Yes (eg: I bought my mother an iMac G5 and use it whenever I'm home). It's better, but it's still slow.
I have one of those 1 GHz iBook G4s too. It's dog slow, but that's because its FSB only runs at 133 MHz. It has nothing to do with the operating system.
The FSB on the Armada I'm comparing it to is even slower - 100Mhz.
I also have a Core 2 iMac, and one of the first things I did when I got it was to try out Windows XP Pro on Boot Camp. I didn't take the time to perform any thorough tests or benchmarks before I deleted the partition, but my general impression was that OS X was notably more responsive than XP on the same hardware - especially when it came to disk operations, for whatever reason. In short, I think your blanket assertion that OS X is "slower" than Windows, based on an uninformed and incomplete comparison of two different and outdated computers, could benefit from a little more research.
I've used nearly every Mac ever made and every version of OS X ever released. It's slow. It's certainly (significantly) faster than it was, but it's still slow. It doesn't multitask or scale as well as Windows and it's more resource-intensive. I'll grant that all those flashy effects like Dock icon scaling and Expose remain fairly snappy even when the system is under load, but since most of them don't really *do* anything useful, it's irrelevant.
I respectfully disagree, and I took my final exam in antitrust law this past Friday, so I'll toss in my $.02.
I must respectifully point out you're not disagreeing with me, you're disagreeing with the findings of the Microsoft antitrust case.
Short version: The judge who decided that case was biased, and Microsoft's lawyers screwed the pooch when they appealed the decision. I wouldn't bet one red cent on that finding being repeated if the case were re-tried today.
I agree completely. However, my point is that the law does(/did) not.
What's both entertaining and depressing in equal measure, is the number of Slashdot who argue one of the basic tenets the Microsoft antitrust case was founded on is incorrect, yet would turn around and agree immediately that the subsequent court findings were correct.
A good UI should present choices that are actions on the buttons themselves. "This program would like to access your e-mail address book. (Stop it from reading my addresses)(Let it read my addresses)." Such a UI does not condition users to always hit the same option because the options are always different. Also, even if they don't read the dialogue message, just the buttons themselves are enough to convey the actions they are taking. This aspect is a great deal more important than having a password prompt because common password prompts will still condition the user to enter their password without knowing what is going on.
Nothing that I'm aware of - especially since every other equivalent machine I've used acted the same way.
I dual boot Linux and 10.4.8 on my old 500 MHz G3, and they both run fine. In fact, I'm amazed at how well a 6-year old machine runs Apple's latest OS. Saying that OS X is "unbearably slow" sounds like either trolling or hyperbole to me.
If you consider OS X "fine" on a 500Mhz G3, then Windows XP should be equally "fine" on, say, a ~266Mhz P2 with 128M of RAM.
I'm guessing RAM is very important to Windows. OK not guessing, I know it is. XP runs pretty much like crap on a 900MHz P4 with 128MB RAM, and I can pretty much guarntee Vista wouldn't run at all. I'm not even sure my 2-year-old machine at work would run Vista well. I don't have enough OSX experience to compare, though.
RAM is important to all modern OSes. However, Windows XP is significantly less RAM-hungry than OS X (IMHO Vista is marginally less RAM-hungry than OS X, but I'm happy to call it a draw).
256MB is probably a reasonable minimum for XP. IME, 768MB is that same reasonable minimum for OS X and Vista.
Microsoft sells an OS that runs on Apple hardware.
Yes, they do (not that it's relevant).
Apple sells an OS preloaded on machines that can have Windows installed on them.
Yes, they do (not that it's relevant).
Apple is specifically marketing that they compete favorably with non-Apple x86 hardware by running both OS X and Windows. So Apple is competing directly with Microsoft's OS biggest customers (the pre-loaders like Dell and HP where the bulk of Windows sales go), who are reselling copies of Windows. They are taking sales from Microsoft's resellers.
Ironically, you've actually hit the nail right on the head here.
You are exactly correct - Apple competes with hardware resellers - HP, Dell, etc.
However, they do not compete with Microsoft.
How is that not competition again?
Because Apple don't sell Desktop PC Operating Systems. They only sell Operating Systems for Macs.
But to say it hasn't blurred and to assume that one judge will see things exactly as another did is just plain silliness.
Of course. But I'm not talking about what _might_ happen, I'm talking about what _did_ happen.
Dunno why you think Windows is faster than Mac OS X, but in my daily experience, Mac OS X is faster.
Because I have extensive experience with Macs, MacOS "Classic" and MacOS X.
Because I can put my 1Ghz iBook next to a ~500Mhz P3 laptop and *watch* Vista and OS X handle similar workloads practically identically, despite the iBook being more than twice as fast.
Because I think OS X has some really cool technology and I'd like to use it more, but I find the poor performance too annoying to do so.
How is Windows cheaper than Mac OS X?
Because the minimum buy-in point is lower. To get the features I want, I'd have to buy a Mac Pro. I can buy a PC with all the features I want for substantially less.
Have you even seen the prices for the pro-level copies of Vista?
It's irrelevant (and compares reasonably if you add up all those OS X upgrades anyway). I'm comparing the whole package, including the hardware, not retail prices of just the OS.
Does it run more software? Probably, but the apps which run on Windows and not on Macs are
But by running the same software on OS X, I have to subsequently put up with the relatively poor perfomance.
Oh, and yes, it is a knockoff. Although admittedly a poorly done knockoff.
No, it's not. Windows has been doing the things I'm interested in longer and better than MacOS has.
Although, it's a struggle to see how anything meaningful in Windows is a knockoff of OS X *at all*, regardless. Vista's compositing layer is much more advanced, its GUI behaves quite differently, its kernel is much more capable and mature, etc, etc.
Um, Microsoft ALSO brought up Linux (which DOES run on x86) as a competitor in the original case when trying to defend themselves.
Albeit not successfully. Hence they were found to be a monopoly.
Somehow I doubt you would have been up there arguing that Apple and Linux were Microsoft's competitor's, given that would have weakened the claim they were a monopoly.
Of course you will now tell me that the courts said that they were found to be a monopoly for "Microsoft Windows as a desktop OS for x86 platforms".
Linux (especially at the time) was hardly a competitor in the desktop OS market.
Whatever. Both Linux and Apple as competitors were used by MS in their defense.
Unsuccessfully. Ie: my point. Apple and Linux were *not considered comeptitors* by the courts, even though Microsoft said they were.
You seem to be missing the point. *I* am not arguing Microsoft and Apple (and Linux - albeit not at the time) do not compete at some level. I'm just pointing out that *the law* didn't/doesn't think they did/do.
I beg to differ. I worked at a part time job at my college in University Relations and they had an old 400mhz clunker with OS X on it. I didn't even know it was a 400mhz Mac. OS X was very responsive and pretty much the only thing that took a long time was the disk load time.
You either had the fastest 400Mhz Mac in the world, or exceptionally low standards.
Having run Vista personally I am wondering if you have even run Vista. The idea of running Vista, even Windows XP, on a 500mhz PC and trying to get anything done makes me shudder in fear and terror.
I think you're trolling. XP is well and truly usable on a ~500Mhz P3 w/512M of RAM. It doesn't get iffy until you're down into 300Mhz P2, 256MB RAM territory.
I must admit I was surprised at how fast Vista was on my old laptop. I wouldn't use it on that machine over XP, but it *was* fast enough for web browsing, email, office, and the like. I wouldn't feel bad about giving it to my mother to use.
Windows XP on a 1ghz PC is fine if you just browse the web and edit word documents, but it's sluggishly slow, especially if you have an antivirus agent and are trying to do multiple things at once.
Your 1Ghz PC is broken if it is "sluggish" running Windows under any sort of reasonable load.
A G5 Mac is incredibly powerful and responsive. Some guys at my part time work had one and I was blown away by how smooth everything was (they use a lot of multimedia apps like Photoshop, the Macromedia suite, etc.) I've had direct experience of both of those types of hardware and IME at any rate, I found the opposite to be true.
I've used just about every Mac ever made. A G5 Mac is, indeed, a very powerful machine in an absolute sense, but OS X brings it to its knees. Any more than a couple of Safari windows with half a dozen tabs each, a few terminals, Thunderbird and maybe a Word document or two, and my mum's 1.9Ghz, 1.5GB RAM iMac can't keep up.
I'm not sure that's the issue here. We're talking about Vista. The eyecandy in Vista is the part of the product that is being marketed to customers, and appears to be the only interesting feature that Microsoft was interested in completing.
If you think the only interesting thing in Vista is the GUI, you don't know anything about Vista.
Personally, *I* don't care about anything in Vista either. That's why I'm sticking with Windows 2000 and Windows XP on my parents' machines. Windows XP just got pretty stable. After the horrors Microsoft brought with Windows XP I really don't think I'm going to upgrade to Vista for a long time. Say, 5 years.
My two highest priorities are UI responsiveness and the ability to multitask lots of stuff. Windows absolutely shits all over OS X from a great height at both of these things, so I prefer Windows. I do own an iBook, however, and use OS X quite regularly both personally and professionally. There's a lot I like about it, but the poor performance is just a showstopper as far as I'm concerned.
Wait wait, wouldn't uncustomizable hardware be a lower cost of ownership, because you don't spend money on upgrades every 6 months?
No, it added _significantly_ to the initial purchase price because to get a decent dual monitor configuration, we would have had to purchase quad-core Mac Pros.
TCO isn't *only* about ongoing costs (and there's little to indicate they would have been lower anyway).
However, if I get a new laptop, it will probably be a Macbook Pro. Those things are really sweet. I would get it for the screen alone. I hope they can get the graphics drivers for linux on the macbook fully working, because that's what I really want on there.
Laptops are a different matter. After waiting a couple of months for the bugs to be shaken out, I'm eagerly awaiting the MacBook Pro work has purchased me. Even if I end up running Windows on it full-time, it's still a damn nice machine. The only things missing are a multibutton mouse and a decent docking station (and the ability to drive two external LCDs, but that's off into fantasy territory).
Unlikely, as addressed by other posters, apple has had next gen OS operations running almost continuously throughout their entire existance, [...]
Just like Microsoft, you mean ?
And the mac while popular at times was never near the monopoly level MS has gained.
If you apply equal standards, Apple has had the kind of monopoly Microsoft could only dream of.
Also not true, I read your secondary post, im not sure where you think XP can outperform a mac on 1/2 the hardware, [...]
