Joined the dark side.... Just picked up a MacBook

[BeanoNYC]

What, exactly, is wrong with Windows? It's stable, easy to use, and far better supported than Macs. I love how Apple doubled their market share with the introduction with Windows hardware compatibility.

Or, as I bring up later, install Linux. Still the same price.

The guy starts a thread because he's excited about his new mac and you go and piss in his cheerios....come on, don't be a Debbie Downer. What anti-virus program do you run on your pc?

 

[dmc]

What, exactly, is wrong with Windows? It's stable, easy to use, and far better supported than Macs. I love how Apple doubled their market share with the introduction with Windows hardware compatibility.

Or, as I bring up later, install Linux. Still the same price.

My MAC is way more stable then my windows builds.. In fact it's more stable then my Redhat build..
MAC may have less software available... But what it has is great and fits perfect..
MAC also has a UNIX OS so I can use my scripting talents... Already have written some shells to maintain ITunes stuff..

I haven't fired up the windows side of my MAC - so far I don't need it... And don't intend to..
I have Office and XWindows server so i can do anything on it for work..

I like it..

 

[ckofer]

Can't we just turn this into a ski gear battle?

Skis can be the pc's
Snowboards can be the mac's
Tele gear will be the Linux (the free aspect will be realized when set up well for backcountry)

Now all the skiers can tell the others they're not really enjoying their sports.

I've been using Macintosh since 1988 (really) just because it works well for me. The stability of OS X has been great and I just smile when some creepy little program tries to drop an .exe file on it. What has become nice for everybody is that $1500 will get you a very productive computer-regardless of the platform. The price difference between the Mac world and the PC world used to be much larger. I suppose that it depends what you use the computer for. If I was gamer then I would see it differently.

 

[knuckledragger]

I was just looking at laptops Saturday. It seems to me that I can get just as good of a computer (after I get the XP downgrade) for about $900 less. Apples are too expensive for what you get!

 

[wa-loaf]

I was just looking at laptops Saturday. It seems to me that I can get just as good of a computer (after I get the XP downgrade) for about $900 less. Apples are too expensive for what you get!

Don't know where you are looking, but prices aren't that out of wack. Laptop prices are pretty close to their PC counterparts in price. iMacs are all-in-ones and carry a slight premium over a similarly specd desktop. Mac Pros are exactly that, you shouldn't be buying them as an email web surfing machine.

 

[mondeo]

The guy starts a thread because he's excited about his new mac and you go and piss in his cheerios....come on, don't be a Debbie Downer. What anti-virus program do you run on your pc?

Don't mean to degrade the original statement, I just get frustrated with anti-Windows Apple fanboys that treat Mac ads as gospel. If you like Mac better than Windows, fine. I'm happy it works for you. But that doesn't mean it's the superior system.

BitDefender, by the way. As a backup for my built-in Common Sense software.

What has become nice for everybody is that $1500 will get you a very productive computer-regardless of the platform.

Agreed. All systems have their strong points.

Don't know where you are looking, but prices aren't that out of wack. Laptop prices are pretty close to their PC counterparts in price. iMacs are all-in-ones and carry a slight premium over a similarly specd desktop. Mac Pros are exactly that, you shouldn't be buying them as an email web surfing machine.

Depends on what your criteria are for a laptop. $300 was the differential for as close as I could match Dell to Apple for the low-end Mac, not sure what it goes to at the higher end. The Air is a niche market that doesn't have a Windows counterpart. My sticking point is dedicated graphics, though; I don't particularly care what the processor speed is in a laptop. You can get dedicated graphics in a Windows laptop for less than $900, on a Mac you need to get to the MacBook Pro, at $2K for dedicated graphics. Maybe it isn't as important on a Mac, or maybe integrated graphics have become a lot better in the last couple years, but it's my criteria for the floor of what I'm willing to get. Again, that's just me. Incidentally, I was reading something earlier today about how Mac has an operating margin of around 19%, Dell is at 6%. Not sure on the exact number, but the magnitude of the difference should be about right.

As you may have been able to figure out, I'm not quite the target audience for either Apple or Microsoft. From here on out I build my own desktops, configured toward the high end (8GB of RAM and dual video cards, but still under $1K for my new PC.) I'm a gamer (beyond solitaire, at least) and engineer, so the solution is obvious: dual boot Windows and Linux. I tried just going Linux, but it was just too much work to get everything working just right that was meant for Windows. At the same time, there is software that I'm intending on using that is only available for Linux, namely OpenFOAM. I'll be getting a new laptop sometime this summer, probably, for use on ski weekends next year. Waiting for the AMD Turion Ultra system to come out, which promises some pretty nifty power saving features.

