Piles are a logical extension of the Dock (magnification feature) and bundles. Mac applications are actually folders at the file system level, but a single icon in the GUI. The user only needs to work with the single icon. A developer or interested user can look at the file system level and find binaries and libraries and image files and sounds that are used in the application.
In media work, for example pro audio, it is common to think of a folder as a document, and inside that folder you put a session file, and a folder of audio files, folder for plug-in settings, etc. There is a movement to standardize these project folders to you can share your work and collaborate more easily. Also, a song that is stored as a folder is easy to open up and find standard audio files in there, that you can use in any application.
So don't think of piles as folders. Think of them as groups of documents.
For example, a directory called song that contains lyrics.html, melody.midi, mix.mp3, and mix.aiff might show in the GUI as a pile called song with little tabs sticking out that you can grab Melody or Lyrics or MP3 or AIFF out.
A Web site that is a folder with index.html and a bunch of JPEGs could be shown as a single pile that you can pull just one file out of if you have to (to use it again, or share it with someone). If you open it or drop it on a browser it would be the same as dragging index.html onto the browser.
This is partly about making documents that you can peek inside and pull out standard stuff. Imagine if you made a Word document with embedded graphics and fonts and if you looked at the Word document at the command line it would be a folder with standard XML, PNG, and other files inside it. You could send that document to someone and they could grab any of those individual files to work with in any application.
If you have access to a Mac OS X machine, Control+click on an application in Finder and choose Show Contents from the context menu and it will open as a folder. It's very easy to understand when you compare a few applications this way and see how easy it is to access that stuff if you want to and how easy it is to ignore if you don't want to access it and just want to run the app (or move it, or rename it, which you can also do).
Also, keep in mind that HFS+ is not path-based only, it also gives each file a unique number so that the name and location of a file can change and the system and apps can still find them instantly. For example, you can rename all of your MP3's with a utility and then start iTunes and it still knows those are all the same songs that it already catalogued. This is maybe the most unknown killer feature of the Mac, because it saves you from maybe 5 error messages a day that you might see on MS Windows. Move an app on Windows and it will often stop working. It's crazy.
CPU's don't have anything to do with it. Most of the time, a desktop system's CPU's are mostly idle. Most users are not suffering from lack of CPU cycles.
Mac OS X just "feels" slow when you start to use it after using a legacy system such as Mac OS 9 or MS Windows or any other bitmap-based GUI. Everything on the Mac OS X display is drawn completely "off-screen" and then composited (layered and blended) with what's already on the display. This takes some time.
In a 3D game, you can turn off the up-and-down bobbing that makes it seem like you are walking and you will get a smoother display, but you don't feel as much like you are actually walking. The Mac OS X GUI seems like real stuff in a light table or under glass. It doesn't snap into place as quickly as older systems but it also doesn't show all the seams of the older systems. You trade a bit of speed for realism and I think it makes up later as you think of what's on the display as real.
I read some things from Apple coders who said that many of the benchmarks that are run on Mac OS X against other systems are misleading because the reviewers or testers don't understand that Mac OS X is tuned and optimized to run things like Logic and Final Cut Pro and iDVD and QuickTime, not tuned for pure Web serving speed, or pure database access speed.
So a lot of these benchmark suites have built-in assumptions that show when they test Mac OS X. They may simulate hitting a database for 1000 32k chunks every second or something, but Mac OS X is optimized to work with 50 500MB DV clips instead.
In short, the systems that benchmark better than Mac OS X in the same old tests don't run Final Cut Pro next to Apache next to Dreamweaver all on a next-generation window server with Unicode throughout like Mac OS X does.
You also see Macs getting benchmarked against systems with only 10/100 and they ignore the 10/100/1000 that's been standard for years on pro Macs. They also ignore FireWire because the other system doesn't have it. That stuff is expected on the Mac and the system is not necessarily optimized to a 10/100 benchmark. These benchmarks always stink to a Mac user because you can see 10 things where they tried to treat it like MS Windows or a PC and did something the hard way or in a way that a Mac user would never do because it is only that way on MS Windows.
When people talk about Mac OS X being slow, they are talking about a lack of interface responsiveness because of the double-buffered and 32-bit composited display. Nothing ever appears out of thin air. It's drawn in a buffer and then composited with your current display.
An analogy is that you could watch a 2-hour movie in 1:45 if you took out all the wipe transitions and just went boom, boom, boom between scenes. Technically this is faster, but it is not better. The way MS Windows is doing its display and interactivity it is cheating all the time. Once you get used to Mac OS X it is like looking at real stuff and interacting with it and you get used to the fact that a window slides away and your pace matches it quite easily.
It is not slow at the kernel level. Real-time multimedia stuff is amazing. Lots of audio tracks, lots of videos, you can really move data around in real-time with low, low latencies that can't be achieved with MS Windows. Also Mac OS X is fast at waking up from sleep so you can close and open your PowerBook all day long with no penalty. It also does a lot of things automatically that you would have to hand-hold a Windows machine. Also one crash per year and the thing runs 24/7 other than that really saves time over a Windows machine. Application admin and security audits and software updates are all also much quicker in Mac OS X. Apps usually work first time and don't break later at all. Very time-saving.
Apple's "diligence" is the key word. It's worth paying for. You run a single installer on a disc and it installs itself and just works. Software Update is polite and reliable, and the updates are spaced out well and versions are easy to understand and libraries and other things are all done in the right order.
The idea that anybody could save money by updating parts of their system themselves is ludicrous. They ask you to pay about US$100 every 18 months or so and for that the OS just updates itself every six weeks or so and also does security updates and bugfix updates for the software that came with the computer (iMovie, iTunes, etc). It's such a ridiculous IT labor steal because it really does work and you really do use it. The logs are right, the security is right.
I recommend to new Apple users that they pick a system that they can afford to replace every three years. Buy AppleCare for those three years, which is about US$300, and put aside $100 for a future OS update, and buy the maximum RAM for your system. After three years, you sell your system, get about 1/3 or more of your money back, and then buy the new equivalent system (new PowerBook to replace old PowerBook) with AppleCare and do three more years. If you ever have a computer problem, you call Apple, they answer quickly, and they help you to fix it or send a box for the system and you get a 3-day repair. It is a STEAL when you look at the uptime of the systems and their capabilities and how good the service is from one source.
Example:
iBook $999 AppleCare $299 Maxed out RAM $199 Future boxed system update $100
That's about $500 per year to run the newest Mac OS X totally worry-free. At the end of three years, you can get $500 at least for that system, probably more.
You have to compare the above not just to a PC system, but also to all the installation and add-ons and admin and virus checking and all the other stuff that comes free with a Dell. How much does it cost to get three years of trouble-free computing from Dell? Can you go three years without MS Windows fucking you at some point? Apple simplifies so many things that it is the death of 1000 cuts to MS Windows... you save money and time and trouble and do better work all the time on the new Mac platform.
It's like $65 per year, tops. You pay $129 for 10.2 and get 10.2.1 through 10.3.5 for free, which is 18 months at least, if not a year. Then you pay $129 for 10.4 and get 10.4.1 through 10.5.5 for free. If you wait a few months after release you can get Mac OS X for $99 and $89. Also, it comes included with any Mac system, which start at $699 and notebooks at $999.
Compare MS Windows pricing, installation procedures, guarantees, security, stability and then complain about how much you pay for Mac OS X. You can't buy a stable version of MS Windows. They have not made anything like Mac OS X yet. This is one of those things people like to complain about but the reality is that in mainstream operating systems there is MS and Apple and if Microsoft sells boxed updates for $99 and $129 and boxed "server" updates for $299 and $499 and more then Apple has to charge there, too. If they just put that charge onto systems, then people will say Macs are too expensive and should be cheaper like Dells.
We have five Macs here, and upgrading them all to 10.2 cost $229 or something, for a 5-pack license. That's less than one Windows XP. And you get iMovie and iTunes and iPhoto and iDVD and all the other great stuff that makes Mac OS X a rich environment from the start.
