I like my PC. Yeah, there are some things I don’t like about Microsoft, but over all, I’m happy with it.
Maybe it’s just what you’re used to. I’ve been using PCs forever, and then whenever I have to use a Mac it just doesn’t feel right. I suppose one could get used to it, but I have no desire to try.
<<I like my PC. Yeah, there are some things I don’t like about Microsoft, but over all, I’m happy with it.
Maybe it’s just what you’re used to. I’ve been using PCs forever, and then whenever I have to use a Mac it just doesn’t feel right. I suppose one could get used to it, but I have no desire to try.>>
I’m completely the same way, but with Macs. Whenever I have to use PCs, I get frustrated by all the different “drives.”
My take on it is that people are evangelical in general - I know guys will argue over which car is best - and computer people specifically. Ask on the boards which programming language is best, or heck, even which editor.
Wow, that’s as strong an argument against me switching to Mac as I’ve ever heard. 
Happy PC user checking in.
Yes, I do get the occasional Mac evangelist but face it…they’re shrinking violets compared to the Linuxistas.
Well of coure we’re more rabid than the Mac users; we’re right.
My OS offers more bang for the buck than your OS. The features/dollar ratio cannot even be calculated for Linux. 
You think I’m bad now, you should have seen me when I was still using an Amiga.
<Joel>you can have a lot of fun with people hopelessly wired in computer nuance, watch this…
hey, has anyone seen the mouse for my Amiga?"
<Tom Servo> ?AMIGA? well there’s a machine for you…
<Crow T. Robot> ?AMIGA?, hey has anyone seen my “Fat Angus” drive?
I’m a converted Mac user, as of OSX. I think there’s two main reasons we’re evangelical, one altruistic and one selfish. First, we consider Mac to be the superior product, for whatever our reasons are (obviously we think it’s better somehow, or we wouldn’t have gone Mac in the first place). When I read a good book, I’ll recommend to others that they read it. When I eat at a good restaraunt, I’ll recommend to others that they eat there. And when I use a good computer, I’ll recommend to others that they use it.
And the other reason is the small market share and corresponding shortage of some applications (mostly games) that the OP mentions. I prefer Mac despite the shortage of games, but I’d still prefer that there be more. If more people used Macs, then more programmers would write games and other software for them. So I have a vested interest in getting more people to use Macs.
Note that neither of these reasons applies to users of other unices, so I won’t push Mac on them. The main advantage that OSX has over other versions of Unix is that it takes less knowledge and skill to use. But for someone who has the knowledge and skills, any Unix is much the same as any other, and the others are generally cheaper. And Mac users benefit nearly as much from any Unix market as we do from a Mac market, since most programs written for a traditional Unix environment will also work on OSX, or at least port easily.
Then show me how to turn the TAR file into DOOMII, dammit!
And you Mac fellas can help me get the antiques at work talking appletalk, browsing the net and talking to each other.
I slowly switched from Windows to Mac. About 3 years ago I bought a Powerbook G4 Macintosh laptop. Drove me insane. For those Mac lovers who snobbishly prattle on and on about how stable the Mac OS is in the face of Windows, allow me to share a phrase with Windows users that hasn’t been repeated yet in here :
Yeah. That’s right. Mac OS-X fails Apps. Plenty. Well, it did when first released. Why? Because OS-X 10.1 had more bugs in it than Washington state has apples ( or, Cupertino California has pot farmers… ). I bought the TiBook to use Final Cut Pro to edit video. Kinda rough, when FCP quits unexpectedly again and again and again and again and again and again.
Mac OS-X 10.2 was called Jaguar, and that release was pretty stable. About once a month, I have an application unexpectedly quit. It happens. Even with Macs. It’s just that nobody talks about it. ( well, except me ).
Then, there was the delightful and interesting Mac OS-X 10.3. That’s called " Panther". Panther was touted as a huuuuuuuuge leap up from Jaguar, and I would have agreed and bought it, except for one sticky little issue. If you happened to have an external hard drive of a certain set of types, when you installed Panther for the first time, the new OS completely erased all of the external drives of those types it could find.
Yes, that’s right. People lost their careers worth of work. Why? Because lots of folks are smart enough to have entire external hard drives for backup of huge files. And, because Panther erased 100% of all hard drive space as fast as it could. And, people lost their livelihoods. The answer from the Apple Corporation was that they had a patch for that problem, so what were people being so pissy about anyway?
Horrifying. I was in the Apple Store near me about a week after Panther came out, and gosh they didn’t have a damned thing to say when I asked them about this issue. So yeah, Mac OS-X is not the end-all and be-all. It’s just another OS.
Why did I dump my PC on the desktop and buy an eMac recently? Because I work on the web enough, surf enough and am sent enough emails from strangers that I have to open up because that’s how I do my business, than the sheer time factor and instability now associated with dealing with the Windows OS vis a vis spyware/viruses/adware/bugs was too much to wish to deal with.
The machines very rarely lock up. I cannot say this for any older Windows machines I’ve owned. We own two Windows XP machines in the house. They lock up a lot more than my Macs do.
I chafe greatly at the entire Apple/Macintosh elitism. It is arrogance at it’s best. Proof? Here ya go: Some insufferably smarmy prick named David Pogue is a Mac God. That’s what all the folks in the Apple Store said to me when I bought my Ti Book. So, I got the new book he’d just released, called " Mac OS X: The Missing Manual". This man figured he knew more than the Apple Corporation about their own OS, and by god he even said so. And, I quote:
Okay, so I should be feeling pretty sure of myself, right? I read this page, and not more than ten minutes later the entire system crashes. I have a black screen with white type that reads an awful lot like ASCII gobblydegook text I used to see when my 8088 IBM - PC would crash. But, I digress. I call the Apple Store. I tell them what I am seeing, and the " Mac Genius " ( they really are called that ) says, " Oh my GOD REALLY? THAT’S SOOOOO COOOL, I’VE NEVER SEEN THAT. " Nice. He gets another Mac Genius on, who asks me to read the white fonted gobbledygook I see on my pricey new machine. Not surprisingly, he says, " Oh wow, I have never seen that before. Would you bring it in so I could see it?? ". Yeah, you snobby motherfucker, I’ll bring my computer down to your store so you can revel in the fact that a compute can actually crash…and while we’re at it you can give me my money back for this half-assed book written by an insufferably arrogant prick who DOESN’T TELL THE TRUTH. Ahem. Thank god I’m not bitter. Imagine if I was?
Anywhoo, I use both Apple machines and 95% of the time enjoy both machines. A great book called Crossing Platforms helped me a lot, since my brain was Windows OS-wired. I still don’t “get” certain things but that’s what the telephone is for, and the more I use it, the more it all kinda makes sense. Duh. That’s how technology is.
I teach workshops in my particular little area of expertise, and after even 2 days, people start to get it in a way they could not imagine on day 1. After 5 days, they get it more. Such is life.
I will never go back to a Windows OS system. As frustrating as the early on experiences had been, and as frustrating as it still is sometimes, we use machines and wish for a reasonable degree of reliability. Macintosh machines deliver that level of reliability. Windows machines do not. Simple as that.
Cartooniverse
Well, it can be answered in the same format as your post.
History: So many big bussiness ran, and still run on Unix, that is is important to know how to use it.
Current:When you have a command line, you can tell a program exactly what you want it to do, and not go searching all over creation for check-boxes and hidden options.
I’m curious. Are you running as a limited user? What do they lock up on?
My users are running a variety of apps running from the well designed to crap, and I have excellent results with Win XP Pro limited users compared to Windows 98 SE.
My theory is that they can’t as a limited user “click on the monkey and win a prize”, but I digress.
My experiences with OS X are a lot like Cartooniverse’s, except that I was coming from MacOS 9, not Windows.
Yeah, 10.0 and 10.1 were pretty robust as operating systems, but the applications themselves crashed so often I found MacOS 9 considerably more stable. Sure, when something goes awry in OS 9 it takes down the whole system, but I could work all day with dozens of apps open and actively doing things and not have it happen, whereas in X…yeah, the OS might not crash all week but what difference does that make if FileMaker or my web browser have “unexpectedly quit” a dozen times by 4 PM?
And yeah, stable or not, I’ve crashed OS X. Under 10.0 and 10.1 I met that fusty old military commander, Colonel Panic, who kept reporting for duty 3-4 times a month. In modern times (Panther), I honestly haven’t seen kernel panics at all but I’ve had processes lock up the system and could not bring up a force-quit window (or could but nuking apps did not fix the problem) and minus another machine to use to ssh in and nuke processes from the command line there was nothing to do but hard-restart. And sometimes even when I did have another Mac nearby and did the remote-ssh thing I was unable to do anything but kill off a bushel of processes before hard-restarting anyhow.
Not that it’s an experience unique to Macs. When I first started at BBDO they proudly presented me with an NT workstation and talked about how robust it was, and I managed to hose the system in 45 minutes so completely that they had to re-ghost the HD. I have a talent for making any OS keel over. They should use me as a crash-test dummy
But it has to be Mac for me. If the next time I go computer-shopping a new Mac with OS X 10.5 is $4000 and a new PC is $110, I’m still getting the Mac.
Intellectually, analytically, there’s nothing compellingly wrong with Windows except the massively frustrating “application window” thing (How in hell do you Windows users tolerate that? It takes me 5 minutes to position documents from three different programs on screen simultaneously / usefully in Windows, and Og help you if you want an open email window situated between two browser windows), and I could point to some really bad design flaws in the MacOS (the Open / Save / Save As dialog boxes have been a perennial disaster wthout 3rd party software enhancements, for instance).
But there’s an undefined something that just feels a lot better in a Mac environment. No way would I use a Windows machine as my main computer.
I don’t think the Mac costs more than a truly equivalent retail PC, but if it did, if it does…? BFD. No matter how cheaply I can buy Boone’s Farm or Thunderbird, it doesn’t lead me to forego paying considerably more, all the time, any time I’m drinking wine, for a nice montepulciano or merlot. The point is not that Windows is Boone’s Farm to Macintosh’s merlot, but that price is only a primary consideration if you don’t perceive any meaningful quality differences between the cheap stuff and the premium stuff, and I can afford a Mac.
If you choose to buy a hi-resolution big-screen TV instead of a cut-rate 14" television, if you rent or own a nice house or apartment in an area where there are far cheaper dwelling places, if you buy your clothes new instead of from the Salvation Army Thrift Shop, why on earth would you say that regardless of anything else there’s no way you’d pay a premium price for a Mac when you can get a PC a lot cheaper? I mean, if you don’t see any quality diff, that’s a different matter, but to just assume that all computer-using experience is the same so the only difference is price? I don’t get that, I don’t get it at all.
Well, he’d probably do fine with a Mac – unless when you said “publisher” you meant Microsoft Publisher, which isn’t available for the Mac. If he uses that routinely, he should probably stay with Windows. No reason to try to make him learn a whole new OS and a whole new program.
<<
True, but it’s one thing to suggest downloading a new browser for free-it’s quite another to tell someone to buy a brand new computer.>>
Tell that to the PC users who constantly bother me from every angle. I can’t say the word “Mac” or any other Mac application or product without getting an immediate negative response. Heck, I can simply have my laptop at school and get ragged on.
In response to the “why spend money on a better computer when I don’t need it” post, I’m the exact same way… Except I’m a Mac user. PCs confuse the heck out of me, and while they have more games and programs and such, why convert when all I need is Word and a web browser? I don’t like Windows, I don’t understand Windows, and Mac does everything I need it to.
Quoth Cartooniverse:
You can’t blame an operating system for programs crashing. Put me on any machine you like, and in thirty seconds I can write you a program that’ll crash on that machine, no matter how stable the OS is. But you can blame an OS when a crashing program takes the OS down with it. This happens all the time with Windows, but not with OSX. I got my first Mac about three years ago, and in that time, the kernal has never crashed, and only four times have I had any problem which affected any part of the OS. I have never heard of a Microsoft machine which could make that claim.
I don’t see how you draw that conclusion from the dialog you quoted. Any programmer writing an application can create a bug that causes the application to crash and burn. I don’t care whether you’re writing it for Windows, OS X, Linux, Solaris, DOS, or IBM System/370. Programs have bugs. Programs die.
What that dialog was telling you is that the programmer screwed up, but the application bug didn’t take the operating system down with it. All data saved before the crash is still there, and OS X is still running stably (is that a word?).
Sure, OS X can crash. But the dialog you displayed is a good thing, and an example of the OS doing something right.
You’re wrong. I quoted two different situations. In the first quote, yes an App failed but the OS did not.
In the second situation I quoted ( well, shared… ), the OS ITSELF failed catastrophically.
And now, at least two people have said to that, " bfd- I could write a line of code in 2 minutes that would crash your OS. " Um…for those of us who do not go out of their way to write computer codes that specifically lock up or crash machines, for those of us who purchase legally licensed software written by Apple or someone else using Apple codes, the idea that the OS OR the software apps would die is anathema.
If I want twitchy, I’ll buy a Windows machine. I bought into a myth that is in fact just that- a myth. I did nothing wrong that day when I crashed a brand new OS-X 10.1 machine, aside from the daring and edgy operation of " turning on the computer and launching a single application ". OOooooooooh yeah. That’ll crash an OS every time. :rolleyes:
Sorry, but the fact that you can write code to crash an OS quickly proves nothing. Consumers pay for reliability and, until Jaguar padded itself out of the kitty cage and onto my HD, my Macintosh was astonishingly unreliable.
I’ve ben using Windows/DOS computers for 20 years, and I’m thrilled with the current state of the technology. They used to not be so good; now they work, at least in my experience, extremely well.
Both machines have their uses. I mostly us mine for games, so I need a PC. If you were doing video editing, you’d need a Mac.
Of course, I had one die on me last week, but it was an out-and-out hardware breakdown. Old hard drive.