Weeeehaaa!
Even though you are not technically running LFS on Mac OS X, it is still the best news since the early release of the Intel Macs! I´ve seen reports from people running Half-life 2 with goodies turned on and with no problems at all.

I´m getting a MacBook Pro now!

"What does Windows do inside a Mac? A lot more than MacOS ever did."

Looking forward for rest of the year to see how this developes. By the way, do you anyone who might need a replacement kidney or a lung? I might have to sell mine to gather enough cash for Mac...

http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/ just run lfs on windows in your mac

Quote :

I might have to sell mine to gather enough cash for Mac...

The iMac is about £200 less than the cost of my PC and comes with a screen (ok not the super duper £300 screen I just bought). I coulda saved myself a packed, but would it have played LFS quite aswell?

I've done some benchmarking on an Intel iMac under rosetta and it scored awefully but i've not yet compiled my cross-platform benchmark tool into a universal intel mac binary.

However I can say that the architectural advantage where Mac users say, "yes but 2Ghz on a Mac is like 3Ghz on a PC" is quite genuinely true - the Intel iMac shoves stuff around in Ram like a gazelle on steroids and makes my CAS2 dual channel RAM look like a lethargic slug on cannabis with learning difficulties.

The scarey thing is the current ?Ghz speed of Mac's is actually alarmingly close to PC's now too ... Facts are, these Intel Macs are actually darn fast, and they dont cost that much money.

Sorry, but the stereotype doesn't hold anymore. We'll know more in a few months when all the frenzy has died down, but I gotta say, the current crop of Apple hardware looks to compare favourably with buying a PC.

Quote from Becky Rose :

(ok not the super duper £300 screen I just bought).

What screen is better than a Mac LCD screen?

That's a good question, of course Apple do actually make very good screens dont they.

I've no idea how mine compares, it's weekest stat is contrast at 700:1. It's a 19" active matrix with a refresh rate of 2ms - which is hot diggidy darn fast especially for gaming. The screen is a Samsung 940BF. I've no idea how it compares to a Mac screen but it certainly doesn't have any of the dead pixels that Apple will let ship (up to 10 dead pixels on a new monitor is "accepteable" according to Applecare).

Quote from spankmeyer :

"What does Windows do inside a Mac? A lot more than MacOS ever did."

hehehe good one. to mock apple advertising would be an endless funny task

Quote from Becky Rose :

Facts are, these Intel Macs are actually darn fast, and they dont cost that much money.
Sorry, but the stereotype doesn't hold anymore. We'll know more in a few months when all the frenzy has died down, but I gotta say, the current crop of Apple hardware looks to compare favourably with buying a PC.

Wow. Do you live on planet Cash where natural resources include spontaneous eruptions of hundred euro bills? The VAT here in Finland is ruthless (national problem, not related to Apple alone) and Apple still sells their basic systems with terribly inadequate amount of memory, hard drive space and short warranties.
I'm getting my next salary soon and found out today at Apple store that it's quite impossible to get any decent Mac to replace my crap work PC with less than 2000 euros.

So then the Mac is dead? Long live Windows? I don't get it. What's the point in a Mac, now? Apart from being able to say that you have a Mac?

I'm not up on the Mac at all. I just know bits and pieces.. like ads they show in the UK getting banned by the ITC for false advertising etc. It just seems a lot like running Wine on a Linux OS.. it's completely pointless, but on a Mac it's expensive too.

Looking at Mac prices, I can build a hell of a PC for the price of a "fairly good" Mac. And I do mean a STEAMINGLY good PC.

[EDIT] I just found this on Bootcamp..

Quote from Apple :

Word to the Wise
Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it’ll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world. So be sure to keep it updated with the latest Microsoft Windows security fixes.

Amazing they still spew this crap. Plague? Silly, silly people.

The driver issue is moot now, seeing Apple has released BootCamp which includes drivers for ALL intel Macs, It is in beta and is rumored to kill your warranty if you F up. Personally I have to get my iMac before I run LFS on it and replace this box and turn it into a 24/7 server. the Apple ads on the bootcamp site are highly awesome and tell it how it is, and I am honestly pissing myself with the latest result that the Macbook Pro is "The Fastest Windows XP Laptop". Proof that Apple has better marketing techniques up their sleeves.

Quote :

Proof that Apple has better marketing techniques up their sleeves

Apple's marketting ... You only have to read the previous few threads to see how good it is isnt !

Quote :

Wow. Do you live on planet Cash where natural resources include spontaneous eruptions of hundred euro bills?

