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Apple to Charge for Boot Camp?
An anonymous reader writes "According to a report MacScoop has obtained, Apple will charge current users of Mac OS X Tiger for the final version of Boot Camp that will be released at the same time as Mac OS X Leopard, this Spring."
I recently bought a Macbook to use mainly with Linux, if they charge for bootcamp then I will not upgrade.
My little Linux and tech blog
No biggie, it's worthy paying for.
I'll believe it when I see it.
"Everything worth innovating today will go to court tomorrow."
They did this with the WiFi update, and now with BootCamp. This should not be surprising, since they put out POINT RELEASES of OSX for $US129.
Other than this text, there is no discernible information contained in this sig.
Well. I guess most users will want to upgrade to Leopard (isn't that why some use the mac instead of XP/Vista/Ubuntu, the OS itself?). If you don't want to, 29$ looks like a fair price (and you can stick with the beta version afaik if you don't want to shell out money at all).
;-).
There are now great alternatives. Boot Camp, Parallels, CrossOverMac, Wine. Competition is great (even if cooperation is better
Animoog.org
Umm, yes? Because they have already, and it will be an integrated feature of OS X 10.5? And Boot Camp does in fact do what it claims to do, make it very easy to dual boot Windows and Mac OS? It seems like this is mainly something to give people who don't want to pay the full amount to upgrade to Leopard the ability to at least buy the Boot Camp functionality if that's all they care about.
Damn accountants.
Sarbanes-Oaxley compliance. Again. FWIW, I have Boot Camp on this very machine. It's worth an addtional 30 bills, if for no other reason than it opens up the world of Windows gaming to me yet again. If some of the Wine-based alternatives for OS X pan out, then I'll drop Boot Camp. Until then...
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Nobody will buy this if they charge for it. There are competing solutions already out which are better than BootCamp (like Parallels), They've already promised this will be part of Leopard and the Boot Camp page still says so: http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/ The quote in the right column says "Get a sneak peak at the other new features in Leopard on the Mac OS X Leopard site." That implies this is stil a feature of Leopard and will not be sold separately. MacScoop should stop smoking MacCrack.
http://www.kontentdesign.com/
This is nothing new from Apple. I believe when iChat AV came out with Panther (10.3), users of Jaguar (10.2) could upgrade to it for $29. Apple wants you to buy the latest OS from them, but for certain things (iChat, now maybe BootCamp) you can purchase them separately for a previous OS.
People that have already used the released(for free) version of boot camp probably do. Have you ever used it? If not, maybe you should try it before spouting off things like this.
Monstar L
Apple stated all along the Boot Camp would ship with Mac OS X 10.5 (aka you buy 10.5 you also get Boot Camp). So this left open the question if you would be able to purchase Boot Camp (the final version) for 10.4 or not. This rumors implies that 10.4 users will have the ability to use the release version of Boot Camp... which is a good thing. It was never really likely that Boot Camp would be free for 10.4 users.
iChat AV was an integrated part of Panther, but Jaguar users could upgrade iChat to iChat AV for $29, since it was sold separately.
I'm pretty sure they will blame the Sarbanes-Oxley Act for that.
Sub-point release?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why would it be Sarbanes-Oaxley compliance? They've been quite open (and made a few ads) about being able to run Windows on Mac. They didn't release that the cards were actually 802.11n, which is why they have to charge to make them such. It's not the same situation.
"Everything worth innovating today will go to court tomorrow."
No surprise. This is the same company that charges you $10 for the ability to use their media player to play videos at full screen, for crying out loud. They charge $130 for incremental OS updates every 12-18 months, which is basically a subscription service. They're charging $2 to enable the 802.11n hardware that they will ship.
Apple is the king of "nickel and dime"ing the user for all it's worth.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Inconsequential. Dual booting is *so* 2005.
Nobody even turns off their macs anymore, much less boots into a different OS.
Apple is the king of "nickel and dime"ing the user for all it's worth.
Right, because the millions of dollars a month they spend on developing OSX should be coming out of the kindness of their hearts.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Sorry, but I'm not paying a cent for Bootcamp til they make it work 100%. For a bunch of guys that brag about how much better their product is than Windows, they certainly code their Windows-based stuff poorly. Itunes on Windows uses more juice than nearly every other application I run.
Back to Bootcamp... it took almost a solid year for them to release a build of the Windows drivers that actually made use of all of the system's hardware... until then, the two-finger trackpad drag didn't work (and it's still sub-par to the responsiveness of the OSX drivers)... opening the onboard camera blew the OS up...
Even now, running the latest code, when you bring Windows back from hibernate on a Macbook, the trackpad doesn't work at all and a reboot is required to bring it back. It's been tolerable because it's a beta, but put a price tag on it and we have a different situation. They're going to have to put a lot more effort into making a quality product if they want us to shell out for it.
---
"how can the same street intersect with itself? i must be at the nexus of the universe!" - cosmo kramer
Excuse my ignorance to all things Mac, but what is the difference between Boot Camp and GRUB/LILO? Can't GRUB/LILO boot a Mac OS?
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Lets see how well IE 7 does if it costs $4.99 to download and install. I think also XP should be sold standard on PCs, with an upgrade fee of $4.99 for Vista.
Sig: I stole this sig.
GRUB and LILO are free.
Check out(http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac) Crossover for OSX. Just a commercial version of WINE, but for the $40-60 I can run office 2k without having to put a Win32 OS on the machine. It feels like it launches a hidden copy of the OS for each application under the covers, so I stay in OSX with my win32 apps running along side the Mac ones. Not a dual OS boot like boot camp, not a vmware OS in a OS like parallels. Just another option. I suspect you could do WINE for free, but the helper stuff was well worth the money, IMHO.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
This is the same company that charges you $10 for the ability to use their media player to play videos at full screen, for crying out loud.
If all you want from QuickTime is full screen, go here. I'm not sure where you're getting $10 from, because QuickTime Pro is $30, and that gets you a lot more than just the ability to play movies full screen.
They charge $130 for incremental OS updates every 12-18 months, which is basically a subscription service.
Wrong. Truly spoken like somebody who doesn't actually know what they're talking about! Don't be fooled by what looks like a change in the minor version number; what you think are "incremental" updates always have a large amount of new features -- it's closer to uprading from Windows 2000 to Windows XP than applying a service pack. Besides, if you don't want the new features, it's not like the older versions of OS X stop working, and they still provide security updates for them.
They're charging $2 to enable the 802.11n hardware that they will ship.
For legal reasons. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act really is that stupid.
Apple's terminology currently for OSs goes, Complete change, major update, minor update. Thus Apples .# is equal to Microsofts name changes, and Apples .#.# is equal to their Service packs.
I honestly dont see why it confuses you Windows people, its not like it takes a rocket scientist to figure that out.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Sweet Jesus, they never described BootCamp as anything but a beta technology from their upcoming major OS release. The fact that Tiger users even have the option at any price to continue using it once Leopard is released is more than they ever stated they would do and more than any Tiger user had reason to hope for. I think everyone needs to stop their goddamned whining about it. I fully expected to have to upgrade to use it. I don't know why anyone wouldn't have had that assumption.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
They charge $130 for incremental OS updates
Spoken like somebody who's never even seen a Mac. Windows 98 and ME were incremental OS updates with a price tag. New versions of OS X really are new versions. Do you seriously not see much difference between the latest version of OS X and the original version?
Apple really needs to wise-up. Information Week published recently (it'll be online next week I guess) that Apple is gearing up once more for a run at the enterprise again. They really need to take a play from Microsoft's book -- Give some stuff away to get yourself better leverage.
Bootcamp is good leverage. The parallels thing might be even better. In either case, it's a good way to bridge from Windows to MacOS and they want to make it less appealing to do so???
Idiots. They over-estimate their value. It's that kind of thinking that has kept them small and will keep them that way. People are already getting tired of their shiny apple logo'd devices.
OS updates every 12-18 months
... in 2001 Mac OS X was a relatively new operating system under going rapid concurrent team development and now that it has matured Apple has stated customers should expect major releases every couple of years as the norm.
10.4 -> 10.5 - ~24 months
10.3 -> 10.4 - ~18 months
10.2 -> 10.3 - ~14 months
10.1 -> 10.2 - ~11 months
Notice a trend?
