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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."
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OS-X based on BSD (Score:5, Insightful)
That said... BSD is dy^H^Hthriving.
long background in C (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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.
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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.
What amazes me most (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure it didn't hurt to have NextStep to build off of.
Parent
Re:What amazes me most (Score:5, Insightful)
What really made MacOS X work is that Apple already had a very secure decently sized niche market for Macs. That is, there was a guaranteed devoted userbase that:
(1) Hardware manufacturers bother to write and include drivers.
(2) Software companies bother to release OS X versions of their applications.
That means that "things just work" - hardware works, and there is enough software, all built for the specific platform, that it all plays together nicely.
Imagine, for a minute, that there was a Linux distributor (Call them X) that standardised on a fixed platform (say GNOME for example), and had enough guaranteed userbase that Adobe wrote a version of the Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) for GNOME, Microsoft released MS Office for GNOME, and lots of other serious software companies also wrote GNOME versions of their commercial applications. All of a sudden distribution X would be a viable platform that had all the software you need, and it all works seamlessly together inside GNOME. Presuming you also have hardware coming with distribution X drivers, dsitribution X would be quite reasonable competition for OS X - it would certainly have the "it just works" factor.
You can redo the whole gedanken experiment with KDE if you like, you'll get similar results.
What made OS X really work was the guaranteed userbase and the fact that it could run old mac software to ensure a smooth transition of that userbase and an immediate supply of software. Honestly, if a small startup company wrote a brand new OS that was as good as OS X but lacked the userbase, and hecne software and hardware support, it would just potter along and probably eventually die or get bought out (see BeOS, NeXTStep etc.)
Jedidiah.
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Re:What amazes me most (Score:5, Interesting)
GNOME is great, but it certainly does not 'just work', and it's not lack of hardware support, or lack of Photoshop and Office, that are the reason for this.
When people say, 'it just works', they aren't referring solely to the hardware (although that is part of it), but the software (OS) as well. How do you set up the firewall in GNOME? How do you format and partition a hard drive? How do you integrate your digital camera with your screensaver? These are just a few random examples--all possible under GNOME, but not even remotely as well designed as under OS X.
I'm guessing you aren't very familiar with Mac OS X. GNOME is great, and I use it daily, but it's not just lack of hardware vendors' and application vendors' support that's keeping it from 'just working'.
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Re:unix laptop = key (Score:5, Interesting)
Me 2. I couldn't agree more.
Three of my good friends who are power users (they used to run Linux on the desktop and server) have all switched over to Macs. Apple has one thing that Linux lacks -- consistency. But that's the advantage of "commercial" software.
For power users:
Pre OS X felt like such a straight-jacket. I used to ridicule the "menu bar at the top" GUI. Now that I've done some dev on it, the whole Mac experience is just more consistent, then the half-baked Windows UI. Apple really has taken the best from Next, Mac, and Windows. Is it perfect? No, but for the most part, things seem to "just work." Ever try coping multiple files totaling over 1+ Gig across on a Windows Box with some of the files already there? Where is the "No to all" button? It's all the "little" UI touches that Windows misses. It all adds up.
For developers:
XCode - doc markup, version control, and a half decent IDE "free" on the 4th OS CD. This is a great way to "win" Window's developers. Microsoft learnt this long ago -- without developers, your OS is going no where.
My next PC is going to be a Mac.
The 17" PowerBooks are sweet -- the next revision should have great 3D performance. The current ones have "good" 3D performance. Gaming is the only real reason to stay away from Macs.
--
XCode tip - trying to add a file that doesn't show up in the file dialog? (Stupid Mac File Dialog
Press '/' and you can type in any path you wan to add any lib(s) you want.
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Re:unix laptop = key (Score:5, Informative)
Hopefully you don't anymore -- hell, I used to myself. If you do, take a look at Fitts' Law [wikipedia.org], from which can be concluded that such a design is actually best for users.
If you want to see this in action, try moving your mouse to any point on the center of your screen as quickly as possible, and see how much you overshoot or undershoot. Also, count the number of corrections you have to make -- using the mouse normally, I overshoot targets at least two or three times. If I'm really slow and deliberate, I can get there on the first try.
What does this mean then? Apple's "menu at the top" allows you to select commands without worrying about Fitts' law. It's impossible to overshoot a target at the edge of a screen; despite how far you use your mouse, your pointer shouldn't extend beyond the top boundry of the screen. Which means it's quite easier to hit the menus in an Apple environment than it is in a menu-under-the-application-title-bar environment such as MS Windows (as well as KDE and Gnome).
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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.
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Re:Marketing people love you! (Score:5, Informative)
- Appeal to authority: Most of the top dogs...
- Appeal to popularity: Last year's conference was full of...
A logic course would teach you the same thing, minus the exploiting part. For that you'd need a course in rhetorical persuasion, or marketing by more popular terminology (ie. your course). It's interesting how long this stuff has been around, yet how fresh it can sound when presented with the psychology/marketing spin.
