OSNews

Shawn (IP: ---.kc.rr.com) - Posted on 2003-10-31 04:24:38
If only I hadn't invested so much money in my PC all these years. I can upgrade this ole' PC for a few hundred and it will be a lot faster.

But to buy an equivalent mac would mean spending thousands of dollars, and I would rather pay my car loan off :p

I can agree with your to a certain extent. I have heard others say, "if they had a competitive upgrade policy which allowed me to move from from the Windows to equivilant Mac version, I would be happy to pay the media costs". I am probably lucky in the fact that the software I owned was dual-operating system, that is, MacOS and Windows version came on the same CD, which was rather neat.

With that being said, there isn't a lack of games but the ability to purchase them is a real nightmare. Sure, you can buy a Mac and productivity applications no problems, however, even finding something as common as "Civilisation III" or "Simcity 4000" is almost impossible. Sure, I *could* purchase it online, however, I am a bit of a ludite and prefer going in and actually

Yet on the other hand, I love Office X for MacOS, it is a great piece of software and I would love to purchase the next version of Office when made available. As for Macromedia 2004, apart from the activation, again, it is great piece of software. The only let down IMHO is Corel Graphics Suite, however, its speed is crap both on the Mac and PC, maybe once I have saved my "pennies and pounds" I can purchase Adobe Creative Suite; having used informally InDesign 2, IMHO I can't believe I put up with all the ideosyncracies of Corel Draw for so long.

johnfive (IP: ---.ne.client2.attbi.com) - Posted on 2003-10-31 04:51:06
I wouldn't go so far as to call this article propaganda but it's pretty close. I wish Apple would do the world a favor and release OS X on x86, because then we wouldn't have to endure so much anti Microsoft hot air.

The whole attraction of the Mac isn't the hardware or the software but the whole package, it is what the marketspeak people call a "vertical business". To achieve the level of integration between the hardware and software which Apple has, they need to control all the aspects of the system and I'm sorry, if you produce a MacOS X, even under the best conditions you're still going to be handstrung by the fact that Apple will need to test their operating system on the numerous hardware combinations; that doesn't even take into account the number of small white box producers who make up a good portion.

That doesn't take into account the amount of possibly different chipsets and the necessary software to work around bugs in the actual chipsets themselves, then there are the video cards, each vendor adding a tweak of their own even though they're all based on the same GPU, hence the reason why it is such a hit and miss to whether you get realiable performance from video cards running on Linux regardless of the fact that the video card is based on a the same GPU's.

rizzo (IP: ---.lsanca1.elnk.dsl.genuity.net) - Posted on 2003-10-31 05:03:49
He makes it sound like apps on the Mac never fail. That's a load of crap. Like a previous poster said, this guy seems to have very little understanding beyond web browsing.

Which represents Joe Average. This is the same audiance that Windows and MacOS pander to. Whether or not the issue is hardware or software, the fact remains that the end user will either blame the computer company, Microsoft or both. The fact remains that if the user perception is that the software is buggy, it doesn't matter whose fault it is, they (the customer) assume that it is the computers fault.

The fact remains that if the hardware and software companies work together OR are under the same roof, it is less likely for problems to arrise. Imagine if every Dell was stress tested with Windows XP and any problems that are found can correct by Microsoft and Dell, you would effectively end up with a situation similar to Apple except both would be independent of each other.