Honest question since I haven't paid much attention to owning a Mac: are upgrades to MacOS free too? Or do you have to pay for those? If the latter, how widely are they pirated (no flames please)?
Minor upgrades are free and can be installed automatically via software update.
Major upgrades, eg. x.x.0 releases, are paid for. They usually (well, Jaguar and Panther) cost $130 or so, or $200 for a large bloc of licenses to use at home. As for piracy, I don't believe they are widely pirated, no, at present, but probably will be if the notoriously cheapskate PC crowd migrates over to the Mac en-mass.
Are they too afraid of losing their white house press pass or something?
And that, my friend, is the real liberal media bias. It's not the media that are biased towards liberalism, quite the reverse actually. It's that liberals are biased towards the media. What passes for journalists these days reported on Whitewater with free abandon and reckless regard for the truth, with little or no follow up in the Rathergate mould, because they knew they could get away with it. That Clinton's equivalent of Karl Rove wasn't going to make their jobs impossible for doing it, because by and large, the left and center has always believed in a free press, not just in practice but in spirit too.
Linksys? Hardeharhar. You kill me. That's the bunch that typically sells three or four different products under the same product name and packaging meaning you have to examine the serial number just to find out which driver you're supposed to use. No thank you.
I've not bought a lot of Belkin stuff (just their 802.11g WAP and a hub) and the only criticisms I have of either is that Belkin seems to think that you have to make things big and ugly to be accepted. Belkin, by and large, seems to create basic networking equipment that does exactly what it says on the box - no extra frills but no unexpected limitations either.
If their "pre-N" stuff is as good as their "g" WAP, then - if you're interested in such things - it's almost certainly worth getting. Me, I'll wait for the official standard. But I'll almost certainly get Belkin's WAP for that, when it comes out.
What's the advantage, for Comcast, over traditional Cable Telephone services? I used Cable Telephones in the UK, you get the traditional socket for a traditional, unpowered, phone, and the voice quality was, as you'd expect, identical to a standard POTS phone.
So why's Comcast doing it this way and adding the complexity of converting too and from IP?
Giuliani was hailed as a hero because of the way he acted after the 9/11 attack, keeping the city (and to a certain extent the country) calm and functioning in the face of what was a frightening incident. Giuliani didn't have the resources or even power to do somehow prevent an international terror group based, at the time, in Florida and acting in such secret even the CIA clearly didn't know what was going on. What he did have the ability to do was act the leader once it happened. And he did. This guy who was considered by most people I know to be little more than a conservative mini-despot suddenly, somehow, united the city around him.
In many ways, Giuliani was also hailed as a hero because he stepped up to the plate at a time when nobody else in the country in a position of authority was apparently doing so. It was several hours before a clearly frightened Bush appeared on television to make a meaningless speech in his usual halting style. The first major government figure who turned up in New York City was Bill Clinton, and he wasn't President any more.
I think it's a tad unfair to blame Giuliani for either terror attack. There was little in practice he'd have been able to do about 9/11. To know about it, the NYPD would have had to be better equiped and more organized internationally than the NSA and CIA. To do anything about it the same NYPD would have had to be paramilitary in nature, AAA gun turrets would have had to be stationed around the city, and New York would have had to have the power to invade Florida at will.
If you're trolling, I apologise. If you're not, really, you need to be a little more reasonable.
You missed the G5 iMac which is working very well as a switching product.
If the $800 eMac isn't, how exactly can a mid-$1,xxx's product do that?
As you say in your very next sentence, it certainly isn't a bargain entry level computer. Indeed, it's not even an entry level computer. And the iPod, while on the high end of MP3 player prices, is certainly not in four digits. It's well within the general consumer electronics budget.
$1,900 (to use your figure, thankfully iMacs do start a little cheaper than that) is a huge amount of money to spend on what's essentially a leap into the dark. Average PC users have never used Macs, they have no idea if they're any good, they're told they are, but they know a few downsides already such as the lack of compatability with what they use at the office. Ultimately they're willing to spend a certain amount to try something new, but $1,300? That's a lot of cash for something that might end up being replaced within a year of buying it.
