Macs aren’t the best computers on earth any more than Dells, HPs, Lenovos, or Sonys (Lenovo and Sony do make some nice stuff). Macs are just what I prefer and for some things they have IMHO an advantage. I am sure that Windows has the advantage in other areas, areas I am doubtless without a clue on. :)

Over all I also enjoyed our discussion and I concur that we both got a bit silly at the end there. I would like to redact a bit and return to a statement I made earlier

Peace and Good Computing for the Holiday Season! :D

Also, PC World did make the statement I claimed they did and at the end of the article I linked to they also said that this was no longer the case as of October 2007, (which was after the Mac ad initially aired I believe). Nothing in what I said was wrong, nothing in what you said was wrong. Engadget is hardly a neutral source of editorial comment. either. It’s a grandiose blog. As of the writing of that article I believe that PCWorld had not tested a faster machine.

Again it’s all about perspective. I live in the U.S. I come at the world from that (no doubt flawed) point of view. I live 15 minutes from Goddard. I have friends that work there. I have repaired Goddard owned Macs as recently as 14 months ago. To be told by someone an ocean away that I don’t know what I’m talking about was a bit insulting.

How about checking out http://ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov/downloads/widget.php which is also publicly available software for download from Goddard but is Mac only?
OR http://cdf.gsfc.nasa.gov/html/FAQ.html#intro
OR http://satc.gsfc.nasa.gov/tools/download/
For that matter go to http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/home/index.html and type Macintosh Software into the search box.
BANG!

All of these, just as your link are downloads that NASA makes available to the outside world. None of these, including your link, tell you exhaustively what NASA uses. If you knew anything about the U.S. Government (not that you should, being in the UK) you would know that the software and systems used may be classified and are often not published to the public without the filing of a Freedom Of Information Act lawsuit as a matter of National Interest and National Security. It’s the biggest bureaucracy on Earth for goodness sake!

Honestly, your absolute refusal to believe that NASA could possibly use Macs, all evidence to the contrary not withstanding is really starting to erode my respect. YES, NASA uses Windows. YES, the majority of their PCs are Windows PCs. YES they use Macs too. I have never indicated anything to the contrary.
Why you insist on making this uninformed, easily disputed, and poorly supported argument that NASA only uses Windows is completely beyond me. Now you’re just attacking for the sake of it.

I’ll say it again, NASA proves out my main computing thesis, they use the right tools for each job. Often that’s Windows, sometimes it ain’t. I don’t care what the press release says, especially one that comes from the United States Government. The phrase that’s always left off of such releases is “accept where not practical”. When I am getting head-hunted by people at Goddard because they need knowledgeable techs for Mac software rollout and support I feel pretty darn confident that they still use Macs.

I didn’t think I’d say this but perhaps you should get a life and pay some attention to PC blogs. If you’re going to make comments on an Apple blog just to prove your thesis that all of us who use them are stupid and wrong because we’re the only ones who do, (remember I use Windows too when it’s the best for the job) then you’re just blowing smoke and trolling. Alright, I took your bait, but in the name of all that’s good on the Earth can’t you show at least as much class as Ritik (who started an argument on mouse buttons as a reason for Windows superiority!) and admit that someone else might just know something you don’t? Or are you really as arrogant as my outgoing President??

“NASA has set January 2008 as a “target” for beginning the transition from Windows XP to Vista, according to a spokesman for the federal agency, which has approximately 60,000 Windows PCs.

NASA typically waits until a service pack is released for any new operating system to ensure stability, the spokesman says. (Microsoft has not indicated when it will release a service pack for Vista.) The interim also will be used to ensure that NASA’s applications are compatible with Vista and that its PCs meet the hardware requirements needed to run the operating system. ” John Foley, Information week, April 24 2007

“….Sep 16 ‘07

For Immediate Release

NASA today joins the ranks of the state governments of Illinois and Massachusetts in adopting Microsoft products across the board.

With help from the Interop Alliance Lab, a joint venture between Novell and Microsoft, all NASA servers will run a mixture of Suse Linux and Microsoft Windows.”

