'Perfect Storm' of Mac Sales on the Horizon? 669
fkx writes to mention an eWeek article suggesting that, finally, the PC-using public is going to 'get' the Mac. According to the article, the new advertising, increased functionality of OSX, and Intel-based machines are all raising the profile of Apple's machines to new heights. From the article: "However, this cycle isn't your usual processor upgrade cycle that comes every time Intel or Advanced Micro Devices tweaks a process. This is a major shift that affects all parts of the Mac customer-developer-vendor ecology. Longtime Apple watchers can count two earlier events of similar magnitude. The first such transition occurred in March 1994 with the arrival of the PowerPC architecture. The Motorola 680x0 architecture that had served the Mac platform for a decade was quickly supplanted by a set of new, more powerful machines. "
The commertials are funny, though disingenuous (Score:1, Informative)
I'll give them the virus commercial (though linux would also solve that problem) and I guess the one where the mac is easier to set up, but the others really bend the truth. Surly they are going to turn off some people who use windows and see that some of what they are saying just isn't true.
Re:Again, the public.... (Score:3, Informative)
Most folks want a nice computer that lets them word process, surf the web and/or look at digital pictures. You may be a geek. Many folks here may be geeks. But most people don't care about the computer itself, only a few applications.
Re:Competition (Score:5, Informative)
An interesting question!
I don't exactly qualify as 'general public' having been using Linux exclusively for the past few years, but I have finally decided to check out what all this talk about OS X is. And I grew up on PCs - I remember when I was like four years old and fucking around at the DOS prompt (like I knew what was going on =P).
A few of my friends have Apple hardware, and they really like how 'OS X just works'. So after months of seeing my boss' Macbook Pro, I've decided to get one myself (after the conference, of course).
And I realize I'm paying a *lot* for a Macbook Pro. I could get something almost as nice for 30% cheaper, as you pointed out. But I am willing to pay the premium for OS X, after not spending *any* money on Free software for the past few years.
Re:Competition (Score:5, Informative)
And I'd be willing to bet that Compaq is at least 30% bigger than the Macbook. Find one with similar specs and dimensions and you'll find the price will go up. You pay for miniturization.
Odd you picked Compaq. Ususally people find some Dell to compare it to and neglect to point out that the Dell is 70% greater volume.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Its probabbly true. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:They're Right (Score:5, Informative)
You'll love it, especially if you love the command line environment of Linux. Being able to have both the great GUI and name applications (like Photoshop) as well as a true Unix subsystem and command line you can use were a big factor in switching to the Mac for me.
You mention defrag, and that is one thing I've never understood. In the time I've been using Windows, it has never run well without 3rd party software. In the 95/98/ME days defrag was probably important, but I found that a little program called MemTurbo make the system feel like it just booted all the time. It would somehow clean up leaked memory, or force specific things to be paged, as well as defragment the memory allocations.
Then Windows 2000 came along and it no longer needed that program (hooray!). But NTFS just gets SO fragmented SO fast. Without a 3rd party program (Disk Keeper, set to defrag during screen saver) then any system that gets quite a bit of use will slow to a crawl pretty fast in my experience.
Vista is supposed to have that built in, so I wonder what users will need next to keep the OS running smoothly.
Re:Again, the public.... (Score:5, Informative)
When it comes to laptops, though, there are different factors. Suddenly size, weight, battery life, and even appearance (well, for the fashionistas among us) come into consideration. And do I need to point out that a 17" widescreen notebook from Apple weighs about a pound less than one from anyone else?
This January, Apple's share of the US laptop market stood at 6% - about double its share of the desktop market.
This July, Apple's share of the US laptop market stood at 12% - double where it was in January.
Apple has projected that as universal binaries of more applications for "creative pros" become available, that share could go higher.
Maybe they'll continue to do better in notebooks than desktops.
Doesn't Anyone Know What Proprietary Means? (Score:5, Informative)
NuBus is hardly proprietary. It is the IEEE 1196 standard originally developed at MIT. [wikipedia.org]
Re:It's too late for the public... (Score:5, Informative)
Someone did the math awhile ago, I can't find the link, but you're just plain wrong. The Mac is maybe $50 or $100 more than a comparable PC. And you'll be repurchasing software with Vista anyhow -- or living through the hell of the security dialogs.
That's assuming you actually have lots of software which can't simply transfer a license to the Mac.
And for twenty years, they've been changing things. You're going to have to retrain about as much to learn to use Vista as you will to use a Mac.
I admit there are problems, but would you like to tell me which one you think makes a Mac worse than a PC?
