% of the market. Boo hoo.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[earls]

http://i.imgur.com/iyOKY.png

What?

[DurendalMac]

building a PC-based Mac was something done only by hard-core hackers and technophiles

What? This is a load of crap. Granted, it's not the simpest thing to do, but I'd say it was two years ago that hackintoshing became simple enough for the somewhat technical to figure it out.

Re:What?

[Pojut]

Indeed...for example, the Dell Mini 9 has been notoriously easy to make into a Hackintosh for quite a while. Hell, even Gizmodo posted a walkthrough in early 2009.

Re:What?

[moonbender]

What? That is completely wrong. It used to be something only done by people willing to spend a lot of time on it (one might call them hard-core), but it has recently become much easier.

Re:What?

[garcia]

10v works fine too http://twitpic.com/tywtq

Re:What?

[darjen]

I have a 10v running Snow Leopard that works great. It didn't take all that long to do, either. I didn't want to spend the money on a mac mini just to dabble in some iPhone development. And my other laptop is too old to virtualize os x.

Re:What?

[cpotoso]

Very nice, I will try. Saw a 10v for only $200!

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

building a PC-based Mac was something done only by hard-core hackers and technophiles

What? This is a load of crap. Granted, it's not the simpest thing to do, but I'd say it was two years ago that hackintoshing became simple enough for the somewhat technical to figure it out.

You tool, the statement was that when it was PPC it was difficult. Once mac went with intel based chipset it was easy.

Re:What?

[Type44Q]

building a PC-based Mac was something done only by hard-core hackers and technophiles

What? This is a load of crap. Granted, it's not the simpest thing to do, but I'd say it was two years ago that hackintoshing became simple enough for the somewhat technical to figure it out.

Perhaps he uses the term "hard-core hacker" to describe the same sort of person that you would label merely "somewhat technical?"

Re:What?

[MrCrassic]

Following on this, here are the generic guidelines for installing OS X on a PC:

• DON'T try installing on anything older than a Core Duo. You will experience massive pain (hacked kernels at the very least). It will also be slow.
• DON'T use Intel wireless cards if you care about having wireless. The long and short of it is that it doesn't work.
• DON'T expect everything to work like a Mac(book). Most people are having troubles with sleep, shutdown and restart.
• DO research your graphics card to ensure that OS X will work with it (with the least amount of suffering).
• DO research installation procedures for your laptop or components. There might be guides out there already.

And here are general instructions:

• Venture out to the Apple Store and buy Snow Leopard for $30.
• Afterwards, download the Boot-132 or Chameleon bootloaders that can emulate Apple UEFI and allow the CD to boot.
• Format your hard disk with HFS+ (Journaled). Use GUID MBR for dual-boots.
• After installation, determine what works and what doesn't. Then start hitting up InsanelyMac for forum posts. It's 90% possible that someone already asked your question.

Expect the first time to take a bit getting it to your desired state. It takes me about an hour to get going nowadays. It's definitely not hard.

Re:What?

[garcia]

I got one for less than $200 last year--when they were new. Keep looking.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[NiceGeek]

Cool story bro.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[Anonymous Coward]

I know of no DRM in Amiga OS to make sure it wasn't running on hardware Commodre hadn't been paid for.
Apple sells copies of an operating system that can run on commodity hardware.
Just as it is my right to play my legally-purchased music on any hardware that can play it, it's my right to run my legally-purchased software on any hardware that can run it.
By the way, it's utterly ridiculous for Apple to claim the DMCA has anything to do with this; it's not about pirating their software.

Pros and cons

[Anonymous Coward]

Pro: your not paying 4x as much for the same hardware

Con: it requires OSX which you cant legally acquire without buying a mac first.

Re:Pros and cons

[Anonymous Coward]

Con: it requires OSX which you cant legally acquire without buying a mac first.

Wrong. You can buy OSX without buying a mac. You can get it from Amazon or something. And it's significantly cheaper than buying a new Mac.

Re:Pros and cons

[UnknowingFool]

You can get OS X pretty easily at Apple, Best Buy, Amazon, etc. The current price for Snow Leopard upgrade is $29. Although it's an "upgrade", I've heard you can use it as an install disc.

Re:Pros and cons

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope.

That $29 Snow Leopard is an upgrade from Leopard. That $169 Mac Box Set is an upgrade from Tiger or Leopard. Only way you can get an original copy of Mac OS X is with a Mac, and it's licensed for use with that Mac. Sure, they don't serialize or put registration restrictions on the software, but you're still breaking the license agreement.

In closing, if you're building a Hackintosh you may as well pirate it, because purchasing a disc isn't going to change anything.

Re:Pros and cons

[GordonBX]

But you can't legally run it on hardware that isn't "Apple Branded" according to the EULA.

Re:Pros and cons

[UnknowingFool]

That $29 Snow Leopard is an upgrade from Leopard. That $169 Mac Box Set is an upgrade from Tiger or Leopard. Only way you can get an original copy of Mac OS X is with a Mac, and it's licensed for use with that Mac. Sure, they don't serialize or put registration restrictions on the software, but you're still breaking the license agreement.

You can use the "upgrade" disc to do a full install. The main difference between the Snow Leopard upgrade and the Mac Box Set is that the Box Set includes the latest version of iLife. Normally iLife does not get upgraded when you upgrade the OS. That is worth about $100 separately at retail. And if you're installing OS X on a hackintosh, you're breaking the license agreement anyways.

Re:Pros and cons

[jythie]

Incorrect. You can buy copies of OSX that can be installed on a fresh hard drive. Otherwise rebuilding with a fresh drive would be very tedious.

Re:Pros and cons

[EvanED]

And if you're installing OS X on a hackintosh, you're breaking the license agreement anyways.

Which is kinda the point of the original post: "it requires OSX which you cant legally acquire without buying a mac first."

Re:Pros and cons

[uglyduckling]

Most Apple hardware comes with a little book of Apple stickers. I've always presumed that's so you can stick the Apple logo on the front of your beige box PC and then install OSX on it legally.

Re:Pros and cons

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get OS X pretty easily at Apple, Best Buy, Amazon, etc. The current price for Snow Leopard upgrade is $29. Although it's an "upgrade", I've heard you can use it as an install disc.

He said legally

I can get a Windows 7 Ultimate disc that will work for full installs for $5 on a street corner in Shanhai, but that's not legal, either.

Of course, this is Slashdot, so we can justify it by saying that all EULAs are illegal and we doing the FSM's will by ignoring them.

Re:Pros and cons

[imthesponge]

And you think that'll stop most Slashdotters? Using others' work without compensating them for it is a point of pride.

Re:Pros and cons

[UnknowingFool]

Technically, he said legally acquire which you can do quite easily. Your counter example is completely illegal. And you can legally install it on a non Apple machine. If Apple goes after you legally for violating the EULA by doing so, you have a defense. It's called Fair Use. Don't expect any support from Apple if you do.

Re:Pros and cons

[UnknowingFool]

It's called Fair Use. You are breaking your contract with Apple so you cannot expect support; however, so far no one has really tested EULA vs Fair Use. I would think that some provisions of the EULA are not enforceable.

Re:Pros and cons

[imthesponge]

Just because you can technically do it doesn't mean it's allowed by your license agreement. An analogy is, if I have volume-licensed software at work that doesn't require activation, that doesn't make it legal for me to take it home and install it, even though the software technically will permit it.

Re:Pros and cons

[QuantumBeep]

I have a personal code. It's probably morally wrong. It goes like this:

If I can buy it and use it, I will buy it.

If they refuse to sell it to me (because I don't own Mac hardware, for example), I will try to pay them anyway and use it.

If they won't take my money, I will pirate it with a smile on my face (like the actually-useful versions of Ventrilo Server).

Re:Pros and cons

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, you have two defenses. The first is Fair Use, the second is that Apple is performing vertical tying, which is anticompetitive behaviour and illegal under the Sherman Antitrust and Clayton acts. Since Apple currently dominates 90% of "premium PC" market sales this isn't quite the outsider case it would at first appear.

As an aside, over at Groklaw PJ fully supports and endorses Apple's tying through EULA, and seems to believe that invalidating any EULA somehow threatens the GPL. If anyone can indicate how striking illegal terms from an end user license somehow affects an unrelated redistribution license, or indeed how one can claim to support free software whilst at the same time ignoring RMS's freedom 0 (the right to run software for any reason), I'm all ears. (Sorry, I do realise this last bit sounds trollish, but I feel strongly about this, and this topic is scrubbed from Groklaw, so it's impossible to discuss it at all there.)

Re:Pros and cons

[UnknowingFool]

Vertical tying is not illegal per se. It matters on specifics. If vertical tying was illegal, Unix vendors would have been guilty long ago.

Re:Pros and cons

[Anonymous Coward]

That's true, though I'd argue that it certainly appears to match the requirements. Of course, in reality this means "nobody will lift a finger, good luck with the lawsuit costing millions and lasting years."

Slashdotted!

[XxtraLarGe]

I wonder if the server is a Hackintosh?

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[i.r.id10t]

Except Windows NT 4 had a PPC build/install disc option ...

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[NiceGeek]

"I know of no DRM in Amiga OS to make sure it wasn't running on hardware Commodre hadn't been paid for."

There isn't any DRM in OS X either. It's a matter of drivers, and EFI.

Somewhat aside

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA:

Topower 1.1kW power supply

People are actually building home rigs with kW rated PSU's? I've been out of the game for too long.

Re:Somewhat aside

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess. Have you ever hooked a Kill-a-Watt up to a computer while running a video game with 2x SLI video cards on a high-end system?

I have trouble passing 250W, no matter how many things I leave running, or purposefully try to bog down the hard drive and video cards.

Re:Somewhat aside

[speculatrix]

building computers at home has turned into a willy-waving contest... the average cheap home computer is more powerful than anyone ever needs, unless they're running vista :-)

Re:Somewhat aside

[MBGMorden]

Not really. I personally build my own systems at home just so that I can upgrade piecemeal as needed. I also run into performance problems on some games. Now, I'm NOT the type to go out and drop $500 on a video card - I typically make it by with budget components, but you still have to upgrade every once in a while.

My current gaming PC for example is a dual-core Pentium 1.8Ghz with 2GB of RAM, a Geforce 9600GT vid card, and Windows XP. It's starting to show some age in newer games. My next upgrade will be ordered within the next week or two. Plan is to go to a dual-core Pentium 3.2Ghz, 4GB RAM, Radeon 5770 video card, and Windows 7 Home. Total upgrade cost ~$450. Certainly not "willy waving". Just taking the system to a modest level where it needs to be to run more modern games.

You may have a point on regular home usage, but not for everything.

Re:Somewhat aside

[skydyr]

When you build your own computers, you can reuse components, and by looking for deals, you can end up with something equal in price to or cheaper than a similarly equipped computer from a manufacturer. Of course, you may not get software licenses included, but you can always reuse old ones or go with an OS which doesn't require one to be purchased (Linux, I'm looking at you).

Re:Somewhat aside

[Anonymous Coward]

You're upgrading a dual core.. to a dual core? I'd just get a quad core AMD for cheap.

Re:Somewhat aside

[MBGMorden]

That would require a new motherboard for that system. Also, gaming has limited benefits from tacking on additional cores. I'd rather a faster clock speed with 2 cores vs slower with 4. I use a quad-core (Phenom 9850) in my non-gaming\everyday machine since I do video encoding and such on it.

Re:Somewhat aside

[QuantumBeep]

That's because a large portion of the people who build their own computers have no sense of proportion, and assume that they need way too much hardware.

Building a computer to competently play video games costs about $500 plus software. For $1000 you can get an insane gaming rig that could do bloody anything. Yet people spend much, much more than that. Morons, I tell you.

Re:Somewhat aside

[Pentium100]

CPU: 2x AMD Opteron 270 (dual core 2GHz);
MB: Tyan Thunder K8WE;
RAM: 4x512MB + 2x 1GB DDR1 400MHz;
VGA: 1x ATI HD2900XT;
HDD: 2x 15kRPM, 1x 5.4kRPM.