For more fallacy fun, see:
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/
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Re:Marketing people love you! (Score:5, Funny)
"Marketing Principle" = "Logical Fallacy".
It makes a strange and liberating kind of sense.
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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.
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Re:Powerusers && Powermacs (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Powerusers && Powermacs (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, no, smarter because they're smarter. We're talking about people we admire here. You don't understand my comment at all, do you? I said that when you see somebody smarter than you carrying a Powerbook, you notice. I didn't say that people who carry Powerbooks are automatically smarter than you.
They built their own Altair? They know the registers on an Apple II? That earns my respect. That quantifies "smarter" in my book.
Okay, so your definition of "smarter" hinges around having a pathological interest in stuff that's utterly obsolete and of no practical use to anybody. That explains so much.
You know, I really wish your nickname were literally true.
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!!
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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.)
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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.
Graham's a few years late on this trend spotting.. (Score:5, Insightful)
However, my powerbook purchase brought the joy of computing back into my life. I frequently read the comments of those who decry the overpriced Mac when compared to constructing your own box (which I used to do - and I still believe that a Mac is equivalently priced with Dell/Gateway/IBM hardware, when all things are factored in properly) and while true on one level, it misses the mark on the total picture. That is depending on your interests and usage desires:
Life got a lot simpler when I replaced my wife's Win XP box with an iMac. No more weekly degunk sessions, antivirus, malware consternation and constant admonitions for her to be vigilant about keeping her machine clean were necessary. And she took to it like a charm -- things were unfamiliar (and still sometimes she stumbles on a Win -> Mac how-to-do question) but she is enthralled with it now and spends more time on email/web browsing than she ever did on the Win box. The iLife/iPod deal is just gravy and really we've experienced firsthand on how much more hassle-free life became after the Mac switch.
So, I'm not swayed by saving a couple hundred dollars. Just like I wouldn't buy a Kia or a Yugo, I'm not going to opt for a bargain basement PC over a quality machine like a Mac. No, it's not perfect and presents its own set of flaws, but at this juncture, it seems to be the product of greater quality for me.
Re:I would buy a Mac... (Score:5, Informative)
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G3 and OSX is fine (Score:5, Informative)
I run OSX 10.3 on a 366mhz G3 iBook with 192mb of RAM, it's fine for wordprocessing, surfing, and multimedia use and isn't any slower than Windows XP on a Pentium-2 366.. which most people would agree is a workable pairing.
10.1 and 10.2 were slow on G3s. 10.3 is fine. As a Windows-refugee I'm still puzzled by an OS that gets faster on older hardware with every release...
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Re:I would buy a Mac... (Score:5, Informative)
Please this argument is old and false.
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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?
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Re:I would buy a Mac... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I would buy a Mac... (Score:5, Interesting)
Show us this marvelous machine that costs $450 and includes a complete operating system and equivalent software to match iLife and AppleWorks (or iWork for another $80), and an LCD monitor that won't make your eyes bleed, and 512MB of RAM that's worth having. Seriously, show us this machine. You were talking about something with no software, right?
how am I gonna convince my wife that I should buy a 600usd mac mini
That's easy, just sit her down in front of one for a few minutes.
, plus 250usd for the monitor, plus the keyboard and the silly one button mouse?
(1) Odds are you already have a perfectly good CRT monitor at home or you can get one for $120. If you want a decent LCD, you'll pay for it whether you get a Mac or a PC. Any monitor with a standard VGA or DVI connector will work with the Mac mini.
(2) Odds are you already have a keyboard. If not, USB keyboards go for about $25. You do not need to buy one from Apple. Any USB keyboard will work with the Mac mini.
(3) OS X has been around for what, five years now? And for five years now, OS X has had context menus and support for mouses with two or more buttons. Mine has 5 buttons including the scroll wheel/button. You do not need to buy a "silly one button mouse" from Apple. Any USB two-button scroll mouse will work with the Mac mini.
In the end, as so many of us have realized already, the cost is now very low, and very well justified.
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Re:Keyboard included at your house (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I would buy a Mac... (Score:5, Insightful)
For anyone who has owned a computer the cost of upgrading to Mac OS X is no more than $600. The excuse that it costs too much is gone. Find another one.
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Re:Games are the key... (Score:5, Insightful)
as strange as it may sound, I bought my Mac to do work.
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Re:Games are the key... (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to think that way. Until I looked at the pile of games I have that I can't play anymore because of:
- OS Upgrades
- New graphics cards (less of an issue now, but I do have a lot of games that no longer work because of this)
- New soundcard (see above)
- RAM upgrade (I shit you not)
- Driver upgrades for video cards or sound cards
- Needed upgrades to get latest game working
Then I looked at my PSOne and noted that with the exception of the CD I ran my chair over, every game I bought for it still works. Every game. The same is true for my Dreamcast and my XBox. With the exception of id Software titles, almost none of my games as old as most of my PSOne games still work. I have refused to upgrade from Win2K to WinXP because even more of my games will stop working if I do that.So, which is the better economy, a stack of games that no longer work added to the cost of constant upgrades to keep up with the latest titles or a stack of games that will continue to work until either the media fails or the hardware to play them on fails?
