thorfinn | BTW, Macs are Awesome.

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BTW, Macs are Awesome.

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.

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

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

*arcane gestures*

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!

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.
.

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.

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

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.

*chucklesnort*

And yes, you're unfortunately right about consoles and the gamingverse. That's been happening a while.

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. :-)

*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.

Also, the airport thingies do wireless MP3 streaming, yes? Or has that gone away?

Cos I was thinking of buying a Squeezebox, but if I can seamlessly integrate my Mac experience, so much the better.

jai.
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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.

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.

We have a Mac Mini with EyeTV and an LCD monitor. It is most excellent.

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.

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...

*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.

The airport expresses do wireless audio-out fu, yes. I don't think the Extreme/TimeCapsule has an audio out, though.

Mmm.. I don't buy that the tradeoff is a bad one - for most users.

I think it's vastly more common and natural for the majority of users to want to be using one application at a time... and for that purpose, the mac GUI paradigm is the best solution.

You (and I, and most unix geeks) are (unfortunately for us) unusual in that respect.

I agree, Expose + Spaces is nowhere near as good as proper X11 window manager and mouse fu. :-) But the latter is most definitely a metric boatload more complexity than the average user bunny wants or needs.

Nope. Well, yes, but that's not why I want pixels.

I like having lots of data on my screen. I want to be able to have multiple windows side-by-side, with reasonable amounts of data in them. I routinely have a browser window (currently about 750 pixels wide and 1000 pixels tall) on one side, with an ssh window (a bit smaller) on the other side, and a couple of IM windows strewn around. Or two browser windows side-by-side, or two ssh windows, or... well, you get the picture.

I've never understood why people run windowing OSes and then make all the windows full-screen. It seems ludicrous to me.

And that doesn't seem like a special need to me. It's just normal computer use.

OK, there *is* one special need, and that's online poker. I need to be able to tile four poker screens around the monitor. But I'd insist on that resolution even if I wasn't playing poker.

My home and work desktop machines have side-by-side 20" 1600x1200 monitors. That's about perfect for me.

*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.

Ah right. Yeah, that's "hardcore power user" land. :-) Special needs for j00, sorry. :-/

The majority of users get confused with that much data on screen - they don't have sufficient realtime mental filtering/processing/alerting to handle it.

It's the iPhone crowd that really niggles away at me. They seem to walk around with the iPhone always in hand, in front of them, and waving around. They seem to wave them around non-stop, pausing only to talk about the wonders of Steve Jobs. I mean, I've had people pull out the iPhone in the middle of meetings and start waving it around and they completely lose track of what everyone else is saying and come in at the end with "But .. I've got an iPhone!". Followed by pulling out a cloth and polishing the screen intently for a minute and then waving it around some more.

One of our salescritters bought the stupid thing and he'll actually shut down in mid sentence to wave the iPhone around.

I'm wondering if there is a correlation between lack of multitasking on the iPhone and a lack of multitasking in iPhone users. Certainly they don't seem to be able to own an iPhone and interact with society at the same time.

*chucklesnort*

I fully intend to get one at some point, but not as a penis extension. :-)

As a penis extension, they'd probably bit a little too pointy on the edge and oddly shaped.

Oh, you meant .. nevermind.

I'm not sure I get what all the fuss is about. But I'm a member of the Nokia E71 club.

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