[Deleted]

[Anonymous]

[Deleted by Admins]

[sabre100]

I got a 15.4inch macbook pro earlier this year and that is one sweet and slick looking laptop.  They rock and you can install Windows either via boot camp, parallels, etc.   You know you pay more money then a Windows Laptop but the look, finish, and the hardware can not even be compared to the cheap plastic looking laptops other vendors make.

[Knuckles_85]

Mac users are pretentious A-holes that needs to be punched in the face daily at 4:35 pst.

[NefariousKoel]

ORIGINAL: Knuckles_85

Mac users are pretentious A-holes that needs to be punched in the face daily at 4:35 pst.

I support this idea.

I think this sums it up well:
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net ... =macs_cant

[HansBolter]

ORIGINAL: yuiymkgfftgh

what do you want for christmas?

Macweenie extinction.

[wesy]

I have a "Mac" notebook (MacBook Pro) and a Lenovo (T61P) "pc based" notebook - whatever that means these days. Luckily i work for a software company and I have the luxury to get a new notebook every year.

Here are my thoughs on both (either way get an extended support agreement)

MacBook Pro

Pros - sexy, nice hardware. fast (core2duo), 2GB of RAM, fast ATI graphics coprocessor. 17 inch screen nice. Conversation piece at work. cool magentic breakaway for power cord. Great for Music recording. More consistency in UI.

Cons - RUNS HOT HOT HOT. Device Drivers (boot camp) issues, some conventions are different., motherboard fried on me. HEAVY (at least the 17") version + carrying the power brick along. It's a battle to connect to corporate network due to security (IPSEC, NAP (or NAC if you're a cisco guy)) Entourage is NOT Outlook when comparing Exhange clients. Shell is buried (makes sense since most mac users wouldn't have a clue anyway - what's this weird prompt? ). relatively expensive for what it is. No VGA port, but comes with adapter that doesn't work for more external LCD display.

Lenovo T61p ThinkPad

Pros - best "pc" based notebook (i use quotations cuz it pretty much parts is parts between the two) imho. I've had HP's, a plethora of Toshiba's both Tablet and standard notebooks. and this Lenovo just runs Vista flawlessly. No issues at all so far...my Toshiba M400 and M3 were a completely different story...reinforced "cage" for the display. comparable build quality (up there with the Macbook). Better Keyboard (subjective) cool "blue" LED to light up on a dark night - kind of like my Acura has or BMW has that Orange LED light for the interiior at night. I think the Macbook keys light up a bit (it's been in the shop for awhile so i can't remember) Metal stantions for connections to chasis. finger print reader, way cheaper than the macbook. upgradeable to 4Gb of RAM (though the mac might be too).

Cons - heavy, not as sexy or as cool at Starbucks or Borders , high resolution makes it hard for those over 40. nickname is StinkPad.

[wesy]

oh yeah - and i have a choice of using the "pencil eraser" or the track pad. I hate track pads!

[Nemesis]

ORIGINAL: Knuckles_85

Mac users are pretentious A-holes that needs to be punched in the face daily at 4:35 pst.

I'm a Mac-user, am I a "pretentious A-hole"?

[ORANGE]

ORIGINAL: Nemesis

ORIGINAL: Knuckles_85

Mac users are pretentious A-holes that needs to be punched in the face daily at 4:35 pst.

I'm a Mac-user, am I a "pretentious A-hole"?

Maybe he should get his buddies together and force you to wear an arm band with a yellow Apple logo on it.

[ORANGE]

Macworld ran a blog item on the diminishing allure of the Mac to artists and graphic designers in the United States. The next day, the San Francisco Chronicle published a story, in the business section, explaining how Mac users in California are a lot more socially and creatively diverse -- read: more strait-laced and less avant-garde -- than you might believe. This month's Computerworld will contain a report by ersatz demographer Mike Elgan that explicitly poses the question: Is Apple the new Microsoft?

Elgan's research on U.S. Census data drives home a point that the Mac vanguard has been wrestling with for a while: The hedonistic, transgressive, radical ethos (and stereotype) that once characterized the Mac community doesn't represent reality anymore. The decline of urban coastal Mac user groups, the increase in the Mac-using population in the interior U.S. and the overall diversification of the Mac community are facts. What's more, Elgan argues, these trends are a function of the growing acceptance of Macs among the American public.

Acceptance? Really? Has Elgan forgotten about the majority of offices that have policies in effect barring Mac use at work, or the Justice Department's recent decision to relax court-ordered restrictions on Microsoft's business practices in the face of continuing opposition from the White House?

Not at all. There is, he says, a vocal, virulent -- and sometimes violent -- anti-Mac movement, but it doesn't negate years of opinion surveys that show a marked increase in tolerance in most Americans' attitudes toward Macs and Mac users. In 1998, for example, a Gallup poll found that only 33% of Americans thought that Macs could perform standard pencil-pushing tasks like running Microsoft Office. By 2007, that figure had risen to 59%.

