So basically what you're saying is that Apple should have followed the Windows user interface style on Windows, rather than their own?
I can't disagree strongly with that, no.
If there was a better KHTML-based browser on Windows I'd be all over it. Or even a Gecko-based one that didn't have the user-interface written in Javascript with functions to request installation of Javascript from an untrsted web page.
But as it is, Opera and Safari are basically the only browser options for Windows that aren't complete user interface nightmares like KMELION, or insecure-by-design like IE and (albeit to a far lesser extent) Firefox. Doubling the number of choices can't possibly be considered a *bad* thing.
As I wrote a few years ago in A Failure of Vision the filtering that NASA has been doing to accurately recreate the actual colors of Mars's surface actually makes it harder to tell what you're looking at. If you were living and working on Mars, before long your eyes and brain would adapt and you wouldn't see the red planet as particularly red.
If you go and adjust the ground to the rusty red in NASA's usual photos with this new photograph the water doesn't look nearly so watery any more. But when I lined up the peaks in the red, green, and blue channels to try and get an approximation of the original image (only an approximation, of course... but this has produced realistic looking images for me in the past... reddish, yes, but a red like you might see in Arizona) I got this picture of what appears to be normal-looking (not food-coloring-blue) water.
So my question is... what else have people missed, because they're seeing Mars through Earth-filtered images?
Maybe if a few folks out there tried this trick on other NASA imagery we'd find out.
Do you really feel completely comfortable about that? Do you for example feel comfortable knowing that that little radical publisher whose mag you subscribed to, and that has just been raided for some good or bad reason, has put your name and address in everything you bought from them?
Hey, dude, if they were raided, the feds already got your name from them *already*. They don't need to dig your name out of a file to do that.
At this point, every book, record or mag anyone buys online has, imagine, a name and address in it that is verified to a credit card.
Which is why the untracable debit cards you can get at any grocery store in the US are so useful.
I mean, you're using them when you buy your porn aready, right?
Well, when you put yourself ON a do-not-call list, is it surprising that your details remain ON that list?
You misunderstood. Please read more carefully.
I did not put myself on a DNC list.
I was getting mail from AA because I had created an account on their website to look up flight information.
They said that they sent mail to everyone who had an account.
I asked that this account be deleted. They said my account couldn't be deleted, that they *never* removed any information about customers from their database. They had an option to change your email address, but that just created a new record and left the old address in their database marked as an old address. Their mailing list company got all the addresses, old and new. I don't recall who the company was... I want to say it was "Topica", but I'm not sure any more.
They offered to add me to a "Safe Harbour" list at that company instead, so I asked what that entailed, and they explained that it was a global list that company maintained, and applied to all bulk mailings from all that company's customers, not just AA.
I declined that offer. Eventually the mail stopped, I assume they changed the way they handled their lists.
I don't understand what you mean by "allow them to re-add your mailing information again later, through whatever means"... I'm not accusing AA or the company involved of spamming people who hadn't signed up... and if I *did* sign up again, why *wouldn't* I want to get whatever I signed up for? The fact that I didn't want the ads from AA right then doesn't mean I didn't want any mail from AA in the future, or that I didn't want any mail from other customers of the company, or anything like that.
I think you're missing the point: it's right there in the subject line.
The point is that *deleting an account* does not mean *removing your information*.
Clinton was the most fiscally conservative president in the past 50 years. Yes, that's including Reagan, who gets second place. And that's *only* counting non-military spending, so we're not counting Reagan's defense build-up against him.
Bush isn't even in the top five. Even Carter did a better job at keeping spending under control.
I mean, I remember my father telling me about this in the '70s. Except it was about buying pre-recorded tapes versus buying records and making your own tapes.
Several years ago I started getting mail from American Airlines because I'd registered on their website to get some information about flights. It took me several months to get the mail stopped.
1. The company that was sending mail for AA wasn't AA. 2. They had no mechanism to remove my account information (email address and name) from their database. 3. They did have the ability to put me on a "Safe Harbour" list. 4. If they did that, I wouldn't get ANY mail from AA. Ever. Even if I asked for it. 5. Or from any OTHER customers of the mailing list handler. 6. They claimed they needed to do this for various reasons (people who kept re-registering and then complaining about the mail, postal regulations, audits, and so on).
They said that this was common, that most companies never actually removed you, they just marked your record "dead". I checked around after that, and, yes, that did seem to be the way they worked.
Don't be a dope. I already accounted for that copy of Windows Home. The point is that the Mac costs more than the comparable PC, and it's the value *to me* of an operating system that doesn't suck dirty swamp water through used oil filters that makes it worth paying the extra $200, or $300, or $500.
No matter what accounting games you play, the difference in price is real and represents the value of the software.
I don't know about you, but I tot up the stuff that's important to me, and look for something that gives me those features.
So I don't care if adding a video camera to a Wintel laptop would put it over the mark or not, because I wouldn't buy a laptop with a built in video camera. That feature has no value to me.
I don't care if making a PC as small as a Mac mini costs $100 more, that has no value to me.
But I do care if the GPU in my computer does native 3d OpenGL or not.
So when I look at laptops, the cheapest acceptable model from Apple is the 15" Macbook Pro. An acceptable model from Lenovo is around $1250. If I'm going to put up with the GMA950 I can get a decent laptop for $750.
Tricking out a Thinkpad T-series (what I'd be using if I could get OS X for it) with everything I actually care about in my Macbook Pro would cost me $1800.
On the other hand, there's no amount of money I can pay to Apple to get me a Macbook with a Thinkpad keyboard.
See... the ONLY way you get Apple's products looking as cheap as Wintel version is by demanding everything that the Mac provides be included in the PC, but completely discounting the value of anything that comes with the PC that the Mac doesn't include.
The only way I can see to get a Macbook that's comparable to a Thinkpad would be to get someone to build you a custom case, a-la the Modbook. What? That's ridiculous? Then why isn't demanding a built-in camera ridiculous? You can't have it both ways... either handicap BOTH sides equally, or don't treat EITHER as a requirements spec.
Using the Intel video chipset on an Intel motherboard is probably the cheapest configuration that any laptop manufacturer can use.
Probably so, but they're selling $400 worth of PC for $600, and $600 worth of laptop for $1000. With those kind of margins, they can bloody well afford an extra $5 to give them a GPU that doesn't suck. Dropping back 10% in the CPU speed would pay for it, and the resulting computer would be more than 10% faster even for granny surfing the web.
The reason AppleTV is cheaper than an MacMini is simply because an AppleTV is not a computer.
If it's not a computer, than neither is a Mac mini. Neither have any built-in expansion capability to speak of, they're hardwired with whatever Apple shipped them with... and both can run all the same software. Oh, the AppleTV has a cheaper CPU than the mini, and soldered memory, but it *does* have USB, and *can* run full-on OSX natively.
you don't need the horse power of a real GPU if you don't play 3D games and only use the machine to surf the web [...]
You don't need a Core Duo either, if that's all you do.
Both the Mini and the AppleTV are built as cheaply as they can be. If the price difference of the nVidia embedded GPU in the AppleTV was more than a few dollars the AppleTV wouldn't have one.
If you get UFS, the say good-bye to Boot Camp, unless you want to do a fresh install of OS X.
Imprimus, if I wanted to run Windows on my Macbook I wouldn't have bought a Macbook, I'd have bought a better and cheaper laptop with a keyboard and trackpad that didn't aggravate my RSI.
Secundus, I'm going to have to do a fresh install of OSX pretty soon anyway. I don't know if it's HFS+ corruption, prebinding corruption, or what, but if I can't track down what's causing those occasional panics I'm getting it's going to be back to backups pretty soon.
Tertius, for the majority of the switchers who think they need Boot Camp (Parallels or VMWare gives a MUCH better solution for everything but gaming) a reinstall of their new laptop or desktop is hardly a hardship.
Quartus, I'm sure Apple will be able to find some features that ZFS doesn't do as well as HFS+, and THAT is the real point. Apple's reluctance to get rid of horribly bad ideas is legendary. I won't believe they're really switching until I see them switch... I've been burned too often by "Apple is finally coming to their senses" rumors too often. And even when my pessimisim *isn't* justified, they've managed to screw things up all too often. Apple's real advantage is that they don't actually *hate* their customers the way Microsoft does, or secretly despise them as the Linux community does. They're just incurably conservative beneath their progressive front...
