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Has Steve Jobs Lost His Magic?
TimAbdulla writes to mention a Wired article wondering if Steve Jobs has lost his magic? The keynote yesterday, author Leander Kahney says, was the most uninspiring he's yet seen out of the usually charismatic man. Accompanied by other folks from within the company, Kahney wonders what lackluster showings like this will mean for the company after Jobs steps down. From the article: "Looking very thin, almost gaunt, Jobs used the 90-minute presentation to introduce a new desktop Mac and preview the next version of Apple's operating system, code-named Leopard. The sneak preview of Leopard was underwhelming. For what seemed an interminable time, Jobs and Co. showed off one yawn after another. There's no way I can get excited about virtual desktops or a new service that turns highlighted text into a 'to do' item. Oooo."
I wondered if Jobs, who was treated for cancer last year, was sick. Was he sharing presentation duties to save energy? When I saw Jobs introducing the iPod Hi-Fi at Apple's headquarters in late February, about five months ago, it looked to me like he was tiring quickly and was glad to get it over.
Gosh, I wonder if his fight with cancer has anything to do with him feeling sick.
Way to ignore pertinent facts to make a story.
No new features?
8 7C8}\Microsoft\Outlook Express
How about Time Machine? This is a very user friendly backup concept. Imagine a normal user performing backups on Windows. How hard is it to save off apps that rewrite 1,000 entries in your registry? Heck your average user has no idea where to find and backup his e-mail:
If you're using Outlook, they're in: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook
If you're using Outlook Express, they're in: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{45E80F8D-E0D8-48D0-B459-408C2E2F
That is unless you've modified (either on purpose or accidentally) some obscure registry keys that redirect these files.
This "dumbarse" with a blog has been writing professionally, full-time, about the Mac for over ten years. I sat a few cubicles away from him at MacWEEK when he was a news reporter and I was a reviews editor, waaay back in 1996. He went on to his current job at Wired (where he's maintained the Apple beat) and has written two excellent books about Apple.
So, umm, no.
Tom Geller
This is old hat for linux users, or I should really say X users that know what they're doing.
I wasn't there. I didn't watch the keynote. I know nothing about the presentation. I don't have a Mac or even an iPod.
However, I did mosey over to the Apple website yesterday to look at the new stuff. The new Pro desktops look like a nice new iteration of what's become a workstation line. Will they enable developers and media-content people to work more quickly and efficiently? Yup. That's all they really need to do. Are the new servers keeping pace on price, performance and management features? Yup. So far, no problem.
And the new OS X features? Looking over the short screencasts on the website, lots of that stuff sounds mighty nice. Time Machine is pretty darned revolutionary: an API and systemwide user interface for user-friendly browsing of data snapshots over time from within any application! Spaces looks like an extremely well thought out expansion on the virtual-desktop concept, with all sorts of visual cues and clever UI bits that will make it useful for people without photographic memories. If the Core Animation APIs are any good, they'll make developers mighty happy. The visual dashborad widget creator opens up widget creation to pretty much everybody. What is there even remotely like it in the Windows world? Even the mail client's editor component leapfrogs everything else out there and will probably sell a lot of consumer Macs the same way iMovie, iPhoto and Garageband have.
Much of it makes Vista look dated enough that Apple shouldn't have a problem keeping up its market share.
Hmmm... Looks like he has better chances than most:
_ Pancreatic_Cancer_is_Very_Rare.html?print
http://atlas.kpix.com/news/local/2004/08/02/Jobs'
If you post it, they will read.
If you have your XP home CD, you should be able to install it, howerer. Run X:\VALUEADD\MSFT\NTBACKUP.msi where X:\ refers to your CD-ROM drive-letter.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
He had a rare form of curable Pancreatic Cancer. He was operated on two years ago. One thing about cancer (no matter what type it is) - you cannot predict 100% that it won't come back. May be he is ill and may be they are preparing for other people to take over keynotes and other duties. I watched the keynote and he did not have the usual energy. He looked emaciated. His walk was terrible. He has not looked well in a while. He looked even worse back when he introduced the intel Mac Mini and the iPod HiFi.
Xray in Xcode 3.0 for Leopard looks interesting though. http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/xcode.html .. Has some features of Solaris DTrace, with some fancy GUI to do graphs and organize your data samples.
It was WWDC after all, what do you expect. the D is for Developer.
I don't know why Leopard added a bunch of Dashboard stuff (like safari as a widget, and a widget builder). I totally don't use Dashboard and it eats a lot of memory.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Jobs had a rare form of *curable* pancreatic cancer.
- day-as-if-its-your-last-one-day-it-will-be/
http://www.thecancerblog.com/2006/07/31/live-each
(Link).
sig? Oh, that sig...
Efficiency. When I used to use a Newton to take notes, I could just upload the notes to my searchable index of project files when I was done.
Now, every time I take notes I have to spend the same amount of time again typing them up and redrawing the diagrams. That's wasted time.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Ooh, so you pay an extra $250 for AppleCare and $100 for another stick of RAM... That doesn't add up to $1100. Even if you paid the $300 for Apple to upgrade the RAM, it's still several hundred cheaper than the Dell. Nice try, though.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
I actually saw Steve Jobs today on the Apple Campus. I didn't talk to him or anything, I was just waiting in line at Caffe Mac, and he was next to me in the trademark black shirt and blue jeans. He isn't looking thin and gaunt in person. Maybe there is something up with the lighting or something when he presented, I don't know.
That configuration is not even close.
... and arrived at a price of 3500 approx.
Basically, I took your configuration, switched to the right intel processor (5150), added a second processor, increased the hard drive size to make it comparable, increased memory speed to make it comparable, added wireless (not even bluetooth, add another 40), switched to a comparable video card (with 256 Mb thankyouverymuch), and selected a sound card.
Next time, don't even bother trying to make a fool of yourself, mr./mrs. Coward.
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
> believe they're all 256 levels of pressure on the Wacom Tablet PCs, which is completely sufficient.
No. Wacom Intuos3 is 1024 pressure levels. The Intuous1 from 2001 had 512. I can tell you as someone who runs Photoshop and a Wacom Tablet 50 hours a week for the past 10 years that 256 levels of pressure is not going to cut it for pro work.
> Additionally, if apple is such a great hardware maker and artists really are a core part of their user base,
> how come they haven't put out a tablet PC done right?
Because Apple doesn't make the little parts of stuff like the optical assembly in a mouse, or the pressure-sensitive screen of a tablet. They assemble systems from parts other people make. Right now the tablet PC technology is not as sophisticated as we would all maybe like.
The Wacom tablet with the built-in display is a tablet PC done right. It has the best specs of any tablet/display combination, including artist features that other tablet/display combinations don't have. It is fairly expensive. That's the reality. However there is nothing intrinsically broken about a great big quality display paired with a great big Wacom Tablet. It takes no time for the user to realize the 1:1 relationship between the stylus and the onscreen pointer and the tablet and the display and you can replace either tablet or display or repair either easily.
There's no doubt that eventually all digital artists will be painting directly on a display. However the idea of going to that today is a total joke. The compromises you would have to make today are just too much.
If you have your XP home CD, you should be able to install it.
:(
Bzzzt... most computers shipping XP home don't come with the CD - only a restore to original image program taking up a hidden partition on the HD. Think Dell, Gateway, HP etc. These users don't have backup and can't install it.