Mossberg reviews the Gateway One, accidentally reviews the iMac again
By Nilay Patel 
posted November 1st 2007 9:02PM
posted November 1st 2007 9:02PM
posted November 1st 2007 9:02PM
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Well, Mossberg is the highest paid journalist at the second highest circulated newspaper in America and he's covered technology there for 20 years. You can't spell "hosted" and only included one complete sentence in your entire post. I gotta go with Walt on this one.
Well the iMac is cheeper...
Wow... that's interesting. I never knew that the iMac was really a bird.
Mossberg obviously likes Apple products, but I'm confused about the comments as to why he's a "shill" when he compares the Gateway to the iMac? Obviously, any all-in-one is going to get compared to an iMac. So that's not unfair... And his observations are pretty objective: the Gateway charges 10+% more for a smaller screen, slower processor, etc. I don't really see, based upon that evidence, how any reviewer could 1) ignore the iMac in the review, or 2) recommend the Gateway over the Mac.
The point here is that he was suppose to give a review and not provide us with a comparision chart... In a review you write what is good about a product, what is bad about the product not how it is when compared to another product.
The review would have been credible if Moss had just said that the "One makes lots of noise and is very expensive..." But he lost his credibility when he said "One makes lots of noise and is expensive WHEN compared to an iMac"
It is like you are taking this class and you are doing really, really bad. Now the prof walks to you and instead of saying "Hey, you are going wrong here and here and you need to improve here", he says you are doing very bad compared to the guy sitting next to you... Is the prof wrong? No. Is he rude... Yes.
It looks tippy.
Don't poke it
Walt Mossberg writes in soundbites. He'll set up for great, quotable remarks, and then later in a rambling sentence explains why his previous comment wasn't quite true.
"he suffered two blue screens while testing"
Huh??? The WinBots have been screaming for some time that the BSOD is a myth for either XP or Vista. Hmm.
Fact > WinBots yet again.
Nobody ever said a BSOD is nonexistent. It's just not common at all for most Windows users.
And practically all BSOD's is a result of some driver failure, or something hardware-related that causes Windows to get a BSOD. It's not a Windows problem really, it's external things.
Practically more than 85% of the time, a Windows problem will be due to bad hardware. Not Windows itself!
Get your facts straight. I don't need to be lecturing idiots. And besides, WinBots probably aren't as obtrusive as MacBots, advertising the superiority of Macs everywhere on the internet.
I'm pretty sure the BSOD exists in another form, but no longer as the characteristic, undecipherable blue screen (though I've heard you can get back the "BSOD classic" through a registry setting). I myself, however, have yet to see a Vista computer get a BSOD or a fatal error remniscient of one either
"Nobody ever said a BSOD is nonexistent." - michael
That's not the vibe I got from the recent Web outrage over Apple's dis of bluescreening Windows machines in Leopard's Coverflow view.
"And besides, WinBots probably aren't as obtrusive as MacBots, advertising the superiority of Macs everywhere on the internet."
As a user of both Windows and Mac, I can assure you the Apple-bashing contingent is far more vociferous and obnoxious than the infamous "oh so smug Mac user" stereotype. Just spend a few minutes reading comments on Digg. Bring your troll repellant, you'll need it.
Anywho, my comment wasn't a "Macs are better than PCs" statement - I simply found it amusing to see that all the recent claims about the BSOD being a thing of the past are, well, rubbish. Unless "Mossberg the Apple shill" is just making it up. Which I'm sure many of you believe he is.
Mossberg is an apple fanboy.....but that still doesn't make the Gateway look like ASS!
he didn't like it he didn't like it, for gods sake what with all the crying?
you can install xp on the imac, and mac osx on the dell.
so get over it. buy what you want. for gods sake stfu.
BTW what I fail to understand is who wants to buy a Gateway / Dell One. I mean if I am a gamer and I have $1700 to spare I would probably buy a machine with extremely fast processor 3+ GB RAM and a kick ass Video card and top it off with a 24 - 30 inch monitor. Ask any decent gamer and he will tell you wireless KB and mouse suck when it comes to gaming...
If I am looking for a comsumer electronics kind of thing I would probably buy a laptop at this price.
If I am business, I would prefer buying 2 beige boxes rather than this space saver.
In fact this is true even in iMac's case. 65% of Macs sold are MacBooks or MacBook Pros. Of the remaining 35% I think a significant percentage are Mac Pros.
Dell of all people should have realised this. Dell DJ (Yeah, the Shuffle 1st Gen kinda thingy) was a major flop.
Consumer Desktops are a shrinking market and wasting so much time and money on this is sheer short sightness from both Dell and Gateway.
3 to 4 years down the road we will have laptops for all our individual needs and Mac Pro type high performace machines for Professionals, Offices and University Labs...
Play with the numbers as much as you like Apple's platform has a gaping hole (actually a few), to put it simply "Microsoft has DirectX". Apple screwed the pooch when it totally ignored the multi billion dollar games industry. There is only so far you can push Photoshop and the pretty icons effects when you have bugger all games and nothing in the works when it comes to games development that is anything close to DirectX.
I've been using computers since 1983, and avidly (several hours a day) using them since 1992, and been using them for my job (10+ hours a day) since 1996. Although I have been into a few games in this time (the marathon series, Myth, Wolfenstein, Doom, Carmageddon, Quake Arena to name a few) it has only accounted for about 1% of my computer usage, yet I have enjoyed 100% of the time I have spent.
The point is, to some of us the computer is a tool, while to others it is a toy. I have been done with toys for a long time, and this tool and knowledge of it has earned me a fun & successful career that I would have never dreamed about having when I was a kid, playing with my toys.
I dont think we have to wait for a long time before we start gaming on an iBox 720 or iStation... Apple is now slowly moving from a computer company to a consumer electronics company. Dropping "Computers" from its name was, frankly, more than a public gimic.
And why do you think Apple is at fault here for lack of game titles for Mac? If we need to blame anyone then it should be Game Publishers... I mean there are 10 times more game titles available for xbox / ps3 / wii than there are for PCs.
Frankly, if title publishers want to write games for Mac they can surely do that.
I am not a gamer nor do I know much about coding games. But I don't think it is easier to write games for Dir. X machines than it is to write for Open GL / Cocoa or whatever Macs run on. I mean, you don't blame MS for not being able to play God of War on your PC. Do you?
lol...here comes the PC jerks
Why is it that everytime a comparison is made to an apple computer hell breaks lose? If the Dell XPSOne had been released a year ago and it had been that computer Mossberg had bragged about nobody would have cared in the slightest!
But ofcourse some people here know it all beter. The writer is a douche, apple sucks and microsoft rocks, only idiots use apple, vista sucks, bsod lololol. Ow, I'm sorry, I didn't know the internet had been invented as an excuse for idiocracy.
If the apple is indeed cheaper and delivers more there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to defend the gateway pc.
I just bought a 20" iMac ($1,199) and it is bright, beautiful and fast. Being a Mac user for 2+ years I am not going back to the M$ hell. Apple just works and delivers. I have nothing against Dell nor Gateway, but iMac just provides a better package than other guys at this moment in the marketplace. No, my screen has no issue at all, don't care of it is 18 bit or 24 bit.
Unlike the iMac, which comes in two screen sizes, 20-inch and 24-inch..
Not exactly - you can still buy a 17" iMac (the old white design) - but only from the education store. If you go to the education store, click on iMac, and under the 20" and 24" iMac is a small logo that says "17" iMac with 1.83ghz processor available $899"
One could dramatically increase the value of the machine.
Just turn it into a hackintosh! Of course that would take some extra work/money/risk but then you'd have the coolest Dell around, you'd have to buy another 400Gb drive for TimeMachine backup and most importantly, you'd KNOW when it's a hardware problem! Dell couldn't argue it was Windows! :-)
As usual, the media and the people who cares try to spin this thing into something the rest of us don't give a damn.
All-in-one systems work for like 5% of the population but doesn't work for the rest of us because we can't upgrade anything but the RAM and hard disk (provided that these things can be accessed).
The PC is the best platform for buying and running PC software.
The Mac is the best platform for buying Mac software.
Linux, go with the PC.
Games, go with the PC.
Software development, go with the PC.
Software availability and extensibility, go with the PC.
Affordability, go with the PC.
In any case, just get a PC desktop and be glad that you only spent $2000 for 5 years instead of 2 years for a Mac.