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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."
http://www.be.com/press/pressreleases/01-08-16_ass etsale.html
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 $1299 notebook I could find (All-In-One FX series). If I wanted to hunt around, I expect that I'd be able to find a better deal than my first pick. Then again, maybe not.
Many folks forget just how many things that Apple has contributed to the computer industry.
The home PC. Would it have happened? Yes, but Apple was there first with some innovations like built in video with color, built in BASIC etc.etc.etc... Apple was the first to offer color in the personal computer industry. And by the way Woz designed the whole damned thing. Apple I and Apple II........ himself. No engineering team needed until packaging and optimization were required.
The GUI thing has been hyped to death and yes I know that they bought the rights from Xerox. But what about the CD drive? Remember having to install applications using floppies? Hell, M$ office was a little skyscraper of floppies. Apple adopted the CD drive mechanism and ended up paying the cost via a lawsuit from Apple records claiming music infringement. And while we are on removeable media, Apple essentially standardized the little 3.25 in hard plastic floppy. Yes they were around, but nobody in the PC business was using them until Apple in the IIe and Lisa.
The first real portable computers. Yes I remember the Osborne. But at 50 pounds with a 4in screen I hardly call that portable. The Mac Portable was still 25 lbs but you could carry it on an airplane and fit it under the seat. However the first real portable that we consider being laptops was again Apple with the original Powerbook. This computer standardized the palm rests with they keyboard in front and the pointing device between the palm rests.
What about USB? Yes it is an Intel standard but nobody was really using it until Apple standardized it on the iMac. And what about Firewire? Again, Apple.
The PDA. The Newton was way ahead of its time, but would we have Palm Pilots without it? Probably not.
How about Colorsync? Thats color matching software for those that don't know. It was a bit of a stealth software package but many industries rely heavily on it.
Hey, BUILT IN NETWORKING!!!! Back in 1985 Apple started shipping systems with built in networking presaging the concept of networked computers and the Internet.
Apple was the first company to combine TV with a PC. Back in 1993? I think I can remember seeing MacintoshTVs in our campus bookstore. They were black. Pretty cool. This essentially is years ahead of where we will be in the next three years with TV and PC's.
Speaking of multimedia, Quicktime. Back in 91 I think, Apple comes out with this cool software that does it all. Video sound and other multimedia that is cross platform.
Plug and play. Apple was years ahead of anyone else here and they still are. Damn, remember all of those ISA bus conflicts and how hard they were if you happened to have two or three cards installed at the same time? Also Apple allowed any configuration to be done in software instead of cracking the case and playing with DIP switches.
Essentially fronting the development of the laser printer and making it practical. Apple funded Adobe to get their start and produce software to drive laser printers. Thus starting the whole desktop publishing industry.
Case design. I am not talking about iMac juicy goodness. I am talking practical case design to allow one easy access to the guts. The 8600 and 9600 models started this with easy open sides and flip apart cases that allowed easy access to memory and PCI cards.
We could go on and on here with past innovations, but is Apple still relevant and is the industry still following their lead? Yes. Apple is the first company to really take UNIX by the horns and make it a mainstream OS for the masses that still retains the power and flexibility of UNIX. This is huge. They are still driving engineering with Firewire (something the rest of the industry is now adopting. Even Intel) Quicktime has yet to reach its stride. Eventually it will become a platform of its own for the dissemination of media. M$ knows this, they know that Apple has better technology and it scares the piss out of them.
iMovie and iDVD are revolutionary in the power they give to the average consumer that never before was available unless you wanted to spend $5-10k on software and hardware. Now you can purchase an iMac for less than $1000 that will do this.
Apple was the first company to go to an all LCD line. We all knew this would happen, but Apple is again the first company with the balls to do it.
One has only to look at M$ in their software products. M$ Windows certainly owes much to Apple, but so does their bread and butter product Office. Apple fronted development of Excel for the Mac and Powerpoint from another company. Even today M$ borrows heavily from Apple in all of its software. Control panels, trash cans, in older software, newer software contains all sorts of appearance issues, interface issues and applications that can all be seen cropping up in XP and their product previews for after XP.
Again, we could go on and on here, and I have no idea why Apple does not spend any marketing efforts on showing the world how innovative they are, but as any individual or company that is truly innovative and running so far ahead of anyone else, they are busy doing the next big thing and not focusing on the past.
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Why does this contantly come up. Are you saying that telling someone to Option click is easier that right click? Everything that windows does using the right mouse button, apple does using the option click. It's the same thing. Only now you have to explain what the option key is. It's that "flower" key, you know, the key with that funny squggle on it that you've never seen before. :P
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
I'm not saying at all that Apple doesn't count, but I've really gotta take issue with one of your points.
The introduction of third party hardware showed that Apple was gouging their customers. Those cloners were putting such a hurting on Apple that the company was bleeding money to the point that they finally killed off all the cloners.
Nice to see it under the GPL. Now I will have to see if the old DR-DOS partition on this machine will still boot -- I don't think I've booted DOS in two years.
Gil Amelio is the one who opened the door for the mac clones, he didn't close it. Steve Jobs did away with the clones. He also killed off the Newton in a fit of juvenile revenge simply because it was the brainchild of John Scully. He did this in spite of the fact that it was a successful product that makes a palm pilot look like a bad joke. It used an arm processor, which is incidentally the same CPU family that palm is being moved over to. Coincidence?
Apple didn't buy Next because NextStep could run existing Mac apps, or even because it would be easier to get it to. They bought it because Gassee wanted more money for Be than they were willing to pay, and Jobs was more than happy to sell. At the time that Next was bought, it was no better suited to running MacOS apps than Be was, it was just cheaper. Apple had dumped a boatload of money into Copland and then discovered that they couldn't make it run existing MacOS apps without running a copy of the old MacOS in a virtual machine ala vmware. Why they ever thought Next or Be could any better I don't know. Even now in OS-X you run an entire instance of MacOS-9 when you run classic apps.
Personally I don't think Apple matters one bit. The reasons are many but they all boil down to the fact that the company has not had its act together for as long as I can remember. The mark of Steve Jobs' personality runs as deep in Apple as the mark of Bill Gate's personality does at Microsoft. Apple is like a intellectually gifted but emotionally immature adolescent that refuses to accept that the world is not as it wants it to be. That does things that it claims are attempts to compete or excel when in fact they are thinly veiled assaults on the way things are, assaults that ammount to nothing more than the company throwing itself on sharp rocks...again. The truth of Apple is that it is a failed monopoly. The position that Microsoft holds through and understanding of how things work is the same exact position that Apple thought it could gain by changing how things work. Steve Jobs summed up Apple best when he said to John Scully, "Do you want to sell sugar water all your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?" That kind of mentality, that you have some kind of high purpose behind what you are doing, is exactly the kind of attitude that makes you sacrifice what is practical and pragmatic because it threatens the purity of your vision. In a situation where there is no opposition or competition this doesn't matter, but that isn't exactly how the computer industry works now is it?
I'm personally amazed that the company is still in business. Part of the reason they are is that Microsoft worked to keep the company around as token competition. Now that doing so won't help protect them from anti-trust litigation I don't know that they're going to do anything to keep apple afloat anymore. I mean do you really think that Office was ported to the Mac because it was profitable? It was ported to make the mac a viable competitor to the PC, but a competitor they could control. Of course there is always the fact that by porting Office they pre-empted another company from creating a viable office suite for the Mac, one that could then be ported to the PC. By having mac users use Office, it is easy to move them to a PC once Apple has dropped from the tree so to speak.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
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.
Just judging from the number of comments that pop up on such articles, I'd suspect there are more Apple fans reading Slashdot than there are BSD fans, but I'd hardly complain about Slashdot stories concerning BSD. Should Slashdot only post stories that would have a majority appeal, and ignore stories with a more narrow audience? If they're going that route, then should they take it a step further and focus stories on the "lowest common denominator" to ensure the maximum number of potential readers will be interested in and understand all stories?
On a more personal note, I've never had a problem with Mac networking, though I admit I've focused more on TCP/IP. Considering changes to Mac TCP/IP settings don't require a reboot, and the relative speed I've observed when comparing Macs with Win9x and NT, I can only assume you were looking for a different type of network than TCP/IP. If you are having any particular probem with Macs on a TCP/IP network, however, feel free to email me and I'll be happy to try and help.
Naked.
My guess is he's going to productize the persistent-object system (e.g. EROS, Grasshopper) and pattern the UI after OS/2's object-based UI. There are so many advantages to this approach: instant-on/instant-off, highly modular (take a moment to imagine what you could do if painting to the entire video screen were represented by a class like any other and you started applying design patterns to it... PCanywhere, multi-head, instant resolution change, etc. etc. would be easy and straightforward), easy fine-grained security, easy rich-media handling, document embedding as a way of life, and the list goes on.
If this isn't what Raskin is working on, I'd be surprised if it weren't something even better.
-jhp
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
Darwin uses I/O Kit. I assume this is quite different from what Linux uses.
:-)
VERY different.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Um, Mac OS X is based on BSD, not Linux. Completely different. Though they could both be considered UNIX.
Granted, you can run Linux on any shipping Mac - but it doesn't ship with any machines from Apple.
Other than that, the ability to use GNU software on Mac OS X/Darwin is very promising, and it wouldn't be overly hard to port many Unix tools between OS X, BSD, and Linux. Interaction with the GUI does make for a big difference, however (I'm not sure if GNUStep would make that easier).
Naked.
after i read this i wish i hadn't chosen to wear all black today!
Xerox, who both Apple and Microsoft fed off of for a while, back in the day. Not so much recently, however, since Xerox mainly developed hardware.
Before OS X apple+network = no as many frustrated admins know.
That's strange, I could swear I've seen lots of stable, nicely running mac networks at various graphic design firms.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
Not sure about that. Classic is the only way to run Photoshop at this time. when i go into XWindows from Aqua, I can keep my Classic apps running especially if I am doing graphics. Gimp and Painter play well with each other.
