“I’ve always been a fan of trying alternate Oses – I was even an OS/2 user (both 2.0 and Warp) for a little while in my early years. So, a while back, I conjured up this idea to try using a Mac for a month. At first, it started as just a personal experiment, but it later developed into the foundation for the article that you’re reading now. After doing the necessary research to make sure that I could actually get work done on a Mac, I whipped out the trusty credit card and decided to give the experiment a try,” Anand Lal Shimpi writes for AnandTech. “What you are about to read are my impressions, as a devout PC user, of the Apple way of life.”
“I had used Macs in the past, mostly at schools, and boy, did I ever hate the experience. I would always feel completely lost when using them and I would grow increasingly more frustrated as the machines were always slow, would crash often and for the life of me, I could never right click on anything. Going into this experiment, I knew that if I was going to give the platform a good chance, I needed to get the fastest system that Apple had to offer. At the time, this was a dual 2GHz G5 system… Needless to say, at almost $3000, the G5 was one expensive system considering its specs.” Anand Lal Shimpi writes. “The classic Mac sound made its entrance as the system booted up. After filling out a couple of screens of information, I was dropped into Mac OS X – my new home away from home.”
“Where to start? Customization is much more possible (and easy to do) under OS X than any variant of Windows that I have ever encountered. Icon sizes are just the beginning; through the view options menu alone, you can change the positioning of the labels on the icons, the text size as well as the normal array of Windows options. And any changes you make here occur in real time – no clicking ‘OK’ or ‘Apply.’ Just check a box and it happens instantaneously; and uncheck it, and everything goes back to normal. It’s a small thing, but as I soon found out, much of OS X’s appeal to me came in tiny gems like this,” Anand Lal Shimpi writes. “The other thing to point out, which is quite possibly the biggest draw to OS X for me, is the fact that just about everything under OS X has a keyboard shortcut associated with it.”
“The fundamental difference between OS X and Windows is how applications and windows are handled… Under OS X, until you actually quit the application, regardless of how many or how few windows of it that are still open, the application remains running. Thanks to an extremely aggressive caching engine and an extremely robust/stable OS core, I ended up actually preferring it when I had the majority of my frequently used applications open. This approach ends up using quite a bit of memory, but I found that there’s no slowdown if you have the memory to handle the open applications… The benefit of leaving applications running even when you’re not using them is that when you do need to use them or open a file with one of them, the response time is instantaneous – as opposed to waiting for an application to load. Of course, you can do the same thing in Windows, but for some reason stability and performance seemed to remain unchanged under OS X, whereas I almost always ran into an issue with Windows – whether it was having too many windows open or too many programs running,” Anand Lal Shimpi writes.
There is much, much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: A great article, but we can’t help wondering why Anand totally discounts the possibility of Windows PC users adding an eMac or an iMac G5 as their first Mac; he seems to base everything on the assumption that users will have to add a $3000 Dual G5 Power Mac. He makes it too expensive for the average Windows PC user to consider a Mac. It doesn’t have to be that way. An iMac G5 with a usable amount of RAM will serve 99% of average personal computer users perfectly well. That quibble aside, it’s a very interesting and valuable article for Windows and Mac users alike. Try reading his article with an iMac G5 with extra RAM for around $1500 in mind and see how differently it strikes you.
Yep hambugers are great, till you try a filet minot or veggie buger! :->
Veggie burgers are never great
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Even I learned a few things from his article. The ability to hide and quit applications while using Cmd-Tab is very cool!! And I hadn’t considered Cmd-dragging images from background windows when the window would come to front, even though I use this technique frequently for other tasks, such as moving background windows.
He’s done an excellent job at reviewing the strong and weak points of OS X. He finishes by saying that OS X is probably the best OS of this time… I have to agree. I can see the day when he’ll just be plain frustrated working in Windows after adapting to OS X.. haha.
at last MDN makes a worthwhile comment.
Wow, that was a long article. Pretty fair and balanced overall. The one comment that I was surprised at was his saying that IE is much faster at rendering web pages. Since I haven’t used windoze for a while I don’t have recent experience with this. Can anybody who is usually on both IE on windows and Safari on a mac comment?
Well, I have a 2.5Ghz P4 running Windows XP Pro, next to my dual 800mhz G4 Quicksilver running Panther. The connection is a T1.
IE 6 on the Pentium Machine.
Safari 1.2.3 on the Mac.
I have noticed no advantage in web page rendering for either browser.
veggie burgers are great when you start noticing that all your hamburger eating friends are dying off.
Just reminds us how shortchanged we get on RAM and Video card memory … This is a fair comment. THink that this is a good article and I agree that Safari is slow at rendering … It is. but i still find it great to use.
