Run Mac OS X on PC Hardware

[Dominus Atheos]

I just used iAtkos when I installed OSX, which is what I'm booted into right now. While this thread is up, I have some questions. I'm not familiar with this OS yet, so I need some help. What are some of the killer features of OSX over Windows and Linux? What does it do that has inspired so many people to 2 or even 3 times as much money for the same hardware and think it was the best investment they ever made? So far I haven't found anything, but I'm sure I'm just not looking in the right places. Any help would be appreciated.

There's no killer feature. It just happens to work pretty well, reliably and with fewer security problems than Windows. It also has a reputation for having superior usability and polish.

I tri-boot my computer between Vista, Linux, and OSX. The question I have is what reason do I have for booting into OSX? What does it do that the others don't?

[Dominus Atheos]

I just used iAtkos when I installed OSX, which is what I'm booted into right now. While this thread is up, I have some questions. I'm not familiar with this OS yet, so I need some help. What are some of the killer features of OSX over Windows and Linux? What does it do that has inspired so many people to 2 or even 3 times as much money for the same hardware and think it was the best investment they ever made? So far I haven't found anything, but I'm sure I'm just not looking in the right places. Any help would be appreciated.

Just talking from my own personal experience, my iBook G4 is by far the best computer I've ever owned. It's over three years old and still runs like it just came out of the box, and the only problem I've had with it is a poorly designed AC adapter I eventually replaced. It's not so much that OSX does any one thing much better than Windows, is that it does a lot of little things a little better, and, more importantly, keeps working like it was designed for years, without me having to waste hours of my time fucking with it.

Any examples? I installed this because I wanted to know what all the hype was about, but I still can't figure it out. You, like so many people, swear by OSX and say you'll never go back, and after using the it I can't figure out why. There are probably tens if not hundreds of thousands of people who think that, so it must be at least a little true. What are the specific things you like about OSX over every other operating system?

[rhoenix]

Any examples? I installed this because I wanted to know what all the hype was about, but I still can't figure it out. You, like so many people, swear by OSX and say you'll never go back, and after using the it I can't figure out why. There are probably tens if not hundreds of thousands of people who think that, so it must be at least a little true. What are the specific things you like about OSX over every other operating system?

No offense, but you quoted Red Imperator's text that answers your question:

Just talking from my own personal experience, my iBook G4 is by far the best computer I've ever owned. It's over three years old and still runs like it just came out of the box, and the only problem I've had with it is a poorly designed AC adapter I eventually replaced. It's not so much that OSX does any one thing much better than Windows, is that it does a lot of little things a little better, and, more importantly, keeps working like it was designed for years, without me having to waste hours of my time fucking with it.

That's basically it.

OS X was built on top of and runs atop of a UNIX kernel, as you know. It's options and usage for its interface is unobtrusive and concise; note I said concise, not simple. All programs upon it are this way.

Essentially, yes, one could get the same stability from a properly-built Linux box. However the interface would be difficult to be that well done; even Enlightenment DR17 lacks some of the ease of use that Mac OS X has.

For the bias in my opinion, I would like to formally state that I learned on DOS 6.2 and Windows 3.1, to Windows 95, to Windows 2000, to Free BSD, to Gentoo Linux, and now to Mac OS X.

I like OS X because of its stability and power of the kernel, and the concise ease of use of the OS interface.

But at any rate - as interesting as the idea is, and though I may later get a desktop PC box to Frankenstein with using this dongle, it won't be for my main computer. I'm just going to save up the extra money for a new Macbook Pro when the new series comes out here in later October, and use Parallels or VMWare Fusion when I need to do cross-OS stuff.

Because I use Windows XP, AS/400, AIX, as well as Linux at work, making sure the core OS at home won't fuck up at random for no good reason or treat me like I'm a fucking idiot, while still being...enjoyable to use is worth the extra money to me.

[phongn]

I tri-boot my computer between Vista, Linux, and OSX. The question I have is what reason do I have for booting into OSX? What does it do that the others don't?

It offers a more polished, cohesive experience? There are applications available for it that are not available on alternatives? Why are you asking us this? If you don't find that it suits your needs then don't use it.

Any examples? I installed this because I wanted to know what all the hype was about, but I still can't figure it out. You, like so many people, swear by OSX and say you'll never go back, and after using the it I can't figure out why. There are probably tens if not hundreds of thousands of people who think that, so it must be at least a little true. What are the specific things you like about OSX over every other operating system?

