Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Hmmm.

Last time I had to install a scanner (on a Mac, of course), the sequence of events went something like this:

1. Plug it in.
2. Turn it on.
3. Install software from included CD.
4. Scan.

So that does seem somewhat simpler than what you described.

Pretty bad.

I go between my OS X lappy, my kids (ahem) game machine and my linux boxen & I have to say that windows is all of the trouble with none of the support.

A headache you pay for with no tylenol in sight.

Hey, no fair! The first time I installed the scanner it was just that simple. Same for when I upgraded to XP. Plug and play generally works well in XP. My question was whether the Mac ever fails the way XP did in my example.

iBooks now just $999

Having used Macs for over 10 years now (an early switcher due to being completely turned off by win 3.1), I have to say I've never seen MacOS fail in the way you describe. That said, I'm primarily a unix geek and from an end-user perspective, OS X is the best marriage of unix + braindead simple gui I've ever seen. Plus, if reliability and stability are important OS X wins there as well - the only time I've rebooted my OS X machines is after installing a system update or a kernel level driver that requires it.

Windows has come a long way since 3.1 and has gotten much better, but in my opinion it just can't compete with MacOS in terms of elegant simplicity and ease of use. Geez, I sound like one of the faithful, yet of the 10 machines in my home office, only 2 are actually running OS X - the rest run various other flavours of unix...

Anything that requires drivers is a problem, no matter your platform. I've had my issues with Epson scanners and multifunction printers on Mac OS 9 and X, but nothing as bad as you report. Certainly no sudden failures. So I think Macs suck somewhat less...

Software has bugs, and can cause erratic behaviour. Corrupted preference files are often a proximate cause of this (and in Windows, the habit of storing these in the registry means every app can corrupt other apps prefs).

I have had experiences like that with OS 9 - my (Lexmark) printer got itself into a state where it would print the document, crash, then start printing it again until ti ran out of paper

On OS X it is a lot harder to bring the whole thing crashing down with one buggy program, due to protected memory, and fewer shared preference files.

Once Lexmark made an OS X driver for this printer, it worked great.

Installing Apps on X can be very easy indeed - drag a bundle to the apps folder is often the way it works. Prefs are encouraged to be stored in xml files in a known format (plists), and there is a standard OS editor for these, but they are separate files per app.

FireWire and USB, having common high-level protocols, and an understanding that you should be able to plug and unplug at will mean that often you can plug a device in and it will work without installing anything.

Rendezvous (zeroconf) is a way to do the same with networked devices.

Go to your local Apple store and try things out.

Kevin, much of what you say is also true for XP. The segmenting of memory works pretty well - program crashes rarely crash XP, in my experience. USB generally works real nice, often with no drivers to install. Preferences are indeed increasingly put into the registry rather than in separate files, but I'm not convinced that putting prefs into the registry is such a bad idea...at least when it works.

I do believe that I spend more time under the hood of XP than Macians spend tinkering with their OS. But could that be because there are more hw and sw options for XP?? Or am I just defending the indefensible?

Sure, Macs can fail as badly as Windows computers--and since I work at a Help Desk that supports both Windows and Mac platforms, I've seen it happen. Admittedly I'd rather go through printer installations on Macs rather than Windows, but I'd say that MacOS 9 is about as stable as Windows 98.

I adore MacOS X, but my XP machine gets a lot more usage because it's more practical for my needs and because I don't want to start up Classic every time I want to use Word or Photoshop. I haven't seen many problems with MacOS X at all, but if something goes really really wrong I'd rather it be on my Windows rather than Mac computer. There just seems to be more resources out there for Windows machines. Also, I'm constantly switching parts in and out of my PC computer, but if hardware in my Mac fails that is not the hard drive or RAM, it'd probably be cheaper just to get a new one than send it in for service.

Asphodel, buying AppleCare gives you 3 years of service & support - a lot of people do this, and it is very well-liked AFAIK.
You can get OS X versions of Word or Photoshop (they work great).

When Macs go wrong, I find it less scary - you can always plug a Firewire cable into another Mac and mount the hard drive that way, or boot from a CD and copy stuff in over the network.

