Apple says it is seeing a large number of UNIX, Java and Open Source developers migrating to Mac OS X. “Over the last three years, people who have experience in those areas are showing a great interest in our OS,” Apple VP of Worldwide Developer Relations Ron Okamoto told internetnews.com.
Apple Sees Shift in Developer Profiles
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Mac OS X is truly the one platform where I can do everything that I need: program (Visual Studio via Virtual PC, NetBeans,
php, perl, objective c, c, python, cvs, sshd), graphic work (photoshop, gimp 2, illustrator), web design (flash, dreamweaver, homesite vis Virtual PC, mysql, php, BBedit, jsp), play games (starcraft, warcraft 3, unreal t2004, halo),
general office stuff (MS office x, openoffice, abi word),
video/audio edits (Final cut pro, dvd express, idvd, imovie,
garageband, reason, bias peak), and direct connect, edonkey, it’s all there!!! The only thing that would keep me from using a mac is price, and that’s not even that bad, the dual g4’s are only 1600/emacs less than $1000, fcuk performance, I have a dual g4 1.25ghz mirror-door and it does fine for what I need to do. Who the hell is going to push scientific calculations on a desktop workstation anyway?
OS X is a great operating system and something you’d miss out on if you went with x86. My uptimes are great under heavy loads, I love the breadth of applications taht I can run on the hardware, and I trust apple to take me to where I want to go with the least headache! It’s just a joy to use. Couple that with a 23″ cinema display, ipod mp3 player, and powerbook and you’re talking about the greatest compute environment ever!
It’s not about choosing only one platform and dodging the rest. I run linux on my x86 hardware in the background, it’s great. Just stay off windows. Play games on your consoles.
Don’t give me this bang for the buck crap, mac’s are a joy to use and makes me damned productive!
In mono_root/mono/mini comment out this line in Makefile.am: libmono_la_LDFLAGS=$(monoldflags)
Then rerun autogen.sh from the mono root directory. You need to install a current version of libgc. It’s called the Boehm GC for those that have never heard of it.
Configure with
./configure –with-gc=boehm
It’s not a good idea to specify a non-default location because if you don’t install to that place again, the next go around might because you to get “corlib out of sync with runtime errors”
My favorite is Open Office. That has Sooooooo much potential. I got V1.1 to install from a *.tar file. Once it is Aquafied, I am removing MS Office.
really. I got a *old* titanium IV powerbook last week and installed debian sid on it. I also got 10.3 running under Mac-on-Linux so I can dabble in “Panther”. But if you really want to run all that software great…More power to you. But free software isn’t just about freedom, its about not bleeding money for supposedly “superior” software. All the apps you just listed would have added a cool 10K to my laptops price tag of 1800 USD.
Lets see:
photoshop
illustrator
flash
dreamweaver
homesite
Virtual PC
MS office X
Final cut pro
dvd express
all that iShit…the list goes on and on…then come the upgrades.
Fsck that.
But free software isn’t just about freedom, its about not bleeding money for supposedly “superior” software. All the apps you just listed would have added a cool 10K to my laptops price tag of 1800 USD.
Very rare that someone needs all… you buy proprietary for the stuff you do business wise and use some free version for what you do as hobby… It’s great to have options, that’s what the post was about…
Besides, Linux doesn’t offer the proprietary making it useless for a lot of work…
ehem… there are several “backup” servers in case you lose the original or need a backup of the original application, it’s all on there man.
http://www.carracho.com
But you’re right, open source is great too, I use fink
and run open source applications like php, cvs, gcc, all
that crap, it didn’t cost me a dime. Or I install those oss apps on my linux box then remote X11 them onto my bloody apple machine, ain’t that f’ing cool!! Then I use all the
great apple stuff, too.
From my experience, there’s less fuss with software on os x,
it’s just more polished. Although you may say php is all the same whether on windows, linux, or mac, but i just unpack a .dmg file, run the installation procedure, and voila!
Plus all the drivers are there, no compiling modules and kernels every release, I just trust apple for that, I don’t have time for that, i compile my god damned linux boxes often enough.
Give apple a fair shake, I know it’s a tough thing to compete with free software, but apple is just enjoyable to use!
Thanks for your comments linux user!
I’m an apple user since the days of the IIc, but I (like everyone else) use Windows and Linux for other tasks. While any statistics are inherently biased, I am glad that UNIX, Java and Open Source developers are attempting to embrace OSX. As much as I enjoyed OS9 and as much as people love BeOS on these boards, it seems the only viable contender to the Windows family of OSes are the Unix-like ones. OSX consolidates both mainstream proprietary tools and OSS quite well. This is important not because Microsoft is any more evil than any other company, but because domination by any OS gives a single entity too much weight. MS can (and does) dictates standards that a company really shouldn’t be allowed to dictate (how many .doc email attachments do you get?). Linux and OSX are both good, not because of any claims of superiority, but because of their very existence and continued viability. At least now there are two camps (Windows and Un*x) rather than one behemoth and a few satellites.
the dual g4’s are only 1600/emacs less than $1000, fcuk performance
Pretty concise description of the Mac product line, if you ask me. From just the hardware perspective, nothing that Apple sells except the G5 line is worth half of what they charge for it. They need to move everything to the G5 and leave the G4 in its late-90’s grave where it belongs. The Mac software is very impressive, though, but the hardware is quite a price to pay for the privilege of using it.
“Who the hell is going to push scientific calculations on a desktop workstation anyway?”
Just about every game, 3D application, audio sequencer etc out there!
You think scientific calculations are only for designing spacecrafts?
yeah, It’s a good thing they don’t port OSX to x86, because nobody would buy their hardware anymore. Man I wish I could run OSX on a shiny new AMD64….Tripple boot, debian sid, WinXP and OSX, wow, that would be so cool… One machine for all your needs.
All the apps you just listed would have added a cool 10K to my laptops price tag of 1800 USD.
Lets see:
photoshop
illustrator
flash
dreamweaver
homesite
Virtual PC
MS office X
Final cut pro
dvd express
all that iShit…the list goes on and on…then come the upgrades.
Fsck that.
So, any Photoshop alternatives? Surely not Gimp with silly broken CMYK support (and horrible UI).
Illustrator? flash?
dreamweaver?
reason? cubase?
“Who the hell is going to push scientific calculations on a desktop workstation anyway?”
Engineering students
Math students
Etc……..
Anyone want to do my home work?
When I talk about scientific computations, I mean things
like genome sequencing and other compute intensive operations where not one, but many computers are required in a MPC cluster configuration. Do you really think a single workstation will cut it for these types of operations?
Of course audio and video sequencing requires “calculations” and many times manipulate waveforms and vectors using processor intensive instructions, but for common use, the mac workstation (even the g4) does it in decent time and is not the point to my original post. Nobody’s in that much of a hurry where they need micro-seconds off their encoding/decoding/sequencing. If you do, then you should really look into a compute cluster, or you should probably be arrested for pirating dvd’s and vcd’s.
Also, I would like to mention that 3D games’ “calculations” take place on 3D video cards, you know, GPU’s? Do you idiot Georgians know anything other than seceding from mother Russia?!?
I would also mention that no 3D rendering company uses a single workstation, but rather a rendering farm of hundreds of workstations to do their processing. Take renderman from pixar, another great application for mac os x.
This is userland, not supercomputer.org forum, go argue your ignorant bang for the buck troll somewhere else. My mac makes me productive and so do my linux boxes, damn trolls!
Can your stupid windows xp box cluster?! Get a freaking clue!!
“reason? cubase?”
There is no real competitor to reason, as its main advantage is integratio of everything, but concerning DW, I have great hope for ardour, which is still in beta, but heavily developped for more than three years, now.
http://ardour.org/
Hehe, you inadvertently gave a lot of reasons not to use a Mac.
You list a lot of apps, funny that you started with Visual Studio, that can all be used on window(with vmware linux) or vice versa for a lot cheaper.
The only thing that would keep me from using a mac is price, and that’s not even that bad, the dual g4’s are only 1600/emacs less than $1000, fcuk performance, I have a dual g4 1.25ghz mirror-door and it does fine for what I need to do. Who the hell is going to push scientific calculations on a desktop workstation anyway?
fsck performance? I think not. Top of the line mac notebooks are woefully underpowered to run something like Doom3 and forget about Halflife2, not to mention that you’ll pay a thousand dollars more for it.
OS X is a great operating system and something you’d miss out on if you went with x86.
Because Jobs has a hardware fetish and refuses to sell OS X for x86.
Just stay off windows. Play games on your consoles.
Since you insist, I guess I’ll have to follow your way. NOT.
Don’t give me this bang for the buck crap, mac’s are a joy to use and makes me damned productive!
Give us OS X on x86 and we won’t have to give you the bank-for-the-buck “crap”. OS X doesn’t make you anymore productive than windows running linux on vmware or vice-versa.
“You list a lot of apps, funny that you started with Visual Studio, that can all be used on window(with vmware linux) or vice versa for a lot cheaper.”
I think his point was that he can use all those on one system.
“fsck performance? I think not. Top of the line mac notebooks are woefully underpowered to run something like Doom3 and forget about Halflife2, not to mention that you’ll pay a thousand dollars more for it.”
Ever played games on a Mac? Performance-wise, it’s not much different from a PC.
“Because Jobs has a hardware fetish and refuses to sell OS X for x86.”
You’d still miss out.
“Give us OS X on x86 and we won’t have to give you the bank-for-the-buck “crap”. OS X doesn’t make you anymore productive than windows running linux on vmware or vice-versa.”
On the contrary, the operating system has a lot to do with productivity, no matter what hardware you are using.
It sounds like the point of his post was the ability to use applications from Windows, Linux, and OS X all on one computer.
I love Macs but I have a hard time believing they are LEAVING Unix/Linux. Mac doesn’t quite have the marketshare to merit such a shift. However, I can easily see them deciding to develop their Unix/Linux apps on the Mac platform as well thanks to the common base they share (this certainly seems more and more common)
Hehe. Wow, someone disagrees with you and your 2nd post goes into a Jobs-like tirade. Maybe you should chill out in a mac forum where your fellow mac users can console you from the criticisms of the evil windows and linux users.
Umm, it’s called vmware. Windows and Linux side-by-side on an x86 box. I guess you’ve never heard of cygwin either. Most unix/linux apps run just fine in a cygwin environment without an emulator. Heck, you can even run KDE on cygwin these days(why you would want to to do that is beyond me, but to each their own).
Ever played games on a Mac? Performance-wise, it’s not much different from a PC
Doom3 is not going to run well on top of the line Mac notebooks. They are woefully underpowered, running at 1.3ghz G4 and costing $3k to boot.
but you dont see quicktime/itunes/etc on bsd/linux.Screw you Apple, make your own apps.
Lumbergh’s right. Whats the point of paying $3k+ when you cant even play some highend games.
@Lumbergh: Doom3 isn’t going to run on well on anything we have nowadays, that’s why ID is stalling it 😉
No seriously it won’t run good on any PC laptop either. And I must say I’m in the play-games-on-a-console-camp (except MAME, C64, SCUMM, SCI etc. emulators).
fsck performance? I think not. Top of the line mac notebooks are woefully underpowered to run something like Doom3 and forget about Halflife2, not to mention that you’ll pay a thousand dollars more for it.
I’m sorry, but what idiot plays doom3 on his/her laptop?
1) resolution on an LCD sucks
2) for portable computing, i prefer battery life over
10 minutes of total computer usage, plus I have a desktop that plays that fine with a larger memory buffer and more pipelines than any crippled notebook video card
3) once again, it’s not the CPU, it’s the bloody
GPU and interconnects!! 1.33Ghz G4 with no L3 cache and about 512k L2 cache and a 333 mhz bus is fine for doom3,
the only limiting factor with this configuration is the ati radeon 9600 card with 64mb and speedstep like instruction set.