Power consumption as indicated by my UPS (I also have a few other computers plugged in):

This PC turned off, (monitor is on): ~500W
This PC turned on and idle, CPUs at full speed: ~750W
This PC turned on and I am playing a game: 900W

So, with CPUs idle, my main PC uses 250W, when playing a GPU and CPU intensive game it's 400W.

Re:Somewhat aside

[drsmithy]

So, with CPUs idle, my main PC uses 250W, when playing a GPU and CPU intensive game it's 400W.

That is ridiculously high. I have 8-core VMware servers with dozens of gigabytes of RAM and 15k SAS drives that draw less power.

Something is wrong. Do you have any power-saving features enabled at all ?

Re:Somewhat aside

[Pentium100]

Do you have any power-saving features enabled at all ?

CPU frequency throttling makes sound crackle when the frequency is changed, which happens a lot when I am watching a movie, so I disabled it. I also disabled turning HDDs off. In short - no.

Also, your server probably does not have one of the most power-hungry video cards (well, it now has been outdone by GTX470 and dual GPU cards).

I thought 250W was kind of normal for a two socket PC, since the CPUs are rated 85W each, so together they draw 170W, the video card at idle also draws some power and the PSU and all other voltage regulators are not 100% efficient.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[morgan_greywolf]

Connectix Virtual PC was released in 1997. That was, what, 13 years ago? I wouldn't call that "relatively recently."

/.ted

[LordAzuzu]

at teh moment

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[Hatta]

Commodore didn't have a monopoly on Amiga OS?

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[NiceGeek]

Sorry, I assumed that the topic was running the OS in question on native hardware, not through emulation.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[jedidiah]

...so then it should be a trivial matter to pop my Snow Leopard disks into a PC that lacks an Apple logo and create virtual machines to my hearts content in either vmware or virtualbox.

Support is the main thing

[UnknowingFool]

I would surmise that the support is the main difference. Getting your own patches, testing, and applying them will probably constitute the bulk of your time. Also in some cases it's variable on when you can to get a patch.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[morgan_greywolf]

Ah, but you didn't say that.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[NiceGeek]

http://www.taranfx.com/install-mac-os-in-virtualbox

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[Anonymous Coward]

I know of no DRM in Amiga OS to make sure it wasn't running on hardware Commodre hadn't been paid for.

Amiga OS didn't need DRM to do that. The Amiga had custom chips that Amiga OS expected to be there for it to work at all.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[camperslo]

Until (relatively recently) you *couldn't* run Windows on a Mac

No, that just isn't true. It just didn't run natively. Connectix Virtual PC for the Mac came out in 1997 (It was a Mac product before MS bought it), Soft PC was around in 1996. And later there was the FOSS Bochs x86 PC emulator. Those products had to emulate an Intel CPU, so there was a significant performance hit. I recall MS-DOS running in emulation on a Mac even before the switch the PPC processors.

I did this once

[tpstigers]

Just to see if I could. Later that day I got bored and ditched OSX for a Linux distro. Other than as an intellectual exercise, I don't really see much of a point in this. If you really want a Mac, just buy one. Sure they cost more, but all your hardware will work without any effort on your part.

Re:I did this once

[Anonymous Coward]

They cost no more than similar offerings from Dell, HP, Sony, etc. Although each of these vendors may run special deals, the average price for their offerings are typically well within a pretty close margin, some being more expensive than Apple, and some cheaper. Having used laptops from Dell, Sony, Compaq, and later HP, as well as Macbook Pro's, I would choose the Macbook Pro every time. Without exception every laptop from the other vendors failed within 2-3 years due to various issues from borked USB ports, busted hinges, display failures, power connector failures, etc.

I have my first Macbook Pro which is approaching 4 years in age which is still 100% functional. There is a reason they rank so high in satisfaction and service. You don't have to read a blog to see which ones last and which ones don't.

Re:I did this once

[Anonymous Coward]

So you had a whole new OS at your disposal, new compilers, new languages and frameworks (Obj-C compilers do exist in Linux and you can do OpenStep, but it's not quite Cocoa), access to development for a whole new set of devices (iPhones and iPads programming tools only run on OS X) ... And you got "bored"???
Sure, perhaps you intended to make some point about OS X vs. Linux, but all you did was to reveal yourself as a poser. No wonder you didn't see a point in doing it, you don't have the imagination to leverage the hard work of other people who made your installation easy!

Re:I did this once

[elrous0]

The problem is that Apple doesn't have anything on its low-end. I can walk out right now and buy a fully functional PC laptop at any price point from $400 and up. Apple Macbooks start at $1000 and quickly jump upwards to $1500 and $2000. It's not so much the features as the weak price spread that creates the perception of Apples as pricey.

Re:I did this once

[tpstigers]

Dear Anonymous Douchebag,

If you had actually read the words I wrote rather than the ones inside your head, you would have noticed that I did not, in fact, write anything anti-Mac or pro-Linux. I simply related a series of events. The point I was trying to make (and actually did make rather succinctly with the fourth sentence) is that most people would serve themselves better by purchasing a Mac rather than building a Hackintosh.

Try to pay attention.

Re:I did this once

[bill_mcgonigle]

They cost no more than similar offerings from Dell, HP, Sony, etc.

I think the point is you pick up a 4GB/15.6" Acer from NewEgg for $350, not that you blow a huge sum on a Sony. Likely neither will last as long as the Apple, but you can replace that Acer every year and still come out ahead. Plus not support attacks on journalism and stuff like that.

Re:I did this once

[Anonymous Coward]

Did IQ's just drop sharply while I was away? (sorry, I couldn't resist). I already said a MANUFACTURER, not some wholesaler from the internet. You do know the difference, yes? One provides a shipping service for bulk parts. They don't offer all encompassing service (although they would replace a part with another one, they don't offer a full service solution for your PC like a manufacturer does). They also don't have the marketing costs of a manufacturer, the warranty costs, infrastructure costs, etc. They don't have long term commitments to a product as they don't produce anything. They just stock it and sell it, which is of course why their prices are so cheap. I didn't say you couldn't find cheaper hardware. I said comparable hardware, meaning same bus speeds, same memory speeds, same processor speeds, same processors, same display technology, etc.

It also doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the difference between a bulk wholesaler and a tier 1 manufacturer (ie. NewEgg vs HP for example). I love how the price folks come in here and immediately throw up NewEgg as a comparison, but never actually show another hardware manufacturer. Apple is not a wholesaler.

On a side note, would you seriously consider scrapping, replacing, reinstalling, and restoring every year less of a hassle just to save a hundred bucks? Most non-techies wouldn't consider that a value, but rather a pain in the ass.

I think the point is you pick up a 4GB/15.6" Acer from NewEgg for $350

When I buy an Apple, I know I can depend on it for years and that I'm not buying a throw-away (read: disposable) laptop that will last a year (just long enough for the warranty to expire) and then start to degrade. I could buy for the same price at Dell, HP, or Sony, but having tried all of those in the last 10 years, and been disappointed each time, it's an easy decision, for me at least, to go with Apple.

Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[HuguesT]

Sorry if this sounds like a lament,

Apple doesn't like OS/X anymore. The platform has basically been stagnant since the inception of 10.6, in 2008. Hardware support is poor, even worse than Linux. For instance there is no way to make a Nvidia GTX460 run under OS/X at the moment, in spite of it being the best bang-for-the-buck video card right now. It was impossible to have an AMD 5xxx series run until only a few months ago! Performance is not good enough. From experience OS/X guzzle memory like no other OS I know. I use two boxes at work, a Linux HP PC with 4GB of RAM that never ever swaps, and a MBP laptop with 4GB of RAM that becomes slow as molasses after a week of use due to memory issues.

I'm extremely disappointed in Apple's focus on the mobile platform at the moment. There is only so much that can be done with a telephone and a hobbled tablet, nice though it may be.

I have some experience with Hackintosh. In my opinion, be prepared for a world of hurt, very comparable to the Linux experience of 10 years ago. Basic features not working (e.g suspend-to-disk), no support, needing to be very careful about what hardware can be accommodated, performance issues, and very shaky future. Apple could basically pull the plug anyday. At the end of it a little more software is available, from the big editors. Realistically a lot of the free software tools that I like do not run as well as under Linux (for instance Inkscape).

I used to like the OSX development tools but they are not portable, I wasted a lot of time with them, so this is as basic as I can make it now, so my software runs everywhere.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, the only thing OSX has over Linux is printing. Printing is Linux's Achilles heel as it has been all along. They keep trying to fix it but for some reason it never does get fixed. My LaserJet 1200 used to work pretty good in Linux but they broke it at some point and it hasn't worked in about 4 years. Something about the USB in Linux gets wedged and even when it works it's slow as hell. Works fine and fast in Windows and OSX.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[bkmoore]

Apple puts development work into OS X to support the current generation of Macintosh computers. Because Apple only has to support a very small slice of hardware, they can concentrate their development work on building features and improving the OS. Sorry for not supporting third party hardware. That's their business model and it works for them.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

I do agree about the horrible RAM management in OS X. 4 GB under Snow Leopard seems to be nothing.

Yet put 4 GB under Tiger or Leopard and the whole system will run circles around Windows or Linux.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to like the OSX development tools but they are not portable, I wasted a lot of time with them, so this is as basic as I can make it now, so my software runs everywhere.

That's rich, and what, Microsoft's dev tools are? Just write the MV part of your apps in C++ and V part in the one that best suits the platform. On Windows I assume that's .NET and on iOS / OS X that's Cocoa / UIKit. Besides, you're not going to find a standardized UI API on any platform, be it Windows, OS X, iOS, Android, Java, Symbian, Blackberry, WebOS, etc.

One more thing about your "guzzle memory" quip. Before you point fingers at the OS, did you ever think the app you're using might be a at fault? I have several Macs that run non-stop 24/7 until a patch popups up that wants a reboot. I have never seen the problem you mention. I think you're getting confused about how OS X manages memory. I suggest you read this and take another look at what's running on your MBP:

Is my Mac using too much memory

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[Gauthic]

10.6 was released in late 2009, not 2008.

One year's of no updates appears much less stagnant than 2 years.

But the problem is, that if Apple releases updates every year or year and a half, people complain about costs of upgrades. If Apple waits too long to release an update everyone thinks that the sky is falling and MacOS is DYING. (Oh NOES!)

The Mac is not dead.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[RManning]

From experience OS/X guzzle memory like no other OS I know. I use two boxes at work, a Linux HP PC with 4GB of RAM that never ever swaps, and a MBP laptop with 4GB of RAM that becomes slow as molasses after a week of use due to memory issues.

I have an entirely different experience. I code on my MBP 10 - 15 hours every single day and I'll go many weeks between reboots. I have 4GB of memory and it's running just fine. I nornally run Eclipse, Tomcat, Postgres, Photoshop, a couple terminal windows, and Open Office all the time.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[StikyPad]

Driver issues are purely a matter of politics, especially for the devices you mention: a video card, and, uh, another video card. The only reason they don't exist is because Apple doesn't want them to.

I'd hardly call suspend-to-disk a basic feature. Basic features, to me, include stability and compatibility, both of which are at or approaching genuine Mac hardware, especially with the right CPU (Intel Core or i), chipset (Intel)*, and onboard devices (mostly Realtek). The AMD support is a bit flakey, as are chipsets from other vendors, but that's to be expected since they weren't factors in the design process, and require custom (hacked) kernels or extensions (kernel mods).

I agree that there's not much to do once you've got the system up and running. Aside from a handful of titles, Mac development takes a distant backseat to Windows, and feature sets aren't always complete. OSS title development likewise takes a distant backseat to Linux, and even falls short of Windows in my experience.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[tezbobobo]

No shit apple doesn't support every piece of hardware on the market. Neither does linux. If you want that, go to Windows. And yes, if you use a hackintosh, don't expect the same experience as a genuine product, which will suspend and so on quite readily. However, if you want to print CMYK, or heaven forbid, Pantone or Focaltone, you've only got two choices, and neither is linux. Finally, Apple can and do pull the plug quite often - G5 to wintel, OS 9 to OS X. Deal with it. It is a OS paired with specific hardware which will only run the latest software. That's the price for running modern software well. Apple's willingness to start over, for certain people, is a boon. We know that if there is a problem, there is a good chance it wont be around for long. My point is, you make it sound like people choose between OSs. Apple has technologies that linux simply does not have. Who gives a fuck about inkscape?! If you're on Apple, and you need a program like Inkscape, then you'll be running Adobe products. Next time you need to print colourmatched, diecut packaging, and you submit press ready artwork from inkscape, you come back here and let me know. Apple is specific use.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[Kildjean]

It doesn't sound like a lament. It sounds like whining.