Dave, of couse things work when they work - here's a Douglas Adams quote for you
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.

Which is our old discussion about engineers needing to be cynical.

Some people are tinkerers, some just stick with what they have. PCs traditionally attracted the former, Macs the latter, as that was the way they were designed - Mac users had higher expectations that it would 'just work', and developers had to meet them or leave the Mac market.

Nowadays all the Unix tinkerers are moving to OS X , which makes things more complicated.

Which reminds me of Jerome K Jerome on bicycles

A webmaster friend of mine recently bought a new iBook and a dual-1.4GHz PIII that he's running W2K and Red Hat on.

He summed up the experience, in his words, by saying: there's just such a huge contrast between the ibook and the pc. i'm still tweaking things on the pc after having it for about three weeks, and the ibook just works, like every mac i've ever had.

As a corollary:

A few years ago, I was on a plane, and picked up a copy of PC Magazine to see what the dark side was up to. I was flipping through it, and something odd struck me: Mac magazines (MacWorld, MacAddict) are full of articles about how to do things. PC magazines are full of articles about how to fix things.

All computers suck. It's just that they suck on a continuum. Windows started out way out at the edge of suckiness, and the Mac started out way far away from the edge of suckiness. Over the years, Windows has moved back from the edge. With Mac OS X, unfortunately, Apple has taken a huge step toward the suckiness end of the spectrum. I find OS X a triumph of superficial eye candy over elegance and usability. OS 9 may crash occasionally, but at least it's not the death of a thousand paper cuts that OS X is. OS X is still not as far out on the continuum as XP (which I use at work every day), but the gap is a lot smaller than it used to be, and Apple is heading in the wrong direction while Microsoft is heading in the right direction in regards to suckiness.

The least sucky computer ever? The Palm Pilot. Would that every computer combined usability and elegance in equal portions the way Palm OS does. It starts up immediately, it's easy to use, and it never ever crashes. Now if I could only get Photoshop for it....

That is one irony, that OS X is often more comfortable for Windows and Unix switchers than OS 9 afficionados.

That's because people who switch from something other than OS 9 don't know what they're missing.

(Grumpy from spending two hours trying and failing to fix an OS X system that hangs for two minutes on startup with a message about "Waiting for network initialization..." Grrrr.... Back to OS 9....)

That whole scary Windows register thing?

Macs don't have that problem, which goes to a point about tinkerers mentioned twice above. Some people buy certain older, small import sports cars because they don't mind the "amusement" level required to keep them running. Just as there are PCs and Macs, there are people that think differently. Windows is based on one set of logic principles, Mac another. Personally I'm MUCH more comfortable second-guessing an extended fix routine on a Mac than an almost simple fix on a PC.

Hate the cost of the Macs tho', and all the new, *expensive* software we need to buy whenever Apple changes course. (Cost of Photoshop these days? $600, or $150 to upgrade. Gotta really want/need it for that price.) Money is always a practical concern, especially these days (for me).

I just went to the darkside in June, so I've got a g4 and a Sony Vaio setting right next to each other. Plus I upgraded to OS X on my Mac in august.

I got the Sony because I was tired of seing new cheepo gadgets at Fry's with no mac drivers. If you can afford it, dual mac/pc is the way to go.

All in all, I have more peripheral driver / registry problems on my Vaio but I think it's just the price you pay for more sw /hw choices.

David, what software do you mainly use? Unless you have one program that is essential for your work AND it only runs on Windows, you should check out one of the Macs.

For $1300 you can have an iBook + Office + WiFi

Using a Mac as your main interface to the Internet sure cuts down on viruses/worms and the hours spent avoiding/fixing them.

The next time I buy a laptop, it'll very likely be a Mac. Switching out my giganto desktop machine is a much bigger deal for two reasons. First, I play PC games, many of which aren't on the Mac. Second, I have so tweaked my PC environment with tiny utilities and, more important, with hand-written tools, that I'm afraid it'd take me years to rebuild to the same level of customization. Same for switching to Linux but more so.

