Apple's Mac mini - Tempting PC Users Everywhere
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 25, 2005 7:39 AM EST- Posted in
- Mac
Despite the lack of a spreadsheet application, Pages does have rudimentary support for charts - including a small spreadsheet-like tool that lets you input data for your charts. The charts themselves look great and the default color schemes are worlds better than those produced in Excel, but if Apple expects iWork to succeed, they need a fully functional spreadsheet application out soon.
As you can expect, Pages has the ability to import Microsoft Word documents, and so far, it's actually done a pretty impressive job of importing Word documents without any issues. When I say that Pages supports importing of Microsoft Word documents, I mean just that. Even if you open a Word document with Pages, the application will simply import the document into a blank Pages document, instead of opening the Word document that you clicked on.
Much like Keynote, Pages can export to a variety of formats - PDF, Word Document, HTML, RTF and plain text. Pages relies heavily on CSS for its HTML output, but it would be nice for Apple to include a simplified HTML export for people like me who just need something to produce clean, simple code without any need to preserve font styles. To Apple's credit, Pages does an excellent job of making sure whatever it exports looks just like what you've typed in Pages.
As a Microsoft Word competitor, Pages is unfortunately lacking in a number of areas - not because Word does things better, but because Word still has a number of features that weren't implemented in Pages 1.0. There are no document tracking options in Pages to track changes by multiple authors to a document, there's no support for mail merge, no grammar check (which may be a blessing in disguise as I've personally never appreciated Word's grammar check), and as I mentioned before, no spreadsheet complement with which to interface.
The one thing that Pages does an extremely good job of is not thinking that it knows what you want to do. Pages will not look at something that you're typing and suggest a different or better way of doing it. Personally, that's one of the biggest issues that I've had with Word since it started gaining in "intelligence".
As a publishing application, Pages does make creating flashy documents extremely easy. Much like many of Apple's other applications, Pages accomplishes this simplicity by including a number of well designed templates that are quite modifiable.
An example of a Pages template
Using Microsoft Word templates is taboo, since pretty much everyone has Word and can spot a Word template from a mile away (e.g. the resume templates), but one of the benefits of Pages is the templates that are unique enough that you do avoid that embarrassing problem. Granted, if Pages catches on, the novelty and exclusivity will fade, but the one thing about Pages is that modifying, customizing and personalizing the templates is extremely easy. Much like OS X, everything in Pages templates is drag-able, but unlike other applications, you can pretty much drag or resize anything without screwing up the pagination of your document or the layout of the template.
Performance-wise, Pages does extremely well - it's just as fast and as snappy as you would expect an application to be. The one exception seems to be when manipulating images in templates. Even on a G5, things aren't as smooth as they should be. Hopefully, it's something that Apple will address in future updates to Pages.
Right now, Pages has a great deal of potential, but it's not there quite yet as the clear (preferred) alternative to other applications. Apple also seems to know this as they have built-in a comment submission system into Pages for suggestions and improvements directly to Apple.
For what it does, it does very well, but it is the missing features and supplementary applications that hurt Pages the most. It's an application to keep an eye on, but right now, Pages and the iWork suite just aren't at the same level of quality and superiority as the OS on which they run.
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aliasfox - Friday, January 28, 2005 - link
mlittl3- that's hilarious.mlittl3 - Friday, January 28, 2005 - link
Wow,Everyone just went through the eight stages of dealing with grief from the first post to the last. Cool!
1)Shock - Apple reviews on Anandtech
2)Emotional Release - just those crazy Mac fans, it will all pass
3)Panic - maybe Apple might just have something here. Oh no, what about my shuttle box!?
4)Guilt - maybe I should have been nicer to Apple all along. I'm now out of the loop.
5)Hostility - those f*cking Mac fans. They don't know how cheap PCs can be.
6)Inability to Resume Business-as-Usual activities - must read forum every second to ensure a Mac fan doesn't get in a good point without rebuttal
7)Reconiliation of Grief - see description of emotional release
8)Hope - we can stop reading anandtech.com and go to another hardware review site where there aren't any Mac articles. If we ignore Apple, they will go away.
You guys crack me up. Let me know when the funeral is.
ElFenix - Friday, January 28, 2005 - link
heat sink is two words. thanks.ransath - Friday, January 28, 2005 - link
Cocnord..."By the way, it is the same 'narrow minded' engineers as you call them who make miniMac. No?"Nope - they are OPEN minded "revolutionizers" caught in the Steve Jobs "reality distortion" field :)
Concord - my apologies to you for being a smart ass. My comments weren't meant to be malicious, I was just poking fun at you. As I said to cygni, I will refrain from them in the future.
BTW - I drink 2 or 3 Mountain Dews (Code Red) everyday! w00t!
WorkingHardMan - Friday, January 28, 2005 - link
#157 "I guess Mac folks are used to paying for everything and don't mind it" - I guess this is a perspective thing. I've always thought of the Wintel crowd as being the ones that like to pay for things that can be had for free on other platforms, since just about all the software I've ever needed either came with the Mac or was easily available as freeware or low cost shareware. In fact, I long ago concluded that one of the reasons you only found 12,000- 15,000 Mac software packages for the Mac vs. the 80,000+ (well, way less if you don't count the games) on the Wintel side is that (1) You don't need a lot of the utility programs like those used by the Wintel crowd to keep a Mac going, (2) free programs on the Mac drive out commercial products, and (3) Mac people are more into value than cost, and are less likely to pay for a program than a Wintel user unless it really makes their life easier. And, or course, most of the major Open Source projects are Unix/Linux stuff and run on Macs (you do know that Mac is a Unix system?), that are ported to Windows.I also find it curious that Wintel people are always concerned about the availability of software on the Mac, but when you find out what programs they use it is usually MS-Word, MS-Excel, MS-Powerpoint, Adobe's Photoshop, and Quark DP, all Mac programs that have been ported to Windows, usually years after their depute on the Mac. And what is the Windows user interface but an imitation (and some would argue, not a particularly good one) of the Mac OS? [I have to admit here, that I haven't spent a lot of time with XP, but both Windows 95 and Windows 98, at least from the UI standpoint, were pretty half-baked imitations of Mac 85, and even MS would like to forget that Windows 1.x through 3.x ever happened).
Similarly, to me it is the Wintel users that seem to include among their ranks the shrill who regard computer operating system selection as more of a religion than as choosing the best tool for the job ( in this thread, people like Concord come to mind).
As I said, it's a perspective thing, what the "Wintel" crowd looks like vs what the "Mac" crowd looks like seems to change with where you are sitting. The good thing about the 3 articles to which this whole thread is supposedly relating, is that one member of one camp made a concerted effort to put away his prejudices and see what life was like on the other side. It was undoubtedly a difficult job, and I think he did a good job with it.
mzlin - Friday, January 28, 2005 - link
I meant after anandtech, of course :)mzlin - Friday, January 28, 2005 - link
Arstechnica is the single best technology site on the internet. Their software and hardware reviews are done by programmers and engineers and is full of all the technical details you would ever want to know while at the same time assessing the more consumer-oriented questions such as value, productivity, practicality. Then they are very up-to-date on general science, technology, and internet news. I have learned of many an upcoming trend or internet phenomenon from them.Entropyq3 - Friday, January 28, 2005 - link
arstechnica is head and shoulders over the others in terms of general level, even though it has deteriorated (IMHO). Go to the technical forums, and you will find knowledgeable people.If you just want to blubber about technical stuff and voice opinions, please choose one of the others. ;-)
Seriously, there are knowledgeable people in all three of these fora, but the signal-to-noise ratio is way better at arstechnica.
msva124 - Thursday, January 27, 2005 - link
Speaking of which what are some other hardware sites to go to? I know of three, hardocp.com, arstechnica.com, and tomshardware.com. Are these any good? They all look very similar, just wondering if there is a certain one that is better than these three that I should take a look at.linuxOwnzIfUrLeet - Thursday, January 27, 2005 - link
Anand,you used to be my hero below john carmack and martha steward.
After seeing you get married and now this mac loving I can only believe that you've lost your engineering edge.
Your poster on my wall will now be taken down.