Posted on 05/27/2005 10:53:28 AM PDT by Swordmaker
I have been Macified. After not owning a Macintosh for more than 12 years I finally decided that the undeniable coolness and beauty of the hardware and particularly of OS X meant that it was time to get religion!
The beast, which arrived a couple of weeks ago, is a Power Mac G5 with dual 2-GHz processors and 1.5G bytes of RAM running OS X Tiger. What a gorgeous piece of engineering! It is an elegant design even under the hood: When you need to take off the side to, for example, add extra RAM, one latch frees the panel. And all the subsystems are plug-ins, making it incredibly easy to work on. Heaven.
Then when you run up OS X, again, wow. The operating system has a remarkable polish - just as if someone had thought about the design as a whole rather than finding and assembling a collection of spare parts and forcing them to fly in formation.
Anyway, back to the Macification: First I fooled around checking out all the cool new features. Tiger has a lot of really well-implemented new stuff that makes it significantly more powerful.
Next I decided to load my photographs into iPhoto. My photo collection is fairly large, weighing in at 14,618 files for a total of 18.7G bytes.
I copied the files to the Mac from my Windows desktop, an XP system that is misbehaving to the point where it is time to wipe it and start again. < digression > It is amazing that XP systems can get to a condition where it is easier to erase and re-install everything than diagnose and fix what's wrong. < /digression >
So now that I had the image files on the Mac I could start loading them into iPhoto. All seemed to go well with iPhoto doing its indexing and thumbnailing, then it finished - crash.
I restarted iPhoto. The program ran for a couple of minutes then, thud! I re-imported the photos. IPhoto finished the import, stayed up again for a couple of minutes, then thud. In the middle of this the 10.4.1 release of OS X came out, which apparently included some iPhoto improvements, but nothing I could find mentioned the problems I was seeing. I applied the upgrade and resorted to clearing out about 5,000 pictures and iPhoto seemed to become stable again.
Now, let's review: This was a brand-new machine, the system detected no problems and iPhoto hadn't been used before, but handling just less than 15,000 images made it blow up. And I thought Mac applications were generally considered to be better than Windows applications. Evidently this is not the case.
According to discussions I've had on lists and in Apple forums, there's no obvious explanation for my problems with iPhoto. According to Gary Stock, CTO of Exfacto: "From a Mac perspective, the surprising part is that iPhoto even tried, rather than warning you when you crossed some threshold or advising you to reduce the dataset."
Exactly! Which makes me think the problem is more fundamental than bad error-handling in the application, unless you are willing to believe that Apple's programmers are not very skilled.
From my experiences with Windows and now OS X, maybe when it comes to sophisticated, multimedia applications it doesn't matter what platform we're using. It may be the case that humans are not capable of creating stable software for the level of complexity required.
Maybe there's a sort of code-complexity limit that we have crossed in the latest generations of computer systems that makes software stability probabilistic rather than deterministic. If so, it makes for some interesting implications for systems engineering.
To begin with, managing systems in the future might be more like psychiatry than programming.
Despite these snafus I still love the Mac. It is just that my illusions are shattered.
Condolences to backspin@gibbs.com.
This sort of comment is just terminology snobbery.
It's also been a human tendency to blame the OS for applications breaking. While you're at the clue store, pick one up for yourself.
Correcting them serves no one well, other than to put them on notice that you are not in a mood to be sympathetic to non-computer nerds right then.
Now if I could just apply this ability to hear what people mean, not the terms they use imprecisely, when to listening to my wife, I might not be preparing divorce papers ;).
IPhoto sucks. Get something like Photo Mechanic or just use the browser in Photoshop CS.
Your files were probably corrupted by your windoze machine anyway.
That's not so. I think you need to do a bit of research before blowing off. it's true that Macs are using dual processors in a number of their high end machines- but that's not to keep up with the Intel P4.
Mac single processor machines do that quite handily.
Yep, you're wrong. And the wrongness comes from your self-satisfied complacency. You are guilty of the same sort of self-absorbtion you seem to accuse Mac owners of. You like PCs? Great. Hang in there, buddy! But don't feel that that complacency empowers you to talk knowingly about that which you clearly know little.
Signed: Proud RIGHT-WING Mac owner....
OK :)
Okay then, why is there only ONE single processor Power Mac available on the Apple web site store? Every review that I have read puts a Dual processor power mac against a single processor Pentium 4. Show me one review where a single processor Mac can hold it's own against a Pentium...
Welllllllll ... it is an Apple, after all... Apples and persimmons might be very tasty together.
