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.
my best rig is an amd64 3400+ with 1gb pc3200 ram, sata hard drives, and an ati 9800 xt pro.
there are very few things the dual 2ghz g5 mac can beat my best rig in. and my machine cost over $1000 less.
i dont own any 5 million dollar supercomputers.
nothing beats a marketing event even if you build a cluster out of 1000 super elegant giant aluminum desktop towers. hey lets build a special rack system for them, lets spend a fortune installing special cooling system, and lets use more power while we are at it.
Yeah notice that price was a lot less than the super computers ranked directly in front and directly behind the Super G5 ranking. Not to mention that Dell lost out to Apple on the VA Tech bid to build the monster.
o knows how many secret govt or private pharmaceutical companies have supercomputers that would smash that mac cluster.
Unfortunately for you, you have nothing to show for your ridiculous claim!
It’s not marketing FUD, it’s just reality and you’re hating every minute of it.
FUD isn’t the right term (Fear of what? Not choosing Apple?)
Regardless, the marketing point of the VT cluster was price/performance. A cluster could be built with twice the number of computers, but so far no one beat Apple on price.
i give no credence to wild claims of performance that have not been verified and the machine has since been dismantled….its a pipe dream just as much as wondering about what secret govt agencies and specialty commercial computing labs are capable of doing.
you and other of the mac faithful are the ones trotting out incomplete science in any effort to try to look good.
i need not try to ride on the coat tails of 5 million dollar computers to make me feel proud of the slow and over priced computer i own.
my machine is fast and was a great buy and only a few select desktop computers made can out perform it…athlon fx and pentium 4 3.2 and 3.4ghz extreme models that cost substantially more than what i own.
a dualg5 costs way more and in benchmarking done by both apple and pc sites and magazines all over the world the stats tell the tale. the g5 is a powerful machine but it remains weaker than top end pc desktops and costs substantially more.
its all marketing FUD…hey you can even buy a piece of Mac history at macmall! better hurry to buy that overpriced used computer.
http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/f/FUD.html
“FUD /fuhd/ n. Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company: “FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products.” The idea, of course, was to persuade them to go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors’ equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors’ equipment or software. See IBM. After 1990 the term FUD was associated increasingly frequently with Microsoft, and has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon.”
repeat after me word/acronym snob:
“has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon”
i give no credence to wild claims of performance that have not been verified and the machine has since been dismantled….its a pipe dream just as much as wondering about what secret govt agencies and specialty commercial computing labs are capable of doing.
Where is your proof that the numbers are “wild”? Face it, your green with envy.
a dualg5 costs way more and in benchmarking done by both apple and pc sites and magazines all over the world the stats tell the tale. the g5 is a powerful machine but it remains weaker than top end pc desktops and costs substantially more.
It depends on the benchmarks. I’ve seen the PC beat the Mac as well as I have seen the Mac beat the PC. They’re both run pretty much neck-n-neck these days give or take the task being compared. But the real question is; how fast do you need your machine to go to check email?
not very as most mac buyers arent fortunate enough to be able to afford dual g5 machines and are still using much slower single cpu g4 machines…cpu technology that is now 4 years old in many cases.
and they still pay more for those than if they bought a faster PC.
but yes the g5 does win in a few select encoding operations. its not a complete rout, the g5 wins about 1 out of 20 benchmarks that are doable on both platforms.
the single most important pro application for a mac is photoshop and it even runs faster on PCs.
not very as most mac buyers arent fortunate enough to be able to afford dual g5 machines and are still using much slower single cpu g4 machines…cpu technology that is now 4 years old in many cases.
Sorry to bust your bubble, but I own and maintain both computer types. And yes, my PC has an Athlon Inside. My other Macs have G4s and I get to see both perform on a daily basis.
and they still pay more for those than if they bought a faster PC.
Not everyone needs some fast PC or Mac, or even cares. Getting work done on the computer through the idea of user-ability and being able to communicate via the web is the concern. You few but vocal clockspeed chasers are the only ones who care about MHz! And as often as you update your machines to keep up with the Jones’ would could had a few Macs lying around the house.
but yes the g5 does win in a few select encoding operations. its not a complete rout, the g5 wins about 1 out of 20 benchmarks that are doable on both platforms.
Now you’re the one spreading the FUD.
the single most important pro application for a mac is photoshop and it even runs faster on PCs.
There’s more to the Mac than just using Photoshop!
In 1996 I bought my first computer, a “super fast” Pentium. I put it to rest in 2001. The only reason it was not fast enough anymore was because I wanted to play DivX movies, and a 120Mhz CPU just didn’t cut it. I have yet to own a computer with more than 800Mhz as a CPU frequency. I’ve really never had complaints about speed.
CPU speed is the least of my concerns really, and I know that most computer users are with me on that one. They really don’t care what the specs of their computer is, or how many gigaflops it can do. Except for games, there’s very little difference now days between a P3 600 and a P4 3.2ghz. Users generally don’t care how fast their computer is. What they care about is the experience.
I know very few details about the VA Tech cluster. However, I highly doubt that they’d be put up as 3rd fastest public supercomputer on VA’s word. “Yea yea, it’s REAL FAST.” Logic says that a 3rd party ran a test.
> but yes the g5 does win in a few select encoding operations. its not a
> complete rout, the g5 wins about 1 out of 20 benchmarks that are doable
> on both platforms.
I enjoy this comparison from PC magazine:
Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop is a popular image editing program used extensively on both OSes. We tested using version 7.01, the latest available for both Windows and Macintosh, and we used Adobe’s G5 Processor plug-in update for Mac OS X, which lets the program take advantage of the system’s additional memory and special instructions. We started with a 59.5 MB test image, but many operations completed too quickly to time, so we quadrupled the size to 238MB.
At these larger image sizes, although the Wintel test times were quite good, both the G4 and G5 computers proved more adept at distort functions like wave and pinch. Moreover, on the Windows system, loading the controls often took a minute or more. If these times are added back to the actual test times, both Macintosh computers would have clearly outperformed the Windows-based computer.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1274230,00.asp
I think that is the best way to go Martin. I bought the same iBook reviewed in this review, but with 128 MB ram. Since it was my first experience with a Mac, I assumed that Mac was just slow compared to Windows. Then I upgraded the ram to 640 MB and it ran twice as fast (and I never have to close any application anymore). A couple of months ago, I bought Pather and it runs even faster now.
Apple charges too much for pre-installed RAM. The way to go is to buy a 128 MB, buy ram from third parties and install it immedietly. Believe me, it will make your experience a lot better.
of 24 scores that run on both platforms the dual g5 won 8.
against a dual xeon 3.0ghz dell workstation. an overpriced specialty workstation that is generally purchased by users that intend to run it for at most a couple of very precise tasks….most commonly 3d and cad/cam work.
but as that is already an outpaced cpu and the g5 has not been upgraded or dropped in price you can now buy even faster xeons and
the pentium 4 3.2 and 3.4 ghz extreme editions with 2mb cache
the amd athlon fx 51 and 53
tha amd64 3200+ and 3400+
all of those have seen price drops since the release of the 2ghz g5.
we can trot out all of the benchmarking if you really want to see it as done by third parties but the most telling was the comprehensive set done by sister magazines maximumpc/macaddict back when the g5 shipped. pc cpus back in the late fall of 2003 utterly trounced the g5….especially the pentium 4 extreme and the athlonfx.
One of the cool things about TextEdit not mentioned in the piece is that you can ask the computer to ‘speak’ the text. Unfortunately, Apple’s built in speech synthesizer is not yet upto the mark. I hope they improve it in future versions.
One commercial software that I found to be good at this is http://www.rhetorical.com/. IBM also has a product, but it is no better than Apples.
If anyone has any suggestions on what I can do to get better speech synthesizer for my iBook (preferably free of cost) please let me know.
and have it cheaper than a stock 1.8 or 2.0 G5 system, then good for you, but I doubt you will.
the dual 2ghz g5 does not win a single test:
http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,112749,pg,8,00.asp
again those are pcs from many months ago and several new cpus and video cards have already shipped to replace them and those older models have also subsequently dropped in price…..
and debman i will be happy to show you those machines prebuilt that cost less than a dual 2ghz g5. give me a moment to get them…
I’ve been a Mac user ever since the Power Mac 6100/60 was first released. And, except for a 5 year stint away from the Mac platform (couldn’t afford to upgrade my 8500/120 with a DVD drive to play Dragon’s Lair DVD, had to trade my 8500/120 for a DVD-equipped PC to do so, and haven’t had the money to “get back with Mac” until about 6 months ago), I have been a staunch “Macophile” ever since day 1.
So, unless Atari ever starts making computers again, BeOS makes a HUGE comeback, or the AmigaOne/AmigaOS 4 really hit the big times, I am going to be a Mac user til the day I die… or until Apple stops making/supporting them, but may that day NEVER come in my lifetime!
But, truth be told, I’d rather be using an Atari computer with as much power as my 466MHz G4 DA has. Atari will always be “THE One” for me, but the Mac is the next best choice given that Atari isn’t likely to do that again…
Latre!
Luposian
at the apple store
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/715…
dual 2ghz g5 tower without monitor or speakers with 1gb ram and the top end mac ati 9800 pro with only 128mb ram comes to $3449….prebuilt.
as for a pc with either an athlonfx or pentium 4 extreme cpu
http://www.abspc.com/app/config.asp?mono=1706&view=2
the following pc is $3691 right now at their site. Nearly every weekend you can order a pc from them with a 5% off discount if ordered on weekends. That would put them at nearly identical prices but please not i configured this pc with a high end 21″ crt, top end 5.1 logitech speakers, a tv tuner card, a very elegant coolermaster aluminum case, the top end sound blaster audigy 2 zs sound card with live drive, and i put double the hard drive capacity in it versus the mac. It also has a better ATI viedo card. If I dropped that stuff down a notch and took off the monitor and speakers to match the mac not having them in the above config, the PC would cost about $1000 less.