Have you even thought that in the time Apple has been pushing their iOS, they have another group of engineers working on OSX 10.x? OSX is a big application, it requires time and creativity to build a competing product that can out sell and out whip the current flagship product of their competition.

Apple has had to up their take in the mobile market since google announced they were pouring out a new phone, mobile os (android) and "tablet" os (chrome).

It's not like apple has been sitting on their laurels either, its been roughly less than a month that they seeded the last build to developers for 10.6.5 (MacRumors: Mac OS X 10.6.5 Build 10H542 Seeded to Select Developers (September 14, 2010))

You describe your discontent with the iPhone and the iPad, but have you thought what was the most advanced phone before the iPhone came out or the expectations the world had based on a smartphone would and should be before they came out? Apple may not have the perfect platform for mobile computing out there, but they sure stirred the honeycomb when it came to what could be done. Now everyone wants to be the next iPhone. The iPad did the same thing for mobile computing, where the best there was, was a laptop with a tiny keyboard and a tiny screen. They as well in that market stirred it up so good, that even Microsoft and HP ditched their original product because they knew it was no match to what is currently out there.

Like you I own several desktops and laptops from Apple, the most recent being a unibody MBP with 8Gb of ram. If you are experiencing memory leaks or poor performance it could be there is something actually wrong with your hardware. Maybe you can build some portable mac development tools and give them to the community or make yourself a buck or two. =)

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[Graff]

From experience OS/X guzzle memory like no other OS I know. I use two boxes at work, a Linux HP PC with 4GB of RAM that never ever swaps, and a MBP laptop with 4GB of RAM that becomes slow as molasses after a week of use due to memory issues.

I don't know what's wrong with your particular MacBook Pro but I run a lab of Macs, including some MacBook Pros, and we regularly have machines that haven't been restarted in months with no noticeable problems. Maybe your particular unit has a bad memory chip and should be taken in for service.

Also, Mac OS X runs great even with a low amount of memory. I've run it with as little as 640 MB of RAM without it suffering from too much of a slowdown, under a simple workload of web browsing and document editing. Yes, if you do a lot of background and complex work then memory requirements will grow but that's not directly related to the core OS.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

Saying OS X has been stagnant since 2008 is a really good indication you don't know what you are talking about.

Also OSX does not "guzzle" memory. It is very efficient at using it when it needs it and letting it go when it doesn't. Unlike every version of Windows you can find including server. Run diskwarrior and Onyx or cocktail on your MBP because your issue isn't memory.

You have a point about hardware support but Apple isn't in that market. You can however get a Radeon 5870, 5770, Quattro FX, or GT 285 as well as flash many other cards. Google is your friend.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[Rich0]

While I agree with much that you said, I have to take objection to suspend-to-disk not being a basic feature.

I can't think of a commercially-sold consumer laptop that resembled a laptop that didn't have this feature - going all the way back to the 1980s (or maybe it was early 90s).

Sure, I guess if you want to get down to it the only basic feature on a computer be that it has RAM, a CPU, and some way of bootstrapping itself, but that makes half of the microwaves out there feature-complete.

Does everybody need suspend-to-disk? No - I don't have it working on my linux box at home. However, I'd never consider that something to be glossed over - if I had a laptop my feelings would be a LOT different.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[Rich0]

You mention that Apple has technologies that linux simply does not have. However, you do not mention what those are.

Certainly you're not suggesting that Adobe's support for CMYK is reliant on some kind of Apple technology or OS framework?

Adobe doesn't make a linux version of most of their products because the demand just isn't there. They only barely support flash on linux, and even then only 32-bit half the time.

You seem to be turning an Adobe vs Inkscape debate into an Apple vs Linux debate. They're really two different things, even if the one platform is often used to run the other software product. I have no idea how good wine support is for recent versions of photoshop/etc but it wouldn't surprise me if it worked at least reasonably well.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh oh... looks like somebody's been drinking lots of Apple-flavored Kool-Aid.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[adisakp]

Apple doesn't like OS/X anymore. The platform has basically been stagnant since the inception of 10.6, in 2008. Hardware support is poor, even worse than Linux. For instance there is no way to make a Nvidia GTX460 run under OS/X at the moment, in spite of it being the best bang-for-the-buck video card right now. It was impossible to have an AMD 5xxx series run until only a few months ago!

This is hardly a new issue. Apple doesn't care about supporting hardware configurations they don't ship. It allows them to focus on supporting a small number of hardware configurations and giving the maximum stability and ease-of-use for their users.

The cost is that they have always been and will always be behind the performance curve on supporting the latest add-in hardware that is available on the PC. Plus if you were really interested in "the best bang-for-the-buck", you probably aren't buying an expandable Mac Pro (which is $2,500 / $3,500 / $5,000 depending on model you select).

In OSX, AMD 5XXX support came because they are shipping all 3 of these configs with the AMD5770 standard -- again, they really only support hardware they ship.

FWIW, on the PC, MS doesn't write the drivers for Windows. The hardware manufacturers do. If there was an actual GFX card after-market on the Mac, NVidia and AMD would write the drivers for the Mac (and there's a good chance AMD did write them for Apple when they won the bid to include 5770's in Mac Pros).

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[metamatic]

Printing in OS X and Linux use exactly the same software: CUPS.

Your USB problems are more likely to be something to do with USB drivers.

Printing (via ethernet) works fine for me in Linux, and has for a couple of years now.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[nine-times]

Is this a troll? The platform has been stagnant since 2008? Wikipedia says OSX 10.6 was released in August 2009, just over a year ago. Even if it had been 2 years, taking 2 years to release a major new OS release is not strange.

As far as all the poor performance and memory problems, those don't seem common to me. Maybe one of your installed apps has a memory leak?

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[carlhaagen]

"From experience OS/X guzzle memory like no other OS I know. I use two boxes at work, a Linux HP PC with 4GB of RAM that never ever swaps, and a MBP laptop with 4GB of RAM that becomes slow as molasses after a week of use due to memory issues." Complete bullshit. What you are describing is according to every person on the planet and their grandma the exact experience with Windows. First off, OS X (or "OS/X" as you refer to it as) doesn't shit itself up after a few days of uptime on 4GB. Not on 2GB either. Nor on 1GB. I right now have over 19 days of uptime on the very MacBook with 2GB of RAM that I'm typing this rant on, and, lo and behold, the swap file is currently at just 11MB. This machine is my work machine, on which I do a crapload more than just writing "word documents" and watching youtube clips on. Secondly, OS X doesn't "guzzle memory like no other OS"; it makes proper use of the memory YOU HAVE, instead of, like Windows, starting to hit the swap immediately after boot to "conserve valuable RAM for when it's needed" instead of putting it to proper use when it's at your disposal. You can successfully run even the hungrier OS X 10.5 on 512mb of RAM (I'm running it on a G4 iBook with that little memory), and, really, it's not like a snail on holiday even on that amount of RAM.

On top of your completely off statements, you referring to Mac OS X as "OS/X" kind of tells me you really don't have even the little experience of the OS you claim you do.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[tibit]

Agree. I've done that, without PhotoShop, but with a 1G vmware Fusion instance of XP running at the same time as well. I reboot when the system updater wants me to, and that's it.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[tibit]

I've had success using Nokia's Qt for cross-platform development, where I develop using Qt Creator under OS X, and then compile same code under VS 2008 running in VMware Fusion. If you're careful, your apps can be hard to distinguish from native ones on both platforms.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[VisceralLogic]

From experience OS/X guzzle memory like no other OS I know. I use two boxes at work, a Linux HP PC with 4GB of RAM that never ever swaps, and a MBP laptop with 4GB of RAM that becomes slow as molasses after a week of use due to memory issues.

That's interesting, since I just restarted my MacBook with 2 GB of memory a couple nights ago for software updates, after about six weeks of uptime. And it was as responsive then as it is now.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[greyhueofdoubt]

From experience OS/X guzzle memory like no other OS I know.

What?

MBP here with two browsers open 24x7 plus whatever other stuff I have open (avg 4-5 open windows).

Here's the output of my 'uptime' command:
14:59 up 6 days, 14:14, 2 users, load averages: 0.22 0.34 0.54

Here's the top of my 'top' output:
Processes: 60 total, 3 running, 57 sleeping, 319 threads 15:01:50
Load Avg: 0.35, 0.35, 0.51 CPU usage: 4.5% user, 5.1% sys, 90.93% idle
SharedLibs: 8988K resident, 1988K data, 0B linkedit.
MemRegions: 26148 total, 927M resident, 22M private, 454M shared.
PhysMem: 854M wired, 2181M active, 525M inactive, 3560M used, 408M free.
VM: 134G vsize, 1036M framework vsize, 928794(0) pageins, 150(0) pageouts.
Networks: packets: 11435804/7468M in, 10101665/1550M out.
Disks: 1329934/17G read, 604685/24G written.

Seems pretty healthy to me. If you want to point fingers, try firefox (currently using 723 MB real) or itunes (currently using 275 MB real). That just blows my mind. Two of the (ostensibly) most basic programs using more RAM than would fit into my first hard drive.

-b

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[AaronMK]

I used to like the OSX development tools but they are not portable, I wasted a lot of time with them, so this is as basic as I can make it now, so my software runs everywhere.

I really like the OS X development tools. I am even starting to like them more than Visual Studio. (I am still on 2008, though.) The insane licensing costs of anything but a bare-bones edition Visual Studio are insane, versus Xcode and its nice integration of lots of profiling tools that are freely provided. If you consider the Mac as the price for Xcode, it makes even a pretty souped up Mac Pro seem cheap by comparison.

Like mentioned before, Cocoa and .net are not really portable, but I have an easier time integrating third party libraries into Cocoa apps than .Net apps, and an easier time integrating external build steps, which I don't need to do as often with Xcode since it is already aware of more of those tools.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[RManning]

Oops, I forgot to mention that. I also run XP in Parallels pretty much all the time too so I can test in IE6.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[tezbobobo]

They're not different things, they're intrinsically linked. Dumb ass. Adobe CS5 wont run in Wine.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[MrCrassic]

Clearly, this is a troll, but I was waiting for my tab and needed something to do.

For instance there is no way to make a Nvidia GTX460 run under OS/X at the moment, in spite of it being the best bang-for-the-buck video card right now. It was impossible to have an AMD 5xxx series run until only a few months ago! Performance is not good enough. From experience OS/X guzzle memory like no other OS I know.

OS X has always been like that. Apple has a HCL for OS X, and compared to Microsoft or Linux's offerings, it's SLIM. They're finicky about the hardware they support, which is a good part of the reason why the experience has been so tight for people.

Memory consumption on Linux gets about as high as OS X for the same experience (which is worse for me). GNOME is a memory hog, KDE is slightly worse!

I have some experience with Hackintosh. In my opinion, be prepared for a world of hurt, very comparable to the Linux experience of 10 years ago.

Outdated experience. Try it again sometime, and you'll see where we're coming from...

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[tezbobobo]

Also, you'd have to be a moron to think that linux has everything Apple has. What are all those patents for?

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds like the Linux experience of today. Why does everyone is still try

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[jdc18]

Hardware support is poor, even worse than Linux.

WTF. Linux poor hardware support??? There is no other OS that has all that hardware support. Linux runs on many architectures, and supports a great variety of hardware that no other OS support. A lot of the "drivers" are hacked, but hey I never had a problem with an ethernet cards and i had 3D acceleration when there was none on the mac book pro. Linux have always had better hardware support than mac, mac only supports mac hardware. The biggest problems we had were back in the day of dial up connection and winmodems and when wireless cards started to show up. If there was a Venn diagram about it, the Linux Circle will be at least twice the size of windows, and 10 times the mac circle.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[Rich0]

How exactly is CS5 dependent on OSX for CMYK support - which was the one feature that was mentioned? Clearly it works on Windows as well.

Does CS5 not run on linux because linux fails to provide some OS capability that it needs, or is it just because that it wasn't targeted to run on linux?

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[tezbobobo]

You mistake me. It is not that CS5 is dependant on OS X; designers are dependant on CMYK, ergo Adobe (usually). You want to espouse the virtues of linux - I'm saying linux is a black hole in the design world. And regardless of whether CS5 relies on OS compatability, or whether it was targeted for other platforms, the pragmatic outcome is the same. Also, you are gay.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[Rich0]

Nowhere in my post did I suggest that designers could use Linux - I only speculated that perhaps Wine would work. If it doesn't work, then it doesn't work.

I took objection to the statement that OSX contains technology not present in Linux. Nowhere has that statement been substantiated in this thread. Just because some vendor writes a piece of software that happens to run on a particular OS doesn't have any bearing on that OS's particular technical merits - only its popularity.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[chainz]

Your wish has been granted: OS X 10.7 Lion will be announced on October 20th!

http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/13/apple-to-hold-media-event-october-20th-well-be-there-live/

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[HuguesT]

QT (ex-Trolltech, now Nokia) is extremely cross-platform.

I do know exactly what runs on my MBP. I run a lot of software simultaneously, I work in medical imaging. I have another Mac with 12GB of RAM and I'm happy with it. OS/X is not happy with only 4GB unless you are doing extremely simple things.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[HuguesT]

Actually you are right, I was thinking of Leopard, which dates from 2007. SL did not add much to the mix except better 64-bit support.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[HuguesT]

I'm surprised about Eclipse. Last time I tried it it immediately took almost a full 1GB of RAM just to start. Open Office is also very bad at managing memory in my book.

Typically after a week of work I have a swap file of about 5GB. My record is close to 9GB. One problem is even if you close all the apps the swap space stays huge.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[HuguesT]

Video card, sound cards, RAID controller cards, eSata cards, you name it. Not much you can put in a Mac Pro and make work, far less than for Linux.

The thing I hate from Apple, and I do really hate it, is that they do not allow NVidia to release their general drivers that they do for all the other platforms (even BSD) for OS/X. They have a unified video architecture, and this would mean I could put dual 480s in my macpro right now without having to wait for Apple's blessing. Old Unix vendors used to do what Apple does now and this is what killed them.

Instead Nvidia have a crippled driver for the 285 card, which is not even produced anymore.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[HuguesT]

Suspend-to-disk is an essential feature in a desktop machine today. It can cut electricity bill significantly and is much more robust than suspend-to-RAM.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[HuguesT]

Inkscape produces standard SVG. This is pretty important in some parts of the world. Illustrator doesn't.

I use it to produce exclusively line art for scientific documents. It does not need to be colour matched.

I have personally produced several books. Usually my work is better than what the professional publisher can do for me. The reason is simple: they don't care, I do. Several times I have had to redo the shoddy work of "professionals" in order for it to be of actual publishable quality.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[HuguesT]

Seeing what they are pushing for 10.7 Lion right now, I think this platform might no longer be for me.

This is sad, I have worked on OS/X since the days of NeXT in the early 90s. BTW NeXT/OS had pretty shoddy memory usage then too.

I do produce mac software, and it is free too, and I'm not looking at making a single buck out of it. Some people find it useful and actually use it.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[HuguesT]

Yes, I use QT too. Little-known FLTK is good too.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[HuguesT]

Nothing is wrong with my MBP, I use it a lot, that's all. I work in medical image analysis and I visualize a lot of 3D datasets, and the way OS/X caches display memory is perhaps the problem. It seems inefficient compared to Linux. I don't work enough with Windows to comment either way.

Memory requirements are definitely a problem under OS/X. It is totally unacceptable that Safari requires 1/2 GB of RAM to display a few web pages like it does on my computer right now. mds, a simple background daemon, is using 400MB! The kernel is using 450 MB. The bloody mail client is using 150MB. This machine has been up for a grand total of 9h.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[HuguesT]

Why is Apple not letting NVidia and AMD propose their own driver ? Why is Apple insisting that *they* should write the drivers ? This is insane. They do a very poor job (cue to game performance under OS/X, a longstanding issue), and they annoy consumers, most notably those who buy their most expensive hardware and need the most performance out of it.

The results is the people who do GPU computing are flocking to W7 or Linux, due to insufficient driver support.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[HuguesT]

Not a troll. OS/X has actually been pretty stagnant since Leopard. I have a dual install of L/SL, and it's hard to tell the difference. In fact old Leopard is often faster, in spite of Apple's claims to the contrary.

I run mostly Apple-blessed software. The worst habitual offender is Safari, followed by Mail.app. The Apple Kernel guzzles memory like no other I know. My machine right now has been up for 10h and the kernel is eating 10% of the memory (400MB). What ? This is real memory, not virtual.

When Aperture has finished opening on my machine (after a few minutes...) it eats more than 600MB of real RAM doing nothing at all. This is not good at all.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[HuguesT]

OS/X is a correct acronym, I did not invent it, look for it. It dates from version 10.0

I take issue about your statement that a recent version Mac OS X can run in 512MB of RAM and actually be useful. I have run every version of OS/X even before it was called that way, and it has never used memory efficiently in my book.

For instance, try running Aperture on a mid-size library of photographs, say 10,000 photos and check your memory usage...

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[HuguesT]

I have typically 30 windows open, and I do use them all, typically viewing lots of PDF documents together (articles, etc). All the PDF readers choke at around 20-30 documents.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[HuguesT]

Not a troll, just not YOUR experience.

Not outdated experience on the Hack, today's experience. It has come a very long way for sure. Only a couple of years ago it was unusable except as a curiosity. Now it is possible to use a Hack as a reasonable everyday machine, but it is still frustrating at times.

Say you want to put a hardware RAID controller on your Hack? (or your MacPro for that matter). You have a choice of one vendor and one card on the Pro, a bit more on the Hack, but nothing fabulous. Many of the more interesting cards are not supported at all.

What about sound cards ? TRIM on SSDs ? Apple doesn't feel it's a priority, so not today. Perhaps for 10.7.

The HCL like you say for OS/X is not slim, it's downright anemic.

This is exactly what I wrote. Apple doesn't think OSX is a priority in their business plan. It helped them get back on their feet some years ago, but they are not lavishly spending resources on it. This is why Mac market share will remain at less than 10%, I think.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[HuguesT]

Yes, and look, it will run DRMed walled apps ! My wish has been granted indeed.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[nine-times]

I have a dual install of L/SL, and it's hard to tell the difference

They were pretty upfront: Snow Leopard was not supposed to add a lot of features. The main purpose was to fix bugs, optimize code, and strip out legacy code.

The worst habitual offender is Safari, followed by Mail.app. The Apple Kernel guzzles memory like no other I know. My machine right now has been up for 10h and the kernel is eating 10% of the memory (400MB).

How much memory is being allocated for an application isn't necessarily a great measure. Many Microsoft products will also allocate a bunch of memory-- Exchange, for example, will just grow and grow and not give up any memory until it needs to. BUT! That's not necessarily a bad thing. Free memory doesn't really do anything for you. You might like to see a big number next to "Free:" but often it's better to go ahead and load things into memory. Free RAM is wasted RAM.

Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX

[Graff]

Memory requirements are definitely a problem under OS/X. It is totally unacceptable that Safari requires 1/2 GB of RAM to display a few web pages like it does on my computer right now. mds, a simple background daemon, is using 400MB! The kernel is using 450 MB. The bloody mail client is using 150MB. This machine has been up for a grand total of 9h.

They aren't really using that all that memory. That's most likely data that has been accessed at one time and is kept around in case you need it again. Any good, modern operating system does the same thing. A good OS will fill up your RAM with stuff that you might possibly use so that when you need it you get it quickly. If some other app comes around and needs a chunk of memory then some of the data in RAM is either paged off to disk or simply thrown out, depending on whether the data is "dirty" (changed) or not.

I assure you that almost all modern flavors of Linux, BSD, and Windows do the same thing. They might do it in slightly different manners and they may report it to you differently but you'd be amazed at how similar they all are under the hood.

You might want to take a look at these articles to better understand your own system's memory usage and to see if you do have a problem:
http://www.atpm.com/12.12/activity.shtml
http://macperformanceguide.com/Mac-MonitoringTips.html
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Performance/Conceptual/ManagingMemory/ManagingMemory.html

Just some notes on what I'm seeing on my machine

MacBook Pro 13", one Intel Core 2 Duo 2.26 GHz, 4 GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.6.4 (10F569)
uptime: 24 hours

rsize (total memory actually in-use):
    Safari: 180.2 MB
    mds: 35.2 MB
    kernel_task: 150.2 MB
    mail: 63.2 MB

I have a few windows open in each application and used the applications for about 1/2 an hour before testing them.

Don't forget...

[Anonymous Coward]

his little brother, the Hackberry!

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[SmilingSalmon]

Sure, but that was just Bill Gates demonstrating to Intel how he could bring down the sales of Intel chips by offering his OS for other chips like PPC or DEC Alpha. All because Intel said they were interested in supporting Java in hardware. When Intel backed down (see page 14), suddenly Microsoft lost interest in other chip architectures.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[m509272]

That's correct. Google is your friend. There's numerous ways to do it. VMware, Virtualbox as mentioned, maybe some others.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[NiceGeek]

The article is about building a "Hackintosh". Silly me, I assumed the topic at hand would be running the OS on native hardware.

Hackintosh?

[Entropius]

... I have an Amoeba 3000, it's even better.

Not worth the trouble

[tylersoze]

I have setup several Hackintosh's at home for my family, a dell 9 mini and a couple of desktops, and I have to say it's just not worth the time and effort. I should have just bought a Mac mini and a Macbook that "just worked" out of the box.

Actually let me amend that, it is worth your time if your time is worthless. :) The money I could have made (as a freelancer contracter) in the time it took to setup and support them would have more than offset the cost of a real Apple machine.

Re:Not worth the trouble

[Anonymous Coward]

And that is exactly why they don't make it easy to run Apple OSX, casue there are dedicated macs out there that work out the box.

Given the amount of money they've made on the iPhone I would assume this is considered the future... a phone that can plug into your TV and double up as a Mac. Personally I get fed up with people (google included) putting a flipping "i" in front of anything and thinking its cool? Can someone please tell me what "i" has got to do with anything? Is it the shorthand for "my"?

Re:Not worth the trouble

[amiga3D]

I installed Snow Leopard on my Dell 1545. It ran fast and worked well. I went back to Ubuntu though. I already preferred Linux to Windows for many years and now I even like it better than Mac. My wife still uses an old iBook G4 because it works for her and she likes the 12" screen on it. She took one look at my new widescreen laptop and went "ugh!"

Re:Not worth the trouble

[m50d]

But what about the knowledge you gain of mac internals, and the pleasure of putting something interesting together?

Re:Not worth the trouble

[Anonymous Coward]

as a freelancer contracter

Let's hope you don't type like that for your clients!

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[Leebert]

Last time I checked, OSX guests on Virtualbox only worked on OSX hosts.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[jythie]

Heh.... I remember running Windows 3.1 on a Mac IIsi via Soft PC ^_^ You could also buy x86 cards that you could plug into a Mac's buss and run Windows strait on intel hardware and get a pop-up window on the Mac Desktop.

Apple needs a desktop mini tower at $1000-$1500

[Joe The Dragon]

Apple needs a desktop mini tower at $1000-$1500

The mini is priced a little to high and only a core2 cpu?

the imac are nice but the price is a little and high + the lack of a mate screen is a trun off and there lots of people who don't want to be locked in to a screen.

also the imac is weak in video card area for it's price.

The mac pro is cool but the base system needs to take $1000+ off it's price and boast the ram to 4gb min.

