You're really reaching here. The PC laptop here isn't the KIA to Apple's BMW. It has all the capabilities if not more. Probably just as much memory as most of the Mac laptops available.
If that KIA had a look just as awesome as the BMW, which all of the features, if not more, then yes, your comment makes sense. If you're trying to say that the Mac is so ahead of the laptop that is makes it budget/obselete/"just good enough" then you really make no sense.
True, some computers are cheap, but this is only half of the story. We need a follow on story when Lauren decides it's time for a new laptop. How much will she be able to get for this one in 2 or 3 years to put toward a new one? It starts to even out when looking at total cost of ownership.
A better comparison would be if you were given 90k$ and had a choice between a 911 Turbo and a Nissan GTR. The Nissan GTR is just as good as the Turbo if not *better* but costs 25k less. The extra 25k really goes towards just a brand name, so which would you choose? I'd choose the GTR.
Same example applies with an Acura RL v. a BMW 5 series, or a Genesis V8 v. a BMW 5 series.
1GB RAM, 2.0 GHZ Core2 Duo, GMA 4500 graphics, 250GB hard drive, 6 cell battery and pretty much zero warranty.
Yeah, but it has a 17" screen which displays up to 1440 x 900. Good luck running that piece of crap on Vista!
My bigger question about this ad is why she went to the Apple Store in the first place. Does Microsoft really think I'm stupid enough to believe that this chick didn't know she couldn't get a 17" laptop for under $999.
It's all in the operating system anyways, comparing Mac OS X, which is Unix BSD based, and built pretty much from the ground up, to Windows XP, or Vista (if you want to make this too easy), which is built out of a quagmire of 1,000,000 lines of code, 13 years of legacy support, shitty design practices (registry, the C:\WINDOWS\system32 clusterfuck), and crappy multi-user permissions management is like comparing a high rise condo complex to a brazillian shantytown.
And the 17" laptop she bought lacks fast wireless 802.11n, fast Gigabit Ethernet, digital audio inputs and outputs, weighs 7.75 pounds, and only features the screen resolution of Apple's 15" notebooks: 1440x900, not 1920x1200.
Lets compare apples to apples before calling Apple computers overpriced.
LOL I think the car comparison is perfectly valid. Have you ever driven a BMW? The only thing that's MILDLY superior to an average car is the turning/braking/acceleration. Even then, once your body adjusts to how your particular car should be handled, those slight differences become moot.
I'd even venture to say that the BMW is a stretch in the other direction. When you own a BMW, your repair bills, your insurance, and your gas (you need to get premium gas every time you fill) will all costs significantly more than with an average vehicle. With a Mac, the initial purchase is expensive, but much of the software that most people are looking for is MUCH cheaper than a PC. $99 for OS X, $79 for iLife (maybe iWork, too) and a developer community that is heavily rooted in freeware.
No pavelbure, it means when you go to a shop to buy a car, you MIGHT check the price of the BMW you intend to buy before saying "this one is so much cooler than that Kia shit !"
Now if you translate this into the PC world : Yes a MBA is much nicer to have than a EEE PC 901, but one costs 10 times the price of the other, and you do the exact same thing with the EEE PC than with the MBA. It seems like a very good argument to me. Got it ?
Unix' permissions systems cannot hold a candle to Windows' permissions systems.
In Unix, you are either no one or you have control of everything on your system. If you want to give a process the ability to kill processes, you also give it the ability to scribble all over your hard drive (on purpose or accidentally). If you want to give a process/program the ability to back up all your files, you also give it the ability to erase all your files, to create and kill tasks, and to create super user accounts.
Unix has an awful security model and permissions system compared to Windows.
Right on PAC Man! Digging into Apple's pricing in this economic climate is good marketing. It's dirty, but Apple slings mud on a daily basis. Pumping crap computers and equating them to good ones is idiocy and only seeks to exploit people who don't know anything.
