Saw this while surfing this morning.
More than half of Amazon's top selling computers are Macs
http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1067

I remember hearing a while back that Windows was an idea derived from the old Mac OS. Does anyone know if that's true or not?

Bill

Kewl..I didnt think so and was not sure..This baby saw my bluetooth dongle immediately, not like the wondows pc which needed drivers..Gonna tru to get it to see my printer and scanner next

Yes, that's essentially true. Windows was Microsoft's response to the Macintosh.

However, it should also be pointed out that Steve Jobs got the idea for the Macintosh GUI from Xerox after a visit to their Palo Alto Research Center.

Yeah but Apple did it with Xerox's cooperation where Microsoft stole the idea and spent years in the courts with Apple suing them, but Apple did loose in the end.

Mac OS X is actually NeXT OpenStep that Apple bought from Steve Jobs which was the OS his company created when Apple fired him back in the early eighties and has been made to look and work somewhat like the old Mac Classic OS.

If you Google around you can find info.

this topic overlooks something important: what do you want to do with the system?
 

I think this section from the FreeBSD FAQ sums it up:

Basically PC and MAC are just hardware platforms. What you can do on it depends on your operating system. You can buy a "PC" platform, but run more than just Windows *cough* virus magnet *cough* on it. However, what you will be doing next on that system depends on what underlying OS you are running because only so many applications are available for a particular operating system (lets stay out of the architecture part for now).

Windows has lots and lots of applications, but, realistically, how many of them are you going to use on a business system? You are just trying to do graphics and web design right? Lets see: Netscape, GIMP, and Emacs or Vi (*NIX text editors). If you're not gaming then who cares if you are not using Windows?

Saying that it has always been Mac and Windows forgets Commodore, Amiga (yes, there was a difference!), Atari, and a few others here and there (DEC Alpha anyone?). I remember people used to (and some still do) swear by Amiga for video. For those thinking that Amiga is dead I present this link. Then there is also IRIX by SGI (which I used on my Indigo2) for virtual reality, video, and graphics design. However, as time goes on, the PC platform continues to dominate because of two reasons: price and performance.

My advice? Go with a PC platform. The parts are cheaper than pretty much anything else out there making changing out defective or obsolete components easier (and less expensive) than any other platform. Anything other than a PC platform (including Mac [since Apple still controls it to a T no matter who they try to fool]) should be considered proprietary and destined for obsolescence (lets see one design team controlling the whole core architecture [Apple, Sun, SGI, etc.]...or two companies [AMD and Intel] controlling design and development of the core components [the CPUs and general motherboard specifications] with a million other companies designing and developing practically everything else).

The advantage of a proprietary platform is that the hardware has been generally of better quality (in some case by a very wide margin) and the OS (Mac, Solaris, IRIX, AmigaOS) has been more stable due to less devices madness. However, even with that said, support contracts still were sold because no one can guarantee a 100% fail proof system (components will always wear out eventually). The trade off, of course, between a highly reliable proprietary platform and a PC has been the price. However, people seem to always forget the saying: you get what you pay for.

Sticking with the PC platform for a sec...what would you feel more comfortable betting your business on: cheap no-name components or high-endian branded components? Of course you probably could get two, three, or four of the knock off components for the price of that high-end component, but can you afford the downtime and frustration of swapping out those components? There is a million more thoughts I could add, but I see that I am getting long winded.

Best advice:
Buy a PC platform for the reasons of price/performance and parts availability.
If you're not going to run games, then look into an OS other than windows (I prefer a *BSD, but Linux is attracting more commercial software vendors).

Windows

Linux! :D

X Windows under Windows
 

better: turn your windows box into an X compatible system to use X programs on your *NIX colo'd server.

Install Cygwin, SSH, and X on your windows box

SSH and whatever X programs you want to use on your colo server.

Now you can use Netscape for *NIX, Gimp, and every other free *NIX software package without abandoning Winslows.

See here for more info.

Enjoy!

I'm surprised that this hasn't been mentioned.

One thing that Macs have that Windows or Linux does not have is Labels. They work just like the colored labels that you would get at an office supply to use on your files and folders.

You can label files and folders so as to keep track of what has been submitted, what needs to be archived, what pics from a set you have used, etc.

Here is a screen grab of one of my job folders with the Label prefs open.

That's probably my favorite "bonus" right now. It's great to have a fully functional development server on a laptop when I need one.

One thing I can add is that I've been a Mac user since the 1984 Superbowl commercial, and while I've helped a ton of people switch to the Mac platform, I don't personally know anyone who's done more than add a Windows machine for compatability testing needs.

I'm not saying no one switches the other way. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) I'm just saying I don't personally know any.

Simon

My Mac broke down about a month ago. I have not been able to get back into the same groove on my sites as I was with the Mac.

I am a Mac lover to the fullest and I cannot wait to get back on one.

In fact... a friend of mine was having this same discussion only days ago. He tried using the whole software argument on me... that didn't last too long.

He says that in any of the computer sections he has visited in the stores lately might have 3 rows of PC software, and only 1 or so for Mac. My argument was this... everything you see on the shelf for PC (minus the game titles) is mostly included in the Macs OS to begin with, whereas the PC has no such software. Most titles for the PC in these sections are sanctioned to the following tasks.

For example...

Anti-Virus - Mac simply does not need to be protected, and if you feel unsafe there is a title or two out there you can purchase... but not NEEDED

Media Player - Windows media player may handle some file formats that mac will not, however the iTunes software and the built in DVD Player are incredibly stable and packed with features that Windows Media Player does not have.

Browser - Mac does come equipped with IE... but the default browser is Safari, which has built in RSS Reading and will read PDF and PSD files. Without a 3rd party app or plug-in.

Calculators of all magnitudes... math, science, graphic, standard and 10 digit (extended)

The preview app on the mac is much like the image viewer on the PC only it will show previews of MANY MANY file formats as opposed to PC... AND it has a slideshow which was only available on PC using ACDsee or similar apps...

Much more, but this reply is LONG.

My opinion is that with OS X.4 and Adobe CS and Macromedia Studio MX 2004, there is nothing you will ever need in this biz, except maybe the occasional Autosubmitter, which seem to only be created in the.exe formats... blah.

Murderous

That all goes back to the simple question: what do you want to do with your system? As the FAQ that I quoted said "people work with applications not operating systems." If you are looking to do something other than games then requiring Windows is not a mandatory thing. Most of the major free OS' run on a myriad of underlying hardware arcitectures, but compile and run software just the same regardless (yes, linux will run on a Mac instead of using MacOS). That can be a huge benefit in a company with a heterogenous hardware buying scheme (a mixture SPARC and i386 based servers for instance). However, it all boils down to one thing: what applications do you want to run on a regular basis?

One of the bonus' of running a free OS (Linux, *BSD, whatever) is the sheer volume of free software available that can be used. Commercial stuff is nice for someone that wants to get something running fast. However, the payoff with the free stuff (GIMP, Apache, PHP, OpenOffice, Firefox, etc) is that upgrades are free, compatibility with newer versions of your free OS is pretty much always (dependencies are the only real gotchas and that's resolveable), and none of that nasty licensing nightmare which is core to commercial stuff. You can always used Wine to emulate windows if you need to use a windows to do some of your business with a windows app.

I agree with all of that... even as a simple family PC, I would much rather be on my mac... and virtualPC is good enough for what little bit of windows gear I run.

Murderous

I have a copy of VirtualPC on my Mac, one word, SLOW, but it does let me test a web page or something like that. Plus since it is nothing but an application I can duplicate its drive image and use the duplicate if my "PC" gets messed up. The drive image is just a single large file that gets loaded as drive C when I open VirtualPC. You can also do save state when you quit out of VirtualPC so that next time you need it you don't have to wait for Windows to boot inside of the emulator. Also since it is just an application you can work on other stuff on your Mac while you are waiting for it to do whatever.