Could HP have cracked it?

[neiltc13]

I'm pretty sure neiltc13 was being sarcastic...

I most definitely was not. The number of times I have seen the "spinning beach ball" in OS X is ridiculous and the frequency increased significantly when I moved to Leopard compared to Tiger.

Conversely, all applications which I've run under Vista seem to be very stable with the "Please report to Microsoft" window being a very rare occurrence. I have never once seen a Vista machine lock up completely, whereas on several occasions on ALL of the Macs which I have owned I have had a "kernel panic" where I'm told to turn off my computer.

I'd say both are about equal.

 

[macintosh tech]

i'm sorry, but vista, as far as i'm concerned, is not crap. i've worked on several os's before, and whenever i encounter leopard, it's not as spectacular as some would lead you on to believe. if you tone down the visual for vista, it runs SO smoothly and a lot quicker. you can turn off the "alerts" that come standard, and everybody complains about. i just don't agree that vista is crap.

and the voodoo lines are alright. . nothing to write home about. and it's a little pricey.

my 2c.

Sorry, Vista is indeed crap. That is very reason why we are not deploying it campus-wide at this point. The Dells come in and we DS down an XP build. Vista is at minimum a year out. And we are a rather forward thinking support group with some of the best deployment tools around. Heck Dell just extended XP on their machines by "popular demand." Now, this group has to be one that isn't doing mass deployment (it doesnt matter for people doing this) and is large enough to get Dell to do this. That is significant and shows that many people do not want for various reasons. Reasons that make Vista crap

And you hit on a interesting point, the amount of work that must be down from the start to get Vista to not be crap. The visuals, the alerts, etc. That suggests that they didn't have the user in mind when developing Vista, specifically enterprise environments. I mean sure, we throw together a master DS build and we can do it that way. But many organizations are doing it that way, much less small companies. Many people are sitting this one out and with good reason.

I most definitely was not. The number of times I have seen the "spinning beach ball" in OS X is ridiculous and the frequency increased significantly when I moved to Leopard compared to Tiger.

Conversely, all applications which I've run under Vista seem to be very stable with the "Please report to Microsoft" window being a very rare occurrence. I have never once seen a Vista machine lock up completely, whereas on several occasions on ALL of the Macs which I have owned I have had a "kernel panic" where I'm told to turn off my computer.

I'd say both are about equal.

Check the logs. Chances are it is hardware. Just about every time we have a machine act that way it is hardware. Or, it is the specific application, Word and Quark are big ones. I can't blame Apple if Word is causing machines to lock up, nor can you say it is Leopard related if you don't have any evidence for that.

 

[surferfromuk]

I most definitely was not. The number of times I have seen the "spinning beach ball" in OS X is ridiculous and the frequency increased significantly when I moved to Leopard compared to Tiger.

Conversely, all applications which I've run under Vista seem to be very stable with the "Please report to Microsoft" window being a very rare occurrence. I have never once seen a Vista machine lock up completely, whereas on several occasions on ALL of the Macs which I have owned I have had a "kernel panic" where I'm told to turn off my computer.

I'd say both are about equal.

You must be running Perrian or some other third-party enhancement. Perrian, whilst great, causes no end of system issues, spinning beach ball, slowdowns and crashes.

A bog standard OS X without any crap simply does not crash. If it is you have some other problem - perhaps ram or hardware ( third-party or otherwise). I suggest you invest some time in tracking it down. Your problems are NOT from a core deficiency in OS X.

Let me repeat - OS X on good Apple hardware, without any dodgy third party crap simply NEVER CRASHES - NEVER!.

I speak from YEARS of experience running OS X on many different macs and pushing it extremely hard - OS X is a rock...

 

[neiltc13]

You must be running Perrian or some other third-party enhancement. Perrian, whilst great, causes no end of system issues, spinning beach ball, slowdowns and crashes.

A bog standard OS X without any crap simply does not crash. If it is you have some other problem - perhaps ram or hardware ( third-party or otherwise). I suggest you invest some time in tracking it down. Your problems are NOT from a core deficiency in OS X.

