Apple responds to new MS ads

[Plaupius]

Dragonos said:

Plaupius said:

Dragonos said:

im a fan of being able to assign commands to your touchpad (and with a larger touchpad as you said, it wouldn't be a significant problem doing it by mistake, just takes some getting used to i assume). i'm impressed there.

Yeah, those things are not anything major by themselves, but when you do actual work, they save you a LOT of time and trouble. And when you have many such features, they add up.

i'm going to assume that the windows searchbar in vistas' start menu was lifted from OSX's spotlight feature then. I actually dont like the feature all that much - not that its not useful, far from it - i just dont like that it the cursor is on it natively when i open the start menu, so i no longer can open start menu programs unless i click them from the start menu manually (as opposed to simply pressing "n" to open notepad, it'd type "n" into the search field. i dont like that). i dont understand quicklook though, it doesnt open an application to run the file, but it opens the file? I'm assuming you mean that you dont have to open an application and then load the file but im still confused there. As for Timemachine - very useful feature. the only times i see that on windows lately is when the external harddrive comes with said software already installed.

The Vista search is probably quite similar, except that in OS X there is no start menu and you hit Command-Space to activate Spotlight. For quickly launching applications, nothing beats QuickSilver, though. It is by far my favorite app ever!

About QuickLook, it opens the file in a separate popup "window", it's a bit hard to explain but maybe this Apple marketing video will clarify it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqjH0_E4pxQ

I'm impressed here as well - remembering which display and displaying it correctly is wonderful, even if i have no use for it right now.

Yep, it is a very handy feature. The problem is, having used to it I now crave for more advanced features: for example, it would be great if OS X would remember the position of each app in each different display configuration so that I wouldn't have to manually reposition them when I switch display setups :)

agreed. on the one hand, i've come to like the individualistic nature of programs on windows - i dont know if it's because i've been trained to think that way though. But i guess theres the ease of use thing again - having to download a new program (read: finding a freeware program that will do it) whenever you need to handle something new is a drawback, even if it doesnt take much more than a google or cnet search.

That's true, and it also does give you more freedom because currently, the iSuite apps do have an advantage over other apps that would do similar things. Like I've mentioned before, I haven't found a real alternative for IrfanView: something lightweight, opens nearly all image files you can think of and is extremely useful for sorting through and resizing images. iPhoto, while ok for the things it's meant for, does not cut it for me.

well. first off - the macs ive come in contact with either have a standard two-button + wheel mouse, or are the huge clear plastic ones with a scroll ball and only single clicks, so while its a misconception, its true based on personal expirience. as for the track pad info - its interesting, but i think i'd would mess with me more than i'd like. still an interesting evolution of the trackpad though - im just a bit more on the traditional side.

Actually, the "huge clear plastic ones with a scroll ball" most probably do have 4 buttons, or ways to click them: left finger, right finger, scroll ball can be clicked and the fourth button is activated by squeezing the mouse from the sides, similar to a thumb button. The buttons are not visible, but they are there if it is the mighty mouse you have seen. I can't remember if any other Apple mouse has had the scroll ball.

My responses in green.

About bootcamp: I don't use it, but I don't think it is really that convenient because you have to reboot every time you want to change the OS. When I got my Mac, I also got Windows XP so I could install it on bootcamp, but after awhile I realized that I don't need it and I haven't done it. If I would need to run Windows, I'd rather try Parallels or WMWare.

One thing that is often overlooked when discussing the price of Macs is the resale value. There's a site (www.mac2sell.net) which gives you an evaluation of what your Mac is worth, and according to it my MBP is now worth about 700€ so if (and when) I decide to upgrade to the new unibody models, I can sell the old Mac and get about a 3rd of what I paid for it back.

mines are in black this time.

two more things - i fully agree - VMware (or, rather, the freeware that was on the "windows guru tries a mac" link, sun's virtual box) would be superior to dual booting, since having to switch over to play a game and switch back to...do everything else is just an annoying hassle to me - not a big one, but definitely enough to think twice about whether i want to bother with playing TF2 or not.

second - regarding its resale - i can understand why the resale value would be higher than its equivalently powered PC laptop when taking into account build quality, but i would also think its more due to apple's release plan. that is - models stay the same price regardless of how late into the model it is (which also greatly pisses me off, since the last time i checked, a newer model was released ~2 months after the start of the school year, which means that anyone who bought a mac overpaid roughly 500 dollars minimum for the same power. its not because of the premium here, its more because college students who already dont have that much money ended up drastically overpaying for their computer IMO, with the exception of the expirienced mac users that know to wait for a new model launch). Also, i do think its how, since Macs aren't geared towards games (yet), stronger Macs aren't all that neccessary, so buying an old mac is more acceptable than say, buying and old PC - that and like you said, with newer OS's actually making the computer run faster (occasionally), there is less worry about buying an old mac that will run slow. its still there, just not as worrysome as say buying a windows XP PC and then trying to load Vista on it. Still, it's higher resale value is worth noting, even if i'd never resell my computers (i either give them away or i keep them, since my old XP laptop can still run the same older games i run on this thing, and its over 4 years old now).

My responses are again in green.

Yes, the "real value" of Macs decreases somewhat over time, although Apple does upgrade the models for faster processors and bigger HDDs / more memory gradually. Maybe not quite fast enough to keep the value constant, but you do get more for your buck as time goes on. For example, my MacBook Pro is from the very first Intel shipments, 1,83 GHz Core Duo with a max 2gigs of memory and a standard 80 gigs of HDD. The latest pre-unibody MacBook Pros had 2,5 GHz Core 2 Duo with max 6 gigs of memory and 320 gigs HDD standard. Also, the graphics card was upgraded from ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 with 128MB all the way to Geforce 8600M GT with 512MB. Other things were upgraded too, such as the wireless networking, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro has a nice table of the different hardware revisions. So, in late 2008 you got a heck of a lot more for the same price than I got on March 2006.