BTW, Macs are Awesome.

[thorfinn]

Oh hi. I forgot to mention. Macs are awesome. Your next computer should be a Mac, assuming you just want a computer where you can do general average day to day stuff and Get Things Done.

If you want to do a specific weird thing (yes, hardcore computer game nerds, that mostly does mean you), then alright, you have special needs, and probably need more thought than just buying a Mac will necessarily get you. You already have the mad skillz needed to go do that. This message isn't for you.

However, for everyone else, if you just want to get connected to the internet, do email, browse the web, maybe do some word processing, download pictures off your digital camera, maybe upload some pictures to the interweb, even have automated hourly backups done for you... then absolutely just get a Mac already.

Oh, and if you're a unix tech-head, you really want a Mac too. Just think, a real Unix OS with a consumer grade UI on top.

See: http://morganjaffit.livejournal.com/34058.html

He says it better than I do.

Comments

[sly-girl.livejournal.com]

Jesus H - it's becoming like Hillsong with you people!

[thorfinn]

The Power of Steve Compels You!
The Power of Steve Compels You!

*arcane gestures*

[pir.livejournal.com]

I just wish the consumer grade UI wasn't so annoying and the real UNIX underneath so quirky and kinda buggy.

I'm typing this on my macbook pro, I'm a convert, but the UI being so application based rather than window based drives me crazy sometimes... I end up doing most things under X11 (xterms all the way!) where at least I can get focus follows mouse that mostly works. The OS doesn't do co-operative multitasking anymore, there's no need for that crap.

There are still bugs like screensaver/screenlock randomly stopping working until you log out and log back in again in 10.5 (great when you want to stop random people messing with your machine), etc. Trying to run them at an enterprise level is a nightmare.

Still using it but... they could be so much better!

[thorfinn]

Oh yeah. :-) Don't get me wrong - the things aren't perfect, and for sure they could be so much better!

But the whole point is that, mostly, the complexity/bugginess is in direct relation to the rarity/complexity of the task you want to do is.

And they're less problematic than every other thing out there, by a long long way.

[thorfinn]

As for the Application based UI rather than window based... that's absolutely one of the conscious Interface Complexity tradeoff choices that Mac OS has made. It's a conscious reduction in feature complexity, coming at the cost of a lack of Power User speed.

Their solution to the worst issue caused by it (I want to get to a particular window, quickly) is actually somewhat solved by Expose... Only somewhat, but it's about solved as best as you can.

Not solved the way us X11 nuts are used to, no... But heck, the point there is, if you want X11, you have it. :-)

[pir.livejournal.com]

Expose is a terrible answer to finding a particular window unless you're so disorganised you never know where anything is (I know it's behind this one, oh look, lets move them all around to different places on the screen and make them smaller and so I can't actually see what's in them all, that will help!) and doesn't do anything for when I want to change focus or move individual windows without bringing something to the front.

I want X11 with focus follows mouse that actually works, the abilit to move windows and change focus fully without bringing a window to the front (I want to read this one and type into that one, but oh, now it's on top and in the way) and the ability to move windows properly, which I don't have, because as it is, it's a poor imitation of real X11.

The GUI sucks. The bandaids added later to try and make it more usable (like Expose and Spaces) are partial answers to not the problems it actually has, the "tradeoff" with applications and windows is a bad one and doesn't make things easier for anyone; it's purely about how they've always done it since back when only one application could be running at a time and has persisted because of not wanting to change and the menu bar across the top of the screen (which could perfectly easily change with focus follows mouse).

My personal answer to the awful GUI choices is to try and never put anything behind anything else and break different sets of windows (because I don't work in one application at a time, I work at a task which may involve individual windows from several applications at a time - read my email and put an event in my calendar, for example) into different virtual desktops (and with Virtue; while spaces does very pretty changes from one window to another it doesn't actually work properly, particularly not for X11).

Not being the way I am used to it is one thing, making it actively hostile to doing anything in a different way is another. If you worship at the church of steve and do everything exactly how he wants you to, you're all fine, otherwise you're SOL.

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Yup. I have slightly special needs, but even I would be buying an iMac if I hadn't just bought a PC.

Actually, I'm thinking of buying one anyway instead of a TV/DVD player.

jai.
.

[thorfinn]

*nod* Quite probably a good solution - a decent size iMac is about the size of a small TV anyway, then all you need is an EyeTV to plug in, and voila, digital TV with recording schedule controls and stuff.

[gths.livejournal.com]

Sad thing is, as a WASD addict but yet not someone so weird that they want to play Crysis at 50fps, (though I have other specific weird things as well) the PC's kind of going backwards as a gaming platform, since a lot of the neat stuff is coming out on consoles first.

[gths.livejournal.com]

Also, I think I still have trouble disassociating Macs with the intro to The Lovecats. You know what I mean.

[whipartist.livejournal.com]

I'm shopping for a laptop right now. I wish I could get a Mac, but unfortunately they don't make one with sufficient capabilities for me. In particular, I need 1920x1200 resolution in a 15" screen.

The advantage of non-Mac is that no one vendor controls the market, so you can shop around for the features you want.

[thorfinn]

*nod* Absolutely - but that puts you firmly in the "special needs" camp. :-)

That's not a general purpose machine - I'm guessing you need that pixel density in a small screen because you want to do something hardly anyone else has a need for... I'm guessing ultraportable digital photography in a fairly hardcore/professional way.

[ltempt.livejournal.com]

Heh. The only thing that bugs me about the Mac is the Apple fan culture - it feels like 90% of Mac users feel the need to browbeat everyone into joining the cult.

I have an couple of iMacs, but I wouldn't consider them a panacea. They're a great general purpose desktop, but the problems start crawling in too often.

Need to connect to a Contivity VPN? Bwa, ha, not likely without some very serious expenditure. Apple's Java seems deliberately crippled and broken, and this is a killer when you need certain Java applications to be functional to get work done. The X implementation is less than stellar. The platform cuts you out of a lot of cheap USB toys (TV tuners, USB audio, blah) that would irritate some. The terminal is wierd and requires a lot of configuration to behave in a manner similar to an xterm (and still doesn't support some xterm features).

Still, it makes a great general purpose desktop. It makes an even better generic "home" desktop, and most of the annoyances I have with MacOS stem from being a UNIX bigot rather than someone looking for general desktop. But that's okay; I have a Sun desktop and my Sunray thin clients - I use the Mac for most things and Solaris for anything UNIX-themed.

[thorfinn]

*nod* Like I said, "special needs". As soon as you want to do something not-very-common, yes, you're going to have issues. But also, you totally should know what you want instead, in that space... and you do. :-)

And yes, the fan culture is a bit nutty - some of it is "recovery shock", I think. Coming out of the Win32 world into Macland, for most users, is a bit like taking painkillers for the first time when you've got a serious chronic pain issue. The relief is so startling, they feel the need to beat everyone else into doing it.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

Gamers who are happy with something less than the absolute-latest high-end cards in a dual-card configuration will probably be pretty happy with the 24" iMac configured with the GF8800GS.

The only problem is that Apple (or nvidia) broke the drivers in 10.5.3 and still haven't released a fix, so WoW at least performs... well, when it's working you're seeing a lovely smooth world with the knobs turned to 11, when it's not it crawls, and I've yet to figure out what triggers that...

[kowari.livejournal.com]

OH GODS!
If you do find out I would love to know! It came with WoW 2.4 (which might have been coincidentally OSX 10.5.3 as well) and it is driving me balmy. I jsut cant figure it out. I have gone back to a PC to play as it is just a bazillion times better till this issue is resolved.

Fix to WoW graphics glitch introduced in 2.4

[elindal.livejournal.com]

The problem is caused by Blizzard trying to improve graphics performance by running the graphics card at full strength, however, something also happened at the same time which limited the detection of the temperature of the GPU and the fan speed control.

This was driving me insane, but I have managed to fix it with two things.

