>> I shut my linux pc - oh excuse me, box - down by typing init 0. What is your point?
The point is that you are using the wrong command for the job, and your Linux box shouldn't allow this, and this is what I get from Mac OS X:
bash-2.05a$ sudo init 0 init: already running
According to the init man page:
"The init program is the last stage of the boot process. It normally runs the automatic reboot sequence as described in reboot(8), and if this succeeds, begins multi-user operation."
In other words, init is NOT supposed to be used on its own on a proper UNIX system. Maybe you should consider switching to Mac OS X.
>> Bigger? Are you really sure about that? Windows (how many versions?), IIS, Office (with all the components), VS, the whole.NET thing, and probably plenty of others I have missed. What about apple? The OS's, iApps. Uh, hmm. Anything else?
Yes, I am pretty sure that there is an Apple counterpart for virtually every MS product, and Apple is usually a few years ahead of MS.
But the opposite is not true. For instance, MS doesn't have any high end software (with prices up to $10,000) for Pro Digital Production, while Apple dominates the market with powerful multi-platform tools: Final Cut Pro for nonlinear video editing, Shake for movie composition, DVD Studio Pro for DVD authoring, and Logic for music production.
Here is an incomplete list of other Apple software products:
Mac OS - first mainstream desktop OS with a legendary GUI; Mac OS X - lickable Aqua GUI with rock solid BSD UNIX and Mach Microkernel; Darwin Open Source - first open source UNIX from a major computer company; Darwin Streaming Server - the only multi-platform open source media server; QuickTime - grandad of media player; Sherlock - access Web services without a browser; Newton OS - first PDA with hand-writing recognition; WebObjects - a cross-platform pioneer of enterprise application server; FileMaker - easy and powerful database solution; AppleWorks - seamlessly integrated office application for word processing, drawing, painting, spreadsheet, database, presentation; Keynote - smaller and better than PowerPoint; Safari - much faster and better looking than IE; iLife (iDVD, iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes) - free and powerful digital media tools unmatched by MS; Interface Builder and Project Builder - free and first class professional programming tools for developing Carbon / Cocoa / UNIX applications with Java / C / C++ / Objective C / C++; and the list goes on and on.
Further more, there are so many other technologies that are either invented or made popular by Apple: GUI, mouse, laser printer, color display, floppy drive, SCSI drive, color sync, AppleTalk, AppleScript, Dylan, FireWire, USB, AirPort Wireless, rendezvous, Gigabit Ethernet, etc.
>> While Microsoft certainly followed Apple into the era of the GUI, they've made notable improvements to the GUI. There are others, of course; only the most rabid anti-MS zealot could claim that they've *never* done *anything* innovative.
What improvements? You mean the Start menu used to Shut down Windows, or the ever annoying Office Clippy whose final removal from Office XP became a feature celebrated with a Flash movie http://www.microsoft.com/Office/clippy/ by its creator, or the beloved Registry.
Microsoft is 60 times bigger than Apple with over $40 billions in the bank, but produces virtually zero innovation. Even more amazingly, a hardware company like Apple actually has a bigger and better software portofolio than MS.
A 1.8 GHz Opteron or a 3 GHz P4 consumes about 80 W, compared to 40 W of a 1.8 GHz PPC 970.
More importantly, a 1.2 GHz PPC 970 burns only 19 W, which makes it possible for Apple to design cool and sexy fortables without huge heat sinks or noisy fans.
The low energy consumption is also critical for 24/7 servers, it reduces electricity bills and hardware failures. So I can't really see why Apple or anyone else should be too excited about the hot chip.
With Safari, Keynote and quite probably another sectret Apple office application that could kill MS Office on the Mac, fewer and fewer Mac users are going to pay MS $500 for its bloated and buggy software, so Apple has really nothing to worry about upsetting the Beast anymore.
Apple is in a very strong position to grow and compete with MS and the Wintel box makers by releasing OS X on X86 and making computers based on both PPC and AMD / Intel.
Apple is the best in industrial design and capable making powerful and stylish computers better than those clueless box makers like Dell.
Amazingly, despite being 60 times smaller than MS, Apple actually produces more and better software than the Redmond bully: WebObject, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Shake, FileMaker, AppleWorks, Safari, Keynote, Darwin Streaming Server, iLife,...
>> i do not have an osx box, so i can not verify your suggestions about the menubar and all. however, something is clearly wrong if i didnt see it, isnt it?
Yeah, either your brain is wrong or you haven't got one. The name of the active application is always the first item on the menubar, but obviously that's too well hidden for over educated power users like you and your boss.
Are you really smart enough to work with Linux? You definitely smell like a poor Windows victim used to the stupid idea of shuting down your Pee Cee by clicking the Start button.
>> i first thought that the problems i was encountering came from overeducation - i admit i have been spoiled by bash and context menus on left click.
Overeducation in what? You are kidding yourself. A middle-aged lady next door has never touched a computer till she bought an iBook recently. With a bit help from me on a few occasions, she has pretty much figured out most of the things on her own and is a very happy OS X user. In fact, she now spend hours everyday playing games, listening music, watching DVD, surfing the Web with the AirPort wireless and broadband.
And by the way, you must be the only "power user" in the world who doesn't know that OS X has bash (as well as csh, tcsh, zsh) and contextual manual.
>> what i do know is that i am never touching that thing again unless it has the full suite of gnu utilities on it and presents me with a terminal window that clearly states 'console' in the titlebar.
WTF are you talking about? There are many different terminal applications on OS X, and they shouldn't be titled "console" because they are not. You obviously don't know what is a console, but there is a separate OS X application called "Console" under/Applications/Utility.
The Charlie White benchmark is a very unprofessional piece of work. It reads more like an interview with the Dell product manager, and he might get paid by the Dell marketing department for that.
