Tim O’Reilly made an informal survey of some members of the Geek Elite and confirmed that Mac OS X has generated significant enthusiasm. He also found that Linux and Unix users are even more likely than sold school Mac users to make the switch to OS X. Read more at O’Reilly’s Mac Dev Center.
I’d expected to hear something more convincing, esp. from such a person as Mr. O’Reilly.
Informal indeed, he asked 15 (!!) people and then drew his conclusions.
It reminds me of a piece on Slashdot I read just now 🙂
“It remindes me of the old story about the behavioral scientist who, after studying rats, said, “33% of white rats consistently prefer Swiss cheese to Cheddar, 33% prefer Cheddar to Swiss, and 33% have unknown preference, because my third rat ran away without tasting either one.”
-fooks
Damn, I also expect somthing better from MR. O’Reilly. What is he talking about?
A statistic of 15 person of a mailinglist of 1000 is crazy.
C.
and got 15 answers. Aned says so. He also says the people he asked where geekier than average joe user.
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http://islande.hirlimann.net
@ David Adams
Peep ERROR >> Lunix <<
Well, I will be taking home a G3 I managed to make “spare” from work and look forward to trying out OS X.
Of course, my girlfriend is going to kill me for bringing even more “junk” home, but still!
Lets be honest, all geeks drool over OS X, but why I don’t know, must be the pretty effects. After all, its nothing special to use.
Nor do the 15 responses I got from IP’s thousands of subscribers represent a significant sample. And of course, any poll with self-selected respondents is not statistically valid. Nonetheless, the responses are suggestive and intriguing.
Tim O’Reilly clearly says that the poll isn’t statistically valid, so what’s with the complaints?? Take it for what it is. If OSX provides a better desktop UNIX experience, which it probably does, then this is no surprise.
Lets be honest, all geeks drool over OS X…
———
They do?
OK so he got 15 out of a 1000. Do you people honestly think all surveys are good? I take each an every survey like I do all benchmarks, with a grain of salt.
Most surveys and polls conducted by many people only use between 100 and 1000 people. Using statistics anyone can draw some kind of conclusion. Would it be right? Who knows, it is all math and we know how some people never really grasped any math past basic algebra.
Lets be honest, all geeks drool over OS X, but why I don’t know, must be the pretty effects. After all, its nothing special to use.
“Real” geeks drool over command prompts, no fancy UI. Oh wait, in Jaguar you can have transparent terminals. So maybe there is something for geeks to drool over afterall.
The only drooling I’ll be doing is in my sleep, while I wait for a window to resize.
Here is some interesting commentary I found on MSNBC about poll taking:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/197170.asp
I work as a graphic designer and web developer and spend a good bulk of my time working in OS X on a G4. I can tell you honestly not a day goes by that I dont pray to God above for the demise of the Macintosh platform. I am saddened by any news that might suggest people are investing their hard earned money on this, the most unstable, antiquated, joke of a platform. Pretty GUI’s will only get you so far. For anybody in the real working world who is strapped to the Mac ball and chain I would say abandon ship.
**Linux Forever**
gee i thought calling windows “clunky” and having girls smoking weed on Mac commercials was enough.
how would they insult linux users now… can’t bash the software library when both lack that. make fun of typical computer cases or say it eats your homework?
“hi, i’m chad and and in CNS. and macs still aren’t 3l33t”
How big is the non-mac unix desktop market anyway? They should build cheaper machines or else port to i386.
The interesting thing about the comments here is how they dismiss or discount the remarks made by the named respondants in the article.
Those folks aren’t teenaged mutant ninja hackers.
Bona fide comments by real folk.
The bias here is so thick….
I’ve used a number of Unix and Unix-like operating systems for years. I am even a Unix admin. of a Linux server (okay, one server, but it’s there.
).
At home I have WinXP, Linux RedHat 7.x and Mac OS X on both a PowerMac G4 and an iBook.
I use Mac OS X a lot more than I do Linux. I like not having to worry about this-n-that library dependancy as I do with Linux. It’s great to have the application base of MacOS and the robustness of Unix.
I haven’t totally switched and doubt I will. I like playing with new OSes, that’s one of the reasons I visit this website.
Someone writes:
“Well, I will be taking home a G3 I managed to make “spare” from work and look forward to trying out OS X.
Of course, my girlfriend is going to kill me for bringing even more “junk” home, but still!
Lets be honest, all geeks drool over OS X, but why I don’t know, must be the pretty effects. After all, its nothing special to use.”
How should you know, you apparantly (you state that yourself) haven’t tried the OS??!
And as someone else wrote, Id rather belive the users that responded to the survey that actually have achived and produceed something and given diffrent OSes real chances with open minds, than self appointed “uber-hackers” that unfortunatly write in these forums.
And if you missed it, Tim clearly writes that the survey isn’t (quote) “is not statistically valid” (end quote).
I for one really recongnise the comments Tim received. I’ve _never_ liked Mac and or apple before, but since buying a PowerBook Titanium I never have looked back. It’s by far the nicest computer I ever owned. I love it and I almost find myself proud for beeing an apple user – but this doesn’t mean that I have to dislike Linux, Windows or any other OS that I have learnt to like before switching to OSX.
“Real” geeks drool over command prompts, no fancy UI.
I have the same opinion, that’s why I would switch faster to FreeBSD/Linux only.
And another personal opinion:
I also expected that those “alpha geeks” ??(?are they ? … really ?)would mount their own computing machine and not taking the crap and old fashioned hardware that Apple pushes to its customers for such scandalous prices.
Why isn’t there Mac mainboards to sell ? (We all know why, right ?? 🙂
Being such a high skilled geeks made those people lose their criticism and rationality. Bip-Bip !
I am truly a UNIX/Linux geek. I work all days with integration on the Solaris platform and play all nights with gentoo(Linux). Im making the switch to MacOSX now cause i really appreciate what Apple delivers!!
Maybe y’all are intent on cute TV ads, but Apple is doing some marketing/advertising aimed at Unix-types. For the last few months, there has been a first-and-second-page ad (first thing you see after opening it) for the TiBook in SciAm. Cute one even, with the slogan “Sends other UNIX boxes to /dev/null.” accompanied by plenty of good info about the Darwin and other stuff that’d appeal to scientists and general Unix peeps as well.
“I also expected that those “alpha geeks” ??(?are they ? … really ?)would mount their own computing machine and not taking the crap and old fashioned hardware that Apple pushes to its customers for such scandalous prices. ”
Hmm, lets see, most a the guys quoted in the article are real life professionals doing real work and you dismiss them cause they don’t build there own machines?
LOL.
If you would read the comments made in the article you might see that they are informed, educated remarks about how OS X is affecting their daily work.
most a the guys quoted in the article are real life professionals doing real work and you dismiss them cause they don’t build there own machines?
LOL.
– If you would read the comments made in the article you might see that they are informed, educated remarks about how OS X is affecting their daily work.
Unless they bought a Mac notebook yes, I would expect them to build their Mac machines, if Steve Jobs allowed them to.
Sure, they are educated … and they are also trying to sell MacIntosh to all of us (for quite some time now) as if it were “Unix”, (?)
those of us that aren’t, supposedly, educated enough to buy old hardware for a very high price in order to have nice jumping icons on a slow Operating System will have to take your LOL
(keep it to yourself and buy as many Macs as you like and then LOL again, it’s a matter of personal taste, or lack of it).
The only PC’s that suck are those PC that belong to users who don’t know how to tune and maintain it; and upgrade the hardware for a few bucks.
Who said anything about PC’s suck?
And they aren’t trying to sell any one a mac.
Read the article.
Reading your posts again I again go to the word I I used before, BIAS.
You are so biased, it clouds your reasoning of this particular thread.
I LOL that you ‘expect’ professionals (that means they make a living working with their machines-the educated part that you keep repeating is the stepping stone to where they got today) to build their own machines.
That doesn’t mean they haven’t done that or won’t or whatever. It’s your insistance that they must build their own machines to meet your expectation. Says a lot about your experience.
I’m an hardcore linux user, but I’d give a shirt or two to have a real try at Mac OS X. While the pretty icons are for sure attracting at first glance, I know two things about Mac, it doesn’t crash as often as Windows and it’s better integrated overall (software suites, multimedia apps, etc).
When you buy a Mac, it just works. When you buy a PC with Windows, you just keep rebooting.
Linux is all stable and fast, yes, but when it comes to X, welcome to bloat, duplicated work, tons of libs, multiple desktop environment fighting for the biggest chunk of ram.
OS X might be slow, but that’s about the only problem with it.
Here in Brazil the Apple’s hardware price is very expensive and because of this fact the market share is little. However, Linux running on cheap PCs is increasing rapidly because we have no money to buy M$ licenses.
And MacOS X don’t have a native complete Unix environment. You have to download many programs from internet (like the X server, gcc, etc) to make it similar to linux distributions.
Ha ha ha ha ha. Downloading GCC for Mac OS X. Ha ha. Good one. 🙂
These people are smart and accomplished. Smarter and more accomplished than anyone on this forum (myself included).
When people smarter and more accomplished than me speak, I listen. You should try to do the same (all of you).
Most *nix users value the choice that comes with running Linux and other Unix variants. Mac is the complete opposite. I mean jeez, I don’t want to scrap my perfectly functional x86 just to get a PPC to run OS X on.
Ha ha ha ha ha. Downloading GCC for Mac OS X. Ha ha. Good one. 🙂
Ok, I’ll bite. Why is this funny? When you download Apple’s dev tools, you are downloading GCC.
And MacOS X don’t have a native complete Unix environment. You have to download many programs from internet (like the X server, gcc, etc) to make it similar to linux distributions.
Linux and Solaris aren’t native complete Unix environments either. You can get versions without the dev tools, X server, or other components, so they must not be Unix!
Being like RedHat or not doesn’t make OS X a “complete Unix environment.” In the past, a lot of Unices- we’re talking about products branded as UNIX by the Open Group- didn’t come with dev tools or X11. They were extras you had to buy. But they’re still Unix, and so is OS X for all intents and purposes.
Someone writes:
“Tim O’Reilly clearly says that the poll isn’t statistically valid, so what’s with the complaints?? Take it for what it is. If OSX provides a better desktop UNIX experience, which it probably does, then this is no surprise.”
The complaints? That he know his poll is bullshit and still make conclusions from that data.
C.
I used to be a 100% full-blooded Linux/UNIX programmer doing systems and kernel programming. I loved my job, but, here’s what happened:
1) RPM cycle: Download packages for new tool, find out that half of my libraries are the wrong version so download new versions, everything breaks, destroying my whole system, rinse, repeat.
2) Start doing kernel work on the kernel. How the hell does this kernel even run? Port our stuff to 2.4.10? This kernel is totally broken.
3) Buy iBook, check out Cocoa programming. Love it. Quit job and go to work for Mac OS X shop. Write major features for software in 2 DAYS instead of 2 months! Man, this is heaven!!!
I’ll wager that most of you who LOVE Linux never try to do anything more than toy-program development on it. Cocoa is WHERE IT’S AT!
i want to know how many of the “apple sucks cuz you can’t build your own box” people build their own car. i bet 0. how many repair their own car? i bet under 10%.
just because you *enjoy* getting inside of a box and tweaking hardware, or building the whole thing from parts, doesn’t somehow invalidate those that don’t want to. i pay apple real money to deliver a finely built box because I just don’t have the time. could i build a PC? probably. would i? why bother. i’ve upgraded cpu’s, video cards, hard drives, caches, vram, etc. on macs over the years. i could care less that i can’t buy an apple chipset and start plugging things in and around it.
i think that arguement is one of the most tired of the apple-bashers. can you build your own mercedes? good luck. want four wheels, 2 axles, a motor, a seat, and a steering wheel? if that’s good enough for you, go build it. more power to you. make your own shoes while your at it, and so your stupid geek clothes. you probably don’t wash them anyway.
Been there, done that. I always used Linux om my Intel machine and switched to A slick looking 800 MHZ LCD Imac, and although it looked great, the performance sucked. Playing an MP3 consumed 25% processortime!!!
If this was 800 MHZ, I thought that I would reconsider another Apple if they were at 5 GHZ or more. Then I tried Mandrake Linux on my Imac and see what happened, the same mp3 player XMMS played the same mp3 at less then 1% processor speed. A trick my Old PII – 266 MHZ also can do.
Exit OS X. I sold it and learned another thing, I my country everybody sells his apple, nobody buys. I took me 1 a month to sell it for half the price. Now a friend of mine is the proud owner and runs Mandrake on it and hosts his website. So my commercial would be
‘My Imac wouldn’t sell on ebay’
Unix users should stay with their platform and not spend their processor cycle’s on apple’s overloaded OS X framework.
>>I my country everybody sells his apple, nobody buys.<<
You’re full of crap, I live in your country, there’s Mac users everywhere. I walk down the street and see Macs in windows here and there, trust me folks the Dutch don’t hide anything, it’s usually normal to keep your window blinds open. The guy down a block from me has a graphite iMac with the back nose (with the Apple logo) pointed directly out the window. Streets near my work various houses have various flavor iMacs here in there in their windows, even seen a few PowerMacs in some of them!
Primafoon couldn’t keep Macs in the stores, though they would have the same model Gateways on display for months on end. Remember that ugly looking egg shaped all-in-one Gateway PC (can’t remember the name), it stayed on display at a Primafoon near my house for over a year, they dropped the clearance price twice!
I just ordered one of the new Macally MicroMouse from MacWarehouse.nl and while the guy was doing my order his computer crashed, he said “give me a moment, I am having some technical problems”, I asked “hey, what are you running for your system?” he said “Windows, but I have a Mac at home… they just work!” sound familiar?!
The Dutch also don’t like Bill Gates that much, so that is probably a plus for Apple! Remember when Bill Gates gets it in South Park the Movie? The Dutch in the theatre celebrated with cheers and clapping, something I thought was funny, but weird I guess!