What is your opinion of Apple?

[Frak]

Originally Posted by cascade9 'Major' platforms? You mean big iron? People like Cray have been moving away from PowerPC chips for a while now, even things like IBM Raodrunner is using both PowerPC (well, PowerXCell) and Opteron chips.

Meant to say major "gaming" platforms. PowerPC's are cheap to make, and very efficient at rendering since they take less cycles to complete a job. Combine that with the fact that they can be stacked pretty high, PowerPC becomes a very tempting platform.

[Windows Nerd]

Their ads, though slightly humourus, are biased towards making Macs "The best" at everything. Though they have excellent multimedia software (Final Cut Pro, par example), they lack when it comes to gaming and programming environments. I also hate how thier laptops, especially, are treated as a fashionable accessory. The only thing I like about them is thier unibody casings and are easier to fit in a backpack with your school books without breaking something on the laptop. My screen on my laptop is falling off because of it's casing beaing caught on something soo many times. Yet another dislike is thier restrictive policies.

On the plus side though, is that though they have a pretty GUI, it still has a fully functioning Command Line that is almost as powerful as Linux's. Did I mention they use BASH for that? Thier kernel is quite stable. Another plus is thier security.

The thing I just cannot tolerate is thier fanboys. One thing to you guys: Steve Jobs is not a god!


Scott

[mamamia88]

I was playing with one of the imacs on campus today and i just had no idea what the hell i was doing. is it just something you get used too after awhile? everyone i know says macs are easier to use but everything just seemed counter intuitive too me.

[mwalimu54]

wormy

[1clue]

Originally Posted by Windows Nerd Their ads, though slightly humourus, are biased towards making Macs "The best" at everything. Though they have excellent multimedia software (Final Cut Pro, par example), they lack when it comes to gaming and programming environments. I also hate how thier laptops, especially, are treated as a fashionable accessory. The only thing I like about them is thier unibody casings and are easier to fit in a backpack with your school books without breaking something on the laptop. My screen on my laptop is falling off because of it's casing beaing caught on something soo many times. Yet another dislike is thier restrictive policies. On the plus side though, is that though they have a pretty GUI, it still has a fully functioning Command Line that is almost as powerful as Linux's. Did I mention they use BASH for that? Thier kernel is quite stable. Another plus is thier security. The thing I just cannot tolerate is thier fanboys. One thing to you guys: Steve Jobs is not a god! Scott

I strongly disagree here. Text Mate is the world's best programming editor on any platform. My boss is buying the entire development staff Mac laptops just to get this editor, and the search whatzit that lets you start typing a word and everything you've touched lately that matches the search shows up in a list.

As long as you can get a compiler for whatever language you need, Text Mate makes up for a whole world of other issues.

[Anzan]

Originally Posted by 1clue I strongly disagree here. Text Mate is the world's best programming editor on any platform. My boss is buying the entire development staff Mac laptops just to get this editor, and the search whatzit that lets you start typing a word and everything you've touched lately that matches the search shows up in a list. As long as you can get a compiler for whatever language you need, Text Mate makes up for a whole world of other issues.

I've read many good things about TextMate.

(I like gedit and its healthy array of plugins. actually, I like it a lot.)

But I think that the important thing for me is to have the tools to do a task rather than a program that I depend upon.

I don't want to depend on an OS let alone a program.

If Ubuntu becomes something I don't agree with or like, I can use Debian or even go to the other side of the packaging street and use Fedora. If Microsoft somehow kills Linux with patent litigation (unlikely, just saying) I can go to BSD.

At this point, after more than two decades of using computers, I'd rather just have a GNU userland and a tty than have my work and data locked in to any product/appliance/OS/program.

I'm still cleaning out crud from old files that used a proprietary program (I think it cost about $500 then) to produce kanji and hiragana on the Mac in the late 80s and Microsoft Office hinkiness in others. I have hundreds of files I have rescued as .txt, .odf, .pdf and paper copies but many hundreds to go. And this is all old work I'm trying to get into useable condition in addition to current projects.

So, my point is that I value being able to use my own work freely and no program or shiny interface or convenient features can displace that.

I walked by an Apple store the other day and had an involuntary shudder as I passed.

[1clue]

Anzan,

I totally agree with you, I've gone through proprietary format hell too.

Our case is different. There are currently 3 developers in our company. We represented Mac OS, Windows XP and Ubuntu. Actually, we've all moved around quite a bit in terms of variants, I've been everywhere from Gentoo to Ubuntu and many places in between. Our Windows user has been mostly XP, but the Mac user has gone through a couple OS variations too.

We're working on Java and Grails. We use Tomcat app server, grails and whatever editing platform we want. The mac user uses TextMate, the rest of us are currently using Eclipse. I've tried IntelliJ, too, and I like it but it's slow. And most of the features are useless with Groovy/Grails. I also use Vim, have been using it as my primary text editor for over a decade until I switched mostly to Eclipse.

The files are text files. There is no marriage to a single OS or single file format. We've each developed our own styles in terms of getting the job done, and we all agree that TextMate is incredibly better at getting the job done than any editor any of us had found or seen. TextMate is so much better that my boss decided it easily paid for Macs all around because of improved productivity. That and the extra productivity tools that come standard on a modern Mac.

Don't get me wrong: I'm still a Linux guy. I just bought my i7/920 and I don't plan on installing Windows on it. It's just that some days, like today, I get stuck in a spot where something I need to do my job is broken. Today it was VMware. Doesn't work on 9.10. So I'm messing around trying to figure that out instead of doing my job. This sort of thing happens all too often, even on Ubuntu. Actually, it seems to me that Ubuntu breaks things almost as often as Gentoo, but with Gentoo you have to budget a lot more time into just maintaining the system overall.

I love the Open Source model, we use it heavily in my company. It's just not always ideal, you know what I'm saying?

Edit:As well, if you go to any sort of software development seminar where Open Source software is discussed, (No Fluff Just Stuff for example) you see a really interesting trend. Back in the beginning, you saw a couple Macs, and then a whole lot of PC laptops, about 20% of which seemed to be Linux.

Now, the Mac content is huge. It seems like a quarter of the machines are Macs, but that may be an exaggeration. You definitely see more Macs in the hands of presenters, where they do live coding for the class.

You don't get a lot of defections from Linux guys unless there's a good reason to do so. In this case, you get to keep almost all of your Linux software, and you gain Mac software. It's a no-lose situation.

[alphaniner]

We have two Macs at work, a G5 and what might be a G3. I think the case design is magnificent; particularly in the G5 but the G3 is nice too. Otherwise, after some practice I've grown to appreciate OS X but I have no particular attachment.

The commercials amuse me too, even if they are a bit too kind to Windows.

[Veteropinguis]

I'm going to jump in here as a more average computer user. I've been futzing with Ubuntu on and off since Hardy, currently dual-booting with Karmic.

I don't like Apple fanboys. I don't like Apple computers. However, I do like iPods (yeah, shoot me) and I have owned a few iRivers.

The 'Mac Mentality' is very different from the 'Linux Mentality'. If I were to speak in broad generalizations, here's how I would generally classify the majority computer users by OS:

Windows: Apathetic about the OS. They use whatever came on the computer that runs what they need for work/to have fun. If you gave them Ubuntu and they had a small learning curve and all their toys would work, they wouldn't care.

Linux: Interested in computers, likes to tinker and take things apart, wants to know how a computer works and doesn't appreciate being held back from doing that. Doesn't mind breaking something because fixing the problem would be fun/it's easy to go on to the Ubuntu Forums and get some geeks to do it for you.

Mac: Doesn't care about/doesn't understand computers, needs something simple and hard to break- or a hipster. Either way, the response they want to a hardware problem is to throw money at it and make it go away.

From a pretty average user's perspective, I can't stand Mac OS. Everything is buried in a tab within a submenu within a submenu within a sidebar. Now, what this does is keep you from doing anything too damaging to your Mac, but assuming you're an intermediate-level computer user who isn't a regular Mac user, trying to, say, print something is a nightmare. The computers look pretty sexy, but that only goes so far. The other sort of frustrating thing is that because of the "Mac Mentality" you end up with people who buy a $1500 laptop to run Firefox, iTunes, and Text Edit- but hey, they've found the computer that best suits their needs.

Regarding iPods. My first mp3 player ever was an iRiver ifp-700, 512 glorious megabytes of flash memory. That actually still works, even though I've left it out in the snow a couple times. The buttons aren't as responsive as they used to be, sometimes, but this thing has been through 5 years of abuse. I then graduated to a 20 GB iRiver H10. Dropped it from about 3 feet while it was running, and the hard drive died the next day. My next iRiver met with a similar fate, and I am actually pretty careful with my equipment. Then I got an 80 GB Zune, because I liked the idea of being able to watch movies on the subway on a decent screen, but unloaded it after a few months when the battery life got annoying. Also, I listen to classical music and wasn't going to retag all my music, then retag it again when the Zune software let you have a composer field. Next up, a 120 GB iPod, which I was very happy with and unhappily had to sell to help fund a trip abroad. I dropped that thing many times while it was playing, and it's soldiered on. The things my boyfriend does to his iPod make me cringe, but it's been playing strong for years. The only thing that ever killed one of his iPods was when he left it in his jeans pocket and it went through a washer cycle...and the drier. Currently I'm trying to find a 5.5-gen 60 GB iPod so I can put Rockbox on it.

iPods are, in my experience, extremely hardy critters. I have used iPhones (my mom switched from Verizon to AT&T to get one) and actually, I like them. They're shiny and fun to play with. Since I'm not particularly in to the FOSS philosophy (I try to support open-source whenever I can, but I use Ubuntu because it's fast and yeah, it was free) I don't really care about how much of their code they've released. I don't think everything has to be open-source.

I also think that some people on here (probably a lot of my age range: I'm 17) need to get a better sense of what the typical computer user is. My boyfriend's cousin deleted his C:\ drive a while ago...while trying to make a desktop shortcut to a game. This sort of thing happens all the time. Linux distros give you more power but for some people, that would be like giving a baby a flamethrower.

Just my two cents.

[handy]

This is all so personal.

Let whoever use whatever they choose.

People that have really negative feelings for Apple, usually are forgetting about the corporations that make the chips that Apple, & MS, & whoever else use.

These chip manufacturers so often have really nasty corporate histories, to the point that they make Apple look like they are good.

Don't believe me?

Have a search on Intel, nVidia, AMD, the old ATi, IBM (oh my god! they even legitimately bring in Godwin's law!) VIA, pick another manufacturer & have a look at their history.

Really nVidia, AMD, ATi & VIA are just new kids on the block.