# SUN or Apple iMac (I am not a wintrol or anti-mac)



## dukejava (Sep 15, 2000)

I am considering purchasing a new computer.  The main determining factor is the Operating System.  I have used Solaris for 2 years on Intel, however it has its limitations in terms of application support, so I have decided to get a Sun Ultra 5 Workstation, however with the launch of MacOS X I have also started to consider may I should get a iMac DV SE + and a copy of MacOS.  The question is relating to stability, how stable is it?  What is the performance like compared to MacOS 9.0.4?  Is the new Office 2001 going to be Carbon compliant (so that it fully utilises MacOS's benefits (Pre-emptive multi-tasking, protective memory, etc, etc).

I am not a anti-mac or wintroll, I just need to find out some more information before making a big purchase.


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## Josev Best (Sep 17, 2000)

Mac OS X is still a beta, so you may be dissapointed.

On the other hand, the iMac is a steal these days, and in terms of multimedia (Audio and Video editing, DVD player, etc) it's a much better option than the Sun.  Not to mention the price/performance difference.  I don't imagine SparcStations are cheap.

Office 2001 will not be carbonized until next summer, according to Microsoft.

Visit versiontracker.com to see what apps are currently available for Mac OS X.


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## Magill (Sep 25, 2000)

It all depends upon your time-frame.

OS X Beta is just that, a beta. The OS is rock solid, it has been around for several years now as OSX server. That world is pretty much  Unix.

I find it interesting that you find no applications for Solaris. Living most of the day in the tru64 Alpha Unix world, I know that there are almost zero apps for Alpha Unix while virtually anything is available for Solaris. Of course, this is from the GNU/Unix point of view.

Shrink-wrapped apps are a different story.

Within 6 months there will be many apps for OS X native. Today, you can run almost all "classic apps" --
"in the box."

Personally, I'm an Apha fan first and a PowerPC fan second. Never did think much of either Intel or SPARC.

But in the end, it all comes down to which apps do you want to run, and how much effort do you want to put into running those apps. Being a Unix type, I can get almost anything running on OS X that I want or need.... but they all require source work, compiling and tweaking... and I can do it today. But if you want shrink-wrap, you'll have to wait a while.


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## Dr_Stein (Oct 12, 2000)

I'm sitting here at work with my Sun Ultra 5 (Solaris 8) to my left, and my G3/266 Powerbook with MacOS X Public Beta to my right. It's great. *VERY* useful for me here at work. (I'm a sysadmin for a subsidiary of the largest single ISP on the planet)
MacOS X is way cool. If you have fun with Solaris, you should have a lot of fun with MacOS X. I would definately consider it a very worthy purchase, and at the very least, you'll have an iMac that you can dual boot and have even MORE fun with.


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## AdmiralAK (Oct 23, 2000)

Well its nice to have an option at buying things in general but what will you need it for ?  A server ? a home machine ?  There are definatelly pros and cons and you should look into them.  I have used both solaris and X but at the end of the day I prefer my mac


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## dukejava (Oct 28, 2000)

I am interested in getting a Sun Machine with Solaris because Solaris's stability, security and scalability.  Though I could buy a copy of Solaris for x86, there is a lack of applications for Solaris x86, such as Media Player and Realplayer.


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## Dr_Stein (Oct 28, 2000)

But... Media Player for Solaris really sucks. There's even a version of IE for Solaris. It sucks worse... I tried it on an Ultra 5 with 512megs of RAM and it absolutely crawled.. ugh..


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## AdmiralAK (Oct 30, 2000)

You say stability and security.... 
therefore I guess that you are going to use it as a server.
Am I correct in this assumption ?

As a servers a Sun machine might be cheacper than the $500 OS X server


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## dukejava (Oct 30, 2000)

I am going to be using it as a workstation for programming and general stuffing around.


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