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[RoderickGI]

Things are different in the Apple world.

Don't I know it!

I am a PC user, but my other half converted to Apple some years back. However, as she isn't that interested in technical problems, I end up supporting her two iMacs, iPhone (plus mine), iPad Air, and associated PC software to work with her Apple products.

I never loved UNIX or Linux, and OS X is just a worse version of both, from my point of view.

Good luck on your conversion to the dark side!  

[macdonjh]

Visited in-laws for Thanksgiving, both families had tried converting to Apple.  Both Macs are now collecting dust in the closet waiting to die.  Once the funerals are over they'll both buy PCs again.

Haven't tried experiments yet.  Trying now to figure out DVD ripping.  MC21 doesn't recognize my Apple Super USB Optical Drive as a "suitable optical drive" for DVDs.

[blgentry]

Visited in-laws for Thanksgiving, both families had tried converting to Apple.  Both Macs are now collecting dust in the closet waiting to die.  Once the funerals are over they'll both buy PCs again.

I'm tempted to be snarky, but instead I'll just be straight up.  Everyone I've converted to Mac has never looked back.  All of my technical friends with Macs are still on Macs.  Generally speaking, the platform is extremely stable, performs well, and runs everything most people need.

The two pitfalls that people fall into are:

1.  'It doesn't work like I'm used to.
'  Sort of like JRiver versus Itunes.  You have to change your way of thinking to figure out the right way to do things in the Mac world.  I know several people, myself included, who overthink how to do common operations in Mac because we are so used to a slightly more complicated way with a PC.
2.  "I HAVE to have X application".  There are very, very few cases where the "must have" application is really required.  They exist.  But they are few and far between.  You can usually use an alternative application and get equivalent work done.  Like Open Office instead of MS Office (as an example).  In those rare cases where X really is the only application that does the work, you can usually use one of the two major virtualization packages (paid) or the free one.  I know at least one friend that runs some very mainstream Windows software in a VM on his Mac because work requires it.  He uses it every day; it works as expected.

There are almost no reasons that a transition to Mac won't be successful.  The major hurdles are mental.  See #1 above.

Brian.

[RoderickGI]

The major hurdles are mental.

Indeed they are Brian. A Windows PC user converting to iMac OS X is like someone learning a new language.

That can be very difficult sometimes, and often isn't very successful.

[blgentry]

Indeed they are Brian. A Windows PC user converting to iMac OS X is like someone learning a new language.

That can be very difficult sometimes, and often isn't very successful.

It's no where near that bad.  Yes, there's a learning period.  Yes there will be a bit of frustration here and there.  It's really not as big a deal as all that.  So Finder works a little differently than windows explorer.  Printer setup is different.  The Dock isn't exactly like the windows task bar.  There's no start button (which is a good thing!).  <shrug>  My friends and family are all happy with their Macs.

Brian.

[RoderickGI]

There is just a little bit more to it than that, particularly once you have to maintain OS X, or fix something that broke under the covers.

Witness the number of people who run MC from the DMG file and wonder why they lose their settings. My other half, who used to work as a PC support person, and is now a Mac user, would have been one of those people.

But enough of that. No need to go into a blow by blow comparison. I'm happy for people to use Macs, and I maintain a couple as I mentioned earlier. It is just that I don't like them, and prefer Windows.

[glynor]

I've converted essentially my entire family to Macs.  My dad, who was probably the most experienced Windows user, had the most trouble switching. But after a month or two, he'd never switch back.  Around the same time he bought the Macbook Pro, his desktop PC's hard drive died, and I replaced it with a SSD and re-imaged it to Windows 8.1.  He had way more trouble adjusting to Windows 8 than he did adjusting to the Mac. In fact, since then they've moved, and the Windows PC is still unplugged in the garage.

At work we support both (the company usage is around 60% Macs, with most of the rest on Windows except the handful of Linux nerds). Both have their troubles with support.

