Simulate it in the dev kit, or inside Dashboard? The latter worries me a bit on my PPC machine... I have my doubts about the performance when emulating anything... =]
I didn't say I needed room for '346 PCI cards'. If it had been, say, twice the volume of the existing mini, it would've been large enough to use regular DIMMs instead of SO-DIMMs, and large enough to use a regular 3.5" HD instead of a laptop HD. Right there, they would've saved enough money to probably make it $100 cheaper.
True, even though my mini is a PPC one which takes "normal" DIMMs. I'd love a speedier grown-up harddisk though, and yes, they would've saved money.
Make it just a smidge longer, and you could've put in a discrete graphics card - maybe just a low-profile one, but certainly the option for something much more powerful than the one included in the chipset. Even with these size increases, it would still be waaaay smaller than a Mac Pro or iMac.
That's somewhat debatable -- the iMac isn't bigger than a mini with a 20" flatscreen. In fact, it's smaller. True for the Mac Pro, but that's a completely different class of machine altogether.
Plus it would've allowed them to sell more upgrades, etc, and more importantly, provided a machine that people have been wanting for _years_. What kind of business flat-out ignored what their user base wants? If they had a cheap upgradeable Mac, they could almost certainly grow their userbase substantially, and thus sell more stuff from the iTunes store, which seems to be their real business model.
And would the average tinkerer (the kind of guy that would want an expandable machine you just outlined) really be the iTunes-shopping crowd?
I think the most important thing for Apple is the Great User Experience(TM), and by offering a machine that can't be screwed up by some uneducated end user plugging in some cheap-ass hardware is NOT going to help that goal one bit. I'm going to guess that the majority of buyers falls firmly into the uneducated end user category, so this "Mac mini tower" that lots of geeks have been wishing for is not going to materialize anytime soon. Sad, but true.
Of course, there's always the OSx86 project for the DIY people, but apart from that the userbase that wants expansion isn't really substantial enough for Apple.
Ah, I didn't know that. Interesting, and all in all not very surprising either, really.
That does make the "iPhone apps on the Dashboard" even more far-fetched, unless iPhone apps are going to be shipped as "fat binaries", which is unlikely due to storage requirements.
With the increased size, they'd more than likely find a way to fit in a proper SSD drive (or even harddisk) and a larger battery to keep it running for some time.
That, and the Aero interface in Vista. Sure, XP could use a face-lift (I never liked the blue Fisher-Price look), but instead of doing a evolutionary upgrade, they decided to toss in a whole new look and feel, moving stuff around, for no good reason at all. When moving from XP to KDE is *less* of a learning curve than XP to Vista, you know you're doing it wrong.
XP did this too, actually, to a lesser extent. Users coming from Win2K could find their way around it, but the hordes of Win98/WinME folks had to relearn way too much stuff to be able to use their computers.
Sure, change stuff, but only if it really improves the interface, and even then be very conservative about it. The last thing you want is to alienate your users. This is something Apple understands more than Microsoft.
Appstore items are binaries for the ARM architecture that runs the iPhone/iPod Touch. Dashboard widgets are HTML(like)/Javascript contraptions running on PPC and x86 machines.
Apple already has a central repository for Dashboard widgets, so why would they move all that to iTunes?
OTOH, if they limited iPhone-apps-on-Dashboard support to recent Macbooks, they'd only have one architecture (x86) to worry about, for which they already have the ARM emulation software running (iPhone dev kit), the touchpads already do multitouch, and AFAIK those machines also have an accelerometer on board.
Jobs hears people cry out for the 'xMac', and we get the Mac mini, way too small to be what people wanted (ridiculous expansion, so small in requires more expensive laptop-class components, etc.)
I rather like my mini, though. Sure, it has less oomph than a "full size" machine, but it's not too expensive, it has a small desk footprint, and it runs silent. I don't care about not being able to cram in 346 PCI cards, USB works for an increasing range of products nowadays.
Part of the charm of Apple is that they don't follow the market. The fact that every computer maker is making underpowered netbooks nowadays doesn't mean Apple will do the same, unless they can find a way to get it right. They're not gonna run off and build anything that some people are asking for, and why would they.
I'm with you on the 12" Macbook though, the Air is no replacement for that and it'd be great if they re-introduced a small laptop. Dunno if that's possible without severely underpowering the thing, though.
Knowing Apple, it's not going to be cheaper than the iLiad. It would probably have a colour screen and the iPhone OS -- cramming a full-blown OS X into a small and not-too-powerful machine is going to degrade the experience too much to be a serious option for Apple.
For the UI, they'd probably upscale the existing UI. That would be a lot easier for the existing apps, and you'd still have most of the screen available for browsing, viewing videos etc. That's what the machine would be for, not as a netbook replacement.
They might add some stuff that's not on the iPhone now (PDF support?), but not that much else. Flash kinda depends on Adobe, really, but it seems to be coming to the platform "any day now". I think they might include handwriting recognition (it's already in the system now for Asian languages), but I don't know if they'd enable you to annotate PDF files, since that would require a new PDF reader app.
I'm not that sure of a tablet Mac emerging anytime soon, though. I'm sure they're researching it, but it won't come to market until Apple is totally happy with it. That might take a while.
When a comment contains the words "problem with free software", you can expect to be modded troll (following that logic, this comment will be modded as such, too).
On topic: I meant compatible as in "being able to install closed source binary blob X on any distro", basically. Locations of libraries, things like that. The things that cause apps to be installable on Redhat, but not on Debian.
You may not like closed source software, but it's not going anywhere any time soon, and if it *does* get a Linux release, at least that's one hurdle less from switching to Linux. Well, for the people that really needed that app and were stuck with $PROPRIETARY_OS because of it.
My 7 year old son still mightily enjoys The Great Gianna Sisters. I think he has some sort of platform fetish, because he also loves Mario Bros on the DS and SuperTux on the Mac.
Some kids will be curious about the digital past. They'll want to learn about those ancient systems, and they'll wonder how we survived. Most, however, won't give a rat's ass.
Me, I was *delighted* when I found some ancient graphics beast the size of a small filing cabinet. I don't recall the brand, but I do remember googling them; they're still in business, but they do something with flight simulators nowadays. When I found them, it was already worthless junk, but it still fascinated me.
Like you said, it's not cross-platform; it's probably basically a proxy that fetches a blacklist periodically. Nifty idea to offer that prepackaged to Windows-users.
I prefer using OpenDNS.com -- free, cross-platform, filters ads, phishing, all kinds of stuff really. Just toss in a domain name and it'll get blocked.
I bought mini that will not run QE (no ripples for me) in oct 2005, Tiger came out about half a year earlier. So they DID sell QE-incapable machines after they had released QE.
However, that's mostly "ripples on Dashboard", and a semi-translucent title bar since Leopard. I don't miss it in the OS itself. It doesn't look radically different, in fact, I'm wondering what day-to-day OS stuff is different apart from the aforementioned menu bar and Dashboard ripples.
- You haven't used Debian or deratives in years - You've never seen a single release of it where clvm works
Maybe you should look at one of the releases from "the last couple of years". Alternatively, you might want to check the Debian bug report logs at bugs.debian.org .
Good luck convincing people of that. Especially people that decide what software gets installed at RandomBigCorp.
If anything, all the Linux distros could try to make sure that they're compatible with eachother, after all it's all Linux. Yes, I realise there's slightly more to it, but to the average layman, Linux is Linux is Linux (which may be Ubuntu).
That was seven years ago, and since then the changes between versions of OS X have been small, in terms of "learning curve". They've added a shitload of functionality, but if you'd take someone from 2001 and switch their 10.0 desktop for a 10.5 one, they *would* know their way around the system. Then again, some stuff under the hood *did* change (NetInfo anyone?) and sometimes that means relearning stuff. Maybe you meant that.
But an OS is never completely fixed. I'll leave out Vista (which was quite a change from XP) since that's been done to death, but for example KDE has the same issue: I've seen stuff shift around in the control centre more than once, and not always for obvious reasons.
That aside, please leave radical changes that occurred when dropping ancient OSs out of this. We're not talking Win3.11, OpenWindows or CDE either.
