Admit it guys, mac has done a decent job in polishing the user interface,and overrall experience, but it has done even a better job in marketing.
A good chunk of your money is buying a brand name, and contrubuting to Apple's higher margins. While the PC world is just much more cut-throat.
Since owning a mac, I have the power of linux, but it just works. It's known fixed hardware. Of course it's going to work properly.
I remember spending a day fixing the crap the linux devs piled on me when they decided to replace /dev with the udev system or something. Then there was some update to libc which broke everything on my system. Those days aren't fun days. I remember spending ages trying to get wifi adapters to work properly under linux. For some, this may be enjoyable, productive work. Definitely if you're into hardware, or trying to learn linux, but I can't imagine the advantage of having linux on the desktop over OSX.
Obviously I have Ubuntu within parallels on my MacBook just incase I want to have an exact server environment or something...
The biggest source of trouble for me with Linux has always been wireless drivers, because manufacturers are so tight with their specs...Intel has a fully open WiFi chipset, and it's the one included in all of these "for Linux" systems, and it works really well.
I remember spending a day fixing the crap the linux devs piled on me when they decided to replace /dev with the udev system or something.
Yeah, I remember that day, too, but only because I was interested in it. My distribution upgraded without a hitch, and I wouldn't have even noticed the difference if I weren't specifically doing development work on a kernel driver that had a device interface.
Then there was some update to libc which broke everything on my system.
Never happened. Unless you're using some oddball build-your-own Linux, libc is not going to be upgraded in an incompatible way. No distro worth a damn would do that, and I'm absolutely certain that Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, Debian, and Ubuntu have never broken everything on your system by providing an incompatible libc version. You did that to yourself, either by using a crazytown distro without proper dependency management (though I can't think of one that has ever broken libc in the way you describe) or by replacing libc manually and against the better judgment of your package management tools.
I'm not saying Linux is foolproof (obviously, it isn't), but if you choose a well-supported distribution, and follow its recommended upgrade processes, you will simply never see the problems you're describing. I've managed Macs, and I can say with confidence that they are no friendlier after an upgrade than a Linux system. You know they've changed their user management system in pretty dramatically incompatible ways several times since OS X was released? Even recently, one user related weirdness led to a friends laptop becoming completely unusable (it was in a sort of death loop seemingly trying to start the login process)...the only advice we could find on the web was to restore from backups--I poked around in single user mode, but couldn't make much sense of it, so I didn't touch anything. She handed it off to the Google techstop folks, who worked on it all day, and finally wiped it and reinstalled the OS. Perhaps all parties involved are just idiots...but it seems to me that things can go wrong with Macs, as well, and you've just not had time to run into it.
It did happen, to me also.
To be fair, I think we were both using Gentoo at the time, which probably qualifies as "oddball" I guess, but Gentoo does (or did - I haven't kept up) claim to have a good package manager with proper dependency management.
More than oddball...Gentoo is just plain retarded. But you have my sympathies and condolences for the hours you lost to Gentoo.
And never let it be said that Gentoo has good package management. Clever, perhaps. But not good. Good package management requires good packaging policies, good maintainers, and good technology. The software involved is only a small part of the picture, and while one could possibly convince me that portage is a reasonably good piece of software, the other two pieces of the equation simply aren't there for Gentoo. And, because the policies of Gentoo are actively hostile to stability and predictability, even if the project does gain enough good maintainers, it will never be a suitable operating system for servers, or any system that you don't want to reinstall every couple of months (unless, of course, their policies change...at which point, the reasons people are so excited about Gentoo will have evaporated and all that will remain is Yet Another Linux Distribution).
I think that's a little harsh. I still use it on a server or 2, it's got some very nice organisation not seen in ubuntu or others. Also having it compile everything should give performance gains.
I still like the whole use flags, rc system etc.
Sure, it's nifty to play with. But, it's the basic philosophy of Gentoo that is broken (for anything other than a tinkerers OS). Nothing can be predicted in a Gentoo system, and no Gentoo system is the same as any other. Lots of fun, and infinitely customizable. But, in a server, you need to know where you stand--and being able to experiment has far less value.
I'll happily concede that portage has done wonders with a rather complex problem...allowing custom on-the-spot builds of everything, and being able to upgrade and install most of the time without resulting in a flaming pile of wreckage. As long as the philosophy is "anything you want, even stuff that has practically zero testing, and all built from scratch while you wait", Gentoo will remain unpredictable and unreliable, and occasionally insane.
Every package and option that Gentoo provides is a new variable...something new that can go wrong. You cannot test that many variables, no matter how smart you are. And, of course, I don't think the Gentoo developers are particularly smarter than the folks behind Debian or RHEL or Ubuntu, though they may be as smart...but to be as successful with their chosen philosophy they have to be significantly smarter and significantly more numerous, because they have to solve far harder problems and on a scale never before seen. A very basic grasp of combinatorial mathematics tells me that Gentoo will have several orders of magnitude more possible failure paths than RHEL or Debian.
Anyway, if you opt to stick with an entirely stock install of Gentoo (by some definition of "stock") you will get a system that has as few variables as RHEL or CentOS or Debian or Ubuntu, which is a win. But, you lose the things that make Gentoo unique (and exciting for some folks)...and you get a system that is tested by a tiny fraction as many people as have tested RHEL, CentOS, Debian, or Ubuntu. Not only is the userbase dramatically smaller, it's also fractured into thousands of unique distros, because so few people are running a "default" Gentoo.
What always amazes me is that the Gentoo developers don't realize what a mess they've signed up for with the choices they've made. They do have some awesome documentation, though. That may be a side effect of a system that is so vaguely defined...anyone that wants to accomplish anything with it has to read a lot and know a lot, so a lot of docs get written. I dunno.
That's an amazing sweeping generalization. I'd say if you're trying for some highly optimized custom setup, gentoo is precisely the right distro to choose on a server.
I do agree though with some of your points. Ubuntu is certainly a lot less hassle than gentoo to maintain/setup, and deploying things on Ubuntu is easier since it's a pretty much known state...
However, in the last three years I've installed linux on two laptops for work - a Dell Inspiron at my previous job and a Lenovo T60 at my current job. In both cases, installation was flawless, hardware was autodetected correctly, and everything "Just Worked". That includes OpenGL, audio, and wireless. For reference, I'm using Ubuntu.
In the last couple of years, linux installations have become much, much better in this respect. I'm sure that people running bleeding edge hardware or using certain components still struggle to make it work with linux. However, the need to compile drivers and fix issues caused by updates is no longer a guarantee when runnig linux.
Outside of my personal gripes with Mach-O, it's a pretty good unix.
i can get better unbiased advice out of online forums. even after going to freebsd i continued to use ubuntuforums, because the advice tended to be great. the arch wiki also rules.
i would rather use a forum or irc then call some dipshit on the "vendor" support line. all i want from a hardware vendor is a sane warranty. otherwise they can keep their worthless phone monkeys
With Linux, you might have some unsupported hardware, and that's that. Your choice is either to write drivers yourself, wait until someone else does, or buy different hardware.
Ah, but the question is: Which chunk? How much of the money buys the brand, and how much buys the OS?
The answer is that we aren't allowed to know. So the question doesn't really come into play.
It's clear that if you could save money by buying a box without Apple's brand, or their industrial design, but with the Mac OS a lot of people would be interested. Probably including me. But that's not Apple's game plan, for good reasons that were explored back in the Mac clone era, a time when (probably not by coincidence) the company nearly went out of business.
As it is, you're stuck with the whole package. So the question is: How much is the Mac OS worth to you? Given that even if I accept all of this guy's arguments the price difference is of order $600 to $800 -- less than 10 hours of my time -- the Mac OS doesn't have to save me much time or pain at all over the lifetime of the machine to justify the higher cost.
The real lesson here is that both PC and Mac hardware are cheap. Compared to many people's time, hardware is cheap. Compared to a developer's time it is really, really cheap. The Mac-PC pricing flame war is obsolete; it's a relic from the Elder Days when Macs cost $3000 to $5000 and didn't even run Unix.
Do I get a Mac for me or do I get a PC for both my wife and myself? Do I put off upgrading some employees to more modern hardware or buy fewer of them Macs?
I really do want to use more Macs around here, but the economics don't make sense at the current price points. I welcome a drop in price which could get Mac a great deal of marketshare.
What if Apple's new announcement this year will be a lower-priced Mac notebook with built-in 3G-- price-subsidized by carriers to make it feel more competitive?
How many of you would buy the Macbook 3G?
Especially now after they've successfully bamboozled carriers with the iphone.
But I actually think that the cheap ultra-portables (eg Eee) wuld have the edge here. If we take the mobile phone industry as a guide, the carriers will probably pay up to about $150 - $250 to get you on a $30 - $50 p/m plan. That doesn't make too much dent in an Air.
If you bundle it with home broadband plan (maybe they'd subsidise $300) they could give out mini laptops for free or at $100 or so. Apple is actually in a spot. Experience & connections with carriers that no one else has, but no product to which a few 100s makes much of a difference.