Um, it's not entirely false. Apple used FreeBSD as the base for the BSD side of Darwin when they replaced the AT&T code in NeXTstep with open source alternatives.
No, you are the one mistaken. Apple is a hardware company. Look at any of their quarterly financial statements. Software isn't even 10% of their income.
Software is 100% of their income. Without the software, nobody would buy their hardware. It's a slightly unusual business model for a software company, but it's not THAT unusual.
It's just like Cisco. Do you think Cisco could could charge upwards of $5000 for a rather anemic PC because it's got "PIX" printed on the front, if it wasn't for the software inside?
Apple can charge what is now only a large (rather than insanely large) premium for what are otherwise unexceptional if nicely built generic PCI-based personal computers because people HAVE to buy them to run their software. But it's the quality of their software that keeps them going out the door, not the pretty boxes the hardware comes in.
That's another area I find myself in conflict with Mac fanatics.
I don't think I'll go there. I'll just stick with a Mac on my desktop and do without a laptop until Apple come to their senses and get IBM to make a decent Powerbook for them.
For me, i think the "Mac Tax" as you put it, is to much for it to be interesting for me.
You've made that point good and hard, and I thank you for it. You don't have to make it again. To you, OS X is a nice bonus, and you won't pay a lot for it... but for people who want a UNIX box with real consumer applications and third party support it's the only game in town. And it's nice that, at last, we can afford it.
This means that you'll use the other (the right) button much less than you would in a windows system.
Until you discover the Contextual Menu Workshop, and find out what CM plugins can do for you.
Re:Great computers, but too expensive...
on
Return of the Mac
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· Score: 1
Actually, you might be able to bribe some Apple developers for a few million in cash to give you access to the top secret x86 version of OS X.
And more millions to Adobe and the rest of the vendors for source code or x86 ports of their applications? And wait for them to do it? that's a thought, you know. Probably not cost-effective, but it's a thought.
iTunes is just an application. It dooesn't have any special privileges. It's not like Windows Media Player that has components that run below the OS level and refuse to display some content if you have even such benign UI-tweaking software as Windowblinds installed. I think Apple's stance on DRM is "we know we need to provide protection to keep the relationship between the labels and the iTunes Music Store intact, so we'll put enough DRM in to keep them happy... but that's all."
Re:Shit, who wouldn't buy a mac ..
on
Return of the Mac
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· Score: 1
Yes, and that $500 headless mac would get me a factor of 1/3 to 1/4 the performance of a similiarly priced PC. (Random numbers pulled out of my ass, without any factual basis by the way, just to enhance my point.)
you shouldn't pull stuff like that out of your ass, you can do yourself an injury you'll regret for the rest of your life.
I just upgraded my son's PC for his birthday, and I've just got a Mac mini. He's got a PC because he's a gamer, and his PC is a hell of a lot more powerful than my mini, but just the upgrades ended up costing a significant chunk of the price of that mini... so I think I have a pretty good idea of what you can get for $500.
And, basically, right now, across the board... the "Mac Tax" for equivalent hardware to a PC is about 50%. You'll end up paying 50% more to get a Mac instead of a comparable PC. Oh, it's not exact, and there's a lot more options on the PC side, but the days when the cost hit was a factor of two and a bit (I don't think it was ever a matter of three or four times) are gone.
Do you really think that photoshop will perform better on a $500 Mac-mini-whatever than my $500 white box PC?
Um, you really want me to say that it's *cheaper* than the comparable PC now? No, that'd be a bit much, right?
It performs better on my Mac mini than on my old IBM Thinkpad, which is not quite up to the specs of a modern $500 white-box PC but beats the Mini in every "objective" dimension. So I think it'd be pretty close to comparable, and the rest of the system just fits together so much better than Windows that you might be most amazingly surprised how much more you get done.
Or not, I don't know, some people hate OS X. Maybe you're one of them... but if you're thinking that it'd be good for you I'm thinking the price difference shouldn't be as big a hurdle as you're making out.
As we've already covered, both NEXTSTEP and OpenStep were half-assed pieces of junk compared to modern platforms.
Well, uh, no, we haven't "already covered" that.
And when the alternative "modern platforms" on Linux are Gnome and KDE, are you sure that 15 years is such a long time?
The whole idea of modular portability is that your front-end applications are entirely native.
GNUstep on UNIX is entirely native, at least they're as native as GTK and QT are. I mean, really, if you want truly native "native X11 widgets" you have to go back to Athena. I don't think you want to do that, do you?
