I have mod points and would have given you +1 Insightful, but I'd rather post an "Amen, brother!" instead.
You are absolutely right, the way patches are handled on Windows is a friggin' mess, and Apple definitely does it a better way with their "delta" and "combo" updaters, plus the fact that there's no such thing as a reboot-requiring patch that insists on being installed separately from everything else-- no matter how many updates you've got listed in Software Update, you can do them all at once and reboot one time. Getting a Windows machine that hasn't been well-maintained up to speed patch-wise is a MAJOR pain in the ass with all the reboots and hand-holding it requires. If someone like me who does that stuff for a living finds it tedious as hell, it's no wonder the average PC user never bothers updating.
Just last week, I went to a relative's house to tune up their XP PC. They only have dial-up and the machine is a couple years old, so I expected it to be unpatched and I wasn't disappointed. I brought XP SP2 with me on a CD and applied it, but I know there are umpteen additional patches that have been released since, and I had no easy way to track them all down, download them and burn them to CD as well-- so they remain uninstalled. (Said relative ordered a cable modem and will get another visit from me when it arrives so I can finish the job and get their machine up to date without it getting instantly pwned).
I remember those hard-to-open machines. I hated the Power Mac 7100 (and Centris/Quadra 650) chassis, where you had to take out the power supply to add RAM. I also hated the Quadra 800 (and Power Mac 8100) chassis, where you had to take the whole friggin' motherboard off to add RAM. I never got a RAM upgrade done on either of those types of Macs without bleeding. I loved the easy-open, pizza box designs like the LC and the Power Mac 6100, though I actually have a scar on my wrist due to one of the latter-- I had picked up my own machine out of the store after an upgrade (Centris 610 -> Power Mac 6100/60). I was carrying it under my arm and it shifted, and the edge of the RF shielding that stuck out under the front bezel sliced fairly deep into my wrist.
Apple has certainly made up for those bad case designs. The more recent beige Power Macs flipped open easily, and then of course we moved on to the wonderfully accessible B&W G3 case and its successors. While it's not fun replacing a drive in a CRT iMac, it's still better than those non-pizza box early-90s Macs.
Finally, while I too am not crazy about Apple migrating to Intel, they didn't have much in the way of options. IBM simply can't deliver what Apple needs and apparently wasn't/isn't very interested in rectifying the situation. I think Apple will make out okay, provided they can do two things:
1. Keep OS X from running on non-Apple hardware, because Apple is in deep shit the moment someone can fire up BitTorrent and download an ISO of OS X for Intel that has been hacked to run on non-Apple x86-based computers. Apple might have to finally put some sort of CD key or activation scheme into OS X to try to keep piracy at bay for a while longer.
2. Keep developers writing Mac-native software instead of having them tell people, "Just use the Windows version" (once someone inevitably comes up with a way to run Windows in a virtual machine at or near the full hardware speed of an Intel-based Mac).
First off, Laptop locks are useless. I can pick most of them in less than 2 minutes, and can crack most of the combination locks in about the same time. Now imagine a pro doing it. Also in most cases, They'll just break the laptop case to get it off the lock. You would be surprised what little most laptop lock points are protected with.
Laptop locks are not supposed to stand up to much abuse. They are just a deterrent to casual theft. If there's a locked laptop and an unlocked laptop sitting unattended momentarily, right next to each other on a library table, guess which one is more likely get slipped into some dude's bookbag in a crime of opportunity?
Laptop lock points are not supposed to stand up to much abuse. They are supposed to break, thereby creating cosmetic damage that will (theoretically) negatively affect the resale value and also fairly scream "Hey, look at me! I'm a stolen laptop!" It would be better IMHO if breaking the lock off rendered the laptop inoperable, but that would result in too many laptops killed accidentally by their klutzy owners. And even if it takes two minutes to pick the lock, that's two minutes during which the thief could get caught in the act, so he likely won't risk it.
My point is, some protection is always better than none, especially if there are other people around who don't use any-- they'll be victimized first.
Here's a real-life example of that: When I was a kid, me and my friend got our bikes stolen from in front of a store we had gone into for a few minutes. They didn't have a bike rack out front, but before we went in, I took the time to at least run my chain through the rear wheel and lock it. My friend didn't. The thief couldn't ride my bike with the wheel bound up, and he apparently got tired of dragging it. He left it behind some stores across the street, and I had it back less than 10 minutes later. My friend never saw his again.
As a tech who works on Macs and PCs, one of the reasons I absolutely hate the latter is because it's such a bitch and a half to troubleshoot a non-booting PC-- you can't simply plug in and boot from any old hard drive with Windows loaded on it and start digging around under the hood of the ailing, primary boot drive. IME it's been more work just getting the friggin' things to a point where you can attempt to troubleshoot them than it is to actually fix the problem once you find it. Having to whip up some Linux boot CD or make a bootable USB memory key with the appropriate device drivers and the ability to read/write NTFS is a bunch of hooey.
