Applepeels

Some interesting numbers on Apple's Leopard, Ubuntu's Jaunty Jacalope and MS's Vista

There has been a bit of buzz on Ubuntu 9.04, a release also known as Jaunty Jackalope. 

I decided it would be a worthwhile project to compare boot times for Ubuntu 9.04, OS X 10.5.6, Windows Vista, and Windows XP.  I also wanted to see how fast Firefox would launch on each system.

Since I have these operating systems all running on a variety of not so new hardware, the tests are more for fun than for serious debate.

I have been an Ubuntu fan since version 5.04 which was called the Breezy Badger.  In December 2005, the Badger rescued me from some serious Suse Linux problems.

I ended up liking Ubuntu so much that I put it on my Dell Latitude D610 laptop from the fall of 2005.  The Dell laptop also has Windows XP.  It is a 1.6 GHz Pentium with 1.25 GB of RAM.  When I heard about Jaunty Jackalope, I decided to upgrade the old Dell laptop. It was running 7.04 or Feisty Fawn. That meant I had to do three upgrades before I could load the Jackalope.

The upgrades took a while but all went relatively seamlessly.  I got one error message and even sort of understood it to the point that I know it is not something that is impacting the system.

The new Microsoft commercials may have inspired me to do this since I want to grab the kid and tell him to grow some whiskers before he starts pontificating on which system is suitable for the not so serious computing that he is doing.

Running against the old Dell laptop in lane two is my summer of 2006 MacBook with two gigs of RAM, 2 Ghz Intel Core Duo, and OS X 10.5.6.

In lane three is my fall 2007 HP Pavilion dv6000 also with 2 gigs of RAM and Windows Vista Ultimate with Service Pack 1. It has an AMD Turion 64x2 TL-56 at 1.8 GHz

In lane four is my December 2004 Dual G5 with 1.8 GHz processors and 1.5 GB of RAM.  It is also running OS X 10.5.6. I did not change my work environments since I try to do the same things with Windows or Linux as I do with the Mac and Linux. All systems required me to type a password.  On the Linux system, I had to type user name and password.

I am not pretending that this is completely scientific.  However, the results did impress me.  When Windows 7 and Snow Leopard actually ship, I will try to do the test again.

Jaunty Jackalope was consistently the fastest booting system. My three boot average was 67 seconds.

Coming in at the number two position was my MacBook at 87 seconds.

Number three in the boot race was the Dual G5 system at 91 seconds.

The number four position went to the old Dell running XP with Service Pack 2 at 195 seconds.

Bringing up the rear was my HP Vista system at 225 seconds.

The Firefox contest was even more interesting.  I disabled all the weird extensions that I have to make the contest fair.

Firefox was timed right after the system booted.  Then I did a shutdown, a reboot, and another launch of Firefox so nothing would be cached.

First place on launching Firefox was a virtual tie between the Dual G5 Mac and the Dell Ubuntu system.  Both seemed to load Firefox in approximately 12 seconds.

Next in line was my MacBook which got Firefox loaded in around 15 seconds.

After that came the Dell running XP which loaded Firefox in 25 seconds.

Finally bringing up the rear was my HP laptop and Vista coming in at 35 seconds.

From the short amount of time that I have spent with the Jaunty Jackalope, I am very impressed.  The oldest and slowest laptop that I have now boots the fastest.  That is an impressive accomplishment.

I plugged the SD card reader that I use with my Macs into the Jaunty Jackalope laptop.  It immediately read the photos.  I have never been able to get Vista or XP to use that particular reader.

We all know that Vista is slow, that is not the new news.  The real news is that Jaunty Jackalope is fast even on old hardware.  It is not a Mac, but it is getting much closer to being a very usable system for lots of people.  The integration of iPhoto with iMovie and iDVD are the hardest thing to duplicate.  However as a very fast system to do email, browsing, and the majority of computer tasks, the Jackalope seems to be a great system.

