PC users buying Mac OS, PC users buying Mac OS software, PC users going 'Hmm Mac is great, I think I'll just buy a Mac for my next computer'. Basically it way lowers the bar for introduction to the platform, seems like a MASSIVE win for Apple.
How realistic is this? If they think they're already getting the Mac experience (they wouldn't be, but that's the beside the point), what's the motivation to buy a different machine if the current situation is "good enough?"
What you've suggested is one possible scenario, but I don't see anything that indicates how likely it is.
The iPod is different because it gives them one a small sampling of Apple product design. You clearly can't do the same things with an iPod as an iMac, though, so there's really motivation to look into it further.
Please note I am a believer in economic freedom, so please no replies about how when MS does action X, it's evil, but if someone else does action X, it's perfectly fine
"Bundling" means you're trying to use a monopoly on one thing to get a monopoly on another.
Apple sells a product that consists of both hardware and software that they've created. I don't see how this is at all the same thing.
bothered me for some time now is why Apple won't release OS X for Intel platform
There was a whole thread about this just a few days ago.
In fact OS X is a really great, consequently designed GUI on top of a robust BSD Unix. It should be rather portable by nature
It is. The challenges aren't purely technical.
Possibly achieving binary compatibility for software would be a problem
Next solved these problems a while ago.
Why Apple won't do it? Maybe because they don't want to get into Microsoft's gun sight?
There are a lot of reasons. Keep a few things in mind:
Next already pursued a strategy like this. If Steve Jobs decided to not do it again, there *might* be a good reason
How many copies would actually be purchased vs pirated?
Some of the desireable features of Mac OS X rely on intergration with underlying hardware
Do you really think you'd ever see an Office for Mac OS X x86?
There's no question people want everything everything Apple has to offer without actually buying any hardware, but it doesn't make any sense to do if such an action destroys Apple and Mac OS X development in the process.
That people would assume blogs are honest and ads are not, as there are laws in place to hold corporations accountable for being at least truthful in their advertising
This is beside the point as there are an infinite number of ways to get the viewer to believe a falsehood without breaking laws. For example: "number one in national taste tests". Ask 15 people in five states -- boom, there's your national test. The advertiser just omits some crucial details.
The difference is that with the blogs, you know it's supposed to be an opinion from the start. The problem is when an advertiser users this to hide an ad in plain sight. Basically suggesting that somebody came to a conclusion on their own, even though this is a complete fabrication.
There would be no software that would run on your x86 OSX machine. Companies would most likely need to port their applications before OSX-x86 would be useful
This really isn't an issue for most modern Mac OS X Cocoa apps. For the most part, they don't make assumptions about the underlying architecture. As other will probably point out elsewhere, Next apps ran on multiple hardware achitectures just fine. I can't really speak to Carbon (Photoshop).
Software is no different than any other type of intellectual property. Software patents are no different than any other type patent
I disagree. The inherent complexity and abstractness nature of software development puts it in a separate category altogether.
Not to mention the rate at which software is being written. Not many people are going to go out and build their own bridge, but how many people have written something that would qualify as a virtual machine? Quite a few. It's a natural progression.
I frankly don't think we could have forseen something like software development when the patent system was originally designed.
I'm not yet sold on the idea of "no patents", but there are too many patents lawsuits that amount to abuse in rather than true defense. The abuse is becoming a business model, that's what most people take exception to.
As I understand it, Searchlight [apple.com] is implemented as indexed metadata in additon to the standard Mac OS HFS+ file system. It's not a true "database," but rather a quick and fairly functional facsimile
Based on the description on the site, the "Database file system" appears to be the same thing:
"The current implementation is a server/client that provides the DBFS as a layer above a hierarchy based file system. The DBFS does not actually store files, it holds references to files on the underlying hierarchy based file system. The GUI part is implemented in KDE where it replaces all hierarchy based file accesses."
I looked through the API reference for about 15 minutes -- it reminds me of Apple's Core Foundation. Not that I think they copied Apple, but there are some interesting parallels.
I submitted this talk before Spotlight was announced. Fundamentally they're different concepts, but that's not clear from the pretty poor coverage that's hitting the news sites now.
I'm curious in what ways it's different. The descriptions I've seen so far have emphasis on fast metadata indexing, which is dead center of what Spotlight is.
I would think that if you're a Phd doing advanced windowing research, you'd want your platform to be Linux so that you can code it the way you want
Not that Linux wouldn't be a good choice, but there isn't anything to prevent you from writing windowing experiments on Mac OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD, etc.
While Linux has *great* technology, and is definately an OS par excellence, it feels like it's more-or-less keeping up with the Joneses, instead of leading in new ideas and technologies.
I think you could reasonably make the argument that the primary cultural focus of Linux has been to provide an operating system based on the GPL license. The idea is to provide a non-commercial alternative to commercial unix and Windows. That's probably where the "keeping up" comes from.
By contrast, Apple's primary cultural focus has and probably always will be user experience - the place where humans and computers meet.
I'm not sure there's anything inherent in the Linux kernel or supporting tools that makes it disproportionately appropriate for technological breakthroughs. It's a fine place for it, but not substanitally more or less appropriate than other unix-like operating systems.
Then we could have 24-bit color, videos, mp3's, tcp-ip and the web, images from your camera... and it wouldn't really be that big or inefficient. Some OS's specialize in media and are small and efficient. I'd be all for that! But, no. We have something that started out like that and became
Programming at lower levels always yields speed, but you're trading in development speed, ease of debugging, and overall flexibility and maintainability.
It's always easy to provide simplistic cases where low-level, low-abstraction technique seem to work -- but that's the programmer's perspective. The business owners and end users have all sorts of crazy ideas that require a flexible, properly abstracted architecture. And it becomes even more important when you consider all of the low-level code that is being shared between various platforms at this point.
You can, of course, have too much abstraction -- (and actually make things too complicated in the process!). I think we'd agree on that. I can think of some programming languages that take this route.:)
With an old Mac Plus, it would take maybe a minute to boot up System 6... and with a modern Windows XP or RedShat/Fedorka box, it takes... maybe a minute. And this is progress?
The question is could most the average consumer realistically replace their current machine with a Mac Plus? I believe the answer is no. Why? Because there are lot of things that weren't around in those days that we take for granted now.
Imagine trying to tell people that they can no longer use 24-bit color, watch videos, play MP3s, surf the web, render PDFs, use instant messages, compose home movies, download photos from their camera, create DVDs. Do you think it would work?:)
Obviously all this code has to go somewhere and has to be loaded at some time. And don't forget about internationalization and accessibility features.
If that's not good enough, then you must be appealing to the old "dynamic typing r00lz" argument
I don't think you've addressed the point.
If you send a message to an Objective-C object and it doesn't have a method that matches the message name, the object can redirect (or do whatever it wants -- log it, for example) the message from within -forwardInvocation.
And the more Apple keeps their head in the sand about this
Why do you believe they have their "heads in the sand?"
Apple's policy is to have their staff "astroturf" sites like/. talking about how awful everything else is.
How did you come to this conclusion?
Doesn't it seem more likely that those already had experience with and liked Objective-C would go to work at Apple, rather than Apple cooking up some conspiracy to "force" the thing on people? I think they have better things to do.
Instead, they should be thinking about being the best platform for C#!
Well, the problem is that you have all these messages which are internal to an app being passed back and forth and each one requires a cross module call
I'll just have to take your word on this because I don't know the internals quit this far down. I would be curious about how you believe the speed compares to the runtimes for Java and such, though.
Why would you go for a C variant with wierd syntax that isn't fully garbage collected, when you can go for something very familiar, that is fully garbage collected?
I agree that garabage collection is good if done right, but I strongly disagree with the idea of shying away from a programming language because it doesn't look exactly like every other language. And it's not like it's hard to learn. If you know Java or C# or something, you can learn Objective-C in maybe a day.
