Sold out for osx and wow

[uncharted]

Running 10.2.8 on a 700Mhz eMac and loving it

Best computer I ever owned.

[Oliver]

@Karlos

Well, yeah, one would have thought so.  Up until about system 6, I was generally pretty happy in macland, but OS's just started growing out of control.  I love to blast windows as much as the next guy, but I actually have preferred using it to systems 7,8,9.

At uni, we had some imacs in a library cafe, as a net bar, and I could type several words in advance of the letters appearing on the screen (I'm also not much of a typist by the way).  What the hell were those things doing???  Admitedly, I think they must have been set up really badly, but why couldn't the software show what you type prior to doing whatever (I don't know what) was keeping the CPU so busy?  Talk about wanting to punch a compter (or at least some engineer).

Anyway, at least mac has done a good marketing job, unlike some other company which shall remain nameless.  As an engineer however, I so often find it grating when business and human factors come in the way of success of good design.  sigh.

I had hoped that the *nix based code would have made macos a lot more efficent.  Multi GB installs just fail to impress.

[Oliver]

hmm, thinking about Apple's maketing strategy of the past 5 years or so, which has focussed somewhat on the 'hairdresser' market (please, I really don't mean to offend anyone, honest), having out of the box installations that hamstring performance really does seem to be a bit of a dull move.  Really good way to annoy and befuddle one's customers.

[Karlos]

Oliver wrote:
hmm, thinking about Apple's maketing strategy of the past 5 years or so, which has focussed somewhat on the 'hairdresser' market (please, I really don't mean to offend anyone, honest), having out of the box installations that hamstring performance really does seem to be a bit of a dull move.  Really good way to annoy and befuddle one's customers.

Substitute "hairdresser" for "as seen on tv interior designer type" and you can be as offensive as you wish and I'm with you 100%...

[vic20owner]

No way you can compare os 7,8,9 to OSX.  OSX is the best thing I've ever seen. The security and power of unix/linux/bsd and the convenience of a mac with the compatibility feeling of windows.  Everything is soooo well designed, there was very little learning curve. Coming from Linux, I find the power of the bash shell everything I wanted. I'm running my G4/450 as a web server for my kiteboarding forum (www.flkitesurf.com), watching dvds, browing the web and generally just screwing around with no slowdown. No hiccups, no choppy video, no slow page serving, nothing. Installing software is quicker and easier than anything I've ever used, including the amiga.

I tried really hard to use my amiga for daily tasks and found it completely useless by today's standards.  Windows was ok but always felt "messy".  

OSX is wonderful.  This is my slowest computer (others are P3/850mhz xp, P4/3.4ghz xp, P4/3ghz xp, P4/2.5ghz linux) and it runs smoother than all of them.  I find it painful to look at windows now... it looks like it was designed by the tele tubbies, video is always flakey, programs stop responding, and the filesystem layout is just a mess.

So yeah, I'm converted. I'm going to by a mac mini G4 ($499) as my next major computer purchase.

[Oliver]

@vic20owner

That's good to hear.  Interestingly mixed results from the other users though.  Do you have any ideas why that would be?

[Karlos]

@Vic20owner

Good for you, I'm glad you found a system you like.

he security and power of unix/linux/bsd and the convenience of a mac with the compatibility feeling of windows. Everything is soooo well designed, there was very little learning curve.

Sure it's fantastic as a home OS, provided you don't have any rare sight problems ;-)

One word of advice - do not *depend* on all this security. OS X Server _failed_ totally, in a way I have never seen any OS do before (I've only ever seen hardware failures that compare) at work, having been doing nothing more than allowing people to log in from their eMacs and save work to there in case they have to work on another station another day.

My 1.25GHz G4 eMac at work often crawls when running Mail, BBEdit, Firefox, Transmit and couple of bash terminals concurrently which are the absolute bare minimum tools I need to do my job. Occasionally I need to use XL to prepare data for my boss, or OmniGraffle to make diagrams. Unless I close down some other apps, it will literally show me the spinning candy mouse pointer anything from 10 to 30 seconds, in which time I cannot actually click on anything.

Typically I have to boot my machine twice a day at work. I am sure a hefty ram upgrade would help but I don't see it happening soon. My colleagues (non technical) use them just for firefox, mail and office, occasionally some other apps and they have many of the same issues.

These are already higher spec systems than the mac mini you intend to buy.

[dylansmrjo]

Switching to Mac OS X is probably the last thing I would do, considering the current abuse of system resources. If Mac OS X should ever be as light as AmigaOS, then .. well... that would be something. :-P

Personally I consider AOS (or on x86: BeOS and OS/2 - the latter one with quite a bit of ideas from AOS) to be the perfect combination of Windows and MacOS, and on top of that: Much, much smaller in regard to use of system resources.

Switching to MacOS from Windows is reasonable. Like switching from Yugo to Mercedes. Switching from AmigaOS to Mac OS X is more like switching from a Mercedes to a Yugo :lol:

[minator]

I had some responsiveness problems in Tiger but I thought they were my HD.  10.4.3 seems to improved things a lot though.

OS X eats RAM I'd say 512MB is the minimum.

As for being bloated...  it's not quite as bad as it sounds , Half of the Tiger install disc is printer drivers.  There's also all sorts of OSS software included web server, FTP, there's also development tools such as Python, Perl etc.
It's big because there's a lot there.

[Acill]

dylansmrjo wrote:
Switching to Mac OS X is probably the last thing I would do, considering the current abuse of system resources. If Mac OS X should ever be as light as AmigaOS, then .. well... that would be something. :-P

Personally I consider AOS (or on x86: BeOS and OS/2 - the latter one with quite a bit of ideas from AOS) to be the perfect combination of Windows and MacOS, and on top of that: Much, much smaller in regard to use of system resources.

Switching to MacOS from Windows is reasonable. Like switching from Yugo to Mercedes. Switching from AmigaOS to Mac OS X is more like switching from a Mercedes to a Yugo :lol:

Uh, yeah what ever mate. I wouldnt go as far as saying that. OS X is awesome. Its much more stable and can do things as well if not better then Windows and AmigaOS cant even touch it. The only people I know that talk like that are the ones that have never sat down and used OS X longer then the time you can in a store.

[Oliver]

Does anyone else think it's a but daft to include EVERY printer driver in a basic installation, just in case you happen to use one of them?  Does anyone change printers so often that this becomes a really good feature, and well worth the disk space, installation time, ....
In OSX, does any of this 'just in case' installation end up occupying RAM?  I know it did in OS 8.  I had assumed that Apple would have improved matters somewhat for their 10'th gen OS.  Is this the case?

[bloodline]

All this kicking of OS X isn't really very constructive... Since I have has the opertunity to run OSX and Windows on the same hardware, I can say that all performance issues experienced with OS X are due to crap hardware... can't wait 'till apple drop the crap PPC and use the superior x86 architecture

As for OS X security... it's been mroe secure than both Win2K and WinXP for me.

As For OS X stability, it's as stable as the most stable Unix I've ever used (AIX and Linux), beats the hell out of Windows and AmigaOS.

OS X has something a bit special for Audio users though... The core audio is excelent, low latencty, highly integrated and STABLE!

[billt]

VirtualPC Could be a solution for some, but I'm putting together a mobile engineering workstation for use re. my day job, and I don't think emulation on an iBook would offer the performance to make that bearable. There's a couple other reasons I chose this particular laptop that the iBook wouldn't have matched either, but the big deciding factor was engineering software and performance. Perhaps after Apple's laptops go x86 and Windows can run directly or VirtualPC won't suffer CPU emulation performance hit, then I can reconsider.

[amigadave]

Karlos wrote:
@Vic20owner

My 1.25GHz G4 eMac at work often crawls when running Mail, BBEdit, Firefox, Transmit and couple of bash terminals concurrently which are the absolute bare minimum tools I need to do my job. Occasionally I need to use XL to prepare data for my boss, or OmniGraffle to make diagrams. Unless I close down some other apps, it will literally show me the spinning candy mouse pointer anything from 10 to 30 seconds, in which time I cannot actually click on anything.

Typically I have to boot my machine twice a day at work. I am sure a hefty ram upgrade would help but I don't see it happening soon. My colleagues (non technical) use them just for firefox, mail and office, occasionally some other apps and they have many of the same issues.

These are already higher spec systems than the mac mini you intend to buy.

I thought the "eMacs" were the lowest spec Mac you could get, or maybe the same spec as the mini.  I would think any company that wanted to use Macs would invest in higher spec machines, specially for your position where you are running so many apps at once.  Tell them to get you a new dual G5 Power Mac @ 2.5mHz with 4gb RAM, that should fix all your problems and the prices should start coming down as they get ready to switch to x86, specially if you can find a used one.   :-D

[amigadave]

@ billt,

Virtual PC isn't great, but I use it on my 1gHz G4 w/1gb RAM Powerbook to run my PC CAD program and it is not too bad.  Faster than it ran on an old Pentium II @400mHz w/128mb RAM (I know that is not saying much, but it is very usable).

[Karlos]

amigadave wrote:

I thought the "eMacs" were the lowest spec Mac you could get, or maybe the same spec as the mini.  I would think any company that wanted to use Macs would invest in higher spec machines, specially for your position where you are running so many apps at once.  Tell them to get you a new dual G5 Power Mac @ 2.5mHz with 4gb RAM, that should fix all your problems and the prices should start coming down as they get ready to switch to x86, specially if you can find a used one.   :-D

As far as I know the mac mini is lower spec than the eMac, but I don't know for a fact :-)

As for the G5, dream on :-) It's a small place ;-)

Prior to the eMac I had to use an old iMac G3 433 (I think, could have been 500) with even less memory than this ;-)

-edit-

Seems out of the box the mac mini 1.25GHz and eMac 1.25 GHz are pretty similar, but the eMac is more expandable...

-edit-

Mother of all stupid typos :lol: