Linux, MacOSX (was Re: [oclug] (no subject))

[Micheal Kelly]

On Wednesday, August 21, 2002, at 10:12 PM, Milan Budimirovic wrote:

> That's missing the main point of the Linux exercise. Linux is free
> software. OSX is not.

I never claimed it was, and am not arguing that point.  All I said was 
overnight Apple became the largest distributor of desktop Unix systems.  
Free or otherwise.  I still believe that Linux has a good chance at 
catching up.  I'd *love* to see Linux move into this space - it's not 
there  yet though.  As pretty and functional as KDE/Gnome and the other 
"desktops" are, they don't yet possess the same level of integration and 
functionality found in OS X IMHO.  But they're improving with each 
release, so we shall see.

> On the other hand a lot of people feel that the shamelessly overpriced
> hardware that Apple forces upon its customers is OSX's biggest drawback.
> Once you get past the motherboard and CPU, Macs are built entirely with
> off-the-shelf parts. Ordinary SDRAM, IDE drives, ATI and NVidia cards...
> ho hum.

Agreed, some of their stuff is overpriced.  Their G4 towers could stand 
to lose a few dollars around the waist.  On the other hand, their 
lower-end commercial products such as the iBooks are extremely 
competitively priced.  $1800 for a small, fast, portable Linux laptop 
with excellent battery life?  Can't complain much about that.  $1600 for 
a G4 eMac with display built it?  That's pretty good too.  The LCD iMacs 
are a little pricey, but they'll drop as soon as competitors begin 
manufacturing similar systems (Gateway is apparently already doing this).