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IT commentator Robert X. Cringely believes that Apple may later decide to cut its initial price of $499 U.S. in order to gain PC market share, especially among the Windows PC audience.

So maybe wait 6 months and it'll be cheaper...?

13twelve, sorry man, but that single button mouse thing is so much bull

having 2 buttons and a wheel is THE way to operate your computer (and i'm sure if i had one of those turbo-advanced jobs with thumb & little-finger buttons i'd be singing THEIR praises too). you can do away with the keyboard completely for many things. or you can have one hand free for... whatever you wanna do with it. Or have one hand typing and one on the mouse to very quickly do menu commands without having to move the other away from the letters/punctuation/space'n'enter "zone" (or have both typing and only move the one).
It offers a MUCH less unimpeded way of doing things. There are a few things in windows for which you have to hold a modifier key down and then use the mouse (doing fixed-proportion clipart resizes in publisher, editing a selection in paintshop etc) and they're a pain in the backside. Not so bad as they can be, as you're unlikely to have been typing something half a second earlier, but still a bind trying to finely coordinate your hands on two different input devices to acheive something that could, with a little thought (e.g. using the right mouse button or the wheel-click simultaneously with the left) be done with just one.
Oh yeah and there's the wheel as well. Still using the scroll bar to navigate up/down (other than HUGE lists that are worth the extra seconds) or moving your left (or worse, right*) hand onto the page up / down keys? Don't make me laugh.

* yeah, i'm talking from a right handed perspective, where the left hand often gets left to fend for itself amongst the letters, and the right activates the mouse sitting somewhere near to the numerical keypad.

On the other hand windows is also a lot easier to use mouse free - keyboarding it, with tab / escape / space / enter / arrows and ctrl / alt. No spacky Apple key to have to go and hit after spending ten seconds intuitively doing Ctrl-C or whatever, and having to look down to do it (yeah i know it's second nature if you're experienced with mac, but this is from a windows perspective)

PS Apple has no excuse for it - lets examine the Atari ST, developed at a similar time as, and released not very long after the original Apple Mac. Similar user environment look and feel (except that lurid green background).. but what's this.. a two button mouse in 1985 (and the amiga also!) and control systems that are quite happy with only industry-standard CTRL and ALT as they dont have to provide for single-button mousers.

PS try using a Sun Solaris based system (e.g. Hermes Nuclear Diagnostics OS) some day. 3 button mouse and none of the three buttons is dispensible - each has a fairly easily memorised function set. You'd freak out. I know I do when i try to use a single buttoned mouse. Even the hardened apple advocate on the department has an iBook... with a white Microsoft Wheel Mouse plugged into it, despite it being a laptop with a trackpad (i like 'em!) built in (single button one, natch) because it simply makes the whole experience so much quicker and easier. And his time, and patience, are limited.

The silliest thing is the "hold down the button" routine to get a submenu, by which point i've already brought up the right-click context menu, chosen Paragraph, changed the spacing and am heading for the OK button. What a waste of time. Like driving a lazy automatic rather than a tight manual.

And the loss of ability to install "mouse gesture" plugins to your web browser. Man that stuff is cool. Hold left and click right to go forwards, hold right and click left to go back. Only takes a fraction of a second, rather than hunting for the back button... or right-click (hold-click, apple-click?) and choosing "back"... or leaping for backspace, alt+left, etc.

lol there are keyboard binds for all of those browswer functions

and control-clicking is just has fast as right clicking - you just press 2 things at once and not right click your mouse.

lol

and whats the other hand free to do? lol


the software piracy thing makes me laugh - choosing an os based on which is easier to rip stuff off for free haha cos actually paying for software is crazy thing to do lol

macs are less prone to viruses though given their small market share.


macs are also in films all the time

ironically the amd adverts boths on the net and on the streets on bill boards has a happy father/son moment looking at a laptop

which happens to be a apple ti book lol

keyboard binds for browser functions

yes i know. but compare the time taken (and the wrist strain used, also) to do Alt-Left arrow (or whatever it might be) or even hitting Backspace vs just moving your ring finger quickly followed by your index, as they are more than likely already on the mouse. It very nearly comes down to a "speed of thought" type interface.