Growing acceptance means a decline in social stigma associated with using Macs, and a consequent shift in the politics of declaring oneself a Mac user. The more Mac users come out, the more accepting people are around them, and the more accepting the public becomes, the more people switch to Macs.

Elgan's study shows that the number of self-described Mac users in the U.S. has quadrupled since 1998, and the biggest increases are in the country's more socially conservative areas.

Utah is the poster state. Between 1990 and 2006, for example, it went from having the 38th-highest concentration of Mac users in the country to 14th highest. In that same time period, the percentage of Mac users who lived in large cities declined from 45% to 23%. Even more counterintuitive, from 2000 to 2006, the states with the fewest Apple stores had above-average increases in the number of Mac users. And places, like Utah, where a majority of people still believe Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11 -- the reddest of red, the squarest of rectangle states -- saw even larger increases.

Some of the growth in the number of Mac users in conservative areas could be because of migration. And yes, some on-the-barricades members of the Mac community have gotten older and mellower and moved out to the heartland. But the larger trend is simply that as more latent Mac users switch to Macs, they don't need to change or assimilate to fit into the mainstream because they are already very much a part of it.

"The demographic characteristics of the Mac community are converging with those of the mainstream," Elgan says. If you're from a state like Utah or Nebraska, chances are you're going to share a lot with your neighbors whether you're a Mac user or a PC user: "They're rural," Elgan says, "they're religious, and they're Republican."

So what does this all mean for American culture at large?

"Society is beginning to say that being a Mac user is not such a big deal," Elgan says. "What that means for Mac users is that their platform choice won't have the centrality to their identity it once did. Being a Mac user then becomes one of a variety of an individual's competing identities."

In other words, as the challenges associated with using a Mac diminish, so does the primacy of the identity that that act of self-discovery and self-assertion once forged. It means that the culture once associated with the Mac becomes less distinctive from the mainstream.

Elgan doesn't believe that these trends spell an end to Mac users' "associational" life. The process he's describing is not unlike the one experienced by so many immigrant or minority groups in America that fought against discrimination, moved beyond their enclaves and then felt a little sad that they lost the embracing sense of uniqueness and community that they once enjoyed.

As Mac users meld into the broader population, places like New York's Lower East Side and the Castro district in San Francisco will inevitably lose some of their appeal. As more Mac users come out in more places, the diversity of creatively expressive politics and lifestyles will come out with them, and the tolerant will multiply.

For some of the pioneers from the edgy, embattled, ecstatic "good old days," this may be bittersweet. "But isn't that what everyone wanted 20 years ago?" Elgan asks. "Just to be treated like everyone else?"

[Marc von Martial]

ORIGINAL: Nemesis

ORIGINAL: Knuckles_85

Mac users are pretentious A-holes that needs to be punched in the face daily at 4:35 pst.

I'm a Mac-user, am I a "pretentious A-hole"?

Yeah, I ask the same, am I a "pretentious A-hole" too? A good part of our planning and design work is done on a Mac actually.

[ORANGE]

The message below is just my humble opinion:

I feel that a lot of the stigma associated with Mac users is brought on by their own actions. They position the Mac solution as a better solution and the more intellectual solution. It isn’t. It is just one of many solutions out there.

Apple was in a position to become as big as or bigger than Microsoft a decade prior but they wanted to profit from all of the hardware sales so they lost out and are still playing catch up. Imagine if the Internet took off a decade sooner? A large part of why it did not lies squarely in the laps of Apple.

[Awac835]

Ill take a Mac anyday simply becouse the OS on it is infinitly better then Windows. But i would settle for my current pc and simply go with a free Linux distro or FreeBSD which i run along side windows for playing games.
 

[Knuckles_85]

ORIGINAL: Marc Schwanebeck

ORIGINAL: Nemesis

ORIGINAL: Knuckles_85

Mac users are pretentious A-holes that needs to be punched in the face daily at 4:35 pst.

I'm a Mac-user, am I a "pretentious A-hole"?

Yeah, I ask the same, am I a "pretentious A-hole" too? A good part of our planning and design work is done on a Mac actually.

I can't say Marc, you seem like a cool guy but it could all be a fascade. I deal with Mac users everyday as a Network admin/PC Repair/ Jack of all trades position at a company. I cringe every time a Mac person calls me. It's not the fact that Apple makes it difficult as hell to get to the Kernel. It's not the fact that Apple guard their white papers like the secret nuclear launch codes of the former Soviet Union. It's the fact that every time some goes wrong with their Mac it's might fault cause Macs "just work". "My Mac at home never have any problems", yeah that's because all you do is play solitaire and use iMovie you fat ass. The way Macs handle resource forks is such a pain in the ass that after fixing and patching what it just did to my network I feel like someone just smashed my nuts with a ballpin hammer. The last straw was those bs Hi, I'm a Mac commercials. I just wanna take that Mac guy and wrap his ass in 10 rolls of duct tape, beat him with a sock full of pool balls and leave him locked in the trunk of an abandoned car in a junk yard.

