Please don't get the impression I'm wavin' a Microsoft flag here either.
My home 'puter is an iMac and my Toshiba has a pile of books resting on
it right now. Apple makes sexy, durable products, and their
out-of-the-box usability/accessibility is unparalleled, no doubt. I have
a 2.5 year-old niece that can navigate an iPhone to find videos on
YouTube. It's just my personal bent that these products need not be
designed with the lowest common denominator in mind. I'd hate to see The
New Yorker written at a fifth grade reading level.
I just find the concept of interchangeable parts a lot more egalitarian
than aggressive user agreements and proprietary hardware antics. The
ability for someone to walk into a parts store, walk out with a box,
motherboard, hard-drive, processor, etc, and plug in a linux build
(without ANY concern for where it comes from) speaks volumes. I
understand there's no money in it, and, hence, little development beyond
the benevolence of a select few, so this approach isn't exactly
competitive. So, I do what I can, and choose not to put the Apple
stickers that come with every item I buy anywhere they can be seen,
other than a land fill, and opt out of the other opportunities given to
me to pay thousands of dollars and still be a walking advertisement for
Steve Jobs.
I'll stop my rant now. Sorry.
On 10/28/10 6:33 PM, Rob Miracle wrote:
On 10/28/10 10:53 AM, Trevor Cunningham wrote:
I've always thought that the only reason someone would choose to
endure a Mac OS would be the benefits of its hardware, most notably
the graphic display. I simply cannot fathom why anyone with the
skills requisite to perform such an install would choose a Mac
OS...that is other than to show that it's possible and give Steve
Jobs the finger.
Trevor. I've used many operating systems over the years. About the
only notable exception was Windows Vista. I purposely skipped that
piece of garbage. I run Win7 and XP at home. I use OS-X at work.
And I've used just about every Linux/Unix platform known to man.
There are 3 pieces to the Mac experience (well 4)
1. The hardware
2. The OS
3. The consistent user interface
On the hardware side, the guts of a Mac are the same as the guts of
most PC's. The only difference is Apple makes sure to pair up the
hardware so they are only supporting one configuration. All Macs of
a given era have the same video card, same chipset, etc. This is
important to #2 below. The other piece of the Mac hardware is the
construction. I just bought a new Win7 laptop this past weekend. Its
plastic. The hinges seem weak. It was clearly made to be as cheap as
possible. I paid $580 for it but I did get a mid-range i5 processor.
Sure $580 is a heck of a lot less than $1500 for a MacBook pro, but
my MacBook pro at work is made from aluminum has a solid hinge that
has no play and has a beautiful design. Is it worth $1000 more? Well
my MBP is around 3 years old and its nearly indestructible. I doubt
very much that my Win7 box will be in as good a shape in 3 years.
The OS is a major part of the equation. Because Apple has to tune its
OS for a small set of configurations the OS is much more solid than
Windows will ever be because there are dozens of computer makers using
hundreds of different hardware combination's. OS-X is based on Unix.
Unix has been around for decades and has proven itself to be stable,
secure and very hardware efficient. It also means there are tons of
existing software that can run on it with little difficulty. Want to
do web development? Sure you can get Apache, MySQL and PHP installed
on Windows, but its a royal pain. Its for the most part built in to
or easily installed with OS-X. The way the OS-X manages memory and
disk space are different than Windows. You never have to defrag a
Unix/OS-X hard drive. Virtual memory is more efficient with Unix than
Windows as well. This is clearly a strong plus for OS-X.
Apple highly encourages people developing apps for OS-X to follow
their interface guidelines and they have put a lot of effort into
making the interface one of the most human friendly on the planet.
Things are quite intuitive and once you get used to using the Apple
key instead of the CTRL key for copying and pasting, you don't want to
go back. Then there are the little things like printing to a PDF
file that are native to the OS.
If I could, I would install OS-X in a heart beat on all my machines,
or if I could afford it, all my machines would be Macs.
Rob
