johnnyshape wrote:

galanter wrote:Finally, the highend Macs, at this point, seem to be cheaper than, for example, similar Dell computers. Apple XServes, especially in media oriented SANs, have been a good buy for quite a while now. Other Apple products have gotten significantly closer in price over the past few years.

...but not cheaper. This stuff has mark-ups of 400%, and you can only get it from one place. You are paying a inflated premium for the platform. Are you actually happy about that? It doesn't annoy you? It does me, when I can do the same job much cheaper.

we did a ROI RFP on XServes/XRaid setups at work for file storage vs. EMC and Dell and Apple did come in cheaper. Apple got the bid. Sorry.

If we are talking "sheep" wouldn't it be more accurate to say Windows users are sheep than Mac users? If you are talking about blindly following some trend or marketing ploy... Windows still gots 95% of the market on them pooter OSes.

Don't get me wrong, I am a Mac fan, but certainly not a zealot. I use a Thinkpad X31 with Windows XP as my main work computer and commute with it, cause EVDO works really well with it, and I like being online on the train to work. Still, I have no love for Windows XP. XP gets to be a slug in molasses, even with regular maintenance and defrags.

Microsoft has done some good things. I think Outlook smokes the shit out of most Mac mail apps (especially EntouRAGE-meh!) as a PIM. Fuck Entourage and Lotus in the eye. Mac Mail.app may be nice and simple so say the Apple lovers. Sure, it's great for your dinky pop and imap mail. However, it sucks like dog farts for any enterprise mail/PIM environment.. spinning beach ball of doom on LDAP lookups, inability to force quit the app when it hangs (requiring a kill command in the terminal). Gah!

However, if thinking Mac OS X.4 is better than Windows XP SP2 makes me a sheep, then BAAAAAAAAA!

johnnyshape wrote:Do you really think that the vast armies of IT managers worldwide are actually deluded fools who gladly swallow Microsoft's expensive bullshit and ignore the pure cheap white light from Apple? Merely to keep their jobs? All of them? Every IT person I have ever met usually really likes Apple systems, but cannot afford to implement them, based on a competing Wintel/Linux model.

I think many IT managers who go through the MCSE/MCSA school of learning do become staunch Windows zealots. I've been through the training myself, and I am a Director of IT at a company with nearly 160 employees. Many IT people, to their credit, don't have the bandwidth to support additional systems other than what they were trained to do. Nor do they necessarily want to. That doesn't make them idiots, just understaffed.

I have 20+ Windows 2003 Servers, an Exchange 2003 environment, and 5 Apple XServes and an XRaid setup at work. I can handle this, but I wouldn't expect every numbnut that gets an MCSE to want to take on the Apple offerings. Sure, the enterprise integration from Apple has gotten 100 times better in the past year or so, but it still is a new thing. Apple has their own tools for managing their systems (WG manager, Server Admin, etc..) This throws some of the MCSE people off big time.

There's also some arguments about cost you are way off on. The Apple XServes shipped with Mac OS X server unlimited client license. Microsoft CALS are not fricking cheap. You have to spend a good chunk of money on licensing CALS to have a useable Win2003 file server with 200 people.

I won't argue with you that PC's are cheaper at the outset (with the exception of the Mac Mini). In my experience, the Macs have lasted longer. We have dual 450 G4 desktops still in use at work. Any equivalent in age PC (a Pentium III 800 MHZ Compaq, for example) has pretty much been decommissioned at this point and melted down for their lead and mercury. Six year old PC's just aren't useable. Six year old Macs are, and they still fetch a hundred bucks or so on Craigslist....

I got the last G5 iMac. I like it. It was my first Apple purchase. Though I hate the evangelism (of everything, except the Beatles) I wanted something that a)wasn't Windows and b)wasn't Linux/BSD/whatever. I had used Linux for years and still have a SuSE box to fiddle with, but I was getting into complicated video editing and recording and wanted something that could keep up, or at least something that didn't require me to hand edit /etc files. It's a good machine; like all machines I always find a wall to hit whether it be how to make it crash or some task it won't do effeciently, and I fucking despise iTunes and wish I could grab something like Winamp or xmms for it, but I'm pretty happy.

mr.arrison wrote:Any equivalent in age PC (a Pentium III 800 MHZ Compaq, for example) has pretty much been decommissioned at this point and melted down for their lead and mercury. Six year old PC's just aren't useable. Six year old Macs are, and they still fetch a hundred bucks or so on Craigslist....

I post to this forum a whole bunch of times every day from a PIII 1GHz machine with 256MB memory. It's horribly obsolete, and was second-best Intel technology when I bought it in 2001, 5 years ago.

It's noticeably slow, to me, because the PC's I have at work (and my work laptop at home) are all much more hi-tech (P4 2GHz+, 1GB memory, hyper-threading capable, etc). So I know the difference, for sure. If I reformat this laptop, which I've already been backing up shit so I can, it will perform just fine. It's slow as shit now, with antivirus and two firewalls and years worth of bullshit acumulated on it.

If you wipe your PC clean, make sure it has enough memory, and *keep* it clean of needless bullshit (i.e. anything AOL, iTunes) it will work just fine for anything short of crunching data or editing video.

I've recorded 20 tracks worth of digital audio (as overdubs, not all at once) on a PIII 800MHz machine using an older version of the software I use today.

I know other people who still use PIII machines to good effect, every day.

zom-zom wrote:All Advertising=Lies

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R706isyDrqI

ChristopherM wrote:

kebabdylan wrote:1. The new MacBook Pros are plagued with problems

Well, I've had mine since they came out and haven't had any problems with it at all. So...what are all these problems that they're plagued with?

there was an article in cnet where the cnet staff in Australia all bought those computers. (4 or 5 of them at different times). All but, I think, one had to be returned. Batteries warping the case, random shut downs, horrible whining noises. Apparently a lot of people have been reporting things like that.

Its first generation, so problems are to be expected. But when you sell yourself as the "nothing ever goes wrong" computer, it's kind of a problem. And then all the mac users start making excuses, and in complete denial.

just admit that apple can make mistakes.

And don't get me started on the iPod...

scott wrote:I have a G4 Cube with OSX. I've never left it on for very long (and it's not even set up right now), but a friend borrowed it for a while when he was between computers, and he said that it would overheat and shut itself off if left on for a day or two. So that's awesome. Sounds like they made something "cool" looking and not as functional as it maybe coulda been. I dunno.

If that is the case there is something wrong with the hardware. My Cube is running 24 hours since I bought it.

I AM worse than a Tool fan.

I'm a software developer, so of course, Windows, Unix and Linux are the main OS's I use...

I bought my mom a video iPod for xmas a while back, and I am amazed at how goofy iTunes and the iPod are.

Just a few things I noticed off the bat:

1. When you add a single album to the iPod (one where there is only one album for the artist) it doesn't list the album. You drill down on the artist, and it lists all the songs. This is weird... It can make one wonder where these songs came from? They were on an album, but now they just are a bunch of track. The album name doesn't show up until another album by the artist is uploaded. For the sake of archival information, they should list the album. I'm a big boy... I can handle one more click to get to the songs.

2. The "services" in iTunes are time based, and not event based. Features like updating the iPod are time based. It does it every x minutes you are connected to iTunes. I know this because I just uploaded a bunch of CD's to ma's iPod and it started updating it. Then I realized that it only put one song of one CD on there. You either have to wait for the update to happen, or right click the iPod icon and chose "update". So at least Apple figured out you can right click on a PC and have a pop-up menu happen. Anyway, the iPod should update based on events. After a CD is imported, for example, that's a good time to update the iPod. A good time NOT to update the iPod is when nothing has changed. But it doesn't care. If you leave it plugged in to iTunes, it will try to update the iPod every X minutes. REEEEETARDED! Who thought of doing it this way? I have heard Apple is into group think, and this is evidence. I guess a high-up geek had a brain fart, and everyone was too chicken to correct him.

3. You can't resize the columns on the lists of music (in iTunes). There was some album title that was really long (from CDDB) and I was interested to see what the CDDB name was (it was different from what was printed on the CD case). I couldn't. I clicked the side of the column header and tried to resize it. It wouldn't. Pretty bad UI. If there is a way to do it, it is inconsistent with how a GUI works.

4. Update iPod firmware. Whenever I connect the iPod, it says there is an update for it. I click OK. The update fails, no error messages. I have no interest in Googling to figure out what needs to be done to get this Crapple crap working.