Give us OS X on x86 and we won’t have to give you the bank-for-the-buck “crap”. OS X doesn’t make you anymore productive than windows running linux on vmware or vice-versa.
Give me a break, you’re comparing windows to os x?! Excuse me, but I haven’t had to reboot in a few months (other than the security patches). And I don’t have any nasty backdoors sending data to the nsa and microsoft about my computer usage. And I don’t install anti-virus software to protect my system! Maybe if you told me you ran windows on linux using vmware, I’d settle down and give you a meaningful
conversation because I love linux, but since you mentioned windows, I’m not even going to acknowledge your point.
Look, I’m not trying to be a mac zealot because I also enjoy x86 machines, but I’m trying to provide people with an open alternative to the x86 and its os’es. The x86 is widespread, it has been around for ages, it started as an 8-bit instruction set which was extended again and again, and now they’ve even managed to squeeze in 64 bit instructions (yay amd!). There’s no question that the
x86 architecture is an awesome display of engineering
prowess, the ability to fine tune a kludgy architecture
and bring it into the mainstream for the masses, for cheap!
And lead in many performance tests at the same time! That’s great, but there’s another architecture available that brings you a lot of nice odds and ends. You think power consumption isn’t a big deal? Well, for your P4 that basically loops idlely over and over and sometimes inserts
loops to fill stalled pipelines, your ghz aren’t really doing that much in terms of bang for the buck. Why don’t you account power usage into your cost metrics? cpu frequency is not what it was made out to be. You probably have 96% idle times with your x86. yeah, you can possibly
pump out more in a shorter period of time, but what are you doing that’s so important? Quaking? Need more fps?
And think of a computing cluster of several thousand cpu’s,
power usage is not a cost factor?
Yes, I can side with you that apple’s cost a lot (i can’t even afford a new mac), but is it so wrong that apple computer wants to make money off its ideas? Is this such a wrong thing? Should they be crucified for not appealing to the thrifty? I personally don’t think so, this helps them to research and develop even better things to come.
*If* a dual g4 1.25ghz new only cost $600 compared to a p4 2.6ghz or whatever for $1000, would you get a p4? Let’s say instead that you received two free computers, a g5 and a top of the line p4, I wouldn’t be surprised if you used the g5 more often…
“So, any Photoshop alternatives? Surely not Gimp with silly broken CMYK support (and horrible UI).
Illustrator? flash?
dreamweaver? Final Cut Pro? After Effects?
reason? cubase?”
When Opensource gets App’s like that, I will use Linux etc…but until then I will stick with windows/OS X…….and dabble with the rest.
I’m sorry, but what idiot plays doom3 on his/her laptop?
From your previous post:
Who the hell is going to push scientific calculations on a desktop workstation anyway?
Guilty on both counts. During school, I’ve got to run things like Mathematica, Matlab, AutoCAD, etc, and during the summer, I like to take my laptop to LAN parties. Call of Duty runs absolutely great on it. A high-end x86 laptop is a great machine for this sort of thing — powerful enough (barely) to run SolidEdge, portable enough to take to the library for writing papers. While my friends are dragging their 80lb brushed aluminium cases out of somebody’s basement, I slip my laptop into its back and beat the rush out the door
resolution on an LCD sucks
1600×1200 sucks? I like to run at 800×600, which is nice, sharp, and runs quite fast.
3) once again, it’s not the CPU, it’s the bloody
GPU and interconnects!! 1.33Ghz G4 with no L3 cache and about 512k L2 cache and a 333 mhz bus is fine for doom3
Its a mixture of both. A pipeline is only as fast as its slowest part. The G4 simply can’t keep a fast graphics card busy. Oh, and no G4 has a 333MHz bus. The G4 can only support a 166MHz SDR memory bus. The 1.3GB/sec of memory bandwidth, compared to the 4.2 – 6.4GB/sec available on modern x86 chips is a *major* bottleneck for the G4.
Doom3 will run fine on my P4 3.2 ghz, 1 gig of ram, ATI 9600 Pro (128 meg of ram) that I paid $2k for. The screen is a UXGA that runs crystal clear at 1600×1200.
Power/gaming notebooks are becoming a big thing these days. Check out Dell’s new offerings or you can look at where I got mine. http://www.pctorque.com
The top of the line Apple notebook that I could find a few weeks ago was the 17″ model, that came with a G4 running at 1.3ghz. It does come with the ATI 9600(which is a sweet card), but with only 64 meg of vram. And it goes for $3k(a thousand dollars more than what I paid for mine). Apple needs to get those G5s into notebooks to stay competitive.
@Steve – the only time XP has crashed on me was when a visual studio plugin crashed the system the first time it was installed. Unacceptable, but this is the only time. I’m on my slackware partition right now running Dropline Gnome.
@Steve – I don’t care about power consumption. I care about having a plug close to where I move the notebook too. That’s the whole point of desktop replacements. Those that want “mobile” systems will buy the Pentium-M.
Listen, i’m not saying OS X isn’t a good operating system or that the G5 isn’t a great processor. My point is that your basically paying a big hardware tax to have the privledge of running OSX on high-end hardware.
I would probably ditch Linux all together if I could just buy OS X and dual-boot with windows.
Anyone who has been to fosdem this year and previous year, must have noticed it. The number of macs (ibooks/powerbooks) at that (free software developers) conference went from 5% to something like 50%. Some talks, like the ruby talk were made in Apples Keynote. But then, it’s not so surprising, Mac OS X is ideal for unix developers. It’s a unix like operating system, but it is still very easy to use, and has quality applications.
“Mac doesn’t quite have the marketshare to merit such a shift.”
http://www.osviews.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=articl…
I’ll compare my iBook (G4 933MHz, 640MB RAM, Mac OS 10.3) with one of my friend’s Compaq (P4 2.5GHz, 440MB RAM, WinXP) laptops.