I can tell you for certain that the people I know on all sides of the fence consider the eMac "not what they want" and the iMac G5 "a massive investment that they're not going to be able to afford for a long time, and why should I if I can upgrade my current PC anyway and keep my old software and maybe try this Lunix thing?"
And I don't know where you buy monitors from, but I can tell you I wouldn't spend $800 on a monitor. Yes, sure, the iMac comes with a very nice one built-in of the kind that may cost $800 or more, but - shock, horror - most people wouldn't actually buy such a monitor ordinarily. We'll have a nice 17" 1280x1024 LCD or < 15" 1024x768 if one's available, as that's more than adequate for what we want to use the machine for.
And that's with a standard SFF box, not with the CPU integrated into the monitor.
I know, Apple has no chance, right?
Or did you mean that would be considered a feature? Most people - including "Grandma" - ditched non-modular machines in the late eighties and early nineties.
Thanks for that. Of course, the problem with these types of reliability reports is that it relies upon the problem being bad enough for someone to send the computer in for repair. Windows 95 was unquestionably less reliable than XP, but I doubt it contributed to a large number of returns.
While Apple appears to be better than average in the Consumer Reports guide you link to, I think it's amazing the return rates are so high in general. Even Apple needs around 5% of its machines to be returned because they're inoperable. Gateway (and Micron - ok, I've heard of them but they're not household names) has an amazing failure rate.
The industry needs to clean up its act. I guess it's never been great, and there were the terrible times of the early eighties where Sinclair and others had awful quality control, but even so...
I would imagine that the vast majority of your non-geek friends own an LCD mostly because it's harder to find a CRT these days.
It's extremely easy. Even Wal*Mart sells them. My non-geek friends have usually gone out and bought an LCD monitor to replace their CRTs. LCDs haven't been foisted on an unwilling public and Wal*Mart, Staples, Office*, etc, are not selling the things for the three geeks in town who are likely to drop in and buy one, they're selling them to regular computer users who've seen the monitors and want one.
Most people I know who've come into my home and seen the LCD on my coffee table have left wanting an LCD, unless they've already had one.
I've never suggested that the eMac was the entry level Mac. In fact, I said there is a need for the $500 headless iMac that is purpoted
Well, you were arguing with me when I said the eMac wasn't consumer friendly, that in the consumer market it was a lemon, and that by and large it only really sells in the education market and that ultimately it isn't appealing to people who want an entry level Mac. For my efforts you accused me of "detracting from something cool" and questioned if I was balmy. What was I supposed to think?
The point about the monitor is not that the eMac comes with one, it's that it's part of the main unit, and is thus not possible to replace with an LCD. And it gets worse when people already have an LCD and know they have to go back to using the 17" CRT if they get an eMac.
And surprisingly, a clear majority of my non-geek friends actually have LCDs.
Mom and Dad that like to surf the net, send email, write a Word document and maybe the odd Excel spreadsheet for work is the target audience. Needless to say that it comes with the whole iLife suite for those that are creative.
Do you mean for the eMac or the new iMac? 'cos I can tell you now neither of my parents, both technophobes, would be interested in an eMac for precisely the reasons I've outlined.
People who advocate the notion that "mom and pop and grandma" are ordinary users tend to simplify what these people want and assume that what they want is to buy an all-in-one box that can do bugger all that costs any amount of money. Ordinary people, however, are technically savy enough to know if they prefer LCDs or CRTs and I think the average elitist slashbot would be surprised how many people are walking into stores and buying themselves a monitor, rather than a whole PC, and who'd like to keep using that monitor.
The eMac is a large, ugly, box with limited appeal. You may like it, it isn't "detracting" from it to argue that it doesn't hit a particular market, that it isn't the entry level switchers Mac its supporters claim it to be, and that Apple should be creating an entry level Mac.
If the eMac remains profitable after producing such a thing, there's no reason for Apple to take it off the market. But it's frankly a little insulting to hear arguments, such as yours, that eMacs are the entry level Mac and people arguing otherwise simply don't know what ordinary users are and should "Quit detracting from something cool".
I don't want an eMac. Nobody I know wants an eMac. That's a simple fact.
Whether other people do or not doesn't mean there isn't a place in the market for a machine I and those people I know would actually want.
