Yes, they're certainly no way near as bad as Microsoft's bundling techniques, but I still worry for the creators of software like XMMS, Winamp, AIM, ICQ, Pixie, MPlayer, and any other software the i* suite replaces, especially those that are commercial enterprises.
Apple's iApps don't replace anything. THIRD-PARTY SOFTWARE HAS TO BE GOOD ENOUGH TO REPLACE THE iAPPS, not the other way around. If it is not, then the developer either has to work harder or move on to something else.
The iApps are so popular because they are "unfeaturist"... the features are the least important thing about them, and that's opposite to everyone else right now ("Think Different"). Compare:
Microsoft's apps are bloated, complicated UI, low-quality, have tons of useless features, and are commingled and blended into Windows so you can't replace them with an alternative Apple's apps are lightweight, simple UI, high-quality, have only the basic features that EVERYBODY needs, and are standalone applications that appear as ONE ICON you can delete if you want to replace it with an alternative.
In fact, you're SUPPOSED to replace one or two of the iApps with alternatives. For example, a video editing person will use iPhoto and iTunes, but replace iMovie and iDVD with Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro. A dedicated music lover might replace iTunes with Audion, but continue to happily make the occasional home movie in iMovie. It's software... it doesn't cost anything to put it in the hands of people who WERE NOT GOING TO BUY SOFTWARE IN THAT NICHE ANYWAY. My wife was NEVER going to go out onto the Web and discover what file-based digital music was and compare the various players and then start a music library. She learned about this whole niche of software from iTunes, simply because it came with her Mac. Then she bought a Creative Nomad portable MP3 player (since replaced by an iPod).
Also, I have to mention that the iApps got popular BEFORE they came with the operating system or with Mac purchases. iMovie 1.0 debuted at $59 or free with an iMac DV (and only an iMac DV), and people bought it and downloaded it in DROVES. iTunes was just a download long before it ever shipped included for the first time in Mac OS X. People were buying new Macs with SuperDrives just to get to iDVD, not buying Macs and getting iDVD along for the ride. This speaks to QUALITY.
> Yes, but you can happily replace the (IMHO) awful bash with zsh. And Linux will still > carry on working just fine.
Just as you can replace IE with Mozilla on Mac OS X and everything is still fine (or the shells for that matter, too). Mac OS X has a built-in HTML renderer as well... it's just not combined with the browser applications. OmniWeb uses it, Mail uses it, but you can still Trash OmniWeb and Mail and not affect the system's HTML renderer. Mozilla and IE don't use the built-in renderer... it's up to the developers of the applications.
Internet Explorer 5.x for Mac OS X is just a single icon sitting in/Applications. The first thing I do after an OS update is convert it into a virtual disk image. That way, it is unavailable (as if it were not on the computer at all), but I can still just double-click it and it mounts like a CD and now I can run IE from there to test Web sites in it (I test as I work in a Mozilla-based browser and in OmniWeb, then check IE at the last minute and it's usually fine since IE/Mac has a standards-compliant rendering engine, unlike the Windows version).
You don't even have to stop the iApps from being installed when you run the Mac OS X installer. On the Mac, the concept of "installed" (sitting on available storage) is not the same as on Windows (where apps are mixed into one big soup). "Uninstalling" iApps is just Trashing (deleting) them. iTunes is ONE ICON. iPhoto is ONE ICON. iMovie is ONE ICON.
A child raised by monkeys can "uninstall" apps on a Mac.
With all these "Switchers" around now, there are actually two ways to do everything on the Mac now: the easy way, and the hard way that former Windows users always choose. For example, it is very hard to convince a Windows user that they don't need to wipe their hard drive in order to install a new version of the OS. When I installed 10.2, I checked the option for "clean install", so that the whole/System folder is completely replaced. My apps are still there in/Applications, and the users are all still there in/Users, so I have a fresh system.
It would be fairly easy for Apple to start a database much like freshmeat which would serve as an easy starting point for OSX users to find the software they want.
Sit down in front of a Mac OS X box and go Apple Menu > Get Mac OS X Software. This option is available no matter what application you are using.
Unlike Microsoft, Apple has ABSOLUTELY NO REASON to discourage you from finding, discovering, and using third-party Mac products. The Mac I happen to be typing this on right now was purchased to run Digidesign Pro Tools. Apple wants me to know about Pro Tools so I keep buying Macs (Pro Tools users are like 98% on Macs). Apple wants me to surround myself with a gajillion little peripherals so that later on I demand a CD-RW be inside the computer not hanging off it by a wire and that's a good reason to get a new Mac, too.
The thing that non-Mac users keep missing is that Microsoft is not happy unless they get it ALL. They are not thankful enough that they screwed you on Windows to let you keep using WordPerfect. Their whole business model is about having it ALL. Apple simply makes computers. They want you to buy their computer because it is a better computer than any of their competitors makes. Go ahead and run whatever fucking software or hardware add-ons you like... go wild. You can "un-bundle" all of the bundled apps on a Mac in less than a minute (select them all in the Applications folder just like you'd select any set of icons, and then drag them to the ever-present Trash). Apple is fine because they still sold you the computer, and that's ENOUGH. Sure, they'd love it if you also run Mac OS X and Final Cut Pro and whatever other Apple software, but if you buy an iBook, wipe it, install Yellow Dog Linux, and that completes you, Apple is still happy to have had your business.
Yes. I really like Mail, and in 10.2 spam has stopped being a problem for me. The newest version also deals with attachments better, and can display PDF inline, and lots of little tweaks besides.
> It's true there aren't many mac virii, but that's just beacause there aren't many macs.
There are over 25 million Macs in use right now, and the platform has been around for 20 years. Mac-bashing is kind of a hobby for some people. Mac OS X has been out for 18 months and has 2-4 million installations. Those are pretty big virus targets.
I think the reason there are no Mac OS X viruses even after 18 months and a very high-profile media presence and some boasting ("World's Most Advanced Operating System") is that it is a proper network operating system, with industry-standard permissions and protocols and time-tested open source technologies at the core. Being on the Internet is NATURAL to Mac OS X. The networking features are ready for it because the Internet is UNIX. Microsoft was quite famously taken completely by surprise by the rise of the World Wide Web and the demise of the "standalone PC'. Bill Gates mentioned the Internet ONCE in his 1995 book "The Road Ahead"... he said CD-ROMs were going to be the big thing for the late 1990's. There is so much chaos in Windows from every perspective that viruses are just a natural feature. It's so easy to make one for Windows, why bother working hard to MAYBE come up with one that will work on Mac OS X or Linux or another UNIX?
