[Dark Goob]

Windows Vista runs faster and is more stable on the MacBook Pro, compared to Mac OS X 10.4.10. Specifically, under OS 10.4.10, the drivers for the NVIDIA 8600M GT are so fatally flawed that the computer often crashes requiring a hardware reboot while running such a common application as Second Life.

Linden Labs, Second Life's developer, notes in its internal bug-tracking website that it has been in contact with Apple for over a month on the issue of Apple's IOKIT's memory leak (which causes the crash). LL says both Apple and NVIDIA are aware of the problem.

Yet almost three months after I bought this $2500 computer, it still crashes requiring a hardware reboot with such regularity that it is utterly unusable. Therefore, I have had to resort to primarily running Windows Vista.

To my pleasure, I found that Vista is faster and more responsive than OS X for almost any task, be it running virtual reality applications, browsing the web, or browsing files on my hard drive. It contains many features for previewing image files that won't be in OS X until Leopard comes out in October (which I will supposedly have to pay for).

Also, Vista has an NVIDIA Control Panel, allowing the user to force anti-aliasing in programs such as Second Life, greatly enhancing the graphics quality. This control panel, which is nowhere to be found in OS X, allows the user to customize many options of the graphics card, and it was clearly a horrible oversight by Apple not to include it in OS X.

My pain and frustration of trying to run OS X on my new MacBook Pro can hardly be described in words. All of my commercial software is on the Mac, such as Adobe CS3 (which runs well) and Microsoft Office (not native, but runs OK).

However my primary work application, Second Life, does not run without crashing the entire computer. This is due to bugs in OS X that are known by Apple and which they still have not fixed after three months of the computer being on the market. Supposedly, Leopard will solve some of these issues with its updated, multi-threaded OpenGL 2.1 system.

But if I'm going to have to pay to get an operating system that will actually make my computer not crash every five minutes, why should I wait until sometime in October to do so? Why should I not just buy Vista now? (I've been testing a friend's copy, but it's not "genuine," so I've been thinking of buying it.)

I feel that I should get a free update to 10.5, since it does not seem that Apple intends to update 10.4.x to fix the horrible graphics drivers that are crashing my computer constantly and rendering it unusable.

Also, I'm not trolling. I've been suffering long through this abominable crap. I'm no Microsoft fanboy; I've been using Macs since 1984 and I own 23 of them (have quite a collection going). But I've NEVER had a Mac system that was as unstable as 10.4.10; never had a new computer that simply crashed over and over and over again.

And no, don't try and tell me it's just Second Life. SL runs wihtout these horrible crashes on ALL other models of Mac, and there are other 3D applications and games that cause similar problems on the 8600M GT models. Apple ignores all these bug reports, and they ignore their software developers. They risk losing people from the platform with their horrible support on this issue (I had an AppleCare tech actually try and tell me it was Second Life's fault my computer was hard-crashing, even though a Mac should NEVER!! hard-crash).

-=DG=-

[Cold Warrior]

Why not downgrade to 10.4.6, for example?

[Dark Goob]

Originally Posted by Cold Warrior 

Why not downgrade to 10.4.6, for example?

10.4.6 won't run on my computer. 10.4.9 was what it shipped with, but that was just as bad. I went to 10.4.10 hoping it would fix things, it did not. There was a firmware update that supposedly addressed "graphics issues," such as crashes, but only for Apple Motion software!

-=DG=-

[Cold Warrior]

I thought this sounded familiar.

I hate to be an ass and dismiss your comments, but you posted similar comments a couple months ago.

http://forums.macnn.com/82/applicati...vista-vs-os-x/

[Dark Goob]

Originally Posted by Cold Warrior 

I thought this sounded familiar.

I hate to be an ass and dismiss your comments, but you posted similar comments a couple months ago.

http://forums.macnn.com/82/applicati...vista-vs-os-x/

Yeah, I did, so what? The fact is that these issues have not been addressed by Apple in all that time.