Because I can look at my iBook sitting next to my Armada and compare. While the iBook smokes the Armada at single CPU-intensive tasks (as is expected), in terms of general UI responsiveness under typical (light, because it's all the iBook can take) workloads, Vista is marginally faster (I'll give OS X the benefit of the doubt and call it a draw) while Windows 2003 or XP are significantly more responsive.
With that said, I wouldn't recommend Vista on anything less than a 1Ghz, 1GB RAM PC - but since a machine like that is ca. 5 years old, it hardly seems unreasonable (I have such a PC here and it runs Vista quite snappily). By my same standards, I wouldn't recommend OS X on anything less than a G5 based iMac or 1Ghz+ dual G4 with 1.5GB RAM.
(I've got to admit I was surprised at the results. I only installed Vista on that old laptop for a laugh, much like the time I installed XP on a ca. 1995 dual Pentium machine to see if it would work.)
[...] i HAVE clean XP installs with performance tuned to minimum impact on PIII 800mhz w/512mb ram. That alongside a 3rd gen G3 imac with OSX 10.4. And the iMac is WAAAAAYYYY faster (still slow for me).
Bullshit. OS X is unbearably slow on anything sub-G4 (I have used it on Beige G3 PowerMacs and G3 iMacs, and have the bald patches to remember it by). To say it's better than Windows XP on a 800Mhz P3 - a machine more than capable of comfortably handling a typical browsing, email and office workload - doesn't even pass the laugh test.
I don't know what you're doing to your PCs to cripple them, but there's no need for them to be unusably slow like a G3 running OS X is. Heck, XP is usable for light tasks on P2 class machines with under 256M of RAM.
Mac's have always performed better under cmparable hardware under their contemporary OS's.
By what measure ? OS X was an atrociously poor performer until 10.3, when it made it up to just a very poor performer. 10.4 helped again by bringing that up to just "slow", but it remains at that - slow. On the hardware side, with a few notable (and short lived) exceptions like the G5 introduction, Macs haven't been faster since the very first round of G4-based PowerMacs.
Even ignoring just "feel", there are numerous sound technical reasons why Windows performs and scales better than OS X - not least of which is maturity.
Also, a 5 year old mac is much more usable than a 5 year old PC.
A 5 year old PC is ca. 1 - 1.4GHz P3 or ca. 1.5 - 2 Ghz P4 (or equivalent Athlons). More than adequate for day to day use and even contemporary gaming with a video card upgrade. A 5 year old Mac is a ~600Mhz G3 iMac or ~700Mhz G4 PowerMac.
Heck, it was only a year ago my main work PC was still a ~5 year old dual P3, and I used to run app workloads on that all the time which have brought every Mac I've tried short of a quad core G5 to their knees.
I understand you may not agree, but if you look in peoples houses and offices, you will find much more older macs still being actively used with much less complaints than any PC counterpart, this eventually address's the issue of cost. There is no question a PC at purchase is outright cheaper, but when you factor in maintence and lifespan, the equation balences out and begins to tilt towards the mac over time.
I will agree that the overall cost over, say, 5 years is about the same - but the difference (and my point) is that at the end of that 5 years you have (and have a
There were plenty of other competitors to the Mac besides Microsoft Windows: Amiga, NeXT, GEM, etc. Apple would still have been forced to innovate, or maybe they would have been steamrolled by PCs running NeXT, or the Amiga.
Which is basically my point. It's never been just Microsoft and Apple.
No, I'm not. I understand what you are saying perfectly.
*You* are the one not getting the points that *adding more RAM is not always possible* and *this is not meant to replace real RAM, but to supplement it*.
ReadyBoost is, essentially, a DIY version of harddisks-with-builtin-flash.
What a fucking sad day this is, when swapping to usbflash is a "feature" (instead of having a proper swap architecture that _naturally_ allows swap on any device).
ReadyBoost is not swapping.
And what a fucking sad day this is when you have to explain generously to persistent ignorants why this is a bad idea. Swap to floppy, children, and witness computing at the speed of your own minds.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Ironic that you should be calling other people "ignorant".
Now that Apple runs on x86, that line is blurring a little more.
No, it's not. Apple do not sell an OS for non-Apple computers (nor are likely to in the foreseeable future), therefore they do not compete with Microsoft in the desktop OS market.
OS X is the slowest mainstream OS on the market. Heck, Vista on an old ~500Mhz P3 laptop is snappier than OS X on my 1Ghz iBook. Windows XP or 2003 even more so. XP or 2003 on a 1Ghz iBook-era PC laptop absolutely trounces it.
OS X has a lot of nice features and very cool technology. Performance, however, is *not* a feature.
[...] not in fact cheaper, [...]
Well, that depends entirely on how much value you assign to Apple's software bundle and small hardware footprints. I assign little, since most of the functionality it bundles I'm not particularly interested in and I have loads of empty space under my desk. Add in the significant expense to get any sort of decent hardware flexibility and the comparison is even worse.
[...] particularly when you consider the average life of a Windows PC is about 3 years and a Mac, closer to 5 years.
Of course, the PC likely only cost 3/5th as much as the Mac in the first place or has 7/5 the performance.
This "Macs last longer" canard carries about as much truth as the "Macs have lower TCO" line. Apart from a handful of exceptions, over the last 5 - 7 years, PCs have consistently delivered more powerful hardware at equal or lower cost to Macs. Combine this with OS X's atrocious performance (especially in the past), lack of hardware options and configurability (especially on the low end) and the idea that Macs "last longer" in any sort of competitive sense is laughable. People may well hold onto their Macs for longer, but a Mac that's X years old will be slower in an absolute sense than a PC of equivalent age, and in a relative sense (how fast the whole package is) it will be slower still. You need a G5 class Mac with a gig of RAM or more for OS X to deliver the kind of responsiveness Windows XP can on ~1Ghz PCs with half as much memory.
Windows is so clearly a knockoff. It's the classic knockoff strategy, looks similar but lower quality.
For most of the things *I* care about, Windows does them better and has been doing them for longer. I fail to see where the "knockoff" is in this equation.
I don't use an Apple... I'm not a Mac zealot, and I'm speaking from experience in a corporate environment.
So where's the evidence of Macs having a lower TCO ? I'm not aware of any recent third-party studies, and I've done the maths before as to evaluate the possibility, with Macs being distinct losers (largely due to an incredibly rigid and uncustomisable hardware lineup).
Doesn't this totally break any security then? I mean, how hard is it to send a keypress from a program to a window?
Applications can't programmatically press the LUA prompt buttons, anymore than applications can sniff (and automatically enter at a later date) the password someone types into a sudo prompt.
Finally, as it's just ANOTHER "Are you really sure?" box, with no real indication what it's asking to do, why it's bothering you, or what's trying to do it (it just gives program names IME with the RCs, which often aren't that helpful to non techies) it fails the same as everything else. Users will just click until the "thing" they are trying to do works.
Exactly. It's no different to the sudo password prompts users blindly enter their passwords into.
However, taking away the need to type the password is the problem. If all they have to do is click OK, then they will just do it. It's like the dialog box for deleting a read-only file. People just click OK, and are done with it. If they have to type their password, they might stop and think about why it's asking for their password.
Historical evidence would suggest the practical difference is zero. People blindly type in their password when prompted. Heck, I've frequently watched numerous people type in several of their "standard" passwords until they hit the one that works.
I could even see lots of instances of the dialog popping up and the user just accidentally hitting enter.
This won't happen because the default button is "Cancel".
Possibly because they were typing in some other window, and the form stole the focus. Taking out the requirement for entering the password removes all good points about this feature.
The prompt (when in focus) darkens the rest of the display to near black and makes it quite obvious something "different" is happening. Functionally, it's no different to sudo prompts.
Imagine a user who just bought an x86 Macintosh running OS X 10.4. Apple would like to sell that user a desktop upgrade when 10.5 comes out. Microsoft would like to sell that user a desktop version of Windows. That makes Apple and Microsoft direct competitors on the Intel desktop PC market.
No, it doesn't. Because if you take the other example - some random PC user - Apple's OS is not an option for them.
Apple *very specifically* do not offer their OS to anyone who doesn't already own a Mac and, indeed, explicitly state OS X may only be run on Apple hardware. Apple do not sell OSes, they sell computers (and updates/upgrades to those computers). You may feel that Microsoft compete with Apple, but Apple clearly - and specifically - do not compete with Microsoft in the OS arena.
(Just to clarify, I agree completely that Microsoft and Apple compete for the same customers - but from a legal perspective, relevant to Microsoft's monopoly status, they are *not* competitors and never have been.)
Windows is a total mystery to those who only barely understand just enough *nix to run a live cd with kde/gnome.
Windows is usually a total mystery even to those who have mastered unix to the point of, say, writing kernel-level code.
Windows and *nix are functionally equivalent, just minor syntax differences to access the semantics.
Maybe if your view is from the orbit occupied by people who get confused when two or more windows are on the screen at the same time...
Except for those who use FreeBSD or Gentoo with complete source package installation by compiling everything including the kernel, you're just a binary whore beholden to Red Hat, Novell, etc. instead of Microsoft.
If you're using ports (or portage) the difference is still just semantics.
Heck, even if you're sucking files out of the developer's SVN repository and compiling it yourself, it's *still* just semantics. You're still just a "whore" beholden to whomever is writing the code.
Re:One "interesting" feature I didn't know about
on
David Pogue Takes On Vista
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Why not just buy real RAM, instead of using a flash drive.
* Maybe your machine is maxed out with RAM.
* Maybe you aren't comfortable with upgrading it yourself and can't afford to pay someone else.
* Maybe you don't understand what RAM even is.
* Maybe you want the performance benefits of both (ReadyBoost delivers improved performance, even to RAM-endowed systems).
Flash drives would die pretty fast if you tried to use them as swap space.
This isn't swap space (well, not literally) it's (effectively) a DIY version of the new flash+magnetic hard disks.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you even tried OS X on modern hardware?
Yes (eg: I bought my mother an iMac G5 and use it whenever I'm home). It's better, but it's still slow.
I have one of those 1 GHz iBook G4s too. It's dog slow, but that's because its FSB only runs at 133 MHz. It has nothing to do with the operating system.
The FSB on the Armada I'm comparing it to is even slower - 100Mhz.
