That’s Windows '95 = Macintosh '84. 
I’m pro-Mac, but any computer that works well for the person using it is a great computer for that person.
But screw objectivity, this is GD…
Monster104: Clock speed is totally irrelevant when comparing processors of different families. A 500 mHz G3 is about equal, perhaps better, than a 1 gHz PIII. Actually, Intel made the same mistake with the P4. Sure, the clock speed is faster, but it’s slower than the PIII by all accounts. This misconception may be the main thing preventing Macs from being more popular. I don’t blame anyone for believing it. I did for years.
Apple is set to release new iMacs in 2 or 3 weeks at Macworld Tokyo. The top-of-the-line is expected to be a G4 (not sure what clock speed), at the reasonable price of $1,399. A G4 computer for the at-home user … oooh, I can’t wait! There’s also rumors of a drive that will play CDs and DVDs, but only burn CDs, which would be perfect for most people since interest in burning DVDs is pretty low at this point.
Me thinks you have succumbed to a teensy bit of Mac propoganda yourself, me friend.
Monster:
I have no doubt that this statement is quite factual. However, I have an NT workstation that does crash, quite frequently. My old one did as well… as do plenty of others in the area. Perhaps poor system administration is to blame, however I do want to point out that my sys admins are highly trained and highly paid professionals. If these guys are too inept to get it right, what chance does the average user have at successfully maintaining their Wintel based personal computer?
TXLonghorn:
Don’t keep us in suspense. What’s the one thing and what’s the one application?
Mr2001:
[/quote]
Call it what you want. The fact is that until a certain point (I assume it’s fixed now), MacOS relied entirely on the active application to yield time to the OS, and thus the other applications. A poorly written application can easily monopolize the system, and then it’s time for the three-finger salute.
[/quote]
Sorry to inform you, but Windows95 has exactly the same problem. Yes it’s true, a poorly written application could (and probably still can) dominate the MacOS… The point is twofold: (1) Poorly written applications are not sucessful, so natural selection tends to insure that the applications I use are all well behaved [except for Microsoft, but they insist on playing by their own rules]. (2) Apple provides the right hooks, clear technical documentation, and well defined skeleton processes for serious Macintosh programmers to insure that the code they produce is well behaved. Also, Apple is able to insure that the OS works predictably with all of the hardware platforms.
BTW, one place were the MacOS does a lot of it’s preemptive multitasking is at the GUI/hardware level. The Mouse and keyboard, for instance, are interrupt driven. Click-drags and keystrokes are rarely lost. However, in the PC world the mouse and keyboard are polled, so it’s not uncommon for mouseclicks, drags, and keystrokes to be totally ignored because Windows is off doing it’s own thing. This is only one of the areas that demonstrates that Windows is a BAD implementation of preemptive multitasking. Maybe I’m just spoiled because I’ve seen it done right on SparcStations…
I think you’re living in the past. I context switch all the time with active processes in the background. It’s seamless and, at least as good as WindowsNT.
It doesn’t stop for me. In fact, this is one of the areas that I often gripe about in the Windows domain. I listen to MP3s and audio CDs a lot on my computers. I never, ever have drop outs or interruptions on my Mac. My PC drops out all the time and sometimes it completely loses it’s ability to play audio CDs. It will be playing along just fine, then poof - the sound goes away. When I try to restart the CD player, I get an invalid format error. The drive seems to still be OK for CD-ROMs. The only way to recover from this condition, that I’ve found, is to reboot. Anyone know what causes this and is there a more elegant method to get WindowsNT to start recognizing audio CDs again?
