If everyone, or even enough people, believed in 'taking' what they wanted, rather than through peaceful exchange, you get a much more brutal and hostile world.
By pulling Chinese support, aren't they doing exactly that? Sticking to the US/EU markets?
Photoshop's price point isn't targetted to consumers, at $600. Photoshop elements, at $89, is targetted towards consumers.
They do understand supply and demand. They supply Photoshop at $600, and the demand doesn't exist for the product. Therefore they exit the market, since it can't support them.
Well, let's see:)
$595 profit per copy translates to 1,260 copies to break even, assuming $5 in distribution and manufacturing costs.
$195 per copy translates to 3847 copies to break a slight profit.
Now, if China's piracy rate is 90% and Adobe isn't breaking even, then, at full price, then 1,260 copies is 10%, meaning then there are about 12,600 copies of Photoshop 6.0 running around. If we're talking $200 versions, then there are 38,470 copies of Photoshop 6.0 running around.
It's not that pirates wouldn't buy the software, it's that some pirates wouldn't buy the software, some pirates couldn't buy the software, and some pirates would have to buy the software.
The question is how to separate all of them enough to target the payers, and get them to pay.
People who do without aren't interesting to this equation or argument. It's the people who make money with the product, and people who need the product, that should be targetted.
In a very fair market way, if there isn't enough pirates who can pay, if they had to, to support the product, the product should go away. If there is enough pirates who can pay, then they can afford to sell, as long as they can convince the pirates to pay.
The question is how lack of an Asian version of the product will affect the market. Will Chinese users, for example, start to use English or Japanese versions? Older versions? Does this mean that Chinese OS X users will be, literally, up the creek?
Yeah, but you're mixing two different streams of thought; paying for the media and packaging ($5) and paying for the man hours to produce the product and to provide support and updates for the product ($600).
So paying $5 for Adobe's products means you pay for the physical cost, even the distribution cost, but not for the labor cost.
Yes, it's justifiable to pay $600 for a flimsy cardboard box and a plastic CD.
If you make $600 with said flimsy cardboard box and plastic CD, I think the product has paid for itself.
Justification's from Adobe's view? If the $600 price funds the development of the next version of Photoshop and keeps employees and the company afloat, that's justification.
Can anybody possibly justify taking property that doesn't belong to you?
True enough, but it's not like LCD PCs are cheap either.
As for networking... I'm not sure what his requirements are, but Mac networking is easier to setup and maintain, from my experience, than anything else out there.
Caveats: I don't run OS X server or Windows NT/XP servers, so I can't speak for those flavors. I have a mixed Debian, Powerbook, Win2k, and Win98 network at home.
Re:Depends on budget of course.
on
Mobile IT Education?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Is there a reason you're not considering a Mac?
The iBook, old iMac, and new iMac all seem to fit the bill nicely, especially considering for maintanance and netboot purposes these are BSD machines, have integrated LCD screens, and run the prerequisite Word, Excel, Office, applications?
I dunno, what you're asking is the same thing I want.
We'll see if it's possible. I don't think it's impossible:)
I do have to note, however, that your speech pattern 'provide for a family' is different than mine 'maximize myself'. I hope to provide for a family, but I plan to do so by maximizing myself. My skills, my values, my talent, etc.
I don't want to be 'locked' into a 'job for life'.
I also don't think being middle class is an 'entitlement'.
To truly make a living, I need to provide services and products other people want to pay for. *Everyone* has to live with that constraint.
Up until this decade, products could only be made laboriously, by hand, by individuals, or by factories, cheaply. You get the expensive one offs and the mass produced cheapos.
This is changing. Printers and print technology makes anyone a publisher. Websites and computers makes anyone an information and entertainment provider. Power tools and other equipment makes anyone a cabinetmaker or artisan.
It used to be that being skilled was available to only those who found a master to teach them. Today *everyone* can be skilled. Everyone can fiberglass, woodwork, paint, sew, cook, write, and carve. In a few years you can add to that list: Everyone can program, model, and make movies.
I don't know about anyone else, but standards of living has raised. I don't *have* to be an accountant for 40 years. I don't *want* to be an accountant for 40 years. I'm a QA person right now, but I look forward to a time when I'm not. I can go get a certification in architecture and I can go back to school and become an architect, and with my own hands and my own resources, build my own house. I can grow my own food. I can do *everything*
This is of course very inefficient:)
The point being is that being comfortable and being happy is not something that is being taken away by the eroding of the middle class. It should be as simple as maximizing yourself and figuring out in any situation, what can I offer to people as a service to get money? Information technology is helping to make that kind of search even easier than ever, too.
