[AUUG-Talk]: Re: [BUGA] Sell me an Apple!

[Enno Davids]

On 3/28/06, Peter Jeremy <peterjeremy at optushome.com.au> wrote:
>
>
> IMHO, the biggest novelty in MacOS was the use of double-indirect
> pointers everywhere to allow memory to be compacted by just moving
> blocks around in RAM.


Well it was novel to see it used to the extent it was, although not all that
new at the time. It was however the only way they could even attempt what
they did on a machine without an MMU and in the cases of the original two
Mac models, very restricitve memory sizes. They simply couldn't afford to
let memory fragment and so allowing the OS to shuffle things around at the
cost of performance was a given.

I have to say the thing I'm finding most amusing in this discussion though
is the number of people who apparently think that you can load all that eye
candy UI on top of a system and still have high performance as a server.
When I build a server to sit in a rack just do stuff I routinely don't let X
start, kill off all the other apps that are surplus to requirements and so
on. And the result amongst other things is better performance.

OSX is almost the other extreme. In order to provide what is by all reports
(I'm not a Mac owner) a very rich UI which is both visually appealling and
provides a bunch of computationally non-trivial 'recognise what the user is
trying to do and reaspond in kind' actions has to soak away some of your
CPU. The real point here seems to me to be that most of us haven't quite
grasped exactly how high that cost is.

As to the h/w quality of Apple, I think they may still be better than many.
If you need convincing, I can always share the stories of me and Dell tech
support over the last 6 months... Lovely people. And such a firm a firm
grasp of our trade practices act in Bangalore too ("Well sir its 80 days
since the last repair, so if its failed again we will repair it for free.
But we will only give you the remaining 10 days of warranty on the new
repair." "Errr no, thats not how the law sees it in this country buddy.")
Apple at least have a good dealer network and good support right?


Enno.