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American Khatru
Forum Senior Member
Joined: March 28 2009
Location: New York
Status: Offline
Points: 732
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Posted: November 13 2009 at 06:14 |
Hey, OP here. Very interesting to see where this thing has gone. Just curious, why do you think you don't use a Mac, or that more people don't use Mac? Co$t Interface Loyalty(whether that makes you sane or crazy, I don't know)
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Why must my spell-checker continually underline the word "prog"?
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Dean
Special Collaborator
Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout
Joined: May 13 2007
Location: Europe
Status: Offline
Points: 37575
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Posted: November 13 2009 at 07:08 |
American Khatru wrote:
Hey, OP here. Very interesting to see where this thing has gone. Just curious, why do you think you don't use a Mac, or that more people don't use Mac? Co$t Interface Loyalty(whether that makes you sane or crazy, I don't know)
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I think a lot of this had to do with target markets - in the early days Mac's were specifically targeted at Graphic Artists and Musicians (after the demise of Atari St the Mac became the preferred Midi platform) this was a distinctly different market to the Apple II and one where it could excel over the PC, whereas the PC was seen as a more general purpose business machine whose architecture was purposely (by IBM) open to clone manufacturers (and Mac was not) so it appeared in far more workplaces. This meant that development of the PC went at the pace of market requirements (observe the exponential growth in the Graphics card market from the humble Hercules cards - none of which were driven by IBM or Micr S ft) and by the big-money players like Intel and AMD, whereas the Mac development was restricted by Apple's cash-flow.
Penetration into the home market (again following the demise of specifically targeted home computers like the Atari ST and Amiga) was simply a case of people wanting to use the systems they were familiar with from work, and the PC was far cheaper than the Mac in this case too - I don't know the figures but I wouldn't be surprised if the number of Macs in homes in the 90s was signficantly less that the number of Apple IIs in the 80s - at that time Apple simply were not interested in the home market. later Apple attempted to redress this imbalance by allowing Mac clones and porting PC software over, but it had to reinvent the Mac as the iMac to achieve the necessary level of PC interface compatibility to really make this work (USB over Firewire, dropping SCSI and ADB etc) - the sexy new case by Jonathan Ive also played a big factor in gaining acceptance of the new design. By then they were 10 years behind the PC in the home market, and still producing a solution that was far more expensive than the PC. Even if you compare the Mac Mini with an equivalent price PC base-unit (ie no kbrd, mouse or monitor) you still got more bang for your buck with the PC. However, I suspect that the later advent of the Intel x86 based Macs has had a lesser effect than the success of the iPlod on the recent rise popularity of the Mac.
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What?
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mono
Forum Senior Member
Joined: May 12 2005
Location: Paris, France
Status: Offline
Points: 652
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Posted: November 13 2009 at 07:22 |
I have OS X on my iMac, and Ubuntu and XP on my laptop. XP just killed me (crashes, crashes.... lost a few projects like that), and I just can't find everything I need with Ubuntu (for sound, DAWs, plugins, standalone software...). So.......Mac! Not only by default, I happen to like it a lot. Ahh, when you turn on your computer and can actually use it less than 5 minutes after, it just feels good (it actually takes around 20seconds to become fully operational!).
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https://soundcloud.com/why-music Prog trio, from ambiant to violence
https://soundcloud.com/m0n0-film Film music and production projects
https://soundcloud.com/fadisaliba (almost) everything else
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AceBad
Forum Newbie
Joined: January 26 2006
Location: United States
Status: Offline
Points: 34
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Posted: November 13 2009 at 07:34 |
A huge reason that I (and many other people) aren't using Linux or a Mac: Games.
As a PC gamer, it's not feasible to use anything other than Windows right now. I've tried Ubunutu and loved it, but the fact that almost all PC games won't run natively on it is a huge problem. I've tried tools like 'WINE', which are supposed to allow games to run on Linux, but there are almost no games that will run 100% correctly on WINE- even the ones that are playable will have bugs and issues. Mac has better game support, with lots of software companies that port PC versions of popular games to Mac, but its still not enough.
Also, I feel like Apple products aren't as open to user configuration / customization as others. The company philosophy seems to be "Our way is so easy, you won't need to do it any other way". That's great and all, but what if I don't want to do it your way? I've hated iTunes since it first came out with it's proprietary music file format that forced limitations on how many times you could copy the file. I realize they now offer DRM-free MP3s as well, but the damage has been done for me- I'm strongly anti-Apple.
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Dean
Special Collaborator
Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout
Joined: May 13 2007
Location: Europe
Status: Offline
Points: 37575
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Posted: November 13 2009 at 07:42 |
mono wrote:
I have OS X on my iMac, and Ubuntu and XP on my laptop. XP just killed me (crashes, crashes.... lost a few projects like that), and I just can't find everything I need with Ubuntu (for sound, DAWs, plugins, standalone software...). So.......Mac! Not only by default, I happen to like it a lot. Ahh, when you turn on your computer and can actually use it less than 5 minutes after, it just feels good (it actually takes around 20seconds to become fully operational!).
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hmmm, what are you comparing here? a 1.3GHz dual boot Celeron laptop against a 2GHz dual-core desktop perhaps? Even if both were PC based the desktop would win.
My XP Laptop boots in <20 seconds.
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