laughing, but gotta jump in there (not attacking Trevor, just
the idea of apples being for graphics)
- the display is *not* an apple display, it's a LCD made
by any number of different manufacturers - in my opinion, a very poor idea by
apple and one which seriously undermines their right to call themselves a
graphics dedicated machine maker.. you need to *know* what the actual LCD is,
and having differing LCD's in the same model, mixed and matched on a whim at the
factory means no consistency - you could be buying two Macs from the same batch
and end up with two totally different displays
Atop this the video card is a regular gamerz card in all
off-the-shelf apples these days - not a 2D dedicated card. It's made to
compromise the system and allows Mac users to play games - once largely the
domain of the windows crowd.. they allow very fast 3D rendering but
sacrifice colour fidelity and sharpness to achieve this. There's NO good
3D card on the market which renders 2D anywhere near as good as a decent 2D
dedicated card. Manufacturers will tell you otherwise, but it ain't
true.
In my opinion - and I am honestly sad to say this, Mac lost
the plot with graphics when they tried to cater to everyone
..and this is where the windows machine component makers
picked up the ball and ran with it - you can buy SO much dedicated and superior
componentry to build dedicated computers for dedicated tasks
When IBM opened the floodgates to allow the component makers
to fabricate bits to a non-proprietary computer system, the non-proprietary
computer users benefited massively. Those buyers who continued to
stick with the proprietary computer makers (Compaq / Dell / Apple/others) have
been boxed into a corner - either with makers who went out of business, or
makers who would only supply a limited set of component options in their
computers.
the IBM/PC model is like Lego - you can build it to be
whatever you want.
Of course there's a downside to this - support is not always
forthcoming from obscure part makers .. they may not support newer OS's
(but proprietary computer makers do this too!) - the OS's have to be
pretty canny and allow all the parts to play inside the box nicely.
This was where Vista came undone - and I loathe to defend that
abhorrent OS .. but it wasn't Microsoft's fault that so much didn't play with
the OS.. It was simply that the component makers didn't put together
drivers for the system - subsequently there was little MS could add to their
installation disks to get the stuff talking. Kinda like why people
abandoned Win98 for XP - WinXP had all the shiny new drivers already loaded,
courtesy of the parts makers, so plugging anything into an XP box would allow
the OS to install and use it with little fuss - none of the searching for
drivers for the latest widget to try to make 98 talk to it.. Vista fell
back to behaving like 98 did ("sorry, can't install it, don't know what it
is.. go away")
The Apple OS is kinda friendly, I'll grant you that - but I
find it inherently annoying because I can't pull it apart and make it do the
obscure things I want it to do the way I can with Windows. The Windows OS's are
inherently annoying because they're largely open to malicious attacks .. the
many other operating systems I like annoy me because I can't use the
applications I want on them
And ultimately that's what we're doing on computers - using
applications
Since I'm rambling off into computer blather again, here's
something I'd like to share about the modern world of computing (language
warning !)
I also have to say how astonishing it is that one of the most
reliable and interesting sources of new-to-me information on the web is a comedy
site
karl
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