Don’t confuse the zealot with facts…
Apple has never gone for the low-end market. They go right for the middle and high. They put together good systems that last a long time, support them well (take a look at Consumer Reports on leading computer manufacturers sometime; Apple beats the snot out of the rest in customer service and satisfaction) and invest in the overall design as well as the parts behind the case.
The Mini is a concession to the lower end of the market, and was actually a kind of experiment for them. It worked out, so they continued it, but that’s not where their focus is. They’re quite content to let Dell and HP pick up the dregs of the market with low-performance, low-margin systems. You can see where they’re concentrating and where they’re strongest by looking at the notebook market share; it’s more than double their overall market share at about 10% of the overall market.
As I’ve said before in similar threads, a Mac is like a BMW or Lexus. There are people who are okay with buying an econobox because it (more or less) gets them where they want to go, or who like to restore and supercharge wrecked vehicles, but those people aren’t in the same market as those who want a nice, well-designed car. It’s not zealotry to point out that there’s a difference in what part of the market they want to target.
That’s just addressing the hardware. Software is a whole other argument that can be more than a bit subjective.
Note that CR’s ratings in customer service and satisfaction are driven by polling the membership. Mac owners tend to be “True Believers” and thus IMHO they are rather likely to give the Product super high marks. I am not saying Apple does not deserve them, mind you it’s just that those ratings need to be considered in the light of how the data is gathered.
Here’s the problem in this ‘Great Debates’ type thread:
Apple is superior in dozens (if not hundreds) if little ways that make the WHOLE EXPERIENCE better FOR CERTAIN PEOPLE. Those that value statistics will ALWAYS get more bang for the buck by not buying Apple, because the crap they DO put up with, is irrelevant to them.
In a forum setting like this, you have smart people on both sides of the fence that can do anything with either religion.(which is what this debate really is…a theological one)
The Apple ‘zealots’ (because, hey, if you don’t agree with them, they must be nuts…or worse), can parry and dodge and come up with 200 of those ‘little reasons’ why it’s better, and flyby potshot thread readers and zip on by with reasons 201-207…If they’re not responded to, it’s assumed the mac can’t do it, and thus it suxxors.
Apple makes a great bit of hardware, so do PC manufacturers. But with certain PC manfacturers, the burden is on the buyer to do that Quality Assurance, patch management, virus protection, and cruft removal.
linux can do a lot of the same things the mac can do, at the expense of the end user (or community) doing the Quality Assurance. Apple HAS a U*IX that doesn’t require a unix admin to maintain.
Other PC manufacturers do NOT have the patch managment issues (they perform the driver research and provide that to you), do not have the cruftware, DO have the end user support and cost more for the service.
So, they’re the same from a hardware standpoint, and similar from a cost standpoint, when you lift yourself out of bargain bin (which 90% of the PC responders can’t seem to get out of, and thus, can’t be debated with on anything OTHER than the dollar cost (lets, sometime, include the cost of your TIME in the equation)
I have a macbook pro and have used it for just about as long as they’ve been out. I’ve had a dozen or so laptops over the years and this is the BEST LAPTOP I’VE EVER USED, BAR NONE.
I’ve got a 24" iMac at the office (lucky end-of-year use it or lose it funds), from that viewport on my world, I can Remote Desktop into the servers, Run parallels with XP for a local ‘100% windows compatible’ network presence, SSH into the Intrusion Detection system, and from a terminal, run the exact same open source tools I use on that IDS farm.
You can do all of this with the PC, but I guarantee you, the experience is better on the Mac due to all of those little improvements, nearly every one of which is duplicated somewhere else in some fashion…poorly…on the PC.
I will always sit in front of a Mac. I will always buy the cheapest little rattletrap PC to sit in the basement and serve up my printer, webpages, movies, etc. and that box will always be running a U*ix.
And I’m doing everything I can at the office to prevent a migration to Vista. But I’ll save that for another Great Debate.
These threads amuse me. I don’t get the reason behind the spittle flying between the two camps.
For the record, I use PCs. I don’t mind the maintenance and I’m comfortable with the interface and happy with how everything is.
I wasn’t calling you out, I was just asking you to clarify a statement that appeared ambiguous. As you noted, I agree with what I suspected to be your point, so there’s no real reason for you to react like that.
Spittle generates counterspittle. There’s a massive tendency for misunderstanding of people’s motives.
I’m not sure there’s any other way to measure people’s satisfaction with the service they get other than to ask them. If you could come up with another way of measuring things you’d probably make a killing. There’s not much difference between Consumer Reports and industry indexes like ACSI. Apparently, Apple has slipped a bit recently, probably due in part to hype backlash, and partially to rapidly increasing market share. They’re still on top, but they don’t have a 15–20 point gap the way they used to. Absolute numbers are actually not too far off from a couple of years ago, actually. The biggest difference is that the other vendors got better, not that Apple has fallen so far.