>> Macintosh products bring 10% (double the apparent Macintosh market share) or even 20% of Adobe's sales.
It's actually 30% according overall, according to Adobe's latest report. Excluding consumer products like Acrobat and Photoshop Album, the figure may well be over 50% for their professional lines.
Again, you need to look at the whole picture, not just CPU and bus speed. My 700 MHz iBook just feels more responsive than a more expensive Sony Vaio with twice the clock rate for most of my daily tasks, and my 400 MHz iBook bought 4 years ago is faster and more stable than my 800 MHz PC.
I used Win XP everyday up till a few months ago just for Outlook and IE with a few Java applet runningand, the performance kept degrading gradually through each working day. The machine was shut down every night and booted up in the morning, it still managed to crash a few times a week. In contrast, my iMac and iBook gets used much more heavily and would run continuously for weeks or months without crashes or rebooting.
It appears to me that you want a premium product without paying the premium price, which is just not reasonable. From what I can see, a $999 eMac with a gorgeous 17" flat CRT screen and a 700 MHz G4 will do you quite nicely, and for $300 more you get a 800 MHz G4 with a DVD burning superdrive plus more RAM and bigger hard drive. For this price, you can't find me a Wintel machine that match the Apple quality and design, and don't forget the Mac also comes with tons of free and high quality software that money can't buy in the Wintel world.
Once again, Macs are designed to last for years, so don't ignore features that may not be immediately useful to you today. Generally, Mac users tend to be more creative and productive with their computers because everything is easier and Just Works with no fuss.
My next door neighbor is a mid-aged lady who never ever touched a computer until she bought an iBook a few weeks ago. Initially, she was worried about everything. But after 2 hours basic training, she discovered how intuitive and natural Mac OS X is to use and quickly developed the confidence to poke around with her instinct. The next time she came around, she was playing the GNU chess with voice command, and the only question she asked me was how to switch off the voice recognition! Now she has also got the broadband connection and her own AirPort network, and is sitting outside in the garden surfing the Web and learning Unix at this very moment.
>> But FW800 is out and how many devices are out there that us it over 400?
Unlike your typical Wintel junks, a Mac is supposed to last for years, not just for 6 months, so perhaps FireWire 800 will be indispensible in a year or two. You need a bit of vision.
My iMac bought 4 years came with Ethernet / USB / FireWire / 80211.b, when my boss paid 50% for a huge Dell box with 2 flopy drives! Now 4 years later, my iMac is used 24 hours a day as a network gateway and an Airport software base station, my wife use it to do genetic research (BLAST, statistics, gene sequencing, Word and Excel, Web, Google, email) and play music and DVD, and the kids play games. Meanwhile, my boss's ugly Dell junk has long been unusable, after several upgrades with new hard drive, CPU, DVD, USB and FireWire.
The amazing thing is that the iMac just feels faster and faster with each new version of OS X, and I haven't spent any money to upgrade it other than $50 or so for 256 MB RAM. What's more, it still gives me such pleasure to look at that translucent and beautifully designed marvel.
>> I personally feel that it is totally wrong to buy old/dated hardware at a premium. If the software they include is worth so much, but the hardware is dated, then apple should lower the prices to be inline with PC makers.
You have to remember that a computer is a complex system consisting of many vital parts (both software and hardware) working together - not just CPU, much like a car is not just a engine. Apple is the only company in the industry capable of making seamlessly integrated hardware and software system with elegant design, which is why Macs are better than Sony and IBM, let alone Dell or Walmart.
Take the 17" PowerBook for instance, it might be too expensive for you and me, but technically no Wintel laptop can remotely match its features: FireWire 800, gigabit Ethernet, 802.11g AirPort Extreme, Bluetooth, 1" thick, 17" wide screen LCD, 6.5 lb, 4.5 hours battery, 1 GHz G3, rock solid Unix core, best GUI.
The clock rate of a CPU is generally not a good measure of performance across different computer architecture, and most definitely not the only factor to consider. Unfortunately, there are so many clueless people like you in this world who just don't understand this simple fact.
I don't know what you do and how much computing power you actually need, but I know that most of the GHz Wintel machines out there are idling most of the time. And most annoyingly, the same people who complains that a dual 1.4 GHz PowerMac is too slow are most likely to suggest that FireWire 800 or gigabit Ethernet are too fast for them!
It's more like a case of Intel muddling up the water with its monoply power.
USB is good for low bandwidth device such as keyboard or mouse, and Apple was the first computer maker to adopt it years before the Wintel box makers. FireWire is so much better for high speed devices like digital camcord or hard disks, and USB2 is just not good enough. It was a nice and simple choice before Intel started to dump its own inferior technology over the consumers.
Now with FireWire 800 and perhaps 1600 and 3200 in the horizon, Apple is clearly leading the march again. Why don't we just accept the best technology and move on.
I personally think your average PC idiots are just too dense to see things beyond one or two bare numbers to realize that Apple products are actually cheaper than those from any of the branded Wintel top dogs like Sony or even Dell. Maybe you guys just haven't acquired the taste for the superior overall design and longevity of the Mac, but you have to look at the whole picture not just the CPU and the hard drive.
Take software for instance, how do you value something like iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, iDVD, iSync, iCal, AppleWorks, etc? In the Windows or Linux world, you simply can't get such high quality products even if you don't spend $100 a piece.
For me as a programmer, MS Visual Studio.NET costs between $1000 up to $3500, while every copy of Mac OS X comes with all these
FileMerge.app IORegistryExplorer.app Ic onComposer.app Interface Builder.app Jar Bundler.app JavaBrowser.app MallocDebug.app Obj ectAlloc.app OpenGL Info.app OpenGL Profiler.app OpenGL Shader Builder.app PEFViewer.app PackageMaker.app Pixi e.app Project Builder.app Property List Editor.app Quartz Debug.app Sampler.app Thread Viewer.app USB Prober.app icns Browser.app
and many more for free, and they are not just small programs - things like Interface Builder and Project Builder are as great and powerful as you can dream of.
