Anand is using an dual Apple G5

[adamp2p]

Continued:

The Verdict? - Monday, Mar 22, 2004 10:02 PM

It's been over a month: and I'm still using a Mac.

I spent my Spring Break using nothing but PCs, and although I had been using PCs all throughout my 1-month Macdate period my break was the first time that I had used nothing but PCs for an entire week. It was necessary for me to move back to exclusive PC usage for a bit in order to truly confirm what I had felt about OS X; I needed to make sure that I wasn't simply being blinded by something new.

The first thing I realized when moving back to a PC was that having a single application open that takes up the entire screen is a mental blessing and a productivity curse. For example, right now I'm typing this blog in a text editor window under OS X surrounded by and overlapping at least 8 other windows - on this monitor alone. The majority of those windows have a decent amount of text in them and it can get a bit draining staring at everything at once (it's also too cumbersome to minimize every window individually). In a situation like this one, a single maximized application is much easier to focus on. I found myself enjoying running Word and writing a document more under Windows XP, as long as I wasn't trying to do anything else.

Once I got to doing some more serious work, then I began to really miss OS X. Case in point: using any application where multiple windows are open. I missed Expos? like you would not believe. For whatever reason I didn't miss Expos? much when I was at school on my laptop (although I did consciously hit F10 a few times just to bring back good memories), but without my daily fix of Expos? I was going stir crazy. I had a handful of IE windows open on the PC I was using and searching through all of them to find the one I wanted was so painful. I ALT-TABBED and held ALT down forever as I tried to remember which browser window I wanted. Granted a tabbed browser like Firefox would alleviate some of those issues but unfortunately not all apps are tabbed and there are a lot of cases where I use both tabs and multiple windows to be efficient.

The next conclusion I came to was that as nice as the Apple keyboard looks, I still prefer a good MS Natural keyboard. Although I know you can remap the Windows keys to Apple keys it would be nice to have something better directly from Apple. As far as input devices go, Apple just seems to have gotten it very wrong with the G5. The single button mouse receives so much criticism it can't possibly be helping Apple; I was talking to someone the other day who completely opposed getting an Apple out of the principle that their machines come by default with no more than a single button mouse. It seems like a silly reason to rule out an entire platform, but the fact of the matter is that a lot of people are turned off by it. While Apply couldn't get away with a single-key keyboard, the keyboard is definitely form-over-function and thus I'm not a big fan of it. Plus, white isn't the best color for a heavily used keyboard.

I'm not a fan of the organization (or lack thereof) of folders under OS X, or maybe it's just that I'm not familiar enough with the directory structure of OS X yet to feel at home. I find myself putting far too much important stuff on the desktop and not enough elsewhere, mostly because I don't know where I really want to put it. I find that the Save dialog boxes are too small, only showing me a handful of folders at a time as opposed to what I'm used to under Windows.

I just can't seem to bring myself to use Firefox; it's a great browser but the keyboard shortcuts are different from all my other OS X apps and there are more page rendering issues with Firefox that I've noticed than with Safari. I was hoping that the latest OS X update (10.3.3) would bring me a faster Safari but my wishes weren't granted as Safari still renders pages entirely too slowly. What's also annoying is that the auto-complete of URLs that you all taught me doesn't always seem to work instantaneously. Just typing anandtech and hitting enter will usually just tack on a www. and a .com around the word but sometimes it sits there and contemplates what it is doing before taking any action. I'm a performance nut and a big part of having a fast system is making sure that everything is as responsive as possible, this one little thing irks me beyond belief. Oh and I'd like a faster rendering Safari anytime n:) :)

The more I have to use Adobe Reader the more I really, really appreciate Apple's Preview. I was talking to a die-hard PC user friend of mine today and even he was envious watching me use Preview instead of Reader for my PDF browsing. I do wish there was a way to be in a directory with images and have Preview flip through the images for me without having to highlight them all and open them that way. I used to use ACDSee to do this back before Windows XP had it built in, but it would be nice to have under OS X as well (unless there's some way I'm not considering).

