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Mac Messiah

Welcome to the first column in a series of articles aimed at introducing and explaining in detail the Apple Macintosh platform to PC users. This will help them get a fair idea of the capabilities of a Mac and rest to doubt the FUD (Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt) factors spread by malicious competitors. In recent years the Mac platform has increasingly set the standards for most features PC users take for granted. Things like USB, FireWire and Airport - even before this, Apple has always made standards out of seemingly commonplace features.

The most common questions you hear from a PC user when asked to switch to a Mac are:

1. Will all my programs work with the Mac operating system?
2. Why is Mac hardware so expensive?
3. Are you serious? Why would I use a desktop publishing machine for doing numerical calculations?

Well to answer these questions is easy. But making you understand the essential differences between the PC and Mac is more important. I believe that once everything is laid out in the open the intelligent user will make his own choice voluntarily and switch to a Mac. Like I did. And look what happened to me. (:-)

For the more pedantic readers the answers to the above questions are:

1. Yes, yes and yes. Between Mac OS 9.x and Mac OS X the Mac OS supports over hundreds and thousands of applications for doing every conceivable task that you can think of. The only thing it doesn't do quite well is emulate the BSOD ( Blue Screen of Death. It happens so frequently on the PC that users consider it an application!). Well I am not saying that the Mac does not crash under Mac OS 9.x. But when it does, it gives a nice helpful message and offers diagnostic on a hardware/bios level by pushing a programmers button. When is the last time you saw a PC do that? And under Mac OS X my Mac is yet to crash in over a year. So I don't know what a crash looks like. Couldn't tell you. Well, not actually true. Sometimes my Aqua interface does freeze up. But I can telnet to the Mac from another machine and terminate the Aqua interface manager process and put it out of its misery. Once this is done, I can re-use my Mac again without rebooting. So there.
   
2. As to this question, I will try to explain using an analogy. Consider cars. You can easily buy the cheapest car on the market and it will do the job of transporting you from Point A to Point B. Then why do people buy cars that they cannot afford? Exactly. For the comfort, pleasure, luxury and snob value. A Mac is like that. If you want to rise above the ordinary and get a beautiful, reliable, feature-rich and stable machine, go for a Mac. Else be happy with your jalopy. When is the last time someone said that a PC was beautiful?
   
3. Get this. My PowerMac G4 has 450 mhz dual processors. I ran a benchmark on it and turns out that it can perform 3 Giga FLOPS. Now that is too much computing power for a desktop to have. You can render 3-D wire frame images on the fly or you could build DNA models. Not only does the Mac have excellent graphics and printing technology but the scientific and industrial community also greatly benefits from the supercomputing performance of the G4 processors. All this for a fraction of a price of high priced UNIX workstations.
   

I could go on and on. But that would only lead to claim that I am being a demagogue.

Harking back to the first Mac introduced in 1984, it had a few innovations that most PC’s of that era or maybe even till 1987 did not have. Of course the centerpiece was the graphical Mac OS that defined the term GUI. This Mac introduced the world to the terms ‘menu’, ‘drop-down’, ‘drag-n-drop’, ‘cut-n-paste’ and ‘point-n-click’. Unbelievable but true. The only thing this Mac lacked at that time was a easy way to expand it. There was no slot for an add-on card since at that time it was believed by Steve Jobs that no one would need anything more than what was packaged in the Mac. The development team to its credit tried to slip in an add-on port disguising it as a ‘diagnostic’ port but Steve caught the sleight and dumped it. But this was soon fixed in subsequent models as Apple realized the folly of not having expansion capacity for a machine so radical that it has its own Smithsonian display. The PDS or Processor Direct Slot was introduced in the Mac LC and subsequent models that allowed third-party add-on cards for external peripherals to be attached to the Mac. We take these things for granted now. But back in the eighties these were very new inventions.

As the Mac evolved into even more powerful and feature-laden models, it kept on introducing new standards to the world. Remember, the original Mac came with a 3.5 inch floppy drive as standard. This helped establish that format as a standard in the industry long before PC’s ever adopted it. Apple introduced the cd-rom drive as standard on all Mac’s and threw away the floppy drive in the original iMac in 1997. Apple also introduced the world to WiFi and FireWire long before they were known in the PC world as 802.11b and IEEE1394. (That’s another thing that differentiates Macs and PC’s. Apple introduces new technologies with a nice catchy name rather than refer to it as a number. Would you rather buy a Hell XGV-345i PC or an iMac?) These kind of ‘risky innovations' have helped build a strong loyal following among demanding Mac users who expect a lot from Apple.
So how different is the typical Mac under the hood from a PC? Let’s compare apples to apples. ;-).

A PowerMac G4 desktop is a beautiful machine to look at. The first difference beyond the obviously astonishing looks, is the ease at which you can open the hood of the G4. One finger is all it takes to pull open a ring on the side and pop open the cover. The entire mother-board pulls away from the chassis and is laid bare for you to tinker with. Inside the chassis has enough space to stack 4 hard drives, an optical drive, a zip drive and an elephant. The mother-board has PCI slots (surprise, surprise) that accept standard PCI cards for connecting various peripherals. The G4 comes with the NVIDIA or the ATI Radeon high performance PCI video cards. Architecturally the mother-board runs on a 100 – 167 Mhz bus depending on which model of the G4 you have. Another important difference from a Pentium chip is the Velocity Engine vector processing unit (also known as AltiVec) that speeds up graphics performance radically. The G4 processors have 256k L2 on chip cache that runs at processor speed and a 2 MB DDR SDRAM L3 cache.

Now I am sure the PC-mongers are getting out their spec sheets and comparing numbers. But frankly comparing the G4 and the Pentium is comparing apples to lemons. The G4 is essentially a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Chip) and the Pentium is a CISC (Complex Instruction Set Chip) that are architecturally different from each other in the way they process numbers.

Also, Apple has an advantage in that it completely controls the design of the mother-board. The board is optimized for the G4, memory and the peripherals. On the Intel PC platform each manufacturer can devise their own mother-board giving different results during benchmarks.

So for PC users, migrating to a Mac can be an experience filled with amazement and wonder. First there is the beauty of beholding the Mac. The sleek lines and the soft touch will mesmerize you. As you power it up, you will notice that there is no BIOS display and memory check. The Mac does not have a BIOS the way a PC does. It has a something called a PRAM (Programmable RAM) that stores various user preferences like date, time, boot device etc. This PRAM can be reset at startup by pressing a special key sequence (Opt-Cmd-P-R). The PRAM is heavily used in Mac OS 9.x and before, though in Mac OS X its dependence has decreased. Also, until Mac OS X came along the Mac had a special ROM that encoded all the graphics routines used by MacOS for drawing basic shapes. This was the QuickDraw ToolBox set and being present in ROM gave phenomenal speed to on screen graphic rendition. This is one of the reasons for the Mac’s success in the graphics industry.

A quick look at the keyboard is sufficient to notice the differences between a Mac and a PC keyboard. There are two special keys – Option and Command (Also called the Apple or Clover key). These keys roughly correspond to the Alt and the Windows key on PC keyboards. Most Mac keyboards also have special buttons for volume control, ejecting CD’s and a Power switch. Every recent Mac keyboard also has two inbuilt USB ports for easy access to your many USB gadgets. Once again an Apple innovation that is now a standard.

The boot sequences of MacOS 9.x and Mac OS X are completely different as they are radically different operating systems. Mac OS X as everyone knows, is a Unix based operating system. OS9.x has an eighteen-year-old legacy that stretches back to the first Mac ever produced in 1984. Suffice it to say that I am glad that MacOS9 is dead. It served its purpose and served it well. But as people do, it had reached its Peter Principle.
But I will leave the topic of the boot sequences for another issue.

The original Apple mouse that is shipped with all Macs always has only one button. Apparently Jeff Raskin, the real ‘father’ of the Mac, believed that users would need only one button and it would be intuitive to use one button rather than two or three. He did not anticipate that users would be dexterous enough to handle three buttons and a scroll wheel. But then you can do everything with one button that you can do with three. Really.
Every recent Mac usually has USB, FireWire, Ethernet, Modem and audio/video ports built-in. Apple recently switched to shipping IDE drives. Previously all Macs came with a SCSI interface and SCSI drives. This allowed users to chain SCSI devices like what FireWire provides now. Apple truly provides Plug and Play functionality to Macs. There is a very rare device that you have to install drivers for. If it’s a USB device like printer, camera, cd-rom drive or scanner, as soon as you plug it in it shows up on the desktop or in an appropriate place. Similarly for FireWire devices. And now with the new Rendezvous networking technology IP enabled devices will recognize each other and configure themselves to work instantly without any fiddling with network settings. BlueTooth is also already available for the Mac and if you have a BlueTooth device like the Ericsson T68i cellphone, it's fun to sync the phone numbers and browse the internet on the cellphone via the Mac.

I hope you have had enough information about Macs to whet your appetite. In coming issues I will elaborate more on the technologies and software that the Mac uses. And if you already know all this (assuming you are a Mac-head), then please forward these articles to your PC friends and help them ‘switch’.

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