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Mac OS X 10.2 "Jaguar" Reviews Pour In
hype7 writes "The reviews on Apple's new Mac OS X 10.2 "Jaguar" are starting to come through. The New York Times (free reg required) heaps on the praise: 'Mac OS X 10.2 is the best-looking, least-intrusive and most thoughtfully designed operating system walking the earth today.' MacCentral is positive: 'From what I've seen Jaguar is leaps and bounds ahead of Mac OS X 10.1 in both speed and functionality.' MacWorld has also chimed in: 'for most users, there are a lot of important improvements in this upgrade: performance boosts, improved printing, and interface enhancements will be immediate benefits. And over time, Mac OS X 10.2's new technologies (including Quartz Extreme and Rendezvous) will make the update even more valuable.'"
If you're worried about losing control of your OS, please take a nice long look at Microsoft, a company that sells very little hardware (and outsources every piece of hardware it does sell, including the X-Box) but is one of the richest and most successful companies in the history of mankind, based solely on OS sales.
Yeah, based on OS sales to hardware makers. If Apple can figure out how to get OSX pre-installed on PC hardware, they'd be rich. They'd be Microsoft in fact, since that's all Microsoft had before they got where they are now.
For now, if Apple makes the OS run on x86 hardware, they don't gain much. In fact they might lose some hardware sales.
I'm starting to dread when Apple news makes the slashdot front page. That is when 3/4 of the discussion tends to be about multi-button mice, "proprietary hardware" and how we don't want to pay for it, stuipid misunderstsandings about the OS, and on and on and on.
I almost prefer the apple.slashdot.org ghetto that we're usually relegated to. At least there it's about 3/4 people who actually understand something about the platform and don't need to bring the discussion back to "why I don't like this platform" no matter what the original story is.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
Actually, I would consider the proprietary hardware to be one of their advantages.
Having a standard platform to work with may be why Apple's work is so impressive. With like hardware across the field to work with, OS X software developers don't have to worry about hardware driver interaction issues nearly as much as on a x86 platform.
It's also an obvious advantage in stability areas, where Windows is so completely flawed...since it has to be compatible with such a wide range of hardware.
As much as I'd love to see OS X for x86, I don't it will ever happen. Apple likes having complete control over their products so they can produce the best products. With a few exceptions, Apple arguably releases the highest quality and designed products in the computer industry, and I think that's a real advantage for them.
-brain
I'll bite.
Yes, I know this subject has been beaten into the ground ad-infinitum, but it still needs to be said once again: DUMP THE PROPRIETARY HARDWARE.
Apple uses off-the-shelf hard drives, optical drives, RAM, and graphics cards. The only proprietary pieces of hardware are their motherboards and cases.
Apple is selling hardware that is half the speed at 2 to 4 times the price of Intel hardware. Yes, apparently there are enough hard-core fanatics to keep the company alive, but why be satisfied with that? Why sit arrogantly back and just preach to those people?
Half the speed, only if you count Megahertz. Mac OS X comes with lots of software which runs faster than any comparable software in the Intel world, such as their G4-optimized MP3 encoder, which can encode high-quality 160kpbs MP3s at 10x real-time on a 733 MHz G4, directly from a CD. Your P4 may be running at 2+ GHz, but since there are currently no MP3 encoders that are optimized for the P4 architecture, your MP3 encoder is slower. Also, Mac OS X takes advantage of your graphics card for all of its drawing now - something that neither Windows or Linux does. This frees up the Mac's poor MHz-starved processors to do other things.
2 to 4 times the price? What are you smoking? The only way you can get a PC for half the price of a similarly-equipped Mac is by using dirt-cheap components that only work half the time. If you want poor-quality or mediocre hardware, you can get a cheaper PC. If you really want good hardware, a Mac is usually priced about the same, or maybe 10-20% more. (Mac laptops are often a better deal than similarly equipped PC laptops; desktop Macs are usually 10-20% more expensive.)
Yes, I know that Apple is traditionally a hardware company. So what? Being a software company hasn't exactly hurt Microsoft. Software is HUGELY more profitable than hardware.
Ha! Apple has at least twice the profit margins as Dell. They make plenty of money on hardware.
Unfortunately, as long as Microsoft has all of the major computer manufacturers in their back pocket, all major brand-name PCs will come with Windows preinstalled. Nobody has a chance of competing with that.
And besides, what's stopping them from "doing Intel right" and coming out with their own line of expensive hardware? Oh, no one will buy it because it will be so much more expensive? Well, some fanatics will continue to buy it, and meanwhile they continue to make huge $$$ on the software.
The main problem with Mac OS X running on ALL Intel hardware is drivers. Unless you're going to talk all peripheral manufacturers into writing Mac OS X drivers, there'd be no point.
