After reading the recent article by a user who has switched to a Mac I thought I'd write of my experience. I've was used a Mac from October 2002 to March 2004. It was provided to me when I started working for another PPC manufacturer but they are not really in the same market and in any case don't make laptops.
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I'm thinking of buying a ibook myself, its abit of a change for me but I really like the interface and the battery life is a big plus imho oh and also the 12" screen
I'm going for the basic model and as time goes on I'm going to upgrade ram and get a airport card (have to have wirelkess after all)
This basic model - http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/irl.woa/90505/wo/Kw4GkgkG4A...
if back on the pc and you need language support:
windows xp does multiple languages quite well
get the Windows XP Professional MUI Pack
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/res...
The Windows XP Professional MUI Pack allows users to change the language of the operating system user interface to any of the supported localized language versions (including English). This version is well suited for companies that:
Want to deploy and maintain a single operating system standard or desktop image worldwide.
Want to maintain a single code base for international application development.
Want to do single, simultaneous worldwide rollouts for hotfixes, patches, and Service Packs.
Have multilingual offices where different language speakers must share computers.
Have users who need to be able to log on anywhere in any language.
The Multilingual User Interface Pack is based on the International English version of Windows XP Professional. Although the user interface can be switched to any of the supported languages, compared to a localized language version of Windows XP Professional, some parts of the operating system are not localized in the MUI Pack. These include:
16-bit code
Bitmaps
Some registry keys and values
INF files
Some system components, including:
Narrator
MSN® Explorer
NetMeeting®
Internet Connection Wizard
also see: http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/DrIntl/faqs/MUIFaq.mspx
In fact take the screen off and it'd be small, portable and still look good, a portable desktop - hmm, Did I just invent a new form factor?
Nope, there's a few Asian companies that make screen-less laptops for cheap, quiet desktops. Can't seem to find a link at the moment though.
I'm sorry, but if you have problems with the screen, and your HDD snaps, I can't imagine why you'd stick with it. *shrugs*
Heh.. sounds like me 5 months ago. "I'll buy the lowest model, and slowly get upgrades." For 200$ more, you can get pretty much all the bells and whistles that Apple has for the iBook, except RAM. I highly suggest avoiding Apple for RAM, they like to pretend that RAM prices haven't changed in 4 years 
. I got the 12" (800Mhz, I'm quite bitter about the upgrades) with 256MB, Bluetooth (you've only got one shot at that one), Airport Extreme, and the 60gig HD. With the educational discount, it was very well priced, then I bought the 512Mb RAM a few months later from Crucial.
To the author... I'm not sure if it applied for the G3 iBooks, but there is a hack for G4s that allows for better dual display action. I've got it installed on mine, and I can do non-mirrored displays, different resolutions and refresh rates. It should let the other display go beyond 75hz if it supports it. 75hz on a CRT is death.
I was a laptop basher for a long time, figured I should give them a try. I love the fact that I can now have my main computer with me everywhere I go. For the time being, I don't see myself going back to a desktop.
Good article, though it sounded much like an Apple ad from 2002. *waits for the comments section to turn bad*
I'm not sure what you're trying to get to here. I haven't heard of many harddrives in macs going bad, so I don't think it's a common problem. Shit happens, I do laptop support for a University, I've seen some fscked up stuff (we don't support macs though). As for screen spots, you'd be surprised how many laptops have this problem. I think it's because of the type of use they get, pressure is applied at places where it really shouldn't be. My iBook has none of these problems, but I suppose that doesn't mean that others don't. Mileage varies.
Some interesting thoughts that might be useful for people considering what to buy. But also a few odd comments such as:
'You have to get used to the menu bar at the top (very 80's)'
In the 80s there were as many GUIs without the menu bar at the top of the screen as there were with a Mac style menu bar. IIRC GEM, Amiga OS and Mac OS were the only ones with the menu bar at the top, RISC OS, Windows, NeXTSTEP, X-Windows and plenty of others had a different menu system.
Personally I think it's a damn shame that Windows went with probably the worst menu system of the lot. I only occasionally use Mac OS, while I use Windows every day. Yet I still find Mac style menus significantly faster to access, even on a large, high resolution monitor. The RISC OS and NeXTSTEP menus were also far superior to the implementation in Windows. Contextual menus make it less of an issue, but it's still annoying.
> From the article:
>
> I never used it for reading PDFs after the first couple of months so I don't
> know if it got any better.
Indeed, Preview saw an incredible enhancement in Panther. Before, it
was slow as hell and absolutely unusable. The new version is way faster.
Apple touted it as the faster PDF viewer avalaible. I don't know if this is
true, but as far as my personnal experience goes, if Preview is not
THE faster it is not far behind.
Overall, Panther feels better and snappier. I do not regret the update
at all. It was worth each of my 99 euros.
Well two of my friends have ibooks and both have had issues but both still swear by them (screens went)
So although I could get a ibook for a approx 1400 from apple.com/ie cover and replacements etc would be very annoying.
So thats why I wanted to get it else-where and upgrade two bits later on
if you don't like the menus-at-the top, please read my news article at: http://otierney.net/comment.php?newsId=30
all that GUI power you get that "slows" down the system allows you to do amazing things like this: http://otierney.net/images/quartzextreme.jpg
no other operating system is currently capable of doing two alpha blends on top of a movie while doing a vector transformation of one of the alpha windows. none, but os x.
if you hate the dock, you obviously have never used launchbar. as it is so powerful you'll practially never USE the dock but for status (to see what apps are open.. and for drag/drop). check it out at http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar
i can't begin to stress how much more productive this application will make you after you've used it for only a few days. it's amazing.
you're using virtualdesktop? sheesh i'm sorry 
that app is slow, and costs money. check out http://wsmanager.sf.net not only is that app faster, but it's free. it uses the actual os x windowmanager desktop switching apis that are left from nextstep. the guy found them and used them in this app. quite cool stuff.
if live/breath unix, you should checkout darwinports over fink. darwinports is the official opendarwin project, and may even find it's way in an actual release of os x soon (tiger i hope). btw the defafult shell is bash in panther (which is a much much better shell).
Apple is still following it's orginial GUI useablity guidelines. Where you spend 80% of your time in the top half of the screen. You want to work a little bit faster on a windows machine, drag the task bar to the top of the screen it's amazing how much better everything is.
Stephen,
Assuming you're not just trolling, there was something *seriously messed up* with those machines you used. First of all, you can turn off image preview in the finder (go to View > Show View Options). Secondly, image previews don't lock up the Finder at all on my 800Mhz iMac G4 -- let alone my Dual 2Ghz G5 which is rarely anything other than SUPERFAST. So this doesn't have anything to do with "Macs are dog slow".
Some people's Windows machines run like ****. Does that mean Windows sucks? No, it runs wonderfully on my brother's modest (by today's standards) 2.5Ghz P4. Don't be so quick to judge, eh?
Regards,
Jared
I have dual 2 G5, and it is not dog slow.
I am sorry, you are wrong.
As far as the preview in file view, theres a toggle arrow that you click up, voila, no more previews! It's really that simple.
I use Photoshop, FCP, Shake, Cubase, etc. and I render while at the same time web surf, listen to music, etc. at the same time.
omnivector, its somewhat amusing that you accuse your parent to be a troll, and then troll yourself. Quite clever. I think anyone, such as myself, who has developed on both osx and windows will admit that each one has its own benifits and drawbacks. Heck, I could point out things that beos or amiga could do out of the box, that nothing today can, does that mean that everthing we have today is a toy? eh, I've wasted enought time feeding you.
omnivector, you didn't answer Stephan's problem. As for the iq of a mac user being higher than the one of a pc user, you're the exception confirming the rule. It’s just computers we’re talking about…
"windows is for amatures, os x is for professionals who just want to get their work done"
thats why apples single biggest market is elementary schools in the united states.
get real, windows is used by pros in every facet of computer technology out there...and in numbers that so far outpace mac it is now laughable.
to talk about a mac as a coders dream is about as silly as it gets. windows used to develop for so many more applications there is no comparison.
go back to a design class or something, the world is a lot bigger than your little school.
actualy, their single biggest market is graphics pros and desktop publishing.
soon it will be Film making though. and science is up and coming by leaps and bounds.
I think you are a wintroll just trying to make Mac users look like fanatics.
This is a nice review, however it worries me that people will base their review when buying new on this one. 10.3 is a big leap from 10.2. I liked how he didnt review apps he didnt use.
"actualy, their single biggest market is graphics pros and desktop publishing."
WTF?!? Apple dosent even have support for the latest GPUs from nvidia/ati
You are quite mistaken.
Apple sells 200k pro model per quarter approximately.
They sell 600k consumer and low end edu models per quarter.
Apples number one market is edu. Specifically, elementary schools as they have a lot more computers installed today than higher education.
Their second biggest market is home users.
Then you come to design pros of all sorts.
Apple themselves discuss these facts.
since when do you need the latest GPUs to create Graphics?
BTW, I can get an ATI 9800 with 256 MBs of RAM for the Mac so what the hell are you talking about?
Umm, uhh... You do realize that I can do all that graphic work and desktop publishing with my "poor" iBook video card right? You need to be an artist to do art, it's not a piece of hardware that does it for you. Even 3D stuff, very little of it is actually rendered by the GPU. Learn how stuff works instead of making yourself look ignorant. And for the record, I don't do artsy stuff with my iBook, I code (with ease ).
"BTW, I can get an ATI 9800 with 256 MBs of RAM for the Mac "
would you please show us a link to where you can buy that card for a mac?
thank you.
As far as Macs being slow, my 1ghz ibook seems almost twice as fast as my 1gzh Dell Inpirion 8100. My athlon64 has been sitting in my computer room collecting dust since I got my ibook about 6 weeks ago. The athlon64 is quite a bit faster than the ibook, but nothing can touch the user experience or the polish of OS X.
oh, I was mistaken it is 128 MBs, but I was sure I saw a 256 MB model around, I will keep looking:
http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Item.cfm?ID=6048&Item=ATI10043505...
you have used truthteller, truthseeker, as your names, and I still marvel at all the time you have to spend exclusively being negative.
It's not good for your mental health to focus on a company like that.
I would assume you love paul thurrot.
"Macs are dog slow"
translation: "I'm running Panther on a 333 MHz Imac with 64 MB Ram and it takes me forever as compared to my Athlon 64 main system."