Of course I'll be called optimistic and unrealistic, but how else can you be? If you face the future with thoughts of doom and gloom, what's motivating you to keep walking, instead of layiing down to die?
IP is artificial, I grant you that. It doesn't mean it isn't the law.
Note, if it's an unjust law, then feel free to break it, as long as you're willing to suffer the consequences of breaking the law up until the very moment they change it. That's part of the burden of defining and obeying personal beliefs above common/group beliefs.
You're only being treated like a wallet as long as you're willing to act like a wallet. They aren't making it adversarial, you are. It's your interpretation of the situation that makes it so confrontational.
As for 'free market law', my understanding is that a free market is defined as one where supply and demand are unregulated or with minor regulations.
The penalty of abusing or ignoring free market laws is excess supply and insufficient profit, or deficit in supply and insufficient profit.
All it sounds like is you using this as an excuse to justify your behavior. Note, some people do think there is nothing wrong with 'rent-rip-burn' because they did pay for the rental, why should they have to pay a second time, or a third time, or a fourth time? Just archive it!
Anyway, part of my point was that without sales of the original DVD, you wouldn't have a SE DVD to complain about in the first place; they wouldn't have made enough to even consider releasing a SE, as the first wasn't profitable.
You can't play both sides and expect to win, the universe really doesn't work that way.
Note, again, your money. If you don't like the practice, just don't buy the DVD in the first place. You bought Tron. Largely because of you and everyone else who bought Tron, I suspect, the Tron SE gets released. Again, my thanks to you, but that's the way it works. Want to change that? Rent-rip-burn will change that because the studios will never sell enough DVDs in the first place to warrant a SE release.
The only statement you made that made me fire off is the 'rent-rip-burn' statement you made.
Just because you don't like the way they release the product (DVD then SE DVD 4 years later) doesn't give you the right to 'rent-rip-burn'.
They should offer a rebate program, but it's ultimately their choice not to, and if they don't, you shouldn't go around renting, ripping, and burning, because you did buy the special features. You bought the original DVD. You aren't 'entitled' to a SE.
As I mentioned in my first reply, it very well could be said that the success of the first release fuels the release of the SE, and if you hadn't purchased the first DVD, then I wouldn't be able to buy a SE DVD. I thank you for your sacrifice. As I said before, you didn't have to buy the 1.0 release. You could have waited, four years ago, and said 'I'll wait for the SE DVD release'.
Anyway, you did find the flaw/error in the bathroom analogy; there was no contract involved between the owner of the house and me. Analogies are never perfect. The point of the analogy is that the homeowner-IP owner has the right to offer the service/product in any manner they see fit, and the visitor-consumer has the right to take advantage of offered services and products, but above and beyond that both sides are bound by social law, contract law, and copyright law.
Easy.
They design their own motherboards, chipsets, drivers, and OS.
For price considerations they choose COTS components for hard drives, optical drives, memory, and even base OS, BSD.
What makes it superior? I never claimed it was superior. You're asking me, who owns a PowerBook G4, if it's superior to an x86 laptop? I'd say yes, but not because of the COTS stuff, but because of the design. The case, the size, the form factor, the LCD they use, the latch, the sleep light, the ports they choose to bundle on the device, the weight, the battery life, and finally, the OS.
That's all *personal*. If none of those matter to you, then of *course* a Mac laptop isn't superior, for your needs, your metrics.
Sigh, I posted a fairly lengthy post before... but some of it bears repeating.
What isn't proprietary on a Mac? Let's start with hardware then software then OS.
Memory: DIMMs and soDIMMs. Electrically compatible 66-100-133MHz busses.
CPU: Common, available, everyday Motorola and IBM PowerPC G3 and G4 CPUs. If you claim the CPU is proprietary, well so is Intel or AMD CPUs.
Internal bus: AGP 4x for video, PCI for everything else. As far back as the 9600 PowerMac, I think, maybe farther.
Video card: ATI Radeon or NVIDIA GeForce(X) on AGP or PCI bus.
Connectivity: Standard USB and Firewire busses.
Networking: Standard 802.11b for wireless, and 10b/100b/1000bT for wired.
Storage: ATA-66 and ATA-100, with run of the mill Fujitsu, Toshiba, or IBM hard drives. Panasonic EIDE DVD-Rs I think.
Okay, how about software?
