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oops double post sorry

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<P>Oooh waiting for class to start I see you guys <STRONG>discussing</STRONG> Macs and PCs and I have to jump in.<BR><BR>I spent the first five? years of my childhood using an old macintosh, the classic Apple IIci, which I loved and still have it in my basement and saddened by the fact that the video board is pretty much dead.<BR><BR>After that we got an IBM, with ms-dos. I loved dos and still love it today. I taught myself to type using dos and playing the old typing adventure games like Kings quest, quest for glory, zork etc.<BR><BR>Than came windows 3.1 which was horrible, win 95 was awesome, 98 even better, my dad had win2k on his laptops and finally we got a comp with XP. After years of not using Macintosh, I used one again in highschool, and those had OSX on them. One of the things I noticed was that OSX was very different from the classic system 6 I loved. OSX seemed to be too simple, it felt foreign, and almost fruity looking. Anothing thing very quick to notice was the lack of games. Since the majority of my computer usage as a child was with an OS that had awesome game support, OSX was like something old people would use. <BR></P>

<P>I remember going to egghead software, and when you want to games, there was PC and MAC games. Well that was gone. I was kind of pissed at apple, not just because of games but they totally switched around the way things looked and felt. <BR></P>

 

I'm not saying that OSX is a bad system, however, a few of you people pointed out, and is easy to observe, the typical mac user (and I'm not calling anyone here that) has this shared collective consciousness that anything non-mac is inferior in everyway, and that they are the smartest people in the world, okay not everyone, but they have this smug, stuck up attitude.

 

Try asking them questions about their hardware, they probably won't know or care because they don't have to. A big chunk of mac's market are the non-power users who don't want to take the time to actually understand why something works, but the fact that their machine just works is good enough for them. And yes there are windows users that are just as ignorant, but my point is that mac really appeals to the less technically inclined.

 

Whenever people get in this debate, I say whatver works for you. I have always loved windows because I like the feel of it, the layout and games. My dad loves to remind me how greedy and evil Bill Gates is and how Apple is so great. But both companies are greedy corporations. Microsoft office is an expensive suite of software and is a bitch to buy especially when funds are tight and you're a college student.

Apple has their iTunes which each song cost a buck, if your HDD crashes and you forgot to back it up, you're screwed. Also you can't synch your ipod with more than like 3 computers or something like that. Now you can install windows on a mac, sound like to me if you can't beat em... And according to OSX's EULA, you can only install it on an APPLE computer, thus making it illegal to install it on a pc (I'm not sure about VMware). Talk about evil corporation.

 

Microsoft and Apple are both greedy bastards. But I know that windows plays games and can do all that apple can and is upgradble. Sure Mac is a UNIX based system is theres less resource hogging, however, this brings me to the next point.

 

If you want an OS that isn't caught up in all the shit about money and usage look at Linux. I've just recently started reading more into linux and have tried it out, and I'm really liking it, its exciting and I can't wait for my new laptop to arrive so I can dualboot with Ubuntu and broaden my horizons.

 

I don't hold all the answers nor do I claim to. Its a matter of preferance.

 

Okay I'm done. Please excuse my rambling.

 

 

 

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Jesus. So much unnecessary hate in this thread.

 

I don't own a Mac myself. I'm unlikely to buy one in the near future. I still prefer Macs over Windows PCs though. Yes, they're not perfect, and yes you pay a premium for the "brand", I get that. But from an aesthetic standpoint, yes they are better. From a technical standpoint, Mac OS X is based on Unix which immediately raises it a peg above Windows (despite its weird implementation of pointer ballistics - which is fixable with a third party hack. Windows also needs its fair share of third party software before I find it usable, so I can't hold that against either of them). I can't speak to the quality of the hardware as I haven't used them for the extended periods of time necessary to test them properly, but I can say that I personally have not experienced any problems with them.

 

From where I'm standing, they're perfectly fine machines and I think all the dislike for them is as reactionary and silly as the insipid lovin' they get from the fanboy crowd.

 

Linux trumps all of course. :D

My games | Public Service Announcement: TDM is not set in the Thief universe. The city in which it takes place is not the City from Thief. The player character is not called Garrett. Any person who contradicts these facts will be subjected to disapproving stares.
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Jesus. So much unnecessary hate in this thread.

 

I don't own a Mac myself. I'm unlikely to buy one in the near future. I still prefer Macs over Windows PCs though. Yes, they're not perfect, and yes you pay a premium for the "brand", I get that. But from an aesthetic standpoint, yes they are better. From a technical standpoint, Mac OS X is based on Unix which immediately raises it a peg above Windows (despite its weird implementation of pointer ballistics - which is fixable with a third party hack. Windows also needs its fair share of third party software before I find it usable, so I can't hold that against either of them). I can't speak to the quality of the hardware as I haven't used them for the extended periods of time necessary to test them properly, but I can say that I personally have not experienced any problems with them.

