Poll: How many PC users, how many Apple?

[Churchlady]

One of my daughters, a Mac addict, asked me to do this. She has a couple of interesting hypotheses about the type of people who tend to love Macs. I won't tell you yet what her theories are so as not to influence you.

[GSequoia]

I do both. My home machine is a Mac, my work machine (which I bring home on weekends) is a PC.

I prefer to the Mac for most things though.

[ryurabbit]

PC. Im not pc just the computer.

[imma honky]

I do both. My home machine is a Mac, my work machine (which I bring home on weekends) is a PC.

I prefer to the Mac for most things though.
Freak......
PC here :badpc:

[jeeplas]

PC here too.

[Karlm]

Mac user since 1986.

I won't buy anything else. I use a PC at work. It's less than a year old and is well on the way to becoming a fish habitat. My current Mac I've had for 6 years with almost no problems at all.

[OT]

My PC eats Apples for lunch.

[F. F.]

Formatting may be a bit off, but here are some NAXJA stats:

# Hits User Agent

1 1072352 21.93% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
2 1002513 20.51% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1
3 275629 5.64% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)
4 185827 3.80% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98)
5 173595 3.55% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; .NET CLR 1
6 84493 1.73% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; FunWebProd
7 69747 1.43% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT)::ELNSB50::0000
8 68020 1.39% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko
9 63491 1.30% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Q312461)
10 63462 1.30% Mozilla/3.01 (compatible;)
11 56469 1.16% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; YComp 5.0.
12 46435 0.95% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90)
13 46068 0.94% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0)
14 41712 0.85% msnbot/0.11
15 36129 0.74% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90; s

[Grizzley]

One of each, though the pc gets more web time.

[Lincoln]

I few years ago when Max OS8.0 (?) came out I was messing around looking at the os files. Looked a lot like Linux with a different front. ????????????????????????????????

[XJ91]

4 PC's Networked :D

[Eagle]

PC here, I hate Macs. There is nothing intuitive about a Mac, regardless of what Steve Jobs says.

Can we start this thread over, with a poll at the top to keep track of the votes? I'm a graphically oriented person and I hate to have to count all the responses every time I look at the thread.

[OT]

PC here, I hate Macs. There is nothing intuitive about a Mac, regardless of what Steve Jobs says.

Can we start this thread over, with a poll at the top to keep track of the votes? I'm a graphically oriented person and I hate to have to count all the responses every time I look at the thread.
I bet a mod like you could add a poll.

[Churchlady]

Can we start this thread over, with a poll at the top to keep track of the votes? I'm a graphically oriented person and I hate to have to count all the responses every time I look at the thread.

Eagle, be my guest. I'd have done it that way if I knew how.

[RichP]

I have a variety, 4 PC's running win2k, win2003 server, XP, 3 Suns running solaris 9 and beta 10, pc running linux mandrake 10, HP9000 K box running HP_UX 10, RS6000 running AIX. This win2k box gets the most use though cause of it's comfortable desk and chair, all the other stuff is either racked or around the work bench and the KVMS switch I want is too much money right now.The kids though use the unix boxes cause of the neat chat and irc stuff the nix boxes can do that the windows boxes don't, whatever that means, I dont use IM or any of that myself. Macs are OK, I just like 'building my own' and you can't really do that with macs or supertune them either for performance. I always considered macs to be for the computer illiterate/application literate type of poeple. They are also friggin expensive....

[Colorado_XJ]

Currently 3 Macs and one PC on the network here at my house. The PC is simply for AutoCAD. Nothing else. One is running OS 6.0.3 (a nice little Mac SE from 1988) and the newest is a G5 from 2 months ago running a beta (GM, actually) of OS 10.4. If I felt frisky I could get the NEXT Cube on the network, or the Sun Onyx300. But they are surplus units from the Gov't that I really could care less about. Daily "driver"? The Mac G5.

I would be wary of what the hits show...my iCab and Opera on the 2 newest Macs are both set to pose as Mozilla 5.0+/WinNT compat., simply because so many coders are narrow-minded.

-Rich

Question for RichP- Since you like building your own...you ever run OS X? I know it's been touted for a while, but OS 10.3+ is really quite tasty for the home tweaker/coder. And anytime you would like to challenge that whole "computer illiterate" theory, lemme know. I think it boils down to a matter of taste, actually. I love them both for their own strengths!

[Kejtar]

One of my daughters, a Mac addict, asked me to do this. She has a couple of interesting hypotheses about the type of people who tend to love Macs. I won't tell you yet what her theories are so as not to influence you.

Go Amiga or go home :D

[tuxxj]

PC's since 86. Commodore 64 before that.

[RichP]

-Rich

Question for RichP- Since you like building your own...you ever run OS X? I know it's been touted for a while, but OS 10.3+ is really quite tasty for the home tweaker/coder. And anytime you would like to challenge that whole "computer illiterate" theory, lemme know. I think it boils down to a matter of taste, actually. I love them both for their own strengths!

What can I say, at Bellcore, ATT and Lucent it was the writers, documenters, arts people who had all the macs, all the computer people ran RS6000's, HP9000's, sendmail and X or CDE, managers ran PC's with windows and used outlook and exchange servers. After every virus outbreak my email still worked and we had to dedicate ourselves to getting the MS crap backup and restoring exchange servers, the mac users, like us nix people, generally stayed up and running.
I did run AIX on mac power pc's a few years ago seeing as how the ibm's were just rebranded versions of mac's more or less. To be quite plain about it, I look at macs every so often but generally ignore them, they don't have the network functionality I want, make crap DNS servers and are a PIA to configure to a HP direct jet network printer, they do have some cool stuff but are targeted for a different audience, network and system engineers not being part of that target.
It is like the 'Ford vs Chevy' thing, the new verison of linux from mandrake has a kick ass graphic editing program that comes free vs $$$$ for photoshop, they each have their + and -'s. Just my .02

[Colorado_XJ]

RichP,

Fair enough. AIX had a lot of potential, as did Apple's Network Servers. They abandoned it all in favor of consumer products. It coulda been something great. But instead, Apple-nuts had to wait for something tasty to come down the pipe a decade later. I have an HP directjet on my home network. Not nearly as much of a pain as it used to be. All good things in due time, perhaps! Mandrake has the best (IMHO) graphics apps out there, as far as end-user accessibility and capabilities.

I appreciate both your candor and you insight. Maybe someday we will have the Jeep of OS's? Something functionally unlimited, end-user modifiable, as neat and clean as you need it to be, and upgradable beyond belief?!?!

Pinch me.

-Rich

[RichP]

I like the newer version of mandrake but I have run machines with all versions since 5 or 6 I think. It has a long way to go. I had to put the new JRE in it, both java and mandrake need to come up with a better and smarter installer, one that makes the correct ln -s's to the correct directories. Also most of the software makes you find it after you install it to add it to the menu and desktop, bad thing for average users IMO. Off to bed, going to the liberty science center tomorrow and rutts hutt for lunch :D

[Colorado_XJ]

Java's enabler has been a little bit (or more) of a mess for years. Thank goodness for being able to tweak the install. Weird thing about what you said...it almost makes the average user underqualified to find/run the installed SW. Anyway, I love the Liberty. Haven't been in almost a year, and I know things are completely new and different, as always.

Enjoy!

-Rich

[PhunkXJ]

http://www.macsecrets.com/2002/img/logo_apple_logo_purple.jpg

I have a Mac at home and work.

[dogtired]

PC here, I hate Macs. There is nothing intuitive about a Mac, regardless of what Steve Jobs says.

Can we start this thread over, with a poll at the top to keep track of the votes? I'm a graphically oriented person and I hate to have to count all the responses every time I look at the thread.


ummmm, I thought the Windows GUI was copied off of a MAC GUI, which in turn they (Apple) ripped the basic GUI design from which I believe from XEROX. If you get a chance watch this: Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires, The (1996) (TV) :dunce: ;)

oh ya, for the record, I have used both MACs for graphic design and PCs for 3D modelling and animation, so no real biggie

:viking:

[Eagle]

ummmm, I thought the Windows GUI was copied off of a MAC GUI, which in turn they (Apple) ripped the basic GUI design from which I believe from XEROX. If you get a chance watch this: Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires, The (1996) (TV) :dunce: ;)

oh ya, for the record, I have used both MACs for graphic design and PCs for 3D modelling and animation, so no real biggie

:viking:
Yeah, both the Mac and Windoze GUI were copied from Xerox. That's not the point.

The point is that Apple claims (or did, I don't look at their ads now) that the Apple and Macintosh are more intuitive than the PC. That's just not true. Nothing about a personal computer is really intuitive. What's intuitive is what you learned first.

I learned to run a personal computer on a first generation IBM PC running IBM DOS version 2.10. The office I was in used IBM DisplayWrite as its word processor. Regardless of operating system, just changing from DisplayWrite to WordStar and then to WordPerfect was exceptionally counter-intuitive.

Then along came GUIs. The first mouse I used was a Logitech with three buttons. When I sat down in front of a friend's Mac, it had a 1-button mouse and the icons weren't the same as the ones in Windows. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't find a file, I couldn't open a file, and I couldn't work in the application.

It's all marketing. The Mac is irrelevent. Has been since the frist time Quark introduced an updated version for the PC before they did for the Mac.

[BornAgainXJer]

5 pc's which I built, networked all running XP pro. You couldn't pay me to use an apple.

[Churchlady]

I was going to stay out of this for a couple of weeks, then tally results & tell you my daughter's theories, but some of you are getting entirely too tacky about Macs.

This is excerpted from a much longer compararison of Windows/Linux/Mac OS X on www.kernelthread.com.

"Conclusion: Why Mac OS X? (The previous sections have been a commentary on Mac OS X....The closing discussion on this page assumes familiarity with the previous pages. )

Bottom line

If I were to choose a computing platform today to run my "digital life", it would be Mac OS X, unless my line of work or specific needs dictate otherwise. This doesn't mean what works for me would work for others. This also doesn't mean Mac OS X has no "issues". It has many....Still, Mac is currently the most worthy client platform in my opinion: the only operating system currently in production that, within reason, lets you have your cake and eat it too......

I have great fondness for Linux. I think Linux is an excellent, if not the best, operating system for a variety of uses--most every domain except mainstream client computing......

Linux provides an incredible number of choices for everything.... except the most important choice: suppose I do not want to think of, worry about, or handle any of this. Suppose I want everything that I need to be there, and to "just work". Suppose I wish to be oblivious of everything that's "under the hood" (maybe I am technically ill-equipped, maybe I do not have the time or inclination, maybe I want to use the computer as a tool so I can create other things, rather than be my own system administrator or software harvester, ...). I have stopped using Linux on my primary computer.... In general, it is possible to do most things that one does on Linux on Mac OS X, usually with less effort....

I believe there exists a psychological trap wherein one spends a lot of time [configuring/tweaking] under the impression that it's a worthwhile activity....I speak for myself. Everything on Linux, including the "problems", was a pleasure.... I would go through each package, reading its description and dependencies, selecting or de-selecting it, etc. I would carefully partition my disk, arranging things such that a minimal amount of space was "read-write".... maintained bleeding edge versions of various packages........

The "trap" is to get sucked into this cycle of tinkering, hacking, figuring out how to make things work, which files go with which daemon or application, ... and be happy about it. While such pursuits are noble and academic in their own right,......There is a very thin line between doing something worthwhile or just thinking that you are...It is possible that your time, talent, and creativity could be better used elsewhere.

I was with a friend once who is a Linux convert.... His attempts to plug-in his USB digital camera to the Linux machine were failing because the usb-storage module did not recognize his camera.... I looked at the error messages.. and found that unusual_devs.h did not have an entry for his camera. He did not have kernel compilation support installed, I didn't want to do more work than necessary so we just patched usb-storage.o and replaced another model's entry with his camera. My friend was impressed beyond belief--not by me, but by Linux! He noted down the steps we took, and is probably patching the module with every kernel update... This is a typical example of the Linux approach, which is why so many people like the platform. My contention is that the sense of machismo you get out of such things can lose its charm after a while, if you can find better things to do with your time.......

In my opinion, Mac OS X is representative of a "best-effort" approach - Apple took technology they had collected over the years, along with technology that had flourished in the open source world, and put together a reasonable system....There is nothing that I want to be able to run that I cannot run on OS X.

The 1-Button Mouse

This is the Traveling Salesman Problem of the Mac Universe. Apparently (as I have learnt over time), all existing "problems" with Apple and Mac OS X are reducible to this. I have had people tell me in all seriousness the following: "Apple cannot even make a mouse with more than one button. They are losers. Mac OS X sucks." I don't have a good answer, or any answer for that matter, to this "issue". There are plenty of 3rd party mice available. Since Apple is adopting technologies such as X11 (which make heavy use of multiple buttons), they might as well just offer one themselves.

At the same time, I suspect some of the revulsion against a one-button mouse might just be anticipatory."

[I agree. I tried 2 different 3-button mouses & gave them away.]

[Matthew Currie]

I never got along with macs. My stepson and I were occasionally called in to try to troubleshoot the computers at the local grade school a few years back. The macs always seemed to be unrecoverable, unfathomable, and unrepairable. The error messages were usually totally uninformative, too. I swear they crashed as soon as I even entered the room, and the usual cure seemed to be to reload everything, and no matter how many disks were available, something would end up being an incompatible version (sorry, you can't use version 6.1 software on Os 6.11) and you'd have to go hunting all over creation for someone else's version 6.100001 modem driver disk, or someone would say, "oh, I left the [fill in blank] at home," and there would be no workaround. It's like having a car that only runs on Shell gas, whose scheduled maintenance is to wait until it runs out of oil then replace the engine.

Oddly enough, I rather liked the Apple IIGS's, which despite being ridiculously slow and overpriced, rarely crashed, and provided seamless plug and play capability within their very limited world. Everything they did was slow, coarse and fuzzy, but somehow it always actually happened.

Anyway, I couldn't ever trust a machine that requires software to eject the (*&)!%(*&-ing floppy disk!

[casm]

I'm a mixed bag at home - 6 PCs, 5 Macs, a couple of Sun boxes, a couple of SGI Indys, and a shuffling of NeXT, Be, and Atari hardware.

Personally, I think the x86 architecture is junk and should have been put out to pasture long ago: Apple's hardware engineering is brilliant, and with the advent of OSX finally has an OS that can run on it that really brings the best out in it. Of course, you've got a somewhat better OS selection and hardware availability on x86 to begin with, so ultimately it's horses for courses.

My main machine is a Toshiba Satellite; the workstation's and old blue & white G3 running OSX; the servers are all Slackware Linux-based. The exotic hardware runs whatever OSes they were designed to run in the first place for testbedding purposes. Really, it's a case of the proper tool for the job.

Anyway, I couldn't ever trust a machine that requires software to eject the (*&)!%(*&-ing floppy disk!

Two solutions:

1) Use a bent paperclip to work the manual ejector

2) Use a Mac that didn't ship with a floppy drive

;)

[Rev Den]

Macs are for folkes in touch with thier, shall we say, softer, side.

Timex-Sinclar here, With the 16K add on memory.


Rev

[casm]

Macs are for folkes in touch with thier, shall we say, softer, side.

Timex-Sinclar here, With the 16K add on memory.


Rev

Technically, I could've listed my first computer, since I've still got (and occasionally use) it - Magnavox Odyssey2. Counts as a computer because it came with a keyboard and assembly-language cartridge capable of holding 800 bytes of instructions. No external storage, though ;)

[RichP]

Geeze, gonna have to drag out the osbourn if this keeps up...

[kthrash]

Mac all the way, home and work.