Apple ships Intel PCs

[drpepper]

To me a good OS is stable, has a nice GUI (osx+++++++) has decent memory management and can run games.

I find this funny. How does that make the OS better?

For me, usability should be the priority of any OS. A good UI, strict interface guidlines (Classic Mac OS [pre OSX] had the best guidelines in the industry) and decent memory managenet will net you some points.

 

[drpepper]

You mean like this.

Yes.

 

[DemoCoder]

And the problem for Apple is of course a lack of decent commercial software, Adobe ditched Mac support for Premiere and other products (and Premiere was less than half way decent). So they are more or less forced to bundle software with the OS.

Adobe has nothing to do with Apple bundling software. Premiere is a professional application with a professional user interface, it is too difficult for the normal user to use. iMovie and iDVD exist to make casual movie making fun and easy for home users. It is Final Cut Pro that competes with Premiere (Premiere Elements competes with iMovie).

Adobe simply ditched premiere support because the PowerPC couldn't keep up with commodity Wintel boxes, and Adobe found a bigger market selling to Wintel workstations, coupled with the fact that Apple undercut Adobe with Final Cut. You'll notice that After Effects is still shipping on Mac, and that's because there is no competitor for AE from Apple yet/

When you can get Pinnacle's excellent Avid Liquid (Edition) 7 for just $499.00 there's really no need for MS to supply a more advanced editing tool, IMO.

Except when I buy a Mac, I get a fantastic and easy to use tool out of the box. I don't need to spend $499 for a difficult to use tool and does not provide *AWESOME* pre-built content templates for the home user. Pinnacle and Ulead software frankly sucks compared to iMovie HD. I do lots of MiniDV movie footage editing (hundreds of hours). Nothing at the low end rivals iMovie. *NOTHING* comes close.

The reason so many software vendors ditched Mac support was because Apple market share dwindled to almost nothing. Today Apple is only staying alive because of the iPod.

False. Mac started recovery as soon as Jobs came back, created the iMac, iBook, and PowerBook, and sheppered in OS X. Mac's marketshare is far from dwindling. iPod certainly helps it out now, but you don't need a Mac to use an iPod.

Most users don't care about games, and many Mac users I know simply play games on consoles. I frankly don't care that the Mac doesn't have lots of games. Because I use computers for far more than games. When I want to play a PC game, I fire up Gamedows XP, or I'll fire up GameVista.

When I want to do other more productive tasks, I'll use a Mac.

Ya that .. but like if for example I want to to the directory for quake 4.. I can goto properties for the shortcut and hit find target, so seaching for data isn't really a big help to me.

Quake 4 isn't *DATA*. Maybe when you have a few hundred documents, emails, address book entries, and photos sitting on your drive (I have 15,000 photos), you'll realize the futility of using directories and shortcuts as a mechanism for information retrieval.

If all you do is game, then you don't need spotlight.

I surmise than when Vista comes out with WinFS search, "tagging", and "stacks" you'll be raving about it.

 

[Entropy]

Is it just me or are the new Intel notebooks from Apple appearing a bit underpowered. I would expect the minimum clock speed to be at 2 ghz at least! And what is up with that crappy LCD resolution? I have a 15.4 inch widescreen and it has 1920 x 1200!

Trolling?
Just how many notebooks around sport something faster than a dual core Yonah on a 667 MHz FSB coupled with an x1600 supporting dualDVI? Less than an inch thick, and weighing 2.5 kg? Plus the extra goodies? For $1999?
Sure you could squeeze a little more in but why? And at what cost ergonomically? Apple doesn't do those "desktop replacement" horrors. Never did, and presumably, never will. If you want one, there are places that are only too happy to take your money, and give you 5kg+ of clumsy, noisy awfulness with too energy guzzling components in too confined an enclosure.

