I am an IT manager of a group supporting faculty and staff of a large university in Washington DC.
Last year, over 70 percent of new students in my university brought Macs to school. We haven't seen hard numbers on this year's freshman class, but we expect Mac use to increase linearly as it has over the past 3-4 years (especially since Intel Macs).
This year, more than 50 percent of faculty who were eligible for a new computer chose Mac.
Linux users are blocked from using the VPN which controls access to the WLAN.
The main driver of faculty and student Mac choice in our surveys has been security (perceived or real) and flexibility. Faculty want the ability to run the OS best suited to the task. One Stat professor uses mostly Unix apps in Apple's X environment, web/email/Word on the Mac, and a few Win-only apps in XP on Parallels. Another prof in Physics triple-boots Ubuntu, Mac OS and XP on a MacBook Pro. A significant number of Mac users run XP in Parallels or Fusion. Several profs only run XP on their Macs, preferring the Apple hardware, and hedging they might use the Mac capability in the future.
To me, as someone who switched majors 4 times, and took tech electives despite my English major, the flexibility of a universal computing platform capable of running the two major desktop operating systems (one of which is Unix-based) plus Linux means all your bases are covered. Setup Mac OS and sandbox Windows and Linux in virtual machines, then use whichever OS best suits your current need. If you find later that you are mostly using Windows, or mostly using Linux, set that OS up as a default boot on its own partition.
Admittedly, you can do all I describe on a PC sans Mac OS, but even if you feel you will never use Mac OS, discounting the possibility that you might need or desire it in the future is shortsighted given Mac OS's current growth vector, especially in education. A less capable PC doesn't even necessarily cost less. I just the other day spec'd a Dell Vostro 13" against a 13" MacBook Pro and the Dell was $50 more.
So, again, hedge your bets. Buy the computer that can do Mac OS, Linux and Windows and use whichever OS you need when you need it.
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>>I kept my PC going for 6 years with incremental upgrades. The iMac might last you 2-3 years max!
The iMac came out a time when OS 9 absolutely screamed on a G3, and later, quite paradoxically and unlike Windows, each new version of OS X ran faster than before. This was of course because the very unfortunately code-named Cheetah (10.0) was highly unoptimized and full of debug code. Each successive version was more optimized and less bloated, and thus ran faster. My company had slot-load 350s and 400s circa 2000 that were in use until mid-2007, running Tiger and Office 2004 in 512MB on 10 and 20GB drives. People got real work done on these iMacs and we got our money's worth many times over. We donated the bulk of these old iMacs to a African charity, who shipped them overseas for classroom use.
Supporting over 30 of these units, I got very adept at opening them to replace bad drives, swap bad optical drives, even an occasional mobo swap. I could swap a hard drive in less than 15 minutes (16 screws total on the slot-loads)
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I have to give props to the puck. I hold the mouse with the tips of my fingers, unlike many who cup the mouse with their hand. Look at your palm and curl your fingers slightly inward. What shape does that create? Right...a circle. For me it was one of the best mice ever. Wish Apple would bring back a bluetooth optical version of it...
Only one issue with your analogy... Porsches are fundamentally like other cars, and Porsche does not rely on a third-party ecosystem to support and justify the value of their product. Market share in computing is important because it drives developers to create products for the platform. Without adequate third-party devices and applications to justify a platform, its viability suffers. One can argue how much market share is "enough" but Apple seems to be doing OK with 5%. While one can also argue whether the computer market's drive to "standardize" for "compatibility" will always lead to 90/5/5 market split, it is interesting to imagine what the world would be like if Apple had the 90% market share. Would absolute power corrupt Apple the way it did Microsoft?
Among my friends, family and aquaintances, almost universally, those who use hard drive-based players experience many more failures than those who use flash-based players, regardless of brand. My wife and I own four iPods, a 1st gen Shuffle, 2nd Gen Shuffle, 1st gen mini, and a 2nd gen nano (we use the Shuffles for workout, and the mini and nano otherwise). That's three flash and one hard drive, and we've have had no failures. However, the minis, with their CF form factor drive seem to hold up better than the Toshiba OEM drives in the full size iPods. I also plan to upgrade the mini to a 8GB compact flash soon, mostly for the increased capacity, but I heard battery life improves as well.
The battery issue in iPods is what evs. All rechargeable batteries eventual fail. The more you use a rechargeable battery the sooner it wears out. iPod users tend to use their iPods alot, so their batteries wear out sooner. Get over it.
The hard drive issue is real. Apple should insist Toshiba fix the reliability issues. Even though I have been accused of being an Apple fanboy, I wouldn't mind seeing a class-action suit against Apple to force them to own up to the high failure rate. But my experience suggests that other hard drive-based players experience high failure rates too. Hard drives are just not well suited to a mobile device like an iPod (you know what I mean, we don't treat out laptops like we treat music players... would you trust a hard drive in your cell phone?). So I have decided not to buy ANY other hard drive-based player until reliability improves markedly. When I suggest players to people, I always mention the capacity vs. reliabilty tradeoff of hard drive vs. flash players. If the person insists on buying the hard drive player, I recommend the extended warranty, again, regardless of brand.
Since all iPod batteries tend to fail in the first two years, and since Apple charges $99 to replace the battery, but only $59 for a two year warranty, it seems prudent to me to buy the extended warranty on all iPods (except the $79 Shuffle). Basically, look at it as saving $40 on your inevitable battery replacement and getting a warranty on the rest of the iPod for free.
So if you really want to switch off iPods, I still suggest you avoid hard drive-based players, otherwise you are likely to face the same reliabilty issues. But if capacity and/or video is not an issue, I think the new nano will prove to be the most reliable iPod to date. It has the tough aluminum exterior that held up so well on the original mini, and the solid-state guts that have proven so reliable in flash-based iPods. Spells winner to me.
Apple used to sell the $699 model as a popular pre-configured model at their stores for $873.00 (the same price if you configured it online.) $174 is a great discount off the old price. I only hope the ATI 9200 chipset has the newer ROM that fixes the issue of video artifacts on some displays. ATI has released a ROM update for their retail 9200 chipsets, but Apple has still yet to patch the OEM mini ROM. I returned a mini over this issue, which made watching DVDs unbearable.
I'm late to this discussion, but it dawned on me that to be productive your machine needs to be available and working properly. If you are constantly dealing with security issues, downloading patches, running spyware removers and scanning for viruses, you are not being very productive. I have seen people literally replace a horked Windows box rather than go though the troubleshoot, cleanup, and reinstall process, only to have their new machine ownd for the same reason a few days later. Maybe I am being laissez-faire, but I don't even have an AV package on my Macs at home. It just never been an issue.
The problem with Zeitgiest is that many Mac and Linux users spoof their browser ID string for "compatibility" with sites that will only allow certain browsers. My Safari browser reports IE 6.0 on Windows. I suspect a good deal of the "Other" category are Mac and Linux users.
Secondly, I agree with the overcount theory. Since Microsoft does not sell PCs, just the OS, it is difficult to know how many users are buying licenses to upgrade, or offices buying site licenses then imaging over OEM licenses, or OEM copies being overwritten with some other OS.
Apple sells machines and that can be easily tracked. Yes there is Linux for Mac, but likely 99.925% of all Macs run Mac OS.
Apple has conservatively said 25 million Macs are in use. They have sold a few million more since saying that. At nearly 30 million Macs they would be about 5% of the market. Zeitgiest has, on occasion, clocked them at 4%. Throw in a percent or two of spoofers and it looks like 5% is a fair estimate of Apple's installed base.
My comments were in direct response to your troll, and hence not trolling for troll's sake. What blew me away was how such an obvious troll got a 5 - insightful rating. Further, I reined my post back ON topic after taking your troll bait.
Problems with Windows and Linux... Mostly not hardware, although given the size of the market and the proclivity of cheapness among PC users, a lot of cheaply made, cheaply designed, poor quality components exist, especially in the DIY and screwdriver shop crowd. Yeah, hard drives are hard drives, but chintzy cases, chintzy monitors, chintzy keyboards and mice, chintzy I/O cards, Winmodems. Not to mention COM and IRQ issues (just saw a guy on XP last week trying to connect to a router over serial, but both serial ports were assigned, so Device Manager, remove device, blah blah).
No, on PCs software is the Achilles heel. I support a network with many PCs (60 Mac, 40 PC) and have supported PCs since Win 3.1. I don't think any slashdotters will disagree with me that Windows is a pain in the ass. Spyware, viruses, registry corruption, security issues, truckloads of patches, Microsoft tax, privacy issues, lack of choice (Microsoft lock-ins destroy any real choice on Wintel).
