Ubuntu vs. Apple [WAS: Re: Novel and Microsoft]

[Matt Nesteruk]

I love my apple.  It has been the best laptop i have ever owned.
Personally, i have never had a laptop last over a year without something
going wrong with it.  Prior to purchasing my ibook, I owned many PC brands
like Dell, HP, Compaq, and Sharp.  They were all good machines, but the
battery life was always horrible.  On a good charge, 45min to an hour was
all i could get out of them.  What good is a laptop if you have to be near a
plug all the time?  When my last PC laptop died, i went out in search of the
longest battery life in a laptop.  Apple boasted 4 hours on their 12in
ibook, so i purchased one.

I have been very satisfied with it.  The battery lasts at least 3.5 hours,
sometimes more depending on what i am doing.  It is very quiet.  There is no
loud rushing fan.  I am most impressed with the suspend feature.  In my past
experience, suspend on a laptop is a very touch situation, usually involving
prayers to awake it from its slumber.  On the apple, this is not the case.
I can be in the middle of anything, just close the lid and it will go to
sleep.  upon opening the lid, it resumes flawlessly.  This is something i
personally have not experienced on any other machine.

As i mentioned earlier, i have this curse that kills my laptop every year.
Like clock work, last February, my ibook died.  I do have the apple care
plan.  I talked to them on the phone and explained that my laptop was no
longer functioning and it needed to be repaired.  The next day, DHL dropped
a box at my house.  It included packing material, pre-printed shipping
label, and packing tape.  I simply put the laptop in the box, taped it
closed, and slapped the shipping label on it.  DHL came and picked it up the
next morning and it was at the repair center that night.  Including travel
time, it took 3 days for the complete experience.  They replaced the mother
board, hard drive, keyboard, and the little rubber feet I lost off the
bottom.

Cost to me? $0
I didn't even have to use my own packaging tape.

One thing i do not like about apple is there switch to the Intel chip.
Personally, i think Intel chips are garbage.  I have had much better luck
with the PowerPC.  Fortunatly I purchased my ibook be for they switched.

-Matt

On 11/14/06, Craig White <craigwhite at azapple.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2006-11-14 at 13:04 -0700, Darrin Chandler wrote:
> > der.hans wrote:
> > > Proprietary software is not near 100% the correct tool either :).
> >
> > Agreed. And Free software usually wins, and as time goes on it wins by a
> > wider margin. :)
> >
> > > I would note that at least some of us GNU/Linux users avoid
> proprietary
> > > blobs.
> >
> > Yes. Not just a few, but a lot, actually. It's more about the distros,
> > and the kernel. Which distros are blob-free? (Yes, I'm really asking)
> ----
> not Ubuntu or SuSE
>
> definitely Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, Debian
>
> Craig
>
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