eotunun wrote:A friend of mine, a programmer, got a Macbook from his boss. It was the one a former colleague used, who left the company in anger and did not give the passwords to access the computer. With important data on it there was a problem.
Hacking it via network took my mate as long as twenty minutes.
So where's that fabulous superiority of Mac OS?
Good looking things which really were a technical alternative as long as they helped keeping the Motorola CPU in developement.
That's over now, so where's the point in paying load for a non-open Unix/Linux/BSD-Clone?
20 minutes? Wow, that's slow. He could have just booted the mac in targetmode and then pull off the files through firewire or USB. Or.. insert the OS X install DVD and reset the password.
And if you want to go into semantics about superiority, well.. you can do the same with Windows machines too in less than 5 minutes. Ofcourse, a poweruser encrypts his harddrive and then the above suggestions doesn't work...
The point in paying a load is that you get a stable system, since OS X is optimized specifically for the hardware Apple sells, so they don't need to spend valuable time trying to support the vast amounts of different hardware a generic pc can contain, great support when something doesn't work, and major OS updates that you don't have to pay through the nose to get (since it's the hardware you pay premium for). Another added bonus thanks to the BSD inheritance is that you can run most, if not all, Linux applications on a mac through X11 or the terminal straight out of the box without external programs such as Cygwin which most windows users who like linux apps have to run if the program isn't ported to run on windows.
But that's just basic stuff. There are lots of little things that OS X offers that is just built in. Need to create a PDF quickly? Just save whatever you work on as a PDF, no need to use any external programs. Want to create a textfile from some text from the net? Don't touch the copy button! Just drag the selected text to your desktop and BOOM, a document is created with the selected text, and or images. Want to create a new PDF file from just certain pages in one big PDF? Just select the various pages, drag to the desktop. BOOM. New PDF created. Need to upload files in a folder weekly to a FTP site? Just create a simple script in Automator, tell the computer to run it weekly. Done. Got lots of windows open and need a specific one real fast? Exposé to the rescue. One click and you got a complete look of all windows you got opened, and just select the one you want. Need to mail an image to a friend? Just select the image, drag to the mail-app, enter the mail adress and swoosh, you're done. Need to show a friend how to do a certain thing on his computer? Either connect to his with screenshare and show him in real time, or use the built-in screencapture program and create a video and mail it to him.
I don't have to get into the "no viruses" thing too, am I?
All these little things sound like nothing, but when you compare how to do all this on a windows machine you get to see how fluid it makes daily work. So yes, the motorola days are over but Apple still brings us lots of fancy things with their software.
This doesn't mean that Apple does everything right though, there are some issues I still hate that they don't fix (Samba shares in Snow Leopard for example.. GRRR!), but compared to other OS's and machines out there, I'd choose an Apple one in an instant, anytime.
Whoa, that got to be quite the posting but what the heck, it had to be said.