"Windows Machines suck..."
translation: "I have XP installed on a 300 MHz PII with 32 MB Ram and it takes me forever as compared to my dual G5 Mac."
Hay Soos, people, ENOUGH with the OS bigotry. I understand it's human nature to want to think your choice is the best and every other is crap, but GIVE IT A FSCKING REST ALREADY!!! All three major OSes have their good and bad points. Take the religious wars to the bit bucket and give the rest of us a break.
It is quite possible that he could have slow previews even on a dual G5.
Typically people looking at images in icon view are previewing tiny images (<1000x1000 pixels, most likely off of the internet).
He may have been previewing film resolution (>2000x2000) images with little or no compression.... thats up to 4x the number of pixels that need to be grocked(opened/scaled/sharpened) versus typical usage... in addition if no compression has been applied thats also a bigger hit to the hard-drive.
I love OsX but the icon previewing system is ludicrously un-optimized.
how about you acknowledge when you are wrong?
negative?
my first post in this thread is saying "thanks a good read"
and i then go on to give the writer some helpful information about how he can get multi language switching support on his pc now that he is no longer on that mac.
is that negative or are you just attacking me and not discussing the topics at hand? point the finger somewhere closer to home.
"Learn how stuff works instead of making yourself look ignorant."
Geez sorry, just because im not some fruity "artist", I get a such a harsh backlash?
"how about you acknowledge when you are wrong?"
its ok friend...and the 256mb ati 9800 is not available for the mac. its ok to make mistakes.
if i made a mistake please point it out and I will be happy to admit it.
i am not perfect, but I do know just a little bit about the areas being discussed in the threads i post in.
:)
well of a power mac, go here:
http://eshop.macsales.com/
upgrade the COU to the latest clock (we are talking pulling out the old CPU and putting in the new one)
upgrade the Optical drives so you can put a super drive in your mac and have iDVD and all the workflow goodness it provides the consumer
upgrade the GFX card to the biggest baddest ATI bad boy out there.
plus memory, and hard drives.
Geez sorry, just because im not some fruity "artist", I get a such a harsh backlash?
I apologize for the belittling, but you hit a raw nerve there. But seriously, I suggest you try informing yourself about a topic before posting such a comment. And please, no need to call artists fruity, I have plenty of non-fruity artist friends, some work on Macs, some don't. It boils down to personal preference usually.
I guess you can't google or anything because look here:
http://www.ati.com/companyinfo/press/2004/4724.html
god it sucks to be right all the time!! (no, it actually feel pretty dang good)
I have the exact same mac, had some awful hardware issues, but still prefer it.
I'll be upgrading to the 17" powerbook this summer as I have outgrown the little g3 700mhz with my interests in video editing.
A G3 mac is slow, dog slow. The system runs at about half the speed a same clock G4 would run at. But when the best tools for what you want to do run on a mac, and all pc counterparts take you more time and frustration to use. You do not give a damn about a 500Mhz difference between a G4 and an Athlon XP (Intel isn't even in my vocabular anymore).
A lot of people will spout garbage about faster clock speeds cheaper. But when I want to get my work done, it isn't just the cpu that delays me. I run a athlon64 workstation, and an ibook I bought as a Mac trial run. For getting my work done, my ibook spanks my PC.
Simply put, buy whatever gets you the best bang for the buck, and for me Macs do.
yep that is great company with good prices
xlr8yourmac.com will show you how to do many of those things too
but
"upgrade the GFX card to the biggest baddest ATI bad boy out there"
please point out that it is the latest and greatest that is made for the mac.
ati has several high end models that do not work in macs.
the ati 9800 pro with 256mb is not made for the mac
the ati 9800 xt with 256mb is not either
and the brand new
ATI Radeon X800 Pro and XT Platinum Edition R420 cards are not made for mac yet either.
nor of course are any of the firegl cards made for mac
you posted a link for a press release from 4 months ago, but unfortunately you cannot buy that special edition card yet
but if you look a little closer you will see this on atis site:
mac radeon 9800 edition
http://www.ati.com/products/radeon9800/radeon9800prome/specs.html
Specifications
128MB DDR memory
Dual Integrated 10-bit per channel 400MHz DACs
Integrated 165MHz TMDS transmitter (DVI compliant and HDCP ready)
Integrated TV-Out support up to 1024x768 resolution
Multiple display connections
DVI-I port
VGA port
S-Video port
DVI-I to VGA & S-Video to Composite adapters included
System Requirements
Mac® OS X 10.2.5 or later
AGP 4x or 2x capable Macintosh®
128MB of system memory
Installation software requires CD-ROM drive
DVD playback requires DVD drive
Power connection to the computer
RADEON™ 9800 PRO MAC EDITION requires connection to your computer’s internal power supply for operation. ATI recommends a 300-Watt power supply or greater to ensure normal system operation where a number of other internal devices are installed.
i will wait here for you to get some stuff right. do you use macs?
you can't read can you!!! did you even read the link above? you want some stores to buy it at?
http://www.academicsuperstore.com/market/marketdisp.html?PartNo=711...
i went to the link you posted both times
i also went to this link for ati's mac page:
http://www.ati.com/products/mac.html
please note that of all the models ati is currently shipping, the 9800 pro 256mb SPECIAL EDITION is not listed.
finding an unreleased product that has been announced does not mean you can buy one today and install it in a mac. that press release from ati is 4 months old and still no Special Edition. Meanwhile the 256mb 9800 pro and the 9800xt have been out and buyable for windows and linux for 6 months and more.
Cant we all just agree that macs are overpriced, underperforming, peices of s%$^?
No, we can't. I am quite happy with mine, and I think it was definitely worth the amount of money I put into it. I don't own virus software; I don't fret about hackers; my computer isn't infected with spyware and adware; I get my work done easily. I'm sure that, after 3 years, that alone has helped to even out the supposed price/performance deficit.
"I don't fret about hackers; my computer isn't infected with spyware and adware;"
Im sorry but I run WinXP home and Slackware 9.1, and they are spotless.
A properly configured windows comp is stable,reliable, and secure. The mistake MS made was putting faith in the intelliegence of the computer illerate.
No patching + no firewall + no a/v + stupid user = trouble on ANY/EVERY platform. Including your precious mac.
Thankfully, SP2 will solve many of these problems and Longhorn takes it a step further by giving the user a much more powerful firewall and anti virus s/w by DEFUALT!
Take that!
'Apple is still following it's orginial GUI useablity guidelines. Where you spend 80% of your time in the top half of the screen.'
The main advantage of having the menu bar at the top of the screen is that it's touching the screen edge. This effectively makes menu items infinitely high. Rather than aiming for a thin menu bar, you just push the mouse until the pointer hits the screen edge. Look up Fitts' law for more information about why this is better than having a menu bar in each window.
'You want to work a little bit faster on a windows machine, drag the task bar to the top of the screen it's amazing how much better everything is.'
I have my taskbar placed vertically on my secondary monitor. The taskbar doesn't have enough space to display all my apps if it's placed horizontally, I end up with about 3 characters of each window title. That slows down app switching a lot more than having the taskbar a little further away.
truthseeker, I was writing about the sum total of your posts.
In this and other threads.
You are dishonest when you try to fudge around w/ your posting history.
It still amuses me about all the time and energy you spend on one computer company-it's like you're the ultimate anti-fan.
You use your taskbar vertically, ok.
What kind of monitor do you have that has more pixels running vertically than it does horizontally?
OK, I know I'll just end up sounding like everyone else you've ignored in a thread like this, unless you're a Mac user, in which case you'll probably just agree.
I've been a MS user most of my life. Started with DOS, a brief stint with OS/2 before moving from Windows 3.1 to 95, then 98, 2k, and then Redhat for a brief stint before using XP, at least for most of my day-to-day productivity. At work, I've been switching from Windows XP to Gentoo, which, honestly, once I got going on it, it's been the easiest linux distro to get it to do what I want, without hassles. I've been the sort to screw around with every setting I can figure out in a computer, just to see what I can do.
But in the midst of all this, I bought a Powerbook for home use about a year ago. 15" Titanium running OS 10.1.5, then 10.2, all the way up to 10.3.3 on a 12" Powerboook Al. In short, I don't screw with it at all. I just install what I want, use it for MS Word, iPhoto, iTunes, an occasional use of iMovie or Photoshop. It's become my no-need-to-change-anything-I-just-get-work-done computer. I didn't even realize how little I messed with it until I gave up my writing job and went back to IT, and started messing with computers again.
If I want to do something Unix-y, I can, but it's the sort of machine that it just seems pointless to do anything with it other than the work you need to get done, and I almost never need the command line. BUT IT'S THERE! When I absolutely need to do something, write some script, I have a bash shell waiting.
In short, I use Windows sometimes because there are Windows machines at work, and Windows won't play nice with anything else. I use Linux at work because of the wide range of quirky things it'll let me do easily (and I already have a Pentium 4 sitting around). But when I want to type something up, send out e-mail, browse the web, actually DO something, MacOS comes the closest to letting me do those things without thinking about the fact that I'm using a computer.
Just my two cents.
GASP!!!
No screenshots! :-)
Good, well written article. I think it's a pretty close match for my experiences with my first mac (800MHz G3 12" iBook) in the past few months (except for the french keyboard and the hardware faults - mine's been faultless so far and I have a UK keyboard).
Everything just works - it's like Linux without the headaches! I'm using Panther (never used Jaguar) so all I can say is most of the problems described have been solved. iCal is fantastic too. I use it on a daily basis to keep my appointments and tasks up to date. It's so easy to use and it syncs with my Clie (using iSync and Missing Sync) perfectly.
Suffice to say I'll never be going back to Wintel/Lintel as long as Apple keep going the way they are. "You'll have to pry my iBook out of my cold dead fingers" :o)
For those who need it, there is software called "Screen Spanning Doctor" available at http://www.rutemoeller.com/mp/ibook/ibook_e.html which increases the available resolutions for external monitors and allows you to turn off mirroring. Really nice!
Except I never had any hardware problem in more than two years with this iBook G3@300Mhz. When I upgraded to Panther, a few months ago, I noticed a BIG speed increase in every aspect. It really does feel like a new computer.
I had experiences with Windows, Linux and BeOS but I never though OSX was this good. I'll never go back to another OS.
Just wanted to point out that the ATI 9800Pro/256MB video card is available here and is listed in stock.
http://www.wiredzone.com/itemdesc.asp?ic=30529200
So the 'general' concensus is that users who've actually used all these OSs prefer os x BUT... they KNOW the advantages of using the other OSs. There are problems w/all of the OSs I've used...