Apple made major releases Mac OS X available relatively often to get newly implemented features out to end customers and developers sooner (a good thing)
Apple will support the current version of Mac OS X and one prior. So in reality customers concerned about the relatively small upgrade fee of $129 (family pack is even a better deal) could skip every other release and hence only purchase an update every 4 years or so (that falls in the Window release time frame and of course the 129 is less then what MS charges). On the time scales of 4 years you also start to get into purchasing new hardware mindset which would get you the latest version of Mac OS X for free.
As opposed to the company that charged you to play dvd on they're media player, or the compagnit that charge you to do basic routing on theyre server os... frankly i find the incremental update bit old. Apple is not the only company that charge for incremental update or haven't you heard of windows 98? So they release a new os every 18 months or so, nobody is forcing you to buy. And the next version will have all the feature of the previous and so on. You don't really need to run the latest os you know.
Well, actually a lot of things. Boot camp isn't simply a bootloader, it is a packaged solution. Upon first running bootcamp, it has you do a destructionless partition on your HD in order to hold windows (if you don't already have a windows part). Then it burns a cd with all the drivers you will need for your mac hardware once windows is installed and looking for drivers for these things. Now yes, it also doeds include a bootloader, but it is designed to be a more "plug and play" solution than having to find and download the individual programs that would do these things, and configure them properly. Just more of a "mac-like" experience.
Cut off his nose in spite of his face.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
As far as I know Bootcamp is no big deal: .pax archive but I am not sure -anyway it is buried somewhere in the installer)
1) It provides a GUI (not very good and limited, it does not support linux) for resizing the patritions. The actual job is done by DiskUtil, which can be used without installing BootCamp.
2) It contains a disk image with Apple Win32 drivers (you can extract the image from the BootCamp installer - just search in the package and you'll find the image somewhere - i remember waguely it is in a
You dont need BootCamp to instal windows and/or linux. You need a Mac with a firmware which supports BIOS emulation; for windows you also need the Apple win32 drivers.
Boot canmp is an irritating application, You cannot use it if you want to configure a triple boot (OSX/Linux/Windows)- It WOULD NOT LET YOU CREATE a LINUX PARTITION.
Another irritating feature. Apple firmware mistakenly identifies any non-Apple operating system as 'Windows'; for Apple 'Linux' is the same as 'Windows'. That is an offense for each and every Linux user all over the world (Bad Apple, Bad!). Fortunately this can be easily corrected by using a third party bootloader (rEFIt).
For installing Linux and Windows on a Mac you need a Mac with a Bios emulation (if it does not have it just upgrade the firmware). For windows you also need Apple Win32 drivers.
1) Make Win and Linux partition at the command line with DiskUtil.
2) Install Win and Linux.
3) Install the rEFIt bootloader. I would suggest to install it even if you do not use linux, it is much better than Apple's bootloader.
Boot Camp actually prepares a Windows disc for you including drivers for Apple's hardware. It also partitions the disk. It's basically an all-in-two solution for adding Windows to your Mac (it's all-in-two because you still need a Windows CD, which you still need if you repartition manually). I don't know if the Windows drivers are available any other way.
Why would you want to run an operating system that Steve Jobs calls a copycat of Mac OS X? Doesn't make sense...
When they advertise it as a feature and something you might want to do... uhhh ya id expect it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
No of cousre they should get reimbursed, but they should bundle ALL the features into the inital cost of the OS, not tons of 'extra charges' that piss off their users.
If they want to charge the extra few bucks upfont that is one thing, but i agree all this garbage with 'fringe costs' is really annoying.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Then why does even PC BIOS know what the date is? Macs use EFI, which is said to be more sophisticated than BIOS.
Intel Macs use EFI instead of the legacy BIOS, so the versions of GRUB and/or LILO shipping with any current Linux distros do not work. GRUB appears to have partial EFI support working on the Mac Mini and LILO has the elilo fork, but at this point neither have made it in to mainstream distros.
What Boot Camp does is it provides BIOS emulation so NTLDR, GRUB, and LILO then work unmodified after the Boot Camp loader has already run. The Boot Camp assistant also provides a non-destructive GUI partitioning tool and allows the user to burn a CD containing all the drivers they'll need for Windows XP on their Mac.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
Looks like an Apple apologist came out of the woodwork. Or an Apple shill or astroturfer.
OK, Jobs apologist, name one other company that charges you $10 to enable full screen video playback in their media player.
And some idiots modded your nonsense as +5 "Insightful"?
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
EFI boots the system, not BootCamp. You can instal win/linux without bootcamp. rEFIt is a nice bootloader for OSX/Linux/Win (you still have to use lilo in combination with rEFIt for linux - rEFIt launches lilo which launches linux). Right now EFI is not compatible with GRUB Details are presented in amother Slashdot post:
c id=17702948
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=218036&
The one thing to understand here is that you don't really need Boot Camp to run other operating systems. Intel macs will boot, install and run other intel OS's just fine without it. All Boot Camp does is gives you a pretty interface to partition your drive and makes a nice CD with all the Windows drivers on it for you.
Not to mention the self-serving way they charge you for iLife separately, but just give it to you installed if you buy a new Mac. Greedy jerks.
Ever hear of iChat?
They did the same thing (release a timed public beta of iChat (though I don't think Boot Camp is timed at all, wouldn't make sense)) for Jaguar, and offered Jaguar users the software for $30, but that if came free in Panther. No one went ballistic , and people just used something else, or bought/installed a friend's copy of Panther. I can't imagine Apple sold more than a double handful of iChat Jaguar licenses. Not that iChat is particularly GOOD, but from what I hear, Boot Camp isn't especially good either. Most of the people I deal with that run windows on their Macs run it under Parallels, which is a whole lot easier in all kinds of ways, starting with not requiring a reboot to get to whatever else you need. Unless you're gaming with it (and I do know a few people that do that) Parallels performs quite well running Office and other normal apps, even on a low-end Macbook. If for some reason you don't want to buy Leopard (and that's certainly quite reasonable, I generally wait until I don't have any other choice to upgrade my Macs. I'd be running Panther on my Intel iMac if I could) but want a fully supported, non-beta version of Boot Camp, this lets you just pay $30 instead of $130 to get the one feature you care about.
Linux, as far as I recall, doesn't require Boot Camp to run on an Intel Mac (though please correct me if I'm wrong, I could've sworn I'd seen stories about Linux running happily on Intel macs well before Boot Camp was released) so who cares if Apple makes people pay for Boot Camp? If you need Linux to the point where simply recompiling your apps to work under OS X-with-X11 is a burden, why the hell do you have OS X installed? Mail.app isn't that killer. Also, no one I've seen is saying that you can't continue to use the current Boot Camp beta. It just won't be supported, and isn't really supported now, so what's the difference? I can't see how Apple could remotely turn it off.
Bundle it all together like a certain software company does, and then have people complain that they are a monopoly because they bundle everything together.
/., I am not allowed to be critical of anything non-Microsoft.
Oh wait, this is
If Apple is going to start charging for Boot Camp, I guess its time for dual-booters to start using the multi-purpose EasyBCD or OnMac to get Windows running on your Macintosh. They're both free, and written by the community, not a big money-making company. You can (and should) donate if you like, of course.
No surprise. This is the same company that charges you $10 for the ability to use their media player to play videos at full screen, for crying out loud.
I just played a bunch of movies out of iTunes and they all will play "full screen". Front Row plays them full screen. VLC will happily play them full screen... The Quicktime player component itself does not, but QT Pro is $30 (I have no idea if QT Pro plays movies full screen)? So what are you talking about?
They charge $130 for incremental OS updates every 12-18 months, which is basically a subscription service.
No, OS X continues to work flawlessly regardless of wether I upgrade or not. Apple doesn't appear to have any trouble getting people to buy the upgrades so there is clearly something worth the time, money, and trouble of doing so.
It could be worse. Linux doesn't charge you, but that's only free if your time is worth nothing. The only reason Microsoft hasn't is because they've buggered themselves to the point that they *can't*. Windows 98, 98 SE, ME, and XP all shipped in close succession.
They're charging $2 to enable the 802.11n hardware that they will ship.
This is pretty lame, but they feel they must do this as a matter of law. Paranoid perhaps, but we aren't under SEC investigation either. It's not a done deal either, nor do we have all the information regarding the specific regulations (yet).
Apple is the king of "nickel and dime"ing the user for all it's worth.
You ever look at your phone bill?
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
Apple's said from the start it would be bundled with Leopard, and it still is. And as usual, people still on Tiger—over two years old at this point—can upgrade to it at a heavily discount (compared to the full price of Leopard).
What's the fuss about? What's wrong with you Apple-hating malcontents?
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
I installed linux and windows on my MacBook without installing bootcamp, the Bios emulation is already in the firmware (if you have an old intel mac, just upgrade the firmware, no need for bootcamp)c id=17702948
Bootcamp:
1) uses diskutil for repartitioning
2) creates a CD with win32 drivers
This is all, you can do everything, and much more, without bootcamp, for example install linux. See the following slashdot post:
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=218036&
About 4 months ago I was in the market for a new PC (my Sony PCV-MXS10 with its Pentium 4 was getting long in the tooth) and the Mac Mini came out on top weighing price/ performance/aesthetics so I looked at a *lot* of information about Boot Camp before buying a Mac to run XP.
... and at a lower price. So I get to give serious thought as to whether to just pay the $29 and skip the OS X version upgrade (I very well might since nothing in 10.5 looks worth upgrading for someone who spends most of his time in XP).
Everything I saw made it *quite* clear that Boot Camp is currently a beta product whose license has an expiration date (although it's been unclear whether that will ever be enforced in the software it is in the licensing terms) and that the only way to get a copy with a non-expiring license would be to eventually buy an upgrade to OS X 10.5.
I decided that the last 4 months of use I've gotten plus use over the next several months before 10.5 is expected to be released would be well worth the anticipated $129 to eventually get to a supported configuration and bought back then. This announcement means I now have an option they'd previously made clear wouldn't be offered
As someone who is smack in the target set of folks who might buy Boot Camp for 10.4 and who bought a Mac solely because Boot Camp was promised to be coming, I'm here to say this is the first suggestion that a permanently-licensed Boot Camp for 10.4 would be available at all. Which is why I will also seriously question the integrity of Apple's execs if they also try to blame GAAP for attaching a fee to it (as opposed to simply claiming "we think this function is worth $29").
As a web developer working at a design firm I am forced to work with both OS X and Windows daily for testing. Because we are a Mac-based office I use a Mac as my primary machine. Boot Camp was a pain in the ass for me because in order to test I didn't want to be forced to reboot my machine.
My solution was to run Parallels. On my Mac, a basic Intel-based 2GHz dual-core iMac, Windows XP runs without skipping a beat; even when running processer-intensive applications such as Adobe's Creative Suite.
If you don't plan on using Windows as your primary OS on your Mac Parallels is absolutely awesome, and for my purposes, a hell of a lot better solution than Boot Camp ever was.
I am Jack's smirking revenge.
How is this a troll? It#s the simple truth, easy to see even if you like Apple
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
I think we should all just wait until it comes out. If you have to pay for it, then let the people thatw ant to pay for it, pay for it. Although I don't think its a good idea (just because I'm cheap like that), I hope the price, if it does end up being seperate and a price, is not too high.
Looks like an Apple apologist came out of the woodwork. Or an Apple shill or astroturfer.
I'll bite. All I did, as someone with 10 years in the software industry, was point out the realities of the cost of software development. I've never owned an Apple computer in my life. Oh, and I work for Microsoft.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
That's exactly my question (you beat me to it). Is it just that Mac people want *everything* done for them? It's really not that hard to do your own partitioning, but again I'm fairly mac ignorant too....
rEFIt is the best Intel Mac Bootloader, and it is also OpenSource and free.
rEFIt is much more than a bootloader, it has its own shell, you can use it to correct and synchronize the GPT and MBR partition tables, etc. Anyway, Bootcamp is not a bootloader,but a helper application, EFI boots the mac.
Ok, now I understand (I think)... You can't load windows on Apple hardware without BootCamp and you can't load Mac on non-Apple hardware. My ignorance is thinning (a bit)...
Quicktime Pro may very well give you more than the ability to play movies full-screen, but that argument of yours actually shows just how lame it is that they charge money for things like "Save this movie":
If QT Pro has so many extra features, why do they have to pull trivial features from QT Free, like playing videos in full screen and the ability to download videos via the browser plugin? (A blockage which can easily be bipassed thanks to View Source, thus making the removed feature look even more ridiculous).
So far the best answer I have found to that question is: Apple does not care if their video format is taken seriously.
I realized a while ago that nobody actually uses Quicktime's fancy features like Quicktime VR.
Thus, I switched to Quicktime Alternative. Now I have one less startup process, the Apple web site does not crash my web browser, I can view videos in full screen, I can download videos, and I am not tied down to a single (ugly looking against the native GUI) video player.
I think it is surprising that Apple would suddenly be caring about the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. After all, how long have software companies been releasing free upgrades?
I can think of a good number:
-Microsoft. (WinFS claimed to be planned for Vista Service Pack 1, I believe?)
-Practically any company that builds proprietary programming languages or 3d modelling programs. Fixes that stop stuff from not working, thus allowing features to work, can quite definitely be considered added features... And that kind of fix is identical to Apple's stopping the 802.11n hardware from not working.
-Game developers. (Hmm... VALVe... Heck, Nintendo? They've released a few fixes that stop stuff from not working lately).
Anyway, I'm miles off topic here so I'd better stop.
Charging for Boot Camp... Well, that makes a lot more sense than charging for 802.11n or saving videos (which I've already downloaded!).
From my standpoint, it would be a good idea for Apple to keep it free because that would make it easier to justify buying a Mac, and easier to get Windows users to switch to Mac OS.
Then again, it is free in the next release of OS X (right?) so that won't really change anything; people thinking of buying a Mac will be using the new ones with free Bootcamp anyway.
So, my theory is that, since Bootcamp cost much money and took a lot of time to develop, Apple wants to even it out.
The solution: Charge money where it won't hurt nearly as much.
You can in fact do WINE for free, it's been supported on OS X since sometime in the 0.9.2x versions. However, you are correct that you don't get any of the helper stuff (you pretty much have to figure out how to launch your app using command-line WINE), and compatibility isn't as good as CrossOver -- there's no Direct3D support at all, as far as I can see. Of course, you don't get the same user support that Codeweavers gives you either. Plus you have to compile it yourself (meaning you need the dev tools installed), since there's no installer package yet. I just have it installed for the PokerStars client, but for someone who needed more extensive support or was running a mission-critical app, Crossover Mac is probably well worth it.
That steve jobs would suck my dong.
There are other reasons to buy Leopard if you have a recent (Core 2 Duo) iMac, Mac Pro, MacBook or MacBook Pro. Three words: MacIntel 64-bit OS. Leopard will be 64 bit native on MacIntel. Meaning the 32-bit leg-irons will be lifted off, and your MacBook will run way faster thanks to all the advantages of 64-bit data addressing and so forth.
The original 32-bit Core Duo and Core Solo Macs won't have the same advantages. It won't be as compelling of an upgrade. But for very, very recent Macs it will be as important as the upgrade between the original single-threaded Finder and the MultiFinder. Yes, I go way back with Macs, and I restore old Macs.
Boot Camp isn't the half of what this upgrade will be about.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
it's very hard to define what a point release is - seeing as nobody goes back and writes code from scratch for a new OS.
I think the easiest way to look at it is not as 'new features' but re-writing existing ones 'better'. Any developer knows how easy it is to progressively add more bells and whistles to a product, and how often you just apply patch over upgrade over patch to 'just make it work'
Personally I take a proper new release to be when the functionality of the last release is frozen, the whole product is analyzed, optimized (including rebuilding parts from the start if required) and then possibly new features are added on-top.
XP maybe fell into this category, but it was more a merge of ME and Win2000. OSX v1 definitely did as it was a completely new OS. Vista does as well (Although Apple still wins in the 'most changed' for their OS9->10 shift)
Precisely how much do you think it would take, in terms of money and support, for Apple to do that?
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
The complaint of charging extra to enable included hardware seems like a legitimate one to me.
I'm typing this from a G4 now.
And as i look around, i see 3 ipods and a powerbook.. ( not to mention at least 15 older Apple items out in the garage.. Do you still have your first ][? Your Newton? )
I'm not in anyway a Apple hater, and have always been a fan of their technology. But i do dislike some of their business practices, especially when Steve J. gets too closely involved.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I do, I do, and my mistake. Apologies.