Although there are a few viruses for the older Mac OS, the MS-Office viruses are by far the most common. I read somewhere once that 4 of the top 5 Mac-based viruses of all time ran only in Microsoft software. A Microsoft-free Mac OS machine was said to be 10,000 times less likely to get a virus than a Mac OS machine with MS Office, IE, and Outlook Express on it.
Check out Ableton Live for audio right now on Mac OS X. It's a great app on any OS, but I've been using it on Mac OS X for months, all day long, and the combination of the two has NEVER LET ME DOWN. Just runs. No crashes, no skips, no problems. The CPU meter stays around 50% on a PowerBook G4 with a 667 in it. There are only a handful of VST plug-ins for Mac OS X right now (although they've doubled in the past couple of months and there should be 10x that easy once Cubase SX comes out in September 2002), but Live has a decent set of built-in effects, FANTASTIC looping and editing and beat-matching that's very musical, and you can work with as many tracks as you like.
The global TCP/IP network pretty much makes "UNIX" an essential feature of a "modern operating system", no matter how old UNIX is. Mac OS X is its own operating system, but it is compatible with UNIX wherever it can be because THAT'S WHAT USERS REQUIRE.
> set an image's icon to a thumbnail of the image?
In 10.2, one of the View Options for Icon view is "Show icon preview", but this is disabled by default. Open a Finder window, choose View > as Icons, choose View > Show View Options, and then check the box "Show icon preview". Note the setting of "This window only" or "All windows" at the top of the View Options panel before you make changes. Once Finder is showing icon previews, if you open a folder of images, their icons will appear as their contents. Set the icon size to 128x128 and you probably won't ever have to open an image just to get a look at it.
The confusion on this is because in previous Mac OS up to 10.1, if an image file had an icon that showed its contents, it was actually a custom icon that was added to the file itself at some point during its life (Photoshop has done this for years, Fireworks does it, and you can just copy and paste an image in Finder's Get Info to do this yourself, too). With a plain custom icon, you could open the image, edit it (say, rotate it) and close it and the icon would still be the same as it ever was. With 10.2, Finder is basically making these content icons for you as you go, so they will be current. If you have images that already have custom icons on them, cut the icon out by using Get Info (select the file or folder, choose File > Get Info, click in the icon field, and go Edit > Cut).
> It is also useful to know exactly what parts are in the machine so > that if something does not work it is very easy to select the correct drivers.
I don't want to know that stuff anymore... that's why I use Macs now. I just upgraded three Macs to Mac OS X 10.2 in the past few days, and it was the simplest procedure you can possibly imagine. And (read this carefully) every change was for the better... it just worked. The "family 5-pack" of full versions of Mac OS X that I used is also only 2/3 the cost of one copy of Windows XP Pro, and there is none of the product activation bullshit to go through. I might keep a fourth Mac I was going to sell, since putting Mac OS X on it is free.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I know my PowerBook G4 has ATI graphics hardware (a RADEON with 16MB I think), and my Power Mac has an NVIDIA GeForce something with at least 32MB. I know this because I read it in the specs when I bought the machines. I was interested at the time only to make sure that each machine would display fast graphics with great quality in full color at the highest native resolution of their displays, and that's what they do. It just works all the time and it's one less thing to be responsible for. I use multiple computers now, with all kinds of other hardware... the fact that a Power Mac or PowerBook is ONE widget really, really simplified things for me. It was more than six months before I opened the Displays system preference on my Power Mac with Cinema Display. I just never had a single moment where that ever seemed necessary. I plugged the single cable from the display into the only place on the back of the computer where it would fit, and switched on the system and it Just Worked. It wasn't just that it lit up, or that I could see a picture... the picture was perfect, in full color, at the right resolution. I can't tell you how many times I've gone to a PC user's house and see a modern graphics adapter with 21" display running 800x600 with thousands of colors, and the user is scrolling around in little windows all the time. They simply don't know that they can choose to see full color and 2 or 3 times the screen real estate. Their system is using all these "safe" settings that geeks think of as nice starting points for tinkering.
> I have built quite a few PC's that Just Work as soon as I install an OS
Look, you don't understand the "Just Work(TM)" thing. When I got my latest Mac -- a PowerBook G4 -- I took it out of the box, hit the power button (battery already had a 2/3 charge), it asked me what I wanted to name the computer, what I wanted to name my account, what I wanted my password to be, and then I was at my desktop. There's an AirPort (Wi-Fi) menu at the top right of the display, which I used to tell the PowerBook the name and password of my wireless LAN (it would have found the Wi-Fi network automatically and just asked me the password if the base station was set to advertise itself like most do). That's about five minutes, tops, and I'm already on the Internet using IE, Flash, QuickTime, iTunes, Mail, etc. The QuickTime subsystem is already there, with its knowledge of every audio and video and media file format I've ever run into, there is a huge collection of high-quality fonts, Apache is ready to be turned on with a click of a button, Java2 is there, UNIX tools, and on and on.
Here's a good example of Just Works: Mac OS X applications are single icons that can be stored anywhere in the file system that you have permissions to place things. You don't have to "install" them, you can move them, you can rename them, and they still work. You can drag them from your desktop to your notebook and they still work. You can put 3,000 other applications on your system and that first one will still work, because even though there are facilities to share libraries, the app still carries the ones it came with within itself as (at minimum) a backup, if it can't find any newer libraries in the shared spots. Until you have used a Mac day-to-day-to-day, you don't realize how much time and trouble a thing like that can save you. It is also nice to put things where you want them on your own system.
From a non-geek perspective (someone who doesn't know all the excuses that programmers make when things fail), dragging the IE 5 application from a Windows desktop to a Windows notebook that only has IE 4 should be all you have to do to run IE 5 on the notebook. What is it about transporting IE 5 across my own local network that broke it? Yeah, I know that "IE 5 for Windows" is really 1,000 various files all over the place on a Windows machine, but there is no excuse for that. On the Mac, IE 5 is a single icon. Why would I want to manage or even look at more than one icon for "IE 5"? Ugh. That's why there is a "Mac faithful"... it's not because we admire Steve Jobs or because we're romantics or something (although there's some of that), it's because when you sit down at Windows or a plain-UNIX after using a Mac for a while, things just seem broken on other systems. You don't want to run a bunch of installers and patchers on your notebook before you go on the road just so you can get the same damn apps on there that you were just using on your desktop. The other side of this is that when people go from Windows to Mac, they often spend months or years trying to do things the hard way. You see them in forums complaining that they unplugged this or disabled this or reformatted this or painstakingly typed in certain IP addresses, or rebooted, or whatever, and you have to keep telling them things like "just drag the icon to where you want it" or "just plug it in, you don't need a driver disc" and they're AMAZED. STUNNED.
> People buy PC's because of price, Mac's because of style...
I buy Macs because they just work. I used to build my own PC systems, but now I just buy a new Mac ever 2-3 years and get everything I need in one purchase, along with a great service contract (AppleCare), and an OS feature called Software Update that automatically keeps all the included software (Mac OS X, iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, etc.) current. Now I spend less overall, too, because I don't have to upgrade piecemeal to make up for what the vendor left out. For example, the oldest of the four Macs here is from January, 1999, and it has FireWire, USB, a 15" flat panel display, and 1.5GB RAM. It runs Mac OS X great (especially 10.2) and can edit DV, be a jukebox, play DVD's, burn CD's and all kinds of other stuff that people are doing TODAY with computers. It also has space for four hard drives and three empty PCI slots. That computer has paid for itself again and again and again and it is still trucking. It does have style as well... translucent blue display, tower, mouse, and keyboard look beautiful... that's just candy, though... an extra.
> It would be nice if they had the balls to say OS-X is better than WIndows, and not that > it's better than a 'pc'.
That is what they're saying. There's one ad that says "I used to think it was my fault that Windows doesn't work right." and another that says "The Blue Screen Of Death." I know Linux users like to think of "the PC" as an independent entity, but the reality is that PC's come with Windows as the operating system, and Macs come with Mac OS X. If you debate "Mac vs. PC" in mainstream advertising, then you're talking Windows vs. Mac OS X.
Just reinstall your Classic OS or start without extensions. Classic can't be more stable than the OS that's running within it. In 10.0, I found Classic to be a real kludge, but since 10.1/9.2 it isn't noticeable once it's started, and very rarely goes down.
We are minutes away from not needing Classic anyway. Even things like Cubase SX will be out in September or so, now that 10.2 and its audio/MIDI core are out.
> I still can't just buy an Apple Cinema display and slap it on my PC and expect it > to work properly, though.
Yes you can, but since your PC doesn't supply power to the attached display, you need to buy a power adapter for the Cinema Display. Apple sells them, and so do third parties. Once you plug the adapter onto the Cinema Display, it becomes a typical DVI display like any other. The ADC connector on the Cinema Display is a combination DVI, USB, VGA, and power, which makes it easy to split the cable out to plain DVI, USB, VGA, and power cables. The ADC connector is also known as a DVI-2 as far as I know... you're just used to DVI-1, but both are standard DVI cables.
Funny that you'd talk digital display connectors. On the Mac, for flat panels we went VGA (1998), DVI-1(1999), then DVI-2 a.k.a. ADC (2000). On the PC, there were a few other kinds of flat panel connectors that haven't survived, and many flat panels still ship VGA, even now. Going from a digital graphics adapter to a digital display with an analog cable... not good.
For my part, I have a PowerMac G4 in a rack that travels sometimes, and when I set it up and plug the mouse into the keyboard with one cable, keyboard into the display with one cable, and display into the computer with one cable, I feel pretty happy about the ADC port.
Also, if you use a plain DVI display, you have to make sure to plug the AC power in BEFORE you attach the display to the computer, or else risk a static charge from the computer wrecking the display. ADC solves this, because you can't plug the display onto the graphics adapter without also plugging on power at the same time.
> Appletalk
Talking about AppleTalk within this discussion is disingenuous or at least ignorant. Mac OS 9 (1999) introduced AppleTalk over TCP/IP (Macs speaking AppleTalk over plain TCP/IP networks), and Mac OS X 10.2 (today) does all the tricks that AppleTalk used to do over plain TCP/IP (using Rendezvous a.k.a. ZeroConf, also a standard). In short, AppleTalk is memory. Why don't you complain about the Newton or something?
> You no longer see much happening with, say, the NuBus slot.
That could be because Apple has been using PCI since 1995. Nothing slows down a technology like being discontinued for 7 years. Sheesh.
Instead of talking on about things you don't know, please investigate the incredible list of IEEE and ISO standards that Apple supports. Their firmware (equivalent to PC BIOS) is an IEEE standard that's also used by Sun and others. The high-speed peripheral bus is an IEEE standard. They use PCI and AGP and USB and the same RAM and storage and even the same anti-theft collars. They've included an Ethernet port standard on every Mac for more than five years, and Gigabit Ethernet has been standard on pro Macs (Power Mac, PowerBook) for two years. They were the first company to introduce Wi-Fi (802.11), as well as the first company to build the antennae and hardware inside every system they sell. PowerBooks have typical PC Card slots. Optical drives are the same, TV outputs are S-Video, Bluetooth, yada, yada, yada.
Darwin runs on both Mac PPC hardware and Intel hardware. Apple sells Mac OS X to run on DarwinPPC because there is a business model and demand there. Apple does not sell Mac OS X to run on DarwinIntel because there is no business model there. The first major problem is that there is a convicted monopolist selling Intel operating systems.
If you are an Intel user, it is YOUR platform that is sick, not Apple's. Don't blame Apple for not waving a magic wand and making everything OK for you and your shitty hardware.
That article has been WIDELY discredited. It starts by assuming that the Internet bubble never happened, and that's only one of its problems. Steve Jobs wrote a letter to the editors of Fortune (which was published in the next issue) offering to sell those options to Fortune for 10% of what the article said they were worth and nobody bit.
A stock option is not a share of stock. It's an option to buy a share of stock for a set price at some time in the future. If your option price is less than the actual price at that time (the time when the options "vest") then you will get to buy some bargain stock. Otherwise, the options are WORTHLESS.
Rendezvous is TCP/IP networking with the ease of AppleTalk. In the late 1980's and early 1990's, all you had to do to network two or more Macs (and printers, too) was plug them together with AppleTalk cables and whatever network services they were offering could be browsed and accessed with no configuration. Since Apple merged with NeXT, they have been rebuilding their stuff to industry standards. So, with 10.2, all you have to do to network Macs is make sure they're physically connected in some way, such as Wi-Fi, Ethernet, or FireWire and the services that each offers will be available to the other machines without any configuration. This stuff is all done to the ZeroConf specs, and HP is bringing out Rendezvous-enabled printers that will just plug on a TCP/IP network and be instantly available to any Rendezvous-enabled computer (right now, that's just Macs running 10.2, but other systems will add ZeroConf support as time goes on).
Amiga has nothing to do with it. Let it die already. Sheesh.
Also, if you are a Mac OS 8.6 user who buys a 10.2 box and so doesn't have Mac OS 9, there is a coupon in the 10.2 box you can use to get a Mac OS 9.2.2 CD for $19.95 shipping and handling.
> I personally wish Apple would rid themselves of [one-button mouses], but I know some > people who like them
Not to get too far into this old hoary debate, but every time Apple does a survey on mouses, they find that 85% of their customers are happily using the one-button mouse, while the other 15% are using a broad mix of two-button mouses, three-button mouses, five-button mouses, full-size trackballs, thumb trackballs, stylii (graphic tablets), and others. What "the new Apple" has done with their mouses is leave the simple, easy, one-button default that works fine for most users and add support for almost any USB mouse or trackball into the OS. So, if you are in love with your high-end Logitech trackball, just plug it into your Mac and use it. Leave the one-button mouse plugged-in as well, if you want. You have ultimate flexibility.
Another point is that the cheap mouses that come with most Wintel systems are only good for the drawer if you don't use them. You can sell an Apple Pro Mouse on eBay for $35-$40, easy, so financially, the "useless" one-button mouse hasn't hurt you too much.
> When grandma is setting up her own Apache server we sysadmins are in a world of trouble.
Mac OS X's Web Sharing is Apache, and all you have to do to start it is click "Start". There are lots of grandmothers out there using it to share a small Web site. They learned how by using the previous version of Web Sharing in Mac OS that was not Apache. What happened was that Apple created an interface for Web Sharing that was for users, and then later (with Mac OS X) put in the best core technologies (Apache). The user doesn't need to know or care, unless they want some truly advanced feature, in which case they can still approach their own Apache by editing text files or by using a third-party GUI utility.
Yay! We are talking here about putting CD's into computers and ripping MP3's the first time, or plugging camcorders into computers and making movies the first time. Just booting is not "just working".
> BTW: does anyone know about the unix command line in OS X ? i have been considering > buying a Mac, but i can't find any info on how easy it is to access the command line > (eg: i don't want to reboot just to do some coding)
Use the included GUI app found at/Applications/Utilities/Terminal to access the command line. From there, you can approach it in the same way you would work with any BSD UNIX. You can change the default shell, do whatever you want. You can even change the transparency of the terminal window so you can see stuff that's behind it.
Sometimes people say that there are two kinds of Mac users now: those with Terminal in their Dock and those without. Makes a great overall community. Artists make sure we get the best color-correction, musicians make sure we get the best audio, and coders make sure we get the best networking standards and interoperability. Steve Jobs makes sure that stuff works before they ship it.
Average user working with network drivers? You are about 10 years behind the curve, there. The average user wants to apply THEIR tools to THEIR work (e.g. Pro Tools to audio recording), not work in any way to make the computer work.
You just don't understand the high level that Apple is working at. When I bought my last Mac (a PowerBook G4), I took it out of the box, pressed the power button (the battery was already 2/3 charged), answered a few questions such as what I wanted to name the machine and my account, and then I was at my desktop. I clicked the AirPort (Wi-Fi, 802.11) menu at the top right of the display (with the other system menus) and entered my wireless network's name and password and I was on the Internet. I put a CD in and iTunes started and ripped it to MP3 and spit it back out. I plugged in a camcorder and iMovie started and I imported and edited some DV. I plugged an audio/S-Video cable between the PowerBook and my TV, chose "Detect Displays" from the Displays system menu on the PowerBook (top right of the display, again), and the TV became an additional 800x600 desktop. I opened the System Preferences and clicked Software Update and it reported that there were some new updates for the included software, so I checked the ones I wanted and clicked install and it did that for me in the background while I worked on something else, and when it was done, I didn't have to reboot or even logout. I inserted a software CD, dragged a single icon from the CD to my Applications folder, and then ran the application and used it. This was a multitrack audio application, too (Ableton Live).
This stuff is all EASY on the Mac. You can't ignore that and keep trying to sell people on building their own systems and scouring the Web for drivers and working hard to get to a point where they have the capabilities they can get all-inclusive on any new Mac.
> Now people are too lazy, I guess. [ to learn to edit config files ]
Now people have other things to do with their computers, like learn Pro Tools and do audio recording, or learn Photoshop and do graphics, or learn iMovie and do video (like iMovie takes any time to learn!). Apple has a very good stable of geeks who are worrying about things like/etc and httpd.conf for ALL OF THEIR USERS. They are also worrying about hardware/software integration, stable kernels, and graphics modes and refresh rates and such, again so that the users don't have to. The user themselves is working with NON-COMPUTER tasks such as being doctors, lawyers, artists, musicians, students, etc. You are not any smarter than them because YOUR field or interest happens to be computer tech.
Now, on the other hand, if those config files and the substructure of the software are hidden from the users (like on Windows), then the user can't trust that their system is doing only what they want it to do. For this reason, Mac OS X's core is completely exposed to the advanced user or programmer or IT staff or security consultant or network architect, etc.
This stuff is part of the "best of both worlds" approach of Mac OS X. Come at it as a Mac user or a UNIX user and leave satisfied. Come at it as a Windows user and leave AMAZED.
The funny thing with the boot-time debate is that Mac OS X users SIMPLY DON'T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT IT. If Mac OS X took one hour to boot it wouldn't bother me, because I only boot it about three times a year. In the last year, my PowerBook G4 had one kernel panic, and one or two system updates that required a restart (typically, security updates for UNIX tools and things like that, not high-level GUI stuff or plain apps). When you close the lid on the PowerBook, it goes to sleep instantly and quietly. When you open the lid up, it wakes up instantly and is ready to use. The batteries last 5 hours each (I carry two), fit in the palm of your hand, and can be hot-swapped, so I have also never run into the situation where I had to shut down just because of lack of power.
The real question is: when you sit down to work, how long does it take the computer to get ready for you? On Mac OS X, it's as long as it takes to open the laptop's lid, which means it's essentially no time at all.
What you want is a 1u rack to put it in. This is a very standard sizing, so you have a very wide variety of racks to choose from, or you could build your own. Think of it as a case mod where you just have to make space for one rack-mount component that has a titanium faceplate. You could have a rack that stands sideways next to a desk, for a very skinny tower, or put a display on top of the rack. The Xserve doesn't have a top, so the guts will show through the top of a transparent plastic rack.
