skip0110
Well, people are always on about how stable, reliable, etc. Macs/OSX are (is?).
It is more reliable and stable. Apple wouldn't have much of a selling point if it wasn't. I've NEVER crashed my mac, nor have I seen any of the OSX macs crash throughout my design course I did - rooms and rooms full of them churning away day and night on pretty intensive design work. Sure, you can get 3rd party apps that screw up, but that isn't the OS's fault. If a OSX machine freezes completely - something is most likely wrong with the HARDWARE. It's been abused physically - things corrupted on the HDD etc. Possibly a very badly written 3rd party app mucks with the system files (but I can't see this happening really). Every computer screws up in this situation.
Well, spurred by this thread, and sice I was going to the store anyways to pick up a newer TV tuner card (can you even get those for a Mac?)
Yes, of course you can get TV tuner cards for Macs. Even way back in the LC630 days (around 486 times).
I stopped by the Apple department of the store (it's a Micro Center, for those of you in the US). Of the machines that were on in the store (quite a few were off, suspiciously) two had "crashed", one of the desktop machines was frozen with a buzy cursor and all its fans were blaring away like a jet engine, and the other would just not take any input, granted, the display machines always take a lot of abuse but over in the IBM-compat section every machine was on and working....
If you're telling the truth, which may not be the case (or the truth greatly exagerrated), it would just be EXTREMELY bad luck for that particular group of Macs. OSX is recognised by most computer industry folk to be far more stable, its built off UNIX, as solid as a brick ****-house. I'd wager there was some hardware faults a-foot, especially if it was a very popular store with loads of idiots coming in and out every day. If you look after a Mac like any computer should be looked after - it is more stable and reliable. Hell, I've still got a Mac Plus from 1988 that works perfectly still, and an LC575 (one of the first CD-ROM Macs). No problems or system reinstalls. Ever. At school, the PC labs were always broken down, the macs fine. Everyone I know that has a PC (including me) has had to reformat at some point, sometimes more than once. Yes, we were responsible with our PCs...
The dock was just as I remebered it, pretty, but very hard to click on an icon, and with no textual description of what the icons were, and way too big.
Yes, its pretty. There is text, nice and readable, in white (and bold) at the top of each icon when you mouse-over each of them. You must have chosen to ignore it. Also, you can change the size of the dock to anything you want, down to tiny teeny little icons or even have it disappear when you're not clicking stuff down there. It isn't hard to click on when you get used to it - if you're still having trouble, you can turn off the magnification animations.
I can't say it was any faster than my windows machine, things weren't "intsantaneous" at all.
You can turn off all the animations, it is instant then. They benchmark faster than equivalent (exactly the same chips!) PC boxes. Also, they even run Windows faster than the same equivalent chipped PCs. You can look up any tests that will show this. (Obviously not 3D stuff against a PC with a super-duper GFX card), we're talking stuff that taxes the main CPU mainly. Not to say the Macs suck at games now that Boot Camp is here... And you CAN buy very fancy GFX cards, insane amounts of RAM, various add ons etc for the power macs (the ones in the tower cases). The new power-macs (whatever they end up calling them) still need to be converted to intel... these are the only machines really designed for business stuff and heavy-duty work... all the iMac line is really designed for home users pretty much. Wait for the really fast ones to come out I say... Then judge.
From a programmers perspective, there is no way I would want to work on OSX, Xcode is buggy, and lacks thread support, while MS's Visual Studio is elegant and really helps me code faster. Support for other languages (Java, for example) is at least one revision behind every other platform. I know plenty of Mac developers who develop on a Windows machine and just do their testing on a Mac. That has to say something.
Of course - the Mac just isn't built as a development environment for programmers. Wrong type of buyer completely, and you shouldn't judge it as such. Its made as a consumer product - the perfect home computer or for use in industries like design or music production, where it simply kills PCs and reigns as the industry standard (in my world you'd think the PC/Mac ratios were reversed and Mac by far the dominant platform!). PCs are the industry standard for coding, funny that. Each platform has grown stronger and better supported in different areas depending on the different industries each platform appeals to!
Macs are very good at catering to their (very loyal) user base, but I think it's not an issue of "what can you do on a Mac that you can't do on a PC" but what you can do on PC so much more easily than on a Mac.
Same issue as above. They are much easier for the common consumer who doesn't need to code Java apps, but anything else besides games and certain business apps, and CAD, its better. There is a reason why people are loyal to Macs - and its not their comparitively high price or aesthetics (Macs still sold when they looked just as dull as PCs)! They are simply a joy to use with a very clever and superior OS. Can they do everything a PC can do? Nearly, and lots of tricks a PC can't, and all the common stuff is so much 'nicer'. The gap has become very much in favour of doing MORE with a Mac now with Boot Camp...
And to address issues of anti-virus and virus scan that are so often brought up: how hard is it to schedule a nightly defrag and virus check? Or have them happen during your lunch break? It's just a few clicks...
I sure enjoy not having to worry about viruses, no matter where I go online etc. Hell, they stopped making Norton Anti-Virus for Mac OSX because no one bought it!
I use my Mac heavily any and all hours of the day for design work with hardcore schedules to complete things by - I simply don't see any reason why my computer needs "time out" because it can't manage its own files competently. My Mac just keeps on going, when I REALLY need it to. There is no argument to be made here. Even as a comparitively small feature, its still very helpful for many people! I love not having to think about maintenance rubbish when I just want to do work and think about what I'm actually trying to achieve! That is what Mac is so good at - just letting you get on with it without interfering. Like I said, I never get annoyed at the computer about anything, like I have done time and time again on my Wintel box - yes I definately qualify as a 'power user', I can competently use and 'tune' every aspect XP, I inderstand it being better for coding etc, I don't hate Windows, I have to use both platforms frequently. The Mac is the only one I enjoy using, however.
I know I sound like an advert for OSX, but hey, it doesn't deserve to get knocked unjustly with a strong negative bias. Its not like everyone blindly loves Apple, there IS a reason behind it all... They would go out of business years ago if there was no meat in the pie, as it were. Use it for a month, on a good, non-faulty Mac, set up how you like it etc, and THEN tell me what you think.
I'd let the bugs get worked out first especially since this is still in beta. I'm assuming this will be out of beta stage when Leopard comes out. Vista and Leopard on an iMac or MacBook Pro... I can only imagine
Hilarious!
aaaah! Ok it has gotten out of hand.... oh well to each his own i guess
