To be fair, Apple's manuals are horrendously bad. There's little useful information there about the way the GUI part of the operating system works, let alone the BSD underpinnings.
Still, I guess that's why there are handy sites like Mac OS X Hints and the like for reference.
The demand curve that has made the iBook one of the best selling notebooks out there?
As far as features, the iBook rivals its wintel competitors as far as price. If you want more than what it has, get a PowerBook; the iBook isn't, nor is it supposed to be, for everybody.
I'm not sure how it stacks up against most of the wintel laptops, but the iBook (especially the new iBooks) certainly beat the pants off of Gateway's new Solo 5300 laptops. For the same amount of money, you get more harddrive space, more memory, FireWire (plus iMovie!), a wireless networking card, and an Ethernet port. (The wireless card is optional and $100, but the iBook is also $100 cheaper than the Gateway.) The iBook gets between 4 and 6 hours of battery life (during real use, too).
Speaking of the demand curve, just look at wireless networking. Apple has been on the forefront of this, and IBM and Dell have just started to play catch up. Wireless networking on a laptop is one of the coolest things I've ever used, and literally has to be experienced to be appreciated.
So much for this "18 months behind the demand curve."
(My iBook also dual boots to Linux, which it runs really well.)
I definately agree with you. Yeah, $30 is steep, but I'll pay for it for two reasons.
First, I won't have to bother downloading a CD-ROM size image and then burning it. I could do this (if it were available) as I have a dorm room T1 and a CD-R drive, but it is nevertheless much easier to get the beta CD from Apple.
Second, I am assuming that the $30 I pay entitles me to some level of interaction with Apple. A feedback form has already been posted, and Apple is setting up a knowledge base as well. As a rabid Mac user, I'm willing to pay money to give Apple feedback on this software. It is simultaneously the next big thing in both the Mac world and probably the personal computer arena as a whole, and it is Apple's last chance in some ways as well. In the interests of the platform, I want to do all that I can to make sure that the release version is as good as it can be, and I'll pay for that priviledge. With the money from the sale of the beta, I hope Apple will pay for support staffers and forums and such, and make the whole feedback thing a more professional operation than tends to exist in most public betas.
On a somewhat related note, how many people have bought Red Hat or other Linux distros? Their constituent parts are available for free, and yet people pony up cash (I'm not sure how much... probably near $30) for those.
Plus, a few people have mentioned getting a rebate on the purchase of the full OS X release... I haven't heard anything about that from Apple or the news sites, but I wouldn't doubt it and it makes me even happier that I've paid for the public beta.
What people seem to realize is that most Napster use is stealing. You can't get away from that with any number of free speech claims. I'm glad that Metallica is taking a stand as a concerned artist in this matter. Unlike most major label bands, they own the rights to all of their songs, and are therefore more directly affected by the free-distribution that is possible under Napster. Under US copyright law, if you don't try to protect your copyright, chances are you can lose it.
While I don't agree with Metallica on all counts (ie: Napster is not 100% evil and bad for artists, although it is mostly) I'm glad that they're taking the initiative as an artist to bring this issue into the light. With Lars on one side and Chuck D on the other, we can have a good, open debate about the future of music in the digital realm. Presumably Napster is only the beginning, so it's good that this is on the table now rather than later when it's too late to assure that artists still get paid, which I think we can agree is a Good Thing (tm).
I got a digital camera from Wired as part of the digimarc promotion. It did work, with a few caveats. For example, the camera had to be focused at a point about five inches away, which means if you're using it for videoconferencing, you'd probably have to re-focus it just to see the ad. Also, some ads worked better than others in terms of success ratio, but it really was cool to go to a URL just by holding a piece of paper in front of a camera. The hassel of getting to the point where you could hold the paper up (lanching the software, focusing the camera, adjusting white points, etc) didn't make it worth it beyond the first few ads. Notice now that there are almost no digimarc ads in Wired, at least in the latest issue.
The cat thing seems like an interesting idea, although I'm a bit upset that it seems to not be USB, and therefore probably not Mac-compatible, and so I'm out of luck (unless I got a USB adapter for it and used it on my iBook which has Linux installed...), although I'll take any free stuff Wired sends me.
Still, I can't see wholly what the point of it all is. First off, the new media-type companies that advertise in Wired tend to have company.com URLs anyway, and they're not that hard to type in. When I tried the digimark'd ads in Wired, I was hoping for some special payoff given the neat-o way that I got to the site, but I didn't. Both the advertisers and the magazine publishers need to figure out exactly *why* this would be useful, and exploit it. If I got a treat for holding the magazine up, or scanning the barcode in, the company would certainly have one foot in the door as far as attracting my attention.
The real possibilities come with blending the printed magazine with online content. If Wired stories began to have an online component that you could get to with the gizmo, whatever it was, then there's something truly useful there. And, it could provide a way of verifying that the person viewing the site is a purchaser of the magazine, so online content could be kept from jeopardizing newstand sales.
Really, when you think about it, if these URL-entering devices were around two years ago, think about what that would have meant for Pathfinder...
