Tell me, how are you going to port Apple's Libraries to any other platform? Magic? Are all Mac developers as isolated from the rest of the computing world as you are?
Of course there will be people who buy Apple stuff, almost anywhere you go, even third world countries with almost no infrastructure, but for Apple to actually spend the money it would take to translate the documentation, localise the OS etc, there would have to be enough people in that country buying Apple's stuff for Apple to make a profit, and I don't know that this is the case in places like Poland, Romania and Estonia etc.
The most obvious answer, from a quick look at the list is that the current list of countries reflects countries where Apple judges that it will make enough ROI to make it worthwhile investing the large sums of money it takes to make for an Apple "experience". For Apple that means translating all its documentation and website/store and also setting up local call centres and localising its products. Given that there are many small countries with small Apple brand recognition in Eastern Europe, I would think that that would be the most realistic answer.
Not that I really care all that much about Apple at the moment. I'm a Mac sys admin and I'm kind of burned about the shit that Apple calls a server OS and the related hardware.
All this "PS Fanboi", "GIMP fanboy", "pseudo-professional" or "OSS hippy" crap is such a waste of time. I think Rob mainly posts stuff like that here once in a while in order to stir the shit a bit and so push the ratings up a bit.
In reality both the GIMP and Photoshop are fantastic programmes (even though I don't work in multimedia anymore, I actually bought the CS suite a few years ago because I've always wanted my own legal Photoshop and Illustrator since I first worked with them back in my DTP days in 1990 to 1992).
In my view, Photoshop is much better. A lot of people are paid high salaries to work on it day in and day out. It is an amazing piece of software. It has almost no bugs, is very fast at what it does and is incredibly precise and flexible. I love it. It does, of course, cost a fortune, as do all Adobe programmes.
BUT, the GIMP is no less amazing. Its feature set and its stability are fantastic, and given that it is free in both source code (not that important to me, to be honest) and price, its even better.
In reality, all the private people who have cracked versions of Photoshop at home could do almost everything they do with the GIMP as well. Any retouching of images that you'll be doing with your private images can easily be done with the GIMP. The reason these people often look down on the GIMP is because they look on its free price as something less worthy and look upon Photoshop's high price as something akin to owning a sports car or something along those lines (even if they are actually using a cracked version)
Owning a cracked version of Photoshop is generally not conducive to a smooth business experience and most professionals who actually make money from it will usually buy it as they'll view it as an investment.
But, in general, all this fighting about the different features of the software or the different UIs is silly. The GIMP can't do CMYK image editing but it doesn't need to in reality because if you really need to get fairly good results to print, you can do it with the GIMP as well. Also, the GIMP's UI is light-years ahead of where it was only two years ago. I find it very usable these days and it reminds for all the world, very much of what PS used to look like on Windows back in the 5.0, 5.5 days.
That said, if you need to be productive and need to work to a deadline in design or pre-press, you're going to need tools that you can rely on with high precision and no bugs, and PS certainly fits there.
Personally, I don't believe him for the simple reason that his arguments are fairly easy for people with a development background to debunk.
He claims, "Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary" and then attempts to relativise the fairly obvious answer to that with "Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open".
Firstly, like Flash or not, the format itself is an open specification. There are numerous open source libraries that produce Flash content, as well as some professional animation tools that output in Flash's SWF format, such as Toon Boom Studio . The proprietary parts of Flash are Adobe's Flash Software and its file format, which is not what the web gets to see.
As for comparing the propietrariness of Adobe's Flash to Apple's iPad, iPod and iPhone, where the entire system, including hardware, software and even the store is proprietary, to the extent where developers can not sell or even give away their apps unless Apple says its OK to do so is such a poor argument, I think you have to pretty much be willing to believe anything that Steve Jobs says.
Steve Jobs then goes on to make bold claims about how the whole web is switching to HTML5 and h264 video format. He names a whole host of large commercial websites that are or will soon be offering h264 video. What he doesn't say is that while the general tendency was certainly to html5 video in the long term, it is mainly due to these corporations not wanting to lose out on the iPad using visitors in the short term that h264 and html5 are suddenly sprouting out of the ground.
His next claim, that "There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world" must rank up there amongst the most arrogant and boastful claims ever made in the IT world. To be sure, the IT world is full of boastful souls with huge egos, most of whom end up facing humiliating failure, but this one is simply ludicrous. The App Store and the iFamily of devices is a huge success, but how on earth do you actually count all the Flash games and PC and or Console games out there?
