<center><img src="http://www.warehouse.com/MecaImages/www/articles/iMac_top.gif"></center><p>thing at the base of the monitor? 'Zat the CPU??? Is a dome design an efficient use of space to house essentially square and rectangular components??? tsk, tsk...

 

That's the CPU...[drools]

 

If they put half the energy they put into making systems that looks like one of the droids the Jawa's were trying to sell Luke, into making an OS that's more than just a few buzzwords and some chintzy apps they could crush microsoft. Alas they'll always be a niche system and nothing more. Until they finally fade out of existance that is.

 

Please.

1) OS X is one of the best, most powerful UNIX implementations ever created. And I've used them all.

2) The PowerPC architecture is cleaner, faster and more robust than the Intel chip architecture.

The fact that Apple has managed to combine technical excellence with ease of use and aesthetically pleasing industrial design should be celebrated, not vilified or dismissed by frustrated PC users who wonder why their own machines look and operate like @$$.

A haiku:

"Yesterday it worked.
Today it doesn't.
Windows is like that."

:-)

 

All they do these days is make cute, overpriced, underperforming systems. I love the G4 case design, nobody can touch it. Doesn't change the fact that you can crack that acrylic with the lightest touch, see also "cube". I know, I have a few of them here and they are all cracked in various places. Pretty bad considering they've never been moved since they were removed from the box and setup. "Aesthetically pleasing industrial design" or "design fluff"? You be the judge...

The PowerPC architecture may be robust and perform. too bad they can't make a system that compete's with an intel/amd platform dollar for dollar, they can't, EOS.

Ease of use is a joke. That's the big "buzzword" mac fans have been tossing around for years and it's meaningless. You put my grandparents on a mac and it's no easier for them to use than Win98 or XP would be. That arguement became invalid quite a while ago.

And for being such a good unix platform, I don't know of any NIX fanantics (and I know many) who would consider having a Mac. I'm sure some will surface here after this post, but their numbers are the minorities minority. They all run intel/amd boxes with a free OS. They also can get their own updates and aren't forced to pay for a point release just to get "faster window resizing" and better memory managment.

Don't know what you mean about "operating like @$$". I've got an OSX box no more than 30ft from me that I can crash on command and make the thing run like total garbage. Pretty bad considering the thing cost 4k less than a year ago. I also have a win2k workstation in front of me that I use for about 8 hours every day currently rolling along with a 7 week uptime. Not bad considering the mass of apps that get ran on it, along with the occasional game. oh, but I guess since like, only 4 games actually work on a mac, that's not much of an issue.

That said i'm not a "hater of macs" I think they are good systems for what they are. But they aren't the best. Besides best is always relative to the person who uses it. Having used just about every OS under the sun, I'll take XP over OSX any day of the week. I don't ask my computer to look cute, only to work and do what I need to without crashing, XP does that in spades.

I still say Apple survives by taking the same old thing, packaging it in a new, "aesthetically pleasing" design and selling it at a markup to the dwindling legions of people who feel they are doing a community service by paying more for an under performing, under supported system than buying a windows system.

 

Elderabuse.

 

components. The entire computer is housed in that ~10.4in base. The real 'revolution' is that coupled with ipod and all the newly introduced video software, the system is taking a big step towards 'convergence'. Namely, simplifying user interface to high tech gadgets as to make it a common appliance to the user.

Tony

 

...to build a stable operating system.

1) The price/performance metric is an interesting question. You can't compare clock-speed per dollar, but clock-speed doesn't mean anything relative to the actual performance of the computer. It's like saying that horsepower = torque...only it's not even that precise, since in the computer world, the very meaning of "horsepower" would vary between machines.

2) "NIX heads?" What self-respecting UNIX user refers to himself as a "NIX head?" I was working on UNIX machines when GUI's were the cool new thing, and that's a new one on me.

3) Yes, "ease of use" does mean something. There's a reason why GUI design is so important to any software development effort -- if the end-user can't learn and use the product quickly and easily, the product itself has less value. The fundamental problem with Windows GUI design is that it has a) never been intuitive and b) never been consistent. This is a real engineering issue, and not ephemeral nonsense.

4) Life-cycle... one-stop hardware shopping and hardware/software integration make a difference in quality. That qualitative edge means longer service life and (over time) lower replacement costs. My Macintosh (no modifier) from 1985 still works like new. So does my Performa, my iMac and my iBook. I have never owned or operated a PC that has proven as reliable as any of my Apple computer products. When I buy a new Mac for myself, it's not because I have to... it's because I WANT to.

5) I build massive mathematical models/simulations that routinely need to run for days just to find an initial solution. Nothing makes me more insane than a crash in the middle of a particularly hairy run... crashes I don't have when I run under OS X, and runs that produce solutions in times that are orders of magnitude faster than I get from my Windows machine. Time is MONEY.

So, rock on Steve Jobs. Maybe if you keep building quality into computers, people will stop buying the same old crap.

 

No more bulky, space wasteing monitors. The only monitors they offer now are flat panel displays. The old iMAC was the last product to be redesigned in this fashion.

I would say the revolutionary aspects of Apple in general can be seen by spending some time at the Macworld Expo going on in SF right now. I was there today, and it was quite interesting to see the 'usual suspects' there as well as some vendors who focus primarily on the unix base of OSX. That's a new twist. In the coming months and years, the apple community looks to be expanding in directions other than the visual/audio creatives.

Also, with the revolution of digital media in the last few years, apple has put an emphasis on easy to use consumer products that perform and function the way they are supposed to.

The new imac is a pretty neat machine. It's plenty powerful for its target demographic, and the flat panel display will make all the difference for some. It doesn't take up a lot of space, and for those who like the space saving properties of a laptop, but don't need the portability, this is a very well priced machine to fit the bill.

 

They both stole it from Xerox corp...