A die-hard PC user’s perspective on Macs, by AndandTech.
A Month with a Mac: A Die-Hard PC User’s Perspective
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
The Achilles Heel for me when surfing the web on my iBook is that if I go to a site with lots of ads, or lots of animated GIFs (forums and their smilies) CPU usage shoots up to 100% and I can barely type into text boxes such as this one. I don’t know who to blame: the web browser, or Quartz. I know for a fact that PCs with lesser specs than my iBook can handle such websites just fine, and I’m using Mozilla/Firefox on both platforms. Same results in Safari on the iBook, which supposedly is a better browser.
iBook G4 1 GHz, 256 MB RAM.
The achilles heel on any new Mac is memory. OSX LOVES! memory. My 1ghz Powerbook was the same way when I first got it. $125 later I had 1gb of ram and all was well. I will point out that the entire system performance shot way up too. Most others I’ve talked to see it the same. Its all about lotsa ram with OSX.
Yeah! I know the problem. There is a solution, though. Try out adblock for Firefox. It solves the problem as it enables you to stop all the ads. It works quite fine for me.
Good luck!
the problem is that even as a second machine, a Mac is an expensive proposition.
That’s more or less what’s keeping Apple off my desk. Pity, guess FreeBSD will have to do.
Not any critisism.. but I’ve had two ibooks. 2usb 700mhz and then the 900mhz. Both started with 256MB RAM. I maxed out the ram to 640MB and It made WORLD of difference. I cant tell you the over all speed increase and snappyness of the machines after this. Actually. Now I have a Dual 876 G4. When I bought it (used) it had 256MB of RAM. I kid you not, that my ibook 700 w/ 640MB felt alot quicker. Then I added ram to it. viola! Fast. Macs need alot of ram. Ram is cheap. Just a heads up. It’s definitly worth it. Now i doubt this is why your browser is slow and hitting your processor so hard. but i never ran into that issue.
-adam
The “deal breaker” for me and I assume many others has always been the same. I simply can’t justify the price.
My daughter who is currently running Xandros on less than 400.00 bucks worth of of hardware, really wants an Apple.
How do I justify going from a 500.00 system to megabucks? For the sake of OS X? Not a chance.
This is the second iBook I’ve owned. The first one I maxed out the RAM to 640, but obviously since the new ones use DDR RAM I couldn’t just migrate the RAM. Even with my old iBook (G3 700) running Jaguar web sites still dragged my system performance down. I’m running Panther now and it’s a little better but CPU usage stills leaps to 100% on some websites.
What blows my mind is: I had XCode running, actively compiling, I’m listening to music in iTunes, and I’m doing a bunch of other things, all this still on the stock 256 MB of RAM. It’s quite impressive. But why is it that a website – even if the browser is the only other program I have running – can bring this system to its knees?
@Adapt/Adam
Actually RAM is not that cheap, at least when upgrading a Mac. Just browsing through various Mac forum sites, there’s always discussions of how Apple updates their firmware to be more and more picky about RAM modules. Today, Macs won’t just take any ol’ memory module, it has to be brand name, or worst case scenario it has to be the one sold through Apple or partners. I can appreciate the fact that buying cheap RAM can/will lead to problems, but it almost seems like there’s always a premium we have to pay just to use a Mac.
After reading all the points he mentioned I can say KDE is not that much worse than OSX when it comes to desktop usability. Sure they’re far from being able to control what hardware they’re running on, but the desktop part is very decent.
I don’t think Macs are too expensive– especialy not if you look at what you get: you get an all-in-one package that works from the moment you put in the power-plug; no building, no setting up, no driver searching.
If you compare Mac’s to x86 equivelants, such as the Sony Vaio product line, you’ll see that Mac’s arent that expensive. Especially iBooks, they are very priceworthy.
just wanted to point out that my cousin uses a compaq presario. his wife uses a mac powerbook.
they’re both not really computer literate. just basic users who type, surf, email, download, listen to music and play videos, etc.
the compaq is only about 8 months old. the powerbook is 3 years old.
i’ve had to help my cousin with the slow startup times. i’ve removed services, unneeded software, cleared up the registry Run list of software, etc. run ad-aware, defragmented, scanned for viruses. i’ve done this more than a couple of times already.
his wife chuckles since her 3-year old powerbook boots up in about 30 seconds, the compaq about 5 minutes on a good day.
the powerbook is a g4 800mhz machine with 256mb ram i believe. the compaq is a p4 2.6ghz machine with 256mb ram.
i’m sure he could just wipe the compaq clean and reinstall everything. but i don’t really wanna bother helping with backups of documents, emails, bookmarks, etc. it’s just too much hassle for a machine he uses for work. he’s now getting an ibook, based on the firsthand experiences of his wife and the powerbook. the ibook is cheaper. but the actual sane usage is the same.
is the mac worth it? for peace of mind, less headaches, definitely. plus where a pc lasts maybe 3 years, the apple can be uesd at double that time.
personally i just avoid windows and use linux on my thinkpad t30.
Instead of just reading the posts, try OSX (not for 5 seconds please). I am running OSX and KDE and there is a HUGE difference between them. As much as i love my Linux machine, the OSX one is by far the best one from a user perspective.
…the achilles heel on os-x is that it’s slower, overall, everything is simply a little slower than windoze. Just read the review, at least the GUI is beefed with lags and stuff. The core may be just a effective as Win, but the GUI is still laggy. Sad, but true.
I’m using a mac and can’t stand crapsettling.
Win XP sucks ram up to, both of mine do.
shame about OSX is the lack of of a full screen button. when i’m *REALLY* working on something I want it to be fullscreen even if the app doesn’t need it. I get too easily distracted with even just a bit of my desktop showing. I gave up trying to learn Delpi since the IDE drove me NUTS.
I’m sure there must me a pluging that could add a fourth button to the window that turns everything not used by the application black. Anyone know of one?
I thought it was a good article overall, but the author claims OS X’s file system is disorganized compared to Windows. I feel exactly the opposite way. For instance, system-wide applications go in /Applications. Applications installed only for a particular user go in ~/Applications. Settings for an application go in ~/Library/Preferences. Etc. I’m a professional Windows software developer, but I do hobby development on OS X on the side, and I can tell you that from the perspective of a developer, OS X is hands-down better organized.
I’m not aware of any “behind-the-scenes” copying of files that goes on when an application is dragged to its installation location (which should always be /Applications or a subfolder of /Applications except under special circumstances). Launch services reads the application bundle to cache things like icons, etc., but that’s all I’m aware of. Applications are responsible for creating their own prefs.
There’s also a rough one-to-one correspondence:
C:Documents and Settings -> /Users
C:Program Files -> /Applications
C:Windows, C:WindowsSystem32 -> /Library
I don’t understand his criticism.
“Win XP sucks ram up to, both of mine do.”
Who cares how much RAM the OS takes; when you are running a game that wants half the RAM on the damn planet? Sort of like claiming your pickup truck sucks lots of gas, while your pulling a 27 foot travel trailer.
How do I justify going from a 500.00 system to megabucks? For the sake of OS X? Not a chance.
I used to think the same way. Here’s the arguement I made for the purchase before finally taking the dive. BTW, the Mac is now my main machine, and my 3Ghz P4 is my secondary. The P4’s nothing to sneeze at, which should give further boost to the quality of the Mac.
Macs hold their resale. PC’s do not. When I bought my Mac, after drooling over them since the G5’s hit the market, the one thing that made the decision the right one for me was the realization that if I didn’t like the Mac, I could sell it via Ebay or somewhere, and loose, at most, $300-400 dollars. Realistically, I’d probably lose $200, based off current pricing. While $200 is a considerable sum, it’s not bad when we’re talking a $2500 machine. Truth be told though, I have no plans to get rid of it.
No downtime’s nice too! I’d talked to several users to see if the myth of “Mac stability” was a valid one or not before I purchased, and I’m glad to say that it’s 100% true. While my P4 rarely has problems itself (whether running XP or Linux), the Mac has only locked on me twice in the last 8 months, and both of those locks were largely me screwing around with 10 different CPU-intensive things while burning DVD’s. I suspect that when I up my memory from 512 to 2.5gb soon, such lockups will disappear altogether since the freezes were just GUI freezes, while the hard drive was thrashing around trying to keep up.
Even after buying my Mac, I was weighing whether to keep it or not for the first several months. In fact since I’ve got Windows XP so tweaked out with my personal customizations, I found myself switching boxes just to quickly get something done, rather than try and learn a new way to do it one the Mac.
This was driving me nuts too, as after switching to the Windows box to do something, I’d find myself opening up a browser, or doing something else while a process ran in the background, and before I knew it, I’d spent several hours working in Windows while my shiny new expensive Mac sat there unused.
What finally made the Mac decision for me, as well as allowing me to work in the Mac 100% of the time, which in turn forced me to pick up the new “Macisms” of the computing experience was when I came across the OSX Remote Desktop component! I run dual monitors, and I can Remote desktop to my Windows box as needed, full screen, in one of my monitors, while remaining in OSX. I get the best of both worlds, speeds are fantastic, and now that I’ve learned the Mac way to do my common tasks, I’m much more efficient with both!
And I have to say that the geek “ooh!” factor of overlaying your full screen, native XP desktop with an OSX app is memorable. You can share clipboard content back and forth, and as long as you have a 100MB netowrk connection or greater, the speed’s amazing. I imagine that when I up my home network to a gigabit backend, it’ll be native speeds for working on XP within the ol’ Mac.
And once you can spend all your computin’ time in the Mac, you can discover some of the Apps that really make the Mac a standout computer for the power users out there:
Quicksilver is a must-have app, and is freeware. I feel naked working without it now. You’ev never been as productive as you will be with this app! Seriously.
