I have to admit, I'm a little confused by your post... Either you've
not used a Mac in a long time, or you're going by what the press and
popular blogs have to say about Apple products.
Disclaimer - I own a couple of Macs. I'm a die-hard Linux fan and
used a Linux desktop since 1996. I support a 200+ server Linux,
UNIXÂ and SAN environment for a huge retailer and get a Windows XP
laptop provided by my employer.
Current Macs are Intel CPU based, so you can run Windows, Linux or
OS X on the hardware. Pretty much the guts of it are standard as far
as memory, disk and external connections go (I agree Apple have
weird video ports, but all of my monitors are DVI or HDMI and work
just fine). Apple hardware is more expensive than most PC stuff, but
it's rock solid and Apple stand behind their products - I had a
battery fail on a MacBook pro from 2007 long out of warranty and
they replaced it for free last week at the Apple store next to my
office. Totally painless experience.
OS X is BSD under the hood, so I can SSH into my Mac and do 95% of
what I can do via the GUI. By virtue of it's 'BSD-ness', it has
native X11 and most popular Open Source apps are available for OS X
as part of MacPorts. I was working from home over the weekend on an
upgrade at work and needed to be able to read a pcap file. I was
able to download, install and load the pcap into WireShark in about
30s on my Mac using MacPorts. Many sys admins in my group use eXceed
to get into UNIX/Linux systems and run X applications - I can bring
up a terminal window on my Mac and just run it all via SSH without
an additional X app, and it all integrates into my OS X GUI
environment.
Apart from the hardware and MS Office, I've pretty much not paid for
anything on my Mac. If I can do it on Linux, I can do it on my Mac,
but with a nicer and more consistent GUI. I'll be honest, I used a
Linux desktop for 6-7 years, using GNOME/Enlightenment and other
window managers. Having install Ubuntu and FC14 on various systems
and VMs, I'd never drag myself back to a Linux desktop when I've got
a Mac - I've got native MS Office, all the Open Source tools I need,
and when I have to use a Windows app I can bring up Windows7 in
VMware Fusion and off I go.
Trying to avoid sounding like I love to throw my cash at Steve Jobs,
but there is a lot of practical value to Apple products and it's not
just for 'writers' who hang out at Starbucks all day (I actually saw
someone with a Dell at Starbucks a couple of weeks ago... ;-)
David
Sent from my MacBook Pro using Thunderbird
On 1/26/11 5:38 PM, Ron Kaye Jr wrote:
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