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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ptanner who wrote (154944)	1/11/2002 10:11:45 PM
From: tcmay	Respond to of 186894

"You might enjoy this opinion by Bill Machrone on trying to do video editing on a PC which concludes: "My wife, bless her heart, asked, "How do normal people do this?" Drew and I answered in unison, "They buy a Mac."" Thanks for the URL...it was hilarious. It reminded me of the old Jerry Pournelle columns in "Byte," when he'd go on and on about the hoops he was jumping through to get "Zeke" or one of his other PCs to do something. I talked to him at a Hackers Conference some years back and asked him point blank why he put himself through so much trouble when a Mac would do it painlessly. "Because then I wouldn't have a column." That, and no doubt the fact that most of his readers were PC users. And his columns were entertainingly written. Yesterday I bought a new G4 Titanium Powerbook. Built in combo drive (reads DVD, writes CDRs and CD-RWs), Radeon Mobility graphics, etc. And it runs (and includes) all the usual stuff: iMovie 2 (which makes Machrone's problems vanish in a puff of white smoke), iTunes, iPhoto, etc., plus all of my usual apps: Microsoft Office X, Mathematica, Mail, Thoth (a newsreader), Explorer, OmniWeb, Create, Squeak, and on and on. Apple has some advantages that neither Intel nor Microsoft have: it controls the basic architecture, so it doesn't get swamped in zillions of incompatible pieces of hardware and the concomitant complexity Machrone talked about. Things like Firewire (IEEE 1394) have been in all new Macs for about 3 years now, giving a standard base for all vendors to assume. (USB is from the PC world, and is equally supported.) Intel of course has substantial advantages. A 90% market share for x86 processors is important, and the PC has substantially more total apps. Fortunately, I mostly use apps that are not so obscure as to not be ported to the Mac. (I'm sure you all know that a lot of the early Windows apps, including Excel, PowerPoint, Pagemaker, Quark, etc. were all first done for the Mac.) As an Intel investor for 27 years, I'm happy to see a lot of Intel CPUs sold. But as a user of GUI interface machines since my Symbolics LISP Machine days circa 1985, I prefer Macs. And my new Titanium is a dream. Ahhhh.... --Tim May