I have yet to find a ftp client that fulfills all of my needs. The only remaining requirement that would seal the deal for my comfort with any OS X ftp client: implicit SFTP support (Port 990). I have yet to find a (good) client that supports implicit SFTP. I have found a couple, but they either crash a lot or they look like they were developed for Mac OS back in the 80s. Any recommendations?

During my Macless period I did use an iMac for a very brief period; for basic email and browsing the iMac was fine, but then again I didn't try to really push the system hard at all. Just today I was stuck using a G4 1GHz on campus and that was an extremely painful experience. The system was using OS X 10.2 and thus didn't have a lot of the features I was used to, not to mention that the default web browser was IE (IE for the Mac is *horrible*). The system had 512MB of RAM but it was slow as a dog (granted it wasn't as sluggish as some of the old Willamette based Pentium 4s (1.7GHz) that were sitting around the lab I was in) but it was horrendous. The system had Adobe Reader set to view PDFs (not Preview) and Safari would crash if you tried to run it, which brings up an interesting point: if I had never used a Mac and that was my first experience, I would never ever touch one of these things. The OS was also configured much differently than my copy of 10.3.3 is configured, for example Command + Tab didn't bring up a Windows-like bar of all the applications open, instead it just highlighted applications in the Dock. If Apple is to ever get back above the 2% market share they are at right now, even the worst systems out there in the public need to be configured much better than this one was. It's not Apple's fault, rather the fault of sysadmins for these labs, but maybe Apple's success isn't at the top of their priority list.

Multitasking on the G4 was a joke compared to the G5, although the minimize animations were surprisingly smooth, switching between Adobe Reader and MS Word sometimes took at least a full second before the application I switched to actually appeared on the screen. Again, if that were my first experience with a Mac, I would've vowed against ever touching the platform. It was quite satisfying to be able to hop on the G4 and be just as comfortable as I am under Windows, which is something I've never been able to do in the past. If anything, the fact that this experiment has enabled me to do just that is extremely rewarding. I used to have no problem if the only open computer in a computer lab happened to be a Mac, I would just remain frustrated while using it, but now I can feel oddly at home with the situation - while criticizing the lab systems for much more than just being a Mac.

Someone once asked if I felt any more secure knowing that there were no viruses or OS exploits that I needed to worry about while using OS X. It definitely feels nice, but I'm not getting too comfortable - if the Apple market expands, we'll definitely have OS X's fair share of destructive programs.

Given that I've used the G5 for more than a month now, what are some things I'm still getting used to?

1) Page up and Page Down don't actually take your cursor up/down a page, they just scroll. This is quite useful, but I'm not used to it yet. Command + Up/Down does the same thing Page Up/Down does in Windows.

2) I would be used to home/end not functioning the same way they do in Windows, except for the extremely annoying fact that they do work like they do in Windows while using any MS Office application for OS X. I'm not normally a critic of Microsoft (I tend to like their products), but damn you Microsoft for not complying in an environment that's not your own.

3) Not being able to hit Windowskey + R to be my starting point for navigating my hard drive. Yes, I know, install LaunchBar; I will...soon.

4) iCal - I just can't bring myself to use it.

But honestly, that's about it. Frightened? I'm not, I like being proficient with another OS/platform. And I have enough other PCs in the house to handle my gaming or any sort of tweaking needs I have to fulfill. The G5 will most likely remain my AT-Work machine.

What's next? There's a lot more, but I've made a few definite decisions:

1) I'm keeping the G5. (cmon, as "cool" as it is to jump on the AppleSucks bandwagon, when have I ever come off as a fanboy?)

2) There will be an AT Mac section.

3) I will continue this blog, although I'm not certain what direction it will take - it may eventually get moved (at least the Macdates) to the AT Mac section.

