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Amelio, Raskin, Gassée On What Apple Means
John Paczkowski writes: "SiliconValley.com is currently hosting the third in its series of online Roundtable discussions. Our topic is 'Does Apple Matter?' and as you might imagine conversation has been quite spirited. Among our guests: Jean-Louis Gassée -- chairman and CEO of Be and former head of head of product development at Apple, former Apple chairman and CEO Gil Amelio, former Macintosh project manager Jef Raskin, and Mark Gonzales, a former senior Apple product manager who worked on the company's 'Star Trek' project. You'll find the introduction to the event here and the discussion itself here."
I'm not sure how you say that the iBooks are unquestionably cheaper than the PC equivalents. This isn't something I want to spend all night on, so I just went to the Apple store and picked the cheapest iBook, then went to Sony's site and picked a VAIO that cost the same. They're both listed at $1299.
Note that I just went to Sony's site and went with the first $1299 notebook I could find (All-In-One FX series). If I wanted to hunt around, I expect that I'd be able to find a better deal than my first pick. Then again, maybe not.
I am a mac user and have been for a long time. Its hard for people who aren't mac users to understand why we like the mac. Most people on slashdot can understand our aversion to windows but few know exactly why we like the platform.
Let me take some time to explain. I'm going to use os 9 for my explanation even though I use osx because the intereface design for osx is still pretty new and unrefined. One reply to the article referred negatively to the macs "flowery" interface. Although I think the interface is rather pleasing to the eye, at least on the default platinum theme, the primary force behind its design was functionality.
There is consistent well thought out design present in the interface. It is responsive and every feature present in the system software is easily accessible. The system software rarely crashes unless there is some conflict with the extensions (well os9 crashes a lot more than linux but to be fair os9 and linux were never competing on any front. osx on the other hand can hold its own ground.). Since the os vender is also the OEM all of the new hardware that runs the mac os will run it well (after a brief stint with clones apple decided that they were a bad idea for a company that makes most of its money from hardware sales).
I don't know if that made anything clear to anyone. I'm not trying to get any linux users to go buy a mac but I dislike how some linux users seem to not understand how any intelligent person could ever prefer the mac os. I mean its not like were windows users and just use it because it came with the box (although it did) and runs the latest games.
There are a lot of myths out there about Apple, and especially about the birth of the Mac. Fortunately, today there is a great source of historical facts for those who are interested or just care about the truth:
Making the Macintosh: Technology and Culture in Silicon Valley at the Stanford Computer History Archives.
Go there to find out that Apple did not "rip off" the GUI from Xerox. For example, a large piece of the truth is that the people at PARC who invented these concepts had to leave for Apple to find a company that was interested in their ideas.
Go there to find out why the Mac mouse has one button.
Go there to find out the reality behind Jef Raskin's claims that he created the Mac. Yes, he started the project. But in his vision, it should not have a GUI, neither a mouse. But he was very much concerned about it having a "programmable calculator-like programming language". Although he did want it to essentialliy have an Internet connection (in the late 70's). Engelbart's NLS was also an important inspiration.
Or just visit that archive to find out about the genuine innovations that were made at the time when a mediocre box called the IBM PC was put together. You don't have to be an Apple zealot to appreciate it, the material there has much more general relevance. But the space of a /. comment is too small to do it all justice.
I was going to say much the same thing. To add to it:
Amelio: Not only was he a failure of a CEO, but he went on to write one of the whiniest books around on his "tenure" at Apple and how Steve "stole" his impending success, blahblahblah...
Gassee: The Be machine was pretty sexy, but the OS was doomed from the start! All C++ and you basically had to multithread from the get go. The development docs basically said "Everything is threaded. Threading is hard. Be careful. Have a nice day!". Worse, Be made every mistake that NeXT and others made-- but 10 years after the market no longer tolerated that kind of BS. Proprietary this, closed that, etc... *yawn* Don't get me wrong-- it was really cool to look at and play with, just utterly doomed to simply not matter when the history books are written.
Raskin obviously has a serious bone to pick over the whole 10.x/NeXT thing. He consistently slams 10.x on things that are simply different than the MacOS he helped build. Quite a number of his points are valid, but saying that 10.1 is just a "face lift" with a lot of "minuses" clearly indicates that he is bitter about something. 10.1 cleans up a boatload of little details and is loads and loads faster. Clearly not just a face lift and without any minuses. Besides, Mac OS 9 is an utter joke-- for all intents and purposes, the memory and multitasking model is about as modern as DOS, but with a really pretty face.
Fortt's love affair with XP's built in instant message is a good sign his is smoking whatever Ballmer was smoking before the recent Monkey Boy episode.
