Macs are for old people.

[Morfiend]

Macs are easy to use.  They are fun to work with.  Its PLEASANT using a Mac.  I have had almost zero problems doing anything with a Mac.

You know. Once upon a time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and there was another president named Bush, I had to work with Macs' fairly often. You see, The University of Arizona had just finishe their spiffy and new Chemistry and Biological Sciences building. Inside of which was a lovely Mac lab, networked to all of the internal research materials and the University Medical Center Library. It was beautiful. HTML was new, and it was easy to do research.

So here I was, plunking away, when suddenly, I get a message. "There has been a critical error in your Macintosh. This machine will now restart". And the vast volume of diagnostic information, or the ability to save my work, or do anything useful but curse The Fates for this twist was gleefully hidden behind the helpful and descriptive button, labeled "Oh!".

Die in a thesis fire Mac. Die and rot in hell.

(all that being said, I do like OS X, and with its introduction Apple is no longer on my comp.apple.discussion.die.die.die list).

Except now, if windows crashes, you still lose all your work. If your Mac crashes, you will most likely still have all your work when you reboot.

[Daeven]

It was easy to lose your work on a DOS or Windows machine back then as well. Memory protection was a luxury.

DON'T CONFUSE MY COLORFUL ANECDOTES WITH FACTS YOU DAMN RAT BASTARDS!

Oh, and get off my lawn too.

Goddamned punks.

[Samwise]

It was easy to lose your work on a DOS or Windows machine back then as well.

But much less common. 

In high school I did almost all of my essays on a DOS machine at home and very occasionally did work on the Macs in the school labs.  I think the DOS machine crashed and lost my work once in all the years I used it.  Having a Mac crash on me was roughly a monthly occurrence.

OS X seems much more stable, but it had nowhere to go but up.

[Strazos]

Except now, if windows crashes, you still lose all your work.

This isn't neccessarily true. Don't ask me how it works, but I was working on a paper before, had windows lock up on me, did a hard (from case) reboot, and found that Word recovered the vast majority of my paper when I went back in.

[Trippy]

Except now, if windows crashes, you still lose all your work.

This isn't neccessarily true. Don't ask me how it works, but I was working on a paper before, had windows lock up on me, did a hard (from case) reboot, and found that Word recovered the vast majority of my paper when I went back in.

By default Word on Windows will create a recovery file every 10 minutes or so to recover from such a crash. AFAIK there isn't anything inherent in Mac OS X that preserves "state" between crashes. I.e. it's up to each application that you run to autosave or whatnot and some do and some don't.

[Simond]

So here I was, plunking away, when suddenly, I get a message. "There has been a critical error in your Macintosh. This machine will now restart". And the vast volume of diagnostic information, or the ability to save my work, or do anything useful but curse The Fates for this twist was gleefully hidden behind the helpful and descriptive button, labeled "Oh!".

Die in a thesis fire Mac. Die and rot in hell.

You are the anti-Ellen Feiss, and I claim my (UK) £5.

(Yet another point in my screed of "Why the Amiga was the Home Computer of Champions" - the BSoD/Bombs for the Amiga were called 'Guru Meditations' and is therefore superior).

[Jeff Kelly]

Macs are for old people? Apple says: No Wai! (The title of the article is just greatness btw).

[Jain Zar]

So here I was, plunking away, when suddenly, I get a message. "There has been a critical error in your Macintosh. This machine will now restart". And the vast volume of diagnostic information, or the ability to save my work, or do anything useful but curse The Fates for this twist was gleefully hidden behind the helpful and descriptive button, labeled "Oh!".

Die in a thesis fire Mac. Die and rot in hell.

You are the anti-Ellen Feiss, and I claim my (UK) £5.

(Yet another point in my screed of "Why the Amiga was the Home Computer of Champions" - the BSoD/Bombs for the Amiga were called 'Guru Meditations' and is therefore superior).

Well, you speak great truths there, as befits someone with a Haruhi avatar.  But few people outside of Europe gave a shit about the Amiga.
I never wanted to go PC in the first damned place, but pre OSX Macs sucked to the point I have PSTD from using Mac SEs for 3 years of Vocational High School Electronics.
(I think there is a reason I am not in the Electronics field.  The early Macs are that reason.)
Of course Commodore couldn't sell water in the desert, so its not totally bad taste in computer public..

[stray]

They were big in the US for a short while (along with everything else Commodore). Some of my fondest memories of games were on the Amiga (read: Defender of the Crown). I never had one though. I just spent nights at a friends house to play with his.