The resolution is actually the only thing I hold against the new portable, because for me it is a bit too high. My eyes aren't what they used to be, and LCDs want to be used at their native resolution. And if I need to, I can connect the highest resolution monitors around, no reason to always have to squint. So I would be happy with their old resolutions, but the drastically improved brightness of the new screen up to desktop levels is a very nice improvement OTOH.

The only way I can justify buying one of these little beauties however is, er, if I give at least one of the computers I have away. Hmm. My elderly mother might need an upgrade. Her e-mailing sure pushes her current system to its limits. *cough*

 

[DemoCoder]

I don't like laptops with large screens or high resolution. I use the laptop screen when I am on-the-go, that means I am usually in an airport, hotel room, or cafe. So I want the lightest, smallest, low power screen, for maximum portability.

When I am at home or at work, I plug my laptop into a desktop monitor and a full size bluetooth keyboard. The idea of sitting at a desk and using ONLY the builtin screen to me is besides the point. If I'm at a desk, I'm docked.

So for me, 1280x1024 is adequate "on the go", he'll, even 1024x768 would be fine. In fact, I'd take a half-screen clamshell style device if it was half the size, or OQO-like.

 

[Moloch]

I find this funny. How does that make the OS better?

For me, usability should be the priority of any OS. A good UI, strict interface guidlines (Classic Mac OS [pre OSX] had the best guidelines in the industry) and decent memory managenet will net you some points.

You kidding?
I have to be able to play D3D games.. and not though a shitty emulator.

 

[Gubbi]

Except when I buy a Mac, I get a fantastic and easy to use tool out of the box. I don't need to spend $499 for a difficult to use tool and does not provide *AWESOME* pre-built content templates for the home user. Pinnacle and Ulead software frankly sucks compared to iMovie HD. I do lots of MiniDV movie footage editing (hundreds of hours). Nothing at the low end rivals iMovie. *NOTHING* comes close.

I'm not contesting your claim that iMovie is better than Movie Maker. I'm just saying that the minute you need something that's a little more advanced there are a whole bunch of alternatives for the PC.

Low end means home editing, or what ? Because iMovie is nowhere near Liquid Edition when it comes to features. And LE is not exactly lacking in ease of use (that together with cost has it killing Premiere for the past few versions).

It's amazing to see how a boutique box running multi thousand dollar software has been easily replaced with a PC running shrink wrap software in production/broadcasting companies.

False. Mac started recovery as soon as Jobs came back, created the iMac, iBook, and PowerBook, and sheppered in OS X. Mac's marketshare is far from dwindling. iPod certainly helps it out now, but you don't need a Mac to use an iPod.

G4/G4+ iBooks had Apple maintaining market share in the laptop segment. That this was seen as a recovery is just testament to the speed at which Apple market share was eroding. G5 machines slowed/stopped the erosion of desktop market share.

You don't need a Mac to use an iPod, but Apple needs iPod (the revenue stream) to stay afloat, - until they start selling x86 machines.

Cheers

 

[drpepper]

You kidding?
I have to be able to play D3D games.. and not though a shitty emulator.

LOL, it looks like you need a dedicated game console, not a PC.

Direct3D? I guess you're stuck with Windows for the rest of your life...

 

[Moloch]

LOL, it looks like you need a dedicated game console, not a PC.

Direct3D? I guess you're stuck with Windows for the rest of your life...

Tell me if you will, what is the primary gaming API?
game consoles are for people who like to have the best hardware for 6 months..

 

[Dave Glue]

Trolling?
Just how many notebooks around sport something faster than a dual core Yonah on a 667 MHz FSB coupled with an x1600 supporting dualDVI? Less than an inch thick, and weighing 2.5 kg? Plus the extra goodies? For $1999?
Sure you could squeeze a little more in but why? And at what cost ergonomically? Apple doesn't do those "desktop replacement" horrors. Never did, and presumably, never will. If you want one, there are places that are only too happy to take your money, and give you 5kg+ of clumsy, noisy awfulness with too energy guzzling components in too confined an enclosure.

