Apple shipped 7484 servers (presumably mainly Xserve) in Q3 2002. In contrast, there were only 3500 Itanium 2 based servers sold in the whole of 2002.
The future looks even better for Apple in the server space, following the recent release of the new Xserve and the Xserve RAID. I can't wait to see an Apple 64 bit PPC 970 blade server to blow the crappy Dell out of the water.
Quoting numbers attributed to Internet World, MacInTouch (Saturday, Jan 12) reports that Apple's share of the server market has more than trebled from 0.2 percent to 0.7 percent (Q3 '01 vs Q3 '02). An equally telling statistic is the fact that approximately 40 percent of growth had taken place by the end of Q2 '02 (ie before Apple's Xserve was released).
In terms of unit sales, Internet World quotes the following for Apple:
? Q3 '01 2,049
? Q2 '02 3,937
? Q3 '02 7,484
>> I'd be very interested in seeing a survey along the lines of "Your a PC user, do you even consider the apple platform to be a real alternative?" My guess would be a very low % of people honestly consider the platform.
Oh, really? But at least 4/. editors including CmdrTaco have switched, and so have many super geeks like James Gosling (Java Inventor), James Duncan Davidson (original author of Tomcat and Ant) and the Perl 6 core team (according to Tim O'Reilly).
Everyone should at least take a look at Mac OS X before buying another computer. Macs are no longer expensive and come with the best Unix and the sexiest UI plus tons of powerful programming tools and gorgeous applications. In fact, Apple portables are cheaper than similar Wintel ones.
Fantastic news for Apple, and trouble for Intel and HP.
For all your Wintel idiots out there who know nothing other than GHz, PPC 970 is a super efficient 64 bit server grade RISC processor with the G4 style Altivec engine, and will blow away your P4, Xeon and Itanium. I home Apple will make a PowerBook with one of these.
According to benchmarks by Intel and HP, the floating point performance of Itanium 2 @ 1 GHz is about 50% faster than P4 @ 3.06 GHz, so clock rate clearly doesn't equal to performance.
In other news, out of 4.5 million servers shipped in 2002, only 3500 were Itanium. In contrast, Apple apparently had already sold approximately 8000 Xserves 6 or 7 months after it was launched in May 2002 - not too shaby for a new product.
IBM Power4+ at 1.4 GHz is about 20% faster than P4 at 3 GHz for floating point operations. And according to http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7973 Power5 will be 4 times faster than Power4 and debut at 1.5 GHz or higher. I can't wait to see Power5 inside a big iron Apple Xserve.
The floating point power of Itanium 2 at 1 GHz is about 50% more than P4 at 3GHz, and Intel knows that clock rate is not equal to processing power.
While virtually every top microprocessor designer outside Intel laughs at the x86 architecture, Linus just loves it for some reason, which is why he never bother to tweak the Linux kernel for anything other x86.
And incidentally, Linus also had some very nasty comments about Mac OS X and Mach Microkernel a year or two ago. Does it ever occur to him that Apple, IBM and Intel might know better on these things?
>> And what helped save Apple from bankruptcy was a $500 million investment from Microsoft.
Get your fact straight, man. MS bought $150 m non-voting shares, as a token of commitment to Mac to avoid being sued for patent infringement. Apple is a $10 billion company, do you honestly believe that $150 m can save them?
>> Look at the stock performance for Apple since the release of iMac. It's a steep decline.
If you know anything about stock market, you would notice that virtually every tech stock has suffered heavy loss since the peak of dot com, and Apple has been doing rather well compared to Yahoo, AOL, HP, Sun, Oracle, Intel, nVidia, Gateway, not to mention the like of Enron.
Apple has been making profit virtually every quarter since the return of Jobs, and increased their cash reserve to $4.3 billion. If that's not goog business in the current economical climate, then I don't know what is.
>> I ask you to define "better" For business purposes, it is whichever platform offers the most capability at the lowest price. For this reason, although the XServe may, or may not, be technically superior to Itanium, Sun, or any other server, if it costs too much to implement, it will not succeed.
Your logic is totally flawed. Corporations don't just look at prices, they also value reliability and reputation, which is why IBM and Sun could make billions. In any case, Xserve is cheaper than a similar Dell as I said earlier, and much more so than an IBM or Sun.
You are all over the place, what's actually your point?
Everyone knows Newton was not a commercial success, which was why Jobs killed it. But it was a wonderful piece of technology that Microsoft still hasn't managed to exceed with the Tablet PC 10 years later.