I apologize for the delay in the Macdate, and for those of you who are bored by my ramblings I apologize for the length. As I mentioned at the beginning of this experiment, there will be an article summarizing all of this (and more). When will it be published? Most likely after the new site launches and I actually have some time to put a good amount of effort into it. School is over (and I mean *over*) for me after May 11th, but hopefully I'll have some time before then to get this thing polished and out.

That's it for now, more Macdates later.

[giga Veteran]

YAY Anandtech Mac section!!!

[Dazzla Veteran]

How old is this guy? He goes on and talks about quad opterons, and he owns a dual G5 then he says he's just finished school :omg:

[Fusion]

How old is this guy? He goes on and talks about quad opterons, and he owns a dual G5 then he says he's just finished school :omg:

Yes, it is very interesting. It seems that his site is so well recognized companies just send him all that. When he got his dual G5, he was like... "I don't like the ATI 9600 that is in here so I'll just call ATI and have them send me a new 9800 pro."

[adamp2p]

Apple NV40? -

I met with NVIDIA today and during our extensive discussion about NV40 I asked if we'd ever see it on Macs, NVIDIA's response? They'd be more than willing to build it, Apple has to request it though.

The retail add-in market for Mac upgrade cards is too small to get involved in, but if Apple asks for it then NVIDIA will plop NV40 on some AGP 8X cards with Mac-compliant firmware and send 'em Apple's way.

Since Apple has historically only gone with one manufacturer for their high-end cards Mac users will most likely have to wait until both ATI and NVIDIA have released their next-gen parts before Apple decides which one they will go with.

Just thought I'd chime in with that for the Mac readers out there.

[adamp2p]

Powerbook...of death -

What spawned my discussion about being surrounded by Macs in my day-to-day environment on campus was a friend of mine in my Compiler class (ECE466 for Statefolk). He had a 12" Powerbook and seeing him switch made me wonder exactly how prevalent these things had become.

Today he finds himself in a bit of a pickle, or more like a jar of pickles with a broken 12" Powerbook. His Powerbook will randomly shut off and not turn back on. A call to Apple results in little more than the following two options:

1) Reset your power management settings, or

2) Reinstall your OS

Now he tried the first option, and being that he was in class at the time the second option well, wasn't really an option. His issue has hardware-problem written all over it (at least the PC diagnostic side of me thinks so, but I claim no expertise in the Mac-arts) despite what Apple says. The problem exists regardless of whether or not the Powerbook is plugged in, so it's not a battery issue.

Any thoughts?

What I've noticed from reading the Apple support messageboards is that Apple's hardware is not flawless as some like to think. It seems to either work perfectly (and I mean perfectly), or have some extremely obscure problem (usually with an even more obscure fix). I'm just hoping I have none of the horrible problems I've read about the G5s; I have this bad habit of tempting fate, maybe I should quit while I'm ahead :)

I still keep my stance on Apple's Powerbooks: they are too bulky for my tastes. Make a thin-and-light notebook and I'll be a mobile convert, but sticking a 90nm PPC 970FX processor in a laptop is not the solution. Intel had the right mentality with Pentium M, a mobile processor has to be designed from the ground up to be a mobile processor - it cannot simply be a underclocked desktop part that can go to sleep every now and then. Until other companies decide to dedicate the resources necessary to implement a similar approach Intel will retain their tight grip on the mobile market. Apple isn't in the business of microprocessor design so I'm not faulting them, but there are others out there who are: they're at fault :) (I know it's not easy to design a chip, much less a good one so I will entertain and accept "easier said than done" responses to my comments). Oh and the same "designed to be a mobile chip first" applies to mobile GPUs as well; mobile gaming will not be a reality unless a similar approach is entertained.

It's bedtime for me, goodnight all :)

[toddl]

How old is this guy? He goes on and talks about quad opterons, and he owns a dual G5 then he says he's just finished school

Anand is about 20 or 21. He's a senior in ECE at NC State University, and if you think that his talk about computers implies a bit of cash in his bank, you should see the cars he drives around.

