Why would anyone bother with Apple? [was: Re: [plug] SME PC hardware linux supplier?]

[James Devenish]

In message <200411092111.34058.skribe at amber.com.au>
on Tue, Nov 09, 2004 at 09:11:33PM +0800, skribe wrote:
> Is there a logical reason why any sane person would choose to do this?
> What I mean by that is fork out the fat wad of cash for Apple's
> hardware and then ditch its OS to run linux.  I mean, I like linux but
> it's not really worth buying hardware at double the price unless
> you're a serious gearhead

I'm sure we can all argue for whatever it is that we prefer, but to
address your points of "sanity" and "wads of cash", here's a comparison
of some experiences I had last year:

Last year I needed to find some no-cost hardware for a headless
monitoring station (which also provides some lightweight failover
services). By luck, I found an old Apple PowerMac 8500 (circa 1997)
in a storeroom. Nice. Having struggled to learn x86 hardware in recent
years, using the old 8500 was a breeze. For a start, Apple seemed to
have provided plenty of power connectors, at least a couple of
reasonably-long SCSI cables and with various drive bays and mounting
positions, so it was a cinch to add more hard drives. Naturally, I was
able to hook up external hard drives with ease. The case is also easy to
open (no screws) and modules can swing out on hinges as necessary. I
don't know how much it cost, and I don't know how many "gearheads"
might or might not have been involved (if any). Nevertheless, it has
contrasted in every way with the "Comdek A/OPEN professional computer"
that I'm sitting in front of at the moment, which cost $3500 in 2001.
For $3500, the machine same with no IDE cables for expansion (or, if
it did, it came with only one short cable), it has no connections for
external drives (other than USB), it has hardly any spare internal power
connectors, and the drive bays that are so badly positioned (at least
in comparison with cable length and motherboard connectors) that I
eventually gave up with one of the drive and I just dangle it vertically
(obviously I don't leave it powered on unsupervised in that state).
However, getting Debian installed and booting on the old Mac was a
challenge because the machine does not use OpenFirmware. Nevertheless,
partitioning drives with Apple and Sun hardware seems incredibly easy
compared to x860: none of the "logical" versus "extended" versus "C
drive must be *here*" nonsense imposed by Windows and Intel (I assume
the limitations are not imposed by Linux itself). Partitioning the
Comdek machine drove me nutty, given that I had never partitioned
an Intel-based machine before.