On the positive side, Macs:
* Are much easier to clone and image
* Don't have trouble with esoteric group policy problems, or complex registry issues that require re-imaging
* Have way fewer hardware issues
* Are very scriptable and it is easier to do more complex things remotely with only a SSH terminal connection

On the negative side, they:
* Still have esoteric file sharing issues (though now that they rolled back to mdnsresponder it has been much better)
* Can be difficult to remotely manage (no real System Center replacement built-in, though 3rd party tools are good)
* HFS+ is a bag of fail
* Are still a bit more troublesome with Wifi networks than the HPs we use now (though older Windows computers had tons of issues here too)

[mojave]

I manage all our computers at work and they are all PC's. The benefit of a PC user is that they don't feel they have to upgrade as often.  Our oldest PC is on 24/7 and is from 1998, however it isn't used much. The oldest one used daily is from 1999. I've been promising to get him a faster one for about 5 years now. His faster one will be 10 year old PC I slide to him from someone further up the technology chain.

Deciding where someone fits on the technology chain is difficult. Some need a more productive PC so they get upgraded every few years. Others don't know any better or don't care and are kept at the bottom. To keep them from feeling left out, I randomly install an old 56K fax modem or other useless gear in their PC. 

[Al ex]

To keep them from feeling left out, I randomly install an old 56K fax modem or other useless gear in their PC. 

Love it

[rovo]

Having used Windows for many, many years (since version 1.1, '86 or '87 I believe it was)...extensive experience with OS/2 ('87 - '99) as well as Linux (since '93) I can totally NOT relate to the OSX bashing in this thread. I bought an iMac in december 2012 and I have not looked back since. It is everything Linux no longer hopes to be and more than Windows could ever aspire to be...

Ron

[couchjr]

Yes, it's like the old slogan; you have to "think different." Whether one set of mental models is better depends on context, task requirements, personality, and how much conserved learning must be relearned. If the coolest new gorgeously styled ultra-high-performance zero-emission under-$5K GT car had the accelerator on the left and the brake on the right, its real advantages might still be outweighed by the carnage during the learning curve.

I've been a Mac user since 1984. If I was going to do this computer stuff, I wanted the tool that demanded the least new learning and allowed me to spend the most time on (real-world) task. Apple has always strived to shield the user from as much of the administrivia of computing as possible. The goal is to be like an audio appliance or (the gold standard) a pencil. It should just work.

Over the years, they've done a remarkably good job of approaching that goal. When something didn't/doesn't "just work" is where the grief often came in. Usually, setting up a home network was a complete no-brainer. When it wasn't, finding the various relevant settings and controls was not always obvious. Over the years I've had to learn to use Windows boxes at work, and it seems to me you have to do 28 extra steps and learn a lot of arcane paths right at the beginning, but if something goes wrong, you're likely already familiar enough with the guts to make troubleshooting quicker. In recent years I've been very impressed with how much of the time Macs do "just work," and since they rebuilt OSX with terminal access it's easier to intervene or customize the niche stuff. I just replaced my 2011 MBP with a current MBP with retina/SSD and the new security features in OS 10.11.x, and I must say the seamlessness of the migration (from good onscreen guidance through the speed and simplicity of machine-to-machine thunderbolt transfer) impressed even a jaded Mac user.

But it's always been the concern with human factors that has made the biggest difference for me. Apple drove the competition for screen resolution, so the Display PostScript-derived screen rendering engine and the high-ppi displays meant less eyestrain and better typography and design. They've continuously pushed faster connection standards, some of which have not survived and others of which have influenced USB-C and Thunderbolt 3. Hardly any of this was invented by Apple, but their ability to package it in usable ways has set the pace. Lots of other devices (Windows and Android) are better at certain aspects, or get to market sooner with some particular innovation, but Apple has generally been the system packager to beat for usability.

Core Audio seems to be pretty good now, but I'm still looking forward to MC support for the ASIO drivers that have now been written for OSX. That's one area where Apple's package decisions are not yet optimal for this particular subset of my computing tasks . . . .

[RoderickGI]

Yep, I agree with all that.

I was very impressed with the ease of transfer when I moved my other half from a 2008 20" iMac to a second hand 2010 27" iMac last year. It was very plug and play.

[glynor]

Point of clarification.

Display Postscript was developed by Adobe, who had been shopping it to Apple for years but they wouldn't take it. Steve Jobs's NeXT did, and NeXTSTEP used Display PostScript. I believe it was, however, widely viewed as a failure, and was a major source of performance issues on NeXTSTEP.

I know Apple stripped all of that out of NeXTSTEP before it became OSX, and the Quartz rendering engine was entirely re-written. It is (or was, originally anyway) based on PDF, not Display Postscript (which are two different things, though PDF does contain a limited subset of PostScript-style commands, it is not at all comprehensive, and contains other things PostScript does not).

I might have a few of the finer points wrong (as it has been a while since I read about all this stuff), but if you're curious, there is a fascinating podcast episode where they talk about exactly all of this stuff from a while back:
http://www.imore.com/debug-16-david-gelphman-adobe-general-magic

David Gelphman worked at Adobe in PostScript support and then later at Apple in the Graphics and Imaging group. So, he'd know.

[couchjr]

Yes, thanks--I was condensing when I said Display PostScript-derived. My point was that Jobs at NeXT saw the value and potential of the thing (the Sculley Apple years are best forgotten) and presumably brought the vision of scalable and vector-based screen graphics with him when he returned to Apple. I'm sure the licensing cost for PostScript was a major factor, and the PDF (also Adobe) terms were much easier to swallow. So it's the Apple/Jobs push for human factors that brought actual typography (just as one example) to mass-market workstation screens and made products like Illustrator, Quark, and PageMaker (later InDesign) usable enough to be functional for designers. It's only been a few years that Windows has had decent font rendering.

So it's back to "things are different in the Apple World." I never saw any evidence that anybody at IBM or Microsoft saw any value in John Warnock's work early on. It was Apple that brought PostScript hardware to market first with the LaserWriter in 1984--so that even before screen resolution or bitmapped screen fonts offered more than 72 ppi, decent scalable 300-dpi hard copy renderings of letterforms and graphics were feasible. In 1984. Same year the Mac was introduced. The entire electronic publishing industry (now including ebooks) is built on the foundation of what Apple and Adobe did in the 1980s, and Apple kept pushing. What Adobe later became (bloated and greedy) is another story (they very nearly blew it with PDF through bad pricing and licensing restrictions before they realized that a free ubiquitous document exchange standard would create a huge market for their other products).   

Thanks for the link--I'll check it out. The career trajectory of Gelphman just reinforces my observation about the common DNA and similar vision of Adobe and Apple at that stage. The Wikipedia summary (in the article on DPS) is pretty clear on the evolution:

Apple's Mac OS X operating system uses a central window server (created entirely by Apple) that caches window graphics as PDF, instead of storing and executing PostScript code. A graphics library called Quartz 2D provides PostScript-style imaging using the PDF rendering model (a subset, plus tweaks, of the PostScript model), but this is used by application frameworks—there is no PostScript present in the Mac OS X window server. Apple chose to use this model for a variety of reasons, including the avoidance of licensing fees for DPS and more efficient support of legacy Carbon and Classic code; QuickDraw-based applications use bitmapped drawing exclusively. Adobe's copyright stipulations for the PDF standard are much less restrictive, granting conditional copyright permission to anyone to use the format in software applications free of charge.

[JimH]

Jobs' ideas for graphics and the mouse came largely from PARC Labs (Xerox).

[couchjr]

That's true, and common knowledge. As I said at the outset, "[h]ardly any of this was invented by Apple" (which mostly means Jobs in terms of the CHI vision). Again, the question at issue is what company brought them to market and forced competitive development. Warnock was at PARC and got nowhere with transferring the principles to commercial technology, so he left:

In 1976, while Warnock worked at Evans & Sutherland, a Salt Lake City-based computer graphics company, the concepts of the PostScript language were seeded. Prior to co-founding Adobe, with Geschke and Putman, Warnock worked with Geschke at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC), where he had started in 1978. Unable to convince Xerox management of the approach to commercialize the InterPress graphics language for controlling printing, he, together with Geschke and Putman, left Xerox to start Adobe in 1982. At their new company, they developed an equivalent technology, PostScript, from scratch, and brought it to market for Apple's LaserWriter in 1984.

--Summary quoted from here.

[imugli]

I run (and support for work) Windows & Mac (via a hackintosh VM) and run Ubuntu as my daily OS.

