Comments on: mini vs pc – the weapon of choice..

By: amber

amber — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 16:03:41 +0000

By: Heather

Heather — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 12:20:02 +0000

For a good text editor on the mac, have you checked out Subethaedit? You can still get the free version, which is awesome, at: http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/11321

By: cameron

cameron — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 21:22:25 +0000

Here’s the deal though: the shapeshifter or mail thing wasn’t really the OS’s fault. You probably coulda fixed those by opening up activity monitor and killing the processes. Therefore, you can really rule those out, I think…

Most everyone agrees the regular build of firefox for os x is trash, as they don’t spend the time because their core audience is windows.

Ironically enough, last night, just minutes after posting that, I decided to try DejaVu, a backup app. Well the thing totally killed os x, brought everything to a standstill, beachballed, everything. It may have recovered, but I yanked the firewire drive cable to see if it’d make the app auto-quit, or whatever, but it kept being frozen. Ended up having to kill the machine.

So, yeah, OS X has it’s faults…

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 12:32:33 +0000

Cam – yesterday I was doing something on the PC and the mac was doing nothing. An email arrived. Both cpu’s went to 50% and stayed there. Weird.

Two days before Shapeshifter would not let go. Refused to be moved despite the uninstaller being used. Restart killed it.

Firefox – the slow one – made me restart many times trying to see what I was doing to break it. When it wasn’t broken.

If a computer starts slowing or behaving unpredictably then I will restart – it works for any machine. It’s not a Win thing.

My windows machine? Hardly ever reboot. Doesn’t need to and I use it for lots of stuff. Since I started keeping the machine free of extra junk it works smoothly.

And it’s not VAT. It’s Apple doing what every other mftr does – screw us Brits.

By: cameron

cameron — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 07:54:30 +0000

Ah, I guess it’s the VAT or whatever then. Because a macbook, the cheapest one, is only $1000 here in the US.

Question: “My pc rebooted less than the mini in the last 2 weeks”

Why? Is this because you feel like you should reboot? Is it because of updates or an app install that required a reboot for some reason?

I’d like to know why this is, as my iBook right now is on it’s 15th day of uptime, which includes about two full days of being asleep during travel, and tons of time in photoshop and such.
Simply put, no bullshit, my windows computer, which I only game and run Azureus on, I have to reboot it about once a week or it gets sluggish. But that may be azureus screwing windows up. That isn’t fanboyism, that’s just what I’m having happen.

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 01:03:57 +0000

I’ve bought 2 I think, maybe 3.

The mini here is the equivalent of $1000
The basic macbook is $1500
A Macbook Pro is $2700

For me, the above would leave no money :)

By: Joey Brooks

Joey Brooks — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 00:59:14 +0000

True enough. But most of the Mac shareware apps (I cringe at calling them that after years of using Windows, but that’s what they are) are well beyond worth it (you’ve mentioned you’ve bought a few yourself :P). But I think that very well may be the mentality of these shareware developers, yes. I mean, when they cheapest computer Apple sells is, realistically, going to run $700-800, if not more, then you can’t blame them for thinking “what’s 20 or 30 bucks to them?”

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 00:29:47 +0000

Newsfire – it’s limited in feeds during the trial so I’m not able to really test it. I did see good things though. I’ve been fiddling with font, colours and styles in NNW and it’s getting close to being just right.

For notes I’m now using Google Notebook as the Firefox extension. That’s as close to Evernote as I can get. Again I looked at several things including Journaler, Yojimbo and others but they came with too much. I really like apps that do one thing but do it well (which was my main liking of freeware). And Textmate – it’s £25 or $50. I don’t think I’ve paid that much for software before and a text editor isn’t going to get me there either :)

One thing that keeps striking me about the mac is the cost. It’s almost “Well if you could afford the mac you can afford this” which may well be true…….

By: Joey Brooks

Joey Brooks — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 00:15:03 +0000

First off, I wanted to agree with shep. It’s been interesting to watch these posts fly through my NewsReader. It’s been a while since I’ve been a new Mac user (read: 13 years), so it’s interesting to see that POV. I’m a user of both Windows and MAc, though, and for equal amounts of time.

Moving on, though. I thought I’d pass on a couple recommendations.

For feeds, a lot of people (such as myself) use NewsFire. I personally love it. You should give it a shot if you haven’t already. For something to compete with Evernote, you may want to try Yojimbo (and possibly the widescreen hack). I’ve heard only good things about it. As far as text editors go, I have to recommend TextMate. It’s fast, it has FTP editing like UE, it’s got anything you’ll probably ever, ever need out of a text editor.

And that’s all I got. Just thought I’d lay a couple suggestions on you.

By: shep

shep — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 22:32:34 +0000

I’ve really enjoyed these posts Mark. I think you are on point with a lot of your observations. I would like to get a mac and learn it myself to see what I would like better, but they are too expensive when they have the same lifespan as a PC (at almost double the cost, or more!). When I get some disposable income I may look into it again. Just a lot of money to spend for something I’m not sure I will enjoy as much as a pc.