<p>"Most people aren’t concerned with these things. There’s a difference between someone who wants to just browse the web and someone who wants to use a command line. One of the bigger differences is that the first group makes up most of the market.</p>
<p>As for having a real Unix console, the OS X terminal has significant deficiencies which are extremely frustrating. One example is the use of a a case-insensitive filesystem, which drives me crazy to no end. There’s an option during the OS X install to use a case-sensitive filesystem, but of course, that would introduce incompatibilities with many OS X applications, which is what usually happens if you attempt to stray from Apple’s narrowly defined consumer experience.</p>
<p>Another example is the lack of adherence to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. The combination of capital letters in common directory names with a case-insensitive filesystem leads to tab completion nightmares."</p>
<p>What drives me nuts the most is the direction of the slash. The other stuff is relatively easy to live with. On VMS, things are different enough so that I don’t get things mixed up. HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Linux and Mac OSX I find easy to navigate.</p>
<p>“Same here, most people aren’t developing, and they definitely aren’t using virtual machines or worrying about the number of bits per instruction in their processors.”</p>
<p>I’ve always been surprised at the number of people (or companies) that by Pac Pros. Apparently there are a lot of content people out there that need the 4 - 32 GB of RAM that you can stuff into these machines.</p>
<p>A few years ago, there was the consideration of selling applications as virtual machine appliances. VMWare provided the tools to do this and a library of available VM appliances. I don’t know how popular this is today but it does make for an interesting way to deliver applications with the simplicity of not requiring the end user to install the program. It also provides compartmentalization of applications.</p>
<p>The IT trends that I’ve seen are moving towards virtualization as it reduces hardware and system management costs and Goldman Sachs has produced a report talking about a huge push to cut costs in 2009 by IT departments.</p>
<p>As far as bitness goes, it’s already an issue because Vista x64 machines are in consumer stores.</p>
<p>“You wouldn’t happen to be talking about the MacBook Air would you? After all, it doesn’t matter how long the battery lasts, seeing as you can’t remove it. And if it dies, you get to send it in to Apple to have them replace it, for an expensive fee, of course.”</p>
<p>No, I think that the MacBook Air is a dud of a product. I do work with someone that has one and he loves it but I think that he prefers his Mac Pro for real work. The current MacBook Air is a throwaway. It uses the previous generation Intel chip and makes too many compromises for style and elegance. The battery difference is in the operating system.</p>
<p>“In the real world, most users don’t care about the things on which you’re basing your computer purchasing decisions.”</p>
<p>They already have to make decisions based on bitness.</p>
<p>“Apple is doing well because of their supreme marketing. That’s what draws most people to their computers. They like the advertisements and think the Macs look good.”</p>
<p>Apple has good marketing but they also have a good product. I have one of their $3,000 laptops and it’s like driving a luxury car.</p>