That 17 inch notebook she bought will have a battery life of all but 30 minutes, especially with all those wonderful Vista features turned on. All those cheap PCs that are being churned out for $699.99 (what no taxes in the US?) list decent amounts of ram and a decent CPU... the rest are junk... and as PAC Man found out, have no battery life to speak of. I guess they give you a big enough battery to run from outlet to outlet.
Pretty lame add. Again MS shows they can not only misuse comedic genius Seinfeld, but also screw up a cup of coffee!
All you people complaining seem to be missing the point of this commercial. It's for everyday people. The everday people that buy computers. Do you really think she is going to notice the difference between 802.11g and n? No. She's not going to be streaming HD movies from her media server from the other room onto her laptop. Which is also why she wont notice that her screen isn't 1920x1200. What she does get, is a computer that works, for fucking cheap
Not the same, really. I'd agree with Bryant. People should definitely buy within their budget, but if I had $2000 to spend, it wouldn't be on an Apple. I don't have anything against them, in fact I would love to have one, but at the same time I could budget my $2000 better and get a laptop with comparable specs and still have money left over for a nice HDTV. Just like if I had $100 would I get an HDMI monster cable, or one from monoprice, plus the wall mount, any other cable that I want, including shipping, and take my wife out to dinner for the price of that one monster cable. Do you still believe a $100 HDMI monster cable is better than the $6 monoprice one?
Don't insult "everyday people", with that low expectations bullshit. That's like saying people in developing nations don't deserve the same quality of life as us because they're not used to it.
@ why not the LS2LS7? I don't believe your statement is correct....if I want to give a process access to kill another process, but not allow it to wipe a harddrive, I change the group settings of the kill/killall command, and add the user executing the process that might need to kill another process to that group.....after ensuring that group level perms are set to give execute access.....Might not be as "user friendly" as windows, but most definitely infinitely scalable...you just have to think a little bit....
Ben: There's more to permissions than file permissions (ACLs, as you refer to).
Mac OS X added "sophisticated" file permissions. But user status in UNIX is still either "user" or "superuser". If you want a process to be able to backup all your files, you must run it is superuser, which means it then can create a setuid root shell or other executable anywhere on a mounted filesystem that it wants. If you run a single program that you downloaded from the net as root once on your UNIX machine, you may have just been hacked and your machine is wide open forever.
This is not true on Windows where you can run them as a user that has permission to read any file but not permission to write any file, let alone put setuid on files or create users.
Again, UNIX permission control system cannot hold a candle to Windows', and it will remain that way until UNIX has concepts of user privilege levels other than "normal" (user) and "all" (superuser).
- You don't know the specs of the two computers. You can't say that the HP and the MBP 17" perform just as well
- Apple's computers don't include the junk trialware which PC OEMs use to subsidise the hardware costs. This makes Macs slightly more expensive, but the experience is better and for people who are scared of reinstalling the OS, the Mac will work better than a windows PC full of trialware.
- Market comparisons have shown that Macs are typically only slightly more expensive than the equivalent PC. As mentioned above, the lack of trialware accounts for this price disparity.
- Apple's products tend to be better designed. Design isn't just about making stuff look nice. People who study design don't spend years learning how to make things look nice. They learn how to make things functional and intuitive. For example, the MagSafe adaptors on Apple's laptops are an example of good design. They don't make the hardware look nicer, but they make it work better. Better designed products usually are more expensive. Whatever market you're in.
- Apple's machines also tend to be made of higher quality materials. I'd bet, for example, that the price of making the aluminium unibody enclosures for Apple's laptops is far higher than what it costs Dell to mould a plastic case for one of their laptops. Higher quality materials mean higher prices, just as real leather shoes cost more in the same style than fake leather.
- Apple's customer support is also much better than PC OEMs. If I have a problem with my VAIO (and when I owned a VAIO, I had loads of problems with it), I have to call up some call centre, be put on hold, wait for them to send the box, send my laptop and wait for it to be fixed and redelivered. If I have a problem with my MacBook, I make an appointment at the Genius bar, go right there (maybe wait for 5 minutes max), and speak to somebody face-to-face. If there's a problem they can't fix for me right there, they'll take my machine right there and have it ready for me the next day. I don't pay extra for that better service - it's in the price of the machine. And it's so worth it.
- Apple provides student discounts. I've yet to see that replicated by PC OEMs (at least in the UK)
I bought a MacBook a year ago. Yes, I may have paid a bit more than an equivalently priced PC, but I really don't regret it. It was my first Mac, and it's so much better than any of the PCs I've owned. In fact, with my student discount, I managed to get the BlackBook (top of the MB line) with AppleCare for less than the base model. I certainly don't feel ripped off.
Let's not forget that the first thing you see on a brand new installation of Microsoft Windows (after it loads the desktop) is a balloon popup that warns you that, without antivirus protection, your computer is insecure.
That's the first thing somebody sees after Windows is installed. It's one of the great facepalms of the user experience world.
"If you want a process to be able to backup all your files, you must run it is superuser, which means it then can create a setuid root shell or other executable anywhere on a mounted filesystem that it wants."
not entirely true, you can set the permissions of the file to give the current user read but not write privileges and then run the program as the current user. That way the program won't have permissions to open the file for writing but will be able to for reading(which it will read in and copy them somewhere else)
The only valid comment in all this gumble of comment is Tim's, in my opinion. Whether Apple is overpriced is relative; there are many PC alternatives that are just as good and priced a lot better. It's all a matter of knowing how to shop and not getting influenced by trivial crap as a brand name (Like Vaio. Oh, those ARE overpriced).
The truth is, Apple products are priced above the budget of most of the world (I'm from a third world country, though I do admit my economic situation is well above the average person over here).
That's weird, somehow time machine manages to make backups without asking for system.privilege.admin.
Multi-User environments in unix are just plain better. In the lab I work in on campus, our windows boxes need to have different permission settings on a program to program basis to make sure everything works because of the way windows defaults to users as Administrators, and leads to bad programming practices by developers. Furthermore, the way read and execute are combined means that any .exe that gets on our computers can be run on our computers. So I can run uTorrent on a university computer.
I feel sad for all those people out there that aren't COOL ENOUGH to be Mac users. At least she knew she was uncool unlike so many others that buy Windows PCs. She should have traded in her VW to buy a MacBook Pro 17" so she could hang out with the really cool group. She really was basing her choice on available amount of money and that's really not a great way to decide. She should have spent a week trying out different computers. But I suppose she had a fixed time limit and price limit, so she purchased what she could afford and that's that. I don't see why she couldn't have settled for a smaller screen, but it's good she got what she wanted. No harm in that.
There is a website that features chicks with glasses and, well, take a guess what happens at the end? This "real" person would be popular on that website.
LMAO way to go Microsoft. Hahahaha. "Not cool enough for a mac".
And to the douche that says you get what you pay for... not the case here. The Apple "cool factor" increases premiums on all their wares.
I guess 'cool" is the new douche.
Whats weird though... is that she fits an apple owners profile perfectly. (VW, hippiesque, and broke.) I'd assume that's Microsofts way of trying to make it look like the average "cool" mac user could easily slip into a life of a PC owner.
First off, there are no current laptops sold in BestBuy that comes under 2gb. In fact, the ONLY laptop I found in Best Buy (when I was shopping for one a couple months ago) that had 2gb of memory was a $350 eMachine. Most current laptops come with either 3gb or 4gb of memory.
Second, even HP's website offers a FREE upgrade to 3gb of memory. I guarantee you that this model with 1gb of RAM is not sold in stores.
Third, let's see the specs on a comparitively specced MacBook: Only one I could find was $999...
2.0GHz
* Intel Core 2 Duo * 2GB DDR2 Memory * 120GB hard drive1 * NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics
Wow... my Dell, which was about the same price (I think it was $989) has a better processor, twice the memory, 3 times the harddrive size, and a more robust graphics chipset. Hell, her HP was probably more powerful at $699 than this Mac would be maxed out.
Yeah, I'm super cool, if anyone ever mentions how cool a mac looks I'll be sure to tell them about the importance of elegance and streamlining in program and tell them to compare the 2000+ files in C:\WINDOWS\System32\ to Mac OS X which the the Frameworks and Extensions folders in /System/Library/ range from around 70 to around 300.
If you have the money i would go mac, if u don't PC. I'm almost positive i got that HP after switching to that from a mac. One week later I rushed back to Circuit City and drove to the mac store and bought myself a unibody 13" Macbook, couldn't be happier.
ben: I don't know how Time Machine does backups. I'll try to find out today to see how it gets permissions.
Poor programs are not anything special to Windows. You've never had to have a program ask you for superuser permissions on the Mac for things you didn't think it should have to? I know I have. It happens weekly. And it happens often enough that no one ever hesitates to enter their password when asked, undercutting this security system.
Read and execute are not the same thing on Windows. I just looked at the perms for 7z.exe on my XP box. There is a separate file permission for "read" and "read and execute".
I just checked how many files there are in /System/Library on my Mac OS X machine. There are 114,226 (cd /System; find Library -print | wc -l, the Finder "only" lists 73,327 items in that folder, thanks for lying to me Finder). Of these, 63,125 are in /System/Library/Frameworks and 5375 are in /System/Library/Extensions. On my XP machine, there are 5,375 files in /Windows/System32. What were you saying about how much cleaner the Mac is?
Hope she bought the extended warranty on that HP. The power inverter should go bad in about 15 mo, following by the logic board from excessive heating. Macs aren't perfect. I'm just saying that you're a tool if you think you can buy any laptop without an extended warranty for under $1000 that isn't a piece of shit, regardless of the manufacturer.
I liked the commercial except for the "cool" comment. She's not "cool" enough to buy a mac, but she can afford that monthly payments on that 2008 Volkwagen?
@LS2LS7: You're apparently as clueless when it comes to operating systems as you are when it comes to cars. You managed to google some buzzwords of UNIX filesystem permissions but you should have read about them a little more before you threw them into your comment. I don't think you got a single fact correct. I'm not sure whether you are willfully lying or if you are just too lazy to find out how it actually works. UNIX was designed from the start as a multi-user environment, the access control has had decades to evolve and improve. In Windows it was thrown in as an afterthought and a band-aid on an inherently unsafe system.
My £850 Zepto 6625, bought in Nov 2007, is still spec-for-spec faster than a new base model 15-inch MacBook Pro that costs £1370. The only major difference is DDR3 RAM instead of DDR2 (which isn't actually a big deal), and the MBP has an LED-backlit screen (which is lower res than mine).
Macs are nice, but they're just too freakin expensive for normal people.
To be honest I wasn't even thinking about the car stuff. I just meant in the economy we are in now is seeing users opting for the cost effective solutions. Heck even my friend that loves OS X opted for a PC (which he later dual booted 2 seconds after purchasing).
Also kind of happy I remembered to uncheck that "E-Mail me when someone replies to this comment" box.
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So true.
so let me get this straight, if i'm given $15,000 and i can't buy a bmw but i can buy a kia then the kia is obviously better ?
Cars != Computers
In the current economic climate, yes.
But I do understand your point of what you get is what you pay for.
You're really reaching here. The PC laptop here isn't the KIA to Apple's BMW. It has all the capabilities if not more. Probably just as much memory as most of the Mac laptops available.
If that KIA had a look just as awesome as the BMW, which all of the features, if not more, then yes, your comment makes sense. If you're trying to say that the Mac is so ahead of the laptop that is makes it budget/obselete/"just good enough" then you really make no sense.
True, some computers are cheap, but this is only half of the story. We need a follow on story when Lauren decides it's time for a new laptop. How much will she be able to get for this one in 2 or 3 years to put toward a new one? It starts to even out when looking at total cost of ownership.