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
If you want the Quicktime Pro features, consider QTAmateur. Every feature in Pro, and batch convert on top of that, for frees.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
It's been said, but.
I need Windows for my job, and I refuse to reboot my macbook twice a day into XP and back. I had tried Parallels but was entirely unsatisfied with its performance until I upgraded to 1.25 gigs of RAM. Sweet Jeebus is it cool. Booting XP in a window takes about fifteen seconds from launch to login, automatically recognizes my hardware setup and network connection and does exactly what I need it to while staying the hell out of my way.
BootCamp looks neat, I guess, but really - who the hell restarts their computers anymore?
Spoken like someone who gets their news from Slashdot, zealously uses and advocates Linux, and doesn't own a Mac.
Their OS releases are not 'updates', they bring significant new functionality while evolving an already great code base. They only APPEAR to be 'incremental' because of their versioning scheme, but each release packs in more upgrade than any corresponding major version upgrade of windows.
And you have to also bear in mind that Apple's target demographic doesn't give a crap about a few bucks here and there. They're not after YOU, they're not trying to capture the low end $500 dell market, or the "build your own and run Linux" market, nor are they trying to capture the "$3000 gaming rig j00 g0t pwned" market.
They're after the upper middle demographic who has money to burn and wants quality at any price. People who aren't going to feel nickeled and dimed over 30 bucks. People who are far more interested in getting reliable quality stuff than saving a few bucks.
I would not call myself a fanboy, I just really like my Mac. (But I'm not trying to have sex with it, like this guy.) It's my "I'm home from work, not the network admin anymore today, and just not going to have a fight with my computer tonight" machine. I bought it because I wanted something less aggravating than windows, at any price. This is exactly the same reason why I sleep on a Tempurpedic and drive a BMW... quality and reliability are more important to me than paying a little more.
People like me are Apple's target demographic, and we just don't think they're being at all unreasonable about their pricing for the quality of product that they put out. Especially compared to all the other total shit hardware and software out there.
To be complete...
10.4 -> 10.5 - ~24 months
10.3 -> 10.4 - ~18 months
10.2 -> 10.3 - ~14 months
10.1 -> 10.2 - ~11 months
10.0 -> 10.1 - ~7 months (free upgrade)
"This is great. It will encourage more people to move to Leopard at a faster rate.
More revenue for Apple. More profits for Apple. More Macs for us to buy. Yea!"
This is a comment on the site. Most illuminating, people who do not know the difference between their own interests and that of other people.
Hardly know where to begin....
Actually, XPSP2 even had free shipping. Microsoft capped the number CDs they would send to one person/address to 10.
Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. -Anonymous
Is $29 more or less than buying a PC to test your application on?
Is $29 more or less than buying a new desk to hold your new computer?
Is $29 more or less than your hourly rate?
Fee to pay for bootcamp: $29.
Fee to make Vista run better: Priceless.
For everything else, use OS X.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
IF they want to support Vista in Boot Camp, and I guess they do, the most tricky part in Boot Camp isn't the partitioning but the drivers that you install to translate the Mac keyboard, iSight, mouse and so on into Windows-compatible devices. In XP, you are warned that these are unsigned drivers. In Vista, or in a final Boot Camp version, would Apple keep them unsigned? Probably not, especially since Vista may lock out any unsigned drivers. So that would leave Apple to pay thousands to MS every year for the privilege of keeping its signed status. Also, if they were to charge for Boot Camp, I think they would have to support Boot Camp, though not whatever software you chose to install on the Boot Camp partition.
Oh wait. I'm a Win/Lin guy who avoids Macs like the plague.
Bah. BFD.
** We now return you to your regularly scheduled chaos **
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
"OK, Jobs apologist, name one other company that charges you $10 to enable full screen video playback in their media player."
Instead of giving a resume, why not give an answer? Oh, I know... because you can't.
Free tools are available for non-destructive partitioning (destructive tools are already included in OS X) and of course this wouldn't be needed when booting an external or secondary HDD (and YES, OS X, Linux, WIndows et all CAN boot from an external - just not thru bootcamp). Emulated BIOS thru EFI was added in a flash upgrade (ie now its part of the firmware). The Mac XP drivers can be had as free downloads.
Bootcamp just saves a few steps but offers ZERO features or functions, and actually hampers your ability to boot from external drives in some situations.
If you want to dual boot OS X and Windows - Bootcamp is ENTIRELY optional and absolutely NOT REQUIRED.
So if Apple charges for it they are just counting on users that are afraid to do a little reading ( a lot of their user base, I'm sure).
Just like the numerous shareware authors/programs out in the wild that duplicate features and functionality already built in to various versions of Windows knowing full well some idiot users out there don't know how to access said function/feature will lay down cash for an app before they do sort of research.
Meanwhile, the world keeps spinning.
For people who use BootCamp - they can buy the updated 1.0 version,
or just bite the bullet and buy the full Mac OS X 10.5 - it will be included.
This gives people the chance to get out of the Beta version without updating their whole system.
BootCamp Beta already works ok, no purchase needed for most Windows functions.
So, it's not like Apple is billing you after the fact.
The choice is yours.
If you don't believe me, compare 10.0 to 10.4 side by side and tell me it feels even remotely like the same OS - they're further apart in feel and features than 98 to XP.
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"As opposed to the company that charged you to play dvd on they're media player"
You mean Microsoft? The technology to play DVDs (CSS) has license fees. Business users don't need to pay the license fees (by not buying the functionality), home users do. Seems reasonable.
Service pack. Singular. SP2 was the only Windows service pack to have a new features count comparable to an OS X point release.
I can't think of any "hardcore Mac users" who don't regard Firefox as an abomination
Think of me, then. Safari is great, but it doesn't have nearly the selection of free extensions available that Firefox boasts. Sure, there might be shareware adblocking workarounds. But how about MeasureIt? How about Colorzilla? How about DownloadThemAll? How about themes? I'd happily use Safari if I could load Firefox extensions.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
There was no question to begin with. GP's troll was pure ad hominem.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
While Apple does put out great products.. please dont think you are giving your money to the good guys. They are every bit as altruistic as Microsoft.
Their OS's are designed with one purpose in mind: To install a direct sucking machine that goes straight from your wallet, directly to their bank account.
In fact, their OS releases *ARE* incremental upgrades, at best. And no I'm not confused because of the version numbers. The differences between OSX 10.3 and 10.4 in no way, whatsoever, compare to the sweeping changes between XP and Vista. Not in any universe could you consider the differences between the two comparable.
The past few releases of OSX, their "new", supposedly revolutionary changes have been little more than usurping some small ISV's shareware app, stealing its functionality while pretending it was Apple's idea all along (Dashboard anyone?). Leapard is no exception. At least when Microsoft does this, they usually do the courtesy of actually buying out the ISV first, before they steal their software. Then they usually tinker enough with the underlying API's so that 3rd party software designed for "insert latest release" here, wont work on the previous versions of OSX, forcing you to upgrade.
I've been buying Apple computers for at least 3 or 4 years now, and am pretty tired of it. I would have switched back to PC's (linux primary os, windows for games) but I was sucked back in to the mac platform after they switched to intel chips, but I probably wont be buying anymore in the future, because of the reasons I mentioned above. Just feel like to much of a sucker.
Anyways, back on topic: Bootcamp is not needed, when you have programs like this: http://refit.sourceforge.net/. Bootcamp is ONLY necassary for the drivers disk (if you run windows, I'm currently dual booting with Linux, without the use of bootcamp at all).
Apple could have not released it for Tiger at all. Like DirectX 10 for Windows XP (which apparently won't be happening).
While I'm not a huge fan of proprietary software, I don't find it all that unreasonable that a company that sells a proprietary operating system expects you to pay for extra OS features. Heck, even with free software, you sometimes have to pay someone to backport the features you need.
http://outcampaign.org/
Just an FYI since you don't seem to be aware of it - I downloaded a binary installer of DarWine ages ago (several months, don't recall exactly)... no need to compile and it works like a dream - doubleclick on an exe and up pops the "WineHelper" and X11 followed seconds later by the application (or, in some cases of course, a WINE error instead).
