"Apple needs to build a LDAP compliant network Management server that plugs into AD network and just blend in, and manages all the iDevices for Enterprise. It would do even better if said server would also allow AD like policies on managed Macs."
Uh, except for the iDevices for Enterprise bit (which I'm not entirely sure about), they already have-- it's called Mac OS X Server. It will replicate AD info for authentication purposes and use separate Open Directory info for management of the Macs on the network. This technique is generally known as the "golden triangle."
You could also use a product called Centrify DirectControl, which as I understand it basically translates AD group policies and applies them to non-Windows systems. I have not used this myself, but it's something that may be worth a look if someone reading this has a need.
Agreed. Apple is being unfairly singled out here. Damn near every major electronics/computer maker's products roll out of many of those very same factories... something the Apple-hater crowd is usually very quick to point out in an attempt to refute the "Apple uses better components" or "Apple products have better build quality" arguments made by Apple fanboys.
Yes, what a silly people we Americans are, designing our combat aircraft based on their purposes in the field.
Designing a plane around a gun that was built to devastate Soviet tanks? Well that was just crazy!
And designing a plane to be nearly invisible to radar, so it can destroy targets before the enemy even knows it's in their airspace? What kind of cockamamie Uncle Sam jibba-jabba is that???
Doublestack, Novell, IBM, Apple, Netscape, AOL, DEC, all were companies that were turned on in an instant and had to deal with a Microsoft's severely bipolar behavior.
Don't forget Go Corp, who'd likely have given us viable tablet computing 20 years ago if they hadn't insisted on using their own OS instead of Windows. Microsoft destroyed them with extreme prejudice for it.
Also, I think you meant Stac Electronics, not Doublestack. A Doublestack is a burger at Wendy's, and it appears you were posting at lunchtime. Freudian slip, perhaps?
I had a Moto SLVR that was kind of bitchy like that. I put up with it for about 6 months, until I found a good deal on an unlocked Sony-Ericsson K550i on eBay. That phone lasted me a year and a half, until I gave in and got an iPhone.
"Appears to be working, but isn't" is about the worst way a phone can act up on you. I had that happen with multiple WinMo based HTC phones over the years. Definitely not fun when your job includes on-call duty. After the first time I got burned while on-call I had them direct that stuff to my personal cell and not my company-issued WinMo piece of shit.
"Learn your geeky history. Apple didn't but Steve Jobs did build all Next manufacturing to high tech facilities in the US."
You learn YOUR geeky history. Apple initially had all their manufacturing done in the US, and kept at least some manufacturing there, up until the early to mid 90s. They had factories in Fremont and Sacramento, CA, and another in Fountain, CO, to name three. You can easily tell the factory that built a given Mac from letters at the beginning of the serial number-- the only two that I still remember are "FC" for the Fremont factory, and "CK" for one they had in Cork, Ireland.
I actually just read the Jobs biography, and he apparently had a meeting with Obama during which Jobs took him to task over how difficult and expensive it is to open a new factory in the US, compared to nearly anywhere else in the world. I got the sense that Jobs would have happily done some production in the US again if it made business sense to do so.
Yup. Plenty of historical accounts have said this. IBM saw Apple's success and wanted a piece of the personal computer market, and quickly. They formed a team to do an end-run around their own bureaucracy and slap something together with off the shelf components in a year. They thought the copyrighted BIOS would be their protection from cloners, but Compaq footed the bill for the first legal reverse engineering of it. Once it was proven doable, another company did it (I think it was Phoenix Technologies) and sold their BIOS to anyone who wanted it. Then the PC clone floodgates opened.
IBM later tried to stuff the commoditization genie back in the bottle with the MicroChannel architecture that shipped in their Personal System/2 machines, but the licensing for it was so onerous the major cloners ignored it, banded together and standardized on (I believe) ISA.
Siri is a gimick. It doesn't make the phone any more useful.
The hell it doesn't. I have practically outsourced my short-term memory to the Reminders app in the last week. Anytime I need to remember something-- particularly when I'm in the car-- it's incredibly easy to hold down a button for 2 seconds and tell my phone "Remind me to [activity] at [time] and/or when I [leave/arrive] [location]". I would never use it that much if I had to set those up manually.
Voice Control in the iPhone 3GS was a gimmick. Siri added utility to my iPhone from day one, and it's only going to get better with time.
It's also only a matter of time before Siri moves into Mac OS X. Mark my words, in the near future one of the F keys on Apple keyboards will be a Siri button (though you'll also have the option for always-on listening and have to address the computer by name to indicate a command).
I can tell you that running your desktop apps on a tablet is one of those ideas that sounds good until you actually try it. The problem is that the desktop and tablet experiences are far more different than the desktop and laptop are. It turns out that the mouse (or trackpad or trackpoint for that matter) is a far better tool for moving a cursor around than fingers are.
Even though you can sort of get it to work, it doesn't work well. Tablets apps are about direct manipulation. You grab something and drag it around with your finger, not some kind of virtual waldo. This isn't something that can be fixed by tweaking the OS UI; you've got to redesign the application as a tablet app.
Exactly. Too bad nobody at Microsoft understands that. I mean, if anyone there did, they surely wouldn't have kept trying to cram desktop Windows into phones and tablets for the last decade. They have such a hard on for leveraging existing Windows applications that they are willfully blind to the notion that you need an OS and apps that are purpose-built for the form factor they're going to inhabit. Even after iPhone and iPad came around and proved it by their overwhelming success, Microsoft is still stubbornly doing the same shit.
Using their usual dirty tricks [Apple keeps] releasing new updates to their OS making them run slower on earlier hardware.
You are so full of shit your eyes are brown. Every version of OS X I have used has felt perceptibly faster than its predecessor on the same hardware, and I'm not the only one who feels that way. Hell, the upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard was specifically about trimming the fat from the OS.
The typical Mac buyer is too stupid to handle two.
Uh huh. I've been doing computer support for Windows users for twenty years. If I had a buck for every time I've had an interaction like this with a client, I could retire:
Me: Okay, now I need you to right-click on [whatever] and choose [whatever] from the menu that pops up. Them: Ok, I clicked on it, but there's no menu, the icon just got dark. Me: It sounds like you just clicked on it, I need you to right-click on it. Them: Right-click? Me:(hiding exasperation that it's the 21st century and I'm STILL having to explain this to people) Click on the button on the right side of the mouse. Them:(astonished) You mean it does something else????
OS X Server would have done better if Apple loosened up the license terms and let it run on non-Apple hardware. I can see why they wouldn't do that while selling the xServe, but once they no longer had a dog in the fight they should have relented. VMware VSphere 5 supports Lion Server, but from what I've read, only when VSphere is running on Apple hardware. If Apple allowed OS X Server to run virtualized on any hardware it would have seen an immediate sales spike (Well, discounting the fact that Lion Server has been widely reviled as a piece of crap compared to Snow Leopard Server.) There are plenty of large Windows-based companies that have Macs, and the ability to better manage them via throwing an instance of OS X Server on their existing VM infrastructure would have been music to their ears.
I've got a hackintosh in the next room that has run Leopard Server and now Snow Leopard Server like a champ for years-- but that's just for my personal needs. I have to figure out problems on my own (there aren't many, and most are related to the fact I'm not running on Apple hardware), and if it goes down for a couple days it's not a huge deal. I could never plunk one in a production environment for a client, where they would expect to be able to call Apple for support and multi-day downtime could hurt their business.
The fact that the only hardware Apple markets as a "server" is a Mac mini should be the first clue.
Wrong. They sell a server configuration of the Mac Pro, as well. They've sold a server configuration of their high-end tower since the waning days of the beige G3 machines back in 1998; the mini server is a relatively new phenomenon. Anyway, the "Server" configuration is just a matter of prepackaged and preinstalled convenience-- any Mac could be a server, it just needs OS X Server installed on it. They could offer laptops with a "server" configuration if they wanted to.
