Slashdot Mirror
Darwin Streaming Server Beats Real, Windows Media
pinqkandi writes "Network Computing recently ran an extensive shootout of video streaming servers, in areas from setup to quality to buffering times. The free, open source Darwin Streaming Server, which streams QuickTime content, edged out costly and closed source Windows Media & RealVideo streaming systems." Well, it edged out Real. It blew Microsoft away.
There are ways to make quicktime videos without purchasing Quicktime pro, but most of them don't work very well, or use older versions of the quicktime mpeg4 based/inspired codec.
Can the darwin streamer be used to stream any other kind of media?
Tarkin support? Tarkin? Tarkin, anyone?
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Even if it only "edged out" Real in terms of streaming speed/whatever, it certainly blows the doors of Real in terms of quality.
Their "fractal" algorithm or whatever they're calling it has been ready for retirement for the last 3 years. Can you say artifacting? Especially in medium to high motion scenes. At low bandwidth it's about the only way to go, but for broadband applications, it's just ugly.
Not only that, but I'm glad to see another alternative in streaming media. More choices is inevitably better.
*everything* is Orwellian to cats.
Go opensource (darwin)! er.. closed source (quicktime)! er.. apple (the underdog)! er.. quicktime (best codec)!
I think this is great.. but what political stance can a mass of angry/happy slashdotter's take on this??
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Darwin sounds really cool. Perhaps it will evolve to become #1? Survival of the fittest streaming servers definitely applies here.
I admittedly have almost nil experience with streaming servers (or clients, for that matter) except for mp3 streams. I must say that I'm surprised that Apple's Darwin QTSS beat out Real and MS! Not bad for something open source and free. Didn't expect it, given my percieved relative unpopularity of it. Is it behind more sites that I seem to be noticing, or is it really a well-kept secret?
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
This would be a lot cooler if *everything* about Quicktime were open (including codecs). It's pretty silly that I can run the streaming server on Linux but I have to go to Windows or Mac to view the content.
---------
get your war on
I think in the end the player will determine which platform will be more succesful, and Microsoft is better placed there.
Not that I love Media Player, but it sure beats that crappy Real Player or that irritating nagware that is Quicktime. Plus it comes bundled with windows...
I know that whenever I'm presented with a choice of streaming media, I usually pick the one for mediaplayer.
I'd rather download something than stream it. Streams are often much lower quality and it prevents you from time-shifting it, which you should be able to do. For this reason I use Streambox VCR, which you can download here, for downloading .RM files and ASFRecorder, downloadable here, which lets you download streaming Windows Media files, so that you can time shift those as well.
It looks like OS X is becoming a serious contender for the server market. Now if Apple can get their ass in gear and make some serious sever hardware, it has a shot at boosting market share.
Quicktime isn't a compression codec. You're free to use whatever compression pleases your ear.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
and if you have to use 1.5 Mbps, why not just use MPEG. I would say WM and Real both do well at low and mid-range bitrates, but the sorenson codec sucks at anything but high bitrates.
The review didn't mention anyting about frame rate or video size. quality was mesured from screen captures, so I guess video framerate and audio are not part of the streaming media experience.
They also should have used S-video for all captures. The osprey 500 DV applies a filter when you use the IEEE 1394 port. This is not an apples to apples comparison. Why not just use the winnov card for all captures?
They also didn't mention how many streams a single server could handle. Real requires a heavy duty server, QT doesn't realy have specs, and I would bet Windows Media server does the best job.
And WTF is with the apple networking icon? Is there realy a need for that?
"That's unfair to the poster."
Where the hell am I that the people care about fairness to posters? I thought this was slashdot.
I don't want to spoil the open source pep rally here but there is ONE MS product that beats the equivalent OSS product, MS Office.
I have wondered for the longest time why a number of news outlets use Windows Media on their web sites, when the quality / stability totally blows. Maybe they're Microsoft trained gnomes who only use FrontPage, write ASP, and use IE. I don't know. But QuickTime blows the $hit out of everything else. I just wish more people recognized that.
