Are Mac's any good?
 

I'm a former Mac Addict (and the black sheep in a family of true believers - each my parents and my two siblings have macs) who even attended MacExpo '96. I got sick of my perfoma crashing ALL the time (in its defense it was a "road apple" 5215CD, and it was running 7.5.3) and not having much software to run, I was just wondering what the general state of Apple today is

Is os X stable?
Is it so miuch slicker and easier to use than Windows, like it was 6-7 years ago?
Is the anti-M$ crowd from years ago now all running linux?
Anyone here run Yellow Dog?

It just seems to me that Apple has gone "Hollywood" and that its so stylish and expensive. (see the movie "legally blond") But is it good for anything beside accessorizing?

I hate Macs not because of the machine, but more because of the people who use it... Mac users have got to be the most fanatical bunch of anti-anything-that-we-are-not-using community in the world. I'm not going to disclaim this with "not all but some" statement because every single Mac user that I have met are irritating idiots that refuse to acknowledge there there is a whole industry of computing outside of their Mac shell.

Until I do... I still say that Mac users will say anything Steve Jobs want them to say... sheeps.

Re: Are Mac's any good?
 

Yes. Yes. Yes. Not at the moment, because I don't have enough disk space.

Seriously, though, OS X is quite nice. (Of course, I was a NeXT addict back in the day!) Even Cocoa can be fun to program (and you can make a GNUstep version effortlessly).

Steve

The place where I work/slave uses a bunch of different platforms, from windows, to linux, MacOS9, OSX. I think the switch to the Darwin kernel was one of the smartest things Apple has done. MacOS9 is a really flaky operating system and we had to rebuild those damn things all the time due to self-implosions. It took a little while to get used to OSX, but it really is a great mix of a beautiful desktop along with stability and accessibilty to the underlying OS that a BSD offers. It still has a bit of that 'Fisher-Price' feel to it (if you know what I mean) so I wouldn't prefer it to Linux, but I think they did a pretty damn good job. My $.02 anyway.

I am gonna get a mac laptop soon. Although I hate Apple for not porting quicktime to linux, their laptops are what I want : an appliance more than a PC, ie little tweaking and some software available off the shelf. I've carefully compared prices and at equivalent features, they are now close to x86 configs price. Just waiting that they ship with the latest OS update.

I prefer Macs over Windows, simply because the operating system is far more intuitive and seems to stay out of your way. True, it's more expensive, but I don't mind paying a little more for quality. As far as Azmeen's statement earlier, I basically am a Mac addict, but also run a Linux box; I can see the merits of both (hey, as long as it isn't a microshaft product, it's good). I believe that the Macintosh has gotten a bad rap from pc users because of a lot of misinformation. I have heard such things as, "Macs are slow," and "Macs aren't upgradeable," and neither of which couldn't be farther from the truth. The processors in the PowerMac series use a different processing technology: RISC; they don't need to run at as fast of a clock speed to get stuff done. Pentium-class processors (and that includes compatibles too) require as much as 20-stage clock cycles to process the same amount of data that PowerPC chips (those found in PowerMacs) do in 7 stages. Therefore, the difference in clock speeds in the processors of both architectures. As far as expandability, your average PowerMac can accept PCI and AGP cards, just like any pc can. In fact, I've got a PowerMac 7300 dating from 1997 that has a 200 MHz PowerPC 604e processor on a daughtercard that can be upgraded all the way to 800 MHz G4 with a simple daughtercard swap--takes 5 minutes, if that. Am I saying Macs are superior? No, I just prefer them to pc's, but that's my preference. :)

mac machines using unix core :D thats why my next machine is going to be one of them, u can switch the gui to xfree86 and use windowmaker or kde or gnome, if u want good commercial products and want to be able to use all the opensource products, then mac is the best choice for anyone.
although the version of unix they based it off is free, u are not paying for that, u are paying for the aqua interface which they wrote and keep closed source

p.s. never owned a mac be4 and thought they were a heap of rubish before OS X

Note that I didn't bash Macs, just Mac users that I have met. I agree that Macs feel much faster than an x86 of similar processor speed (I do have a lone iMac that I have to maintain at work)... BUT if you had to pay for an OS that can run on only one particular hardware type, it sure as hell be fully optimized to run on that bloody architecture... I'd expect no less from Macs in general.

If I can get my hands on a dual-G5, I'd be a VERY happy man... I won't run MacOS on it though... Maybe Yellow Dog Linux and probably try to get an LFS system running after that and use it 100%.

as long as u are aware that most linux users are to a large degree "non techies" that simply repeat to windows users what they hear about linux, eg. linux hs this, has that, never crashes. When someone challenges them, the excuses they give are total FUD. i have seen this loads of times, most computer users think linux is for geeks.
well i put the :cool: into linux user

At least with FUD, you'll know FUD when you hear it... but blatant OS-fanaticism is the worse kind of one-sided discussion you can ever get entangled into. The worse offender of this kind of incidents are Mac fans that I have met... They defend the Mac like it's their homeland or something!

Most Windows users will almost always complain about their OS... and yet keep using them like the sheep that they are.
Most Linux users will preach about open source and yet will never have modified a single line of code in apps that they're using prior to compilation. diff patches doesn't count :p

And I don't even want to get started with Mac users, however, I must say the Mac users on LQ are very civilized, I have yet to be flamed regarding my posts in this thread by the amazing Mac-fanatics that seem to be everywhere.

The G5 is a joke:

http://www.overclockers.com/tips00408 /
http://www.amdzone.com/articleview.c...id=1296&page=2
http://www.overclockers.com/tips00409 /

I have no doubts Macs are faster machines. You can say all you like about clock cycles and all that jazz, but statistics are like ladies of the night, throw money at them and they'll do anything you want. Where the rubber hits the road, desktop publishing and video editing Macs are dominant because they are simply faster. I just get irritated by the attitude of a few of my classmates toward their iBooks, when all they're used for is browsing and word processing.

I am far from a techie, but even I can tell windows is trash. When my laptop XP partition hangs and keeps hanging, I boot the RH one just to make sure I didnt smash up any hardware inside the laptop, and everytime it works flawlessly.

Now if Intel would write proset 2100 wireless drivers i'd be all set

every seems to have forgotten that amds 64 chip need to be restarted before switching between 32 and 64 modes. the g5 does not

I hate HATE OS 9 I had to do some compatibility thing for a project, it involved changing names (stupid truncating)
I like it for the video editing. (Final Cut Pro... mmm)

OSX looks cool. The funny thing is that of the three mackys that I know, two have asked me about the unix stuff. These guys are the ones that act all superior when it was OS 9. hahah.

I want one of those old ibooks, with the colours.
(I get ribbed at having mac-user tendencies.)

Yes: I would say macs have improved.
Yes: try yellowdog, though it looks a bit complicated.

titanium_geek

(all right, all right, End Rant)

os 9 sucked the more than windows me thinks.