Typing this on my Macbook Pro, I can only commend Microsoft for finally hitting Apple's weak spot. Expect Massive Damage.
@pavelbure
A better comparison would be if you were given 90k$ and had a choice between a 911 Turbo and a Nissan GTR. The Nissan GTR is just as good as the Turbo if not *better* but costs 25k less. The extra 25k really goes towards just a brand name, so which would you choose? I'd choose the GTR.
Same example applies with an Acura RL v. a BMW 5 series, or a Genesis V8 v. a BMW 5 series.
I looked up the specs on that HP G70t she bought:
1GB RAM, 2.0 GHZ Core2 Duo, GMA 4500 graphics, 250GB hard drive, 6 cell battery and pretty much zero warranty.
Yeah, but it has a 17" screen which displays up to 1440 x 900. Good luck running that piece of crap on Vista!
My bigger question about this ad is why she went to the Apple Store in the first place. Does Microsoft really think I'm stupid enough to believe that this chick didn't know she couldn't get a 17" laptop for under $999.
It's all in the operating system anyways, comparing Mac OS X, which is Unix BSD based, and built pretty much from the ground up, to Windows XP, or Vista (if you want to make this too easy), which is built out of a quagmire of 1,000,000 lines of code, 13 years of legacy support, shitty design practices (registry, the C:\WINDOWS\system32 clusterfuck), and crappy multi-user permissions management is like comparing a high rise condo complex to a brazillian shantytown.
And the 17" laptop she bought lacks fast wireless 802.11n, fast Gigabit Ethernet, digital audio inputs and outputs, weighs 7.75 pounds, and only features the screen resolution of Apple's 15" notebooks: 1440x900, not 1920x1200.
Lets compare apples to apples before calling Apple computers overpriced.
LOL I think the car comparison is perfectly valid. Have you ever driven a BMW? The only thing that's MILDLY superior to an average car is the turning/braking/acceleration. Even then, once your body adjusts to how your particular car should be handled, those slight differences become moot.
I'd even venture to say that the BMW is a stretch in the other direction. When you own a BMW, your repair bills, your insurance, and your gas (you need to get premium gas every time you fill) will all costs significantly more than with an average vehicle. With a Mac, the initial purchase is expensive, but much of the software that most people are looking for is MUCH cheaper than a PC. $99 for OS X, $79 for iLife (maybe iWork, too) and a developer community that is heavily rooted in freeware.
And by 13 I mean 23.
No pavelbure, it means when you go to a shop to buy a car, you MIGHT check the price of the BMW you intend to buy before saying "this one is so much cooler than that Kia shit !"
Now if you translate this into the PC world : Yes a MBA is much nicer to have than a EEE PC 901, but one costs 10 times the price of the other, and you do the exact same thing with the EEE PC than with the MBA.
It seems like a very good argument to me.
Got it ?
Unix' permissions systems cannot hold a candle to Windows' permissions systems.
In Unix, you are either no one or you have control of everything on your system. If you want to give a process the ability to kill processes, you also give it the ability to scribble all over your hard drive (on purpose or accidentally). If you want to give a process/program the ability to back up all your files, you also give it the ability to erase all your files, to create and kill tasks, and to create super user accounts.
Unix has an awful security model and permissions system compared to Windows.
Right on PAC Man! Digging into Apple's pricing in this economic climate is good marketing. It's dirty, but Apple slings mud on a daily basis. Pumping crap computers and equating them to good ones is idiocy and only seeks to exploit people who don't know anything.
That 17 inch notebook she bought will have a battery life of all but 30 minutes, especially with all those wonderful Vista features turned on. All those cheap PCs that are being churned out for $699.99 (what no taxes in the US?) list decent amounts of ram and a decent CPU... the rest are junk... and as PAC Man found out, have no battery life to speak of. I guess they give you a big enough battery to run from outlet to outlet.
Pretty lame add. Again MS shows they can not only misuse comedic genius Seinfeld, but also screw up a cup of coffee!
Wait....NO TAX.....????