Use the right tools (ie what works best for you) for the job.

No, you will not see many Macs in the public spaces but if you somehow got into the labs you would find plenty of them. When I was there seven years ago I installed some software on the laptop of the CIO of GSFC. What did the CIO choose to run his daily duties on? An Apple Powerbook. A G5 PowerMac came into my Apple Store for repair one day. It needed a new logic board (I didn’t do forensics on it and there wasn’t visible damage so I don’t know why, the possibilities are vast) and I personally repaired it. It was carried in by my old boss and bore the property sticker from Goddard Space Flight Center. In my 2 years repairing Macs for Apple I saw probably 10 or 12 different laptops come in from Goddard, most suffering from some sort of accidental damage while traveling including being viciously dropped by Homeland Security at the airports (all too common – you have been warned).

My former team lead from my days at Apple is back working for the Federal Government (I believe he’s at the FDA but I am not certain) supporting their Macs. Our team lead before him is now, after more than 5 happy years at Apple, supporting Macs at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab and a good sailing buddy of mine works on his Mac daily at that same location.

Maybe it’s because I am in the U.S. but I find it disheartening to see people say things like “regardless of what you hear if you go to X,Y, Z you will find Windows, not Macs”. The reality is, of course that many of the public facing terminals are Windows terminals. Much of the heavy lifting is done by Macs, though. If someone tells you that they’ve worked at a corporation and worked on or with a Mac, I suggest you believe them until you can show otherwise. We may be a minority, but we are a hard working one regardless of what you may hear.

Emre says that if you go to NASA you will see windows not Mac. True in the public spaces, but Emre also says that he is in the UK. He says that Macs are expensive and expensive to upkeep. Apple is a U.S. company and in other countries there products are more expensive, I will give him that, because I don’t know what the comparative UK market costs are.

We are all subject to our experiences. It may very well be true that the U.S and U.K. perspectives are different. It is true, from what I gather, that in the U.K. Macs are further at the top of the cost curve than they are here and thus the price argument is a stronger one. Australia, and I expect other countries, too.

Perspective is such an important thing. Let’s remember that. I wish that there was a way to contact some of you all from this discussion without publishing my email across the Net (DON’T EVER do that) as I think the discussions we could have would be very interesting indeed. My thanks to The Apple Blog for giving us this forum

Happy Holidays

By the way macbook pro is NOT the fastest machine that can run vista:

“So there’s a bit of grumbling on the internets that PC World, like, totally sold out and lied about the MacBook Pro being the fastest Vista laptop they ever tested (presumably just so they could get mentioned in that new Apple commercial, right?) shortly before the staff went cow tipping and passed out drunk in a public park. The reality is PC World apparently hadn’t tested a laptop faster than the MacBook Pro at the time, and it wasn’t until weeks later they tested the Eurocom D900C Phantom-X, which handily bested Apple’s lappie by a broad margin. At least that’s what PC World’s editor Harry McCracken told us, but then again we did hear he recently got an Apple tat and is planning a hostile takeover of Macworld magazine in ‘08.”

This was written in http://www.engadget.com in 2007 (where the test for vista on macbook pro was done)

“Apple promotes free and open source software on their corporate website.” Dont you find this sentence and the fact that ipod, itouch, iphone can ONLY play .mov files but not any other movie format extremely contradictry? avi is also open source, compression formats divx, mpeg etc are all open-source, why no support?..

Speed: I understand what you are saying and that is exactly what I am fighting against: anecdotes rather than facts. This is not a mac thing though. Adverts are almost always flawed. They talk about 5 hours of battery life (but they don’t state that only happens when you do NOTHING on it!!!..) What I am saying is if there are no scientific tests you can’t really say something is more powerful. MAC World guys should also do some tests..just to let everybody know how much power we are really talking about, is it substantial? how much dollars per “power unit”..etc..

I agree about the vista with you. I deleted it in 1 month after using it. It was unusable for me. Probably thats why microsoft decided to release a sp3 or XP! after releasing Vista..