The drive I bought was a Quantum EIDE and the packaging only indicated that it worked for Windows. However when I opened the box, there was a little addendum for the Mac. Incidentally, the Mac installation instructions were only one paragraph long, whereas the PC instructions were in a little booklet and talked about all the possible jumpering configurations that might have to be tried and BIOS changes, different formatting options, blah, blah, blah. I bought my drive at the same time a friend bought one for his PC. I had mine installed, formatted, partitioned, and was storing stuff on it within 10 minutes (nearly 5 of that was spent amusing myself with the Windows installation guide - I thought there might be some useful precautionary information). My friend took a couple of hours to install, mainly because there was something non-standard about his system. He had to call their tech support hot line… The irony was that he laughed at me when we bought our drives because he was so sure (based on all the misinformation he’d been given about Mac limitations) that there was no way that I was going to get that PC drive to work in my Mac…
SNenc wrote:
then bernse wrote:
While not “TOTALLY” irrelevant, I think the point SNenc was trying to make is that there’s not a one-to-one relationship between the clock speed of CISC processor (Pentiums, Athlons, Celerons, and the like) and the clock speed of a RISC processor (PowerPC, Sparcs, etc.). I don’t agree with SNenc that a 500MHz G3 is equal to or better than a 1GHz Pentium III. Perhaps the 733MHz G4s will outperform the 1GHz PC architectures, but the key points are: (1) A 500MHz RISC processor will outperform a 500MHz CISC processor and (2) The CISC architectures will probably never exceed about 2.0GHz in production (which is why Intel and others are working on RISC processors for the future). I know the PowerPC architecture is expected reach, at least, 3.0GHz (probably higher).
I am well aware of the fact that you cannot compare different processor architectures via clock speed. I will not profess to be an expert of PowerPC or even x86 designs (not even close!). I can however say from the research that I have done, it is a totally bogus claim for a person to say that a G3/G4 CPU of 1/2 the clock speed of a Athlon of P3 can outperform it in every aspect. I will agree with you to a point Joey, I have little doubt that in some applications it may take a 50% “faster” x86 CPU but even then that would be very few every day/real world applications.
Processor speed is indeed irrelevant, since it’s the user experience that counts. If yosemitebabe’s experience is that her preferred program (photoshop) runs faster on her mac than on her peecee, then that’s all that really matters, isn’t it?
Hell, if your preferred program is Myth and it’s only for peecees, then that’s where your experience is superior, right?
For those of us who are Mac lovers (rebels?), no amount of peecee “plusses” can top the experience we get from the Mac, we’ll even pay more for that experience (although were really talking just a few bucks, really). Multitasking? I have no problems whatsoever swtiching between 6 different programs (quark, illustrator, photoshop, outlook, IE, acrobat), including self-activating background utilities that function flawlessly like desktop printing and unstuffing and distilling. The Macs network flawlessly with the peecees and the NT server as well as the G4 Server. My G4 running OS 9.04 is the most stable machine I’ve ever worked on.
On the peecee side, I am forced to enter time with the abysmal Peachtree Accounting, where the mere clicking to generate a report forces me to wait 3 minutes or more while the peecee churns away at the numbers. I thought peecees were “superior number crunching business tools”! Conversely, my experience with FileMaker Pro on a Mac in similar settings at other companies has been much more pleasant and expediant. Sure, perhaps it’s the way the computers are configured and the way the database is set up, but why the hell doesn’t it get fixed? If my Mac were not up to optimal performance, I could diagnose the problem (hardware or software) and remedy it myself. No one seems to be able to help the peecees without calling in an expensive IT pro.
So, yes, I’m in the graphics field where the Mac dominates thank God. If you peeceers wish to have the last laugh, I believe the upcoming disaster OS X will provide you with plenty of ammo.
You’ve probably got me on this one (Hey, it was late when I made that post!) But a 500 mHz G3 is faster than an 800 mHz PIII, I’m sure of that.
Wrath:
Essentially, what you’re saying is that it’s not machine performance that counts, its overall performance and that clock speed is not a reasonable metric for measuring the total performance equation…
I agree, however processor speed obviously plays a role in this equation, so it’s not irrelevant, just less relevant. This is the single biggest flaw in the benchmarking wars. They show performance measurements for some configurations and some usage models, but don’t necessarily reflect the performance that any specific user would see. This highlights a point that I didn’t make earlier, but meant to. There have been a number of productivity studies, looking at a number of different platforms and the Macintosh has always come out significantly ahead in the productivity benchmarks.
