I have never really grokked what makes Apple loveable to people – their style is attractive, sure, but it strikes me as very 50’s “modern.” And it all looks so identical, little rows of computers all looking exactly the same, little iPods all exactly the same, little stores all with exactly the same arrangement, etc. It all seems so mindlessly conformist, these endless plastic rounded boxes all in antiseptic white. It looks totalitarian.
This insight into Apple Computer’s design was made by the reader Balfegor, in response to a post by Ann Althouse on the merits or otherwise of the offerings of that computer company.
I myself am so frustrated with the erratic performance and system bloat of Windoze XP that I am resolved to not purchase another item of software from Microsoft, and I am tossing up between buying an Apple or building my own Linux based system. I have heard great things about Apple’s recent offerings, but I had always had an objection to the company’s products which I could never put my finger on until I read Balfegor’s comments.
Except that its among the most ridiculous things I’ve ever read! Apple is about style, sure, but it’s products are also simply the best, most innovative, most user-friendly, high-performance and competitive in the industry. I would suggest that you’re f**king insane if you choose to make an objection to Apple’s products based on their ‘STYLE’ – which has been praised up and down by the vast majority of industry watchers AND is probably the least relevant decision for a serious computer owner anyhow.
OS X is the most advanced operating system out there, the company’s latest Intel-based offerings are smoking the competition with ease, and their style happens to be beautiful (opinion) – “little rows of computers looking exactly the same”, what did you want, a bloody custom-made design for each model that rolls off the production line??? WHAT OTHER COMPUTER MANUFACTURER DOES THAT?
Bloody hell, man. As soon as Apple starts making jumbo profits again, earning it proudly in a fashion that shocked Silicon Valley, they become fair game for anyone who wants to make stupid, potshot comments like the ones you quote from above.
And if you’re trying to make some ‘libertarian’ or vaguely political point here by alluding to the ‘sameness’ of Apple’s product line, I want you to know its been COMPLETELY lost on a fellow libertarian.
I bought a Mac out of frustration with shoddy PC manufacturers rather than Microsoft.
I find it tolerable for letting my kids play with it, but not really a serious alternative to a well built PC. What’s more, I find it unpleasantly “closed”, with minimal configuration possible by the user. The perception of smooth totalitarianism only gets worse when you actually try to use it.
And I went to that Mac store in Regents Street and it was the most infuriating shopping experience of my whole life, a shocking triumph of style over content.
It’s odd, really. Apple purports to be a sort of freedom-fighting movement when in fact the reality is that they are the worst offenders when it comes to lack of openness. They’re sort of the Liberal Democrats of the computing world – they seem like an attractive alternative, but just imagine the awfulness of a world where they actually ruled.
When Apple was making multicolor iMacs they were getting in trouble because the different skus were counted separately, there were problems in stocking all the appropriate colors, etc. Variety will eventually come back when they hit a 10-20% marketshare or the materials scientists figure out how to make plastic change colors in the store so you can open the box, flip the color dial to the color you want and 30 seconds later have the machine to go with your decor.
One thing you may want to remember. Apple spends an awful lot of engineering time on making its cases lower the heat burden and and reduce the amount and noisiness of the fans necessary to keep the system cool. Those cases are much more functional than 99% of their competitors.
It looks totalitarian.
And a row of IBM Thinkpads on a glass table looks like a Darth Vader’s data center from Star Wars.
How subjective. I’m agnostic about the tools I use – recognizing that they are -just- tools and a means to get a job done, not the means in and of themselves.
Mac on the desktop is the best desktop computer I’ve ever used, in a career that started in 1989. My Powerbook just gets out of the way and lets me work – from managing Windows and Unix servers across the street to minor web chores on server in California. I can fool around with it, sure, but only if I want to.
As a tool it’s superb.
JW sez:
“OS X is the most advanced operating system out there, the company’s latest Intel-based offerings are smoking the competition with ease, and their style happens to be beautiful ”
Actually, the Intel equipped boxes running OSX were much slower than the same boxes running windoz. OSX isn’t ‘the most advanced’, it simply is such a small market share that virus writers (who know of plenty of holes in OSX) don’t exploit them because: a) they don’t hate Apple like they hate Bill Gates, b) with such a small market share, OSX viruses are less capable of spreading.
Criticizing Apple products on their conformist 50’s-like modernist style is entirely appropos, given that Jobs’ primary mantra of distinction is that Apple is by “artists” and for “artists”, ergo style is of utmost importance.
What the replicant designs of Apple actually remind me of is the Monty Python quip of the demagog telling the faithfull drones: “You are all individuals”. Response, “We are all individuals.”
Pete,
If you’re looking for uber-configurability, Mac OS X is at least as configurable as Windows if you’re comfortable working from the command-line. Check out http://www.macosxhints.com, as that’s a community that’s pretty dedicated to sharing the wealth on hacking and configuring OS X.
