I have a confession to make and it is one I am both ashamed and amazed by. It isn’t easy to admit ones faults or admit one has made a mistake of judgement, but I am a man who has done that tenfold. I have been seduced by an inferior mistress and I’m not sure if I’ll ever return to my old ways again. You see, I’ve been mesmerised by… the Apple Macintosh.
I know, I know, it is shocking. How can this be? Will, how can you have turned on us this way? I can already here those accusing me of being a heretic but I must admit that the folks at Apple have actually turned out a way decent product.
You see, back in the day the Apple really was ultra cool. They were the first computer company to this complex thing known as the home computer and made it very easy for people at home to use. Their only problem is that they didn’t want to license anything… they wanted total control of the hardware and the software and they never bothered to try and take their nifty interface and put it on anything but Macintosh hardware.
We all know this story 100 times over by now. Granted they have really been trying over the past decade to re-invent themselves and change the way we look at the Apple product line. In all of this they did do one very important thing: They realized that the kernel they were working on was almost two decades old and just wasn’t cutting it. Thank goodness they did.
I won’t get in to what they were able to do and change by coming out with MacOSX, because in all honesty they still didn’t quite have it right when that came out. The new Mac OS is based on the FreeBSD Kernel, a unix derivitive in the same ilk as linux, and as such they did lighten their load considerably in the way of things running. Still, with the OS they were inventing and the hardware they run it on the machines still should have been a lot faster. Guess what? They finally are. With the latest release of their OS (10.2, also referred to as Jaguar) Apple finally got over the long living hurdles of OS vs. hardware and even their oldest G4’s can now run like a Ferrari. My new weapon of choice for testing the real capabilities of this new OS is on a G4/400 Titanium Power Book. I have to admit that this machine just freakin’ screams. The fastest computer in my house is a P4/1.2 Ghz and this damn thing runs circles around it.
For those that have adopted the ways of Linux, or are old school PC command line power gurus I can tell you that the OS X platform offers you a terminal window finally that you can use for every command line function you can think of. As an IT professional, this feature along with Microsoft’s recent release of Terminal Services for Microsoft Servers has pretty much sinched that I just don’t need my PC laptop any more, and it will soon be on the eBay money making machine. Of course I’m not telling everyone to run out and get a Macintosh. Hard core gamers know that the PC is the only place to be (for now) and until Apple finally removes their head from their collective asses and finally lowers the price of Apple hardware they still won’t get the market share they need to ever become a serious hitter in the ball game.
That’s it for now. Be well.
-WW
PS: This entire entry was done on a Macintosh… go figure.