(and most of them are in their junior year or even senior year when they do this lol)
whitesaint
Well for one thing, I'm not a die-hard Mac fan, I'm a Mac fan. That's it. I'm more fascinated with Apple's history than I am with the computer. The Mac is faster, that is true, however it's not as fast as Steve Jobs would have you believe. Yes Photoshop 6 is faster on a G4 than it is on a P4, but the P4 is a piece of shit anyway. Anybody that wants a fast PC gets an Athlon and these are only a tiny bit slower than the G4. Besides, the reason Photoshop 6 is faster on the G4 is because Adobe took advantage of Altivec, which they don't have on the PC.
Yes, gaming is better on the PC platform than Mac, SGI, Linux, Sun, etc., but That has been a double edged sward for Microsoft. In their original roadmap, Microsoft wanted to have everyone using NT by the time NT 5.0 (later renamed 2000) was released. What stopped them was gamers. Why do you think they have been working to put together a gaming platform of their own? To get gamers out of computing enough to let everyone else move over to NT technology.
News Flash: Apples slowest G4 system is now the 733MHz, and at $1700, I don't see many people complaining about it. So who is selling a "dual Athlon and 768 megs ram" for less than $1500? I could run Solaris 8 on a system like that and have a ton of fun. Just point me in the right direction (before they close their doors for giving their systems away).
Games again, do you actually work on your systems? And if you rule out games and Photoshop type apps, then why do you need a fast system anyway? Are you going to tell me that I can type more words per minute in the PC version of Word on a Dual Athlon at 1.5GHz+ than I can in the Mac version of Word on an old PowerMac 6100/66? Once you remove games and real work apps that need speed, then you have remove any reason to buy super fast systems. The current low end iMac (G3/500, CD-RW) is more of a system than most average users would ever need (or know what to do with).
Yes, but I would argue that xp isn't the product that Microsoft shipped back on July 17, 1993. When you look at it like that, Apple is doing a great job when compared to Microsoft considering the amount of rewriting that was require to get development firms (like Microsoft, Adobe, and others) to agree to make apps for it. In the form it was in back in 1999, it was faster and more rock solid than anything on the market. Microsoft has never had to please developers, or anyone for that matter. Do you honestly think anyone could get away with the security holes that were part of Windows. Microsoft installed and turned on by default a feature that 99% of users won't use, and the 1% that could would have known how to install it anyways. It is not that Windows is a big target (as you put it earlier) it is just that is the easiest target ever.
This shows that you are not up to speed on the Mac part of the market. Apple sold more PowerBooks and iBook than they did before the slowdown. Apple is opening stores at the same time others are laying off thousands of workers and closing down stores. This is a great time to gain market share, though they really won't. The only thing that is going to unseat Microsoft is for the government to say that software can not be pre-installed on any systems. Then let the tides of a free market flow.
NeXTStep's first release was in October 12, 1988 (version 0.8) and was design to run on the Motorola 68030 processor. Though there were small advancements over the following years, the deal made with Sun to make the development platform portable (known as OpenStep) was the biggest leap forward (even bigger than moving to Intel, SPARC and HP PA-RISC processors) The foundations of the OS changed very little from OPENSTEP 4.0 to the final release of Mac OS X Server 1.x. Apple had a consumer version ready for release in 1999 when major Mac developers told Apple that they could not and would not spend the money to port their existing apps to the new OS. This forced Apple to create a new application environment based on the Mac Toolbox called Carbon that would let developers move most of their original code to Mac OS X without completely rewriting it. Apple thought it would only take them a few months to a year to create this environment... they were wrong, it took much longer.
OS 9 is exactly what it's name implies, the 9th version of an operating systems. Of course it is "was designed specifically for the Apple audience", they pushed for all of the changes with each new version. As for stability, the Mac OS has only partial protected memory that can not be controlled (easily) at the user level. The was the best implementation of technology that Apple developed during the Copland years. Also font management is a problem. 4 out of 5 service calls I respond to have to do with font management issues (and people using either Suitcase or ATM Deluxe). I show them that with those tools set aside you can started up a Photoshop process that can take up to 15 minutes and still work in QuarkXPress or browser the internet or check mail while Photoshop does it's thing. Mac OS X gives users more control over misbehaving apps (along the same lines as NT, even though NEXTSTEP was doing it long before Windows could) and a better way of managing fonts. The implementation of BSD is as an application environment that is utilized to run the filing systems and networking, and as an interface for Darwin. The end user should not have to deal with that interface unless they want to.
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Well, at my old high school, the school had some agreement with M$, and because of it, they were not *allowed* to buy a Mac. Infact, it was over the entire district (k-12). I think the agreement had something to do with tech support from M$, but I'm not sure (concidering how nothing ever worked, anyway ;-).