 

From where I'm standing, they're perfectly fine machines and I think all the dislike for them is as reactionary and silly as the insipid lovin' they get from the fanboy crowd.

 

Linux trumps all of course. :D

 

What exactly do you mean by "an aesthetic standpoint"? Do you mean that the cases are nicer to look at? :)

 

I think it's understandable how people feel about Macs given the perception that Mac users give off about the superiority of Macs and the actual experience people have using them. Personally, I also think Macs are far behind PCs/Windows in a lot of ways.

 

For all the supposed reliability you always here about Apple products, every time I find myself in the position of having to use a Mac the keyboard or mouse is broken. The amount of times I've had problems with a keyboard or a mouse from any other company is essentially zero.

 

I also feel Apple is very arrogant in keeping a UI for their OS which works completely counter-intuitively to a Windows user. Microsoft has stolen plenty of ideas from Apple over the years, I think if Apple just made their UI more like Windows, it would help their user base tremendously.

 

Not to mention, now that OSX is for an x64 processor anyway, they should release it for all machines, not just their own. This would really make a true competitor to Microsoft and might give Microsoft some real motivation to get their act together after the disaster that is Windows Vista.

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A huge part of the 'hate problem' is exactly that macs aren't marketed as 'perfectly fine.' They're marketed as the Second Coming, and that if you don't embrace it you are some kind of stuffy, dumpy, poor-fitting business suit and glasses wearing nerdy dork-loser who can't get girls and refuses to see reality. Seriously, what kind of response can be expected from that type of marketing? They could've relied on the quality of their product alone and did well; instead they chose to sling insult, and thus brought the ire on themselves.

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I certainly don't hate Mac's...but I've used them enough to know that they're every bit as temperamental as Windows based PC's. We had Macs at my old tech support job, and they were always locking up....or doing some such nonsense. Certainly wasn't user error, we all knew what we were doing.

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Back in highschool I job shadowed with the IT guys, and when we had to fix the ibooks, that sucked so bad. There was like 30 screws and like 4 different screw sizes.

 

And those desktops that are the monitor stand with all the hardware at the bottom, it took an hour and a half just to unscrew all the screws, pull up the foiltape, pull out that hdd cage... just to replace a broken optical drive!

 

trying to repair them is a bitch.

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I think Apple's marketing is hilarious. :) Unjustified sometimes perhaps, but I get the feeling that the barbs are playful, not smug.

 

Honestly, they are a big bad company just like Microsoft in many respects. I have a lot of respect for their marketing department though. They sell a good story much better than Microsoft does, and I don't feel like vomiting when they do it. ("Your potential, our passion"? Yeah fucking right. You're not fooling anyone.)

 

What exactly do you mean by "an aesthetic standpoint"? Do you mean that the cases are nicer to look at? :)

The cases, the user interface, the "look'n'feel" of the operating system, the typography (in my opinion - it is a matter of taste of course, as the article there notes). All the subtle little visual and UI touches which Windows just doesn't have.

 

Compare Mac OS X's theming to Vista's theming sometime. They're both shiny and glossy, but compared to OS X, Vista comes off as a cheap hack.

 

(All this is my opinion. I do think it's worth something; I'm not speaking from a position of entire ignorance here, I do know a few things about aesthetics and interface design. You are of course free to disagree as long as your reactions aren't purely knee-jerk "they think they're so superior!!!" ones.)

 

I think it's understandable how people feel about Macs given the perception that Mac users give off about the superiority of Macs and the actual experience people have using them.

Understandable, sure. But still reactionary and silly nonetheless. :P

 

For all the supposed reliability you always here about Apple products, every time I find myself in the position of having to use a Mac the keyboard or mouse is broken. The amount of times I've had problems with a keyboard or a mouse from any other company is essentially zero.

I've honestly never had that problem. Which is not to say that it doesn't exist, just that I've never experienced it.

 

I also feel Apple is very arrogant in keeping a UI for their OS which works completely counter-intuitively to a Windows user. Microsoft has stolen plenty of ideas from Apple over the years, I think if Apple just made their UI more like Windows, it would help their user base tremendously.

Um... LOL. The primary differences between Mac interfaces and Windows interfaces, the ones that confuse users which are used to one system and then encounter the other (yes it does work both ways), are merely convention. I'll repeat that because it's important: Merely convention. They're completely arbitrary. If Apple were to change Mac OS X's GUI to function more like Windows', they'd simply be confusing their user base - not helping them at all. There is nothing inherently "more intuitive" about the Windows GUI than the Mac GUI. You're just used to the former and not the latter.