Let me repeat - OS X on good Apple hardware, without any dodgy third party crap simply NEVER CRASHES - NEVER!.

I speak from YEARS of experience running OS X on many different macs and pushing it extremely hard - OS X is a rock...

Well if we're going to compare things like this then Vista is definitely the same.

 

[surferfromuk]

Well if we're going to compare things like this then Vista is definitely the same.

Well, that's comforting to know (should I ever have the utterly hideous displeasure of having to use it again).

 

[jemeinc]

Well if we're going to compare things like this then Vista is definitely the same.

No, it's not.. Vista will always have the potential for crappy third party hardware issues- OSX will not.. Huge advantage.. Sure, hardware goes wrong with Apple, like anyone else- but fixing it is easily diagnosed and quickly acted upon.. Diagnosing hardware issues with Windows can be a long, arduous process.. Fixing those problems, once diagnosed, can be down right nerve wracking..

There's huge advantages to having the whole system "in house".. This, IMHO, makes OSX a far superior user experience.. I'm far from a Windows hater- I actually think that MS does an outstanding job with the challenges they face..

 

[MattZani]

Looks nice, a little pricey, but very nice. Not the kind of thing I expected Voodoo to make though, this must be there only system without a dedicated GPU!

 

[ezekielrage_99]

LOL. We've all been hearing about "Apple killers" and "iPod killers" and "iPhone killers" starting 20 years ago. I remember the Zune (R.I.P.). Microsoft, and the bulk of the electronics press, were pretty sure THAT device was going to put Apple in its place.

Since 1977, the only company that has ever come close to "killing Apple" was Apple itself.

So, HP has developed a "MacBook killer", huh? Yawn.

I tend to agree, there have been very few products to date that can compete with Apple sense to industrial design and integration.

iPod is still king and the Macbook Pro IMHO is still the benchmark for laptops however I really do think HP has designed some very nice look Voodoo PCs and laptop. However a good looking laptop or PC is still not nearly enough to go back to the Windows side.

 

[Wotan31]

It looks nice at first glance, but there are plenty of ultra-portables out there, that I don't think this one is anything revolutionary. I'm not a fan of HP quality control, or their India-based tech support. Plus the whole Windows OS thing is rather a big turn-off.

Pass.

 

[28monkeys]

You must be running Perrian or some other third-party enhancement. Perrian, whilst great, causes no end of system issues, spinning beach ball, slowdowns and crashes.

A bog standard OS X without any crap simply does not crash. If it is you have some other problem - perhaps ram or hardware ( third-party or otherwise). I suggest you invest some time in tracking it down. Your problems are NOT from a core deficiency in OS X.

Let me repeat - OS X on good Apple hardware, without any dodgy third party crap simply NEVER CRASHES - NEVER!.

I speak from YEARS of experience running OS X on many different macs and pushing it extremely hard - OS X is a rock...

It's not a rock, it's PLATINUM

 

[chrono1081]

For the posters above, I LOVE Vista! Its the reason I own a mac

Seriously though the OS is NOT good. If it was why would Microsoft start selling XP again? Not to mention use it in a corporate environment once. I spent MONTHS downgrading hundreds of machines back to XP because vista was unusable (I am still doing this!). Not only does it crash all the time, but it's extremely slow unless you have a high end system. People can say I'm wrong all they want but I know from hands on experience of hundreds of computers. Most people dont.

 

[Maestro88]

And I haven't had a crash with Vista.. Honestly, I think OS X is better, but Vista is nowhere near as bad as its reputation would lead you to believe.

That's totally right. As long as you stick to word pad, and don't plug anything into it that isn't supposed to be there like mouse and screen, it's totally ok and you can always just reset if it crashes. I also like solitaire and the start button is my favourite feature I love to scroll through the menus to find my app (word pad)

 

[Maestro88]

I speak from YEARS of experience running OS X on many different macs and pushing it extremely hard - OS X is a rock...[/QUOTE]

I have 16 gigs of ram here are the apps I have had running all at the same time for days at a time:

Adobe CS3 suite including photoshop, illustrator, indesign, bridge, dreamweaver etc.
iphoto, iweb, itunes, idvd, imovie and remote desktop and aperture
logic pro with a stack of music loaded the vienna symphony library, native instruments packages and high quality grand piano libraries all fully loaded with reverbs and production plug ins.
preview, mail, safari, firefox, ichat address book waveburner reason dvd player quicktime system preferences isync disk utility trasmit ftp activity monitor terminal airport utility calculator dashboard widgets google earth text edit xcode, digital audio control apps, pages, numbers and keynote.

oh yeah, and calendar. Put it sleep, wake it up, hit play in logic.

