Wall Street Journal technology columnist Walt Mossberg gave the highest praise possible to not one but two Apple Computer products in his Thursday Personal Technology column, calling Mac OS X “rock solid” and the G5 iMac “the single best desktop computer I have ever reviewed.” Mr. Mossberg used his weekly column to discuss the plague of viruses, spyware and other security problems that primarily affect the Windows platform.
Mossberg: OS X “Rock Solid”; G5 iMac “Best” PC “Ever Reviewed”
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I am a sane person, therefore I will say that Apple’s hardware is super expensive.
However, it is a completely awesome platform. I was fortunate to get an iMac G4 1.25 GHz logic board for very cheap, so I am now the pround owner of a home-built macintosh. I love it.
After using it for 2 months now, I’m still not sure yet if I could justify paying full price for a new mac. My concern is that once this mac is obselete, I’ll have to go back to the PC (I doubt I’ll be able to ever find a good deal like this on a mac again…it only cost me about $400 to build). I can just as easily use Windows, but I love OS X because it looks so much nicer and has UNIX as its base.
Have you recently checked the prices and specs of Sun’s Blade 150 ? Anyway even in a medium range workstation (I would consider the iMac G5) you buy a high quality LCD with a decent CPU. If you price a medium range PC from a known maker with a high quality LCD screen you are coming to the same price as the iMac G5 (20 inch model). As for the rest of the people who claim to do not use IE, Outlook, etc… Yeah lynx and pine are excellent Apps but do not provide any usefull functionality (All GUI Browsers have flaws). Gnome and KDE is cool and all but it will never come close to the Mac OS X GUI.
Apple users are considered elitists. Yes we are, and our money is well spent. For the PC user who can’t afford to buy a Mac and complain about the price…well keep drooling. Wait few years until Microsoft will copy once again the GUI of the Mac OS.
What you spend is what you buy.
Everyone is responding to his post about not having virus/spyware problems on windows.
His other comment was the most observant, and it’s about the part of this story that everyone is overlooking. This is an article from the Wall Street Journal. It’s in the print edition (I know as it’s sitting on my coffee table).
But for the WSJ to put that article in print is a fairly big deal. We’re talking about a major publication that rarely even acknowledges that anyone but MS exists. And while they occasionally acknowledge server competitors, it is even more rare for them to acknowledge, let alone promote a desktop alternative. And this is to a non-technical, older demographic.
I don’t care if you love or hate mac. Personally, I’m on the fence. Regardless, True or not, some things are significant because you’d never expect to hear them from an unexpected source.
Wow, another round of “I can build something for less than paying others to put it together for me.”. This is truly an ancient concept that has been reiterated so often that it is stale news. It is always so exciting (yawn) to find someone who has stumbled onto the obvious.
Here are some uninteresting facts: My eyes are unable to discern the difference between a photograph that is “improved” over the original unless drastic changes have been made so I do not need expensive software for correcting my poorly taken pictures. On the other hand my sense of smell (taste) is superior to most humans (Yes, I have been paid to identify odors, etc.) and I do not mind paying a little more for such pleasures as dining. My hearing is dimming from my youthful days so I do not hear the very high notes with clarity (including their wonderful overtones) so investing in a very expensive sound system makes no sense unless it is for others to enjoy. I do not like or understand or enjoy the paintings of Dali or Picasso but I do like the work of Michelangelo. These are the some of the traits that make me who I am.
I do not press upon others about how erudite I am when they do not have these same traits and abilities or appreciation for things. I keep reading about folks at this site that “prove” they can get a superior computer system for much less. Or, my computer OS is great and yours sucks. How juvenile, or less.
Let’s face it. If you do not see the difference between a $1200 monitor and a $300 one it does not make one superior or others dumb. It really says that you are unable to visually see the difference or you really can’t afford the more expensive model. In that case one would be correct to assume that the cheap monitor is perfectly acceptable. If you have no eye for good design or you are simply utilitarian then it would be proper for you to not pay extra for things that have no aesthetic value to you. Etc., etc, etc.
But how can one be so blind as to think that anyone can set the criteria for what is acceptable and what is stupid. We do not represent the average user if there is such a thing. So please, let’s discuss OS issues and not extraneous, dull, and overly discussed generalities of, “I am smart and you aren’t”. Or “I can spit further than you can”. Or “My criteria of a computing experience is superior to yours”. Or “My OS has no competitors”, etc. For those who want to have such childish and immature discussions I suggest that a separate website be set up to handle these exciting subject.
Everyone who says macs are the best desktop are speaking about their own personal needs. If you are joe bloe and you are deciding between a gateway and a mac for surfing the web, checking email, making xmas cards, etc. then sure, a mac would be great. But for people like me, who have never bought a prebuilt computer… people who do so many things that the pure strength in numbers in terms of both support and extreme software title redundancy/diversity is something the mac can’t touch.