However, the success of the iPad might certainly spell the slow death of Flash on the web if things carry on at this rate. It seems there is such a rush to produce politically correct apps (ok, I put this in here to highlight Apple incredible arbitrariness in its behaviour towards App developers) that one sometimes feels that websites with rollovers/hovers will be dead by tomorrow (They won't).
Jobs then gets to the one absolutely true point, and that is Flash's performance, security and resource consumption, all of which are terrible. Point made. Flash has never been a sucess on mobile platforms before because a) no one made Flash apps for mobiles, b)Flash Lite was pretty terrible and c) mobiles were flakey enough without Flash crashing them, thank you.
But then Steve Jobs goes and blows it again with his claims that Flash somehow won't work because (insert some hand-waving here) it doesn't support "touch". I honestly wonder how he can claim this with a straight face while looking at your average website, which is a damn sight less flexible for "touch" than Flash is. I don't know of many websites, which Steve Jobs is claiming is a major target for the iPad/iPhone etc, that support multi-touch and that don't use some form of rollover. In fact, even Apple's own site supports rollovers, right at the very top.
Finally, and this is where Steve Jobs, in my opinion, twists the truth the most while perhaps inadvertently exposing the true reason for his anti-third party developer tools hatred. In his 6th claim, he states, "letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform" and goes on a violent rant even adding the Adobe Creative Su
No, it's not just you. I also get the feeling that SJ's behaviour has become far worse since he had his brush with death. My thinking is that he probably realised his mortality and then decided that he absolutely had to achieve his life goals before he died and that he might not have a lot of time. This has resulted in his recent paranoid and highly intolerant behaviour, even more so than before.
At the moment, Apple is the public's darling and end-users don't care as long as their toy works, but as soon as that changes, Apple is in for a world of hurt. They've burnt a lot of bridges lately and that might come back to hurt them badly when they lose favour with the public. All the Linux geeks and Flash creators might not be willing to give them a go next time round.
Gizmodo may have got themselves a large enough extra hit-count last week to pay for their legal costs in the upcoming trial, and they may have gotten themselves some free publicity vis a vis Engadget, but they will be sullied with a slight whiff of illegality from here on. After all's said and done, I'm pretty sure they will be asking themselves if it was worth it.
The only one who's laughing all the way to the bank in this is Apple, who once again gets a boat load of free PR for doing sweet nothing.
Apple, in my view, overtook Microsoft a while ago in terms of abusive business practices.
Why be fair to Jobs? Are you stupid enough to think he'd be fair to you? Apart from, which, the affair has been pretty widely documented. They had paternity test back then, too, you know.
Stephen Hawking's assumption is that we should be thinking carefully about advertising our presence in the universe because any Alien visitors might be like Columbus discovering the America's in 1492. I think he most certainly has a point, but what about another viewpoint, where Aliens take a look at us and what we have done in our history of contact with new civilisations, realise what the implications for them would be if we were to meet them, and decide that a pre-emptive attack to exterminate all of humanity is probably their safest course of action?
There is a particularly depressing science fiction book called The Killing Star, which describes exactly such a premise. The story is depressing because only a tiny group of people actually survive the devastation to flee in utter silence from the solar system. The method used to exterminate humanity is absurdly simple. No huge ray-guns, no huge bombs, or poison or any such thing, just objects accelerated to 99% the speed of light, so-called relativistic kill-vehicles. Almost impossible to stop because even if you do detect them coming, they're so close behind their own light signal that there wouldn't be much time to do anything about it.
This is the assumption that would worry me the most, I think. any alien civilisation intelligent enough to understand what we are would be intelligent enough to understand how dangerous we could be to them.
Steve Job, today's "moral apostle" on the iPhone, is the same hypocritical fuck who fathered a girl and denied it, yet proclaims his moral superiority to the rest of us because of porn? Steve Jobs doesn't give a flying fuck about porn. It's just more pandering to the Disney crowd. There's nothing wrong with that, but it would be nice if he had the balls to admit it.
There are so many people like you in your country, who would willingly and gladly destroy your own country, because the guy you voted into power happens to be black.
Your post must count as the scoop of the spaceflight year, and the major news agencies didn't even pick it up. Who says that Slashdot is only full of rubbish?