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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:OMG... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh the shock and horror. Apple is a "corporation" which has to protect its IP and trade secrets from being leaked to the competition.
# Tried to use the DMCA to remove content from source forge
See above.
# Use DRM to lock product(itunes) to device(ipod) and threaten to use the DMCA to protect the lock in
I have news for you, the labels want and demand DRM. But it can be easily circumvented legally with a thing called a CD-R disk.
# Reciever of numerous customer lawsuits from selling used products as new, and to lie about about the battery life on ipods
Those lawsuits are being pushed by disgruntled resellers, not consumers. Have those cases been proven?
Does the competition speak honestly about their battery life? No. Companies like Dell and Sony forget to mention that their "numbers" are based on testing using the lowest bandwidth settings with no user interaction.
YMMV but I've experienced battery life on my 2nd generation iPod which exceeds Apples claims for battery life but then again, I don't use the backlight and I'm not deaf. What this means is I usually listen on Shuffle mode and my volume is less than a fifth of full volume.
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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.
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Re:Author is on crack (Score:5, Interesting)
So ten years ago, they were using what was intended to be a research tool to communicate with their friends and download pointless and silly bits of entertainment, and you don't think they were ahead of the game?
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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
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Re:Author is on crack (Score:5, Informative)
Mach -- Carnegie-Mellon
BSD -- UC Berkeley
Cisco -- Stanford
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Re:great hardware (Score:5, Informative)
As well, iBooks aren't too terribly over priced, they are normally very well constructed - IOW it's a nice notebook. The icing on the cake is Mac on Linux [maconlinux.org] - where you quite literally get to have your cake and eat it too.
Soko
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We switched the OTHER way... (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using macs daily since '98, and with the move to OS X, file sharing went from ACLs to unix permissions and suddenly there was no essential difference between using linux and using macos to the end user.... Since X came out and netatalk got useable, I've never had a compelling reason to use OS X on the server - but then, a server is (ime) a thing you set up once, lock up, and leave sitting in a rack until hardware dies. It probably helps that I'm a lot more comfortable with debian on the command line- it's easier to update and maintain a debian system without having to be at the box, in my experience.
But my job has no call for Serious Computers. So, YMMV.
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Re:Service (Score:5, Informative)
I recently had an XServe motherboard fail and it was 28 hours before the new motherboard arrived via DHL and was installed. With the IBM gear, that's 4 hours max.
Sure, I could just have a second XServe on site but that costs 2x - the IBM service contract is approximately 10% of the machine's cost per year.
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Re:Funny... (Score:5, Insightful)
The mac mini HAS to be as serious turning point. Finally, you can buy an economy mac without paying for redundant hardware you most likely have (monitor, ram, hard drives). It's as close as you can get to being able to buy a PPC motherboard, G4 CPU, copy of OSX, and do with it as you please. I got my mini last week and was pretty much able to take all of my old PC hardware and shuffle it over to the mini thanks to a USB 2.0 HD enclosure, spare ram, exisiting monitor and USB mouse.
I've been one of those fence riders for a long while about buying a mac, but damnit, now there is no reason not to. If you were like me and liked Linux for the *NIX'ness, but also wanted mainstream apps like Photoshop, etc with a GUI that beats the snot out of Windows, get one of these mini's. It's the best of both worlds. You can be a geek with a crapload of terminals open and still be chic.
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Re:sorry, just won't buy it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not flaming you (although I think that's what you want). Most anti-Mac folks I run into these days haven't touched a Mac since the System 7 days and continue to carry that prejudice.
Stating that Apple refused to adopt backward compatibility is ignoring the fact that you can still run ancient software in Classic layer and will be able to for some time.
Can't use a floppy?
I haven't missed it, but I can go buy a USB external for peanuts.
No two-button mouse?
Never mind, I'm not going there
Seriously
Anyway, I guess I don't understand where you get "Apple thinks it's customers are idiots" out of any of this.
All I can say is fear not, there is enough room in this town for two OS's.
They can switch. I'll stick with *nix and free updates, and save myself $140 every other year in upgrade costs.
Too bad, those $140 (sic) upgrades are friggin' awesome.
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Re:right click (Score:5, Informative)
Secondly, even with the old mice, you just had to control click to get the same functionality.
It'd be nice if you had actually used a Mac in the last four years before you state categorically that you can't right click one.
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Re:Captain Obvious Strikes Again (Score:5, Interesting)
No exactly. Everybody dislikes microsoft the open source fanatics are doing something about it.
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