When Is There a Good Time to "Switch" to Apple? 323
AllNines asks: "With all the hype of MacWorld and the compelling keynote given by Steve Jobs about the upcoming Tiger and Spotlight, I am thinking about 'switching' (Linux user since '97) but I am not sure the time is right. It seems like the PowerBooks are getting very long in the tooth and the iPods are due for a major rev. When is the right time to jump on the Apple ship? Am I going to get burned by a sluggish overpriced laptop that is updated next month?"
It's never the right time. (Score:2, Insightful)
But, at least here in Iceland the Mac's hold their reselling price alot better then all the rest.
All that aside.......i'd go for the switch, i've tried alot of OS'es and arch's but it's no contest...my beloved 12" PowerBook is the best yet.
Just go for it....soon (Score:5, Insightful)
To be honest, it hasn't made too much difference, it's still far and away the best laptop I've ever used. Just get enough RAM!!
The thing is really, there isn't ever a 'best' time to buy anything like this. Look at the PC market - we have new motherboards, cpu's etc. coming out all the time.
At least with Apple its fairly regular that they do major updates, usually at MacWorld time!
I think the best time will be very soon. Wait till they release Tiger, and start shipping it on the Minis (or just get one and pay for the upgrade).
The Mini is the cheapest Mac available, and you can re-use all your old monitor/mouse/keyboard etc. Hell, even if you dont like it as a proper desktop, there's still the media-centre/server thing everyone seems keen to turn these babies into.....
My advice? Wait... (Score:5, Insightful)
Friends of mine who bought the first model of any product line (G3 towers, Powerbooks, etc) find they get all the teething problems associated with a new release, so if you can, wait for the second revision of anything.
So if you want a Powerbook, check the rumour sites - they are all estimating Q2 shipping. This would suggest a revision anything up to 6 months later (usually just a speed bump, but they tend to iron out the wrinkles too).
If you can't wait that long, buy one now - they're still great machines, even if they're superceded next week!
Following this advice I got a 30GB iPod when it was new (the 2nd rev of the 3G series) and the 17" 1GHz iMac (first of the widescreen ones, but not the first flatscreen), both of which have never given me a day's trouble.
Mark
Any time really! (Score:2, Insightful)
on the flip side of that, you may as well upgrade now as every day on windows is a day when your PC can crash and die and get infected with malware etc etc. (Bit dramatic I know, but hey that is what too much time spent on billyware does to you!)
Do you mean... (Score:4, Insightful)
As usual when you want to buy a computer (or quite anything technology-related), you have to know what you need, and jump and buy it... Of course it will become outdated shortly, but do you really need the new one ?
Wait for Rev B (Score:1, Insightful)
Why did this troll get modded up? (Score:3, Insightful)
OSX has its faults, but none of them are show stoppers, the apps definitely do not crash wildly and the GUI is most certainly not crippled and there is no way in hell that configuration is anywhere as difficult or problematic as in your average Linux distro.
i just switched (Score:5, Insightful)
You're probably gonna get a lot of "wait for the new product announcements" or "wait for Tiger" comments, but seriously, why should you wait? New products might be announced next week... maybe the week after that, maybe the month after that, hell you might end up waiting until June. Or you could just buy one now, and you'll be sure that whatever you buy will most likely still run the latest versions of OS X and other software in 4 years time.
Re:Why did this troll get modded up? (Score:4, Insightful)
As to your Taskbar comment, that indicates a) you have a preference for it, whihc is your good right, but your comment about Expose being a flashy hack immediately brings you down to troll level. Expose allows you to see, as you might know, the current application's windows (F10 by default), all application windows (F9 by default), or the Desktop (F11 by default). All of those can be changed if you like. Added to which there is added functionality such as being able to hide or quit apps from Expose and the Task switcher, drag and drop to the Expose windows etc.
If you don't like that, it's your preference, and mine to disagree, but calling it a flashy hack is simply asking to get flamed as there just as many people who hate the task bar.
Now, if you said you prefer virtual desktops, as is implemented in most Linux GUIs, then I would understand.
As it is, it just makes you look like you don't like the OS works, which says nothing about how good or bad the OS is.
(And please, how is the Font manager in the OS bad? Which other OS has a better built in Font manager?)
Right and wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Those reasons, cliched or not, are real.
I should have put in a disclaimer that OSX is not perfect and that there are occasional hardware problems, but my experience on the whole over 15 years of using PC's (from Windows 2.11) and Macs (System 6) is that Apple's hardware is among the best there is overall.
