I can't agree with you on that: in my experience Nokia phones have by far the best user interface. I've used phones by Ericsson, Motorola, Siemens, Panasonic and Alcatel. The displays are well backlit, the fonts used are easy to read, the GUI is very intuitive, and you can accomplish common tasks with great economy of effort. To be honest, Nokia's software strikes me as the only one that has had any thought put into it in terms of ease-of-use.
However, I haven't used any of these Communicator models, which are bound to be more complicated, given the greater range of functionality. However, if anybody can pull this off, I believe Nokia can.
"I don't think you can claim Vast Right-Wing Conspiricy(tm) on this one."
I don't think many people are claiming that. Just because a Democrat approved the ballot doesn't mean that Democrat voters should have put up with their vote going to the wrong candidate if the paper was confusing. It's just a question of fairness.
If I had cast an absentee ballot*, I would be pretty peeved by the fact that everybody wants the election to be decided before my vote is counted. I hear people on the news saying "We could have to wait ten days before this is finally decided" as if this is an absurd situation. So why allow ten days for these ballots to be returned if the expectation is that they won't make much difference?
In other democracies, absentees have to cast their votes in advance, and return them by polling day. Some might object to this system, as it means that not everybody votes on the same day, but if you're going to allow time for these ballots to be returned, then you've got to allow for the fact that they may hold up the result. I'm glad that this might be the case in Florida, as it will force everybody to consider the role of the absentee voter.
Personally, I feel that the whole results process is driven to far too great an extent by the media. The media obviously wants to get out the story of who has won as soon as possible, but this now extends to announcing the result before it has been decided. This would be fine if it was just an opportunity for the television networks and newspapers to make idiots of themselves, but in many cases the results are being declared when polls are still open in parts of the country. And obviously the candidates themselves have to pay heed. The public expect one of the candidates to concede defeat on the basis of television exit polls, instead of having the decency to wait for hard results.
Gore, for example, is being shown in a bad light for retracting his concession phone call to Bush, but why should he concede such a tight race based on what the television pundits say?
*I didn't know I could until it was too late - California chose the lesser of two evils without my help anyway
Kudos to Slashdot for getting so many of the presidential hopefuls to reply to the user-submitted questions. It's possible that the only reason Gore hasn't responded is that he's afraid of making another gaffe along the lines of "inventing the internet".
I only found out today that I may be eligible for an absentee ballot, but I'll say this from an outsider's perspective: please don't vote Bush in! I don't know if many Americans realise how out of touch with the rest of the world this man and his policies are. His presidency could usher in a new age of isolationism for the US, just when it most needs to engage with the rest of the world.
Apple have said that the necessity of rebooting after changing network settings is a bug, which will be fixed in the final release. The previously posted shell script shows that it's easy to fix, so we can be pretty certain it will be done.
The current MacOS, unlike Windows 9x, does not require a restart after changing your IP address, for example. If this suddenly became the case in Apple's new, improved MacOS, it would be a little embarrassing, to say the least.
"They do not deserve credit for finally bringing a good GUI to Unix, because that was done in 1989, by Next, which was not Apple, even if Jobs and probably some other people had been at Apple before Next."
You've misinterpreted my point - I'm not saying that NeXT was Apple, I'm saying that Apple is now NeXT. As somebody else put it here: "NeXT bought Apple in 1997 for minus 400 million dollars". Obviously that's not the full story, but check out what's been happening at Apple for the past few years - the NeXTians are running the show, and I'm not just talking about Steve Jobs.
I wouldn't call those pieces lukewarm. The fact that John Siracusa went to the trouble to write 5 articles of considerable depth shows that he considers it a significant piece of work. Most of his (very cogent) critiques relate to GUI functionality that exists already in MacOS 9, but which seems to be missing in the new interface. You'd have to ask John, but the impression I get from the articles is that he, like me, is very excited about the OS, but is gravely concerned at some of the directions it seems to be taking in relation to the GUI.
"NextStep has provided a good graphical user interface on top of a Unix variant for 11 years now. Apple bought Next, freshened it
up, and added Mac compatibilty and eye candy. I fail to see how that gives them all the credit for it."
How can you deny them credit for this? Apple is really as much NeXT as it is Apple. It has the same CEO as NeXT, and the same person in charge of software, Avie Tevanian. As you can read in his bio, Tevanian was also a principal developer of Mach at Carnegie-Mellon.
This is not the same as Microsoft buying some guys out of their garage because they had developed some widget Bill wanted to assimilate or bury (Apple do this too, of course). The acquisition of NeXT has totally transformed Apple, and not just because of Steve Jobs' return. Five out of Apple's eight-strong senior management team are ex-NeXT.
Many of the people who brought you NeXTSTEP are developing it into OS X. Why should they be denied the credit? Also, if you think the developments are merely cosmetic, you should check out John Siracusa's articles on Ars Technica
"Especially as they have broken some of the nice things in Next, like having both buttons on a scroll bar in the same place."
That's a fair point - you can have this under the current MacOS, so I doubt it will be long before it is grafted back onto OS X, together with a bunch of other useful stuff from both MacOS and NeXTSTEP which is absent from the Public Beta.
"In the past also Apple had been through severe beatings, but nothing like this. Wired has an article where they have mentioned that OS X might be the only straw it has. Remains to be seen.. "
The recent stock slump has certainly been dramatic, but Apple has been in much more serious trouble. Its stock has been in the toilet on a number of previous occasions, coupled with massive losses and serious financial mismanagement that left the company on the brink of collapse. What we have today is a sales slump and a stock market panic. Apple is still going to turn a profit this quarter, unlike many companies still in favour on the stock market, it has billions in cash and practically no debt.
It's true that this may turn out to be a serious chapter in Apple's history, but if you've read that history you'll know that this is a company that's seen it all.
Q. Will Mac OS X Public Beta expire?
A. Mac OS X Public Beta will expire on May 15, 2001. At that time the software will stop
working, and you will need a bootable Mac OS CD (not the Mac OS X Public Beta CD) to gain
access to the contents of your hard drive or to reset your computer's startup disk.
For a number of years, the base configuration of every Apple machine has been very obviously deficient in RAM. The original iMac shipped with 32MB with an OS that was easily capable of hogging up to 25 of that. The reason often suggested is that this is one of Apple's few concessions to its dealers: value-added resellers can make extra money by pre-installing extra RAM, as well as flogging other goodies such as printers and scanners with the package.
I'm not certain I buy this, but it is certainly plausible, and Apple's practice does require some explanation. The iMac can take up to 1GB of RAM, so why not pre-install more? Every review of every Apple product in the last few years has mentioned the lack of RAM, so you'd think they'd address this. Another explanation is that Apple doesn't want its bottom line to be held hostage by fluctuating RAM prices.
Whatever the reason, if you're buying a Mac in the near future, you're going to be buying some RAM also.
"You never know what might happen if the PPC coalition falls apart."
By all accounts the AIM (Apple, IBM, Motorola) coalition has more or less collapsed. IBM and Motorola haven't been getting along, Apple is pretty peeved at Motorola for the slow progress they been making and low yields they've been producing. More importantly, IBM and Motorola seem to have different roadmaps for where the PowerPC is going, and the two companies are reluctant to share their intellectual property with regard to manufacturing processes etc.
This is really a great shame - I think the companies would need to work closely together again to fulfil the potential of the PowerPC technology.
"Does anyone think that one could make a legal argument that the NDA was signed under protest, or duress, due to the complete
industry lockout of anyone who won't sign an NDA?"
I think your point would be fair enough if you were talking about a contractual stipulation that actually affected the employee's life. I fail to see how being bound by a restrictive NDA could affect any employee adversely, unless they had some uncontrollable compulsion to reveal trade secrets.
I really doubt that there are workers out there bemoaning the fact that they can't get a job that doesn't require an NDA: this would be the same as a worker claiming he was being discriminated against because no employer will accept the fact that he/she is lazy and abusive.
"The prospective employee could, of course, choose to enter another professions, or start his own company. Or his services might be so valuable that he could have the NDA requirement waived."
To me, an NDA is just something that formalises the ethics that should operate in any case. Every profession has its ethics: the fact that they are contractualised in the technology industry is just an indication of how important these issues are to employers. If I thought you were likely to reveal my trade secrets, I wouldn't hire you no matter how good I thought you were.
Further, if the employee's services are so valuable, it is more likely, not less, that an NDA will be required. If you're the brainiest of the bunch, and I'm paying through the nose for your services, you're probably going to be working on my most important, and therefore most sensitive projects. If you're free to reveal trade secrets, I would have been better off never to have hired you. What's more, if you're so good that I couldn't do the project without you, then I'll give you a stake in the enterprise, and suddenly NDAs are your concern as well.
The font used in the picture is a variant of Adobe Garamond, and is slightly shorter than Apple Garamond.
This is the classic tell-tale sign of a photoshop fake. My eye isn't trained enough to tell the difference, but if it's not Apple Garamond, then it's not from Apple.
Two other things struck me about this photo:
The central panel in the head-on shot looks very much like it was ripped from a photo of the PowerMac G4.
Apple's actual product shots would probably include a much more dramatic angle than the simple three-quarters view from above shown here. Remember the iBook and PowerMac G4 shots?
Having said all that, I can't believe we're picking this apart in such great detail. I'm not even convinced they're fakes - can we really second-guess Apple?
One thing that was pretty clear from the article was that neither "expert" had much knowledge about the other platform. Each of them made inaccurate or misleading statements that should have been edited out.
It just goes to show how far apart the Linux and Mac camps are. I think this has got to (and is going to) change. I'd rather read a face-off written by one person who has used both OSes extensively.
If you read the introduction to the article, you'll notice that they were testing these two as consumer OS choices.
Consumers are the people who shut down their machines every night. Days of uptime are of no relevance to them.
Of course, a consumer still needs an OS that isn't going to crash and burn while saving their Word doc. The Mac OS is still known to do this once in a while, but this has been much rarer since about OS 8.5. What's more important to a consumer is how efficiently they can get things done while the machine is up, rather than how many months the thing remains stable before falling over. I would suggest that most consumers would not be put out by as much as one crash a week. If anybody's Mac is crashing more often than that, I suggest they get it looked at.
As a professional user, I am infuriated whenever my Mac crashes, but I am more than willing to put up with it because it really is such a treat to use when it's up and running. That's the Macintosh secret!
Corel Linux seems to be a step in the right direction, and we're all looking forward to Mac OS X. What's clear is that the "perfect OS" (a rock-solid system which makes it as easy as possible to get things done), if it ever arrives, will not be made by Microsoft. Let's have more comparisons between Linux and the Mac OS: it's clear that they can learn from each other. Anything that could be learned from Windows has already been learned.
But the message that she preached was a good one: that we're responsible for ourselves and shouldn't depend on "society" to take care of things for us. Now what the hell is wrong with that?
The problem is that we must depend on society. This is what modern life is all about. We have progressed from the days when each family/tribal unit had to fulfil all of its own basic needs. We have learned that by grouping together in a larger society, individuals and subgroups can specialise in things they're good at, and not have to worry about feeding and sheltering themselves. This is to the general benefit of everybody - it has allowed for all the great achievements of humankind.
As an example, society allows a computer programmer to immerse his/herself in arcane matters of technology while neglecting to learn about agriculture, animal domestication, cookery, distribution etc. etc. Nonetheless, this person can still order a pizza when he/she gets hungry.
Society allows for everything we take for granted: business, language, money, art, technology. You are right to say that we are responsible for ourselves, as we are the basic unit of society, but we are responsible to society. Society allows us to live the way we do, it is in our interests to uphold it, to allow us to continue to communicate in this productive way with our fellow humans.
This is not to say that the society we live in is perfect: far from it. However, I believe this means that we have to be more socially conscious, to change society to an even more productive system. In my opinion, this includes caring for those whom society has failed, those less fortunate than us.
I don't want to get too far in to the special loathing I reserve for Ayn Rand's political philosophy, but as I see it the basic problem with it is that it assumes that capitalists support the rest of society and not vice versa. Capitalism is just one of those things that society makes possible.
I have to agree with this. No real benefits would accrue to anyone through Apple opening its GUI, except perhaps those who want to port it more or less directly to another Operating System. I'm not even convinced that Linux or Windows users would benefit from this.
I firmly believe in open source development for the core functions of an OS or software app, but I'm not convinced that the model works for GUI development. The Mac's user interface has benefited from remaining closed - its consistency is what makes it a joy to use. Of course, leaving the GUI in the hands of a single company is scary - what if Aqua turns out to be a UI nightmare? But at least Apple are strongly motivated towards UI excellence - it's their main selling point.
Open source brings the benefits of peer review to work that the general public cannot evaluate. However, GUI design has always been subject to peer review, in the sense that the general public can evaluate its usability. Therefore I have no problem with its remaining closed, at least in some cases.
The fact that Linux people want Aqua for Linux shows that they accept the value of something developed in a closed source environment. They don't want Aqua in order to extend it, or make it work more efficiently, they just want the advantage of great GUI design for their great operating system.
On the other hand: Apple is probably also going to hold on to Quartz, which is something I would be very interested in seeing released to the open source community. This is an exciting technology that could conceivably benefit greatly from open source development.
I know I'm not comparing like with like, but consider the market for Mac monitors. Mac users have a massive choice of monitors from all sorts of third parties, but most probably still choose to buy one from the mothership.
I think if OS X was released for Intel, you'd see more or less the same situation. As long as Apple keeps turning out top-quality hardware (and they do, by the way), most Mac fans will choose the box stamped with the big crystal apple. Apple covers the price ranges pretty well with its monitors, if it does the same with its boxes, then only those who are trying to meet a specific price/performance ratio need worry about speccing out an Intel solution.
Please disagree with me, but I don't think iMac sales will be wiped out by cheapo Intel boxes running Mac OS X. I would guess that, for comparable performance to an iMac, you'd need a low-end Pentium II/III machine with all the goodies, like Ethernet, Firewire, Modem, software bundle. And it would still look ugly.
The people who would be seriously considering an Intel Mac will be the same people who bought Mac clones when they were available. Publishing types, for example, who know exactly what their machine needs to do, and will look for the most cost-effective way of achieving this.
"would you be willing to agree that Apple shouldn't have sole patent on a colored case?"
Of course they shouldn't - and they don't. But that is not the point.
"Coloured case" is too generic a concept to be patented/trademarked. So is "beige box". However, you can't describe the iMac's design in such generic terms. To decribe what constitutes the iMac's design would take many pages of description or pictures (which I've heard are worth about a thousand words each). This can and should be copyrighted and protected, because it is the product of very real work and innovation.
I think that many of those who have argued that Apple should not be able to protect its design are not alive to the huge role industrial design plays in business and in our lives. Good industrial design improves our living environment, and justly brings reward to its producers.* Sloppy industrial design, like sloppy architecture, causes a blight.
I feel that many/. readers, who can appreciate the work and inspiration that goes into a work of art, an elegant block of code, or a beautiful GUI theme, don't apply the same appreciation to idustrial design. The iMac is not just another case, it is a masterpiece of industrial design - love it or hate it, it has become an instant classic. Why should cheap knock-off merchants be allowed to profit from the creativity of others?
Ryano
* Personally, I would like the designers themselves to see more of the reward than the corporation of capitalists, but I don't want to alienate too many Americans.
Re:...and Apple's a software company. Right?
on
Apple Sale Rumors
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· Score: 1
"I'm not sure why you're so transfixed on the money issue. While he has stock, he only takes a $1/yr paycheck. All evidence points to the fact that he's not in it for the money."
