On Sat, 2003-04-19 at 16:20, Aryan Ameri wrote: > On Saturday 19 April 2003 20:59, Shri Shrikumar wrote: > > On Sat, 2003-04-19 at 18:08, Aryan Ameri wrote: > > > Well, they might look cool, but I guess when it comes to design, > > > nothing beats a Mac. If there is one company with an absoloute > > > advantage in design, that's Apple. > > > > Very true.How good is debians support of the apple platform. Is it > > worth me considering buying an apple laptop next ? > > PPC people seems to be active, and usually I see many packages for ppc. > PPC support might not compete with i386 (for example I have heard that > MPlayer doesn't work on non-i386 machines perfectly), but it seems to > be useable and stable. > > I am also thinking of buying an iBook. I admit, they are a bit more > expensive than their i386 counterparts, but anyway, I am thinking > different :-) > > But one issue which makes me think twice when buying a Mac, is their low > processor speed. Sure, i know that clock speed isn't everything, and > AMD has really proved it I guess, but still when I see that 800 Mhz > Power G3 sentence, I get a strange feeling ... > > Cheers > -- > /* Impeach God */ > --RMS > Aryan Ameri The clock speed would matter if the cpus took the same number of clock ticks to do each instruction, but i386-style cpus typically take more ticks per instruction in many cases. Their effective speeds are comparable if not still slightly in favour of the PowerPC in terms of what is on the market at any particular point, although my understanding is that the gap is narrowing. I have to admit that while I like the hardware design decisions made by Apple, I personally can't see myself paying *that much more* for laptop hardware that I would then run Linux on (unless it was dual booting with MacOS X,) when I can get relatively similar hardware based on i386 for noticeably less. However, an iMac with the flat panel screen running Linux would make sense to me as an excellent workstation and head to a number of headless servers running additional computing resources, particularly with a wide screen. Just my preference, though. -- Mark L. Kahnt, FLMI/M, ALHC, HIA, AIAA, ACS, MHP ML Kahnt New Markets Consulting Tel: (613) 531-8684 / (613) 539-0935 Email: kahnt@hosehead.dyndns.org
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