It's not as "clean" as CrossOver to use, but I honestly prefer it since CrossOver's "bundles" thing seems far too counterintuitive to me (each to their own of course - if you like CrossOver, keep with it!)
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Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
How dare Apple!!
Oh wait, by most accounts, Tiger is still as good or better than Vista.
This sig only exists because you are observing it.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
If you are a Linux guy, you will fall in love with a Mac if you use it for a little while. Thats how I was. Totally pro Linux ... found a Mac, and its the perfect mixture of a powerful GUI with *nix under it.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
Apple fans will spend the $30 to buy Boot Camp....anything that will let them run Windows on their Mac hardware!! (funny how Apple fans flame Windows so much, but they scream for free BootCamp so they can *gasp*, use Windows!)
The irony of it all...
While Apple does put out great products.. please dont think you are giving your money to the good guys. They are every bit as altruistic as Microsoft.
You completely missed my point. I'm NOT buying their products because "I want to give my money to the good guys" or any such philosophical or idealistic bullshit.
I buy their products because at the end of the day, they just work. It's not just a marketing slogan. I can sit and relax on my couch and not fight with my computer.
That's all it is. I don't care about their philosophy, or revolutionary upgrades. I just want a computer that does what I want, when I want, without irritating me.
All I care about is the quality. And I'm willing to pay for it. And people like me are Apple's target demographic. That was my point.
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Think of the big picture. Whether this is a feature from an upcoming OS release or not, the end result is you have to pay just to install another OS on your computer... your computer that has essentially the same hardware as a generic PC. You're paying for a boot loader and a set of Windows drivers - the kind of stuff you could get for free if your hardware didn't have pictures of apples on it.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Why not just get Office for OSX? Granted, it doesn't have Outlook (it has Entourage instead), but that's not necessarily a bad thing...
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Wow.. so they're charging for drivers, which every other hardware company on the planet provides for free? Imagine the outrage if Dell tried to pull a stunt like that.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Like I said, I don't know if they're anywhere else or not. It's entirely possible that they are--I haven't particularly had the desire to find out.
This way Apple sells OS X 10.5 for $129 with Boot Camp integrated in the OS, thus allowing the argument that the OS *really* only costs $100 with Boot Camp added in.
I'll take a buggy crossover-enabled Outlook over Entourage. Though it'd be much better if Apple could just get the Mail/iCal combo to work with Exchange servers.
No, it seems to me that I still have the better deal. Or did Vista suddenly get a utility to make it easy (and supporrted!) to install other OSs on the box? Did that happen and I just missed it?
And let's be honest here. You're thinking of installing Linux on your PC. I can do that, too, and completely without Apple's permission.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
I just stick with the OSX that came with my computer. It works fine. That's $0 per year, roughly infinity percent less than any brain-damaged scheme that makes me pay a rental fee. Actually, no, it wouldn't make me pay a rental fee, because I then wouldn't buy an Apple. Renting things is nearly always financially stupid. Especially computer software.
Hmm. Well, I'm not sure what benefits, if any, bootcamp (free or at $30) offers over Parallels at $60; while I am quite certain of a very long (and quite relevant to me) list of advantages Parallels has over bootcamp.
So I guess this is about as much news as changes to Safari — because I don't use that either. Once I tried Omniweb, I basically never had a reason to go back. It kicks Safari's butt right off the face of the planet, particularly in the area of tab features and controlling how individual web sites are allowed to act.
I sure wish Apple would concentrate on fixing the basics instead of duplicating functionality available in far more sophisticated forms from third parties; for instance, the Terminal's character addressing modes haven't been working 100% for the last three years, the system-wide implementation of function keys is a disaster, the single button on laptops is insufficient to the task of dealing with the full range of two button operations any windows laptop can pull off (and yes, I know all about the two finger emulation... try a right button drag and let me know how that works out for you) and why, on a laptop wider than my PC's keyboard, can't Apple be bothered to put a numeric pad? And why on a dual core, high speed laptop, running what is nominally supposed to be a modern multitasking OS, do I *ever* see that *&^&$^$ beachball when doing I/O? And why can't I refresh a network share?
I'm a huge Apple fan, really I am, but it just seems to me that they could do better - and bootcamp doesn't appear to be worth the time they are spending on it. Maybe I'm missing something. Why - anyone - is bootcamp better than Parallels? I'm booting linux, win98, winxp all in windows on my laptop using Parallels. Concurrently. They run great. What would using bootcamp gain me? I mean, besides losing the incredible convenience of OSX running alongside those other OS's, and vice-versa?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Because of the Service Pack troll.
It's old meme and dumb.
After all, I am strangely colored.
E.g. try building the latest GARNOME on the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL 4). This simply isn't possible because of API dependencies for which there isn't an official RPM package.
Differently worded, Apple and GNOME applications try to adopt the latest platform innovations (which is definitely not a bad thing). In contrast, the "Install New Font" dialog in Vista is still exactly the same as in Windows 3.1!
They didn't release that the cards were actually 802.11n, which is why they have to charge to make them such. It's not the same situation.
Actually, they did - the machines with the -n cards have an apple80211 man page which has details.
Whether that release was inadvertent or not seems immaterial - anybody at an Apple store could have read all about it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I see, thanks. Still true. I can acknowledge that OSX updates (from one cat to another) are more than point releases, put IIRC I paid MacOS 7.2 -> 7.3 and that was surely not more than a service pack
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Intel Macs use EFI instead of the legacy BIOS, so the versions of GRUB and/or LILO shipping with any current Linux distros do not work
Not entirely true; Ubuntu Edgy works with GRUB if you follow these directions, specifically steps 6 and 7 where you sync the partition tables while the installation is in progress, which allows GRUB to install successfully. Edgy works great on my MBP, except no wireless support. (And Beryl is *slick*).
What Boot Camp does is it provides BIOS emulation
BIOS emulation is provided by the firmware, not Boot Camp itself; see here. Also, Boot Camp's partitioning tool is just a GUI wrapper for "diskutil resizeVolume"
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
While its of some debate that the Sarbanes-Oxley law would 'force' apple to charge for the 802.11n support, your lame ass assertion about the numbering scheme is worthy of abject ridicule. Have you been under a rock for so long or are you not aware that each 'point release' has been a major revision. Are you upset by the way they are numbered? Would you, perhaps, be happier if Tiger was called Mac OS XIV?
You have been modded and you certainly are flamebait. The only question is which camp do you fall into? GPL cultists or MS Apologists?
Here are a few reasons:
- I run a few intensive processes (single core systems) and get the beachball/spindle of death
- I can't stand the dumbed down configuration GUIs compared to others.
- I find myself copying bad concepts from Windows on OS X, downloading utilities/hacks to customize the OS, to fix stupid things. Like ShadowKiller (to kill shadows), tinkertool (to disable some font smoothing -- I would prefer to disable it all, but I can't).
- Lack of the ability to customize -- Yes zoom is fine in some cases, but I want maximize too. I want to be able to use the maximum amount of space on my workspace can provide sometimes not waste a minute trying to resize the window the best I can.
- I hate the dock, I like KDE's panels
- Finder -- can't use it to file manage most stuff --> sftp, fish, ftp (uploading) etc.
- Finder -- Stupid
.ds_store files -- Can't disable them fully - The ability to just disable spotlight completely -- I don't want it, if I wanted desktop search, Beagle already surpasses it's functionality.
- Widgets -- they seem to carry a heavy memory footprint compared to widgets loaded in say.. SuperKaramba
- Lack of ability to change keybindings -- copy/paste etc.
- Privative X11 server, doesn't support drag and drop, clipboard sharing
- OS X feels SLOW compared to to running Kubuntu on the same hardware -- This could be because I do disable effects, font smoothing and other crap in KDE that I can't do on OS X
- Signaling -- It's not working properly under OS X
- Huge amounts of how to configure things (in config files, since most of the settings aren't available in the GUI like it is on KDE) just seems to be mostly undocumented.
Far from perfect to me... The GUI is lacking largely in configurability (strange that this is what people tend to complain about that's wrong with Linux though).Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
"but they should bundle ALL the features into the inital cost of the OS,"
... it's logically incoherent.