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Yes, they're certainly no way near as bad as Microsoft's bundling techniques, but I still worry for the creators of software like XMMS, Winamp, AIM, ICQ, Pixie, MPlayer, and any other software the i* suite replaces, especially those that are commercial enterprises.
Apple's iApps don't replace anything. THIRD-PARTY SOFTWARE HAS TO BE GOOD ENOUGH TO REPLACE THE iAPPS, not the other way around. If it is not, then the developer either has to work harder or move on to something else.
The iApps are so popular because they are "unfeaturist"
Microsoft's apps are bloated, complicated UI, low-quality, have tons of useless features, and are commingled and blended into Windows so you can't replace them with an alternative
Apple's apps are lightweight, simple UI, high-quality, have only the basic features that EVERYBODY needs, and are standalone applications that appear as ONE ICON you can delete if you want to replace it with an alternative.
In fact, you're SUPPOSED to replace one or two of the iApps with alternatives. For example, a video editing person will use iPhoto and iTunes, but replace iMovie and iDVD with Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro. A dedicated music lover might replace iTunes with Audion, but continue to happily make the occasional home movie in iMovie. It's software
Also, I have to mention that the iApps got popular BEFORE they came with the operating system or with Mac purchases. iMovie 1.0 debuted at $59 or free with an iMac DV (and only an iMac DV), and people bought it and downloaded it in DROVES. iTunes was just a download long before it ever shipped included for the first time in Mac OS X. People were buying new Macs with SuperDrives just to get to iDVD, not buying Macs and getting iDVD along for the ride. This speaks to QUALITY.
> Yes, but you can happily replace the (IMHO) awful bash with zsh. And Linux will still
... it's just not combined with the browser applications. OmniWeb uses it, Mail uses it, but you can still Trash OmniWeb and Mail and not affect the system's HTML renderer. Mozilla and IE don't use the built-in renderer ... it's up to the developers of the applications.
/Applications. The first thing I do after an OS update is convert it into a virtual disk image. That way, it is unavailable (as if it were not on the computer at all), but I can still just double-click it and it mounts like a CD and now I can run IE from there to test Web sites in it (I test as I work in a Mozilla-based browser and in OmniWeb, then check IE at the last minute and it's usually fine since IE/Mac has a standards-compliant rendering engine, unlike the Windows version).
> carry on working just fine.
Just as you can replace IE with Mozilla on Mac OS X and everything is still fine (or the shells for that matter, too). Mac OS X has a built-in HTML renderer as well
Internet Explorer 5.x for Mac OS X is just a single icon sitting in
You don't even have to stop the iApps from being installed when you run the Mac OS X installer. On the Mac, the concept of "installed" (sitting on available storage) is not the same as on Windows (where apps are mixed into one big soup). "Uninstalling" iApps is just Trashing (deleting) them. iTunes is ONE ICON. iPhoto is ONE ICON. iMovie is ONE ICON.
/System folder is completely replaced. My apps are still there in /Applications, and the users are all still there in /Users, so I have a fresh system.
A child raised by monkeys can "uninstall" apps on a Mac.
With all these "Switchers" around now, there are actually two ways to do everything on the Mac now: the easy way, and the hard way that former Windows users always choose. For example, it is very hard to convince a Windows user that they don't need to wipe their hard drive in order to install a new version of the OS. When I installed 10.2, I checked the option for "clean install", so that the whole
It would be fairly easy for Apple to start a database much like freshmeat which would serve as an easy starting point for OSX users to find the software they want.
Macintosh Product Guide
A catalog of over 20,000 products made for Mac.
OR ...
Mac OS X Downloads
OR ...
Sit down in front of a Mac OS X box and go Apple Menu > Get Mac OS X Software. This option is available no matter what application you are using.
Unlike Microsoft, Apple has ABSOLUTELY NO REASON to discourage you from finding, discovering, and using third-party Mac products. The Mac I happen to be typing this on right now was purchased to run Digidesign Pro Tools. Apple wants me to know about Pro Tools so I keep buying Macs (Pro Tools users are like 98% on Macs). Apple wants me to surround myself with a gajillion little peripherals so that later on I demand a CD-RW be inside the computer not hanging off it by a wire and that's a good reason to get a new Mac, too.
The thing that non-Mac users keep missing is that Microsoft is not happy unless they get it ALL. They are not thankful enough that they screwed you on Windows to let you keep using WordPerfect. Their whole business model is about having it ALL. Apple simply makes computers. They want you to buy their computer because it is a better computer than any of their competitors makes. Go ahead and run whatever fucking software or hardware add-ons you like ... go wild. You can "un-bundle" all of the bundled apps on a Mac in less than a minute (select them all in the Applications folder just like you'd select any set of icons, and then drag them to the ever-present Trash). Apple is fine because they still sold you the computer, and that's ENOUGH. Sure, they'd love it if you also run Mac OS X and Final Cut Pro and whatever other Apple software, but if you buy an iBook, wipe it, install Yellow Dog Linux, and that completes you, Apple is still happy to have had your business.
> Does anyone know: is it really all that good?
Yes. I really like Mail, and in 10.2 spam has stopped being a problem for me. The newest version also deals with attachments better, and can display PDF inline, and lots of little tweaks besides.
> It's true there aren't many mac virii, but that's just beacause there aren't many macs.
... he said CD-ROMs were going to be the big thing for the late 1990's. There is so much chaos in Windows from every perspective that viruses are just a natural feature. It's so easy to make one for Windows, why bother working hard to MAYBE come up with one that will work on Mac OS X or Linux or another UNIX?
There are over 25 million Macs in use right now, and the platform has been around for 20 years. Mac-bashing is kind of a hobby for some people. Mac OS X has been out for 18 months and has 2-4 million installations. Those are pretty big virus targets.
I think the reason there are no Mac OS X viruses even after 18 months and a very high-profile media presence and some boasting ("World's Most Advanced Operating System") is that it is a proper network operating system, with industry-standard permissions and protocols and time-tested open source technologies at the core. Being on the Internet is NATURAL to Mac OS X. The networking features are ready for it because the Internet is UNIX. Microsoft was quite famously taken completely by surprise by the rise of the World Wide Web and the demise of the "standalone PC'. Bill Gates mentioned the Internet ONCE in his 1995 book "The Road Ahead"
Although there are a few viruses for the older Mac OS, the MS-Office viruses are by far the most common. I read somewhere once that 4 of the top 5 Mac-based viruses of all time ran only in Microsoft software. A Microsoft-free Mac OS machine was said to be 10,000 times less likely to get a virus than a Mac OS machine with MS Office, IE, and Outlook Express on it.
Check out Ableton Live for audio right now on Mac OS X. It's a great app on any OS, but I've been using it on Mac OS X for months, all day long, and the combination of the two has NEVER LET ME DOWN. Just runs. No crashes, no skips, no problems. The CPU meter stays around 50% on a PowerBook G4 with a 667 in it. There are only a handful of VST plug-ins for Mac OS X right now (although they've doubled in the past couple of months and there should be 10x that easy once Cubase SX comes out in September 2002), but Live has a decent set of built-in effects, FANTASTIC looping and editing and beat-matching that's very musical, and you can work with as many tracks as you like.
The global TCP/IP network pretty much makes "UNIX" an essential feature of a "modern operating system", no matter how old UNIX is. Mac OS X is its own operating system, but it is compatible with UNIX wherever it can be because THAT'S WHAT USERS REQUIRE.
> set an image's icon to a thumbnail of the image?
In 10.2, one of the View Options for Icon view is "Show icon preview", but this is disabled by default. Open a Finder window, choose View > as Icons, choose View > Show View Options, and then check the box "Show icon preview". Note the setting of "This window only" or "All windows" at the top of the View Options panel before you make changes. Once Finder is showing icon previews, if you open a folder of images, their icons will appear as their contents. Set the icon size to 128x128 and you probably won't ever have to open an image just to get a look at it.
The confusion on this is because in previous Mac OS up to 10.1, if an image file had an icon that showed its contents, it was actually a custom icon that was added to the file itself at some point during its life (Photoshop has done this for years, Fireworks does it, and you can just copy and paste an image in Finder's Get Info to do this yourself, too). With a plain custom icon, you could open the image, edit it (say, rotate it) and close it and the icon would still be the same as it ever was. With 10.2, Finder is basically making these content icons for you as you go, so they will be current. If you have images that already have custom icons on them, cut the icon out by using Get Info (select the file or folder, choose File > Get Info, click in the icon field, and go Edit > Cut).
> It is also useful to know exactly what parts are in the machine so
... that's why I use Macs now. I just upgraded three Macs to Mac OS X 10.2 in the past few days, and it was the simplest procedure you can possibly imagine. And (read this carefully) every change was for the better ... it just worked. The "family 5-pack" of full versions of Mac OS X that I used is also only 2/3 the cost of one copy of Windows XP Pro, and there is none of the product activation bullshit to go through. I might keep a fourth Mac I was going to sell, since putting Mac OS X on it is free.
... the fact that a Power Mac or PowerBook is ONE widget really, really simplified things for me. It was more than six months before I opened the Displays system preference on my Power Mac with Cinema Display. I just never had a single moment where that ever seemed necessary. I plugged the single cable from the display into the only place on the back of the computer where it would fit, and switched on the system and it Just Worked. It wasn't just that it lit up, or that I could see a picture ... the picture was perfect, in full color, at the right resolution. I can't tell you how many times I've gone to a PC user's house and see a modern graphics adapter with 21" display running 800x600 with thousands of colors, and the user is scrolling around in little windows all the time. They simply don't know that they can choose to see full color and 2 or 3 times the screen real estate. Their system is using all these "safe" settings that geeks think of as nice starting points for tinkering.
... it's not because we admire Steve Jobs or because we're romantics or something (although there's some of that), it's because when you sit down at Windows or a plain-UNIX after using a Mac for a while, things just seem broken on other systems. You don't want to run a bunch of installers and patchers on your notebook before you go on the road just so you can get the same damn apps on there that you were just using on your desktop. The other side of this is that when people go from Windows to Mac, they often spend months or years trying to do things the hard way. You see them in forums complaining that they unplugged this or disabled this or reformatted this or painstakingly typed in certain IP addresses, or rebooted, or whatever, and you have to keep telling them things like "just drag the icon to where you want it" or "just plug it in, you don't need a driver disc" and they're AMAZED. STUNNED.
> that if something does not work it is very easy to select the correct drivers.
I don't want to know that stuff anymore
Somewhere in the back of my mind I know my PowerBook G4 has ATI graphics hardware (a RADEON with 16MB I think), and my Power Mac has an NVIDIA GeForce something with at least 32MB. I know this because I read it in the specs when I bought the machines. I was interested at the time only to make sure that each machine would display fast graphics with great quality in full color at the highest native resolution of their displays, and that's what they do. It just works all the time and it's one less thing to be responsible for. I use multiple computers now, with all kinds of other hardware
> I have built quite a few PC's that Just Work as soon as I install an OS
Look, you don't understand the "Just Work(TM)" thing. When I got my latest Mac -- a PowerBook G4 -- I took it out of the box, hit the power button (battery already had a 2/3 charge), it asked me what I wanted to name the computer, what I wanted to name my account, what I wanted my password to be, and then I was at my desktop. There's an AirPort (Wi-Fi) menu at the top right of the display, which I used to tell the PowerBook the name and password of my wireless LAN (it would have found the Wi-Fi network automatically and just asked me the password if the base station was set to advertise itself like most do). That's about five minutes, tops, and I'm already on the Internet using IE, Flash, QuickTime, iTunes, Mail, etc. The QuickTime subsystem is already there, with its knowledge of every audio and video and media file format I've ever run into, there is a huge collection of high-quality fonts, Apache is ready to be turned on with a click of a button, Java2 is there, UNIX tools, and on and on.
Here's a good example of Just Works: Mac OS X applications are single icons that can be stored anywhere in the file system that you have permissions to place things. You don't have to "install" them, you can move them, you can rename them, and they still work. You can drag them from your desktop to your notebook and they still work. You can put 3,000 other applications on your system and that first one will still work, because even though there are facilities to share libraries, the app still carries the ones it came with within itself as (at minimum) a backup, if it can't find any newer libraries in the shared spots. Until you have used a Mac day-to-day-to-day, you don't realize how much time and trouble a thing like that can save you. It is also nice to put things where you want them on your own system.
From a non-geek perspective (someone who doesn't know all the excuses that programmers make when things fail), dragging the IE 5 application from a Windows desktop to a Windows notebook that only has IE 4 should be all you have to do to run IE 5 on the notebook. What is it about transporting IE 5 across my own local network that broke it? Yeah, I know that "IE 5 for Windows" is really 1,000 various files all over the place on a Windows machine, but there is no excuse for that. On the Mac, IE 5 is a single icon. Why would I want to manage or even look at more than one icon for "IE 5"? Ugh. That's why there is a "Mac faithful"
> People buy PC's because of price, Mac's because of style...
