[Ti] A real world comparison

[~flipper]

Shawn King wrote:

>On 6/9/05 6:08 PM, "Dennis Fazio" <dfz at mac.com> wrote:
>
>>  So, when you say Apple has to beat Windows, I'm not sure what that means.
>
>Once these MacIntel machines ship, Apple had better have some awfully good
>PR showing how OS X and its apps run faster on their machines than Windows
>does on "their" machines.
>
>If Apple doesn't, Microsoft will show that their OS runs "better". Once that
>"information" goes mainstream (and believe me, MS knows how to get
>information into the mainstream. Most so-called tech journalists are more
>than happy to have someone feed them "news"), you'll see the Dvoraks,
>Thurrotts and CNETs screaming from the rooftops that "Apple made a mistake!"
>or "Mac OS X Slower than Windows" or any number of negative headlines.
>--

That could get pretty obnoxious, all right. My own feelings are that 
it doesn't matter, this idea of being 'faster than Windows on Intel".

I use Firefox as a browser, most of the time. And it is clearly 
better than IE on Windows, but, i'm not on Windows, and furthermore, 
being better than IE isn't exactly the Holy Grail in terms of 
'ambition'. Firefox is not a real Mac app. (I use it for the 
developer's tools, and the extensions.) But it doesn't really conform 
to Apple standards.

So, sure, it's 'better' than IE on Windows, but who, on a Macintosh, 
cares? Not me. It is difficult to compare different companies in 
different industries, but one of the common characteristics of 
successful companies, is 'focus'.

I would rather that Apple live up to their statements, in the 
Developers pages and at the release of tiger, that, now, finally "the 
OS is mature and the APIs are in place, and there won't be any major 
changes, so relax and develop, and we'll perfect the system itself, 
etc".

Before the 10.4.1 update, if an app crashed, or was quit on purpose 
but threw an "application quit unexpectedly" dialog, I'd get a form 
onscreen to look at the status of the 'quit' or 'hang', with an 
option to send it to Apple. But now i'm seeing the rare app failure, 
but accompanied by weirdness in the Finder, also: I'll lose the 
focused scrolling in menus, meaning, the cursor traverses the menu, 
but the text behind the cursor, at any given time, fails to 
highlight. Same thing in the Dock... and it turns out that, for some 
reason, Bluetooth has 'enabled' itself (despite the disabled setting 
that I run under in Prefs). As soon as i turn off Bluetooth, menu 
scrolling is normalized, the Dock works, etc.

Not a 'peep' in the Console.

Trying to watch video interviews in Safari this evening, with QT 
7.0.1 Pro, choices at the Apple store were QT, Real, or Win Media... 
I have all the apps. Safari says, Win media plugin not loaded, then 
the video plays anyway...huh? meanwhile the QuickTime window is still 
'negotiating'... nice.

Focus.

Is fixing the Finder as exciting as moving to yet another chip shop? 
Apparently not. But which of those two has more impact day in, day 
out? And the Apple "Pro" keyboards. I use a 14 dollar compaq board on 
a 7 year old PC at work. it feels terrific compared to the Apple. The 
Apple feels like the keys are sitting in a nice bed of warm oatmeal, 
in comparison.

Maybe we can get a deal on throwaway keyboards from Gateway, as a 
'bonus'. It seems odd that a company that pays so much attention to 
detail, design, and so-called human interface issues, would have two 
of the three most ever-present parts of the interface (the keyboard 
and the "Finder") being so lame and awkward.

Apple should give the Finder the heave-ho, and port that NeXTSTEP 
File server thing that was on the NeXT stations... I use Xfile on the 
Mac here, whenever I don't blindly click Finder, and it's a relief to 
see 'all' the files, the resource forks, and have folders with 
several thosand files opening in a split second...

It's about focus. I don't care about 'beating' Microsoft. Turning out 
computers, Apples, that are better than the ones (Apples) that came 
before, that's the ballgame, for me.

This 'speed' thing, i don't know. I know several people with Apple 
laptops, and then there's students, guys at where i work. None of 
them, as in zero, has complained about speed, or expressed an urge to 
buy a Dell. Yet, all of a sudden, it's national emergency.

Last week i was writing a blog, Eudora checking mail every 5 minutes, 
PhotoRetouch pro, and Photoshop CS2 launched, and i had a dozen 
utilities and smaller apps all idling away, and on top of it all, i 
was running an NTSC-to-Pal conversion in Cleaner 6... no problemos. 
try that on XP on a 3.xx Ghz Intel chip. And good luck <laughs>.

It's been a tough week. nerves frayed, hot here in central new york, 
the Apple deal, people feeling emotional (and logical, at times). The 
bottom line is we won't now what happens until it transpires. People 
are entitled to feel 'spooked', confident, angry, whatever. but the 
feelings will pass, and we'll all shift gears, and deal with it... 
just like other stuff in life, some of which is almost as 
important... heheh.

brian s