Honestly, I don't mean to threadjack, and to each his own. But that means allowing me to be happy with Windows, too.

 

[dmc]

Go to an Apple store...
Check one out... See if you like it.. If you do - buy it...

 

[kcyanks1]

Which brings me to my final statement about Apple: if not for the common misperception of Linux as a non-user friendly, text driven operating system, I don't think Apple would sell any computers, whatsoever. Linux is now at the point where a basic user (web browsing, email, general productivity, multimedia,) would probably be more than happy with a Linux system. Any further beyond that, and it begins to be a pain, but that's the point where you start getting compatibility issues in Mac, too. Games, things like TV tuner cards, and other non-standard but still fairly common applications, etc. So in the end, I don't see the benefit of Apple over a Linux system other than a few Apple-developed programs, and Linux is free.

FWIW, I built my new computer last December, and ran until mid-March with Linux only. It does work, even with printer and file sharing with Windows computers on the same network; never tried linking it with my XBox (as a media server,) but from what I know, it does work.

I use Linux exclusively at home. Both Windows and Mac are the dark side. Mac OS might be less buggy, but Mac might be even more into DRM and vendor lock-in than Microsoft. Linux works and is free, both in terms of freedom and cost. I have no interest in someone else controlling my computer.

 

[knuckledragger]

I agree with kcyanks1, I have really been thinking about a Linux machine. I need to try open office before I make the big switch.

 

[kcyanks1]

I agree with kcyanks1, I have really been thinking about a Linux machine. I need to try open office before I make the big switch.

Try the newly released Ubuntu 8.04. There is a LiveCD that you can boot to. You can mess around without installing. You can't save anything and things will run slower---you are running a full OS and applications off a CD---but it can give you a taste. 8.04 also has something called "Wubi" that allows you to install it within Windows like any other program. I've never personally tried it and don't know too much about it, but it might be a good way for a Windows user to give Linux a chance. When you are ready for a normal install, Ubuntu does a good job at recognizing a Windows installation and giving you the option to dual boot. It will install the Grub bootloader which will allow you to choose between Linux and Ubuntu when booting up. Once you get a hang of it, you can take the plunge and abandon Windows

 

[mondeo]

You can also try open office out on Windows; it's the same as the Linux version.

I personally like OpenSUSE with KDE, but I was messing around with FakeRAID on my computer when I first bought it, and now OpenSUSE doesn't want to install (has difficulties with the shadow of the RAID drives that somehow still exist.) So, I'm running Kubuntu 8.04 on this PC, OpenSUSE 10.3 on the laptop, and Xubuntu 7.10 on the old PC. If you have an old computer that you want to resurrect, I'd suggest using XFCE as the desktop environment, no matter the distribution. The base system uses 70MB of RAM with Xubuntu, compared to around 300MB with the GNOME or KDE (going off of memory here.)

Try Linux out, but go in with an open mindset. My first experience with Linux was Fedora Core 3; before that I was fully on the bandwagon that Windows was the worst piece of software ever developed. After installation of FC3, I gained a new appreciation for how truly versatile Windows is, and how impressive it is given the baggage of backwards compatibility, hardware support, etc. it has to deal with.

 

[MichaelJ]

I'm a longtime Linux user. It runs my servers at home, is my desktop at work, and I've been developing for it for close to 8 years now. For email/web/simple home office stuff it's finally reached a level of excellent usability.

But for image editing or video production, I will not give up my Mac. Nothing in the Linux/FOSS world is up to that level of technology. The Gimp comes close, I'll admit, but as a whole it's just not there. Plus, all my external devices "just work" without having to get modules or recompile kernels.

Oh, and as a result of developing for Linux, let me tell you, the kernel and glibc are NOT the pillars of software architecture that you might think, and they have their share of bugs, too.

 

[kcyanks1]

Try Linux out, but go in with an open mindset. My first experience with Linux was Fedora Core 3; before that I was fully on the bandwagon that Windows was the worst piece of software ever developed. After installation of FC3, I gained a new appreciation for how truly versatile Windows is, and how impressive it is given the baggage of backwards compatibility, hardware support, etc. it has to deal with.

