Dissapointed so far

[contoursvt]

Not to start a flame but I had traded a PIII 533Mhz with a 30gig drive, 256mb RAM for a G3 B&W with 256mb RAM and 30gig drive. It runs at 400Mhz.

My observation so far. OSX 10.2 is very pretty and clean. Other than this, I see no other real benefit. Its no more or less stable than Win2k/XP in my opinion and no easier to use. I'll take a stab and say that application compatability with older apps is not as good as it could be but I dont know for sure because I didnt use any older apps.

Installation took nearly 2 hours which is just unacceptable for a 400Mhz machine of any kind. A PII 400Mhz machine takes about 1 hour to install XP. Granted this is just once but even booting OSX is a painful process. It takes so long to start. With the eye candy on default settings, windows are as fast as a snail. This is compared to the PIII 533 of course. That was my 3rd machine at the time.

I traded the PC for the MAC to play with OSX and basically, I'm done playing. Hardware support so far is poor in my opinion. I have a Hammer UW SCSI controller based on a Qlogic chipset which works in OS9 but not OSX. There is no excuse why the chipset cannot be supported. Apple obviously doesnt care about supporting 3rd party users especially some of the older stuff so the user will be out of luck. Too bad. A 10K SCSI drive and UW controller gone to waste. At least Win2K/XP still has many drivers for products which were gone long ago.

User interface is also very slow. This may not be the fault of the hardware though. Its OSX. Even when I installed Redhat 9 on the 533 running Gnome, I found it sluggish in terms of user interface. Maybe Unix/Linux and all variants are just not as tighly written as Win2k/XP when it comes to the interface. I compare the interface speed to a Pentium 166MMX running XP with about 128mb RAM. I can compare because I had to do this for a client who insisted.

About the above, in fact, I will go as far to say that OSX can make any fast machine feel slow. My friend bought a dual 1gig G4 with 512MB RAM and a 60 gig drive. I think its 60. Doesnt matter. This machine felt horribly slow. Sure it was 10.1.something but still, come on. My server machine is a used compaq SP700 dual PII Xeon 450Mhz which feels much faster. I'm sure that the 60gig 7200RPM IDE drive is faster than the 9.1gig 7200RPM SCSI drive which boots this server. Sure processing power is much greater on the Dual 1gig but so what. Unless someone is going to do a batch conversion of 500mp3s or some Divx encoding or something like that, its a waste considering how slow it feels. I'm not even going to talk about the speed difference between the XP2100 AMD system I put together.

Also I hear rumors that the next release of OSX may not even support G3's? If this is the case, then god what a shame and what a horrible company to have on your side. Its like throwing money into the wind. Forcing users to upgrade just plain sucks.


Anyway thats my rant. Maybe it would be differrent if I was a casual user who didnt have exposure to different systems. At least I was able to find a buyer for it who will offer me somewhat more than what I could have sold a 533 PIII for so thats good. Resale value is nice.

[Giaguara]

256 mb is not much for jaguar, 128 is the minimum... the more ram the better it runs. and 10.1 .. is slower anyway.
2 hours?? i think to install mine it took 40 minutes. less than installing redhat.

i won't go back for windows, if i'd use a pc it'd have linux or other *X on it. u'll get enough speed once u use unix, and on a windows anything.. can't do that. i like the graphics but.. enjoy the terminal as well

any support seems better than windows. at least it has been so for me.

i hope you'll find yourself better in the future with the os x. at least the mac does what i want, with windows i felt like i had to do what windows wanted.. how long ago did you get your mac?

[contoursvt]

Well, I dont know, I guess I'm a little bit more ticked off than I should be because I cant get good SCSI components to work due to lack of support. Thing is, I cant even find any info on this FWB UW SCSI card. All I know is that the chipset is Qlogic which works fine in all versions of windows and PC linux and it works in OS9.

[ex2bot]

I agree with contoursvt to a certain extent on slower machines. OS X requires some horsepower. But my flat-panel iMac (800 mHz) is plenty fast for me. Most operations are essentially instantaneous.

