We had to buy a Mac so my wife could work at home (they are still de rigeur in the graphics arts world) and to be honest I'm seriously impressed by them. Yes, for the hardware you get they are stupidly and brutally expensive, but the graphical interface puts pretty much everything else I've seen to shame. What I like about it is that Apple hasn't followed the "Windows is how a computer is supposed to be" mentality and instead come up with an interface that functions well. Linux developers could learn from that attitude.

Of course what really sold me was that you can pop open a console and tinker under the hood.............

You see, from a marketing perspective, they want to keep Apple Macs as an exclusive product. They certainly do have technically competent programmers, but I'm willing to bet that they keep development quite tightly controlled as opposed to the FOSS community approach of Linux and surely the number of Mac programmers would be far less than the number of programmers who write software on other platforms.

From the replies here, it is also obvious that the "technically discerning" crowd are more price conscious (as many replies show) and are not the likely customers for Apple in any case.

Again, the market segment is different. Windows users are just the average income group of people who probably use a computer without even thinking about it while Mac users are probably affluent and take pride in owning one... the whole segment is different. Because of the "pride of ownership" factor they are extremely loyal to Apple and vocal in supporting Macs, not necessarily because of their technical competency... In other words, Apple Customers become the brand ambassadors of Apple and Apple sees to it that the brand image remains strongly embedded in their customers' pscyhe.

Note that I am using general marketing lingo. Obviously anybody can go out and buy a Mac but I'm just emphasizing on the difference in marketing approach between Microsoft and Apple.

>> "Of course what really sold me was that you can pop open a console and tinker under the hood............."

i did say dont go for macosx , go for a plain(whatever its means to anyone) mac instead ... more fun actually ...

probably if someone ask me why ... i would answer its because after using linux for sometime(even if its an on and off affair) , you quickly found out that your mac doenst work at all(unless you stick to apple-works) ...

but ... if eventually if you managed to get it to work the way you want it to be , i mean just for normal home desktop usages(not a mac with those really over-sized and bulky monitor like what i saw) , its great -- probably better than linux in some way ...

and one more thing ... i like u2 , not the recent u2 , i mean the older u2 up until arund "unforgetable fire" i think ... dont get their recent ones , those are total craps in comparision ...


.

I like OS X very much. My main system is a PowerMac G5. I don't have Linux installed because I do audio work with it, so I need all the hard drive space and system resources to keep everything running. Since Linux and OS X are both UNIX-based systems, there are so much similarities that one could even say OS X is a highly developed distro.

Apple products? Overpriced, overhyped and unethical: They ruin the environment. Since Mac users are usually undersexed the only disease they're gonna catch (and that's guaranteed) is DRM

They give out Xcode which is a free IDE for their systems and is complete enough to create commercial code. It seamlessly integrated with my subversion repository with little to no prompting. Not only is Xcode easy to use, it also creates very good looking code and you can take and sell those compiled programs if you want. They encourage development (even FOSS) and provide all the tools and documentation you could desire. I've yet to see an IDE as functional as Xcode in Linux (and I have tried many). Further, they come with complete man pages so you can develop and make *nix code using their program and it will be portable elsewhere.

Sure, they encourage (mainly through quality of product and ease to get it) programs for the Mac platform. But you could develop it for other systems as well. They make no stipulations about the license you use for your code... you can release it for free to everyone or you can charge exorbitant fees for it. Regardless of what you choose, Apple won't ask for a penny. Even though you used their product to create it.

In my experience, they encourage all possible developers to produce quality code for their systems. They figure, as best I can tell, that if you're developing code for a Mac then the existence of your code could increase the number of people using Macs.

They also contribute back to the BSD projects where they got code from in the first place. But that's not really about non-apple people developing for the apple.

As well they shouldn't. They would be no better than windows if they did such a thing.

I have a Apple G4 Powerbook 12". It wasn't much more expensive than equivalent laptops from other manufacturers. I have also found it to be physically more robust than other laptops. It also runs silent - the fans almost never come on.

I love the interface - it is probably the best that I have come across.