Devon Think is a packrats dream come true! Anything you want is instantly at your fingertips, and as you train this app, it’ll do all the backend sorting/categorizing and such for you. I’m using it for everything from images to code snippets. It also supports movies and such, though I’ve yet to do much more with movies than confirm this works.
Office for the Mac is what Office for the PC should be.
In fact, I’m spending less and less time with the PC, as it’s slowly being relegated to being a server box for me, handling web development tasks, and automated tasks for my home network, while allowing me to focus on productivity with the Mac.
Enough of my sales pitch though. Seriously… If you consider yourself a computer “power user”, and you’re looking for that next tweak which will make you a bit more productive, consider switching to a G5 Mac. With Tiger right around the corner, there’s never been a better time to jump fences and try one. If you don’t like (and you will like it!), you lose a couple of hundred, which is likely something we’d all spend without realizing it on frivolities (beer, bar, PC addons, games, etc.).
At least it’s that rationale that made me make the switch, and I don’t regret it one bit.
This article gives you a very good impression of what OSX is like to use and will probably save me a lot of time if ever I get around to buying a Mac.
I am a recent convert to Linux. There is no way that my version of XP was ever going to run for months at a time, but the author has made me consider that the hardware and software I was using might have contributed to a problem I blamed entirely upon XP.
Of course the big problem with the Mac alternative is cost. The ‘whole widget’ approach is an expensive solution, especially when compared with Linux. I would be quite upset to spend $3000 on a machine that did not have enough memory to do basic things, but that not insignificant point aside, the article does convince that OSX is a superior operating system.
However, if you are looking for an alternative to Windows it seems you can save a lot of money and still have a very good OS by adopting a good Linux distribution.
try maybe dragging the window o fill the screen.
what is that you say? that is not the point? well the + button works the way Apple wants it to and I almost never use it myself because I want full screen some times, but rather than complaining about something that will not change, I just drag the window open more.
Yeah! I know the problem. There is a solution, though. Try out adblock for Firefox. It solves the problem as it enables you to stop all the ads. It works quite fine for me.
That’s not really the problem. The problem is that you should be able to view a webpage containing a bunch of animated gifs with an 1GHz iBook. If a computer with that kind of power is unable to do that, then there’s some kind of flaw.
Removing the animated gifs doesn’t really make that flaw disappear does it?
I used to have that problem with mozilla on BeOS, but nowdays it works fine. I’m not sure what solved it though.
I thought it was a good and fair article from the Windows perspective. It’s always interesting to see what a thoughtful user of Windows will find in a Mac. Being a hard-core Mac user (and recovering Windows user), I no longer have an objective perspective on the two platforms.
I assume then that you do not work with a lot of open windows in XP do you?
my XP machine drags and gurgles and craps itself when I have 15 windows open and try to get anything done.
OS X does not do that to me.
” Well, to install an application, you simply drag the application’s installer to any folder on your hard drive and it’s “installed”. Doing so actually triggers a number of files to be copied to various places on your drive, but the fact that you are separated from that process, it really made me feel like I wasn’t in control of my system.”
—What the heck is he talking about? When you copy an .app folder it just copies the folder doesn’t it? He make it sound like the OS is coppying .DLL files into your WIN32 folder behind your back.
Oh I wasn’t complaining… just looking for a shortcut that’s all.
umm, the flaw is the memory. 256 MB is paltry to say the least.
The devil is in the details.
KDE is a nice DE, but you can really put it in the same class as Mac OS-X. There are alot of little things that just make OS-X a better product.
Jack wrote:
“the problem is that even as a second machine, a Mac is an expensive proposition.”
That’s more or less what’s keeping Apple off my desk.
This is a question which I’m curious about: how much money do you (generic you) spend on your PCs? I mean not just the initial purchase price, but also the interim upgrades (CPU, Graphics, RAM, cooling system, etc etc).
Anonymous@comcast wrote:
My daughter who is currently running Xandros on less than 400.00 bucks worth of of hardware, really wants an Apple. How do I justify going from a 500.00 system to megabucks? For the sake of OS X? Not a chance.
Well, it boils down to priorities: Apple simply isn’t in the low-cost low-quality market, and if for her OS-X isn’t worth saving up some money herself by forgoing other expenses, and maybe looking at used systems, then she can’t be wanting an Apple that bad.
And honestly, a Mac isn’t that expensive anymore: a midrange quality PC can easily cost as much as a midrange Mac.
This was overall an excellent review, and having owned both pc and mac, I can relate to alot of the things mentioned. I’m a welder by trade, making above average coin, and 3000 is alot of money. The points made about overall quality of components was bang on. you definately get what you pay for.
The fact that seperates the mac and any pc was also spelled out loud and clear: “OSX”. And another truth was pointed out here, great, not perfect. There’s alot of things I had to learn all over again, and if time was money, I could see a windows guy being in a knot, at first. It does take a bit of reading, alot of googling, and unthinking the windows way of doing things. But the rewards, however, are great. Time spent learning comes back as time saved, over and over. It’s quite rewarding when you “get it”, and relize how much time you can save…
Now, if the auther had poked around a little more, and relized that there are some real gems out there in the *unix arena just waiting to be discovered… like fink, for example. It was the most fun I had on the mac, getting X11 and KDE, Gnome, Windowmaker, XFCE4, ect. up and running on my desktop.. brilliant. alot of good folks working hard on these projects, and alot of excellent help to get it all working…
I’m back on a pc, running SimplyMepis, and missing my G5… Waiting for my next G5 (Imac g5, 1.8 20″, 2gig of ram) to arrive. I think the years spent toiling away on Linux have helped me to switch between mac osx and Linux easily. There’s simply no fear to it at all, it mostly just all works. It would have made little sense jumping straight from xp to osx. I hate to sound ungratefull to windows, it’s where i started, but I won’t be heading back that way any time soon. Got sick of the lack of help, acusation’s of stealing Xp (switched to a new computer, kept old hd!!), viri, spyware, malware, bland desktop, lack of community….
No regrets here, and some will disagree, cause for most people, xp is all they can afford, or all they know. And that’s a fair point of view.
“I’ve always been a fan of trying alternate Oses ” – he dual boots Win ME and Win XP!!!!
Yes, I wrote him an email about his incorrect comments conerning DnD of Apps, as well. Frankly, I don’t understand how he got the impression that dragging an app to a folder would silently install crap elsewhere… Unless he just hasn’t comprehended the reality of self-contained apps, yet.
The other issue was with the way Windows handled having so many windows opened; after a certain number of windows were opened, stability and performance both went down the drain. Sometimes applications could no longer spawn additional windows or dialog boxes, requiring me to close a handful before I could continue doing anything, and other times, applications would simply crash.
Where are the good old days were you clicked a link and
more then 30 windows popped up.heh?Close one, and you get
even more popped up.Bit off topic ok.
Well, it boils down to priorities: Apple simply isn’t in the low-cost low-quality market, and if for her OS-X isn’t worth saving up some money herself by forgoing other expenses, and maybe looking at used systems, then she can’t be wanting an Apple that bad.
And honestly, a Mac isn’t that expensive anymore: a midrange quality PC can easily cost as much as a midrange Mac.
For the price of that i-mac G5 i could build myself a PC
which performances exeeds that of an G5,to be honest i like the design of the “real” G5 but since design adds nothing to performance and hardware efficiency.
Do you seriously think that running an OS and a webbrowser should require more than 256MB RAM?
There’s really something wrong there. Developers should try to optimize the software, so that you will be able to use those extra cycles for useful things like signal processing and stuff.
Instead of just reading the posts, try OSX (not for 5 seconds please). I am running OSX and KDE and there is a HUGE difference between them. As much as i love my Linux machine, the OSX one is by far the best one from a user perspective.
That would be just your personal preference, I own two macs G4 and G5 (OS9 and OSX). When forced to go working on them I choose OS9 and avoid OSX if possible. But still anything to do with browsing, mailing, RSS, File Mangement or administration I always do on Gnome.
p.s. That would be personal preference too, but that doesn’t mean that OSX is not as good as Gnome for the whole world. It’s just that I don’t like it.
I stuck a 256 stick of 2100DDR from a Dell someone left in my house into my dual 867 and it works perfect.
“For the price of that i-mac G5 i could build myself a PC
which performances exeeds that of an G5”
Yes, we know, its been said millions of times now, but it still can’t run OS X. (hehe)
IMHO, “Computer Experience” is simply more than the sum of its parts, in that regard, I view computers as more than just memory and speed.
“Outperforms” isn’t always better than “More Convenient”.
For Example: my digital camera “Just Works TM” with iPhoto. No driver needed and iPhoto came bundled with the cmputer. On a PC, you need to get some third party photo app (one might have been presintalled, granted) and install the drivers for the camera. From that perspective, my computing experience with regards to my digital camera “exceeded performance” on a PC.
i like the design of the “real” G5 but since design adds nothing to performance and hardware efficiency.
Nope but it does add to the experience and usability. This isn’t only a consideration for Apple’s though. For example my Acer TravelMate is fairly weak (800Mhz PIIIm, 256 RAM, 20 GB, 8 Mb video card, 12″ screen) and for the same money I paid for it I could gotten a full-powered gaming laptop. Why didn’t I? Because being a TabletPC provided a better experience.
Now how to justify a Mac? Simple. Will the difference in cost be worth the benefit to her? If she just wants one to be trendy then probably not. If she is a graphic artist that doesn’t know much about computers then yes.
I gotta agree with Rain. 1 GHz and 256 MB of RAM should be enough to just surf the web. Right after a cold boot, OSX doesn’t use even half my current RAM. With one browser window opened my web browser (be it Safari/Firefox/Camino) still doesn’t touch the page file.
Debman did you see my other post? I said I ran XCode (compiling) and iTunes and a few browser windows and everything was still snappy, except for when I’m viewing a “busy” website.
@Adapt
I stuck a 256 stick of 2100DDR from a Dell someone left in my house into my dual 867 and it works perfect.