Linux, lack of commercial desktop apps, still a very get-under-the-hood OS (compile source, chase kernels, edit config stuff), lack of standardized interface, millionbillion distributions, linux techies few, far-between, and expensive, SCO uncertainty (I hate SCO, but what if they win?), ultimately still hard to use and who wants to rtfm everytime they want to do something that should take two clicks to configure.
I think Mac OS X is the best because I have used and supported many OSes and in my opinion OS X does more, is more reliable, is easier to setup and configure, is easier to support and troubleshoot, integrates better in mixed environments, costs much less to support over time, and runs on amazingly cool and cutting-edge hardware (Xserve, PowerBook, G5, nuff said).
How did this a "5 - Insightful"? The post was totally OT and a obvious troll.
To answer this troll's highly rated post though, I would rather buy a $1000 Mac than get a $1000 PC for free, because I don't need the headaches that the PC clone architecture and Windows and Linux OSes bring to the equation. Although plenty of people and companies do it, I would never spend my own hard-earned cash to buy into that world. Besides, the TCO costs on the back end eat up all your "savings" on the initial purchase. And your beige box has no style (same to you Fast and Furious Alu-mini-um, windowed, water-cooled, glowtube boys too, like school on Sunday, no class).
Now, to get OT. ZeroInstall sounds like Mac OS X's (and NeXT's) application bundles, which are basically special folders that contain all the pieces of the app, but act like an application and launch when clicked. Bring up a contextual menu on most Mac OS X apps however and you can select Show Contents which opens the bundle as a directory rather than launching the app. Throw said app away and you just uninstalled it completely.
Mod the OT troll down.
(Now that I think about, I guess I'd take the free PC and sell it to get money to pay for the Mac).
This happened to me in the late 90's when Sprint decided to shut down their Spectrum network in favor of the parallel PCS network they were building. Trouble was they only offered new phones to their highest paying customers. My bill was pretty low each month, so I was only offered refurb phones. I called to ask why and the guy said everyone got refurbs, which I knew to be false because my wife, a heavier user, got her choice of new phones. Anyway the chintzy Sony by Qualcomm I ended up with sucked compared to the cool Moto I had on Spectrum. And because the PCS network was so new, coverage sucked ass. I am permanently anti-Sprint over that fiasco. I assume ATT will lose some customers to this as well. Maybe they'll go to cingular... Won't they be surprised.
I don't want to sound like a Mac elitist, and I know this is OT and probably redundant by now.... But, fricking blame Sony for NOT including a FireWire cable with a fricking DV cam. Yeah, you should know DV does not work over USB, but Sony confuses the issue for DV noobs by giving them a fricking USB cable in the box (who actually uses the sub-par still capability anyway?).
Long story short, buy the FireWire cable Sony should have given you in the first place.
confuse market share for installed base. IDC (subsidiary of IDG) is one of the worst undercounters of Mac marketshare and installed base. A quick look at Google's Zeitgeist shows 3% Mac, 1% Linux. I know these number are not perfect as we all spoof browser IDs, but I think the the ratio of Mac to Linux boxes undercounted due to spoofing is also likely 3:1.
Apple has sold nearly 30 million Macs since 1984. The PowerPC shipped a decade ago in 1994. Any PowerPC will run OS 9, any G3 will run 10.2, and any factory USB machine will run 10.3 (officially, XPostFacto). That is something like 20 million machines still in use mostly as desktops.
I don't hate free software, and I think Mac OS X and Linux complement each other. I just hate these so-called analysts with their biased numbers. My wife used to work for an economics firm that did analysis for the telecom industry. I would liken what they did to selling cosmetics to ugly people to make them look better. They tailored their reports to put the companies that were paying for the reports in the best light no matter what the truth was. IDC is no different. If Apple gave them a crapload of money, they would say Apple's marketshare far outpaces Linux.
By the "guy in charge," I take it you mean Sirhindi Varadarajan. He has stated that he never used a Mac before VT bought this cluster, so your charge of his being an Apple zealot is false. Shame you can't just admit that the platform chosen was the best choice at the time, has worked out brilliantly, has changed opinions about Apple and the Mac, and is only going to get better on Xserves.
By blowing it off as Apple zealotry, you totally discount just how good the PowerPC 970 and the G5 architecture are.
