Posted on 02/16/2004 2:08:15 AM PST by Swordmaker
Conventional wisdom paints the Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) Macintosh as a "soft" machine. Elementary schools might use it, and those in creative fields might use it, but those who want to do hard-core computation choose workstations running Windows, Unix or Linux, right?
Not necessarily.
"If you pull up a shot of NASA after the [first] Mars landing and look at the desktops, you'll see a couple of PC laptops there, but you'll see more PowerBooks," Jon Rubinstein, senior vice president for hardware engineering at Apple, told the E-Commerce Times.
Although no hard figures are available to chart the Mac's rise in scientific communities, anecdotal evidence suggests various Apple machines, from the Xserve G5 to the PowerBook, have become viable options. For example, Virginia Tech chose last fall to build a supercomputing cluster using Power Mac G5s, then decided to upgrade to Xserve G5s when those machines became available. The university's choice of Apple products stemmed from the computers' attractive price-performance ratio, Virginia Tech spokesperson Lynn Nystrom recently told the E-Commerce Times. As Apple continues to reinvent itself, how are scientists putting Macs to work in research projects and other innovative endeavors?
Macs for Mars
Matt Golombek, a planetary geologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), has used Apple machines since the Mac SE came out in the late 1980s. Golombek told the E-Commerce Times that 90 percent of his JPL colleagues also use Macs for a host of reasons.
In Golombek's case, he was responsible for choosing the landing sites for both of the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. To make that determination, he needed to render maps, mosaics and related images into Canvas, a graphics application. This task entailed layering maps together and being able to toggle between different data sets to find parallels between them.
"For our landing site work, we always get the highest-end desktop Mac we can find, so we just got one of the G5s with dual 2-GHz processors and 8 GB of RAM," Golombek told the E-Commerce Times. "We are dealing with Canvas files that are a gigabyte in size. They're huge, huge files, so we need every bit of performance we can get."
According to Golombek, Macs traditionally have been superior in handling images. Although PCs may have caught up in this regard, he added, the Mac's ease of use and computational power ensure he has no plans to switch to another platform. That said, he is eager for Apple to introduce a PowerBook G5 so that he can take advantage of the new chip's ability to handle more RAM.
'A Revelation'
Michael Swenson, life sciences computing analyst at research firm IDC, told the E-Commerce Times that Apple's Unix-based Mac OS X has been the driver of Mac popularity in such areas as bioinformatics and chemistry, mainly because porting open-source applications from Linux and Unix has become a trivial process.
"Having that flexibility to hit a key and go from Microsoft Office to an open-source application and back is appealing" to scientists, Swenson said.
For his part, Theodore Gray, director of user interface technology and co-founder of Mathematica maker Wolfram Research, said that before OS X, some problems were too big for Macs to handle. Now, he noted, Macs can tackle almost any task.
"It's safe to say that, since Mac OS X became widely adopted, there has been an increase of use within [the scientific] community," Gray told the E-Commerce Times. "Scientists tend to prefer Unix (including Linux) over anything else, and Mac OS X is a revelation. You can compile all of your stuff: source code, projects, scientific subroutines. Mac OS X provides a nice environment for all of them."
Indeed, as senior software engineer at the MIT Whitehead Institute for Genome Research, William Van Etten once needed four computers to do his work: a Windows box for productivity , a Unix box for development, a Linux computer for Linux development and a notebook computer. When Mac OS X became viable, Van Etten was able to slim down to a single computer: a Mac.
Hardware BLAST
Gray added that Apple's strategy of designing both the Mac operating system and hardware allows the company to provide a more coherent and polished setup than typical PC configurations.
For example, Stan Gloss, managing director of life sciences IT consultancy The BioTeam, told the E-Commerce Times that certain applications in the bioinformatics industry are optimized for the G4 chip's velocity engine -- a coprocessor that increases application performance from five to 50 times over regular levels.