On the other hand, the color iMac has sold more than any other computers by any company and single handedly saved Apple from the brink of death.
I don't know the latest figure, but last year, Apple sold substancially more Xserve units in 4 or 5 months than Intel sold the first version of Itanium for a whole year, not bad at all. I have seen nothing but positive reviews.
>> Slammer didn't affect PC networks because of bad programming. If affected them because of bad network administration.
Are you paid by MS or what? Even MS was not cheeky enough to blame the poor system admins in this case. In fact, according ro leaked MS internal memos, their own network was severely compromised for nearly a whole day, in addition to most of South Korea, Bank of America, Intel, HP and many other biggest corporations in the world. The problem is that MS software is full of holes and security patches are issued weekly or even daily. People are reluctant or find it impossible to keep up with them, because any of the patches could kill the system.
But, you obviously are too stupid to figure out that things don't have to be so bad and there might be more secure systems than the MS crap.
My point is that a typical Wintel user is just not smart enough to look for better alternatives, they just look at the market share and follow the crowd, which is why MS has come to dominate the world with its inferior technology.
>> the apple users I meet are still idiots. Geeks will eventually get fed up with apple for the same reasons that apple's own developers did.
Perhaps it's because you are such an idiot yourself. Mac OS X is the most exciting thing for the geek community in recent years - just count how many/. threads are related to Apple.
Top geeks such as James Gosling (Java inventor), James Duncan Davidson (original author of apache Tomcat and Apache Ant) and the entire Perl core team, are switching to Mac OS X left right and center. At least 4/. editors use Apple portables.
>> My network is aware of all other network devices...hmmm few little things like Plug&Play, WINS, and DHCP...do a little homework outside your imac.
You are talking rubish.
>> It's still can't get into the PDA market because the stink of Newton is still on it. Moreover, it's iMac division, for all the hype, has not performed as well as expected.
What the fuck are you talking about? Newton may be too far ahead of its time, but it was the first PDA with a working natural hand writing recognition system. Now 10 years and billions of dollars research later, Palm and Pocket PC still can't do it, Tablet PC is no better.
Which iMac are you refering to? The classic iMac has been sold to more than 3 millions happy users and inspired a generation of industrial designs and millions of translucent computers, printers, mice, keyboards, toys. Or are you talking about the LCD iMac with the gorgeous floating display that is infinitely adjustable with a finger touch?
>> Apple will never make significant inroads into the office because no IT manager can justify paying 40% markup for a brand-name.
That's just your opinion, I am afraid. Take a look at here http://www.apple.com/xserve/reaction.html and you might feel foolish. The Xserve with unlimited OS X Server license and the Xserve RAID are more powerful and cheaper than a similar Dell products.
>> And if you want to know why there aren't viruses on the Mac, it's because it's a waste of time to come up with a virus that AT BEST will only affect 3% of the computer market. More bang for your buck by attacking PCs.
You are talking shit through your ass, idiot. Since when do hackers care about market share. What they want is prestige, but cracking a Windows PC is like breaking a fortress built with glass - any boy with a pebble can do it. They would get more respect if they can crack a real OS like Mac OS X.
>> Who do you think Adobe is developing for first and foremost for now? 95% Windows users.
And yet Adobe still gets 50% of their revenue from Mac users.
I am not saying the performance doesn't matter, it just isn't the only factor and often not even the main one to consider for most users any more.
I have been a C++ and Java programmer on Unix and Windows for more than 10 years, now I program, browse, play music, design graphics, edit photos and video all on a $999 700 MHz iBook which feels faster than a Sony Vaio with twice the clock rate.
>> Let's look at some other factors which affect user productivity. How productive is a user if they can't go to a local store and buy the software that they need? How productive is a user who has to settle on a sub-standard package because the size of the Mac market means that the money is not there to support the R&D necessary to make it competitive with the Windows offerings.
Mac OS X comes with much more cool and useful software out of the box than Windows. Everything I ever care to use is either available for Mac and often works better than the Windows version or there are Mac alternatives. You more have more third rate junks and have to worry about virus and worms on a daily basis, but we have the best and a clean environment, so I don't envy you at all. And we don't need dozens of installers and deinstallers and registry editors and disk utilities and virus checkers, which are either built-in or unnecessary. Thanks to its Unix root, Mac OS X is much more compatible with industry standards and the open source community than any versions of Windoze, so nowadays I more likely to get free or shareware than to buy commercial software. Although Windows still has more market share, but it is the odd technology which doesn't play well with the rest of the world, so the tide is turning against MS.