Sorry? It's not as open as I'd like, but as far as I know, you don't get ANY source code with Windows.
Target, yes. But it really is more secure. Prove me wrong, though, if you dare. I'll put my Mac on any network you like and let you hit it with anything you want.
Vista is just now starting to do some of the things that OS X has had for years, in terms of security.
The vast majority of computer users own less than $100 worth of software, and the price difference is also less than $100. Geek Squad charges $129-229 every time you screw up your PC. After just a couple of those, it's already cheaper to make the switch.
Personally, I don't think it's as useful as, say, a mass exodus to Ubuntu would be. But at least I can easily set up SSH, use Perl, and all that good stuff without hours of hassle, so I'd be happy with people using a Mac.
Anyway, get back to Digg. Your 12-year-old MS apologist friends miss you.
Re:evidence? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Its probabbly true. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Its probabbly true. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Family (Score:4, Informative)
Take it from someone who learned Mac administration by myself first, and only started for Windows in 2000. By all rights it should be much harder for a Mac guy to pick up Windows admin skills, but I did, and without any MSCE certification courses either. I picked up most of these skills with no Windows PC of my own, so my situation is like yours, in reverse.
Your concerns about not being able to walk your grandmother through stuff is valid, but possibly misplaced given your examples. If you're physically at your grandmother's, as I said you'll figure them out fairly fast.
If you mean *talking* her through stuff over the phone that's different, so here's my suggestion (applies for Mac or Windows); I've set up and used the free (as in beer) and very user-friendly Bosco's Screen Share (http://www.componentx.com/ScreenShare/ [componentx.com]) with my friend's mom the couple of times she's needed help. It allows me to see or even control her screen (I set it up so she must click OK these requests; I can't just login any time I want). Much more efficient than describing a problem by words alone.
Re:Parent flamebait but I'll bite. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Its probabbly true. (Score:4, Informative)
2. They will fix them for you. If you have a problem, call them. They aren't very public about it, but what good would that do anyone, since they fix them?
3. I have a MacBook Pro, rather than a MacBook, but it doesn't seem to run very hot to me. I'd think the MBP would running warmer.
I had one of the first MacBook Pros, and the only issue I had was my battery went bad. They sent me a new one without a problem.
Re:Here's some evidence (Score:4, Informative)
1) "Fitts' law is a model of human movement, predicting the time required to rapidly move from a starting position to a final target area". Unless you never select anything from the menu, it applies. For every GUI-user you show me who has never selected a menu-item, I'd be able to find hundreds who had.
2) Did you get the bit about "infinite depth" ? That the edges of the screen make it easier to locate the mouse because of no possibility of overshoot ? Seems completely obvious to me, but hey! Actually it seems bloody obvious to others, too [asktog.com]
3) If it's easier to do something, that's a better usability. End of.
Game, set, and match.
Re:Its probabbly true. (Score:4, Informative)
If you can't close a disk image it's because of some file on the image that is in-use. You either opened a file on the disk or ran an application from the disk. Try closing open applications that may be the culprit. If that doesn't work then restart the machine.
Not allowing you to eject a disk that is in-use is safer than allowing you to eject a disk with an open file. This helps to avoid file and disk corruption.
Select the file, hit the return key, type in the new name. It's pretty simple and quick to do. The problem is under Windows hitting the return key OPENS the file so you probably never thought of trying this.
I'm unable to duplicate your problem. I shift-selected a ton of files and then went back and command-clicked on the ones I didn't want selected (I'm using the standard key settings for a Mac here). At no point did my selection changes open any files no matter where I clicked. You say you re-mapped your keyboard, maybe whatever you used to do that messed around with something. The control key on a Mac usually simulates a right-click when used in combination with a left-click, perhaps in remapping things you managed to provoke some sort of odd behavior.
As both a Mac and a PC user I find the Mac interface to overall be more intuitive to use. However, this can be completely different if you are ingrained in your old PC habits and ideas. Old PC habits are hard to change and that can turn the Mac experience into something you are fighting against daily.
Re:Mac is the best platform... (Score:2, Informative)
Except for a small point: Java Mustang Betas were available on Windows/Linux for more than one year. What about the OSX version ? Correct me if I'm wrong, but they had to wait until the B77 version in May to get it. Oh, and how long was it to get a working Java 5 on OSX ?
Sure, the coding tools are nice - but there's more to take into consideration.
And the difference between Linux and Mac is performance. *Usually*, a Java application runs faster on Mac than on Linux, because the Java VM in Mac is done by Apple, meaning that its built by the ones who knows the OS.