His site, AnandTech, is a very well respected hardware and software review site for PC stuff. Anand himself is a very well respected person; his reviews are very thorough, well thought-out, and unbiased. IMO, Anandtech and Tom's Hardware are the two absolute best review sites out on the web.

Anand is thought of well enough that nVidia and ATi will call him up and ask him what type of improvements can be made on their next cards. Many companies will send him very expensive equipment to test and review, because they know that he will give a good review and his opinion will be valued among the PC universe.

That is why we Mac users care so much about his Mac test drive. If he likes OS X enough to create a Mac section on his site, then maybe his opinion can win over at least a few sales in our neverending quest for higher marketshare, or at least mindshare.

[Chad]

Anand is about 20 or 21. He's a senior in ECE at NC State University, and if you think that his talk about computers implies a bit of cash in his bank, you should see the cars he drives around.

His site, AnandTech, is a very well respected hardware and software review site for PC stuff. Anand himself is a very well respected person; his reviews are very thorough, well thought-out, and unbiased. IMO, Anandtech and Tom's Hardware are the two absolute best review sites out on the web.

Anand is thought of well enough that nVidia and ATi will call him up and ask him what type of improvements can be made on their next cards. Many companies will send him very expensive equipment to test and review, because they know that he will give a good review and his opinion will be valued among the PC universe.

That is why we Mac users care so much about his Mac test drive. If he likes OS X enough to create a Mac section on his site, then maybe his opinion can win over at least a few sales in our neverending quest for higher marketshare, or at least mindshare.

Tom's hardware is no where close to being one of the best review sites on the net. He was considered reputable a couple years ago, but anymore, a few dollars will sway his review. He's a sellout.

[giga Veteran]

Yeah I've heard that he's biased towards Intel in his benchmarks. Anand is awesome.

[Redestium]

Yeah I've heard that he's biased towards Intel in his benchmarks. Anand is awesome.

I think his reviews are good, but I take them with a grain of salt and check other places too.

[adamp2p]

I think his reviews are good, but I take them with a grain of salt and check other places too.

Like what "other places?" I am always looking for good content, but find it incredibly hard to find.

AnandTech is the best. Why? I will post what he said:

here

"Come April, AnandTech will have been up and running for a full 7 years. Exactly 1/3 of my life has been spent running AT and considering that the remaining 2/3 were spent learning to read and write, I can say that this site has been my life. I'm in a reflecting mood right now so I'm going to do just that, with a little bit of sharing.

I started AT the summer of my Freshman year in highschool, I was 14 at the time and really had no idea of what this would turn into. I remember thinking that I really just wanted to be able to have a community to talk tech with, to be able to say "Good Morning" to be able to just have fun with. Seven years later, I do believe that dream was realized. Although it's tough to keep a personal connection to 4 million individuals, through things like this blog, your comments and your emails (not to mention the Forums), I think the personal connection is definitely there - at least in my eyes. I read all the threads although I don't post much and I get some of the best entertainment from the Off Topic Forum, so do a lot of my friends, it's great.

The community has definitely grown since my early days in '97; there are many more hardware sites around, a very good thing overall. As readers the community has grown to be much more aware of what goes on in the industry and I think overall has positively influenced the direction of our industry. Companies like AMD and Intel that would never pay attention to an online community in the past now give me a call whenever they read something of interest appears on the site. NVIDIA calls me up and asks for suggestions to make their control panels more user friendly - from the perspective of the AnandTech reader. ATI will put things together like the famed Valve event to showcase up and coming technology, primarily directed at this audience - at you - at the AnandTech reader. It's amazing how incredibly large everything has gotten.

Most of the newer hardware sites around today learned from all of our mistakes in the past and are a lot smarter about how to run things, but at the same time so are the manufacturers.