I wish folks would stop making false comparisons and embrace the fact that "horses for courses" is a perfectly acceptable mode of decision making when it comes to technology.
There's nothing false about that comparison. You can't remove the battery on a MacBook. If you're on the road and you don't have a power supply near by, you're stuffed. How important that is to most people is another thing. I think most people don't think that far when buying a computer.
As much as I loved the enormous spaces and times of the Xeelee sequence, I just cannot see anyone making them into a decent film. The characters in Baxter's books are often very flat but that doesn't matter much, as the hard science keeps the reader captivated. Which is something that would simply fall apart in a movie as it's very hard to bring complicated concepts across in a story.
I would love to see a good rendition of Altered Carbon, Broken Angels and Woken Furies. Especially the last one was, IMO, extremely good and it would be hard to mess it up as its very action orientated and the extoic location would lend itself to special effects which big studios love so much. What would be hard to do right without a good director and actor would be the rage that the man feels. It would require someone like Daniel Craig, who really did the "man seething with rage" bit very well in a Quantum of Solace. I'm also pretty sure that the studios would not go with such a nihilistic message in a movie.
...... To basically sum up, yes, this locks developers on the iPhone OS. On the other hand, these meta-platforms hurt Apple's ability to improve their devices.......
You know, Microsoft used to make claims like that all the time during the anti-trust proceedings, that the trials were hurting their ability ot "innovate" and "improve" their products. Everyone used to deride Microsoft about their pathetic excuses. Now it's Apple doing the same thing.....
The company where I work uses a large, well-known European ERP software package. The actual software is truly not that good and the licenses and support costs are very high. Added to that the software will never fit perfectly into a customer's company and will need customising. IBM, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, SAP etc, all have an army of consultants that charge a fortune to do this kind of work, and while it's fine for a large company with a significant IT development and support budget, it's much harder for smaller companies to justify these costs. Very often they try to use COTS and end up paying a single external supporter/consultant a lot of money to customise or provide a solution that will often only work for as long as that consultant is around.
There are advantages in terms of know-how and long-term ease of use in using open source or in-house development. The initial costs are higher, but the flexibility can be really good this way.
I wonder if this isn't possibly a case of a paranoia meme carrying across society? Either that, or the fact that most America cars have automatic transmission and most cars in other countries have manual transmission?
The length and verbosity of a language have nothing to do with its use and popularity. The culture surrounding does. Apple is the only company that uses Objective C on its platform in any major way and since the explosion of the iPhone and the hundreds of thousands of iApps onto the scene, ObjC has gone from being a language less popular than, say Prolog to number 12 on the list of popularly used languages. ObjC in Apple's implementation (all the NeXT Step classes and methods) is probably the most verbose language I've ever seen. It's very popular because of the iPhone and the new iPad though.
Java had the same opportunity with Android, but the interest amongst the less geeky programming public is far lower. This is almost purely because Google couldn't market the thing at all well. Google seriously messed up the market for Android apps by not hosting their own searchable and sortable store in a website, and by having zero quality control.
The problem is NOT the language, although if any company could possibly kill a language's popularity it will be Oracle.
...The thing that really amuses me about the whole Windows vs. Mac thing, is how often the Mac people end up knowing so much more about both platforms than the people who only really know Windows....
This makes me weep. I'm a system administrator for a large design company, running Mac servers with about 45 Mac clients and 10 PC clients. The Mac users are so singularly clueless about what a computer does and how it does it, it makes me cringe. It's good that OSX is simpler and more robust than Windows because, man, do they need it.
What Mac users especially are, is loud-mouthed know-it-alls who think they know more about any topic in IT because some rabidly Mac centric blog, like Daring Fireball or Roughly Drafted writes totally false articles on why Flash won't work on the iPhone (They said it's because the OS doesn't have a cursor so roll-over events won't work, which is so utterly pathetically wrong, it's just sad), for instance. Those same "knowledgeable" Mac users will then go on to scream that piece of falsehood at the top of their lungs on the internet.
Yay Mac, because having to apply one's brains is sooo uncool.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, isn't that what Apple's doing with the whole appstore drama? Telling users (and developers) what they can or cannot do (or develop, etc)?
Tell me, how are you going to port Apple's Libraries to any other platform? Magic? Are all Mac developers as isolated from the rest of the computing world as you are?
