My mom uses it just fine, and she is a non-computer-literate as they come. If you set up a login for her with just the programs she needs to use in the doc, and auto-start them, you can get a very minamalist computer experience. It does require that someone set it up for her this way, but that is no different than any other OS I have used.
Actually, they need to write a KEXT (kernal extension) for MacOS X, and don't have the requisite knowledge. They are waiting for someone who does to join the team. Basically what they are looking for is a DVD device driver that does all the CSS work, and hands over a decrypted data stream. Apple is in no position to do this legally.
You are right about the linker only loading one version, and more than that, it loads the newest revision of that version on a computer. For example if my system folder has lib Foo version B.0 and program blue has lib Foo version B.1 in its shared lib folder (in the.app package), when program green asks for routines out of Foo version B the linker will use B.1.
This allows for there to be both major versions (incompatible) and minor version (compatible) of any package on the system. There is a lot more to this new linker, and a lot of it is still in progress.
Apple has been going more and more with the regular libs because people are complaining that newer version of the library don't work, or that they want newer features. Apple is working at making this seamless, but at the moment it is in a bind, spend the resources to make everything compatible (slowing work down), or get a version that works out now, and then go back and make it better...
AppleShare over IP was introduced with 8.6, and there are tools to use it with earlier systems.
MacOS X can use NFS to connect to volumes if you set it up in NetInfo Manager (they mount on boot), but if you simply use "Connect To" and type in an address it uses AFP (Appletalk File Protocol), not NFS. Do you have real evidence to the contrary?
It is correct that MacOS X ships with the root account turned off... if you need that you just turn it on and give it a password. This is to encourage the use of sudo.
But on the Classic speed issue, for me it runs nice and fast, as long as I have enough physical memory. I suspect that you are running out of memory and are thrashing. The other possibility is that you are trying to run games and are expirienceing the wonder that is software graphics acceleration (there is very little use of accelerated hardware at this point.. but getting better).
I disagree. If you look at the KEXT (kernel extensions) matching routines in the kernel you will find that there is a very elegant way of deciding what drivers control what pieces of hardware, and the whole Device Kit in general is head-and-shoulders above the Win2K driver Kit. And when you start to look at the advantages in OpenFirmware and the Hardware Expert there is no comparison. There is less hardware with drivers for MacOS X, but that doesn't mean that blind luck has anything to do with "Plug and Play" just working.
um... no, you can't. The stability of MacOS X comes in part because the only things that can see hardware at kernel extensions (KEXTs). One side effect of that is that nothing in the Classic (Blue Box) environment can see anything in hardware. There are a few shim out there to make certain parts of MacOS 9 think it is talking to hardware (that is how FireWire and USB devices can sometimes see things), but Classic is not a generic solution to this problem.
Summary: if it requires specific hardware drivers it is not going to work in Classic Environment.
Actually, the Encoding Software is only $30, and is QuickTime Pro. If you want live encoding/streaming, the you do need to spend the couple hundred bucks to buy Sorenson Broadcaster.
If you need to clean up the video, and want to be able to do batch processing, etc.. then you would want Media Cleaner, and this is more expensive. But you can do steaming with existing media for the cost of of $30 of software (QuickTime Pro + Darwin Streaming Software) and relatively cheap hardware (my favorite for this is an iMac running MacOS X Server... portable/luggable and stable... add a second iMac with Sorenson Broadcaster and you have a mobile streaming setup).
You can maintain a completely separate tree of your own changes (a coed fork), and distribute/sell the changed code/binaries without talking to Apple, or giving Apple rights to the modified code.
It includes little/none of the Apple worked on code/technologies. This means that Apple's Obj-C compiler and frameworks are not currently included (the compiler changes are being merged back slowly) the concept of Frameworks is not there, the MacOS X layout is not there, etc.. And the way the kernal has evolved from its Mach basis is/will be different (different emphasies).
So the fact that Apple is not involved is both a blessing and a curse.
Ok, you are obviously blowing off steam, but here might be a few notes to help you along:
You can get along fine in less than 128MB of RAM, I do. The trick? Don't use 'Classic' applications. For what I do they simply are not necessary. If you are constantly using them (say your Classic email program polling for mail in the background), then you are forcing a large chunk of memory to stay resident. I run in 96MB, and occasionally have to wait while swapping occurs (2-3 seconds), but I don't really have big problems.