And there are many other advantages: less virus, less crash, less noise, less heat, instant sleep and wake up, etc. So you see, Mac users are not stupid and they love the platform for very good reasons: Macs are cheaper to own, sexier to look at and make us more productive.
>> Now there is a USB2 chip on the pmacs, but Apple won't allow that to be used.
Why is this such a big deal? In addition to less CPU usage and more power for external devices, even FireWire 400 is faster than USB2 in the real world. Now Apple have introduced FireWire 800 which is twice as fast, why should they bother with USB2?
>> Macheads with the computer world so very Windows focused why do you still buy macs?
You sound like a lemming with just enough brain to follow the crowd, and not smart enough to know what you are missing.
I have been programming C++ and Java on Unix and Windows professionally for many years, and now do everything usinf OS X on a 700 MHz iBook and never been happier and more productive.
Mac OS X is just so much better than anything else out there: open source kernel, rock solid Unix, beautiful and sexy GUI, best-of-breed multimedia software, free and powerful programming tools. Most importantly It Just Works, unlike Linux or Windoze.
My iBook gets used over 12 hours a day and carries on for days and weeks without rebooting or crashing. It's virtually silent, goes asleep and wakes up in a second or two.
The iBook costs as little as $999 - actually cheaper than a branded Wintel laptop with similar spec - but comes with tons of more first rate software, and it just doesn't feel slow at all. And just in case you suspect that it's not heavily loaded, take a look at the "top" listing:
>> Yes, but if you work 8 hours per day, 7 of which is waiting for things to render, it *does* make a difference.
You sound like a stupid robot. Sitting in front of a ugly Dull waiting for rendering? You can write a script to do it and move on to something more interesting or at least sexier. Ever heard multi-tasking?
Date: Wed Mar 26, 2003 11:23:16 am Europe/London To: cwhite@digitalmedianet.com Subject: Mac vs. PC
You should really be shamed of yourself for such unprofessional journalism. Your so called benchmark is totally unscientific, and half of the article sounds like an interview with the Dell product manager.
Not sure whether you are paid for it, but you are helping a cheap box maker and shameless parasite who has done virtually nothing to the computer industry other than profited from other's R&D, and hurting a company that has ignited the PC revolution and invented so many things that have made it possible the like of Dell and MS to make money. Despite its small market share, Apple remains the technological leader and innovates faster than the Wintel copycats that make 10 or 100 times more money. Do you really wish Apple go under? I for one just can't bear the thought of a world full Dull boxes and dirty Windows.
For God sake and your credibility, don't ever mix marketing with your own benchmarking - do a proper interview with a Dell executive and quote more reliable sources. I am not sure you are competent enough to do a proper benchmark, but you should at least try to be a little more precise about the price / hardware configuration and less biased in choosing your tests - learn from the professionals like Tom's Hardware if you need help.
There are several points that immediately render your benchmark meaningless:
(1) AE is not designed for multi-processor system or optimized for Altivec, so the second CPU and the superior G4 architecture are most likely ignored. You could easily confirm this by turning on the CPU Monitor if you have acted with a bit more professional journalism.
(2) Adobe is being driven out of the DV market by Apple's own Final Cut Pro and Shake which are taking Hollywood by storm and challenging Avid from top to bottom, so an AE benchmark is hardly relevent.
(3) Your choice of tests are just too limited to prove anything. Why not add some better designed programs like Maya or LightWave?
(4) The price comparison is pure nonsense - a dual 1.25 GHz G4 costs as little $1999 (nearly $1000 cheaper than the $2964 Dell box, not $629 more expensive as you repeatedly suggested) and still comes with more features such as Firewire 800.
(5) We all know that benchmarks can be designed to confirm whatever we want to believe, which is particularly true when they are based on a single application. So why should anyone care about this one?
Hope you learn from the mistakes and do a better job next time.
Only an idiot like you is cheeky enough to compare a crappy pile of parts with zero applications to a high end Apple system that comes with tons of programs. And being a tight bastard, you probably going to spend the rest of your life to roll your own software to run the useless thing.
I would choose an eMac over your POS for any purpose. And for $1999, you can get
? Power Mac G4 Dual 1.25GHz w/1MB L3 per proc. ? 256MB DDR333 SDRAM (PC2700) - 1 DIMM ? 80GB Ultra ATA drive ? Optical 1 - Combo Drive (DVD/CD-RW) ? Optical 2 - None ? ATI Radeon 9000 Pro w/64MB DDR ? 56K internal modem ? Apple Pro Keyboard - U.S. English ? Mac OS - U.S.
which is not that much more than yours when you remember to add on some minimum cost for software.
By their own admission, Adobe started out on the Mac and continue to get a very large portion of their revenue from Mac users.
It is really a very sad saga and a shameless and risky tactics for major software company to openly take side, particularly when Apple is making solid progress in all fronts with Mac OS X and Xserve and many other pieces all falling into places.
And Adobe know damn well the benchmark is bogus, because After Effects is not optimized for Altivec or multiprocessor system.
Charlie White article and the website appears rather crude and unprofessional. His so called DV benchmark is mostly about After Effects with imported Photoshop or Illustrator files.
There are several points that render the benchmark meaningless:
(1) AE is not designed for multi-processor system, so the second CPU is most likely unused, and he could easily confirm this by turning on the CPU Monitor if he has acted with a bit more professional journalism. Why hasn't he tested some better designed programs like Maya or LightWave?
(2) Adobe is being driven out of the DV market by Apple's own Final Cut Pro and Shake which are taking Hollywood by storm and challenging Avid from top to bottom, so an AE benchmark is hardly relevent.
(3) He gave very little details about the Dell box and the price comparison is pure nonsense - a dual 1.25 GHz G4 costs as little $1999 (nearly $1000 cheaper than the $2964 Dell box, not $629 more expensive as he repeatedly suggested) and still comes with more features such as Firewire 800.
(4) We all know that benchmarks can be designed to confirm whatever we want to believe, which is particularly true when they are based on a single application. So why should anyone care about this one?
The guy talks like a Dell marketing person, and 30% of the article is essentially an interview with a Dell product manager, which could almost make you believe that Dell has invented the PC. But we all know that Dell is just a cheap box maker and parasite that profits from other's R&D and has contributed zero to the industry, while Apple has ignited the PC revolution and continues to lead in both hardware and software innovtions.
To put things in balance, here is an article from Mac Night Owe:
THE MAC NIGHT OWL NEWSLETTER *** Issue #139*** July 27, 2002
THE STRANGE CASE OF THE DUELLING BENCHMARKS
Benchmarks are probably little different from statistics. You can manipulate them any way you want, and let the buyer beware. But recently I decided to succumb to benchmark mania and put a dual-gigahertz Power Macintosh G4 up against one of those 2.2Ghz Pentium 4 PC boxes to see if Apple's claims of superiority had any merit.
Yes, it's true that the Pentium 4 has reached 2.53Ghz and is growing, but I used the hardware I had at hand. If the more powerful Pentium 4 computer scales up in a normal fashion, the differences wouldn't be that great, right? The first installment of this "smackdown" appeared in my Mac Reality Check column, carried by Gannett News Service online and in a number of the chain's daily newspapers, and later at usatoday.com.
My goals were modest, and that was to demonstrate whether Apple's benchmarks were real or not. That, of course, required running the exact tests myself. Apple sent me a CD containing a Photoshop file, a set of Photoshop Actions and an Adobe Acrobat file explaining how to perform the benchmarks. Now there is a silly rumor out there, which some folks buy into, claiming that Apple uses a specially designed version of Adobe Photoshop and somehow cripples the PC so it won't perform at full efficiency. Worse, some folks feel the tests are really tricks to make it seem as if the Power Mac is faster. However, my experience showed no evidence of any such thing.
In fact, there is nothing controversial or strange about Apple's methods. The file they use is a perfectly ordinary color photograph and the nine Photoshop filters used perform perfectly normal functions, such as resizing, changing color modes and so on. In fact, they are remarkably unsophisticated. Since I acquired the Windows box for my test directly from its manufacturer, Sony, there was nothing Apple could do to manipulate the results.
Regardless, I got scores of e-mails from folks who managed to misrepresent every element of the test. The excuses were silly and sometimes outlandish, such as the suggestion that a Photoshop Actions file can only run on a Mac, in which case how does one explain how it ran perfec
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>> I shut my linux pc - oh excuse me, box - down by typing init 0. What is your point?
The point is that you are using the wrong command for the job, and your Linux box shouldn't allow this, and this is what I get from Mac OS X:
bash-2.05a$ sudo init 0
init: already running
According to the init man page:
"The init program is the last stage of the boot process. It normally runs the automatic reboot sequence as described in reboot(8), and if this succeeds, begins multi-user operation."
In other words, init is NOT supposed to be used on its own on a proper UNIX system. Maybe you should consider switching to Mac OS X.
>> Bigger? Are you really sure about that? Windows (how many versions?), IIS, Office (with all the components), VS, the whole .NET thing, and probably plenty of others I have missed. What about apple? The OS's, iApps. Uh, hmm. Anything else?
Yes, I am pretty sure that there is an Apple counterpart for virtually every MS product, and Apple is usually a few years ahead of MS.
But the opposite is not true. For instance, MS doesn't have any high end software (with prices up to $10,000) for Pro Digital Production, while Apple dominates the market with powerful multi-platform tools: Final Cut Pro for nonlinear video editing, Shake for movie composition, DVD Studio Pro for DVD authoring, and Logic for music production.
Here is an incomplete list of other Apple software products:
Mac OS - first mainstream desktop OS with a legendary GUI; Mac OS X - lickable Aqua GUI with rock solid BSD UNIX and Mach Microkernel; Darwin Open Source - first open source UNIX from a major computer company; Darwin Streaming Server - the only multi-platform open source media server; QuickTime - grandad of media player; Sherlock - access Web services without a browser; Newton OS - first PDA with hand-writing recognition; WebObjects - a cross-platform pioneer of enterprise application server; FileMaker - easy and powerful database solution; AppleWorks - seamlessly integrated office application for word processing, drawing, painting, spreadsheet, database, presentation; Keynote - smaller and better than PowerPoint; Safari - much faster and better looking than IE; iLife (iDVD, iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes) - free and powerful digital media tools unmatched by MS; Interface Builder and Project Builder - free and first class professional programming tools for developing Carbon / Cocoa / UNIX applications with Java / C / C++ / Objective C / C++; and the list goes on and on.
Further more, there are so many other technologies that are either invented or made popular by Apple: GUI, mouse, laser printer, color display, floppy drive, SCSI drive, color sync, AppleTalk, AppleScript, Dylan, FireWire, USB, AirPort Wireless, rendezvous, Gigabit Ethernet, etc.
Where do you get that silly idea from?
No, you use "shutdown" or "reboot" or "halt" in UNIX.
>> While Microsoft certainly followed Apple into the era of the GUI, they've made notable improvements to the GUI. There are others, of course; only the most rabid anti-MS zealot could claim that they've *never* done *anything* innovative.