Target disk mode and the ability to boot from any attached hard drive with an OS on it are IMHO two of the most ridiculously useful features of the Mac from a hardware standpoint. It would be a foolish move indeed for Apple to drop them. The only reason they'd need to stick with the creaky old BIOS would be so Windows could run on the Intel-based Macs. But since Apple's position is that they will not support the installation or use of Windows on those machines, my hopes are high that they will in fact adopt something newer and a little more versatile.
After all, these "development Intel Macs" need to be capable of running the final release operating systems as well, or they'd just turn into junk when the retail Macs become available. Steve Jobs wouldn't let that ever happen...would he?
At the WWDC keynote, Jobs was quite clear that Apple is requiring the development machines to be returned to them. I don't remember exactly when, but presumably not until the first Intel-based Macs are available for purchase. I specifically remember Jobs adding a comment like, "We want these things back, we don't want them to end up on eBay."
If Apple don't start selling these things (PPC or x86) in department stores then average Joe will still buy Windows boxes. I really hope they take a page from the iPod success story and let all and sundry apply to be an "authorised Apple retailer" or whatever they call them these days.
Uh, buying an iPod is slightly different than buying a Mac. They're less than $500, and people just need to know the size they want (and in the case of the mini, the color). When you're buying a computer that costs a thousand bucks or more and runs a completely different OS than the de facto standard, there are more things to take into consideration.
Apple tried selling Macs in consumer electronics stores back in the 90s and it didn't work. Never mind that the specs of each individual machine in the Performa line was nearly impossible to keep straight, kids making minimum wage at Circuit City and CompUSA who have PCs and know nothing about Macs will be predisposed to doing a horrible job of selling them. Even after Apple's late-90s agreement with CompUSA that gave us the 'store within a store' concept, Macs still get short shrift there.
Apple built its own retail stores specifically so people who might be interested in Macs will encounter knowledgable salespeople, not some punk kid who won't be able to answer questions correctly or who will say "there's no software for those, let me show you these Windows machines over here."
You obviously don't have anything to do with end user support in your line of work. I've got the same people asking the same questions all the time. They don't want to be bothered to learn how to do anything on a computer other than the absolute minimum knowledge they need to get things done for work or school. There are millions of people out there who don't know anything more than how to turn their computers on and off, and use the basic features of Word, IE, and Outlook Express. They are ignorant of and/or apathetic about the nasty stuff that can happen to their PCs if they don't maintain them. Even if you try to put the fear of God into them about identity theft and whatnot, their "it can't/won't happen to me" attitude means they STILL won't care.
If you want to increase the percentage of computer users who actively maintain their systems, you'd get better/faster results just by going around killing the people who don't.
Whatever it uses, IMHO it's infinitely inferior to Outlook 2001's MAPI support. I don't know what the Mac Business Unit people were thinking on that one. Furthermore, the fact that Entourage still doesn't do everything that Outlook 2001 does (out-of-office assistant control and fully-functional public folders, to name two still MIA features) is shameful.
I really try not to wear the tinfoil hat, but sometimes I can't help but wonder if it's being done deliberately to keep the Mac platform at bay in corporate environments. Mac Office is a very lucrative product for Microsoft-- it's not like they can't afford to throw lots of money and programmers at making Entourage a top-notch Exchange client with full Outlook 2001 feature parity ASAFP.
OSX servers are above average, but if you will notice, not many people/bussinesses use them.
Yeah, one word explanation for that: Exchange.
My company has been selling Microsoft SBS hand over fist for years, but during that time there was quite a lot of interest in OS X Server (even from clients with all Windows-based workstations), for two reasons: because of all the egg on Microsoft's face over security issues, and because the OS X Server licensing costs are so cheap and licensing is low-maintenance. You don't have to keep track of CALs if your business is growing-- throw down $1000, boom, unlimited CALs. The last time one of my company's clients got unlimited Microsoft CALs, it cost them around $25K.
So why doesn't OS X Server sell more? The dealbreaker is always the fact that it doesn't have something like Exchange. I've been screaming for Apple to make an Exchange killer for years. They've got most of the pieces already: iCal, Mail, Address Book... all that needs to be done is to tie them together into a single app, and on the server end add group calendaring and maybe a new mail protocol similar in function to MAPI (IME, using IMAP as an Exchange client in MS Entourage SUCKS, so I think Apple needs to go one better with their imagined product).
Exactly. Plenty of the virus-coding bozos out there would love to impress their peers and make a name for themselves by being the first to come up with a real OS X virus, yet in five years, nobody's been able to do it.
Anyone who believes it's simply because nobody's been trying to come up with one seriously needs to remove their sphincter from around their neck.
I'm just going to paste my standard reply to this below. It still holds true even though it was written months ago, before the Intel announcement:
---------- Look, you guys just can't get it through your heads that the reason why OS X works so well is because it runs on such a limited pool of hardware-- this allows the engineers coding OS X to make assumptions THAT CANNOT BE MADE in the x86 world, where a machine could be using one of thousands of motherboards, network cards, graphics cards, sound cards, etc. Windows developers have to code for the lowest common denominator. OS X developers code for specific hardware. Even the version of NeXTStep that ran on Intel ran on a tiny subset of the available PC hardware. If your CD-ROM drive and motherboard weren't on the "supported hardware" list that came with NeXTStep, you were SOL.
That little fantasy you all have of buying "Mac OS X for x86", running it on some homebuilt shitbox you cobbled together from spare parts, and having it work as well as a G5 runs Panther today will NEVER come to pass. Microsoft has spent twenty years and untold millions trying to achieve that goal, and they still have quite a way to go.
Do you think Jobs could just snap his fingers one day and a few months later have a product on the shelves that would run perfectly on every PC capable of running XP today? It's impossible. And even if it were possible, you wouldn't buy it. Why? Because Apple uses their software to sell their hardware, so a copy of OS X for x86 would have to be priced to ease the pain of a lost hardware sale-- you'd either do without it and bitterly bitch about the price here on/., or you'd pirate it-- either way, Apple would lose money on it.
If [Apple] not allowing people to run MacOS on non-Apple hardware is really true, this will mean that, apparently, Apple is chronically disabled in its capabilites for marketing strategies and will never get it right.... Steve Jobs is clueless.
Not as clueless as you are, Sparky. Guess what brings in the lion's share of Apple's income right now? That's right, hardware sales. What happens if that income disappears overnight because you can suddenly install OS X on every POS $300 PC on the planet? Apple goes away, real quick-- like they almost did back in the 90s, when the Mac cloners were taking business away from Apple. When Jobs came back, he had to do fancy footwork to weasel out of the clone licenses via a technicality (by renaming what should have been Mac OS 7.7 to Mac OS 8.0-- only Mac OS 7.x was licensed to the cloners, so they were unable to sell machines with an OS) to save the company.
In light of their prior experience, Apple moving to Intel but working to prevent OS X from running on generic PCs is totally justified at this point. Perhaps at some future point they will make a gradual transition away from proprietarized hardware, but it it won't be happening within the next 18 months, and for a very good reason.
It was some time ago, and I believe it was the result of a "hack the server, get a prize" type contest.
I'm too lazy to Google it right now but IIRC, the server that was hacked was running the classic Mac OS, WebSTAR, and Lasso, a tool that lets you webify FileMaker databases. There was a vulnerability in Lasso that was used to, per the contest rules, successfully alter the contents of a certain page on the WebSTAR-hosted site.
The prize was awarded, the vulnerability was quickly fixed, and that's the first, last and only time I have ever heard of any server on a classic Mac OS based machine getting hacked.
Yet oddly enough entry requirements have just been relaxed for visitors coming from Saudi Arabia, where 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers came from.
Welcome to America, where common sense is second fiddle to political correctness.
What's even funnier is that IIRC the hijackers all had legit IDs, which were legitimately obtained.
No matter what kind of fancy, high-tech shit they stuff into IDs, as long as there are greedy people in charge of doling out those IDs, people who want fraudulent ones will be able to get them.
What's worse, anyone with fraudulent Real-IDs will not get the scrutiny they deserve-- people will just swipe the thing, see it comes up as valid, and not question it.
It's just the illusion of security, just like all the horseshit they put into place at airports after 9/11. Window dressing, nothing more.
ISPs are more concerned about their bottom line than your bandwidth.
If one ISP cuts off its idiot customers' connections until they patch their PCs, what do you think is more likely to happen?:
a) Idiot customers become conscientious about maintaining their PCs, and become model "netizens." b) Idiot customers get pissed off at their ISP for cutting them off, and take their business elsewhere.
If you chose "A," you're hopelessly deluded. There are way more maintenance-apathetic, "I'll double-click on anything" PC owners out there than PC owners who carefully maintain their machine and tread lightly on the net-- the big ISPs are going to play to the biggest market, and it ain't you.
I don't know if there's a big enough market right now for an ISP that ruthlessly polices its network and quickly cuts off the connections of infected machines, and makes that a selling point of their service-- sort of like the online equivalent of one of those gated communities that tells you what the approved hours are for mowing your lawn and what color flowers you're allowed to have in your street-facing flowerbed. If things keep going the way they're going, however...
Want to create an arbitrary share like you can under Windows? Right clicking on the directory will not help. Pretty soon you realise there's actually no easy way to do it. Apple presumably wants you to buy OS X Server for that.
More like Apple wants all data on an OS X client machine to be somewhere in a user's folder rather than placed arbitrarily elsewhere on the drive. I have to agree with this stance-- in the pre-OS X days people would put their files wherever they wanted them (and frequently, accidentally and unknowingly where they didn't want them). If their machine became problematic and needed to be rebuilt I'd have to look in every directory for errant data files that might be important and retrieve them before wiping the drive. With OS X, stuff *must* go in their user folder. If the machine needs to be rebuilt I just have to back up the Users folder to know that I got everything of importance.
If you're too lazy to use your Public and Drop Box folders for sharing your local data with peers on the LAN, (or if you legitimately want to use a spare OS X Client machine as a cheapie file server with a 10-simultaneous-connection limit) you can always download and use SharePoints-- just not on any network that I admin.:-)
...you're a fool and deserve everything you get if you put a week-old OS on production hardware without doing non-production testing or having a fall-back.