Speed may be an issue, but not the whole issue... let's face it, a fast car with no suspension maybe fun to drive in a straight line but a slower one with a great suspension is fun to drive along those curvy hills...
ah so they say they have it in stock yet ati doesnt say they sell it?
very interesting
also very interesting that though they say it has 256mb it also says it is the "RADEON 9800 PRO MAC EDITION" which only comes with 128mb ram.
the SPECIAL EDITION comes with 256mb ram.
so its either a typo for the amount of ram or they are just trying to book pre-orders.
half life 2 was listed in stock at several places back just before their code was stolen too....no one ever had it.
This was an issue with Mac OS 9-down (not really, it was just a bigger pain).
I've been useing OS X from version 10.2 and I have XP on work-type laptop.
I must say langauge support is better on the Mac.
Don't get me wrong w/ Win2K & XP language support was better than Mac OS 9-down.
Today, language support is not an issue w/ Mac OS. As, a matter of fact, it's a pleasure.
Yours truely,
Friendly neighborhood Linguistics Major
"Thankfully, SP2 will solve many of these problems and Longhorn takes it a step further by giving the user a much more powerful firewall and anti virus s/w by DEFUALT!"
Your faith in products that haven't been released or are years from being released is admirable. Typical troll comment. Complain about what's past and offer some fictitious future. Try living in the present.
You must just go looking for people to flame. How bout we take a look at why it'd make sense to have a task bar on the side of a screen instead of at the bottom. Note.. I don't do this, but your attempt at dismissing it is pathetic. No, most screens don't have more pixels vertically than horizontally. It's usually a 4:3 ratio. However, you can stack more applications vertically than you can horizontally, and you can usually get the icon, plus the first few letters of the app/window. Once you get beyond 16 windows, it gets damn hard to use the horizontal task bar. If you still disagree with this, let me know, and we can work out some math 
yep its a typo
the model number they use is the same as the mac edition not the special edition.
https://buy.ati.com/shopati/product.asp?category=AP&part%5Fno=10...
RADEON 9800 PRO MAC EDITION 128MB AGP
Description: RADEON 9800 PRO MAC EDITION 128MB AGP
Product: 100-435050 US
Unit: EA
Price: $349.00
Quantity:
You're right about the trash moving in the bar but I found that using SHIFT COMMAND DELETE was better anyway for tossing stuff in the trash -saved all that mousing. I believe there is also a key combo for switching between apps but it's not that big of a deal for me so I never bothered to look for that again.
As for the cost, since the euro is so high these days, you should pop over for holiday and buy a PB at dollar prices - you can even get a cheap flight.
You'll just hate the PC and unlike the mac, it doesn't hold up its value - you'll be surprised at how much you can sell the mac for ...
About the vertical thing, he said that the labels get cut so much that you can't tell the difference between "someapp - readme.doc" and "someapp - another.doc" because they both say "som..." (well I don't have a mac so this is not a 100% authentic illustration, but that's the idea).
Placing the dock vertically allows the labels to be completely readable.
thats why i was confused, i know that most monitors have more pixels horizontally except for those speciality page layout monitors that give a true portrait view.
i did not attempt to dismiss it....i asked a question to find out what he was talking about. grow up.
as for what you said it makes no sense and i do disagree with you.
i have a taskbar right now running along the bottom of my screen. if i have so many apps and windows open that they grow too small to see what they are via the words, i can stretch the taskbar upwards and make it double, triple, ......thickness and they return to full size. the icons are always there no matter how small the app in the taskbar gets. there is a minimum size an app will assume on the taskbar and then at the end of the taskbar a scroll button set appears.
if i move my taskbar to the side and run it vertically and keep it a single taskbar thickness, i get nothing but icons....no descriptive wording at all. yes i can stretch its width and get the descriptions back but that is no different than what i can do on the bottom or top....
so i dont follow what you are talking about.
Before we start placing the Mac below PC, we must first learn how to write.
"I've was used a Mac"
Sorry people, Apple might have had a chance back in the late 80's, early 90's but they intentionally isolated themeselves and are nothing now. Get real, get a PC.
What a bunch of crap, dude. I don't own a Mac (yet), but I won't go as far as saying that they've 'lost'. In fact, I am pondering about purchasing an iBook or Powerbook.
It's okay to exaggerate, but this is really too much man. Get fucking real, please. Apple is not 'nothing', they're just a different world than yours.
Do everyone a favour, and stay truthful to your religion. Stay with Microsoft till the end, and after. No matter what the outcome will be in 10 years from now. Just don't ever become open minded; people might start to listen to your delusional ideas.
i can stretch the taskbar upwards and make it double, triple, ......thickness and they return to full size.
if i move my taskbar to the side and run it vertically and keep it a single taskbar thickness, i get nothing but icons..
You almost had me convinced, up until you switch the rules. If you can switch the height of the start bar at the bottom, why not switch the width of it on the side? Personally, I can't stand the startbar on anything but the bottom, but I really think you could see more on the side if you wanted.
No, just wanted you to show everyone what a real troll does-in the end the troll always ends up a classic trollism.
I give you a fine example:
"HAHA is that all you got? Pathetic, much like Apple."
(Sorry for the meta thread post.)
"Of course living in Paris this machine is French so came with a French keyboard which is so strange as to be downright evil, the Q, W, Z, A and M keys have moved and you have to press shift to get the numbers."
Umm... is the French keyboard actually completely hardwired? My PB came with a Finnish keyboard layout printed on the keyboard, but I'm using the standard US layout about 98% of the time.
What OSNews needs is user moderation (ala Slashdot). Trolls soon become irrelevant then (unless by some freak chance they're funny).
my man please read all the way through
"You almost had me convinced, up until you switch the rules. If you can switch the height of the start bar at the bottom, why not switch the width of it on the side?"
i said exactly that in my post as seen here....
if i move my taskbar to the side and run it vertically and keep it a single taskbar thickness, i get nothing but icons....no descriptive wording at all. yes i can stretch its width and get the descriptions back but that is no different than what i can do on the bottom or top....
switch on your eye glasses please.
Please dont mistake me with "Richard" eheh.
I think you read my post wrong, I was pointing that out exactly, you can do it the same both ways. What I'm saying is that I'd think you'd need less stretching on the side than in the bottom. At one point both become ridiculously overcrowded though, hense why I hate the whole concept of a taskbar.
"dude" read my other post. I use linux also. Mostly for programming. Kdevelop is pretty wicked.
I don't get it then. You have to be openminded, but why so hostile to other systems? Is it because apple is not opensource?
For the record, I am a Linux user too. I have been for 5 years now. Yet I don't see Apple as the enemy. I have no reason to be anti-apple. What is your reason?
About the 'different world' thing, you must have misunderstood me. I am talking about software and hardware world. Being a Linux user, you *are* in a different world. But you probably thought I was insulting you; that usually has something to do with insecurity. No worries though.
And for games on PC, I don't give a shit. DOOM III and Half-Life 2 are just two first person shooter games with enhanced graphics. Why the hell would I save up money for that?
I just sometimes out the troll who thinks he's smart and cute, when he's being neither, or the one, who by sheer volume of posts, c's.
I think you are all wrong.
Amiga is gonna make a huge comeback, converting both windows, mac and linux users alike.
ooops, my mistake....didnt notice that there were two Richard's.
sorry. so now i have made debman happy that i made a mistake...and I admit typing an incomplete name.
hehe
your point about a vertical task bar is in the end correct:
you can see the whole label for a running app, open window, etc if you stretch the bar wide enough....doable but a very inefficient use of space as the bar will end up being about 1.5" wide/thick and have a whole stack of narrow apps at the top near the start button/quicklaunch bar and below them before you get to the system tray will be a large swath of unused taskbar space.
There is a new Sony that looks quite attractive, a 10.6" screen and 3.1lbs of weight. However it is prohibitively costly ($2,299 US). I would probably buy an iBook if I were to currently buy a laptop, the nice little $1,100 one has the features I seak.
The Sony runs linux quite well, I've seen it with a battery monitor working.
I doubt you will find a new PC laptop that has hardware support for BeOS; but if you do that'd be nice.
Course, my spite for Sony would likely drive me to buy the Apple. Something about Movie companies that irritates me......
I assume you are not trolling..
My Mac is VERY Fast. I have 4 computers, Dell Insprion 8500 2.2 with 1/2 gig of ram Laptop. P4 3.0 HT with a gig of ram and ATI 9800 Pro, another p4 2.8 HT with a gig of ram and Ati 9800 Pro. I am a game developer.
And I have a Mac. Why A Mac in a PC/Intel Domaniated world. #1 Its faster for office related working. Office for the mac is clearly the better product than for windows. Speed? Good god, IBM PowerPC chip runs circles around the intel chips. Frankly, If users had a choice of PowerPC or intel on the windows machine, Intel be out of business in 5 years. No one wants that bloated chip.
Mac are slow? G4 1.0mghtz can keep the pace of a p4 2.x series. a G5 will out pace a p4 3+ or xeon chip, IN MY WORLD. Gaming WORLD. Thats probably why XBox2 is PowerPC and not intel. Why? PERFORMANCE is king.
I really wish Windows NT PPC version for the G5 would come out, but MacOS X is still DAMN FINE OS. But I am a huge microsoft fan.
Speed? Good god, IBM PowerPC chip runs circles around the intel chips.
But how does it fair when you add OSX on top of it? If the rest of OSX is like iTunes, you could have a 400ghz super computer and it would run like a 386
What always strikes me about these sorts of threads is that Windows/Linux users who've actually taken the time to get to know Macs and OS X tend to end up preferring them. Doesn't mean they're perfect or that Windows and Linux don't have their strengths. It just means that Apple can be a compelling solution, if you're willing to give it an honest look. Maybe it won't turn out to be the best choice for you, but at least your decision will be based on experience and not assumptions.
"...decision will be based on experience and not assumptions"
Exactly... and companies shouldn't be afraid of a mixed environment... PCs/Macs/Linux they all talk to each other... use what's best for your situation... That's the way is should be, and in my world... that's the way it is.
ignorance is the culprit here...
I agree it is very beneficial to have a heterogenous computing environment, unfortunately these environments are usually constructed out of needs to glue existing systems together, e.g. Windows clients pulling everything down from a Linux/UNIX/FreeBSD/OS X/insert your fav server OS here.This way when the Windows clients fall into complete dissarray they can be reformated and replaced almost seemlessly. My office has a homogenous environment, the worker bees using The new iMac's, the higher up people having sleek g5's amd everything tied together on a really sexy OS X server, but then I wake up to an inbox filled with reports of virii and other miscellaneous problems.
