July 20th, 2007Mac Computing is Infallible!
PART 1
Look, before I even get started. I am not a Microsoft fanboy and I am not a Apple fanboy, and I don’t hate either of their operating systems either. I am just a person that uses both Windows and Mac OS on a frequent basis for graphic design, web design, gaming and even just surfing the net. I hear people almost everyday praising Mac/Apple computers, whether it’s my teachers, co-workers, friends or family. These people can all have one of these statements applied to them:
- They have never been familiarized to a Windows PC, and refuse to be.
- They use a Mac to check emails and surf the web.
- They don’t even own or use a Mac at all, they just repeat what they have heard.
1. They have never been familiarized to a Windows PC, and refuse to be.
There exists some real die-hard fans of Apple out there that have never really touched a Windows PC in their life because they are convinced it doesn’t work as good, as fast, as fluid, or even work at all. Some of these people only use one reason, and one reason ONLY to why they use Macs over Windows PCs. Some of those reasons include:
- Mac <OS 10,9,8…> is so much easier to use and more user friendly than Windows.
You’re just being blinded by the graphic user interface and the hardware exterior. Let’s face it, Mac’s interfaces through computing history usually look better than their Windows counterpart. The presentation and overall look of the monitors and hardware exterior is also much more appealing then the standard PC (non-gaming that is). But instead of making up fake excuses, just go out and say it, “I like the way they look”, because even the newest Mac OS is not any easier than XP or even Vista. It’s the same damn thing and you know it, there’s just different methods of doing the same thing.
- Microsoft stole Windows architecture from Apple, and continue to copy them to this day.
Of course, there’s variations to this claim, but it’s still a pretty stupid reason not to use something, even if it is true. We import lots of things to our country from different places all over the world, for examples spices. At one time, thieves may have stole these spices and brought them back for trade. Does that mean you shouldn’t use pepper because it was stolen and traded at one point in time? A pretty weak analogy, I know, but it’s a pretty weak claim too. Microsoft continues to do what works, what the users want; if they didn’t then we would all be using Macs right now.
- Macs don’t get viruses or spyware.
That’s weird that there’s tons of virus protection software out there for Macs then, isn’t it? The most popular PC-based scanner and protection software usually also have a Mac version. That’s really strange, isn’t it? Look, it’s true that there’s less of a security risk on Macs because virus programmers usually want to create the biggest impact on the public, so why would they go with 10% (actually 7.6% as of June 21st, 2007) of the computing population over 90%? The percentage is rising though. Let’s see how the Mac stands up against security issues at 20% or 30%. I think Microsoft is doing a real good job at controlling security at 82.4% of the market share, especially with their advancements in Vista.
2. They use a Mac to check emails and surf the web.
These are possibly the worst type of Mac users of them all. Of course you love Macs if all you do is read email and surf the web, because that’s generally all it’s good for (don’t get mad yet). I mean, even with emulating software (weird that there’s tons of emulators out there for Macs to run Windows applications and games, but not many Windows to Mac emulators) you are not going to be able to run millions of useful applications and games. And while on the subject: It’s emulated, so it’s not going to run at a full Windows speed, if it actually runs at all.
While I’m at it, let’s dispel another thought. Most people think that all graphic designers, animators, movie makers or any type of creative professional at all use Macs. Sure, that was how it was a long time ago; unfortunately the stereotype stuck. All Adobe/Macromedia (now Adobe anyways) work for both operating system now, interchangeably. The only thing different is the hotkeys and some of the interface; which are all based around the keyboard for Macs because they refuse to get out of 1980 and supply a default two or three button mouse. Hell, even some Adobe programs only ever seen light on Macs in the most recent Creative Suite, like Adobe Premier Pro CS3 (which is hailed to be better than Apple’s Final Cut Pro).
For one last comparison, let’s take a look at Maya, a very powerful 3d animation program (used at Pixar). You need a very powerful computer to be able to run and render in Maya. You will not be able to run this program effectively on your standard Mac computer, because Mac computers don’t innately come with good video cards (because of no gaming support), and will not be able to run or render Maya, or very poorly. Yet, on the Windows-based PC side, any computer with 1GB of ram or a decent video card will be able to run it. Supposedly one of the minimum requirements for Maya is also a three button mouse, which I found hilarious.
3. They don’t even own or use a Mac at all, they just repeat what they have heard.
Look people, you have never used a Mac, you have never owned one. You probably really want to buy one, because in all honesty, it’s the cool thing to do, and they look so damn nice. But really, is it worth it? Is it worth the extra thousand dollars to be so non-conforming that you end up being an even bigger cliche? But please don’t think you know anything about the Mac OS, because you don’t.