WindowMaker has been used for sometime by OSX users. They are from the same family if you remember.
photosMy Photostream
A lot of people are saying that Apple doesn't matter because thay don't innovate anymore. I think I can counter that.
AFAIK, Apple is the only organization thus far to make UNIX available to the masses. Additionally, I know of no other modern desktop OS that uses a vector-based graphics engine (this will be a very important model for future graphics hardware technology). They're pushing hardware design with convection cooling and compact hardware, as in the G4 Cube. Apple also helped to show the benefits of DV by making DV editing available to everyone in a truly usable package. I also believe their vision for the direction of personal computing, as being the "digital hub" for embedded consumer devices. Most importantly, Apple is the only real alternative that consumers have to Microsoft (before you flame me, understand that Linux is not ready for general consumption yet)
Can anyone say that none of this matters?
"Leave the strategizing to those of us with planet-sized brains." -Tycho
Come on. I think you're forgetting about the Commodore Amiga (not to mention several other revolutionary 8 and 16 bit platforms from the 80s). Apple and Commodore, together, established much of the early personal computing, multimedia, and gaming markets. About the same time that Commodore faultered and started to fail, Apple nearly disappeared, too.
Is it any coincidence that nearly all the non-IBM platforms disappeared by '90 or so? Not really, IMHO. They may have had very different reasons for their failures, but, thanks to their inept marketing, bad management, poor decisions, etc, the IBM clones were able to seal up the market and push the surviving companies into miniscule niche markets.
Most of the non-Intel PC and workstation companies are starting to disappear now, a decade later. DEC? Dead. SGI? Nearly dead. Sun? Losing marketshare quickly to Microsoft, of all people. Cray? Dead. (No pun intended. RIP Seymour Cray). Who's left, really? Hewlett-Packard, who's now working with Intel? Motorola, who is known mostly for cell phones and embedded chips? The future doesn't look so bright to me.
I was never much of a fan of Apple or their products, but I do mourn the slow death of competition in the PC and workstation markets. The most recent Apple products do give me hope that Apple can recreate the success they acheived in the 70s. Maybe competition and innovation aren't dead, but they sure are starting to smell funny.
Apple has never really been about innovation, IMHO. They've been about dumbing down computers so that "the rest of us" can use them. That's why I personally never liked Apple much. Going to the PowerPC chip architecture was a good move, and using the NeXT architecture as a next-gen Macintosh was also a great idea. However, neither of these are innovative... just good decisions.
Innovative? No. Not since the 70s or early 80s. Potential competition to the growing conglomerates? I hope so. Nobody else is rising to the challenge, except a bunch of poorly-run Linux companies that are dying off faster than they can make up business strategies.
I feel that I know the solution to the problems we're facing today (lack of innovation, giant monopolies, slouching market, bold companies driven to niche markets) -- return to the glory days of the 80s, the epitome of open computing, choice, and competing architectures. If that means pumping Federal money into Apple, so be it.
I'd rather not be labeled a kook or a troll, but I suppose either fits.
while i find linux to be very interesting, i think that everyone recognizes that the primary influence of linux will be behind the scenes. it will matter on the server and in the embedded/appliance markets. to work in the last area it needs a simplified ui. but, while i have been on slashdot for a few years, and this subject has continually reared its head, i have yet to see a ui that is useful. while i can program to an extent, i do not use a cli enough for it to be truly useful to me. apple on the other hand, has in this time developed a "new" gui on top of a bsd base that combines the usefulness of each environment. does it matter now? if you asked a windows use what their machine was good for, what would the answer be? i would be willing to bet that many mac users are rather pragmatic about their computers. they work. certainly not on lans, but on wans at least.
Obviously, you didn't read his book. Jef explains his idea of a revoutionary UI looks like, and it makes sense to me.
Once drivers are made for Darwin, they can be easily ported to other flavors of LINUX
Darwin uses I/O Kit. I assume this is quite different from what Linux uses.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I think Macs have their place. I think its great that OSX is Unix based, and I think that Apple has been a real driving force in the industry. I'm sorry, though, I just can't but a Mac until they figure out how to make a mouse with more than one button. ~_^
Zeus_tfc
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"...At the end of the day"..."when everyone goes home, you're stuck with yourself." RIP Layne Staley
I've always felt he was a bit of an eccentric, egomaniac loon, rather than this golden-boy visionary he's so commonly portrayed as.
He may well be an eccentric, egomaniac loon, but he seems to be a pretty effective eccentric, egomaniac loon.
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
- Width: 12.8 inches
- Thickness: 2.2 inches
- Depth: 10.5 inches
- Weight: 6.7 lbs
While the iBook has this:Now . . I don't know about you . . but try using one of these bigger laptops on a crowded SEPTA train (philly mass transit) or full AirTran flight . . it sucks. With the iBook I can really take it anywhere and just get my work done and not worry about finding a space . . or getting the right bag for it . . lugging it around time . . etc.
That and I've yet to use a pc notebook (though I've only had a dell and ibm) that lasted longer than 2.5 hours . . I've used my iBook for 4.5 hours at a time.
There is no need to argue this shit to death . . every has their own opinion . . I just thought it was important to point out the size/weight difference. I mean the iBook is meant as a sub-notebook . . I don't use it as a desktop replacement . . I want a small, light, dvd/cd-rw capable notebook . . end of story. That all-in-one FX simply doesn't meant the small and light requirements I have.
I think only if they start making OS X available to intel/amd architecture.
There's no money in that and there are tons of hurdles to surmount to get there.
I can't imagine a single windows 9x/XP user NOT moving over to a system that is both *nix and Apple.
The vast majority of computer users in the world don't care about whether their OS is Unix based or not. Developers do, though -- and that's key.
Plus, would these people run Mac OS X if there was no Office, Outlook or Explorer for it? Do you think Microsoft would seriously port their software to x86 Mac OS X?
"An easy to use and new user friendly Unix client with Plug and Play adaptability?"
A lot of this value comes from the fact that Mac OS X runs on standardized hardware. You lose a good chunk of this value by moving to a non-standardized hardware platform.
As I struggle to get my new Digital camera to work with my PC (it works fine with my mac, after 30 seconds GARRRH) I realize how much easier my life would be with mac OS X on my AMD system.
It's not software magic that makes Macs easier to configure -- it's the tight integration between hardware and software. John Carmack has talked about this in the past -- how the standardization made it cheaper to port to the Mac.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
For some reason I have always had a predilection for underdogs... and that's why I'll always have a soft spot for Cupertino. Without Apple I really do feel that the computer industry is headed in a very dull and bloated way, especially with the Gates-and-Uncle-Fester mantra of "all your base are belong to us".
At the same time I am frankly quite tired of fighting that old fight. OS X is good, but frankly, where are the big apps? Adobe is shamelessly dragging its feet, even after Apple went out of their way to create Carbon as a way to port the "classic" apps to the new OS natively. Apple itself has dumped some technologies that were pretty essential to the old OS (like Input Sprockets), and for all its UNIX underpinnings OS X remains a classic Jobsian top-down project. Sure, you can hack it, but only to a certain extent. So it fails in achieving the sheer usefulness in graphic design that the "classic" MacOS has, the do-it-yourself aspects of Linux, and the ubiquitousness of the lowest common denominator, which shall here remain nameless.
Technologically OS X was a great idea. In the practical world it didn't quite turn out that way. This isn't about whether people like Aqua or not, this is about whether the OS can deliver a platform which is useful in my daily life, and sadly I can't say that it does at this point.
And that's why my Mac gets used less and less, and my cheap "roll-your-own" Linux box with a 1.3G Athlon processor gets most of the attention at my place these days. "Back in the day" I was an ardent a fan of Apple as they get (I'm one of those weirdos with a tatoo, of all things), and I don't regret those days, but people change. Computers change. And computer companies sure as hell change. I just think that Apple has seriously lost its way, and that instead of concentrating on their concrete, established strengths they have decided to open whole new cans of worms for the sake of some abstract (though very valid) OS concepts, and in doing so they really lost track of what put them where they were -- not the majority by any stretch, but a strong minority that was loyal as hell and a constant pain the Borg's butt.
My sig is too lon
Cryptnotic
My other first post is car post.
Somebody mentioned it in the forum. I never thought of it and it actually makes sense. If a server version of OS X is released for intel computers, it will become easily popular. Mainly because of the UI of OSX. Even system admins like to have a easy to use interface and apple proves that they can deliver it. That is mainly the reason of increasing NT/2000 server sales. Not because they are more stable or more secure. They are easier to setup and administer for inexperienced system admins (who are the majority).
That page links to an old BYTE magazine article from 1983 about the release of windows 1.0. I love this quote:
"Moreover, programmers can take advantage of the ability to customize windows so that each software house retains its own distinct look within the Microsoft environment. The same enlightened attitude enabled Microsoft to resist the temptation to reserve Windows as an environment for its own applications programs. Microsoft is making Windows available to a number of applications software houses, including some major competitors."
Apple mattered in those days, and they could have given Microsoft a run for it's money with the "star trek project" linked to in the article. But they were undercut by someone offering more choices, just as Microsoft will be undercut by other choices today.
Apple's significance today is largely that it is the only alternative to Microsoft/Intel that's still around. But they fulfill that role only at Microsoft's pleasure--Microsoft could pull the rug out from under Apple whenever they like.
Without Jef Raskin there surely wouldn't be this discussion. Without Raskin, Apple had no Mac - he was the main driving force behinde the Macintosh, and it took him a quite while to convience Steve Jobs of his idea.
And nobody outside the fan club notices.
I know, I was surprised too.
What's the point of moderating?!
Well that's a rediculous comparison. First of all the iBook is smaller and lighter, and size is one of the most expensive aspects of buying a laptop. Second of all the Celeron is a bad enough chip in desktops, but a mobile Celeron is a piece of garbage. You have to at least compare to a mobile Pentium III 700.
..but whatever. If you're buying 100% on price then you don't buy a Mac (or a BMW), same as always. The iBook is still fiercely competitive however.
- j
Of COURSE I would pick the one technology they DID invent. *chuckle* I must have known that on some level. Darn subconscious.
:-)
Oh well
The roundtable participants don't hate Apple any more than they hate Microsoft... I could have phrased that better. Regardless, anyone who reads it will find an excellent roundtable; not so much whether Apple matters, but more why and how, and growing opportunities (which I expect Apple to mostly ignore, as it most always does).
About the facts:
Amelio, far from killing clones, initiated and championed Apple clones - for the first time in Apple's history - contrary to Steve Jobs stupid, gutless, counterproductive, anticustomer, antideveloper, anticompetitive, long established and soon reinstated whine, shout, hunt, & kill clones policy.
You only need to use BeOS briefly, or just watch a demo, to find many of Gassee's statements justified.
Raskin's criticisms of OSX and its rejected opportunities have received ample support from every independent authority on UI design; for one example, you can drop these in your browser.
http://asktog.com/columns/034OSX-FirstLook.html
http://asktog.com/columns/035SquanAdv.html
http://asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html
Jef Fortt has his work at http://www.siliconvalley.com/hottopics/apple/ for anyone who wants to read a fair sample of it.
Why doesn't mr100percent name, or even mention, the other 3 or 4 panelists? Did he or the moderators not even click on the link?
Finally, would Dvorak "hate Apple" just because Apple ignored priceless consulting that he (and nearly every analyst in the industry) repeatedly gave them for free?
Incidentally, at the end of the introduction of participants
it states, "Note: Despite our best efforts, Apple has declined to participate in this conversation. [Care to guess why?] MacNN publisher Monish Bhatia, while originally scheduled to participate in this event, is unable to do so."
Apple matters. (USB ports anyone?) You can't read the roundtable without thinking that Apple would matter far more if its management would let it. That has rarely changed since 1986.
"Kindness is my religion." The Dalai Lama
I was an Amiga zealot from way, way back -- had an A1000 on Christmas Day, 1985. (well, my parents did, but it was almost the same thing. :) ) And I despise Apple and will never give them a dollar that's under my control if I have any way to stop it.
That said, they WERE amazingly innovative. Remember, these are the people that *invented the laser printer*. That was actually a more impressive feat of engineering than the Mac was -- the laser printer attached to many Macs was more powerful than the computer itself!
You can point at almost any manufacturing company on the planet and say 'you didn't innovate feature X, you just used new parts by your supplier Y'. I believe that this is an unimportant argument. Surely one wouldn't expect Apple, who specialized in making PCs, to be creating new serial interfaces like Firewire from scratch. Instead, that is for specialist companies, which will then be bought out or start licensing their technology to more general-purpose ones. There's not a PC maker on the planet that is really 'innovative' anymore, not even Compaq. Everyone just takes boxes of off-the-shelf parts and assembles them in different configurations based on what users want.
By that measure, for many years Apple was leaps and bounds ahead in innovation. For years, they saw the interesting new technologies long before the PC market did, and integrated them and had them in shipping computers very quickly.
As an example, few, if any, PC manufacturers would have taken the risk to implement USB if they were designing their own motherboards -- nearly all of them license from specialists, though, and that is why most PCs now have USB. (it's only in the last year or so that the USB port has become useful, and it was largely the (otherwise horrid) iMAC that caused that to happen.) But Apple makes its own motherboards, and because of that they can implement new features sooner than the PC market generally can. Expecting them to design entirely new features completely out of thin air is a bit unrealistic -- they can't out-think the entire world. Why not just take what the world has invented and make it WORK?
Of course, I suppose you could argue by the same term that Microsoft is innovative -- because they buy the products of specialist companies and integrate them. However, I don't feel this applies in quite the same way -- Microsoft is in the business of writing software, and if they were really innovative they'd be coming up with new forms of software by themselves. Apple is more of a 'systems assembler' sort of company (admittedly with the software engineer hat as well) -- so their form of 'innovative' isn't quite the same as Microsoft's.
Even judged, though, from this lowered standard, they don't seem to have done much of import in the last four or five years. Actually, as far as I can tell, their innovation pretty much stopped dead after Jobs took back over... the high point has been 'colored computers'. OSX may be interesting but I think it's going to take some more proving out first.
Amelio was doing a much better job, IMO. He thought of the customer first and not Apple. If he had been allowed to stay in charge, Apple would likely have had hard times for about as long as they have -- maybe worse. But I think at this point the Macintosh would be a vibrant, healthy computing platform with lots of little garage shops making lots of money selling different expansions and attachments, much like all computers had in the 1980s. Instead, it is a mostly-stagnant, mummified architecture with few signs of life beyond snazzy new paint jobs.
I suspect that the Mac will need to show rousing success with OS X within the next 18-24 months, or become permanently irrelevant.
>>>don't get me started on that stupid hockey-puck mouse that Steve just refused to discontinue No argument that the "hocky-puck" mouse was probably a bad idea (hard to innovate w/o a few mistakes along the way, isn't it?) & probably should have been discontinued earlier, but the iMac my Mom bought nearly a year ago came w/ an oblong, optical mouse, not the discontiued "hocky puck". BTW - the wife & kids are STILL pissed I replaced the round mouse w/ an optical one as soon as it became avalible w/o purchasing a new machine, which was about Christmas time last year. I assume that was because Apple had to use them to keep up w/ demand for the non-innovative machines they've been selling since Mr. Pepsi was (thankfully) run off?
In 1969, Raskin wrote a paper called "The Quick Draw Graphics System," or something like that. His argument was that processing power should be devoted to aiding the user, by drawing graphics to present an interface.
That was pretty unthinkable at the time. Parc hadn't been founded yet, and for those who don't know, it was Raskin who started the Macintosh project at Apple, before they ever went to Xerox.
Historians take a look at the past from primary documents. News reporters don't, and there are a lot of false truths out there, like "Xerox invented the GUI, and Apple took it and popularized it." Don't believe it's true unless if you hear it from the horse's mouth.
He helped change the course of computing. He doesn't feel Apple's doing that anymore (and they're not, they're just helping it evolve).
Still, I think he wants Apple to do too much too fast. Apple could have made landmark changes with Mac OS X's interface, but who would have wanted to use it? If it can't run Office, people won't buy it.
At this point, Apple's best off bringing change in bits and pieces, because Mac OS users are already freaking out with the changes in OS X.
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
Many people enjoy the Mac OS over Windows or Linux ...for it's ease of use, GUI or whatever other reason. I like OS X as I get everything I need in an OS. I love logging in via SSH from school changing some things, checking the irc channel out with BitchX and then running PhotoShop for whatever reason. No other Os offers that, none.
Programming OS X in Cocoa using objectiveC (a BETTER alternative to C++...for a GUI anyways) is a great hobbie I have right now and makes for a great profession. the number of mac users to programmers is great.
Go ahead and mock Apple and Macintosh..
I don't care...I don't need these "experts" to tell me what if my computer or OS of choice is "relevent" or crap or great for that matter. Apple makes a fine product and I love it. Also, usually I can tell people everything about their OS (linux/windows/be) but they can't tell me a thing about Mac. What do *you* really know about a Macintosh anyways?
Besides, the PPC is a fine chip and the assembly is a lot more exciting then X86 =)
"Allez Cusine!"
NeXT had Avi Tevanian, who explained to Amelio in very clear terms why NeXT was better than Be.
Coding for Be is a bitch, coding for NeXT is a walk in the park. Apple needed apps. Once the legacy software issue was figured out (BlueBox), it was a no-brainer.
Of course, this comes from the OpenStep/WebObjects support guys who sat three cubes down from me at Apple, so take it how you will.
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
Uh huh. So, what's the flavor of the Koolaid they're using?
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
Raskin's criticisms of OSX and its rejected opportunities have received ample support from every independent authority on UI design; for one example, you can drop these in your browser.
http://asktog.com/columns/034OSX-FirstLook.html
Like Raskin, Tog worked on the early Mac at Apple, so I don't see how he could be independent.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
You know, money doesn't mean everything, and frankly, past the first ten million, just how many more Ferraris can one man drive? Integrity means a lot, and so does reputation, and so does independence...
Furthermore, the people we are talking about are Übergeeks first and anything else second. If you're a geek, you know that what motivates you is getting to build the next big one, not how much loot you get.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
hey but are you "proud" of being a microsoft employee? why dont you use your real name? are you contractually allowed to say anything else but "I love this company"? personally I reckon the SS in nazi germany would say the same thing... peace, love and open standards... iGod
It is also important to remember that in an industry where many PC clone makers have margins hovering between an anemic 5 and 10 percent, Apple's is hovering around 30 percent. In fact, it was Tim Bajarin who recently wrote that in this consumer market bloodbath, many of the companies are likely to be gone. His picks for the survivors? Sony and Apple. Both have great name recognition, a focus on potentially becoming a digital hub, and enough money(Sony is obviously Sony, Apple has over $4 billion in cash in the bank) and profits to survive. The coming years should be interesting. I look forward to seeing how it all turns out!
Who cares about bang for the MHz when you don't get bang for the buck. A 1.4 GHz T-bird is well under half the cost of a top-end G4 system.
MHz simply doesn't matter. You get like 4x the MHz per buck with x86 that you do of a G4.
Yeah, but the Intel and AMD processors we use are just extension after extension to the 1971 Intel 4004 hand calculator chip.
Why are we still trying to handle everything in 64k pages? Isn't the overhead to do that just ridiculous?
While you can get 4x the clock speed for the same price in x86 architecture, I'd suggest to you that the Motorola/PowerPC architecture will provide you at least 4x the power per MHz.
Comparing CPU speeds between Apple and x86 is like comparing apples and oranges. Would you honestly try to benchmark an Alpha or a MIPS or a Sparc by comparing its clock speed to an x86?