I have to say it, Windows is my least favourite. So much so that I'm about to partake in a project to rid myself of it by building attempting to build a  Hackintosh / Ubuntu dual boot machine.   

Mac is nice, but it doesn't really do enough for me to want to use it as my daily driver over Ubuntu (and I hate their tie-me-down eco-system)... Mac is a nice compromise between Windows and Ubuntu / Linux though, IMO.

[couchjr]

That's a great example of the "diff'rent strokes" factor. The rigid (and sometimes ridiculously pricey for stuff like cable connectors) ecosystem provides the vendor control that make a lot of the "it just works" stuff feasible. For people (especially people who are comfortable writing code) who want greater flexibility and interchangeability, that ecosystem can be a straitjacket.

Some days I'm in the latter camp, and some (more often) I'm in the former.

From a business perspective, it's that systems thinking that really catapulted Apple into the stratosphere of market cap. The relatively seamless combination of iPod+iTunes+99-cent licensed downloads completely changed the game. Apple didn't really invent any of those technologies but they saw the huge appeal of the "just make it easy to get my songs (legally)" and rolled out the end-to-end system instead of just a device or a conventional web site. The iPhone+app store merely extended the same model into new areas.

I agree about HFS+ though. Even more annoying is the occasional unreliability of working with big (.dsf) files on NTFS drives using third-party drivers under OSX.

[blgentry]

Some days I'm in the latter camp, and some (more often) I'm in the former.

I've been a professional Unix administrator for a lot of my career.  Not all of it, but certainly for long enough to have worked with 4 or 5 major flavors of Unix.  I installed my first version of Linux at kernel version 0.97.  I ran Linux as a desktop for 6 years?  7?  I finally gave up when I had to do more work stuff at home with Windows.

After a good number of yeas with Windows at home, I bought an Intel Mac.  A few years later I stopped using Windows at home altogether.  OSX has a lot of the power of any Unix.  It's got a world class GUI (not arguing "best", just that it's really good).  It runs major applications.  It's stable.  VERY stable.

I haven't seriously considered Linux as a desktop in several years.  Maybe it's gotten a ton better.  Maybe not.  It's audio support is behind OSX.  Not super far behind.  But it doesn't do everything that OSX does on the audio front.

Today I get far less excited or argumentative about this subject.  I know what I like and I'll talk to you about my choices and recommendations, but I have little interest in arguing.  I just wanted to give a little bit of background on my computer background and history.

From a business perspective, it's that systems thinking that really catapulted Apple into the stratosphere of market cap. The relatively seamless combination of iPod+iTunes+99-cent licensed downloads completely changed the game.

From what I've been told, the Ipod was what gave Apple the cash to really grow.  It "supported" the computer side of the business.  From what I can tell now, iphone and ipad probably provide most of the revenue with the computers being low on the sales charts.  But I haven't looked in several years.  Things might have changed.

The world is ever changing and I think more people are adopting portable devices than moving from windows to OSX (or vise versa).  Thanks for reading these ramblings.

Brian.

[imugli]

Today I get far less excited or argumentative about this subject.  I know what I like and I'll talk to you about my choices and recommendations, but I have little interest in arguing.

This is me as well. Using all three, I understand they all do very very similar things. I love being in a conversation and having someone say "But my mac does this" or "My Windows PC does this" and being able to say the others do that as well... They're all just a means to an end, really.

[couchjr]

Today I get far less excited or argumentative about this subject.  I know what I like and I'll talk to you about my choices and recommendations, but I have little interest in arguing.  I just wanted to give a little bit of background on my computer background and history.

From what I've been told, the Ipod was what gave Apple the cash to really grow.  It "supported" the computer side of the business.  From what I can tell now, iphone and ipad probably provide most of the revenue with the computers being low on the sales charts.  But I haven't looked in several years.  Things might have changed.

The world is ever changing and I think more people are adopting portable devices than moving from windows to OSX (or vise versa).  Thanks for reading these ramblings.

Brian.

Agree with most of this. I do find it frustrating when people (often people very comfortable with programming) try to puncture what they seem to see as Apple fanboy or zombie loyalty by pointing out that Jobs or Apple did not invent every single thing that made their products successful, when that misses the entire point, and distorts history.

GUI, desktop metaphor*, windowing systems, mouse, vector-based graphics and typography, a simple-to-use mp3 player that seamlessly integrates with cheap granular content, ultra-hi-res displays, etc. etc--lots of other vendors offer them now, and many are well-implemented, but all those things were first brought to the commercial market by Apple, who created the conditions for competitive offerings by other vendors and the economic viability of the development ecosystems built around them. Jobs and Apple had some big failures (NeXT, though that launched the WWW, Lisa, and Newton, for instance) but those were cases of reaching for a vision that either wasn't quite ready for prime time (in the available state of execution) or that was ahead of the market's readiness (in the case of PDAs). I think Jobs learned from that, and his notorious perfectionism about finish and usability no doubt reflected the pain of those attempts.

Yes, it was the iPod, as I said, that changed Apple's fortunes, but only because it was introduced in conjunction with iTunes and 99-cent downloads (and all the major-label licensing deals needed to make that happen). Otherwise it might still have been a successful device, by traditional measures, but it would not have completely changed the economic model of the music industry and catapulted Apple to the size it became. What Apple realized is that by creating a simple way for users to complete the real-world task (acquire and play music anywhere) rather than just creating a better device, they would be far more successful.

And you're right about iOS and portable/mobile devices. And it was the iPhone and the iPad that launched those categories (smartphone and tablet) at scale. I think a lot of Apple's recent growth in OSX-device market share is due to halo effect from the iOS-device success. Here at Penn, where I work, the proportion of our network traffic from mobile devices is far higher than laptops and desktops combined. Total user population of about 35,000, more than half of which is staff.

Who knows whether Apple will continue to lead in this way? It's been a long run. Things can change quickly.

And none of this bears directly  on the question of what environment a given individual finds most effective for their particular needs today.

Cheers,
Randall

*Apart from the $17,000 Xerox 8010 STAR workstation in 1981, which was a real pioneer.

[JimH]

... NeXT, though that launched the WWW ...

I must have missed that.  The first time I saw the WWW, it was on an early version of Mosaic and it did almost nothing.  There was a really great site (Louvre something) that showed what it could do, but everything was very slow and often didn't work at all.  Unfortunately, I wasn't impressed enough to dig deeper.  A year later, I realized how important it was.

[glynor]

I must have missed that.  The first time I saw the WWW, it was on an early version of Mosaic and it did almost nothing.

Yes. That is correct. Mosaic was originally written for NeXT.

Also worth mentioning... Xerox certainly did do early development on the mouse and GUI designs. However, to suggest that all Apple did was "rip off" the Xerox/PARC systems (which were NOTHING like the early shipping Macs) is misinformed at best, or FUD at worst. I'm not suggesting that was your intention, but it gets bandied about lazily all the time.

That would be akin to me saying JRiver doesn't do anything but ship a ripped-off version of iTunes.

It was entirely revolutionary that Apple shipped a computer with no command line interface at all in 1989. They went all in on the mouse, and it involved a huge amount of development work to make it viable and productive.

[JimH]

I don't think Mosaic was written for Next.  Next may have had an early version of it.  I don't know.

I didn't say Jobs ripped off PARC but they did do it first.

[blgentry]

Yes. That is correct. Mosaic was originally written for NeXT.

Hmm, that's news to me.  I first used Mosaic on an HP-UX workstation in 1992 or 1993.  The web was REALLY small back then.  Maybe 5 sites?

Also worth mentioning... Xerox certainly did do early development on the mouse and GUI designs. However, to suggest that all Apple did was "rip off" the Xerox/PARC systems (which were NOTHING like the early shipping Macs) is misinformed at best, or FUD at worst.

Well... I guess it's all a matter of degrees here.  Jobs did get the ideas from touring PARC's facilities.  ...and famously, the director didn't want to allow Jobs a second tour with his development team.  He tried to refuse.  But Jobs got someone at Xerox to overrule the director and they got their second tour.  Was it a "ripoff"?  Not exactly.  But they got the revolutionary ideas from PARC.  I don't think that's disputable.

