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Apple Marketing Hypes New PowerMacs
Wacky_Wookie was only one of many who wrote in with a mention of Apple's "leak" of specifications for a new line of PowerMacs to be dubbed "G5", apparently running the new PowerPC 970 CPUs. No offense, but anyone who thinks it was a mistake or leak doesn't understand marketing. :) Update by J : In case those linked sites get taken down too, try
MacNN.
"Steve Jobs simply loves the "wow" he gets from the audience by completely surprising them."
Like you are any more likey to know this than the original poster knowing it was a leak on purpose.
Stop being so naive, this was leaked to gain some free media attention, and by the looks of it, this worked very well.
Yeah. Everyone knows you can get a Sony Vaio or IBM Thinkpad for $500. What are those idiots at Apple thinking?
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Anti-Mac? Maybe. I am definately anti-BS however, which is normally thrown around in huge quantities whenever Apple is mentioned on Slashdot. The reality distortion field is strong here, and it annoys me. Or what, are my points not valid now because we're suddenly talking about Apple instead of a different slashdot topic?
You can't seem to help taking a swipe. It's tiresome.
And yet I keep getting modded up for it! You know what is really tiresome? Seeing people get +5 Interesting for posts that say little more than "wow apple are so cooooool maybe I will buy one now. it's unix but it's mac! sw33t". Even the well written ones basically boil down to that normally. This happens even when the post is blatantly offtopic - somehow, somebody will find a way to link the current topic to Apple or MacOS, no matter how tenuous. It's just noise, or maybe karma whoring.
Home users care nothing for 'vendor independence', etc. They usually just buy the cheapest machine that has the specs they want.
Are you sure about that? They may not actually realise it, but things as simple as being able to shop around and feel you got a good deal without having to throw away all their old software is caring about vendor independance, but it's so natural that nobody ever thinks about it explicitly.
The *really* big news is that a huge chunk of the geek-set here on Slashdot will soon have a really, really compelling alternative to any high-end PC workstation.
Why is this news? There has been plenty of competition in the high end workstation space for years. Oh right, I forgot. This is Apple. Their cases glow in the dark. Of course it's news.
Think about it - almost everyone on here drools over Mac OS X
I hate to burst your bubble, but no they don't. Of course only the drooling fanboy posts get modded up, but I took a stab at explaining why that was a few months ago in terms of marketing psychology etc. FWIW I know several people who bought iBooks which are now on ebay - they tried out MacOS in a shop, thought "cool!" and bought it, then dumped a year later after its faults started annoying them. Obviously people don't post about that on Slashdot. Why should they?
whether justified or not; I still suspect a lot of these goons screaming for speed just want it for Doom 3
Classic Mac apologism at work. All the Mac users I know (well, all one of them ignoring slashdot) are treating this like christmas come early, but for the longest time the party line seemed to be "who needs speed when you have MacOS X" or whatever. Of course before that it was "ho hum, another day, another supercomputer" - will Mac users please decide whether they care about speed or not? The story changes every few years!
With 64bit dual-Ghz high-speed-bus Macs, you will see an even larger migration of those Unix geeks to the Mac. Something I look forward to.
This does of course lead to the question of why you look forward to it. You look forward to it, because you have made a large (almost certainly personal) investment in the platform. Platforms suffer network effects - the more people who invest in the platform with you, the more valuable your investment becomes. The more people who use the Mac, the better your user experience becomes. It's simple market economics.
Clearly, this is the type of thinking that keeps Microsoft in the top spot, keeps IE dominating the web in the face of superior free alternatives etc. You want people to use Macs, despite the fact that this ultimately profits only Apple, because the nature of proprietary systems makes it a winner/loser scenario.
The first rule is that don't bother posting to Apple stories if you are not pro Apple. It doesn't matter how valid or interesting you think your points are, they won't be seen, or somebody will post a reply that doesn't address your original assertions and you'll be modded down, normally via Overrated or Redundant mods.
The second rule is that the more meta moderation you do, the more mod points you get. So, it's in your interests to spend your time meta moderating rather than posting to these stories, if you wish to have an impact on the discussion.
Finally, you might be wondering how you can get -1 Interesting, a seemingly impossible combination of score and adjective. Basically, Overrated/Underrated mods change the score, but not the associated word. Why? Dunno. Ask Taco. They also aren't metamoderated.
Good luck, and have fun! :)
Uh-uh. For $600 or not much more, I can put together about an Athlon 2500 with a CD burner and a recent Radeon or nV graphics card, and 512 MB RAM. Apple can't offer anything to come close to that for under $1500. The problem is, if Apple wants to expand it's core business to other areas, they need to target geeks. And now they're not fighting Dell, necessarily, they're fighting people like me who are going to make their own damned machines. That's why they've expanded their laptop business much more than their desktop.
Honestly, I'd rather have MacOS X running. But I'm not going to effectively pay $1000 for the privelege. I'll stick with linux.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat