Being a relatively new Apple convert, this concept was hard for me recently. In the world of PC’s, specs are *everything*. A faster CPU, more RAM, faster hard drive – these are the only things that matter.
All that is out the window.
Don’t get me wrong. My iMac is pretty darn fast. But just about any $500-$600 PC on the market will crush in in terms of specs and raw power. Does that fact bother me? Not in the least. I’d say that my good buddy Robert Mozayeni put it very eloquently in his Apple on Paper article.
Quality over specs. Simplicity over raw power. I can live without having the fastest computer in the world.
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This is generally true of open-source operating systems, and OS X is based upon one of them (the upstream Darwin project has its roots in BSD). An 8-year-old 2.5 GHz Pentium 4, 1.2 Gb RAM system with a lightweight install of Ubuntu 10.4 LTS I upgraded and donated to a local nursing home runs better and is more responsive than the Core i5 system I am compelled to use at work. The Fedora system I have on a Turion 64×2 laptop feels more powerful than the Windows 7 Core i7 sitting next to it despite being massively outgunned.
Simplicity and directness of design is critical. Mac exemplifies this, but then again Apple is a hardware company which found a cheap and effective way to provide software as a service by harnessing Darwin. This is the model the software industry is likely moving back to after a 20 year diversion down the treat-sourcecode-as-literature sidetrack. That really set us back.
It saddens me that we do not do anything today that we couldn’t do in, say, 1993 with our computers but we send a lot more cycles getting there. (3D render-intensive applications — games, namely — are an entirely different discussion, of course.)
Have fun with your Mac!