The survey of folks deploying streaming servers said that the #1 most important thing when choosing a format was quality. But, the #1 most-deployed format was Windows Media, which was judged to be, by far, the worst format for quality. What does this tell us?
As a person that uses Linux for a Desktop.
Let me just say this..
I only see Windows and MAC on the download page.
Next stop.. avifile?
HOW ABOUT A QUICKTIME VIEWER FOR LINUX?
(With a current codex.)
Would that it were so. Unfortunately, it's difficult to top the MS Office suite, Outlook included. Certainly with OSS.
Frankly, the Office programs are what most business users need, and a good solid OSS solution would be beautiful, but it hasn't happened yet.
IP is just rude.
Is there any torture so subl
This would be a lot cooler if *everything* about Quicktime were open (including codecs). It's pretty silly that I can run the streaming server on Linux but I have to go to Windows or Mac to view the content.
:P
Amen brother.
This seems to be the trend... GNU/Linux is perceived as a server platform, as much as the commercial Unices are. I know several Unix admins that exclusevely use Windows as their desktop box using X servers/telnet/ssh to connect to the Unix boxes. Even they really can't view a Unix platform such as GNU/Linux as desktop (not because it doesn't have what it needs, but because they can't come to terms with it).
Take Lotus Notes... you can run Domino Server in Linux, but if you try to access the mail you are out of luck because Notes is Windows-only.
Most desktop frontends end up being Windows-only, while the engine is running on some Unix. Hell, HP, IBM and other Unix vendors encourage this!
Take mysql and CVS... there has been nice and friendly win32 graphical tools long before any was available in Unix. It seems people like it this way
In the end it is exactly as you said it: we end up powering the services and providing content that we can't view ourselves
cheers,
fsm
Kind thoughts do not change the world
Actually, there is one Microsoft product that beat an Open Source product, hands down. What is it?
Microsoft Product: WindowsNT
Open Source Product: crashme
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
Here's a tip to get rid of the nag screen: Set your system clock ahead, say, 20 years. Run the quicktime player. When it asks you to buy the full version, click the "later" option. Exit the player. Restore your clock to the correct time. You won't get the nag screen again for 20 years.
"We created screen shots of the same scene from each player at different encoding rates: 56, 128, 256, 384 and 512 Kbps."
So they're not even testing motion or sound quality?
I have seen it first hand in the product our company produces. I am in QA, and even though I have raised several issues about the usability of our product, the end result is - it doesn't matter. The end user will use whatever they are told to use. We sell to hospitals, and cater to the administration needs, not the end user needs (nurses, stock people, etc). As long as we can sell it, and it does what the "higher-ups in the hospital want", the end user isn't a factor.
I think that is what would happen with a company setting up streaming media - the end user will use whatever they decide they will use.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I've often wondered why all of the player's gui's - Media Player, Real, and Quicktime - suck. All of the user interface research that has been done over the years must have been thrown away or forgotten.
--Jeff
ipv6 is my vpn
My company is using the Darwin Streaming Server for a client project to stream MP3's. You can create SMIL files that auto-detect the right bandwidth-specific version for your connection.
<smil>
<body>
<switch>
<ref title="Title of Song" src="rtsp://streaming.my.localhost/mp3/Title_ of_Song/128.mp3" system-bitrate="220000"/>
<ref title="Title of Song" src="rtsp://streaming.my.localhost/mp3/Title_ of_Song/40.mp3" system-bitrate="45000"/>
<ref title="Title of Song" src="rtsp://streaming.my.localhost/mp3/Title_ of_Song/20.mp3" system-bitrate="20000"/>
</switch>
</body>
</smil>
I don't know much about Linux/BSD software, but RealPlayer and QuickTime plugins can play these streams.
No one at our company had ever done any sort of music streaming before, but I was able to convince the client to go with our solution. It (Darwin Streaming Server - free) is running under Linux (free) as a Apache/Tomcat JSP application (free).
It was the right decision financially (as far as keeping development costs down). It's also nice to see that our decision, in this instance, was the right one performance-wise as well.
... It opens with a scene from Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension . Yay.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I don't want it either, but the original poster will be right if people don't start writing there representitives now.
Most people don't want to learn about coputers, they just want it to work, and when there box "has everything needed" they will not look for an alternative.
Plus, with the laws that MS is rtying to see put into place will secure there position even tighter.
Get involved.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
MS Office isn't really appropriate for most business settings, because nowdays, many businesses are connected to the internet and share documents with others. If you don't interact with outside organizations, MS Office may be ok. But if you do swap documents with outside organizations, you've got to be crazy to use Office. The macro language is too powerful and virus-friendly. That's like passing around executable binaries.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
And yet it blows any other commercial e-mail package away for ease of use and fluid design. It challenges any open source/free alternative at the very least.
Outlook rules.
Really?
A quick look at Apple's site shows that Windows is a supported OS for QuickTime Pro, so it must run on x86.
So, we're back to the $30 dinner.
An AC wrote:
;) Microsoft's developers don't seem to mind the sky high cost of Visual Studio.Net. Lets see Microsoft give that away for free!
> Its a classic Bait and Switch. Apple will always charge money for
> video compression deliverred stock in their normal Quicktime, and
> will never offer source to the compressors.
Apple doesn't have the rights or the ability to give you the source to the compressors of others that they license to use in QuickTime. Good Grief! The whole reason they are not releasing QT6 is because the MPEG-4 people are demanding that content creators pay them a tax to use it, over and above the $2 million Apple will be paying them to license it. Apple is going to bat for its users here, and you have the gall to blame them for not giving you someone else's source code!
> Apple charges (GOUGES) its dwindling developer base.
Oh yeah, right! A whole twenty bucks to get a CD of their developers tools FedExed to your doorstep. Wow, that's highway robbery!
The old Apple was greedy and stupid, sure. Their greed nearly killed them. The new Apple, born in December 1996, is on the whole, wiser and more compassionate. This is the Apple that:
- Based the core of their new OS on open source (and gave back the source, which was not required by the license).
- Slashed the price of their Web Objects from $50,000 to $699.
- Gave away their OS X developer's tools for free download ($20 for CD).
- Went to bat for their users to avoid extra end user charges (for MPEG-4 content creation) for Quick Time Pro users.
- Opened the source of their Darwin Streaming server.
- and a lot more.
> Developers have priciples... and the number one priciple is that they
> HATE being exploited.
No, you just hate having to pay to get anything in life.
> They expect Apple to PAY THEM to read new manuals, not the other
> way around.
>
> They expect Apple to PAY THEM to adapt and ebrace new proprietary
> system technologies, not the other way around.
Actually, that is what your *employer* pays you for, and expects you to do if you want your salary to continue going up. If you are programming as a hobby, it is its own reward.
> They always give long marketing-speak excuses why they wanted 895
> dollars for newton programming manuals
>
> They use excuses such as : default IBM OS/2 programming manuals
> from IBM cost 5000 dollars in March 1987.
>
> Sigh.......
>
> OS/2 is dead, Apple.
So's Newton, so why are you expecting to be able to get programming manuals for it, at any price? Anyway, IBM OS/2 didn't die due to the price of the programming manuals (actually, last I heard, another company was still developing versions of OS/2).
> Offer some video compression source code (pay your consulting
> suppliers if you need to) or shut the hell up.
It's two million dollars (plus content creating costs) just to put MPEG-4 in QuickTime. Do you really want Apple to go broke to give you free source code?
If you want the source that badly, go gripe at the MPEG-4 people.
> I hope Darwin crap dies as well as slow buggy MAc OS X.
> (Mac-O-Sux)
Oh, go argue point with Aqua Mothra! Grrr...
On December 14, 1996, Mothra resurrected an apple tree.
On December 14, 2001, she returned to see its fruit:
OS X, the Apple of Mothra's Aqua eye.
"bcast and xmovie" wont play sorenson codec quicktime movies.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Please add Visual Studio to that. I've tried CodeWarrior, the Borland IDE, KDevelop, Project Builder, vi, emacs and Visual Studio. Visual Studio blows them ALL by a large factor in MY opinion.