Clock speed differences between architectures is irrelevant. Just benchmark the machines to compare their speed.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I haven't had time to do more than just glance at a few of the commentaries, and I'll go through it in more depth later -- but my initial impression is:
WHAT A BUNCH OF PRETENTIOUS WHINY ASS CAN'T GET THEIR OWN SHIT TOGETHER SOUR GRAPED LOSERS!
I mean, sure, criticism has its place. Just because someone makes more money than you do, or is more succesful in other ways, doesn't make them above criticism. I've been mightily critical of Apple in the past, and will continue to harp on them here and there. How much genius does it takes to see that multi-buttoned mice with mousewheels are a boon to productivity? Oh, man, and don't get me started on that stupid hockey-puck mouse that Steve just refused to discontinue, no matter how many people internal to Apple complained about it.
It's just the smell of arrogance that you get from reading a forum of "experts" on "Does Apple Matter," with the headline "expert" being Gil Amelio, the dumbass that almost finished destroying the company. He's like that idiot in every Mafia movie, than talks too much, thinks he knows too much, fucks up a lot, then he gets whacked. You maybe feel a bit sorry for him; but you know that if he hadn't been such a moron, he would have lived a lot longer.
</rant>
Sorry, I'll go chill out for a bit.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
You suggest Sony, IBM, or Dell. I'd add Toshiba to that list and drop Dell, since they once again exhibited their commitment to being Microsoft's #1 lackey this week by pulling support for Linux on the desktop just when Microsoft's new licensing scheme for XP is making many customers take a serious look at alternatives. (Linux desktops are now only available through "DellPlus" custom orders, which have a 50-unit minimum - mark my words, Dell will make it increasingly harder to get a desktop Linux box, since they march ONLY to Bill's tune. How do I know? I used to be point man for software for both Latitude and Inspiron at Dell, and I can tell you first hand that they really care much less about their customers than they do about keeping MS happy.)
The IBM's are weird but work well - I especially like the old 550, 560, and 570, which are truly portable and can be had used at pretty decent prices. Many of the laptops of a couple of years ago have the longest battery life readily available - the reason is that there were already low-power CPUs then, but the clock rates had't gotten so insane as to more than use up the savings as is the case in current laptops, some of which have pitiful battery life. (Realistically, is there anything you'll be doing on a laptop that requires more than say, 233 MHz? I doubt it.)
The larger Sonys are pretty good, but have the usual frustrating proprietariness of all Sony gear, and often Linux drivers only "sorta work" on Sonys in my experience. Like Compaq, Sony insists on "adding prporietary value" in ways that actually decrease the value of the hardware for those of us clever enough to try to use it in new ways. (FWIW, I think Compaq laptops aren't worth the trouble or the money for this very reason.)
Toshiba has been making good strides back after slipping for a few years. The new ones seem about as tough as the old ones that built their reputation, and they have some pretty good deals now. Avoid HP like the plague. Fujitsus are surprisingly good, but harder to find good deals on.
Sadly, no laptop vendor seems to be interested in building what I think most laptop users want: A true thin and light notebook with a good screen and a *slower* processor that would allow battery life of 8 hours or more. This is now easliy do-able, and would sell, as I think most people are wondering what they need gigahertz CPUs in their laptop for, since they can't use even a quarter of that power in their desktop machines. That and built-in 10/100 Ethernet, which still seems maddeningly rare in today's world.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Well, one thing people don't understand is that Apple is a signifigantly different company than it was years ago. Years ago, yes, the gouged their customers. But after the return of Jobs, things have gotten better. Prices have fallen dramatically although people fail to realize that. Machines such as the PowerMac G4 are still overpriced, but have been getting closer and closer to PCs pricewise with every itteration. Products such as the iBook are unquestionably cheaper than PC equivilents. A lot of people here are living in the past, not realizing that Apple has moved on from competing with PCs under the dark days of Amelio and Co. to becoming an innovator of PCs. While they have been slow to adopt some technologies, they pioneer or push for adoption of others (USB, Firewire, etc.) One size does not fit all. Linux is not ready for mainstream. Macs aren't ready for penny pinchers. Windows... well. They all matter. They all push each other further along. You don't have to look too hard to find traces of influence from other platforms in the platform you are using, whichever it may be. So how can any of these companies/platforms not mattter?
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.
"all I can say is that I love this company"
C'mon, DANCE MONKEY BOY !!! Yeeeeeaaaaah !!!!
"Honey, I feel a certain distance between us..." "Really? A 31ms ping ain't that bad..."
Graphically, OS X is dissapointing. It's ok but not great looking.
Ummmm... what?
It's slow and has responsiveness bugs.
It's 1.0.
There isn't anything there that hasn't been done before in other operating systems.
I don't see how one could say that after reading SystemOverview (2.6MB PDF file).
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
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.
If you mean "Does it matter in the course of
computer history?", the answer is yes; it's place in history is undeniable.
It probably means "Does it matter to the future of computing?"
that probably now regrets not selling to them for $125 million when he could
You bet your sweet ass he does!
$125 million (when he owned more of the company, I'll bet) or $11 million... hmmm, which would I choose?
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
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.
As someone who uses MacOS 9, Win2K, and Linux on a regular basis, I gotta say that OS 9 still works quite well, even if it doesn't have all the latest tech. The cooperative mulitasking and old skool memory management aren't great, but *as long as programmers code carefully* the apps work fine. Memory protection and premptive multitasking just make it so that apps CAN'T screw anything up, even if there is something wrong with them. This means that I need to reboot OS 9 more often (maybe every other day), but that only takes about 2 minutes, and it's well worth it for me because of the quality of the OS for everything else. OS 9 is not perfect by any means, but hardly "an utter joke".
Now OS X (which DOES have all the latest tech buzzwords) is, unfortunately, a complete joke for now. I managed to use it exlusively for three days last week (and get everything I needed done) but it wasn't pleasent, and I finally rebooted to OS 9 and haven't looked back. What happened Apple? You were always so good with usability, but this is worse than Win2K in that dept (as a long time Mac fan, I would much prefer to use Win2K than OS X in it's current state). Classic apps are unusably slow (on a G4/450 w/512ram), the finder is slow, windows don't remember where I put them the last time they were opened, the finder crashs, preference panels aren't well thought out, everything just seems kludged together. It's nice to be able to open a bash shell and run all my unix stuff, but with OS9 I can just telnet to my linux box and do that there. I'll give 10.1 a look when it comes out, but I'm not holding my breath...
Hmm send me the MAC, I put it to use. I am sad to see such a religious feeling on a machine but like i said before , send me the devil.. oops ,mac ill use it.
Hell, .. oops that word again. Just let me know buddy. I do an exorcism fer YA!
[Education: Key to success, and overcomming boundries of confusion. ]
I always laugh when the inevitable post pops up in an Apple story: Why are Apple zealots so enthusiastic about a company that {threatened some web site for violating an NDA; protects their IP; sells an OS that only runs on their hardware; doesn't allow clones; uses one-button mice}?
What I always wonder is how people can get so passionate about companies that make components that are 10% faster/bigger than they were the year before, manufacturers who screw those parts together or game developers who write new engines to push 10% more polys through the new machine. I mean, that stuff is all necessary but if Nvidia, AMD or Dell didn't do it, ATi, Intel or Compaq would do exactly the same thing.
For better or worse, Apple tries to make computers qualitatively _better_.
An aside: why are people so infatuated with the idea that Apple "stole" all their GUI ideas from Xerox? It's blatantly false and _somebody_ had to have done it, right? Why is it so much less painful for them to believe that work was done by Xerox and not by Apple?
"Then, at Be, Jobs snubbed him [Gassee] (with good reason) by going with NeXT."
:-)
Jobs couldn't have snubbed him. Jobs was at NeXT, not Apple. If anyone, Amelio did the snubbing.
"This roundtable is like getting B'nai B'rith, Winston Churchill and Jesse Jackson around a table to discuss Goebbels."
Godwin's law: you lose.
indeed I would have been just as happy if Apple bought Be and used it
I'd LOVE BeOS guts (threading and so on) with the OSX interface on my G4 *droooool*
Not in this universe... =[
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
I remember when BeOS was still on PPC only, ('95-6?) I could get quad (YES, QUAD!) PPC machine from UMAX while Apple was still selling overpriced, all-in-one-box systems. Those systems kicked ass! Did Apple build such a system? Nooo... they where too busy polishing their ivory tower, but I'm still waiting for such a beast... Just imagine where we would be if dual & quad CPU PPC trend would have cought on... *drool*
J.
i suppose it does have a better ring than the Granny Smith, or the Golden Delicious
Oh, now this sounds like a hoot and a half... Faithful viewer Nina Tovish pointed out an interesting announcement in today's San Jose Mercury News: apparently, SiliconValley.com (the paper's "online partner") is planning to host a little virtual get-together next week-- an "online round table discussion," as they call it. The topic of this little shindig? "The present and future of Apple Computer." Sounds pleasant, right?
But wait just an Apple-bashing minute, here-- check out the roster of participants they've managed to scrape together for the big event: "former Apple Chief Executive Gil Amelio, industry analyst Tim Bajarin, Mercury News reporter Jon Fortt, former Apple product division president Jean-Louis Gassée and former Macintosh product manager Jef Raskin." That doesn't sound like a particularly well-balanced panel to us. If anything, it sounds like the premise for a bad TV sitcom called "Rotten To The Core." "Join us next week for laughs aplenty when Gil pours sugar in the fuel tank of Steve Jobs's jet while Jean-Louis tries to teach Jef how to say 'Mac OS X sucks rocks' in French and hilarity ensues. Don't miss it!"