I agree... the original Windows UI is really quite good, with excellent support for both mouse and keyboard. The problem is that underneath that UI is the most horrid godawful collection of hacks and kludges it's been my displeasure to meet.
It's like being a plantation owner on Tatooine, with a barely controlled mob of surly slaves from a dozen planets each with their own biological and ecological requirements. It's fine so long as you stay up in the GUI palace, but as soon as you have to deal with the innards you really do need a couple of Sith-trained guards along lest you fall afoul one of the toxic swamps or seamy bars the DLLs and EXEs hang out in.
OS X, well, it's like being a Jedi. Especially if you really know how to use the Source.
Re:Great computers, but too expensive...
on
Return of the Mac
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· Score: 1
I was talking about Powermacs, and you respond with comments about the iMac & the MacMini.
iMacs, eMacs, and the Mac mini are all Powermacs. Any Mac using the Power PC instead of the 68000 family processor is a Powermac. Oh, they're less expandible than the one branded "Powermac G5", but your software won't be able to tell the difference.
I can get a PC which is comparable to the iMac specs
But you can't get a PC that's comparable to any Macintosh, for any price, because when you buy a Mac the thing that makes it a Mac is the software. And that won't run on your x86-based PC no matter how much you spend on it.
how sure is he that they're not just running Linux on those iBooks?
If they are, they're certifiable. You can get Wintel laptops to run Linux on that are better than Apple *books in whatever dimension you consider important for less money. I know a few people like Linus are buying Apple computers and sticking Linux on them, but I can't imagine any significant number really prefer Apple laptops to the superior x86 hardware like (for example) the IBM Thinkpad.
Sounds like you're either not that familiar with Cocoa or you're not that familiar with GNUSTEP.
I'm talking about using it as the basis for a porting base, writing software to the NeXT/Openstep base that's common to Cocoa, not using the Cocoa enhancements. Writing portable software has always required extra effort, but it's not now and never has been excessive IF you're willing to do a modicum of work.
And I'm all too familiar with software written for Cocoa by people who are too lazy to consider portability, who pull in whole frameworks to save a couple of lines of code. The most absurd example being someone who required the Panther PHP framework (yes, really, PHP! Not even Perl or Python!)... and all he was doing in PHP was fetching a web page.
Re:Why is this trolling??
on
Return of the Mac
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I bought the x86 machine I was speaking of and saved about $350 on a machine that has more horsepower and generally is better in everyway execpt power consumption.
Your mistake is thinking that Apple is a hardware company. They're not. They're a software company that sells hardware with their software. They're not alone there, Cisco has a similar business model.
You saved $350 on the machine, and didn't get the most important part... Mac OS X. If that's not the part you wanted, if you're satisfied with Windows or Linux, then you probably shouldn't have been looking at Macs in the first place.
Me, when I switched from the PC to the Mac, a couple of years ago, I "upgraded" from a P4-1.7 and 4x AGP graphics to a used G3-400 and a PCi Rage 128. The "Mac Tax" to get a machine comparable with my PC would have been about $650, not $350, even if I bought a used Mac... so I got something slower and less capable.
In the intervening time the "Mac Tax" has dropped from a factor of two or more, to about 50% more. I think you're just a wee bit churlish to complain that it's "insanely expensive". It's not... Macs are still expensive, but at least they're not completely unaffordable for the ordinary joe any more.
If you're using the StupidMouse, you use the control key. If you're BYODKM-ing it with a Mac mini, you buy a better mouse cheaper.
I sit here with my 5 button mouse
Macs have a 5 button mouse, they just put 4 of them on the keyboard... and they'd be better with two fewer buttons no matter where they are.
Re:Great computers, but too expensive...
on
Return of the Mac
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· Score: 1
You can get a Mac for 2/3 the price
I meant... "for 1/3 the price"... I was thinking of the Mac Mini.
But... you're saying the Powermac G5 is also only about 50% more expensive than a comparable Windows box? That's not bad, I thought the "Mac Tax" on those bad boys was higher than that.
Re:Great computers, but too expensive...
on
Return of the Mac
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· Score: 1
Where can I get a new Powermac/G5 for $1000?
I didn't say you could, I said you could get a new Mac for $500.
Remember, its a graph of dollar revenues, not unit sales.
That's a great soundbite but it doesn't explain anything. Why does it project a big gain for 2005, but a smaller gain for 2006? If lower prices are the factor, why don't they have the same effect on the iPod sales?
