Advice on Switching to Apple

Hard protection boundaries between system components and applications. Application security model based on least privilege. Hard separation between internet and local applications. Consistent user interface between applications. Consistent application behaviour. Universal services and contextual menu plugins for all Cocoa and most carbon applications. Common application scripting that actually works.

There is no Gecko or KHTML based browser for the PC with a solid native user interface.

In some areas, the best applications are Mac-based. In radiology, for example, there is nothing on the PC comparable to OsiriX for DICOM file manipulation.

And then there's the stuff you don't get on the Mac. Viruses. Spyware. Corrupted registries. Applications you can't reinstall. Keeping track of "installers" for your applications... almost all Mac applications are self-contained, you can run 'em from a flash drive, for example, just by dragging the application folder to the flash drive.

A lot of OpenGL programs I've used perform extremely well on my machine, but then mine is a G5 so it's harder to directly compare with an 'equivalent' machine.

As for Apple's hardware, they're not so over-priced as people seem to think. Especially when you consider many Apple machines that are a decade old are still running quite happily with a little bit of care. And while I'm not a huge fan of Apple's hardware policy either, it does allow a significant amount of control over what components need to be supported, which is something that helps contribute toward stability.

i have one of those decade old mac's runs quite decently with a dual processor upgrade, a phat stack of ram, hard drive and a firmware upgrade

and it was costly to do ... even a simple ati radieon video card pc version 40$ mac version 99$


well this is a toy to me .. so needless to say its made up of mostly generic parts (hard disk out of an HP, pc raideon, memorex cd burner ect) and some firmware tinkering, and software like "cd-rom tool kit" you and it cant tell the differance

on the more modern machines its less strict, ie we were putting compaq laptop memory in the original i-mac's back when .. most G3+ computers take standard memory, the new mactels im shure you could upgrade the cpu with a non apple certified part ect

You can't avoid anything in SL.

So basically, if performance is not a requirement, and you don't mind it running slower, then its okay to get a Mac to run SL.

Simple.

Or if you don't mind paying more money. Yep. It's all in what you consider Not Dealing With Windows is worth to you. To me, Not Dealing With Windows was worth buying two computers so I could limit my Windows Exposure to what's necessary to get SL running, and it was cheaper than buying a better Mac.

You could try reading what I actually wrote, by the way. I objected to your use of the word "flakey" ... I've been agreeing with you all the way down the line about the performance of Apple's hardware.

Oh yes, slow AND flakey too. But arguing about this is beyond any usefulness for anyone. Its based on my personal experience working on the Macs for a considerable period of time. Others might experience otherwise so let them judge the stability for themselves.

Why not just learn how to operate windows properly? 99.9999999% of people do not know how to use windows and so it's little wonder people complain about it. Windows XP tries to do everything for the user, such as memory allocation etc - all the "under the hood" stuff that in the old days people used to do for themselves. This is great for people who don't know how to do this stuff, but bad for the rest of us because it means XP uses vast amounts of RAM to do stuff automatically that we can do ourselves anyway. Use Task Manger to turn off unneccesary programs that run in the background, and XP is actually not all that bad.

Mmmm....toxic gumbo....