Good article, but he left out a heap of things to consider…I emailed him with a huge list. If this guy could just get rid of the snotty beginning and the evidence of misconception-itis. Did you notice how, as his experience and article went along, that his attitude changed somewhat. I think this guy got a spiritual awakening and will never be the same, even though his pride still covers this up. No one on a professional level wants to admit they were wrong or had no clue.
“Needless to say, at almost $3000, the G5 was one expensive system considering its specs.”
No – its one CHEAP system considering its specs. Try getting a similar specced machine from someone else for less.
Also, he only had 512MB of RAM installed, I have more than that in my TiBook – the OS would seem a lot faster for him with more RAM.
Ooops:
“The obvious requirement for any OS that caches heavily is a lot of memory; while my system shipped with 512MB of memory, I quickly found the need to upgrade to more. At first, it was 2GB, then 4GB and I even contemplated going up to the 8GB limit; although, with 4GB, I definitely have memory to spare. What I found, however, was that unlike under Windows, the extra memory actually did something under OS X”
Nothing about Mac’s ease of networking. And nothing (that I recall) about being able to drop into the terminal window and do the command-line thing til your fingers drop off. I woulda thought that would have appealed to him quite a bit, since his love for the keyboard still lingers from his DOS days. But perhaps the most glaring ommision from his report is the virus/spyware/adware issue. He didn’t mention anything about viruses or their prevention, cause there was no need for him to do anything. If he were evaluating a Windows system there would have been an entire section on what virus protection he used and how easy (or difficult) and effective it was. But overall I have to give the guy credit — he at least gave me the impression that he was trying to be fair.
John- about RAM. He said he bought it with 512M but soon bumped it up to 1G or more due to some software he had that he said needed it.
Reading it now. So far the only problem I have with it is ” I’ve never had to reboot the entire system because one application crashed” and “OS X crashes”.
What he’s actually saying is OS-X has never crashed, but applications have !
John:
Remember, this guy is a PCHead, and an advanced one at that. He is comparing the price of a machine purchased from a Mac store to a PC built by hand from “scratch”, with no charges made for the labour, or the time needed to learn how to do such things. Those PCs are definitely “cheaper” than the comparable Mac, but, of course, they are missing engineering integrity and OS X.
Jack A:
Regarding web page rendering, I have had experience on both PC and Mac, but never on the same speed connection (we have a “hot” ADSL hookup at work). Even so, my more humble home ADSL speed combined with a slower spec computer is noticeably, but not embarrassingly, slower than at work.
I believe he discusses what is actually happening: IE and Safari work differently. If you code only for IE, Safari struggles. He learned to tune code for his own website to accommodate both browsers.
Now, as Anand owns of one of the top two PC hardware sites in the world, do you suppose he visits a lot of sites that are coded specifically and only for IE? Do you think Safari – or any other browser that isn’t IE – might have to struggle a lot?
Generally:
I am fascinated by the article. When reporting hard-nosed facts, I don’t think he had one bad thing to say – quite the opposite, in fact. With a minimum of exposure, he found that everything worked at least as well or better (sometimes much better) . He just couldn’t quite get his head around that. For instance, after stating that games worked just fine, he trashed the machine because games come out late for the Mac. Well, the fact remains that the games were OK, whatever other editorial comments he had to offer. He did not discuss the sublime security advantages of OS X, which, in my books, is worth quite a few tics of “snappiness”.
…continued…
…continued…
I have had the experience of knowing one piece of hardware inside out (a specific brand of computerized lighting control console). I then had to learn to use another brand. I HATED IT. Nothing worked the way I expected. Everything was hard. Nothing was intuitive, so I had to look everything up. I just didn’t like it, although it made the lights go up and down just fine. Then I went back to the original console. What a pig! Slow! Limited in function! I didn’t realize how good and clever the new console was, and how good I had gotten at using it, until I went back to the old one. Reading between the lines, I think that Anand is currently experiencing a similar thin edge of the wedge.
You get awfully used to system wide spell check, and Expos�, and easy to make ‘�’s, and Display PDF and…well you know…all that Mac stuff! It gets hard to go back.
Mike
yeah this was added because it was on thurrotts site… this is a decent article.. but I also can’t imagine why he needed a $3000 machine to just check out the basic OS features.. a powermac is built for high-powered rendering, etc.
He should have gotten an eMac, then he wouldn’t be whining about the price.. he loaded the gun and shot himself in the foot with it..
I thought at first he was going overboard with the spec/price, but he says himself that it was in order to give the OS a chance. Had he had an eMac, it’s likely that he would not have been able to be as objective as he has been.
Having said that my soon-to-switch friend has been using my old 400MHz G4 for months now and just accepted that some things were going to be slow on that machine.
veggie burgers are never great when you can have a turkey burger instead.