Second note: Did you do a clean install, or install over the top of an existing MacOS 9 install? Clean installs seem to run much faster. This might be due to fragmentation, as some people have found that running a defragmenter over the partition helps. Not having had this problem, I can't really comment.
Third: MacOS X is a Unix insomuch as Linux is a Unix. Neither is in truth, but both are Unix-Like. Open up a Terminal.app window, and you can go to. Like every other Unix-Like variation it has it's own 'fingerprint' (using Netinfo would be one big point on this).
Fourth: Airport does in general work. If you provided more details, such as: are you using WEP, is it a private network, did you flash the basestation to the latest firmware, etc... then maybe I could help you.
Fifth: I set up a MacOS X box for my mother, and she finds it very user friendly. She is definitely not a "computer user" (I know this is a contradiction... go with me on this one). I do agree that there is more work to be done, but I disagree with the term "half baked".
Lastly: Speed is a very complicated issue. If you are referring to live window dragging in the finder, then I agree with you it needs work. But then I have to point out that what Quartz (the lightweight windowing system) is doing here is a whole head-and-sholders above any other windowing system out there. There is going to be a shake out period where the techniques and technologies need to catch up to what is being done. Is it perfect in the mean-time? No. Is it useable, yes!
I think if you sit down and look at how much work you can get done in what amount of time, you will find that your perception of "slowness" is simply a perceived thing.. not an actual one.
Apple is going to be installing MacOS X on all machines this summer, with the exception that they will be allowing Educational institutions to buy lots of MacOS 9.1+ (whatever is out then) for a while longer to ease that transition.
As far as the general public (including students) is concerned, MacOS X will be the Apple OS this summer.
I have to third this opinion. HyperTalk was how I really got into the programming business (ok... Turtle Basic was my first). I remember in grade school a teacher gave us the magic square problem, and not being able to think it out on my own I spent a half hour creating a simple stack that let me brute force the solution (I moved the numbers around, and it did all the calculations). At that time there was no comparable language, and for getting a simple GUI, there still is no solution that is simpler to learn (for that it sacrifices complexity later on...).
barnyfoo, give up. I am writing this on a 333 Mhz iMac with 92Mb RAM. On this machine, which is a couple of generations slower than the 400Mhz iMac that is now the bottom of the line (66Mz system bus vs 100Mhz, better video chip, etc...). I am running MacOS X Public Beta very comfortably and will be doing so with the Final version in two days. There is no reason to claim that the low-end iMac is not "MacOS X-ready". As others have already pointed out, if you don't have legacy apps then it is completely ready. If you do need more ram, then it is not expensive, and a 3 minute install (including reading the directions).
Living in Worcester? You have my condolences... I went to WPI (on who's campus Goddard blew up a couple of rockets, and a chemistry building if rumors are to be believed).
They have been slowly extending the coverage over the last year-and-a-half. The goal is to make sure that coverage is at most a 4 minute walk from any campus building. Not a small feat when you think that UW-Madison is approximately 50,000 students spear out over a campus over 1.5 miles long and about a mile wide.
I was even one of the techs who tested some of the trial systems before the final hardware was chosen.
MacOS X does not share the driver sub-system with BDS at all. While it is true that you can sometimes wrap a BSD based driver enough to get it wot work with IOKit, it is usually better to re-write the driver, looking over the BSD driver (or other platform) for ideas.
You are suffering from the illusion that MacOS X is built on BSD. It is not, it is somewhat based on the ideas... This is especially true in the Kernal space.
And the Mach-O application type can include multiple binaries in the same package so separate releases would be pointless. Apple has been doing this sort of thing since the 68K->PPC transition, and NeXT was also proficient at this.
I don't for one moment think that Apple is ever going to move MacOS X to x86, there are simply too many roadblocks, and no business sense in it. Notice I said MacOS X, not Darwin. In this the two are very different.
Um.. everything compiled already, a company ready to sell you support (and stand behind their product... the iServices team rocks!), and the wonderful graphical remote admin tool... sounds like a lot of tech support cost savings.. oh, and did I mention an unlimited copy of WebObjects thrown in to the bargin, and NetBooting, Macintosh Manager, AppleShare over IP (+ SMB and NFS all admined together), and all of this with Apple's ease of use... hmmm.. sounds like a great deal to me...