Standard HTTP based web browsers, POP/IMAP email clients, and HTTP, SMB, webDAV, FTP, SSH and telnet out of the box. Standard Office compatibility with Office v. X and good compatibility with AppleWorks. Standard use of mp3s, movs, and DV files for music, movies, and movie editing. Use of standard CDs and DVDs, as well as CDRs and DVDRs. Oh yeah, Quicktime movies, too, for all people malign it, is not proprietary. It's well documented and is available under Linux through xanim and through Windows through Quicktime player. Yes, *one* codec is proprietary, called Sorenson, but then so is WMF or RMF. Heck, even the display layer of the OS, Quartz, is nonproprietary. It's DisplayPDF, which is a subset of DisplayPostScript. PDF is owned by Adobe, not Apple, and *anyone* can create a DisplayPDF layer if they wanted to.
How about the OS?
How about the fact that Darwin is open source and you can compile/install/port it to your x86 box? Standard TCP/IP stack, command line interface, GNU tool chain, BSD tool chain.
Okay, I'm getting tired of writing. You get my point?
I haven't looked lately, but as of a year ago, the answer was 'yes'.
You could buy a IBM CHRP motherboard for $3k, slap in a $400 CPU, choose your own PCI ATI video card, standard ram, standard hard drive, flash your own BIOS, and boot up OS 9.
The reason you wouldn't want to is, of course, price.
3 years before that there were Mac clones, proving that there was a market, but Apple, in it's wisdom, figured out it wasn't profitable, so stopped licensing Mac OS to them.
BeOS proved you could create CHRP mobos too.
It's not Apple's fault, per se, that no one else produces PPC chipsets or mobos, in the same way that it's not Microsoft's fault that the Pentium IV doesn't use the EV6 bus or the Athlon doesn't use RDRAM. Apple doesn't exactly encourage it, but you can't say that it's Apple's fault that there aren't 10 mobo manufacturers producing PPC mobos.
You want to know something? The new Macs aren't exactly targetting graphics people.
Perhaps you don't know: LCDs have a smaller coloer range than a CRT. More precise, but smaller. LCDs also have a smaller viewing angle and they change color as you look from different angles. LCD screens are also polarized. None of these things, by default, attract a graphic pro.
Anyway, I'm a PC user who bought a new PowerBook last year. *My* anecdotal view, every bit as valid as *your* anecdotal view, is that OS X is 10x more functional, useful, and enjoyable than XP, and a Mac PC is 10x cooler, more useful, and more attractive than *any* PC hardware.
The mobo spec may or may not be open. At one point they had documented something called the common hardware reference platform, or CHRP. IBM had a few mobos, but no one else took that initiative to make their own. Apple, Motorola, and IBM are the only manufacturer's of chipsets for PPC, I suspect.
The PPC chips isn't any *more* proprietary than the Pentium chips. There are at least two manufacturers, Motorola and IBM, and more to be had as far away as a license and a phone call, or some good reverse engineering teams, no more or less than on the x86 side.
System busses. Electrically they are 66-100-133MHz and use standard SDRAM, no different than a PC. They use soDIMM for their laptops, but that's not a big deal either.
For graphics they use AGP. Only the PowerMac has an upgradeable AGP slot, but if you check out the electrical specs, all the current systems and even the older systems used PCI or AGP video. Also, they used industry standard ATI or NVIDIA graphics solutions, and are no more or less proprietary than any other graphic solution.
Networking. They use standard 10bT, 100bT, and 1000bT on their lineup. They use standard 802.11b wireless network protocol for their wireless connectivity, and that's a IEEE standard as well. They use, surprise, the BSD TCP/IP stack. They speak HTTP, FTP, telnet, SMB, and Appletalk all out of the box. None of those are proprietary.
Connectivity. They use USB and Firewire. Those are about as standard and nonproprietary as the rest of the industry.
Storage. They use DVD-R, CD-RW, DVD, on an EIDE bus. Those are as standard and interchangeable as any other drive. Heck, they use ATA-66 or ATA-100, and that's industry standard too. Their hard drives are the standard Toshibas, IBMs, and Fujitsus.
Expansion. Internally the PowerMac uses PCI, the same as everyone else. On the PowerBook thy use PCMCIA/PCCard, the same as everybody else.
Video. They use VGA on everything, and for digital output they use ADC, which is an industry accepted DVI compatible connector; it's DVI with USB and power bundled along.
