All the round Apple mice I’ve ever used had a ridge on them denoting the “forward” side. It was a bad design, and that ridge may not have been on the original, but it was hardly as universally bad as is often described. Certainly, in the grand scheme of things, a much smaller offense than the ludicrous measures one has to take to enter special characters in Windows or the Chiclet keyboard IBM shipped with the PC Jr.
Apple’s current mouse is top notch, in any case.
AirPort card for iBooks, iMacs, eMacs or the Mini. Of course, those come built into a lot of models.
Also, Mac-specific aftermarket video cards are usually a lot more expensive (for no good reason) than the comparable PC models. You usually do need these cards, if you want an ADC connector, or proper drivers for Mac OS X.
Well, you see, the thread was never intended to be another battle in the PC vs Mac war. It was never intended to allow proselytizing from either side. It was merely intended to answer the nagging question I have asked myself as I’ve used Macs: “Who the hell could like this?”. People advocated Macs long before Mac OS X arrived. It is those people I wanted a response from. That would be the point.
You’re kidding? I could tell you specifics about Commodore 64s, and I haven’t used one of those in fifteen years.
I’m an administrator at an ad agency. I personally have purchased over 300 Macs in my career. I Love the platform. I can’t say enough good things about it.
But I like oral sex more.
You might enjoy this trashing of the Apple evangelism. A quote:
Which, of course, would put any responders IMMEDIATELY ON THE DEFENSIVE, since your very question implies an insult upon them. Regardless, aside from that, I doubt you’d find a lot of furor over factual questions regarding OS 9. No one gives a shit about OS 9 anymore, aside from some archaic diehards running obsolete programs.
I also advocated Macs before OS X. But I wouldn’t remember many of the talking points. That’s so fucking ancient. I haven’t touched a system running OS 9 in close to three years. Frankly, I’d rather rip my eyes out than deal with it again. OS X is just that much better.
Commodore 64s weren’t replaced by something extremely similar, but better in basically every way. I could remember a lot about OS 9, but a lot of the stuff that’s similar to OS X, well, I’d be hard pressed to remember the exact differences. And some of the esoteric stuff that I only had to do once in awhile, I’ve scrapped that useless information to make room for more about OS X and the like.
At least one company (Belkin) makes these, aside from Apple. At any rate, the cost of even the Apple versions are about the same as the cost of equivalent (notebook, basically) wireless cards on the PC side. AFAIK.
Not true on equivalent models, from what I’ve seen. Difference is that (as in some other areas) low-end versions of things aren’t available on the Mac. Example: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra, which AFAIK is only available in the more expensive dual-DVI version for Mac, whereas there’s a cheaper single-DVI version on PC as well.
But: I don’t pay much attention to hardware. Like I said, I don’t own a computer myself. So… I could certainly be wrong.
Macs don’t have teeth. 
Yes, if I phrased it that way, which I wasn’t going to do, since I would try my hardest to be as polite as absolutely possible, which is also why I would have put it in IMHO.
I could tell you about Windows 95 too, which was replaced by Windows 98. Speaking of which, I did tell a lie earlier, 'cause I have used Mac OS X a little bit. Way too little to form an opinion on it, but enough to see that it’s definitely not “extremely similar” to Mac OS 9. I thought they rewrote the entire codebase for Mac OS X?
How old is OS 9 and why no major applications are made for it? A good portion maybe 85-90% of modern PC applications can run perfectly on Windows 95 and 98.
Funny, I use Outlook for work email and a web based for personal. I just like the speed on a PC better. No other reason really. Plus, with all the room I use on my Mac, the last thing I need is something else taking up that space. When you’re regularly working with files 100 MB+, storing those, transferring them over severs, etc. it tends to suck up memory. Besides, if I’m trudging my way through a huge file on my Mac, I can just turn to my PC and check my email pretty quickly. I don’t really think this is a GOOD explaination as to why I do this, maybe it’s just force of habit after all these years.
