Thread: iMac?

Who cares? How often does hardware break? Anyway' personally, I'm not a fan of os x. It feels weird. It's like touching a cold' solid block of steel, where Ubuntu is like a block of Jello.

Originally Posted by [SomeGuy]

Who cares? How often does hardware break? Anyway' personally, I'm not a fan of os x. It feels weird. It's like touching a cold' solid block of steel, where Ubuntu is like a block of Jello.

I guess it's more a matter of personal preference. One of the things I really like about iMacs is that they're just what they need to be, and nothing more. No zillion cable mess and stuff like that. I figured I could have Mac OSX behave the same way

You could always dual boot!

Guys, I found a KDE theme like LCARS (Linux Can Also Run Star Ships...). Installing Kubuntu now.

Macs are overpriced, don't bother.

Originally Posted by Demon Parasite

Macs are overpriced, don't bother.

Virtually all preassembled computers are overpriced. It's not like the iMac is more expensive than some other computer that has the same specs, size, all-in-one form, look, etc. Apple products used to be more expensive than competitors, though. Anyway, if you want a "good deal" then buy the parts yourself.

That being said, I don't love Mac OS X. It's certainly a step up from Windows in the security department, but the GUI is equally inflexible. I myself use Arch Linux with a keyboard-controlled window manager (stumpwm), but lxde, xfce, and even kde4 are probably faster than Mac OS X's Aqua. If you care about choice and want to get an iMac, feel free to run Linux on it.

Originally Posted by Demon Parasite

Macs are overpriced, don't bother.

This statement is about a decade out of date. It's almost as out of date as "Macs have a one button mouse."

If you've used iTunes, then you pretty much know how OSX works. Unlike Windows, everything in OSX acts the exact same way as everything else. OSX has better memory management and multicore processing than either Windows or Linux. In terms of security, it's not quite Linux, but light years ahead of Windows.

As for software, Apple software is far better than the Windows equivalent. Windows has Office, OSX has iWork, Windows has Paint, OSX has GIMP, Windows has Windows Movie Maker and Windows Media Player OSX has iLife and iTunes.

Unlike the Windows of Quicktime, the OSX version is stable, faster, and can play any type of media.

Best of all, the average lifespan of a PC is just over two years, where as the average lifespan of a Mac is 6 years.

The only downside to the iMac hardware is that Apple only uses the old-fashion DVD players. It won't do bluray

No, putting Ubuntu on it will not void the warranty. You should dual or parallel boot anyway, Linux is good, but it doesn't have the programs that OSX and Windows have. (Windows programs will run natively on OSX using Darwine, including games. In fact, OpenGL Windows games will run better on a Mac using darwine than on Winodws because it manages multithreading and memory better.)

Both Ubuntu and OSX have very powerful disk utilities for repartitioning and verifing. Adding a second operating system is very easy using either one.

Originally Posted by ninja9578

OSX has better memory management and multicore processing than either Windows or Linux.

hmmm....

You do know the mainline Linux kernel can take advantage of many, many thousands of CPU's

see here
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7313

You think OS X beats this....

SMP & NUMA are server technologies (which have only recently hit the desktop)

Originally Posted by ninja9578

This statement is about a decade out of date. It's almost as out of date as "Macs have a one button mouse."

If you've used iTunes, then you pretty much know how OSX works. Unlike Windows, everything in OSX acts the exact same way as everything else. OSX has better memory management and multicore processing than either Windows or Linux. In terms of security, it's not quite Linux, but light years ahead of Windows.

As for software, Apple software is far better than the Windows equivalent. Windows has Office, OSX has iWork, Windows has Paint, OSX has GIMP, Windows has Windows Movie Maker and Windows Media Player OSX has iLife and iTunes.

Unlike the Windows of Quicktime, the OSX version is stable, faster, and can play any type of media.

Best of all, the average lifespan of a PC is just over two years, where as the average lifespan of a Mac is 6 years.

The only downside to the iMac hardware is that Apple only uses the old-fashion DVD players. It won't do bluray

No, putting Ubuntu on it will not void the warranty. You should dual or parallel boot anyway, Linux is good, but it doesn't have the programs that OSX and Windows have. (Windows programs will run natively on OSX using Darwine, including games. In fact, OpenGL Windows games will run better on a Mac using darwine than on Winodws because it manages multithreading and memory better.)