As rhoenix noted, there may be a great deal of little things. A polished GUI, a document-centric workflow, the tight coupling that Apple provides between OS and hardware, the perceived lack of security problems, etc. Users may simply be more comfortable with its UI paradigm. There are millions of Macintosh users, all with their own particular reasons and you want bullet points?

[Dominus Atheos]

I tri-boot my computer between Vista, Linux, and OSX. The question I have is what reason do I have for booting into OSX? What does it do that the others don't?

It offers a more polished, cohesive experience? There are applications available for it that are not available on alternatives? Why are you asking us this? If you don't find that it suits your needs then don't use it.

Any examples? I installed this because I wanted to know what all the hype was about, but I still can't figure it out. You, like so many people, swear by OSX and say you'll never go back, and after using the it I can't figure out why. There are probably tens if not hundreds of thousands of people who think that, so it must be at least a little true. What are the specific things you like about OSX over every other operating system?

As rhoenix noted, there may be a great deal of little things. A polished GUI, a document-centric workflow, the tight coupling that Apple provides between OS and hardware, the perceived lack of security problems, etc. Users may simply be more comfortable with its UI paradigm. There are millions of Macintosh users, all with their own particular reasons and you want bullet points?

It's just that after seeing all the "Get a Mac" ads and reading so many posts of pro-apple people (not necessarily on this forum, I used to post a lot on Ars Technica's Battlefront forum back when I was drinking the Linux kool-aid a little more), I just expected actually booting into it to be... I don't know, like a virtual blowjob or something. After being told for so long that if I take my Windows box, throw it in a trash can, and go drop $1500 on a Macintosh computer I'd never regret it. But after actually using it for a while, I just don't see any reason to go do that. Would my experience be much improved if I used actual Apple hardware, or were all the people telling me that just idiots?

[phongn]

Well, Apple hardware tends to be reasonably well-designed and it (mostly) Just Works with the OS. People value that, a lot: Windows doesn't provide nearly as transparent an experience (to say nothing about Linux). And an "experience?" It's just an OS: ideally you shouldn't even notice the damn thing.

[Robert Treder]

Dude, stop being a douche. Fucking five people have already very patiently explained the benefits of Mac OSX, but Stark hit the nail on the head: you're trolling, looking for a reaction. Nobody here is going to tell you 'omg if u dont roll mac ur an idiot lol' so quit it. We get that you're so superbad that you triboot your computer. We also get that you're so fucking retarded that you decided to install OSX on your computer to get your "virtual blowjob" when you could have simply spent a few minutes on somebody else's computer to see what the buzz was about. It's not like every library in the country doesn't have a Mac.

And House is still a stupid show.

[Dominus Atheos]

Dude, stop being a douche. Fucking five people have already very patiently explained the benefits of Mac OSX, but Stark hit the nail on the head: you're trolling, looking for a reaction.

No, I'm looking for someone to explain to me why so many people think OSX is so much better then it competitors and suggest everyone should dump their PC and go buy a Mac. I see a lot of things that are nice about it, but no "killer feature" that justifies spending the $1500 that sales figures say is the average selling price of a Mac or Macbook.

Nobody here is going to tell you 'omg if u dont roll mac ur an idiot lol' so quit it.

Yes, the lack of fanboyism is one of the biggest reasons I post on this forum. Even I freely admit the Mac Mini is probably a good computer at it's retail price of $599, I just can't understand why so many people are willing to shell out so much more for the iMac.

We get that you're so superbad that you triboot your computer.

What was the OP asking again?

We also get that you're so fucking retarded that you decided to install OSX on your computer to get your "virtual blowjob" when you could have simply spent a few minutes on somebody else's computer to see what the buzz was about. It's not like every library in the country doesn't have a Mac.

You can't get a feel for a product just by using it for a few minutes. It take days if not weeks to evaluate something as complex as an operating system.

And House is still a stupid show.

Now I know you're crazy.

Edit: fixed typos and grammar.

[phongn]

No, I'm looking for someone to explain to me why so many people think OSX is so much better then it competitors and suggest everyone should dumb their PC and go buy a Mac. I see a lot of things that are nice about it, but no "killer feature" that justifies spending the $1500 that sales figures say is the average selling proce of a Mac or Macbook.

