The software box said...

Or Better! LOLOL I get it! LOLOLOL

 

I can't let this one slide by without adding my own $.02 on the topic. Having owned both platforms, I believe the Windows platform is the better of the two. However, before I owned a Mac, I made fun of all things Apple, with smugness. Then, because I've always considered myself both open-minded (which is even sometimes the case!) and curious, I stopped by on a whim at the only Apple store that I know of in a local town nearby. I wanted to see what the competition had to offer--not much, I supposed. I expected to look a little while, get some questions answered, leave, and go home. I saw an eMac and fell in love with it on the spot and bought it (Mac OS X IMO is simply a beautiful GUI), and the operating system has been rock-solid in stability and performance. But after awhile I realized the Apple platform has a tiny share of the market, is underappreciated, and though software support is now excellent in almost every area, developing on a Mac is simply not for me. Most of my skillsets and interests are better suited to Windows development. Anyways, there is precious little Mac support or interest in my area, and I have no friends who even LIKE Macs, much less support me in them---well, OK, I have ONE friend who was supportive (he liked the GUI and ease of use, though not the difficulty of finding software and support in my area). In short, I still have and like my eMac, but Windows is the OS and platform for me. This is not to start to an OS holy war; this is just my humble opinion on the matter and I'm not infallible (not in all case, at any rate [big grin]).

--
CurtX

 

Curt, I've always and only had Windows and love my XP. I've not had any problems with it at all. It was funny tho.

Diane

 

You need better friends... Friends who are not afraid to think differently.

There is support for the Mac if you look for it. Much of the software can be easily purchased online.

Unfortunately, the Golden Triangle is literally and figuratively "in the boonies" for computer technology, so only the worst stuff ("Windows") makes it into the area in any great quantity.

For the record, I have had only two OS crashes on Mac OS X (this includes all versions from 10.0-10.3) over the past 3 years. They were caused by a faulty hard drive that sometimes did not respond.

I use Windows (previously 2000 and now XP) at work every day and have had innumerable OS crashes over the last two years.

Windows does have a nice Solitaire solution built into the OS, but very little else appeals to me. Furthermore, the only drivers I have ever had to install on OS X were to get the "advanced" features for the two printers I have had in the last three years. Everything else (from mice, MIDI keyboards, hard drives, joysticks, USB 2 internal cards, etc.) have worked properly from the moment I plugged them in. And I haven't had to worry about viruses one bit.

On top of that, Apple provides quite a bit of software at no cost or low cost to Macintosh users.

Windows costs too much in productively, time, risk, privacy and money for me to ever consider voluntarily using it again.

 

Baptist Believer:

Do you ever worry that Apple is on its way out of the desktop market entirely? I wonder somtimes if the company will become an appliance distributor instead of a personal computer manufacturer.

--
CurtX

 

Not at all. There are no signs of it.

I realize that some may think that the runaway success of the iPod has turned Apple into a music company, but their bread and butter has always been computers. They're just diversifying to sell more hardware.

Furthermore, the latest hardware, the 64-bit G5s blows away anything on the Windows side for the same money. OS X is far better than Windows XP. And Apple's X-Serves are getting some serious attention by businesses and universities who want some serious computing power for their money. (The fourth faster supercomputer in the world was recently built with 1100 stock G5 desktops for far less money than could be accomplished with Windows systems. Currently Virginia Tech is replacing those stock desktop units with G5 X-Serves to save space and energy costs and will still get the same power.)

http://www.computing.vt.edu/research_computing/terascale/

http://www.apple.com/hardware/video/virginiatech/

I think they aim to do both.

I've heard that they want to maintain a cutting edge high tech company with a high priority on ease-of-use and intuitive interfaces.

 

BB: Just out of curiosity, what kind of machine do you have? I have an eMac 800MHz which is a nice little machine, although it is slightly underpowered for running some Virtual PC activities. If I had endless supplies of money, I would already have a top of the line PowerMac or PowerBook, and it would rock. Oh, wait. I think I just coveted in my head. I'll have to stay away from thinking those thoughts.

 

I'm running an older machine that came out in 2001:

733 mHz "Digital Audio" G4
Superdrive
768 MB
60 GB and 80 MB internal hard drives
160 MB Firewire hard drive

My love is running the top-of-the-line G5: Dual-processor 2 GHz G5 (64-bit processors)

She's got a computing monster!

It will be my turn to upgrade my primary machine in a year or two. Hope to get a dual G5 at 3-4 GHz at that point.

 

Ack! Stop that! You made me covet again. If you say something like that again and I sin, it's YOUR fault.

No seriously, that would be an awesome machine. For what I want, I'll probably stick to the Windows side of things. But just in case, what do you think would be the sticker price of a beast like that?

Speaking of Mac... have you heard about/used MacSword?

 

Oh, I wanted to say something else too about my eMac. Stupid me, I went out and bought a USB external hard drive from Western Digital (80GB) before really checking to see if my eMac supported USB 2.0. It doesn't. So reading poked along at the USB 1.1 speed limit of what is it, 11 mb or something like that? I see the iMac supports USB 2.0 (I wish I had bought it instead for that reason and another--the eMac weighs a goodly portion of a ton!). Does your older machine support USB 2.0? And do you care? Because I heard most things were FireWire-based for the Mac, which is slightly less speed theoretically than USB 2.0. But I bet with all the gizmos riding on USB, a single firewire connection could be faster on average. Is this right?

 

"Better" does not always equate to "successful". Just ask those who bought BETA video cassette recorders instead of VHS. BETA was higher quality, but VHS was more popular. As for me, I bought VHS because that's what everyone ele had. Also, the movies were slightly cheaper. It was easier to swap tapes with my friends and family if I had what they had. However, BETA is still used in the media industry.

Mac may be better, but the general public find the PC format more palatable. So, give 'em what they want, not what YOU think they want. Henry Ford learned that the hard way. I don't think the Mac will be an Edsel, but it might become a BETA.

 

Ow! They do now of course… Perhaps there’s some sort of add-on available for the eMac… I’ll keep my eyes open for something like that and let you know.

Yep. Minus the data transfer overhead from the packet protocol.

Actually, the entire Apple line has now been updated to include USB 2.0 from the factory.

USB 2.0 didn’t exist when my machine was built (2001), but I spent $20 on a generic card from CompUSA and added two powered ports. (Didn’t even have to install drivers for it, Mac OS X recognized it immediately.)

Not really. I bought the USB 2.0 card because I wanted to have a few more powered USB 1.1 ports (I have a lot of devices attached) and I could get a USB 2.0 card for only a little more than a USB 1.1 powered hub. I decided to get it just in case I wanted to add a USB 2.0 device in the future.

USB 2.0 is slightly faster than the original Firewire (Firewire 400), but it has the major disadvantage of sending data in packets instead of streams like Firewire. The packet transfer information undermines the data transfer capabilities and actually makes USB 2.0 slower for most data transfer operations. USB 2.0 drives are slightly faster when accessing very short records from a database, but Firewire is faster for more standard uses.

Of course, Firewire was out for a couple of years before USB 2.0 and by the time USB “caught up” with Firewire, Apple released Firewire 800 which is twice as fast as the original Firewire (and backward compatible).

I tend to avoid USB 2.0 drives because I can get a faster drive in both Firewire formats.

Yep.

 

"Better" does not always equate to "successful".</font>[/QUOTE]Very true. Especially when folks like Bill Gates build their marketshare illegally to the detriment of the American public.

Not so sure about that. Most people I’ve talked to don’t even consider a Macintosh because they’ve been told that they won’t be able to do anything with it. When folks see my Mac at work, they usually change their minds very quickly.

But the kinder thing to do would be to show people a better way instead of just letting then languish in mediocrity and Microsoft viruses.

But your analogy doesn’t really work.

I used to believe it, so back in 1993 I bought a Windows-compatible computer. I suffered through Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and plenty of viruses until I realize the fallacy of the analogy.

If you use a computer to simply play games, run non-productive programs, or get infected by viruses, then your analogy holds.

If you use a computer to produce data for use on other systems or create output (such as documents or graphics), then the analogy does not hold up at all.

The most important part of compatibility is that the output that is created is usable on other machines. I work cross-platform all the time and I rarely run into any problems. The most trouble I have is that Windows systems can’t reproduce some of the fancier things I can do on my Macintosh, so I have to be mindful of the weaknesses of Windows when I create PowerPoint presentations and other visuals for use on Windows machines. (The Macintosh version of Microsoft Office is much more powerful than the Windows counterpart – especially in the ability to do graphics of varying opacity and the PowerPoint application.)

As far as hardware goes, most peripherals work just fine with a Mac (although quite a few companies don’t bother to advertise that fact on their boxes) without installing drivers. You simply plug it in and start using it.

Then of course you have the software that is exclusive to Apple systems that surpasses anything on the Windows side for the same money, like Final Cut Pro, Garageband, iMovie, etc.

And if for some reason I want to run Windows to use a piece of software that does not have a Mac equivalent, then I can run Windows XP with the use of emulation software distributed by Microsoft.