Dave, what do you hand-write tools in? You might like AppleScript Studio, which lets you handwrite tools that control other apps (and run shell scripts). You get the whole OS X dev environment free, including the C compiler, plus Python, Perl, Ruby and so on. Apart from being neat when you need these, a lot of little utilites and widgets are showing up.

CrankyGirl, Photoshop has always cost about $600. You used to get it bundled with scanners when they cost about $400, but now they're given away in cereal boxes they've stopped doing that.

I'm impressed, no theological warfare!

I run Win98SE, not a Mac.

Generally, the MAC has a rep as being less crash-prone. And, generally, I believe that reputation.

On the other hand, you seem to like tweaking/customizing. Apple frowns on this even more than IBM does for mainframes: oh, you can customize - their way. On the third hand, Apple already does a lot of stuff so well that less customization may be desirable.

When another implementation of Unix (hey Bell Labs, are you listening?) grows out of the soldering-iron (or arrow-in-the-stomach) pioneer stage (Lindows?) that may be the way to go. Or not.

I will mention that Apple is a hardware company rather than a software company, at least as presently configured, so there is a tendency for new peripherals or software goodies to be used for pushing a new computer purchase. The Intel part of Wintel tries the same, but with AMD and other CPU competitors snapping at their heels (aside: how would we pronounce WinAMD?) and M$ not really caring whose logo is on the box they are less successful.

On the whatever-hand-I-am-up-to, M$ has recently offered multi-media software with very strong arm-twisting as to whose peripherals should be used with it. Others can still offer drivers and use the software, but the direction seems to be veering away. Since the reason I started on Wintel is that third-party hardware and software could be added without voiding the warranties entirely, I find this a bit repulsive.

Ah well, back to your actual question. If you add anything to any system you have a very good chance of encountering one or more problems.

As to the scanner in particular, I read something a while ago - I think on Lockergnome - that resolved similar, occasional, glitches by moving cards in the box to get the scanner a lower IRQ or port or whatever...

I just got a new Mac G4 and was shocked to see how many of the ports on my old Mac 8600 didn't make it to this new generation box. I feel gratified that I decided to add a SCSI card and my whole SCSI chain is working perfectly, including my ten year old scanner. It was nip and tuck for a while.

Then I had to figure out how my very functional HP printer, which had a localtalk connection could be locally connnected to the new box. I had to fork over $100 for an AsantéTalk translation box and, again I feel like I "won" when I was able to hook up the printer to via my ethernet hub.

I think my scanner's days are numbered, even though it is in perfect working order. I'm afraid when I actually start using OS X all my hard work at hard wiring will go down the drain. While Apple is spending a good deal of $$ on its Switch campaign, it isn't doing much for us diehard Mac users (had the very first Mac in 1984!). Of course, I was just a babe then...

I agree windows suck

I think that macs and windows are both good. Don't kill me yet; they're just for different reasons. Macs are easier to use, simpler, and for the general user who wants to get something done quick. Windows (XP, now) is for people who plan to update their computers with specialized harware and software, which you have to say is much more available than mac software. Macs aren't as customizable. Also, I've worked with some of the new macs with OS X at my school and they still have a problem of booting up a little slow. I personally enjoy windows but macs are ok. Personally, it's like using a shell instead of an OS, and i find it slower...but that's only for what I do. But why is it, if windows suck so bad, are they so much more popular than macs? It's not like they aren't advertised, they are more than windows! So what's up with that?

Oh yeah, and whats all the talk with "yeah my pc always crashes and the blue screen of death..." who the heck is using the pc? A monkey? I think crashes only occur when third parties install their programs and clutter up the memory (Compaq, Gateway) I build my own pcs without the junk and you'd be amazed by the unshittiness and unclutterness of the pc.

Hey, why are windows called personal computers?
Why are pcs so much more popular than macs?

Answer those, and I'd be impressed!

