Rant

[cdybedahl]

Someone on Pyramid said, regarding that after Apple moves the Mac over to Intel CPUs they're still only going to have OSX run on Macs:

Well that's too bad. I like MacOS. I don't like spending a premium for a pretty box.

Speaking personally, I'd much rather that Apple spend their developer resources on improving OSX than on making it run on all the gazillion weird-ass pieces of stuff on the PC market. Which pretty much means that if Apple wants to keep the level of reliability that I have come to expect from OSX (and which experience has forced me not to expect from Windows), they can't try to make it run on everything.

I've heard statements similar to yours many times, about not wanting to pay extra for "a pretty box". On one level, it makes me wonder what your home looks like, if you're not willing to pay for things to look good. On another level, it makes me sad that the thought that the reason for the higher price might be that it actually works better does not even occur to you.

For the past fifteen years, Microsoft has managed to teach people so well that computers are unreliable shit that it has become almost impossible to sell ones that aren't -- because that does cost more, and since people don't believe that "better" can exist they're not willing to pay for it. So they go on buying the piece of dung that happens to cost the least amount of currency at the moment, and then pay the cost for it in zombie networks deluging them with spam, with worms and spyware making their system work at a crawl, with expected reinstallations a couple of times per year, with dataloss and with frustration.

And of course I'm not talking about you personally here. I don't doubt that your Windows box is totally free from worms, viruses, spyware and all that ilk, that you have an uptime measured in years, that you never lost a single bit without wanting to, that you never had to reinstall because too many different programs had spread garbage all over your registry and that your work environment matches your desires perfectly. I'm talking about what I see at work, what I see among my friends, what I see on my LiveJournal friends list. I've seen companies in the PC business go under because they tried to do things well instead of as cheap as possible. And all that makes me sad, because I know it doesn't have to be like that.

Comments

[trixieleitz]

[standing ovation]

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

The theory I'm getting from various people is that they're doing this because IBM aren't prepared to commit to long term support and development for Apple's specific needs any more. Apple's computers are a very small part of their chip business, and IBM can simply live without it, whereas Intel want the business and are prepared to let Apple take a hand in specifying the next generation of processors. Also Intel are building in a lot of support for multimedia applications that Apple need, and IBM just don't want to know, since they would much prefer to develop their server business. So for once Intel aren't the villains, neither are Apple.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Oh, sure, I can easily see reasons for Apple to switch (although I don't buy GrokLaw's paranoid one). And, frankly, as long as the machines keep working as well as they do now (or better, of course) from the user perspective, I really don't care what CPU is inside them.