Caltrops - Motherfucking News

Forum Overview :: Motherfucking News

by mark 01/25/2006, 4:17pm PST

Quentin Beck wrote:

What's your Apple bragging right? 'oh I bought the most overpriced and least used patform to run my gay clicky-windey crap'.

Well, I suppose the bragging right is that if you use a computer that was made sometime after your hated Apple IIe, that's all you do. And I, subjectively, find that OS X does all the clicky-windey crap far better than any version of Windows that I have used (which is to say all of them, Win 3 through to XP, excluding M.E., which I understand was a real winner). It also has every single thing that was good about Unix in a usable, cohesive, affordable package. I can't stress enough how Linux, as an end-user OS, was rendered utterly obsolete the second OS X came out. The only reason I have had to use Linux in the last 4 years was when I was performing scientific computing experiments on a battery of machines. I have used OSX almost exclusively when writing email, making music, writing code, writing articles, making presentations, using the web, etc. etc. I think it's worth paying a bit more for a system that I have been much more productive on.

All that said, I am not particularly enamored of Apple the company. My iBook has had a myriad of horrible design and construction problems (dual usb g3), and I have had to dissemble and rebuild it twice. It took several years for a decent version of Java to come out. They've released way too many versions of their OS over a very short period of time. They have a tendency to unfix things they did right the first time. They even manage to forget about the usability guidelines that they themselves authored.

I've worked for 3 years in a Software Research Lab and we had both Macs and PCs there. Aside from one person, everyone who spent large amounts of time working on the macs has ended up buying one because they preferred using them. I have no idea if I would like them were I a professional graphic designer, or a professional musician. But as a person who has spent a lot of time using computers for other equally nontrivial purposes, I can't see myself going back to PCs. Unless, I suppose, the next version of windows is amazing enough to get me to buy in to it.