30 Days with Mac OS X @ [H]

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Jason_Wall

[H] Consumer Managing Editor
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Jul 22, 2005
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Brian is back with another "30 Days.." story to tell. There were some big surprises this time around, much like our Linux article. In some ways, Apple fell far short of its "it just works" mantra. In others, it lived up to its reputation as an easy-to-use platform. We may catch some heat from the Apple side of the aisle for this one, but at least now we can say we have a "trilogy."

Mac OS X is merely good, and that's not enough for me to get over the inadvertent hurdles of the OS, not to mention the deliberate ones Apple puts in my way. While my experiences have been good throughout the 30 day period, I have pined for the flexibility of my Linux partition and the games of my Windows environment. I returned the MacBook to Fry's for the refund and went back to using my Linux/XP setup on Whakataruna.
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Thanks for reading!

Please Digg here!
 
I think it was a very good article, as an owner of a Powerbook and Vista Ultimate PC I have experienced firsthand some of the frustrations with trying to get my Mac useable for things other than web content and movie creation (which it beats the pish out of my PC for) but have never really got there.

Generally I'd say that Mac is 90% towards being as functional as I need it to be in order that OSX is my primary machine instead of secondary but the last 10% is just too much effort for it to be worthwhile for me.

Incidentally I hear that the OSX port of OpenOffice works pretty well as an office package, haven't tried it myself though.
 
An interesting read. As a mac and pc owner I'm always intregued by people switching across and what problems they find.

Personally I use neoOffice on the mac and it works fine.

Also you could compare apple not providing enough ram to dell doing the same. The amount of dell machines I get called to that have 256mb of ram or less, but are installed with windows xp it very high. Though they are far from the only ones who do it.

I do agree that apple should be providing at least a gb of ram with every mac.

In terms of the freeware I have to say in the time I've owned my mac's I've been constantly impressed by some of the small software house apps that are out there. I keep finding ones that blow me away and I have to buy them. There are also some really good free apps out there like iStumbler, cyberduck and appdelete that do the job. Also there are inbuilt apps that do things that would cost money on the pc as you mentioned.
 
Holy cow, that was extremely thorough. I didn't expect to hear about all the day to day trials, as other similar articles I've read tend to gloss over them. I think this article is much more informative and realistic to the end user considering buying a Mac for the first time.
 
I completely agree with Brian's conclusion - the Mac is made for a specific audience, but it is often priced well above that audience's reach.

gordy_hand said:
Also you could compare apple not providing enough ram to dell doing the same. The amount of dell machines I get called to that have 256mb of ram or less, but are installed with windows xp it very high. Though they are far from the only ones who do it.
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There's a HUGE difference there. With PCs, everything is built around "buy now, upgrade later." Sure Dells only come with 512MB by default, BUT I must point out that: A) upgrading to 1GB from Dell only costs $60 (try to get it that cheap from Apple :p), and B) you don't have to pry apart a Dell system with putty knives (and most likely void your warranty) to upgrade the RAM.
 
so that stability was running texedit? I have to use the new mac pro machince every once in a while becuase one of the labs is setup with them because someone thought it would be a great idea to have them.
So one I have noticed is when you actually start using them for anything serious they will crash your program about twenty levels in photoshop at 1k squares, and simple levels and scenes both windows and linux have no problem with. They should be faster considering they have four cores fully buffer dimms, yet they are sluggish and I even crash the OS twice I can't remember the last time I BSoD windows just using maya, hang yes but and unrecoverible error we had to turn the power supply off and back on. And try drawing on the mac with the wacom you will find your self in finder or some other program half the time.
 
The X11 parts was painful (and comical) to read. The same arcane commands often have to be done for linux too but at least they actually do work.

I did an environmental paper last year and the professor specifically pointed out Apple as one of the most unethical company out there in regards to recyclability.

Yet look at how many people out there that worship the ground Steve Jobs walks on.
 
InorganicMatter said:
There's a HUGE difference there. With PCs, everything is built around "buy now, upgrade later." Sure Dells only come with 512MB by default, BUT I must point out that: A) upgrading to 1GB from Dell only costs $60 (try to get it that cheap from Apple :p), and B) you don't have to pry apart a Dell system with putty knives (and most likely void your warranty) to upgrade the RAM.
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Yeah but how many of either target customers actually have the first idea how to do a ram upgrade or if it needs an upgrade. My experience is very few.

Oh and the ram upgrade doesn't void the warranty, but I agree its far to hard to do on the mini. There should be an access panel like on the laptops. :)

And in the news to day http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/download/aqua.html there is an alpha of open office for mac yay :)
 
Hey guys. Just wanted to point out a few things and shamelessly self-promote.