(Apple's) Project Builder is getting there, and is extremely good for a version 1.0 (well, 1.1.1) but there is still some work left to do, especially on the debugging side. GDB is nice, but not being able to step into C++ templates classes majorly sucks, for instance, or not being able to set watches in the UI...
One shall speak only if what one has to say is more beautiful than silence
Microsoft spanks open source in the desktop operating systems market, which is the 95% of the computing population that ISN'T running a server.
Clue - users don't want to be told to use a command line in order to make their system work.
lets assume that we want OS X to move to x86-64. I would love this as well, get Apple using fast, 64-bit chips. Alas, there is already a TON of software for the Classic and current OS X that would either not run, or would have to be recompiled. Older Classic software would have to run in an emulator... blah. It's just way too much complication, and then unless they use a pretty custom mobo architecture w. x86-64, they will get muscled out but discount systems. So its pretty much a losing situation for Apple any way you cut it that way =\
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
if you want to use an Alpha or Sun box as an encode server
If you can afford a Alpha or Sun encoding setup, I really doubt you'd have any problem with
affording a sub-$1000 PC to use as a dedicated QT encoder.
Not everyone uses $platform because it's free.
C-X C-S
Really? I hadn't seen a single dicussion of MacOS X specifically for AMD x86-64 only, myself...
One reason that might be an attractive move for Apple is that it *wouldn't* run on IA32. Hammer systems will be significantly more expensive (and hopefully higher quality) than typical x86 systems.
It wouldn't necessarily be a high-volume item (well depending on how Clawhammer does;), so it might provide a nice, easy transition to a portable OS. Again, that is: OpenStep was ported to five or so CPU architectures and MacOS X is essentially up-to-date OpenStep with a facelift.
Java is a first-class development language on OSX, and fat binaries are available. Again, OpenStep was developed to easily accomodate multiple CPU architectures. Software developers would have to endure a little pain, but would sell more product.
The final point is that Apple can charge whatever it wants for the OS and limit things that way. I think if it hit the right sweet spot ($300?) it would generate plenty of revenue for not that much of an investment. The folks who want white-box Hammers are a very different crowd from Apple's traditional user base.
Don't forget that both hardware bases use the same peripherals and cards, so driver support is a no brainer.
Amazing to see such a good idea get such a negative response... ;-)
299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I don't want to spoil the open source pep rally here but there is ONE MS product that beats the equivalent OSS product, MS Office.
Three years ago, I would have agreed. But thinks are changing.
For small text documents, AbiWord is easier than the singing-paperclip-bloated MS Word. It's heavily used now by my clinets for office memos and two page documents.
For large text documents - LaTeX is pretty hard to beat for productivity, but for the middle ground (40 pages of test) MS Word does a better job, provided it doesen't crash on you.
Excell - the spreadsheet of StarOffice/OpenOffice is just a good.
Access - with it's 'Jet' datastore is a joke. Use a real tool like Postgresql with Access if you like to keep your data, or replace it all toegther with free software in your choice of laguages.
Outlook - Evolution is darn close to being an Outlook killer. Give it six months to work out the *few* bugs left.
Powerpoint - the whole idea of computer aided presentations is a joke. Learn to speak in front of people - it's not that hard.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
If AMD comes through as promised, the first Hammers will be at a 3400+ PR rating. That's the equivalent (according to their metrics) of a 3.4 GHz. original Athlon in throughput. Discounting Altivec vs. SSE, that is at least twice as fast as those 1 GHz. G4s...and they're 64 bit CPUs so they can tackle problems the G4 can't touch. Finally, each Hammer has it's own memory controller, so a dual CPU system has double the memory bandwidth of dual G4s with DDR...except of course your current Mac is still using PC133 SDRAM. Every Clawhammer CPU will work in a two-way SMP system.
Apple will have to work very hard to compare to that. They've overpromised on CPU performance for a long time, I'm skeptical of the G5. And I haven't even touched on Sledgehammer, which has dual DDR controllers (per CPU) and scales to at least 8-way systems...
299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Does a product have to be made from the ground up as an open source project to be a 'triumph of open source'?
It seems to me that when open source has become so appealing that commercial software producers find it benefitial to release their source code to the world and continue development as an open source project, that is the truest triumph of open source.
