Ok, so I have already raised the possibility of needing to switch teams in this journal before, and I have been thinking about it alot…
- Reasons to Go Mac
- Finally getting fed up with Microsoft’s DRM shenanigans
- Finally a Unix Workstation with a good user experience
- The excitement of playing with a new OS
- Reasons to continue avoiding Macs
- Flashy UI will grate on my soul
- God-damned “Switch” ads
- Being back in “Not universally supported” OS land
- The punishment of playing with a new OS
- “Apple Tax” (the extra money you pay for the privelege of owning a Mac)
So you pro/anti Mac bigots out there, what am I missing?
i want one so bad :(
Screw the mac… go for an Amiga!
Ok, I know (hope?) you are joking, but really, I see absolutely no redeeming qualities of the various AmigaOS incarnations… The UI hasn’t really evolved at all, the hardware is all still hacked together, and I have no concept of why people still attach themselves to such shit?
Amiga was awesome then, it’s just sad now…
Because it reminds us of a time before M$ domination, when your biggest problem was how long a file was gonna take to save to floppy.
and there apparantly is new “Amiga” hardware, but it’s a far cry from what “Amiga” was.
And yes, I most definitely am kidding. ;)
Screen Because it reminds us of a time before M$ domination, when your biggest problem was how long a file was gonna take to save to floppy.
Nostalgia is fine, I just don’t understand these hardcore Boingers who beat their heads against the wall trying to keep their Amiga up to date….
I miss my C=64, I learned alot on it, I had tons of fun on it, but I would never go back to it…
heh. I never heard of Amiga Users as called ‘boingers’ before. I dig it. hehe.
IT IS THE BEST THING
TO COME ALONG SINCE
COMPUTING BEGAN. YOU
EVEN GET TO USE A
MOUSE!!!!1!!
heh. I never heard of Amiga Users as called ‘boingers’ before. I dig it. hehe.
It’s very possible that is because I invented that on the spot before… I had Amigans there and for some reason was compelled to replace it… It’s also possible that Boingers came somewhere out of the dusty amiga depths of my brain that haven’t been used in awhile. :)
And GEOS fucking owned… Especially if you were like my family and had 1mb of RAM expansion and could load all the disks into RAMDISK for speed…. Mmmmm…. GEOS…
I picked up a PowerBook a couple months ago, and I have to say that I really like it. I still haven’t found good terminal software (i.e. one that is really vt100 compliant), but other than that, I have no qualms about getting it. As far as flashy UI grating on your soul.. it isn’t all that bad. You can make the bar at the bottom really tiny, and the rest is pretty inconsequential. Last but not least… the screen is huge, and the overall form-factor is tiny. What more do you want?
I switched in December, from Wintel/Linux to OS X and Wintel/Linux only when I have to.
The UI won’t bother you much after you get used to it and its hotkeys.
You don’t get a whole lot of punishment for using it, not as much as going from say Windows to Linux or back again.
You don’t need to install a million tools to make it usable, it comes with a bunch of stuff. Even a mail client that works pretty well with IMAP, and vi
If you’re a pro or hobby software developer, you’ll definitely not regret it.
Project Builder is way better to use than MSVC, integrates nicely with CVS, uses GCC under the hood, and can use shell scripts as part of the build or install process (from the GUI).
Also, Cocoa is a very nice API, and Objective C is a nice language to use unless you can’t live without operator overloading.
It’s at least as supported as Linux, and it’s got all of your core apps for design, web stuff, and office junk (adobe, macromedia, microsoft). It’s got a fair amount of drivers for stuff that you’d actually use (printers, firewire devices, usb peripherals, etc).. you don’t often throw PCI inside a mac.
You don’t really pay a huge Apple tax, unless you buy all your ram and harddrives from apple. Especially if you consider the software it comes with and the fact you don’t have to install and setup Linux on it.
Jaguar (10.2) supposedly kicks some serious ass. I haven’t had time to bother with it yet, but from what I’ve read in articles, friends, and on the OS X developer lists it’s badass and solves a lot of issues that people have had with previous version of OS X.
Yes, the “Switch” campaign sucks ass, and I have to see the posters every day (I work/live in lower manhattan, not too far from the new flagship Apple store).
One benefit- in the newer version of the OS, ALL ON SCREEN DISPLAY IS DONE VIA OPENGL (given you’re using a supported graphics adapter).
The new version of the OS is very, very nice. I have it behaving in marius’ windows domain almost better than his XP box (which presently cannot log on to the domain for some bizarre reason). It’s also extremely fast, and goes from power off to completely loaded in thirty seconds.
If you can hijack someone’s machine for a stint to play around with, try the utility LaunchBar – it scans specified directories for whatever you want to have access to (HTML documentation, applications, scripts, whatever) and then you hit cmd+space and start typing abbreviations or the beginning of the name. It uses heuristics to generate a list of possible items you could mean, and then you can select the one you want. The next time you use that abbreviation, the app is selected as the first one, and you just hit enter. Sorry to gush- it’s just an amazing utility. I can barely function without it.
It depends what you mean by ‘not universally supported’. It will cut into the games you play– this is a good and bad thing, but you also have your older machine as well.
I’ll also say that, with very few exceptions, the OS is extremely forgiving. I’ve been able to take it to hell and back and still be able to do work on it, despite a plethora of problems. Also- this is the first operating system I’ve seen someone install a point update on top of and still have a perfectly functioning computer. Don’t get the current crop though- they’re just stupid. If you want a laptop, go ahead- they’re still great, but hold off until the next revision. If you’re after a tower- I might try getting one of the old Dual 1Ghz machines, as they’ll be cheaper and perform as well as the Dual 1Ghz with DDR machines. I don’t plan on getting a machine until they actually have a whole new architecture to offer. This DDR memory without a DDR bus shit ain’t cutting my grass. Plus- the vents are ugly and I want to ass rape the person who OK’d the beveled panel. There are rumors that apple might take on IBM’s Power4 chip, but that type of move isn’t happening for a bit- at least not until next year.
Fucking Ellen Feiss- someone needs to date rape her and leave her in a dumpster– beep-beep-beep-beep-beep!
One benefit- in the newer version of the OS, ALL ON SCREEN DISPLAY IS DONE VIA OPENGL (given you’re using a supported graphics adapter).
Your statement make this sound like a good thing… That is an awful thing. When I first heard of such an idea (I heard it originally from microsoft) I smacked my forehead, amazed that OS vendors had let the fucking glitz get so far out of hand that you needed a fucking 3D accelerator just to get reasonable speed from your UI. Apple was the first to market with the tech, but everyone has been talking/working on it for a long time (Microsoft and X WM’s included).
I would trade in YOUR AMAZING SCREEN DISPLAY BEING DONE VIA OPEN GL in a heartbeat if I could instead have a switch to turn off Apple’s fucking bullshit flair in the UI.
It depends what you mean by ‘not universally supported’. It will cut into the games you play– this is a good and bad thing, but you also have your older machine as well.
It’s pretty fucking clear that there isn’t the same selection or variety of software for the Mac as there is for Windows.
And for the record, I was thinking portable.
Quartz Extreme only turns on if your accelerator is supported. Otherwise Quartz compositing is handled by the processor. I don’t see what the big deal is with having your GPU take care of your on screen display. It makes alot of sense to me.
Most Xwindows applications will run alongside Aqua in a rootless windowmanager. It depends what kind of software needs you have. I don’t know what kind of software profiling tools are available- but anything I’ve looked for has had binary packages available. I’ll grant there isn’t fifty different variations of hearts, but the selection has been very decent. A lot of hardcore unix users have been playing around with the included development tools and a lot of really neat software has been coming out on versiontracker. I also really appreciate the fact that almost all macintosh software is posted to versiontracker- it makes finding what’s actually out there a lot easier.
Quartz Extreme only turns on if your accelerator is supported. Otherwise Quartz compositing is handled by the processor. I don’t see what the big deal is with having your GPU take care of your on screen display. It makes alot of sense to me.
The problem is that there was a time where the GPU didn’t do 3D at all, yet was just as fast at moving windows around and shit. Then companies like Apple and Microsoft added a bunch of unnecessary flair that made it look fancy but slowed it down like a motherfucker (transparant/lucent windows, wipe effects, etc). So everything got slow, and they now need to rely on the 3D core of the GPU to bring it back up to speed.
Regardless of which processor you are wasting cycles on you are still wasting cycles, and I don’t like that. There is no need for the GUI to take up so much processor bandwidth (again, regardless of which processor)
Most Xwindows applications will run alongside Aqua in a rootless windowmanager. It depends what kind of software needs you have
And most XWindows applications blow. Taking two undersupported platforms (MacOS and X Windows) and tossing them together makes the situation better, but doesn’t solve the problem. There simply isn’t as much variety in vendors and software on the Mac side of things… Now there may be ENOUGH variety, but more is always better, imho.
And most XWindows applications blow.
And so does most of the windows visual basic shareware. What I have seen is that the amount of good OS X freeware and shareware is disproportionally large compared to the amount of good windows freeware/shareware. I won’t argue that there’s more- but a lot of professionals are starting to use the platform, including developers, and if the types of software you need aren’t already here (software profiling apps, etc. etc. ) I think they’re on their way. If there’s anything you’re specifically wondering about, look on versiontracker- basically anything worthwhile to anyone gets posted there.
As for the whole OpenGL bit- 3D games and the GPU market in general is driving up what graphics processor companies are putting out for consumer graphics cards. I don’t think I’ve seen a straight 2D or even primarily 2D card in awhile. I’m not saying they don’t exist- I’m just not aware of them– I had to buy a Radeon 32MB card for my second display because I couldn’t find a 16mb rage pro. Most of the cards coming out are getting more and more ridiculous in terms of the amount of throughput they can do. It makes sense to me to exploit that to handle ANY ui graphics processing and free up the processor to handle more general processing needs- especially when the GPU is so specialized for the purpose. Otherwise it seems wasteful to not exploit it– because then your own processor is doing work that it doesn’t need to be and the GPU isn’t doing much of anything.
because then your own processor is doing work that it doesn’t need to be and the GPU isn’t doing much of anything.
But the only reason the processor is doing work that it doesn’t need to be doing is because the UI is doing work that it doesn’t need to be doing.
Again, I maintain that I would much rather be able to turn off all the stupid fading, wiping, pulsing, and transparancy that just slows me down instead of continually buying faster video cards. Remember, some of us don’t care for the fact our OS is fucking lickable.
MacOS X is pretty rad. I still prefer Windows as my primary desktop operating system (because I’m so damn used to using it by now), and my headless machines will likely continue running FreeBSD or Linux, but MacOS X makes a really cool geek platform. If you already have your basic computing needs met, think about getting an iBook or a Titanium.
I don’t think you’d be disappointed, but I can see you not getting total use out of it in the long term and being annoyed at shelling out the cash.
But I think you should go for it.
i am not nearly as smarty-smart as everyone else who offered suggestions, but seriously, go mac if you’re thinking about it. i’m trying to figure out how to modify most of the UI (which isn’t that hard but i’ve never used a unix platform before). look at versiontracker.com daily to see what sort of apps are released. modifications are released daily. LaunchBar is the best thing ever.
and my machine–it just seems so stable. rarely ever crashes, and if it does, i never have to reboot. 10.2 is fast. i’ll admit that i haven’t done anything to really test the limits of my processor in a long time, but i’m quite happy with the stability of os x.
i like windows for various reasons, but obviously, being an art major, mac is much more appealing. i don’t really know what sort of stuff you’ll be doing with a mac, but there is a very decent chance you’ll have the software you need and you’ll be pleased with the stability.
i doubt my comment has helped you in either direction, but i felt like posting anyway.
-lindsey (yeah, i read steve’s friends’ page almost daily .. for kicks)
i am not nearly as smarty-smart as everyone else who offered suggestions, but seriously, go mac if you’re thinking about it.
Don’t discount yourself… While I do geek out pretty hardcore, when I get home I use my computer like most other people… Browsing the web, checking my email, playing games, nothing too special…
One of the reason I am considering OSX is because I am a UNIX geek trapped in Windows, and I think that I might enjoy an environment where I exploit my UNIX knowledge on a regular basis…
and my machine–it just seems so stable. rarely ever crashes, and if it does, i never have to reboot. 10.2 is fast. i’ll admit that i haven’t done anything to really test the limits of my processor in a long time, but i’m quite happy with the stability of os x.
I am very glad to hear that…. I have gotten very used to the stability of WinXP (which I installed 9 months ago and only crashed a few times over the course of a few days…. I installed a bad driver), so I have grown to dislike crashes pretty seriously…
i doubt my comment has helped you in either direction, but i felt like posting anyway.
It’s always good to hear a testimonal from someone who isn’t a complete computer dweeb like me and most of my friends.. :)
I have an iBook for some time now. Don’t do that. I love the iBook, but now I want a PowerMac too and that starts to get really expensive ;)
Only move Mac if you are sure you could replace all your main machines. ;)