Unless you work for a company that doesn't allow external web-browsing during hours...
I can't imagine myself working in an environment where I can't access online resources while I'm working. The productivity gain is very significant. Any company that doesn't realize this is clearly managed by idiots.
What I'd like to see is putting Linux on it and turning it into a full-blown living room appliance. In terms of hacking the Apple TV has much potential, it could easily replace the XBox as most useful hackable livingroom hardware. It has more powerful hardware, has an HDMI port, and appears to require less messing around with the hardware.
The only thing that sucks is lack of RCA and S-Video outputs, for those of us who don't give a flying shit about HDTV. My existing TV set works fine, thank you very much. What the hell was Apple thinking?!
I can stand downloading the odd 1mb update, with linux it seems that every other day there's a good 10MB of updates, I just don't have an hour to waste my bandwidth updating my OS every day.
Unless you are talking about Gentoo that is definitely not true. Linux distributions in general have less security updates to download than Windows.
And whatever OS it is, it's not like you're forced to download them anyway.
Cut the bullshit, when will NeoOffice REALLY have an Aqua look and feel? Sure, it's not X11 like mainline OpenOffice, but still wrong. GUI fonts are non-standard, command+left and command+right don't act as they should in an OS X app, contextual menus look nothing like Aqua menus and render slowly, etc.
And what about the performance? NeoOffice is unresponsive and choppy, almost like a PowerPC app running under Rosetta.
Having features not in mainline OpenOffice is nice and all, but I'd be nice if you first made NeoOffice look and run correctly.
Oh, and stop bugging me for donations. I donate only to free software projects that don't piss me off by opening my browser to a donation page while I'm trying to work.
Please tell me with a straight face that your Windows box has NEVER frozen up so bad that even the power buttons stopped working?
On any ACPI-compatible computer I've ever used, holding the power button for 3 seconds triggered a hardware poweroff that the operating system cannot prevent. And in the case of older non-ACPI computers, the hardware poweroff occurred right away, without holding the button.
This is not even debatable. If a Mac crashes, it recovers gracefully 99% of the time. If WinX crashes, it is usually a painfully drawn-out and aggravating process of trying to ctrl+alt+del an app that is not responding. My favorite feature of Windows is when the ctrl+alt+del window crashes. Good luck force quitting the force quitter. This simply doesn't happen on a Mac. OK, first of all, you seem to be confusing a system crash and a stalled app. You also seem to imply that system crashes NEVER happen on a Mac, which is plainly false. I've seen plenty of them, from old 68k Macs to brand new Intel Macs. Finally, you claim that stalled apps can bring Windows down, which is downright false on any Windows NT. It appears that the last version of Windows you tried was 98. Or (god forbid) ME.
The previous poster was incorrect in bringing up the "uplug" troubleshooting technique. I don't have enough fingers in my house to count how many times I've had to remove a PC from the power supply to get it to reboot. Hello? Reset button?? And if you don't have a reset button, holding down the power button will shut it down. Please learn how to use a computer.
This has never happened on any of my 10 or so Macs in the past 19 years. Again, I find that hard to believe.
Killing a hung app in OS X is as graceful as a crash can be. Confusing system crashes with hung apps again... Why do I even bother?
Firefox, for example, even brings you back to the website you were on, and if it was a site that required login, remains logged in for you. Now that's just depressing. Firefox does that on ANY operating system. Don't think you're special because you use a Mac.
You don't see Mac users yelling out their computer trying to figure out why in the hell it isn't responding. Mac users take a calm breath, then right click on the offending app and choose "force quit". I'm a Mac user, and OS X managed to make me yell plenty. Almost as much as Windows, in fact. All operating systems have their problems, and those who fail to recognize it are zealots.
I don't like defending Apple (I'm a long time Linux user who recently bought a Mac and thinks it's nice but not the second coming), but here I'll bite:
1. It crashes more frequently than XP. Saying one crashes more than the other is pretty subjective. I've seen both crash. I've also seen Linux crash. In the case of all OSes, unstable drivers were usually the cause.
2. When it crashes you have to unplug the machine. Huh? Ever tried holding down the Power button? (and don't tell me it's just a Mac thing, because it's always what I've had to do on any laptop because they lack reset buttons)
3. To do anything 'strange' you have to dig in to a *nix command line. Wait, that's a BAD thing? At least you DO have a real BSD shell environment, as opposed to the half-assed DOS-like shit you're stuck with under Windows.
4. OS Updates are _very_ frequent. (I'm assuming you're talking about major paying updates (ie. 10.3 -> 10.4), not minor updates (ie. 10.4.8 -> 10.4.9)) They're slowing down. And unlike Windows they seem actually useful. Windows has peaked in 2000. Most new features now are UI appearance overhauls.
5. There is WAY more software available for Windows. That one's a given, but not everyone needs all the Windows software out there.
6. Writing software for a Mac is no fun, especially now that they claim the OS is 'open source' and like directing questions to a Darwin forum. MS gives MSDN, and MSDN rules. MSDN is a bloody mess. You search for a win32 API call and it forwards you to a Windows CE API call of a similar name. I hate that. Apple's documentation is not incredible but so far it hasn't made me cursing. Besides you also get nice stuff like man pages. Anyway we're in the age of the Internet, and Google rarely fails me. Those big documentation blobs are overrated. When I develop under Linux I don't miss them at all.
BTW: Office 2007 is amazing. Yeah, it's amazing how Microsoft manages to make people believe that there is a point in buying their Office suite all over again.
This list is unfortunately lacking in the free/opensource department. And like many other Mac sites they fail to indicate what's closed source and what's not, and when they say "free" they really mean that "beer" kind of free which is annoying (but that's another subject).
Personally I use non-free software only when I REALLY need something and there's absolutely no free alternative (and yes that's the "freedom" kind of free here).
Open Source Mac is a good resource for free/opensource software on the Mac. I'd suggest you check it out if you haven't already.
Target disk mode is indeed nice, but there's no reason Apple couldn't make it work with USB as well.
Not really. Target Disk Mode is made possible by the fact that Firewire uses a peer-to-peer communication model. It couldn't be possible over USB because you can't plug two USB hosts together (unless using special hardware like one of those USB-to-USB network dongles).
I still agree with you that USB is more important than Firewire though.
Maybe, but people don't want their products. And the nice thing about buying a Mac, is that it's one of the few machines you can be confident doesn't have Windows preloaded.
I think the more proper way to put it would be "doesn't have a Windows license paid for". There are numerous Linux laptop resellers out there, but from what I can guess they just throw away the Windows OEM license that was forced onto them by the original seller, so the customer thinks they didn't pay "the Windows tax".
Funny how you claim that OpenOffice Impress is slower than PowerPoint. I used to think the same, but last week I had this PPT that used a fancy background that rendered very... slowly... in PowerPoint 2003. Then I decided to try viewing it in OpenOffice, and to my surprise the pages rendered near-instantly.
What I hate the most about OpenOffice Impress is that using the mouse wheel over the main view doesn't switch pages, it only scrolls the view itself which is pointless because the page is usually automatically sized to fit the view area. That alone drives me nuts and makes me prefer PowerPoint.
How about instead of Kubuntu, we just stuck with Unbuntu, and got someone to maintain some sort of system for installing KDE.
Kubuntu is just Ubuntu with a different default desktop. It uses the same packages in the same repositories, and is maintained by the same company. It is not a separate distribution, like you seem to imply.
I know I don't play Final Fantasy games because they're innovative. I play Final Fantasy games because they're damn gorgeous.
Thanks for reminding me why I stopped playing RPGs (or at least the Japanese kind). When I want to see pretty CG, I go see a damn movie. When I want to experience a good story, I go read a damn book. But when I play a game, I want to PLAY A GAME.
RPGs stopped being interesting to me when I grew up and became a busy adult who wants to maximize his ever-decreasing free time allocated to video games. Nowadays it's mostly arcade-ish and FPS-ish games for me, where the emphasis on gameplay is put to the maximum, with little to no time wasted on staring at pretty pictures or developing a story. Some great games manage to do all of those without sacrificing gameplay, but Japanese RPGs are basically the complete opposite of that idea.
I'm not ignorant myself. I know very well how top works. I was talking about users in general, who end up in top for the first time and don't understand the worthless figures it shows them. At least it did confuse me the first time I used it. Maybe it didn't happen to you. Whatever.
Do you see that thing over there that says BUFFERS? Gee, I wonder what that means? top is not primarily a memory reporting tool, it shows you the top processes running, with a short display of memory stuff as a reference. It *gasp* EXPECTS THE USER TO KNOW WHAT BUFFERS ARE.
That doesn't make its output any less broken. I know what buffers (and cache) are. Do I want to know that my memory is filled up by it? No. That's how it's supposed to be anyway. What I DO want to know is how much non-temporary memory is being used. Does top show that? No, not at all. I have to manually calculate it from (total used - (buffers + cache)). Why isn't this shown? I don't know.
Try free -m instead. There's a helpful line that shows you used/free memory minus the buffers and cache.
