Slashdot Mirror
Why Apple Delayed Leopard for the iPhone
Ernest DeFarge writes "Apple recently announced that they've pulled several key programmers from the OS X 10.5 "Leopard" and assigned them to the iPhone in order to get it done on time. In doing so, they delayed Leopard for 4 months. Does that mean that the iPhone is more important to Apple than Mac OS? Or is it just capitalizing on the current state of Apple's fanbase?"
I guess brand new massively hyped iPhone is more important to Apple than the difference between OS X 10.4 and 10.5 during the limited time period of the summer of 2007.
Don't be crazy anymore!
What is this "iPhone" that you speak of???
Cell phone buyers, or releasing the preview to Microsoft's next OS features?
...and you know the end product never lives up to the previews ;-)
You can't take the sky from me...
I wouldn't expect the common person to understand this, but it's something you learn in business school: You put your key programmers on the project that's LEAST important. Trust me. It all makes sense.
That Apple wasnt delaying to for the iPhone more than they are delaying it for some secret additions to the codebase and the testing involved for it that we will get a hint of come WWDC.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
...but when I read the subject line, I imagined a team of executives, military men and helicopters keeping a leopard at bay in the wild, while they looked for one of their prototype iPhones in the grass.
"FOUNT IT!"
"Ok, you may now pass Mr. Kitty"
~A
--
X's and O's for all my foes.
I don't know what Leopard is. I know what an iPhone is. You know why?
Because the iPhone is on the news, tv, radio; everyone is talking about it. It is absolutely more important than OSX at the moment. The iPhone could potentially be Apple's new iPod.
Sigs are for Terrorists.
Let's not forget that many OS features on which the iPhone depends are practically guaranteed to make an appearance on the desktop version of OS X, whether that happens in Leopard or the next version after. Things like resolution independence, multitouch, smooth scrolling, Core Animation.
On a related note, I can't wait until OS X and apps begin expecting high-res displays and multitouch input, making the marriage of OS to hardware ever more obvious even to the squarest of squares. Finally that ought to silence the clueless pundits who still try to peg Apple as either a hardware or a software company.
comma
This just doesn't make sense. The big problem is that the actual evidence from looking at Apple's fanbase shows that the opposite reaction has occurred. Not only are a lot of Apple fans pissed off that Leopard isn't coming out in June, but the people who are specifically Mac fans are even more ticked off about the iPhone being the cause of the delay. These are the people who are Mac fans, but not necessarily fans of anything Apple makes, and see the iPhone and the iPod as examples of Apple losing focus on the Mac, and focusing too much attention on consumer electronics, etc.
So the fundamental argument this guy is making doesn't hold water. Delaying Leopard doesn't do anything to change how people who are hyped up about the iPhone will react and contribute to the "hype". And it only serves to make the rest of Apple's loyal fanbase like the product less than before.
Does that mean that the iPhone is more important to Apple than Mac OS?
Did nobody else notice that when Jobs announced the iPhone, he also renamed the company to take the word "Computer" out of it?
That sounds kind of, well, I dunno, strategic to me.
Its been delayed only 4 months, I don't know what all the drama is for. In fact, this extra development time is going to be very beneficial, because they are going to release a full beta at WWDC for developers.
Apple is not now, nor has it ever been, a computer company. Do you really think Jobs et al. are limited in their vision to fiddly boxes dangling keyboards and mice? No, those are just the means to a greater end.
I don't doubt the likes of Michael Dell or Steve Ballmer would disagree with this assessment. That's okay; nobody expects those dunderheads to get the point.
comma
I don't suppose the opinions stated in this blog post deserve much attention if the author can't be bothered to write the name of the company correctly.
"I seem to have mastered a certain amount of control over physical reality."
i thought it was a given that... "adding programmers to a late software project only makes it later"
I suppose this means that the Apple Accessory fanboy is more important than the Mac fanboy.
Pulling QA and Software Engineers off the Leopard project onto iPhone?? I don't care if its the "same" OS, i.e. iPhone using the mobile version of OSX. Adding developers and QA towards the end of a project lifecycle usually means disaster. I'm curious to see if they pull it off.
maybe because for many people tiger is just fine and even though leopard will add great features, it wont be like the transition from shit ui phone to iphone
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
What's up with these binary comparisons? Just because OS X 10.5 was delayed a few months for the iPhone doesn't mean anything to do with OS X being unimportant. The iPhone runs OS X; it must be important.
Most users are happy with 10.4 and 10.5 is more of a luxury than a necessity. All this means is that 10.4 is sufficient that the general Apple buyer isn't screaming for OS improvements, but that the market may indeed be screaming for a decent mobile phone, like they were screaming for a decent MP3 player around when the iPod gained in popularity.
Anyway, a lot of the funds and improvements from the potential success from the iPhone will probably be funneled back into OS X and the Mac hardware. Haven't some of the improvements in 10.5, like Core Animation, been brought about due to the iPhone already?
You can't conclude from a press release what the real reason for the delay is. Leopard may be delayed because of the iPhone, or it may be delayed because it's still buggy, or maybe Apple is still trying to file some last minute patents, or maybe it's something completely different.
The demo was largely smoke and mirrors, and as it turns out, delivering that level of functionality on an underpowered device requires corners cut and tremendous optimization.
Of all the various theories about why it won't run third-party software, mine is that they don't want people to actually see what they had to do to Mac OS to get it on the device.
..it's a matter of which one they can't afford to fail with. I saw a *lot* of mainstream press on the AppleTV, simply because it was Apple. The reviews weren't that great though, and they really can't afford the iPhone to be a flop - they'll go from being the iPod king to so-so producer of stylish consumer electronics. That is far more important to them than missing an OS upgrade (how long was Vista delayed again? Debian etch? It's not like Apple is the bad apple here.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Will too!
I think (Apple has a couple million advisors everywhere) Apple should have aimed lower with 10.5.
They should release 10.5 right before Vista or right after it, with the flashiest features (the ones that increase wow-factor and are easy to do) thrown in and steal Redmond's thunder.
That way, they could even have more time to finish 10.6 with the real (i.e. versioned FS instead of time machine) features and still avoid Vista stealing OSX's spotlight (pun intended).
But that's just me. I bet they have very competent people on their payroll.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
The margins on a $500 phone are much higher than a computer or operating system, particularly when Cingular is going to be bearing most of the distribution and much of the marketing costs.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Maybe there deadlines for contracts with Cingular that needed to get done be fore ATT took them over?
getting the software retry for FCC testing. The Soft is not 100% done yet but needed to get it to a state in where the FCC can test I-phone out.
Conspiracy theories aside, what if.... WHAT IF.... what's going on is exactly what Apple said is going on? What if they decided to postpone Leopard's release to make sure that everything works as it's supposed to (as opposed to Micro$loth who rushes crappy half-finished software to market simply to say it's out there). Personally I'm happy to wait a few more months for quality software that works as it's supposed to right from day one instead of waiting for some service pack that may or may not fix the problems.
iPhone is ready to go. Why postpone it in favor of leopard if leopard isn't ready? Perception is everything - Vista's already had the shit kicked out of it in the media for being a steamy turd in shiny new wrapping paper because they released software that is barely beta quality. Steve and the boys are not stupid... they promote Apple as hardware and software that "just works". And unless they want to have the same kind of black eye as Micro$loth has they'll make damn sure that Leopard is as closed to perfect as they can get it. Of course there will be bugs... that goes without saying... but the major problems will be worked out before it gets into the public's hands. And that's the way it should be!!!
Have we (and the media) become so accustomed to crappy software being rushed to market that we think that it's the way it's supposed to be? Who in their right mind thinks that delaying a product until it's, oh I dunno, FINISHED is a bad thing????
It's the iTunes company.
AppleTV, iPod, iPhone, Airport, etc.... all complements to iTunes.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I do have to say that this is one of the most stupid things I've ever read on slashdot. A point release for an OS that's already recognized as great, or finish one of the most anticipated products in history on schedule? The choice here for apple is obvious. Especially considering the large amount of hype that was generated by fake iPhones in the months preceding the reveal.
I shall not lie, im in the telecom buisness makeing software for mobile phones (not Apples though). And one thing I know about is rushing schedules and stuffing in to many features. So if Apple have promised more then they can deliver and need to sort a lot of bugs out before release they sure need to hurry now. Cause if they lack F.O.T.A. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over_The_Air_Programm able they might have a firmware upgrade from hell on their hands when it reaches customers.
Just my 2 cents.
It makes sense for Apple to put a bit more effort into the iPhone because it's a new market - they'll make quite a bit of money off it and sell new product to new customers.
However, Leopard is pretty much a point upgrade to an existing product; there's no threat to its market leverage apart from its successor, and most copies of it will be supplied with a new Mac - put simply, they an afford to let it slip as it's not as big a cash cow and isn't cracking open a new market for them. In fact for Apple, an OS update must be getting a bit dull by now - there's not a huge amount of stuff missing or wrong with it that they could add to teh mix.
iPhone on the other hand has to be right - it's one phone in a sea of hundreds, so that little bit of spit and polish to get things just right could pay off big time.
I read through most of the comments and didn't see anyone state the obvious. Earnings are due next week for AAPL and they'll need to explain why they've lowered targets for Q3. An OS release quarter brings in alot of cash, and analysts need to know ahead of time when so they can accurately (haha) predict the earnings.
People think Microsoft is the answer. Microsoft is just the question, "No" is the answer.
That would have easily passed any decent spell checker. What you're probably thinking of is a grammar chacker, none of which are or have ever been very good.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
I think I woul speak not only for me but for a many developers out there - pretty please, with the sugar on top, it is time to release f*ing xnu 10.4.9 sourses already..
Company moves a couple devs from 1 project to another... News at 11.
oogly boogly!
He was refuting the claim that Vista is no *competition* for OSX, in a thread discussing the business merits of this move. From a Business perspective, where the *money* flows is key, and by any stretch of measuring, MS has probably seen more cash-flow for Vista to date than Apple would claim directly for OSX since 10.0, adding in system sales they might attribute to OSX might shift the picture, but that's hard to measure, since iPod and OSX have been responsible for Apple overall popularity gains. Vista hasn't been a widely sought after upgrade, but PC purchases swelling have been fortuitous for MS.
But I think from Apple's perspective they know Tiger won't make a bit of difference. Some people running OSX today might buy an upgrade, people who happen to be buying Apple's after Tiger's release will get Tiger, and the people running Windows will be no more likely to switch for Tiger than they are to switch for released OSX versions. They know they can't let it fall out of date, but also know there is no significant profit potential to be milked.
Yes OSX has nice features and if I had to choose between Windows and OSX of their own merits, I'd choose OSX, but saying that Vista is no competition for it and scoffing is blatantly dismissing reality. I run linux, but I don't dare scoff and say 'Windows is no competition to linux'. Linux may be better by many measures than Windows, but to declare across the board Windows has nothing, it would make me sound like a stupid zealot.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The current Apple funbase is pretty pissed (developers at least). Dont't know how long you can capitalize on that...
Personally, I'm skeptical that the iPhone is the reason they're delaying Leopard. Which sounds better to Wall Street, and the general public: "We had to delay Leopard becouse it's super buggy right now, and we've underestimated how long it would take to fix it," or "We've delayed Leopard in order to work even harder on the most hyped and highest profile consumer device of the year: the iPhone"?
Have you been in a cave on the dark side of the moon since 2000?
During the last five years, Apple released major versions of OS X about every 1-1.5 years while all Microsoft had was XP. Third party developers were actually complaining because of the rapid pace of change of OS X. Before Tiger was released, Apple announced they would be slowing down the pace of their OS X releases.
I'm disappointed that I have to wait longer than expected for Leopard, but I'd rather they ship it when it's ready-- besides, it's not like they had to scrap it midstream and start over, and then chop all the compelling features to make an already embarassingly late ship date.
It does make sense to focus on the iPhone right now, because the mobile phone market is much larger than the personal computer market. If Apple gets a nice foothold in it, it will mean more money for them to pour into expanding their presence in the computer market.
~Philly
Don't know if you heard, but Apple Computer was in the past couple months renamed to Apple, Inc.
What generates more revenue a $600 phone or a $200 pussycat? I don't know the margins on these 2 product but I have to believe that they will get more dollars back from the iPhone
http://sqlservercode.blogspot.com/
There I said it.
my guess is that they were busy buttfucking a bunch of apple fagbois so they lost some time getting around to working. they were fucking those apple fagboi losers hard.
if you're a switcher and you're a heterosexual GTFO.
lol!! dumb fucking filthy faggots. sucking them dicks.
iphone is nothing more than apple skin on third tier cheap mobile phones from china.
Nobody including chinese uses these P.O.S. S wrapped on a fancy paper is stil a S.
The real reason is actually that they are going to unbundle the OS and sell it to run on white box intels. This is taking longer to work out the details of than they had expected. More hardware and drivers to support. There will be a range of reference certified machine configs that will be supported, and apparently the oems are lining up to make them.
It just seems to be in people's nature to blow things out of proportion and get all worked up over nothing. iPhone looks nifty, I can't afford one at the time, but probably in the future. as for Leopard, some of the features shown are neat, but not making me have apple fever. Really, I always thought it was going to go down like this. WWDC will allow El Jobso to reveal the "TOP SECRET" features, let the devs have some time to support them, etc.
and really, I don't think anyone was expecting a release before the end of June, so this is 3 whole months? not that big of a deal.
Live EVERY week... Like it's Shark Week
I was going to write my own comment but then I read John Gruber's Bottleneck... and well it better states my opinions on this then I could do myself.
...so?
10. It's tough porting the Iphone interface to a desktop machine.
9. Cingular made them an offer they can't refuse.
8. Vista compatibiity: adding all those bugs and screwing the UI up is hard work.
7. "The Pinch" found to have unfortunate side effects, putting Iphone into sleep mode a la Spock.
6. "Time Machine" found to accidently punch holes in hyperspace, thereby screwing up cause and effect.
5. Beta testers "can't stop licking the display."
4. Still haven't found that, "One more thing..." for Jobs.
3. Port of Photoshop to Iphone taking longer than expected.
2. Nokia's squad of ninjas has to be dealt with first.
1. They want Balmer to sweat a few more months.
Your anecdote is a perfect example of why I think the Mac community has been compromised by using Office X, and other products from Microsoft's Mac Business Unit. As I have mentioned here before, I do not trust PC-type people. They do not think like us. They are not like us. They are as close to "alien life forms" as we can get without having to leave this planet.
/Applications folder, none of them pledge allegiance to a corporate master churning out horrifying simulacra of Mac users' innovations. On top of that, given that they are run by Windows users, how easy would it be for one of them to allow a "friend" to dummy up a Trojan, have another "friend" port it to the Mac, and then allow another "friend" to unleash a remote controlled hell on our private Bonjour-configured LANs? After all, they are "blood", right?
Seriously, they do not share our values. They hate that we have good taste. They like to keep their windows maximized and their ligatures uncombined. They think gray is a color. Hell, most of them are perfect little squares in perfectly square holes and if you go to PC strongholds like Staten Island you'll see most of the media they consume is produced by Mac users, as the Windows demographic is incapable of creativity in music, the arts, interior design, etc.
They are backwards. They live in the 1980s. They've contributed nothing meaningful to humanity for decades and decades. While we different thinkers are out writing AppleScripts, making HyperCard stacks, mixing in Logic Pro, editing collaboratively in SubEthaEdit, proofing rainbow banners in Illustrator, creating wealth through a variety of postmodern/postindustrial models and winning Nobels and Pulitzers and Grammys and Tonys and Oscars and Pritzkers along the way, the PC users are sitting on their asses downloading the fruits of our labor (how else do you explain so many being able to reference Futurama, bash the New Yorker, etc.?) The only thing they have in their favor is old, fat, white-bread bankrolls accumulated on slavery and imperialism and, personally, I wish their inherited wealth would run dry. Sure, we'd have a hell of a headache funding our next indie production, but so would the whole world, and when faced with adversity the ingenuity of Mac users truly comes to the fore.
Anyway, back on point. Why don't I trust the Mac Business Unit?
Because to have PC-type people writing software to help us finance our projects, communicate with our studios, write our manifestoes and organize our political protests, is a disaster waiting to happen.
Whereas we may allow products from other dull, dogma-bound companies into our
Which leads me to how some in our own community—i.e., YOU —are encouraging PC-type people to switch to the Mac.
If you go back and do some checking of stories, you will see that in most cases where lifelong Windows users suddenly buy Macs, or people who are Linux to the core suddenly pirate Intel OS X from the internet, it is almost all done in cahoots with another recent switcheur (read: poseur) on the "inside" or one that "knows" someone on the inside.
So if we have these so-called "switchers" from Linux and Windows in the Mac community, facilitating crass, classless ass-pickery on our platform by encouraging more PC-type people to switch, just how far a stretch is it to say the PC users in charge of the MBU won't do the same when it comes to our applications? HMMMMM?!?!?!
The biggest secret Apple were protecting at the time is obviously the iPhone.
Sure, there are probably some things Apple didn't show because they were not ready, interface stuff that they can build on top of resolution independent display for example, or a long list of desperately needed Finder improvements. The Mac rumor mill has been going on about secret features ever since Steve Jobs mentioned those in the Leopard feature Keynote at WWDC last year. Well, device driver support for GSM/GPRS and multi-touch displays was a pretty big secret. The Mac rumor mill will grind on about this until Leopard ships in October, then they will whine shrilly about the lack of interesting "promised" secret features.
Meanwhile, Time Machine will solve one of the most important problems with personal computers today, and the rumor mill is singularly unimpressed. I've lost track of how many people I know who have lost data to a hard disk failure because they didn't have a reasonabe backup. Time Machine will make this headache go away. It's almost guaranteed that none of the other un-announced features in Leopard will have the real world impact of Time Machine. Start setting your expectations now.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Given the Apple emphasis on support for open standards (such as a standards-compliant web browser and email client) and the UNIX base of Mac OS X, I'd say Apple users are relatively much less locked in than Windows users.
Apple users are certainly no more locked in than users of any other platform. The average useful life of a general purpose personal computer has been two to four years, depending largely on individual use case. If you don't like being locked in to Windows, buy a Mac the next time you need a new system. Same works in reverse.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
"Service Packs" for OS X are free. Minor revisions are not; however the same can be said about Windows (2000 is NT 5, XP is NT 5.1).
don't know who this Anonymous Coward is (duh) but he/she has a point. As is evident by the name change Jobs is very serious about growing the company beyond just the mac. Maybe way beyond (music/telecommunications/media).
When apple releases an upgrade there is no need to buy it. I know a lot of mac users who are running 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 right now. Now if they upgrade then they'll be treated to better performance (new iterations of the operating system tent to speed up older systems instead of bog them down) but I know people whose older macs are working "just fine" and who haven't upgraded, except for security patches, since 2001.
My personal theory is that Apple is hiding a big iphone feature. They announced it in January because they had to for FCC filings, they showed us a bunch of the features to get people excited, but there's going to be something more that justifies the price and their entry into the market.
don't panic-- clowns can smell fear.
What? By that logic, Microsoft users are 100% locked in, and Linux users are 100% locked in. Mac users are no more locked in than any other users. Get fed up with OS X? Install Linux or Windows or Solaris any one of the other operating systems that runs happily on a Mac.
Either way, everybody using a Mac has to buy it and will buy it.
Yeah, I know they've FORCED me to buy the upgrades several times now. Damn I wish I still had freewill...
This guy's the limit!
You're forgetting that everyone who has any of the intel macs can install and use Windows, or any other x86 based operating system...even without having to have OSX insalled on the drive.
There have been people that were working on a version of Boot Camp before Apple released their own version...and they were successfully running Windows without having to have OSX installed.
I know... I was being ironic :)
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Pushing Leopard back to October lines it up for Christmas and for the fall product line refresh. Releasing Leopard in late spring lines it up for ... nothing much.
I see this as the opposite of Vista's release. Apple will release a mature, tested, stable product with actual usability improvements that runs *faster* on existing hardware.
Not at all, since it isn't analogous to a service pack but is instead a feature upgrade. I, for example, won't buy it unless there is some compelling feature that justifies the cost. I'd still be using 10.3 if I hadn't bought new hardware as the most compelling feature of 10.4 for me (spotlight) was and is better handled by a software package I've been using for years (DEVONthink).
Sure you can, if you want to throw money down the toilet. The only reason for paying the premium for an Apple box is an OS. If you don't want OSX, you'd have to be an idiot to buy an Apple, quite honestly. That's like buying a Porsche, and putting a Toyota 4 cylinder engine in it.
I don't respond to AC's.
There is more here than meets the eye. It takes a long time to get a phone certified on all the networks.
Carriers are each a royal pain, and the each have special demands that range from branding issues to functionality changes. I've worked in this industry for a while. You don't do a single release as you would for an OS. You have to do a release per carrier. It's a tremendous amount of time and money.
By putting priority on releasing the iPhone, Apple is creating a demand for it. This gives them important leverage when dealing with carriers. They are no longer just another phone... they are the iPhone.
So, in the end, this may be a good strategy and save Apple a lot of grief.
I just went to a show called Willcom Forum in Tokyo on Friday. It featured maybe 30 companies selling products associated with Willcom's WinCE based phones with slide-out keyboards and touch screens. They are extremely neat, and sophisticated.. they can be used with VPNs, with RFID readers in stores, as Point of Purchase video displays in supermarkets, etc. etc. With the iPhone Mac OSX could go head to head with WinCE too. However phones are a huge tough market and I think it probably greatly dwarves the Mac buying community, I could be wrong. Many competitors but if they win it will be a big win for OSX and Apple.
Personally though I'm bummed because I was waiting to get a new Mac Book Pro with Leopard on it!! Darn! The idea of getting a cheap XP laptop instead for now went through my mind but I guess it will be upgradable, so will probably get it with the current version of Mac OSX sooner instead. I don't want to wait until October! Boo-hoo. Oh well, an Apple with money in the bank is much more friendlier to customers than the old kind. At least that is the theory..
link
Interesting that most Apple software continues to work for years. I don't recall anyone having to upgrade to 10.4 or 10.3. You might have wanted to, since the OS got leaner and faster and offered some serious new benies, quite unlike, say, the XP -> Vista "upgrade".
However, unlike Mac upgrades, the Vista/Office upgrade is designed to force an upgrade cycle, by that wonderful "incompatible" format structure. What do you get for your upgrade dollar? A more unstable system with a new UI to learn and ever adoring love from everyone you exchange files with who now have to upgrade to read them.
Lastly, about lock in: You've never run an apple. You're anything but locked in. Apple is hardware with some software provided. It's damn good hardware, and if you really want, you can even run MS software on it, along with various other flavors of *nix, and even OS/2 if you're really into convoluted configurations.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I kind of have a feeling that this is intended to be a marketing message by Apple. Something along the lines of attempting to "prove" that the iPhone really "is" or "relies heavily" on OS X technology. If you're trying to hype a product that is supposed to be revolutionary, what message would you send? Apple seems to be sending the message that they need their best OS guys, specifically, and not just good developers, to work on their phone, because that is central to the iPhone's success, or at least its design.
Apple makes more money on the hardware so delaying an OS is smart for them. Why hire on more programmers and take on expenses to put out something that will bring in minimal revenues. They do make money selling upgrades, but nothing like Microsoft. Nor do they rely on that income to bolster earnings.
this is so lame. Does this foolboy really think I really care about Leopard.
... 8) a couple of weeks ago. I don't really care what version of OSX I get, that's not what I'm buying.
I bought my most recent Mac with 10.4.whatever (let me check
On the other hand, I have a real concern about the financial health and future viability of my laptop/mp3-player supplier of choice, so I do pay attention to what will help them succeed in the market. If Apple fails I lose more than just support (yada, yada, I'm not going to argue about that), it's a whole series of technology choices I've made. So yes, I do think that iPhone is much more important than Leopard. I may never even buy an iPhone, but anyone with more than one neuron can understand why I may have more than a smidgen of interest.
For me the iPhone looks like a huge opportunity for Apple (and also a huge risk on the other hand), so I'm really gonna give about 3 seconds thought to not getting my upgrade to 10.5.0 for an extra 3 months - not.
Unlike certain fanboys of another-not-to-be-named-OS who waited through intermediate releases (XP, XPsp2) for over 5 years - wait, what? 7?), I think I can handle 3 months.
Look, Apple is a hardware company, and they make great products backed up superb software and marketing. Some people - not all - like the stuff and are prepared to pony up the dough for it. They're known as "customers". Get used to it, it's called the market.
Other people - "investors" - recognize that Apple has a great market niche and rather than chuck peanuts from the sidelines, put their money up. Get used to it, it's called capitalism.
Fact is, those "customers" and "investors" can both see the benefit when their favorite company chooses to bring a new product to market that potentially greatly expands it reach and delays a minor upgrade to an existing product. There's a lot more money for a hardware company in every sale of an iPhone over the microsale of an OSX 10.5.0 upgrade. Get used to it, it's called being an adult.
Yes. With reason. iPhone is the start of a new market. Leopard isn't.
A Lot of people went to MacWorld (empahsize Mac as in MACINTOSH) and did not see a new version of the OS or hardware enhancements but a Phone and a box that hooks to a TV. And the announcement that Apple is taking "Computer" out of thier company name, great news for all thopse computer show attendees, eh?.
Of course Apple said, "Just wait till spring, we'll annouce all that computing goodness you paid to hear about" , which has now become, "Well, expect it later in the year, the Phne this is more important to us now than those old computer updates anyway."
Yeah I really miss the Apple of a few years back, before they became another MicroSoft, jumping on every market but thier core one (you know, computers and OSs). But I am really glad to see all the software/interoperability innovations in the GNU/Linux community though. These companies should be conneting the dots, offering more consumer-oriented music/video whiz-bang eye candy (and relatede DRM) is certainly turing off the "let's get stuff done" IT types who just wand a SMB protocol that works and a Finder that does not have the dreaded "Pinwheel of wait" features..
Yep IT planning may not have Apple or MS in the picture, at least for for those looking for long-term solutions not Zunes and iPhones.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
You can not install the update and deal with new apps not working with your Mac, or you can install Windows or Linux on your Mac, wasting the premium you paid for the box.
You're making the usual Apples v. Oranges mistake. Just as nobody would compare a $500 Windows machine with a $2,000 Windows machine, it is foolish to compare bargain basement PCs with Macs. If you want to compare quality hardware with quality hardware, compare $2,000 machines. You spend $2,000 each on three different laptops. Here are the three scenarios:
On your Mac, if you can not install the update and deal with new apps not working with your Mac, you CAN install Windows or you CAN install Linux on your Mac.
On your Windows machine, Microsoft comes out with an upgrade. You cannot install the update and deal with new apps not working with your Windows computer. You CAN install Linux on your machine. You CANNOT install Macintosh on your machine.
On your Linux machine, the latest and greatest Linux distro arrives. You cannot install the update and deal with new apps working sluggishly or not working at all on your computer because of processor speed, graphics card limitations, or limited disk space. You CAN install Windows on your machine. You CANNOT install Macintosh on your machine.
So the Macintosh hardware gives you three OS choices. The other two only give you two OS choices each. I fail to see how the Apple hardware locks you in more than PC hardware.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I've got a great new Core 2 duo machine, and I've spent a lot of time and money creating a quiet cooling system for it because I use the computer for music production. I've made a great effort choosing the very best components including 10k hard drives. I can run Windows XP Pro SP2 (which I do) or Vista Home, Premium or Business or Ubuntu Studio (which I will).
I'd like Apple to sell me a version of OSX that I could run on this new machine, too, but they've decided that I can't use their OS unless I pay a premium for their hardware (which is basically either the same or inferior to what I've got). This is not an example of "giving the customer what they want".
Free markets are supposed to be about choices. It's the lack of choices that has kept me from switching to Vista. After careful consideration, and despite the fact that I admire much about OSX, I choose not to use Macs because I don't want to be limited in such a way.
Maybe putting its resources into its consumer products is a good choice for Apple's shareholders. It's not in my best interest, though, nor is it in the best interest of the many loyal users of Apple computers. I'm less certain of the long-term viability of the Macintosh platform now than I've been at any time since 1998.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Linux users are 100% locked into what? Most Linux software is open-source and will compile on other *nix operating systems. A smaller percentage of that software has a win32 or Mac version or fork. The proprietary software for Linux (Flash, hardware drivers, I almost said Java, etc.) was Windows or Mac software originally. Much Linux software can be compiled for other architectures too... so I'm not even locked into using an x86... I could switch to an PowerPC if I wanted, and could find a decent PPC-based laptop. Put all that together and I could by a PowerPC-based machine, put FreeBSD on it and STILL keep using almost all the software I use. Obviously this isn't true for every Linux user, but I think I just smashed your 100% idea. Find a Windows or Mac user that can tout that and call me.
No, it's like buying a Buick and not bringing it every weekend to the carwash.
All the 'Apple' automobile analogies are ridiculous. The only way that I can agree with them is that arrogant effete assholes *do* buy BMWs.
The engineers who've been lent from other parts of the company to the iPhone project have been working on it for quite a long time. This left their departments short-handed, and what happened yesterday is that the OS X program office took a look at where they were, and where they needed to be on the schedule, did the math, and announced a four-month slip.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I too have seen machines go wonky as a result of corrupted fonts. All the same, I've never seen it as solely Apple's fault. Quark's font reserve is piss poor (Quark in general is piss poor, IMHO) and Adobe's is not much better.
I blame the poor software much more than the OS.
Message contains 1 attachment: spam.gif
If this is true, it may be a bad idea.
-- Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month
Let's just hope iPhone wasn't behind schedule in the first place.
I'm not sure really if it even matters. I'm not sure when, or if, we'll find out what's really going on behind closed doors at Cupertino. What really matters is what comes out in October. It matters that leopard is feature complete, and as bug free as reasonably possible considering the complexity of the project.
Apple as a company is hugely affected by its own marketing at this point. Anything they can do to assure that the iPhone succeeds (or at least doesn't flop) will be much more effective than anything they could do with OS X. As long as Joe Sixpack views Apple as a successful and cool company, they will keep selling computers.
If you don't want OSX, you'd have to be an idiot to buy an Apple, quite honestly. That's like buying a Porsche, and putting a Toyota 4 cylinder engine in it.
So you're saying Windows is a cheap 4-cyl to OS X's Porsche, then?
At last, something we can all agree on.
That said, Apples prices are only a modest premium over name-brand PCs of the same specifications, so it's like getting a Porsche for only slightly more money than a Toyota Tercell... and if you REALLY prefer to drive a Toyota, it's equipped to be downgraded. In fact, it can be switched back and forth very quickly every time you pull it into the garage.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Time Machine solves a different problem than Windows System Restore. Time Machine is a backup system designed to make it so easy for ordinary users to back up and restore data that they actually do it. It can back up over the network or to a secondary hard disk (FireWire, USB, internal, Airport Disk). It allows restore of individual files.
Time Machine
Leopard Technology Series for Developers
Time Machine
Although System Restore on Windows is a useful concept on Windows, it's not designed as a backup system for user data.
Windows System Recover
What is restored and what isn't?
System Restore FAQ: What files are monitored by System Restore?
Finally, System Restore solves a problem that to a large degree doesn't exist on Mac OS X (which has less of a tendency to randomly degrade into an un-usable or non-startable state due to regular activity like software installation and removal) and even if a system is rendered non-bootable, the Mac OS X installer allows easy restore of the system without losing user data.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
No, it would also be relevant if UNIX applications could run on Mac OS X, or if Mac OS X applications interoperated seamlessly with UNIX servers, both of which are true. Thus my comment.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Apparently, freewill is one of the Leopard unannounced "secret features," so in that case, you really should upgrade.
Hardly. Apple is competitive when you compare similar systems from other OEMs. But if you want a complete system for as little money as possible, you can run out and buy a nice Dell POS for $400. You can't do that with Apple.
A personal computer is user-configurable. A phone or dvr is not. Processor power is not the issue, versatility is.
Changa hates change.
No, it is the same operating system. Everybody else dialed in this clue long ago and moved on. It has a whole tonne of stuff removed that isn't needed on the phone just yet. It's built for a different CPU architecture, so the OS now builds on 3 platforms (at least) PowerPC, Intel x86, and ARM (or whatever is in the iPhone). In all likelihood, Apple compiles the iPhone OSX, Apple TV OSX, Mac OS X, and Mac OS X Server from the same SVN repository. The fact that people are installing additional software on the Apple TV is a bit of a clue here.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
EXACTLY!
