I 'grew up' apple hardware; Apple II's in grade school and when I was in High School, my parents got a Macintosh II (with a color monitor, ooooh). I will admit I do have a nostalgic soft spot for apple machines. I have a beige G3 that I use as a fileserver/surfing machine. It runs debian, os9 and os x (10.2.8) like a champ.

My experience has been that when apple does something well, it is done well. However, when apple makes a 'road apple' (credit lowendmac.com for that one), boy is it a doozy. Think the IDE controller on the 1st revision Blue and White G3, the powermac 5260, etc.

On good hardware, apple works great for linux. I have a Blue and White G3 that I plan to upgrade memory and processor, buy a M-audio pci card, run debian or fedora on it and use it for some light audio work.

What gets me about Apple is their "I want One" approach to marketing: A shiny new iPod, "I want one".... PowerPC out, intel in..."I want one" Assuming that they are selling good harware and software, it's not too bad, however, look out for those road apples...

Yes, you're right. And that's why I think they cannot directly compete with Microsoft or even Linux on the mass market desktop. I don't think their forte is creating low end computers that can compete against extremely configurable and tweakable PCs. By that I mean, PCs have a huge availability of peripherals, spare parts and the people who can service them. Something that I don't see with Apple hardware.

Their strength lies in what you said: the "I want one" approach to marketing. That's what I meant by aspirational value.

a mac shouldnt aim for being a computing box that nessecitates tweakablity and configurability(i mean as a normal things to do) ... thats bad designs(whatever they are call) in the first place ...

if they can match up with the pricing and the availability of "spare parts" against their pc friends but still remains a typical "mac thing" , then it would be a blessing ...

probably we will have "why linux works so much like a mac" by then ...


//its dangerous if we dont even have a mac and try it out ourselves and study it ...

//you can still have and enjoy these sorts of things in life and yet maintaining an uncorruptable mental state which those linux users are generally feel more at home with ...


.

i meant a different kind of elitism. it's the "hey i can afford a mac ! look how shiny it is and inexplicably better than your pc it is!" elitism. i'm not talking about technically knowledgeable people.

For me, the technical merits are irrelevant. I will not touch a Mac for the following reasons:

1. Lock-in. Buy a Mac and you a in a single supplier situation. I remember when I was buying, literally, a dozen scanners. 3 for work and 9 for myself and others. PC scanners were €70. A Mac scanner was €270.

2. Sales tactics. Apple sold very cheaply to schools. When parents then went to buy a computer for little Johnny they wanted one "like he has at school". Price was double that of a PC.

3. Ethics. Apple once announced that they would licence the ROMS so that clones became possible. After some companied invested Apple withdrew this offer and left them high and dry.

4. Flame Wars. I do NOT want to be a part of a "community" that flames anybody who dares criticise their beloved little toy.

5. Freedom. (OK part of lock-in). I want a choice of hardware to upgrade my computers.

I'm with chort and frob23. I got OSX 2 years ago, it beats the hell out of Windows and Linux. In fact, Linux could learn a lot from Apple.

Everything works, it's not more expensive when you take into account the fact that your support needs are less (I support some Windows and Mac users, I never hear from the Mac users because it always works). My mum got one on my say so, as I knew it would be secure and easy to use. I can SSH into it if I ever need to do any support on it...

...Which I haven't (ever) in over a year. I can't say the same of several other people's XP setups. And any Linux setups need days of tweaking before they work properly. Basically, my 60 year old mum is running a FreeBSD derivative and can setup printers and wifi on her own. That just shows the thought and quality of OSX, it betters the aspirations of Open Source. Instead of "computing for everyone", it's "computing for anyone"

There's a lot of people on here - obviously - that just adore Linux. But they're blinkered, and the use of the word "religious" in a previous post was an insightful one.

btw
have you heard of USB?

You could say the same about Linux! What you are seeing from Mac users is an appreciation of a product that works. When Linux users flame it's usually an ego thing, which is why they're committed to something that lacks well-written documentation, thus leaving power in the hands of a few (like doctors or brahmins.)

If you apply the principle that more expensive = better, then Linux is free, and compared to "expensive" OSX, it shows.

Apples are pricey, but in my experience they get the job done where PC's just can't. I'm majoring in Recording at Ball State University and I would never use anything other than a Mac for any kind of recording/sound work. They hardly EVER crash unless you do something extremely stupid, while PCs seem to crash at the drop of a hat, and just make everything a chore (I am so sick of pop up windows I could kill something...). However, I'm a CS minor, and I switched to Linux recently because I felt that Windows was too bloated just for a programming computer (that and the experience of actually tinkering with the computer really drew me to it!) In the end every OS has its pros and cons, just depending on what you want to do...trying to take a "This one is bad, this one is good" stance is a little self-defeting. Even Windows has its silver lining, just depends on who you talk to.

You know what Linux users are like and you said that on a Linux forum?

Fortuanately I'm not going to flame you, just politely explain why you're wrong.

Linux gives the source code for free. This means that every programmer can make massive changes to his own system, and if you have the money you could hire a programmer to do it for you. The price of hireing Linux programmers will probobly fall as the supply increases, or as Linux grows in market share.

Apple dosn't publish code, so the only way to actually customise the OS is to pray Apple dose it of their own accord.


Secodnly Apple works easier but Linux works better when you have the skill to use it, thats why Linux is trashing apple in the supercomputer market.

That's incorrect. Apple contribute to the Darwin system which is open source and free.

Based on what? Apple <edit>OSX</edit> is a partially closed source FreeBSD derivative. Point out a specific difference to back up your claim, that isn't based on the fact that Linux is free. Which is the primary reason it is used, let's face it.

This website will let you view the operating system statistics for the worlds top 500 supercomputers

http://www.top500.org/stats

Linux has 65%, runner up is AIX with 8.5%, OSX has 0.60%, I don't see free BSD on the list at all.

As for a spesfic diffrence, I have no idea what the question is but I'll hazard a guess, you asked for a spesific technical point where Linux > OSX? How about that Linux is a Real Time OS and OSX/FreeBSD arn't
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_operating_system

Finally Darwin: lets take this quote form Wikipedia,

(my bold)

So its not actually OS X and thus irrelivent, and its worse than OS X, so its probobly not to you're advantage to say that Apple lets you chose between quality or flexibility when Linux gives you both, for free.

Firstly, of course it's worse than OSX - it's just one layer of OSX. That doesn't stop it being a valid free open-source BSD derivative and thus negating what you wrote (about Apple not publishing code). Your logic about it not being relevant is therefore invalid.

I'm also not interested in stats of who's using what. We can always pull out the Windows stats if you like and say it's better than Linux at desktop?

I can fully accept, however, that you came up with 1 good reason why a supercomputer admin might pick Linux over OSX. Lucky I'm not running any. Also lucky that supercomputers don't need to connect to wifi

I have to say this has devolved into some of the silliest arguments ever. Even where the arguments border on accuracy... they're just laughable.

I love the one about the Real Time OS... that is such a massive argument for a desktop OS...


Anyway, give it a rest you two. If you like one or don't like the other... who cares? No one is going to force you to use what you don't want.

Well this is pretty cool. Having read the first couple of pages I feel like I need to go use a mac more frequently. Our marketing dept. uses them and has a contractor come in once a month to do whatever they need him to do for the machines. What little I've seen of them they are very nice and to a point not much different to learn than a new distro of linux.

We have one that is a version or two behing the ones in the marketing dept. I'll have to see if I can talk them into letting me have it and get it upgraded...