Granted, in most cases I'd rather have something rackmountable with LOM and redundant PSUs, but for the SMB market most likely to use a Mac as a server, a mini is perfect-- it's tiny, it's quiet, it sips power, and it doesn't need much in the way of care and feeding. Throw a low-end UPS on it, mirror its internal drives, hook up an external USB drive for Time Machine backups, and you've got yourself a pretty capable little box. Especially when the alternative would be some Dell or HP monstrosity running Windows SBS-- if SBS gets any more bloated and ungainly, the boot time will need to be measured with a calendar.
I haven't had a chance to sit down and play with Lion Server yet, but the reviews I've read so far (including this one) do not impress me. Hopefully some features will get added back due to customer complaints. If the bit where you need two different admin apps to configure all the services is true, that's completely asinine. They had it right in Snow Leopard Server, where the Server Preferences app was aimed at non-geeks, but if you knew what you were doing you could do what you needed to from within Server Admin.
Actually, Skynet originally went online August 4, 1997. It became self-aware at 2:14AM Eastern time on August 29, 1997, and the attempt to shut it down resulted in Judgment Day. Anybody not wearing 2,000,000 sunblock had a really bad day.
it's something that brings back good memories and I'd love to share something similar with my son.
Why not just buy an actual C64 setup on eBay for a fraction of the price of this thing? There are always a few on there and some of them come with a large selection of game disks.
~Philly
Slashdotters have usually put Windows Phone 7 down because of the old clumsy feel of older Windows Mobile phones and the OS, but you have to remember WP7 is completely different beast and it's completely redesigned.
Yeah, well, Microsoft had years to make Windows Mobile not be a complete piece of shit, and they just couldn't be bothered to try until the iPhone showed up and Apple started eating their lunch in the mobile space and publicly embarrassing them. I've been using company-issued WM phones since 2006, and the experience has been uniformly terrible-- to the degree that I no longer trust my company phone when I'm on call, and have the calls sent to my personal phone (which, yes, is an iPhone).
It's a little too late for Microsoft to be telling me, "But, baby, I can change!" and expect me to believe it and/or be interested in giving them another chance. I suspect many others feel similarly.
"Apple finally made the break between OS 9 and OS X. If MS attempted such a break, their business customers would revolt."
Except, they sort of did with Windows 7, and they solved it the same way Apple did-- an XP compatibility environment.
Technically, there's not much stopping them from doing it for real-- throwing out all the 20 year-old, backward-compatible cruft and making a fresh start from the ground up, while providing a VM for legacy applications. Virtualization technology has improved by leaps and bounds over what was available when Apple transitioned from 9 to X. Hell, since 2006 I can (with the help of VMware or Parallels) run Windows apps on my -Mac- and have it be damn near seamless, there's no reason Microsoft couldn't do the same thing.
They've been flogging tablets for 10 years. They keep doing the same stupid shit over and over again, which is trying to stuff desktop Windows into a smaller form factor for which it is too bloated and battery-hungry, with a UI for which it was not designed nor suited, and try to use "it's the Windows you already know!" bit as a selling point. Even if they do rework a version of the Windows UI to be more touch-friendly, the second you launch an app (which will most likely NOT be touch-friendly, because it was designed for "the [desktop] Windows you already know!") you're right back to hurting for a mouse/stylus and keyboard.
Seriously, what the hell has Microsoft been doing? It's been a year since the iPad was announced, and the best thing they have to battle it is still a PowerPoint deck of FUD? Yeah, good luck with that, Steve. By the time you have a horse to put in the race, the race will be over. iPads have been making their way into corporations and meeting with wide approval. Apps are being written for them. They are going to be nice and entrenched by the time any possibly-viable competing product comes off the assembly line, and then Microsoft will learn what it's like to be on the bad side of corporate technology inertia.
It would be interesting to include penetration of the box. I've had multiple UPS packages with large circular holes punched in the side and through a significant portion of the box as if it had lost a jousting match.
At my last job, about 10 years ago, UPS dropped off a 21" CRT. The dead center of one side of the box had a hole in it the shape and size of one fork of a forklift, and there was the pleasant tinkling sound of broken glass when the box was moved. Unfortunately the receptionist who signed for it didn't notice that when it was dropped off. We didn't even bother to open the box, we just called the vendor and arranged a swap.
The president's office at that company was very close to where the UPS trucks would park when delivering to the building. One day I was in there working on her laptop when they pulled up outside. The driver went in the back, and then one by one I saw the packages for our building come arcing out and hitting the ground outside the truck.
After those incidents I stopped using UPS whenever possible. When I cannot avoid using them, I use an absurd amount of padding and insure the package up the wazoo.
The Xserve has been largely redundant since Apple discontinued the Xraid.
It's not like there aren't other options. Apple promoted and sold a Promise RAID unit as a replacement, and the guys who were on the former Xserve RAID team formed a new company to make and sell a unit that is a worthy successor to the Xserve RAID in capability and appearance. I haven't had the chance to play with one yet but I understand they're pretty nice.
I know the iMac had the irDA port. It didn't bear mentioning because nobody used it-- it was little more than a curiosity, and vanished from the iMac by January of 1999 when the 3rd revision came out.
And the previous reply was right, you are completely missing my point about USB. The iMac wasn't the first PC with USB-- which would be why I said it had been on PC motherboards since 1996-- but it was the first to basically force its adoption through the elimination of legacy ports.
Remember the Gates on-stage BSOD while demoing connecting a USB scanner in Win98? Remember the "plug and pray" jokes? USB support in Windows wasn't what I would consider usable and trustworthy until 98SE (shipped in May, 1999), so people with the option to do so would stick with their trusty serial and parallel peripherals for their Windows PCs. Meanwhile Apple had been selling computers with only USB ports for nearly a year, driving demand for USB peripherals.
Though 3.5" floppy drives had been around since 1982, they did not meet with success until the 3.5" floppy drive was chosen for the original 1984 Macintosh (quickly followed by the Atari ST and Amiga the following year). Apple was not too far ahead of their time when they killed the floppy in 1998, but they saw where things were going and made the right call-- Mac users who still really needed a floppy drive were able to buy an external one. Windows users questioned it because they weren't (really, still aren't) accustomed to being able to boot from any device with an OS on it that's connected to their computer, so floppies were their lifeline.
Though USB had been on PC motherboards beginning in 1996, nobody did anything with it until Apple put it in the iMac in 1998 and excluded all other port types. Lots of people will argue that Microsoft finally adding USB support to Windows (in Win95 OSR2) was the tipping point, but that's bull. Windows users had the option of clinging to their peripherals that used the ancient parallel and serial ports, and cling they did. iMac users had no such option, and the popularity of the iMac meant that if hardware makers wanted iMac owners' money, they had to start churning out USB-based peripherals for them.
As an aside, Firewire did not appear in a Mac until the Blue & White G3, in January of 1999. It did not appear in an iMac until the 6th revision, in October of 1999. Apple's view was that USB and Firewire were complementary... USB for low-bandwidth stuff like keyboards and mice, and Firewire for hard drives, video cameras, and other high-bandwidth devices. Intel was the one that had the apparently inferiority complex and started working on USB2, to compete. Based on my experience using both, Firewire 800 is superior to USB2, and if I have the choice between those two I'll always pick Firewire. (As for the future, Firewire 1600 and 3200 have been approved by the IEEE but aren't in any shipping product, I haven't seen a USB3 device in the wild yet, and Light Peak is a wildcard at this point.)
To sum up, Apple is the tech company that is not afraid to chop off legacy stuff at the knees, and by doing so indeed often drags the rest of the industry kicking and screaming with it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Apple needs to build a LDAP compliant network Management server that plugs into AD network and just blend in, and manages all the iDevices for Enterprise. It would do even better if said server would also allow AD like policies on managed Macs."