OS X is the most advanced operating system out there, the company’s latest Intel-based offerings are smoking the competition with ease, and their style happens to be beautiful (opinion)
It’s adequate for personal use on simple 1-2 processor setups, but hardly high performance — poor threading and process creation/destruction, and the locking isn’t fine grained enough. Kinda dated, actually, but nothing that you are likely to notice much in everyday personal use where the nice user interface and bundled applications count for a lot.
The big problem I always had with Apple was the price, the lack of an upgrade path, and missing software. The latter is no longer such a problem unless you play a lot of games, but the lack of an upgrade path still seems to be there. I wouldn’t know for sure because I dumped Apple and took the build your own route and run Linux these days. Not that I would recommend that to everyone either, you still need to be a bit geeky and will have to do without some things like games and much other commercial software.
I think the first question to answer is simple: what do you do most on the computer, and what do you have to have? Be honest, and your decision will be much easier.
The customer is always right.
Wow! It’s stretched analogy time!
Apple have very distinctive and rigorously enforced design values. If that makes them look like the product of a 1950’s statist distopia in your eyes, then I’m glad I don’t have your eyes, but hey, each to their own.
Apple hardware has always been high quality. It’s less open than PC hardwar, but Apple have noticed, rather sensibly, that there’s a large market of people who care more about quality and consistency than price/performance ratio.
It’s worth noting that in the past companies like Compaq produced PC hardware that was just as closed as Apple is now – but a good deal uglier.
The fact that most ‘high end’ consumer laptop manufacturers are now attempting to copy Apple designs to a greater or lesser extent.
Unfortunately, Mac’s are rubbish for play games on, so I stick to PCs….
Indeed, which is why I have one of each.
WiNdOWs is for people who don’t want to know why their computer doesn’t work.
MS-DOG is for people who want to know why their computer doesn’t work.
Apple is for people who don’t want to know why their computer works.
Linux is for people who want to know why their computer works.
What do you want?
Two things you don’t write about on blogs: Macs and abortion.
I have to second most of the comments here. To see any statist totalitarian undertones in Apple’s product line is ridiculous. Of course Apple’s products look similar, that’s their design style. It’s the same way that Dells often look similar, and IBM ThinkPads look similar, and so on and so forth.
Apple has hit upon a design theme that appeals to consumers in its clean lines and relative simplicity, and so they’re sticking to it. And why not? It makes no sense to change a winning formula (for their iPods at least).
Besides, to use the whole “totalitarian” approach, an appropriate analogy would be a political party in a democratic country. Apple is one such party, and it has adopted a particular style/theme. Yet there are other parties out there, and nobody is stopping you from choosing them and their themes. There’s nothing remotely totalitarian about it.
As for choice, as a happy Mac user I can of course recommend Apple’s products. For the person who doesn’t want to fuss around with the computer’s settings, it seems to just work, and it has a wonderful knack of seeming to get out of the way when you’re working in a way I’ve never experienced on a Windows machine. At the same time, those who are more bold can dig deeper, harnessing the intricate complexities and power of the underlying UNIX subsystem through the terminal. Sure, it’s not nearly as open as Linux (no surprise there), but it’s a helluva lot more open than Windows could ever be.
But hey, ultimately it’s about personal preference. Some people like the Mac form factor and are willing to pay the price premium for it and OS X (with its great bundled apps), and others are not. It’s not my place to tell anybody which option they’d prefer.
That is why I never bought a Bentley. They look like all the other Bentleys.
http://www.uriahcarpenter.info/1984.html
Nuff said.
The one thing I really can’t stand about the Mac community? Pretentiousness. That’s not to say that all Mac users are smug jackasses, but their most vocal proponents certainly are, and Apple only feeds into this with their marketing campaigns.
“Sure we’re overpriced and underperforming, but boy do we look good!” could reasonably sum up Apple’s attitude. And if you think MS is restrictive, you know nothing of Apple’s attempts to squash dissent; just look at how out of their way they’ve gone to sue bloggers to reveal their sources on upcoming Apple products.
Microsoft may have a lock on the desktop OS world, but why locking yourself into a vendor who controls both the software and the hardware is beyond me.
Whoops. Meant to say “why locking yourself into a vendor who controls both the software and the hardware could be considered a better choice is beyond me.”
Gee,
Everyone has different opinions and all seen to have different reasons for making their choices.
Gosh.
How unexpected, who woulda thunk it?
Well, the Mac OS X is built on open source foundations, and there are plenty of ways to customise it with 3rd party tools as well as Apple’s own.
As for personalising the hardware’s look, that’s what stickers are for.
Back in the days when computers were appearing in universities in great numbers Apple devotees in Quebec were referred to as Macniacs. Comme on dit en francais, plus ca change….
OK folks…..I know computers like I know most things, i.e. not a lot. But I do know a little about human nature & much of it is nasty. We have an ‘envy’ society & we have a ‘hate’ society; the two go hand-in-hand. If you want enemies, the best way to achieve your wish is to be succesful. Bill Gates has enemies; millions of them. He started from relatively nothing to become the richest man ever & gives away each year the equivalent of the GDP of many of the world’s nations. That alone deserves the hatred of all of us, does it not.