[Brolan]

They were big in the US for a short while (along with everything else Commodore). Some of my fondest memories of games were on the Amiga (read: Defender of the Crown). I never had one though. I just spent nights at a friends house to play with his.

I spent far too much time playing Dungeon Master and someone's shareware BattleTech game.

[geldonyetich]

My favorite amiga game would have to be Armour-Geddon.  Carrier Command and Armor Command were pretty good too.  Unfortunately, my Amiga 1000 eventually gave up the ghost, but only after they were somewhat out of style.  Strange that it happened though, it took years for the PC to catch up in terms of multimedia capacity.

[Big Gulp]

They were big in the US for a short while (along with everything else Commodore).

You bet your ass they were.  It was the only computer I considered when I (finally) replaced my Commodore 64.  Shit, Bard's Tale actually had real music, not just cheesy MIDI!  That was fucking huge back in the late 80's.  It absolutely blew away anything in the PC or Apple world.  Actually, the runner up was probably the Atari 1040 XT, which a buddy of mine had and was great also.  Again, better than anything in the PC or Apple worlds.

[Strazos]

I just don't understand how Amigas can still be in use today.

They're so old.



Just remember, this is coming from someone Born in the 80s. I didn't have a PC of my own until my Freshman or Sophomore year of high school (late-90s). I don't think I've ever even seen an Amiga.

[stray]

The Amiga's in use today are PowerPC based, with a sort of modern, but sort of shitty OS/2 like interface.

Only fiercely nostalgic Euro Trash use them apparently.

[edit] I liked that era of computing though. Everyone was making tightly integrated systems back then. Only Apple and a couple of UNIX companies do that now (as far as desktops go).

[raydeen]

I never had an Amiga but lusted after them for one reason and one reason only:

Shadow of the Beast

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_of_the_beast

It didn't hurt that Roger Dean did the artwork for the game either.

[Jain Zar]

I never had an Amiga but lusted after them for one reason and one reason only:

Shadow of the Beast

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_of_the_beast

It didn't hurt that Roger Dean did the artwork for the game either.

They had that out for the Genesis.  Trust me, that was NOT the reason to own an Amiga.  It was SHIT.  Now Gods?  That's some quality Motorola CPU sidescrolling awesome.

[Simond]

Pretty much anything by the Bitmap Brothers or by Sensible Software was worth buying.

Speedball 2 is still the best futuresport game ever made, and Sensisoccer is still the best football game.

[Jeff Kelly]

Pretty much anything by the Bitmap Brothers or by Sensible Software was worth buying.

Speedball 2 is still the best futuresport game ever made

I agree but it is also one of the hardest games I've ever played.

Xenon Megablast was also way cool. It had a Bomb the Bass soundtrack for god's sake!

[Jain Zar]

Speedball 2 wasn't that hard.  Its not even hard compared to many modern games.
And Sensible Soccer was kickass.  A shame the remake was apparently complete ass.
Maybe the original game will get that rumored Xbox 360 Live Arcade release.

[Big Gulp]

Maybe the original game will get that rumored Xbox 360 Live Arcade release.

It's not really a rumor when Peter Moore has already said "yes, it's coming".

[Big Gulp]

http://www.apple.com/support/diy/ But mostly I buy through our local shop, which is great about ignoring Apple's tightness with parts. I was actually considering buying a Core 2 Duo + mobo from them to build my new pc, so I could boot into OSX on it (for everything but playing games, which is really the only reason one needs a winders machine).

I got to thinking today...  Isn't the only proprietary part of Macs nowadays the mobo?  I mean, a standard Intel C2D should work just fine in a Mac motherboard, correct?

So I started searching around, but apparently Apple doesn't exactly sell it's motherboards to Joe Consumer.  This to me is incredibly stupid.  Hell, keep your markup on the motherboard.  Charge well beyond Asus standards into the $350-400 region and your margins are still incredibly fucking high for basically just soldering an instruction chip onto an off the shelf standard Intel mobo so OSX can boot.  I know I'd bite the bullet and pay a markup on one component to be able to dual boot, but what I won't do is pay the inflated prices for the entire Mac desktop experience.

Since Apple is embracing Windows compatibility with Boot Camp already what would they really have to lose by going this route?  They'd be raking in money on mobo and OS sales, and they could still keep the vast majority of MacTards who view their computer case as a "work of art", and they wouldn't be releasing the OS into the wild for just any X86 user to run it.

Anyhow, Sky, could you find out what that shady Apple shop in your neck of the woods is charging for motherboards?

[stray]

Apple's ROM's (OpenFirmware), while not totally owned and developed by Apple (some Mac specific parts are), still sets them apart from PC's as well.