If you liked the article, I'm also the editor of NetworkPerformanceDaily.com (as my day job,) and I contribute to GeeksAreSexy.net.

If you're new to the 30 days stuff, I've also written "30 days with Linux" and "30 days with Vista"

Feel free to drop me a line at [email protected] as well.

Oh, and these conversations tend to get out of hand, so let's keep it civil. I'm sure my experiences probably don't match up 100% to yours - and the 30 days series, is, by it's nature, subjective, though I tried to be thorough.

Also in a BIG irony, OpenOffice.org (alpha) for MacOSX was released today, the publication date of the article. (Big article on Slashdot.) Most of this testing was done quite a while ago (it takes a long time to edit these articles,) and I wished I had this version of OpenOffice.org to evaluate. I do knock the platform quite heavily for not having a stable, fully featured, freeware word processor - this may have been a game changer - if you have a Mac, I'm hoping you can download OOo and talk about your experiences. However, if this poster on Slashdot is correct, there are still problems with copy/paste and printing - which are the same problems I had on the X11 version.

One last thing: The bald guy in the iMovie screenshots is Shannon McCormick - I was recording a stage-show of his called "Spices," where he improvises a 17th century centigenarian spice trader - a little Baron Munchausenish, but funny as hell. You may also know Shannon McCormick as one of the video bloggers on the Direct2Dell video casts.
 
drakken said:
so that stability was running texedit? I have to use the new mac pro machince every once in a while becuase one of the labs is setup with them because someone thought it would be a great idea to have them.
So one I have noticed is when you actually start using them for anything serious they will crash your program about twenty levels in photoshop at 1k squares, and simple levels and scenes both windows and linux have no problem with. They should be faster considering they have four cores fully buffer dimms, yet they are sluggish and I even crash the OS twice I can't remember the last time I BSoD windows just using maya, hang yes but and unrecoverible error we had to turn the power supply off and back on. And try drawing on the mac with the wacom you will find your self in finder or some other program half the time.
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That might actually be Photoshop. One of the more frequent complaints that I hear is that when Apple made the switch to the Intel archetecture, Photoshop CS2 really didn't work all that well. Supposedly Photoshop CS3 is coded natively for Intel. I didn't have a chance to test out either Photoshop CS2 or CS3, so that's really just speculation.
 
Nice review.

Being a dual OS owner since February, I can honestly say Mac OSX is good but not without its flaws.

Maybe its just me but Firefox bails every so often. Wireless networking can be flaky sometimes, and if you have a Linksys router working with it, KEEP IT! IT IS SPECIAL! because mine with Sveasoft firmware the Mac refused to always stay connected and bandwidth was horrendous. I purchased a Netgear (on recommendation from Apple store employee) and wow what an improvement.

Funnily with all the issues I have had I have ran Windows configurations that match the Mac that have ran just as if not more stable. Its the usability that sometimes keeps people from realizing the issues.

My 5 year old loves Photobooth and iMovie, that says alot for usability. But hey I bought the iMac for the wife and kids and they love it and that is what matters.

Just wish Mac users would work harder to push Apple to make improvements like the ones you discussed.
 
If you're trying to contact me at [email protected], that address isn't working really well.

Hardocp.com email addresses get loaded with tons of spam (we put them on the front page of our articles, publically) and I've set mine to download through my personal Gmail account. The problem is, of course, that the gmail account only downloads 200 e-mail messages a day and I've currently got around 4000 spam messages in the queue.

It is starting to clear, though, so please be patient.

-- Brian.
 
Thanks for spending the money and giving us the review! It would have been easy to pass by because of the cost, but I was very happy with the article.
 
Brian Boyko said:
I do knock the platform quite heavily for not having a stable, fully featured, freeware word processor - this may have been a game changer - if you have a Mac, I'm hoping you can download OOo and talk about your experiences.
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I don't understand this.

On a PC, yes, the frugal in-the-know person will use OpenOffice, because they know it exists. But with out a "tech head" that knows of the availability of such programs, the vast majority of the general populace will buy MS Office (which is currently $121 on the egg). The Mac alternative is iWork which is available immediately (through online purchase) without hassle for $79. The thing that irks me is when you say:
30DaysWithMac said:
The truth is, for the 30 days that I used the Mac, I had to do most of my writing of this article in TextEdit, the Macintosh text editor (like WordPad in Windows), and I had to do all of my professional editing on my Windows computer at work, where I had Word and OpenOffice.
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It's almost like you imply that Word just "comes" with Windows and it most definitely does not.