If you insist, however, do it right. Prep a build of the new OS and put it on its own hard drive in the machine of your one or two most clueful end users. Let them beat on it for a while and document their problems/questions as they try to do their work. Once in a while go through the list and address their fixable issues. If they happen upon a show-stopper, they simply boot from the drive with the old build on it and use that until the next service release appears. Then you apply it, and test again. Repeat as necessary until the number of issues is low enough that you can confidently deploy the new OS build to all end users.
I have used this technique to great effect at several of my Mac clients, though I don't even consider giving them the newest OS until the.2 or.3 service releases have been out for a few weeks. A couple of my clients used to question this conservative method until some renegade users bought and installed Panther right after its release (without authorization from anyone) and ended up being basically unable to work until I reverted them to the standard OS/applications build.
As for OS X Server, that gets tested in my company's lab and on my bench at home from the day we get it, but it doesn't get rolled out anywhere until.4, and even then we clone the old drive to a FireWire drive before upgrading, just to be safe.
What kind of system performance do you want to know, that Activity Monitor doesn't provide? I've got that in my Login Items and always keep the CPU meter running in a corner of my secondary display.
Actually, there's a quote from a Microsoft guy in the Ars Technica Tiger review. They apparently just need to write a Spotlight plugin to add Entourage search capability.
First of all, I'd bet the farm that Apple will not make OS X for x86.
Secondly, even if they do, it won't run on commodity hardware-- it will run on x86-based, Apple-branded boxes only. Because like it or not, the lion's share of Apple's revenue, which funds practically everything else they do, comes from their hardware sales. You're right, Apple DOES care about revenue-- you saw what happened to Apple's revenue when the Mac clones were around in the late 90s, didn't you? (In case you missed it, the company damn near died from the clones.) So if you'll still have to buy a new computer to run OS X (just like you do now), why should Apple go to the trouble of migrating to x86? It'll just piss off developers who will have to update all their Mac products, and existing Mac users, who will have to repurchase all their software again-- who just did that a few years ago when they moved from OS 9 to OS X.
Finally, Apple and Dell will NEVER strike up any kind of relationship due to the egos of and animosity between their respective CEOs. (Dell only sold iPods for a couple minutes because they didn't have a competing product of their own at the time.) Besides that, no matter how big they are, Dell is still beholden to Microsoft. If Dell pisses off Microsoft, Microsoft could revoke their Windows license tomorrow and put them out of business. Dell only makes a half-assed attempt at offering systems with Linux preloaded, and that's without giving special consideration to the hardware that goes into them. Partnering with Apple to sell Dells running OS X would require a much deeper level of cooperation between the two companies, and I just don't see it happening.
Microsoft's Mac Business Unit said a couple weeks ago that they were going to release an update to Office 2004 "this summer" that will take advantage of new features in Tiger. I don't recall opening up the Entourage database to Spotlight searches being specifically mentioned-- only time will tell.
The question: Why doesn't Apple port their OS to Intel hardware?
Once again time for me to dust off and repost this: ---------- Look, you guys just can't get it through your heads that the reason why OS X works so well is because it runs on such a limited pool of hardware-- this allows the engineers coding OS X to make assumptions THAT CANNOT BE MADE in the x86 world, where a machine could be using one of thousands of motherboards, network cards, graphics cards, sound cards, etc. Windows developers have to code for the lowest common denominator. OS X developers code for specific hardware. Even the version of NeXTStep that ran on Intel hardware ran on a tiny subset of the available PC hardware. If your CD-ROM drive and motherboard weren't on the "supported hardware" list that came with NeXTStep, you were SOL.
That little fantasy you all have of buying "Mac OS X for x86", running it on some homebuilt shitbox you cobbled together from spare parts, and having it work as well as a G5 runs Panther today will NEVER come to pass. Microsoft has spent twenty years and untold millions trying to achieve that goal, and they still have quite a way to go.
Do you think Jobs could just snap his fingers one day and a few months later have a product on the shelves that would run perfectly on every PC capable of running XP today? It's impossible. And even if it were possible, you wouldn't buy it. Why? Because Apple uses their software to sell their hardware, so a copy of OS X for x86 would have to be priced to ease the pain of a lost hardware sale-- you'd either do without it and bitterly bitch about the price here on/., or you'd pirate it-- either way, Apple would lose money on it.
Well, the argument could certainly be made that USB is little more than the Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) with hot-swapping ability and a few other modern touches added.
ADB first appeared in 1986, and it sure seems reasonable to me that Apple could have started work on FireWire in the 80s (as claimed by one of the articles I linked to in my previous post) to be an eventual ADB replacement-- only later to realize that FireWire's capabilities meant using it for keyboards and mice would be like using a bazooka to kill a fly.
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I have mod points and would have given you +1 Insightful, but I'd rather post an "Amen, brother!" instead.