These are the specs (prebuilt) and includes two free very well regarded games valued at about $80:
Ultimate M6 Print Summary Base/Sale Price: $2599
Item Description Quantity Price
Cooler Master Wave Master Case without Power Supply, Model “TAC-T01-E1C” -RETAIL (Item#ABS11119023) 1 $38
Logitech Z-680 5.1 Surround Speaker Set THX-Certified with Dolby Digital Decoder (Silver) (Item#ABS36121105) 1 $267
NEC-Mitsubishi MultiSync 22″ FE21111SB-BK Diamondtron Flat-Screen CRT Monitor (Black) (Item#ABS24002040) 1 $541
Antec 480W Power Supply TRUE480 (Item#ABS17103909) 1 Standard
Asus Motherboard for AMD Athlon 64 & Opteron 200 – Model SK8N nForce3 pro150 (Item#ABS13131465) 1 Standard
AMD Athlon 64 FX-53, 1MB L2 Cache, – OEM (Item#ABS19103437) 1 Standard
Thermaltake Silent Boost K8 Copper Heatsink and Fan for AMD Athlon 64 FX and Opteron (Item#ABS35106036) 1 Standard
Corsair XMS Series 512MB PC3200 DDR 184-Pin ECC Registered (Item#ABS20145462) 2 pieces Standard
ATI Radeon 9800 XT 256MB DDR DVI/TV-out (Item#ABS14102317) 1 $50
Leadtek “EXPERT” PCI TV/FM Tuner Card with Remote (Item#ABS14122180) 1 $54
Maxtor 160GB SATA 7200RPM 8MB Cache (Item#ABS22144322) 2 pieces $65
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum 7.1 with 1394 (Item#ABS29102163) 1 $77
DVD|SONY 16X DDU1612/B2 BLACK OEM (Item#ABS27131003) 1 Standard
NEC 8x DVD+RW/-RW Drive, Black Model ND-2500A OEM (Item#ABS27152014) 1 Standard
Sony 1.44MB Floppy Drive (Black) (Item#ABS21103116) 1 Standard
18″ ATA133 Round IDE Cable (Transparent Black) (Item#ABS12104627) 1 Standard
Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer Optical (Two-Tone) (Item#ABS26105142) 1 Standard
Microsoft 114 keys (10 Hot Keys) Internet Keyboard | Mouse Not Included | – Black (Item#ABS23109125) 1 Standard
Blue 8″ x 9″ x 6″ ABS Mouse Pad (Item#ABS17114110) 1 Standard
Microsoft Windows XP Home with Service Pack 1a (Item#ABS37110015) 1 Standard
EVGA Nvidia NVDVD 2.0 DVD Software (Item#ABS32164001) 1 Standard
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 (Item#ABS37110020) 1 $0
Microsoft Rise of Nations – PC Game (Item#ABS37110021) 1 $0
2Net 1 Year 24/7 Tech Support & Onsite Service | (Concurrent with Standard Warranty) (Item#ABS88101201) 1 Standard
ABS Computer System Binder for Organizing Drivers and Manuals (Item#ABS57101101) 1 Standard
Free Gift! ABS/Canon Silver Ink Pen (Item#ABS00101004) 1 Standard
Price with Option(s): $3691
and of course you have all those options you can pick and choose to suit you. get xp pro or better video card or fill that case with hard drives….spend less on speakers, whatever….
http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,112749,pg,8,00.asp
This benchmark has been beaten to death on these and many other forums. Premier 6 is not a native MacOS X application. Word on Mac is not the same as word on windows.
A better benchmark is the Vatech super cluster which is the 3rd fastest in the world and does it with hundreds of cpus less than either the opteron or xeon.
3
Virginia Tech
United States/2003
X
1100 Dual 2.0 GHz Apple G5/Mellanox Infiniband 4X/Cisco GigE / 2200
Self-made
10280
17600
4
NCSA
United States/2003
Tungsten
PowerEdge 1750, P4 Xeon 3.06 GHz, Myrinet / 2500
Dell
9819
15300
6
Los Alamos National Laboratory
United States/2003
Lightning
Opteron 2 GHz, Myrinet / 2816
Linux Networx
8051
11264
There you go a 2200 cpu g5 beat a 2500 cpu xeon and a 2816 2.0Ghz opteron. I trust the linpack cores on the top 500 site a lot more than the pcworld benchmarks.
Your ABS PC is missing something when you compare it with the high-end G5. Something called a second cpu and a dual cpu motherboard. Add those and see the price go up.
” Hmm. The math department at my university has converted en masse its several hundred lab computers (and most of its grad student computers as well) from Windows to Linux and OSX…..Computer illiterate, eh?”
And what makes you think that computer literacy is based on common intelligence.
Using your logic, I must be a genius since Im more much adept at computers than my cousin that works as a physicist at the Uni of toronto.
Bow down to my magnificence
no the dual cpu isnt missing
it isnt needed to outperform any mac made.
if you are running very specialized software or server stuff than a dual cpu or quad or name your number comes in handy.
see most macs sold to the tune of about 3/4 of them do not have dual cpus. the overwhelming majority of mac software (even apples) does not benefit from a second cpu. apple has been forced into using them in a select few high end models to make a stab at the performance issues that have plagued them for years. the consumer pays more but gets little real world benefit from that second cpu.
f you are running very specialized software or server stuff than a dual cpu or quad or name your number comes in handy.
see most macs sold to the tune of about 3/4 of them do not have dual cpus. the overwhelming majority of mac software (even apples) does not benefit from a second cpu.
