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So are you defending Apple or what? Are you saying that Apple is going to OS as a service? Inquiring minds need to know about your whataboutism.

Perhaps I've lived in a bubble, but Apple is nothing like Microsoft - Examples pleas.

You have lived in a bubble, apparently.

If anything, Apple is even more arrogant than Microsoft, fuelled by the lemming-like loyalty of its fanbois. That arrogance has resulted in Apple dictating what users want, such as:

• - buggy forced yearly updates (ex. iOS 11) with gimmicks (Animoji......with tongues, anyone?) as "features"
• - removal of the headphone jack no one asked to be gone, because "courage"
• - flawed products (butterfly key keyboards) in the name of "thinness" (again no one asked for)
• - dictating how the device you paid for and own should perform without your control (batterygate)
• - design over function (awkward/hidden/esoteric UI, anemic products passed as “Pro”) being the product design philosophy

There's plenty of other examples out there (MacInTouch being a good resource.

And Launchpad that came long before - looks just like the iOS home screen.

https://www.macintouch.com/specialreports/lion/review2.html

There's a little wheel-reinvention in Launchpad. If we set aside its iOS-based design and interaction, it's strikingly similar to Apple's At Ease environment in System 7, except that it isn't a replacement for the Finder like At Ease was. It's more of an add-on, like the System 7.5 Launcher was, augmenting the Dock and Finder.

or some machine learning thing of some sort. (Totally borrowed from this comment because it's soooooo spot on!).

Is it as good as this ?

• microSD: 4-23MB/s
• Samsung Galaxy SIII: 11.8MB/s
• HTC One X+: 21.5MB/s
• iPhone4s: 38MB/s
• iPhone5: 100MB/s

iPhone benchmarks
microSD benchmarks
Android Benchmarks

You can start here and read all the problems you want to.

The idea that if you gave me a program now it would still be working in 30-50 years when I am likely to die is pretty silly.

I think it's sad that people think it's silly.

But from http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/lion/index.html, someone says:

If you think this is an extreme position, let's compare it to the mainframe world, where programs compiled 30 years ago continue to run. In that time, machines changed -- System/360 to System/370, System/390, zSeries, System z9, System z10, to zEnterprise. The CPUs have changed from 24 to 31 to 64 bit addressing, with hundreds of new instructions available. The operating system changed from OS/VS2R1 to MVS, MVS/XA, MVS/ESA, OS/390 to z/OS, adding everything from multi-tasking to virtual memory along the way. Programs compiled 20 years ago in high level languages continue to run, even though the run-time system the languages runs on has been completely rewritten. It *is* possible to maintain forward compatibility. Users just need to demand it as a requirement of the platform.

Though I think he's using "forward compatibility" where most people term that "backward compatibility".

I think we're talking about two different things. I wholeheartedly agree that you need a UI different from Windows for a touch-based GUI. But you don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. You don't have to have a system where the manufacturer acts as a gatekeeper to what can and can't be put on the device. And you don't have to have a system where the file system is completely abstracted away from you, and you have no choice on where to put things. There should be defaults as to where to store things, for newbies, but there shouldn't be mandated storage areas for files.

Most of all, though, a good touch OS should allow you to do everything you can do on a conventional OS. From what I've been reading about iWork, it's a pale shadow of an office suite. There's no excuse for that. What justification could there be for such a paltry application suite? It seems nonsensical to me. If I'm going to pay more than a netbook for a device, it should do more than a netbook. And that's why it needs a real OS.

.

And FWIW, AppleTV has component out.

I'm aware that the first-generation Apple TV has component out. But very few CRT SDTVs that I've seen in homes have component in, especially given that 480i component has negligible advantage over full-bandwidth S-Video. (If you try to use a component output with a composite input, you get black and white.) In fact, there are reports that the first-generation Apple TV's user interface is hard to read in 480i. It's really designed for 480p or higher, and 480p is considered EDTV.

Hardware failures are just far more rare for Apple products than they are for the flimsy machines that everybody in the windows market makes.

Tosh.

Apple use the same components, and the same assemblers, as everyone else. The G3 iBook had a 70% failure rate. Early Intel MacBook Pro's had a 25% failure rate.

Hardware failures are just far more rare for Apple products than they are for the flimsy machines that everybody in the windows market makes.

Tosh.

Apple use the same components, and the same assemblers, as everyone else. The G3 iBook had a 70% failure rate. Early Intel MacBook Pro's had a 25% failure rate.

Considering most early personal computers did include schematics, and various appendixes of technical information for expansion, including the original IBM PC XT.
( ref 1, IBM PC Technical Reference Manual, ref 2).

(And, honestly, why should installing Open Office be outside the scope of this machine's functions? The machine is good enough to run "iWork Pages"...)

It's not "outside its scope", it would just require a group of dedicated people willing to put the effort into porting Open Office to the iPad, while taking into account the device's relatively low processing power. The iPad versions of the iWork apps had to be scaled back quite a bit to work on an iPad.

I'm a long time PalmOS fan, so I can appreciate a system that does things a little differently in order to serve its role better

Same here. I like my iPhone but there were a lot of things that my old Palm IV did better. Unfortunately, making phone calls was not one of them.

This is about power... Diminishing Adobe's power and leveraging Apple's power.

I agree with you about Apple using its market power to diminish Flash's domination of Web video but I think that, rather than Apple wanting more power at Adobe's expense, it's more a matter of turnabout being fair play. When Apple was at its low ebb during the late Nineties, Adobe changed its development emphasis from Mac to Windows and urged its Mac-using customers to switch platforms. Now that Apple is once again strong, they're giving Adobe a bit of payback. Steve Jobs has a very long memory when it comes to things like that; after all, in his opinion at least, there might not even be an Adobe today if Apple hadn't been the first company to license PostScript for its LaserWriters.

Of course, it doesn't help that Flash for Mac really sucks, and has for years now.

With Windows, I could quickly find solutions to problems via forums, where most responses to Mac issues include countless "I refuse to acknowledge your criticism of my Apple product" or more often "but it's shiny" responses ... most often you have to reply multiple times with "yes, it is shiny, but I would really like it to do this ..." before finally giving up and living with the issue (example, I don't need to see my desktop when working in Photoshop ... wtf would I want to see unrelated content of any kind??? ... but too bad live with it)

Just because you're too stupid to use Google doesn't mean they don't exist. Hell, Macintouch has been around since the Paleozoic age of the internet, 1994.

single-button mouse?

Any complaints that aren't six years out of date?

like having the apple key (core to most actions) only on the left side of the keyboard

WTF are you talking about. Both the Macbook Air (smallest laptop) and their minimized wireless keyboard have the command key on both sides of the spacebar.

Apple's no-competition-when-playing-in-our-house philosophy (message: Apple, your iPhone email app sucks big time; no marking 'all read', no 'send only' accounts, no .... you get the idea)

So use Google's. Or Yahoo's. Or pull your head out....

The intellectual vacuum that exists in fanboyism causes the same sort of negative progress in the Mac arena as the self-entitlement that Windows brought to its own products. If you can't question God, how can you evolve?

Damn your palms must be hairy after that rhetorical masturbation. Could be dangerous with all that projecting you're doing....

... Macs ... overall they have proven (to me anyway) that they are generally much more reliable than systems made by Windows PC vendors.

A 2006 survey by MacInTouch.com suggested the failure rate for G3 iBooks was 73%.

The Mac Mini's power supply maxes out at 85W but it uses much, much less than that. I just used my Kill-A-Watt to verify that my 1.25 GHz G4 uses less than 20W when logged in and looking at localhost in Safari. The Intels are comparable.

I have an original Mini that has been serving apache (with php and mysql), ssh, afp, and other things 24/7/365 since a month after it was released--coming up on 4 years now--with OS X. AFAIK they take Linux just fine and that shouldn't make much (if any) difference in the power usage. Original G4s can be had for ~$200 used, used Intels are around $400, and of course new ones start at $600.

More info:
http://www.dssw.co.uk/sleepcentre/threads/mac_mini_power_consumption.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/apple-mac-mini,978-7.html
http://www.macintouch.com/macmini05.html#jan25
and these guys: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3468

http://www.macfixit.com/
http://www.macintouch.com/
http://123macmini.com/

And Apple is getting 7 hour run times out of their normal laptops.

Citation needed.

Apple claims MacBook Airs have a battery life of 5 hours, and that's the longest of a MacBooks. I might get 4 hours on my MacBook Pro but not much more. I know because when the battery charge goes down too far the laptop automatically goes to sleep and will not wake up until it is plugged in or the battery is swapped with another, I've had it happen to me a few tymes. The first tyme I about panicked because I thought it had died, but when I plugged it in it woke up.

