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I have no real interest in convincing you or anyone else for that matter to switch to a Mac. I'm just making the observation that people from the outside (incl

by pcc 17y ago

I have no real interest in convincing you or anyone else for that matter to switch to a Mac. I'm just making the observation that people from the outside (including myself before I started using Mac), seem to gravitate to certain arguments that seem "obvious", like the cost, or that Apple attempts to "control" what users can do; which now in hindsight seem pretty irrelevant to me. I know from experience that its next to impossible to describe to people the details of the benefits. I have a very long list of small things that just make me smile. I can't speak to how relevant those things might be to you. Also, you might not ascribe a huge amount of value to any individual point (neither might I), but they certainly add up for me. And for a fact I know that anyone could say "well you could achieve pretty much anything on that list by just adding software xx to your Windows machine or by knowing about some <nonobvious> feature" -- but part of the point is precisely that I can do these things without spending time on googling / looking for / figuring out / configuring. In other words - yes I can get stuff done faster because I can focus more on "stuff" and less on fighting with my machine. For example: 1. My Mac laptop is the first machine I've ever owned that goes to sleep and wakes up properly. I almost never turn it off. Saves me tons of time as I can get working immediately. 1b. Your question about iWork: From time to time I suddenly have the need to do word processing that's more like "page layout" but not enough to warrant buying a "proper" tool for this (eg oftentimes this happens in the context of a technical report or proposal). Ever tried doing "page layout" in Word / OpenOffice? In Pages I can flow text automatically between boxes, position images precisely, even pull the background out of an image and flow the text around the "inside" part of the image, without fiddling around with frames, anchors etc. 2. I was recently playing with a VoIP wireless phone that supports limited options for wireless security. Every time I would switch a parameter on the AP (eg from TKIP to AES, or WPA-PSK2 to WPA-PSK), I would need to reconfigure the network connection on my wife's Windows laptop, while my Mac reconnected automatically. 3. I recently had to ferry my son about town and ended up having precisely 45 minutes to get work done stuck in a place I'd never been before. I connected my iPhone to my Mac, turned "internet tethering" on, and instantly could get working. Even though this was the first time I had ever tried doing that, I could actually use the full 45 minutes for work. I still recall the times I had done that with my previous set-ups, and vividly recall the wasted time figuring out how to get everything talking. 4. If I suddenly need to grab a screenshot of part of the screen, I just press shift-cmd-4. 5. If I need a calculator, I just press f4 6. If I connect a second screen, projector or whatever, sensible things tend to happen. 7. PDF production is a snap. 8. Any "color selection" dialog allows me to pick up a color from anywhere on the screen. 9. Multitouch scrolling saves a ton of time. 10. I have a real unix terminal available that understands sensible commands like ssh / ifconfig / python, again without having to lift a finger to install anything. 11. Once or twice I've needed to ssh -X to a remote machine, and again, it just works without any further installs required. 12. We were taking my son skating and a lady kindly agreed to snap a little video; only she ended up holding the camera in portrait mode. Correcting that with the built-in software was a breeze (further noting that at the time I had used Windows Movie Maker far more extensively than iMovie on the Mac) 13. When I get home I plug in my external harddrive (and that is it). Backups are seamless, and I never had to do much thinking or configuring. etc etc. I could go on and on but frankly I don't have the time. And I know from experience the type of response to this: "yes, but..." I used to be precisely the same way when arguing with my Mac-adherent colleagues. Today,given the choice between a $0 PC and a $3000 Mac Laptop, 9 times out of 10 I would opt to pay for the Mac. (I should also note that I do a ton of embedded linux work, so I spend a lot of time inside linux; these days my preferred environment for this is inside VirtualBox on my Mac laptop).

elblanco 17y ago
I'll respond to each item as well...please bear in mind, the original post that started this thread was "Apple could offer a 'lite' MacOSX inside a virtualized environment (like VMWare 'appliances') for Windows, to give more potential "switchers" a taste before their first Apple hardware purchase." and my response was "They'd have to stop the practice of charging for every single minor point release update of their OS." Which is still finding downvotes from people who apparently have unlimited piles of money at their command. My longer reply to that was an explanation that to consumers, cost is a factor, and among competing equivalent alternatives, the cheaper buy usually wins. This is proven out by simple observation and yet that post is also in negative score territory. If Apple isn't willing to listen to what consumers are saying, they will stay in sub-10% market share forever. I'm trying to reply thoughtfully, like you are, but still am getting hammered by fanboys. I have a year old Mac Book pro sitting next to me that I haven't even bothered to turn on in six months simply because it doesn't do half of the stuff I need to do without either starting up Parallels or booting into XP. And then once I'm in Windows have a degraded experience because quite simply I'm using hardware designed for a different OS. It's not that the hardware is bad, or OS X is bad, it's that I can't do what I need to do in that environment. 1. So does my $300 netbook. 1b. Yes, agreed, Word is the wrong tool to do desktop publishy kind of things. That's why most versions of Office (at least the ones I've used) come with a tool called Publisher. That being said, Macs do do a better job for preparing print media. Working years ago in the print industry it was easy to see that Apple did a better job paying attention to all the little things related to font flow and layout and WYSIWYG to printer support etc. You'll get no argument out of me. However, I and most people I know aren't in the print industry and this isn't really much of a selling point. In addition, iWorks offers lousy support for the majority of the document formats I (and most people I know) have to deal with, that being Office documents. It's "there", but isn't really great for complex documents, necessitating buying Office 2008 anyways. 2. I've had equally frustrating network problems with my Mac when I was using it. Usually just had to boot into Windows to resolve it. It may have been just me and lack of familiarity with how OS X does it's networking stuff, but I gave it a solid six months, and still couldn't connect at various offices, coffee shops, book stores, libraries, without spending 20-30 minutes to get it to sync up. My $500 Windows Laptop has almost never failed to connect anywhere I've ever taken it. If I have to spend more than 5 minutes to get connected to some oddball network, it's very rare. 3. Funny, this seems to be about your iPhone not your Mac. I'm setup the same way on my PC. 4. Screenshots of stuff in Windows are a hair behind OS X. Prnt Scrn gets the whole screen, alt-Prnt Scrn gets the current window in focus. Doesn't do partial shots without extra software or cropping. 5. Same here, mine is ctrl + alt + c, but I could move it to f4 if something else wasn't using it. 6. me 2. Actually, one of the things that precipitated me to stop using my mac book pro was that it had trouble connecting to stuff. That and having to carry around an adapter cable so I could hook into the universe of VGA only projectors I seem to encounter everyday. What finally was the nail in the coffin was when this little "problem" cost me a deal and I lost quite a bit of money to it. I gave Apple six months of my time and couldn't get it sorted out. 7. Same here. I can make a PDF out of any app in seconds. Office 2007 has native PDF export also. Not interesting. 8. That's a nice feature. I do wish that Windows apps were more consistent about their color pickers. 9. It's "alright". I'm glad to see them mainlining back into the desktop. A few folks I know absolutely would not buy a Mac Desktop because they would loose multi-touch. But it's a double edged sword, Apple fought for decades to keep only one button on the mouse because users were "confused" with two. The tradeoff was that for years all the stuff that's available through right clicks had to be performed on a Mac with some combination of keys the users had to remember cmd+shift+k then l or some such nonsense. Multi-touch also is going to be tough for much of the population to become acclimated to due to having to remember various gestures and such (was flick three fingers or two?). I like Apple's physics in their multi-touch, but most of the multi-touch stuff I've found to be slower than equivalent mousing. 10 & 11. You've just advertised why I should "switch" to Ubuntu. With the $0 figure associated with that, Linux is even more tempting. In addition, just like with the mice, Apple fought for decades to keep the command line out of their systems. It was only when desperate for a working Kernel after the previous OS rewrite-debacle did an nix core make sense. The benefit? Easy ports of software written for free Linux. It worked out well though, Microsoft's out-of-the-box command line is geriatric. More importantly, the average user will never see the command line. It's nice that it's there, but if you can do useful things with ifconfig, you can install such software yourself also. 12. iMovie is a nice app. That was one of the only apps I really miss on my Mac. Comparing it to Movie Maker is insulting to iMovie. 13. I have a different backup system, conf wasn't really a big deal, and use my external hard drive for more storage. Different strokes for different folks. 14. Virtualbox on my PC runs Ubuntu perfectly fine as well. Look, I understand that "lots of little things" have added up to you to make it a nice environment for you to surf the web, look at photos and write reports in. That's great. What my point is is that to the average consumer, "lots of little things" != "why I should pay a fairly large price premium to switch". At this point I'm getting downvoted hard by people that don't understand this and for providing reasonable and honest insight into why people don't switch. I could go along with this and say "OMG Apple is AWEZ00m! M$ Sux0rz" and get some easy upvotes. But this is HN, I'm guessing most people on here have some minimal understand of basic business practices -- and that's what we are talking about. Consumers operate according to sometimes rational reasons. "Using a Mac will make you feel* better" is not a rational reason to spend 2x the money. Nobody can say "if you buy a Mac you can do this thing that you can't do on PCs" And more importantly (at least to my mind) nobody can even say "if you buy a Mac you can do all the same stuff you can do on a PC but at a better price point!". Because it isn't even remotely close to true. The PC ecosystem is so cheap these days that even absolutely free alternatives like Ubuntu look expensive in terms of time spent to switch. I agree, the Apple ecosystem is compelling, but Toyota didn't beat GM by building better and equivalent cars and charging a 200% price premium. And Hyundai isn't on the upswing because of the Apple model either. My thrust is that most consumers, and I am using myself as a model here, don't see the price as making sense. Apple can't even make a rational case, their advertising copy is full of last year's features and appeals to "coolness" and "smartness". I don't care about being cool, and I really don't think that my doorstop Mac Book Pro was a smart purchase. I really wish I had that $2,300 + cost of Software back to keep me stocked with PCs for the next decade.

by pcc 17y ago

elblanco 17y ago

I'll respond to each item as well...please bear in mind, the original post that started this thread was "Apple could offer a 'lite' MacOSX inside a virtualized environment (like VMWare 'appliances') for Windows, to give more potential "switchers" a taste before their first Apple hardware purchase." and my response was "They'd have to stop the practice of charging for every single minor point release update of their OS." Which is still finding downvotes from people who apparently have unlimited piles of money at their command. My longer reply to that was an explanation that to consumers, cost is a factor, and among competing equivalent alternatives, the cheaper buy usually wins. This is proven out by simple observation and yet that post is also in negative score territory. If Apple isn't willing to listen to what consumers are saying, they will stay in sub-10% market share forever. I'm trying to reply thoughtfully, like you are, but still am getting hammered by fanboys. I have a year old Mac Book pro sitting next to me that I haven't even bothered to turn on in six months simply because it doesn't do half of the stuff I need to do without either starting up Parallels or booting into XP. And then once I'm in Windows have a degraded experience because quite simply I'm using hardware designed for a different OS. It's not that the hardware is bad, or OS X is bad, it's that I can't do what I need to do in that environment. 1. So does my $300 netbook. 1b. Yes, agreed, Word is the wrong tool to do desktop publishy kind of things. That's why most versions of Office (at least the ones I've used) come with a tool called Publisher. That being said, Macs do do a better job for preparing print media. Working years ago in the print industry it was easy to see that Apple did a better job paying attention to all the little things related to font flow and layout and WYSIWYG to printer support etc. You'll get no argument out of me. However, I and most people I know aren't in the print industry and this isn't really much of a selling point. In addition, iWorks offers lousy support for the majority of the document formats I (and most people I know) have to deal with, that being Office documents. It's "there", but isn't really great for complex documents, necessitating buying Office 2008 anyways. 