A commodity market is one where the market dictates that the price of the product has to be close to its production cost. If Apple believes that $500 is the market price for this device, and it costs something close to that to build, then they're making a commodity machine. Remember there's the PC market, and then there's the broader market, the market for people's dollars.
I think Apple can sell the machine for more than $500.
As far as Commodore goes, the Amiga line was profitable, no matter how badly Commodore mismanaged or mismarketed it. Commodore never made a commodity Amiga, they always priced substantially above cost price, and made a healthy profit on virtually every model. Commodore overstretched themselves because their managers believed that the Amiga's future couldn't be guaranteed and that PCs were the way to go, so they put an extremely loss making toe in that water.
Those who argue Commodore failed because of poor marketing tend to make somewhat dubious assumptions about the platform. As Apple has proved, you do not need a huge market share to survive and be profitable, and the Amiga, at the time of Commodore's bankruptsy, had a much higher market share in the personal computer market as a whole than Apple does now. They could have survived, long term they'd have needed to get rid of some of the idiots Irving Gould was appointing, but they could have survived had they not lost so much money in trying to produce IBM compatables.
Ransome Olds introduced the assembly line for auto production a number of years before Ford, FWIW.
Of course, this doesn't mean Ford wasn't innovative. Innovation, contrary to popular belief, is not a synonym for "invention", it means to bring a technology to the public.
Ford hit the right formula of pricing, combining the right forms of manufacture, and using a good, popular, design of vehicle, to bring cars from being relatively obscure items to the general masses. Likewise, Apple and Commodore could be called the joint innovators for personal computers (IBM and Microsoft really took advantage of an already built market, and neither Apple nor Commodore can really take credit for inventing the personal computer); Microsoft arguably innovated with the GUI (Xerox invented it, Apple refined it, Digital Research made a good false start, Commodore and NeXT made the nicest versions, but really, GUIs weren't taken seriously until Microsoft released Windows 3.0 and bundled it with DOS. Business people considered computers with GUIs "toys" and DOS programs sold by the bucketload until Microsoft forced the situation.)
At some point, someone mod-bombed Alan Partridge and now his karma's shit.
Do what I do, make him a friend (click on the little gray ball) and make sure your friends have at least a +2 bonus (see your preferences) and you'll see what he writes.
Moderation unfortunately gets abused. Partridge made a few enemies, and that's what happens.
FWIW, OS X has crashed on most of my systems regularly (though 10.2.8 is fairly good on my Beige G3, and 10.3.5 good on the B&W I'm using now), and XP has never crashed on my office PC. I think a lot of crashes today - Mac or PC - have to do with hardware quality, and despite the enthusiasts cries of the opposite, Apple is really no better or worse than anyone else. (When I've argued this before, the repost has tended to be "Yeah, but Macs come with better video cards" which is, I guess, "Quality" in one sense, but not the definition of quality in this context. Macs are Macs, they're built, for the most part, with commodity components as much as practically possible and in the same factories as the average PC, and Apple's care and control of the platform is offset by the fact competitors can pick and choose between different x86 motherboards on the basis of known quality.)
Dell is the exception. Look, instead, at what it's done to IBM, Gateway, Escom, Commodore (Commodore would probably still be with us if it wasn't for their blunder into PC manufacturing), et al. Look at how Compaq and HP felt the only way they could remain in the market was to merge, reducing the competition a little.
Dell has a particular formula for success but they're extremely vulnerable. Slight market adjustments could cause HP to succeed and Dell to Chapter 11, or vice versa.
You don't want to get into a commodity market if you don't have to. It's one of the first rules of business. Apple has no reason to enter a commodity market, they merely need to create a machine that will attract significant customers. It can be underpowered relative to commodity PCs, as long as the price is low and the reputation (through products like OS X) is good enough.
Well, the Cube isn't part of Apple's current line up, so I didn't mention it. The Cube's big problem was that everyone I knew wanted one, but didn't want Mac OS 9 (OS X was still a year or so away) and certainly didn't think it was worth the mid $1,xxx price it carried.