I've had PC hardware from no name chinese brands that fail rapidly, Dell stuff that fails often enough to be a real problem (I used to be a Sysadmin for Windows and dell machines) and IBM stuff that is as good as or better than Apples, but really, only HP and IBM are as good as Apple in terms of hardware quality in my experience.
And your comment about a Linuc head only going for the hardware is simplistic, don't you think. OSX has a lot of features and gimmicks that are nowhere to be found in Linux (and vice versa, of course) and those could be valid reasons for wanting to use it as well. It's not just the hardware.
OS X is about the *apps* (Score:5, Insightful)
The main benefit of Mac OS X is the quality (and integration) of the applications. You can drag-and-drop any file onto any application, and (if it understands the format) it will open it. You can use any application's print command to get a PDF, which can be searched in the same preview window. Hell, in Tiger, you'll be able to look for a phrase anywhere in any document of the system. Want to know the signature of the Runtime.exec() method? Type in 'Runtime.exec()' in the spotlight bar, and it will bring up the JavaDocs and PDFs that have that phrase on your system.
All Cocoa apps have access to text-to-speech synthesis (thus; it's easy to use a remote phone to dial up and have it read your e-mail contents over the phone, which is very useful if you're a road warrior) via the built in services. You can open a URL in any application with a single keystroke, or send a file to a bluetooth device.
It syncs with your phone, your printer is discovered automatically, and if you've got a SlimServer running on your network it's already in your browser's bookmarks.
Oh, and you can get hardware that works. No, you don't have to google across multiple websites to find supported hardware, or see what the initialisation string you have to hard-code in a config file. You plug it in. It works.
Problem with your system booting up? Boot it and hold down Command+T, then plug another Mac box in with a firewire cable; you can browse the mac as a very large and expensive firewire disk.
And for those of you that love multi-button mice; yes, they work out of the box. No config file changes, no having to configure apps for each key combo. It just works.
As an operating system, Mac OS X and Linux are very similar; Unix was designed to be.
As a user experience, Macs Just Work.
Apple meeting their own expectations... (Score:5, Insightful)
iPods are only about 3 years old. They have had multiple generations already with different wheels, button configurations, and improvements. Why would they be in need of a MAJOR revision? Probably because in such a short amount of time they have achieved HUGE market penetration and its hard to image what life was like with those crappy pre-iPod mp3 players. What other product has had so much success in such a short amount of time? Perhaps sliced bread... Powerbooks are getting long in the tooth? Do you mean just the fact that they still use a G4 or the design? The current model of Powerbook was introduced 2 superbowls ago, IIRC, replacing the titanium models. Do you want a G5 laptop? Well you'll have to wait. Intel doesn't launch a new processor and have a laptop immediately available. Why should the expectations be different for Apple/IBM. Speaking of IBM, has the thinkpad design changed drastically at all over the past TEN years? Maybe a little lighter, but I would say that laptop is much longer in the tooth.
Now, how about the fact that you are considering migrating from linux and an MP3 player is one of your major deciding factors. Who deserves that credit? Would you be paining over a Creative 64MB rio mp3 player?
Apple has changed the way people consider their computers and accessories so much over the past 3-5 years, that sometimes people lose track of time and perspective. If you want to migrate to apple here is my advice. Do it today. If it doesn't go well, you can go back immediately. That way you won't lose another night sleep pondering what life would be like in OS X vs. KDE/GNOME (yes I know OS X runs X11, I use it.)
Not until you really need to! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:depends on your needs (Score:1, Insightful)
That being said, lets clear some things up- for one, a laptop with Linux pre-installed is not going to be any better a value than a Mac laptop. Price them out. Dollar for dollar, the iBook is one of the best laptop values out there, compared to comprable Linux, or Wintel, rigs.
As for Linux having more available software, I am not convinced. If you find Fink to be lacking pre-built binaries of your favorite Linux software, you always have the option of building from source, or even harnessing the power of X forwarding and running the apps. remotely from your Linux machine(s).
I bought a Powerbook a couple of years back. It worked flawlessly out of the box, no installation or fiddling required. The Powerbook has had a couple of problems over those two years, though I am sure my less than gentle treatment is partially to blame. (who knows though, a Linux laptop might like it rough) Despite the minor troubles, I still feel as if the Powerbook was the single best purchase I have ever made in my 30+ years as a consumer, though please do not tell that to my Beanie Baby collection.....
On Switching (Score:5, Insightful)
When is the right time to jump on the Apple ship?