I can't find it in me to complain about Mac OS X at all. Our machines just run and run and there are lots of features that have made my work easier and better.
Who else is making news in computers these days? Everywhere else it is all lawyers and poor excuses for the same old half-assed shit.
The Apple platform has made more progress in the past two years than MS Windows has made in the last eight years since Windows 95. The Mac stopped crashing altogether, is UNIX-compatible, Java2 with all the trimmings, an updated API and a new object-oriented API, next-generation graphics system and so much more, while you can receive an email and lose your MS Windows system at any time. From top to bottom the Windows platform looks like a joke right now after all these years of "it will be stable soon". Remember when they delayed Windows 2000 and left out features just to "concentrate on fixing bugs and improving reliability" because people were demanding it. Now, a really advanced user can set up a halfway-decent Windows XP machine, but even they can't get close to the quality of a Mac, and for regular users, they are in a completely different world if they get a Gateway instead of an iMac as far as what they can do with it, and what they will have to do to admin it (almost nothing for the iMac, even adding hardware and apps is dead easy, just drag and drop at the most, and often it just works even without that.
This is not MS Windows. Mac OS X is modular from top to bottom. They don't have to put it in a wind tunnel to see what's wrong with it every two seconds. They can feature freeze in May and ship in September and be stable and reliable.
The whole industry is stuck thinking in a Microsoft box. Apple didn't rewrite their whole OS over the last few years so that they could continue to have the same old problems. Part of the reason why Mac OS X software is so great is that it has a lot of great stuff underneath it that developers can leverage in their solutions. They will hype the Panther name but this is just 10.3, the "stable" version of Jaguar. Since Jaguar is giving me 24/7 uptime we don't expect to have any trouble with 10.3. The "new" features in it are things that were meant for 10.2 but were not ready or not practical yet, while the big payoff will be all the 10.2 stuff that is even more refined.
If you skip Jaguar you will have to pay for Panther.
Here's how it worked in the past:
8.5 - pay 8.6 - free to 8.5 users
9.0 - pay 9.1 - free to 9.0 users
10.0 - pay 10.1 - free to 10.0 users
10.2 - pay 10.3 - free to 10.2 users
But notice that 9.1 is not free to 8.6 users. If you are running 10.1 when 10.3 comes out you will have to pay $99 for 10.3. You are actually wasting your "Jaguar-Panther" time. It costs $99 whether you get in at 10.2.0 or 10.3.0, so there is no use waiting. 10.2 is a great OS.
Right now a Mac OS X users' contacts, to-do's, and calendars are regularly syncronized between separate copies on different devices. So you add a phone number to your phone, and next time you sync you'll be told "this will add 1 new phone number to your PowerBook, iDisk, and iPod" and now you can get that number on any device.
All they will do is extend this to home folders, I think. The multiple copies are good as backups and you can always get to one to work with it and the changes will be published to the other copies when they are available. You can explain Apple features without any acronyms. That's the point. The implementation will be user-focused, not technology-focused.
I think pervasive computing won't be about always being connected to one data set by a huge connection, but rather always being connected in some way to at least one current copy of your data, and those changes going from server to server so that all your copies are current over time. So sometimes you just browse your Web site from any browser, sometimes you login to your home folder at work, sometimes at home, sometimes on your PowerBook, but to you it always feels like the right thing is happening and your data is available to you. In the background, there may be caching and the computers talking to each other overnight to stay synchronized, but the user will always get at what they want and even if a disk crashes they shouldn't lose too much work.
On Mac OS X it is common to represent some folders in the GUI as single icons. You use them that way, and if you want to "open the hood" you can go inside and there are individual files in there. It's a convenient way to have a less-complex interface and still work with lots of data.
As of Logic 6, there is a new "project" file format for Logic which is the same old file, but sitting in a standard folder structure with folders for audio files, plug-in settings and such always in the same place. In 10.3 these project folders could easily be represented as a single document, or as a single item with child items.
Suitcases? It's the 21st century, man. Suitcases are early 1990's Mac platform stuff ported badly to MS Windows and repurposed as a way to sync two folders. The history of bundles is all Mac and NeXT. On the old Mac OS they were forked files with "resources" stored in the resource fork. On NeXT they were folders that appeared to be single icons most of the time, and that's how they work on Mac OS X.
Speaking of syncronization, that's what this article is about, too. Mac OS X will sync your contacts and such across your phone, PDA, iPod, and their Web services. Now they are adding the whole home folder, basically.
All the tech for this stuff is already in Mac OS X. They are in a phase now where they are just building on the solid foundation that they worked so hard on for the past five years. They don't have to do a bunch of hacking and trickery to make a UI feature like this happen. It makes sense along with other features, like the way you can easily manipulate disk images in Mac OS X, even encrypted ones, even your grandmother. The whole platform gets better because when they build a feature in they do it right and then it is a problem that's taken care of. We all build on top of it.
Apple's software is the best desktop software there is. This is widely, widely accepted in the industry. People buy Macs often to run just one great app, like iPhoto or Final Cut Pro or Logic or Pro Tools, and that software is so good, so perfectly realized, so easy to use, so reliable, it's worth getting the Mac just for that. The creative tools are a generation and sometimes two ahead of what's on MS Windows.
OS X - Yeah it's cool, but it's not that cool. And besides, most of the features Apple is putting in OS X are things Microsoft did with Windows many years ago. That's not to say Windows is some amazing product, but calling OS X new and original is a load of crap. It's new to the Mac hardware, but it's all old ideas.
No, you're wrong. Mac OS X is much more than the sum of its parts. You can compare feature lists and say smart-sounding things, but if you have truly used both Mac OS X and MS Windows you don't defend MS Windows after that. It's like when you hear someone say that Hitler built good roads, it is easy to point out that good roads or not, that doesn't make up for the other stuff. It's not a question of politics or opinion, but just that people don't go "Hitler... good roads". You have to ignore so many deal-breaker features of MS Windows (no security, no reliability) to point out "you could do feature Y on Windows two years ago". Who cares? Not Mac OS X users. Truly, we don't care. We have the best of everything with very few exceptions and it's cheap ($999 iBook, $1299 flat-panel iMac) and the stuff you can do is next-generation not because it's possible for a geek to do it but because everyone can do it. A whole range of things that you can't do with MS Windows without someone to hand-hold it and clean its viruses and update its miserable design flaws and workaround its broken features and battle installation-entropy.
Also, the creative media tools on MS Windows are crap. Even where there are ports of Mac titles, the ports are missing professional features in many, many cases. And adding hardware or software is a misery, so the fact is that people don't use as many tools on their MS Windows systems unless they have a full-time computer geek to play roulette with DOS day by day. As I said, you can compare this stuff on paper and it looks OK, but it's not the same at all in the real world.
I already replied, but I have to say one more thing...
> In some ways this is a good thing - there is nothing > wrong with high schoolers coming away with a little > technical knowledge.
By technical here, you mean CS-technical, computer-technical.
Video is a technical field, but students who want to make movies or TV have their own universe of technical details to master. Like cameras, lenses, light, colors, composition, DV, MPEG-4, audio sampling rates and bit depths, color depths, narrative, storytelling, dialogue, theme. Go to an Apple Store and just look at Final Cut and imagine that all the things you don't understand about its dials and buttons and meters and functions were a penalty you had to pay just to program a computer.
The attitude that it's "good" for students, in addition to the subject their studying, to also get a castor-oil like lump of computer science medicine is really, really educationally damaging. When a kid who lives and breathes MOVIES shows up at a VIDEO LAB, do not teach them CS. Do not require them to jump CS hurdles. You didn't start programming by being force-fed movie-making so why should they know UNIX to make movies. iMovie is free and it runs on a UNIX that doesn't require any admin.
There is a ridiculous bigotry amongst CS-types that somehow the computer is the only technical thing in the world and everyone has to get a taste of it. It completely ignores that a doctor or lawyer or architect or movie maker has their own technical world to master. Just because a computer is general purpose and can be used to instantiate a video-editing system at will, that doesn't mean that video editors will want to learn to work a command line. Maybe they will, maybe they won't... don't make it a hurdle when a used iMac with iMovie and a FireWire port can be had for paper route money. Seriously. Easy desktop video on the cheap is news in 2000, maybe. It's 2003 and we expect a cheap system to also have iDVD and a DVD burner, because you can get those systems for $50/month assuming a three-year working life and they don't even need IT staff.
