Posted on 05/03/2011 9:03:20 AM PDT by Swordmaker
Apple today updated its signature all-in-one iMac with next generation quad-core processors, powerful new graphics, groundbreaking high-speed Thunderbolt I/O technology and a new FaceTime HD camera.
(Excerpt) Read more at macdailynews.com ...
I usually build with AMD but if I were buying or building Intel I would only get a Sandy Bridge processor. Not the first gen i3, i5, i7. In fact I am tempted to build a Sandy Bridge desktop computer
Memory is so cheap you should get 8gb for that upscale system
Wrong guy.
She wanted to learn about multi-boot. Building one was the best way to gain that experience. There was no consideration of "saving money", "getting a computer on the cheap", etc. in that activity.
Remember, my comments about valuing one's time have to do with being honest about adding up the cost of a "cheap" PC. An intentional learning experience is a completely different goal.
I understand the tactic, but I don't understand how you expect it to work. We're presented with the argument that you simply cannot build a computer cheaper than you can go out and buy a new Mac,after you figure the cost of your time to build it, and the value of warranty and support.
The premise is that there is no warranty if you build your own. The reality is that if you bought good quality parts, they all came with a warranty, and vendors of major components provide support like firmware and driver updates and support forums. As far as support goes, it's unlikely that someone who buliding their own computer would have much need for outside support.
You submit that you've built your own, but only as an exercise in learning about multi-boot. Setting up multi-boot is simply a matter of OS installtion options, and possibly bios settings if you're wanting to select boot from different physical devices. You can do that with off-the-shelf systems just as well as what you built yourself.
The bottom line is that absent needing a very specialized piece of hardware, there will never be a reason to not buy a Mac, and there will be lots of reasons not to buy something else. The explanations may not make sense, but there will be a lot of them.
My Core 2 Quad Q6600 still handles any daily tasks, even if it is slower than a i5-650.
AMD makes a nice processor for netbooks (E-350?). It is outclassed everywhere else. Bulldozer better at least match Nehelem.
Now you're back tracking. Dancing to cover your faux pas. We know what you said and no amount of wiggling can reverse your error. Dennis, we KNOW you are ignorant of things Apple... It's OK. Just quit trying to "educate" us who are not. We know a lot more than you do, being intimately familiar with BOTH platforms, unlike you.
You certainly can homebrew the hardware of a WinPC of decent quality, and add a low-end copy of Windows, cheaper than the cost of a new Mac. But then you have a Windows machine, not a Mac. To get the equivalent capabilities of the Mac (OS, built-in applications) you spend more money than just for the hardware and baseline Windows OS. Of course, not everyone thinks that's desirable; tastes vary.
> The premise is that there is no warranty if you build your own. The reality is that if you bought good quality parts, they all came with a warranty, and vendors of major components provide support like firmware and driver updates and support forums. As far as support goes, it's unlikely that someone who buliding their own computer would have much need for outside support.
That's a good point. And I'll grant you that I follow that path myself at times.
> You submit that you've built your own, but only as an exercise in learning about multi-boot. Setting up multi-boot is simply a matter of OS installtion options, and possibly bios settings if you're wanting to select boot from different physical devices. You can do that with off-the-shelf systems just as well as what you built yourself.
I see I was unclear in telling the story; sorry about that. Here's a clearer cut at it.
I myself have built, on average, one homebrew computer every 2 years or so, since 1976. The first few were hand wire-wrapped 6502-, 6800-, and 6809-based; I did my own circuit designs and wrote my own BIOS and drivers. Later ones were constructed from a mobo, CPU, RAM, and board-level components, based on x86 CPUs. Something around a dozen home-built machines overall.
My daughter was born in 1993. Her first computer was a 386-based box built from components with DOS and Win95 on it, that I made for her (she was 5). She helped construct, and used, a couple of other built-from-component Windows and Linux boxes until in 2005 or so she said she wanted a multi-boot system and wanted to learn how to do it herself.
So no, only that most recent homebrew of hers was a learning experience in multi-boot. I'd been doing multi-OS systems for years before that (around 2002 or so).
It was a Big Deal to decide that she would buy a Mac, and she had mixed feelings about it. It was the first machine she used at home that wasn't homebrew. She justified it on the basis that she needed a portable, and building her own portable wasn't practical from a mechanical reliability point of view.
My long run of homebrews was really for two reasons: I wanted to learn, and I wanted exactly what I wanted. I still build systems from components when I need something out of the ordinary, but most of the time a commercial assembled system does the job and saves me enough time to justify the extra cost of somebody else putting it together. Some are WinPCs, some are Macs. I'm not a partisan, I just have a lot of different jobs to do, and try to get a tool that best fits the task. While having fun and still learning. :)
If the requrement is that if have a Mac OS, then the question of whether it's cheaper to build your own is moot. As far as whether a modern Windows PC is "equivalent" to it's Mac counterpart that's pretty subjective. As long as there is any difference, someone will find it significant enough to justify saying they are not "equivalent".
AMD makes plenty of CPUs that do great with Windows 7. I wouldn't call that out classed. The top 45 scoring CPUs are Intel but who cares except real enthusiasts. For Windows 7 a score of 2000 and above is enough for the vast majority of computer users and buyers. Plus I like the on board Radeon video on AMD boards
AMD is awful on laptop chips. Their chip naming system is awful. I can't figure out what I am getting when I buy an AMD powered laptop
True. By "equivalent to the [Mac] OS and built-in applications" I meant the OS should be equivalently robust, stable, and flexible, and the applications should cover the same functional capabilities. No requirement that it actually -be- Mac OS-X -- there are Windows equivalents of most or all of the Mac built-in apps, and IMO Win7 is getting pretty close to Mac OS in terms of robustness and stability; it may beat Mac OS-X for overall flexibility since Apple is fairly restrictive.
> As far as whether a modern Windows PC is "equivalent" to it's Mac counterpart that's pretty subjective. As long as there is any difference, someone will find it significant enough to justify saying they are not "equivalent".
As a constant daily user of both, usually simultaneously, my comment is that if we're talking Windows 7 Pro or Ultimate 64-bit and Mac OS-X 10.6 Snow Leopard, they're awful darn close in most important functional respects. Yes, each one has some things the other does not -- but I eschew partisan arguments whenever possible. :)
The only major architectural item missing from Windows 7 is Unix underneath. I install Cygwin over it to gain the most critical Unix-like functions, but that isn't the same as having it at the OS level. It's the one thing Mac OS-X has that makes me prefer the Mac over Windows for my daily use. And it's so silly -- Microsoft was a Unix house long ago, and knows that it's the right way to do things.
Someday, when Microsoft finally sh*tcans the NT codebase and puts the Windows GUI over Unix, they'll have achieved Satori. But they'll have to put Ballmer permanently out to pasture before that happens. Hell may have to freeze first.
Not to mention cooler (as in, less hot; hence more efficient), snapping to full brightness instantly, with a wider color gamut and better color consistency from edge to edge and over time.
That would be a monumental task. There's a hell of a lot more to Microsoft's codebase than Windows.
What do you think the chances are that somebody over at Apple is busy porting Powershell to OSX?
I'd think.... zero. OS-X has six major flavors of the Bourne and Csh families of Unix shells already, any of which are at least as capable as Powershell:
% cat /etc/shells /bin/bash /bin/csh /bin/ksh /bin/sh /bin/tcsh /bin/zshPowershell is great on a Windows box, I agree. But only because COMMAND.COM and CMD.EXE were the only native alternatives until it appeared. Granted all shells have their strengths and weaknesses. But overall, Powershell is 20 years behind the times. They should have supplied that as a baseline part of Windows 3.1, and been expanding on it since.
> That would be a monumental task. There's a hell of a lot more to Microsoft's codebase than Windows.
Quite true.
It is widely acknowledged even at Microsoft that no one knows the internal structure of the NT codebase any more. It grew like Topsy over two decades, and is a huge mess, architecturally. When they change one part of it, things break in other parts that should have no interrelationship, yet are interdependent in poorly understood (or unknown) ways. This is why it's so difficult to manage the development of the OS -- nobody anywhere REALLY knows all of what happens when you change parts of it. This was one of the key reasons why the NT6 (Vista) development took so long and had to be repurposed to produce NT6.1 (Win7).
By comparison, the internals of Unix are well-understood by thousands of experienced programmers around the world, and changes are made in a fairly straightforward and predictable fashion. That's how it was possible for Apple to graft the Mac GUI over Unix in only a few years, and have the result be stable and relatively simple. They knew that the old Apple MacOS had reached the end of its usefulness, and chucked it. Microsoft needs to do the same with NT, painful as it is -- graft the Windows GUI over Unix and proceed into the future instead of constantly being held back by past errors.
The argument of back-compatibility with MS-DOS and old versions of Windows became moot a few years ago with the rise of mobile devices. Business apps based on Win2K and WinXP are migrated into VMs now. Microsoft needs to move into the present immediately, and prepare for the future.
By which I meant NT 3.1, the first release of NT. Not the DOS-based 3.1.
is there any large office that uses macs? I am talking 100+ computers.
seems they are all PC.
WTF?
Powershell uses a dotnet object-oriented pipeline (as opposed to the strictly text/string based Nix shells). The first version of the dotnet framework didn't appear until XP/Server 2003.
Oh, I didn't mean a useful shell had to be identically Powershell or use .NET -- just that Windows NT should have had SOME kind of a powerful interactive and programmable shell from the very start.
Neither MacOS nor Windows had a useful shell at that time; Windows had COMMAND/CMD "batch" processing and MacOS had basically nothing. And yet powerful shells had been around for decades. And it wasn't like Dave Cutler didn't know that -- DEC machines were where Unix got started, after all.
Unfortunately, both MacOS and WinNT remained glorified toys until the end of the century. That was where Microsoft lost the architectural lead -- MacOS leaped ahead with OS-X, and Windows merely grew a Fisher-Price colored UI and sat on its duff for seven years trying to achieve security by "Mother May I?" UAC.
I sure hope Windows 8 changes that pattern. BTW, will that be NT7?
That's like saying "C is at least as good as C#".
IMHO, your bias is showing.
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