The Second Coming of Apple

[Agathon]

Anand doesn't write most articles these days. He's too busy doing something useful in studying to become a computer engineer.

He did write a good review of OS X, detailing how much better it was than Windows.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Q Cubed

For students, the eMac is a good computer.

I work as a student employee of the uni's IT department. We refuse to buy eMacs for the following reasons:
1. space is a premium in the lab. emacs are fat and heavy.

The HP machines in our department's lab take up 50% more space than the emac. I installed an emac for a colleague the other week, they are only heavy if you're some kind of wimp.

2. they're underpowered. emacs choke if asked to do more than two things at once--they're just slightly more powerful than imac g3s.

Bull****. They aren't particularly powerful, but you're talking crap there. My old imac G3 can do multiple things at once and doesn't choke at all (one reason I'm still hanging on to it). A new emac is much more powerful than that, and runs just fine. I was playing on one the other day, doing photo stuff and Garagebanding. It works just fine.

It's a perfectly acceptable computer if you want to do the things that most people do in their offices. Write documents, send email, organize pictures and listen to music.

3. their price-performance ratio is awful. even bought in bulk, what you pay for what you get, they don't match up.

Sure, you can't buy a cheap mac. But you get what you pay for. OS X is rock solid and easy to use. You get the best bundle of consumer multimedia software available, and if you are at university you can get Office 2004 for next to nothing.

4. difficulty in maintenance. you can't just pop it open, replace defective parts, and move on.

You can if you bother learning how.

[q]now, tell me, for a student, who wants something lasting 4 years, for whom space is a big factor, for whom price is important... how is an emac a good computer? [/QUOTE]

It doesn't run Windows, and it doesn't make the technical demands that Linux does right now. But, if I were a student, I'd buy an ibook. Lots of them do, there are many around campus.

[Agathon]

From Anand's review of OS X (one of the best and fairest reviews I've seen).

The benefit of leaving applications running even when you're not using them is that when you do need to use them or open a file with one of them, the response time is instantaneous - as opposed to waiting for an application to load. Of course, you can do the same thing in Windows, but for some reason stability and performance seemed to remain unchanged under OS X, whereas I almost always ran into an issue with Windows - whether it was having too many windows open or too many programs running.

Under OS X, the term drag-and-drop is really taken to a new level - you can drag and drop just about anything. Let's say, you really like one of the pictures in this review. Under OS X, you could simply click and drag the image to your desktop or any folder and a copy of it would be saved. The dragged image appears as a smaller, slightly translucent version of the original, which obviously remains untouched. For whatever reason, this process is quite CPU intensive, making the G5's fans spin up if you drag an image for too long. With two CPUs, however, it's not really invasive, but it's just interesting to hear fans spin up while you're dragging an image around. The benefit of this stretches far beyond just saving an image. You can drag it into an IM window to send someone a URL of the image, or you can drag it into an email to send someone a copy of it. I'm a huge fan of car discussion boards online and I'm always sending pictures of up and coming cars that I may come across online to friends. The drag-and-drop of an image into an IM window makes the process a lot easier than right-clicking on an image, going to its properties and copying the URL, and then pasting it into an IM window.

The final cool feature that I'd like to mention briefly here is OS X's system-wide spell check. Any window, whether it is a text document, IM, email, form in a browser or anything else where you're inputting text, OS X checks spelling for you. It can be disabled in specific applications if you'd rather not be bothered, but it is very useful

Performance isn't always a negative thing under OS X. In fact, there is one aspect of OS X's performance that I do believe significantly outshines that of even Windows XP: caching. The biggest pet peeve of mine as a PC user is hearing that hard drive crunch and having it be the reason for an interruption in my work, play or whatever else that I may be using my PC for at the time. I always get the upgrade-bug just as soon as I hear that drive crunch away, and immediately, I want to upgrade any and everything in my system to make those few seconds that feel like an eternity cease once and for all. Of course, regardless of how much I throw at the problem, it's always there and although I can lessen it, I cannot rid myself of it.

What I found in my time with the G5 and OS X was that it does a marvelous job of caching, to the point where after the first time I start the machine, I rarely hear the hard drive being accessed. Furthermore, I definitely don't feel as slowed down by it as I do under Windows. Again, I feel a bit lost writing this without a complete understanding of how Apple architected the caching system of OS X, but the results are positive and noticeable.

The end result is that my Mac is a bit more stable than my PCs. It's not night and day, and the Mac does crash, just like my PCs do - it just crashes a little less frequently.

Want to open a lot of files using a particular program (not necessarily the one that they open with by default)? Just drag them to the program's icon on the dock. There are tons of little features like these that I ended up appreciating quite a bit. I know that it's not hard to open up a few folders to copy a file, but this way is just quicker and just so much more intuitive. If you're looking at something, why shouldn't you be able to drag/copy/attach the file without having to find it in another form somewhere else? It seems to me that Apple asked that very same question.