I'd rather see Photoshop open sourced than use The GIMP anyhow.
Kevin Fox
Second, Real Server probably has many more features, for one more codec support:
* RealAudio/Video
* QuickTime
* Avi
* Mpeg
* MP3
These are some of the more popular ones, eh?
Umm... QuickTime isn't a codec, perhaps you meant to say Sorensen? Aside from RealAudio/Video the codecs you mention are also supported by Quicktime (as well as many others).
Does Daewin Streaming Server do it all?
From what I understand, yes. It can broadcast a Shoutcast stream.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Trouble is, we do NOT want the overhead of Wine. We want a native Linux/BSD/Unix quicktime player that is freely available for personal use.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
All of the user interface research that has been done over the years must have been thrown away or forgotten.
With QuickTime 4, Apple threw their own Human Interface Guildelines out the window and made something that looked cool, which Microsoft promptly copied. Users complained, so QuickTime 5 fixed some of the UI problems a bit (using a slider bar for volume instead of a stupid wheel). The brushed metal look is also used by the "i" apps (iMovie, iTunes, iDVD, iPhoto) which I also find to be frequently counterintuitive. Maybe QuickTime 6 will be better?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
The authoring isn't the problem. The playback is. Offering a system that doesn't play on Linux or FreeBSD (unless you count OS X as being FreeBSD), or anything else that's not Mac or Windows, is NOT a win for open source like the summary falsely claimed - it's using one open source project (the streaming server) to hamper another (the OS'es that can't do quicktime because Apple won't release the Sorensen Codec (and it would be illegal under DMCA to reverse engineer it nowadays even if you could figure out how {damn DMCA}.)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
But the unfortunate fact of the matter is that Outlook has an installed base of incredible size. How do they retain so many with a product so poor?
Answer: The product wasn't designed to be a usable, powerful, intuitive MUA. It was designed to provide the most customer lock-in possible, period. In this, it, and all the MS desktop apps, have succeeded admirably. Except maybe WMP.
IP is just rude.
Is there any torture so subl
GUI design was turned over to the Marketroids, with no input from engineers, or anyone else with any sound training or experience. Now, the programmers just get an MRD that says "Make it do X, and make it look like Y" and that's it.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
My experiance with computer aided presentations has spoiled my from them forever. If you use it to display a *few* key ideas - that's ok, but the dancing bears and the cheesy music is a waste of time.
In my capacity as a developer - I have to give bid presentations several time a quarter and standing up and speaking clearly keeps by victem's attentention on me and my ideas, and not the flashy presentation behind me.
I often sit in quietly on my competetor's presentations - and they abolsutly kill their message with powerpoint. They often can't get the hardware working right and they can't tailor their presentation to the vibe that they are getting from the audience.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
That page is wrong (and it's been wrong for awhile now, somebody has yet to clue in the marketing person who did that page...). It works fine on Mac OS X Client (I know, I'm using it right now).
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
Why would you downgrade your cable service just to watch low-res streams? You can still watch 56k realmedia files on a faster connection...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Quicktime on linux has been done, it just doesn't support Sorenson(sp?) codecs which, unfortunately, the majority of streaming video on the net uses.
The full Quicktime suite of apps might be harder, but all most linux users really want is a viewer/plugin that handles Quicktime movies.
...of the article was the software ratings compared with the user survey:
What is the most important aspect of a video stream?
Low Bandwidth 27%
Quality 73%
Video Quality Report Card:
QuickTime 4.1
Real 3.7
WMP 2.5
In what format do you provide content to your users?
QuickTime 22%
Real 31%
WMP 42%
In other words, with quality being the most important factor, WMP wins - despite being the lowest quality of all. (Both QuickTime and Windows Media solutions are free) Hmmm... sounds like other familiar Microsoftian stories.
What if you already have an Alpha or Sun encoding server? Do you want to spend more money buying a midrange to highend PC to do the work, or buy a $30 native software package?
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
How can Apple release an official version if Sorenson won't license their codec for linux? Apple isn't to blame here, blame Sorenson for depriving Linux users.