Apparently, its am a PC and I smoke weed!
i giuess i touched a nerve with you felix. haha
haha
That would be correct if Mac OS X used basic Unix permissions. Which it hasn't since 10.4.
All you people complaining seem to be missing the point of this commercial. It's for everyday people. The everday people that buy computers. Do you really think she is going to notice the difference between 802.11g and n? No. She's not going to be streaming HD movies from her media server from the other room onto her laptop. Which is also why she wont notice that her screen isn't 1920x1200. What she does get, is a computer that works, for fucking cheap
@PAC
wait... I thought she bought this computer:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=9166635&type=product&id=1218041148373
it has 4 GB of RAM and is 699 just like in the ad... don't know where you were looking.
@pavelbure
Not the same, really. I'd agree with Bryant. People should definitely buy within their budget, but if I had $2000 to spend, it wouldn't be on an Apple. I don't have anything against them, in fact I would love to have one, but at the same time I could budget my $2000 better and get a laptop with comparable specs and still have money left over for a nice HDTV. Just like if I had $100 would I get an HDMI monster cable, or one from monoprice, plus the wall mount, any other cable that I want, including shipping, and take my wife out to dinner for the price of that one monster cable. Do you still believe a $100 HDMI monster cable is better than the $6 monoprice one?
Don't insult "everyday people", with that low expectations bullshit. That's like saying people in developing nations don't deserve the same quality of life as us because they're not used to it.
@ why not the LS2LS7?
I don't believe your statement is correct....if I want to give a process access to kill another process, but not allow it to wipe a harddrive, I change the group settings of the kill/killall command, and add the user executing the process that might need to kill another process to that group.....after ensuring that group level perms are set to give execute access.....Might not be as "user friendly" as windows, but most definitely infinitely scalable...you just have to think a little bit....
Ben:
There's more to permissions than file permissions (ACLs, as you refer to).
Mac OS X added "sophisticated" file permissions. But user status in UNIX is still either "user" or "superuser". If you want a process to be able to backup all your files, you must run it is superuser, which means it then can create a setuid root shell or other executable anywhere on a mounted filesystem that it wants. If you run a single program that you downloaded from the net as root once on your UNIX machine, you may have just been hacked and your machine is wide open forever.
This is not true on Windows where you can run them as a user that has permission to read any file but not permission to write any file, let alone put setuid on files or create users.
Again, UNIX permission control system cannot hold a candle to Windows', and it will remain that way until UNIX has concepts of user privilege levels other than "normal" (user) and "all" (superuser).
@Bryant
That's complete bogus.
- You don't know the specs of the two computers. You can't say that the HP and the MBP 17" perform just as well
- Apple's computers don't include the junk trialware which PC OEMs use to subsidise the hardware costs. This makes Macs slightly more expensive, but the experience is better and for people who are scared of reinstalling the OS, the Mac will work better than a windows PC full of trialware.
- Market comparisons have shown that Macs are typically only slightly more expensive than the equivalent PC. As mentioned above, the lack of trialware accounts for this price disparity.
- Apple's products tend to be better designed. Design isn't just about making stuff look nice. People who study design don't spend years learning how to make things look nice. They learn how to make things functional and intuitive. For example, the MagSafe adaptors on Apple's laptops are an example of good design. They don't make the hardware look nicer, but they make it work better. Better designed products usually are more expensive. Whatever market you're in.
- Apple's machines also tend to be made of higher quality materials. I'd bet, for example, that the price of making the aluminium unibody enclosures for Apple's laptops is far higher than what it costs Dell to mould a plastic case for one of their laptops. Higher quality materials mean higher prices, just as real leather shoes cost more in the same style than fake leather.
- Apple's customer support is also much better than PC OEMs. If I have a problem with my VAIO (and when I owned a VAIO, I had loads of problems with it), I have to call up some call centre, be put on hold, wait for them to send the box, send my laptop and wait for it to be fixed and redelivered. If I have a problem with my MacBook, I make an appointment at the Genius bar, go right there (maybe wait for 5 minutes max), and speak to somebody face-to-face. If there's a problem they can't fix for me right there, they'll take my machine right there and have it ready for me the next day. I don't pay extra for that better service - it's in the price of the machine. And it's so worth it.
