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Apple's Missed Opportunity With Leopard Delay
An anonymous reader writes "According to an article on OSWeekly.com, Apple missed a big opportunity by not releasing Leopard soon. They could've taken advantage of Vista's losing streak and one upped Microsoft, the author suggests. 'It's not uncommon for Windows users and technology consumers in general to say that Microsoft missed out on making the most of Vista both before and after its launch. Longtime fans of Windows have changed their tone due to Vista's inadequacies, and regular users are in many cases stuck with trying to figure out why they still can't get certain things to work within the operating system. Granted, it's not a completely horrific OS, but is that even a compliment worth accepting?'"
no longer acceptable. Ignoring your testers complaints on usability and performance issues will no longer get it done
But the people that 'actually' used Vista for a significant amount of time (i.e. the testers) don't see Vista as the horrible OS that others looking in that haven't used it extensively do.
Vista added a lot of architectural changes and paved the road for many new things the industry will just start seeing and using in the next couple of years. From hot dock Video to the revised audio and video subsystems that 'DO' increase application and even gaming performance in addition to pulling video out of the kernel for stability. (Latest tests now show Vista 5-10% faster than XP in 99% of the games on the market, it was NVidia and ATI that didn't put enough effort into performance optimizing the Vista drivers for games as they did with XP where they had 6 years to add tweaks.)
The other big shove Vista has going for it is the migration for development to not only a new set of APIs, but a new concept of development that is as revolutionary as Drag and Drop event based programming made popular with Visual Basic back in 1993. Vista's XAML and core WPF technologies are a graphic designer/developers wet dream in terms of abilities, performance and moving from basic UI constructs. This can also be witnessed with Silverlight, another technology based on Vista technology. People can say XAML or WPF or Silverlight is like Display PDF or Flash or SVG, but when they actually take a look at what it does, it is quite apparent XAML and WPF go further than the current technology hardware even supports. And this isn't even talking about its inherent 3D support and 3D UI hit testing and other features that have to be faked to appear 3D on OS X(Display PDF) or Flash.
Vista also added enough new features to the user side of the OS that it still offer more than XP, and yes still even offers more than Leopard, which makes Leopard look like a catch up OS - especially considering many of the Leopard and even Tiger ideas that were so coveted by Apple users first appeared in alpha versions of Vista.
Pick almost any Leopard feature and Vista has the feature, and architecturally there is no 'killer' feature of OS X that Vista cannot implement via 3rd part support. On the other hand Vista has technologies that OS X, Linux, etc don't have yet and won't have for several years.
Until OS X or Linux can handle and pre-emptively multi-task GPU operations, non-double buffer writes from system RAM to VRAM, or process sound with virtually infinite channels and bit discrepancies, there is a LOT of architectural work to be done to compete with Vista. On Vista you can run several CAD/High End graphical applications under the Aero interface and not lose performance in any of the applications, even with them performing side by side. (This is the same paradigm shift that pre-emptive CPU operations offered applications, and Vista has extended this concept to the GPU subsystem.)
And Vista as for the claim that Vista is buggy or broken or performs slowly, think about it in these terms instead. It is more stable than XP, OS X, and Linux and for an v1 OS release has shown that MS can get security on industry par and even best what is out there, as Vista has had fewer security flaws or bugs than OS X has in the last year and Tiger has been around a while where these issues should have been fixed a long time ago.
And as for Vista having 'poor performance' remember than using boot camp and using native versions of any Adobe CS3 product, it runs faster under Vista than it does on OSX on the EXACT same hardware. And this is with non-optimized Apple drivers for Vista, and a sad note to loss of performance OS X inherently has.
Another area of performance you can look at is the gaming, with the latest drivers OpenGL and DX9/DX8/DX7 games run 5-10% faster than they do on XP now. And DX10 games run faster on Vista than the same games running in DX9 mode on XP, and have better visuals.
So Vista
Mac's caters to afluent customers who buying a new computer is no big deal. The thing that kept some of them from moving to Mac was they worked in a Windows world and didn't want to hassle moving things back and forth or not being able to run some software. Now Apple has BootCamp to make dual booting simple, but more important is Parallels and VMWare Fusion to run Windows inside of OS X. So all those issues are no more. Mac's have ease of use like no other and stylist computers that yuppie users like so they are going to start showing up in business in offices of managers. If Apple starts making deals for corporate sales they are going to continue to increase marketshare beyond the Halo effect on home users.
The biggest advantage Apple has is also its weakness that is Steve Jobs. Jobs ability to create products that attract the typical user as been amazing since he returned and introduced the iMac and then on to Apple gadgets. OS X ease of use and stabilty is unequalled another carrot to draw in users. But Jobs doesn't like to discount prices in fact a fanatic about price control. If he keeps that up expanding business sales won't improve. For home users Jobs price controls have created a used Mac market to they can afford to come aboard and learn to love Apple.
I would say Apple has the products to take huge bites out of MS marketshare, if Jobs allow pricing deals to be made.
Care to back that up with some facts?
Unless you hit one of Dell's schizo once in a blue moon sales, you're simply lying. Comparable laptops between Apple and Dell are almost invariably cheaper on the Apple side, and generally by a large margin.
i'm sure if other_operating_systems[] get to more than 10% we'll see microsoft working on those incompatibilities (by which i mean, microsoft will try to exacerbate the situation).
I'm a professional Windows software developer who has been there since Windows 3.0. Windows and Windows APIs are my bread and butter. And you sir, are living in a complete fantasy land.
.. looking only at the UI, it's pretty similar, except with more nice visual effects.
.NET, which is somewhat independent of what version of Windows you are using (and well-documented where it's not). If that's not an option you can still leverage new stuff in Vista by simply coding fallbacks, or disabling certain features that are not available in XP.
I am also a professional Windows software developer who has been at it for over a decade (though I can't remember the specific version) and I put it to you, sir, that you are the one living in a fantasy. You are correct on some points, because the poster you are replying to also made some stupid claims. So I'll just reply to what you got wrong, and that other replies haven't already mentioned...
Our company still, after dedicating all that effort, will not support running our product on Vista.
Then you are incompetent. I have not encountered any significant difficulties porting code from XP to Vista. In fact, we have encountered several problems that only occur on XP, becuase it has strange limitations that have been raised or remove in Vista. Overall, Vista is the superior development platform.
The fact that Vista has revised how its internal subsystems interconnect has had zero impact on the user experience,
This sounds strange coming from a developer, since you should know that even small changes beneath the surface of a program can dramatically alter the user experience. Not saying Vista really offers a dramatically changed experience from XP
and your assertation that Vista is faster than XP flies in the face of reality.
It is notably faster on my 1+ year old laptop, which shipped with XP but was upgraded to Vista shortly after (so I got to test both OSes). In particular, the Vista UI seems much quicker to respond. On my five year old PC at home, Vista is significantly slower than XP, but it seems logical that they would optimize the OS for new hardware, seeing as it is expected to be around for at least five years. In other words: If Vista runs slowly on your computer and the drivers are all OK, your computer is under-spec'd for Vista, and you should be running something older.
No developer in their right mind is going to code to an API that is not backwards compatible to XP.
The easy way around this is, of course, to use
On the other hand Vista has technologies that OS X, Linux, etc don't have yet and won't have for several years.
Name one.
Easy: ReadyBoost. To add, a proper file system (NTFS). A well-documented, built-in, backwards-compatible, object-oriented API (.NET). Good hardware support (not really a "technology" so much as a side effect of being the only desktop OS with double-digit market share). Compatibility with practically every piece of popular software on the market, because they're all written for Windows.
The poster you are replying to also mentioned that many features of OSX/Linux can be implemented in Vista via third-party applications. Of course, this goes both ways. So simply comparing features between OSes is kind of silly.
Under Aero, you cannot have a single application running within 10% of the efficiency it would have run had it been on XP. That's the problem. It's a huge step down in efficiency.
Please Google before you make untruthful statements like this. The performance impact of Aero is zero; this has been benchmarked and verified by independent parties. Aero improves subjective performance because the GPU handles graphics operations faster than the CPU, which has to do all the work if Aero is disabled.
It is more stable than XP, OS X, and Linux...
No. No, it's not. Arguing that is rid
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.