A Month with a Mac: A Die-Hard PC User's Perspective
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 8, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Mac
The Basics
I had used Macs in the past, mostly at schools, and boy, did I ever hate the experience. I would always feel completely lost when using them and I would grow increasingly more frustrated as the machines were always slow, would crash often and for the life of me, I could never right click on anything. Going into this experiment, I knew that if I was going to give the platform a good chance, I needed to get the fastest system that Apple had to offer. At the time, this was a dual 2GHz G5 system configured as follows:Dual 2GHz 0.13-micron G5 CPUs
512MB CAS3 DDR400 SDRAM
160GB SATA HDD
ATI Radeon 9600 (64MB)
The MSRP on the system when I bought it was $2999 ($2699 with a student discount). Since then, it has dropped to $2499 ($2299 with a student discount) with the dual 2.5GHz system taking its place at the $2999 pricepoint. Needless to say, at almost $3000, the G5 was one expensive system considering its specs. Many will attempt to justify the price of the G5 by comparing it to a workstation class PC, such as a dual Opteron or Xeon and then saying that the price differential isn't all that much - after all, it's not abnormal to spend $3000 on a workstation right? While that is true, generally speaking, a $3000 workstation will buy you much more than what Apple's top of the line G5 gives you from a hardware perspective.
The first thing I quickly realized was that justifying Apple's pricing wasn't something to do - just bite the bullet and try the experiment. It's all about supply and demand, Apple has around 2% of the computing market. Compare that to the rest of the pie that x86 makers get to share and you can quickly see why the economies of scale don't play in Apple's favor. If you look at the brief spec list above, however, you'll see that the memory, hard drive and video card are fairly mass produced components, but then you have to take into account that the chassis, processors, motherboard, power supplies and basically every other component in the system are not. Then, keep in mind that the video card has to be specially made for Apple and the memory is also the slowest DDR400 that you can find on the market today, so even the mass produced components aren't all that mass produced. The system is expensive; you can get much more PC for the same price, but the point of this experiment wasn't to discover what we already knew.
Ordering such an expensive system is a dangerously easy process through Apple's website (it's also dangerously easy to get a student discount. I was still in school when the order was placed, but it seems like Apple doesn't really require any proof one way or another). I ordered the system pretty much stock from Apple; I was going to do any and all upgrades on my own. Once your order is shipped, there's a 10% restocking fee if the box is opened should you decide to return it; it's not an unusual policy, but definitely not the most customer-friendly one.
Setup was a breeze, but so is any computer setup these days. There is a bit less cable clutter with a Mac, but it's nothing too significant, especially if you are using anything other than an iMac. Of course, all of the cables that come with the machine are white, which made using the millions of black power cables that I had laying around somehow "wrong". I had a setup of two Cinema Displays that I was going to be using with the G5, and since they were older displays, they both featured ADC connectors instead of the normal DVI connectors that I was used to. ADC is an interesting standard developed by Apple that basically allows power, USB and the video signal to be carried off of a single cable. The ADC interface cuts down significantly on cable clutter, since three cables are now merged into one; unfortunately, there is only a single ADC port on the video card, meaning that I had to use an ADC to DVI adaptor for the second display. The ADC to DVI adaptor is pretty expensive (around $150) as it has to provide an external power supply to power the monitor and USB ports. Apple has fixed this issue with the latest revision of their Cinema Displays, which are now all DVI. Unfortunately, you lose the cable clutter benefits with the new displays, since they abandon ADC.
The rest of the hardware is pretty simple, a stylish USB keyboard and the dreaded one-button mouse. Apple's mentality behind the one-button mouse is that it is less confusing to their users than two-button mice; rumor has it that John Carmack once asked Steve Jobs what would happen if they put more than one key on a keyboard in response to Apple's reasons for sticking with a single button mouse. Regardless of why they do it, for a power user, and especially for a Windows user, there was no way I was going to survive with a one-button mouse. Luckily, the mouse is USB and just about any PC compatible USB mouse will work on the platform. The same applies to the one-button Apple mouse, if you were wondering; it works just fine under Windows. I didn't bother hooking up Apple's mouse - I went straight for my optical Intellimouse. I had already met and hated the Apple mouse, so there was no reason to re-open old wounds if I was to remain as objective as possible.
The USB cables on the mouse and keyboard are purposefully short; they are meant to be plugged into your monitor - not the actual computer itself - in order to reduce cable clutter.
The system came with a recovery CD and some other manuals and booklets that I quickly cast aside; just because I'm using a Mac doesn't mean that I have to change my habits on reading manuals!
Unlike the older Macs that I remembered, you couldn't turn on the G5 using the keyboard - there was no keyboard power-on switch (which isn't a bad thing, as I remember turning friends' computers off all the time in the Mac labs). Touching the power button on either the Cinema Display or on the actual computer itself would turn on the system.
The classic Mac sound made its entrance as the system booted up. After filling out a couple of screens of information, I was dropped into Mac OS X - my new home away from home.
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phlipper8 - Sunday, October 10, 2004 - link
Just one question. The author never mentioned the fact that he was using an actual 64 bit operating system, built specifically for a 64 bit machine. Could be the reason behind some of the good speed he noticed. Also, he needs to compare prices of comparable 64 bit windows systems. The pricing would be extremely comparable I would imagine.garfieldonline - Sunday, October 10, 2004 - link
There are other values of Mac haven't been discussed here. For instance, itsnoise level. Granted, you can make your PC quiet too but at what cost? P4 and new processors are continuously getting hotter and hotter, and keeping them cool is a nightmere to system builders. Big fan and non-traditional cooling systems such as water coolers are options. Big fans causes noise, and for some, like me, would find it very distracting. It is very hard to concentrate when you are sitting next to a noisy machine.Until recently, to me, cooling is a weakness in case cooling. You put a fan to suck air from the front panel, exhuast hot to the back. A fan on the top of the CPU and a fan on the chipset. In nutshell, put a fan on whatever it is hot. When it may seem effective. But what about air turbulence?
It is a double edges sword when you have the complete control of the system design (English isn't my first language) Apple engineers are allowed to take a look into the cooling system in more details. Result, they divided the machine in to cooling zones. Fans are all monitored and controlled. Not one or two fans in the system, but all nine fans (if my memory serves) The whole system is properly cooled but still manage to be quiet. Unlike PC, only the core components got cooled (CPU, GPU, Northbridge)
As we all known, overheated system can cause stability problems, and I should know it. I used to have a SIS735 motherboard from ECS. SIS735 runs very hot at full load. Since the passive cooling for the chipset wasn't adaquate. The system tends to hang a lot. To getting the system cool is an expensive experience sometime. Not everyone has all the building kit at home. Thermal componetns, fans etc aint' cheap ... For some it is a hit & miss process. (Correct me if I am wrong. I think Dell got cooling problems with their new Prescott machines when they first launched.
Non-traditional cooling ... first thing comes to my mind is price, and second is difficultly. My friend just tried installed one, and what a disaster! Result, a new machine. While on the topic of water cooling. Have anyone mention the new water cooling system in new Mac? It is an engineering marvel. The big and bulky water cooling systems used in PC is not on the same level, at least not on my book.
Game is pushing PC design to its boundaries, and often people over-emphasize the framerate. At work, I don't really care about framerate (unless you are a game developer I guess) All I care is if a machine is stable, fast enough to get my job done quick. Many here already mentioned, Mac OSX is based on Unix, and hence inherites the stability of Unix. Time is all we fighting against. I remember few months ago, I walked back to my office, and turned on my P4 2.6GHz HT machine. I was greeted with a BSOD. How nice was it. It told me to take a walk.
Standard ... As mentioned by the writing. The menu bar is always there on all Apple application. We PC uses like to "hunt" thing. It is "fun". But for new uses, espeically older user, this standard causes much less confusion in using a computer. From the support prospective, this is a great idea too. Try to get someone to work with Windows Multimedia Player 10 over the phone. Skinnable is great if you know you are way around. Otherwise, it is a nightmere to supporting staff. Tell them to go to FILE->OPEN? What FILE-OPEN, I can't see any ...
I guess things can go on and , and I am not even I Mac user (in that sense, I sure someone can point out few mistake here and there in this post. Please do it kindly.)
victorpanlilio - Sunday, October 10, 2004 - link
kmmatney wrote in #111: $2500 for a computer with no monitor and a crap video card. That's the "uncomfortable" part to me.What exactly do you plan to *do* with your computer anyway? Play games? Edit digital video? Render 3D animation? Write the next Nobel prize winner for literature? Sequence genes? Design buildings? Develop web applications? Analyze stocks? Visualize seismic data to find oil deposits?
