I think if you need the latest and greatest games, you probably need a high end Windows machine. However, most (not all) of the major FPS type games and other popular games (Sims etc…) make it to the Mac side as well (although often after they’ve been out on Windows).
Although I would argue (IMHO) that iMovie is probably the simplest and most elegant video editing solution for beginners, there ARE plenty of video editing solutions that work just fine for Windows…so I don’t think one “needs” a Mac to do video editing.
That does sound nasty. What I have found since upgrading to Tiger is that you have to specify your existing wireless network as a “Trusted” network - otherwise you keep getting “No Trusted Networks Found” (or some such) and you have to connect manually. This happens both with a total install and an upgrade from an earlier OS, and even after you let the installer set up the wifi connection.
So IMO it is a piece of extremely bad useability, a retrograde step for OSX.
…remembers a rather horrifying dream about Steve Jobs…
I dont like iPod’s, i think they are terrible creations, some people think they are the best think since sliced bread,
I use firefox, IE started to piss me off after a while so i switched to firefox, (which annoys me but not to the same degree that IE did)
i think you can all see my point, some people like mac’s for whatever reason, others prefer a PC, the real problem is people voicing their opinions about these things, lets be honest nobody really cares, if you use a mac you’ll probably continue to use a mac, if u use a pc you’ll probably continue to do so, and some tosser telling you that the machine you are using is crap ain’t going to change your mind,
I think it’s a self-enforcing circle. Like a poster said earlier, Mac people get dumped on. I’ve done it myself - was at a friends, saw her iBook, and immediately said, “You have a Mac? Eewww.” And that was wrong of me. But her immediate response? “It’s so much better than Windows. Windows sucks.” And that was wrong of her too. But still, we go round and round. Why are Mac people evangelical? Because they get dumped on constantly. But why do they get dumped on constantly? Because they’re so defensive about their platform. It’s really too bad that computers aren’t like forks - nobody tells me how wonderful their fork is and that I should switch from my old crappy fork.
I’ll try to stop with my dumping.
Being a Windows user, there’s some quirks about the Mac that I don’t like, but those quirks stem from me being unfamiliar with the OS, not due to underlying faults in the OS itself. I do think that Apple is starting to become enamored with design for design’s sake, leaving usability (once its battlecry and enormous selling point) behind. And that’s a tragic step.
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But her immediate response? “It’s so much better than Windows. Windows sucks.” You have lost me here. Windows has design flaws. (For example, programs that steal the focus as I am typing.) Since there are now just a few, but many such flaws, it is quite fair to say that “Windows suck.”
Also, I really dought that it is a self-perpating cycle. Even if the Israelies stopped killing “palestians”, they would still be attacked by them.
Whoops, I mean… Well, actually, I think you get what I mean.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about here. Do you mean MDI = Multiple Document Interface, where an application opens a parent window, and opens documents as sub-windows inside the parent window? I don’t like it too much, but they are usually major applications that are better off being full-screen anyway.
Each operating system has a preferred mode of use, and if you try to do things differently you get frustrated. Windows lends itself to the “one application fills the entire screen” mode, and many applications are designed to be used that way. Mac and X-windows applications are usually designed to be used as small windows taking up a small part of the screen, so that’s how I work when I’m on those systems. (And I go nuts without the “focus follows cursor” mode, though I’d never want that on Windows.)
I feel the same way about Windows - there’s something about it that makes it more smooth and comfortable to use. I suspect each one just has its own quirks, minute differences in how they respond to user input, that we get used to over time. It’s like driving your own car vs. someone else’s.
Some Mac users are quite evangelical, but I myself don’t follow along with this. A Mac can be better or worse than an IBM depending on what you’re using it for. I’m a graphic designer and for my 3 years of school I was trained on a Mac. Macs are generally a graphic standard because the design software is very well-developed. After I got out of school I tried using the same programs on an IBM system and had constant problems, so I started saving up for a Mac.
The one caveat about Macs is they are bloody expensive. It took me 2 years to pay for mine. I also don’t like how they keep whipping out new OS’s so quickly - I can’t keep up. But, on the good side, OSX is an extremely stable system - I’ve never once had my computer crash in the 2 years I’ve had it. Also, If I have to force quit a program, it lets me do it right away - no hanging or freezing up like IBM tends to do in the same situation.
People who have only worked on OS9 and gave up might want to try an OSX system. Any problems that I noticed with OS9 have been resolved. Like I said though, it all depends on what you are doing on a computer that will determine if Mac or IBM is better for you.
