[muglo] Re: B&W or PC?
- From: "Eric D." <hideme666@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <muglo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2003 15:51:01 -0400
on 8/4/03 6:06 PM, Alex at admeddemda@xxxxxx wrote:
> I am as yet undecided... but I am sure if one thing... I dont like OSX,
> in fact, I think I hate it. All these years learning MACOS, just to be
> forced to switch to UNIX. Well maybe Apple made a big mistake... I'm not
> the first to consider learning PC instead of X/UNIX, and I'm surely not
> the last... maybe X will finally kill apple. And I have to say, if Apple
> is X, I really won't be too sad to see them go.
The thing is that UNIX is entirely hidden and Jaguar gives an amazing level
of stability (I don't have system crashes that are *not* self-inflicted --
try that with OS 9 (hahahahaha) or even Win XP Home).
I am encountering people who don't have a clue that there's a command-line
in OS X. They use OS X the way computers were envisioned to work -- just to
work, with the same reliability (and ease of use) as a toaster.
OS X was Apple's only one of three brilliant moves made by Apple in the past
decade. I'm not entirely sure which was more important to the survival of
the Mac 'way of doing things': 1. switch to PPC; 2. adoption of PCI; 3.
switch to NetBSD/Mach UNIXes.
On LowEndMac.com I saw an interesting piece recently -- they compared the
complaints about OS X sluggishness to System 7 sluggishness when System 7
came out. On the low-end machines (Mac Plus, LC, LC II) System 7 ran on it
was quite slow and consumed a lot of resources and people worried about
Apple's survival given System 7's poor performance. With time, hardware got
faster and all those concerns disappeared and people could use the System 7
multitasking quite effectively. Similarly, OS X runs piss-poor on an iMac
G3/233 or a Beige G3/233 but when you start getting up to the upgraded
Beiges, or a B&W G3/400 (with 16 MB or more video memory) OS X is quite an
acceptable OS.
PS don't unplug/plugin USB devices *while* a computer is going to sleep ;-)
I once saw someone whine that OS X was unstable because it crashed while
this person was removing his "hot-swappable" CD-drive from a laptop. Only
a moron could expect to change a computer's hardware *while* the computer is
going through an initialisation/deinitialisation routine (just like it's not
the best idea to be hotswapping hardware *during* the boot).
I guess the only way to find out whether OS X is for you is to use it
extensively. It's taken me a year and a half to make the transition to 98%
Mac OS X use (I could live with the non-OS 9 bootable machines b/c the only
time I booted into OS 9 in the past two months was to trouble-shoot an OS 9
issue).
I would say that for everyday use a G3/400 with 8 MB of video RAM, or a
G3/300 with 16+ MB of video RAM would realistically be the minimum I could
accept. The fact that web on OS X is so blazingly fast, that multitasking
really works (with 0.5 GB RAM --> less needed on faster computers), and is
*absolutely* stable makes up for any sluggishness in the GUI.
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