Simply not true. You should try Cocoa and Interface Builder on the Mac. The best designed user-interface developing solution on any platform. That’s why all the applications in Mac OS X look so nice.

Eric

Now, back with the early Thinkpads and LiIon batteries I could blame that on the new battery technology. But, you know, by the fifth generation it was clear that they weren’t even trying to fix this. I haven’t had a new Thinkpad in a few years now, but the people at work tell me they still chew up batteries. That’s really too bad, because otherwise they’re terrific.

In 2001 I bought my wife a Ti Powerbook. She used it for 4 years and the battery was still working reasonably well (about 2 hours at a charge). At 6 years, now used by a relative, it’s dead. In 2002 I bought a 12″ Powerbook. I used it for 4 years without ever replacing the battery and it still worked pretty well. (Still being used by a relative, battery life is much reduced.) It’s too soon to tell how the new laptop batteries will fare, but the oldest is just under 2 years and still pulling almost 3 hours of DVD playing at a time.

Regarding overall hardware reliability, the older G4 series laptops were great. 7 years of daily use without a failure on the Ti Powerbook. 5 years on the 12″ Powerbook, at which point the drive died, but otherwise still going strong. But the newer ones….

The 15″ Powerbook (Nov 2005) has been back for significant service twice — once it got a new mainboard, the other time a new top deck. The Macbook (Apr 2006) has been back for significant service three times. Once for a new top deck, once for a new Airport, and once for a new mainboard. I have a G5 Quad (Nov 2005), too, which lost its optical drive and is under recall for its power supply. Apple has been excellent at honoring their warrantee, and their turnaround times have never exceeded 5 days (real days, not business days). Still, sure wish I didn’t have to do the whole “Genius” Bar thing quite so often. On the upside, the Macbook is a hell of a lot more serviceable than were the G4s and the Quad is a work of art in so many ways, particularly the ease at which you can goof with its insides. (And FAST. OMG fast, it took the 8-core Mac Pro to beat it in compute-intensive tasks.)

So: I’d give the Thinkpads the nod in terms of quality today, but I sure as hell wish they’d work on battery longevity. They’re the worst in the business.

In terms of overall value, though, it’s no contest. The less said about Windows software reliability the better; it is a bear to keep it running between malware, the idiot registry, and disk fragmentation issues (the latter is ridiculous, the technology to avoid that problem has existed since 1985 and has been mainstream for around fifteen years). Data and app migration between hardware is effectively nonexistent. Gah!

If you’re an alternative kind of person Linux — just about any variant — is a huge improvement in basic maintenance. No malware, no fragmentation, easy updates, and while there’s manual effort necessary to migrate data (all the apps being part of the install of course) it’s really trivial (I usually do “(cd ~ ; tar czf – .) | rsh newhost tar -xzf -” or something to that effect). Nice, although there are so many quirks with Linux applications that it places a solid third in terms of usability in my mind.

But the Mac. The software really sets it apart.

It takes second place to Linux in out-of-the-box application support. It’s useful right out of the box for a lot of things but you’ll be hunting down a bunch of add-on applications for sure. Windows is a distant third; out of the box it is pretty much an e-mail and web machine, with moderately decent audio-visual media support. The other bundled apps are pathetic. The Mac’s bundled app mix varies by hardware level; interestingly, the top-end desktops don’t ship with productivity software (I can’t recall if the Macbook Pros do). Consumer-level stuff has them, and they’re pretty darn useful, although they don’t interoperate all that well with Microsoft Office. Audio/Visual support ranges from really good (Garageband!), to good-enough (it’s kind of criminal what they did to iMovie in ‘08, it used to be remarkable and now it’s only ok, although that’s still a lot better than either Linux or Windows manages).