Wrong; benchmarks never displayed such a performance edge of Java/OSX over the Linux version.
In Linux, as you certainly know, is a certain pain to install Java (you need to follow one or another howto to get things working),
Ah, well, it was indeed a pain to be able to unpack an auto-extract archive and link the java executables in your
Moreover, don't forget that it was for the Java SDK. The JRE, the only one that interests the non-coder user, was packaged by lots of distributions for some time already.
I'd also point out that with the recent changes of the JDK licence, it is now easier for distributions to package the Java SDK directly - that's what Debian did, for example; so there is no "manual" handling of the install required.
If you had to follow an howto to install the Java SDK on a Linux box during the last three years, well, your knowledge of Linux and computers is probably so thin that it is understandable that you prefer the Mac. But you definitely don't examplify the "geeks" out there.
and the performance is *usually* worse than in a Mac, because the VM is done by Sun, which is concerned mainly in getting things working. Yes, they care about performance, but not that much
The performance point is grossly wrong. Grab a Mustang JDK and benchmark them both on OSX and Linux on a MacBook, and come back when you got numbers. You may also want to get a couple informations about the relative performance of Java on OSX - for example http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.
I'll not comment on the Ruby part of your experience, because I don't have enough knowledge of that language - but given the amount of rather biaised information you presented here, I think people interested in Ruby should take your opinion with caution.
Re:They're Right (Score:4, Informative)
The thing is, he WAS talking about things that are specific to the Mac, it's just that what you're seeing as two functionally separate things are, on a Mac, a single integrated feature. Yes, under a good Linux you can jury-rig a major app to run under Wine, and you can run unix command line tools.
But on the Mac, you can run that major application, and a command-line tool, and they interact with each other in a completely supported manned. You could script Photoshop using normal Bash commands (via OSAScript) under OSX, and you could write an Applescript to export information from Photoshop directly into four different ImageMagick processes running in separate terminal windows. Of course there's much more mundane stuff, like dragging and dropping between applications and command lines.
That's the sort of thing Mac users mean when they say how great it is to have a real Unix with great commercial software together on the same box. It isn't just about the convenience of not having to SSH or KVM to another system to run the full variety of apps you may need during a day's work, they become an actual SYSTEM working together in a unified way that no other OS I know of can match with any amount of hacking.
Re:Its probabbly true. (Score:3, Informative)
I mean really, is mounting a dmg file (which shows up as a drive on your Mac), then opening your application folder and dragging an icon into it really simpler than just double-clicking an executable to install it?
I think you meant "double-clicking an executable and then clicking through three to twelve installation screens". So yes, in my experience "installing" an application on Mac OS X is much simpler than a typical application installation procedure on Windows. It's also much less likely that you'll have to reinstall any particular Mac application because they don't have the insanity of the Windows Registry.
What are you supposed to do after you're done with the dmg? I've still got three dmg's mounted on my machine that complain whenever I try to unmount them. This is a serious question - I don't know how to get rid of these things. And I'm an experienced computer user - I've got four home-built PC's and my first computer was an Apple II. But I can't figure out how to close out these installers on my Mac at work. I eject them. I drag them to the trash. They complain every time about stuff not working if I go through with either action.
Normally you just eject the DMG after you drag the application icon into your Applications folder. If you have a DMG refusing to eject it means there is some application still accessing or otherwise holding onto a file located on that DMG image. Sometimes it's the Finder. Have you tried relaunching the Finder? Did you run any installer application from the DMG? If you did, the application you ran from the DMG would have to be closed before attempting to eject the disk image, the same as any real disk, otherwise it will refuse to eject. You do know that you aren't supposed to just run the application directly from the disk image, right? It is perfectly safe to do so and you can even run applications from removeable media like USB flash drives, but that will definitely cause you to be unable to eject the volume (drive) or disk image. Try to quit all the open applications and then see if you can eject the disk images. If you see a black triangle under the application's Dock icon that means it is still running.
No matter what the cause, logging out or rebooting the machine will definitely get rid of the mounted disk images. Since it would appear that you've tried none of the available solutions so far, at this point I would have to respectfully submit that you aren't quite the experienced computer user you think you are. Also I'd have to say there is probably something not quite right with your installation of Mac OS X and you should run some maintenance procedures on your machine (like repairing permissions with Disk Utility) and re-run the latest combined update for your version of OS X. That should help stabilize things. If you're running anything earlier than Panther you should definitely upgrade. I used two versions of OS X prior to Panther and as far as I'm concerned they were still basically public betas until Panther came along.
