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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."
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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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.
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.
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
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
There are a lot of myths out there about Apple, and especially about the birth of the Mac. Fortunately, today there is a great source of historical facts for those who are interested or just care about the truth:
Making the Macintosh: Technology and Culture in Silicon Valley at the Stanford Computer History Archives.
Go there to find out that Apple did not "rip off" the GUI from Xerox. For example, a large piece of the truth is that the people at PARC who invented these concepts had to leave for Apple to find a company that was interested in their ideas.
Go there to find out why the Mac mouse has one button.
Go there to find out the reality behind Jef Raskin's claims that he created the Mac. Yes, he started the project. But in his vision, it should not have a GUI, neither a mouse. But he was very much concerned about it having a "programmable calculator-like programming language". Although he did want it to essentialliy have an Internet connection (in the late 70's). Engelbart's NLS was also an important inspiration.
Or just visit that archive to find out about the genuine innovations that were made at the time when a mediocre box called the IBM PC was put together. You don't have to be an Apple zealot to appreciate it, the material there has much more general relevance. But the space of a /. comment is too small to do it all justice.
I was going to say much the same thing. To add to it:
Amelio: Not only was he a failure of a CEO, but he went on to write one of the whiniest books around on his "tenure" at Apple and how Steve "stole" his impending success, blahblahblah...
Gassee: The Be machine was pretty sexy, but the OS was doomed from the start! All C++ and you basically had to multithread from the get go. The development docs basically said "Everything is threaded. Threading is hard. Be careful. Have a nice day!". Worse, Be made every mistake that NeXT and others made-- but 10 years after the market no longer tolerated that kind of BS. Proprietary this, closed that, etc... *yawn* Don't get me wrong-- it was really cool to look at and play with, just utterly doomed to simply not matter when the history books are written.
Raskin obviously has a serious bone to pick over the whole 10.x/NeXT thing. He consistently slams 10.x on things that are simply different than the MacOS he helped build. Quite a number of his points are valid, but saying that 10.1 is just a "face lift" with a lot of "minuses" clearly indicates that he is bitter about something. 10.1 cleans up a boatload of little details and is loads and loads faster. Clearly not just a face lift and without any minuses. Besides, Mac OS 9 is an utter joke-- for all intents and purposes, the memory and multitasking model is about as modern as DOS, but with a really pretty face.
Fortt's love affair with XP's built in instant message is a good sign his is smoking whatever Ballmer was smoking before the recent Monkey Boy episode.
As for Bajarin, he is likely the only one that can stand up straight for lack of a mondo Apple related chip on his shoulder. Of course, the fact that he would agree to be on this "panel" in the first place raises a few questions...
Hell, I'm surprised they didn't pull in Spindler, Hancock, and Sculley.
What a total joke... the sad thing is that it will be completely unsurprising when CNET picks up whatever the result is as a sure sign of Apple's impending doom.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
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...
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! :)
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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.)
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- 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.
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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...)