 

Not to mention, now that OSX is for an x64 processor anyway, they should release it for all machines, not just their own. This would really make a true competitor to Microsoft and might give Microsoft some real motivation to get their act together after the disaster that is Windows Vista.

It would certainly increase sales of their OS, but unfortunately that's not going to happen, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Apple is first and foremost a hardware manufacturer. That's where they make most of their money (see: the notable lack of Mac clones; the iPod; the iPhone).

 

Secondly, it makes the software easier to develop when you only need to write drivers for, and test against, a known set of proprietary hardware. When Microsoft changed the way hardware drivers work in Vista, thus obsoleting every single XP driver in one stroke, they had a huge problem on their hands. How many hardware manufacturers are there that make equipment for Windows PCs? Include the dozens or hundreds of shoddy no-name brands that nobody's ever heard about. How many product lines does each of those have? How many products in those product lines? How many models of that product? There are thousands of different devices which are or were compatible with Windows. To achieve 100% hardware compatibility you have to rewrite every single driver. That's a lot of work, and in many cases Microsoft can't do it since they don't have the specs or the old source code. And then you have to test every single driver. Thoroughly. In dozens of combinations with other equipment. Otherwise you get bugs and your operating system fails to work properly on many many PCs... oh, hey! Guess what happened? Microsoft tried their hardest to make it all work and spent lots and lots of bags of money in the process, and of course they largely failed anyway.

 

When Apple transitioned from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, which presumably had a completely new driver stack but was still perfectly compatible with all their legacy devices (up to a reasonable point, though they did and do have an impressive backwards-compatibility list), they didn't need to do any of that. They just looked at their existing source code and ported stuff over. If they needed specs they'd just ask their hardware department. Easy and cheap. Testing is also a lot easier and cheaper when you only have a few dozen types of machine to test on (each one pretty much identical to the others in its line).

My games | Public Service Announcement: TDM is not set in the Thief universe. The city in which it takes place is not the City from Thief. The player character is not called Garrett. Any person who contradicts these facts will be subjected to disapproving stares.
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@ Crispy

 

I think you are missing my point about the UI design. Microsoft's is superior in so far as the fact that they have a 90% market share. 90%. Nowadays that amounts to easily over a billion people who are familiar with the Windows UI and the Windows way of doing things. For better or worse, that is the reality and Apple should realize that and make there OS more approachable to Windows users.

 

And as for the argument about how 'hard' it would be for them to put their OS on PCs because they'd have to support so many different hardware configurations... I've heard this many times but frankly I just don't think it holds water. Apple is a business, and their objective should be to make as much money as possible, regardless of whether it would be a difficult transition or hard or whatever else.

 

Microsoft Windows makes something like 16 billion dollars or more in revenue a year. That is a lot of money. If Apple released their OS for PCs and took say, just 1% of that in their first year alone, which is clearly a vast underestimate of how well they would do, they would still be making an extra 160 million dollars a year. And over time they would obviously be doing better than 1% of Microsoft's sales. The cost for Apple to support some extra hardware for an OS which is already designed and fully functional would be nowhere near their potential profits. There is just no way you can make the argument that it would cost Apple more money than they would potentially reap.

 

I think for all of Apple's success in recent years with the IPod, their computer division remains tragically mismanaged and stuck in the 1980's.

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I personally think they would be fools to change their computer division. Just because windows owns a market share doesn't mean all Operating systems should emulate it. I love the Mac UI, it's wonderful and far better than windows in my opinion. Microsoft is interested in domination, but Apple seems to have a different agenda and I applaud them for that. Sure, they're not raking in the money hand over fist like Microsoft, but they're finding success 'their' way, and that's truly a wonderful thing in this age of copy cats, cookie cutter production.

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I think you are missing my point about the UI design.

No, you're missing the point. Apple's most important market is not Windows users. It's existing Mac users. Sure, they do want to convert Windows users (and their ads are a transparent attempt to do just that), but NOT at the expense of losing their core niche audience. That would be SUICIDE. (It always is, in any market.)

 

See the end of the post for some more on niche vs mass-market.

 

And as for the argument about how 'hard' it would be for them to put their OS on PCs because they'd have to support so many different hardware configurations... I've heard this many times but frankly I just don't think it holds water. Apple is a business, and their objective should be to make as much money as possible, regardless of whether it would be a difficult transition or hard or whatever else.

I agree with your premise (their objective is to make money) but not your conclusion. Difficulty is not the problem; the problem is cost vs. benefit. And the benefits just don't stack up on a financial level.

