Apple is actually alienating some of its most influential users, the ones with the big fancy machines that other Apple owners fap to
On what Mac site do you see complaints about the Mac Retina? I see little but raves about how fast the system is tieing the 2008 macpro (the desktop) in most CPU / memory tasks and with 450M/sec hard drives crushing desktops that don't have top of the line RAIDs.
The changes to Final Cut Pro alienated their user influential users. The rMBP is why people buy Apple products.
The macbook air is hugely successful and can't be upgraded. The way you upgrade a mac is you sell it or give it away and get a new one.
What Apple needs to do is start figuring out how to get themselves enterprise-friendly without losing their consumer market. Enterprises buy stuff in such large chunks that a few good contracts are a lot better than lines around the building of hipsters.
Based on what? Enterprise customers are a) cheap while Apple tends to offer top of the line hardware b) demand long support cycles which goes against Apple's ability to rapidly move their eco system c) don't care about design....
Apple has most of the profits in the desktop industry and a huge chunk in the mobile industry. Because they focus on being end user and are not IT friendly.
First off Apple users don't have final word on what runs. They like a managed platform. Essentially they like government over anarchy. Over time the iPhone has gotten more open not less. As for advanced users, since you know that developers don't have that problem, how exactly have people lost control?
If you know what you are doing you, do what you want. If not, you have sound management. And finally if you don't like Apple's policies you can:
a) Install iPhone Linux b) Jailbreak your iPhone c) Get the developer, enterprise or university SDK and change your policy settings
The life cycle on a phone from the major carriers is 2 years. And Apple generally supports phones for a little over 3 from initial release date. With the 3G it has been much longer and still counting.
RIM doesn't agree with you. Shipments of new phones are down about 1/2 what they were 2 years ago.
solid top-of-the-line hardware
Huh? In what way?
I agree that RIM has a good product, just not that it is comparable to Apple / Android offerings in terms of OS, software or hardware. Frankly given their data efficiency I think they should move down market. RIM messaging / email plus light browsing (especially because of compression) is fine with a 200m dataplan / mo or even using 2G data. That's what they should be doing, going for being a cheap alternative until they get comparable. In terms of security, no question RIM is the leader. Really they are the only phone with enterprise features. Which again, cheaper could help.
They often start off with some very courageous moves and lose their nerve. For example if Longhorn/Vista had had all 3 major enhancements: Aero interface, database filesystem, trusted computing it would have been a huge shift. Similarly if they had gone ahead with the user defined functions by example in Excel that would have been a major advance for spread sheets. I'm hoping they don't chicken out with Windows 8, and totally shifting to a vector graphics cross platform OS with legacy support.
Agree on the 1990s internet with simple pages. I love going to pages without all that crap, with just basic hyperlinks, text and graphics.
As far as usage and family, let me pick mine. Everyone but me is a non programmer. Daughter and Father don't stress their systems. My mother likes to use about a dozen SaaS apps at the same time in the browser. She swapping to VM even with 8 gigs of ram and burning through a dual core. She could easily step up to much faster.
My wife is not a programmer but far exceeds my needs. I keep telling her to buy a 12 core system, for home use. She in any given 3 mo probably rips about 200-400 hrs of video into a different format. Her Powerpoints and Word docs always have embedded video and sound. And she's messing with them while doing video chat, using SaaS synchronization services web browsing (though as you mentioned, she doesn't use tabs). Oh and she wrote her own custom device driver in Applescript (incredible evidence of how empowering Apple can be) so she has a piece of hardware constantly triggering an interpreted language as part of her interface. If she had a computer 10x as fast she'd chew it up by just upping the resolutions she works with.
My sister, if she had the system to handle it, would love to be running BI stuff in Excel (she lives in Excel) with 10m row spreadsheets or having differential equations as the cell formulas. Excel can't do that, so she ends up using an Excel like interface to a DB2 backend but I would gather she's probably stressing multiple servers when she works. Brother in law, could probably do fine with XBox and a 286 for work.
My brother used to be a gamer but gave up because his computers were too slow.
I don't see people's needs being met by today's hardware.
I run OSX on that system. But I've had the same problem with Windows boxes. For example I'm on a Windows box right now which has project, excel and IE open (2g ram, 2 ghz processor) and it is only semi-responsive. For example when I started msinfo32 to pull up the processor info I could actually see the ghost of the window form and had to wait for the application to complete drawing the window.