... Apple does not want its users having unsatisfactory experiences playing their Flash games, and then subsequently blaming Apple for the bad UI.
psssst
That is about the most concise, accurate summary of Apple fanboys I have yet seen.
Of course there will be people who buy Apple stuff, almost anywhere you go, even third world countries with almost no infrastructure, but for Apple to actually spend the money it would take to translate the documentation, localise the OS etc, there would have to be enough people in that country buying Apple's stuff for Apple to make a profit, and I don't know that this is the case in places like Poland, Romania and Estonia etc.
Chris, that you getting your apple-nazi rocks off?
The most obvious answer, from a quick look at the list is that the current list of countries reflects countries where Apple judges that it will make enough ROI to make it worthwhile investing the large sums of money it takes to make for an Apple "experience". For Apple that means translating all its documentation and website/store and also setting up local call centres and localising its products. Given that there are many small countries with small Apple brand recognition in Eastern Europe, I would think that that would be the most realistic answer.
Not that I really care all that much about Apple at the moment. I'm a Mac sys admin and I'm kind of burned about the shit that Apple calls a server OS and the related hardware.
All this "PS Fanboi", "GIMP fanboy", "pseudo-professional" or "OSS hippy" crap is such a waste of time. I think Rob mainly posts stuff like that here once in a while in order to stir the shit a bit and so push the ratings up a bit.
In reality both the GIMP and Photoshop are fantastic programmes (even though I don't work in multimedia anymore, I actually bought the CS suite a few years ago because I've always wanted my own legal Photoshop and Illustrator since I first worked with them back in my DTP days in 1990 to 1992).
In my view, Photoshop is much better. A lot of people are paid high salaries to work on it day in and day out. It is an amazing piece of software. It has almost no bugs, is very fast at what it does and is incredibly precise and flexible. I love it. It does, of course, cost a fortune, as do all Adobe programmes.
BUT, the GIMP is no less amazing. Its feature set and its stability are fantastic, and given that it is free in both source code (not that important to me, to be honest) and price, its even better.
In reality, all the private people who have cracked versions of Photoshop at home could do almost everything they do with the GIMP as well. Any retouching of images that you'll be doing with your private images can easily be done with the GIMP. The reason these people often look down on the GIMP is because they look on its free price as something less worthy and look upon Photoshop's high price as something akin to owning a sports car or something along those lines (even if they are actually using a cracked version)
Owning a cracked version of Photoshop is generally not conducive to a smooth business experience and most professionals who actually make money from it will usually buy it as they'll view it as an investment.
But, in general, all this fighting about the different features of the software or the different UIs is silly. The GIMP can't do CMYK image editing but it doesn't need to in reality because if you really need to get fairly good results to print, you can do it with the GIMP as well. Also, the GIMP's UI is light-years ahead of where it was only two years ago. I find it very usable these days and it reminds for all the world, very much of what PS used to look like on Windows back in the 5.0, 5.5 days.
That said, if you need to be productive and need to work to a deadline in design or pre-press, you're going to need tools that you can rely on with high precision and no bugs, and PS certainly fits there.
That's exactly how I feel. It's like being humiliated day after day until you reach a point where can't take it anymore.
Personally, I don't believe him for the simple reason that his arguments are fairly easy for people with a development background to debunk.
He claims, "Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary" and then attempts to relativise the fairly obvious answer to that with "Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open".
Firstly, like Flash or not, the format itself is an open specification. There are numerous open source libraries that produce Flash content, as well as some professional animation tools that output in Flash's SWF format, such as Toon Boom Studio . The proprietary parts of Flash are Adobe's Flash Software and its file format, which is not what the web gets to see.
As for comparing the propietrariness of Adobe's Flash to Apple's iPad, iPod and iPhone, where the entire system, including hardware, software and even the store is proprietary, to the extent where developers can not sell or even give away their apps unless Apple says its OK to do so is such a poor argument, I think you have to pretty much be willing to believe anything that Steve Jobs says.
Steve Jobs then goes on to make bold claims about how the whole web is switching to HTML5 and h264 video format. He names a whole host of large commercial websites that are or will soon be offering h264 video. What he doesn't say is that while the general tendency was certainly to html5 video in the long term, it is mainly due to these corporations not wanting to lose out on the iPad using visitors in the short term that h264 and html5 are suddenly sprouting out of the ground.