The application itself is lightning-fast; start up time is much faster than Outlook 2003 and a bit faster than Outlook 2004. The one aspect of Mail that is absolutely an improvement over Outlook is in its searching abilities. If you have any appreciable number of messages under Outlook, you know that searching for a particular message: 1) takes forever, and 2) leaves you with a noticeably slower machine with your hard drive crunching constantly. The search function in Mail is significantly quicker than Outlook and you get noticeably fewer disk accesses to find the email that you're searching for than under Outlook. Obviously, without knowing the architecture behind how Outlook searches vs. how Mail searches, I can't say exactly why Mail is faster, but I'd venture to say that it's either OS X doing some incredible caching, or it's just a much better indexed database with a faster search algorithm. Regardless of why, the reality is that it is significantly faster on a single 160GB SATA drive than I've ever had an Outlook search be on anything from a regular IDE drive to a 10K Raptor.

The OS is excellent, far from perfect, but more so than Windows in my opinion - and all the major applications do run on the platform.

n the end, Apple has developed a very strong platform. OS X is quite possibly one of the best operating systems of its time and in many ways, is the best for what it does, and Apple's hardware leaves very little to be desired. But as always, the Apple platform is a tough sell to the mainstream for the reasons that I've already outlined. I took a chance and ended up pleasantly surprised.

[Asher]

I'll note that that was the last software review Anand ever did because it blasted his credibility with inaccuracies and subjective opinion, with anecdotal evidence most people do not agree with.

He's since agreed to stick to hardware, something he knows.

Never send a computer engineer to do a computer scientist's job. It's the rule.

He hasn't used the system very extensively, for one. He praises its reliance on drag-and-drop, but neglects to mention its frustrating inconsistencies. Drag-and-drop by default will copy the object somewhere else. Sometimes, OS X will make a shortcut. Others, it will move it. Sometimes, it will copy it.

He doesn't mention that the reliance on drag-and-drop means the context-menu system is inconsistent and horribly designed -- in fact, it's downright stupid. In Xcode, you if you have some other part of the screen selected, then right click on something else to adjust its properties...the menu draws where you right-clicked, but it's actually working in the context of where you last left-clicked.

Stuff like that is just ridiculous, and the MacOS interface is riddled with inconsistensies and stupidity like that, and the Mac faithful are just used to them.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Agathon
The HP machines in our department's lab take up 50% more space than the emac. I installed an emac for a colleague the other week, they are only heavy if you're some kind of wimp.

He's referring to new PCs. You can get PCs with integrated flat-panels like the iMac, for the same price as the eMac -- and more powerful.

Bull****. They aren't particularly powerful, but you're talking crap there.

They are underpowered. You can buy an eMac today with the same power of a PC 4 years ago. Don't tell me it's "powerful enough" -- it's underpowered compared to alternatives.

Sure, you can't buy a cheap mac. But you get what you pay for. OS X is rock solid and easy to use. You get the best bundle of consumer multimedia software available,

OS X is an annoying, slow, and inconsistent operating system that is only easy to use if you prefer to do math with pictures of bananas instead of numbers. It's heavily abstracted to the point of overloading visual metaphors, slowing your system down with cutesey and annoying animations.

and if you are at university you can get Office 2004 for next to nothing.

Depends how lame your university is. I get MS Windows XP Pro, Windows Server 2003, MS Office 2003, MS Visual Studio, etc. all completely free of charge. Apple charges us the "educational" rate of about $100 for OS X, by comparison...every year.

It doesn't run Windows, and it doesn't make the technical demands that Linux does right now.

When your main argument for buying an overpriced, slow computer with minimal software support is "it doesn't run Windows", you handily discredit your own argument.

[Q Classic]

The HP machines in our department's lab take up 50% more space than the emac. I installed an emac for a colleague the other week, they are only heavy if you're some kind of wimp.

go ahead, call bs on that statement of mine. go ahead. doesn't change the fact that those emac machines are still pretty big and bulky, and the new dell optiplex machines we replaced our windows fleet with are smaller than emacs and even the mac cube footprints.

also, you're right, individually, they're not heavy. but i work for the uni's IT department. we don't deal with one, we'd be dealing with fifty, sixty at a time.

that's just one reason why we don't deal with emacs.

Bull****. They aren't particularly powerful, but you're talking crap there. My old imac G3 can do multiple things at once and doesn't choke at all (one reason I'm still hanging on to it). A new emac is much more powerful than that, and runs just fine. I was playing on one the other day, doing photo stuff and Garagebanding. It works just fine.