So deeply does this run that there are those who would rather jump into Mt. Fuji than buy a product produced by this evil, evil man. Anything. Anything.
Computer compschmuter……we’re talking plain cardinal sin here.
I’ve never understood this “the Mac is a closed system” claim. For anyone capable of reading documentation and writing programs it has *always* been a very very open system. Far more so than Windows.
Traditional MacOS had no protections and had thousands of documented system routines, all of which could be easily replaced by one you liked better to make windows or menus or the file open dialog or whatever it was work the way you preferred.
OS X is even more open, with the entire source code for the kernel and drivers and X11 and all the *nix commands available for downloading, free. You can grab it annd build it yourself, and replace bits in a standard retail version of OS X with your own bits. That’s everything that you get with Linux, the very paragon of openness and flexibility. The only things you *don’t* get are the Quartz GUI library and Apple’s own application programs.
It’s also always been easy to build your own hardware add-ons for Macs, using various interfaces. AppleTalk was a great one in the past, and USB interface chips are cheap to buy and easy to use today.
As far as I can see, the only people who complain that the Mac is closed and inflexible are the people who might regard themselves as “power users”. The people who know just enough about computers to be able to find and download and play with “TweakUI” but wouldn’t have a clue how to create it.
It’s perfectly fine for the people who just want their computer to work with no hassles, and it’s wonderful for the people who could build and program their own computer but don’t have the time. (and Linux is great for those who *do* have the time…)
The “totalitarian uniformity” of Apple hardware is a feature not a bug. The entire goal of Apple hardware design is to create a standardized hardware platform such that both users and developers can count on each unit having a set high base of functionality.
I am a computer geek but I like Macs because hardware bores me to tears. I don’t get a thrill from popping in yet another module into a beige case. I like software and the standardized Apple hardware makes the software more customizable and flexible.
Apple is justifiably proud of its design work. 90% of the time they have taken a highly functional design element and made it look aesthetically appealing as well.
Macs are intended to finished unitary products like a sedan. You get in, turn the key and go. By comparison, Windows machines are still in the hotrod phase. Yes, you can tweak the hardware by swapping modules but you better be prepared to burn your time doing it. That goes double for Linux.
If you need to get work done, don’t have some super custom hardware requirements and don’t like spending time futzing, pay for a Mac up front.
(Disclaimer: I used to work for Apple Computer and still have financial interest in the company.)
Oh God… the Mac vs. PC vs. Linux thing. Talk about a recurring number.
No wonder Steve Den Beste quit. He posted a couple of pieces mildly critical of Macs and got like 300 hate emails in the first six hours.
Here’s what we know: most of the tests which purport to show Mac’s speed compared to Windows machines are tilted in Mac’s favor, because Mac uses applications which favor their strongpoints.
Actually, I’ve found Macs to be really slow on some of the severe number-crunching routines I’ve used, and most serious mathematicians I’ve met wouldn’t touch a Mac with a pole.
As for their design stuff: it’s way too precious for me, personally, although their screens look fantastic.
All that said, if my Tech Support died (or divorced me), I’d probably get a Mac, because I’m pretty clueless about how PCs work, and I’m only interested in what comes out of it at the end of the day.
I suspect that most Mac owners are the same.
I wandered into Apple’s flagship British store in Regent Street yesterday afternoon, and had a look at the new Macbook. It appears to be a beautfully designed machine, it lacks the slightly crippled quality that the iBooks had relative to the Powerbooks and which were presumably to try to encourage you to buy the more expensive machine, and the £749 price of the base model compares extremely favourably with similarly specced machines in the PC world. Apple have really got themselves a winner as far as I can see.
The colours are a lovely Appley touch though. The high end model is a quite pricey £1029, and is the only model that is black rather than white. This costs £130 more than the next model down, and the only differences are a 20Gb difference in hard drive size (cost to Apple,: £20, if that) and the colour. Apple will let you customise the specifications of your machine if you buy online, and if you do it that way it is possible to buy a machine that is identical to the high end black one only white, and that costs £939. So, you are paying &90 for the machine to be black rather than white. If Apple can persuade some of its customers to pay that much money in order to be cooler than their friends, then there is nothing wrong with their doing this, but it is amusing that it is this obvious.
And of course the Apple store in Regent Street had sold out of one model when I visited yesterday. This was of course the high end black one.
How come then, every speed comparison of the Intel Macs with PCs show Macs are significantly faster?
Heard of Boot Camp? You’ll have to come up with a better argument for avoiding Mac than that.
But hey, if you like co-existing with 140,000 viruses, worms, etc, you stick with Windows… the current attempt of MS to persuade people through advertising that it takes security seriously is just laughable.
(MS-Vista: ‘Vista’ is an acronym: ‘Vastly Inferior System To Apple’)
There. That’s my rant over.