I also question some of the points:

-Slow boot time . . . How often do you boot, really?
-Slow installation time. . . How often do you install?
-10.1 is slow. . . Well, we're running .2 now. It's significantly snappier. For new hardware, the windowing interface is 3d accelerated (Quartz Gl).
-Future OS X versions won't support G3s? I DOUBT it. Current iBooks are still running with G3s.

Win XP is stable, but it's ugly both in looks and interface design. I much prefer working (with Office, for example) on Mac. I'm selling my PC.

I understand you're frustrated, but come on.

Doug

[phatsharpie]

I have to admit that OS X boots slowly for me too, but it's not any slower than Windows 2000 on a PIII-600MHz. However, the saving grace is that I re/boot my machine about once every two months. I am completely serious about this. The only time I re/boot is when I have to install an update, but other then that, I can just close the lid of my PowerBook and put it to sleep and it never gave me any problems! Although I did find Windows 2000 stable, it couldn't compare with Mac OS X.

Regarding the speed of the UI. I do think it could be improved, but it doesn't really bother me all that much. I don't resize and move my windows all the time - and the slowness is more about preceptions than anything else. I find myself multitaking more and never had I any problems with running most of my applications at once.

What really sold me on OS X is when I did the following experiment:

1. Open up a transparent terminal window and run top.

2. Open a MPG movie in Quicktime - make sure it's looping.

3. Open another MPG movie in Quicktime - make sure it's looping.

4. Play a song from a CD in iTunes - turn on the visual effects (so that it plays the effects within a window).

5. Stagger the multiple windows so that the transparent terminal window is on top and all the moving images can be seen through the window.

The amazing thing was that none of the MPGs had any playback problems. The CD played flawlessly. Despite low frame-rates, the visual effects by iTunes played without a hitch. And top refreshed with no problems in the transparent terminal window.

It was amazing - I have never seen a desktop computer (or a laptop in this instance) do something like it.

[fryke]

What sold me on Mac OS X was one feature that you mentioned as well - albeit not in your list. The instant sleep and wakeup. As a writer I love writing my stories while I'm on a train to work or back home from work. I have to change trains in the middle. I've often seen people use their notebooks and shutting them down (!) or putting them to sleep two minutes before the train arrived at the station. It's a nice trick on them to keep on writing on my TiBook and only closing the lid when they get up and just follow them outside. Same when entering the next train. If you're lucky, the same PC guy (or OS 9 guy for that matter) will also use the same train this time. You follow him, sit somewhere where he can still see you, open your 'book and start writing immediately.

It happened to me once or twice, and one time the guy I was making fun of said that I was joking. So I showed him how easily it worked on Mac OS X. He was using a Pismo with OS 9 himself, and as he was using it for PIM functions and Excel sheets, I showed him Microsoft Office v. X. He was the right kinda guy. A lawyer with some money. He went shopping the day after. And I'm sure he got a TiBook with Mac OS X preinstalled as well as a copy of Office v. X.

[dlloyd]

I'm glad, another converter!
I really like the instant sleep/wakeup on my iBook, I've heard that it isn't as fast as a powerbook, but by the time I have finished opening the lid, it has usually fully woken up.
I must say that I have only restarted this about three times since I got it (last week), one was to test and see how long it took, one was to install OS 1.2.3, and the last was because I think that OS X crashed.
As for the UI, I don't find that it is any slower than OS 9, but I haven't really pushed it yet.
My dad has a 2.56GHz PC running XP, and I am really upset because that boots in 15 seconds flat!.
Come on Apple, get your act together!

[edX]

Originally posted by contoursvt
Well, I dont know, I guess I'm a little bit more ticked off than I should be because I cant get good SCSI components to work due to lack of support. Thing is, I cant even find any info on this FWB UW SCSI card. All I know is that the chipset is Qlogic which works fine in all versions of windows and PC linux and it works in OS9.

like the floppy disk, scsi is dead.

basically i have the same computer you do and os x works fine. of course i have double the ram and i would suggest you have at least 512 as well. but since it isn't going to ever get that instant responsiveness while browsing or launching apps, you'll probably continue to be upset. accept the limitations of the mac-chine, accept the limitations that accompany the stability of the os and start learning the tricks to tweaking it to suit your needs instead of assuming it's all apple's fault and then perhaps you'll enjoy it for what it is and stop crying about what it is not.