OS. Heck, even the OS is non proprietary. Darwin is open source and available for the x86 platform. The presentation layer, Aqua, is written in Objective C and uses Quartz, a displayPDF solution, and is 'proprietary', but no more than PDF is proprietary.
Video: Quicktime isn't, as many believe, proprietary. It's well documented and has been for years, from what I've been told. Some codecs are proprietary, but then again, so is WMF and ASF. Quicktime is available in Linux under xanim and Windows provided by Apple.
Sound is traditional PCM and mini-headphone jack. They also support USB sound and industry standard MIDI.
Productivity. Courtesy of Microsoft there is 100% Office compatibility. Appleworks from Apple has good/decent compatibility. There's the full availability of web, email, ICQ, AIM, and IRC on OS X as well.
The reason you have a plethora of manufactureres of $499 pentium IV class machines has nothing to do with proprietary. You just have a bigger market share of proprietary components (95%).
They want to release *their* products at their discretion, and you want to take that away from them?
"I hate strangers who don't let me use their bathrooms when I knock on the door. One more reason to piss on their lawns."
Point the first: Don't buy the special edition DVD then.
Point the second: If *no one* buys the first DVD, then a special edition DVD is *unwarranted*
Point the third: I never even *knew* there was a first edition DVD. I look forward to buying the special edition.
Point the fourth: Your money is your discretion, their product is their discretion. You have full control over your spending habits, they have full control over their release cycle. Any transaction here is a *voluntary* one.
Reduce cabling. Instead of a 50pin ribbon, migrate to Firewire! 6 wires, no power cable. Currently the 'bus' is limited to ~50MB/s, which means no more than 5 devices on the bus, but it's getting bumped to ~100MB/s this year. Not only is it better than flat ribbon cabling mechanically, it's more expandable, with the capability to address up to 64 (or is it 128?) devices.
No drive rails. Have them snap into place like Legos, using edge slots or something. Then 'fold' a cover down to secure them in place, like the guardrail on a roller coaster.
External power supply. Reduces heat production and cooling needs, electrical noise and insulation, and volume of the case by greater than 1x. Feed clean DC into the thing. Add a 2 minute battery, for kicks, just for redundancy purposes:)
CPU on the bottom is good, but having cards on top of it restricts airflow unless the cards are positioned vertically.
Adopt a newer bus for cards, and solve 3 problems simultaneously. HyperTransport, for example. Bus performance bottleneck, connector complexity, card placement/alignment. Akin to adopting Firewire for drive connections, this simplifies and makes boards smaller. Make the connector 'snap', like the hard drives, and align the cards vertically to allow air to flow over them and between them.
If we're designing for the future, the legacy ports should be on an 'optional' card. Parallel, serial, modem, and PS/2. Only support USB, Firewire, ethernet, video, and sound on the back. Provide USB and Firewire on the front, as well as a headphone jack.
You want function over form, thereby making the assumption that you prefer form to be marginalized to the benefit of function. At least the iMac, while not perfect, has a higher attention to function than the average PC.
There is no VGA connector and no power cable for the video. Two cables gone, functionality has been improved by reducing clutter, form has been improved by removing clutter.
There is no bulky three prong power cable, but a slender laptop style power cable. Form and function.
The possibility of using an Airport card, increasing functionality and form. No wiring for networking necessary.
Problems: USB and headphone access is in the rear. Keyboard, as you mentioned, is in front. The saving grace is that the mouse is designed and intended to be attached to the keyboard, meaning only one USB cable needs to snake to the back, minimally.
Functionality: Out of the box, all you need to do is plug in the speakers in the back, the power in the back, and the keyboard in the back, for use. For maximum utility, you have Airport installed. For slightly less utility, you can plug in an ethernet cable.
Compare to the average PC: On PC power cable, one VGA power cable, one keyboard cable, one mouse cable, one speaker-sound cable, one ethernet cable, one VGA cable. That's 7 cables to the Mac's 4, maybe six vs three, for the same functionality.
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That's the problem, isn't it?
If everyone, or even enough people, believed in 'taking' what they wanted, rather than through peaceful exchange, you get a much more brutal and hostile world.
Only $89! Over 9x cheaper than Photoshop :P
By pulling Chinese support, aren't they doing exactly that? Sticking to the US/EU markets?
Photoshop's price point isn't targetted to consumers, at $600. Photoshop elements, at $89, is targetted towards consumers.
They do understand supply and demand. They supply Photoshop at $600, and the demand doesn't exist for the product. Therefore they exit the market, since it can't support them.
For Photoshop Elements.
What do you say to that?
