What sources do you have that show Apple backing Blu-ray? My guess is whomever Apple backs is the way the industry will go, given the recent history of Apple (killing floppy drives, USB standard, Firewire, etc.). However, I haven't heard anything regarding the potential direction Apple will go. I guess we might find out more Monday?
Including HD in the name is very good marketing, not because consumers are stupid, but because consumers are lazy. But, consumers ARE stupid, and I bet I could make a vhs tape and call it Stew-HD-DVD, and people would buy it thinking it was HD DVD content. As you said, Blu-Ray will suffer for this very reason. Marketing 101 at any Community College would have helped.
Hell, people still refer to any digital music player as an MP3 player, whether it actually plays MP3s or not! To quote my wife: I hate people.
most people, believe it or not... don't have HDTV sets in their home yet. And that technology has been out a LONG time.
I'm one of those people! My wife and I have plenty of money and have expensive tastes, but only recently have we been able to (maybe) justify the out-of-proportion prices of HDTV sets. I absolutely HATE my tube tv, and have for the past 12 years, and have been bitching about the slow growth of HD. Even though it has been out for a while, the prices are stupid. Why can't I get a decent HDTV for a moderate price? I don't know, something around $1000, like I paid for my last tube tv in 1994? That was what the cutting-edge tvs cost at the time: adjust for inflation and I expect to pay, what, $2000 for a cutting-edge tv? Instead I'm closer to the $7,000 range for a higher end flat HD tv. Maybe NEXT year... Man, it pisses me off so bad to think I've got this 35" behemoth that I've lugged around during 8 moves in the past 12 years, and the quality is crap, but still...those freakin' prices on new tv's are stupid.
if one format ends up winning (and not compromising), then that side will not have fucked up.
But if they do so through shady strong-arm tactics, and the public perceives it as "giant corporations" forcing their will upon us, the consumer backlash could cause the entire format to disappear; thus both sides lose in the end. (This is my prediction, btw).
The best way to end the format war is to not have multiple formats anymore. As long as you continue to fight, the war continues. Only when both sides decide on a common format (either because one side gives in, or because they decide to cooperate rather than fight) will there be a solution.
What an excellent post! There are basically three ways for a format to become standard, two of which are positive. First, the negative way, is what they are talking about here...basically a company using its marketing power to force an unwanted or inferior standard on the masses, ala Microsoft, or as exemplified by the "decisiveness and strength" comment.
The second way is to let the consumer decide. This doesn't always give us the best product, but it does appease the most people (see Ford Taurus, or Wal-Mart, for example).
The third way is best exemplified most recently by the iPod phenomena. Make a new and great product that jumps out and screams to massive amounts of consumers "you WANT to buy ME!". One could argue that Apple has strong-armed people into their propietary players and media formats, but they didn't do this against the will of the majority of consumers, nor did they (in my opinion) do this to corner market share. Had another player come out simultaneously and had similar features, we might have had an ugly format war on our hands.
This isn't really a format war, because the media is INTENTIONALLY made to be incompatible. Shame on the players involved. They are creating the war, not the fact that one might be better than the other, because they are basically the same freakin' thing..HD on a disk.
Frankly, I'm tired of these so-called "wars" and really stopped caring when a few movie studios (Disney and another one) where bickering about DVD formats. And by bickering I mean trying to make their own propietary format. I think it took 4 or 5 years for the losing end (Disney, I think) to cave. What a pain in the consumer's ass!
My solution is to buy NEITHER, and reward the first player that takes the consumer into consideration before the bottom-line.
If we learned anything from the VHS/Beta wars, it's that people don't prefer quality over convenience(at least in the US). Been to a Wal-mart recently?
VHS won out because you could fit an entire movie on one tape, and because the porn industry adopted it. Hey, when in doubt, just follow the porn. Nobody will ever accuse you of having good taste, but your media choices will be cheap and plentiful.
As a HUGE fan of the G3 and G4 processors (especially during their respetive haydays) I can only say I'm not sad that both of my new Macs have Intel processors (1.83 Core Duo, and 2.33 Core 2 Duo, repsectively). The nice thing about these chips are they are an obivious performance jump for portables, and the transition thus far has been flawless for me. Even if IBM made the 5GHz processor work in a Mac, I'm not sure it would persuade me, since I can now run Windows and Mac OS on my computers. This flexibility is more important to me than sheer clockspeeds. Maybe more PC people will start being like many Mac users have been for the past 20 years and start realizing that cpu speed isn't everything (Apple marketing aside, or course). It is pretty clear, that given an unbiased chip speed test, the G3-G5 chips consistently out performed anything by Intel. Now that IBM is out of the Mac market, I think it is funny that the PC crowd is finally acknowledging what has been true all theses years; the PowerPC architecture was superior in nearly every way. But now it is all irrelevant, I suppose. But at least now that my PC friends accept me as an Intel-lovin' PC user (albeit it on Apple hardware), I can at least say: nanner nanner boo boo, I told you so! I'll never sell my G4 by the way, so no more offers!
Apple has a long uphill battle creating a system as seamless as Tivo.
So you haven't seen the rumors of a pending Apple-TiVo marriage I assume? I read on slashdot (I think) that Apple and TiVo have made some undisclosed deal, leading to rumors of an Apple device that is TiVo based. I guess we'll see on Monday, eh?
Interesting response...very rational too! Let's (we Mac users) hope that iTv allows for most of this functionality you state, but with the typical Apple elegance and ease-of-use. I'm not sure how you've configured your WMC, but it sounds like it is quite the monster, and probably far beyond what the average user will want to do. Maybe iTv will be some sort of plug-and-play hub that does all of that with just a few wires and a few settings from your Mac.
I would never actually buy RAM from Apple, as they charge an arm and a leg for it.
Actually, the first GHz is pretty competitive, or at least was within $20-$30 of buying stuff online. If you buy one a Mac from an Apple Store, as I did with my MacBook, and you upgrade the ram, they give you the pre-installed ram back, which you can sell on eBay or something to recover some of the cost. My iMac has 2GHz of ram, but I bought it online, so I didn't get any ram back. I think the Apple store would have given me two 500MB sticks back when and put two 1GHZ sticks in.
My only problem now is I don't know if anyone could use 2 sticks of 256MB MacBook ram.
iTV already has to compete with an installed base of almost 10 million Xbox 360s
Why would anyone over the age of 25, that doesn't have children, and already has a mac, need (or even want?) an Xbox 360? Apple isn't playing catch-up to a niche, money-losing Microsoft gaming platform; they are (hopefully) bringing usable pc-to-living-room convergency to millions of people who don't care to geek-out just to watch Lost on their 60" HDTVs. If this sounds a lot like, well, me, then you know me well;-) My father-in-law had never seen a mac, and always thought they were pieces of junk, but nearly walked out and bought a Mac just because of Front Row. Considering I really have nothing functional in Front Row at the moment, that says a lot about the potential of mac-to-tv technology and the average Joe user.
I don't crack on the Xbox lightly, as my original thesis for my masters degree was titled PC-Xbox Convergency: Unlocking the Hidden Capabilities of the Xbox. At the time (a few months after the original Xbox release) it was a pretty novel concept, but as we know now, it is old news. (It got shot down by an uppity thesis committee as not being a serious topic, so I took my tuition elsewhere!)
Considering iTV isn't available, it is all speculation. I've never seen WMC in action either, but I'm just going to go out on a limb and guess the Apple implementation will be usable, stable, an elegant. I base this solely on 20 years of Apple-MS comparisons. Apple could get it wrong though; they aren't impervious to mistakes.
As for Apple copying Microsoft, there is always the right-mouse button functionality and adding an eject button for disks. Those are about the only two I can think of, and I've been using both since, well, Win95.
I'll take it a step further. Compare the Sony VAIO VGC-LS1 http://pcworld.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php ?masterid=24757962 to my 20" iMac. The Sony costs $1950 and my iMac was $2100. My iMac has a much faster processor (2.33GHz Core 2 Duo), a bigger monitor 20", an arguably better OS (and the ability to run the other OS, if needed), a bigger hard drive (500 GB), a dedicated video card (X1600, 256mb, whereas the Sony has integrated video), just to name a 'few'. I would be hard-pressed to find anyone who wouldn't opt to pay the extra $150 for the cpu upgrade alone, (or the hard drive upgrade). The video card on its own is 'almost' worth $150 to me, considering the DVI output capability. Not that Sony is a bad brand, but I'd pay the extra $150 just knowing I was getting quality Apple hardware (judging by the past 10 years of consumer report type research).
But on the bright side, Sony provides media card reader slots! Woo hoo! Now I'm sure there are better deals from Dell, Compaq et al., however, when people argue that Macs are more expensive than equally configured PCs, this Sony is an equally configued PC (well, actually it is less configured, but that isn't Apple's fault now is it?). It seems that whenever Apple makes a nice product, like the new iMacs, the PC copycat version comes out $100-$200 less, but with lower specs, to preserve the illusion of PCs are cheaper. If I were to have dumb downed my iMac to the specs of this Sony, it would have been around $1500, and still would have a bigger monitor faster cpu and better video card.
