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Further rumours of running Windows apps natively in OS X, are nothing new. A decade ago, the idea was touted as Red Box.

Many posters have argued that for Apple to actively support other platforms natively such as Win32, .NET, KDE, GTK and Java are counter-productive in terms of promoting their own native Cocoa and iApps. However providing OS level hooks to run .Net/Windows applications through mono/wine would allow 3rd party volunteers to complete the efforts. [Off-topic]Similarly, Apple mightn't be an active participant in the virtualization area such as porting Xen but providing implicit support in XNU wouldn't hurt either[/Off-topic].

I have another wild theory: It might actually exist and be a, currently, hidden Apple internal subsystem for running cross-platform applications in XCode. Since the NeXT days, there's been a Cocoa subsystem for Windows which facilitates Apple building iSuite apps for Vista. The missing piece? Click Run in XCode and an embedded Wine-subsystem will launch enough of Windows to show you, with high fidelity, how the application will behave under Vista/XP.

That scenario would save Apple a lot of time in terms of testing their Windows applications. If they wanted to re-launch Cocoa as a cross-platform deployment platform makes more sense, to me at least, than the proposal that Apple will endorse running natively the Windows version of Photoshop et alia.

Correction: You didn't click "OK", you clicked "Replace." Probably because Windows has taught you to ignore the information in dialog boxes and just click the button.

What you consider to be an obvious defect I've always considered to be a feature. After dealing with Unix and Windows for 10 years and never getting the results I expected on a copy/move operation, I was delighted to find that Mac OS X behaved as expected. In 8 years of using a Mac I've never suffered any data loss because of this behavior. I rarely find a need to merge folders, but in those rare cases where I do want to do it, I agree that it would be nice to have a "merge" option, though I would be against having this as the default.

See also: http://lowendmac.com/misc/05/1031.html

Having a stable Unix base certainly helps, but their products are far from flawless.

While Apple's products aren't flawless they are much better than many competitors' products, and this was true before OS X. The first computer I bought was a used Mac SE30 I bought in 1992, SE30s came out in 1989. I used it until 2000 when it finally failed. I bought another used Mac in 2000 after the SE30 died, a PowerMac 7300/200. They were released in 1997. I used it until January 2006, when it refused to bootup.

At the same tyme I've bought 3 new Windows PCs. I bought a laptop from Gateway and a DEC Alpha based PC running Windows NT4.0 and Redhat Linux from Microway in 1997. Within 6 months the hdd in the laptop had to be replaced, then 2 week short of having it a year the motherboard also had to be replaced. I replaced the PC with an HP Pavilion I bought in 2000. Just as with the laptop, it's hdd and motherboard had to be replaced in the first year. The one PC I haven't mentioned yet is the Alpha. Because it's cpu is an Alpha I was not able to install much software, the only commercial program I was able to install was Borland C++ Powerbuilder. And because of this I haven't used it much, not at all in 3 or 4 years.

people bought clones because they were less expensive than the real thing.

Some did, but I recall that some people were buying some of the higher-end clones because they offered some advanced dual- and quad-CPU options (for example, DayStar Digital) that were unavailable or under-spec'd by Apple at that time. In many case, they were paying the same or more for these than extant retail for Apple kit.

I found a short clip of Jobs exerting the Reality Distortion Field wrt clone licences. Jobs derides their value, but this says they were a 7.25% royalty... low, but not "$50", assuming an average of $2,000 retail for every Power Computing machine, some 50,000 generating $100m in sales.

All in all Jobs' attitude presented quite a change from Apple's earlier I Think We're A Clone Now enthusiasm. Here's another vintage video, a news extract describing Apple's short-lived experiment with Macintosh licensing.

Under Jobs, Apple resorted to several strategies to squelch the Mac cloners. One cunning method was to rebrand OS 7.7 as OS 8, thereby voiding existing pricing deals and enabling Apple to reset terms that were more punitive. In the case of Power Computing, Apple paid $100m to buy the company outright, including all its IP, and thus shut down one of the more prominent cloners. Apple also got PC's impressive direct ordering system modelled on Gateway/Dell , which enabled it to build out its apple.com sales channel.

people bought clones because they were less expensive than the real thing.

Some did, but I recall that some people were buying some of the higher-end clones because they offered some advanced dual- and quad-CPU options (for example, DayStar Digital) that were unavailable or under-spec'd by Apple at that time. In many case, they were paying the same or more for these than extant retail for Apple kit.

I found a short clip of Jobs exerting the Reality Distortion Field wrt clone licences. Jobs derides their value, but this says they were a 7.25% royalty... low, but not "$50", assuming an average of $2,000 retail for every Power Computing machine, some 50,000 generating $100m in sales.

All in all Jobs' attitude presented quite a change from Apple's earlier I Think We're A Clone Now enthusiasm. Here's another vintage video, a news extract describing Apple's short-lived experiment with Macintosh licensing.

Under Jobs, Apple resorted to several strategies to squelch the Mac cloners. One cunning method was to rebrand OS 7.7 as OS 8, thereby voiding existing pricing deals and enabling Apple to reset terms that were more punitive. In the case of Power Computing, Apple paid $100m to buy the company outright, including all its IP, and thus shut down one of the more prominent cloners. Apple also got PC's impressive direct ordering system modelled on Gateway/Dell , which enabled it to build out its apple.com sales channel.

You asked how to make your product a disaster by selling a million units. I told you how. Units sold is about as effective as MHz as a measure of performance. It doesn't tell the whole story, and the story in Apple's case will be told in another week or so. Q4 conference call is due soon. AAPL is going to get murdered if their core business doesn't make up for the slack iPhone sales.

Do you think they even managed a million units this quarter? If they only moved 730,000 units in 72 days I'd be really surprised. It is looking like 900,000 in 90 days to me. Maybe they had some explosive demand for iPhones in the last half of the September, but I wouldn't bank on Apple having sold one million phones this quarter. Even if they do, it's still bad news. They did it at $399 per unit. Any way you look at it, it's a major revenue shortfall.

Bad news for a company hoping to sell 10 million in the first year. I'm sure Steve will dress it up though and say 1.2 Million since the debut, because 5-10% under one million is going to sound really bad for a company with a 51 PE ratio. The only way they can maintain numbers like that is to maintain the "growth stock" image. You do remember how Wall Street received the news about the cube don't you?

Over the last 10 years AAPL has been an unreal performer. They're a f'ing stock market superstar. Nobody can touch that record. But I believe they will be taking their lumps with the iPhone. No need to argue about it, we'll know in a few more days.

You forgot that it was announced way too early by Sculley, which gave the competitors years to get their shit together. He announced a PDA in early 1992 and had a Newton demo that summer. I'd say Jobs' tight secrecy is a good thing. http://lowendmac.com/orchard/06/0207.html

... and put your heads in the sand. As a true Apple fan, I don't hesitate to point out when they F' it up big time.

I don't think they were actually "banking" on it.

You don't think? You must not have read much about it then. To anyone who has, they were clearly banking on it. A month into it they were renegotiating contracts attempting to cut production in half. A month after that, they dropped the price 33%. The "revolutionary new product" has been a dud.

Let's not forget that they are only just now starting to release the product in Europe. They haven't released it in Asia yet.

No shit!?! Maybe they could sell more phones if they could somehow sell their iPhones directly to customers instead of pairing it with service plans from various vendors. Maybe if the iPhone were somehow unbound from that relationship, unlocked if you will... Man!!! Confused one, that is an AWESOME idea!!! You should tell Apple about that!

...

Friday's close of 144.15 is just off AAPL's all time high. AAPL crashed hard on their last high profile failure. I'm not expecting a repeat performance, but it isn't going to be pretty. We'll see who's flamebait in another month, won't we?

One thing that really bothered me on OS X was its complete and total lack of an uninstall feature. This was especially annoying, as I'd hoped that the "drag to trash" was really a fancy GUI for some sort of real package manager.

I mean, sure, if your app is entirely self-contained, you can just drag it from Applications to Trash and be done with it -- at least that's no worse than Linux, where per-user preferences are left alone, but nobody really cares, since it's only a few K of disk space and doesn't affect anything else.

But what do you do about the random app that installs kernel extensions, browser extensions, and generally insinuates itself among all your stuff? You know, the cool stuff like Insomnia, the SMS-to-HID driver, or the force-any-window-to-fullscreen extension? Or even multi-desktops, or something as simple as a VPN?

Often, the uninstall instructions for these are at least as complicated and unnecessary as anything you hear people complaining about for installing software on Linux.

Oh wait, I forgot -- there's a proud Mac tradition of making you pay $20, $50, or $100 for random bits of third-party software to implement stuff that should have been in the OS to begin with. In the past, it was things like dynamic RAM allocation and swap space, and now, it's an uninstaller.

(You could complain that Windows is the same way, needing third-party stuff like anti-virus, but most of what you need on Windows is either bundled with the OS or available for free, often open source. And you don't really need anti-virus. On the Mac, it's always this truly basic functionality that I guess isn't needed by people who want it to "just work".)

In any case, mod me offtopic if you will, but maybe this proves that Apple was right not to include an uninstaller. Maybe most people just don't need to uninstall anything, ever, so it's too much work to include yet another feature that may confuse grandma, even if it makes us geeks grind our teeth at the mere thought...

What about Bean? While not a kitchen-sink suite, it seems like one helluva word processor.

I'v got a Macintosh Plus [1Mb]
(Valley Girl) O-M-G !!!
ALL the women want me.
I AM leet.

Seriously, it runs a [small :-] server ... offline:

http://www.machttp.org/modules.php?op=modload&name =Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=6

Like others:

http://www.ld8.org/servers/servers.html

It's 21 years old for Christ's sake. My Wife has a PowerMac 2x 2,5 MHz G5 and it *feels* snappier than that.
The point is BIGGER MHz EVEN BIGGER bloat, we've gained so little.
The constant "arms race" of MHz to bloat makes most gains moof, er - moot.

Further:

http://www.lowendmac.com/compact/plus.shtml

http://lowendmac.com/musings/macplus.shtml

http://macplus.mia.net/

http://www.nd.edu/~jvanderk/sysone/

Mactracker:

http://www.mactracker.ca/

I'v got a Macintosh Plus [1Mb]
(Valley Girl) O-M-G !!!
ALL the women want me.
I AM leet.

Seriously, it runs a [small :-] server ... offline:

http://www.machttp.org/modules.php?op=modload&name =Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=6

Like others:

http://www.ld8.org/servers/servers.html

It's 21 years old for Christ's sake. My Wife has a PowerMac 2x 2,5 MHz G5 and it *feels* snappier than that.
The point is BIGGER MHz EVEN BIGGER bloat, we've gained so little.
The constant "arms race" of MHz to bloat makes most gains moof, er - moot.

Further:

http://www.lowendmac.com/compact/plus.shtml

http://lowendmac.com/musings/macplus.shtml

http://macplus.mia.net/

http://www.nd.edu/~jvanderk/sysone/

Mactracker:

http://www.mactracker.ca/

And this explanation was helpful too.

Theoretically we're dealing with 24-bit video on all of today's Macs - 8 bits of red, green, and blue combine to create 16,777,216 colors. However, it seems that all of today's notebook LCDs only support 6 bits per color channel, which means that these 'Books can only display 262,144 colors.

However, there's a catch. An LCD pixel isn't a single spot. It's a square composed of three side-by-side red, blue, and green crystals. By using adjacent crystals on the right and/or left (sort of borrowing them from the pixel next door), we can effectively display 7 bits per channel. That's 21-bit color, which means that using clever programming these "6-bit" LCDs can actually display 2,097,152 colors.

The DS design itself is NOT superior.

Why?

The DS can NEVER play GTA even if it had the horsepower.

I assume this is why you think the DS is "not superior". However the word "superior" is extremely subjective, and you give no qualifiers to this effect. While you are perhaps correct regarding "computing power", you are completely wrong in, say, "battery life".

Also, if I upgraded the DS's "horsepower" to a 4 GHz processor, a gig of RAM, a 1080p screen, and a DVD attachment, it still couldn't "play GTA"? Wow, I must really not understand computers very well.

Ever tried browsing on a 32mb PC?

It's not that bad.

The DS does NOT attempt to be cutting edge,

According to you.

The PSP tries and fails, the DS doesn't try and succeeds.

So PSP:DS::your post:mine?

The last time Apple offered this sort of thing it did wonderfully! I still have some great notes about it in my eMate... I don't watch the MacTV too often anymore though because I'm too busy playing games on my Pippin!

http://lowendmac.com/compact/classic.shtml, there you are. The fact that you never saw one, doesn't mean they didn't exist :c)

Back in the day, Apple used to ship Macs with a copy of pre-OS X, Mac OS on a ROM.

Which macs are these?

I've never seen one.

The Mac Classic could boot up from ROM using System 6.0.3 and Finder 6.1.

Did someone say "RedBox"?

Um, pretty much the only thing wrong with the Cube was the pricing. The success of the Mini demonstrates that rather nicely! There have been real Apple lemons.

macs, lol.

Hey, if you want to block millions of potential visitors, that's your prerogative. Personally, I'd like to keep the doors open for them.

I'm sure Steve's influence on the company's success is overrated. They did just fine without him, launching many successful products under the wise leadership of their brilliant interim CEOs.

Because blogs are a way to reach audiences that are not reached through traditional marketing outlets

Yeah, because Apple has a real problem "reaching audiences." I mean, who ever heard of an iPod? They seem to think that TV commercials and word-of-mouth alone will sell the things.

they increase the amount of feedback you receive from your customers, and they provide a way to mine your user base for ideas.

If only there were some website where Apple could gather user opinions and feedback.

-- Brian Boyko
-- Professional Blogger.

It shows.

If I were to guess, I'd say that they'd simply use force feedback to indicate when your lightsaber was being blocked/was blocking. Give the player a bit of 'grace' for over-swing and force them to learn some control of their movements. Now admittedly, I've never been involved in a real sword fight, but in swinging wooden practice swords around with my friends, we quickly learned that the two wooden swords will bounce off each other when someone blocked a very strong swing. There was more than one incident with somebody's wooden sword bouncing back and striking them. Now that could hurt when it was a simple wooden pole; I'd imagine the consequences would be much worse if the same happened with a real sword/light saber. Besides, using Macsaber is far more entertaining.

see here

Power Mac G3 is clearly listed. This would include the Power Mac G3 All-in-One.

Switchback was not really noticed that much either. It only could infect 7 to 8 million OSX based Macs. Still it shows that AppleScript and Safari are weak links in the OSX armor that can be exploited by someone if they try really hard enough to make it work with newer versions of OSX.

Mac Users are like the old Amiga users, thinking that their platform is so secure that no virus is written for it, so there is no need for antivirus programs. The Amiga users figured this, because MS-DOS was targeted by virus after virus (they infected floppy disk boot sectors back then), and that AmigaDOS would not be targeted by virus writers. That was 1986-1989, and in the 1990's viruses were written for AmigaDOS and Amiga users got infected and didn't know it because they refused to run antivirus programs. Then it was on demo disks that people always spread around to show off what the Amiga could do, the viruses infected those disks and Amiga after Amiga.

Hackers should target Mac users, because chances are a Mac user has more money than a Windows user, and the Mac user is less likely to run an antivirus program. Just read this article with all of the comments from Mac users saying how a real virus won't infect their system.

According to this article, there isn't anything really special about laptop batteries that would make them that expensive, but batteries ARE expensive. They must have been making some good money off the batteries. So they did well in the class about how to rip people off.

I imagine most Apple Employees are more productive on 17" screens than on smaller ones.

Funny though, my word processor is slower today than it was then.

nrrdy people can see that the problem was an issue with Sony's manufacturing. that has little effect on the headlines. basically you are upset with the media and how they are reporting news. yeah, it happens. if it was flaming iPods, i am sure Apple would have gotten more negative attention.

think about it:
1) Dell had to recall many times the number of batteries that Apple did. that just makes it a bigger issue. if Ford recalled 75,000,000 cars and GM recalled 100,000 for the same defective brake pads i am sure Ford would get the headlines. Dell was shipping the batteries for over two years. that's a LOT of machines for them.
2) you may be reading biased blogging sites?
3) Apple does not even use that type of battery in the MacBook/Pro. they now are using lithium-polymer, and not lithium-ion, for the laptops. (li-ion still in iPods though). maybe analysts like that?
4) in terms of fault, i am sure that can be argued forever, and we'll never know the true facts. yes, Sony made the batteries. at what point did Dell or Apple know the issue was serious and widespread enough to issue a recall. did Sony tie them up figuring out which models were at risk? did their own internal management tie up the recall hoping it would go away? did you read/see Fight Club? the whole part about car recalls and why they take so long to happen. yeah......
Apple spent years being dissed for "the flaming powerbook" thing from 1995, that was a battery issue that was resolved before any machines got out to consumers.
just for history/fun: http://www.lowendmac.com/pb2/5300.shtml
5) if you do some poking online you will see that the Dell recall hot them at a time that Wall Street analysts have been unpleased with them about other issues, including customer service. the estimated $500 million recall is a bad thing for Dell and Sony in a biz sense. both stocks took a (temporary?) hit.
6) it sounds like there may be other manufacturers besides Apple and Dell that got the wonky batteries, but who knows if it will be so large scale.

Crack quite possibly, but also could have been had.... UMAX did make Macintosh clones, a loong time ago way back in 1996. Before Steve came in and killed the whole practice. At LEM they have a write up from 2002 on getting OS X to work on the hardware, so it is not too far fetched to say that you might have a UMAX computer with OS X, anything further than that is BS. Keys... never seen it on a Mac OS (never touched server, so can't say anything about it). I did recently notice that Apple has computer specific install disks that come with their computers. I had an OS X install disk from an iMac that I tried to use to upgrade a G4 with, and I got an error saying that I couldn't do that. They may have been doing this for awhile, but this is the first time I've ever ran in to it.

Crack quite possibly, but also could have been had.... UMAX did make Macintosh clones, a loong time ago way back in 1996. Before Steve came in and killed the whole practice. At LEM they have a write up from 2002 on getting OS X to work on the hardware, so it is not too far fetched to say that you might have a UMAX computer with OS X, anything further than that is BS. Keys... never seen it on a Mac OS (never touched server, so can't say anything about it). I did recently notice that Apple has computer specific install disks that come with their computers. I had an OS X install disk from an iMac that I tried to use to upgrade a G4 with, and I got an error saying that I couldn't do that. They may have been doing this for awhile, but this is the first time I've ever ran in to it.

I used to have a Performa 5200 back when I started college, and if you're not familiar with the machine, it's arguably the worst Macintosh ever made. Ever. The only thing it excelled at was displaying grainy TV on the TV tuner card you could get for it.

Read that second link for all the gory details of why the follow scenario works, and you'll shudder.

I used to note in college that when doing particularly fast FTP transfers that saturated by 10-Base-T card that the machine would often lock up within a minute of starting the transfer. For months, I fiddled around and noticed that if I was actively working that this didn't happen. Eventually, I found the article I mentioned and realized that if I kept moving the mouse constantly, the machine wouldn't get in whatever weird state locked up the machine and I could finish my transfers. That's right -- to run FTP (or any other sustained, saturated transfer), I had to sit there moving the mouse in circles through the entire transfer.

Essentially, the "Left 32" bus described in the article was shared by the 16-bit Apple Desktop Bus (for mouse and keyboard) and the 16-bit networking card (as well as audio and the 8-bit SCSI controller). So long as I kept interrupting the bus with input from ADB, the networking card was unable to flood the controller that had to make sense of all the different bit-widths and clock speeds between the various busses hanging off of it, and the machine wouldn't lock up.

Now how's that for some serious computer voodoo?

I used to have a Performa 5200 back when I started college, and if you're not familiar with the machine, it's arguably the worst Macintosh ever made. Ever. The only thing it excelled at was displaying grainy TV on the TV tuner card you could get for it.

Read that second link for all the gory details of why the follow scenario works, and you'll shudder.

I used to note in college that when doing particularly fast FTP transfers that saturated by 10-Base-T card that the machine would often lock up within a minute of starting the transfer. For months, I fiddled around and noticed that if I was actively working that this didn't happen. Eventually, I found the article I mentioned and realized that if I kept moving the mouse constantly, the machine wouldn't get in whatever weird state locked up the machine and I could finish my transfers. That's right -- to run FTP (or any other sustained, saturated transfer), I had to sit there moving the mouse in circles through the entire transfer.

Essentially, the "Left 32" bus described in the article was shared by the 16-bit Apple Desktop Bus (for mouse and keyboard) and the 16-bit networking card (as well as audio and the 8-bit SCSI controller). So long as I kept interrupting the bus with input from ADB, the networking card was unable to flood the controller that had to make sense of all the different bit-widths and clock speeds between the various busses hanging off of it, and the machine wouldn't lock up.

Now how's that for some serious computer voodoo?

I've been running OS X on a first gen white iBook for years now. Sure, you don't get all the whizz-bang fancy effects, but it's quite usable. The first gen G4 iBooks had a few logic borad problems, but the first gen G3s were soid wee beasts. All you needed to do was stick in a bit more RAM. Couldn't believe there was a 64MB option, but Low-End Mac confirms it. I started with 384MB and it worked like a charm. The bus did suck though. The next revision ripped CDs almost twice as fast with a CPU boost of only 100 MHz; it was the bus upgrade that made all the difference.

What's wrong with a 7 year old computer anyhow? Stick enough RAM in an old Blue & White G3 and you can run the current OS X. That's equivalent to running XP on a 7 year old PC, only it's not slow as molasses.

Cool.
I'm sure IBM is not showing us everything, (wink, wink) what they do for the DoD, NSA and the rest of the alphabet, I'm sure would give us nightmares.

(Laboratory for Telecommunications Sciences (LTS) -programs continue to emphasize transmission of quantum communications through optical elements.
Quantum communications, quality of service, and high- speed network interfaces)

http://www.er.doe.gov/ascr/NITRD05supplement.pdf

August 19, 2002
IBM, RIM Drafted By Defense Department

http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/1 448711

"Big Blue Monday said its AIX 5L was the first UNIX operating system certified by the DoD to run COE Version 4 (Common Operating Environment), a user interface which utilizes the same commands regardless of what operating system is running on the server."

Fun huh?

VMware: US military staff and do not recommend VMware for secure environment:

http://www.cs.nps.navy.mil/people/faculty/irvine/p ublications/2000/VMM-usenix00-0611.pdf

Apple's foray in DOS add-on cards

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=112 244

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadra_610

http://www.ralentz.com/old/mac/faqs/source/houdini .html

http://homepage.mac.com/olivers/DOScard/DOScard.ht ml

http://lowendmac.com/archive/06/0407.html

Bullshit. Whenever there is a *wide-scale* issue, Apple responds very quickly.

Yes, they tell you to fuck off very quickly. Ever hear of a UDMA data corruption issue with the Revision 1 B&W G3?

The Rev. 2 b&w G3 uses a different motherboard, has an additional drive bracket, incorporates a new IDE controller chip (marked 402), and includes a faster version of the ATI Rage 128 video card. 350 MHz and 400 MHz models may have either motherboard; 450 MHz and faster versions always have the Rev. 2 board from the factory. The new IDE controller improves slave drive support and solves a drive corruption problem.

When buying a blue & white G3, insist on getting a Revision 2 system. The best way to make sure you're getting a Rev. 2 motherboard is the "402" marking on the CMD646 IDE controller chip. See Accelerate Your Mac! for more details on differences between these motherboard revisions.

And here is the page on Acclerate Your Mac! that lets you download the data corruption test tool.

Ah, finally! I found the page that talks about the data corruption problem in the first place. There's also a page on B&W G3 problems in general, but it's not as interesting.

Apple's solution (they pulled this article from the KB when they moved their old pages to the new support pages) was to either buy FWB Toolkit and install a driver that will put the drive in PIO mode, which costs you significant CPU time and reduces throughput, or to buy an add-in IDE host adapter card and hook your UDMA drives up to that.

You can trust Apple all you want, but I think that makes you an idiot. After they fucked over early adopters of the bondi blue G3, then they hid the evidence!

Forget "inflation". If you really want to compare values, line up the cost of the consoles against the cost of computing hardware.

I used the Mac, because it's conventient to look up past prices on "lowendmac.com", admitedly, Apple pricing has historically been downright goofy compared to commodity PC's, but this is just let's check it out.

I included inflation adjustments in my other post to illustrate that the PS3's price point was a heavier load on consumers' wallets than any past system (though the Sega Saturn got close). I also had a conclusion: a cheap system with an early release stands far stronger than more expensive systems released later on ... being the last one out of the gates and releasing at the highest initial price doesn't bode well for the PS3, especially since Nintendo will be sharing their release window. Another note I made was that Sega made it big by releasing the Genesis long before the SNES, and Sony did the same with the PSX. ... Microsoft's Xbox stands tall with a year's lead over the PS3 and Wii.

Inflation adjustments give us an estimate of what those systems cost in terms of modern cash equivilance. It weights the upward trend of console costs with the downward trend of the value of American cash. I did not use inflation as the comparative rate, only a bias to compare console prices overall.

There was a time when console gaming was THE gaming solution for those who could not afford to just buy a game computer.

These days, if you want to sell a console, you need some other hook besides price to set it apart. Sony and Microsoft are betting on selling you an uber-fast PC dressed like a console and taking a loss on each unit. Nintendo is hoping their "sideways TV remote" controller will dazzle people.

Most video game consumers are NOT technical in terms of computing; they want something affordable and specialized to the purpose of playing games. Take a look at the success of iPods, for example. Simple and specialized. I do not think that comparing the relative cost of computers to consoles is a good measure; video game consoles are always on a strict budget, and they'll cram in as much technology (be it GPU power or clever interfaces) as possible within that budget.

Forget "inflation". If you really want to compare values, line up the cost of the consoles against the cost of computing hardware.

I used the Mac, because it's conventient to look up past prices on "lowendmac.com", admitedly, Apple pricing has historically been downright goofy compared to commodity PC's, but this is just let's check it out.

I included inflation adjustments in my other post to illustrate that the PS3's price point was a heavier load on consumers' wallets than any past system (though the Sega Saturn got close). I also had a conclusion: a cheap system with an early release stands far stronger than more expensive systems released later on ... being the last one out of the gates and releasing at the highest initial price doesn't bode well for the PS3, especially since Nintendo will be sharing their release window. Another note I made was that Sega made it big by releasing the Genesis long before the SNES, and Sony did the same with the PSX. ... Microsoft's Xbox stands tall with a year's lead over the PS3 and Wii.

Inflation adjustments give us an estimate of what those systems cost in terms of modern cash equivilance. It weights the upward trend of console costs with the downward trend of the value of American cash. I did not use inflation as the comparative rate, only a bias to compare console prices overall.

There was a time when console gaming was THE gaming solution for those who could not afford to just buy a game computer.

These days, if you want to sell a console, you need some other hook besides price to set it apart. Sony and Microsoft are betting on selling you an uber-fast PC dressed like a console and taking a loss on each unit. Nintendo is hoping their "sideways TV remote" controller will dazzle people.

Most video game consumers are NOT technical in terms of computing; they want something affordable and specialized to the purpose of playing games. Take a look at the success of iPods, for example. Simple and specialized. I do not think that comparing the relative cost of computers to consoles is a good measure; video game consoles are always on a strict budget, and they'll cram in as much technology (be it GPU power or clever interfaces) as possible within that budget.

Me Culpa, I looked here and read bottom up to find G3...mistook it for G3 pro. Oh well, they're both old hardware (and by old, I should clarify that I mean "fully depreciated by the standards of the US Internal Revenue Service").

I stand corrected.

Are you saying your powerbook has a 13" screen and a core duo?

Next you'll be telling me that when you say "my powerbook", you're talking about a Powerbook Duo 2300c.

Leave it to Apple to set the trends again. I bet all the other companies are gonna copy them and come out with black laptops now... ; )

Another example of the influence of the original PowerBook on the rest of the laptop industry is the placement of the keyboard and pointing devices: prior to the release of the PowerBook pointing devices were either non-existant on PC laptops (purchased separately and hung off the side of the laptop by a hook or bracket) or were situated above the keyboard or on the display and keyboards were placed in a "key-forward" position without a palm or wrist rest. After the release of the powerbook, however, almost all laptops placed pointing devices below the keyboard or used the IBM TrackPoint eraser-head mechanism in the middle of the keyboard itself and moved the keyboard back to allow the user's wrists to rest on the blank space at the front of the laptop case.

http://lowendmac.com/quadra/q610dos.shtml http://flickr.com/photos/jotefa/123832903/

I said it once and I'll say it again Spindler was a man ahead of his time.

Gott in himmel, you are WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.

Herr Spindler almost augured Apple into the ground. More Road Apples came out during his regime than any other CEO of Apple.

It took the combined heavy lifting of Gil Amelio (the true unsung hero who saved Apple from the shitter) and The Steve to get Apple out of the rut Spindler put it in. Sculley sent it on this trajectory, but it was Spindler who put it into a power dive.

Spindler's place in Apple history is assured: the guy who nearly killed the company.

Spindler is not "forgotten". People who were Apple customers and employees at that time will never forget him, and still curse his name to this day. Spindler had no idea what he was doing, no sense of vision, and no understanding of what it was any of the departments under him were doing.

Exactly. During Spindler's tenure we got:

• Pathetic computers (such as the Power Mac x200 series and the infamous PowerBook 5300). I just so happen to own a Performa 6220 (acquired through somebody giving it to me about a few years ago, along with a Mac SE. I like the SE better.). The architecture is so messed up, it couldn't even support a 28Kbps or faster serial port modem! That machine is currently collecting dust in a closet back home.
• Copland disaster. Apple could have destroyed Microsoft and Windows 95 with a real, modern Mac operating system like what Copland promised. But delays after delays stalled the project until it was finally cancelled. It would be interesting to see what a modern, non-Unix (and non-Windows) GUI OS looks like, but Apple completely rested on their laurels here, and users were stuck with crashy and ancient OS 7, 8, and 9 until 2001 (OS X didn't really become stable until late 2002, IIRC). No wonder why Microsoft made a huge gain in marketshare during these years; I'd take Windows 2000 (or, heck, Windows 98) over Mac OS 9 any day.
• Corporate infighting. Imagine all of the nice Apple products out there had they succeeded.

The years between 1995 and 1997 was the perfect storm for Apple. Lousy products, lousy leadership, and Microsoft's exploitation of Apple's failures almost killed Apple. You can thank Spindler for starting the mess. (A lot of people want to blame Gil Amelio for these problems, but Amelio did the best that he could to solve them and he did bring Jobs back). The best thing about Spindler is that he was kicked out and replaced with Amelio, who was then kicked out and replaced with Steve Jobs. Now the company is successful again and making great products.

Spindler is not "forgotten". People who were Apple customers and employees at that time will never forget him, and still curse his name to this day. Spindler had no idea what he was doing, no sense of vision, and no understanding of what it was any of the departments under him were doing.

Exactly. During Spindler's tenure we got:

• Pathetic computers (such as the Power Mac x200 series and the infamous PowerBook 5300). I just so happen to own a Performa 6220 (acquired through somebody giving it to me about a few years ago, along with a Mac SE. I like the SE better.). The architecture is so messed up, it couldn't even support a 28Kbps or faster serial port modem! That machine is currently collecting dust in a closet back home.
• Copland disaster. Apple could have destroyed Microsoft and Windows 95 with a real, modern Mac operating system like what Copland promised. But delays after delays stalled the project until it was finally cancelled. It would be interesting to see what a modern, non-Unix (and non-Windows) GUI OS looks like, but Apple completely rested on their laurels here, and users were stuck with crashy and ancient OS 7, 8, and 9 until 2001 (OS X didn't really become stable until late 2002, IIRC). No wonder why Microsoft made a huge gain in marketshare during these years; I'd take Windows 2000 (or, heck, Windows 98) over Mac OS 9 any day.
• Corporate infighting. Imagine all of the nice Apple products out there had they succeeded.

The years between 1995 and 1997 was the perfect storm for Apple. Lousy products, lousy leadership, and Microsoft's exploitation of Apple's failures almost killed Apple. You can thank Spindler for starting the mess. (A lot of people want to blame Gil Amelio for these problems, but Amelio did the best that he could to solve them and he did bring Jobs back). The best thing about Spindler is that he was kicked out and replaced with Amelio, who was then kicked out and replaced with Steve Jobs. Now the company is successful again and making great products.

Spindler was the man behind several Road Apples, crippled Apple models that the company isn't particularly proud of.

Basically, with the pressure to produce low-cost Apple models, Apple stripped high-end designs in retarded ways (such as the narrow data bus on the Classic II which made it 30% slower than the SE/30 released several years earlier) or designed new models by producing technically absurd add-ons to older models (like the Performa 5200 that was basically the motherboard from one of the last 32-bit 680x0 series with a 64-bit PowerPC 603 on top of it that ran at half the effective clock speed and all the multiplexing on the resulting two 32-bit system buses had to be done by the CPU in software). Definitely suboptimal, and Apple fans today aren't particularly fond either to remember these all-time lows in Apple product history.

may also be the case for the XPClassic environ... (Or whatever they call it.)

You mean the Red Box? It's been a rumor since the late-90s Rhapsody days. With Apple assisting on the WINE project now, it seems to be more of a reality than a rumor these days.

You're describing an update of the 20th Anniversary Mac, which was considered a huge failure (of course this was pre-Jobs, to be fair.)

http://www.lowendmac.com/ppc/tam.shtml

When they released a overdesigned computer built from half-baked technology borrowed from the laptop line as the "20th Anniversary Mac". specs and extra pictures
Oh wait. Thats just like the iMac. Steve-o will have to try something else this time.

...850 MHz Centris...