All my email accounts were on the original installation of Linux.  All the accounts but one ended up successfully working with the latest version of Evolution.  More impressive was the ease with which I imported my digital certificate.  The eamil account with that attached certificate has been unable to send with Outlook for about six months.

This morning I ran the same tests with my faithful solid state Zonbu which I use for my gmail accounts.  It booted in 100 seconds.  It also launched Firefox in just 10 seconds, but I have to add the disclaimer that the version of Firefox was 2.0.0.12 so I do not think I should award it the Firefox crown.

It is good that the MS shopper finds his computer so quickly.  He is going to need all of his spare time booting up his Vista machine.

After digesting these results, stick your toe in our ocean waters.

Advice to a Windows friend from an Apple and XP user

This is a letter that I sent the other day in response to a letter from an old college friend who has a dying Windows XP machine.

The ironic thing is she copied another techie friend who has a XP machine.  He came back with essentially the same recommendation as me, buy an iMac.

_______________________________

In other news check out this post on a potential Mac Tablet for use with Electronic Medical Records.

_______________________________

Dear Sally,

I use both Macs and PCs every day.  I writing this on my Vista HP laptop.  I have been using Vista since Oct 08, and our desk computer at work is an ancient XP Dell.  I also have an inexpensive Zonbu Linux miniature desktop.  It is also in use every evening.

My personal opinion is that Vista is not very good software.  Windows 7 will likely be better, but if they add some of the eye candy that they added to the latest version of Office, it might not be better at all.

Recently I wrote on a post on this comment from John Dvorak who is not known for pro-Apple views.   This is his recent comment on Windows.

I'm tired of dealing with Windows malware, patch Tuesday, and the never-ending deterioration of the OS as it clogs up like a drain in a greasy-spoon restaurant. I can't take it anymore.

And there's something else that always bugs me about Windows. I have an iMac that I use at the office, and a few times every month Apple has some patch that it sends out. With few exceptions, each time a patch is installed with the Mac OS, the performance of the machine improves. With Windows, the performance always declines.

I don't think Microsoft has ever sent out a patch that improved the performance of the machine. Ever.

I actually agree with him 100%.  My Windows laptop is very good hardware. However, Vista has made it a pain and is not good software.  There is rarely a week when I don’t have to do a couple of reboots.  It does not sleep reliably, often waking up in a weird video mode that cannot be fixed in the control panel.  Rebooting Vista often takes over three minutes.  Waking a Mac laptop from sleep takes under 10 seconds, and it always works.  Even when it works right in Vista, it takes far longer than that.

Having said all of that, a Mac, especially a laptop will cost you more at least in the short term.  If you want more details go to my Applepeels blog where the debate happens daily.  Read some of the comments from the most recent post.

If your interest is mostly pictures, email, browsing the web, and communicating with Mollie,  I think that a Mac will be a better choice even if Mollie has a PC.  The tools that come with a Mac are far better than the tools that come with a PC.  There is nothing close on a PC that matches iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD.  In fact I am headed to Morehead City this afternoon to pick up just over $100 in Adobe software so I can show a reasonable comparison product to iMovie in a seminar that I am giving on making movies with PCs and Macs.

The Macintosh also has very good backup software, Time Capsule, built-in. 

My recommendation would be for you to buy an iMac and add an external firewire drive of the same size so that Time Capsule can do automatic back-ups.  MS Office is even available at a reasonable price if you want to add that or you can get by fine with NeoOffice, a free open-source alternative.

I do not like giving Steve Jobs money, but the reality is that OSX is really good software that just works and keeps getting better.  The three ladies in our family are all using iMacs that were bought in early 2003.  They are doing fine and none of those machines even have a gig of ram.  The current Apple software would work great on them, but they have been fine using a previous version.

The current  iMacs and all of the Mac laptops have cameras built-in.  The camera works well with Apple’s iChat and Google’s Gmail Chat.  Gus and I have video chats occasionally from his iMac to my HP laptop which also has a built-in camera.