In general, the time to switch platforms in any direction is when you've finally got everything running smoothly on your current platform of choice after some major disaster. I'm sure that seems illogical at first, but it stems from the fact that you do not want to switch when you're in the middle of an emergency. If things have always been smooth, there's no need to switch at all. If things are becoming a reoccurring mess, resolve to switch, but then still clean up the current mess! It'll make the switch that much easier when you're not trying to transition all the mission critical stuff a once.
Am I going to get burned by a sluggish overpriced laptop that is updated next month?
Only if you're a fucking idiot. If you think a Mac is sluggish today, why the hell would you buy it? It doesn't matter if a vendor is updating their systems next week or next year. Either what they're offering today meets your needs or it doesn't, and if it doesn't and you still buy it, then you should probably be fired (or beaten by friends and family). The march of technology still guarantees any purchase you make is an expense, not an investment. Stop pretending you can wait to "buy low" because you will never, ever be able to "sell high".
NOW (Score:5, Insightful)
I find that it's best to wait until a product comes along that makes you want to upgrade. Anticipating specific future products leads to long waits and disappointment when the final product isn't what you expect. If the PowerBook is compelling to you now, you should buy it now. You won't regret it. If it's not, then wait until Apple releases something you want to buy (if you're waiting for a PowerBook G5 specifically, you could be waiting a long time).
Re:been there, done that, got the tshirt (Score:3, Insightful)
you consider it stable when "every once and a while AQUA" crashes? isn't that like arguing that windows is stable but it's the explorer that crashes and as such it's not a biggie?
Well, lets look at this for a moment. People get pretty defensive both of their purchases and their hardware/software choices. So when ever you hear soemone talking about stability, you have to take it with a grain of salt. Personally I run OSX, Linux, Win2K, and NetBSD. I find Win2k has the most crashes while the others are about the same, which is to say I remember one or two crashes for each system. Back in the early days (beta and some of 10.0) of OSX I remember a few times the window server locked up and I had to ssh in and restart it. I had the same problem with one redhat release. One nice thing is that you can ssh in and fix the window server. On windows it means a reboot and is indistinguishable from a system crash and you have to restart all your applications and services. I have not had to restart the window server on either linux or OSX for at least 2 years though.
Any production machine, where new software is installed on a regular basis will have some bugs. I've noticed that OS X, like the other BSD systems, had a few stability issues in the early days, then became pretty indestructable. The only person I know that had serious stability issues (a crash or 2 every month) eventully traced the problem to cheap, 3rd party RAM and the system has been fine since its removal.
Personally, I am thankful that OS X is so stable and that it has a capable CLI so that if I do something stupid (like hack the UI) I can recover from it without a reinstall. I wonder what OS you might run that would be more stable. I rank OS X 10.3 about the same as NetBSD, maybe slightly more stable than fedora, and better than anything else I have used by a significant margin.
This was typed on Win2k and boy am I missing my spell check service.
Re:It always amazes me (Score:2, Insightful)
Isn't it interesting that research no longer seems to include asking experts.
Did it five months ago, had lots of reasons (Score:3, Insightful)
The verdict so far: it just works. I have MS Office for the Mac installed, so I have compatibility with the office computers. I put Apple's development suite on the machine, so I'm able to write software. (I'd recommend getting the "Building Cocoa Applications" book off of eBay.) Most of the Linux programs I used have OS X ports, and I don't have to fuss with keeping the system running. I can also count the number of system crashes I've had so far on one hand.
Re:Spotlight (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, software developers are welcome to develop their own data types which will automatically be indexed by Spotlight.
From a UI and functionality perspective it seems Beagle is trying to do something similar. But under the hood they are very different. Check out Apple's developer info for this at http://developer.apple.com/macosx/tiger/spotlight
I'm finding myself becoming more and more frustrated with
Until geeks can wrap their heads around these concepts, people like you will continue to post links to 'version 0.0.5' open source projects (which depend on other packages to do stuff like indexing) and say that it's going to be just like something that Apple will put out in a few months.
I'm not knocking Open Source. But let's call a spade a spade here. When it comes to underlying OS features and UI enhamcements, Apple these days is innovating at a pace that OSS (and even Microsoft) is having trouble keeping up with.
Re:Good reasons. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why? Not ease of use... Ease of maintenance!
OS X checks weekly for security patches, and installing them is a matter of a few clicks. It's slick, easy, and fast.
I used to run Red Hat 9, and security updates were a major headache. The first time I tried to run the updater, I had to first update the OS (manually) to support the current updater. Even after that, I often had to do all kinds of sick hacks to keep it working. Then, a few months later, Red Hat dropped support entirely and asked that I migrate to Fedora or buy their "Enterprise" level package. That was the last straw.