What improvements? You mean the Start menu used to Shut down Windows, or the ever annoying Office Clippy whose final removal from Office XP became a feature celebrated with a Flash movie http://www.microsoft.com/Office/clippy/ by its creator, or the beloved Registry.
Microsoft is 60 times bigger than Apple with over $40 billions in the bank, but produces virtually zero innovation. Even more amazingly, a hardware company like Apple actually has a bigger and better software portofolio than MS.
A 1.8 GHz Opteron or a 3 GHz P4 consumes about 80 W, compared to 40 W of a 1.8 GHz PPC 970.
More importantly, a 1.2 GHz PPC 970 burns only 19 W, which makes it possible for Apple to design cool and sexy fortables without huge heat sinks or noisy fans.
The low energy consumption is also critical for 24/7 servers, it reduces electricity bills and hardware failures. So I can't really see why Apple or anyone else should be too excited about the hot chip.
IBM will use the PPC 970 in their blade servers, well before Apple. So they have strong incentive to develop the chip.
Why do you think Apple can't support 2 platforms, while IBM and HP have been selling multiple architectures for decades.
Darwin supports X86 right from the beginning, and there are strong evidence that OS X does indeed run very well on X86, as well as G4 and G4.
Apple could instantly double its OS market share by releasing OS X for X86, and it's not impossible for them to make Macs using both PPC and x86.
With Safari, Keynote and quite probably another sectret Apple office application that could kill MS Office on the Mac, fewer and fewer Mac users are going to pay MS $500 for its bloated and buggy software, so Apple has really nothing to worry about upsetting the Beast anymore.
...
Apple is in a very strong position to grow and compete with MS and the Wintel box makers by releasing OS X on X86 and making computers based on both PPC and AMD / Intel.
Apple is the best in industrial design and capable making powerful and stylish computers better than those clueless box makers like Dell.
Amazingly, despite being 60 times smaller than MS, Apple actually produces more and better software than the Redmond bully: WebObject, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Shake, FileMaker, AppleWorks, Safari, Keynote, Darwin Streaming Server, iLife,
>> i do not have an osx box, so i can not verify your suggestions about the menubar and all. however, something is clearly wrong if i didnt see it, isnt it?
Yeah, either your brain is wrong or you haven't got one. The name of the active application is always the first item on the menubar, but obviously that's too well hidden for over educated power users like you and your boss.
Are you really smart enough to work with Linux? You definitely smell like a poor Windows victim used to the stupid idea of shuting down your Pee Cee by clicking the Start button.
>> i first thought that the problems i was encountering came from overeducation - i admit i have been spoiled by bash and context menus on left click.
/Applications/Utility.
Overeducation in what? You are kidding yourself. A middle-aged lady next door has never touched a computer till she bought an iBook recently. With a bit help from me on a few occasions, she has pretty much figured out most of the things on her own and is a very happy OS X user. In fact, she now spend hours everyday playing games, listening music, watching DVD, surfing the Web with the AirPort wireless and broadband.
And by the way, you must be the only "power user" in the world who doesn't know that OS X has bash (as well as csh, tcsh, zsh) and contextual manual.
>> what i do know is that i am never touching that thing again unless it has the full suite of gnu utilities on it and presents me with a terminal window that clearly states 'console' in the titlebar.
WTF are you talking about? There are many different terminal applications on OS X, and they shouldn't be titled "console" because they are not. You obviously don't know what is a console, but there is a separate OS X application called "Console" under
The Charlie White benchmark is a very unprofessional piece of work. It reads more like an interview with the Dell product manager, and he might get paid by the Dell marketing department for that.
>> Macintosh products bring 10% (double the apparent Macintosh market share) or even 20% of Adobe's sales.
It's actually 30% according overall, according to Adobe's latest report. Excluding consumer products like Acrobat and Photoshop Album, the figure may well be over 50% for their professional lines.
Again, you need to look at the whole picture, not just CPU and bus speed. My 700 MHz iBook just feels more responsive than a more expensive Sony Vaio with twice the clock rate for most of my daily tasks, and my 400 MHz iBook bought 4 years ago is faster and more stable than my 800 MHz PC.
I used Win XP everyday up till a few months ago just for Outlook and IE with a few Java applet runningand, the performance kept degrading gradually through each working day. The machine was shut down every night and booted up in the morning, it still managed to crash a few times a week. In contrast, my iMac and iBook gets used much more heavily and would run continuously for weeks or months without crashes or rebooting.
It appears to me that you want a premium product without paying the premium price, which is just not reasonable. From what I can see, a $999 eMac with a gorgeous 17" flat CRT screen and a 700 MHz G4 will do you quite nicely, and for $300 more you get a 800 MHz G4 with a DVD burning superdrive plus more RAM and bigger hard drive. For this price, you can't find me a Wintel machine that match the Apple quality and design, and don't forget the Mac also comes with tons of free and high quality software that money can't buy in the Wintel world.
Once again, Macs are designed to last for years, so don't ignore features that may not be immediately useful to you today. Generally, Mac users tend to be more creative and productive with their computers because everything is easier and Just Works with no fuss.
My next door neighbor is a mid-aged lady who never ever touched a computer until she bought an iBook a few weeks ago. Initially, she was worried about everything. But after 2 hours basic training, she discovered how intuitive and natural Mac OS X is to use and quickly developed the confidence to poke around with her instinct. The next time she came around, she was playing the GNU chess with voice command, and the only question she asked me was how to switch off the voice recognition! Now she has also got the broadband connection and her own AirPort network, and is sitting outside in the garden surfing the Web and learning Unix at this very moment.
>> But FW800 is out and how many devices are out there that us it over 400?
Unlike your typical Wintel junks, a Mac is supposed to last for years, not just for 6 months, so perhaps FireWire 800 will be indispensible in a year or two. You need a bit of vision.