The other day we were sitting around burning up CDs. He had only iTunes opened and he was ripping and playing CDs and the sound kept skipping! Mine ran smoothly and I had about 10 different apps open.
My friend’s laptop is also big and bulky compared to mine even though there’s only one inch screen difference between our laptops.
The battery life on his laptop is only about 2 hours, mine is about 5.5
The wireless connection on his laptop keeps breaking but my connection is always rock solid. This is on the same network with similarly priced wireless cards.
My friend spent about the same as me for his laptop (just over 2000 euro) but my laptop has twice the hard disk space and also a firewire port.
I won’t even start on how Panther is better than WinXP (more stable, hardly any viri to be worried about, i don’t have to “activate” it) ’cause i’d be here all day.
It’s obvious that my laptop is far more superior to his in every conceivable way but, like you, he is an x86 zealot and actually slags me off for having a mac!
“Hehe. Wow, someone disagrees with you and your 2nd post goes into a Jobs-like tirade. Maybe you should chill out in a mac forum where your fellow mac users can console you from the criticisms of the evil windows and linux users.”
“but to each their own)”
These statements seem to conflict…
“Give us OS X on x86 and we won’t have to give you the bank-for-the-buck “crap”. OS X doesn’t make you anymore productive than windows running linux on vmware or vice-versa. ”
Actually there was a statistic I saw somewhere that stated when they compared the amount of work Mac users got done compared to windows users, mac users where about 50% more productive. Being able to find an run things well has A LOT to do with being productive.
And please quit this stuff about buying all of these top of the line stuff and it costing $3,000! Unless you plan on being a computer artist, photoographer, web designer, animator & more all at the same time there is no way you’d need all that software. There are lower costing alternatives and even free/open source ones, it just clearly shows your a troll who has not done their research. I do my research whenever I lookup windows or linux software, please do yours for the mac.
All I care is that I can get in, work, play games, do whatever I want, configure things easily and then get out and not worry about anything crashing or apps locking up, thats something I can do with Mac OS X. Plus Xcode is just awesome for development and there are some really terrific mini-apps out there that make a world of difference like Konfabulator, Tinker Tool, SideTrack, etc..
The other day we were sitting around burning up CDs. He had only iTunes opened and he was ripping and playing CDs and the sound kept skipping! Mine ran smoothly and I had about 10 different apps open.
Could that be because iTunes has a really crappy Windows port? Or that his CD drive had DMA disabled? There are any of a number of reasons why his machine could be skipping. I’ve got a lesser laptop (2.0GHz P4) and I can’t make audio skip (in Linux, anyway).
My friend’s laptop is also big and bulky compared to mine even though there’s only one inch screen difference between our laptops.
His laptop is also a lot more powerful. A 2.5GHz P4 isn’t exactly a svelte, power-sipping dandy.
The battery life on his laptop is only about 2 hours, mine is about 5.5
When you can’t run the apps you need at a decent speed, battery life doesn’t matter. If you don’t need to run 3D CAD programs or complex simulations on your computer, then yay for you. You are a good candidate for a Mac. Otherwise, you’re going to need the power that only a PC laptop can give you.
The wireless connection on his laptop keeps breaking but my connection is always rock solid. This is on the same network with similarly priced wireless cards.
Windows XP’s wireless sucks. This has nothing to do with the hardware. My Netgear MA401 works just fine in Linux.
My friend spent about the same as me for his laptop (just over 2000 euro) but my laptop has twice the hard disk space and also a firewire port.
His laptop is also much more powerful!
It’s obvious that my laptop is far more superior to his in every conceivable way but, like you, he is an x86 zealot and actually slags me off for having a mac!
It’s stupid to slag people for having a Mac. If I didn’t need a powerful machine, I’d buy an iBook (Linux runs on those too
instead of the machine I have. However, I do need a powerful laptop, and Apple simply cannot deliver in that department.
yeah, It’s a good thing they don’t port OSX to x86, because nobody would buy their hardware anymore. Man I wish I could run OSX on a shiny new AMD64….Tripple boot, debian sid, WinXP and OSX, wow, that would be so cool… One machine for all your needs.
One machines for all? So why dont you buy a mac again? You do know that the Mac can run not only MacOS but linux and WIndows (Virtual PC).
Why does everyone insist that the better hardware of the two is the least expsensive? Try running OS X in any kind of emulator for Windows or linux (On X86 hardware for you guys with Mac-On-Linux people.)
Can your stupid windows xp box cluster?! Get a freaking clue!!
Actually, yes, it can. But people who use clusters usually like UNIX, so it doesn’t make all that much sense to cluster windows for this. But pretty much any operating system can cluster.
And as for your scientific applications quip, let me enlighten you. As one who does “scientific calcualtions” for a living I can tell you that many many calculations are done on workstations. Only some calculations require clusters, but the majority of scientific calcualtions are in fact done on workstations.
At any rate, I do agree with you that scientific calculations are not the main selling point of a mac. You could equally use any unix workstation for that. What the mac gives you is a unix environment (great for us science calculatoin people) AND the silly programs that usually require running Windows in vmware.
So it really comes down to more or less what you said, Macs are just a joy to use. But, especially so for those who want unix functionality, like science types!
I’ve messed about on a few different high end, “desktop replacement” x86 laptops and they don’t feel quite as snappy as my iBook. This is all quite subjective though. Are there any respectable benchmarks out there that say either platform is definitely faster? Because the different systems are so, err, different it’d be pretty hard to have a fair test.
Anyway, I still feel, as a Computational Linguistics student, that a mac laptop is definitely the way to go. Java is pre-installed, so is perl. It’s completely hassle free, allowing me to get on with my college work.
” it’s all there!!!”
For your relatively limited needs.
