Macs (and Apple in General)

What a joke. Macs apparently are better, since they have less "issues" than Windows Vista. Lies. The way I see it, Macs are for computer newbies, "PCs" are for power users. Why is it even Mac and PC? Aren't they both for Personal Computing?

Sure, Macs aren't bloated, but neither is Vista. It's just the OEM's crappy version of it that has what, 100 trial programs these days? At least Apple doesn't feel like having extra money from business partners is as important as optimizing a computer. To really use Vista, go out and buy a plain, generic version that doesn't say HP, Toshiba, Dell, or any other crap on it.

Vista has been great to use so far, at least for me. The launch was epic fail, but after a year's time, most of the issues have been worked out. I know everybody's been ranting about Vista, and me at one time, but that's just from "following the pack" and not paying attention to what it actually is. Vista is a great OS, and if you want to upgrade and have the computer resources, go for it.

Mac OS X is a great OS as well, but the problem is that it's designed with newbies in mind. It's definitely not flexible enough for me, and it's restricting to what you can do. Also, Mac hardware is a joke. I've seen an Apple stand in stores with then Mac on a screensaver that said it had all the latest hardware. Yeah, Core 2 Duo is worse than my Quad by far, in fact, by half. And a standard 250GB HDD? O.o? I know some PC users that don't know how to use the delete function, not so much Mac users. 1Gig of RAM? Are we living in 2005? ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT with 128MB of GDDR3 memory? We're not living in 2003 anymore.

MacBook Air. It's not the thinnest notebook anymore. It needs add-ons to install software from a disc. It's slow. It has terrible battery life. But if it's shiny and glossy, and thin as hell, then who cares? Apparently that's Apple's marketing strategy. If you want a real notebook that's also thinner than a MacBook Air, then you might as well just check out the Voodoo Envy. It's also glossy, and the specifications are reasonable for such a notebook. Also, as a bonus, it's thinner.

PC's have their own issues, but if you know how to deal with them, it's not that big of a deal. Sure there's actually viruses out there for Windows, but why bother targeting Macs, which only make up about 4% of the computing world?

iPods. Why do people get sucked in by these things? Unless I had a Mac, I would not even bother getting one of these, just for the fact that I must install iTunes. There is a way better alternative, the Creative Zens. They're drag and drop based, just copy your mp3 files to it (it's seen as a flash drive) and you're ready to go.

Ah the deception. Apple always tends to leave important features out that have existed for a long time, then implement it in the version of whatever, claim to "invent it", and then steal the spotlight using some other corporation's technology.

-I posted this on this forum, just for the record. It's Halo orientated. They have absolutely no idea what a Meizu is, so I suggested the Zen as an alternative to the iPod.

I haven't played Halo 1 multiplayer on the PC in awhile. I think I'm going to do that now!

lol, have fun!

I agree with most of what you say here JkPwNsTeR... however, although I feel much more comfortable with Windows too, I must point out that I dislike it as much as I dislike OS X. And I think both of them are bloated.

In my opinion, sometime in the nineties computing went badly astray, and software companies stopped caring about the efficiency of their programs. I still remember how the Amiga OS kicked so much ass back in the late 80s, with great responsiveness and flawless pre-emptive multitasking, way before all the other OSs! And everything fitted on 3 little single-density disks... compare that with the "gigs of data" for a full Windows install (or whatever it takes on OS X), and you will see what I mean.
Nowadays, Operating Systems add abstraction layer over abstraction layer and become fatter and slower with each iteration. IMO, BeOS was the last really efficient and responsive OS, too bad it never became widely used.. now I'm waiting eagerly for Haiku R1 to come out, but it's taking ages..

Back to the Macs: have you seen the new MacBook and MacBook Pro announced this week? I'm usually an Apple hater (mostly because I hate the way they do business), but I was very impressed with those. And it seems that the Air is getting updated too (it has a Geforce 9400M now, and a few more things).