Back when I posted that thread a couple of months ago, all I got were people denying the factuality of the real-world benchmarks that I had observed, and posting completely illogical responses that did not even address the point I made (which was that Vista runs faster). Instead of people doing objective comparisons between Vista and OS X, everyone just responded saying how fast things ran on OS X, without posting a comparison of how fast it also ran in Vista, though some people did manage comparisons to XP. (I guess I'm the only human being with Vista installed on my Bootcamp partition?)

And, they completely ignored my points relating to Second Life, dismissing it as a game, or saying that "games always run better in Windows." Or they were telling me, "All I can tell you is to get used to it and cross your fingers that one day, things will improve." Or, essentially, 'get used to it.'

Both people who did bother to actually do tests between both platforms (even if it was XP) did confirm my results, and one person even said, "just as a test, parallels running windows xp on my mac pro open cnn faster in firefox than natively on my Mac OS. Kinda funny actually."

Look, I would even be willing to accept OS X running a bit slower -- but I cannot accept it CRASHING all the time, requiring hardware reboots. I seriously need an operating system that does not crash, and runs fast. Is that too much to ask for? You illogically "dismiss" my comments based on the fact I had this problem two months ago -- a point that I clearly made in this thread already!

Please, do not respond to this thread unless you have a constructive thing to say about whether Apple will (a) be offering free updates to 10.5 for MacBook Pro w/8600M GT owners, (b) if you know of a fix for this issue, (c) if you know if there will be a 10.4.11 that fixes this issue, or (d) you know of a way to install the NVIDIA Control Panel on OS X.

Please do not waste electrons posting nonsense about how this is not a valid issue. Because it is a valid issue. It is unacceptable that Mac OS X has this issue.

Thank you.

-=DG=-

[SEkker]

Very frustrating.

All I can say is that you might want to send a note to steve jobs directly. You have a legitimate complaint that has not been addressed.

I did so 4 years ago when I first purchased my PB17 - and after several months, Apple still had not shipped Mac OS X software capable of handshaking with my university modem pool. This was an amazingly poor choice by Apple - OS 9 hardware could connect fine on older laptops, but run OS X on those same machines, and the same modems suddenly could not work together. And of course the PB17 could not run OS 9, so I was suddenly without remote access to my university. [4 years ago, decent cable internet and/or DSL access was still pretty limited). So I sent Steve Jobs an email saying how I had spent $3k for a defective computer.

I had to sign an NDA and install a software patch (came out months later to everyone else in one of the scheduled updates to mac os X), but they took care of me pretty quickly after I sent out my email.

Just be sure to be straightforward with your complaint and be willing to work with them on finding a solution.

[bballe336]

SEkker, I strongly doubt Steve Jobs has a publicly posted email address, and if he does, the chances of him reading an email from someone he does not know at this point in time is about as likely as Bill Gates endorsing OSX and iPods.

[Mister Elf]

Originally Posted by bballe336 

SEkker, I strongly doubt Steve Jobs has a publicly posted email address, and if he does, the chances of him reading an email from someone he does not know at this point in time is about as likely as Bill Gates endorsing OSX and iPods.

Actually, he does have several public e-mail addresses, and high-level staff check the inboxes. It's a good way to get something solved when all else fails.

[Dark Goob]

I never thought I would e-mail Steve Jobs from within Windows Vista while running on a Mac, but I did. I feel dirty now.

We'll see what happens... thanks for the suggestion.

-=DG=-

[Big Mac]

How in the world is Second Life a primary work application? You rely on selling virtual goods in a downward spiraling virtual land as a primary income source?

[Super Mario]

Originally Posted by Big Mac 

How in the world is Second Life a primary work application? You rely on selling virtual goods in a downward spiraling virtual land as a primary income source?

He's selling his virtual body under every virtual red light on every virtual corner and in every virtual toilet.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by Dark Goob 

Yeah, I did, so what? The fact is that these issues have not been addressed by Apple in all that time.

Valid issue or not, the "so what" is that nobody HERE can fix this issue. Instead of going off on a rant about it, why not take the attitude that a lot of people asking Apple to fix something could get more attention than one person alone? You know, "help me get Apple to fix this" instead of calling Apple incompetent.

