I saw a sketch on Family Guy the other night where a gorilla had adopted a kitten and was stroking it lovingly. Then Peter said something on the lines of “see I told you she’d eventually adopt it as her own”. Then came into view a huge pile of kittens which the gorilla had previously torn in half.
It reminded me a bit of Microsoft OS’s. I don’t know that we should ever stop trusting MS but an OS is supposed to work of the bare metal – other than virtualisation there is no “abstraction layer”. Maybe MS was a bit slow off the mark but the advantage Apple has seems to be in part owed to their hardware and their OS and they kinda work well together. Maybe it wasn’t that they were slow off the mark and that strategically MS did well for itself by servicing a market that existed because that’s exactly what the general public wanted.
But where is the economy in buying either a Mac or a PC?
People see Macs as expensive – but they are not really. You can get yourself a PC for < £500 these days or you can pay £900+ for a Mac. It's a shame to be restricted to what can be afforded.
What I never really understood is this big organisation thing : "lets have a rule where everyone shuts down their PC's at night – or someone will do it for them!" and how much electricity that will save over a year. At one place calculated it to be around £70 per desktop per annum.
I always through that was nonsensical because the whole "starting up" in the "am" meant either being efficient and resourceful or (more likely) drinking coffee for an additional 10+ mins while the whole thing settled down before you could use it. Say a contractor costs the company £60/hour, it doesn't take long before the false economy of the situation is realisable.
As I dipped between a PC and a Mac earlier today, the cursor froze periodically, the fan kicked in and the virus checker took a chunk of CPU to keep me safe. I don't have to ask the question, "which one was I using when that happened?"
The bottom line is when using my Mac I don't have the frustrations a PC gives me – other than the hash and delete key restrictions of the Mac.
David H. said
(Hi Kev, missing Helsinki?)
A £400 price difference is a fortnight’s pay for some; a day’s for others (’course, you Documentum boys earn that before you’ve finished drinking your first cup of tea). But I could build a system—6-core 3.3GHz CPU, 32GB RAM, 2GB graphics, 3TB hdd, 256GB SSD, blu-ray burner, 27″ led monitor, etc.; all for under £3k. An equivalent system on the Apple website (but no blu-ray burner, SSD and lesser graphics) comes out at £4,258. Granted, building my own means I’ll end up surrounded by £3k of top-end PC components and going, ‘Why doesn’t the sodding USB work?’. But in between weeping, I will be much comforted knowing I’ve saved 1¼ grand.
PC, Mac… Without any processors or software, we used to build the finest ships and aircraft in the world; some *fridges* now have more processing power than the computer that took Apollo 11 to the moon—and what do we do with it?
(Good to see that you are still blogging, Kev.)
kevinyeandel said
Yo David I must gmail you when it gets light. Good to see you are still about and wondered where you had got to.
I think one of the major benefits of the Apple and iOS is the amount of time I don’t spend sitting around waiting for stuff and subsequently getting frustrated.
I like the way I plug stuff in and it just works. It doesn’t freeze when I plug in a new device – it just spends a couple of seconds installing it.
I plugged a 2TB drive in the USB3 and Time Machine keeps everything safe. It doesn’t slow down with more apps and the registry doesn’t get dirty.
In short, my belief it it’s false economy for any company to invest in a product when the users have to spend time getting frustrated having to reboot periodically because the virus checker or Windows Updates insists.
Granted Bill Gates is a generous sort and I do like many MS products, like PowerShell and MS Office – I just think the OS sucks and there’s better stuff out there.
Catch up later.
Kevin
David H. said
If you dislike current versions of Windows, wait until you play with Windows 8… Armies make their soldiers practice with bayonets to teach them aggression; they could sack that and make them use Windows 8 — an hour on that would turn a nun into a killer. Truly, truly awful. Oh, well, just have to wait for Windows 9.5.
kevinyeandel said
Just installed Classic Shell from sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/classicshell/?source=dlp Want to see how that goes. Been using Windows 8 for a few weeks now and not at all sold on its awful start button and the tablet-orientated UI.Apple got it right, MS got it wrong as far as I am concerned