having used both methods i know what i'd go for every time. in fact you've just reminded me that i need to re-install my firefox mouse gestures plugin as it got lost in the upgrade. been (hunting for, then) hitting the on-screen "back" button like some kind of lemon.

control-click as fast as right mouse

pffft! prove it. especially with the difference between, again, moving your ring finger if your hand's already on the mouse, and having to shift the angle of your entire other hand (assuming it's resting in a normal typing position) in order to be able to reach control even with your little finger, then co-ordinating the two. you can get fast with it, sure, but not as fast as just hitting that right button.

like i said though ---- i tend to use a mix. if i'm typing away it's still faster to do ctrl-b, ctrl-c, ctrl-s, ctrl-shift-leftarrow, alt-o-f-enter, than moving hands to carry out the equivalent mouse actions (clicking "bold", "copy" or "save" buttons, selecting the entire word to the left, or opening the detailed Font dialogue menu)



Left hand is free for whatever you want it to be. Typing being one thing. Other sundry controls, another. Drinking a cup of coffee, talking on the phone, whatever. Or even just propping your chin up after a long day.

Software piracy issue - yes, some of us are actually poor enough, or have been, that we need to use a particular bit of soft for school or work but not had access to it legally as it can cost £100 if not considerably more. I think the last fully legal PC software that entered this house - apart from the odd game given as a present - were MS Works v4, Encarta 2000, and Windows 98SE. I might need to use Word for some report at uni because Works doesnt cut it any more, but if i'm already up to my eyeballs in student debt, i'm not going to think twice about "borrowing" it from microsoft instead of shelling out the really quite ludicrous cash they want for it. Which of course is a big thing for how popular PCs are, not to mention ENORMOUS legal software base. The big thing for the mac right now is iWork, supposedly a MS Works rival? It has a word processor and some kind of DTP - no spreadsheet, database, presentation software? The main office thing that i've seen for it is MS Office... and if I'm having to run microsoft code... i'm sure as hell going to do it in it's native environment.

And i'm not even a big one on the piracy front - if there's something non essential i'd like to have (ie a game), i'm quite prepared to wait until i can afford it, rather than wasting my time trying to download it, convert it, de-security-check it and burn it. Could probably earn the purchase price in that time, certainly the 2nd hand price.

BTW the paying for software thing whether piracy or otherwise --- sounds like you need a dose of the Linux.

Macs less prone to viruses, but are they totally clean? What's the state of the ANTI virus and firewall market? The Windows one is HIGHLY developed and if you take a short while to figure out and install the correct stuff, you can sit back and relax. EG Avast antivirus, it appears to automatically update itself every 18 hours or so when i'm using it... But my firewall, browser, etc are good enough that it's only once reported anything getting through, and it was my own stupid fault.

Macs are in films is no argument whatsoever --- that's because apple pay for the product placement. There is no one real PC company that would be willing to shell that kind of money because the manufacturing is so distributed, thanks to the fantastic licensing scheme IBM set up for their standard waybackwhen. Besides they don't NEED to advertise

I'll have to look at that AMD one, might be another one to add to their advertising gaffes, along with the happily mousing man... whose mouse was unplugged. (no, wait.. wasn't that a mac advert?)


Meh, it's gone dark whilst i've been writing this... You stick to your mac if you're happy with it, but whilst Mac folk are buying up MS Wheel Mice as their essential first mod, loading windows emulators to make use of the software base, and people continue to complain about various unintuitive bits of the OS, i'll stick with what I know thanks.

lol its not like all my software is legit hahaha


the mac vs pc battle is age old - and i have no real interest in taking a massive part in another one


i do think its ironic that mac processors are made by ibm nowadays and that ibms share in what was originally called "ibm compatibles" i minute

I have the pleasure of using UNIX, Windows and a MAC every week.

