[Ti] MAC commercial ... The truth??? You decide...

[Massimo Marino]

On Sunday, February 23, 2003, at 02:58 AM, PowerBook G4 Titanium List 
wrote:

> Subject: Re: [Ti] MAC commercial ...  The truth???  You decide...
> Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2003 14:16:33 -0500
> From: cbirds <cbirds at earthlink.net>
> Message-ID: <auto-000005074280 at mail.ninewire.com>
>
>> Thank god for OSX!
>
> Uh, yuh, this is what the PC users must be saying.


Yes, because they are switching! My group went from a PC majority to a 
PC minority group. Long time Apple haters are more or less frantic now 
and more and more I hear people commenting their next PC replacement 
might well be a Mac. At conferences and workshops the Macs (Tibooks in 
majority) are no more a lonely appearance. They well are in greater 
number than many other laptops,
Friday at a plenary session I counted 14 TiBooks in the audience out of 
some 40 laptops around, That is an incredible figure and definitely was 
the single best represented brand in the amphitheater.
>
> I think you missed the point. Os 9  has no "dock". The parody was
> complaining about a dock, and therefore was about X, which 70% are NOT
> using much to Apple's chagrin, and folks are dumping Macs at an 
> alarming
> rate, helped by this crash-a-day operating
> system-that-feels-like-a-bad-webpage.
> Just my opinion . :-)
>

Might be 70% but it is dropping at fast rate. On our lab there will be 
no more OS 9 running in an estimated 3 months: and there are 1436 
Macintosh running. The orders for TiBooks and iBooks and desktop are 
currently backlogged and that is the first time in some 5 years.

Must be your opinion certainly but you must be living in a niche 
environment or on such an extreme fringe of the distribution to be 
claiming such a thing. TiBook is the best selling (all brands) laptop 
since long time, Macs sell more then even before, the latest market 
rate is increasing and over 3%, more and more major sw producers are 
coming out with OS X product. Some late comers (Quark) finally came out 
with the OS X version.

The rate of Linux and Unix packages ported to OS X is increasing almost 
exponentially - which is an indication of the adoption of the platform 
from OpenSource developers.
Apple with Dell is the only profitable computer maker in this economy 
downturn.

cbird: no flame here, but crash-a-day? And you call that an opinion? 
That is utterly a false statement or else you are desperately trying to 
install a OS 9 extension believing it is a kext! ;-)
You may take that as a flame but - seriously now - if your OS X truly 
crashes once a day bring it to a repair shop: you must have a hardware 
failure somewhere: all the OS X users I know (and they are many!) have 
average uptime of double digits days. I personally never shut down my 
TiBook and reboot only when some updates/install here and there 
requires it . The last kernel panic I had I was running OS X 10.1.4.
One of my colleagues - who switched a couple of months ago is 
mesmerized he can leave the TiBook on sleep mode and never reboot for 
days: his experience - and he believed was a common and normal thing 
with computers - was to never let the PC sleep at night as in the 
morning everything would be frozen. He believed sleep in computers was 
a matter of a couple of hours at most then either wake it up or face a 
reboot next time you need it.

PS

The lab I am at the moment counts some 8000 people so it IS a decent 
indication of the general scientific and educational community. One 
experiment is even supporting the platform because of its stability. A 
crash-a-day OS? Such a unbelievable statement I have to believe you 
must be able to crash a typewriter machine.
--
Massimo Marino, Ph.D.
NERSC Division - HPC Department
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
On leave at CERN, CH, EP Division, Atlas experiment
phone: (+41) 22 767-1288 fax: (+41) 22 767-8350 Office: 32-R-C24
alternate email: marino at mail.cern.ch, Massimo.Marino at cern.ch