He added that the new G5 architecture, which supports 64-bit processing and up to 8 GB of RAM per unit (systems that handle 32-bit processing max out at 2 GB of RAM), is an even bigger boon for life sciences.
"In the life sciences, you are dealing with large data sets being input into memory, so you need a fairly large memory space when you are comparing, let's say, the genome of a fruit fly with a human genome," Gloss said.
He provided an example: Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST), a common bioinformatics application, works as a similarity search engine to match genomes. The program matches sequences of four letters representing a gene that can run almost indefinitely. Gloss said the Mac processes these queries at a speed that significantly improves the overall price-performance ratio of the organization using it.
In one practical application of Mac technology, BioTeam helped Texas A&M researcher David Adelson construct an Xserve cluster so that he and his team could map the cow genome. Adelson is expected to complete this work by the end of 2004.
Personal Preference
Why are these moves toward more Mac use taking place now? Gray contended that Apple occasionally takes a step ahead of other vendors in its price-performance ratio. The company now appears to be in one of those "leapfrog" cycles. Wolfram Research has a G4 cluster installed, and Gray said the company is happy with it because it is easy to maintain and is price competitive.
Indeed, because PCs no longer carry the huge price advantage they once did, choosing a hardware and software configuration now also involves an element of personal preference, Gray said. He noted that with Macs, "you do not have the sort of virus problem as with Windows."
And David J. Stevenson, George Van Osdol Professor of Planetary Science at Caltech, said that he, like Golombek, has used Macs for years because he does not want to be a rocket scientist of system administration. "A lot of scientists are like me -- they may know a lot more about how computers work than the general public, but they don't really care," Stevenson told the E-Commerce Times. "They just want something that works reliably."
As Apple's Mac becomes more and more reliable, its scientific renaissance is likely to gather steam.
My $700 refurbished IBM Thinkpad T22 running Linux 2.6 reaches 90% or more of what is achieved (performance wise and measure clock time) by a $3000 G4 OSX Laptop which was purchased using a gov't grant by a colleague. Size, weight and battery savings is quite comparable as is its functionality.
If my colleague had gone the same route as I did, she would have had $2300 left in her grant fund to buy something else, like hire a grad student for a summer or a number cruching server.
Instead, she funded Steve Jobs and leftist Hollywood (unwittingly of course). But, of course, she is "cool" since she uses a MAC, don't all the ads say so??
First, you're doing a refurbished/new comparison, second you're doing a Linux/Mac comparison where this so far was mainly about PC/Mac.
If it works well with low cost for your purpose then that's great. If you needed some software not available for Linux, like any decent design app, then you'll need another OS or platform.
IDC: Apple Macintosh market share under 2% worldwide; under 3% in United States for 2003
Wednesday, January 14, 2004 - 09:33 PM EST
snip
Kanellos reports, "By contrast, Gateway saw its market share shrink in the fourth quarter, Smulders said. Apple also saw its market share stay below the 2 percent mark worldwide in 2003 and below the 3 percent mark in the United States for the year, Smulders said."
Mac has no desire to become the chevy of computers. They are the BMW (with that wonderful leather interior.) The problem with making it a price thing is you soon end up with another just so so product. Anyone that owns and loves their mac , knows this. You get what you pay for !!
BS. Just another unsupportable fabrication by the Mac Moonies...
I am a former IT consultant and presently, CTO of an international natural resources corporation and I have held several similar high level IT positions in the past and based upon my personal experience, I can say that, without a doubt, Macs have a much lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) than similar PC's. They are also much, Much, MUCH more dependable. Even as an IT consultant, where all of my work was PC's and UNIX systems, I maintained my own mission critical stuff on Macs. After all, every hour that I would have spent chasing PC problems on my own system or just rebooting, would have been an hour that I could not bill out to a client.