Apple likes to say no to a lot of good features. As they realize if it is implemented the majority may suffer to make the minority a little bit happier.
Dude, all that counts is that it makes Steve Jobs happy. If he wants Feature X, it goes in. If he doesn't, it's out.
(this was intended +5 funny, not -2 troll -- I'm an Apple fanboy myself, thank you very much)
If they had been really serious about grabbing some actual marketshare with Chrome, they would've had a Mac and Linux client ready from day one. None of this "Just windows now, but we're working on the other guys! really!" crap. They missed two very vocal groups of users there.
RIght now it's sitting at 1.39% usage -- that's visitors to MY site, IE scores 62% there, Firefox 26%, Safari just under 7%. AFAIK, those are somewhat "common" numbers.
Maybe 1.39% is not that bad for a "new" browser, but it's certainly nowhere near world domination. But I think that was kinda your point, too. =]
They didn't catch up only by coding a better browser. Making it a default part of the system surely helped things along too.
Also, the first IE was not built by MS anyway, it was NCSA Mosaic under a different name.
That being said: I really liked IE3 or IE4 on the Mac when it came out. It was simply a better browser than Netscape 2 or 3, which was bulky and slow. Web standards didn't count back then, so all people wanted was a browser that was relatively easy to use, and displayed most of the web somewhat OK. When IE5/Mac came out, it was at that point the most standards-compliant browser out there, IIRC. Too bad they axed that engine rather than use it as a replacement for trident.
But anyway: Microsoft tends to "catch up and kill" competitors by throwing wads of cash around, buying tech and marketing that straight to the top. Having to do stuff themselves often results in massive fail.
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Simulate it in the dev kit, or inside Dashboard? The latter worries me a bit on my PPC machine... I have my doubts about the performance when emulating anything... =]
I didn't say I needed room for '346 PCI cards'. If it had been, say, twice the volume of the existing mini, it would've been large enough to use regular DIMMs instead of SO-DIMMs, and large enough to use a regular 3.5" HD instead of a laptop HD. Right there, they would've saved enough money to probably make it $100 cheaper.
True, even though my mini is a PPC one which takes "normal" DIMMs. I'd love a speedier grown-up harddisk though, and yes, they would've saved money.
Make it just a smidge longer, and you could've put in a discrete graphics card - maybe just a low-profile one, but certainly the option for something much more powerful than the one included in the chipset. Even with these size increases, it would still be waaaay smaller than a Mac Pro or iMac.
That's somewhat debatable -- the iMac isn't bigger than a mini with a 20" flatscreen. In fact, it's smaller. True for the Mac Pro, but that's a completely different class of machine altogether.
Plus it would've allowed them to sell more upgrades, etc, and more importantly, provided a machine that people have been wanting for _years_. What kind of business flat-out ignored what their user base wants? If they had a cheap upgradeable Mac, they could almost certainly grow their userbase substantially, and thus sell more stuff from the iTunes store, which seems to be their real business model.
And would the average tinkerer (the kind of guy that would want an expandable machine you just outlined) really be the iTunes-shopping crowd?
I think the most important thing for Apple is the Great User Experience(TM), and by offering a machine that can't be screwed up by some uneducated end user plugging in some cheap-ass hardware is NOT going to help that goal one bit. I'm going to guess that the majority of buyers falls firmly into the uneducated end user category, so this "Mac mini tower" that lots of geeks have been wishing for is not going to materialize anytime soon. Sad, but true.
Of course, there's always the OSx86 project for the DIY people, but apart from that the userbase that wants expansion isn't really substantial enough for Apple.
Ah, I didn't know that. Interesting, and all in all not very surprising either, really.
That does make the "iPhone apps on the Dashboard" even more far-fetched, unless iPhone apps are going to be shipped as "fat binaries", which is unlikely due to storage requirements.
With the increased size, they'd more than likely find a way to fit in a proper SSD drive (or even harddisk) and a larger battery to keep it running for some time.
That, and the Aero interface in Vista. Sure, XP could use a face-lift (I never liked the blue Fisher-Price look), but instead of doing a evolutionary upgrade, they decided to toss in a whole new look and feel, moving stuff around, for no good reason at all. When moving from XP to KDE is *less* of a learning curve than XP to Vista, you know you're doing it wrong.