AS gordon ramsay would say F me!!

It all works.

Yes I have had crashes, you wonder why I don't have them all the time - it just works. I have to say ms word is absolute garbage it dies all the time, I've removed it and use pages now no ms for me. ALso the adobe stuff is mediocre in the reliability department, but it never brings down OSX. The worst app is remote desktop - again though, never hurts OSX. I've had kernel panics on rare occassion again check out that list of apps running at the same time. And I always have some combination of the above going

The beauty of Leopard is NOT skin deep, and it's not just security features, it's the enjoyment of having something wonderfully and lovingly engineered from the ground up over such a long period of time. Removal of PPC redundant code is just going to seal the deal for OSX. It's portable, and their use of big cats to describe it's "nature" is totally apt... it is smart flexible and beautifully designed. Perfect? No, it's software! But it is great and it has done more for me in productivity and helping my business than windows EVER could. I love it! Thanks Apple!

I have Vista running in VMWARE tried it out for a while, it's garbage garbage garbage hated it completely, it's stupid rediculous design and sorry but the windows war is over they've lost round two and it's just now a matter of time before all the old stuff gets replaced with linux and macs. It took 20 years to build that user base, it's going to take as long for it to disappear but disappear it will.

 

[neiltc13]

crash all the time

This is a ridiculous exaggeration.

Check the logs. Chances are it is hardware. Just about every time we have a machine act that way it is hardware.

I guess we'll have to say that my iBook, iMac, second iMac, MacBook, third iMac and second MacBook were all faulty hardware then?

 

[Ad Pro]

ermm... nope. sorry but there is no way that looks anywhere near as good as any Mac notebook, in my opinion anyway.

 

[tmelvin]

In my experience, Windows Vista is far more stable than Leopard.

LOL. That's funny. Really. I BETA tested Vista and ran the RTM version for a year. I've only been using Leopard for about 6 months now, and it's far more stable than Vista is, or ever will be. Vista is total garbage.

 

[surferfromuk]

I guess we'll have to say that my iBook, iMac, second iMac, MacBook, third iMac and second MacBook were all faulty hardware then?

Seriously, WTF are you running on your macs to make them crash cos there is certainly no way your experiences with Mac are typical. Your telling me you've had 6 macs in a row and they all crash? I'd hate to call you a liar but I really find that hard to believe.

However, if that is the case you absolutely must be doing something totally unique and totally corruptive to each and every one of your past macs. There must be something common to all your computers if they ALL exhibit this behaviour...Do you smack them about maybe ?

Without sounding exasperated or repeating myself - just WTF are you doing to have major stability problems on six macs...

I just don't get it...your story makes no sense and defies the experiences of millions...

 

[Alpha04024]

Seriously I can't understand some replies.

The voodoo laptop is nice, I like it on white and black. But it's exactly a copy of a mbp, the same position of everything, the same trackpad, only one button, allegedly with some kind of touch gestures....it can't be that hard to design a laptop which is not like a mac

After that...how's that leopard and vista are equal? I mean...are you serious? Vista is annoying and apps don't run smooth most of the times. Some friends use vista and they have lots of problems everywhere, I've been using mac for years and I had never a problem. It can stay on months and runs perfectly.

Sorry but I can't believe it

Btw I don't know how there is people who say leopard runs bad, I have a 2year old imac and a new mbp and both go perfect

 

[Sesshi]

OS X has generally been pretty reliable (the hardware, not so much), but KP's are not entirely unknown - like Vista, this is undoubtedly a hardware issue. Unlike Microsoft however, Apple has no excuses when they control both the OS and the HW. Since this time last year I've seen BSOD's on Vista on only two machines - a Macbook Pro and a Pro. Never on a 'real' Windows machine. And I own far more machines which get used for intensive tasks than >90% of you. OS X hangups are - when compared with Vista also in the same timeframe - of an acceptable frequency but not ideal. And as neiltc13 says, general application stability is worse in some cases under Leopard.