Good for you, I’m glad to hear that, but I also hear of other unfortunate souls who couldn’t do the same.
Anyone who praises OSX for its stability, and believes in the “It’s a Mac, it just works” marketing phrase, should really just take a gander at the trouble-shooting forums for Macs. They have the same problems PC users have too. Only difference is PC users don’t always have to wait a year and plunk down $130 to see if the next upgrade fixes the problem. :p ok that was a back handed joke I’m sorry.
or if she is a graphic artist that knows a lot about computers. or a musician, or a scientist, or a unix fan.. quite a few reason…
For the price of that i-mac G5 i could build myself a PC
which performances exeeds that of an G5,to be honest i like the design of the “real” G5 but since design adds nothing to performance and hardware efficiency.
And as I said in the same post: it comes down to priorities, which by their very nature are different for every individual. If you want the most processing power per buck -> PC. If you want a good OS -> Mac. If design is of at least passing importance, it’s a toss-up, depending on your taste. And you can probably think of a couple other criterias yourself.
In other words: Once you look beyond the cheap low-end systems, the choice between Mac or PC is not a no-brainer.
It’s not a bad idea if you are paranoid and need the web services or a personal vpn. Being able to run my personal svn repository beats worrying about USB keys or backpack hard drives..
If money didn’t count i would buy a G5 true,don’t know
what i would install, maybe gentoo or debian for ppc,i have never touched Mac OsX so perhaps it’s very nice as well who know’s. 🙂
An eMac only cost $799 retail (cheaper if you are a college student or work for an educational institution). So how does going from $500 to $800 considered megabucks that is only 60% higher cost, and you get a lot with it.
Why is it everytime people say Mac’s are too expensive they always point to the most expensive one and then compare it to the least expensive offerings from other vendors?
perhaps ’cause all they look at is the cpu megahertz numbers?
I can’t believe you people complaining about how expensive Macs are. Stop it already.
If you really figure it out, the price is either very compatible or even cheaper sometimes. All you guys are thinking are the “high end” Macs.
Listen, even the lowely cheap eMacs are waaay more than anyone needs to for any internet, email and office stuff. New eMacs start at $799. Excuse me?
And it comes with most everything you need.
Stop it already.
Plus, you will be free from spyware/adware/virus. And think about all the money. headache and time (or your friend’s time) you will be saving because Macs hardly ever need and maintenance or trips to doctors.
.
You are a weird individual.
I have five Macs in my house (thats still being used). Apple has always found ways to squeeze money out of me since I had them. Fixing two laptops cost a fortune, but I loved the OSX experience.
I was an Emagic Logic user for about 11 years and I saw apple buy them out. I upgraded Logic from 5.5 to 6.4.2. An apple rep told me to go ahead and upgrade. One week later they release 7.0, and REFUSED to honor me with an incremental upgrade price. They have absolutely no regard for good customers.
I will never a buy another apple product again. Been there, done that.
Be careful if you buy their products….
This is a fair and balanced article, and I have little to complain about. Anand is wrong about a few things, and points out a few problems that, in fact, have easy solutions (ex: he says you can’t navigate a “save sheet” with keyboard shortcuts; though you can, of course). but all in all, it seems thorough and thoughtful.
Another small point. This review has just been published, but it’s based on Anand’s experiences back in March, or 8 months ago. He does mention this point at the beginning, but I don’t think he should be moaning about this being a $3,000 machine. It’s not, it’s a $2500 machine. That’s a small but important point.
He does mention that OS X can be slow in a few mundane areas, and points to scrolling as one concrete example. But if memory serves – and I know you will all correct me if I’m wrong – isn’t this by design? Does the Mac OS slow scrolling so you can actually see the pages (in Word, for example) that you’re scrolling through.
As well, he points out correctly that this machine is fast, fast, fast when it comes to multitasking, a point that more Mac reviewers should be at pains to point out.
But for me, the real surprise is that he likes the PowerMac and OS X as much as he does. Didn’t anyone here have the same thought?
I mean he talks about using Microsoft Word and Excel, and Macromedia Dreamweaver extensively, and in my opinion, these are the three slowest Mac applications I have ever seen… And they’re the apps that crash most often (for me). (In fairness, Anand also uses Photoshop a lot).
That Anand spent his time surrounded by mediocre code, and still enjoyed himself, almost blows me away. Imagine how glowing this review would be if he used the iLife apps, the various incarnations of Final Cut, DVD Studio Pro, the Logic family, or Motion.
He missed out on the best parts!
There is a 15 days return policy.. In all Apple Store products..
I’m a mac user and that will not likely change.
HOWEVER, while the internals of an $800 emac are just fine for me, the monitor is not. It’s too small and no where near as crisp as my older, bigger mitsubishi.
I’d sure love to see apple make a cheap, headless tower or desktop machine.
An emac or imac without the monitor component would make me just thrilled.
Those g5 towers are really nice, but I don’t need nearly that horsepower, and it seems kind of silly to be forced to spend 1800 bucks just to use a monitor that I already have.
[i]Listen, even the lowely cheap eMacs are waaay more than anyone needs to for any internet, email and office stuff. New eMacs start at $799. Excuse me? [i/]
I only know the i-mac G5, they cost here in Europe about 1700 .- euro.
So how does going from $500 to $800 considered megabucks that is only 60% higher cost, and you get a lot with it.
Well going from $500 to $800 is a %62.5 exact increase in costs.
There is a 15 days return policy.. In all Apple Store products..
Only if you buy the product @ the apple store…
The apple rep told me SPECIFICALLY to buy the upgrade @ Sam Ash. Emagic was honorable regardless of where you purchased or upgraded your product.
Apple is getting ready to screw loyal customers to make wall street happy.
I just built a new PC – nice black HTPC case (Antec Overture), Athlon XP-M 2500+ running at 2.2GHz, 512MB RAM, GeForce4 MX440 (OK, that part sucks, I’m holding out for the 6600GT, which will add maybe $200-250 for much higher quality gfx than a Mac – I could get a 9600 card for $100 or so, I think, currently), onboard SoundStorm (i.e., very good quality for onboard) audio, Seagate 160G SATA hard drive, Lite-On DVD+-RW drive and very quiet cooling system consisting of a Thermalright ALX-800 heatsink with a Vantec Stealth 80mm case fan for a grand total of CAN$820. No monitor, as it’s an HTPC, but I could add a very good quality 19″ CRT for CAN$200 (AOC 9KLR) or a decent 17″ LCD screen for maybe $500. That’s a big, big price difference. I don’t expect I’ll spend much on upgrades either – that 6600GT gfx card when it’s out, so I can play Doom3, and probably another 512MB of RAM sometime, and that will be it for several years.
“For Example: my digital camera “Just Works TM” with iPhoto. No driver needed and iPhoto came bundled with the cmputer. On a PC, you need to get some third party photo app (one might have been presintalled, granted) and install the drivers for the camera. From that perspective, my computing experience with regards to my digital camera “exceeded performance” on a PC.”
not actually true, under Windows *or* Linux, for any camera that identifies itself as a mass storage device (i.e., most of them these days). Both Windows XP and recent versions of consumer-oriented Linux distros (SuSE, Mandrake, Fedora) will detect the camera and stick it on the desktop. Some Linux distros will also take a stab at non-mass-storage devices, using gphoto.
“I just built a new PC – nice black HTPC case (Antec Overture), Athlon XP-M 2500+ running at 2.2GHz, 512MB RAM, GeForce4 MX440 (OK, that part sucks, I’m holding out for the 6600GT, which will add maybe $200-250 for much higher quality gfx than a Mac – I could get a 9600 card for $100 or so, I think, currently), onboard SoundStorm (i.e., very good quality for onboard) audio, Seagate 160G SATA hard drive, Lite-On DVD+-RW drive and very quiet cooling system consisting of a Thermalright ALX-800 heatsink with a Vantec Stealth 80mm case fan for a grand total of CAN$820. No monitor, as it’s an HTPC, but I could add a very good quality 19″ CRT for CAN$200 (AOC 9KLR) or a decent 17″ LCD screen for maybe $500. That’s a big, big price difference. I don’t expect I’ll spend much on upgrades either – that 6600GT gfx card when it’s out, so I can play Doom3, and probably another 512MB of RAM sometime, and that will be it for several years.”
Thanks for proving the point that has been put out there time and time again. You can mish mash together this part and that part and come with something that may , or may not work nicely with windows/and or linux. I’ve built a few of them, and she’s hit or miss, as far as I’m concerned. Mostly works, but check out /var error messages after you run Linux for a few reboots. Not all north/south bridge’s are equal, nor agp ports, ect.
So you add 512mb ram, and the nice 17″ lcd for 500, and you end up with a machine that is 820+140 for ram=960 . 960+500for lcd=1460. oh then 1460+250 for better vid card=1710cnd. uh , that’s pretty close to 1750 for the 1.6 g5 17″ imac. and 1,999 for a 17″ 1.8 g5. And if you think your 2.2 mhz amd is faster… you’d be mistaken. I run the xp 2400+ with 512mb ram. It’s a dog compared to the 1.6 g5 i had. I can’t wait for the new imac g5, ditching all the cables and clutter on my desktop. And to those folks who think style doesn’t matter, what kind of car do you drive, pants you wear, haircut, color???? It matters to most folks i know
yeah, but your nice black 900 dollar machine can only run windows.
Completely useless if you hate windows and love OS X.
I know I’m not the only one, but I’d rather pay the Apple “hardware tax” to be able to run OS X.
And that wouldn’t change, even if windows were free.
I’ve never been a fan of Windows, and although XP is nice and stable it doesn’t do it for me. For the last few (say 9 or 10) years I’ve been using Linux/BSD on x86 and although in the late 90’s with companies like Loki I thought Linux might really take off as a desktop OS it didn’t really happen. Late last year I purchased an iBook G4 and have to say I wasn’t too impressed, about a month later I wasn’t using the Linux box anymore. OS X takes a little getting used to, but once you have it’s an amazing thing.
