Comments | qbear: Biting the apple

qbear

Biting the apple

Oct 09, 2013 11:05

I was never a fan of Apple computer products. My profession as a programmer/software engineer always involved Windows PC and servers, and Unix boxes. Apple computers were in my view toylike, catering to the non-technical crowd. But I really resented the arrogant advertising Apple did, implying their products were so much better, hip and cool. ( Read more... )

Comments 6

furrbear October 9 2013, 19:02:57 UTC

VMS -> Unix -> Windows here. My "mac" is a Toshiba A205.

You can do quite a lot without ObjC. Fink, Macports, and Homebrew provide many FOSS tools. There's enough similarity that you won't feel overly lost at a shell prompt, but things get really different under the hood. If O'Really has updated "Mac OS X for Unix Geeks", it's a worthwhile buy. (My 4th ed. is for Leopard). The pocket guides release a new edition for each OS release.

mrdreamjeans October 9 2013, 23:40:29 UTC

I'm not in a technical field and so my first computer was a MAC. I was touring in Phantom at the time and all of the sound and lighting equipment cues were programmed and called on Apple products. I figure I knew nothing, so I should go with the product everyone on that tour had ...even all of the actors had Mac Powerbooks. I was definitely their target audience ... the simpler the better. I can't explain it, but as a creative, left-handed person, the Macs made more sense to me.

When I finally had to do the PC thing in the workplace, all of the extra steps, the right nad left clicking seemed unnecessarily fussy to me. I'm getting better and faster at running the programs I need for my work.

I hope you enjoy the new MAC mini and that it serves the purpose you have in mind.

;-) sfkev October 10 2013, 01:38:14 UTC

And so it begins...again LOL I have 3 Macs ranging in age from 5 years to 3 months and they all run without a problem. I only got more because...because... I could! Hope you have fun!!!

kybearfuzz October 10 2013, 12:17:30 UTC

One of us...

One of us...

(tee hee hee)

snousle October 10 2013, 16:37:15 UTC

I have never understood the whole "toylike" thing. iOS is perhaps toylike due to its closed nature but macs per se have never been that way. Particularly back in the os7 period you could do some interesting hardware level things. I wrote a GUI based physics data acquisition system in '90 that used a card which let you control CAMAC crates though memory mapped registers and let me process 10,000 events/second in real time. It was so not-toylike it's ridiculous - the software saved the lab seven million dolars, it's still in use today because nobody has been able to come up with anything better, and the lab has a stack of 90s era hardware in a closet ready to replace it if anything goes wrong. The Mac II series was a great hacker system, and made PCs of the era - Windows 3 was not even out then! - look pretty lame ( ... )