... translucent blue display, tower, mouse, and keyboard look beautiful ... that's just candy, though ... an extra.
I buy Macs because they just work. I used to build my own PC systems, but now I just buy a new Mac ever 2-3 years and get everything I need in one purchase, along with a great service contract (AppleCare), and an OS feature called Software Update that automatically keeps all the included software (Mac OS X, iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, etc.) current. Now I spend less overall, too, because I don't have to upgrade piecemeal to make up for what the vendor left out. For example, the oldest of the four Macs here is from January, 1999, and it has FireWire, USB, a 15" flat panel display, and 1.5GB RAM. It runs Mac OS X great (especially 10.2) and can edit DV, be a jukebox, play DVD's, burn CD's and all kinds of other stuff that people are doing TODAY with computers. It also has space for four hard drives and three empty PCI slots. That computer has paid for itself again and again and again and it is still trucking. It does have style as well
> It would be nice if they had the balls to say OS-X is better than WIndows, and not that
> it's better than a 'pc'.
That is what they're saying. There's one ad that says "I used to think it was my fault that Windows doesn't work right." and another that says "The Blue Screen Of Death." I know Linux users like to think of "the PC" as an independent entity, but the reality is that PC's come with Windows as the operating system, and Macs come with Mac OS X. If you debate "Mac vs. PC" in mainstream advertising, then you're talking Windows vs. Mac OS X.
Just reinstall your Classic OS or start without extensions. Classic can't be more stable than the OS that's running within it. In 10.0, I found Classic to be a real kludge, but since 10.1/9.2 it isn't noticeable once it's started, and very rarely goes down.
We are minutes away from not needing Classic anyway. Even things like Cubase SX will be out in September or so, now that 10.2 and its audio/MIDI core are out.
> I still can't just buy an Apple Cinema display and slap it on my PC and expect it
... you're just used to DVI-1, but both are standard DVI cables.
... not good.
> to work properly, though.
Yes you can, but since your PC doesn't supply power to the attached display, you need to buy a power adapter for the Cinema Display. Apple sells them, and so do third parties. Once you plug the adapter onto the Cinema Display, it becomes a typical DVI display like any other. The ADC connector on the Cinema Display is a combination DVI, USB, VGA, and power, which makes it easy to split the cable out to plain DVI, USB, VGA, and power cables. The ADC connector is also known as a DVI-2 as far as I know
Funny that you'd talk digital display connectors. On the Mac, for flat panels we went VGA (1998), DVI-1(1999), then DVI-2 a.k.a. ADC (2000). On the PC, there were a few other kinds of flat panel connectors that haven't survived, and many flat panels still ship VGA, even now. Going from a digital graphics adapter to a digital display with an analog cable
For my part, I have a PowerMac G4 in a rack that travels sometimes, and when I set it up and plug the mouse into the keyboard with one cable, keyboard into the display with one cable, and display into the computer with one cable, I feel pretty happy about the ADC port.
Also, if you use a plain DVI display, you have to make sure to plug the AC power in BEFORE you attach the display to the computer, or else risk a static charge from the computer wrecking the display. ADC solves this, because you can't plug the display onto the graphics adapter without also plugging on power at the same time.
> Appletalk
Talking about AppleTalk within this discussion is disingenuous or at least ignorant. Mac OS 9 (1999) introduced AppleTalk over TCP/IP (Macs speaking AppleTalk over plain TCP/IP networks), and Mac OS X 10.2 (today) does all the tricks that AppleTalk used to do over plain TCP/IP (using Rendezvous a.k.a. ZeroConf, also a standard). In short, AppleTalk is memory. Why don't you complain about the Newton or something?
> You no longer see much happening with, say, the NuBus slot.
That could be because Apple has been using PCI since 1995. Nothing slows down a technology like being discontinued for 7 years. Sheesh.
Instead of talking on about things you don't know, please investigate the incredible list of IEEE and ISO standards that Apple supports. Their firmware (equivalent to PC BIOS) is an IEEE standard that's also used by Sun and others. The high-speed peripheral bus is an IEEE standard. They use PCI and AGP and USB and the same RAM and storage and even the same anti-theft collars. They've included an Ethernet port standard on every Mac for more than five years, and Gigabit Ethernet has been standard on pro Macs (Power Mac, PowerBook) for two years. They were the first company to introduce Wi-Fi (802.11), as well as the first company to build the antennae and hardware inside every system they sell. PowerBooks have typical PC Card slots. Optical drives are the same, TV outputs are S-Video, Bluetooth, yada, yada, yada.
Darwin runs on both Mac PPC hardware and Intel hardware. Apple sells Mac OS X to run on DarwinPPC because there is a business model and demand there. Apple does not sell Mac OS X to run on DarwinIntel because there is no business model there. The first major problem is that there is a convicted monopolist selling Intel operating systems.
If you are an Intel user, it is YOUR platform that is sick, not Apple's. Don't blame Apple for not waving a magic wand and making everything OK for you and your shitty hardware.
That article has been WIDELY discredited. It starts by assuming that the Internet bubble never happened, and that's only one of its problems. Steve Jobs wrote a letter to the editors of Fortune (which was published in the next issue) offering to sell those options to Fortune for 10% of what the article said they were worth and nobody bit.
A stock option is not a share of stock. It's an option to buy a share of stock for a set price at some time in the future. If your option price is less than the actual price at that time (the time when the options "vest") then you will get to buy some bargain stock. Otherwise, the options are WORTHLESS.
Rendezvous is TCP/IP networking with the ease of AppleTalk. In the late 1980's and early 1990's, all you had to do to network two or more Macs (and printers, too) was plug them together with AppleTalk cables and whatever network services they were offering could be browsed and accessed with no configuration. Since Apple merged with NeXT, they have been rebuilding their stuff to industry standards. So, with 10.2, all you have to do to network Macs is make sure they're physically connected in some way, such as Wi-Fi, Ethernet, or FireWire and the services that each offers will be available to the other machines without any configuration. This stuff is all done to the ZeroConf specs, and HP is bringing out Rendezvous-enabled printers that will just plug on a TCP/IP network and be instantly available to any Rendezvous-enabled computer (right now, that's just Macs running 10.2, but other systems will add ZeroConf support as time goes on).