Up to 2005 they show exponential growth for BOTH product lines then without any explanation in TFA they show a drop in Mac growth... precisely enough of a drop to bring the Mac and iPod lines together. If I were a suspicious fella I'd say that was too much conicidence.
And your message doesn't say anything meaningful about the graph, anywhere. You're talking in past tense, as if the dropoff was in 2004. It's not... it's accelerating through 2004 and the projected 2005. If it's because "powerbook sales are down" then why isn't 2004 and 2005 down to reflect that? If it;s because "the mac dropped off", why does it show the Mac increasing sales through this year?
Want a Mac version? Write a Cocoa front-end. Want a Linux version? Spend a month fighting with X and then give up and go back to working on your Windows and Mac front-ends.
I would argue that back when I bought my powerbook it WAS cutting edge. Few if any notebooks had the combination of being extremely thin, being widescreen, having firewire, DVI etc..
Sony VAIO. Any of the ultra-portable notebooks (very popular in Japan, not so much in the US). No firewire, but Firewire is a Mac thing, really... Windows firewire support is appalling, and if you really need it FW PCI cards are readily available.
And there's such a thing as being TOO thin. My company Thinkpad T23... which I've had for so long I forget when I got it... is for me a better laptop than any Powerbook, as far as the hardware goes. Higher resolution screen, MUCH better keyboard, and the Ultrabay gives me easy expansion capability. Oh, yeh, it's got DVI output.
Put OS X on it and it'd be perfect. It doesn't have the bathroom-tile sleekness of the Powerbook, but I could care less.
Once, before, Apple and IBM got together and produced a Powerbook... I dearly wish they'd do it again.
They're not writing in Objective C or putting in Mac specific code, because they know that limits their audience to the few percent who have Macs.
They need to look at GNUstep. I've been really surprised there hasn't been more spillover to this great open-source toolkit that'll let you write code for BOTH platforms.
Re:Shit, who wouldn't buy a mac ..
on
Return of the Mac
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· Score: 1
Shit I'd love to have one. I'm just not willing to cough up the $2k entry price.
You're off by a factor of 3 or 4 there. The entry level Mac starts at $500...
I'll stick with my sub $500 pc that does everything I need it to....you can afford it.
Slashdot Mirror
Macs were derided by the slashdot crowd quite a bit. Nice to see that apple is getting the respect it deserves.
That's because Apple's earned that respect, now.
Um, it's not entirely false. Apple used FreeBSD as the base for the BSD side of Darwin when they replaced the AT&T code in NeXTstep with open source alternatives.
IBM recently sold off their laptop buisness.
:)
Technically, yes. Though when you sell off a business you don't NORMALLY get to tell the buyer to move their HQ to New York.
No, you are the one mistaken. Apple is a hardware company. Look at any of their quarterly financial statements. Software isn't even 10% of their income.
Software is 100% of their income. Without the software, nobody would buy their hardware. It's a slightly unusual business model for a software company, but it's not THAT unusual.
It's just like Cisco. Do you think Cisco could could charge upwards of $5000 for a rather anemic PC because it's got "PIX" printed on the front, if it wasn't for the software inside?
Apple can charge what is now only a large (rather than insanely large) premium for what are otherwise unexceptional if nicely built generic PCI-based personal computers because people HAVE to buy them to run their software. But it's the quality of their software that keeps them going out the door, not the pretty boxes the hardware comes in.
Ah well, Apple laptops.
That's another area I find myself in conflict with Mac fanatics.
I don't think I'll go there. I'll just stick with a Mac on my desktop and do without a laptop until Apple come to their senses and get IBM to make a decent Powerbook for them.
For me, i think the "Mac Tax" as you put it, is to much for it to be interesting for me.
You've made that point good and hard, and I thank you for it. You don't have to make it again. To you, OS X is a nice bonus, and you won't pay a lot for it... but for people who want a UNIX box with real consumer applications and third party support it's the only game in town. And it's nice that, at last, we can afford it.
This means that you'll use the other (the right) button much less than you would in a windows system.
Until you discover the Contextual Menu Workshop, and find out what CM plugins can do for you.
Actually, you might be able to bribe some Apple developers for a few million in cash to give you access to the top secret x86 version of OS X.
And more millions to Adobe and the rest of the vendors for source code or x86 ports of their applications? And wait for them to do it? that's a thought, you know. Probably not cost-effective, but it's a thought.