Macs are great, don’t get me wrong..Good looking os, decent machines, good design etc.. However my whole point is any decent XP or linux machine is as good as any mac, maybe even better if you think about prices..Thats my whole point..If I would won a mac from a draw etc I would probably try and use it..or maybe sell it as new and buy a much better new sony for the same money :)

Lets agree on disagree then…Nice debating with you :)

Cheers,
Emre

Enlightenment is the best tool we can give ourselves.

Cheers!

Software: I absolutely agree that the choices are more vast for Windows. 90+% market share for over a decade will do that for you. I don’t care how many titles there are out there. My point is that more is not innately better and does not justify the argument that an alternative is unusable. I don’t have a ballpark figure for Windows because 1) I don’t care and 2) it’s not the point I am trying to make. The point I am trying to make is that there is software available and I don’t need 150 word processors, I generally need one. My personal preference is a GNU licensed piece of freeware called Bean.
To quote your comment #46:
“There are much more important reasons why I don’t support mac’s. The biggest one is the availability of software. The “apple experience” is a closed circuit. Because apple is VERY VERY opposite of the “open source” and “open developement” concepts the software count available for mac’s are a tiny fraction of what you can find for the windows platform.”
Actually, the Apple Developer program is free to join. The Darwin variant of BSD Unix is open source and freely available. Apple promotes free and open source software on their corporate website. Apple openly courts Unix developers. WebKit, which powers Safari and Google’s Chrome browser (ironically not available for Mac) is an open source, freely available product. Mac OSX is highly extensible through its use of BSD. Apple hosts annual development conferences for registered developers (even the free members such as myself) where they hold extensive seminars on coding for all manner of their software.

I grant you that my Macs are faster argument is flawed. Let’s look at that.
1) The RAM comment reflects the fact that my Mac has 50% of the RAM that it is capable of supporting installed. That means 2GB. Most of the PCs in my office also have 2 GB. Nowhere did I claim that the Mac had half the RAM of the other PC, sorry if that was unclear. My example was merely meant to reinforce that just because people claim a Mac can’t be faster does not make it so. I believe that what makes my Mac faster is a better processor, perhaps a faster hard drive. I maintain my OSX installation but the Vista installation on my Mac was done (and is maintained by) out IT department. They use the same image for all of our Vista PCs so the configuration is as close to identical as is reasonably possible.
PC World did in fact state that the fastest Windows Vista notebook they tested was a Mac. source http://www.pcworld.com/article/136649-3/in_pictures_the_most_notable_notebooks_of_2007.html

2) I very specifically stated that “Mileage will vary, this is anecdotal only, use what you like.” (emphasis added) The reason that I mentioned the fact that this is anecdotal was that I hoped to avoid just what happened with you. I was not putting forth the prospect that one hardware platform is innately faster than another. What I was saying was that contrary to your inference in comment 47 “…believe things that are not true at all … Macs are faster” a Mac can be faster in some instances including a very generic one that I happen to know about. Anecdotal evidence is not benchmarking. When I sit 2 machines side by side with no user launched programs running and basically identical installations of software, then I launch Internet Explorer (an optimized for Windows application if ever there was one) on both, if one finishes launching in 2 seconds and one finishes launching in 4, then I have anecdotal evidence of greater speed on the 2 second machine. I don’t do hardware benchmarks (nor did I claim to) I leave that to folks like PC Magazine.

I am glad to hear that your old IBM is running great. I agree that in 1990 it was damn tough to find better hardware than IBM, especially for a portable! I have friends running Macs built in the mid 80’s. The processors can’t handle modern web surfing, but that’s not what they are used for. You can, and many people do, use a computer for decades as long as you are OK with the fact that as applications and online media get more complex, that machine will start to become less capable/more slow. Good on ya!

Viruses, let’s agree to disagree as we evidently always will.

I think we both have the same problem. I don’t care that you find Windows better suited to your needs. I am happy that you have a tool that works for you. Just as you don’t like hearing some people denigrate Windows PCs based on ignorant and false claims, I don’t like the same unsupported animosity foisted on Macs. Personally I believe that your experiences vis a vis viruses, blue screens, freezes and the lack thereof is pretty uncommon. But so are many of my Mac successes. The simplistic reason for this is that we take the time to research and learn about our platform and how to use it wisely.

