Comments on: Does anyone want to give me a Mac?

By: Simon Palmer

Simon Palmer — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 18:58:35 +0000

I have been a hardened Windows user for a very long time. I bought myself a Mac almost by mistake because I wanted to combine a tv, dvd, mp3 store, browser, cd, development machine in something that would look nice on the living room table. I bought an iMac (one of the ones with a hemispherical body and a chrome arm supporting the screen).

I was blown away by it. I plugged it in, it asked me if I wanted it to join my wireless network and then sprang into life. I left it switched on for almost 9 months before the power in the house went out and I had to reboot it. During that time I did pretty much everything with that little machine and it just stood up.

I even put Microsoft Office on it so I could use it for work and it still stayed up.

I now am the happy owner of 4 macs (3 other Mac Minis), dotted around the house, all of which talk to one another and pipe music around with no setup, no effort, no downtime, no maintenance.

By contrast I bought a MacBook Pro as a personal laptop and installed Windows in a partition on it. That was in Nov 06. Since then I have had to reinstall Windows once and I reboot the thing every hour or so when I’m using it for development on the Windows partition. I personally think Windows has a life-span of about 4-6 months before you have to reinstall it. It is just so crap. I think the general public have very low expectations of their computers because of Windows. The Mac is a complete revolution to someone who has been suffering from Windows instability.

When I boot my MacBook Pro in OSX I have no trouble with it at all (and the battery lasts longer), so it’s not the hardware.

I say get rid of Windows, it really is very poor. It’s a long road but maybe one day MS will get the message.

If you just want a computer for the home a Mac is a no brainer. If you want to use it for development its a bit more tricky because often MS have their own components which don’t play too well when you try and run your code on a Windows box. I have found that as long as I stick to the middle of the java road I am fine, but even XML parser behave quite differently across the two.

Down with Windows. Up with OSX! I’d love to give you one of my Macs, but I’m using them at the moment… A mini costs next to nothing and you can use your current peripherals…

By: Ben Huot

Ben Huot — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 01:43:05 +0000

Why should we buy you a Mac? A Mac speaks for itself. If you don’t want to constantly fidle with Linux, then go with the Mac. And I use the latest version of Ubuntu too. I have no problems with it, but then again I got my computer with Linux pre-installed. I found it through Linspire’s links to get a computer with Linspire pre-installed. And if you want support for things new to the PC world like wireless, just go with the Mac. You can already run Mac OS X, Linux, and even Windows if you want to some how, To get a computer that runs Linux well you are going to spend as much moeny as you are getting a Mac. One tip - get as much RAM as your comuter will take especially if you are goin to be running any Adobe applications - they are not universal binaries yet and will be very slow. More RAM will speed this up considerably. OS X - just on PowerPC with native OS X coe requires at least 1GB RAM to be fast. If you don’t give your Mac at least 1GB of RAM just for native Intel Mac software alone, it will be very slow. Also if you want to run Linux on it, I would stick with the integrated graphics (Intel) like the Mac Mini because Intel has given the specs up so Linux coders can make drivers.

By: John Wilker

John Wilker — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 00:16:08 +0000

I’ve got an old (no, really old) powerbook 500, but it’s pretty much capped out at OS 8, and only runs on AC power. Batteries were expensive in their day, now they’re upwards of 250 IIRC.

Good luck!!