His next claim, that "There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world" must rank up there amongst the most arrogant and boastful claims ever made in the IT world. To be sure, the IT world is full of boastful souls with huge egos, most of whom end up facing humiliating failure, but this one is simply ludicrous. The App Store and the iFamily of devices is a huge success, but how on earth do you actually count all the Flash games and PC and or Console games out there?
However, the success of the iPad might certainly spell the slow death of Flash on the web if things carry on at this rate. It seems there is such a rush to produce politically correct apps (ok, I put this in here to highlight Apple incredible arbitrariness in its behaviour towards App developers) that one sometimes feels that websites with rollovers/hovers will be dead by tomorrow (They won't).
Jobs then gets to the one absolutely true point, and that is Flash's performance, security and resource consumption, all of which are terrible. Point made. Flash has never been a sucess on mobile platforms before because a) no one made Flash apps for mobiles, b)Flash Lite was pretty terrible and c) mobiles were flakey enough without Flash crashing them, thank you.
But then Steve Jobs goes and blows it again with his claims that Flash somehow won't work because (insert some hand-waving here) it doesn't support "touch". I honestly wonder how he can claim this with a straight face while looking at your average website, which is a damn sight less flexible for "touch" than Flash is. I don't know of many websites, which Steve Jobs is claiming is a major target for the iPad/iPhone etc, that support multi-touch and that don't use some form of rollover. In fact, even Apple's own site supports rollovers, right at the very top.
Finally, and this is where Steve Jobs, in my opinion, twists the truth the most while perhaps inadvertently exposing the true reason for his anti-third party developer tools hatred. In his 6th claim, he states, "letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform" and goes on a violent rant even adding the Adobe Creative Su
No, it's not just you. I also get the feeling that SJ's behaviour has become far worse since he had his brush with death. My thinking is that he probably realised his mortality and then decided that he absolutely had to achieve his life goals before he died and that he might not have a lot of time. This has resulted in his recent paranoid and highly intolerant behaviour, even more so than before.
At the moment, Apple is the public's darling and end-users don't care as long as their toy works, but as soon as that changes, Apple is in for a world of hurt. They've burnt a lot of bridges lately and that might come back to hurt them badly when they lose favour with the public. All the Linux geeks and Flash creators might not be willing to give them a go next time round.
Gizmodo may have got themselves a large enough extra hit-count last week to pay for their legal costs in the upcoming trial, and they may have gotten themselves some free publicity vis a vis Engadget, but they will be sullied with a slight whiff of illegality from here on. After all's said and done, I'm pretty sure they will be asking themselves if it was worth it.
The only one who's laughing all the way to the bank in this is Apple, who once again gets a boat load of free PR for doing sweet nothing.
Apple, in my view, overtook Microsoft a while ago in terms of abusive business practices.
Why be fair to Jobs? Are you stupid enough to think he'd be fair to you? Apart from, which, the affair has been pretty widely documented. They had paternity test back then, too, you know.
Stephen Hawking's assumption is that we should be thinking carefully about advertising our presence in the universe because any Alien visitors might be like Columbus discovering the America's in 1492. I think he most certainly has a point, but what about another viewpoint, where Aliens take a look at us and what we have done in our history of contact with new civilisations, realise what the implications for them would be if we were to meet them, and decide that a pre-emptive attack to exterminate all of humanity is probably their safest course of action?
There is a particularly depressing science fiction book called The Killing Star, which describes exactly such a premise. The story is depressing because only a tiny group of people actually survive the devastation to flee in utter silence from the solar system. The method used to exterminate humanity is absurdly simple. No huge ray-guns, no huge bombs, or poison or any such thing, just objects accelerated to 99% the speed of light, so-called relativistic kill-vehicles. Almost impossible to stop because even if you do detect them coming, they're so close behind their own light signal that there wouldn't be much time to do anything about it.
This is the assumption that would worry me the most, I think. any alien civilisation intelligent enough to understand what we are would be intelligent enough to understand how dangerous we could be to them.
Steve Job, today's "moral apostle" on the iPhone, is the same hypocritical fuck who fathered a girl and denied it, yet proclaims his moral superiority to the rest of us because of porn? Steve Jobs doesn't give a flying fuck about porn. It's just more pandering to the Disney crowd. There's nothing wrong with that, but it would be nice if he had the balls to admit it.