"A digital photography site called Rogalbraith has made a comparison of high end Macs and PCs for digital photography tasks. The analysis features two cutting-edge machines - one Alienware laptop with a 3 GHz P4 and 1 GB RAM, against a dual-processor 1.25 GHz G4 system with 1GB RAM. The tests also included two trailing-edge systems - a laptop Mac and a 1.8 GHz P4 Dell. In almost all of the tests, the Alienware laptop decisively beat the dual Mac system, leading the author to proclaim that, "The fastest dual-processor Mac has been soundly thumped by one of the fastest single-processor PCs....the overall speed superiority of the PC is impossible to ignore." Of course, the ease of setup/ease of use, reliability, seamless integration, superb service and support, and elegance of Mac platforms will probably dissuade most Mac users from switching to PC platforms. Moreover, the Mac platform should get a substantial boost if/when Apple switches to the IBM 970 CPU. Still, the fact that the PC could trounce a Macintosh in an area where Macintoshes are supposed to be dominant should be both surprising and disappointing to the community of Macintosh users." - Geek.com
Gee, macs seem to be losing in every category now...

please post more comments, I will visit this site again

I am a big pc user, right now i am on a mac at school and i really cant stand it to tell you the truth. I find that it takes a lot longer time to make documents becuase there are no toolbars. Plus i am i WinXP user and all my hardware has just pluged in and worked, and i have alot of stuff everything from extrenal HD to the cheapest mp3 player. As long as you have the data cd that came with the hardware it should work fine. Plus macs shouldnt have the hardware problems of the PC for macs hardly have any aftermarket hardware. Most hardware for macs is made by mac and at that is very hard to find software and hardware for it. since your local best buy doesnt carry it. also how the hell can you upgrade an imac there pretty much a throw away machine i think.

There is less aftermarket hardware for Macs, but there is a lot more than Adam seems to realise... Also, Adam, I find toolbars' icons confusing, but most recent Mac programs I've seen have toolbars. Mac OS X even has that little "pill" button on the top right of the window to hide/show the toolbar for you. (If Apple's own programs would only use this button...)

I was struggling with the 'waiting for network initialization' thing last night. It took me about fifteen minutes (including a few restarts) to resolve. It's probably *way* too late for ralph now, but my problem was caused when I added an AirPort card to my system. The solution was to start up the System Preferences, turn off all network ports in Network, apply, quit System Preferences, and then bring up System Preferences again and turn on the ports that I wanted.

As for the suckiness of Mac OS X, I'd have to agree with ralph: all computers suck. I find it much easier to track down an application's or other preference file in Mac OS X then to track down all vestiges of an application's registry entries, but maybe that's just me.

The worst XP story I have is when my PC at work decided not to recognise my USB devices, which happened to include my keyboard and mouse. I spent hours on it, rebooting many times, shuffling cables around, with no success. Fortunately I had a VNC server running, so that I could connect remotely, and risk an OS upgrade. Something in the latest XP patch fixed the USB and I was back up and running.

The same thing happened after I reassembled my Mac last night after installing the AirPort card. In this case, the solution was to unplug and replug the keyboard. No rebooting required.

system restore

This is an interesting conversation to be sure. I've been in the UNIX industry for 17 years (worked 10 of those for the now long-gone Pyramid Technology Corp. OSx "Dual Universe" UNIX). I've been a Mac user since about 1990 and have lived through the years of progression of the old Mac OS ... lamenting unprotected memory, rejoicing at every OS release that added functionality and reliability.
I absolutely hated Windows 3 ... stayed as far away as possible. I found NT 4.0 to be just as bad from a user's perspective. Windows 95 ... looked more like the Mac ... but totally painful to deal with from a laptop/transient hardware perspective. Win 98 ... much better device P&P support. Windows 2000 was probably the best thing to come out of Redmond to date. XP is more 2000 with gummi bear icons ... seems very stable and has a lot of very nice features from an admin/user perspective.
With OS X (10.2.6) I am in heaven. I have Apple's rootless X11 server, terminal/bash at my fingertips, bluetooth, built-in 802.11, and Rendezvous (zeroconf) is all added together to be a virtually endless source of joy and productivity for me (as I sit on my back patio with my TiBook ... supervising the swimming kiddies).
As an old UNIX hack and an old Apple junkie, Jaguar (10.2) is a dream. 10.0 and 10.1 were a little problematic for me at times; Norton Antivirus corrupted my system and I abandoned it ... which has been the case for most configuration problems, third party software run amok.
LDAP/WebDAV support, VirtualPC, X11, darwin & bash all let me use my (personal) Powerbook in a Windows/UNIX business environment with a lot of joy and no headaches, and my co-workers are absolutely envious ... as they futz with Cygwin (which I love) and LINUX on Vmware, just to get the built-in UNIX world I can reach out and touch without hassle.
I can't wait for Panther.