” I have a dual g4 1.25ghz mirror-door and it does fine for what I need to do. Who the hell is going to push scientific calculations on a desktop workstation anyway? ”
Most people who actually perform scientific calculations.
“Just stay off windows. Play games on your consoles.”
Thank you, but no on both counts. For *my* purposes, OS X is inferior to Windows. Just as a desktop is a better game platform for anything more complex than Donky Kong.
“One machines for all? So why dont you buy a mac again? You do know that the Mac can run not only MacOS but linux and WIndows (Virtual PC).”
Emulation is not a solution for anything remotely serious.
When apple breaks away from there ignorance in maintaining one mouse button I make take them seriously!
*looks at my (apple) mouse (that I bought from apple.com) with 2 buttons*
*looks confused*
Doom3 will run fine on my P4 3.2 ghz, 1 gig of ram, ATI 9600 Pro (128 meg of ram) that I paid $2k for. The screen is a UXGA that runs crystal clear at 1600×1200.
Care to post a link to this configuration and the price.
Power/gaming notebooks are becoming a big thing these days. Check out Dell’s new offerings or you can look at where I got mine. http://www.pctorque.com
Yes they are a niche market. But Apple doesn’t claim the 17″ powerbook G4 is a desktop replacement Gamming machine. It is general purpose notebook designed for portability. Apple could easily cramp 2 g4s and a 128 MB Graphics card make the notebook 3 inches thick and call it a gaming system and sell it. But apple chose to cater to majority of the notebook market which wants a portable light unit with features like bluetooth, firewire an a 17inch screen.
The top of the line Apple notebook that I could find a few weeks ago was the 17″ model, that came with a G4 running at 1.3ghz. It does come with the ATI 9600(which is a sweet card), but with only 64 meg of vram. And it goes for $3k(a thousand dollars more than what I paid for mine). Apple needs to get those G5s into notebooks to stay competitive.
Stay competitive with which market. If every laptop consumer wanted a desktop replacement notebook why would intel spend millions developing and advertising the centrino line of products. The laptop gaming market is an extremely small share of the laptop market. Apple is smart not to venture into it, Apple alreadt is a niche player in the PC market.
I already posted the link, but here it is again – http://www.pctorque.com. look under the Sager 5680 model.
As far as your niche market comment, Dell is starting to push them in a big way and many people want them more than just for gaming. I never said that “everybody” wants a desktop replacement but there is definetely a market out there for them. In any case, Apple better get those G5s in their notebooks because Intel and AMD aren’t sitting still.
Doesnt performance depend on optimization for a specific processor? I remember back in the days of the 604e when there were alot of graphics apps that ran alot better on the 604’s than the G3’s because they were 604 optimized. Also in another comparison I have a biege G3 running at 266Mhz with 64Mb’s of pc100 ram running the latest version of Yellow Dog Linux and I also have a 500Mhz Celeron with 64Mb of pc100 ram running Red Hat 9. The mac isnt exactly a speed demon with YDL due to the need for constant paging in and out of swap but it is far more responsive than the red hat machine, now if your think well there 2 different os’s YDL is basically a port of Red Hat, anyhow the point I’m trying to make is that the software running on the mac was more optimized for the G3 and as a result ran much faster than it did on a chip that is rated at about twice its speed.
9.6lbs and 1-1.5 hours battery life isn’t really a laptop/notebook it’s portable desktop unit. Why not just pick a dual opteron 1RU server, mod it to use a laptop power supply attach and LCD and a keyboard and use it as a portable gaming system? That would beat any laptop in perfrmance. Sound ridiculous?
That’s about as ridiculous as claiming that performance on games is the only reason to buy a laptop. Why would you come to an article about apple as a development platfrom and post about their hardware prices. The article is about an increase in developers on thier platform. Thier platform is tied to thier hardware so they are obivilously selling more hardware and thier price is not prohibitive to those interested in thier platform.
If you want to play doom or game buy whatever platform suits your fancy. Why come and say Apple hardware is expensive. Let me give you a car analogy, though I hate car analogies, lets say price performance is to buying a car as it is to computers. Mustangs and corvette provide the best price performance so people who buy hond odyssey van or dodge caravans mus be stupid why pay $25000 for a slower car. How about people buying lexus LS430s a corvette would run circles around a ls430 and costs less, why would anyone buy a lexus LS430. Different people have different needs and preferences that’s why markets exist. Why the jealousy if Apple posts dome positive news?
, Dell is starting to push them in a big way and many people want them more than just for gaming.
Dell has one gaming laptop in thier line up of 7 laptop models. The gaming system is also the almost twice as expensive as the second most expensive model of thier laptops, I would hardly call that pushing it in a bigway.
“Dell has one gaming laptop in thier line up of 7 laptop models. The gaming system is also the almost twice as expensive as the second most expensive model of thier laptops, I would hardly call that pushing it in a bigway.”
Dell has more than one “desktop replacement” model. There are plenty of uses for same besides gaming.
Dell has more than one “desktop replacement” model. There are plenty of uses for same besides gaming.
There is one model that dell explicitly one gaming system.
NEW Inspiron XPS
Ultimate Gaming Notebook
Dell’s new ultimate portable gaming notebook combines desktop processor performance with the latest video graphics in a stunning unique style.
I said : “Yes they are a niche market. But Apple doesn’t claim the 17″ powerbook G4 is a desktop replacement Gamming machine.”
Luxembergh claimed “As far as your niche market comment, Dell is starting to push them in a big way and many people want them more than just for gaming. ”
Dell has one model they explicitly push as a gaming laptop and it is 2x the price of thier second most expensive laptop in thier home/home office laptops section.
should be Lumbergh
Check out the SPEC results for the G4 and the Pentium 4.
http://www.heise.de/ct/english/02/05/182/
http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results
Then take a look at what benchmarks are included in the suite. That’s basically what I do: compiling and scientific modeling. I can’t find any good 3D CAD benchmarks, but a lot of stuff in there (eg. calculating object properties from models) shouldn’t be too different from SPEC-CPU 2000.