As much as I despise Apple-the-company, I would LOVE to have a real competitor to Microsoft on the desktop, particularly one that was Unix based.
If you're unwilling to buy Apple's hardware, you'd better put your money behind your favorite Linux distro, then. Apple makes a great hardware/software combination and they have no reason to start running on PCs.
I really wish Steve would pull his head out of his ass and stop being satisfied being a boutique.
Yeah, wouldn't it be cool if Apple started advertising to Windows users, letting them know how Mac OS X is fast, stable, practical, and "just works"? Oh wait...
2) Universal Access -- So what if you got all your eyeballs, ears and arms, doesn't mean you can't take advantage of the amazing Universal Access controls in Mac OS X. Apple's Text to Speech technology rules. Now my Mac talks to me when certain events occur, "Mutha Fucka! E-Mail Server Down!", "Some asshole is NMAPn' me!!!". I can also hilight text and have the Mac read it to me with a simple keystroke.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
So why doesn't Linux and Windows have this sort of feature? I would love to see Gnome or KDE rendering everything using my GPU, so that my CPU could do something more interesting.
I believe the point is that people who upgrade from other versions of Mac OS X (which is not the entire user base) should get a discount. People, then, who have Mac OS 9 should pay full price.
I disagree, but that's the statement.
This makes absolutely NO sense whatsover!!
Actually, it does make sense. If the cost of an upgrade doesn't vary whether you keep up-to-date or not, then there is no financial incentive to keep up-to-date. In other words, if 10.3 is going to cost me the same price whether I own 10.2 or not, why don't I just save myself some money and wait a year or so for 10.3? Whereas, if I get a discount for 10.3 by buying 10.2, then I have a reason to keep current.
-Joe
I don't really buy this argument, which I have heard over and over again every time Mac OS X is brought up.
Let's think about Linux for a minute: very, very little "vendor" driver support, and yet 90% of PC hardware works flawlessly under Linux. Certainly a Linux distribution vendor, like Red Hat, could never afford to produce solid drivers for all of the hardware out there, but they don't have to; the community does it for them.
If Apple could open source their kernel driver API (maybe they have already? I don't know, I don't really follow Mac OS X), and found that enough hackers out there were enthusiastic about Mac OS X and wanted to get their hardware working with it, then it is highly likely that Apple would find itself in the same position as Linux - solid support for 90% of the hardware out there.
Apple could even do some kind of "certifying" of hardware and independent drivers, which would involve testing the hardware and inspecting the drivers to ensure that they work well. The end user could then feel confident that as long as they buy Apple certified hardware, they will achieve the same level of reliability that Apple has historically been known for (as you suggest, once again I am not an expert on Macs).
All of the reasons that keep being presented for Apple's locking of its OS to one proprietary hardware platform really just fall flat. Some people have suggested that Apple makes their money from hardware, not software, and so porting their OS would be shooting themselves in the foot. And yet, Microsoft has become one of the richest companies in the world due in large part to their OS sales; they sell very little hardware. Other people suggest that Apple must retain control of the hardware to be able to ensure reliability. And yet Linux is one of the most reliable operating systems out there and 99% of the hardware that people use under Linux use drivers that were produced freely by the community.
I think that porting Mac OS X to the x86 platform would be a major boon to Apple; it would reduce their reliance on a small set of hardware manufacturers (for the CPU, at least), and it would allow many people who are on the fence because they either don't want to switch to a proprietary hardware platform, or don't want to buy entirely new hardware just to use Mac OS X, to give OS X a try.
I for one would buy Mac OS X for x86 in a heardbeat. The only thing that has kept me from using OS X is the hardware issue. I intend to remedy that when my 4 year old x86 laptop, still going strong, dies on me. But I could be enjoying Mac OS X already if Apple would just see the light on this issue.
You care to give a legitimate defense of OS X's system structure?
It works.
How was that?
Want me to elaborate? I've been running OS X full time on a G3 iMac since 10.0. The operating system has never crashed. I use the machine fairly heavily, for browsing and email, but also for publishing work with the Adobe products and for Java programming. I spend a lot of time in front of it, pounding away. It has never crashed, in any sense of the word. It has never needed a reboot. The only times I've rebooted it were for OS upgrades and back in May when I moved. That's it. The last time I rebooted was when I installed by developer seed of Jaguar 6C106. Even the prerelease version of the OS has never crashed for me.
That, my pugnacious friend, is the only defense that matters. It does everything I need with, in my case, perfect reliability.
Win XP doesn't crash. However, it does begin getting quirky. Sometimes, with many windows open, it will take 5 seconds to respond to a keystroke. Sometimes, it will stop responding to mouse clicks, or be very slow. It doesn't exactly crash, but it is necessary to reboot to get full functionality back again.