I get that quite often as well. It probably boils down to the fact, that a lot of people have yet to realize, that OS X has arrived. Pre-X Mac operating systems pretty much suck ass, if you're a Windows or Unix kinda guy/gal anyway. OS X is modern, advanced, stable and, well, cool. Please don't mistake it for those older Mac operating systems. Thanks.
That has been my experience exactly. Apple has to work harder to remove the stains of the pre-X mess. Most people I present the Mac proposition to are surprised to hear that it's fully compatible with Windows networks and Office files. Those seems to be the two major issues.
Once that's cleared up, warm feelings are quick to heat up. Usually followed by a lot of "wow, that's cool!", "sooo sweet", and "how much was that again?".
> Holy bigjeebuz! I'd rather buy a car for those money
Hmm, try to compair prices on Mac's with prices on brand-pc's... I think you'll find the prices more than fair... And if you're interested a user-friendly and stable unix-system, machines with a lot of power (please do not run the megahertz (giga*) myth on me) and a kick-ass design... well, there's only one path to go...
Read my lips - I'm switching too... after eighteen years of ibm/microsoft pc's
Challenge by martin (tm) on January 29, 11:15
Show me the money.. gimme da cash. Pricy but cool.
Why are we too focused on pure CPU p0wer? Sales trick?
"Hmm, try to compair prices on Mac's with prices on brand-pc's... I think you'll find the prices more than fair... "
That by far depends on your definition of fair. If you find it fair to pay roughly one third more for your hardware in order to get the OSXperience, then I will not dispute that the prices for Macs are fair.
The experience might be worth it, but at the moment the figures at the bottom of my bankaccounts tell me that it isn't time to invest in some expensive, subjective, and inmeasurable experience that may or may not suit me.
It is a darn shame that money is what's keeping me (and a bunch of other people I bet) from switching, but in the end that is what it comes down to - no matter how cool or stable OSX is.
I gather you should never invest in anything expensive without taking the product for a test-drive. Exactly because the experience is so important with an Apple machine, you can't really make a purchase decision just by comparing numbers.
What you can do, though, is place trust in people who you think like the same experience as you do. That's how many people decide what kind of entertainment to buy. They read reviews of movies and music hoping that the reviewer value the same kind of experience they do.
But I understand if you don't want to hope that your sense of a good experience equals mine or any of the other Mac people claiming so. That would be a bit of a bet.
It's just that I haven't read about a single person who had a Mac with OS X and thought "no way, I'm going to Windows!". But we get the other way around all the time at the moment.
Dual Processors for workstations is a waste of a perfectly good CPU. It is a myth that it matters at all for the desktop user.
Mac OS may look cool (actually Aqua looks damn cool, no question about it), but the core OS is still a ripped apart BSD branch. It would annoy the hell out of me to use a system where several importat concepts have been ditched for no good reason.
Comparing Apple prices to that of brand PCs is unfair (even if the PC setup wins by a fair margin). If you want to waste money on a brand PC then go do so. Appleish systems on just as good looking hardware but with better performance and stabilitity at lower than Apple prices is just not available. We who buy PCs have that option.
Why is the benefit of the dual processor machines a myth? I'm really asking, not confronting. Maybe you know something I don't. All the theory of operating systems (I just finished half a year of studies on that) supports the idea of duals being A Good Thing from the task switching point of view.
Apple seems to like the concept as well.
Everybody in PC land is raveing about how cool HyperThreading with the new P4's are.
Well I may have overstated my knowledge a bit. On the server side dual processors definatly does rock -- no doubt about it. I currently use a dual pentium III workstation at work. It very seldom uses more than one of its processors no matter what task I do. This is a story I have had confirmed from many other people (one, two years ago a common story in PC land was to buy two slightly slower CPUs and expect better performance. Don't know anybody who actually got that).
One of the few tasks that may make it use its second processor is a very heavy source code compilation task, and at that it seems to make the number of IO reads explode (which brings the machine to a noticable slowdown). It is my theory that the desktop users CPU intensive tasks for the most part is directly associated with IO intensive tasks which the two processors then have to fight about.
I'm not that much in the know about hyperthreading, but isn't that a single CPU mechanisme that only deals with branching and the like in the CPU and its onboard cache memory? Don't really know...
