I simply CAN'T agree with the rest of you on this. I am the sole Mac Administrator in a shop with about 30 of them, only four of which are in daily use. The level of time and effort I have to put into resolving a problem with OS X nearly always dwarfs the level of time and effort required to resolve a comparable problem on Windows XP. Apple has a habit of breaking things with OS X updates, like NIS authentication, command line scripts, and users' applications. NIS authentication has been broken since 10.4.6. While I'm sure your experience varies, I've yet to sit down with a Mac for more than an hour and not found a bug. In March, I reported an average of 1 bug or crash to Apple per day, most of which they hadn't seen before. Then there's the hardware. Three of the four G5s we bought were dead out of the box. One of the two Intel iMacs in our QA Lab is probably defective given how unstable it is. I was a HUGE Mac fan as recently as 1997, but no more. OS X pretty much killed any desire I have to own or use a Mac. I'll take Linux, XP, or Vista any day over the Mac.
As the editor of a gaming news site called The Gamer Hotsheet and podcast (same name, site) that covers RPGs, wargames, board games, CCGs, etc., it's good to see traditional gaming getting attention on Slashdot. The industry is still doing well, but I think it would be doing a lot better if it could get more mainstream attention. Even though I've been involved in hobby gaming for many years, even I had no idea of some of the really cool stuff out there until I started publishing the news on my site. Articles on sites like this help more people realize that there are some very cool games out there that are far more fun and challenging than old classics like Monopoly (not that there's anything wrong with that game). Kudos to Slashdot for helping keep the pen-and-paper gaming industry alive.
I can say this with a great deal of certainty. I've been a Mac user since 1985. I've owned Macs almost as long. Up until about 1996, Mac hardware was pretty much bug free, rock solid, reliable stuff. The most you could expect to go wrong was a bad hard drive or floppy drive. As the advertising hype said "it just worked".
Things have definitely changed. For example, the last shipment of G5s we received at work consisted of 4 machines. Out of the box, 3 would not power on. The fourth powered on after a struggle but quit a week or two later. Apple's techs fixed three fairly quickly. The fourth required every component to be replaced, including the case. At that point they found that during manufactuing the wire leading to the power switch had been squashed under the motherboard and was short circuiting.
But there's a more objective way to look at this. I looked at Apple's financial statements for 1995, 1996, 2004, and 2005. In 1995, they set aside about 1% of sales for warranty repairs. In 1996, that was upped to 2% because there were "serious quality problems" in a couple of their product lines that resulted in large warranty expenses. In 2005 and 2006, the percentage has gone from the 1% back in 1995 when things were well, to 1.75% today. Note that this is almost as much as when they had "serious problems" in the past. If 1% is "rock solid" days and 2% is "serious problems", where does 1.75% put us? I'd say a lot closer to problems.
Then of course, there's OS X itself. Secunia shows that while Windows XP Pro had almost 3 times as many security advisories issued during the year to date, none of those was marked as "extremely critical". During the same time period, 33% of the advisories for Mac OS X were marked as "extremely critical". If Windows XP deserves all the media hype it gets for bad security and its worst flaw has been "highly critical" while 66% of Apple's flaws have been "Extremely Critical" or "Highly Critical", doesn't OS X deserve a far worse reputation for security than it gets? Linux should have an EVEN BETTER reputation than that, since not one of its flaws this year has been marked as Extremely or even Highly critical.
I said essentially the same thing in my blog the other day:
"Leopard - Is Apple Late to the Party, Again?"
http://mikesalsbury.com/mambo/content/view/519/
Apple seems to have this habit of taking an existing technology (like an MP3 player, a GUI, etc.) putting a slightly prettier package on it, and acting as though they invented it.