Adobe has every right to charge whatever they want.
Consumers have every right to *not* buy something more expensive.
Consumers don't have the right to pirate, just as Adobe doesn't have the right to take the bits from your bank account.
Well, let's see :)
$595 profit per copy translates to 1,260 copies to break even, assuming $5 in distribution and manufacturing costs.
$195 per copy translates to 3847 copies to break a slight profit.
Now, if China's piracy rate is 90% and Adobe isn't breaking even, then, at full price, then 1,260 copies is 10%, meaning then there are about 12,600 copies of Photoshop 6.0 running around. If we're talking $200 versions, then there are 38,470 copies of Photoshop 6.0 running around.
Of course this is all meaningless math games.
It's not that pirates wouldn't buy the software, it's that some pirates wouldn't buy the software, some pirates couldn't buy the software, and some pirates would have to buy the software.
The question is how to separate all of them enough to target the payers, and get them to pay.
People who do without aren't interesting to this equation or argument. It's the people who make money with the product, and people who need the product, that should be targetted.
In a very fair market way, if there isn't enough pirates who can pay, if they had to, to support the product, the product should go away. If there is enough pirates who can pay, then they can afford to sell, as long as they can convince the pirates to pay.
The question is how lack of an Asian version of the product will affect the market. Will Chinese users, for example, start to use English or Japanese versions? Older versions? Does this mean that Chinese OS X users will be, literally, up the creek?
Yeah, but you're mixing two different streams of thought; paying for the media and packaging ($5) and paying for the man hours to produce the product and to provide support and updates for the product ($600).
So paying $5 for Adobe's products means you pay for the physical cost, even the distribution cost, but not for the labor cost.
Yes, it's justifiable to pay $600 for a flimsy cardboard box and a plastic CD.
If you make $600 with said flimsy cardboard box and plastic CD, I think the product has paid for itself.
Justification's from Adobe's view? If the $600 price funds the development of the next version of Photoshop and keeps employees and the company afloat, that's justification.
Can anybody possibly justify taking property that doesn't belong to you?
True enough, but it's not like LCD PCs are cheap either.
As for networking... I'm not sure what his requirements are, but Mac networking is easier to setup and maintain, from my experience, than anything else out there.
Caveats: I don't run OS X server or Windows NT/XP servers, so I can't speak for those flavors. I have a mixed Debian, Powerbook, Win2k, and Win98 network at home.
Is there a reason you're not considering a Mac?
The iBook, old iMac, and new iMac all seem to fit the bill nicely, especially considering for maintanance and netboot purposes these are BSD machines, have integrated LCD screens, and run the prerequisite Word, Excel, Office, applications?
Who modded this to neg 1?
Just because you don't agree with him or is this a 'normal' setting?
You're telling me it's impossible for a single earner to provide for a family?
Other than the fact that I don't share this ideal in the first place, I don't think it's impossible.
It just means you have to be frugal, which has been the *norm* for thousands of years.
What do I want? What do I need? What can I afford? How do I make do?
I dunno, what you're asking is the same thing I want.
:)
We'll see if it's possible. I don't think it's impossible
I do have to note, however, that your speech pattern 'provide for a family' is different than mine 'maximize myself'. I hope to provide for a family, but I plan to do so by maximizing myself. My skills, my values, my talent, etc.
I don't want to be 'locked' into a 'job for life'.
:)
I also don't think being middle class is an 'entitlement'.
To truly make a living, I need to provide services and products other people want to pay for. *Everyone* has to live with that constraint.
Up until this decade, products could only be made laboriously, by hand, by individuals, or by factories, cheaply. You get the expensive one offs and the mass produced cheapos.
This is changing. Printers and print technology makes anyone a publisher. Websites and computers makes anyone an information and entertainment provider. Power tools and other equipment makes anyone a cabinetmaker or artisan.
It used to be that being skilled was available to only those who found a master to teach them. Today *everyone* can be skilled. Everyone can fiberglass, woodwork, paint, sew, cook, write, and carve. In a few years you can add to that list: Everyone can program, model, and make movies.
I don't know about anyone else, but standards of living has raised. I don't *have* to be an accountant for 40 years. I don't *want* to be an accountant for 40 years. I'm a QA person right now, but I look forward to a time when I'm not. I can go get a certification in architecture and I can go back to school and become an architect, and with my own hands and my own resources, build my own house. I can grow my own food. I can do *everything*
This is of course very inefficient
The point being is that being comfortable and being happy is not something that is being taken away by the eroding of the middle class. It should be as simple as maximizing yourself and figuring out in any situation, what can I offer to people as a service to get money? Information technology is helping to make that kind of search even easier than ever, too.
Of course I'll be called optimistic and unrealistic, but how else can you be? If you face the future with thoughts of doom and gloom, what's motivating you to keep walking, instead of layiing down to die?
IP is artificial, I grant you that. It doesn't mean it isn't the law.
Note, if it's an unjust law, then feel free to break it, as long as you're willing to suffer the consequences of breaking the law up until the very moment they change it. That's part of the burden of defining and obeying personal beliefs above common/group beliefs.
You're only being treated like a wallet as long as you're willing to act like a wallet. They aren't making it adversarial, you are. It's your interpretation of the situation that makes it so confrontational.
As for 'free market law', my understanding is that a free market is defined as one where supply and demand are unregulated or with minor regulations.
The penalty of abusing or ignoring free market laws is excess supply and insufficient profit, or deficit in supply and insufficient profit.
All it sounds like is you using this as an excuse to justify your behavior. Note, some people do think there is nothing wrong with 'rent-rip-burn' because they did pay for the rental, why should they have to pay a second time, or a third time, or a fourth time? Just archive it!
Anyway, part of my point was that without sales of the original DVD, you wouldn't have a SE DVD to complain about in the first place; they wouldn't have made enough to even consider releasing a SE, as the first wasn't profitable.
You can't play both sides and expect to win, the universe really doesn't work that way.
Note, again, your money. If you don't like the practice, just don't buy the DVD in the first place. You bought Tron. Largely because of you and everyone else who bought Tron, I suspect, the Tron SE gets released. Again, my thanks to you, but that's the way it works. Want to change that? Rent-rip-burn will change that because the studios will never sell enough DVDs in the first place to warrant a SE release.
The only statement you made that made me fire off is the 'rent-rip-burn' statement you made.
Just because you don't like the way they release the product (DVD then SE DVD 4 years later) doesn't give you the right to 'rent-rip-burn'.
They should offer a rebate program, but it's ultimately their choice not to, and if they don't, you shouldn't go around renting, ripping, and burning, because you did buy the special features. You bought the original DVD. You aren't 'entitled' to a SE.
As I mentioned in my first reply, it very well could be said that the success of the first release fuels the release of the SE, and if you hadn't purchased the first DVD, then I wouldn't be able to buy a SE DVD. I thank you for your sacrifice. As I said before, you didn't have to buy the 1.0 release. You could have waited, four years ago, and said 'I'll wait for the SE DVD release'.
Anyway, you did find the flaw/error in the bathroom analogy; there was no contract involved between the owner of the house and me. Analogies are never perfect. The point of the analogy is that the homeowner-IP owner has the right to offer the service/product in any manner they see fit, and the visitor-consumer has the right to take advantage of offered services and products, but above and beyond that both sides are bound by social law, contract law, and copyright law.
Easy.
They design their own motherboards, chipsets, drivers, and OS.
For price considerations they choose COTS components for hard drives, optical drives, memory, and even base OS, BSD.
What makes it superior? I never claimed it was superior. You're asking me, who owns a PowerBook G4, if it's superior to an x86 laptop? I'd say yes, but not because of the COTS stuff, but because of the design. The case, the size, the form factor, the LCD they use, the latch, the sleep light, the ports they choose to bundle on the device, the weight, the battery life, and finally, the OS.
That's all *personal*. If none of those matter to you, then of *course* a Mac laptop isn't superior, for your needs, your metrics.
Sigh, I posted a fairly lengthy post before... but some of it bears repeating.
What isn't proprietary on a Mac? Let's start with hardware then software then OS.
Memory: DIMMs and soDIMMs. Electrically compatible 66-100-133MHz busses.
CPU: Common, available, everyday Motorola and IBM PowerPC G3 and G4 CPUs. If you claim the CPU is proprietary, well so is Intel or AMD CPUs.
Internal bus: AGP 4x for video, PCI for everything else. As far back as the 9600 PowerMac, I think, maybe farther.
Video card: ATI Radeon or NVIDIA GeForce(X) on AGP or PCI bus.
Connectivity: Standard USB and Firewire busses.
Networking: Standard 802.11b for wireless, and 10b/100b/1000bT for wired.
Storage: ATA-66 and ATA-100, with run of the mill Fujitsu, Toshiba, or IBM hard drives. Panasonic EIDE DVD-Rs I think.