PS: I really like the looks of the Voodoo Envy 133, but it's even more expensive than the MacBook Air, for near-indentical specs (comparing to the first version of the Air)... I think I would go for a ThinkPad X200 instead

I would go for the ThinkPad X300. I actually wouldn't mind springing for an Apple laptop, but the price for the hardware that is "required" to run it is just ridiculous. I'm a power user as well, and I can't afford that significant performance dip. As for the new MacBook Air,

Originally Posted by Apple

The MacBook Air hard drive is now larger at 120GB. So now there’s plenty of storage space for your photos, movies,

120Gigs is the same amount of memory you would find in a Acer Aspire One netbook costing 350CAD.

Originally Posted by Apple

Think fast.

Inside the new MacBook Pro is the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processor running at speeds up to 2.8GHz. It’s based on groundbreaking 45-nm process technology and advanced Core microarchitecture. With the 1066MHz frontside bus and up to 6MB of shared L2 cache, MacBook Pro runs applications faster and more efficiently than ever before.

rofl, groundbreaking? For a Mac, sure. For a PC, no.

Originally Posted by Apple

Ports with possibilities.

MacBook Pro is iPod, iPhone, digital camera, and external hard drive ready. If it has a cable, there’s a place for it. You’ll find two USB 2.0 ports and a FireWire 800 port for connecting faster peripherals. The Mini DisplayPort is a perfect fit for the new Apple LED Cinema Display. MacBook Pro even understands what you plug in, so you don’t have to install new drivers.

Brag much? Where's my eSATA port? How about my HDMI port? I have 4 USB 2.0 ports on my $599 Sony VAIO, as well as a FireWire 400 port. As for the drivers, give me a show of hands how many of you Mac users actually know what a driver is.

Originally Posted by Apple

Advanced NVIDIA integrated graphics.

The NVIDIA GeForce 9400M brings amazing, high-speed graphics to MacBook Air. With up to a 4x graphics performance boost, graphics-intensive applications now run faster. Movie and video playback is now richer. Even Cover Flow flips more smoothly. It’s a quantum leap for MacBook Air graphics.

Originally Posted by Apple

The logic board in the new MacBook contains only two components: The CPU and a graphics processor with all of the core logic built into a single chip. That graphics processor is the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, and it helps MacBook reach new levels of gaming performance — without sacrificing battery life.

The Air and the regular MacBook use the same GPU? O.o? And "new levels of gaming performance"? Last time I checked, Macs are not for gaming. "Without sacrificing battery life"? Impossible, anything that is resource demanding needs more power. Also, the Macbook Air states that they'll see up to a 4x increase with gfx. The MacBook says up to 5x. Something just doesn't add up.

Originally Posted by Apple

Graphics Performance

The NVIDIA GeForce 9400M delivers up to 5x faster graphics performance.

Well, probably not if you didn't use a crappy one before.

And these games they're testing with, CoD 4 is the only recent one. Quake 4? Doom 3? UT2004? What the heck? These are 5 years old. Show me a consumer, not prosumer Mac that can play Crysis (Warhead) decently.

Steve Jobs really needs to have an ego-reducing operation.

I find that the Windows side of the computing community has much more freedom compared to Macs. Thousands of models compared to half a dozen, and hardware upgrades that aren't priced ludicrously are what makes a PC great.

Anyways, that's all I have to say for now.

I'm not impressed with the newest MacBook offerings. Even an Apple fanboy that I know said that the glass screens on the MacBook made it impossible to read outside and if you break it, it won't be cheap through Apple to repair.

Seriously, shiny gloss is not as good as matte, since matte blocks out glare and has less fingerprints. My laptop is a pain since I have to polish the screen every week so I can actually use it and not think that somewhere on my screen, there's a dead pixel.

Pros and cons...
Glare makes colours look more alive and real on the screen. It looks better for things like watching movies and playing games.

Glossy is mostly just for people who will mainly watch movies and use their laptop indoors. I prefer a matte display even for movies and gaming, the colors don't look terribly different to me.

With glossy, the cons outweigh the pros. If there is ANY light, the screen can be unreadable. So if you lived in your mom's basement, a glossy screen would be great for you.

Lol, why directly attacking my post and opinion Steve?

Do you have something personal against me? I said pros and cons didn't I?

No need to imply that I might live in my mothers basement....

How did I directly attack it? I was stating my opinion. I wasn't implying that you lived in your mom's basement, I was saying that as a joke that that is the only place that a glossy screen looks good (dark places with no light)

Kind of off topic, but do any of you guys play Descent 1 or 2? I haven't played a multiplayer match in a while.

That's almost like asking if anyone here plays Doom or Doom II. I doubt anyone here plays it.

You're so right about Apple. Not only the computers are bloated, so is the company itself.

Take, for example, the iPhone. There is NOTHING what you would use on a regular base that a normal phone can't do. Except for costing over 800 euro's. Specwise it's a horrible phone and the battery life is terrible. No, I'd prefer a decent HTC or a Meizu M8.

Now those iPods. I must confess, the Touch is a nice one. Yet the 'classic' ones (and I don't mean iPod Classic, just the ones with the touchPAD, not the touchSCREEN) are crapware. Starting off at the use of iTunes which is horrible software. When I tried it, iTunes decided to go and copy my entire music collection (30 GB by then) to my Program Files dir in AAC format. Who came up with that bullshit? Whoever that was needs to burn in hell. Then we come to the sound quality. I don't know how they do it, but it's even worse then a radio stream for example. It completely lacks midtones. Then you get those useless features like Coverflow. You don't use that to find music? An alfabetical list is way better.

Those Macbooks, seriously. Look at the specs? I can buy a similar laptop for 500 euro's. That is, if I can still find a laptop which is that slow. I really don't see the point in paying 2000 euro's for a laptop when the first Acer Aspire (600 euro's) beats it into Oblivion performancewise. Maybe to run the Mac OS on it? Brings me to the next point.

Mac OS X is chaos on a disc. It had to do everything just slightly different. The window controlls for example are on the left-top? Every single OS so far had them on the top right, then WHY change it? It's what people are used to, dammit. It's all those little things. And why on earth is the menu bar not attached to the window? If I want to do something in a different window's menu, I need to click the windows, move to the top, do whatever I want to do and get back down. It's pointless.

And indeed, Steve Jobs is in dire need of an ego-recuding operation. Also those fanboys he gather's around him on those keynotes. He only has to fart and people will apploud like they are watching a god. Al he can say is that it's great and it's better then Windows. Only point is, he obviously doesn't have a clue what the hell he's talking about. I saw him talking on about a new chip they 'invented' for the new Macbooks: the graphical processor and the northbridge will be in the same chip! Innovation! Revolution! No sir, it's called an IGP and has been around for ages.

Originally Posted by MartijnGP

Take, for example, the iPhone. There is NOTHING what you would use on a regular base that a normal phone can't do. Except for costing over 800 euro's. Specwise it's a horrible phone and the battery life is terrible. No, I'd prefer a decent HTC or a Meizu M8.

Depends where you live. A hacked imported iPhone goes for about 800 euros? Maybe. Either way, the plan for the regular iPhone 3Gs are ludicrously priced, it costs $130 here for an unlimited 3G plan.

Originally Posted by MartijnGP

Mac OS X is chaos on a disc. It had to do everything just slightly different. The window controls for example are on the left-top? Every single OS so far had them on the top right, then WHY change it? It's what people are used to, dammit. It's all those little things. And why on earth is the menu bar not attached to the window? If I want to do something in a different window's menu, I need to click the windows, move to the top, do whatever I want to do and get back down. It's pointless.

Well, Apple did pretty much invent the modern GUI you see today. Microsoft and Linux just made it into what you are use to using today.

You know, Macs and PC are like cats and dogs, like fire and water. You can't simply compare them, it's all about what appeals more to you.

I love my Creative Zen. I works great, is cheaper than an Ipod, and has lots more feature and is more practical. Creative Zen FTW!

Originally Posted by 22lambo

I love my Creative Zen. I works great, is cheaper than an Ipod, and has lots more feature and is more practical. Creative Zen FTW!

I agree 100%. I love my Creative Zen M! It's 3 years old and better than the crap that Apple still pushes out (5G and Classic).

Has the Classic even been updated? Didn't they downgrade from 160GB to 120GB?