I don't believe there was either for the last Keynote. In any case, I recall them saying the IRC feed was from their man actually at the event (with the usual c---waving about the specs of the PowerBook being used, etc)
The last few times I followed a Steve Note it was via MacRumors who were doing live updates of their website and presenting an IRC feed (IRC didn't really work for it as 90% of the text that'd scroll up your screen would be
* ^7eetLu5er has joined channel #macrumors * _MacSux0r_ has joined channel #macrumors <MacRumors> It's got a G5 * ASL21M781 has joined channel #macrumors * ^subf^ has joined channel #macrumors * SexyM^^ has joined channel #macrumors * pr0n4free has joined channel #macrumors * slashbot has joined channel #macrumors <MacRumors> He's demonstrating the on switch now. It's touch sensitive. Wow. * ASL21M781 has left channel #macrumors * ASL21M781 has joined channel #macrumors * MacHead69 has joined channel #macrumors * AmigaFan has joined channel #macrumors * USA4EVER! has joined channel #macrumors <MacRumors> Steve's saying the On switch on different models will be different colors. * HuggyBear has joined channel #macrumors * CmdrTaco has joined channel #macrumors * Pudge has joined channel #macrumors * Pudge^ has joined channel #macrumors * Pudge has disconnected (Ping timeout) * CmdrTaco^ has joined channel #macrumors * Pudge^ is now known as Pudge <MacRumors> Ok, it's booting up. The Apple logo has just come up and it looks bigger for some reason... might be the screen resolution's set too low. * CmdrTaco has disconnected (Error 503) * MacHead69 has left channel #macrumors * CmdrTaco^ is now known as CmdrTaco
...you get the idea.
But they've definitely been able to do live updates before on virtually every Stevenote I've followed.
The other option, of course, would be GPRS or some other mobile phone network connection...
Ah, another idiot who believes "unfair" means the same thing as "should be illegal".
No, it's unfair. The cellphone provider is making you pay the full cost, over time, for a phone that could work on any network but is locked to their's.
Quit it with the moronic psuedo-libertarianism. Just because someone can go to a competitor doesn't mean that any action on your part is decent, reasonable, honest, and fair. And we shouldn't live in a society that believes every issue of reasonable dealing should be dealt with legally.
G4s themselves are still relatively expensive. When Apple was switching to the 970, a lot of the speculation was that Apple would want this to happen as quickly as practically possible because they'd save money by doing it.
This isn't to say the device will have a 970, just that I'm currently doubting the price is high enough to have a reasonable profit margin given the rumoured 1.2GHz CPU is probably 20-40% of the cost of the device. I'd be extremely surprised if it's under $600 (though disappointed if it's over $700)
Apple doesn't make commodity machines. They shouldn't either, it's a surefire way to doom your company.
With the greatest of respect, as I said yesterday, Bill Palmer is arrogant and doesn't exactly put together a sane argument.
This paragraph says it all:
It's not all that difficult to figure out. The eMac already is the "Switcher vehicle" that the delusionals keep talking about, they just don't know it. In delusionland, the eMac is being rejected by potential Switchers because it has a built-in monitor. But in reality, Windows users are already Switching to the eMac, in droves for that matter. All you have to do is stick your head outside the delusionland bubble for a few minutes in order to get a whiff of just how many people have already switched.
By all accounts the eMac is Apple's poorest selling Mac in the consumer sphere. Oh sure, it has some educational buyers, and probably outsells the xServe, but in terms of so-called consumer Macintoshes being bought by actual consumers, it's a lemon. It's an ugly box that forces you to have a giant 17" monitor with it at a time when ordinary users - not just geeks, not just trendy Mac users - are running out and buying LCD flat panels in droves.
I know many, many, people who will not buy a Mac because of the high cost of entry. And when I say "Well, you can always get an eMac, they start at just $800", they always point out the monitor. It's not even as if you can throw away the monitor, it's there, even if you decide not to use it. Of course, Bill "Delusional" Palmer seems to think that this is a delusion on my part, that the many, many, people saying that they've made this argument and got this reply are deluding themselves. Well, there's either something very strong in the water and Palmer is a bottled water freak, or it's Mr Palmer that's living in a fantasy world.
