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Is Apple Doing All It Can to Beat Vista?
aalobode writes "The New York Times is running an article on the narrowing window that Apple has for beating Microsoft's Vista. According the Times, not enough has been done to capitalize on the Mac user experience versus the 'world of hurt that is Vista'. It also points out that that restructuring of Apple leaves ambiguities about Apple's exact commitment to the computer end of its business. The article calls MS Vista's certified vendors, developers and driver writers a flywheel that takes a while coming up to speed - and then becomes unstoppable."
With the New York Times putting fawning articles like this in front of millions of readers every day, why would Apple want to spend money to do the same?
As a lifelong Apple fanboy (all Apple since 1982, thanks), I can say without a doubt that there's not been a better time to be an Apple fanboy in 20 years. We actually have some street cred now. IT departments no longer laugh dismissively at the idea of perhaps a Mac in the office, maybe. (Though corporate America is a long way from embracing Macs. And Apple originally lost the PC war because most consumers bought what they had at work for home (and, hey, it was a little cheaper).) People are actually buying Macs. Sales are up; growth is up. The article makes a big deal of Apple not starting its relationship with Best Buy soon enough to gain a retail presence. Hello? NYT, two years ago Apple barely had the cred and was still working on retail presence for the iPod. I bought my iPod at Target; I've vowed never to buy so much as a blank CD at Best Buy after some of its shady business practices, and if Apple wanted to just make the Mac available to more people, it'd sell them everywhere the iPods are sold. How far away is that? Well, they'd have to be able to make enough Macs to put them there, but I bet we'll see it someday.
How is that? Agreed, when I'm on the move I will naturally turn to handheld devices that can offer basic services (multimedia playing, communication, web browsing). But there's no way I'm going to resort to them when I need actual work done, or for serious entertainment purposes. They're good to keep you going from one place to another, but for productivity's sake I will need to sit at a desk, use a full size keyboard, a normal mouse, and enjoy a large screen and sensible performance. And if I want to watch movies or play games I will also require the kind of hardware that doesn't travel easily.
Furthermore, that desktop computer paradigm itself is very hard to surpass. There are specialized devices that offer niche services (multimedia players, game consoles, handhelds, laptops), and there are desktop computers, which can be used for anything. That versatility is very hard to throw aside. Niche devices come and go, but a universal purpose device like the desktop computer will be around for a lot of time.
The only possible change I foresee is extreme miniaturization, which would at some point reduce the desktop computer to something like a pen that you take out of your pocket, place on the desk and it expands to a full size interface (keyboard, mouse, display, or all in one). Perhaps using holography and motion sensors. But for all practical reasons that kind of thing is a long way from the mainstream.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
The point with Compiz is that is is a compositing window manager platform. Compiz isn't the effects. Compiz is the platform. Even GUI people seem to miss this.
You cannot hail OS X GUI and dismiss Compiz in the same sentence. Compiz is what brings things like Exposè, window grouping, "live" thumbnail preview etc. to the OSS world. Those things are doubtless useful in the sense that they let you do your work more efficiently. If you get stuck on viewing Compiz as the "spinning cube that nerds take screenshots of", you'll be missing the point. Of course, one has to drill down through the configuration and disable all those flashy no-good effects such as flaming windows and windows that pop up on cube rotation, water, snow, etc. etc. Such things will happen when you have a bunch of talented people working on a software product that lets you do cool stuff; you can't expect everybody to focus on usability only. Still, usability is what lies at the core of Compiz.
The most important thing about Compiz, for the GUI people at least, is that it is an open architecture which you can use to design and usability-test different GUI paradigms. We shouldn't be afraid of trying out new things, even if we are aware that they may never become mainstream. Many GUI paradigms never became "mainstream"; heck, even Mac's "one-menu-bar-at-the-top-of-the-screen" paradigm is not mainstream, if you count its occurrences in the entire population of desktop/laptop computers worldwide! And yet it is considered more usable. Therefore, GUI people should be happy that they now have a toy to try out new paradigms for themselves.
You are right, once you let someone with lots of Linux experience lose on MacOS X, things start to break.
You say that no matter what you did, you couldn't get to mount NFS shares on her Macintosh. Did you try the following steps:
1. Go to the Finder.
2. Select the "Mac Help" item in the "Help" menu.
3. Type in "NFS share" into the search box and hit the return key.
4. Follow the instructions given?
God bless you.
Slashdot is full of people who type plaintext for a living and seem to think that that is all anyone does with their computers. As long as there's a working keyboard driver, they're happy. The suggestion that I (or my friends who do design, or my parents who use enterprise software, or my colleagues who do stats) could make do with Linux is laughable. In my case, I have a very hard time even using a Mac, because of the statistical packages I use, only SPSS (which I use infrequently, but is essential) has a Mac version, and it doesn't even run on Intel (yet). I have all these packages running on XP in VMware Fusion on my Mac laptop (which I have been extremely impressed by).
Further, I'd like to point out that those "pointless Linux distro reviews" never explain how to get, say, your nVidia card to spit out more than 640x480 (the problem which stymied me last time I tried Linux), or how to get wifi to work, or any of the real problems you actually have after install.
Bah. My sig is sufficient to communicate my basic opinion.