My wife has a mac and a PC (actually a mac and 2 PCs). I noticed that the prices on macs are way down so I asked my wife what was going on. She seemed to think it had to do with the internet. She thinks that it is faster and easier to surf the web on a PC than on a mac. Is the internet somehow built to optimize surfing on a PC (not an anti-trust thing just a matter of an overwhelming majority of PC users so the web gets optimized for PC use)?
Is mac trying to regain market share to avoid getting shut out of the internet or something? Why are they so much cheaper these days?
An argument can be made that it is “faster and easier” to surf the web using Microsoft’s browser, Internet Explorer, which happens to come hard-wired into any machine running a Microsoft OS. But that is more directly related to browsers and the priorities of web development than it has to do with the OS.
More internet users are currently using IE than any other browser, regardless of what OS is being used. So most people building websites are certain to make a site optimal for IE first, and then possibly make it optimal for other browsers as well, if they have any remaining resources to do so.
It is a hugely over-simplified argument though, and not one that I personally make. The security issues with Microsoft software, and IE in particular, must be taken into account when attempting to quantify “faster and easier”, imho. The sad thing is, many internet users don’t set the bar very high.
Macs are still a bit expensive compared to a similarly-equipped desktop PC, but the difference is getting smaller. Also, what sort of Mac are you looking at? The Mini, which comes bare-naked and doesn’t even include a mouse or keyboard, or the fully tricked-out iMac that includes mouse, keyboard and a remote control, and stuffs a dual-core processor, speakers, webcam, 250-gig drive, 20" LCD monitor and a CD/DVD-RW drive into a package not much larger than a 20" LCD monitor?
It’s got nothing to do with the internet - Macs can get on and surf just as easily and quickly as a PC. Maybe even faster - my iMac needed zero configuration to sniff out my network and figure out how to connect. Speed will be more dependant on your connection - dialup vs DSL, for example, than the browser or operating system.
In an ideal world, everything on the internet would be “agnostic” meaning it doesn’t know what’s using it and doesn’t care what’s using it - a PC running Windows 98 has the same experience as one running Windows XP has the same experience as a Mac has the same experience as one running Linux. We’re getting better at this, but there is still a lot of stuff that only works in Internet Explorer, mainly as a result of lazy or arrogant developers. Or of budgets that don’t allow you to support everything that’s out there.
As for why they’re getting cheaper - the components are getting (slightly) cheaper, but it’s all about price points. If they can put a computer together and sell it at any level of profit for $499, they’ll sell more than if the thing was priced at $529, and probably more than enough to make up the difference. One costs nearly five hundred and thirty dollars, but the other’s less than five hundred - there’s a significant psychological difference in those two hypothetical prices.
As for the security issues that honeydewgrrl mentions - I was at a security conference recently, and was somewhat surprised at how many Macs were there - half of the presenters were running their presentations on PowerBooks, in comparison to the roughly 10% overall market share that Apple has.
Not completely true, speaking as a Mac and PC user. Yahoo’s Launchcast videos, for example, will not work on Macs. The error message is “We regret that Yahoo! Music videos are not currently supported for Macintosh.” To be fair, I assume that this is just a matter of bad programming on Yahoo’s part, because there’s no reason the video can’t be streamed in conventional cross-platform formats and I don’t understand why PC-specific code would even need to be used to run an application this simple. Not that I use Launchcast at all, but it ticks me off that Yahoo! would even constider designing a website that’s platform specific.
But, yeah, for 99.9% of web content out there, there’s no difference between surfing on a Mac and a PC. I do almost all my surfing on a Mac via Firefox (I don’t particularly like Mac’s native browser, Safari). If there’s any problems, it’s browser-dependant, not platform dependant. Internet Explorer is available for Mac, so that solves that concern, should it be an issue.
Yup - it’s the browser, not the platform. IE for Mac (outdated as it is) still somehow renders pages faster than any of the other browsers I have installed on my Mac. And I think that’s exactly the issue: the rendering engine. I think that IE’s engine’s priority is to throw something, anything, up on the screen as quickly as possible, and then render the rest of the page later. Usually this means the page’s text. Meanwhile, the other browser’s engines prefer to gather everything together and then display it all at once.
So this creates the perception that IE is faster, even if the total page-load time is the same.
I suppose IE’s method has an advantage when a page has banner ads. Many Web designers have the bad habit of putting the banner ad code before everything else in the HTML. Because browsers render HTML in the order it’s written, a browser can get hung up trying to access the advertisement that is coming from a different, possibly slower, server than the rest of the page. Maybe IE is designed to skip over content coming from a third-party server and come back to it after the rest of the page is loaded.
Though I can’t confirm this, I’ve also heard that IE likes to “pre-fetch” content. This means that when you launch IE, it starts fetching the pages you visit frequently so that when you click your bookmark, it’s already been downloaded and appears instantly. When you visit a new page, IE starts pre-fetching content from all of the links on that page before you even click on them.
Other browser developers see this kind of behavior as a security risk, and leave it out of their products. They seem slower as a result.
You can tweak these parameters in Firefox, using the about:config panel.
Type “about:config” in the address bar in Firefox, and change broswer. display.show_image_placeholders" to false. The images will now load in IE style.
There’s a bunch of performance tweaks out there for Firefox–the other common tweaks are to enable pipelining (change network.http.pipelining" to “true” and “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to “8” (you can change it to any number you want, but 8 is the most it will handle.)
A web search will turn up some more tweaks, for those interested. And, yes, it does make a noticeable difference in speed, especially the pipelining tweak.
There’s some noise within the last week about a class action lawsuit regarding earning reports.
They also just had to recall 1.8 million Sony-manufactured laptop batteries, so maybe they’re trying to boost sales in light of recent negative publicity.
Macs have no trouble accessing the internet any worse than a PC, so there’s no story there.
Apart from introducing the low-end Mac Mini line more than a year and half ago, Apple’s price structures haven’t changed very much since about 1998. Even before the Mac Mini, the eMac line filled in the low end, but most people didn’t know about them, they rarely got very much marketing attention outside of the education channel.
They haven’t cut prices on anything. They have, however, increased their advertising and made more people aware that they do sell machines other than the high-end super-expensive monsters.
And just about every other major laptop manufacturer has also had battery recalls. That’s an industry-wide problem, and I don’t think it’s causing anyone to not buy a certain laptop over another.