Both Ubuntu and OSX have very powerful disk utilities for repartitioning and verifing. Adding a second operating system is very easy using either one.

I thank you that you took the time to type out such a long reply! There's no problem in it not doing bluray. I yet have to find a need for more than 5 gb on a single disc

I'll think I'll make a dual-boot then, but only if I'm buying it. I promised I wouldn't until summer break. Anyway, I figured I'd get some advice early on. Thanks guys, keep them coming!

Originally Posted by Ynot

hmmm....

You do know the mainline Linux kernel can take advantage of many, many thousands of CPU's

see here
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7313

You think OS X beats this....

SMP & NUMA are server technologies (which have only recently hit the desktop)

Darwin is UNIX, so it has all the features of UNIX. The only difference is that Darwin was written specifically for multicore computers, I don't even think it will run on a one core machine. It's not as flexible as the Linux kernel because Macs have a most 32 cores. Linux would beat it at the super computer level with hundreds and hundreds of cores, but at the average level, OSX and Linux are about the same.

Oops, I meant to say that Linux has better memory management Linux outperforms OSX when it comes to memory allocation and management, but once the memory is allocated, OSX outperforms Linux because of it's thread and process management.

Also, starting with 10.6, OSX will use OpenCL and push large chunks of it's floating point calculations out to the graphics cards.

Originally Posted by ninja9578

This statement is about a decade out of date. It's almost as out of date as "Macs have a one button mouse."

...

As for software, Apple software is far better than the Windows equivalent. Windows has Office, OSX has iWork, Windows has Paint, OSX has GIMP, Windows has Windows Movie Maker and Windows Media Player OSX has iLife and iTunes.

Unlike the Windows of Quicktime, the OSX version is stable, faster, and can play any type of media.

Best of all, the average lifespan of a PC is just over two years, where as the average lifespan of a Mac is 6 years.

...

In fact, OpenGL Windows games will run better on a Mac using darwine than on Winodws because it manages multithreading and memory better.)

I'm going to tackle these points one by one.

Out of date:
Reasonable rebuttal. Macs are still not cheaper than PCs though.

Software:
Ok. iWork is in no way superior to Office. Have you used office 2007? iWork is on the same level as OpenOffice.
Comparing paint with GIMP is like comparing notepad and iWorks. It's not the same class of program. Also there's the fact that GIMP is free and works just as well on windows.
MovieMaker is included free with Windows whereas iLife must be bought separately. EDIT: (or so I thought! WMM and iMovie are still both useless though)
Finally, I have friends who use Media Player over iTunes because they prefer it. It all comes down to how you like to manage your music. Also, iTunes works just as well on Windows, no emulation required so you can hardly use it as a valid argument for why macs are better.

Quicktime:
Who uses quicktime? It's rubbish. I've used it on both Mac and PC (yes I own both) and it is significantly worse in terms of functionality and performance than VLC which is available on both platforms.

Lifetime:
I have a computer which I used to play all my games on till recently. I bought it back in 2002 or something. At the time it was less than $2000 AUD. That computer played every game I ever owned up until Crysis (which to be fair, slaughtered a lot of new computers) and happily upgraded to Windows 7 recently.
Significantly longer lifespan than 2 years.

OpenGL Games:
Darwine is just a port of Wine. Wine is an emulation program. If you seriously think that you can load up an OpenGL game in emulation mode on a mac and have it perform better than that same game running on the same system with windows installed natively then you probably shouldn't be allowed on the internet.
There's also the fact that Darwine/Wine often fail to work with OpenGL at all (See: Google).

iLife comes with every new mac.

I never said they were cheaper, I said that they were competitively priced. The original accusation was that they were way more expensive than a PC, which is not true.

Office is a disaster. LaTeX has been the standard word processing tool for 30 years, and iWork uses it as the back end. Microsoft claims that they get requests every day for features that Office already has. Most of the coming from professional users, if a professional user can't find a feature, it's very poorly designed.

Wine is not an emulator, it's just a layer that tricks programs into thinking that they are running on Windows when they are not. There is no emulation what-so-ever. Everything runs at native speed both on CPU and GPU, and for things like games, memory management is key, which UNIX runs circles around NT.