Re:Apple needs a desktop mini tower at $1000-$1500

[UnknowingFool]

I think the reason that Apple doesn't have a $1000-1500 mini desktop is because that market is heavily saturated and competitive. All of their desktops are in very select markets with little competition. They can get much more profit per unit. If they released a mini desktop as you suggested they would be competing with Dell, HP, Lenovo which are low margin on each unit but overall makes profit by selling high volume. Apple wouldn't make much money selling low volume (relatively) so it's not worth it.

As for the Mac Pro, people always forget/don't seem to realize that the Mac Pro is not a consumer desktop; it's a professional workstation. As such it is priced competitively with other workstations. People who are buying one are using it to edit sound/music/video/graphics for a living not simply to play games/edit their home movies/surf the web, etc. It's the same reason a professional DSLR camera costs a scale more than a digital consumer model.

Re:Apple needs a desktop mini tower at $1000-$1500

[germansausage]

Why would Apple need such an expensive desktop machine. $1500 will buy five entry level e-machine type boxes, or three decent mid range HP home/small business computers. If you spend $1500 on a single PC you could get a quad core i7, 16GB RAM at least a TB of hard disk a nice mid range gamer video card and still maybe have some money left over.

Re:Apple needs a desktop mini tower at $1000-$1500

[vijayiyer]

Think about it this way. You're about to drop $100k on a workstation (be it audio/video, animation, etc). Your software may cost $50k/seat. You're going to spend money on control surfaces, mixing boards, you name it. Who really cares about saving a few hundred dollars to get a PC with some crappy sheet metal case where you can cut your hand opening it (happened to me with a Dell)?
When your tools are used to make money, the equations change. It's why auto mechanics drop $40k on a Snap-on/Mac setup.

Re:Apple needs a desktop mini tower at $1000-$1500

[mikestew]

It's why auto mechanics drop $40k on a Snap-on/Mac setup.

And it's why I'm happy to spend the money on Macs today. If a stint as a pro auto mechanic taught me anything, it's not to go cheap on your tools. Yeah, Craftsman may have the same lifetime warranty as Snap-On, may still turn a 10mm bolt, but when you're using that wrench a dozen or more times a day Snap-On doesn't look so expensive. There are differences that don't show up on a spec sheet.

I've since given up turning wrenches for a living and make my living with computers as my primary tool. I can save some pennies and get a laptop that I'll use because I have to, or spend more and get a Macbook Pro that is the first laptop that I actually enjoy using. Same with my 27" i7 iMac. I like good tools. Whipping out spec sheets and telling me how you could build "the same thing" for less isn't going to sell me. Because in the end, what you're really saying is, "I want what's cheapest". That's fine if I'm buying a set of coffee mugs. Not so fine when we're talking about what I use to make my living.

Re:Apple needs a desktop mini tower at $1000-$1500

[VisceralLogic]

As for the Mac Pro, people always forget/don't seem to realize that the Mac Pro is not a consumer desktop; it's a professional workstation. As such it is priced competitively with other workstations. People who are buying one are using it to edit sound/music/video/graphics for a living not simply to play games/edit their home movies/surf the web, etc. It's the same reason a professional DSLR camera costs a scale more than a digital consumer model.

Maybe, but I just built a Hack Pro that's equipped competitively with the entry level Mac Pro for $700.

I'm a life-long Mac user, but I really couldn't justify buying a new one at Apple's price.

Re:Apple needs a desktop mini tower at $1000-$1500

[UnknowingFool]

How the heck did you get a full system including Xeon and RAM for only $700?

Re:Apple needs a desktop mini tower at $1000-$1500

[VisceralLogic]

Well, I'm using i5-760, so not Xeon, but still 64-bit 2.8 GHz quad core. So to upgrade to an LGA-1366 mobo and W3530 processor would have cost $200 more.

unfair practices

[StripedCow]

What is unfair, of course, is that it is allowed to run Windows on a Mac, while it is not allowed to run OSX on a PC.
Time for the FTC to look into this, I would suggest.

Re:unfair practices

[spire3661]

Please list in detail why the FTC should be involved.

Re:unfair practices

[StripedCow]

Sorry I am not going to spell it out. FTC should be involved whenever (paying) consumers are being held back by artificial means.

Re:unfair practices

[UnknowingFool]

What is unfair, of course, is that it is allowed to run Windows on a Mac, while it is not allowed to run OSX on a PC. Time for the FTC to look into this, I would suggest.

First of all, you can run OS X on a number of different platforms via virtualization. VirtualBox is just one software. Second of all Apple has the right to dictate what hardware runs with their software. If you think that Apple has done something wrong, then you need to inform the FTC about

virtually all Unix vendors:

• IBM (AIX works only on IBM)
• HP (HP-UX works only on HP)
• SCO-Unix only works on SCO

some mobile device makers:

• Palm (WebOS only works on Palm)
• Nokia (Symbian only works on Nokia)
• RIM (Blackberry OS only works on Blackberry)

in fact many, many hardware/software makers have this arrangement. So unless all these companies are violating rules for decades, there probably isn't anything for you to report.

Re:unfair practices

[I_am_Jack]

Almost all of the OS/Hardware pairings you reference are necessary because of proprietary hardware solutions (see the references toward the top above to Amiga). Apple's contention that it only be run on Apple-built machines relates to its interpretation of copyright law, which if the Library of Congress' last ruling regarding jailbroken mobiles is any indication, it'll get its brushed aluminum backside handed to it shortly.

Re:unfair practices

[untouchableForce]

Apple's contention that it only be run on Apple-built machines relates to its interpretation of copyright law, which if the Library of Congress' last ruling regarding jailbroken mobiles is any indication, it'll get its brushed aluminum backside handed to it shortly.

I fail to see how that ruling has any connection to running OS X on non-Apple branded hardware at all. If Apple was preventing you from running an OS other than OS X on Apple hardware then I could see it. On the other hand this article seems to be quite applicable.

Re:unfair practices

[UnknowingFool]

Almost all of the OS/Hardware pairings you reference are necessary because of proprietary hardware solutions (see the references toward the top above to Amiga).

You can run lots of different software on the hardware that is listed above. For example, even IBM sells Linux on their machines. The "necessary" part is BS. It's a matter of optimization and support. If IBM doesn't want AIX not to run on non-IBM machines, that's their right. IBM (and HP) will support Linux on their hardware. As for mobile devices, they pretty much all use ARM so your argument is very weak.

Apple's contention that it only be run on Apple-built machines relates to its interpretation of copyright law, which if the Library of Congress' last ruling regarding jailbroken mobiles is any indication, it'll get its brushed aluminum backside handed to it shortly.

First of all you are confusing two different issues. Apple has allowed hobbyists to install OS X as long hobbyists realize that they get no support. It's called Fair Use. The problem for Psystar is that copyright law specifically says only the copyright holder can permit modification and redistribution which Psystar did not get permission before they created a business whose sole purpose was to infringe on Apple's copyrights.

Second of all, jailbreaking is only referring to iOS which applies to the mobile devices not their computers. Apple considers their mobile devices as appliances and locked down. This article is about their computers.

Re:unfair practices

[mikestew]

FTC should be involved whenever (paying) consumers are being held back by artificial means.

I think you misunderstand what purpose the FTC serves.

Re:unfair practices

[UnknowingFool]

You are allowed to run OS X on PCs via virtualization. You are also allowed to build a hackintosh as long as you understand that you will get no support from Apple. I don't see what there is to complain.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[Anonymous Coward]

fanboi.. you cant deny it, your nick has Mac IN IT.

Because your an obvious fanboi, your opinion automatically means less then any other user on this site. congrats.

The worst of both worlds

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole reason i dont buy macs is because OSX is such a pain in the ass... why would i want to use OSX if i didnt have to?

Apple = good hardware hamstrung by crap software.

hardware quality

[goombah99]

Did you see the picture of the case he chose? He says he chose it because the HP blackbird case is one of the highest quality aluminum cases he could find. I had to laugh. Having looked inside a mac tower case it's just astonishing that such a spagetti looking case could be considered "high quality". In the end perhaps the case as little to do with the function of a computer. But one of the main points of building your own is aesthetics and as far as that goes mac cases are the best you can possible get.

Re:hardware quality

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the main reason I used the Blackbird case was because it was what I had laying around. Normally the inside of the case is walled off with divider panels and looks very neat. However, the panels were custom fit for the motherboard the Blackbird Exhilaration Edition came with (an NVIDIA-based EVGA board with a QX9770 processor), and don't fit with the ASUS P6T V2 Deluxe motherboard (well, I might be able to hide the power supply). But that doesn't mean the rest of the case isn't really nice. I don't know of many PC cases I'd consider better built or designed.

Lenovo-compatible

[tepples]

Well, its history is derived from "I have an IBM-compatible PC"

So would the proper term be "Lenovo-compatible" since IBM sold its PC division to Lenovo about half a decade ago?

Re:Lenovo-compatible

[QuantumBeep]

No. The PC architecture isn't designed to be compatible with something branded Lenovo. It's compatible with the IBM PC model 5150, designed by IBM and sold starting in 1981. The original doesn't really exist any more.

Time is a key factor.

Re:Lenovo-compatible

[tepples]

The PC architecture isn't designed to be compatible with something branded Lenovo. It's compatible with the IBM PC model 5150, designed by IBM and sold starting in 1981.

And whose rights under copyright, patent, and trademark Lenovo bought.

Re:Lenovo-compatible

[blackraven14250]

Although it transformed from the IBM trademark "PC" into a word of its own, through the wonders of language evolution.

Re:Lenovo-compatible

[QuantumBeep]

And whose rights under copyright, patent, and trademark Lenovo bought.

Lenovo has no model 5150. That was only sold branded IBM, ever. When people talk about being "PC compatible", they are not talking about IBM PCs in general. They are talking, specifically, about only one model. Lenovo has no reasonably-applicable relationship to this.

MacOnLinux

[Anonymous Coward]

Excuse me? MacOnLinux has been able to run PowerPC version of MacOS X on most PowerPC equipped non-Apple systems long before Apple switched to X86!

HP-9100A

[krischik]

Nope the first computer marketed as a personal computer was the HP-9100A. And that was 1968. But apart from that you are right.

Exactly

[formfeed]

Does your PC run windows?
"My PC is really l33t"
elif
Is your PC made by apple?
"My Mac is really cool"
else

"Want to have a look at my linux box in my Mom's basement?"

Re:Exactly

[Ukab the Great]

"Want to have a look at my linux box in my Mom's basement?"

You need better pickup lines.

Death to "PC"

[Sloppy]

separating them into Mac and PC labels makes it easy for conversation regarding the two.

No, that's just it. It doesn't make for easy conversation; it makes for confusing and ambiguous conversation, like talking about Toyotas vs cars would, if someone arbitrarily and unilaterally defined car as meaning only automobiles that were built in England. PC used to mean personal computer, and then it meant IBM-PC-compatible computer, generally drifted to meaning generic x86 computer (which is almost the same thing, but has become less stringent, and then it meant Windows, while the x86 definition got refined to include all x86 machines except for the ones built by a single manufacturer (Apple). It's gone through too many meanings (and forks!), so when someone says it, you don't know which one they mean unless you're already intimately familiar with the context.

When talking about computers in general (such that mainframes might not be off-topic), PC usually means personal computer; when talking about games, it usually means Windows; when talking about Macs, sometimes it means generic x86 and sometimes it means Windows. But when you come at the conversation from a different direction or from a gray area (e.g. you're comparing Linux gaming with console gaming) then it's totally ambiguous and you have to assume it means both until someone says something that (to you) obviously only refers to one of them, and then you say, "ah, you were talking about Windows and didn't mean to ask or imply anything about OpenBSD" and then someone else says "no, we're still ambiguous at this point," and then you have a flamewar and whatever the original subject was, is forgotten by then.

The best thing to do is either only use it by its original meaning, or kill the word. And since abused words can't ever be reclaimed (e.g. "hacker", "bricked", etc) they must be humanely slaughtered.

Re:Death to "PC"

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you've discovered that context can alter or imply a particular meaning for a word with more than one possible interpretation!

Your 4th grade english teacher would be proud.

Communication is a messy analog affair, nerd. Stop trying to make it binary, and learn to play in the gray.