I don’t buy in to the Macs are expensive thing either. My current desktop machine is a Power Mac G5 Dual 1.8 GHz, 2GB RAM, 256MB Radeon 9800 XT, 160 GB SATA HDD, Bluetooth, 20″ AL Apple Cinema Display. While I agree it costs a lot of money, I see it as worth the money. Yeah I could buy a PC for $1000 but does it really compare? You can throw specs at me all day, but like they say “But does it run OS X?”.
I have no problem with gaming on my hardware, but then the amount of games on OS X is amazing when you come from a Linux background
.
At work I deal with a lot of XP/Windows 2000/2003 Server boxes and I have to say I don’t buy the XP is faster argument at all, the P4 3GHz + boxes at work don’t compete at all with my G5, the boxes I’d compare it mostly too would be the Dual Xeon 3.06 GHz boxes I work with constantly, but once again they don’t run OS X either.
I’m a UNIX junkie and IMHO Mac OS X is the best desktop UNIX out there, in fact I’ll go as far as to say it is the best desktop OS out there.
Feel free to flame me, but it’s just an opinion and we all know what they say about opinions.
Thanks for the price point!
Not news from the western front.
This is boring me…
I have used Macs since 1984 and absolutely think they have always had the best OS out there…especially OSX. Nothing else comes close to the easy interface and seemless configuration. The hardware is beautiful. Everyone has spent millions (and done it through often questionable and even illegal methods) trying to copy Apple and they have only made a bunch of half baked frankenstein type boxes with clunky GUI’s. I have used Windows since 3.1 and Linux for some years…and I really Linux…but none of these other offerings can touch the Mac. Long live to Mac!
You hit the nail on the head! OS X IMHO as well is hands down the best Desktop on the market, and anyone who has used it with an open mind for more than 5 minutes would indeed find that to be true. I also agree that the only thing I found upsetting about the article is that it didn’t touch on some of the most powerful iApps that come for FREE with OS X. They are simply unmatched on any other OS period.
We haven’t even gone into the UNIX underpinnings and the loads of quality free software available to OS X users either. The G5’s are work horses as well, seriously powerful machines! I just feel like there are still many many things to get into with OS X, applescript is one tiny powerful nugget, and the free included DVD software kills anything on the windows side that you have to pay for. I feel that one thing many OS X power user must truly appreciate is the fact that he OWNS his machine. Any *nix geek out there knows that he is ROOT of his box, yet it’s very hard for any windows user to say with confidence that they too have total control of their machine. Painful to admit, yes, but true. I manage several hundred windows boxen, and personally do not feel in total control of anything but my Macs! As far as customer support goes I have also never been treated better by a company than I have by Apple, my first powerMac was a 733mhz G4 and the day that it arrived it worked perfectly, however the hard drive sounded funny to me, after no more than 10minutes on the phone I was assured that a new Hard Disk would arrive soon. The very next morning there it was on my door step, complete with instructions that even a child could follow to replace it. Sending the old one back was a dream as well, simply placed old HD in the new box and peel away one label and it set it on the door step. I’ve never been more pleased with a “total computing experience” I’d pay anything.
as long as apple doesnt make an atx-board they are way too expensive for me.
why should i throw away what i already have?
and as long as there is no real os for it it’s useless to buy one (linux, osx and apple-software in general are just not written for me).
maybe 500mhz and 192mb ram are not enough to play mp3s with itunes, but they are enough to watch mp4s while browsing with 4*ie…
If you’re happy using a computer with very limited upgradability and a built in monitor then I’d agree that the eMac is competitive with PCs. Personally I find those limitations unacceptable, I want a computer I can upgrade and use with a dual headed display.
My current PC cost around $800, including a 19″ monitor and much better graphics card than a 32Mb ATI Radeon 9200. I’ve added two extra internal hard disks and a SCSI card so that I can use an external SCSI hard disk as a backup device. I’ve connected a space 17″ monitor as a secondary display and I can upgrade the CPU and graphics card at a later date. I like Mac OS X, but there’s no way I’d be willing to trade my PC for an equally priced Mac. The only Mac I’d be happy with is a is a tower case system, but they’re much more expensive.
“yeah, but your nice black 900 dollar machine can only run windows”
Heard of Linux? Or *BSD, which is what OSX is based on…
x86 != Windows. There are alternatives.
I salvaged one of the original orange iMacs from going to the dump after a user switched to the PC. He was running Mac OS 9 with 32MB of Ram.
I added one 256MB Ram stick and installed Mac OS X. First 10.2 then 10.3.
It is running great. I have Office X, Dreamweaver MX, Skype and couple of other applications installed. All run as fast as I can use the apps. The whole machine boots into a usuable state in half the time of my Windows XP 2Ghz computer. True, if you do a fresh install of XP it is incredibly snappy. But start installing updates and applications and uninstalling, in short just doing some work then the Window XP machine will boot slower overtime. Especially even after logging in you can’t do anything until some background tasks finish starting.
I have to install and remove apps on a regular basis due to my job and the ‘normal’ users might not be doing that but my experience with XP has been that overtime it will get slower and slower and slower.
Spending quite some time disabling services, removing system tray apps, cleaning up registry and temp files. Many times I had to go to people because they complain how slow their computer is (some even bought a new computer before even trying to clean up or reinstall).
Mac OS X has a lot of room to improve as well, but fortunately Apple is improving the OS. Every point release has seen significant speed improvements which is very different to new versions of Windows. To usually run well enough you tend to have to upgrade your computer. If you get new hardware fully designed for XP it works pretty well. Installing it on older hardware can work out or can cause big issues.
I have for years resisted to buy a Mac due to the cost factor but finally broke down and bought a Powerbook. The one area where I think Apple is really skimmping is on the memory and graphic cards side.
The ‘lower’ end models should come with 512MB, the ‘middle’ range with 1GB and the higher end ones with 2GB. The same should be applied for the graphic cards. Otherwise you get a lot for the money. Great hardware/design and actual useful software.
To the person that build his own PC I didn’t see any mentioning of Software cost such as the Operating System and Applications to just match all the programs you get with the Mac (unless he was planning to use Linux but I didn’t see that mention either).
Overall this was a refreshing article that showed once again that every operating system and computer architecture has its place and use and that before buying a new computer each of them deserve the attention to find out which one would do your work the best. If the application develeoper would provide versions for more OS’s it would be much easier for many people as the one killer app you are using might only be available on one platform. So keep your mind open and see if there is another app on the other platform that could do the job as well.
most of the build your own machines have focused on desktops/workstations. There is no doubt that you can build (non mac e.g windows, linux, freebsd) a much cheaper high end workstation or a desktop. However, what about comparing laptops?
The largest growing segment within the computer industry is laptops. Are window laptops much cheaper than mac laptops? Can you build a much cheaper windows laptop than buy a mac laptop?
parv
I am from India and I have noticed this undying loyalty of Indians towards Intel or Intel like processors and Microsoft Windows. The author in my opinion is biased, how many 64 bit powerpc macines are there in the market that run at 2.5 ghz with front end bus speed being 1.25 ghz, also something that the author should know PowerMac G5 has a dual channel RAM that maximes the throughput from the processor to the RAM. PowerMac G5 is the best machine for now money can buy and also games normally are written for the PC’s and then ported to mac, else how can an xbox having 733 mhz PIII and a real old graphics card deliver more fps than G5’s with the latest graphics cards. Tell me one game devevloper that re-wrote the whole game for the mac platform, none of the games available are optimized for the mac it’s always been a choice between bad or worse.
Mac OSX was belittled in the article when the author termed the multi-tasking capabilty if OSX similar to that of WindowsXP, come on man. What’s with being Indian and Pro-Microsoft, pro x86 platform.
…at work I develop on XP Pro. At home (and I do tunnel into work from home) I use Mac OS X on my G4 dual and ubuntu linux on my dual Athlon MP machine.
I think the article was decent. OS X definitely has some issues that still need ironing out… but with each release of OS X Apple DOES eliminate some major issue and each release has gotten faster (imagine OS X 10.0! – Sloooow). But, I can tunnel into work, use Office, mount my work drives, etc. all on my Mac (and actually on my linux machine too).
My Mac also serves up several web sites (family, and my wife’s business). It’s a nice machine and Apple put it together nicely.
re:
“my XP machine drags and gurgles and craps itself when I have 15 windows open and try to get anything done.
OS X does not do that to me.”
I hear ya!
I get pretty frustrated at work sometimes when I am compiling/running/debugging code and the system bogs down and suddenly you click on a window and you can count to 10 waiting for it to get focus and paint. But I also understand that I am running Oracle Application Server on it, which eats 800 MB of my 1 GB of ram all on its own, leaving a pittance for Windows and Outlook, etc.
Mike
He didn’t mention what is probably one of OS X’s nicest features – at least for laptop owners – “Network Locations”.
OS X makes it trivial to move between numerous network configurations by allowing a complete network configuration switch just by picking an option from the Apple menu. If you’ve got a laptop and often move between different locations, it’s freakin’ fantastic.
I can see how someone mainly using Desktops probably wouldn’t even see it, but it’s one of OS X’s best features.
Interesting article, but very biaised.
Firstly, Windows has never been efficient with RAM. Hell I remember reading a Microsoft kbase article saying that more than 512mb RAM was not recommended as it could cause stability issues with the system (Windows 2000, XP will be the same). Microsoft Windows loves using hard drive cache instead of RAM – don’t believe me have a look. No idea why, but it’s one of the reasons why Windows is such a poor operating system design. Disk cache was for the days when RAM was mega expensive. These days it isn’t, design an o/s Microsoft that uses RAM and not disk cache and you’ll see performance improvements.
2. Windows servers more stable than Linux servers due to hardware requirements. Bullshit. Anandtech has been pro Windows for years, only recently it’s started covering Linux and only then cos a number of members are using Linux so they think to jump on the bandwagon…
3. MS Office 2004 for Mac – yeah well…It is a Microsoft product after all. Internet Explorer for Mac has been a dog for years. Much worse than the Windows counterpart, rarely has Microsoft fixed bugs/security issues for the Mac platform. Why? Cos Microsoft doesn’t really give a shit. AppleWorks is a competent Office environment that does everything you need and maintains good compatibility with office documents. It’s stable as, and integrates well/looks good within the Mac OS X environment.
4. Games – hey don’t blame the Mac system please. Let the developers get off their fat lazy asses and write software for the Mac platform. That’s not Apples fault. Linux has the same problem, and it’s purely because of the fact that Microsoft puts a LOT of pressure on application/games developers not to develop for anything else other than the Windows platform. I mean, if Microsoft says “if you develop for non Windows platforms we’ll withhold API information”, what would you do as a developer? You’d go the way of what will make you the most buck.
5. Hardware support – see point 4 above
6. Usability – Mac OS X is a lot more usable than either any Linux desktop environment or Windows environment. Period. That said I’m not a Mac user (I use a PC at home running Libranet Linux, KDE 3.3).
7. One button mouse/right click – puhlease! How hard is it to command click? Christ. Get over it Anand.
8. Safari – Internet Explorer is a tiny bit faster than Safari/Konqueror/FireFox etc, but not a huge deal. It’s mainly due to the fact (and Anand kindly admits this) that most pages are explicitly written for Internet Explorer and nothing else. And the fact that most pages don’t conform to w3c standards. Anyone who’s done any basic html and bothered to not use crap like Frontpage will know this. I’m not expert web designer, but at least the pages that i’ve done conform to html-en transitional 4 thanks.
9. Forums – yeah right…well…has anyone bothered to read the EULA for the Anandtech forums? I took one look at it and declined. That says enough about that site.
Dave
“The author in my opinion is biased, how many 64 bit powerpc macines are there in the market that run at 2.5 ghz with front end bus speed being 1.25 ghz, also something that the author should know”
I thought it was quite an unbiased article actually. In response to your question – afaik there’s one, the 2.5GHz Mac. What’s your point?
“else how can an xbox having 733 mhz PIII and a real old graphics card deliver more fps than G5’s with the latest graphics cards”
One day I’ll see one of these mythical G5’s with the latest graphics card – all the ones I see for sale have average cards. You can’t compare to a console regardless though, the XBox will slaughter any general-purpose computer by the specs, because it’s a dedicated platform.
Anyway, lay off the poor guy – it’s a bit rough (I’ll refrain from saying typical) to assume he’s biased against the platform just because he came out with some negative points. And the fact that he’s Indian really has nothing to do with anything.
Easy. Buy a secondhand machine.
I got a Powermac G4 450 MhZ AGP, added memory to 1GB and OS X, added an extra hard disk and this has cost me much less than buying new. In fact it has cost me equivalent of 500 UK Pounds.
I find the machine fine, as fast as my old PC was, and good enough to become my only machine.
Windows isn’t drastically inefficient with RAM – it and OSX both like their RAM, as does Linux. I’ll grant you that OSX probably has better memory management, but that’s not hard – Windows really is abominable with swapping, as you said. But that’s not quite the same as the amount of RAM you need.
I’ve never heard of that >512MB issue – I did hear of a similar one with >256MB and 9x, but I highly doubt having a GB of RAM is an issue now.
2. True, you can’t call Windows more stable than Linux, especially for servers where Linux has major advantages, ie. being able to run without a GUI.
3. Yeah okay, but let’s face it: People are more than likely going to have to deal with Office docs, and I highly doubt AppleWorks handles them perfectly. From a Windows users perspective, this is an important point.
4. I don’t really think it matters to the users *why* there aren’t any games, just that there aren’t. We know why this is, but from a customer’s perspective they don’t care what MS do with their API, only that they can’t play most games.
5. See 4, again 🙂
6. I disagree. This is a personal choice thing – I can list all sorts of things I don’t like about it. Let’s leave it there.
7. I always find this one amusing… what makes Mac users like to pretend they only need one button? The very fact that you have to “command-click” indicates a need for a right button. I like 5 and a scroll wheel, at least – you can’t say you can get that sort of functionality with the same ease from only one button.
8. Anand are being a bit rougher on the browser than they have to be I think. I prefer Firefox, but Safari is pretty good – IE’s a total mess, even if it is faster. Hands down win for OSX on that point I’d say.
Point 6 is really down to personal preference I agree. Points 4 & 5 I also agree with, but it’s frustrating as hell. I mean counterstrike/doom 3 on Linux outperform their Windows counterparts – and that’s with Nvidia drivers for Linux not being quite as good as their Windows counterparts. Oh and counterstrike is via wine, which will slow things down a bit imho. Imagine if it ran natively!
Windows from a technical point of view is not a fantastic gaming environment, it’s performance is horrid when compared to other operating systems. Linux, OS X, the BSDs are all much better designed/efficient systems. Kudos to Microsoft for realising that computers were going to explode into popular usage, and that games were the real way to take advantage of this and build a monopoly. Whilst I disagree with Microsofts morals, from a business point of view it was smart. Very smart.
Point 7 – I used a Mac for 9 months and it took me all of a day to get used to it. In fact I never even really noticed it being a negative. It was quick and a natural behaviour. Oh and i’d never used a Mac before, prior to starting working for Apple Australia. I’d used Windows, Linux, some BSD (freebsd)…in the words of Master Yoda “you must unlearn”.
Point 8. I prefer konqueror in Linux. It’s faster than ephiphany (which looks simply dreadful), firefox, opera, netscape, mozilla. It renders 95% of pages without issues. Of the 5% that it doesn’t, it’s either because the website designer only designed for Windows, it’s non-conforming w3c code, or it’s a design issue with konqueror (very small % imho). And Safari uses khtml I might add, so it’s very similar. Interestingly, some sites that don’t work with Konqueror work fine with Safari. Makes me really wonder if Apple honestly gave back all of the improvements to the KDE community that it made to the khtml engine.
Apples prices aren’t that bad. You get a carefully put together system, runs well, excellent operating system and it looks a million dollars. A dual Opteron 64 bit system wouldn’t be that much cheaper either I might add…i’ll go figure it out and do the sums and post…
Dave
Windows from a technical point of view is not a fantastic gaming environment, it’s performance is horrid when compared to other operating systems.
And you base this on…?
I used a Mac for 9 months and it took me all of a day to get used to it. In fact I never even really noticed it being a negative.
I expect there’s at least one area that took you more than a day to get used to – navigating around text (ie: the behaviour of Home/End/PageUp/PageDn/arrows/etc.
Apples prices aren’t that bad. You get a carefully put together system, runs well, excellent operating system and it looks a million dollars. A dual Opteron 64 bit system wouldn’t be that much cheaper either I might add…i’ll go figure it out and do the sums and post…
Apple’s prices are reasonable at the absolute top end of their product line and for their laptops (particularly the iBooks). Everything else they sell is well and truly into “expensive for what you get” territory.
Firstly, Windows has never been efficient with RAM. Hell I remember reading a Microsoft kbase article saying that more than 512mb RAM was not recommended as it could cause stability issues with the system (Windows 2000, XP will be the same).
You remember incorrectly.
Microsoft Windows loves using hard drive cache instead of RAM – don’t believe me have a look. No idea why, but it’s one of the reasons why Windows is such a poor operating system design. Disk cache was for the days when RAM was mega expensive. These days it isn’t, design an o/s Microsoft that uses RAM and not disk cache and you’ll see performance improvements.
The correct term is “virtual memory” (or “swap”). Given you don’t even know that (or why it’s still relevant, even with lots of real RAM), I’m not sure why you think you’re qualified to comment on operating system design.
What do I base my comment on? Well if a game *designed* to run on Microsoft Windows, being run on another system (Linux) via Wine (I know it’s not an emulator but it’s still a layer that the system has to go thru and will affect performance) can outperform the same game being played in its native Windows environment, I think that says a LOT about Windows gaming. And I might add that the vast majority of games that are accessible to Linux via Wine/Cedega etc outperform their Windows counterparts. You do the maths.
Point 7 – read my *original* post please. I was referring to the one button mouse. Of course the rest of the Mac OS X system took me longer to get used to. That said, it was easier to get used to OS X than Mac OS 9 (a truly crap system imho).
Apple is more expensive than the PC counterpart, yes. It always has been. It’s a gripe that I do have with Apple, but they still make nice systems, and they are still reasonable value for money. Apples hardware prices have dropped a lot over the past 5 years, I suspect mainly cos of the fact that they’ve had an increase in sales. The commodity rules will always mean that as a manufacturer, Apple doesn’t have the same buying power as HP, Dell, Compaq etc and therefore will not get the same price. That said, most of the PC vendors have very poorly put together systems (buildwise). Dell uses the cheapest, nastiest parts available that it can find. At least with Apple you do get quality parts. No cheap shit.
Onto prices…the equivalent to a Dual G5 (well the closest in the PC world) would be an Opteron 246 2ghz. This is a street price…most people pay this…
http://www.cougar.com.au/index.cfm?ID=33&PART=10777&RequestTimeout=…
$787. Oh, you need 2 of them. That’s nearly $1600 there alone. Add a good tower (say, a Lian Li, pc60usb, that’s approximately $250 or so). We’re now up to nearly $1900. Add the motherboard.
http://www.cougar.com.au/index.cfm?ID=33&PART=11234&RequestTimeout=…
$856…doesn’t take pc3200 400 mhz ram for starters…stuck with pc2700 333 mhz ram…mmm not good 😉 that’s less than the PowerMac G5 ram for starters in terms of features.
Our price is now up to nearly $2700 or so.