It's a perfectly acceptable computer if you want to do the things that most people do in their offices. Write documents, send email, organize pictures and listen to music.

i have two friends with old imac g3s. both of them are sick to death at how ass-slow they are. i've seen those boxes, too. two anecdotal bits on my side, compared to one for you. guess i win, there.

even better? both of them are ditching macs for windows machines.

yes, a new emac is more powerful than those, but not by that much--i rechecked the specs, it's a g4 now, but even with that... you're paying close to a thousand for a computer whose specs are rather piss-poor.

Sure, you can't buy a cheap mac. But you get what you pay for. OS X is rock solid and easy to use. You get the best bundle of consumer multimedia software available, and if you are at university you can get Office 2004 for next to nothing.

and you can get a comparable, nay, more powerful machine that's windows based for the same price. you get what you pay for--greater expandability, longer lifespan. office 2003 for next to nothing at the uni, greater choice in consumer multimedia software, with, i daresay, better options than ****ware itunes, and windows xp, properly maintained is rock-solid and easy to use.

You can if you bother learning how.

an emac? right, an all-in-one machine. forgot how easy those are to repair. especially when the monitor goes, or the ram goes, or the hd goes, or the mobo goes... how easy an all-in-one is to diagnose because--surprise, surprise--it's just soooo modular.

It doesn't run Windows, and it doesn't make the technical demands that Linux does right now. But, if I were a student, I'd buy an ibook. Lots of them do, there are many around campus.

disagree with how the lack of windows and linux makes an emac is a "good computer". that's like saying angola not having roving clouds of toxic gas makes it a shining example of a nation.

i don't disagree with you on the matter of an ibook, but i'm going to say this again and again:

emacs are pieces of ****.
imacs aren't that much better.

[Agathon]

He hasn't used the system very extensively, for one. He praises its reliance on drag-and-drop, but neglects to mention its frustrating inconsistencies. Drag-and-drop by default will copy the object somewhere else. Sometimes, OS X will make a shortcut. Others, it will move it. Sometimes, it will copy it.

Only if you move it to the dock or the sidebar. Otherwise only if you option drag.

I'll note that that was the last software review Anand ever did because it blasted his credibility with inaccuracies and subjective opinion, with anecdotal evidence most people do not agree with.

It's a perfectly fine review. He probably got "blasted" by loons like you, for whom objectivty is a meaningless term.

[Agathon]

i have two friends with old imac g3s. both of them are sick to death at how ass-slow they are. i've seen those boxes, too. two anecdotal bits on my side, compared to one for you. guess i win, there.

Perhaps they should have put more memory in them, like I did. There was a noticeable performance boost. I guess you lose.

yes, a new emac is more powerful than those, but not by that much--i rechecked the specs, it's a g4 now,

Shows how much you know, there has never been a G3 emac.

and you can get a comparable, nay, more powerful machine that's windows based for the same price. you get what you pay for--greater expandability, longer lifespan. office 2003 for next to nothing at the uni, greater choice in consumer multimedia software, with, i daresay, better options than ****ware itunes, and windows xp, properly maintained is rock-solid and easy to use.

In a computer lab? You can leave an emac and let people use it, go back six weeks later and its fine. Try that with a Windows machine.

[Agathon]

OS X is an annoying, slow, and inconsistent operating system that is only easy to use if you prefer to do math with pictures of bananas instead of numbers. It's heavily abstracted to the point of overloading visual metaphors, slowing your system down with cutesey and annoying animations.

Better graphics, better UI, more secure, proper use of drag and drop, informative dialogues, easy installs, proper font support, I could go on.. but what's the point. No reason means anything to you... as you so obviously demonstrate every day.

[Agathon]

I'll say it again, an emac is a perfectly reasonable computer if you want to use it for general office work. That is all I'd recommend it for, because that is the sort of thing it is designed to do, and it does it well.

The problem with both of you guys is that you want to impose your own needs on everyone else. Not everyone needs a hyperfast machine with lots of silly doodads on it. Most people want a simple machine that they can perform everyday tasks on. That is what consumer machines are designed to do. Complaining that they don't have massive amounts of video memory or anything like that is besides the point.

[Q Classic]

Perhaps they should have put more memory in them, like I did. There was a noticeable performance boost. I guess you lose.

perhaps they weren't able to. beats me why they didn't upgrade them.

oh, wait, now i remember why. all-in-ones are notorious for their inability to be upgraded decently.

Shows how much you know, there has never been a G3 emac.

i'll admit it. i don't pay too much attention to crapware apple offerings. i know far more about the powermacs and the laptops than i do for the imacs and the emacs, mostly because both the imacs and the emacs are ****ware.

