RIP Steve Jobs

[Highlander]

I'll second Harry's comments although I'm not a MAC user... never have been for (bluntly) cost reasons, though I would love to own a high-end unit for recording and photography work...

How many of you (PC/MS) users here have had to go through PC-HELL, regardless of how many BUD's you have, whether it was a PSU failure, or an HDD, or a Motherboard, or whatever, and had to reload all the software you use on a regular basis to a new machine and get back onto a level playing field...? Not a pleasant experience... hours and hours of wasted time that you will never recover...

I assist a friend who although is happy to strip down a car, remove engines, running gear, do welding, etc (his wife will too), has issues when it comes to technology...
With his MAC's he can run several different operating systems from the same hard-drive without worrying about partitions and run them externally to the system via firewire or USB... (legit-installed) software can be run from any drive on any machine...
He wanted to upgrade his CUBE so all we had to do was copy everything from the hard-drive onto a new (larger) drive, remove the old one, and fit the new one - job done...
No messing around with GHOST or some such thing, no hardware issues, no conflicts, everything works...
Copy-paste-done... (albeit USB1)
For many years they (Apple) held onto their code and allowed no tinkering and this resulted in limited (brands/type ie not a gaming platform) but highly efficient products that "does wot it sez on the tin" to coin an expression over here, although in a limited way they have allowed this to change...

Microsoft is King, end... of... story... but their kingdom is flawed and perverted...

Long live the King...!

I have a (#2) Ipod and I have no issues about how it works, or the (hifi) quality, it just, day-in-day-out, works...

I think Microsoft has approx 90% market share below $1000 equipment, whereas this is almost mirrored in Apple's favour above the $1k PC bracket... that says it all, from a professional perspective...
We all use what suits us or what we can afford...

I have no use for an Iphone... I so rarely use a "personal" phone and usually end up with my wife/daughters cast-offs, so my present phone has a camera and REAL-BUTTONS () but I do have to suffer working tools (presently a BRICK called an ES400 as it is designed to suffer abuse which it does) and have been a "mobile" user since the mid eighties (I still have my first phone, a BIG hand-bag sized Panasonic "transportable" that had nicad batteries about the size of 6 Iphones, 3 high-end on and it worked until cloned around the time GSM was launched, then I switched to a Motorola flip-phone (beam me up, Scotty) and on to a Nokia Communicator (first model) and so on... but if I am out I'm with my family I only need a cheapie so they (SWMBO and daughter) can track me down... at work, why carry 2 phones...
I've had an HTC (for work - side on-slide out qwerty thing - MSM5) and my daughter presently has one (Android too, Al, iirc) which she loves...
The present (work) phone has a Blackberry qwerty style interface which is not user friendly fo my chubbie fingers...

[Dave W]

Can we stay away from the PC vs, Mac argument? PCs own the market in all price ranges, Jobs recognized that and decided that he'd rather have a small market and stick with the closed OS, yet he was able to rebuild Apple with products no one else had at the time.

[Pilgrim]

I've been a Mac user for almost 15 years, but I don't consider myself particularly rabid, and Steve Jobs passing hasn't really affected me. However, I once heard this expression and it resonated with me: "Windows is for what you have to do, Mac is for what you want to do."

I like that..and it seems to follow the use pattern I have observed.

Jobs was indeed a brilliant and most capable guy.  I see in today's paper that Sony has already started negotiating for rights to produce a movie of his life story.

[Freuds_Cat]

Can we stay away from the PC vs, Mac argument? PCs own the market in all price ranges, Jobs recognized that and decided that he'd rather have a small market and stick with the closed OS, yet he was able to rebuild Apple with products no one else had at the time.

The irony here is that in the 90's Windows was considered the "Proprietry" OS and Apple the open and free to access OS from an application or hardware developers perspective. Made even more so after the choice to use a Unix backend. Today Apple are as bad or worse than Microsoft in this regard. The reality is that they are both just computers which fundamentally do the same thing.

[Denis]

The irony here is that in the 90's Windows was considered the "Proprietry" OS and Apple the open and free to access OS from an application or hardware developers perspective. Made even more so after the choice to use a Unix backend. Today Apple are as bad or worse than Microsoft in this regard. The reality is that they are both just computers which fundamentally do the same thing.

That may be true, but it's also true that Apples crash less and are affected by fewer viruses. Plus, I bet fewer people hated the Steve Jobs than hated Bill Gates. 

[Freuds_Cat]

That may be true, but it's also true that Apples crash less and are affected by fewer viruses. Plus, I bet fewer people hated the Steve Jobs than hated Bill Gates. 

   Having spent 8 years as an Apple Tech I gotta say that prior to OSX (no protected memory in OS 7,8 or 9.x) Macs crashed every bit as much as Windows. The main difference was that the fix was a lot easier. The 1st company I worked for did IBM and Acer as well as Apple so I got to see a very balanced comparison.

Regarding the whole virus thing. Since 1994 I have only seen 3 Macs infected with a worm and they were all associated with MS Word. I have never and still dont run virus software. There are Mac viruses but in the hundreds of computers I had come across my bench each year and the 6 or so Macs I've had at home over the years I've never seen a virus infection. So I would have to agree.

[dadagoboi]

I use AVG free virus protection on my PC, view tons of quasi legal movies from all over the globe and have no infection problems.  PCs no longer crash, Macs have only recently become affordable.  Tech costs to repair a Mac used to be beyond outrageous and doing anything yourself was highly frowned upon to say the least.  The Heathkit DIY ethic that inspired Jobs, Woz and so many others of the early computer age is nowhere to be seen in Apple products.  They are made to be consumed...period.  The 'creative people' who use Macs are by and large computer illiterate...IMO

Regarding 'RIP Steve', I suggest reading the current Rolling Stone article.

[Pilgrim]

Apple makes solid products with design appeal that rivals or surpasses anything in the market - any market.  Jobs made that one of the defining characteristics of the brand, and under his direction, Apple defined their products brilliantly.  I have noticed that they fail seldom enough that their owners often have no clue about how to repair them.  They are also still quite expensive for the functionality they provide.

PCs have much less elegant design, offer a lot more bang for the buck, and they fail often enough (and parts are so commonly available) that many owners can come close to rebuilding them by themselves.  That's the legacy of the approach that Microsoft took.

Both have much to recommend them, and each system has specific advantages.  I don't think there's much room to argue that as a single person, Steve Jobs had more impact on Apple than almost any other single person has had on any other major company.

[Freuds_Cat]

PCs no longer crash, Macs have only recently become affordable. 

They both still crash just not as often.

Tech costs to repair a Mac used to be beyond outrageous and doing anything yourself was highly frowned upon to say the least.

Must be an American thing, the hourly rate to repair a Mac or a PC was/is the same here.
I have to disagree about fixing Macs yourself. There has always been a massive amount of free up to date info available on repairing Macs. So much so that in a lot of cases as techs we would use public info before Apple had time to document the problem/fix.

The Heathkit DIY ethic that inspired Jobs, Woz and so many others of the early computer age is nowhere to be seen in Apple products.  They are made to be consumed...period.

True, as is also true with the latest version of Windows.

The 'creative people' who use Macs are by and large computer illiterate...IMO

In my experience regardless of weather a Bureau uses Macs, Windows or Unix the people seem mostly the same.  Probably best to check this one with Rob