I can sympathize with Anand, I just recently purchased my first Macintosh, but unlike Anand I took small steps and chose to buy an iBook (and iPod) instead of a powermac G5. I�ve been very happy with the purchase of my iBook, and for the reasons I purchased the iBook it has met my requirements. I work full time as an Engineer and at night I�m working on my Masters and wanted a cheap ultra portable to take school work with me everywhere. All right let me confess I really wanted just an iPod but cram and jam tempted me into an iBook.
After having the iBook for about 2 months now I can say it�s a great notebook. The battery life is what I needed and the performance is acceptable (I added another 512 megs of ram to the iBook 256 is a joke). I too have found the same irritations Anand found. Slow scrolling in windows (particularly safari), occasional crashes, some minor compatibility issues, and whats up with making the HD in an iBook so hard to replace! A company that prides itself in ease of use and simplistic engineering makes adding ram, and replacing the ram a chore. Why aren�t HD upgrades easier?
Despite my nits I think Apple portables are great and I�ll probably buy another portable from them again in the future. However, the lack of games, and the need to remain proficient with PC�s for my career will relegate the apple as a secondary machine.
It’s largely what you’re used to I suppose. I find the fast scrolling on windows makes it virtually unusable. It’s certainly impossible to select a couple of pages of text in word without scrolling through 20 pages instead.
There’s always page-up/down for faster scrolling or dragging the sidebar using the mouse. It think it’s a problem relating to being keyboard centric.
I must admit though that the key repeat rate could have a greater range. It seems about right at its maximum, but I’m sure a lot of people would want an extra. (I confess that this has been frustrating me for a while, but I though I was on maximum, but was, after just checking, on 1 below that, it’s a lot better now)
I read this article the other day and is a fair but incomplete work. He’s should have spent a little more time and effort before rendering a verdict. That aside, he raises a few legit points:
1) Safari is faster than IE for Mac, but is slow and renders poorly under a load, even with broadband on a high-spec Mac.
2) He didn’t mention it directly, but OS X has a problem with the way the finder handles/responds to network recovery and corrupted files. If the Finder hangs, you cannot always get Force Quit/Finder Re-Launch to work. Apple needs to address this.
3) Parts of OS X and many applications (Garage Band & iMovie come to mind) are resource hogs and should be more responsive. Apple needs to do some work on the Open GL and Java components of OS X.
4) iCal/Address Book/Mail/iSync should be “rolled up” into ONE app. An updated Sherlock, Backup & iChat should also be included. Sharing of calendars, contacts & e-mails, sync with mobile devices, data backup, IM and dynamic internet data gathering (Sherlock) are closely connected and should run under ONE app-not many. Time to “Think Different” Apple.
What did he miss?
1) All the things that come “built-in” to the OS, like native PDF generation, faxing from the print command and the like. No mention of the fact that most users need not buy Adobe Acrobat in order to generate PDFs-worth quite a bit of money all by itself and stuff like that.
2) No mention of use of Mac OS specific programs, just bundled stuff and Microsoft Office. There are many “Mac only” applications that are a great part of the experience of using a Macintosh.
3) No mention of the mess Apple has made of Mac gaming with input device interfacing. I have gamepads sold at the Apple Store that do not work with games “Made for Mac OS X” without 3rd party apps or a ton of setup- very early PC & not very Mac. What happened to Plug & Play for gaming input on the Mac?
4) No QuickTime support for full screen viewing without upgrading to QuickTime Pro. VLC, RealOne Player and the Windows Version of WiMP all allow for full screen viewing of video content. BTW, while we are here, why does Apple not include QuickTime Pro with PowerBooks and PowerMacintosh computers? Spend $3k+ on a Dual 2.5gHz G5 and you still have to spend $30 for QuickTime Pro and another $20 for MPEG-2. Smells of rip-off to me.
Wow! A long and impressive article!
The first time I’ve read a fair comparison of the OS’s by an intelligent PC-freak.
There’s been plenty by intelligent Mac-freaks.
Well done Anand!
But …. if that’s his opinion of OS X after just a month …. well … I’d like to hear his opinion after using it for a year or two, because there are a lot of goodies he didn’t mention and probably didn’t have time to discover. (I’m still learning after three years and I’m also a keyboard freak.)
Not to mention iLife and the other Mac software – which is included in the price.
In it’s Native state Safari is quite a bit slower than IE on a PC.
Apparently Safari has a built-in 1 second page load delay that you can stop with a couple of lines on code added in its prefs.
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040516220739506#comments
Try it guys it makes safari 75% quicker in a lot of cases!!
Interesting article indeed. But Anand is a hi-tek guy. For most users, you’d only need to spend less than $2K to have a very good Mac experience. I bought an eMac with 1gb RAM, wirless Airport, and DVD burner, and it’s been great for all common tasks (Mail, Safari, AppleWorks, FTP, Painter, GoLive, InterArchy, etc.). DVD burning can be slow, but I’m not a commercial operation! I do only a couple per year.