On a point of information, as far as I know, Steve Jobs only holds one share of Apple stock in order to keep his family on a health plan. This makes Jobs' motives even trickier to fathom. There is quite a lot of interesting stuff being written about this though, such as Gil Amelio's new book and a couple of corporate histories of Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't agree with you on that: in my experience Nokia phones have by far the best user interface. I've used phones by Ericsson, Motorola, Siemens, Panasonic and Alcatel. The displays are well backlit, the fonts used are easy to read, the GUI is very intuitive, and you can accomplish common tasks with great economy of effort. To be honest, Nokia's software strikes me as the only one that has had any thought put into it in terms of ease-of-use.
However, I haven't used any of these Communicator models, which are bound to be more complicated, given the greater range of functionality. However, if anybody can pull this off, I believe Nokia can.
"I don't think you can claim Vast Right-Wing Conspiricy(tm) on this one."
I don't think many people are claiming that. Just because a Democrat approved the ballot doesn't mean that Democrat voters should have put up with their vote going to the wrong candidate if the paper was confusing. It's just a question of fairness.
If I had cast an absentee ballot*, I would be pretty peeved by the fact that everybody wants the election to be decided before my vote is counted. I hear people on the news saying "We could have to wait ten days before this is finally decided" as if this is an absurd situation. So why allow ten days for these ballots to be returned if the expectation is that they won't make much difference?
In other democracies, absentees have to cast their votes in advance, and return them by polling day. Some might object to this system, as it means that not everybody votes on the same day, but if you're going to allow time for these ballots to be returned, then you've got to allow for the fact that they may hold up the result. I'm glad that this might be the case in Florida, as it will force everybody to consider the role of the absentee voter.
Personally, I feel that the whole results process is driven to far too great an extent by the media. The media obviously wants to get out the story of who has won as soon as possible, but this now extends to announcing the result before it has been decided. This would be fine if it was just an opportunity for the television networks and newspapers to make idiots of themselves, but in many cases the results are being declared when polls are still open in parts of the country. And obviously the candidates themselves have to pay heed. The public expect one of the candidates to concede defeat on the basis of television exit polls, instead of having the decency to wait for hard results.
Gore, for example, is being shown in a bad light for retracting his concession phone call to Bush, but why should he concede such a tight race based on what the television pundits say?
*I didn't know I could until it was too late - California chose the lesser of two evils without my help anyway
Kudos to Slashdot for getting so many of the presidential hopefuls to reply to the user-submitted questions. It's possible that the only reason Gore hasn't responded is that he's afraid of making another gaffe along the lines of "inventing the internet".
I only found out today that I may be eligible for an absentee ballot, but I'll say this from an outsider's perspective: please don't vote Bush in! I don't know if many Americans realise how out of touch with the rest of the world this man and his policies are. His presidency could usher in a new age of isolationism for the US, just when it most needs to engage with the rest of the world.
Apple have said that the necessity of rebooting after changing network settings is a bug, which will be fixed in the final release. The previously posted shell script shows that it's easy to fix, so we can be pretty certain it will be done.
The current MacOS, unlike Windows 9x, does not require a restart after changing your IP address, for example. If this suddenly became the case in Apple's new, improved MacOS, it would be a little embarrassing, to say the least.
Woah! For that money, Apple will give you their cinema display, plus their top-of-the-line G4 to run it with:
$7,598.00
I can't find a picture of that NEC, but I'm willing to bet it doesn't look as good as the Cinema Display.
"They do not deserve credit for finally bringing a good GUI to Unix, because that was done in 1989, by Next, which was not Apple, even if Jobs and probably some other people had been at Apple before Next."
You've misinterpreted my point - I'm not saying that NeXT was Apple, I'm saying that Apple is now NeXT. As somebody else put it here: "NeXT bought Apple in 1997 for minus 400 million dollars". Obviously that's not the full story, but check out what's been happening at Apple for the past few years - the NeXTians are running the show, and I'm not just talking about Steve Jobs.
"Given the lukewarm review on ArsTechnica..."