Amiga has nothing to do with it. Let it die already. Sheesh.
Also, if you are a Mac OS 8.6 user who buys a 10.2 box and so doesn't have Mac OS 9, there is a coupon in the 10.2 box you can use to get a Mac OS 9.2.2 CD for $19.95 shipping and handling.
> I personally wish Apple would rid themselves of [one-button mouses], but I know some
> people who like them
Not to get too far into this old hoary debate, but every time Apple does a survey on mouses, they find that 85% of their customers are happily using the one-button mouse, while the other 15% are using a broad mix of two-button mouses, three-button mouses, five-button mouses, full-size trackballs, thumb trackballs, stylii (graphic tablets), and others. What "the new Apple" has done with their mouses is leave the simple, easy, one-button default that works fine for most users and add support for almost any USB mouse or trackball into the OS. So, if you are in love with your high-end Logitech trackball, just plug it into your Mac and use it. Leave the one-button mouse plugged-in as well, if you want. You have ultimate flexibility.
Another point is that the cheap mouses that come with most Wintel systems are only good for the drawer if you don't use them. You can sell an Apple Pro Mouse on eBay for $35-$40, easy, so financially, the "useless" one-button mouse hasn't hurt you too much.
> When grandma is setting up her own Apache server we sysadmins are in a world of trouble.
Mac OS X's Web Sharing is Apache, and all you have to do to start it is click "Start". There are lots of grandmothers out there using it to share a small Web site. They learned how by using the previous version of Web Sharing in Mac OS that was not Apache. What happened was that Apple created an interface for Web Sharing that was for users, and then later (with Mac OS X) put in the best core technologies (Apache). The user doesn't need to know or care, unless they want some truly advanced feature, in which case they can still approach their own Apache by editing text files or by using a third-party GUI utility.
> it booted the first time.
/Applications/Utilities/Terminal to access the command line. From there, you can approach it in the same way you would work with any BSD UNIX. You can change the default shell, do whatever you want. You can even change the transparency of the terminal window so you can see stuff that's behind it.
Yay! We are talking here about putting CD's into computers and ripping MP3's the first time, or plugging camcorders into computers and making movies the first time. Just booting is not "just working".
> BTW: does anyone know about the unix command line in OS X ? i have been considering
> buying a Mac, but i can't find any info on how easy it is to access the command line
> (eg: i don't want to reboot just to do some coding)
Use the included GUI app found at
Sometimes people say that there are two kinds of Mac users now: those with Terminal in their Dock and those without. Makes a great overall community. Artists make sure we get the best color-correction, musicians make sure we get the best audio, and coders make sure we get the best networking standards and interoperability. Steve Jobs makes sure that stuff works before they ship it.
Enjoy.
Average user working with network drivers? You are about 10 years behind the curve, there. The average user wants to apply THEIR tools to THEIR work (e.g. Pro Tools to audio recording), not work in any way to make the computer work.
You just don't understand the high level that Apple is working at. When I bought my last Mac (a PowerBook G4), I took it out of the box, pressed the power button (the battery was already 2/3 charged), answered a few questions such as what I wanted to name the machine and my account, and then I was at my desktop. I clicked the AirPort (Wi-Fi, 802.11) menu at the top right of the display (with the other system menus) and entered my wireless network's name and password and I was on the Internet. I put a CD in and iTunes started and ripped it to MP3 and spit it back out. I plugged in a camcorder and iMovie started and I imported and edited some DV. I plugged an audio/S-Video cable between the PowerBook and my TV, chose "Detect Displays" from the Displays system menu on the PowerBook (top right of the display, again), and the TV became an additional 800x600 desktop. I opened the System Preferences and clicked Software Update and it reported that there were some new updates for the included software, so I checked the ones I wanted and clicked install and it did that for me in the background while I worked on something else, and when it was done, I didn't have to reboot or even logout. I inserted a software CD, dragged a single icon from the CD to my Applications folder, and then ran the application and used it. This was a multitrack audio application, too (Ableton Live).
This stuff is all EASY on the Mac. You can't ignore that and keep trying to sell people on building their own systems and scouring the Web for drivers and working hard to get to a point where they have the capabilities they can get all-inclusive on any new Mac.
> Now people are too lazy, I guess. [ to learn to edit config files ]
/etc and httpd.conf for ALL OF THEIR USERS. They are also worrying about hardware/software integration, stable kernels, and graphics modes and refresh rates and such, again so that the users don't have to. The user themselves is working with NON-COMPUTER tasks such as being doctors, lawyers, artists, musicians, students, etc. You are not any smarter than them because YOUR field or interest happens to be computer tech.
Now people have other things to do with their computers, like learn Pro Tools and do audio recording, or learn Photoshop and do graphics, or learn iMovie and do video (like iMovie takes any time to learn!). Apple has a very good stable of geeks who are worrying about things like
Now, on the other hand, if those config files and the substructure of the software are hidden from the users (like on Windows), then the user can't trust that their system is doing only what they want it to do. For this reason, Mac OS X's core is completely exposed to the advanced user or programmer or IT staff or security consultant or network architect, etc.
This stuff is part of the "best of both worlds" approach of Mac OS X. Come at it as a Mac user or a UNIX user and leave satisfied. Come at it as a Windows user and leave AMAZED.
The funny thing with the boot-time debate is that Mac OS X users SIMPLY DON'T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT IT. If Mac OS X took one hour to boot it wouldn't bother me, because I only boot it about three times a year. In the last year, my PowerBook G4 had one kernel panic, and one or two system updates that required a restart (typically, security updates for UNIX tools and things like that, not high-level GUI stuff or plain apps). When you close the lid on the PowerBook, it goes to sleep instantly and quietly. When you open the lid up, it wakes up instantly and is ready to use. The batteries last 5 hours each (I carry two), fit in the palm of your hand, and can be hot-swapped, so I have also never run into the situation where I had to shut down just because of lack of power.
The real question is: when you sit down to work, how long does it take the computer to get ready for you? On Mac OS X, it's as long as it takes to open the laptop's lid, which means it's essentially no time at all.
What you want is a 1u rack to put it in. This is a very standard sizing, so you have a very wide variety of racks to choose from, or you could build your own. Think of it as a case mod where you just have to make space for one rack-mount component that has a titanium faceplate. You could have a rack that stands sideways next to a desk, for a very skinny tower, or put a display on top of the rack. The Xserve doesn't have a top, so the guts will show through the top of a transparent plastic rack.