There you go spreading FUD again. Most of apple’s prosumer apps like finalcut pro, photshop can use multiple cpus.
Here is the top output from my power book, notice safari has 7 threads, terminal has 3.
PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE
1720 top 7.2% 0:01.05 1 16 26 292K 384K 1.73M 27.1M
1719 tcsh 0.0% 0:00.02 1 13 20 360K 616K 876K 22.1M
1718 login 0.0% 0:00.04 1 13 37 140K 376K 488K 26.9M
1717 Terminal 0.0% 0:03.95 3 62 131 2.55M 6.29M 6.65M 140M
1692 Safari 0.0% 7:24.73 7 118 565 65.8M 16.9M 72.8M 215M
1676 lookupd 0.0% 0:00.25 2 35 58 420K 728K 1.19M 28.5M
MacOS X can very well use multiple cpus, apps don’t need to be multithreaded to use a second cpu, though most are. The OS’s scheduler can very well schedule any thread it wishes to any of the cpus transparent to the Apps running on the systems.
PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE
1724 LimeWire 7.7% 0:10.56 47 678 460 41.6M+ 26.0M+ 53.9M+ 446M
See limwire/java is using 47 threads. The MacOS X kernel can easily schedule limewire to run on one and safari to run on the other cpu if this machine were to be a dual cpu box. Applications need not be specifically threaded for the OS or the consumer to benifit from a second cpu in a box.
This whole notion of oh applications can’t use the second cpu anyway, a blatanlty false statement, the OS can always use a second CPU to improve the throughput in a systems.
By the way almost every cpu manufacturer is moving to dual core cpus soon, to further discredit your false notion.
“By the way almost every cpu manufacturer is moving to dual core cpus soon, to further discredit your false notion”
“is moving”….and hyperthreading on pentium 4 gives benefits in some things more than others today.
dual cores will cheaper than dual cpus in one machine.
the future….
but of course a second cpu is better than just one but at what cost is the point. the bottom line is the benefit for most applications does not justify the expense.
but of course a second cpu is better than just one but at what cost is the point. the bottom line is the benefit for most applications does not justify the expense.
Well apple sells a dual 1.8ghz 64-bit cpu for $2500 machine for find me a dual cpu opteron for that price with all the features and software stack, I believe the athlon 64s are single only, but I could be wrong.
Your price comparison of the abs pc is pointless. You need to get a dual cpu machine to compare it to. Your assertion that a dual cpu won’t make a difference for average users is baseless and absoluletly naive.
The point was not the dual core cpus would be cheaper but that more cpus makes a difference in performance.
and hyperthreading on pentium 4 gives benefits in some things more than others today.
hyperthreading is a pseudo-SMT hack intel did to squeeze more out of the p4, it is not a dual core cpu. Sun and IBM have dual core cpus in the market. AMD and intel are soon to follow.
“Well apple sells a dual 1.8ghz 64-bit cpu for $2500 machine for find me a dual cpu opteron for that price with all the features and software stack, I believe the athlon 64s are single only, but I could be wrong.”
you run about talking like you know so many things but you dont know how to use a search engine?
on the pc i can find dual opterons
dual amd athlon mp
dual pentium 3
dual xeon
use a search engine or shopping site and price to your hearts content.
of course i can find dual cpu pcs for under $2500. i can also custom build them to my hearts desire as well.
id go through all the trouble and youd tell me i was tripping cause it dont have iphoto or some such crap.
find it yourself and post back here.
What is it with our dear TheSeeker? He also attacked everybody about the price of the Mac in the previous Mac thread a few days ago. Well, let me enter the war with my own experieces with Macs and PC’s.
I would say that if you want a the fastest processor for the lowest price, you don’t buy a Mac. But why is it only the processor speed that counts? What about hardware design? A nice case? MacOS? Don’t they count?
I have two PC’s. A Macintosh Performa 6400/180 and a Pentium II 350. Now let’s look at them:
The PC costed about $1100. It was not the fastest available: the Pentium II 450 was already out. In the past 6 years, it has broken 7 times:
– speaker smelling like they were burning
– CD-ROM player ruined the harddisk, well, almost
– Non-working keys on the (Trust) keyboard
– 2x broken monitor: 1x Philips, 1x Belinea
– Broken power supply
– RAM that went bad
That means the only things that have not failed yet are:
– Case
– Mainboard + CPU
– Floppy drive
– Mouse
The Apple costed about $1700. It’s 180 Mhz processor was faster than anything available in the PC world (the fastest PC had a Pentium 166). In the past 7 or 8 years, it has only had an empty battery two times, because we always pulled the plug when not in use.
Besides that, the software has also always just worked. I can’t remember ever having to reinstall the MacOS (7.5.5 / 8.5) because something broke.
Additionally, I have recently experimented with the Apple: replacing the harddisk and adding a network card. And I can only conclude that the machine is designed extremely well. You can just slide out the mainboard to add cards. You can remove the front panel and then just slide out the HD to replace it.
That makes me think that you get what you pay for, even with Apple machines. Only some people get something different than they want when they buy a Mac, well, then don’t buy one.
Btw. My parents do have a faster PC, in case you wonder.
And what makes you think that computer literacy is based on common intelligence.
What makes you think that mathematicians are not computer literate? Many are not, but a large number of them are. The largest section of my school’s math department works in what we call scientific computing; another fairly large section (myself included) works in computer algebra. For these two groups, computer literacy is not an option.
Remember, computer science was born from the womb of mathematics departments: Turing, von Neumann, Knuth…
The deal with seeker is as Jack Perry so rightfully claimed is our hybrid troll.
If he can’t discuss with reasoning he drops down to name calling. As evidence in the other thread “Apple is a business” shows. He posts price comparison and when someone comes and dismantles his comparison with well reasoned arguments, he again drops down to personal attacks.
He claims to have owned macs till 2003, I strongly doubt that claim.
I have seen him and many others on this forum, who make personal attacks and the moderators at OSnews, review thier comments even though it violates
alteast three of their rules, still don’t moderate them down or ban them.
So it makes people, who are here to really have a discussion, want to get them off of their backs and get on with the real topic. We end up indulging them and then we get 100+ posts and always on mac topics. I have yet to see trolls of this caliber on other topic.
I did own three powerbooks before I switched to PC at my home. The point is: I hadn’t met any problem in any parts of my powerbooks, and at last I said bye to it. It’s very good to know that sometimes, you can get a bad dot on the screen. I think I am very lucky leaving the Mac early.
There is one thing that will keep me away from the Mac, and probably having to have a Windoze partition on my PC, games. I know I might get flamed for bringing up a use for computers that may not be ‘serious’ but I do play a lot of games.
I work in the systems team for a University and consider myself a fairly computer literate person. I use my PC for lots of non-gaming activities, Internet, file sharing, office tasks, audio work etc. I know some games will run on the Mac, just as they do on Linux (my other OS) but I want access to all games not just some. And I don’t have a games console because the PC is best for FPS and strategy.
why would you get flamed? at least you have a preference based on a fact and not some strange irrational hatred like Seeker and carbon-12
“I think I am very lucky leaving the Mac early.”
Could you elaborate a little?
i have no irrational hatred of apple
i have given them many thousands of dollars of my money over the years
i switched platforms and discuss my impressions of computers and software
if the truth hurts, oh well.
all of my posts lead back to a rational appraisal of apple computers:
they are overpriced
they are underpowerd for that price as compared to similarly priced models by other makers of computers
they are on the decline and i do not want to invest in a dying horse any longer
they are not as expandable as the platforms i now choose.
they do not have the as good of a selection of software and hardware solutions (including games)
it is not as easy to get support on the mac platform
repairs and parts and software for macs cost more
the list could go on….
i am not a troll, my opinions are well thought out and fairly well elaborated (yes i do drop some flame bait at times), and not that it really matters, my thoughts are a lot more well accepted by a larger proportion of people than most of the drivel i see mac users spouting.
and debman, you are welcome for finding those pc prices you requested.
i am not a troll, my opinions are well thought out and fairly well elaborated
Don’t forget to tell us about your immense modesty, your incredible charm, and your boyish good looks.
You are entitled to your opinions; what we object to is your insistence that other people’s opinions to the contrary are groundless. — Well, that’s what I object to, can’t speak for the others.
As for Apple dying, well — see the other story today about overall Mac sales increasing.
Then why did you spend “thousands of dollars” on Apple products? Oh wait, you didn’t have any problems and after the commercial with the flying women of Windows XP you suddenly saw the light and bought a PC.
Well, I can say two more things of my own experience with our old Mac.
1. Mac OS Classic sucks. On our Performa 6400/180, you can’t surf the internet in any usable way, since MacOS is too slow. Waiting an entire minute for the osnews.com mainpage is not funny.
2. Performance isn’t everything. I am currently typing this on that same Performa 6400/180 on Linux, on KDE 3.2.2 with nice anti-aliased fonts. So what would be the use of a computer 10 times as fast? Could I type this comment in one tenth of the time? Most likely not.
I think it is time for people to start not only looking at the number of Ghz, MB and GB in a machine. I mean, nowadays people buy more LCD panels than CRT screens, and I bet that isn’t because they (LCD panels) offer less image quality and lower resolutions for a higher price. Likewise, I know someone who has bought a recent PC, and the noise alone is so terribly loud that I would never want such a PC, how cheap it might be.