I wouldn't call those pieces lukewarm. The fact that John Siracusa went to the trouble to write 5 articles of considerable depth shows that he considers it a significant piece of work. Most of his (very cogent) critiques relate to GUI functionality that exists already in MacOS 9, but which seems to be missing in the new interface. You'd have to ask John, but the impression I get from the articles is that he, like me, is very excited about the OS, but is gravely concerned at some of the directions it seems to be taking in relation to the GUI.
"NextStep has provided a good graphical user interface on top of a Unix variant for 11 years now. Apple bought Next, freshened it up, and added Mac compatibilty and eye candy. I fail to see how that gives them all the credit for it."
How can you deny them credit for this? Apple is really as much NeXT as it is Apple. It has the same CEO as NeXT, and the same person in charge of software, Avie Tevanian. As you can read in his bio, Tevanian was also a principal developer of Mach at Carnegie-Mellon.
This is not the same as Microsoft buying some guys out of their garage because they had developed some widget Bill wanted to assimilate or bury (Apple do this too, of course). The acquisition of NeXT has totally transformed Apple, and not just because of Steve Jobs' return. Five out of Apple's eight-strong senior management team are ex-NeXT.
Many of the people who brought you NeXTSTEP are developing it into OS X. Why should they be denied the credit? Also, if you think the developments are merely cosmetic, you should check out John Siracusa's articles on Ars Technica
"Especially as they have broken some of the nice things in Next, like having both buttons on a scroll bar in the same place."
That's a fair point - you can have this under the current MacOS, so I doubt it will be long before it is grafted back onto OS X, together with a bunch of other useful stuff from both MacOS and NeXTSTEP which is absent from the Public Beta.
"In the past also Apple had been through severe beatings, but nothing like this. Wired has an article where they have mentioned that OS X might be the only straw it has. Remains to be seen.. "
The recent stock slump has certainly been dramatic, but Apple has been in much more serious trouble. Its stock has been in the toilet on a number of previous occasions, coupled with massive losses and serious financial mismanagement that left the company on the brink of collapse. What we have today is a sales slump and a stock market panic. Apple is still going to turn a profit this quarter, unlike many companies still in favour on the stock market, it has billions in cash and practically no debt.
It's true that this may turn out to be a serious chapter in Apple's history, but if you've read that history you'll know that this is a company that's seen it all.
"No, only the SUPPORT for the Beta will expire. THere's no expiration date on the actual software..."
The FAQ says different:
Q. Will Mac OS X Public Beta expire?
A. Mac OS X Public Beta will expire on May 15, 2001. At that time the software will stop working, and you will need a bootable Mac OS CD (not the Mac OS X Public Beta CD) to gain access to the contents of your hard drive or to reset your computer's startup disk.
I'm not certain I buy this, but it is certainly plausible, and Apple's practice does require some explanation. The iMac can take up to 1GB of RAM, so why not pre-install more? Every review of every Apple product in the last few years has mentioned the lack of RAM, so you'd think they'd address this. Another explanation is that Apple doesn't want its bottom line to be held hostage by fluctuating RAM prices.
Whatever the reason, if you're buying a Mac in the near future, you're going to be buying some RAM also.
"You never know what might happen if the PPC coalition falls apart."
By all accounts the AIM (Apple, IBM, Motorola) coalition has more or less collapsed. IBM and Motorola haven't been getting along, Apple is pretty peeved at Motorola for the slow progress they been making and low yields they've been producing. More importantly, IBM and Motorola seem to have different roadmaps for where the PowerPC is going, and the two companies are reluctant to share their intellectual property with regard to manufacturing processes etc.
This is really a great shame - I think the companies would need to work closely together again to fulfil the potential of the PowerPC technology.
And Apple is definitely keeping its options open.
"Does anyone think that one could make a legal argument that the NDA was signed under protest, or duress, due to the complete industry lockout of anyone who won't sign an NDA?"
I think your point would be fair enough if you were talking about a contractual stipulation that actually affected the employee's life. I fail to see how being bound by a restrictive NDA could affect any employee adversely, unless they had some uncontrollable compulsion to reveal trade secrets.
