This site is not intended to be a comprehensive guide to all things Macintosh; there are many other sites, like MacCentral, which do this job better. Instead, it's intended merely to be my personal paean to the Macintosh computer. I find so much on the Net assumes you are a "PeeCee" (Wintel) user by default, with an occasional nod to Linux.
Mac users need all the help they can get finding hardware and software they can use. These days, Mac versions of most software and hardware products are released a year late, if they are ever released at all. I remain a Mac loyalist, even if my friends and family keep trying to lure me to the Wintel side. But they know I know computers, and have used computers of all types, so they know that my devotion is based on familiarity with the competition.
For some people, I realize these arguments come close to resembling religious fervor. I don't quite feel that strongly. I have used PCs in a variety of situations, and find Windows 2000 a tolerable alternative to the MacOS. Still, on balance, I like Macs better, despite the fact that our minority market share status means foregoing a number of choices.
I keep arguing with my friends about Apple's decision to kill their cloning program in 1997. To me, some of the most amazing machines were produced during the short-lived cloning era (1994-1997). Power Computing and other vendors made clone machines Apple never would -- clones with multiple processors, clones with a spacious SIX PCI slots, clones running the BeOS and the MacOS in separate partitions, clones with a PC Compatibility Card built in. Oh well, Apple's stuff is great, but I still think cloning forces them to be greater.
I hope it comes back some day.
Select where you want to go from this popup menu:
Provide links to everything Mac-alistic.
A heady tribute to MacUser, which exists no more. Peace to the publishers of MacHOME, MacFORMAT, and other magazines, but I've never read your stuff, so I offer no links.
Of all these, it should be pointed out that ClubMac and MacConnection are the only ones whose URL is not a redirect. Frustratingly, MacBuy frequently reports that its price search engine cannot find items on "any vendors" despite the fact that the item is listed in all five catalogs. MacBuy seems to be mostly useless since the range of price variation for Mac hardware does not seem to be great. Usually, the only 'real' deals are to be found on Ebay.
Oddly, many other price search engines, such as www.computershopper.com, cannot be reliably counted on to "find" Macintosh peripherals, which often seem to be MIA. For example, computershopper.com does not even OFFER "Firewire" as an interface option, to complement IDE, SCSI, USB, serial, parallel, etc.
There are a few other vendors, like TigerDirect, which sell some Mac hardware, but don't even make the effort to create a separate Mac catalog.
Occasionally, you can find Mac hardware on these engines, but it's dicey. Most don't even list "firewire" as an interface category option.
Somehow, I wonder about Steve Jobs' decision to take something out of the iMac that almost everyone needs (a removable storage drive - if no floppy, why not put in a Zip?), and removing most of the ports Mac people have used for aeons (serial, ADB, SCSI) while replacing them with a new one (Firewire) that most vendors still don't seem to know exists.
I have these two wondrous Firewire ports on the side of my Mac, and nothing to stick in them, at least until I buy a DV camcorder.
But the "reality distortion field" keeps on churning. Maybe 2001 will bring a new crop of peripherals to use in these vacant ports.
Like many people, I am hoping that OS X delivers the stability and capabilities of other "modern" OSes (i.e. true multitasking, protected memory) like NT and Linux, without sacrificing too much of the user interface that Mac OS users have come to expect. Many people have had a foretaste of "Aqua" (the new interface) and are very concerned...
There are two statistics that I find ironically juxtaposed. One magazine I once read said that the Mac web server software (StarNINE's WebStar) is the least efficient. I don't know how much OS X Server has changed the equation. Another once said that the majority of web sites are created on a Macintosh. Hmmm, created but not hosted?
Use that "i"Mac for something "i"vailable
Macintosh shareware and freeware can be found in other archives - Nonags, Jumbo, shareware.com, etc. - but haphazardly. Everything below is guaranteed to have apps that will run on the MacOS, without having to pick out the "Windoze" crap.
Press here to return to the Home Page of Dr. Steven Mizrach