First Gabe and Tycho, and now Josh…it’s so cute.
I bought my very first Mac in 1984, the 128K model, with an external disk drive. I later upgraded that to an amazing 512K of RAM, with a 30MB hard drive. I’m a truly godless man, but if I have anything close to religion, it is the Cult of Macintosh.
And a fine cult it is.
My college roommate got a Mac 128K back in 1984, and I was hooked. I got to use one again in our lab in 1988, but I didn’t own a Mac of my very own until 1990 or 1991. It was a Mac LC.
I bought my first Mac for myself when they fixed the underlying operating system, putting their extremely usable face on the functionality of a Unix system. I have been delighted by my machines ever since. My wife never misses a chance to say “I told you so” of course — she’s been using Macs forever.
I still play games on my Windows machine though. Blowing things up is what the box excels at.
I was the first generation born into the cult: my parents bought an Apple IIe while I was in utero. It’s been macs for me ever since then.
Yup! Been a Mac user since the Mac II in 1988 – an Apple user since 1980. I use both Mac and Windows a work. There really is a difference in the overall user experience – the Mac is simply better in UI, stability, and integration – not to mention security. I use the Winders box at work when I have to, the Mac whenever I can.
We always pitied you Mac folks, who could manage to do only one thing at a time, and who saw the world in only black and white.
Yup, I was an Amiga owner:
http://oldcomputers.net/amiga1000.html
I’ve been toying with the idea of switching for a year now.
Pros:
elegant OSX
Ease of setup/reinstalls
pretty hardware
cons:
less software
much more expensive
steve jobs’s occasional insanity
dependant on one company
The machine i’m using at home is a Dell from 1999. At work I run lots of MatLab etc, but at home I just chat and read webpages. So I haven’t been forced to upgrade. But I will need to decide, sooner or later, whether to switch.
I was an amiga owner, too. But now I am firmly in the Mac camp.
OS X rules!
It must be a cult to survive 68K->PPC->OS X -> Intel.
steve s, the choice ultimately hinged on the fact that I wanted a laptop. In desktop machines I think the solution is blurrier and largely because of cost, but in a laptop the Apple engineering really shines. I have never had a Windows laptop behave the way I wanted it to in order to facilitate portability, but my powerbook did exactly the right thing out of the box.
steve s:
While in general there is less software choice, if any of your home uses encompass the capability of the iLife suite, there is no comparison!
On the Mac support site people ask all the time whether there is a “PC version of Garageband.” The waggish answer is “Yes, it costs $500 and comes with a free Mac Mini.”
In fact if you want to get your feet wet, and have a USB keyboard and mouse and a compatible monitor, than a mac mini might be a good start.
I had Apples since the IIc, and many Macs (starting with a no-HD SE). I started using OS X when it was in beta, and loathed it. Slow, counter-intuitive, etc. The dock is the worst piece of software ever. I kept with it, though, but eventually gave up. We’re a three-Dell household now — much less expensive, more software, more compatibility, faster, etc. And we’ve had no problems. My wife has to use OS X at work, and prefers to do all her work here. Sorry, fanatics. I do have an iPod and AAPL stock!
Macs always remind me of Howard Dean. Obviously superior, but the condescension of the followers turned my stomach.
I wonder how long it will take Windows to figure out the two-finger scroll thing on a trackpad?
Just one of those little things Apple just does *right*.
We’ve been committed mac users for a long time. The pirate just recently replaced his 3 1/2 year old G4 Powerbook (it had broken hinge that could not be repaired). We bought a new G4 Powerbook. Unfortunately, the one we bought was basically DOA. It happens. The thing was crap right out of the box. You would not believe the run-around Apple gave us. They made us talk to Technical Support every time we called. We didn’t figure out that we could talk straight to Customer Service (we found that information in the discussion forums, and not anywhere noticeably obvious in their documentation materials). They weren’t much better, but the pirate convinced them to stick with their return policy, and to send us a new G4. We did not want the broken one they had sent us to be repaired and returned to us. A simple concept, no? Hard for them to get it through their customer service heads. Let’s just say I actually was frustrated to the point of saying “What the fuck is wrong with you people?” on the phone to someone. Yikes. We still love the mac, but Apple is big business, and not very customer-friendly.
steve s-
You mention “less software” for the Mac as a con. While in terms of absolute numbers this is true, every time I get presented with this canard by a Windows person deriding a Mac, I ask the question: “What software do you actually use and/or need?” 9 times out of 10 the answer is “I read email, surf the web, and sometimes use Microsoft Office.”