Uh, except for the iDevices for Enterprise bit (which I'm not entirely sure about), they already have-- it's called Mac OS X Server. It will replicate AD info for authentication purposes and use separate Open Directory info for management of the Macs on the network. This technique is generally known as the "golden triangle."
You could also use a product called Centrify DirectControl, which as I understand it basically translates AD group policies and applies them to non-Windows systems. I have not used this myself, but it's something that may be worth a look if someone reading this has a need.
~Philly
Agreed. Apple is being unfairly singled out here. Damn near every major electronics/computer maker's products roll out of many of those very same factories... something the Apple-hater crowd is usually very quick to point out in an attempt to refute the "Apple uses better components" or "Apple products have better build quality" arguments made by Apple fanboys.
~Philly
Yes, what a silly people we Americans are, designing our combat aircraft based on their purposes in the field.
Designing a plane around a gun that was built to devastate Soviet tanks? Well that was just crazy!
And designing a plane to be nearly invisible to radar, so it can destroy targets before the enemy even knows it's in their airspace? What kind of cockamamie Uncle Sam jibba-jabba is that???
Doublestack, Novell, IBM, Apple, Netscape, AOL, DEC, all were companies that were turned on in an instant and had to deal with a Microsoft's severely bipolar behavior.
Don't forget Go Corp, who'd likely have given us viable tablet computing 20 years ago if they hadn't insisted on using their own OS instead of Windows. Microsoft destroyed them with extreme prejudice for it.
Also, I think you meant Stac Electronics, not Doublestack. A Doublestack is a burger at Wendy's, and it appears you were posting at lunchtime. Freudian slip, perhaps?
~Philly
I had a Moto SLVR that was kind of bitchy like that. I put up with it for about 6 months, until I found a good deal on an unlocked Sony-Ericsson K550i on eBay. That phone lasted me a year and a half, until I gave in and got an iPhone.
"Appears to be working, but isn't" is about the worst way a phone can act up on you. I had that happen with multiple WinMo based HTC phones over the years. Definitely not fun when your job includes on-call duty. After the first time I got burned while on-call I had them direct that stuff to my personal cell and not my company-issued WinMo piece of shit.
"Learn your geeky history. Apple didn't but Steve Jobs did build all Next manufacturing to high tech facilities in the US."
You learn YOUR geeky history. Apple initially had all their manufacturing done in the US, and kept at least some manufacturing there, up until the early to mid 90s. They had factories in Fremont and Sacramento, CA, and another in Fountain, CO, to name three. You can easily tell the factory that built a given Mac from letters at the beginning of the serial number-- the only two that I still remember are "FC" for the Fremont factory, and "CK" for one they had in Cork, Ireland.
I actually just read the Jobs biography, and he apparently had a meeting with Obama during which Jobs took him to task over how difficult and expensive it is to open a new factory in the US, compared to nearly anywhere else in the world. I got the sense that Jobs would have happily done some production in the US again if it made business sense to do so.
~Philly
...and if you disagree with me, you can bite my shiny metal ass!
~Philly
Yup. Plenty of historical accounts have said this. IBM saw Apple's success and wanted a piece of the personal computer market, and quickly. They formed a team to do an end-run around their own bureaucracy and slap something together with off the shelf components in a year. They thought the copyrighted BIOS would be their protection from cloners, but Compaq footed the bill for the first legal reverse engineering of it. Once it was proven doable, another company did it (I think it was Phoenix Technologies) and sold their BIOS to anyone who wanted it. Then the PC clone floodgates opened.
IBM later tried to stuff the commoditization genie back in the bottle with the MicroChannel architecture that shipped in their Personal System/2 machines, but the licensing for it was so onerous the major cloners ignored it, banded together and standardized on (I believe) ISA.
Siri is a gimick. It doesn't make the phone any more useful.
The hell it doesn't. I have practically outsourced my short-term memory to the Reminders app in the last week. Anytime I need to remember something-- particularly when I'm in the car-- it's incredibly easy to hold down a button for 2 seconds and tell my phone "Remind me to [activity] at [time] and/or when I [leave/arrive] [location]". I would never use it that much if I had to set those up manually.
