A Month with a Mac: A Die-Hard PC User's Perspective
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 8, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Mac
Perfect Multi-tasking
So far, I've described OS X's multi-tasking as very similar to what is currently available under Windows, but where OS X sets itself apart is in a little feature called Exposé (note that typing an accented "e" is extremely easy under OS X - ALT-e followed by the "e" key or any vowel will do just that).By default, Exposé is activated by one of three function keys - F9, F10 or F11. Each function key serves a different purpose, each of which is a feature of Exposé. The theory behind Exposé is simple: it is a way of getting to a specific window on your desktop as fast as possible.
We start with our cluttered desktop...
Click to enlarge.
Hitting F9, for example, will cause Exposé to zoom out all of your active visible (unhidden) windows and essentially, tile them across your desktop. Then, using either the keyboard or the mouse, you can select the window that you want and everything goes back to normal, with the window that you have selected appearing in the foreground. The rest of the windows are untouched and are all in their original positions. The window that you selected is also in its original position; it is simply moved to the front so that you can see it.
Hitting F9 activates Exposé across all applications.
Click to enlarge.
If you don't want to Exposé all windows, you can just Exposé the windows within a particular application (F10 by default), which is extremely handy for dealing with tons of images in Photoshop for example.
Hitting F10 activates Exposé across only a single application's windows.
Click to enlarge.
Another example of Exposé's usefulness in editing all of the images for this article in Photoshop.
Click to enlarge.
The final Exposé function lets you view your desktop (F11), which, to me, was like a more polished version of Windows-D, since after I was done doing whatever it is I needed to do on the desktop, Exposé deactivated and my screen was restored to its original state.
Hitting F11 reveals the desktop.
Click to enlarge.
The beauty of Exposé is difficult to convey in text alone. Honestly, the best way to evaluate it and understand its potential is to use it - luckily, there are Apple stores for this very purpose. Keep in mind that Exposé is very customizable as well and the three function keys that I mentioned above, although the defaults, are not the only ways that you can configure OS X to activate Exposé.
The benefits of Exposé are numerous. If you ever feel overwhelmed by having too many windows open, Exposé definitely alleviates that feeling as you don't have to tab through multiple applications to finally get to the window that you want. While Exposé does make having only a single display better, heavy multi-taskers will still enjoy the benefits of a dual display setup.
Since the OS X desktop environment is completely OpenGL accelerated, the performance of features like Exposé are not CPU limited - instead, they are GPU limited. Luckily, using Exposé with many windows open is not very stressful on even a Radeon 9600, but you do run out of video memory very quickly - in which case, your system ends up swapping to main memory over the AGP bus, making the Exposé animation considerably choppy. It seems that the sweet spot for more than a handful of windows open is around 128MB of video memory, with 256MB being perfect - needless to say, I found the mere 64MB that came on the Radeon 9600 which shipped with the system to be too little. There is no detriment to functionality if you don't have enough video memory; the Exposé animation simply becomes more choppy (which can be annoying on a $3000 system).
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brichpmr - Friday, October 8, 2004 - link
#53, I can't prove or disprove your statements; but the bottom line for me as a dual platform user, is that OSX is a very cool computing environment that gets better with every point release; it's very stable, malware free (so far) and lets a bunch of us earn a handsome income, even in a Windows-dominated enterprise....as a workhorse machine, the numbers become secondary to a user's productivity...the Mac is very productivity-friendly. I won't even mention how much fun it is to run F1 Championship Season in 1280 by 1024 with a nice Logitech force-feed wheel...whoever thinks the Mac can't play good games needs to re-think!gherald - Friday, October 8, 2004 - link
To #48 who says: "If a lot of PC users would open their minds and try using a Mac for 30 days: they would appreciate what us mac users like about the platform."My answer is: The usefulness of this article is that we don't HAVE to spend time and money doing that. We get to read about someone else doing it -- someone who's opinion we trust.
This is the most fair minded Mac review I have ever seen. Kudos to Anand for giving us insights on a platform that is too expensive for most of us to afford to try out on our own.
The $3000 price tag is interesting. I recently built 2 AMD64 machines for somewhat less money: A 3400 for windows, and a 3200 for Linux. There is no doubt in my mind that this was the best value, especially since I play a number of windows-only games but prefer Linux for everything else. I don't think the Mac even comes close to beating the power, compatibility, and flexibility of such an approach, at least for my purposes.
skiboysteve - Friday, October 8, 2004 - link
cindy are you kidding me?ALl it takes is one air cooled 2.4ghz Athlon64 to match a DUAL WATER COOLED 2.5ghz G5.
Not to mention a single air cooled 2.4 A64 is cheaper.
And that barefeats article is so laughable, one of the shadiest configurations of hardware i've ever seen... not trustable at all.
I dont have the info in front of me, but there was a G5 bench mark from an actual hardware website worth something and the G5 got smoked on single proc. and only matched with dual.
And where the hell did you pull the PPC970 does more ops per clcok than an Athlon64 info? It has a 16 stage integer pipe, gee, hmm, thats 25% more than an athlon64. Now I know your going to say it can have 200 operations in flight, but... "So while the 970 may be theoretically able to accommodate a whopping 200 instructions in varying stages of fetch, decode, execution and completion, the reality is probably that under most circumstances a decent number of its valuable execution slots will be empty on any given cycle due to dispatch, scheduling, and completion limitations."
