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Apple to Unveil New Leopard OS in August
Max Fomitchev writes "Looks like Apple is going to reveal its new cool and fast Mac OS code-named 'Leopard' in the upcoming World Developer's Conference in August. Good news for Apple! And terrible news for Microsoft. If 'Leopard' is really what it claims to be, i.e. fast and efficient, in sharp contrast to slow and resource hungry Windows Vista, we certainly would see Apple's remarkable market share gain next year."
Way back in the day, Apple code named their boxes by color. From the aforementioned article: So we can speculate that Leopard might not only be fast but also encourage a partitioned Windows installation using boot camp so that it can reference everything within Windows and run Windows apps flawlessly without having to reboot or (more importantly) reverse engineer Windows.
Again, this is just speculation, I've been expecting them to put 'red box' functionality in a release of OS X soon.
My work here is dung.
Seems like a great time to buy Apple shares right now as they are in a dip at around $57. Peaking at around $85 earlier this month with news of this and the new powermacs expected it will definitely be an easy jump if you are looking for a short term investment.
Business Voyeur
I mean c'mon. A day's worth of submissions, and you can't do any better than information that's been on the street for over a week, rewritten by a fifth-grader?
If "Leopard" is really what it claims to be, i.e. fast and efficient in sharp contrast to slow and resource hungry Windows Vista, we certainly would see Apple's remarkable market share gain next year."
Maybe the reason fewer people are taking Slashdot seriously is because Slashdot doesn't seem to take itself seriously.
Hire a f-ing editor to check out and rewrite the most egregious but still post-worthy submissions. No, a real editor, not one of your friends.
I remember Steve Jobs saying "Tiger will be out long before Longhorn".
Now maybe even Leopard will come out before Vista. But, I guess "reveal" is not really the same as "release".
Even if it weren't for the fact that this was announced, what, a week ago, it doesn't take a genius to realise that Apple will talk about their next OS at the forthcoming WWDC. It's what they've always done. Duh, that's what it's FOR. And those who care will know about it, and those who don't will ignore it. Just like THEY'VE always done. Fuck me, Slashdot gets lamer every day with shit "stories" like this. And I speak as a nominal Mac fan.
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/jun/26wwdc.ht ml
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Neither the submission nor the article actually says anything about the OS, yet we're told the Leopard is "cool and fast" without any evidence whatsoever. Yet somehow this magic OS, which we know nothing about, is going to cause "remarkable market share gain next year." Nope, never heard that before.
It seems as if journalists (or Apple proponents in general) have caught whatever afflicted the Linux fan-boys. Every release or change in Apple software/hardware is seen as something that could trigger a whole bunch of Windows users to switch.
Seems a bit out of character..
So just how does anyone know how it's performance is at this time.
...since it's in beta at this time, I'm sure lots of people can tell you EXACTLY what the performance of Vista is "at this time". It sucks!
Dude, read that sentence back...I'll wait, so you can sound out the words.
If they lost that image, I'd certainly consider a mac of some sort
So, basically you choose your computer on the basis of its marketing image, rather than any serious look at what it can actually do, or how it works. You realise how lame that is? Still, it is certainly this sort of attitude that has handed Microsoft its 90%+ market share, so you're not alone.
And in my humble (and the rest of the world's) experience, Microsoft has not made anything that works faster than the previous edition. I dare you to name a product that Microsoft has revised, and turns out faster - I am not talking about more secure (which I accept that Windows 2000 is), but one that runs faster.
Why? Because Microsoft has chosen the option to add in more options, rather than streamline. Can't really fault them for this strategy, since it seems to work for them and most people, but it annoys the hell out of me.
I'm waiting for the release called "Pete Puma"!
Yeeeeeeeeeeee.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
Quote: The upcoming "Leopard" OS is expected to be even slicker and faster than its predecessor OS X.
Fleur de Sel
...they release OS X Liger.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Sure, why not? http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/
Obviously.
I too hate to point out the obvious but...
Thousands of casual computer users are switching. I switched. I know at least 10 people in my age group (20-30) who have swtiched. 10 more who are thinking about it. People looking to buy a new comptuer when they go off to college are looking at Macs more seriously than ever. They do the same things that any casual user is looking for in a Windows computer (email, web, chat, word processing), they look better doing it, and they work flawlessly (and better) with that iPod they got for Christmas.
You're right when it comes to Gamers not switching to Macs, but how many gamers don't have a PS2 or Xbox? You're right when it comes to businesses not switching to Macs, but the home computer market is certainly not worth overlooking.
Mac's marketshare may not be stellar yet, but compare it to their marketshare 5 years ago.
"...we certainly would see Apple's remarkable market share gain next year." Remarkable market share? Ok, I'm a Mac guy - have been for ... too long, but are you kidding? 3-5% is remarkable?
Well, maybe in so much as how small it is given how good it is, but I don't think that's what you meant when you used "remarkable market share..."
Yes, it requires a (somewhat) beefy 3d graphics card to make full use of Aero Glass. But that's just the UI. Rarely is the UI a system's bottleneck. I imagine that with the revamped TCP/IP stack and memory manager, Vista should yield performance improvements over XP/2003 for a wide range of apps.
Sure it might have some bearing on upgrade OS sales, but does it really sell computers? I mean if you go into a store and try out a new computer, it's always going to be feel much faster than even a 2 year old computer. No matter how bloated an OS is, a new computer with a fresh OS installed on it will always seem fast. I don't see how it's a differentiating factor.
If "Leopard" is really what it claims to be, i.e. fast and efficient in sharp contrast to slow and resource hungry Windows Vista, we certainly would see Apple's remarkable market share gain next year."
People have been saying that since Jaguar. You're not going to see Apple's share suddenly jump up in the desktop market because it still carries the stigma of not being compatible with anything and being ridiculous to troubleshoot when something breaks.
That's why Apple stuff sppeals to a lot of people. It's something not everybody has. Buying Apple shows you're different. iPods are excluded from this of course. I mean, who doesn't have an iPod :-)
-- Cheers!
In calendar year 2005 (Q2-4 FY2005, Q1 FY2006), Apple unit sales were 4.7 million.
In calendar year 2005, total PC unit sales were 208.6 million.
Apple's selling plenty to survive as a profitable niche product, sure. But they are competition for Microsoft in the same sense mainframes are.
Ummmm . . . Apple has been adding more options and features to their OS with every 10.x release while streamlining it every time. The minimum sys reqs for Vista Ultimate with Aero are through the roof.
Well one could go with history and note the fact that EVERY new version of Windows has been a lot slower than the predecessor. Meanwhile every version of OS X has been faster than the predecessor.
If you look at the unit sales of Macs from Apple quarterly reports, you'll see that they is usually significantly larger growth YoY that in the overall PC market. That means growing market share.
Of confirm it by looking at sites browser stats. This one shows Mac userbase doubling in 3 years.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.
I can see why you selected your username. But you'd do better if you didn't overreach yourself with your FUD.
Did the submitter even READ what he wrote?
If "Leopard" is really what it claims to be, i.e. fast and efficient in sharp contrast to slow and resource hungry Windows Vista, we certainly would see Apple's remarkable market share gain next year."
WTF is that? First off, it's wrong. It's very very wrong. Tiger is better than XP now, but did we see 'Apple's remarkable market share gain this year'? No. There is nothing certain about Apple and 'market share gain' no matter how superior their products. Forget 'remarkable'. Second off, it's written so badly I had to go over it three times to make sure it really said what it said.
Really? Not according to this article: http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/busine
Apple may have lost market share in the late 90's / early 2000's but they are recovering. I believe this a lot of this is due to OS X.
I generally don't trust statistics but I have more faith in these numbers than someone who calls himself MSFanBoi2.
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
It's still too little. While thousands switch to Mac, there are hundreds switching from Mac, and thousands of new computer users who choose PC instead of Mac, which pretty much wipes out gains. It's pretty easy to see why, at least from the "availability" point of view. Around here, there are several big-box stores that only sell PCs. There's a cool Mac store, but it keeps limited bankers hours, so it ends up if you get that "new computer" itch at 7:00 pm, you'll find several big-box chains to sell you PCs at a time the Mac store has been closed for at least an hour.
Where were you when the voynix came?
I too have noticed a downward trend of the quality of article posted by slashdot. However this debate is just like the linux debate. The actual non-enterprise market will for the foreseable future be Windows. Being a programmer and doing a lot of linux work with a lot of fanboys I enevitably take some ribbing for running Micro$oft. However, I tried the switch to linux - purely on the influence of my co-workers - last time I built a pc. I spent about 25% of my time looking for an application like X where X was something I already used on Windows. I eventually realized it was insane to try and be windows LIKE when I could actually have windows. Mac is going to find this out the same way. The hardcore graphics people will likely always use Mac, but they are likely to lose their recent converts to windows. Why bother paying an extra 30% for hardware/software only to run the SAME as any other computer? Unfortunatly 80%+ of the world is too stupid to really consider switching. It took them 5 years just to learn where their any key was and they aren't going to be switching to go back to knowing less than nothing. The Mac has always been a great Mac. It is now a crappy PC and unfortunatly that's what they are marketing it as. Finally to you fanboys out there talking about efficient Mac development - Mac's are more like consoles than computers - Windows has a billion different pieces of hardware and software it has to deal with - Mac has a few hundred pieces of hardware and a few thousand software titles. It's a bit smaller scope project.
Eat a Chicken, You know you want to.
I dunno I finalized my switch on linux once I got E. I have alot of my friends hooked. And the applications are there for your average everyday user. I had my sister and parents switched for a while. Now that my sister is going off to college in the fall she bought a mac.
I know not everyone is going to switch so you have a point... but presentation has alot to do with it for most people. Even simple stupid stuff.