–
Sure, buy a mac if you want to read a PDF, if you want to surf the web, and maybe even to match with your iPod. Buy a Mac if you want to design, make movies, or do anything. Because, in the end, it’s the same thing as a Windows PC, just more trendy. It has faults, it is fallible, just like Windows, just like Linux, just like you. Stay tuned for part 2 where I write about designing on a Mac.
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Though cute that a graphic designer, and probably php script-kiddie would find it within his purview to comment on the technical specifications of either the mac or “pc” systems, I’m not really the type to start in with ad hominem attacks. However, in this case, I think it’s justifiable to state the obvious: you really are quite as ignorant as all of the people you are insulting.
While it’s clear you’ve made some good points about the LAF (Look and feel) of Apple hard and software as a marketing tool, you’ve missed the obvious. The entire purpose of a “personal computer” is not only that it be functional, as that is the fundamental basis for computing whether server or client side, but that it be “personal”–which, for most people, entails what they consider usability and presentation.
Before I begin my absurdly easy rebuttal against your tom-foolery, I’m going to leave this side note: Apple computers have had two button mice for over a decade, and you’ve done nothing more than to prove that you practice exactly the same myopia and ignorance as those you claim simply regurgitate what they hear.
First, there is no competition between Mac and “PC”, as PC simply stands for personal computer. Apple, I believe, has made a serious error in continuing this misnomer in their advertising. The history of this, for those interested, stems from the original competition between the monolithic IBM and the quirky Apple.
Ignoring Xerox entirely, the first “PC” was the 5150 by IBM in 1981. Before that IBM had the 5100 in 1975, which was comparable to the original “Apple II” both ran a BASIC interpreter.
Since then that “war” has ensued. Though, it has become quite absurd, since there is no “pc” competitor, but rather an amalgamation of Dell, IBM, Gateway, AlienWare, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq (now bought out) and a dozen other hardware manufacturers.
Though as you have pointed out, standard Apple hardware is not typically “performance” hardware (with respect to gaming in which you really are considering graphics cards and not the rest of it) however, they have in the last 10 years offered top of the line (upgradeable) hardware.
Your comparison however, is between Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X. In which case, it is obvious you have little idea of what you’re saying.
This war goes all the way back to the foundations of the first “user-friendly” OS: DOS which offered one of the first hardware abstraction layers (i.e. you needn’t code right down on the bare metal). Though DOS offered computer users a chance to “easily” script small programs in batch protocol, it was not designed for multiple users or much security for that matter.
UNIX on the other hand, which was developed by AT&T’s think-tank as one of the first operating system was built from the very beginning with the concepts of simultaneous multi-login and filesystem security. Berkley University of Southern California made major advancements to this system in a version aptly titled BSD (Berkley software distribution) which was then remade completely open source into Open / Free BSD. This later evolved due greatly to Linus Torvalds’ work to support the majority of the user interface known in modern flavours of Linux.
The core of the Macintosh operating system is Darwin a port of OpenBSD for the Motorola PPC (a company whose quality control far outperformed that of Intel). Darwin has since evolved to include x_86 and i386_64 architectures.
Microsoft, however, elected to remain with the antiquated DOS systems all the way through win 98, only improving it slightly with the release of NT.
While Microsoft abandoned DOS, or at least reduced it to nothing more than a bootloader upon which to piggy-back, they did not much improve security to their operating system as it is still very much based in DOS protocols.
Point 1: The UNIX subsystem is fundamentally more secure than DOS or NT, and therefore OS X really has justification for being more secure, not simply a market share issue. As a coder, I can tell you personally that writing viruses for NT is a walk in the park compared to attempting so for ANY *nix based platform, let alone the absurdly (and sometimes annoyingly so) protected OS X.
Yes, there are anti-virus programs for the mac, but I think you’ve taken one two few economics and marketing courses if you don’t see why. Virus protection companies are in the business to make money, and it behooves them greatly to produce a mac client, (even more to write code easily changed/compiled for both systems) as to sell more copies of their application to BOTH sections of the market in this insane scheme they call “profit”.
Microsofts OS Applications are written with Microsoft’s .NET framework, which for the most part is okay, save for a few performance issues that should certainly be addressed.
Darwin is largely written in a language dubbed Objective-C (an ANSI C based language with preprocessor and OOP/ADT behaviors given by the NeXT Step library, well known as “Cocoa” whose rights were transferred to apple during the acquisition of NEXTSTEP. Which, has the advantage of being (by default) a reference-counted rather than garbage collected language. This means that memory allocation and deallocation is much more manually controlled than say, java, or most garbage-collected implementations of C++, are.
This performance boost means fewer system resources are required to achieve nearly the same thing. Ergo, why Apple systems were often able to achieve with what appeared to be “blazing speed” with limited system resources. What’s that you say? efficient programming? OMG MAGIC HAXXORZ!!!!1!1 one one eleventy one…
Another major problem is the compilers people use for “Windows” applications. given the different processor architecture differences on different “pc”s a compiling for windows often means restricting yourself to a set of fairly “universal” assembly calls, thereby losing efficiency in your applications as well.