I also have a Core 2 iMac, and one of the first things I did when I got it was to try out Windows XP Pro on Boot Camp. I didn't take the time to perform any thorough tests or benchmarks before I deleted the partition, but my general impression was that OS X was notably more responsive than XP on the same hardware - especially when it came to disk operations, for whatever reason. In short, I think your blanket assertion that OS X is "slower" than Windows, based on an uninformed and incomplete comparison of two different and outdated computers, could benefit from a little more research.
I've used nearly every Mac ever made and every version of OS X ever released. It's slow. It's certainly (significantly) faster than it was, but it's still slow. It doesn't multitask or scale as well as Windows and it's more resource-intensive. I'll grant that all those flashy effects like Dock icon scaling and Expose remain fairly snappy even when the system is under load, but since most of them don't really *do* anything useful, it's irrelevant.
I respectfully disagree, and I took my final exam in antitrust law this past Friday, so I'll toss in my $.02.
I must respectifully point out you're not disagreeing with me, you're disagreeing with the findings of the Microsoft antitrust case.
Short version: The judge who decided that case was biased, and Microsoft's lawyers screwed the pooch when they appealed the decision. I wouldn't bet one red cent on that finding being repeated if the case were re-tried today.
I agree completely. However, my point is that the law does(/did) not.
What's both entertaining and depressing in equal measure, is the number of Slashdot who argue one of the basic tenets the Microsoft antitrust case was founded on is incorrect, yet would turn around and agree immediately that the subsequent court findings were correct.
A good UI should present choices that are actions on the buttons themselves. "This program would like to access your e-mail address book. (Stop it from reading my addresses)(Let it read my addresses)." Such a UI does not condition users to always hit the same option because the options are always different. Also, even if they don't read the dialogue message, just the buttons themselves are enough to convey the actions they are taking. This aspect is a great deal more important than having a password prompt because common password prompts will still condition the user to enter their password without knowing what is going on.
On this, we can agree.
What's wrong with your hardware?
Nothing that I'm aware of - especially since every other equivalent machine I've used acted the same way.
I dual boot Linux and 10.4.8 on my old 500 MHz G3, and they both run fine. In fact, I'm amazed at how well a 6-year old machine runs Apple's latest OS. Saying that OS X is "unbearably slow" sounds like either trolling or hyperbole to me.
If you consider OS X "fine" on a 500Mhz G3, then Windows XP should be equally "fine" on, say, a ~266Mhz P2 with 128M of RAM.
I'm guessing RAM is very important to Windows. OK not guessing, I know it is. XP runs pretty much like crap on a 900MHz P4 with 128MB RAM, and I can pretty much guarntee Vista wouldn't run at all. I'm not even sure my 2-year-old machine at work would run Vista well. I don't have enough OSX experience to compare, though.
RAM is important to all modern OSes. However, Windows XP is significantly less RAM-hungry than OS X (IMHO Vista is marginally less RAM-hungry than OS X, but I'm happy to call it a draw).
256MB is probably a reasonable minimum for XP. IME, 768MB is that same reasonable minimum for OS X and Vista.
Thanks for proving my point about Microsoft claiming to have mamde something themselves.
Microsoft's contributions to OS/2 were significant.
NT was solely a Microsoft project.
Thanks. I was pretty sure you didn't actually have the brains to understand a simple sentence, but it's nice to get confirmation.
I understand your sentence perfectly, I just don't understand why you think it makes any sense.
Further, given your reluctance to elaborate, the only reasonable conclusion is you don't have any interest in discussing it.
Microsoft sells an OS that runs on Apple hardware.
Yes, they do (not that it's relevant).
Apple sells an OS preloaded on machines that can have Windows installed on them.
Yes, they do (not that it's relevant).
Apple is specifically marketing that they compete favorably with non-Apple x86 hardware by running both OS X and Windows. So Apple is competing directly with Microsoft's OS biggest customers (the pre-loaders like Dell and HP where the bulk of Windows sales go), who are reselling copies of Windows. They are taking sales from Microsoft's resellers.
Ironically, you've actually hit the nail right on the head here.
You are exactly correct - Apple competes with hardware resellers - HP, Dell, etc.
However, they do not compete with Microsoft.
How is that not competition again?
Because Apple don't sell Desktop PC Operating Systems. They only sell Operating Systems for Macs.
But to say it hasn't blurred and to assume that one judge will see things exactly as another did is just plain silliness.
Of course. But I'm not talking about what _might_ happen, I'm talking about what _did_ happen.
Dunno why you think Windows is faster than Mac OS X, but in my daily experience, Mac OS X is faster.
Because I have extensive experience with Macs, MacOS "Classic" and MacOS X.
Because I can put my 1Ghz iBook next to a ~500Mhz P3 laptop and *watch* Vista and OS X handle similar workloads practically identically, despite the iBook being more than twice as fast.
Because I think OS X has some really cool technology and I'd like to use it more, but I find the poor performance too annoying to do so.
How is Windows cheaper than Mac OS X?
Because the minimum buy-in point is lower. To get the features I want, I'd have to buy a Mac Pro. I can buy a PC with all the features I want for substantially less.
Have you even seen the prices for the pro-level copies of Vista?
It's irrelevant (and compares reasonably if you add up all those OS X upgrades anyway). I'm comparing the whole package, including the hardware, not retail prices of just the OS.