Ever notice the apps that break are usually by the vendors that do their Mac version as an afterthought (ahem, Quicken) or never did stable apps in the past (cough, Quark). Apple doesn't break good code. If they would follow better coding practices, the apps wouldn't break.
A look at the used computer marketplace shows that Macs do not depreciate anywhere near as fast as commodity PCs. A computer is a great tool for teaching history, music and art.
I was in Palo Alto doing a job at Stanford back in mid 2000. Went out to eat at a little Italian place just down from the Cardinal Hotel (who was doing 802.11b in the hotel way back then), and overheard some engineers from Sun talking shop (blah blah Sparc blahblah Solaris blah). I went over and asked them what they thought of Mac OS X. They pooh-poohed it saying Mach was a crappy kernel, the PowerPC was a dead-end, blah blah Objective-C bad blah, and other things. I'm just a lowly Network Admin for whom all things silicon are magic, so I was roundly "put in my place."
With G5s and Panther nigh, it's safe to say those engineers were wrong. Maybe Apple should just buy its way into the Enterprise by snapping up Sun, but then again Solaris is a "dead-end" compared to Linux and the Sparc III is "stuck" back at 1.2GHz blah blah blah....
I think it is worth it for those with many machines, but maybe not for those with only one or two machines.
I admin a K-12 charter school with 55 Macs. My rule of thumb has been to buy AppleCare on anything with an LCD (from past experience with expensive LCD repairs) or anything portable (due to highly integrated circuitry, eg. dead Ethernet port requires whole new motherboard, etc.). Previously, LCD=Portable, but now with iLamps and LCD displays, I increasingly buy AppleCare for desktops as well. It is worth mentioning that AppleCare is significantly cheaper for desktops, and includes the display when purchased concurrently. I have found that the few repairs I need to effect tend to "pay" for all the AppleCare warranties I purchase. Because we have so many machines, we are likely to experience failures at a somewhat constant percentage. With a typical home user with one or two machines, it is more like a 50/50 shot that you will never use the warranty. That said, I bought AppleCare for my Cube at home...
Some other notes...
AppleCare also gets you free unlimited telephone tech support for three years. Many people have pointed out that you get a one year warranty with any new Mac, but telephone tech support is limited to the first 90 days (so-called "up-and-running" support). It's even worse when you consider that Apple used to start your 90 days from the time of the first call, but now start the 90 days from time of purchase
Apple will run you through the ringer with tech support before authorizing a repair. Be patient, try everything they suggest. Document, document, document. They will eventually give up and authorize repair.
It helps if you live near an AppleStore. Apple will send out a repair guy (or gal) but dispatch can take a week or more. For portables, Apple offers a very decent return service; they send you a box overnight, you pack your 'book and return it postage paid overnight, they fix and return to you overnight. Still taking your Mac into an Apple store means you can "supervise" the repair easier, and your stuff is less likely to get stolen, broken, or lost.
Watch out for a company called Warrantech. They are targeting Apple customers for their inferior, albeit legitimate, extended warranty product. What is shady about them is that they advertise via direct mail to Mac owners in a ambiguous fashion that leads many consumers into believing they are purchasing an extended warranty from Apple. Their price is as high as AppleCare, so they are no bargin.
This is the peril of of the computer industry becoming a commodity-based system. Margins are so low, manufacturers have to make it up on volume. Consumers say why not buy a new P4, it's only $700. Gamers buy new ware just to play Unreal Tourney at 100fps instead of 70. My brother just bought a new box because his old one (P3 500) got trashed by a virus and he lost his restore disk. I know a lot of/.er's reuse old ware with *BSD or Linux for routers, DNS etc. But how many PC users collect old Packard Bells, Dells, Gateways, HPs?
I still have every machine I've ever owned. Mac Plus (classic), Mac TV (rare and cool), Quadra 660 AV (+VCR=TV), PM 7500 (workhorse, testbed), G4 Cube (you wish), and 1999 iBook (yeah, it's Tang). Only the Plus sits in a closet. I keep them all because they are either still useful, collectible or have sentimental value (my Plus got me through college). I fully intend to pull the Plus, time-capsule-like from the closet in 2010, and boot it up for old-times sake. It'll never end up in some Asian landfill...
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Some initial info....
I am an IT manager of a group supporting faculty and staff of a large university in Washington DC.