As for Bajarin, he is likely the only one that can stand up straight for lack of a mondo Apple related chip on his shoulder. Of course, the fact that he would agree to be on this "panel" in the first place raises a few questions...
Hell, I'm surprised they didn't pull in Spindler, Hancock, and Sculley.
What a total joke... the sad thing is that it will be completely unsurprising when CNET picks up whatever the result is as a sure sign of Apple's impending doom.
Surely one wouldn't expect Apple, who specialized in making PCs, to be creating new serial interfaces like Firewire from scratch.
*ahem*, they did create FireWire from scratch.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
You can't really have much of a roundtable if most of the people there blatantly hate Apple.
Gil Amelio was thrown out in a boardroom coup. He killed the clones, and failed as a CEO in most respects of success, losing millions. His only good thing was hiring Steve Jobs back.
Jean-Louis Gassee quit Apple, then became a big critic when they refused to buy Be, taking NeXT instead becaue it could run existing apps while Be couldn't.
Jef Raskin went on record in March Mac OS X saying that OSX 10.1 "isn't worth the upgrade, because it's just "another face-lift" with "an awful lot of minuses.""
Jon Fortt, who recently wrote an article called "Mac platform good to a point" that basically said Windows XP is going to kick Mac OS X's butt because it's got really great "built-in instant messaging capabilities." Oooooo
As for Tim Bajarin, well, I've certainly got nothing against him-- he was the one who recently wrote that once the PC price war is over, the two main contenders left in the consumer market are likely to be Sony and Apple.
Maybe more of a slanted table. Who's next? John C. Dvorak?
What do you expect when you post a nebulous article about the future of Apple on Slashdot?
I hate to be hardhearted but the percentage of people here who really care about the future of apple is probably about as high as those who can't wait to see what great new ideas MicroSoft will unveil when it launches XP later this year.
IOW, how do you troll for something that's not there?
Articles like this were made for posting self-congratulatory comments which demonstrate people's skill or lack there-of to make wry and witty remarks about the topic in question
BSo please quit raining on the parade
Personally I don't think there is a great and sunny future for Apple computers. They make great imaging and publishing software from what I understand, but aside from their little niche, they have very little universal appeal. Also, having working in a computer lab with several iMacs I know that they don't network worth snot.
Apple may have their corner of the market and they may do some things very well, but I have little if any interest in whether or not they bite it in the long run
Comments should be like skirts. Short enough to keep your attention, but long enough to cover the subject
Actually....Apple bought the rights to every peice of IP Xerox came up with and Apple used in MacOS. Xerox didnt think it was going anywhere and gave it to apple for a bunch of stock. That stock then went way up, so Xerox made a mint. I like Apple, sure, and I know people who dont, but if you're going to slam something, try to get your information right or someone might think you're a disinformation troll. Now you just look like a lemming. Moving right along....
in anima Apparatus
I've heard that this driving thing is pretty cool, and everybody agrees that a car is neccessary. Which car should I buy?
Not to be persnickity, but what constitutes a good laptop under $1000? Well, it depends on what you do! Amazingly enough...
For example, my main axe is a ThinkPad 760ED. It's about 5-6 years old, a P-133 with 48MB RAM, 4xCD, 12" 1024x768 TFT. Is it a kick-butt machine? Well, no... It runs Windowmaker, Emacs and Netscape 4.74 on FreeBSD 4 pretty good, though, and that covers everything I need a laptop to do.
When it was new, it was a $6K machine, now it goes for $150 or so on Ebay. It makes it a pretty good laptop for throw-away purposes (for example, if you're particularly hard on your laptops).
For others, Firewire, USB, etc may be important. You may need massive speed -- I dunno. However, if you don't spend a lot of time on the road, or need to take your machine with you when you go home, your laptop should generally be a generation or two behind your desktop as a general rule. Computers depreciate quickly, and laptops are fragile. You don't want a $4000 toy that spews sparks 2 days out of warranty. (at least, I don't -- others are different)
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Hemos,
The IBM ThinkPad T20 has the very popular Lucent Winmodem in it. My Acer Extensa 501T has one as well.
Download This File from Linmodems.Org. Sure, it's binary only, but it works. Set up the modem with isapnp, unzip the file above, read the readme, and run the installer.
You can add this to conf.modules:
alias char-major-62 ltmodem
install ltmodem insmod "-f" "-k" "ltmodem"
I'm pretty sure this will work for you. Enjoy.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
For an entry level laptop, I have been VERY impressed with Apple's new iBook. It has the small form factor of the VAIO's (though not quite as thin), but with all of the goodies (10/100 enet, modem, dual USB, firewire !!!, a 1024X768 screen, pretty decent graphics performance, damn good battery life, and DVD for those long flights, iTunes which really is pretty cool, iMovie which I must admit blew me away in terms of the power given to a consumer level package, and some other software in the package as well) which taken together make for a pretty compelling package. Plus you throw in OSX and you have that UNIXy goodness as well.
Even though OSX is not by any means a mature OS, I see great things for it in the near future and I am kinda stoked given the fact that never before has one really had access to a UNIX laptop with all of the goodies one gets here.
The real world advantage that I have really seen with these things over the two weeks I've used it is that for the price, you get a laptop with a small form factor that you can actually use in coach class when flying without getting crammed. You can put these things almost anywhere and not worry about getting the thing tweaked, because its so rugged. And it is significantly lighter than the Dell or the Compaq systems that I have toted around before this. You really do get so many more features for the money than anyone else provides in a form factor that truly does exude good design. (compare this to the PIII Acer laptop I used that had the fsking fan on the bottom of the case exactly where your left thigh would be causing it to overheat if you used it on anything other than a perfectly flat table surface. Unbelievable.)
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
- If you're willing to get a year-old machine, almost any distribution will support almost all the features on
any Sony, IBM, or Dell. Specifically we have had good luck with all IBM ThinkPads, Dell Inspirons, and Sony
Vaios.
- The best machine for the ultimate power user is unquestionably the Dell Inspiron 8000. The 1600x1200 display
works perfectly in X4. Many of our university astronomer customers opt for this system. For a powerful machine that
you can port around daily, the IBM ThinkPad T20 series is expensive, but very nice. Its 1400x1050 display works
perfectly in Linux. Both of these machines have an Intel eepro100 ethernet which works perfectly in Linux. They both
have the Lucent winmodem which can also be made to work in Linux. They both have CDRWs which will burn CDs in Linux.
- By far our most popular machines are the Sony Z505 and R505 machines which weigh 3.75 pounds and are still very
fully featured. APM can be a problem with these systems, but X runs at 1024x768, the USB floppies work, the memory
sticks work, and they also have the internal eepro ethernet. Their winmodem is worthless in Linux.
- Of extreme popularity lately has been the Transmeta Crusoe chipped Sony PictureBook (C1VN/C1VP). It weighs
just over two pounds and also runs Linux very well. The camera works. Due to its small size, it does not have
internal ethernet, serial or parallel ports.
On all of these systems which are newer and don't have especially good support in any distribution, the primary thing you really need to make them work well, is to recompile your kernel (and to get a very up-to-date kernel.) We specifically keep up to date with every minor release of the kernel, and frequently with patches in between. You should never use the PCMCIA services in the kernel, rather use the separate pcmcia-cs package. To get sound to work, you will almost certainly need the ALSA drivers. Our current set-up snapshot as of 8/6/01 is:Kernel: linux-2.4.7 + 2.4.8-pre-3 + kerneli patch (kernel.org)
Sound: alsa-0.9.0beta5 (www.alsa-project.org)
PCMCIA: pcmcia-cs-3.1.27 (www.pcmcia-cs.sourceforge.org)
My personal machine upon which I have done all of my development work for the past year is the IBM T21. The person who does all of our web and Perl development uses the small C1VN. My wife, who has to carry her computer in a backpack all over downtown Atlanta, uses the Z505.
Lincoln D. Durey, Ph.D.
Electrical Engineer
EmperorLinux
One important thing is to do research! Many "OEMs" actually buy their laptops from other OEMs.
for example, check out this link
"For example an ODM named Compal makes the Dell Inspiron 5000e, the ChemBOOK 3015, the PowerNotebooks.com PowerPro III:16, the Sceptre SoundX S6600 (14.1") and S6900 and 6902 (15")...and they are all the same laptop, just with different names on them!"
Buying from lesser known companies could potentially net you the same laptop for less. I bought a Umax T333, and I thought it sucked. Umax support was crap, and replacement parts impossible to find. Then, I found out that it is the same model as the Kapok 1100 and the ProStar 1200, then finding BIOSes, drivers, and batteries was simple.
If you are looking for an older laptop, consider one with a cpu that has multiplier controls. Mine is a K6-2 333, so everything is configured via dip switches. I can run the 333@166 and lower all the voltage settings for a cool running laptop that still runs Linux and E with ease. I've gotten my battery time from 2.5 hours up to 3.5-4.0 hours. I'm glad I ordered the cheapest laptop that money could buy two years ago. I now have no regrets.
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It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.