Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] Value in older macs

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Thu, 4 Mar 2004, Nathan Odle wrote:

> So upon starting my new profession, I needed a machine for work.  
> Without much of a budget for anything, I drug in my old 450MHz G4 Cube. 

Not to rub it in or anything, but a $500 refurb eMac would be pretty
much literally twice as fast as this, so what you're about to say 
goes double.

> After hot-rodding around at home on a 3GHz P4 for the last several
> months, I was a little skeptical as to how much useful stuff I
> could get done after upgrading to 10.2.

But 10.3 is faster. :-)

[snip]
 
> However, the fact that I'm doing useful work doesn't exactly tell the 
> story I want to tell.  What amazes me is how useful this 'iLife' stuff 
> seems to be.

It is, I notice, the little stuff that is now adding a lot of value.  
You mentioned iSync (or iCal) but iTunes was what got me off my rump
as far as moving my CDs online.  And then there's the new Preview,
which is a better PDF viewer than Acrobat, and the new TextEdit,
which reads and writes simple (and some not-so-simple) .doc files
*and has emacs-style text editing keys*.  And, as I just found out,
*you can even paste in graphics*.  No marketing (and maybe no docs)
for these last features, but you have no idea how much good this
does for me.  The whole freaking world wants .doc format and now I 
can give it to them for at least the simple stuff.

> I'm the last guy to be a Mac Zealot (and it's plain that there are
> a few on the list) but I've got to give Apple some props here.  
> The best part is, this new shiny software runs reasonably well on
> 1st gen G4 hardware, which is down around where real people can
> afford it.  If I were starting a new office, I'd run out and buy
> everyone a used G4, your average office worker doesn't need any
> more power than that and they get to take advantage of all the
> cool software.

I think you've figured out the future.  Hardware is now fast enough
that speed alone provides few additional benefits.  But most
software is still a complete mess.  There is *no reason* why MS
could not produce a software system every bit as useful and fun as
Apple, but there is also little incentive for them to do so.  I 
think it will still take some time, but Linux (and BSD) are also 
more likely to make rapid progress on the Total User Experience 
front than MS seems to be.
 
> I should note that this doesn't mean that dollar-for-dollar the
> value-priced Apple is faster than a value-priced PC, because it's
> not.  I can buy a brand-new $350 Dell that will blow the doors off
> of any equivalently-priced (and probably used) Apple.  However,
> the cool software that Apple has integrated so tightly makes up
> for the difference, and that's what makes them a good deal in my
> book.  Faster isn't always Better, at least until Windows or Linux
> has all this built in too :)

Well, faster was always better until an entry level PC (or Mac) was
truly only bandwidth-limited when surfing the web, could play DVDs,
and encode your CDs into mp3s in a reasonable amount of time.  At 
that point, everything else that software could do for you became 
very important.  The Mac has released Mac OS 10.2 and 10.3 into this 
environment, and I think MS and Linux desktop vendors really will 
have to do something about it.

Which is great news for everybody. :-)

jking

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