What about DRM and iTunes?
iTunes is just an application. It dooesn't have any special privileges. It's not like Windows Media Player that has components that run below the OS level and refuse to display some content if you have even such benign UI-tweaking software as Windowblinds installed. I think Apple's stance on DRM is "we know we need to provide protection to keep the relationship between the labels and the iTunes Music Store intact, so we'll put enough DRM in to keep them happy... but that's all."
Yes, and that $500 headless mac would get me a factor of 1/3 to 1/4 the performance of a similiarly priced PC. (Random numbers pulled out of my ass, without any factual basis by the way, just to enhance my point.)
you shouldn't pull stuff like that out of your ass, you can do yourself an injury you'll regret for the rest of your life.
I just upgraded my son's PC for his birthday, and I've just got a Mac mini. He's got a PC because he's a gamer, and his PC is a hell of a lot more powerful than my mini, but just the upgrades ended up costing a significant chunk of the price of that mini... so I think I have a pretty good idea of what you can get for $500.
And, basically, right now, across the board... the "Mac Tax" for equivalent hardware to a PC is about 50%. You'll end up paying 50% more to get a Mac instead of a comparable PC. Oh, it's not exact, and there's a lot more options on the PC side, but the days when the cost hit was a factor of two and a bit (I don't think it was ever a matter of three or four times) are gone.
Do you really think that photoshop will perform better on a $500 Mac-mini-whatever than my $500 white box PC?
Um, you really want me to say that it's *cheaper* than the comparable PC now? No, that'd be a bit much, right?
It performs better on my Mac mini than on my old IBM Thinkpad, which is not quite up to the specs of a modern $500 white-box PC but beats the Mini in every "objective" dimension. So I think it'd be pretty close to comparable, and the rest of the system just fits together so much better than Windows that you might be most amazingly surprised how much more you get done.
Or not, I don't know, some people hate OS X. Maybe you're one of them... but if you're thinking that it'd be good for you I'm thinking the price difference shouldn't be as big a hurdle as you're making out.
As we've already covered, both NEXTSTEP and OpenStep were half-assed pieces of junk compared to modern platforms.
Well, uh, no, we haven't "already covered" that.
And when the alternative "modern platforms" on Linux are Gnome and KDE, are you sure that 15 years is such a long time?
The whole idea of modular portability is that your front-end applications are entirely native.
GNUstep on UNIX is entirely native, at least they're as native as GTK and QT are. I mean, really, if you want truly native "native X11 widgets" you have to go back to Athena. I don't think you want to do that, do you?
I agree... the original Windows UI is really quite good, with excellent support for both mouse and keyboard. The problem is that underneath that UI is the most horrid godawful collection of hacks and kludges it's been my displeasure to meet.
It's like being a plantation owner on Tatooine, with a barely controlled mob of surly slaves from a dozen planets each with their own biological and ecological requirements. It's fine so long as you stay up in the GUI palace, but as soon as you have to deal with the innards you really do need a couple of Sith-trained guards along lest you fall afoul one of the toxic swamps or seamy bars the DLLs and EXEs hang out in.
OS X, well, it's like being a Jedi. Especially if you really know how to use the Source.
I was talking about Powermacs, and you respond with comments about the iMac & the MacMini.
iMacs, eMacs, and the Mac mini are all Powermacs. Any Mac using the Power PC instead of the 68000 family processor is a Powermac. Oh, they're less expandible than the one branded "Powermac G5", but your software won't be able to tell the difference.
I can get a PC which is comparable to the iMac specs
But you can't get a PC that's comparable to any Macintosh, for any price, because when you buy a Mac the thing that makes it a Mac is the software. And that won't run on your x86-based PC no matter how much you spend on it.
how sure is he that they're not just running Linux on those iBooks?
If they are, they're certifiable. You can get Wintel laptops to run Linux on that are better than Apple *books in whatever dimension you consider important for less money. I know a few people like Linus are buying Apple computers and sticking Linux on them, but I can't imagine any significant number really prefer Apple laptops to the superior x86 hardware like (for example) the IBM Thinkpad.
If they get popular enough, soon someone (Dell? Sony? IBM?) will copy the concept, but sell it *much* cheaper.
I'd really like to hear more details of this missing step in your cunning plan. Do you mean they'll reverse-engineer Mac OS X, or what?
Sounds like you're either not that familiar with Cocoa or you're not that familiar with GNUSTEP.
I'm talking about using it as the basis for a porting base, writing software to the NeXT/Openstep base that's common to Cocoa, not using the Cocoa enhancements. Writing portable software has always required extra effort, but it's not now and never has been excessive IF you're willing to do a modicum of work.