In a computer lab? You can leave an emac and let people use it, go back six weeks later and its fine. Try that with a Windows machine.

we do. we only blank 'em out, wipe, and repush images at the end of every quarter. windows machines have no trouble lasting 12 weeks, alongside the macs we have the labs.

it shows you're not too knowledgable about IT, otherwise you'd realize that a properly maintained OS, no matter who makes it, can be locked down and secured with little trouble at all for multitudes of users.

[Q Classic]

I'll say it again, an emac is a perfectly reasonable computer if you want to use it for general office work.That is all I'd recommend it for, because that is the sort of thing it is designed to do, and it does it well.

and again, i'm saying it's not. did you even look at the reasons i listed? for the cost that you buy an emac for, you can get a better windows pc.

if you want to save money, then, it follows that you don't buy an emac.

The problem with both of you guys is that you want to impose your own needs on everyone else. Not everyone needs a hyperfast machine with lots of silly doodads on it.

and my biggest complaint about the emac is that it's price/performance ratio is bad. meaning, it's too expensive for what it is.

Most people want a simple machine that they can perform everyday tasks on. That is what consumer machines are designed to do. Complaining that they don't have massive amounts of video memory or anything like that is besides the point.

most people want a simple machine that's cheap. i'm not complaining about the video memory, i'm not complaining about whether or not it can play games; i'm pointing out that it's a thousand bucks for a computer whose hardware is out of date and inferior to something you can get at a similar price point for windows machines. i'm saying that you can get a better windows computer that'll last longer for $600.

my argument why emacs are bad computers can be summarized in the following:
1. all in ones are bad. (philosophical. didn't really emphasize it.)
2. price. (economic.)
3. performance compared to price. (economic.)
4. maintenance. (applied/philosophical. didn't really emphasize it except in the first few posts, which was explaining why we didn't purchase them for our uni labs.)

simply put, i'm comfortable recommending powermacs, powerbooks, and ibooks to people.

on the other hand, i refuse to recommend emacs or imacs when so many better options exist.

[Agathon]

perhaps they weren't able to. beats me why they didn't upgrade them.

oh, wait, now i remember why. all-in-ones are notorious for their inability to be upgraded decently.

At least try to sound like you know what you are talking about. There is an easy access door on the bottom. Open it, slide the memory into the slot. Done.

i'll admit it. i don't pay too much attention to crapware apple offerings. i know far more about the powermacs and the laptops than i do for the imacs and the emacs, mostly because both the imacs and the emacs are ****ware.

Blah blah blah. Don't you have anything else to contribute?

we do. we only blank 'em out, wipe, and repush images at the end of every quarter. windows machines have no trouble lasting 12 weeks, alongside the macs we have the labs.

That's a total waste of time. I used to take care of the emac in our lab. That meant logging in, deleting files that people had left on it (about 20 seconds) and launching a couple of apps to make sure they were working.

That's it. That's all you have to do, if you have set it up properly.

Again, an emac is designed for writing documents, blogging, mail, messing with basic multimedia stuff and a couple of other things.

That's what it's for. Complaining that it won't do what you want is just silly, Not everyone is the same as you. Please accept this simple and obvious fact.

For example: let's take people like my mother and her friends. They want to use computers primarily for communication and web surfing, to keep copies of their photos and to write and print things.

Should they buy a massive gaming rig for this? No. That would be stupid.

Should they use Windows with its security problems? Of course not.

Do they care about pulling the machine apart and doing anything more than simple upgrades? No.

Are they techie people? No.

Unleashing Windows on any of these people is a recipe for disaster. I know, last time I was home I had to clean up several disasters for them. These people do not need the hassles caused by hardware conflicts, Windows screwing up, viruses or spyware.

These are the kind of people who get worried when the dialogue for an "illegal operation" pops up, because they think they might have broken the law.

Are they stupid? Certainly not. Many of them are well educated, but do not have the time to become major league computer technicians.

It's exactly the same as buying a car. Some people want high performance cars that they can fiddle with and upgrade. Other people want small, low maintenance cars that require little or no knowledge to use. The emac and imac are targeted towards these people, and they are very good at doing the tasks that those people require them to do.

You are trying to assert that everyone is like you, that everyone needs what you need. It's simply garbage to say that.

[Agathon]

and again, i'm saying it's not. did you even look at the reasons i listed? for the cost that you buy an emac for, you can get a better windows pc.

I'm perfectly aware of that - it's not some amazing new fact. But if you factor in the crap that people actually have to deal with, then avoiding Windows is a good idea.

You can get a cheap PC for next to nothing, but you get what you pay for. I wouldn't buy any bargain basement Windows machine.

[Spiffor]

To my greatest horror, I must admit Ag's post had me thinking about getting my parents a Mac next time they'll buy a computer.

The "no virus" thing is great, especially as they panic whenever the anti-virus prompts them (in English) to update the definitions.