So are you saying a Windows notebook comes with better hardware my MacBook Pro does? Like a magnetic power connector? (Which unplugs safely instead of dragging the PC with it if the power cord is pulled.) A built-in webcam? (I guess most do these days.) A brilliant widescreen 1440x960 LCD (15" version that I have)? The ATI Radeon Mobility X1600 is not too shabby either. And let's not forget the built-in motion sensor that quickly parks the drive safely in case of an accident. Are you saying a non-Apple laptop with all those specs is cheaper?
Apple hardware is good. Don't pretend otherwise.
Oh, and does this cheaper Windows laptop have a mousepad that lets you use two fingers as a scroll wheel (or whatever you program the multiple inputs for)?
The article title should be changed to "Pure Speculation on why Apple Delayed Leopard for the iPhone". There are no sources, documents, statements within or outside Apple cited to back up the claims of the article, its just speculation by someone who has no more information than anyone else sitting in there underwear typing a blog at home claiming what they say to be absolute truth. As far as the type of stories that Slashdot links to, I would like more NEWS that matters and less editorials by nobodys.
If you look around at Mac applications, most of them require atleast 10.2. A good portion of them require 10.3. I suppose someone may not be interested in newer applications, perfectly happy with what they are running. But if you want to be able to run the latest applications, you pretty much can only skip every other release of OSX or be left behind.
Also, there is the whole issue of patches. 10.2 and 10.1 have been cut off. 10.3 will be cut off once 10.5 is out. You may still be fine with those old versions, but if some major vurnability is found that affects those operating systems, Apple is just going to tell you that you have to upgrade.
Dude, you have serious reading comprehension problems. You just made my point for me. I was saying that Mac users aren't locked in any more than any other users. Linux users are 0% locked in, in exactly the same way that OS X users are 0% locked in.
Ha ha, my 1999 windows (and now linux) laptop lets me scroll from the trackpad. It also has a right-click button :)
Better that they should pull good, experienced developers off one product to finish another, than buy a zillion offshore kindergarten programmers to finish the project! So I'm kinda looking at this as good news.
I would think that for proper integration into OSX Leopard, it would be good to have the iPhone out the door.
Also, there's not been a major hardware upgrade in quite a while, perhaps the delay will mean something in the pipeline as exciting and important as the iPhone, like systems matched to Leopard. This delay could make the Leopard release
--
Franklin Brauner
If users wanted to continue getting security updates and support for OS X, then they had to upgrade to OS X 10.3 (released October 2003) if they were using 10.1 (sold September 2001 to July 2002). They had to upgrade to 10.4 (released April 2005) if they were using 10.2 (sold August 2002 to September 2003). Those are relatively short lifecycles for an operating system.
In comparison, Windows XP (released October 2001) will continue to get security updates and (paid) support until at least April 2014. Windows 2000 (released February 2000) gets updates and support until July 2010. Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (released June 2006) will be supported until June 2009 (desktop version) or June 2011 (server version).
You might have wanted to, since the OS got leaner and faster and offered some serious new benies, quite unlike, say, the XP -> Vista "upgrade". No operating system (including Mac OS or Vista) gets "leaner and faster" when they first implement their compositing window manager (Quartz, Aero). Remember how awfully slow OS X 10.0/10.1 were? OS X got faster because they had time to optimize a new, slow, buggy window manager. Vista is implementing a compositing window manager (Aero) that's more advanced than OS X 10.4's. Quartz 2D Extreme should catch up (or surpass) Aero when it's finally enabled in 10.5. However, unlike Mac upgrades, the Vista/Office upgrade is designed to force an upgrade cycle, by that wonderful "incompatible" format structure. What do you get for your upgrade dollar? A more unstable system with a new UI to learn and ever adoring love from everyone you exchange files with who now have to upgrade to read them. What file formats will be "incomatible" with Windows XP and Office 2003? Microsoft always released Office Compatability Packs that allow previous versions of Office to use (not just read) the newest Office formats. The Compatability Pack for Office 2007 allows users of Office XP and Office 2003 to "open, edit, save, and create files using the Open XML Formats new to the 2007 Microsoft Office system." Heck, it even allows Office/Windows 2000 users to convert Office 2007 files. It's damn good hardware, and if you really want, you can even run MS software on it, along with various other flavors of *nix You can thank Microsoft for allowing Windows to be run on Apple hardware. You can blame Apple for disallowing OS X to be run on non-Apple hardware.The only reason to pull people from a project for another one is when the product doesn't work and you want to shove it out the door on time. Spin it any way you want, you know I'm right.
You must transition to GNUwill or prepare to be ostracized!
I can scroll from the trackpad by using 2 fingers on in and moving them up or down depending on whether you need to scroll up or down. I can also "right click" by putting 2 fingers on the trackpad and clicking. And if I want the classic "right click" I can plug in a mouse or a trackball.
Any questions?
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
There's a single OS X development team. OS X is running on Mac, AppleTV, iPhone, and god knows what other products Apple has in the development stream. The team is going to focus on numerous facets of the OS; currently, they're focused more on the iPhone drivers & UI et al. All of which is going to pay off for us Mac users.
My bet is that the big OS X secret is going to have something to do with new ways of interacting with the computer, using technologies developed expressly for the iPhone initially. All Apple products are high-touch/interactive; the iPhone is *especially* so. The computer and TV platforms can only benefit by that.
These are very exciting times in the OS world. We are *finally* beginning to get an OS that really lives up to everything an OS should be: stable, secure, great UI, intuitive, pleasant.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
OS X is nothing but a pretty (ugly -- who likes metal?) face to NeXT, dummed down a bit.
The iPhone is nothing spectacular. Maddox said it right:
---
"Now everyone's hyping up the iPhone. You know what would make the iPhone
better? Tactile response, so you don't have to look down every time you want
press a button on the phone.
One would expect a computer that's built on a legacy of being closed to
outside developers and third-party manufacturers to "just work,"
and it does, until it doesn't. It would be like bragging that your
VCR just works."
--- (Was hidden in the "stfu mac users" post)
I am a recent mac convert, although, I am typing this on my XP machine, my iMac is sitting right next to me. (Yes yes, you zealots out there, there are Linux machines here too).
The thing about the iPhone is that IMO, it will be bigger than the iPod, and will likely be the biggest cell phone to date. I strongly suspect it is going to bury the legacy of the Razr - and I should know as I own a Razr. But, now here is where I think the opposite of what you are worried about will happen. You see, the iPhone RUNS OS X. And people will be using the iPhone as what is most likely to be one of the biggest consumer devices since the iPod, walkman, or Razr. Now, few consumers now use OS X. Most of them are using Windows, just like I am to type this post.
Here is the thing - the interface of the Razr SUCKS. You can bet that the interface of the iPhone will kick ass. So, now you have people who become used to a slimmed down version of OS X, and now it comes time for them to buy a computer... The influence of the iMac and iBooks have been growing. So, what does Joe consumer take a little longer look at? A Mac.
Most consumers only know of an OS as "windows" when they hear OS they think "windows". The iPhone has the potential to change OS to "Mac OS X".
Now, when Joe consumer walks into best buy and asks for the computer that runs the same thing as this here phone thingy, that thing will be a Mac.
The primary goal is to make coin by selling the iPhone, back it up with iTunes and iRingTunes, and then the secondary goal is to slowly migrate people to OS X as a choice because they are now familiar with their great little iPhone.
This thing is going to be a massive change in the industry if it works properly, and I strongly suspect it will. *
* (Expect 1st gen iphones to have problems that get fixed in the second incarnation).
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
I'd have to say, yea, go with an IBM(now lenovo), well, for most of those features... But maybe that's because I like 12" computers.
Note, I do use my 12" Powerbook g4, and yes, it dual boots with debian. If apple made a 12" mac book pro, yep, I'd probably buy it, because yes, I do like the quality of the hardware.
sent from my slashdot browser.
They will have a hardware upgrade in 3 to 6 months for HSDPA. Most EDGE networks are not MCS-12 yet..
ho-hum. Tiger's just fine. We don't need a new OS every year or even every few years. I would much prefer to see Apple work on perfecting 10.4.
or maybe the iphone as the delay is really iphoney as alluded to by this report...not flaming...just sowing some seeds of doubt...
/ 14/new-eight-core-mac-pro-performance-mixed-bag
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/04
"You can kill the revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution."-- Fred Hampton
Jobs got more pride than he deserve.