Look you mentally diffused yard ape, Boot Camp is a feature of OS X 10.5, that's ten point FIVE. Apple is going to sell it as an add-on for users of OS X 10.4, that's ten point FOUR; you know, the OS that's been out for TWO YEARS ALREADY. Your complaint isn't just groundless
Go away.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I won't be buying Vista either. :) Bootcamp doesn't work very well anyway. I ended up having to use third-party tools to setup a tri-boot box of OS X, Windows, and Linux so Bootcamp really didn't impress me much.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
No, the real reason to buy CrossOver Office is the GUI. If you want maximum compatibility, consider compiling from Wine's git repository.
BootCamp is also a partition resizer (similar to PartitionMagic) and a set of drivers for Windows to support the trackpad, the iSight, the 3D graphics, the wireless controller, etc. Possibly the drivers could be installed "for free" by downloading OEM versions but it is very convenient to stick in the BootCamp Driver CD and have everything Just Work.
But personally, I never found a reason to want to go buy an Apple machine and/or run OS X. I run Windows XP about 20% of the time for a few games and for work/compatibility/Office reasons - the rest of my time is tinkering and programming in Linux. I've even got to the stage now where a Windows XP PC feels "dirty" to me because I can't rip it apart to the "nth" degree - I'm so used to compiling source code in Linux with as much optimization as I dare risk and tinkering with text config files, by now I know where every config file is that I need to know about on Linux; no, it's not always "plain sailing" with it but that (to me) is part of the fun and the charm of it.
Added to that, I find the Apple crowd a bit too "cliquey" for my liking and that puts me off even wanting to explore more with OS X. Yep, there's a whole heap of Linux zealots around also but me personally, I just feel more productive in Linux without wanting to "cut my nose off to spite my face". Yes, some day I'd like to wave goodbye to Windows for good but, for now, if I need to use Windows to get something done then so be it.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Here's info from a proud owner of an intel mac mini (core duo version).
I have tried dual boot (osx + winxp), dual boot (winxp + linux) and finally settled for a pure Ubuntu machine. It is running everything perfectly - 1280x1024 resolution, accelerated video for the 945GM chipset, AIGLX and Beryl is smooth, sound, remote control is working and I use if for Freevo.
You do not need bootcamp to dualboot OsX and Linux - that's what rEFIt is for.
Bootcamp is only good if you want to dualboot OsX and Windows XP since Bootcamp burns Apples Windows XP drivers that you need onto a CD for you. You do not need Bootcamp to partition the disk. The Bootcamp partitioner uses DiskUtil (included in OsX anyway for free). You only need to create a MBR boot partition in DiskUtil and you're set.
If XP is important enough for you to use and pay for then you can pay Apple for its XP drivers. That's all Bootcamp really is.
Bah, forget him. People like this have such a narrow point-of-view that there's no way to have a discussion. No inquiry for elaboration, no consideration of how he might be incorrect. Patch managers have been around since the dark ages on all platforms, does he really suppose we've never heard of one? I don't think he really thought about his argument at all.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
I'll admit this isn't my specialty, so hopefully I'll get the s**t corrected out of me. But, IN GENERAL:
For most things 64-bit computing is not faster but SLOWER than 32-bit computing. A simple example of why this is would be that all pointers are now twice as long, so instructions like "jumps" take more space - and therefore more cache and more time to load from RAM.
But usually a newer architecture is faster regardless of that, because it tends to have a bigger/faster cache and better branch prediction. Having more registers is a BIG help... IF you've recompiled your OS and apps for that arch so it uses them.
For certain things, 64-bit computing is substantially faster... for example, if you needed 64-bit integer operations, doing them in 32-bits involves a lot of waste. For lots of stuff you don't need this... but AltiVec, for instance, uses 128-bit pathways for certain image processing. This is sometimes really important, because these certain things tend to be really time-consuming and big.
But the biggest and most general reason you really want a 64 bit computer isn't that at all - it's that a 32-bit computer can only use 4 GB of RAM in the normal way. (Both physical and Virtual, basically) 64 bits = 18 x 10^18 B of RAM. So if you only need 4 GB of RAM, 32 bits is fine for you. The moment you need more, 32 bits really blows.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
If you're a professional software developer, you're not going to buy Boot Camp, you're going to buy VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop, because the $50 difference will pay for itself in the time saved waiting for your Mac to reboot and your software to start up... within the first *week*.
Boot Camp is for Mac fanboy gamers (if that's not an oxymoron) and hesitant switchers and people who need to run Windows once or twice a week.
2) True, but that also leads to the tendancy for the updates to take a heck of a lot longer in the background than they would be normally.
3) because for most of the linux using populous, it doesnt always work right.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
It will only take one half hour phone call to support to burn through the $30 retail price, and in the scope of things the price vs additional functionality you will get from a Mac is a mind bending proposition.
Even if their phone tech support isn't outsourced, what on EARTH makes you think that your average bottom-tier, script-reading support dude makes $60/hour?
All most people want to do with the QuickTime player is use full screen mode. Apple's OS X is a beautiful OS, but from a company so oriented towards making using and creating video easy - to not have full screen mode available in the version of QT Player that ships with the machine makes the whole thing look...shoddy. Even Windows users get full screen playback out of the box. Linux users get it out of the box. But not Mac OS X.
I use OS X, but I don't want any extra functionality out of the QuickTime player. So instead I have to use VLC instead of the native player because I do want full screen playback. Finding out that OS X doesn't have full screen video playback out of the box is a bit like having one of those really nice, expensive ice cream cones - and then finding a dead mouse at the bottom. It kind of makes the nice experience of everything else rather soured.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I might buy a desktop computer in the next year. If Leopard's Boot Camp can run XP 64, I would probably buy a Mac, but otherwise a PC.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
So yeah, due to accounting laws, we must charge for this. If you don't like it, blame the man. It's the man keeping you down, really, it's not us at Apple at all.
Damn the man
You realize its a Beta, right?
I mean, you know, software that's not done yet? Might have some warts or missing functionality? Beta, as in "not the final product."
So, you downloaded BETA software for free, and are complaining of instability and missing functionality?
What, are you retarded?
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
IIRC, Apple doesn't get a whole lot of money from software sales (Mac OS X, etc); they get it from hardware sales.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Hardware 3D.
Get over it.
First of all, Boot Camp is beta software. You should be happy that Apple will provide a supported version of Boot Camp for those who choose to stick with 10.4, and if $29 is all it takes to get a fully supported version, complaining about it is ridiculous. This is the price you pay for software that isn't Free as in Speech, but Free as in "It Just Fucking Works and Lets You Get Your Job Done".
As for the rest of the vast majority of Apple users, we will be upgrading to 10.5, anyway. Nobody seriously worries about upgrades to Mac OS X, given that the retail version is only $129, and every succeeding version of Mac OS X has gotten demonstrably faster.
So, stick a sock in, whininistas...
hmm not if you're a linux guy because you like free, open source software that can run on anything.
Firefox Power http://firefoxpower.blogspot.com/
iTunes plays videos fullscreen.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I stopped using dual boot in my first experiments with Linux because it was too big a pain in the ass, it seemed every time I had a document open, the next app I wanted to use was always on the other OS. While I had access to both filesystems at all times (the right Windoze utility will do this), it was the other OS apps I needed. Going to emulation fixed the problem and gave me cut and paste clipboard between guest and host OSs.
When it became impossible to upgrade Win4Lin 9.x, I switched to VMware Server, and I'm very happy with it.
Given how good my experiences have been with VMware Server on Linux, I'd say that Mac users should give the free (except for needing a cc of a Windoze OS) VMware Server instead.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I know that every non-gamer scratches their head at this and declares "dual boot is dead" but if you are any sort of gamer at all, you are well aware of the wonderful 3d support Apple has provided in boot camp ;)
and if you aren't a gamer, sorry to hear. it's pretty damn fun out on the internets these days, now on macs more than ever
I have both now (Parallels as well as the VMWare beta). Nice thing about VMWare is that the "tools" that give you the upgraded video driver, and drag/drop, work with more than just windows XP... which is great, since I have Ubuntu and win98 images as well.
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Right, 7.1 to 7.5. Nothing much changed
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
More people will buy Parallels and just run Windows in a virtual machine.
That's good for Apple, as the people who think they need Windows or other PC OS will find it easier to use MacOS when appropriate (no reboot). It's good for Parallels, a 3rd party software firm. And it's great for Microsoft-- Windows runs better in a nice safe virtual machine.
But, do me a favor for a second, which undocumented Microsoft program are you actually refering to?
There are many problems with Microsoft software. There's bugs, security holes, etc... but one thing I have to bitch about is people claiming the programs aren't documented. If anything, the big problem these days is too much documentation to sort through and find anything in.
As for unsupported... well, I have also learned that all Microsoft software is in fact supported, you can even get internal API calls for applications using your telephone to call..... just keep your credit card ready since support calls aren't cheap. So I think you're more referring to expensive support as opposed to lack there-of.
P.S. - I was a developer for a Macintosh app that was installed over 5 million times, won't mention names. We had meetings with senior officers at Apple regularly and had direct developer support channels to Apple, we're talking skip teir 1 and teir 2 support, straight to the developer kinda stuff. And one thing I can safely say is, the Macintosh community has no right to call Microsoft support bad. I have never experienced such a lack of documentation and total chaos as found at Apple. They lack professionalism and thing that single letter variable names in header files counts as documentation.
If all you want from QuickTime is full screen, go here. I'm not sure where you're getting $10 from, because QuickTime Pro is $30, and that gets you a lot more than just the ability to play movies full screen.
Wait, I thought Macs were easy to use? And you're telling me I have to make a script in a language I don't understand just to play a fucking movie in full screen without paying another $30 on top of the cost of the OS?
I'll stick with Linux & Windows, thank you very much. Come back and let me know when OSX is desktop ready and I might take another look.
All these 'but I've had XP for 5 years now' arguments are only happening because Vista was such a trainwreck in development!! Believe me, if Microsoft could have had Vista on the shelves in '03 or '04 they very happily would have, and charged you half a grand for it, but the dev cycle went to hell and here we are, 5 wonderful years of XP. Look at pre-XP releases, Win95, Win 98, Win ME, Win 2000, Win XP, sure they aren't annual releases, but they aren't that far off from the OS X refreshes.
The only thing more pathetic than a PC user is a PC user trying to be a Mac user. We have a name for you people: switcheurs.
There's a good reason for your vexation at the Mac's user interface: You don't speak its language. Remember that the Mac was designed by artists, for artists, be they poets, musicians, or avant-garde mathematicians. A shiny new Mac can introduce your frathouse hovel to a modicum of good taste, but it can't make Mac users out of dweebs and squares like you.
So don't force what doesn't come naturally. You'll be much happier if you stick to an OS that suits your personality. And you'll be doing the rest of us a favor, too; you leave Macs to Mac users, and we'll leave beige to you.
I didn't think I needed to spell it out so painstakingly. Ok, I'm not saying it's not expensive in absolute terms--I'm saying that, when operated on a LARGE SCALE, the actual cost per call is fairly trivial.
The costs of electricity, rent, insurance, your phone system, etc. do NOT grow proportionally with the number of calls received. (You can get a crappy building in a crappy part of town for cheap that has TONS of floorspace. And yes, the script-reading drones WILL be working in a crappy building, not a nice corporate building.) The number of truly knowledgable staff on hand doesn't increase linearly, either (because the number of calls that actually require someone knowledgable will always been the minority, and there's never a need to keep more than a handful of such experts on hand. In any case, it's a trivial expense.) The number of managers can stay roughly constant--I've known a couple people who've work at call centers and their bosses had literally HUNDREDS of people reporting to them.
Do you see what I'm getting at here?
The ONLY thing that increases roughly linearly, as your number of calls received increases, is the number of tech support drones, and if they're VERY lucky they might make in the vicinity of $15/hour (the people I know have made $6-$10/hour.) Everything else is more of an upfront cost than a proportional cost, and if you have a very large call center handling tens of thousands of calls every day, those costs become (for our purposes here) irrelevant.
Not to mention:
1. Almost no one spends a full half an hour actually TALKING to tech support(like the ggp said.) MUCH more likely, 25 minutes of those minutes are spent on hold and
2. MANY call centers are outsourced. In recent years, it seems to me that MOST are. Does anyone want to comment as to whether or not Apple's call centers are outsourced? If they are, you can bet your ass that their costs aren't even remotely near $60/hour.
Even if they don't outsource, they can still contract. If Apple doesn't have enough customers to make it worth their while building their own call center (due to the aforementioned upfront costs), they can contract out another company (which presumably DOES have the infrastructure already in place) to do it for them. I'm sure it happens all the time...
3. Many places don't give a shit if you get a busy signal or are randomly disconnected or are placed on hold for a half an hour before ever speaking to a human being. Granted, this (hopefully) isn't true of a company of Apple's calibur, but when talking about tech support call centers in general I think it's safe to say that many (most?) small-to-medium sized companies cut corners like crazy.
So, in conclusion:
a) Apple is a big enough company that their upfront call center costs shouldn't be hugely significant when talking about per-call costs.
b) VERY few Boot Camp customers will ever require a 30 minute (as in, 30 minutes of constant communication with a human being, omitting time spent on hold) tech support phone call. Weird, arcane errors can happen, but COME ON. It's_a_bootloader. The OP claimed that a single 30-minute support call would cost Apple the price of the software--it's worthwhile pointing out that there are very few Boot Camp customers who are actually going to consume 30 minutes' worth of tech support time.
c) The basic infrastructure costs of a large call center remains *relatively* constant--the main thing is adding new script drones. (This is ESPECIALLY true of a consumer product company like Apple, where they are routinely inundated with trivial questions from the ignorant masses. This isn't mean as an insult to Apple; just that consumers in general are less educated about their purchases than companies.)
d) If Apple's tech support call centers are even partially outsourced, then they're saving MASSIVE amounts of money by employing VERY cheap (e.g. Indian) script drones.
e) Ain't no way in he
> If you want the Quicktime Pro features, consider QTAmateur. Every feature in Pro, and batch convert on top of that, for frees.
The web page doesn't give much detail, but it looks like QTAmateur will let you play back but not edit movies.
I have no way to verify this, since it crashes upon launch on my Powerbook G4.
"The only thing more pathetic than a PC user is a PC user trying to be a Mac user. We have a name for you people: switcheurs."
Wow, a complete asshole. I'm afraid people aren't so cut and dry as you seem to think they are. Different people take to different things, even "creative" people. If I were to take your line of reasoning I'd have to conclude that Mac users are condescending pricks, but that would be ridiculous. You sir are a platformist, and platformism has no place in a civilized world.
Maybe it's Sarbanes Oxley? (tongue firmly in cheek)
If, like me, you're a Mac user who's trying to use a Mac in a corporate environment, Outlook is THE app you need to run. Like it or not, American business runs on Exchange/Outlook.
That's precisely why Microsoft doesn't include Outlook in Office for the Mac. That way they can say they support the Mac, but ensure that the Mac can never be a true equal in the enterprise.
As pointed out elsewhere, Entourage is a very poor substitute for Outlook. Most of the basic mail/calendar/collaboration functionality works OK, but with just enough incompatibilities to drive you, and they people you try to collaborate with, bonkers.
My solution? Parallels running a slimmed-down WinXP and Outlook 2003 in 256MB. I just upgraded to a MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM, so it runs comfortably side-by-side with Mac OS X and native Mac apps.
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
There's also the point that those running Tiger on Intel got it by getting it for free with the computer. Leopard will be the first unbundled version of Mac OS X that can run on Apple's Intel hardware. (I'll leave that for someone else to make a point with.)
I'm more concerned whether Leopard will run on G3 and G4 hardware and whether it will be a single universal package or separate Intel and PPC packages. It impacts my upgrade decision on whether I will/can buy a multi-seat license. I just know that I will be upgrading my Mac Pro to Leopard and Boot Camp won't run on the PPC platforms whether they're Tiger or Leopard.
The only way this could impact me is if the Boot Camp beta expires before I can upgrade to Leopard, locking me out of my XP installation. I wouldn't want Apple to become a gatekeeper over whether or not I can exercise my Windows license.
Another thing to keep in mind was that Apple didn't even release Boot Camp into beta until after others came up with their own solution. Making Boot Camp free pretty muck killed off interest in their version. (Has it seen any further development?)
Apple is now in the position of having eliminated its competition with a long-time free beta and about to charge for their release version. Not that competition may come forward now, but there's the development time lost and those who were motivated earlier having moved on.
What if Apple did this with X11? What if Microsoft did it with Internet Explorer, charging users of 2000 for what XP gets for free, or charging XP users for DirectX 10 that Vista gets for free?
Again, it doesn't matter much to me, apart from that beta expiry thing. (I haven't been using that XP installation that regularly; I'd planned to do some LAN gaming against my other PC until my Macs' 21" Studio Display died. Nothing critically work-related.) But if it was something that did matter to me, yeah, I'd probably be a bit upset.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Uhuh. You're obviously *not* using 10.4 at all. Spotlight and CoreData alone are a *huge* change.
.Mac sync for keychain, GCC 4.0 and parental controls, too. And that's only the major ones I remember off the top of my hat. Now remind me again what Vista gives us that XP didn't have? (Except hot Aero)
Let's throw in Dashboard, Automator, 64 bit support,
This is the same company that charges you $10 for the ability to use their media player to play videos at full screen, for crying out loud.
And the most retarded thing about non-Pro QuickTime not playing fullscreen, is that both iTunes and Front Row can play fullscreen video just fine.
QuickTime is such an awful piece of crippleware it's not even funny, especially since it's bundled with the OS.
I appreciate the link and I see now that there were certainly big technical changes ("nanokernel", whatever that is) but from a user's perspective ... not so much. Certainly, given that 7.1 crashed a lot for me (and not only for me), I found it very annoying that a fix would cost extra. And 7.5.0 was not that stable either. Granted, for various reasons I had one of the dreaded Performas, that might have contributed a lot.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Haven't compared the actual prices of high end hardware lately, have you?
Hint: Apple is frequently cheaper than "discount" outfits like Dell.
What do you mean by "high end"? I'm basing my comparisons on the MacBook and MacBook Pro vs. competing laptops. Last I checked, the low-end MBP is still at least $500 more than a near-identical model from HP, and the price differential only gets worse with the higher models.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Well, there was Stickies, the menu-bar clock, Windowshade, the Launcher, the Control Strip, the new help system, system-wide drag & drop for text and other data, and if you didn't buy 7.1 Pro - AppleScript.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Yeah, I have read this at the page you kindly linked to. Sounds rather like moving from one point GNOME release to the next (GNOME 2.17), if that even. Oh, and "AppleScript" not really as such, the page just says "a scriptable Finder".
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
I'm cheap! I have a license for Win2K, and would have to pony up $350 for Office 2004. Don't exactly qualify for the student/teacher $129 version. I might go Office 2008 when it comes out, but for now, good enough. I picked up crossover for a couple internal win32 apps that don't have an OSX port (and probably will never get beyond VB6), so the fact that Office 2000 worked was a huge bonus for my pocket book. I've got Office 2004 for one of the work G4 laptops... not worth paying a fourth of what the actual hardware cost (for the macbook) to get a personal copy.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Free software is by a wide margin has been the most likely to give problems when upgrading the OS. Unsurprising really, few people like doing methodical testing in their spare time - it's a pretty dull aspect of software development and it's not particularly rewarding - all you'll usually get is 20 questions from developer or the package maintainer, who will almost certainly be defensive about the issue and won't even consider your report unless you jump through a bunch of hoops to report it (a stereotype perhaps, but one that I've encountered frequently).
The closest that springs to mind with regard to an OS update from a vendor that's annoyed me is the the last Windows XP service pack - though while that change the functionality of the system (with a built in firewall), it didn't actually hose the system in a way that meant I had to burn a bootable CD to go fix it, which is exactly what apt ('someone uploaded a broken basic package and now nothing works'), RH's up2date ('breaks when running for no reason and hoses the system in the process') and ports ('doesn't really track if a new package may conflict with what you have installed already') have done.
It's not that it doesn't happen in commercial OS's, it's just that it happens an awful lot less frequently than it does with software that isn't commercially supported, which makes having a proper build and lab environment all the more important if you are deploying mission critical systems on free (as in beer) OS's.
While a huge amount of OS patches are released by Microsoft (and a not too shabby amount from Sun for Solaris) it's very rare indeed they cause actual harm to the OS install.
So you're complaining that things aren't working properly because you don't use a 'stable' version of a distribution?
Red Hat is commercial.
Well, of course you've never had these problems with Windows. Windows doesn't come with much beyond IE, notepad, wordpad, mspaint, movie maker. Barely any complex programs. Since you were talking about the OS, I was assuming you were talking about upgrading a base installation (since that's the only way you can compare the setups between windows etc.).
I wasn't taking additional software packages that aren't included with install by default -- I'm using stable versions, not experimental, I'm not using 3rd party repositories that don't comply to the package management standards for the given distribution either. I have very rarely had problems with my upgrades on Linux -- and they weren't as dire as I have experienced on other OSes.
Heh, you have absolutely no idea how much stuff that upgrade broke then, just google on it.
The firewall was already in Windows XP when SP2 came out, it just came with a new interface and different default settings.
But it did for many other Windows users.
.avi file, explorer would crash trying to generate a thumblenail of it.
Hell, this laptop I am typing on has a "Designed for Windows XP" sticker. But the graphic card drivers don't work on SP2 (BSOD on boot), the wireless drivers don't work SP2 -- They worked fine on SP1 (which is no longer supported) and the manufacturer hasn't released any updated drivers. DEP in SP2 also broke a bunch of video codecs, to the point where if I'd enter a folder that had a
Did you even investigate exactly how your free systems broke?
Rather than just saying "updates broke my system" that is, I'd like to know what broke.
To be honest, I have only used Redhat for about fifteen minutes my entire life, so I can't really help you with that. I'm also not going to go out and buy a copy of Redhat Linux just to verify this.
I haven't noticed significant amount of breakage happening on Windows vs OS X vs Linux yet.
If you're deploying mission critical systems, even under Windows, you're going to TEST it first before you deploy any updates. This is one of the first things you learn todo in mission critical systems. The other thing you forgot to mention, when updates do break, trying to fix it on a closed source system (mostly common with commercial systems), it is very difficult to fix compared to coming up with at least a
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
It's a very old and tired argument, everyone knows the deal with Debian's Stable. It's largely why we have Unbuntu now (with it's ~6 month cycles). Of course, dispite the name, 'Stable' has the same problems too (leading to complete borkage). It just happens more often in the other trees. Red Hat is commercial. Red Hat Enterprise is, Red Hat (RIP) wasn't (it was put together by a company, but originally came in one flavor that was free as in beer, and not the same product that RHE is today). Did you even investigate exactly how your free systems broke? No, dispite having been around long enough to have a 5 digit UID, I've just kept with the tried and true method of re-installing every time it breaks - it's worked fine for the last 10 years!
Real answer: Yes, always. Bad or broken packages for the most part. I already explained why in the previous post too. To be honest, I have only used Redhat for about fifteen minutes my entire life, so I can't really help you with that. I'm also not going to go out and buy a copy of Redhat Linux just to verify this. I'll save you the bother, I've been using it for over 10 years (through not through choice in the last 8) - it's not like I need help! 'i r not r newb 8)'
NB: Red Hat Linux is free (but discontinued) - only Red Hat Enterprise costs money! Not to nitpick, but to continue the differentiation from earlier. Have to say patches behave the same way on Linux. I admit, I have had problems though when upgrading things (SP2, IE7 [yes, it did break things], glibc (v3 to v4), QuickTime etc.) with all OSes I call BS. How many times have you had vendor supplied Windows, Mac OS or Solaris patches render your system non-functioning and non-bootable? vs. How many times have you had that happen on various Linux distributions or BSD variants do the same?
As I've said, nobody likes to QA regular software. Not even paid testers! For the most part, it's really dull and unrewarding. Slip ups happen when bad data get's pushed out to mirrors, it's not like people's jobs are on the line when they do either, so mistakes happen. Hell, we've struggled to get good testers when we've paid people here.
OS X - 7 (I don't really get how updating things like quicktime caused the system to attempt Haraki on boot after)
Windows - 600+ (deployed a dcom patch that seemed okay to a lot of workstations that utterly borked them after causing them to all BSOD on boot, requiring a complete reinstall of all systems)
Linux - 0 (Biggest thing I've ever had broken in a update on Linux: xorg, but another update was released within a hour that fixed it.)
FreeBSD - 1 (I don't remember what it was, only that I had such issues trying to retrieve my information off it using a Linux livecd)
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.