I am currently doing my final year project using Mac OS X, and I can say that Xcode is an excellent IDE. The documentation for all the NS* classes is second to none. Cocoa has a huge selection of classes for you to use with no licence restrictions. The Objective-C language (which most of OS X is written in) is brilliant.

--Ian

frob23, you seem to have missed the gist of my point. I was saying from a marketing perspective and not a technical one that Apple wants to give the impression of being an exclusive product targetted at the upwardly elite folk.

Also I do understand that they would encourage FOSS development, but then again, it won't necessarily be part of their marketing strategy to give that impression to the outside world that their OS is for the common masses... even with the FOSS development for Mac, I don't think it will have the same community flavour as for Linux.

As a mass-market product they will have too much competition to fight in the form of Microsoft's dominance and the growing popularity of other *nix and have a lot to lose in terms of reputation of being a high quality product for the high-end. So I doubt whether they want to expand their market in the lower end. If they do want to do that, they will not release a new computer with the same brand name "Mac" but rather probably a different brand name which dissociates itself from the high-end product.

Hope that explains what I was trying to say.

I bought an ppc mini mac in '05 just to be able to know a bit about Macs. I like to keep up with the different HW/SW.

I think OSX is easier to use than windows and less problems also. Mac's are expensive compared to x86 boxes.

But apple is about as bad as MS when it comes to locking you in!

Just a thought!

I have to be honest, I still don't really understand harishankar. It's possible that the flu I am dealing with is hampering my ability to comprehend. I mean it really depends on what you're into, how they advertise to you. I was made very aware of their tools for software development before I bought it. I also saw the huge listing of FOSS programs and code indexed on their site. Sure, you don't see this brought up in the commercials with the Mac and the PC -- because programming is seen as work and they want the Mac to seem more fun.

Sure, in general they don't walk around talking up their excellent development tools that you get for free. The general user just isn't going to care. So it's part of their marketing strategy if you're interested in that sort of thing. You'll need to seek it out and it won't be brought up in a magazine (unless that magazine is aimed at the right market).

I don't know that the Macbook (or other Mac products) are aimed at the elite market. There are the Pro models which surely are but the other models aren't that bad. I don't know... and I'm too sick to think clearly. But I have seen marketing campaigns aimed at geeks, like me... mostly because that is what I was searching for.

I think what Harshinkar is trying say is that in mass media marketing (that is marketing where you don't search for the product the product searches for you such as magazine ads, TV, and radio) Mac will never advertise themselves in such a way that makes them sound easy to obtain. Unlike Dell, where every commercial they put on lists ridiculously low prices for computers. Mac never talks about prices in their ads and for very good reasons. If they focused on price noone would by one.

There are lots of Mac myths which are quite simply that: Myths.

Myth: Macs are expensive.
Truth: You can get Mac Minis and iMacs with retail prices under $1000, and Macbooks for just a touch more. If you are seriously price-concious, check out their refurbished systems. By the way, Macs are likely to last much longer than entry-level PC-based machines, and they have a much, much higher resale value when you're done with them. The initial investment might be higher, but over a period of time they're actually a better value.

Myth: Mac hardware is too restrictive.*
Truth: Macs are rated as extremely reliable because of their quality hardware and restricted compatability. A lot of the stability problems with PCs are due to cheap hardware and the ease of modification, which leads amateurs to do unwise things to their systems and lower the stability or reliability. By keeping tight control over the hardware platform, Apple keeps the quality high, and thus they're extremely reliable and stable machines. Macs do work with most external peripheals though, so you can easily attach most printers, cameras, etc without any hassle.

Myth: Macs are slower than PCs.**
Truth: This was only briefly true of Mac laptops over the last two years when the G4 chip seriously lagged behind x86 developments and IBM was unable to make the G5 small enough or cool enough for portable systems. In fact, when the G4 chip first came out it was the fastest in the world; so fast that the US government labled it as a dangerous munition and subjected it to export control due to the fear it could be used to break encryption. When the G5 chips first came out they were faster than the contemporary x86 chips, and now that Apple are using Core Duo/Core Duo2 chips in their laptops and portable systems, and Xeons in their workstations & server, Macs are just as fast as PCs.

Myth: OS X is buggy and inflexible.
Truth: Most of the negative reviews on OS X were from very early versions, such as 10.1.x and 10.2.x. Also, most of those reviews were from OS 8/9 users who didn't like this "new-fangled stuff". The truth is that since 10.4 the OS has been leading both Windows and KDE/Gnome for usability and innovative features and is far and away the best desktop environment, but still has all the UNIXy goodness available through the terminal. Installing anything on OS X is so easy you'll wonder why other OSs can't ever get it right, and the applications are extremely intuitive to use. If you ever need to run your favorite command-line programs you can, simply by opening a terminal. You might be surprised to find a lot of the standard UNIX-like commands are available, and what isn't available by default can easily be installed with MacPorts (very similar to FreeBSD's port system). In fact a large amount of the "userland" code in OS X came from FreeBSD and NetBSD. OS X even has it's own Xserver and allows you to run your own windows manager inside it. It comes with most of the common UNIX programming and scripting languages & tools, and a lot of the open-source services, like Apache, OpenLDAP, Samba, etc.

Summary: If you want an OS that "just works", then OS X is for you.

I settled on it a few years ago as my primary desktop platform (e-mail, collaboration, web surfing, etc). It is far and away better than any other OS for all the common, every day things you want to do. I have tried Windows, several popular distributions of Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD and OS X is the only one that did all the stuff I wanted, reliably. For servers I use other OSs, but mostly because I like to build those from salvage/surplus parts and I like using all different hardware architectures to learn.

If you aren't serious about actually using the OS, and your main purpose is to learn about OSs, then obviously OS X isn't the best choice since all the complexity is hidden and very little manual intervention is ever required.

*To continue the argument of Macs being too restrictive, I'd like to point out that there has been a huge trend in corporate solutions recently away from typical software installed on servers, to either "network appliances" or "hosted services". The idea is you still get to configure the software to work how you want, but it removes all the tricky parts of installing and maintaining it. This is intentionally to remove the ability to do things that would affect the stability or reliability of the service being rendered. Most companies prefer to give up a little bit of the fringe customizability in return for rock-solid uptime. I would argue that the same thing applies to end-users as well: removing needless options simplifies things and makes it much more difficult for the user to seriously screw something up, which in turn leads to drastically better reliability.

**My 2.16GHz Core Duo Macbook Pro is actually faster at openssl speed -evp md5 than my dual Opteron 265 rig running SLES 9.

My thoughts exactly.


Myth: Macs being more expensive are naturally worth the extra expense.
Truth: This is based solely on what you intend to use it for. Outside of professional editing, or some apple only software that'll you'll just die without, its still a terrible entry price.
Definately NOT the same bang for buck with a pc. Considering you can actually buy a COMPLETE system, NEW, with a monitor and keyboard and xp even, for $500. And from a bigtime manufacter, thats trying to milk every penny out of you possible. An sharp consumer can build an actual gaming rig.


Myth: Mac hardware is higher quality than pcs.Because its from apple. ooOOo

Truth:Same deal, prettier shell and ofcourse your OS is locked down to a single manufacter of hardware.
pffft. Freeing the Intel processor?
yea .... right.


Myth: Mac lasts longer than PCs
Truth:Been pouring water on your motherboard lately? If not, chances are your PC is still capable of performing the same function it did 5 years ago.

Summary: If you want an OS that "just works", then any modern OS with all the applications you desire will do.




and you say this at a time when its well known that intel > amd.
tsk. tsk.

Who cares if a Mac computer lasts longer? No one wants an old computer. I have an old eMachines from 2001, and it's still cranking just fine. Do I want to use its 766 MHz 128 MB RAM little engine that could? Not very often, even though it flies with IceWM on it.

The hardware may last, but the specs will quickly become outdated. Do you really want to be running a clam shell Mac in 2015? How well do you think OS X Cougar will run on that thing by that time?

Macs are more expensive for most people who try to accomplish simple tasks (not movie editing). If all you want to do is check your email, surf the web, and edit a doc here and there, you're much better off with a $400 desktop or a $600 laptop from Dell (whether you install Linux on it or keep the native Windows) than a $1000 desktop or $1200 laptop from Apple.

Just because you copy and paste Apple marketing into a post doesn't mean you're right.