The other issue that I find very disturbing is that you seem to have difficulty seeing the value in mac hardware. First off, you buy the absolute lowest priced Mac computer available (without bothering to configure it at all) and then complain about it not working speedily. Do the same with a dell or random BestBuy eMachine, and I guarentee that you will have a VERY similar result. And yes, you do have to pay a bit more comparitively because of the form factor size.

And then, instead of purchasing a standard Apple desktop (aka an iMac), you purchase a MacBook, and specifically the higher priced "BlackBook" and get laptop performance from it, when comparing it to desktop PC equivilents.

Now I'm not trying to completely discredit your points on having to spend some extra on the initial purchase and potentially spend extra on specific software needs... But you didn't exactly go about getting what would work best in the first place. Had you tested a MacBookPro or iMac, Oblivion and xxx game would have worked in Windows boot up (have tried them myself) with little to know effort because you need a gfx card. Had you initially priced-bought a system (as anyone with the amount of tech knowledge your article assumes), you wouldn't have docked so much for lack of free word processing.

It's not that I'm a Mac lover, because I have, use, and enjoy my Core2Duo XP PC, and my CoreDuo MacBookPro. I just don't see this article being very valid because the hardware issues weren't ironed out and only caused more difficulties because of poor initial purchasing.

BTW, I have throughly enjoyed and agreed with all your previous articles, its just that this one seems to have some big "holes" that hold it back from being what I see as a true OSX analysis.
 
I think some of you are missing the point, this is under [H] Enthusiast, not general PC purchaser. The enthusiast can build their own PC, can't do this "legally" with Mac OS. Purchaser goes and tries to get Mac OSX as cheap as possible, and it runs like crap (I have a $600 mini too, but threw a 1 gig stick in when it was painfully slow). Goes out and spends 1200-1500 on the normal macbook (equivalent dell or lenovo would have been 600-1000) and proceeds to review the OS. This article is for people who would consider themselves an enthusiast who are looking to try a new OS. They can install open office, they can upgrade their own PC, they are just looking to try out this "great" OS that is so easy to use and are looking for the same functionality that they have in Windows or Linux. This article is meant to evaluate that switching process.
 
Dayvon said:
The other issue that I find very disturbing is that you seem to have difficulty seeing the value in mac hardware. First off, you buy the absolute lowest priced Mac computer available (without bothering to configure it at all) and then complain about it not working speedily. Do the same with a dell or random BestBuy eMachine, and I guarentee that you will have a VERY similar result. And yes, you do have to pay a bit more comparitively because of the form factor size.

And then, instead of purchasing a standard Apple desktop (aka an iMac), you purchase a MacBook, and specifically the higher priced "BlackBook" and get laptop performance from it, when comparing it to desktop PC equivilents.

Now I'm not trying to completely discredit your points on having to spend some extra on the initial purchase and potentially spend extra on specific software needs... But you didn't exactly go about getting what would work best in the first place. Had you tested a MacBookPro or iMac, Oblivion and xxx game would have worked in Windows boot up (have tried them myself) with little to know effort because you need a gfx card. Had you initially priced-bought a system (as anyone with the amount of tech knowledge your article assumes), you wouldn't have docked so much for lack of free word processing.

It's not that I'm a Mac lover, because I have, use, and enjoy my Core2Duo XP PC, and my CoreDuo MacBookPro. I just don't see this article being very valid because the hardware issues weren't ironed out and only caused more difficulties because of poor initial purchasing.

BTW, I have throughly enjoyed and agreed with all your previous articles, its just that this one seems to have some big "holes" that hold it back from being what I see as a true OSX analysis.
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Brian addresses this concern in the article, as follows:
Brian said:
And here’s the really crazy part of the hardware issue: Apple designed the hardware and the software, and still, somehow, the Mac Mini was a mess. If the company has sole province over how the OS should run on a limited set of hardware, you’d think that it would know when 512MB of RAM isn’t enough. We can understand how Microsoft can claim ignorance when different OEMs may mismatch Vista to low-end hardware, because Microsoft has absolutely no say in it. They simply point the finger at the integrators. In this case, there’s only one corporation with blood on its hands. While this article was very much about the OS and not the hardware, the supposed synergy of the two is purported to be Apple’s strength in contrast to the chaotic, hodge-podge blending of hardware and software in the PC world. While the MacBook performed as it should, we marvel at the fact that given Apple’s stifling business model for its software and hardware, it would conscionably sell a computer that it knew would not perform up to par and would be virtually unusable under any kind of duress.
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OEM's don't have control over what OS consumers put on their system, so a user could buy a cheap E-Machines for $400 and run a Linux distro just fine and dandy, and there is obviously a market for such cheap machines because of this. On the other hand, Apple DOES have control over what OS goes on their systems, so Brian is saying that if Apple knows OS X will absolutely crawl with a certain system configuration, they should know better than to sell that certain configuration to consumers.