HFS+ is a different design. It has advantages in some areas, disadvantages in others, and a lot of those advantages *are* purely theoretical... for example the spotlight features can be implemented on top of *any* file system if they're handled at the vnode layer, and SoftUpdates shows that most of the supposed advantages of other file system structures are simply a matter of write scheduling and disk allocation algorithms that are applicable to any file system. So while there are advantages, they're fewer than you'd think.
With those advantages come a lot of complexity, and attendant fragility. It has *never* been as reliable as UFS, and it's *not* just the utilities. The catalog can be completely corrupted just by running the disk near capacity, and that's *still* true in Tiger.
You're right, Apple likes to cling to ideas that look good on paper. It's burned them over an over again, from the cooperative multitasking of the original OS, through the Copland fiasco, and even the use of Mach... OS X by now uses very little of Mach's features... it's just a performance sucker. And they have a terrible "Not Invented Here" problem. I'm afraid that no matter how good ZFS is, Apple will keep clinging to HFS+ no matter what.
If Apple wanted a better file system they would ALREADY be using UFS.
I'm really sick of HFS+. Three times now I've had it eat its brains so bad that FSCK wouldnt fix it. I have NEVER, not in 20 years that I've been working as a network administrator, had anything even vaguely resembling a modern UNIX file system get so messed up that fsck *refused to work*, not unless the disk was completely destroyed. That hasn't been a problem since ncheck and clri got replaced with fsck back in the '70s!
And in three years, HFS+ ate its own brains three times... and that's just with my own personal hardware.
That's worse than Windows.
When they announced that Panther was getting an updated version of UFS from FreeBSD, I was hopeful. They *almost* had all the HFS+ extra functionality working over UFS in Jaguar... including aliases. But NO, they decided they were going to make the system even more HFS+-specific by putting the Spotlight hooks in the file system instead of the vnode layer.
So until I actually see this come out from Apple, I'd take it with a grain of salt. They've had an appalling tendency to hold onto old bad ideas long past their freshness date.
If you're paying $600 for a desktop or $1000 for a laptop you should be able to do a LOT better than "but it's quite playable".
My mini is the PPC version, and it gets better performance for 3d than the core solo Intel, and the core duo only barely beats it in some areas. Now, I'm not a gamer, I need 3d for other things than killing orcs, but I have dabbled... and the old PPC mini is still "quite playable"...
So rather than spend another $600 upgrading my mini and *still* putting up with "quite playable", I spent less than that on upgrading an old Windows box with a KVM switch, and I run Windows versions of 3d apps. I'd MUCH rather leave that behind me, but until Apple comes to their senses I can't afford to.
If you're not a gamer, the Intel chip is more than adequate.
I'm not a gamer. But I *do* use 3d applications, and the GMA950 is not "more than adequate". Its 3d support is so bad, Apple has to basically blow one of the cores on software OpenGL when you're using 3d.
Plus it is fully supported under Linux with free drivers.
If you're running Linux you can get a much better desktop or laptop for 30-40% less than the Mini or Macbook. Apple is completely non-competitive for Linux at the low end.
I'm not talking about having a more complicated lineup. I'm talking about getting rid of the Intel GPU completely.
This has nothing to do with "professional" versus "entry level".
A *real* GPU, nVidia or ATI, with full OpenGL support, should be a basic part of every Mac model. It's not a matter of price, both ATI and nVidia make cheap low-end GPUs that are better than the Intel models, and if they can put an nVidia GPU in the $300 AppleTV, they can put one in the $600 Mac mini.
That, and my experience with the Macbook Pro and its embroyonic multi-touch support.
Multi-touch is a poor replacement for real keys and buttons, and real buttons is what the HTC phone and the iPhone both lack. Multitouch might make the iPhone might suck slightly less than the HTC device, but anyone who's really interested in getting a good cellphone... as opposed to a poor-to-middling PDA with a cellphone in it... would be well advised to look elsewhere.