As far as my needs what I've found is additional hardware headroom just gets used as more advanced tasks become possible. For example on my current box I had just enough power to taking a video and creating a standard DVD (iDVD). It still is about a 7 hr process for the rip and even using the app is unpleasant because I have to be careful. I wouldn't even think of doing this with a BluRay. Or for example I don't regularly update my ports because long compiles still take about 4 hrs, if on the other hand that went to 20 minutes...
That's not the right analogy. The only start menu type functionality in the apple menu is the recent items tab, which is roughly equivalent. The analogy to the start menu, access to applications, is dragging the Applications menu to the dock. But the ability to use an arbitrary folder / smart folder on the dock is where I disagree that the Dock is less powerful than the start menu.
Linux is not going to merge. It ain't gonna happen. The desktops are getting further apart not closer together in the last decade. Linux offers choice not consistency.
It sounds like what you want is a window manager and not a GUI. Excellent Window managers are Linux's strength. For example you want keyboard bindings: http://www.haskell.org/wikiupload/b/b8/Xmbindings.png and these are all changeable easily.
I'm running ABP. I agree the ads are terrible but the content of the sites are also problematic. In any case if you agree the problems happen with FF, Chrome and Safari then you get my point that web browsing is a very high utilization application. I do actually own a license for Omniweb, now that its free it doesn't matter, which has ABP from the ground up. But ultimately if I need speed and don't care about compatibility I'll use Links. I want to stay mainstreamish when it comes to browsers.
Anyway that was my only point that it is easy to tax a system browsing the web.
I see you are debating the ACs on this post. Anyway, Gnome and KDE quickly took very different paths.
In the first generation KDE had allied itself with the United Linux (Caldera, Sus...) effort while Gnome allied itself with the User Linux / Debian and RedHat crowd. That drove KDE towards a power user feel while Gnome focused on simplicity and elegance. The two complement one another. Linux users divide on which they prefer.
I've been a Unix user since 1988, Linux since 1995 and an OSX user since 10.1. I'll tell you why I used it. At the time I switched I was a Windows 2000 / Linux dual booter.
Linux offered the best all around Unix experience, but a terrible business productivity experience Windows offered the best business productivity experience, but cygwin and unix services for windows were a terrible substitute for Unix. OSX offered an OK Unix (with fink) and a pretty good business productivity experience. It was about equally complex to setup right with Linux.
Over the last decade.
Linux is still the best Unix experience, and still the worst business productivity though it has gotten much better. Windows has gotten some truly wonderful business service applications that cost a ton. If you exclude those Windows is about the same. Excluding those server apps, OSX is getting close to Windows in terms of business productivity and Fink/Macports is slightly better than it was. The setup has gotten dead simple. Moreover in the 10 years I've grown to love the graphic integration features of OSX. Drag and drop works so well on OSX you forget how far ahead it is until you use another system and realize what you can't do all the time.
If you care only about FOSS software stick with Linux. If you have commercial apps you need to run, OSX is a really good compromise and all around pleasant experience.
And Desktop Linux didn't gain share that time because they were also busy screwing up.
Actually they did gain share at the time. They made a major thrust into a new market with Netbooks. They lost once Microsoft released and then subsidized Windows XP on that platform but Linux was able to gain share in a niche where Microsoft couldn't compete with Vista.
I find the whole summary rather interesting. It starts by mentioning Adobe's divestment of Flex, which really is a thin client architecture. You'll notice that Adobe's apps are still mostly fat client. You download and install CS6 the only "cloud" thing is you pay a monthly service fee rather than have to buy all at once. The article also fails to mention.Net and Objective-C/XCode.
This cycle has been going on since the 1960s. In systems that are cost efficient special case stuff gets pushed out for speed. This leads to systems that are difficult to manage so stuff that was pushed out gets pushed back into general purpose for cost. We are in a world where mobile is pushing stuff out (i.e. platform specific) and desktop is pushing stuff in (web applications). But we are far from a world where either paradigm is uniform.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple is not enterprise friendly. Apple has some enterprise features.
Let me link you to an advanced enterprise feature: http://us.blackberry.com/business/software/blackberry-mobile-voice-system.html
Apple has nothing like that. The fact that RIM is losing ground to a company that barely even tries in the enterprise, shows you how effective Apple is at consumer features.
Apple is actually alienating some of its most influential users, the ones with the big fancy machines that other Apple owners fap to
On what Mac site do you see complaints about the Mac Retina? I see little but raves about how fast the system is tieing the 2008 macpro (the desktop) in most CPU / memory tasks and with 450M/sec hard drives crushing desktops that don't have top of the line RAIDs.
The changes to Final Cut Pro alienated their user influential users. The rMBP is why people buy Apple products.
The macbook air is hugely successful and can't be upgraded. The way you upgrade a mac is you sell it or give it away and get a new one.
What Apple needs to do is start figuring out how to get themselves enterprise-friendly without losing their consumer market. Enterprises buy stuff in such large chunks that a few good contracts are a lot better than lines around the building of hipsters.
Based on what? Enterprise customers are ....
a) cheap while Apple tends to offer top of the line hardware
b) demand long support cycles which goes against Apple's ability to rapidly move their eco system
c) don't care about design
Apple has most of the profits in the desktop industry and a huge chunk in the mobile industry. Because they focus on being end user and are not IT friendly.
First off Apple users don't have final word on what runs. They like a managed platform. Essentially they like government over anarchy. Over time the iPhone has gotten more open not less. As for advanced users, since you know that developers don't have that problem, how exactly have people lost control?
If you know what you are doing you, do what you want. If not, you have sound management. And finally if you don't like Apple's policies you can:
a) Install iPhone Linux
b) Jailbreak your iPhone
c) Get the developer, enterprise or university SDK and change your policy settings
The life cycle on a phone from the major carriers is 2 years. And Apple generally supports phones for a little over 3 from initial release date. With the 3G it has been much longer and still counting.
Their user-base is still growing rapidly.
RIM doesn't agree with you. Shipments of new phones are down about 1/2 what they were 2 years ago.
solid top-of-the-line hardware
Huh? In what way?
I agree that RIM has a good product, just not that it is comparable to Apple / Android offerings in terms of OS, software or hardware. Frankly given their data efficiency I think they should move down market. RIM messaging / email plus light browsing (especially because of compression) is fine with a 200m dataplan / mo or even using 2G data. That's what they should be doing, going for being a cheap alternative until they get comparable. In terms of security, no question RIM is the leader. Really they are the only phone with enterprise features. Which again, cheaper could help.
They often start off with some very courageous moves and lose their nerve. For example if Longhorn/Vista had had all 3 major enhancements: Aero interface, database filesystem, trusted computing it would have been a huge shift. Similarly if they had gone ahead with the user defined functions by example in Excel that would have been a major advance for spread sheets. I'm hoping they don't chicken out with Windows 8, and totally shifting to a vector graphics cross platform OS with legacy support.
OSX is a unix of course it allows insertion of software between the real and virtual TCP stack, the dev filesystem.
Here are two common utilities that wrap that functionality:
http://www.metakine.com/products/handsoff/
http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html
Agree on quicktime though the iPhone has parts of Quicktime actually working in custom hardware.
As far as bypassing that hardware, yep, then video sucks. The iPhone creates the illusion of more power than it has by careful design choice.
Agree on the 1990s internet with simple pages. I love going to pages without all that crap, with just basic hyperlinks, text and graphics.
As far as usage and family, let me pick mine. Everyone but me is a non programmer. Daughter and Father don't stress their systems. My mother likes to use about a dozen SaaS apps at the same time in the browser. She swapping to VM even with 8 gigs of ram and burning through a dual core. She could easily step up to much faster.
My wife is not a programmer but far exceeds my needs. I keep telling her to buy a 12 core system, for home use. She in any given 3 mo probably rips about 200-400 hrs of video into a different format. Her Powerpoints and Word docs always have embedded video and sound. And she's messing with them while doing video chat, using SaaS synchronization services web browsing (though as you mentioned, she doesn't use tabs). Oh and she wrote her own custom device driver in Applescript (incredible evidence of how empowering Apple can be) so she has a piece of hardware constantly triggering an interpreted language as part of her interface. If she had a computer 10x as fast she'd chew it up by just upping the resolutions she works with.
My sister, if she had the system to handle it, would love to be running BI stuff in Excel (she lives in Excel) with 10m row spreadsheets or having differential equations as the cell formulas. Excel can't do that, so she ends up using an Excel like interface to a DB2 backend but I would gather she's probably stressing multiple servers when she works. Brother in law, could probably do fine with XBox and a 286 for work.
My brother used to be a gamer but gave up because his computers were too slow.
I don't see people's needs being met by today's hardware.
I run OSX on that system. But I've had the same problem with Windows boxes. For example I'm on a Windows box right now which has project, excel and IE open (2g ram, 2 ghz processor) and it is only semi-responsive. For example when I started msinfo32 to pull up the processor info I could actually see the ghost of the window form and had to wait for the application to complete drawing the window.
As far as my needs what I've found is additional hardware headroom just gets used as more advanced tasks become possible. For example on my current box I had just enough power to taking a video and creating a standard DVD (iDVD). It still is about a 7 hr process for the rip and even using the app is unpleasant because I have to be careful. I wouldn't even think of doing this with a BluRay. Or for example I don't regularly update my ports because long compiles still take about 4 hrs, if on the other hand that went to 20 minutes...
That's not the right analogy. The only start menu type functionality in the apple menu is the recent items tab, which is roughly equivalent. The analogy to the start menu, access to applications, is dragging the Applications menu to the dock. But the ability to use an arbitrary folder / smart folder on the dock is where I disagree that the Dock is less powerful than the start menu.
Linux has stable environments. I've been using WindowMaker since '95 and it hasn't changed much at all.
OSX allows for that. You create a script in Automator (which allows for AppleScript / Shell Script) and add it to the service menu.
findutils.
"port install findutils" and you have all of them.
Linux is not going to merge. It ain't gonna happen. The desktops are getting further apart not closer together in the last decade. Linux offers choice not consistency.
It sounds like what you want is a window manager and not a GUI. Excellent Window managers are Linux's strength. For example you want keyboard bindings: http://www.haskell.org/wikiupload/b/b8/Xmbindings.png and these are all changeable easily.
I'm running ABP. I agree the ads are terrible but the content of the sites are also problematic. In any case if you agree the problems happen with FF, Chrome and Safari then you get my point that web browsing is a very high utilization application. I do actually own a license for Omniweb, now that its free it doesn't matter, which has ABP from the ground up. But ultimately if I need speed and don't care about compatibility I'll use Links. I want to stay mainstreamish when it comes to browsers.
Anyway that was my only point that it is easy to tax a system browsing the web.
My wife uses word features (automatic bibliography handling) that are not part of OO. So there's one.
http://cocoatech.com/pathfinder/
Just replace finder with something more advanced. I personally use http://www.alfredapp.com/ which has wonderful path related commands
What people mean by good is substantially better than the competition.
I see you are debating the ACs on this post. Anyway, Gnome and KDE quickly took very different paths.
In the first generation KDE had allied itself with the United Linux (Caldera, Sus...) effort while Gnome allied itself with the User Linux / Debian and RedHat crowd. That drove KDE towards a power user feel while Gnome focused on simplicity and elegance. The two complement one another. Linux users divide on which they prefer.
I've been a Unix user since 1988, Linux since 1995 and an OSX user since 10.1. I'll tell you why I used it. At the time I switched I was a Windows 2000 / Linux dual booter.
Linux offered the best all around Unix experience, but a terrible business productivity experience
Windows offered the best business productivity experience, but cygwin and unix services for windows were a terrible substitute for Unix.
OSX offered an OK Unix (with fink) and a pretty good business productivity experience. It was about equally complex to setup right with Linux.
Over the last decade.
Linux is still the best Unix experience, and still the worst business productivity though it has gotten much better.
Windows has gotten some truly wonderful business service applications that cost a ton. If you exclude those Windows is about the same.
Excluding those server apps, OSX is getting close to Windows in terms of business productivity and Fink/Macports is slightly better than it was. The setup has gotten dead simple. Moreover in the 10 years I've grown to love the graphic integration features of OSX. Drag and drop works so well on OSX you forget how far ahead it is until you use another system and realize what you can't do all the time.
If you care only about FOSS software stick with Linux. If you have commercial apps you need to run, OSX is a really good compromise and all around pleasant experience.
And Desktop Linux didn't gain share that time because they were also busy screwing up.
Actually they did gain share at the time. They made a major thrust into a new market with Netbooks. They lost once Microsoft released and then subsidized Windows XP on that platform but Linux was able to gain share in a niche where Microsoft couldn't compete with Vista.
I find the whole summary rather interesting. It starts by mentioning Adobe's divestment of Flex, which really is a thin client architecture. You'll notice that Adobe's apps are still mostly fat client. You download and install CS6 the only "cloud" thing is you pay a monthly service fee rather than have to buy all at once. The article also fails to mention .Net and Objective-C/XCode.
In terms of desktop widget sets .Net
Windows =
Apple = Cocoa
Firefox... = XUL
Gnome.. = GTK+
KDE = QT
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_widget_toolkits
This cycle has been going on since the 1960s. In systems that are cost efficient special case stuff gets pushed out for speed. This leads to systems that are difficult to manage so stuff that was pushed out gets pushed back into general purpose for cost. We are in a world where mobile is pushing stuff out (i.e. platform specific) and desktop is pushing stuff in (web applications). But we are far from a world where either paradigm is uniform.