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PC user needs help converting
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Grizzled Veteran
Join Date: Apr 2001
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Ok, I have been a PC user for a while (Not a WinTel, but PC hardware and various OS's), and worked with Mac's long ago (System 7 was the big thing last time I was around).
So anyhow, with OS X and the TiPB, I think I found my new laptop, but I need some honest opponions, since I also have to convince another PC lover to co-sign on it.
How long does the battery really last? I know that 5 hour claim is marketing speek. And what were you doing when testing the battery time?
How upgradable does everyone really believe the CPU will be? This could be a huge piece of my argument, since no PC laptop offers a user changable CPU. (Has anyone pulled the processor board out, etc...)
OS X seemed a bit slow on the local stores PB 500. Since this will be my primary OS (No classic baggage), how much did the recent update help? How many more free upgrades do you think there will be? I don't like MS's subscription idea for XP, and I won't like having to run out to buy OS 10.5 just to get peformance boosts. (then 11, etc...)
How fast is the DVD? Nowhere can I find this.
Where can I find benchmarks between Mac and PC based systems? (Hopefully sites on netural sites will be posted...)
How well does Mac OS X talk to Windows and Linux/Samba networks? Also, is there a way to use PPTP?
Is the Velocity engine really all that, or just another worthless CPU feature like SSE on the PIII?
How well do the PC emulators preform on the Mac? I will probably need this for a bit while I migrate all my mobile apps to the Mac.
How good is Apple support? Say I get a TiPB, and find after 10 months, my battery life is under an hour. What would Apple do, and what hoops would I have to go through? And is the AppleCare really worth it in situations like this?
Is the price of the system justified? Or does anyone believe a price drop will come soon? (Or possible upgraded laptops?) Or does Apple typicially keep the prices the same?
Ok, that was a bit long, but should help bring me over quicker. Please post honest answers, as if I am lied to, it will probably push me away. I want to know I can trust the Apple community.
Thanks,
Tom
(Dreaming of a TiPB)
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<This space under renovation>
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Grizzled Veteran
Join Date: Mar 2001
Location: Hong Kong
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Originally posted by Drakino:
How long does the battery really last? I know that 5 hour claim is marketing speek. And what were you doing when testing the battery time?
The battery last a full 5 hours if you're not using the hard drive much and you're not using the DVD drive. If you max the machine out (let's say, playing a DVD while running SETI@Home in the background) then you will get no less than 2.5 hours.
How upgradable does everyone really believe the CPU will be? This could be a huge piece of my argument, since no PC laptop offers a user changable CPU. (Has anyone pulled the processor board out, etc...)
The processor is not upgradable. It is soldered to the motherboard. That said, it is very overclockable (400MHz to 550MHz, etc.), as these chips have generally been underclocked in the factory. And as far as I know, most PC laptops do have a CPU socket, and the CPU is user swappable. At least my wife's subnotebook is. Unfortunately, if I popped in a 1GHz Pentium III, the thing would burn a hole through my tile floor.
OS X seemed a bit slow on the local stores PB 500. Since this will be my primary OS (No classic baggage), how much did the recent update help? How many more free upgrades do you think there will be? I don't like MS's subscription idea for XP, and I won't like having to run out to buy OS 10.5 just to get peformance boosts. (then 11, etc...)
I don't think the software situation for OS X will be mature until late summer, but that said, with the 10.0.1 update, OS X is already much faster than most installations of 10.0 (only those that had installed the developer tools had full performance), and is generally more stable than Windows 2000 or Linux on a PC. I expect incremental (10.1, etc.) updates every three months, as is usual for Apple, and the 10.5 update will cost about $30 when it arrives in about a year. This is just a guess.
How fast is the DVD? Nowhere can I find this.
As far as I know, it's a standard 6x DVD, 24x CD-ROM. I could be wrong.
Where can I find benchmarks between Mac and PC based systems? (Hopefully sites on netural sites will be posted...)
You might try these sites:
xlr8yourmac for the Mac perspective.
Ars Technica for a generally neutral perspective.
How well does Mac OS X talk to Windows and Linux/Samba networks? Also, is there a way to use PPTP?
No idea. I'm not a network or Linux guy.