The DRM module in OSX does one thing and one thing only - it keeps you from running OS X on non-Apple computers. It's no different from the CD-Key you need to install Windows, and FAR less of an imposition than activation, "Windows Genuine Advantage", Secure Audio/Video Path, DRI, signed drivers, and everything else that Windows imposes on you.
Having to buy Apple hardware to run OS X seems to be about 90% of the author's complaints, and it's a valid one, but the fact that on *some* Macs (and not all) this uses a DRM chip to enforce the lock-in doesn't mean that this is DRM, any more than using a Power PC rather than an intel chip was DRM in the previous generation. The only actual DRM in OS X as shipped is the barely-honor-system-quality encryption that iTunes uses... and that is hopefully on the way out...
Not the screen scraping part, that's OK, but the drag-and-drop is implemented insecurely, by exporting your file system to the VM instance... if you trust Windows with your data, that's fine, but if you're expecting Parallels to act like a sandbox, you better turn that off.
In practice, though, because it IS screen scraping all your Windows windows pop back and forth at the same "level" on your display, which annoyed me enough that I turned it off.
I'm kind of disturbed that they're asking us to pay for the upgrade, since they haven't had a version that's got even beta-quality USB support for more than a few months: I still have to disable and re-enable USB every time I sync my Palm, but at least it's possible now. I feel like I've been paying for being in their beta program, and shouldn't have to pay again for their "real" version.
Even if they're calling it 3.0.
I've been debating switching to VMWare already, because they've had good USB support from the start, AND they've been calling a beta version "beta". What's been holding me back is that I've already sunk the cost of Parallels, and don't want to pay again for VMWare when it comes out of beta. But if I'm going to have to pay again anyway, I might as well jump ship and go with a professional company.
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Click the icon with the "bug" on it on the toolbar to report a bug to Apple.
So basically what you're saying is that Apple should have followed the Windows user interface style on Windows, rather than their own?
I can't disagree strongly with that, no.
If there was a better KHTML-based browser on Windows I'd be all over it. Or even a Gecko-based one that didn't have the user-interface written in Javascript with functions to request installation of Javascript from an untrsted web page.
But as it is, Opera and Safari are basically the only browser options for Windows that aren't complete user interface nightmares like KMELION, or insecure-by-design like IE and (albeit to a far lesser extent) Firefox. Doubling the number of choices can't possibly be considered a *bad* thing.
As I wrote a few years ago in A Failure of Vision the filtering that NASA has been doing to accurately recreate the actual colors of Mars's surface actually makes it harder to tell what you're looking at. If you were living and working on Mars, before long your eyes and brain would adapt and you wouldn't see the red planet as particularly red.
If you go and adjust the ground to the rusty red in NASA's usual photos with this new photograph the water doesn't look nearly so watery any more. But when I lined up the peaks in the red, green, and blue channels to try and get an approximation of the original image (only an approximation, of course... but this has produced realistic looking images for me in the past... reddish, yes, but a red like you might see in Arizona) I got this picture of what appears to be normal-looking (not food-coloring-blue) water.
So my question is... what else have people missed, because they're seeing Mars through Earth-filtered images?
Maybe if a few folks out there tried this trick on other NASA imagery we'd find out.
Or maybe Afterburner Powered... that would explain why your laptop gets so hot.
Do you really feel completely comfortable about that? Do you for example feel comfortable knowing that that little radical publisher whose mag you subscribed to, and that has just been raided for some good or bad reason, has put your name and address in everything you bought from them?
Hey, dude, if they were raided, the feds already got your name from them *already*. They don't need to dig your name out of a file to do that.
At this point, every book, record or mag anyone buys online has, imagine, a name and address in it that is verified to a credit card.
Which is why the untracable debit cards you can get at any grocery store in the US are so useful.
I mean, you're using them when you buy your porn aready, right?
Well, when you put yourself ON a do-not-call list, is it surprising that your details remain ON that list?
You misunderstood. Please read more carefully.
I did not put myself on a DNC list.
I was getting mail from AA because I had created an account on their website to look up flight information.
They said that they sent mail to everyone who had an account.