Well, all of these are on the Mac. You have your choice of web browsers, from MS’s crappy Internet Explorer to Safari to the outstanding Firefox. For email Apple’s Mail app is great for me but MS Outlook is available if you want it. And according to almost every review I’ve read, Office for Mac is actually better than Office for Windows. I have the older version of Office for Mac (Office v.X) and I have yet to encounter a Word/Powerpoint/Excel file I’ve made on my work PC that I couldn’t open flawlessly on the Mac.
You mention using Matlab, which I also use. Matlab and Mathematica are available native on the Mac. And if you’re doing any other kind of code development, you’ll find that the Xcode environment (which comes with the Mac OS for free! Can you say that about MS Visual Studio or whatever?) is beautiful. Being an old-fashioned guy, I still mainly write code in BBEdit (simply the BEST text editor/processing software around) and compile with make in the UNIX Terminal shell window (also built in on the Mac).
As to “expensive”, instead of trying to compare the most bargain basement PC hardware you can get, compare a Mac and PC with comparable features AND software (as I said, you’re not getting a complete code development suite, nor seamless Movie and Photo editing, and DVD authoring software out of the box on Windows) and you’ll find the price differences aren’t that far out of line.
A Mac fan since my first IIe although I’ve had to use PC’s at work. :-( No comparison!
BTW, John Aravosis at AMERICAblog is a new Mac convert, too.
To be fair, don’t try that line of argument if the “PC” user in question is going to run running Linux or BSD instead of Windows.
I strayed into the wrong church. I went DOS – OS/2 – Linux.
Emacs or vi?
pico.
Rheinhard, it’s worth mentioning that not only is MS Word available for Macs, not only is it better than the PC version, but it was first available for the Mac first (in 1985)–a version for Windows didn’t exist until 1989.
I’m with wswilso. But we don’t really need to act all slashdotty around here…
vi :P
emacs when there’s no alternative like JOE, oo or ?. I don’t use an editor rather than a WP often enough to stay familiar. Does anyone else remember Lotus Manuscript, Agenda or Improv?
And sh – ksh – bash
And Slackware, Redhat, SuSE, SuSE, SuSE, SuSE, SuSE, SuSE, SuSE
And KDE, not Gnome, Though there are still some features if the OS/2 PM that I miss.
Honestly, if I weren’t a gamer I’d probably be using a Mac or running Linux. I’ve used them in the past during a stint as a desktop publishing coordinator at a Kinko’s and I’ve played around with a more recent iMac at a friend’s house. I think they’re reasonable enough computers though in the past they were horribly overpriced.
If I ever give up gaming, or reduce the amount of gaming I engage in, I’ll probably end up getting a Mac. For the moment, though, it behooves me to tough it out with the Wintel PC if for no other reason to keep me in top form for my job as a PC Support Tech. :-)
With all due respect, Rick, I think even in that case it’s a reasonable comparison. In the Linux case, you’d still be running on the same Intel hardware, so you would need to get motherboard, video card, Firewire/USB support, etc. all to comparable specs. And much as I like Linux, I haven’t been paying attention — is there in fact *any* Linux/OSS software that lets you do movie editing and DVD authoring anywhere close to as easily as the Mac? Sure for code writing, Linux is great and also has all the code authoring tools “out of the box”, if that’s what you mean. But for productivity apps, I think you’d have a hard time matching the Mac with Linux.
Sure, Macs are nice enough, if you have money burning holes in your pockets. (I used a 512K Mac until I got an SE/30, in the 80s.)
For the rest of us, who already have adequate equipment and just want a better experience, some version of Linux might be a better choice. For most beginners, Ubuntu (ubuntulinux.com) is probably the best place to start. You can download and burn a CD image, and then run directly from the CD, giving you a chance to try it with no risk. If you like it, you can install it alongside your old Windows stuff, and boot into one or the other when you turn your machine on. With some 20 thousand Free Software packages easily and automatically (and safely! — no viruses or spyware) installed from the net, it’s hard to argue with the value.
