The transition from Motorola 680x0 to PPC is a good example of Apple innovation at its best. The transition was sometimes ugly, but overall amazingly smooth. The transition from IBM Power64 to Intel Core was perhaps less innovative, simply because they were using a state-of-the-art kernel. Nevertheless, the transition was almost completely transparent from a developer point of view. I'm amazed how quickly I made my Application into a Universal Binary.You really have to give Apple some credit here. A lot of salaried guys at Apple worked long hours for years to keep Mac OS X running well on Intel hardware when no one else was aware of it. Yeah, well, that has two sides to it. While I admit, that all Apple has ever done to solve the problem of changing to another platform was simply astonishing, from a technical point of view. From the end-user point of view, things didn't always went that smooth. I work at a DTP-Buisness and I remeber how painful the switch to OSX was. So painful that we switched half the department to Windows-Desktops to keep reliability in production (which actually works great). And I remeber that I actually prefered OS9 over any OS at that time for working with graphical apps, even though it was a laughable OS, it was EASY and had not the administration-problems a more complicated OS like NT had. With OSX there came a lot of instability into the workflow, updates caused Photoshop to crash, and the whole font-problems. I can't understand why it can be so hard to handle fonts for a OS, Windows does this flawless. A simple font once caused my colleagues G4 to Kernelpanic, what is this? Then I know how there wasn't a native support for Photoshop 7 and we had to use it in "Classic"-Mode. Which technically may be a great achievement, but again, was a real pain-in-the-ass for our working environment. Nowadays I can see nothing OSX can do better than Windows relating to my work, even if it has Screen-PDF or system-wide colormanagment. Apple isn't supporting the userbase in the graphical industry very much, not like they did in the past. Meanwhile Microsoft hires some colormanagment-experts off Canon for developing the Vista-CMS. Right now half of my company works with Photoshop under Rosetta-environment, which runs on a MacPro as fast as on a G4 Powerbook. And that is kinda frustrating, the windows-machines run Photoshop three times as fast as the shiny, new cheesegrater. I don't blame Apple, I don't blame Adobe for not beeing faster at developing a Universal Binary version. But still, as a customer, it would have been very much more efficent and productive if we'd have entirely switched to Windows-PCs ever since OSX came out. XP has its flaws but thanks to its age and support it is a very reliable system when used in production and I can't always say this about OSX. The flaws of Windows can also be its strengths; it carries a lot of old waste and support for entirely old or unmodern protocols, hardware, specific software aso. While OSX doesn't have to support all that crap, a lot of it makes Windows extremly backward-compatible and thus reliable for buisnesses. Microsoft does great work in keeping backward-compatibility in nearly all they do, though you can argue about that this is blocking innovation, buisnesses just demand that kind of behaviour.
So, yes, Apple's efforts in making switches less painful were undoubtly great. Still not all of Apple's decisions are very customer-friendly, they are very good at selling it to their customers. Like they were marketing the G5 and the PowerPC Architecture so much faster and superior to the Pentium... till they switched to Intel, when (Ah, but I know it isn't a Pentium, but a Core Duo now, sorry)suddenly Intel had the fastest CPU on the Market according to Apple.
I admit that Apple is better at innovation than Microsoft. But Apple is also much better at marketing innovation where there is not much about it (the iPod shuffle - it only plays shuffle. No, you can't select the tracks, it's a feature, idiot!)
I agree with the salaried developers. I was making an over-extreme statement, as I was referring to the fanboys' point of view: "Apple innovates. Microsoft steals". While we all know there is a lot of truth about this, I think it's not ENIRELY true, because finally they are both companies with economic interests (which don't even directly compete - instead they've often worked together for profit. The "MS vs Apple"-Talk happens in the heads of the fanboys but not in the economy). And both have often bought off ideas, or talented people, or both. The ways and methods Microsoft did this in the past may be ugly, they also might've had "no taste", like Jobs said. But both will take any opportunity to buy or steal any idea they think is good or marketable before they pay for expensive research and development. That is just the way a company thinks.
However, MS promised a lot with Vista and didn't deliver and that pisses me off. Not enough to buy a mac. Yet.
Talking about Timemachine, though: that really IS a true innovation, even if I wonder how big a HD it would take me to be able to timetravel all my apps back to, let's say one week?