As someone who is sitting with an absolutely gorgeous Mac Cube, which cost over $3000. and is now obsolete, discontinued and unexpandable..
How did you pay $3000 for a Mac Cube when the retail price on it at introduction was $1799 (450MHz) to $2299?
As for expansion, you can replace the standard 20 or 40 Gigabyte HD with an up to 200G HD, put in the max 1.5Gbytes of RAM, replace the 450MHz or 500MHz single G4 card with a GigaDesigns Dual 1.6 GHz Cube processor card, and replace the Rage 128 Pro Graphics card with a GeForce3 card... and get a blazing fast G4 that beats the Mac Mini.
If you don't want it... sell it. The current street price for a Mac Cube is between $500 and $700. I sold my old cube to a client where it is now doing service as a file server.
How many five year old Windows PCs can still bring one third of their sales price today?
The short answer is that it "it just works". Because Apple controls both the hardware and the operating system, a whole class of errors that you have with PCs dealing with badly written drivers or quirky hardware compatibility problems simply doesn't exist. It also means that I have a diagnostic disk for my iBook that can check the hard drive, memory, video card, and logic board if I suspect I'm having a hardware problem. Also, the hardware is also usually (though not always) top notch and looks good.
Personally, I'm also a Unix/Linux person and with OSX, the Mac gives me the best of all worlds. I can run Mac applications, Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer, and I can run a lot of Unix and Linux application and use Unix command-line tools. Basically, I can run a beautiful port of the most important Windows application (Microsoft Office) and get most of the benefits of Linux with a nicer user interface and access to more commercial software. And it's all in a very cost-effective solid-as-a-rock laptop that I don't fear carrying around in a canvas bag with no padding. And, personally, I consider the lack of games a feature given how much time I see my friends wasting on computer games. If I really want to play games, I'll get around to buying a PS2 or a PS3 or that nifty new XBox when it comes out.
As for Macs being liberal, the reality is that Silicon Valley and the entire tech industry is filled with liberals and foreign venders. Unless you build your own PCs from Taiwanese components and run only Linux and Open Source software, you are going to be supporting some company or another that backs liberal causes.
And when he abandons a perfectly serviceable OS for something else, how does that serve him? After all, any computer thingy that can't import photos is clearly broken, right?
Well, no. Broken apps are not the same as broken OS'es, and it seems to me that it doesn't serve anyone to conflate the two. If iPhoto is giving the poor guy headaches, save him the $500 he'll incur by tossing the machine in the trash, and instead explain the difference by proposing a replacement for iPhoto, rather than the machine. And it's hardly an imaginary problem - I've lost count of how many times I've had someone tell me "Windows is broken", when what they meant was that Word/Outlook/Quicktime/whatever is broken ;)
Tried that (with and without one of the d/led utilities.
That doesn't work.
Care to try and back that up?
Computers are a lot of fun... let's enjoy them!
Take the latest Dell XPS system, you can get the complete package, latest of every thing for under $2000. Apples low-end dual CPU similarly configured system (less monitor) is over $600 more. Why would Apple insist on the price hit by adding the second CPU of they didn't have to?
What computer isn't obsolete and discontinued five years later? As to "unexpandable", I'm not sure what you mean. The original 20 GB hard drive can be replaced with 128 GB for under $100, and additional storage (terabytes if you want) can be connected via FireWire. The original processor (450-500 MHz) can be upgraded to 1.7 GHz for $400. This won't make your Cube a supercomputer, but it will make it highly useable.
Apple has been hot on dual CPUs since the late 90s/early 00s when they needed two to even get close to the performance of your average Wintel. But now you get dual G5s that run slower and cooler than a Wintel, but (depending on the application) give you better performance, for the same or less price.
Take the latest Dell XPS system, you can get the complete package, latest of every thing for under $2000. Apples low-end dual CPU similarly configured system (less monitor) is over $600 more. Why would Apple insist on the price hit by adding the second CPU of they didn't have to?
Let's take that about $2,000 price point. For that in an Apple you get dual 2 GHz PPC970s, 1 GHZ FSB, 512MB RAM, 160GB SATA HDD, Radeon 9600 128MB, excellent audio, and a dual layer DVD writer. A Dell Dimension with approximate specs will cost you about the same. You do get speakers with the Dell but the audio will be inferior. You also won't get Firewire, OS X or all the free applications that come with the Mac, and the Dell is louder (the Mac's temperature management is wonderful).
As you can see, Apple can affordably put dual processors in a system. And if you've ever used dual processors on any OS, they're sweet.
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