Most of the Free Software available for Linux runs on Macs, too, because Apple switched to Linux-like underpinnings with OS/X.
I must be the most pro-Mac Windows user that doesn’t actually own a Mac.
I’ve been thinking about, and trying to, make the switch for several years now, but the timing is always wrong. I was going to get an iBook for example, and then I got a job that gave me a work laptop. I wanted to get an iMac3, but my old PC needed updating bad and I still needed a PC in the house for some things.
The even funnier thing is I just gifted an iPod to my sister, this something that I’ve been pining for since they first came out.
I’m a PC guy now, but when I was little, the Apple IIgs was the most amazing gaming system ever. Hardball. Gnarly Golf. GNARLY FREAKIN’ GOLF. Best golf game ever conceived, it’s not even close.
I also had Where in the World and Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego?, an educational dinosaur game that let me print out my dinosaurs (I had a dinosaur thing and a space thing when I was growing up… Where in Space was Carmen Sandiego? helped that one), and a 9800 baud modem.
At some point, I may have to switch to Mac. I plan to go into television/media and I am an amateur videographer, and of course Apple completely owns the media (photo and video) editing market.
Dude! X giant multinational product is soooo superior to Y giant multinational product that I’m inspired to put a bumper sticker on my car and bore everyone within earshot with my ‘evangelizing’.
Started with a Commodore 64, but now prefer my iMac. However, like all cults, there is a downside or two – Apple’s service is normally garbage (in my personal experience), and the iTunes music store has garbage podcasts under science (such as astrology and the Reason to Believe podcast).
Dude! I’m so emo anti-establishment that I use the text only operating system I wrote for the Sinclair Z-80 in 1981! Stick it to the man!
Wow, the memories. Bought my first Mac 22 years ago this month. Of course, it wasn’t delivered until May, but hey. I only had the single 400K drive for the longest time and so was a master of the floppy swap. And you tell kids these days that you used to be able fit an operating system, application and documents all in 400K… My god am I getting to be a geezer.
The hardware’s still going to be cheaper on the non-Apple side, unfortunately – even with the Mac going Intel. Now if OSX could (legally) run on non-Apple hardware, the story might be different. You pay for the name. And there’s nothing wrong with that, either. (For the record, I don’t think Apple *should* try to support generic Intel boxes.)
As easily as the Mac? Probably not. I do virtually no video editing. (And neither does the casual user who surfs the web, uses e-mail, and uses Office.)
For most users’ idea of “productivity”, Windows, Mac, or Linux should do the job. Heck, you could almost run the same basic productivity applications on all three platforms.
My point is mainly that the lowest-cost option for many users will be Linux simply because most of the end-user software is free and Linux users can leech off the cheap hardware market that feeds Windows users.
I don’t really think the cost argument for choosing the Mac over a Windows machine is very good, either. After all, what’s the value of an entire suite of code and video editing tools to the average computer user, who is probably not all that interested in using either? Better arguments against Windows might be ease of use and a relative lack of spyware/viruses.
When I first got online in the early 90s (other than my UNIX experiences in the 1980s) I always found the PC vs. Mac flamewars amusing. It was quaint the way Mac people would puff up and proudly point out that their computers only crashed once every day or so, as opposed to the PCs out there. My Amiga, of course, crashed twice in 4 years — both times when I deliberately tried to make it crash to see if I could do it. And talking about multitasking to either Mac or PC people then was like talking to blind people about the sunset’s colors — they just couldn’t see it. Oddly, I’ve never used a computer that wasn’t good at multitasking. (Well, except for the PCs I used Xywrite on when collaborating with someone — and tried a Mac at the UCSC Mac center. The appalling noise the floppy made and the incredible length of time it took for anything to happen — I thought I’d broken the machine.) Guess we’re all lucky things aren’t what they were then — of course UNIX users, and Amiga and perhaps Atari users back then knew what a reliable, multitasking computer was like and how nice it was. When a Mac guy back then asked me what good multitasking was I told him “you’ll find out”. And you all did!
Isn’t that special? :)
Don’t forget to buy your official Apple Steve Kosh action figure: push its button and it intones “If you go to Windows XP, you will die.”
400K? BLOATWARE! Check out GEOS:
http://www.commodore.ca/history/company/turks_geos.htm
Ahh, memories …
Now, what’s that?