The killer feature is that it has polish, it works well, it doesn't have the perceived flaws of Windows. In general, consumers don't buy for what the average computer enthusiast might considered a "killer feature." You are viewing the industry through the lens of an enthusiast or a tinkerer.

Yes, the lack of fanboyism is one of the biggest reasons I post on this forum. Even I freely admit the Mac Mini is probably a good computer at it's sale price of $599, I just can't understand why so many people splurge on the iMac.

Because people like the design of it, because it represents the "base" model of Macintosh for most people, because the target audience of Apple can afford an iMac.

You can't get a feel for a product by just using it for a few minutes. It take days if not weeks to evaluate something as complex as an operating system.

You can't? You should be able to get a feel for how productive you might be with not much time invested.

[Stark]

As I've already said, for someone like DA (ie, a skilled computer user looking for 'power features' or 'killer apps') the advantages of OSX aren't apparent. To regular people, the lack of maintenance, simple layout, excellent bundled software and what phongn calls 'polish' and I'd probably call 'experience' are worth the $200 extra or whatever.

Giving someone a Macbook you can listen to them saying 'how do I... oh I see' and 'where's the.. ohhhh' and such. Vista has caught up with many of it's features (most glaringly I think their search no longer sucks the shit out of my ass), but it's much easier to use, run, maintain and 'own' a Mac as an appliance rather than a self-compiled, updated, tweaked computer nerd orgasm.

WhileI personally would never buy a Mac desktop (as the premium there is less worth it in my opinion), my parents are considering buying one for many reasons related to maintenance and hassle. Macs just work, they're difficult to break in casual use, and solutions are easy to implement. In particular - for regular people - the integration of cameras, external drives, printers etc seems superior for regular people (I find it just as annoying, but whatever).

[Dominus Atheos]

No, I'm looking for someone to explain to me why so many people think OSX is so much better then it competitors and suggest everyone should dumb their PC and go buy a Mac. I see a lot of things that are nice about it, but no "killer feature" that justifies spending the $1500 that sales figures say is the average selling proce of a Mac or Macbook.

The killer feature is that it has polish, it works well, it doesn't have the perceived flaws of Windows. In general, consumers don't buy for what the average computer enthusiast might considered a "killer feature." You are viewing the industry through the lens of an enthusiast or a tinkerer.

That's defiantly possible. It's just that when I buy something, I usually consider what I want it to do and how well I want it to do it, and then go find the cheapest product that can do all those things (and I especially don't care about how "pretty" something is or how it looks, or what people think when they see me using it). But I suppose there are plenty of people who don't buy things like that.

Yes, the lack of fanboyism is one of the biggest reasons I post on this forum. Even I freely admit the Mac Mini is probably a good computer at it's sale price of $599, I just can't understand why so many people splurge on the iMac.

Because people like the design of it, because it represents the "base" model of Macintosh for most people, because the target audience of Apple can afford an iMac.

It just seems strange to me. There isn't a whole lot an iMac does better then a Mini, so by my purchase process you'd have to be nuts to shell out an extra grand for an iMac.

You can't get a feel for a product by just using it for a few minutes. It take days if not weeks to evaluate something as complex as an operating system.

You can't? You should be able to get a feel for how productive you might be with not much time invested.

As an example Linux looks pretty good until you try to watch a dvd and it won't decrypt the CSS protection, and then you have to google the problem and read a forum to get the commands you have to copy to a command line to download something that can break the encryption. Windows also works pretty good until you install a badly written program that kills your performance, or installs adware, or even breaks it all together and causes the system to start randomly BSoDing on you. All these things take weeks before you come across them. Mac users swear to me that OSX doesn't have any problems like that, but I'd still prefer to use it for a while just to make sure.

[Seggybop]

I don't see how he's is trolling at all; I've had a very similar experience.

I've been using Apple hardware and software for many years while in school/work, but only for performing tasks in software like Photoshop that works the same regardless of OS. After it became available for x86 I took the opportunity to try using it for my main system-- I had always felt OSX had a smoother UI than Windows, so I was excited to mess with it.

I honestly had the same reaction as Dominus Atheos-- looking around desperately for some significant advantage, to no avail. By now I've had it as my main OS for three separate periods now. Each of those times, the OSX partition fell into disuse and was eventually purged after the novelty wore off and I realized I was wasting time rebooting into XP to use the software I needed, while there was nothing available exclusively for OSX that lacked a Windows equivalent.