The G4 just isn’t a very fast chip. It never was. Clock for clock, its often slower than an Athlon for floating-point, and slightly faster for integer. That’s why I think Apple should ditch all its G4 machines. The G5 is a vastly better CPU, and actually does well on the SPECmarks. Real-world benchmarks support the trend exposed by the SPECmarks.
That is what I call FUD at it’s finest.
Really? When benchmarks were done, it was shone that the G4’s FPU performance was no better than a late-model P3. AltiVec was cool and all, but if you do the math, you’ll see that it could churn through 10x as much data as the G4 bus could feed it. SSE might have sucked, but it was still fast enough to saturate the P4’s memory bus, and the P4 had way more bandwidth to begin with.
I’m sure there was a little gap between the intro of the G4 and the intro of DDR Athlons or the dual-RDRAM P4s where the G4 wouldn’t be considered a slow CPU, but it was a short one.
Look at the first comment by Steve and you’ll see how all of this started. You seem to have missed how the whole thread came about. As far as your hypothetical, jerry-rigged setup, I don’t think I can just pick that up and move it downstairs to the living or anywhere else for that matter without it being just a little less hassle than a regular desktop.
My god! It’s full of idiots!
Seriously. People use their computers for different things, in different ways. I have no interest in a laptop, because everywhere I do any sort of work has a workstation running my preferred OS (linux with GNOME), and my car has an Mp3 player.
Does this mean that people who buy an iBook and iPod are automatically stupid? Of course not! Someone needs portability and doesn’t care about server applications? Gosh, that must mean they’re idiots.[/sarcasm]
Why does everyone have this huge problem with anyone who does or doesn’t use Mac/Windows/Linux/Consoles/PC games. Guess what! I don’t like the Mac OS X interface, but I recognize that many people do like it, and you know what? That’s OK.
@Lumbergh
play Doom3 an a Centrino Notebook the only x86 Notebook you can buy (a good vaio is also a 3k $ book), and then tell me again a powerbook is slow with this game. x86 Notebooks are crap and also very slow. If you buy a notebook to play 3d Shooter it seems you have too much money.
“play Doom3 an a Centrino Notebook the only x86 Notebook you can buy ”
Which is a completely wrong statement.
“When apple breaks away from there ignorance in maintaining one mouse button I make take them seriously!”
Just buy a better 2 button mouse and use it.
If that’s your hang up, it’s not a big one!
Thank you, but no on both counts. For *my* purposes, OS X is inferior to Windows. Just as a desktop is a better game platform for anything more complex than Donky Kong.
Yes, and the original article was about unix/linux developers migrating to OS X. Do you even develop anything other than a sore thumb from your quaking?
And like I’ve stated, I have multiple machines, I’m not anti-x86, I am anti-windows, I just think being locked onto windows for everything, including game playing, is a bit ridiculous and have finally been freed from the clutches of MS–this is after 15 years on their crummy platform because of no viable alternatives, none!
Let’s look into the future as you troll along that windows/x86 is a superior platform for game playing. Consoles are more and more becoming as sophisticated
as computers for gaming. Heck, the components are
rather similar in the xbox wouldn’t you say? Some Intel processor, ATI graphics card, hard drive, broadband adapter, etc. Too bad the xbox2 is going with powerpc as their choice of architecture, you’re just a fucking x86/windows troll that hasn’t RTFA.
Look at the first comment by Steve and you’ll see how all of this started. You seem to have missed how the whole thread came about. As far as your hypothetical, jerry-rigged setup, I don’t think I can just pick that up and move it downstairs to the living or anywhere else for that matter without it being just a little less hassle than a regular desktop.
Well I must admit that he first post was a little bit of a flamebait. There really is not need to belittle other platforms to praise one. Yes the whole point of my jerry-rigged setup was to demonstrate that desktop replacement units are inconvinient to many people. I have seen 4 colleagues return dell inspiron (5100, 3x 8500) and get the centrino equvivalents 600m, 8600 and a celeron . All of them wanted a P4 or mobile p4 becuase of the high gigahertz cpus. I explained to them about the centrino line and the pentium-Ms all of them returned thier machiens a week afterwards realizing that thier machinew were too bluky, ran too hot and had no battery life. That is the reason I can claim that not everyone wants a desktp replacement with a 3.2 GHz pentium.
They were all taken by Intels Gigahertz advertising gimmic of the early 2000s. I actually had to help them understand that a pentium-M at 1.6Ghz is as fast or faster than a 2.4 Ghz mobile P4. There are people on this group that claim the Megahertz myth doesn’t exist. However, In reality intel is a victim of it’s on own advertizing, ironic.
The moral of the story is different people buy stuff for different reason’s, Having seen 4 people return dells marketed as high performance laptops which in actuallity to those people were as inconvinient as the jerry-rigged setup I propsed.
Oh an the other reason a colleagure of mine returned the 8500 was speedstep. The Damn laptop would run as 1.2 Ghz or 700Mhz on battery power. Dell’s bios wouldn’t let us disable it the only setting was to leave te damn things at 1.2Ghz always!!! He was frustrated by how slow it was and just got a 2.0Ghz celeron which didn’t do speedstep!!!!
The G4s at 1.25Ghz are faster than a mobileP4 as 1.2 Ghz. Apple’s Cpu powermanagement is seemless. A G4 is faster than a PIII at similar clock speeds a PIII is faster than a P4 as similar Clockspeeds.
– Almost all apple computers now run at 1ghz or above.
– With the optimizations that Apple has put into OS X, only a troll, who has never Used a Mac, could complain about the speed of the machine, and think that’s an issue.
It isn’t.
I have a 550mhz Powerbook and it very responsive under OS X.
Numbers on a sheet of paper don’t tell the difference, and to anyone who has used a Mac this kind of criticism simply sounds like “Bunk” or “FUD”. But, you’re not hitting home with any real Apple user.