And by the way, the staff are the ones who decide whether a poster has "wasted electrons" in posting. He didn't. HIS point is valid too.

[tomlayton]

Originally Posted by Dark Goob 

Windows Vista runs faster and is more stable on the MacBook Pro, compared to Mac OS X 10.4.10.
-=DG=-

First, thanks to Google for helping me find this forum. Second, thanks to nnforums for providing this vital resource. Third, thanks to Dark Goob for letting me know I'm not stupid or crazy and providing me with a solution that works.

I have not owned any computer other than an Apple Computer since I bought an Apple ][ (yes, I should have waited for the ][+ with floppy drive) and Apple could not have a bigger fan. However, Apple's help line left me feeling stupid, crazy, then really angry. It took 3 calls (+long wait times) and getting belligerent with the guy to get bumped up to someone who knew what Second Life was (not a fan, but they had heard of SL). They all spent most of my phone call trying to convince me that the Second Life program was faulty. Finally, a supervisor said that she would check with Apple engineers to see if it was really Apple's problem.

Meanwhile, thanks to the above, I had installed Vista and was running Second Life with no crashes.

Imagine the supervisor's surprise after reporting to me that it was indeed the fault of Second Life, and my response that I was a "switcher" and was running Vista/Boot Camp on my Mac. I reported that SL was significantly faster (no lag) and had eye-popping graphics - far superior to OSX.

I hope the new OSX will solve this problem. Vista is very OSX-like, but I do not feel comfortable in VistaLand and don't really want to climb up another learning curve. I'm getting too old for that.

[0157988944]

Instead of making yet ANOTHER post, why not edit your double post to not take up s much space?

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by adamfishercox 

Instead of making yet ANOTHER post, why not edit your double post to not take up s much space?

Relax, it's really not a big deal. Why scare away yet another new member with such trivialities?

[0157988944]

For the benefit of my OCD.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by adamfishercox 

For the benefit of my OCD.

Well, if it's any comfort, it doesn't seem like you are the only one with this disorder around here...

[0157988944]

yeah, there's a few.

back to the topic...

[besson3c]

Goob: I'm sorry you've experienced these problems. I'm sorry you've had to deal with a lot of people whose initial reaction is to defend Apple, but some of us can comprehend the notion that there might be some bugs that have been making life miserable for you.

What I don't understand is what you hope to accomplish by posting about them here so insistently. Like has been said, we can't help you with these (unless the suggestion to email Steve Jobs was a useful one). As you know, some problems have workarounds, but it doesn't sound like this one does, and if there is one, you'd probably fare better posting to a Second Life forum.

[Dark Goob]

I am glad I could help some of you out by showing you the only solution for running Second Life on the MacBook Pro w/NVIDIA 8600M GT. I know there are many of you out there who also bought this computer thinking that it would enable you to run Second Life much faster and more stable than your previous-generation Mac, and are frustrated and miserable now. I have seen all of your posts on the Second Life forums and the Linden Labs bug report areas.

I'm also glad to know I'm not the only person who had Apple's tech support people tell me it was Second Life's problem. (If it's Second Life's problem, then why does the latest Digital Performer also cause so many hard crashes and kernel panics, even though it never did on my PowerBook G4?)

Normally I'd think that I had faulty hardware, but the fact that Vista runs almost flawlessly on this computer proves that the problem lies with something between OS X and the MacBook Pro.

I'm not going to respond to the trolls.

I will however, respond to this small section:

why not take the attitude that a lot of people asking Apple to fix something could get more attention than one person alone?

Thanks for the good suggestion. I hereby ask anyone who cares, to e-mail and/or call Apple about this issue.

Also, this is worth responding to:

What I don't understand is what you hope to accomplish by posting about them here so insistently. Like has been said, we can't help you with these (unless the suggestion to email Steve Jobs was a useful one). As you know, some problems have workarounds, but it doesn't sound like this one does, and if there is one, you'd probably fare better posting to a Second Life forum.

What I hope to accomplish is that someone who is thinking about buying a MacBook Pro, perhaps for similar reasons that I bought it, would think twice, and maybe wait until these issues are resolved, thereby saving themselves a huge headache and probably getting a faster computer (since by the time this is resolved, at the rate things are going, the quad-core MBPs will be out). Or, that they would know they'd need to install Windows in order for it to work properly. For, had I known of this problem, I'd have saved myself some cash and just bought the previous-generation MBP (the only reason I waited for this generation is because it has the 8600M GT).

Secondarily, there is the faint hope that people at Apple and/or NVIDIA read these forums and it dawns on them that there is a problem, since all my posts in the Second Life forums and all my bug reports to Apple and my posts in the NVIDIA forums have obviously accomplished zilch. I understand that there are certain companies in this world that monitor their customers' opinions and feedback, and forums like these would be a good place for such companies to do so, so hopefully they are.

I would hope that Apple would care that its own operating system does not perform as well on its hardware as the competition's OS. Sure, there are things OS X does far better than Windows, and I prefer OS X. That's why it maddens me to no end that I cannot use it due to the fact that it has such stability problems. And also, that's why it maddened me when I did use Windows on my computer and realized it ran noticeably snappier than OS X does, for the simple tasks like web browsing, browsing files, etc. That's not to say that there aren't things OS X *does* do better, or that Apple is incompetent, or that I would rather use Vista -- no, I just want OS X be fixed, and drawing attention to these issues feels like the only way to possibly go about affecting some manner of change (sorry, I'm a trained journalist).

I know 10.5 is supposed to fix some of this stuff, and hopefully it does. Sorry if I seem impatient, but I had heard a rumor that there was a 10.4.11 developer seed, and I hoped maybe someone in these forums had it installed and could tell us if it fixes the crashing with OpenGL programs like Second Life.

Just because it's a Mac, and I'm a loyal Mac user, does not mean I'm going simply "grin and bear it" when there is an ongoing issue. I'm going to be vocal about it, and I'm going to post about it in multiple forums hoping that it might raise attention to the issue that it actually gets fixed.

-=DG=-

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by adamfishercox 

Instead of making yet ANOTHER post, why not edit your double post to not take up s much space?

Originally Posted by besson3c 

Relax, it's really not a big deal. Why scare away yet another new member with such trivialities?

Originally Posted by adamfishercox 

For the benefit of my OCD.

Originally Posted by besson3c 

Well, if it's any comfort, it doesn't seem like you are the only one with this disorder around here...

Originally Posted by adamfishercox 

yeah, there's a few.

back to the topic...

I fixed the dupe and the apology. And there is no way YOUR OCD is more insistent than mine-I just didn't get to the thread early enough.

Dark Goob: thanks for the "less frantic" tone. I think this is something that SHOULD be addressed by Apple. But I've always been a "fixer"-when I see a problem, I want to do something about it, not just hear others say "yeah, that's a problem." It bugs me very deeply, thus my above post. But a letter writing campaign can be effective, as can many people emailing a company about an issue. If I had that hardware, I'd be right there with you. My MBP is a Core Duo model with an ATI card (that has its own issues). And even though I don't mess around with Second Life, the fact that I couldn't effectively under OS X is something I'd be very insistent toward Apple about fixing.

[nikhsub1]

I been saying this since I got my SR MBP 3 months ago... Vista runs great, fast as expected. OS X runs like poop in comparrison. Those that NEVER have run windows would not realize the difference and just say, 'oh you're crazy blah blah'. It is true no doubt. My hope is that the next OS will fix this issue. My belief is that OS X was not entirely intended to run natively on Intel ( I know what mr. jobs said about this) and this is why it runs like poop.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by nikhsub1 

My belief is that OS X was not entirely intended to run natively on Intel ( I know what mr. jobs said about this) and this is why it runs like poop.

There is nothing inherent in the OS that could possibly be "not intended to run natively on Intel)." The code for the OS is what's important, and compiling it for an Intel platform (done by people who know what they're doing and who tweak the compiler and its output appropriately) should produce an OS that works perfectly well on that platform.

