Where's the Mac Love? (Was: Re: Advice on Purchasing home PC - TESCO or DELL??)

espresso

Alex

Thanks for your reply. I do not know the exact details about the particular G3 imac and it's installed OS. It is 100 miles away from me but I know that it does not have an Airport card and I had hoped that it would be easy to add an alternative WiFi adaptor into the LAN or USB sockets but the availability of drivers do still seem to be the problem. I have done a bit more searching and found that some engineers have successfully modified or hacked existing drivers to suit various other commonly available WiFi devices that use similar chipsets. I will continue to look into this idea and may give this idea a try. I know my way around PC's but macs are more of a mystery to me!

:beer:

newfoundglory

alexjohnson wrote:

By the way newfoundglory - a quick search on other Apple posts here shows that you lied to get a job at Apple Expo. As well as being shocked at the lies, I am even more shocked that you somehow missed the Kool-Aid drinking sessions. I am getting the distinct impression that when Steve Jobs tells you that he has something new, expensive, and novel but ultimately fairly derivative to sell, you don't feel compelled to buy it. I am torn between begrudging admiration for a moral courage I no longer possess, and a desire to see you stoned to death.

Yeah, i confess, I worked at the macexpo from thurs - sat having never used OS X in my life... and yeah, i dont own a mac either...sad maybe... but thats what computer science does to you

Its just as well OS X is based on FreeBSD then... large parts of the kernel... network stack and userland :beer:

Don't get me wrong, i think they made a good job with OS X...

geekgirl

I have the mac lurve.
I run two laptops one mac one pc. I have been using mac and pc for about 15 years.
I just love my mac because it is nicer.
Both of my machines do what I need I just love my mac more.

Dude

alexjohnson wrote:

No probs. Rather than reinvent the wheel the best thing is to find out if it will take the official AirPort card. About half way through its life they started to. If you get the colleague to go to "About This Mac" which is usually the first entry from the Apple Menu (top left) and post the whole lot here chapter and verse, as well as the colour of the iMac (I'm serious...) I should be able to let you know whether a bit of eBaying would be of use.

Correction: Actually the cut-off is much simpler than I remembered. If the iMac has a slot-loading CD drive, it is almost definitely AirPort compatible. If if has a CD tray, it isn't, and you'll have to do something funky. (In passing that means it's about six years old!) The only exception is that if it's indigo (purply-blue, not the lighter blue they used a lot back then) and just 350MHz then it was a particularly cheap model and it won't work. The only other thing I had also forgotten is that as well as the card, you need the imac adapter that may or may not have been included with the AirPort card.
For clarity, you need one of these adapters:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Apple-iMac-Airport-adaptor-card_W0QQitemZ5824810020
and this particular AirPort card is likely to go cheap as the vendor is unknown to spell-check :-) :
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Apple-Aiport-Card_W0QQitemZ8716580974

Hope this helps.

Carriers are no longer included as standard with airport cards (802.11b model, the 802.11g don’t need them) and will cost around £20 (I recon I must have thrown away somewhere between 400-800 of these, I could have had a brilliant market on ebay!).

I work with high-end Mac’s on a daily basis but always go home to my PC at night (I am loyal that way!). I disagree with the argument that Mac component are high quality. Apple refurbish components (e.g. logic boards, CD drives) and as any honest Mac engineer will tell you the new (refurbished) component is often covered in dust with capacitors looking like they are about to explode (in fact I have seen a number of them in worse condition than the faulty ones!). If a CD drive breaks on my PC I could nip round to my local shop and get a DVD writer for £30, the apple price for what could potential be the same drive would be 4 times that.

I love apple stuff especially my G4 powerbook but the company has to wake up and start pricing produces competitively. An example of this is to compare the high end Mac mini with a £600 dell! If you are thinking about a mac mini for web browsing and email then think carefully, it may look good on your desk, you may not get any viruses but I am constantly frustrated by webpage’s not displaying correctly on mac browsers.

Mr_Skint_2

geekgirl wrote:

I just love my mac because it is nicer.

