Seems kind of obvious that on the same day as a financial report that saw Apple miss their targets, wow, Mountain Lion is released with its low, low, low price.
I think you might want to turn down the paranoia. The Mountain Lion previews have been out for about 6 months when Apple was setting records.
The $3000+ TCO you pay for the pleasure of owning an iPhone is a different story.
First off it ain't $3000. Second if you are going to count the total cost of a smartphone plan, the there is nothing special about iPhone. iPhone vs. the cheapest options is like a 5% difference.
and there is no denying it because there is no rational argument that can be made for Apple charging for trivial OS X upgrades when they have offered free substantial iOS upgrades in the past
10.0 - $129, 10.1 - $129 (free for 10.0), 10.2 - $129, 10.3 - $129, 10.4 - $129, 10.5 - $129, 10.6 - $29, 10.7 - $29, 10.8 - $19. Long before there was an iOS apple charged for upgrades.
You don't need a tool. If you open up the package that comes with mountain lion there is a file which is mountable / burnable as a stand alone installer. Very typical of Apple: hard enough to stop people who don't know what they are doing from shooting themselves in the foot, easy enough that if you do know what you are doing you can make your install media.
Since that was an AC... I'll answer for him. His rMBP means the $20 was waived. He got the license for $0 but that license applies to any machine he logs into with his App store account.
I would bet that OSX users use far more free software than Windows users.
1) OSX users were early users of Camino (a gecko based browser) and had a much higher Gecko adoption rate than Firefox on Windows during those crucial years. 2) In 2003 Apple released webcore and created the open engine that became the basis for Safari, Chrome and fed back into Konq. 3) Ruby is on its way into deep integration into Apple. 4) Darwin is free in both senses 5) A huge percentage of Apple users use Open/Libre/Neo Office. etc..
I would have tried OSX ages ago, if only Apple let me install it on hardware I already owned instead of purchasing new hardware which is spec'd damn near the same as what I've already got.
I would have tried Black Berry OS 10 if only RIM would let me use it on iPhone. Huh? Apple is not Microsoft, they do not sell operating systems. If you are unwilling to buy an Apple then why would they care if you try OSX?
I've never written for OSX and I've been on OSX since 10.1. And the reason is that OSX is a pretty good Unix while having good business productivity software. As a Unix / development environment it is not as good as Linux, but certainly more than consistent enough with most server environments to make it possible to develop. In Windows everything is handled differently. The networking stack on windows is totally different: better in some respects, worse in others, but so different that developing on windows is pointless. And frankly the quartz based X11 ain't half bad so you can run most Linux dev tools and integrate them into your OS X workflow.
The Apple community isn't like the Windows community. A very large percentage of the userbase does every OS upgrade, and that was true even when they charged $129 for them. Developers are allowed to force the issue, for example there are many applications which require 10.7.3 Feb 1, 2012 release) or newer already. At the same time software buyers expect support very quickly. Pretty much everyone is going to 10.8 over the next few years and probably 80% of the user base this year.
I'm not sure why how many decided to do it this week rather than a month for now matters though.
No, I'm responding to a claim that the funders would create bias in the researchers but pointing out the funders are diverse. If you don't believe funders have an influence on the results of research your issue is with the GP.
People in technology often don't think in terms of NPV. In other words money today is worth a lot more than money in the future. Innovation that drives down costs, can cannibalize existing products. Interest rate adjusted that can be devastatingly stupid.
In other words, financially it can often be the right thing to hold all of a market at a higher price rather than lose a market. Lots of Parc innovations would drive down publishing and reproduction costs in ways that would devastate Xerox. How Xerox understood low large the publishing market would be once it became cheap of course they would have brought at these technologies. But at the time Xerox looked at Parc's innovations as very risky to the bottom line, not if they failed but if they succeeded.
The Xerox systems was written in SmallTalk and used a SmallTalk object system. You wouldn't see anything like that approach in GUIs until (arguably), Visual Basic / Windows 3.0, it was not the approach that Apple choose.
