Macintosh Value
From Jason Packer in response to MacBook and Mac mini Overpriced:
I think your answer was correct - there really isn't anything quite
like a Mac. But when you get down to brass tacks, if you try to match
the computing power in most every Mac on the market today, you're hard
pressed to get the price down by much more than 5%. And it's impossible
to get the price down at all if you buy it in one piece, from a
reputable dealer, and expect any level of support.
Heck, I went to both Dell and HP and tried to come up with a system
to match the downgraded single-CPU Mac Pro that you can get with BTO,
and I've yet to find a workstation that comes in under $2,800!
Jason Packer
Mac Mini Tower
From Jim Phipps:
I have to wonder if Apple has a real Corporate Marketing Policy. It
seems that there is a market for a Mini Tower. However, as Apple delays
or selects not to make one, there will be a hackintosh effort on a
growing scale to develop and make them. Once there is a reliable design
formula, it will be "Katy bar the door".
I am an engineer and have used Macs off and on since my first
Fat Mac in 1984. I
used it for design with MacDraft, reports with MacWrite, Excel Ver. 1.0
for spreadsheets, and a defunct but solid project management tool.
I have a plan to moonlight on the cheap (capital dollars) in
engineering here in Louisiana. My thoughts are probably a MacBook or
cheap MacBook Pro. Any thoughts on which one works as a good buy for a
new system on a real budget. The longer I wait saving cash, the longer
it will take before I can market myself and start a second career along
with the first one.
You have a column and site.
Jim Phipps
Jim,
I agree, the hackintosh market will only grow as more
and more people discover how easy it is to build your own mini tower
Mac and get Leopard running on existing notebooks, handhelds, and
tablet PCs.
As far as the best bet in a notebook goes, it comes
down to one simple question: How big a screen do you need? If you can
live with 1280 x 800, you'll probably find the consumer MacBook is
plenty good enough. If you need 1440 x 900, the 15" MacBook Pro is a
very impressive piece of hardware. Still not enough? The 17" MBP
normally ships with a 1680 x 1050 display, but for $100 more you can
get a higher resolution display at 1920 x 1200.
Dan
Advice for Dell and HP: Innovate, Don't
Imitate
From Jeremy Smart:
What a great article [Advice for Dell and HP:
Innovate, Don't Imitate]. If I were a rich man, I would post it on
a billboard outside of HP and Dell Headquarters. Maybe then someone in
charge might get the message.
What I would like to see is HP and Dell to start developing their
own operating systems. Take a flavor of Unix, say BSD, and build a nice
GUI on top of it. If all PC manufacturers based their operating systems
on on Unix, it would make it much easier for software developers to
create cross-platform versions for their products. It might even be
possible to create universal binaries of products to work on all
Unix-based platforms. The software could auto-detect the OS the user
has and make any necessary changes during installation.
I'm sure it's a bit frightening for PC manufacturers to think about
developing their own operating system. There is some comfort in being a
sheep and letting someone else make all your decisions for you, even
when you have a bad shepherd (Microsoft). Plus the fact that Microsoft
is an extremely vindictive company. If they discovered that a PC
manufacturer was developing their own OS, I have no doubts Microsoft
would do whatever it could to make that manufacturer suffer. However, I
think it's a risk that is worth taking.
I see two major problems with Windows. The first one is that it has
to accommodate an almost limitless combinations of hardware. It has to
use all those different hardware setups and attempt to deliver one user
experience. That is a problem any software manufacturer would have to
deal with in that situation. In a minor defense of Microsoft, it is a
difficult goal to attain, but I still think it could be done better.
(There has been talk recently on LEM about what could happen if Apple
licensed OS X to other PC manufacturers. Could Apple make it work
better than Microsoft? Who knows if we will ever find out.)
The second problem is that Microsoft seems to have gotten lazy
recently. Despite all the criticism, I don't think Windows Vista is
completely bad. It's just a disappointment. With all the time they
spent developing it, it should have been a lot more polished when
released. Furthermore, Microsoft should have spent more time than they
have refining it after its release. Microsoft knows that many people
are forced to buy Windows whether they want to or not, and that is what
irks me the most about them. (While not everyone is forced to buy
Windows, if you're into gaming like me, or require Windows-only
software, you have to have it.)
Unique operating systems would substantially help distinguish
different PC brands. It would also allow PC manufacturers who had
superior operating systems the ability to charge more for their
hardware. PC manufacturers could make their own decisions about what
features they wanted to include. Better hardware support would also be
possible since a manufacturer would only have to worry about supporting
their own hardware. It would unlock the door to innovation and open a
whole new world to the home user.
Sadly, I'm not planning on this happening in the near future. I
think more people will have to flock to the Mac platform and more money
will have to be lost by the major PC manufacturers before they will
wake up and realize that being tethered to Microsoft is a serious
problem.
Jeremy,
In the first era of personal computing, hobbyists had
to assemble their own computers and buy or write their own software and
operating systems. In the second era - brought in with the Apple II,
Commodore PET, Tandy TRS-80, etc. - each hardware company developed its
own operating system. Then came CP/M, an operating system from Digital
Research that ran on many computers with Z-80, 8080, and 8085 CPUs. It
didn't have the graphics of an Apple II, Commodore, or Atari, but is
ran on many brands of hardware.
Then came IBM, which wanted to dip its toe into the PC
market with a minimal investment. IBM chose an off-the-shelf CPU and
contracted with UCSD, Digital Research, and Microsoft to provide
operating systems for the new computer. The UCSD p-system never really
caught on, and PC-DOS from Microsoft, which was essentially a clone of
CP/M for the 8088/8086 CPU, was priced a lot lower than CP/M-68 from
Digital Research. The rest is history.
From that time forward, anyone has been able to build
and sell x86 computers without having to even think about operating
systems. Microsoft had what they wanted, and Microsoft was only to
happy to license it.
Any company that wanted to develop its own operating
system would be at a significant disadvantage, as nobody else would be
investing R&D dollars in OS development. On top of that, Microsoft
is unlikely to port Office to Unix, Linux, or anything besides Windows
and the Mac OS, and that's what people are used to.
The market is full of sheep. Despite the Vista fiasco,
most users are content to stick with XP or wait for Windows 7, not
switch to a new and unfamiliar operating system - even if it's given
away (e.g., Linux). Apple is the only viable alternative, and with 3.5%
of the worldwide market, it's a very distant second. (That said, Apple
is making inroads, as is Linux.)
If IBM couldn't make OS/2 a success, I don't expect
Dell, HP, or anyone else will be able to raise up a viable alternative
to Windows. Windows will continue to dominate the market for a good
long time, with the Mac and Linux hardly impacting Microsoft's
market.
Dan
Leopard Install Tip
From Mike Friedman:
I ran into a situation where my iMac would not read the dual-layer
install DVD I had, so I ran the installer using FireWire target mode
with the DVD in my MacBook.
The easiest way to do this is:
- Boot the external Mac in Target Disk Mode with the installer disk
inside.
- Set the startup disk to be the 10.5 DVD.
- Boot into open firmware and do the first two lines (or four for dual
procs) of commands, then just type boot as the last line, and it
will boot from the FW TDM DVD.
Thanks!
Mike,
Thanks for the info. This may help others with the
same problem.
Dan
Successful Leopard Installation on 800 MHz iBook
G4
From Tyler Nielson:
I just upgraded my iBook G4/800 to Leopard. I
used the little Leopard
Assist program, but I'm sure the open firmware method would work as
well. I have a 32 MB video card, the one that came stock with the
iBook. I have 640 MB of RAM, just the soldered-on 128 plus an
aftermarket 512 card. I've thought of upgrading to 1152 MB via a
1 GB stick, but I keep hearing that only some of the laptop DDR
SODIMMs in the 1 GB size are compatible, and I don't have extra
money to gamble right now.
I installed with the retail 10.5 disc, then upgraded with the 10.5.2
combo from Apple. As far as the features go, I've been impressed. I
have not had the chance to test Time Machine, but everything I've tried
has worked fine. The reason retrieving Time Machine backups may not
work for users of unsupported systems is probably that Time Machine
obnoxiously requires the Install DVD to boot from before you can see
the files. If you don't re-tweak your visible CPU speed in Open
Firmware first, you can't boot from the DVD and therefore can't
retrieve the files.
Spotlight is slower, but I think it may be doing more anyway. I have
found it to be adequate and still use it frequently. My one big
complaint with Spotlight is that the "Search Everywhere" feature seems
to have disappeared. Why, oh why, dear Apple Gods?
My 640 MB of RAM, surprisingly enough, seems to be mostly adequate.
The memory management seems to be about the same as Tiger, and each
application uses about the same amount of RAM as it did in Tiger. The
computer does, however, slow down drastically when it starts using swap
space; this is something I didn't observe in Tiger. This is no big
issue: I shut the computer down each night, and it has a fresh start in
the morning. Rarely does the RAM actually fill up over the course of
one day, so 640 is adequate for my use. A typical work load is 5 to 10
tabs in iCab, Safari, or Firefox, iTunes and YouControlTunes in the
background, and two or three open documents in Pages 08. Much beyond
that seems to slow it down, but the computer is still a better
multitasker than I am!
Spaces is the one feature that I do not use. It seemed to get bogged
down frequently, and the animation was simply too choppy at times. With
Exposé and the Open Apple+tab command to switch apps, I hardly
need Spaces, though I might use it if I had a supported machine.
The machine felt slow until Spotlight finished doing whatever it
does after an install, but once it finished things ran smoothly. One
feature that surprised me with how well it works is Cover Flow in the
Finder. Even at the full 512 by 512 resolution, the animation is
smooth. The icons don't load instantly, but the interface is still
enjoyable and practical to use.
One must-have for my iBook is a trackpad driver replacement, called
iScroll2, it gives me
2-finger scrolling, vertical and horizontal, and this makes both web
browsing and Cover Flow much more enjoyable. I do feel the loss of
Classic mode; I really miss Wolfenstein 3D! I must be one of the last
people to enjoy that game, but it's been 16 years and it's never gotten
old. I will either have to put it on one of my G3 iMacs or make a 10.4
+ classic partition on my iBook.
Sorry for being so terribly verbose, I just hope these details help
you know which unsupported machines will run Leopard well. I'd say for
the iBook G4/800, it can definitely run Leopard in a pinch. 1.12 GB of
RAM might help, but 640 MB feels adequate. I plan to perhaps upgrade
the hard drive to something bigger and faster so the data swapping
doesn't slow the iBook down as much - I'm still running the stock 30
GB/4200 RPM IDE drive; an upgrade couldn't hurt. Besides, I'll have
room for a Tiger partition, my main Leopard partition with plenty of
space, and even a room for a Debian Linux partition.
Summary: the hard drive and RAM may be lacking, but the 800 MHz
processor feels totally adequate, as everything runs smoothly until I
use up the RAM. A faster HD might eliminate the need for additional
RAM, as swap space would become practical.
Thanks for the excellent article, and I hope this response is
helpful.
Tyler Nielson
Tyler,
Thanks for writing and sharing your experience. As a
former PowerBook G4 owner, I can tell you that going to a 5400 rpm hard
drive with an 8 MB or 16 MB buffer is going to blow you away.
There is a bit more of an improvement with 7200 rpm, but bang for the
buck, a 5400 rpm drive will make you very happy. Probably a better
investment than a 1 GB memory module.
When you do that, invest in a FireWire or FireWire/USB
2.0 notebook drive enclosure for your old drive and use SuperDuper
or Carbon Copy
Cloner 3 to create a bootable backup. That should give you a way to
work around having to boot from the Leopard DVD to restore from Time
Machine.
I'm glad Leopard is working so well for you - and that
we helped you get there.
Dan
Dan,
Thanks for your feedback, I had already thought of the drive
enclosure thing, but from a slightly different angle: I was going to
put my new drive in the enclosure, clone my current drive to
that, boot from that for testing purposes, and if all goes well, start
digging under the hood to install the drive. The reason for this
preliminary testing is 1) to ensure that the 80 GB drive (new) works
properly, and 2) to ensure that I know whether or not I can boot from
the USB port. It would be a real bummer to install the new drive and
then not be able to boot. I happened to pick up a USB 2.0 notebook HD
enclosure for $7 a while ago, so I won't go the FireWire route unless I
have to.
This whole affair has been giving me flashbacks to when Apple
dropped support of the PowerBook
3400c for System 9.2. I used OS 9 Helper to
install it anyway and actually saw a performance increase over
9.1. I had that machine until 3 months ago, when I sold it to a friend
for $70, a price we were both very happy with (it had upgraded RAM, and
a 6 GB hard drive, so I guess I was generous!)
Only when Apple announced that 800 MHz G4s would not be supported in
Leopard did I first think of my iBook as a "low end" machine. Since the
upgrade has gone well, and a new HD is in the works, I think I can
quell my urge to buy a new MacBook with my education discount
. . . at least for a year or two, or until they become
affordable. As long as I sell my iBook before 10.6 comes out (I'm
guessing 10.6 will be Intel-only, but that's a ways off), I'll be able
to get most of my money back from the iBook! I mean, 80 GB HD, 640 MB
RAM, a Combo drive, and Leopard? Sounds (and feels) like a fairly new
computer!
Did you notice your 5400 RPM drive running cooler than the stock
4200? My stock one tends to heat up and make the palm of my left hand a
little to warm, most iBooks do this, but I don't know if the PowerBooks
did.
Thanks again for your feedback, it's good to hear that I'm at least
thinking along the right lines with my upgrades. I'm a big fan of your
site, and I visit it often. Considering my first computer was an
Original 128K (I've
always been a Mac user, no switching necessary!) and I tend to keep my
computers for at least ten years, your site has become a very useful
reference. Keep up the good work!
Tyler
It's a long time since I replaced the 10 GB drive in
my 400 MHz TiBook with
a 20 GB 5400 rpm drive, and as far as I can recall, it didn't seem to
run any hotter than the original drive. Ditto for the 40 GB drive I
later moved to.
Apple doesn't support booting Mac OS X on PowerPC Macs
from USB drives. You won't be able to choose it as your startup drive
in System Preferences / Startup Disk. And I don't think you can
actually install OS X to a USB drive either. But there is a
workaround: clone your internal drive and hold down the Opt key during
startup. This will let you select the USB drive.
There are a couple caveats: USB may not provide enough
bus power for your external notebook drive, so you may need an external
power supply or a dual USB cable to provide the needed power, and USB
2.0 is noticeably slower compared than FireWire 400.
Dan
Thanks for LEM
From Robert White:
Hello,
As a sometime reader and frequent recommender to your site, I just
wanted to first say thank you for the invaluable knowledge base about
the Macintosh line. It has helped many times when referencing back on
some of our in-house infrastructure. I'm writing today also to agree
with about 99% of your most recent column, A $99 PC, a $399
Hackintosh, and Growing the Mac Market. My only reservation would
be at the assertion that "Linux is not a suitably user-friendly
solution, as Walmart discovered in trying to sell a low-end Linux
computer." I'd have to disagree with this, since Walmart sold out the
entire initial run of Linux machines in less than two weeks. The
reviews of the system itself, and the dumbed down interface have been
quite good, and considering that the system was available with Vista at
150% of the price and it didn't sell much at all, one could
argue that Walmart's initial foray into Linux PCs was fairly
successful.
Thanks for the great article (other than my one little quibble) and
a great site!
-Robert
Robert,
Thanks for your kind words.
Whether Walmart sold out the first batch of Linux PCs
isn't the point, as geeks had been put on alert about the $200
Linux box. The important thing is that Walmart decided it would no
longer carry the computer in its retail stores. As the
Washington Post put it, "Walmart has stopped selling Everex's
Linux-based PC in its stores because of a tepid response from
customers...."
This wasn't Walmart's first experiment with Linux,
but the four-month test convinced the company that this wasn't what its
customer base wanted. Most people want to use Microsoft Office on
Windows, and giving them an open source office suite and operating
system that may be file compatible isn't good enough - they generally
want the same system and software at home as at the office. That's the
biggest obstacle to both Linux and Mac OS X, because Office for
the Mac is different enough to require Windows users to retrain
themselves.
Dan
USB 2.0 for Older PowerBooks
From Matt:
Hi Dan,
I've been a fan of the site since 1998. I saw the info you gave
about PowerBook users getting USB 2.0 speeds in OS X.
I gust wanted to add, the card they get must be NEC chipset to work
with OS X drivers to get that speed. I went through 2 cards before
I found this out.
Thanks,
Matt
Matt,
Thanks for the info. I'll pass it along in the
mailbag.
Dan
Dan Knight has been publishing Low
End Mac since April 1997. Mailbag columns come from email responses to his Mac Musings, Mac Daniel, Online Tech Journal, and other columns on the site.