Just one question, Why ? :beer:

wolfman

alexjohnson wrote:

I don't think you are comparing apples with apples (as it were). On a Mac with an expansion bay you could do exactly the same thing. if you had an IBM and went to IBM for the part, you would not pay the same as if you got some no-name brand component from your local shop. If you look at what Sony for example charge for their own-brand wi-fi adapters and DVD-ROMs for their smallest notebooks, you'll see that while two wrongs may not make a right, hammering Apple for something everyone does is a bit unfair. That goes for using refurb components too. You never know about these things, but I have a friend whose sound card in some no-name brand PC literally blew up. Scorch marks on the inside of the case. I would compare Apple's build quality (generally) with IBM, Sony, etc., but I also reckon it is fair enough to think that if you pay £299 for a complete system, the components are likely to be crap.

I can kind of see where he's coming from. One thing with Mac's, is the difficulty, or cost to upgrade. PC's are generally easier to upgrade as you can buy from a number of places/manufacturers etc... The type and quality of component depend upon (but not always) price and manufacturer. Just because it's cheap doesn't mean it's poor quality, you can find some very well priced stuff out there.

If I did have a Mac Mini and wanted to upgrade it, I'd be a little stumped, or out of pocket in doing so. PC's are generally more versatile in this sense. Apple build to a spec, whereas PC's are usually built to a cost, so you will have a lot of poor quality PC components out there, just as much as you will have some very high quality components out there.

With a Mac you don't get so much for your money in terms of hardware performance, but you do get a system of more than reasonable quality and stability and an OS that is virus/spyware free, and requires much less maintenance than Windows. In my eyes, it's much more of an "out of the box" package which isn't a bad thing.

Dude

alexjohnson wrote:

I guess I just don't go to the kind of sites that need so much ActiveX scripting that it breaks my browser. But I don't judge...! ;-)

That is a bit below the belt! Guess I must have hit the core ;-)

wolfman

alexjohnson wrote:

Most users never open the box. Why would they? Add a hard drive or DVD burner? As an average user, you're either going to be doing that in the context of a failure - in which case the tech guy is going to do it for you - or to add something you didn't have before. The Mac mini has USB 2.0 and FireWire. Doesn't that give you all the expansion you need?

True, although you'll be suprised at the number of people adding memory, wanting another hard drive, installing dvd writers, tv cards, better graphics cards. You just have to look on this forum to see there are quite a few at least asking about or considering it. Expansion is merely a way of compensating for the pace at which technology is advancing. It allows you to extend the life of your machine that little bit further. And installing it yourself (generally not that difficult) can save you money (if you're patient and do it correctly!) and you learn a little about what you're using.

USB and Firewire slots maybe enough, but I'd personally rather have everything inside the case, than numerous external hard drives, dvd-writer etc... sat outside the case. One thing I like about the Mac Mini is it's simplicity and size, I wouldn't buy it with expandibility in mind.

alexjohnson wrote:

To bring it back to the Mac mini, what is it missing that you would want?

Nothing to be honest (bar processing power, and graphical power). Actually the top of the range Mac Mini has an 80gb hard drive and DVD-Writer. Although in todays market 80gb isn't that much, especially given people's ever expanding music and video collections.

alexjohnson wrote:

But I used the example of a bus and a porsche before: I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to pick things like processor speed out in isolation as the whole experience is so different. Clearly if you do want to play the latest first person shooter the frame rate is a key number. If you want to surf the web, manage your photos, and use iTunes it really isn't, and I think for the average user the ability to do those things without all the hassles of viruses, security, and hardware incompatibilities that PC users take for granted has got to be worth more than your MP3 encodes taking a couple of seconds longer.

I never would. In fact a lot of the expense on my computer has gone on other components. Such as the TFT, Logitech MX1000, Apple Wireless Keyboard, Aluminium case. I did get to choose my parts though, but there are places other than Dell where they'll custom build a pc for you. There are many decent components for the PC out there, just like there are many poor quality components.

Also you mention viruses, spyware etc... in relation to a PC, but that's OS related, not PC related. Linux is getting much easier to use and install, but people often avoid it either out of lack of knowledge, they don't want to learn something new, or Windows comes as part of the deal.

newfoundglory

So lets see now.... 10.4.3...

The fixes focus on Finder, Mac OS X's Spotlight search system, Mail, the Safari web browser, .Mac and device synchronisation, networking (including AFP, SMB/CIFS, NFS and FTP network and file services, plus AirPort and Bluetooth), iChat, Disk Utility, Preview, iCal, Calculator, Software Update, Keychain Access, Core Graphics, Core Audio, Core Image, RAW camera image format support, disc burning, and Dashboard and a variety of widgets.

Soooo....errrr.... they had to fix just about everything then.... oh, and that list doesnt even include the security fixes :rolleyes: :beer: