[Am-info] What Steve Jobs WON'T do at Apple

[Sujal Shah]

On Thu, 2002-02-07 at 10:44, Fred A. Miller wrote:
[SNIP]
> >
> > I was wondering how long it would take someone to notice this.  I'm
> > finding out that I'm not the only one who's excited by this
> > possibility among friends and colleagues.... I'm amazed that a ZD pub
> > picked up on this...
> 
> [snip]
> 
> Now and then, it happens.....by accident, I think. :) If you want to 
> see a G4 REALLY perform, put SuSE on it!
> 

But see, you've hit an important point on the head.  Whether Linux
performs better on the G4 (my iBook has a G3, BTW) is more or less
irrelevant these days.  I would assert that the performance of the
previous generation of every processor family (except maybe AMD, since
the K7 was a big improvement for them) performed fast enough for
everything that most people do with computers on a day-to-day basis.

The important thing is out-of-the-box experience, i.e. pull it out and
do stuff.  I don't really care if I can squeeze out a bit more
performance... I care about what I can do with my computer... it's one
of the reasons I got RID of windows... the things I needed to do on a
day-to-day basis (at home) were more expensive and restrictive, i.e.
development, image processing and web programming.  In the end, Linux
was more flexible, free, and I only gave up a few things I did once in a
while (games, mostly...).  That, and I'm a Unix person (I actually
*like* typing and piping together commands to amaze friends ;-) )

Apple clearly gets the OOBE, and has designed their computers to do
things right out of the box.  In addition, the experience is just
smoother overall right now than GNOME is (I don't use KDE, so can't
comment there).  And, even better, I still have the flexibility of a
Unix shell (though I hate tcsh and will eventually get annoyed and find
a bash/ksh shell somewhere ;-).  

In other words, I think I'm ahead of the game with OS X.  I like Linux
(and still run it on ALL my other machines).  The Mac just plays nicely
with my other digital equipment (DV was the one thing I was going insane
with on my Linux box)... I'm unlikely to get rid of it.  If I get truly
bored, I might dual boot, but even that seems a remote possibility now.

I would suggest to you that you download darwin (the core of Mac OS X)
and give it a whirl on any available hardware you have.  I think you'll
be pretty satisfied with the performance you get... :-)  Right now, the
slow bits seem to be Aqua/Quartz/et al...  Something I'm expecting to
see improve over time.

Sujal


> Fred
> 
> - -- 
> Fred A. Miller
> Systems Administrator
> Cornell Univ. Press Services
> fm@cupserv.org
> 
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