Gaming on linux isn't bad. I've yet to come across a game that I want to play that doesn't work under cedega or doesn't have a linux client. It turns out that I also happen to be a huge nwn fan (even before I switched) and play alot of unreal tournament and quake. But I have other things that I still play like WoW, starcraft, sim city 2k and they all seem to work just fine. Granted I can't run the cutting edge games but most people get them, play them for a short time and dispose. This saves me money. If I buy 3-4 games a year I'm lucky. But I play them all into the ground.
There exists some positive integer N that you are the Nth person to read this signature.
Now I've heard everything. A Windows supporter on the defensive, having to deny that MS's days are numbered. My how times have changed.
Sure, how about 2001 vs 2005? A quick Google found this from 2002 and this for 2005 (hint: they are basically the same, maybe even lower). The rest of your post hit the nail on the head (though maybe unintentionally) - Mac's are all about perception and appearance. They seem to have a far larger market share than they actually do.
That being said, I'm also considering getting a Macbook :) (why no integrated video, why?!?).
The thing that handed Windows its share was that it had no competition. No OS which will not run on third party hardware is ever going to make a dent in Windows.
As to the marketing image. its important to a lot of people, but perhaps its not just the image as put out by Cupertino of the products. Its also the image put out by the Mac people, the attitudes struck and so on. Its something that a lot of people do not want to be associated with. Something that has been commented on in the Mac online community fairly often. Enthusiasts who are their chosen platform's worst enemy.
I'm in the process of switching myself. No more Windows. No more DRM nightmares. No more "trusted computing". No more paying over the odds for software and hardware.
I'm switching to Ubuntu.
Once again, the Slashdot editors did a great job, not. This news was released by Apple last month, and the writing quality of this news segment is terrible. Leopard's expected features are built-in virtualization, related with Boot Camp, a new file system (possibly, unsure on this one myself), new finder (hopefully finally not carbon anymore), improved spotlight, dashboard widget editor, improved mail.app, ichat 4.0 with tabbed chatting, safari 3.0, and of course a ton of security fixes, bug fixes, etc. I dont know what exactly will be "new" of course. Will it be cool and fast? We'll have to wait and see...It will obviously crawl around on older Macs (G3s) if they are even supported, but speed along on the new Intel Macs. Market share... With Apple's new Intel Macs, market share is already increasing, but not by much - probably in the range of 0.50 - 1.50% this year. However, through 2007 I expect Apple to gain a few more percent market share, and they might compete more aggressively against Dell and others. Apple will never gain more market share with their software, only with their hardware (unless of course, they license OS X to the PC cloners). Just my take on all this, and my attempt to sort of complete this news post as it should have been done.
Oops, first one is actually 2001.
you apparently forgot to type "windw" in the word "windOwS".
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Microsoft released their Leper OS years ago
People talk about Apple taking MS market share, about OS X getting viruses, about the Steve releasing OS X for generic Intel boxes.
None of those things will EVER happen. Apple has come to understand you can run quite a profitible biz by having 7-10% marketshare. It even helps them because the evil virus authors don't write viruses due to it's market share compared to windows(one of the reasons). The OS runs well (one of the main reasons) because Apple controls the hardware it runs on, as opposed to MS having to deal with generic Asian motherboards and horribly written driver software by 3rd party vendors.
The Steve never wanted to become Bill Gates. Bill Gates and Microsoft has come to accept Apple because it does not effect them. Microsoft could wait another 5 years to release Vista and it would still be bought by 90% of the planet who runs PC's.
The article had NO MEANING. It was one of those things you say to your buddies while hanging around. "You know, if Leopard is as fast as Apple says so, MS could be in deep [insert colorful adjective here]." Then you're promptly shot down by your friends, reminding you that the masses have a "Crapple" frame of mind because their last experience with Mac OS was with the pizza-box LC IIs running System 7 from back when they were in high school, and they don't care any more.
Not only does this bode poorly for Slashdot's credibility as having important and accurate information, but what does this say about journalism in general, when this passes for a good article. Oh, wait, it's not even an article! It's a blog posting! Do we even know who this Max Fomitchev is? I've never heard of him. This place is slowly becoming a rumor mill full of dupes.
Come back when you've got an article from a credible source, no less than 500 words, with some real analysis, facts to back it up, and maybe a cool graphic or charts or something. Until then, stop wasting my time.
Rawr
"Microsoft released their Leper OS years ago"
Who can forget the ad blitz that started on St. Patrick's Day, 2002, featuring an Irish midget dressed in green, saying "Leper cahn do many things!"
Where were you when the voynix came?
Windows is used primarly by people who have to let others (salesmen) make their choices for them. This may be due to a lack of familiarity with computer systems, or more commonly total fear. And you're right, I cannot see this type of person disappearing, or Microsoft stopping their main business practice of preying on these vunerable individuals.
What you fail to recognise however, is that Microsoft never have, and never will, deal with advancement of technology (why bother when you've got Sun, IBM, Apple etc. doing it for you, ten years in advance?).
No... Windows will continue to represent the 'world of computing' to people who don't know what a computer is (and presumably think that Macdonald's make the best food in the world!!).
As for Apple having a 'niche' market share, this is really funny. You could equally argue that more than 90% of people who need a stable and robust system that can process huge files, and have more important things to do then 'patch' their operating system every other week, have already ruled windows out. Remember those of us with an interest in the computer industry spent ten years listening to MS fanboys like yourself claiming that Mac's were 'rubbish' with their windows and newfangled mice and would NEVER replace dos.
Oh, and love the gaming bit. Yeah, mac users will never be able to compete with people who spend $1000 to play 'niche' games on a computer. Yeah idiots like Mac users will probably just have to spend $50 dollars on a gamecube and play stuff created by the world greatest games developers... oh dear. Not to worry Vista should be out soon, so you will be able to spend another $100 on making your email program run more slowly. How the world of technology envies you!!!!
You are all too negative about this idiotic little piece. Its value is enormous, not in what it says, but that it appears at all. What it is telling you is: it is too early to buy, and not too late to sell. As long as pieces like this are coming out and being linked to, we know that sentiment is absurdly optimistic. Don't worry, it will change.
So, Editors, pay not attention, keep linking to them as long as there are any to be found. When there are none, that's the interesting time. The rest of us will await with interest the arrival of the cluster of really negative ones. There was one swallow recently, Herb Greenberg's postings on his CBS blog. But it was only one. We need to see a whole flock....
You'd do well to follow your own advice. I've already posted this, but what the heck:
Q1 2001 (roughly 5.4% worldwide) and Q1 2006 (roughly 2.0% worldwide)
Windows XP is responsive and quick even on my son's old 800 MHz Duron system with 256MB of RAM. I sold all the Macs, bought PCs, and haven't regretted it one bit.
"I'm waiting for the release called "Pete Puma"!"
Looking forward to "Ornery Ocelot" OS in 2008, followed by "Citified Cerval" in 2011.
Where were you when the voynix came?
By your own logic, 10.5 must really suck performance wise. You can't even get it. Thats the ulitmate in suck.
Windows 2000 runs games a little faster than 98 (or NT 4, if you want to make that comparison instead).
Rubbish. Windows 2000 was the one edition that I had to think twice about. I know many people who kept running windows 98 on a seperate machine (or as a dual boot) because it was faster for games. Windows 2000 added a lot, including better stability and security, but it was not faster on the same hardware.
Direct x - maybe, but I am stil not sure until I see some benchmarks. I know new releases removed bugs, and added support for more hardware.
"Unfortunately, most users associate Carbon with all those ported ("carbonized") OS 9 C++ applications written on top of Metrowerks' PowerPlant"
Or they think of the Han Solo-shaped hatrack leaning against the wall in Jabba's palace.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Streamline? Apple added dashboard and spotlight in 10.4. Not to mention the other 150 new features in Tiger. As for speed, 10.4 seems faster since apple has added more acceleration using the video card, and more caching. It also uses a lot more ram. Its not always faster on older hardware, especially if you don't have the ram to handle it. Apple also changed their startup sequence for services with little dependance on rc.d startup scripts and cron anymore.
Windows XP is also around 4 years old. On newer systems its very fast. If you ever ran it on a k6-2 400 or some other outdated hardware, you'll know how much slower it is to Windows 2000 or NT4 (in some cases). XP introduced a higher level of software compatibility than Windows 2000 though. You can run more software in XP that home users have enjoyed. I ran NT4 for years at home and had trouble playing many games (except quake2 and AOE2). It only supported directx 3. Things have changed for the better on both platforms. Both still need a great deal of work.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
...that said XP was slow and bloated. and 2000 was slow and bloated. and NT was slow and bloated.
I never had a problem with any of those.... now 9x/ME were a steaming pile, that much I'll grant.
I have a few concerns regarding Vista, but size and speed really aren't among them.
Just another flamebait story, without any meat in the article.
Well played on the research. Still, why are you considering buying a Mac now, and not in 2001? Clearly something has changed. Is it just intel? Has that made enough difference alone?
I don't remember seeing Mac commercials on TV 5 years ago. I don't remember even CONSIDERING a Mac as a viable platform five years ago. Again, something clearly has changed. Is it only in my head? I suppose that's possible.
Macs are all about perception and appearance, but I know very few people who felt let down when that perception faded, and they were left with a new Mac. I know that I've been very pleased with my Mac. I've heard some customer support horror stories, but I've had nothing but good experiences (2 of them to be precise).
Simply put, I think Macs are a better option for non-tech-heads and I think more people realize this now than they have in years.
First it was 'come out of the closet', then it was 'unveiling', now I'm supposed to not only be fast but encourage Windows AND run WinApps flawlessly? just what do you expect of me anyway?
Boolean logic: True, False, and File not found.
to gain marketshare for OS/X and their position becomes more difficult.
