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How Mac OS X is Changing the Mac Community
rgraham writes "Derrick Story (O'Reilly Network editor) has written a follow-up article to The New Mac User, titled The Changing Mac Community. He makes some interesting observations about how Mac OS X's Unix underpinnings have greatly 'broadened the landscape' of the Mac community beyond that of typical artists to now include hardcore Unix users and the like." I personally believe this is the single most important component to Apple's continued success for the near future.
The shame of it is, as slick as OS X is, it's still on expensive, proprietary, out of date hardware. Don't get me wrong, the hardware is nice, but imagine OS X on a platform that has general use benchmarks as high as the PC side of the house. IBM announced the 1 ghz G3 750FX power PC six months ago. But Apple has a stranglehold on their hardware. So the only place we will see that chip is in a game console. We will soon be able to guy a 1 ghz G3 game console for three hundred dollars.
That puts Apple's speed, price and marketing to shame. Marketing? Apple's marketing puts their inferior hardware in glossy wrappers and words. Apple used to have hardware features that put PCs to shame. Back when every computer was $2000, Apple was the obvious choice. But competition in the PC industry has pushed their speed up and price down. Apple can no longer hide their head in the sand about price. Apple is competing with PCs on four fronts: price, hardware, OS and software. Apple must not let marketing make their hardware decisions. If nothing else, if their hardware was better, their marketing would not have to lie so much. Jobs using the same Photoshop benchmark that shows apple hardware faster than PC hardware over and over is an industry joke. Apple users must know what SDRAM i845 Pentium 4 owners feel like. They pay insane prices for hardware that does a few things fast and does everyday tasks significantly slower. So the G3 does not have the altivec multimedia (SSE) instructions, so what?
Build a business machine based on the 1 Ghz G3. Make it mesh seamlessly with an NT environment (without Dave) and make it cheap. The iMac does not serve the roll well. Let the businesses use their legacy monitors. Give it some PCI slots. Resurrect the beige G3 tower for less than $600. Compete on all three fronts. OS X alone will rescue Apple. But competing on price and speed will bring Apple back to dominance.
Final word: Appleworks. This is the last competition to Office. But even Apple themselves is pushing Office on the mac. Sure, Microsoft injected 200 million into Apple. Microsoft bribed the only competition for 200 million, then spent 500 million marketing the X-box. Apple sold out for a song, and will soon be surpassed in performance by a console. Will soon be surpassed in performance by a console. A console for god sakes.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Power is control. Its that simple. If you don't like your GNU/Linux system, you have the freedom to change it yourself. And then you can share these changes with others. Thats the spirit of cooperation. What you see right now (in the GNU/Linux system) is the result of this spirit.
Sure, you may not be a programmer. You don't write code. You want the software to be written for you--you want it already configured to your liking. Or maybe you don't know what exactly you want from your system. So you want someone else to make all the decisions for you and you want to like it. So you say you like Apple. They've done testing. UI science is little more than averaging out the preferences of many potential software users.
But what about the license? The end-user agreement? When you started up your OS, did you click "I agree" ? Did you read it? Do you agree with everything it said? None of the software on the system can be copied, shared, or modified. Okay...perhaps the BSD core.
Whats the big deal? you ask. Do you like Apple? Do you trust them? The users of BeOS did...look what happened to them. You don't own the operating system. They do. That nice interface of theirs is their property. Anything that looks like it is their property. All the software is theirs to. You just pay to use it.
If you wrote an operating system or designed the interface, what would you do? Would you choose to own it or choose to share it? Which promotes cooperation and which promotes your own interests? Whose interests do you think Apple is promoting?
The spirit of cooperation is a huge factor in software development. Its what made the GNU/Linux system what it is today. And all them command line programs that you like on your Apple system, where did they come from? Open cooperation. Open cooperationg is the spirit of free software. Thats why it exists. Hope you like your Apple.
Conclusion: Apple is not your friend.