5 ms·

I agree, even if you hate windows, a Linux box is much more cheaper than anything mac has to offer for the same price range. Admit it guys, mac has done a dece

by ardit33 18y ago

I agree, even if you hate windows, a Linux box is much more cheaper than anything mac has to offer for the same price range. Admit it guys, mac has done a decent job in polishing the user interface,and overrall experience, but it has done even a better job in marketing. A good chunk of your money is buying a brand name, and contrubuting to Apple's higher margins. While the PC world is just much more cut-throat.

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
mechanical_fish 18y ago
A good chunk of your money is buying a brand name, and contributing to Apple's higher margins. Ah, but the question is: Which chunk? How much of the money buys the brand, and how much buys the OS? The answer is that we aren't allowed to know. So the question doesn't really come into play. It's clear that if you could save money by buying a box without Apple's brand, or their industrial design, but with the Mac OS a lot of people would be interested. Probably including me. But that's not Apple's game plan, for good reasons that were explored back in the Mac clone era, a time when (probably not by coincidence) the company nearly went out of business. As it is, you're stuck with the whole package. So the question is: How much is the Mac OS worth to you? Given that even if I accept all of this guy's arguments the price difference is of order $600 to $800 -- less than 10 hours of my time -- the Mac OS doesn't have to save me much time or pain at all over the lifetime of the machine to justify the higher cost. The real lesson here is that both PC and Mac hardware are cheap. Compared to many people's time, hardware is cheap. Compared to a developer's time it is really, really cheap. The Mac-PC pricing flame war is obsolete; it's a relic from the Elder Days when Macs cost $3000 to $5000 and didn't even run Unix.
- thorax 18y ago
  I disagree a lot on the relevancy of prices. When you're a startup or a family looking to buy a handful of machines, the extra $800 adds up quickly to cut in half (roughly) the number of machines you can afford. Do I get a Mac for me or do I get a PC for both my wife and myself? Do I put off upgrading some employees to more modern hardware or buy fewer of them Macs? I really do want to use more Macs around here, but the economics don't make sense at the current price points. I welcome a drop in price which could get Mac a great deal of marketshare.
  - thorax 18y ago
    Which makes me wonder if we're going to see something crazy: What if Apple's new announcement this year will be a lower-priced Mac notebook with built-in 3G-- price-subsidized by carriers to make it feel more competitive? How many of you would buy the Macbook 3G?
    - elai 18y ago
      It more depends on the carriers than the laptop. Many laptops have a "built in 3g" card option to order, but it's not significantly popular outside of business due to carrier retardation.
    - netcan 18y ago
      I wouldn't be surprised if apple is considering that route. Especially now after they've successfully bamboozled carriers with the iphone. But I actually think that the cheap ultra-portables (eg Eee) wuld have the edge here. If we take the mobile phone industry as a guide, the carriers will probably pay up to about $150 - $250 to get you on a $30 - $50 p/m plan. That doesn't make too much dent in an Air. If you bundle it with home broadband plan (maybe they'd subsidise $300) they could give out mini laptops for free or at $100 or so. Apple is actually in a spot. Experience & connections with carriers that no one else has, but no product to which a few 100s makes much of a difference.
axod 18y ago
