Waccoon wrote:
Funny how people lambast Microsoft if the latest version of Windows won't work on such an old computer, but Mac people have no trouble buying brand new hardware all the time.
Mac people have less of a need to keep purchasing new hardware. My lowest-end Mac (well, aside from
my 7.8MHz Mac Plus) is a iBook G3 700. I got it just over four years ago, in 2002. I have been on top of every release of OS X and every consecutive release has the machine running faster, more efficiently. It runs faster now than it did the day I bought it over four years ago.
It's a very different situation with Windows.
I've been using Macs since '95. I was also the system admin for a fleet of Macs at my college newspaper office. Oh, the horror stories I could tell -- especially about OS8. A clean install of that system was a non-stop crashfest. Just putting an audio CD in the drive caused a lock-up (the 8.1 "superpatch" released 6 months later finally fixed that).
Oh, I agree with you there. While the Mac OS was, early on, innovative as far as pioneering the desktop metaphor to the masses, the OS itself was weak. OS 9 on down's kernel is, in many ways, inferior to that of Windows 95.
Some of
the machines I owned in the 80s and early 90s were Macs, but I stepped away to the PC - to NEXTSTEP for Intel v3.2 on a then $4500 486 66 setup. I did not come back to the Mac until NeXT took over Apple and announced that NEXTSTEP would be come the basis for Apple's operating systems.
Sorry, but I'm really sick of people telling me they have no problems with their Macs, but simply putting any DVD in the drive of my mini gave me "error -5862" or some similar crud, with no way to figure out what the problem was. After lots of google searches, I eventually found out that the problem was a region mis-configuration. My DVD region was set to 0 (unset), even though the machine is a US model. WTF? Was it just not initialized properly at the factory? According to several forums I've read, I'm not the only one that has had this problem.
This, I'll disagree with. I have an OS X kernel panic or other unexplained error a little less than once per year on my main machine (currently a dual G5 2.5 Mac). They happen so infrequently that my first reaction is that I must have had a hardware failure. I find that amusing, really.
I mean, how is it I can use an install of Windows for years at a time, get one BSOD every 6 months, and never get a virus, but my Mac mini crashes just by trying to make an NFS connection and I regularly get error messages I can't decode?
I am forced to reboot my work PC running XP SP2 about once every other day due to a lockup of one type or another.
At any rate, my main machines are
that dual G5 2.5 w/ 30" Cinema and
my somewhat new MacBook Pro 2GHz (which
runs NEXTSTEP just fine). I couldn't be happier or more productive, really.
Of course, I have
a couple of Amigas in
the computer room, as well. :-)
blakespot
