Posted on 06/20/2005 8:42:07 PM PDT by quidnunc
Not since Walter Mondale suggested that he might raise taxes have I had such a terrible, sick, sinking sensation deep in the pit of my stomach.
Things like the Michael Jackson verdict, using Christina Aguilera’s music to torture prisoners at Gitmo and the rising cost of gasoline are inconsequential compared to Apple Computers’ abrupt surrender to Intel.
This is serious business. To put things into perspective, my devotion to the Macintosh is of an intensity similar to Paul Greenberg’s feelings for "the South."
This has been going on since 1987. I think my first Mac was called an SE, and it had one full MB of RAM and two floppy disk drives. There was no internal hard drive, so you had to save whatever you did on floppies.
Of course, there was a keyboard and the trademark mouse. IBM people just detested the mouse. Somehow, using that thing made traditionalist computer geeks feel less professional and superior, but Mac people never cared. We just wanted to get our work done.
I paid $3,400 for that first system, and that was in 1987 dollars. We’re talking real money, folks. There was not much software for the Macintosh, but Mac-Draw and MacPaint made ordinary people into (drum roll, please!) MacArtists. The word processing program was known as—what else?—MacWrite, and it set the standard for a decade.
All the while, IBM folks were scrambling to learn weird and incomprehensible codes. Life was good.
After awhile, I decided to add on a 20 MB external hard drive. That cost $400, but it was so much more convenient than shuffling all those dadgum floppies. I vividly recall the serene sense of empowerment derived from possessing such unprecedented storage capacity. The 10-inch screen and processor fit in a case, and the display was black-andwhite.
Mac users become personally involved in the life of their computer and are always trying to improve its operating environment. In due time, I also expanded the RAM to 4 MB, and that probably cost $300.
When you pop open the case of one of those old Macs, the signatures of the original design team are represented on the interior surface, including that of Apple’s founder, Mr. Steve Jobs, the traitor.
Jobs may someday be excused for crossing over to the dark side, but those of us who have come up through the ranks are not happy people. While we were paying more for a more stable and useful operating system, those rascals on the other team were stealing the clever desktop analogy. They even added a mouse.
We went through a lot to stay loyal to the superior computer. My present iMac G3 is the first Macintosh I have ever owned that had an internal modem. Friends, this little puppy has a 500-MHz processor, which was scalding hot when it was new three years ago. If you watched the Apple commercials, you know that it was registered as a national defense secret or something like that. That is one reason this switcheroo is so bewildering.
The iMac G5 desktop computer is a thing of beauty. Its PowerPC processor is an engineering triumph, except for one little thing. It’s too darned hot. That really matters on laptops, which are supposedly the biggest selling models.
Macintosh has been held back one full generation with a G4 PowerBook, which is just a cat’s hair slower.
It is a business decision for Apple to make nice with Intel, but I don’t have to like it. Usually, when I am informed that some action was purely a "business decision," I have just gotten the shaft, so excuse the skepticism.
When you think about brand loyalty, remember Macintosh, "the computer for the rest of us." Its superior operating system and amazing stability have far outweighed the expense and inconvenience, but it would be nice to see the corporation display a tiny bit of sensitivity to the folks who consistently give this company a 3 percent share of the personal computer market. That may not sound like much, but Steve Jobs seems to be doing OK.
We mere customers are now left to wonder about whether our software will work on the next generation. Should I buy a Mac to replace this aging G3? These are also provocative business decisions.
Memo to Mr. Jobs: Change is always bad. Uncertainty is worse.
Thats great, did you come up with that yourself..
Well my wife has had a powerbook for 2.5 years and my mother has been using macs back to OS8.. But it was not till the mini came out I even considered replaceing my Linux desktop..
There is not too much on the desktop that can hold a candle to OSX..
People have written viruses for a particular cell phone that occupies less marketshare than apple..
But if Macs were the dominant system on the internet, then *they'd* be the target of the hackers.
A bigger target, sure.. more hits on it you betcha but it would probably not be as bug ridden as Windows..
Nah I found it surfing...I thought it was funny from both sides of the fence.
*** There is not too much on the desktop that can hold a candle to OSX..***
There is nothing IN the desktop that can hold a candle to AMD. Hardware performance is primary for me. OS is secondary. Someday maybe the planets will align and pair the best OS to the best processing platform. I'm not holding my breath however.
There's a lot of money to be made, certainly. But I can't help but think that consumers of digital media will balk at the idea of having a hardware-level ID tied to the reproduction of music and video.
The public might very well balk, but how often has the music/entertainment industry cared about public reaction. If they had evolved their business model sooner, they would not be having the problems they are currently experiencing. Yet another self-inflicted wound from the entertainment industry of America.
>>
Well all I can say is if you're doing as well as you say, I'd be living somewhere else than San Francisco.
<<
I'm with you on that. I love San Francisco, but the freaks have ruined it. I'm tired of the smell of urine and daily Union Square "protests" over nothing in particular. I'm moving back to Savannah this Summer. Some freaks there too, but they are a better grade of freak.
My life might not have been as rewarding without the Mac, and that's the God's honest truth.
D'j'ever heard of BURNERS? :)
It would be the most-cloned, least profitable software venture in HISTORY.
Like Microsoft, right?
Well, Microsoft _has_ gotten away from regular serial numbers to 'electronic fingerprinting' with the final live/die verification via internet so you can't keep it working on more than one machine... Figure it.
bttt
I have owned Macs and PCs.
My experience using Macs, reminds me of an old saying, "You can't polish an overpriced (sic) t**d.
C
I almost bought a Dell notebook. But hordes of negative reviews on CNET.com scared me off; there were lots of build quality issues and many compaints about phone support. (I'm told the top-of-the-line Dells are good but the inexpensive lines are junk.) Meanwhile, there were few negative reviews from owners of iBooks. All I wanted was a small machine for email and the web, for travelling. The iBook is a lovely little computer and I appreciate the relative immunity of Apple to hackers, viruses and worms.
But I do have one regret: I have some programming skills for Visual C++.NET, but I do not know how to program Macs. If I had to make this purchase again, I might have looked for a higher-quality Win XP notebook at a somewhat higher price point.
MACS do not...suck! But that's usually the opinion of people who either never actually owned one or used it for a few hours and decided they became "experts". I switched to Mac 6 years ago and I am regretting it for not doing it sooner. To the day I haven't experienced one hardware or software problem and there are plenty or resources out there for Mac users. So next time, when facing the "blue screen of death" and missing kernels or DLL files warnings consider this: you are not alone, you are one of millions windows users :)
Of course. But Rush would exist and perform just as well if there were no Apple Computers in this world.
Well, it wouldn't be the first time my sarcasmeter jammed at a crucial moment.
What in the world is wrong with the whiney idiot who wrote this article? When the announcement first came that Apple was going to transition to Intel chips, I was a bit worried ... until I looked at the transition roadmap, and at the long-range advantages that it will give the Mac OS in the future.
Firstly, while the G5 is an excellent chip right now, and truly does outperform an Intel chip with 2x the GHz, this is really the very top capacity of the G5 chip that IBM will produce. They simply don't want to carry the chip further for the price that Apple is willing to pay. So, the "future roadmap" with PowerPC chips is not nearly as positive as it will be on the Intel side of the ledger in subsequent years. This does not invalidate the superiority of the PowerPC chip's abilities of the past ... they were excellent in their day. They're excellent NOW. But their future is limited.
Secondly, software written for the PowerPC chip will easily and seamlessly work in OS X on an Intel-based computer with the use of Rosetta for translation function ... and there is no humanly perceptible (or significant) slow-down of function. In other words, the MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite software that makes up the heart of my publishing business' operations will work just fine on the new generation of Intel-based Macs. AND, the producers of this software will be writing upgrade versions of their Apps that will run on EITHER platform. Hence, there is no loss of software and the upgrade path over time is well-established.
Thirdly -- and this could be big -- there is solid reason to expect that OS X on Intel may very well be capable (using a Windows-to-Mac version of Rosetta code auto-translator) of running Windows-based software ... and will run it better, cleaner, and faster than XP or (whistling in the dark) Longhorn. Yes, that's right ... the day may well come when Windows users will be able to run any/all Windows software through the Mac OS X interface.
Some Windows users might ask "why would we want to do that?" Well ... the interface war has, without a question, been won ... and Mac won it. Answer this one question and you'll see what I mean: Which OS has, over time, become more like the other one? Think about the evolution of PC OSs ... DOS to Windows 3.0, to 98, to 2000, ME, XP, etc. Each step in the evolution of Windows has been to make it MORE like the dynamic GUI that is present in the Mac OS. Why go with a virus/spy/maulware plagued imitation OS when you can run with the benchmark that Windows is trying to copy, and do so without all the other annoying problems that Windows brings with it?
I use Macs at work and at home. I've used the Mac OS and Apple computers since BEFORE the advent of the Mac ... I cut my teeth with Basic an Fortran programming on the Apple II and Apple IIc before moving to Mac in 1986. Since then I've owned many different generations of the Mac, up to my current G4 Powerbook and G5 desktop computers. I have also used, and own, several Wintel machines over the years, and my current one is running XP (a laptop) which I use for various projects and purposes. I do NOT use the windows unit on the internet ... my macs are infinitely safer. And, I much prefer to use the Mac OS X interface for my daily needs; there's very little I can't do on my Macs that I can on my Windows laptop. I just like having access to both platforms. And, it would appear, Apple is about to make that even more easier with it's future generations of computers.
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