Mac OSX stability

Question

I've been making serious inquiries into making my next laptop a mac. Probably an iBook, because they feel a little more sturdy than the powerbook.

Now to the question. I've only ever found two opinions on mac stability, one being that since OSX they are the most stable consumer machine out there,

and two, that they are buggy and crashy, and one should stay away.

Now I have to reference this with the fact that I'm not what one would consider a 'normal' user, I push my hardware to it's limits. I run lots of apps, and I would plan on installing either Fink or Gentoo MacOS.

Anyone have an objective opinion here? Am I going to run into issues if I buy an iBook?

Answer

This question was answered on December 9, 2004. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

In my opinion 10.3 (Panther) is as stable an operating system as u can buy. 10.4 (Tiger) is due for release in the new year, so it might be worth waiting till then to buy ur notebook. I dont have much experience of running Unix/Linux apps on OS X, but do run some fairly intensive programs on an ibook at work and it copes ok.

The early versions of OS X were buggy and slow and until Panther came out, Id rather run OS 9.2.2 on a mac. In my opinion, Panther was a big step forward in terms of stability and OS performance.

The difference in terms of performance between an ibook and powerbook are in my opinion, minimal. Just my opinion. Its worth boosting the memory in both models though to get the most out of OSX.

Author

Posted by Christopher of Katharine Gibbs School - New York on December 9, 2004