BTW: I wish I had the option to use XP SP3 for my Windows tasks at work. I get a blue screen or two almost weekly. It always occurs when Vista reboots after a Microsoft security update! Apple updates aren’t perfect, but I personally, anecdotally (grin) have never had that experience from them.

Wishing you Peace and Good Computing for the Holiday Season

Adam

Thank you all for taking the time and trouble to better educate people like me.

I must say, I love the rotating touchpad of an iPod…FANTASTIC technology.

To conclude, while Macs have a bright future ahead of them, I believe that PC’s (isnt it funny how PC generally refers to the Windows platform?) will continue to dominate the market.

Have you seen the latest mac adverts depicting microsoft as spending more money on marketing its product rather than investing in trying to “solve problems”?

Well, thats not only false but its actually what apple is doing. Microsoft is releasing its second major service pack for Vista and already announced the upcoming operating system “windows seven”. In fact microsoft is spending billions for research and developement.

On contrary, Apple, compared to all other vendors is in the top place for spending more on marketing. Which actually turned out to be a good thing for apple, they have recovered from the serious shake happened 6-8 years ago (when microsoft bought 150 million worth of shares of Apple as “good manners and to keep the competition going”).

In short, negative is not a good strategy for firms. It wouldn’t get apple anywhere by trying to say that microsoft spends more money on advertising while actually they are doing it on a daily basis. People are not stupid. Focusing on things that other vendors do badly is a cheap solution that often backfires.

Apple, rather than focusing on what other do badly should focus on opportunities like other vendords do..Netbooks could be a good example..

Firstly, although you disagree to some points I have said, I also respect for your experience and your background on the subject. However I am seeing that you don’t 100% disagree with me, which is a good thing..

Software: Of course there are SOME titles for each type of sector, I never said there are NO software other than its own software. However, please give me a ballpark number about how many are there for the windows platform so that we can compare. Is this what apple people always do? A couple of days ago a systems engineer from apple was doing a seminar and in his presentation at some point he, as an incentive to buying a mac, said “there are 350 million people using quicktime therefore its connects you to world..blah blah blah”…However he never mentioned how many total users are there, and how many users are there for, say, windows media player…which I know for a fact that its a little bit more than 1 BILLION!..So what he was doing is called distorted statistics in favor of his own thought. Please lets stick to the reality. If you agree this please let me know: “There are much much much more titles available for PC’s than mac’s and IN REALITY if you go to an estate agent, an airline, nasa, a hospital, army etc etc etc you will see a windows machine, not a mac. This is mostly down to software availability and expenses. I will give you an example from my field, which is audio. If you work with professional sonic test equipment your only choice is windows, because ALL the professional test eqipment which can be connected to a computer are windows based. My partner works in a big architecture company and all they use are windows machines, and all over the UK the main platform for architecture (Autodesk CAD) is windows. Also, nearly all audio mastering houses use Sadie Systems which is again a windows only platform. Supermarkets use XP based POS, bank ATMS nearly exclusively use windows NT based software..All very critical jobs..

Here is the important bit: What I am trying to get at is definitely not “macs are not as good as pc’s” or anything similar to this…Its quite the opposite..I am against the thought that “PCs are inferior”. They are not, in the wrong hands, with inferior hardware put together from unknown sources and constantly downloading all kinds of junk software and installing them on a windows machine is definitely a recipe for disaster. However saying that this is purely because windows design is “wrong” or “bad” or whatever is just ignorant. I have been using windows based machines since windows 3.1 Of course there have been disasters like windows millennium, but microsoft actually IS trying to make a better software that would work perfectly. I am sure thats what apple is constantly doing as well. If you go to microsoft website and watch videos of their seminars for the upcoming windows 7 you would see how they are trying to address various issues and coming up with innovative solutions. So its not the dark side of the computing.

If there is a challange in software engineering it must be trying to build an operating system that would seamlessly work with thousands of hardware manufacturer’s products put together in endless combinations.