Yes, we can't wait to hear the new and creative ways in which this panel tears Apple a new orifice. Presumably Gil's going to be rattling off the same old "they'd be doing fine if they'd have stuck to the Master Plan I gave them" routine. Gassée, well, he's not exactly an impartial observer, either; sure, he used to work for Apple, but he left and started up Be, whose operating system Apple almost bought as the basis for what is now known as Mac OS X. Instead, Apple went with Steve's NeXT operating system, and Be is currently floundering badly. We expect thinly-veiled bitterness. Next up: 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. And Jef Raskin, widely regarded as the Father of the Macintosh? Well, he went on record last March saying that Mac OS X isn't worth the upgrade, because it's just "another face-lift" with "an awful lot of minuses." We'll see if the imminent 10.1 version has changed his mind at all.
So we've got four panelists with an axe to grind about Apple, or at least about Mac OS X (and this is about the "future of Apple," remember). As for Tim Bajarin, well, we'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. But when you stick five people in a room and the most Apple-positive one turns out to be the "industry analyst," clearly you're looking at the "online round table discussion" equivalent of a mob hit. If you'd care to tune in for the carnage, reportedly "the discussion will begin Monday at 9 a.m. and end at noon Aug. 16." Whoa, seventy-five consecutive hours of probably Apple-bashing with only a lone industry analyst to defend (maybe) Apple's honor? What could possibly be more entertaining?
First, Gil didn't kill the clones, Steve did. As for his performance in the job, he inherited a basket case of people who simply wouldn't do what they were told, and it took someone like Jobs to kick the necessary ass (read: fire the dead wood) to get the company turned around. As for the losses, those were mostly a matter of facing facts that Spindler wasn't willing to face. Gil took the hit, but he didn't cause the losses.
Second, Gasseé *isn't* a big critic of Apple. I have yet to see anything from him that sounds like sour grapes to me. Also, Gaseé deserves the credit for the Mac II, which certainly saved the Mac line from extinction.
Raskin, I pretty much agree is no more qualified than John Dvorak to criticise Apple or the Mac, since he was off the project so long ago. See the Canon Cat for Raskin's idea of what he wanted the Mac to be.
Fortt I've never heard of, but he sounds like a lightweight.
Bajarin's claim to fame seems to be nothing more than having been quoted a whole lot by reporters who don't know anyone with first-hand information on anything they're writing about. Did this guy *ever* do anything in the industry, or has he just made a living through cleverly exploiting his keen grasp of the obvious?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Perhaps I could have been more clear in the meaning of my sentence. Hosting on top of the NT kernel would be a bad STRATEGIC move. What if M$ just up and decided to not let Apple use it any more? What then?
Well, that clarifies your position considerably, since in your original post you went on to lambaste Windows on usability issues.
My opinion on the strategic inadvisability is that's why you hire lawyers. Perhaps the unliklihood of coming to acceptable licensing terms was part of the decision not to build on NT. Technically, it isn't so impossible to imagine working, given what they have done with Next. There would have been some interesting potential strategic upsides as well. I don't see how it is idiotic to consider a possibility just because it would shock most people, especially as he didn't take this direction in the end. Of course opinions sometimes come across stronger than we intend when filtered through a keyboard.
There are certain decisions of Gil Amelio's that I very strongly disagreed with. In particular I think the abandonment of OpenDoc was a horrible mistake. But he was in a tough spot and he made some tough decisions, that unfortnately for his reputation he did not stay around long enough to benefit from them. Jobs did a lot of important things, particularly slimming down manufacturing times and inventory and adding panache to Apple's increasingly beige designs, but it wasn't a case of his messianic qualities working in a vacuum that "saved" Apple -- Amelio deserves part of the credit.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Apple IS now walking a little nearer to the Free software path than it used to. And it is not just because they were/are losing support. The Macintosh OS was in dire need a serious overhaul, as it was not designed with multitasking, networking or 3-D graphics as priorities.
Sure Apple's decision to go with NeXT's BSD kernel was motivated in part by software user base and development (read: financial) concerns, but it was also because it was the closest option to doing the ideal/right thing. "Think Different" is not just Apple's marketing slogan, but something of a company philosophy. If the underground is doing Free software and Open Source, and Micro$oft is steering clear of it, then Apple will do what it can to get that bit of market (quantity) mind (quality) share.
Free software isn't quite ready for the primetime. Hopefully it will be someday. When it does approach user friendliness, then I would expect that Apple will be one of the first mainstream vendors to fully commit to it. After all, they are a hardware company, not a software one (hahaha, that's a whole argument in itself), so the Free software model shouldn't hurt them financially. In the meantime, Apple is doing there best to give people a taste of what it is like.
When Thales was asked what was difficult, he said, "To know one's self." And what was easy, "To advise another."
The future of Apple may look like the present of the Amiga. There's a hard core of fanatical users. Machines are still manufactured and sold, although in very small volume by PC standards. New models come out occasionally. New releases of software appear now and then. And nobody outside the fan club notices.
It's really more like NeXT took over Apple though. The CEO, top hardware person, & top software person are all former NeXT people. OS X is a direct descendant of NeXTStep.
Isn't Gassee still a shareholder? A decent portion of that money is most likely coming to him.
D
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?
The clones makers had one plus - they were smaller and able to access newer chips/parts faster because they basically did BTO... Jobs learned that lesson and applies it to Apple...
Eric Aitala
www.f1m.com
This is the same brilliant logic Umberto Eco parodied in 'Foucault's Pendulum'. "He must know the secret. And if he doesn't reveal the secret, that means he's really deep into it."
I think only if they start making OS X available to intel/amd architecture. I can't imagine a single windows 9x/XP user NOT moving over to a system that is both *nix and Apple. I mean, that combination is already the holy grail of operating systems worldwide. "An easy to use and new user friendly Unix client with Plug and Play adaptability?"
As I struggle to get my new Digital camera to work with my PC (it works fine with my mac, after 30 seconds GARRRH) I realize how much easier my life would be with mac OS X on my AMD system.
The question is: Will apple take a bite out of this market? (oh god, shoot me now for that pun)
skye
"Firewire was developed by Apple, but has been adopted as an industry standard, IEEE 1394
As for your other points, forward thinking is much more laudable, relevent and necessary than hindsight. Without entities which are forward thinking, things don't go forward. Due to lack of thinking. Like when it's 5 am... and you start to trail off..
Yes, you're exactly right. I can tell you (having worked there), the NeXT guys completely received the red carpet treatment and more than their fair share of company resources... especially when you consider how fucking long it took them to ship OSX. They should have been able to get their shit together long before, if they had just planned things out better and not changed directions every five minutes.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
>Amelio wanted to host MacOS on top of the NT kernel. Freakin' idoit.
No, he *considered* NT, along with Solaris, Linux, BSD, and the other alternatives, and he and his VP of software development made the right choice. Do you have a problem with that?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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
Apple does count.
1) They have created a user interface that their users have grown to love and protect (in holy wars). The 20% grey philosophy of their ui with allowing their users to throw in accents if they saw it fit was what held their user base for as long as they did. The single function buttons and uncluttered desktop mindset has also allowed Apple to maintain the same interface for YEARS. (are you listening micro$oft?) Simplicity also yielded stability and made the interface adaptive for designers and artists who wanted as little as possible when interfacing with their machines.
2) They have a reputation for building solid hardware. The introduction of third party hardware with Power Computing showed that Apple's OS wasn't all that was essential for their reliable systems nor was it all that they had going for them.
3) They have been able to adapt their technology as time forces them to change it. OS X (that's ten, not "ex", I've been corrected time and time again) is Apple's answer to the market demand for businesses that want machines that they can reliably network and don't want Dells. Before OS X apple+network = no as many frustrated admins know. Damn that NETATalk.
And above all these reasons for apple counting are coming from a biggoted PC user!!!! I've never seen such a strong following from a fringe operating and hardware system, and until recently I saw practically no reason for it. Well, I see you Apple, and yes you will be a contender for some time.
From browsing about the net, it seems that a lot of the Next stuff found its way into OSX, so in a sense, Next is still with us.
Oh yes. and Jean Louis got kicked out of the board in a 1990 reorg and Gil Amelio tried to put a favorable spin on Stevie Wonder's coup. Read Fire in The Valley for more on this.
I think one of the panel members summed it up best by saying something along the lines of... "If they didn't, why would we be talking about them?"
=)
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
Well, it depends on what you mean when you say "Does Apple matter?" If you mean "Does it matter in the course of computer history?", the answer is yes; it's place in history is undeniable. "Does it matter to it's users?" Again, the answer is yes; ask any Mac addict. As for the question "Does any of that matter?", the answer depends on how much money Apple is making as a company. ;) That's life for you.
lets get a bunch of former Apple employees and gather them together, and see if they really DONT have any personal feelings against their former employer... hmmm
Amelio wanted to host MacOS on top of the NT kernel. Freakin' idoit.
All I have to say is; next time you set up a Windows or Linux box, and you're a few days into it, know that you could have done this all in 15 minutes on a mac.
I love the fact that grep, openssh, perl and apache are standard with the current macos, and I don't have to spend any time cursing xfree getting it to work for me. Apple is or at least will be the known universe's largest distributor of UNIX.
Penguin and VA will never get in the hands of a 5 year old kid. But starting in september, some of those kids will go to school and notice, emacs, VI, gcc, apache and gnu/bsd in their classroom.
If you want to raise a nation of hacker kids; kids who find their own uses for technology, then you realize that Apple matters.
And even if you don't buy into that, you might dig the peace of mind gained by not being forced to give your personal info to passport.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
what this means? Scroll to "And now for some not so nice things".
see here for a bunch more on ZUIs
While I think that Raskin is over the top with some things he's right that the fundamental metaphors for human-computer interaction haven't changed much from the advent of the GUI at PARC.
Can anyone say Windows 95? Sure there were differences, but seriously folks, from the end user's perspective, it was basically a copy of Mac OS 6. Trash can = Recycle bin, start menu = apple menu, folder browser = apple standard file browser. Windows didn't get everything right, they still didn't have a true desktop. Their control panel wasn't as easy to use as apple's, but they had stuff apple didn't have, like an MS DOS prompt (even if MS DOS sucked completely) for the geeks to enjoy.