As I figure you know, Linux has come a long way as far as hardware support since FC3. My first personal install of Linux was also FC3, I think, perhaps FC4. Windows's driver support is not impressive, though. Windows is on 90% of the computers so the companies make closed, proprietary drivers for Windows. Many of them don't support Linux and irrationally refuse to open up their drivers to allow the open-source community to create drivers for them. (Note that as big a supporter as I am of open-source software, I can see the logic that would lead a software company to keep its code closed. I cannot, however, see why a hardware company would ever want to keep its drivers closed, therefore making it more difficult for users to use its hardware. The drivers are not its product.) The fact that so many open drivers exist for Linux is much more impressive than the fact that Windows has drivers created for it by the companies making the hardware. And in any case, while I haven't touched it myself, I've hard that Vista has plenty of hardware-compatibility problems. There goes a supposed Windows advantage.

Also, so as not to give the impressive that Linux is full of compatibility issues, I have it installed on my Dell Latitude D620 and it works. Wireless works. Volume buttons on the computer work. Graphics card with acceleration works fine with all the eye candy (using the proprietary nvidia driver--nvidia does make drivers for Linux, but doesn't open them). However, probably in large part do to nvidia's failure to open its proprietary drivers, there is often trouble with suspend/hibernate while using the proprietary driver--I haven't tried them since upgrading to 8.04 though.

 

[mondeo]

As I figure you know, Linux has come a long way as far as hardware support since FC3. My first personal install of Linux was also FC3, I think, perhaps FC4. Windows's driver support is not impressive, though. Windows is on 90% of the computers so the companies make closed, proprietary drivers for Windows. Many of them don't support Linux and irrationally refuse to open up their drivers to allow the open-source community to create drivers for them. (Note that as big a supporter as I am of open-source software, I can see the logic that would lead a software company to keep its code closed. I cannot, however, see why a hardware company would ever want to keep its drivers closed, therefore making it more difficult for users to use its hardware. The drivers are not its product.) The fact that so many open drivers exist for Linux is much more impressive than the fact that Windows has drivers created for it by the companies making the hardware. And in any case, while I haven't touched it myself, I've hard that Vista has plenty of hardware-compatibility problems. There goes a supposed Windows advantage.

Also, so as not to give the impressive that Linux is full of compatibility issues, I have it installed on my Dell Latitude D620 and it works. Wireless works. Volume buttons on the computer work. Graphics card with acceleration works fine with all the eye candy (using the proprietary nvidia driver--nvidia does make drivers for Linux, but doesn't open them). However, probably in large part do to nvidia's failure to open its proprietary drivers, there is often trouble with suspend/hibernate while using the proprietary driver--I haven't tried them since upgrading to 8.04 though.

Yes, there have been big advances in driver support for Linux, but there still remain issues. After many, many attempts, I never got the wireless to work in my laptop, no matter 32 bit, 64 bit, Suse, Ubuntu,..., and SLI support in Linux is still sub-par, and from what I hear ATI is even worse, but getting better. I disagree with the drivers not being the product; the hardware isn't the product, the software isn't the product, it's the solution that's the product. I could see where nVidia doesn't want AMD to see how SLI is implemented, and AMD for nVidia to see how Crossfire is implemented. These are software solutions to hardware issues. Believe me, I'd love to have avoided the $110 I spent on my copy of Vista, but for what I want to do, it just isn't there yet. For a lot of people, it is.

From what I know, the driver issues were mainly on launch of Vista. Now that some time has passed, I think everyone's pretty much caught up, and x64 support is even pretty good, despite the fact that there are still very few people using it. I'm personally very happy with Vista; don't try to install it on an old PC, but that's always been true with Windows releases. Still would like multiple desktops and focus under mouse without window auto-raise (at least they have focus under mouse,) but the desktop search, some of the security improvements, DirectX 10, and the tweaks to usability are all nice, and load time is comparable to Linux and XP on my laptop.

But we digress...

I forget what it is that does it, but Macs are built in with a driver advantage, seeing as how the same drivers work on 32 bit Macs as 64 bit Macs. Probably the reason that Mac was the first to go to a 64 bit OS. Go Apple! on that one.

 

[BeanoNYC]

Okey dokey...I went ahead and made a Mac social group on alpinezone to discuss mac issues. Feel free to join mac users.

