Naw, I’m using one right now. Simple, elegant and intuitive – the Apple way.
The only really major compatability annoyances I have had regarding my Mac Mini relate to MS Office - more specifically that the Mac flavour is not 100% compatible with the Windows version and vice versa. :rolleyes:
I have had a couple of instances of Mac Word documents that crash PC Word, and one instance of Mac Powerpoint happily inserting a picture that PC Powerpoint then couldn’t display, as well as several PC documents that have somewhat broken formatting on the Mac. So don’t assume you’ll get perfect interoperability by giving MS double the money. The only completely reliable way around this issue is to stick to very simple formatting, or maybe using PDF, sticking the same open-source office suite on both platforms or some other workaround.
Other than that, not much to add, other than that in my experience the assertion that Macs cost a little bit more but are a lot less trouble is broadly correct, at least as far as XP is concerned. I haven’t summoned up sufficient enthusiasm to try Vista yet.
I have one of those, too. As has been stated, it is a two-button mouse, plus there’s two side buttons on it as well. However, while sexy, it is perhaps not the best ergonomic design. The side buttons for me are more-or-less useless, and using it for extended periods of time does tire my hand out. Plus the little scroll ball, while very functional and generally a good idea, is a little bit too small and occasionally gets a little bit of dust in it and becomes non-responsive until you hold it upside down and give the ball a good, hard roll in every direction.
So, a mouse with good ideas, and elegant visual design, but lacking in functional ergonomics.
It’s not stubbornness, it’s a good idea. Apple’s justification for it is dead-on. Before my dad bought a Mac, every time I walked him through setting something up on his computer, he’d constantly be asking ‘left click or right click?’
For novice users, it’s confusing. Advanced users can enable right-click functionality if they wish. That really sums up Mac OS X in general - easy to use for inexperienced users, but if you know what you’re doing, you can fire up a Terminal and have access to the entire suite of standard Unix applications. Who needs Linux?
The Mac user interface works perfectly without right-clicking - the only reason Apple finally released a two-button mouse was to support Windows in Boot Camp.
I’ve owned 2 computers over the last 16 years. Both were used on a daily basis, and both were Macs.
Neither of them ever broke, and neither of them were ever in the shop. I maintained and upgraded both of them myself, but my work only consisted of cleaning them out every couple years, and upgrading memory and hard drives.
My first was a Mac IIsi that I bought in late 1990. It came with 5 MB of RAM and an 80 MB hard drive. By 1995, I’d added the maximum 17 MB of RAM and a 500 MB hard drive. When I finally recycled it in 2000, it still booted just fine. I never even had to replace the battery.
My current computer is a Mac G4 PowerPC tower that I bought in 2000. It came with 128 MB of RAM and a 10 GB hard drive. The only thing I’ve done with it since is to upgrade the OS, add 256 MB of RAM, and drop in an 80 GB extra hard drive. All of the hardware upgrades were off the shelf from Staples or CompUSA. It’s running Mac OS 10.4, the latest Mac operating system, without any hangups. Pretty good for a computer that’s almost 7 years old.
I expect to get another 2-3 years out of my current Mac. Then I’ll buy another one. I like being able to upgrade my computers easily, so I’ll buy the lowest-end tower. If I bought it today, it would be this. If the past holds true, it’ll last me another decade.
You could run your PC from an Ubuntu Live CD too, zero problems. Damn what are all you mac users thinking. 
Saavy users rarely have problems with a PC anyway. I ran 2K pro for the last 3 years, my only problems were #1 a failed hard drive (mac’s are not immune to this) and a bad video card (they have those too IIRC). I just recently loaded Vista, for no other reason just to get some more hands on experience with it.
Imaging and separate storage partitions are prudent for any machine. I admit I do not know much about mac OS installs but I’m sure there are upgrade and or reload situations that would make partitioning for document storage prudent. Moving the my documents folder is simple and transparent to the end user. I do this on every machine I do a reload on to make it easier to fix if another problem comes up.
I take it you’ve never seen the inside of a modern Mac tower? I could turn off my computer, and within 30 seconds of it powering down, I could open it up, replace any single component (or probably, any two), close it up again, and be powering up. There’s none of this nonsense of having to remove the hard drive to be able to access the optical drive to remove it, too, so you can slide the motherboard over to reach where you have to change the RAM. Everything is easily accessible, and nothing gets in the way of anything else.
This is incorrect. The Mighty Mouse senses whether or not it’s a right or left click by being sensitive to which part of the mouse is being touched on the top of the mouse. I’m almost positive of this because if you do right click while resting your index finger on the left side you’ll get a middle click.
I’ve never done an image or a partition for a Mac hard drive. I’ve certainly never done a partition for “document storage.” What on Earth is the point of that?
There’s never been an “easier to fix if another problem comes up.” There’s never been a problem in the first place.
(The only parallel type of situation for me is that I added a second internal hard drive to install Mac OS X on. That way I could continue to boot from Mac OS 9 from the original hard drive if I needed to. If I had owned a Mac that only fit one hard drive, however, I would have had to partition it to install both OS’s on, though.)
Allright I give, you can fix your own Mac as well. I’ve been stuck in laptop land for so long the idea of cracking one of these things open is entirely alien. I had a G3 tower way back when, and to be honest I did add my own memory pretty easily.
I guess I was just remarking on the personality difference I’ve witnessed between PC users and Mac users. Mac users typically don’t want to fiddle with stuff to get it to work. PC users always seem to be cracking their computer open and installing drivers and such. Neither way of thinking is wrong.
If you’re opening your computer to install a driver, your way of thinking is wrong. 
Well, for Macs and PCs alike, a laptop is pretty crowded inside, and therefore rather a pain to service.
And since OSX, Macs have attracted a fair amount of tinkerers, too. You just don’t have to tinker, if you don’t want to.
Cool! Now I know why Mighty Mouse seemed so finicky about right clicking – I was letting my left finger brush the shell while right clicking.
From here
I can’t use them because of this – I apparently have a bad case of “lazy-finger;” I don’t lift the non-clicking finger, which basically turns all clicks into left-clicks on a Mighty Mouse. A telling anecdote about the Mac’s usability is that I often don’t notice that I got the wrong click – the “right thing” just happens.
But for my Mac (my wife happily uses a Mighty Mouse on hers), I just go with the same style of multi-button Logitech mice I’ve been using on Macs for a decade. And the second (and third, and…) mouse buttons work, just like they have for a decade, despite people telling me every few days that “multi-button mice don’t work on Macs.”
This is the norm in PC towers as well. Generally everything is easily accessible couple screws unplug a couple cables and out it goes.
When you start going for small form factor cases all bets are off, but even most of those you can pull a hard drive or swap ram in a few minutes.
Yeash this is a tough crowd. I’ll just crawl back in my hole now.
It’s not a huge production with a PC, but it is a bit more work, usually with wires going every which way and a certain amount of wiggling necessary to get everything in the right place. The hard drive bays in a Mac Pro are basically drawers that you just slide out, and pop the hard drive in. Nice, clean, no mess.
Like everything else with PCs, it depends on the hardware you buy. I have an Antec Sonata case that was designed beautifully. The four hard drives slide in and out nicely (you have to screw the rails in, but that’s no big deal) and they’re inserted perpendicular to the 5 external drives, so you can rout the cabling some. A single door comes off the side easily to give access and the dual 120 mm fans give plenty of cooling.
Well, the idea is, if the OS needs to be reinstalled, you just wipe the small partition that contains the OS. The larger partition is what holds all your data. It’s a pain afterwards, since you have to reinstall all your programs to set the DLLs, though of course you could just use an image. (I assume the same is true, more or less, on a Mac.) I take it even further, having one hard drive just for operating systems (I triple-boot it–Win98SE, WinXP Pro, and Ubuntu–I might go quad one day and install Solaris 10 just for kicks), one hard drive for programs, and a third hard drive for files–documents, Quicken backups, MP3s, and so on. The fourth hard drive is just sitting there empty right now–I used to run a RAID-1 but gave up as it was a pain to remirror whenever I had to shut down the OS improperly.
And, of course, you should have regular backups of your important data anyway. I’m a three-backups kind of guy–one backup on a different internal hard drive, a second backup on CD, and a third on a Zip disk. The Zip disk is somewhat dangerous because of the click of death, so I’ll also back up to flash if it’s really important. If it didn’t cost so much, I’d probably have an internal tape drive as well. And some things, like my music collection, are either ripped from the CD (so the only loss there would be time to rerip) or were bought online but are currently backed up by being on my iPod as well.
I’m glad to hear you back up your info again, because I have had three, yes three, iOmega Zip drives that suffered from the click of death. I’ve lost so much information due to iOmega’s piece of crap drives. Never again.
Actually, no it isn’t. You can reinstall the operating system without affecting your applications at all, except for ones that hook directly into the OS (like VPN clients). Your data remains untouched as well.