Wel, if you buy an Intel-based Mac, you can install XP and run it natively (Not in

[Redstone]

software emulation.)

Which reminds me, I gotta buy a copy of XP befoore they stop selling it.

Redstone

[bicentennial_baby]

1. But why would I want to do that?

I'm loving OSX :D

[Redstone]

5. There ARE reasons. I, for example, need to see how the websites I develop look in

Windows. Not that I'd use Windows to MAKE them, but most of my customers' customers use Windows.

Redstone

[ghostsofgiants]

2. What really pisses me off is the fact that they won't do the opposite.

Release OSX for non-Macs. Apple can die in a fire.

[Omphaloskepsis]

21. I wish the same...

But for different reasons.. Not because I want to use OS X on a PC. I just want the industry to evolve into something better. Some competition would be nice. IMHO all current Operating Systems suck.

And, Primate1, don't hold your breath. I doubt Apple wants to have to support all the random hardware on the PC. Look at all of the problems with Vista and drivers. But I would love to see the look on Bill's face if Apple started selling OS X to PC users.

[alfredo]

26. Apple is a hardware company. The OS adds value to the hardware.

[Solon]

32. Since Apple switched to Intel, I don't think that applies anymore...

Macs are PCs with an extra ROM chip on the Motherboard. Apple is a hardware company the same way Dell is a hardware company. The only difference is that they also sell their own OS with the system.

If Apple were to release OSX similarly to Windows XP(not Vista), being hardware neutral, it wouldn't affect Mac sales that much, they would still be fancy boxes for OSX, what would change is that those of us who "roll our own PCs" would have an additional option in OSes, without doing ugly hacks and shit. They could still be the ONLY provider of OSX for NEW computers, OEM installed, just sell the OS at retail that is hardware neutral.

They would also end up taking up probably 50 percent of the OS market in only a couple of years, and, as a result, hardware and software compatibility would go through the roof, being on par with Windows XP. Neither OS security nor usability need to be affected either. OSX is built upon the Mach microkernal and BSD, both robust enough to handle being hardware neutral, and, in fact, you have hardware neutrality with Darwin, which is Apple's contribution to the Open Source community, and is basically OSX without the Aqua interface.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again, I would love to have OSX on my computer, problem is, it isn't a Mac, I have a perfectly usable computer, which I'm upgrading, slowly, as I can afford it, and I don't NEED a new mouse, keyboard, monitor, or case, all I need is a Motherboard with CPU. I already looked, and Apple doesn't even sell them, and I'm NOT getting a refurbished motherboard. The thing is that I don't CARE what my computer looks like, I care about how it works, hence why I use Linux for serious work, and Windows XP for games(by necessity, not choice). Hell, I've even gone so far as to disable networking in Windows, entirely, I disabled my network device under Windows, that's security. :)

[alfredo]

33. Dell is captive to the specs demanded by MS. They have little or

no control in that respect. They have to be reactive. How many companies had to redo their product line to be Vista compatible? What about the huge list of software companies now scrambling to make their software work with Vista? Developers know what to expect with Apple.

It isn't just how it looks. Look at the inside of a Mac. Look at the thought they put into making the machine easily upgraded. How many computer companies go that far?

[sir_captain]

34. This post is silly

I mean, seriously now. Oh, the horror of redoing a product line for a new OS. Apple would never do that! There's no way that they'll release new machines to coincide with the release of 10.5!

Vista is almost completely backwards compatible in terms of software support. You'd have a much better argument when it comes to hardware support. Then again, Apple had exactly the same problems when switching from OS9 to OSX and again when they went Intel.

As for your last point, there are tons of PC makers that build machines that are far more customizable and upgradable than any Apple machine (granted, you can't buy them at Best Buy.) And really, talk to me when you can build a mac from scratch exactly the way you want it.

Apple makes great computers. I love OSX. The fanboy stuff gets real old, though.

[alfredo]

36. My seven year old and my eight year old Macs will run

10.5 without any alterations. 10.5 will still run OS 7 to 9 software in classic mode. I had no real problems with running OS 9 software on OSX. the worst I had to do is to boot into OS9 instead of running the Classic environment. That was a rare occurrence.

No matter what others may want, Apple is a HARDWARE company. Their software adds value.

I am a fan of Jonathan Ives design expertise. He's what makes Apple special. It's worth paying a few extra dollars to get a well designed machine. I've never cut or scratched myself working inside a New World Mac. (Nubus Macs, yes)

Not everybody builds they own machines. You can build a Mac from the ground up except for the motherboard. Everything else you can buy off the shelves.

[sir_captain]

37. Yeah, that's great

except you can't buy that motherboard so the rest is moot.

If your 7 and 8 year old machines use G3s, you might not actually be able to run 10.5, as a note--pre-release versions do not support G3s.

I completely agree that Jonathan Ives is a fabulous designer. Like I said, I like Apple machines, and I like OSX. I just find the rampant fanboyism irritating.

[alfredo]

38. I do have a G3 that ran 10.4, but I made that a

Linux box and now a friend is using it.

We will see if there will be G3 support in the final. The G3 I have is a 333mhz and it handles 10.4 well.

I like watching Apple. They have a way of shaking up the industry. Look at what they have done for music distribution. Soon they will redo the movie industry, and TV will be changed by iTV. iPhone? I will have to wait and see how that works out. The first born of a product line usually doesn't show the full utility of the device. It took a few years for the iPod to really mature. I saw where they are going to be used as flight recorders for light aircraft.

Sure I am a fanboy. I find them interesting because they play the game so well. It's not what you do it's how you do it. I've been following them since the days right before Jobs returned. I got some inside info on the direction of the company and the fallback plan if MS was able to kill Apple off. I knew they were going to the Nix platform well before the general public knew. I was encouraged to learn MkLinux and Linux in general because that was the direction the OS was going. Also Linux was where all the Apple people were going if MS killed Apple. They were going to rebuild from there.

I was also told that Apple was not going to confront MS head on, they were going around them and claim different markets, then expand into MS territory from there. So far it seems to be working. MS knew what was up. That's why they insisted Apple "Knife the baby", kill of QuickTime.

It was more an insurgent movement back then. Mac users were outsiders and that made us "clubby." We learned to get our software online because you couldn't find it on the shelves. Some retailers were getting kickbacks from MS to keep Mac software and hardware off the shelves. Our university purchaser was given an office and an assistant by MS on the condition that he banned Apple products from the university stores. Professors were given $200 for plugging MS products in their lectures. It was tough back in the late 80's and 90's. We wanted to protect our right to have a computer that catered to the content creators, the artist, and musicians.


Apple is our soap opera, it is a form of entertainment. How many pages of print do you see about Dell's new machines? They may have their strong points, but they are not rule makers like Apple. Apple is fun to watch.

[Solon]

39. Dell has SOME control, granted, their PCs are crap, just like all "prepackaged" PCs are crap...

However, they actually allow you options like no OS installed, or even Linux installed on the systems for you, if you ask for it. Its not all Windows Vista, just that Vista is an MS product, so its an automatic monopoly. This isn't to say that Dell is a good company, they aren't, so I don't buy from them.

Yeah, that Mac Pro looks nice on the inside, but let's assume I want a computer with the EXACT or even exceeding its specs, well, let's add it up. A 250 GB hard drive is 70 bucks, 2GB of RAM is 206 bucks, 18X DVD-R is about 31 bucks, a Dual Socket Motherboard costs about 400 bucks, and 2 Intel Core Duo processors, Woodcrest core, costs, together, about 680 bucks. Total price for everything: $1387, over a thousand dollars LESS than the Mac Pro.

Add in a PCI-E Nvidia Graphics card, 256 MB, and you add 143 bucks, bringing the total to 1530 bucks, still almost 1000 dollars less than the $2,500 Mac Pro. If I want a nifty case, then that's another 80 bucks, making it 1610 total.

Got all prices at www.newegg.com

Of course, I'm not one to buy a WHOLE computer at retail, or at one time, I buy it as I can afford it, and right now, the ONLY things I need now are the Motherboard/CPU/Memory, so the total price for me is 1286 dollars. Plus, if I was lazy, I could have the local computer shop, oddly enough called Computer Pro around here, assemble and set up the computer for me, to my exact specs, for about 30 bucks extra.

Of course, this is assuming I even want a dual processor server, which I don't, not really, I don't need it, and the only other options at the Apple store are iMacs, and Mac Minis, which, regardless of what you may think, I definately do NOT want, I want a computer that can use ALL my old components, and the iMacs with the specs I want cost the SAME as the price for the combo I listed above. I could build a high end Core Duo PC just not dual processor, for the same price or less, as a Mac Mini.

Before you ask, OS cost would be 0 dollars, Ubuntu Linux.

[Orsino]

3. There's no t in "naively."

:+

[leeroysphitz]

4. That's very clever!

Have fun with Turbo-Cad...

[Deja Q]

6. I wish Apple would get its head out of its soft parts and sell their OS X for the PC...

They seem to have an issue with not wanting to license... then they wonder why their products aren't ubiquitous. :eyes:

Fortunately, Windows XP can be had, works, and if people don't want to buy an over-glorified PC (aka a new Mac) they can just download FreeBSD and install it themselves. It's 98% the same thing.

[Edweird]

35. They are way beyond "not wanting to license" they are militant about it.

They are invoking the DMCA and using the Gov. to help them shut down websites that DISCUSS running osx on PC's. Just talking about has become a crime and makes you subject to all kinds of BS. They are not playing nice at all. But, then again, they never have.

[billyskank]

7. Why on earth would you want to do that?

The operating system is the best bit of a Mac.

[Deja Q]

8. Except it's nothing more than a PC with one extra chip.

(the chip saying it's not a PC so OS X will install if the attempt is made... ;) )

Otherwise it's an Intel mobo with an ATi video card. x1600 if I recall rightly...

[Pierre.Suave]

10. Why do you hate Macs so much?

Did Steve Jobs kill your grandma?

[Redstone]

11. Why should that matter? Steve Jobs killed MY Grandma, and I still use Macs. Maybe it's

because Bill Gates killed my OTHER Grandma, and I liked her better than the one Steve killed.

Redstone

[idgiehkt]

12. roflmao

:rofl:

[Redstone]

13. That was indeed one of my better ones, wasn't it?

Redstone

[Pierre.Suave]

23. yes

[Pierre.Suave]

22. LOL

[Deja Q]

14. Okay, here's why.

They did to Xerox what Microsoft did to them. (you do know it was Xerox that invented the GUI and mouse? Why does Apple get this credit?)

Over the years they kept dropping high quality components in favor of lower ones (You do remember the days Apple used SCSI architecture, yes?)

They originally sold the Mac without a keyboard (dumb)...

The Apple Lisa originally sold for $10,000 despite being underpowered. (another dumb, but their machines are usually underpowered for their cost, even to this day...)

They flaunted the Motorola processor until the day they moved to Intel, after which they flaunted Intel... that seemed odd...

And for all the people who made FreeBSD, I find it an insult that a big company would come in, make a handful of modifications, claim they would give back to open source (and for that part I have to see if they kept their word, bit I digress), and sell it for a high price.

Apple's offshored a lot of jobs. Except the one owned by Steve Jobs.

Never mind the debate in GD over Jobs pissing on teachers' unions. Ouch! Blue? I don't think so.

And lastly, Apple could make a LOT more money if they opened up licensing of their OS. Surely it's obvious to even him that a lot of people hate Windows and the product activation garbage right now, and it's even worse with Vista. If Steve Jobs had even one working brain cell, he'd make OS X a bit more inclusive and not tie it into what is merely, these days, an overpriced PC box. Sorry.

"Think different" used to be their slogan. These days they seem to be thinking like everyone else.


So I will ask why do people have loyalty in a company that's little different from Microsoft, apart from being terrified to license their operating system? Especially now that it's just another PC, with a hijacked freeware OS?

[Kutjara]

17. About half right.

(1) Xerox were never in a position to capitalize on the work their PARC researchers did on the WIMP GUI. It was always something of an interesting curiosity for them. Steve Jobs was given a tour of PARC's research and immediately understood the value of what PARC had done. He used it as the basis for the Mac GUI, and Xerox was pretty much happy for him to do so. It took Microsoft another decade to get anything remotely similar to market (Windows 95).

(2) Apple components still tend to be generally higher quality than those found in PCs (if only because there are so many different PC manufacturers that the average quality is bound to be lower). Apple still innovate from a hardware standpoint to some extent (the MagSafe power connector, Firewire), but their current crop of machines is nowhere near as comparatively innovative as their early models.

(3) They sell the current Mac mini without a keyboard or screen, so people can simply hook up their current preipherals to the new computer. It's not necessarily dumb, just a marketing decision. I used to hate having to buy PCs in enormous bundles, together with printer, monitor, keyboard, speakers, mouse, when all I really wanted was a new CPU.

(4) The Lisa was an early adopter machine, with a correspondingly stupid pricetag. Remember, the first CD players on the market were about $15,000. Now you practically get them free with Cracker Jack. It was quickly realized that the Lisa was the wrong product. It was, however, the spiritual ancestor of the Mac and, in that capacity, was a huge success. Macs were certainly underpowered during the latter days of the PowerPC era, but that's certainly not the case now. My MacBook Pro boots, shuts down, opens applications, renders graphics and video and plays games (under Vista in native mode), much faster than any of my equivalent Windows machines. It also compared very favorably in price with similarly specced Windows boxes, particularly when you consider the software that comes bundled.

(5) Macs contained Motorola processors until Motorola could no longer supply the kinds of processors Apple wanted. So Apple switched to IBM for their PowerPC chips. When it became clear that IBM weren't able to keep up with Intel in chip speed, Apple took the sensible choice of switching to Intel. Of course they flaunted Motorola (and then IBM), because those were (in Apple's opinion) the best chips available at the time. When that was no longer the case, they switched to a new supplier. Nothing wrong with that; companies do it all the time.

(6) The Darwin Mach+BSD kernel is open source, but Apple haven't provided much in the way of resources or support to the development community. Consequently, there is very little development of the Darwin kernel outside of Apple.