These are tools. Your little hybrid vehicle with bubbly dome lights and a voice that welcomes you when you get into the cushiony cockpit might make you feel warm and fuzzy, and might be worth the high cost… but I have more money into my ugly truck, with lots of extra tools slapped onto it so that I can get the job done. No matter how nice OSX is, the current situation is that a power user has more opportunities with a serious x86 machine. It might be different in the future. But this is just how it is right now.
I hope that this ends the mac vs wintel debate forever. I’m glad I could lay this to rest.
No matter how nice OSX is, the current situation is that a power user has more opportunities with a serious x86 machine.
What are some examples?
For games, yes of course that’s true.
But what are some of these “extra tools” that pcs have that can complete jobs that a mac can’t?
[i]No matter how nice OSX is, the current situation is that a power user has more opportunities with a serious x86 machine.[i]
Aren’t generalizations great!? I love folks who just wave their hands and say ‘X is true’ without actually providing any facts. You could probably find a nice job in Bush’s cabinet.
I use a vareity of systems. Generally the OS isn’t too important (although it’s very handy to have a UNIX shell) for the work I do. Most of the applications I use can be found on a number of platforms (for example, matlab, java, netcdf libraries, SQL tools and databases, C compilers, etc). The only exceptions are that I need a Windows platform to run ArcGIS and Microsoft SQL Enterprise Manager (Oh, and Half-life 2). My wife, on the other hand, needs a Mac platform for her profession as a video editor.
So I would say that the ‘opportunities’ are generally the same on both platforms. If you have specialized needs then you may be restricted to a particular vendor.
contrary to the opinion of a growing body of posters here like yourself, ‘the real world’ is NOT equal to ‘The Mighty Corporation’.
Superbly faulty logic, there. Macs besides eMacs force you to buy LCD screens, so you must spec competing systems with LCD screens.
Why? I’m typing this on an excellent quality, nice looking 17″ flat screen CRT. In the space where it sits, there would be no, zero, zip, nada, point in having an LCD. None whatsoever. With my nice high-quality CRT screen I enjoy the benefits of being able to render whatever resolution I choose without excessive loss in quality, and far superior colour rendering to *any* LCD. If I’d bought an equivalent LCD screen I’d have a monitor that does less for my needs and costs at least $100 more. Oh, whoopee doo.
And what the hell are you talking about, Lynx and Pine? Are you on crack? Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, K-Meleon are exactly as safe as any Mac browser, and have as much functionality. On a Windows system I’d use The Bat! or Eudora or something for email, on my Linux system I use Evolution. Again, just as safe as using a Mac, all the functionality and more of their Microsoft equivalents.
I’ve used the OS X GUI. It’s not great. I run GNOME on my system, I use 100% GNOMEified and HIG-compliant (to some extent, anyway) apps, and I think it’s an extremely nice and functional desktop. On OS X, call me back when they finally decide on one widget theme, would you?
“Macs besides eMacs force you to buy LCD screens, so you must spec competing systems with LCD screens. ”
Absolutely not true.
My Dual G5 shipped with a vga adaptor(included in the box), and am using my old CRT right now.
“if you want to construct your own filing system for your photos you are free to do so. iPhoto can be pointed to any folder you wish, or you can simply use the file system with preview on and max iCon size for that folder. ”
I really hate iPhoto, and i don’t need something to go orginizing my photos, infact thats what i don’t want to happen. I just want to put them in folders in my system that i use to keap things straight.
The problem is viewing pictures. In windows, it’s great, open the folder, click on a photo and it opens up windows picture veiwer with all the pictures in that folder and i can click through them as fast as i can click no matter how many pictures are in the folder. Its great and I use it all the time for looking through them, finding photos, deleting bad ones, printing them, showing pictures to people at my computer and such. Apple doesn’t have any such thing. Preview is as close as it gets, but it’s not even close. For one, it’s more of an app, not a off shoot from explorer like the windows picture veiwer is, I really don’t like things that start become more of a app and not a basic built in utility. Second you have to select all the photos, and then open up preview to get them all at once, which is anoying. Third, it’s massively slow, clicking between photos is very slow, and basicly un-usuable.
This is something that should simply be built into finder, it’s so simple, click on a photo in folder, it pops up a viewing window and you can click through them fast, and being apple theys should have options like being able to get sub-folders at the same time.
I went through all the third party apps i could find, but they were all poor. They were largly fullscreen slide show apps, which i see nearly no use for. They are overly complicated and trying to do to much. Some want to set up spacial folders and rank photos and do all sorts of random stuff. Oh and they still don’t have a good way to view pictures at a normal size in a clean window, and they are all slow.
For an OS that is suppose to be for photo people, you would think such an simple app would be at the core of things.
That was George’s reasoning, not mine.
Not sure what you are talking about. iPhoto has always been an app, not a utility. Takes a few seconds to load, but once it does, it is blazingly fast (at least on my 1ghz powerbook). Albums are the equivalent of folders. Selecting a folder, then making the photo size the largest possible so it fills the viewer screen does exactly what you are talking about. Forwarding through the photos then becomes nothing more than clicking on the slider bar – and is immediate. Again, no idea why you would say Apple doesn’t have an app that can do this for you, since it is the very one you have so disdained.