Does it run more software? Probably, but the apps which run on Windows and not on Macs are
But by running the same software on OS X, I have to subsequently put up with the relatively poor perfomance.
Oh, and yes, it is a knockoff. Although admittedly a poorly done knockoff.
No, it's not. Windows has been doing the things I'm interested in longer and better than MacOS has.
Although, it's a struggle to see how anything meaningful in Windows is a knockoff of OS X *at all*, regardless. Vista's compositing layer is much more advanced, its GUI behaves quite differently, its kernel is much more capable and mature, etc, etc.
Thanks. I was pretty sure you didn't actually have anything useful to contribute, but it's nice to get confirmation.
Um, Microsoft ALSO brought up Linux (which DOES run on x86) as a competitor in the original case when trying to defend themselves.
Albeit not successfully. Hence they were found to be a monopoly.
Somehow I doubt you would have been up there arguing that Apple and Linux were Microsoft's competitor's, given that would have weakened the claim they were a monopoly.
Of course you will now tell me that the courts said that they were found to be a monopoly for "Microsoft Windows as a desktop OS for x86 platforms".
Linux (especially at the time) was hardly a competitor in the desktop OS market.
Whatever. Both Linux and Apple as competitors were used by MS in their defense.
Unsuccessfully. Ie: my point. Apple and Linux were *not considered comeptitors* by the courts, even though Microsoft said they were.
You seem to be missing the point. *I* am not arguing Microsoft and Apple (and Linux - albeit not at the time) do not compete at some level. I'm just pointing out that *the law* didn't/doesn't think they did/do.
While you'ld be proudly switching DOS tasks in something Microsoft stole from some poor schmuck - just without those stupid icons.
OS/2 and Windows NT beg to differ.
I beg to differ. I worked at a part time job at my college in University Relations and they had an old 400mhz clunker with OS X on it. I didn't even know it was a 400mhz Mac. OS X was very responsive and pretty much the only thing that took a long time was the disk load time.
You either had the fastest 400Mhz Mac in the world, or exceptionally low standards.
Having run Vista personally I am wondering if you have even run Vista. The idea of running Vista, even Windows XP, on a 500mhz PC and trying to get anything done makes me shudder in fear and terror.
I think you're trolling. XP is well and truly usable on a ~500Mhz P3 w/512M of RAM. It doesn't get iffy until you're down into 300Mhz P2, 256MB RAM territory.
I must admit I was surprised at how fast Vista was on my old laptop. I wouldn't use it on that machine over XP, but it *was* fast enough for web browsing, email, office, and the like. I wouldn't feel bad about giving it to my mother to use.
Windows XP on a 1ghz PC is fine if you just browse the web and edit word documents, but it's sluggishly slow, especially if you have an antivirus agent and are trying to do multiple things at once.
Your 1Ghz PC is broken if it is "sluggish" running Windows under any sort of reasonable load.
A G5 Mac is incredibly powerful and responsive. Some guys at my part time work had one and I was blown away by how smooth everything was (they use a lot of multimedia apps like Photoshop, the Macromedia suite, etc.) I've had direct experience of both of those types of hardware and IME at any rate, I found the opposite to be true.
I've used just about every Mac ever made. A G5 Mac is, indeed, a very powerful machine in an absolute sense, but OS X brings it to its knees. Any more than a couple of Safari windows with half a dozen tabs each, a few terminals, Thunderbird and maybe a Word document or two, and my mum's 1.9Ghz, 1.5GB RAM iMac can't keep up.
I'm not sure that's the issue here. We're talking about Vista. The eyecandy in Vista is the part of the product that is being marketed to customers, and appears to be the only interesting feature that Microsoft was interested in completing.
If you think the only interesting thing in Vista is the GUI, you don't know anything about Vista.
Personally, *I* don't care about anything in Vista either. That's why I'm sticking with Windows 2000 and Windows XP on my parents' machines. Windows XP just got pretty stable. After the horrors Microsoft brought with Windows XP I really don't think I'm going to upgrade to Vista for a long time. Say, 5 years.
My two highest priorities are UI responsiveness and the ability to multitask lots of stuff. Windows absolutely shits all over OS X from a great height at both of these things, so I prefer Windows. I do own an iBook, however, and use OS X quite regularly both personally and professionally. There's a lot I like about it, but the poor performance is just a showstopper as far as I'm concerned.
Wait wait, wouldn't uncustomizable hardware be a lower cost of ownership, because you don't spend money on upgrades every 6 months?
No, it added _significantly_ to the initial purchase price because to get a decent dual monitor configuration, we would have had to purchase quad-core Mac Pros.
TCO isn't *only* about ongoing costs (and there's little to indicate they would have been lower anyway).
However, if I get a new laptop, it will probably be a Macbook Pro. Those things are really sweet. I would get it for the screen alone. I hope they can get the graphics drivers for linux on the macbook fully working, because that's what I really want on there.
Laptops are a different matter. After waiting a couple of months for the bugs to be shaken out, I'm eagerly awaiting the MacBook Pro work has purchased me. Even if I end up running Windows on it full-time, it's still a damn nice machine. The only things missing are a multibutton mouse and a decent docking station (and the ability to drive two external LCDs, but that's off into fantasy territory).
