I think this speaks volumes.
Well, I think Scupper has since clarified his point, but I meant how the actual data (1s and 0s) was arranged on the storage medium, not how it is logically represented. That is, NTFS being potentially superior to whatever MacOS used. I don’t know enough to say either way, but I tihnk it’s moot anyway.
Then you’re not really qualified to discuss the current situation.
They are opinion. There is no “factual” reason that littering the screen with menubars is better. In fact, Fitt’s Law makes a good case for the single menubar being far superior. Your preference for Windows’ crappy maximize feature, as opposed to Mac’s more elegant zoom feature, is likewise just an opinion. As are my positions.
Again, your ignorance of Mac OS X makes you unqualifed to discuss this situation. Files in Mac OS X have filetype extensions as well as more classical and flexible Mac filetype and creator codes.
I’ll agree, aside from UI issues like the menubar and the annoying Maximize feature, and its repugnant cousin MDI, Windows pulled ahead, in terms of flexibility and technology, of the classic Mac OS in the OS 9 v. Windows 98 era. I stopped using Macs in 1999 and switched over to Dell PCs. However, Mac OS X leaps so far back ahead of Windows in almost every area (while maintaining classic Mac strengths like a lack of DLL hell, drag and drop software installation, and a better GUI) that it drew me right back in.
Merge, please stop making an ass out of yourself and all Mac users.
One small nitpick: While Mac OS 7.5 was a dog stability-wise, I never saw any major stability bonuses for Windows 98, or especially Windows 95, over the Mac OS 8 series. I never used OS 9 (exccept for when I boot into it from my iBook for a sense of nostalgia) at home, though I use it at work every day, with no stability problems.
No, it doesn’t.
Most Mac users I know are more intimitely knowledgable about their Macs than most PC people I know. Thats because, at a very real level, the Mac is less complicated: files are named with English names, there is no DLL Hell, no need to worry about Uninstallers, etc.
No programming is required to use a two-button scroll mouse in Mac OS X. Just plug it in, and it will work as you would expect it to. Now, if the mouse has special buttons, you’d need to install the mouse software and program those, but that’s the same situation as on Windows.
Which again and again makes your points meaningless in the real world.
How so? Both are journaled file systems with multi-user permissions capabilities and comparable maximum storage limits. How is NTFS superior to HFS+?
The best technology in the world is useless if its not accessible and friendly, with a reasonable learning curve.
Uh, what? I know that MSFT and IBM jointly developed OS/2 up till version 2, then MSFT took their toys and left and released NT and IBM continued w/ subsequent versions of OS/2.
But OS/2 based on VMS? Cite?
Heh, you are really misunderstanding me. I in no way pretend to know much about the details of how FAT or NTFS or HFS work or what their relative merits are.
The ONLY reason I brought it up is because I thought you were misunderstanding scuppers point about the file sytem. I thought he was trying to make a point about the technical merits of the file system, but it turns out he wasn’t (which is why I said the point was moot)
I was a bit off, sorry. Windows NT was similar to VMS, with OS/2 compatibility tacked onto it. While NT wasn’t directly based on VMS, it features a very similar design.
David Cutler designed VMS, and was the lead designer for MS-OS/2 NT after shepherding VMS to version 5.0.
This article details the incestuos ties between VMS and WNT:
http://www.winntmag.com/Articles/Index.cfm?IssueID=97&ArticleID=4494
Hey Sdrawkcab cool link thanks!
Not to hijack totally, but that article shoots itself in the foot a bit, claiming that features added to VMS after NT was released are eveidence of the similarities.
Anyhow, I’ll be away from the board for a week now. Ive enjoyed the debate, happy holidays!
No doubt many of those things were in the pipeline before Cutler left the VMS team. Merry Christmas, if that’s your sort of thing. 
Sdrawkcab: Photoshop 7 costs $609.00 from adobe.com. Scupper’s point stands, Photoshop is ridiculously expensive and NOT something that will be in use by the average user.
Less usefull, perhaps, but certainly not useless. I think there are other parts of the operating system (namely, almost all of them) that are more important than the user interface.
(Note that I am not saying the UI is unimportant, only that it is less important than, say, memory management. An OS with crappy UI but terrific MM is still able to be used, even if it’s a pain to do so. The reverse is not likely to be true.)
But anyway, I’m off topic. I think the fact that Macs aren’t as popular as PCs is due to a number of the things already mentioned in this thread. I don’t think there is a single reason.
I didn’t say that Photoshop wasn’t expensive. So is Microsoft Office. But the difference between $600 and $750 is 20%, that’s a sizeable chunk.
I love being a student. I got Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, GoLive, Acrobat and LiveMotion all for less than $300.
Moderator’s note:
Oh goody.
Just in time for Christmas, another Mac vs. PC set-to.
::sighs::
This thorny issue arouses strong passions in some but keep in mind IMHO ain’t the place for flaming. This was fairly mild, Sdrawkcab, but please don’t do it again.
Keep the discussion civil, folks.
TVeblen,
IMHO mod
Sdrawkcab, let me clarify a few things, because they obviously need clarification:
I will repeat that I was relating information about the past. I would ask you to read the title of the thread and the OP. It doesn’t say anything about “better,” it simply asks “why?” The “why” has nothing to do with OSX and everything to do with the history.
If the history of Macs and PCs started with OSX, then I wouldn’t be qualified to comment, but that isn’t the case, is it? If one of the qualifications to post in this thread is reading the question posed rather than launching yet another “Mac is better than Windows” argument, I would say that you are the one who’s not qualified to discuss the current situation.
Your obstinate refusal to acknowledge the basis of the real-world situation is puzzling, regardless of your fondness for Mac. I think you’re trying to convince us that people should be using the Mac, when we’re trying to discuss reasons the vast majority of people aren’t. Your points may be perfectly valid, but that’s not the issue.