No, Windows does not suck. Honestly, it does the best it can do given the circumstances it has to. Think about it this way. With a Mac OS, it’s feasible to test that OS on a very wide range of hardware configurations the average user is likely to use (not counting peripherals, just what’s inside the bos when it is first purchased.) Can’t do that with Windows. Can’t even come anywhere close to testing it on every combination. With Tiger (that’s the newest version of OS/X, right?) they developers knew ahead of time what machines would be running it, and waht was inside of those machines (for the most part.) They knew that they had to test it on every release of every Powermac, iBook, Powerbook, iMac, eMac, MacMini, etc… there was. Granted, testing it on every hardware profile could be close to impossible, but it would certainly be easy to test it on the most common ones made, yes? The best Windows can do is test it on the most popular configurations of the most popular brands. Test it on a bunch of Dells, HP’s, and Gateways, and throw in a lot of combinations of home-built PC’s with the most popular brands of mobo’s, video cards, and sound cards. Even then, they are probably lucky to get 5% of general hardware profiles (by general I mean oness that share similar drivers, not specific modelsm even.)
Add to that the fact that more software is made for Windows, and therefore more chances for problems to occur, and it’s easy to see why Windows has problems.
Oh, and that stealing focus thing? That can easily be solved on any XP machine with either Tweak XP or with the service packs.
I never really get this. “Using a Windows computer sucks, but it’s not Windows’ fault.” Personally, I don’t give a crap whose fault it is; if it don’t work, it don’t work. S’why I’m willing to pay a premium for a Mac. If I had a bunch of old peripherals I had to use, maybe I’d have to look at a Windows box, but I don’t, and neither do most computer users, so the smooth-running, functional, plug-and-play Mac it is.
I have installed both service packs. No fix. I have installed Windows XP Power Toys. No fix, despite the fact that is is an option, avalible, the option does nothing. Now, the fact is that windows gets instoled on a wide variety of platforms, but the vast majority of devices are expected to have identical protocals, recorded in actual book you can but. (Red-book cds, blue-book cd, SCSI) The fact is that not only does windows fail to work with know standards, but it is inefficently thought out. I recentley downloaded a BeOS skin for my computer, and was surprised what a (positive) diffrence it makes to have the “close window” button on the left side of each window.
One point of interest is that most Mac folks also have a good amount of experience using Windows, since they’re often the only computers at work/school/whatever – so when we have a preference for Macs, it’s from direct, hands-on comparison of the two. In contrast, a sizable number of anti-Mac folks either have no experience with them at all (and are thus perpetuating things they’ve heard from others), or their “experience” consists of playing with a busted floor model at CompUSA for 30 seconds.
Which is about the best anyone ever says about a PC/Windows, that they’re happy with it.
Mac users, on the other hand, frequently love their Macs. You just don’t find people that love Windows.
You can find people like you who are happy with Windows.
You can find people who hate Windows.
You can find people who hate Macs.
You can find people who love Macs.
But you just never find people who love Windows.
Even people who are supposedly evangelical about Windows aren’t really saying that Windows is great, they’re really saying that Windows is better than a Mac. Find someone who says, “I’d never use a Mac, 'cause Macs just suck” and ask them if that means that Windows is truly great, and that they just love Windows. “Well no, I wouldn’t call Windows great, but it’s hella better than a Mac!” So that’s not a Windows lover, it’s a Mac hater.
Find me someone (other than Bill Gates) who believes that Windows, in and of itself and not compared to the Mac, is a great OS.
But thousands of people believe that the Mac OS, in and of itself, is a great OS.
Well… people rarely love the de-facto standard, whatever it is. It just is, so people tend to love or hate anything else by comparison.
You never hear people talking about “how great MS Office is”, in spite of it really being the best productivity suite out there. You probably have some people out there talking about how they LOVE StarOffice or some other also-ran suite though.
I have a feeling that Windows is much the same way- on desktops, it’s pretty much the only game in town, barring the few Macs out there. In the server arena, it’s fighting against the various UNIX/Linux OSes, and there are probably some MS bigots out there proselytizing about how much easier XP is to configure vs. some UNIX/Linux application to do the same thing.
That’s a simplistic answer that just sidesteps the point. People generally don’t emphatically love something just because it’s the underdog. There is usually an intrinsic reason that they firmly believe that it is, in and of itself, something really good.
I’ve been using Macs for my personal computing needs since about 1986. I’ve been using Windows at work, eight hours a day, since about 1998. So I see the differences between the two every day. The Mac gives me reasons to love it. Certainly, it’s not perfect, there are some things I don’t like about it (although, frankly, most of those are a result of Apple trying to make the Mac OS more Windows-like). Windows gives me reasons to think it’s ok, and other reasons to hate it. It gives me no reason, ever, to love it.
As at least one other poster said, one of the greatest things on the Mac is that, usually (there are, of course, always exceptions), things just work. Plug in a new device, it works. Install new software, it works. On Windows, plug in a new device, and go through the tedious wizard crap, and it might work or it might not.