5. Resetting the iPod. You switch the hold switch and then hold the menu and select button down for 6-10 seconds, and then it shows an apple icon for 2 minutes, and then it works again. I had to do this because the thing would not turn off. Maybe the iPod update fixes this, but I will never know, because the update doesn't happen.

6. Managing the iPod independent of iTunes is problemmatic. The iPod is not autonomous. You really need access to a PC every once in a while.

Oh, I could go on and on... As the owner of 2 other earlier mp3 players, it is evident to me that Apple just decided to make something quick and throw a lot of marketing dollars at the problem. The sad thing is that this works so well. You can make the biggest piece of crap in the world, and people will buy it if you tell them to.

So, anyway... People say Apple is so great and their stuff is amazing. It's not. As bad as Windows is, Mac OS is even worse.

Beyond that, lots of software is not available on the Mac. If you want to use a Garmin car nav (amazingly helpful), they don't support the Mac. A large software company (that I will not name) gets paid by Apple to make software for the Mac. They wouldn't do it otherwise -- no money in it.

It seems every experience I have had with Apple, since the Apple II in 3rd grade, just is inferior to anything else on the market. Atari made far superior home computers at that time.

Apple has a cult following. They legitimize it by pointing out the Windows monopoly ("the evil empire"), but Apple would like a software, hardware, and media monopoly. They lock you in to their machines (which are overpriced). The lock your music on to your iPod and iTunes. Apple is all about locking you in... On top of that, you have Apple fanatics that think they are Cesar frieken' Chavez for sticking with Apple. Like Apple is slighly less greedy than Microsoft? No... They are just not as good with strategy and didn't have the early advantage of getting OEM deals like Bill Gates did (through family connections, IBM, etc.)

Let's face it... as much as neo-cons like to talk about the competitive market place, they love to scratch out deals which limit their competition. How else can they sell crap to so many people? I don't care if Jobs wears blue jeans or Gates gives money to Africa. These are neo-cons who have no notion of fair competition...

I don't think you have to love any operating system or software developing corporation.

The best stuff I have seen is based on open source technology. For example, the Eclipse IDE (OK, IBM funded a lot of that, but it is open source) is one of the best IDE's I have used. All of the rock-solid app servers (JBoss) are either open source or have many open source components.

I would like to see both Apple and Microsoft fail. They both make crappy crap. Windows XP is two steps back... it is the slowest piece of crap OS I have ever used. I haven't seen the blue screen since NT 4.0, but it's back baby! You can start to see Microsoft falling apart at the seams. I can't wait for it to happen. It will happen. There's only so much money you can throw at a problem, and really, some of the best software out there is free...

galanter wrote: Macs also, in study after study, come in as costing less than Windows based machines when considering total cost of ownership.

Not for 95% of how computers are used -- business. A desktop business PC needs an OS and a suite of office software. With a Mac, you have to buy Microsoft office anyway. They don't give it away. It's funny that one of the most popular Mac software suites is made by Microsoft. Anyway, the only offices that seem to have Macs are the ones in the movies. I have only seen one other office that is Mac based -- at a "hip" design firm. They ended up buying a bunch of Windows-based laptops to woo a computer manufacturer they were trying to get a contract with.

For servers, I have never ever ever seen a Mac in a server room. Apple came out with rack-based Macs after their OSX came out, hoping to get some of the server market. After NT came out in the 90's you saw more and more Unix installations moving to Windows. Now there are some monster Windows servers. Then there is the hypervisor thing (VMWare) of running a bunch of OS's on one box. But when VMWare pitched to us, no mention of Apple was made. They are non-existent in the server market, apart from the Apple fanatic running an extremely slow web server on his/her Mac.

I am not a Windows fanatic. I find it funny that I need to run a Korn shell on Windows to do the stuff I need to do. Might as well use Linux or Unix, but I still need Outlook, XL, Word, etc. to do the non-tech stuff I need to do.

But yes, I would like to see some studies that show Mac has a lower cost of ownership, because to me, it seems the end user is paying for TV commercials, hardware monopoly and product placement in the movies...

Anyway, screw both Windows and Mac, and if your organization allows it, use Open Office.