Last year, over 70 percent of new students in my university brought Macs to school. We haven't seen hard numbers on this year's freshman class, but we expect Mac use to increase linearly as it has over the past 3-4 years (especially since Intel Macs).
This year, more than 50 percent of faculty who were eligible for a new computer chose Mac.
Linux users are blocked from using the VPN which controls access to the WLAN.
The main driver of faculty and student Mac choice in our surveys has been security (perceived or real) and flexibility. Faculty want the ability to run the OS best suited to the task. One Stat professor uses mostly Unix apps in Apple's X environment, web/email/Word on the Mac, and a few Win-only apps in XP on Parallels. Another prof in Physics triple-boots Ubuntu, Mac OS and XP on a MacBook Pro. A significant number of Mac users run XP in Parallels or Fusion. Several profs only run XP on their Macs, preferring the Apple hardware, and hedging they might use the Mac capability in the future.
To me, as someone who switched majors 4 times, and took tech electives despite my English major, the flexibility of a universal computing platform capable of running the two major desktop operating systems (one of which is Unix-based) plus Linux means all your bases are covered. Setup Mac OS and sandbox Windows and Linux in virtual machines, then use whichever OS best suits your current need. If you find later that you are mostly using Windows, or mostly using Linux, set that OS up as a default boot on its own partition.
Admittedly, you can do all I describe on a PC sans Mac OS, but even if you feel you will never use Mac OS, discounting the possibility that you might need or desire it in the future is shortsighted given Mac OS's current growth vector, especially in education. A less capable PC doesn't even necessarily cost less. I just the other day spec'd a Dell Vostro 13" against a 13" MacBook Pro and the Dell was $50 more.
So, again, hedge your bets. Buy the computer that can do Mac OS, Linux and Windows and use whichever OS you need when you need it.
>>I kept my PC going for 6 years with incremental upgrades. The iMac might last you 2-3 years max!
The iMac came out a time when OS 9 absolutely screamed on a G3, and later, quite paradoxically and unlike Windows, each new version of OS X ran faster than before. This was of course because the very unfortunately code-named Cheetah (10.0) was highly unoptimized and full of debug code. Each successive version was more optimized and less bloated, and thus ran faster. My company had slot-load 350s and 400s circa 2000 that were in use until mid-2007, running Tiger and Office 2004 in 512MB on 10 and 20GB drives. People got real work done on these iMacs and we got our money's worth many times over. We donated the bulk of these old iMacs to a African charity, who shipped them overseas for classroom use.
Supporting over 30 of these units, I got very adept at opening them to replace bad drives, swap bad optical drives, even an occasional mobo swap. I could swap a hard drive in less than 15 minutes (16 screws total on the slot-loads)
I have to give props to the puck. I hold the mouse with the tips of my fingers, unlike many who cup the mouse with their hand. Look at your palm and curl your fingers slightly inward. What shape does that create? Right...a circle. For me it was one of the best mice ever. Wish Apple would bring back a bluetooth optical version of it...
Only one issue with your analogy... Porsches are fundamentally like other cars, and Porsche does not rely on a third-party ecosystem to support and justify the value of their product. Market share in computing is important because it drives developers to create products for the platform. Without adequate third-party devices and applications to justify a platform, its viability suffers. One can argue how much market share is "enough" but Apple seems to be doing OK with 5%. While one can also argue whether the computer market's drive to "standardize" for "compatibility" will always lead to 90/5/5 market split, it is interesting to imagine what the world would be like if Apple had the 90% market share. Would absolute power corrupt Apple the way it did Microsoft?
Among my friends, family and aquaintances, almost universally, those who use hard drive-based players experience many more failures than those who use flash-based players, regardless of brand. My wife and I own four iPods, a 1st gen Shuffle, 2nd Gen Shuffle, 1st gen mini, and a 2nd gen nano (we use the Shuffles for workout, and the mini and nano otherwise). That's three flash and one hard drive, and we've have had no failures. However, the minis, with their CF form factor drive seem to hold up better than the Toshiba OEM drives in the full size iPods. I also plan to upgrade the mini to a 8GB compact flash soon, mostly for the increased capacity, but I heard battery life improves as well.
The battery issue in iPods is what evs. All rechargeable batteries eventual fail. The more you use a rechargeable battery the sooner it wears out. iPod users tend to use their iPods alot, so their batteries wear out sooner. Get over it.
