I have two friends from Duke University Class of 2004, both in CS majors, both working in Information Technology at separate firms in Atlanta. Their work is in testing and developing massively scalable corporate databases. They are both staunch Apple users and made a Big Switch before graduation. Peter got a 12'' Aluminum PowerBook and Geoff got a 15'' Titanium PowerBook. (Geoff had to use his Student Discount before graduation and the AlBooks weren't out in 15'' models yet)
The PowerBooks have now become their everyday personal machines. Peter also has a Xmas gift Compaq laptop w/ Duron 900 MHz and headless Fedora Core server. Geoff also has a cheap new Compaq desktop for bittorrents and other long downloads. At Duke, our computer labs either a medley of Macs and IBMs or dedicated Sun Blade UltraSPARC workstations w/ Solaris. Neither of them can be described as narrow-minded when it comes to computer use. In fact, they probably have more eclectic experience in operating usage than you'll find in almost anyone, IT people included. Yet, despite this utter menagerie of OSes they've had to deal with, Pete and Geoff both adamantly use OS X as their OS of choice.
AZkid's recommendation was made as someone whose Win-centric experience culminated in his abandoning Macs. I'd like to provide counterpoint the other way around, from actual IT people who've made the Switch and have come to appreciate OS X. First, I need to address several points from AZkid's post.
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"Email for corporate use, there is simply no alternative on the Mac for Outlook."
Counterpoint: There IS an alternative to Outlook. In fact, it IS Outlook, w/ native OS X modifications. It's MS Entourage, and comes w/ the MS Office suite.
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"After using Googles Hello, Desktop Search, Picasa, etc
I finally realized I am missing out on a world of killer developer applications."
Counterpoint: Many of these applications provide feature sets already integrated into an Apple computer. On a Win32 platform, you'd have to acquire them from 3rd party developers. Desktop Search is available in Tiger as Spotlight, basically an instantaneous search based on a continuously updated database of metadata across the filesystem. Being part of the OS itself, it's readily accessible by a simple Cmd-Space Bar keyboard shortcut. The digital photo organization feature provided by Picasa to Win32 users has already been available to Apple users for years in iPhoto, part of the iLife Suite.
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"I finally realized I am missing out on a world of killer developer applications."
Counterpoint: He said this as part of the "desktop search, photo organization" point, so I believe what he meant to say was
"a world of killer 3rd party developer applications." That passage had nothing to do w/ actual software development. He was saying you could download lots of 3rd party software to add functionality to Win32. However, the functionalities he provided are already part of OS X already. There IS no need to bolt on 3rd party applications for functionality so integral to the digital lifestyle. Daily planner? iCal. Photo organizer? iPhoto. Digital video creation? iMovie, iDVD. Starting to see a pattern here?
If we're talking about 3rd party developer aplications, how about the hundreds of free open source software titles available for OS X? Many applications long considered Unix/Linux staples are ported to OS X, thanks to OS X's technological roots in Unix. The kernel is based on Mach, an offshoot of the original BSD kernel. The command line userland, which I'm sure AZkid as a home user has rarely, if ever, touched is almost completely copied from FreeBSD. Projects such as DarwinPorts, Fink, and Versiontracker provide X11-compatible Unix/Linux applications in addition to native OS X software. Since OS X 10.3 Panther, an X11 server has been integrated to the OS X desktop as a transparently running X11.app.
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"Office 2004 is a weak version of Office 2003."
Counterpoint: I will conceded that MS Office on Mac isn't as accessible as its Win32 counterpart, if only b/c OS obfuscated the entire interface scheme when porting Office to Mac. If you're really that starved for a good, clean word processor, Apple's new iWork suite provides Pages, which is clean, fast, intuitive, and has almost flawless compatibility w/ MS Word DOC format. If you want really fast and really low resource usage, Mariner Software's Write uses all of 2 MB of RAM. Mariner also makes a complete office suite, w/ spreadsheet, etc. I can also steer you toward OpenOffice.org, whose complete office suite is ported into native OS X interface by the NeoOffice project.
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"Function As a long time Mac user, OS X just hasnt felt like a functional Operating System. It still feels like a beta."