Then of course you could talk about the education system and how pretty much any 20-something who works on computers started out with an Apple II or some similar model in their 1st grade "technology" class. Most coders I've ever talked to could still spit out a BASIC program in a couple of minutes that could ask you for your name then put it in a sentance. Anyway that's just my opinion, you guys probably won't agree.
~ now you know
Truly, I think that Apple will continue to push the industry forward. Indeed, Apple may eventually push past the magical 10% marketshare which will help ensure their survival.
But, I think Apple has to see where the wind blows in the next year (they'll be busy with OS X anyways). With the push in the internet appliance space (Sony's e Villa, Palm's buyout of Be, PeoplePC's new IA program) lately, Apple may see their "digital hub" idea begin to really pay off. Whether Apple buys Palm after Palm has created something useful out of Be, or whether Darwin (or OS X) becomes Apple's way of entering embedded systems, I think the next year will point the way that Apple should go.
And, as we've seen in the past, where Apple goes, the industy goes...
When I read in Raksin's about ZUIs, I had to think of Nautilus. Sure, it is far from what a proper ZUI should be like, but it is a small step in the right direction. Too bad that it is overshadowed by Konq and that development or at least publicity has stalled since Eazel left the building.
Within some limits, you can. In the late 80's the Mac had a stable, working, easy-to-use GUI; meanwhile PCs had character-based apps, and Windows was a joke. Anyone who wanted a GUI computer had only one reasonable choice, the Mac.
And Apple ruthlessly exploited this fact. They charged the highest margins in the industry; they forced people to buy Macs with Apple hard drives, even though people wanted to buy third-party hard drives that cost less; and they refused to license out their ROMs or OS to anyone, preventing third-party computers from under-cutting their price. They maximized short-term profit, and then when Windows 3.0 shipped (the first version of Windows that didn't suck too horribly) the customers started deserting Apple and going to PCs.
If Apple had licensed out the ROMs and OS, they would have made less money per customer but they could have had oh so many more customers. They had GUI working great long before MS; they could have owned the computer market and Windows could have been an also-ran. But because they chose short-term profit over long-term--to be blunt, because they decided to rape their own customers for maximum dollars--they now have a tiny slice of the market.
Another moronic point
And the POINT is... in your EYE!!
you guys see the mac has something you dont (usb, 3.5 inch drives, TV on the desktop to name a few) and you guys go running to the nearest forum to try and boost your crumbling self-confidence
Okay, let's go over it again; see if you can keep up. The original poster said that we have convenient 3.5" floppy disks now because Apple used them. I pointed out that we have them because people wanted them. I never said anywhere that Apple never gave the users what they want; you might have noticed that I said the PowerBook was a home run, exactly what the users wanted, just years too late.
its clear you dislike macs.
Not so; I dislike paying too much for a computer that will not perform as well as the computers I build for myself. If I could affordably build my own Mac, I might... I'd run Linux on it, though.
you actually sound as if you beleive everything MS tells you is true.
Dude, you are hearing what you want to hear. Go back and read what I wrote. I'll tell you what I believe: I believe what I remember from those years, since I was around, playing with computers and reading the news.
What I want now, more than anything, are open computers (where I can build them and fix them myself) running open software (Linux, GNOME, etc.) Your attempt to paint me as a mindless MS fanatic is amusing.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
.sig wanted: Must be concise, funny, and display my cleverness.
If Apple wasn't around who would the other companies copy?
The future of IBM may look like the present of the Amiga. There's a hard core of fanatical users. Machines are still manufactured and sold, although in very small volume by PC standards. New models come out occasionally. New releases of software appear now and then. And nobody outside the fan club notices.
>I think only if they start making OS X available to intel/amd architecture. I can't imagine a single windows 9x/XP user NOT moving over to a system
Erm, why is the Mactel camp so thick? You can't imagine which 9x users _wouldn't_ switch? Like how about the absolute FUCK ALL apps there'd be? Y'think the applications barrier to entry might hurt you there, HRMM? How about mindshare of all the thickskull 9x users out there?
>I realize how much easier my life would be with mac OS X on my AMD system
OS X would go to shit. Apple would spend all their time and money supporting every lameshit chipset out of every podunk x86 mobo manufacturer in the middle of nowhere. Why do you think Macs are so integrated? So Apple knows WHAT the HELL THEY'RE SUPPORTING IN THEIR OS.
Or how about Bill Gates? Apparently he is a closet Mac fan, so I would certainly be interested to hear his point of view. Though the truth is, unless I sat down with him privatly he probably wouldn't want to share his real point of view, on this subject, in public.
Sometimes the best placed point of views come people being able to stand back and look in from the outside.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I submit that those details are secondary to this question.
What really matters, if we're actually talking about Whether Apple Matters, is that Apple as a company has certainly pushed the personal computer's adoptation by society.
1) The personal computer - a computer that you could go to a story and buy, that you didn't have to solder together yourself, that let you do fun stuff like play games and write letters and even program. Sure, Apple didn't make the first personal computer, but let's not forget how important the first Apples were in popularizing home computers. The first time I ever thought a computer was "cool" was playing four-player Asteroids on my friend's Apple IIe.
2) The GUI - yes, this is a hot-button topic. Did PARC create it or was it Apple, or even the Martians? Again, who cares. Apple popularized the desktop metaphor and allowed consumers (yes, those people who go to stores and spend money and don't work at universities or research labs) to buy a computer that used a GUI. I recall many a conversation with my DOS-using friends back in the pre-Windows days: "That graphical interface sucks! I'll NEVER use something like that. You have no real CONTROL over what you're doing. What a useless TOY that Mac is!" Of course, the world has gone GUI. Even die-hard UNIX/Linux folks are getting into the act, crowing from the rooftops about the superiority of Gnome. I'd be willing to be that without Apple, there would be no Gnome and no KDE.
3) Making computer hardware and an OS that work together in a way that turns people into Mac Evangelists - laugh if you will, but it's interesting to note why people evangelize different OSes. In my experience, while Windows zealots go on and on about how many zillion different first-person shooters there are for Windows and how you can't go wrong with Windows because it's ubiquitous, Linux users preach the elegance of the kernel, the efficiency of the UNIX approach with small, sharp tools and transparent underpinnings.
Mac users are as often as not people who now love computers (their Macs), even though they'd never loved or even enjoyed using a computer before that. With their Macs, they can actually get things done - things that had eluded them for whatever reason on more intimidating systems like DOS and Windows.
4) Desktop publishing. 'Nuff said there.
If not for Apple constantly pushing (not always succeeding, but at least trying) to make the user experience actually usable by people who aren't interested in learning about the inner workings of their computers, I really doubt that personal computing would be anything like what it is today. Would Microsoft (not to mention UNIX hackers) have seen the worth of a GUI without the competition from Apple? Would Compaq and other competitors be making hardware with the ports clearly labeled, with easy to use instructions and easy access to the innards? Perhaps, but my guess is that the Mac towers helped to push them along.
So that gets us to now. As to whether Apple Really Matters in the Future, we may be surprised yet again. Apple has been on the verge of extinction for years - since before the Mac, really. I can't count the number of somber articles I've ready during that time, delineating the reasons why Apple is irrelevant. Yet somehow, they've managed to survive. In fact, they're looking pretty solid right now.
The concept of the personal computer as the hub of a digital lifestyle is, again, not a new concept to the geek readers of Slashdot. But to the general public, it is a novel idea. Apple has adroitly positioned themselves to take advantage of the covergence of several technologies.
They're making desktop video a consumer reality. Again, they didn't invent it, but they're making it so easy to use and clearly orienting their products around this core function, that desktop video could take off the way desktop publishing did in the 1980s.
They've brought UNIX to the masses. Apple is already the largest-volume UNIX supplier in the world. The "not invented here" syndrome that crippled Apple in the 80s and 90s has been rolled back quite a bit under the second Jobs tenure. Put another way, although the Mac hardware is proprietary, the OS itself plays well with others far better than Microsoft OSes.
Finally, Apple isn't afraid to think creatively about the personal computer. They're not afraid to take chances. Some of their big gambles, like the celebrated failures of the Newton and the Cube, have made them look foolish. Think of Apple as you would a person - does any person who never takes chances ever *really* get ahead in life? Does that person ever inspire others, or get people excited? Like Apple or not, when they push their latest hardware or OS, people talk. People argue, people re-examine what's good in personal computing and what isn't.
Is Apple relevant? Yes.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Who cares about bang for the MHz when you don't get bang for the buck. A 1.4 GHz T-bird is well under half the cost of a top-end G4 system.
MHz simply doesn't matter. You get like 4x the MHz per buck with x86 that you do of a G4.
You'll find GEM as well as other gems here.
"Slashdot - the one place on the internet where guys brag about how small it is." - that IT girl
GEM is here
In case you didn't notice, tons of PCs come without floppy drives too. Not to mention the fact that the cheap ass drives they put in bargain PCs write disks that no other disk drive can read.
Is there a summary somewhere? I'd really like to get to the heart of what they said without reading all the seperate messages.
Main Entry: apple : the fleshy usually rounded and red, yellow, or green edible pome fruit of a tree (genus Malus) of the rose family; also : an apple tree : a fruit or other vegetable production suggestive of an apple -- compare OAK APPLE : one that is highly cherished <his daughter is the apple of his eye>
Pronunciation: 'a-p&l
Function: noun
Usage: often attributive
Etymology: Middle English appel, from Old English æppel; akin to Old High German apful apple, Old Irish ubull, Old Church Slavonic abluko
Date: before 12th century
1
2
- apple of one's eye
Welp, doesn't take a genius to figure out this one!
This problem is not new, it is only gotten worse over the last decade. Here's a short timeline which reveals my biases.
1990-96: If you wanted to do graphics, you bought a Mac and paid the premium for the proprietary hardware. If you did anything else, you generally didn't bother with a computer at all, or got an inexpensive x86. The problems then were having to pay two or three times the cost of the x86 'puter for a specialized machine.
1996-2000: If you wanted to do graphics, and you didn't already have a Mac, you could buy an x86 'puter and run anything you cared to name; Quark, Illustrator, Photoshop, Fractal, etc. If you had other tasks to do, you already had the x86 with a popular office suite and other stuff. The problem then was in deciding whether to pay up to four times more for a fashion statement or get the x86 and move on with your life. If you wanted to run a server, you could choose between many flavours of Unix/Linux to get the job done, and if you had an older x86 laying around, you could build the server with little or no money. Sure, you might in the process contribute to the M$ bank, but you got your work done using all the "standard" graphics and office formats.
2001-future: Now, that OSX is out, the decision of whether to buy a Mac is even more difficult to justify. Since more and more of the productivity software has been ported to the Mac, and more and more of the graphics software has been ported to x86, the choice to buy a new Mac running two separtate OSes (OS9 & OSX) and pay dearly to run them on proprietary hardware doesn't make any sense at all, unless one gets the iMac for a student. But OSX is a server, running a BSD variant, they say. So if you want to run a server, and since servers have become so much more critical in the last couple of years, then the choice to, again, pay up to four times the x86 cost for hardware and run, really an unproven variant, which would otherwise be a free download of BSD, is a particularly poor choice. One can, again, run the x86 'puter with one or many free OSes or use a semi-commercial product (like Solaris or Redhat) which can be installed again and again and again, and is configured for the x86. Parts are interchangeble and upgrades are much cheaper. So, a setup like Slashdot's "Matrix" would be even more outlandisly priced than the overpriced VA hardware it currently uses (which must be provided for promotional reasons, I'm sure - paying VA those premium prices is dumb).
So, the Mac vs x86 decision has never been harder. But don't get me wrong: Personally, I use Redhat (and my dot-com sits on an ISP's Solaris system) for server operations, and a single Win98 box for graphics, running the programs mentioned above and many more. The reason I went with Win32 is detailed in the 96-00 section above, which is when I started my business. I would absolutely love to get off the Windblows and onto an Apple, or a Wine enabled Redhat box. The problem with the former is still the cost of that proprietary hardware, and the problem with the latter is the lack of full operability with all Win32 programs.
Perhaps all of this is a massive sell-out in the eyes of Mac Zealots, but I could argue that for one to stick to Apple for all PC and server operations is another kind of sellout, one which requires blind obedience to a single company's vision of the future, whether that vision is clear, or in this case, quite blurry. Give me a real alternative to Win32 and I'd be out of Windoze before you can say 'reboot', but a real alternative does not mean trading a proprietary operating system costing $89 for proprietary hardware and upgrades which could cost thousands. If OSX, or some version of it, ran clean on x86 architecture and also allowed me, through a version of Wine, to keep my existing multitude of graphics applications without repurchasing them for the Mac, then I'd be onto an Apple this afternoon. I do not agree with those who say an embrace of x86 by Apple would be Apple's doom: I firmly believe it would be one of the best decisions Apple could make. After all, OSX IS a BSD variant, and BSD is an x86 OS, so making all the GUI stuff run should not be a big problem, in general theory.
So, as it stands, we all have to choose which proprietary setup we wish to support: Microsoft and Intel, or Apple and Motorola. To choose one and claim only the other is proprietary is unrealistic, for they both are. There are SO many disaffected Windows users out here who would seriously consider running OSX, if only the above problems could be solved. The company to solve them is, guess who, Apple. That's the kind of "innovation" we really need.
You will outgrow your usefulness - actual Slashdot footer quote
Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy, and taste good with ketchup.
Nyuck nyuck!
we are building a religion
a limited edition
we are now accepting callers
for these pendant key chains
Now THANKS to Apple, we're stuffing.. oh wait, we're wishing we could stuff 3.5 floppies into those tupperware containers. MY kinda fun! It's amazing how they can market it so no one cares. They should try and market bodies without asses, and see if people notice.
Our topic is 'Does Apple Matter?'
Of course it does! Without them to take the lead on everything, we'd still be stuffing 5.25" diskettes onto beige machines without GUIs.
They're the computer industry's metronome. No one wants to admit it, but every other company follows.
I sometimes suspect that 50% of their machines get sold to cults. The other 50% of their machines, of course, are sold to - and reverse engineered by - every other PC manufacturer and software developer.
Now that OS X is a *NIX derivative, an Apple is suddenly as viable as Linux on a PC. Moreso, in fact, since the hardware architecture is so much better and they get so much more bang for a MHz than does an x86.
Not to mention, the cases are so cool.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
"Also, having working in a computer lab with several iMacs I know that they don't network worth snot"
NT4 never networked worth a damn either.
Neither did 2000. Hell, it won't even allow
100mbits full duplex, when I can pop in a Linux
HD, and it goes 100mbits full, or I can put a G4 on the wire, and it goes 100mbits full.
I plan on buying a G4 with OSX this month.
Monopoly products don't work worth a flying
fuck.
It seems an excellently weighted group to me if its objective was to get former Apple employees talking about Apple. Do you know something about its raison d'être that I don't?
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
Thus you would say that the San Francisco Giants never win games?
Would the physicists and engineers behind the Manahattan Project have created the atom bomb without the creation of the vast infrastructure of Los Alamos?
Would the brains at PARC have been able to create the GUI without someone paying them and providing them with the necessary tools to do so?
I think it's fair to say that while people create, they do so in the context of a structure that affords them the opportunity to do so. It's a symbiotic relationship. Another way of looking at it might be that while the employees of PARC created the GUI, the Apple company created the GUI, because the organizational structure and focus was on bringing new technologies to market.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
This thread reads like any other apple thread on /. - Maccaddict - Or I Hate apple.
There are your uninformed PC enthusiasts who try to hammer thier point home with out evidence to back it up.
As well as the evangelistic Apple lovers - to who the company can do no wrong.
And lets not forget the majority of the posters in this thread who have no back bone & waffle between Apple bashing & loving.
I am seriously dissappointed with this thread - I was hoping for an intellignet discussion of Apple's future & past. Instead I got an argumentative thread chock full of the vastly unclued.
I'm just glad that none of these people actually work for Apple.
___________________________
I'm not a geek, but I play one on TV.
For Q2 2001, Apple's profit was $61 million on sales of $1,475 million, about 4%. Gross margin was $434 million, or 28% of income. By comparison, Dell's profit was $462 million on sales of $8,028 million, or 6%. Dell's gross margin was $1,448 million, or 18%. So Apple as a manufacturer does have larger gross margins, but they don't translate into profits. Apple's R&D, selling, and administrative costs are much larger than Dell's. And that's after big cuts.
Apple was once hugely profitable, but that was a long time ago. Now they have numbers typical of a mature manufacturer in a competitive market.
I happened to be cleaning out a file cabinet the other day when I stumbled across a printout of an editorial entitled "Can Anyone Save Packard-Bell," which then went on to say roughly, "Okay, Packard Bell and Apple have roughly equal market share, how come you only consider one of these companies doomed?" Well, um, in those days nobody really would have thought Packard Bell was doomed. I assume most of you are old enough to remember when a Packard Bell sub $1000 computer was revolutionary (if crappy).
If you have never read Gil Amelio's book you might want to go to your local library. It of course is necessarily biased, but it illustrates the foundation he built for the company. Of course The Steve came in as the conquering hero. He could not have done it if Gil had not gotten the finances in order. Gil also mentions that one of his biggest problems was not "Steving" certain executives early on. Hmmm, something to learn from.
Now if I may address certain perennial complaints of non-Mac users. Complaint: "Nutty color schemes are not what it takes to sell computers." Fact: If the appearance of a computer does not matter, then explain why you can walk into a furniture store and buy a "Computer Armoire?" If appearance doesn't matter then how come so many iMacs have sold over the last few years? Complaint: "Only one mouse button!!" How many of you use the mouse that came with your machine? Really! I don't use the single button mouse, I bought a nice multi-button scrollwheel mouse. But if you have ever tried to teach a small child to use a mouse, you know that the single button variety has it's uses.
-- I Am Not A Terrorist.
I was digging through years of accumulated floppies, sorting out which ones looked cool enough to see if they could still be read and which ones would go in the blank floppy bucket, and I found a two-diskette installation of GEM.
GEM is the windowing software mentioned in the star trek project link.
Just in case my floppies don't work, does anyone know if you can still find GEM on the web anywhere ?
I find Raskins comments on Apple's lack of innovation interesting.
He says that apple doesn't innovate at all anymore. While that is true from one point of view, it's quite false from another.
So Apple didn't invent USB. Who cares? Without Apple, it would have never caught on. Even the GUI was pioneered at Xerox PARC. Just because you didn't come up with an origonal idea doesn't mean you didn't play an extremely important role. If the technology is never adopted, it's greatness doesn't mean anything.
Apple has proven itself pretty damn good at taking someone else's technology, and making it popular, and you can't discount the importance of that.
Raskin talks about how Apple also isn't innovating with GUIs anymore. He says that X is just another 'WinMac GUI,' and he's right. He says that Apple needs to adopt a totally different strategy and use the mac as a cash cow while this new innovation catches on.
He says "What I would build wouldn't be a traditional OS, it wouldn't have a traditional GUI, but it would run on Macs, it would run on Wintel boxes, and we'd license it so as to make money from our competitors."
Of course, no mention what it would be. I don't think he really has a clue what this next 'super innovation' (like the mac was in '84) should be, but he blames Apple for not coming up with it yet.
Of course, I've never read The Humane Interface, so maybe this little issue is explained there...
Well, I think that now is also a fairly important time for Apple, -maybe even more so than the 80's- for personal computer development.
;), but most of the real problems come from not having a monolithic type of effort towards a unified and consistent interface (ie: You can install Red Hat ten times and never see the same set of options twice).
