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.
The Hardware
I got the Mac because I had asked for it. I needed an office computer and the combination of a friendly front end and a Unix base should provide a good system and I’d heard some very good things about it, I’d even gone to a Mac user meeting in Amsterdam (when I lived there) at one point to have a look around.
The machine I’ve been using is a 700MHz iBook with 640MB RAM running OS X 10.2.8 (Jaguar).
Physically the hardware is very nice, there is an unending attention to detail from Apple which shows right through the system, even the power supply and the polystyrene packaging looks good! There’s a nice touch in that you can either plug the PSU directly into the mains socket or remove the head and plug in a longer wire.
It’s not perfect though, the track-pad was faulty and had to be replaced, also at one point the Hard Disc died and had we were told, physically snapped. This is one of the iBook models known for white spots and video failures but I can’t say the screen has had any problems. There is a white spot but it’s hardly noticeable and never bothered me, there are also smaller spots in the bottom corners which appear to be stress points but are even less noticeable.
One gripe I had with the video system is it’s complete inability to give me decent resolutions or refresh rates on an external monitor. It would allow 1024×768 at 75Hz and that’s it. I can handle the 1024×768 but I usually set 85Hz as a minimum on a CRT monitor, anything lower flickers noticeably to me.
For noise this machine doesn’t appear to make any beyond accessing the Hard Disc and occasionally the CD-ROM drive if you are using it. There is a fan but it took 10 months to switch on, I was not even aware there was fan so I was rather taken aback when it did! We were in the middle of a European heat wave at the time (the temperature got to 40 Celsius) so the fact the fan never switched on until then shows just how cool the machine runs in normal conditions.
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. That took a lot of getting used to but I can’t blame Apple for that, you can apparently get the keyboard changed but when I was told I was getting used to it and didn’t really care. I’m so used to the French keyboard in fact that I still tend to press shift before pressing numbers…
OS X itself doesn’t assume anything about your location or nationality so I can tell it I’m using a French keyboard in France but I speak British English and it’ll be happy to comply. This is something of a contrast to the French version of Windows which installs in French but appears to offer no way of changing to English. Internationalisation is a much more difficult issue than changing the language and character set, ex-pats like me only serve to confuse the situation even further, full points to Apple for getting this right.
The battery life is good (around 4 hours) and the sleep mode is great, switching on and off almost instantaneously.
The track-pad only has a single button but pressing “ctrl” acts as a second button.
OS X fully supports the second button so if you are used to a 2 button mouse as I am you can just plug one in and it works, the apps all support it. Some people make an issue of this, why?
The OS X user interface
The first thing you notice about the Mac is the interface is both weird and on this machine, more than a tad slow. This is probably to be expected with me coming from BeOS which is designed for high responsiveness and is the fastest interface you’re likely to see on a PC. Going from one to the other is something of a slow down. That said the speed of the interface is perfectly acceptable once you’ve got used to it. Panther is meant to be faster but this machine was running Jaguar.
The interface is however very, very good. I have never used anything which even comes close to it’s quality and polish. There are glitches but these are few and far between.
The usability is as you would expect absolutely top notch and OS X provides a system which is powerful, stable and very easy to use.
I mentioned above the interface is “weird”. The OS X interface has inherited parts from OS 9 and it’s predecessors and it’s not the same as Windows or any other OS I’ve ever used. You have to get used to the menu bar at the top (very 80’s) and the fact you have to close applications by selecting Quit from the menu – unless it’s iPhoto which closes when you close the window…
There are some little things I still miss from BeOS which I would like to see. BeOS lets you navigate the entire file system with a single right mouse click, this isn’t a prefect way of getting around but if you want to get to a directory buried deep down somewhere there is no faster way of doing it, you can’t do this in OS X which is a pity (would be useful as an advanced feature you can activate).
Another thing I’d like to see is “right click to back” (right click on the title bar of a window and it moves to the back) it allows you switch very rapidly between two or three apps and is amazingly useful, it is one of those things you won’t realize just how much you use until you lose it. Even with the new features in panther I’d still like to see it implemented.
The Dock
I have something of a Love-Hate relationship with the dock, it was and is confusing to use. The problem is that it tries to act as both a means of launching programs and tracking them while they are running. Invariably you end up going to the wrong icon to get the window you want. No matter how much I tried I could never get fully used to it, it always sort-of worked.
They do seem to have found a way of showing running apps in Panther (expose) and I’d be interested in trying it out but I found another way which I’d also encountered on other OSs: Multiple desktops. I’d originally used these on the Amiga which uses “screens” but they are implemented elsewhere with a small desktop “pager” or “switcher”. I got myself one and never looked back. I still use the dock but only as a launcher and very occasionally as a way to move things out of the way quickly. My one other gripe with the Dock is that the trash icon has a bad habit of moving out of the way if you aim is not perfect, there should be a bit more of a delay before this happens.
