On Fri, 2005-06-10 at 00:39 +0800, Martin Hill wrote: > What are the two main reasons PC people state over and over why the Mac > isn't a good option? In my experience, they boil down to: > > 1. Not enough software for the Mac > 2. Macs are too slow
Really? The top two I've had mentioned: 1. "Macs are too expensive", or "Mac prices would be OK but MacOS is waaayy too expensive." 2. "I can't run [blah program I need] on MacOS"; or "To run [blah] on MacOS I'd have to emulate Windows, so why bother." I happen to feel the first one rather strongly myself. I don't mind paying for Mac hardware, but paying regularly for MacOS galls me. I know, Apple's always done that, and there's some protection offered by AppleCare, but I still find it very annoying. There's no "OEM escape" like with Windows, and the Apple "service packs" are full and expensive OS releases. Anyway, enough of that particular grumble for now... > 1. Large software choices - Macs running Windows software at around native > speeds [...] Be careful with this. So far there is no solid evidence it'll be possible to run any given Windows software package without running or emulating Windows as well. Yes, you probably get near-native speed depending on the app, but you'd still need VMWare or similar and a Windows license, or need to dual-boot. We don't even know absolutely for certain that you'll be able to dual-boot, either. It's possible that better options like a cleaned up and ported WINE will emerge, but it's not safe to assume that. For now, speaking with a clear "might" or "may" in there is probably wise. > [...] as well as X11, unix and ported linux software and of course Mac > software.(1) > > 2. Macs running processors with the same number of GHz as the competition at > last.(2) If Apple go for Pentium M, then I'm afraid that will only be the case if the P4 never makes it above 3.6GHz . Pentium M is clocked slower than the P4, but does much more work - kinda like a PowerPC CPU, or an AMD Athlon XP. This whole issue matters less now that Intel uses "model numbers" not GHz ratings, and now that AMD has been helping get the GHz message out too lately. Even Intel is behind the marketing push about clock speed not being important now. [snip] > (2) It'll be interesting to see if there is a significant performance > overhead which results in OS X running slower than Windows on the same GHz > Pentium chip. With all the Quartz eye-candy this is a possibility, but of > course Longhorn with it's own eye candy will be out sometime along in that > timescale so it may end up being a wash. We'll just have to wait and see. Given that people complain about Linux GUIs being slow, I wouldn't be surprised if MacOS took the same flak. MacOS GUIs tend to be smoothly updated, but IMO somewhat slow and more importantly sometimes VERY unresponsive to user input. Safari and iTunes come to mind regarding the last point. <rant>Of course, it probably wouldn't take Apple all that much work to fix that responsiveness problem, at least for their bundled apps. The GUI as a whole is fantastically responsive, it's just the UI within applications that's a problem. All it takes is for a button to go down then up again when clicked or the app to show some other response while it's working away, even if the actual requested action doesn't happen instantly. There's nothing worse than hitting stop in Safari, wondering if it's actually going to do it, and hitting stop again when you begin to think it won't - only to find that it then stops the page, changes the stop button to reload, treats the second click as reload, and begins loading the page from the start again. *FOAM*.</rant> -- Craig Ringer