Re:Death to "PC"

[QuantumBeep]

I've started asking "Is your computer a Mac or does it run Windows?" Most people can give a useful answer to that question, and the one in 1000 that runs Windows on their Mac will definitely have the brains to say "Actually, I have Windows running on my Mac".

Or, if you want to have a memorable conversation, ask "Do you use a Mac or a real computer?"

I accidentally said that once, no insult intended. I'll let you guess how that turned out.

Re:Death to "PC"

[Sloppy]

Wow, you've discovered that context can alter or imply a particular meaning for a word with more than one possible interpretation!

No, I was bitching that this word has ambiguous meaning in many contexts, and conflicting meanings in closely-related (often overlapping) contexts. Sure, things can get messy, but usually not to this degree.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[uglyduckling]

"I know of no DRM in Amiga OS..."

Then you don't know anything about Amiga OS. The OS was tied heavily to the custom chips on the motherboard, and to the Workbench ROMs, all of which were copyright owned by Commodore and normally only sold with a complete system. Even now, Amiga emulators are (in theory) illegal if you don't buy a licensed ROM image - as is the case with many emulators of very old hardware. I think most people are happy to copy now because it's so obsolete, but in the late 90s and early 2000s it was very common for the documentation for emulators of 80s and 90s hardware to suggest that you copy your own ROM image from your own machine in order to use it.

Why bother?

[Medievalist]

Ubuntu is easier to install and supports more hardware and software.

Hackintoshes are like teaching a pig to sing. Even if you succeed, it just wastes your time and annoys Apple.

Re:Why bother?

[I_am_Jack]

For one, building my Hackintosh was fun. I've done loads of hardware bashing since I bought my first PC about 17 years ago. When I made the switch to Macs a couple of years ago, I gave up the ability to hot-rod like I could with Windows-based boxes. I know more about OS X and Macs now, thanks to the process. Secondly, having a Mac-based netbook is great for traveling as I can share my iTunes libraries, season pass shows, etc between my iMac and my Hackintosh. I've built an Ubuntu-box from an old PC laying around, and while I enjoyed learning hot to configure a new OS, I don't see much more than Ubuntu offers over OS X (given that I was constantly updating the OS as well as apps and dealing with version incompatibilities).

Re:Why bother?

[VisceralLogic]

Ubuntu is easier to install and supports more hardware and software.

Hackintoshes are like teaching a pig to sing. Even if you succeed, it just wastes your time and annoys Apple.

Some people prefer the software that is only available on OS X. Other people simply prefer the OS itself.

Re:Why bother?

[claudia_t]

Not necessarily. I started to develop for the iPhone not long after I had bought my i7 desktop. I had installed snow leopard with a vanilla kernel and it worked out of the box. Saved me a fortune too!

Re:Why bother?

[Medievalist]

That's a damn good reason. Thanks for pointing it out!

Of course, if it hadn't worked "out of the box" you'd have been better off buying a mac... so to some extent you got lucky on the hardware compatibility front.

But hey, as Napoleon said, luck is at least as important as skill.

servers, mainframes and embedded devices.

[krischik]

Not every computer is a PC. There are also servers, mainframes and embedded devices. Personal computer means that it is commonly used by one person at a time. And just in case you wonder: An embedded device usually lack the resource for self hosted software development.

Re:servers, mainframes and embedded devices.

[Gaygirlie]

Not every computer is a PC. There are also servers, mainframes and embedded devices. Personal computer means that it is commonly used by one person at a time.

Indeed, and all the examples I gave are commonly used by one person at a time. Even an iPad is clearly identified as a personal computer even though many professional programmers would argue it doesn't have the resources for self-hosted software development.

Or an example in the opposite: my mobile phone, an N900, does have more than enough resources for self-hosted development and is a fully-fledged computer yet some people would still claim it an embedded device, too.

OSX Doesn't Make Money

[mpapet]

Long ago (in computer industry terms), OSX got Apple back on the road to financial success. OSX has become a favored, octogenarian at Apple. Treated well, but generally irrelevant to other projects.

Every time there's a consumer buying content for one of Apple's dedicated entertainment devices, they are made richer. The best part of this scheme is two-fold.
1. It's early days for dedicated entertainment devices like the ipad and even the iphone. Tons of money yet to be taken from the consumer while the personal use doctrine is being dismantled.
2. The distribution of entertainment is a U.S. government sanctioned oligopoly. Apple has become an blessed member of the oligopoly.

Contrast the scale of those revenue generating opportunities with the general purpose computer (OSX) where once the tower/laptop is sold, that's about the end of the revenue stream.

Re:OSX Doesn't Make Money

[jackbird]

Thing is, Mac users by and large DO pay for OS upgrades after purchase. I think it's driven by a) A longer wait between hardware upgrades due to enormous cost, b) That OS upgrades on a Mac are actually a good idea, rather than the Windows truism that you're crazy if you don't wipe and reinstall, c) Apple EOL-ing older OS versions much faster than Microsoft (it can be challenging to find things that will run on 10.4, and old versions of iPhoto, for example, won't send prints to the drugstore any more unless you shell out for iLife.), and d)Less of a pervasive sense among nontechnical users that they know a guy whose nephew can install the new version.

citation needed

[krischik]

That is not the definition I find of Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_computer . So where did you get your definition from? Invented in the fly? Or do you have some citation for me?

Re:citation needed

[Homburg]

It's right there at the top of your own link. "For computers generally referred to as 'PCs', see IBM PC compatible."

Re:citation needed

[krischik]

It's right there at the top of your own link. "For computers generally referred to as 'PCs', see IBM PC compatible."

Which is Wikipedia's typical, polite way to tell you that you got your term wrong and what you are looking for is really called something else:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox

A nice little helper for those who are not so intelligent.

Re:citation needed

[Homburg]

Well, try the definition from the OED (temporary link):

PC n. (also pc) personal computer; spec. one that is IBM-compatible.

Re:citation needed

[jythie]

Ask any random person what it means? Outside the tech equivalent of grammar nazis and they will tell you a PC is a home computer running windows.

Re:citation needed

[krischik]

Ok, you got me there.

but $2500 for a 1 cpu base system is too high

[Joe The Dragon]

but $2500 for a 1 cpu base system is too high cut it down to $2000.

also apple should make the mini more like $500-$600.

and why not have a imac like system without the screen or at least a mate imac.

apples pushing games on mac and the video cards are not there and with the imac the card in the system is weak for the screen size.

Re:but $2500 for a 1 cpu base system is too high

[UnknowingFool]

but $2500 for a 1 cpu base system is too high cut it down to $2000.

Why don't you build a similar model on Dell and see how much it costs you. I think if you matched specs, it's close to what Apple charges. Most of the time you come within $200 but there are still enough differences to say whether it's a difference. i.e. iLife comes with OS X, etc. And don't build one with a iCore i5 and call it the same as a Xeon. They're not the same processor.

also apple should make the mini more like $500-$600.

Again price out what it takes. Also take into account the form factor. A micro-ITX form factor costs much more to build than a regular size because parts are more specialized. If a small form factor isn't worth it to you, then it's not for you. The only thing that comes close to the mini is the Dell Inspiron Zino HD which isn't as small.

and why not have a imac like system without the screen or at least a mate imac.

Read my post above about why Apple doesn't make a generic desktop. They won't make much money as the market is saturated and they have to compete with the likes of Dell whose business model is to sell at very little profit for lots of volume. It's not a matter of can't; it's a matter of that there isn't enough profit in it for them. And businesses are in it to make money for them.

apples pushing games on mac and the video cards are not there and with the imac the card in the system is weak for the screen size.

I don't think Apple has ever advertised any of their computers are hardcore "gaming machines" like Alienware. They've advertised you can play games on them which is true. It's more a problem of you what you want.

Re:but $2500 for a 1 cpu base system is too high

[Joe The Dragon]

$2000 gets you a pc with I7 and likely SLI video / 1 high end video card + 6gb ram not just a 1 socket Xeon that is just about same price / speed as a i7 920 / 930 + mid rage video with 3gb system ram no apple wants $2500 for that also apples 1K psu is over kill for hardware is the base system.

AS for the imac apple just needs one with a mate screen.

also with the laptops apple needs a lower priced 17" screen system $2,299.00 or $1800 just to get a 15" screen? 13" is to small and there are pc with 17" under $1000 but apple wants $1800 just for a 15"?

Re:but $2500 for a 1 cpu base system is too high

[UnknowingFool]

$2000 gets you a pc with I7 and likely SLI video / 1 high end video card + 6gb ram not just a 1 socket Xeon that is just about same price / speed as a i7 920 / 930 + mid rage video with 3gb system ram no apple wants $2500 for that also apples 1K psu is over kill for hardware is the base system.

Sigh. A Core i7 is not the same as a Xeon. Intel charges you (and Apple) more for the Xeon as it is a workstation/server CPU. If you can't spec the same, the comparison is useless.

AS for the imac apple just needs one with a mate screen.

What do you mean by "mate screen"? If you mean use an additional monitor, you can attach a separate monitor if you have the right cable. On the high end iMacs, you can even use the iMac as a monitor alone.

also with the laptops apple needs a lower priced 17" screen system $2,299.00 or $1800 just to get a 15" screen? 13" is to small and there are pc with 17" under $1000 but apple wants $1800 just for a 15"?

Just like the Mac Pro, the MacBook Pro laptops are designed for professionals. Hence the "Pro" in the name. Again match specs before you complain about pricing. To use an analogy, your complaints about pricing would be similar to you complaining that luxury cars cost more than other cars. Yes they do; there is a reason they are called "luxury." There are differences. Whether the differences are worth it to you is another matter.

Re:but $2500 for a 1 cpu base system is too high

[snuf23]

There is still a large gap in Apple's product line between consumer iMacs and professional Mac Pros. There is no consumer grade Apple computer that is very expandable or upgradeable in the sense an average Windows desktop is.

I don't think Apple really cares about that market segment. If they did have a decent i7 desktop that handled a large amount of memory it would cut in to their Mac Pro sales. A magazine publisher I used to work for is currently dealing with this now. They don't have the budget to replace their older PPC G5s. The IT department is actually trying to get them to use Mac Minis!

Re:but $2500 for a 1 cpu base system is too high

[Peeteriz]

What do you mean 'is too high cut it down' ? Would it be a benefit to apple ?

That gap feels intentional and most likely will stay that way.

They don't want to compete at all for price-sensitive pro-users - there is no profit in it, it just cuts down margins to the level of dell/others; they can keep all the guys for whom apple features are valuable and simply give up the price-sensitive segment to wintel vendors to fight over the scraps.

They definitely do not want pro-users to consider the cheaper apple consumer stuff as a good enough option, they want the pro-users to feel that they really need to buy the pro-version at all costs.
They don't want consumers to upgrade their stuff much as well - consumers won't ever agree to pay a large premium up-front for 'upgradeability', but are generally quite agreeable to replace usable hardware with the new shiny, which is good for sales.

Re:but $2500 for a 1 cpu base system is too high

[drsmithy]

Why don't you build a similar model on Dell and see how much it costs you.

A similar Dell T3500 will be between $500 and $1000 cheaper. Further, if you're prepared to forego ECC RAM (the only thing a Xeon gets you over a non-Xeon these days) you can probably knock nearly as much off again.

Read my post above about why Apple doesn't make a generic desktop. They won't make much money as the market is saturated and they have to compete with the likes of Dell whose business model is to sell at very little profit for lots of volume. It's not a matter of can't; it's a matter of that there isn't enough profit in it for them. And businesses are in it to make money for them.

It's got nothing to do with competing with Dell, and everything to do with competing with themselves. A reasonably-priced Mac Desktop would *slaughter* high-profit Mac Pro sales.

Re:but $2500 for a 1 cpu base system is too high

[toddestan]

Sigh. A Core i7 is not the same as a Xeon. Intel charges you (and Apple) more for the Xeon as it is a workstation/server CPU. If you can't spec the same, the comparison is useless.

Well, go ahead and spec the i7 for the Mac then. Wait, you can't and have to get the Xeon for more $$$? That's too bad.

Helpful car analogy.

