mac people..

[GuitarStv]

LOAD *.*, 8, 1


The magic line that made all my games work for some reason.

[Gamera]

Syntax Error

It was LOAD "*",8,1

That command loaded the first program "*" off the disc, device 8 which was typically the disc drive.

[GuitarStv]

Huh, now that you mention it, I think you're right. 8 yr old GuitarStv is mortified.

[dr. ad]

LOAD ".", 8
worked for disks too
i think it looked at the tape player first, but if there was nothing happening there it'd go to the FDD. remember how you had to find the right part of the tape with the tape counter, have play and pause down and release pause as you entered it?

i agree with dominus in the main... but
for people who aren't familiar with BIOS and drivers and codecs and cabling and current
and who don't need a home-made supercomputer to send emails and stream video
and just want to plug it in and switch it on
it's mac all the way. although i too believe that the company has grown mad and drunk with power, and must be stopped.

[dystrust]

I currently use Xubuntu as my main OS and have been Linux-only on my primary machine since fall 2009. Before that I was dual booting Ubuntu 5.10 / Windows 2000 on a Thinkpad T23 going back to October 2005.

I see the need for having a Mac. They are super polished and user friendly but don't buy into the hype. Read what you can about it and make your own choice.

I own a Mac Pro, and I use it as a recording machine. It's wonderful for that, but I hate it for everything else. I used to really like OS X, but the Soviet IT aspect drives me crazy these days after getting used to how tweakable Linux is.

The best quote ever, from my friend Dave, a lifelong PC user:

"I can't believe how long I put up with Microsoft / PC's."

This pretty much sums up why I'm whine d'ohs free.

[xntrick]

The best quote ever, from my friend Dave, a lifelong PC user:

"I can't believe how long I put up with Microsoft / PC's."

I had a co-worker tell me the same thing. Once his wife tried the imac she liked it so much he had to get a macbook just for her. He ended up converting 6 people and all he did was let them spend some time on his imac, that should tell you something.

[That90'sGuy]

I'm just not a Windows fan. I mess around on my wife's Dell laptop and I've been through a few laptops and desktops in my time with various Windows configurations (I started out with Windows 3.1 and played around a lot with DOS), but my Macbook Pro has been my favorite by far. It just plain runs well and it's fast, recording is a breeze with it and it's been unbelievably reliable. I'll never go back, honestly. I know you can tweak the crap out of a PC to probably run as good as a Mac, but the appeal is just buying one and having it work the way you want it to right from the get go with no tech. experience/tinkering needed. Everything just fits in a really smooth and streamlined package.

[Scott_F]

I'm a mac guy, but have to run windows on a partition for work stuff. Win7 is okay in partition life, but whenever I go to run my wife's Win7 sony notebook, it's just crap. I think it has to do with all the stuff inexperienced users accidetnly load up on their boxes. Same OS, and her laptop is decent specs. Yet, her Win7 runs like crap, mine's okay. I still prefer the mac and after July 8th, I won't have to use Win7 at work any longer. Life keeps getting better and better.

[JumpMarine]

I wasted a lifetime on PC's and wished that I could do it all over with a Mac. I love my Macbook Pro.

[some_dude]

Ultimately, the decision should come down to what you intend on doing with it.

IMO, Mac OS is different... but if you take a step back and look at it it's not really that different than Windows. It's an OS. It lets you run applications. You can check your email and browse the web. You can produce documents on it. And if you maintain suitably low expectations you can even play games on it.

At the end of the day a Mac is just a computer and you should keep that in perspective. I honestly haven't found my Mac (MacBook Pro) to be any more or less stable than my Windows laptop. And I can honestly say that for five times the price browsing websites on the internet looks pretty much identical.

That said, where I feel that Apple has succeeded is that they have the whole Mac Ecosystem on lockdown. My Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and TimeMachine all work seamlessly together, and there's a cross platform consistency to applications that allow me to flow information from one platform to another relatively easily. I can get an idea while I'm out and start it in my iPhone, then crunch it out on my Mac when I have time to sit down and hammer the keyboard. Or I can do the reverse and generate a spreadsheet on my Mac than I can then later view on while I'm out and about using my iPad/iPhone. Through my Apple TV I can wirelessly pump Youtube videos off my Mac/iPhone/iPad onto my big screen TV, or I can pump iTunes into my home stereo.