My iMac bought 4 years came with Ethernet / USB / FireWire / 80211.b, when my boss paid 50% for a huge Dell box with 2 flopy drives! Now 4 years later, my iMac is used 24 hours a day as a network gateway and an Airport software base station, my wife use it to do genetic research (BLAST, statistics, gene sequencing, Word and Excel, Web, Google, email) and play music and DVD, and the kids play games. Meanwhile, my boss's ugly Dell junk has long been unusable, after several upgrades with new hard drive, CPU, DVD, USB and FireWire.
The amazing thing is that the iMac just feels faster and faster with each new version of OS X, and I haven't spent any money to upgrade it other than $50 or so for 256 MB RAM. What's more, it still gives me such pleasure to look at that translucent and beautifully designed marvel.
>> I personally feel that it is totally wrong to buy old/dated hardware at a premium. If the software they include is worth so much, but the hardware is dated, then apple should lower the prices to be inline with PC makers.
You have to remember that a computer is a complex system consisting of many vital parts (both software and hardware) working together - not just CPU, much like a car is not just a engine. Apple is the only company in the industry capable of making seamlessly integrated hardware and software system with elegant design, which is why Macs are better than Sony and IBM, let alone Dell or Walmart.
Take the 17" PowerBook for instance, it might be too expensive for you and me, but technically no Wintel laptop can remotely match its features: FireWire 800, gigabit Ethernet, 802.11g AirPort Extreme, Bluetooth, 1" thick, 17" wide screen LCD, 6.5 lb, 4.5 hours battery, 1 GHz G3, rock solid Unix core, best GUI.
The clock rate of a CPU is generally not a good measure of performance across different computer architecture, and most definitely not the only factor to consider. Unfortunately, there are so many clueless people like you in this world who just don't understand this simple fact.
I don't know what you do and how much computing power you actually need, but I know that most of the GHz Wintel machines out there are idling most of the time. And most annoyingly, the same people who complains that a dual 1.4 GHz PowerMac is too slow are most likely to suggest that FireWire 800 or gigabit Ethernet are too fast for them!
It's more like a case of Intel muddling up the water with its monoply power.
.NET costs between $1000 up to $3500, while every copy of Mac OS X comes with all these
j ectAlloc.appi e.app
USB is good for low bandwidth device such as keyboard or mouse, and Apple was the first computer maker to adopt it years before the Wintel box makers. FireWire is so much better for high speed devices like digital camcord or hard disks, and USB2 is just not good enough. It was a nice and simple choice before Intel started to dump its own inferior technology over the consumers.
Now with FireWire 800 and perhaps 1600 and 3200 in the horizon, Apple is clearly leading the march again. Why don't we just accept the best technology and move on.
I personally think your average PC idiots are just too dense to see things beyond one or two bare numbers to realize that Apple products are actually cheaper than those from any of the branded Wintel top dogs like Sony or even Dell. Maybe you guys just haven't acquired the taste for the superior overall design and longevity of the Mac, but you have to look at the whole picture not just the CPU and the hard drive.
Take software for instance, how do you value something like iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, iDVD, iSync, iCal, AppleWorks, etc? In the Windows or Linux world, you simply can't get such high quality products even if you don't spend $100 a piece.
For me as a programmer, MS Visual Studio
FileMerge.app
IORegistryExplorer.app
Ic onComposer.app
Interface Builder.app
Jar Bundler.app
JavaBrowser.app
MallocDebug.app
Ob
OpenGL Info.app
OpenGL Profiler.app
OpenGL Shader Builder.app
PEFViewer.app
PackageMaker.app
Pix
Project Builder.app
Property List Editor.app
Quartz Debug.app
Sampler.app
Thread Viewer.app
USB Prober.app
icns Browser.app
and many more for free, and they are not just small programs - things like Interface Builder and Project Builder are as great and powerful as you can dream of.
And there are many other advantages: less virus, less crash, less noise, less heat, instant sleep and wake up, etc. So you see, Mac users are not stupid and they love the platform for very good reasons: Macs are cheaper to own, sexier to look at and make us more productive.
I don't think royalty is a big deal in either case, unless you know the exact number.
The 4 pin handicap is a price you have to pay to live in a confused Wintel world, hardly Apple's fault.
>> Now there is a USB2 chip on the pmacs, but Apple won't allow that to be used.
Why is this such a big deal? In addition to less CPU usage and more power for external devices, even FireWire 400 is faster than USB2 in the real world. Now Apple have introduced FireWire 800 which is twice as fast, why should they bother with USB2?
>> Macheads with the computer world so very Windows focused why do you still buy macs?
You sound like a lemming with just enough brain to follow the crowd, and not smart enough to know what you are missing.
I have been programming C++ and Java on Unix and Windows professionally for many years, and now do everything usinf OS X on a 700 MHz iBook and never been happier and more productive.
Mac OS X is just so much better than anything else out there: open source kernel, rock solid Unix, beautiful and sexy GUI, best-of-breed multimedia software, free and powerful programming tools. Most importantly It Just Works, unlike Linux or Windoze.
My iBook gets used over 12 hours a day and carries on for days and weeks without rebooting or crashing. It's virtually silent, goes asleep and wakes up in a second or two.