The quickest way for a manufacturer to get press is through the web, but it is also a manufacturer's biggest nightmare. Nothing scares these manufacturers more than JoeRandomTech.com opening up, gaining virtually instantaneous readership, and slamming their product (either with valid complaints or, even worse, a misinformed opinion). So a lot of manufacturers will do whatever it takes to be the "nice guy" and establish good working relationships with most websites. I stopped selling ads on AnandTech years ago because of this; it's too easy for a manufacturer to put pressure on a site if you are dealing with them on all fronts, editorial and sales. I contract all of our sales out to a third party company which has no influence on any AnandTech staff member (and vice versa). Advertising is actually the least of the problems with the community; for the most part, advertising is handled (today at least) on the up and up. It's the politics that you've got to worry about...

Manufacturers quickly learned that reviews couldn't be bought; there's too much potential for someone to spill the beans and then you get bad press for the manufacturer if they keep their ad contracts and even more bad press if they lose them. To a journalist money isn't a primary concern, an exclusive however is. The promise of "exclusivity" is often times the bargaining chip that's used to get a favorable look at things. If exclusivity doesn't get you, then it's other things like parties, drinks or the worst - review samples.

Now the parties and the beer I could care less about, I don't drink and thus me and "conventional" parties don't mix. In the past, a manufacturer pulling review samples was an issue (and believe me, it's happened to me countless times) but now we can either go out and buy the stuff or get it from other sources.

I'm not here to chastise all manufacturers, in fact the ones I'm talking about are most likely not the ones that come to mind when you think about the issue. I started out reading tech publications and websites, that's what brought me here. I figure the next generation of writers in this industry are also going to be coming from the same sort of background, and on the off chance that one of them happens to be reading here right now I figured I would pass on what I can.

My message to the manufacturers? The same as it has always been. Don't wine and dine us, it's not necessary. You don't want anyone who responds positively only after receiving that sort of treatment reviewing your products to begin with, if someone can be bought that easily it's just as easy to pull their loyalties elsewhere.

My message to the readers? I don't think I've ever read a conspiracy theory about the politics in this community that has been right. It's usually the exact opposite that's true, and although it's hard (and not as fun) to believe - it ends up being true most of the time. My perspective on the matter is this: anyone with a conscience wouldn't sell out their readers for any amount of money, product, good treatment, etc... I look at it this way, if 4 million readers are coming to AT every month they are coming here with money in hand, wanting to upgrade and wanting guidance - take the average cost of a hardware upgrade, multiply it by 4 million people and you've got a number that's way too high to betray regardless of what the stakes are.

My Dad came to this country with $26 in his pocket with borrowed luggage, a loaned plane ticket and a scholarship. His story has been my driving inspiration ever since I heard it. There are always ways to get ahead in life and I'm not one for taking the easy route. It's not something I advocate openly or behind the scenes at AnandTech, and just something that I wanted to keep out in the open.

I'm off to class, I'll make a Macdate later tonight. Have a great day everyone."

Edited March 29, 2004 by adamp2p

[macster]

Adamp2p

Humans do make mistakes. Its logical to check out other sites and compare their opinions. I agree that Anand is one of the best but he is a human too. We all have our own opinions

[adamp2p]

Adamp2p

Humans do make mistakes. Its logical to check out other sites and compare their opinions. I agree that Anand is one of the best but he is a human too. We all have our own opinions

Hey, you may read that I am saying AnandTech is the only website I read and trust. That is simply not the truth. There are others, too. For example, [H]ardOCP.

However, I must emphasize that I must truly scorge the 'net to find any articles/reviews/guides that are as well written and truthful as AnandTech's.

[adamp2p]

http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/index.html?bid=91

Anand Lal Shimpi Weblog

Mac Usage Improves Tolerance? - Thursday, Apr 22, 2004 1:57 AM

This is sort of a strange Macdate, as I am typing it from a Sunblade 100 workstation in the Unity Lab at NCSU's Library, but after working with this Sun for the past several hours something dawned on me: my Mac usage experience has greatly improved my tolerance for non-PC OSes and interface setups.