Counterpoint: I might point out first that OS X desktop might "feel like a beta" only because it hasn't replicated a Win32 desktop interface for AZkid's Win-centrism. From an IT point of view, you will not find an OS w/ as robust feature set as OS X. AZkid has obviously not explored the true nature of OS X--that is, its BSD-derived kernel and userland. Since your degree is in IT, I'm sure you're already familiar with what a great developer platform Unix is. AZkid's contrary views on OS X desktop functionality are probably adversely affected by [1] concurrent familiarity w/ Win32 desktop and [2] a resulting need to demand Win32 behavior from his OS X interface.
For an in-depth look of a long-time Win32 user's month-long acclimation to OS X and his objective looks at the functionality and flaws, I herein link you to
Anandtech's Mac Section. Anand has several well-written and remarkably extensive reviews on the OS X desktop for personal and productivity usage. He has three separate Long Term Tests, one for each the PowerMac desktop, PowerBook laptop, and the new small form factor Mac Mini. Hearing such a glowing evaluation from a fellow Win32 user was what finally made me decide to Switch. I highly suggest reading them before making your decision.
For a more technologically in-depth evaluation of OS X 10.4 Tiger, I link you to
ArsTechnica's Tiger Review. From there, you can also find links to their past OS X reviews, each just as comprehensive and objective. It's an engrossing look at the evolution and construction of this Unix-based desktop OS. As an IT person, your appreciation of an OS should extend much farther than the superficial desktop happenstances of AZkid's assertions.
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"Security The Windows machines I have used have yet to be downed form a virus."
Counterpoint: Again, I'm assuming you have Unix background. If so, then you shouldn't need me to go too deeply into this area. Win32 users rarely log in w/ an account set less than a Power User or Administrator. Both of these settings allow system-level changes, such as to the registry, hardware settings, software un/installation. This is how malicious software so easily foils Win32 systems. In Unix, logging in as root is quite simply not used unless doing drastic, system-wide modifications. Most root-level activities are done through the su/sudo authentication, wherein the user accesses superuser privileges w/ the root account password while logged into his normal account. This scheme means the user needs TWO passwords: [1] a normal account password, [2] root password.
I've actually had my Win2K system hijacked by way of a maliciously installed backdoor. Luckily, it was a friend who was demonstrating my system weaknesses instead of an actual malicious hacker. He had complete control of my desktop and I was, naturally, logged in w/ Administrator privileges b/c Win32. Imagine the havoc the hacker could have wreaked upon my system at whim. If the same thing actually happened on my OS X desktop, the most he could have done would be to wipe some personal files from /home/, but he would've been powerless to wreck my system by virtual of the su/sudo protection.
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"Hardware Sure, Apples hardware is ok, but its still limited. There is something so refreshing about have so many laptop options in the PC market. With Apple, you get two choices of notebooks in various sizes (iBook or PowerBook). Additionally, Apple has allowed their PowerBook line to become very out of date. A 100MGhz front side bus on the top of the line PowerBook???"
Counterpoint: As with all of Apple's hardware, an exquisite level of attention is devoted to design and detail. There is no laptop quite as appealing in its elegance and simplicity as an Apple iBook or PowerBook. What AZkid finds "refreshing", I find "chaotic". 90% of the mainstream Win32 laptops are of less than sturdy construction, w/ IBM's venerable Thinkpad being the sole exception. When NASA flights use a laptop exclusively, that really says something about its construction. But the Thinkpad is also pretty darn ugly, especially compared to the Aluminum PowerBook.
I agree w/ AZkid that the Apple laptops are somewhat dated in their tech specs, but this has not adversely affected their performance. Win32 laptops use x86 CPUs, all built on CISC architecture (Compex Instruction Set) and Apple's PowerPC CPUs are built on RISC (Reduced Instruction Set). Basically, a RISC PowerPC CPU would use only a fraction of the number of instructions that a CISC Pentium would need to complete the same computational task. This is why the x86 market is witness to the "gigahertz wars" between Intel's Pentium and AMD's Athlon CPUs. In order to increase computational capacity of CISC chips, you need to ramp up clock speed and bus speed to accomodate the glut of CPU instructions. The frontside bus speeds also need to increase in turn to accomodate flow of data between CPU, memory, and logic controllers.
