Posted on 10/20/2001 11:49:24 AM PDT by CheneyChick
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:16:28 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Mac heads shouldn't get too upset when they see how closely Windows XP apes Apple's OS X. In the long run, imitation can only help Jobs & Co.
Even though Windows XP won't be officially released until Oct. 25, I can hear the Mac faithful howling already. Once again, Mac heads are accusing Microsoft of building its latest PC operating system on innovations pioneered at Apple. And, quite frankly, they have a point. New XP features such as Windows Movie Maker, My Pictures, and the revamped Windows Media Player strike me as awfully similar to Apple's iMovie, Image Capture, and iTunes software.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessweek.com ...
This is pretty silly. Apple is no longer the innovater it once was. Both companies are swiping these ideas from innovative small companies.
prissoner6
No, but would you want to be in the fast-food service business and have products or services imcompatible with McDonalds? Because we live in a capitalistic society, we let the marketplace decide issues like "winning" and "better". In planned economies, selected individuals get to to tell the masses which products, services, things and ideas are better.
From: Experienced User
Re: It Ain't the Way It Used To Be
I have been following this debate since we got really excited that we could go to an 80 character screen and 64K on our cutting edge Apple. I have owned four PCs and 2 Macs and used many more than that at work. By training I am a control systems engineer. I have written both 6800 and 8085 hex code.
I now have a 450MHz, fairly generic P-II PC, with 250 MBRAM and two USBs in use (a camera and an iPAQ). It's nearly 3 years old and was at that time a top-of-the-line box. I bought it because my prior box had been a Mac-II that bombed fairly frequently, couldn't run a decent CADD program, and cost WAY too much considering its functionality. For a living, I write books, do CADD, consult, and try to keep track of my money. I can now say with some rationale, that owning a PC has become a vicious treadmill.
When I added the iPAQ i had the wondrous experience of BSD, as often as 7 times per day. This little irritant often takes TWO boots to clear. So I thought I would go modern and upgrade to Win2K... AFTER blowing the $300 for software and attendant upgrades, I still can't figure out how or whether to do the upgrade. Now, this is pretty dispiriting, as I don't think I am that unusual and am certainly not a stupid person. The problem is that I can't get a full complement of drivers even if I wanted to and NO ONE will tell me how to do the complete process of reformatting the monster and getting back to where I was should I make a mess of it. The manufacturer (Micron) refuses to support a machine that old and tells me that I shouldn't bother, preferring to regale me with stories of people who replace their computers every 90 days...
Did you hear that PC fans? 90 days.
After confronting this little tid-bit I concluded that I really don't want to spend the rest of my life feeding CDs and waiting for downloads. I would prefer a slower product life-cycle with more time spent developing rugged, error-free software and making sure that a minor concern such as CUSTOMER SERVICE is respected by maintaining access to a current set of drivers or links to get them from someone else.
I really don't mind that technology progresses so rapidly, I simply resent the fact that products are sold as backward compatible to Win98 and are not. I don't appreciate each vendor messing with the guts of my system software without explaining the rationale BEFORE I BUY THE PRODUCT, a 'What we do to your machine,' as it were.
"Oh but CO that would be too hard, there are so many configurations out there..."
Exactly.
Wake up PC land, this customer is looking around again.
I admit I really LIKED the Coco (even if it was a sister under the skin with Macs)! It had great user support!
Still does actually.
I'm thinking of putting mine to use recording and posting pertinent weather information from a home brew wx station.
Should be online after the first of the year. Have to figure a way around that 300 baud modem though...LOL!
prisoner6
Agreed! It (currently) does a couple of things marginally better. For most useres it doens't mean a thing.
Like pigeons picking up a piece of flashy, aluminum gum wrapper, it's my opinion that Apple folk are attracted by colors and form rather than usability and practicality.
Then there's that Penn State like cult...
prisoner6
You have revealed that you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. Every Mac tower, starting with the Blue and White (circa 1999) has a hinged door that allows the user to drop the entire side of the tower down for complete access to the guts. No screwdriver needed. Apple designed this because they know their users like to tinker. I open my case more often than I raise the hood of my car.
Apple doesn't even see fit to provide 3.5 floppy access...
I can't remember the last time I used a 3.5 inch floppy, and I can't imagine why I would ever need one now. They are so 3 years ago. Again you are revealing that you are not in touch with current computing technology.
Don't wanna know, don't care. Every time I did check 'em they cost WAY more than what I would pay for a similar PC.
And the salesman would show me cute stuff I would NEVER use and claim it was a techno breakthrough.
Yeah right!