Using a desktop switcher did add a problem. Due to the way the graphics system works the windows you see are actually textures which are displayed by the 3D accelerator. If you are using a desktop switcher you may have quite a number of windows open and these all take up room in memory. This machine only has 16MB video RAM, it quickly runs out and switching between desktops can sometimes be a rather slow experience.
Using more video RAM would speed this up of course but there may be another way which uses less RAM: Graphics in OS X are drawn as vectors using display PDF, if this could be done on the Graphics card windows could be stored as a set of vector descriptions and drawn when they are needed. This would take up a lot less RAM and speed up switching as well as off-loading it from the CPU. GPUs do not support this at the moment but can be added and I believe the bitboyz (sic) implemented vector drawing in one of their mobile chips. With everyone moving to 3D based drawing it’ll be a common problem so maybe this is something worth adding to desktop GPUs.
Built in Apps
OS X comes with a selection of build in applications, the infamous “iApps” and a selection of other utilities. As the year progressed and OS X was updated a few new apps also appeared such as iCal and Safari. I don’t use or even know all the functions of these programs but I’ll tell you of my experiences with them.
iTunes
iTunes got a lot of use from me. I have a lot of CDs and listen to music pretty much all the time unless really deep concentration is required. I filled 15GB with music and that’s less than half of my collection.
iTunes also has the music store now and it looks pretty interesting but I buy CDs as they are not compressed, until I can buy uncompressed files the store is simple of no use to me. iTunes compresses music into MP3s or AAC files and these are fine for headphones or PC speakers (they’ve since added an uncompressed format to iTunes).
When importing music iTunes gets the track names from an online database but it sometimes messes up, sometimes there is a selection to pick from and there’s no way to tell which is which so you just have to pick one and hope it’s right. It usually is but it’s sometimes found the wrong results but this is pretty rare. I do have one Fleetwood Mac CD which iTunes is convinced is a Chris de Burgh CD, I have both so that can be a bit weird. This is easily fixed though as you just select the tracks and change the info for Album / Artist.
One oddity I discovered was when ripping CDs which were scratched, iTunes can sometimes have a hard time dealing with these and produces some strange audio files. I found however that if I was to copy the files to disc as AIFF files they would usually copy fine without problems even if they were scratched. I could then rip them and the resulting files would be fine.
iTunes never had any problems and did it’s job of playing music. It organises the music in a sensible manner allowing you to select whatever you want quickly and without a fuss.
All in all iTunes is an excellent piece of software. There are reasons Macs cost more, iTunes is one of them.
iPhoto
iPhoto is another one of those reasons. I plugged in my camcorder (it has a built in still picture function) and it recognised it first time allowing me to download the files. When I got a new camera I plugged it in and again it worked first time.
iPhoto allows you to put your photos into albums and generally organize them. You can see all files at once or just the last downloaded ones (which is useful). You can also edit photos but I prefer to do more advanced editing in Photoshop.
To be honest iPhoto runs like a dog on this machine but both it and OS X has since been updated so it should be faster now. Apart from the speed issue iPhoto is another excellent piece of software, then again I’ve been using it with a couple of thousand 6 MegaPixel images so perhaps I’m just asking a little too much of it.
Other Apps
You also get apps such as iMovie, iCal, iChat and a few others but I didn’t use them much if at all so I can’t really say anything about them other than the fact they are present.
There are a selection of other small apps which I did make use of however:
Preview
This just displays images and PDF files, it seemed to have problems with some PDF files so I just downloaded Acrobat reader and used it. I never used it for reading PDFs after the first couple of months so I don’t know if it got any better.
The picture viewer worked fine and it’s display is better than iPhoto so I generally use it to have a good look at pictures though it is considerably slower at actually displaying my images than iPhoto. Anti-aliasing is also supported but it’s a bit over the top for my liking generating blurry images.
TextEdit
It’s a text editor, what can I really say? It does it’s job well and I used it a lot, preferring it after MS Word managed to annoy me. Pretty much everything I’ve written for the last year (including much of this) was done in TextEdit.
It also has spell checking and you can switch rich text processing off in rtf and HTML if you want to get your hands dirty (I also used it as an HTML editor).
My only gripe is the fact the file name gets deleted if you convert from rich text to plain text.
Safari
This is the new KHTML based web browser Apple introduced. I also used Internet Explorer and the Mozilla based Camino but I soon switched over to Safari for 99% of browsing. I do a lot of on-line research so I’m a heavy web user. Safari is a bit flaky at times but as before I have an older version, the newer versions don’t seem to work on Jaguar.
The tabbed browsing and pop up ad killer work fine and the ability to add a button which opens a series of pages in different tabs was immensely useful (you can do this in Mozilla but this works better).