I really doubt that there are workers out there bemoaning the fact that they can't get a job that doesn't require an NDA: this would be the same as a worker claiming he was being discriminated against because no employer will accept the fact that he/she is lazy and abusive.
"The prospective employee could, of course, choose to enter another professions, or start his own company. Or his services might be so valuable that he could have the NDA requirement waived."
To me, an NDA is just something that formalises the ethics that should operate in any case. Every profession has its ethics: the fact that they are contractualised in the technology industry is just an indication of how important these issues are to employers. If I thought you were likely to reveal my trade secrets, I wouldn't hire you no matter how good I thought you were.
Further, if the employee's services are so valuable, it is more likely, not less, that an NDA will be required. If you're the brainiest of the bunch, and I'm paying through the nose for your services, you're probably going to be working on my most important, and therefore most sensitive projects. If you're free to reveal trade secrets, I would have been better off never to have hired you. What's more, if you're so good that I couldn't do the project without you, then I'll give you a stake in the enterprise, and suddenly NDAs are your concern as well.
On a point of information, at the time that ad came out (1983), the Big Brother figure was IBM, not Microsoft.
"So what killed NeXT? High prices, lack of standardization with the X community, and (ultimately) the Web."
Ironic, given that Tim Berners-Lee developed the concept of the Web on a NeXT Cube.
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb. html
This is the classic tell-tale sign of a photoshop fake. My eye isn't trained enough to tell the difference, but if it's not Apple Garamond, then it's not from Apple.
Two other things struck me about this photo:
Having said all that, I can't believe we're picking this apart in such great detail. I'm not even convinced they're fakes - can we really second-guess Apple?
One thing that was pretty clear from the article was that neither "expert" had much knowledge about the other platform. Each of them made inaccurate or misleading statements that should have been edited out.
It just goes to show how far apart the Linux and Mac camps are. I think this has got to (and is going to) change. I'd rather read a face-off written by one person who has used both OSes extensively.
If you read the introduction to the article, you'll notice that they were testing these two as consumer OS choices.
Consumers are the people who shut down their machines every night. Days of uptime are of no relevance to them.
Of course, a consumer still needs an OS that isn't going to crash and burn while saving their Word doc. The Mac OS is still known to do this once in a while, but this has been much rarer since about OS 8.5. What's more important to a consumer is how efficiently they can get things done while the machine is up, rather than how many months the thing remains stable before falling over. I would suggest that most consumers would not be put out by as much as one crash a week. If anybody's Mac is crashing more often than that, I suggest they get it looked at.
As a professional user, I am infuriated whenever my Mac crashes, but I am more than willing to put up with it because it really is such a treat to use when it's up and running. That's the Macintosh secret!
Corel Linux seems to be a step in the right direction, and we're all looking forward to Mac OS X. What's clear is that the "perfect OS" (a rock-solid system which makes it as easy as possible to get things done), if it ever arrives, will not be made by Microsoft. Let's have more comparisons between Linux and the Mac OS: it's clear that they can learn from each other. Anything that could be learned from Windows has already been learned.
The problem is that we must depend on society. This is what modern life is all about. We have progressed from the days when each family/tribal unit had to fulfil all of its own basic needs. We have learned that by grouping together in a larger society, individuals and subgroups can specialise in things they're good at, and not have to worry about feeding and sheltering themselves. This is to the general benefit of everybody - it has allowed for all the great achievements of humankind.
As an example, society allows a computer programmer to immerse his/herself in arcane matters of technology while neglecting to learn about agriculture, animal domestication, cookery, distribution etc. etc. Nonetheless, this person can still order a pizza when he/she gets hungry.
Society allows for everything we take for granted: business, language, money, art, technology. You are right to say that we are responsible for ourselves, as we are the basic unit of society, but we are responsible to society. Society allows us to live the way we do, it is in our interests to uphold it, to allow us to continue to communicate in this productive way with our fellow humans.