'You use your taskbar vertically, ok.
What kind of monitor do you have that has more pixels running vertically than it does horizontally?'
What does the number of pixels have to do with anything? With the taskbar vertical I can see about 40 characters of the title of up to 36 windows, or about 20 characters of up to 72 windows. This is more than adequate for my needs and as the taskbar is on my secondary monitor the space used doesn't bother me too much.
Even expanded to 2 rows, a horizontal taskbar would only show the first 2 or 3 characters of each title with 30+ windows open. I would have to mouse over the taskbar and wait for tooltips to find the window I want.
Plus you're correct, there are less pixels vertically than horizontally on a monitor, so vertical space is more valuable. A horizontal taskbar would be using up my valuable vertical screen space, especially as I'd have to expand it to at least 3 rows.
i agree with the other poster. if you've used linux for any extensive amount of time, how can you be so ademantely anti-apple?
people can debate preferences, opinions, etc all the want, but for many many reasons it is a better "desktop" operating system than currenty linux and windows xp. if you want to talk about servers, openness, available software, etc that's a different story. if you were discussing ease of use, desktop-developer oriented features, GUI consistency and standards os x wins just about everywhere and those are all measures of a "base" system by which software is created and used. without a strong core, available software suffers as a result.
if it doesn't run on your athlon 64fx, that's fine. but that doesn't make the operating system irrelevant. apple still commands 4% (and possibly more) according to google's stats, which is a very large sample portion of computer users. macs are used in a higher ratio than most areas in education and graphics/video/print. those fields aren't just going to disappear tomorrow, so in light of that apple will be around for a very long time to come. they've show no lack of ability to innovate and profit in an otherwise low-profit-margin market.
Also, it's much quicker to glance down a single column of titles on a vertical taskbar, than read through 4 or 5 rows of titles on a horizontal taskbar.
I don't get it then. You have to be openminded, but why so hostile to other systems?
Nope just macs. Long story short, I think:
-apple mooches oss and dosent contribute back(yes I know about khtml). For once id like to go to www.linux.com and see a vulnerabliliy reported by Apple. It still hasent happened.
Mac users get all the great oss apps usually via fink, but wheres itunes/quicktime for linux?
-apple is a blatant liar when it comes to marketing. Remember the huge controversy over the "fastest desktop CPU" being rewarded to the G5, when the benchmark didn't even exist.
For the record, I am a Linux user too. I have been for 5 years now.
Ive been on and off again for about 3-4yrs. I didnt start dual booting until Slackware 9.1 came out in late 2003. Damn thats a fine distro.
Why the hell would I save up money for that?
Dude try the alpha of doom3 and the vids of Hf2, they look fantastic. I cant wait.
Keyboard layouts do not depend on the hardware. He should be able to use the American or British English layout on his French keyboard.
Also, there is a 256 MB Radeaon available for the Mac:
http://www.academicsuperstore.com/q/PartNo/f/market-marketdisp/v/71...
OMG dude check www.ati.com, its not there. Heck even the box their showing clearly says 128MB Duh
Just recently, after using PCs for 15 years, bought my first Mac. A 1.33Ghz 12" Powerbook. This replaces my IBM Thinkpad R40. What can I say, absolutely love the machine and Mac OS X (Panther) is a dream to use. Had been playing aroudn with Linux for awhile, and quite frankly, i can hardly see linux being ready for the desktop market anytime soon. OS X and it just works
iTunes on windows is a fat pig, but that is because Apple, in order to maintain the same codebase, had to include in it all the support libs and ancillary applications that itunes on the mac uses.
if you ran it on a mac, you would not think anything about it at all.
except when you run it with visualizations and you have a large mp3 collection.
both itunes and iphoto choke on large collections of data.
its been well documented by apple users but hey you can improve it by buying a $3,000 dual g5.
Scott wrote:
"What always strikes me about these sorts of threads is that Windows/Linux users who've actually taken the time to get to know Macs and OS X tend to end up preferring them. Doesn't mean they're perfect or that Windows and Linux don't have their strengths. It just means that Apple can be a compelling solution, if you're willing to give it an honest look. Maybe it won't turn out to be the best choice for you, but at least your decision will be based on experience and not assumptions.
Yup, I agree with this. Worked with DOS since 2.x days and every version of Windows there has been, both in my job capacity (network engineer) and at home. At times I have used other OS's almost exclusively at home for a period of months; this includes OS2, BEOS and various flavours of Linux. My favourite by far is Gentoo. I will also point out right now that I have had very few stability problems with any version of Windows since Win98.
I was sick of continually rebooting my PC so the 'better half' could use Windows, so would often just leave it there and suffer with XP. Due to this, I was looking at buying a second PC so that I had two desktop class machines as well as an old PIII that was used as a linux server. One for me and one for her :-)
Id kept a bit of an eye on the Mac and OSX and when Panther came out, it seemed to me that OSX gave me all the worlds I wanted. Good multimedia support, a unix backend and a GUI that the 'better half' could use, as well as lack of current viruses etc. On the otherhand, my god they were expensive compared to what I can build a PC for.
When iTunes came out for Windows, I downloaded and tried it out. The quality/feel/simplicity of iTunes is what finally sold me to stump up with the money for the Mac and that maybe the Mac afficiando's were right about it being a nicer environment to work in.
Then came the whole 'which one'. The G5 came out as the best option since it allowed me to use my current 19" monitor and had the best 'future-proofing' via ram expandability and videocard upgradability. So I got a G5 1.8 SP as a run-out model. The 1.6 was a little too crippled features-wise (4gb of Ram and only PCI) and I couldnt really justify the extra $$$ for one of the DPs for a home machine. The only pity is that since it was a run-out, I couldnt do a build-to-order to upgrage to the Radeon 9600 video card. One thing that does really bug me is that I cant buy that card as a seperate item from Apple and that ATI dont sell the 9600 for the Mac. I dont play games enough to justify the 9800 and the Geforce FX5200 doesnt give quite good enough framerates in Americas Army or UT2004.
Once it arrived, even opening the box was a pleasurable experience. Ive never seen such nicely done packaging and the G5 itself is stunning from a design and hardware point of view, although a 3rd drive bay would have been nice.
I ENJOY using this computer. XP just gives me the sh*ts. While the GUI isnt as ultimately as responsive feeling as XP, its velvet smooth. Even when its being pushed, it still feels smooth whereas XP starts falling over in a tied-up heap. Its still running with the standard 512MB of ram, though I am going to throw an extra GB at it at some stage. Once you have 3 users running (via FUS) and want to work on a large photoshop doc, it does start grinding a little bit.
OSX took a little bit of getting used to, but ultimately I think I prefer it. I definately prefer the top menus and the better menu-item conformity (ie Preferences always under the Application name in the menu). Im still not as 'fluent' with the GUI as I am on Windows, there is just still too many learnt motor responses that I have, plus the fact that I work on a PC 8 hours a day at work. Having to use Expose or a different key combination to get between windows in the same application is a little annoying sometimes. However, if you have a huge number of apps open, all with a number of windows... then the Dock / Expose / Apple-Tab / Apple-~ comes into its own. For me, its FAR easier to navigate through a large number of open apps/docs on OSX
It also JUST WORKS. Plugged my HP printer in, no annoying popups or driver installs etc (one advantage of a regularly updated OS - less chance of outdated drivers), it just worked. Plugged my Nikon CP5400 camera in, it just worked. Plugged a mates Sony DV camera in, it just worked... etc etc. I can USE this computer and not have to mess around with it, I dont have to spend time each week checking for updated m/b drivers, or updated video drivers, or making sure my virus scanner is up to date, or that the Windows Update has failed to find a new update (or choked on an update) AGAIN. I dont have to recompile kernels. I dont have to continuously download and apply secuirty patches (and reboot).
When I got it last December, I immediately did a couple of reinstalls and messed around and upgraded to Panther (from Jaguar preinstalled). Since then, I have rebooted maybe 5 times and always due to an update that required a reboot. It has NEVER crashed.
Other nice little things like the java/swing apps I wrote in Linux run on the Mac with out any work (no JVM to install etc) and look better to boot. XCode is there and Im having a mess around with Objective-C/Cocoa. And I have a shell that gives me all my normal utilities that I love on Unix.
There are definately things that DO bug me. I havent found a way to FORCE finder to do a refresh of files in a directory. SMB access was a little dodgy up until 10.3.3. I dont like the way it sorts directories intermingles with files, rather than all dirs at the top. iPhoto cant (without extra work/scripts/repartitioning) have a shared photo library that multiple users on the same box can access and download stuff into (this is my biggest one). There are others, but I cant think of any. Most of them are very picky things and arent really a problem.
What it finally comes down to is that, overall, I far prefer the Mac to anything else I have ever used. Its fun. And the 'better half' loves using it, she experiments herself now, rather than always asking how to do something in Windows.
itunes really slows down when youre library is around 15,000 songs, im not going to debate whether thats likely a legal collection or not because that'd be making me hypocritical.
i don't really use iphoto, but it's my understanding in version 4 (which is 50 bucks but comes with garageband, idvd, imovie etc, not the 3000 needed for a dual 2ghz g5) handles large libraries much better.. either way, i don't use it..
if you're going to be doing to be working with a large number of images id say to go with <a href=http://www.iview-multimedia.com/>iView very solid software, works well with the 200,000 + images we work with at our company.
sorry about the html formatting
http://www.iview-multimedia.com/
A properly configured windows comp is stable,reliable, and secure. The mistake MS made was putting faith in the intelliegence of the computer illerate.
Hmm. The math department at my university has converted en masse its several hundred lab computers (and most of its grad student computers as well) from Windows to Linux and OSX. Why? To save money: it's too time-consuming and expensive to maintain Windows.
Computer illiterate, eh?