If you have to be a CS guy to make video, then that is a problem. You're not serving students with crashy tools that the CREATIVE ones can't use. It's no good having Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman making movies about how to install the OS while Francis Ford Coppola sketches scenes from The Godfather in an 8x10 notebook.
Cheap video workstations: ANY MAC. All inclusive. The machines are even cheaper to education than they are at retail. Even the $699 "classic" iMac comes with iMovie and FireWire. Students make movies on iBooks with no additional software.
For about $1500 you can get a flat panel iMac with a DVD burner in it and an EASY three-year working span (they guarantee that and the rest is gravy). Without any additional hardware or software, any halfway interested CREATIVE student can make a DVD with production values that most people can't tell from Hollywood. Everything is there, all the encoding and 50+ media formats. The software all updates itself, too.
I can second that Altivec is in its own category. On paper it may sound or look a bit like SSE, but in practice they are entirely different universes. Over the past few years, as each CPU-hungry app was updated to support Altivec, we saw dramatic gains. Twice the performance is typical even if the developers weren't working all that hard to Altivec-optimize. Real-time performance, too. So, a software instrument that could do 64 real-time voices gets an Altivec update and now it does 128 real-time voices on the same system. I'm talking about performance that you can really see, here. You don't have to get out a scope to notice that your sampler is now twice as powerful.
Also, by now many Mac apps have been built from scratch or heavily developed for Altivec, so the performance increase keeps getting better. It is an entrenched part of the system now, like L3 cache or main RAM. Proof of this on a meta level is that IBM licensed Altivec recently when originally they were not hot for it in their own PowerPC chips. There is so much software out there now with these optimizations (which are patterned after supercomputer processing so they're easy to port to) that to leave it out of a PowerPC now is like deliberately hobbling it.
Also, to compare the G4 to the P4 clock-for-clock and not consider Altivec is very disingenuous. The G4 CPU includes multiple parallel 128-bit vector processors, the OS and apps utilize them for relevant tasks, and those tasks (DSP, encrytion, encoding) are very current and lots of users benefit. Intel didn't go this route; instead they went for big clock speeds to brute force that kind of DSP performance. If you shoot a 5-minute home movie on a camcorder, plug it into an iMac, edit it for an hour in iMovie, then send it to iDVD for burning to a DVD, you are using Altivec all over (especially when encoding the MPEG-2 for the DVD, or rendering a transition between scenes in iMovie). MP3 encoding is 8x faster when it uses Altivec, and of course iTunes does that. So you can't just turn a blind eye to Altivec and then at the same time fault the G4 for lower clock speeds. Similarly, you see a lot of people just "forgetting" that Macs have two CPU's and the software utilizes them both very well. A 1.42GHz Power Mac has two CPU's, dozens of Altivec units... on the Intel side you get one 3GHz monster. 2x1.42GHz is 2.84GHz or very nearly 3GHz. I know there are multiprocessing penalties but they are much less on the Mac than on Intel and there are penalties for a huge single honking 70watt CPU with no DSP co-processor as well when you look at it from the Mac side.
In short, on paper you can make a case for any of these things either way. We're ultimately talking about systems, though, like weather systems, that are complex. The user's experience and productivity with a given system is like an emergent property... sit he or she down at both systems for a day of work and see what the results are and that is much more interesting information. I know that many of my friends who recently went from MS Windows to Mac OS X (forget all the other specs) are much happier and productive and they all make things regularly now that they didn't before, like DVD's or Web sites, or they can actually find and show you all of their digital photographs.
The article we are discussing right now includes the announcement of a product called Shake 3 that uses Rendezvous to find more render CPU's on your network. If you plug your PowerBook into your Power Mac with a Cat6 cable you are going to be using all three CPU's for Shake. That's a use for Gigabit Ethernet that you might not have thought of.
I write songs on a PowerBook and then I just import the audio files onto a Logic system that's built on a Power Mac. It's as fast to do that over Gigabit Ethernet as it would be if the PowerBook's drive was actually inside the Power Mac, hooked onto an ATA interface. I do this a lot. It is a great feature now and an indispensible one later.
Media is big files, y'know? Making DVD's involves big files, and the PowerBook we're talking about is a DVD creation workstation. That's all included. A DVD disk image is a single almost 5GB file and we use those all the time and we don't mind shooting them back and forth between computers.
By the time some people dismiss or whittle down all the extra features on the Mac so they can dismiss the paltry few hundred dollars more you pay (especially in notebooks) you have removed all relevant information from the comparison. If you don't need Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire, FireWire 800, Bluetooth, WiFi(g), Rendezvous, Quartz, Mac OS X, iDVD, etcetera, then what are you buying a new system for? What does the above-mentioned Dell system offer that you personally can't do already with yesterday's notebook? A ThinkPad with a PIII in it is cheap and solid and makes a good typewriter-style system for many users. Now, why do you want the Dell or the PowerBook mentioned above? What do they offer over and above the cheap-on-eBay ThinkPad PIII? The Dell offers very, very little while the PowerBook is completely next-generation from top to bottom over a ThinkPad PIII. Software, hardware, holistic system capabilities.
The guy with the Bzzt wrong is just plain dreaming. There are problems with the pixel shaders? Try and find a PowerBook user who gives a flying fuck. Even if it were a true problem, Apple is positioned to fix it like nobody else. They can patch the system to work around a hardware fault while Dell just tells you to complain to Microsoft and vice versa. Also, saying that the 17" PowerBook loses on dimensions is dreaming... VOLUME, you dumbass. Not units shipped, but how much water each machine could hold. Yes, a 17" display requires a duh 17" housing. It's one fucking inch thin and built like a tank out of aircraft aluminum. It seems to be cut from a solid block of steel and it is a holistic system that can perform X tasks that the Dell system is simply not equipped for, from DVD creation, video editing, Apache Web serving, hopping from network to network, and on and on and on and on and on all out of the box. Running specs while people are down at the Apple Store banging on these things looks so foolish. Nobody cares if an NVIDIA XXXX is 4% faster than an NVIDIA XXXY in certain tests. They care that they can access WiFi, FireWire, Bluetooth, run on batteries with no compromise, open the thing up and it wakes instantly (instantly) and also MACS DON'T CRASH. MACS DON'T CRASH. Two years ago on Slashdot it's all "Macs crash. Mac OS 9 sucks" and now it is just mum on the issue of crashing computers now that Mac OS X is going down about once a year per user (burning DVD's, doing amazing shit all day long, never being turned off, updating its own software).
The article we are discussing right now includes the announcement of a product called Shake 3 that uses Rendezvous to find more render CPU's on your network. If you plug your PowerBook into your Power Mac with a Cat6 cable you are going to be using all three CPU's for Shake. That's a use for Gigabit Ethernet that you might not have thought of.
I write songs on a PowerBook and then I just import the audio files onto a Logic system that's built on a Power Mac. It's as fast to do that over Gigabit Ethernet as it would be if the PowerBook's drive was actually inside the Power Mac, hooked onto an ATA interface. I do this a lot. It is a great feature now and an indispensible one later.
Media is big files, y'know? Making DVD's involves big files, and the PowerBook we're talking about is a DVD creation workstation. That's all included. A DVD disk image is a single almost 5GB file and we use those all the time and we don't mind shooting them back and forth between computers.
By the time some people dismiss or whittle down all the extra features on the Mac so they can dismiss the paltry few hundred dollars more you pay (especially in notebooks) you have removed all relevant information from the comparison. If you don't need Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire, FireWire 800, Bluetooth, WiFi(g), Rendezvous, Quartz, Mac OS X, iDVD, etcetera, then what are you buying a new system for? What does the above-mentioned Dell system offer that you personally can't do already with yesterday's notebook? A ThinkPad with a PIII in it is cheap and solid and makes a good typewriter-style system for many users. Now, why do you want the Dell or the PowerBook mentioned above? What do they offer over and above the cheap-on-eBay ThinkPad PIII? The Dell offers very, very little while the PowerBook is completely next-generation from top to bottom over a ThinkPad PIII. Software, hardware, holistic system capabilities.
