Hmm. I just happen to have a Civic too (a 2006 EX 5-speed). I disagree with your conclusions.
Safety: It has 6 airbags, very good crash test results, and a decent insurance history (unlike many SUVs).
Speed: It does 0-60 in under eight seconds, average for cars these days but faster than all but a few hot-rod SUVs.
Handling: Gotta emphatically disagree here. Sure, it pushes -- it's a front-driver -- but it's got great transient response and I don't think I could get it to roll if I tried. I'd take my car through a 600-ft slalom over any SUV with a 100-ft head start.
Can't stop: OK, the results (in magazine tests) are average for the small-car segment. But they're still way better than the average SUV.
Don't have much interior space: It's not supposed to. It's a small car and weighs 2700, not 5000, pounds.
Hard to load and unload: Are we talking about the same car? Low trunk cutout, wide-opening doors, no three-foot-high load floor, no problem.
No one tries to advertise a Civic for off-road capability, or equips it with the heavy, fuel-burning equipment that would be required.
Social Security and Medicare are both available to all Americans (at the appropriate age). How is that supporting a special interest group or a minority?
The Clean Air Act benefited you unless you don't breathe. Is that supporting a minority?
In defense of the OP (who I called into question earlier) the biggest engine in a 2006 Malibu is actually reasonably respectable. It's a 3.9L V6 making around 240 hp, which is not that far off the output of the Japanese V6s, and way above the output of any mass-market Japanese four. Combined with the much lighter weight of today's Malibu, this engine will produce roughly equivalent performance (0-60 in under 7 seconds) to all but the craziest of the '60s and '70s engine options and vastly better performance than anything you could get on a Malibu or Monte Carlo in the eighties. And it will get at least 30 on the highway doing so.
The new 2008 car has a 3.6L twincam V6 that's fully competitive with the Japanese. I've driven Buick Lacrosses with that 3.6 twincam and it's a sweet motor with a lot of character.
Finally, you can get a V6 Malibu for about what you'd pay for a four-cylinder Accord/Corolla. It's really not a bad deal at all.
I appreciate the severity of the blizzard and am glad you got home safely. But an all-wheel-drive car with good snow tires would have done the same job. If you were caught off-road, you would have had a much better chance with a Wrangler or short-wheelbase pickup. Your experience doesn't change the fact that other vehicles do everything SUVs do much better.
Social Security. Singlehandedly nearly eradicated severe poverty among people over retirement age and with disabilities.
Medicare. Saved American companies billions in retiree health benefits. (Now if we could just expand it to everyone...)
ADA (transportation provisions). Did more than anything in the last 50 years to allow people with disabilities to lead independent lives and contribute to society.
Clean Air Act. It didn't solve CO2, but it got rid of a huge majority of the other pollutants fouling our air in the '60s.
FAA. While there are flaws, by and large America has the best air safety in the world.
I'm just as sick of people who say government can't do anything right as you are of people who think government involvement is a panacea. Government has inherent institutional problems, but it's the only force capable of addressing systemic market failure.
All that's true when modern cars break. But until they break, which they do far less often, the modern computer controls are what make today's low (non-CO2) emissions and efficiency possible.
If we still had that easy-self-service 1968 technology running our engines we wouldn't be allowed to drive anymore because the pollution problems would be so severe. Have you ever seen pictures of LA in the late '60s? Do you realize how many more cars are on the road than there were in the late '60s?
Until they roll over, because no American drivers are trained to handle heavy, high-CoG vehicles...
American SUV stupidity just makes me want to bash my head against a wall. The vehicles don't do ANYTHING well, at all (except tow loads heavier than 99% of owners will ever need to tow), and yet all the sheeple think they're the best things on the road, because all the other sheeple think they're the best things on the road.
They're unsafe, slow, can't handle, can't stop, don't have much interior space, are hard to load and unload, don't do well off road, and cost half again as much as more capable cars and vans. Ugh.
Executives of American car companies live in Detroit suburbs where it's perfectly normal to drive a 17-foot 10-MPG vehicle. Thus American car companies won't adapt until they are forced to by legislation. The market has been trying to tell them to downsize for about three years and their only response is 4000-pound 260-hp "crossovers" like the Edge and Acadia.
If the rich, multimedia Internet content of today had come to maturity a decade or so earlier, Joe Schmoe might never have had a PC. Gmail etc. are not that dissimilar from the mainframe model of computing.
The only reason Joe Schmoe has a PC today is that PCs were already mature by the time the Internet became attractive to mainstream users. If he and lots of other users had a multimedia-capable dumb terminal, their lives would be a lot simpler. (Think "interactive TV and stereo" -- that and word processing is really all many users do with their PCs).
Of course, having said that, there's no way I'd trade my own Macs for dumb terminals...
Anyone who considers OS X performance on a G4 "reasonable", will (or should, if they're being honest and not picking out specific corner cases) find Vista's performance *at least* similarly "reasonable" on equivalent hardware (ie: P3s and low-end P4s). Personally I find OS X annoyingly unresponsive on anything less than a G5 based machine, and even my mum's G5 iMac stumbles more often than I like.
My experience is that OS X responsiveness actually has more to do with RAM than processor. I've used an early, slow G4 machine with 2GB of RAM running Tiger, and while "the snappy" is missing everything happens reasonably quickly and the machine is not painful at all to use. By contrast, the 512MB, shared-memory Core Duo iMacs at school (thank you, Mac-clueless IT dept.) are horrendously painful to use, worse than a 256MB XP machine we have in our journal office. I expect your mom's iMac is similarly RAM-limited.
I have no experience with Vista on low-end hardware, but I wouldn't be surprised to find the same principle applies, provided Aero's somewhat higher graphics requirements are met.
And you really think Joe User is going to administer his own email server instead of using Gmail?
Even if Apple were to develop "Mail Server for Idiots" and you could just plop it onto the IPv6 network, it would still require some administration, to set up accounts, deal with over-quota family members, etc. On the client side, either Joe will have to get a domain name or type in an IPv6 address every time he wants to get his mail remotely, rather than typing "gmail.com." All of that takes time and brainpower that most people want to use elsewhere. Furthermore, Joe's home server is a WHOLE LOT more likely to lose his data than Google is, since Joe never wants to take the time to back up.
Most consumers will use home servers to store media libraries. In the IPv6 era a few more may use them for remotely accessible services like email and calendars, but not many. It just takes unnecessary time and effort, especially for someone who just doesn't care about technology.
One thing that may explain part of the difference is that, especially in more recent OS X revisions, the OS has been very smart about which features of Aqua it enables and disables. On slower systems (lacking either GPU or CPU power) it may turn off some of the shadowing effects, some of the animations, the translucent menus/dialogs, and especially Core Image effects like Expose animation or Dashboard ripples.
At least by default, Aero may not be that smart. (I plead ignorance here, though -- I've only ever used Vista on extremely capable machines and I've never dug into it to see if it's as configurable for performance as, say, Luna on WinXP.)
Both parent and siblings are probably right. The C2D models (both Macbook and Pro) seem to do better than the original CD models, at least to the point where they're not much worse than late G4 iBooks and PowerBooks. My CD MBP gets under three hours *if* wireless is on and screen brightness is max or close to max. I would expect to get 5 hours out of a C2D MBP, or 6 hours out of a C2D MacBook, by turning the brightness way down, turning 802.11 off, and letting the HD spin down.
Also, Apple laptops seem to treat batteries better, at least from my anecdotal experience. Most of the Dell/HP laptop owners I know end up with horrible battery life after not that many cycles. After the same amount of use, my Mac laptops have typically only lost a bit of their capacity. (My current MBP with 180 cycles on the one-year-old replacement battery has about 90% of its original capacity.) Whether this is due to better power-management software, better battery design, or better battery cooling, I couldn't say.
As for the two mouse buttons, it was a problem until Apple came out with the two-fingers-plus-click move last year -- now I definitely prefer that to a physical second button, because the huge first button is still so easy to hit and I never accidentally right-click.
At least last time I tried to run Vista on my MBP, part of the problem was Apple drivers that weren't optimized for power saving. The processor ran at full speed all the time (where on OS X it used SpeedStep) and the HD would never spin down. Thus I don't know how much of the fault is Microsoft's and how much is Apple's.
With that in mind, I got about 60% the battery life from Vista that I got from OS X.
Still, though, OS X's decent battery life gives the lie to the idea that "it's a processor-intensive process. Duh." If the Aero interface is eating battery, then why isn't Aqua, which is just as full of eye candy?
The X1600 in all MBP's ever built will drive the 2560x1600 displays. (Some of them are 128MB and some are 256MB, and the cards in the C2D models are clocked faster, but they are all capable of the same resolutions.) I think the issue is not so much high resolutions per se as the dual-link DVI port. Not many laptops come with any sort of DVI port, and those that do tend to be single-link. I may well have missed something but the only other laptops I've seen that will drive these monitors are the 9-pound gaming monsters (the ones that usually have 2 HDs, a killer video card, and 1/2 hour battery life).
I will admit that, in the educational or large-business environment, you do end up paying a premium for Apple laptops as they are just not discounted as heavily. (Just today, I was looking at our university's prices on widescreen T60s, and a configuration comparable to a $1899 MBP configuration was selling for $1599. At retail, they're within a few bucks of each other.) Call me a snob, but I'll still pay, both because I find the hardware design orders of magnitude more appealing and because I prefer OS X.
It isn't so much that Mathematica is proprietary. It's just that Wolfram still indulges in practices that the rest of the closed-source software industry has given up on: charging as much as they can get away with, and putting piracy prevention ahead of customer experience.
Um, well, probably the two most important proprietary software vendors in the world (for the general public) are Microsoft and Adobe. If charging $400 for a WGA-infested Vista "Ultimate" license or $2000 for a CS3 Master Collection that can lock you out if you have to replace a completely failed machine on short notice doesn't qualify as what you said above, I don't think Wolfram's practices do either...
But, seriously, while I overgeneralized, for my own needs, my statement is true.
If you can find me another dual-core laptop with a 15.4" screen that weighs under six pounds, is about an inch think (I won't ask for "less than an inch" as I know no one else has done that), has an elegant (i.e. as un-Alienware-like as possible) design, can drive a 2560x1600 external monitor, and can last 4 hours on a battery charge, I'd be thrilled to find out about it. I haven't seen such a product from any maker. The closest I've found is the T60 widescreen, and it's over six pounds and can't drive the big display.
The T60 widescreen is about half a pound heavier and half an inch thicker than a MBP; you get the regular ThinkPad goodies, but lose DVI, FW800, a slightly better graphics card, and OS X. The regular T60, being a 14" non-widescreen laptop with (usually) integrated graphics, really isn't the same type of product.
The X60 is very small and light, but doesn't have an optical drive and suffers a considerable power deficit compared to even a MacBook, let alone an MBP. (1024x768 screen is unusable these days, too.)
Of course, both are vastly, vastly better designed and made than moretypical MBP competition.
Your MacBook is almost five years old? Impressive, considering they first came out about a year ago... Perhaps you meant "iBook."
Agree with your analysis, though. While I might consider a Win/Lin desktop, I have just not seen laptop offerings competitive with Apple's. The closest in terms of build quality and design is Lenovo, and even their offerings are thicker and uglier (while not offering DVI or FireWire 800). Others may be more feature-complete but are huge, heavy, criminally ugly monstrosities next to a MacBook Pro.
Even if I needed to buy a Windows laptop, given the choices I have today, I'd buy an MBP.
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Hmm. I just happen to have a Civic too (a 2006 EX 5-speed). I disagree with your conclusions.