But how does it fair when you add OSX on top of it? If the rest of OSX is like iTunes, you could have a 400ghz super computer and it would run like a 386
Not sure what super computer you're talking about.
http://www.top500.org/list/2003/11/
Oh and it's running OS X. Notice that Dell is in 4th place (behind Apple)?
considering you can implement software updating services on a windows network for free. sus is free from ms and with admins that know what they are doing it can be dled once to the server and then rolled out to all the clients based on whatever parameters they choose.
linux and mac os x dont need to be upgraded huh? they dont need to be secured and maintained?
schools move to linux as they are generally hotbeds of liberalism and are anti capitalism. what school are you at that is making technology choices based on political slant?
so you can pull it from all stats
va tech tore that machine apart as it didnt suit them (after less than 6 months of using it)
also, the figures were never independantly verified.
nothing but marketing FUD.
so you can pull it from all stats
va tech tore that machine apart as it didnt suit them (after less than 6 months of using it)
also, the figures were never independantly verified.
nothing but marketing FUD.
Yeah, the machines were replaced with the more up-to-date Xserves.
And who do you suppose is going to "independently" verify the stats.
It must really hurt inside to see that Apple is beating your favorite machine!
va tech and apple stage massive marketing event
va tech gets all dual g5 mac towers from apple first. regular customers are delayed and get macs later than promised.
less than 6 months later va tech rips apart cluster at great expense to get machines that do a better job (what did this migration cost?)
apple then when xserves go into production gives first shot to va tech and again delays release to all other customers.
funny thing is when doing the switch out, apple still hasn't shipped a faster g5 cpu so va tech gets no speed benefit, just a size and power benefit. (11 months into steve jobs claim we would see 3ghz g5 by end of june 2004, we have not seen ANY speed increase!)
nothing beats a marketing event even if you build a cluster out of 1000 super elegant giant aluminum desktop towers. hey lets build a special rack system for them, lets spend a fortune installing special cooling system, and lets use more power while we are at it.
all science is submitted to peers for independant review. the same applies to publicly listed supercomputers. who knows how many secret govt or private pharmaceutical companies have supercomputers that would smash that mac cluster. they dont get submitted for peer review. dream on.
its all marketing FUD.
my best rig is an amd64 3400+ with 1gb pc3200 ram, sata hard drives, and an ati 9800 xt pro.
there are very few things the dual 2ghz g5 mac can beat my best rig in. and my machine cost over $1000 less.
i dont own any 5 million dollar supercomputers.
nothing beats a marketing event even if you build a cluster out of 1000 super elegant giant aluminum desktop towers. hey lets build a special rack system for them, lets spend a fortune installing special cooling system, and lets use more power while we are at it.
Yeah notice that price was a lot less than the super computers ranked directly in front and directly behind the Super G5 ranking. Not to mention that Dell lost out to Apple on the VA Tech bid to build the monster.
o knows how many secret govt or private pharmaceutical companies have supercomputers that would smash that mac cluster.
Unfortunately for you, you have nothing to show for your ridiculous claim!
It's not marketing FUD, it's just reality and you're hating every minute of it.
FUD isn't the right term (Fear of what? Not choosing Apple?)
Regardless, the marketing point of the VT cluster was price/performance. A cluster could be built with twice the number of computers, but so far no one beat Apple on price.
i give no credence to wild claims of performance that have not been verified and the machine has since been dismantled....its a pipe dream just as much as wondering about what secret govt agencies and specialty commercial computing labs are capable of doing.
you and other of the mac faithful are the ones trotting out incomplete science in any effort to try to look good.
i need not try to ride on the coat tails of 5 million dollar computers to make me feel proud of the slow and over priced computer i own.
my machine is fast and was a great buy and only a few select desktop computers made can out perform it...athlon fx and pentium 4 3.2 and 3.4ghz extreme models that cost substantially more than what i own.
a dualg5 costs way more and in benchmarking done by both apple and pc sites and magazines all over the world the stats tell the tale. the g5 is a powerful machine but it remains weaker than top end pc desktops and costs substantially more.
its all marketing FUD...hey you can even buy a piece of Mac history at macmall! better hurry to buy that overpriced used computer.
http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/f/FUD.html
"FUD /fuhd/ n. Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company: "FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products." The idea, of course, was to persuade them to go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors' equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors' equipment or software. See IBM. After 1990 the term FUD was associated increasingly frequently with Microsoft, and has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon."
repeat after me word/acronym snob:
"has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon"
i give no credence to wild claims of performance that have not been verified and the machine has since been dismantled....its a pipe dream just as much as wondering about what secret govt agencies and specialty commercial computing labs are capable of doing.
Where is your proof that the numbers are "wild"? Face it, your green with envy.
a dualg5 costs way more and in benchmarking done by both apple and pc sites and magazines all over the world the stats tell the tale. the g5 is a powerful machine but it remains weaker than top end pc desktops and costs substantially more.
It depends on the benchmarks. I've seen the PC beat the Mac as well as I have seen the Mac beat the PC. They're both run pretty much neck-n-neck these days give or take the task being compared. But the real question is; how fast do you need your machine to go to check email?
not very as most mac buyers arent fortunate enough to be able to afford dual g5 machines and are still using much slower single cpu g4 machines...cpu technology that is now 4 years old in many cases.
and they still pay more for those than if they bought a faster PC.
but yes the g5 does win in a few select encoding operations. its not a complete rout, the g5 wins about 1 out of 20 benchmarks that are doable on both platforms.
the single most important pro application for a mac is photoshop and it even runs faster on PCs.
not very as most mac buyers arent fortunate enough to be able to afford dual g5 machines and are still using much slower single cpu g4 machines...cpu technology that is now 4 years old in many cases.
Sorry to bust your bubble, but I own and maintain both computer types. And yes, my PC has an Athlon Inside. My other Macs have G4s and I get to see both perform on a daily basis.
and they still pay more for those than if they bought a faster PC.
Not everyone needs some fast PC or Mac, or even cares. Getting work done on the computer through the idea of user-ability and being able to communicate via the web is the concern. You few but vocal clockspeed chasers are the only ones who care about MHz! And as often as you update your machines to keep up with the Jones' would could had a few Macs lying around the house.
but yes the g5 does win in a few select encoding operations. its not a complete rout, the g5 wins about 1 out of 20 benchmarks that are doable on both platforms.
Now you're the one spreading the FUD.
the single most important pro application for a mac is photoshop and it even runs faster on PCs.
There's more to the Mac than just using Photoshop!
In 1996 I bought my first computer, a "super fast" Pentium. I put it to rest in 2001. The only reason it was not fast enough anymore was because I wanted to play DivX movies, and a 120Mhz CPU just didn't cut it. I have yet to own a computer with more than 800Mhz as a CPU frequency. I've really never had complaints about speed.
CPU speed is the least of my concerns really, and I know that most computer users are with me on that one. They really don't care what the specs of their computer is, or how many gigaflops it can do. Except for games, there's very little difference now days between a P3 600 and a P4 3.2ghz. Users generally don't care how fast their computer is. What they care about is the experience.
I know very few details about the VA Tech cluster. However, I highly doubt that they'd be put up as 3rd fastest public supercomputer on VA's word. "Yea yea, it's REAL FAST." Logic says that a 3rd party ran a test.
> but yes the g5 does win in a few select encoding operations. its not a
> complete rout, the g5 wins about 1 out of 20 benchmarks that are doable
> on both platforms.
I enjoy this comparison from PC magazine:
Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop is a popular image editing program used extensively on both OSes. We tested using version 7.01, the latest available for both Windows and Macintosh, and we used Adobe's G5 Processor plug-in update for Mac OS X, which lets the program take advantage of the system's additional memory and special instructions. We started with a 59.5 MB test image, but many operations completed too quickly to time, so we quadrupled the size to 238MB.
At these larger image sizes, although the Wintel test times were quite good, both the G4 and G5 computers proved more adept at distort functions like wave and pinch. Moreover, on the Windows system, loading the controls often took a minute or more. If these times are added back to the actual test times, both Macintosh computers would have clearly outperformed the Windows-based computer.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1274230,00.asp
I think that is the best way to go Martin. I bought the same iBook reviewed in this review, but with 128 MB ram. Since it was my first experience with a Mac, I assumed that Mac was just slow compared to Windows. Then I upgraded the ram to 640 MB and it ran twice as fast (and I never have to close any application anymore). A couple of months ago, I bought Pather and it runs even faster now.
Apple charges too much for pre-installed RAM. The way to go is to buy a 128 MB, buy ram from third parties and install it immedietly. Believe me, it will make your experience a lot better.
of 24 scores that run on both platforms the dual g5 won 8.
against a dual xeon 3.0ghz dell workstation. an overpriced specialty workstation that is generally purchased by users that intend to run it for at most a couple of very precise tasks....most commonly 3d and cad/cam work.
but as that is already an outpaced cpu and the g5 has not been upgraded or dropped in price you can now buy even faster xeons and
the pentium 4 3.2 and 3.4 ghz extreme editions with 2mb cache
the amd athlon fx 51 and 53
tha amd64 3200+ and 3400+
all of those have seen price drops since the release of the 2ghz g5.
we can trot out all of the benchmarking if you really want to see it as done by third parties but the most telling was the comprehensive set done by sister magazines maximumpc/macaddict back when the g5 shipped. pc cpus back in the late fall of 2003 utterly trounced the g5....especially the pentium 4 extreme and the athlonfx.
One of the cool things about TextEdit not mentioned in the piece is that you can ask the computer to 'speak' the text. Unfortunately, Apple's built in speech synthesizer is not yet upto the mark. I hope they improve it in future versions.
One commercial software that I found to be good at this is http://www.rhetorical.com/. IBM also has a product, but it is no better than Apples.
If anyone has any suggestions on what I can do to get better speech synthesizer for my iBook (preferably free of cost) please let me know.
and have it cheaper than a stock 1.8 or 2.0 G5 system, then good for you, but I doubt you will.
the dual 2ghz g5 does not win a single test:
http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,112749,pg,8,00.asp
again those are pcs from many months ago and several new cpus and video cards have already shipped to replace them and those older models have also subsequently dropped in price.....
and debman i will be happy to show you those machines prebuilt that cost less than a dual 2ghz g5. give me a moment to get them...
I've been a Mac user ever since the Power Mac 6100/60 was first released. And, except for a 5 year stint away from the Mac platform (couldn't afford to upgrade my 8500/120 with a DVD drive to play Dragon's Lair DVD, had to trade my 8500/120 for a DVD-equipped PC to do so, and haven't had the money to "get back with Mac" until about 6 months ago), I have been a staunch "Macophile" ever since day 1.
So, unless Atari ever starts making computers again, BeOS makes a HUGE comeback, or the AmigaOne/AmigaOS 4 really hit the big times, I am going to be a Mac user til the day I die... or until Apple stops making/supporting them, but may that day NEVER come in my lifetime!
