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Is Apple & Community Evangelizing Into Uncoolness?
kbeischer writes "John Kheit followed up his MacObsorne article, which others have since covered minus the parts detailing a Steve Jobs uncanny ability to repeat his own mistakes, with a scathing editorial damning the most of the Mac Press, Apple's managment and parts of the user base as a bunch of deranged goose-stepping lemmings that are ignoring the costs associated with the Mac PPC to Intel switch. In the editorial, he links to an older article on BOZO (bitter obstanate zealot order) users causing market share loss. All of which makes me wonder, do evangelical users and press help or hurt the popularity of a platform?"
Here's a quote from TFA (the very first sentence, as matter of fact...):
Nice going, Sarcastro. Nothing opens up the floor for rational discussion like howling ad hominem attacks.
I thought that the rest of the article would prove to be more substantive, but no, it's pretty much all like that.
Perfect article for Slashdotters, though. Let the flame war begin.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Just do what the cruisers do, just put a sticker on your computer of a kid pissing all over the logo of another platform. A new product for ThinkGeek?
So please, RTFA. It's worth it.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
The evangelist tend to lose sight of the bigger picture. They get so caught up in what they are preaching, they don't have time to learn about other things.
Overall, it's the same thing as before, the evangelist damning things that the normal user will not even care about, as long as it works the same way.
Is that the oxide of obstana?
Loving a product because it is of high quality is OK, Loving a product because its made by a certain manufacturer is a problem .
People all too often insult those who like the product for what it is, bycalling them fan-boys when who they really should insult is the people who blindly love something because its made by the manufacturer
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
"They get so caught up in what they are preaching, they don't have time to learn about other things." That reminds me of Linux zealots on Slashdot talking about Windows -- they don't know what they're talking about.
Another columnist puts up a straw-man argument and then handily batters it down. If only reality were so easy to manipulate, huh ?
/. article - even if only for the comedy value - at least we'd be getting *something* out of the columnist.
I wish there was an objective way of rating columnists, but I really like the 'deathmatch' idea proposed on an earlier
"All the news that's fit to print", and a bunch of stuff I just made up...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Just port the code over. Why is everyone making this a big issue THEY PORTED MATHMATICA in one day! www.irecompile.com they will do it for you in days! It is going to be GREAT! Wait till you feel the blazing speed of the P4 ahh.........
it would not be unreasonable to expect a Mac purchasing lull
That's it? The crux of his worries? You've got to break a couple eggs to make an omelet.
A good evangelist, though vocal and possibly in-your-face, is rational and can explain why he believes as he does and why you should too, but will not insist you beleive as he does "or else."
A zealot will drown you out and/or attempt to make life rough for you if you disagree with him.
Some people get turned off by evangelists they disagree with, almost everyone gets turned off by zealots they disagree with.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Apple would be #1 in the market.
There are zealots on both sides who will argue until they are absolutely blue in the face over what is better than what. However, how does anyone ever plan on being able to prove it? Mac Zealots evangelize Mac just as much as Linux users do Linux....But while linux may be ridiculously stable and open source....try getting any ported game to run as fast on it as it runs on windows.
My point is that there will never be a "winner" in this debate. They're all here to stay, and the more griping and screaming that's done about how much better one product is than the other, the more people won't want to use those products simply because everyone supporting them seems like a blathering idiot... They all have good and ad points and all this screaming is retarded.
Neg Mod away...
We should also hope that Rosetta is capable of helping OS X for Intel to run classic OS 9 applications.
Steve to developers in 2002: OS 9 is dead, stop developing for it.
Steve in 2003: You should all be developing for OS X now, OS 9 is dead.
Steve in 2005: Develop under OS X Xcode, OS 9 is long dead
Steve in 2006: I mean it, seriously, just stop already
Steve in 2007: WTF is wrong with you people, stop developing for OS 9 already.
So they say Rosetta won't run OS 9 apps... isn't it time Classic is laid to rest once and for all? You need to step forward at some point.
...and that's all there is to it.
I didn't pick Apple for their marketing, their fanatics, or their devoted press. I picked Apple because the platform suited my needs. I liked the design of the PowerBook and I liked the design and feel of the OS. Those are the most important factors in my book. In fact, I got my PowerBook because I enjoy my iPod Mini so much. I recognized good design (at least, good design for my purposes, YMMV). Zealotry never really was a consideration.
I tend to buy systems based apon sound reviews, personal experience, and technical documentation, not what a very vocal minority or majority might be ranting on about.
--
...from John Siracusa of Ars Technica
Q: Will x86 Macs be cheaper than today's Macs?
A: A better question would be, "Will x86 Macs be cheaper than 'equivalent' PowerPC-based Macs would have been had the IBM relationship not gone south?" My answer is "no." Expect Macs to remain more expensive than PCs.
Q: Will I be able to run Mac OS X on a non-Apple PC?
A: No.
Q: Try and stop me!
A: Apple most assuredly will--try, that is. And they'll fail, just like Microsoft failed to stop people from installing Linux and MAME on the Xbox. But like MS, all Apple has to do is make sure that only Slashdot-reading, VoIP-using, PC-assembling, DMCA-breaking geeks hack their way to an "unapproved" configuration of hardware and software. If it's illegal (thanks to the Mac OS X EULA or the DMCA) or at least "technically complex and/or annoying" to run Mac OS X on non-Apple x86 hardware, Apple will be able to absorb any loss in hardware sales attributable to geeks and hardware hackers.
Q: Will future Macs use Pentium 4 CPUs like Apple's x86 developer kit announced today?
A: Probably not. I expect Apple to start with Intel's next generation of multi-core CPUs. Hannibal has more to say about this issue.
Q: Will I be able to run Windows applications on an x86 Mac?
A: Not unless you also run Windows on it.
Q: Okay, will I be able to boot an x86 Mac into Windows?
A: No.
Q: Try and sto--
A: See earlier answer about running Mac OS X on a non-Apple PC. Update: I missed this quote from Phil Schiller. "That doesn't preclude someone from running [Windows] on a Mac. They probably will. We won't do anything to preclude that." My reaction to this new information can be found in the article discussion thread.
Q: Will I be able to run Windows on an x86 Mac?
A: With something like Virtual PC, yes. (Well, VMware, really.) Only it'll actually be fast now, close to native speed if all goes well.
Q: Will Apple provide a VMware-like environment to run Windows applications at near-native speeds on x86 Macs running Mac OS X?
A: No.
Q: Okay, then will someone other than Apple provide one?
A: Yes.
Q: Will Apple continue to design its own motherboards, or will it use commodity PC parts?
A: I think Apple will continue to produce custom designs, or will "bless" a particular PC motherboard/chipset maker (like Intel, for instance...) and contract them to build boards/chipsets that suit Apple's needs.
Q: Will Apple's planned emulation of the PowerPC ISA on an x86 chip really work?
A: It'll be "good enough," but not nearly as good as 68K emulation was on the PowerPC.
Q: Will developers get onboard with such a big change, or will they revolt and abandon ship?
A: If history is any indication, enough developers will ride out the storm to maintain the life of the platform.
Q: Will porting Mac OS X applications to x86 really be easier than porting classic Mac OS applications to Mac OS X was?
A: Yes.
Q: Will Apple maintain an internal PowerPC build of Mac OS X even after moving its entire product line to x86 processors "just in case" they ever need to switch back?
A: I hope so, if only to continue to enforce the discipline of portability.
Q: Is Microsoft worried that every Windows user is suddenly a potential Mac OS X user if Apple ever decides to give up or de-emphasize its hardware business?
A: You bet your ass they are. Don't believe the hype. Microsoft worries about everything, and this is more than a little blip on their radar.
Q: Would Apple ever do that? You know, sell Mac OS X to current Windows users to install on their existing PCs?
A: Someday, maybe, but not soon, and probably only after Apple is convinced that such a market exists and is big enough to be worth sacrificing their own hardware business. How will Apple be convinced of this?
Apple & Community were cool???
Steve Jobs manages to repeat the very same mistake.
I think NOT offering an Intel platform in the first mistake.
Also, the author talks about revenue loss until the unproven Intel product was released!
I am not sure, but Apple's announcement is certainly NOT stopping me from running and buying a Mac today...
Heck, if I REALLY want a Mac, I get it... if not.. will hang around till other options are available .
For some reason the editors cut this part of my question out...All of which makes me wonder, do evangelical users and press help or hurt the popularity of a platform? Did the iPod become successful because of or because of a lack of evangelizing and is a backlash from Apple becoming a bit too much of a "cool" and "think" dictator coming from people seeing it as hypocritical to it's think different market image ?
I'm sorry. Could someone please assist me in deciphering this first sentence-like-thing:
John Kheit followed up his MacObsorne article, which others have since covered minus the parts detailing a Steve Jobs uncanny ability to repeat his own mistakes, with a scathing editorial damning the most of the Mac Press, Apple's managment and parts of the user base as a bunch of deranged goose-stepping lemmings that are ignoring the costs associated with the Mac PPC to Intel switch.
I mean, I get the jist, but my meat parser is going apeshit over the syntax.
This would probably be a mildly interesting article if he stopped talking out of his ass for a couple paragraphs. It's too bad, I'd probably agree with him if he could write.
I'm surprised we have not seen this before.
For too long have we of the linux community suffered alone beneath the iron fist of Dvorak. Finally, our pain is to be shared by a less minority group, hopefully with the consequence that journalists in general will be complained out of existence by the angry Mac bloggerfish of the Atlantic deep.
I've seen this lots of times - WTF? The P4 is not multi-processor capable, you need a Xeon for that. The line in the 'about' box said 'Pentium 4-processor', and the '-' was in the wrong place - it should have said 'Pentium-4 processor', but it *was* a pre-production machine for developers only... this audience is supposed to have a clue...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Definitely trolling for hits with that article -- Did you see the amount of advertizing on that page?? Damn.
Maybe he was hoping that all the movement would distract readers from the meat of his article. It was goddamn anoying.
He does make some interesting points as you read down the article though.
It's like the entire collection of supposed Mac experts put their collective heads in the sand (or in some other dark orifice) and have decided to sing Pollyanna-like songs rather than thoughtfully looking at the situation. This migration has costly consequences for both consumers and business users depending on the decisions made.
with a scathing editorial damning the most of the Mac Press
Well... At least it wasn't the least of the Mac Press.
8)=
This same sort of thing could be said about the Elite Order of the Firefox.
The Zealots hurt the platform.
... Profit?
First it places it on a pedistal so high that it can't possibly reach.
Secondly when the normal person uses it they find that it isn't as great as the Zealot advertises they feel ripped off and will likely make an other choice in the future.
Third, excessive love for a company will only lead to pain. A company (espectially a public traded one) is in it for the money. And they will do what ever makes the most bucks for them.
Forth. Forcing decision just by strength of conviction is not a good way to make a good argument. Sure you may win the battles but overall you can loose the war.
Fifth. Dissing you competitors zealotly can make one blind on what good the other guy is dooing.
Sixth. Blind to what you being zealot about faults.
Seventh. When you do make a true balanced point you will be classified as a zealot and not listened to.
Eighth. Situations occure that forces you to flip-flop on your speach. ie "Classic Rules Unix sucks" Now "Unix Rules and Classic Sucks" or "Command line is for loosers" now "Command line adds more power to the system"
Ninth. You spend more time defending yourself then actully enjoying your life.
Tenth.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
From the article: I wonder if the Atlantic ocean has as vast a collection of spineless jellyfish as seemingly comprises significant portions of the Macintosh user base and its ass-kissing punditry.
;)
Sounds like the Washington, D.C. political establishment. I thought the entire Macintosh user base was located in California (there was an earthquake with the last Steve Job's announcement). We do have spineless somethings in Sacramento but they're not jellyfish.
Has worked for religion for thousands of years without failure, if it doesn't work for apple it disproves the cult of the mac.
Go Cultists Go!
RTFA again for the best results.
I've been in the middle of a number of transitions including Win3x to Win95, to WinNT, NT to 2000 and 2000 to XP. Also, I've done transitions from Mac OS 6 to 7 (to 32-bit) 6800 to PPC and OS 9 to OS X. I also worked with the NT versions for Alpha (which was dead before it came out)
Anybody that has been through these knows that the transitions on the Mac side have been smoother. OS 6 to 7 was similar to Win3x to 95 and I had far fewer problems on the Mac side even though WinTel had a few years of seeing how Apple handled it before they did their own (partial) 32 bit transition.
I have far more confidence that OS X (the offspring of NextStep which ran on Intel through the 1990's) will be a smoother transition than any service pack upgrade that Microsoft has ever offered.