I installed smcFanControl (http://homepage.mac.com/holtmann/eidac/software/software.html), this is a small app that runs in your menu bar of OS X. It allows you to set the speed of your fans. I increased my ODD fan to 2000rpm instead of the default 600.

I also used the following command in WoW.

"/script maxFPS 35"

This sets your maximum fps at 35, which is good enough that I can't see any real difference between this and the 70 I used to get before I started getting the overheating. One side effect of this is when WoW hits the 35fps cap, it actually increases quality a little rather than trying to get the extra fps. I have noticed water translucency and terrain detail are slightly better since I did this.

It is annoying that I needed to fix this with a 3rd party fan speed control program. But it works, and I have not had a problem with it since, even when heavily using Exposé and raiding :D

[elissande.livejournal.com]

Who am I to disagree when I just got myself a 24" iMac. :) As well as all the things you mentioned, this screen is just stunning. Not to mention the funky screensavers. And on a 24" screen you can get lots of windows all side by side and still have them big enough to be useful.

Special needs - gaming - is on my PC. But the iMac is for work and just a little bit of play.

[lil-brown-bat.livejournal.com]

Macs are perhaps awesome as long as you don't have a job that requires you to do tech support or QA. If you have to support software on a PC or have to test such software, Macs are not even a little bit awesome.

[thorfinn]

Well, yes, that would be silly, at least having a Mac as your only computer would be silly. Having a mac to do your corporate email and webbrowsing, whilst having a PC to actually do the support/testing on would be a perfectly sensible (albeit more costly) thing though.

[anthologie.livejournal.com]

Every time I use a Mac (even new ones) I'm sitting there tapping my fingers waiting for it to do what I asked it to do. I do that with PCs, too, but the tapping lasts less long. :)

[thorfinn]

Mm, sounds awfully like they've got insufficient RAM. The default off the shelf rarely actually has enough for great performance. That's even more true for PCs too (the shelf quantity is usually not even enough for normal performance, let alone good), it's just that most people who buy PCs always know to upgrade the default RAM to the maximum you can get. :-)

[kowari.livejournal.com]

Everyone here is quoting special needs... which really wasn't the point of the post.

Macs are GREAT for general purpose web 2.0 style computer usage. Seamless(ish) integration to your multimedia gadgets (iPods, cameras, TV tuners blah blah) and Teh Intertubes. It does most other stuff passing well (plays most games, runs windows if you need to) BUT I wouldnt recommend it for business office use, nor any other special needs (high end twitch gaming, supporting other kinds of operating systems - which I actully do on a mac but meh, you know specialist situations)

Macs.are.good. :)

[zey.livejournal.com]

Nice enough OS, unless your machine's a PPC Mac, you want to attach three largish USB fat32 drives to it and have them all appear at once. Or maybe you want your DNS resolver issues patched quickly.

Dunno why, but, to me Mac OS X has the feeling of having been put on development life support while they develop other money trees like their iPod, iTunes and iPhone ranges.

[thorfinn]

Err, that would be because you are correct. :-) And actually, it's the iPhone, not the other two.

The iPhone is essentially an ARM based computer running Mac OS X, glued onto a mobile phone.

This meant that they had to pull a lot of OS X kernel/OS people over to iPhone... and that had unfortunate consequences for Leopard. That's why Leopard lacks some of the polish that Panther and Tiger had, and was somewhat buggier on initial release than the previous two.

Things should get better from here - the ARM port should be relatively stable now, and I don't think there's any plans to introduce another chip platform any time soon. :-)

Sure, I expect them to bring out a tablet with full touch screen, but that'll be low power Intel, I'm guessing.

And, well, plugging 3 giant USB fat32 drives into a PPC machine isn't exactly a common regular every day thing. Heck, plugging 3 giant USB FAT32 drives into any machine isn't exactly a common thing. FAT32 is kinda crappy and unreliable all on its own, regardless of platform. I wouldn't expect that to behave particularly well on any platform, let alone an old platform that's essentially been end-of-lifed.