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Jaguar is Over
The Panther Finder is brand-new, with a new brushed metal appearance, and enhanced column view, with the items used most commonly in the far left column. Searching is "live" and a lot faster, and is more user-centric instead of computer-centric.
The Finder now has labels, and icons can resize with window resizing.
The iDisk now caches itself locally, so it can be used offline, and the user can copy to and from it more efficiently (with the real copies happening in the background).
A new feature called Expose allows minimizing into a smaller window, all open windows, to temporarily move everything out of the way, sort of like workspaces.
File Vault can encrypt a user directory and decrypt it "on the fly."
Faxing is now built-in, and available system-wide.
Pixlet is a new compression codec that does video compression without noticable artifacts, for 48 bits per pixel: at 960x540 and 24 fps, can be decoded on a 1GHz Power Mac.
Preview is significantly faster, with searching, and PS to PDF conversion.
Panther features fast user switching, a feature in Windows XP, allowing under-one-second (on the demo machine) switching between two different users.
FontBook is a new "pro" app for font management.
iChat AV is an update to iChat that does audio and video conferencing in addition to text, that works with any built-in or USB mic, and any DV video camera, connecting using only a user's screen name. It is going to beta today, and will be included in Panther, and will be sold for $29 to Jaguar users. Apple will sell iSight for $149, a small camera that does audio and video over FireWire.
Apple is preparing a new set of developer tools called XCode, which works with GCC 3.3, does distributed compiles (using available resources on the network), and has other cool stuff. It is fast, it has improved searching (like the Finder, and over entire projects), and it looks like an iApp (though it isn't metal). It removes the need to link; onnly link objects you need to launch. It starts compiling while you are editing, cutting the time you need to compile drastically. It can modify the program while it is running.
What about an upgrade price for Panther? I just spent $129 last fall for Jaguar.
Microsoft should (but won't) take a page from Apple's book. You can as a company, co-exist peacefully with the Open Source community. Apple has put themselves in a great position IMO for the future. Their releases add actual features, making people *want* to upgrade instead of forcing them to. It's a beautiful thing, because you can still use OS 10.0 if you want to, but they add so many features, bells, whistles and in general cool stuff - people really want to get the newest version of their software.
Kudos to Apple for that.
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
I think step 2 would be "sell them to consumers" :P
Dear Mr. Jobs:
... please use a flame more creative than "whiner." Obliged.
Iâ(TM)m not saying I donâ(TM)t want to pay you guys when you upgrade the OS. You guys put a lot of features in every release, and your staff deserves to get paid for it. Panther looks pretty damn cool, for the most part. Just do me a favor. Reward me, even with a paltry amount, for being a customer who likes to keep his OS up-to-date.
Knock $40 off the price and call it a $89 upgrade fee. Hell, even $30, and $99, would be somewhat palatable. Thatâ(TM)s really not that much to ask, considering the discounts one can find elsewhere on the OS after a few months.
Itâ(TM)s a bit more palatable than the pure psychological âoeF--K YOUâ of making me buy the operating system over and over and over again with every new release.
Longhorn users may be waiting until 2005 for their next release, but I doubt theyâ(TM)ll have spent $460 or $690 by that point on keeping their OS up to date.
Sincerely,
Quite Unpleased Customer Who's About to Get His Ass Handed to Him By Fellow Mac Loyalists for Even Daring to Question the Wielder of the Reality Distortion Field
P.S. To all those who decide to flame instead of intelligently reply
Why do people constantly bitch (yes, bitch) when someone dares to charge for software that they can do without?
The release od Panther doesn't make your copy of Jaguar any less useful - it doesn't detract from Jaguar's functionality, ease of use or anything else.
If you like what Panther has to offer and can't live without it then buy it. If you don't think it has anything significant to offer or that it's poor value for money then don't. It's that simple.
Nobody forced you to upgrade from OS 9 to OS X and nobody forced you to upgrade from OS X 10.0 to Jaguar. Similarly, nobody's got a gun to your head forcing you to fork over your cash for Panther.
You don't expect free upgrades for life do you?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
It seems to me that rather than being analagous to 9.0, 9.1, 9.2, etc. OS X's 10.1, 10.2, are more like System 7, System 8, System 9. Each version has entirely new features on top of entirely different underpinnings. Apple is using the cat names as an attempt to shed the 'They're charging for an upgrade!' stigma.
:(
Not that I'm looking forward to the price, mind you. However, they haven't (that I've seen) given a release date, and as I'm looking to buy a new computer it probably will work out for me. Even if I weren't, I don't think my graphite iMac would take it anyway.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
For those who are counting, that's 5 minor releases of 10.2 since it was released and numerous security updates within 24-48 hours of the publishing of vulnerabilites.
Oh, and it all just works.
Nothing's free my friend. You can pay Red Hat $60/year or Apple $129. I think the Apple user experience is worth the extra $69 to support actual R&D, don't you?
Service packs dont introduce the kind of features Apple's updates do.
Service Packs are 99% bug fixes. Something that should have been fixed before you got the product.
I'm out of the Apple loop these days, but surely Apple produces free patches between OS point releases?
"Old man yells at systemd"
Before you call that person "stupid," I think somebody should point out that you clearly misunderstand what is commonly meant by "proprietary hardware."
Years ago, when Apple was using NuBus and IBM was using Microchannel for their respective card expansion options, those were examples of proprietary hardware. You could only plug Microchannel cards into those IBMs, and you could not use them with any other PC (unless they licensed Microchannel from IBM.) Eventually, both the IBM PC division and the Apple designers came to their senses, and they switched to Intel's PCI design, which pretty much the rest of the home computer industry had already moved to.
Proprietary hardware is troublesome, because it restricts the availability of expansion and replacement parts. You are either locked into the original vendor, or to the handful of hardware makers who have specific hardware license agreements with the company who invented the hardware platform in question. Over the years, a lot of companies (including Apple) have attempted proprietary solutions for memory, video, expansion cards, etc. They seldom succeed, unless they manage to get the rest of the industry to adopt it as a standard.
Writing an OS that is specific to your company's computer architecture (such as OS X for the Macintosh or Solaris for Sun servers) is not an example of "proprietery hardware." It's an example of operating system software integration, and if vendor lock-in (for the complete system, not for replacement parts) doesn't scare you, it can be a very good thing.
My G3 tower has been upgraded with a third-party IDE hard drive, a third-party G4 CPU, a third-party PCI SCSI card, a third-party Firewire CD-R drive, and lots of third-party memory. All of these parts were industry-standard items which could have been installed in almost any x86 box sold in the last few years, too (except for the CPU, which could be used on any open-firmware motherboard, but then you can't drop a P4 onto an Athlon board, either.) If Apple used proprietary hardware, as you claimed, none of this would have been possible. I would have had to purchace my CPU, HD, memory, SCSI card, and CD-R from Apple themselves.
I mean think about what you are saying - if that is your criteria for being open then Microsoft has Apple beat.
Microsoft, they have never, as far as I remember, sold any proprietary hardware at all. The only hardware they sell is usually stuff like re-branded HP mice and keyboards, using either PS/2 or USB.
I'm not sure what your point about Microsoft is. Their software is not open, just as a lot of Apple's code is not open, but that doesn't really have anything to do with what we were talking about (proprietary hardware.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Seems pretty reasonable, just speced a 1.6Ghz Opteron, 512MB DDR ECC (PC2100), DVD-ROM, DVD-RW, GiG-E, 80GB Segate SATA drive, Audigy 2 OEM, Win XP Home, ~$2,000, and if the Apple comes with an FX it will have much better graphics (was using onboard because it was not going to be used for anything graphics intensive). Plus Velocity Engine is MUCH better than SSE2 for vector ops.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Being a recent convert to the Mac/Apple fold, I find I have both concerns about these upgrade cycles and at the same time, I feel they are justified.
Let's take a look and see what we are comparing so we aren't comparing Apples and well.. you know.
In my mind, there are really only three platforms out there: Apple, Windows, and *nix(Linux,BSD,Solaris,etc).
Let's look at the "cost" of upgrades for each of these, shall we?
With Apple, it seems you pay $129 for each major revision change. People who were using 10.0-10.1 were charged to go to 10.2 and now it seems that 10.2 users(myself included) will be charged to go to 10.3.
My experience with my iBook running 10.2.6 has been about as damn near perfect as I have ever experienced on any platform with a user interface to match. Sure I paid top dollar for a laptop which won't beat my fellow co-workers' 1-2Ghz laptops anytime soon, but I also won't be cursing at my laptop for wiping out my data either. That has got to be worth something.
With Linux, we get free kernel and OS upgrades. However, each time I went through the upgrade process, I had to literally double check every software package and perform countless recompiles to get things right again. On average, with every major kernel release I have had to spend the better part of an afternoon performing "installation" exercises. With every minor release, I have had to recompile the kernel. I didn't pay cash on the barrel for the upgrade, but I paid for it in time.
With Windows, it has always been a struggle. People say *nix is unfriendly. I say it is Windows which is unfriendliest of all. You have to pay about $149 for an upgrade to the OS or in my case, $349 for the "full" version of the software. To top it off, if I have any aspirations of a marginally stable system, I have to perform a clean install and not just an upgrade on top of my existing system. This results in at least a full day of work on my part in re-installing the OS and all of the applications on the system. I pay in time and money.
Now. With that in mind, I'm looking at the prospect of paying $129 for the 10.3 version of Mac OSX:Panther for my iBook which will run better with other systems and be even friendlier.
I think I can live with that.
Winged Power Photography