Why Mac?
I hear a lot of frustration in this thread, and I can truly empathize with it. Those of us who are longtime Mac users and are completely comfortable with the OS would love to have a state of the art CPU, bus, and other components to go along with our great user experience. Perhaps the IBM 970 will get us closer to that goal. But, first and foremost it's the OS that makes us Mac users.
Apple has made a lot of marketing mistakes over the years, but somehow managed to stay in business even so. It's a company that has to do everything itself, including the OS, the industrial design, working with CPU companies to build chips to support its OS, and now even writing some critical apps, just to stay in the game. That makes it incredibly difficult to compete with companies that do nothing more complicated than assemble components, throw them into a case, and perhaps copy the latest design fad du jour they can get away with without facing a lawsuit.
How does such a company turn a profit? It would be nice to have all the latest technology, but that means Apple has to cut some corners somewhere. It has to look at what's available, and select those components that provide the best collective overall experience for the general user. And that means that users who focus on single interest items will likely never be satisfied, since they're only one segment of the total customer pool.
I personally think Apple is making most of the right decisions. Would I like to have the industry's fastest, most powerful processor? Sure. Am I willing to switch to another OS to get access to that power? No. First, and last, it's the MacOS that I pay for. It's the integration of the complete user experience that I pay for. Can a computer geek put together his own PC running one of the Windows variants that's stable, fast, and provides a great experience for him? Sure. Can I do the same for myself? No.
I've built PC's, installed Windows, and produced a fully functioning computer that would meet the needs of most users. But what a dreary user experience. The interface options were garish. Whenever I wanted to uninstall software I was never quite sure that I had removed all the components (dlls, whatever) without accidentally removing something that something else shared and needed. When something went wrong, I was left with the option of starting from scratch, doing an enormous amount of research in some Microsoft database, or hoping to find some true Windows guru who could help out. If the computer worked, all was fine. It it didn't...
On the Mac side, uninstalling was dragging something into the trash. A misbehaving app could often be fixed by throwing away a corrupted preferences file, or simply replacing the app executable itself with a simple copy from the master CD...no requirement to run a wizard or installer app, answer a bunch of questions that may or may not be understandable to a non-tech, no reregistering with Microsoft because the computer configuration changed. In short, it was a user experience I could deal with following a short list of common fixes. For more obnoxious problems, I'd run Symantec's Disk Doctor, or some similar utility that I trusted to try to fix the problem. However, even in MacOS X I've hardly ever had to resort to starting from scratch. To put it another way, a logically thinking non-computer tech could learn to take care of his/her OS without incurring a $20k MCSE training experience.
So, what about today's updates? I paid $2400 for my first generation 233MHz iMac, with 32MB RAM and a 4GB HD. I'm running MacOS 10.2.3 on that same box today with 96MB RAM, and while not peppy by any stretch of the imagination, it's fine for basic web surfing and email. I recently upgraded my old Sawtooth G4 450MHz Tower with a Sonnet 1GHz G4 card, and it works great...and it's EXTREMELY peppy. I'm typing this note on my 600MHz iBook, and even with its old Rage Mobility video chip, works just fine. I even watch movies in bed with headphones on this laptop with NO jerkiness. I think Apple's done a great job with its OS updates, and all my Macs work without a hitch. I run Disk Doctor and Speed Disk once a month or so, back up my HD's with Retrospect Express over Firewire to a bootable external Que HD, and...that's it. If something truly awful goes wrong, I can boot up my tower or my laptop with the Que Firewire HD and fix it immediately. In the worse case, I can simply erase the bad volume and copy the backed up volume from the Que and be fully operational in an hour.
So, $1800 for a 1GHz iMac sounds quite good to me. And under $1000 for an eMac sounds outrageous for a Mac that's four times faster, at least, than the iMac sitting in my kitchen that I'd like to replace. And, by the way, that video problem with the eMac was a bad video cable...Apple found that they were repairing the same Macs over and over again, even after they replaced all the electronics, which left only the wiring.
As with most of you, I wait yearningly for the 970 Macs. But, in the meantime, I'm not suffering by any means. I'm not much of a gamer, but the adventure games I do play occasionally work just fine. It's only in the intensive shoot-em ups that I'm left in the dusk. So, for fence sitters, and potential switchers, I'd suggest you take a moment and think just why you're even considering a Mac. If it's system reliability, OS stability and user experience, ease of user OS maintenance, and just having a computer that you're happy to not hide under your desk, why not stop by an Apple store, or CompUSA, and spend a few moments hands-on with a Mac?
Macs aren't the fastest, and don't have the latest state of the art hardware, but they do provide the best, overall integrated user experience...at least for me. And Apple continues to do what few in the industry seem willing to do...innovate. USB was Intel's baby, but no one used it until Apple made it a standard. Firewire is Apple's technology, and has become a standard in its own right. When third party vendors failed to produce a browser better than Microsoft's IE, and Microsoft failed to update it, Apple took up the mantle to create its own. And, with the iApps, Apple is taking the out-of-the-box user experience to the next level by actually creating a digital hub, not just talking about it.
Now, back to the disappointed Mac users... (This, of course, includes me, but I at least accept that a bankrupt Apple will never give me the toys I desire.)
