Letters to the Editor
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Getting back to the point
Personally, I doubt I'll ever buy a Mac for myself -- I'm far too comfortable with the PC menus and find everything about Macs counter-intuitive and frustrating (hey, it takes all kinds...). But, getting back to the point of the article: Farhad has an unmistakable point here. PCs take way, way, way too long to start up and shut down.
The worst aspect of starting up (this is on an older PC, no doubt too slow for you whizkids, with corporate virus protection): pressing the "on" button causes the gears to grind for about two-to-five minutes, at which point the dam' thing FINALLY asks for your password -- and then, after you log on -- it goes back to grinding away for another two-to-five minutes. Why can't it ask for the password either at the start or at the end of the endless process? Then I could go away and have breakfast while it's slowly firing up. But no, I have to wait, wait, wait until it's good and ready to ask for the mystery word.
And about shutting down: sure, you could tell it to shut down and then leave -- and sometimes I do that -- and sometimes I come back to work on Monday and find that some glitch prevented it from shutting down, and the stupid question "Quit process now?" has been sitting on the screen all weekend long. Lovely.
On another matter -- congrats to Farhad for the glowing mini-review in today's Nicholas Kristoff column in the NYT. "... Farhad Manjoo writes in his terrific new book, 'True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.' It's the best political book so far this year." http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/opinion/17kristof.html
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An admission - Useful PC configurations available at lower price points than Mac
After more careful consideration, I realize the fallacy of comparing strictly identical configurations of PCs and Macs.
In reality, users will probably find a DVD-writer far more useful than a few tenths of a gigahertz in CPU speed, some extra RAM, and extra HD capacity. You cannot get a Macbook with a DVD-writer for less than $1,299 (retail price for general public).
If you choose a Dell, you can get a notebook computer with a DVD-writer for $999. This comes with 0.6 GHz less CPU speed, 1 GB less RAM, and 40 GB less hard drive capacity, compared to the $1,299 Macbook. If you're on a budget and the DVD-writer is more valuable to you than the faster/more cpu/ram/HD, then Apple simply does not provide an option that fits your needs.
When I was in college and racking up student loan debt, I would be hard pressed to shell out $300 more for the Mac. In fact, in those days, I was piecing together PC parts purchased at Fry's and CompUSA grand opening sales. (Yes, I was a PC user - and Mac doubter - until I graduated from college.)
Still, this is only looking at the purchase price, without considering resale value and other factors.
Apple is still changing the PC industry. When Macs were absolutely more expensive than PCs, across the board, most purchasing decisions did not look beyond price and popularity. Now that Macs have price parity on the higher end configurations, many users (anyone who DOES want the extra CPU/RAM/HD) WILL consider other factors in the purchasing decision.
I suspect Apple is quite happy to chip away at PC market share from the top down. This puts the PC makers in a bind. Profit margins are lower on the lower end systems where the PC makers are still price competitive with Apple.
This also puts Microsoft in a bind. The price of software becomes more significant as the price of hardware decreases. Budget-conscious computer buyers now have the option of using Linux and OpenOffice as free alternatives to Microsoft Windows and Office.
In an earlier comment, I noted that Dell must have lowered their prices since last year, in response to Apple's competitive pricing. There's clearly a change in the industry when a major PC manufacturer drops its prices to remain price competitive with Apple.
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Consider The Source
I'm the first person to absolutely loathe Microsoft and wish Apple could gain more market share (he said, writing this on a Linux box using Firefox). But I regard Popular Mechanics' computer reviews about as highly as I regard MarketWatch's auto reviews.
Turn the page, move on, nothing to see here, people.
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It's not the hardware base
OS X is FreeBSD. Both FreeBSD and Vista have plug and play features, but they work differently. Vista examines all your hardware every time it boots up. FreeBSD lets you compile the kernel (which Apple surely does) so it supports the hardware you have and doesn't waste time trying to re-learn everything on every boot. I have OS X running on a Toshiba laptop (mostly running anyway) so it is capable of recognizing strange hardware. It just doesn't go through the process every time.
Windows also has to load support for applications that were written when i386 was unbelievable new technology. Apple has a policy of not supporting anything that was written prior to last Tuesday. A policy, I might add, which has finally turned out to be supremely smart. The way computers are sold now, the quality of the bundled software, has made data the only thing that has to be portable across upgrades so trying to be compatible with the 1992 version of Label Writer Pro is counterproductive.
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re: Farhad - what I run that won't run on a Mac
What I do is art for video games. I work through a company that hires me out to a bunch of different developers. Almost no video games are developed on Macs. I need to be able to run pre-release versions so I can check my work in game. Can't do that on a Mac.
It would also be nice, after I'm done, to be able to play the games myself. Can't do that on a Mac either, mostly.
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addendum
I should mention that no one I work with is using Vista except the people who have to make sure things work in Vista.
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Having read most of the responses now...
IBM's laptop mouse is the greatest hardware interface enhancement since... the mouse :) Apple should steal it. Hell, the federal government should require it to be standard equipment on anything manufactured in the United States - refrigerators, cars, cigarettes. It's that good.
Shutdown time does matter, at least to me and I think a lot of other people. See, I have to be sure my machine is actually shut down before I leave it. If it hangs on shutdown, then it's accessible to anyone who walks by and that is not acceptable. So I have to sit and wait and wait and wait as my XP, or Vista, or Ubuntu machine shuts down. Yes, I said Ubuntu. Makes Vista look pretty freaking snappy at shutdown time.
I have to use XP at work. Well, I could use Vista but we don't have those special anti-suicide windows here so that would be dangerous to my health. I don't do anything one might consider hard on the equipment, I think. Visual Studio, Gimp, and load a few hundred (thousand?) web pages a day - most of my tools are web based, and I work on web sites. Typical week I'll have to reboot 5 - 15 times. That startup and shutdown time adds up.
OS X is not immune to viruses. It's ignored by virus writers and viruses aren't really the problem any more anyway, trojans are, and OS X is definitely not immune to those. OS X does incorporate a lot of ideas from OpenBSD (the only truly secure operating system in the world) which gives it an advantage, but OpenBSD is almost always 3 or 4 versions behind on every UNIX port because of the time the vetting and recoding process takes so newer features are less secure. And the UI relies on whatever internal coding practices Apple has implemented. Macs are immune from attacks in the same way New York City is immune from tornadoes. It hasn't happened yet, but there is no real reason it couldn't.
MS is crippled by legislation and the market in that regard. There are secure versions of Windows out there. The government uses them. But if they were to start selling them, they would be in court forever facing charges of anti-competitive behavior when they put Symantec and Kaspersky out of business. So we are stuck running half-assed security software that we get to pay extra for instead of doing it right. Apple will be in the same boat in a year or 2.
MS does have what amounts to a UNIX based (or at least UNIX like) operating system. Windows Datacenter. There was talk about consolidating the code bases for Windows Server and Windows Datacenter a long time ago. If that does happen, eventually it will trickle down to the desktop since MS is set on having a single common codebase.
In the end, unless something radical happens, my next computer will be a Mac. Hopefully the next computer my employer gets me will be a Mac. They aren't perfect, and they certainly aren't as good as some of the Macista would lead you to believe, but they are the best combination of speed, usability, and security around and that isn't likely to change for a while.
And they look really cool.