The core of the iPhone (2007) was: a) capacitive touchscreen as the primary or sole means of input b) animation based interaction c) high speed web rendering
There was no other system in 2007 that made use of those 3 things together. There were systems that made use of some of those pieces prior to the iPhone. After the iPhone everyone is making use of those 3 things and making them the core.
1) A discussion of how ideas evolve, which ironically enough has been a topic of discussion evolving over the thousands of years of human culture with no consensus emerging. 2) A discussion of specific historical events, a history of science / history of engineering debate. 3) A discussion of what is the distinction between innovation and improvement. 4) A discussion about specific details of specific innovations between Apple and Samsung.
I don't think there are many, if any people on/. that think that technology patents should offer 17 year monopolies. But the disagreement, which is broad, on policy doesn't change the historical facts.
Actually NeXT was pretty cheap for the workstation market. NeXT had problems because he jumped into the Unix workstation market just at the point where the whole Unix workstation market was dying (not in terms of sales but in terms of innovation) switching over to the x86 market, and the move in Unix was to Unix servers. SGI, IBM and Sun had mature products to sell into this market. NeXT was incredibly innovative, at a time when the workstation market was not about innovation. Where there was a lot of room though was figuring out how to bring workstation technology down to cheap x86 (and PPC) hardware. And once NeXT (Apple) tried to do that, they came up with OSX which worked out well.
If you think of NeXT as a really cool PC then it was too expensive. Though not by much (only about 2x price of high end Mac or PC). if Jobs had stuck with his vision of the academic market, he might have been able to bring the cost down. If you think of NeXT as a cool workstation than it was underpowered and immature.
Prototypes are not products. Real life involves many things more than just invention, like being able to manufacture it cheaply enough to get to market. There are great retina 30" displays that exist and are sold to the radiological market at $18k. And there have been great "retina" displays for a decade. Apple / Panasonic invention is not inventing retina but getting the cost of manufacture down by a factor of about 50x so that the entire supporting infrastructure can evolve.
All sorts of things exist in academia, and research facilities that don't exist yet in the market.
To violate a patent you have to steal a means of doing something. The approach that Apple choose with Macintosh was quite often very different than the approach that Xerox choose with their Smalltalk based system. That's not to say they were not heavily inspired by Xerox, but inspired is not a patent violation.
Yes and your historical facts are wrong. Xerox had pieces of those technologies and prototypes of those technologies. If you blur out enough details typewriters were "essentially" computer word processors. Forget Apple. The guys who left Xerox to form Adobe did so because Interpress (later Postscript later PDF) was not the direction Xerox choose to go. Adope really did invent stuff. The idea of Postscript is not the same as the reality of Postscript.
Go to http://research.microsoft.com/ and you can see something very much like Parc today all sorts of incredible innovations.
The Apple 2 was not a Xerox, there was nothing similar between them. I think you mean the LIsa. And it was not literally a Xerox. There were some idea from the Xerox prototype that were in the Lisa then later the Mac.
There were lots of touchscreen far earlier than 2000. Palm was dominant from about the mid 1990s with a touchscreen. Phones didn't have touchscreens in the early 2000s because phones were about making phone calls and texting. Other devices, designed to plug into your computer and download information in advance, were about data. It took a while till those two separate product classes joined.
Or we conclude that the AC was dead wrong and in Prada vs. iPhone we had very different technologies, using different designs that achieved different goals. The actual differences between Prada and iPhone show what independent evolution looks like.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems kind of obvious that on the same day as a financial report that saw Apple miss their targets, wow, Mountain Lion is released with its low, low, low price.
I think you might want to turn down the paranoia. The Mountain Lion previews have been out for about 6 months when Apple was setting records.
The $3000+ TCO you pay for the pleasure of owning an iPhone is a different story.