I highly doubt 85% of modern PC applications can run perfectly on Windows 95 and 98, for a number of reasons. Highly doubt. If you can point to evidence for your claim, I’d find it interesting.
Your logic is off. Windows 95 and 98 are, sort of, a similar codebase to XP. An equally intellectually honest question would have been asked in 1998 or so, and gone something like this: “How old is Windows 3.1 and why no major applications are made for it? A good portion maybe 99% of modern Mac applications can run perfectly on system 7.1.” See how silly that is? It’s a switch to a different OS base. It happens sometimes, in both Windows and Macintosh worlds.
Poor choice of smilies.
:o
Windows 95/98 share a common API with Windows NT/2000/XP – Win32. Mac OS X programs typically use an API called Cocoa, which is derived from NextStep, or an API called Carbon, which includes a cleaned up subset of the original Macintosh API. Programs written for Mac OS X in Carbon can be made to run on Mac OS 9, however, in choosing to do so, the programmer has to avoid the features of Carbon which link into Cocoa, and thus are Mac OS X only, and also has to do the extra work of testing and checking the code against the various versions of Mac OS Classic which included Carbon (Mac OS 8.6 - 9.2).
Since people running OS 9 don’t buy much software anymore, since leaving out the Cocoa-linked features of Carbon makes their programs less OS X-like and less functional, since Apple doesn’t even ship machines that can boot into OS 9 anymore, there’s really no point for developers to do this.
And I could tell you about OS 9. But only a fraction of what I could have told you about it back when, you know, it actually mattered.
What version? 10.0.x was very Next-y. By 10.2.x, they’d gotten most of the big features of OS 9 in there, and in most ways it was pretty similar. As of 10.3, they began going off in a direction that was based on neither Next or OS 9, and that has continued in 10.4.
Sort of. The codebase is an entirely different operating system – NextStep – after some major revisions.
OS 9 came out sometime around 2000, 2001 (someone correct me if I’m wrong here). I’m not too sure what you mean by “major applications”, to me those are Photoshop, InDesign, Quark XPress, and Illustrator. To people in other businesses, that’s completely different. Could you elaborate? What doesn’t work?
I know there was a time where there wasn’t a Mac compatible version of Microsoft Office, but that’s been so long ago I can’t even tell you when it was. Besides, during that time there were Mac equivilents to some of the Office programs. Microsoft Office is not the end-all, be-all of the computer world, it’s just been so mass-marketed that it’s all people know. Granted, they’re pretty easy to use and now are universal, but that does not equate to better use.
Didn’t OS 9 come out in 1999? I know that 8.5 came out in 1998. Maybe it was 2000. In any case, OS 9 has been irrelevant since the shipment of OS X v.10.1 in mid-2001.
Well, those were the programs I was referring to. Those and Microsoft Office, and now Apple iLife and iWork – ever since any of those programs (except iTunes, briefly) moved to OS X, there’s been no compatibility with OS 9. If you’re using OS 9, you’re now two versions behind on the Adobe and Microsoft software, one version behind on Quark, and several versions behind on Apple’s software.
MS Office for Mac OS X didn’t ship until about 7 months after OS X was released. However, prior to OS X, there had been a Microsoft Office version for Mac going back to the late 1980s. The first version of Office was released for Mac back in 1987, I believe. Whenever they began bundling Mac Word and Excel.
Close. October, 1999.
Since the question is “Why did people like Mac OS 9?”, it matters now.
Don’t know, sorry. It doesn’t look anything like Mac OS 9, though.
Eh, sounds like a decent explanation to me. I used to do similar (had the PC open to do occasional tasks like playing the radio or ftp while I did real work on the Mac). Now the PC only gets used for testing on security software that requires Windows-only hardware.
If the speed is at issue in your 'net (whether browsing or email) experience on your Mac, I’d concur with another poster that part of that problem may be Netscape. But your setup sounds like it works for you, so.