Is the Velocity engine really all that, or just another worthless CPU feature like SSE on the PIII?
AltiVec is VERY effective for those programs which use it. Currently, these are few and far between, but like SSE, adoption will improve. AltiVec generally shows a much better performance improvement for certain tasks than SSE.
How well do the PC emulators preform on the Mac? I will probably need this for a bit while I migrate all my mobile apps to the Mac.
Linux has been ported natively to PPC, so no emulation is needed. VPC on a 400MHz TiBook is about as fast as a 200MHz Pentium III when running Win95. Win98 is slower, and Win2000 is slower still. Peripheral support is good, but could be better.
How good is Apple support? Say I get a TiPB, and find after 10 months, my battery life is under an hour. What would Apple do, and what hoops would I have to go through? And is the AppleCare really worth it in situations like this?
Apple warrants all laptops for 1 full year, and since I, like most people upgrade my computer every two years or so now, I chose not to buy Apple Care. That said, some reader reports make it seem as if you are treated better if you have Apple Care. If in 10 months your battery life is under one hour, Apple will replace the battery. You'll send them your old one, they'll test it and send you a new one, probably within 3 or 4 days.
Is the price of the system justified? Or does anyone believe a price drop will come soon? (Or possible upgraded laptops?) Or does Apple typicially keep the prices the same?
The price will not drop, but the video chip will likely be upgraded very soon and other small defects like loose battery connections will quickly be addressed.
That said, read my little vignette in the Dell vs. Titanium thread. Loose battery, scratches and all, I love my TiBook, and there are many grumpy PC users out there.
Hope this helps!
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Junior Member
Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: KC
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Originally posted by Drakino:
How upgradable does everyone really believe the CPU will be? This could be a huge piece of my argument, since no PC laptop offers a user changable CPU. (Has anyone pulled the processor board out, etc...)
The previous PowerBook (known as PowerBook Firewire or Pismo) has better potential for upgrading than the Titanium PowerBook. None currently exist for it however, but since it's a daughterboard-based design it should be simple for upgrade manufacturers to offer solutions. Like the other response said, the Ti has it's CPU soldered to the motherboard. Greedy bastards 
Comparitively I believe the motherboard specs (memory controller, agp speed, bus speed, video chip) are the same on the Pismo vs. the Ti. If upgradability is a key factor you really might want to look into finding a 500mhz Pismo somewhere (good luck though).
How well does Mac OS X talk to Windows and Linux/Samba networks? Also, is there a way to use PPTP?
Check out http://www.versiontracker.com/vt_mac_osx.shtml
There's a Samba client for OS X and also a utilty called Sharity that will do what your looking for. Can't attest to their current stabilty. Never tried Samba for OS X, but I had Sharity b9 on my Pismo running OS 10.0 and it seemed ok. Haven't tried newer versions of Sharity with OS 10.0.1 though.
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bah!
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: Simi Valley, CA
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Quote:
"How well does Mac OS X talk to Windows and Linux/Samba networks? Also, is there a way to use PPTP?"
With Linux or any other Unix networks that use NFS shares, it works beautifully! There is a utility called NFS Manager for OS X, I used it at work, it was a snap (after I read the readme 'cause some features don't work).
Sharity is a lot easier to use than Samba. If all you want to do is be a Netbios CLIENT. If you want to be a Netbios SERVER, you will need Samba. I tried to use SWAT to configure Samba on OS X and for some reason it wouldn't let me do it, it just gave me the client utilities, I think it was a privileges thing, though I didn't have time to troubleshoot it. The Samba installation on X is amazingly simple compared to Solaris and Linux. Editing the smb.conf file is still the same if you do it manually but it you get SWAT or Webmin to work, you're in good shape.
As far as PPTP I haven't seen anything out there for Mac OS X yet, but I'm sure there's something for FreeBSD which might be recompiled for Darwin. I'm looking for an IPSec client to use with our Cisco VPN, if you see one let me know.
At this point, OS X is an unfinished product, albeit a great one with great potential and is the right choice for Apple and the rest of us Macheads. We just have to be patient. In your situation I wouldn't upgrade now, I would wait until the end of the year or at the very least until after Summer. If you like experimenting and are willing to put up with the pains of being an EARLY, EARLY adopter, go for it. I'm having a lot of fun and really love the OS, it's the first time a Mac has had a command line that I can actually see what's happening.