This is not to say that the society we live in is perfect: far from it. However, I believe this means that we have to be more socially conscious, to change society to an even more productive system. In my opinion, this includes caring for those whom society has failed, those less fortunate than us.
I don't want to get too far in to the special loathing I reserve for Ayn Rand's political philosophy, but as I see it the basic problem with it is that it assumes that capitalists support the rest of society and not vice versa. Capitalism is just one of those things that society makes possible.
I have to agree with this. No real benefits would accrue to anyone through Apple opening its GUI, except perhaps those who want to port it more or less directly to another Operating System. I'm not even convinced that Linux or Windows users would benefit from this.
I firmly believe in open source development for the core functions of an OS or software app, but I'm not convinced that the model works for GUI development. The Mac's user interface has benefited from remaining closed - its consistency is what makes it a joy to use. Of course, leaving the GUI in the hands of a single company is scary - what if Aqua turns out to be a UI nightmare? But at least Apple are strongly motivated towards UI excellence - it's their main selling point.
Open source brings the benefits of peer review to work that the general public cannot evaluate. However, GUI design has always been subject to peer review, in the sense that the general public can evaluate its usability. Therefore I have no problem with its remaining closed, at least in some cases.
The fact that Linux people want Aqua for Linux shows that they accept the value of something developed in a closed source environment. They don't want Aqua in order to extend it, or make it work more efficiently, they just want the advantage of great GUI design for their great operating system.
On the other hand: Apple is probably also going to hold on to Quartz, which is something I would be very interested in seeing released to the open source community. This is an exciting technology that could conceivably benefit greatly from open source development.
I know I'm not comparing like with like, but consider the market for Mac monitors. Mac users have a massive choice of monitors from all sorts of third parties, but most probably still choose to buy one from the mothership.
I think if OS X was released for Intel, you'd see more or less the same situation. As long as Apple keeps turning out top-quality hardware (and they do, by the way), most Mac fans will choose the box stamped with the big crystal apple. Apple covers the price ranges pretty well with its monitors, if it does the same with its boxes, then only those who are trying to meet a specific price/performance ratio need worry about speccing out an Intel solution.
Please disagree with me, but I don't think iMac sales will be wiped out by cheapo Intel boxes running Mac OS X. I would guess that, for comparable performance to an iMac, you'd need a low-end Pentium II/III machine with all the goodies, like Ethernet, Firewire, Modem, software bundle. And it would still look ugly.
The people who would be seriously considering an Intel Mac will be the same people who bought Mac clones when they were available. Publishing types, for example, who know exactly what their machine needs to do, and will look for the most cost-effective way of achieving this.
Nonetheless, kudos to Ars for a great article. If only this standard of writing was more common on the web...
Of course they shouldn't - and they don't. But that is not the point.
"Coloured case" is too generic a concept to be patented/trademarked. So is "beige box". However, you can't describe the iMac's design in such generic terms. To decribe what constitutes the iMac's design would take many pages of description or pictures (which I've heard are worth about a thousand words each). This can and should be copyrighted and protected, because it is the product of very real work and innovation.
I think that many of those who have argued that Apple should not be able to protect its design are not alive to the huge role industrial design plays in business and in our lives. Good industrial design improves our living environment, and justly brings reward to its producers.* Sloppy industrial design, like sloppy architecture, causes a blight.
I feel that many /. readers, who can appreciate the work and inspiration that goes into a work of art, an elegant block of code, or a beautiful GUI theme, don't apply the same appreciation to idustrial design. The iMac is not just another case, it is a masterpiece of industrial design - love it or hate it, it has become an instant classic. Why should cheap knock-off merchants be allowed to profit from the creativity of others?
Ryano
* Personally, I would like the designers themselves to see more of the reward than the corporation of capitalists, but I don't want to alienate too many Americans.
On a point of information, as far as I know, Steve Jobs only holds one share of Apple stock in order to keep his family on a health plan. This makes Jobs' motives even trickier to fathom. There is quite a lot of interesting stuff being written about this though, such as Gil Amelio's new book and a couple of corporate histories of Apple.