//mac owners// can see the writing on the wall. Move to the new platform or else.
While we don't know the contracts they have with their suppliers a number of things work against OS/X gaining any considerable amount of the market.
1. Apple is the only company that sells hardware legally capable of running OS/X. This limits the number of sales for OS/X more than anything.
2. Apple's suppliers may not be able to keep up with a huge spike of sales. Apple is probably required to place orders in large multiples and with their sales, even improving, probably is adverse to ordering a larger number as their "niche" market does not guarantee that they will sell.
3. Most consumers don't care. Most look at price and continue to do so and that price is of the machine.
4. Most consumers will never see a Mac in the store. The rollout through BestBuy may do more for Mac Sales than any change to the OS.
5. Kind of a repeat, but how many companies sell PCs with Windows installed versus OS/X installed?
6. Geeks are not a major market factor, and there are more geeks concerned with staying up with the newest hardware on the Windows side than Mac side.
7. Most of the new Intel-Mac interest is sales to existing Mac owners. They
I think shelf space is the real key. Get a big-box popular retailer like BestBuys into the mix and they can move more machines than by themselves. To me the "apple experience" at Apple stores is one of indifference. I did not get the impression they really wanted to sell me one. It just didn't seem important to them. Now iPods and such were still high on their "buy this version because".
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Wow is it 1999???
I reall don't suffer foos lightly and you are a fool!
1. Gamers use gaming consoles. Repeat after me gaming consoles.
2. Gramdma ain't going to run out and buy a new computer because of Vista. And if Grandma had so much trouble learning to send email on XP why the hell would she run out and buy Vista? IT's not the same interface moron. So there's a learning curve and the Mac is easier to learn than Windows.
3. You have no grasp of the Business market. Wordprocessing, Spreadsheets, Email oh my. In a word,OpenOffice. I've used it on Windows and it runs fine. Hell their presentation software runs a powerpoint presentation better than powerpoint!
The point is most businesses do not need to run Windows because they do not use software that runs on Windows only. Alot of businesses to simplify deployment are turning to Terminal Server or Citrix. You can run either client in the Mac. Thus if you need access to some Windows software you can easily access it using Terminal Server or Citrix.
4. Hundreds of thousands of virsues. Home users might not mind being infected but businesses sure do. That's forcing alot of IT departments to look at alternatives. Consider you can dualboot Windows with a Mac and soon run it in Virtualization - that makes a Mac look more attractive.
Here's the deal, to run Vista you need new hardware and new software. Alot of your programs will not run under Vista, which means replacing them. Consider you can run your existing software under the Mac, why not try the Mac? It might not work for everyone but then again it will work for alot of organizations.
Yeah, funny how these people 'who have absolutely no clue about computing' were all using cd-rom, multimedia, usb, firewire, multitasking, GUI, mice etc, etc. a long long time before you!!!
You are very much mistaken. XP runs about 5-8% faster on the same processor and RAM as Windows 2000 did. Windows Server 2003 is leaps and bounds ahead of Windows 2000 Server in every category, in some, such as IIS, and file serving, its nearly 4x (not percent) thats FOUR TIMES faster.
Um, you really don't understand market share do you? Please get back to us after reviewing exactly how marketshare works. Please peruse http://www.pegasus3d.com/mac_sales.html. Apple's current marketshare of the PC world is now just under 2.0%
Are you seriously trying to say browser stats prove any type of marketshare?
My personal experience sounds quite similar. Perhaps the grandparent is local to me it's a local phenomenon? Or, perhaps it's a sign of a larger trend?
I actually have been considering a mac for the past couple years - the 12" iBooks and powerbooks were rather tempting. However, at the time I could not justify the extra money for something with less raw power. I actually ended up getting a dell laptop.
At present, the price points are actually a bit different. The macbook is actually very competetively priced, which I think will help their marketshare quite a bit. Of course, what I think will happen and what you think will happen is fairly moot - so far it hasn't helped their market share, which is still very low. Macs may give a lot of people that warm, fuzy feeling, but not many more people are buying them.
What is the author even basing these claims on?
Was any tests released that show e.g Vista Beta 2 is *slow* compared to OS X that I missed?
Or is it just FUD that once again managed to creep into a news submission?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
This has little to do with Apple. GUI's existed and were used even before Apple Lisa. The PC started with USB and CD-ROM at the same time Apple did (and few PC makers made the blunder of getting rid of standard serial ports in favor of USB at a time when few devices used USB: they just shipped standard AND USB at the same time). Multimedia dates back to the late 1970s. Firewire? Yes, Apple was ahead on that one.
Where were you when the voynix came?
I wasn't aware that "cool and fast" was an OS feature.
That means their worldwide sales figures were 5.4% bigger that quarter than the previous quarter, and the year ago quarter. It's not saying that their market share is 5.4%. That article doesn't quote their worldwide market share, only the US one. And as their US market share is always larger than their worldwide market share, that should have given you another clue that you'd made that comprehension error.
Apple market share has grown in the 2000s, since OSX came out. Shrinking market share is a story from the 1990s, with OS9 and earlier.
5.4% worldwide was the increase in their market share. The first link never mentions their actual worldwide marketshare percentage. The 2.0% in the second link is their actual worldwide marketshare percentage in 2006. You're not comparing them properly.
49 20 68 61 76 65 20 74 6F 6F 20 6D 75 63 68 20 66 72 65 65 20 74 69 6D 65 2E
It's telling of the new slashdot community when droll like this is listed as insightful.
Owning and using both daily, I have no idea what you're on about but I'm fairly certain I'd need to be uninformed and possibly mentally handicapped to arrive at the same opinions as you.
Presently here, but not there.
And to even run MacOS you gotta purchase as system from Apple. Thats enough for the roof for me. No choice at all other than what Apple tells you to buy.
The minimum requirements for Vista with Aero are:
1.0 GHz CPU (not even in production any more...)
1.0 GB of RAM (which most current Windows PC's ship with)
Direct X 9.0 GPU with v2.0 Pixel Shader (which most modern AGP or PCI-X video cards are today, for well under 200 bucks)
128 MB video RAM (see above)
15 GB of free HDD space (if you don't have this free, I don't know what else to say)
DVD-ROM (got 10 bucks? You can buy one)
SO going thru that list I see about $500-$600. Which also gives you the ability, unlike Apple, to choose AMD or Intel, multitudes of motherboards, ATI or Nvidia (or even the new Intel embedded), multitudes of hard drives, RAM out the kazoo...
So how exactly is that "through the roof"????
Unfortunately, I think you're correct. Apple made a smart move when they started speaking of the whole "halo effect" to investors and potential investors. (Basically, Apple claimed that people would buy iPods as their introduction to Apple products, and it would then lead them down the path to buying their first Mac.) That helped tie stock price increases to the new Mac announcements, whether or not they directly generated enough sales to justify it. (Hey, it's "good news" because it potentially gives all these iPod buyers another new possibility to buy next, right!?)
I think there's some truth to the "halo effect" concept, too. iPods did give a big boost to the respect/credibility of Apple's name - and some people surely did see how well the whole iTunes/iPod thing worked together, and thought "If all the Mac stuff is this easy to use, maybe I should buy one of those computers next time?"
But I think just as often, a die-hard Windows user saw an iPod purchase as their token way to acknowledge Apple products while still shunning everything else they made. (What better a way to prove you're not just a "mindless Mac hater" than to whip out your new iPod, right? "See, I give everything a chance! But I'm telling you, Macs still suck right now!")
And now, with iPod competition heating up (as the market is about saturated anyway), it's time for Apple to push in other directions.
Every time Apple have released a version of OSX - through from 10.1 to the current 10.4, we have had no end of problems with all the little "under the bonnet" changes they keep making; IP stacks, security updates, SMB compatibility. That plus the £80-a-pop update price each year just makes supporting Macs on a corporate network annoying.
Don't get me wrong, I await 10.5 for my home Mac with a great deal of enthusiasm, I just wish they'd realise that businesses need version stability, rather than version surprises when selecting and using an OS.
Do you have some evidence that a minority of the savvy tech types use Windows PC's? In my experience, hardly any of these have Mac's, either.
Where were you when the voynix came?
This has everything to do whith the people you call 'idiots' seeinbg the trends the computer industry is following. As for your other errors: Lisa brought GUI to the marketplace. IMac brought usb to marketplace. MacintoshII (1986)... same year as dos4! brought CD-ROM/Multimedia to the marketplace. deal with it. Sure, these ideas were being developed decades before, but there is a HUGE difference between a working Xerox PARC prototype, and a consumer computer. As for firewire, yes, you are right, that I am right!
Probably the same way he knows that the new Leopard will be "slicker and faster" even though he hasn't even seen even an alpha of it yet.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
As for speed, 10.4 seems faster since apple has added more acceleration using the video card, and more caching. It also uses a lot more ram.
RAM is cheap. Time isn't. That's why we bought so many G5s with eight 1GB DIMMs for our Photoshop lab.
Quartz Extreme runs on any GPU with 16MB of VRAM or more - the early white iBooks (2001 era) had 8MB of VRAM in their initial spec (moving to 16 realatively quickly), but no new Mac since late 2001 has been unable to use Quartz Extreme.
The OS also scales UI features if it detects a lower power GPU - the effects look better on more powerful machines and a scaled back on low power GPUs to help performance.
With Windows, I know that the step from 2000 to XP is significant because the names are way different. Similar with XP and Vista. But seriously, how can I expect something significant going from Tiger to Leopard?
BTW, I guess I can blame my ignorance, because as a long-time Linux user, I only view Windows and MacOS/X from afar.
Yesterday was the time to do it right. Are we having a REVOLUTION yet?