Before the buyout of WotC by Hasbro, Origins was a thriving game convention. Tons of vendors in the exhibit hall. A huge game auction that lasted almost as long as the convention itself. WotC took over Origins and killed the auction, much to the disappointment of many attendees. (Oh, there's still an auction but it's nowhere near as big or interesting now.) But at least there was a strong presence from Hasbro with its re-vamped Avalon Hill line and other products, and WotC had an unnecessarily large booth in the middle of the exhibit hall. This year, with Origins in other hands, the auction is still pretty much dead. The exhibit hall seemed far less occupied, both by vendors and attendees. The miniatures hall had MANY empty tables compared to past years. In all, it felt like Origins had been dealt a serious blow. I'm hoping GAMA will bring it back to life. My http://www.gamerhotsheet.com/ web site has (as of today) applied to join GAMA as a communicating member in an effort to help it and its members reach the customers. But I have no problem telling you I'm concerned. I don't want to see Origins become another piece of gaming history, or see it roll into GenCon (which is a fine convention and I'm NOT knocking it). That would be very unfortunate for the hobby.
As I was attending Origins 2006 in late June/July, walking around looking in the exhibit hall at all the items available for sale, I wondered how in the world a game can keep up with all the developments in the industry... new games, new companies, expansions, etc. After it was over I decided to set up a site to make that a little easier. We now scan over 230 sites each day for news and information, have a mailbox where companies can send product announcements, etc., and post daily news updates about goings-on in the tabletop game industry.
If you're a gamer - and you probably are if you're reading this - you may want to check out the site: http://www.gamerhotsheet.com/
We even offer RSS feeds of the latest articles for those who prefer their news by RSS... something not too many game information sites do.
Apple's own advertising and media articles like this one are giving novice users the false impression that Mac OS X is inherently safer, more secure, and less bug-free than Windows XP. The reality is that more security bugs, and much more serious ones, are being found on Mac OS X than Windows XP. The Mac has remained relatively safe because it's well under the radar of hackers and malware coders, that's all. But the more Apple trumpets its security, the bigger a target it becomes to malware coders, and the brighter the bullseye it's painting on itself and its user community. If security was my only concern, Linux would be my platform of choice. Aside from the snazzy looking boxes and cute GUI, I see no compelling reason to switch OS X - and certainly not from a security viewpoint.
In my blog, I've been ranting about Apple's false sense of security and its advertising misrepresentations for a while now. Some of my recent posts which are very much on-topic here include these:
I think it's just a matter of time until the big bright bullseye Apple is painting on itself and its users becomes some malware coder's primary target. Hopefully they'll be ready when that day comes, but I have a feeling it's going to come as a very rude surprise.
As David Coursey said last year in his article "When Will Apple Grow Up?":
"...because of its small market share and low enterprise presence, Apple can release software that really needed better, and more public, testing almost with impunity. This is further proof that Apple isn't willing to do what's necessary to become an enterprise player--and customers reward that behavior by staying away, in droves." http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1813718,00.as p?kc=EWRSS03129TX1K0000611
Sure, mass numbers of Windows users MIGHT defect to the Macintosh and OS X. They might also just
defect to Linux, which runs on the hardware they already have. That seems more likely to me.
Realistically, though, Windows users aren't about to move to the Mac in any great numbers. There are
lots of reasons.
Already here in the comments, Mac users have boasted about Macs giving you more for the money. Shortly
after the MacBook Pro was announced, I published this article showing that the Apple laptop offered little or nothing over a comparable Dell, HP, or Acer laptop. Then a bit later on, I wrote another. Again, Apple has little to offer. I'm not the only one who thinks so.
As for resale value, it's no surprise that a Mac retains more of its value. Faced with paying $2,500 for a new Macintosh with marginal speed improvements over the previous generation unit decked out for $1,800 I would imagine many users on tight budgets would opt for the older unit. Or they might look at a brand new Dell machine running Windows for $600-1000. As noted by other writers here, if Apple had to compete with some other brand on equivalent Mac hardware, their resale prices would change accordingly.
Performance is important to many computer users, especially most Windows users I know. This is one thing that will keep the masses from moving to the Macintosh. OS X can't outperform Linux on the same hardware, doing the same tasks with the same software. OS X can't outperform Windows on the same or comparable hardware. OS X has lots of little hidden performance problems just waiting to be found.
Consistency is also important to many computer users. It's not uncommon for a major Service Pack for Windows to break something, but it rarely breaks anything major. It is, however, extremely common for even minor updates to Apple technology to break things. Just this week I found that the OS X 10.4.6 update broke a script we've used at login to set up home directories for network authenticated users. The same update on Intel-based iMacs broke the same script in a different way. I spent hours troubleshooting that, all for a minor update of dubious value. It took a slight change to how I installed the script and one command change to one line of the script, but finding those needed changes wasn't easy. This isn't the first time OS X has done this to me in the past year. Windows hasn't done this to me since Service Pack 2, and a quick update to the affected software fixed the only compatibility problem I had in seconds... not hours.