Safety: It has 6 airbags, very good crash test results, and a decent insurance history (unlike many SUVs).
Speed: It does 0-60 in under eight seconds, average for cars these days but faster than all but a few hot-rod SUVs.
Handling: Gotta emphatically disagree here. Sure, it pushes -- it's a front-driver -- but it's got great transient response and I don't think I could get it to roll if I tried. I'd take my car through a 600-ft slalom over any SUV with a 100-ft head start.
Can't stop: OK, the results (in magazine tests) are average for the small-car segment. But they're still way better than the average SUV.
Don't have much interior space: It's not supposed to. It's a small car and weighs 2700, not 5000, pounds.
Hard to load and unload: Are we talking about the same car? Low trunk cutout, wide-opening doors, no three-foot-high load floor, no problem.
No one tries to advertise a Civic for off-road capability, or equips it with the heavy, fuel-burning equipment that would be required.
Try again.
Social Security and Medicare are both available to all Americans (at the appropriate age). How is that supporting a special interest group or a minority?
The Clean Air Act benefited you unless you don't breathe. Is that supporting a minority?
I'm a little confused...
s/Corolla/Camry. Duh.
In defense of the OP (who I called into question earlier) the biggest engine in a 2006 Malibu is actually reasonably respectable. It's a 3.9L V6 making around 240 hp, which is not that far off the output of the Japanese V6s, and way above the output of any mass-market Japanese four. Combined with the much lighter weight of today's Malibu, this engine will produce roughly equivalent performance (0-60 in under 7 seconds) to all but the craziest of the '60s and '70s engine options and vastly better performance than anything you could get on a Malibu or Monte Carlo in the eighties. And it will get at least 30 on the highway doing so.
The new 2008 car has a 3.6L twincam V6 that's fully competitive with the Japanese. I've driven Buick Lacrosses with that 3.6 twincam and it's a sweet motor with a lot of character.
Finally, you can get a V6 Malibu for about what you'd pay for a four-cylinder Accord/Corolla. It's really not a bad deal at all.
Or lock the center diff, in any truck with a serious 4WD system.
I appreciate the severity of the blizzard and am glad you got home safely. But an all-wheel-drive car with good snow tires would have done the same job. If you were caught off-road, you would have had a much better chance with a Wrangler or short-wheelbase pickup. Your experience doesn't change the fact that other vehicles do everything SUVs do much better.
Social Security. Singlehandedly nearly eradicated severe poverty among people over retirement age and with disabilities.
Medicare. Saved American companies billions in retiree health benefits. (Now if we could just expand it to everyone...)
ADA (transportation provisions). Did more than anything in the last 50 years to allow people with disabilities to lead independent lives and contribute to society.
Clean Air Act. It didn't solve CO2, but it got rid of a huge majority of the other pollutants fouling our air in the '60s.
FAA. While there are flaws, by and large America has the best air safety in the world.
I'm just as sick of people who say government can't do anything right as you are of people who think government involvement is a panacea. Government has inherent institutional problems, but it's the only force capable of addressing systemic market failure.
All that's true when modern cars break. But until they break, which they do far less often, the modern computer controls are what make today's low (non-CO2) emissions and efficiency possible.
If we still had that easy-self-service 1968 technology running our engines we wouldn't be allowed to drive anymore because the pollution problems would be so severe. Have you ever seen pictures of LA in the late '60s? Do you realize how many more cars are on the road than there were in the late '60s?
Well, of course you get bad mileage when you fill up the thing with cinder blocks.
2006 Malibu sales = approximately 175,000.
2006 Silverado sales = approximately 675,000 (with a shortened model year.)
On top of that, over half of the Malibu sales were to fleets.
I think we know which side Detroit's bread is buttered on.
Until they roll over, because no American drivers are trained to handle heavy, high-CoG vehicles...
