Macs soon to lose out to PC/Windows?

What this comes dwon to is what people want to pay. It seems because macs cost a bit more, or more acurately don't have low priced models they must be bad.

How come this does not work in the hifi industry?

Macs are built from the ground up using the latest technologies avaible (latest models firewire 2 and USB2, super drive) and are built around modern unique case design, as well as keyboards etc.

Yes it does cost a bit more. But here we are again people comparing apples with oranges (snigger)

Osama, go out for me and cost up a PC with superdrive, firewire2 and USB2 and see how much it comes out at, because I can't find anything to really say the mac is more expensive, espcially when you see the hideous facias it all lives behind.

And then of course windows stuck on top of it, yuck.

 

I spoke to my friend again the other day and he's signed NDA's up to his eyeballs so he couldn't tell me much but he did say that the user interface of Longhorn is very different. It will be as big as the change from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95, if not bigger.

He said that some of the preview versions that have been "reviewed" deliberately still had the old (XP style) interface. Basically, no one who has seen the real deal hasn't also signed an NDA and therefore there's no one who can talk about it or "review" it properly.

One thing he could reveal is that the OS is 64bit from the ground up. The old Win32 "core" (which has been with us since the first versions of NT in the early 90s) is history.

Michael.

 

The latest BETA screenshots from Longhorn....





Remember, its still got a long way to go before its finished...

 

I did a test on my computer last night, I had all these programs running on at the same time and did some simple graphics/programs with them

Abobe Photoshop 6.0
MS Visual Basic 6.0
Dreamweaver MX
Flash MX
Freehand MX
Fireworks MX

My PC coped with it all fine, my 1ghz Duron would have struggeled, my Athlon 2000+ coped with it fine though. It did slow down a bit but then I only have 256mb DDR RAM which is more than enough for simple web surfing but for the lastest programs its not enough. DDR memory is so expesnive atm though, I will wait to the prices come down again.

When I had Windows 98SE I had a dual setup with Red Hat 7.0 and WIN98 I used Redhat for word processing my reports because I knew it wouldn't crash, but since the first day I installed XP in October 2002 I haven't used Linux since.

I haven't used Macs for years but I hope they have improved, my school had some 608040 (right CPU?) based Macs which ran at 66Mhz and had 8MB RAM (this was in 1995!) and they crashed all the time. I think they ran Mac OS 7.0. It was a great operating system though until Microsoft copied with Win 95. The Macos is actually a copy of an Xerox GUI based concept operating system from the 70's. Mac then did somthing very similar with the Lisa in 1983 and then introduced it with the Mac.

Do the Imacs use a different operating system? I've never had the pleasure or displeasure of using one.

 

I think you mean 68040 - a similar chipset base to that used by the Amiga.

They use OS X now. Far better and smoother/slicker than any previous Mac OS.

 

Yep thats the one, the Motorola series, I thought it looked wrong as I wrote it down. thanks

 

Snigger, that was back in the Applemac Plus, all in one days.

But look at the compatition at the time? 3.11 wasn't even available then (they hadn't had time to copy the mac os) other than that you had things like nimbus with Dos on it.

Imagine my generation in my school, looking at pagemaker on the mac screen, in total context, exactly as it would be printed.

I vowed never to own anything else, and I never have. The mac plus boxes still look kind of cool today.

 

Windows was never a copy of the Mac OS, as the famous "look and feel" lawsuit showed. Fact is, both Apple and MS stole the whole desktop metaphor and mouse idea from Xerox PARC research, as any fule kno.

Having said that, I will be getting a secondhand powerbook some time soon to make music with. Wouldn't use it as a serious computer, however, for that only Linux or BSD will do...

-- Ian

 

AFAIK the user interface you can see in the posts above from early betas is a long from what the finished product will look like. MS know better than to let the cat out of the bag too soon It's rather like when you see new cars being tested using the bodywork of the previous model.

Michael.

 

A friend of mine reakons that there's been leaked copies floating about for a while. Didn't really take much of what he said in but I think he said Longhorn is XP ......blah blah blah...... net server.... summat.

I'm about to reformat with xp. Taken me a couple of days to maike sure i've backed up everything I need to. Bound to have forgot something though.

MO

 

I had the pleasure of using XP all day today.

In fairness nothing crashed or was other wise naughty.

sorry guys but the graphical elements are appauling, the icons, task bar and everything else is shite and the text is barely readable.

There was nothing about it that makes me want to have a PC.

 

It that's all a Mac fan can find fault with with XP then things really have moved on

Honestly garyi - nearly all of that stuff is customizable. If the text was barely readable then it's been poorly configured.

Michael.

 

You Mac owners are such zealots...

BTW, I agree Mike, that will be nowhere near the finished product, as this is what Windows Whistler (XP) looked like at about the same stage in its life.





Oh, and Windows looks so shite doesnt it?

 

Paul your a young lad no?

If you look at the windows you have posted, the smaller text looks appauling, that is what I wa refering too. Presumably your system has been configured correctly?

The actual operating system was fine, I like the preview of pictures and the information that appears nice and quick in the left had of the window panes, quite useful that.

But lets get down to brass tacks here, the interface does not look great, the graphics do not look great they are blocky, small and in precise. when I selected windows and moved them about quickly, the screen had to catch up to redraw. This was a brand new computer. Running XP Professional. really there is no excuse for this, how many version of windows is there? How much money do they have to spend on making this thing perfect and un breakable? Whats gone wrong?

Here's my desktop, notice smooth text, large crisp icons (fully configurable and changable, easily) and the dock, actually something you can use.

 

No Gary, I must admit, I do agree in seriousness that Windows doesnt look as good as that....

The anti-aliasing on Windows makes the text look much better, and with the right theme, it can be made to look very good. Getting it as good as what Mac OS X looks as standard would probably take a lot of effort though...

Thing is, I like the way windows works, to me its quite a good usable operating system, but it must be said, it does have some pretty glaring faults, I admit. For starters, the inbuilt file manager is pants, and it does have some usability flaws, but as I'm sure is the case equally with OS X, its not perfect.

Having said that, I wish it could be ported to the PC. I used to be a champion of alternative operating systems, I used to use an Amiga back in the days of Windows 3.11 because the Amiga OS was so vastly superior. I'd definetly try OS X, but am not prepared to buy a Mac to do it, and Linux just sucks. Have you ever seen how bad the fonts are on that.

Now, you've made me want to tart my desktop up.....!

 

One other cool thing about Mac OSX is that you don't get "lock-up" when a program you're running hangs. Force quitting in the old Mac OS can really be a nightmare on certain occassions especially when you still have unsaved works in the other open programs. But with the Mac OSX, it's a breeze. You get a floating directory to choose which of the open programs to quit. It can get quite disorienting the first time you use the OSX when you got used for a long time with the old OS, but it's all worth it afterwards.

I'm not quite aware of it, but can this be done in PC, force quitting with a directory?

Access is definitely much better. The added floating window(?) for the finder/desktop is very convenient. You can easily access the desktop files by a separate window that appears when you select the finder icon in the menu below.

And Garyi's desktop and HD icon is really cool.


regards

 

But Linux is highly configurable. You can easily set it up to use nice pretty scalable fonts of any type. Linux can be made to look pretty, it just takes a little bit of time/effort to do so.

 

Just to prove that it's all a matter of opinion.. Personally I think that the OSX Icons are way too big.. take up far to much desktop space.. but that's just me.. I like a clean desktop.. with the minimum space taken buy taskbars/icons etc.

I agree with you that the icons are relatively low res on Windows.. even at their best settings. As for the performance of the desktop graphics.... I did notice a considerable slowing of 2D speed when I moved from 98SE to XP on the same computer with exactly the same hardware.. After a bit of tweaking it's a bit better.. but XP is definitely not getting the best performance out of the Hard Disc/Graphics hardware. It's most noticable on browsing folders on the hard drive.. if there are a lot of icons.. you can see XP going down the list drawing the program icons on occasion.. (usually the first time you open a folder).. this NEVER used to happen on 98SE where all the program icons would appear instantaneously on the screen every time. Also the IE window doesn't come up instantaneously either .. (like it did under 98SE - with exactly the same version of IE6 !). So something is definitely not quite right with XP.. probably due to the never ending increase in system performance requirements of MS OSs just to work.. IMHO... this is the poorest aspect of MS products.. every new version requires more and more hardware performance just to maintain the same "real world" speed as the previous one using doing exactly the same thing. I've no doubt Longhorn will be exactly the same requiring a jump up in processor/video card performance just to work at the same speed as XP. If you were to run 98SE on todays 2ghz+ machines you would realise just how much hardware performance is being squandered by 2000/XP etc by the MS bloatware, (which takes longer and longer to start up with every version), as it would be blazingly fast.. as opposed to just quick. I remember thinking a long time ago.. that a Pentium 133Mhz pc with 32mb of memory would be as quick as I ever wanted. Because extrapolating the speed of the then 75Mhz pentiums with 16mb memory (using Windows 3.11).. I envisioned that a 133mhz machine would seem instantaneous at opening softare apps etc.. Today I find myself almost literally having to put the kettle on whilst waiting for some MS apps to open up on a 300mhz Pentium with 128mb of memory running W2k. So much for progress eh? I'd almost be better off with a 286 and Wordstar 4.0 as far as WP speed is concerned !!

No doubting that 2000/XP etc are very stable though.

GTM

 

GTM, I have my icons set to the largest size on the desktop. They can be resized to about half of an MS icon, all the way through to the size on mine, you do it with a zoom bar thingy so you can have any size you want. Its very handy for things like photoes and photoshop documents as the images are nice and clear. I think its the same in the XP pictures folder.