Gaming is important to many computer users. Most new commercial games are released on Windows first, and later (if ever) to the Macintosh. Now that Apple has offered "Boot Camp" as an option, it has been suggested that Mac-specific gaming might be dead soon. Why create a Mac-compatible game when you can release just a Windows version and tell Mac users to run that on their Intel-based Mac? Sure, you'll always have little Mac boutique companies putting out Mac-only or Mac-first games, but the Electronic Arts' of the world likely drop any Mac support quickly.
Build quality is also important. Where I work, we get hundreds of new Dells in per year and a handful of new Macs. In 2005, we got in 6 Macs. 3 of them were dead out of the box. 1 had to be taken completely apart and replaced piece by piece for the tech to figure out that the power cable had been crushed into the motherboard at the factory, shorting out the system and preventing it from booting. In about 400 Dell systems (desktops and laptops) we received
I agree with you, tpgp! The only consumer-oriented thing I've seen Apple do with respect to the iPod is fight the labels to keep its pricing at 99 cents per track. Although, I'm not sure that's entirely consumer-oriented, since it means older tracks we could buy as an entire album for $5 or $6 in the bargain bin will cost $10-13 on iTunes at 99 cents a track...
I realize why Windows XP is slower than it should be. Legacy code plays a big role in that. Windows has to work with lots of different hardware configurations, changing hardware configurations, and software that may date back as far as MS-DOS. But it should be noted that for the most part, even older software works.
But holding Apple up as the example for dealing with legacy code is hardly the answer. The Mac OS through OS 9 bent over backwards to work with legacy code. Mac OS X includes an entire virtual machine architecture to enable users to run old Mac OS 9 programs. That virtual machine's main characteristic is that it's SLOW.
But even when you're not running legacy code, OS X is still slow. As I've reported in my blog recent article on Ars Technica showed that Mac OS X, running on the same hardware as Windows XP, is substantially slower at doing the same software tasks.
And OS X isn't just slower than Windows on the same hardware. OS X is slower than Linux on the same hardware.
Worse, OS X has little performance problems built into it, like the World Clock Dashboard Widget that can (if you leave it up long enough) drag your system to its knees. For just a CLOCK!
Give me Windows or Linux any day. OS X isn't ready for prime time as far as I'm concerned. Neither one locks me into any specific hardware configuration, both offer the software I need and want, at prices I can handle.
Apple has always been more about making a big splash in the media with some technology than about releasing something solid and fully tested. This is the sort of thing that should have been found in beta testing, but then Apple's never been too big on doing that because it might spoil their "one more thing" at the next Steve Jobs keynote. Better to fix it after it's in the wild than risk a leak to the media. I'm not the only one questioning their quality control. There are lots of others. Just look at the mess they've made of font management in OS X. It's causing graphic designers no end of problems. The really bad part of this is that the kind of people who'll be using this application will be less-technical users who won't know why violating these standards is a bad thing and wouldn't be able to fix it if they did know. For a company that once had the best quality control and the best operating system, they've sure gone downhill. Sadly, Apple isn't learning the right lesson because their sales (thanks largely due to the iPod) are doing well and the Mac Faithful seem willing to live with the flaws just because "it's a Mac".
I think there are several factors at work here. One is that publishers are investing more and more on the development of games, just as Hollywood does with movies. Similarly, just as Hollywood is reluctant to try anything too daring or experimental, the game industry would rather produce a "me too" title (i.e., "another" Quake/Doom/Halo title) than something more innovative. Personally, I can only play so many first-person shooters (one?) before I need something with a bit more meat for my brain to chew on. I editorialized on this on my blog the other day. The only strategy/simulation games I saw in 2005 (apart from Civ IV, which is another "sequel" game) were the dumbed-down "Tycoon" games. Those have less intellectual "meat" in them than a chicken nugget.