Actually, this is not true.
Mac OS X is a new-from-the-ground-up system, designed to make infection extremely difficult if not impossible. Windows is kludge-upon-kludge-upon-kludge; a veritable virus-writer’s paradise.
The only so-called ‘OS X holes’ occassionally reported in the trade press are without exceptions false holes that require the positive assistance of the target infectee, and all have really been desperate attemps by minor security software vendors to create a market for their products in Macs.
I hate my Ipod. The “18 hour battery life” might be one of the most outrageous pieces of PR horseshit ever released by apple corp.
As a person who has both, I have no dog in this fight, but it seems simple to me: there is more software for PC and the XP interface is now sufficiently Mac-like that there is not that much in it as to which is easier to use, it is really just a matter of preference. A typical Mac looks much nicer than a typical PC in my opinion but then I do not buy typical PCs.
Likewise on performance, it really depends what you want it for. My Alienware blows the socks off my Mac by a huge margin (and being a gamer, I am about to rebuild the Alienware with Quad graphics cards, dual processors and water cooling, which might well put my house into orbit when I turn it on).
Yet for 99% of other uses (i.e. everything except games and a few specialist uses) my Mac is just fine. Where the Mac scores is that is it is simply more reliable and in the final analysis the most important thing with a computer is that when you turn it on, it works. Oh, and the Mac really is plug-and-play rather than Windows plug-and-pray.
There is no ‘right’ answer, it just depends what you value more. Horses for courses.
… though as it happens, my Mac is currently feeling poorly and my PC works fine 🙂
And of course, with my Mac I just turn it on and it works … and keeps on working until I turn it off again. My Windows machine, on the other hand, likes to close down every now and again (preferably when I’m in the middle of something important) just to reassure me that it can … I know which I prefer.
All the speed comparisons and sniping remarks about design are irrelevant to me. My Mac works.
Hank,
Microsoft may have a lock on the desktop OS world, but why locking yourself into a vendor who controls both the software and the hardware is beyond me.
They don’t actually lock you in. It comes with OSX, but you can run Windows on the Intel boxes, and I think Linux too (you could definitely run Linux on the old IBM Power machines).
The key thing is that if you have one company doing hardware and software on a box, then integration should be better, that what comes with it is going to work well.
Arguably, Mac may be more open, as it’s based on an open source BSD Unix core which you can download and see how it works.
Apple has always been fascist in it’s attitude.
Just go back to the days of the Apple II, when people tried to clone them, and Apple hunted them down like vermin and stamped them out.
They forbade clones and modding the system voided any warranties.
Whereas IBM let clone makers prosper, which only benefitted Microsoft, who went along for the ride.
The first and only time Apple tried to license clone makers, there were only 3 takers, and the restrictions and costs were so high they abandoned the licenses within a coule years.
Fascist? Apple? Yes. For decades….
1) Those who tried to claim that Apple’s OS is a ‘closed’ system that you can’t change and that somehow WINDOWS would be better in this way are delusional jokesters who made me choke on my morning cereal. OS X is based on an open-source BSD UNIX core which is pretty bulletproof – comparing it to Windows in this way demonstrates how little you actually know.
2) I liked the comment that Windows machines are ‘plug and pray’. I have both PC & Mac – THEY ARE A WORLD APART, folks.
3) It is NOT the case that Macs and PCs are simply ‘comparable’ nowadays, and ‘its just a matter of personal preference’. Its also not the case that only viruses and spyware make the difference. Apple are at least 5 years ahead, and meantime Microsoft can’t even get it’s FIRST copy-cat competitor to OS X released (who knows when the fabled Vista will actually appear?)
4) Talking of copy-cats, Apple are the company the rest watch for the direction of the industry. First with IEEE standards, first with bluetooth, first to ship computers with built-in 802.11, first notebook with a trackpad, first with Firewire 800, hell, first with a f**king MOUSE, people. If you want to buy computers that are ahead of the curve, do yourself a favor and don’t buy a bloody PC. Talking of style, Apple decides to release an iMac back in 1999 that has translucent back and bright colors – SUDDENLY the market is flooded with – guess what – translucent shapes with bright colors – printers, drives, etc.etc. – at the time it was the antidote to a bunch of beige little boxes. And you want to argue that Apple’s style is totalitarian? It’s a no-brainer.
5) I agree with whoever said OS X is NEW while Windows is just the addition of additions – Microsoft are notoriously shit at the job of making a good operating system. Hell, by the time Microsoft had made Windows anything but an application running on top of DOS (1995), Apple had been runnning their OS that way for 11 years. Just when Microsoft thought they had caught up, already Apple were working on throwing the whole thing out to develop a UNIX-based OS of the future. XP is simply a poor copy of the concept.
Anyway, it’s not my job to try and convert you. I’m a libertarian, for God’s sake. I’m happy that when I turn MY computers on in the morning, my Apple Powerbook will run quickly, smoothly, will not crash, will not pop annoying windows in my face telling me about yet another virus or spyware, will do the job and do it WELL. My PC will just sit there like an annoying, high-maintainance kid that tried to bring a knife to a gunfight.