On the Mac, if you drag an icon from one place to another, the file is moved if the two places are on the same physical medium, otherwise it’s copied. On Windows, that’s generally true . . . except if one of the places is the desktop and then for some bizarre reason you get a shortcut when you drag the icon. That’s just one of many examples I could give of odd, inconsistent, user-unfriendly behavior of Windows compared to consistent behavior of the Mac. On the Mac, if you don’t like the order of the things in your Dock, you just drag them around to rearrange them. On Windows, if you don’t like the order of things in the task bar, you have to buy a third-party tool to be able to move them around. On the Mac, if you want something to be easilly and always accessible in your Dock, you just drag the icon in. On Windows, if you want something to be easily and always accessible in the task bar, you got nothin’.
Hey, I’m not trying to convince anyone to switch, this is an answer to the OP: Mac people are evangelical because they love it. They love it because it gives them reason to love it. The same just can’t be said about Windows, or any Windows program. MS Office? That’s your best example? MS Office isn’t great, not be any stretch, it’s just the only game in town. Personally, I think MS Word sucks more than any piece of software I’ve ever used. A perfect example of how to make simple tasks complicated; of how to make a program where the user has no idea of why things happen the way they do, or how to make things happen the way the user wants them to. I use it, both on Windows and the Mac, because unless your word processing is 100% isolated from the rest of the world, you have to use Word.
You can find plenty of people who love Toshiba notebooks, or love their Alienware gaming machine, etc. I used to love IBM ThinkPads and bought several without even shopping for other brands. (My newest system is a Dell, but only because it had a specific feature ThinkPads didn’t, i.e. a DVI port that supports 1600x1200. Yes, I know Powerbooks support it too, but as I said I prefer Windows and it was half the cost of a comparably equipped Powerbook.) Yes, I’m confusing OS preference vs. hardware preference, but that’s part of the problem: do Mac users really like the OS, or is it Apple’s overall approach they like (e.g. the lack of clone machines, which naturally means fewer compatibility problems.)
Also, Mac users are a self-selected group who do not like some aspects of Windows systems. Like Feynman said about “differentiating under the integral” - if it does a few things that Windows cannot, that’s all it takes to look like the best OS in the world.
Any Windows program? If you haven’t found any Windows program you love, that’s fine with me, but don’t try to generalize it to everyone else. For instance I love MathCAD and this alone is more than enough reason to choose Windows over Mac.
And I thought MS Office was the most common office app on the Mac as well. If not, what is?
In reading the other responses here, something occured to me. Back in the days when I used primarily Macs and had certain programs I needed to run on Windows, I had one of each on my desk. I liked the Mac for certain tasks and the Windows machine for others (and for yet a third category, I’d just telnet into my Linux box in the other room).
I wasn’t evangelical about the Mac even though, generally speaking, I liked it more.
Then, the business world started to change. Companies mandated Windows, even when it didn’t matter. If I bought a computer with an Intel processor, I had to pay for a copy of Windows, even though I was going to run Linux on it. I really began to resent having Windows shoved down my throat.
Then it got worse. Consulting clients began to demand that I write their code in Microsoft Visual Basic and design their Web sites using Microsoft Frontpage, even when there were better alternatives. Microsoft’s licensing policies punish anyone in mixed-OS environments.
Now, I’ve become evangelical about the Mac simply because I resent being forced to use Microsoft products. I no longer do freelance software or Web design, so I don’t have to worry about those. I’ve switched from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice. I use a Mac instead of a Windows machine. If enough other people put their money where their mouth is, perhaps we’ll start seeing choice back in the world of computing.
another thing that many people forget, is the Mac doesn’t have the hardware/software seperation that windows does, PC users often wonder (as the above poster does) whether it’s the hardware or software that we like, is one better than the other?
the answer, to put it simply, is there is no distinction between hardware and software on a Mac, the Mac is the fusion of hardware and software, lets say there was a way to get OS X running on wintel hardware, yes, you’d have the Mac OS running on a PC, but you know what, it wouldn’t be a Mac, because a Mac is more than a simple set of hardware or an operating system, it’s hardware and software running in perfect harmony
i’m probably not explaining it too well, but the Mac is more than the sum of it’s parts (Og, that sounds revoltingly new-agey to me, but i can’t find a better way to explain it)
it’s also the reason that the Mac is generally more stable (ALL computers have the potential to crash, Macs are not immune, it’s just generally very rare), the Mac OS runs on a specific, known set of hardware, there’s less variations between machine hardware, and the applications have to conform to an Apple defined set of Human Interface Guidelines, that’s the reason for the consistency
to be fair, given the massive amount of hardware variations on the pc side of the fence, it’s amazing windows even runs (no, it’s not meant as a slam against windows, it’s actually amazing, given the variables, that it can run consistently)
Actually, that’s a good point, and the people to get an earful are those running Yellow Dog Linux or other flavors of non-Apple operating system on Macs. See what they think of the hardware, etc.
To get a sense of the software separate from the hardware, you’d have to resort to emulation (e.g., PearPC) which isn’t the same as experiencing the OS running on hardware it’s native to.
(Also, the PearPC users are a self-selected lot for sure. You’ve got to like the MacOS a lot to spend much time running it at the speed that PearPC can emulate a Mac on a PC).