Why post the Apple/Mac post on “gadgets”?
You do have an “Intelligent Design” category, don’t you? ;-)
I can remember someone actually asking me around 1991 or so “Why would you want to have more than one application running, anyway?”
All of you boasting about your Mac user cred…I’ll go you one better. The first scientific paper I published was written using LisaWrite!
That would not have been me. Back in the early 80s I was using a PDP-8 running RTS. It was amazing; you’d just tell it to do a dozen different things in a command line, and it would run everything concurrently and spit out the answers as they were ready. When Herzfeld’s Switcher add-on for the Mac OS came out, I grabbed it right away.
My first science paper (and my thesis) were done on an Apple II, in PIE writer. I drooled over the Lisa, but no grad student could afford a $10,000 computer.
Since the return of Steve Jobs to Apple, the Macintosh has become more and more like a PC. IDE hard drives. VGA monitors. PCI slots. The only difference WAS the processor. Now with you can get a Mac with an Intel processor. So, Apple is becoming more of a Software company…
With each revision of the OS, Windows and Macintosh have swapped features. Win98 brought us the “Taskbar” (which came from MS Office…) So, OSX uses a Dock. Both OSes have their plusses and minuses. You’re talking, which is better Golden Delicious or Granny Smiths? The differences are very minor!
The ONE THING that Macs NEED to do is the THREE BUTTON MOUSE! (with scroll). The 1 button mouse was obsolete almost immediately. Why should I have to ALT-click? Couldn’t we get a button on the mouse for that? Shift-Click? You all know the shortcuts, so why isn’t there a button on the mouse for it? (Yeah yeah yeah — USB – Program yourself…) Oh, and the floppy disk may be dieing, but it certainly isn’t dead! Why ask if I want to shut down when I clearly pulled down the menu to tell it to shut down? Why is it so hard to have a physical eject button on your computers? Why require using the keyboard? Why put everything useful in a “Utilities” folder in the “Applications” folder? After all, this is the aggregator of your programs if you don’t want your dock filled with hundreds of programs. Why isn’t “Find” part of the “Finder”? Why did you change “Apple-N” from “New Folder” to “New Finder Window”? Why does apple abandon technologies so readily? (Remember Apple Software Restore? – I do, what happened to it?)
Sorry to rain on the Mac party, but they aren’t angels. I have had just as many problems with the PC’s I’ve had as the Mac’s I’ve had… Garage Band and iMovie aren’t enough to make up for System 7.5 – System 9…
I had an Apple IIgs
OS X Tiger finally caught Apple back up with that machine.
Switching from supercomputers to lowly Intel processors must deeply bruise the egos of the Mac Faithful.
Of course, the new Intel Macs are still slower than PCs that cost less, so I suppose it doesn’t matter.
The ONE THING that Macs NEED to do is the THREE BUTTON MOUSE! (with scroll)
So buy one. I’m writing this on an iMac with a five-button trackball plugged into it.
(with scroll)
What’s with everyone joining the Mac Panthers?
Or use the new Apple SuperMouse, with a scroll *ball.* Computer screens are indeed two dimensional.
At last, a truly religious discussion on Pharyngula!!!
Be a man and get a real editor: jEdit (open source).
I’m a diehard GNU/Linux fan — diehard enough to write it properly as GNU/Linux. (Most of the code in your “linux box” is GNU, not Linux.) Being a diehard fan I’m interested in full disclosure: GNU/Linux is only for the technically competent who have the skill and time to maintain their system, or for those who can pay for tech support with pizza and soda or money.
And to leave no stone unturned…
Windows users are like Republicans: they look only at short-term ROI and support the greediest of monopolies.
Mac users are like soccer-moms driving SUV’s to pickup their kids while giving money to fight global warming.
It’s the software stupid
We all likely have far more hardware than we need. The only reason to have any of that hardware is to run software, and if you have XP, OSX, or GNU/Linux you also have more than all the basic operating system software than you need. The only reason to have an OS is to run applications. And all the basic applications are available from the opensource community.
What we do need is to address intellectual property rights so the opensource community can flourish and the way we run the economy so software than represents useful knowledge and capability can be made available to those who need it.
(Most of the above with tongue in cheek.)
Hmm. I started programming on Apple II+, later they had IIe. My first computer was an Apple IIgs, promising to a) provide a Color MAC type OS and compatibility with older Apple II stuff. Well… It sort of did, but even though the GUI libraries where “similar” and even used the same commands, they didn’t always use the same entry points or flags for functions. What worked perfectly on a MAC or even the more expensive Apple Compiler would fail to work when using the same identical flags using the third party one. And forget translating between MAC and GS at all in some cases. Apple II support worked great, as long as you didn’t use timing critical application that used backdoor methods to get data on/off a floppy. What could crack and copy a protected disk on anything from the Apple II+ to the IIc and even the horror Apple IIIs, with the right IIe card in them, simply did nothing on the IIgs. Not a big problem, but it was annoying. Hard drives? Nope, not early on and the later ones where pathetically expensive and nearly 5 times smaller than what you could get with a PC. And since it didn’t use MFM encoding, you couldn’t simply rig a real HD to it. This made programming a pain in the ass and installing some games impossible. ROM versions where free upgrades, *except*, by the time they had the much improved ROM V3 they where weeks from cancelling the entire system.
See… Apple pulled the rug out from under both me, other fans of the II line *AND* one of their own founders when they decided that a more cross compatible, and in some ways superior, hybred was less desirable than the next over priced MAC. I went PC right after that and haven’t looked back. Burn me once, but twice, and overcharge me while doing it? No thanks.
Yes, I miss my IIgs, but I couldn’t do anything with it at this point, I can get emulators (though I wish they where better and you could find the V3 IIgs ROM, since programming that in ML was real fun), but in the end, a better OS doesn’t mean much if you get screwed every other way. Until recently, that was the reality. And even now they are still trying to, by installing special chips on what is Intel hardware, which prevents non-Apple OSes from running on what is basically the same damn thing everyone else is already using. A tactic that fails to impress any more that hanging me out to dry the last time.
I am both a fan and someone sufficiently irritated by them that I won’t now touch a MAC with a ten foot pole. Its simply not worth my time anymore to bother.
At home I’ve got a mouse, a monitor, a keyboard, a Windows XP box, a Mac Mini and a KVM switch – perfect. I use the PC for games and the occasional home office type doc, but the Macintosh for pretty much everything else – music, photography, Internet etc.
Apple zealots are worse than creationists.
Wow. I visit here daily, and Penny Arcade on the days it updates, to get my “fixes” on what I thought to interests that rarely coincided in the “bloggisphere”. In hindsight, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised as a software PM I frequently worked with had his degree in Microbiology, and Evolution and Intelligent Design are frequent topics in the Penny Arcade forum.
Macs are great for some puproses, less great for other purposes – it’s all about selecting the right tool for the job.
Don’t like their propertarian attitude though. It’s Microsoft without the muscles.
I didn’t think it possible, but you people have managed to make Pharyngula too nerdy.
Can’t be too nerdy when we are debating Macs – had it been a crowd of FreeBSD people, then it would be nerdy, but Macs are too trendy for that.
In my case, IBM PC â Amiga â FreeBSD â FreeBSD + Mac. I used to loathe Macs for their “you don’t need to look under the hood, so it’s welded shut” attitude. In fact, I loved the Amiga in part because it had both a cli and a gui, so I could decide on the spot whether I wanted to be an Eloi or a Morlock. Apple’s decision to switch to Unix is what made Macs appealing to me — they could now be useful.
And I still have my Amiga in a box, actually. One of these days I need to transfer over the old floppies and figure out how to put UAE on a Knoppix CD.
I use PCs and Windows all the time and get along okay. Macs are nice but I dislike the cultish bit. In particular, I like Macs better than I like Apple and its we-own-you attitude. The company actually seemed offended when people pried open the original Macs to stuff in adequate memory or hook up hard disk interfaces. It took Apple a while to sort of open up the box and be more friendly to add-ons, but they still like to control things. (They rather have that in common with Microsoft.)
A friend just sent me this link to an amusing stand-up routine on living with a Mac:
http://xepher.xepher.net/downloads/mac.wmv
At the moment, I’m ready to slap the skin off someone or other at Apple for–evidently– making Tiger unable to fucking NETWORK with a box running an older Mac OS.