AZkid needs to do some fact checking here. I know he was probably in a rush to wrap up his post. PowerBook FSB speed is currently 167 MHz and iBook FSB is at 133 MHz. In case you haven't noticed, the gigahertz wars have resulted in massively high-wattage power sources for Pentium computers. Higher clock speeds mean higher power consumption. The faster we clock our CPUs and FSBs, the more power your computer is going to suck up. In a corporate environment, it could result in thousands of dollars in excess power bills.
Meanwhile, w/ the advent of Tiger, Apple's laptops are due in for a pretty big spec-bump in this next year. The current generation of G4 CPU is at an end and the next generation w/ the new e600 core from Freescale should be hitting production in late 2005. The single core version will have 200 MHz FSB and dual-core version w/ 667 MHz. The single core is socket-compatible w/ current G4, although it would be absolutely stellar if a dual-core PowerBook debuted. OS X is already enabled for utilizing multi-core CPUs. Here is the
Freescale website with specs on next generation G4.
People keep buzzing about a G5 laptop, but that is simply a consumer pipedream. The G5 from IBM's Power-series was never intended for mobile use. It was a server-CPU, first and foremost. Stuffing it inside an iMac G5 was enough of a challenge. They'll never make it cool and low-wattage enough for the kind of 5+ hour battery life that PowerBooks and iBooks boast.
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"There are features in Apples OS that are significant, such as Spotlight, but the Operating System is still only as good as the applications it supports. And for Apple, OS X is still a limited OS."
Counterpoint: AZkid has already abandoned OS X so I highly doubt he has any qualifiable experience with Spotlight, an OS X Tiger feature. Tiger was only released a week ago. It seems we've come all the way back to the matter of "application support" and "integrated feature set" relative to third party developers, points I've already addressed earlier. I challenge you to find as many readily available free Win32 applications as are available from Versiontracker, DarwinPorts, and Fink. You will not, and will never. That will remain a fact as long as MS keeps their Win32 system closed to the public. Apple, on the other hand, has built their system on top of Mach and BSD, both products of the open source movement. They even provide XCode, a robust development suite, along w/ OS X. A similar move would be if Microsoft bundled Visual Studio w/ WinXP, an impossible dream of an impossible future.
"OS X is still a limited OS," AZkid concludes and again I will point to the robust, powerful network-oriented BSD roots of OS X, an aspect of the OS that the average home user (i.e. AZkid) would not be aware of and rarely appreciate. But geeks like you and I, we know otherwise. I'm actually premed, so I cannot say I'm professionally trained like you, Pete, and Geoff are. But the one one major hobby I've allowed myself these past few months has been learning BSD Unix, and the more I read, the more I begin to appreciate the elegant, powerful nature of a BSD system. I might also add that OS X is the only mainstream OS to actually get FASTER with each upgrade on the same hardware. The BSD code base is already quite elegant, but Apple's engineers have streamlined it with each revision. This is a far cry from MS Windows, which has required leaps in system requirements w/ each release.
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Mohd_jafarali, before you decide to Switch, I highly recommend reading the OS X reviews on Anandtech and ArsTechnica that I've linked above. Also, Wikipedia (search: Mach kernel, OS X, BSD) and your local BarnesNoble/Borders bookstore are great sources of info on the history and technological nature of BSD. A few excellent books I've read have been
FreeBSD Unleashed,
OS X Unleashed,
Secure Architectures with OpenBSD, and
Absolute OpenBSD. The
"Unleashed" series are excellent in-depth introductory references that span thousands of pages, covering topics from historical backgrounds to user interfaces to networking tutorials to system configuration/administration.
Conclusion: People often lament that there is no easily accessible BSD for the common user who doesn't want to fdisk & disklabel their own partitions and brave the gauntlet of text-based install scripts. But there really is. It's an OS built w/ a Mach-derived kernel, a FreeBSD userland, and exquisitely crafted GUI above it all. It's OS X.
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May 12, 2015
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