The iBook costs as little as $999 - actually cheaper than a branded Wintel laptop with similar spec - but comes with tons of more first rate software, and it just doesn't feel slow at all. And just in case you suspect that it's not heavily loaded, take a look at the "top" listing:
bash-2.05a$ top
Processes: 91 total, 5 running, 86 sleeping... 244 threads 16:41:12
Load Avg: 6.97, 5.19, 4.63 CPU usage: 63.9% user, 35.5% sys, 0.6% idle
SharedLibs: num = 101, resident = 20.8M code, 2.17M data, 8.13M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 12505, resident = 260M + 14.2M private, 208M shared
PhysMem: 115M wired, 351M active, 158M inactive, 625M used, 15.0M free
VM: 5.05G + 64.4M 172808(0) pageins, 646055(0) pageouts
PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE
27088 Project Bu 0.3% 9:43.45 3 112 389 4.86M 19.3M 10.2M 118M
26184 Start Menu 0.0% 0:01.20 1 51 99 616K 5.77M 704K 55.1M
24801 top 2.4% 1:02.80 1 14 18 376K 380K 668K 13.6M
24791 less 0.0% 0:00.02 1 9 15 68K 436K 344K 1.36M
24787 sh 0.0% 0:00.00 1 8 13 52K 748K 300K 1.79M
24786 sh 0.0% 0:00.00 1 9 13 36K 748K 456K 1.79M
24785 man 0.0% 0:00.01 1 9 15 92K 376K 316K 1.42M
24734 bash 0.0% 0:00.03 1 10 14 128K 788K 632K 1.79M
24726 tcsh 0.0% 0:00.02 1 9 17 340K 636K 780K 5.73M
24725 xterm 0.0% 0:00.29 1 11 21 312K 872K 1.12M 14.2M
24720 tcsh 0.0% 0:00.04 1 10 20 344K 636K 780K 5.73M
24718 login 0.0% 0:00.59 1 12 33 248K 432K 576K 13.7M
24713 tcsh 0.0% 0:00.06 1 10 19 340K 636K 784K 5.73M
24708 login 0.0% 0:01.50 1 12 33 244K 432K 572K 13.7M
24706 Terminal 3.2% 0:22.26 4 65 140 1.45M 9.48M 8.61M 60.6M
24695 tcsh 0.0% 0:00.09 1 10 16 216K 876K 764K 5.73M
24693 xterm 0.0% 0:00.31 1 11 21 332K 872K 1.12M 14.2M
24633 quartz-wm 0.0% 0:00.34 2 42 33 404K 996K 1.29M 30.9M
24629 Xquartz 0.8% 0:15.24 4 128 138 4.23M 9.19M 10.3M 62.9M
24628 X11 0.0% 0:00.07 1 12 15 84K 620K 452K 13.6M
24609 Nisqually. 10.5% 4:04.92 6 113 155 9.36M 7.22M 13.3M 67.8M
24604 Camino 0.0% 0:04.38 6 92 205 5.61M 18.2M 18.5M 79.2M
24597 Microsoft 0.0% 0:00.66 2 71 100 1.79M 7.94M 4.12M 55.3M
24594 iCal 0.0% 0:02.11 1 60 135 4.14M 8.33M 9.60M 60.1M
24593 Network Ut 1.9% 0:43.98 1 58 86 1.16M 5.10M 3.68M 53.3M
24589 Address Bo 0.0% 0:02.00 1 71 116 1.87M 5.32M 5.08M 54.7M
24587 Microsoft 1.6% 1:33.03 1 62 174 6.15M 37.1M 17.7M 95.5M
24585 iTunes 15.7% 3:41.96 8 141 200 6.96M+ 9.35M 12.5M+ 74.1M+
24582 Interface 0.0% 0:05.58 2 83 203 4.08M 9.02M 10.7M 61.1M
23735 lookupd 0.1% 0:11.12 3 35 54 372K+ 544K 860K+ 15.4M+
22103 JBuilder 1.2% 5:04.05 16 395 881 111M 41.3M 124M+ 502M
21115 OmniDictio 0.0% 0:04.43 3 85 154 1.36M 5.14M 1.99M 57.7M
19742 java 0.3% 0:51.80 19 412 286 7.89M 12.6M 15.1M 256M
14732 Safari 0.2% 16:28.99 22 1039 1572 51.7M 22.3M 48.3M- 508M
14317 QuickTime 0.0% 6:18.16 6 119 176 452K 5.32M 1.45M 74.1M
10953 TextEdit 0.0% 10:44.07 2 91 172 1.85M 13.3M 6.98M 79.7M
3552 NetCfgTool 0.0% 0:00.31 1 17 17 0K 336K 152K 13.6M
1949 iChatAgent 0.0% 0:00.74 3 57 35
But if you check amazon.com, the iPod is #1 & #2 (Mac & Win versions), so people don't mind to pay more for a better design.
>> Yes, but if you work 8 hours per day, 7 of which is waiting for things to render, it *does* make a difference.
You sound like a stupid robot. Sitting in front of a ugly Dull waiting for rendering? You can write a script to do it and move on to something more interesting or at least sexier. Ever heard multi-tasking?
Date: Wed Mar 26, 2003 11:23:16 am Europe/London
To: cwhite@digitalmedianet.com
Subject: Mac vs. PC
You should really be shamed of yourself for such unprofessional journalism. Your so called benchmark is totally unscientific, and half of the article sounds like an interview with the Dell product manager.
Not sure whether you are paid for it, but you are helping a cheap box maker and shameless parasite who has done virtually nothing to the computer industry other than profited from other's R&D, and hurting a company that has ignited the PC revolution and invented so many things that have made it possible the like of Dell and MS to make money. Despite its small market share, Apple remains the technological leader and innovates faster than the Wintel copycats that make 10 or 100 times more money. Do you really wish Apple go under? I for one just can't bear the thought of a world full Dull boxes and dirty Windows.
For God sake and your credibility, don't ever mix marketing with your own benchmarking - do a proper interview with a Dell executive and quote more reliable sources. I am not sure you are competent enough to do a proper benchmark, but you should at least try to be a little more precise about the price / hardware configuration and less biased in choosing your tests - learn from the professionals like Tom's Hardware if you need help.