Both Jon and Gus bought iMacs this past winter.  Jon got a 24” iMac.  I believe it is what he uses for DVD movie watching.

Apple has done a great job of integrating iMovie with YouTube.

As for other things, the only thing that I cannot get to work on my Mac is our ancient Konica copier at the office.  It worked fine until they installed some security software to track how much people were printing.

I don’t like having a built-in monitor on the iMacs but they seem very reliable, and I have yet to talk to someone who doesn’t like the system.  Of course if you want to, you can run PC software on your Mac these days, but I have yet to find a piece of PC software that is better than what I have on my Mac.

I also hate having to pay for security software for my Windows machines.  You still do not have to worry about that on Macs.  If you have any more specific questions, let me know.

You should be able to get iMac through the college for a reasonable price.  The one in the sweet spot, the 24” model, should go for around $1,399.  It has 4 gigs of ram and a 640 GB drive.

The only weakness you will see on a Mac is high end video cards for gaming. On another note, if you decide to go with a PC, make certain you get 4 gigs of ram.

Apple also has a really useful piece of software called Pages which I use to print tri-fold brochures.  If you can get an educational deal on that software, it is worth it for any specialized printing.   If you want to go with a laptop, the least inexpensive Mac laptop is at $949, I have been using one of those for three years.  It hooks up nicely to my 19” Samsung screens.  It has been very reliable.  

On one of my posts I figured the cost of time that I spent over a year on my Windows system.  Conservatively it came out to almost $700 per year in my time which I value at $40 per hour.  If you have lots of time, get a PC.

But remember $600 PC plus $700 in your time, plus security software plus decent photo software at $100 equals $1440, the Mac is cheaper even in the first year.

Apple's not so subtle shift over the years

There were a couple of common themes tying together my first Apple II computer and my early years at Apple.  One was the belief that computers were an empowering tool.  The second was that part of Apple's role was to take computing power and put it in hand of everyone.

Whether those themes were ever part of Apple's strategy and hopes is an open question that might never be answered.  I know that in the late eighties there was a debate at Apple on whether or not to lower the margins on the Mac II color computers.  At the time their expandability and color capability were head and shoulders about the competition.  Apple chose to keep margins and prices high.

The market share wars were over soon after that decision.

Eventually Apple had to respond with the Mac LC and LC II or as we called them internally, low cost color computers. They were very successful.

Even when Steve Jobs came back to Apple, the original iMac was an attempt to redefine the game and bring low cost, simple computing to consumers.  Things like USB, built-in networking, an integrated monitor, and no floppy drive were seen as ways to drive down cost and bring more computing power to people who knew little about high speed networking.

I have always believed that the core genius of Apple was to take sophisticated, expensive technology, and figure out how to make it easy to use, reliable, and not so expensive.

In the late nineties I can remember attending some management meetings in Cupertino. There were huge concerns that Apple was coming up with all these great technologies and not making any real money off of them.  The stock price was a major concern. 

A year or two after the turn of the century the thought began to circulate that Apple had its whole model wrong.  The idea became popular that trying to make money off a limited number of expensive computers was never going to work.  We started to hear the thought that the real way to make money was by selling countless less expensive devices.  I might be tempted to say the rest is history, but history keeps rolling along, and the strategy that worked a year or two ago might not be the one for the next five years.

Sometime between the late nineties and just after the turn of the century, Apple lost interest in delivering what its core customers wanted.  When I say core customers, I mean those customers who hung with Apple during the very lean times like the days when Wired Magazine had an Apple logo on the cover with the word, "Pray."

Apple really used to care about those customers.  As hard as it is to believe, at one time Apple had customer advisory boards.  My guess is that the only surviving ones might be in education.  Perhaps someone will chime in and tell us if they are just window dressing or actually effective forums for getting feedback to Apple.

