I'm thinking of buying a Macbook laptop. I've heart a lot positive around this system, but I've never tried it myself. Does anyone here have any experiences with it? Is it as powerfull as windows? Final question; is Apple the only one who deals with Macs? / Love, gobb :]
for me i would use windows just as much as most of the people on this board its just really up to you, some people prefer one over the other.
for general use - doesn't matter for most media applications - doesn't matter for graphic design(atleast in theory) - OSX for hardware compatability(driverwise) - Winblows for gaming - Winblows FYI some people illegally install OSX on their PCs. Doing illegal things like pirating software is bad and can get you in trouble with the law so even though it's relatively easy to do, you should not do it. also another consideration is to go the GNU/linux and BSD routes. stable platforms very efficient BUT mediocre 3rd party support. For general use though, I consider them king. Merged Post: mac is a line of computers made by apple. they currently use standard PC hardware for the most part and the only difference is on the software side of things. Apple bundles their own proprietory operating system and some software with their systems, OSX. OSX runs off the XNU(xnu is not unit) kernel which is based off of the mach kernel. but that's BS since OSX is now considered to be a unix operating system... the bulk of the OS is based off of Darwin which had originally been developed by apple but is now considered Free software. Apple basically lets others do the maintenance and does their own modification if you're curious about OSX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_%28operating_system%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osx http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU and if you're curious about winblows http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista for the record I'm a fan of neither and I curse the conditions which lead to the rise of both M$ and Apple. I currently am using windows vista and XP FYI
So far the only question that hasn't been answered is your 'power' question. In theory, OS X and Windows XP are equally powerful. Any feature that one OS has, the other has an answer to it. In everyday use, however, OS X is far more powerful because it's coded to actually take advantage of those technologies. A fair comparison of this would be in graphics processing technologies, for example. Mac OS X has Core Image, and Windows XP has DirectX. Core Image is found in MANY more places within the Mac OS than DirectX is in XP. DirectX is mainly used for games and such, while Core Image can be applied to many onscreen elements, such as the Dashboard "ripple" effect or the smoke in the CD-writing program, Disco. So the real question I guess would be which is the better utilization of power, in which case OS X wins hands-down (that is, if you don't play games. everybody knows OS X is bad for that)
If your thinking that you might need tech support, an Apple computer is the best way to go. Microsoft routes all service calls through a hub in India and is very annoying when you have serious and minor questions concerning all things Microsoft. I think windows is good because of its price, while I admire Apple Macs for their functionality. In theory, macs are completely compatible with most windows parts due to the recent conversion to INTEL type processors. If I had the money I would buy a Mac because of the functionality and because I don't need the development capabilities of windows, yet windows is great because you can buy notebook computers for hundreds less then the mac notebook.
if you can't use google, you shouldn't be using a computer yet alone forcing a human being to deal with you. also I want you to link me to a decent SCSI RAID controller which has drivers available under OSX. Heck, I want you link me to an Apple product which supports multi-GPU arrays. Apple is a company just like any other any they want to make profit and their claims of compatibility are - well fictional. They build proprietory systems for a reason, they want a stable platform which has minimal developmental costs. Apple will never (under the current paradigm) support a wide array of hardware products because that would mean two things - increased development costs - decreased hardware sales. as for software, virtualization goes a long ware towards cross platform compatability so long as driver based acceleration is not a neccessity(though parrelels does an acceptable job of that more so than any other virtualization app I've see on other *nix OSes or in windows.) again it's gotten to the point where you can ask 100 college students which is better and many will say OSX. Of the say 80 who say that, 50-60 will never have used OSX for more than a few moments, 10 will have never used windows extensively and 15 or so do things which operate equivilently under either operating system with the largest bottlneck ebing the end user... and 95 of the 100 are (by an ITs standards) largely computer illiterate
For stuff like Vis Com (Graphic Design, Video Editing, etc) Macs and the reasonably bulletproof OSX operating system prevail, mainly for their ability to multitask amazingly well. However, I think we can all agree that Macs aren't cheap, and you need to be willing to either fork out the cash for a Mac or settle for mediocrity in Vis Com work. if you're not doing any graphics/video editing, you can be like every average American and enjoy your boring Windows OS. Oh yeah, lolvista.
I say Windows, but only because it's more familiar and I know how to get the same basic functionality from it as from a macbook. I would say that as long as the laptop has a decent centrino duo chip, then It's definatly got enough power for anything you can try on a laptop. All you should have to do is: 1) Get rid of all the pre-installed crap that companies LOVE to load in 2) install and configure a decent dock 3) Get styler toolbar, and FindeXer. After that you should have a pretty nice explorer and desktop setup
you're example is garbage, vista runs open GL to render hardware based acceleration for the GUI. then... then let me quote linus torvalds "The thing about an operating system is that you're never supposed to see it. Because I mean nobody really uses an operating system. People use programs on their computer and the only mission in life of an operating system is to help those programs run" inevitably one OS will pull ahead of the other in some instances but in terms of kernel level efficiency I'm finding XNU to suck. There's a reason I don't run Darwin as my *nix OS. XNU just sucks. most mediocre example of memory management EVER. GNU/hurd has been developed since the late 80s and is more efficient and stable and it's not even out of the beta stages... how the hell can a lesser product be used in retail? That's why I always hated Mach either years of work and a pain in the ass to deal with... or else you get crap like XNU. I'm hoping that Leopard is based off the FreeBSD 6.X kernel. Then other various aspects of the OS are just... well let's just say that free stuff works better... here's a good read from the University of California Berkely http://sekhon.berkeley.edu/macosx/intel.html few articles from anandtech... http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436&p=8 http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2520&p=8 some of it one might attribute to the architecture change, PPC handles instructions somewhat differently than x86, but it's not(PPC based linux distros reflected the same results) and the fact remains that at the current moment here and today OSX is one of the least efficient operating systems on the market. There is a reason why so few multibillion dollar companies run their servers on OSX - they want the absolute highest performance for their money. The server segment(when most of the profit in the computer industry is made) is largely dominated by linux based OSes at this time with over 75% of the worlds top super computers running a linux based OS. Windows and BSD take up the number 2 and 3 spots in the server industry and I'm not even sure if OSX makes it onto the charts in terms of market penetration. Then I hope Tiger basically does some DRAMATIC restructuring. My list of 3 most mediocre OSes includes: DOS, windows NT, OSX. Should tell you several things 1 apple is not the answer. Apple is the question. The answer depends on whether or not you'll get the most productivity for the money spent. 2 Microsoft is never the answer when it can be helped. If you don't need good driver support, you shouldn't be running windows(outside a VM install of course) if you're a power user. 3 Too many people fall for marketing ploys. Multibillion dollar corporations make money off their customers one way or another. If a company makes a claim, ------uate it on your own. If a product becomes "trendy" ------uate it on it's own merits. I mean at the end of the day you have to realize that at a literal sense every sense Mac on the market here and today is knock off - a clone... not that being a clone is bad they're just not the "original and creative" machines that Apple put them off as. A PC with a hacked version of OSX will run it just as well as one that came with the operating system from the foreign sweatshop/factory... and yes I'm biased. yes I hate every company that tries to rob people of money(my favorite companies are basically the ones I hate the least, but I still have no trust for them). yes I think every OS sucks. ______________________________________________________________________ If you find what i say above to be wrong, then by all means do as you wish, I am after all only one person and as a human I am prone to bias. I implore everyone to do their own research and to use various operating systems on their own. What works for one person may or may not work for another.