I asked that this account be deleted. They said my account couldn't be deleted, that they *never* removed any information about customers from their database. They had an option to change your email address, but that just created a new record and left the old address in their database marked as an old address. Their mailing list company got all the addresses, old and new. I don't recall who the company was... I want to say it was "Topica", but I'm not sure any more.
They offered to add me to a "Safe Harbour" list at that company instead, so I asked what that entailed, and they explained that it was a global list that company maintained, and applied to all bulk mailings from all that company's customers, not just AA.
I declined that offer. Eventually the mail stopped, I assume they changed the way they handled their lists.
I don't understand what you mean by "allow them to re-add your mailing information again later, through whatever means"... I'm not accusing AA or the company involved of spamming people who hadn't signed up... and if I *did* sign up again, why *wouldn't* I want to get whatever I signed up for? The fact that I didn't want the ads from AA right then doesn't mean I didn't want any mail from AA in the future, or that I didn't want any mail from other customers of the company, or anything like that.
I think you're missing the point: it's right there in the subject line.
The point is that *deleting an account* does not mean *removing your information*.
If you're running an online business in SL, you're already liable for income from it. This isn't new.
Clinton was the most fiscally conservative president in the past 50 years. Yes, that's including Reagan, who gets second place. And that's *only* counting non-military spending, so we're not counting Reagan's defense build-up against him.
Bush isn't even in the top five. Even Carter did a better job at keeping spending under control.
I mean, I remember my father telling me about this in the '70s. Except it was about buying pre-recorded tapes versus buying records and making your own tapes.
Several years ago I started getting mail from American Airlines because I'd registered on their website to get some information about flights. It took me several months to get the mail stopped.
1. The company that was sending mail for AA wasn't AA.
2. They had no mechanism to remove my account information (email address and name) from their database.
3. They did have the ability to put me on a "Safe Harbour" list.
4. If they did that, I wouldn't get ANY mail from AA. Ever. Even if I asked for it.
5. Or from any OTHER customers of the mailing list handler.
6. They claimed they needed to do this for various reasons (people who kept re-registering and then complaining about the mail, postal regulations, audits, and so on).
They said that this was common, that most companies never actually removed you, they just marked your record "dead". I checked around after that, and, yes, that did seem to be the way they worked.
Don't be a dope. I already accounted for that copy of Windows Home. The point is that the Mac costs more than the comparable PC, and it's the value *to me* of an operating system that doesn't suck dirty swamp water through used oil filters that makes it worth paying the extra $200, or $300, or $500.
No matter what accounting games you play, the difference in price is real and represents the value of the software.
"OS X really costs $300... and it's worth it!"
(adjust for the model of Mac you bought)
I don't know about you, but I tot up the stuff that's important to me, and look for something that gives me those features.
So I don't care if adding a video camera to a Wintel laptop would put it over the mark or not, because I wouldn't buy a laptop with a built in video camera. That feature has no value to me.
I don't care if making a PC as small as a Mac mini costs $100 more, that has no value to me.
But I do care if the GPU in my computer does native 3d OpenGL or not.
So when I look at laptops, the cheapest acceptable model from Apple is the 15" Macbook Pro. An acceptable model from Lenovo is around $1250. If I'm going to put up with the GMA950 I can get a decent laptop for $750.
Tricking out a Thinkpad T-series (what I'd be using if I could get OS X for it) with everything I actually care about in my Macbook Pro would cost me $1800.
On the other hand, there's no amount of money I can pay to Apple to get me a Macbook with a Thinkpad keyboard.
See... the ONLY way you get Apple's products looking as cheap as Wintel version is by demanding everything that the Mac provides be included in the PC, but completely discounting the value of anything that comes with the PC that the Mac doesn't include.
* Contoured keyboard.
* Two trackpad buttons.
* Ultrabay.
* Trackpoint mouse.
* Docking port.
The only way I can see to get a Macbook that's comparable to a Thinkpad would be to get someone to build you a custom case, a-la the Modbook. What? That's ridiculous? Then why isn't demanding a built-in camera ridiculous? You can't have it both ways... either handicap BOTH sides equally, or don't treat EITHER as a requirements spec.
