| David Coulson on 26 Jan 2011 17:14:42 -0800 |
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| Re: [PLUG] why apple |
|
I have to admit, I'm a little confused by your post... Either you've
not used a Mac in a long time, or you're going by what the press and
popular blogs have to say about Apple products. Disclaimer - I own a couple of Macs. I'm a die-hard Linux fan and used a Linux desktop since 1996. I support a 200+ server Linux, UNIXÂ and SAN environment for a huge retailer and get a Windows XP laptop provided by my employer. Current Macs are Intel CPU based, so you can run Windows, Linux or OS X on the hardware. Pretty much the guts of it are standard as far as memory, disk and external connections go (I agree Apple have weird video ports, but all of my monitors are DVI or HDMI and work just fine). Apple hardware is more expensive than most PC stuff, but it's rock solid and Apple stand behind their products - I had a battery fail on a MacBook pro from 2007 long out of warranty and they replaced it for free last week at the Apple store next to my office. Totally painless experience. OS X is BSD under the hood, so I can SSH into my Mac and do 95% of what I can do via the GUI. By virtue of it's 'BSD-ness', it has native X11 and most popular Open Source apps are available for OS X as part of MacPorts. I was working from home over the weekend on an upgrade at work and needed to be able to read a pcap file. I was able to download, install and load the pcap into WireShark in about 30s on my Mac using MacPorts. Many sys admins in my group use eXceed to get into UNIX/Linux systems and run X applications - I can bring up a terminal window on my Mac and just run it all via SSH without an additional X app, and it all integrates into my OS X GUI environment. Apart from the hardware and MS Office, I've pretty much not paid for anything on my Mac. If I can do it on Linux, I can do it on my Mac, but with a nicer and more consistent GUI. I'll be honest, I used a Linux desktop for 6-7 years, using GNOME/Enlightenment and other window managers. Having install Ubuntu and FC14 on various systems and VMs, I'd never drag myself back to a Linux desktop when I've got a Mac - I've got native MS Office, all the Open Source tools I need, and when I have to use a Windows app I can bring up Windows7 in VMware Fusion and off I go. Trying to avoid sounding like I love to throw my cash at Steve Jobs, but there is a lot of practical value to Apple products and it's not just for 'writers' who hang out at Starbucks all day (I actually saw someone with a Dell at Starbucks a couple of weeks ago... ;-) David Sent from my MacBook Pro using Thunderbird On 1/26/11 5:38 PM, Ron Kaye Jr wrote: my daughter is almost 30 |
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