The hard drive issue is real. Apple should insist Toshiba fix the reliability issues. Even though I have been accused of being an Apple fanboy, I wouldn't mind seeing a class-action suit against Apple to force them to own up to the high failure rate. But my experience suggests that other hard drive-based players experience high failure rates too. Hard drives are just not well suited to a mobile device like an iPod (you know what I mean, we don't treat out laptops like we treat music players... would you trust a hard drive in your cell phone?). So I have decided not to buy ANY other hard drive-based player until reliability improves markedly. When I suggest players to people, I always mention the capacity vs. reliabilty tradeoff of hard drive vs. flash players. If the person insists on buying the hard drive player, I recommend the extended warranty, again, regardless of brand.
Since all iPod batteries tend to fail in the first two years, and since Apple charges $99 to replace the battery, but only $59 for a two year warranty, it seems prudent to me to buy the extended warranty on all iPods (except the $79 Shuffle). Basically, look at it as saving $40 on your inevitable battery replacement and getting a warranty on the rest of the iPod for free.
So if you really want to switch off iPods, I still suggest you avoid hard drive-based players, otherwise you are likely to face the same reliabilty issues. But if capacity and/or video is not an issue, I think the new nano will prove to be the most reliable iPod to date. It has the tough aluminum exterior that held up so well on the original mini, and the solid-state guts that have proven so reliable in flash-based iPods. Spells winner to me.
Apple used to sell the $699 model as a popular pre-configured model at their stores for $873.00 (the same price if you configured it online.) $174 is a great discount off the old price. I only hope the ATI 9200 chipset has the newer ROM that fixes the issue of video artifacts on some displays. ATI has released a ROM update for their retail 9200 chipsets, but Apple has still yet to patch the OEM mini ROM. I returned a mini over this issue, which made watching DVDs unbearable.
I'm late to this discussion, but it dawned on me that to be productive your machine needs to be available and working properly. If you are constantly dealing with security issues, downloading patches, running spyware removers and scanning for viruses, you are not being very productive. I have seen people literally replace a horked Windows box rather than go though the troubleshoot, cleanup, and reinstall process, only to have their new machine ownd for the same reason a few days later. Maybe I am being laissez-faire, but I don't even have an AV package on my Macs at home. It just never been an issue.
The problem with Zeitgiest is that many Mac and Linux users spoof their browser ID string for "compatibility" with sites that will only allow certain browsers. My Safari browser reports IE 6.0 on Windows. I suspect a good deal of the "Other" category are Mac and Linux users.
Secondly, I agree with the overcount theory. Since Microsoft does not sell PCs, just the OS, it is difficult to know how many users are buying licenses to upgrade, or offices buying site licenses then imaging over OEM licenses, or OEM copies being overwritten with some other OS.
Apple sells machines and that can be easily tracked. Yes there is Linux for Mac, but likely 99.925% of all Macs run Mac OS.
Apple has conservatively said 25 million Macs are in use. They have sold a few million more since saying that. At nearly 30 million Macs they would be about 5% of the market. Zeitgiest has, on occasion, clocked them at 4%. Throw in a percent or two of spoofers and it looks like 5% is a fair estimate of Apple's installed base.
My comments were in direct response to your troll, and hence not trolling for troll's sake. What blew me away was how such an obvious troll got a 5 - insightful rating. Further, I reined my post back ON topic after taking your troll bait.
Problems with Windows and Linux... Mostly not hardware, although given the size of the market and the proclivity of cheapness among PC users, a lot of cheaply made, cheaply designed, poor quality components exist, especially in the DIY and screwdriver shop crowd. Yeah, hard drives are hard drives, but chintzy cases, chintzy monitors, chintzy keyboards and mice, chintzy I/O cards, Winmodems. Not to mention COM and IRQ issues (just saw a guy on XP last week trying to connect to a router over serial, but both serial ports were assigned, so Device Manager, remove device, blah blah).
No, on PCs software is the Achilles heel. I support a network with many PCs (60 Mac, 40 PC) and have supported PCs since Win 3.1. I don't think any slashdotters will disagree with me that Windows is a pain in the ass. Spyware, viruses, registry corruption, security issues, truckloads of patches, Microsoft tax, privacy issues, lack of choice (Microsoft lock-ins destroy any real choice on Wintel).