>> As to the machine idling, that's a good thing. That it can redraw the screen in a blink of an eye or smoothly drag windows around and then idle means that the UI is crisp and responsive.
In fact, with Quartz Extreme, my iBook handle transparency, antialiasing, windows dragging and screen updating much more smoothly than a much more expensive 16" 2.6 MHz P4 Sony Vaio I was playing the other day.
Ever heard "GHz when you don't need it"? Your P4 may happily idle at 3 GHz, but the built-in thermal control will quietly slow down the chip to avoid overheating when the processor is actively used - what a waste of energy. And a Wintel laptop will never run at full speed when not plugged in, so the battery can last a little longer. But still, you would be lucky if you get 2 hours usage, while an iBook can last 4+ hours.
>> RENDEZVOUS - What exactly is so innovative about Rendevous? Doesnt do anything that my wireless 802.11 network of PCs doesnt do.
You haven't got the faintest idea. Rendezvous is about network devices self configuring themselves and discovering each other. Explain to me how the hell your 802.11 network can do that.
No Wintel box makers have the Apple style drive for perfection and attetion to details - they may use similar components but Apple products always looks and feels better.
People are willing to pay extra for a Mac because it just works and makes you more productive. And now Macs are actually cheaper than many top brand Wintel machines.
For me, there is an ethical dimension: Apple has been contributed more to the world than companies that are 10 or 20 times bigger. In fact, Apple is probably the only computer maker left in the industry except perhaps IBM that is still actively innovating, often for the benifit of parasites like Dell. Just look around to see how many things are either invented or first adopted by Apple years before the Wintel crowd: GUI, mouse, color display, laser printer, plug-n-play, speech and hand writting recognition, PDA, digital camera, QuickTime, USB, Firewire, 802.11b, 802.11g, gigabit Ethernet, Rendezvous,...
Compared to Microsoft, Apple has a 20 times smaller market share, probably makes 100 times less profit, and yet its software portofolio puts Microsoft to shame: Mac OS X - the best GUI with rock solid Unix, Darwin - the first open source OS by a main stream computer maker, QuickTime Player - grandad of multimedia players, Darwin Streaming Server - the only multiplatform open source media server, WebObjects - the first application server, FileMaker Pro - powerful and easy to use database software, AppleWorks - small and powerful office package, FinalCut Pro - the choice of Holywood movie editors, iLife - the best free software for managing music and photos and movies and DVDs, DVD Studio - professional DVD authoring tools, Shake - leading edge compositing software, Safari - faster and smaller than MS IE, Project Builder and Interface Builder - free and powerful IDE and GUI tool for developing Java or C/C++ or Objective C/C++ or AppleScript applications, and the list goes on.
Dell is a shameless parasite, and by its own admission relies on other companies R&D budgets and then undercut their prices. I will not spend my money to help a clueless box maker like Dell gaining more market and to produce another ruthless monster like MS that would eventually destroy the ecosystem in the computing industry.
What a great reply. Apple must be doing something right to get this kind of loyalty.
Everyone knows that Mac users are smarter, richer, more articulate, and passionate about their platform. But what people don't realize is that the passion comes from experiences and has nothing to do with GNU type ideological reasons.
>> I'll grant you some of the hardware on that laptop. The top-of-the-line Gateway matches the specs that count to me, though, for $600 less.
>> It only drops Gb Ethernet (don't need it), 802.11g (all the APs I ever see are 802.11b anyway, and I work for a manufacturer!), the slot-loading DVD burner (whoop!), and the light sensor.
You can get the 15" PowerBook for $1000 less if you don't need all the features in the 17" one, and I am programming C++ and Java on a $999 iBook.
>> Your assertion that you have to pony up three grand to Microsoft to program for Windows is just wrong. You can use the same Free GNU toolchain for Windows that you do for OSX, and you can pick up a brand-new copy of Visual Studio.NET for under $1000, not $3000. If you don't need the absolute-latest version (and you don't--I use version 6.0 at work), pick up a copy of version 6.0 for about $250.
I said up to $3000 (for the Enterprise Architect Edition), and in any case $1000 is just equally ridiculous. You obviously know nothing about Apple programming tools for Mac OS X, which are much more than just GNU compilers and debuggers. For instance Project Builder and Interface Builder are more powerful and better than any IDE and GUI builder from Sun, HP, Linux, or Microsoft (I haven't tried Visual Studio.NET).