Core OS, though, that’s where Apple really nails it. The out-of-the-box security model, even in the default “user is an administrator” mode, is excellent. The root/user separation is always maintained and the management features integrate well with it without undue password prompting (Vista UAC is a huge step forward but it sure does nag the hell out of you) or the need for UNIX/Linux arcanity. The only “urp” out of the box is that administrator accounts can modify the Applications directory. Malware is effectively nonexistent (as it is with Linux). Software update is trivial. Migration between hardware is so good that I almost cried the first time I did it; hook up firewire between the old and new, put the old into target (disk) mode, and the set-up program clones the whole shebang. It’s so seamless that it made me angry with how badly Microsoft botched the job.

Apple nails disk search — it’s blazingly fast (FSEvents is the single best OS enhancement I have seen since the 80s). And while there are some nits with Time Machine (sure would like some more knobs) nobody else is even close out-of-the-box. Apple leveraged the heck out of FSEvents here, too, and made the most transparent incremental backup system EVER. Leopard is worth buying just to get Time Machine. Even major OS upgrades are almost always trivial (my wife does hers, usually, and geek stuff is not her domain).

Generally speaking I don’t care who makes it and I don’t care what other people think about the products I buy. If it gets the job done with a minimum of hassles I’ll use it. On the desktop and laptop Apple’s products are second to none in overall quality. I’ve used Windows, Linux, and Mac OS on my laptop and I’ll take Mac OS thank-you-very-much, even if their hardware is not up to the quality standards of the past. I’ve used all three on the desktop and I’ll take Mac OS there too. On the server I prefer Linux (superb bang-for-the-buck, especially given the application set; very good remote administration as long as you are familiar with UNIX arcana).

For UI development Windows really takes the cake now that they’ve abandoned MFC (gah) in favor of .NET, and that makes it a huge (HUGE) win in business desktop scenarios (a lot less so on the server unfortunately, and God Help You if you use it for anything but web applications). It is also the only real choice in gaming and you just can’t beat the depth of the available software. It’s nice that I no longer have to buy separate systems to get both Mac OS and Windows.

Well, that went pretty much afar from what I intended, and is way longer, but there you have it.

jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com

at SCALE? i don’t know why. the FOSS conferences i attend tend to have a majority of dell / ibm with a macbook here and there but not dominating.

Sorry to throw a spanner in the works – but MacBooks don’t have Open Firmware. OF was a Power PC technology. The Macintels use EFI.

Just thought I’d add that into the mix!

RB

They’re getting rid of the wrong thing Throw some form of Linux on there and they’ll be good to go. Thinkpads were meant for Linux. They don’t even have a “Windows” key

Most new users know nothing about open firmware. That comes with no password as expected. However, you should note that you can password protect your open firmware. Some experts say its a necessity. So, if you want, please set an Open Firmware pass word. Use google and search parameters “set open firmware password” and you will get 186,000 possible links. Most of the top 10 give accurate information.

I found something unexpected to! Apple provides a utility application to help users set a password, this link is : http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/openfirmwarepassword.html

For those who do not know this, setting an open firmware password enables you to prevent evil people from using a Mac Startup CD to start your machine and bypass your own security measures.

Apple products are not quite as insecure as you think they are. Apple is by not means perfect. However, they made the right choice when they chose UNIX and FreeBSD as the starting point for the Open Source kernel.

Hope this helps!

Davidf

Most new users know nothing about open firmware. That comes with no password as expected. However, you should note that you can password protect your open firmware. Some experts say its a necessity. So, if you want, please set an Open Firmware pass word. Use google and search parameters “set open firmware password” and you will get 186,000 possible links. Most of the top 10 give accurate information.

I found something unexpected to! Apple provides a utility application to help users set a password, this link is :

For those who do not know this, setting an open firmware password enables you to prevent evil people from using a Mac Startup CD to start your machine and bypass your own security measures.

Apple products are not quite as insecure as you think they are. Apple is by not means perfect. However, they made the right choice when they chose UNIX and FreeBSD as the starting point for the Open Source kernel.

Hope this helps!

Davidf