BTW, I just looked it up, and they’re up to between 17 and 18% of the total notebook market now. Rapid expansion like that is obviously going to have some kind of impact on how well they can provide customer support.
I’ve always considered the “zealotry” argument to be a huge steaming pile of dung. People use products that do what the customers wants them to do and that people feel are worth what they paid for them. People have switched away from Macs when they found that one of those things didn’t match up. More people have switched to them and have remained loyal customers. It doesn’t matter what the product is or what the business is, you don’t get and keep customers by making a shit product or by treating your customers badly. That means that Apple makes good products and takes care of their customers. That’s the source of the loyalty. Period.
If anything, the lies and misrepresentation go the other way, from non-users toward Mac-users. Most anti-Mac arguments I’ve seen have looked like one of our experienced posters taking down a foaming-at-the-mouth newbie in the Pit.
“Macs are _____!!!11!”
“Sorry, no. Here’s a cite.”
“Well they _____.”
“<sigh> Wrong again. Cite and cite.”
A recent example (Tuesday, October 16) regarding the iPhone from an industry blog at PC World. He got pretty much everything in the original article wrong. He has cleaned it up since then, but it’s still a heavily slanted article with misinformation. He didn’t mention this in his correction, but he originally said that the iPhone does not support IMAP. His point about POP3 falls partially flat because of this. He also makes a big deal out of the group scheduling feature of Exchange when the calendar format that iCal uses is an open format supported by a long list of other programs, including several Microsoft programs.
This is par for the course as commentary on anything Apple goes. It’s like trying to deal with people who get their “facts” from conspiracy theorists. Nobody does any research, they all relate the same info nuggets that might have been half-true a decade ago but are distorted and absolutely worthless now, and they do it over and over again. This isn’t to say that there aren’t crazy fringe elements associated with Macs, because there are some Mac whackos out there, but they’re hardly the norm, especially nowadays when there are so darn many Mac users.
My preferred system is a Mac, but I have an XP machine downstairs, and provide de-facto tech support for my family’s computers, so I do have experience with both OSs. One of the main reasons I prefer Macs is ongoing maintenance costs.
I recently spent yet another afternoon (about 3 hours) de-crapifying my mother-in-law’s Toshiba after it started running slow again (5+ minutes from boot to desktop, more time before it was actually usable!). This is after having spent a couple of hours a month or two ago cleaning, tweaking, and updating stuff, and another couple of hours earlier getting rid of Norton and installing decent firewall and anti-virus clients. I’m thinking that I’m probably going to have to do a wipe and re-install to get things running properly, which is completely fucking ridiculous. You should never have to do something like that with a decent operating system.
Her computer, at just over 3 years old, is slightly newer than my main notebook. I have an older PowerBook from 2000 (400 MHz G3) that runs the latest version of OS X better than her much higher specced system (1.8 GHz Celeron) runs XP, even on a good day. And the last time I had to install any system software on that was when I upgraded the original 6 GB HD to a 20 GB drive I got from a friend’s dead notebook last year.
The other day, my wife fired up her XP computer to play Sims 2, only to have the game crash with a video-related error. I checked the error and decided to update the video card driver. Bad idea. That gave me another error that, when I googled it, turned out to be a known problem with some Nvidia cards running the newest driver. So I roll back to the old driver. The game crashes again. Much cussing, googling, and tweaking ensues. An hour and a half later, my wife has fallen asleep on the couch and I’ve given up. The new driver lets the game run properly but pops up an error on login related to some Net 2 library incompatibility. I’ve checked, but can’t find anything we do that might affect that. Still waiting for the other shoe to drop there.
I’ve installed OS X on my 3.6 year old PowerBook once: when I upgraded from Panther (10.3) to Tiger (10.4). The last time I had to do any kind of admin stuff on my Mac, other than running system updates, was about two years ago. I manually run the chron tasks that are supposed to run by themselves at 03:00, since my computer is never on at that time, and I run the disk utility once in a while for fun; it never finds any problems and OS X automatically defrags the drive in the background.
I’ve never gotten random slowdowns like my MiL’s computer starts having every few months. I almost never have to fiddle with the system. Any fiddling I might do is for fun, really, as I’ve never run into anything that necessitates messing around with the guts. Even Linux programs I’ve installed that use some command-line input to get working don’t require the kind of ongoing tweaks I’ve had to do with XP.