[krischik]

While it might be inconvenient that Ford break shoes won't fit a GM car it is neither unfair nor is it a case for the FTC.

Another helpful car analogy

[krischik]

I see. Then to FTC has a lot to do. Starting with making sure that all car spare parts fit every similar sized car. If they finished with that in 2210 they might find time for OS X compatibility.

Re:Another helpful car analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Your analogy is incomplete. If consumers (or third parties) can make spare parts that fit a particular car, then they should be allowed to do so.

Re:Another helpful car analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, what's preventing them?

As an iOS developer

[Anonymous Coward]

I do this, despite access to real macs, just so I can virtualize my dev environment. Hackintosh in a virtualbox is the only way to fly.

Apple needs to pull their heads out.

Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

This just proves without a doubt that Macs are overpriced junk, if you can build your own system with COTS parts and end up with a higher performance system than Apple can provide. I've been inside a MacBook's case, and I can also say, what a heap of junk that is!

Re:Awesome

[carlhaagen]

Overpriced junk? So if you bought the exact same components from your local shop and made a "normal PC" with them, as there already are a few billions of, it wouldn't be junk but magically "great hardware"? Something is very wrong with your logic.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

That they strictly control in every way possible, by selling in their own stores, itunes, ipods, iphones, an os that runs on standard intel mb's and cpus... that anyone can buy.

How about Apple filing suit against Psystar for creating Mac compatibles? Apple might as well sue Dell and Intel for making Mac Compatibles. Apple won that lawsuit. Apple has a monopoly over an OS that is designed to run on standard PC hardware.

There is no reason why another company cant make Apple Compatibles technologically.... but Legally... Apple has won their legal right to be a monopoly.

Next to no apps for NT on PowerPC

[tepples]

Except Windows NT 4 had a PPC build/install disc option ...

But how many publishers of applications for Windows provided universal binaries?

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[Anonymous Coward]

Has is the operative word. Microsoft discontinued it long before NT 4 was no longer the latest Microsoft server OS.

No DRM in OS X?

[imthesponge]

What is this, then?

Understanding Apple's Binary Protection in Mac OS X

With the advent of Intel-based Macintosh computers, Apple was faced with a new requirement: to make it non-trivial to run Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware. The "solution" to this "problem" is multifaceted. One important aspect of the solution involves the use of encrypted executables for a few key applications like the Finder and the Dock. Apple calls such executables apple-protected binaries.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[imthesponge]

That requires a modified (and illegal to distribute) copy of OS X.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[Arker]

Like the supposed POSIX compliance, this was more vapour than reality.

Yes, you could get a version of NT4 compiled for PPC. But it was never at all useful. Why? Because windows relies on a blobware ecosystem and the vast majority of app vendors simply couldnt be bothered to clean up their code so it would compile on PPC and release it. So you have no apps. There were no 'universal binaries' for NT, and I cant remember a single application that actually offered a PPC port for NT (if there was one, there certainly werent many.) Hardware support was sketchy, and just getting it to install on a PPC machine could be a major hack job. And for what purpose with no apps? You could presumably, with enough work, find a way to get it to run x86 NT apps in emulation, but this would only make your fast, expensive PPC machine run your apps like a slow, cheap x86 box, and with a lot more work, so why bother? These are all the same reasons why NT on Alpha never took off as well, btw.

One possibility would come to mind with NT/PPC that would not with NT/Alpha, of course - the possibility of running apps intended for Macintosh PPC using a much thinner emulation layer since the processor is the same. This doesnt work either, however. PPC processors (and this is an overgeneralisation, in fact in some cases not true, but usually) are bi-endian, meaning they can be set to run little-endian OR big-endian code. However for decent performance you really need to pick one mode and stick to it. Mac software was all big-endian. NT is little-endian. So, like everything else positive about NT on PPC, this was only a theoretical benefit but not a practical one.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[jimicus]

It did. Unfortunately very few applications were released for the PPC, but you could dick around with Windows all you liked.

Mac's aren't PC's

[Anonymous Coward]

they're more like those pink triangles used to identify teh gheys during 1930's and 40's Germany.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[Lunix Nutcase]

Like the supposed POSIX compliance, this was more vapour than reality.

What do you mean "supposed"? Microsoft has supplied a POSIX layer for NT for over a decade.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[Anonymous Coward]

> Commodore didn't have a monopoly on Amiga OS?

Nope, because that's not what "monopoly" means.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[mikestew]

I think you need to go back and look up what "monopoly" means. Sure, it's a cool word to throw around on /. because it triggers responses (hell, I'm responding), and might even get you modded up. But words have meanings, and there's a _Princess Bride_ quote I'm holding back on.

Besides, it wasn't that long ago that running Windows on a Mac wasn't even a consideration, hacks or not. So one does not need imagine at all.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[Hatta]

In economics, a monopoly (from Greek monos / (alone or single) + polein / (to sell)) exists when a specific individual or an enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it.

You are saying that Commodore did not have sufficient control over Amiga OS to determine significantly the terms on which others would have access to it?

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[mikestew]

How about Apple filing suit against Psystar for creating Mac compatibles? Apple might as well sue Dell and Intel for making Mac Compatibles.

That might be, except for the fact that "creating Mac compatibles" wasn't Apple's complaint with Psystar.

Interesting to do but I don't really see the point

[Eggbloke]

My dad did this on his Dell laptop, it was the first time I got to use MacOS and after a little play around I decided I would much prefer to just use Ubuntu.

Re: your point being?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows NT supported the PPC platform since the NT 3.5.1 build. But it only ran on PREP (and later CHRP) compliant platforms. How many PPC Macs were PREP compliant?

IIRC, the only company to make any money from the PPC version of NT, or even give it serious support, was the Bull Group.

Keyboards are not that great.

[Anonymous Coward]

The keyboards are NOT great - maybe for the point and peck typist - but not for serious (and I mean real-serious) touch typing. They are simply not responsive enough nor can you adjust them. Try typing 180+ WPM on one for 20 minute intervals - you'll struggle or you'll spend an awful lot of time deleting to put that space in or that shift-key-[inserthere] character that should have gone in first time round.

In fact I resorted to using a dell keyboard that came with a cheap-end Desktop I bought 5 years ago and that is far more responsive and tactile than any Mac-own keyboard.

Don't believe the hype.

The mice are really bad compared to basic functionality - scroll wheel please not a stupid button thingy. The track pad I don't use so cannot comment on. Otherwise screens are nice to use for any period of time and while I have owned Macbooks (only until G4) I now use an imac and that is nice to use, there is relatively little fan noise. The build quality is superb, but really Apple...get a decent mouse and keyboard.

Re:Keyboards are not that great.

[copponex]

Bullshit. My average typing speed is 140+ and it's far better than having to depress a tall key for 10-15mm than a flat, larger key about 5mm. The feedback is enough to let you know you pressed a key, and not so much that it delays it any further.

For reference, look at my posting history for the last year here on /.

Re:Keyboards are not that great.

[Anonymous Coward]

The keyboards are NOT great.

I think it depends on the person typing. I hate the Mac keyboards (but love the Mac). I tried for three months to get used to it, but ended up going and getting a third-party Mac keyboard. I type pretty fast. I touch-type. The Mac keyboard will throw me every time.

By contrast, our receptionist got a Mac and tried out the keyboard and took to it like a duck takes to water. She types faster than I do, and her job depends on it.

But I can't stand them.

As far as the mouse is concerned: junk. Hate them. They're good for someone who has never used a mouse and has never seen anything different. What annoys me more about the Mac, though, is the lack of any way to turn off mouse accelleration without having to install some third-party hack. IMHO, though, the disadvantages to using Windows far outweigh the inability to turn off mouse accelleration.

Just my $.02.

Gwa?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have got to take issue with your timing:

iTunes (modest 12 gb library): 4 seconds.

Photoshop CS5: 13 seconds.

Spotlight: Broken? For what? I get results in ~1 second, with searches finished in the 5-10 second range.

This is on a MacBook Pro 2.2 ghz 4 gig's of ram.

iTunes needs a snappification, especially on Windows, where it's doggin', but really.

Re:Gwa?

[copponex]

I have a 68GB library, on an i7 MBP. It loads in twenty to thirty seconds. I have a 750GB hard drive that is 70% filled, and Spotlight simply doesn't work. Type in "Text" and it hangs for about 10 seconds before finally settling on TextEdit in the Applications folder.

Again, for most college kids, it's a fine OS. Ask it to be more than a media player and web browser that also runs Pages, and you're looking for trouble.

Re:Gwa?

[Anonymous Coward]

You may need to repair permissions if you're getting those kinds of response times. Also check to see if you have any hardware problems developing on that hard drive.

For reference, I have two 1TB hard drives (each about 65% full) and a 640G system drive, and Spotlight works nearly instantly. Photoshop CS4 loads in four seconds for me. It also renders Maya scenes blazing fast compared to my not-too-shabby PC that has two dual-core processors and 4G of memory. I mean, ya, the Mac Pro is newer, but only by a year. That's not enough to explain four and a half minutes versus thirty seconds. As far as iTunes is concerned, I only have a couple hundred megs of music, so mine wouldn't be a good benchmark.

I also have to say that the new Mac Pro running Leopard Server has outperformed our Windows servers amazingly in terms of stability and speed. There's way more that you can configure with Leopard server if you crack open the config files (which, if you can't do that, then you have no business administering a server IMHO) than you can in Server 2003. To be fair, though, Server 2003 is a lot older than Leopard server. Can't comment on Server 2008 or later, because I haven't worked with them yet.

All in all, I've been impressed with Apple computers, and I beat the crap out of them. One thing that other computer manufacturers have not caught on to, it seems, is the ease of working on a computer. The early 2009 Mac Pro, for instance. To open it, you pull a lever on the back, and the side pretty much falls off. The hard drives are in trays that you slide in and slide out as easily as if you were opening a drawer. The processor and memory are on another tray that slides out. No lacerated fingers from un-burred metal edges.

Oh dear, does that mean I'm worried about image?

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[QuantumBeep]

He didn't need to mention that. For every technical discussion, there's always some freak with a special case. You know damn well emulation wasn't what he was talking about.

Reminds me of a discussion I was having circa 2003, explaining that Windows XP does not have a DOS backend you can boot into. The freak of the day decided to join the conversation and say "No, you're wrong. I was able to boot into DOS using a floppy disk from Norton!"

Sometimes I think the true hobby of most computer hobbyists is trolling.

build?

[louden obscure]

I've been able to run OS X on my AMD gateway 5654 for a while now with only the addition of a cheap nvidia graphic card. you'd be surprised what the ability to read, comprehend and follow directions can accomplish.

Yes, if you don't count the experience

[Jonathan]

I created a Hackintosh and I think it taught me a lot about how OS X works "under the hood". If you don't see that as valuable, then no it isn't worth it.

I did it, though relying on the old x86 wiki

[MoriT]

For $500 I built a gaming machine that dual-booted nicely with much better hardware than I could get in a Mac Mini, especially the base version, and I've been able to upgrade it piece-meal in the four years since. Why? Well, there are some programs that are Mac-only, but mostly because I like the user interface for general day-to-day use. I can't get the polish yet in Linux. It may be purely aesthetic, but it matters to me.

I have a licensed copy for the machine, and stuck a mac sticker onto my case. No reason to break the EULA if I don't have to, and it just says "apple-labeled hardware" ;-)

IMHO, it's worth the time and effort.

[phillymjs]

If you're careful, hackintoshing is not that big of a hassle. I have two. The first one I built as an experiment about 2 years ago, just to see it for myself. It worked well enough that I put it into service as a fileserver in my home running OS X Server 10.5, replacing an ancient G4 2x450MHz machine. A couple weeks ago I upgraded it to OS X Server 10.6. It's rock stable and performs very well.

The second one is about a year old, and was built to replace two machines: an aging gaming PC, and an old Power Mac G5 that was my primary desktop. I chose my components carefully and got Mac Pro performance for about half the price, and the machine dual boots OS X 10.6 and Windows 7 Ultimate. I enjoy the occasional PC build, and for $1200 in savings, I didn't mind needing to get my hands a little dirty to get OS X running on it. Already having a functional Mac meant I could keep the hackintosh on my workbench for about a month, testing things risk-free, blowing it up and putting it back together, and generally figuring out every last little detail to make sure it would do what I wanted/needed and give me trouble-free operation.

