Apple to customers, "Come here, bend over."

The BBQ Pit
1

http://macteens.com/more.php?id=1035_0_1_0_C
http://www.cooltechzone.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=1431&Itemid=0
Okay, well read through those URL’s from a truly bizarre little Mac fan as well as some more level headed reporting, and ask yourself this: why should I pay $1,000 for a computer that has the same capabilities as a $400 one? Well, if Apple has its way, you’ll continue to do so by forcing you to run OS X on top of an Apple machine that really might just as well be any beige box by anyone else. So, how do you Apple users feel about this?

Also, I live the Orweilian shift from, Macs are special, Macs are a thing of beauty, the PowerPC chip is amazing, to fuck IBM and the PowerPC chip they rode in on!

Also, when the legal battles come in, precidence suggests that Apple will be forced to permit their software to run on non-Apple machines. What does Apple do then?

Furthermore, why is Apple fighting the widespread adoption of its OS? Frankly, I might be interested in having a dual-boot machine after hearing a lot about its supposed security and stability, but I’m not going to pay a $500 premium to do so. If the OS is so great, it will be able to sell itself on the market without being tied to a particular brand of hardware. However, Apple’s insistance on not allowing it’s OS on non Mac machines makes me question the OS. I’ve always suspected that Macintosh fans were driven by emotion, but my limited experience with OS X suggests that this might finally be a better OS than Windows. However, this bizarre allusion to some sort of mysterious Maintosh-spirit makes me wonder about its supposed benefits.

Granted, this is a very, very weak rant. More GQ or GD than the pit, but why won’t Mac let me install a fucking dual-boot of OS X?

2

First, MacOS X is better than Windows. It’s more secure and more stable, and it doesn’t allow programs to do stupid things like only install if you’re running as Administrator. This is coming from someone who will never buy an Apple but who does understand OS design and some details of how MacOS X is arranged. In other words, I’m not a zealot.

Second, Apple would be stupid to let MacOS X run on white boxes. And this isn’t just about profit, either:
[ul]
[li]Dells will never come with MacOS X pre-installed. Microsoft will see to that. That means if Apple ever gets out of the hardware business it will be crushed just like Be, Inc. (Never heard of Be? They made the Next Big OS right before the Internet took off. Now they’re another notch in MS’s gun stock.) If MacOS X ran on white box machines, Apple would give up both of the bottom benefits and it still wouldn’t gain ground against Windows.[/li][li]Mac users benefit from the Apple hardware monopoly. It’s difficult for us white-box guys to see this, but it’s true. Mac users never have to worry about blatantly crappy boxes because Apple knows that if they wanted crap, Compaq sells it a hell of a lot cheaper. Mac users are no longer chained to proprietary RAM or impossible-to-open cases, but they know that everything in the box they bought is fully supported by Apple and will never put them through driver hell.[/li][li]Mac users are (apparently) willing to pay for looks. If there is one thing Apple knows, it’s fashion. White boxes are, well, ugly. Case mods make (most of) them look strange and ugly. Macs are sold, in part, on how they look, and Mac users eat it up.[/li][/ul]Finally, what makes you think Apple will be forced to make MacOS X run on non-Apple machines? IBM isn’t forced to make OS/400 run on Alphas and Compaq isn’t forced to make VMS run on any modern architecture whatsoever.

3

Opinion.

Both of which are side effects of not being popular.

4

righto: Completely wrong. Windows has the registry, it has loads of programs that will not run unless the user is an Administrator and therefore gives the program full and free access to fuck up the machine, and it has Internet Explorer integrated into the OS core to give all those juicy ActiveX exploits a jumping-off point.

Come back when you actually know something.

5

A spoon is a lot safer and more stable than a chainsaw…gonna take awhile to take down a tree with one though.

Of course, some of us have trees and some of us have cereal.

6

Bullshit Derleth. More stable? I’ve been running XP at home since the night it came out and still haven’t crashed. Pretty fucking stable.

The hammer you keep swinging on MS is getting old. If you want to rail against the human running the program, have at it. I work for a company that is sole proprietor of software that runs the computer systems of every store of a global franchise.

You’ve been there, and you will be again.

Somehow, even running partly on Win98 (though a shell program) there is no security concern because the user is limited to what the admin gives access to. And firewalls. And many other access limits available to any admin.

It’s not that Windows is inherently unsafe. It’s the end-user that doesn’t practice safe use. You know this.

You also know that at a 20:1 ratio of Windows:Mac usage, there is a 20x chance of a hacker preying on the Windows system.

You’re such a software expert, I trust you can see how having a 20:1 advantage of a system will make you concentrate on exploiting that one? I also trust you’re not just taking a position of “M$ SUXX!11111”

I’d be interested in your views in a thread I recently opened.

I work with OS security on a daily basis. I’m just curious why Mac hasn’t completely taken over the world’s sensitive systems since they are impervious to maliciousness.

Or would you be willing to admit the shitbags trying to harm others deserves at least a hint of derision you hold for Redmond?

Come back when you actually know something about the real world. The one that isn’t shown on MTV.

7

Fine. I’m done. There’s a reason people call these things ‘Holy Wars’ and I’m not at all interested in a fucking Holy War with or against anyone.

I gave technical reasons in this thread, and all you can come up with is ‘works for me’ and ‘ten million users can’t be wrong’. If we try to have a long debate like that, all we’ll accomplish is a lot of vitriol and foul language. Not my idea of a fun evening.

I don’t use Macs. I do use Windows. Neither fits my needs right now, except for the vanishingly small minority of Windows software I am forced to use. I’m not a fanboy and I don’t ‘debate’ with people who are.

Sorry.

8

No, but you’ve been a dick in this thread and added fuel to the discord that exists and quickly does turn into an OS Holy War.

You’ve been superior and pretentious and have passed off your opinion as fact.

9

Don’t Macs come with a bunch of software in addition to the OS? I hear the iLife stuff is pretty cool. Definitely some value added there.

10

The reason is given right in the Cool Tech Zone article you linked to. Apple is a hardware company. It’s not a software company that sells computers to install it on, it’s a premium-priced computer manufacturer that provides software to match. If they sold a version of OS X that’d run on a PC, what would be the reason for buying the premium-priced computer? Mac users’ problems with Windows machines mostly have to do with the OS, not the box.

11

I run XP pro and it hasn’t crashed a single time since I installed it a year ago. I keep it pretty clean and secure though.

12

Um, one way to have a robust OS is to limit the hardware it runs on. One of the reasons that Windows systems have typically been support nightmares over the years is that the operating system has to run on such a wide spectrum of hardware, some of it supplied by major manufacturers and some of it cobbled together out of spare parts in someone’s bedroom. Admittedly, devices are a lot more compliant with standards nowadays, and you can almost rely on the drivers working for things like CD drives and video cards.

But if Apple doesn’t want to have to field technical support calls from some user furious that OS-X doesn’t run on his homebuilt AMD machine, I’d say that’s their prerogative.

13

Oh seriously, everyone…

a) The current Macintosh is not an otherwise-ChipIdentical PC with a PowerPC chip wired in where a PC would have an intel (or intel-compatible AMD etc) chip instead. The entire internal architecture is historically different and although there’s been a lot of convergence in the last decade, a Mac with a Pentium 4 in it is not a PC. And, while the Windows OS, which has had to be able to run on a very wide range of hardware, may install and run on the new intel-based Macs, the MacOS has been designed to run on a much narrower hardware framework. So unless Apple goes out of their way to make it support the various PC-industry-standard chipsets, the MacOS ported to the intel processor probably won’t run or install on a Gateway / Sony / Dell / Toshiba.

It’s entirely possible that Apple will, <ahem>, “see to it” that the MacOS will not run on non-Apple HW, and if so it’s also possible that DoJ will pin their ears back and tell them they can’t do that. But it’s also decently possible that unless Apple specifically devotes extra dev time into making the MacOS run on PC-ISA, it won’t without them having to “see to it” or do anything to prevent it.

b) Preliminary indications are that you can own a dual-boot machine. It would be a Macintosh. You would be able to install Windows on a separate partition and boot from it (although Apple would not “support it”).

c) I seriously seriously doubt that MacOS X 10.5 (Intel-compatible) will even be on the shelves before industrious hackers have it booting at native speed on standard PCs, even if the average non-tinkerer is unable to do so.