So I can get a Mac as my next computer.
i work with data and facts as generally accepted. not a bunch of opinions but as they are influenced by data. opinions alone hold little merit on a board like this.
apples total sales are up versus the same quarters a yr ago.
mac sales are down and that is what i am most concerned with here….not selling 800,000 ipods.
the other thread you mention has a direct quote by apple saying they worry about their opportunity for profitability if they cannot sell macs.
they are now driving sales via ipods and other non-mac items. they are getting the majority of their retail sales from non-mac items.
all of that spells trouble to me….and many apple analysts.
apple themselves also mention that maintaining profitability in the music segment will be difficult. ipods are doing great but when you can buy a 40gb creative zen mp3 player for $250 instead of apple’s $499, i wonder how long they can command those kind of margins?
apples margins are also down…
i take all of that data and surmise apple is dying as a computer manufacturer, but only time will tell.
i certainly could be wrong, sun came from nothing to become one the worlds tech leaders….the same can be said about little dell or compaq back in the 80s. so apple as a $6 billion dollar biz likely has a better shot at it than someone starting from scratch, but all evidence currently points towards decline not growth.
“Then why did you spend “thousands of dollars” on Apple products? Oh wait, you didn’t have any problems and after the commercial with the flying women of Windows XP you suddenly saw the light and bought a PC.”
now i evaluated my purchases and after using macs exclusively for 15 years, i bought my first pc after i tried windows 98 second edition in 1999. I liked what I saw. I liked the price. I wanted to play Half Life. I enjoyed tinkering and upgrading.
I then tried Windows XP and liked it even better. Even more reliable, an even better feature set.
I also got to do the migration to os x and found it a miserable experience. It didn’t go smoothly and it was very expensive.
I made the decision to go with Windows to save money.
I gave my Macs and all software and books away to a friend.
Nothing sudden about it.
I evaluated and found Windows to be the superior product based on all of the things being debated in these threads.
mac sales are down and that is what i am most concerned with here….not selling 800,000 ipods.
No, you really haven’t been reading the other stories on the site, have you? Apple’s latest SEC filing reports that Mac sales are UP, not DOWN. That does not include iPods, although it does include iBooks and PowerBooks. I even asked a question about it in the forum there.
So much for using the latest facts…
http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2004/04/14/unitsales/?lsrc=mcrs…
headline: iPods up, Power Macs down and also
Consumer sales good and bad
stats:
“Power Mac sales, which includes Power Mac G4s, Power Mac G5s and Xserve boxes, did not quite match expectations. Apple had hoped when the Power Mac G5 shipped last year that it would be able to sustain about 200,000 units sold per quarter — they exited the quarter with 174,000 Power Mac units sold. Power Mac unit sales were up year-over-year by about 12 percent, although they DROPPED 19 percent sequentially”
so out of the recession and comparing to recession sales numbers they are up. great, as is nearly everyone. but, compared to a non-recession quarter just previous to the last one they are DOWN 19%. and they are not meeting their own stated goals.
“PowerBook sales totalled about 157,000 units — $336 million all told. Forty-eight percent of the Macs Apple sold during the second quarter were portable units, between the PowerBook and iBook. Those PowerBook numbers did represent a 19 percent sequential DROP, however, and a 5 percent year-over-year DROP”
so powerbooks are down sequentially and year over year. bad news considering the mobile move is the big push for apple “the year of the laptop”…..
“Apple sold 217,000 iMacs and eMacs for the quarter, racking up about $252 million in revenue. That’s DOWN four percent from the holidays and OFF 15 percent year-to-year”
so again down sequentially and year over year.
“The iBook sold very strong for the quarter. Unit sales were FLAT sequentially, which is a victory, as calendar Q4 sales usually uptick with holiday and end-of-year shopping. That still translated into 201,000 iBooks sold for the quarter, worth about $223 million in revenue, UP 51 percent year-over-year”
ibook is FLAT sequentially, and up in a big way year over year. note this is the cheaper line and less profitable….not good for the bottom line.
you may now call me a troll again for posting accurate data taken directly from apple sec filings and as reported on probably the best known mac news site on the net.
Well, I have also switched from Mac OS 8.5 to Windows 98, and for me it was a switch from a perfectly working system to a system with blue screens every day. And I am not exraggating when I say that my Windows 98 system crashed already at boot 2 out of 3 times when I dared to install a virus scanner.
Windows 2000/XP seems to work pretty good, indeed, other than freezing entirely every now and then when a sound is played. Not to say Windows 2000 and XP (professional) are cheap though, and you don’t even get MS Works with it, let alone Office. Or do you only install illegal copies of them?
And my parents also bought a Compaq laptop, with a celeron 667 processor. It wasn’t exactly cheap, and what do you get? A computer that takes ten minutes to boot. Five to get at the login prompt, and five afterwards. And if you let it sit unused for a few hours, it seems all applications are swapped out so with every click you then do it takes at least 15 seconds to restore the application from the virtual memory.
Not to mention that my Intel PC of $1100 has been broken at least once a year.
Now you must be curious why whe haven’t bought a second mac. The reason is that the combination of MacLinkPlus and ClarisWorks isn’t exactly ideal to deal with Word documents with embedded spreadsheets. Looking back, I think a wiser thing would have been to buy Office 98 instead of a new PC, which had Works so you still couldn’t open and save Excel files easily.
you may now call me a troll again for posting accurate data taken directly from apple sec filings and as reported on probably the best known mac news site on the net
Um, I’m not the one who claimed Mac sales were down. Compared to last year, the sales are up:
– Power Macs UP year-over-year by about 12 percent
– iBooks UP 51 percent year-over-year
– PowerBooks DROP 5 percent year-over-year
– iMacs, eMacs DROP 15 percent year-over-year
If you would bother to do some math, instead of capitalizing the words that favor your argument, you would see that total Mac sales are UP 5% over the last year.
So, I call you a troll because you are either deliberately misrepresenting a basic fact, or because you are ignorant. Which is it?
By the way, that 5% is an approximate number, calculating last year’s sales from the data that Seeker posted. I didn’t feel like looking up the actual sales data from last year, so I calculated 156000 PowerMacs, 166000 Powerbooks, 256000 iMacs and eMacs, 134000 iBooks from last year. That totals 712,000 Macs sold in the quarter, compared to 749,000 in this quarter.
Seeker might like to pretend that all that matters is the quarter-to-quarter change, whose data do support his argument; alas if he would read what he quoted, he would notice that calendar sales are always better in Q4 “with holiday and end-of-year shopping”, while in Q1 people are paying off their accumulated debt. In other words, the comparison is invalid.
Overall Mac sales are up from last year, as Apple’s SEC filing states, and the number agree.
I found that for dual processors, even building one myself, was the same price as apple. When you are building a dual processor workstation you don’t use cheap pricewatch parts anyway.
What many who consider G5 comparable systems are either the exact same price if not more, or cheap half-assed competitors that don’t come close to a real G5 dp powermac, or dual opteron system.
Jack is right for the same quarter from one year to the next.
Seeker is right from one quarter to the next.
But, no, the holiday season is a great quarter but many PC makers are reporting better sales from the fourth quarter 2003 to the first quarter 2004. Gartner, IDC, and Forrester are all revising numbers up as the world economy and especially the American economy kick into high gear again.
Apple has not realized the gains that other computer makers are getting from increased spending by world corporations and more confident consumers.
Finally, Apple’s computer sales are trending downwards both as a percentage of the world market (Gartner estimates the world market at 187 million this year and Apple at its current pace will sell under 3 million to give them about 1.6% of the world share) and compared to their own highs of a few years ago.
Another interesting point is that Gartner’s (and all other researchers) numbers do not include computers built by small shops and enthusiasts…which would add many more millions to the world total. No one is building macs as you cannot buy mac roms from apple. All self-built computers are therefore PCs.
The biggest story is not just one quarter to the next or one year to the next but the overall market trends: the world computer market is going to be about 30 million computers bigger this year versus two years ago but Apple’s numbers are shrinking over that same time frame.
I would say the evidence is pretty clear. Apple’s sales are declining and they better hope the iPod and ITMS can save them.
By the way, I have also noticed that the first people to trot the word “troll” and accuse people of being one tend to be the worst offenders themselves. Jack Perry fits that billing.
I see the trend continuing for Apple as they cannot release faster G5 machines and the iMac and eMac lines have grown a bit tired in their design. Apple needs a refresh as soon as possible.
Peace.
No one is building macs as you cannot buy mac roms from apple. All self-built computers are therefore PCs.
There is an irony here, in that Apple started off by selling built-it-yourself kits. 🙂
By the way, I have also noticed that the first people to trot the word “troll” and accuse people of being one tend to be the worst offenders themselves. Jack Perry fits that billing.
I would really like to know how I fit that billing. Perhaps you’d like to peruse comments I’ve made in other threads, and dissect them for me, showing me how I’m trying to stir up an argument when none exists? I’m quite open to correction when I’m wrong, and I’ve been corrected in these forums in the past.
http://www.macminute.com/2003/12/20/10k
This is information for the year that just ended for Apple.
“Mac sales declined 3% year-over-year to approximately 3 million units”
So from fiscal year 2002 to fiscal year 2003, Apple sold approximately 100,000 fewer Macs.
From 2001 to 2002 Apple was ho-hum.
http://www.macminute.com/2002/12/19/sec
“Mac sales were relatively flat year-over-year at approximately 3.1 million units”
In 2001 Apple sold 3,087,000 Macs
IN 2000 Apple sold 4,558,000 Macs
2003 compared to 2000 is 1,558,000 fewer Macs per year. That is a decline of approximately 34%. Meanwhile the wold computer market has grown substantially in the same period of time.
Apple has shrunk massively over the last four years in computer sales and if you want to look at it in the most favorable light, is now treading water the last two years.
Peace.
It always amazes me that these Mac articles generate so much feedback. I’ve only been a mac person for about 5 weeks, but when I used PC/linux/windows, I never felt the need to go into a Mac news forum to state how much mac suck, they’re going out of business, they’re too expensive….etc. If you don’t want to use the Mac, great, why the holy wars. Another thing, it seems like a common occurrence that a lot of Mac users also have decent PC’s but rather use their Macs, even though they agree the Mac aren’t as fast as their PC’s. You’ll then get an anti-Mac crusader telling them that the Mac sucks because it X amount slower or X amount more expensive than a PC. I bet if you said strawberries taste better than cherries you get these same idiots spewing forth crap loads of numbers and sales data to disprove that strawberries taste better.
If you would bother to read what Seeker had originally written, you’d see he was claiming Mac sales were down year-to-year, which is not the case, according to the latest results.
Here, let me help you out.
In the story on “XSLT: taming a functional language”, I disagreed with Fredrik, who claimed that “real” programmers always count from 0. That thread has only 25 comments, and both of mine appear in the 1st 15 comments.
In the story on worms jacking up the cost of Windows, I took issue with Darius, who was blaming users who don’t install a firewall.
In the highlights on Apple’s SEC filings, I asked a question, under the topic “Confused”, which was answered. I used that answer to address Seeker.
In this forum, I’ve talked about what my university’s math department has done, and I’ve disagreed with whether Macs are “overpriced, underperforming pieces of crap,” and I’ve taken issue with Seeker’s claiming Mac sales are down year-to-year, when the SEC filing says they are up.
If that sort of writing is considered trolling, I guess that would mean pretty much every possible conversation one could have online that doesn’t include starting an argument, or name-calling, must be trolling.
i dont think you are a troll….you are more of a “quibbler”. i like that word better
you say “I’ve taken issue with Seeker’s claiming Mac sales are down year-to-year”
did i write that sales were down “year to year” or “first quarter 2003 to first quarter 2004” in this thread?
i dont believe i did. if i did, please show me where.
as the guy has pointed out just above, as macworld pointed out from q4 2003 to q1 2004, as apples sec filings point out, mac sales are down versus previous years.
why quibble? is there something to quibble about with the 1.5 million macs fewer in sales in 2003 versus 2000?
i think not, all the pundits talk about this very subject. it is not an opinion, it is matter of record that apple talks about.
a point to be made about declining sales also is the continued slide of the high end powermacs. apple had some great years right after the release of the first generation imacs, but the newer imacs sales never hit anywhere near the original and they too keep going down.
apple is selling more of the cheapest ibooks they make. again low margins on lower sales when selling ibooks.
the premise remains in a nutshell: macs are declining in market share,they are selling fewer macs today than they were in the past (except for the one year to year quarter jack worries so much about), and they are even selling fewer and fewer high end high margin powermacs to pros.
you can quibble but it only makes your arguements look petty….especially when you go calling people trolls for pasting data from other reputable third party sources.
Here’s what you said:
apples total sales are up versus the same quarters a yr ago.
mac sales are down and that is what i am most concerned with here….not selling 800,000 ipods.
You’re right, I’m quibbling. I think you do the same; I was wrong to call you a troll. I went back & looked through the entire thread at that point.
I don’t happen to disagree with your overall point, which is why I didn’t argue it.
for fucks sake.
Stop it with all these massive anti Apple articles. If your a real geek you would own both a PC and a Macintosh. Instead of fearing OS X – try and see what its all about…
well i guess i passed out of that realm late last year as i gave my last macs away after owning them for 19 years.
i do run windows xp pro and i currently have suse 9 installed on another old box….first time i tried it and it at first glance appears better than my last shot with red hat. linux like os x remains a novelty for me though. i dont fear os x, i installed it as a beta and used it for three years up through os 10.2.4. please dont jump to conclusions so quickly.
mac os still smokes linux in my opinion, but the overpriced and underperforming hardware hurts apple with folks looking for alternatives to windows.
i dont think there are many non-geeks that read much less post on this site.
its not about being anti-apple. this is a site dedicated to debating computers and oses and tech. if you dont like the format i dont know what to say, but it isnt likely going to change. go look in virtually all threads about ms and you will see folks taking exception with them…likewise linux or whatever.
and yes Jack, i quibble too because i so like the word. hehe. i try to keep my quibbling to quibbling with other quibblers though.
Yes, you keep saying that Macs are overpriced and underperforming. That makes me wonder: can you also have underpriced, underperforming computers? Or overpriced and overperforming ones?
Macintosh G4: € 1394 – 1,25 Ghz G4 + 256 MB DDR333 RAM + 80 GB HD + DVD/CDRW + Radeon 9000 64MB
Sun Blade 150: € 1660 – 550 Mhz UltraSparc IIi + 256 MB RAM + 80 GB HD + DVD + PGX64
Dell Precision 650: € 1664 – 2,4 Ghz Xeon + 256 MB DDR266 RAM + 80 GB HD + DVD/CDRW + nVidia QuadroFX NVS 280 64MB
Now how dissimilar are they, except for the processor? Not very much, except for the Sun not having a CD burn capability. In processor speeds, the Sun is the slowest and cannot do CD Burning. The Dell is the fastest. The Apple is in the middle and is the cheapest.
So according to TheSeeker, no single thinking being would ever even consider buying something from Sun. Yet I see no reason for not buying a Mac. Except if you want to pay € 300 for a faster processor. But then why not invest an additional € 100 to have a Dual G4 and the beautiful design of both the Mac and its OS?
Btw.:
– The Sun is adverted on the website for $ 1935, but I added 19% VAT as has been done with the others.
– I chose the more expensive line of Dell computers, as I want something that has good quality. Not a PC like mine that breaks at least once a year.
– To TheSeeker: in case you reply, please use the comma sign and capital letters, so that I don’t need to decipher what you are trying to say.
The Sun costed $ 1395, of course.