I mean is it this so unbelievably superior that nothing could match it?
By getting so caught up on familiar, you give up some tremendously useful functionality like Categories, dynamic messaging (-forwardInvocation:), dynamic typing, etc.
Is this based on anything? It's slower than raw C or assembly of course, but quite fast overall.
Everything below this sentence is from http://www.alastairs-place.net/cocoa/faq.txt:
* 2.7 How fast are Objective-C messages?
The name "message" might make you think that they are slow; however, they are actually quite fast. Here are some figures from a 1GHz PowerPC G4 (courtesy of Marcel Weiher):
Operation | Time (ns)
Increment (memory) variable | 2 Call through an IMP | 12 Local function call | 18 Cross-module function call | 37 Objective-C message | 54 atoi("1") | 182
Local function call refers to a call to a function in the same executable or dynamic object module. Cross-module function call is a call from one executable or dynamic object module into another.
On current Apple versions of GCC, an Objective-C message results in a call to objc_msgSend(), which is itself a cross-module function call. That means that the actual method dispatch only takes 17ns (on average), which is pretty quick.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not just use a web interface
A lot of people want their feed reader to interact with their desktop environment and other desktop apps.
- Scott
PC users buying Mac OS, PC users buying Mac OS software, PC users going 'Hmm Mac is great, I think I'll just buy a Mac for my next computer'. Basically it way lowers the bar for introduction to the platform, seems like a MASSIVE win for Apple.
How realistic is this? If they think they're already getting the Mac experience (they wouldn't be, but that's the beside the point), what's the motivation to buy a different machine if the current situation is "good enough?"
What you've suggested is one possible scenario, but I don't see anything that indicates how likely it is.
The iPod is different because it gives them one a small sampling of Apple product design. You clearly can't do the same things with an iPod as an iMac, though, so there's really motivation to look into it further.
- Scott
Please note I am a believer in economic freedom, so please no replies about how when MS does action X, it's evil, but if someone else does action X, it's perfectly fine
"Bundling" means you're trying to use a monopoly on one thing to get a monopoly on another.
Apple sells a product that consists of both hardware and software that they've created. I don't see how this is at all the same thing.
- Scott
There was a whole thread about this just a few days ago.
In fact OS X is a really great, consequently designed GUI on top of a robust BSD Unix. It should be rather portable by nature
It is. The challenges aren't purely technical.
Possibly achieving binary compatibility for software would be a problem
Next solved these problems a while ago.
Why Apple won't do it? Maybe because they don't want to get into Microsoft's gun sight?
There are a lot of reasons. Keep a few things in mind:
- Next already pursued a strategy like this. If Steve Jobs decided to not do it again, there *might* be a good reason
- How many copies would actually be purchased vs pirated?
- Some of the desireable features of Mac OS X rely on intergration with underlying hardware
- Do you really think you'd ever see an Office for Mac OS X x86?
There's no question people want everything everything Apple has to offer without actually buying any hardware, but it doesn't make any sense to do if such an action destroys Apple and Mac OS X development in the process.- Scott
That people would assume blogs are honest and ads are not, as there are laws in place to hold corporations accountable for being at least truthful in their advertising
This is beside the point as there are an infinite number of ways to get the viewer to believe a falsehood without breaking laws. For example: "number one in national taste tests". Ask 15 people in five states -- boom, there's your national test. The advertiser just omits some crucial details.
The difference is that with the blogs, you know it's supposed to be an opinion from the start. The problem is when an advertiser users this to hide an ad in plain sight. Basically suggesting that somebody came to a conclusion on their own, even though this is a complete fabrication.
- Scott
I predict the reinvented versions will never catch on because they'll be too complex and inaccessible.
Complex from the perspective of the user or developer?