e) Windows has come a long long way. I don’t think Windows sucks. If I had to choose between running Windows XP and running Macintosh System 4, I would definitely go with XP, any day.

f) My issues with the Intel processor are that, firstly, the world is a better place with more than one viable competitive consumer processor architecture, and now we won’t have that. The alternative could have been MIPS or Alpha or heck, Motorola 68K-series even, but now we don’t have one really, at all; and, second, the x86 architecture is a misbegotten troglodyte of an instruction set. That the Intel (and AMD) chips execute it with such speed and power-usage sophistication is applause-worthy, and I understand the frustration of Steve Jobs in trying to obtain competitive chips from Motorola or IBM over the years, but the modern x86 architecture chips are essentially sprawlingly complicated hardware emulators of a 386 chip that convert that godawful legacy instruction set into something that’s much more akin to RISC instructions, and then those are fed into a core that works like a RISC chip. It just isn’t elegant and it just can’t be an architectural design that has a long future. Intel’s miracles and phenomenal R&D deparmtent beside the point, it’s a design that will increasingly hamper the PC (and now the Mac, dammit) until it is finally dropped in favor of cleaner more modern chips that leave execution of the legacy x86 instruction set to software emulation routines.

14

Cite?

I dunno about the boards that Apple sells, specifically, but every DIY PPC mobo I’ve ever seen has been basically an __ATX with a socket for the G-whatever.

15

I run MacOS X and it hasn’t crashed a single time since I installed it five years ago. I don’t have to do anything special to keep it clean, either. :slight_smile:

Well, except for the crumbs in the keyboard, but that’s a universal regardless of platform.

16

Okay, I’m not sure that I buy that. When people drool all over their Macs, they talk about how reliabe and robust and cool they are, but I even though there may be differences in the reliability between the OS’es, I seriously doubt that the hardware itself is more reliable. I mean, I really only use the University’s Mac’s, but I’ve seen several of them come up with little flashing serious errors related to the memory or hard drives. I mean beyond a mother board, HD, optical drive, cards, monitor, and chips, what exactly is a computer? Surely you could still spend much less on PC components to get a higher quality computer than through Apple. When people say that there’s a “whole architecture” behind Macs that PC’s don’t have, what exactly are they referring to?

17

I use XP at work and Macs at home. I’ve only been using Macs for about three years (shortly after Mac OS X came out); prior to that, I’ve mostly used Windows, some Linux, and a smattering of OS/2.

With that background, I infinitely pefer Mac OS X. Beyond the fact that it has a unix-like underpinning, it is just plain easier to use. Even for a power user/software developer like myself.

Things just work on OS X. I plug things in and the OS knows how to deal with them. With XP, it’s a constant battle of upgrading drivers to deal with little known quirks that show up in nasty ways. (I’ve spent any number of hours trying to get WoW working smoothly on our XP gaming box at home. Never had a problem with it on our Macs.) Controls are consistent throughout the entire operating system and most third-party apps, and there’s very little of this mis-match accumulation of user interface tack-ons that define the Windows experience for me.

As for hardware, when I buy white box systems from various PC retailers, I always wind up with crappy hardware that flakes out the first chance it gets. I’ve only had one hardware failure with all of the Macs (now three) I’ve owned, and it was fixed promptly and without cost at a local Apple store. I’m still very happy with the iBook I purchased three years ago. It runs just fine, I don’t feel a need to upgrade it, and I’ve never had to reinstall the operating system, a task I need to perform at least once every six months for each of the Windows boxes I keep alive around the house (my housemates are entirely windows based and I, unfortunately, serve as primary technical support).

Unless you use both system for a good amount of time, there’s no way you’ll understand how it’s actually cheaper to buy a Mac in terms of long term investments.

JOhn.

18

Software architecture, and software/hardware integration, probably.

19

MacOS is just better, get over it. It was very obviously designed by someone who actually cared about the end user being able to use it: there are just lots and lots of very neat ideas put into it. The underlying OS is clean, powerful, and most importantly, accessible to power users if they need to do stuff. Windows code, in comparison, is an extremely bloated mess.

20

Actually, Compaq ported VMS to IA64.

IA64 may be a sinking ship, but it’s a modern sinking ship. :wink: