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How Sony, Intel, and Unix Made Apple's Mac a PC Competitor
smaxp writes In 2007, Sony's supply chain lessons, the network effect from the shift to Intel architecture, and a better OS X for developers combined to renew the Mac's growth. The network effects of the Microsoft Wintel ecosystem that Rappaport explained 20 years ago in the Harvard Business Review are no longer a big advantage. By turning itself into a premium PC company with a proprietary OS, Apple has taken the best of PC ecosystem, but avoided taking on the disadvantages.
Slow news day?
Sorry, cannot understand summary.
Heavy on words and opinion, light on proof. Mostly just the authors "thoughts" on how Apple's PC growth came to be what it is today...
No idea why this has a Sony image with the post, the article is in large part about Apple and doesn't provide any proof of what exactly Apple consumed in Sony's supply chain.
1 out of 5. Would not read again.
Seriously, Apple sold 5.5 million intel-pc's.... It's nothing on total pc sales. They took a great OS (freebsd) closed it down, put huge payed-garden-walls around it and made it idiot-proof and dumb enough for a 2 button mouse.... Of course there will be a couple million idiots buying it... Even including the apple-tax, for their customers, it's either paying up or learning to handle 3 mouse buttons. I don't think we can expect the intellectual effort of understanding 3 buttons, let alone a terminal, from someone who is paying for this. And that is just fine. It's good to see that the 'special' people also can use a 'computer'. But please... Don't go pretending that apple created something really good or unique with this rebranding of intel cpu's and freebsd.
PPC. Always a day late and a dollar too much. Apple wasn't a big enough customer to justify to IBM to spend more on making foundries and there were always supply problems.
By using the same intel chips as the competition, Apple shed one of it's biggest boat anchors around it's neck. The people who really care about which chips are in it are gamers and they stay with intel/MS since it's what they can play the most games on.
Other than that, the people don't pay attention unless it's a hindrance. Which PPC was but Apple thought it was being different back in the 90s for whatever reason. To the point that there were RISC vs CISC arguments in the 90s directed at end consumers, the last people in the world who should actually give a damn about it.
Apple woke up not too coincidentally when PPC had no viable path for mobile and it's probably one of the best moves Jobs ever made, and in hindsight, most common sense. Surprisingly it took him nearly a decade to shed that inherited weight.
If you've swallowed the Kool-Aid, you're dead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown
I kept looking for a "next page" link. That article didn't go into any depth whatsoever.
Right... Then you should be happy that you can still sell your Mac for some $$ which will cover your next windows laptop.
While the premise of TFA is incorrect, Apple certainly has created a quality product - at least as good as upper end offerings from most mainstream manufacturers. Yes, it has a marketing cachet that, to most of us, is kind of annoying, but that is the real world.
You don't need 'a great deal of money' to get into OS X either as user or developer (remember, the development system is free). No, you cannot scrape the components for a Wintel supercomputer out of a dumpster but there apparently is a large enough population with enough money to actually pay for things they use.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I say this not as a consumer, but a certified Apple technician.
There's no premium in Apple products anymore. Only Ive's obsession with "thin" devices, sacrificing tons of functionality and potential resources at every turn. Case in point, the original iMac G5 machines were wonderfully designed (yes, I'm aware of all the problems they had with the G5 and capacitors) internally. Totally modular, with a great deal being user serviceable. Today's iMac is sealed with foam around the LCD, the same foam you need to cut out and replace every time you open the machine. Likewise, the LCD is now fused to the front glass where before it used to sit just behind it, with the glass being attached to magnets so it was removable with a pair of Apple approved suction cups.
All the laptops are basically disposable now. Soldered in RAM, soldered CPU, soldered GPU, no optical drives, proprietary SSDs. We replace Retina logic boards on a weekly basis now due to failed RAM. A keyboard replacement requires swapping out the entire lower half of the chassis, and a web cam failure means replacing the entire LCD screen.
Apple products are overpriced disposable garbage. The only thing "premium" about them is their insistence on using milled aluminum for their chassis, but even that comes at a huge price- most of the systems aren't very structurally sound, which we've already seen with the iPhone 6 and 6+. They don't even have the "premium" software anymore- I can't tell you how many customers come in here complaining about perpetual updates that change everything (iOS 7), and more recently we've had a ton of complaints and downgrade requests from 10.10 because it's hard to look at.
IMHO; unless Apple smartens the fuck up in the next ~2 years, people are going to start losing interest in their products. This form-over-function thing has gone way too far on the hardware and their recent war on good user interfaces has turned their "premium" experience into a muddled bland mess of white space and blurry fonts.
How is it crippled? OS X runs all the same development tools that any Linux does.
bla bla bla payed-garden-walls ...plumbing new levels of stupid
bla bla bla apple-tax
bla bla bla rebranding of intel cpu's
bla bla bla I don't even know what i'm talking about.
no webserver in your init process? thats a clear disadvantage, macs are shit.
You have to spend a great deal of money and have already swallowed all the Kool-Aid.
You've been able to buy an entry-level Mac Mini for $499 since 2005. That's only $100 more than Dell's lowest cost Inspiron.
You don't need 'a great deal of money' to get into OS X either as user or developer
How dare you bring silly things like facts into Apple bashing. Pay no attention to the fact that Apple has sold an entry-level Mac Mini for $499 for the last 9 years. Even Dell's lowest-end desktops only sell for $100 less.
So a 20% premium over a PC at the low end, with the gap widening as you move up the performance curve.
That's a pretty big premium for what seems like an intangible benefit.
So a 20% premium over a PC at the low end
Amusing goalpost shifting. The claim was that there was a "high barrier to entry" which is plainly false as their entry-level Mac Mini is not much more than the very lowest-end i3 desktops from other companies. Also, the Mac Mini does have an i5 vs i3 which gives you a faster CPU and GPU. So you do get something for the "premium" of a whopping $100.
That's a pretty big premium for what seems like an intangible benefit.
Maybe so, but irrelevant to what I was being responded to. $499 is not a high barrier to entry. Unless one is going to claim that Dell's prices are a high barrier to entry when 31 of their 35 current desktops cost $499 or more as well.
Actually, the premium gets narrower as you go up the performance curve.
For example, the retina iMac is $2499, $500 cheaper than Dell's screen (i.e. without the computer in it) of the same size and resolution.
The MacPro is somewhat tricky to compare, as there's very little competing directly with it, but it goes for a very similar price to other Xeon workstations, in fact, in most cases, slightly cheaper than Dell/HP's offerings.
Apple has taken the best of PC ecosystem, but avoided taking on the disadvantages.
* So Apple let me use of the shelves hardware?
Even if you had a x86 Mac Pro before it required special graphics cards. The new Mac Pro is completely different so .. No.
* Is it software compatible?
No.
* Can I build my own one?
Kinda.. But that's not Apples idea. .. and that's kinda the benefits of the PC? No? Good and steady progress because it's what everyone use? Ok, score on that one. But Apple doesn't improve on it.
* Disadvantages of the PC which Apple solve.
Uhm.. What?
$500 is a lot of money just to try some other OS out.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Pay no attention to the fact that Apple has sold an entry-level Mac Mini for $499 for the last 9 years.
They have sold the entry-level Mac Mini for $499 for 1 week. Before that, it was $599.
you can return it no questions asked. thats pretty easy. or just go to one of the billion apple stotes out thee.
I just don't think you're right. I remember as developer about 10 years ago we were given $5000 every two years to buy whatever computer system we wanted. Nearly everyone bought Dell laptops - they had the best power/$ ratio, and when you have a company of 20 developers, 10 of whom are making that decision each year, it is pretty apparent what best laptop to buy was. I've left, but maintained touch with them. When I walk in to their offices now, it is 15" macbook pros that I see everywhere. I just find it unlikely that these guys, who now have 15+ years experience in the industry, have swallowed the Kool-Aid.
Funny how I have never seen anyone hate Apple computers who could afford one.
Pay no attention to the fact that Apple has sold an entry-level Mac Mini for $499 for the last 9 years.
They have sold the entry-level Mac Mini for $499 for 1 week. Before that, it was $599.
It used to be $499, then went up to $599 for a few years, now back to $499. Which is all beside the original point: there is not a high barrier to entry for the Mac. And it has a lot of additional value to a lot of people: simple for the beginner, and an entire open-source UNIX for the advanced user, combined with high-quality parts and great service, a big ecosystem of software and services, and almost no viruses or threats to worry about, and a lot of folks (me included) think life is too short to deal with Windows at home.
E pluribus unum
Hell, the magsafe connector is worth that. One Labrador Retriever puppy and one Dell XPS power connector = one damaged motherboard - even though the Dell connector is pretty robust as these things go.
Nothing intangible about that. Sometimes you get what you pay for.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
High quality parts? Quit swimming in the Kool-Aid.
They use generic PC parts the same as the rest of the industry. Sometimes the same exact quirks exist between Apple's and Dells. They are impacted by the same bad engineering choices.
Except there are more options with PCs. You can avoid an inherently problematic form factor with Dell. There's something else to choose.
Been there. Done that. Not impressed at all.
You're just repeating the same nonsense as the original article which was marketing masquerading as journalism to begin with.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Bah. The magsafe connector is a gimmick. The advantage of the magsafe connector was supposed to be that it would release easily from the laptop in the event of a snag. This does work most of the time. Not always, but most of the time.
What is falsely implied is that other laptop connectors don't come out under such conditions. In my experience, this is not true - I've had two other laptops where the connector slipped out easily under a relatively small amount of force.
On the other hand, the magsafe connector is more complex and I've already had to replace it because the connector split apart, which I've never had happen on any other laptop I've owned.
That being said, Apple does, in general, make solid laptops. What I appreciate is that I can carry my laptop around open and not have to worry about the display flapping around.
The hardware integrates well with the software and OS - I've yet to come across a Windows laptop where the hardware vendor took the same care for the details.
I don't understand the summary, and so I am scared to read the linked articles.
Can someone please translate the summary so I can make an informed decision whether to read the articles or not.
Since OSX 10.4 or so, it has been relatively easy to install OSX on any PC. So if one is curious and wants to try the ecosystem, one can do it at a very low cost, that of one already existing, partitioned PC, or a virtual machine. This does require some technical skills, for sure. In recent years it has become easier, not harder, to do so.
This usually is a fairly smart move on Apple's part. This test will usually convince people who try it that they can trust Apple to be their provider for their next laptop purchase. In this department, their approach truly shines.
Not a perfect article on Apple or Intel or Microsoft.
But a filament points to Apple/Aligent/IBM for PowerPC away from Motorola 65K and then to an "Intelish" Intel chip for mid-2003 Macs and beyond.
Strange that. Apple is back again design their own chip architectures and A8X is everything proprietary. Hence Apple today is back-to-the-past with PowerPC and they have to rent a Chip factory to build them for them.
So yes! A8X looses "Home Field Advantage."
Problem!
Apple will not get the previous tax evasions benefits running forward in Ireland, Scotland and elsewhere!
"Bad Bad Amico" as the Iranian "students" chanted outside the USA Embassy in Tehran one eventful day long long ago.
Nearly all of the development tools of Linux are available on OSX via ports, brew or simply compiling oneself. Even fairly advanced stuff like valgrind. There is no shortage of cross platform GUI toolkit like Qt.
In what way is OSX crippled as a dev box ?
1. "In 1991, Andrew Rapport declared Microsoft the winner in the PC contest because Microsoft and Intel had harnessed the Asian supply chain and dramatically undercut the cost of the eccentric Steve Jobs’s Apple Mac." No, by 1991, it was John Scully's Mac, as Jobs was ousted in 1985.
2. "When Apple’s first notebook, the Macintosh 100, wasn’t embraced by consumers because it was two big, too heavy, and too expensive" No, that would have been the original Mac Portable (1989), which was all of those things. The Powerbook (not Macintosh) 100 was actually a very light ultra-portable.
Since author Steven Max Patterson and his editors couldn't be bothered to perform basic fact-checking, I stopped reading at that point...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Or, you can install the free (for noncommercial use) VMware Player, and in about an hour of googling and not-too-difficult hacking, plus the time to legally download the installation media, you can try out OSX on your existing Windows or Linux machine.
It won't let you know what a low-end Mac Mini feels like as a daily driver, and it's not what I'd recommend for an HTPC, but if you wanted to try cobbling together a small app to see what it's like to develop on OSX compared to Windows or Linux, it's about as low a barrier to entry there is.
There's no Macintosh 100.
There were two Mac Portables before the MacBook 100/140/170 came out.
Indeed both were enormous, each even had a lead-acid battery! The first one didn't even have a backlight.
The Sony-designed MacBook 100 was actually designed to just be a smaller version of the original Macintosh Portables, which is why it also was based upon the much slower 68000 processor (the 140/170 used 68030 processors).
The Powerbook 100 was well designed and small, but it wasn't really a big seller. The PowerBook 140 and PowerBook 170 took most of the sales. The later Powerbooks (145b, 160, 180, etc.) were all nearly identical to the 140/170 and not Sony's 100. This seemed to show that Apple didn't really take all that much from Sony's PowerBook 100.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
This is like complaining my Audi costs more to fix than a Camry. What is this nonsense about their laptops being disposable? First of all most laptops have a soldered in CPU/GPU, at the most you can pick between 3 CPU's that are compatible. No laptop is built to be extensively user upgraded, like swapping the CPU. They are all a pain to open, and no where near as organized on the inside as an Apple. Unlike other laptops the Air does has fixed ram, but that is only cause the whole point of the machine is to be as small as possible, same with the SSD. If you wanna upgrade, or need extreme performance, you would buy a Pro which is as upgradeable as any other laptop. Second Apple computers are at the top of every comparison chart. Indeed they are the only computers that stand out. This isn't a budget PC you buy and two years later its worth scrap. Apple computers hold their value better than any other brand. Face it, even if you don't think so, they make a better computer. I feel you're missing the whole point of their products. This is just more Apple hate from someone who can't afford one.
A brief history of the final days of PPC at Apple:
PPC. Always a day late and a dollar too much. Apple wasn't a big enough customer to justify to IBM to spend more on making foundries and there were always supply problems.
IBM was not concerned with power management at the time, and wanted to build bigger and bigger server class hardware. This was before people actually realized one of the huge costs in building an actual large data center was going to be a major cost compared to hardware and flooring (i.e. the 19 inch racks needed to hold the large iron). It wasn't until Enron emerged from bankruptcy in 2004 and started selling off pieces of itself, culminating with the sale of its last real non-debt instrument asset, Prisma, to Ashmore Energy, that the PG&E contract rate handwriting was on the wall, that energy prices were going to be high in California - where most of the data centers live - for the next 10 years to pay for the long term contracts for natural gas, from Texas, for the power generation plants.
By then, it was far too late for IBM to correct its miscalculation and start producing reasonably power efficient chips in time for Apple.
Apple woke up not too coincidentally when PPC had no viable path for mobile and it's probably one of the best moves Jobs ever made, and in hindsight, most common sense. Surprisingly it took him nearly a decade to shed that inherited weight.
I disagree. Apple had already been in talks with P.A. Semi over the PA6T processor to have a G5 class processor without massive liquid cooling requirements for use in mobile.
The G5 processors from IBM were already looking at massive cooling overhead so that they could survive being overclocked to desktop speeds, and P.A. Semi had the answer Apple needed, but the T.I. foundries were unable to accommodate the necessary feature size shrink to get them to where they needed to be in time.
It was either lose a product cycle (or two), while a willing foundry was being searched out and contracted - which likely meant IBM, at a premium cost, or Intel, which does foundries correctly - or jump ship to Intel. This was at a time Steve was in the middle of his Pancreatic cancer, and it looked like he wouldn't be able to push through to a legacy that would survive his death, without a radical change.
It's a testament to the belief of Apple in the P.A. Semi team that they still bought the company, even though the commitment to an Intel switch, meant that the PA6T and the PWRficient were effectively ruled out. At the time, there were massive problems in the memory bandwidth of ARM processors, and the iPhone was being worked on. So they set the P.A. Semi team, as an "acquihire" rather than a "bring the PPC design in house" play to solving that problem. The Apple CPU still beats the Tegra 4, which is the next closest CPU in memory bandwidth, by about a factor of 4 (8, if you count the 64 bit parts).
So it was a chain of events, and Steve's impending mortality, more than anything else, that killed the PPC at Apple, not that there wasn't a path forward into the mobile marketplace (and Apple had in fact built G4-based iPad prototypes, among other things), and not that Intel was a better path forward onto the supply chain. For Intel, it offered a technology demonstrator opportunity that they needed, because no one was pushing their top end tech until one release cycle behind, and for Steve it was a way to ensure his legacy, while getting back at both IBM and Motorola (it's no mistake that the Intel announcement happened so soon after FreeScale divested themselves of the Intel version of their CodeWarrior product), which he took.
Obviously, my view on some of the details is skewed by where I was in the company at the time; I'm certain other people saw other parts of the elephant, so to speak, but that's roughly how I remember the hallway discussion.
One of the great tragedies, I think, is that there was no Official Apple Historian, with Steve's confidence with regard to secrecy of projects, to document the history of Apple so that we could look at it in clear hindsight.
The motherboard in laptops are not like motherboard in desktops. You can't just pop any CPU in there. For one the heat sink is designed for the TDP of the original CPU. Then if you do change to one with a higher operating frequency it's still gonna be the same architecture so now you've greatly reduced your battery life. Now say you do go through all the hassle of upgrading the CPU, probably also gonna do the RAM and SSD. The laptop is what a couple years old, now you've got a newer laptop inside the shell of an old one with all that comes with that; old battery tech, missing newer ports, old screen res...
Want to know a big reason people have been getting Macs, that Apple doesn't like to admit? You can run Windows on them now. The Intel switch made it viable to run Windows on them, natively if you wanted, and good virtualization tech means it runs fast in OS-X. That lets people get their shiny status symbol, but still use the programs they need.
We've seen that at work (an Engineering college). Prior to the Intel conversion, there were almost no Mac users. The thing is engineering software just isn't written for the Mac. There is actually some stuff now, but even so the vast majority is Windows or Linux. Back in the PPC days, there was almost nothing. So we had only really two stubborn faculty that used Macs, one because he did no research and just played around, and one because he wrote his own code and was stubborn. However that was it, you just couldn't do your work on them.
Now? All kinds of faculty and students have Macs. PCs are still dominant, but we see a lot more Macs. However every one has Windows on it. Some it is all they have. Seriously, we have two guys who buy Macs, but have us install Windows on it, they don't use MacOS they just want the shiny toy. A number have bootcamp, and many have VMWare. Regardless, I've yet to see one, faculty, staff, or student, that didn't put Windows on it to be able to do the work they need to.
So that is no small part of how Intel helped Apple gain market share.
They use generic PC parts the same as the rest of the industry.
A bit like how here, you're parroting the usual /r/PCMasterRace garbage. There is vastly more to a PC than the jiggahertz and moggaflips. Typical inability to see the forest for the trees.
Like bullheads to a doughball on a treblehook you come...
Reinforcing your point, I find my MBP to be an excellent dev box, with all the bells, whistles and software vendor support I could want. Bonus points for being lightweight and high performance with a great battery life, especially compared to the regular (HP, Toshiba, LG) "high performance" employer-issue dev laptops which seem to be either slow or not very portable.
OK, let me try...
I can't speak for Macintosh, since I haven't used one in ages, but I've got a fairly new iPad. Let me tell you about it. First of all, it's got a million processes running on it at all times that hog about 95% of the RAM, and that you can't turn off. That makes apps like the web browser and Google Earth terribly crashy, and when they crash they don't say "hey, that app crashed," they just disappear. Google can suck a dick too, because I use Chrome for the browser, and basically all the sites I care about have some issue. Slashdot, for example, hangs for about three minutes when it first loads, and manages to block anything from happening on the device during that time, and god forbid you should lose network connectivity in that three minutes because then you need to reboot it. Google News has this weird jittery thing it does when you try to scroll it, so it just flashes between the bottom and top of the page. (Google Fucking News doesn't render right on Google Chrome on an iPad. WTF?) There's a photoshop forum I go to every once in a while that has animated gif competitions, but more than about five on one page kills the iPad. Both Chrome and Safari gleefully allow banner ads to auto-forward you straight to the 'are you sure you want to buy this?' dialog on the app store. The sound sometimes stops working and the device needs a reboot. The Wi-Fi does the same. Basically what I'm saying is anyone who claims Apple Computer farts rainbows is severely, psychotically delusional. Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.
That is a fact too. Linux also works much better as a *NIX development environment and you can run it on pretty much any hardware you already have.
Also, just as a hardware point of comparison, a Mac Mini is almost 200% more expensive than a compatible Intel NUC and about infinite times less upgradable.
Your argument is akin to "Linux is shit because TextMate doesn't run on it".
"This project, specifically designed to not target that platform doesn't work well on that platform"
Well, no shit. Go and find a dev tool designed for that platform. The fact that it's possible to run Kate is actually to OS X's credit. Which Linux distro can run TextMate and/or Smultron?
$500 is a lot of money just to try some other OS out.
People don't try OSes out. People buy a computer and the OS is incidental. The end result is you either use the OS you have or install another one. Nothing is forcing you to use OSX once you buy a Mac.
OS-X is a hammer without a handle. It technically still is Unix, just like a hammer-head technically is a hammer. It is just badly crippled and requires inordinate amounts of research, trial and error, or experience to use as a proper Unix box.
So it doesn't act like your favorite pet Linux distro out of the box and you consider it crippled? It's no more crippled than Solaris or Tru64 was out of the box. No, compilers and X11 are not part of the default install. Neither is a package manager 90% of Mac users will never touch. And no, it doesn't come with your favorite package manager out of the box. There's a couple to choose from, both MacPorts and Fink work pretty well.
Personally, I found dealing with OSX much easier from a UNIX standpoint than Solaris. There's differences for certain, but if you're too lazy to learn anything new, go back to installing Ubuntu and living without commercial desktop software.
And if you're wanting to use KATE, why the hell are you using a Mac anyway? There's much better native options that don't require that antiquated stale windowing system.
"It don't werkz lik3 uBuntu or Windows so OSX is teH SuXorz" Chances are you aren't a seasoned Linux admin either, you just got tired of your latest activator for your pirated copy of Windows failing and thought running Linux would make you an er33t H@x0R D00d.
BTW, both FINK *AND* Macports both deal with dependencies. You are trolling. If you don't REALLY know what you're talking about, STFU.
Did you say i3 from 'other companies'?
What are you doing on slashdot if you buy your computers at Kmart?
The cost of building my own i3 is ridiculously low these days. The cost of building my own Mac... well you know where I'm going with that.
I can't imagine a more vapid and informationless article with no context of history.
That bar graph of a spike starting in 2007 would more likely be related to the release of the iPhone.
Developing for the iPhone required a Mac. That was Apple's "killer app" for the Mac. Anyone wanting to get in to iPhone development had to have a Mac and it started mainstreaming the Mac.
Without the development of the iPhone it is hard to see an particular strong reason for Mac marketshare to start growing (sure you have the characteristic that it is very hard to get malware on a Mac, but that alone doesn't make up for the lack of apps or games, which was more far severe back in 2007 and not quite as bad today. The selection of software on a Mac is okish today, but in 2007 it was downright terrible.)
Pre-Intel (2007 +/-), the Mac did have Bootcamp (the ability to load and boot Windows on the machine) and software development was about the same before Intel and after, it isn't like casual developers are writing in assembly language --- the compiler (usually) takes care of all the fine details and endianess really only enters the equation when reading files with specific byte ordering of values.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
If you want to tinker with the hardware... well Apple hasn't produced a "tinker-ready" mac since the last Mac Pro tower.
True, but since 10.4 you've been able to build a hackintosh with slots quite cheap. So the people whining about Macs costing to much while posting from their pirated copy of Windows could just as easily have a Mac clone if they learned how to read.
Nobody, zero people out there... runs Linux as a desktop.
Not quite true but close. I ran FreeBSD on my primary desktop for years until OSX 10.6 was released. Was actually quite capable and did what I needed it to do. Eventually I got more heavily into audio recording and Ardour doesn't compare to Logic. I also got sick of jumping through severe hoops to exchange data with people running PhotoShop or InDesign. OSX gives me the wonderful FreeBSD userland with a GUI layer that doesn't suck. Win-Win
For awhile they were the only one who had a decent screen resolution. I almost went back to CRTs before I learned how to build a Frankenpad (mixing Thinkpad parts with a 3rd party LCD for a high-res laptop for under $480). Programming is one of the tasks where you really want a high resolution screen.
If you don't like it, run Windows or Linux on the damn thing. It's a *PC*.
Or if you just want to try OSX out and learn more about its internals, build a hackintosh or play with a virtualized install of OSX w/ VirtualBox or VMWare.
That's also a fact.
Bah. The magsafe connector is a gimmick. The advantage of the magsafe connector was supposed to be that it would release easily from the laptop in the event of a snag. This does work most of the time. Not always, but most of the time.
What is falsely implied is that other laptop connectors don't come out under such conditions. In my experience, this is not true - I've had two other laptops where the connector slipped out easily under a relatively small amount of force.
The magsafe connector has saved my laptop a trip to the floor on several occasions when a kid or dog tripped on it. Generally you won't have USB cables strung across the floor.
I've repaired MANY HP, Dell, and Toshiba laptops with broken power connectors. Not a gimmick, this is/was a serious problem. Even now that I don't turn screws for a living, most of the laptop repairs I do involve soldering in a new power jack. The others are typically LCD panel replacements which are a 5-minute job.
Homebrew is. the handle, minutes to install.
nuff said
That STARTING AT $499 is a laughing fucking joke at 1.43 GHz when the Pentium N3540 quad core is pretty much the same thing at $125 cheaper in an HP laptop at HALF the power draw and 2.1GHz, and the HP laptop comes with an optical drive, remote control, a quick-launch OS for easy access to media and such without needing to boot Windows, and a bunch of other shit the Mac Mini won't come with, including A SCREEN and a webcam - STARTING AT $329.
Give. Me. A. Fucking. Break.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Between Homebrew and Virtualbox I got it covered. When I need Linux tools, I run Linux. When I need Windows tools, I run Windows. Most of the time the native Mac apps are good.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
and $170 more than HP's cheapest laptop which still competes on features, hardware, and usability versus the Mac Mini.
You're just an uninformed Apple Shill. Ever since Apple went Intel, I've ALWAYS been able to find the same or better hardware combinations CHEAPER from other manufacturers. And I used to be an Apple repair tech at Flextronics while Apple was still using G3 and G4 processors in their iBook series laptops.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Macs are a mythical product that most people are unfamiliar with because the whole platform has a high barrier to entry.
I got a brand new Black MacBook (2006) for $1,300 USD that gave me eight years of useful life before the CPU fan died this summer. Since it has a 32-bit CPU and most software coming out in 64-bit only, I didn't bother to get it repaired. After owning Toshiba and Dell laptops, this is the best laptop I ever owned.
For the price of the new Mac mini with AppleCare and sales tax (~$650), I'm going to pimp out a used White MacBook (2010) with a 120GB SSD (from the Black MacBook), 250GB hard drive and 16GB RAM to run Yosemite OS X. Except for the extra memory, this is a similar set up to my Black MacBook with an external Firewire drive. That should keep me going for another four years or longer.
There used to be a $499 model back when they still had built-in DVD drives. Much to the haters' amusement.
"We don't know how to make a $500 computer that's not a piece of junk" -Steve Jobs
Huh... a high end Windows Laptop will set you back the same or more than an equivalent Mac laptop.
I looked around for better part of a year for a good Windows laptop to replace my ageing Acer Timeline. Finally just bought a MacBook Pro and installed Windows 8.1 on it.
IMHO Apple makes some of the best Windows laptops in the world.
My cat has learned to pull the magsafe connector off and play with it. :-)
And even if you (like me) simply run Windows on it, being able to buy it at the local Apple store or be able to get it fixed at the local Apple store, by a company I trust to fix things is a win.
None of the other suppliers of Windows laptops have a local store where I can do that.
Does the Bay Trail GPU in Pentium N3540 perform anything like the Haswell GPU in the new Mac mini? Does that Pentium offer hyperthreading? Does it take more than 8GB of RAM? Does that HP laptop have anything close to the I/O throughput of the 2 x Thunderbolt 2 ports and 4 x USB 3.0 on the Mac mini?
No?
Then it isn't much of a comparison, is it?
Is touch. All are chasing touch like crazy. To the detriment of people using traditional desktops on machines without touch screens. I understand why -- most of the world when they use a computer will use a cheap phone or tablet, and there touch makes perfect sense.
But for people who use computers to create and analyze -- accountants, lawyers, writers, architects, engineers, statisticians, artists, etc. -- the traditional desktop without touch and with all the things we expect out of Mac OSX or Windows 7, or Gnome 2, just works.
And that is going away as Apple, and Microsoft, and Ubuntu all chase phones and touch and tablets. The Mac OSX desktop is not what it was. I'm sure it is nicely convergent with Ipads and Iphones, but I don't use either and I want my computer to get out of my way as I do work. I don't need touch, I don't need lots of fancy graphics, or tiles, or launching my applications by searching for them. I like the good old Windows/Gnome 2 hierarchical menu, a dockbar for frequently used items (thanks Mac OSX designers!) and the Applications folder or something similar for everything else [I really prefer the Windows/Gnome 2 /XFCE way of listing programs].
Stuff like the Whisker Menu on the latest XFCE is fine, I don't mind that. But the desktop should be a place to manage files, launch and manage programs, connect to networks, and manage disks and media. That's about it.
As a long-time Mac User, I just don't see the value in investing in an ecosystem going down the touch interface for the masses interested in cheap phones or tablets. The same goes for Windows, and yes Ubuntu too. Unity?
That is why my strategy is to buy cheap Windows laptops, replace them as need be, and look at other distros now: Arch, Mint, possibly even PC-BSD if System D takes over. But Mac Laptops? Really? I can get more work done on a cheap Toshiba, themed to look like a Mac, at a fraction of the price. Libreoffice, Gnucash, etc. are "good enough" to work, and R and Ruby (for Monte Carlo simulation) are the same essentially on every platform.
I say this as someone who owned: a Mac SE (I really loved that machine), Mac IIci (I also loved that machine), Quadra 650, Powerbook Duo 250, Powerbook G4 Titanium, Powermac G4, iBook G3, and Macbook Pro 17. For the time, I loved the Mac SE, Mac IIci, and the Powerbook G4, Powermac G4, and Macbook Pro 17 the most. Some of the others were just ... there.
I just don't see the passion from Apple anymore to create computers that are worth paying extra for. And I can get nearly the same by using open source software tuned to my needs. I have an Aqua themed desktop that Apple just won't provide anymore that lets me work the way I like.
Bottom line I can get the best of Apple look and feel at a fraction of the price.
Macs are a mythical product that most people are unfamiliar with because the whole platform has a high barrier to entry.
Yeah, you,re right.
You have to get your Mommy to come up with a whole $500 bucks to be allowed to enter the rarified air of the land of Macs.
That amount of money would have brought some pretty beastly desktop PCs. Any reason they all chose laptops instead of a PC with a large hi res CRT?
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
And have the RAM soldered to the board? No thanks, I don't like getting buttfucked so some corp can charge Compaq RAM profit margins for commodity parts.
I'd much rather buy a quad with SSD for $210 or an octocore with HDD for $290 and use the money I save to buy a more powerful GPU and as much RAM as I'd like without getting bent over to increase Apple's quarterly earnings report.
If you like Apple because you like the design or having a girly UI bolted onto BSD? That's cool, enjoy your purchase. But don't try to sell us that horseshit that Apple is a "good deal" because its not, never was, and never will be. Its a boutique brand with insane profit margins on the exact same parts you can get from anywhere...let me repeat that, they use THE EXACT SAME PARTS you can buy anywhere, its the same bog standard Foxxconn made boards, same Intel CPUs, same old same. If you want to pay a hipster tax to apple? Its your money, spend it how you wish, but don't try to sell us bullshit, we ain't buying crazy today.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Woah there buddy. Check the specs first on that white 2010 MacBook: my understanding is that the memory tops out at 4gb. Source: guy who just "pimped out" a late 2009 White MacBook with more memory and an SSD for OS X Yosemite just last week.
Nearly all of the development tools of Linux are available on OSX via ports, brew or simply compiling oneself. Even fairly advanced stuff like valgrind. There is no shortage of cross platform GUI toolkit like Qt.
In what way is OSX crippled as a dev box ?
Well, obviously the lack of systemd.
A "girly" UI? What, are you eight and stuck in a playground where that's actually a cutting insult? Grow up.
And if you're wanting to use KATE, why the hell are you using a Mac anyway? There's much better native options that don't require that antiquated stale windowing system.
Such as?
X11 is neither antiquated or stale. Sure, it has a long history having started in 1987. However MacOS also has a long history, starting in 1976 with BSD (from which it's derived) and 1982 for ObjectiveC.
If mere age of the original relases is a problem, then OSX is far more stale and antiquated than X11.
Clearly that's a silly argument, but you're obviously a mindless Fanboi/window system bigot.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The summary is just tech buzzwords organised into a sentence that means less than nothing.TFA is just crap... describing FreeBSD as UNIX. Can't help but think the first six, or last six paragraphs of TFA are missing? WTF /. ?
[FUCK BETA]
If memory serves me well, the appeal of OS X to unix pros became a selling point quite late in the Apple revival and shift to Intel CPUs. Back then, Windows XP was clearly too old, ugly, clunky and misused to be part of *any* high end PC offering. In my opinion, the OEM attempts to improve the Windows XP experience by way of pre-installed utilities were even worse.
The elegant UI and experience that OS X offered was way ahead of what Windows XP and most contemporary Linux distros could offer and that's what helped today's perception of MacBooks and iMacs are fine for their price, unlike many Lenovo, HP, etc that only sell at £300-£500 and therefore cannot have high end parts.
Now there's a lot of web-developer type of professionals who use OS X, helping sustain the perception that modern, trendy, successful, etc, etc professionals go with Apple, while the bad guys on 24 use matte black Lenovos :)
You can see obviously that the trends that smartphones created, especially iPhone, are stirring the evolution of the PC (and yes mac IS included as a Personal Computer). If Apple manages to keep up with the iPhone sales, they can offer a great sandbox solution to the market, e.g. get those files on all your devices by default, no configuration, everything works out of the box, get discount on those purchases from our company e.t.c. they can force their customers to buy iMacs, Macbooks and so forth. I believe it is not the transition from PPC to x86 that boosted the iMac and macbook sales, although intel had a greater chip in the mobile market, but the fact that the Apple trend rose the same period when they released the iPhone. As a developer, products like the ones from Apple do not cover my needs, I like to tweak around my devices, add features(mPCI-e cards, extra drivers or batteries, or 2nd VGA , I know it sounds crazy but the Ideapad series offer that) and I use exclusively Debian, so there is no reason to get a system that it's h/w locked and it's software is designed for FB and twitter users.
People don't seem to realize that Mac's never made anymore then a niche in the PC market until they could run Windows. If you don't think this was a big deal.
Then why did Apple make Boot Camp in the first place? Intel was simply a means of allowing Windows on a Mac which erased the barrier for people who wanted a elitists computer design but needed Windows. Yes, Apple still has those OS X users for sure. But the majority of the Mac's success lately has been Windows capability.
What did the Apple pay for this "story"? This site is really taking a spiral to the bottom.
If he drank Kool-Aid at Jonestown he wouldn't be dead, because they used Flavor-Aid.
But... but... but... you can't get Macs for $100 at the place that sells used off-lease Dells!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Apple's success is driven by your ignorance? How do you do that?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
X11 is neither antiquated or stale
Which is why the Linux world is so eagerly jumping on the wayland/Mir bandwagon, right?
Such as?
Textmate would be one fine example that I use, you also have Sublime (granted, it's multiplatform) and Coda if web development is your cup of tea.
And then you can have pretty much ANY of the Linux text editors if you wish, as GP said.
Does your cat run OSX?
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I find my MBP to be an excellent dev box, with all the bells, whistles and software vendor support I could want.
I've tried developing on macs before. I found it a fairly mediocre experience compared to Linux.
Getting libraries is an exercise in pulling teeth. I tried macports and fink. Compared to Linux they were slow, unrelaible and too often required nuking and redoing from scratch. Compared to OpenBSD they were merely unrelaiable and required nuking and redoing from scratch.
It was a toss up between that or compiling everything by hand.
Compared to the breezy ease of installing dev packages on Linux it was awful.
Also they had an ancient, hacked and weird version of GCC for ages. I gather they have a modern compiler now, but it sure sucked a lot when they didn't.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The "specs" on RAM limits usually under-represent the maximum possible. The reason is that when the specs are released, the chip sizes needed for that maximum likely do not exist, and Apple doesn't want to advertise something it can't test. If you check the lowendmac page (assuming I found the right one), it says there's a 16GB limit.
I vaguely recall that the reason Apple is pretty strict about this is because of the Mac SE/30, which didn't have 32-bit clean ROMs, limiting it to 8MB. The physical limitation was 32MB with 4MB simms, or 128MB with the very rare 16MB simms. (16MB simms were very expensive when new, the most memory you can put on a 30-pin simm, and only came out right before everyone switched to dimms.) They bought out the Mode32 product from Connectix, rather than produce a new ROM module, to avoid a class-action lawsuit. (FWIW, you can install a Mac IIfx ROM into an SE/30, removing this limit. If you ever find a IIfx, putting its ROM in an SE/30 is a better idea than trying to upgrade IIfx's unusual RAM.)
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
if he was still alive would have created a new asshole in this writer. What a load of crap. How do people get paid to write such utter garbage, he makes it sound like Apple is just a Sony drone instead of the world's most valuable company.
Which is why the Linux world is so eagerly jumping on the wayland/Mir bandwagon, right?
Are they? I've not seen either deployed in the wild yet. Also, what the distro makers do (*cough* systemd *cough*) is hardly representative of what people actually want and what's actually better.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I was planing on doing some development with the Unity/Unreal engine and unfortunately it does not support Linux (for development). Since I don't want to replace my (powerful) pc and I would kill myself if I had to develop in windows, I have considered installing a hackintosh. My top priority is getting the video card and wifi supported without any problems.
Also I have never used Mac OSX for more than 5 minutes, the main feature I can not live without is customizability of shortcuts (specially the shortcut to change from one virtual desktop to another), is that possible in Max OSX?
Besides that I have a few Linux visual programs that I like (gnome pie, gnome do, guake, wine/play on linux), any chance I can get those working on Max OSX? I can live without them if there are good alternatives though (guake will be sorely missed though).
Anyone has hackintosh experience to share?
It might be the app but it happens several times a day with my ~2 year old Mac mini when using VLC (pretty much all I use it for). Might very well be the app itself but since it was updated (think when iOS 8 came out it is weird. First off opens up shows that the media library is empty for about 1-2s then "realizes" I always have 5-100 TV show rips in it. Then I can't scroll/interact with the app for about another 5-10s. It seems to remember things I did just doesn't actually start interacting (not responding to the message pump?). Next up I try to increase the speed of playback (1.0X is for suckers ;)): that 50% of the time leads the app to freeze and need to be restarted.
I'm not sure if it is the version of VLC, its interaction with iOS or iOS fault but that is what I've seen. Also about once a month I get a straight up crash of the device: pow black screen and reboots.
The article: Sony's supply chain lessons? Doesn't mention what it means by that I'm assuming it is about the issues with PS3. So let me get this straight: Apple's 2006 switch to intel (which probably was in the works for 1+ years) is due to them learning lessons from Sony's 2007 problems? At least in my opinion Apple probably should have been on Intel or AMD for ages. They picked PowerPC and were on the wrong horse for a long time. PowerPC had some advantages but anyone with half a brain (especially one so good as to learn lessons from 2 years in the future) should have known whatever MS does is going to be the volume market with component costs the lowest and a lot of pressure to meet deadlines. The bonus is your deadlines would also be your competitors: so if Intel delays a CPU release well at least Windows PCs aren't going to come out faster than you are this holiday season: they have the same problem.
Developers like developing for Unix: wow, really? I'd say a lot do. But a lot do just because it is free (Linux, BSD etc) so they can get started as a student when dead broke with a 10yr old computer. Yeah open source helps and has several cool communities. But I can't think of a tool that I use on OSX that I can't find an alternative (and usually just as free) on windows. Given that Java is the number one programming language and .Net pretty popular too I'd say "developers like to develop for windows or really anywhere they can" would have been just as valid.
While i hate systemD (Gentoo user here), it takes a minute playing around with weston to notice that we should've been using this for a long time. Xorg IS old, slow, buggy and deprecated by all standards.
And this is exactly why OS X is superior in that regard. They had GPU assisted rendering (first compositing, then full UI rendering) since what? 2005? I remember it was around 10.4 PPC. We have 10.10 now. Windows only figured it out on Vista and up. Linux STILL doesn't have it (Xgl was just compositing) unless you count hacks like glamour.
Saying something you dislike does not make me a shill. I'm sorry that facts make you so angry.
Nope. First $499 Mac Mini was released in 2005.
So a 20% premium over a PC at the low end, with the gap widening as you move up the performance curve.
That's a pretty big premium for what seems like an intangible benefit.
That $100 is the money most people don't have to spend for anti-virus because they run Mac OS X.
(OS X of course can be attacked, just like any other system, but the malware ecosystem is so much less toxic that AV generally isn't necessary.)
...any time Microsoft tries to actually advance forward or shrug off the baggage of supporting 15 year old technologies, the entire tech communities whines like little babies.
Things that make apple kit "worth" it.
Magsafe
Multi Touch Trackpad (no one else even comes close)
(maybe) nice industrial design (looks)
I think that's about it. Does that make it worth the soldered ram, non-standard ssde, etc... up to you.
Not a development tool, but give me a desktop environment that works like this on Linux, and I'll drop OS X
And if you're wanting to use KATE, why the hell are you using a Mac anyway?
If you read the thread, HuguesT had said "Nearly all of the development tools of Linux are available on OSX via ports, brew or simply compiling oneself." Mr_Wisenheimer was making the point that while possible it was not simple, and as an example described installing Kate.
Whether using Kate on the Mac is a good idea or not is beside the point; Kate was just an example of installing a Linux tool - a mainstream and vey common utility.
Can someone explain why Apple stories lately sound very much like obituary?
To somebody with just a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. To someone without a brain, OS X looks like a hammer without a handle. Unlike you, I have a point.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Xorg IS old, slow,
No, it isn't. Seriously, I've not seen any real evidence of this. If anything it's one of the best performing systems out there. There were a bunch of gaming benchmarks a while back where the framerate of games under Linux/X11 beat Windows. There's no way that could be the case if the graphics system were slow.
On some cards with the "glamour" driver, all 2D operations are done on the graphics card using shaders. Never mind the EXA and XAA systems which have also used older 2D acceleration.
Where does the slowness come in at all?
And this is exactly why OS X is superior in that regard. They had GPU assisted rendering (first compositing, then full UI rendering) since what? 2005?
Seriously? Are you joking?
XAA, a rendering acceleration system was released first in 1996. You're not going to win a "who was first" pissing contest here because X11 is much, much older and the OSX display manager used solidly established technology.
Linux STILL doesn't have it (Xgl was just compositing)
Yes it does and you're just making shit up. XAA came out in 1996. It replaced earlier ad-hoc schemes. EXA has been around since 2005 or so. In other words, X11 has had hardware assisted rendering since before you even first logged on to slashdot.
unless you count hacks like glamour.
So using shaders to do 2D stuff is a "hack" in your book? How does that make any sense whatsoever?
Did OSX get some hardware accelerated features first? Yes, but it didn't get hardware assisted rendering of any sort first. Either you're misinformed or you're selecting one very particular feature to "prove" that OSX is more advanced because it got it first.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Something tells me that UNIX compatibility had little to do with Mac OS X's growth in popularity. Most end users simply don't really care about the command line. Instead, I'd consider these to be the primary reasons why people started buying a lot more Mac's around 2007:
1) Windows Vista came out around this time, and many people didn't like it. Mac OS X looked like a good alternative in terms of both ease of use and better stability.
2) People were getting sick of seeing their Windows XP systems getting infected with malware, so they switched to the Mac where drive by malware downloads are less of a problem.
3) A lot of people wanted their computer to "just work" like their iPod did. Mac OS X just seemed easier to use to them.
Also they had an ancient, hacked and weird version of GCC for ages. I gather they have a modern compiler now, but it sure sucked a lot when they didn't.
Did you last work on a Mac? OS9?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
The OS and nice hardware integration alone makes it worth it to me. And it's not overpriced kit compared to EQUIVALENT PC hardware in a similar form factor, in many cases it's actually cheaper.
I install common and mainstream utilities all the time. In fact, I just installed KATE with a single command to prove a point. And all I had to do is type "sudo port install kate". Like I said, either he's a troll or he's lazy and didn't do proper research and expected it to act like yet another Debian knockoff.
And it's no more complicated than any other UNIX. Like I said, if you only know how to stumble through an X11 GUI desktop environment with tools to hold your hand the entire way you do not have any true "SysAdmin" experience.
You'd have many problems, in fact probably more, installing a newer version of KATE on a STANDARD UNIX (HP-UX, Solaris, etc). Linux is not a standard UNIX system and a lot of open source packages have a lot of Linuxisms now. Systemd and crap like that is actually going to kill portability for things like desktop environments. Now, FreeBSD ports has it right but even they can't fix all the Linuxisms in things like GNOME and certain things just plain don't work or have limited functionality on other UNIX systems.
No, it isn't. Seriously, I've not seen any real evidence of this.
Move a window. See how the window lags behind the cursor? (Or the cursor lags behind the window, i don't remember). That's one. Now scroll in either chrome or firefox. Less than 60fps. Enable compositing - now you've lost vsync with any kind of accelerated video (unless you enable that ugly hack in intel drivers, which slashes performance in half). That's just the top of my head.
If anything it's one of the best performing systems out there
Even the current developers of Xorg disagree with you
On some cards with the "glamour" driver, all 2D operations are done on the graphics card using shaders. Never mind the EXA and XAA systems which have also used older 2D acceleration.
That's exactly ONE driver - intel. And glamour is a HACK. It does a double-reacharound to do what wayland does by default (and any other sane windowing system). With adding the X protocol cruft with all it's stupid extensions on top.
Yes it does and you're just making shit up.
No, I'm not. First it was XAA, which did shitall. Then it was RENDER, which supposedly did what glamour does now. Oh, and let's not forget about EXA, FMA and other 3 letter acronyms which were supposed to "fix it". I read Keiths blog regularly, I remember his benchmark for intel, when he worked on SMA and GLAMOR (too lazy to link to his benchmark, but you can use google). And let's get this straight, all those "acceleration" extensions were for one purpose - going AROUND the X protocol, because it was designed for LINES, not bitmaps.
So using shaders to do 2D stuff is a "hack" in your book? How does that make any sense whatsoever?
No, doing 2D in shaders is exactly what you want. Gluing that to the X protocol is patently stupid and counterproductive. It's a stopgap until the Linux desktop adopts wayland.
Did OSX get some hardware accelerated features first? Yes, but it didn't get hardware assisted rendering of any sort first
Actually, it did.
OS X 10.4 (Quartz Extreme 2D) - 2005
Win 7 (DirectDraw) - 2009
Linux - about now-ish, and STILL not fully adopted. Unless you can point me to a data source that claims otherwise. And no, hacks like glamour (which got release a fucking month ago!) or Xgl don't count (it doesn't matter really, since it was just compositing)
Such as?
BBEdit and various ports of Emacs for starters but there's many more, even a native GUI. Or you could use XCode. Or Eclipse.
X11 is neither antiquated or stale. Sure, it has a long history having started in 1987.
It's quite stale. The protocol itself hasn't changed significant and has required kludge after kludge that pretty much breaks the whole reason for its existence. There's a reason Sun tried to push NeWS and NeXT was pushing its own Display Postscript-based window system that ALSO had network transparency (why Apple didn't keep this intact I'm not sure because it was pretty cool!). NeWS was OK for a proof of concept. NeXT's window system was downright awesome. The reason they weren't adopted for EVERY UNIX SYSTEM was the fact that A.) Postscript required an expensive license. B.) They were proprietary and X11 was essentially free.
However MacOS also has a long history, starting in 1976 with BSD (from which it's derived) and 1982 for ObjectiveC.
Actually, MacOS was an entirely in-house design. MacOS X was derived from NeXTStep which was a mutant Mach/BSD hybrid. One could also say Windows was stale because of lingering MS-DOS code.
OSX also didn't ignore the last 25 years of OS research and has evolved. X11 has simply had kludge after kludge piled on top.
For an example of what I mean, try getting an old NCD or IBM X-terminal to actually work in the modern age with modern X11 apps. If you don't have the same X11 library versions and likely X server version on both ends, prepare for some fun. Everything that was cool about X has been marginalized to make it easier to port 3D games, play video content and have nice looking fonts..... and be slower than most other windowing systems. It's time for it to retire.
If mere age of the original relases is a problem, then OSX is far more stale and antiquated than X11.
Clearly that's a silly argument, but you're obviously a mindless Fanboi/window system bigot.
Mindless Fanboi LOL No. I'm an experienced sysadmin who has dealt with just about every major UNIX variant still in existence and several that aren't.
http://www.dell.com/us/p/deals#dlpgid=popular-laptop-deals?ref=tile1&s=dhs
Dell has laptops that are $249..now that is a low budget entry.Just over 50% less
They had GPU assisted rendering (first compositing, then full UI rendering) since what? 2005? I remember it was around 10.4 PPC. We have 10.10 now. Windows only figured it out on Vista and up. Linux STILL doesn't have it (Xgl was just compositing) unless you count hacks like glamour.
Actually, Quartz Extreme made its debut in MacOS 10.2 in 2002. So yeah, it's been a long damn time.
According to OWC, 2009 White MacBooks maxes out at 8GB and 2010 White MacBooks maxes out at 16GB. Plus the offer a trade-in rebate for your old memory.
Quartz extreme is just the compositing part - like Xgl. Quartz2D Extreme is the actual "draw widgets on GPU" part
I use a combination of brew and MacPorts. I tried Fink but the updates were so archaic as to be laughable, and I think it was missing something I wanted (hping or something similarly esoteric).
Either way... The dependency handling is terrible. Really. Terrible. Esp when compared to Ubuntu, RedHat, or Arch. Being that I fundamentally have issues with Ubuntu, and RedHat and some of their dependency handling, that's saying something.
Really, that sort of functionality is not in MacOS wheelhouse, so I was hopeful but skeptical while testing. As far as Nix-like work environment, they are where linux was about 10 years ago. It works. Mostly. I advise being prepared for a goodly load of of suck on the way.
Regarding using KATE. KATE is a little too cumbersome for my taste, but it is freaking cool and extensible. Anyone who has gone through the effort of getting it set up would want to take it with them when they changed platforms. That is not an unreasonable expectation, esp when the platform is built on a Nix. Better native options? Maybe, but not to the GP.
Kudos for re-iterating this point and not caring about all the passive aggressive (or just straight up aggressive) comments that are going to be hurled at this article by the apple fandom. Apple makes a GREAT PC, the fit and finish can't be beat. Although, asus and some other manufacturers are sure trying to close that gap. Apple ships their awesome PC hardware with their proprietary OS, OSX ... Although OSX has its origins born completely outside of apple by Jobs after he was pushed out of the company in the 80's
Regarding using KATE. KATE is a little too cumbersome for my taste, but it is freaking cool and extensible. Anyone who has gone through the effort of getting it set up would want to take it with them when they changed platforms. That is not an unreasonable expectation, esp when the platform is built on a Nix. Better native options? Maybe, but not to the GP.
Yet I installed kate and all it's dependencies with a simple "sudo port install kate" from command line this morning.
Your right, FINK kinda sucks and a lot of the packages in their repo are stale unless you use unstable branch and that's when dependency issues really start to show. I have had no worse of an experience with Macports than I have with APT. There's even GUI package managers for both package systems.
Are there some packages that aren't there because there were too many Linuxisms to port it easily? Yep. Those same packages have issues on FreeBSD systems as well.
Linux went from a decent UNIX clone to a wannabe Windows competitor and it's really starting to break app portability. Especially for larger packages like GNOME or KDE.
Multi Touch Trackpad (no one else even comes close)
QFT. The amazing thing is that my completely computer illiterate relatives can take my MacBook and use Safari without being told a thing how to use it (I have given up telling them there is no reason to go to www.google.com first).
And even if you (like me) simply run Windows on it, being able to buy it at the local Apple store or be able to get it fixed at the local Apple store, by a company I trust to fix things is a win.
When my relatives had a problem with their iPad and the new printer they had bought, I told them to go to the Apple Store which is luckily only a few miles away. The idea that you could go to a computer store and would actually get help with your problems, without paying for it, was completely alien to them. (iPad was their first Apple computer).
It was actually Flavor Aid.
Most of that doesn't matter though. Apple's supply/repair chain is setup for replacing big chunks of the computer rather than individual parts. Yes, it's quite a bit more overhead, but Apple is willing to swallow that, so to the end user it doesn't matter.
Ie. web cam:
dell/generic pc: separate monitor half of laptop from body, upen it up, pull out faulty web cam, insert new webcam, close up, test, reconnect to body. done.
apple: separate monitor half of laptop from body, take replacement monitor half and reconnect to body. test. done.
The whole industry is heading this way, Apple just happens to be at the forefront. The modular PC is slowly going away, mostly because things are 'good enough' for the majority of people. Some things have tangible benefits - ie. having the LCD fused to the glass makes the screen much 'nicer' looking (imho).
I remember when every PC component was an separate card - Audio, LAN, Modem - that is long gone and almost everyone is just fine with the built-in options on their motherboards. Where was the outrage when this happened?
Even the current developers of Xorg disagree with you
Well, they also disagree with the benchmarks. Besides they've been plugging anti-X FUD since they came up with Wayland.
That's exactly ONE driver - intel. And glamour is a HACK.
http://www.x.org/wiki/ExaStatu...
Hmm yes only one card supports EXA with RENDER acceleration. One, that is if you ignore all but one. Never mind that the proprietary AMD and NVidia also accelerate these features.
It does a double-reacharound to do what wayland does by default (and any other sane windowing system). With adding the X protocol cruft with all it's stupid extensions on top.
I love how you argue with complete and utter ignorance of both X11 AND Wayland.
Wayland doesn't specify any sort of acceleration at all. It's a protocol for sharing pixel buffers, and a bit of input device handling. You can go and implement a Wayland compositor using OpenGL for accelerated compositing of the buffers if you like. Weston is exactly this.
And you still haven't explained why Glamour is a hack (will be tricky because it isn't). X11 specifies a bunch of 2D drawing operations. Glamour implements these in OpenGL shaders. So, once you have an OpenGL surface up, you can accelerate all operations.
No, I'm not. First it was XAA, which did shitall.
No it didn't. You clearly never ran VESAFB back in the 90s which really was unaccelerated. The difference was vast.
Then it was RENDER, which supposedly did what glamour does now.
Oh for fuck's sake, you have no clue about any of the underlying technologies whatsoever.
RENDER is an extension for specifing a bunch of new drawing primitives for the X protocol. It has nothing AT ALL about how these are implemented. Nothing. It's a protocol or if you perfer, API spec. Glamour is an implementation of X11 drawing primitives using GLSL.
See the difference?
No, doing 2D in shaders is exactly what you want. Gluing that to the X protocol is patently stupid and counterproductive. It's a stopgap until the Linux desktop adopts wayland.
WTF? The acceleration is done after the X protocol is decoded. The program speaks X. The server decodes the X protocol and then draws it using OpenGL. This is just like any other OpenGL accelerated drawing API: API is decoded then drawing happens.
Actually, it did.
No it didn't. As I pointed out XAA (which is hardware accelerated rendering whether you like it or not) came out in 1996. That was years before OSX even existed.
EXA which accelerated the RENDER extension (actually, acceleration existed before that, EXA was designed to make it work across drivers better) came out in 2005, the same date as you quote for OSX.
The claim "OSX got hardware accelerated rendering first" is blatantly wrong.
And no, hacks like glamour (which got release a fucking month ago!)
I've really not sure what you've got against glamour. Either way, it's designed to obsolete EXA, which will hit it's 10th birthday next year.
Glamour is the FOURTH 2D grapics acceleration generation in the XFree86 derived series. There was ad-hoc stuff first, then XAA, then EXA and now Glamour. Yet for some reason you are despreate to claim that OSX was first even though XFree86 had accleeration before OSX even existed.
Basically you seem to be wildly misinformed about several things:
* What hardware acceleration is
* What X11 does
* What Wayland does
* What Xorg does and did in the past
* What the X protocol is
And yet you argue anyway. I admire your spirit!
SJW n. One who posts facts.
yea gcc was a bitch but they've ditched it for Clang now and it runs real strong.
A while back, I did a (pardon the pun) apples to Apples comparison of MacBooks to other desktops with the same chipset and features, as well as the Mac Pro to other workstations with the same features.
The ironic thing... Apple was the least expensive, all things factored in. Yes, one can get a computer with far less stuff in it and it will be cheaper, but buying a comparable Dell with what a Mac Pro has in it, even the canister is less expensive.
You have obviously never looked inside a Mac system before. They're "high-quality" parts are made by Foxconn, guess who else uses Foxconn to manufacture their parts? Dell. Let that sink in for a while.
it most certainly does not compete on hardware, features and such. my nephew just bought one when I told him to buy a Mac. the crapware on it took him an hour to uninstall. and it's a slow mess wit win8.1. brand new out of the box and it hangs up regularly.
whenever he sees me workin on my Mac mini I always wink at him. he learned his lesson. next computer->apple.
His cat is MacOS X ;)
Thunderbolt is only (and not even then) necessary for video. HDMI does the same and can just as easily change to do the same thing. It's already doing ethernet, audio, and video, it would be a snap to have keyboard and mouse, joystick, etc.
Hyperthreading is pointless when you're getting 4 threads either way from either chip.
It doesn't take more than 8GB RAM but we're comparing BASE features, here, EG what it already comes with.
Performance numbers are just about equal.
You can either buy the laptop at $329 and have a complete system, or buy the Mac Mini at $499 and STILL have to buy more shit just to make it even work.
That's a goddamned ripoff.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
This is just silly.
Agreed. It *seems* like a unix box on good quality great looking hardware. But it's not. It's crippled unix box very unlike Linux. A typical debian distro is way more useful for development work than a Mac.
If your unix system is not at the other end of a Terminal.app, you're doing it wrong.
There is nothing special about developing on the Linux desktop.
OSX is actually worse than both windows and linux when it comes to backwards compatibility...
No pre OSX apps (pre 2000ish) will run on the current versions of OSX...
No PPC-only (pre 2006) apps will run on the current versions of OSX...
16-bit windows dates from the early 90s, 64bit windows will run 32bit windows apps just fine.
16bit windows/dos is now sufficiently antiquated that its possible to emulate the hardware entirely and get reasonable performance, emulating a ppc machine to boot earlier macos is doable but some of the later ppc apps designed for g5 class systems are likely to perform worse than the real hardware.
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Actually, prior to just recently the cheapest mac mini was $599. I forget exactly when it jumped up to $599 from the earlier (initial?) $499
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My only beef about the MBP compared to other laptops of its price range are security related:
1: The Kensington lock slot is important, either that, or some other way from Apple to put a theft deterrent mechanism in place. Right now, there are no solid theft deterrent solutions, other than MacLock's offerings (which are not doing so well on Amazon reviews) or the Snake (which is decent, but prevents you from closing your laptop.) Every other laptop maker has some form of Kensington slot out there, and even though this isn't made to stop a dedicated thief, it will put a stop to opportunistic thefts. Even if the lock slot is on a sliding metal bar that pops out and pushes in, that is better than nothing.
2: Along the lines of security, I'd like to see a TPM chip on Macs, that is shipped deactivated, but can be easily turned on. This would provide another layer of protection.
True, their GCC is goofy as hell. They've migrated a lot since early OS X and now they consider the Mac to be just a dev system from iOS. They've got something called "gcc" on the system that defines __GNUC__ and yet which rejects valid gcc inline assembler because it's not really gcc on the backend.
As for other stuff, I do cross compiling on the Mac, so the only local Mac programs I need to build are the build tools themselves, so I never cared about libraries or clang. Linux would be definitely easier to be sure overall, but as a developer system OS X is light years ahead of Windows+cygwin. It says a lot right off the bat that they weren't scared and frightened by a command line tool and that they preferred common standards to obscure stuff invented at home.
That's a pretty big premium for what seems like an intangible benefit.
Mac OSX 10.10 (Yosemite -- or 10.9 if you don't like the new UI) is free on any Mac. Windows "upgrades" (like 8 or 10) cost ~$100.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
They use generic PC parts the same as the rest of the industry. Sometimes the same exact quirks exist between Apple's and Dells. They are impacted by the same bad engineering choices.
There will be cases of overlap when vendors choose hardware from the same pool of suppliers.
Still, Apple tends to be better than an average PC laptop. I believe this is due, in part, to their decision to focus on refining premium laptops rather than developing additional products in the budget segment.
IPS panels with reasonable-to-excellent resolution for their size, solid multitouch touchpads, good-to-excellent battery life, and the MagSafe connector are standard across the line. All of these things are desirable to virtually anyone, but they do inflate the price.
The trade-offs are more hit-and-miss: limited product selection, upgrade limitations, basically one industrial design for the entire product line, somewhat difficult repairs, no high-end gaming/CAD options.
Non-techy people won't care about most of those since they won't upgrade or repair it themselves, and CPU/RAM/GPU specs aren't critical for office and media applications. They can happily pick out whatever looks and feels best, be it Sony, Dell, Apple, Lenovo etc.
More technical workers actually have to consider the trade-offs more closely.
Apple is certainly not the only company to build an interesting piece of premium hardware. They are, however, one of the few to maintain a premium product line consistently. E.g., Sony had a great line of executive laptops for about 3 years or so, and then it disappeared.
I think the tradition of premium placement and the corresponding tendency to avoid bargain-basement hardware is where the high-quality comment comes from.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
I've seen a several of laptops get pulled off a desk by their power cord. However I've never seen that happen to a laptop with a mag-safe connector.
Seems like you have lost control of your iPad. I have been using them since released and have never experienced the problems you claim. Of course, I see no reason to install Chrome on it. And I routinely check to see if some app is getting crazy, very few have. If they do - I delete them. Also, I lock down notification, location tracking and other battery draining solutions to make it a more user friendly solution.
So, don't waste your time. It really doesn't make sense. One leg of this alleged trifecta of supply chain was switching to Intel. Magically than taught them how to use the Wintel supply chain and thus made all their stuff soo much better.
Pure hogwash. If the clown believes this then I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale to him, cheap. Well, cheap-ish.
The big ones I can think of are Cadence SPB, Ansys HFSS, Ansys Fluent, Dassault Solidworks, Dassault Abaqus, Rocscience RS3D, Agilent ADS, Bently Microstation, PTV Vision, Intel Fortran, and Xilinx ISE.
There are more, but those are the ones I can think of we use the most off the top of my head.
Core i5-4260U @ 1.43 GHz (Turbo Boost to 2.7GHz) vs a dual core vs Pentium N3540 @ 2.16 (Turbo Boost to 2.42 GHz), don't let the megahertz myth fool you as to which is the faster CPU.
The Pentium N3540 gets a PassMark CPU Mark of 1887, versus 3659 for the Core i5-4260U. (source: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php) So yeah, they're "pretty much the same thing" except for the slower CPU with half the physical cores actually being about twice as fast.
Apple picks out of the same pool of commodity Intel CPUs and other parts as the companies making computers that run Windows; the difference is that Apple doesn't use cheaper, low-end parts like Pentium or Celeron CPUs. Apple uses Core family parts across their entire product line. Some of those low-end Pentiums have clock speeds above 2 GHz, but are still beaten out by Core family chips running at 1.5 GHz -- with half as many physical cores. When folks say Apple uses high quality parts, it means they don't build systems with cheap, crap components just to offer a cheap-but-crap entry point system.
And yet in spite of all these things you mention that existed in the late 90's, OSX 10.2 still smeared X11 in UI performance. I was a *rabid* FreeBSD desktop user in those days yet my jaw still dropped when I saw Quartz Extreme working the first time.
2D graphics acceleration has been around forever. Early attempts in XFree86 were more similar to hardware QuickDraw acceleration on classic MacOS than Quartz Extreme. Using OpenGL for compositing was introduced in OSX 10.2 and it was some time before that was seen in X11.
So yeah, Macs have had hardware accelerated graphics just as long as Linux, possibly even before Linux existed. This is part of the reason they were so awesome for the DTP and graphic arts fields for a long time. Hell, my Atari 800 had hardware graphics acceleration LOL
And yet in spite of all these things you mention
Ah now we come to moving the goalposts. You asserted twice, and one of those was after I provided evidence against, that OSX had hardware acceleration first. It didn't. It appears you are now admitting you were mistaken because you have moved from "OSX had it first" to "OSX did it better".
I was a *rabid* FreeBSD desktop user in those days yet my jaw still dropped when I saw Quartz Extreme working the first time.
Meh. It was moderately impressive (though apart from expose, it didn't really give much improvement for most stuff). Jaw dropping was an SGI compared to everything else in 1994. That was draw dropping.
So yeah, Macs have had hardware accelerated graphics just as long as Linux, possibly even before Linux existed.
Yes? Never said otherwise. You were talking about OSX for which the reverse is true. I'm glad you've finally managed to admit that hardware acceleration is, in fact, acceleration.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Steve admitted his mistake early: not recognizing OOP. But he learned. Then the plus's went kaboom: Mac OS X on the iPhone. Now Mac OS X on the iPod. Meanwhile MS has a cluster of an OS that is not easy to resize.
OSX is actually worse than both windows and linux when it comes to backwards compatibility...
No pre OSX apps (pre 2000ish) will run on the current versions of OSX...
No PPC-only (pre 2006) apps will run on the current versions of OSX...
16-bit windows dates from the early 90s, 64bit windows will run 32bit windows apps just fine.
16bit windows/dos is now sufficiently antiquated that its possible to emulate the hardware entirely and get reasonable performance, emulating a ppc machine to boot earlier macos is doable but some of the later ppc apps designed for g5 class systems are likely to perform worse than the real hardware.
I call bullshit.
Rosetta performs no better than any of the freeware emulators you can get now. I'd argue that with the latest i7s, an emulator like PearPC can outpace a dual core G5 (real throughput, not theoretical throughput) even though PearPC doesn't really emulate the G5 CPU yet. On top of that all of the apps where that might matter have either been ported to x64, or have been replaced in the market by something far superior that runs natively.
The current hassle over 10.7 - 10.9 sandboxing does create some grief, but that can be resolved by hosting 10.6.8 in a VMWare 6 instance, with the bonus of getting Rosetta back.
Re supply chain, if you watch Steve Jobs' MacWorld addresses (and other product intro keynotes) he repeatedly used Dell's supply chain prowess as a benchmark from which Apple drew inspiration. Sony's industrial design was the benchmark for laptop design and the first Titanium Powerbooks were the result of Jobs' unabashed shout-out to the Sony machines.
Apple only offers a limited set of configuration, and if it meets what your needs are, they are price competitive. However, there're a bunch of morons out there who keep comparing a low end netbook to a macbook pro or macbook air, and claiming it's the same.
It is really hard to take these people seriously...
Bah. The magsafe connector is a gimmick. The advantage of the magsafe connector was supposed to be that it would release easily from the laptop in the event of a snag. This does work most of the time. Not always, but most of the time.
What is falsely implied is that other laptop connectors don't come out under such conditions. In my experience, this is not true
Well, unless your laptop is to heavy to be mobile, the power cords will disconnect - after they send the laptop over the table edge.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.