- Scott
There would be no software that would run on your x86 OSX machine. Companies would most likely need to port their applications before OSX-x86 would be useful
This really isn't an issue for most modern Mac OS X Cocoa apps. For the most part, they don't make assumptions about the underlying architecture. As other will probably point out elsewhere, Next apps ran on multiple hardware achitectures just fine. I can't really speak to Carbon (Photoshop).
- Scott
Software is no different than any other type of intellectual property. Software patents are no different than any other type patent
I disagree. The inherent complexity and abstractness nature of software development puts it in a separate category altogether.
Not to mention the rate at which software is being written. Not many people are going to go out and build their own bridge, but how many people have written something that would qualify as a virtual machine? Quite a few. It's a natural progression.
I frankly don't think we could have forseen something like software development when the patent system was originally designed.
I'm not yet sold on the idea of "no patents", but there are too many patents lawsuits that amount to abuse in rather than true defense. The abuse is becoming a business model, that's what most people take exception to.
- Scott
Your points are fairly well-reasoned, but you totally lost me on this last statement:
:)
"Apple isn't innovative. It's a marketing machine. And you got sold on the hype."
My conclusion is either:
1. You have patchy understanding of what Apple has done in the last five years, and its material affect on the entire industry
2. Innovation doesn't mean what you think it means
I'll accept that sometimes Mac fans will give Apple too much credit, but you've gone to the other absolute extreme here.
- Scott
Almost. The OS is still 32bits
Not entirely true. Panther (10.3) does make some 64-bit functionality available to applications. The next release will have more extensive support.
- Scott
As I understand it, Searchlight [apple.com] is implemented as indexed metadata in additon to the standard Mac OS HFS+ file system. It's not a true "database," but rather a quick and fairly functional facsimile
Based on the description on the site, the "Database file system" appears to be the same thing:
"The current implementation is a server/client that provides the DBFS as a layer above a hierarchy based file system. The DBFS does not actually store files, it holds references to files on the underlying hierarchy based file system. The GUI part is implemented in KDE where it replaces all hierarchy based file accesses."
- Scott
I looked through the API reference for about 15 minutes -- it reminds me of Apple's Core Foundation. Not that I think they copied Apple, but there are some interesting parallels.
- Scott
Isn't this just a low budget version of the Macromedia site?
The only element it really seems to share prominently is rounded corners.
- Scott
In apples case there is no need to integrate it with any legacy Maybe AFS is more modular then NTFS
The default Mac OS X filesystem is HFS+
- Scott
The important differences are that it will be based on a generalized idea linkage inside of the desktop
Could you explain in slightly more detail?
and that it won't be a stand alone tool, but a framework that can be used for having search-centric UIs throughout the desktop.
This is exactly what Spotlight is. A framework and subsystem that happens to have UI in the Finder.
Either way, sounds interesting.
- Scott
I submitted this talk before Spotlight was announced. Fundamentally they're different concepts, but that's not clear from the pretty poor coverage that's hitting the news sites now.
I'm curious in what ways it's different. The descriptions I've seen so far have emphasis on fast metadata indexing, which is dead center of what Spotlight is.
- Scott
I would think that if you're a Phd doing advanced windowing research, you'd want your platform to be Linux so that you can code it the way you want
Not that Linux wouldn't be a good choice, but there isn't anything to prevent you from writing windowing experiments on Mac OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD, etc.
While Linux has *great* technology, and is definately an OS par excellence, it feels like it's more-or-less keeping up with the Joneses, instead of leading in new ideas and technologies.
I think you could reasonably make the argument that the primary cultural focus of Linux has been to provide an operating system based on the GPL license. The idea is to provide a non-commercial alternative to commercial unix and Windows. That's probably where the "keeping up" comes from.
By contrast, Apple's primary cultural focus has and probably always will be user experience - the place where humans and computers meet.
I'm not sure there's anything inherent in the Linux kernel or supporting tools that makes it disproportionately appropriate for technological breakthroughs. It's a fine place for it, but not substanitally more or less appropriate than other unix-like operating systems.