– Then we have price, and again if you can’t afford an eMac, you can’t afford a computer. The eMac is a Best Buy, because you get to run OS X on good hardware for a great price, loaded with great software. It’s a great first machine / learning( Unix ) tool.
So, what’s with all this Apple bashing?
What’s the point? What’s your motivation?
Apple Envy?
Are you afraid you made the wrong decision by Not buying an Apple? Are you trying to justify your mistake?
What gives?
“Give me a break, you’re comparing windows to os x?! Excuse me, but I haven’t had to reboot in a few months (other than the security patches). And I don’t have any nasty backdoors sending data to the nsa and microsoft about my computer usage. And I don’t install anti-virus software to protect my system!”
-Steve
My Windows 2000 machine doesn’t have antivirus software (granted, you need to be somewhat savvy to get away with this), is virus and trojan free (even from the mythical nsa trojan), and hasn’t rebooted in weeks (and I’ve only been shutting it down so my broken fans wouldn’t keep me awake).
“Actually there was a statistic I saw somewhere that stated when they compared the amount of work Mac users got done compared to windows users, mac users where about 50% more productive. Being able to find an run things well has A LOT to do with being productive.”
-akumaX
So where is it? It sounds made up, as I can “find and run things well” with Windows 2000 too. Windows XP supposedly improves this, but I can’t stand XP.
I use a 800MHz G4 iMac with OS X 10.2.8 several times a week. I use it for light work, typing paper, editing documentation, ssh’ing into my Linux box, etc, but its still slow. Its a very nice machine in most respects (nice screen, nice UI, compact, never crashes) but the G4 is a dated CPU architecture, and OS X is “big and beautiful.”
upgrade to panther, it supposedly has some tweaks in
it to improve performance. Also, the newer G4 systems
have upgraded buses, so instead of pc133, they use ddr 2700 (333mhz), that makes a pretty substantial increase in performance, also 7200 rpm hard drives probably made it in after the G4 800mhz, you’re probably on a 5400 rpm drive
and who knows if the L3 cache is gimped on the imacs or not. My g4’s have 1 MB L3 cache, i know the g4 ibooks don’t have any L3 cache.
G4’s may be inferior to P4’s, Athlon XP’s, and G5’s in
terms of computational throughput, but they’re still a great chip, I manage to be productive on them still, and take into
account an smp G4 where mac os x can really soar.
My powerbook is only 500Mhz, but loaded with ram (1GB), it’s fast enough and the best of all worlds.
@lundbergh
As for cygwin, I run that with windowmaker at work, it’s ok, but I mainly use cygwin for the x11 environment, i just boot into slackware when i need to get real work done.
And the final point, how’s the resale value of your x86 machines? Does your system hold even 50% of its value
after 6 months? How about a year? Macs hold great value,
I’ve actually profited on some used macs I’ve owned by selling on ebay or craigslist. You’d be pleasantly surprised if you, one day, decided to go try out a mac.
I can’t upgrade to Panther (these are lab machines) but I don’t know if it’d make *that* much of a difference. And these machines are the 17″ widescreen iMacs. So they’ve got the DDR RAM and the 7200 RPM hard disk. The G4 can’t even use the DDR RAM effectively — the 333MHz RAM has a bandwidth of 2.7GB/sec, while the G4’s bus can only handle 1.3GB/sec. Unless you’re doing large AGP transfers from memory, the DDR RAM on any G4 machine is just marketing fluff.
Are you insane? I have a regular P4 running at 3.2ghz with a gig of dual-channel 400 ram and a ATI 9600 Pro(128 meg of ram) that cost $2k, not $3k. Dude, just because you have no clue of what notebooks are available doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. If my machine isn’t going to run Doom3 fine, then about 99.9% of the desktops aren’t going to be able to run it either and Id might as well sit on it for a few years while PCs catch up.
“Yes, and the original article was about unix/linux developers migrating to OS X.
Do you even develop anything other than a sore thumb from your quaking?”
Let’s see: Among other things, I write software. Said software is usually for Windows and Linux/UNIX
or both (Fortran is great for cross-platform work). I’m paid for writing said software. I suppose
then, yes, I *am* a “unix/linux developer”, just not one who intends to move to OS X. It is an inferior
platform for my purposes (including “scientific computations” on the desktop).
“And like I’ve stated, I have multiple machines, I’m not anti-x86, I am anti-windows, I just think being
locked onto windows for everything, including game playing, is a bit ridiculous and have finally been freed
from the clutches of MS–this is after 15 years on their crummy platform because of no viable alternatives, none!”
Much the way *I* view Apple.
“Let’s look into the future as you troll along that windows/x86 is a superior platform for game playing.
Consoles are more and more becoming as sophisticated as computers for gaming. Heck, the components are”
You brought up gaming first, Steve – and no, they aren’t as sophisticated as a desktop. What’s more, a desktop
has other uses. A console is only a toy.
“Too bad the xbox2 is going with powerpc as their choice of architecture, you’re just a fucking x86/windows troll that hasn’t RTFA.”
I think I now know why Compaq died.
Thanks for showing us what a true troll would say.
“But, you’re not hitting home with any real Apple user.”
“Apple Envy?”
“Are you afraid you made the wrong decision by Not buying an Apple? Are you trying to justify your mistake?”
“real Apple user”? “Apple envy”? what is this, a Viagra ad? Ford vs. Chevy?
So, feel very elite by now? so sad.
I own a nice powerbook G4 1.25Ghz (and a Quicksilver G4, and a dual G5 at work), and yeah ,it’s “responsive” under OS X, which is just about the most meaningless, subjective thing you can say about performance. As for actual speed performance on actual computational loads (that means NOT iTunes or iPhoto, that means, in my case, rendering 3D scenes, heavy duty 3D games, compression/decompression of large files, etc.), it’s just a non-performer compared to my cheap ass $1650 centrino 1.7 laptop, which manages to beat the Mac at just about everything by a margin of at least 200%, reaching 500% in some cases – and that’s running crappy Windows XP. Not to mention it cost nearly half as much and exceeds every single one of the powerbook’s hardware specs. Sadly, that also goes for my desktop systems, albeit a smaller margin for the G5. And this pisses me off to no end, because I would really like to have the option to completely migrate to OS X.
Do I like my powerbook with Panther? hell yeah, it’s super nice. I love using OS X on it. But I never consider it for doing anything that requires superior performance. I like OS X far, far better than I like Windows, but trust me, you are deluding yourself if you think a 550Mhz powerbook can hold a candle speedwise to a decent modern laptop running crappy Windows XP – hell, my 1.25Ghz can’t. If that’s the case, then guess what… you’re the troll, because you didn’t bother to actually check this out.
Why not treat it as the COMPUTER that it is instead of a f’ed up value system of “superior choice”? Apple will never improve this situation while their user base is made up of pseudo religious drones who will inexplicably defend the fact that their computers are slower. It’s all well and good if you LOVE your Apple setup to death, really, it’s great, I do like most of my OS X stuff too, same as I like a few things about having Windows. But seriously, it doesn’t help ANYONE (and that includes you) when you, and others like you, go around attacking people who point out the fact that their hardware is slower and yet more expensive than the competition.
And these machines are the 17″ widescreen iMacs. So they’ve got the DDR RAM and the 7200 RPM hard disk. The G4 can’t even use the DDR RAM effectively — the 333MHz RAM has a bandwidth of 2.7GB/sec, while the G4’s bus can only handle 1.3GB/sec. Unless you’re doing large AGP transfers from memory, the DDR RAM on any G4 machine is just marketing fluff.
The 17″ 800Mhz iMac’s were released in july 2002 (almost 2 years ago) and didn’t have DDR Ram they had SDRAM. Jaguar makes extensive use of the graphics card for compositing the GUI.
So the newer 1.25GHz iMacs would make a big difference with thier DDR RAM because the GPU needs to be feed constanly for QE to composite the desktop. Also the newer iMacs have better graphics cards. I would call that machine slow too. My PB 1.25Ghz is plenty fast and I have never cursed at this thing for being slow and I am an impatient man. Slow is a relative term. I have cursed my Athlon XP 1700+ machine running XP and linux quite a bit. Also my toshiba notebook running a 700Mhz celeron is slow.
Look at the title of this article.
Now look at the discussion.
They don’t seem to be related.
I wonder why OSNews don’t have a Mac vs PC article and let everyone comment it out there, because this crap invading every article is making a lot of people sick.
Matt
Hmm, you’re right. For some reason I thought the DDR and widescreen came out in the same release. Anyway, I’ll have to take a look at a DDR G4 machine, though all the benchmarks I’ve seen of DDR on the G4 show no performance improvements.
I would call that machine slow too.
I meant the 800Mhz 17″ iMac if it wasn’t clear.
This discussion is way off topic, well ao are most Apple related topics on OSNews anyway, sigh.
You are right the DDR wouldn’t make much of a difference on a CPU benchmark because of the G4’s bus. But in terms of User experience OS X with QE and a good graphics card (those on recent Macs) can most certainly take advantege of the DDR bandwidth for its Graphics subsystem.
For average desktop uses such as Websurfing, Documents watching DVDs, software developtment and even some moderate DV processing a 1.25Ghz G4 based iMac should be plenty fast, again fast being a relative term.
I’d like to know why we get these trolls on OS News.
I think the point is most people will find the Powerbook very fast.
Is there a faster laptop on the market?
Yes, no one said the Powerbook was the fastest anything!
The point of the Powerbook was that you can run almost Everything on it.
OS X, Linux and Windows( abet slowly ).
You can develop for at least OS X, Java and Linux on it.
I’m not sure developing for windows under Virtual PC is really practical.
@lumbergh
A centrino is the only x86 chipset you can call a notebook chipset. Your notebook is a battery grave. Thats why it costs 2k. Thats a crap notebook with a hot short life. Have fun. I’m with you.
“A centrino is the only x86 chipset you can call a notebook chipset. Your notebook is a battery grave.
Thats why it costs 2k. Thats a crap notebook with a hot short life. Have fun. I’m with you.”
There are plenty and were plenty of notebooks that could achieve 4 hour battery times – including the PIII desktop replacement I’m typing this on. So, there are plenty
of x86 chipsets that can be called “notebook chipsets”.
you can’t play Doom3 on such notebooks, lumbergh meant a powerbook is bad because you can’t play actual 3d Shooter on it. Every PC Notebook with the performance to play actual 3d Games is a small Desktop PC they should not build in a battery in such books, its a bad ecological decision. A toxic battery inside the book wich you can’t use anymore after six month.
“you can’t play Doom3 on such notebooks, lumbergh meant a”
You can’t play Doom3 on most desktops, either.
“powerbook is bad because you can’t play actual 3d Shooter on it. Every PC Notebook with the performance to play actual 3d Games is a small Desktop PC they should not build in a battery in such books, its a bad ecological decision. A toxic battery inside the book wich you can’t use anymore after six month.”
The laptop I’m typing this on can play “3D shooters” and gets a four hour battery life. It isn’t a Centrino laptop. Your “ecological decision” makes little sense.
Good PC laptop chipsets have been around for *years*. The Pentium-M is just a better chip for a subset of the notebook market.
we talked about actual 3d Shooters like farcry ut2004 or doom3 and you’re right the notebooks you can play such games are non existent. Also a celeron 433 notebook can do it right with quake2 or you can play quake3 on a 1ghz pentium 3 thats not the point. Lumbergh can’t say the powerbook is bad because its bad with 3d shooters.
The Pentium-M has a better battery life than a normal Pentium but he’s not comparable in this point with a G4. The only x86 notebook processor you can compare with a g4 is the centrino. And the power of the centrino is nearly the same of the g4.