There have been some amazing morons talking in loud voices over the last week. Thankfully, they're loud enough to identify themselves to the people that remember that Apple's a company, not a way of life or a philosophy of being.
Com. Pa. Ny.
That said, keep it up. It's amusing to see people waste all this brain energy while trying to sound intelligent. I think my favorite so far has been this one, where someone literally calls into question the point of continuing development on a platform because of a processor change.
Can we have a section on Slashdot called "OMG APPLE" that holds all the stories that hold no real merit and have been submitted without so much as googling for an answer first? I'd love to just see the headlines for those. In the meantime, I'm glad to see all these idiots standing up. Makes it easier to see them coming in the future, and much easier to totally ignore.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
This activity as of late harkens back to the DEC and SGI days. SGI took a similar route to Apple, ditching their high-performance IRIX and MIPS workstation platform in favor of a lower-powered, but Windows NT-based x86 workstation. In the end, SGI did end up returning to their IRIX/MIPS roots, but it was not enough. They had dischanted enough of their userbase that they never fully recovered. Their switch to the terribly performing Itanium platform has basically sealed their fate as a minor player in the workstation market.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Always has. There's plenty of documentation of this in the Usenet archives, especially of the comp.sys.next hierarchy.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
This makes the purple-haired moonbabes sad...
>All of which makes me wonder, do evangelical users
>and press help or hurt the popularity of a platform?
I think AmigaOS is the greatest, it's easier to use and customize than blah blah blah.
Guess what? Every time someone says a good thing about Amiga, zillions of Slashdotters attack, calling the poster nuts, stupid, dead, and other things. I'll probably get called names or told my platform is dead just for posting this satirical evangalistic nonsense here.
So it's not good or beneficial to all platforms. You all used to think Mac users were a bunch of weirdos too until the switch to OSX, right? Suddenly Macs became cool and accepted on Slashdot and other places. Why did the Mac Mini get popular here, because someone went on and on about how cool they thought Apple or Jobs was, or because a tiny quiet computer with a BSD based OS was actually useful for new space-sensetive applications?
I don't think that evangelizing changed that, the better technology did.
From the article:
;)
With far too few exceptions, this is a group that just days ago was smugly debunking, dismantling, and railing against the notion of Intel processors in their Macs, only now to squirm and slither out explanations that provide justifications to the contrary.
I see the Reality Distortion Field has worked once again.
-1, Flamebait
This is ridiculous.
Let's take a step back:
Apple is now less than 2% of IBM's PowerPC business, and less than 3% of Freescale's.
IBM is focused on the server market, embedded markets, and gaming console marketplace. Not desktop and portable (especially), areas where Apple desperately needs processors.
Freescale is, and has been, focused on the embedded, communications and automotive markets, and the fact that some of the processors were also good for some Apple products was almost incidental.
PowerPC in the desktop marketplace is going nowhere fast, and IBM has shown that in spades for the last two years. Its renewed focus and commitment to the game console market eclipses any priorities Apple would ever hope IBM to have.
So, Apple made a tough choice. A choice its been planning for, just in case, for over 5 years.
The Intel (vs AMD) move was one of convenience and political expedience. Intel gets a big PR win, Apple gets its point across. Once the x86 architecture switch is complete, the hard part is over, and Apple is free to use other products from, e.g., AMD, as do many other x86 vendors. And Apple hasn't forgotten about the 64-bit marketplace in the least. The message now is simple, and has to be kept simple: we're moving to x86.
Further, PowerPC support WILL continue for an indefinite period into the future. The Mac OS X product lifecycle is now about two years. Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) will ship likely around MWSF 2007, and will support PowerPC. It will have a lifecycle of two years, for a total of continuing support for four years from now. Apple has been providing security updates for the previous version of the OS from the current one since Mac OS X 10.0; therefore, we can assume security updates and fixes for a minimum of six years. And that's just from what we know now; the support may in fact last longer than that.
At some point, support for older hardware is dropped from the current version of the OS (e.g., G3s). What's the difference whether the hardware that supplants it contains an IBM PowerPC G6 or an Intel Pentium 6?
Further, this crap about software companies - already using Xcode, mind you - arbitrarily dropping PowerPC support from their applications early is complete, unadulterated bullshit. Aside from which, the 68K -> PPC transition, as rocky as it was, is often viewed as the quintessential success in hardware transitions.
I'm sorry if some people really want people to panic and stop buying all PowerPC hardware, and possibly commit mass suicide. But with the CLEAR commitment of Freescale and IBM to literally everywhere but the desktop(/portable) market in terms of the features and performance Apple needs, I can't see this decision as anything but a good thing.
I didn't consider the article bad, though perhaps shallow. But the /. tag was misleading; he never mentioned coolness or hipness, etc. Which is just as well, because my view of the Mac does not include "cool", any more than my view of unkempt beards or of Birkenstocks does.
I think I speak for many Mac users when I say "I have confidence in Apple's decision to continue the Mac experience using Intel CPUs."
- I made the x68 to PPC switch.
- I made the OS 9 to OS X switch.
- I'm going to make the PPC to Intel switch.
Our platform has constantly been playing catch-up and on a rare occasion, our top of the line jumps ahead of the x86 top of the line for a month or so.
Unfortunately, very few of us live at the top of the line. Our consumer offerings fall well behind the x86 architecture in various areas. While the rest of our hardware is well ahead of the PC curve, the CPU does not.
Perhaps if IBM had shown us a portable G5 or a 3+GHz system... I would be morning their absence.
I will also wait until I see a shipping system before casting negative speculation on this issue. Perhaps apple WILL use a BIOS in the shipping system, perhaps not. Will we still have Firewire 800? What about Target Mode... etc. etc.
How about you wait and see what Apple and Intel can conjure up?
The article makes a common mistake. Before, SOME mac users claimed PPC was THE way to go. Now SOME Mac users are saying Intel sounds like a good idea. Hey, guess what? They are not the same people saying this. The author is just being silly. I don't think many people have changed their positions about anything since Jobs made his announcement. The people who were saying "Mac is better because of PPC" are now saying, "Damn, this is a bad move, what's going on?" But most people don't give a crap. It's just about making the best Mac possible. If it's built on Intel, great.
Currently hooked on AMP
John Kheit followed up his MacObsorne article, which others have since covered minus the parts detailing a Steve Jobs uncanny ability to repeat his own mistakes, with a scathing editorial damning the most of the Mac Press, Apple's managment and parts of the user base as a bunch of deranged goose-stepping lemmings that are ignoring the costs associated with the Mac PPC to Intel switch. In the editorial, he links to an older article on BOZO (bitter obstanate zealot order) users causing market share loss. All of which makes me wonder, what's for dinner?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I do not goose step!
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
I want to know what Kheit and the other naysayers think Apple's options were. Motorola failed to deliver on faster chips and IBM has such a huge cash cow with the CPU business for the new X-box and PS/3 that you have to wonder how much effort they'd be willing to make to produce faster desktop chips for Apple.
Apple is already falling behind in the laptop world, for $1000 less than Apple sells their top of the line G4 laptop I can get a Toshiba with a 17" screen, built-in wireless, super drive, 100Gb hard drive, 3.33 Ghz CPU and 533Mhz front side bus. OK, sure, megahertz comparisons are hard but when you're comparing two CPUs and one of them is clocked twice as fast and has a faster front side bus then it's pretty much over. Sure, the Toshiba is a brick compared to the PowerMac 17" (although it's a very solid brick, I've owned Toshibas and like them quite a bit) but if you don't want a brick with a huge screen you have smaller and lighter options.
I'm not really happy about this decision but the naysayers such as Kheit aren't saying anything other than "we're pissed off because we're losing the PowerPC", they certainly aren't offering any kind of alternative strategy for what Apple could have done instead of switching CPU architectures. Perhaps they'd be happier if Apple continued on as a sort of red-headed bastard step-child of IBM and Freescale and faded into obscurity as their CPU offerings became less and less relevant and less and less competitive to what Intel and AMD were offering.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
...do evangelical users and press help or hurt the popularity of a platform?
If Jobs and his followers would just STFU for a month, Mac sales would double.
do evangelical users and press help or hurt the popularity of a platform?
No, but a website that runs a article designed to insite a nuclear flame war, and written by a man who could be described as the love child between John Dvorak and Satan is guarenteed to generate a shitload of hits from said evangelists who plan on posting a lot of their own scathing articles of this article.
But in this day and age of the web, links and hits mean profits, specifically from ads. Hits simply drive up ad revenue, and Critics posting articles with links will only up the PageRank on Google, which means higher ad revenue and more links.
It's only my personal opinion, but of the articles I've seen on MacObserver, I haven't seen very many of substance. They are probably just trying to fan the ever burning flames of Mac evangelism for profit.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Anyone who uses the term "flip-flop" loses all creditiblity with me. People are natually indecisive. Indeed, people often do change their opinions when presented with further information. If anything, that's good. That's a sign of not being a complete zealot. So accusing someone of "flip-flopping" as if it is a bad thing is moronic, at best.
It saddens me to see such an immature, mindless term used so extensively by the American big media and now by other writers.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
There's no such thing as bad PR.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Come on people, it's a computing platform. Even at it's pinnacle it's still just a tool. Anyone that thinks of OSes in terms of "hot or not" shouldn't be using a computer at all.
In a way, yes. When I planned on buying a Mac Mini, I visited several Mac-related forums. And the fanatism I saw there was a major turn-off. I'm a Linux-user, so I have had my share share of fanatics. But nothing like the Mac-fanatics!
I remember when they found out that Linus Torvalds had had some techincal critique of OS X. In the timespan on 10 minutes, Torvalds was transformed from OK guy in to complete asshole, mediocre programmer, a dictator and complete moron who doesn't know what he's talking about, in the minds of the forum-participants. All that because he criticised some things in OS X (note: things normal users never see).
It didn't stop there. Apparently OS X was flawless (well, it had SOME minor issues), whereas every other system on the planet sucked. OS X was only thing that mattered and none of the other systems had anything worthwhile to contribute. PPC was of course clearly superior to x86 (I wonder what those guys think today....), and Apple's programmers and engineers were the smartest on the planet.
In the end it was all too much. I became very defensive under the assault of the fanboys, and the whole idea of buying the Mini started to lose it's appeal (I did buy it in the end, but NO thanks to the fanboys!). I went there to get information about Macs, but the blind following of all things Apple and hatred towards other systems, and people who had criticised OS X, was a real turn-off. I left the forum, and never returned. And I'm not sure that is that forum an exception, Macs seem to have unusually high fanboy-ratio.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
This article doesn't know what it wants to be.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
And in this cor-nah, wearing tattoos of Apples, weighing in at 45 lbs., with a combined record of 6-12, are tha Macintosh Zealots.
And in this cor-nah, wearing helicopter hats, weighing in at an unknown, global weight, with an unknown record but lots of How-To's, are tha Linux Zealots.
And in that cor-nah, wearing ties, weighing in at an 800 haaaaairy lbs, is the gorilla itself, Middle Management.
And in the fah cor-nah, laughing their asses off, is Microsoft.
Let's get ready to ruuuuuuuummmmmbbbbblllleeeeee.....!!!!
My favorite part of Slashdot these days is all the FUD. I mean, with the Apple-to-Intel stuff, how many more Gross Conceptual Errors can there possibly be in one article??? Come on people! Keep it up! This shit is hi-larious!
"Thank you. Please spellcheck your genitalia references though.
Never thought I'd be yearning for more Google articles! Though in a sense I'm not - I guess I'm just feeling a bit constipated from so much Apple :)
The revolution will not be televised.
...if all those bozos from the last transition caused a loss of market share? This is just bad logic - in order for him to be correct, it would have to be the case that Apple is doing poorly, and they are not.
In three years, no more, current Power PC users will be SOL. And not only on Mac OS X, I expect Linux developers to migrate away from the platform that's now officially dead.
1: No speed increases in PPC Macs for the next year, unless they are very expensive models that won't compete with mainstream Intel boxes when they're introduced.
2: Give Intel a year to catch up, which is a generation in computer processor years.
Conclusion: It's going to be a tough year to be a Mac owner.
Second Conclusion: I wonder how well OSX will run on an AMD?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Then again, so does Linux and MacOS under emulation.
The smart thing is for Apple to write or hire someone to write an emulator tailored to "Classic" apps. Heck, if they play do the initial work and make it FOSS (not including MacOS9 and the Mac ROMs of course) it will get done faster and be better quality, assuming a lot of people make good contributions.
Of course, FOSS means run-on-any-Intel or even run-anywhere, and this might mean a bunch of Legacy-only Mac users who have no interest in MacOSX would just buy a cheap PC instead of a new Mac, Intel or otherwise.
It's not FOSS, but SoftMac may do the trick, but it requires specific versions of the MacOS ROM either as hardware or as a properly-licensed (i.e. you own a Mac and aren't using it) image file.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
And well... Check out amazon (read independent of apple) best seller list.
1-5 are Macintosh, surely by now if there was a sales dip they would not be there.
Try this experiment: replace every mention of "PowerPC" with "68x" and every mention of "Intel" with "PowerPC". You end up with a factually correct article that predicts the end of Apple because they pre-announced their new order-of-mag-faster machines in advance and are thus killing sales.
Of course the world generally credits the 68k->PPC transition as one of the best handled ever, but that could _never_ work twice, right? I mean, after all, it _didn't_ work once, so that must mean it can never work.
with him on some points - like the classic part - I still use classic at home for my daughter's educational software either because it hasn't been rewritten for 10.x or it is too dam expensive to buy the macosx version. Not when I can dual boot into Ubuntu linux and have the same program/functionality.
I upgraded her hard drive to a 40gig the other day and something strange was happening - I would install classic 9.1 first - I used a 9.75 partition but then when I installed macosx it would not install because the partition was larger than the first 8 gig - strange that an old os was able to install onto a bigger partition than the newer os.
I these respects there is a lot to be said to open source - you can basically buy any hardware and install your os and have it always updated to the latest version without any worries.
We will probably get a lot of life out of this Imac tray-loading thanks to open source.
As a homosexual male, I find that I relate far better to Apples marketing than to any other Technology company. You may mistake this for zealotry but Apple are the only game in town for people like myself.
They want a fast Mac anyway they can get it.
If Intel gives them a faster Mac then what is the worry.
Apple is certainly a company willing to break a few eggs in my opinion.
I've been considering buying a Mac recently. Although I've been a PC user (mostly Windows, some Linux on the server) nearly my whole short-lived life (I started out on Apple IIe/IIgs), I think the progress they've made since releasing X has been substantial.
:/ I guess only time will tell.
However, now it seems I should wait until the Intel machines are released so that software will be more readily available in the future. However, I don't want to buy one of the overpriced Intel boxes when they are released only to end up with a first-gen model that is lacking or has problems. "Oh, that's a known problem with the original models."
So when do I buy a Mac? I'm not interested in a PPC model if they are switching platforms, but I don't want to end up beta-testing a new platform either.
There are a few more in the pipeline:
1. From Objective-C to something faster and less brain damaged. Let's face it, there's NO tangible benefit to using Objective-C. None. It's just an additional cost and pain in the ass.
2. From microkernel to something less taxing in IPC department. Otherwise app startup times and multithreaded app performance will remain as crappy as they are now.
3. From 32 bit to 64 bit for UI apps. Right now only console apps can be 64 bit.
And you're gonna pay every step of the way.
Steve's been trying to kill Classic Mac OS for longer than that.
Steve to developers in 1997: Rhapsody will only run OS 8 apps in an emulator, start using "Yellow Box" now.
Steve to developers in 1998: If you port to Carbon, you'll be able to run on Rhapsody and OS 8/9.
Steve to developers in 1997: If you develop for Carbon, you'll be able to run on OS X and OS 8/9.
Steve to developers in 2000: If you develop for Carbon, you can run on OS X, but Cocoa is really the way forward.
Steve to developers in 2001: We really have OS X working properly now, switch to Cocoa.
Steve to developers in 2002: OS 9 is dead, stop developing for it.
Steve in 2003: You should all be developing for OS X now, OS 9 is dead.
Steve in 2004: Develop under OS X Xcode, OS 9 is long dead
Steve in 2005: It'll be much easier to port Cocoa apps to OS X Intel, and did you notice we don't sell OS 9 bootable Macs any more?
Steve in 2006: It's much easier to port Cocoa apps to OS X Intel, you don't need to keep OS 9 compatibility, honest!
Steve in 2007: WTF is wrong with you people, stop developing for OS 9 already.
...must be a slow news day, huh?
does it run linux?
if so.. cool..
otherwise, I sheet on it!!
</linux_zealot_mode>
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Many years ago, I had some grant money to spend on technology for a high school. I did my research and I was very impressed by Apple. Going with Apple would have made my life a lot easier. However, it would have meant that I would have been able to get about half the stuff. I went with Wintel and suffered the consequences. It meant more work for me but the students were much better off.
In my case, nothing mattered but the bottom line. I suspect that is true most of the time for most people.
TFA is just a rant against buying a PPC Mac now but in favor of waiting for Intel Macs to be released next year. Fine. I will wait, but it's just because I don't have money right now. If I win a lottery jackpot tomorrow I'll buy a current G4 PB. I know it would serve me well up to three years, after which I expect to switch to a new machine. Not because it's Apple. Just because in IT three years is a lot of time.
Vendors dropping support for PPC versions afterwards don't concern me. Game vendors don't concern me at all - I don't game. The OS would surely be updated for those three years, after all it is possible to use it now a 3yr old PB G3. Same about main apps.
...what are you doing on /.?
The CB App. What's your 20?
...nobody likes a fanboy.
It might be the greatest thing since sliced bread but at some point you just have to stfu about it and allow people to draw their own conclusions.
- Toby
(Yes, I actually had an Osborne 1)
Apple has $10 Billion in the bank. They can afford to have a crash in hardware sales until the x86 machines come out. The mistake that Adam Osborne made was that he slit his own throat, because he depended upon the revenue stream that came from Osborne 1 sales.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
In my experience, it is the Mac Zealots that have been the most effective in keeping me from owning a mac.
Maybe i'm different, maybe not.
do() || do_not();
and got modded down for a day or two back. The Intel switch announcement was a troll, with the the meta aspect that it's actually real. Jobs must have been gleeful about dropping that one on the faithful attendees. People are wailing and rending their clothes, as much as thinking sensibly.
As for the people complaining about the cost of porting just after OS X has stabilised, this is a perfect demonstration of why portable code matters, even when you don't have a multiplatform market.
Because you only ever think you have a sole platform to target, the world is always going to change out from under you one day. Deliberately non-portable code for no specific good reason is self inflicted pain. If you had a good reason to write PPC specific code, then you probably knew how much it might hurt later, and took steps to hide stuff behind #ifdefs.
Wasn't the Rhapsody Intel release and NeXT/OpenStep heritage enough of a heads up? Or maybe I just caught me a whiff of that MacIntel crack.
Google has infected the search button at the bottom of the page, hmm.
Dark Castle.
;)
Bolo.
Early versions of MacWrite/MacPaint.
Fool's Errand (and its sequels).
NetTrek 3.
Zork.
Or anything that used to be shipped on a 400k, 800k or 1.4mb floppy(ies). Photoshop 1.0, QuickTime 1.0...
Etc., etc.
For those who grew up on Macs, these have nostalgic meaning. It would be nice to be able to run them, on a whim. I know it must seem silly, but I was a nerdy kid and spent a lot of my life on Macs and promoting Macs
Hopefully there will be an emulation solution for this stuff. I know that back when I was at college, people were using a Mac emulation environment on Wintel just to play Snood (which has since gotten a Wintel version). Perhaps that will get a new lease on life. I know there is a solution called vMac, but I don't think it's been updated in some time...
Oh really? Now that sounds like the dying gasp of another zelot. Having had Steve Jobs finally tell you it's okay to condem the processor, you still claim everything else Mac is better than the PC.
What exactly is ahead hardware wise? PCI slots? Nvidia video cards? AGP slot (oops). USB keyboards and mice? Audio? Just what other everything are you talking about? The power switch?
And how much of that will make the transition to an Intel Mac? Jobs is going to be using Intel chipsets in conjunction with his Intel CPU's. Same thing Dell uses.
You, Sir, are still a zelot, and one grasping at crumbs. Mac hasn't even gotten to an onboard RAID controller, although they'll get one with Intel finally.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Any techno-zealot has already lost the big picture.
I think this is evident from the constant talk about how Linux is going to be killed by the Intel-Apple alliance. Look at who is saying this stuff; Apple Zealots, Linux Zealots and Dvorak, a total idiot (and suspected Microsoft zealot).
I still predict that Nipple will foster Linux growth. But then again, I'm not a zealot and open to ideas.
Get your Unix fortune now!
"ass-kissing punditry"
"smugly"
"squirm"
"slither"
Loaded Adjective Count Buffer Overflow Detected
Troll Flag Enabled
Article Reading Aborted
Crow T. Trollbot
The point is that the World isn't going to jump aboard this Rhapsody [i.e. Mac OS X] ship any time soon. Elitism, attitude and bragadaccio [sic] about Rhapsody's 10 year heritage aside, there first needs to be a warm, fuzzy community. -- The BOZO Bit
Well, now it's got a warm, fuzzy community.
And, look, Mac OS just went down the drain... there's no new Macs that'll boot OS 9 now, and after 2007 there won't be any new Macs that'll even run OS 9 apps.
It's all NeXTSTeP... I mean Rhapsody... I mean OS X from now on. Mac OS is dead, long live Mac OS X.
I am planning a switch and I stumbled upon a dutch forum (macosx.nl) and they must be thé most helpful people I have ever seen.
way better than those linux fuckers who think way too much of themselves.
>How much do you want to bet a bunch of those developers drop support for PPC Macs far sooner than the
>aforementioned "3-5 year" period and claim that the games demand the "performance" of the faster Intel
>machines. We already saw that when Doom 3 was released for the Mac. It supported only the very fastest
>Macs while leaving many other current and/or new Macs out in the lurch.
Does he think we just sit around and say "Lets just not support the rest of these macs because we want to screw the user base!"
We work with Apple, ATI, and Nvidia to make everything run as well as possible. Doom 3 had AltiVec code in it, and there were driver changes to make things work better. The bottom line is that the compiler / cpu / system / graphics card combinations available for macs has just never been as fast as the equivalent x86/windows systems. The performance gap is not a myth or the result of malicious developers trying to make your platform of choice look bad.
Yes, it is always possible to make an application faster, but expecting developers to work harder on the mac platform than on windows is not reasonable. The xbox version of Doom required extensive effort in both programming and content to get good performance, but it was justified because of the market. In hindsight, we probably should have waited and ported the xbox version of the game to the mac, which would have played on a broader range of hardware. Of course, then we would have taken criticism for only giving the mac community the "crippled, cut down version".
John Carmack
There are perfectly valid and useful apps for OS9 that simply are no longer updated or maintained (and often can't be because they are closed-source the the company who made them no longer cares), yet these programs are still needed by people working with more modern, up-to-date software just because no replacement has yet been coded.
My case in point: Aleph One is an open-source FPS engine based on Bungie's classic Marathon series. While the original Marathon series was pretty much Mac (Classic) only, the latest version of the engine runs on OSX, Windows, Linux... there's even some outdated versions for Be. The whole thing now runs in OpenGL, all platforms are being standardized on the SDL media layer, and so on. The engine itself, while still by no means a "modern" 3D engine (that's not the point), is very up-to-date and in keeping with current technologies and formats. There are still mod projects being made for this engine.
HOWEVER, all the TOOLS used to make CONTENT for the engine are not open-source (and can't be, the source code has been lost by the original developers). So for all of us working on such mod projects, we NEED to be able to run older Classic applications.
I guess my point is, modern mainstream apps from MS and Adobe, and minor system utilities or helper apps that get obsoleted with every OS or big-app update, are not the only things people use computers for. There are all sorts of niche applications that don't get updated because *they don't need to be*, so forcing them to update or not run when their users upgrade is not right. Hell, games themselves are often in this category. Every now and then I go back into my older games, like Caesar III for a current example, and start playing again because, despite being old, they're still fun.
You're right that writing NEW code for OS9 is stupid. But there's a lot of OLD code that doesn't otherwise NEED to be updated, which plenty of users probably still want to run. Forcing them to stop if they want to upgrade their system (or to keep an old machine around to run it), just isn't right.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
I have only read this one article by this author, so I don't have enough information to guess whether or not he is an astroturfer.
However, I have been expecting to see an anti-Apple FUD article, and I expect to see more.
That's because the gloves are off. Bill Gates now realizes that he can no longer count on Apple as an "ally" (someone who is afraid to oppose Microsoft), because he no longer has the means to threaten Apple.
Microsoft can no longer threaten Apple with the loss of Internet Explorer, because the majority of Mac users now use Mozilla or Safari. Even buying Trolltech would not help, since Safari is no longer dependent on Qt.
And Microsoft can no longer threaten Apple with the loss of MS Office, because Mac users can switch to OpenOffice.
And now, Apple is starting to compete on Microsoft's home turf.
Apple's iTunes has grabbed a big piece of a market that Microsoft wanted to monopolize, not to mention the fact that there is an iTunes player for Windows.