It was entirely revolutionary that Apple shipped a computer with no command line interface at all in 1989. They went all in on the mouse, and it involved a huge amount of development work to make it viable and productive.

YES. ...and this is what all the Jobs haters miss.  He was a revolutionary thinker.  ..and sort of a deadly combination of work-a-holic and tyrant.  Who better to change the world of computing?  NO ONE else was going to do this.  Then they did.  Then Microsoft saw it and said "Uh oh.".  Now we have MS Windows.

Brian.

[glynor]

Hmm, that's news to me.  I first used Mosaic on an HP-UX workstation in 1992 or 1993.  The web was REALLY small back then.  Maybe 5 sites?

Sorry. My bad. It wasn't NCSA Mosaic. It was before Mosaic.  It was called WorldWideWeb by Tim Berners-Lee, and was for NeXTSTEP, written in 1990 and first "released" in 1991, and it was the only way to access the web for some time. The web was absolutely "invented on a NeXT" (Berners-Lee was a big Objective-C fan).

I definitely remember using NCSA Mosaic (on Windows) in early-1994, before it became Netscape. And good ol' Trumpet Winsock (which also came up at work earlier today).

At the end of 1993 the web consisted of ~500 web servers. It exploded throughout 1994.

[glynor]

I didn't say Jobs ripped off PARC but they did do it first.

Actually, no. They were building off of prior work too. The computer mouse itself, and first thing you could call a GUI (with windows you could move around and whatnot) was invented in the 1960s by Douglas Engelbart at Stanford Research Institute (later SRI International). And his work was built off of previous trackball-based systems.

Xerox/PARC then built off of this and was the first company to build an entire computer (the Alto) around the concept. And then Apple built on them and the Mac forewent a command line UI of any kind. That's how it goes, is all I was saying.

[JimH]

Sorry. My bad. It wasn't NCSA Mosaic. It was before Mosaic.  It was called WorldWideWeb by Tim Berners-Lee, and was for NeXTSTEP, written in 1990 and first "released" in 1991, and it was the only way to access the web for some time. The web was absolutely "invented on a NeXT" (Berners-Lee was a big Objective-C fan).

I definitely remember using NCSA Mosaic (on Windows) in early-1994, before it became Netscape. And good ol' Trumpet Winsock (which also came up at work earlier today).

At the end of 1993 the web consisted of ~500 web servers. It exploded throughout 1994.

Russ Nelson, the author of the Clarkson Packet Drivers, showed us a version of Mosaic when he visited JRiver in the winter of 92-93.

Tim Berners-Lee of Cern has always been cited as the inventor of HTML and the browser, and yes, apparently he wrote in on a Next computer, but Jobs had no role in that.  It was Yet Another Unix Computer.

Marc Andreessen and others at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champain, wrote Mosaic and that took off.  Jim Clarke, of Silicon Graphics fame, found Marc and partnered with him to start Netscape, which offered a commercial version of the browser.

And the mouse and GUI were first implemented commercially on the Xerox Star.  Jobs did a better job of commercializing it.  

It wasn't his idea though he gets most of the credit.

[KingSparta]

digging up the Steve jobs mouse from a 1983 time capsule

http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/12/5405260/time-capsule-containing-steve-jobs-1983-apple-mouse-excavated

[glynor]

That was cool. Thanks, King.

If you're interested in a little of the history of how the PARC demos influenced the original MacOS, this is a good place to start:
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt

As you may be gathering, the difference between the Xerox system architectures and Macintosh architecture is huge; much bigger than the difference between the Mac and Windows. It's not surprising, since Microsoft saw quite a bit of the Macintosh design (API's,sample code, etc.) during the Mac's development from 1981 to 1984; the intention was to help them write applications for the Mac, and it also gave their system designers a template from which to design Windows. In contrast, the Mac and Lisa designers had to invent their own architectures. Of course, there were some ex- Xerox people in the Lisa and Mac groups, but the design point for these machines was so different that we didn't leverage our knowledge of the Xerox systems as much as some people think.

He would know. He worked at both Apple, on the original Macintosh OS design team, and for many years at PARC.

And then browse around the whole site. Folklore.org is full of all sorts of amazing tales from early in the history of these things.