...that Apple moved to Intel to take advantage of Intel's new virtualization support in hardware. In nearly every case when using a hypervisor on top of such hardware (where there is a ring -1 for the hypervisor) the performance has beat native performance. Or put another way; using a hypervisor for virtualization provides you with virtualization with NO performance hit at all. If anything you get a performance boost. Apple, typically being quite a few steps ahead of the reast of the industry, is very likely going to use this so that you can run Mac OS X Leopard, Windows Vista, and any Linux distro simultaneously with the full performance of running natively. This is the first time in history when you really CAN get something for nothing!!! Not to mention they will likely make it so that you can set up ways to exchange data in a live fashion between VMs. No more incompatibility between OSes ever again. Leave it to Apple to come up with something like this.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Intel invented USB. It was available long before the iMac even hit the market. There's something to be said about the iMac ditching legacy serial interfaces, but I'd wager the correct statement would be "iMac brought USB to Apple users."
That's a nice theory, but it's all wrong. The Mac II had a small hard drive and a couple of floppy drives -- and not even 1.4MB drives, but the old 800k models.
What? Your absolute ignorance? Or the fact that the only actual Apple advance here -- firewire -- isn't even available on some of their computers any more?
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
"Lisa brought GUI to the marketplace"
Lisa did not bring anything to the marketplace. Why? It wasn't really present in the marketplace. It was a demo of ideas, that was hardly for sale at all. It ended up being the computer world's equivalent of those "concept cars" shown at January auto shows. What brought these ideas to the marketplace? The first Mac, which was the Lisa "brought to market".
"IMac brought usb to marketplace"
I had a PC with from a major maker that came shipped with internal USB in 1997. Unless I'm wrong, didn't the first iMac come out in 1998, one year later?
Where were you when the voynix came?
Software for X86 computers should be compatible despite the OS. The end. It is 100% possible. If the future is "buy OSX and Windows" then count me out. Wine on Linux is much cheaper
The UI is irrelevant. Too many people believe windows users would switch to something else if only they were able to run windows applications. Some people actually like the windows UI. I don't. But then, I don't like the UI for OSX. I run X over the top of both (actually xdmcp to a Linux box when confronted with windows).
If Linux (unix) software can be run natively on OSX then so can Windows. OSX users told that to Microsoft with their $. That is why Office and IE are available for OSX.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
"MacintoshII (1986)... same year as dos4! brought CD-ROM/Multimedia to the marketplace. deal with it"
According to a Mac "Zealot" page, nzmac.com, Apple first shipped a computer with built-in CD Rom in 1992. External CD-Rom drives were available for PC back in 1986, the year you mention. I remember seeing these, the ones with the caddies for the CDs.
Where were you when the voynix came?
You'd prefer I used someone else's personal experience to form my opinions? Fine then, I will begin taking applications immediately.
the sign reads: beware of the leopard!!
This is my sig.
I felt the same way until my Windows PC broke and I was forced to borrow and live with a PowerBook for a couple weeks. At first, I hated it, until I got over my Windows habits and started to get used to the new UI. I absolutely hated Apple products, but now I'm more efficient and can't live without 'em. In any case, my advice to anyone thinking about switching is to spend more than just an hour with the thing. Force yourself to use it for a few days and actually be honest enough to give a go at learning how it's supposed to work. It may not fit your needs better, but then again, it might. You'll never know if you only try it long enough to get frustrated or you go into the experience planning on hating it.
Au Contraire!
I purchased a Mac for the OS, and I highly recommend them to both beginner and advanced PC users simply because it's a bad-assed-rock-solid OS, and that's coming from one of the biggest preachers of PC hardware and Open Source on the block.
There are literally THOUSANDS of OSS apps that run on OSX because of it's roots.
They will never sell their OS to regular Joe PC users because they couldn't handle the tech support lines burning up with all the retarded hardware that's out their. It's about a controlled hardware environment.
I agree that the new OS won't change the market much, but the difference will come when Apple offers a wider variety of hardware in their lines.
They have consistenly been better with each OS release, and they are slowly but surely chewing away at Microsofts stranglehold.
---I'm waiting for my dual dual-core powermac, I want it now...maybe after the ADC?
My Win2k workstation loaded with CAD, graphics, NLE, and 3D animation apps has a 10 GB partition for Windows and all installed software, and has done fine with same for a long time, leaving the hundreds of remaining GB on the machine free for lots of huge data files and the occasional game install. I find an install directory larger than a dual-layer DVD rather shocking.
There are, IMHO, three 'growth-paths' into computers for lay people. The first one is work (front-office), the second one advertising, and the third one is a geek relative (and general hype among the soldering-iron crowd). It may be controversial, but I think they have roughly the same kind of influence on buying decisions of commodity hardware.
MS have the first one nailed fast as a brick on a concrete floor. Apple's upgrade path doesn't help here, either, and neither does OSS's lack of commercial options (anyone care to invest a couple of million in my new-to-be-formed 1000 people on-site OSS support consultancy company ? I didn't think so either).
Advertising. Here Apple and MS go neck-and-neck. MS does more in volume (especially magazines), but Apple's ones are more sexy. OSS doesn't count, the occasional firefox-ad notwithstanding; it just doesn't have the bling to pay for it. And even if it did - what would it advertise ? Linux AS ? Ubuntu ? Openoffice ? They're all so different, and differently deployable (even on windows and macs, some of them), it's just not doable, campaign-wise.
The geek-nephew-factor; splits three ways. Mac hackers have had a sudden wake-up call, and don't forget that there's a good deal of hackers running around that swear by Windows. And they can hack it front-to-back, some of them. However, most of them are just really glad to be able to get away with being called a geek because they know how to edit the registry (not that I do).
Now add up the points: MS have 33 + 16 + 11, Apple have 16 + 11, and OSS has 11. Not quite where we are today, but an illustration, in my mind, of where it can go, given the status quo. Bear in mind that these are growth-paths; the reaping is to be done later only. Also notice how Mac overtook OSS within two years time; showing how powerful a tool vision and money is, something where OSS sometimes lacks a bit. Lastly note, if you please, that I have not a single drop of expertise in trend-forecasting. Just my two eurocents.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
If Leopard contains ANY of the "awesome" new features that are being rumoured and maintains good performance, this is going to be a massacre. On one hand, an elegant OS with cool new features that just works - on the other, a clunky compatibility nightmare with 20 different versions. For people without the hardware, Vista is going to look like a whole lot of nothing new, and that kind of perception (though somewhat unjustified) is bad news for Microsoft - and its shareholders. Employees who do use the new enhanced graphics are going to want it at work, but cheap business boxes are not going to be able to handle it.
Haiku for you!
Here's the list of OS X code names:
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
I keep saying this I know, but if Apple gets a proper PDA out the door (Not a Newton, something i-Pod like with a touchscreen/stylus) then I'm sold. I can't use a system which doesn't sync perfectly with a PDA because I need contacts, calendar, notes, tasklist etc. available *instantly* with a sensible UI (Which rules out my phone for all but quick checks of my calendar).
.mac connectivity (And sync when on the road), and possibly it will carry your music as well. I feel that would drag over many business-types who use PCs because of Outlook (And the fact it is actually a damn good PIM).
I sense a PDA with a similar profile and same dock connector as an iPod so it will fit existing holders (Notice the 'universal dock' adaptors have quite a bit of free space, even for the largest of the iPods?). Perfect sync with iLife (As is Apple's trademark), wireless for
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Apple has a contract with Microsoft, signed way back in 1997, that gave them rights to use the Windows API through 2002 (see here about two-thirds of the way down). Windows XP came out just before that contract ended, so theoretically Apple has access to the XP API.
Despite that, you're probably right that it would be easier and safer to require a real Windows install underneath. Apple has always been about things Just Working, and using the real Windows code is the surest path to that.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
""Why aren't you using the normal win32? I want to use your app on my Mac!""
Yes, when MS got complaints from both users, they would rush to reconsider.
No seriously, are you trolling, or do you not understand the numbers here?
I suspect that has something to do with the fact that, with Apple, you constantly have to upgrade your hardware as well as your software. It's not like you can go back and install OS X on your 1998 PowerPC 740 and expect it to run faster than the OS it originally came with.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It will be cool and fast because Intel's CPU's are cooler and faster then the PowerPC crap Apple was using.
When you can boast that your current generation of Macintels are 5x - 10x faster then your previous generation, then you can claim your next OS will be faster.
OSX 10.5 will be the first Mac OS that will truly support Intel architecture, so I am sure that this will give it a performance edge that 10.4 doesn't have, which was kludged to support Intel architecture. While Apple did a brilliant job in making the transition to Intel seamless, I have no doubt that there are major performance and quality problems with running Tiger on an Intel platform. Also, you can't make me believe the whole Rosetta technology runs native PowerPC applications on Intel without a performance hit.
In any regard, I also think the whole "Microsoft should worry" statement in the article is inflammatory and unfounded. I have been running Vista Beta 2 for several weeks on my test platform, and it runs well, stable and except for occasional performance hiccups, relatively fast. Its beta software of course, so I will reserve judgment on it being slow and a resource hog until its release.
Also, most people are so upset about Vista requiring a GPU to run, and claim its a resource hog. When you stop and think about it, using the GPU to render UI frees up your CPU to do other things, the UI is no longer consuming CPU horse power to render. Windows is using a GPU when its remain an untapped resource in your box when your just running OS apps and utilities. I think people still hold on to old past experiences with Windows and don't allow themselves to understand the truth of Vista's new architecture. In fact, its the same thing OSX is doing to render their UI in OpenGL to take advantage of 3D rendering, although something tells me that Microsoft is the first to make it an exclusive operation of the GPU while OSX still relies on software OpenGL rendering consuming CPU power.
In any regards. Unless Apple introduces FLAWLESS Windows vitalization within OSX, complete with a ZERO performance hit, the I doubt Apple will make any impact on the PC market with Leopard. Tiger was supposed to be Apple's sledgehammer against Windows, as too was Jaguar and Panther, and the Ocelot, they haven't proven to be anything more then another entry in Apple's history books, an OS that has maintained 5% market share.
The bottom line is, why run OSX at all? I mean, except for iLife applications, there is nothing I can't do on my PC that I can do any better on my Mac. In fact, iLife is the ONLY reason many people are getting Mac's and OSX. But, I get better entertainment value from a PC because it supports better quality sound output (true surround support), HD support, true PVR/Media Center capabilities, and of course, Games which is a Billion Dollar industry Apple has soundly ignored. And there are handful of independent applications that give me good multimedia organization and video editting, just not as slick as iLife.
I love hearing these grandstand statements that Microsoft should worry about Apple. Why? Apple has existed for 30 years without being a real competitor to Microsoft. In the last 6 years, Apple has had a superior OS to Windows, and still can't take over the market. Now, even with Apple making PC clones that can run Windows, this might increase Apple's hardware share of the PC market, but people want to buy Mac's now to run Windows. Microsoft is more worried about Google and Apple is just a mosquito buzzing in their ears. The day that Apple takes over 90% marketshare will be the day I eat my shorts.
People have to understand that in the Apple Microsoft war, Microsoft has won, period, and did so like 10 years ago.
Apple will continue making good quality products for a niche market, they might gain a few percentage points in marketshare, but I think that Apple will eventually realize that putting time and money into OSX will never result in the returns they have been hoping for.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
What I'd like to see would be some sort of 'red box' for Linux. I've yet to find a program that I want to use that WINE runs well, much less flawlessly. I'd have no problem paying for a Windows installation, I just want to avoid all the problems that go along with it. A Virtual Machine isn't the environment I'd like to be working with, but something like the red box would be pretty cool with Linux. Linux development would keep up because most Linux users wouldn't want to touch Windows if it can be avoided.
When flaming linux fanboys like you quit bitching about Apple and Windows, Slashdot will probably just go away.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Microsoft's software wasnt named Gazzelle or Antelope. That would be just too funny.
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in mud. Soon, you realize the pig is dirty, and he likes it.
Actualy... I did exactly that. I wanted a reliable OS that I could still run a mattering of comercial software on. (That last one essetialy bumped Linux off the list.) So far, my MacBook Pro has been very good to me. (And got me lots of chicks cuz it's sooooo sexy.)
How hard can it be for apple or NVIDIA to write drivers for there chip set / video cards same thing with ATI?
Intel, NVIDIA, and ATI are the three big chip set makers so they coming out with good drivers for Mac OSX may not be that hard.
Sound may be a issue but NVIDIA is working on sound storm 2 and then we may just need Creative to make some OSX drivers for it sound blaster cards.
How can apple go after the high end market with out cross fire or SLI support in there systems?
Also $899 systems with GMA 950 and only 512 ram with video eating up about 80 meg+ and because of the on board video you need fill both slots with 256 meg ram sticks is a bad idea.
What will happen if apple does not come with about $1000 system with a real video card?
People will buy the cheaper system and when they try to run a game / or windows vista they will get poor performance and I think there will be some people who will not want an iMac as they will want to use there own monitor.
I mod this article -1 (no shit sherlock). Hmm, Apple will announce its new OS at its developers conference! Boy, I didn't see that coming. Apple always full of surprises, huh. Then, I mod this article -1 (Yet another damn blog). Some dork posts a link on his website and its news that matter? Why not link directly to the story? I don't care about the dork, his interests, his profession, what he thinks, or to look his at ugly mug in a horrible picture. Let him post on Slashdot like the rest of us and earn his karma. In conclusion, editors RTFA!
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Faster on the same computer, you tit.
The first OS X (Cheetah) was released in 2001
The current OS X (Tiger) is compatible back to the slot loading iMac of 1999.
ANY computer that was bought for any version of OS X can still run the current version of OS X.
"Meanwhile every version of OS X has been faster than the predecessor."
OK, I AM an apple fanboi, and that's just not really my experience. Yes, 10.1 was faster than 10.0, and 10.2 was faster than 10.1 (and 10.3 was, maybe, snappier than 10.2). But aren't these really optimizations that weren't yet completed in a massive rewrite?
In my experience, 10.4 is NOT faster than 10.3 on the same hardware (Mac Mini G4 and iBook G4 - really the same computers). At my employment (school), we use approx. 4 yr-old iMacs. These babies were truly suffering under the load of 10.3 last year. I shudder to think of their responsiveness under Tiger this fall.
As one who has recently switched (or joined) to Mac, I am very impressed with Apple and my Intel iMac. From a users point of view, working with Tiger is a joy compared to WinXP. Tasks are rarely unresponsive or hang, and when that happens a simple & fast power-cycle will cure the problem. Memory is not as big a problem as on WinXP - my iMac had no problem with the inital 512MB and the 1GB I added doesn't appear to be used all that often. I don't even notice when/if swapping is occuring. There are a few items I would like to change, but nothing like the hundreds on the WinXP list.
As on the subject line - I am very impressed with Tiger and cannot wait for Leopard.
Comparing the market share of Apple Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows is really not very informative. Apple has positioned itself as a platform company - that means it competes both as a software and hardware vendor, both with Microsoft and Dell, HP, Gateway, etc.(but more with Dell, HP, Gateway than Microsoft, since OS X can't be sold or licensed to third party vendors.) Comparing Apple market share isn't a very good way to guage it's success in the market, since even a tiny percentage of market share gain over Microsoft for Apple means they've just made billions of dollars in new hardware revenue. One can't say that about a market share gain for Windows, which can be divided up among several different OEM manufacturers. It's not even a good estimation of *future* success - since the installed base percentage (the number of computers currently running OS X) for Apple is much, much larger than the market share(15% was a number I heard) . This reflects the total mindshare Apple has in the computer market, and as such, is a more promising statistic for measuring future growth for the company's computer division. Moreover market share just measures what percentage of world or US computer sales Apple is responsible for - but the entire industry is growing at such a substantial rate that even keeping up with past years means that Apple is an extremely successful company. And *any* market share gain therefore means Apple is exceeding expectations by a *lot* - the emphasis is on *change* versus a snapshot of what Apple's slice of the market is right now. I for one prefer that Apple be below 5% to 10% of market share. There have been quality issues with iPods and other Apple products that have hindered their success, and I believe these problems have stemmed from Apple not being able to handle that scale of production, having spent so long as a marginalized hardware company. If they grew too quickly too fast we're likely to see some more problematic quality failures as well. Being small preserves their ability to innovate.
Some additional factors to consider.
How many different languages/localizations does Win2k workstation support?
Apple does not do hardware specific installs. If you install it on a G5, the same install will boot and run every Mac that came before that meets the minimum hardware requirements. Not to mention that support for most peripherals are installed as well.
I'm not sure if that space incudes what's necessary for the dev tools too, or not.
The amount of free drive space required to install any app or OS (Win/Mac/Linux...) does not necessarily reflect the final size of the install. Often extra space is required during the installation procedure for scratch/temp files.
It still a pretty big install though, but I generally worry more about how much RAM an OS requires than the drive space.
Yes, comparing one company's PR with another company's beta results in some fairly... fruitless... comparisons.
Actually, XP will be 5 years old in a little over a month. It released in late August, 2001.
"in sharp contrast to slow and resource hungry Windows Vista" No way in hell. Vista is not slow OR resource hungry. It runs faster than XP, and only uses marginally more memory than XP. The XP Beta 2 used like 350+MB of memory, but less than 256MB in the final release. Vista beta 2 is using around 500MB. The final release should be a a bit under that as well.
One other thing you can learn from those statistics - you need to be nearly as concerned with users in 256 color mode as you do with Macs.
After a bit of digging in an old box, I too found a pre-iMac usb card!, The iMac did, however play a big part in bringing USB to the attention of the consumer not to mention peripheral developers (if i remember lots of the newly released peripherals at the time were suddenly badged as iMac/Win compatible and strangely came in translucent plastic. Am also aware that USB was developed by Intel and never claimed apple invented any of this stuff(?) As regards the lisa, I'm not going to argue about whether it was or wasn't in the 'Marketplace' as far as i'm concerned it was a product that was marketed, sold and failed, it was however, released. And anyway, even if the Lisa was a prototype as you believe, The mac wasn't long after, and still beat everyone else. The bit about the Lisa being the first Mac underplays the huge technical differences between these machines.
Thats great for a lab, but I'm more concerned with the 640mb ram limit on my original iBook G4. I was able to run 10.3 on 384mb, but had to buy a memory upgrade to run photoshop. I'm a college student.. i can't afford to buy a highend macbook pro or PowerMac G5. You know your mac hasn't got enough ram when mail.app crashes constantly.
Its not like I haven't tried to upgrade my iBook. I've maxed out the ram, added an airport extreme and put in a 60gb 5400rpm disk. (52 screws suck!)
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Actually, I'd say that implementing Win32 on Mac OS X would be a way that Apple could screw Microsoft, but good. A second implementation would freeze it: "Why aren't you using the normal win32? I want to use your app on my Mac!"
This was already tried with IBM OS/2 and it failed, and IBM was even requiring that users have a real copy of Windows. The future is vitualization and being able to run any version or patch of Windows. BootCamp is cool but it is temporary.
A FULL install of Vista Beta2 Ultimate is currently 6.3 GB...
You must not play any modern game. BF2 takes up nearly 2.1 GB and WOW 1.8 with the last patch...
That sounds about right. As I recall, the iMac was mainly important in driving USB support in Linux. Before the Linux/PPC guys got it working out of necessity, USB support in Linux was generally slow in coming. Also, the fact that USB was the iMac user's only choice for mice, keyboards, printers, etc. probably jumpstarted the USB market at least a little.
Seems like a great time to buy Apple shares right now as they are in a dip at around $57. Peaking at around $85 earlier this month with news of this and the new powermacs expected it will definitely be an easy jump if you are looking for a short term investment.
Uh, in recent history Apple stock has dropped in the same timeframes that new Mac systems were being announced. And these are some of the best systems that Apple has ever released. Apple stock movement beyond $30 or so has been all about iPod. Apple is a pretty volative and risky stock stock right now. Sure volatility can lead to short term profit but be very willing to accept the high risk.
I'm a big Apple fan since before NeXT purchased Apple for -430 million dollars... And the only marketshare gain since 1980 when I first began to track such things against IBM (and M$ later) has been effectively negatively positive, meaning damage control. I simply have a hard time believing that Apple's 'new' OS release (another mod version of Panther, Tiger) is going to put a significant marketshare dent in Microsoft's Windows sales, or even the vaporware Vista... Droids will always migrate to M$ for the same reasons they did for IBM in the hardwareland, 'nobody loses a job for buying IBM/M$'... However I have seen many people sadly disposed when purchasing Apple products.
pleeeeeeaaaaaase (haha)
Um...compare that to:
. html)
Mac OS X Version 10.4 requires a Macintosh with:
* PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 processor
* Built-in FireWire
* At least 256MB of physical RAM
* A built-in display or a display connected to an Apple-supplied video card supported by your computer
* At least 3.0 GB of available space on your hard drive; 4GB of disk space if you install XCode 2 developer tools
* DVD drive for installation (get CD media for $9.95)
(http://www.apple.com/macosx/upgrade/requirements
I think you could max a G3 at 800Mhz and it ran at 200Mhz on the low end. Not sure why Firewire is needed, but I think the requirment of a graphics card it smart:-p
3GB of space is still hefty, but not compared to Vista.
The specs are comparable to XP:
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/xpfaq.html#01
# PC with 300 megahertz (MHz) or higher processor clock speed recommended; 233-MHz minimum required; Intel Pentium/Celeron family, AMD K6/Athlon/Duron family or compatible processor recommended
# 128 megabytes (MB) of RAM or higher recommended (64 MB minimum supported; may limit performance and some features))
# 1.5 gigabyte (GB) of available hard disk space.
# Super VGA (800 × 600) or higher resolution video adapter and monitor
# CD-ROM or DVD drive
# Keyboard and Microsoft Mouse or compatible pointing device
I have never seen XP run on anything slower than 800Mhz, but I have seen OS X, and it runs pretty well; it is responisive to say the least.
So let us say that both OS are full installs (bc, quite frankly, there is a lot of features (such as language support that you can choose to not install, on both if I'm not mistaken) AND clean installs of both work at comprebale speeds on similar (particualy old) hardware , XP is roughly half the size and uses less memory (I'm assuming 128MB min for full functionality). But that's assuming XP runs well at 128MB RAM (never tries, so I cannot say). Now I'm not going to get into, or start a feature war, but I think that both are reasonable expectations for what you get. Vista is not...
So, even my MS standards, Vista specs are horrible.
BTW: 128MB video WTF? What about comps w/ integrated video? Ans since when is a white box ship with a gig of RAM standard?
"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm." - S. G. Colette
Windows 2000 still runs fine, and as fast as it ever did.
I guess the gamers will be forced to Vista when DirectX 10-only games come out, but I won't care.
> Apple has always been about things Just Working, and using the real Windows code is the surest path to that. ?!
My point is not that people who use windows are idiots (at least I hope they're not!) my point is that computer technology is often implemented in areas where a microsoft solution either isn't or wasn't prefered. These choices were made out of necessity not some fanboy reasons. It just annoys me to hear people slagging of machines, OS's and especially users of these systems, when their own knowledge and experience is based on the concept that (Best Product=Highest Number Shipped).
I'd guess that they will add support for hybrid disk drives in Leopard. I wouldn't be surprised if they introduced new hardware to demo the capabilities (instant boot/sleep, lower power consumption, blah blah blah) at the same time.
FYI: When tasks hang, control-click (or right-click if using a two-button mouse) the icon in the Dock, and select "Force Quit". Or, if you're a unix geek, open a terminal and kill -9 $task.
I've been using OS X for about a year now (my work bought me a mac laptop, so I can't complain), and had to power-cycle my mac exactly twice. Both for it not coming out of sleep mode properly.
The UI is not "irrelevant", it's one of the most irritating things about using a Mac.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Yup, that's how to win in the OS world -- base your strategy around an old legal agreement with Microsoft. (maybe it's valid, maybe it's not, but if Microsoft doesn't like what you are doing, they've got an effectively infinite amount of lawyers to keep you tied up in court indefinitely)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Of confirm it by looking at sites browser stats. This one shows Mac userbase doubling in 3 years.
Because it's so hard to go from 12 users to 24...over 3 years...
I know we are trying to assume the new MacOS will be much lighter/faster, but as someone who has Vista running on one machine and MacOS (The new intel core duo mac mini) on another, my impression has been that MacOS is the slow resource hungry operating system, and by comparison Vista is quite snappy.
;))
The Windows machine is more than twice the clock speed of the economy mac mini, but even with this in mind I can't help but get the impression the MacOS is abnormally sluggish.
I am not traditionally a mac user (or a windows user for that matter) and people who are more familiar with Apples history tell me that the lack of a 'snappy' feeling in the GUI is just something you get used to, and not representative of the efficiency of the O/S... but i'm not sure that I buy into that.
Anyway, Let me go ahead and make my points very clear:
1) Vista is really not sluggish in the sense we are talking about here. Especially if you get the new RTM (post beta2) builds from MSDN. In fact it is much snappier than any Mac/Gnome/KDE desktop I have worked in on similar hardware. (Perhaps this is becuase the windows GUI is so ugly
2) Current MacOS IS sluggish, maybe its becuase of all that silly anti-aliasing and frequent x86 emulation, I really don't know, but if they make a new O/S which solves this problem there would be ALOT of people more willing to use it, especially if they can get some damn native applications available for x86.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
"As regards the lisa, I'm not going to argue about whether it was or wasn't in the 'Marketplace' as far as i'm concerned it was a product that was marketed, sold and failed"
I'm a little more generous to Apple than you on the Lisa. As the equivalent of a concept car, it wasn't a failure.
Where were you when the voynix came?
And while I have no real idea what is the case in this particular instance, you could probably make the case that the speed (snappiness is the metric that I usually hear mentioned) of OSX comes from continual streamlining and refinement of the code, taking out rosetta code and such, while Windows has already had streamlining done to it already, and there aren't any more places for those kinds of easy speed wins in the code and architecture. It's known that Microsoft is slower at developing new releases of software than Apple, and that Apple is more 'feature' oriented than Microsoft, and I also know what happens to _my_ code when someone tells me to implement a feature by a certain date no matter what (ie, Cruft and Kludges ALL over the place. It works, it's pretty to the end user, but it's not necessarily fast or pretty code)
Like I said, I don't know if my scenario is more or less likely than yours. All I'm saying is that speed increases in subsequent releases in software may not mean better development practices, and may actually be counter proof of that.
- ------- There are ten kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who... Huh?
Oops - the link to my brainstorm did not work.
"Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair" - George Washington
I find your post both intriguing and an excellent source of fertilizer for my garden. Somehow, I don't think either company would agree to this on a phone call without asking their counsel how loudly the SEC would howl.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
Thanks for the info. Some tasks hang so thoroughly that I can't use the Dock and can't start terminal/console, so it is power-cycle at that stage. But like I wrote before, it is a rare occurance.
The more likely issue is hanging on shutdown. After the Dock, Dashboard, icons, etc., go away and you are left with just the Desktop (wallpaper). Fortunately power-cycles on a Mac are not anywhere near as bad as on a Windows box.
No, no they don't. Were Apple to implement the Windows API, they'd be doing so with more legal grounds than Microsoft had when they pulled the same trick on Apple, and the courts were pretty clear they were permitted to do so.
Moreover, the '95 agreement between Apple and Microsoft forbids either party from suing each other for this sort of thing again. One could speculate that this is the largest reason Microsoft's been pushing Vista, because now that Apple's an x86 platform there's no substantial hurdle left to make OS X compatible with the Win32 API (excepting possibly DirectX).
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
I'll be excited about the next release of OS X when Apple admits that the piercing whine made by my five day old MacBook Pro is not "normal" as claimed by the fellow at the Apple Store. Until it's fixed, I feel cheated having spent nearly $2,000 on a computer I can't comfortably use in a quiet room.
That Thinkpad is starting to look awfully nice. If only I could return my Mac without incurring a 10% restocking fee.
Windows 2003. If it wasn't so damned expensive I would put it on all of my workstations. I see consistant 100% performance increases in many 3d and compositing apps. They put magic fairy dust in there, that's the only explanation I can find.
Not only does this bode poorly for Slashdot's credibility as having important and accurate information, but what does this say about journalism in general, when this passes for a good article. Oh, wait, it's not even an article! It's a blog posting! Do we even know who this Max Fomitchev is? I've never heard of him. This place is slowly becoming a rumor mill full of dupes.
Yeah, but you know... It's a refreshing change from the 8 years of "Linux will rule the world! Any day now... just you wait... it's right around the corner... Micro$oft is d00med!" posts.
iSync can sync all of these with pretty much any device that supports SyncML. It syncs iCal and Address Book with my 'phone regularly and has with the last three 'phones I've owned.
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My personal experience is similar. I am in the 18-25 age group at college, and I've noticed over the last two years people have been looking more and more seriously at a Mac. Before it was just "wouldn't it be nice to have something that slick without paying through the nose?", but now with the MacBook I'm seeing *many* people who are actually switching.
Personally I'm getting an iMac. The ATI X1600 may not be the world's greatest video card, but it gets most of the job done. It can play HL2 at native res (1440x900) with details cranked reasonably high, and I'm not hardcore enough of a gamer to want anything more than that. Plus now I can run all my Win32 games :P
Apple is making HUGE leaps and bounds with the style-aware college demographic, and in a few years when these kids start graduating I think we'll see a reflection in industry adoption brought about by this. For the same reason MS hands out free copies of Visual Studio to CS students, Apple getting students addicted to OSX can only be good in the long run.
May the asbestos in your fireproof suite hold true.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
...and the fact that Slashdot posts drivel like this is why I prefer Ars Technica. Shame really, Slashdot used to be informative.
Yeah, mac users will never be able to compete with people who spend $1000 to play 'niche' games on a computer. Yeah idiots like Mac users will probably just have to spend $50 dollars on a gamecube and play stuff created by the world greatest games developers... oh dear. Not to worry Vista should be out soon, so you will be able to spend another $100 on making your email program run more slowly. How the world of technology envies you!!!!
I spent less on my gaming computer than anyone has ever spent on a new Mac [not a mini, a real computer with some actual performance capabilities], and it can run a lot of very good games not made by "the worlds greatest game developers". [Obligatory: Yes, it runs linux]. Of course, your entire post is baseless opinions, and was likely modded insightful by some other Mac fanboy. The majority of the people who I know buying new Macs are people who don't share my view that paying $2500 for a laptop to play mp3s and do word processing is ridiculous.
On the other hand, I would personally love to see Windows have some real competition, and I would really love to see Mac end up with a large enough market share that their hardware and software get shorn apart by the DoJ, because if they were in Microsoft's position, that would be an antitrust suit waiting to happen.
No... Windows will continue to represent the 'world of computing' to people who don't know what a computer is (and presumably think that Macdonald's make the best food in the world!!).
What the fuck is this? Seriously? I don't agree with your fanboy opinions of Mac so presumably I'm an uncultured slob? -1 Flamebait.
Windows NT 4, before you installed IE 4+, felt about as fast on my P166 as Windows 2000 did on my P3 550 (I ran them side-by-side for comparison before I installed FreeBSD on the P166). Windows 2000 added proper DirectX support and PnP, so it made a better home OS than NT4, but it definitely wasn't faster. NT4 was also happy with 32MB of RAM, and very nippy with 64MB. 2000 wasn't really happy with less than 128MB.
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So Mac OSX is faster than Windows XP?
Maximum PC set up an Apple iMac to boot both OS X 10.4 and Windows XP, finally having a single platform with which to effectively compare the performance of both systems. I don't recall what issue it was, but it was fairly recent.
The results demonstrated that Windows XP was faster in virtually every test they conducted. So much for OSX's so-called performance advantage.
Considering that no one has seen the new OSX nor has a final version of Vista been benchmarked yet I don't understand the basis for such baseless claims of performance.
You are very much mistaken. XP runs about 5-8% faster on the same processor and RAM as Windows 2000 did. Windows Server 2003 is leaps and bounds ahead of Windows 2000 Server in every category, in some, such as IIS, and file serving, its nearly 4x (not percent) thats FOUR TIMES faster
Since your post is in line with what I was going to say, I decided to just add a couple of things and then add my other two cents directed at the others reading these posts.
To add to the facts you present, if a computer system has 64mb of RAM or greater (not unreasonable for the last 10 years) then WindowsXP is faster than Win95, Win98, and WinME.
This is significant as the Win9x models used assembly optimiation and also due to the nature of the OS architecture, there is a lot 'less' going on in the Win9X OSes. (i.e. Security, Object passing, way processess are handled, etc.)
Vista ALSO has a chance to best WindowsXP on performance on equivalent hardware, again RAM being a key. I would estimate that if you system has 256mb of RAM Vista will again out perform even WindowsXP. (In our internal testing, non-official, post Beta 2, many applications, and this includes games, applications on Vista run 10-25% faster than they do on WindowsXP.)
The Vista performance can be attributed to several sound differences, the new memory allocation system, how paging works, the new caching systems, the new network stacks, and even the GPU drawing offsets.
Just a quick example of Vista's jump in performance can be seen on identical systems running WinXp and Vista and doing even basic tasks as Web Browsing (even non-IE), Vista will display the page in 1/10th the time WindowsXP will. Also with the Vista Video model, scrolling and display of the page is smoother, especially when animations/flash in involved.
Vista could hit the market and not be faster than WinXP in 'every' regard, but I would not be surprised that the numbers we are seeing are accurate to the final version, with the possibility of the final version of Vista even surpassing WinXP in many areas.
Here are my thoughts on this topic that are not an addition to the post I am responding to...
As for the whole debate about OSX 'getting' faster, people really aren't using OSX on the same hardware that it was released on. 10.4 is a dog on a system that 10.2 runs rather well on. RAM upgrades often make a difference, but with the increasing complexity of OSes, this is becoming true of almost ALL OSes.
Also when you look at OSX, it is still a very immature OS when you get beyond the MACH/BSD core. This would leave room for a lot of improvement, but sadly unlike Microsoft where update and Service Packs for XP have been free for the past 6 years, Apple makes users drop out $99 bucks for even 'optimiation' and set of bug fixes.
I know people say that 'new' features are added in each 10.x release, but if you look at these 'features' you should notice that the SAME LEVEL of features, especially the applications bundled are nothing different than 'free' add-on Microsoft has been providing with WindowsXP. (WindowsXP has actually had new applicaiton level features available for free from Micorosft since its release than even OSX, yet MS hasn't charged a single user for these new 'features'.
I don't hate Apple, and I use OSX, but the mindset of many Mac users borderlines on a neurosis of protecting their 'beliefs' rather than 'exposing' themselves to the truth.
One area this manifest is that people make fun of XP for not releasing a new version since 2001, yet this is far from the truth. With SP1, SP2 and the free application downloads like photostory or the new movie maker, etc Microsoft has continued to provide VERY COMPERABLE upgrades and new features for XP over the years waiting for Vista.
The difference between Microsoft and Apple here, the XP updates, features, and security fixes are and always have been free. Microsoft doesn't slap a new name on XP and try to scam $99 out of their users every year. This is
On several places i have read that Apple can use the original Windows API, MS and Apple had a technology exchange and the API was part of it. Lets hope they use it.
As I said, I'm not counting games (which I generally install to other partitions). I am counting, however, the last 4 versions of 3ds max (for accessing older projects/interoperating with clients), 2 versions of Photoshop (6 for speed, CS2 for power), 2 versions of Acrobat, the current AutoCAD, Sony Vegas, Quicktime/iTunes, MS Office 97, and dozens of other supporting apps, utilities, and plugins. My Progams total about 5 GB, and my Windows directory is 2 GB. Add a 6-year, 1.5 GB mail store, and it's plenty roomy for the forseeable life of this machine.
I really hope I never have to use any software written by you. The UI is the difference between a great piece of software and a hack. It is the difference between fighting the software, and having it work for you. The difference between getting one job done in an hour, and two.
What does UI stand for? User Interface. Think on that. It is the part of the code that sits between the machine and the user. If the UI is irrelevant, then so is the user.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Well one could go with history and note the fact that EVERY new version of Windows has been a lot slower than the predecessor. Meanwhile every version of OS X has been faster than the predecessor.
You are so wrong, so stupid. OSX 10.0 was a DOG, a real FUCKING BIG DOGSLOW, so it's "easy", really, to be "faster" when you started DOG SLOW. Osx 10.0, 10.1, 10.2 are so slow compared to Windows 2000. 10.3 and 10.4 are acceptable but not as SNAPPY as, say, Windows XP.
Then, windows 2000 was faster than win98, if you compared them with a computer that got a minimum amount of ram (256's good). You can see that just doing something like viewing the FPS in the games.
Then, Windows XP got a better VM implementation and some more optimizations. (less fragmentation, for example)
Yes, every new version of Windows cost some more RAM, but they run BETTER on the same processor, graphic chip etc. Just tri-boot win98, win2000 and winXP and do some benchs on the same machine (with 256 of ram minimum). There's a real difference, and it's a lot faster.
You can also press Command + Option + Escape. This brings up the Force Quit dialogue.
When that happens, try this:
Click on the desktop (to give focus to the Finder)
Under the Apple Menu, select Force Quit and select the non-responsive app to terminate it.
Not always true! For example, I have a new Motorola Razr phone and although it supports bluetooth hotsyncing to my Mac with "iSync" - it won't sync the calendar entries at all. Keeps saying that function is "unsupported" (although it syncs the phone numbers from Address Book fine).
Microsoft never implemented any of Apple's APIs. What they did do was infringe on some software patents held by Apple, but you don't need to implement an API to do that.
Microsoft is not pushing Vista, at least no more than any previous operating system, possibly less. The betas for Vista have been good, but Microsoft has officially delayed the operating system, clearly not seeing this as something that must go out now whatever the cost.
There is a hurdle to be crossed if Apple implements Win32, and that's that it's a huge PITA to implement. The Wine people have been trying to get this running for decades. They'll get close, and then Windows will move forward again. Some features, (DirectX, hard to implement as you point out, is one of them), have never been properly implemented. Even once implemented, a Windows application will need to be installed (not the case for a Mac app), it will require some massaging of the APIs to get something that even vaguely fits into the same desktop as traditional Macintosh applications, it will, in short, be half-arsed. Imagine what the WINE people have had to go through. Now apply Steve Job's perfectionism, and Apple's lack of time and resources, and ask how Apple can possibly come up with code by themselves that will work.