[0157988944]

When Leopard comes out, I would expect it to run just as fast.

[Dark Goob]

Originally Posted by ghporter 

There is nothing inherent in the OS that could possibly be "not intended to run natively on Intel)." The code for the OS is what's important, and compiling it for an Intel platform (done by people who know what they're doing and who tweak the compiler and its output appropriately) should produce an OS that works perfectly well on that platform.

It should, but it doesn't. We shall see, when Leopard arrives. So far I have not been disappointed by any of the major OS X releases; they've all been faster and snappier than the previous versions. I'll be surprised, and very disappointed indeed, if that's not the case with 10.5.

I still think that if Apple does not fix these crashing issues with a 10.4.11 release, whoever, then MBP 3,1 owners should be able to get 10.5 for free.

-=DG=-

[tinkered]

Quick question. When Second Life is run in Vista is it using DirectX or OpenGL? Could the superior graphics for SL in Vista be a resultof SL programers utilizing Direct X 10 effects more effectively than OpenGL 2.0 effects?

In OS X, could crashing be a result of Apple's/Nvida's poor drivers and the inferior graphic be a result of SL programmers not putting as much effort into their OpenGL graphics?

[rubaiyat]

Dark Goob I feel for you. My experience with Macs is as long as yours and I am always very wary with new products but eventually you will be caught out because you are engaged in a non-mainstream activity or circumstance.

In my case it was my G4 overheating, the lack of adequate Unicode support in early versions of OSX, as well as poor network and SCSI support. My work totally ground to a halt whilst I did nothing but try to isolate and resolve the problem. I saw my income plunge and relations with clients become difficult as I struggled to produce the goods.

Then as now I found that trying to make a public case of it was frustrated by defensive users whose knee jerk reaction was to deny that you could possibly have any problems because "Apple says they don't exist".

Without having a clue, or trying to reproduce the problems or even giving it cursory thought, they would dismiss the problems out of hand and bald facedly tell me that:

1 I didn't know what I was talking about

2 I was incompetent, malicious or an agent of Microsoft

3 My problem was "unique" and therefore irrelevant

4 I shouldn't go public as it was bad for Apple and would give ammunition to PC users

Eventually I tracked down, from a developer, that Apple's declared support for Unicode was still a work in progress, the overheating was something I would just have to live with and the Unicode, networking and SCSI problems were finally resolved a couple of versions (and years) of OSX later.

It goes with the territory that you are expected to suffer in silence and not dispute Apple's a. veracity b. competency c. support or d. commitment to its users.

Essentially sweep yourself under the carpet. Remove yourself out of sight, because you are lowering the value of the real estate.

My suggestion?

Stuff it, keep doing what you are doing. If you have a problem, shine a spotlight on it. Any business, including Apple, hates that and just might make the effort to do something about it. If you don't speak up they will happily ignore it.

Make your problem your local Apple Store or retailer's. They too will get sick of it and pass it up higher (and also get ignored in my experience) but it adds to the weight of your argument.

As to the Apple chorus, they get the satisfaction of being "right" because "everyone says so" until it turns out they are wrong, but by then everyone has forgotten about it and it becomes "that was then, this is now".

And the cycle begins all over again.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by rubaiyat 

Dark Goob I feel for you. My experience with Macs is as long as yours and I am always very wary with new products but eventually you will be caught out because you are engaged in a non-mainstream activity or circumstance.

In my case it was my G4 overheating, the lack of adequate Unicode support in early versions of OSX, as well as poor network and SCSI support. My work totally ground to a halt whilst I did nothing but try to isolate and resolve the problem. I saw my income plunge and relations with clients become difficult as I struggled to produce the goods.

Then as now I found that trying to make a public case of it was frustrated by defensive users whose knee jerk reaction was to deny that you could possibly have any problems because "Apple says they don't exist".