SNenc:
Again, I have to say with caveat, this all depends on what you’re doing. I can guarantee you that in some applications the 800MHz PIII will outperform the 500MHz G3. Likewise, I feel fairly certain that the 500MHz G3 would win in some other benchmarks. In a composite benchmark (which more closely resembles the typical application) the G3 may, indeed, outperform the PIII. But back to Wrath’s point, none of that amounts to a hill of beans if the user can’t detect the performance improvement…
It’s not how big you clock is that counts, it’s how you use it…
[sorry, couldn’t resist]
Ummm… that should be:
It’s not how big YOUR clock is that counts, it’s how you use it…
Also, I meant to give some cites/sites relevant to my productivity claim (obviously, some of these are biased):
http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Dox/ADLMacVsWindows.html
http://www.mac-mgrs.org/mm/MacReport.txt
http://www.execpc.com/~rjohnson/ics/studies.html
http://www.mackido.com/Reference/westinghouse.html
http://www.pfeifferreport.com/mac_pc.html
http://www.info.apple.com/pr/press.releases/1996/q3/960514.pr.rel.study.html
http://www.themacmind.com/~ymac/norriswong.html
One of the best studies that I’ve seen is the GISTICS study. The results of this study are mentioned in an Apple press release, but I don’t think the study itself is on-line.
Damn! Note to self: Learn to use the formatting tags…
Of course, it’s only fair to point out that the results of these productivity studies have little relevance if you use your computer predominantly for games…
Though I have to go with S-Terry Dan. Why argue that Wintel is better than Mac because (1) They’re cheaper (2) There are more games and (3) Games are available earlier? If I were a gamer, wouldn’t I make this same argument to suggest that a Sega, Nintendo, or PlayStation box was the best choice? In fact, since these systems are specifically engineered and optimized to play games, I suspect that they’re performance is going to be much better than a PC, even with 3D graphics accelerators, no?
Of course, I don’t think any of the consoles are networking games, so I can see some appeal there…
Nice that this thread has managed more savvy and constructive posts than usual for a Mac/PC discussion.
Have to disagree with this:
Sorry, but this is just not so. I’ve been using computers, professionally and personally, since 1980. I don’t play computer games because I find my work a zillion times more fun and interesting.
I “make stuff”. I use computers to create all kinds of media stuff (technical books, advertising materials, photographic projects, illustrated books, CDs of original music, cards, posters, promotional graphic materials, props for shows, yada yada yada). I use a PC, and always have.
To some extent, I don’t have a choice. I’ve worked in the IT industry for about 14 years, the last 6 working for myself. Every company I’ve done work for is PC-oriented. Not a Mac in sight.
I have very occasionally used a Mac, through force of circumstance. No real problem with them, but I think I’ll stick with the PC, warts and all.
It seems to me that the fundamental ‘philosophical’ difference is simply this. In terms of designing any tool, ‘ease of use’ and ‘richness of options’ are opposites. Think about it. If a language only has 3 tenses, it’s easier to learn than one which has 8, but you can make fewer fine distincitions with it. If a piano only had white notes, it would be easier to learn and use, and there’d be less to go wrong!, but you wouldn’t have the options available that you have on a normal keyboard.
Macs are biased towards brownie points for ‘ease of use’. PCs are biased towards ‘richness of options’. This requires the user to take greater responsibility for making sensible decisions for him/herself. Some people don’t want this, and that’s fine. I do.
Well, I’ve got a few points people have made that I have to talk about…
Well, the 733 Mhz G4 will outperform a 1 Ghz PIII. It even outperforms the 1.5 Ghz P4 in several areas (Primarily 3D graphics). The CISC architecture can get much faster than 2.0 Ghz. The Athlon is expected to peak at about 2.4 Ghz, while the P4 hasn’t been projected yet. I expect the P4 to get rather fast, because it’s brand new (It’s basically the Pentium Pro thing all over again), and it’s already at 1.5. The extended pipeline, while slowing it down right now, allows it to reach much higher clock speeds.
The 64-bit server chips (Based on enhanced RISC architecture) are designed to take on SPARC servers. Intel’s Itanium is going to suck (Wait until the successor code-named McKinley comes out…then we’ll see a real powerhouse), while the AmD Sledgehammer is expected to be real good (Although much, much hotter than the Athlon already is).