You’re right, Photoshop costs $609 (I noticed FDISK’s post during my preview, sorry to repeat). My bad. Still very expensive for an average user who, I maintain, will not relate to a benchmark based on it (and didn’t, judging by the fact that Apple’s market share hasn’t changed much). Not only would they need to own it, they’d need to know how to use it and understand what the benchmarks are comparing. I’m not saying it’s an invalid comparison – for what it is comparing, it’s extremely valid. It’s not very compelling to a regular user, is all I’m saying, or ever said.
The best technology in the world is useless if no one is using it, too.
The (debatably) unfortunate fact is that because of the history, not the technology as it currently stands, relatively few people are using the Mac (5% market share last time I heard).
Good for them. I suspect, however that the people you know are mainly Mac enthusiasts rather than business users, who, I can assure you are, ON AVERAGE, completely clueless, regardless of the OS they use. The Mac doesn’t require you to learn much to use it, but you don’t learn much about it by using it, either.
For a real-world example: I worked for 2 1/2 years at a Hollywood newspaper that was almost entirely Mac at the user level. Of approximately 125 Mac users, I can only think of two who I would consider “intimately familiar” with the Mac. The rest were clueless, just like most of the PC users.
Are you intentionally being disingenuous, or do you maintain that the same level of use can be gotten out of a two-button mouse plugged into a Mac? (Just curious, really, because it has nothing to do with the question at hand.) Surely you don’t debate the fact that the Mac stuck with a one-button mouse when the PC moved to a two-button one? That was certainly the case with OS 7-9. And I’m not talking about the “scroll button,” here, I mean the right mouse button that opens context menus and so forth.
And finally, the usability features I cited are facts. My opinion is that they are superior to those of the Mac OSs I have used. You acknowledge that the features exist, no? Do you deny that some people prefer the flexibility of the Windows version? Since I prefer it, it is a fact that some people do prefer it (as I constitute “some people.”) Anecdotally, I can assure you that I have met many people of the same mind, particularly those who have tried to use a Mac after being used to a PC.
Anyway, I don’t have the energy or the inclination to get into a huge debate about PC vs. Mac. I tried to relate information I felt was relevant to the OP, but, as invariably happens with the Mac vs. PC issue, this has degenerated into a religious debate.
Enjoy it while it lasts. And don’t go into I.T.; it is a depressing field for Mac lovers.
That’d be a really nice idea if folks had a lot of money to throw around but there’s generic hardware and BSD to make a cheaper server which is just as secure than setting a bunch of Mac boxes up as a server.
At publishing companies where I’ve worked, designers used Macs but editors used PCs. This always seemed unnecessarily complicated to me, especially since we frequently shared files, but people didn’t want to give up “their” machines, I suppose.
Yes, but like most threads, the conversation has moved well beyond the OP. And in any case, your comments were about System 7. The battle was lost before System 7 was released. The Mac was relegated to second-place status in perpetuity by the late 1980s, during the days of System 6 and DOS.
Excuse me? Go read my first post in this thread.
Millioins of people use Mac OS computers. The Mac is a very successful product.
Some are. Most aren’t. Most are just staffers at the paper I work for.
You shouldn’t have to.
[quote]
I worked for 2 1/2 years at a Hollywood newspaper that was almost entirely Mac at the user level. Of approximately 125 Mac users, I can only think of two who I would consider “intimately familiar” with the Mac. The rest were clueless, just like most of the PC users.
Yes. Left click to select, right click for contextual menus (accessible with a control-click with a one button mouse), scroll wheel for scrolling. All supported natively by the operating system.
The PC never moved to a two-button mouse. The PC mouse was always two buttons. I prefer a one-button mouse, so I don’t view Apple’s maintaining it as “sticking,” which implies a pejorative connotation.
Support for right mouse buttons has, IIRC, been built into the OS since System 8 or 8.5. And since System 8, control-clicking has been the way to get contextual menus on a Mac with a one button mouse (before that, actually, for programs like Microsoft Word and Netscape Navigator).
Yes, it is a fact that you can resize a window from any side in Windows, while in Mac OS 9 you cannot, you can only drag from the sides and resize from the resize box in the corner. That doesn’t make the Windows way superior. Yes, it is a fact that the Windows maximize button treats you like a child who can only have one thing on the screen at a time, while the Mac zoom button does the logical thing and zooms the window to whatever size is needed to show all the contents of the window (if possible). Yes, its true that Windows has yuour screen littered with menubars that do not benefit from Fitt’s Law, while the Mac has a menubar and Dock that both benefit from Fitt’s (in fact, the Windows taskbar, IIRC, didn’t begin to comply with Fitts until Windows XP).
That doesn’t make the Windows way superior. The superiro/inferior nature of the Windows or Mac way is totally opinion.
Why would I go into IT? Why would I want to?
It’s not a debate over which is better, it’s over why one sells better. So, it seems obvoius that macs don’t sell as much as PC’s. Where’s the debate in that?
Actually I’ve tested this and found it to be untrue.And not “mute” at all, nor even Moot. I use several pieces of software, specifically Deneb, Pro-E, SolidWorks, Cadra, and Autodesk products of several varieties. One of our service guys (a mac user) decided he was going to “switch me over”. We spent a weekend trying.
Not a single one of these products will run under Virtual PC. Deneb and Pro-E will not allow you to even install them on a mac, under any circumstances. Yeah, I was able to get Blender to run,(barely) but it runs better under linux on both PC’s and Macs. Additionally, the pointing devices I use (spaceballs and other 3d manipulators) have no drivers available for Macs.
The higher end of software is written, in industry, for PC based systems. And they will most assuredly not run on a Mac. And that, like it or not, makes the decision for me.
b.