Without having a clue, or trying to reproduce the problems or even giving it cursory thought, they would dismiss the problems out of hand and bald facedly tell me that:

1 I didn't know what I was talking about

2 I was incompetent, malicious or an agent of Microsoft

3 My problem was "unique" and therefore irrelevant

4 I shouldn't go public as it was bad for Apple and would give ammunition to PC users

Eventually I tracked down, from a developer, that Apple's declared support for Unicode was still a work in progress, the overheating was something I would just have to live with and the Unicode, networking and SCSI problems were finally resolved a couple of versions (and years) of OSX later.

It goes with the territory that you are expected to suffer in silence and not dispute Apple's a. veracity b. competency c. support or d. commitment to its users.

Essentially sweep yourself under the carpet. Remove yourself out of sight, because you are lowering the value of the real estate.

My suggestion?

Stuff it, keep doing what you are doing. If you have a problem, shine a spotlight on it. Any business, including Apple, hates that and just might make the effort to do something about it. If you don't speak up they will happily ignore it.

Make your problem your local Apple Store or retailer's. They too will get sick of it and pass it up higher (and also get ignored in my experience) but it adds to the weight of your argument.

As to the Apple chorus, they get the satisfaction of being "right" because "everyone says so" until it turns out they are wrong, but by then everyone has forgotten about it and it becomes "that was then, this is now".

And the cycle begins all over again.

Well said! It is rather strange the whole Apple cult thing... allowing ourselves to become so emotionally invested in a company that has no emotional investment in us, and shunning anybody that questions the value of any Apple products.

I still run a couple Macs, but I refuse to feel subordinate to them or any other company.

[Dark Goob]

Originally Posted by tinkered 

Quick question. When Second Life is run in Vista is it using DirectX or OpenGL? Could the superior graphics for SL in Vista be a resultof SL programers utilizing Direct X 10 effects more effectively than OpenGL 2.0 effects?

In OS X, could crashing be a result of Apple's/Nvida's poor drivers and the inferior graphic be a result of SL programmers not putting as much effort into their OpenGL graphics?

I honestly do not know what SL is using under Vista, but I believe it to be using OpenGL in all its iterations. I could be wrong though.

The superior graphics in SL under Vista are for one reason only: Microsoft does not insist (as Apple does) on writing its own GPU drivers. Therefore NVIDIA writes the drivers, and includes a nifty "NVIDIA Control Panel" that allows the user to force anti-aliasing to be forced "on" in all applications (including SL). Therefore, graphics in SL are way better in Vista.

WIthout the anti-aliasing being forced "on", the graphics between OS X and Vista are pretty much the same. However, I will say that for whatever reason, at very long draw distances, Vista performs noticably smoother. I think that this may have something to do with the memory leak that exists in the NVIDIA drivers on the Mac OS side, since it causes the system to slow to a crawl whenever it rears its ugly head.

I take it at this point that Apple is simply concentrating on putting 10.5 out there. I have tried the latest 10.5 build and it seems to fix this specific memory leak issue, although I must say that it does introduce another crashing problem (though I would chalk that up to SL simply needing an update to work properly with 10.5).

However I do not intend to update to 10.5 immediately since it will undoubtedly break my professional audio applications such as Pro Tools, and may also break Creative Suite from what I've heard. So I will more likely be giving 10.4.11 a chance whenever it comes out, since I don't think I should have to pay to have my computer run the way it's supposed to (i.e. not crash). If 10.4.11 does not fix the crashing, then I will demand a free update to 10.5.

[CheesePuff]

Just for the hell of it I'll throw this out there -- you claim it takes your MacBook Pro 17 seconds to load CNN.com. It takes my Mac mini 2 GHz with integrated Intel graphics 4 seconds on a wireless connection.

[MrForgetable]

Takes me two seconds on a MacBook Pro here.

[zaghahzag]

This thread is interesting. I think that people assume that apple and windows are on par wrt to the software that works on both. They aren't. It is getting better and in the next few years as apple gets its market share up, it will improve, but they are not on parity.

The latest example for this for me is Endnote + Word. They just barely work together on an intel mac b/c word is running under emulation and the VB based cite as you write works so slowly it hurts. On top of this, word chokes pretty hard on embedded excel charts in office 2004.