(7) Apple offshore manufacturing. Can't disagree with that. In common with the rest of the computer industry, Apple manufacture most of their machines in Taiwan or Shanghai.

(8) Job's did indeed make a mess of his statements about teachers. Then again, Stevo has never been one for making considered remarks; he sticks his foot in his mouth fairly frequently. That said, his remarks were certainly not the most progressive I've ever heard, and demonstrated a lack of understanding about the challenges teachers face. I hope the teachers do give him the Rotten Apple award.

(9) Opening OSX up to other machines is an issue I feel very conflicted about. The way things stand today, OSX is fully integrated with Apple hardware. If I buy OSX, I know it will run on any Apple machine that has the necessary basic specs. I know that I can plug just about any peripheral into my Mac and OSX will recognize it without requiring me to install drivers. Macs work as a package, the hardware and software are well integrated, and this results in very stable and useable machines. Macs don't crash nearly as much as PCs do, simply because MacOS is designed to work on Macs. Windows is designed to work on machines that conform to certain specificiation, but it is left to the manufacturer to decide how they'll meet that specification. It would be nice if Macs had greater market share, but I'm not sure I want to sacrifice the other benefits of having the complete package from one vendor. If I want vendor independence, I'll buy a PC. This issue is purely a matter personal preference, though.

Apple and Macs aren't perfect, by any means, but I don't think Steve Jobs is a total idiot. He's charting a different course from both M$ and the other PC manufacturers. Apple machines are sold as total packages that just work, with a minimum of screwing around. This has a lot of appeal for people who don't want to have to get an electrical engineering degree before they can figure out how to open their word processor. Yes, after the switch to Intel chips, much of the hardware "uniqueness" of Macs is gone, but this makes it all the more important for Apple to differentiate on look and feel, features, ease of use and stability.

Windows Vista has barely caught up with OSX Tiger. In three months, Apple will be releasing OSX Leopard, which will again put Macs five years ahead.

I use Windows when I have to. I use Macs because I want to. Long may they remain unknown to the great unwashed.

[Redstone]

27. You've studied your history well, and reported it fairly.

I'm not a big fan of Steve Jobs, but you are entirely fair in your assesments.

Redstone

[alfredo]

28. There's a lot of attention to detail in the design of the hardware.

The inside of the new MacPros is very nice. Things just clip right in and out. Upgrading is easy. The Pro hardware reminds me of the internals of their Xserve, and the Mini and iMac owes their heritage to the MacBooks and iBooks.



Of course there is the Mini. It is so small and uses so little power, it can be used in small robots.



Or in the dash of your Prius.

[Kutjara]

29. Excellent point.

Much of Apple's hardware innovation these days is around formfactor and modularity. The insides of a Mac Pro are indeed a work of art, and the Mini is a tiny wonder. Even though the components are essentially standard PC stuff, the way Apple combines them into its products is always surprising.

[alfredo]

30. Industrial design by Jonathan Ives. He's the man behind what

you see. His genius is to take Jobs' ideas and make them concrete. He's the man behind the iPod too.

[AlCzervik]

19. Steve Jobs keeps food on my family.

i don't bash microsoft or dell or their users.

[Pierre.Suave]

24. So, you are saying that

Microsoft has never done one unethical thing, or released a product that was over priced and underperforming?

It seems like you have a lot of pent up hostility towards Apple for no really good reason.

[Redstone]

9. Dammit, I did it again! this was supposed to be a REPLY, not an original post.

Think I might maybe want to start paying a bit of attention?

Redstone

[Kutjara]

15. You can do the same with Vista...

...if you really want to desecrate your Mac. It does take a little bit of fiddling around with the drivers, though.

[Omphaloskepsis]

16. A word of advice...

I installed XP on my iMac.. For some dumb reason when I re-boot it defaults to XP. I have to hold down the Option key during start-up to choose which OS I want to use.


I'm not sure if this is normal, but it pisses me off.

[Kutjara]

18. Simple fix.

Go to System Preference and select the OS you wish to boot from. By default, MacOS chooses the last one you installed, but it takes a couple of seconds to click on the Macintosh HD in the preferences panel and you'll be back to booting from MacOS, as God intended.

[Omphaloskepsis]

20. Holy crap..

Now I feel like a total idiot.. Thanks, for the tip, not the feeling.. I have been stuck using Windows for a while and assume most system settings are hidden under 10 layers of tabs.

[Pierre.Suave]

25. The beauty of Mac OSX is

its ease of use and simplicity.

[politicat]

31. And it works 99% of the time, too.

Sketchup works better on the windows side, so ya know, but games can be problematic. I can't think of any real weirdnesses I've had on that side, but with Crossover, you don't even have to have the Win installation.

And the one crazy in our local Mac users' group who decided to try Vista.... Trust me, Redstone. Don't. Go. There.