American SUV stupidity just makes me want to bash my head against a wall. The vehicles don't do ANYTHING well, at all (except tow loads heavier than 99% of owners will ever need to tow), and yet all the sheeple think they're the best things on the road, because all the other sheeple think they're the best things on the road.
They're unsafe, slow, can't handle, can't stop, don't have much interior space, are hard to load and unload, don't do well off road, and cost half again as much as more capable cars and vans. Ugh.
Either useless ones that don't really save anyone any gas, or ones with technology licensed from Toyota.
Executives of American car companies live in Detroit suburbs where it's perfectly normal to drive a 17-foot 10-MPG vehicle. Thus American car companies won't adapt until they are forced to by legislation. The market has been trying to tell them to downsize for about three years and their only response is 4000-pound 260-hp "crossovers" like the Edge and Acadia.
If the rich, multimedia Internet content of today had come to maturity a decade or so earlier, Joe Schmoe might never have had a PC. Gmail etc. are not that dissimilar from the mainframe model of computing.
The only reason Joe Schmoe has a PC today is that PCs were already mature by the time the Internet became attractive to mainstream users. If he and lots of other users had a multimedia-capable dumb terminal, their lives would be a lot simpler. (Think "interactive TV and stereo" -- that and word processing is really all many users do with their PCs).
Of course, having said that, there's no way I'd trade my own Macs for dumb terminals...
My experience is that OS X responsiveness actually has more to do with RAM than processor. I've used an early, slow G4 machine with 2GB of RAM running Tiger, and while "the snappy" is missing everything happens reasonably quickly and the machine is not painful at all to use. By contrast, the 512MB, shared-memory Core Duo iMacs at school (thank you, Mac-clueless IT dept.) are horrendously painful to use, worse than a 256MB XP machine we have in our journal office. I expect your mom's iMac is similarly RAM-limited.
I have no experience with Vista on low-end hardware, but I wouldn't be surprised to find the same principle applies, provided Aero's somewhat higher graphics requirements are met.
And you really think Joe User is going to administer his own email server instead of using Gmail?
Even if Apple were to develop "Mail Server for Idiots" and you could just plop it onto the IPv6 network, it would still require some administration, to set up accounts, deal with over-quota family members, etc. On the client side, either Joe will have to get a domain name or type in an IPv6 address every time he wants to get his mail remotely, rather than typing "gmail.com." All of that takes time and brainpower that most people want to use elsewhere. Furthermore, Joe's home server is a WHOLE LOT more likely to lose his data than Google is, since Joe never wants to take the time to back up.
Most consumers will use home servers to store media libraries. In the IPv6 era a few more may use them for remotely accessible services like email and calendars, but not many. It just takes unnecessary time and effort, especially for someone who just doesn't care about technology.
One thing that may explain part of the difference is that, especially in more recent OS X revisions, the OS has been very smart about which features of Aqua it enables and disables. On slower systems (lacking either GPU or CPU power) it may turn off some of the shadowing effects, some of the animations, the translucent menus/dialogs, and especially Core Image effects like Expose animation or Dashboard ripples.
At least by default, Aero may not be that smart. (I plead ignorance here, though -- I've only ever used Vista on extremely capable machines and I've never dug into it to see if it's as configurable for performance as, say, Luna on WinXP.)
Both parent and siblings are probably right. The C2D models (both Macbook and Pro) seem to do better than the original CD models, at least to the point where they're not much worse than late G4 iBooks and PowerBooks. My CD MBP gets under three hours *if* wireless is on and screen brightness is max or close to max. I would expect to get 5 hours out of a C2D MBP, or 6 hours out of a C2D MacBook, by turning the brightness way down, turning 802.11 off, and letting the HD spin down.
Also, Apple laptops seem to treat batteries better, at least from my anecdotal experience. Most of the Dell/HP laptop owners I know end up with horrible battery life after not that many cycles. After the same amount of use, my Mac laptops have typically only lost a bit of their capacity. (My current MBP with 180 cycles on the one-year-old replacement battery has about 90% of its original capacity.) Whether this is due to better power-management software, better battery design, or better battery cooling, I couldn't say.
As for the two mouse buttons, it was a problem until Apple came out with the two-fingers-plus-click move last year -- now I definitely prefer that to a physical second button, because the huge first button is still so easy to hit and I never accidentally right-click.
At least last time I tried to run Vista on my MBP, part of the problem was Apple drivers that weren't optimized for power saving. The processor ran at full speed all the time (where on OS X it used SpeedStep) and the HD would never spin down. Thus I don't know how much of the fault is Microsoft's and how much is Apple's.
With that in mind, I got about 60% the battery life from Vista that I got from OS X.
Still, though, OS X's decent battery life gives the lie to the idea that "it's a processor-intensive process. Duh." If the Aero interface is eating battery, then why isn't Aqua, which is just as full of eye candy?
/grabs hammer...
*bang* *bang* *bang*
Oops, it looks like a couple of those DLT drives are running into problems. We need replacements. Did you see what happened to Business 2.0?
The X1600 in all MBP's ever built will drive the 2560x1600 displays. (Some of them are 128MB and some are 256MB, and the cards in the C2D models are clocked faster, but they are all capable of the same resolutions.) I think the issue is not so much high resolutions per se as the dual-link DVI port. Not many laptops come with any sort of DVI port, and those that do tend to be single-link. I may well have missed something but the only other laptops I've seen that will drive these monitors are the 9-pound gaming monsters (the ones that usually have 2 HDs, a killer video card, and 1/2 hour battery life).
I will admit that, in the educational or large-business environment, you do end up paying a premium for Apple laptops as they are just not discounted as heavily. (Just today, I was looking at our university's prices on widescreen T60s, and a configuration comparable to a $1899 MBP configuration was selling for $1599. At retail, they're within a few bucks of each other.) Call me a snob, but I'll still pay, both because I find the hardware design orders of magnitude more appealing and because I prefer OS X.
Um, well, probably the two most important proprietary software vendors in the world (for the general public) are Microsoft and Adobe. If charging $400 for a WGA-infested Vista "Ultimate" license or $2000 for a CS3 Master Collection that can lock you out if you have to replace a completely failed machine on short notice doesn't qualify as what you said above, I don't think Wolfram's practices do either...
LOL at "iBlinders"...
But, seriously, while I overgeneralized, for my own needs, my statement is true.
If you can find me another dual-core laptop with a 15.4" screen that weighs under six pounds, is about an inch think (I won't ask for "less than an inch" as I know no one else has done that), has an elegant (i.e. as un-Alienware-like as possible) design, can drive a 2560x1600 external monitor, and can last 4 hours on a battery charge, I'd be thrilled to find out about it. I haven't seen such a product from any maker. The closest I've found is the T60 widescreen, and it's over six pounds and can't drive the big display.
The T60 widescreen is about half a pound heavier and half an inch thicker than a MBP; you get the regular ThinkPad goodies, but lose DVI, FW800, a slightly better graphics card, and OS X. The regular T60, being a 14" non-widescreen laptop with (usually) integrated graphics, really isn't the same type of product.
The X60 is very small and light, but doesn't have an optical drive and suffers a considerable power deficit compared to even a MacBook, let alone an MBP. (1024x768 screen is unusable these days, too.)
Of course, both are vastly, vastly better designed and made than more typical MBP competition.
Your MacBook is almost five years old? Impressive, considering they first came out about a year ago... Perhaps you meant "iBook."
Agree with your analysis, though. While I might consider a Win/Lin desktop, I have just not seen laptop offerings competitive with Apple's. The closest in terms of build quality and design is Lenovo, and even their offerings are thicker and uglier (while not offering DVI or FireWire 800). Others may be more feature-complete but are huge, heavy, criminally ugly monstrosities next to a MacBook Pro.
Even if I needed to buy a Windows laptop, given the choices I have today, I'd buy an MBP.