But, truth be told, I'd rather be using an Atari computer with as much power as my 466MHz G4 DA has. Atari will always be "THE One" for me, but the Mac is the next best choice given that Atari isn't likely to do that again...
Latre!
Luposian
at the apple store
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/715...
dual 2ghz g5 tower without monitor or speakers with 1gb ram and the top end mac ati 9800 pro with only 128mb ram comes to $3449....prebuilt.
as for a pc with either an athlonfx or pentium 4 extreme cpu
http://www.abspc.com/app/config.asp?mono=1706&view=2
the following pc is $3691 right now at their site. Nearly every weekend you can order a pc from them with a 5% off discount if ordered on weekends. That would put them at nearly identical prices but please not i configured this pc with a high end 21" crt, top end 5.1 logitech speakers, a tv tuner card, a very elegant coolermaster aluminum case, the top end sound blaster audigy 2 zs sound card with live drive, and i put double the hard drive capacity in it versus the mac. It also has a better ATI viedo card. If I dropped that stuff down a notch and took off the monitor and speakers to match the mac not having them in the above config, the PC would cost about $1000 less.
These are the specs (prebuilt) and includes two free very well regarded games valued at about $80:
Ultimate M6 Print Summary Base/Sale Price: $2599
Item Description Quantity Price
Cooler Master Wave Master Case without Power Supply, Model "TAC-T01-E1C" -RETAIL (Item#ABS11119023) 1 $38
Logitech Z-680 5.1 Surround Speaker Set THX-Certified with Dolby Digital Decoder (Silver) (Item#ABS36121105) 1 $267
NEC-Mitsubishi MultiSync 22" FE21111SB-BK Diamondtron Flat-Screen CRT Monitor (Black) (Item#ABS24002040) 1 $541
Antec 480W Power Supply TRUE480 (Item#ABS17103909) 1 Standard
Asus Motherboard for AMD Athlon 64 & Opteron 200 - Model SK8N nForce3 pro150 (Item#ABS13131465) 1 Standard
AMD Athlon 64 FX-53, 1MB L2 Cache, - OEM (Item#ABS19103437) 1 Standard
Thermaltake Silent Boost K8 Copper Heatsink and Fan for AMD Athlon 64 FX and Opteron (Item#ABS35106036) 1 Standard
Corsair XMS Series 512MB PC3200 DDR 184-Pin ECC Registered (Item#ABS20145462) 2 pieces Standard
ATI Radeon 9800 XT 256MB DDR DVI/TV-out (Item#ABS14102317) 1 $50
Leadtek "EXPERT" PCI TV/FM Tuner Card with Remote (Item#ABS14122180) 1 $54
Maxtor 160GB SATA 7200RPM 8MB Cache (Item#ABS22144322) 2 pieces $65
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum 7.1 with 1394 (Item#ABS29102163) 1 $77
DVD|SONY 16X DDU1612/B2 BLACK OEM (Item#ABS27131003) 1 Standard
NEC 8x DVD+RW/-RW Drive, Black Model ND-2500A OEM (Item#ABS27152014) 1 Standard
Sony 1.44MB Floppy Drive (Black) (Item#ABS21103116) 1 Standard
18" ATA133 Round IDE Cable (Transparent Black) (Item#ABS12104627) 1 Standard
Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer Optical (Two-Tone) (Item#ABS26105142) 1 Standard
Microsoft 114 keys (10 Hot Keys) Internet Keyboard | Mouse Not Included | - Black (Item#ABS23109125) 1 Standard
Blue 8" x 9" x 6" ABS Mouse Pad (Item#ABS17114110) 1 Standard
Microsoft Windows XP Home with Service Pack 1a (Item#ABS37110015) 1 Standard
EVGA Nvidia NVDVD 2.0 DVD Software (Item#ABS32164001) 1 Standard
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 (Item#ABS37110020) 1 $0
Microsoft Rise of Nations - PC Game (Item#ABS37110021) 1 $0
2Net 1 Year 24/7 Tech Support & Onsite Service | (Concurrent with Standard Warranty) (Item#ABS88101201) 1 Standard
ABS Computer System Binder for Organizing Drivers and Manuals (Item#ABS57101101) 1 Standard
Free Gift! ABS/Canon Silver Ink Pen (Item#ABS00101004) 1 Standard
Price with Option(s): $3691
and of course you have all those options you can pick and choose to suit you. get xp pro or better video card or fill that case with hard drives....spend less on speakers, whatever....
http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,112749,pg,8,00.asp
This benchmark has been beaten to death on these and many other forums. Premier 6 is not a native MacOS X application. Word on Mac is not the same as word on windows.
A better benchmark is the Vatech super cluster which is the 3rd fastest in the world and does it with hundreds of cpus less than either the opteron or xeon.
3
Virginia Tech
United States/2003
X
1100 Dual 2.0 GHz Apple G5/Mellanox Infiniband 4X/Cisco GigE / 2200
Self-made
10280
17600
4
NCSA
United States/2003
Tungsten
PowerEdge 1750, P4 Xeon 3.06 GHz, Myrinet / 2500
Dell
9819
15300
6
Los Alamos National Laboratory
United States/2003
Lightning
Opteron 2 GHz, Myrinet / 2816
Linux Networx
8051
11264
There you go a 2200 cpu g5 beat a 2500 cpu xeon and a 2816 2.0Ghz opteron. I trust the linpack cores on the top 500 site a lot more than the pcworld benchmarks.
Your ABS PC is missing something when you compare it with the high-end G5. Something called a second cpu and a dual cpu motherboard. Add those and see the price go up.
" Hmm. The math department at my university has converted en masse its several hundred lab computers (and most of its grad student computers as well) from Windows to Linux and OSX.....Computer illiterate, eh?"
And what makes you think that computer literacy is based on common intelligence.
Using your logic, I must be a genius since Im more much adept at computers than my cousin that works as a physicist at the Uni of toronto.
Bow down to my magnificence
no the dual cpu isnt missing
it isnt needed to outperform any mac made.
if you are running very specialized software or server stuff than a dual cpu or quad or name your number comes in handy.
see most macs sold to the tune of about 3/4 of them do not have dual cpus. the overwhelming majority of mac software (even apples) does not benefit from a second cpu. apple has been forced into using them in a select few high end models to make a stab at the performance issues that have plagued them for years. the consumer pays more but gets little real world benefit from that second cpu.
f you are running very specialized software or server stuff than a dual cpu or quad or name your number comes in handy.
see most macs sold to the tune of about 3/4 of them do not have dual cpus. the overwhelming majority of mac software (even apples) does not benefit from a second cpu.
There you go spreading FUD again. Most of apple's prosumer apps like finalcut pro, photshop can use multiple cpus.
Here is the top output from my power book, notice safari has 7 threads, terminal has 3.
PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE
1720 top 7.2% 0:01.05 1 16 26 292K 384K 1.73M 27.1M
1719 tcsh 0.0% 0:00.02 1 13 20 360K 616K 876K 22.1M
1718 login 0.0% 0:00.04 1 13 37 140K 376K 488K 26.9M
1717 Terminal 0.0% 0:03.95 3 62 131 2.55M 6.29M 6.65M 140M
1692 Safari 0.0% 7:24.73 7 118 565 65.8M 16.9M 72.8M 215M
1676 lookupd 0.0% 0:00.25 2 35 58 420K 728K 1.19M 28.5M
MacOS X can very well use multiple cpus, apps don't need to be multithreaded to use a second cpu, though most are. The OS's scheduler can very well schedule any thread it wishes to any of the cpus transparent to the Apps running on the systems.
PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE
1724 LimeWire 7.7% 0:10.56 47 678 460 41.6M+ 26.0M+ 53.9M+ 446M
See limwire/java is using 47 threads. The MacOS X kernel can easily schedule limewire to run on one and safari to run on the other cpu if this machine were to be a dual cpu box. Applications need not be specifically threaded for the OS or the consumer to benifit from a second cpu in a box.
This whole notion of oh applications can't use the second cpu anyway, a blatanlty false statement, the OS can always use a second CPU to improve the throughput in a systems.
By the way almost every cpu manufacturer is moving to dual core cpus soon, to further discredit your false notion.
"By the way almost every cpu manufacturer is moving to dual core cpus soon, to further discredit your false notion"
"is moving"....and hyperthreading on pentium 4 gives benefits in some things more than others today.
dual cores will cheaper than dual cpus in one machine.
the future....
but of course a second cpu is better than just one but at what cost is the point. the bottom line is the benefit for most applications does not justify the expense.
but of course a second cpu is better than just one but at what cost is the point. the bottom line is the benefit for most applications does not justify the expense.
Well apple sells a dual 1.8ghz 64-bit cpu for $2500 machine for find me a dual cpu opteron for that price with all the features and software stack, I believe the athlon 64s are single only, but I could be wrong.
Your price comparison of the abs pc is pointless. You need to get a dual cpu machine to compare it to. Your assertion that a dual cpu won't make a difference for average users is baseless and absoluletly naive.
The point was not the dual core cpus would be cheaper but that more cpus makes a difference in performance.
and hyperthreading on pentium 4 gives benefits in some things more than others today.
hyperthreading is a pseudo-SMT hack intel did to squeeze more out of the p4, it is not a dual core cpu. Sun and IBM have dual core cpus in the market. AMD and intel are soon to follow.
"Well apple sells a dual 1.8ghz 64-bit cpu for $2500 machine for find me a dual cpu opteron for that price with all the features and software stack, I believe the athlon 64s are single only, but I could be wrong."
you run about talking like you know so many things but you dont know how to use a search engine?
on the pc i can find dual opterons
dual amd athlon mp
dual pentium 3
dual xeon
use a search engine or shopping site and price to your hearts content.
of course i can find dual cpu pcs for under $2500. i can also custom build them to my hearts desire as well.
id go through all the trouble and youd tell me i was tripping cause it dont have iphoto or some such crap.
find it yourself and post back here.
What is it with our dear TheSeeker? He also attacked everybody about the price of the Mac in the previous Mac thread a few days ago. Well, let me enter the war with my own experieces with Macs and PC's.
I would say that if you want a the fastest processor for the lowest price, you don't buy a Mac. But why is it only the processor speed that counts? What about hardware design? A nice case? MacOS? Don't they count?