I'm not trying to draw fire here, but Linux is just not ready for consumption by the general public. Some of it the difficulty is because of drivers (which will be quickly cleared up as soon as manufactures stop making new hardware
Apple is shaping the future by permitting -albeit slowly- the "freedoom" that GNU users enjoy to permeate its way into the mainstream. And I'm not just talking about OS X being built on a BSD kernel. Maybe Apple's "open" source license isn't perfect, but it is a heck of a lot more free than Micro$oft's efforts. Also, IMHO, Apple has been far more lenient than most of the other mainstream computer manufacturers when it comes to proposing and enforcing copy protection schemes.
These things lead me to state that Apple is contributing much more to the future of computers than fine industrial design and intuitive interfaces.
When Thales was asked what was difficult, he said, "To know one's self." And what was easy, "To advise another."
I hate my soulless Win2k PC. I have to use it, there is no other choice.
*NIX puts me in awe just by it power and efficiency.
But I love my Mac and I am not a cheap bastard so I don't mind paying for something that looks good and in a way is a piece of art in an industrial design sense.
Travis
BSD/Mach (darwin) has threading. It's a *NIX.
--
"I have also mastered pomposity, even if I do say so myself." -Kryten
Remember, if you build it they will come. Jobs knew the UNIX/Linux fans couldn't resist. Look for more BSD apps to be ported. for now check out this screenshot. Yes that is photoshop. Yes Apple still matters.
more than eye candy more than a toy.
photosMy Photostream
which laptop dance to buy? and wheres the best place to get one?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
It really depends on what you want. If power is what you want, you might sacrifice battery life and portability. If you want portability, you may have to sacrifice power, or might have to pay a premium. Cost also factors in. Who wants to buy a computer that has as much power as their desktop at double the price, even if it is portable?
There are plenty of special designs in the notebook world that are made only for one purpose. There was a guy showing one at work the other day...it was an unbreakable laptop. He hurled it against the marble floor in the hall to test it...it wouldn't break....it blew my mind. Some of the subminis (Vaios and the latest Librettos) have digital cameras built right in... that's always a plus.
I use a Toshiba Libretto 70CT. It's possibly the smallest full-featured computer ever built; P120, 32Mb RAM, no 3D, no CDROM, no floppy, but dual-booting Linux and Windows on a 10GB HD. You can get one off eBay for about $300-$500 (of course, it's an older model; the new ones are far more powerful and cost $2500 last I checked). It's not powerful considering this day and age, but don't think of it as a small computer. Think of it as a big palmtop. ;)
As you can see, I favor portability. In addition, I am hooked for life on Toshiba because they use a standard laptop HD. You know, the kind that you can plug into an adapter to connect to your desktop's IDE cable if you so prefer. Other than that, the only computer-to-computer I/O is done through a cheap PCMCIA card.
Oh yeah, and all the chicks dig the Libretto because it's SOOOO CUTE! :)
There's no sig like this sig anywhere near this sig, so this must be the sig.
Prepare to loose all Karma
The PowerBook G4, and iBook are still impressive offerings.
Even if you don't accept a little Apple FUD there is still one thing that can't be beat: These things are amazingly light, fast, and have a great screen. Besides that, they run many Open Source OSes (Linux, Darwin).
Keep in mind, I am not posting this from a "Mac zealot" perspective. I am posting this as someone who admires the aesthetics of a computer, and who realizes that one of the powers of Open Source is that you can compile anything to your hardware. What ever it is.
All I ask, is that you don't mod me down simply because you dislike macs, just keep it as an option for some people to consider
What's the point of moderating?!
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
I got mine with a DYD-ROM and 256MB of memory for $1500 -- I looked at what Sony and Compaq etc. had to offer, and the nearest offerings wre usually lacking something big (like, say, the CDROM) or had about 50% of the battery life (or, even worse, didn't mention the battery life at all.) I can watch two DVD movies on this, back to back, before the battery runs out.
It works well with Linux too. The hardware is almost entirely supported now. There's a preliminary sound driver, and a daemon for answering requests from the volume/screen brightness/eject CD buttons on the keyboard. Wireless networking is fully supported, and since the iBook has an antenna built in to the case, you'll get much more range than with a run-of-the-mill 802.11 card. Power management on Apple laptops under Linux is actually better supported with pmud than with the APM support on most other laptops. Hmm, what else... the latest XFree86 supports the ATI chip with DRI support, so the video is fast. Since it's a new machine, a lot of the drivers are floating around as kernel patches on linuxppc-dev, but I fully expect them to be rolled into benh's kernel tree in the next couple weeks.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
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.
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
Aside from the P233MMX machine I bought for $150 in 1998, I haven't made a better purchase choice than the new (white) Apple iBook. It's small, it's light, it's fast, and the battery lasts a good 4 hours. Though perhaps my favorite feature is the keyboard... the keys are full size and have normal spacing, and the travel is decent. Best laptop keyboard I've ever used. Mac OS 9.1 works great, OS X is coming along nicely, and YellowDog Linux works like a charm -- even has zippy fast XFree86 acceleration via the RageMobility128 right out of the box.
Get an iBook, you won't be sorry. (Now if only the 3 year extended warranty was cheaper...)
I can't think of a better way to discuss the future of a company by asking a bunch of ex-employees!
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Get one of Tog's books and see how hard it really is. Even something as simple as getting someone to tell the Apple II demo program if there is a color or black and white display takes a lot of work. And his books make it an amusing story.
These are harsh words. If I have wronged you, please email me and let me know how I can address it.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Surprising you brought that up. As a former Amigoid, I remember the period between Commodore's bankrupty and the purchase by Escom (which was followed by Escom's bankruptcy and the purchase by Gateway, and the fire sale by the Cow to Amiga, Inc.). Rumors started floating around at that time that the newly-incorporated Be was highly interested in buying Commodore from Irving Gould, and that the announced-but-not-yet-in-development BeOS would be AmigaOS 4.0. All of the talking points that Jean-Louis Gassbag had for BeOS up until the end were originated at that time, and a LOT of Amiga owners bought into it. There was still talk about Be even AFTER the Escom purchase. I suspect that former Amigoids make up a high percentage of BeOS evangelists.
And now we've got AmigaOS 4 actually coming out later this year (supposedly). Cross-platform multimedia solution, etc. Jesus, sounds like Gassbag does have a new job: head of PR at Amiga, Inc.
If using Linux is about choice, how come people complain when I choose to use Windows?
"Most of the non-Intel PC and workstation companies are starting to disappear now, a decade later. DEC? Dead. SGI? Nearly dead. Sun? Losing marketshare quickly to Microsoft, of all people. Cray? Dead. (No pun intended. RIP Seymour Cray). Who's left, really? Hewlett-Packard, who's now working with Intel? Motorola, who is known mostly for cell phones and embedded chips? The future doesn't look so bright to me. "
;-)
You forgot IBM, whos real computers, like the new ASCII White, are non Intel... PowerPC ya know
Also Cray is not dead yet (the company that is)
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
"They've been about dumbing down computers so that "the rest of us" can use them. "
Linus Torvalds was quoted as saying the only thing he liked about Mac OS was the GUI and the ease of use, so I guess not everyone thinks is been dumbed down.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
"Errr, the Mac Portable was definetely a latecomer in the laptop segment being released in 1989. Toshiba brought out its first laptop in 1985, the T1100. See this page for details: "
I own a MacPortable... it's so big no one would ever call it a lap top! It's more along the lines of the first Portable PC, the Compaq... it's like a Portable Typewriter. The Compaq was like a small suitcase.
By the way, Sony was the one that took the Apple designed motherboard, and shrunk it down to the first PowerBook model for Apple. Acer (blech) also used to make PowerBooks for Apple.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
I guess this is the point a lot of people don't get. Most people buy Macs because we like the OS. We have to buy the hardware because that's what the OS runs on. The hardware works well, gives very few problems, looks cool, and is very fast. If you want to run IRIX you have to buy an SGI...
I think a lot of PC users care more for the hardware, and if you like Windows, fine. If you use Linux then you do have more choices, and yes, Apple hardware is more expensive. I also run Linux on one of my Macs (a clone, but not on my G4, because of OpenFirmware issues with booting). I find that Linux is not as fast on PPC as Mac OS is, but is plenty fast on x86 hardware. I suppose I would run Linux on PC hardware, and not mind. I just don't like Windows very much.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
A business is primarily about performing well on two fronts: innovation and marketing.
Innovation is, and always has been, an economic term. It's about creating or responding to a market need, and hence creating a new "niche" or even "industry", so to speak. Marketing is about communication.
Apple has done the innovation part better than almost any PC company in history. Its marketing hasn't been as stellar traditionally, with notable exceptions (1984 and the iMac launch). The Apple 2, Macintosh, iMac, Quicktime, iMovie + Firewire, USB peripherals, iDVD, and Mac OS X, are all examples of knowing how to extend existing ideas and reshape them to be innovative.
"Computers for the rest of us" is clearly an innovation.
-Stu
From Merriam-Webster
Innovate: 1 : to introduce as or as if new
Invent: 2 : to devise by thinking : FABRICATE
3 : to produce (as something useful) for the first time through the use of the imagination or of ingenious thinking and experiment
Innovation has always been about doing "new things" to fill market needs. Invention gets the glory, but rarely the $$$... hence, people like to equate innovation with invention, but it's simply not the same thing.
-Stu
But I do get this. That's why I claimed Apple was able to force its customers to do things, within limits; people wanted to be able to run Apple software, and they were willing to buy Apple stuff to run it, even when the Apple stuff was more expensive.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
They've been about dumbing down computers so that "the rest of us" can use them. That's why I personally never liked Apple much.
dumbing down? we don't need a world full of programmers...
Apple made personal computers a reality... Computers for average users.
As more and more people use computers in their daily lives, there will be more of a need for "average user" machines.
Desktop publishing, a GUI that's intuitive and responsive, an interface that is not intimidating or confusing to a new user, reliable for those who don't upgrade very often... quality hardware that lasts... and more recently, easy to access the internet
These are the things that matter to "average" users. They don't want to learn command prompts... they have simple needs, which shouldn't be hard to meet