Before I bought a Mac, a year and a bit ago, I used Linux on a variety of laptops. Most brands (Sony,IBM,Toshiba,Dell etc). I spent a sizable chunk of time fighting with hardware, drivers, whatever sweeping changes the linux devs decided to implement that broke everything... Since owning a mac, I have the power of linux, but it just works. It's known fixed hardware. Of course it's going to work properly. I remember spending a day fixing the crap the linux devs piled on me when they decided to replace /dev with the udev system or something. Then there was some update to libc which broke everything on my system. Those days aren't fun days. I remember spending ages trying to get wifi adapters to work properly under linux. For some, this may be enjoyable, productive work. Definitely if you're into hardware, or trying to learn linux, but I can't imagine the advantage of having linux on the desktop over OSX. Obviously I have Ubuntu within parallels on my MacBook just incase I want to have an exact server environment or something...
- SwellJoe 18y ago
  I'll point out that it is now possible to buy laptops, from several vendors, pre-installed with Linux. Lenovo makes several ThinkPad models with Linux, Dell has three or four models, as well. And they cost less than their Windows-running twins, generally. So, you have the power of Linux, and it just works. The biggest source of trouble for me with Linux has always been wireless drivers, because manufacturers are so tight with their specs...Intel has a fully open WiFi chipset, and it's the one included in all of these "for Linux" systems, and it works really well. I remember spending a day fixing the crap the linux devs piled on me when they decided to replace /dev with the udev system or something. Yeah, I remember that day, too, but only because I was interested in it. My distribution upgraded without a hitch, and I wouldn't have even noticed the difference if I weren't specifically doing development work on a kernel driver that had a device interface. Then there was some update to libc which broke everything on my system. Never happened. Unless you're using some oddball build-your-own Linux, libc is not going to be upgraded in an incompatible way. No distro worth a damn would do that, and I'm absolutely certain that Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, Debian, and Ubuntu have never broken everything on your system by providing an incompatible libc version. You did that to yourself, either by using a crazytown distro without proper dependency management (though I can't think of one that has ever broken libc in the way you describe) or by replacing libc manually and against the better judgment of your package management tools. I'm not saying Linux is foolproof (obviously, it isn't), but if you choose a well-supported distribution, and follow its recommended upgrade processes, you will simply never see the problems you're describing. I've managed Macs, and I can say with confidence that they are no friendlier after an upgrade than a Linux system. You know they've changed their user management system in pretty dramatically incompatible ways several times since OS X was released? Even recently, one user related weirdness led to a friends laptop becoming completely unusable (it was in a sort of death loop seemingly trying to start the login process)...the only advice we could find on the web was to restore from backups--I poked around in single user mode, but couldn't make much sense of it, so I didn't touch anything. She handed it off to the Google techstop folks, who worked on it all day, and finally wiped it and reinstalled the OS. Perhaps all parties involved are just idiots...but it seems to me that things can go wrong with Macs, as well, and you've just not had time to run into it.

