Having a few dangerous thoughts at the moment ...
When it comes to buying a car, it's an unfamiliar piece of machinery, different from everything else you've driven. So you get a test drive and give it a good try out before you part with any cash. How come that doesn't seem to be possible with certain computers ?
There's 3 major domestic computer operating systems out there at the moment : Windows, Linux and Apple's MacOS. Windows and Linux are what almost all PCs will use, with Apple's MacOS being for proprietary (but now mostly Intel based) Mac hardware. Windows is a well known quantity, Linux can be tried out for free under the Gnu Public Licence (it's the package distributions that cost you money). Apple's MacOS is something you'll only be able to properly evaluate if you actually own a Mac.
The trouble is though, that the proprietary Mac hardware costs double (literally) what it would to acquire a well specced PC. Let's take a look at that :
Macbook - basic one would cost me £750. And that's for something with just a 13.3inch screen (size does matter). Everyone who knows Macs says they're wonderful, however one thing I do know is that they barely have any games available for them (which in a laptop for me might not be such a big issue)
Windows laptop - this one cost me £369, has a 17" screen and I can play games on it. Not that I do play many games on my laptop but it's nice to have the option :-). However, a 17" MacBook Pro would cost me £1,849 minimum. I could buy 5 of my laptop for the same price.
So you're paying a huge amount of money for something that involves a Leap Of Faith.
Hang on - where does that "YARR Me Hearties !" come in to all of this ? Well, there is a way you can test drive what it's like to run the Mac Operating System. It's called doing a Hackintosh and it begins a few years ago, when Apple made the Big Decision to move away from the Motorola 680x0 series and IBM's PowerPC and towards the Intel processors that everybody else uses. So what's inside a Mac is now very close to what's in a Windows PC.
Yuk - geektalk creepin' in there and this is the wrong one of my blogs for that. :-)
Right - this Hackintosh thing involves downloading a tweaked copy of the Macintosh system and then installing it on to standard PC hardware. The tweaks allow it to run with subtly different hardware to the expected Apple stuff. I've read a few things on how it works and I reckon I could do it. However, there are a few barriers :
It would mean downloading a piece of copyrighted software. Which is illegal ... And highly risky as well as all the muppets who believe you have a right to download stuff "Cos It's There" have meant that traffic monitoring is coming in much more.
It breaks the Apple licence agreement - "this software must only be installed on Apple hardware".
The IP address gets tagged as one using peer to peer filesharing software. This is the biggie ... There's a performance hit from other P2P pirates trying to get stuff from your machine, even after you stop the software. That's cos the other P2P people know you're out there, they go asking your machine for stuff and your machine has to deal with that. Performance hit.
(I do have a wayz n meanz to stop this happening but I'm not too interested in implementing it)
So the dangerous "let's have a test drive" thoughts come up against the legality behind the issue and the high likelihood that you'll leave tracks while effectively stealing your software.
On the one hand, you have the supposedly wonderful computer that costs 5x what the competition costs. On the other you have the Rational Mind saying "is it worth it ?" And one thing to answer the "is it worth it?" question would be a test drive. And I'm not talking about poking the machine in the shop and cooing at the pretty lights and the awfully nice screensaver (that I'd disable), I mean :
Sitting on the sofa in front of the telly with laptop on lap while :
Drafting up a blog post
Seeing the emails coming in
Keeping an eye on Facebook
Nattering over Windows Live Messenger
Listening to the music play over the network in iTunes
And maybe a few more things too
That's what I mean by a test drive. It's not something that's going to happen over 10 minutes in the shop, it needs the software running on a machine over a weekend. Bit like some of the deals car people were offering, where you could have a 24 or 48 hour test drive - see what it's like doing the shopping, going into car parks, fitting in the garage, behaviour in traffic. Things like that.
A Hackintosh conversion would allow you to do that test drive, albeit with a little less of the stability you'd expect from a bought machine. I'm keeping the dangerous thoughts at bay at the moment, I'll resist the temptation of downloading the Hackintosh conversion software. I like my internet connection and cable tv (same pipe), I don't want to lose it by getting caught downloading and installing illegal software ...
So how about it Apple ?
Possible customer here, wants a test drive. Won't buy your hardware until I know precisely how it may or may not meet my needs. Doesn't have to be a permanent thing, a 30 day trial would be fine.
I'm sure there's plenty more potential Mac owners out there who are wary about the Big MacOS Change who don't want to risk the extra money.
PS Linux isn't really being an option. I'd like to move away from Windows (too many quirky bugs) but I've seen Linux before. Even though it's effectively free, my Inner Geek is just going "Meh".
Don't buy a Mac, its way to expensive, and not worth it. Your paying extra for the brand, that's it.
ReplyDeleteWait for Windows 7, as is pretty bug free. Been running the release candidate for months now and its the most stable OS I have used in a long time.
Being able to test drive an OS, and get a feel for it would be a great idea though.
With Linux, you get the Live CD's, where you can run the OS on a CD to see if you like it, without touching your hard drive or changing anything on your computer.
With Windows, at least for now, you could get the release candidate of Windows 7, and give it a try. Not ideal, as you have to have a PC spare to try it.
I do wonder if VM is a option though? I know from the VMware site you can download images of pre-setup environments for example.
Perhaps you could get a virtual image of Windows 7, and a virtual image of Mac OS, and run them through VM Player on your current machine to see how you like both the coming operating systems.
Not ideal, but as there are no Live CD's for Windows, or Mac OS its the only other way I can think of, for test driving a OS without installing it.
Getting very curious about Windows 7 as well ... Although the £50 pre-order version doesn't come with the XP Mode, that's actually not too much of a handicap. I've gotten used to having 2 hard discs in my desktop, swapping between them for games & email. Could still do that with Windows 7, using the second hard disc for XP apps as before :-)
ReplyDeleteAnd the RC is something I could test drive on the trashed apps drive after the climate model finishes (130ish hours to go)
I thought about using the pre-release of Windows 7 on my Vista laptop....but too new a computer for me to take risks messing it up. As it is, my Dell XPS M1530 (only 7 months or so old) has its share of quarks. My other laptop is XP...and that would be a more complex upgrade.
ReplyDeleteHmm ... I'd quite happily do the deed with a desktop PC, they tend to be fairly standard with all the bits they have inside them.
ReplyDeleteLaptops on the other hand, I've made the mistake of trying to change an OS on them before and came unstuck in painful and embarassing ways ... They're just a bit too much Black Box to think about changing the fundamentals of how they work.
This current lappy is picking up the quirks as well sadly, I get the feeling that MS do Weird Things with service packs that don't do much for the continued stability of what they go on ...