A few years ago I swore off platform wars because they always seemed a complete waste of time and energy, always the same discussion over and over ad nauseam, no matter how much time has passed. In 1998 we argued about floppy drives, in 1992 and many other years we bickered about ADB, in 2012 (or whenever it was) the end of the 30-pin iOS connector was the hot topic, and so on and so forth. File formats, interoperability, PowerPC chips vs Intel chips, you name it.
Now I feel like a reformed smoker having just one cigaretteā¦ it canāt really hurt, just this once, right?
I think this is a great post because itās got just the right mix of myth, unwillingness to graduate past newbie, ages-old anti-Apple tropes and bang-on analysis to get both the faithful and the haters whipped up into a fine lather.
Iām not going to bite on any of the specifics of it, but nonetheless you really hit all the right notes for a classic pro v. anti Apple pissing match. Wouldnāt take many changes to make it right for it to fit the ādebateā in any year from 1984 onward.
Iād agree. Every single Mac product in our home is still in use except for the ORIGINAL iPod that died after about 10 years, because it didnāt make sense to see if it was fixable at that point (probably just needed a new battery, though).
The majority are re-purposed, handed down to someone younger, or only used occasionally, but theyāre all (minus the one) still functioning machines.
Just picked up a refurbished Nexus 7 and loaded Cyanogenmod. Itās great - the most Iāve spent on a digital device in years - 130 bucks! (Fits in a shirt/suit pocket too).
With bluetooth DUN or a WiFi hotspot on my E7, there isnāt really any need for me to upgradeā¦ well ok if I wanted 4G, but I just donāt need that kinda speed on my mobile devices.
If the E7 craps out, Iāll could just revert to my E72 which has been virtually bulletproof from day 1.
My original iPod died after about 10 years, too; it went from not keeping a charge to just not starting up any longer. I looked into getting it fixed but the parts for OG iPods just arenāt available anymore, and the cost for an internal rehab just wasnāt worth it for nostalgiaās sake. But my 8-year old replacement iPod is still working perfectly.
The one Iām a little sad about is my G4 Cube, the coolest and silliest Mac they ever made, imo. It was silent ā no fan, air-cooled ā and turned on with a wave of the hand. I even replaced the motherboard and added a fan to keep it running fast enough for newer Photoshop versions as years went by. But it just couldnāt keep up with my needs.
I am curious about this. I went through three Macbook Pros in six or seven years. In all three cases, the hardware broke in some way. In the last case, the machine never left my desk, so it wasnāt damaged by being carried around. My general impression is one of flimsiness.
Not sure what to tell you. Mine lasted through falls from desks, trips across New Zealand and Japan, and many years as my daily workhorse machine. I took it in once when the fan started making too much noise, and that was a quick repair. After about eight years the battery stopped keeping a charge and it had to be kept plugged in, and last year the keyboard became weirdly erratic, and I replaced it with a Macbook Air.
I guess I didnāt really hate it, so much as got really tired of its limitations at the time. (And compared with BeOS or IRIX, these were legion). NeXT/OS X may have been slow, but it really did have preemptive multitasking, protected memory, and a UI which everyone should have been inspired by in 1985, let alone 1997. (And OS X got faster much more quickly than classic.)
Doing the Extensions Rearrangement Dance and restarting a lot isnāt something I really miss about Classic.
[quote=āgreg_codori, post:159, topic:73409ā]
The average age of automobiles on the road is 6 years. Iām guessing millions of Americans didnāt get your memoā¦[/quote]
false comparison, do you not see the difference between a laptop or phone and a car?
NeXTStep ran nicely on black hardware, they didnāt cut corners, so for its time the 68040+DSP+SCSI was nice hardware (and you could use multiple cube logic boards inside one cube for more perf.) and by the time NeXT gave up on hardware you could run OpenStep on fast x86/Sun/PA-RISC hardware. It only got really slow when it was ported to PPC/Apple hardware where it needed a ton of tuning before it performed acceptably (the Mach kernel messaging overhead added a real performance hit on RISC hardware).
I liked OS 9ās spatial Finder and still miss it, but thatās about the only thing about the old OS I miss. The fact that any application error could corrupt global memory and require you reboot the computer, mixed with bugs in the memory manager from 7.6 through 8.5 that caused the entire system to crash with error 11s (8.6 finally fixed that), 8.1 corrupting IDE boot drives, and a few other massive bugs in that realm make me glad that itās dead and gone.
Plus I really, really like *NIX - being able to SSH into my system and do useful things is the best.
Wow, you canāt point out the shortcomings of an nicely branded, overpriced computer without raising the hackles of some people. OS jihadism will never die, it seems.
Jasmin, you might like to know that you can pull a drive out of brand Y machine linux machine, slap it into brand Z and carry on. iām partial to ubuntu gnome, but the nice thing is, you can put whatever windows manager/gui you want on it.