I wouldn’t be so sure of that, if I were you. The new models of PIII’s will beat the G3 (pick a speed, any speed) because of new instructions added to the MMX technology, and they also have 133 Mhz bus speeds, which then allow them to use faster RAM. They also have a faster on-die secondary cache, and while it is a smaller secondary cache than on the G3, it allows a much larger information bandwidth. Remember, Apple isn’t touting the G3 as the ‘Pentium Killer’…the G4 is because of how many Floating Point Operations it can do in a second (Which is why it is faster than PIII’s…it calculates more operations slower, while the PIII calculates a smaller number of operations faster).
Actually, PC’s can still get better performance than game consoles. Even PS2 is wimpy compared the graphics output any modern computer is capable of. For one thing, PS2 only has a 128 bit graphics engine. Second, it’s hard as hell to make games for (Which is why I think it’s gonna flop…Xbox is going to kill it dead). The GeForce 2 is a 256 engine, with faster core clock speeds and Ram speeds. If all you do is play games, go ahead and get a game console. However, if you want to be able to do more than one thing efficiently, get a computer, any computer.
Well, I just need to make a small nitpick. I think you’re fairly accurate, but PC systems themselves are designed for those taking the responsibility to make sensible decisions themselves (ie, those who build their own computers). Windows is trying just as hard to make PC’s easy to use.
JoeyBlades:
Yes, a poorly written Windows app can dominate the system.
But with cooperative multitasking, “poorly written” is anything as simple as “it doesn’t poll the message queue on every iteration of a loop”. For example, Netscape doesn’t poll messages while it’s laying out a page. With a cooperative multitasking OS, a complex page, and a slow computer, this means the computer is unresponsive for minutes at a time.
With preemptive multitasking, the program has to go out of its way to be nasty enough to spoil things for the other active programs.
That’s not multitasking, those are just drivers that use interrupts. The PC does that too.
Preemptive multitasking is when you can have one task running an empty infinite loop, and the OS will still interrupt it to give time to the other applications.
The keyboard is interrupt-driven. The mouse may or may not be, depending on the connection (serial/PS2/USB) and the driver.
Incidentally, one of my biggest gripes with the Mac was that while a background application was running, keystrokes to the foreground application would be lost. When I was trying to browse the web and chat on IRC simultaneously, a sentence like “hey, has takamine been on today?” would usually come out like “hy s tkae y?”. Literally.
I’ve never seen Windows lose a keystroke. Of course, I have an AT keyboard. Maybe the PS/2 driver isn’t as good.
Now, I’m not claiming that the MacOS of today is inferior in terms of multitasking. I’m just saying that hailing Apple as “technically innovative” is debatable at best, since it took them until version 8 or 9 to get any sort of enforced multitasking. (“Windows 95 = Macintosh '84” loses even more meaning in light of that.)
It seems like a lot of you are complaining that you get all kinds of weird problems with PCs, and even as a die-hard anti-mac bigot, I agree. Windows is a bloated, overpriced, unstable, unintuitive and uncapable OS. MacOS is even worse. Unix reigns supreme (mostly Linux, but FreeBSD is cool too). I have been using Unix on my PC’s for three years, and it has NEVER, EVER crashed. Not once! I have never had to reboot it without wanting to (except after upgrading the kernel, akin to upgrading from Windows NT4 to 2000). And I don’t just leave them on doing nothing, either. Under heavy load (14 programs compiling at once) I never saw any slowdowns in my user apps, nor any shortage of memory, and certainly no crashes. Who here can say that their OS has never crashed in three years?
The Mac partisans will beg to differ – the MacOS has its problems, but it’s not as overpriced, unstable, unintuitive and uncapable as Windows is. That’s the crux of the perpetual Mac-vs-Windows debates.
Mister V: Yes, we’re glad that you think the ultimate OS out there is Unix. I’m sure all the people out there who can barely use Windows would love to use Unix because it never crashes. Forget the fact that it can’t do what the average Person wants to be able to do easily - It doesn’t crash. And Unix is just so intuitive… :rolleyes:
ianzin:
I disagree. I don’t think they are opposites. It might seem that way to anyone who uses predominantly Wintel computers and has found them less than easy to use and has only played with a Mac and found it somewhat less than rich in options.