Viruses: I would extremely disagree that the main reason for not having so many mac viruses is because its harder to code. I would insist that if there is a little pond of water with a few fish in it, and an ocean full of every kind of fishes in it you would fish in the ocean, not the pond…Do you really think that hackers would just say “lets not code in osx, because its harder to do so”?

““Macs are faster” – Vista runs just as fast on my Macbook while OSX is also running as it does on Dells in the office costing time and a half as much. If I boot directly to Vista it is the fastest Vista machine around, beating Dells costing twice as much, all this despite having 50% of its RAM capacity installed. Mileage will vary, this is anecdotal only, use what you like.”

I ABSOLUTELY disagree what you are saying here. You have not given any information as to what settings are being used in the vista versions you have been benchmarking. It is IMPOSSIBLE to run two TOTALLY IDENTICAL copies of vista with exactly similar software running in the background and one of them having 50% ram working “faster”.

Macs are more durable discussion: I agree that mac’s hold their value. However the point I am trying to emphasize is this: When one talks about a mac they are talking about a spesific brand. However when they are comparing the macs to pcs, for some reason they pick either an average pc or worse. I am still using my IBM laptop made in mid 1990! and it works flawlessly, it might be the slowest machine on earth right now but it does work!..Thats the whole point in pc vs mac arguments. Whenever someone is in favour of macs, the pc side is always an unbranded pc made of cheapest hardware..that is my whole point.

Anyway..I will sum up. I am in no way affiliated with microsoft or linux or anything else. I use computers for business, fun, games, dvds, music etc..I exclusively use pc’s at home (which are very well designed by sony, in most ways better than any mac design if you ask me), they all run XP service pack 3 which is rock solid. I have never seen a blue screen, I have never crashed my computer, never lost any data, and never ever got viruses. It works perfectly. I can go online and select from a very wide selection of newest hardware, software for my desktop and upgrade it any time, even on my own, without any problems (and relatively cheaper due to wide availability). These point all make me extremely happy and that is why I don’t see any solid points as to make a switch to another platform.

@ Emre
Although I respectfully (very respectfully) disagree with you, I do compliment you on actually knowing some facts. Having said that:
Software – there are tens of thousands of software titles for Mac encompassing games, productivity, CAD/CAM, publishing, medical, legal, accounting, office, real estate, scientific, multimedia production, and so forth and so on. These titles are available commercially, as freeware and shareware, and are easily located with a websearch at sites like http://guide.apple.com or http://www.versiontracker.com – ad excellent resource for locating and reviewing software for Windows as well.

Viruses – security through obscurity is an argument that doesn’t hold water. Apple doesn’t tell anyone that Macs can’t get viruses, no one with half an understanding says that. What they say is that there are none right now and haven’t been for the 8 years of OSX. For the 16 years preceding that there were less than 20 recognized mac viruses. What makes OSX harder to code viruses for is the basic fact that with OSX you cannot install code or make modifications to the system without administrative password access. Vista is much better than its forbears in that I have to click “Yes” to authorize about 10% of what I do every day on my Vista machine at work including tasks I have authorized repeatedly (like opening an email from a known sender with an attachment), but I am never prompted to actually verify who I am. If I go for coffee without locking my Mac (I run both OSes simultaneously for my work BTW) you can very easily install whatever malicious code you want on Vista, but not on my OSX. Same thing goes for most malicious code execution. If the Mac starts to modify files it requires a password to continue. Ahh the joys of a UNIX underpinning. Yes vulnerabilities have been exposed in labs, yes they have been patched (usually within weeks) and so far no, they haven’t been exploited in the real world. By far the biggest threats for any computer these days are based on social engineering, not code, anyway.

“Macs don’t crash” – Of course Macs crash. On the whole my experience is that they don’t crash often and when they do it is usually the result of a bad hardware component or (and much more frequently) because someone installed software that either “customized” (read-modified) the OS intentionally (input managers are infamous for this) or that is known to cause issues on many platforms. LimeWire is evil people! Vista is now (post SP1) very stable as well, and XP is just as much of a rock as OSX. I just don’t care for them as much. You mentioned early on that inexperienced users are the biggest problem Windows has. I agree. That’s very often the case with Macs as well. In my opinion the learning curve for a Mac is less steep, though.

