What do you think of Macs?

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This is true, instead of developing OSX as a Unix flavor, they could have bought out Be Inc., who went into recievership about a year after the launch of OSX. -- That would have been a great system.

I think using BSD as a basis for the Darwin kernel was a perfectly good idea, especially at the time. Not only is the kernel high quality and stable, they partially solved one of the biggest problems with the Mac, that it has less software than any other major OS.

Their UI fell short. They did a number of things (window button placement) that were done just to do it differently from Windows. If iOS had come out after Android, they would have done the same type of thing and iOS would have suffered for it.

The button placement for Mac OS has *always* been on the left. They didn't change it because they didn't want to alienate their users at the time. Personally, I prefer the OS X UI over Windows by far. Every time I switch back to Win7 from OS X I end up aggravating the living hell outta myself. Things like the ability to scroll through a window without bringing it into focus is extremely helpful, and living without such things adds up quickly. The ability to close windows from an application without actually closing the application, while being the biggest change to get used to, is also extremely powerful because you don't have to worry about application start-up times. This holds especially true with large applications like Adobe's creative suite.

The other extremely nice thing about OS X's UI is it's *consistent*. Apple put quite a lot of time into making UI development extremely easy - as long as you follow their specifications. At the end of the day it means that every application you use has a consistent look and feel, which is a lot more than I can say about Windows and especially everything *nix

I wouldn't know, the only apps I use on a Mac are Google Chrome, uTorrent, Microsoft Office, VLC Player, and XCode. Of those only XCode is really Mac native, and it makes me want to punch the screen every 3 minutes.

They're certainly nice and seem well built enough, but I don't see the point. I can put OSX on any modern laptop, and then more or less have a Mac. I mean Mac does have nice looking, feeling, etc, hardware, it is a "premium" product, so yeah, but I don't have premium dollars. If I did have premium dollars, well, I'd spend it on something else besides a flashy little PC that's upgrades consist of throwing it out and buying a new one.

For me, I went through sort of a "Get a Mac" moment, I got a virus on my Windows PC, first tried Ubuntu, then went to Crunchbang Linux and things for the most part have been peachy. Crunchbang for me has been very much "It just works!" as far as my computing experience, just I've had a lot of trouble installing programs with the whole repository thing, that and I just suck at Linux. But besides that, "It just works!" Seriously, my PC boots up and I can be online and watching youtube in under a minute, and it's a crappy little 2ghz eMachines.

At this price I would rather buy a PC that is very good at playing games, something you can't say about a Mac.

Agreed, xcode makes me want to punch babies.

I've always liked Macs for some reason. If I had the money, I would buy one. I suppose I could whore myself out for the money for one, but that seems a tad too risky.

I know plenty of people who buy Macs and install Windows or Linux on them. People who do that are people for whom the price difference between a Mac and a similarly specced non-Mac isn't a serious issue, and who don't care that the god damn HDMI port is missing or that they just spent 3 grand and Apple couldn't afford a third or fourth USB port on a laptop the size of a small table.

gnome shell > windows or mac
its not even a choice really,you will never hear of a shell that you can customize with javascript and css besides gnome,
BUT nix is pretty damn hard to get used to, in linux 75% of your time goes to google on how to get stuff done, and when you finished doing it, you find something else to procrastinate.but its the linux way of live i guess,

currently i am like perfectly capable of running linux without knowing what iam actually doing,
guess i have to start reading a linux book or something

With the death of steve jobs, it will go down hill.

You should start pulling out of mac.

Yes, but Cinnamon >> gnome shell.

My feelings on both Macs and Windows is easily shown by this and this, respectively (by which I mean in that order, I have little respect for Windows, and even less for Macs). Macs USED to be good, back when they were doing all the new stuff nobody else did (different fonts, floppy drives, etc) but now they are just overpriced computers with a crap OS, giving its mostly (computer)-illiterate users a reason to stop being depressed. Only thing I like about Macs is the cases look kinda cool (Ive got one here that eventually Im going to strip out the inside, which was destroyed by a coolant leak, and put in new stuff, when I have money to do it). Linux is way better OS, and you can find or build a better computer for a fraction the cost of a new Mac.

I think both calling Mac OS "crap" and calling Linux "a really good OS" are exaggerations. The Mac OS UI could be a lot better than it is, but it's hard to see it as worse than any UI available on Linux at the moment. All of the Linux UIs including Ubuntu's Unity are about as polished as chopped firewood. I'm sorry, there's no getting around it. Linux has what I believe is the best kernel of any current OS in circulation anywhere, but despite that it is getting crusty in a number of places. Linux is "a really good OS" for specific cases.

Apple was just steve jobs. Its too centralized, you can see this in the way they treat there app system.

Now that he is dead. Things are very uncertain.

You are correct that Apple is uber-centralized, they like to control every aspect of everything that goes into their products including materials several steps down the supply chain, or aspects of diagnostic software supplied by HW vendors that don't even really affect them. Let's see how the next few years shape up. They are going to get some new competition.