by ardit33 18y ago

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

mechanical_fish 18y ago

A good chunk of your money is buying a brand name, and contributing to Apple's higher margins. Ah, but the question is: Which chunk? How much of the money buys the brand, and how much buys the OS? The answer is that we aren't allowed to know. So the question doesn't really come into play. It's clear that if you could save money by buying a box without Apple's brand, or their industrial design, but with the Mac OS a lot of people would be interested. Probably including me. But that's not Apple's game plan, for good reasons that were explored back in the Mac clone era, a time when (probably not by coincidence) the company nearly went out of business. As it is, you're stuck with the whole package. So the question is: How much is the Mac OS worth to you? Given that even if I accept all of this guy's arguments the price difference is of order $600 to $800 -- less than 10 hours of my time -- the Mac OS doesn't have to save me much time or pain at all over the lifetime of the machine to justify the higher cost. The real lesson here is that both PC and Mac hardware are cheap. Compared to many people's time, hardware is cheap. Compared to a developer's time it is really, really cheap. The Mac-PC pricing flame war is obsolete; it's a relic from the Elder Days when Macs cost $3000 to $5000 and didn't even run Unix.

thorax 18y ago
I disagree a lot on the relevancy of prices. When you're a startup or a family looking to buy a handful of machines, the extra $800 adds up quickly to cut in half (roughly) the number of machines you can afford. Do I get a Mac for me or do I get a PC for both my wife and myself? Do I put off upgrading some employees to more modern hardware or buy fewer of them Macs? I really do want to use more Macs around here, but the economics don't make sense at the current price points. I welcome a drop in price which could get Mac a great deal of marketshare.
- thorax 18y ago
  Which makes me wonder if we're going to see something crazy: What if Apple's new announcement this year will be a lower-priced Mac notebook with built-in 3G-- price-subsidized by carriers to make it feel more competitive? How many of you would buy the Macbook 3G?
  - elai 18y ago
    It more depends on the carriers than the laptop. Many laptops have a "built in 3g" card option to order, but it's not significantly popular outside of business due to carrier retardation.
  - netcan 18y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if apple is considering that route. Especially now after they've successfully bamboozled carriers with the iphone. But I actually think that the cheap ultra-portables (eg Eee) wuld have the edge here. If we take the mobile phone industry as a guide, the carriers will probably pay up to about $150 - $250 to get you on a $30 - $50 p/m plan. That doesn't make too much dent in an Air. If you bundle it with home broadband plan (maybe they'd subsidise $300) they could give out mini laptops for free or at $100 or so. Apple is actually in a spot. Experience & connections with carriers that no one else has, but no product to which a few 100s makes much of a difference.

axod 18y ago

Before I bought a Mac, a year and a bit ago, I used Linux on a variety of laptops. Most brands (Sony,IBM,Toshiba,Dell etc). I spent a sizable chunk of time fighting with hardware, drivers, whatever sweeping changes the linux devs decided to implement that broke everything... Since owning a mac, I have the power of linux, but it just works. It's known fixed hardware. Of course it's going to work properly. I remember spending a day fixing the crap the linux devs piled on me when they decided to replace /dev with the udev system or something. Then there was some update to libc which broke everything on my system. Those days aren't fun days. I remember spending ages trying to get wifi adapters to work properly under linux. For some, this may be enjoyable, productive work. Definitely if you're into hardware, or trying to learn linux, but I can't imagine the advantage of having linux on the desktop over OSX. Obviously I have Ubuntu within parallels on my MacBook just incase I want to have an exact server environment or something...

SwellJoe 18y ago
I'll point out that it is now possible to buy laptops, from several vendors, pre-installed with Linux. Lenovo makes several ThinkPad models with Linux, Dell has three or four models, as well. And they cost less than their Windows-running twins, generally. So, you have the power of Linux, and it just works. The biggest source of trouble for me with Linux has always been wireless drivers, because manufacturers are so tight with their specs...Intel has a fully open WiFi chipset, and it's the one included in all of these "for Linux" systems, and it works really well. I remember spending a day fixing the crap the linux devs piled on me when they decided to replace /dev with the udev system or something. Yeah, I remember that day, too, but only because I was interested in it. My distribution upgraded without a hitch, and I wouldn't have even noticed the difference if I weren't specifically doing development work on a kernel driver that had a device interface. Then there was some update to libc which broke everything on my system. Never happened. Unless you're using some oddball build-your-own Linux, libc is not going to be upgraded in an incompatible way. No distro worth a damn would do that, and I'm absolutely certain that Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, Debian, and Ubuntu have never broken everything on your system by providing an incompatible libc version. You did that to yourself, either by using a crazytown distro without proper dependency management (though I can't think of one that has ever broken libc in the way you describe) or by replacing libc manually and against the better judgment of your package management tools. I'm not saying Linux is foolproof (obviously, it isn't), but if you choose a well-supported distribution, and follow its recommended upgrade processes, you will simply never see the problems you're describing. I've managed Macs, and I can say with confidence that they are no friendlier after an upgrade than a Linux system. You know they've changed their user management system in pretty dramatically incompatible ways several times since OS X was released? Even recently, one user related weirdness led to a friends laptop becoming completely unusable (it was in a sort of death loop seemingly trying to start the login process)...the only advice we could find on the web was to restore from backups--I poked around in single user mode, but couldn't make much sense of it, so I didn't touch anything. She handed it off to the Google techstop folks, who worked on it all day, and finally wiped it and reinstalled the OS. Perhaps all parties involved are just idiots...but it seems to me that things can go wrong with Macs, as well, and you've just not had time to run into it.