I have two PC's. A Macintosh Performa 6400/180 and a Pentium II 350. Now let's look at them:
The PC costed about $1100. It was not the fastest available: the Pentium II 450 was already out. In the past 6 years, it has broken 7 times:
- speaker smelling like they were burning
- CD-ROM player ruined the harddisk, well, almost
- Non-working keys on the (Trust) keyboard
- 2x broken monitor: 1x Philips, 1x Belinea
- Broken power supply
- RAM that went bad
That means the only things that have not failed yet are:
- Case
- Mainboard + CPU
- Floppy drive
- Mouse
The Apple costed about $1700. It's 180 Mhz processor was faster than anything available in the PC world (the fastest PC had a Pentium 166). In the past 7 or 8 years, it has only had an empty battery two times, because we always pulled the plug when not in use.
Besides that, the software has also always just worked. I can't remember ever having to reinstall the MacOS (7.5.5 / 8.5) because something broke.
Additionally, I have recently experimented with the Apple: replacing the harddisk and adding a network card. And I can only conclude that the machine is designed extremely well. You can just slide out the mainboard to add cards. You can remove the front panel and then just slide out the HD to replace it.
That makes me think that you get what you pay for, even with Apple machines. Only some people get something different than they want when they buy a Mac, well, then don't buy one.
Btw. My parents do have a faster PC, in case you wonder.
And what makes you think that computer literacy is based on common intelligence.
What makes you think that mathematicians are not computer literate? Many are not, but a large number of them are. The largest section of my school's math department works in what we call scientific computing; another fairly large section (myself included) works in computer algebra. For these two groups, computer literacy is not an option.
Remember, computer science was born from the womb of mathematics departments: Turing, von Neumann, Knuth...
The deal with seeker is as Jack Perry so rightfully claimed is our hybrid troll.
If he can't discuss with reasoning he drops down to name calling. As evidence in the other thread "Apple is a business" shows. He posts price comparison and when someone comes and dismantles his comparison with well reasoned arguments, he again drops down to personal attacks.
He claims to have owned macs till 2003, I strongly doubt that claim.
I have seen him and many others on this forum, who make personal attacks and the moderators at OSnews, review thier comments even though it violates
alteast three of their rules, still don't moderate them down or ban them.
So it makes people, who are here to really have a discussion, want to get them off of their backs and get on with the real topic. We end up indulging them and then we get 100+ posts and always on mac topics. I have yet to see trolls of this caliber on other topic.
I did own three powerbooks before I switched to PC at my home. The point is: I hadn't met any problem in any parts of my powerbooks, and at last I said bye to it. It's very good to know that sometimes, you can get a bad dot on the screen. I think I am very lucky leaving the Mac early.
There is one thing that will keep me away from the Mac, and probably having to have a Windoze partition on my PC, games. I know I might get flamed for bringing up a use for computers that may not be 'serious' but I do play a lot of games.
I work in the systems team for a University and consider myself a fairly computer literate person. I use my PC for lots of non-gaming activities, Internet, file sharing, office tasks, audio work etc. I know some games will run on the Mac, just as they do on Linux (my other OS) but I want access to all games not just some. And I don't have a games console because the PC is best for FPS and strategy.
why would you get flamed? at least you have a preference based on a fact and not some strange irrational hatred like Seeker and carbon-12
"I think I am very lucky leaving the Mac early."
Could you elaborate a little?
i have no irrational hatred of apple
i have given them many thousands of dollars of my money over the years
i switched platforms and discuss my impressions of computers and software
if the truth hurts, oh well.
all of my posts lead back to a rational appraisal of apple computers:
they are overpriced
they are underpowerd for that price as compared to similarly priced models by other makers of computers
they are on the decline and i do not want to invest in a dying horse any longer
they are not as expandable as the platforms i now choose.
they do not have the as good of a selection of software and hardware solutions (including games)
it is not as easy to get support on the mac platform
repairs and parts and software for macs cost more
the list could go on....
i am not a troll, my opinions are well thought out and fairly well elaborated (yes i do drop some flame bait at times), and not that it really matters, my thoughts are a lot more well accepted by a larger proportion of people than most of the drivel i see mac users spouting.
and debman, you are welcome for finding those pc prices you requested.
i am not a troll, my opinions are well thought out and fairly well elaborated
Don't forget to tell us about your immense modesty, your incredible charm, and your boyish good looks.
You are entitled to your opinions; what we object to is your insistence that other people's opinions to the contrary are groundless. -- Well, that's what I object to, can't speak for the others.
As for Apple dying, well -- see the other story today about overall Mac sales increasing.
Then why did you spend "thousands of dollars" on Apple products? Oh wait, you didn't have any problems and after the commercial with the flying women of Windows XP you suddenly saw the light and bought a PC.
Well, I can say two more things of my own experience with our old Mac.
1. Mac OS Classic sucks. On our Performa 6400/180, you can't surf the internet in any usable way, since MacOS is too slow. Waiting an entire minute for the osnews.com mainpage is not funny.
2. Performance isn't everything. I am currently typing this on that same Performa 6400/180 on Linux, on KDE 3.2.2 with nice anti-aliased fonts. So what would be the use of a computer 10 times as fast? Could I type this comment in one tenth of the time? Most likely not.
I think it is time for people to start not only looking at the number of Ghz, MB and GB in a machine. I mean, nowadays people buy more LCD panels than CRT screens, and I bet that isn't because they (LCD panels) offer less image quality and lower resolutions for a higher price. Likewise, I know someone who has bought a recent PC, and the noise alone is so terribly loud that I would never want such a PC, how cheap it might be.
So I can get a Mac as my next computer.
i work with data and facts as generally accepted. not a bunch of opinions but as they are influenced by data. opinions alone hold little merit on a board like this.
apples total sales are up versus the same quarters a yr ago.
mac sales are down and that is what i am most concerned with here....not selling 800,000 ipods.
the other thread you mention has a direct quote by apple saying they worry about their opportunity for profitability if they cannot sell macs.
they are now driving sales via ipods and other non-mac items. they are getting the majority of their retail sales from non-mac items.
all of that spells trouble to me....and many apple analysts.
apple themselves also mention that maintaining profitability in the music segment will be difficult. ipods are doing great but when you can buy a 40gb creative zen mp3 player for $250 instead of apple's $499, i wonder how long they can command those kind of margins?
apples margins are also down...
i take all of that data and surmise apple is dying as a computer manufacturer, but only time will tell.
i certainly could be wrong, sun came from nothing to become one the worlds tech leaders....the same can be said about little dell or compaq back in the 80s. so apple as a $6 billion dollar biz likely has a better shot at it than someone starting from scratch, but all evidence currently points towards decline not growth.
"Then why did you spend "thousands of dollars" on Apple products? Oh wait, you didn't have any problems and after the commercial with the flying women of Windows XP you suddenly saw the light and bought a PC."
now i evaluated my purchases and after using macs exclusively for 15 years, i bought my first pc after i tried windows 98 second edition in 1999. I liked what I saw. I liked the price. I wanted to play Half Life. I enjoyed tinkering and upgrading.
I then tried Windows XP and liked it even better. Even more reliable, an even better feature set.
I also got to do the migration to os x and found it a miserable experience. It didn't go smoothly and it was very expensive.
I made the decision to go with Windows to save money.
I gave my Macs and all software and books away to a friend.
Nothing sudden about it.
I evaluated and found Windows to be the superior product based on all of the things being debated in these threads.
mac sales are down and that is what i am most concerned with here....not selling 800,000 ipods.
No, you really haven't been reading the other stories on the site, have you? Apple's latest SEC filing reports that Mac sales are UP, not DOWN. That does not include iPods, although it does include iBooks and PowerBooks. I even asked a question about it in the forum there.
So much for using the latest facts...
http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2004/04/14/unitsales/?lsrc=mcrs...
headline: iPods up, Power Macs down and also
Consumer sales good and bad
stats:
"Power Mac sales, which includes Power Mac G4s, Power Mac G5s and Xserve boxes, did not quite match expectations. Apple had hoped when the Power Mac G5 shipped last year that it would be able to sustain about 200,000 units sold per quarter -- they exited the quarter with 174,000 Power Mac units sold. Power Mac unit sales were up year-over-year by about 12 percent, although they DROPPED 19 percent sequentially"
so out of the recession and comparing to recession sales numbers they are up. great, as is nearly everyone. but, compared to a non-recession quarter just previous to the last one they are DOWN 19%. and they are not meeting their own stated goals.
"PowerBook sales totalled about 157,000 units -- $336 million all told. Forty-eight percent of the Macs Apple sold during the second quarter were portable units, between the PowerBook and iBook. Those PowerBook numbers did represent a 19 percent sequential DROP, however, and a 5 percent year-over-year DROP"
so powerbooks are down sequentially and year over year. bad news considering the mobile move is the big push for apple "the year of the laptop".....
"Apple sold 217,000 iMacs and eMacs for the quarter, racking up about $252 million in revenue. That's DOWN four percent from the holidays and OFF 15 percent year-to-year"
so again down sequentially and year over year.
"The iBook sold very strong for the quarter. Unit sales were FLAT sequentially, which is a victory, as calendar Q4 sales usually uptick with holiday and end-of-year shopping. That still translated into 201,000 iBooks sold for the quarter, worth about $223 million in revenue, UP 51 percent year-over-year"
ibook is FLAT sequentially, and up in a big way year over year. note this is the cheaper line and less profitable....not good for the bottom line.
you may now call me a troll again for posting accurate data taken directly from apple sec filings and as reported on probably the best known mac news site on the net.
Well, I have also switched from Mac OS 8.5 to Windows 98, and for me it was a switch from a perfectly working system to a system with blue screens every day. And I am not exraggating when I say that my Windows 98 system crashed already at boot 2 out of 3 times when I dared to install a virus scanner.
Windows 2000/XP seems to work pretty good, indeed, other than freezing entirely every now and then when a sound is played. Not to say Windows 2000 and XP (professional) are cheap though, and you don't even get MS Works with it, let alone Office. Or do you only install illegal copies of them?
And my parents also bought a Compaq laptop, with a celeron 667 processor. It wasn't exactly cheap, and what do you get? A computer that takes ten minutes to boot. Five to get at the login prompt, and five afterwards. And if you let it sit unused for a few hours, it seems all applications are swapped out so with every click you then do it takes at least 15 seconds to restore the application from the virtual memory.
Not to mention that my Intel PC of $1100 has been broken at least once a year.