It did take a little work to get them up and running, but once you reach that point you're pretty much set. I am pretty careful about updates since sometimes they do break things, but others usually figure out the fixes pretty quickly and post them on the sites where hackintoshers congregate. I also keep very good backups, via Time Machine as a matter of course, and by making bootable clones to secondary hard drives before I install anything major.

~Philly

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and it was extremely limited, IIRC not even supporting the networking syscalls. If the NT POSIX layer were any good, Cygwin wouldn't need to replicate the POSIX API at the user level.

Now of course there is the Interix product that adds a real useful POSIX layer (both API and userland), but this started as an expensive third party product that was bought out by MS. It was renamed to SFU and then SUA. It was formerly free to download but now it is only available bundled with the most expensive versions of Windows 7.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, Amiga only required custom roms that were specific to a given version of the OS.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[Anonymous Coward]

You are saying that Commodore did not have sufficient control over Amiga OS to determine significantly the terms on which others would have access to it?

No, I'm saying that a company always has complete control over its own products.

A creative work like Amiga OS is not equivalent to the whole market for operating systems. There was still competition in the OS market, which is not a commodity market.

By your logic, Firestone has a monopoly on Firestone tires and Krispy Kreme has a monopoly on Krispy Kreme donuts.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[Hatta]

By your logic, Firestone has a monopoly on Firestone tires and Krispy Kreme has a monopoly on Krispy Kreme donuts.

Yes, they do. Is that not obvious?

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[Lunix Nutcase]

Now of course there is the Interix product that adds a real useful POSIX layer (both API and userland), but this started as an expensive third party product that was bought out by MS. It was renamed to SFU and then SUA.

Yes and as I said, it has been supplied by Microsoft for over a decade. Since February 1999 to be exact.

It was formerly free to download but now it is only available bundled with the most expensive versions of Windows 7.

Formerly? I can go to this page and download it for free. Maybe you got confused by the "suggested registration" and assumed that meant it was no longer free?

Mr. random

[krischik]

Actually I would think the random person to thinks of a computer running of XP, Vista (making a disgusted face) and Windows 7 (smiling). M$ marketing has made sure of that.

And since the random person is likely to have a PC at work as well she/she won't consider a PC a home computer.

And if Mr or Mrs random works for a company with uses Linux he/she will still think that his/her work computer is a PC.

Of course this is just my educated guess.

Hmm

[speedingant]

I'm typing this on a $1000NZD Hackintosh right now. Has more power than the top end iMac configured with an i7 Processor. Runs latest OS, installed from a purchased DVD of Snow Leopard, and nearly every bit of the chipset is fully supported (and in fact in many of the current Macs). It's as stable as a normal Mac, at 1/3 the cost! I'm happy with that. Oh yeah, and I retrofitted it into a PowerMac G5 case, so it looks the business.

Re:Hmm

[speedingant]

For what it's worth, this is all the help you'll ever need. http://www.tonymacx86.com/ They have recommended builds, and a large community to help you with issues. 10 hours of research, 5 hours to build, and it was running smoothly.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[Arker]

Microsoft POSIX subsystem was carefully crafted to satisfy a federal procurement requirement without actually being useable at all. It implemented POSIX.1 only. It could not create a thread, open a socket, use RPC, etc. The one and only practical use for the thing was to circumvent the requirement for POSIX compatibility in the Federal Information Processing Standard 151-2.

Dont confuse this with the third party Interix/SFU implementation which replaced it starting with XP, and is actually somewhat useful.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[jedidiah]

Why would I want to do that?

VNC sucks and RDP in Windows 7 doesn't so Windows 7 is running on the mini for now (AnyDVD).

Plus my desktop machine is much more powerful than any of my minis.

I may be a zealot but I have no problem trying strange fruits to see what they offer.

Although it's nice to know if the great overhyped is all that it's cracked up to be. (it isnt)

This is why.

[Anonymous Coward]

> and annoys Apple.

Well, time for me to build a Hackintosh.

PPC vs Intel suspend/resume

[hackshack]

Clevenger, is it just me, or did the PPC Macs have better sleep/wake capability than the Intel Macs?

Used to be that when you closed the lid on an (aluminum) PowerBook, it'd go to sleep within one second flat. Same when opening the lid. On every Intel MBP I've used, including the 5 or 6 I've owned, when I close the lid, they whir and beep and bloop for almost 10 seconds - sometimes more - before going to sleep. On wake, it's usually faster than that, but typically is around 3 seconds to get a proper image. I've also seen waaaaay more "phantom sleep/wake" issues with the Intels, where a machine refuses to come out of sleep, etc. My hunch is it's something to do with re-purposed Intel hardware as opposed to purpose-built PPC hardware, EFI notwithstanding. Or, could be the "shadow hibernation" function saving to disk, which the GP was talking about.

Eh. Still smokes any PC I've used, though!

Re:PPC vs Intel suspend/resume

[TClevenger]

Clevenger, is it just me, or did the PPC Macs have better sleep/wake capability than the Intel Macs?

Oh good, it's not just me. I figured it was because my MBP was a first gen.

My current Toshiba Tecra running XP actually does a good job at sleeping and waking--much better than my MBP did. Though Toshibas use a non-standard power controller that requires a bunch of funky drivers to work properly, so there's that downside. (Well, that and the whole running Windows thing.)

Re:PPC vs Intel suspend/resume

[hackshack]

I suspect the non-standard, weirdly-driver'ed power controller is the only reason you're getting good sleep performance out of Windows. It's good to know Toshiba's putting in the effort to make that aspect of Windows nice. I've always had rotten luck with Windows sleep, so I'm one of those people that walks around with their laptop lid open. ;-)

Even with my latest Core i7 unibody, it's slow to sleep/wake. A little faster, but a PowerBook it ain't. Was just working on an old 1.66GHz PowerBook, and marveled at how fast that old beast did this.

Re:PPC vs Intel suspend/resume

[bill_kress]

The New version is doing the suspend/hibernate thing I mentioned in my post you were replying to--that's why it whirrs for a few seconds after you close the lid.

I think that can be disabled if you don't like it.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[log0n]

A monopoly is determined by size. Apple isn't a monopoly, it's just exclusive.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[jedrek]

Five years is 'relatively recently' in the world of computers?

That's not DRM

[Weaselmancer]

That's necessary hardware, not DRM.

Your argument is akin to saying that this word processor program has DRM in it because it won't work without this custom 'video card' board thingy in my machine.

Sure, the OS was tied to those chips. Because without them you wouldn't have video or audio.

DRM is a different animal. You have all the hardware you need, but there is a 'hurdle' you have to pass before something will decide to let you or not let you perform the given function.

Don't confuse necessary hardware with DRM. They're different.

Re:That's not DRM

[Mr_Escher]

Agreed with Weaselmancer... There was no DRM in the Amiga OS.

The ROM was licensed and, yes, to run an emulator you are supposed to buy a license. As for the custom chips, to say it is DRM has the argument the wrong way around. The software was written for that hardware - you seem to suggest that the hardware was made to make the software hard to copy.

My Ubuntu desktop has been compiled for some custom hardware called the 'x86 instruction set', but I wouldn't say that that was DRM.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[Anonymous Coward]

> Yes, they do. Is that not obvious?

You need to look up what a monopoly legally is, because the anti-trust authorities are not exactly going after Firestone and Krispy Kreme.

If every company has a "monopoly" on its own products, what would be the point of using a separate term for a normal business situation??

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[BlackSnake112]

NT ran great on the alpha cpus. Back in the 1990s through 2000 I saw many NT alpha machines. The alpha machines were faster then the Intel machines of the same era. The alpha cpus were much slower then the Intel based ones, but NT ran faster.

We finally migrated off of alpha cpus when we rebuilt the database systems using fiber channel storage systems. That was 1999.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[Arker]

Yeah, NT itself ran great on it, but if you needed applications it wasnt very appealing. Of course if your apps were in-house or Free then, yeah, it was workable, so I am assuming that was your situation. But if you wanted the usual commercial apps you would have been very disappointed.

Doesn't work on Home or Pro

[tepples]

I can go to this page [microsoft.com] and download it for free. Maybe you got confused by the "suggested registration" and assumed that meant it was no longer free?

Scroll down and see the system requirements: Enterprise, Ultimate, or Server. It won't run on a common Home Premium or Pro installation. So it's not free for most users, who would have to Anytime Upgrade.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not actually true. There are files, required to boot, that are encrypted and will be decrypted if the hardware id of (IIRC) the CPU matches one that Apple have shipped. Of course, these are frequently found in regular PCs now anyway.

Not sure what would be a "good reason", but

[ridgecritter]

I've used Macs since 1984. In my first startup, we had three IBM PCs, and my memory of using them was that I had user's manuals for everything in my lap, always. One day, our three PCs all croaked simultaneously for apparently different reasons, and my friend brought in his then-new Mac Classic. Two days later, we gave the PCs to a local high school and bought Macs. My memory of that transition is that I lost track of the user's manuals by the second day we had the Macs.

Since then I've used Macs whenever I had a choice. Not because they're the fastest, or most flexible, or the cheapest, or the best for somebody who wants to dig into the guts of the soft/hardware and make it do stuff, but because they acted more like a tool than a project and helped me do my work. I've checked in as various versions of Windows have come and gone, but the Mac has remained a better choice for me.

I've had my frustrations with Macs, and I'm not one of the fanbois who thinks Jobs and co. can do no wrong. But, gotta say, I still am utterly unconcerned with what antivirus apps I ought to have on my machine, pretty much everything I have wanted to plug into my Macs over the years has Just Worked as I wanted. The service I've gotten from Apple has been exceptional. I took a failing G4 MacBook in for its 3th service, two days before my AppleCare policy expired, and the Apple guy at the Genius Bar gave me (that's GAVE me) a new Intel MacBook without my having said more than "Hi, I'm back.". That's a level of customer service I value and that seems uncommon in the PC world.

As well, having a Mac frees me (almost) from Microsoft, which I've found to be a Good Thing over the years. I am troubled by Apple's continued construction of its walled garden, and I'm concerned it's another Microsoft in the making. But for now, their systems work better for me than the systems on the PC or *nix side.

YMMV, as always.

Old articles are awesome!

[MrCrassic]

First, they inform me about the dangers of "Free Public WiFi." Now, they're educating me on how to install OS X on my Dell. Even though I did it a year ago with MUCH less difficulty than when I tried three years ago, I could always learn, right?!

This is old news. eeePC's and Dell Mini 9's were super popular for being OS X friendly. I, and many, many others installed OS X using retail discs from the Apple Store. Why is this here?

Re:Old articles are awesome!

[Achromatic1978]

Yup... apparently they're even getting support for X58 motherboards and Hackintoshes this last couple of months...

Err, I was running a Hackintosh with an X58 board well over a year ago...

Preload versus distro

[Anonymous Coward]

Macs work well because they are only preloads i.e., OS tested and tuned for that particular HW. But if you use it as general purpose OS distro, it should be interesting

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[Achromatic1978]

Then you don't know anything about Amiga OS.

Workbench ROMs, all of which were copyright owned by Commodore and normally only sold with a complete system

Speaking of not knowing anything about Amiga. There was a huge market for Kickstart (the firmware, Workbench was the software) 2.0 ROMs and most people didn't buy a new system to upgrade.

Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a

[drsmithy]

That might be, except for the fact that "creating Mac compatibles" wasn't Apple's complaint with Psystar.

Absolutely it was. It was just argued more subtly than that.

Definition of rabid fanboi

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

Rabid Fanboi: Anyone you disagrees with you, and has the gall to explain why.
I should know, I used to be one. Now I just believe in using the best tool for the job.

Back to the computer business

[krischik]

No my Analogy is perfect. Because the “third parties” when we come back to computer would be Linux. And Linux installs fine on Apple, Dell, Acer and whatever else. And Apple does not prevent you from doing so.