Microsoft's unstable, disorganized, binary registry configured, single screen user interface is not much of an improvement over Windoze 3.1
Sorry, but that's totally laughable. The NT-Line is pretty much a very different platform in comparsion to the DOS-based Windows. The early network-stack of the first NT was pretty similar to the BSD-Stack at that time. Of couse, that's only because microsoft hired some very skilled BSD-Developers. All that talk about how the one OS is so superior and the other is 10 years behind... todays desktop OS are not THAT different in their core functionality. Linux, NT and even the Darwin/Mach-Kernel, all three are more ore less monolithic/hybrid kernels, all have lots of kernelmode-drivers, protected memory, multitasking, networking integrated. So after all there seems to be a some kind of design-approach that all popular, modern Desktop-OS share. And as long as it benefits my user experience, I really don't care who invented it.
I am also still trying to find a graphical Systemmanager for linux, which gives me the same power the registry or the MMC does in Windows...
They've never had a better product than Apple has and they stubbornly continue to polish that turn of a system in the hopes that someday it'll be shiny. Reading/. for two years now, never even saw the need to reply any post. Somebody always wrote what I'd have written. But this time is different. And sorry for the english, us krauts are not entirely talented when it comes to that matter.:-)
Of course Microsoft once had a much better product than Apple!
Let me kick some buzzwords: protected memory. preemptive multitasking. real 32bit multi-user-system. command line (yeah, well cmd, but at least it's a command line at all).
Now you tell me where these things were on OS7, OS8 or even 9??? WindowsNT had them all! to me any OS before X from Apple wasn't even a real operating system:-D
And to all the others who always say Apple is SO innovative:
just think about it this way for a minute: OSX-Developers that are really on Apple's payroll don't even do the Core-Work on the OS! The entire Kernel is developed by the open source community, let alone all the core-applications and libraries. Apple would have NEVER been Apple making the swith to x86 in such a (seemingly) short amount of time. Why? it has already been prepared for by the Open Darwin Team to make that step a long time before Apple even decided to change CPU-vendors. Yes, Apple doesn't even pay their Kernel developers! Microsoft does:-P
What I want to say is: Apple is really developing much less than most people think, they don't "do OSX", they do it "the Apple Way": If it can be done elsewhere - let's do it elsewhere or buy it. If it doesn't fit our needs - we'll do it ourself. I don't have to mention that the iPod wasn't an idea anyone at Apple thought of?
At the moment a "Mac" is mostly Intel Hardware running BSD. Apple DOES do a lot of the software and UI stuff, though.
Don't get me wrong, I think Apple is a cool company making cool computers, but they're not half as "innovative" as most fanboys like to think.
just my 2 cents.
And talking about monopoly and stuff: apple is going to could very likely become sued by the country of denmark, sweden, norway and france for making the iPod only compatible with iTunes AND putting DRM on the Tracks from the Music Store. (But it's very likely that this is going to happen to MS and "Zune" too:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with the salaried developers. I was making an over-extreme statement, as I was referring to the fanboys' point of view: "Apple innovates. Microsoft steals". While we all know there is a lot of truth about this, I think it's not ENIRELY true, because finally they are both companies with economic interests (which don't even directly compete - instead they've often worked together for profit. The "MS vs Apple"-Talk happens in the heads of the fanboys but not in the economy). And both have often bought off ideas, or talented people, or both. The ways and methods Microsoft did this in the past may be ugly, they also might've had "no taste", like Jobs said. But both will take any opportunity to buy or steal any idea they think is good or marketable before they pay for expensive research and development. That is just the way a company thinks. However, MS promised a lot with Vista and didn't deliver and that pisses me off. Not enough to buy a mac. Yet. Talking about Timemachine, though: that really IS a true innovation, even if I wonder how big a HD it would take me to be able to timetravel all my apps back to, let's say one week?
Microsoft's unstable, disorganized, binary registry configured, single screen user interface is not much of an improvement over Windoze 3.1 Sorry, but that's totally laughable. The NT-Line is pretty much a very different platform in comparsion to the DOS-based Windows. The early network-stack of the first NT was pretty similar to the BSD-Stack at that time. Of couse, that's only because microsoft hired some very skilled BSD-Developers. All that talk about how the one OS is so superior and the other is 10 years behind... todays desktop OS are not THAT different in their core functionality. Linux, NT and even the Darwin/Mach-Kernel, all three are more ore less monolithic/hybrid kernels, all have lots of kernelmode-drivers, protected memory, multitasking, networking integrated. So after all there seems to be a some kind of design-approach that all popular, modern Desktop-OS share. And as long as it benefits my user experience, I really don't care who invented it. I am also still trying to find a graphical Systemmanager for linux, which gives me the same power the registry or the MMC does in Windows ...