The solution was parallels + windows office + windows endnote. It works 100x better running in parallels than it does directly in OSX. There is no comparison.

Is this apple's fault? Not really. Office is seriously old and out of date (and it ****ing sucked anyway). Endnote is written by a 3rd party and god bless them - they are trying to hack something into word that M$ should have included (and considering how much bloat there is in that POS, you'd think they'd add something useful like automatic bibliography building).

Anyway, I feel for you guys. Apple has been moving really fast with the hardware, their video drivers have always been 1 or 2 generations behind the windows versions, and i've found tiger to get less and less stable as it's evolved.

I can't wait for Leopard just to see if they fix some of the little things.

[zaghahzag]

Originally Posted by CheesePuff 

Just for the hell of it I'll throw this out there -- you claim it takes your MacBook Pro 17 seconds to load CNN.com. It takes my Mac mini 2 GHz with integrated Intel graphics 4 seconds on a wireless connection.

The only way to test this is to try it with the exact same network connection. God only knows what kind of crappy router someone might have

[SEkker]

Endnote is a terrible program on the mac. Has been from the beginning. A competitive product on the mac side (i.e. adding a reference manager to pages) is what we need.

I, too, feel Tiger is less stable now - I think that's because stevo has stolen the best programmers for the iphone project.

I will also comment - I've never had cnn.com take me 17 seconds to load!

[Dark Goob]

Originally Posted by SEkker 

Endnote is a terrible program on the mac. Has been from the beginning. A competitive product on the mac side (i.e. adding a reference manager to pages) is what we need.

I, too, feel Tiger is less stable now - I think that's because stevo has stolen the best programmers for the iphone project.

I will also comment - I've never had cnn.com take me 17 seconds to load!

Endnote is GREAT. I love all its features and I never had a problem with it. I wrote my senior thesis using it, without any problems -- on a PowerBook G4. The PowerBook G4 I had was a spectacular computer for everything related to word processing, 2D graphics (i.e. Creative Suite), video editing, etc.

However, the PowerBook G4 just didn't handle Second Life or virtual instruments very well, which I was starting to get into, which was why I updated to a MacBook Pro. Also, I am done with school so I didn't need EndNote anymore, and haven't tried it on the MacBook Pro yet.

Obviously the Intel transition will take another few years before all the programs that everyone loved get ported over, and many of them simply will not make it. Every time there's been a major OS transition, lots of cool software has been lost. Worse, a lot of those programs have been things that Apple has made its own version of. The OS 8/OS 9-based video editing program EditDV, for example, never really made it into OS X. Itunes and Final Cut Pro killed it dead.

SIDE NOTE:
CNN taking 17 seconds was some kind of weird fluke. Normally it doesn't take that long. I think, at that point, I might have had an outdated version of the Flash plugin or something. But anyway the main point is just that browsing goes 2x faster in Windows Vista... and lets not even talk about scrolling through a Finder/Explorer window with 200 folders/applications.

BTW -- I've tested Leopard and it does not really seem to improve scrolling choppiness in the Finder when there is a massive amount of files. Even on a dual 2.4 GHz machine! Maybe the developer release I have is not indicative of the final product though, we'll see. >crosses fingers<

-=DG=-

[zaghahzag]

dev releases are slower b/c of all the debugging code. It's not fair to compare that to a final release.

I think endnote is a decent program for what it does, but the cite-as-you-write stuff basically doesn't work with ppc word on an intel mac. It's so slow even with a small db and a small word file. It sucks.

I am wondering if endnote web might work better on the mac, but i haven't tried it yet.

[Dark Goob]

I still think Apple should let NVIDIA write the drivers and control panel for OS X, since Apple always is so far behind in the drivers that they write themselves based on the code NVIDIA sends them.

[mfbernstein]

I'm sure NVidia is perfectly capable of writing and releasing their own OS X drivers, if they want to. It is, after all, their hardware.

By and large, most device manufacturers don't write/maintain their own Mac drivers because they'd rather not spend the time/money on it. Apple, for its part, apparently has bigger priorities.