Voice Control in the iPhone 3GS was a gimmick. Siri added utility to my iPhone from day one, and it's only going to get better with time.
It's also only a matter of time before Siri moves into Mac OS X. Mark my words, in the near future one of the F keys on Apple keyboards will be a Siri button (though you'll also have the option for always-on listening and have to address the computer by name to indicate a command).
~Philly
I can tell you that running your desktop apps on a tablet is one of those ideas that sounds good until you actually try it. The problem is that the desktop and tablet experiences are far more different than the desktop and laptop are. It turns out that the mouse (or trackpad or trackpoint for that matter) is a far better tool for moving a cursor around than fingers are.
Even though you can sort of get it to work, it doesn't work well. Tablets apps are about direct manipulation. You grab something and drag it around with your finger, not some kind of virtual waldo. This isn't something that can be fixed by tweaking the OS UI; you've got to redesign the application as a tablet app.
Exactly. Too bad nobody at Microsoft understands that. I mean, if anyone there did, they surely wouldn't have kept trying to cram desktop Windows into phones and tablets for the last decade. They have such a hard on for leveraging existing Windows applications that they are willfully blind to the notion that you need an OS and apps that are purpose-built for the form factor they're going to inhabit. Even after iPhone and iPad came around and proved it by their overwhelming success, Microsoft is still stubbornly doing the same shit.
~Philly
Using their usual dirty tricks [Apple keeps] releasing new updates to their OS making them run slower on earlier hardware.
You are so full of shit your eyes are brown. Every version of OS X I have used has felt perceptibly faster than its predecessor on the same hardware, and I'm not the only one who feels that way. Hell, the upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard was specifically about trimming the fat from the OS.
If you want to talk about bloated OSes that force hardware upgrades, you'd better talk Microsoft.
The typical Mac buyer is too stupid to handle two.
Uh huh. I've been doing computer support for Windows users for twenty years. If I had a buck for every time I've had an interaction like this with a client, I could retire:
Me: Okay, now I need you to right-click on [whatever] and choose [whatever] from the menu that pops up.
Them: Ok, I clicked on it, but there's no menu, the icon just got dark.
Me: It sounds like you just clicked on it, I need you to right-click on it.
Them: Right-click?
Me: (hiding exasperation that it's the 21st century and I'm STILL having to explain this to people) Click on the button on the right side of the mouse.
Them: (astonished) You mean it does something else????
OS X Server would have done better if Apple loosened up the license terms and let it run on non-Apple hardware. I can see why they wouldn't do that while selling the xServe, but once they no longer had a dog in the fight they should have relented. VMware VSphere 5 supports Lion Server, but from what I've read, only when VSphere is running on Apple hardware. If Apple allowed OS X Server to run virtualized on any hardware it would have seen an immediate sales spike (Well, discounting the fact that Lion Server has been widely reviled as a piece of crap compared to Snow Leopard Server.) There are plenty of large Windows-based companies that have Macs, and the ability to better manage them via throwing an instance of OS X Server on their existing VM infrastructure would have been music to their ears.
I've got a hackintosh in the next room that has run Leopard Server and now Snow Leopard Server like a champ for years-- but that's just for my personal needs. I have to figure out problems on my own (there aren't many, and most are related to the fact I'm not running on Apple hardware), and if it goes down for a couple days it's not a huge deal. I could never plunk one in a production environment for a client, where they would expect to be able to call Apple for support and multi-day downtime could hurt their business.
~Philly
The fact that the only hardware Apple markets as a "server" is a Mac mini should be the first clue.
Wrong. They sell a server configuration of the Mac Pro, as well. They've sold a server configuration of their high-end tower since the waning days of the beige G3 machines back in 1998; the mini server is a relatively new phenomenon. Anyway, the "Server" configuration is just a matter of prepackaged and preinstalled convenience-- any Mac could be a server, it just needs OS X Server installed on it. They could offer laptops with a "server" configuration if they wanted to.
Granted, in most cases I'd rather have something rackmountable with LOM and redundant PSUs, but for the SMB market most likely to use a Mac as a server, a mini is perfect-- it's tiny, it's quiet, it sips power, and it doesn't need much in the way of care and feeding. Throw a low-end UPS on it, mirror its internal drives, hook up an external USB drive for Time Machine backups, and you've got yourself a pretty capable little box. Especially when the alternative would be some Dell or HP monstrosity running Windows SBS-- if SBS gets any more bloated and ungainly, the boot time will need to be measured with a calendar.
~Philly
I haven't had a chance to sit down and play with Lion Server yet, but the reviews I've read so far (including this one) do not impress me. Hopefully some features will get added back due to customer complaints. If the bit where you need two different admin apps to configure all the services is true, that's completely asinine. They had it right in Snow Leopard Server, where the Server Preferences app was aimed at non-geeks, but if you knew what you were doing you could do what you needed to from within Server Admin.
~Philly
Actually, Skynet originally went online August 4, 1997. It became self-aware at 2:14AM Eastern time on August 29, 1997, and the attempt to shut it down resulted in Judgment Day. Anybody not wearing 2,000,000 sunblock had a really bad day.
~Philly
it's something that brings back good memories and I'd love to share something similar with my son.
Why not just buy an actual C64 setup on eBay for a fraction of the price of this thing? There are always a few on there and some of them come with a large selection of game disks. ~Philly
Slashdotters have usually put Windows Phone 7 down because of the old clumsy feel of older Windows Mobile phones and the OS, but you have to remember WP7 is completely different beast and it's completely redesigned.
Yeah, well, Microsoft had years to make Windows Mobile not be a complete piece of shit, and they just couldn't be bothered to try until the iPhone showed up and Apple started eating their lunch in the mobile space and publicly embarrassing them. I've been using company-issued WM phones since 2006, and the experience has been uniformly terrible-- to the degree that I no longer trust my company phone when I'm on call, and have the calls sent to my personal phone (which, yes, is an iPhone).
It's a little too late for Microsoft to be telling me, "But, baby, I can change!" and expect me to believe it and/or be interested in giving them another chance. I suspect many others feel similarly.
~Philly
"Apple finally made the break between OS 9 and OS X. If MS attempted such a break, their business customers would revolt."
Except, they sort of did with Windows 7, and they solved it the same way Apple did-- an XP compatibility environment.
Technically, there's not much stopping them from doing it for real-- throwing out all the 20 year-old, backward-compatible cruft and making a fresh start from the ground up, while providing a VM for legacy applications. Virtualization technology has improved by leaps and bounds over what was available when Apple transitioned from 9 to X. Hell, since 2006 I can (with the help of VMware or Parallels) run Windows apps on my -Mac- and have it be damn near seamless, there's no reason Microsoft couldn't do the same thing.
~Philly
They've been flogging tablets for 10 years. They keep doing the same stupid shit over and over again, which is trying to stuff desktop Windows into a smaller form factor for which it is too bloated and battery-hungry, with a UI for which it was not designed nor suited, and try to use "it's the Windows you already know!" bit as a selling point. Even if they do rework a version of the Windows UI to be more touch-friendly, the second you launch an app (which will most likely NOT be touch-friendly, because it was designed for "the [desktop] Windows you already know!") you're right back to hurting for a mouse/stylus and keyboard.
Seriously, what the hell has Microsoft been doing? It's been a year since the iPad was announced, and the best thing they have to battle it is still a PowerPoint deck of FUD? Yeah, good luck with that, Steve. By the time you have a horse to put in the race, the race will be over. iPads have been making their way into corporations and meeting with wide approval. Apps are being written for them. They are going to be nice and entrenched by the time any possibly-viable competing product comes off the assembly line, and then Microsoft will learn what it's like to be on the bad side of corporate technology inertia.