As I already mentioned, an iMac compared favourably on cost to the cost of my PC. Does the iMac need money spending on it to do the same thing?

Yes and no, from base spec it could use an extra 512mb and ok the hard disk isn't massive but it is at least adequate.

It's processor speed is a moot point because the architecture is different, you can argue until the cows come home about which is faster and the bottom line is it depends on what you're doing, copying blocks of RAM about the Intel iMac whilst running rosetta emulation (an emulator to make it work like an old pre-intel Mac) did it at it over twice the speed of my PC running natively. What I can say is the speed of the machine is 'perfectly adequate' and yes, apparently the Mac Book Pro is the fastest laptop around whilst running XP - although that's probably application speed and lord knows how it fares whilst running 3D.

Edit: I'd steer clear of the G5 at the moment though - it's still running the old processor and is hopelessly overpriced given that it is out-dated. Obviously Apple are already pledged to replace it soon but until they do their flagship machine will be a heap of overpriced junk.

Quote from Becky Rose :

Does the iMac need money spending on it to do the same thing?

Absolutely. The cheapest baseline iMac (that alone sets me back for 1400 euros) will not cut it in my profession. No way around it. End of story. Cash out your chips at the exit.
Triple the RAM and extend the warranty but then you'd be near two grands, at which point one might ask how much am I actually getting and will it run my business for 3 years?

Of course if your monthly salary is more than 500-1000 euros, then the price might not be impossible to overcome.


"I'm rich, bitch!"
- Dave Chappelle

I dont know what industry you are in, or how competetive Apple are on price in your country. I have only given my point of view in comparison of the iMac to my high end gaming PC. I dont know if the iMac's 3D performance would compare, I can say that it's desktop/application performance is very good indeed.

Fogetting that the default install of OSX uses a bucket load of it and that 512mb isn't really enough, if you reinstall OSX or you are putting Windows on it that becomes neither here nor there. I would personally choose to upgrade the Intel iMac's RAM to 1gb, possibly 2gb, but unless your buying so charged RAM it is so cheap that this is a moot point.

In the UK an iMac with 1gb costs just over £1k including taxes that a business would get back, running in a Windows environment it will perform much higher than it's advertised clock speed because the iMac architecture is genuinely much quicker than a conventional PC - I did a benchmark test on one yesterday that astounded me when I compared it to my PC, the iMac was much faster.

What this means is there's some tasks the iMac will do quicker than my PC which cost £100 more before I bought the screen for it. However the iMac would loose out heavily doing 3D rendering and be a bit slower doing video work ... so it's all down to what you need the computer for as to whether it will perform well enough.

With regards warranty the iMac comes with a 1yr warranty which is comparable to most of the bits inside my custom built PC - my RAID array is warrantied for longer. Apple's are a very reliable brand, so it's 6 of one and half a dozen of the other.

You're talking about the Mac in relation to business, in which case if it's mission critical a warranty doesn't cut it anyway - and neither does skimping on price. If it's not mission critical then you still either want contracted support or an office backup machine so you aren't left hanging if something does go wrong - which historically with Apple there's very little chance of - wouldn't the cheap base spec iMac serve as an excellent backup machine if the worst happens?

If it's mission critical then forget moaning about price, if you skimp on a mission critical machine and dont invest in redundancy then you deserve bankruptcy.


I'm not saying the iMac is better, I think they look far too ugly (designed by a 7 year old) to be put anywhere near my home office. I'm just saying it is a serious contender on spec and price when I compare it to my PC. The performance of the thing really does fly, and even with their lowly RAM small Hard Disk base specification they punch a heck of a weight for the price.

I find the 512mb RAM in my iBook enough and despite being a 1.4 ghz processor it's much faster than an equivilant Windows laptop.

The main use for Macs are in photographic work where they are the industry standard due to their OS level colour profiling setup with the display you are using in mind. The same level of colour profiling cannot be acheived on a Windows, not that this is usually a problem but when doing proffessional photography you have to be able to see the exactly same colours on the screen as they will be in print.

Quote from ajp71 :

The main use for Macs are in photographic work where they are the industry standard due to their OS level colour profiling setup with the display you are using in mind. The same level of colour profiling cannot be acheived on a Windows, not that this is usually a problem but when doing proffessional photography you have to be able to see the exactly same colours on the screen as they will be in print.

I don't wish to be argumentative on this topic, but.. tosh!