>> I cut my teeth on Apples (II+, IIe, then Mac Plus); now I'm more of a Linux person, simply due to the economic realities (search for Mac programming jobs vs. Unix programming jobs and you'll understand).
I have been programming C++ and Java on Unix and Windows for more than 10 years, and to me OS X is simply the best Unix out there, better than Solaris, HP/UX, Linux, and certainly Windows too.
Can you Wintel people ever stop talking about performance? There are more important factors like the overall quality of the system and the productivity of the user. After all, what's the point of a 3GHz machine that keeps crashing or idles most of the time?
Take the $999 iBook for instance, it's fast, quiet, light, and has long battery life and more than enough features most people. Where can you find a cheaper laptop with similar features?
Apple is also miles ahead of the Wintel crowd at the high end. Is there any other 6.8 pounds 1" thin 17" laptop with slot loading DVD nurner, gigabit Ethernet, 800 Mbps Firewire, USB, 54 Mbps AirPort Extreme (802.11g) wireless, Bluetooth, and a ambient light sensor that light up the keyboard and dim the screen when the light goes out?
And it also comes with the best Unix system with the most functional and stylish GUI with built-in speech and hand writing recognition plus tons of free programming tools as well as super cool and useful software like iLife, iSync, GNU Chess, etc.
The components maybe same, but Apple still build much better system. If this is too abstract to you, think about BMW and Ford - they may use the same engine or seats but still differ in the overall quality. Have you got it?
I bet your laptop hasn't got a 17" screen, slot loading DVD burner, gigabit Ethernet, 800 Mbps Firewire, 54 Mbps 802.11g, Bluetooth, 4.5 hrs battery life, 1" thin, or an ambient light sensor that automatically light up the keyboard and dim the screen.
And of course you wouldn't have the previlege of enjoying the best Unix system with a lickable GUI and best-of-class digital tools like FinalCut Pro, DVD Studio, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iSync, iCal, iCha.
If you are a programmer, you have to pay MS up to $3000 for Visual Studio.NET just to develop for Windows, while Mac OS X comes with dozens cross-platform programming tools for free.
To make matters worse, you probably have to reboot your laptop everyday to keep the heat and noise down or to reduce crashes and performance degradation, while mine can carry on for weeks and months, and go asleep and wake up instantaneously.
You are clearly just a typical Windows users with a severely limited brain and imagination. By the way, there is nothing wrong to prefer a better looking as well as functional computer, particularly when you have to work on it whole day long. But then again, your poor Wintel guys have to choose either black or white and it never occurs to you that there is another world full of colors.
He appears to be totally unaware that Apple is actually one of very computer makers that still turn a profit despite the recession, and draws his conclussion solely based on bad experiences with a Mac "built before the Internet" and the buggy Palm software.
I have been using Mac OS X on 2 iBooks for over 2 years now and can't remember when was the last crash. It's quiet, light, stable, cheaper than a similar Wintel portable, definitely the best system i have ever used.
The BMW site requires Windows IE 5+ or Netscape 6+ for no particular reason, and is rendered perfectly by Safari when I press the stop loading button well before the silly JavaScript browser and OS detection kick in.
What sort of idiot would design a web site like this? The guy should be sued by or killed.
I am not saying AppleWorks is enough, but Safari is replacing IE and Keynote will beat PowerPoint on the Mac. As far as I can see, Office is far from the main reason let alone the only one that people buy Apple computers. In fact many people switch to Mac just to avoid paying MS tax.
With X11, Java, OpenOffice, Safari, Keynote and thousands of cool native OS X apps, MS becomes less and less relevent on the Mac. If MS resorts to its usual dirty tricks, Apple has at least two weapons to retaliate: release OS X on x86 or make AppleWorks fully compatible with MS Office. In combination with Linux and other open source projects, OS X on x86 could finally break the MS monoply.
That's because you are a student and you can't use it for any comercial purpose. In any case, why would you want waste your time to learn something that doesn't work on anything other than Windows, instead of using industry standard like Java or C++ that plays well on all platforms?
As a programmer myself, I have little respect for MS and most of its technologies. For some reason, the richest company in the world is simply incapable of innovations, styles or decent behavior. They either copy others or introduce incompatability into existing standards.
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Apple shipped 7484 servers (presumably mainly Xserve) in Q3 2002. In contrast, there were only 3500 Itanium 2 based servers sold in the whole of 2002.