Unlikely, as addressed by other posters, apple has had next gen OS operations running almost continuously throughout their entire existance, [...]
Just like Microsoft, you mean ?
And the mac while popular at times was never near the monopoly level MS has gained.
If you apply equal standards, Apple has had the kind of monopoly Microsoft could only dream of.
Also not true, I read your secondary post, im not sure where you think XP can outperform a mac on 1/2 the hardware, [...]
Because I can look at my iBook sitting next to my Armada and compare. While the iBook smokes the Armada at single CPU-intensive tasks (as is expected), in terms of general UI responsiveness under typical (light, because it's all the iBook can take) workloads, Vista is marginally faster (I'll give OS X the benefit of the doubt and call it a draw) while Windows 2003 or XP are significantly more responsive.
With that said, I wouldn't recommend Vista on anything less than a 1Ghz, 1GB RAM PC - but since a machine like that is ca. 5 years old, it hardly seems unreasonable (I have such a PC here and it runs Vista quite snappily). By my same standards, I wouldn't recommend OS X on anything less than a G5 based iMac or 1Ghz+ dual G4 with 1.5GB RAM.
(I've got to admit I was surprised at the results. I only installed Vista on that old laptop for a laugh, much like the time I installed XP on a ca. 1995 dual Pentium machine to see if it would work.)
[...] i HAVE clean XP installs with performance tuned to minimum impact on PIII 800mhz w/512mb ram. That alongside a 3rd gen G3 imac with OSX 10.4. And the iMac is WAAAAAYYYY faster (still slow for me).
Bullshit. OS X is unbearably slow on anything sub-G4 (I have used it on Beige G3 PowerMacs and G3 iMacs, and have the bald patches to remember it by). To say it's better than Windows XP on a 800Mhz P3 - a machine more than capable of comfortably handling a typical browsing, email and office workload - doesn't even pass the laugh test.
I don't know what you're doing to your PCs to cripple them, but there's no need for them to be unusably slow like a G3 running OS X is. Heck, XP is usable for light tasks on P2 class machines with under 256M of RAM.
Mac's have always performed better under cmparable hardware under their contemporary OS's.
By what measure ? OS X was an atrociously poor performer until 10.3, when it made it up to just a very poor performer. 10.4 helped again by bringing that up to just "slow", but it remains at that - slow. On the hardware side, with a few notable (and short lived) exceptions like the G5 introduction, Macs haven't been faster since the very first round of G4-based PowerMacs.
Even ignoring just "feel", there are numerous sound technical reasons why Windows performs and scales better than OS X - not least of which is maturity.
Also, a 5 year old mac is much more usable than a 5 year old PC.
A 5 year old PC is ca. 1 - 1.4GHz P3 or ca. 1.5 - 2 Ghz P4 (or equivalent Athlons). More than adequate for day to day use and even contemporary gaming with a video card upgrade. A 5 year old Mac is a ~600Mhz G3 iMac or ~700Mhz G4 PowerMac.
Heck, it was only a year ago my main work PC was still a ~5 year old dual P3, and I used to run app workloads on that all the time which have brought every Mac I've tried short of a quad core G5 to their knees.
I understand you may not agree, but if you look in peoples houses and offices, you will find much more older macs still being actively used with much less complaints than any PC counterpart, this eventually address's the issue of cost. There is no question a PC at purchase is outright cheaper, but when you factor in maintence and lifespan, the equation balences out and begins to tilt towards the mac over time.
I will agree that the overall cost over, say, 5 years is about the same - but the difference (and my point) is that at the end of that 5 years you have (and have a
Who are you to say this isn't due to Microsoft dropping Windows for all other computer platforms?
I'm afraid I don't know what you're getting at.
There were plenty of other competitors to the Mac besides Microsoft Windows: Amiga, NeXT, GEM, etc. Apple would still have been forced to innovate, or maybe they would have been steamrolled by PCs running NeXT, or the Amiga.
Which is basically my point. It's never been just Microsoft and Apple.
You are missing the point.
No, I'm not. I understand what you are saying perfectly.
*You* are the one not getting the points that *adding more RAM is not always possible* and *this is not meant to replace real RAM, but to supplement it*.
ReadyBoost is, essentially, a DIY version of harddisks-with-builtin-flash.
What a fucking sad day this is, when swapping to usbflash is a "feature" (instead of having a proper swap architecture that _naturally_ allows swap on any device).
ReadyBoost is not swapping.
And what a fucking sad day this is when you have to explain generously to persistent ignorants why this is a bad idea. Swap to floppy, children, and witness computing at the speed of your own minds.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Ironic that you should be calling other people "ignorant".
Now that Apple runs on x86, that line is blurring a little more.
No, it's not. Apple do not sell an OS for non-Apple computers (nor are likely to in the foreseeable future), therefore they do not compete with Microsoft in the desktop OS market.
It's slower, [...]
OS X is the slowest mainstream OS on the market. Heck, Vista on an old ~500Mhz P3 laptop is snappier than OS X on my 1Ghz iBook. Windows XP or 2003 even more so. XP or 2003 on a 1Ghz iBook-era PC laptop absolutely trounces it.
OS X has a lot of nice features and very cool technology. Performance, however, is *not* a feature.
[...] not in fact cheaper, [...]