I'm frankly sick of these old-ass arguments spewed by dweebs that still live in their mothers' basements waxing poetically about self-built PC towers with 18 expansion bays.
There is always a few loud complaints about the limitations of the iMac expansion. The fact remains, it fills the niche it is made for, and more people are realizing the shelf-life of their computers usually requires them to just buy a new one every few years instead of sticking to a long lineage of upgrades.
I've stayed away from iMacs until my new Intel iMac. What I learned from my 6 years of ownership of a G4 tower is that I never never needed the expansion capability. The only upgrade I've made is I swapped out the 350MHz chip for an 800MHz chip. Everything else is still in there. I suppose I could have added a second hard drive, or upgraded the video card, but never found the need. Therefore, I snapped up my new iMac without any reservation. I've swapped out the video card on a 2nd gen iMac before, so I suppose it won't be impossible on the new iMacs.
Are you kidding me? Have you SEEN font rendering in Win XP as compared to OS X, for example? Just boot up an Intel Mac in XP mode and tell me you prefer aliased fonts over the elegant implementation of fonts in OS X? And please don't give me the argument that all my pc friends do, that such "fancy" graphic options "slow your computer down." Someone forgot to tell my 800 MHz G4 tower that.
Seriously though, what exactly do you like about jaggy fonts? For me, this small feature alone is one of the HUGE difference makers for me to choose OS X over anything else (along with about 1,000 other 'little' details, but that's an argument for a different day). I am a linguist (German and Arabic) so fonts and special characters are very important to me, and Mac OS X is far ahead of other flavors in this regard. I have worked with typography for nearly 20 years and the Mac OS (whatever flavor) has always implemented the industry standards for font rendering, whether printed or displayed. No other computer system can say that, as they've all been playing catch up for the past 25 years.
I'd love to give it a spin, but at 2kbs download for the client installer I'll be here all night. Maybe I can find a torrent for it for a faster download...oh the irony.
I'm lucky enough to work in educational technology, and we have hundreds of licenses laying around...free to any teacher, student, staff member interested in having one. Seems like a huge waste of money to me, considering most teachers don't know Microsoft Office from their orifice...
I, for one, am embarrassed for my country because of the likes of Microsoft. World Domination with such a patently inferior product is such an American trait, and the reason most of the world hates us. For now, I'll back other American tech companies like Apple, and any other inventive and inspiring company. When (if) Microsoft starts making compelling products, I'll start rooting for them.
"Apple sold over 1.25 million Macs--including 667,000 desktops and 587,000 portables, a 20 percent increase from the year-ago.... Apple did say, however, that it may not be able to meet demand for its new Intel-based MacBook Pro in the current quarter." http://www.macnn.com/articles/06/01/18/apples.holi day.quarter/
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Star Wars? I think you mean Porn.
Hell, people still refer to any digital music player as an MP3 player, whether it actually plays MP3s or not! To quote my wife: I hate people.
The second way is to let the consumer decide. This doesn't always give us the best product, but it does appease the most people (see Ford Taurus, or Wal-Mart, for example).
The third way is best exemplified most recently by the iPod phenomena. Make a new and great product that jumps out and screams to massive amounts of consumers "you WANT to buy ME!". One could argue that Apple has strong-armed people into their propietary players and media formats, but they didn't do this against the will of the majority of consumers, nor did they (in my opinion) do this to corner market share. Had another player come out simultaneously and had similar features, we might have had an ugly format war on our hands.
Frankly, I'm tired of these so-called "wars" and really stopped caring when a few movie studios (Disney and another one) where bickering about DVD formats. And by bickering I mean trying to make their own propietary format. I think it took 4 or 5 years for the losing end (Disney, I think) to cave. What a pain in the consumer's ass!
My solution is to buy NEITHER, and reward the first player that takes the consumer into consideration before the bottom-line.
VHS won out because you could fit an entire movie on one tape, and because the porn industry adopted it. Hey, when in doubt, just follow the porn. Nobody will ever accuse you of having good taste, but your media choices will be cheap and plentiful.
Or, the smart consumer waits a few months to see...
As a HUGE fan of the G3 and G4 processors (especially during their respetive haydays) I can only say I'm not sad that both of my new Macs have Intel processors (1.83 Core Duo, and 2.33 Core 2 Duo, repsectively). The nice thing about these chips are they are an obivious performance jump for portables, and the transition thus far has been flawless for me. Even if IBM made the 5GHz processor work in a Mac, I'm not sure it would persuade me, since I can now run Windows and Mac OS on my computers. This flexibility is more important to me than sheer clockspeeds. Maybe more PC people will start being like many Mac users have been for the past 20 years and start realizing that cpu speed isn't everything (Apple marketing aside, or course). It is pretty clear, that given an unbiased chip speed test, the G3-G5 chips consistently out performed anything by Intel. Now that IBM is out of the Mac market, I think it is funny that the PC crowd is finally acknowledging what has been true all theses years; the PowerPC architecture was superior in nearly every way. But now it is all irrelevant, I suppose. But at least now that my PC friends accept me as an Intel-lovin' PC user (albeit it on Apple hardware), I can at least say: nanner nanner boo boo, I told you so! I'll never sell my G4 by the way, so no more offers!
That's because we don't want to know where the majority of losers have their other hand while sitting at a computer :-(
Interesting response...very rational too! Let's (we Mac users) hope that iTv allows for most of this functionality you state, but with the typical Apple elegance and ease-of-use. I'm not sure how you've configured your WMC, but it sounds like it is quite the monster, and probably far beyond what the average user will want to do. Maybe iTv will be some sort of plug-and-play hub that does all of that with just a few wires and a few settings from your Mac.
My only problem now is I don't know if anyone could use 2 sticks of 256MB MacBook ram.
I don't crack on the Xbox lightly, as my original thesis for my masters degree was titled PC-Xbox Convergency: Unlocking the Hidden Capabilities of the Xbox. At the time (a few months after the original Xbox release) it was a pretty novel concept, but as we know now, it is old news. (It got shot down by an uppity thesis committee as not being a serious topic, so I took my tuition elsewhere!)
As for Apple copying Microsoft, there is always the right-mouse button functionality and adding an eject button for disks. Those are about the only two I can think of, and I've been using both since, well, Win95.
But on the bright side, Sony provides media card reader slots! Woo hoo! Now I'm sure there are better deals from Dell, Compaq et al., however, when people argue that Macs are more expensive than equally configured PCs, this Sony is an equally configued PC (well, actually it is less configured, but that isn't Apple's fault now is it?). It seems that whenever Apple makes a nice product, like the new iMacs, the PC copycat version comes out $100-$200 less, but with lower specs, to preserve the illusion of PCs are cheaper. If I were to have dumb downed my iMac to the specs of this Sony, it would have been around $1500, and still would have a bigger monitor faster cpu and better video card.
I'm frankly sick of these old-ass arguments spewed by dweebs that still live in their mothers' basements waxing poetically about self-built PC towers with 18 expansion bays.
I've stayed away from iMacs until my new Intel iMac. What I learned from my 6 years of ownership of a G4 tower is that I never never needed the expansion capability. The only upgrade I've made is I swapped out the 350MHz chip for an 800MHz chip. Everything else is still in there. I suppose I could have added a second hard drive, or upgraded the video card, but never found the need. Therefore, I snapped up my new iMac without any reservation. I've swapped out the video card on a 2nd gen iMac before, so I suppose it won't be impossible on the new iMacs.
Seriously though, what exactly do you like about jaggy fonts? For me, this small feature alone is one of the HUGE difference makers for me to choose OS X over anything else (along with about 1,000 other 'little' details, but that's an argument for a different day). I am a linguist (German and Arabic) so fonts and special characters are very important to me, and Mac OS X is far ahead of other flavors in this regard. I have worked with typography for nearly 20 years and the Mac OS (whatever flavor) has always implemented the industry standards for font rendering, whether printed or displayed. No other computer system can say that, as they've all been playing catch up for the past 25 years.
I'd love to give it a spin, but at 2kbs download for the client installer I'll be here all night. Maybe I can find a torrent for it for a faster download...oh the irony.
I'm lucky enough to work in educational technology, and we have hundreds of licenses laying around...free to any teacher, student, staff member interested in having one. Seems like a huge waste of money to me, considering most teachers don't know Microsoft Office from their orifice...
I, for one, am embarrassed for my country because of the likes of Microsoft. World Domination with such a patently inferior product is such an American trait, and the reason most of the world hates us. For now, I'll back other American tech companies like Apple, and any other inventive and inspiring company. When (if) Microsoft starts making compelling products, I'll start rooting for them.
Sorry...forgot to mention these numbers were from just the 4th quarter only.
"Apple sold over 1.25 million Macs--including 667,000 desktops and 587,000 portables, a 20 percent increase from the year-ago. ... Apple did say, however, that it may not be able to meet demand for its new Intel-based MacBook Pro in the current quarter." http://www.macnn.com/articles/06/01/18/apples.holi day.quarter/