Analog video input is accomplished these days with a little box that bristles with analog inputs and outputs and has a FireWire jack through which all video ultimately travels to the Mac (or camcorder or other standard DV device) as standard DV. A Formac box even has a TV antenna input that goes right through FireWire to your display and is captured to the hard drive as DV. We got one and had a great laugh doing a plugfest that involved hooking an old VCR, two camcorders, a cassette deck, an answering machine (?), and cable TV and rabbit ears onto a PowerBook G4. Ha ha.
How can you talk about analog video inputs and disparage FireWire. DV travels over FireWire. DV is compressed digital video. Ultimately, you're going to store the analog video as something, and if it's not DV then you are an eccentric. Seriously.
You're making excuses for Wintel systems that won't last because they don't have the features to do tomorrow's tasks. Intel's new ad campaign is all about WiFi, which is (truly, really) so 1999 for Mac users. I am communicating with you now over a three year-old AirPort network that cost $299 to implement and we skipped all the PPPoE crap and the Internet is "just there" when you open your notebook.
If you are running Linux on a home-built box, more power to you, but please don't try to give others the impression that a Wintel typewriter is in any way the same thing as a modern Mac. When people ask me for advice on computers, I tell them that personally, I would like to just tell them "Get a Mac" if they want a short answer, and they will likely still be better off, but I tell them if they are going to shop around or compare any systems, then compare a Mac (at the Apple Store if possible, where they are set up to be pounded on and plugged into and used before purchase) and really actually compare other systems to it by USING them. Ignore the specs and look at what the systems do and what they cost and you get a whole different picture than from PC Magazine, which for years has been a lazy adventure in scope-watching (HP's new system 3% faster than Dell's almost-identical new system! Read more inside.)
I would take a 1GHz G4 over a 2GHz P4m any day. The P4m is stripped down while the G4 is a full G4 with lots of Altivec units. G4's are also built from the start to be small and low-power consumption. They are ideal for notebooks. You can debate the workstations if you want, but on the notebooks, the performance is obvious to the naked eye when you put these systems side by side. The Mac is faster at all kinds of things, including MPEG encoding and encryption and anything DSP related like audio/video work. Even rotating graphics you will see the difference.
Apple will definitely show the better battery life. They have been doing 4-6 hours battery life in their notebooks for years and years.
- FireWire 800 - WiFi(g) - Bluetooth - Rendezvous
all built-in to the PowerBook as well, and the OS and software all work. I just got a Bluetooth phone and it was sweet to watch it suck 200 numbers out of iSync on my PowerBook.
I just saw the 17" PowerBook for the first time yesterday. It's something very, very special. You're talking about paying $500 more to get a Ferrari instead of a Chevy. Go $300 more for AppleCare and they will keep it working for 3 full years for you, with fast tech support (and no passing the buck) and 3-day repair if necessary. Three years from now the 17" PowerBook will still be a very current system at that size and with all those features.
Cut/copy/paste standards have been the same for over 20 years on the Mac. Maybe you're accidentally hitting the wrong keys due to a Windows-oriented keyboard.
Command+X = Cut Command+C = Copy Command+V = Paste Command+O = Open Command+S = Save Command+P = Print Command+A = Select All Command+I = Get Info (Properties) Command+H = Hide the current app Command+Q = Quit the current app Command+F = Find Command+G = Find Again (Find next of previous Find)
If you are using a lot of software with diverse backgrounds (e.g. UNIX, Java2, Carbon, Cocoa) then you will find some of the places where the uniformity of the interface is stretched thin now that the Mac runs so much software. One weird thing you see sometimes is that former-NeXT apps will say Command+T and they mean "Command+Shift+T" because the T is uppercase. The Mac convention was and is that T is T is T when you do modifiers, and if you want three keys held down you tell the user to hold down three keys "Command+Shift+T".
As a UNIX type of user, who as you say is not interested in the media stuff as much, you will find yourself in the minority in what you're doing, sort of like NeXT users used to be in the UNIX crowd. The user base and market is oriented towards content creation and the selection of apps in those areas is unparalled. Not even Windows comes close.
All pro Macs have had Gigabit Ethernet for over two years now. Even the notebooks. There isn't a Titanium PowerBook anywhere in the world that doesn't have Gigabit Ether. There are only a handful of very early Power Mac G4's that don't have it. So, your network of Macs IS a big disk array with like 12 Altivec units per CPU. And, you're not going to send uncompressed video... even plain DV has built-in compression... it is ALWAYS compressed.
If I had a penny for every time some bullshit PC Magazine nerd reviewed a Mac and dismissed Gigabit Ethernet as an irrelevant feature (along with FireWire) and then proceeded to compare with some Dell that's good for MS Office (maybe) and has probably long-since been retired... sheesh. These aren't throw-away machines like many other PC's... they are actually built with an eye on the future and obviously Rendezvous and Gigabit Ethernet and Mac OS X just fucking love each other.
I have an old Power Mac G3 from early 1999 that is now an iTunes jukebox in my house. It is 4.5 years old but it has a flat-panel display, FireWire, 1.5GB RAM, and runs iTunes/Mac OS X like a champ. Even the Mac OS X was free because we had an extra license in a multiple pack. Every day we use this Power Mac G3 (people LOVE it at parties) is all gravy... it paid for itself so long ago but after 3 years the warranty is up and we consider them retired and we either repurpose them or sell them and this one always found some use due to having a complete feature set that was forward-looking and media-oriented. It's got 300GB of disk space or something and it plays DVD's, too, and it still updates its own software automatically and there are no known viruses for it or any of its software.
PROFESSIONAL audio/video tech, could you guys who are still running Linux on a 286 give us all a break? These are cheap, cheap, cheap everyday tools by every measurable standard in our industry, and they are top-quality and they actually work, and they work for a living. They pay for themselves very quickly.
I hardly ever rent out studio time anymore because my demo studio just got better and better until it turned into a project studio, primarily thanks to Apple and a handful of other brilliant companies in the pro audio market. We used to have to go to hundreds of dollars an hour to get the quality and utility I get now from two Macs and maybe $10,000 to $15,000 in additional instruments/hardware/software that I can even admin and run myself (I'm a singer for chrissakes), and we don't count the studio hours anymore except to say that it's Wednesday so we might want to take a break and sleep a bit.
"Masses" is very much appropriate, because this really is about the workers owning the means of production. Fuck the rhetoric and think about what that really means: the tools go away and there is just communication, art, culture, business, etc. I don't have to become an indentured servant in order to make art.
Others have talked and talked because our industry is sort of sexy, but decades later it is still Apple doing it for us in 1000 ways. The promises have only been fulfilled by Apple.
AND, if you are not a pro and would like to get your feet wet in media creation, you can get an iMac and you are DONE. And that is also from Apple. They are anything but the elitists that Bill Gates and Michael Dell would like you to believe that they are because they want to sell you something that looks like a Mac but is still really just a typewriter. Audio and video are full of people who glow when they get close to an Apple logo because they did their first album or movie 5 years earlier than they would have otherwise simply because Apple made it affordable for them to have their own systems.
If I sound emotional about it, it's because I am. I don't think I can stand to hear from another teenager about how their fucking MS Windows is crashing and how to we handle that in a real studio? "Get a Mac."
Slashdot Mirror
Piles are a logical extension of the Dock (magnification feature) and bundles. Mac applications are actually folders at the file system level, but a single icon in the GUI. The user only needs to work with the single icon. A developer or interested user can look at the file system level and find binaries and libraries and image files and sounds that are used in the application.
In media work, for example pro audio, it is common to think of a folder as a document, and inside that folder you put a session file, and a folder of audio files, folder for plug-in settings, etc. There is a movement to standardize these project folders to you can share your work and collaborate more easily. Also, a song that is stored as a folder is easy to open up and find standard audio files in there, that you can use in any application.