XP did this too, actually, to a lesser extent. Users coming from Win2K could find their way around it, but the hordes of Win98/WinME folks had to relearn way too much stuff to be able to use their computers.
Sure, change stuff, but only if it really improves the interface, and even then be very conservative about it. The last thing you want is to alienate your users. This is something Apple understands more than Microsoft.
Please mod parent into the stratosphere of insightfulness. Thank you.
Appstore items are binaries for the ARM architecture that runs the iPhone/iPod Touch. Dashboard widgets are HTML(like)/Javascript contraptions running on PPC and x86 machines.
Apple already has a central repository for Dashboard widgets, so why would they move all that to iTunes?
OTOH, if they limited iPhone-apps-on-Dashboard support to recent Macbooks, they'd only have one architecture (x86) to worry about, for which they already have the ARM emulation software running (iPhone dev kit), the touchpads already do multitouch, and AFAIK those machines also have an accelerometer on board.
It's a stretch, though, and a large one at that.
Jobs hears people cry out for the 'xMac', and we get the Mac mini, way too small to be what people wanted (ridiculous expansion, so small in requires more expensive laptop-class components, etc.)
I rather like my mini, though. Sure, it has less oomph than a "full size" machine, but it's not too expensive, it has a small desk footprint, and it runs silent. I don't care about not being able to cram in 346 PCI cards, USB works for an increasing range of products nowadays.
Part of the charm of Apple is that they don't follow the market. The fact that every computer maker is making underpowered netbooks nowadays doesn't mean Apple will do the same, unless they can find a way to get it right. They're not gonna run off and build anything that some people are asking for, and why would they.
I'm with you on the 12" Macbook though, the Air is no replacement for that and it'd be great if they re-introduced a small laptop. Dunno if that's possible without severely underpowering the thing, though.
Knowing Apple, it's not going to be cheaper than the iLiad. It would probably have a colour screen and the iPhone OS -- cramming a full-blown OS X into a small and not-too-powerful machine is going to degrade the experience too much to be a serious option for Apple.
For the UI, they'd probably upscale the existing UI. That would be a lot easier for the existing apps, and you'd still have most of the screen available for browsing, viewing videos etc. That's what the machine would be for, not as a netbook replacement.
They might add some stuff that's not on the iPhone now (PDF support?), but not that much else. Flash kinda depends on Adobe, really, but it seems to be coming to the platform "any day now". I think they might include handwriting recognition (it's already in the system now for Asian languages), but I don't know if they'd enable you to annotate PDF files, since that would require a new PDF reader app.
I'm not that sure of a tablet Mac emerging anytime soon, though. I'm sure they're researching it, but it won't come to market until Apple is totally happy with it. That might take a while.
Ahhh, Liberia...
"We use the System of Metric"
"It's called Metric System"
"Thank you... but I prefer it my way."
I, for one, welcome our new Anti-Religion Flaming Horse-riding overlords.
Cheap, I know, but I couldn't resist.
...a beowulf cluster solving this puzzle.
Actually, to go beyond mere meme-tossing: solving a knight's tour for a really large board with a beowulf... how would you do that?
When we impeach Bush, can we do something about Memphis' "King Willie" please?
When the US have chosen a new president, can we do something about your sig please? =]
When a comment contains the words "problem with free software", you can expect to be modded troll (following that logic, this comment will be modded as such, too).
On topic: I meant compatible as in "being able to install closed source binary blob X on any distro", basically. Locations of libraries, things like that. The things that cause apps to be installable on Redhat, but not on Debian.
You may not like closed source software, but it's not going anywhere any time soon, and if it *does* get a Linux release, at least that's one hurdle less from switching to Linux. Well, for the people that really needed that app and were stuck with $PROPRIETARY_OS because of it.
There. Now bring on the downmodding. =]
My 7 year old son still mightily enjoys The Great Gianna Sisters. I think he has some sort of platform fetish, because he also loves Mario Bros on the DS and SuperTux on the Mac.
Some kids will be curious about the digital past. They'll want to learn about those ancient systems, and they'll wonder how we survived. Most, however, won't give a rat's ass.
Me, I was *delighted* when I found some ancient graphics beast the size of a small filing cabinet. I don't recall the brand, but I do remember googling them; they're still in business, but they do something with flight simulators nowadays. When I found them, it was already worthless junk, but it still fascinated me.
It sounds an awful lot like "ass-muncher"... =]
Like you said, it's not cross-platform; it's probably basically a proxy that fetches a blacklist periodically. Nifty idea to offer that prepackaged to Windows-users.
I prefer using OpenDNS.com -- free, cross-platform, filters ads, phishing, all kinds of stuff really. Just toss in a domain name and it'll get blocked.
I bought mini that will not run QE (no ripples for me) in oct 2005, Tiger came out about half a year earlier. So they DID sell QE-incapable machines after they had released QE.
However, that's mostly "ripples on Dashboard", and a semi-translucent title bar since Leopard. I don't miss it in the OS itself. It doesn't look radically different, in fact, I'm wondering what day-to-day OS stuff is different apart from the aforementioned menu bar and Dashboard ripples.
I think the GP would avoid open source software that ONLY runs on Windows and/or OS X, yes. What's the problem with that?
So...
- You haven't used Debian or deratives in years
- You've never seen a single release of it where clvm works
Maybe you should look at one of the releases from "the last couple of years". Alternatively, you might want to check the Debian bug report logs at bugs.debian.org .
Good luck convincing people of that. Especially people that decide what software gets installed at RandomBigCorp.
If anything, all the Linux distros could try to make sure that they're compatible with eachother, after all it's all Linux. Yes, I realise there's slightly more to it, but to the average layman, Linux is Linux is Linux (which may be Ubuntu).
That was seven years ago, and since then the changes between versions of OS X have been small, in terms of "learning curve". They've added a shitload of functionality, but if you'd take someone from 2001 and switch their 10.0 desktop for a 10.5 one, they *would* know their way around the system.
Then again, some stuff under the hood *did* change (NetInfo anyone?) and sometimes that means relearning stuff. Maybe you meant that.
But an OS is never completely fixed. I'll leave out Vista (which was quite a change from XP) since that's been done to death, but for example KDE has the same issue: I've seen stuff shift around in the control centre more than once, and not always for obvious reasons.
That aside, please leave radical changes that occurred when dropping ancient OSs out of this. We're not talking Win3.11, OpenWindows or CDE either.
Apple likes to say no to a lot of good features. As they realize if it is implemented the majority may suffer to make the minority a little bit happier.
Dude, all that counts is that it makes Steve Jobs happy. If he wants Feature X, it goes in. If he doesn't, it's out.
(this was intended +5 funny, not -2 troll -- I'm an Apple fanboy myself, thank you very much)
Oooh, that is nifty. I'm still waiting for someone to code Doom in javascript, though...
If they had been really serious about grabbing some actual marketshare with Chrome, they would've had a Mac and Linux client ready from day one. None of this "Just windows now, but we're working on the other guys! really!" crap. They missed two very vocal groups of users there.
RIght now it's sitting at 1.39% usage -- that's visitors to MY site, IE scores 62% there, Firefox 26%, Safari just under 7%. AFAIK, those are somewhat "common" numbers.
Maybe 1.39% is not that bad for a "new" browser, but it's certainly nowhere near world domination. But I think that was kinda your point, too. =]
They didn't catch up only by coding a better browser. Making it a default part of the system surely helped things along too.
Also, the first IE was not built by MS anyway, it was NCSA Mosaic under a different name.
That being said: I really liked IE3 or IE4 on the Mac when it came out. It was simply a better browser than Netscape 2 or 3, which was bulky and slow. Web standards didn't count back then, so all people wanted was a browser that was relatively easy to use, and displayed most of the web somewhat OK. When IE5/Mac came out, it was at that point the most standards-compliant browser out there, IIRC. Too bad they axed that engine rather than use it as a replacement for trident.
But anyway: Microsoft tends to "catch up and kill" competitors by throwing wads of cash around, buying tech and marketing that straight to the top. Having to do stuff themselves often results in massive fail.