It was probably in 2003 when I heard a senior Apple executive make the statement, "Customers do not know what they want, it is our job to tell them."

It is no secret that mostly Apple prices have trended upwards since the switch to Intel processors.  I have no doubt that Apple has picked up many new customers, but the question remains, are those customers as committed to Apple as the ones that Apple has been ignoring for several years.  Will they stick with Apple during a rough spot in its computing business?

I have seen nothing within the last few years to indicate that Apple is trying to drive down the price of computing for users. That is clearly something than many computer users would hope to see. I have seen Apple become a huge money machine.

Perhaps Apple has simplified smart phone technology, but I doubt that Apple has been a factor in driving down the cost.

The protests from Steve Jobs that Apple cannot make a good Mac at a lower cost ring pretty hollow to me.  I just do not believe it any longer.  Having said that I am still willing to pay the difference because I am more productive on a Mac, and I value my time.

Watching the change from a company obsessed with bringing technology to the people to one obsessed with high margins and stock prices is interesting.  I am no longer an Apple investor, but I wonder where Apple is headed?  Will Steve Jobs return the company to its roots with a reasonably priced netbook or are computers with the exception of the iPhone on a downward slope at Apple?

As always time and Steve Jobs will let us know.

Speaking of time, Beach Days are on the horizon here on the Southern Outer Banks of NC.

Getting Apple history right

As we watch mainstream media struggle over a lack of readers, I wonder how many mistakes can creep into their efforts which are constrained by dropping revenue?  Everyone who writes makes mistakes, and I know that I have made plenty.  Writing for the web without a staff to check for errors is something of a challenge.  Still I hope that I have never made a blooper of this magnitude.

Having lived through the Apple-Microsoft War, I  just cannot imagine someone making this mistake.

Maybe that is why this error that I found in Time Magazine's "The Evolution of the Dorm Room" is so funny to me.  The eighth slide has this as part of its caption.

Here, a freshman at Drexel University shows off a gift from her alma mater; in 1985, the school issued each incoming student a new Microsoft computer.

The picture gets it right and shows a cute freshman with a Macintosh. Those Macs at Drexel were part of Apple history. Drexel and Dartmouth students getting Macs kicked off a series of wonderful years in higher education for  Apple.

Just a quick Google search turned up this article on the Drexel program.  I hate to think that something as iconic as the original Macintosh has already been forgotten by copywriters.  Perhaps this copywriter is a graduate of Jay Leno's Jaywalk program segment.

And that is my nugget of wisdom for today from the North Carolina Crystal Coast.

True story response to Microsoft's negative Apple ads

This morning I had to laugh when I read the eWeek article on the new Microsoft ad.  However, when I watched the video at MacDaily News, I felt compelled to share my story.  If you have followed Applepeels, you will know that I worked at Apple for nearly twenty years, and I left in 2004.  Since that time I have used Mac OSX, Linux, Windows XP and Vista.  All have been used almost daily in my work.

Just as Leopard was being announced I went out and bought a new 15" HP laptop.  My purchase was made on Oct. 23, 2007.  There were a lot of reasons that I bought the HP.  The biggest were screen size, hard drive size, and price.  Over the almost eighteen months that I have had the system, I have worked hard to make it something that I can count on to work when I need it.

I have done that because I do need it for my work as a Realtor® on the North Carolina Coast.  I specifically need it for real estate forms and for a GIS application that Cateret County uses which prefers MS Internet Explorer.

In spite of or perhaps because of the need for the Windows system, at the end of the first six months I declared Vista a quagmire.  In the year since then I have come to the conclusion much like John Dvorak that Windows does not get better over time.  Instead it gets worse and eventually gets to the point that you go out and buy a new one, hoping that it will be better or at least not as bad.

Recently I have even written a post suggesting that we should just pay Apple's high prices without complaint or they might stop making Macs.  I am pretty well at that point.  Using Vista and XP on a daily basis with OSX has made it hard not to come to that conclusion.

