This is painful. Having got used to the idea that my PowerBook wasn’t going to ship from manufacturing until next Monday, the order status page on Apple’s site tells a far more optimistic story. On Tuesday, the page indicated that my PowerBook had already shipped from the Netherlands that day. That’s less than 24 hours after placing the order – wow. Come Wednesday morning, the status had updated indicating that it had actually shipped from Taiwan and not the Nethlands after all. That’s some level of confusion – don’t they know where they make these things?
Of course, my hope is that it’ll make it to me by the weekend. Sod’s law says it’ll arrive afterwards, but we’ll see. I don’t know how long it takes to fly from Taiwan to UK (or if they even go direct), but the order status page now shows that my PowerBook departed from the terminal yesterday (Wednesday) evening. If it arrives in UK this afternoon or early evening, it should make it to a distribution centre tonight. As I’m only just outside London, it’s entirely possible that it might make it to me tomorrow morning. Finger crossed. Touch wood.
Update: It landed this afternoon (Thursday) in Luxembourg. A Friday delivery is looking less likely, but isn’t out of the window quite yet.
Update: It left Luxembourg 30 minutes later. Looking better.
Update: It’s not here yet (12.30 Friday) ... chances looking slim.
Update: Well, at nearly 5pm on Friday, it’s still not here. Looks like I’m sans-PowerBook for the weekend. Ah well.
Update: I found my consignment on the TNT website – my PowerBook is still in Eindhoven, as of 1730 Friday.
Update: It’s in the country! Unfortunately, it’s in Northampton which is about 1.5 hours north of here. This means that presuming TNT flew it into Heathrow or Gatwick, it’s literally come past my house on a lorry already. Anyway, looking good for a Monday delivery.
Comments
Spec wise, it’s worth noting that you’re not comparing like for like. The G4 (in my case) and the PentiumIV are different processors with totally different architectures. That is to say a G4 running at 1GHz is a lot more responsive than a PIV at the same clock speed. It’s just the same with Pentium and Athlon processors - the Athlon 1700 in my Windows box is so named because it has the same performance as a Pentium 1.7GHz, when it actually only runs a 1.1GHz. Bottom line is that you can’t measure by clock speed alone - it’s totally misleading.
On price - you do pay a premium for Macs. However, it’s possibly not as much as you think. My other half recently bought herself a really nice Dell laptop (it’s a great machine). In order to be diligent in my purchasing choices, I went to Dell’s site and spec’d up the same machine Rachel’s got to as close to the same spec as the PowerBook I was looking at. Once you add in as extras all the things that come standard on the PowerBook you begin to appreciate what a serious piece of kit it is. WiFi, Bluetooth, DVD writer, Gigabit ethernet, the whole shooting match. As it turned out, the Dell was only £200 less than the PowerBook. Add in the niceties you get on the Mac that you don’t get on a Dell (backlit keyboard, slim aluminium case, FireWire 800, really beautiful design) and a £200 premium isn’t too bad at all.
Now lets talk quality.. I just let go of a 1st generation tibook only because I could replace it with an AlBook. My dad has gone through 2 dell latitudes and is working on his 3rd. The keys have fallen off, the HD’s die, WiFi issues, DVD drive died.. the list goes on but it was all fixed for free. My TiBook? Latch broke, fixed for free.
Personally i prefer the OS...
It's nice to see real Mac users explain Mac related things to Windows users :p
One more question guys: why is it that Mac’s processors are always a step behind the rest of the industry? I believe that the 2.0GHz chips just came out recently, and it was already out for quite a while with Athlon and Intel.
Thanks.
Ummm... you know that could be considered a flame nowadays ;) Macs use PowerPC chips that have a very different configuration than the x86 AMD and Intel chips. Plus there are cache differences, motherboard design, and a real chip geek could go on an on.
Take a look at Analysis: x86 Vs PPC. That could explain it better than this mac loyalist.
Hey Jesse that was a great article, very nice read.
PC desktops are incredibaly cheap but how about a dual 2Ghz 64 bit cpu, 160GB serial ATA, 512 DDR 400, ATI 9600 Pro, superdrive, etc? Bet its not cheaper. Compare the actual components in Mac to a PC when comparing price.