I already knew about that, and use it regularly, due to top being too brain-damaged to show useful memory usage figures.
No wonder people are so afraid of using Linux; they can't take 2 minutes to READ AND LEARN about simple things like this. It doesn't take much brainpower to understand, you know.
There's a difference between having to learn things and being shown unintuitive interfaces that end up being more confusing than helpful.
Wrong. The top utility is doing the correct thing. That memory is being used, even if it is being consumed by the buffers and cache.
No, it's definitely not doing the correct thing. The user doesn't give a flying shit that his total memory is used up. This figure is misguiding and completely pointless. What he really wants to know is how much is actively being used by applications. Buffers and cache are temporary throw-away memory usage.
Imagine if it actually did subtract such memory usage. We'd never hear the end of new Ubuntu users asking "I've got 4 GB in my system but top only shows my programs ever using at most 3 GB! Why won't it use the rest of my memory?!?!?!?!"
I have my doubts on that. Meanwhile, what we DO constantly hear right now, though, is people thinking that Linux is bloated, and whine about how it's a shitty operating system because it uses up all of their memory at all times.
Seriously, this is fucking dumb. Any operating system (including previous versions of Windows) caches data in unused areas of RAM until those areas are needed for currently running applications. Remember when you first run "top" in Linux and noticed that all almost memory was used up? That's because top stupidly shows you the total memory usage without subtracting buffers and cache.
But there are still things you can't do; you can't right click and drag with the two-finger setup, for instance.
Actually you can right-click-drag. Just right-click as you usually do, then move your fingers on the trackpad to move the pointer. As long as you hold the trackpad's button down, the virtual right button is kept pressed, and the two fingers on the trackpad move the pointer instead of acting as a 2D wheel as they usually do.
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Unless you work for a company that doesn't allow external web-browsing during hours...
I can't imagine myself working in an environment where I can't access online resources while I'm working. The productivity gain is very significant. Any company that doesn't realize this is clearly managed by idiots.
Putting full OS X on this is uninteresting...
What I'd like to see is putting Linux on it and turning it into a full-blown living room appliance. In terms of hacking the Apple TV has much potential, it could easily replace the XBox as most useful hackable livingroom hardware. It has more powerful hardware, has an HDMI port, and appears to require less messing around with the hardware.
The only thing that sucks is lack of RCA and S-Video outputs, for those of us who don't give a flying shit about HDTV. My existing TV set works fine, thank you very much. What the hell was Apple thinking?!
All we need now is for Taco to call it lame and it's time to start buying up those stocks and shares with abandon.
It does have wireless though.
They're not going to port the actual desktop (ie. kwin, kicker, etc.), just the libraries and apps.
Crossover supports Windows IE very well, under both Linux and OS X.
I can stand downloading the odd 1mb update, with linux it seems that every other day there's a good 10MB of updates, I just don't have an hour to waste my bandwidth updating my OS every day.
Unless you are talking about Gentoo that is definitely not true. Linux distributions in general have less security updates to download than Windows.
And whatever OS it is, it's not like you're forced to download them anyway.
Kick ass laptop to be the envy of your friends .... $1,000,000 ... $ 100
Coffee to show off your laptop in the cafeteria
Better ending:
Spilling your $100 coffee on your $1M laptop... priceless
Cut the bullshit, when will NeoOffice REALLY have an Aqua look and feel? Sure, it's not X11 like mainline OpenOffice, but still wrong. GUI fonts are non-standard, command+left and command+right don't act as they should in an OS X app, contextual menus look nothing like Aqua menus and render slowly, etc.
And what about the performance? NeoOffice is unresponsive and choppy, almost like a PowerPC app running under Rosetta.
Having features not in mainline OpenOffice is nice and all, but I'd be nice if you first made NeoOffice look and run correctly.
Oh, and stop bugging me for donations. I donate only to free software projects that don't piss me off by opening my browser to a donation page while I'm trying to work.
But does the XBOX 360 have a lower Total Cost of Ownership than the Apple TV? And do you have "independent" studies to prove your "facts"?
Inquiring minds want to know!
Please tell me with a straight face that your Windows box has NEVER frozen up so bad that even the power buttons stopped working?
On any ACPI-compatible computer I've ever used, holding the power button for 3 seconds triggered a hardware poweroff that the operating system cannot prevent. And in the case of older non-ACPI computers, the hardware poweroff occurred right away, without holding the button.
Oh great, now I'm defending both sides...