Now you must be curious why whe haven't bought a second mac. The reason is that the combination of MacLinkPlus and ClarisWorks isn't exactly ideal to deal with Word documents with embedded spreadsheets. Looking back, I think a wiser thing would have been to buy Office 98 instead of a new PC, which had Works so you still couldn't open and save Excel files easily.
you may now call me a troll again for posting accurate data taken directly from apple sec filings and as reported on probably the best known mac news site on the net
Um, I'm not the one who claimed Mac sales were down. Compared to last year, the sales are up:
- Power Macs UP year-over-year by about 12 percent
- iBooks UP 51 percent year-over-year
- PowerBooks DROP 5 percent year-over-year
- iMacs, eMacs DROP 15 percent year-over-year
If you would bother to do some math, instead of capitalizing the words that favor your argument, you would see that total Mac sales are UP 5% over the last year.
So, I call you a troll because you are either deliberately misrepresenting a basic fact, or because you are ignorant. Which is it?
By the way, that 5% is an approximate number, calculating last year's sales from the data that Seeker posted. I didn't feel like looking up the actual sales data from last year, so I calculated 156000 PowerMacs, 166000 Powerbooks, 256000 iMacs and eMacs, 134000 iBooks from last year. That totals 712,000 Macs sold in the quarter, compared to 749,000 in this quarter.
Seeker might like to pretend that all that matters is the quarter-to-quarter change, whose data do support his argument; alas if he would read what he quoted, he would notice that calendar sales are always better in Q4 "with holiday and end-of-year shopping", while in Q1 people are paying off their accumulated debt. In other words, the comparison is invalid.
Overall Mac sales are up from last year, as Apple's SEC filing states, and the number agree.
I found that for dual processors, even building one myself, was the same price as apple. When you are building a dual processor workstation you don't use cheap pricewatch parts anyway.
What many who consider G5 comparable systems are either the exact same price if not more, or cheap half-assed competitors that don't come close to a real G5 dp powermac, or dual opteron system.
Jack is right for the same quarter from one year to the next.
Seeker is right from one quarter to the next.
But, no, the holiday season is a great quarter but many PC makers are reporting better sales from the fourth quarter 2003 to the first quarter 2004. Gartner, IDC, and Forrester are all revising numbers up as the world economy and especially the American economy kick into high gear again.
Apple has not realized the gains that other computer makers are getting from increased spending by world corporations and more confident consumers.
Finally, Apple's computer sales are trending downwards both as a percentage of the world market (Gartner estimates the world market at 187 million this year and Apple at its current pace will sell under 3 million to give them about 1.6% of the world share) and compared to their own highs of a few years ago.
Another interesting point is that Gartner's (and all other researchers) numbers do not include computers built by small shops and enthusiasts...which would add many more millions to the world total. No one is building macs as you cannot buy mac roms from apple. All self-built computers are therefore PCs.
The biggest story is not just one quarter to the next or one year to the next but the overall market trends: the world computer market is going to be about 30 million computers bigger this year versus two years ago but Apple's numbers are shrinking over that same time frame.
I would say the evidence is pretty clear. Apple's sales are declining and they better hope the iPod and ITMS can save them.
By the way, I have also noticed that the first people to trot the word "troll" and accuse people of being one tend to be the worst offenders themselves. Jack Perry fits that billing.
I see the trend continuing for Apple as they cannot release faster G5 machines and the iMac and eMac lines have grown a bit tired in their design. Apple needs a refresh as soon as possible.
Peace.
No one is building macs as you cannot buy mac roms from apple. All self-built computers are therefore PCs.
There is an irony here, in that Apple started off by selling built-it-yourself kits. :-)
By the way, I have also noticed that the first people to trot the word "troll" and accuse people of being one tend to be the worst offenders themselves. Jack Perry fits that billing.
I would really like to know how I fit that billing. Perhaps you'd like to peruse comments I've made in other threads, and dissect them for me, showing me how I'm trying to stir up an argument when none exists? I'm quite open to correction when I'm wrong, and I've been corrected in these forums in the past.
http://www.macminute.com/2003/12/20/10k
This is information for the year that just ended for Apple.
"Mac sales declined 3% year-over-year to approximately 3 million units"
So from fiscal year 2002 to fiscal year 2003, Apple sold approximately 100,000 fewer Macs.
From 2001 to 2002 Apple was ho-hum.
http://www.macminute.com/2002/12/19/sec
"Mac sales were relatively flat year-over-year at approximately 3.1 million units"
In 2001 Apple sold 3,087,000 Macs
IN 2000 Apple sold 4,558,000 Macs
2003 compared to 2000 is 1,558,000 fewer Macs per year. That is a decline of approximately 34%. Meanwhile the wold computer market has grown substantially in the same period of time.
Apple has shrunk massively over the last four years in computer sales and if you want to look at it in the most favorable light, is now treading water the last two years.
Peace.
It always amazes me that these Mac articles generate so much feedback. I've only been a mac person for about 5 weeks, but when I used PC/linux/windows, I never felt the need to go into a Mac news forum to state how much mac suck, they're going out of business, they're too expensive....etc. If you don't want to use the Mac, great, why the holy wars. Another thing, it seems like a common occurrence that a lot of Mac users also have decent PC's but rather use their Macs, even though they agree the Mac aren't as fast as their PC's. You'll then get an anti-Mac crusader telling them that the Mac sucks because it X amount slower or X amount more expensive than a PC. I bet if you said strawberries taste better than cherries you get these same idiots spewing forth crap loads of numbers and sales data to disprove that strawberries taste better.
If you would bother to read what Seeker had originally written, you'd see he was claiming Mac sales were down year-to-year, which is not the case, according to the latest results.
Here, let me help you out.
In the story on "XSLT: taming a functional language", I disagreed with Fredrik, who claimed that "real" programmers always count from 0. That thread has only 25 comments, and both of mine appear in the 1st 15 comments.
In the story on worms jacking up the cost of Windows, I took issue with Darius, who was blaming users who don't install a firewall.
In the highlights on Apple's SEC filings, I asked a question, under the topic "Confused", which was answered. I used that answer to address Seeker.
In this forum, I've talked about what my university's math department has done, and I've disagreed with whether Macs are "overpriced, underperforming pieces of crap," and I've taken issue with Seeker's claiming Mac sales are down year-to-year, when the SEC filing says they are up.
If that sort of writing is considered trolling, I guess that would mean pretty much every possible conversation one could have online that doesn't include starting an argument, or name-calling, must be trolling.
i dont think you are a troll....you are more of a "quibbler". i like that word better
you say "I've taken issue with Seeker's claiming Mac sales are down year-to-year"
did i write that sales were down "year to year" or "first quarter 2003 to first quarter 2004" in this thread?
i dont believe i did. if i did, please show me where.
as the guy has pointed out just above, as macworld pointed out from q4 2003 to q1 2004, as apples sec filings point out, mac sales are down versus previous years.
why quibble? is there something to quibble about with the 1.5 million macs fewer in sales in 2003 versus 2000?
i think not, all the pundits talk about this very subject. it is not an opinion, it is matter of record that apple talks about.
a point to be made about declining sales also is the continued slide of the high end powermacs. apple had some great years right after the release of the first generation imacs, but the newer imacs sales never hit anywhere near the original and they too keep going down.
apple is selling more of the cheapest ibooks they make. again low margins on lower sales when selling ibooks.
the premise remains in a nutshell: macs are declining in market share,they are selling fewer macs today than they were in the past (except for the one year to year quarter jack worries so much about), and they are even selling fewer and fewer high end high margin powermacs to pros.
you can quibble but it only makes your arguements look petty....especially when you go calling people trolls for pasting data from other reputable third party sources.
Here's what you said:
apples total sales are up versus the same quarters a yr ago.
mac sales are down and that is what i am most concerned with here....not selling 800,000 ipods.
You're right, I'm quibbling. I think you do the same; I was wrong to call you a troll. I went back & looked through the entire thread at that point.
I don't happen to disagree with your overall point, which is why I didn't argue it.
for fucks sake.
Stop it with all these massive anti Apple articles. If your a real geek you would own both a PC and a Macintosh. Instead of fearing OS X - try and see what its all about...
well i guess i passed out of that realm late last year as i gave my last macs away after owning them for 19 years.
i do run windows xp pro and i currently have suse 9 installed on another old box....first time i tried it and it at first glance appears better than my last shot with red hat. linux like os x remains a novelty for me though. i dont fear os x, i installed it as a beta and used it for three years up through os 10.2.4. please dont jump to conclusions so quickly.
mac os still smokes linux in my opinion, but the overpriced and underperforming hardware hurts apple with folks looking for alternatives to windows.
i dont think there are many non-geeks that read much less post on this site.
its not about being anti-apple. this is a site dedicated to debating computers and oses and tech. if you dont like the format i dont know what to say, but it isnt likely going to change. go look in virtually all threads about ms and you will see folks taking exception with them...likewise linux or whatever.
and yes Jack, i quibble too because i so like the word. hehe. i try to keep my quibbling to quibbling with other quibblers though.
Yes, you keep saying that Macs are overpriced and underperforming. That makes me wonder: can you also have underpriced, underperforming computers? Or overpriced and overperforming ones?
Macintosh G4: € 1394 - 1,25 Ghz G4 + 256 MB DDR333 RAM + 80 GB HD + DVD/CDRW + Radeon 9000 64MB
Sun Blade 150: € 1660 - 550 Mhz UltraSparc IIi + 256 MB RAM + 80 GB HD + DVD + PGX64
Dell Precision 650: € 1664 - 2,4 Ghz Xeon + 256 MB DDR266 RAM + 80 GB HD + DVD/CDRW + nVidia QuadroFX NVS 280 64MB
Now how dissimilar are they, except for the processor? Not very much, except for the Sun not having a CD burn capability. In processor speeds, the Sun is the slowest and cannot do CD Burning. The Dell is the fastest. The Apple is in the middle and is the cheapest.
So according to TheSeeker, no single thinking being would ever even consider buying something from Sun. Yet I see no reason for not buying a Mac. Except if you want to pay € 300 for a faster processor. But then why not invest an additional € 100 to have a Dual G4 and the beautiful design of both the Mac and its OS?
Btw.:
- The Sun is adverted on the website for $ 1935, but I added 19% VAT as has been done with the others.
- I chose the more expensive line of Dell computers, as I want something that has good quality. Not a PC like mine that breaks at least once a year.
- To TheSeeker: in case you reply, please use the comma sign and capital letters, so that I don't need to decipher what you are trying to say.