I wrote a series of articles on my web site a little while ago comparing Red Hat Linux FC4 to Mac OS X 10.4. While OS X has the advantage in a number of areas, I believe Linux has it in several others. Spotlight is one of those tools Apple makes a big deal about, but which Linux and open source have replicated with relative ease. Beagle is one good example of this. Other search tools noted in the replies here are good as well. I was a Mac advocate until just before the release of Mac OS X. Apple lost me there. I couldn't see the point of paying a premium price for hardware to run an OS that was (aside from eye candy) not much different or better than Linux (which is free and runs on far cheaper and more common hardware). I think OS X may be the best thing that's ever happened to Linux. It's helped the average user see the value of a UNIX-like desktop while taking major vendors like Adobe and Macromedia a step closer to supporting Linux on Intel (since OS X on Intel isn't THAT far-removed from Linux on Intel from a development standpoint).
My sister is a graphic artist in the DC area. Her company has had various restructurings and layoffs in recent years, dumping more work on her.
This got me thinking about how much money a typical graphic shop spends on Mac hardware and software. I wondered if a Mac shop could switch to Linux (PPC or x86), save money, and still be able to do everything they could before with a comparable ease of use. I spent a while analyzing OS X 10.4 Tiger and Linux in a series of articles on my blog.
What I came up with is that Linux itself is certainly easy enough for a Mac user to pick up, and can be customized to look and act enough like OS X that while there would be a learning curve, it wouldn't be a steep one.
There are lots of open source and free packages out there to do the kinds of things Mac designers do, and most of them compare favorably to their commercial counterparts on the Mac.
The only real drawbacks I saw were (as noted here in the article and commentary) that software installation is a touch easier on the Mac and that the Linux applications aren't (yet) capable of reading Macintosh files.
This led me to the conclusion that a "new" designer with no existing library of graphics in proprietary formats (e.g., PageMaker, FreeHand, Illustrator) could pretty easily use Linux and OSS.
A more experienced designer with lots of graphics in proprietary formats could still do it, but would have a heck of a time getting those graphics moved to Linux. In exchange for that effort, they'd save a ton of cash on hardware (since Linux runs on cheaper x86 iron) and software (since most of the Linux stuff is free).
Some of the commentary here is a definite match for some research and writing I've been doing on my blog.
For a while now I've been comparing OS X 10.4 and Linux from the perspective of whether a Macintosh-oriented designer could make a successful switch to Linux.
I've looked at the availability of applications, compared a few to one another, and dug in to both operating systems a bit as well. I've learned to appreciate Linux a lot more than I did before and Mac OS X differently than I did before. While the research is still underway, there's quite a lot to read at my site on the subject if you're curious. The main articles you'll want to see are here:
There are some other related articles out there, too, but these are the main ones. I figure the flames are going to head my way for writing these articles, but the point isn't to say that OS X or Linux is "better" - rather to examine their differences and similarities and try to answer the question "If there was a reason to switch, how would it go?"
I should point out that my OS of choice until the late 1990s was Macintosh. Since then it's been Windows XP, mostly because I'm a gamer and that's where my favorite games are (I don't care for console gaming). But more recently, I've really begun to appreciate Linux and OSS and actually do use Linux on a machine at home somewhat regularly. I wouldn't say any of the three is any "better" than the others. All have strengths and weaknesses.
So this post and my articles above aren't meant to criticize anyone for their OS choice, but merely an attempt to inspire serious, objective thought about Linux and OS X.
I found a serious one when I was doing some testing prior to the implementation of Mac OS X 10.3. As far as I know, this issue still exists despite my reporting it to BOTH Symantec and Apple... (I believe Symantec did something about it in their latest version, though I haven't had a chance to test it yet... but I know OS X would still allow the problem in 10.4.)
The scenario goes like this: Create a cron task to update Norton AV for Mac from the command line. Log off the system. Unplug the network cable. Wait for the cron task to fire. Norton tosses up an error box indicating that it couldn't update itself. This error message appears OVER the login screen, along with an Apple menu that shows you logged in as the administrator user who setup that cron to update Norton. Even without logging in you have limited access to OS X as AN ADMINISTRATOR!
(I discovered this little "hiccup" when I'd configured Norton to auto-update and found that our network had experienced a problem overnight when the update was scheduled to take place. Imagine my surprise to come in and find a machine with an administrator's Apple menu accessible and no one logged into it!)
Personally, I think applications shouldn't be able to display GUI elements if the user initiating those applications isn't logged in at the moment, and certainly not if NO ONE is logged in.
Slashdot Mirror
I simply CAN'T agree with the rest of you on this. I am the sole Mac Administrator in a shop with about 30 of them, only four of which are in daily use. The level of time and effort I have to put into resolving a problem with OS X nearly always dwarfs the level of time and effort required to resolve a comparable problem on Windows XP. Apple has a habit of breaking things with OS X updates, like NIS authentication, command line scripts, and users' applications. NIS authentication has been broken since 10.4.6. While I'm sure your experience varies, I've yet to sit down with a Mac for more than an hour and not found a bug. In March, I reported an average of 1 bug or crash to Apple per day, most of which they hadn't seen before. Then there's the hardware. Three of the four G5s we bought were dead out of the box. One of the two Intel iMacs in our QA Lab is probably defective given how unstable it is. I was a HUGE Mac fan as recently as 1997, but no more. OS X pretty much killed any desire I have to own or use a Mac. I'll take Linux, XP, or Vista any day over the Mac.
As the editor of a gaming news site called The Gamer Hotsheet and podcast (same name, site) that covers RPGs, wargames, board games, CCGs, etc., it's good to see traditional gaming getting attention on Slashdot. The industry is still doing well, but I think it would be doing a lot better if it could get more mainstream attention. Even though I've been involved in hobby gaming for many years, even I had no idea of some of the really cool stuff out there until I started publishing the news on my site. Articles on sites like this help more people realize that there are some very cool games out there that are far more fun and challenging than old classics like Monopoly (not that there's anything wrong with that game). Kudos to Slashdot for helping keep the pen-and-paper gaming industry alive.
Things have definitely changed. For example, the last shipment of G5s we received at work consisted of 4 machines. Out of the box, 3 would not power on. The fourth powered on after a struggle but quit a week or two later. Apple's techs fixed three fairly quickly. The fourth required every component to be replaced, including the case. At that point they found that during manufactuing the wire leading to the power switch had been squashed under the motherboard and was short circuiting.
But there's a more objective way to look at this. I looked at Apple's financial statements for 1995, 1996, 2004, and 2005. In 1995, they set aside about 1% of sales for warranty repairs. In 1996, that was upped to 2% because there were "serious quality problems" in a couple of their product lines that resulted in large warranty expenses. In 2005 and 2006, the percentage has gone from the 1% back in 1995 when things were well, to 1.75% today. Note that this is almost as much as when they had "serious problems" in the past. If 1% is "rock solid" days and 2% is "serious problems", where does 1.75% put us? I'd say a lot closer to problems.
Then of course, there's OS X itself. Secunia shows that while Windows XP Pro had almost 3 times as many security advisories issued during the year to date, none of those was marked as "extremely critical". During the same time period, 33% of the advisories for Mac OS X were marked as "extremely critical". If Windows XP deserves all the media hype it gets for bad security and its worst flaw has been "highly critical" while 66% of Apple's flaws have been "Extremely Critical" or "Highly Critical", doesn't OS X deserve a far worse reputation for security than it gets? Linux should have an EVEN BETTER reputation than that, since not one of its flaws this year has been marked as Extremely or even Highly critical.
See:
http://www.themacsucks.com/
I said essentially the same thing in my blog the other day: "Leopard - Is Apple Late to the Party, Again?" http://mikesalsbury.com/mambo/content/view/519/ Apple seems to have this habit of taking an existing technology (like an MP3 player, a GUI, etc.) putting a slightly prettier package on it, and acting as though they invented it.
Before the buyout of WotC by Hasbro, Origins was a thriving game convention. Tons of vendors in the exhibit hall. A huge game auction that lasted almost as long as the convention itself. WotC took over Origins and killed the auction, much to the disappointment of many attendees. (Oh, there's still an auction but it's nowhere near as big or interesting now.) But at least there was a strong presence from Hasbro with its re-vamped Avalon Hill line and other products, and WotC had an unnecessarily large booth in the middle of the exhibit hall. This year, with Origins in other hands, the auction is still pretty much dead. The exhibit hall seemed far less occupied, both by vendors and attendees. The miniatures hall had MANY empty tables compared to past years. In all, it felt like Origins had been dealt a serious blow. I'm hoping GAMA will bring it back to life. My http://www.gamerhotsheet.com/ web site has (as of today) applied to join GAMA as a communicating member in an effort to help it and its members reach the customers. But I have no problem telling you I'm concerned. I don't want to see Origins become another piece of gaming history, or see it roll into GenCon (which is a fine convention and I'm NOT knocking it). That would be very unfortunate for the hobby.
