<p>everything just changed... i have a 433ghz g4 with 256mb ram and 160gig hard drive.. i was gonna buy a new mac laptop, but they just announced the new intel processors, which will make the next line of macs much faster and cheaper.. theyll be out within the next year.. i would wait another year to buy a mac if you can afford to.. theyre gonna need to switch all the software to the new platform.</p>
<p>Actually it won't be until 2007 that the x86 chip is going to be used in Macs. And I'm sure there are going to be a lot of people who hack the chip to allow Windows to be ran on it.</p>
<p>No, they said that they will have macs using Intel processors this time next year, and that all macs will have Intel processors by the end of 2007.</p>
<p>And why would someone want to hack a mac to allow Windows to be installed? Wouldn't it be the other way around? Mac OS X on a cheap or home built PC?</p>
<p>So I guess there will never be a PowerBook G5 after all....</p>
<p>
[quote]
Who pays for spyware removal? The best ones: AdAware, Spybot, etc. are free. So if you're paying for spyware removal then that has to do with the person not the computer.
[/quote]
Ad-aware, Spybot, and Microsoft AntiSpyware alone are entirely insufficient to clean off spyware completely (or even mostly in the majoriy of cases). If you are only using these programs, you probably still have some on there. A good way of telling is by hitting ctrl+alt+del and going to the "processes" tab. Then, google all of the ones that are being run by that user. See if they were considered malicious by other people.</p>
<p>It is possible that you do not have spyware, but that probably just means you are more prudent and intelligent than the usual computer user.</p>
<p>I concur that Dell's have cheap hardware; so it's no surprise that you can get a Dell for cheaper. Also, Apple's are measured differently so while you can get a PC with ostensibly better numbers for cheaper, it wouldn't be the equivalent to a Mac (in other words, a 1 gHz Mac might be equal to a 2 gHz PC--just for theoretical example, of course!)</p>
<p>Sorry for any incoherentness... I'm going to bed now.</p>
<p>AdAware & Spybot are entirely sufficient to remove any and all spyware. I help people all of the time with spyware/virus problems (even on Macs), and what programs do I install? AdAware & Spybot! This completely removes all of the spyware and 99% of the time I never get a call from them again.</p>
<p>And yes, Dell's have cheapER hardware, but it is far from cheap. I mean, doesn't it make sense that it is cheaper because the overall price is cheaper? Otherwise it would be expensive. I had a Dell for 4 years and nothing ever went wrong with it. There are also several other people I know who have Dells, and they have had minimal to zero problems.</p>
<p>The point you made about hardware is only true for one piece of hardware: the processor. PowerPC's are clocked differently than Pentium 4s; you have to multiply the PowerPC speed by 1.5 to get the Pentium speed. However, RAM and hard drive space are the exact same with both systems. When I was comparing systems, I was taking the processor difference into account, and I still came out with a better processor than the Mac.</p>
<p>With that said, I'm done arguing about PC's and Mac's. I trust the OP will make a good choice based on what he/she has seen in this thread so far.</p>
<p>Ok, as am I. I'll throw in the towel on the Mac/PC discussion that has been well, exhausted.</p>
<p>but,
[quote]
AdAware & Spybot are entirely sufficient to remove any and all spyware. I help people all of the time with spyware/virus problems (even on Macs), and what programs do I install? AdAware & Spybot! This completely removes all of the spyware and 99% of the time I never get a call from them again.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>It's my job to do this, and I make a great income. The majority of the time, if you just run Spybot & Adaware, the computer will not be clean. Now, this does not mean you are lying--you could be dealing with people who are prudent and only get minimal spyware. Or you could be lucky! But the nasty ones keep coming back--this has happened to me even after I have done a manual clean, run spybot/adaware, and installed all of the updates.</p>
<p>It is possible that adaware and spybot have made strides recently, but still, to say that they clean off all spyware is just well wrong.</p>
<p>Another possibility is that spyware/adaware aren't detecting the spyware (this has happened plenty of times too). Check in the processes list.</p>
<p>alright ------ first off. There is no reason to "hack a mac to run windows". Jobs and others announced at WWDC that the new macintels (or whatever you wish to call them) will be able to windows if you so chose. BUT they have said that MacOS will not run on a machine typically designed for windows. So its basically the new macs (due out 2006/2007) will be able to run two OS' while other PCs will only be able to run one OS: windows. </p>
<p>Second: its this time next year it looks like they will <em>start</em> placing the intel chip in their boxes, and by 2007 the full line of Macs will carry the chip. </p>
<p>Third: Macs bought now with a PPC chip (instead of the x86 chip that Apple will start to use in 2006) will be obsolete in a few years because software and hardware manufacturers will stop building programs and hardware compatible with the PPC chip --- So, word of warning. . . (and this is coming from one of the most loyal Apple customers you would ever meet) buying a new Mac at this moment isn't the wisest investment. Its only a matter of time before Apple and other developers stop releasing programs for the PPC chip, and this won't be an easy upgrade like from OS9 to X. Instead this means having to get an entirely new system eventually. ::cries:: </p>
<p>Darn; And I was just about to buy a new Powerbook before Jobs dropped this mini-bombshell.</p>
<p>They arent really going to go obsolete any faster than they would anyways. It will be like the 68k->PPC switch except much cleaner becuase the devtools are ready for this. It would probobly be better to buy one now just so you have one before the switch (altivec is so much better than any of the lame intel extensions). Maybe the hardware developers will stop but thats ok because how much new hardware is developed for 3 year old systems now? It is just extensions of old parts because the development goes on with the new busses (hell, my PC laptop is still under warranty and I cant buy more RAM because they don't make large sizes in that style...they moved onto the new systems).</p>
<p>yeah, mac OSX was designed so that it can switch platforms easily... itll just be a simple version update on the system to make it compatible with files and programs from the new platform... obsolete isnt exactly the right word.. its just that a computer you buy today wont be state-of-the-art for long. </p>
<p>and your wrong about when theyre going to ship. Intel and apple have already been working on this together secretly, they should be ready to ship with part of the line within a few months, youll be able to buy a macintel by june of 2006 is what jobs said.
The only debate is which one.. most likely theyll introduce it on the Power PC.. which prices it out of most of our range, but there is some talk about it being introduced on the mac mini. Im sure once the first ones come out in june 06, they wont wait long to follow with the whole line. </p>
<p>Also, apple would be dumb to wait a whole year, or more than a year, to make this available to consumers, because they know that people will think like us that they are buying an obsolete machine... so tehy wont buy, and sales go down, which is bad news for the company. If they werent gonna sell em till 07, they wouldve waited to make the announcement.</p>
<p>I believe that Apple has a very good platform and they make very good hardware. However, Apple doesn't have control of the market like Microsoft does. Because of this, some applications are not available for the Mac platform. Sure, the major titles are available for both Mac and PC, but there are still speciality applications that are only available for the Windows OS.</p>
<p>I believe that Apple has a very good platform and they make very good hardware. However, Apple doesn't have control of the market like Microsoft does. Because of this, some applications are not available for the Mac platform. Sure, the major titles are available for both Mac and PC, but there are still speciality applications that are only available for the Windows OS.</p>
<p>They won't be obsolete as the new software developed will be compatible with both PPC and Intel versions of OS X. The new Xcode produces fat binaries which have code for both x86 and PowerPC processors.
<a href="http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/tradeshows/2005/WWDC/universalbinary.jpg%5B/url%5D">http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/tradeshows/2005/WWDC/universalbinary.jpg</a></p>
<p>It will be harder on people who purchase Rev A Mactels than people who have PowerPC's because a good bit of the software they will want to run will have to be translated through Rosetta, which will give them a bit of a speed loss. The software will run, but not as well as if running natively.</p>
<p>sorry - I meant the computers being ready to ship for consumers -- the developers kit is ready to ship in two weeks, i did know that; but how many of us have the $500 developers membership and an extra $1000 to <em>rent</em> that system. Jobs indicated that this time next year we would be seeing this first version of Macintels for consumers.</p>
<p>And . . . obsolete was the word I was looking for. The PPC technology will no longer be used and will become obsolete. And I tend to expect the span of my computers to last a good while -- and I consider more than 4 years a good while. A four year time frame is about the lifespan I'm putting on a new PPC mac if you want to continue to use the most modern programs and hardware. </p>
<p>And, I re-listened to Jobs entire keynote tonight, and just hearing him talk about it again makes me feel a little safer inside over the whole transition. In the long run, this is probably a great move for apple; in the short run the decrease in hardware sales is going to hurt some until the new machines are released. The transition doesn't seem like it will be extremely difficult to developers and relatively easy for consumers like the 9 to X transition. Inside, it looks like it will be nicer on the developers and than the consumers will be the ones more affected by having to upgrade their actual hardware and systems.</p>
<p>A lot of the transition (and utility of the PPC computers released now) relies on developers continuing to develop apps that are PPC compatible. If this remains the case, then the PPC machines will have a much longer utility life. If developers start scrapping PPC compatibilty, then its going to hurt sooner.</p>
<p>"Sure, the major titles are available for both Mac and PC, but there are still speciality applications that are only available for the Windows OS."</p>
<p>There are also plenty of special apps that are only available for OSX or that are only available for Linux (though those have a higher probobility of being ported to OSX and even windows). There is more than one way to solve a problem and there will probobly be a solution for every major platform. If you have a specific problem for which there is only a solution on select platforms, then there is no point to even think about it, you need THAT platform (be it mac/windows/*nix).</p>
<p>heh <a href="http://omid.tomshardware.com/%5B/url%5D">http://omid.tomshardware.com/</a></p>
<p>Two good articles on the Apple transition to Intel chips and the impact it may have for students needing to purchase a computer for the upcoming fall '05 term. </p>
<p>These are my comments and quotes from the CC Confidential Cafe "PC or Mac" thread:</p>
<p>"Neither Jobs nor Otellini revealed which chips Apple was expected to use initially, nor in which computers they would first appear, though experts expect them to first show up in laptops.</p>
<p>Bill Davies, secretary of Mac-Nexus, the Sacramento-area Macintosh users group, said the Apple desktop G5 is a powerful machine, but he can't say the same for Apple's laptops.</p>