So don't think of piles as folders. Think of them as groups of documents.
For example, a directory called song that contains lyrics.html, melody.midi, mix.mp3, and mix.aiff might show in the GUI as a pile called song with little tabs sticking out that you can grab Melody or Lyrics or MP3 or AIFF out.
A Web site that is a folder with index.html and a bunch of JPEGs could be shown as a single pile that you can pull just one file out of if you have to (to use it again, or share it with someone). If you open it or drop it on a browser it would be the same as dragging index.html onto the browser.
This is partly about making documents that you can peek inside and pull out standard stuff. Imagine if you made a Word document with embedded graphics and fonts and if you looked at the Word document at the command line it would be a folder with standard XML, PNG, and other files inside it. You could send that document to someone and they could grab any of those individual files to work with in any application.
If you have access to a Mac OS X machine, Control+click on an application in Finder and choose Show Contents from the context menu and it will open as a folder. It's very easy to understand when you compare a few applications this way and see how easy it is to access that stuff if you want to and how easy it is to ignore if you don't want to access it and just want to run the app (or move it, or rename it, which you can also do).
Also, keep in mind that HFS+ is not path-based only, it also gives each file a unique number so that the name and location of a file can change and the system and apps can still find them instantly. For example, you can rename all of your MP3's with a utility and then start iTunes and it still knows those are all the same songs that it already catalogued. This is maybe the most unknown killer feature of the Mac, because it saves you from maybe 5 error messages a day that you might see on MS Windows. Move an app on Windows and it will often stop working. It's crazy.
Running fsck on HFS+ takes only a few seconds for a 120GB disk. Mac OS X does this on every startup, even if you have journaling enabled.
You won't mess up a single file as easily with journaling, but you're not saving any boot-up time.
Also, if your Mac OS X system is crashing, what is up? Crashes are rare for me in day-in day-out use of two systems.
CPU's don't have anything to do with it. Most of the time, a desktop system's CPU's are mostly idle. Most users are not suffering from lack of CPU cycles.
Mac OS X just "feels" slow when you start to use it after using a legacy system such as Mac OS 9 or MS Windows or any other bitmap-based GUI. Everything on the Mac OS X display is drawn completely "off-screen" and then composited (layered and blended) with what's already on the display. This takes some time.
In a 3D game, you can turn off the up-and-down bobbing that makes it seem like you are walking and you will get a smoother display, but you don't feel as much like you are actually walking. The Mac OS X GUI seems like real stuff in a light table or under glass. It doesn't snap into place as quickly as older systems but it also doesn't show all the seams of the older systems. You trade a bit of speed for realism and I think it makes up later as you think of what's on the display as real.
I read some things from Apple coders who said that many of the benchmarks that are run on Mac OS X against other systems are misleading because the reviewers or testers don't understand that Mac OS X is tuned and optimized to run things like Logic and Final Cut Pro and iDVD and QuickTime, not tuned for pure Web serving speed, or pure database access speed.
So a lot of these benchmark suites have built-in assumptions that show when they test Mac OS X. They may simulate hitting a database for 1000 32k chunks every second or something, but Mac OS X is optimized to work with 50 500MB DV clips instead.
In short, the systems that benchmark better than Mac OS X in the same old tests don't run Final Cut Pro next to Apache next to Dreamweaver all on a next-generation window server with Unicode throughout like Mac OS X does.
You also see Macs getting benchmarked against systems with only 10/100 and they ignore the 10/100/1000 that's been standard for years on pro Macs. They also ignore FireWire because the other system doesn't have it. That stuff is expected on the Mac and the system is not necessarily optimized to a 10/100 benchmark. These benchmarks always stink to a Mac user because you can see 10 things where they tried to treat it like MS Windows or a PC and did something the hard way or in a way that a Mac user would never do because it is only that way on MS Windows.
When people talk about Mac OS X being slow, they are talking about a lack of interface responsiveness because of the double-buffered and 32-bit composited display. Nothing ever appears out of thin air. It's drawn in a buffer and then composited with your current display.
An analogy is that you could watch a 2-hour movie in 1:45 if you took out all the wipe transitions and just went boom, boom, boom between scenes. Technically this is faster, but it is not better. The way MS Windows is doing its display and interactivity it is cheating all the time. Once you get used to Mac OS X it is like looking at real stuff and interacting with it and you get used to the fact that a window slides away and your pace matches it quite easily.
It is not slow at the kernel level. Real-time multimedia stuff is amazing. Lots of audio tracks, lots of videos, you can really move data around in real-time with low, low latencies that can't be achieved with MS Windows. Also Mac OS X is fast at waking up from sleep so you can close and open your PowerBook all day long with no penalty. It also does a lot of things automatically that you would have to hand-hold a Windows machine. Also one crash per year and the thing runs 24/7 other than that really saves time over a Windows machine. Application admin and security audits and software updates are all also much quicker in Mac OS X. Apps usually work first time and don't break later at all. Very time-saving.
Apple's "diligence" is the key word. It's worth paying for. You run a single installer on a disc and it installs itself and just works. Software Update is polite and reliable, and the updates are spaced out well and versions are easy to understand and libraries and other things are all done in the right order.
... you save money and time and trouble and do better work all the time on the new Mac platform.
The idea that anybody could save money by updating parts of their system themselves is ludicrous. They ask you to pay about US$100 every 18 months or so and for that the OS just updates itself every six weeks or so and also does security updates and bugfix updates for the software that came with the computer (iMovie, iTunes, etc). It's such a ridiculous IT labor steal because it really does work and you really do use it. The logs are right, the security is right.
I recommend to new Apple users that they pick a system that they can afford to replace every three years. Buy AppleCare for those three years, which is about US$300, and put aside $100 for a future OS update, and buy the maximum RAM for your system. After three years, you sell your system, get about 1/3 or more of your money back, and then buy the new equivalent system (new PowerBook to replace old PowerBook) with AppleCare and do three more years. If you ever have a computer problem, you call Apple, they answer quickly, and they help you to fix it or send a box for the system and you get a 3-day repair. It is a STEAL when you look at the uptime of the systems and their capabilities and how good the service is from one source.
Example:
iBook $999
AppleCare $299
Maxed out RAM $199
Future boxed system update $100
That's about $500 per year to run the newest Mac OS X totally worry-free. At the end of three years, you can get $500 at least for that system, probably more.
You have to compare the above not just to a PC system, but also to all the installation and add-ons and admin and virus checking and all the other stuff that comes free with a Dell. How much does it cost to get three years of trouble-free computing from Dell? Can you go three years without MS Windows fucking you at some point? Apple simplifies so many things that it is the death of 1000 cuts to MS Windows
It's like $65 per year, tops. You pay $129 for 10.2 and get 10.2.1 through 10.3.5 for free, which is 18 months at least, if not a year. Then you pay $129 for 10.4 and get 10.4.1 through 10.5.5 for free. If you wait a few months after release you can get Mac OS X for $99 and $89. Also, it comes included with any Mac system, which start at $699 and notebooks at $999.
Compare MS Windows pricing, installation procedures, guarantees, security, stability and then complain about how much you pay for Mac OS X. You can't buy a stable version of MS Windows. They have not made anything like Mac OS X yet. This is one of those things people like to complain about but the reality is that in mainstream operating systems there is MS and Apple and if Microsoft sells boxed updates for $99 and $129 and boxed "server" updates for $299 and $499 and more then Apple has to charge there, too. If they just put that charge onto systems, then people will say Macs are too expensive and should be cheaper like Dells.
We have five Macs here, and upgrading them all to 10.2 cost $229 or something, for a 5-pack license. That's less than one Windows XP. And you get iMovie and iTunes and iPhoto and iDVD and all the other great stuff that makes Mac OS X a rich environment from the start.
I can't find it in me to complain about Mac OS X at all. Our machines just run and run and there are lots of features that have made my work easier and better.