 

There is just no way you can make the argument that it would cost Apple more money than they would potentially reap.

Oh yeah?

 

Benefits:

* More copies of Mac OS X sold (at $129 a copy). More people buy into Apple's software arm.

 

Costs:

* Making Mac OS X work with all the devices out there.

* Sales of Mac hardware (a minimum of $599 for a cheap Mac Mini, quickly ramping up past $1000 for a MacBook) plummet, since the "switcher" audience doesn't need to replace their existing hardware, and existing Mac users who want to upgrade will tend to buy cheaper (and more piecemeal-upgradeable) PC hardware.

* Fanboy rage! (Not to be underestimated.)

 

Microsoft is interested in domination, but Apple seems to have a different agenda and I applaud them for that. Sure, they're not raking in the money hand over fist like Microsoft, but they're finding success 'their' way, and that's truly a wonderful thing in this age of copy cats, cookie cutter production.

A very good point. Apple's entire marketing strategy depends on them being seen as "elite"; special, unique, better. Whether that's true or not is another matter - point is, this is the story they're trying to tell about themselves. You can see it in everything they do, from Macs to iPods to iPhones. Diluting this strategy by "watering down" the very things that set them apart from Windows would be stupid.

 

Apple is not interested in direct competition with Microsoft. Who would be??? That's a losing strategy. Instead, they've used clever marketing to stake out a niche for themselves, and have explored different markets that Microsoft isn't particularly interested in (or wasn't until they caught Apple envy in the case of music players; see "Zune"); hardware, music players, phones.

 

Sure, it's not a huge niche. That's not a problem. Point is, it's theirs, and nobody can take it away from them - unless they stupidly throw it away themselves.

 

You can either choose to be mass-market or niche. You can't have both, and switching from one to the other mid-stream is a terrible idea. Go read some Seth Godin. :)

My games | Public Service Announcement: TDM is not set in the Thief universe. The city in which it takes place is not the City from Thief. The player character is not called Garrett. Any person who contradicts these facts will be subjected to disapproving stares.
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You can either choose to be mass-market or niche. You can't have both,

 

Well, if you are big enough, you can have both. See Sony (just kidding).

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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@ Crispy

 

The crux of your argument is basically that it is in Apple's best interests to remain a niche company. Do you really believe that? I think mathematically my point speaks for itself. You just glossed over the entire fact that there is no way a person could do the numbers and not see Apple making astronomical profits from releasing OSX on non-Macs.

 

Yes, there are a lot of hardware configurations. Yes it would cost money. Can you honestly tell me you think it would cost more money to adapt an already existing piece of software to different PC hardware than the potential slice of a 16 billion dollar industry? To say that it would is simply ludicrous.

 

Not to mention, it is equally ridiculous that if a 15 year old kid in his basement can get OSX to work on his PC currently, that Apple engineers would have such a tough time at it.

 

Another point you make is that it would piss off all the die hard Apply fans. Yes, it would piss them off... for a few months until they got over it. Just like they always have. For a niche company, Apple has screwed that niche over more than once in the past. Just look at when the iPhone was released for example. All the die hard fans went out and bought it immediately.

 

Then only a few months after release Apply cut its price by $200, completely screwing those early adopters over. Apple's response? Give them all a $100 rebate they could only spend in the Apple store anyway. Apple has made it pretty clear that as much as its fan care about it, it could care less about it's fans, it's the bottom line that matters most.

 

You also contend sales of Macbook hardware would tank. As you yourself say, many people feel their hardware has a sleek elegant design and they believe it is more reliable and a status symbol. Suddenly that would change simply because any PC user could go out and buy OSX? People who like and buy Macs will continue to buy Macs; as pointed out already in this thread they do so for many more reasons than just the OS that is on it.

 

It is not in any company's interest to remain a niche company. It is a good way for company's to start out and get their foot in the door. It is not a good way to grow a company once it clearly has potential to be so much more.

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You seem to be confusing "niche" ("a distinct segment of a market") with "small". They are not the same thing. Apple's niche is a big one, and it's not getting any smaller. :) Growing their niche is a better strategy than going mass-market.

 

Niche means you don't serve everyone. By deliberately not serving some people, you get a lot more value out of the customers that you do serve. Mass-market means you serve everyone, but poorly. Narrow and deep vs broad and shallow.

 

I won't respond to your other points because I'm pretty sure I already have.

My games | Public Service Announcement: TDM is not set in the Thief universe. The city in which it takes place is not the City from Thief. The player character is not called Garrett. Any person who contradicts these facts will be subjected to disapproving stares.
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