They'd be better off just licensing Win32. The real thing. Or applying the OS/2 approach, and allowing users to install Windows using a custom installer and a replacement module or two. Or ignoring the issue altogether, because whatever they do is going to have incompatibilities, and Apple will get it in the neck for releasing a shoddy product every time a program fails to install and/or run properly. If Apple will not release Mac OS X for generic hardware because of some supposed risk of being blamed for bad third party drivers, how likely is it they'll try EMULATING WINDOWS?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
According to the update here, Sekhon acknowledges the discovery of the performance issue with malloc. He does, however, still find issues with medium-sized datasets. There only logical explanation for this is darwin system call overhead (discussed in the article I linked, AND the comments of the blog post you linked).
Next time, read the page you link.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
I believe he meant the FTC or the Dept. of Justice.
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
So you read this Cringely column too?
If what was proposed earlier functionally builds a monopoly, the SEC might not get involved but it would catch the stockholders' attention. My earlier point was that this story sounds and smells like bullshit (Jobs calls Gates, suggests MS make dramatic, possibly vulnerable business decision and within minutes all three MS top dogs are behaving like bobbleheads).
I can imagine the idea, but not the way it's played out in one act--hell, one scene. Points for the drama, negative points for credibility (compared with the other insider's story ACed here).
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
Well, Max Fomitchev won't be getting many dates with that picture.
You mean 'Leopard', right? What kind of fanboy are you?
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
Without access to internal APIs, doing it entirely through blackboxes.
XP is done. There may be tweaks, but the API is frozen.
I mentioned DX because of firmware differences between Mac/PC video cards from the same vendor.
You're assuming it has to live in the same partition/filesystem as OS X. Bootcamp shows it doesn't. Moreover, Classic and X11 have given their dev team upwards of five years' experience dealing with sandboxes.
With considerably fewer years to do it. If we assume Red Box dates back to 1997, that means XP in 2001 was an incremental change for them, not a sea change. Codeweavers, in contrast, did everything through reverse engineering.
Have you SEEN the Finder?
Cite references to either imaginary factor?
Assuming Red Box exists in a workable form, it's been in the works since 1997. Rhapsody was all about getting Classic/Win apps to run natively inside it on the processor-relevant platform, as well as creating a framework to run natively inside Windows itself. Do some homework.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
If Apple reverse engineered the Windows API, Microsoft would probably make "improvements" to it out of spite, to cause things to break when run on the Mac's reverse-engineered API.
Microsoft does that anyway. Something may not break going from one OS to the next but it very well may if you skip an upgrade.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Microsoft has most of its costs subsidized by its near-guaranteed bundling with every PC sold by someone else's effort. Even at $50 a pop (the average bundled cost of XP to a vendor) the sheer volume makes it immensely profitable for them.
Apple doesn't have this kind of a business model, so it really isn't fair to critique them for not doing exactly the same thing when their distribution system is different.
Because one computer software company profitably engages in a particular practice does not mean it defines a norm for the industry when all other things remain equal. And in this case, all other things aren't even close.
As far as the "new free things" while "waiting for Vista" are concerned, most of the things in Vista are in the OS I paid for, just like you'll have to pay for them in Vista. I can't honestly remember what I've gotten in SP1 and SP2 that vastly defines it from the XP I installed. It doesn't seem as comparable to the differences between Ubuntu Breezy 5 and Ubuntu Dapper 6, for example.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
Without the smilies, I can't really tell if you're joking.
In any case, my employer (school), being a large organization, is always developing common images and rolling them out late. I'm not even sure we get Tiger this fall...
...Apple's last BIG "upgrade" - which ran much slower than previous versions!
Of course it ran slower, on the same hardware. There's more features in 10.4 than 10.3. I don't see how this is any different than each version of Windows being a little slower in each incarnation. There's no way I'd dream of putting XP on my first PC, that ran Win95 acceptably. And my PC that runs XP decently would just barely be able to run Vista.
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
"If 'Leopard' is really what it claims to be, i.e. fast and efficient, in sharp contrast to slow and resource hungry Windows Vista"
I'm likely to be modded down for this, but I do enjoy consistently finding biased posts here at Slashdot.
In my humble (but maybe not the rest of the world's) experience, Windows 2000 Service Pack 1 seemed to work faster than Windows 2000 w/o any SPs. SP2, SP3, and SP4 also seemed to improve performance. I admit I didn't run benchmarks, so maybe I'm just deluding myself ("It's snappier!"). I won't be surprised if Windows XP with SP3 runs faster than XP w/SP2.
I know you probably weren't counting Service Packs, but MS does add some new features with each OS SP (but not as much as an OS X point release). However, both MS and Apple add significant performance increases for the new features that were introduced at the OS's introduction (before SP's and point releases). Quartz/Aqua was slow as molasses when OS X 10.0 was released, but has gotten faster with each point release. Sure there were other optimizations, but Quartz/Aqua was by far the most significant. Aero will also undoubtedly be "slow" when Vista is released, but I expect performance improvements (at least for Aero) with Vista SP1, SP2, and SP3.
From my observations, MS adds some minor new features (like security, DirectX, software compatibility) with each Service Pack, but also improves performance for those big new features that were introduced before the SPs. Since Aero is such a big change from the XP interface, I expect it to get faster as MS has more time to optimize it. I probably won't consider buying Vista until SP1 is released (Windows 2000 will work just fine on my next PC).
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
Speaking for myself, and around 4-5 acquaintances who have switched to Macs within the last year to year and a half, it's not the status that matters, it's the fact that, even with the performance-lagging G4 processors, the Apple laptops offer great functionality, at reasonable prices. Before you open your mouths to say that they lack power, RAM, or whatever other hardware spec, consider this: Ideally, when you buy a computer, you pay x money expecting y funcionality. That's it, no more, no less.
Sure, my iBook 12" isn't the fastest machine I've ever worked with. However, my productivity while working on it is a great deal better than on Linux, and miles away from my windows work performance. Here by productivity I mean actual amount of useful work generated over time, and comfort while working (which yields long periods of effective work). There's very little that you could buy for the price of most 15" or smaller apple laptops that would give me a better return on investment, as measured in productivity. Since it is strictly a work machine, that's the only metric that matters.
Note that the actual VRAM requirements are variable. For resolutions of 1280x1024 and below 64 MiB will suffice. Mostly every laptop with a dedicated graphics card will fit the 64 MB or more, under 1280x1024 total pixels bracket. 1280x800 or 1440x900 are popular resolutions nowadays, and are both beneath that amount of total pixels.
This said, the requirements are above and beyond those of OS X's Quartz Extreme. A 64 MiB card like the geforce 5200 Ultra in the powerbook 12" can and will drive a 1024x768 panel (built-in) and a 23" apple panel (the 20" ones are 1680x1050, so scale it appropriately). That's a lot more bang for buck. But it still doesn't make the hardware demands that tough. Who here has a big, beefy screen without a correspondingly beefy video card? Who can you imagine actually upgrading the OS in their boxes that doesn't have a suitable video card? I'm not going to go into the RAM and CPU requirements (note that the basic vista version only demands 512 MiB, rather than the full 1 GiB for Premium), which I don't think are over the top. Except for some odd low-voltage offerings (I'm not even aware of any, but I can conceive them existing) I can't see anyone having trouble meeting the 1 GHz requirement, and 1 GiB RAM isn't really a big deal nowadays.
I subscribed to get access to the full archives of user's posts. That was to search the past posts of another user I got into a flame war with. It took me about an hour or so, but I found enough information in his old posts to really seriously burn the guy. That was the best $5 I ever spent! Thanks Slashdot! Now I set my ad-free page views to 0 though so I keep my subscriber status without paying extra.
My other first post is car post.
Tiger runs like total CRAP on my iMac. 10.2 and 10.3 are fine.
Parallels is NOT hypervisor based you n00b. Read up on the Xen project at Sourceforge and Intel's Vanderpool technology. We're not talking VMWare, VirtualPC or Parallels here. Those are weak virtualization models based on concepts that always incur a performance hit. When you know what ring -1 and ring 0 are, then come back and talk to me. Until then, you've made it quite clear you know nothing about virutalization.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Microsoft has most of its costs subsidized by its near-guaranteed bundling with every PC sold by someone else's effort. Even at $50 a pop (the average bundled cost of XP to a vendor) the sheer volume makes it immensely profitable for them.
Apple doesn't have this kind of a business model, so it really isn't fair to critique them for not doing exactly the same thing when their distribution system is different.
Either you are mental or very bad at math and business...
Apple MAKES profits from the hardware and the OS installed on the hardware. If they had a 'larger' market share, their profits would be SIGNIFICANTLY greater than Microsoft's...
What blatant hit whoring. The article has nothing new in it whatsoever. Did nobody check to see that it was submitted by the author?
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
You make a good point there. I have an 8 year old 266 MHz iMac G3 with OS 10.3.9 on it that still performs well. It's slow but it never crashes. I use it for typing in vi and running LaTeX mostly.
-- Cheers!
It's a remarkable =5% which is - as an absolute number - truly remarkable compared to the =1% of new information in the referenced article.
k2r
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
How can the article even claim to know what Vista is?
Based on a few betas?
Seems like PR hype for Leopard to me.
I find it funny how Microsoft made changes to the Windows API to kill off OS/2 compatibility when in Bill Gates' Book "The Road Ahead" he states that the problem with windows is that windows programs cannot run on different operating systems. I'd love to see some sort of classic-like windows program compatibility on Mac OS X Leopard, but I'm unsure of whether or not it will happen.
Sig: I stole this sig.
I look forward to seeing Leopard, and I'd love to see dual-booting Mac/Win come into its own, but don't knock Vista just because MS-bashing is fun. It is honestly a superb OS.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...