2. I've had equally frustrating network problems with my Mac when I was using it. Usually just had to boot into Windows to resolve it. It may have been just me and lack of familiarity with how OS X does it's networking stuff, but I gave it a solid six months, and still couldn't connect at various offices, coffee shops, book stores, libraries, without spending 20-30 minutes to get it to sync up. My $500 Windows Laptop has almost never failed to connect anywhere I've ever taken it. If I have to spend more than 5 minutes to get connected to some oddball network, it's very rare. 3. Funny, this seems to be about your iPhone not your Mac. I'm setup the same way on my PC. 4. Screenshots of stuff in Windows are a hair behind OS X. Prnt Scrn gets the whole screen, alt-Prnt Scrn gets the current window in focus. Doesn't do partial shots without extra software or cropping. 5. Same here, mine is ctrl + alt + c, but I could move it to f4 if something else wasn't using it. 6. me 2. Actually, one of the things that precipitated me to stop using my mac book pro was that it had trouble connecting to stuff. That and having to carry around an adapter cable so I could hook into the universe of VGA only projectors I seem to encounter everyday. What finally was the nail in the coffin was when this little "problem" cost me a deal and I lost quite a bit of money to it. I gave Apple six months of my time and couldn't get it sorted out. 7. Same here. I can make a PDF out of any app in seconds. Office 2007 has native PDF export also. Not interesting. 8. That's a nice feature. I do wish that Windows apps were more consistent about their color pickers. 9. It's "alright". I'm glad to see them mainlining back into the desktop. A few folks I know absolutely would not buy a Mac Desktop because they would loose multi-touch. But it's a double edged sword, Apple fought for decades to keep only one button on the mouse because users were "confused" with two. The tradeoff was that for years all the stuff that's available through right clicks had to be performed on a Mac with some combination of keys the users had to remember cmd+shift+k then l or some such nonsense. Multi-touch also is going to be tough for much of the population to become acclimated to due to having to remember various gestures and such (was flick three fingers or two?). I like Apple's physics in their multi-touch, but most of the multi-touch stuff I've found to be slower than equivalent mousing. 10 & 11. You've just advertised why I should "switch" to Ubuntu. With the $0 figure associated with that, Linux is even more tempting. In addition, just like with the mice, Apple fought for decades to keep the command line out of their systems. It was only when desperate for a working Kernel after the previous OS rewrite-debacle did an nix core make sense. The benefit? Easy ports of software written for free Linux. It worked out well though, Microsoft's out-of-the-box command line is geriatric. More importantly, the average user will never see the command line. It's nice that it's there, but if you can do useful things with ifconfig, you can install such software yourself also. 12. iMovie is a nice app. That was one of the only apps I really miss on my Mac. Comparing it to Movie Maker is insulting to iMovie. 13. I have a different backup system, conf wasn't really a big deal, and use my external hard drive for more storage. Different strokes for different folks. 14. Virtualbox on my PC runs Ubuntu perfectly fine as well. Look, I understand that "lots of little things" have added up to you to make it a nice environment for you to surf the web, look at photos and write reports in. That's great. What my point is is that to the average consumer, "lots of little things" != "why I should pay a fairly large price premium to switch". At this point I'm getting downvoted hard by people that don't understand this and for providing reasonable and honest insight into why people don't switch. I could go along with this and say "OMG Apple is AWEZ00m! M$ Sux0rz" and get some easy upvotes. But this is HN, I'm guessing most people on here have some minimal understand of basic business practices -- and that's what we are talking about. Consumers operate according to sometimes rational reasons. "Using a Mac will make you feel* better" is not a rational reason to spend 2x the money. Nobody can say "if you buy a Mac you can do this thing that you can't do on PCs" And more importantly (at least to my mind) nobody can even say "if you buy a Mac you can do all the same stuff you can do on a PC but at a better price point!". Because it isn't even remotely close to true. The PC ecosystem is so cheap these days that even absolutely free alternatives like Ubuntu look expensive in terms of time spent to switch. I agree, the Apple ecosystem is compelling, but Toyota didn't beat GM by building better and equivalent cars and charging a 200% price premium. And Hyundai isn't on the upswing because of the Apple model either. My thrust is that most consumers, and I am using myself as a model here, don't see the price as making sense. Apple can't even make a rational case, their advertising copy is full of last year's features and appeals to "coolness" and "smartness". I don't care about being cool, and I really don't think that my doorstop Mac Book Pro was a smart purchase. I really wish I had that $2,300 + cost of Software back to keep me stocked with PCs for the next decade.