(http://arstechnica.com/cpu/02q2/ppc970/ppc970-5.ht...
The problem with the PPC970 is its long pipe wide execution scheme would be good but it doesnt have enough resources to fill the wide ass pipe and all the execution units, which is exactly as expected becasue its a cut power4 chip. "The 970's integer hardware was designed to deliver 64-bit integer performance, and it was also designed with the ridiculously large caches of the Power4 in mind. When it you decrease the cache sizes to desktop computing levels and run 32-bit code on it, it starts to look less impressive next to the P4."
Your "facts" are terribly flawed and I just had to post about this because somehow no one else did.
The PPC970 is the best chip the Mac has ever had, but its clock is not high enough, its too hot, and its operations per clock are no where near the G4, and behind the A64.
(http://arstechnica.com/cpu/03q1/ppc970/ppc970-1.ht...
I realize this probably comes off as a massive PC-bias attack on you, but honestly, get your facts straight before you start praising the great PPC970 chip on a HARDWARE website, where people KNOW whats up.
Sakamura - Friday, October 8, 2004 - link
1st post. Mac user. Reader of AnandTech for a long time for PC needs and other cross-platform niceness.For the few answers I can provide that aren't already addressed in the 5x messages prior to mine:
- Applications are "packages" like explained. Some do use the Library to install ... And some ask for a admin password to add their kext in the system library. It all depends on the app.
- Caching is indeed very optimized. Still no Ext4 but very optimized. Thanks to BSD base.
- Search engine is not cached. It's a system service that allows you to sort and classify any sort of data. That's the same sorting algorithm that determines if a mail is spam or not. This is also used in file search, text search, dictionary and whatnot.
- User interface is not meant to be snappy. Strangely enough, I have almost the same user interface speed on my G3/400 than on a G5. But then, the actual work does slow down to a crawl when doing processor intensive tasks. Alas, today, this means Mail, Safari, Quicktime. But nonetheless other than the actual "work" being done on something, the interface remains decently fast all the time.
Great article, nice points.
Have a nice day
Mike
CU - Friday, October 8, 2004 - link
You can run X11 and all the open source stuff on Windows to. You just install cygwin. Don't some dist. offer running linux inside windows also.jecastej - Friday, October 8, 2004 - link
44 - "price to performance" is perfect if you need to justify a purchase to your office or IT department. Which maybe is the 98% of the cases.It may look like luxury but sometimes is necessary to value other human needs. Business creative environments benefit from aesthetics. Apple's software/hardware provides an alternative at a reasonable price to performance ratio. Won't kill to have this option.
punko - Friday, October 8, 2004 - link
Wow.And I thought Coke vs. Pepsi was bad.
All I can say is that as a computer user from way back (punch cards and PDP-11's anyone?) I have never owned or used a Mac (other than to print false birth certificates in high school to go to bars) but I have occasionally wondered what it would be like to have one.
Anand has a better understanding of the total breadth of the PC environment, and so is a perfect lens with which to view the Mac world from a PC user perspective.
All the bile and venom swishing around here in the comment trenches isn't worth worrying about.
Great article Anand. I know more is coming down the pipeline concerning the Macs; and even though I am dreaming of a AMD64 upgrade, I will read and consider the informed opinion of a knowledgable computer user.
Cheers.
rvirmani - Friday, October 8, 2004 - link
About as objective an article as you can expect from a hard core PC user (who makes most of his income from the PC World).I switched to the Mac 2 years ago, and went through the adjustment.
I think the key thing I want to point out is:
1) less irritation on a day to day basis
2) My system has never crashed ( although I do fix the "permissions" on a weekly basis using the built in disk utility
3) The other benefits of the mac are the iapps (Which Anand did not get around to looking at)
4) I use a Power Mac G4 with 2 Gig of Ram and it is plenty fast for day to day things like MS Office and Web research.
I think the "performance" mentality of many PC enthusiasts is really the biggest barrier (I like not worrying or thinking about the hardware too much).
5) OSX is much better at multi-tasking - even on a single processor machine.
If a lot of PC users would open their minds and try using a Mac for 30 days: they would appreciate what us mac users like about the platform.
A good start for Anand, and I look forward to more explorations of the Mac platform.
sprockkets - Friday, October 8, 2004 - link
err... that was 256MB of memory with 233MB used due to a shared SiS740 chipset in my Shuttle system and 165MB in swap, was running transcode and a few other smiple apps, such as Konqueror.sprockkets - Friday, October 8, 2004 - link
I find that browsing is fastest with Opera on any platform, yet it was almost as fast with IE and Firefox on a new install of Windows XP home. I only put 256MB of RAM in it yet it boots and runs applications quite nicely. I notice the delays in web pages when using FireFox in Linux, though I could care less (has 256MB too with.The bottom line is, you shouldn't have to use 1GB to 2 or even 4 GB of ram just to get a nice response time. That and dual 2.0GHZ is still available. That and browsing and multitasking shouldn't require DUAL 3.0GHZ PPC processors.
Another point, if Mac OSX was made for an X86 processor, I would buy it. But since it isn't, and SuSE 9.1 is free anyhow, with just as customizeable KDE or GNOME desktops, not to mention light and fast IceWM desktop, why bother.
Off topic, but doesn't Windows NT5 varients shut down after 45 days of uptime?