Who else is making news in computers these days? Everywhere else it is all lawyers and poor excuses for the same old half-assed shit.
The Apple platform has made more progress in the past two years than MS Windows has made in the last eight years since Windows 95. The Mac stopped crashing altogether, is UNIX-compatible, Java2 with all the trimmings, an updated API and a new object-oriented API, next-generation graphics system and so much more, while you can receive an email and lose your MS Windows system at any time. From top to bottom the Windows platform looks like a joke right now after all these years of "it will be stable soon". Remember when they delayed Windows 2000 and left out features just to "concentrate on fixing bugs and improving reliability" because people were demanding it. Now, a really advanced user can set up a halfway-decent Windows XP machine, but even they can't get close to the quality of a Mac, and for regular users, they are in a completely different world if they get a Gateway instead of an iMac as far as what they can do with it, and what they will have to do to admin it (almost nothing for the iMac, even adding hardware and apps is dead easy, just drag and drop at the most, and often it just works even without that.
This is not MS Windows. Mac OS X is modular from top to bottom. They don't have to put it in a wind tunnel to see what's wrong with it every two seconds. They can feature freeze in May and ship in September and be stable and reliable.
The whole industry is stuck thinking in a Microsoft box. Apple didn't rewrite their whole OS over the last few years so that they could continue to have the same old problems. Part of the reason why Mac OS X software is so great is that it has a lot of great stuff underneath it that developers can leverage in their solutions. They will hype the Panther name but this is just 10.3, the "stable" version of Jaguar. Since Jaguar is giving me 24/7 uptime we don't expect to have any trouble with 10.3. The "new" features in it are things that were meant for 10.2 but were not ready or not practical yet, while the big payoff will be all the 10.2 stuff that is even more refined.
You could say it this way, too:
Mac OS X subscription
Cheetah/Puma
10.0.0 through 10.1.5
$99
Mac OS X subscription
Jaguar/Panther
10.2.0 through 10.3.5
$99
So unless you are waiting for the one after Panther (to be called 10.4 or 10.5) then you are just missing out on Jaguar and not saving a penny.
If you skip Jaguar you will have to pay for Panther.
Here's how it worked in the past:
8.5 - pay
8.6 - free to 8.5 users
9.0 - pay
9.1 - free to 9.0 users
10.0 - pay
10.1 - free to 10.0 users
10.2 - pay
10.3 - free to 10.2 users
But notice that 9.1 is not free to 8.6 users. If you are running 10.1 when 10.3 comes out you will have to pay $99 for 10.3. You are actually wasting your "Jaguar-Panther" time. It costs $99 whether you get in at 10.2.0 or 10.3.0, so there is no use waiting. 10.2 is a great OS.
Right now a Mac OS X users' contacts, to-do's, and calendars are regularly syncronized between separate copies on different devices. So you add a phone number to your phone, and next time you sync you'll be told "this will add 1 new phone number to your PowerBook, iDisk, and iPod" and now you can get that number on any device.
All they will do is extend this to home folders, I think. The multiple copies are good as backups and you can always get to one to work with it and the changes will be published to the other copies when they are available. You can explain Apple features without any acronyms. That's the point. The implementation will be user-focused, not technology-focused.
I think pervasive computing won't be about always being connected to one data set by a huge connection, but rather always being connected in some way to at least one current copy of your data, and those changes going from server to server so that all your copies are current over time. So sometimes you just browse your Web site from any browser, sometimes you login to your home folder at work, sometimes at home, sometimes on your PowerBook, but to you it always feels like the right thing is happening and your data is available to you. In the background, there may be caching and the computers talking to each other overnight to stay synchronized, but the user will always get at what they want and even if a disk crashes they shouldn't lose too much work.
On Mac OS X it is common to represent some folders in the GUI as single icons. You use them that way, and if you want to "open the hood" you can go inside and there are individual files in there. It's a convenient way to have a less-complex interface and still work with lots of data.
As of Logic 6, there is a new "project" file format for Logic which is the same old file, but sitting in a standard folder structure with folders for audio files, plug-in settings and such always in the same place. In 10.3 these project folders could easily be represented as a single document, or as a single item with child items.
Suitcases? It's the 21st century, man. Suitcases are early 1990's Mac platform stuff ported badly to MS Windows and repurposed as a way to sync two folders. The history of bundles is all Mac and NeXT. On the old Mac OS they were forked files with "resources" stored in the resource fork. On NeXT they were folders that appeared to be single icons most of the time, and that's how they work on Mac OS X.
Speaking of syncronization, that's what this article is about, too. Mac OS X will sync your contacts and such across your phone, PDA, iPod, and their Web services. Now they are adding the whole home folder, basically.
All the tech for this stuff is already in Mac OS X. They are in a phase now where they are just building on the solid foundation that they worked so hard on for the past five years. They don't have to do a bunch of hacking and trickery to make a UI feature like this happen. It makes sense along with other features, like the way you can easily manipulate disk images in Mac OS X, even encrypted ones, even your grandmother. The whole platform gets better because when they build a feature in they do it right and then it is a problem that's taken care of. We all build on top of it.
Apple's software is the best desktop software there is. This is widely, widely accepted in the industry. People buy Macs often to run just one great app, like iPhoto or Final Cut Pro or Logic or Pro Tools, and that software is so good, so perfectly realized, so easy to use, so reliable, it's worth getting the Mac just for that. The creative tools are a generation and sometimes two ahead of what's on MS Windows.
OS X - Yeah it's cool, but it's not that cool. And besides, most of the features Apple is putting in OS X are things Microsoft did with Windows many years ago. That's not to say Windows is some amazing product, but calling OS X new and original is a load of crap. It's new to the Mac hardware, but it's all old ideas.
No, you're wrong. Mac OS X is much more than the sum of its parts. You can compare feature lists and say smart-sounding things, but if you have truly used both Mac OS X and MS Windows you don't defend MS Windows after that. It's like when you hear someone say that Hitler built good roads, it is easy to point out that good roads or not, that doesn't make up for the other stuff. It's not a question of politics or opinion, but just that people don't go "Hitler ... good roads". You have to ignore so many deal-breaker features of MS Windows (no security, no reliability) to point out "you could do feature Y on Windows two years ago". Who cares? Not Mac OS X users. Truly, we don't care. We have the best of everything with very few exceptions and it's cheap ($999 iBook, $1299 flat-panel iMac) and the stuff you can do is next-generation not because it's possible for a geek to do it but because everyone can do it. A whole range of things that you can't do with MS Windows without someone to hand-hold it and clean its viruses and update its miserable design flaws and workaround its broken features and battle installation-entropy.
Also, the creative media tools on MS Windows are crap. Even where there are ports of Mac titles, the ports are missing professional features in many, many cases. And adding hardware or software is a misery, so the fact is that people don't use as many tools on their MS Windows systems unless they have a full-time computer geek to play roulette with DOS day by day. As I said, you can compare this stuff on paper and it looks OK, but it's not the same at all in the real world.
I already replied, but I have to say one more thing ...
... don't make it a hurdle when a used iMac with iMovie and a FireWire port can be had for paper route money. Seriously. Easy desktop video on the cheap is news in 2000, maybe. It's 2003 and we expect a cheap system to also have iDVD and a DVD burner, because you can get those systems for $50/month assuming a three-year working life and they don't even need IT staff.
> In some ways this is a good thing - there is nothing
> wrong with high schoolers coming away with a little
> technical knowledge.
By technical here, you mean CS-technical, computer-technical.
Video is a technical field, but students who want to make movies or TV have their own universe of technical details to master. Like cameras, lenses, light, colors, composition, DV, MPEG-4, audio sampling rates and bit depths, color depths, narrative, storytelling, dialogue, theme. Go to an Apple Store and just look at Final Cut and imagine that all the things you don't understand about its dials and buttons and meters and functions were a penalty you had to pay just to program a computer.
The attitude that it's "good" for students, in addition to the subject their studying, to also get a castor-oil like lump of computer science medicine is really, really educationally damaging. When a kid who lives and breathes MOVIES shows up at a VIDEO LAB, do not teach them CS. Do not require them to jump CS hurdles. You didn't start programming by being force-fed movie-making so why should they know UNIX to make movies. iMovie is free and it runs on a UNIX that doesn't require any admin.