Falcon

It depends on how many important files you have. If you have just a few documents, you can still burn them to CD periodically, or use an online for-pay backup service such as Carbonite or Rsync.Net. The reason to use HDDs is because you have lots of data, or your computer data, including OS installs is very important to you, and you need a way to recover rapidly. (E.g. you _really_ can't wait, and it's worth the cost of external HDDs and accessorie to avoid waiting)

If money is no object, ioSafe makes some fireproof, waterproof, shock-proof drive enclosures, which could help against disaster situations. The alternative is indeed use of an offsite location. You need a lock box or safe regardless of method, to help protect against human risks to your drives. Or utilize encryption to help prevent data from fallign into the wrong hands.

Otherwise, if you use HDs for backup, consider a hard drive docking station. Like one of these or a voyager Q (who makes a model supporting Firewire800 also); docking stations are more convenient to buying a bunch of external HDs. Eventually, when you upgrade your hard drive, use the old one to store important files.

If you have a stack of old hard drives, you can actually use them also. So a dock, and some plastic cases to put your internal HDs in could be favorable to buying a bunch of external HDs. (There are companies that specialize in selling rugged anti-static plastic cases for HDs, but I just pile them in a box, and use the original anti-static bags that came with new HDs)

If you are using old HDDs for archival purposes, make sure to spin them up every few motnhs, or you suffer bit rot, and the mechanical components of the drive may fail.

Or get one dock + multiple cheap HDDs for important documents.

And possibly one large HD for a full system backup. Apple users are blessed with Time machine. Linux users can dd or rsync their files, and even have a script do it nightly (so long as you have multiple HDs, and cycle them after backups).

Windows users have got to use third-party software or do some scripting.

Highly ironic, since a non-insignificant (IMHO) number of people have posted to this discussion:
http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/macmarginalization/topic2678.html
about how they can't get their TomToms to work properly with a Mac. A few people _have_ said it works for them, and IIRC at least one person recently said that a friend couldn't get it to work on their Windows machine either... but a lot of the posts are from people saying that something about the TomTom works on Windows but not the Mac..

Then I guess I have been imagining lists like these:

http://www.macintouch.com/tigerreview/incompatibility.html

http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/iphone3g/index.html#d20aug2008

hardly positive really.

The G5 series had a lot of loud fan problems, where a problem caused the variable-speed fans to all run at full blast. It was nearly as loud as the Psystar effect.

We test, because OS X is not backwardly compatable enough.

We currently have 1 enterprise product that DOES not work on OSX 10.5, but does on 10.4 fine.

10.5 also broke our centralized authentication process. So if you run unmanaged Macs then yep its all fine, but that is not running an enterprise setup, that's just running a heap of Macs.

Its not the same, and it doesn't scale well
We more than halved our support calls times on Macs when we rolled out a centrally managed and supported managed operating environment,
it would have been more, but apples last minute upgrades, and breaking of backward compatability
now require significant more testing.

We support Linux, Win XP, and OS X, and the linux and PC's are the cheapest to support, and have the best backward compatability.

Just go to http://www.macintouch.com/leopard/compat.html, to see what broke and what only kinda broke, (and its not a small list), we were affected by a number of these issues.

I'm not surprised a repair tech, when cornered with an unusually bad problem, will make noises implying the model in question is bad design... which is why you shouldn't take their word as sincere in that situation.

I do know that Apple had many more problems with easily-dented aluminum causing motherboard problems on 15" Powerbooks. This repair survey does show both of the 12" models as among the most reliable.

A: it's less likely to get injured in an impact
B: as weird as this sounds, mechanical hard drives with spinning discs don't work well at high altitudes, like Everest Base Camp. Apparently many hard drives fail at over roughly 3500 meters altitude. With that said, none of my computers or apple ipod/creative zen have had troubles with extended operation -- several days at a time -- at 11,000' elevation, and it's not a problem if they're not running. (I didn't previously know the hard drive cases were vented to atmosphere, although I guess it makes sense.)

Probably the same read why this wasn't caught in QA, people are human...

Games - I agree Vista sucks, but then I stopped playing games on PC since I bought PS3. The U3 drive is hardly a Vista problem - I have heard it doesn't work with anything but XP - not mac, not vista. I don't understand the slow booting part - I never reboot it for one and for other whenever I do it is pretty quick.

All OSes on major upgrades make things incompatible - that's why they are major upgrades and that's just the technical limitation that we have to live with. Look at how many things Leopard made incompatible - http://www.macintouch.com/leopard/compat.html . On the other hand there is a ton of other stuff that works just fine on Vista and OSX Leopard.

This is a bug with the FINDER ONLY, just so everyone is clear. The Unix "mv" command in Leopard is NOT affected by this.

http://www.macintouch.com Obviously this is the front page story today.

This only affects "move" operations between logical volumes. You have to hold down Command while you're doing this, inside the Finder, to get this to happen. Yes, it's a bad bug. It's not something, however, that you're going to run into if you're thinking sensibly about how you treat important data, or if you didn't know that the Command-drag functionality was built into the Finder (which I didn't, and I can't think of a time when I would use it now that I do, even if it was working correctly).

It isn't just VOIP. There's been a recent thread on Macintouch regarding Comcast not playing nice with iChat's audio and video.

Some background: I regularly have video chats with my father, normally once a week on Sunday morning. Over the last few months, I've noticed that my dad's video will start macroblocking and/or stuttering after the first 2-5 minutes of the conversation; audio will be similarly affected. We finally figured out that Comcast was packet shaping; they notice that X amount of bandwidth is being used, and they allow it for a few minutes before throttling you back.

The work-around is to have my dad set his video bandwidth cap at 200 kbps. This seems to be adequate for our needs, though it really is noticeable whenever there's a lot of motion on his end.

Some of the fault lies with iChat, which determines connection speed during initial handshake but doesn't periodically re-check the speed.

please don't claim that your problems represent a statistically relevant sample.

Of course not. I'd never claim such a stupid thing.

But the experience is quite enough to convince me not to gamble yet another $300 on an ipod.

We all frequently make buying decisions based on my own prior experiences of products, or those of our friends or acquaintances. We don't always have the luxury of access to unbiassed, statistically valid studies on the products we buy. Sometimes, common sense is enough. For me, two lemons in a row is enough to convince me not to buy a third.

The following study bears out the claim that ipod have pretty dismal reliablity, and the 40GB model that I own is indeed the worst:

http://www.macintouch.com/reliability/ipodfailures.html

http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/ipodclassic/
http://ilounge.com/index.php/news/comments/ipod-classic-tests-reveal-audio-problems

and the best list is here:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070914_002928.html

http://www.macintouch.com/iphone/faq.html

And there's no hack (well, at least not yet) to turn it on.

It's visible to IOKit (so yes, it's 'accessible'), but there's no driver to actually *use* it. For example, I just connected a USB mixer to my Mac. It shows up on ioreg, but since I haven't installed the driver, I can't use it yet.

Mac OS X ran on Intel processors since 10.0. In terms of the version shipping on production units, 10.4.4 was the first.

Info here: http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/0,1000000193,39284700,0 0.htm

There's also lots of info (much of it from Apple itself) saying flat-out that Apple will prolly have an 8-core rig pretty soon (relatively):

http://www.macintouch.com/reviews/macpro/
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/31484/135/
http://www.tuaw.com/2007/03/12/apple-store-error-r eveals-8-core-mac-pro/

HTH a bit... (and yeah, I'd kinda like to have one too)

/P

Quantization issues are well understood, it doesn't take a color guru to understand that. However, name-dropping digitaldog as you leap to conclusions about the new display is total bullshit. Claiming that the new displays have improved gamut is pure, baseless speculation at this point. Furthermore, I've read reliable explanations for why notebook LED displays can't be wider gamut.

Wow, you really do know how to turn on the charm, don't you?

I do have to say yes, you're right that I've speculated about wider gamut on the new MBP LED displays, as have a lot of other sources, from folks posting in messageboards to MacInTouch to MacWorld. Much of this speculation concerns comparisons to NEC's nice LED-backlit display that claims to recreate "107% of the AdobeRGB colorspace". (Yes I realize, the backlighting on the NEC display is almost certainly quite different from that of the new MacBook Pro).

I've looked for a bit and don't find Apple making any claims at all about wider gamut for the new MBP LED displays. So yep, all speculation at this point. I deserve a spanking for thinking I'd seen Apple claiming wider gamut when that impression was mainly created by my conflation of "news" coverage and people raving in blogs and fora with what Apple had actually announced. It'd be nice to see Apple make some claims about what the display will do, but they're probably smarting about such things this week.

I wasn't "name-dropping" Andrew Rodney to try and grab some cred, buddy. Frankly, my own favorite color management guru passed away recently. I just figured that if I was going to mention Rodney's name, I should point to his site.

Andrew Rodney weighs in on LED- vs. CCF-illuminated displays in this forum post discussing the new MacBook Pro machines - though he doesn't specifically address the MBP display, which one might or might not assume he's seen.

And BTW, Rodney links to his own site in his .sig, so you'd sure better go bitch at him about it too. Looks like you've got the time on your hands.

Slow news day? More like OLD news day. My first thought was--what the fuck is this, early 2001? OS X has been out for SIX FUCKING YEARS--who cares that some douchebag just now spent 30 days with it?

The use of, benefits of, and shortcomings of Mac OS X have been thoroughly documented on a thousand* different sites. It's not like it's even a new version--10.4 has been out for TWO EFFING YEARS!!! Where has this retard been? (Reminds me of the NewsRadio episode when Bill discovered rap.)

Up next: 30 days spent breathing air and drinking water--a Hard OCP exclusive!

* the funny thing is, "thousand"--usually an exaggeration--is in this case a drastic understatement. Googling for 'os x review' yields 67,400,000 matches. Just in case anyone has been under a rock and wants to read some good reviews by smart people, here are a couple:
Review of 10.3 by Bruce Tognazzini, Apple employee #66
Detailed technical review of 10.4 from ars.tecnica with links to reviews of every version of OS X, ever
Typical review from a Mac site
Review of 10.4 from PC World

http://www.macintouch.com/reliability/laptops.html

Or
http://www.macintouch.com/
http://www.macrumors.com/
http://www.thinksecret.com/

[They may not be 100%, but proably are pretty close]

No doubt adding these sites to their tracking would change the figures dramatically.

It does not have a corporation oriented sales channel. It does not have corporation oriented support channel either. Its entire model is geared towards end-users (alone or within an educational establishment).

If this is what you're going to use as criticism, I call bullshit. I've never heard of anything like application software that would run on 10.3 that won't run on 10.4, with the sole exception of Classic software that will not run on Intel. MacOS is not like Windows that breaks apps on every service pack.

The only two iPhones at the show were under glass, and Apple representatives said it is a "closed platform", refusing even to identify the specific processor it uses, and there's apparently no developer kit for it, though "developers who want to do applications [for the iPhone] are welcome to contact Apple developer relations."

I very much prefer having all my mail on an IMAP server (accessed over SSL only). As you mention, this is problematic when you don't want to run your desktop machine at home 24/7.

Until recently, I had a Linux server for this specific purpose. However, after years of relatively trouble-free service, the hardware was getting old to the point where keeping it running was becoming more troublesome than buying something else.

So I bought a Mac Mini for several reasons:

1. It is very silent
2. It uses only 20-25W (!), even much less (3-5W) when in sleep mode - though you'll have to disable that when you use it as a server, obviously. This is quite important to me for devices that are running 24/7. I'm not just pulling these numbers out of my ass, check for yourself, e.g. here or here
3. It runs UNIX. Installing Courier IMAP and some other basic services (apache, already installed by default; PHP, installed a more recent version) took me just a few hours.
4. The builtin harddisk is not very big and quite slow. Also it's hard (though not impossible) to replace when it breaks. So I bought a 250 GB external drive to go with it. If you buy the right one (e.g. the MiniMax), it even looks nice together with the Mac Mini.
5. It's small, just put it on your desk somewhere.

There is one pretty big difference between Spotlight and Vista Search. Spotlight is exclusively a file index searching mechanism. If the information is not stored in a file, it effectively doesn't exist. So email programs which don't store the individual messages in individual files cannot participate in Spotlight.

http://www.macintouch.com/tigerreview/spotlight.ht ml

In Vista, the search API is not constrained to just files. It's effectively a general purpose and open full text indexing mechanism. The OS itself will scan and catalog files using the file filters installed, but other programs can tie into the index directly and catalog internal bits of data. An email program which uses a single mailbox file could not be searched in Spotlight, but it can be searched in Vista. You might think that this is a negligable difference, but think of all of the programs out there which don't necessarily store data on local files, perhaps using a database instead, and the possibilities become greatly expanded.

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.

I installed this as soon as it came out, as did many other Mac users. My Mac (mini DP Intel 1.67GHz, 2GB RAM) slowed to a crawl as soon as I launched it. I had to yank the power cable. I uninstalled it and all was well. This is a common experience. If you're just going to try out a new version, cool, go for it, maybe it'll go well. But please understand that it's a beta -- don't plan on getting any work done with this.

I've been following some debate on Macintouch about whether or not to consider this a 64-bit laptop. Apparently the processor is but the memory bus isn't. Or something.

What's the real deal as far as compatibility w/64-bit Leopard goes?

I'm not sure about DELL, but Apple, who has earned a reputation for good engineering in general, posts about a 15% failure rate on its laptops in the first year, according to that survey. On some models, it goes as high as 4!%, and 73% over two years.

So 15% is within normal by that standard.

Yeah, because disk corruption issues are unheard of on the mac.