Oh ... and as far as scanners and peripheral equipment with OS X, I've got an external firewire CD-R drive, a "Windows" SCSI PCI card, "Windows" bluetooth dongles (on my B&W tower and Powerbook), a Canon scanner, and use my desktop Mac for a lot of digital photo work (Nikon cameras), and I've been happily plug-and-play with them. The only exception to all of my cloudless happiness with OS X, was when the support for the first-gen firewire hardware in my B&W mysteriously went away in 10.2.3 -- which I ultimately fixed with an off-the-shelf firewire + USB 2.0 PCI card ($35).
I don't hate Microsoft, but I LOVE Apple!

Mac OS 9 was never a good OS for tinkering, very limited software and options, with no ability to multi-task. To me OS X is not only a huge leap in functionality, but in tweakability, stability, can multi-task extremely well, good looks, and alot more software. Mac OS X feels as if it has this layer of ease of use, wether you want to go past that layer to tweak your system manually is completely up to you. There are many command line tweaks system tweaks or utilities for OS X, makes things fun for the experimental type.

Any how back to the topic, for one i think windows experiences random failures because of the massive amount of spyware and virii infecting the WWW. Theres always the possibility it was the 3rd party driver that screwed up, perhaps a prefs file or configuration file went corrupt. Also depending on how you treat your System can greatly effect how things work too. My friend had a PC for a month and he infected it with hundreds of virii and spyware, he downloaded lots of stuff thru kazaa..... Also having to many things installed can effect your system too, slow it down and maybe interfer with other programs or drivers at the same time.

My point is there is less of a chance for failures on a Mac. Main reason is because there are almost no harmful virii for Mac os. I download lots of stuff thru p2p applications and have had no virus threats in all my years of using a mac, 7 years to be exact.

with xp, i installed my scanner by plugging it in, windows had some sort of automatic driver install and it works fine.

iv heard lots about macs being easier, but then your stuck with using mac everything, you have to get a mac scanner, or a mac video car, a mac sound card, and forget upgrading.

and thats basically why using a mac is easer, the company has compleat control over what you use.

personally, iv tryed win95, win98, winXP, red hat linux, and i find windows XP to be the best.

You don't need a "mac scanner, or a mac video car, a mac sound card" Everything that fits industries standart should work perfectly with OS Ten. For me tought.

Honestly you guys, if you dont have dial up, should check out this site

http://www.wimp.com/macs

And then you'll understand why macs SUCK

How bad does windows suck? Well I guess you'd have to own a Mac to find out.

Everyone knows that Macs are for the rich, and PCs are for the poor.