All the talk about Apple delaying Leopard because of the iPhone assume The Apple statement was telling the truth. My bet is that the real reason for the delay is bugs in Leopard that are taking longer than expected to kill. Notice that all of the developer releases of Leopard have a long list of known issues. Apple needs time to work these off and of course any big company loads people between departments. But Apple can't say publically "Leopard is broken and it will take us until October to fix it/" That simply sounds bad.
3-year warranty including accident cover makes the power connector and the motion sensor moot. I have zero use for a webcam. My 17" has a 1920x1200 display and a 7800GO - both better than Apple's offerings. The only thing that I wish I had on my laptop is the touchpad, and that's just not worth the price difference.
Don't get me wrong, the MBPs are damn sexy laptops. But I have better uses for the money.
It's not exactly rocket surgery.
I've also got a 15" MBP. And honestly, the thing I like the least about it is the hardware.
Magnetic power cord: this should have been standard on all laptops a decade ago (my understanding is that that things like many cooking appliances have this). Preferably a unified connector, but that would be too much to hope for. So, a point for that.
Webcam: like you said, many laptops have it. It was fun for about a day with Photo Booth, but I haven't really used it since. Maybe if more people had one I would, but my upload bandwidth tends to be too low for video chats plenty of time, and in any case, I'm perfectly content with audio or just text.
Widescreen: well, it's 1440x900 (not 960), but it is nice. The backlight bleed is abysmal on it though, and mine seems to have dust under the screen now. How it happened escapes me, but I don't seem to remember it being there before AppleCare dealt with it. And by some laptop standards, that's fairly low-res. I know I've heard of 17" screens at 1920x1200 (same as my 24" Dell screen, and Apple's own 23"), and I could swear some 15" screens are there too. It being just right for 2x upscaling of DVDs is nice, though.
x1600: for what I (and most people) do, it just shortens battery life and adds more heat. As if it wasn't hot enough already. Macs aren't exactly famed for their game selection, and I've yet to find any real evidence of any other apps I use benefiting from a standalone GPU. I could be wrong, but subjective testing hasn't shown me any improvement over the GMA950 in MacBooks and my thinkpad.
SMS on hard drive: pretty common now. I know the thinkpad I'm typing on right now has one.
So, yeah, about my thinkpad. It's running OSx86. It's a bit quirky, but it keeps me away from Windows, so I'm happy enough. I've lost audio, WiFi, and the battery indicator, but it otherwise works surprisingly well. It runs Aperture fine, as well as Parallels for those rare occasions, iTunes (just for syncing my iPod, since I've got no sound), and Disco has no problems with its funny smoke thing.
And, you know what? By and large, I prefer it to the MBP. It gets better battery life. It runs MUCH cooler (I've got it on bare skin right now and it's barely warm; I'd actually be concerned about my skin melting if I were doing this with my MBP). When the fan comes on, less frequently, it's typically quieter. It has a right mouse button, which works a lot more consistently than the two-finger tap on the trackpad. It has home/end/delete/pgup/pgdn keys on the keyboard, that don't require a function key to use (and Fn+PgUp illuminates an LED for night typing, though it's not as cool as the backlit keyboard). But, I'd say the most important thing is the physical enclosure: it's more durable (it won't dent), and doesn't have a SQUARE edge where your wrists rest!
So, let's talk price. It looks like this thing, a Thinkpad T60 with 1GB RAM, DVD/CDRW, and a 60GB hard drive retails for about $1100. Same as an entry-level MacBook, which comes with a borderline-useless 512MB of RAM. From using my brother's MacBook for a short while, the battery life is comparable and the MB has a nicer screen, but the vanilla MBs also have that stupid sharp wrist rest, no keyboard illumination of any form, and requires an extra adapter to use an external display (the T60, and most other laptops out there, have a standard VGA port not requiring you to spend more money). While I seem to remember the heat being considerably more bearable, the MacBook was still quite a bit hotter than this thinkpad. For the record, both my Thinkpad and my MBP use a Core Duo 1.86GHz chip, and the MB has a 2.0GHz C2D.
I'll give you the two-finger scrolling. It doesn't work with OSx86, at least. But in Windows, I can set up hot zones on the touchpad that serve the same purpose, plus hot corner tapping to launch apps or use as back/forward. Doesn't compare to Quicksilver by a longshot, but I'd love to see the hot corners for page or tab navigation.
Apple hard
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
The only one of those things my laptop has not that the MBP does is the magnetic connector (which is a great feature, I'm the first to admit). And it was $150 cheaper than the Mac.
Jobsmonster only has to ask his (paying) slaves to bend over, and they will.
> If you look around at Mac applications, most of them require atleast 10.2. A good portion of them require 10.3
Yeah, but you can get OS v10.3 on eBay for $20.
It's like the talk about Apple delaying leopard for Vista compatibility... if they're having problems with some new component in Leopard and have to delay it, any plausible excuse would be more acceptable to Apple than inviting the press to cast aspersions at them. I've already seen idiots suggesting they're suffering from some "Vista-like" delays. Vista-like? Leopard's being delayed months, not years!
It's not like they haven't come up with transparent excuses for their business decisions in the past, and they know people will accept just about any gobbledegook they can throw at them. I don't like it, but I can quite understand why they do it.
I've been keeping track of Apple's development cycle for the past few years, and I don't think the iPhone has anything to do with the delay. ;) In fact, I have been saying for some time that I didn't think the quality of Leopard was on target for a spring release... well before the iPhone announcement. While I suppose it's possible that the iPhone was somewhat of a drain on the core OS developers, I think this all ties into Steve's "Top Secret Features" announcement... the suspicious lack of any Leopard discussions during MacWorld San Francisco is interesting... but not necessarily surprising... If Apple really does have a rabbit up its sleeve, they may have wanted to wait until Vista was sufficiently saturated before unveiling it.
;)
Keep in mind that Apple claims the iPhone is delayed until June because of the need for FCC approval... so which story are we supposed to believe?
Also, if you actually break down the time that Leopard has had for development... it's *much* longer than previous releases, and that doesn't have anything to do with the Intel work because Apple's been keeping things in sync for 5 years...
I'm skeptical of the announcement... Either Apple's dates have slipped, or they've got something big. It surprised me that Jobs stood up and said there were "Top Secret" features coming, so I hope he makes good on that promise... I expect the unexpected at WWDC in June.
"...and Linux users are 100% locked in."
So that's not in the GGP? Huh. Guess I have reading problems this morning, too.
Well, I think our discussion is less a case of right and wrong than a case of talking past each other. I think that's happening because I seem to be employing a more conventional and less narrow definition for vendor lock-in than you seem to be. Since you're interested, I'll try to elaborate a bit so you can understand my intended argument better. Do check out that short Wikipedia page on vendor lock-in before proceeding, so you get a better idea of my perspective.
Most of what people put forth as evidence regarding vendor lock-in is self-inflicted, or isn't really valid (e.g. based on misunderstanding the technology choices), or at best falls into the "perceived" rather than "actual" cost of switching platforms. Most home users, for example, don't have a pile of expensive applications which must be replaced when they get a new system. Often times they would pay to upgrade the applications they have, at a cost not much different than switching to an equivalent application on the new platform. Most home users typically surf the web, check email, and maybe play a game or two that are obsolete and which they have already quit playing by the time they get a new machine, etc. They never upgrade the OS over the lifetime of the machine. Most home users are so totally not locked-in at all, and they tend not to realize it. Almost everything they need when they switch platforms comes with the new system.
Most businesses wind up with a considerably greater set of interlocking dependencies which tie them to a platform. However they often could, with only the smallest amount of well placed clue, begin migrating their custom applications to sport web interfaces as a part of their regular development cycles, unwinding such interlocking bits over time. The could (but typically do not) make other decisions to emphasize loose-coupling in their IT architecture. Over a period of time they could achieve a substantial degree of vendor independence without making large sacrifices. Typically the resulting IT infrastructure would have a lower maintenance cost and greater robustness as a result of these same architectural decisions, too. They tend not to do this because at any step of the path they are looking only at the next step. Not much bigger picture thinking happens, so you don't see companies routinely switching platforms, because years of sub-optimal decisions wind up locking them in tightly to whatever they started with. Well, the vendors can only be blamed for part of that, and I think it's the smaller part, frankly.
The worst example was Microsoft which for a long time considered vendor lock-in to be an intentional and essential feature of their architectures for both Windows and applications. (The pace of development at Microsoft has been so slow the past several years that it isn't really clear if this is the case any longer, it may or may not be.) Apple and Sun, by contrast, consider vendor lock-in to be an anti-feature because their customers are already dominated by Windows and their growth opportunities come from attracting people from other platforms. They emphasize loosely coupled architectures and portability, to a large extent in their designs. They emphasize good import/export between file formats. They emphasize loosely coupled client-server architectures and development tools that provide proprietary advantages, but don't require you to use them. Yes, they offer proprietary features which can result in some degree of lock-in if you write custom apps to those features, but look at the difference between Java and POSIX APIs compared to Win32 and that ilk. Java is the anti-vendor-lockin development environment. Apple, Sun, IBM, HP, and everybody else with a sense of "platform" who isn't the monopoly platform provider likes and supports portable and inter-operable technologies.
Sure, if you build a mountain of code on top of Solaris, AIX, H
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Of that $7B, how much of it is iPod (absolutely zero to do with OSX), iTunes (again, zero to do with OSX), Quicktime licenses to Windows systems and streaming services (essentially zero to do with OSX), and hardware (some to do with OSX, but this is not 100% because some end up running Windows or Linux on Apple hardware, and even when OSX is included and used, it is difficult to determine if the impetus of the purchase was OSX, or the growing strength of the Apple brand name independent of OSX). So to even begin the discussion, all this has to be forgotten, probably decreasing the amount by over half. Apple's move to focus more and more on the likes of Apple TV, iPod, iPhone, etc and renaming their company is a clear indication where they are seeing the best business results, and it's not in PC sales.
The amount that is 100% purely attributable to OSX is probably low relative to the amount MS can claim for Vista. MS's $21B is also not purely Windows, with the lions share probably going to Office/Exchange licensing, but the second biggest slice is probably Windows licenses. This is not necessarily a technical merit of course, they've simply managed to get the industry to accept them as a 'must-have' in the commodity system space, which is great for a software company.
I know, Vista isn't by choice for a majority of the purchasers (got through PC purchase) and by that logic, you should somehow be able to count Apple system sales, but the different ways the two situations work make it impossible to determine how much revenue credit OSX gets in an Apple hardware purchase. MS gets a fixed, measurable license fee that is occasionally refunded, so their financial benefit from a bundled PC purchase is clearly defined, while Apple's really isn't (even if they have some internally defined value, it has no free market meaning unless they offer OS-less systems with a known discount in place, or sell Windows installed without OSX swapping their fee for MS).
Comparing to Dell is not apt either, they have little software, mostly given away for free by necessity (software nowadays is the best shot in the industry at decent margins), have no remotely popular product line outside the PC/Server market, and they largely target the commodity system market (margins are almost nothing). Apple positions itself as a prestige brand and as such enjoys a fatter profit margin on each hardware sale, plus their Quicktime and iTunes situations are larger margin situations as well. I guess your claim is that Apple computer sales in terms of profit exceeded Dell's, but that is hard to determine if you are judging Apple's total revenue to Dell, you'd have to compare direct sales, as mentioned earlier.
Apple may have done some impressive technical work, but you have to face the market reality that as of Today, MS is clearly the leader in a business sense. I don't use Windows or OSX, but I don't claim my preferred platform is beating MS business-wise either.
I
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
If iPhone delays then Apple's stock actions will go down, a lot more that when they announce that Leopard will be delayed 4 months... iPhone is more important in economic/stock terms
ghostbar page.
I consulted Wikipedia earlier in this discussion to confirm that my understanding was mainstream and it was (although I don't take Wikipedia as gospel). You, on the other hand, have a unique definition of lock-in that nobody could expect to be using until you finally explained it.
Overall, I found that your post makes a lot of unproven assertions that are popular in certain circles (e.g. Java or web apps are the solution to vendor lock-in and host of other ills). Yes, there are many ways to make multiple platform applications (although none of them are really WORA) even without Java or a browser.
The key question is whether this idealistic goal has any real business value. As long as you choose a non-niche platform, the vast majority of in-house applications have no need to run on other platforms. In addition, if it's a non-command-line app, the user experience will meet or exceed what can be achieved with Java or browser-based apps. Java because it has to compromise to achieve multi-platform functionality and browser-based apps because in general, elements such as the back button aren't appropriate.
I think rewriting working applications merely to try undo vendor lock-in is a bad business decision in most cases.
As usual, there's isn't a one-size-fits-all approach that gives the best solution. User Java apps when appropriate, use browser apps when they are appropriate and something else otherwise.
Getting back to the orginal point, I think given a conventional definition of lock-in, Unix apps running on OS X isn't relevent. I don't think, however, the vendor lock-in matters that much. The only issue I have is when a different set of rules are used for different platforms. Sometimes excuses are made for Apple that wouldn't fly if we were taking about MS.
Right now, I see the only lock in program(s) out there as MS Office. To give you an idea of how bad the lockin is, Office 2007 will force yet another upgrade/training cycle as it's largely incompatible (for all practical reason) with previous versions. No, it is not appropriate to "offer" a save in previous version on the save menu. By default it should save in a compatible mode with a warning if for some reason it could not be saved in a previous mode. (MS's mode operandi has generally been to indivate that you're losing some functionality if you save in an older format even if that's not true.)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Face it, Windows sucks because they don't care about the user experience. Vista is slower than XP even when you don't run Aero. OSX 10.0/10.1? I didn't run them, but hey, it was basically a version 1.0 of the OS, which would equate to Windows NT 3.1/3.5. Recall how dog slow those were? I do. What file formats will be "incomatible" with Windows XP and Office 2003? Microsoft always released Office Compatability Packs that allow previous versions of Office to use (not just read) the newest Office formats. The Compatability Pack for Office 2007 allows users of Office XP and Office 2003 to "open, edit, save, and create files using the Open XML Formats new to the 2007 Microsoft Office system." Heck, it even allows Office/Windows 2000 users to convert Office 2007 files. Yep, MS's solution to "interoperability" is to require you to manually select to save in the previous office format. I'm assuming that you'll get that nifty wunderbar modal dialog stating something about the potential to lose formatting and features of your current worksheet because you're saving in an older version. WTF can't I select a system wide document version to save to, and disable or at least warn all those features not compatible with the designated version? Now that would at least be user friendly. Even better would be to fail seamlessly into older versions, so that basically your documents would always be good, just not as pretty. You can thank Microsoft for allowing Windows to be run on Apple hardware. You can blame Apple for disallowing OS X to be run on non-Apple hardware. I believe I can thank Apple for allowing Windows to run on Apple hardware. You are correct about blaming Apple for not allowing OSX to be run on non-Apple hardware, but then, it is their OS/hardware, isn't it? Do you blame MS for not allowing XBox software to be run on Sony, Nintendo, Apple, Sun, IBM, or Sega? No? Interesting.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Generally, I'd say there are many programs that lock you into a single vendor, not just MS Office. I'd also say that forcing you to upgrade is an entirely separate issue that might actually encourage people to switch despite the lock-in.
What other program that's designed to create essentially shared content forces upgrades via incompatible file formats and locks you into a single vendor?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Certainly one can choose to use only applications that will run on multiple platforms, but that is going to eliminate any advantage of selecting a particular platform and give you only the least common denominator functionality. ... The real issue of lock-in concerns applications that take advantage of the platform they're written for. Linux and Windows can't run standard OS X GUI applications. Macs and Windows can't run GNOME apps etc.
... whatever Windows developers do with Windows. At any rate, when you start straying from the path of the least-common, most-accepted standards, you're going to get a product that's not compatible and requires your users to be using a certain set of software and/or hardware.
I don't get what you're asking for. It seems to be two mutually-incompatible things. You can't tweak for a particular hardware/software configuration, and its particular idiosyncrasies, while also retaining broad compatibility. In the past, this usually meant either having compatibility, or having speed (because most optimizations were speed or memory/footprint related). Now, I think it's generally compatibility or features, because most platform/vendor-specific tweaks involve proprietary ways of doing things in order to make certain tasks easier. But it's the choice of the developer in each case. As you pointed out, it's possible to have compatibility, but most developers choose not to.
There are applications which run, and work well, under Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows; Python with Tk GUIs for instance, I've seen in real-world applications. But they don't offer some of the features of a "native" app on each platform -- you're not going to get integration with Quartz and WebKit on OS X, or do cool stuff with KDE on Linux, or
This really isn't the fault of the OS developers either. It's silly to require than an OS maker not insert any features that aren't also present in all other OSes -- that would just discourage native software development for that platform. If Apple had said that the only applications you could write for OS X would be command-line POSIX-compatible ones, what kind of reaction do you think they would have gotten from the Mac-only development houses (and there are quite a few); they don't care about Linux/UNIX compatibility, and neither do their users (as evidenced by them being customers of software houses that only produce Mac software). They want features.
All operating systems, and on a broader scale, toolkits and programming languages, provide software developers with a palette of options that they can do anything they want with. We're past the time when developing on a particular platform meant that you software will only run there. It's trivial, if you really want to, to produce software that can be run basically anywhere. But it requires making compatibility a priority, and in most software development that just isn't at the top of the list.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I was talking about general lock-in. You're talking about a category you've created specifically to exclude anything except MS Office (how well you've done it, I don't know or care).
All you have to do to create standard Unix "mbox" files from Apple Mail is select the messages you want to export, and choose File > Save As, and choose Raw Source. Name the file something like "messages.mbox" and hit save. Thunderbird or any other decent MUA should import them just fine.
0 706201156481
I suspect you could also just concatenate the individual emlx (individual message files) stored in the Library folder together, but it's unnecessary, since Mail will just do that on save, for any arbitrary group of messages you specify.
Saying that Apple Mail used lots of incompatible formats really blows the issue out of proportion. For the first few versions, it stored each mailbox in a "mbox" file, basically a long text file of messages. This is the standard format used by most other mailreaders (the ones which don't use a proprietary system or a database backend). In the most recent version, Apple changed from the one-file-per-mailbox "mbox" file to a one-file-per-message "emlx" format. This lets utilities like Spotlight or Quicksilver search them without parsing the files by hand. Either way, your messages are still stored, in their entirety, including MIME attachments, as plain text.
[Just as a slight digression: That, in itself, is worth a hell of a lot more than some 'Export' option buried in the software -- even if the software is no longer available; even if the architecture to run the software is no longer available, the messages themselves, in the as-stored format, will still be readable. (So when making a backup you don't have to worry about trying to put some sort of a reader or file-parser on there too, which I think is mandatory for backing up proprietary formats.) So you can do a full backup of your mail just by burning ~/Library/Mail to a DVD.]
If you want more info here's a "hint" about the process:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2006
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
> What other program that's designed to create essentially shared content forces upgrades via incompatible
> file formats and locks you into a single vendor?
GarageBand? iPhoto? iMovie?
The vendor lockin of old is mostly gone. It disappeared with the advent of RDBMSes. So what other lockin exists these days? I'm dead serious in asking this question, because from what I can tell with all the programs I use, everything has standard types of input data and produces standard types of output. That's because everything these days works with third party equipment. (OK, I know of some hardware/software combos that will lock you in in the enterprise, but those are very specific purposed applications and you don't have to choose them, or choose to use the ever helpful proprietary portions that will lock you in)
About the only non-MS product I can think of that even remotely smacks of vendor lockin is the iTunes music store. iPods aren't even vendor lockin. AAC is a standard that's not owned by Apple.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Available open source or freeware:
Windows - a lot
Mac OSX - a lot
Try
Available open source or freeware:
Windows - a pretty good amount
Mac OSX - This is a full fledged BSD UNIX.
-- The vendor supports and distributes freely a fully integrated X server so that Aqua and X apps can communicate and in particular cut and paste is fully functional (at least as much as it functions at the X level).
-- The vendor supports a massive porting effort slightly smaller than the freeBSD ports library (mac ports).
-- The vendor's standard development environment is based on gcc and thus code interoperability is ensured
-- The user community ensures an easy to use ports system and takes advantage of gcc to offer many packages without the need for ports. This makes OSX probably second only to the major Linuxes in terms of package availability.
I'd say they aren't close.
GarageBand output: Standard WAV/MP3/AAC or some other format if you care to encode it.
iPhoto output: same as input or JPG
iMovie output: standard MPEG2 on a DVD via iDVD
So, basically, none of these lock you into anything. Now, if you're talking about the intermediate project files for GarageBand or iMovie, I'd say that's not a valid argument. You still have the original inputs and can even produce standard output of various intermediate stages if desired.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
> Now, if you're talking about the intermediate project files for GarageBand or iMovie, I'd say that's not a valid argument.
Yes, I was talking about the project files. You can't edit your projects with anything but the iLife apps. GarageBand can't even export MIDI - that was enough to convince me it's a lock-in tool.
> You still have the original inputs and can even produce standard output of various intermediate stages if desired.
Sure, any app's format is portable if you're willing to re-do all your work.
I am not living in the US. Apple have just delayed a product I was interested in buying in favor of another that not only am I not interested in (I hate cellphones), but I won't be able buy anyway because it will be US-only at launch.
That's just fucking brilliant, Apple.
> GarageBand output: Standard WAV/MP3/AAC or some other format if you care to encode it.
> iPhoto output: same as input or JPG
> iMovie output: standard MPEG2 on a DVD via iDVD
Word output: standard ASCII, RTF or HTML or some other format if you care to encode it.
Excel output: same as input or tab- or comma-delimited
You see Office uses standard formats! No lock-in there either.
You also have the standard output files and even full quality AAC - should be convertible to whatever you want, but it's not included in the program.
It's like iPhoto - RAW pictures can be displayed, but editing them for something like red eye creates a JPG. Purchase Aperture, and you get RAW editing capability.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Yep, and that Word output in ASCII, RTF, or, god forbid, Word's HTML certainly makes for a wonderful transfer of the Word document, doesn't it? It looks exactly like the original Word doc. Same goes for Excel.
There seem to certainly be a lot of oranges around those apples.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
You seem to be running circles around my irony. :)
Once you create the project in one of these proprietary apps, you are stuck with using that app to edit again if you want to retain all the edit decsions, metadata and full output quality. I gave the ASCII, RTF, CSV examples just to illustrate how your "standard" output formats from iLife apps do not work around their proprietary format issues.
Microsoft is not the only vendor that pushes file-format lock-in, that's the point.
- Neal
Maybe I'm not seeing your irony (It was quite late and the 1040 really sucks).
iPhoto for instance -> JPG in, JPG out. In some/many cases, it's the same JPG. I'm confused.
iMovie -> DV/MPEG2/etc in, MPEG2 out (for final product) iMovie is an assembler with cropping capabilities. I haven't used any deeper than that, but I fail to see how that creates anything similar to the scenario you posted.
GarageBand -> same basic functionality as iMovie from what little I've played with it, it assembles multiple tracks and creates a composite in a standard easily usable output format.
I think I know what you're trying to say, but your analogies are falling short because the differences are too great. Perhaps a better comparison would have been Pages or Keynote, except IIRC both can produce PDFs which again are multi-product compatible.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Doesn't Apple's POS sell for $500?
Sorry, dude.
I was being ironic in suggesting that RTF, HTML, CSV etc. are usable solutions to proprietary Office format standards. They are not, just as MPEG, JPG, and MP3 are not solutions to proprietary iLife formats. Your suggestion that standard output formats avoids lock-in is akin to saying that Word .doc files don't lock you in since you can always output to PDF (a standard format).
Try this: create a slide show in iPhoto. Save or export it. Move your files to a machine that doesn't have iPhoto. Now change the slide timings.
Create a song in GarageBand. Record some instruments. Set your track levels and effects. Move your files to a machine that doesn't have GarageBand. Now change the arrangement.
Create a movie in iMovie. Set your transitions, titles, credits, etc. Move your files to a machine that doesn't have iMovie. Now change the titles.
You can't do any of these things, because the project files are in proprietary formats. The fact that there are no other applications which can edit the projects is moot, because with proprietary formats, no such tools can be developed. That's lock-in.
They don't have a POS to sell you at any price.
Seems I have higher standards than you.
Or you're a high maintenance bitch.
No, I would have noticed that. I'm curious, how did you came to such a idiotic conclusion so quickly?