Semper Fi
Elvino
I think you need to read what I wrote again. I know iPhoto is an app, thats one of the reason I don’t like it. I don’t like how it orginizes things. It’s also slow (it does not go through photos very fast, this could be patialy do to the brokeness of my powermac, but still. I don’t like how iPhoto works and it’s not at all what I want. Uses the Photo viewer in windows XP, it’s clear as day what I want, and iPhoto is completely differant. iPhoto is way overkill, furthermore i don’t want to open iphoto and then go find my photos. I just want to click on a photo and boom i’m good to go.
All apple needs to do is simple, add a couple minor things to preview. All it needs is an option to open all the pictures in a folder when you click on one picture in the folder (instead of having to do a select all, then open in preview), and be fast, thats it. They allready have 98% of what I want there.
It’s sorta like safari, what is there is ok, the problem is it’s missing so many options, like a new window, new tab button in the window itself, the ability to make a new folder when saving a bookmark, the ability to open up a new window when I click on the safari icon in the dock instead of bring up I one of my currently open windows, ability to export my book marks (yeah, you can sync it with .mac, but thats not the same and should have both routes).. etc. Its fine, it’s just missing things.
I basicly expect apple to keap adding to things, OSX is still pretty new, and it just takes time to add things. I expect Tiger to bring more things that just seam to be missing.
>I’ve used the OS X GUI. It’s not great. I run GNOME on my system, I use 100% >GNOMEified and HIG-compliant (to some extent, anyway) apps, and I think >it’s an extremely nice and functional desktop. On OS X, call me back when >they finally decide on one widget theme, would you?
You should really reconsider on who is on crack. Mac OS X has the most advanced GUI for a general purpose operating system. If Gnome was as good as you think Novell, RedHat, and Sun would have made a big push marketing Linux as desktop computer.
>Superbly faulty logic, there. Macs besides eMacs force you to buy LCD >screens, so you must spec competing systems with LCD screens.
>Why? I’m typing this on an excellent quality, nice looking 17″ flat screen >CRT. In the space where it sits, there would be no, zero, zip, nada, point in >having an LCD. None whatsoever. With my nice high-quality CRT screen I >enjoy the benefits of being able to render whatever resolution I choose >without excessive loss in quality, and far superior colour rendering to *any* >LCD. If I’d bought an equivalent LCD screen I’d have a monitor that does >less for my needs and costs at least $100 more. Oh, whoopee doo.
My 20” LCD screen displays Mac OS X GUI in 1680 x 1050 by default. Try do that on your screen without torturing your eyes. In addition, most of the people I know, that use PCs, have LCD screens as well as the PC in my office. Oh and by the way the LCDs that ship with Macs are very high quality (Yes unfortunately you are forced you get the best of a kind hardware from Apple…oh well).
>And what the hell are you talking about, Lynx and Pine? Are you on crack? >Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, K-Meleon are exactly as safe as any Mac browser, >and have as much functionality. On a Windows system I’d use The Bat! or >Eudora or something for email, on my Linux system I use Evolution. Again, >just as safe as using a Mac, all the functionality and more of their Microsoft >equivalents.
What I have said in the previous post is that no usable browser is safe enough in these days. That works for email clients as well. The question is when you get compromised what happens next. In a non corporate environment (that means home use) most likely people are going to use IE and Outlook or web based email client. In this scenario it safer (IMHO) to use a Mac OS than Windows 98 through Windows XP. For people who know more about computers any UNIX based system is safer than Windows OS.
Sorry, still don’t see it. You don’t want to search through iPhoto for your picture (which is extremely easy and fast) but you are ok searching through folders to find the pic you want to open. I’ve got a couple of thousand pics in my computer already – if you get near the 25,000 pic max of iPhoto, searching through individual photos is impractical. Then you claim the program is too much, but want them to add features to Preview to get you the same functionality as iPhoto. Don’t see that happening. As an aside you can set the icons in your folders to show a preview of the image, set the icons for the largest size and you’ll have a quick and simple way to see what is in each folder. Again not exactly what you seem to want. Would still have to say that iPhoto is exactly what you are looking for – substitute the world album for folder and it does exactly what you state – ” All it needs is an option to open all the pictures in a folder when you click on one picture in the folder (instead of having to do a select all, then open in preview), and be fast, thats it.” You don’t have to use it, but to say the functionality isn’t there is misleading.
Semper Fi
Elvino
“You should really reconsider on who is on crack. Mac OS X has the most advanced GUI for a general purpose operating system.”
You should learn to distinguish subjective opinion from objective reality.
“For people who know more about computers any UNIX based system is safer than Windows OS.”
Only from the standpoint of obscurity. The security model in Windows is actually very good. Unfortunately, many don’t use it (run as root) – which would be just as dangerous as running as root on a UNIX-based OS.