Mail / Address Book
The mail client is not as comprehensive as Outlook (which I wouldn’t touch with a long pole due it’s security problems) but allows you to set up multiple accounts and folders and do the usual stuff, all easily of course. There is also a good SPAM filter which you have to teach but works pretty well after a while, the spammers don’t stand still though so it won’t catch everything.
There is also a feature which allows you to check through the email addresses you’ve used and add them to the system Address Book. This is better than it sounds because if it stored everything it encountered you’d end up with an address book full of people you don’t contact or know. This way you get to pick the important ones. The Address Book isn’t something I used much but it can export the addresses which you can backup and read on other systems which is useful.
Help System
All of the built in programs have a built in help system which can handle most problems but it does tend to be on the slow side, they should replace the display with something Safari based if they haven’t already.
Terminal
For the geeks out there there is a Terminal (shell) present. It’s default was Tcsh but bash is present if you want it as I did, I believe bash is the default in Panther. You can do neat tricks like making the shell transparent which sound like a gimmick but can actually prove useful as it lets you read off info from the window below.
The usual tools are all there as you would expect but you won’t get absolutely everything you’ll find in a Linux distro (i.e. the 5 you use and the 3995 you never look at). There is however the “Fink” tools which you can download and it provides a whole set of other Unix tools.
You can of course also download X Windows for OS X but I don’t have a use for it so didn’t.
Other Applications
I used MS Office at times which has a different interface then the PC version which, once you are used to it I found to be better. I usually find MS software to be buggy and for some reason it seems to go out of it’s way to annoy me, this was no exception. That said it was perfectly usable, I had no 100% CPU hogging problems like Dr Haque mentioned recently in his series.
On some systems the small apps are free, on others you pay $$$ but they are not excessively priced on the Mac (low $10s). I tried a few of the free apps but of what I tried I found the commercial stuff to be better.
There’s a ton of software out there for OS X if you need it so getting software is no problem. Comparisons with the PC’s software base are meaningless as most people only use a relatively small number of applications, new platforms don’t always have these but eventually even the most obscure of platforms get a decent selection of software. i.e. I can get all the software I need on BeOS and the Mac has a much bigger software base!
I did get myself some other software for the system all of which performed their function well:
FirewalkX (enhanced firewall)
IRCicle (IRC client)
CodeTek Virtual Desktop (desktop switcher)
I also used:
RBrowserLite (Free version of a commercial FTP client)
Which seems to work OK, I did have some problems with huge transfers but they may have been the FTP server’s fault.
Conclusion
So, what can I conclude after using a Mac for the past year and a bit? Remember of course that the current Mac range, OS X and the iApps have now been updated multiple times.
My answer can best be given by describing my situation:
You see, it was not my iBook and I had to give it back, what do I do now?
I’d never had a laptop before and the freedom it gave was very useful. In fact with my propensity to take photographs by the ton I need a laptop if I intend to go anywhere (either that or a few 1GByte CF cards…).
So I’d like another laptop. I could get a PC laptop and then I’ve got a choice of Windows, BeOS or Linux.
The Mac provided a much better experience than any system I’ve ever used before and none of the above compare, I’d like to stick with a Mac. It’s easy and quick to set up and from then on it just does it’s job, it does not get in your way or try to annoy you. It’s also stable, Yes, I’ve seen it crash a few times but very rarely. The interface is the best in the business and it comes with some very good applications. This is the way computers should be, right now nobody else even comes close.
I do have a few minor niggles with the Mac but I cannot say I have any major complaints.
I don’t consider them to be bad value, if you are just looking at CPU speed yes P4s are faster than the G4s but these are entire systems and as such are not so bad value considering what you get. Besides of which in a Laptop battery life is rather more important than raw computing speed.
I quite like the 12 inch iBooks given their size and weight. I especially like the 12 inch PowerBooks which could act as a full desktop system given their spec (one version includes a Superdrive) but I’m not so keen on the small screen if I had to use it all the time, plugging in a decent sized external screen will soon fix that though. 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?
Many alternative computing (BeOS, MorphOS, etc) users have a windows partition or entire PC sitting around for when they need access to a file or content which other systems can’t read or have a device with no drivers etc.. (I myself have an old copy of Windows for this purpose). The Mac has the advantage of not having these sorts of problems, pretty much everything works and you can watch all the content on web pages (i.e. Quicktime, Flash, Real etc). If you really want to be Windows free, the Mac makes a good choice.
Unfortunately I can’t afford a new Mac right now so in the mean time it’s back to my PC…
Copyright © Nicholas Blachford April/May 2004
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
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?
hmm, ok, thanks for the info.
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 (<1000×1000 pixels, most likely off of the internet).
He may have been previewing film resolution (>2000×2000) 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 1024×768 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.
Get real, don’t tell me what to do.
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.
Guru Meditation
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 http://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.
by marketing I also mean hype.
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 http://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.