RE: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] reading through Apple's marketing speak...

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Fri, 16 Aug 2002, Woodsmall, Ryan (IATS) wrote:

> Yeah, and all those machines you priced run MacOS X and all of the
> wonderful iTools smashingly!

To be fair, Dell does try to provide comparable things.  But iPhoto 
itself is...not an easy target.
 
> The platform choice is not about money these days, and it's not about
> performance, either; PCs are cheaper (and relatively faster for what you
> pay) and my computer can do anything I can throw at it, quickly at that.
> It's about your personal preference and the fact that you *have* a
> choice.  I like MacOS X.  Everything just works, and I don't have to
> futz with anything.

I myself am really in awe of this point.  So I remember when I first
used my digital camera with my ThinkPad (running Win2K, so maybe
this has improved).  It was the usual install drivers, install
software, restart, blah blah... It did work, but you did notice the
effort.  Then there was the time I first used my digital camera with
Mac OS X.  I plugged it in.  Everything was auto-detected, and
everything worked.  It was pretty absurd.  And I will admit that
it's hard to be an Alpha Geek when your 7-year-old can edit digital
video.

The only *big* complaint I have is printing, and it appears that
they have finally fixed that with the new version of the OS.  If
they haven't, do expect for me to flame them to a crisp on every
arena I have access to.

> I hammer on ~200 Linux and IRIX workstations and servers at
> least eight hours a day; when I go home, I want something that
> just works.  That's why I bought a Mac, that's why I like MacOS
> X - it's *nix but you can completely forgo that part of you want
> to.  No goofing with drivers, no recompiling kernels, no patch
> sets to manage, no kludges to maintain, no IE6 or IIS
> vulnerabilities.  You pay more when you buy a Mac, but you get
> what you pay for, even if the price/performance ratio is kinda
> lame.

The lameness depends on what you want to do, but it's clear that 
they do have to do something about this to keep the scientific
users who were re-interested in the platform by things like MatLab
and the hacked up version of BLAST they now use.

jking


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