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The real difference between Apple and Dell (or HP or whoever) is Apple doesn't offer an equivalent to the low end, thick, heavy laptops that Dell or HP offer.

That's not true; Apple used to offer a model that is comparable in design and form factor to these Dells & HPs.

The vulnerabilities are apparently the result of Microsoft release policies:

It was widely reported that Windows 2000 was released with 63,000 known defects.

It was widely reported that Windows XP was released with more than 100,000 known defects. (I don't have time to find a better link.) Microsoft reported that Windows XP Service Pack 2 fixed several hundred bugs, several of them very serious.

Windows Vista was released against the wishes of some Microsoft managers, who said it was not ready for release. There was a court case that revealed emails saying that. (Again, I don't have time to find a better link.)

Actually, when Mac OS X was first released with its dock, there was quite a bit of uproar from fans of Mac OS 9 because they were used to hunting around the sides of the Menu Bar, launching apps from the Apple Menu and switching apps with the Application Menu. A number of third-party hacks came along to restore the "lost functionality." They were also upset that application windows rolled into the Dock when minimized instead of into their own title bars, so they came up with a third-party windowshading hack. A few of these hacks are described on Low End Mac's website. However, users eventually got used to the Dock, and personally, when I go back to Mac OS 9 I use a third-party hack that replicates the Mac OS X Dock, unsurprisingly called A-Dock, to make the app switching experience more consistent. The Dock was a good UI decision, and has lasted the test of time. As for this new Firefox ribbon thing, if they do it right, we'll grumble for a bit but eventually it will become as natural as using the traditional menu bar. If they don't do it right, they'll switch it back in the next release.

Very interesting read on AAPL's start into retail: http://lowendmac.com/orchard/08th/roots-of-the-apple-store.html Even if no one actually buys from the store, it is a place for people to touch and feel the products. This is especially effective for a brand that sells "it just works" devices like the ipod.

I have always thought Apple made product that was technically inferior to the equivalent IBM style hardware. (This is still true ... just looking at an Apple Laptop proves it (and they still have a one button mouse)

Does THIS qualify as a "one button mouse"?

if it wasn't for the artyfart fan boys, Apple would have been long gone.

Wow, then the number of "artyfart fan boys" must not only be legion, but is actually GROWING at a phenomenal rate, especially when compared to the PC Sales slump overall this year.!

Fucking TROLL.

Apple failed to correctly implement the CMD IDE chip used in the Revision 1 B&W G3 macintoshes. They used to have a techinfo library entry that told you to buy FWB toolkit or an IDE card to fix the problem. (FWB toolkit would let you force the drive to PIO mode, at which point it's about half as fast and requires more CPU intervention, but UDMA is what Apple screwed up.) When the merged the TIL into the new Knowledge Base they omitted this article; there are earlier and later articles. I used to have the TIL number, and you can search the KB by TIL number and find things, but only if they are there.

Apple customers are mushrooms, they are only happy as long as you keep the in the dark and feed them shit. If people at large had longer memories and more geek awareness they might still not avoid them, but they would stop paying a premium for what is after all essentially the same experience you get from anyone else: a bloated, chunky, choppy operating system (sometime compare NeXTStep on an '040 Turbo slab to OSX running on a Dual core anything, and be depressed) extremely wasteful of resources running on simple motherboards built by Foxconn and populated with simple commodity parts.

8.6 compatibility is very good... so far. I'm testing the browser on my Cube, a Bondi iMac (running 8.6) and a Performa 6400 (ditto). It's definitely faster than Mozilla, Netscape, and WamCom, and fairly stable. Only certain sites make it crash, such as Alltop (if you hover over a link), and it has some rendering and scrolling bugs (such as on Blogspot). But on the whole, it's much more stable than the older browsers. And Slashdot no longer crashes either :)

I jumped on as a tester fairly early in the project; discussion started on the OS 9 list sponsored by Low End Mac about a modernized browser for the classic OS; as I still use my OS 9- running Cube daily, and got tired of WamCom crashing on me.

In one way, Windows 98 had better file system security. You could set permissions so that access required entry of another password besides the log-on password.

In my opinion, the big advantage of BSD and OS X over Windows is that BSD and OS X were written to be secure. In contrast, Microsoft manages development in such a way that the programmers are not allowed to finish their work. That makes Microsoft a lot of money, since it creates a market for another, supposedly fixed, operating system. This works only because most purchasers have little technical knowledge.

Here are some articles about that: 63,000 known bugs in Windows 2000. Microsoft's explanation: Microsoft disputes reports of 63,000 bugs in Windows 2000.

Here is a sarcastic story about Windows XP: Windows XP Beta 02. Only 106,500 Bugs.

The discussions at the time led to the impression that there is a huge amount of sloppiness. I don't have time to provide more information.

Here is a quote from a comment in the Slashdot story, "Explaining The Windows/UNIX Cultural Divide": 'Each Microsoft application is written "to the metal", reimplementing huge pieces of code that should be abstracted into layers.'

Just as with the Macintosh, Jobs devoted most of his attention to the user interface and physical design of the case, probably because he wasn't a trained engineer. Jobs designed the Macintosh as a personal information appliance.

If you look at those patents in TFA, they're mostly related to design. It is not stretch of the imagination that Jobs actually designed the cases for those patents while working at Apple the second time.

Jobs might charm smart people, etc., but there is substantial evidence that Jobs does more than that. Yes, it actually looks like he works for a living sometimes.

Low end Mac has a section it calls Road Apples. It reckons the worst macs were The Powermac 5200 and 6200

No, they didn't explode. But they did couple a 680x0 style motherboard with a PowerPC.

Because of the design, all data from the serial port, comm slot, or an ethernet card must pass though the CPU to reach RAM.

Low end Mac has a section it calls Road Apples. It reckons the worst macs were The Powermac 5200 and 6200

No, they didn't explode. But they did couple a 680x0 style motherboard with a PowerPC.

Because of the design, all data from the serial port, comm slot, or an ethernet card must pass though the CPU to reach RAM.

Mac OS is a niche market.

That's not only untrue; it's also a non-sequitur.

Since it was a significant amount of time after OS X 10.0.0 debuted in January 2000, before certain widely-used productivity suites, such as MSOffice (not OS X-native until Nov. 2001), Photoshop and InDesign (both not OS X-native until 2002), Quark XPress (not OS X-native until 2003), in a very big way, the renewed vitality of the Macintosh platform, and by association, the ultimate success of OS X, depended on the ability of "New World" Macs to be able to seamlessly integrate "Classic" MacOS applications and MacOS X applications. Apple pulled this not-so-trivial feat off with pretty stellar results, overall. And to ease the transition even more, although not virtualization, per se, Apple created the Carbon API, which allowed applications to be developed or recompiled to run NATIVELY either in MacOS 8.5 and above, or in MacOS X.

Let's just see if MS can do the same relatively painless transition, which still jettisoning most or all of its compatibility cruft, like Apple (for the most part) neatly has. The Connectix VirtualPC engine was pretty good, but not that stable. Let's see how well it works for XP on Vist, er Windows 7...

Oh, and speaking of seamless transitions, Apple's 68k to PPC, and PPC to Intel transitions were both incredible feats of engineering.

Do you honestly believe that MS can carry off something as seamless as either of those? Of course not. And so they aren't even going to try, apparently.

And before you say "Well, of COURSE; Apple doesn't have to support a GAZILLION motherboards, peripherals, etc."; please keep in mind that nearly every Apple system (except some of the very recent designs) used fairly unique (to the particular model) hardware. In fact, in most Apple designs, the only major IC in common was the CPU. (family). Yes, the overall "universe" is somewhat smaller; but not nearly so small as to preclude many, many problems.

..."OS X ready!"

There's no OS installed, so one could install Linux or even Windows. But that's in the smaller print in the advertisement.

As it stands, all one needs to install OS X on almost any netbook is a DVD drive, an OS X DVD and some software on a flashdrive. And if I'm not mistaken, there are now flashstick only OS X installers, with a patched/hacked version of OS X included on the stick.

As for the "limitations" of ONLY 2GB. My Mac, a 1.42GHZ G4 Dual Processor MDD/FW800 frequently has 10 or more apps running at once, with, I must say, only the slightest observable slowdown in some processor intensive apps. So this whole Windows 7 only 3 apps at a time thing is amazingly stupid.

Sure, most folks only need a few apps at a time on a netbook, but I can easily see situations where having email, browser, graphics editor, text editor, streaming audio, P2P, Skype, etc all going at once could be not at all out of the ordinary. FSM knows that's what's on my Mac right now.

Really, IMHO, the only limitation I see in a netbook is the drive capacity. If they can get 160GB SSD in a netbook capable of running OS X for approx. US$500, I think that would be a very popular and best selling computer.

Macs never had the OS in ROM, with one exception. The Mac Classic, released in 1990. It had System 6 in ROM, and you could boot into it by holding down Cmd-Opt-X-O at boot time.

~Philly

It amazes me now, how we computed with so little RAM and no Hard Disk. I don't know how much ram Cell phones have but its probably more..

Those old macs 8 mhz processor 128 Kbytes (512 soon after.)

full specs
http://lowendmac.com/compact/original-macintosh-128k.html

Of course there were times when those old macs would spit out the disk you were using and ask you to put in the system disks... The Mac SE with harddrive couldn't come soon enough.

My guess is that this feature exists in the 25th Anniversary Mac, we just don't know it yet.

Given that the 20th Anniversary Mac is already 12 years old, what machine would you propose as the "25th Anniversary Mac?" The iMac G4 and 14" iBook were introduced about five years after the 20th Anniversary Mac.

I believe you when you say it is ok for you :) I know daskeyboard is one of the best out there.

For me, take a look at this enter key. The lower part is ridiculously thin. If you are pressing the enter close to the lower side like me, with that keyboard you have a problem. And that is the reason for my previous flames.

"I had an Apple Performa 6360 and I don't know if a clone company could have made anything worse that that piece of crap."

You never had a 52xx/62xx series Performa. There was absolutely nothing Apple ever made that was worse than these pieces of shit. Mine literally ended up as a basement doorstop. Luckily for me, it was given to me to tinker with when the original owner couldn't keep it running.

Consider yourself lucky :)

Sorry to hear about your problems. Given your comments below, it looks like your MBP is completely effed. I would look into getting a new mobo (I don't think you can replace the GPU on those boxes) and finding a good guide (look around here). Otherwise, sell it to an enthusiast when it dies.

I had something similar happen with an iBook G4 many moons ago, and it taught me a very important lesson: buy the damn warranty, especially with a laptop. I've done it with every laptop I've bought since then, Apple or not, and it's absolutely worth it.

If it seems like it costs too much, there are two things to do:

1. Consider whether you need the laptop you're buying - would that last $200 be better spent on the warranty?
2. Remember that much of the time you're able to purchase the warranty up to a year after the purchase of the machine. This means you can distribute the cost of the warranty. Often it makes sense to go ahead and make the purchase and then buy the warranty 6 months later.

The one thing that's really not an option is to just bank on your laptop living through your use of it. You'll stress it, abuse it, maybe drop it one day - and you need some kind of support when that happens.

Actually, people have been saying "One day, OS-X will have enough users that malware authors will target it the way they target Windows". That hasn't happened yet

are you sure?

then no one could

Pish and bosh! When did MS drop compatibility? This is FUD through "the wrong end of the telescope".

I can run the clock, MSDOS Executive and Notepad from Windows 1.0 on Vista, forgodssake! .Net 1.0 code runs fine on the .Net 3 VM, just as most Java 1 code runs on the new Java6 JVM. Deprecated libraries can be accessed one way or another.

Azure is mostly a .Net machine with some REST for storage - with a very good deployment tool integrated with VisStudio TS. You want to pull out of the cloud and self-host? Pretty easy. Just watch your cost to deliver service go up.

Yea, but a lot of people show devotion to their notebook computer manufacturers, who hardwire these chips onto the mobos.

Like, say, the Apple MacBook Pro and its nVidia GeForce 8600M GT, for instance.

Yea, a 1997 with laptops that weigh 1kg, have a battery life of 5 hours and a screen that is actually capable of doing graphics work on. I wish I was around in *your* 1997.

Well, except for weighing ~5 lbs more and a max battery life of four hours, we had this way back in 1995. So I'm not really impressed.

GUI's could have been patentable, but as we've seen, Xerox started it, Apple used it, and Microsoft stole it from apple. When Microsoft was sued, they claimed prior art from Xerox. Once again, graphical representation is now prior art.

I used to think the same as you, that MS stole the GUI from Apple. However as CEO of Apple in or around 1991 John Sculley sold a license to a GUI to Microsoft. Some people think Steve Jobs stole the GUI from Xerox too. However Xerox invested in Apple and invited Jobs to tour Xerox PARC and try to develop a commercial product from what he saw there, PARC did fabulous research but weren't so good at commercializing what they created.

Falcon

Offense:

Psystar = Stolen Identity
Power Computing = Speeding

Your License Please - Power Computing:

http://www.streamstudio.com/images/pcc_6lg.jpg

Low End Mac:

http://lowendmac.com/orchard/07/0220.html

Quit yer bitchin': Used Macs

http://www.macofalltrades.com/

Now, you can produce music with ZERO MONEY (provided you got a PC). With GNU / Linux and a decent Audio editor and recorder (Ok, Audacity isn't the cream of the crop, but at least it gets the job done), and some music editor (forgot the names, but there are), you can produce your own album, and then burn the CD with k3b or another CD recording tool.

But let's get back a little in time, and that zero money became a couple thousand dollars: First you needed Microsoft Windows, and then an audio and music editor like Cakewalk Studio. The difference from zero to 2 thousand dollars is enough to keep amateurs out of the business. That's the power that Microsoft, Apple, Adobe and the rest keep over you. They keep for themselves, the tools that YOU NEED to succeed.

Given that Microsoft, Apple, etc. wrote that software, isn't it well within their rights to "keep it to themselves"? They're not obligated to give you the software they wrote for no charge. I think it's a great thing that you now have some free alternatives, but I find your statements absolutely ridiculous. No one's stopping you from writing your own music production software. If you can't, or it would take too much time, then why do you expect other people to do it for you for free?

And the more money you give to them, the more powerful they become to keep improving their product AND CHARGING MORE FOR IT. Or have you see software prices decrease over time? Well, actually, they have. According to this page and Amazon, Photoshop has decreased in price. $1000 - $999.00 = One dollar :)

So Photoshop has improved itself over the years, but costs roughly the same? What's the problem?

Now let's go to Microsoft Windows. In the 80's, MS-DOS costed around $40. The price for Windows Vista Ultimate is $319.95. Eight times more. Connect the dots, and guess how much Microsoft Windows 7 will cost when it's out.

$40 in the 1980's is worth more than $40 today, you know. It's not an eightfold increase in price.

Or have you see software prices decrease over time? Well, actually, they have. According to this page and Amazon, Photoshop has decreased in price. $1000 - $999.00 = One dollar

Oh sure, if you ignore inflation and added features.

As a matter of fact, if all of my computers were to vanish right now, my life wouldn't change that much.

Speak for yourself. You don't NEED computers as much as graphical designeers, movie and music producers (and I mean the musicians, not the RIAA tycoons), etc. We live in an age where handling information is vital for the economy. But tell me, how will poor people compete with big businesses if the tools they need cost THOUSANDS of dollars?

30 years ago, only the big labels were able to distribute music for you. Because making records was one of the most expensive things on earth. So you needed to depend on the big labels, the radio stations (who depended on the big labels), and so on.

Now, you can produce music with ZERO MONEY (provided you got a PC). With GNU / Linux and a decent Audio editor and recorder (Ok, Audacity isn't the cream of the crop, but at least it gets the job done), and some music editor (forgot the names, but there are), you can produce your own album, and then burn the CD with k3b or another CD recording tool.

But let's get back a little in time, and that zero money became a couple thousand dollars: First you needed Microsoft Windows, and then an audio and music editor like Cakewalk Studio. The difference from zero to 2 thousand dollars is enough to keep amateurs out of the business. That's the power that Microsoft, Apple, Adobe and the rest keep over you. They keep for themselves, the tools that YOU NEED to succeed.

And the more money you give to them, the more powerful they become to keep improving their product AND CHARGING MORE FOR IT. Or have you see software prices decrease over time? Well, actually, they have. According to this page and Amazon, Photoshop has decreased in price. $1000 - $999.00 = One dollar :)

Now let's go to Microsoft Windows. In the 80's, MS-DOS costed around $40. The price for Windows Vista Ultimate is $319.95. Eight times more. Connect the dots, and guess how much Microsoft Windows 7 will cost when it's out.

Apple had ethernet as a ship-with-computer option in 1991.

Apple was shipping its OS with built-in TCP/IP support at the exact same time MS started doing so. MacTCP could use ethernet or a PPP link.

You mean like how Apple never really bothered to port their m68k code when they switched to the PPC architecture? OS7 thru 9 could have been one hell of a lot faster and more stable if they'd just pulled their finger out.

Virtualisation/emulation is useful, but there are limits...

Btw, have you tried using an expensive old g3 mac (your five year old example). Good luck finding software thats not purposely broken so that it wont run on your revision of the OS. Thats the most hilarious part. Even if the software would work fine, there are locks on most programs to tell you what os revision you can run them on. You know the odd program that complains when you run it on 2k, but doesnt on XP? thats par the course for mac

I spent a couple days as an Apple representative in Circuit City, making sure their sales guys knew what iMacs could do. In addition to Apple's demo software, I brought in a copy of Unreal Tournament and an Ethernet crossover cable. Of course you can't really play UT without a two-button mouse, and iMacs at that time were shipping with hockey pucks, so I asked the sales guys if there was a PC with an extra USB mouse we could borrow.

They had no idea that an HP USB mouse could be plugged into a Mac.

They had also never heard of Unreal Tournament before, although a very attractive girl from the appliances department wandered over and mentioned that she had seen her boyfriend playing it at home. I was shocked that none of the computer salesmen were aware of such a popular game. It was definitely an eye-opening experience.

This is why Apple now has their own retail stores.

I've got news for you: http://lowendmac.com/compact/original-macintosh-128k.html And you couldn't even upgrade the memory. Well, not officially, anyhow. The first iMac was more expandable than the 128K.

As for the puck mouse, the problem wasn't carpal tunnel syndrome, the problem was that you couldn't know which way it was oriented without turning your head to look at the cable. With an oblong mouse, you can feel which way is "up" on the mouse and adjust accordingly.

Anyone out there still have one of these? Have you put it to any good use, other than a fish tank?

The keyboards in the first two years of white iBooks DO start to smell like BO. Something in the plastics and it is STRONG!

http://www.google.com/search?q=iBook+BO+smell&rls=com.microsoft:*&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1

A Stinky Old iBook that Smells Like Sweat

I got rid of mine!

Actually you can install Tiger natively, it has firewire. Also i believe there are some reports of installing Leopard on Pismos with G4 Upgrades
http://lowendmac.com/osx/leopard/unsupported.html

Apple did just this with Mac OS X. When I run an old 68k app, it starts Classic and runs the 68k emulator there. I have Hellcats Over the Pacific; it runs full screen and smooth even under Mac OS X, smoother than it ran on my Powerbook 140.

See lowendmac and (for instance) wikipedia

Could it have been an Acorn System 2 http://lowendmac.com/orchard/07/0228.html

Speaking on anecdotes, I personally think that Sony stereo equipment is shit.

That's probably true for their newer stuff (had to get a head unit in one of my cars fixed after only a year or two), but their older stuff was better. My father has an open-reel tape deck (a TC-730, IIRC) that's probably somewhere around 35 years old now. It doesn't see much use anymore (I don't even think it's been unboxed after my parents' last couple of moves), but it was in like-new condition the last time it was up and running.

As for Trinitrons, my Color Classic has a 10" that still works.

Good thing that Microsoft copywrited Windows as opposed to patenting it....

It works.

Got some links to back up that statement? Netbooting OS X over Airport with WPA keys?

Firewire requires 12V; battery on this is only 7.4V.

I imagine there's a voltage converter in there already, like in my Powerbook that has a powered firewire port on it... BTW, I said "DV-sized" for a reason; 6-pin firewire is pretty meaty as peripheral connectors go, which is why they removed it from the iPod after the 1st generation. The unpowered 4-pin Firewire connector present on most DV cams (aka i.Link in Sony land) is really tiny (smaller even than mini USB), and the TI chip that usually runs it costs about $5 (qty 1k).

On a high(er) end laptop like this I see it as the only glaring omission, even in the ultraportable minimalist meme that the MBA targets. I imagine the dialogue went something like this:

"Hey, all our expensive laptops have Firewire on them"

"But our connector's way too big"

"What about the 4-pin version?"

"Doesn't Sony have a brand consciousness build around that connector?"

"Yeah, and it already starts with the letter "I". Screw it, USB2 is good enough."

...which is really too damn bad. I would have much rather seen a mini-USB2 port and 4-pin Firewire than the standard-sized USB port, even if it meant using a dongle to connect "normal" USB peripherals, as most of the time I'd be using something that needs a USB cable (hub, drive, camera, card reader, etc) as opposed to a mouse or webcam or whatever that has a hardwired cable. This certainly would not have flown with the marketing guys as it's definately restrictive, but for me personally it's a design sacrifice that makes the difference between me wanting this machine and not. I just have too much Firewire stuff to not have it on any machine I own. Even the lack of wired ethernet port could be pardoned by having Firewire, but without one or the other there's just no real high-speed low-latency non-cpu-intensive way of getting large amounts of data in & out, which puts it in the same category for me as either (A) an EEEPC or (B) my phone (an E61).

BTW, this same conclusion lead me to wait until the 2nd iteration of the toilet-seat iBook was released before getting one, as it had Firewire (as did the Pismo).

What makes it worse is that every now and again, Apple pulls out the stops to make a keyboard or mouse that isn't just good, it's legendary.

Serious. In the "Best Keyboard Ever" sweepstakes, there's the IBM Model M, and there's the Apple Extended II at the top, and then it falls off a cliff. Nothing else is anywhere near as good. There's a company charging almost $150 for a bog-standard 110 key USB keyboard - and getting it - because its key action and layout are almost exactly like the old Extended II.

Then Apple turns around and gives us crap like the new Son of Chicklet bluetooth rattleboard or the original iMac hockey-puck mouse. Madness, I tell you.

Intelligent design in classroom of a public school is potentially dangerous to my life, because it stalls progress as I understand it. Conspiracy theories? No, this is unfortunately the reality.

The original Macintosh, from 1984 was an all-in-one. It's been their mantra under Steve, and will continue to be. Having an easy to use computer that you can also move at will by just unplugging one power cord, moving it, and then just plugging it back in is nice, and always has been. The question is why have all other attempts at duplicating this idea sucked so much, for so long?

--> http://lowendmac.com/brierley/06/0824.html

by your assertion, let's look at the numbers you're suggesting:

According to this --> http://www.macobserver.com/article/2003/03/10.6.shtml -- article, Apple's market share was at 3.5% in 2003. That's nearly 5 years ago. Let's just go with the lower estimate of 20% year over year. (You cited a LOT of wild figures you know... going up 20 times over 5 years? Are you saying it went up 20 x 3.5%? Isn't that 70% market share? And if it tripled, wouldn't that be 10.5%? But then your metrics are also all over the place...) but at 20% compounding, we're looking at 4.2% in 2004, 5.04% in 2005, 6.048% in 2006 and 7.2576% in 2007. That does seem like a reasonable figure, but we're not looking at the staggering numbers I'm predicting. I'm predicting a great deal more than that. I'm looking for numbers that will actually humble Microsoft to the point of actually having to listen to Apple's demands rather than the other way around as it is presently.

Admittedly, I'm unable to quickly find any useful information indicating present market share, but in a conversation I had with an Apple store employee recently, I recall a statement of around 6 or 7% market share which doesn't quite reach your assertions even with a conservative interpretation of your numbers. (If I went with 40%, it'd be WAY off...) And to say "fairly steady" and "20-40%" is an oxymoron! Care to cite your references?

Yup - as commented, probably single digit MHz: the PC/AT for example, was 6 to 8 MHz.

Of course, at the time that came out, I was using a 7.83 MHz processor on my desk, and had access to something a bit bigger for the fun stuff.

It's a puck