You can get a cheaper PC with less premium hardware but even at $1800 USD for a low end G5, I don’t you would be saving that much on a 64 bit PC. It all depends on what you need.. which is why pro users lean towards Apple. A home user has no use for the power you are paying for.. but a gamer does, and that is one place Apple hurts.
Where PC’s use to win is in upgrading... although that has changed lately.
Can you tell i had to justify my office’s computer budget? We are a mac island in a sea of PC’s... only other beacon of Mac is in the Math faculty and its spreading ;)
But then, a 64MB DDR (yes, just sixty-four megabytes, that’s what the G5 uses) 9600 Pro is probably equivalent to about £80 and 512MB of DDR400 is £55 - I know, I just bought some! Superdrive? Say £90. 160GB SATA? Another £90. Say £150 for a 64-bit motherboard and a decent case and you’re on £495 with only the processor to add. Say £230 for an Athlon 64 3200 and your total is only £695. OK, so you don’t have 4GHz of G5 to play with, but you’ve just saved yourself £1605 on Apple’s top-end £2300. You could have four of those PCs for the price of a top-end G5.
How about we do a low-end comparison? 5200 Ultra...£50. 256MB DDR 333 is a pathetic £25. 80GB SATA is £55. Say £120 for motherboard and decent case. Although the bottom-end G5 is only a 1.6GHz, I’ll be kind and propose we compare it to the processor I have, an Athlon XP 2500. That’s just £70. Superdrive another £90. How much is all that? £410. Compared to Apple’s £1400, you’ve just saved yourself almost a thousand pounds.
For me, there’s just no comparison. Much as I love Macs, they are just too expensive in desktop form. For £2300 you could have a PC that would decimate just about anything you threw in front of it, and you’d have a posh monitor to boot!
What are some of the applications / programs that are really useful for Apple users? For example, word processing, spreadsheets, web development, design, mp3s, videos, firewall, anti-virus, etc...?
I agree you can get a PC that screams with a nice LCD for the same as a G5 but it is not the same machine. It's like comparing Impreza WRX to a Mercedes SLK32 AMG. Sure you can go fast with both, probably have more fun in the WRX but the SLK is style with a little more HP and higher design...
Ok.. debate can rage. But on applications..
-MS Office V.x is really nice (2004 version coming, so is stable KOffice).
-web dev - Macromedia suite for me but keep BBedit around.
-mp3's, itunes hands down
-videos.. quicktime/iLife apps of course
-firewall, built in..
-anti-virus, no need - find me a virus for OS X
...and Warcraft III
Now no system is truly secure.. but still OS X is pretty darn safe. Good comparison with X vs XP here.
Unfortunately, Apple’s pricing structure continues throughout the rest of it’s products. I personally have an iPod because it literally kicks everything else available and isn’t really that much more expensive. For example, an Airport Extreme card costs around double the price of an equivalent PCI one.
I think at the end of the day it comes down to personal choice. Personally, I’d rather spend £500 on a PC rather than £1500 on a G5 and put up with the security holes and viruses as I’m not exactly a n00b. However, some people would rather have the benefits of OSX, which is fair enough.
Linux for a desktop machine is perfectly achievable, but you’ll need to dedicate more time to simply learning how your computer works. It’s getting better month by month and the KDE desktop environment, whilst not as polished as OS X, is very nice to work with.
I guess I like OS X because it gives you a huge amount of the functionality of a Linux desktop (their ’guts’ are very similar), but without needing to spend time paying attention to the computer - you can just get on with what you’re trying to do.
Me, I would build myself a shiny new PC for about £500 and install Linux on it. A lot of the stuff that comes with a Mac I neither need nor want, so the argument that you get all this cool hardware and software doesn’t really mean much to me - as a developer most of what I do all day involves writing text files, I don’t need 2 grands worth of machine to write text files. I’d pay that much for a server but not a desktop ... as you can imagine it is great fun in our house ;)
...Linux, I would buy a x86 just to run Linux but Fink came along for OS X and with a little tinkering I get a lot of Linux apps I love but in x-windows. So the more aqua the better... the only app I missed from Linux was xchat, but now there is an aqua version. A lot of Linux apps are being ported to OS X thanks to the BSD and the flock of Linux converts to Apple (probably Uni profs with edu pricing).
For a cheap and powerful webserver, nothing can touch Linux (but Fedora is being a bugger on this Dell server I would like to use).
I mean .. why spend all that money to run applications that would run just as well on a computer that cost under a third of the price?
As for Linux ... sod Fedora, install Debian ;)
I’m going to try Debian sometime. If only OSX worked on x86!
Yup Debian would be the way to go but we are using VMWare with it and a Red Hat variant is our only choice at the moment. The problem doesn’t seem to be Fedora, its appears its crap ethernet cards.
1) Get a Mac desktop machine (G4 or G5 depending how much they are in spring 2004)
2) Built my own machine with custom parts and Athlon or Intel chips. Install Windows XP on the machine.
3) Built my own machine with custom parts and Athlon or Intel chips. Install Linux Gentoo on the machine.
Since I already have a Pentium 4 2.0 GHz machine running Windows XP, I would like to try to avoid option 2 for sake of learning something new in Mac OS X or Linux Gentoo. My first option was option 3; built my own machine with custom parts and Athlon or Intel chips. Install Linux Gentoo on the machine.
However of the past few weeks I have done some research and I am beginning to like the Mac more and more, but still the high prices are drawing me away a little.
I plan to use this new machine for work on web development (web coding and graphic work), word processing, and storing my MP3 collection on it.
Since I see that there are some real helpful users that use these systems, I hope some of you could help me.
Thank you in advance.
Otherwise, you could dual boot, but as you already have a decent XP machine there seems little point. If you build, I’d recommend AMD at the moment - they’re just so cheap!
...if you can stomach the price of course. But if you live by the computer, you might as well do it in style ;)
I was quite pleased...I ordered a new 80mm fan on Friday and it came today, as did my new mouse, thermal compound and audio cable. Unfortunately the latter three are at some depot somewhere...
I’ll be home in an hour or so, so hopefully next time I post will be from my PowerBook.
Just downloading a bunch of updates from Apple.
• State of the art OS
• True multitasking (despite what many pc ads claim, a pc is simply not capable of true multitasking)
• Protected memory
• Inherently more stable OS & applications
• Generally speaking macs are better constructed and have a longer usable life (I have macs that are over 10 years old and are still in perfect working order and providing useful service on a daily basis)
• Viruses? what is it, about 100 or so that affect the mac and something in the thousands for the pc!! (I havent had a mac infected by a virus for around 6 years now, and even that was intercepted immediately and destroyed)
• The mac also uses a software structure that is incredibly stable by comparison. Most people forget that a pc is still stuck with DOS and the bios, and an architecture that is based on 1970s technology.
Ok, so I am definitely showing that I favour the mac. But thats not out of blind faith. I have used both platforms, and if I thought the pc was a better platform I would say so. It just isn’t. I buy computers for speed, reliability, ease of use, and overall value for money. And whilst macs appear more expensive on the surface, once all is taken into account, they are definitely a better buy. Its much like the betamax/VHS battle. VHS won because of marketing power and its range of titles, but betamax was, and still is a better system, which is why professional broadcast studios still use it. Its the same with the mac and pc.
Moving past the rambling though, I will say that I have just upgraded from a 900 MGHz iBook G3 to a Powebook G4 1.5MGHz. Let me tell you, this thing is sweet, it’s a mere 12 incher with only 512 meg of DDR ram, but this thing runs circles around my iBook, and my other laptops, a Toshiba and a dell(the first running Solaris, and the second running Fedora Core 3)
I simply put despise the weakness of Microsoft, I am a huge supporter of Open source software, and therefore am very willing to use high quality peecees, but the problem for me is you pay the same or higher prices for what can be a huge headache to someone who just likes things that work.
that is the main reason mac users buy macs I’d say, things just work.