- Apple provides student discounts. I've yet to see that replicated by PC OEMs (at least in the UK)
I bought a MacBook a year ago. Yes, I may have paid a bit more than an equivalently priced PC, but I really don't regret it. It was my first Mac, and it's so much better than any of the PCs I've owned. In fact, with my student discount, I managed to get the BlackBook (top of the MB line) with AppleCare for less than the base model. I certainly don't feel ripped off.
Can someone find the cache size of that HP G70t? I cant seem to find it anywhere
Let's not forget that the first thing you see on a brand new installation of Microsoft Windows (after it loads the desktop) is a balloon popup that warns you that, without antivirus protection, your computer is insecure.
That's the first thing somebody sees after Windows is installed. It's one of the great facepalms of the user experience world.
"If you want a process to be able to backup all your files, you must run it is superuser, which means it then can create a setuid root shell or other executable anywhere on a mounted filesystem that it wants."
not entirely true, you can set the permissions of the file to give the current user read but not write privileges and then run the program as the current user. That way the program won't have permissions to open the file for writing but will be able to for reading(which it will read in and copy them somewhere else)
The only valid comment in all this gumble of comment is Tim's, in my opinion. Whether Apple is overpriced is relative; there are many PC alternatives that are just as good and priced a lot better. It's all a matter of knowing how to shop and not getting influenced by trivial crap as a brand name (Like Vaio. Oh, those ARE overpriced).
The truth is, Apple products are priced above the budget of most of the world (I'm from a third world country, though I do admit my economic situation is well above the average person over here).
That's weird, somehow time machine manages to make backups without asking for system.privilege.admin.
Multi-User environments in unix are just plain better. In the lab I work in on campus, our windows boxes need to have different permission settings on a program to program basis to make sure everything works because of the way windows defaults to users as Administrators, and leads to bad programming practices by developers. Furthermore, the way read and execute are combined means that any .exe that gets on our computers can be run on our computers. So I can run uTorrent on a university computer.
Um, visual comprehension FAIL! That's not a G70t she bought. Like Kevin stated, that's clearly a midrange AMD powered machine-the dv7 to be precise.
PC stores are shit.
Seriously. They never have internet access so the PCs on display are dead in the water.
Plus, Microsoft should lobby congress and pass a law saying that no PC should be sold with under 2 GB of RAM.
For those who are whining about no tax... ya know, she could have been in Oregon, where they don't have sales tax.
I feel sad for all those people out there that aren't COOL ENOUGH to be Mac users. At least she knew she was uncool unlike so many others that buy Windows PCs. She should have traded in her VW to buy a MacBook Pro 17" so she could hang out with the really cool group. She really was basing her choice on available amount of money and that's really not a great way to decide. She should have spent a week trying out different computers. But I suppose she had a fixed time limit and price limit, so she purchased what she could afford and that's that. I don't see why she couldn't have settled for a smaller screen, but it's good she got what she wanted. No harm in that.
There is a website that features chicks with glasses and, well, take a guess what happens at the end? This "real" person would be popular on that website.
LMAO way to go Microsoft. Hahahaha. "Not cool enough for a mac".
And to the douche that says you get what you pay for... not the case here. The Apple "cool factor" increases premiums on all their wares.
I guess 'cool" is the new douche.
Whats weird though... is that she fits an apple owners profile perfectly. (VW, hippiesque, and broke.) I'd assume that's Microsofts way of trying to make it look like the average "cool" mac user could easily slip into a life of a PC owner.
Funny how, after all the picking and choosing, the "look of that one" was what made her final choice. That's top-notch research right there.
@ P.A.C. Man
Your an idiot and a troll.