As to the 3.5 flopp0ies just what DO YOU use to transfer between machines? Especially when you are moving from one office to another and the bixes may not even have cd-roms?
3.5's are convenient, cheap and universal. Why I can even use them to transfer doc files to some Apple machines!
Seriously Apple always bugged me - much like Compaq - with the proprietary systems. Need something ya gotta go back to the slaes people.
Not my slice of pie.
prisoner6
If Mac users are such simpletons, and are marginalized and trivialized as only ~5% of the market, then why do you and the other PC bigots spend so much time worrying about us??
It seems to me that if we are so demented, then you should just let us be happy wallowing in our dementia. BUT NO!!! Misery LOVES company, and it just kills you PC bigots that Mac users could actually LIKE their computers.
All the PC bigots think that since we enjoy using our computers that there MUST be something wrong with us. I mean there is simply NO way that using a computer can actually be enjoyable, right?? Well, it wouldn't be enjoyable if we had to worry about DLL conflicts, a dearth of interrupts, the dreaded Blue Screen of Death 8 times a day, winmodems, etc etc etc etc.
It is obvious that most of the PC bigots on this thread have NEVER used a Mac. If somebody is willing to say in public that a Mac is not expandable, then I question their veracity and credibility. As a matter of fact most all the newer Macs don't even require a screwdriver to get to the guts. You just pull a handle and the whole machine just unfolds.
And before anybody starts acting like I am clueless, let me state my bona fides. I personally with my own two hands have sold over a million dollars worth of PC hardware to the consultants around W-S at the wholesale level. I personally with my own two hands have built at LEAST 350 machines including OS installs.
I have also been a sys. admin. (The ONLY one there) at an ISP, and I can program in a half dozen different languages, using nearly every IDE known to man/woman.
Within arm's reach right now are a half dozen or so machines: 2 Red Hat Linux boxes, an NT 4.0 sp6 box, a windoze 98 SE box, an 8100/100 AV PowerMac, and a Powercenter pro 180 (Mac clone).
As soon as the 1930's like depression in the IT sector passes, my next box will prolly be a 2000 server/FreeBSD dual-boot box. BTW, I built every box in here that does not have the Mac OS running on it.
Furthermore, I have also been a windoze repair technician in the past, and have seen nearly every type of Windoze related issue you can imagine. All I can say is that the Windoze bigots here who are bad-mouthing the Mac REALLY don't know what they are talking about.
Care to guess which machine I am using to compose this post??
There ARE legitimate points of contention between the Mac OS and Windoze, but this OS war thread doesn't seem to be the place to discuss them. Generalizations about Mac users liking flashy things are so absurd and based in ignorance, that it is hard to have an intelligent discourse. Ad hominem attacks on the Mac OS only prove the point that the Mac must be doing SOMETHING right, or it's users couldn't get your goat so easily.
PS-- Bill Gates did NOT LOAN Apple 150 million. He bought 150 million worth of Apple's stock. And Apple's stock OUTPERFORMED his own for a long time after that. He made more money on that investment than he would have buying back his own company's stock. NEVER let it be said that Gates is NOT a savvy investor. He saw that Apple's stock was at a price that had their market capitalization at LESS than the worth of Apple's physical assets. It was CLEARLY a super bargain at that time, and he made a GOOD investment decision. To this day Apple has a HUGE reserve of cash, despite their piddly ~5% market share.
From http://www.owenink.com/26.pdf:
"Even Microsoft benefitted from Apple's fabulous financial performance. The preferred shares of Apple that Microsoft purchased for $150 million in August 1997 are convertible into 9.1 million common shares, leaving Redmond sitting on a paper pretax profit of well over $1 billion in early 2000."
No, but would you want to be in the fast-food service business and have products or services imcompatible with McDonalds? Because we live in a capitalistic society, we let the marketplace decide issues like "winning" and "better". In planned economies, selected individuals get to to tell the masses which products, services, things and ideas are better.
I think that the intent of the original post was to support the position that Apple Computer has a superior product line. I agree with that postion, Apple *does* have a superior product line when compared to off the shelf WinPC's. Whether the "sheeple", a word bantered about here on FR perhaps a little too often, embrace this reality is not in question, they obviously don't. This does not change the fact that the MacOS and the platform it runs on is proven to be far superior to WinPC's in regards to un-interupted uptime stat's and ease of use. No plug and pray here.
Relax, have a cup of tea, tune in some elevator/easy listening music on the radio and get a grip.
It might help if you gaze into that translucent colored case housing an iMac. Works for me.
Really this thread was taunting PC'rs from the word go, but as far as I can see the original post and replys were all in good fun.
prisoner6
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.