Junior Member
OSX only needs to be sufficient enough to flood kickstarter with a bunch of really horrible album ideas from starbucks wifi. Scale Linux back to this point and you'll get 10000hours of battery life.
Phoronix Member
A sure sign somebody hasn't actually used Mac OS/X.
Such a failure so brightly demonstrated is often a sign of ignorance, take the time to actually use a Mac Book and you will find that they are very high performance platforms and well worth considering for development or other significant tasks. In many ways they are the ideal platform for power users as UNIX is never far away.Originally Posted by droidhacker
Phoronix Member
I suppose all of those engineers at NASA really don't use their Macs.
I mean really a NASA engineer has no need for a powerful and reliable computer. After all putting a rover on Mars is child's play. Like wise developers in general haven't flocked to the Mac because they need to access Star Bucks WiFi (even if a god cup of coffee is a morning kick starter), nope it might have something to do with a stable platform that doesn't need constant handholding. It might also be to do with state of the art Java and compiler support.
Yeah sure!
Junior Member
Why the hell is it that people can't judge products based on their merit instead of on colloquial perception?
Overall, Apple makes great hardware. They really do. Look at the iPad 3; GPU-wise, nothing comes close, AND it has a better screen, AND it has better battery life. Macbook Pros tend to have similar advantages, especially in battery life.
The downsides (in my eyes) are that OS X is very poor at memory management and overall is much slower than Windows or Linux. The GUI looks fancy, but usability is poor. However, they do have EXCELLENT font rendering. If Linux worked well on Macbook Pros, I think that would be the ultimate combination once Wayland-only desktop environments become feasible. Oh and I almost forgot the most important downside: their computers are EXPENSIVE. The iPad3 is very reasonable though; cheap, even (for what's in it).
Senior Member
Well I guess that explains the utter failure that was the Ares Rockets, and the Constellation program in general.
But could it perhaps be that they're purchasing Macs because #1. They got Rich and decided to go for the most expensive thing out there because of it, and #2 They were managed to have been pulled in by the Apple marketing department that's calling it's users iDiots and sophisticated in the same breath?
Honestly what their marketing department has managed to pull is rather interesting, Essentially they play into the user's fears about computers, while saying "you could look smart and sophisticated while using this because it's the computer for stupid people". And thus we result in all these claims of userfriendliness and such when it's a system designed by sadists for masochists.
It's still fundamentally the same broken interface design from the 70s they stole via purchasing copies of Xerox's OS and REing it, yeah it's been prettied up some but the actual interface itself never changed, and their periphreals are utterly awful, their keyboards are hand breaking and their touchpads and mice are a joke, from there the internals themselves are those that run for about half the price or less usually. So this leaves us with the case, the display, and the internals of the OS. Now the Display is gotten from LG which means that other than the "retina" displays which are limited to their 13.3in and below because of cost of said panels they're nothing special. LG Panels aren't bad but they're not something I would associate with the word premium. So then we got their cases, the design of the cases they use in general is rather ill conceived and lead to heat issues to the point of people getting burned, besides them being heavy and aluminum being something that dents easily vs plastic and in general it's just yuck. If you want to use aluminum do it like HP does with dv6, which is to say light, it's being used for heatsyncing purposes and it uses the strengths of both metal and plastic in the design of the machines. This just leaves the underlying OS which as shown in the recent article boils down to there not really being a performance advantage and the power savings advantage has to do with GPU switching, So yeah...
As far as the iPad 3 goes It's screen is actually inferior to the iPad in terms of coloration because it's more yellow, and the actual image quality itself hasn't really improved from what people say. To be blunt people have to look very closely for the coloration differences to be able to visually tell the difference between an iPad 2 and an iPad 3. We're not exactly talking a desktop where more pixels really translates over into more space to work with because in the tablet paradigm everything is full screened. The rendering performance is worse because while they're using a twice as fast GPU, they're pushing 4x as many pixels vs the iPad 2, which effectively means having 1/2 of the performance when all is said and done. This of course has brought about heat and overheating issues because of their ill conceived cooling and case designs
Junior Member
Wow there are lot of non-sensical, unsubstantiated claims in the last post. Apple makes nice hardware, thus the government employees want to use it. Why does that have to be some sort of conspiracy?
I find it pretty depressing that too many people in these forums rag on companies' products just because they don't run Linux. Some people even rag on Red Hat because they are too "enterprise". Without large companies like that, a lot improvements to the Linux kernel, userspace apps, etc would not exist. Why can't you be thankful for what you DO get for free instead of making yourself out to be some holy man who's better than them because you say so. That's 3rd grade behavior (my dad can beat up your dad, for example). Why not make arguments like "Red Hat is in bed with the government to put backdoors into Linux"? Because it's bullshit. So is what you just said. By your logic, any Phoronix member developers that make any money off software should be lumped into the same group as Apple, Microsoft, etc. That is also bullshit. If you work hard and make a good product, people will buy it; that is how a free market is supposed to work. The Humble Bundles are a great example of that.
If a company makes a great product, don't they deserve recognition, praise, and sales for it?
People like nice things. If you disagree with them, fine. But don't make shit up just to massage your ego.
I honestly hold no ill-will towards you despite what you've said, I just disagree with those particular points. There's a good chance we agree on a lot (we are both here, after all).
Junior Member
I do, however, agree with your notion that the OS X user interface is not very good. It certainly LOOKS good, but functionality-wise, it's frustrating to use.
Senior Member
Except that 95% of my post was arguments based upon a technical basis There was a sarcastic shot at NASA for their failure with the constellation program and then a few sentences about Apple Marketing filling the rest of that 5%.
Except I never brought up linux in that post, other than stating that OS X is less performant (which you yourself agree with) and that the power thing has to do with GPU Switching which is substantiated even by your fellow macbook users in this forum.
Other than the initial section the post is basically about why the Apple Hardware really isn't good at all.
So quit strawmanning, particularly when it results in your own statements becoming ironic and hypocritical in particular this:
Last edited by Luke_Wolf; 08-26-2012 at 06:50 PM.
Junior Member
The fact that you automatically assume I'm a macbook user because I had nice things to say about it shows that you view life very black and white. I would actually never buy a Macbook for myself because I don't personally like their design, but I can realize when something is well made. In other words, good products should be viewed as such regardless of who makes it.
The Red Hat thing was a bit of a rant, I admit. I actually think they're doing a fantastic job with Fedora unlike many years ago, so I must be a Red Hat fanboy. I like Windows 7, so I must be a Microsoft fanboy. I think Ubuntu is headed in the wrong direction design-wise, so I must be an Ubuntu hater.
Overall, I'm just trying to say to notice good products regardless of their makers. Shitty companies can make great products and vice versa. Look at the Apple TV: that thing is a complete waste of time. Although I wouldn't consider Apple a good company anymore.
Senior Member
Oh, the price is the most important downside? Not the fact that Apple has a strong track record of being dominating and controlling when it comes to how to use their hardware? As well as being one of the biggest patent trolls in the world ATM?
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