The future looks even better for Apple in the server space, following the recent release of the new Xserve and the Xserve RAID. I can't wait to see an Apple 64 bit PPC 970 blade server to blow the crappy Dell out of the water.
Quoting numbers attributed to Internet World, MacInTouch (Saturday, Jan 12) reports that Apple's share of the server market has more than trebled from 0.2 percent to 0.7 percent (Q3 '01 vs Q3 '02). An equally telling statistic is the fact that approximately 40 percent of growth had taken place by the end of Q2 '02 (ie before Apple's Xserve was released).
In terms of unit sales, Internet World quotes the following for Apple:
? Q3 '01 2,049
? Q2 '02 3,937
? Q3 '02 7,484
>> I'd be very interested in seeing a survey along the lines of "Your a PC user, do you even consider the apple platform to be a real alternative?" My guess would be a very low % of people honestly consider the platform.
/. editors including CmdrTaco have switched, and so have many super geeks like James Gosling (Java Inventor), James Duncan Davidson (original author of Tomcat and Ant) and the Perl 6 core team (according to Tim O'Reilly).
Oh, really? But at least 4
Everyone should at least take a look at Mac OS X before buying another computer. Macs are no longer expensive and come with the best Unix and the sexiest UI plus tons of powerful programming tools and gorgeous applications. In fact, Apple portables are cheaper than similar Wintel ones.
Fantastic news for Apple, and trouble for Intel and HP.
For all your Wintel idiots out there who know nothing other than GHz, PPC 970 is a super efficient 64 bit server grade RISC processor with the G4 style Altivec engine, and will blow away your P4, Xeon and Itanium. I home Apple will make a PowerBook with one of these.
According to benchmarks by Intel and HP, the floating point performance of Itanium 2 @ 1 GHz is about 50% faster than P4 @ 3.06 GHz, so clock rate clearly doesn't equal to performance.
In other news, out of 4.5 million servers shipped in 2002, only 3500 were Itanium. In contrast, Apple apparently had already sold approximately 8000 Xserves 6 or 7 months after it was launched in May 2002 - not too shaby for a new product.
IBM Power4+ at 1.4 GHz is about 20% faster than P4 at 3 GHz for floating point operations. And according to http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7973 Power5 will be 4 times faster than Power4 and debut at 1.5 GHz or higher. I can't wait to see Power5 inside a big iron Apple Xserve.
The floating point power of Itanium 2 at 1 GHz is about 50% more than P4 at 3GHz, and Intel knows that clock rate is not equal to processing power.
While virtually every top microprocessor designer outside Intel laughs at the x86 architecture, Linus just loves it for some reason, which is why he never bother to tweak the Linux kernel for anything other x86.
And incidentally, Linus also had some very nasty comments about Mac OS X and Mach Microkernel a year or two ago. Does it ever occur to him that Apple, IBM and Intel might know better on these things?
>> And what helped save Apple from bankruptcy was a $500 million investment from Microsoft.
Get your fact straight, man. MS bought $150 m non-voting shares, as a token of commitment to Mac to avoid being sued for patent infringement. Apple is a $10 billion company, do you honestly believe that $150 m can save them?
>> Look at the stock performance for Apple since the release of iMac. It's a steep decline.
If you know anything about stock market, you would notice that virtually every tech stock has suffered heavy loss since the peak of dot com, and Apple has been doing rather well compared to Yahoo, AOL, HP, Sun, Oracle, Intel, nVidia, Gateway, not to mention the like of Enron.
Apple has been making profit virtually every quarter since the return of Jobs, and increased their cash reserve to $4.3 billion. If that's not goog business in the current economical climate, then I don't know what is.
>> I ask you to define "better" For business purposes, it is whichever platform offers the most capability at the lowest price. For this reason, although the XServe may, or may not, be technically superior to Itanium, Sun, or any other server, if it costs too much to implement, it will not succeed.
Your logic is totally flawed. Corporations don't just look at prices, they also value reliability and reputation, which is why IBM and Sun could make billions. In any case, Xserve is cheaper than a similar Dell as I said earlier, and much more so than an IBM or Sun.
You are all over the place, what's actually your point?
Everyone knows Newton was not a commercial success, which was why Jobs killed it. But it was a wonderful piece of technology that Microsoft still hasn't managed to exceed with the Tablet PC 10 years later.