Using the Intel video chipset on an Intel motherboard is probably the cheapest configuration that any laptop manufacturer can use.
Probably so, but they're selling $400 worth of PC for $600, and $600 worth of laptop for $1000. With those kind of margins, they can bloody well afford an extra $5 to give them a GPU that doesn't suck. Dropping back 10% in the CPU speed would pay for it, and the resulting computer would be more than 10% faster even for granny surfing the web.
The reason AppleTV is cheaper than an MacMini is simply because an AppleTV is not a computer.
If it's not a computer, than neither is a Mac mini. Neither have any built-in expansion capability to speak of, they're hardwired with whatever Apple shipped them with... and both can run all the same software. Oh, the AppleTV has a cheaper CPU than the mini, and soldered memory, but it *does* have USB, and *can* run full-on OSX natively.
you don't need the horse power of a real GPU if you don't play 3D games and only use the machine to surf the web [...]
You don't need a Core Duo either, if that's all you do.
Both the Mini and the AppleTV are built as cheaply as they can be. If the price difference of the nVidia embedded GPU in the AppleTV was more than a few dollars the AppleTV wouldn't have one.
If you get UFS, the say good-bye to Boot Camp, unless you want to do a fresh install of OS X.
Imprimus, if I wanted to run Windows on my Macbook I wouldn't have bought a Macbook, I'd have bought a better and cheaper laptop with a keyboard and trackpad that didn't aggravate my RSI.
Secundus, I'm going to have to do a fresh install of OSX pretty soon anyway. I don't know if it's HFS+ corruption, prebinding corruption, or what, but if I can't track down what's causing those occasional panics I'm getting it's going to be back to backups pretty soon.
Tertius, for the majority of the switchers who think they need Boot Camp (Parallels or VMWare gives a MUCH better solution for everything but gaming) a reinstall of their new laptop or desktop is hardly a hardship.
Quartus, I'm sure Apple will be able to find some features that ZFS doesn't do as well as HFS+, and THAT is the real point. Apple's reluctance to get rid of horribly bad ideas is legendary. I won't believe they're really switching until I see them switch... I've been burned too often by "Apple is finally coming to their senses" rumors too often. And even when my pessimisim *isn't* justified, they've managed to screw things up all too often. Apple's real advantage is that they don't actually *hate* their customers the way Microsoft does, or secretly despise them as the Linux community does. They're just incurably conservative beneath their progressive front...
HFS+ is technically superior in design to UFS.
HFS+ is a different design. It has advantages in some areas, disadvantages in others, and a lot of those advantages *are* purely theoretical... for example the spotlight features can be implemented on top of *any* file system if they're handled at the vnode layer, and SoftUpdates shows that most of the supposed advantages of other file system structures are simply a matter of write scheduling and disk allocation algorithms that are applicable to any file system. So while there are advantages, they're fewer than you'd think.
With those advantages come a lot of complexity, and attendant fragility. It has *never* been as reliable as UFS, and it's *not* just the utilities. The catalog can be completely corrupted just by running the disk near capacity, and that's *still* true in Tiger.
You're right, Apple likes to cling to ideas that look good on paper. It's burned them over an over again, from the cooperative multitasking of the original OS, through the Copland fiasco, and even the use of Mach... OS X by now uses very little of Mach's features... it's just a performance sucker. And they have a terrible "Not Invented Here" problem. I'm afraid that no matter how good ZFS is, Apple will keep clinging to HFS+ no matter what.
If Apple wanted a better file system they would ALREADY be using UFS.
I'm really sick of HFS+. Three times now I've had it eat its brains so bad that FSCK wouldnt fix it. I have NEVER, not in 20 years that I've been working as a network administrator, had anything even vaguely resembling a modern UNIX file system get so messed up that fsck *refused to work*, not unless the disk was completely destroyed. That hasn't been a problem since ncheck and clri got replaced with fsck back in the '70s!
And in three years, HFS+ ate its own brains three times... and that's just with my own personal hardware.
That's worse than Windows.
When they announced that Panther was getting an updated version of UFS from FreeBSD, I was hopeful. They *almost* had all the HFS+ extra functionality working over UFS in Jaguar... including aliases. But NO, they decided they were going to make the system even more HFS+-specific by putting the Spotlight hooks in the file system instead of the vnode layer.
So until I actually see this come out from Apple, I'd take it with a grain of salt. They've had an appalling tendency to hold onto old bad ideas long past their freshness date.
If you're paying $600 for a desktop or $1000 for a laptop you should be able to do a LOT better than "but it's quite playable".
My mini is the PPC version, and it gets better performance for 3d than the core solo Intel, and the core duo only barely beats it in some areas. Now, I'm not a gamer, I need 3d for other things than killing orcs, but I have dabbled... and the old PPC mini is still "quite playable"...
So rather than spend another $600 upgrading my mini and *still* putting up with "quite playable", I spent less than that on upgrading an old Windows box with a KVM switch, and I run Windows versions of 3d apps. I'd MUCH rather leave that behind me, but until Apple comes to their senses I can't afford to.
If you're not a gamer, the Intel chip is more than adequate.
I'm not a gamer. But I *do* use 3d applications, and the GMA950 is not "more than adequate". Its 3d support is so bad, Apple has to basically blow one of the cores on software OpenGL when you're using 3d.
Plus it is fully supported under Linux with free drivers.
If you're running Linux you can get a much better desktop or laptop for 30-40% less than the Mini or Macbook. Apple is completely non-competitive for Linux at the low end.
I'm not talking about having a more complicated lineup. I'm talking about getting rid of the Intel GPU completely.
This has nothing to do with "professional" versus "entry level".
A *real* GPU, nVidia or ATI, with full OpenGL support, should be a basic part of every Mac model. It's not a matter of price, both ATI and nVidia make cheap low-end GPUs that are better than the Intel models, and if they can put an nVidia GPU in the $300 AppleTV, they can put one in the $600 Mac mini.
And I don't mean Santa Rosa, I mean... how about putting an nVidia GPU in the Macbook and Mac mini instead of that appalling GMA950?
That, and my experience with the Macbook Pro and its embroyonic multi-touch support.
Multi-touch is a poor replacement for real keys and buttons, and real buttons is what the HTC phone and the iPhone both lack. Multitouch might make the iPhone might suck slightly less than the HTC device, but anyone who's really interested in getting a good cellphone... as opposed to a poor-to-middling PDA with a cellphone in it... would be well advised to look elsewhere.
The DRM module in OSX does one thing and one thing only - it keeps you from running OS X on non-Apple computers. It's no different from the CD-Key you need to install Windows, and FAR less of an imposition than activation, "Windows Genuine Advantage", Secure Audio/Video Path, DRI, signed drivers, and everything else that Windows imposes on you.
Having to buy Apple hardware to run OS X seems to be about 90% of the author's complaints, and it's a valid one, but the fact that on *some* Macs (and not all) this uses a DRM chip to enforce the lock-in doesn't mean that this is DRM, any more than using a Power PC rather than an intel chip was DRM in the previous generation. The only actual DRM in OS X as shipped is the barely-honor-system-quality encryption that iTunes uses... and that is hopefully on the way out...
Not the screen scraping part, that's OK, but the drag-and-drop is implemented insecurely, by exporting your file system to the VM instance... if you trust Windows with your data, that's fine, but if you're expecting Parallels to act like a sandbox, you better turn that off.
In practice, though, because it IS screen scraping all your Windows windows pop back and forth at the same "level" on your display, which annoyed me enough that I turned it off.
I'm kind of disturbed that they're asking us to pay for the upgrade, since they haven't had a version that's got even beta-quality USB support for more than a few months: I still have to disable and re-enable USB every time I sync my Palm, but at least it's possible now. I feel like I've been paying for being in their beta program, and shouldn't have to pay again for their "real" version.
Even if they're calling it 3.0.
I've been debating switching to VMWare already, because they've had good USB support from the start, AND they've been calling a beta version "beta". What's been holding me back is that I've already sunk the cost of Parallels, and don't want to pay again for VMWare when it comes out of beta. But if I'm going to have to pay again anyway, I might as well jump ship and go with a professional company.