Granted I'm finding this site over a year later than the post I'm responding to; machater (as if the name doesn't scream bias) you need to learn the meaning of tongue-in cheek. If macs couldn't do video editing much better than a machine running windows than most, if not all, film studios would not use them to make movies, yeah look into it, cuz i'm talking major hollywood studios not little indy film companies. my 2 cents: I hated using computers (which happened to be all windows os) until I started college where I majored in art, the art department had a lab full of g4 powermacs up until a year and a half ago when they got all new g5s running panther, and then i bought my newest computer, a powerbook running tiger, and i learned how very simple accomplishing meaningful work could be. for the record i know computers, hardware and software, for any os, much better than your average user, though i claim to be no technical wizard, but if you want to insist that microsoft is the center of the computing world I can only feel sorry for how much of your time and energy you are wasting making a poor OS function. For the people who query why pc's are more popular, use your heads for a minute, microsoft does NOT make hardware just software, apple makes hardware with software that will only run on that hardware, there are a plethora of hardware companies making machines to run windows allowing more competition and lower prices between them while apple hardware remains at a fairly fixed price and the only option to run that software. It's simple economics, you can't make the blanket statement that pc's are more popular because there are more machines running windows, many of the companies producing that hardware do not have a market share incredibly larger than apple, except for the big names like dell, and if anyone here wants to claim that dell makes awesome high quality products feel free because i know most knowledgeable pc users will argue against that (even most unknowledgeable ones). You can call me a macaddict or whatever the term is for someone that just claims macs are better for whatever reason, but unless you want to just play games on your machine instead of actually accomplishing something or are a robotic corporate office that just purchased pc's because they got a massive discount or don't know any better, then you would be wise to just consider the mac os as an option, I know many of my pc using friends have been looking in to macs since they have seen mine and it hasn't been b/c of my "brainwashed cult preachings." I will use macs until something better comes along and for the record you die-hard windows fans better thank apple for one reason alone, if it weren't for them your precious security-flawed clone of an OS would not be what it is today

THE SECRET MULTITASKING LIMITATION OF WINDOWS XP

WindblowsXP sucks more than you can imagine! Get a load of this!

WindowsXP is the joke of modern operating systems because it is only able to run a very limited number of programs at once. If you freshly boot XP, no matter how much RAM you have, you will only be able to open about 54 IE or Explorer windows before you won't be able to open anymore. If you open about 3 major programs like photoshop, Eudora, etc. you will then only be able to open a few more windows before you reach the "resource" limit. You will still have plenty of RAM, and the swap file won't be big--simply, Windows XP has the same limitation as Windows 98--limited resources. Maybe the kernel doesn't but the "windows xp overlay" does. On OSX you can open hundreds or thousands of windows with no problems at all.

Microsoft is a retarded company and their products seriously suck. That's why no graphics/publishing professionals use Windows. It's good for a casual user who just wants to write an email, maybe take a look at some website. As soon as you need to do some serious work on it, like open a bunch of web browser windows, edit some photos, work with your email, etc. you'd be wondering why at some point nothing works anymore, and you are forced to close some of your windows.

This is not a real "multitasking" operating system, but a joke on consumers. It's amazing that I couldn't find any report of this serious limitation! I posted on a techie board and people just laughed at me--the don't want to admit it. I had a hard time believing the limitation when I found it. I wonder if Vista will still have the same limitation. I challenge anyone to try this! I experience this problem DAILY, and I have replicated it on a brand new machine.

I have used windows since 1995, and at this point I have decided that if I ever want to use a "REAL COMPUTER" I will have to use OSX. I am recommending to everyone who asks me now, to buy one of the new Intel Macs...

Tek.

P.S. Another "feature" of WindowsXP is that I noticed that sometimes, if you have a large file, like 300 MB or more, like a movie file in a folder, when you go to look at the folder in Windows Explorer, Explorer will crash and restart immediately--even if you are just seeing the file listed (not trying to see a "thumbnail" or anything. The basic objective of an operating system is to be able to manage files--even that doesn't work 100% reliably! Viewing the file from within another "browser" like WinRAR for example, there is no crash... Microsoft SUCKS.

I knew that moving to our new home was going to be very traumatic for the entire family, so I wanted to find a way to give everyone our new address. I searched the internet and found several good sites that offered real cute moving cards that could be personalized, http://www.cardsshoppe.com/Moving_Announcements/Moving_Announcements_Cards-9-1.htm,
http://www.express-invitations.com/moving_announcements/Moving-Announcements-Housewarming-Invitations.php,
http://www.cardspersonalized.com/Moving-Announcements-Housewarming-Invitations-11.htm and
http://www.announcements-shoppe.com/Moving-Announcements-Moving-Cards/productsList-11-1.htm. I also wanted to order invitations for our housewarming party so all these sites had excellent ones. I ended up buying my moving announcements cards and housewarming invitations from http://www.CardsShoppe.com and was very pleased. Both personalized cards turned out great!