Apple Macworld Snub a "negotiating tactic"

Nick dePlume writes "Apple Computer's decision to not endorse the move of the east coast Macworld Expo convention from New York to Boston is a "negotiating tactic," albeit a shockingly public one, reports Think Secret. Sources believe Apple had firmly endorsed the move, which was announced today."

Comments

Re:Excuse to cut down to one MacWorld/year?

[BitGeek]

In my experience, NT 4 was neither more stable nor faster. Especially on the hardware back in those days.

OS 7 was rather stable, OS 8 was extremely stable.

What was unstable was the extensions that people would add to the OS. If you didn't do that, you almost never saw crashes-- and even then you only saw crashes from poorly written apps.

A OS 8 machine, unpatched, running quality apps, would never crash. Giving it less issues than NT 4. (Which is not to say that NT 4 wasn't a big improvement for MS)

Re:Excuse to cut down to one MacWorld/year?

[dpbsmith]

7.1 was OK.

7.5 was bad, real bad, and 7.5.1, 7.5.2, 7.5.3, "buster", "son of buster," etc. were not much better.

8 and 9 have been OK.

My own experience is that stability differences between unprotected memory/cooperative multitasking systems and protected memory/preemptive multitasking systems are MUCH LESS than they ought to be. I won't go quite to far as to call protect memory/preemptive multitasking "snake oil," but software quality, third-party attention to detail, and SQA are obviously a much bigger factor than the kind of technology used.

My experience is also that anyone who claims BIG differences in stability between Macs and Windows systems is grinding an axe.

Actually, when the Mac first came out, I thought its instability compared to a PC running MS-DOS might kill it. But, fortunately, Windows came out and equalized the situation.

Let's define "crash" to mean "any situation which leads you decide to reboot the machine." That's to get away from silly language games ("Oh, that wasn't a CRASH, it was a "kernet panic.") ("Oh, yes I see that when you click on a window it take fifteen seconds to bring it to the top, but NT is STILL RUNNING). By that definition:

On a "sweet" system--one with a fast processor, lots of memory, and reasonably good luck about the combination of software, hardware, drivers, etc. I find that OS 9 and Windows 98 can be fairly stable--let's say "several" crashes a week. OS X and Win 2K are better, but not THAT much better. In my personal experience they crash several times per month. Now please don't get on my case about "that's not NT's fault, you must have some bad third-party driver." This is my actual experience USING the system.

The only situation in which I see a HUGE difference is doing software development, where I commit lots of gross errors all the time. In THAT specialized situation, yes, OS X or NT is a godsend, and OS 7-8-9 or WIndows 95-98 are a pain.