First off, there are no current laptops sold in BestBuy that comes under 2gb. In fact, the ONLY laptop I found in Best Buy (when I was shopping for one a couple months ago) that had 2gb of memory was a $350 eMachine. Most current laptops come with either 3gb or 4gb of memory.
Second, even HP's website offers a FREE upgrade to 3gb of memory. I guarantee you that this model with 1gb of RAM is not sold in stores.
Third, let's see the specs on a comparitively specced MacBook: Only one I could find was $999...
2.0GHz
* Intel Core 2 Duo
* 2GB DDR2 Memory
* 120GB hard drive1
* NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics
Wow... my Dell, which was about the same price (I think it was $989) has a better processor, twice the memory, 3 times the harddrive size, and a more robust graphics chipset. Hell, her HP was probably more powerful at $699 than this Mac would be maxed out.
Yeah, I'm super cool, if anyone ever mentions how cool a mac looks I'll be sure to tell them about the importance of elegance and streamlining in program and tell them to compare the 2000+ files in C:\WINDOWS\System32\ to Mac OS X which the the Frameworks and Extensions folders in /System/Library/ range from around 70 to around 300.
Wow, I am a type machine. *programming *just one the
If you have the money i would go mac, if u don't PC. I'm almost positive i got that HP after switching to that from a mac. One week later I rushed back to Circuit City and drove to the mac store and bought myself a unibody 13" Macbook, couldn't be happier.
ben:
I don't know how Time Machine does backups. I'll try to find out today to see how it gets permissions.
Poor programs are not anything special to Windows. You've never had to have a program ask you for superuser permissions on the Mac for things you didn't think it should have to? I know I have. It happens weekly. And it happens often enough that no one ever hesitates to enter their password when asked, undercutting this security system.
Read and execute are not the same thing on Windows. I just looked at the perms for 7z.exe on my XP box. There is a separate file permission for "read" and "read and execute".
I just checked how many files there are in /System/Library on my Mac OS X machine. There are 114,226 (cd /System; find Library -print | wc -l, the Finder "only" lists 73,327 items in that folder, thanks for lying to me Finder). Of these, 63,125 are in /System/Library/Frameworks and 5375 are in /System/Library/Extensions. On my XP machine, there are 5,375 files in /Windows/System32. What were you saying about how much cleaner the Mac is?
Very good add, and yes... your not cool enough.
Hope she bought the extended warranty on that HP. The power inverter should go bad in about 15 mo, following by the logic board from excessive heating. Macs aren't perfect. I'm just saying that you're a tool if you think you can buy any laptop without an extended warranty for under $1000 that isn't a piece of shit, regardless of the manufacturer.
I liked the commercial except for the "cool" comment. She's not "cool" enough to buy a mac, but she can afford that monthly payments on that 2008 Volkwagen?
Right.
@LS2LS7: You're apparently as clueless when it comes to operating systems as you are when it comes to cars. You managed to google some buzzwords of UNIX filesystem permissions but you should have read about them a little more before you threw them into your comment. I don't think you got a single fact correct. I'm not sure whether you are willfully lying or if you are just too lazy to find out how it actually works.
UNIX was designed from the start as a multi-user environment, the access control has had decades to evolve and improve. In Windows it was thrown in as an afterthought and a band-aid on an inherently unsafe system.
My £850 Zepto 6625, bought in Nov 2007, is still spec-for-spec faster than a new base model 15-inch MacBook Pro that costs £1370. The only major difference is DDR3 RAM instead of DDR2 (which isn't actually a big deal), and the MBP has an LED-backlit screen (which is lower res than mine).
Macs are nice, but they're just too freakin expensive for normal people.
@ Ben
So fucking true I almost cried.
And fix the friggin comment system now, please?
To be honest I wasn't even thinking about the car stuff. I just meant in the economy we are in now is seeing users opting for the cost effective solutions. Heck even my friend that loves OS X opted for a PC (which he later dual booted 2 seconds after purchasing).
Also kind of happy I remembered to uncheck that "E-Mail me when someone replies to this comment" box.