 

[riverc0il]

I installed linux on my PS3 and am quite impressed. ...Runs great. I'm more partial to my Macs. On both a mac and linux related note, I'm hoping that Netflix quickly comes up with some sort of player for those two platforms.

I am sure the current software available for Linux and Mac could work with Netflix. They are choosing a standard and excluding a large amount of customers by force requiring MSIE6.0+ and WMP 11+. Quite frankly, that sucks and the sooner the world wakes up to just how many people are ditching MS products, the better. In a competitive market place, we can only hope another company comes along and challenges Netflix for online viewing of videos. I would think Apple would be in the best position to do so seeing how well iTunes has done.

(Speaking from the Linux Dark Side perspective, but everyone not running MS are in similar boats. The big difference between Linux and Mac is Linux does not yet "just work" for everyone without some tinkering.)

 

[riverc0il]

I agree with kcyanks1, I have really been thinking about a Linux machine. I need to try open office before I make the big switch.

Open Office 1 was pretty raunchy but the 2.x version really updated the software significantly and I have no issues. Considering the price tag (free versus what, $200-300 depending upon version?), I am surprised it has not gotten broader usage. I am sure it will be a fairly seemless transition but give it a shot. You can still save to DOC and XLS formats IIRC. You can always WINE in MS Office if you have your heart set on that package.

Try the newly released Ubuntu 8.04.

There is also the KDE version, Kubuntu, which I favor. Having tried both Gnome and KDE environments, I found KDE a smoother visual transition from MS Win, but that is just my opinion. Point is, new Linux testers should give both a shot and Ubuntu is a really solid distro for a first taste.

Oops, what a hijack!

 

[kcyanks1]

I disagree with the drivers not being the product; the hardware isn't the product, the software isn't the product, it's the solution that's the product.

I'm somewhat confused here. nVidia (to pick on them) sells graphics cards. People don't buy nVidia products because they have great drivers. Some people who are more extreme than me in their beliefs will *not* buy nVidia products because of their (unopen) drivers. If nVidia were to just open their drivers, Linux drivers would be created for them -- they wouldn't even have to put effort in. That would be a "solution", I think. (Not trying to be a wiseass, I perhaps am just not following what you are saying.)

I forget what it is that does it, but Macs are built in with a driver advantage, seeing as how the same drivers work on 32 bit Macs as 64 bit Macs. Probably the reason that Mac was the first to go to a 64 bit OS. Go Apple! on that one.

Mac controls all of the hardware and software. If one party has full control over the entire system, compatability is much easier.

 

[kcyanks1]

There is also the KDE version, Kubuntu, which I favor. Having tried both Gnome and KDE environments, I found KDE a smoother visual transition from MS Win, but that is just my opinion. Point is, new Linux testers should give both a shot and Ubuntu is a really solid distro for a first taste.

Oops, what a hijack!

Yup .. so should we start a Linux users group to compete with the Mac one? I just ended up with Gnome because I used it first and custimized it before playing around too much with KDE. I have heard KDE is more like Windows, though. I do think that since Ubuntu is primiarily a Gnome-centric distribution, they polished off the Gnome interface a little better. Though I haven't tried KDE since 6.06 (or maybe 6.10). For anyone who might go ahead and try Ubuntu, you don't actually have to get Kubuntu if you want to try KDE as well as Gnome. You can install KDE from Synaptec (the package manager in Gnome) and then choose which desktop manager you want to run when logging in.

 

[kcyanks1]

I am sure the current software available for Linux and Mac could work with Netflix. They are choosing a standard and excluding a large amount of customers by force requiring MSIE6.0+ and WMP 11+. Quite frankly, that sucks and the sooner the world wakes up to just how many people are ditching MS products, the better. In a competitive market place, we can only hope another company comes along and challenges Netflix for online viewing of videos. I would think Apple would be in the best position to do so seeing how well iTunes has done.

I don't use Netflix, so I am not familiar with it specifically, but you can download codecs to use with mplayer/xine/your player of choice with Linux and play Windows media files, including some with at least some sort of digital restriction management.

That said, most content providers just aren't going to support Linux (well, at least with free/open-source software). Years late, recording companies are finally realizing the DRM is bad for consumers and the industry, and they are finally releasing DRM-free music. The MPAA and TV studios haven't grappled with reality yet. Until they do, they can't provide the type of software most Linux users want. Linux users have to do it themselves.