So your comment
It makes no sense for Apple to make, it has no market to fit in
is just plain bogus. It does have a market, it's an entry level Mac. Right now Apple does not have an actual entry level desktop Macintosh. It has a Mac built for the education market that's kind of cheap, and it has an entry level laptop, but nothing in the entry level desktop area that works for general consumers. That's why Apple's marketshare is poor at the moment, so poor it's being beaten out by GNU/Linux, currently the ultimate niche product.
As for the price, I agree it will not be $500. But those arguing that the headless iMac isn't real usually argue the product isn't real, not the price. The price is speculation. Realistically, we're looking at $600-700. At that price, it'll still be entry level, it'll still, despite the misgivings of those looking at specs alone, be low enough to attract substantial sales.
For a time (apparently they've stopped), all Cingular's "World Phones" (phones that supported 1800 and/or 900Mhz) were unlocked.
Personally, I don't it as fair to lock a phone in the first place if you're going to force someone to commit to a contract (except, perhaps, for a few months while validating they're real), but that's the way it works unfortunately.
Well, there is one major problem with an open/free "smartphone": How do you go about getting your packets through the cell-phone system? The frequencies are owned by corporations like Verizon, and you can only communicate if you use their approved equipment.
The solution is to stick to operators that use standards that do not permit these kinds of lock-ins. Unfortunately, Qualcomm, in its efforts to whore its technology to get it accepted, made the selling feature that IS-95 would, essentially, make it easy for phone companies to lock users to specific approved equipment, rather than give that control to end users.* Other standards, notably GSM, have always leaned the other way, supporting a concept called "personal mobility".
The GSM operators in the US, like elsewhere, will happily take you on using any equipment of your chosing that's compatable with the network. If it's GSM1900 or GSM850, it'll work on any 1900MHz or 850MHz GSM network in the US as long as an appropriate SIM card is in the phone.
It's expensive to get a phone that's "unlocked" (doesn't refuse SIMs from operators other than the network that sold the phone), but it's not impossibly so.
Cingular and T-Mobile USA are currently the two largest GSM operators in the US. Cingular uses a mix of 850 and 1900MHz, T-Mobile just 1900MHz. They're both reasonably good with plans competitive with those of Verizons, but check out the experience of people you know on those networks in the areas you want to use them as coverage varies with any network.
* (Off-topic CDMA rant: This, incidentally, is a crying shame. Qualcomm's supporters initially claimed no mobile users actually wanted personal mobility, then argued it would be illegal to implement in the US, then finally, when Qualcomm implemented it as an optional extra, argued that it was perfectly reasonable to make it optional because those kinds of decisions should, for reasons unknown, be the choice of the network operator. Sure. Right. Whatever. CDMA is a really nice idea, it's a shame the major standard for it really, really, sucks, to an extent that the standard made the entire package worse than the competition. It's nice UMTS has adopted the technology itself (not the standard) and hopefully will put it out to people in a package that's actually user flexible rather than Qualcomm's bizarre systems.)
Re:There never was a sub $500 mac planned.
on
Apple Sues Think Secret
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If he's the sanest commentator...
t's not all that difficult to figure out. The eMac already is the "Switcher vehicle" that the delusionals keep talking about, they just don't know it. In delusionland, the eMac is being rejected by potential Switchers because it has a built-in monitor. But in reality, Windows users are already Switching to the eMac, in droves for that matter. All you have to do is stick your head outside the delusionland bubble for a few minutes in order to get a whiff of just how many people have already switched.
Wow, insulting and completely insane to boot... people are switching to the butt-ugly and CRT-monitor laden eMac? I've never come across anyone.
I've said in my journal I doubt there's a $500 headless iMac coming but right now it's the $500 I find the unlikely part of the rumour, not the machine itself which continues to make perfect sense as long as the price is reasonable. Around $700 seems credible to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Major upgrades, eg. x.x.0 releases, are paid for. They usually (well, Jaguar and Panther) cost $130 or so, or $200 for a large bloc of licenses to use at home. As for piracy, I don't believe they are widely pirated, no, at present, but probably will be if the notoriously cheapskate PC crowd migrates over to the Mac en-mass.
The Mac mini exists. It's about the size of a CD ROM drive! Now let's hope the price is reasonable.
I've not bought a lot of Belkin stuff (just their 802.11g WAP and a hub) and the only criticisms I have of either is that Belkin seems to think that you have to make things big and ugly to be accepted. Belkin, by and large, seems to create basic networking equipment that does exactly what it says on the box - no extra frills but no unexpected limitations either.
If their "pre-N" stuff is as good as their "g" WAP, then - if you're interested in such things - it's almost certainly worth getting. Me, I'll wait for the official standard. But I'll almost certainly get Belkin's WAP for that, when it comes out.
So why's Comcast doing it this way and adding the complexity of converting too and from IP?
In many ways, Giuliani was also hailed as a hero because he stepped up to the plate at a time when nobody else in the country in a position of authority was apparently doing so. It was several hours before a clearly frightened Bush appeared on television to make a meaningless speech in his usual halting style. The first major government figure who turned up in New York City was Bill Clinton, and he wasn't President any more.
I think it's a tad unfair to blame Giuliani for either terror attack. There was little in practice he'd have been able to do about 9/11. To know about it, the NYPD would have had to be better equiped and more organized internationally than the NSA and CIA. To do anything about it the same NYPD would have had to be paramilitary in nature, AAA gun turrets would have had to be stationed around the city, and New York would have had to have the power to invade Florida at will.
If you're trolling, I apologise. If you're not, really, you need to be a little more reasonable.
As you say in your very next sentence, it certainly isn't a bargain entry level computer. Indeed, it's not even an entry level computer. And the iPod, while on the high end of MP3 player prices, is certainly not in four digits. It's well within the general consumer electronics budget.
$1,900 (to use your figure, thankfully iMacs do start a little cheaper than that) is a huge amount of money to spend on what's essentially a leap into the dark. Average PC users have never used Macs, they have no idea if they're any good, they're told they are, but they know a few downsides already such as the lack of compatability with what they use at the office. Ultimately they're willing to spend a certain amount to try something new, but $1,300? That's a lot of cash for something that might end up being replaced within a year of buying it.
I can tell you for certain that the people I know on all sides of the fence consider the eMac "not what they want" and the iMac G5 "a massive investment that they're not going to be able to afford for a long time, and why should I if I can upgrade my current PC anyway and keep my old software and maybe try this Lunix thing?"
And I don't know where you buy monitors from, but I can tell you I wouldn't spend $800 on a monitor. Yes, sure, the iMac comes with a very nice one built-in of the kind that may cost $800 or more, but - shock, horror - most people wouldn't actually buy such a monitor ordinarily. We'll have a nice 17" 1280x1024 LCD or < 15" 1024x768 if one's available, as that's more than adequate for what we want to use the machine for.
I know, Apple has no chance, right?Or did you mean that would be considered a feature? Most people - including "Grandma" - ditched non-modular machines in the late eighties and early nineties.
While Apple appears to be better than average in the Consumer Reports guide you link to, I think it's amazing the return rates are so high in general. Even Apple needs around 5% of its machines to be returned because they're inoperable. Gateway (and Micron - ok, I've heard of them but they're not household names) has an amazing failure rate.
The industry needs to clean up its act. I guess it's never been great, and there were the terrible times of the early eighties where Sinclair and others had awful quality control, but even so...
Most people I know who've come into my home and seen the LCD on my coffee table have left wanting an LCD, unless they've already had one.
Well, you were arguing with me when I said the eMac wasn't consumer friendly, that in the consumer market it was a lemon, and that by and large it only really sells in the education market and that ultimately it isn't appealing to people who want an entry level Mac. For my efforts you accused me of "detracting from something cool" and questioned if I was balmy. What was I supposed to think?And surprisingly, a clear majority of my non-geek friends actually have LCDs.
Do you mean for the eMac or the new iMac? 'cos I can tell you now neither of my parents, both technophobes, would be interested in an eMac for precisely the reasons I've outlined.People who advocate the notion that "mom and pop and grandma" are ordinary users tend to simplify what these people want and assume that what they want is to buy an all-in-one box that can do bugger all that costs any amount of money. Ordinary people, however, are technically savy enough to know if they prefer LCDs or CRTs and I think the average elitist slashbot would be surprised how many people are walking into stores and buying themselves a monitor, rather than a whole PC, and who'd like to keep using that monitor.