Computers are the heart and soul of the engine that lets me make money.  I depend on my computers, and I work them hard.  I actually have no complaints about Windows hardware.  I have found my Dells and HP computers to be very good.  However, I cannot say the same thing about Vista.

When I travel, I take both Mac and HP laptops with me. I never do anything more than close the lid on my MacBook which will be three years old this summer.  It goes to sleep and wakes without a problem in under five seconds.

My Windows laptop is not nearly as sleep friendly.  Often when I put it to sleep, it will wake in a deranged state with stretch video which only sometimes can be fixed by going to the control panel.  Most times it requires a complete reboot. Another person in our office has a new Dell that behaves the same way.

Yesterday we were on a trip and without emal access for almost ten hours. I do not have an iPhone or Blackberry, and so far it has not been a problem.

When we got to our destination, and I opened my MacBook, I found that a potential client had written to me about a particular piece of property.  I did a couple of searches in our Mac-friendly MLS and could not find it.  I did eventually find the property after talking to the client, but he had a couple of questions which required that I use the county's GIS system. 

I opened up my Windows machine and went through the long wait for it to be functional only to find that it was really screwed up.  Windows Explorer was not responding and Internet Explorer when I launched it would only show a blank window.  It took me nearly thirty minutes to get the machine rebooted and up and working. 

It went on so long that I had to call the client and tell him that I would get back to him in the morning with the information. In this particular case the client did not have a problem with the later information, but what if it had been a problem?  I could have lost the client.

My Vista machine's problem would not be an issue except that it is recurring.  About once a week something weird happens, and I end up spending at least twenty minutes of my time getting things back to where they were.  That ends up being over seventeen hours a year that I am wasting my time being my own IT support.

Now a youngster looking for a computer to play games probably has a low value on his time, so seventeen hours a year costs him nothing.  My over seventeen hours charged at forty dollars per hour which is what I charge when I am billing my times comes out to around $693 per year.  In the one and one half years that I have had the Vista laptop it has cost me $1,040 conservatively in my own IT support. Actually it should be more, I only charge that low rate because I am semi-retired.

Of course I know that it has been more time spent than that.  Each time I boot, it takes at least three minutes before I get anything done, and there have been some serious problems that have taken far more than twenty minutes.

I did have to send my MacBook off to Apple service once because the battery would not charge.  It was under warranty, but other than that it has been very reliable.

All this brings me to the conclusion that if you just want a computer for games, and your time has little value, buy a Windows computer like the kid in the commercial.

However, if you want to get serious work done, value your time at something other than zero dollars per hour, and want a computer that you can count on, pay the Apple tariff and buy a Mac.

I have sincerely tried to live in the Windows and/or Linux worlds.  I am not someone who apologizes for Apple mistakes or believes everything they say. However, it is hard to argue with my experience on Vista.

I am just more productive as a Mac user.  I do not think I am alone.  This morning I got an email from a former boss at Apple apologizing for taking so long in responding to an email. After Apple he worked for several years at Dell before retiring, so he went on to explain that his Dell computer would not let him access my website, and it took Dell support thirty days to figure it out. 

His final comment, "I have had enough of the Windows world, my next computer is going to be a Mac."

That about sums it up

Spring is coming along nicely on the Crystal Coast.  I have some great new listings of coastal property.  I have done an article on how I manage my email at View from the Mountain and another one at Sea Salt blog on numbers that people should run before they consider moving. 

My experience on Twitter as Ocracokewaves has gotten me thinking about social media.  A visit to Northern Virginia convinced me that deer are taking over the world.  Our trips around the area and through NC (Fearington Village) have convinced me that I do not miss spring in Canada.

Finally thoughts of being on our river, the White Oak, are just about to drive me crazy as I wait for the wind to drop and the temperatures to warm just a little more.

Still spring is here to stay, and my tomato plants are in the ground.