The Mac isn't industry-standard. It may be MAC-industry-standard, but it's just not true any more to say it's INDUSTRY-industry-standard. There really isn't such a thing. Unless you're referring to an historical pointer, it's a myth.

Also, I am sure you didn't mean to imply that it's not possible to do accurate colour profiling on a PC. Of course it's just as possible to do as it is on a Mac.

I deal with a lot of publishers and some now don't even know what a pantone is, colour matching is not the critical issue it used to be. Although coloursync is still a feature of MacOS it's mostly redundant and little used.

You know, I'm going to head out of this before the trash talking hits Richter scale 6...

Macs suck just as much Windows PCs suck. They all crash, they all break, they all complain to me about something and in the end they all ask me "Are you sure?".
But if I had the income to invest in work-suited Macs, I would gladly do so and be happy, dance with the fairies, post at the forums about the joy of dancing with Steve Job's magic dust fairies while my productivity goes through the roof.

But unfortunatly it doesn't work that way.

You seem to imply that doing work without a Mac instantly makes one's business second-class and worth only of bankcrupty. And for someone who is unwilling to buy overpriced (because of market shares, I know) hardware you say they are skimping on price, when they can do the same work with hardware costs of 2/3? You must be joking. I'm not going to even write an example how nutty that argument is.

Quote from ajp71 :

The main use for Macs are in photographic work where they are the industry standard due to their OS level colour profiling setup with the display you are using in mind. The same level of colour profiling cannot be acheived on a Windows, not that this is usually a problem but when doing proffessional photography you have to be able to see the exactly same colours on the screen as they will be in print.

Thats no longer true, Windows has gotten CYMK Support in Photoshop, so saying that macs are image machines are a load, they are very good, but windows PC's can be just as good.

In normal publishing it's less important but in glossy magazines and jewlery/fashion brochures colour matching is very important and Macs are what most studio photographers use. Windows can do what Macs do but they've never come setup to do the job and colour syncing them with post script printers is supposed to be alot of work. None of us really know what we are talking about but my uncle (who is a professional photographer) says there is no alternative to Macs for this work and are what all use.

Umm.. I'm a professional photographer, and I don't use Macs any more. And actually when I think about it, none of the other pro photographers I know still use a Mac either.

Sure, I used one at art college, and I bought one for my biz when I started editing my own images, but at some point common sense took over and I realised that while I had been admiring my Mac and its capabilities, the rest of the world had continued moving forward around me. I had to stop listening to Steve Jobs' completely unrealistic spiel, and the Mac User relay service/self-perpetuating, unpaid media department.

And, unless things have become REALLY smart on Macs, they weren't ever before ready for absolutely perfect colour matching out of the box any more than PCs. You still have to go through the motions on both to get perfect colours.

Octane magazine (which came to my house to do a photoshoot the other day) use Windows based PC's to produce most, if not all of the magazine. Doesn't prove anything, but I thought I'd add it anyway.

Quote from SamH :

Umm.. I'm a professional photographer, and I don't use Macs any more. And actually when I think about it, none of the other pro photographers I know still use a Mac either.

Intresting to know which field of photography your in, my uncle says he knows no London based studio photographers who use Windows and about 50% of the publishers use Macs (a lot more than the 2% globally). Despite being intrested in Bootcamp he says he can't see windows becoming substancially used in his field in the near future.

TBH Octane magazine's photography isn't the same industry as this jewlery type photography work (my uncle is currently finishing an 18 month project) where the images have to look perfect for millionare customers in a glossy A3 brochure

I'm not London-based, I'm freelance and currently based in Yorkshire. I now primarily photograph the Dales and have postcards printed. I do less photography now than ever before, and work primarily in web development and business process redevelopment/web enablement (where the money is).

From what you say, it sounds like Windows already is established in this field, except for niche markets like photography for the consumption of millionaires. Certainly where I am, Windows is thoroughly established. Not even my printer uses Macs any more (and they really did fight to keep them). Perhaps here in the north, we're more value-for-money oriented. Yorkshiremen are notoriously tight-fisted, after all.

Quote from dUmAsS :

http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/ just run lfs on windows in your mac

did anyone tested this already? I get my macbook pro soon but very curious

Sam, if you can point me somewhere that explains how to set up a windows system of computers/monitors/printers to have even halfway decent colour matching, I'd be eternally grateful.
I'm an architect and we have a devils job getting our repro printed stuff to look anything whatsoever like we see on our screens.
The whole ICC profile thing in windows is just bewildering.