There is a ridiculous bigotry amongst CS-types that somehow the computer is the only technical thing in the world and everyone has to get a taste of it. It completely ignores that a doctor or lawyer or architect or movie maker has their own technical world to master. Just because a computer is general purpose and can be used to instantiate a video-editing system at will, that doesn't mean that video editors will want to learn to work a command line. Maybe they will, maybe they won't
If you have to be a CS guy to make video, then that is a problem. You're not serving students with crashy tools that the CREATIVE ones can't use. It's no good having Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman making movies about how to install the OS while Francis Ford Coppola sketches scenes from The Godfather in an 8x10 notebook.
Cheap video workstations: ANY MAC. All inclusive. The machines are even cheaper to education than they are at retail. Even the $699 "classic" iMac comes with iMovie and FireWire. Students make movies on iBooks with no additional software.
For about $1500 you can get a flat panel iMac with a DVD burner in it and an EASY three-year working span (they guarantee that and the rest is gravy). Without any additional hardware or software, any halfway interested CREATIVE student can make a DVD with production values that most people can't tell from Hollywood. Everything is there, all the encoding and 50+ media formats. The software all updates itself, too.
It is not 1987.
If you didn't crack the seal you can return it and buy the newer versions. What is the problem?
I can second that Altivec is in its own category. On paper it may sound or look a bit like SSE, but in practice they are entirely different universes. Over the past few years, as each CPU-hungry app was updated to support Altivec, we saw dramatic gains. Twice the performance is typical even if the developers weren't working all that hard to Altivec-optimize. Real-time performance, too. So, a software instrument that could do 64 real-time voices gets an Altivec update and now it does 128 real-time voices on the same system. I'm talking about performance that you can really see, here. You don't have to get out a scope to notice that your sampler is now twice as powerful.
... on the Intel side you get one 3GHz monster. 2x1.42GHz is 2.84GHz or very nearly 3GHz. I know there are multiprocessing penalties but they are much less on the Mac than on Intel and there are penalties for a huge single honking 70watt CPU with no DSP co-processor as well when you look at it from the Mac side.
... sit he or she down at both systems for a day of work and see what the results are and that is much more interesting information. I know that many of my friends who recently went from MS Windows to Mac OS X (forget all the other specs) are much happier and productive and they all make things regularly now that they didn't before, like DVD's or Web sites, or they can actually find and show you all of their digital photographs.
Also, by now many Mac apps have been built from scratch or heavily developed for Altivec, so the performance increase keeps getting better. It is an entrenched part of the system now, like L3 cache or main RAM. Proof of this on a meta level is that IBM licensed Altivec recently when originally they were not hot for it in their own PowerPC chips. There is so much software out there now with these optimizations (which are patterned after supercomputer processing so they're easy to port to) that to leave it out of a PowerPC now is like deliberately hobbling it.
Also, to compare the G4 to the P4 clock-for-clock and not consider Altivec is very disingenuous. The G4 CPU includes multiple parallel 128-bit vector processors, the OS and apps utilize them for relevant tasks, and those tasks (DSP, encrytion, encoding) are very current and lots of users benefit. Intel didn't go this route; instead they went for big clock speeds to brute force that kind of DSP performance. If you shoot a 5-minute home movie on a camcorder, plug it into an iMac, edit it for an hour in iMovie, then send it to iDVD for burning to a DVD, you are using Altivec all over (especially when encoding the MPEG-2 for the DVD, or rendering a transition between scenes in iMovie). MP3 encoding is 8x faster when it uses Altivec, and of course iTunes does that. So you can't just turn a blind eye to Altivec and then at the same time fault the G4 for lower clock speeds. Similarly, you see a lot of people just "forgetting" that Macs have two CPU's and the software utilizes them both very well. A 1.42GHz Power Mac has two CPU's, dozens of Altivec units
In short, on paper you can make a case for any of these things either way. We're ultimately talking about systems, though, like weather systems, that are complex. The user's experience and productivity with a given system is like an emergent property
The article we are discussing right now includes the announcement of a product called Shake 3 that uses Rendezvous to find more render CPU's on your network. If you plug your PowerBook into your Power Mac with a Cat6 cable you are going to be using all three CPU's for Shake. That's a use for Gigabit Ethernet that you might not have thought of.
... VOLUME, you dumbass. Not units shipped, but how much water each machine could hold. Yes, a 17" display requires a duh 17" housing. It's one fucking inch thin and built like a tank out of aircraft aluminum. It seems to be cut from a solid block of steel and it is a holistic system that can perform X tasks that the Dell system is simply not equipped for, from DVD creation, video editing, Apache Web serving, hopping from network to network, and on and on and on and on and on all out of the box. Running specs while people are down at the Apple Store banging on these things looks so foolish. Nobody cares if an NVIDIA XXXX is 4% faster than an NVIDIA XXXY in certain tests. They care that they can access WiFi, FireWire, Bluetooth, run on batteries with no compromise, open the thing up and it wakes instantly (instantly) and also MACS DON'T CRASH. MACS DON'T CRASH. Two years ago on Slashdot it's all "Macs crash. Mac OS 9 sucks" and now it is just mum on the issue of crashing computers now that Mac OS X is going down about once a year per user (burning DVD's, doing amazing shit all day long, never being turned off, updating its own software).
I write songs on a PowerBook and then I just import the audio files onto a Logic system that's built on a Power Mac. It's as fast to do that over Gigabit Ethernet as it would be if the PowerBook's drive was actually inside the Power Mac, hooked onto an ATA interface. I do this a lot. It is a great feature now and an indispensible one later.
Media is big files, y'know? Making DVD's involves big files, and the PowerBook we're talking about is a DVD creation workstation. That's all included. A DVD disk image is a single almost 5GB file and we use those all the time and we don't mind shooting them back and forth between computers.
By the time some people dismiss or whittle down all the extra features on the Mac so they can dismiss the paltry few hundred dollars more you pay (especially in notebooks) you have removed all relevant information from the comparison. If you don't need Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire, FireWire 800, Bluetooth, WiFi(g), Rendezvous, Quartz, Mac OS X, iDVD, etcetera, then what are you buying a new system for? What does the above-mentioned Dell system offer that you personally can't do already with yesterday's notebook? A ThinkPad with a PIII in it is cheap and solid and makes a good typewriter-style system for many users. Now, why do you want the Dell or the PowerBook mentioned above? What do they offer over and above the cheap-on-eBay ThinkPad PIII? The Dell offers very, very little while the PowerBook is completely next-generation from top to bottom over a ThinkPad PIII. Software, hardware, holistic system capabilities.
The guy with the Bzzt wrong is just plain dreaming. There are problems with the pixel shaders? Try and find a PowerBook user who gives a flying fuck. Even if it were a true problem, Apple is positioned to fix it like nobody else. They can patch the system to work around a hardware fault while Dell just tells you to complain to Microsoft and vice versa. Also, saying that the 17" PowerBook loses on dimensions is dreaming
The article we are discussing right now includes the announcement of a product called Shake 3 that uses Rendezvous to find more render CPU's on your network. If you plug your PowerBook into your Power Mac with a Cat6 cable you are going to be using all three CPU's for Shake. That's a use for Gigabit Ethernet that you might not have thought of.
I write songs on a PowerBook and then I just import the audio files onto a Logic system that's built on a Power Mac. It's as fast to do that over Gigabit Ethernet as it would be if the PowerBook's drive was actually inside the Power Mac, hooked onto an ATA interface. I do this a lot. It is a great feature now and an indispensible one later.
Media is big files, y'know? Making DVD's involves big files, and the PowerBook we're talking about is a DVD creation workstation. That's all included. A DVD disk image is a single almost 5GB file and we use those all the time and we don't mind shooting them back and forth between computers.
By the time some people dismiss or whittle down all the extra features on the Mac so they can dismiss the paltry few hundred dollars more you pay (especially in notebooks) you have removed all relevant information from the comparison. If you don't need Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire, FireWire 800, Bluetooth, WiFi(g), Rendezvous, Quartz, Mac OS X, iDVD, etcetera, then what are you buying a new system for? What does the above-mentioned Dell system offer that you personally can't do already with yesterday's notebook? A ThinkPad with a PIII in it is cheap and solid and makes a good typewriter-style system for many users. Now, why do you want the Dell or the PowerBook mentioned above? What do they offer over and above the cheap-on-eBay ThinkPad PIII? The Dell offers very, very little while the PowerBook is completely next-generation from top to bottom over a ThinkPad PIII. Software, hardware, holistic system capabilities.
Analog video input is accomplished these days with a little box that bristles with analog inputs and outputs and has a FireWire jack through which all video ultimately travels to the Mac (or camcorder or other standard DV device) as standard DV. A Formac box even has a TV antenna input that goes right through FireWire to your display and is captured to the hard drive as DV. We got one and had a great laugh doing a plugfest that involved hooking an old VCR, two camcorders, a cassette deck, an answering machine (?), and cable TV and rabbit ears onto a PowerBook G4. Ha ha.
How can you talk about analog video inputs and disparage FireWire. DV travels over FireWire. DV is compressed digital video. Ultimately, you're going to store the analog video as something, and if it's not DV then you are an eccentric. Seriously.
You're making excuses for Wintel systems that won't last because they don't have the features to do tomorrow's tasks. Intel's new ad campaign is all about WiFi, which is (truly, really) so 1999 for Mac users. I am communicating with you now over a three year-old AirPort network that cost $299 to implement and we skipped all the PPPoE crap and the Internet is "just there" when you open your notebook.
If you are running Linux on a home-built box, more power to you, but please don't try to give others the impression that a Wintel typewriter is in any way the same thing as a modern Mac. When people ask me for advice on computers, I tell them that personally, I would like to just tell them "Get a Mac" if they want a short answer, and they will likely still be better off, but I tell them if they are going to shop around or compare any systems, then compare a Mac (at the Apple Store if possible, where they are set up to be pounded on and plugged into and used before purchase) and really actually compare other systems to it by USING them. Ignore the specs and look at what the systems do and what they cost and you get a whole different picture than from PC Magazine, which for years has been a lazy adventure in scope-watching (HP's new system 3% faster than Dell's almost-identical new system! Read more inside.)
I would take a 1GHz G4 over a 2GHz P4m any day. The P4m is stripped down while the G4 is a full G4 with lots of Altivec units. G4's are also built from the start to be small and low-power consumption. They are ideal for notebooks. You can debate the workstations if you want, but on the notebooks, the performance is obvious to the naked eye when you put these systems side by side. The Mac is faster at all kinds of things, including MPEG encoding and encryption and anything DSP related like audio/video work. Even rotating graphics you will see the difference.
Apple will definitely show the better battery life. They have been doing 4-6 hours battery life in their notebooks for years and years.
- FireWire 800
- WiFi(g)
- Bluetooth
- Rendezvous
all built-in to the PowerBook as well, and the OS and software all work. I just got a Bluetooth phone and it was sweet to watch it suck 200 numbers out of iSync on my PowerBook.
I just saw the 17" PowerBook for the first time yesterday. It's something very, very special. You're talking about paying $500 more to get a Ferrari instead of a Chevy. Go $300 more for AppleCare and they will keep it working for 3 full years for you, with fast tech support (and no passing the buck) and 3-day repair if necessary. Three years from now the 17" PowerBook will still be a very current system at that size and with all those features.
Cut/copy/paste standards have been the same for over 20 years on the Mac. Maybe you're accidentally hitting the wrong keys due to a Windows-oriented keyboard.
Command+X = Cut
Command+C = Copy
Command+V = Paste
Command+O = Open
Command+S = Save
Command+P = Print
Command+A = Select All
Command+I = Get Info (Properties)
Command+H = Hide the current app
Command+Q = Quit the current app
Command+F = Find
Command+G = Find Again (Find next of previous Find)
If you are using a lot of software with diverse backgrounds (e.g. UNIX, Java2, Carbon, Cocoa) then you will find some of the places where the uniformity of the interface is stretched thin now that the Mac runs so much software. One weird thing you see sometimes is that former-NeXT apps will say Command+T and they mean "Command+Shift+T" because the T is uppercase. The Mac convention was and is that T is T is T when you do modifiers, and if you want three keys held down you tell the user to hold down three keys "Command+Shift+T".
As a UNIX type of user, who as you say is not interested in the media stuff as much, you will find yourself in the minority in what you're doing, sort of like NeXT users used to be in the UNIX crowd. The user base and market is oriented towards content creation and the selection of apps in those areas is unparalled. Not even Windows comes close.
All pro Macs have had Gigabit Ethernet for over two years now. Even the notebooks. There isn't a Titanium PowerBook anywhere in the world that doesn't have Gigabit Ether. There are only a handful of very early Power Mac G4's that don't have it. So, your network of Macs IS a big disk array with like 12 Altivec units per CPU. And, you're not going to send uncompressed video ... even plain DV has built-in compression ... it is ALWAYS compressed.
... sheesh. These aren't throw-away machines like many other PC's ... they are actually built with an eye on the future and obviously Rendezvous and Gigabit Ethernet and Mac OS X just fucking love each other.
... it paid for itself so long ago but after 3 years the warranty is up and we consider them retired and we either repurpose them or sell them and this one always found some use due to having a complete feature set that was forward-looking and media-oriented. It's got 300GB of disk space or something and it plays DVD's, too, and it still updates its own software automatically and there are no known viruses for it or any of its software.
If I had a penny for every time some bullshit PC Magazine nerd reviewed a Mac and dismissed Gigabit Ethernet as an irrelevant feature (along with FireWire) and then proceeded to compare with some Dell that's good for MS Office (maybe) and has probably long-since been retired
I have an old Power Mac G3 from early 1999 that is now an iTunes jukebox in my house. It is 4.5 years old but it has a flat-panel display, FireWire, 1.5GB RAM, and runs iTunes/Mac OS X like a champ. Even the Mac OS X was free because we had an extra license in a multiple pack. Every day we use this Power Mac G3 (people LOVE it at parties) is all gravy
When an article is posted on a PRO
PRO
P r o f e s s i o n a l
PROFESSIONAL audio/video tech, could you guys who are still running Linux on a 286 give us all a break? These are cheap, cheap, cheap everyday tools by every measurable standard in our industry, and they are top-quality and they actually work, and they work for a living. They pay for themselves very quickly.
I hardly ever rent out studio time anymore because my demo studio just got better and better until it turned into a project studio, primarily thanks to Apple and a handful of other brilliant companies in the pro audio market. We used to have to go to hundreds of dollars an hour to get the quality and utility I get now from two Macs and maybe $10,000 to $15,000 in additional instruments/hardware/software that I can even admin and run myself (I'm a singer for chrissakes), and we don't count the studio hours anymore except to say that it's Wednesday so we might want to take a break and sleep a bit.
"Masses" is very much appropriate, because this really is about the workers owning the means of production. Fuck the rhetoric and think about what that really means: the tools go away and there is just communication, art, culture, business, etc. I don't have to become an indentured servant in order to make art.
Others have talked and talked because our industry is sort of sexy, but decades later it is still Apple doing it for us in 1000 ways. The promises have only been fulfilled by Apple.
AND, if you are not a pro and would like to get your feet wet in media creation, you can get an iMac and you are DONE. And that is also from Apple. They are anything but the elitists that Bill Gates and Michael Dell would like you to believe that they are because they want to sell you something that looks like a Mac but is still really just a typewriter. Audio and video are full of people who glow when they get close to an Apple logo because they did their first album or movie 5 years earlier than they would have otherwise simply because Apple made it affordable for them to have their own systems.
If I sound emotional about it, it's because I am. I don't think I can stand to hear from another teenager about how their fucking MS Windows is crashing and how to we handle that in a real studio? "Get a Mac."