There are so many people like you in your country, who would willingly and gladly destroy your own country, because the guy you voted into power happens to be black.
Your post must count as the scoop of the spaceflight year, and the major news agencies didn't even pick it up. Who says that Slashdot is only full of rubbish?
I wish folks would stop making false comparisons and embrace the fact that "horses for courses" is a perfectly acceptable mode of decision making when it comes to technology.
There's nothing false about that comparison. You can't remove the battery on a MacBook. If you're on the road and you don't have a power supply near by, you're stuffed. How important that is to most people is another thing. I think most people don't think that far when buying a computer.
As much as I loved the enormous spaces and times of the Xeelee sequence, I just cannot see anyone making them into a decent film. The characters in Baxter's books are often very flat but that doesn't matter much, as the hard science keeps the reader captivated. Which is something that would simply fall apart in a movie as it's very hard to bring complicated concepts across in a story.
I would love to see a good rendition of Altered Carbon, Broken Angels and Woken Furies. Especially the last one was, IMO, extremely good and it would be hard to mess it up as its very action orientated and the extoic location would lend itself to special effects which big studios love so much. What would be hard to do right without a good director and actor would be the rage that the man feels. It would require someone like Daniel Craig, who really did the "man seething with rage" bit very well in a Quantum of Solace. I'm also pretty sure that the studios would not go with such a nihilistic message in a movie.
...... To basically sum up, yes, this locks developers on the iPhone OS. On the other hand, these meta-platforms hurt Apple's ability to improve their devices. ......
You know, Microsoft used to make claims like that all the time during the anti-trust proceedings, that the trials were hurting their ability ot "innovate" and "improve" their products. Everyone used to deride Microsoft about their pathetic excuses. Now it's Apple doing the same thing.....
The company where I work uses a large, well-known European ERP software package. The actual software is truly not that good and the licenses and support costs are very high. Added to that the software will never fit perfectly into a customer's company and will need customising. IBM, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, SAP etc, all have an army of consultants that charge a fortune to do this kind of work, and while it's fine for a large company with a significant IT development and support budget, it's much harder for smaller companies to justify these costs. Very often they try to use COTS and end up paying a single external supporter/consultant a lot of money to customise or provide a solution that will often only work for as long as that consultant is around.
There are advantages in terms of know-how and long-term ease of use in using open source or in-house development. The initial costs are higher, but the flexibility can be really good this way.
I wonder if this isn't possibly a case of a paranoia meme carrying across society? Either that, or the fact that most America cars have automatic transmission and most cars in other countries have manual transmission?
The length and verbosity of a language have nothing to do with its use and popularity. The culture surrounding does. Apple is the only company that uses Objective C on its platform in any major way and since the explosion of the iPhone and the hundreds of thousands of iApps onto the scene, ObjC has gone from being a language less popular than, say Prolog to number 12 on the list of popularly used languages. ObjC in Apple's implementation (all the NeXT Step classes and methods) is probably the most verbose language I've ever seen. It's very popular because of the iPhone and the new iPad though.
Java had the same opportunity with Android, but the interest amongst the less geeky programming public is far lower. This is almost purely because Google couldn't market the thing at all well. Google seriously messed up the market for Android apps by not hosting their own searchable and sortable store in a website, and by having zero quality control.
The problem is NOT the language, although if any company could possibly kill a language's popularity it will be Oracle.
...The thing that really amuses me about the whole Windows vs. Mac thing, is how often the Mac people end up knowing so much more about both platforms than the people who only really know Windows. ...
This makes me weep. I'm a system administrator for a large design company, running Mac servers with about 45 Mac clients and 10 PC clients. The Mac users are so singularly clueless about what a computer does and how it does it, it makes me cringe. It's good that OSX is simpler and more robust than Windows because, man, do they need it.
What Mac users especially are, is loud-mouthed know-it-alls who think they know more about any topic in IT because some rabidly Mac centric blog, like Daring Fireball or Roughly Drafted writes totally false articles on why Flash won't work on the iPhone (They said it's because the OS doesn't have a cursor so roll-over events won't work, which is so utterly pathetically wrong, it's just sad), for instance. Those same "knowledgeable" Mac users will then go on to scream that piece of falsehood at the top of their lungs on the internet.
Yay Mac, because having to apply one's brains is sooo uncool.