And to uninstall a program, while it might seem like a no-brainer to drag an application to the trash to uninstall it, that does not get rid of it if you've added it to the dock. For more advanced users that's not a big deal, but it's certainly not more "intuitive" than using an uninstall applet that gets rid of everything - start menu shortcuts and all - in one swat.
Windows uninstallers also won't remove any shortcuts they didn't create, like shortcuts you manually place in the Quick Launch toolbar or on the desktop. Accessing applications and the whole Dock idea is a bit of a weak point with OS X, but it's easy to get used to, and the problem you refer to is no different from what happens in Windows.
How about this one: let's try renaming a file under OSX. How do you do it? Click the file name, then click it *again* (but not too fast, mind you, or you'l
Re:OSX is missing good remote access, though (Score:3, Informative)
OS X isn't for hardcore F/OSS people. I run some F/OSS, but mostly commercial software or freeware. That said, I'll try to answer you as best I can.
No X11 like forwarding. Apple does have some sort of remote desktop, but I'm not sure how it works, and I think you have to pay for the client. That said, I just use VNC to access my Mac. I do it almost daily. I found a free VNC server (OSXVNC, I think) and it works great. It's not quite as clean as true X forwarding, but it works great. It's a fair complaint, but then OS X is designed as a desktop OS so that's not a feature many people care about. Now if you want to be the client that all the X11 windows come to (while running on other boxes), OS X has an X server (like many things, it's included with the free development tools). I realize that VNC is not the same as true X11 forwarding, but that's the best I can offer in that department.
Good F/OSS that is prebuilt or ready to build can be tough. There is something odd about the way that OS X handles libraries (or something) that has caused me problems in the past. You best bet there is either Fink or DarwinPorts. It's not always up to the latest version though, that's true. Most OSS software doesn't care about OS X and it only works thanks to the Unix subsystem, so the users often have to do the porting. Still, with something like Fink it's as good as "apt-get install x" if it's there (although the command is different, IIRC).
OS X has a Samba server built in. Samba is the sharing mechanism that Macs seem to use to talk to one another. Just turn sharing on and share the folder (or let it share you home folder by default or whatever) and you can access it from any Windows computer. It actually is Samba running, IIRC. They just hide it from you.
Cocoa is based on NextStep, and NextStep is emulated by OpenStep. If you program to OpenStep then your programs will run nativly on both OS X and Linux. You don't get some of the widgets and such (since Apple has obviously enhanced things) or the Apple add ons that make programming so much easier (like CoreData) but if you can do without those (which would be normal in a cross-platform app anyway) then you are set. Go check it out.
Upgradability is a fair complaint. There are 3rd party sites that keep track of that kind of thing so you know that when you buy a drive it will work. There are also sets of drivers you can install that will allow Finder to let you use the drive (without having to use Toast). Apple is a little stingy here, I'll agree. As for the hardware, they had to change any firmware on PCI cards (because of PPC) and such and that's expensive. Now with the Intel transition that shouldn't matter. Add to that most things can be FireWire or USB now and it's not that much of a problem. As for debugging network problems, I really haven't had any so I don't know how bad that would be (although I know it's not as easy as Linux). That said, if you want to, the documentation is up on Apple site and you could write your own driver (or port someone else's, like one of the BSDs).
Not everyone is set for a Mac. Sound like you may not be. But you can use the command line and those apps all day while having other great stuff like Safari and iTunes and such at the same time. And if you decide to get some commercial piece of software, it's there and it works (no fiddling with Wine). When I was doing development for my Senior Project my Mac was great because I could do all my development and testing on one box thanks to PHP/Apache/MySQL/Java. Compare that to my partners wh
Re:Its probabbly true. (Score:2, Informative)
Regarding the upgraded machine, I had extra RAM in mine, which wasn't a problem. They just popped it out of the old machine, and put it into the new machine. Did it right in the store. An upgraded hard drive, would have been more of an issue though, as they don't replace (or upgrade) those in the store so far as I know.
Re:Its probabbly true. (Score:4, Informative)
> including in the Cache folder and Preferences folder in most cases.
Yeah but they are text files with stored preference settings. Leaving them there is much less harmful than accidentally deleting something you need later. If you want to get rid of them, though, it is easy to identify them either manually or with Spotlight (by searching for the trashed app's name or developer).
Also when you run an uninstaller in MS Windows it still leaves cruft in the Registry which is more potentially damaging to the system than the left-behind preference files on the Mac. And just the fact that you're not dealing with an installer on the Mac means one less app that can mess with your system.