Since Apple offers a low-end configuration for the Mac, it is still reasonable to assume that it should run OS X decently since it is one of the configuration choices available for consumers.
 
Having partaken in the installing of OSX86, I never had anywhere near as many problems with X11 as you did - it came on the install disc for the OS. I ran the install and installed Open Office just fine, which was pretty slick, even with one core tied behind its back, my Inspiron E1705 with CD T2300 did very well with OSX. (Given, it had 2GB of ram to play with, and a 7200rpm sata drive)

All in all, a good review. A little scathing in places where I'm not sure it should have been, but a good read.
 
After many frustrating attempts, I finally got OSX86 (10.4.8 kernel) running natively. I ended up building a PC with "OSX friendly" hardware.

After the initial dazzle of the pretty graphics and snappy performance wore off, I realized I saved a TON of money by not buying one to try it out.

I can't believe how limited I was in what what programs were available and how terribly convoluted the interface was.

Trying to browse a network share was a nightmare. Shortcuts to shares dissappear off the desktop. Creating a temporary text file was a chore and installing programs like Yahoo messenger was confusing. (Why do I have to drag messenger into the apps folder? Shouldn't that happen automatically? Why is there an icon of a drive of my desktop called Yahoo Messenger that has to be ejected? WTF?)

I realize that MAC OS is different, but I made the mistake of assuming everything would just make sense like their marketing implies.

Stability? See what happens to MAC OS when you are browsing a share and the other computer loses its network connection.....
 
I agree that the description of installing X was painfull, somewhat comical, and totally unnecessary. Apple includes a nice install file for X11.app on the developer tools cd/dvd that comes with every mac, you can also download it from their OSX site. It even has a default theme that makes X apps integrate well with the look and feel of OSX. I use it all the time. I've been using it to run openoffice and the Gimp for a couple of years, well before there were aqua native ports of wither and the older unix and X11 versions are fully functional.
 
Dayvon said:
It's almost like you imply that Word just "comes" with Windows and it most definitely does not.
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I don't see this. I said, I had Word and OpenOffice at my work computer. I specifically mentioned OpenOffice because while it didn't come on my work computer, I could download it for free if I didn't HAVE Word.

The other issue that I find very disturbing is that you seem to have difficulty seeing the value in mac hardware. First off, you buy the absolute lowest priced Mac computer available (without bothering to configure it at all) and then complain about it not working speedily. Do the same with a dell or random BestBuy eMachine, and I guarentee that you will have a VERY similar result. And yes, you do have to pay a bit more comparitively because of the form factor size.
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This is why I also tested on the MacBook. As for "didn't configure it at all" - I went into the terminal to do a hack which disabled Dashboard.

And I'll be honest with you. I don't have benchmarks or any way to objectively prove it, which is why it doesn't get mentioned in the article, but a bog-standard Windows XP computer with 256MB of RAM tends to run faster than the Mac I got - and at 512MB, the amount of RAM in the MacMini, XP practically flies in comparison.

And then, instead of purchasing a standard Apple desktop (aka an iMac), you purchase a MacBook, and specifically the higher priced "BlackBook" and get laptop performance from it, when comparing it to desktop PC equivilents.
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I had no performance problems on the MacBook. Just the MacMini. I doubt that would have changed if I had gone with the iMac.

Now I'm not trying to completely discredit your points on having to spend some extra on the initial purchase and potentially spend extra on specific software needs... But you didn't exactly go about getting what would work best in the first place. Had you tested a MacBookPro or iMac, Oblivion and xxx game would have worked in Windows boot up (have tried them myself) with little to know effort because you need a gfx card. Had you initially priced-bought a system (as anyone with the amount of tech knowledge your article assumes), you wouldn't have docked so much for lack of free word processing.
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I don't think I knock them too hard for this. Oblivion will work in a Windows computer with a graphics card that can support it. I'm knocking Apple not for the performance I got with the MacBook, but the fact that they sell underpowered graphics cards across the board, and the only computer where this can be upgraded in their line is the MacPro.

Also, I don't know what price-buying a system has to do with anything.
 
I finalized my decision to buy MacBook (regular - not pro) after looking around at other 2.0 Ghz Intel Core 2 duos with 1280x800 screens with 1 gig of ram and 80 gigs of hard drive space. At the time I made the comparison, comparing to equivalent systems from DELL and HP, Apple was the cheapest for that piece of hardware. I needed something lighter than my ~10 lb HP AMD based laptop and the Mac fit the bill nicely. I was going to dual boot linux, but Mac OS a better user experience IMHO. I can also run RoR on it fine, along with NetBeans and MySQL. MS Office rounds out the setup and is not really negotiable - since I don't want to look like a tool to my clients by asking them to re-save their MS Word/Excel documents so I can read them. I'm also looking at buying a Mac Pro at the next refresh because for a dual CPU, multi core system they're one of the cheaper options based on Intel 5160-ish cpu's.

