h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A machine which should by now have dominated the computer market.

They have been making a beautifull and easy to use product since 1984.
But have seemingly had no intersestin making a profit.

This is admirable, because a rival competitor , with less integrity, has been around for a similar amount of time and is only a couple of years away from world domination.

He has achieved this by releasing inferior software. Nobody minds though because they have never used a Macintosh and just accept what they are given.

In the year 1999 though Apple inadvertantly released a product that sold quite well. Not sure what to do next they re-released the same product in different colours to see if that would confuse the public, unfortunately for Apple these sold even better than the previous model which was only available in blue.

A shift has started to occur which will mean that Apple will soon dominate the computer market
If Apple keep on selling everyone might well have a sensible, reliable, friendly PC that says hello with a smile.
 

Amen.

A lot of anti Mac bias to be taken care of first though.

The Macintosh is a superb system. I have been using one sice 1990 and wouldn't have it any other way. When ever I see an anit-Mac message, I wonder "why". But, things are getting better

I have found that most people who claim to "hate" Macs, have rarely, if ever, used one and simply base their predujice on ignorance, like all bigotry. I think this is slowly changing, I hope it is. At the end of the day if they haven't seen the light, as it were, that really is there loss.

Sorry about the spelling mistakes in my last enry. I get messy with my spelling when I'm passionate about something.

And do PC owners ever get passionate about their machines?

What is there about PC's to be passionate about?

Absolutely. I bought a new wintel PC this year, purely because of the investment in software and understanding I'd already put into the platform. My brother around the same time bought a G3, and its immediately "I want one"
Have you looked at the Y2K info page at Apple, it quotes something along the lines of the money wasted on Y2K "upgrading" is enough to buy an iMac for every US citizen. But that is at retail price and if you are buying that many we'd probably give a discount.

There was a test run recently, it's a bit of Apple PR, but it is based on fact. They gave a Microsoft engineer a P.C. in a box and a young lad a mac in a box. The task was to set them up and get them working as quickly as possible. The microsoft engineer had done a practice the day before, the young lad had only been given the briefest instructions. The young lad completed the task in less than an hour ( if I remember correctly), the engineer had so many problems, he gave up after several hours. Says a lot.

Agreed. I currently support two computer rooms, one Mac based, (old G3s, and 4400s, so slow jobs there), and one PC based, (PII, PIII, buckets o'RAM).

Two points to make here:

1) The PC Win98 boxes are continually having problems tying in to the network, and are not remarkably fast. (PII 266, 333, and PIII 450MHZ beasts). Still trying to solve this. Macs, no prob, even on to an NT Server!

2) The PCs and Macs both are using Photoshop 4. The Macs all beat the pants off the PCs, with slower speed processors, and less RAM.


And the point about Mac phobia is very true! A student, (his name shall remain nameless), continually complains that 'Macs are s**t'. Yet in the next sentence will admit he has never used one.......

I'm glad you said that, as a technician, you'd think people would believe me when I say that Macs are more reliable, faster and generally easier to use, but everyday people ask that question, aren't PC's better because everyone has one? D'oh! What kind of logic do they operate on? My reply has to be: If everyone laid down in the road in rush hour traffic, is it still the right thing to do? Bill Gates has a lot to answer for.

I agree. Following on from that, you could ask them if that means Ford Escorts are better than Ferraris, because everyone else has got one.

I had the same thing yesterday, the students' reasoning that the Mac was crap was..........that it didn't have an eject button! Good ere innit?


Incidentally, what does everyone think of the new iMac colour - Graphite?

I'm gonna reserve judgement until I see it in the flesh, but isn't graphite a flash word for grey?

Well..........................yes.


But it DOES look sexy, DVD drive, etc.

I've wandered in to this forum, so I'll put my tupnyworth in.

I have to start by saying I like PCs and use windows. However! I have used, be trained on, and done tech support for macs, and I like them too!

The problem with macs is simply that they are quite expensive, are hard to upgrade (a problem apple seem to delight in making worse), and there is not as much support for them as the wintel platform.

I used powermacs in a design/print environment where they are bloody brilliant. However, where I work now, we run windows NT, which has been properly configured (by me!) and works very well in the business environment. NT is easy to configure if you know what you are doing. My opinion is that there is far too much 'computers are easy, lets everybody have a go' around. To setup a computer to behave in the correct fashion is not easy. I'm glad, cause otherwise I'd be out of a job.

I admit that macs tend to be easier to 'plug and pray'. However, in a real business situation, they can be just as much of a pain as windows.

In most situations, vhs has won over beta, so to speak. windows is cheaper, far, far more widespread and has manufacturers support. Apple are doing very well at a come back from near dead, but I really can't see most people throwing away pcs and buying all macs.

H&K
Z

What about the US Army who recently dumped Windows NT in favour of Mac's running StaNine's WebSTAR sever software. Mac's are not expensive they are merely better quality. The saying you get what you pay for springs to mind. Having said that the new entry level G4 is a modestly priced machine for it's capabilities. Not bad for a Supercomputer.
Macs are not difficult to upgrade in the physical sense, especially nowadays, the handy little hatch door at the side that allows you instant access to the internal Mac. The availability of upgrade hardware is never a real problem. There is already a G4 upgrade chip on the market. However, the other side to this is that nowadays there is very little need to upgrade the Mac, because they are already faster, more stable and more capable than many, if not all PCs.

and the US navy who ran a whole ship on NT & got stuck cos it crashed and they were stranded? no software is perfect and things are better suited to a task than others.

sorry, macs are expensive. they're good, very good, but ya gotta compete in the world, and apple are slowly coming round to this. I hope they come alot further and really give wintel a run for their (our, the consumers!) money, that could only be good for everybody. The G4's should be good, but I take it you're joking when you call them superputers.

physically upgrading wasn't what I meant, though nothing beats the latest dell optiplexs. I've fitted a new scsi card in under 30 secs, with out moving the box from under the users desk! puters will always need upgrading, its a technological cycle.

H&K
Z

The G4 HAS been commented on by many British journals, and called a 'supercomputer'. It has already been hailed by the Personal Computer World magazine as the 'fasted computer ever', with over 1 billion floating point ops, per second.

The new G4 computers are more powerful than their PC counterpart, but you are quite right, they will not get majority share a: because of cost and b: because now every man and his dog runs Microsoft software.

Here's a little bit of useless info though. The iMac has had a massive influence on PC manmufacturers. Why I hear you cry, well.....


1) You can get self build towers in the colours of the iMac flavours.

2) Get a copy of Personal Computer World (December 99). There is an ad for (I think) Hewlett Packard, but don't sue me on that! It features a paint style hand print, with each segment in 6 different colours, can you guess. Fingers - Red, Orange, Green, Purple, Blue, and the palm a lighter blue. (Bondi Blue.....?) Subliminal message?

I agree, its about time puters came in better cases & the imac look has created the demand. Apple are having a whale of a time suing the arse off of any number of rippoffs, and good for them too!

I'll just never buy the idea of any form of desktop being a superputer, but that cause I've been beating sense into puters half my life, and I remember when they were serious bits of kit (insert dribbling old fart ramble here).

The insane rantings of journos aside, real superputer are liquid cooled and have more processors than a mac has transistors

H&K
Z

According to my sources, a computer is defibed as a supercomputer when it can perform 1 billion floating point operations per second. (1 Gigaflop). Somenthing that the G4 does, which therefore would mean it can be classified as a Supercomputer.

Anyway, I think thinks are getting that way anyway, supercooled etc. How long befored we stick our PCs in the deep freeze????