Time for RAM – we need registered ECC RAM – say a gb…
http://www.cougar.com.au/index.cfm?ID=33&PART=10031&RequestTimeout=…
That’s another $508…grand total? $3200. Yup. Now add a video card (ATI 9600) – $187:
http://www.cougar.com.au/index.cfm?ID=33&PART=10773&RequestTimeout=…
we’re now up to $3400…not looking good eh? Add a soundcard (<$100 or so)…a cool $3500. Oh and we haven’t even looked at the monitor yet (I know the PowerMac G5 doesn’t come with a monitor…that’s why I mentioned it to be fair). Oh and this is retail prices. You still have to put it together. Or you can buy this system, add another $250 markup price to it for being pre-built. We’re now up to around $3900.
Oh and add Windows XP – that’s another $350 or so for a full edition. $4250. Oh and it doesn’t run 64 bit…oh my oh my…sure you can download the 64 bit beta, but it’s a beta, not a production version. Oh and it’s been beta for quite some time. A bit of a worry eh?
I think i’ve proved my point…
Dave
Windows from a technical point of view is not a fantastic gaming environment, it’s performance is horrid when compared to other operating systems. Linux, OS X, the BSDs are all much better designed/efficient systems.
Riiiight, and I guess from a technical point of view, Betamax was better than for watching movies than VHS. So, what’s your point?
“Usability – Mac OS X is a lot more usable than either any Linux desktop environment or Windows environment. Period. That said I’m not a Mac user (I use a PC at home running Libranet Linux, KDE 3.3).”
It depends for a great deal on skills of the user.What’s usable anyway?
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;253912
That’s for Windows 98, my mistake there, doesn’t apply to Windows 2000/XP systems. Been a while since I read that kbase article 😉
The correct term can be virtual memory, swap (they’re windows names for it btw). Hard drive disk cache is a term used in Unix/Linux areas for the same thing. And yes I know the terms virtual memory, swap thanks, doesn’t mean I have to use them.
I’ll quote the hdparm man page from a Linux system (man hdparm | grep cache):
“melkor@melkor:~$ man hdparm | grep cache
Reformatting hdparm(8), please wait…
-f Sync and flush the buffer cache for the device on exit. This
-T Perform timings of cache reads for benchmark and comparison pur-
Linux buffer cache without disk access. This measurement is
cache, and memory of the system under test. If the -t flag is
cache to the disk without any prior caching of data. This mea-
head. To ensure accurate measurments, the buffer cache is
”
Sorry about the formatting…As to swap being still needed, that’s again bullshit, and shows that you don’t really know what you’re talking about. If you have enough RAM, swap is not needed. It’s still a good idea to use it, but you don’t need it. Especially on a Unix or Linux system. Windows you need it, because Windows does NOT efficiently use RAM. That was my entire point.
As to not being qualified to comment on operating system design, good comment. I’m not a kernel hacker, but i’ve used a few operating systems in my time (how many have you used?). That does give me a “feel” for a operating system and how it works. I’ve never once heard my hard drive thrash under Linux. Not in all the years i’ve been using it. True, i’ve usually had systems with sufficient RAM (one of my earlier systems was a p2 400, it had only been on the Australian market for 2 weeks or so when I got it, so it was cutting edge. I was using 256mb of RAM, back when the average was 32mb, moving towards 64mb). Windows would still thrash on this system, Linux behaved.
Dave
the compaq is only about 8 months old. the powerbook is 3 years old.
[…]
the powerbook is a g4 800mhz machine with 256mb ram i believe. the compaq is a p4 2.6ghz machine with 256mb ram.
A 3 year old Powerbook will be one of the original 400Mhz TiBooks. Perhaps more importantly, it would have cost a fortune new (I remember they were $5000ish Australian, so probably ca. $2500 US) whereas that POS Compaq probably wouldn’t even have cost half that.
Also, having owned a 667Mhz PB ~18 months ago, and currently owning a 1Ghz iBook, I’d be highly sceptical of anyone who would consider a 400Mhz PB “fast”.
[quote]That said, most of the PC vendors have very poorly put together systems (buildwise). Dell uses the cheapest, nastiest parts available that it can find. At least with Apple you do get quality parts. No cheap shit.[/quote]
Between my dad and I, we’ve bought 5-6 Dells over the years and have never had much of a problem with any of them. I’m typing this on a Dell I bought last February .. runs like a dream and is quiet as a tomb. I suppose anybody who needs a computer with training wheels would consider Macs to be a godo value (there are a lot of good people out there who need a computer like this and I am not knocking any of them), but most of us who are PC-literate and have gotten comfortable enough with an x86-based OS to the point where it is now our bitch just couldn’t be bothered to spend the extra $$. I mean, I haven’t seen anything on the Mac that would make me more productive than I am now, and the ‘it just works’ argument just doesn’t work on a power user – you’ll have to do better than that.
I always laugh at Mac fanatics who talk about ‘cheap PC hardware’ .. I just retired a PC earlier this year after 14 years of service, and that’s only because I didn’t need it anymore.
[quote]Onto prices…the equivalent to a Dual G5 (well the closest in the PC world) would be an Opteron 246 2ghz. This is a street price…most people pay this… [/quote]
I dunno .. I’ve played with OSX (10.3) on a dual G5. It just didn’t feel any faster than what I’m running now. Of course, iTunes was running on the system, which is probably why
Oh and add Windows XP – that’s another $350 or so for a full edition.
Where the hell did you come up with that price? Find somebody who’s got an old Win95 CD lying around and get WinXP Pro for $190.00 at Amazon.
Yes, in fact Betamax was a better system. Still is. It was poorly marketed, and the legal fighting about it made sure it died. Pity, it was inherently better than vhs in nearly every aspect.
Jophn, yep, and I said that in my reply to Archangel. Usability is very subjective. That said, OS X is more stable than Windows 2000/XP, and that’s a big part of usability in my eyes. If it’s unstable then you can’t use it, yes? That means usability goes out the window. I know Windows 2000/XP are a LOT better than their Win9x brethren, and I also admit that they’re not totally crap systems. They are usable, and mostly reliable.
Security is a huge issue with Windows (not that OS X appears to be any more secure) – and that security issue comes down to the way applications talk to the Windows kernel via system calls and APIs. Microsoft wanted to tie applications to the kernel to encourage development, unfortunately these ties between kernel/app introduce a lot of security issues. Even now, SP2 is still a joke – it’s a PR attempt by Microsoft to make it look like it’s tightening security. If Microsoft was serious about security it would force users to have a user account with normal permissions for starters. The Unix method has been going for a lot longer than Windows, and is a time proven way of having a secure system. True, no system is perfect, or totally reliable, or bug free, or totally secure. Microsoft does not want to encourage users to have strong user accounts etc, because that would make their system more difficult to use, and quite frankly most of the dumbasses that use it would be lost.
Dave
http://www.cougar.com.au/index.cfm?ID=33&PART=7741&RequestTimeout=1…
$247. I was a hundred bucks out, gimme a break. And if memory serves me correct – win95 is *not* one of the operating systems that allow you to buy the upgrade version of Windows XP. It was Win NT 4, Win ME (for XP Home) or Windows 2000 if memory serves me correct. Your average person isn’t going to fart ass around hunting on ebay etc for a used CD disk just so they can save a few bucks on an upgrade…
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/upgrading/matrix.mspx
there ya go!
Dave
I had some w2k cd laying around so i bought the academic version of windows xp-professional for $80.
Quote: “A 3 year old Powerbook will be one of the original 400Mhz TiBooks. Perhaps more importantly, it would have cost a fortune new (I remember they were $5000ish Australian, so probably ca. $2500 US) whereas that POS Compaq probably wouldn’t even have cost half that.”
I agree with you. Most probably a 600mhz. It’s been 13 months or so since I left Apple and they were just introducing the PowerBook 1.25ghz machines then…the 1ghz machines had been around for 5 or so months. That makes 18 months or so ago for the 1ghz…the 800mhz would have been six months prior to that i’d suspect, so we’re looking at 2 years for that…most probably a 400-600mhz machine.
That said, Apple’ CPUs have always been *faster* than their Intel counterparts on a mhz per mhz basis. Comes down to the design of the CPU. I’d rate a 800mhz G4 about equivalent to a p4 1.6 or so in all honesty. Some really intensive stuff will favour the p4 for sure (image editing etc).
All of that said, I still wouldn’t call a 400mhz G4 PowerBook super ‘fast’ when compared to todays beasts. That said, I noticed a big improvement when going from the p2 400 to the Athlon 1ghz machine. Going from that to an Athlon 3000+ XP CPU has elicited a much smaller and noticeable performance increase. Generally usage here. Games wise, performance is up, but these days I rarely game – I just don’t have the spare time or money to buy the latest games 🙁
The other thing i’ll point out – restoring your Apple system using the supplied Apple disks is a breeze. To be fair, i’m comparing them to OEM/retail versions of Windows XP. Manufacturers restore disks would be much better in this respect I totally agree!
Dave
Quote: “I had some w2k cd laying around so i bought the academic version of windows xp-professional for $80.”
yeah, but my point was that not everyone has a spare disk lying around, and if they do, it might not qualify for an upgrade. My dad bought a PC 18 months ago and got Windows XP – he had to buy full retail. No upgrade there, and there are a lot of new users to computers in the past 2 or so years that will be in the same boat. And not everyone qualifies for a academic version either. I’m using an average example, brand new, retail disk of Windows XP.
I still consider Windows XP outrageous in pricing. You get the operating system, a media player, a messening system, simple text editor and that’s about it. You want a graphics editor? Go and buy it. You want to do some coding? Go and buy a compiler. You want to do some dvd editing/composing? Go and buy it. You want an office suite? Go and buy it (I know OpenOffice is there, but your average PC user has never heard of it and doesn’t know what it’s about and quite frankly doesn’t care). You want to do webdesign? Go and buy the software. It all adds up. BSD & Linux give me the vast majority of this type of software – at no or little financial cost. Sure, not all of it works very well, there are some dud applications out there, but they usually die a quick death. Successful OSS/FSF/GNU applications usually are very good and very reliable and very powerful.
Oh…you want to run a server? Sure, why not. You need a server version of Windows for that m’lad. Server 2003 single license is around $1200…
http://www.cougar.com.au/index.cfm?ID=33&PART=10125&RequestTimeout=…
I’m going to pay that much for an insecure system? I don’t think so. Oh and i’m limited to 5 licenses. No thanks. I can download Debian and configure a mailserver, webserver, print server etc etc and very little cost, it runs, runs well, is secure and efficient.
Dave
PS I’ve used the same online retailer purely because I knew they’d have the items i’d be quoting prices on etc. You can get cheaper prices out there, by how much is the million dollar question…
Onto prices…the equivalent to a Dual G5 (well the closest in the PC world) would be an Opteron 246 2ghz. This is a street price…most people pay this…
[URL]http://www.cougar.com.au/index.cfm?ID=33&PART=10777&Request…[/URL]
$787. Oh, you need 2 of them. That’s nearly $1600 there alone. Add a good tower (say, a Lian Li, pc60usb, that’s approximately $250 or so). We’re now up to nearly $1900. Add the motherboard.”
Well here in Europe an Opteron 246 costs about EUR 339,00.
Even is the euro:dollar rate would do 1:2 this would still
be $678.With a lian Li this comes to the grand total of $1600.A Tyan Tiger K8W S2875ANRF motherboard costs about $250 + DDR400, ECC, 2x512MB, KRX3200K2/1G (EUR 429,00) ,256 MB GDDR3 GeForce FX6800 Ultra AGP 8x (EUR 599,00),2x SATA Deskstar 7K250 (80 GB) (EUR 68 each),Plextor SATA PX-712SA
DVD±R/±RW, CD-R/-RW (EUR179),makes the grand total of:
EUR2279,- A comparable G5 (2.0 Ghz) tower starts at that prize and a monitor is allso an option.
[QUOTE]Well here in Europe an Opteron 246 costs about EUR 339,00.”[/QUOTE]
Sry i mentioned the Opteron being EUR339 here in Europe,it
actually is EUR549 which makes the mentioned grand total
EUR2699,-
How do I justify going from a 500.00 system to megabucks? For the sake of OS X? Not a chance.
Are you now claiming that US$799 for an Apple eMac as too much? are you then going to claim that an eMac isn’t enough “expandibility” for your daughter?
Geeze, and to think I was tight! <mumbles like old fart, remembering the good old days when people used to save a little bit each week so they could afford something>
I’ve been happier with Windows XP than any previous Microsoft OS (except maybe the good ol’ DOS days)
Ah, ok! The guy liked MS-DOS! The article is in serious trouble from there on. Don’t get me wrong, I was a full-time DOS power user for close to 10 yrs since the late 1980s and it was cool! So no-nonsense, so bare-metal, so simple! Yet every time I even looked at some *NIX station, or any of those, you-know-which home or personal computers with Motorola inside I said to myself: man do DOS and PeeCees suck! Haven’t lost that feeling even today with much more capable, advanced and truly much *better* Redmond OS’s. I don’t know why! I can’t qulify it. It is just like the article author said… a “review of experience”.
Go and buy the software. It all adds up. BSD & Linux give me the vast majority of this type of software – at no or little financial cost. Sure, not all of it works very well, there are some dud applications out there, but they usually die a quick death. Successful OSS/FSF/GNU applications usually are very good and very reliable and very powerful.”
This amongst other reasons made me switch to Linux.
As i don’t like wine and friends ( the software),and its
not that difficult to get a playstation bios emulator,no
need to say that ther’re a lot of game titles for the play
station.
Oh…you want to run a server? Sure, why not. You need a server version of Windows for that m’lad. Server 2003 single license is around $1200…
I don’t know if their stackguard (compiler switch /GS)
is still broken.But if you would like to experiment with
setting up a server , it’s very hard to get around Linux,
?.BSD.
“I’m going to pay that much for an insecure system? I don’t think so. Oh and i’m limited to 5 licenses. No thanks. I can download Debian and configure a mailserver, webserver, print server etc etc and very little cost, it runs, runs well, is secure and efficient.”
It’s certainly not more secure out of the box , but way
better to control to the last bit.It is as secure as
you configure it.Besides that its waiting for the next
0day,as with every other OS.That is if you don’t install
additional pro active security features.
I thought it was a good and fair article from the Windows perspective. It’s always interesting to see what a thoughtful user of Windows will find in a Mac. Being a hard-core Mac user (and recovering Windows user), I no longer have an objective perspective on the two platforms.
There were a few comments there I think indicated either a lack of knowledge of Windows or, more likely, someone who still uses Windows XP like they used to use Windows 3.1 (or maybe 95). I also think he was rather harsh on running multiple tasks on Windows. I run dozens of applications (obviously with even more open windows) all day, every on my old dual P3 machine and it handles it exceptionally well.
What do I base my comment on? Well if a game *designed* to run on Microsoft Windows, being run on another system (Linux) via Wine (I know it’s not an emulator but it’s still a layer that the system has to go thru and will affect performance) can outperform the same game being played in its native Windows environment, I think that says a LOT about Windows gaming. And I might add that the vast majority of games that are accessible to Linux via Wine/Cedega etc outperform their Windows counterparts. You do the maths.
Sorry, I don’t keep track of game benchmarks – what examples are you thinking of ? Do they take into account how long it takes to get everything working first ?
Incidentally, WINE shouldn’t add much overhead at all, if any. Indeed, if the WINE developers have reimplemented a particular Win32 API more efficiently than Microsoft, it’s quite possible for it to be faster.
Apple doesn’t have the same buying power as HP, Dell, Compaq etc and therefore will not get the same price. That said, most of the PC vendors have very poorly put together systems (buildwise). Dell uses the cheapest, nastiest parts available that it can find. At least with Apple you do get quality parts. No cheap shit.
Bullshit. Indeed, I think you’ll find Dell and Apple actually use the same Taiwanese manufacturer for their laptops, for example. Macs have the same OEM hard disks, RAM, Superdrives, etc in them as name-brand PCs.
One of my previous employers had a preferred supplier deal with Dell, so I’ve seen a *lot* of Dell computers – desktops, laptops and servers. Most of them are very solidly put together. Of course, the absolute bottom of the barrel dirt cheap machines aren’t, but since Apple don’t even have competitive products in that market segment, it’s kind of hard to compare.
Add the motherboard. $856…doesn’t take pc3200 400 mhz ram for starters…stuck with pc2700 333 mhz ram…mmm not good 😉
I think you probably meant this one:
http://www.cougar.com.au/index.cfm?ID=33&PART=10402&RequestTimeout=…
Time for RAM – we need registered ECC RAM – say a gb…
Remembering that the G5 doesn’t even *support* ECC RAM, of course…
Add a soundcard (<$100 or so)
The motherboard has onboard sound.
Oh and add Windows XP – that’s another $350 or so for a full edition.
No need, buy OEM for about $250.
$4250
Well, according to the Apple store, a dual 2.5Ghz G5 with 1GB of RAM is about AU$5700, so there’s still about $1300 worth of headroom there to add in a hard disk, Superdrive, etc. Although a fairer comparison is probably a dual 2Ghz with 1GB, which only clocks in at about $4750. Of course, since I already agreed the dual G5s are reasonably priced, I’m not entirely sure why you’ve used them as an example at all…
You should at least compare better:
A Dell Precision 470 with Dual 2.8Ghz Xeon-64s, 1GB of RAM, 160GB SATA drive, a 3 year warranty and a 16x Superdrive costs about $5050. Bump it up to dual 3.4Ghz and it’s about $6250.
For reference, a dual 2Ghz G5 with 1GB of RAM, 160GB SATA drive, 1 year warranty and 8x Superdrive costs about $4750. Dual 2.5Ghz is about $5700.
So the Dell costs more, but gets you an optical drive twice as fast and 3x the warranty.
Oh and it doesn’t run 64 bit…oh my oh my…sure you can download the 64 bit beta, but it’s a beta, not a production version.
OS X doesn’t “run 64 bit either”. Not that it’s particularly relevant in 99.9% of cases.
Oh and it’s been beta for quite some time. A bit of a worry eh?
Most people consider long beta tests to be a *good* thing. You know, ironing out the bugs ?
I think i’ve proved my point…
Yes, you’ve proved you’re an obnoxious tool. For starters, you reply to a post where I stated Apple’s top end machines and laptops are the only areas where their prices aren’t high by…comparing comparing one of those machines. You then proceed to try and artificially inflate the price you’re comparing. You close by advocating 64 bit computing, despite its irrelevance to most present day computing tasks and the lack of such a functionality in OS X.
A few assorted points here…
The dual Opteron may be similar on paper, but one of the advantages of a PC is that you don’t have to get an expensive dual-CPU setup to get decent power. That second CPU won’t be getting so much use while you’re playing any games, although it may be nice for a spot of multitasking.
It is nice to build an “equivalent” system to compare, but $4250 is huge money – I could put together a fast as system for half that. It wouldn’t be *as* fast, but near as dammit in any practical sense.
And no, there’s no XP 64-bit edition yet (there is 64 bit Linux though). Interestingly enough, there’s no 64 bit OSX either – note that the current versions run on G4’s as well, which are a 32-bit CPU – hence it can’t be 64-bit, unless it installs different versions of everything for the G5’s, which I somehow doubt.
Apple’s CPUs generally have been a bit faster per Hz than an Intel one, but I would say that 800MHz G4 you mentioned would be eaten alive by a 1.6GHz P4. The difference has never been as much as Apple tried to make out.