The trade off to the whole Mac Ecosystem is that it's basically a slick way to bleed your bank account into theirs. Apple isn't in the business of giving anything away for free and you'll find yourself getting nickel and dimed to death via their system of micro economics. Pay-to-use services and buying the same app two or three times to get it on each device gets old quickly.

Where Mac suffers is on the application front. A lot of developers don't bother making software for the Mac due to it's small market share, and when an application is cross platform (Mac and Windows) you can tell that for most developers Windows is the priority and that Mac is worked on in their spare time. If you're a gamer you'll be limited to a relatively small selection of games, many of which are old, and when a new game is release on Mac you're usually stuck with a buggy edition that they'll get around to fixing after they've fixed the Windows version.

When it comes to interfacing with the rest of the world Windows owns about 80% of the PC market with Mac OS being around 11%. It puts me as a Mac user in a position where I have to either run Microsoft products on my Mac or export my documents into Windows compatible formats all the time.

And lastly, if you're into gaming I wouldn't even bother with a Mac. If you want access to the majority of the games on the market you're going to need to run Windows anyway, and for the price of a Mac you could build a substantially better Windows machine.

All that said I don't really see myself going back to Windows at this time. I'm not a hipster and I see Apple for the greedy, conformist corporate empire that it is, but I like the way their products interface and right now there's no other viable alternative should I want to ditch them anyway.

[Powdered Toast Man]

Ultimately, the decision should come down to what you intend on doing with it.

IMO, Mac OS is different... but if you take a step back and look at it it's not really that different than Windows. It's an OS. It lets you run applications. You can check your email and browse the web. You can produce documents on it. And if you maintain suitably low expectations you can even play games on it.

At the end of the day a Mac is just a computer and you should keep that in perspective. I honestly haven't found my Mac (MacBook Pro) to be any more or less stable than my Windows laptop. And I can honestly say that for five times the price browsing websites on the internet looks pretty much identical.

That said, where I feel that Apple has succeeded is that they have the whole Mac Ecosystem on lockdown. My Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and TimeMachine all work seamlessly together, and there's a cross platform consistency to applications that allow me to flow information from one platform to another relatively easily. I can get an idea while I'm out and start it in my iPhone, then crunch it out on my Mac when I have time to sit down and hammer the keyboard. Or I can do the reverse and generate a spreadsheet on my Mac than I can then later view on while I'm out and about using my iPad/iPhone. Through my Apple TV I can wirelessly pump Youtube videos off my Mac/iPhone/iPad onto my big screen TV, or I can pump iTunes into my home stereo.

The trade off to the whole Mac Ecosystem is that it's basically a slick way to bleed your bank account into theirs. Apple isn't in the business of giving anything away for free and you'll find yourself getting nickel and dimed to death via their system of micro economics. Pay-to-use services and buying the same app two or three times to get it on each device gets old quickly.

Where Mac suffers is on the application front. A lot of developers don't bother making software for the Mac due to it's small market share, and when an application is cross platform (Mac and Windows) you can tell that for most developers Windows is the priority and that Mac is worked on in their spare time. If you're a gamer you'll be limited to a relatively small selection of games, many of which are old, and when a new game is release on Mac you're usually stuck with a buggy edition that they'll get around to fixing after they've fixed the Windows version.

When it comes to interfacing with the rest of the world Windows owns about 80% of the PC market with Mac OS being around 11%. It puts me as a Mac user in a position where I have to either run Microsoft products on my Mac or export my documents into Windows compatible formats all the time.

And lastly, if you're into gaming I wouldn't even bother with a Mac. If you want access to the majority of the games on the market you're going to need to run Windows anyway, and for the price of a Mac you could build a substantially better Windows machine.

All that said I don't really see myself going back to Windows at this time. I'm not a hipster and I see Apple for the greedy, conformist corporate empire that it is, but I like the way their products interface and right now there's no other viable alternative should I want to ditch they anyway.

This is a great post. Probably the most objective and practical stance I've seen on this issue.