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, Apple's manuals are horrendously bad. There's little useful information there about the way the GUI part of the operating system works, let alone the BSD underpinnings.
Still, I guess that's why there are handy sites like Mac OS X Hints and the like for reference.
As far as features, the iBook rivals its wintel competitors as far as price. If you want more than what it has, get a PowerBook; the iBook isn't, nor is it supposed to be, for everybody.
I'm not sure how it stacks up against most of the wintel laptops, but the iBook (especially the new iBooks) certainly beat the pants off of Gateway's new Solo 5300 laptops. For the same amount of money, you get more harddrive space, more memory, FireWire (plus iMovie!), a wireless networking card, and an Ethernet port. (The wireless card is optional and $100, but the iBook is also $100 cheaper than the Gateway.) The iBook gets between 4 and 6 hours of battery life (during real use, too).
Speaking of the demand curve, just look at wireless networking. Apple has been on the forefront of this, and IBM and Dell have just started to play catch up. Wireless networking on a laptop is one of the coolest things I've ever used, and literally has to be experienced to be appreciated.
So much for this "18 months behind the demand curve."
(My iBook also dual boots to Linux, which it runs really well.)
_pete
I definately agree with you. Yeah, $30 is steep, but I'll pay for it for two reasons.
First, I won't have to bother downloading a CD-ROM size image and then burning it. I could do this (if it were available) as I have a dorm room T1 and a CD-R drive, but it is nevertheless much easier to get the beta CD from Apple.
Second, I am assuming that the $30 I pay entitles me to some level of interaction with Apple. A feedback form has already been posted, and Apple is setting up a knowledge base as well. As a rabid Mac user, I'm willing to pay money to give Apple feedback on this software. It is simultaneously the next big thing in both the Mac world and probably the personal computer arena as a whole, and it is Apple's last chance in some ways as well. In the interests of the platform, I want to do all that I can to make sure that the release version is as good as it can be, and I'll pay for that priviledge. With the money from the sale of the beta, I hope Apple will pay for support staffers and forums and such, and make the whole feedback thing a more professional operation than tends to exist in most public betas.
On a somewhat related note, how many people have bought Red Hat or other Linux distros? Their constituent parts are available for free, and yet people pony up cash (I'm not sure how much... probably near $30) for those.
Plus, a few people have mentioned getting a rebate on the purchase of the full OS X release... I haven't heard anything about that from Apple or the news sites, but I wouldn't doubt it and it makes me even happier that I've paid for the public beta.
What people seem to realize is that most Napster use is stealing. You can't get away from that with any number of free speech claims. I'm glad that Metallica is taking a stand as a concerned artist in this matter. Unlike most major label bands, they own the rights to all of their songs, and are therefore more directly affected by the free-distribution that is possible under Napster. Under US copyright law, if you don't try to protect your copyright, chances are you can lose it.
While I don't agree with Metallica on all counts (ie: Napster is not 100% evil and bad for artists, although it is mostly) I'm glad that they're taking the initiative as an artist to bring this issue into the light. With Lars on one side and Chuck D on the other, we can have a good, open debate about the future of music in the digital realm. Presumably Napster is only the beginning, so it's good that this is on the table now rather than later when it's too late to assure that artists still get paid, which I think we can agree is a Good Thing (tm).
_pete
I got a digital camera from Wired as part of the digimarc promotion. It did work, with a few caveats. For example, the camera had to be focused at a point about five inches away, which means if you're using it for videoconferencing, you'd probably have to re-focus it just to see the ad. Also, some ads worked better than others in terms of success ratio, but it really was cool to go to a URL just by holding a piece of paper in front of a camera. The hassel of getting to the point where you could hold the paper up (lanching the software, focusing the camera, adjusting white points, etc) didn't make it worth it beyond the first few ads. Notice now that there are almost no digimarc ads in Wired, at least in the latest issue.
The cat thing seems like an interesting idea, although I'm a bit upset that it seems to not be USB, and therefore probably not Mac-compatible, and so I'm out of luck (unless I got a USB adapter for it and used it on my iBook which has Linux installed...), although I'll take any free stuff Wired sends me.
Still, I can't see wholly what the point of it all is. First off, the new media-type companies that advertise in Wired tend to have company.com URLs anyway, and they're not that hard to type in. When I tried the digimark'd ads in Wired, I was hoping for some special payoff given the neat-o way that I got to the site, but I didn't. Both the advertisers and the magazine publishers need to figure out exactly *why* this would be useful, and exploit it. If I got a treat for holding the magazine up, or scanning the barcode in, the company would certainly have one foot in the door as far as attracting my attention.
The real possibilities come with blending the printed magazine with online content. If Wired stories began to have an online component that you could get to with the gizmo, whatever it was, then there's something truly useful there. And, it could provide a way of verifying that the person viewing the site is a purchaser of the magazine, so online content could be kept from jeopardizing newstand sales.
Really, when you think about it, if these URL-entering devices were around two years ago, think about what that would have meant for Pathfinder...
_pete