Juxtaposed to this are the apple-darwin-gcc family of compilers which has the advantage of knowing EXACTLY what architecture it supports and therefore can compile with a much broader set (nearly or all) of the processor commands. A HUGE performance boost.
Sure, its true macs have their share of issues, but they’re the degree of severity and, the capacity for diagnostic, and the ease of restoration when one runs into those problems that matter when an issue does occur.
OS X sports a backtrace, processes sampler, and logging that Windows neither ever had, nor currently has. This is an AMAZING help during both debugging and technical support. But most of all, it supports several types of backup and restore features that are well promoted, well documented, and most of all user-friendly. Windows cannot stake that claim.
Further, of all of the (major) issues I’ve seen during my days of technical support, I have found that they have often revolved around hardware related issues. Almost all custom upgrades by inexperienced or ignorant computer enthusiasts, the user-damaged parts, or on the rare occasion an honest-to-goodness overlooked factory defect. In the final case, the solution is as easy as taking the computer to ANY apple store where they will (though at times begrudgingly) fix your machine and either return it to you, or send it to wherever you may be heading at no additional cost.
Neither Dell, nor IBM, nor Gateway, nor anyone else can boast that claim since Apple is the only producer with retail outlets.
Further, your claim of OS X lack of support for windows applications is entirely without merit, as you cannot blame the creator of an operating system for a third-party corporations lack of re-coding and re-compilation for another OS. Now obviously, there hasn’t been enough market share in Macs to make smaller companies, or even the Goliaths like Adobe rework their applications for OS X… but as you’ve said… that’s changing. And there’s a reason for it.
Lastly, emulation is not necessary, since, well, as of the time of your writing, Apple has had Intel x_86 based processors which require a GUID partition map for the HDD, therefore making it possible to dual-boot BOTH Windows AND OSX AND anything else for that matter… on your system. The Windows API for games, and the Mac side for the dependability of any real work you have to accomplish…
The dependability of a UNIX 3 compliant OS, the (as you’ve so strangely denounced) beauty of a soon-to-be entirely vector graphic based GUI, the tight resource management of a good API for developers, the ease of use of an intuitive, hierarchical, and interconnected system of applications, and the growing impressive standards of Apple’s hardware as of late 2008 early 2009 clearly make the extra 1000 (more like $400 – $500 if you make fair comparisons in systems) well worth it, if not strongly advisable.
tl;dr:
Go do your research before bashing the public for their ignorance. If you want to “educate” us, do it fairly, and do it from an actual standpoint of knowledge, not from your delusional and uninformed rantings from your high-horse.
As an addendum:
I used many different hardware configurations and OSs over the years, and from an actual computer background I can assure you that even the new windows vista runs smoother on the mac hardware, not always because of the chip’s clock-speed, but the very efficient board architecture used to achieve high bus-rates between all components on the board.
I apologize for any direct remarks, but people need to stop with the marketed bullshit and actually learn something about computer science so that they can make informed decisions, thereby driving market forces in “correct” directions, rather than what we have ended up with today.
Apple has its faults, its true, but not nearly as many as Microsoft, and that should be well-noted.
Comment by Tim — May 30, 2009 @ 4:58 am
Though I genuinely applaud your comment… er essay, It’s probably not called for, well, not in the way you intended it. I thought I had made it clear that I use both operating systems on a daily basis, and even state at the end that they both have issues – I’m not really giving argument for either one; but I guess you found the need to. The direction of the post was more to dismiss the common myths and misconceptions about apple computing in a social setting. For people that aren’t “tech” savvy, and for people that generally check email, surf the web and do other business related functions, they think their [insert mac computer/notebook here] is completely justified in their price, when they could of got the same thing for $1000 less. And they think nothing at all could beat their [insert Mac computer/notebook here] and bloated ego. In my industry, there is a lot of designers and the like blindly following Mac because it’s “cool” and “trendy” and say things like “Ewwwww, you use windows? Gross” – they know nothing about the technical aspects. Obviously I’m generalizing here a bit, but that’s what I found during my schooling and during my school work experience.
You should also note the date of this post. Lots has changed since then, especially with the architecture and the full proliferation of Intel implementations. You’ve clearly missed the point, and the rest of your post talks about irrelevant facts that are not based on anything I wrote about, and come off as your own fan-boy fancy, this quote in particular was quite funny “Apple has its faults, its true, but not nearly as many as Microsoft”. Clearly you’re being completely subjective ending on that note. Opening with a personal attack, without “doing the research” about me or who I am – you defeated yourself quite nicely from the get go.
