Slashdot Log In
Return of the Mac
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Mar 29, 2005 01:55 PM
from the it-went-away? dept.
from the it-went-away? dept.
Ben Gutierrez writes "Paul Graham has posted a new essay on the Return of the Mac which begins with: 'All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs.' Tim O'Reilly said some similar things in Watching Alpha Geeks . From the article: "My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the mid 1990s. They're about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
OS-X based on BSD (Score:5, Insightful)
That said... BSD is dy^H^Hthriving.
Re:Then why....? (Score:5, Informative)
I wish *Step was more popular. Learning Objective-C is a snap if you know C already. GNUStep makes an amazing range of functionality available to apps 'for free'. On OS X it's even better. For example, Tiger will give every app an undo function, automagicly. The included tools, and overall design of the OS, make developing on the platform a pleasure.
Parent
unix laptop = key (Score:5, Insightful)
I've got a mac now. The first of my life, from someone who wasn't ever a mac guy (and was probably more 'anti-mac' than most.) My g/f has one too -- more than once I was like 'just open a terminal and do....'
The fact that she doesn't need to know what the terminal.app is? That's the best part..... I get what I need, she gets what she needs.
Of course. (Score:5, Funny)
Powerusers && Powermacs (Score:5, Insightful)
Last year's Usenix conference was full of Powerbooks. Most of the top dogs in the industry. That prompted me to buy a PowerMac. It's the best computing decision I've ever made.
Marketing people love you! (Score:5, Funny)
This is an example of Principle of Similarity and Principle of Social Proof including "The Number of Sources" Effect.
> Most of the top dogs in the industry.
This is an example of influence using authority, including High Status
> That prompted me to buy a PowerMac.
Aha! The requested target action!
> It's the best computing decision I've ever made.
Principle of Consistency
p.s., I'm not mocking you. I just noticed a bunch of statements that match the midterm I have Thursday night. Thus, this post counts as "studying"
p.p.s., I love my PowerBook
p.p.p.s., Please note, reading the above post qualifies you to place out of a graduate level Consumer Behavior marketing class.
Parent
Re:Lemme guess... (Score:5, Insightful)
I bet you also voted for whoever your favorite actor told you to.
Sheep. Baaaaaaa! B-a-a-a-a!
Sometimes taking unspoken advise from those whom you respect is a conscious choice, not mindless groupthink. There are developers out there who are better than I am, and when they speak, I listen. I also pay attention to what tools they use. This is neither blind nor foolish, when not taken to an extreme.
Parent
And? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the seller, an OS that's stable and powerful, on hardware that's powerful... Less to do with it being Apple, more to do with being better than Dell and HP and the rest of the crap out there.
Let the flame war commence! (Score:5, Funny)
Foaming-at-the-mouth Linux zealots in another.
This could get ugly, folks. I'm sure the *BSD crowd would chime in too, except that a judge recently orderd the feeding tube to be removed.
Re:Let the flame war commence! (Score:5, Funny)
FreeBSD compiling a kernel to my right And behind me I have an x86 laptop running a Dist-upgrade to an install of Debian (unstable)... Its sitting on my sparc server running solaris 8
So what corner do I go to
Ive been running around in circles for half and hour now!!
Parent
well (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, their laptops are pretty much class dominant, and compare favourably on price with the high-end thinkpads in the powerbook range.
Re:well (Score:5, Interesting)
When it came time to pick a machine for myself for the lab, I ended up going with the Mac -- and I'm someone who's never had a Mac before. Part of my motivation was the "getting stuff done". I don't care if it doesn't play games like my home Wintel box. I need good Unix/X compatibility for when I deal with the big iron. And I don't want to have to futz with dozens of
But I'll admit that the design and prettiness of the environment doesn't hurt. If I'm going to be spending hours every day looking at the screen, it might as well look good. (No badly aliased, bitmapped text in Emacs windows, thank you.)
Parent
Anecdotal evidence: (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm at university, and I know a lot of computer scientists (particularly of the theoretical sort) and scientists of various other disciplines around here that love OS X. Just like using a functional language like Lisp versus using assembly, using OS X takes some of the responsibility for mundane, largely unnecessary tasks out of your hands and frees you to do the computing work that you need to do.
Sure someone well versed in systems or operating system design would be able to get more out of Linux if they took the time to optimize it, but most "hardcore hackers" I know around here sure don't have that sort of time.
Why not? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now they even have a working scroll implimentation (which was a crippling omission, my NEC had a scroll stub for ~3 years before Apple thought of something).
And yes, your brand new very pretty computer will work well with Linux just fine, so there seems to be little downside at all*.
*Apart from lack of 3D card support, and for some reason Apple use crappy propriatery 802.11g cards with no Linux drivers. Mystifying.
It jives with my experience (Score:5, Interesting)
I work at a development house that makes network security products. Three years ago there were a couple people with powerbooks running OS X. Today it is about half of the company. Last week a senior developer was talking to me about our latest hire. He's an experienced, professional coder. It had taken him a week to get the thinkpad we gave him up and running the Linux distro of his choice and configured to work with all our servers and testbeds. Thats 40-60 hours of work gone. How many powerbooks could we have bought him with a corresponding amount of cash. He was considering mandating powerbooks for all new hires unless they had a good reason to use something else.
OS X is making some huge inroads into the computer security field. It has certainly gained a huge amount of penetration here in just 3 years. Even some of the the managers have switched after looking over a developer's shoulder for a bit. You'd never guess Apple had a 5% market share from a walk around this office.
Windows - Linux - Mac? (Score:5, Insightful)
Leaving Windows wasn't a problem, but sticking with Linux is. Sure it's very fast on my machine, and I have all the familiar Unix tools from the GNU chain, but so much doesn't work right. Linux on the desktop is close to a joke. I've tried both GNOME and KDE and neither is bug free (cf. Win2K which was very, very stable), and there are so many hardware incompatibilities that it's a pain.
Ultimately, I want to support F/OSS, but I may have to switch because it's a productivity drain for me to discover that gnome-panel has crashed something and now Evolution can't open the File dialog. Ugh. Or figure out why gaim's icon disappears in the tray some of the time, or have gdesklets eat the CPU for no apparent reason, or...
John.
Re:I would buy a Mac... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:I would buy a Mac... (Score:5, Informative)
Please this argument is old and false.
Parent
Re:I would buy a Mac... (Score:5, Funny)
Tell your kid brother that I and all my geeky friends would like our lunch money from the last six months back, uh... please?
Parent
Re:I would buy a Mac... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Games are the key... (Score:5, Insightful)
as strange as it may sound, I bought my Mac to do work.
Parent
Re:OMG... (Score:5, Insightful)
Most /. advocacy seems to stem from the following:
Macs aren't Microsoft (unless you used Word or something on them)
You can install Linux on them (not that you can't even an electric toothbrush these days)
They were an underdog, which made those really cool Apple ][ computers back in the day (some of us have the emulators installed on our PC's and still fiddle with them.)
They had a sense of style, which the monolithic PC companies still can't seem to get (PC's, seen them lately? Was Dell/HP styling inspired by pinching a loaf?)
They were evolving, which always inspires some hope.
did I miss anything?
Parent
Re:Author is on crack (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you sure about that? Think about messing around on the Internet. Ten years ago that was just getting popular in universities and now it's perfectly normal in the home.
Parent
Re:Author is on crack (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux - 1 grad student at Helsinki University
GNU - bunch O' long hairs at MIT
You were saying something about the author being on crack? Those are 3 examples off the top of my head that have not only influenced but re-defined the software industry. I'm sure there are probably at least a couple more out there
Parent
Re:Author is on crack (Score:5, Informative)
Mach -- Carnegie-Mellon
BSD -- UC Berkeley
Cisco -- Stanford
Parent