“WiNdOWs is for people who don’t want to know why their computer doesn’t work.”
(cackle) How I wonder what this is about. My Win2K rigs have been cruising along for years, now, with uptime measrured in many months at a time, usually between shutdowns for hardware touches.
When it comes to “art” and “artists”: by 1991, I was doing things in AutoCAD and 3D Studio (mostly stage-set and lighting designs) that had the Mac-heads down at the local print bureau scratching their heads in wonder. It was stuff that they couldn’t do, and they had no clue on earth that it was even going on, anywhere. They were laughable ignoramuses then, and I see little evidence that they’ve learned much over the years. For example: there are still ignoramuses out there who have no idea that there are Windows systems that don’t blow-ass-up all the time.
More likely, they were rolling on the floor, helpless with laughter at the pathetic results from such a primitive system and someone who actually was so delusional as to think the stuff was anywhere close to Mac quality.
Come to think of it, if you imagine AutoCAD produces ‘art’, that rather proves my point. And 3D Studio got laughed off the Mac stage almost as soon as it turned up, it was so pathetic.
But if you’re happy in your primitive little world…
In terms of interface and ease of use (which is what I was talking about)? Of course it is true, the fact some people who use both prefer one or the other makes is self evidently true. In someways I think XP has actually over-taken OSX in terms of ease usability in some ways, but clearly both are sophisticated GUIs.
As I do not give a rat’s arse what makes a computer work as long as it does what I want, the mechanics under the hood do not really interest me.
I’ve used both Macs and PCs for many years.
I have a technical background but really have no interest in discussing arcane technical points any more. When it comes to spending my own money I have always bought a Mac. Why? They tend to be more compact (I have a new iMac with everything build into the back of the screen), they look nicer, they’ve long been quieter (usually completely silent, which is exactly what I want), they are very reliable, easier to set up and maintain, don’t need all this anti-virus s/w nonsense, are nicer to use and they tend to come with pretty much everything I need as standard.
The PC argument doesn’t attract me, at least at present. The only advantages for a user like me are lower price (but not much when you compare like with like) and a greater availability of s/w (I couldn’t care less about games but there is a relative lack of accounts, database and contact mangement s/w on Macs).
So overall, I just find a Mac a better bet. If it ever changes I would certainly consider changing, but so far I haven’t seen any reason to.
I put a double “hear hear” on the pretentiousness of Macistas, the core of my comments about Jobs’ attitude of Mac being by artists and for artists.
I’ve run into this in my work in publishing, coming into it from a life of experience with PCs, CAD, Corel Draw, raytracing, but also plenty of prior experience on Macs and *nix/linux machines. The arrogance of people I met who were both certain that Macs were superior but had never themselves done more than cursory work on a PC was astounding. Most prepress people I met then were shocked at the things I showed them I could do on a PC.
JEM’s comments here are par for the course in that respect. The Mac users attitude is much like that portrayed by Neal Stephenson in “In the beginning was the command line”, of pretentious Alfa Romeo owners who were sure their cars were the best cars on the road, but couldn’t be bothered to change their own oil.
Is the Mac a good computer? Yes, though its lack of number crunching ability is a handicap. Is it worth the 10-20% premium over PCs? Not if I could spend that money getting a higher performing PC.
Saying the Mac is open because linux can be run on its intel models is laughable: PCs have been able to run linux for ages (linux was designed for the PC), so all I can say to Mac about that is: It is about time you guys joined the club.
JEM trumpets “Boot Camp”: Whoopie doo. I’ve been able to run my Windows PCs as multi-OS machines for many years now. Its about time you guys came to the party.
Mike Lorrey-
First, despite your listing your resume of experience for us, you don’t appear to know what you’re talking about. The reason the Mac OS is ‘open’ is nothing to do with being able to run Linux. It is open because it is a UNIX BSD. Unlike Microsoft, who package a shit product and then make it as unflexible as a Game Boy, Apple have brought open-source ideals to the masses in a way that Windows never did.
Second, “Lack of number crunching ability?” Show me in today’s specs where similarly kitted-out PCs out-perform Macs? I think you’re in a dreamworld.
Third, it is no longer a 10 – 20 percent premium for a Mac – comparing like with like they are very competitive now.
Besides, wouldn’t you pay more for a BMW over a Ford?
I noticed that only a very few people seemed to have acknowledged the existence of Linux, as if the only options out there are WiNdOwS and Apple.
WTF?
Linux is a very viable alternative to Windows, as it is stable and infinitely configurable. That infinitely configurable part also trumps Apple. ALthough, admittedly, Linux does have a bit of a learning curve, I guess. But having been compuiting since before the great computer wars of the 1980’s, I really didn’t notice any learning curve.
“Show me in today’s specs where similarly kitted-out PCs out-perform Macs? I think you’re in a dreamworld.”