And I'm all too familiar with software written for Cocoa by people who are too lazy to consider portability, who pull in whole frameworks to save a couple of lines of code. The most absurd example being someone who required the Panther PHP framework (yes, really, PHP! Not even Perl or Python!)... and all he was doing in PHP was fetching a web page.
I bought the x86 machine I was speaking of and saved about $350 on a machine that has more horsepower and generally is better in everyway execpt power consumption.
Your mistake is thinking that Apple is a hardware company. They're not. They're a software company that sells hardware with their software. They're not alone there, Cisco has a similar business model.
You saved $350 on the machine, and didn't get the most important part... Mac OS X. If that's not the part you wanted, if you're satisfied with Windows or Linux, then you probably shouldn't have been looking at Macs in the first place.
Me, when I switched from the PC to the Mac, a couple of years ago, I "upgraded" from a P4-1.7 and 4x AGP graphics to a used G3-400 and a PCi Rage 128. The "Mac Tax" to get a machine comparable with my PC would have been about $650, not $350, even if I bought a used Mac... so I got something slower and less capable.
In the intervening time the "Mac Tax" has dropped from a factor of two or more, to about 50% more. I think you're just a wee bit churlish to complain that it's "insanely expensive". It's not... Macs are still expensive, but at least they're not completely unaffordable for the ordinary joe any more.
How do you right click a mac?
If you're using the StupidMouse, you use the control key. If you're BYODKM-ing it with a Mac mini, you buy a better mouse cheaper.
I sit here with my 5 button mouse
Macs have a 5 button mouse, they just put 4 of them on the keyboard... and they'd be better with two fewer buttons no matter where they are.
You can get a Mac for 2/3 the price
I meant... "for 1/3 the price"... I was thinking of the Mac Mini.
But... you're saying the Powermac G5 is also only about 50% more expensive than a comparable Windows box? That's not bad, I thought the "Mac Tax" on those bad boys was higher than that.
Where can I get a new Powermac/G5 for $1000?
I didn't say you could, I said you could get a new Mac for $500.
But... if you insist... how about Apple?
Remember, its a graph of dollar revenues, not unit sales.
That's a great soundbite but it doesn't explain anything. Why does it project a big gain for 2005, but a smaller gain for 2006? If lower prices are the factor, why don't they have the same effect on the iPod sales?
Up to 2005 they show exponential growth for BOTH product lines then without any explanation in TFA they show a drop in Mac growth... precisely enough of a drop to bring the Mac and iPod lines together. If I were a suspicious fella I'd say that was too much conicidence.
And your message doesn't say anything meaningful about the graph, anywhere. You're talking in past tense, as if the dropoff was in 2004. It's not... it's accelerating through 2004 and the projected 2005. If it's because "powerbook sales are down" then why isn't 2004 and 2005 down to reflect that? If it;s because "the mac dropped off", why does it show the Mac increasing sales through this year?
Nice soundbite, zero thought behind it.
Want a Mac version? Write a Cocoa front-end. Want a Linux version? Spend a month fighting with X and then give up and go back to working on your Windows and Mac front-ends.
Or... port your Cocoa front end to GNUstep.
I would argue that back when I bought my powerbook it WAS cutting edge. Few if any notebooks had the combination of being extremely thin, being widescreen, having firewire, DVI etc..
... I dearly wish they'd do it again.
Sony VAIO. Any of the ultra-portable notebooks (very popular in Japan, not so much in the US). No firewire, but Firewire is a Mac thing, really... Windows firewire support is appalling, and if you really need it FW PCI cards are readily available.
And there's such a thing as being TOO thin. My company Thinkpad T23... which I've had for so long I forget when I got it... is for me a better laptop than any Powerbook, as far as the hardware goes. Higher resolution screen, MUCH better keyboard, and the Ultrabay gives me easy expansion capability. Oh, yeh, it's got DVI output.
Put OS X on it and it'd be perfect. It doesn't have the bathroom-tile sleekness of the Powerbook, but I could care less.
Once, before, Apple and IBM got together and produced a Powerbook
They're not writing in Objective C or putting in Mac specific code, because they know that limits their audience to the few percent who have Macs.
They need to look at GNUstep. I've been really surprised there hasn't been more spillover to this great open-source toolkit that'll let you write code for BOTH platforms.
Shit I'd love to have one. I'm just not willing to cough up the $2k entry price.
...you can afford it.
You're off by a factor of 3 or 4 there. The entry level Mac starts at $500...
I'll stick with my sub $500 pc that does everything I need it to.