When comparing Leopard vs Vista stability, you have to compare Apples with apples. Same-class hardware sourced fully configured from comparable manufacturers. Part of the problem of the Windows ecosystem is a large number of people who build their own machines incompetently then blame problems on Microsoft for example. You've got a lot of switchers who had previously been using DIY'd machines who marvel at OS X's stability, or buy bottom-feeder machines and complain that it's too slow to run Vista. Well no **** Sherlock.

At first I wasn't really tempted by the Envy - because as the above poster has said, it's practically an Air in terms of specs. However it looks like being an ultra-rigid machine and from what I can see, might be a better Air with the bugs taken out.

The only obstacle to me being further tempted is that I have a bunch of Sony TZ's I'm quite happy with, and I've also rid myself of a Lenovo X300 recently as it wasn't quite as functional to me as an ultraportable as the TZ is. The Envy being a heavier, less functional X300 I'm not so tempted with it in terms of spec - but as the photos have dribbled out I do like the look, I do like the fact that it can be custom-painted (although lacquered carbon is probably a better look than most paint jobs) by the manufacturer. I might pick up one for casual use. I'm also interested in the Omen, but I think I'll wait for distribution channels to be available over here before I take a serious look at it.

As far as the Air is concerned I have two of them now. The Air is undoubtedly simultaneously the crappiest and best looking so-called ultraportable I've ever owned. The reason I still hang onto them is obviously for running OS X apps. Why two? One as a spare when the other is in Applecare - an all too typical problem with inferior Apple hardware.

 

[cheekybobcat]

IMOP working hardware is better than good-looking hardware. I do agree that Apple needs to update their laptop line soon. My uncle is buying me a MBP for my 18th birthday because I'm working for him and he says I'll need it (I'm not about to argue with him). Hopefully, by next January a new line will be available. If not, I'm still getting one.

 

[ucfgrad93]

I have to say, that I have seen some new HP laptops and I think they are very nice looking. Much improved in my opinion. But I still can't run OS X on it, so I won't be purchasing one.

 

[SodiumBenzoate]

BTW - is it Aluminium ?

Carbon fiber, which is probably better than aluminum as it's not susceptible to denting and it's a far superior insulator (the case won't get as hot).

Does it have the magnetic power cable

No. Apple patented that one, it would be tricky to design a magnetic power cable that doesn't infringe on the patent.

does it have the backlit keyboard

Yes.

does it have a multi-touch touch pad

Yes.

does it have nasty vendor specific drivers to integrate it with Vista that cause all kinds of problems,

It has vendor specific drivers.. whether or not they're "nasty" and "cause all kinds of problems" remains to be seen.

does it have it's battery in the centre so it's perfectly balanced and cools between your knees rather than on your thigh

The battery does look to be centered. As far as cooling, it vents out the sides.

does it have an LED screen

Yes.

does it have slot loading drive or a pop out caddy

The included external drive is slot loading.

does it have FW 800

No, but it has eSATA, which is faster than FW 800 but can't branch.

what's the video card?

Intel GMA X3100, same as the Macbook Air.

I don't know the specs and It could have a couple of these points but I doubt it has them all - so again it's a superficial copy...

It has most of them. Keep in mind it's a MBA competitor, not a MBP competitor (some of the things you mentioned are only included on the MBP, like FW 800 and a video card other than Intel's integrated solution).

 

[Chandler Adaway]

Hm..
I just may be weird, but I think the voodoo looks like garbage.

It reminds me of someone trying to build their own PC and decides on an ugly case...

I'm sure it works well....
But it's ugly as hell.

EDIT:
The laptop looks okay...
And has some cool features such as the carbon fiber (hope it doesn't yellow),
but the edges are a little to sharp for my tastes, and a simpler logo on top would be nice...

Just my two cents though.