Comment by Vaughn — May 30, 2009 @ 11:36 am
Not… really… since the research I was referring to was that of the systems themselves and not of either of our professions…. To be honest, I like windows, I am insanely grateful to what they have done for the computing world. Without them, none of us would have the computers we have today.
However, while its true that a net-book running some low grade form of windows (one of their cheaper flavours) would get the job done nicely for email and web-surfing, it’s simply an objective fact that the Macintosh operating system is more efficient, and more secure. This comes not specifically from anything Apple did, but because of what thousands of people have over the last few decades at AT&T, Berkley, and NEXTSTEP.
Truth be told, it was apple who found themselves so far behind remaining with OS 9 for so long. But they changed. Microsoft still hasn’t really tried to move on. Even with Windows 7.
The beauty, and the curse, of the internet, “bro”, is that your disembodied voice pretty much has to present logic that stands well enough on its own… credentialing, and personal slighting and the rest, its all just playful banter that should most times be ignored. Mostly not used, but I just found it comical, if not ironic, that this random site I stumbled upon would greet me with such a directly disdaining argument that had little basis in fact–aside from the general idiocy of your coworkers as you poignantly stated–and that I, as one of the generalized people you seem to whom you seem to take such offense might just give it all right back. (it was meant as low level irony)
But the real point is, you say things like Apple only has a one button mouse… and Maya needs a three button mouse etc… when in reality Apples computers have shipped with a 5 button mouse (one on each side of the face, one on either half of that uniface, and one in the middle of that little two-d scroll wheel) since, if I remember correctly… tiger… which was well before this posting. It just takes a quick trip to System preferences to change it (at this point i think it defaults to one button as a sort of joke)
You have the graphics card point however, Apples graphics cards have ALWAYS sucked hard… I have no idea, aside from most mac users being business professionals, who don’t see the need for the overhead cost of a good graphics processor, until recently, why they remained with the cheap ATI or intel-onboard graphics. I thank god every day I have to do something in OpenGL that he had the foresight to convince the ruler of the mac underworld to partner with nvidia, but that hadn’t happened at the time you wrote this.
Most of the reason for graphic design professionals historically using apple, as I’m sure you well know, were all of the core-animation files (what quartz is based on) that design programs could make use of… these are all pre-compiled modules that are written in openGL and objective-C that are available as an open library for any developer. (only difference being the y-axis is inverted from open-GL but thats all in the meta-programming)
So yeah, if you wanna say I’m a fan-boy, I guess I am. Never really much thought about it before, since I don’t vehemently oppose one or the other.
But from a computing standpoint, Apple just has the advantage because they don’t HAVE to provide drivers and a universal HAL for billions of hardware combinations… since they stringently control all of theirs.
But really, I stick with the points for superiority listed in the last post. Why? Because if people actually knew, and continually espoused those reasons for their arguments, then Microsoft might actually adopt similar practices. And I would very much like if everyone could have a secure, fluid, and efficient experience with their operating system. Because frankly… a good OS is an invisible one, it’s simply a window to what you want to do, it interacts intuitively, and as often as it can tries to NEVER fight you. And it provides clean, efficient, API’s and HAL for the programmers to produce applications with similar quality.
I don’t really think my points are irrelevant, since those points are the only thing that allows you all to have your mail clients, browsers, or even your precious graphic design suites like Adobe and Maya. The better the SDK the better programmers can code. The better programmers can code, the better the applications. The better the applications, the better the user experience. And so forth.
If it weren’t for good programming none of this would even be around… so… since peoples’ insanely simplified and often wrong arguments for superiority are based upon more and more distant abstractions from these facts. I thought I would just bring them to light so people could see some actual differences why the mac fan-boys make their claims. More information is never a bad thing–unless you simply don’t want to know.
Honestly, no real offense to you.
Comment by Tim — May 30, 2009 @ 6:39 pm
Also, to be honest I had to read over my post because I couldn’t even remember what I said years ago. Reading over it I cringed on several points, because you are right, I did state quite a lot of lame things like the whole mouse button thing. I guess I should of made it more clear the point I was trying to make was “they should come with more than one button by default”, to me I don’t understand why they can’t get over that (I know some do now, and even have a “scrolly” ball as well) but if adding a second monitor increases effectiveness by 44% (As I read off of an article on Forbes.com), how much do you think a couple extra buttons would help? I just don’t see the reasoning.
And no, your points aren’t irrelevant, I welcome all the points and facts you bring up in this dead, ugly, old site – haha. I just felt you were bringing them up in defense to Apple when I didn’t mean to be attacking Apple. But I can see how anybody would see that over that angsty, poorly written post I did those years ago. I can also see how that poorly placed “iCrap” image might make me seem petty. I was actually thinking about taking this site down the other day as well instead of letting it rot :).
Comment by Vaughn Royko — May 30, 2009 @ 8:21 pm