On the other hand, the color iMac has sold more than any other computers by any company and single handedly saved Apple from the brink of death.
I don't know the latest figure, but last year, Apple sold substancially more Xserve units in 4 or 5 months than Intel sold the first version of Itanium for a whole year, not bad at all. I have seen nothing but positive reviews.
>> Slammer didn't affect PC networks because of bad programming. If affected them because of bad network administration.
Are you paid by MS or what? Even MS was not cheeky enough to blame the poor system admins in this case. In fact, according ro leaked MS internal memos, their own network was severely compromised for nearly a whole day, in addition to most of South Korea, Bank of America, Intel, HP and many other biggest corporations in the world. The problem is that MS software is full of holes and security patches are issued weekly or even daily. People are reluctant or find it impossible to keep up with them, because any of the patches could kill the system.
But, you obviously are too stupid to figure out that things don't have to be so bad and there might be more secure systems than the MS crap.
My point is that a typical Wintel user is just not smart enough to look for better alternatives, they just look at the market share and follow the crowd, which is why MS has come to dominate the world with its inferior technology.
>> the apple users I meet are still idiots. Geeks will eventually get fed up with apple for the same reasons that apple's own developers did.
/. threads are related to Apple.
/. editors use Apple portables.
Perhaps it's because you are such an idiot yourself. Mac OS X is the most exciting thing for the geek community in recent years - just count how many
Top geeks such as James Gosling (Java inventor), James Duncan Davidson (original author of apache Tomcat and Apache Ant) and the entire Perl core team, are switching to Mac OS X left right and center. At least 4
>> My network is aware of all other network devices...hmmm few little things like Plug&Play, WINS, and DHCP...do a little homework outside your imac. You are talking rubish.
>> It's still can't get into the PDA market because the stink of Newton is still on it. Moreover, it's iMac division, for all the hype, has not performed as well as expected.
What the fuck are you talking about? Newton may be too far ahead of its time, but it was the first PDA with a working natural hand writing recognition system. Now 10 years and billions of dollars research later, Palm and Pocket PC still can't do it, Tablet PC is no better.
Which iMac are you refering to? The classic iMac has been sold to more than 3 millions happy users and inspired a generation of industrial designs and millions of translucent computers, printers, mice, keyboards, toys. Or are you talking about the LCD iMac with the gorgeous floating display that is infinitely adjustable with a finger touch?
>> Apple will never make significant inroads into the office because no IT manager can justify paying 40% markup for a brand-name.
That's just your opinion, I am afraid. Take a look at here http://www.apple.com/xserve/reaction.html and you might feel foolish. The Xserve with unlimited OS X Server license and the Xserve RAID are more powerful and cheaper than a similar Dell products.
>> And if you want to know why there aren't viruses on the Mac, it's because it's a waste of time to come up with a virus that AT BEST will only affect 3% of the computer market. More bang for your buck by attacking PCs.
You are talking shit through your ass, idiot. Since when do hackers care about market share. What they want is prestige, but cracking a Windows PC is like breaking a fortress built with glass - any boy with a pebble can do it. They would get more respect if they can crack a real OS like Mac OS X.
>> Who do you think Adobe is developing for first and foremost for now? 95% Windows users. And yet Adobe still gets 50% of their revenue from Mac users.
I am not saying the performance doesn't matter, it just isn't the only factor and often not even the main one to consider for most users any more.
I have been a C++ and Java programmer on Unix and Windows for more than 10 years, now I program, browse, play music, design graphics, edit photos and video all on a $999 700 MHz iBook which feels faster than a Sony Vaio with twice the clock rate.
>> Let's look at some other factors which affect user productivity. How productive is a user if they can't go to a local store and buy the software that they need? How productive is a user who has to settle on a sub-standard package because the size of the Mac market means that the money is not there to support the R&D necessary to make it competitive with the Windows offerings.
Mac OS X comes with much more cool and useful software out of the box than Windows. Everything I ever care to use is either available for Mac and often works better than the Windows version or there are Mac alternatives. You more have more third rate junks and have to worry about virus and worms on a daily basis, but we have the best and a clean environment, so I don't envy you at all. And we don't need dozens of installers and deinstallers and registry editors and disk utilities and virus checkers, which are either built-in or unnecessary. Thanks to its Unix root, Mac OS X is much more compatible with industry standards and the open source community than any versions of Windoze, so nowadays I more likely to get free or shareware than to buy commercial software. Although Windows still has more market share, but it is the odd technology which doesn't play well with the rest of the world, so the tide is turning against MS.