Er, it's not 5 years ago. Since Centrino most PC laptops are easily around 1" - sure there are the heavyweights if you want, but there are also the 2.5pnd ultraportables if you want those too. I do agree though that the new MacBook is hardly out of line price-wise considering its specs.

The resolution is actually the only thing I hold against the new portable, because for me it is a bit too high.

Huh? The next step below is 1024*768, which is ridiculously small for a 15" screen, especially for MacOSX. The resolution of the MacBook is bare minimum.

This is the main advantage of moving to a vector-based display though which Vista (and ultimately OSX) will utilize - your resolution determines clarity, not necessarily the size of your desktop. Everything a little too small to see? Just adjust the DPI slider, and everything scales smoothly as it's all based on vectors as opposed to bitmaps.

OSX 10.4 was supposed to have this from the outset, Apple calls it "Quartz 2D Extreme", however it was disabled by default and eventually you couldn't even hack it to turn it on after a few point updates. I suspect Apple will have it working probably right when Vista comes out or even sooner, so determining the pixel count of your screen for readability will soon be a thing of the past. The higher, the sharper!

 

[Skrying]

Ahh, PCs, all the functions 99% of the computer using world needs at half the price of a Mac!

Its not hard to understand why Apple has a hard time selling its systems. Its the simple fact that they cost to much. Macs just simply cost to much.

I dont know any one, besides gamers and those who need work stations, that are not fine on extreme budget $350 systems. You'd actually be surprised how much power you can get out of a $350 PC, I'll tell you now its plenty for anyone who wants to do every day tasks and then some.

Intel based Mac Mini's will be Apples only true hope. Cheap and fast..... hopefully.

 

[Fox5]

The Mac laptops are actually heavier than average for their size compared to PC notebooks. Probably has something to do with the titanium casing, or is that just the color? Anyhow, I don't see what else could be in the laptops that would make them so heavy.

BTW, Apple's website lists the iBooks as heavier than the larger PowerBooks, surely that can't be right!

 

[Fox5]

Ahh, PCs, all the functions 99% of the computer using world needs at half the price of a Mac!

Its not hard to understand why Apple has a hard time selling its systems. Its the simple fact that they cost to much. Macs are just simply cost to much.

I dont know any one, besides gamers and those who need work stations, that are not fine on extreme budget $350 systems. You'd actually be surprised how much power you can get out of a $350 PC, I'll tell you now its plenty for anyone who wants to do every day tasks and then some.

Intel based Mac Mini's will be Apples only true hope. Cheap and fast..... hopefully.

If you bargain shop, you can get a surprisingly powerful PC. When I built my PC for approximately $500 in 2003, it was top end in pretty much every way. It would cost more to go top end now, but overclocking and keeping a sharp eye out for deals always helps a lot.

 

[Skrying]

If you bargain shop, you can get a surprisingly powerful PC. When I built my PC for approximately $500 in 2003, it was top end in pretty much every way. It would cost more to go top end now, but overclocking and keeping a sharp eye out for deals always helps a lot.

I know what they cost, the $350 price is system I build on a regular basis, that price is with my profit included into it. A full system, monitor, windows, everything. Its nice, while the high end market gets higher in cost, there's also this extremely nice budget market that offers great performance for a great price.

 

[Fox5]

I know what they cost, the $350 price is system I build on a regular basis, that price is with my profit included into it. A full system, monitor, windows, everything. Its nice, while the high end market gets higher in cost, there's also this extremely nice budget market that offers great performance for a great price.

Ah, I wasn't arguing, just pointing out that even top end performance doesn't have to be unreasonably expensive (my price was minus the monitor and windows though). The market has changed a bit since then, but a $350 PC, with yesterday's closeout sales or today's budget stuff, it still a very powerful PC. Throw in a decent video card, and I bet those $350 PCs of yours would even make good gaming systems.

 

[DemoCoder]

I'm not contesting your claim that iMovie is better than Movie Maker. I'm just saying that the minute you need something that's a little more advanced there are a whole bunch of alternatives for the PC.