I have to both agree and disagree with you. Apple's implementation of UFS is not faster than their implementation of HFS+. Everything I have seen has put them at about par in normal usage. But HFS+ does not have "less features", everything that UFS does, HFS+ can do to. This includes permissions, modification date/time, etc. In fact HFS+ provides for features that UFS does not, aliases (a more complex version of hard links), forked files (now deing denigrated by Apple), etc... With the one exception that HFS+ is case insensitive but case preserving (it will remember whether you called the file THISFILE or tHiSfIlE, but will view both names as the same file). This is/was a consious decision by Apple for Human Interface reasons.
At this point there are only two reasons for selecting UFS over HFS+. One is that you need a case-sensitive filesystem for legacy codebase reasons. And the other is that you can take a HFS+ hard drive to a MacOS 8.1-9.x system and bypass all security (the older MacOS's do not understand/enforce file permissions). This is really not all that much of a security precaution because you could just take a UFS disk to a linux box and play with user Id's to bypass security anyways... but this arguably take a bit more knowledge. IN any case, if someone has physical access they can always bypass any security.
As to running MacOS X on an iMac, I am writing this on a 333Mhz iMac running MacOS X PB and am getting decent performance. This computer only has 96Mb of RAM and I am not running into memory thrashing. Occasionally during a developing session switching apps takes a moment wile it swaps out pages, but I don't use Classic so I don't really run into big problems. And everyone is saying that the newer builds are better both in terms of speed and memory footprint. I wouldn't put up an old iMac as the ultimate gamer's machine, but then again if that is your real purpose in computing get a PC, or better yet a console box...
On the impressions side, I have set up a couple of computers for multiple people, and fins it very easy to setup the computer for both power users and newbies. There is still a lot of work to go (from the Public Beta.. the newest showing at MWSF solved a lot of things), but this is something to look forward to.
<blockquote>Quick! copy and paste any amount of text without touching they keyboard</blockquote>
<p>Ok... select, then drag & drop to another window/program... done.. next?</p>
MacOS X's kernal is a heavily modified Mach 3 kernal. NeXT Step was based on a modified 2.x kernal, and the Rhapsody/MacOS X Server 1.x project was 2.5 based. If it is fixed in the 3.0 kernal, chance are MacOS X/MacOS X Server 2.0 do not have this problem (I do not see it on my system).
You are right on the money.. but to add one thing, when you are buying the server from the Apple Store, choose one of the "server" packages, and then choose the "MacOS X Server 2.0" (tentative number) that will be out in the next few months, that will save you the time of installing Samba, PHP, WebObjects, Tomcat, and MySQL. It will also give you a nice graphical interface for admining the box remotely from any MacOS 8.6 or better computer. I don't see this as a replacement OS for sites like yahoo.com, but rumor has it Apple has started to move parts of its site over to the new MacOS X Server for stress testing.
Apple has gone with only one mouse button because this is what all the research has show is the best for new, non computer-people to use. There is no research that shows anything but, so Apple is always going to default to a single button mouse. I am not a non-computer-person, so I got myself a 4 button + scroll wheel mouse, and it worked right out of the box (without drivers, etc)... Granted software only knows what to do with 2 of the buttons.. but get over it!
Apple has been using standard parts in much of their computers for quite some time. IDE (UltraATA 33/66) had drives/CD/DVD drives, USB devices (2 independent ports), PC100/133 RAM (granted they need speed code 322 unbuffered or better, but that is a good thing), PCI (33 mhz and 32/64 bit slots... better than almost all PC's), AGP (all the lines are moving to 4X now), and FireWire/IEEE1384. All of this is standard based stuff.. How is it more expensive? You are living in the past! Maybe you can't use video card X or some cheap ethernet card, but in real life this is not a big deal.
So, periferals are by and large the same ones for Intel hardware.. I assume that you meant that software is more expensive... lets see MacOS has been prices at US$99 for the last few upgrades.. and that was for the full version (not an upgrade, you could take a completely blank HD and install on it without jumping through any hoops), how much is a full version copy of Windows? And comparing prices on cross platform programs such as Photoshop, FileMaker Pro, Office, etc.. leads me to find that prices are either very close, or identical for all these.. where am I supposed to be finding a price gap here?
As to being too expensive, the iMac/iBook lines are priced very competitively for college students. Starting at US$749 for the iMac (including monitor), this is a great price point for college students, remembering this is a full featured computer that includes a Modem and Ethernet, and has an education discount ($50 on the iMacs), what is wrong with it? I suppose if you want to compare Apple's professional line cost with your celeron...
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My mom uses it just fine, and she is a non-computer-literate as they come. If you set up a login for her with just the programs she needs to use in the doc, and auto-start them, you can get a very minamalist computer experience. It does require that someone set it up for her this way, but that is no different than any other OS I have used.
With MacOS X the control panel is not necessary for a second button and scroll wheels. For my third and fourth buttons yes, but for the first two, no.
Actually, they need to write a KEXT (kernal extension) for MacOS X, and don't have the requisite knowledge. They are waiting for someone who does to join the team. Basically what they are looking for is a DVD device driver that does all the CSS work, and hands over a decrypted data stream. Apple is in no position to do this legally.
You are right about the linker only loading one version, and more than that, it loads the newest revision of that version on a computer. For example if my system folder has lib Foo version B.0 and program blue has lib Foo version B.1 in its shared lib folder (in the .app package), when program green asks for routines out of Foo version B the linker will use B.1.
This allows for there to be both major versions (incompatible) and minor version (compatible) of any package on the system. There is a lot more to this new linker, and a lot of it is still in progress.
Apple has been going more and more with the regular libs because people are complaining that newer version of the library don't work, or that they want newer features. Apple is working at making this seamless, but at the moment it is in a bind, spend the resources to make everything compatible (slowing work down), or get a version that works out now, and then go back and make it better...
AppleShare over IP was introduced with 8.6, and there are tools to use it with earlier systems.
MacOS X can use NFS to connect to volumes if you set it up in NetInfo Manager (they mount on boot), but if you simply use "Connect To" and type in an address it uses AFP (Appletalk File Protocol), not NFS. Do you have real evidence to the contrary?
It is correct that MacOS X ships with the root account turned off... if you need that you just turn it on and give it a password. This is to encourage the use of sudo.
But on the Classic speed issue, for me it runs nice and fast, as long as I have enough physical memory. I suspect that you are running out of memory and are thrashing. The other possibility is that you are trying to run games and are expirienceing the wonder that is software graphics acceleration (there is very little use of accelerated hardware at this point.. but getting better).
I disagree. If you look at the KEXT (kernel extensions) matching routines in the kernel you will find that there is a very elegant way of deciding what drivers control what pieces of hardware, and the whole Device Kit in general is head-and-shoulders above the Win2K driver Kit. And when you start to look at the advantages in OpenFirmware and the Hardware Expert there is no comparison. There is less hardware with drivers for MacOS X, but that doesn't mean that blind luck has anything to do with "Plug and Play" just working.
um... no, you can't. The stability of MacOS X comes in part because the only things that can see hardware at kernel extensions (KEXTs). One side effect of that is that nothing in the Classic (Blue Box) environment can see anything in hardware. There are a few shim out there to make certain parts of MacOS 9 think it is talking to hardware (that is how FireWire and USB devices can sometimes see things), but Classic is not a generic solution to this problem.
Summary: if it requires specific hardware drivers it is not going to work in Classic Environment.
Actually, the Encoding Software is only $30, and is QuickTime Pro. If you want live encoding/streaming, the you do need to spend the couple hundred bucks to buy Sorenson Broadcaster.
If you need to clean up the video, and want to be able to do batch processing, etc.. then you would want Media Cleaner, and this is more expensive. But you can do steaming with existing media for the cost of of $30 of software (QuickTime Pro + Darwin Streaming Software) and relatively cheap hardware (my favorite for this is an iMac running MacOS X Server... portable/luggable and stable... add a second iMac with Sorenson Broadcaster and you have a mobile streaming setup).
Two main ways:
You can maintain a completely separate tree of your own changes (a coed fork), and distribute/sell the changed code/binaries without talking to Apple, or giving Apple rights to the modified code.
It includes little/none of the Apple worked on code/technologies. This means that Apple's Obj-C compiler and frameworks are not currently included (the compiler changes are being merged back slowly) the concept of Frameworks is not there, the MacOS X layout is not there, etc.. And the way the kernal has evolved from its Mach basis is/will be different (different emphasies).
So the fact that Apple is not involved is both a blessing and a curse.
Just arrived here on Wisconsin Public Television.
Ok, you are obviously blowing off steam, but here might be a few notes to help you along:
You can get along fine in less than 128MB of RAM, I do. The trick? Don't use 'Classic' applications. For what I do they simply are not necessary. If you are constantly using them (say your Classic email program polling for mail in the background), then you are forcing a large chunk of memory to stay resident. I run in 96MB, and occasionally have to wait while swapping occurs (2-3 seconds), but I don't really have big problems.