As I was attending Origins 2006 in late June/July, walking around looking in the exhibit hall at all the items available for sale, I wondered how in the world a game can keep up with all the developments in the industry... new games, new companies, expansions, etc. After it was over I decided to set up a site to make that a little easier. We now scan over 230 sites each day for news and information, have a mailbox where companies can send product announcements, etc., and post daily news updates about goings-on in the tabletop game industry.
If you're a gamer - and you probably are if you're reading this - you may want to check out the site: http://www.gamerhotsheet.com/
We even offer RSS feeds of the latest articles for those who prefer their news by RSS... something not too many game information sites do.
We'll be covering GenCon Indy next weekend.
In my blog, I've been ranting about Apple's false sense of security and its advertising misrepresentations for a while now. Some of my recent posts which are very much on-topic here include these:
http://mikesalsbury.com/mambo/content/view/385/
http://mikesalsbury.com/mambo/content/view/401/
http://mikesalsbury.com/mambo/content/view/494/
http://mikesalsbury.com/mambo/content/view/13/
I think it's just a matter of time until the big bright bullseye Apple is painting on itself and its users becomes some malware coder's primary target. Hopefully they'll be ready when that day comes, but I have a feeling it's going to come as a very rude surprise.
As David Coursey said last year in his article "When Will Apple Grow Up?":s p?kc=EWRSS03129TX1K0000611
"...because of its small market share and low enterprise presence, Apple can release software that really needed better, and more public, testing almost with impunity. This is further proof that Apple isn't willing to do what's necessary to become an enterprise player--and customers reward that behavior by staying away, in droves." http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1813718,00.a
Sure, mass numbers of Windows users MIGHT defect to the Macintosh and OS X. They might also just defect to Linux, which runs on the hardware they already have. That seems more likely to me. Realistically, though, Windows users aren't about to move to the Mac in any great numbers. There are lots of reasons.
Already here in the comments, Mac users have boasted about Macs giving you more for the money. Shortly after the MacBook Pro was announced, I published this article showing that the Apple laptop offered little or nothing over a comparable Dell, HP, or Acer laptop. Then a bit later on, I wrote another. Again, Apple has little to offer. I'm not the only one who thinks so.
As for resale value, it's no surprise that a Mac retains more of its value. Faced with paying $2,500 for a new Macintosh with marginal speed improvements over the previous generation unit decked out for $1,800 I would imagine many users on tight budgets would opt for the older unit. Or they might look at a brand new Dell machine running Windows for $600-1000. As noted by other writers here, if Apple had to compete with some other brand on equivalent Mac hardware, their resale prices would change accordingly.
Performance is important to many computer users, especially most Windows users I know. This is one thing that will keep the masses from moving to the Macintosh. OS X can't outperform Linux on the same hardware, doing the same tasks with the same software. OS X can't outperform Windows on the same or comparable hardware. OS X has lots of little hidden performance problems just waiting to be found.
Consistency is also important to many computer users. It's not uncommon for a major Service Pack for Windows to break something, but it rarely breaks anything major. It is, however, extremely common for even minor updates to Apple technology to break things. Just this week I found that the OS X 10.4.6 update broke a script we've used at login to set up home directories for network authenticated users. The same update on Intel-based iMacs broke the same script in a different way. I spent hours troubleshooting that, all for a minor update of dubious value. It took a slight change to how I installed the script and one command change to one line of the script, but finding those needed changes wasn't easy. This isn't the first time OS X has done this to me in the past year. Windows hasn't done this to me since Service Pack 2, and a quick update to the affected software fixed the only compatibility problem I had in seconds... not hours.
Gaming is important to many computer users. Most new commercial games are released on Windows first, and later (if ever) to the Macintosh. Now that Apple has offered "Boot Camp" as an option, it has been suggested that Mac-specific gaming might be dead soon. Why create a Mac-compatible game when you can release just a Windows version and tell Mac users to run that on their Intel-based Mac? Sure, you'll always have little Mac boutique companies putting out Mac-only or Mac-first games, but the Electronic Arts' of the world likely drop any Mac support quickly.
Build quality is also important. Where I work, we get hundreds of new Dells in per year and a handful of new Macs. In 2005, we got in 6 Macs. 3 of them were dead out of the box. 1 had to be taken completely apart and replaced piece by piece for the tech to figure out that the power cable had been crushed into the motherboard at the factory, shorting out the system and preventing it from booting. In about 400 Dell systems (desktops and laptops) we received
I agree with you, tpgp! The only consumer-oriented thing I've seen Apple do with respect to the iPod is fight the labels to keep its pricing at 99 cents per track. Although, I'm not sure that's entirely consumer-oriented, since it means older tracks we could buy as an entire album for $5 or $6 in the bargain bin will cost $10-13 on iTunes at 99 cents a track...
But holding Apple up as the example for dealing with legacy code is hardly the answer. The Mac OS through OS 9 bent over backwards to work with legacy code. Mac OS X includes an entire virtual machine architecture to enable users to run old Mac OS 9 programs. That virtual machine's main characteristic is that it's SLOW.
But even when you're not running legacy code, OS X is still slow. As I've reported in my blog recent article on Ars Technica showed that Mac OS X, running on the same hardware as Windows XP, is substantially slower at doing the same software tasks.
And OS X isn't just slower than Windows on the same hardware. OS X is slower than Linux on the same hardware.
Worse, OS X has little performance problems built into it, like the World Clock Dashboard Widget that can (if you leave it up long enough) drag your system to its knees. For just a CLOCK!
Give me Windows or Linux any day. OS X isn't ready for prime time as far as I'm concerned. Neither one locks me into any specific hardware configuration, both offer the software I need and want, at prices I can handle.
Apple has always been more about making a big splash in the media with some technology than about releasing something solid and fully tested. This is the sort of thing that should have been found in beta testing, but then Apple's never been too big on doing that because it might spoil their "one more thing" at the next Steve Jobs keynote. Better to fix it after it's in the wild than risk a leak to the media. I'm not the only one questioning their quality control. There are lots of others. Just look at the mess they've made of font management in OS X. It's causing graphic designers no end of problems. The really bad part of this is that the kind of people who'll be using this application will be less-technical users who won't know why violating these standards is a bad thing and wouldn't be able to fix it if they did know. For a company that once had the best quality control and the best operating system, they've sure gone downhill. Sadly, Apple isn't learning the right lesson because their sales (thanks largely due to the iPod) are doing well and the Mac Faithful seem willing to live with the flaws just because "it's a Mac".
I think there are several factors at work here. One is that publishers are investing more and more on the development of games, just as Hollywood does with movies. Similarly, just as Hollywood is reluctant to try anything too daring or experimental, the game industry would rather produce a "me too" title (i.e., "another" Quake/Doom/Halo title) than something more innovative. Personally, I can only play so many first-person shooters (one?) before I need something with a bit more meat for my brain to chew on. I editorialized on this on my blog the other day. The only strategy/simulation games I saw in 2005 (apart from Civ IV, which is another "sequel" game) were the dumbed-down "Tycoon" games. Those have less intellectual "meat" in them than a chicken nugget.
I wrote a series of articles on my web site a little while ago comparing Red Hat Linux FC4 to Mac OS X 10.4. While OS X has the advantage in a number of areas, I believe Linux has it in several others. Spotlight is one of those tools Apple makes a big deal about, but which Linux and open source have replicated with relative ease. Beagle is one good example of this. Other search tools noted in the replies here are good as well. I was a Mac advocate until just before the release of Mac OS X. Apple lost me there. I couldn't see the point of paying a premium price for hardware to run an OS that was (aside from eye candy) not much different or better than Linux (which is free and runs on far cheaper and more common hardware). I think OS X may be the best thing that's ever happened to Linux. It's helped the average user see the value of a UNIX-like desktop while taking major vendors like Adobe and Macromedia a step closer to supporting Linux on Intel (since OS X on Intel isn't THAT far-removed from Linux on Intel from a development standpoint).
My sister is a graphic artist in the DC area. Her company has had various restructurings and layoffs in recent years, dumping more work on her.
This got me thinking about how much money a typical graphic shop spends on Mac hardware and software. I wondered if a Mac shop could switch to Linux (PPC or x86), save money, and still be able to do everything they could before with a comparable ease of use. I spent a while analyzing OS X 10.4 Tiger and Linux in a series of articles on my blog.
What I came up with is that Linux itself is certainly easy enough for a Mac user to pick up, and can be customized to look and act enough like OS X that while there would be a learning curve, it wouldn't be a steep one.
There are lots of open source and free packages out there to do the kinds of things Mac designers do, and most of them compare favorably to their commercial counterparts on the Mac.
The only real drawbacks I saw were (as noted here in the article and commentary) that software installation is a touch easier on the Mac and that the Linux applications aren't (yet) capable of reading Macintosh files.
This led me to the conclusion that a "new" designer with no existing library of graphics in proprietary formats (e.g., PageMaker, FreeHand, Illustrator) could pretty easily use Linux and OSS.
A more experienced designer with lots of graphics in proprietary formats could still do it, but would have a heck of a time getting those graphics moved to Linux. In exchange for that effort, they'd save a ton of cash on hardware (since Linux runs on cheaper x86 iron) and software (since most of the Linux stuff is free).
If you would like to read the (even more) long-winded version, see my blog at http://mikesalsbury.com/mambo/content/view/243/
For a while now I've been comparing OS X 10.4 and Linux from the perspective of whether a Macintosh-oriented designer could make a successful switch to Linux.
I've looked at the availability of applications, compared a few to one another, and dug in to both operating systems a bit as well. I've learned to appreciate Linux a lot more than I did before and Mac OS X differently than I did before. While the research is still underway, there's quite a lot to read at my site on the subject if you're curious. The main articles you'll want to see are here:
Introduction to the OS X vs. Linux series
Inkscape vs. FreeHand
Review of Scribus 1.2.1
How OS X on x86 is great for Linux
Linux Equivalents to Mac Design Software
There are some other related articles out there, too, but these are the main ones. I figure the flames are going to head my way for writing these articles, but the point isn't to say that OS X or Linux is "better" - rather to examine their differences and similarities and try to answer the question "If there was a reason to switch, how would it go?"
I should point out that my OS of choice until the late 1990s was Macintosh. Since then it's been Windows XP, mostly because I'm a gamer and that's where my favorite games are (I don't care for console gaming). But more recently, I've really begun to appreciate Linux and OSS and actually do use Linux on a machine at home somewhat regularly. I wouldn't say any of the three is any "better" than the others. All have strengths and weaknesses.
So this post and my articles above aren't meant to criticize anyone for their OS choice, but merely an attempt to inspire serious, objective thought about Linux and OS X.
I found a serious one when I was doing some testing prior to the implementation of Mac OS X 10.3. As far as I know, this issue still exists despite my reporting it to BOTH Symantec and Apple... (I believe Symantec did something about it in their latest version, though I haven't had a chance to test it yet... but I know OS X would still allow the problem in 10.4.)
The scenario goes like this: Create a cron task to update Norton AV for Mac from the command line. Log off the system. Unplug the network cable. Wait for the cron task to fire. Norton tosses up an error box indicating that it couldn't update itself. This error message appears OVER the login screen, along with an Apple menu that shows you logged in as the administrator user who setup that cron to update Norton. Even without logging in you have limited access to OS X as AN ADMINISTRATOR!
(I discovered this little "hiccup" when I'd configured Norton to auto-update and found that our network had experienced a problem overnight when the update was scheduled to take place. Imagine my surprise to come in and find a machine with an administrator's Apple menu accessible and no one logged into it!)
Personally, I think applications shouldn't be able to display GUI elements if the user initiating those applications isn't logged in at the moment, and certainly not if NO ONE is logged in.
For slightly more information on how to update Norton AV 8.0 and 9.0 from the command line and via cron, see: http://mikesalsbury.com/mambo/content/view/115/