Sure, you are about to tell me how much better Debian or SuSE or some other distro is about automated revisions, but I don't trust any of them to not pull the carpet out from under me the same way Red Hat did. After all, if it's a "Free" OS, I have no right to complain if some company providing sercices for it wants to stop spending resources on making my life easy, do I?
There's a huge difference between knowing how to mess with the Linux CLI, and wanting to do so. Administrating a Linux box is a terrific learning experience, but once you've learned what you wanted to know the "fun" of maintaining it wears off quickly, and you just want a server that works with a minimum of farting around.
That, my friend, is the time to move to OS X.
Re:been there, done that, got the tshirt (Score:4, Insightful)
I find expose and the doc far easier to use than the task bar. It's easier to think in apps than in windows, especially when there's a pile of windows open.
Re:big disappointment (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like you got some bad hardware. Unfortunate but not representative of the whole.
The processor is pretty slow, too: even in its heyday, a G4 wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and today it is really not competitive anymore.
Slow for what? It's well maintained that most home users will have a hard time maxing a 1 ghz processor let alone anything faster. I've not come across anything yet where I felt the processor was the bottle neck and not say the hard drive.
And it's not true that the thing never crashes; it's not bad, but the GUI will hang on occasion, and I have had it crash, too.
I don't think I've ever had the GUI hang. Invidual applications, yes, but not the entire GUI. I suspect that's what happened to you as well. As for crashing the system, unless the last time you played with this was sometime arround 10.1 or 10.2 on an old G3, crashing the whole system has been in my experience someting very difficult you use, and usualy involving mucking with something like AFS.
Then, your only real choice for an office suite is Microsoft Office. If you want a laptop just to run Microsoft Office, I suppose it is better than a Windows laptop. OpenOffice has too many limitations on the Mac (among other things, forget about using it for presentations) and it requires you to fiddle with X11, which isn't well integrated (and also needs to be installed).
Well, really your only real choice for an office suite anywhere is MS Office. As much as I hate to say it, they are the standard. However, there's also NeoOffice (OO without X11).
iWork isn't a serious academic or business tool either: no spreadsheet, no math, limited drawing.
No it's not. Not yet anyway. Though keynote does fine for presentations.
The iLife applications are useless toys: iPhoto doesn't let you fix even gross problems with images, iMovie has limitations on what you can important and export (looks like they are deliberate). You probably need to upgrade to expensive commercial packages if you want anything that's more than a toy.
They're hardly useless, but it looks like you're looking for something more akin to the GIMP or something like that.
If that's the case, you can get the GIMP
http://www.gimp.org/macintosh/
Or you can get a nice little app I found called PhotoLine
And most macs should still come with graphic converter, which while not GIMP or Photoshop does more than iPhoto does. iPhoto is more management than editing although that has supposedly changed considerably with the new version. But iPhoto was never meant to be an editor.
iMovie is purposefuly restricted on import and exports that's true. It's designed for the purpose of pulling video from your DV Camcorder and doing home movie editing and then exporting. If you're looking for Professional level editing, is it really a suprise that you need professional level programs?
I thought there were going to be a bunch of nice outliners and brainstorming tools for Macintosh--lots of them are advertised with great fanfare and colorful ads, but they were pretty much a disappointment, too: proprietary formats, complex UIs, and limited functionality. There are better open source tools available than that.
What exactly where you trying to do that OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner didn't handle? And as a further question, did you search to see if your favorite apps had been ported yet?
Fink is supposed to be the way to install more of a real UNIX/Linux environment on Macintosh, but I had no end of trouble. Worse, for many packages, there are two versions of it: the Fink version and a non-Fink version. Some Mac applications assume one, some the other, and if you install both, you run into conflicts. Cygwin
Re:At the workplace, when Apple introduce Mac "Met (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's exactly what to do (though I recommend darwin-ports over fink). If you really want to run your own window manager just install it and then log in with ">console" to enter darwin without the GUI, then start x in your favorite way after you log in. Then you pretty much have a pure BSD system and you can install and run whatever you used to run under linux. Of course, you won't be able to run OS X apps (except command-line apps) without starting the OS X GUI. You'll probably want to run the X11 server on top of the OSX GUI even though it's a little kludgy.
Chances are, you will eventually learn to love the OS X GUI as much as the rest of us, and a lot of commonly used linux apps have been rewritten to take advantage of Apple's GUI which means you won't have to run them under Apple's X11 server anymore.