You are absolutely right, the way patches are handled on Windows is a friggin' mess, and Apple definitely does it a better way with their "delta" and "combo" updaters, plus the fact that there's no such thing as a reboot-requiring patch that insists on being installed separately from everything else-- no matter how many updates you've got listed in Software Update, you can do them all at once and reboot one time. Getting a Windows machine that hasn't been well-maintained up to speed patch-wise is a MAJOR pain in the ass with all the reboots and hand-holding it requires. If someone like me who does that stuff for a living finds it tedious as hell, it's no wonder the average PC user never bothers updating.
Just last week, I went to a relative's house to tune up their XP PC. They only have dial-up and the machine is a couple years old, so I expected it to be unpatched and I wasn't disappointed. I brought XP SP2 with me on a CD and applied it, but I know there are umpteen additional patches that have been released since, and I had no easy way to track them all down, download them and burn them to CD as well-- so they remain uninstalled. (Said relative ordered a cable modem and will get another visit from me when it arrives so I can finish the job and get their machine up to date without it getting instantly pwned).
~Philly
I remember those hard-to-open machines. I hated the Power Mac 7100 (and Centris/Quadra 650) chassis, where you had to take out the power supply to add RAM. I also hated the Quadra 800 (and Power Mac 8100) chassis, where you had to take the whole friggin' motherboard off to add RAM. I never got a RAM upgrade done on either of those types of Macs without bleeding. I loved the easy-open, pizza box designs like the LC and the Power Mac 6100, though I actually have a scar on my wrist due to one of the latter-- I had picked up my own machine out of the store after an upgrade (Centris 610 -> Power Mac 6100/60). I was carrying it under my arm and it shifted, and the edge of the RF shielding that stuck out under the front bezel sliced fairly deep into my wrist.
Apple has certainly made up for those bad case designs. The more recent beige Power Macs flipped open easily, and then of course we moved on to the wonderfully accessible B&W G3 case and its successors. While it's not fun replacing a drive in a CRT iMac, it's still better than those non-pizza box early-90s Macs.
Finally, while I too am not crazy about Apple migrating to Intel, they didn't have much in the way of options. IBM simply can't deliver what Apple needs and apparently wasn't/isn't very interested in rectifying the situation. I think Apple will make out okay, provided they can do two things:
1. Keep OS X from running on non-Apple hardware, because Apple is in deep shit the moment someone can fire up BitTorrent and download an ISO of OS X for Intel that has been hacked to run on non-Apple x86-based computers. Apple might have to finally put some sort of CD key or activation scheme into OS X to try to keep piracy at bay for a while longer.
2. Keep developers writing Mac-native software instead of having them tell people, "Just use the Windows version" (once someone inevitably comes up with a way to run Windows in a virtual machine at or near the full hardware speed of an Intel-based Mac).
~Philly
First off, Laptop locks are useless. I can pick most of them in less than 2 minutes, and can crack most of the combination locks in about the same time. Now imagine a pro doing it. Also in most cases, They'll just break the laptop case to get it off the lock. You would be surprised what little most laptop lock points are protected with.
Laptop locks are not supposed to stand up to much abuse. They are just a deterrent to casual theft. If there's a locked laptop and an unlocked laptop sitting unattended momentarily, right next to each other on a library table, guess which one is more likely get slipped into some dude's bookbag in a crime of opportunity?
Laptop lock points are not supposed to stand up to much abuse. They are supposed to break, thereby creating cosmetic damage that will (theoretically) negatively affect the resale value and also fairly scream "Hey, look at me! I'm a stolen laptop!" It would be better IMHO if breaking the lock off rendered the laptop inoperable, but that would result in too many laptops killed accidentally by their klutzy owners. And even if it takes two minutes to pick the lock, that's two minutes during which the thief could get caught in the act, so he likely won't risk it.
My point is, some protection is always better than none, especially if there are other people around who don't use any-- they'll be victimized first.
Here's a real-life example of that: When I was a kid, me and my friend got our bikes stolen from in front of a store we had gone into for a few minutes. They didn't have a bike rack out front, but before we went in, I took the time to at least run my chain through the rear wheel and lock it. My friend didn't. The thief couldn't ride my bike with the wheel bound up, and he apparently got tired of dragging it. He left it behind some stores across the street, and I had it back less than 10 minutes later. My friend never saw his again.
~Philly
As a tech who works on Macs and PCs, one of the reasons I absolutely hate the latter is because it's such a bitch and a half to troubleshoot a non-booting PC-- you can't simply plug in and boot from any old hard drive with Windows loaded on it and start digging around under the hood of the ailing, primary boot drive. IME it's been more work just getting the friggin' things to a point where you can attempt to troubleshoot them than it is to actually fix the problem once you find it. Having to whip up some Linux boot CD or make a bootable USB memory key with the appropriate device drivers and the ability to read/write NTFS is a bunch of hooey.
Target disk mode and the ability to boot from any attached hard drive with an OS on it are IMHO two of the most ridiculously useful features of the Mac from a hardware standpoint. It would be a foolish move indeed for Apple to drop them. The only reason they'd need to stick with the creaky old BIOS would be so Windows could run on the Intel-based Macs. But since Apple's position is that they will not support the installation or use of Windows on those machines, my hopes are high that they will in fact adopt something newer and a little more versatile.