In one company where we had some divisions that were exclusively PC users and other divisions that were exclusively Mac users, almost all of our help desk calls (97-98%) were PC related, while only about 60% of our computers were PC's. Furthermore, help desk calls concerning Macs were usually solved quickly, over the phone in that initial call, while more than half of PC related calls required multiple call-backs and often required a tech to attend the problem computer, either in person or remotely. Although at that time, the Macs cost a good deal more as a capital expense item than comparable PC's, the ongoing maintenance costs (including down time and productivity losses) of the PC's, soon passed even the most expensive Macs, that just sat there and ran without so much as a hiccup. On top of that, all of my staff with any kind of certifications were PC or UNIX people. We had no need of special training for Macs.
We are a 100% Mac shop at my current company and my staff is about 10% the size that it would be if we were a PC shop and with the exception of the network guys (router, satellite, etc.), they do not have to have nearly the level of expertise as would be required of PC techs. That translates to even further cost savings. Interestingly, the few calls that we do get now are, almost exclusively, how-to calls concerning Microsoft Word, Excel and Entourage (Outlook for Mac) and have nothing at all to do with the Mac, itself (questions about Word text styles, defining shortcut keys, Excel macros, etc.).
When it came to TCO, the more expensive Macs of the past had it all over PC's at the time. Now, with Macs being competitively priced and more stable than ever, while PC are flakier than ever, that TCO gulf is widening rapidly.
I resemble that remark... as a computer consultant for a number of small businesses married to Windows because of required software, I am sitting at the bottom of that "rat hole" collecting a lot of that money.
On the other hand, those businesses I have convinced to go Mac have not regretted it... and I don't collect nearly as much money as I used to from them!
The Mac client always was the premier friendly interface to larger databanks and supercomputers; Apple, SGI, Cray, and Sun have always worked closely.
Well, I also thought that headline was abit over the top considering all the science people who were using Macs before. Just look in the article: many of the people cited have been using Macs for years! They are just happier than ever with OS X.
SYDNEY 12 June 2002.
A study from technology research company, Gartner has found Apple Macintosh computers to be up to 36 percent cheaper to own and run than competing PC products. The study utilised Gartner's Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) methodology, which takes into account the direct and indirect costs of owning IT infrastructure. Direct costs include all hardware and software costs for desktop and mobile computers, servers and peripherals as well as upgrades, technical support and annual depreciation. Indirect costs cover the costs of end-users supporting themselves and each other, end-user training time and non-productive downtime.
The report compares the TCO for the University's Mac environment with its PC environment. It also compared the University's Mac environment with similar sized PC installations around the world. The research was conducted at Melbourne University in the Faculty of Arts which included 4676 Apple computers and 5338 Windows based machines. The relevant cost comparisons were $ 14.1 million and $ 18.9 million respectively. Apple systems cost just $ 1953 per year to support, Gartner found, compared with annual costs for Windows based machines of $ 2522.
Apple Computer Marketing Director, Arno Lenior, said the findings illustrated how medium to large sized organisations like Melbourne University could save time and money by investing in Macs over PCs. There is a perception that Macs are more expensive than PCs but this report proves what we've long believed - Macintosh is the most cost effective and efficient platform available, said Marketing Director, Apple Computer, Arno Lenior.
In examining direct costs, Gartner found that Macs required less technical support and the hardware and software costs were lower. Gartner found that this translated into direct savings of 25 percent over similar sized organisations using personal computers. University of Melbourne IT staff were able to manage more Macintosh systems per person servicing 30 Apple computers for every 23.2 Windows based computer. Macs are designed to be easy to use. The report highlighted this, proving that Mac users at the University required less formal training and didn't rely as heavily on technical staff as PC users. When something did go wrong, the technical staff solved the problem faster on Macs than PCs, said Lenior.
The Gartner report found that the Mac's efficiency and ease of use resulted in additional indirect savings of 43 percent. When combined, the Total Cost of Ownership for Melbourne University's Macs was 36 percent lower than similar PC environments elsewhere. Perhaps even more importantly, when questioned on how they felt about their networks Mac users at the University were happier than their PC counterparts.
Does that mean my daughter in laws 17 inch one too?
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