If you're going to buy a computer in this day and age, 512 megs of Ram is not sufficient unless all you're going to do is browse the internet and send e-mail. Even though Linux is much better with Ram than Windows, 512 is not a lot of breathing space. I would think you'd want a minimum of 1 Gig of Ram. I actually found the hard drive and Ram on my MacBook easily accessible behind the battery, as easy as my 10 lb HP laptop. In fact, the second dimm on the HP laptop is going to require a substantial amount of dis-assembly to upgrade it. Mac Mini's are also a poor choice, for most people, given that they use laptop hard drives instead of regular 3.5" drives. You would be better off with an iMac, which is easily upgradable on RAM. Frankly, if I about the cheapest ultra-compact desktop from HP I would probably find it "wanting" in many respects. And as far as installing X11, why didn't you just pop in the install disk and double-click on the X11 installer?
 
I couldn't read your whole article because, being a Mac head, I got turned off pretty fast. Two hours to install the OS? I have a PowerBook 1.5ghz which isn't nearly as fast as either of the machines you used and it has 512MB of ram. It takes me less than 30 minutes to install the OS. I skipped to your conclusion and completely disagreed with you thoughts on freeware. There's plenty of it and NeoOffice.org is a great writing application. Why it's not completely fair to say your biased because I didn't read the entire article, just reading the first section and the last page left me with that feeling.
 
ND40oz said:
I think some of you are missing the point, this is under [H] Enthusiast, not general PC purchaser. The enthusiast can build their own PC, can't do this "legally" with Mac OS. Purchaser goes and tries to get Mac OSX as cheap as possible, and it runs like crap (I have a $600 mini too, but threw a 1 gig stick in when it was painfully slow). Goes out and spends 1200-1500 on the normal macbook (equivalent dell or lenovo would have been 600-1000) and proceeds to review the OS. This article is for people who would consider themselves an enthusiast who are looking to try a new OS. They can install open office, they can upgrade their own PC, they are just looking to try out this "great" OS that is so easy to use and are looking for the same functionality that they have in Windows or Linux. This article is meant to evaluate that switching process.
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Thank you.

Don't get me wrong, I believe that criticism makes me a better reporter and helps get to the underlying truth of the story, but between some of the posts here and some of the posts on Slashdot, it's aggravating. Comments such as "He must not have heard of MacPorts or Fink" do much to demoralize me when I spend a page, each, on MacPorts and Fink.
 
paulch said:
And as far as installing X11, why didn't you just pop in the install disk and double-click on the X11 installer?
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That's exactly what I did, but the problem is that I had trouble identifying which package was indeed the X11 installer.
 
You know, I'm not sure what exactly to think of your article.
While I have used a MacBook Pro for a year now, you're 30 day use in no way reflects my first use. However, I had previously been a linux user so maybe I'm quicker at figuring things out....

Here are a few things that bothered me about your article:

1. Personally, I agree with the Mac Mini. Running OSX on 512MB of RAM is like trying to run Vista or Gnome on the same setup; it'll work but it won't be pretty. However, I feel that since you work for HardOCP, a HARDWARE review website, you should have read up a little before your purchase and realized that the 512MB Mac Mini wasn't going to cut it. Sales people lie, even Apple ones.

2. For VLC, you have to turn deinterlacing ON while watching DVDs. VLC for Mac has several options, you need to click Video->Deinterlacing and choose an option. I don't know why it doesn't turn on automatically, but it is there. On the same note, I've been using NeoOffice for about 2 months now, writing school papers on it with no problems. I've never noticed the Italic problem you mentioned.

3. Free software for the mac is a pain. I don't understand why I'm able to download and use several thousands of free software on Windows and Linux, but people porting software for Mac always require X11 and sometimes require you to pay. Mac programmers seem to be a little more greedy and lazy then Windows or Linux programmers.

4. I wish you would have pointed out bigger failures in the OSX world, namely drivers. I don't understand why I have the same ATi drivers that came with this laptop. There has been several new drivers released for Windows and even for Linux in that time span, and I'm still waiting...

5. You never mentioned Apple's tech support, which has always been horrible in my opinion. The people on the phone and the guys in the store. They're useless.

I've always sort of felt that the editors at HardOCP are a little biased against Apple, and this article seems to support that. Maybe I'm a little biased for the Mac, but you should know that I don't think I'll buy another Mac when this one needs upgraded. Not unless the freeware people get it together and drop X11 as a solution, and Mac decides that they should stay on top of the graphics drivers.

