ubuntu-au Digest, Vol 12, Issue 4

[Christopher Lees]

On Mon, 2007-02-05 at 12:00 +0000, ubuntu-au-request at lists.ubuntu.com
wrote:
> 
> Great opinion piece in The Guardian today:
> 
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2006031,00.html

I didn't find it that great. Okay, so Mac users these days are too
concerned with style over substance, just like the people who switch to
Linux and the first thing they do is try and get Beryl working.

But that certainly wasn't true 10 years ago. In 1997, desktop Macs were
beige and laptops black. The GUI was a "platinum" grey. You could open
up your Mac and add memory, PCI cards, drives, or a modem. You also had
more options than with PCs - every Mac had an port for external
high-speed devices. And for the record, most Macs sold today have
multiple mouse buttons, and if yours doesn't then you can add one.

Notice how all the Mac users got their work done for years without a
second mouse button, and never complained?

And unlike Windows, there wasn't even a command-line to "struggle" with.
(The Windows users who say "Linux won't get accepted by normal people
until it stops relying on the command line" are hypocrites, because they
all used Windows 95).

Sure, the Mac ads are irritating. Sure, I find it difficult to use Mac
OS X - there are no places to put things, and the keyboard commands are
so counter-intuitive, for a start! But claiming that you want to poke
someone's eye out because they use a Mac is not funny.

Another inaccuracy about the "Macs aren't fun" part: Yes, Myst was
released in 1993 for the Mac and Doom was released in 93 for the PC. But
Doom wasn't "the first shoot-em-up" (what we now call an "FPS"). He
forgot about Wolfenstein 3D, which probably wasn't the first anyway.

In 1994 (I believe), Doom 2 was released with exactly the same game
engine. You couldn't look up or down, each weapon had only one function,
and only the levels were different to Doom 1. In 1994, Bungie Software
released Marathon, which was MUCH more fun than Doom - partly because
there were actual deathmatch levels, partly because of the storyline in
single-player mode, partly because of the superior game engine (you
could aim up and down, some weapons had multiple triggers like the
assault-rifle/grenade launcher), and partly because there were all sorts
of modifiers like fish-eye vision, invisibility, temporary
invincibility, health rechargers, etc.

So while I find Macs now to be ridiculous machines (and some parts of
PCs still frustrate me, like the BIOS), there was a time when they were
much better than their x86 counterparts; therefore the rant is quite
invalid.