>> As to the machine idling, that's a good thing. That it can redraw the screen in a blink of an eye or smoothly drag windows around and then idle means that the UI is crisp and responsive.
In fact, with Quartz Extreme, my iBook handle transparency, antialiasing, windows dragging and screen updating much more smoothly than a much more expensive 16" 2.6 MHz P4 Sony Vaio I was playing the other day.
Ever heard "GHz when you don't need it"? Your P4 may happily idle at 3 GHz, but the built-in thermal control will quietly slow down the chip to avoid overheating when the processor is actively used - what a waste of energy. And a Wintel laptop will never run at full speed when not plugged in, so the battery can last a little longer. But still, you would be lucky if you get 2 hours usage, while an iBook can last 4+ hours.
And don't forget Keynote - the PowerPoint killer.
>> RENDEZVOUS - What exactly is so innovative about Rendevous? Doesnt do anything that my wireless 802.11 network of PCs doesnt do.
You haven't got the faintest idea. Rendezvous is about network devices self configuring themselves and discovering each other. Explain to me how the hell your 802.11 network can do that.
No Wintel box makers have the Apple style drive for perfection and attetion to details - they may use similar components but Apple products always looks and feels better.
...
People are willing to pay extra for a Mac because it just works and makes you more productive. And now Macs are actually cheaper than many top brand Wintel machines.
For me, there is an ethical dimension: Apple has been contributed more to the world than companies that are 10 or 20 times bigger. In fact, Apple is probably the only computer maker left in the industry except perhaps IBM that is still actively innovating, often for the benifit of parasites like Dell. Just look around to see how many things are either invented or first adopted by Apple years before the Wintel crowd: GUI, mouse, color display, laser printer, plug-n-play, speech and hand writting recognition, PDA, digital camera, QuickTime, USB, Firewire, 802.11b, 802.11g, gigabit Ethernet, Rendezvous,
Compared to Microsoft, Apple has a 20 times smaller market share, probably makes 100 times less profit, and yet its software portofolio puts Microsoft to shame: Mac OS X - the best GUI with rock solid Unix, Darwin - the first open source OS by a main stream computer maker, QuickTime Player - grandad of multimedia players, Darwin Streaming Server - the only multiplatform open source media server, WebObjects - the first application server, FileMaker Pro - powerful and easy to use database software, AppleWorks - small and powerful office package, FinalCut Pro - the choice of Holywood movie editors, iLife - the best free software for managing music and photos and movies and DVDs, DVD Studio - professional DVD authoring tools, Shake - leading edge compositing software, Safari - faster and smaller than MS IE, Project Builder and Interface Builder - free and powerful IDE and GUI tool for developing Java or C/C++ or Objective C/C++ or AppleScript applications, and the list goes on.
Dell is a shameless parasite, and by its own admission relies on other companies R&D budgets and then undercut their prices. I will not spend my money to help a clueless box maker like Dell gaining more market and to produce another ruthless monster like MS that would eventually destroy the ecosystem in the computing industry.
What a great reply. Apple must be doing something right to get this kind of loyalty.
Everyone knows that Mac users are smarter, richer, more articulate, and passionate about their platform. But what people don't realize is that the passion comes from experiences and has nothing to do with GNU type ideological reasons.
>> I'll grant you some of the hardware on that laptop. The top-of-the-line Gateway matches the specs that count to me, though, for $600 less.
.NET).
>> It only drops Gb Ethernet (don't need it), 802.11g (all the APs I ever see are 802.11b anyway, and I work for a manufacturer!), the slot-loading DVD burner (whoop!), and the light sensor.
You can get the 15" PowerBook for $1000 less if you don't need all the features in the 17" one, and I am programming C++ and Java on a $999 iBook.
>> Your assertion that you have to pony up three grand to Microsoft to program for Windows is just wrong. You can use the same Free GNU toolchain for Windows that you do for OSX, and you can pick up a brand-new copy of Visual Studio.NET for under $1000, not $3000. If you don't need the absolute-latest version (and you don't--I use version 6.0 at work), pick up a copy of version 6.0 for about $250.
I said up to $3000 (for the Enterprise Architect Edition), and in any case $1000 is just equally ridiculous. You obviously know nothing about Apple programming tools for Mac OS X, which are much more than just GNU compilers and debuggers. For instance Project Builder and Interface Builder are more powerful and better than any IDE and GUI builder from Sun, HP, Linux, or Microsoft (I haven't tried Visual Studio
>> I cut my teeth on Apples (II+, IIe, then Mac Plus); now I'm more of a Linux person, simply due to the economic realities (search for Mac programming jobs vs. Unix programming jobs and you'll understand).