“Macs are faster” – Vista runs just as fast on my Macbook while OSX is also running as it does on Dells in the office costing time and a half as much. If I boot directly to Vista it is the fastest Vista machine around, beating Dells costing twice as much, all this despite having 50% of its RAM capacity installed. Mileage will vary, this is anecdotal only, use what you like.

“Macs are more durable” – Remember my job working as front line tech support at Apple? Average service life for a Mac in business is 7 to 10 years. Other PCs (Personal Computers not “Windows Machines” THAT bit of lazy terminology drives me nuts – they’re all PCs) typically run on 3 to 5 year upgrade cycles. Mileage varies depending on demands.
I will say that Macs hold their value for a long time, though. Check out what people are paying for them on eBay. A true measure of consumer value if there ever was one. The 2 year old Macbook I am using at home right now is virtually identical to one which recently sold for about 80% of its original price. If you can get 80% of retail for a 2 year old Dell, you impress me to no end.

As for getting real work done, I don’t equate “most work done on” with “most work requires”. I have worked at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and I can assure you that critical calculations done for the US Space program are done on Macs. I supported both Macs and Windows while there, I know of what I speak. I don’t know about the current US President, but the last 2 before him (yes, his father included) used Macs. One of my clients when at Apple was a local, very busy and well respected, medical imaging facility. Their Macs do much of the imaging. There are many web hosting and colocation services running on X-serves and even Mac minis. Don’t take my word for it, Google it. I suspect that the Apple Blog is hosted on Windows or Linux coincidentally, not because the owner needed it to be so. My clients have included musicians, realtors, movie makers, lawyers, doctors, veterinarians, and Senators. In short, there is a LOT of business in MANY fields being done daily on Macs and OSX. It may not apply for you, but don’t write it off.

As for my “mouse discussion” I agree that it is ludicrous. I, like you, get fed up with people like Ritik who spout off and try to tell me I am wrong when they obviously know nothing that supports their so called “argument”. You may notice that until this post I have not responded to you directly. I disagree with you, but I do so respectfully because you actually put some effort into stating points that you know about. My second mouse posting was merely to point out the fact that if you are going to argue with me, you better actually read what you are attempting to refute.

Emre, I disagree with you. I think that we both have well informed points to make. I thank you for making your points in a logical, informed, and non-vindictive manner. I respect your opinions and I am glad that your solution works for you. My solution works for me. I would never deign to tell you that you should switch unless you sought out my opinions. As for the Apple ads? They are ads, they are meant to stretch the truth and get you to buy. That’s what ads do, and anyone who spends money based just on advertising not research is a fool. Put your energy into something that matters. There have been plenty of misleading Dell, MS, HP, Intel, Chrysler, Ford, etc… ads on TV. At least some ads are entertaining, although some are just inscrutable. Churro anyone? ;-)

A final point, and I hope all the Mac users out there read this, is about Viruses. When I consult about Macs I tell everyone the same thing and I always have especially when working for Apple: There are currently no viruses in circulation for Macs. I believe that the basic architecture of BSD Unix and OSX makes it more difficult to code viruses for Macs. It is very possible that viruses will crop up, though, and you can always easily send viruses to your Windows using family and friends if you don’t have an anti-virus strategy in place. There is a reason that every single Apple retail store sells anti-virus software and it’s not just to fill up the shelves. Every Apple retail employee I have spoken to has some version of this that they offer when asked about viruses. Ask questions, do your research. There is a reason.

Here is an interesting fact for you:

The reason this blog can exist and the reason we can talk to each other right now is PC’s. Even if you like it or not. You can check and verify this. theappleblog.com is being served on rackspace.com which is a windows/linux based hosting service. http://www.rackspace.com if you don’t believe me go and see yourself!..

So before we speak and talk down something we should do our research and talk.

Never underestimate the power of advertisements.