on 4/4/03 2:13 AM, Jon Glass at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > On Friday, April 4, 2003, at 04:02 AM, Eric D. wrote: > >> They are ubiquitous, and more than half the population >> has experienced Windows, but far fewer have experienced Mac. > > This number is actually far greater than you are assuming. I have run > into few kids (and I meet a lot) who have not used the Mac in their > classroom or school. Macs have had broad exposure through the > classroom. Of course, this is changing, but in my experience, a vast > number of kids are at least familiar with the Mac because of school, so > this number would probably be higher than you suggest.
I was just thinking of the % who hasn't touched a computer in any serious way (25-30%?) -- I'm talking the person who's looked at a kiosk in a museum, but does not actually own one or has a friend who owns one. I really wonder where things'll go. I think that in the next few years we'll see a make-or-break situation for computers and OSes. We've gone from being able to sell new computers simply because they're faster to having to make better software to sell new computers b/c the existing computers are as fast as they *need* to be. For us consumers this is a great thing. Software manufacturers will now have to focus on quality interfaces and stability than simply writing useless features to consume more processing power. One of my regular working computers is a Pentium 166 running Windows 95, Office 97 and IE 5.5 and it does all of those things quite satisfactorily (web browsing can be slow sometimes, but even with a 10BaseT pipe to the web the computer is rarely the bottle neck). Sometimes (when it's cached) it even opens Word 97 faster than a computer 10x faster, a G4/1 GHz, will open Word for X (and, feature-wise Word 97 and Word X are virtually identical (IMNSHO Word 97 does a better job of auto-crap than X because 97 has less auto-crap than X)). Another of my regular machines is a 7600/132. For everything but web browsing (painfully slow on a LAN) it is more than an adequate computer (Office 98)! When these computers were new (95, 96) I would never have looked to a computer that was 7-8 years old (IIcx, IIsi) to be functionally equivalent to then current computers and to be willing to use them on a weekly basis. Computers are now so fast that the encouragement to upgrade to newer hardware comes not from faster CPUs. If you've ever played with a 3+ GHz Pentium or a dual processor 1.2 GHz G4 you'll know what I mean ;): web browsing, spread sheets, word processing and full screen video don't benefit from faster CPUs anymore. My G3/400 doesn't do some full screen video (M$ media player, some QT movies, Real Player) happily but something with only a scant 200 or 300 extra MHz does that fine. Web browsing is about as fast as it can possibly be (about 10% of the time my computer is actually the bottle neck (LAN-based internet access)). Word processing and spread sheets have been as fast as they can be since 1980!!! It really doesn't take much to write text or crunch the types of numbers most of us use, though, for some bizarre reason Office for X is slower than molasses in January, and aside from PowerPoint (which was a poorly written app in 98/2001) offers no improvements over Word 6/Excel 5. About the only thing that's really demanding on CPUs is the modern video game, and, for that I'd rather have a console than a computer any day. Video games stress a computer physically and I'd rather pound away on an attachment to a $300 console than the keyboard on a $2000 laptop (which does a worse job of playing games anyway). -- G-Books is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- Check our web site for refurbished PowerBooks | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> G-Books list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-books.html> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/g-books%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