My life would be a hell of a lot easier if my family members switched. It’s not like they use any proprietary stuff that prevents them from doing so. I spend at least 10x more time doing admin for them than I do for either of my Macs. That alone is almost enough to make it worth it for me to buy them their own damn Mac so they can stop bugging me with XP’s shortcomings.
I think the Mac is a hell of a good computer, above and beyond which it is by far the best choice for me, in part because I’ve been on Macs for a long time and so they’re familiar territory to me.
Why the partisan sniping?
• Some of it is akin to Yankees fans and Red Sox fans ragging on each other. It’s really not akin to religion, it’s akin to sports-fan loyalties. There’s no blood in the streets but a lot of energy does go into dissing the opposing platform.
• How it got that way? Once upon a time the Mac looked like this at a time when the PC looked like this:
A:\
At that time, it was not a matter of “they are both reasonably good computer platforms, whatever floats your boat”. It was not a matter of “the Mac is nominally better in a handful of ways, some of which may be important to you”. The Mac was flat-out a full quantum leap ahead. The PC had the larger market share for one and only one reason: the heft of IBM in the business world. PC users who made fun of the Mac at that time, companies that refused to consider the Mac as an option, etc, represented a different thing than today’s XP user who says “I don’t like the way the windows won’t maximize to full screen, and I use OLE objects and I know vB not AppleScript, and I can buy my own motherboard and wire up my own cheaply”. Or even the Windows 98 user from yesteryear who said “What, no right-click button? And why don’t your menus stay down when you click them?” There simply weren’t any defensible reasons for dissing the Mac back then, and it was hard sometimes to obtain and defend the right to do your work on a Mac, so yes we were partisan, sometimes angry, and often (justifiably) derisive of that stupid MS-DOS platform and the stupid people who thought everyone should be using it.
We won, by the way. Not Apple, but the modalities of the Mac way of doing things. Mice. (PC users made fun of the mouse). Icons (ditto). Uniform keyboard commands (⌘-X Cut, ⌘-C Copy, ⌘-V Paste, ⌘-P Print, ⌘-Z Undo, ⌘-S Save, ⌘-O Open, etc). The pixel-based screen instead of the text-based screen. File names that made sense in English. The “desktop” motif with a trash can, folders to organize files, filenames below the file. How a mouse works: single-click to select, dlick and drag to move, double-click to open, release mouse button to let go, click in the background to deselect, etc. (The PC world of a later generation gets credit for a few useful additions like the right-click mouse button and its behavior, and the force-quit menu, but there’s very little of the pre-Windows era PC that has caught on as an “all computers have that” modality)
Anyway, where I was going with this: the quality gap was a chasm and contempt for DOS and claims of the Mac’s superiority were a lot more justified. You couldn’t boil it down to a a taste-and-quality dispute. It wasn’t steak au poivre versus MacDonald’s hamburgers, it was precision Remington rifles versus muskets. If we were contemptuous of DOS users it was as justified as an auto mechanic upbraiding someone trying to loosen a nut with a pair of pliers instead of an impact wrench.
But I suppose they found us arrogant, and being proved right didn’t endear us to them. We, on the other hand, got defensive and overzealous when Windows came onto the scene. (“Well, we had that first, and our implementation is still better!”).
That, plus history and tradition, is the impetus behind the Mac vs PC arguments of the modern era.
The biggest security bonus comes from the OS-X being based on BSD Unix and the power and limitations this brings to the table. It’s a big deal, the Unix base - one I like, frankly.
I practically strain my eye muscles every time one of these MAC vs PC battle starts. Invariably an Apple fan will haul out the “Well, I don’t have to worry about viruses” argument. Happens every thread and it’s patently false. MACs are less susceptible to attack, true, in part due to the Unix underpinnings and in part due to the lower popularity of the operating system.
Same is true for the Linux fanatic - they’ll bring up the virus thing, too.
Hell, the first big virus written (more properly, a worm) took advantage of a security hole in a Unix box. Nothing is immune from attack.
The “I’m a MAC. I’m a PC” commercials skirt the edge of outright lies at times, too.
More properly, Xerox PARC won.
Yeah, yeah - but somebody was bound to say it - might as well be me.
Gad, I wish all posts in Mac vs. Windows fights were as reasonable as this. Although I always find myself on the Windows side in these things (not because I love Windows, but because I see too many people criticising it from positions of total ignorance), I was more of a Mac user before ever touching a PC, although sadly I couldn’t afford to own one in those days. Early versions of Windows were a joke compared to Macs of the time. Windows 3 had a strange, overly-abstracted UI, but was just about usuable, better when they added the .1 . It was still manifestly inferior to the Mac. I think the crossover point, where it became more a matter of taste which one was better, came somewhere between Windows 95 and XP (if you will allow me to gloss over Windows Me). Win95’s user interface was good enough that something much like it is still in use today on Windows and Linux, and some elements of it even crept into the Mac UI. Not that Microsoft invented, say, the taskbar any more than Apple invented menus, but they implemented it well and so popularised it.
But one thing in your post I will disagree about, the double click. The double click is a kludge borne of the fact that one button is not enough. It’s a way of making one button do double duty. There is no neat divide between what kinds of things a single click does and what kinds of things a double click does. You must have sat with inexperienced users and seen them double-clicking on some kind of togglable item which does not recognise double clicks. So they double-click, and the thing turns on and then straight back off, and the user doesn’t understand why it isn’t on. Or they double-click on web links, not realising that the rules are, for no good reason, completely different in web browsers. Even describing a double-click to a total noob is difficult.
Bah, double-clicks. I’m not sure who to blame, because Wikipedia says that they were first used in the Apple Lisa, but Googling says that Microsoft somehow got a patent on the idea.
What really cracks me up is how everybody seems so great at recognising snarkiness or smug superiority in everybody’a post but their own; often it’s almost as blatant as “I don’t understand all this awful polarised bitterness! Besides, [platform] is just better, that’s all!”
I think a lot of the argument is imaginary.
Sort of. I mean, yeah, that’s all good and fine for a comparison of Macs vs. name-brand PC systems. But the people who really care about performance, ie the BMW drivers of the personal computing world, buy high-performance parts and build a PC themselves, and they feel that having a prepackaged system only handicaps them.
That’s true, there are some people who want to tune and tweak their systems and who are good at it, but again the tinkerer market is not one Apple targets. Technically, you could tune and tweak a Mac, since the underpinnings are UNIX, the kernel is open source, and none of the hardware is proprietary, but you’d be kind of dumb to do so.
The people who engineer the systems are experts, they don’t just slap parts together but design things, even the interiors. Take a look at the inside of the Mac Pros. Compare one of the best PC cases on the market a couple of years ago, the Thermaltake Tsunami, — which I got for my wife’s PC and which got great reviews from multiple sources — to the Mac Pro or earlier G5 cases.
The Mac case makes the Thermaltake look cheap and flimsy in comparison. The front of the Thermaltake is machined aluminum (good) but the sides and back are sheet metal (bad). The Mac case is all machined aluminum, and the tolerances and build are much higher quality than the Thermaltake. The drive bays in the Tsunami have rails and clips for easy drive install and de-install (good) but the clips are plastic and there’s no integrated cabling or sockets (bad). On the Mac case, you can just slide drives into the bay. Bam, installed. No routing cables, no fiddling with plugs in inaccessible places.
The back panel, where the installed video cards and motherboard ports come out, show even more of a difference in build quality. The panel on the Mac is solid and provides protection for the more fragile internal parts, even if attached cords were tugged on. Everything is tightly fitted with basically no play. The Thermaltake’s fit is loose and the sheet metal there is even thinner than the sides. Everything back there feels flimsy as hell and standard sized cards have in some cases several millimeters of play. I’ve done installations on both a friend’s G5 (very similar to the Mac Pro case) and my wife’s computer, which is why I know first-hand how well both cases are built and how easy they are to work with.
To extend the car analogy, getting a Mac Pro and taking it apart to play with it would be like buying a Shelby automobile and messing around with it to see if you could get it to work better. You’re more likely to screw things up than you are to improve anything. The engineers at Apple spent who knows how much time and skull sweat on putting that stuff together so that it fits together well, gets optimal cooling (the liquid cooling system is beautifully designed), and is optimally easy for even an inexpert user to perform standard upgrades like installing drives and memory. While there are some people who could do a comparable job, like expert case modders or people who are already employed designing computer layouts, your average system builder is not even in the same league.
Again, that’s just hardware and build quality. On the software side, it’s optimized for the hardware. Any other computer manufacturer could do the same thing as Apple, choose a limited set of parts and thus limit the number of configurations they have to deal with, but because they want to offer more choices, they have to deal with not being as focused and optimized. They’re also hampered in that they don’t make the operating system integrated with the hardware. Apple doesn’t have that problem. They make everything to work together, and can tweak the guts to work optimally well with the smaller subset of hardware they use for making the computers.
Like I said, you could play with the software if you want to — there are some people who do hack on the Darwin kernel and other open source parts of the system — but even the semi-experts who know a lot about the low-level OS calls are almost certainly not going to be able to do better than the combination of talented and dedicated open source hackers and Apple’s software engineers who are already working on those things. They can play if they want to, but they’re more likely to introduce instability than they are to get things working better than they already are out of the box.