Apple is rumored to be coming out with their new OSX Lion operating system and new MacBook Air and Mac Minis on the 14th. Apple has not given an official launch date for any of their new products, though they say OSX will be released in July. With the huge popularity of the iPhone and iMac and laptops, Apple went from a company that once needed to borrow $100M from Microsoft to #35 on the fortune 500 (Microsoft is now #38). Anyhow, the rumors swirl around the launch of Lion and the new Air notebooks. Supposedly, Apple stores are going to do an "overnight" on the 13th where they put up new displays and upgrade their existing in-stock systems in preparation for a 14th launch.
My first computer was a Quadra 405 running System 7 with an 80MB HD; it was pretty sweat! I've never really messed with Mac's since then, started assembling PC's a few years later and always went PC route since it's better bang for the buck and you have freedom to buy whatever parts and install whatever software you want. That is pretty amazing Apple has grown so much and Microsoft is just an average software corporation, there were a few years Apple really became a tiny niche product. I believe MS has negative association from people who hate blue screens of death, configuration headaches, general desktop computer frustrations and no MS tech support. It really hurts MS when they have a windows phone or windows media player people just associate all the problems of windows with that portable device. Apple just feels "cool" and has an elegant style which made the ipod and its derivatives so successful.
Great post! My gripes with Apple all along were that the machines were expensive and underpowered. The O'S used 110% of the CPU. The O'S would let you switch between apps, but it didn't multitask. A friend of mine was rendering a movie for a video game. He left his Mac running for 5 days - it took that long to render. On the fifth day, he shows upbeat work and there's a system modal dialog on the screen, "out of disk space," retry or cancel buttons. He couldn't switch to the finder to delete some files to make space. He literally threw the Mac out the window, he was that furious... But these days, the OS is a really tight implementation of FreeBSD, and it's way better than Windows. Unfortunately, Windows has huge market share in the business world, so Apple has had a long slog to even get where they are now. I still think the hardware is underpowered and expensive for what you get. But the traffics for the best software is worth it. And the Air is fairly priced...
I'm Mac thru and thru. iPhone, iPod, MacBook, iMac, MacMini......... I love the fact that I don't know a damn thing about how computers work and yet I can hop on 'em and do everything I need to. Just like my car..... don't know how they work or how to fix 'em, but I can drive the fuck out of one. Denny, the new Air is my next purchase when my McBook ever dies. Had it coming up on 3 years and it won't die. Use it everyday, travels with me everywhere I go. Don't think I have ever turned it off. Actually even spilled a full cup of Diet Coke all over the keyboard on the team plane a little over a year ago and it still keeps on going. But the real reason I am a Mac guy is they look cooler then your PCs..... Just like I'M cooler then YOU guys!
Yes I would like to mess around with this sometime. I used to have a Linux box that I played with years ago. Can't you bring up a BSD prompt window right in OSX? The other thing I always hated about Mac's was having one buttom, it felt like trying to write left handed.
I bought one of the white MacBooks in 06 and loved the hell out of that thing until my buddy spilled beer all over it at a party one night (it was hooked up to his home theater for music), rendering it useless. I have since gone through three Windows laptops and had problems with every single one of them. They were all highly regarded manufacturers: Two Toshibas and an ASUS. In January, I bought a MacBook Pro and have only had one problem with it: The power cord went bad and it was replaced after 15 minutes in the Apple store. The fact that I can take my computer somewhere and have it fixed (usually) immediately is worth the price premium to me. With the ASUS, the monitor went bad three weeks after owning it and I had to send it off for repair, which took about two weeks of downtime. Basically, from here on out I'm sticking with Macs. They cost more, but the level of service, build quality and stability of the OS are worth the difference, IMO. I'm thinking hard about getting a Mac Mini to use an HTPC and I will probably cave after the new one is announced and the current line drops in price.
Mac is really a hot brand... maybe the hottest in the world. They use to make all the hardware OS everything... now they just have the pretty OS on top of someone elses OS. I know quite a few techies with Macs. Personally I don't work with Macs much anymore... but about 10 years ago I worked at a publishing company that had a lot of Macs. I was surprised that most of the Mac users seemed more computer literate than their PC counterparts... despite the stereotypes. With mobile devices taking over the world... and with Apple so far ahead with their IPhone and IPad... the future looks very bright for them.
I always wondered why computer experts on here and people I work with hate Macs. They look down at me because I own and enjoy the experience. I laugh at them when they whip out their 10lb battery chargers and have to defrag (just learned what that was a few months ago) and run virus scans. I say to each his own, I love mine.
Mac OS is their software. They did hire one of the top FreeBSD guys a few years ago. You can open a terminal window. And HCP may not know how cars work, but he knows how to display them on blocks on his front lawn.
ah haha. Maybe if your mom wasn't also your aunt you could follow a semi-techinical two sentence post?
Running a defragmentation program has almost always been a waste of time. It's the panacea of PC computer problems, similar to the "have you rebooted/power cycled it yet?", but at least the power cycling helps sometimes, defrag rarely ever does. "My computer keeps popping up porno, I ran defrag but it didn't fix it..." - "My computer is super slow, I ran defrag and it didn't help...", "my computer won't boot, how can I run defrag to fix it?". Defrag just rearranges which sectors of the hard drive your files are located so that they are closer together with each other. In theory this should make data access on the hard drive run faster but the cold hard facts are that if you have to hit the hard disk for any reason it's going to be 100 - 1000x slower(depending on how you define slow: bandwidth or latency) than RAM, so you're kind of screwed regardless of how your files are arranged on the disk.
I never had to do anything, I also haven't had a virus since windows 98. All I really use my computer for is sites like this and for jacking to free porn.
I agree, that Apple ties the rights of their OS towards the hardware and then decides to charge what they want for their product. This pricepoint has been a downfall as a mac user when i can't afford their machines sometimes. Apple has been profitable since the flavor imacs back in 2009, so why doesn't apple drop their prices even more? Mac Mini was the best solution for that but a basic imac desktop is over $1000 still to this day. I finally upgraded my g4 tower that i purchased back in 2001 and it served for 10 years with a faster custom cpu chip in it. So, my next machine was a late 2005 G5 (power pc) tower that still costed $275.00 on ebay. I can't run any OS passed 10.5.8. Anything imac thats intel (2006) to run snow leopard or lion still costs $475 and up on ebay. I do admit, as a mac user, apple has the technology break through with gadgets that microsoft is still striving to achieve so this controlled market or niche is making apple work as a company and their customers.
im split, ive got 3 ipods , 2 iphones and 1 ipad - both my main computers are pcs tho and the servers i rent are all linux based. i love the portablility and cool factor of the apple products, the flexiibility and customisation of pc's (hw and sw) and the extreme reliablility of *nix based systems.
I use a Mac at work, but I can't stand it. I hate the way it manages windows and I hate the way it doesn't easily let me access my desktop. I don't like it for a variety of reasons. I know that it's primarily just me being used to my Windows machines, but I've been working on my Mac for two years now and still am nowhere near as competent on it as I'd like to be/am on Windows machines. Ed O.