First off it ain't $3000. Second if you are going to count the total cost of a smartphone plan, the there is nothing special about iPhone. iPhone vs. the cheapest options is like a 5% difference.
and there is no denying it because there is no rational argument that can be made for Apple charging for trivial OS X upgrades when they have offered free substantial iOS upgrades in the past
10.0 - $129, 10.1 - $129 (free for 10.0), 10.2 - $129, 10.3 - $129, 10.4 - $129, 10.5 - $129, 10.6 - $29, 10.7 - $29, 10.8 - $19. Long before there was an iOS apple charged for upgrades.
You don't need a tool. If you open up the package that comes with mountain lion there is a file which is mountable / burnable as a stand alone installer. Very typical of Apple: hard enough to stop people who don't know what they are doing from shooting themselves in the foot, easy enough that if you do know what you are doing you can make your install media.
Since that was an AC... I'll answer for him. His rMBP means the $20 was waived. He got the license for $0 but that license applies to any machine he logs into with his App store account.
I would bet that OSX users use far more free software than Windows users.
1) OSX users were early users of Camino (a gecko based browser) and had a much higher Gecko adoption rate than Firefox on Windows during those crucial years.
2) In 2003 Apple released webcore and created the open engine that became the basis for Safari, Chrome and fed back into Konq.
3) Ruby is on its way into deep integration into Apple.
4) Darwin is free in both senses
5) A huge percentage of Apple users use Open/Libre/Neo Office.
etc..
I would have tried OSX ages ago, if only Apple let me install it on hardware I already owned instead of purchasing new hardware which is spec'd damn near the same as what I've already got.
I would have tried Black Berry OS 10 if only RIM would let me use it on iPhone. Huh?
Apple is not Microsoft, they do not sell operating systems. If you are unwilling to buy an Apple then why would they care if you try OSX?
I've never written for OSX and I've been on OSX since 10.1. And the reason is that OSX is a pretty good Unix while having good business productivity software. As a Unix / development environment it is not as good as Linux, but certainly more than consistent enough with most server environments to make it possible to develop. In Windows everything is handled differently. The networking stack on windows is totally different: better in some respects, worse in others, but so different that developing on windows is pointless. And frankly the quartz based X11 ain't half bad so you can run most Linux dev tools and integrate them into your OS X workflow.
Great point about the importance of iCloud and Sandboxing.
For me. I usually like to wait about 3 months for upgrades. But will do this one very soon. The feature I want is the enhanced video drivers for rMBP.
Other stuff I like:
1) iMessage
2) Share / autosave / iCloud tightly wound together.
3) Launchpad search (for my parent's computers)
4) Fine control over mail notifications
5) iCloud tabs
6) X11 install on demand (for distribution)
7) Expanding scroll bars
And powernap might be cool.
The Apple community isn't like the Windows community. A very large percentage of the userbase does every OS upgrade, and that was true even when they charged $129 for them. Developers are allowed to force the issue, for example there are many applications which require 10.7.3 Feb 1, 2012 release) or newer already. At the same time software buyers expect support very quickly. Pretty much everyone is going to 10.8 over the next few years and probably 80% of the user base this year.
I'm not sure why how many decided to do it this week rather than a month for now matters though.
I got one of those, and about 20 minutes later another email with the corrected codes.
Just confirming what the AC said here as another person who got the free upgrade.
No, I'm responding to a claim that the funders would create bias in the researchers but pointing out the funders are diverse. If you don't believe funders have an influence on the results of research your issue is with the GP.
Yes he's too young to have computing in the early 1980s. Welcome to middle age, macs4all, and this crap gets worse as you get older.
object oriented programming.
Sketchpad 1961 MIT. Those ideas get incorporated into Simula and Alan Kay brings them to Xerox. Xerox didn't invent OO.
People in technology often don't think in terms of NPV. In other words money today is worth a lot more than money in the future. Innovation that drives down costs, can cannibalize existing products. Interest rate adjusted that can be devastatingly stupid.
In other words, financially it can often be the right thing to hold all of a market at a higher price rather than lose a market. Lots of Parc innovations would drive down publishing and reproduction costs in ways that would devastate Xerox. How Xerox understood low large the publishing market would be once it became cheap of course they would have brought at these technologies. But at the time Xerox looked at Parc's innovations as very risky to the bottom line, not if they failed but if they succeeded.
The Xerox systems was written in SmallTalk and used a SmallTalk object system. You wouldn't see anything like that approach in GUIs until (arguably), Visual Basic / Windows 3.0, it was not the approach that Apple choose.
The core of the iPhone (2007) was:
a) capacitive touchscreen as the primary or sole means of input
b) animation based interaction
c) high speed web rendering
There was no other system in 2007 that made use of those 3 things together. There were systems that made use of some of those pieces prior to the iPhone. After the iPhone everyone is making use of those 3 things and making them the core.
There are 4 issues here.
1) A discussion of how ideas evolve, which ironically enough has been a topic of discussion evolving over the thousands of years of human culture with no consensus emerging.
2) A discussion of specific historical events, a history of science / history of engineering debate.
3) A discussion of what is the distinction between innovation and improvement.
4) A discussion about specific details of specific innovations between Apple and Samsung.
I don't think there are many, if any people on /. that think that technology patents should offer 17 year monopolies. But the disagreement, which is broad, on policy doesn't change the historical facts.
Actually NeXT was pretty cheap for the workstation market. NeXT had problems because he jumped into the Unix workstation market just at the point where the whole Unix workstation market was dying (not in terms of sales but in terms of innovation) switching over to the x86 market, and the move in Unix was to Unix servers. SGI, IBM and Sun had mature products to sell into this market. NeXT was incredibly innovative, at a time when the workstation market was not about innovation. Where there was a lot of room though was figuring out how to bring workstation technology down to cheap x86 (and PPC) hardware. And once NeXT (Apple) tried to do that, they came up with OSX which worked out well.
If you think of NeXT as a really cool PC then it was too expensive. Though not by much (only about 2x price of high end Mac or PC). if Jobs had stuck with his vision of the academic market, he might have been able to bring the cost down.
If you think of NeXT as a cool workstation than it was underpowered and immature.
Prototypes are not products. Real life involves many things more than just invention, like being able to manufacture it cheaply enough to get to market. There are great retina 30" displays that exist and are sold to the radiological market at $18k. And there have been great "retina" displays for a decade. Apple / Panasonic invention is not inventing retina but getting the cost of manufacture down by a factor of about 50x so that the entire supporting infrastructure can evolve.
All sorts of things exist in academia, and research facilities that don't exist yet in the market.
To violate a patent you have to steal a means of doing something. The approach that Apple choose with Macintosh was quite often very different than the approach that Xerox choose with their Smalltalk based system. That's not to say they were not heavily inspired by Xerox, but inspired is not a patent violation.
Yes and your historical facts are wrong. Xerox had pieces of those technologies and prototypes of those technologies. If you blur out enough details typewriters were "essentially" computer word processors. Forget Apple. The guys who left Xerox to form Adobe did so because Interpress (later Postscript later PDF) was not the direction Xerox choose to go. Adope really did invent stuff. The idea of Postscript is not the same as the reality of Postscript.
Go to http://research.microsoft.com/ and you can see something very much like Parc today all sorts of incredible innovations.
The Apple 2 was not a Xerox, there was nothing similar between them. I think you mean the LIsa. And it was not literally a Xerox. There were some idea from the Xerox prototype that were in the Lisa then later the Mac.
The iPhone looks very much like the LG Prada,
Yes but it doesn't act anything like the LG Prada. Once you get beyond the most surface examination independent evolution is immediately evident.
There were lots of touchscreen far earlier than 2000. Palm was dominant from about the mid 1990s with a touchscreen. Phones didn't have touchscreens in the early 2000s because phones were about making phone calls and texting. Other devices, designed to plug into your computer and download information in advance, were about data. It took a while till those two separate product classes joined.
But if you want a 2002 phone with a touchscreen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_180
Or we conclude that the AC was dead wrong and in Prada vs. iPhone we had very different technologies, using different designs that achieved different goals. The actual differences between Prada and iPhone show what independent evolution looks like.