[Knuckles_85]

Acceptance? Really? Has Elgan forgotten about the majority of offices that have policies in effect barring Mac use at work, or the Justice Department's recent decision to relax court-ordered restrictions on Microsoft's business practices in the face of continuing opposition from the White House?

You know why most companies have policies banning Macs? Because they are a headache for IT departments. Macs don't play well with others. For Example let's say you want to host the files on a linux or a Microsoft Server. No problem except without a third party solution opening those files are slow as hell because the make wants a confirmation for EVERY SINGLE PACKET SENT! Do you know how bad that bogs down the system? Let me give you another example, let's say you want to move those files to another server. You can't just map a drive and an d move them, oh no that would be too easy. Mac tags those files so if you move them with anything other than a Mac it corrupts the files and they can't be open. On top of that you can't move them all at once or the Mac will start deleting some of the files thinking the files where moved. Now I've had to go trogh this process only moving about 200mb at a time (after restoring the files the Mac deleted[:@]). Marketing had 232 GB of Mac data on the server, yeah I was more than a lil pissed at the end of the day.

[ORANGE]

ORIGINAL: Awac835

Ill take a Mac anyday simply becouse the OS on it is infinitly better then Windows. But i would settle for my current pc and simply go with a free Linux distro or FreeBSD which i run along side windows for playing games.

I would not say Mac is better than Windows. Apple has a huge advantage when they can control the hardware. A lot of the problems with Windows is butt-cheap hardware and poorly written third party apps. Something people who even know better rarely seem to state.

Linux may have less problems but it supports less hardware, software and users.

[ORANGE]

ORIGINAL: Knuckles_85

Acceptance? Really? Has Elgan forgotten about the majority of offices that have policies in effect barring Mac use at work, or the Justice Department's recent decision to relax court-ordered restrictions on Microsoft's business practices in the face of continuing opposition from the White House?

You know why most companies have policies banning Macs? Because they are a headache for IT departments. Macs don't play well with others. For Example let's say you want to host the files on a linux or a Microsoft Server. No problem except without a third party solution opening those files are slow as hell because the make wants a confirmation for EVERY SINGLE PACKET SENT! Do you know how bad that bogs down the system? Let me give you another example, let's say you want to move those files to another server. You can't just map a drive and an d move them, oh no that would be too easy. Mac tags those files so if you move them with anything other than a Mac it corrupts the files and they can't be open. On top of that you can't move them all at once or the Mac will start deleting some of the files thinking the files where moved. Now I've had to go trogh this process only moving about 200mb at a time (after restoring the files the Mac deleted[:@]). Marketing had 232 GB of Mac data on the server, yeah I was more than a lil pissed at the end of the day.

This was a brilliant bit of work that I read at one of the regular blogs I read. It was based on an latimes.com article:

Gay — the new straight

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la- ... columnists

I posted it hear because I thought it was a really good job and did seem to fit the Mac community as well. I applaud the original poster.

[Nemesis]

ORIGINAL: ORANGELinux may have less problems but it supports less hardware, software and users.

Um, hardware-support in Linux mops the floor with Windows and OS X combined. If you plug some device in to a Linux-box, there's a good chance that it just works. Windows? Windows will probably prompt you for drivers.

[Nemesis]

ORIGINAL: Knuckles_85
I can't say Marc, you seem like a cool guy but it could all be a fascade. I deal with Mac users everyday as a Network admin/PC Repair/ Jack of all trades position at a company. I cringe every time a Mac person calls me. It's not the fact that Apple makes it difficult as hell to get to the Kernel.

How easy is it to "get to the kernel" of Windows? you have the source-code of OS X kernel available, how about Windows?

No problem except without a third party solution opening those files are slow as hell because the make wants a confirmation for EVERY SINGLE PACKET SENT!

IIRC, that's configurable.

Mac tags those files so if you move them with anything other than a Mac it corrupts the files and they can't be open.

Haven't heard of that one. Got any links?

On top of that you can't move them all at once or the Mac will start deleting some of the files thinking the files where moved.

That was a bug that manifested itself in rare occasions. It's already fixed.

Now I've had to go trogh this process only moving about 200mb at a time (after restoring the files the Mac deleted). Marketing had 232 GB of Mac data on the server, yeah I was more than a lil pissed at the end of the day.

Well, I know few Mac-using companies that move terabytes of data every day, and they have no problems at all.

[leastonh1]

ORIGINAL: Nemesis
Um, hardware-support in Linux mops the floor with Windows and OS X combined. If you plug some device in to a Linux-box, there's a good chance that it just works. Windows? Windows will probably prompt you for drivers.

I agree. There has been very little hardware I couldn't see running immediately after installing Linux on any PC I've owned/built/supported. The only real exception is with graphics tablets. Historically, they are poorly supported in Linux, but even that's changing now. Windows driver issues are the bane of most techie's lives, mine included. XP was much better with drivers, but I believe Vista has gone backwards in time.