*cough* Let's try pricing an IBM Intellistation Pro. A single-CPU Opteron system starts at C$3489 from the IBM Canada web store. A single-CPU Xeon-based IBM Intellistation Z starts at C$3209. The dual-CPU capable HP xw6000 starts in a lower price range but only has 533MHz FSB. A Dell Precision 670 with dual 2.8GHz Xeons and configured similarly to an entry level Power Mac G5 is about C$2754 (forget about the single-CPU model with only a 40GB HD).
A dual-CPU Power Mac G5 starts at C$2799, but this is with only 256MB PC3200 RAM (not enough), 80GB SATA HD, and a 64MB nVidia FX5200...
Apple's pricing appears to be similar to that of the Tier 1 PC vendors, and in some cases a bit better. I'm sure others more knowledgeable can correct me if I'm wrong. In some recent reports, Dell and HP appear to be taking market share from the whitebox vendors -- in many cases, the price delta between the Tier 1 vendors and the smaller builders has all but vanished. It means that boutique vendors such as Voodoo, Alienware, BOXX, and Falcon are going to get squeezed on margins as well. Such is the risk of differentiating on "speeds and feeds" and then getting stomped on by large competitors with deeper pockets.
twilson - Sunday, October 10, 2004 - link
Good article. Probably one of the best articles I have read. And it manages to remain objective.However the comments on Safari, are a bit misleading. When it comes to the speed of rendering a page, I believe Safari actually waits until the page is loaded (so that it can check/validate the content [how well it conforms to the W3C standard]). If you have a page that is written correctly/closer to the W3C standard you will find that Safari will in fact load it faster than IE. Also, the time it takes to render a page must from pressing ENTER to when it finishes loading activity (as opposed to having a screen full of info).
You also refer to Safari's 'incompatibility' with Web sites. Yes this does appear to be the case. But in truth it is actually the web-sites "non-compliance" with the ratified W3C standards. Even the Anand homepage fails W3C HTML 4.01 vaildation (which it claims to be) with 367 errors.
Safari is quite strict in it's adoption of these standards. If only IE was like Safari in that respect and we wouldn't have the badly written sites we have today. For example, in Safari if you browse a page with an error in a function of javascript, then none of that pages Javascript will work. This is better than IE's everything else works and you only learn that function is crap when you get to it.
This all stems back to IE/Netscape fight when each side was introducing it's own object model for javascript and their own tags.
Safari absolutely rules.
victorpanlilio - Sunday, October 10, 2004 - link
Correction: I had written in post 120 "dmr9748 wrote in #117" and it should read "dmr9748 wrote in #119". My apologies.victorpanlilio - Sunday, October 10, 2004 - link
dmr9748 wrote in #117: "The thing is when you when you think of MAC you think of one company"No, when I think of MAC I think Move, Add, Change, or MAC as in MAC address. I've worked for IBM, DEC, Compaq, and Fujitsu, and the corporate deployment projects I've been involved with are in the range of 1500-2500 PCs, so I think I can speak to the issue of volume purchasing, and yes, discounts are normally offered for large numbers of identically configured units. One concern a business may have about buying Macs for corporate use is that Apple is the sole hardware supplier, but this does not seem to bother Genentech, a leading biotech firm that runs its business on Macs. Of course, Genentech's CEO is on the Apple board, but I suspect that he isn't buying Macs for his company just because they look pretty.
You wrote: "It is not that hard to get a bulk deal directly from the company that builds and distributes the entire machine."
True enough, but Virginia Tech originally purchased their G5s at full retail from the Apple web store, with no volume discount, so the price on their cluster was even higher than it could've been, and yet the price/performance was better than the alternatives they had considered.
You wrote: "The point that I am getting at is that you should not be suprised that Apple with allow people to purchase a large amount of MACs for a lower price than PC"
See my statement above. What was your point again? Macs can be purchased directly from Apple. IBM Intellistations and Power5 blade servers can be purchased directly from IBM. I imagine that any savvy purchaser can negotiate a volume discount from either vendor. So?
You wrote: "In a business you have to purchase machines that is easy to use for all levels of computer users, easy to manage, cost effective, and you can easily get people to control and maintain the system."
I once worked for a large energy company that had over 2500 Macs. The support staff needed to answer help desk calls and do deskside visits? 12 people. That's 1 support person for every 208 machines, and this was without remote tools like SMS2003, pcAnywhere, or ZenWorks. In another large energy company I worked at, the ratio of support staff to PCs in an all-Windows shop was about 1:70. Do the math. If you're an IT Director who wants to build a large empire, which platform do you choose?
Of course, now that vulnerabilities in Windows are becoming a huge headache, AT&T -- which has 70,000 PCs -- is doing its due diligence and looking at alternatives: MacOS X and Linux.
You wrote: "Now, when you take a look at the numbers, 98% of the computer market consists of PCs and 2% are MACS."
There are also more Chevys and Fords on the road, does this mean everyone should drive a Chevy or a Ford, or that Chevys and Fords are better cars than marques that have a smaller market share? Curious logic indeed. And since we're talking about numbers, why is it that, even with its tiny market share, Apple manages to win kudos from the likes of PC World, which named OS X best desktop OS of 2004, and from PC Magazine, which recently gave the iMac G5 a 5-star rating Editor's Choice rating? Do you suppose they've taken leave of their senses?
You wrote: "The versatility of the PC is what really wins over MAC." Well, sort of. What "wins" is that even a whitebox Celeron is good enough for a lot of people's basic computing needs, and Apple chooses not to build stripped-down models. When I got my Honda Civic 8 years ago, I could still buy one without a radio; now I can't buy a Civic without a radio. I suppose if I wanted a really barebones car I could buy a Yugo or a Lada... :-D
dmr9748 - Sunday, October 10, 2004 - link
#117 My opinions are backed by fact that is why I posted those links.So far, the "facts" that I have been confronted with are of listings of a supercomputer consisting of numerous clustered MAC computers that was purchased directly from Apple. It is not that hard to get a bulk deal directly from the company that builds and distributes the entire machine.
The thing is when you when you think of MAC you think of one company. With your everyday computer, you have numreous other companies competing for your business. MAC has their own line of stores which makes things pretty easy. With the other end of the spectrum, you have to shop around for every little thing and prices as well as performance varies.
Another you have to look at is the fact that since the PC part of the market is so big, not a lot of companies are going to give people huge bulk deals. The one example with NEC, for example, even though the cost is so high, a company will buy that large number of computers for that price. You have to look at this from various views. The most important view is that of a business.
In a business you have to purchase machines that is easy to use for all levels of computer users, easy to manage, cost effective, and you can easily get people to control and maintain the system. Now, when you take a look at the numbers, 98% of the computer market consists of PCs and 2% are MACS. With that said, which would best fit this scenario?
Since PCs statistically better for that scenario, you get those people that spend the extra money for NEC computers.
I know we have seen companies bend over backwards for people but it usually happens in very few situations. Mostly when they are trying to take hold of a target market. If a company already has a hold of it, they will not barter on their price. Sort of like Walmart. Walrmart will come in and lower their prices to a point they are hurting but it hurts the surrounding stores as well to a point where the competition goes out of business. Once that happens, Walmart will jack the prices back up. The most famous company for doing that is Blockbuster.
It is a standard business tactic that is seen in the computer industry everyday between Intel and AMD. It is almost the same between PC and MAC except MACs can be purchased direcly from Apple. I am not able to find an option to go to a retailer and purchase a barebones MAC. You buy a MAC you get everything. You buy a PC and it's like buying a car. You can upgrade parts or you can just leave them out. The versatility of the PC is what really wins over MAC.
The point that I am getting at is that you should not be suprised that Apple with allow people to purchase a large amount of MACs for a lower price than PC. Also, you should not be suprised that PCs sell for a lesser price in smaller numbers. PC companies know they can sell their products in any volume. MACs, on the other hand, do not have a big enough hold on the market to say to a large company "we will not give you a special bulk deal." That does not help them get close to that 3% of the market.
Like I said earlier, if both PCs and MACs had 50% of the market, things would be different.
ThatGuyPSU - Sunday, October 10, 2004 - link
Cindy, you rock. Forget about calming down. You go with your bad self.Marry me? How about just a tryst then? (haha)
=T=
gankaku - Saturday, October 9, 2004 - link
It appears that #112 isn't about to let facts get in the way of his opinions.So I agree with my learned colleagues. The Dell is, in fact, a cheaper server. You win.
However... Kindly take a look at the next rankings for the Supercomputer list in November (I think). Two of the top 10 supercomputers (possibly two of the top 5) will be comprised of Apple Xserves. They will also be the least expensive clusters in the top 10, by a wide margin.
azkman - Saturday, October 9, 2004 - link
You have to actually read the articles and the background, not just look at the pictures. Basically, VT built the number three supercomputer in the world with 1100 G5s for less than $7M. Number one and number two at the time both cost over $200M.http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.j...
Naturally, you will not accept this as proof. So to discontinue this pointless debate, I concede that the Dell server you chose is cheaper than the Apple server you chose.