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The Odds at Macworld
Moby Cock writes "Jason O'Grady has posted the odds on what is to be announced at the Macworld Expo beginning next week. Coming in at 100:1 is OS X 10.5 and even money on a new and sexy Intel Mac Minis and iBooks. Gentlemen, start your credit cards."
You can always tell which rumors are true by the rapid-fire Apple lawsuits to the websites responsible.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I have no problem paying $.99 for a song, but i will pay no more. This happens and I will be looking other places for my music for my iPod. They have to pay none of the traditional distribution costs of CD's, so they shouldn't even be the price they are now. you want to be greedy, i'll look elsewhere.
O'Grady writes :"Hopefully it'll be the PowerBook nano I've been dreaming of. Unfortunately, it's not likely as the pro software (Final Cut, Creative Suite, etc.) isn't universal binary yet. Rosetta emulation isn't fun folks. Odds: 50-1."
So, basically, he's saying that because a certain segment of the userbase will be waiting a little while, EVERYONE should wait?
If Apple doesn't ship Intel Powerbooks now, these users are going to be waiting, because they certainly aren't going to buy G4 powerbooks unless they absolutely have to. If Apple does ship Intel Powerbooks now, these users are going to be waiting for their apps to be shipped as Universal binaries.
So, given that these customers are ogoing to be waiting either way, why shouldn't Apple get hardware on the market to serve the customers who *can* buy now? Customers for whom XCode is their main app, not Photoshop or Final Cut.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
Not for certain, but I'd give you 3.1x10^8 to 1.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Oh, man, that's gotta hurt the Mac zealots even more than the switch to intel. Apple hiring *PC laptop designers* to build the next Powerbook.
I think Mac zelots (arguably myself included) are more enamored with the OS than the hardware. My gripe with PC manufactures out there is a lot of shoddy support, bottom-of-the-barrel parts, and bulky/ugly laptop design and only a handfull of gems.
Yes, a sexy new Intel based mac mini seems likely, but in light of that why are they only giving 10:1 odds on an iLife/Frontrow upgrade? It seems the new mini would be the perfect platform to add PVR functionality to, but with no upgrades/additions to iLife, it seems the new minis would move from a killer living room appliance to a minor curiousity...
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
At 50:1 for an x86 PB I'd put $30-$40 on one and that way I could afford one to buy one straightaway. I don't think those odds are realistic. With iLife 06 being good value at 10:1 a $5 bet would more than pay for the PB bet even if there weren't PBs.
the more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the pipe
considering there is a story just today with a quote by Jobs saying there would be some major releases. I would think your wrong.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
O'Grady is, as always, full of crap. The iPod nano has no video compression/decompression chip as the iPod with video does, and the PortalPlayer chipset it comes with doesn't do real-time decoding of H.264. Supplying such a feature via firmware is impossible.
Manufacture != Design
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Interesting speculation, but a lot of it just doesn't quite add up.
-The AirPort "Ultra" would "be able to stream video to your TV - in High Definition". Where is all this HD content coming from? Not from the iTMS, not from DVDs. Assuming this AirPort is running 802.11g, streaming HD content is iffy at best. Apple is known for making things easy. I don't see how this could possibly fly as a consumer product. Maybe in another year or two, with faster WiFi and more HD content.
-Jason reckons that the Intel PowerBooks won't be released because (despite all the engineering done) not all the pro software is written yet for Intel, and Rosetta emulation just isn't fun. But then his #1 prediction is for Intel iBooks? Doesn't make sense to me.
-Why are iLife & iWork updates so unlikely (10% and 4% odds, respectively)? Unless Apple is just willing to let this software die (unlikely given relations with Microsoft), this is practically a given. Maybe not until summer, but the odds of an announcement or mention are more likely on the order of 50% - 75%, IMO.
Sorry, I'm just not buying it. Guess I'll wait until next week to find out for sure.
But if they upgrade the iBooks first, won't they be significantly more powerful than the Powerbooks for a while. Assuming Apple is going for a new Pentium M of some kind, that is.
The Buddha would tell us that anyone who goes on about Buddhaism for more than two sentences is to be ignored because they do not get it.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I just dont think Apple is going to make a DVR to actually compete with Tivo. Let alone "defeat it in one fell swoop!!#!11111!!!".
Might they make DVR software for say, college kids and such? With a little dongle for cable input? Sure. But this would hardly make any waves in the DVR market.
I don't buy the "hits" so the songs I'd purchase would probably come out cheaper than $.99.
That sound you hear in the background is thousands of executives worldwide laughing at your naiveté.
The one sure thing is that, whatever he announces at MacWorld, Steve Jobs will made it seem like the most amazing development in the history of computing, and the Apple Store site will be bogged down with orders.
Geoff
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
Apple's productivity suite will get upgrades to Pages and Keynote with the possible addition of a modern Office-killing spreadsheet application (rumored to be called "Numbers" or "Sheets"). If it reads and writes Excel files the Apple spreadsheet will be the final nail is Microsoft Office's coffin. Microsoft will waste no time in announcing the end of support for Office for the Mac if this happens.
And then Apple can kiss all of its corporate sales goodbye. Nope, not gonna happen. Maybe a light-duty, somewhat-compatible spreadsheet for people to make little lists with, but Apple knows it will lose more in corporate hardware sales than it can ever make back with their little $99-a-pop suite.
Besides, if there's one thing we have learned, it's that 100% compatibility with MS Office file formats is impossible. Can OOo do it? Can Quark or InDesign perfectly import Word docs? Hell, do MS Office for Mac and Win perfectly read each others' files? No, no, and no.
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A DVD player which doesn't moan about regions and doesn't prevent you from skipping would be a good start. I know about VLC and MPlayer OS X, but they don't work well on all DVDs. I have Region 1 DVDs which I can't even play on my Mac, but which work fine on my Linux box. This isn't the way it's supposed to be ...
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
Oh, man, that's gotta hurt the Mac zealots even more than the switch to intel.
As it happens, the intel announcement was taken with very little complaint in the Mac community. I went up to the SF apple store the day after the keynote last year, and it was business as usual. One sales associate there told me about one fanboy he pretty much needed to talk down from a ledge, but that was about it.
Apple hiring *PC laptop designers* to build the next Powerbook.
Want to talk pain? Imagine being one of those Sony designers, doing all that fine electronic and mechanical work, and having the quality of the product still be limited by Microsoft. At Apple, they'll be able to specify better materials, because there's actually enough margin to support it. Viao notebooks are cleverly designed, but the economics of the PC world means they have to be flimsy.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Apple will announce the release of a 3 button mouse after they realized what a hit they had with their 2 button model...
Actually the mightymouse only has one button and it looks and works just like the old single button mice. The trick is that depending on which finger you press down on the single button with you get a left or right click functionality and the trackball on top of it doubles as a third button. This is a typical Apple (aka. Steve Jobs) solution:
Fact #1: Official Apple policy is that a user only needs one mouse button.
Fact #2: Unfortunately experience has shown that it is better to have more mouse buttons.
Fact #3: Since we are talking aboute Apple (aka. Steve Jobs) it is not an option to back down on Fact #1.
Ergo: Design a mouse that has a single button that works like two buttons and has a trackball built in instead of a scroll-wheel giving 2d scrollingcapability. This has the dual effect of adding a little novelty to a new product and most importantly it enables Apple (aka. Steve Jobs) to save face by not having to back down on Fact #1.
It never ceases to amaze me how Apple continually seems to succeed in coming up with gadgets that sell like hotcakes but that really are only redesigns or recombinations of already existing ideas. Both the iPod and the Mighty Mouse really just combinine two old ideas into a new one. I have seen mice with builtin trackballs before but no design that was quite as elegant as the mightly mouse. Similarly the iPod is nothing new either, the inovation is really to marry an MP3 player with an obscene amount of storage space and package it in an elegant and ergonomically well designed package. Both these are, surprisingly enough, ideas that nobody had thought of even if they had been bloody obvious for years.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
OS X has supported multiple buttons and scroll wheels natively since its very first release, as the OS's event architecture was originally designed to accommodate Next's three-button mouse. Apple continued to develop the multi-button support under OS X despite shipping a single-button mouse. Most OS X applications (Cocoa, Carbon, and even Java) have always automatically taken advantage of the OS-level support for scroll wheels and right-clicking for basic tasks (e.g. copy, cut, paste) without doing anything, plus OS X developers routinely add additional contextual menus and other types of support for modern mice. I don't know a single OS X developer who routinely uses a single button mouse, and I've met a good number of them. On top of that, I believe that the Mighty Mouse's buttons are fully customizable in the System Preferences (not sure on that - I still use an old Logitech mouse on my Mac)
OS X applications never require a multi-button mouse, but they almost universally support them.
Once he stated that he thinks there will be a firmware upgarde to the iPod nano to support video I figured he was out to lunch. The 5G iPod has a hardware video decoder. You aren't going to be able to update your nano's software and get the same thing.
Lasers Controlled Games!
I've seen this incorrect information in more than one place. It's not emulation, it's on-the-fly translation. It is not painfully slow, and some of that software will run substantially faster on the new notebooks than on the old G4s.
Native x86 software, of course, will be faster still.
I'm getting an Intel Powerbook as soon as I'm reasonably sure there aren't design/manufacturing issues.
Yonah is hot, power hungry, 32bit, and has pathetic floating point performance.
Not one of these points is correct. Nice job.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Except DVD-Rs are a STANDARD in even low-end computers today.
I could give less then two shits about any "Apple Product Strategy." Apple is a company, and they are allowed to do what they want in these regards, just like I'm allowed to bitch and ultimatly make the choice to not buy it.
Because of this little bit of BS, they lost a sale.
The 12 inch iBook fits everything I want in a product, except it lacks a dvd-r. Super small, Plays emulators, Browses web wirelessly, has office suite, connects to TV.... but you cant burn a dvd of the shit you download.
C'mon, thats some mega bullshit right there. Heck, I even want to pay them for the upgrade, and they wont let me.
Its apple zealots like you that piss off so many. Stop defending them, they dont need it. They already arnt getting my money because of their "product strategy" and thats enough.
My complaint stands, and apple still doesnt get my money.
One thing you can bet on is that 10.5 will be released simultaneously with their first Intel-based machine. You'd be crazy to bet that the latter can happen before the former. What would it run? There won't be a 10.4X86....
Don't be surprised if this IBook is the first to ship without a FireWire port.
Which instantly eliminates one of the big USPs of the whole iLife suite - that you can import, edit and burn your own movies. Without Firewire, how are you supposed to get the data off your digital camcorder? (Do many camcorders support USB 2.0 yet?) And what about all those people (like me) who have their data backed up on Firewire external drives? What are they supposed to do, transfer it on Zip discs when they upgrade?
Hell, Apple invented Firewire, so it's not like they have to pay a per-unit royalty to have one somewhere on the machine.
You must think in Russian.
Dude. Sneaker Net is obsolete. Fucking transfer your data over the network. Or put the iBook in target disk mode and get on with life.
/ ??? instead. And to someone who puts togther their own PCs with exactly what I want, Apple's way of doing things really seems bizarre at times and can really be a turn off.
Those are just work arounds.
Fact is, this is how Apple works. They like to dangle a carrot in front of your face (The $999 iBook, the Shuffle) to get you interested. But the thing is, they cripple the low end models so they can try to upsell you to the higher end models. And they like to carefully set their price points so that the next model up is "just a bit more".
On the PC side of things, the manufacturers can't pull that crap. If Sony decided they weren't going to put a DVD burner in their lower end models to try to sell more high end models, everyone would just go and buy a Compaq/HP/IBM/Dell/Acer/Gateway/EMachines/Toshiba