I agree with what you say about Windows pricing – on a cost basis, you can’t beat Linux – it’s free. Server 2k3 is expensive yes, but OSX Server isn’t cheap either, and comparing 2k3 to Debian is a little off topic really 🙂
The one-button mouse thing – sorry, I won’t give on this. You may have gotten used to a 1-button mouse quickly, but it wasn’t efficient. How do you go forward or back a page in Safari? I use my thumb buttons in Firefox – but of course the mac mouse doesn’t have those. It doesn’t have the scroll wheel, so I can’t use that either, nor a middle button to open a link in a new tab… efficiency has been killed dead.
“Are you now claiming that US$799 for an Apple eMac as too much?”
Yes. I would. Being as that’s the cheapest on offer – I can get a cheap-ass PC for NZ$799, which is roughly half that. It’ll be in all likelihood faster, I can happily run Linux on it if I don’t like XP and get a refund on Windows.
That being said, I would never actually buy one…. but it’s an example.
Oh, and Stalker: “If you love her, open your wallet.” I seriously hope you were joking there…
The correct term can be virtual memory, swap (they’re windows names for it btw).
“Swap” is a unix term. The equivalent “Windows” term is “pagefile”. “Virtual memory” is a generic term.
Hard drive disk cache is a term used in Unix/Linux areas for the same thing.
No, it isn’t. You appear to be deeply confused as to what you are talking about.
I’ll quote the hdparm man page from a Linux system (man hdparm | grep cache):
hdparm has nothing to do with swap. It *does* have something to do with “hard disk cache”, but not in the sense you were using the term previously. “Hard disk cache” has nothing to do with virtual memory, or “thrashing” – the symptom you were describing earlier.
As to swap being still needed, that’s again bullshit, and shows that you don’t really know what you’re talking about. If you have enough RAM, swap is not needed.
Most every virtual memory system in mainstream use is designed and tuned with the assumption swap space will be available. They generally do not perform as well without the presence of swap space even if they don’t actually swap anything out.
Windows you need it, because Windows does NOT efficiently use RAM.
By default, Windows’ VM system is tuned to maximise the amount of free physical RAM (and hence the size of the disk cache). Because of this, it is fairly aggressive about paging out unused memory. So you can end up with a bit of an additional delay if you flick back to an application that hasn’t had focus for some time.
Personally, I find that more usable than the near-universal sluggishness of OS X.
I’m not a kernel hacker, but i’ve used a few operating systems in my time (how many have you used?).
I could probably make up a list if you want.
That does give me a “feel” for a operating system and how it works. I’ve never once heard my hard drive thrash under Linux.
I find that exceptionally difficult to believe, assuming you’re actually using comparable workloads and hardware configurations (which is an iffy assumption at best – usually what happens when people say Linux is “so much faster” they’re doing something like comparing XFCE running a few xterms to Windows XP running a few Office apps and IE).
True, i’ve usually had systems with sufficient RAM (one of my earlier systems was a p2 400, it had only been on the Australian market for 2 weeks or so when I got it, so it was cutting edge. I was using 256mb of RAM, back when the average was 32mb, moving towards 64mb). Windows would still thrash on this system, Linux behaved.
What were the relevant workloads and specifications ? Given you’re talking ca. 1997, it’s highly unlikely you were using any remotely comparable applications or GUI under Linux. Not to mention you were probably comparing to Windows 95 and not NT.
That said, OS X is more stable than Windows 2000/XP, […]
You say this as if it’s some universal truth.
Security is a huge issue with Windows (not that OS X appears to be any more secure) […]
OS X is no more secure by design. It does, however, benefit greatly from its lower marketshare.
[…] and that security issue comes down to the way applications talk to the Windows kernel via system calls and APIs. Microsoft wanted to tie applications to the kernel to encourage development, unfortunately these ties between kernel/app introduce a lot of security issues.
I really don’t think you know what you’re talking about.
It’s kind of hard to say Windows apps are “tied to the kernel” when they run equally well on two *completely* different kernels (Windows 9x vs NT).
Even now, SP2 is still a joke – it’s a PR attempt by Microsoft to make it look like it’s tightening security.
And you base this on…? There’s a limit to what *Microsoft* can do to “tighten security” when the vast bulk of security problems are caused by *users*.
Microsoft does not want to encourage users to have strong user accounts etc, because that would make their system more difficult to use, and quite frankly most of the dumbasses that use it would be lost.
I’ve been using NT from a regular user account for ~8 years without any major problems, although I’m far from a “typical user”. However, OS X shows that it’s possible to make regular user accounts usable when you don’t care much about legacy support. Microsoft *do* care a great deal about legacy support (because inevitably when software breaks, Microsoft gets blamed), which is why users are still Administrators by default.
That said, Apple’ CPUs have always been *faster* than their Intel counterparts on a mhz per mhz basis.
Compared to P4s, yes. Compared to (later model) P3s or Pentium-Ms (“Centrino”), not really. The G4s, in particular, are crippled by slow bus speeds.
Comes down to the design of the CPU. I’d rate a 800mhz G4 about equivalent to a p4 1.6 or so in all honesty. Some really intensive stuff will favour the p4 for sure (image editing etc).
That’s pretty generous. I’d call a 800Mhz G4 a touch slower than a 1.4Ghz P4. Of course, the early P4s sucked, so the discepancy isn’t as large as you move further up the line.
My dad bought a PC 18 months ago and got Windows XP – he had to buy full retail. No upgrade there, and there are a lot of new users to computers in the past 2 or so years that will be in the same boat.
All were eligible to buy an OEM copy of XP (basically it’s available with any “major” piece of hardware – motherboard, CPU, hard disk, etc). OEM XP is about $250 AU. For the likes of Dell, it probably costs closer to $150.
I’m going to pay that much for an insecure system?
It’s no less secure than any of the alternatives.
I can download Debian and configure a mailserver, webserver, print server etc etc and very little cost, it runs, runs well, is secure and efficient.
If your time is free. For example, even a modestly paid sysadmin like myself typically costs a company in the area of $55/hr. So $1200 is about half a working week. Taken over the 3 – 5 year lifecycle of a system using it, that’s chicken feed.
Not forgetting of course that if you want to run something like Oracle, Debian isn’t even an option.
I’ve used the same online retailer purely because I knew they’d have the items i’d be quoting prices on etc. You can get cheaper prices out there, by how much is the million dollar question…
No company of any size pays retail prices. If you’re much over the 200 desktops mark, you’re probably going to be eligible for a Select agreement and a minimum of 10% off retail price.
The Australian Dollar is worth around .58 Euro. ie 6/10…so recriprocal is 10/6 ie 5/3. Divide 2699 by 3 and times by 5…and that’s about 4500 australian dollars…
Dave
Arguing on the side of the Mac guy… this feels wrong. Nonetheless…
Yes, Windows is aggressive about maximising the amount of free memory. In my book this is inefficient – free memory is a useless commodity. Linux is much, much better at using memory – despite the fact it likes to use 90% of my 512MB all the time. In particular, something huge like UT2004 feels much more responsive in Linux – because it’s not hitting the hdd constantly. I rather imagine OSX would be the same, as it’s built in very similar technology – of course it’s near impossible to measure, since the hardware differs so drastically.
“OS X is no more secure by design. It does, however, benefit greatly from its lower marketshare.”
No and yes. Lower marketshare helps it a lot. But Windows has some serious basic flaws:
– Just about everything depends on RPC. This (and any other sevice with “remote” in it) shouldn’t be running by default – but it is.
– Ports open by default: Too many.
– Users are all administrators. In XP Home this isn’t a default, it’s mandatory – good work there MS. In XP Pro you don’t have to be, but say you want a game of Diablo 2 – oh look, you have to be an admin That’s the last example I can think of where I wasn’t an admin – it’s pretty common though. Basically to get anything done you ahve to be an admin, a lot of which is because there’s no su/sudo to temporarily receive privileges.
“It’s no less secure than any of the alternatives.”
That’s laughable after Blaster and Sasser.
You’re probably right about legacy support – unfortunately if legacy support for Office 97 comes with a gaping security flaw, I’d be abandoning the legacy support. It’s nice, but not at too high a price.
“Not forgetting of course that if you want to run something like Oracle, Debian isn’t even an option. ”
Not everyone uses Oracle… we’re quibbling over $250/$350 Windows licenses, I don’t think tens of thousands on an Oracle license really fits this picture. Can you run Oracle at all on OSX anyway?
“I’ve never once heard my hard drive thrash under Linux.”
I agree with him *partially*. I certainly have been impressed by the speed of my Linux install at times – I suspect this is a consequence of better memory management and a faster filesystem. I wouldn’t say it hasn’t thrashed at all though…
Like the author said if used with the correct (not cheap crap) hardware, such as compaq proliants etc.. then the server never breaks down. Ive never had a problem with Windows NT, 2000 and 2003 server crashing. They have been up for year without a reboot (i had a P166 64MB Fujitsu server, serving a workgroup of 15 for 4 years without a reboot or crash,before they needed an upgrade to exchange which required more power).
You put windows server on a cheap put togeather pc and it will crash.
This comment is not putting down apple or linux down in anyway, all of these computers have there place and we are lucky in that we are living in an age of computers where we don’t have to worry about barriers (we can do video editing take photographs) without crashes (or pretty much without them). I used Windows XP Pro before Win2k Pro and they never BSOD. I use Windows for games, video editing and image manipulation and windows will just keep running. My brother uses a Mac G5 at college using finial cut pro and that just keeps running.
One thing i have noticed (in a Very good way) is that the Three Main OS’s (Windows, MacOS X and Linux) will all “borrow” the best features from each other. Which is making your/my desktop of choice evolve in a more productive way.
sorry the statement
“I used Windows XP Pro before Win2k Pro and they never BSOD”
Meant to be “I USE Windows XP Pro, before that win2k pro and i have never had a BSOD”