- Scott
Then we could have 24-bit color, videos, mp3's, tcp-ip and the web, images from your camera... and it wouldn't really be that big or inefficient. Some OS's specialize in media and are small and efficient. I'd be all for that! But, no. We have something that started out like that and became
:)
Programming at lower levels always yields speed, but you're trading in development speed, ease of debugging, and overall flexibility and maintainability.
It's always easy to provide simplistic cases where low-level, low-abstraction technique seem to work -- but that's the programmer's perspective. The business owners and end users have all sorts of crazy ideas that require a flexible, properly abstracted architecture. And it becomes even more important when you consider all of the low-level code that is being shared between various platforms at this point.
You can, of course, have too much abstraction -- (and actually make things too complicated in the process!). I think we'd agree on that. I can think of some programming languages that take this route.
- Scott
With an old Mac Plus, it would take maybe a minute to boot up System 6... and with a modern Windows XP or RedShat/Fedorka box, it takes... maybe a minute. And this is progress?
:)
The question is could most the average consumer realistically replace their current machine with a Mac Plus? I believe the answer is no. Why? Because there are lot of things that weren't around in those days that we take for granted now.
Imagine trying to tell people that they can no longer use 24-bit color, watch videos, play MP3s, surf the web, render PDFs, use instant messages, compose home movies, download photos from their camera, create DVDs. Do you think it would work?
Obviously all this code has to go somewhere and has to be loaded at some time. And don't forget about internationalization and accessibility features.
- Scott
Since the advent of Quartz Extreme, the "clip list" should be a thing of the past
For whatever it's worth, this was written just a few months after Quartz Extreme become available to the public in Jaguar 10.2.
- Scott
If that's not good enough, then you must be appealing to the old "dynamic typing r00lz" argument
I don't think you've addressed the point.
If you send a message to an Objective-C object and it doesn't have a method that matches the message name, the object can redirect (or do whatever it wants -- log it, for example) the message from within -forwardInvocation.
- Scott
And the more Apple keeps their head in the sand about this
/. talking about how awful everything else is.
Why do you believe they have their "heads in the sand?"
Apple's policy is to have their staff "astroturf" sites like
How did you come to this conclusion?
Doesn't it seem more likely that those already had experience with and liked Objective-C would go to work at Apple, rather than Apple cooking up some conspiracy to "force" the thing on people? I think they have better things to do.
Instead, they should be thinking about being the best platform for C#!
That sounds fine.
- Scott
I'll just have to take your word on this because I don't know the internals quit this far down. I would be curious about how you believe the speed compares to the runtimes for Java and such, though.
Why would you go for a C variant with wierd syntax that isn't fully garbage collected, when you can go for something very familiar, that is fully garbage collected?
I agree that garabage collection is good if done right, but I strongly disagree with the idea of shying away from a programming language because it doesn't look exactly like every other language. And it's not like it's hard to learn. If you know Java or C# or something, you can learn Objective-C in maybe a day.
I mean is it this so unbelievably superior that nothing could match it?Or can you consider that there is an adavantage to:Is it really that scary?
By getting so caught up on familiar, you give up some tremendously useful functionality like Categories, dynamic messaging (-forwardInvocation:), dynamic typing, etc.
- Scott
Is this based on anything? It's slower than raw C or assembly of course, but quite fast overall.
Everything below this sentence is from http://www.alastairs-place.net/cocoa/faq.txt:
* 2.7 How fast are Objective-C messages?
The name "message" might make you think that they are slow; however, they are
actually quite fast. Here are some figures from a 1GHz PowerPC G4 (courtesy
of Marcel Weiher):Local function call refers to a call to a function in the same executable or
dynamic object module. Cross-module function call is a call from one
executable or dynamic object module into another.
On current Apple versions of GCC, an Objective-C message results in a call to
objc_msgSend(), which is itself a cross-module function call. That means that
the actual method dispatch only takes 17ns (on average), which is pretty
quick.
Apple doesn't include a 3D card in its systems.
It uses 2D to simulate 3D
This is completely false.
- Scott