Linux, lack of commercial desktop apps, still a
very get-under-the-hood OS (compile source, chase kernels, edit config stuff), lack of standardized interface, millionbillion distributions, linux techies few, far-between, and expensive, SCO uncertainty (I hate SCO, but what if they win?), ultimately still hard to use and who wants to rtfm everytime they want to do something that should take two clicks to configure.
I think Mac OS X is the best because I have used and supported many OSes and in my opinion OS X does more, is more reliable, is easier to setup and configure, is easier to support and troubleshoot, integrates better in mixed environments, costs much less to support over time, and runs on amazingly cool and cutting-edge hardware (Xserve, PowerBook, G5, nuff said).
How did this a "5 - Insightful"? The post was totally OT and a obvious troll.
To answer this troll's highly rated post though, I would rather buy a $1000 Mac than get a $1000 PC for free, because I don't need the headaches that the PC clone architecture and Windows and Linux OSes bring to the equation. Although plenty of people and companies do it, I would never spend my own hard-earned cash to buy into that world. Besides, the TCO costs on the back end eat up all your "savings" on the initial purchase. And your beige box has no style (same to you Fast and Furious Alu-mini-um, windowed, water-cooled, glowtube boys too, like school on Sunday, no class).
Now, to get OT. ZeroInstall sounds like Mac OS X's (and NeXT's) application bundles, which are basically special folders that contain all the pieces of the app, but act like an application and launch when clicked. Bring up a contextual menu on most Mac OS X apps however and you can select Show Contents which opens the bundle as a directory rather than launching the app. Throw said app away and you just uninstalled it completely.
Mod the OT troll down.
(Now that I think about, I guess I'd take the free PC and sell it to get money to pay for the Mac).
This happened to me in the late 90's when Sprint decided to shut down their Spectrum network in favor of the parallel PCS network they were building. Trouble was they only offered new phones to their highest paying customers. My bill was pretty low each month, so I was only offered refurb phones. I called to ask why and the guy said everyone got refurbs, which I knew to be false because my wife, a heavier user, got her choice of new phones. Anyway the chintzy Sony by Qualcomm I ended up with sucked compared to the cool Moto I had on Spectrum. And because the PCS network was so new, coverage sucked ass. I am permanently anti-Sprint over that fiasco. I assume ATT will lose some customers to this as well. Maybe they'll go to cingular... Won't they be surprised.
I don't want to sound like a Mac elitist, and I know this is OT and probably redundant by now.... But, fricking blame Sony for NOT including a FireWire cable with a fricking DV cam. Yeah, you should know DV does not work over USB, but Sony confuses the issue for DV noobs by giving them a fricking USB cable in the box (who actually uses the sub-par still capability anyway?).
Long story short, buy the FireWire cable Sony should have given you in the first place.
confuse market share for installed base. IDC (subsidiary of IDG) is one of the worst undercounters of Mac marketshare and installed base. A quick look at Google's Zeitgeist shows 3% Mac, 1% Linux. I know these number are not perfect as we all spoof browser IDs, but I think the the ratio of Mac to Linux boxes undercounted due to spoofing is also likely 3:1.
Apple has sold nearly 30 million Macs since 1984. The PowerPC shipped a decade ago in 1994. Any PowerPC will run OS 9, any G3 will run 10.2, and any factory USB machine will run 10.3 (officially, XPostFacto). That is something like 20 million machines still in use mostly as desktops.
I don't hate free software, and I think Mac OS X and Linux complement each other. I just hate these so-called analysts with their biased numbers. My wife used to work for an economics firm that did analysis for the telecom industry. I would liken what they did to selling cosmetics to ugly people to make them look better. They tailored their reports to put the companies that were paying for the reports in the best light no matter what the truth was. IDC is no different. If Apple gave them a crapload of money, they would say Apple's marketshare far outpaces Linux.
By the "guy in charge," I take it you mean Sirhindi Varadarajan. He has stated that he never used a Mac before VT bought this cluster, so your charge of his being an Apple zealot is false. Shame you can't just admit that the platform chosen was the best choice at the time, has worked out brilliantly, has changed opinions about Apple and the Mac, and is only going to get better on Xserves.
By blowing it off as Apple zealotry, you totally discount just how good the PowerPC 970 and the G5 architecture are.