There was a recent report that compared a 1.25Ghz mac with a PC of the same price (dell one). The MAC came out top because even though the processor is rated lower, the architecture and OS aren't as inefficient as the PC's. I think a 1.25Ghz G4 compared to a 2.2 Ghz P4.

So pound for performance the MAC is actually cheaper!

However, I still find Windows has the edge because of it's huge range of software and gaming abilities. and 3 buttons on the mouse.

Not sure what the deal is with graphics cards, but the 2D stuff doesn't need huge memory to perform well, it's all processor limited. So for photoshop, illustrator you don't need these hideously overpriced graphics cards.

I wish someone would design an all in one PC that looked nice AND was cheap. Like the Macs.... they are sweet looking for sure.

Right, back to UNIX now....

Since my Windows crashed for good three weeks ago I've been using SuSE Linux 9.1 exclusively, and the only difference I've noticed so far is the inability to play either DoD or Sudden Strike (my two favourite games).

My Windows' config file was 'corrupted' - possibly received a payout from the Linux guys? - and now if I choose Windows on boot up the machine returns a black screen, and the message stating the config file crime and telling me to use the Install disk to repair things.

Last time I did such a thing, though, my computer was sent back in time by three weeks, and all work done during that time was irretrievably lost. Blame the "recovery points" thing Microsoft has built into windows.

So now I'm comfortably working on the very same files (as Linux can see them and copy them back to its partition) and there's not a hint of a crash about my computer.

I miss the games (as I did when I had a Mac) but Linux is growing on me.

As for mice and buttons, I'll have three, thank you, though the centre one can double as a wheel for scrolling down text. Like my microsoft optical mouse right here.

I don't care for the nasty mice on Macs - the despisable little round thing that came with my iMac was destroyed in a fit of rage at some lost work a few years ago. I bought this very same MS Wheel Mouse Optical I'm using now, as a replacement for the damned Mac mouse.

A few months later, I sold the iMac too (if I weren't so poor at the time I'd have probably thrown it against a wall too).

I don't even know why I keep coming back to mac-related threads...

they are useful for some things though - the dtp and graphics scene i dare say is more developed, there's itunes (overpriced as it is), and those RISC processors find some fancy uses because of the turn of speed they can put in when it comes down to number crunching.

the self same tech i was on about in the earlier post had the ibook because he was having to run simulations of nuclear emissions, interactions, absorbption and detection, which required an enormous amount of runtime on a PC with the large instruction set x86 processors, even a P4 (in fact the lastest p4s are apparently worse).
the version on the ibook, despite it only having like a 1200mhz chip (or even a 1.0ghz?), optimised for the powerPC processor, was miles faster - and considering it still takes that laptop a good couple of hours to simulate a 10 minute bone scan procedure, you can see the time saving such a speedup garners.

both have similar width buses, but unless you have very tight MMX-optimised code, the x86 will only be getting a max of one instruction down the pipe for each CPU cycle, whereas the RISC chip may have up to eight of them in one burst..

RISC is good.

I remember though, that back in the early- to mid-nineties (1994 perhaps?) when IBM and Moto were talking about this new chip called PowerPC, that it was going to be used by both Mac and IBM-PC systems (why else would IBM get involved? They were into PCs and Notebooks big time back then).

A RISC-based PC would be great.

I'm still waiting for it. 11 years ain't that long.

As i've just set up my new toy and this is the first place i've been with it I felt i should write my first post on it in here!

Bit pathetic i know.

But i have my mac mini now and so far i love it. this is my first experience with a mac, generally got it just so i could learn how they work. Only frustratiung thing i've found os far is that there;s no scroll on the mouse!

Next is to play with my ipod shuffle

DIRTY BOY!

Ok two things now to do:
send the shuffle back and get a better, more capacious, cheaper mp3 stick that also has shuffle play, but a screen as well - instead of it being an excuse for not having one

and go buy yourself an USB wheel mouse. An optical one. They are far from expensive.

/soapbox

RISC based PC though - why not just get a mac, strip out OSX and put some other PPC-compiled linux in it's place? thought that was part of the whole osx idea, that it brought linux (and therefore, some pc folk) over to the mac