~Philly
After all, these "development Intel Macs" need to be capable of running the final release operating systems as well, or they'd just turn into junk when the retail Macs become available. Steve Jobs wouldn't let that ever happen...would he?
At the WWDC keynote, Jobs was quite clear that Apple is requiring the development machines to be returned to them. I don't remember exactly when, but presumably not until the first Intel-based Macs are available for purchase. I specifically remember Jobs adding a comment like, "We want these things back, we don't want them to end up on eBay."
~Philly
If Apple don't start selling these things (PPC or x86) in department stores then average Joe will still buy Windows boxes. I really hope they take a page from the iPod success story and let all and sundry apply to be an "authorised Apple retailer" or whatever they call them these days.
Uh, buying an iPod is slightly different than buying a Mac. They're less than $500, and people just need to know the size they want (and in the case of the mini, the color). When you're buying a computer that costs a thousand bucks or more and runs a completely different OS than the de facto standard, there are more things to take into consideration.
Apple tried selling Macs in consumer electronics stores back in the 90s and it didn't work. Never mind that the specs of each individual machine in the Performa line was nearly impossible to keep straight, kids making minimum wage at Circuit City and CompUSA who have PCs and know nothing about Macs will be predisposed to doing a horrible job of selling them. Even after Apple's late-90s agreement with CompUSA that gave us the 'store within a store' concept, Macs still get short shrift there.
Apple built its own retail stores specifically so people who might be interested in Macs will encounter knowledgable salespeople, not some punk kid who won't be able to answer questions correctly or who will say "there's no software for those, let me show you these Windows machines over here."
The only solution is user education.
You obviously don't have anything to do with end user support in your line of work. I've got the same people asking the same questions all the time. They don't want to be bothered to learn how to do anything on a computer other than the absolute minimum knowledge they need to get things done for work or school. There are millions of people out there who don't know anything more than how to turn their computers on and off, and use the basic features of Word, IE, and Outlook Express. They are ignorant of and/or apathetic about the nasty stuff that can happen to their PCs if they don't maintain them. Even if you try to put the fear of God into them about identity theft and whatnot, their "it can't/won't happen to me" attitude means they STILL won't care.
If you want to increase the percentage of computer users who actively maintain their systems, you'd get better/faster results just by going around killing the people who don't.
~Philly
FWIW though, Entourage 2004 uses DAV, not IMAP.
Whatever it uses, IMHO it's infinitely inferior to Outlook 2001's MAPI support. I don't know what the Mac Business Unit people were thinking on that one. Furthermore, the fact that Entourage still doesn't do everything that Outlook 2001 does (out-of-office assistant control and fully-functional public folders, to name two still MIA features) is shameful.
I really try not to wear the tinfoil hat, but sometimes I can't help but wonder if it's being done deliberately to keep the Mac platform at bay in corporate environments. Mac Office is a very lucrative product for Microsoft-- it's not like they can't afford to throw lots of money and programmers at making Entourage a top-notch Exchange client with full Outlook 2001 feature parity ASAFP.
~Philly
OSX servers are above average, but if you will notice, not many people/bussinesses use them.
Yeah, one word explanation for that: Exchange.
My company has been selling Microsoft SBS hand over fist for years, but during that time there was quite a lot of interest in OS X Server (even from clients with all Windows-based workstations), for two reasons: because of all the egg on Microsoft's face over security issues, and because the OS X Server licensing costs are so cheap and licensing is low-maintenance. You don't have to keep track of CALs if your business is growing-- throw down $1000, boom, unlimited CALs. The last time one of my company's clients got unlimited Microsoft CALs, it cost them around $25K.
So why doesn't OS X Server sell more? The dealbreaker is always the fact that it doesn't have something like Exchange. I've been screaming for Apple to make an Exchange killer for years. They've got most of the pieces already: iCal, Mail, Address Book... all that needs to be done is to tie them together into a single app, and on the server end add group calendaring and maybe a new mail protocol similar in function to MAPI (IME, using IMAP as an Exchange client in MS Entourage SUCKS, so I think Apple needs to go one better with their imagined product).
~Philly
Exactly. Plenty of the virus-coding bozos out there would love to impress their peers and make a name for themselves by being the first to come up with a real OS X virus, yet in five years, nobody's been able to do it.
Anyone who believes it's simply because nobody's been trying to come up with one seriously needs to remove their sphincter from around their neck.
~Philly
...so it's much harder to casually obtain one without paying for it.
Plus, those "cheap hardware" fanboys all own iRivers or whatever and mock the iPod.
~Philly
I'm just going to paste my standard reply to this below. It still holds true even though it was written months ago, before the Intel announcement:
/., or you'd pirate it-- either way, Apple would lose money on it.
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Look, you guys just can't get it through your heads that the reason why OS X works so well is because it runs on such a limited pool of hardware-- this allows the engineers coding OS X to make assumptions THAT CANNOT BE MADE in the x86 world, where a machine could be using one of thousands of motherboards, network cards, graphics cards, sound cards, etc. Windows developers have to code for the lowest common denominator. OS X developers code for specific hardware. Even the version of NeXTStep that ran on Intel ran on a tiny subset of the available PC hardware. If your CD-ROM drive and motherboard weren't on the "supported hardware" list that came with NeXTStep, you were SOL.