The difference (in my opinion) is strictly approach. The PC approaches it’s user friendliness in a bottom up fashion. The Mac goes at it top down. If your approach is bottom up, your users find themselves necessarily being exposed to the guts of your OS, in order to manage their basic interface needs. If your approach is top down, your users need never be exposed to the roots… but here’s the catch, they can be if they want to dig deep enough. The MacOS is often criticized for it’s lack of low level interface, but Macintosh power users know that this is simply not the case. There’s plenty of tools and very well designed technical documentation that let’s a Macintosh power user get his or her hands as dirty as they want. I can’t think of anything I can do on my Wintel machines that I can’t do on my Mac.
Mr2001:
Interrupt driven ‘drivers’ ARE preemptive multitasking. Preemptive multitasking is anytime the OS ‘preempts’ another active task. My point was that most modern operating systems have preemptive constructs.
But you’re just not getting it… The Macintosh has always been multitasking. It’s called cooperative multitasking and when it’s properly managed, it’s the best kind of multitasking around. It always give the programmer the choice of who gets priority and let’s the programmer decide where his/her software is going to release control… as opposed to having it ripped from their grasp. Apple actually created a preemptive version of their OS many years ago. They decided not to release it because it had a lot of the same problems that Windows has… lost keystrokes, lost mouse clicks, inadvertent mouse release events, vanishing menus, video artifacts left behind dragging windows, and more…
As for Windows and Macs losing keystrokes… I guess it’s system dependent. My Macs rarely lose them - my Wintels frequently lose them…
Both PCs and Macs have a number of users who are able to sit down, click on a small and finite number of icons (more often than not located on their desktop) and launch and use somewhere between one and four programs, save their documents, print as need be, and that’s about it. And you’ve met them and I’ve met them, and we’ve all met more than a few who are almost fervently militant in their refusal to learn or understand more than that. (We also know some who can’t handle even that much). For all of these folks, I don’t think platform choice influences their ability to use the computer.
The slope leading away from that level of computer-literacy is much more gentle on the Mac. I’ve started a few people on their first Mac and for one reason or another wasn’t on hand to answer many subsequent questions, and although some were about where I’d last seen them, others had quickly gotten to the point they knew how to copy files from one drive to another, rename files, create folders and use them to organize their files, install new software, delete software, install operating system upgrades, and even set up up small home networks, all without one single training course.
PC users obviously learn how to do those things as well, but the distribution is different–once you leave behind the clump of users described in the first paragraph, the users thin out quickly to a proportional scarcity that you don’t find on the Mac platform until you look around for people who do their own AppleScripting and RedEdit hacking and put in their own PCI cards and know whether or not they can use PC-100 SDRAM in bank A if they have faster modules in bank B without screwing up the interleaving scheme. Which is roughly comparable to the average entirely self-sufficient PC user, of which there are many (and they are proud of their platform, what it can do, and of their ability to make it do those things).
If you plotted each platform as computer-literacy by number of users, I think the Mac platform graph would taper off smoothly as you move towards the geekier end; the PC platform graph would drop off much more rapidly, then flatten again to a level that tapers off only very slowly between “I can move and rename my document files and install new applications and set up a network” and “I can move the files and settings that constitute ‘Microsoft Access’ from one computer’s C drive to another and get it working properly without an installation CD” and even “I can hack the registry so as to modify the order that the networking protocols get priority access to my second NIC” for that matter.
What this means is that among the computer-literate users of PCs are many PC users who have run into their share of Mac users who are only semi-adept and yet who are smug about their ability to use their Macs. Many of these semi-adept Mac users are well aware that they (and many other Mac users they know) had very little trouble reaching this level, whereas comparable PC users are afraid to do more than click on the Microsoft Office taskbar icon to launch Microsoft Word. This causes the Mac users to think (incorrectly) that the PC is so awfully complicated that no one can make them their own personal machine and really work uninhibited and unimpeded on them; and it causes the fully proficient PC users to think (incorrectly) that Mac “proficiency” only reaches halfway and that no one who really wants to understand their machine and completely control it would use a Mac.
YMMV
I think Win95 and up are very easy to figure out how to use, at least for nearly every task a casual user would want to do. The Help function has always worked well for me, if there’s something I don’t know how to do I can find 3 ways to do it with a few minutes research.