[geeks] RE: Reevaluating Macintosh (was Dual Xeon vs Dual G4)

[Brian]

re this macs overtaking feeling, market share and the trends within it are
key to survival, a quick look at
http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0207/03.marketshare.php shows apple with
a Q1 2002 3.48 market share, hardly a mover.

    Brian

----- Original Message -----
From: "Nathaniel Grady" <nate at physics.ait.fredonia.edu>
To: <geeks at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Saturday, February 01, 2003 8:58 PM
Subject: [geeks] RE: Reevaluating Macintosh (was Dual Xeon vs Dual G4)


> On Sat, 1 Feb 2003 19:56:22 -0600,  Bill Bradford wrote:
> > I swore I'd never buy a Mac - but then OSX happened, and EVERYTHING
> > CHANGED.
> > I *still* think OS9 sucks, but it sucks less than XP or Windows in
> > general.
>
> OS7 sucked pretty bad - my high school had macs and it was torturous to
> do newsletter layout because opening netscape, pagemaker, photoshop and
> clarisworks or word at the same time guaranteed that you would crash
> within the next 15 mins. Why did I have this combo opened? I needed
> netscape to fetch word docs that were emailed to me, and put the
> contents thereof into pagemaker for a newsletter. It was actually
> faster to open netscape, save the word docs, close netscape, open word,
> save as text, close word and open pagemaker, insert the text document
> just because you would reduce the number of crashes. My PC at home
> running win 95 or 98 could handle this much better, causing me to swear
> never to buy a mac. Well, that and the whole lack of a command line.
>
> Anyway, now that we've established beyond any reasonable doubt that OS7
> sucked (*duck*), I had a rather interesting experience when i got to
> graduate school last semester. The lab I work in is mostly PCs running
> windows (98 for instrument computers, 2k and XP for the rest - two of
> us have apple laptops, there's a SS-10 server that everyone uses to run
> some custom software critical to the lab doing anything,  an ultra-1
> that's on loan to me on my desk, and soon a new Dell running linux
> (wtf? the unix admin didn't want to buy a sun so i got stuck with a
> dell. grrrrr)), which I haven't use for anything serious since doing
> page-layout in high school. Matlab on an athlon running XP is slower
> than under linux on my 366mhz P-II thinkpad 600e, the machines all
> crash and have to be wiped every once in a while, powerpoint can't eat
> excel or matlab graphs without barfing, labview freezes, etc... I
> started working on a project that needed a data acquisition card and
> GPIB, and it just happened that in a currently unused part of the lab
> was an "old, crappy mac" that nobody touched with just the stuff I
> needed. Compared to recent windows stuff, OS9 absolutely rocked. The
> powercomputing power center pro 180 was at least as responsive than the
> new PCs running 98, and way more responsive than brand-new 2k or xp
> machines, didn't crash as often as the 98 machines (most instruments
> need 98 because they haven't gotten programmers who can write NT
> drivers), had a nicer interface, tasted better, etc... I was completely
> dumbfounded at first - macs had never been worth the plastic they were
> cased in when i used them before! Then CS people I knew started
> switching to OS X in herds, so i bought a Pismo off ebay. Yum. There
> are things about it that I don't like as much as xBSD, solaris or
> (gentoo/debian/lfs)  linux, things just work. And when it comes down to
> it, I'm a physics graduate student and my lack of time has caused me to
> fall in love with it. Mail.app is actually more fun than mutt (i swore
> I would never use a gui client again after a job forced outlook upon
> me), iCal should be able to publish to my linux-based web server using
> open protocols if i ever get the free time to set it up, I can use
> office to make my prof happy when I don't have the energy to argue that
> the LaTeX i sent her was what she really wanted, my favorite unix apps
> all work (more-or-less), mathematica is absolutely beautiful, there's a
> command line, etc, etc, etc... The ironic part? My molecular biologist
> relatives who all used to use macs, are switching to PC's because
> they're slightly cheaper and their students were more comfortable with
> them, while my "why can't we all go back to VMS" father now says he's
> going to ask for a mac instead of a PC for his next computer (he does a
> lot of computational physics stuff - the G4 should kick the crap outa a
> P4. Now if only apple would get their act together and fix that whole
> memory bandwidth thing...).
>
> Sorry this is getting kind-of long. I think I'm going to put it on my
> webpage and consider it the first draft of an essay!
> http://nate.grady.is-a-geek.com/mac.html Hm, maybe I should make a wiki
> or something so we can construct an open-source essay on the topic :)
>
> --Nathaniel Grady
> _______________________________________________
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