Second note: Did you do a clean install, or install over the top of an existing MacOS 9 install? Clean installs seem to run much faster. This might be due to fragmentation, as some people have found that running a defragmenter over the partition helps. Not having had this problem, I can't really comment.
Third: MacOS X is a Unix insomuch as Linux is a Unix. Neither is in truth, but both are Unix-Like. Open up a Terminal.app window, and you can go to. Like every other Unix-Like variation it has it's own 'fingerprint' (using Netinfo would be one big point on this).
Fourth: Airport does in general work. If you provided more details, such as: are you using WEP, is it a private network, did you flash the basestation to the latest firmware, etc... then maybe I could help you.
Fifth: I set up a MacOS X box for my mother, and she finds it very user friendly. She is definitely not a "computer user" (I know this is a contradiction... go with me on this one). I do agree that there is more work to be done, but I disagree with the term "half baked".
Lastly: Speed is a very complicated issue. If you are referring to live window dragging in the finder, then I agree with you it needs work. But then I have to point out that what Quartz (the lightweight windowing system) is doing here is a whole head-and-sholders above any other windowing system out there. There is going to be a shake out period where the techniques and technologies need to catch up to what is being done. Is it perfect in the mean-time? No. Is it useable, yes!
I think if you sit down and look at how much work you can get done in what amount of time, you will find that your perception of "slowness" is simply a perceived thing.. not an actual one.
Apple is going to be installing MacOS X on all machines this summer, with the exception that they will be allowing Educational institutions to buy lots of MacOS 9.1+ (whatever is out then) for a while longer to ease that transition.
As far as the general public (including students) is concerned, MacOS X will be the Apple OS this summer.
I have to third this opinion. HyperTalk was how I really got into the programming business (ok... Turtle Basic was my first). I remember in grade school a teacher gave us the magic square problem, and not being able to think it out on my own I spent a half hour creating a simple stack that let me brute force the solution (I moved the numbers around, and it did all the calculations). At that time there was no comparable language, and for getting a simple GUI, there still is no solution that is simpler to learn (for that it sacrifices complexity later on...).
barnyfoo, give up. I am writing this on a 333 Mhz iMac with 92Mb RAM. On this machine, which is a couple of generations slower than the 400Mhz iMac that is now the bottom of the line (66Mz system bus vs 100Mhz, better video chip, etc...). I am running MacOS X Public Beta very comfortably and will be doing so with the Final version in two days. There is no reason to claim that the low-end iMac is not "MacOS X-ready". As others have already pointed out, if you don't have legacy apps then it is completely ready. If you do need more ram, then it is not expensive, and a 3 minute install (including reading the directions).
Living in Worcester? You have my condolences... I went to WPI (on who's campus Goddard blew up a couple of rockets, and a chemistry building if rumors are to be believed).
They have been slowly extending the coverage over the last year-and-a-half. The goal is to make sure that coverage is at most a 4 minute walk from any campus building. Not a small feat when you think that UW-Madison is approximately 50,000 students spear out over a campus over 1.5 miles long and about a mile wide.
I was even one of the techs who tested some of the trial systems before the final hardware was chosen.
A few problems:
MacOS X does not share the driver sub-system with BDS at all. While it is true that you can sometimes wrap a BSD based driver enough to get it wot work with IOKit, it is usually better to re-write the driver, looking over the BSD driver (or other platform) for ideas.
You are suffering from the illusion that MacOS X is built on BSD. It is not, it is somewhat based on the ideas... This is especially true in the Kernal space.
And the Mach-O application type can include multiple binaries in the same package so separate releases would be pointless. Apple has been doing this sort of thing since the 68K->PPC transition, and NeXT was also proficient at this.
I don't for one moment think that Apple is ever going to move MacOS X to x86, there are simply too many roadblocks, and no business sense in it. Notice I said MacOS X, not Darwin. In this the two are very different.
Um.. everything compiled already, a company ready to sell you support (and stand behind their product... the iServices team rocks!), and the wonderful graphical remote admin tool... sounds like a lot of tech support cost savings.. oh, and did I mention an unlimited copy of WebObjects thrown in to the bargin, and NetBooting, Macintosh Manager, AppleShare over IP (+ SMB and NFS all admined together), and all of this with Apple's ease of use... hmmm.. sounds like a great deal to me...
I have to both agree and disagree with you. Apple's implementation of UFS is not faster than their implementation of HFS+. Everything I have seen has put them at about par in normal usage. But HFS+ does not have "less features", everything that UFS does, HFS+ can do to. This includes permissions, modification date/time, etc. In fact HFS+ provides for features that UFS does not, aliases (a more complex version of hard links), forked files (now deing denigrated by Apple), etc... With the one exception that HFS+ is case insensitive but case preserving (it will remember whether you called the file THISFILE or tHiSfIlE, but will view both names as the same file). This is/was a consious decision by Apple for Human Interface reasons.
At this point there are only two reasons for selecting UFS over HFS+. One is that you need a case-sensitive filesystem for legacy codebase reasons. And the other is that you can take a HFS+ hard drive to a MacOS 8.1-9.x system and bypass all security (the older MacOS's do not understand/enforce file permissions). This is really not all that much of a security precaution because you could just take a UFS disk to a linux box and play with user Id's to bypass security anyways... but this arguably take a bit more knowledge. IN any case, if someone has physical access they can always bypass any security.
As to running MacOS X on an iMac, I am writing this on a 333Mhz iMac running MacOS X PB and am getting decent performance. This computer only has 96Mb of RAM and I am not running into memory thrashing. Occasionally during a developing session switching apps takes a moment wile it swaps out pages, but I don't use Classic so I don't really run into big problems. And everyone is saying that the newer builds are better both in terms of speed and memory footprint. I wouldn't put up an old iMac as the ultimate gamer's machine, but then again if that is your real purpose in computing get a PC, or better yet a console box...
On the impressions side, I have set up a couple of computers for multiple people, and fins it very easy to setup the computer for both power users and newbies. There is still a lot of work to go (from the Public Beta.. the newest showing at MWSF solved a lot of things), but this is something to look forward to.
<blockquote>Quick! copy and paste any amount of text without touching they keyboard</blockquote>
<p>Ok... select, then drag & drop to another window/program... done.. next?</p>
MacOS X's kernal is a heavily modified Mach 3 kernal. NeXT Step was based on a modified 2.x kernal, and the Rhapsody/MacOS X Server 1.x project was 2.5 based. If it is fixed in the 3.0 kernal, chance are MacOS X/MacOS X Server 2.0 do not have this problem (I do not see it on my system).
You are right on the money.. but to add one thing, when you are buying the server from the Apple Store, choose one of the "server" packages, and then choose the "MacOS X Server 2.0" (tentative number) that will be out in the next few months, that will save you the time of installing Samba, PHP, WebObjects, Tomcat, and MySQL. It will also give you a nice graphical interface for admining the box remotely from any MacOS 8.6 or better computer. I don't see this as a replacement OS for sites like yahoo.com, but rumor has it Apple has started to move parts of its site over to the new MacOS X Server for stress testing.
A couple of points:
Apple has gone with only one mouse button because this is what all the research has show is the best for new, non computer-people to use. There is no research that shows anything but, so Apple is always going to default to a single button mouse. I am not a non-computer-person, so I got myself a 4 button + scroll wheel mouse, and it worked right out of the box (without drivers, etc)... Granted software only knows what to do with 2 of the buttons.. but get over it!
Apple has been using standard parts in much of their computers for quite some time. IDE (UltraATA 33/66) had drives/CD/DVD drives, USB devices (2 independent ports), PC100/133 RAM (granted they need speed code 322 unbuffered or better, but that is a good thing), PCI (33 mhz and 32/64 bit slots... better than almost all PC's), AGP (all the lines are moving to 4X now), and FireWire/IEEE1384. All of this is standard based stuff.. How is it more expensive? You are living in the past! Maybe you can't use video card X or some cheap ethernet card, but in real life this is not a big deal.
So, periferals are by and large the same ones for Intel hardware.. I assume that you meant that software is more expensive... lets see MacOS has been prices at US$99 for the last few upgrades.. and that was for the full version (not an upgrade, you could take a completely blank HD and install on it without jumping through any hoops), how much is a full version copy of Windows? And comparing prices on cross platform programs such as Photoshop, FileMaker Pro, Office, etc.. leads me to find that prices are either very close, or identical for all these.. where am I supposed to be finding a price gap here?
As to being too expensive, the iMac/iBook lines are priced very competitively for college students. Starting at US$749 for the iMac (including monitor), this is a great price point for college students, remembering this is a full featured computer that includes a Modem and Ethernet, and has an education discount ($50 on the iMacs), what is wrong with it? I suppose if you want to compare Apple's professional line cost with your celeron...