Hell’s weather report: cold and colder. Beattie switches to Windows

I’m sorry but overall the price/performance issue is fairly moot point. It doesn’t fly if you do the comparisons.

I prefer windows for the enterprise

Windows is unusable in the enterprise (insecure and unsecurable), unless you consider your target market the cubicle dweller who only fetches email and writes one-page memos the “enterprise”.

“I’m appalled that Microsoft, a convicted monopolist felon, still stoops to painting itself as an alternate to “religious” third-party offerings instead of marketing its own products as useful tools. ”

Microsoft is not a convicted monopolist felon. They lost a civil suit, and thus are not “convicted” of anything, and it certainly was not a felony, so they are not a “felon.” I’m a Mac fan and generally think Windows is the lowest-common-denominator junk, but let’s not fall prey to excessive hyperbole.

Well, Apple is not making Tablet PC notebooks at all (I have 2 of them already) and Microsoft does, so Microsoft delivers some features that Apple don’t, so people who criticize Microsoft miss the point.

Regarding Beattie: he is using computer for writing emails and making PowerPoint slides – for this any computer would suffice, any. I think that Apple’s Mac OS X is too complicated for him, so that’s why he switched. And being simple is not a sin.

“I’m sorry but overall the price/performance issue is fairly moot point. It doesn’t fly if you do the comparisons. ”

Wait… you mean comparing PCs (lower price, more performance) to Macs? It very clearly does fly. In the laptop market, it’s flying like never before.

Of course, with Apple switching to Intel it’s likely that will change. But for the moment, it’s not even close.

I am not an OS-Trend-Hopper. I simply look at the market. I have had so many vendors using the LAMP methodology on their Servers, that I would be ignorant and a bad business person to ignore it. I started out on the IBM PC-JR, then went to AMIGA, then it was MAC for 10 years at home/PC at work. I will continue to use the Wintel platform at work, at home, my wife constantly bitching about the Slow-as-hell Windows-XP machine, do I want to fork out another $500 for another machine? No. I need to reinstall Windows-XP becuase it has become almost unusable, why does the hard-drive spin forever? Why? What the hell is it doing? Why can’t I open my email. Why can’t I burn a CD? Why doesn’t Microsoft release a new OS? It’s hard to explain these issues to my wife. She wants to go online, do some stuff, get her email, that’s it. i am not getting the happy shiny feeling from MS, I have been hearing that Windows-Vista may ship in 2007, is this true? Are they waiting for the hardware manufacturers to lower their price points on new faster hardware? Why can’t a HUGE corporation like MS get their act together? I have been using VS 2005 for a few weeks now, I am NOT IMPRESSED. This software has so many bugs, try installing SQL Express on a remote server, go ahead try!

Brandon,

I’m using a Dell laptop at work and my iBook at home. I notice a lot of performance differences between the iBook and the Dell in favor of the iBook. I’ve only got 512mb RAM on my iBook and 1GB of RAM on the Dell, but the dell (running Windows XP Pro SP2) takes a lot longer to start up programs. I don’t have any benchmarks, it’s all anecdotal. I’m looking at my dock on my iBook right now and almost every icon on it has a black arrow underneath it showing that it’s running. I’ve got 4 desktops active. Including 12 tabs in Safari, 2 projects in Xcode, NetNewsWire, Mail, TextMate, 2 PDF’s, and Locomotive. I find that if I have 2 or more solutions open in Visual Studio that my system bogs down.

For kicks and giggles I just decided to open up iTunes, iPhoto, and one of my old presentations in Keynote. I only have 755 photos in iPhoto right now, but when I use the app I only notice a tiny bit of slowdown when I zoom in on a picture.

Right now, the only arguments for Wintel (or should that be WAMD laptops?)laptops are “Apple hardware is expensive”, “Everyone runs Windows”, and “PPC isn’t as fast as x86″. Two out of three of those arguments are going to go away this year (I think). You’ll start to see more Softies walking around campus carrying dual-boot Powerbooks to go with their iPods.

Scott, the “Yonah-based Apple ‘books” may give softies even more benefit than that…

As well as the dual-booting that will be possible on the x86 hardware, there’s now talk of them running Windows .exes in the same window layer as regular OS X apps.

Just as the “blue box” allowed antique Mac System 7-9 programs to run by booting OS 9 as a separate process, and the techie’s X11 (Unix is good for partitioning things off like that), Windows XP could be there ready to run an .exe.

Think Virtual PC without boundaries, and with no performance hit.

Microsoft would be pleased as users doing this would bring an extra Windows license, and perhaps even a Virtual PC one too.

As for the hardware, if the specs on the just announced Yonah-based Acer are anything to go by, and the package is as nice as say Apple’s existing 12″ aluminum PowerBook, these laptops should be sweet indeed.

Ah, the usual cast of zealots and zombies are attacking in full force. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of this Beattie fellow before and, if his blog is any indication, I’d rather not hear of him again.

“…but I just can’t deal with not being able to be on the bleeding edge anymore.”

Oh, for crying out loud. I’m checking IMDB right now to make sure he wasn’t a screenwriter for Hackers. The blog entry reads like

“Even just using Macs for the past year, I’ve found myself farther and farther away from the mainstream and that’s a very bad thing.”

The mainstream? What does that even mean? Do we want the computing experience of a housewife in Pittsburgh?

You know, Switch stories are nothing more than testimonial ads for a product. And Ellen Feiss trounces this guy any day of the week! Hyuck.