I don’t know, or care about specs. What I do know is when I was doing some intensive statistical work with some smart old boys at MIT and Harvard Bus School, none of them used Macs — even though they could afford to use any machine they wanted, thanks to the grants they were getting — and hell, most of them used three-year-old PCs running the old XP OS. And those machines never broke.
Sure, I could compare spec sheets, and make a decision based on that comparison.
But I’d rather see what the serious PC jockeys are using in my field, and use that as a reference.
And not one — NOT ONE — uses a Mac, of any generation or newness, for their work.
Oh, and by the way, I own both a Mac and a PC, but the kids use the Mac to play games. I do work on mine.
Modern linux is pretty enough and usable enough. It’s dirt cheap. It has at least one good tool for all common tasks.
The main reasons to prefer Mac are that it has more commercial programs, hardware support is never patchy or complicated, and all well-written programs work alike and interoperate. Of course, the downside is the price.
Linux’s learning curve is odd. On modern versions, you can learn the windowsy stuff by trial and error, it’s as easy as the Mac. But the curve goes from shallow to precipitous the moment you look under the hood. Not that it’s undocumented or ill-designed, it’s just awfully complex and the complexity goes ALL the way down. You can rewrite the operating system!
heh… with me is exactly the other away round. I use my nuclear powered supadoopa PC for games and the Mac for work.
Also worth noting: on Linux the simplest way to do something is often the nongraphical way. Example: when I installed Debian, it was configured to search for packages (of ready-to-install software) on the install CDs. I wanted to reconfigure it to seach Debian’s up-to-the-minute online repository. I could have fired up “synaptic”, the graphical tool, and used it’s “repositories” menu item and laboriously added them in. But it was quicker to pull up a terminal, become root, and edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file.
If what I wrote above scares you, you’d be better off with a Mac.
I went to a party in New York city and most of the people there were employees of the mac store in soho. Predictably, you could tell which ones were “geniuses” because of the way they strutted around the room and the way the other people at the party worshipped them. Just to shake things up I mentioned how much I loved my brand new Dell desktop and how much more performance it provided for a much lower price.. . Jaws dropped, an awkward silence ensued. . . it was if I had professed my faith in a room full of atheists. Pretty funny stuff.
Bill Gates didn’t start from nothing, his parents are wealthy lawyers.
I’m inspired. I think I’ll go over to the GMC website and say something nice about Ford F 150 pickups.
veryretired-
I drive a Ford Explorer. Great vehicle (but it ain’t a BMW).
…and you were the jokee.
(Many find it even funnier when the jokee doesn’t even realise he’s the jokee. However I’m not sure it’s right or proper to make fun of the afflicted in this way. Someone should at least explain why they are making a total laughing-stock of themselves.
A PC would be bad enough. But a Dell? You loved a Dell? Love is indeed blind…)
“Don’t ever ask a man what computer he has. If he’s got a Mac he’ll proudly tell you soon enough. If he’s not got a Mac, why embarrass him?” — Tom Clancy
… or you could do the same thing in an instant under Mac OS X using Searchlight. But I don’t suppose that would do for those who like to do things the slow painful way.
—
More seriously, you can run your Mac at the command line level if that’s your thing — no-one is stopping you. A knowledge of Unix would help, but that’s true of Linux as well I imagine.
The real point is that this sort of computer use is a tiny minority ‘sport’. 99% of users will use the graphical interface, and that’s where Mac OS X just leaves Windows in the dust.
“More likely, they were rolling on the floor, helpless with laughter at the pathetic results from such a primitive system and someone who actually was so delusional as to think the stuff was anywhere close to Mac quality.”
I was there, watching their faces. You weren’t.
Take a good long look back. Tell me who was rendering 150,000 faces of 3-D geometry resolved to 1/16-inch accuracy, on a Macintosh in ”91. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
You don’t know what you’re talking about, son.
The perfect mataphor!
You have just summed up the fundamental difference between the two worlds; why Mac users consider Windows to be so pathetic:
You, like most of your kind, confuse quantity for quality.
(A bit like they say of accountants: they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.)
That is the real ignorance.
“And 3D Studio got laughed off the Mac stage almost as soon as it turned up, it was so pathetic.”
No wonder no good games come out on the Mac.
I see that this has reached the Pearls Before Swine stage with “JEM”.
But he didn’t answer the question.
And so, with trepidation at the hopeless of it all, I will add my 0.02 to this debate.
For much computer work, m’lad, quantity is quality. Polygon rendering for 3D work is, IMHO, just exactly one of those.
I learned to program on an Apple IIc. I like Macs for certain things.
But dollar for dollar, I can put together a much more performant Wintel system. Why? Dozens of competing manufacturers for virtually every piece of hardware in the Wintel case – video cards, memory, sound cards, RAID controllers, NICs, hard drives, etc etc. Even the cases themselves come in a kaleidoscopic assortment with a similarly wide-ranging price.
Of course, Linux has much of the same hardware advantages and the OS is even cheaper (free!) but, despite all the hype about its increasing user friendliness, its still not ready to be used by the non-technical.
So its Mac for people who like to buy attractive appliances, Linux for cost-conscious techies who don’t want to play games, and Windows for the non-technical user who wants the best price/performance ratio, and for hardcore gamers.
As for Windows crashing all the time, it is certainly true than an unmaintained Windows system is not that great. However, SpyBot and Windows update together can keep Windows in top shape effortlessly. And I haven’t seen a blue screen in two years, since I moved to XP and Server 2003 (systems which I abuse the hell out of, running dozens of memory-and-cpu hogging applications all at once).
Disclaimer: I work for the evil MS beast, though not in the Windows division.
I use both Windows and Mac systems constantly. I own five (3 Mac, 2 Windows), and work with over a dozen more. Putting aside the silly religious arguements, here are some things to keep in mind:
Windows XP and OS X 10.3+ are about equally erratic–which is to say, not very erratic at all. Nearly all Windows reliability problems are caused by using Internet Explorer with no protection. I use Firefox, and have Spybot and NAV running. My OS X machine is actually more erratic, thanks to a problem I’m having with my scanning software and a really old SCSI film scanner.
The Mac OS used to have a much better interface than Windows, but OS X threw away that advantage. It’s been slowly climbing back since 10.0, but the old idea of Macs being easier to use isn’t really true any more.
If you want to play games, buy a PC. That’s why I bought one of mine.
OS X retains a clear advantage in the area of inter-application communication, AppleScript and Automator being the best-known examples of this.
I’ve had really bad experiences with the reliability of Mac laptops. I’ve owned three (one was stolen), and I actually bought a PC laptop just so I could be sure that I would have at least one laptop that wasn’t in for repairs at any given time. I actually put mine in laptop bags and walk around with them nearly every day, which is unheard of here in Los Angeles. All the other people I know with Mac laptops follow the normal pattern of only walking to the parking lot, and they’ve had no trouble.
I’ve often seen the claim (including here) that OS X is “newer,” and presumably therefore better, than Windows. This is actually false. OS X is a Unix variant (Unix dates from the 1960’s), and is a continuous development of NeXTstep, an OS that was released in 1989. It’s undergone some major changes over the years, when it was reinvented as OpenStep and again as OS X, but OS X 10.4.6 has much more in common with NeXTstep 1.0 than Windows XP does with Windows 1.0.
Personally I don’t consider this history to be a bad thing, but then in my opinion newer does not necessarily mean better in technology. But then, I’m the guy who carries a Newton (PDA) made in 1997 and a pistol made in 1918…
Whatever. I’m not sure why a rainbow handful of Sharpie markers and/or model paints couldn’t adequately individualize your hardware’s looks. Or, if you’re really motivated, a tube of model glue and all the little plastic crap you have laying about.
Criticizing Apple for making its products all look the same is exactly as pertinent and useful as criticizing a shipping company for using identical brown cardboard boxes. If you don’t like it, get creative, take the insides out, and put them in something else.
“For much computer work, m’lad, quantity is quality. Polygon rendering for 3D work is, IMHO, just exactly one of those.”
I wasn’t going to say it.
I work as a computer software contractor in London, UK. I haven’t physically seen an Apple Mac yet this year…
Every time I’ve used a Mac in the past, I’ve always thought they were crippled by only having one mouse button, so that you always have to shoot the mouse up and down the screen to the top menu and back 10 times a minute to do anything.
The context-sensitive ‘right-click’ pop-up menus available since Windows95 multiplies usefulness beyond compare, as far as I’m concerned.
I second Bombadil. I’ve not had a blue screen under Windows XP that I can remember, ever. It seems to me that the Mac users jumping on Windows here are living in the past.
Ron,
You are woefully out of date on the Mac mouse issue. All Macs have had support for multiple button mice for years. Whether you chose a single or multiple button mouse was up to you.
I am using my standard (i.e. I didn’t pay extra for it) Apple Mighty Mouse right now. It may look like it only has one button, but it has a pressure sensitive left or right click facility. It also has a side click facility (which is very handy for displaying all open windows on the screen at once so you choose can click on the one you want) and a scroll and click button (better than a wheel as it goes in all directions). You can configure it in pretty much any way you please.
It’s the best and most versatile mouse I’e ever used (and I’ve used a great number on both PCs and Macs).
Every time I’ve used a PC, I’ve always thought they were crippled by needing two mouse buttons.
Not on a Mac, you don’t. At least, not since about 1987, when mice were virtually unknown on PCs. Do try to keep up to date…
I like the mac platform. You like Windows. Some folks like BSD or Amiga or some other boutique OS. I am willing to pay a significant premium for a system I percieve as being more reliable and the knowledge that for what I do with a computer (make music) macs are the de-facto standard, supported better by third parties and available to rent pre-configured for my needs from music equipment hire companies all over the world. You may consider higher performance or lower price more important. You may set a very low value on your own time and build your own computer. You may enjoy tinkering in the same way a car enthusiast with an antique car does. We may both believe each other to be nuts, but as long as we have a reasonably free market, we can all have our own way. The religious war that is mac-vs-PC illustrates very well why ‘leave it to the market’ is generally the safest bet.