The eMac is a large, ugly, box with limited appeal. You may like it, it isn't "detracting" from it to argue that it doesn't hit a particular market, that it isn't the entry level switchers Mac its supporters claim it to be, and that Apple should be creating an entry level Mac.
If the eMac remains profitable after producing such a thing, there's no reason for Apple to take it off the market. But it's frankly a little insulting to hear arguments, such as yours, that eMacs are the entry level Mac and people arguing otherwise simply don't know what ordinary users are and should "Quit detracting from something cool".
I don't want an eMac. Nobody I know wants an eMac. That's a simple fact. Whether other people do or not doesn't mean there isn't a place in the market for a machine I and those people I know would actually want.
I think Apple can sell the machine for more than $500.
As far as Commodore goes, the Amiga line was profitable, no matter how badly Commodore mismanaged or mismarketed it. Commodore never made a commodity Amiga, they always priced substantially above cost price, and made a healthy profit on virtually every model. Commodore overstretched themselves because their managers believed that the Amiga's future couldn't be guaranteed and that PCs were the way to go, so they put an extremely loss making toe in that water.
Those who argue Commodore failed because of poor marketing tend to make somewhat dubious assumptions about the platform. As Apple has proved, you do not need a huge market share to survive and be profitable, and the Amiga, at the time of Commodore's bankruptsy, had a much higher market share in the personal computer market as a whole than Apple does now. They could have survived, long term they'd have needed to get rid of some of the idiots Irving Gould was appointing, but they could have survived had they not lost so much money in trying to produce IBM compatables.
Of course, this doesn't mean Ford wasn't innovative. Innovation, contrary to popular belief, is not a synonym for "invention", it means to bring a technology to the public.
Ford hit the right formula of pricing, combining the right forms of manufacture, and using a good, popular, design of vehicle, to bring cars from being relatively obscure items to the general masses. Likewise, Apple and Commodore could be called the joint innovators for personal computers (IBM and Microsoft really took advantage of an already built market, and neither Apple nor Commodore can really take credit for inventing the personal computer); Microsoft arguably innovated with the GUI (Xerox invented it, Apple refined it, Digital Research made a good false start, Commodore and NeXT made the nicest versions, but really, GUIs weren't taken seriously until Microsoft released Windows 3.0 and bundled it with DOS. Business people considered computers with GUIs "toys" and DOS programs sold by the bucketload until Microsoft forced the situation.)
Do what I do, make him a friend (click on the little gray ball) and make sure your friends have at least a +2 bonus (see your preferences) and you'll see what he writes.
Moderation unfortunately gets abused. Partridge made a few enemies, and that's what happens.
FWIW, OS X has crashed on most of my systems regularly (though 10.2.8 is fairly good on my Beige G3, and 10.3.5 good on the B&W I'm using now), and XP has never crashed on my office PC. I think a lot of crashes today - Mac or PC - have to do with hardware quality, and despite the enthusiasts cries of the opposite, Apple is really no better or worse than anyone else. (When I've argued this before, the repost has tended to be "Yeah, but Macs come with better video cards" which is, I guess, "Quality" in one sense, but not the definition of quality in this context. Macs are Macs, they're built, for the most part, with commodity components as much as practically possible and in the same factories as the average PC, and Apple's care and control of the platform is offset by the fact competitors can pick and choose between different x86 motherboards on the basis of known quality.)
Dell has a particular formula for success but they're extremely vulnerable. Slight market adjustments could cause HP to succeed and Dell to Chapter 11, or vice versa.
You don't want to get into a commodity market if you don't have to. It's one of the first rules of business. Apple has no reason to enter a commodity market, they merely need to create a machine that will attract significant customers. It can be underpowered relative to commodity PCs, as long as the price is low and the reputation (through products like OS X) is good enough.
Well, the Cube isn't part of Apple's current line up, so I didn't mention it. The Cube's big problem was that everyone I knew wanted one, but didn't want Mac OS 9 (OS X was still a year or so away) and certainly didn't think it was worth the mid $1,xxx price it carried.