Ever notice the apps that break are usually by the vendors that do their Mac version as an afterthought (ahem, Quicken) or never did stable apps in the past (cough, Quark). Apple doesn't break good code. If they would follow better coding practices, the apps wouldn't break.
A look at the used computer marketplace shows that Macs do not depreciate anywhere near as fast as commodity PCs. A computer is a great tool for teaching history, music and art.
I was in Palo Alto doing a job at Stanford back in mid 2000. Went out to eat at a little Italian place just down from the Cardinal Hotel (who was doing 802.11b in the hotel way back then), and overheard some engineers from Sun talking shop (blah blah Sparc blahblah Solaris blah). I went over and asked them what they thought of Mac OS X. They pooh-poohed it saying Mach was a crappy kernel, the PowerPC was a dead-end, blah blah Objective-C bad blah, and other things. I'm just a lowly Network Admin for whom all things silicon are magic, so I was roundly "put in my place."
With G5s and Panther nigh, it's safe to say those engineers were wrong. Maybe Apple should just buy its way into the Enterprise by snapping up Sun, but then again Solaris is a "dead-end" compared to Linux and the Sparc III is "stuck" back at 1.2GHz blah blah blah....
I think it is worth it for those with many machines, but maybe not for those with only one or two machines.
I admin a K-12 charter school with 55 Macs. My rule of thumb has been to buy AppleCare on anything with an LCD (from past experience with expensive LCD repairs) or anything portable (due to highly integrated circuitry, eg. dead Ethernet port requires whole new motherboard, etc.). Previously, LCD=Portable, but now with iLamps and LCD displays, I increasingly buy AppleCare for desktops as well. It is worth mentioning that AppleCare is significantly cheaper for desktops, and includes the display when purchased concurrently. I have found that the few repairs I need to effect tend to "pay" for all the AppleCare warranties I purchase. Because we have so many machines, we are likely to experience failures at a somewhat constant percentage. With a typical home user with one or two machines, it is more like a 50/50 shot that you will never use the warranty. That said, I bought AppleCare for my Cube at home...
Some other notes...
AppleCare also gets you free unlimited telephone tech support for three years. Many people have pointed out that you get a one year warranty with any new Mac, but telephone tech support is limited to the first 90 days (so-called "up-and-running" support). It's even worse when you consider that Apple used to start your 90 days from the time of the first call, but now start the 90 days from time of purchase
Apple will run you through the ringer with tech support before authorizing a repair. Be patient, try everything they suggest. Document, document, document. They will eventually give up and authorize repair.
It helps if you live near an AppleStore. Apple will send out a repair guy (or gal) but dispatch can take a week or more. For portables, Apple offers a very decent return service; they send you a box overnight, you pack your 'book and return it postage paid overnight, they fix and return to you overnight. Still taking your Mac into an Apple store means you can "supervise" the repair easier, and your stuff is less likely to get stolen, broken, or lost.
Watch out for a company called Warrantech. They are targeting Apple customers for their inferior, albeit legitimate, extended warranty product. What is shady about them is that they advertise via direct mail to Mac owners in a ambiguous fashion that leads many consumers into believing they are purchasing an extended warranty from Apple. Their price is as high as AppleCare, so they are no bargin.
If Sony can get a new DVD-R squashed into this thing, maybe Apple can too. 1 GHz TiBook with SuperDrive at Macworld? Hmmm....
This is the peril of of the computer industry becoming a commodity-based system. Margins are so low, manufacturers have to make it up on volume. Consumers say why not buy a new P4, it's only $700. Gamers buy new ware just to play Unreal Tourney at 100fps instead of 70. My brother just bought a new box because his old one (P3 500) got trashed by a virus and he lost his restore disk. I know a lot of /.er's reuse old ware with *BSD or Linux for routers, DNS etc. But how many PC users collect old Packard Bells, Dells, Gateways, HPs?
I still have every machine I've ever owned. Mac Plus (classic), Mac TV (rare and cool), Quadra 660 AV (+VCR=TV), PM 7500 (workhorse, testbed), G4 Cube (you wish), and 1999 iBook (yeah, it's Tang). Only the Plus sits in a closet. I keep them all because they are either still useful, collectible or have sentimental value (my Plus got me through college). I fully intend to pull the Plus, time-capsule-like from the closet in 2010, and boot it up for old-times sake. It'll never end up in some Asian landfill...