— Yobbo
Yeh, right. Presumably you compute with your eyes tight shut:
“In the wake of at least one targeted attack that exploits a new flaw in Word, Microsoft is advising users to run the application in “safe mode.”
“Running Word in the restricted mode will not fix the vulnerability, but it will help block known modes of attack, Microsoft said in a security advisory published late Monday.”
(CNET News, 23 May 2006)
Or then again, you could move to a reliable system. Mac OS X, say….
“Yeh, right.”
My dear swine: you don’t have a good reason in the world to doubt that man’s word.
What the fuck’s wrong with you?
First of all, what does a security flaw in Word have to do with bluescreens? Do you have the faintest idea what you are talking about?
Second, Microsoft often advises workarounds when there is a security problem, until they can release a QFE or patch. I guess they could go the Mac route and just cover it up until they release their big security bundle – but I for one would rather know about the issues so that I can take precautions.
JEMTroll probably sez: “But Mac doesn’t have any security issues!!!”
Yes they do. http://www.betanews.com/article/Apple_Issues_Security_App_Patches/1147447703.
Naturally an aspiring virus writer isn’t quite as interested in attacking a system with less than 10% market share, so Mac gets fewer attackers. In the long run, that actually works to the detriment of Apple.
Aether141: “The religious war that is mac-vs-PC illustrates very well why ‘leave it to the market’ is generally the safest bet. ”
Hear, hear. That is the most sensible thing yet to appear in this thread.
> SpyBot and Windows update together can
> keep Windows in top shape effortlessly.
Spybot isn’t worth a shit anymore (well, that’s not strictly true; it *eventually* catches up); IMO, WinXP users are best served with Kaspersky AntiVirus (which can be set to update as frequently as hourly) and eTrust PestPatrol.
Regards MacOSX vs WinXP, the former has finally gelled into a fairly slick operating system, while each new iteration of the latter tends to yield something that consumes more resources and runs slower. MacOSX 10.4.6 runs adequately on a 350mhz “Blueberry” iMac with 192mb ram. XP runs well enough on a similar PII system — until you add the anti-virus and anti-spyware packages, at which point it grinds to a crawl. OSX employs virtual-memory usage of the harddrive more efficiently than XP.
Of available software packages, the nod continues to go to XP.
Look & feel: I preferred OS9’s appearance to OSX’ rotten “dock” scheme. In many ways, XP is a rip-off of OS9 (which is mainly why I gravitated to PC after using Macs almost exclusively for fifteen years). Losing “Windowshade” was the clincher (it’s available free for PCs as “Winroll” from tinyapps.org).
Mice: They suck for every platform, but they’re all USB now, so there’s no reason everyone shouldn’t be using a multi-button mouse with two wheels for vertical *and* horizontal scrolling.
How do you upgrade a PC?
You go out and buy the hardware you want and install it.
How do you upgrade a Mac?
You go out and buy the newest model.
And for all the judy boyz that scream “We offer more security and don’t have security holes in our OS’s that you could drive a truck through that MS does” I call BS. When you’re the big boy on the block and every two bit hack is banging your on OS like a $5 hooker looking for flaws they’ll be found.
When you get enough market share to be noticed you’ll find out that the hacks will have their way with you too.
And for the true elitists, even a locked down Mac can be broken into in less than 30 min. They really aren’t very secure and touting that they are is delusional.
> How do you upgrade a PC?
> You go out and buy the hardware you want and install it.
Assuming it’s not one of those “planned obsolescence” Dell riveted-shut case designs. (Even the hardest to get into Macs never went that far.)
> How do you upgrade a Mac?
> You go out and buy the newest model.
Bullflips. On a tower, I pull the loop on the side and pop it open. On a new LCD screen iMac, I take a regular Phillips screwdriver to the screws on the bottom, then slide out the guts. Laptops are no trickier than your average PC laptop. (The most esoteric gadgets you might need are a couple $1.95 mini-torx from Sears.)
CRT-iMacs are a pain in the ass, but managable with the trusty Phillips. The few PC all-in-a-CRT designs are no easier to fiddle with.
I’ll work on ANY Mac in preference to shreddying my knucles inside those damn HP/Compaq minitowers where you have to remove the freaking power-supply and yank half the ribbons to get at the pci cards.
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
> When you’re the big boy on the block
> and every two bit hack is banging your
> on OS like a $5 hooker looking for flaws
> they’ll be found.
What is claimed can be done and what is actually done are two different things. Suffice to say that Microsoft’s security problems ratios are grossly in excess of its OS market-share ratios, and have been for decades.
(I am presently typing this reply on a laptop running Windows XP, so I deny any insinuations of being a judy boyz.)