It would be interesting to include penetration of the box. I've had multiple UPS packages with large circular holes punched in the side and through a significant portion of the box as if it had lost a jousting match.
At my last job, about 10 years ago, UPS dropped off a 21" CRT. The dead center of one side of the box had a hole in it the shape and size of one fork of a forklift, and there was the pleasant tinkling sound of broken glass when the box was moved. Unfortunately the receptionist who signed for it didn't notice that when it was dropped off. We didn't even bother to open the box, we just called the vendor and arranged a swap.
The president's office at that company was very close to where the UPS trucks would park when delivering to the building. One day I was in there working on her laptop when they pulled up outside. The driver went in the back, and then one by one I saw the packages for our building come arcing out and hitting the ground outside the truck.
After those incidents I stopped using UPS whenever possible. When I cannot avoid using them, I use an absurd amount of padding and insure the package up the wazoo.
Great story, I always wanted to see a filmed version of it.
~Philly
The Xserve has been largely redundant since Apple discontinued the Xraid.
It's not like there aren't other options. Apple promoted and sold a Promise RAID unit as a replacement, and the guys who were on the former Xserve RAID team formed a new company to make and sell a unit that is a worthy successor to the Xserve RAID in capability and appearance. I haven't had the chance to play with one yet but I understand they're pretty nice.
~Philly
I know the iMac had the irDA port. It didn't bear mentioning because nobody used it-- it was little more than a curiosity, and vanished from the iMac by January of 1999 when the 3rd revision came out.
And the previous reply was right, you are completely missing my point about USB. The iMac wasn't the first PC with USB-- which would be why I said it had been on PC motherboards since 1996-- but it was the first to basically force its adoption through the elimination of legacy ports.
Remember the Gates on-stage BSOD while demoing connecting a USB scanner in Win98? Remember the "plug and pray" jokes? USB support in Windows wasn't what I would consider usable and trustworthy until 98SE (shipped in May, 1999), so people with the option to do so would stick with their trusty serial and parallel peripherals for their Windows PCs. Meanwhile Apple had been selling computers with only USB ports for nearly a year, driving demand for USB peripherals.
~Philly
Though 3.5" floppy drives had been around since 1982, they did not meet with success until the 3.5" floppy drive was chosen for the original 1984 Macintosh (quickly followed by the Atari ST and Amiga the following year). Apple was not too far ahead of their time when they killed the floppy in 1998, but they saw where things were going and made the right call-- Mac users who still really needed a floppy drive were able to buy an external one. Windows users questioned it because they weren't (really, still aren't) accustomed to being able to boot from any device with an OS on it that's connected to their computer, so floppies were their lifeline.
Though USB had been on PC motherboards beginning in 1996, nobody did anything with it until Apple put it in the iMac in 1998 and excluded all other port types. Lots of people will argue that Microsoft finally adding USB support to Windows (in Win95 OSR2) was the tipping point, but that's bull. Windows users had the option of clinging to their peripherals that used the ancient parallel and serial ports, and cling they did. iMac users had no such option, and the popularity of the iMac meant that if hardware makers wanted iMac owners' money, they had to start churning out USB-based peripherals for them.
As an aside, Firewire did not appear in a Mac until the Blue & White G3, in January of 1999. It did not appear in an iMac until the 6th revision, in October of 1999. Apple's view was that USB and Firewire were complementary... USB for low-bandwidth stuff like keyboards and mice, and Firewire for hard drives, video cameras, and other high-bandwidth devices. Intel was the one that had the apparently inferiority complex and started working on USB2, to compete. Based on my experience using both, Firewire 800 is superior to USB2, and if I have the choice between those two I'll always pick Firewire. (As for the future, Firewire 1600 and 3200 have been approved by the IEEE but aren't in any shipping product, I haven't seen a USB3 device in the wild yet, and Light Peak is a wildcard at this point.)
To sum up, Apple is the tech company that is not afraid to chop off legacy stuff at the knees, and by doing so indeed often drags the rest of the industry kicking and screaming with it.
~Philly