It's late, and I'm halfway through a bottle of Chianti, so bear with me on this, because this is a little long ...
.2 release to upgrade. I'm loyal, but not naive.)
Even if the licensing terms of the Sorensen codec permitted Apple to release the specs for Quicktime, I'm confident that they wouldn't. I'm pretty sure I understand why. And I agree.
It's all about the brand.
Explanation By Example
Once upon a time, I was a loyal Microsoft user. Dos, Windows 3.1, Windows 95. I had invested time in the system, knew how to get work done using those tools. When a knowledgeable friend suggested that I upgrade my trusty HP Vectra to the newly released Windows NT 4.0, I did so. After the third time the system crashes SO HARD that I had to reinstall the operating system from scratch, I was so irritated at Microsoft that I swore I wouldn't believe their lies again. I went and bought a copy of Red Hat Linux 4.2, and began the long, painful process of self education.
RedHat 4.2 was much, much more difficult for a casual user than MS Windows NT 4.0. But Microsoft's marketing machine was in overdrive at the time, trying to convince the world that Unix was dead, that NT was the future - and, more importantly, that NT was the best computing experience I would get. Microsoft flat out lied to me. The Linux community, on the other hand, never once suggested that I wouldn't have to sweat, curse, and study in order to use their Stone Soup operating system.
I don't mind hard work. I will not tolerate being lied to.
You might be asking at this point, "What the hell does this have to do with the parent article, or even with the subject line of this post, ferchristssake?"
My point is that Microsoft damaged their brand. They misrepresented themselves - they created a significant negative impression in my mind, and I haven't given them a penny since. At the same time, RedHat created a positive impression on me by NOT overselling themselves, by being truthful with me, and I have happily bought a copy of every x.2 release of their software since. (I always wait until the
Apple's single strongest asset is it's brand. As I sit here typing this article on my recently purchased Titanium Powerbook running OS X, I understand the truth of that. I've been a Linux user for the past six years, but never bothered to try any of the BSDs, until Mac OS X. Why? Because Steve Jobs, legendary control freak and perfectionist, has staked his professional reputation on the Apple brand. You know that if you buy a Steve-Jobs-Apple product it will be as good as anything else out there. Apple is all about providing the best computing experience that you can get as a user.
(Don't believe me? Feel the urge to say something in defense of Linux that this point? Think about how many hours it took you to become fluent with linux + the desktop manager of your choice. Spend that same amount of time with Mac OS X and the Aqua interface. After that time, you will find me happy to compare and contrast.)
Proprietary is not neccesarily bad
Apple will probably never Open Source QuickTime, and I don't mind. It's Apple's technology, and they have no social or moral obligation to release it into the wild. But while QuickTime is an Apple technology, when I am presented with multiple formats to select from when viewing multimedia on the web, I always choose QuickTime. It's not out of loyalty. It's because I know, based on experience, that Apple's technology will provide the best user experience.
Happy to spend money
How many of you work on a Windows machine during the day? How often do you use QuickTime and see that annoying "Upgrade to QuickTime Pro now" ad?
Since I began an experiment to use my Apple laptop exclusively for a month (no better teacher than experience) I have spent the $40 for Quicktime 5 Pro. I've also spent a similar amount of money for the OmniWeb browser. Why? Because I was so impressed by the experience those products provided me on this platform that I was happy to give them my money. I don't use Open Source software because I'm cheap. That's a small amount of money to give to people who make a damned fine piece of software.
It's all about the brand, and how seriously the owners take that brand. I don't trust Microsoft, because in my opinion Microsoft doesn't want to have the best damned software out there. Microsoft doesn't care if I have The Best user experience. Microsoft is happy with Good Enough. I trust Apple. Apple DOES want to have the best damned software out there. It's (mostly) not Open Source, and they want to control the experience from the hardware on up, and you have to pay more for that experience. But Apple is very, very good at what they do. Ideology aside, it's worth the money. I'll spend more money with Apple, because I'm so impressed with what i've seen so far. And I'll take a chance on the Next Big Thing that Apple produces. Again, because I've been consistently impressed by what I've seen.
It's all about the brand.