Yes, I'm just saying that iMovie is likely to satisfy 90% of home users. I only had to go outside iMovie once, which was I had some poorly exposed footage and I used Premiere to "grade" the color and exposure of the footage and recover most of the quality. I also had footage in which the audio was barely audible thanks to a noisy bit of machinery, so I used Adobe Audition, noise sampled a bit of the machinery noise on the track (with no talking), and "subtracted" the noise out to recover the dialogue.

So yes, sometimes I need to go outside the basics, but it happens remarkably little. 90% of the time I go outside low end tools is to use After Affects to create something, or motion tracking to stabilize some shaky-cam camera footage.

 

[Blazkowicz]

LOL, it looks like you need a dedicated game console, not a PC.

Direct3D? I guess you're stuck with Windows for the rest of your life...

I already heard that from a mac ****** : use a console for gaming.

PC gaming and console gaming are NOT the same thing. you can have fun on a console, and some games are actually the same, but consoles don't have keyboard + mouse, backward compatibilty up to more than 20 years (tens of thousand of games not counting console emulators ), customization/mods of games (and custom maps/levels), freeware/shareware games, chatting on keyboard when playing online, "HD" without buying expensive stuff..

No need to swap memory cards and discs (well, depends on copy protection and how strong it is).
Also, I'd game more on consoles if I could, but having both a GC and an Xbox is already an hassle, plugging all my consoles would be troublesome (megadrive, dreamcast, N64, even my VCS 2600 which has great games). How do I plug in 5 consoles or so on my TV and where do I find the space to put all these controllers, cartdriges and CD boxes?

 

[drpepper]

The Mac laptops are actually heavier than average for their size compared to PC notebooks. Probably has something to do with the titanium casing, or is that just the color? Anyhow, I don't see what else could be in the laptops that would make them so heavy.

BTW, Apple's website lists the iBooks as heavier than the larger PowerBooks, surely that can't be right!

The casing is aluminum, so it's a relatively light metal. Apple stopped using titanium cause they had problems woth the casing cracking.

 

[drpepper]

Tell me if you will, what is the primary gaming API?
game consoles are for people who like to have the best hardware for 6 months..

Whatever man, I rarely play games on my computer so I wouldn't know.

So how do games make a better OS?

 

[Entropy]

Huh? The next step below is 1024*768, which is ridiculously small for a 15" screen, especially for MacOSX. The resolution of the MacBook is bare minimum

The two steps earlier 15.x inch model had a 1,280 by 854 resolution for 101 ppi, the new (and immediately preceding) has 1440 by 960 for 114 ppi.

I am with you 100% that we need completely resolution independent GUIs, unfortunately and as I'm sure you know, there are practicalities involved that make it non-trivial. There is a bit of chicken-and-egg involved as well of course. But hell, you could still have fallbacks to the old model, if screen_rez < some_limit.
My experience with high-ppi screens that are properly utilized is nothing short of wonderful. Type is so much better.


Re: portables and power draw.
Apple found IBMs 970fx thermals unacceptable for portables. Not impossible, just not desireable. Their thinking was one of the reasons they decided to switch processor families. (You'd have to be very naive to believe it was the only one. )
Laptops is just not a good place to push powerdraw to the bleeding edge. Component environment is cramped, cooling weighs, is bulky and makes noise, battery life goes down drastically, which you can somewhat compensate with bigger batteries making weight increase even more... If you want to climb where the clock/power draw curve gets really steep, do it in a nicely ventilated case with space for a hefty cooling apparatus, or preferably, in a dedicated server room.

Nevertheless, there are some lunatic fringers who want such portables, and by the laws of supply and demand, someone will cater to these individuals. Not Apple though.
I wasn't talking about the situation where PC notebook manufacturers push pricing down by using desktop components - that makes for abominable portables as well, with similarities to the performance driven, but for different reasons, and as you noted Dave, the Centrino family largely (but not completely) took care of the worst P4 examples.