That little fantasy you all have of buying "Mac OS X for x86", running it on some homebuilt shitbox you cobbled together from spare parts, and having it work as well as a G5 runs Panther today will NEVER come to pass. Microsoft has spent twenty years and untold millions trying to achieve that goal, and they still have quite a way to go.
Do you think Jobs could just snap his fingers one day and a few months later have a product on the shelves that would run perfectly on every PC capable of running XP today? It's impossible. And even if it were possible, you wouldn't buy it. Why? Because Apple uses their software to sell their hardware, so a copy of OS X for x86 would have to be priced to ease the pain of a lost hardware sale-- you'd either do without it and bitterly bitch about the price here on
~Philly
If [Apple] not allowing people to run MacOS on non-Apple hardware is really true, this will mean that, apparently, Apple is chronically disabled in its capabilites for marketing strategies and will never get it right. ... Steve Jobs is clueless.
Not as clueless as you are, Sparky. Guess what brings in the lion's share of Apple's income right now? That's right, hardware sales. What happens if that income disappears overnight because you can suddenly install OS X on every POS $300 PC on the planet? Apple goes away, real quick-- like they almost did back in the 90s, when the Mac cloners were taking business away from Apple. When Jobs came back, he had to do fancy footwork to weasel out of the clone licenses via a technicality (by renaming what should have been Mac OS 7.7 to Mac OS 8.0-- only Mac OS 7.x was licensed to the cloners, so they were unable to sell machines with an OS) to save the company.
In light of their prior experience, Apple moving to Intel but working to prevent OS X from running on generic PCs is totally justified at this point. Perhaps at some future point they will make a gradual transition away from proprietarized hardware, but it it won't be happening within the next 18 months, and for a very good reason.
~Philly
I concur with the Anthro recommendation. You might also want to check out Global Industrial's selection.
The good stuff can be pricey, but it's worth it.
~Philly
Actually, there was an exploit, once.
It was some time ago, and I believe it was the result of a "hack the server, get a prize" type contest.
I'm too lazy to Google it right now but IIRC, the server that was hacked was running the classic Mac OS, WebSTAR, and Lasso, a tool that lets you webify FileMaker databases. There was a vulnerability in Lasso that was used to, per the contest rules, successfully alter the contents of a certain page on the WebSTAR-hosted site.
The prize was awarded, the vulnerability was quickly fixed, and that's the first, last and only time I have ever heard of any server on a classic Mac OS based machine getting hacked.
~Philly
Yet oddly enough entry requirements have just been relaxed for visitors coming from Saudi Arabia, where 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers came from.
Welcome to America, where common sense is second fiddle to political correctness.
What's even funnier is that IIRC the hijackers all had legit IDs, which were legitimately obtained.
No matter what kind of fancy, high-tech shit they stuff into IDs, as long as there are greedy people in charge of doling out those IDs, people who want fraudulent ones will be able to get them.
What's worse, anyone with fraudulent Real-IDs will not get the scrutiny they deserve-- people will just swipe the thing, see it comes up as valid, and not question it.
It's just the illusion of security, just like all the horseshit they put into place at airports after 9/11. Window dressing, nothing more.
~Philly
ISPs are more concerned about their bottom line than your bandwidth.
If one ISP cuts off its idiot customers' connections until they patch their PCs, what do you think is more likely to happen?:
a) Idiot customers become conscientious about maintaining their PCs, and become model "netizens."
b) Idiot customers get pissed off at their ISP for cutting them off, and take their business elsewhere.
If you chose "A," you're hopelessly deluded. There are way more maintenance-apathetic, "I'll double-click on anything" PC owners out there than PC owners who carefully maintain their machine and tread lightly on the net-- the big ISPs are going to play to the biggest market, and it ain't you.
I don't know if there's a big enough market right now for an ISP that ruthlessly polices its network and quickly cuts off the connections of infected machines, and makes that a selling point of their service-- sort of like the online equivalent of one of those gated communities that tells you what the approved hours are for mowing your lawn and what color flowers you're allowed to have in your street-facing flowerbed. If things keep going the way they're going, however...
~Philly
Want to create an arbitrary share like you can under Windows? Right clicking on the directory will not help. Pretty soon you realise there's actually no easy way to do it. Apple presumably wants you to buy OS X Server for that.
:-)
More like Apple wants all data on an OS X client machine to be somewhere in a user's folder rather than placed arbitrarily elsewhere on the drive. I have to agree with this stance-- in the pre-OS X days people would put their files wherever they wanted them (and frequently, accidentally and unknowingly where they didn't want them). If their machine became problematic and needed to be rebuilt I'd have to look in every directory for errant data files that might be important and retrieve them before wiping the drive. With OS X, stuff *must* go in their user folder. If the machine needs to be rebuilt I just have to back up the Users folder to know that I got everything of importance.