I've had to use these Sun boxes in the past, and I would always complain about their keyboard layout (e.g. the control and capslock keys are interchanged compared to a PC keyboard) and often times I would not be able to survive using the things for more than a few minutes to struggle to check my email. Interestingly enough, I don't find the keyboard layout difficult to get used to anymore. Maybe it's because I have to keep on switching between the positioning of keys when I switch between my G5 and the PCs that I use, or maybe it's just that not being tied down to one platform for the majority of my work has made me a bit more open minded in the computing world. I can even see situations where it helps having the control key where it is on this keyboard :)

That being said, this machine is still horrendously slow :)

I know the Macdates have been sparse these days, if you follow my regular blog you'll know that's because of the school projects that require me to use these Sun machines that is keeping me from blogging about my continued G5 experiences. Since I've run into a bug in the ASIC project I'm working on and I've made it this far into a Macdate I'll share a few things about my more-than-a-month with a Mac:

1) The more I use Safari the more I appreciate it as a web browser, however it is still entirely too slow for me and there are far too many times where I have to use Firefox because pages won't function correctly under Safari (particular German car configurator websites - what can I say, I'm a car guy and I like to play with their car configurators).

2) I'd switch to Firefox completely if I could get the autocomplete .com URL keyboard shortcut would work. I know, I'm fickle.

3) My desktop is getting messy. All the PDFs I click on in Safari download themselves to my desktop and sometimes multiple copies end up there as I forget that I've already downloaded a particular PDF. I'm thinking of having all of the automatically downloaded links go to a particular folder that I'll just trash periodically. Any other suggestions for removing clutter from my desktop?

4) I have yet to figure out the sense behind the icon organization on my desktop. I swear I've done this a tremendous number of times - I set the desktop to keep icons arranged by modification date, yet I still get seemingly randomly placed icons. The same applies for keeping icons arranged by name, type, creation date and just about anything else I can think of. It's a bit annoying, especially with so much stuff on my desktop - thus problems 3 and 4 are somewhat related.

5) Mail.app has been handling my email extremely well, I wondered how it would hold up under the load of thousands of messages and thus far it has been doing wonderfully. What is most impressive is that deleting thousands of messages doesn't bring the system to a screeching halt, I can actually work with the rest of the OS just as if nothing were happening in the background. Mail.app seems to have Outlook's file management trumped for large emailboxes.

6) DivX files no longer seem to want to play under Quicktime for me. The OS and the DivX codec just seemed to decide that they would exclude Quicktime from their nights on the town and now I'm forced to use the OS X version of mplayer2, which isn't bad but it lacks polish. I tried reinstalling the DivX codec to no avail, I have yet to try reinstalling Quicktime though (although I probably should have before making this post...shhh). Anyone else have a similar problem and/or a solution and/or especially an explanation for why it happens? I'm always curious as to why things happen, not necessarily just that they do :)

7) OCZ sent over 4 x 1GB beta sticks for me to play around with, so I ripped out the 8 x 512MB sticks and have been running on their 1GB modules with no problems at all. I'd actually be willing to say that the G5 has been more stable since the change in memory, but that's most likely due to the fact that replacing the RAM required a shutdown of the computer thus ending the life of any renegade processes. Once I'm sure that the 1GB sticks play well, I'm going to try and throw in another 4 x 512MB sticks to see what 6GB feels like. Before you scoff, I have run out of memory once under OS X with 4GB installed - but I have a feeling it was due to Excel just being its ornery self.

8) Derek was working on the pipeline diagrams for his NV3x Moratorium article (yes, he meant to type Moratorium, sheesh :)...) so I called him over to my place to use OmniGraffle on the G5. He was floored (ask him yourself) and decided that OmniGraffle alone was a cool enough program to want a Mac. I think we've both decided that the ideal setup is a Mac and a PC side-by-side. When I setup my new office in CT this fall I think I will give the setup a try.

That's all I can think of for now. Forgive me if there are any spelling mistakes as the Sun I'm posting from does not have the oh-so-useful system wide spellcheck that my G5 has spoiled me with. Not that systemwide spellcheck has prevented me from making spelling mistakes in the past or anything :)

It's back to trying-to-graduate-on-time again, goodnight all.