Hope this helps.
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Admin Emeritus  Join Date: Oct 1999
Location: Zurich, Switzerland
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Registered User
Join Date: Apr 2001
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don't forget to do an optimise with os x. I will give you quite a substantial increase in performance. Go to http://www.xlr8yourmac.com they discuss os x in detail there.
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Junior Member
Join Date: Oct 2000
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Yeah doing the installer optimization helps and all, but it's still nowhere near the GUI speed of OS 9, WinME, Win2000. At least not on my Pismo 400.
Just didn't want to suggest to a new user that a simple pre-binding of packages is going to suddenly make OS X 10.0.1 (aka Public Beta 2 heh) feel so much snappier.
If Apple would just do something about the slow window re-sizing that would go a long way in making the OS "feel" faster. Still, it is a fairly usuable OS (especially if you're a UNIX user) and has many good things going for it ... just a little immature at this point.
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bah!
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Grizzled Veteran
Join Date: Mar 2001
Location: Hong Kong
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It's been pointed out before, but the OS X GUI is not slow because it is not mature, it is slow because it has been written in anticipation of faster hardware.
Remember when System 7 came out and there was a lot of grumbling about those slow zoom rectangles? Well, thoughtful shareware programmers quickly got to work and devised zoom rectangle killers.
Until we have the dual gigahertz machines necessary to run Quartz as fast as our current machines run Quickdraw, I'm sure we'll have transparency and shadow killers, and live resize killers etc. That said, I was happy running System 7.0 on a 25 MHz LCIII, and I'll be happy running OS X on my 400 MHz G4 (just as soon as Photoshop is Carbonized).
Now, to stay on topic, to Drakino:
If you are a Unix guy and see OS X as a way to run a familiar environment on a Mac, I suggest you forego that plan until Mac hardware can better support this gorgeous operating system. If you still want a TiBook for the "sex and power" factor, you might consider running Linux PPC on it instead (or in addition to).
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Junior Member
Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: KC
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Getting off topic now... but...
-------------
tonton-
Yes in it's current state, faster hardware (CPU) does display faster. However I don't think it's because the intent was for it to only run good on next year's machines. It's seems like it's because Quartz is not very accelerated by our current video drivers. Check your CPU monitor when you play with the GUI. You shouldn't be hitting 80%+ CPU usage resizing a window...
It was pointed out by Arshad (ATI engineer) on xlr8yourmac forums a while back that it possible to accelerate Quartz with the "3d" capabilities of current graphics chips, but that hasn't happened yet. When (hopefully not "if") that happens the GUI will run much smoother.
This is why I say OS X is immature. If we can get better video acceleration out of our current graphics chips, then all will be good and OS X will feel fast on this years machines.
Of course I don't work for Apple so this is all conjecture, but it makes more sense that saying they developed a GUI that will only run good on next years machines. Apple pulls some bonehead moves at times, but if the GUI doesn't run good on current models when it starts shipping pre-installed in July then they are in big trouble.
Who knows. Maybe in July, machines will start shipping with a Raycer chip on the mb designed specifically for Quartz acceleration. That would suck for everyone else though.
[This message has been edited by dviant (edited 04-18-2001).]
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bah!
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Grizzled Veteran
Join Date: Apr 2001
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I just wanted to thank everyone for their responses on this. I think for now I am going to hold off on replacing my PC laptop with anything. The TiPB is still at the top of my list, but this time I want to buy it outright, so it's going to take me a few months to save for it without cutting into savings. And thats going to place my timeframe probably around late July. Even if only a few of the things posted on macosrumors.com come true, I will be happy. For me looking around, $2500-$3500 seems too much for a laptop without a CD-RW option, and I'd personally like to see a slightly faster processor in it with all the upcomming speed raises on the desktop side. Plus, if I hold off till July, I should be able to get Mac OS X preloaded, instead of at the added $129 cost.
I'll probably stay around lurking, so that I can keep up on all the issues so I know exactly how to use my new toy the best I can once I get one.
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<This space under renovation>
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