Well, that depends entirely on how much value you assign to Apple's software bundle and small hardware footprints. I assign little, since most of the functionality it bundles I'm not particularly interested in and I have loads of empty space under my desk. Add in the significant expense to get any sort of decent hardware flexibility and the comparison is even worse.
[...] particularly when you consider the average life of a Windows PC is about 3 years and a Mac, closer to 5 years.
Of course, the PC likely only cost 3/5th as much as the Mac in the first place or has 7/5 the performance.
This "Macs last longer" canard carries about as much truth as the "Macs have lower TCO" line. Apart from a handful of exceptions, over the last 5 - 7 years, PCs have consistently delivered more powerful hardware at equal or lower cost to Macs. Combine this with OS X's atrocious performance (especially in the past), lack of hardware options and configurability (especially on the low end) and the idea that Macs "last longer" in any sort of competitive sense is laughable. People may well hold onto their Macs for longer, but a Mac that's X years old will be slower in an absolute sense than a PC of equivalent age, and in a relative sense (how fast the whole package is) it will be slower still. You need a G5 class Mac with a gig of RAM or more for OS X to deliver the kind of responsiveness Windows XP can on ~1Ghz PCs with half as much memory.
Windows is so clearly a knockoff. It's the classic knockoff strategy, looks similar but lower quality.
For most of the things *I* care about, Windows does them better and has been doing them for longer. I fail to see where the "knockoff" is in this equation.
I don't use an Apple... I'm not a Mac zealot, and I'm speaking from experience in a corporate environment.
So where's the evidence of Macs having a lower TCO ? I'm not aware of any recent third-party studies, and I've done the maths before as to evaluate the possibility, with Macs being distinct losers (largely due to an incredibly rigid and uncustomisable hardware lineup).
Doesn't this totally break any security then? I mean, how hard is it to send a keypress from a program to a window?
Applications can't programmatically press the LUA prompt buttons, anymore than applications can sniff (and automatically enter at a later date) the password someone types into a sudo prompt.
Finally, as it's just ANOTHER "Are you really sure?" box, with no real indication what it's asking to do, why it's bothering you, or what's trying to do it (it just gives program names IME with the RCs, which often aren't that helpful to non techies) it fails the same as everything else. Users will just click until the "thing" they are trying to do works.
Exactly. It's no different to the sudo password prompts users blindly enter their passwords into.
However, taking away the need to type the password is the problem. If all they have to do is click OK, then they will just do it. It's like the dialog box for deleting a read-only file. People just click OK, and are done with it. If they have to type their password, they might stop and think about why it's asking for their password.
Historical evidence would suggest the practical difference is zero. People blindly type in their password when prompted. Heck, I've frequently watched numerous people type in several of their "standard" passwords until they hit the one that works.
I could even see lots of instances of the dialog popping up and the user just accidentally hitting enter.
This won't happen because the default button is "Cancel".
Possibly because they were typing in some other window, and the form stole the focus. Taking out the requirement for entering the password removes all good points about this feature.
The prompt (when in focus) darkens the rest of the display to near black and makes it quite obvious something "different" is happening. Functionally, it's no different to sudo prompts.
Imagine a user who just bought an x86 Macintosh running OS X 10.4. Apple would like to sell that user a desktop upgrade when 10.5 comes out. Microsoft would like to sell that user a desktop version of Windows. That makes Apple and Microsoft direct competitors on the Intel desktop PC market.
No, it doesn't. Because if you take the other example - some random PC user - Apple's OS is not an option for them.
Apple *very specifically* do not offer their OS to anyone who doesn't already own a Mac and, indeed, explicitly state OS X may only be run on Apple hardware. Apple do not sell OSes, they sell computers (and updates/upgrades to those computers). You may feel that Microsoft compete with Apple, but Apple clearly - and specifically - do not compete with Microsoft in the OS arena.
(Just to clarify, I agree completely that Microsoft and Apple compete for the same customers - but from a legal perspective, relevant to Microsoft's monopoly status, they are *not* competitors and never have been.)
Windows is a total mystery to those who only barely understand just enough *nix to run a live cd with kde/gnome.
Windows is usually a total mystery even to those who have mastered unix to the point of, say, writing kernel-level code.
Windows and *nix are functionally equivalent, just minor syntax differences to access the semantics.
Maybe if your view is from the orbit occupied by people who get confused when two or more windows are on the screen at the same time...
Except for those who use FreeBSD or Gentoo with complete source package installation by compiling everything including the kernel, you're just a binary whore beholden to Red Hat, Novell, etc. instead of Microsoft.
If you're using ports (or portage) the difference is still just semantics.
Heck, even if you're sucking files out of the developer's SVN repository and compiling it yourself, it's *still* just semantics. You're still just a "whore" beholden to whomever is writing the code.
Why not just buy real RAM, instead of using a flash drive.
* Maybe your machine is maxed out with RAM.
* Maybe you aren't comfortable with upgrading it yourself and can't afford to pay someone else.
* Maybe you don't understand what RAM even is.
* Maybe you want the performance benefits of both (ReadyBoost delivers improved performance, even to RAM-endowed systems).
Flash drives would die pretty fast if you tried to use them as swap space.
This isn't swap space (well, not literally) it's (effectively) a DIY version of the new flash+magnetic hard disks.