My experience has been that OSX is nice and smooth, pretty great as long as every piece of software you need runs under it, but has no really compelling advantage, be it exclusive software not replicated on another OS or better speed on equivalent software between OSs, and the huge disadvantage of software availability.

It may be true that from our perspective as enthusiasts we're unable to see the advantage of the OSX UI for newbs, but seriously the differences aren't that great and I've seen people new to computers equally flustered by an XP or OSX desktop. Is there any objective evidence that OSX is simpler for novices, or is that Apple marketing?

[phongn]

That's defiantly possible. It's just that when I buy something, I usually consider what I want it to do and how well I want it to do it, and then go find the cheapest product that can do all those things (and I especially don't care about how "pretty" something is or how it looks, or what people think when they see me using it). But I suppose there are plenty of people who don't buy things like that.

The majority of people don't buy things like that. Furthermore, you have repeatedly made the assumption that people's values (with regards to purchase of goods) are like yours. People often want things to look good, have higher build quality or have certain intangible requirements. Purchasing of goods is not a purely rational decision.

Because people like the design of it, because it represents the "base" model of Macintosh for most people, because the target audience of Apple can afford an iMac.

It just seems strange to me. There isn't a whole lot an iMac does better then a Mini, so by my purchase process you'd have to be nuts to shell out an extra grand for an iMac.

The iMac has a built-in monitor, for one, which means one less thing to hook up. It looks better. And it's not THAT much cheaper when you consider the price of a decent LCD added onto it.

It may be true that from our perspective as enthusiasts we're unable to see the advantage of the OSX UI for newbs, but seriously the differences aren't that great and I've seen people new to computers equally flustered by an XP or OSX desktop. Is there any objective evidence that OSX is simpler for novices, or is that Apple marketing?

To some extent. For example, the global menu bar at the top of the screen has - effectively - an infinite height. Applications, at least the built-in ones, follow a more uniform design than on Windows. Mouse navigation only requires a single mouse click.

[Durandal]

OS X was built on top of and runs atop of a UNIX kernel, as you know.

That's half true. The kernel is a hybrid of BSD and Mach.

[rhoenix]

OS X was built on top of and runs atop of a UNIX kernel, as you know.

That's half true. The kernel is a hybrid of BSD and Mach.

Ah, touche. Thank you for pointing that out.

[Rye]

I just used iAtkos when I installed OSX, which is what I'm booted into right now. While this thread is up, I have some questions. I'm not familiar with this OS yet, so I need some help. What are some of the killer features of OSX over Windows and Linux? What does it do that has inspired so many people to 2 or even 3 times as much money for the same hardware and think it was the best investment they ever made? So far I haven't found anything, but I'm sure I'm just not looking in the right places. Any help would be appreciated.

While everyone else has addressed the trolling aspect, I can weigh in here. In general, I prefer PCs to Macs, but macs are the industry standard when it comes to video editing (and apparently audio editing, but I use cubase for that), and finalcut pro is a fantastic bit of editing software. Cheap, all the functionality of avid and it's more stable. Adobe premier and after effects may also be awesome, but I've yet to properly try them.

[RedImperator]

For what I do, and for what I suspect the majority of computer users do, the applications gap between Windows and Mac doesn't come into play. There are basically three applications I use regularly: a word processor, a web browser and iTunes. And my word processor (Pages) is exclusive to OSX (I've never had a problem converting files into .doc, incidentally, and I convert into PDF more often because the majority of the time, I'm sending someone a document to read and print, not edit). So the tradeoff works for me: in exchange for not being able to run a bunch of applications I'll never run anyway, I get a machine that I'm confident will work every time I start it up. I've owned this machine for going on four years, and I've yet to experience whatever the OSX equivalent of a BSOD is. I can run it for weeks without a reboot if I want. I'm not a tinkerer and I don't want to be a tinkerer; I don't enjoy the experience of messing around in the machine's guts, and having a machine which doesn't ever require I do so is well worth the premium.

[Braedley]

I've owned this machine for going on four years, and I've yet to experience whatever the OSX equivalent of a BSOD is.

It's called a Kernel Panic, and I have experienced them before. It only happened because the motherboard on the work machine I was using (an iMac, one of the flat panel style) was dieing. We ran those machines pretty hard too, using full CPU for hours on end to do analysis.