I don't believe there was either for the last Keynote. In any case, I recall them saying the IRC feed was from their man actually at the event (with the usual c---waving about the specs of the PowerBook being used, etc)
No, it's unfair. The cellphone provider is making you pay the full cost, over time, for a phone that could work on any network but is locked to their's.
Quit it with the moronic psuedo-libertarianism. Just because someone can go to a competitor doesn't mean that any action on your part is decent, reasonable, honest, and fair. And we shouldn't live in a society that believes every issue of reasonable dealing should be dealt with legally.
This isn't to say the device will have a 970, just that I'm currently doubting the price is high enough to have a reasonable profit margin given the rumoured 1.2GHz CPU is probably 20-40% of the cost of the device. I'd be extremely surprised if it's under $600 (though disappointed if it's over $700)
Apple doesn't make commodity machines. They shouldn't either, it's a surefire way to doom your company.
This paragraph says it all:
By all accounts the eMac is Apple's poorest selling Mac in the consumer sphere. Oh sure, it has some educational buyers, and probably outsells the xServe, but in terms of so-called consumer Macintoshes being bought by actual consumers, it's a lemon. It's an ugly box that forces you to have a giant 17" monitor with it at a time when ordinary users - not just geeks, not just trendy Mac users - are running out and buying LCD flat panels in droves.I know many, many, people who will not buy a Mac because of the high cost of entry. And when I say "Well, you can always get an eMac, they start at just $800", they always point out the monitor. It's not even as if you can throw away the monitor, it's there, even if you decide not to use it. Of course, Bill "Delusional" Palmer seems to think that this is a delusion on my part, that the many, many, people saying that they've made this argument and got this reply are deluding themselves. Well, there's either something very strong in the water and Palmer is a bottled water freak, or it's Mr Palmer that's living in a fantasy world.
So your comment
is just plain bogus. It does have a market, it's an entry level Mac. Right now Apple does not have an actual entry level desktop Macintosh. It has a Mac built for the education market that's kind of cheap, and it has an entry level laptop, but nothing in the entry level desktop area that works for general consumers. That's why Apple's marketshare is poor at the moment, so poor it's being beaten out by GNU/Linux, currently the ultimate niche product.As for the price, I agree it will not be $500. But those arguing that the headless iMac isn't real usually argue the product isn't real, not the price. The price is speculation. Realistically, we're looking at $600-700. At that price, it'll still be entry level, it'll still, despite the misgivings of those looking at specs alone, be low enough to attract substantial sales.
Personally, I don't it as fair to lock a phone in the first place if you're going to force someone to commit to a contract (except, perhaps, for a few months while validating they're real), but that's the way it works unfortunately.
The GSM operators in the US, like elsewhere, will happily take you on using any equipment of your chosing that's compatable with the network. If it's GSM1900 or GSM850, it'll work on any 1900MHz or 850MHz GSM network in the US as long as an appropriate SIM card is in the phone.
It's expensive to get a phone that's "unlocked" (doesn't refuse SIMs from operators other than the network that sold the phone), but it's not impossibly so.
Cingular and T-Mobile USA are currently the two largest GSM operators in the US. Cingular uses a mix of 850 and 1900MHz, T-Mobile just 1900MHz. They're both reasonably good with plans competitive with those of Verizons, but check out the experience of people you know on those networks in the areas you want to use them as coverage varies with any network.
* (Off-topic CDMA rant: This, incidentally, is a crying shame. Qualcomm's supporters initially claimed no mobile users actually wanted personal mobility, then argued it would be illegal to implement in the US, then finally, when Qualcomm implemented it as an optional extra, argued that it was perfectly reasonable to make it optional because those kinds of decisions should, for reasons unknown, be the choice of the network operator. Sure. Right. Whatever. CDMA is a really nice idea, it's a shame the major standard for it really, really, sucks, to an extent that the standard made the entire package worse than the competition. It's nice UMTS has adopted the technology itself (not the standard) and hopefully will put it out to people in a package that's actually user flexible rather than Qualcomm's bizarre systems.)
I've said in my journal I doubt there's a $500 headless iMac coming but right now it's the $500 I find the unlikely part of the rumour, not the machine itself which continues to make perfect sense as long as the price is reasonable. Around $700 seems credible to me.