There are several points that immediately render your benchmark meaningless:
(1) AE is not designed for multi-processor system or optimized for Altivec, so the second CPU and the superior G4 architecture are most likely ignored. You could easily confirm this by turning on the CPU Monitor if you have acted with a bit more professional journalism.
(2) Adobe is being driven out of the DV market by Apple's own Final Cut Pro and Shake which are taking Hollywood by storm and challenging Avid from top to bottom, so an AE benchmark is hardly relevent.
(3) Your choice of tests are just too limited to prove anything. Why not add some better designed programs like Maya or LightWave?
(4) The price comparison is pure nonsense - a dual 1.25 GHz G4 costs as little $1999 (nearly $1000 cheaper than the $2964 Dell box, not $629 more expensive as you repeatedly suggested) and still comes with more features such as Firewire 800.
(5) We all know that benchmarks can be designed to confirm whatever we want to believe, which is particularly true when they are based on a single application. So why should anyone care about this one?
Hope you learn from the mistakes and do a better job next time.
>> Two of them are looking at upgrading their apples and they are looking at the new line of Vaio's. But the Vaio is more expensive than the Mac.
Only an idiot like you is cheeky enough to compare a crappy pile of parts with zero applications to a high end Apple system that comes with tons of programs. And being a tight bastard, you probably going to spend the rest of your life to roll your own software to run the useless thing.
I would choose an eMac over your POS for any purpose. And for $1999, you can get
? Power Mac G4 Dual 1.25GHz w/1MB L3 per proc.
? 256MB DDR333 SDRAM (PC2700) - 1 DIMM
? 80GB Ultra ATA drive
? Optical 1 - Combo Drive (DVD/CD-RW)
? Optical 2 - None
? ATI Radeon 9000 Pro w/64MB DDR
? 56K internal modem
? Apple Pro Keyboard - U.S. English
? Mac OS - U.S.
which is not that much more than yours when you remember to add on some minimum cost for software.
By their own admission, Adobe started out on the Mac and continue to get a very large portion of their revenue from Mac users.
It is really a very sad saga and a shameless and risky tactics for major software company to openly take side, particularly when Apple is making solid progress in all fronts with Mac OS X and Xserve and many other pieces all falling into places.
And Adobe know damn well the benchmark is bogus, because After Effects is not optimized for Altivec or multiprocessor system.
Charlie White article and the website appears rather crude and unprofessional. His so called DV benchmark is mostly about After Effects with imported Photoshop or Illustrator files.
There are several points that render the benchmark meaningless:
(1) AE is not designed for multi-processor system, so the second CPU is most likely unused, and he could easily confirm this by turning on the CPU Monitor if he has acted with a bit more professional journalism. Why hasn't he tested some better designed programs like Maya or LightWave?
(2) Adobe is being driven out of the DV market by Apple's own Final Cut Pro and Shake which are taking Hollywood by storm and challenging Avid from top to bottom, so an AE benchmark is hardly relevent.
(3) He gave very little details about the Dell box and the price comparison is pure nonsense - a dual 1.25 GHz G4 costs as little $1999 (nearly $1000 cheaper than the $2964 Dell box, not $629 more expensive as he repeatedly suggested) and still comes with more features such as Firewire 800.
(4) We all know that benchmarks can be designed to confirm whatever we want to believe, which is particularly true when they are based on a single application. So why should anyone care about this one?
The guy talks like a Dell marketing person, and 30% of the article is essentially an interview with a Dell product manager, which could almost make you believe that Dell has invented the PC. But we all know that Dell is just a cheap box maker and parasite that profits from other's R&D and has contributed zero to the industry, while Apple has ignited the PC revolution and continues to lead in both hardware and software innovtions.
To put things in balance, here is an article from Mac Night Owe:
THE MAC NIGHT OWL NEWSLETTER
*** Issue #139***
July 27, 2002
THE STRANGE CASE OF THE DUELLING BENCHMARKS
Benchmarks are probably little different from statistics. You can manipulate them any way you want, and let the buyer beware. But recently I decided to succumb to benchmark mania and put a dual-gigahertz Power Macintosh G4 up against one of those 2.2Ghz Pentium 4 PC boxes to see if Apple's claims of superiority had any merit.
Yes, it's true that the Pentium 4 has reached 2.53Ghz and is growing, but I used the hardware I had at hand. If the more powerful Pentium 4 computer scales up in a normal fashion, the differences wouldn't be that great, right? The first installment of this "smackdown" appeared in my Mac Reality Check column, carried by Gannett News Service online and in a number of the chain's daily newspapers, and later at usatoday.com.
My goals were modest, and that was to demonstrate whether Apple's benchmarks were real or not. That, of course, required running the exact tests myself. Apple sent me a CD containing a Photoshop file, a set of Photoshop Actions and an Adobe Acrobat file explaining how to perform the benchmarks. Now there is a silly rumor out there, which some folks buy into, claiming that Apple uses a specially designed version of Adobe Photoshop and somehow cripples the PC so it won't perform at full efficiency. Worse, some folks feel the tests are really tricks to make it seem as if the Power Mac is faster. However, my experience showed no evidence of any such thing.
In fact, there is nothing controversial or strange about Apple's methods. The file they use is a perfectly ordinary color photograph and the nine Photoshop filters used perform perfectly normal functions, such as resizing, changing color modes and so on. In fact, they are remarkably unsophisticated. Since I acquired the Windows box for my test directly from its manufacturer, Sony, there was nothing Apple could do to manipulate the results.
Regardless, I got scores of e-mails from folks who managed to misrepresent every element of the test. The excuses were silly and sometimes outlandish, such as the suggestion that a Photoshop Actions file can only run on a Mac, in which case how does one explain how it ran perfec