I have been programming C++ and Java on Unix and Windows for more than 10 years, and to me OS X is simply the best Unix out there, better than Solaris, HP/UX, Linux, and certainly Windows too.
Can you Wintel people ever stop talking about performance? There are more important factors like the overall quality of the system and the productivity of the user. After all, what's the point of a 3GHz machine that keeps crashing or idles most of the time?
You sound like Microsoft, blame users for the poor quality of Windows. But with Macs, the users can afford being lazy.
Take the $999 iBook for instance, it's fast, quiet, light, and has long battery life and more than enough features most people. Where can you find a cheaper laptop with similar features?
Apple is also miles ahead of the Wintel crowd at the high end. Is there any other 6.8 pounds 1" thin 17" laptop with slot loading DVD nurner, gigabit Ethernet, 800 Mbps Firewire, USB, 54 Mbps AirPort Extreme (802.11g) wireless, Bluetooth, and a ambient light sensor that light up the keyboard and dim the screen when the light goes out?
And it also comes with the best Unix system with the most functional and stylish GUI with built-in speech and hand writing recognition plus tons of free programming tools as well as super cool and useful software like iLife, iSync, GNU Chess, etc.
The components maybe same, but Apple still build much better system. If this is too abstract to you, think about BMW and Ford - they may use the same engine or seats but still differ in the overall quality. Have you got it?
I bet your laptop hasn't got a 17" screen, slot loading DVD burner, gigabit Ethernet, 800 Mbps Firewire, 54 Mbps 802.11g, Bluetooth, 4.5 hrs battery life, 1" thin, or an ambient light sensor that automatically light up the keyboard and dim the screen.
.NET just to develop for Windows, while Mac OS X comes with dozens cross-platform programming tools for free.
And of course you wouldn't have the previlege of enjoying the best Unix system with a lickable GUI and best-of-class digital tools like FinalCut Pro, DVD Studio, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iSync, iCal, iCha.
If you are a programmer, you have to pay MS up to $3000 for Visual Studio
To make matters worse, you probably have to reboot your laptop everyday to keep the heat and noise down or to reduce crashes and performance degradation, while mine can carry on for weeks and months, and go asleep and wake up instantaneously.
You are clearly just a typical Windows users with a severely limited brain and imagination. By the way, there is nothing wrong to prefer a better looking as well as functional computer, particularly when you have to work on it whole day long. But then again, your poor Wintel guys have to choose either black or white and it never occurs to you that there is another world full of colors.
Well, where do you begin to argue with him?
He appears to be totally unaware that Apple is actually one of very computer makers that still turn a profit despite the recession, and draws his conclussion solely based on bad experiences with a Mac "built before the Internet" and the buggy Palm software.
I have been using Mac OS X on 2 iBooks for over 2 years now and can't remember when was the last crash. It's quiet, light, stable, cheaper than a similar Wintel portable, definitely the best system i have ever used.
The BMW site requires Windows IE 5+ or Netscape 6+ for no particular reason, and is rendered perfectly by Safari when I press the stop loading button well before the silly JavaScript browser and OS detection kick in.
What sort of idiot would design a web site like this? The guy should be sued by or killed.
I am not saying AppleWorks is enough, but Safari is replacing IE and Keynote will beat PowerPoint on the Mac. As far as I can see, Office is far from the main reason let alone the only one that people buy Apple computers. In fact many people switch to Mac just to avoid paying MS tax.
With X11, Java, OpenOffice, Safari, Keynote and thousands of cool native OS X apps, MS becomes less and less relevent on the Mac. If MS resorts to its usual dirty tricks, Apple has at least two weapons to retaliate: release OS X on x86 or make AppleWorks fully compatible with MS Office. In combination with Linux and other open source projects, OS X on x86 could finally break the MS monoply.
That's because you are a student and you can't use it for any comercial purpose. In any case, why would you want waste your time to learn something that doesn't work on anything other than Windows, instead of using industry standard like Java or C++ that plays well on all platforms?
As a programmer myself, I have little respect for MS and most of its technologies. For some reason, the richest company in the world is simply incapable of innovations, styles or decent behavior. They either copy others or introduce incompatability into existing standards.