<p>"Mac laptops are underpowered, and as the trend is for people to expect 'desktop' performance from a laptop, Apple needs to fix that," he wrote in an e-mail." (MacNewsWorld)</p>
<p>(My take on the transition to Intel based on articles taken from the last couple of days from the NYT)</p>
<p>"And where is the G5 laptop? Why couldn't IBM (the maker of the G5 chip) engineer a less power hungry and hot running mobile version for the PowerBook models? Why did Steve Jobs go with Intel? According to Jobs, Intel's mobile Pentium chips provide better performance and less heat (on a per watt basis) and power consumption than the G5 was capable of. In the race for performance, battery life and cost, Jobs decided that Intel was the way to go. He knew that within the next year the G5 would be a "dead end" given IBM's reluctance to improve on a product line that represented only 2% of their East Fishkill, NY chip plant's capacity...</p>
<p>Projecting the performance levels of Apple laptops against Wintel based machines, the future looked bleak given the delays from IBM which from 1999 to 2005 has barely broken even selling the G series chips to Apple. According to the NYT, Jobs demanded that IBM sell the G chips to Apple at steeper discounts. IBM decided not to sell at a loss and "politely declined" his offer. IBM stands to make more money selling versions of the G chips to Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo for their gaming consoles than to Apple. </p>
<p>After the annual Developers Meeting this past Monday, most Apple centric websites were adopting a wait and see attitude about how well the new Intel based machines would perform. This is especially true in the laptop market. This year already, laptops sales have surpassed desktops and this is the market that raised the biggest concerns at Apple. At the higher end of the laptop market where the PowerBooks reside, Jobs correctly analyzed that Wintel machines would start pulling away and put Apple at a competitive disadvantage despite the superiority of their OS X. </p>
<p>All of this raises some serious concerns for students in the market for laptops going into the fall 2005 term. The new and improved Apple Intel based machines are scheduled to go on sale in 2006 and the complete Apple line will finish moving to the Intel platform by 2007. Apple claims that neither the current PowerBooks nor IBooks will be obsolete. And I believe that claim. But I also believe that Apple is renowned for its innovation and styling. The new Apple Intel laptops will make a big splash when they're introduced. But will students buying an Apple laptop for the '05 fall term suffer from "buyers" remorse when the Intel systems hit the market in the spring of '06?</p>
<p>(It is unclear exactly when Apple laptops will transition over to the Intel chip. Some say earlier, some say later... )</p>
<p>Good luck making a decision!</p>
<p>I really do hope that apple uses the Pentium-M (or similar) everywhere instead of those god-awful p4 chips.</p>
<p>The M's are much more fitting to apples image; raw power instead of clockspeed, cool running/quiet, more of a "finesse" chip than a brute force chip.</p>
<p>Ottothecow: A growing number of Mac Industry pundits apparently agree: <a href="http://www.cio-today.com/news/Apple-s-Move-to-the-Dark-Side/story.xhtml?story_id=02300000HW1A%5B/url%5D">http://www.cio-today.com/news/Apple-s-Move-to-the-Dark-Side/story.xhtml?story_id=02300000HW1A</a></p>
<p>"But more importantly for Apple's wider community was the realization that for Apple to stay at the forefront of computer innovation it had to team up with a company able to deliver high powered performance in laptop computers. </p>
<p>Mobile computing is rapidly becoming the most important and profitable sector in the industry. Sales of laptops surpassed desktop sales for the first time ever in May but it is the one area where Apple is lagging far behind the WinTel machines. </p>
<p>This was best explained on the ubergeek website Ars Technica in a post entitled "Hell Freezes Over" in reference to Apple's previously unthinkable switch to Intel. </p>
<p>"Portables are the place where Apple is hurting the most, due to IBM's inability to deliver," wrote site editor John "Hannibal" Stokes. "I don't really have to go into much detail about the current, pathetic state of Apple's portable line. </p>
<p>In marked contrast to the currently stagnating G4, the Pentium M is fast, and Centrino is a great, full-featured, low-cost mobile platform that just kills anything that Apple could hope to offer. Apple needs the Pentium M in its mobile line, and it needs it yesterday."</p>
<p>Does anyone else see a possible conflict of interests on IBM's part?</p>
<p>IBM makes the best PC laptops out there and is then expected to provide the chips for the Apple laptops which are most on par with IBM quality (rather than any other laptop manufacturer). IBM would have no real interest in a small, low-power ppc970 except to sell to apple as all of their own ppc systems are large scale preformance beasts rather than compact portables.</p>