I was just pointing out that the PSU for the Macbooks are small, well designed and attractive.

Completely different to the black brick on a rope style PC ones.

I even saw a Dell laptop PSU with a fan in it once! talk about rubbish design.

Name an OS with decent applications that runs on stock PC hardware?

Linux? nope, a few decent applications, but a lot of faffing about to get them working right or working at all.

Windows? lots of faffing again to keep it running nicely. 6 month reinstalls to keep it running fast.

OSX is the closest you get to a computer you turn on and use without too many irritations. Windows gets on your t*ts and it also gets in the way and reduces the stability of low latency audio. You have to use XP lite or other tools to cut away the junk.

I've run Logic Studio with a C compiler running on Linux (in Parallels) compiling code and had no glitches.

Name an OS with decent applications that runs on stock PC hardware?

Linux?

Got it in one (although FreeBSD would do just as well).

a few decent applications, but a lot of faffing about to get them working right or working at all

I'd have to suspect that you haven't tried recently, or tried at all. Something like Fedora is as easy to install as you like, on any hardware - not just expensive proprietry equipment - has just about any application that you can think of available for it, and none of the "glitz" that comes with OS X. Real computing at it's best.

Now as an iAddict I'd have to disagree with you claiming that walloping almost any flavour of 'lunix' on an el cheapo generic laptop will give that 'pure computing' experience touted before.

The entire point of apple approach is one homogenous environment, by keeping a limited set of hardware the 'just works' tag may have been subject to much flaming on digg/slashdot et al, but for your average none geek it's usually the case that it does 'just work' with the more mainstream computing uses.

For me personally, dual booting OpenSolaris11/08 and OS X with xVM for running virtual XP,Fedora and se7en instances on my MBP allows me to see (and get irked by!) the lack of 'polish' or 'glitz' as you put it,from apples competitors. Engineering and design have set the cupertino (hardware and software) offerings apart from the volume box shifters for a long long time now.

As for easy install, I've yet to see an installer thats as simple or as fast as the 10.5.4 install dvd. (you can make it even quicker if you remove the 4GB of printer drivers and language files from a default install).

Horses for courses. I run my OS X on a separate machine (it's a PPC MacMini so wouldn't be up to running virtual machines) and use PCs to run the Windows, Linux, OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD installations, with a few virtual machines to run the oddities like Windows Server and QNX.

I love them all, and wouldn't claim that any are the ideal OS. But, value for money, you can't beat the PC that I put together for £100 (plus an old case, PSU, and couple of hard disks that I had lying around) running Fedora. I can't get OS X running as cheaply as that.

Truth is there's no such thing as the perfect OS. My preference is for simplicity and accessibility, which is why I go for the Unix lookalikes. Others have different preferences, and I welcome the variety.

I used to run Linux full time on numerous computers. It works alright to a point, then once you've hit that point you have to recompile a kernel or some source code.

My media PC is Gentoo running Mythtv, it's the only version of Linux that I can tolerate and that works how I want it.

Sometimes you need a leader, a person at the top who decides what to allow or not. The open source people hate that and when disagreements happen in the open source world you get forks and all sorts of dramas.

Some people hate Apple's control freak nature, but on Windows there's a lot of developers who do their own thing and as a result the user experience is poor.

Applications for OSX tend to all be nicely written to the style guides and they don't have awful custom GUIs.

I was like that. Had loads of machines. Then I realised if I sold them all I could afford a Mac Pro and do it all nicely and effortlessly on one computer. So I did it.

Then later added a Macbook pro as I sit in the living room all the time and a laptop is easier.

No - just two machines (plus the Mac Mini which was a present). I'm afraid that even if I could sell the two for the price that I paid I still wouldn't be able to afford a new Mac.

Edited by deleted (Sun 08-Feb-09 22:36:33)

Truth is there's no such thing as the perfect OS.

Aint that the truth!

My preference is for simplicity and accessibility, which is why I go for the Unix lookalikes. Others have different preferences, and I welcome the variety.

Boxen that I log into occasionally (like my dell dimension 8300 based nexenta NAS & the IBM SFF PC running ESXi hidden away in a cupboard) usually are made up of unwanted spares and 'decomissioned' machines from clients - can't beat the Open Source OS for giving perfectly capable hardware a new lease of life.

But the machines I'm working with all day every day ALL run OS X. Fanboy zealot? maybe, love the shiney? Definately...