Okay, how about software?
Standard HTTP based web browsers, POP/IMAP email clients, and HTTP, SMB, webDAV, FTP, SSH and telnet out of the box. Standard Office compatibility with Office v. X and good compatibility with AppleWorks. Standard use of mp3s, movs, and DV files for music, movies, and movie editing. Use of standard CDs and DVDs, as well as CDRs and DVDRs. Oh yeah, Quicktime movies, too, for all people malign it, is not proprietary. It's well documented and is available under Linux through xanim and through Windows through Quicktime player. Yes, *one* codec is proprietary, called Sorenson, but then so is WMF or RMF. Heck, even the display layer of the OS, Quartz, is nonproprietary. It's DisplayPDF, which is a subset of DisplayPostScript. PDF is owned by Adobe, not Apple, and *anyone* can create a DisplayPDF layer if they wanted to.
How about the OS?
How about the fact that Darwin is open source and you can compile/install/port it to your x86 box? Standard TCP/IP stack, command line interface, GNU tool chain, BSD tool chain.
Okay, I'm getting tired of writing. You get my point?
I haven't looked lately, but as of a year ago, the answer was 'yes'.
You could buy a IBM CHRP motherboard for $3k, slap in a $400 CPU, choose your own PCI ATI video card, standard ram, standard hard drive, flash your own BIOS, and boot up OS 9.
The reason you wouldn't want to is, of course, price.
3 years before that there were Mac clones, proving that there was a market, but Apple, in it's wisdom, figured out it wasn't profitable, so stopped licensing Mac OS to them.
BeOS proved you could create CHRP mobos too.
It's not Apple's fault, per se, that no one else produces PPC chipsets or mobos, in the same way that it's not Microsoft's fault that the Pentium IV doesn't use the EV6 bus or the Athlon doesn't use RDRAM. Apple doesn't exactly encourage it, but you can't say that it's Apple's fault that there aren't 10 mobo manufacturers producing PPC mobos.
Go to an Apple Store near you and take a look.
Make a list of everything wrong with computers today (not Windows, not Apple, just computing) and see what Apple has done with OS X.
It's stable.
It's pretty.
It's functional.
It's useable.
You want to know something? The new Macs aren't exactly targetting graphics people.
Perhaps you don't know: LCDs have a smaller coloer range than a CRT. More precise, but smaller. LCDs also have a smaller viewing angle and they change color as you look from different angles. LCD screens are also polarized. None of these things, by default, attract a graphic pro.
Anyway, I'm a PC user who bought a new PowerBook last year. *My* anecdotal view, every bit as valid as *your* anecdotal view, is that OS X is 10x more functional, useful, and enjoyable than XP, and a Mac PC is 10x cooler, more useful, and more attractive than *any* PC hardware.
I just wanted to add more, and maybe clarify.
What's proprietary right now?
The mobo spec may or may not be open. At one point they had documented something called the common hardware reference platform, or CHRP. IBM had a few mobos, but no one else took that initiative to make their own. Apple, Motorola, and IBM are the only manufacturer's of chipsets for PPC, I suspect.
The PPC chips isn't any *more* proprietary than the Pentium chips. There are at least two manufacturers, Motorola and IBM, and more to be had as far away as a license and a phone call, or some good reverse engineering teams, no more or less than on the x86 side.
System busses. Electrically they are 66-100-133MHz and use standard SDRAM, no different than a PC. They use soDIMM for their laptops, but that's not a big deal either.
For graphics they use AGP. Only the PowerMac has an upgradeable AGP slot, but if you check out the electrical specs, all the current systems and even the older systems used PCI or AGP video. Also, they used industry standard ATI or NVIDIA graphics solutions, and are no more or less proprietary than any other graphic solution.
Networking. They use standard 10bT, 100bT, and 1000bT on their lineup. They use standard 802.11b wireless network protocol for their wireless connectivity, and that's a IEEE standard as well. They use, surprise, the BSD TCP/IP stack. They speak HTTP, FTP, telnet, SMB, and Appletalk all out of the box. None of those are proprietary.
Connectivity. They use USB and Firewire. Those are about as standard and nonproprietary as the rest of the industry.
Storage. They use DVD-R, CD-RW, DVD, on an EIDE bus. Those are as standard and interchangeable as any other drive. Heck, they use ATA-66 or ATA-100, and that's industry standard too. Their hard drives are the standard Toshibas, IBMs, and Fujitsus.
Expansion. Internally the PowerMac uses PCI, the same as everyone else. On the PowerBook thy use PCMCIA/PCCard, the same as everybody else.
Video. They use VGA on everything, and for digital output they use ADC, which is an industry accepted DVI compatible connector; it's DVI with USB and power bundled along.
OS. Heck, even the OS is non proprietary. Darwin is open source and available for the x86 platform. The presentation layer, Aqua, is written in Objective C and uses Quartz, a displayPDF solution, and is 'proprietary', but no more than PDF is proprietary.
Video: Quicktime isn't, as many believe, proprietary. It's well documented and has been for years, from what I've been told. Some codecs are proprietary, but then again, so is WMF and ASF. Quicktime is available in Linux under xanim and Windows provided by Apple.
Sound is traditional PCM and mini-headphone jack. They also support USB sound and industry standard MIDI.
Productivity. Courtesy of Microsoft there is 100% Office compatibility. Appleworks from Apple has good/decent compatibility. There's the full availability of web, email, ICQ, AIM, and IRC on OS X as well.
The reason you have a plethora of manufactureres of $499 pentium IV class machines has nothing to do with proprietary. You just have a bigger market share of proprietary components (95%).
I'm really off topic here. He's talking about copyright violation as a joke, and I respond to his comment, and I'm off topic. Haha.
Anyway, this guy's been modded up to 5 or something. It's not a good view; a valid view, maybe, but not a good one, I don't think.
I hope you're joking.
They want to release *their* products at their discretion, and you want to take that away from them?
"I hate strangers who don't let me use their bathrooms when I knock on the door. One more reason to piss on their lawns."
Point the first: Don't buy the special edition DVD then.
Point the second: If *no one* buys the first DVD, then a special edition DVD is *unwarranted*
Point the third: I never even *knew* there was a first edition DVD. I look forward to buying the special edition.
Point the fourth: Your money is your discretion, their product is their discretion. You have full control over your spending habits, they have full control over their release cycle. Any transaction here is a *voluntary* one.
More design considerations:
:)
Reduce cabling. Instead of a 50pin ribbon, migrate to Firewire! 6 wires, no power cable. Currently the 'bus' is limited to ~50MB/s, which means no more than 5 devices on the bus, but it's getting bumped to ~100MB/s this year. Not only is it better than flat ribbon cabling mechanically, it's more expandable, with the capability to address up to 64 (or is it 128?) devices.
No drive rails. Have them snap into place like Legos, using edge slots or something. Then 'fold' a cover down to secure them in place, like the guardrail on a roller coaster.
External power supply. Reduces heat production and cooling needs, electrical noise and insulation, and volume of the case by greater than 1x. Feed clean DC into the thing. Add a 2 minute battery, for kicks, just for redundancy purposes
CPU on the bottom is good, but having cards on top of it restricts airflow unless the cards are positioned vertically.
Adopt a newer bus for cards, and solve 3 problems simultaneously. HyperTransport, for example. Bus performance bottleneck, connector complexity, card placement/alignment. Akin to adopting Firewire for drive connections, this simplifies and makes boards smaller. Make the connector 'snap', like the hard drives, and align the cards vertically to allow air to flow over them and between them.
If we're designing for the future, the legacy ports should be on an 'optional' card. Parallel, serial, modem, and PS/2. Only support USB, Firewire, ethernet, video, and sound on the back. Provide USB and Firewire on the front, as well as a headphone jack.
You want function over form, thereby making the assumption that you prefer form to be marginalized to the benefit of function. At least the iMac, while not perfect, has a higher attention to function than the average PC.
There is no VGA connector and no power cable for the video. Two cables gone, functionality has been improved by reducing clutter, form has been improved by removing clutter.
There is no bulky three prong power cable, but a slender laptop style power cable. Form and function.
The possibility of using an Airport card, increasing functionality and form. No wiring for networking necessary.
Problems: USB and headphone access is in the rear. Keyboard, as you mentioned, is in front. The saving grace is that the mouse is designed and intended to be attached to the keyboard, meaning only one USB cable needs to snake to the back, minimally.
Functionality: Out of the box, all you need to do is plug in the speakers in the back, the power in the back, and the keyboard in the back, for use. For maximum utility, you have Airport installed. For slightly less utility, you can plug in an ethernet cable.
Compare to the average PC: On PC power cable, one VGA power cable, one keyboard cable, one mouse cable, one speaker-sound cable, one ethernet cable, one VGA cable. That's 7 cables to the Mac's 4, maybe six vs three, for the same functionality.