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13th of November, 2024

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Rube

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Uncritical, Poorly-Written Nonsense About Macs and PCs


I mean my post, not Dvorak’s.


All the hand-wringing that Mac fans do about whether or not Apple will survive is good reason to write a column saying Apple won’t. The Mac cultists love to defend and extoll their beloved machines until they froth at the mouth, citing style or simplicity or general coolness as the reason they love their Macs. Those people are dorks. It’s a machine, people; get over it.


As a rule, I don’t like desktop Macs. They cost too much, and once you look inside, it’s just about all commodity hardware. They even use the same cheesy CD drives that every PC in the world does, hiding the “eject” button with an ill-fitting, tilting faceplate. In the old days, for a PC guy, a Mac’s guts were a confusing blend of exotic components: Motorola chips, where Intel was expected; weird 3.5” 800K floppy drives, instead of the usual 5.25” 360K or 1.2M drives; SIMM banks, instead of DIP sockets; 50-pin SCSI ribbons instead of God’s own hard drive interface, ESDI. It was truly different. Today, a desktop Mac has IDE drives, IBM-made CPUs, and the memory can be bought at the grocery store next to the cigarettes. About the only difference you’ll see, hardware-wise, is the FireWire port, but even that’s beginning to give way to the ubiquity of USB 2.0. It’s the same cheesy hardware you’ll find in any tired old PC; it just costs twice as much.


Notebooks, however, are a different story. Here, Apple really is the king, in my opinion. You simply cannot compare a clunky Sony Vaio running clunky Windows XP to a Powerbook running OS X, I don’t care how many card-reading orifices the thing has. The 15” Powerbook I’m writing this on is simply the most efficient computer I’ve ever used. The OS X paradigm, along with Apple’s hardware philosophy, fits perfectly into the laptop world. You don’t ever shut the computer down, for example; you just clap it shut and it goes to sleep. You open it up, and it’s immediately ready to use. I’ve had this computer since March, and I’ve only booted it into OS X about 10 times so far, mostly for system updates. Bluetooth is built right into the laptop, as is 802.11g (I would say 54Mbit ‘Wi-Fi’, if anyone could tell me what the hell ‘Wi-Fi’ stands for). There’s USB, FireWire, Ethernet, Bluetooth, and a modem. There’s also a PC card slot, though I’ve never used it, so I don’t know what this guy’s talking about. All-in-all, the Powerbook is rock solid, and it’s a joy to work with.


I’m no Mac zealot, though. I like both my Mac and my Linux-running desktop PC. If you’ve got the money, buy the Apple. If not, then burn in hell, you Gates-rimming plebe.

Comments

Bob Baird

Come on Rube... don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel!

That argument has gone on for so long I've got it taped onto the back of my old dead 8 inch floppy drives.

I'll believe that Apple is dead when they actually bring me the corpse of Steve Jobs... in a box... complete with flowers.

I wouldn't have one of the damned things because the assholes wouldn't enable the upper case shift key on the Apple II and everybody had to get the crappy enhancement kits they so obligingly sold to the unsuspecting world.

Buddy... that was before you were born.

Bob

Rube

I'd never heard that about the shift key, Bob. Is that really the beloved Apple ][ people won't leave off their "best computers evar" lists? My best computer evar list probably would have some sort of minimum feature requirements...

Adrian

Actually, I was referring to desktop systems. In the notebook world Macs are fairly good.

The card reader is the card reader built into most PCs that reads the little flash cards that go in most digital cameras. That should be built in by default. Not an add on.

That's what I was talking about.

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