This is not even debatable. If a Mac crashes, it recovers gracefully 99% of the time. If WinX crashes, it is usually a painfully drawn-out and aggravating process of trying to ctrl+alt+del an app that is not responding. My favorite feature of Windows is when the ctrl+alt+del window crashes. Good luck force quitting the force quitter. This simply doesn't happen on a Mac.
OK, first of all, you seem to be confusing a system crash and a stalled app. You also seem to imply that system crashes NEVER happen on a Mac, which is plainly false. I've seen plenty of them, from old 68k Macs to brand new Intel Macs. Finally, you claim that stalled apps can bring Windows down, which is downright false on any Windows NT. It appears that the last version of Windows you tried was 98. Or (god forbid) ME.
The previous poster was incorrect in bringing up the "uplug" troubleshooting technique. I don't have enough fingers in my house to count how many times I've had to remove a PC from the power supply to get it to reboot.
Hello? Reset button?? And if you don't have a reset button, holding down the power button will shut it down. Please learn how to use a computer.
This has never happened on any of my 10 or so Macs in the past 19 years.
Again, I find that hard to believe.
Killing a hung app in OS X is as graceful as a crash can be.
Confusing system crashes with hung apps again... Why do I even bother?
Firefox, for example, even brings you back to the website you were on, and if it was a site that required login, remains logged in for you.
Now that's just depressing. Firefox does that on ANY operating system. Don't think you're special because you use a Mac.
You don't see Mac users yelling out their computer trying to figure out why in the hell it isn't responding. Mac users take a calm breath, then right click on the offending app and choose "force quit".
I'm a Mac user, and OS X managed to make me yell plenty. Almost as much as Windows, in fact. All operating systems have their problems, and those who fail to recognize it are zealots.
I don't like defending Apple (I'm a long time Linux user who recently bought a Mac and thinks it's nice but not the second coming), but here I'll bite:
1. It crashes more frequently than XP.
Saying one crashes more than the other is pretty subjective. I've seen both crash. I've also seen Linux crash. In the case of all OSes, unstable drivers were usually the cause.
2. When it crashes you have to unplug the machine.
Huh? Ever tried holding down the Power button? (and don't tell me it's just a Mac thing, because it's always what I've had to do on any laptop because they lack reset buttons)
3. To do anything 'strange' you have to dig in to a *nix command line.
Wait, that's a BAD thing? At least you DO have a real BSD shell environment, as opposed to the half-assed DOS-like shit you're stuck with under Windows.
4. OS Updates are _very_ frequent.
(I'm assuming you're talking about major paying updates (ie. 10.3 -> 10.4), not minor updates (ie. 10.4.8 -> 10.4.9))
They're slowing down. And unlike Windows they seem actually useful. Windows has peaked in 2000. Most new features now are UI appearance overhauls.
5. There is WAY more software available for Windows.
That one's a given, but not everyone needs all the Windows software out there.
6. Writing software for a Mac is no fun, especially now that they claim the OS is 'open source' and like directing questions to a Darwin forum. MS gives MSDN, and MSDN rules.
MSDN is a bloody mess. You search for a win32 API call and it forwards you to a Windows CE API call of a similar name. I hate that. Apple's documentation is not incredible but so far it hasn't made me cursing. Besides you also get nice stuff like man pages. Anyway we're in the age of the Internet, and Google rarely fails me. Those big documentation blobs are overrated. When I develop under Linux I don't miss them at all.
BTW: Office 2007 is amazing.
Yeah, it's amazing how Microsoft manages to make people believe that there is a point in buying their Office suite all over again.
This list is unfortunately lacking in the free/opensource department. And like many other Mac sites they fail to indicate what's closed source and what's not, and when they say "free" they really mean that "beer" kind of free which is annoying (but that's another subject).
Personally I use non-free software only when I REALLY need something and there's absolutely no free alternative (and yes that's the "freedom" kind of free here).
Open Source Mac is a good resource for free/opensource software on the Mac. I'd suggest you check it out if you haven't already.
Target disk mode is indeed nice, but there's no reason Apple couldn't make it work with USB as well.
Not really. Target Disk Mode is made possible by the fact that Firewire uses a peer-to-peer communication model. It couldn't be possible over USB because you can't plug two USB hosts together (unless using special hardware like one of those USB-to-USB network dongles).
I still agree with you that USB is more important than Firewire though.
Maybe, but people don't want their products. And the nice thing about buying a Mac, is that it's one of the few machines you can be confident doesn't have Windows preloaded.
I think the more proper way to put it would be "doesn't have a Windows license paid for". There are numerous Linux laptop resellers out there, but from what I can guess they just throw away the Windows OEM license that was forced onto them by the original seller, so the customer thinks they didn't pay "the Windows tax".
Purple is not even remotely as bad as brown. PR-wise it's the worse color one can choose for portable consumer electronics.
Funny how you claim that OpenOffice Impress is slower than PowerPoint. I used to think the same, but last week I had this PPT that used a fancy background that rendered very... slowly... in PowerPoint 2003. Then I decided to try viewing it in OpenOffice, and to my surprise the pages rendered near-instantly.
What I hate the most about OpenOffice Impress is that using the mouse wheel over the main view doesn't switch pages, it only scrolls the view itself which is pointless because the page is usually automatically sized to fit the view area. That alone drives me nuts and makes me prefer PowerPoint.
How about instead of Kubuntu, we just stuck with Unbuntu, and got someone to maintain some sort of system for installing KDE.
Kubuntu is just Ubuntu with a different default desktop. It uses the same packages in the same repositories, and is maintained by the same company. It is not a separate distribution, like you seem to imply.
I know I don't play Final Fantasy games because they're innovative. I play Final Fantasy games because they're damn gorgeous.
Thanks for reminding me why I stopped playing RPGs (or at least the Japanese kind). When I want to see pretty CG, I go see a damn movie. When I want to experience a good story, I go read a damn book. But when I play a game, I want to PLAY A GAME.
RPGs stopped being interesting to me when I grew up and became a busy adult who wants to maximize his ever-decreasing free time allocated to video games. Nowadays it's mostly arcade-ish and FPS-ish games for me, where the emphasis on gameplay is put to the maximum, with little to no time wasted on staring at pretty pictures or developing a story. Some great games manage to do all of those without sacrificing gameplay, but Japanese RPGs are basically the complete opposite of that idea.
Wow, ignorance sure is amazing.
I'm not ignorant myself. I know very well how top works. I was talking about users in general, who end up in top for the first time and don't understand the worthless figures it shows them. At least it did confuse me the first time I used it. Maybe it didn't happen to you. Whatever.
Do you see that thing over there that says BUFFERS? Gee, I wonder what that means? top is not primarily a memory reporting tool, it shows you the top processes running, with a short display of memory stuff as a reference. It *gasp* EXPECTS THE USER TO KNOW WHAT BUFFERS ARE.
That doesn't make its output any less broken. I know what buffers (and cache) are. Do I want to know that my memory is filled up by it? No. That's how it's supposed to be anyway. What I DO want to know is how much non-temporary memory is being used. Does top show that? No, not at all. I have to manually calculate it from (total used - (buffers + cache)). Why isn't this shown? I don't know.
Try free -m instead. There's a helpful line that shows you used/free memory minus the buffers and cache.
I already knew about that, and use it regularly, due to top being too brain-damaged to show useful memory usage figures.
No wonder people are so afraid of using Linux; they can't take 2 minutes to READ AND LEARN about simple things like this. It doesn't take much brainpower to understand, you know.
There's a difference between having to learn things and being shown unintuitive interfaces that end up being more confusing than helpful.
Wrong. The top utility is doing the correct thing. That memory is being used, even if it is being consumed by the buffers and cache.
No, it's definitely not doing the correct thing. The user doesn't give a flying shit that his total memory is used up. This figure is misguiding and completely pointless. What he really wants to know is how much is actively being used by applications. Buffers and cache are temporary throw-away memory usage.
Imagine if it actually did subtract such memory usage. We'd never hear the end of new Ubuntu users asking "I've got 4 GB in my system but top only shows my programs ever using at most 3 GB! Why won't it use the rest of my memory?!?!?!?!"
I have my doubts on that. Meanwhile, what we DO constantly hear right now, though, is people thinking that Linux is bloated, and whine about how it's a shitty operating system because it uses up all of their memory at all times.
Seriously, this is fucking dumb. Any operating system (including previous versions of Windows) caches data in unused areas of RAM until those areas are needed for currently running applications. Remember when you first run "top" in Linux and noticed that all almost memory was used up? That's because top stupidly shows you the total memory usage without subtracting buffers and cache.
Have the media still not figured out that correlation does not necessarily imply causation?
No, they follow the teachings of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
But there are still things you can't do; you can't right click and drag with the two-finger setup, for instance.
Actually you can right-click-drag. Just right-click as you usually do, then move your fingers on the trackpad to move the pointer. As long as you hold the trackpad's button down, the virtual right button is kept pressed, and the two fingers on the trackpad move the pointer instead of acting as a 2D wheel as they usually do.
I'd like to know why this has been modded Troll. Hell I'm a Mac owner myself and I agree with him.