Plus, Apple will soon be providing an OS for Intel-compatible hardware. This means that, between the two of them, Apple and Linux will provide a large enough market to ensure the continued availability of inexpensive commodity PC hardware.
And that foils Microsoft's plans to decommoditize PC hardware, in order to block Linux. Not only will Microsoft lose their advantage of running on cheaper hardware (what is usually viewed as Microsoft's success is actually the success of commodity PC hardware), but Microsoft could end up running on more expensive hardware that Linux and Apple.
Thus, Microsoft will be using their standard tricks, which now makes Apple one of Microsoft's FUD targets.
Sorry if this repeats some of the things out there but the positive sides can be explained in 4 simple points:
...
- if Apple moves x86 (read: Intel) they always have a least one other Chipmaker (AMD) "just in case" without switching the platform again
- if Microsoft should decide to abandon Office on the Mac - well, Apple in return could offer their OS to any other PC users. Oooh, thats nasty. (Free Keynote and Pages included)
- if IBM should deliver mobile Chips or 3+ GHZ PPC Processors "out of the blue"(TM) they could stay (longer?) on that platform.We didn't say when we abandon PPC
- and if corporate Users demand a better XP/Longwhaterver "Emulation" they would just have it
just one question. are we there yet?
* Smile. People will wonder what you think. *
Wasn't there supposed to be a big speed increace from using Intel's compiler instead of GCC? If they move to AMD later down the road, is XCode going to make SUPER-Universal-Fat binaries with PPC/Intel/AMD versions?
Ugh!
Not trolling - Mac user for 5 years! And hope to be one for another 5.
This is just speculation, and where he isn't already provably wrong, there's no particular reason to thing he's right either.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
...if you buy a Mac PPC G5 today, it'll be supported by Apple for the next 3-4 years or so.
By which time, not only will you likely be in the market for a new computer, the shakedown as Apple intgrates Intel into its hardware line will have been completed. 2008/9 era Macs will work fine, run fast and cool, and very, very likely run all the software you're using on that just purchsed today PPC G5, save for the OS, of course.
I swear, substitute "PPC" for "68040" and "IBM" for "Intel" and this whole non-issue sounds just like the bloviating when Apple went RISC and dropped Motorola's 68xxx CPUs.
Go and buy that new PPC G5 you want. It'll be just fine. You'll have a good computer that you'll be happy with for the next few years.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
Thanks for posting to the thread. As long as you're here, and given your previous statements of support for Mac OS X's NeXTStep derived development environment, now that OS X is going to be on Intel, how difficult do you see the task of converting Active X controls to OpenGL? Or, for that matter, reverse engineering the entire Active X control set for OS X?
Crow T. Trollbot
Apple is the new Google.
/.
I don't feel that the day is complete until at least 3 or 4 Mac articles are posted on
Historically, Apple has led in technology innovations: GigE, 802.11g, USB instead of serial (how's your PS/2 keyboard?), Firewire, Firewire800, standard optical audio I/O (sharing a connector with the analog I/O, which is nice), standard line-level audio inputs, optical mice, self-illuminating and adjusting keyboards, touchwheels, self-crossing ethernet. Just because many of those innovations are now on PCs doesn't make them any less of an innovation.
You, Sir, are still a zelot, and one grasping at crumbs. Mac hasn't even gotten to an onboard RAID controller, although they'll get one with Intel finally.
Really? So, I can't RAID multiple hard drives in my Mac, without needing any add-on hardware or software? I wonder what it's doing, then.
-T
The Mac observer article seems interesting at first, but reading through it you find the whole base of it is built on top of cherry picking from ONE developer post on the Intel dev kits! He then goes on to promote one of the largest mass delusions in recent computer history, that current PPC users are going to get the short end of the stick in this transition. I'll touch more on that later.
First of all, the mass acceptance of the switch. I was also against the switch to Intel. But then again I also did not have any real vision into what Intel and IBM's roadmaps look like - Apple does, and they said Intel was the smart choice even though it brought some pain. Is it fair to call a userbase unthinking zealots because they are capable of changing thier mind based on new data? If I though the G5 could keep up with speed increases I would not support the switch at all but now it's pretty obvious IBM is thinking only of its new love - the game industry.
Now to address his points one by one:
1) Software vendors will abandon PPC when it makes sense to do so.
On the face of it this is a reasonable and true statement. Then he goes on to explicity bring up the example of GAME DEVELOPERS. Come on. This is a group of people who are going to be an order of magnitude more likley to do hardware specific things. Now note that even with such a group of people, they mention that they'll probably have PPC support for two to three more YEARS. Why is that? Marketshare. The simple fact that for a while the PPC install base is going to have a larger marketshare than Intel boxes and thus they are going to have to support PPC to a large extent. I actually expect to see some Intl Mac specific games within the first year - but for the rest of the software world probably about five years before any other kind of software ships without a universal binary. Why would it be any different when all of the work involved in switching to the Intel chip makes it just as easy to dual compile binaries? Why would you cut out half (or more) of your market? He talks plenty about business reasons, but I think the finadamental "business reason" to do anything is because custoers are there that will buy what you do!
Furthermore lets say there are a lot of Intel only Mac games. Is that really a reason to not buy a Mac now? Have GAMES really become the deal breaker in a choice to wait for a newer future Mac? If you like games buy a console. The fact that the new Macs may tilt slightly to having more game support is hardly a reason to not buy one now on the verge of HUGE console releases in the coming months and years.
2. Software vendors will charge you money for Intel (or PPC) versions of software when it makes business sense to do so.
Possibly, but this is related to how much work they have to do to make the port. Please note that in the developer article he's so fond of linking to is also states how the developer can believe the transition will be much easier than the 68k->PPC and OS9->OSX transitions. For a lot of software the cost is going to be minimal or very little.
But wait, I thought he was trying to proove how this move would be bad for PPC owners, not new Intel mac owners. This point goes against his core message.
3. Apple has shown it drops support for old products regularly because it makes business sense to do so.
Here's the masterful step of misdirection. He parlays the lack of release of a security patch for two versions of the OS back into is absolute stick-in-the-sand marker of "two years until your PPC is dead!". Yet that's hardly the case, software will continue to work on versions of the OS even after Apple stops releasing security updates. And here's the REAL key. Sure support may dry up for two or three versions of the OS back, but what is stopping people from installing NEWER versions of the OS? Nothing! He has twisted his findings to imply that computer bought now will be useless in two years even thoug
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There are already fat-fat-fat PPC binaries (G3,G4,G5) in existance.
In 5 years, we should be approching or past the 0.5-1 TB storage range for the HD Apple puts into it's machines.
>>> All of which makes me wonder, do evangelical users and press help or hurt the popularity of a platform?"
You mean like Linux.
Perhaps if IBM had shown us a portable G5 or a 3+GHz system... I would be morning their absence.
IBM is showing you a 3-core 3.2 GHz "G5" and a "G5" with 8 integrated DSPs, either of which could have been used in a Powermac if Apple was actually interested in them.
Freescale is showing you a G4 that'll run as fast as a 3 GHz Pentium 4 and cooler than a Pentium M and its bridge chips... because it's an integrated CPU with multiple independent memory and I/O ports.
Mourn that.
Does Apple really have more zealots than Linux or Windows? I go read the Ars Battleground and tend to say "a pox on all your houses." Admittedly the Linux Zealots bug me the most. But still....
I think Evangelical supporters are bad for anything IMO, Especially political parties.
s e.
As a Republican, for example, I don't like how the Evangelical wing has taken over the Republicans from Fiscally Conservatives/States-righters to Who-The-Hell-Cares-As-Long-It-Appeals-To-"The"-Ba
That reminds me of Windows zealots on Microsoft blogs talking [bad] about Linux/BSD/FOSS - they don't know what they're talking about.
Here are real market share figures, year by year. The Mac peaked at 11.20% in 1991. Every year since then, it's dropped. For 2004, the figure is 1.8%.
But the awful year was 1996, when Mac market share dropped from 9% to 5.1%. Just at the PowerPC transition. And in 1997, it was 3.45%.
That's reality.
I agree that Apple is going to lose a lot of sales from this. I've definitely put my own Mac purchasing plans on hold until the dust settles a bit. I was thinking of buying a G5 PowerMac or two; now I think I'll stick with the existing G4's. (Might still buy an iMac or two, though).
What makes Apple's preannouncement of InteliMacs different from Osborne's error is that Apple has the iPod revenue to carry them through. I think this may have a lot to do with Job's decision to make this jump at this time. There is no guarantee that Apple's dominance of the music player business will continue indefinitely, so if a jump is to be made, this is the time to do it. That cushion also probably fueled Jobs's decision to spill the beans so early. Given that Apple can afford to take the hit, leveling with the user and developer communities may well pay off in better goodwill down the line. How would you feel if you had just spent 2 years optimizing your program for Altivec, only to have Steve announce that the Intel machines would be on sale tomorrow? And I'd certainly be upset if I'd just bought a G5 tower. This way, I'll at least get 2 good years of use out of that tower. That's still a bit short--I expect Macs to be useful for at least 5 years--but I won't feel blindsided.
I like the PowerPC chip. I'm disappointed to see Apple abandoning the platform when multicore PowerPCs are starting to come out. On the other hand, I'm looking forward to the day when I'll be able to switch to Windows for the rare application I need that doesn't have an OS X counterpart without taking a big speed hit.
optical mice, self-illuminating and adjusting keyboards
Um, I'm pretty sure Microsoft were the ones who came out with the first modern optical mice. The puck mice Apple was using in 1999 sure weren't optical.
And those keyboards are nowhere near as good as the ones the IBM Thinkpad was already using... and the LED at the top of the Thinkpad's screen does a MUCH better job of letting you work in the dark.
Maybe having some stoner chick in an ad is considered cool.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
how long have we been waiting for a PowerBook G5?
Anyone who was honestly waiting for a Powerbook G5 isn't qualified to comment on processor technology.
The G5 is the high-power PPC, like the Pentium 4.
The Pentium-M equivalent of the PPC line is the Freescale MPC8641. It's running a bit later, but a dual-core G4 with two 667 MHz memory busses is a lot more exciting to me than a Pentium III core with a single 533 MHz FSB, even if the Pentium is running 25% faster.
1. Software vendors will abandon support for PPC machines as soon as it makes business sense to do so.
Of course, but here's the thing : in the very, very, very vast majority of cases, it won't make sense. Comparing the situation to NeXT is a bit silly ( unless you'd like to compare numbers of installed users, see my point yet? ). If someone decides to stop supporting PPC, it means their product has somehow become Intel-specific ( how? ) and they have a small PPC install base, _and_ don't want the existing PPC customers. That should be pretty rare, really. I'd like to see the numbers of NeXT vendors that dropped 68k support and kept Intel support, anyway; I don't think that number is as high as this guy claims.
2. Software vendors will charge you money for Intel (or PPC) versions of software when it makes business sense to do so.
They'll happen either as upgrades or as new versions of software. You'd pay for those anyway. Yes, people buying Intel macs and wanting native performance will end up buying lots of new software. Duh. Guess what happens with every OS switch? Of course, if performance is acceptable, you can probably put off that software purchase for quite a while... initial reports show Rosetta getting pretty decent performance, so this could be less of an issue. Even if it is, is it a reason to not buy a Mac today? It sounds like more of a reason to not buy an Intel Mac if you already own a PPC Mac.
3. Apple has shown it drops support for old products regularly because it makes business sense to do so.
Like every other company on the planet? Yet, with the tools in place to make builds for PPC a single checkbox away, it should be some time before simply using that check box doesn't make business sense. Let's see... when exactly did NeXT stop supporting 68k hardware, since that's what he's comparing this to? Was there ever an NeXTStep for Intel release without a matching 68k release? Ok, I know... there weren't many of the first, but it was pretty easy for them to keep 68k support, and they did.
4. Macs tended to have a far longer life-span than the average PC.
Yea... and this changes how ? Right now, a dual G5 is right up there with a top-of-the-line PC ( well, except maybe for the graphics card, maybe ) and will still compare to that same PC... his prediction is that in 2 years today's PCs will be obsolete? Wow. Stunning.
5. The new Intel machines promise to be much faster than current machines.
Huh. That's the reason for the switch right there in a nutshell, isn't it?
6. People do not buy computers only for how it will serve them today, but for how capable it will be in serving them for their desired term of use.
uh... as compared to _other_ computers available to buy _today_. If I _can_ put off buying a computer, I'm going to; tomorrow will always provide faster computers at lower prices. If I can't ( say, I'm a student starting college this fall... or a business which just hired a new employee... or I just need a computer to handle my digital photos ), well, I'm likely to buy one now rather than wait a year. Better ones will be here in the future, but that's not terribly relevant today. If I want to run OS X, this doesn't deter me from buying a PPC mac unless I can wait anyway. In which case, I was going to maybe wait anyway for a year. For that relatively small group of users that can wait for a year, sure, Apple will parlay those users into pent-up demand for their first Intel machines. That's somehow bad for Apple?
7. Potentially no Classic support.
I thought he was looking for reasons why people won't buy more PPCs? If you want Classic support, you'll run out and stockpile PPC Macs. Believe me, though... few people want it. This publishing industry he's talking about don't represent that many computers... and it does represent a business that sets up systems and never, ever replaces the
That was a well-written piece of non-claptrap that never once made me want to retch!
Also, kudos to the author for getting a sly dig in at the current US administration! Oooh, you madcap rebel! I swoon at your daring! Nothing sez 'brilliance' like a hackneyed regurgitated half-thought so witless that George Lucas used it. Thanks for the useful political commentary in a supposed column on technology, fuckwit.
um... correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't obstinate spelled with an i after the t, not an a?
At least spellcheck before submitting something, sheesh.
Is it just me or does this guy look like Bill Goldberg as a cancer patient?
Did somebody say my name? Does this mean I have to link to Apple now? What Amish loser thought 'Why ask why?' would be a good slogan for a 'dry' beer? And why the hell would that same asshat marketing team think anybody would want 'dry' beer? What's next? 'warm flat' beer? Sign me up! What? They actually still make bud dry?!? blargh!
There've certainly been Bitter, Obstinate Zealots around in the Mac community for a while now. They're the ones who've railed against every move that Apple has made that shakes their world view. The amount of flamage directed from the "old guard" at OS X went on for years. Putting the application title in the menu makes the system completely unusable! What idiot came up with the Dock? Where's my control strip? If the trash can isn't on the desktop it's no good! And -- my God -- the Finder isn't perfectly "spatial" anymore! Wah! Wah! Wah! Fitt's Law! Fitt's Law! Fitt's Law!
... that's blind zealotry.
Jesus Christ, people, give it a rest.
You know what? Giving Apple the benefit of the doubt that they've actually, y'know, put some thought into this decision and aren't just doing it because they think x86 chips will look prettier in those brushed aluminum cases isn't blind zealotry. Saying that, yes, you'll be willing to look at Intel Macs when they come out isn't blind zealotry. But rending your clothes and beating your chest and screaming, "No! Never! I'll keep my PowerMac until you pry my cold, dead fingers from my mouse, and goddammit, my mouse has only one button!"
Mr. Kheit, for your long and distinguished service in saying "Hell No, We Won't Go" to every single change Apple has made, I award you the Big Red Clown Nose of Bozo Punditry.
(And, don't worry, Dvorak fans! I have faith he'll reclaim it soon.)
this topic is stupid
I'm guessing you can't sell Intel-based Macs until they are demonstrably faster than the fastest PPC Mac being sold. The way to accomplish this is to screw the Mac community by:
1: No speed increases in PPC Macs for the next year, unless they are very expensive models that won't compete with mainstream Intel boxes when they're introduced.
2: Give Intel a year to catch up, which is a generation in computer processor years.
Clue: It's IBM who is doing the screwing and #1 and #2 are happening today and this is the prime reason that Jobs is ditching PowerPC.
Apple would love to sell super fast high-end Macs which blow away the Pentia. The G5's were quite fast when introduced, but it is IBM---not Apple---who has been unable or unwilling to ramp up the speed and in enough volume.
There is nothing wrong at all with the PowerPC architecture and there are lots of things very right with it. It's far less crufty than x86, though the iAMD 64 bit mode does improve things somewhat (finally no register starvation and antideluvian 387 FP)
The problem is that IBM was apparently unwilling to make economically competitive CPU chips in the middle of the market and maintain the incremental gains to always stay competitive with Intel.
They made their choice to go for high volume, static performance embedded (Cell + microcontrollers) and on the other end, very expensive chips for their high end $10K+ servers.
And nothing really for competitive laptops, which are a big, and growing, part of Apple's business.
Today, the Pentium 4 "netburst" ultradeep pipelined processors suffer in comparison to PPC and AMD in real-world real-software tests, but this isn't going to last long.
Intel has finally woken up and realized that netburst is a turd like Itanic, but the poor widdle Pentium M (evolved from the 10 year old Pentium Pro core) has been rocking. Back to the future at intel, as their mainstream dual core desktops and laptops will use 64 bit versions of these chips with the marketing cripple removed (i.e. 64 bit instructions + SSE3).
that Apple is crippling their OS so it only runs on their x86 hardware? This seems like the biggest complaint of /.ers when any other company uses this type of strategy, e.g. Microsoft, Lexmark, etc.
Vote for Pedro
Hmm, had no idea about the timeframe there. The first PowerPC chips were excellent in their day... I remember our school getting the first batch of PPC processors in the form of "Power Macintosh 7500's" and the performance gain was enormous over the LC's that they replaced. No one complained about the PPC chips after we saw the huge leap in productivity.
Keep in mind the date of that market share drop coincides with Windows 95's release. Windows 95 is really what killed Mac, because the main reason for using the Mac was a far superior user experience over DOS and early versions of Windows. With 95 out there, the user experience was "good enough" and offered a lot of things an average user would have bought a Mac for. So the creatives kept moving on with Macs, mainly due to having $3000 invested in software and fonts that wouldn't work on the PC, and most new users just went with '95.
Back in 1995 you could buy a couple of different Macs at OfficeMax. When Steve took over again the Mac's disappeared from common retailers like OfficeMax, which also helped to kill off buying. There was also so much talk of Apple dying that no one wanted to make a huge investment in something that was going to be dead in a year.
So basically what I'm saying is that during that time period there was a lot happening besides an architecture change to kill Mac popularity. Going from 68000 to PPC was great if you needed the performance and were committed to the Mac platform.
Ummm....fine? It's a Model M, should be good for another century or two. Seriously, what's wrong with PS/2? Were people making out the interface of their keyboards?
USB instead of serial
Tell me again what the "S" in "USB" stands for.
I call zealot, not informative.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
There are two types of Mac fans:
. html
The first is the more sincere user who is having a hard time figuring out what to think about the move.
The other says this was unquestionably a good move, and Jobs is, once again, steering the company right. (Forget the fact that these are the same people who defended PPC as vastly superior to x86 just a month ago.)
An example of the second type would be a guy I knew who at our company who has a habit of overstepping his bounds. He got really upset at us for buying Spruce DVD authoring systems because they were NT-based, and not going with Sonic, which was Mac-based. When Apple bought Spruce to make DVD Studio Pro 2, he told me, "You know, in retrospect Spruce was the way to go because Apple wouldn't purchase a dead-end company."
(This guy also told me regarding one of our vendors, "They're expensive, but they're coming along.")
As an example of the second type of Machead, here's a recent email thread I had with a recovering Mac zealot:
>>> This is an interesting theory that answers your random complaints...
>>>
>>> http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050609
>>>
>>> -b. smith
>> Thanks for the laugh.
>>
>> To cite a Slashdot post on the issue:
>> When a company with 30B USD market cap becomes a part of a company with 170B USD market cap it's called an acquisition, not a "merger."
>>
>> --j
>>
>>
>
> I think the guy went over the edge... but it was an interesting theory.
>
> Although, it seems like the vast majority of the Mac Community is supporting Jobs' move. Does this guy have too much power over our hearts and minds? You would say yes.
>
> -b. smith
>
>
Ah, my son. The moment you asked that question, you took your first step into a larger world.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
If you're looking for people who are sick and tired of Apple's policies, here's one. I'm dropping Mac OSX. I'll be getting a PC and be dual booting Windows and Linux. They may possibly be worse than OSX, but they are much more consistent.
Generating fat binaries that run on PPC and Intel requires a checkbox to be clicked. This is not a problem. This guy is another ignorant little prick looking for attention. When anyone gets this emotional about a product, look past the words and try to find the hiddden agenda. Cripes, even the developer community has taken the announcement in stride for the most part, and that's who really matteers.
Firstly, your subject line is patently false, per your link. PowerPC was introduced in 1994, not 1996
. .........2.5. ......4.0
Let's look closer at those numbers (per your link.)
Year...Share.....units (millions)
1991....11.2.........2.1
1992....12.
1993....10...........3.3 - PowerPC announced
1994....9.4..........3.8 - PowerPC shipped
1995....9............4.5
1996....5.1...
2004.....2.0..........3.5
Apple's market share peaked two years before PowerPC. It was in decline for two years before PowerPC. From the looks of things, PowerPC gave the Mac a temporary boost in unit sales, even though market share continued to decline. I would say, based solely on the numbers, that PowerPC had no discernible effect on the Mac's viability in the market.
There have been a multitude of slashdot stories posted all filled with angst ridden comments. But the simple fact is this move, while it may hurt in the short term simply had to be done, or the consequences would have been worse in the long term.
Quite simply IBM was not competetive, had very little driving it to be competetive with general desktop CPU's. To hang on in hopes of better days ahead would have been easy destructive way out.
Now Apple will NEVER again have to worry about having to fall behind on the CPU curve. It can tap the dominant x86 rivalry to always get the best chips going.
There are added bonuses of common architecture for code porters, and better migration paths (dual boot/wine) for windows escapees.
I have never purchased an Apple Product before, so I don't think I am subject to the reported Steve Jobs RDF, but I am keen on this move and the possability of getting an x86 Mac.
The enviro that will stop working with Rosetta is Classic. Carbon != Classic and will continue run as long as it meets the other requirements for Rosetta.
I am quite confident that nobody* has been developing for Classic since 'round 2001. That doesn't mean that certain-people-that-won't-be-seen-dead-changing-th eir-software-in-any-way-ever (frequent in the publishing industry) still run Classic apps. Moreover, even if there actually were Classic/OS 9 apps developed right now these users still would not use them for the same reason.
* I do know of a few audio apps. But they've been simultaneously released for OS X so it's beside the point here.
There's no 'on' position on the Slacker switch!
FFS guys, get over it. What is so great about a mac? I'll tell you. Nothing.
My friend could not stop spouting off about how great apple were, he was quite surprised when he found out his ipod did not conform to any open standards and was basically a useless piece of shit without itunes installed on a PC to load the music off it.
IT'S JUST A BRAND. THERE IS NOTHING MAGICAL ABOUT MAC.
All of which makes me wonder, do evangelical users and press help or hurt the popularity of a platform?
Well, I'm a Mac zealot, and I've convinced 4 or 5 people who were fed up with there shit-riddled Windows boxes to switch to Macs. They've never been happier, and tell their friends about it. So...it helps.
The only people Mac zealots piss off are PC guys who know, in their heart of hearts, that OS X is waaaay better than anything that will ever ooze its way out of Redmond.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Ehm..uh..on my company we rely on Dark Castle for our everyday, down and dirty business. We just can't afford Apple making another switch leaving industry proffessionals out in the cold like this.
No siree-bob. Windows just delivers more bang-per-buck when it comes to cornerstone legacy apps like Reversi.
There's no 'on' position on the Slacker switch!
It's best to ignore zealots of any stripe. In my case, I use what works best except when I find that I don't want to support a company or organisation because of actions they have taken that I find distasteful. Apple is on that list because of their constant questionable legal battles.
OT but it has to be asked:
Do evangelical Christians and press help or hurt the popularity of a political platform?
It wasn't just the cost of the hardware. We could get really good educational discounts for Pagemaker and Ventura etc. for Wintel but not for Mac.
Actually, Apple had the first clones. In the early eighties many people were building their own Apple II clones from kits. Apple made sure that didn't happen with subsequent machines. That may have been a really bad mistake.
I understand exactly what they are saying. Believe what you will, but I have always felt the same way about hard-core-freak-out-smash-secular-cds-in-your-gara ge Christians who give the rest of us bad names.
Believe and love what you want, but dont ruin it for the rest of us.
Apple's original, flim-flam video explaining why Intel CPUs sucked arse. And the (deleted) web page at Apple explaining, in more details, why Intel CPUs sucked arse.
Da Blog
as long as Apple users will continue to do things like this
It's fun to be in the group, but honestly I don't think it helps. It probably hurts.
BeOS - DEAD
OS2 - DEAD
Atari - DEAD
Amiga - DEAD (close enough)
BSD - just kidding...
All had rabid fan bases and all died out. OS2 users weren't so bad, but those who liked it were very vocal.
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
> Evangelizing Into Uncoolness?
Apple hasn't been cool since sometime in 1986.
the performance gain was enormous over the LC's that they replaced.
That says a lot more about the terrible performance of the LC than anything else. "Low Cost" my arse.
Da Blog
I wish all these crazy computer-as-religion types would grow up and see the computer for what it really, truly is: a tool.
Computers are JUST TOOLS that help you accomplish useful tasks. That's it, guys. They're not religious artifacts, they're not fetish items, they're just the equivalent of a good set of socket wrenches.
You should choose the best tools available to you at the point when you're buying them, and you should try and squeeze some mileage out of them (this means, don't buy new tools every couple of years! Mechanics don't replace all their wrenches every two years, do they?).
Mac O/S is an excellent tool. So is Linux. The two are essentially interchangeable, given that Mac O/S is somewhat better at working with media files, and Linux is somewhat better for software development, especially web development.
Of course, whereas Mac O/S and Linux are roughly equivalent to Craftsman or Snap-On, well... Microsoft is kind of like the cheapo tools from Taiwan you see on Canal Street. They work, but they break a lot, and they don't have as fine a finish. Still, I suppose you might find a use for them.
Whatever! Back to the point! Relax, everybody! This shit isn't life and death, it's not even Red, white or Sangria! REEEEELLLLAAAAXXXXX!
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
For all I know it could have been running on a bowl of Grape Nuts, but I just don't find this idea credible. The original claim being disputed is that Steve was running a machine with four Pentium processors, a claim that is both extremely unlikely and which has absolutely no supporting evidence (and no, a link to another article making the claim is not itself evidence). Are we going to start counting potential virutal processors in an attempt to support this shakey claim?
To further explore the notion hypthetically, since we know that the Intel-based Macs that are being made available to developers are single-CPU machines, what would be the gain in kitbashing together a special machine for Steve's demo? To make performance look better on Intel than it really is? Do you think developers with access to the single processor machines would be both capable and interested in keeping this secret for Steve?
If you belive that all that is plausible, you might as well not believe in the moon landing. The thrust of Space cowboy's post is surely correct. It is further supported by nuggetman's pic of the machine's "About this Mac" box, which makes no mention of additional processors. Unless, of course, you believe they faked that too. But for those of us who are such a total conspiracy fruits that they believe Steve had the contents of that About Box falsified, you might as well believe it was secretly a PPC-based machine.
Except that Intel does not have an Objective-C compiler, they only have a C/C++ compiler. I'll bet that they are working on an Objective-C compiler, but they don't have one announced as of yet. Which means Apple can't use Intel's compiler.
Anyone remember Osborne computers? They announced a new Osborne computer to replace the last one. Osborne buyers held off buying the current Osborne computer for the one due to come out later. The Intel Mac is due out in two years. Are potential Mac Buyers holding out for the Intel Mac? Is this the Osborne Syndrome, or is it more like the New Coke Syndrome? Remember when New Coke was made to taste like Pepsi?
Steve Jobs, are you taking notes on these two failures? Perhaps it is just a ploy to sell more PPC based Macs as some Mac Users are trying to get the last of the PPC made Macs before the Intel ones come out. I'll bet the auction sites are full of PPC Macs at high prices, it might be a seller's market if there ends up being a shortage of PPC Macs.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
The processor isn't the X86, It's a resurrection of the IXA432, extended to 64 bits in the latest process. Woz asked for and got tagged lisp extensions and support for superdrive. I swear, I read it on the internet. Or maybe it was ./?
Current Macintosh users and would be switchers should buy now more than anything. The reason is simple that Mac OS X (ppc) is fully matured. All major apps and drivers have been fully develop with little bugs. Moreover, with universal binaries, most developers will support ppc for at least till 2009-2010. Apple will be completely switched over by 2007 but a majority of mac users won't. So, there is no reason to believe developers will drop ppc support anytime soon. In contrast, I worry about the early adopters of X86-macs. Will all your devices work and will your software supplier have universal bninaries by then? Will Rosetta run your software well till it is? My guess is no. I was an early adopter in the Mac OSX transition, and it was not pretty. My system was only partially useful until 10.2 was released ( a good 2 years). I could accept it because it was just the OS, but I would not be happy to do that with a $1000+ computer.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
You mean the LED that casts NO LIGHT at all? Funny, I looked forward to that when I got my hardware refresh at work, and the thing is utterly useless.
Man, I hope the Mac nostalgia-trippers get something analogous to DOS users' DOSBox. Full emulation; your programs will run on any platform the emulator can be compiled on---they will never die.
If only it would run Carmageddon. I have such fond memories of that game.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
apple used to have a history of exotic, and sometimes superior, hardware. they have since gutted their lines and replaced most of those exotic components with ones that had already standardized in x86.
other than the proprietary mainboard and the ppc cpu, macs are basically a pc anyways...
sum.zero
I predict that because of this uncertainty in how the Mac-Intel computers will perform, PPC Mac sales will be decent or even high until just before the Mac-Intel models come out and buyers wait to see if the new models are everything that has been promised.
Warning: The intelligence of this post may be larger than it appears.
As for me, I'm leaving my options open and putting off a Mac purchase until I find out whether or not a set of hacks will appear making the x86 OSX run properly on a generic x86 whitebox... in which case, I plan to cough up $100 or whatever for a legit copy of OSX.
Since I'm running Linux (with Windows in emulation), it isn't like there's anything compelling about doing a platform switch right now.
Tech Public Policy stuff
firewire is no longer standard on many macs as far as i know, but has been replaced with usb 2.x
superdrive is a marketing term. they exist in the x86 world aplenty.
optical digital audio as standard i will concede, although that is changing. the reason mac has had this for so long is because of their presence in the recording industry. as pcs move into the living room, this will cease to be a buying decision and will become standard in x86, imho.
now consider the flipside, where apple has replaced key technologies with x86 standards: ram, usb, ide, pci, agp, and so on...
sum.zero
I can't plug my friggin' mouse into the damn keyboard. I know it may be a minor point, but why the hell did they make PS/2 the way they did? When I used a SPARC box, it had the mouse plug into the keyboard, Apple had ADB, which allowed the same. PS/2? what? seperate connectors on the box for mouse and keyboard? What if I put the box on the floor? It is serial, but RS232 doesn't allow daisy chaining. Why didn't they use RS422? (I think I got that right, whatever Apple used for serial, which allowed daisy chaining.) PS/2 sucks for that reason alone. Otherwise, sure, it's fine, it gets the job done, in an unelegant manner.
i just come back from a bar... a friend asked me what to get... an apple or a linux-based x86. i told him not to buy a new apple. maximum a used apple would be interesting due to the pricefall because of the switch-news....
"IBM is showing you a 3-core 3.2 GHz "G5" and a "G5" with 8 integrated DSPs, either of which could have been used in a Powermac if Apple was actually interested in them."
Let's all think about this real hard:
We can expect the lifespan of the consoles for which those CPUs are being made to be perhaps four or five years.
Which is to say, the console makers will be selling exactly the same hardware configurations... for four or five years.
Got that? IBM doesn't have to do a thing to improve these amazing chips... for four or five years. Why should they? IBM's best business case here is to spend upfront on design and on tooling up their fab, and then stop spending while they sit back and watch the cash roll in... for four or five years. This is not the expensive 18 month performance-treadmill of the desktop/portable CPU market.
So, are you sure you want Apple to use those chips?
When I first saw the news, I thought, Apple is going to get nailed by the Osborne effect. Who wants to buy the old machines, I know my purchase decisions are on hold.
But there is one crucial difference. I am a PC user, and I wasn't really thinking about buying a Mac. Now all of a sudden I am thinking of this new Mac and I am putting off any PC purchase plan, because this is possibly a good migration case from PC's.
But what about Mac users? If they really want a Mac the more powerful ones may remain Altivec based G5s and they can expect support for quite a while. So maybe they are better off with PPC macs for a bit of time.
Is it possible that this will cause more "Waiting" among curious PC users like myself than actual committed Mac users??
Something to think about.
Sorry, looking at the picture (and assuming that at least the info is correct), it can't be a dual-core as the clock is too high. It would be reasonable though to assume it's hyperthreaded, for all the good that might do (or not). I should have checked first; this way, even if what I argued for, that you can get the system to see/use 4 cpus with just one p4, is still correct, it's also irrelevant here :-)
... too many ripples to afford a shakey demo at this time. Whether they actually did that or not is a rhetorical question right now. What will matter is 1. people's perception of the transition (given that it's still a long way off and right now it's a faith-based thing, no meat yet) and 2. when it comes, the actual transition (and Apple has 1+ year to make sure it's pulled out fine, irrespective of what was in this week's hardware black box)
Using a special kit for the demo would however make sense. Remember, there's a lot more at stake here than just some developers complaining their rented kit is slow (which in itself is not even a big problem - a dev kit needs not be fast in general, just at some specific tasks, like compiling code) This has to show Intel Macs in the best possible light and erase from memory Apple's previous claims of G5 versus P4 performance. It's about sales, profit, stock
All in all, it's going to be an interesting year. If only to see how Apple handles phasing out the kit it's still selling without making the buyers feel like second-class citizens after 2007. I'm especially curious to see the spin for this fall's 'back to school' campaign.
If that were the case, linux would have been gone long ago.
I have several Model M keyboards, from IBM and Lexmark. I have replacement keycap sets. I wouldn't replace them with anything else for use with my PCs.
However, PS/2 isn't hot-pluggable, which both USB and ADB are (although it's not recommended that you hot-plug ADB, devices that are hot-plugged and removed at least function). PS/2 has far smaller bandwidth than USB. And PS/2 devices aren't daisy-chainable, which is trivial on both USB and ADB.
Seriously, if either platform NEEDED USB to replace its default bus for input devices, it was the PC. ADB was good enough for Macs, but "good enough" isn't always good enough for the Mac platform. But what happened? USB adoption in the PC world was almost zero before the iMac came along and kicked a few manufacturers' asses into gear for you (us). Thank Apple for that.
Also, I am a visually-impaired, lynx-using script.
That said, the attitude of an assortment of people representing themselves as "the Mac community" has been the most negative factor in my Apple experience. Any complaint or criticism of Apple, from single-button laptop trackpads, to no USB 2.0 support on the FireWire 800 PB, to the apparently serious crime of calling the key with "ALT" printed on it an alt key; has been met with a degree of flamage and rationalization unprecedented to even me, a former Amiga owner! I've chosen to simply divorce myself from the interactive (forum/newsgroup) support sources - it just isn't worth the grief to me.
KeS
it appears apple is still offering at least one [often two] firewire400 port on its machines.
usb had intel and many others behind it. tell me again how apple's >3% marketshare caused it to become so popular again.
sum.zero
The 3-core 3.2 GHz part you speak of is not a G5. It is a 64-bit PowerPC core, true, but it lacks things like out-of-order execution. It supports SMT (two threads per core, for a total of 6 threads in hardware simultaneously). However, it's not clear that this particular version of SMT will play nicely with Mach. Regardless, this chip is not designed for general purpose computing. It's fine for the Xbox 360, which it was intended for, but that's it.
The Cell processor is also not a G5. It has a 64-bit PowerPC core with SMT support (for a total of 2 threads), and eight SPE units surrounding that. But those SPE units are not DSPs, although they are "DSP-like." Furthermore, Sony will be disabling one of the eight SPEs in each Cell to improve chip yields. Like the other chip you mention, the Cell is not intended for general purpose computing.
Since neither chip is really suitable for a PowerMac, Apple couldn't use them. It wasn't for "lack of interest." There's been some talk of using the Cell for blades or specific embedded applications, but the vast majority of existing PPC Mac software would run poorly on such chips. I can see the Cell being used in a server farm of blades running a tweaked Linux, for very specific computational tasks (crypto, gene sequencing, etc.), but not for a personal computer. The software would have to be custom tailored to the chip's architecture.
"Is Apple & Community Evangelizing Into Uncoolness?"
Yeah, I can imagine that's a tough question for someone who doesn't know cool from cowdung.
'superdrives' existed for pcs at exactly the same time as they did for macs. they are ide devices and it would have been stupid to make them only for macs. many low end m,acs have 'combodrives' as opposed to 'superdrives' by default.
"Exactly! Kinda like the Superdrive, Firewire, USB ports being standard, etc"
nope. firewire is a niche product at the moment, relegated to video. these devices increasinly supply usb 2.x ports exactly because firewire didn't get much traction in the x86 world.
it is also nowhere near as signifigant to the system as the things you conceded to me.
with ram i meant sdr & ddr, don't be so inane.
and finally, usb became a 'standard' [by your usage] when it was released by usb.org. it became a real standard when it was deemed such by iso. all of the key development partners were x86 focused [ie intel, hp, etc]. usb was primarily targeted at x86 and existed on pcs as early as it did on macs. apple and its >3% marketshare was not the impetus for adoption by x86.
sum.zero
usb was developed by intel, hp, etc. these are x86 focused companies. they promoted usb heavily and the industry noticed.
that apple chose to obsolete so many of their customers hardware overnight is simply an example of them not caring about their customers [just like whenthey decided the floppy was dead, but most peripherals still only came with drivers on floppy. that was lots of fun for the people i know providing support...
in the x86 world, older connections remained while usb was added. this is the proper way to do things. then you build critical mass as your base begins to replace older hardware and peripherals through the natural course of these things. eventually you have it everywhere without having to force it on people.
bluetooth is doing this in na now [it's been big in europe for quite a while].
sum.zero
redundant....? how is this redundant? because I answered the question? *sighs*
They are the Xeon Pentium 4s. The class is important as Xeon has been around for a long time. Xeon is Intel speak for "Better SMP capabilities enabled, maybe some more cache and a really big price tag." They aren't special cores or anything. Intel simply charges more for them because they can, since the demand is only in the high end market.
I'd like to go on record as saying I hate the x86 architecture.
Oh, the 8086/8088 was fantastic - in a "look at what can be done with a box of leftover commodity bits" way. An absolutely magnificent testimony to Rube Goldberg engineering. The problem is, the x86 world has been paying for that ever since...
Just look at all the kludges, workarounds, and add-ons that have been made to get around the design limitations of that first hardware, many of which are still with us today. LIMS/EMS. Bank switching. Extended mode switching. Too few DMA channels. Too few hardware IRQs. An insane memory map. The list goes on.
The IBM-PC architecture should have been dumped years ago, when the 386 came out. Forget the legacy 8086 design, start from scratch and take advantage of the new chip that did things properly. Instead, the PC world has been stuck in a rut for 20 years, building machines & OSs which resemble a giant game of Mousetrap more than a logical and sane evolution of design.
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
and as good a reason to wait as any.
Tech Public Policy stuff
It was the 'new' netburst architecture which sucks for power and computation per megahertz.
Pentium M's are good, and Intel finally realizes it.
MS invented the technology which they called Intelleye. Many others licensed it, and others have since developed related and improved technologies. However the first ever optical mouse that didn't need some special elaborate pad was an MS mouse.
If you asked me, however logitech has mastered the whole optical mouse thing. I just love my MX510, awesome design and I've never been able to move it fast enough to cause it to skip.
A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. - Winston Churchill
Apple has "lead the pack" only in that they chose to integrate many technologies before others. Most call this "jumping the gun". Back when Apple put GigE in their systems, it was silly. GigE switches were so expensive (over $1000 for a 4 port unmanaged) that nearly no one was using them. Also gig ethernet chips were expensive, it added a good bit of cost to the system to integrate onem and that was cost most people didn't need. Now it makes sense to integrate it since the chips are as cheap as 10/100, and switches are cheap enough that anyone who wants one can have one, though most networks are still 10/100.
The only innovations Apple can claim are the Firewire standards. Those are theirs, and nobody is questioning that. It's a wonderful bus for DV and harddrives.
However the rest of that wasn't invented by Apple, and often found on PCs first (USB is Intels and was standard on all motherboards form 1995 on, optical mice are Microsoft's). It's not innovation to grab a new, expensive technology and stick it in your system before there's real demand for it. I mean if you wanted, you could integrate 10GigE on a motherboard today. There's even a single chip solution out there now. However it'd add a lot of cost and you'd gain nothing, I have yet to see a network with 10gig to the desktop, when it is used at all it's for switch interconnects. It's simply too expensive for anything else. That'll change, of course, but putting it standard in a desktop wouldn't make me an innovator, it'd make me an idiot.
As for the RAID thing there's a big difference between software and hardware RAID. Windows and Linux will likewise do RAID in software however there's a number of problems with it, the biggest being performance. You CPU has to handle all the additonal calculations and transactions and that slows things down. A real RAID controller offloads all that, so the CPU feels no additonal load. Good ones even do things the CPU normally has to do for single disks, reducing the load further. Desktop boards with low-end RAID chips are common in the PC world, and workstation/server boards with high-end RAID chips are quite common as well, have been for a while now.
He is (indirectly) on to something. The Mac is a niche platform, espically for games, so as I'm sure you know there has to be consideration of how many resources can be allocated to porting a game to it, if any. Now when Macs move to Intel, I can easily see many developers who decide to port deciding that the Intel Macs are the only ones worth their time. After all they are they are they probably represent the segment with the most money, and those most likely to want to purchase the flashiest games. Combine that with the fact that most of your hand optimised assembly won't need much of a rewrite and that the ICC does a much better job than GCC of generating optimised code and I think many will find it hard to justify the additonal resources to make games run acceptably on PPC Macs.
So I can very well see developers leaving PPC Macs "out in the lurch" as he says because it makes good business sense. They may find that while a port to Intel Macs is simple enough and has a large enough market to justify it, backporting that to PPC does not.
Macintosh users like the user interface, the 'insanely great'
inclusion of features that you can't get in a Wintel box,
and will do just fine with whatever CPU comes out next year.
Macs will boot from the iPod if asked to, and Wintel boxes
won't. Mac users like that sort of thing.
Developers weren't stumped when the 68000 family expanded,
had no difficulty getting good functionality from PowerPC
and were even getting the hang of G4/G5 vector processing.
Adding Pentium target CPUs is going to be mainly a matter
of telling the compiler to be prepared for another variant.
It's not likely to be a deal-breaker.
I suspect C code will recompile and cover the next
machines just fine.
What folk like the games developers REALLY care about
is assurance of their library support; a game delivers its
video to Aqua or OpenGL nowadays, not to a CPU.
Doesn't anybody understand? There are REAL feelings involved here... its not just all chips and market and money.... Steve REALLY cares about his constituents! He made this decision... and didn't really know if it was the right one... but IBM was IGNORING him! Intel, at least, knew that he was feeling bad, and listened to him!!
The Admin and the Engineer
Aaaw, come on, Asshat is great word.
/., so it's a meme! /Dons FRS
Such a great mental image of a guy whose ass right below his stovepipe -- like yours!
It's alliterative with AC!
And i learned it from
And you, madam, are very ugly. In the morning, I shall be sober.
Um, I'm pretty sure Microsoft doesn't ship computers. So Apple *is* the first computer manufacturer shipping their systems with it. Sadly, they may not have been the people to invent it... sheesh.
Sorry.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
"All of which makes me wonder, do evangelical users and press help or hurt the popularity of a platform."
To answer that question, simply look at the extremely slow adoption rate of desktop Linux, which has more crazed zealots than any OS ever has or likely ever will.
You mean the LED that casts NO LIGHT at all?
No, that must be some other LED. The one on my Thinkpad is perfect for working in the dark without disturbing people sleeping in the same bed.
I'll bet dollars to donuts that had more to do with Mac market share dwindling during 1996 than any CPU change.
What was there before '95? DOS? Real competitor to MacOS that was... :)
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I am so happy with switch... I want vmware or zen running on top of mac os x to run linux, *bsd or windows whenever I need to instead of carrying an intel laptop in my car or struggling with Virtual PC.
Anybody with half a brain that saw the keynote video (rather than blindly quoting idiot rumor sites) saw "3.6GHz Pentium 4 processor" in the system about panel. I'm pretty sure there are no quad Pentiums (the original?). And even though I've been mac-only for forever, I know there are no Quad Pentium 4s. And the window clearly did not say Xenon. fsking rumor sites. I'm never gonna live this down from those goddamn windows fanboys.
---k--
</stupid>
Slashdot Geek's wife: I have good news!
Geek: You solved the Mac vs. Microsoft war?
Wife: No, I saved a bunch of money on Auto Insurance.
The guy's mostly trolling. He calls himself "The Devil's Advocate", so it's not like he's not being up front about it.
But, he's basically right about the obselescence of the PPC Mac. Game developers are a bad example because they hate porting to the Mac in the first place, but I'm sure developers will abandon the PPC faster than Steve Jobs would like.
The 3.6 Ghz P4 beating a 2.7Ghz G5... uhh, not really a surprise. Beating a dual in some cases? Probably cases where one processor was idle. This rather demonstrates the problem with the PPC, one he denied in an earlier article -- it's not keeping up.
Classic support? Uhh, yeah. Apple has a huge base of people who need their 5+ year old Classic apps to run on their brand-spanking-new machines. (There's two or three guys who troll comp.sys.mac.system, I think that's about it. They'll buy the new machines just to have more to complain about). And I love the way Kheit's link "work in publishing" points to someone who says nothing about Classic and doesn't work in publishing.
Disclaimer: I think this move likely WILL kill Apple as a computer company. A Mac which can run Windows apps at reasonable speed will result in developers who don't bother to make Mac versions even when substantial portions of their market are Mac users. Then Mac users will note they're spending an awful lot of time in Virtual PC, and they'll just buy a PC next time, resulting in a death spiral.
What you have to understand about John Kheit is that basically every one of his bylined articles is like this. He's The Mac Observer's ace in the hole, the John Dvorak they call upon to write completely asinine articles to drive up their readership (and thus, their advertising revenues).
It's what they pay him to do, and he does it well.
They also have a regular forum troll who riles up the readership in article comments. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if they're bankrolling him too -- if you can keep people coming back to argue with the troll's baseless arguments (which they always do), you can keep getting fresh ad impressions.
Microsoft now has some competition
Mod it up! Informative.
Some of the zealots may simply be developers who understand that their livelihood could come to an end unless enough others follow this move along with them. If too many leave, the Mac will suffer in comparisons against Windhose.
They must feel very vulnerable because of this switch, so, to compensate for their vulnerability, they are being that much more rigid and controling of any hint of disapproval.
Either that, or the zealotry is actually the work of those paid bloggers we've been hearing about. That is, MS also stands to gain if people believe that their opponents are zealots, commies, hippies and lunatics.
Current applications will not run on the new Intel based systems, except in emmmmuuuuullllaaaatttiiiooonn - sloooowwwwww. It will take a re-compilation of the OS to execute on x86 processors.
Why Apple didn't go out of their way to get on the Cell is beyond me. Can anyone here enlighten me?
Now that would make some kind of sense. Even stealing just a little of MicroSofts pie would bring in the big bucks.
over minor typos.
good job.
sum.zero
That made the tech which enabled optical mice without a special mousepad (you know, the grid) that the old Mouse Sytems optical mice used._ gordon_gary.html
MS may have been the first to license it, but they didn't invent it.
Check: http://www.agilent.com/labs/news/1999features/fea
Zealots rarely know what they're talking about. If they did, they'd realise everything has good and bad points, and thus would cease to be zealots! ;)
A couple of years ago I stopped using Linux because I didn't want any association at all with its userbase.
Uninformed opinion and "my dad's bigger than your dad" rhetoric, combined with insulting the people you are trying to persuade is not the way to win converts. True for Mac, true for Linux, was true for the Amiga. (And look where that ended up!)
Would sitting in a Apple store and using one for 15 minutes tell me if it was any good?
Well, it would have allowed you to see all the things which you seem to feel are glaring flaws (one menu bar, dock etc etc). All of the things you mentioned are evident after a few minutes use.
Personally I like many of those things you denigrated, including the dock and a single menu bar at the top of the screen, not because I haven't used windows, but because I have. I imagine it's cmd-delete because it's a destructive action, and you wouldn't want to do it by mistake - many of the things that are different are done for a reason, though some are historical and inconsequential like the placement of window close buttons.
And now I know. It's for people who don't like computers. They just want their box to do a few tasks/programs then go home.
Sweeping generalisations are not often useful. If you're happier on Windows, that's great, why the need to judge others and pretend to know their motives?
Most of your comments boil down to 'Argh, it's different from Windows, how dare they'; they're neither constructive nor attempting to be objective, that's why I said you're not trying.
As for remedies, you'd have to actually *want* to accept something different from the conventions you're used to. If you're complaining about the position of buttons on the windows being on the left or right, I doubt you'll ever be happy but on Windows/Windows clones.
I made the Apple to PC switch in 1998 after 4 years of problems with my Mac in college. Printing was an issue. Playing games was an issue. Transfering files was problematic. Nearly anything I wanted to do with my computer was difficult. Don't get me wrong...I liked the Mac...and I hated how complicated the PC was. Windows 3.x was awful for a new computer user to work with. The Mac was a good option. But it was expensive. And after observing all of my Mac using friends getting screwed by Apple time and time again (expensive repairs, equipment that went obsolete after a year), and seeing how happy my buddies with their Gateways were, I made the switch. And then I made the switch away from Gateway to a custom built PC. I was part of the Mac Fanatic camp for those 4 years as an undergrad...and now I look back and realize how misguided I was. I even recently walked into a Mac Store to try out the new Macs...and I found the OS and included applications clunky and hard to use. Not intuititive at all.
you can believe anything you want, but i have admined windows, linux and aix systems. i do know what i am talking about.
i usually just write it out in full as sdram. i don't know why i didn't finish the whole acronym this time. probably because i was in a rush to head out the door...
however, it remains sad that this is the single point of contention for you amongst the argumnents that i did make [just like the original poster pointing out 'RAM' isn't a standard]. it was pretty clear what i was saying.
sum.zero
Apple's a company that makes great software and pretty good hardware that makes its money by using the software to sell the hardware, so they THINK they're still a hardware company.
On the other hand, Microsoft's a company that makes a little bit of great hardware and some good applications, but is mostly a holding company for some legacy intellectual property that's very valuable. They make most of their money by licensing that IP... so they THINK they're a software company.
Kind of like SCO was, back when they'd given up really improving UnixWhatever but before their IP had lost its value. They were smart enough to get out of that business and let Caldera take it on, and we all know what happened when THEY realised the IP they'd bought wasn't worth anything...
aix had some pretty crazy requirements [and subsequent calculations] for how you alloted ram from the whole to your various logical partitions [essentially virtual servers]. failure to allocate according to these requirements resulted in massive problems.
sum.zero
It will take a re-compilation of the OS to execute on x86 processors.
Yeh, but that's not a big deal any more. Back in the '80s switching a bunch of high performance graphics software from one CPU to another meant rewriting a bunch of highly optimized assembly code and tweaking it for the new platform. But now it's pretty much a matter of changing a few compiler options... most of the really hairy work is in the video drivers and graphics card now, and OpenGL means most of THAT is portable.
Why Apple switched now is that Apple was able to switch now. They've just moved a bunch more graphics code to the GPU with QE2d, so there's less dependence on getting the absolute last bit of performance from the CPU that there's ever been. And on the marketing side they've finally put a stake through the heart of OS 9 by dropping the last OS 9 bootable Mac. Switching the CPU will let them cut off the head of OS 9 and stuff its mouth with garlic for good measure. There's nothing holding them back from completing the transition they started by bringing Steve Jobs back from NeXT with an actual operating system instead of a bunch of really great graphics libraries tied together with spit and baling wire that they called Mac OS.
I suspect that Leopard, even on the PPC, won't run on any Mac that can't support Quartz Extreme. That way it'll run really fast even if the codebase isn't quite as portable as they hoped.
I don't like the processor change, but if that's what it takes to kill the classic Mac OS for good I guess it's worth it.
I am also baffled by this senseless turn of events and have written on the subject from a slightly different angle called Switching is a loser's game at The CDCer blog.
I am all for supporting Intel, but Mac OS X is platform-neutral by design, which is a huge advantage for our platform and shouldn't be casually thrown away.
I wonder whether someone should start a petition to save the PPC Mac, maybe SJ will listen this time.
What some people seem to be overlooking is, *some* Mac evangelists were raving about the new G5s over Intel because the G5 seemed to be a better "bang for the buck" system than anything you could buy with Intel's processor in it AT THAT TIME.
Lots of Mac users I knew were primarily excited because the G5 running at up to 2Ghz seemed to just be the very beginning of a long, prosperous upgrade path. Intel's P4 had already been around a long time and they'd released a couple "flops" (way overpriced "Extreme" P4's for example). It wasn't looking like they were going to be in a better position than IBM was.
Jumping a whole year ahead now and saying "Hey, IBM didn't do what we all hoped... ramping up the G5 speeds quickly because of having a whole new architecture to work from." -- why would that really mean you're "eating crow" if you now agree that Intel ended up having the better roadmap?
I am all for supporting Intel, but Mac OS X is platform-neutral by design, which is a huge advantage for our platform and shouldn't be casually thrown away.
I suspect one reason they're doing this is to make it *really* platform neutral, to flush out the last of the heritage of the old Mac OS.
Because if it was really platform-neutral like NeXTstep was, this wouldn't be a big deal. But it's not. It's not just Classic, either... Carbon is leading two different lives, and only one of these lives has a future. There's CEF-format executables that are PPC only and run on Mac OS 9 as well as Mac OS X, and there's Mach-O executables that are OSX-only but can be turned into fat... I mean universal... binaries.
I would go AMD or Intel, whichever is really faster next 2 years. Isn't this "fast" thing meant for games, multimedia applications?
I go whichever OS has all games (read Carmacks post) and more multimedia applications and can run whatever AGP card, Sound card I plug it in.
It won't be mactel, it will be Wintel or AMDTel than.
They tell us not to be "zeolot" or "fanboy", why the heck OS X matters than? Didn't I know to install Slackware latest to my P4 1800 and dual boot to xp?
Steve Jobs is no god, Apple is just a hardware maker, I go with most compatible and fastest.
As a mac user, I will be able to plug SB Live, standard SB Live to my mactel and run it with couple of drivers from creative? No.
Also that will happen while win32/64 driver with all directsound support is there.
Pass.
If you're worried about someone other than Intel/AMD coming along and delivering the Next Big Thing(tm), well, the universe of Mac code is going to be a heck of a lot more portable after next year, won't it?
This is the important bit.
Apple tried to make this happen in 1997, when they announced Rhapsody and wanted everyone to code for Yellow Box.
They got handed their heads by Adobe and the rest, back then.
there's no reason to do this now, other than all the reasons that make it not only practical, but the perfect time
But it's the right time because they can get away with it. Not because they suddenly went "Oh My God, The Power PC Stinks". It's not stinking any worse now than it has at almost any other time in the past five years. It's actually looking better in the medium term than it has for most of that time.
I'm convinced the loss of Carbon-chained developers will be miniscule. Cocoa is just so much easier to develop new apps in that most of the major Carbon users left are the big development houses
Plus absolutely anyone who's doing cross-platform work, since there's no OpenStep any more, GNUStep has languished, and there's no Objective-C.NET. That's most of the open source community, to start with, but even Apple's iTunes is Carbon, as far as I can tell, because that's what it takes to be portable.
That's undoubtedly why they've made sure they can build Carbon universal binaries... but they have to be Mach-O, not CEF. Which means it's not as big a problem as it could be... but it's still easier under Cocoa.
It would be a real smart move for Apple, though, to give GNUstep a thumbs up and to re-release OpenStep for Windows... so people can write apps that work superbly on OS X and decently on Linux and Windows.
I understand your point, I think, but I'm not commenting on that, just a point of info--
This stone age font--did you copy it into the font folder in the os9 system folder or one of the several OSX font dirs?
One of the nifty backward compatibility features of osx is that it uses any classic font (true type or postscript) that is in the classic system folder (though if there is an OSX version, it'll use that first). No need to translate it to unicode or whatever you tried to do. Classic need not be running. I use one named combinumerals that started life as a windows truetype, which i translated into a mac truetype. I also use a couple ps fonts that I got from adobe years ago. All merely copied into the OS9 fonts folder. Simple.
If it's a ps font, you'd want to have the ps font file and at least one bitmap size file, or better, a font suitcase with several sizes and faces.
Well, it would have allowed you to see all the things which you seem to feel are glaring flaws (one menu bar, dock etc etc). All of the things you mentioned are evident after a few minutes use.
Everyone who has posted about adapting to the Mac says it takes a month to really get used to it. I have never, ever, seen anyone go "Poke around for 15 minutes, if you find anything that bothers you, then it's not worth it for you to get a Mac."
Sweeping generalisations are not often useful. If you're happier on Windows, that's great, why the need to judge others and pretend to know their motives?
Because I didn't. Because after going to all my Mac using friends, (looking for help) that's what they ended up saying. Because that's how they all, all used the Mac. That isn't a sweeping generalisation, this is what I found out by talking to experenced Mac users.
I imagine it's cmd-delete because it's a destructive action, and you wouldn't want to do it by mistake
First, how the heck is moving the file to the trash can a destructive action? You can do it by mistake, and if it's a mistake, you just put it back.
You can right click on the file and delete in one action, no problem. No extra buttons need be pressed. Come on, there is NO reason at all to require two buttons to delete. None. Zip. Zero. Nada. Zilch.
Most of your comments boil down to 'Argh, it's different from Windows, how dare they'; they're neither constructive nor attempting to be objective, that's why I said you're not trying.
Sit back, an imagine for a minute. What if there's a perfect way of deleting something. What if Windows does it? So, is it the Windows way, or the right way?
As for remedies, you'd have to actually *want* to accept something different from the conventions you're used to. If you're complaining about the position of buttons on the windows being on the left or right, I doubt you'll ever be happy but on Windows/Windows clones.
Actually, I'm angry at being scammed. I was told that the Apple UI was a superior product, and after using it for a month, it certainly is not. I spent hundreds of dollars to learn this lesson. Even though my Mini is a month old, I'll lose a good chunk of cash selling it. Other Mac users don't seem concerned about that, it seems that they just have money rain down from the sky at them.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Both Motorola and IBM have dicked around with Apple by not advancing the PPC.
Apple had production delays because IBM couldn't get chips out fast enough. No higher-speed G5 chips and no releasable G5 laptop compelled Jobs to do this in the first place.
I for one, welcome our new Intel overlords, if only for one reason: On my iMac DV SE (circa 2000) Mac OS X has been getting snappier with each release with the same G3 processor. I can't imagine how fast it will be on modern Intel hardware.
My father is a blogger.
There's a difference between 30 years of bad design, none of which has ever been discarded, and a 30 year old design that's been refined, repaired, with bad ideas like multiplexed files and System V networking and maybe a hundred different IOCTL and FCNTL calls discarded and replaced.
In 1975 the PDP-11 had a complex instruction set and 8 16-bit data registers. That was actually pretty advanced for a processor: in 1975 Intel's top of the line CPU had a relatively simple instruction set and 3 16-bit register pairs for data. In 1980 the x86 had a complex instruction set and had upgraded to 4 16-bit data registers, while the VAX (which replaced the PDP-11 as the most common UNIX platform) had a complex instruction set and 16 32-bit data registers. By 1995 the x86 had a complex instruction set and 8 32-bit data registers, while a typical RISC processor running UNIX had 32 to 64 data registers, 32-64 bits wide. In 2005 the x86 still has 8 32-bit data registers, and the main reason the Opteron (x86-64) gets better performance than Intel processor is that it's got 16 of them... like the VAX did in 1980.
Which is why little companies or unimportant divisions of big companies can spend a fraction of the resources on their processors and still keep up with and often surge ahead of Intel's heroic efforts to make the x86 go fast.
In 1975 the big OS for personal computers was this new thing called CP/M. In 1980 IBM came out with a new personal computer, and Microsoft bought a clone of CP/M and improved it a bit and called it MS-DOS. Within a year you had a choice of real CP/M or this clone of CP/M to run on it.
In 1983 Bill Gates released MS-DOS 2.0, which incorporated features from Microsoft's high-end OS, Xenix, Microsoft's port of UNIX to the 8086. There were obvious differences, for example CP/M had used "/" as an option character because the folks at Digital Research and Microsoft were used to DEC's mainframe and mini OSes which used "/" that way... so MS-DOS 2 used "\" for the path separator so old CP/M software would still run, although it did make it more of a pain to use file names in Microsoft's newly-released C compilers because "\" was the escape character.
Microsoft abandoned Xenix within a couple of years because Macintosh and Windows became his new big idea. So they never regularised the path separators, and people are still finding security holes in Windows programs today because of this decision made in CP/M 30 years ago.
But... MS-DOS now had Xenix file handles and error codes. Now it happened that both MS-DOS and UNIX returned an error code of 2 when you tried to open a file that didn't exist. And in both MS-DOS and UNIX file handle 2 was standard error, where error messages were written. But... in Xenix, the return from an "open" when an error occurred was -1, and an error code was returned as a separate value in a variable called "errno" (these days "errno" is usually a macro or a function that returns the error from the current thread). In MS-DOS there was a separate error flag, and the return value from the call was either the file handle or the error number.
This turned out to be a problem: one MS-DOS program made a mistake parsing a file name and tried to open a zero-length string as a file. It failed to check the error flag on opening a file and treated what it returned as a file handle, so by chance it wrote a message to file handle 2 when it got an error code of 2, and the combination of these two bugs meant the program seemed to work. In Windows 95, the return code changed to a 3 and the program quit working.
When someone at Microsoft figured this out, rather than say "fix your program" Microsoft changed Windows to return error code 2 when this particular combination of events occured. This special case code is still in Windows today. Windows is full of special cases like this, so that some 25 year old program that probably nobody uses any more won't hang. Microsoft co