EDIT!
Since there seems to be a little bit of bashing in the time it took me to type all this up (not the fastest typist), let me say a few good things. :)

1. the $600 Mac Mini is useless unless you're wanting to give it to your grandmother so she can check her email. Thanks for pointing that out!
2. I didn't know about the Freeware OSX website, I'll look into it.
3. Pointing out how much of a pain it is to get opensource stuff to work on the Mac. This is my biggest problem. I hate having to run Gimp and Inkscape under X11 and I really hate having to buy software... (except games!)
4. You did point out that Mac people aren't very helpful. If you accuse OSX of acting oddly in a chatroom or a forum, they'll linch you.
5. You did show that printers don't always work in Mac. My printer doesn't work in Mac and i have to boot to windows if i want to print. This is terrible and annoying. I know it works in Linux, but not Mac.

I hope that makes my post a little more balanced. :)
 
The expense completely depends on what you are doing. If you want to start doing more than what a MAC comes with, then things start to get expensive.

With PCs, everything you buy has a cheaper alternative. Not so with Apple.

Want Word for cheap? Buy Works Suite OEM online for what $50? 2Gigs of PC5300 ... $80.00 Need for Speed Carbon at Future Shop $19.99 Canadian, and on and on and....
 
Very cool article.

Interesting about the lack of open source / freeware apps on OSX. I just assumed that Open Office had been ported a long time ago.

My Mac-using friends all use Abiword - but they have faster systems with more RAM, etc - so I guess it might be a memory hog...

Another though - on those Mac/PC commercials, you never see the Mac guy saying how he has to reboot, press and hold the power key for 3 seconds... etc etc - to update the flash ROM or whatever that step was... heh

Good read - dugg!
 
Parastie said:
You know, I'm not sure what exactly to think of your article.
While I have used a MacBook Pro for a year now, you're 30 day use in no way reflects my first use. However, I had previously been a linux user so maybe I'm quicker at figuring things out....
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Pretty sad you need to be an expert on the least user friendly OS to use the supposedly friendliest one....
 
calebb said:
Very cool article.

Interesting about the lack of open source / freeware apps on OSX. I just assumed that Open Office had been ported a long time ago.

My Mac-using friends all use Abiword - but they have faster systems with more RAM, etc - so I guess it might be a memory hog...

Another though - on those Mac/PC commercials, you never see the Mac guy saying how he has to reboot, press and hold the power key for 3 seconds... etc etc - to update the flash ROM or whatever that step was... heh

Good read - dugg!
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I honestly think that maybe the problems I had with AbiWord dealt with the Intel platform and that AbiWord is optimized for G4s and G5s... which is a possibility. Still, it's been what, two, three years since they switched platforms?
 
One thing I want to say before we go on:

I don't care what perceived or real biases "HardOCP" as an organization has against Macs, but if anything, my article should have been biased towards Macs. I was a Mac user from 2001 to 2005, as mentioned in the article. I really loved my Mac because it was better than the alternatives at the time (which included Pre-SP1 Windows XP and Really Hard To Use Linux.) So I was actually walking into this thing prepared to be wowed and expecting everything would work really well. The fact that they didn't unfortunately surprised me.

I think many of the problems I had stem from the G4/G5 to Intel changeover - alot of coders haven't optimized for the new instruction set. However, the Intel platform has been out for years, and I thought they'd get the kinks out by now.
 
Brian Boyko said:
One thing I want to say before we go on:

I don't care what perceived or real biases "HardOCP" as an organization has against Macs, but if anything, my article should have been biased towards Macs. I was a Mac user from 2001 to 2005, as mentioned in the article. I really loved my Mac because it was better than the alternatives at the time (which included Pre-SP1 Windows XP and Really Hard To Use Linux.) So I was actually walking into this thing prepared to be wowed and expecting everything would work really well. The fact that they didn't unfortunately surprised me.

I think many of the problems I had stem from the G4/G5 to Intel changeover - alot of coders haven't optimized for the new instruction set. However, the Intel platform has been out for years, and I thought they'd get the kinks out by now.
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I was hoping to be wow'ed too. But all I found was a quirky and extremely limited platform. My mpg music videos looked worse in Quicktime than WMP, Winamp and Nero Showtime. iTunes won't play songs over the network directly, it has to copy them first. Looking in a network folder with thousands of files took longer than Windows as the network performance b/w MAC and PC seems to suck - A LOT. (Copying files from a Windows machine took forever) When I resize a window, the files don't re-sort to fill it - which makes a widescreen kind of pointless. Music and pictures didn't thumbnail - which shocked me. Where's the wow factor?

EDIT: I was also shocked Quicktime was as limited as the PC version. I assumed MAC OS would include Quicktime PRO. You can't play a video full screen or save the file you just played without buying it? PC media players have been doing that for free since Win95.
 
VIC-20 said:
Pretty sad you need to be an expert on the least user friendly OS to use the supposedly friendliest one....
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LoL...well it's certainly friendly for the average user, but for anyone actually trying to get work down you have to dig a little too deep to get anything to work properly.
 
Canon Lide 30 scanner not working? Actually, that is my exact scanner and I use a Mac and it works fine for me. On the Canon driver download page, there are actually two packages. One called toolbox and another download called scanner driver. It seems from the article that he only downloaded the toolbox application and not the driver package. The fact that he could not even figure this rather simple task out makes me wonder about the rest of the article as well. I also take issue with the Macs are so expensive rhetoric. I agree that there are no Mac's under $500, but look what kind of PC rig you get in that price range. The Mac mini is very competitive with other PC's when you match features and form. The Macbook Pro was just update with Santa Rosa, LED, and an nvidia 8600m. Again, if you match specs as closely as possible it is extremely price competitive with other 15 inch laptops. I also think the Macpro line are the best value for a pro user. The top of the line Mac Pro with Dual Quad 3.0 GHz is a monster. You can't even buy a PC with dual quad 3.0 GHz as far as I know, but compare it to a Dell with dual quad 2.6 GHz and you will see that even though the Macpro is faster, it is about $2,000 cheaper when you match specs. I realize that is overkill for most users, but you can configure a Macpro for $1900 with dual dual 2.0 or $2500 for dual dual 2.6. This is much cheaper than a Dell XPS Kentsfield quad core 2.6 which is about the same speed.

Having said that, I too think that Apple would be wise to create a headless iMac midrange type tower that uses a Conroe type CPU with a few PCIe slots and maybe at least room for 2 hard drives. The perfect name for this new model should simply be "Mac"
 
It's good to see this article. I found it a bit rambling (some topics would have benefited from sub-navigation to skip around, but that's more an aspect of the site I presume), but all in all it was a good exposure for people to see.

Some advice to budding Mac users:

1) Do not try to do anything with 512MB in the current OSX. Too much of this article was spent describing all the bad things that can occur when you do that, and Anand's 1-sentence solution was all that was really needed: don't do that... there lies the path of pain.

2) If you want a good experience, avoid X11. There is nothing you can do in X11 that you can't do much better with a native app, and nothing is really free; if you value your time so little, sure -- go with something that causes you to waste lots of it but cost nothing to do so. If you do value your time, realize that expense isn't just what you pay for something out of the gate, and you end up ahead (usually far, far ahead) by choosing a better app. And the better app is not to be found in X11.

3) If you are a writer trying out OSX, you owe it to yourself to check out the following apps:
http://www.nisus.com/Express/
http://www.bartastechnologies.com/products/copywrite/
http://www.blue-tec.com/ulysses/

And of course, for general text editing or coding, TextMate has no peer on Mac or Windows: http://macromates.com/ -- Eclipse users beware, you may have a hard time going back.

For office type stuff, I use Pages. I've disabled Word launching on my system for .doc files, and I couldn't be happier; I still open it to make sure things look identical if I am sending a Word doc out, but more and more I just send PDFs anyway, and they look much better coming from Pages. Ditto for presentation apps with Keynote (learning curve, though).
 
gwmacosx said:
Canon Lide 30 scanner not working? Actually, that is my exact scanner and I use a Mac and it works fine for me.
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Here's the weird thing.

I think I bought the Canon back in 2001/2002. Back when I had a Macintosh G4.

And there -were- drivers for the Canon, they just didn't work. I think this may be an "intel platform" switch problem but without a G5 to use as a control machine I don't want to conclusively say that that's it.
 
Kinda disjointed article, but decent...

Firstly, you seemed to go off immediately on tangents with your freeware agenda, you should have put most of that stuff at the end. On this website/forum in particular we have people for the most part who dump shit tons of cash on their home built rigs to get a few more fps for the latest game. Would anybody here actually buy a low end Dimension from Dell? Thought so.

You're going cheap due to budget constraints, and that's understandable. But you're implying professional use from a consumer end machine. Encoding on a low end Dell can be just as painful as a low end Mac. Its not a professional tool, and as mentioned does not come with professional apps.

Most of the negativity toward Macs are their lack of gaming ability and the ads. Lemme tell you about those ads...

I dunno how many of you bother fixing computers for a living, but the ads are not designed for you, meaning 90% of the [H]. Of all the 'home users' i have bothered to help fix their computers, other then themselves being retards, I can sum up their problems in two words 'bastard kids'. Spyware, pop-ups, viruses, bloated webapps/games etc. My own nieces and nephew can trash a brand new clean install in less then a week and no matter how many times you tell them what they're doing wrong and to cut the crap, they do it anyway.

So your a parent, you have some kids maybe or are, in general, an internet retard yourself. You've payed money for someone to come over to fix your computer before, you've talked to 'Bob' at Dell who strangely has a thick Indian accent for a guy named Bob...and poof, the silly Mac ads come up. With that in mind, do you not believe that your BASIC run of the mill user is going to have a better experience with a Mac? I think so and I've seen the smiles on people's faces when they use a Mac for the first time and their camera blasts out their pics to iPhoto and can immediately start messing with them. Compare that to the shit-tastic software that comes bundled with the camera, infects the start menu and has to install a driver and the service needs to be stopped before you disconnect it. The 'It just works!" slogan hits a home run there.

So when we come down to it, the article is basically trying to squeeze professionality from a consumer based product made for a person to check their mail, do some chatting and surfing and do some small fun stuff. A product made for a person who has no idea wtf a 'benchmark' is other then the lines on their cottage cheese thighs as it sinks in between the wood of a bench. IMO, you kind of muddied the waters between the [H] target audience and the line of product you were reviewing. Getting a Mac mini, 'floor model' at that as your main computer is kinda funny. If you connect it to say a KVM switch and added it to your network as a suppliment, THEN yer talking. Even a Macbook isn't a 'main rig'. If you have a computer at home and you were say looking to go wireless so you can do some stuff on the porch instead of a dark office one day then there ya go.

If you're looking for the whole shebang, and your a professional, the Pro line is where you're need to look. A race car driver doesn't take the pole in a Pinto and drive shirtless with overalls. He has a professional car and a professional helmet and professional saftey gear. Similarly, if you are doing professional editing, you need a pro Office suite. Office for mac is kinda pricey, iWork is somewhat 'lower end' but reasonable. You want free, which is fine. But Open Office isn't anywhere NEAR the quality of a payed for application. In most cases its true with any app. And quite frankly, who the hell out there doesn't know that office suites don't come with a computer by now? And yes, you can use x11. I really don't use office suites in my Mac OR my PC so your mileage may vary. But as mentioned by someone else here, I too did not experience anywhere near the problems you did with it, Fink, or Fink commander. If you wanted to do an enthusiast run at the Mac, what I would have done was make a fake [H] username and asked the apple boards here. The official Dell site is full of retards too, but if this is what your target audience is, would it not make sense to take a gander at the site where you probably more then once asked for help rather then their offical sites? I dunno how you got to a Mac chat channel support, especially one that points you to developer tools. Seems a bit overkill.

In all decent article, but it misses some points IMO (disclaimers if you will). It doesn't really address the same run of the mill trash talk that usually accompanies Macs on this site. Rather, it plays right into them. My i9300 Inspiron is a damned good laptop but even it struggles with Vista now at times, Is it Microsoft? Dell? nVidia? A combination? Probably. Consequently, my G4 Powerbook with 512 Mb of Ram which I bought for basic system maintenance at work and home surfage has made it through 2 IN PLACE upgrades since Jaguar with no hiccups and no problems. Cost a bit at the time and I may upgrade mid year when Leapord comes out with the sweet upgrade today, but in my opinion, the extra cash spent vs. the 'I can't upgrade wah wah' refrain allowed me to concentrate my swearing at my Windows boxes. Not everyone is in the industry, and not everoyone can afford multiple boxes, but those are points which I believe are over looked a LOT and are worth mentioning...
 
After a quick skim, there was a bunch of software that was overlooked for this article. There's probably more, but I haven't really carefully read the article yet, so this is just off the top of my head:

Free Mac Office suite (no X11 needed):
http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php

Free Mac DVD ripper:
http://www.mactheripper.org/

Free Mac DVD to DiVX encoder:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dvdibbler/

Free Mac DiVX encoding and conversion tools:
http://www.objectifmac.com/

FFmpegX, another Mac video/audio encoder:
http://homepage.mac.com/major4/

Commercial hardware H.264 Video Encoder, Elgato Turbo.264:
http://www.elgato.com/index.php?file=products_eyetvturbo

Roxio Popcorn, a commercial DVD recompresser:
http://www.roxio.com/enu/products/popcorn/standard/overview.html

It is possible to capture stills from Apple's DVD player with a third party shareware program like this:
http://www.tool-forcesw.com/shareware_dvdsnap.html

Sites to find freeware, shareware, and commercial update downloads:
http://www.versiontracker.com/
http://www.macupdate.com/
 
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