Scientists: The Latest Mac Converts

[MacBytes]

Category: Opinion/Interviews
Link: Scientists: The Latest Mac Converts (http://www.macbytes.com/link.php?sid=20040212123323)

Posted on MacBytes.com (http://www.macbytes.com)

Approved by arn

[HexMonkey]

Good to see that most of the scientists in charge of the current Mars project are using Macs. I guess that explains why the mission has been so successful so far. ;)

[Santaduck]

and don't forget MATLAB is now available for macs again. (a very common engineering/scientific/technical environment)

Mathworks stopped develoment of matlab on the os9 platform, but continued in win & *nix. After OS X (and X11), now the latest greatest MATLAB is back for mac users.

This one application alone had made many science types get windows machines in the past... no more.

[Mr.Hey]

WooHoo! :).

[Fender2112]

Nice article. Now if we can get some of those big business corporate yo-yo's to give Mac and OS X a serious look. They've been snow blinded by Microsoft for so many years. Perhaps more articles like this will help them open their eyes.

[MrMacMan]

For our [Mars] landing site work, we always get the highest-end desktop Mac we can find, so we just got one of the G5s with dual 2-GB processors ...

Arg... Gigabyte is a type of STORAGE.

Gigahertz is a way of measuring CPU speed...

Arg... :rolleyes:



For science, Design, Movies and any graphics Mac is for you...

Buisnesses? Naaaahh.

:rolleyes:

[Mav451]

This is not at all surprising. Considering what i have seen (w/o disclosing anything), many chemical/bio companies have been using Macs for their applications in labs/experiments for quite a while now b/c the software support IS THERE! This is not really news...more like informing anyone else who didn't alreaady no haha.

I agree, the 2GB processors line was hilarious...

[bryanc]

My experience is definitely in agreement with the observations made in this article. Since the availability of OS X, scientists like myself have been switching in droves.

I used Apples way back before the Mac, but have been a PC/Windows/Linux user since the mid-80s. I was constantly cursing the crappy OS I had to use, or cursing the lack of application software for Linux, or cursing the crappy hardware the cheap PCs came with, but didn't see the Mac as a viable alternative until OS X came out. It was everything I wanted Linux to be and more. So I took the plunge and bought a powerbook...I love it. Now our lab has 3 desktop macs (including a nice G5), one iBook and 6 powerbooks. There are still a couple of grad students hanging on with their wintel machines, but one of them just died the other day (the student is currently writing her thesis...we managed to move her data onto one of the lab powerbooks, and she's now borrowing it to write on...I suspect her next machine will be a mac too).

The lab across the hall from us is now exclusively mac (having gone from an exclusively PC based lab 2 years ago) and I see the same sort of thing happening everywhere I look. Two years ago I was at a conference and my (then new) TiBook drew many admiring looks, comments and questions. This year, almost everyone has a mac. (And Keynote kick the ***** out of PowerPoint for presentations, even though it's still immature and lacks many features I'd like).

I hope Apple can leverage their technological and software advantages to gain some market share elsewhere over the next few years, because I still think most software development companies (even those selling to science and engineering) see the Mac as too tiny a market to be worth the effort.

Cheers

[mrsebastian]

woohoo :D the more mac addicts the better!

[crackpip]

Yeah this doesn't surprise me a bit. Scientists are generally very busy people. They don't want to waste time screwing around with the system or hardware. They know its worth it to spend the extra money to get something that causes less of a hassle.

Right now, we're trying to get aproval for 4 dual 2Ghz G5's with 8GB of RAM each to run in a cluster to run weather models. :D I hope it goes through.

crackpip

[Frohickey]

Not saying that layoffs and corporate downsizing is good, but with less and less IT personnel, ease of maintainability is a desired thing as companies strive for more productivity. Mac is better than the Windows counterpart in that it doesn't require as many support personnel.