If you're too lazy to use your Public and Drop Box folders for sharing your local data with peers on the LAN, (or if you legitimately want to use a spare OS X Client machine as a cheapie file server with a 10-simultaneous-connection limit) you can always download and use SharePoints-- just not on any network that I admin.
~Philly
...you're a fool and deserve everything you get if you put a week-old OS on production hardware without doing non-production testing or having a fall-back.
.2 or .3 service releases have been out for a few weeks. A couple of my clients used to question this conservative method until some renegade users bought and installed Panther right after its release (without authorization from anyone) and ended up being basically unable to work until I reverted them to the standard OS/applications build.
.4, and even then we clone the old drive to a FireWire drive before upgrading, just to be safe.
If you insist, however, do it right. Prep a build of the new OS and put it on its own hard drive in the machine of your one or two most clueful end users. Let them beat on it for a while and document their problems/questions as they try to do their work. Once in a while go through the list and address their fixable issues. If they happen upon a show-stopper, they simply boot from the drive with the old build on it and use that until the next service release appears. Then you apply it, and test again. Repeat as necessary until the number of issues is low enough that you can confidently deploy the new OS build to all end users.
I have used this technique to great effect at several of my Mac clients, though I don't even consider giving them the newest OS until the
As for OS X Server, that gets tested in my company's lab and on my bench at home from the day we get it, but it doesn't get rolled out anywhere until
~Philly
What kind of system performance do you want to know, that Activity Monitor doesn't provide? I've got that in my Login Items and always keep the CPU meter running in a corner of my secondary display.
~Philly
Actually, there's a quote from a Microsoft guy in the Ars Technica Tiger review. They apparently just need to write a Spotlight plugin to add Entourage search capability.
~Philly
First of all, I'd bet the farm that Apple will not make OS X for x86.
Secondly, even if they do, it won't run on commodity hardware-- it will run on x86-based, Apple-branded boxes only. Because like it or not, the lion's share of Apple's revenue, which funds practically everything else they do, comes from their hardware sales. You're right, Apple DOES care about revenue-- you saw what happened to Apple's revenue when the Mac clones were around in the late 90s, didn't you? (In case you missed it, the company damn near died from the clones.) So if you'll still have to buy a new computer to run OS X (just like you do now), why should Apple go to the trouble of migrating to x86? It'll just piss off developers who will have to update all their Mac products, and existing Mac users, who will have to repurchase all their software again-- who just did that a few years ago when they moved from OS 9 to OS X.
Finally, Apple and Dell will NEVER strike up any kind of relationship due to the egos of and animosity between their respective CEOs. (Dell only sold iPods for a couple minutes because they didn't have a competing product of their own at the time.) Besides that, no matter how big they are, Dell is still beholden to Microsoft. If Dell pisses off Microsoft, Microsoft could revoke their Windows license tomorrow and put them out of business. Dell only makes a half-assed attempt at offering systems with Linux preloaded, and that's without giving special consideration to the hardware that goes into them. Partnering with Apple to sell Dells running OS X would require a much deeper level of cooperation between the two companies, and I just don't see it happening.
~Philly
Microsoft's Mac Business Unit said a couple weeks ago that they were going to release an update to Office 2004 "this summer" that will take advantage of new features in Tiger. I don't recall opening up the Entourage database to Spotlight searches being specifically mentioned-- only time will tell.
~Philly
The question: Why doesn't Apple port their OS to Intel hardware?
/., or you'd pirate it-- either way, Apple would lose money on it.
Once again time for me to dust off and repost this:
----------
Look, you guys just can't get it through your heads that the reason why OS X works so well is because it runs on such a limited pool of hardware-- this allows the engineers coding OS X to make assumptions THAT CANNOT BE MADE in the x86 world, where a machine could be using one of thousands of motherboards, network cards, graphics cards, sound cards, etc. Windows developers have to code for the lowest common denominator. OS X developers code for specific hardware. Even the version of NeXTStep that ran on Intel hardware ran on a tiny subset of the available PC hardware. If your CD-ROM drive and motherboard weren't on the "supported hardware" list that came with NeXTStep, you were SOL.
That little fantasy you all have of buying "Mac OS X for x86", running it on some homebuilt shitbox you cobbled together from spare parts, and having it work as well as a G5 runs Panther today will NEVER come to pass. Microsoft has spent twenty years and untold millions trying to achieve that goal, and they still have quite a way to go.
Do you think Jobs could just snap his fingers one day and a few months later have a product on the shelves that would run perfectly on every PC capable of running XP today? It's impossible. And even if it were possible, you wouldn't buy it. Why? Because Apple uses their software to sell their hardware, so a copy of OS X for x86 would have to be priced to ease the pain of a lost hardware sale-- you'd either do without it and bitterly bitch about the price here on
~Philly
Well, the argument could certainly be made that USB is little more than the Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) with hot-swapping ability and a few other modern touches added.
ADB first appeared in 1986, and it sure seems reasonable to me that Apple could have started work on FireWire in the 80s (as claimed by one of the articles I linked to in my previous post) to be an eventual ADB replacement-- only later to realize that FireWire's capabilities meant using it for keyboards and mice would be like using a bazooka to kill a fly.
~Philly