I don't want iTunes, don't want Quicktime, don't want a broken browser and i certainly wouldn't support an OS that meant upgrades to a media player could potentially break your purchased apps functionality with the only recourse being a re-install. Thats so WIN NT 4 which is so TEN YEARS AGO.
Quicktime is more than just a media player (just like IE is more than just a web browser).
Why is Apple able to deliver an OS that is faster instead of slower? It's got as much eye candy as vista.
Because OS has historically been so mind-bogglingly slow (even on the fastest hardware of the day), they haven't had anywhere to go but up.
Windows has never suffered this problem. Pretty much every version has been usable on hardware anywhere up to 5-7 years old (assuming that hardware was top of the line in its day).
FYI: Single processor G4 with only 784 meg of ram, and a crappy laptop video card.
If you're happy with 10.5 on that, you should be equally as happy with Vista on a similarly-aged PC, because it sure as hell isn't any slower.
"The system is very responsive, using barely 480MB of memory after boot."
Statements like this are a sure sign the person making them knows nothing about operating systems and that their opinions on same can safely be ignored.
Huh? Each one of Apple's point releases brought as much utility to the user as Vista brings over XP.
Rubbish. The change from XP to Vista is more comparable to the change from NeXTSTEP to OS X (and version 10.5 as well, not 10.0).
You're probably one of those folks who thinks that Shadow Volume Copy and/or rsync is "basically the same" as Time Machine, too, aren't you? Or that batch files and Automator are basically the same? Don't believe what the Windows (super)sites tell you on this stuff.
Your probably one of these people who thinks Vista is just XP with a new theme, aren't you ? Don't believe what Slashdot and The Register tell you about this stuff.
No, the sad thing is that their server OS has a filesystem where regular defragmentation is a necessity.
It's not. The scale and impact of fragmentation on NTFS is *vastly* overstated, initially by people trying to sell defragmentation software, then subsequently by the usual lineup of Microsoft-bashers.
i am also glad that they updated the documentation from nt4 to w2k under defragment.. i will never forget reading that in the nt4 manual.. the recomended procedure for disk defragmentation was to back up the drive to tape.. format the drive and restore from tape.. just sadly funny for a server OS..
Huh ? That's historicaly been the accepted way for "defragmenting" on *most* OSes (and especially "server" ones like, say, UNIX).
Unless VMware gets its act together it's going to lose market share pretty quickly. The documentation is awful. Just. Fucking. Awful. There's tons of it to be sure, but it's contradictory, badly written, confusing and downright wrong in places.
Maybe so, but it's streets ahead of the documentation of the Linux-based offerings (to say nothing of the UI and management tools). VMWare have a long, long way to fall before any of the current alternatives knock them off (through either fair means _or_ foul).
... and brought down the underlying OS, which then left attached equipment in an unusable state.
Evidence ?
There should be no possible way for a failure of application-level code to bring the OS down. Any system where this can happen is mindblowingly broken, and shouldn't be let loose on production systems.
And there is no reliable information suggesting this is what happened.
The point back then was that the Imac was the Internet Mac. Anything small enough to fit on a floppy was sent via email. Napster was all the rage at the time. People weren't adverse to downloading files of that size.
Bollocks. When the iMac was released, Napster was still a year away from even existing and 3 years away from the peak of its popularity. Back then, internet connections were *far* from ubiquitous and even for those that had them, a 56k dialup was likely to be it.
(This is before even getting into the whole "backups" and "have it with you all the time" aspect.)
If you needed something bigger, Zip drives were very prevalent and CD-R was coming into it's own.
Which was, you know, my point. Removing the the floppy disk was a good idea, lack of a replacement was not.
Highly unlikely. The first USB flash drives weren't commercially available until late 2000 (and cost a hell of a lot more than a stack of floppy disks).
I'm fairly certain your parent post was pointing out how people bitched up a fit about the iMac not having that piece of junk back in 1998, not when the major PC builders finally dropped them from their standard configuration within the last 2 years.
Of course, back then the complaint was perfectly valid because Apple didn't replace it with anything.
Had the iMac shipped with a CDRW drive, they would have actually been "innovative", rather than "cheap".
I've always used the one on the keyboard. However I guess this isn't available if you are using the wireless one, but you should be aware of that tradeoff.
How ? They're unpowered (or, at least, the ones on my Mum's G5 iMac are). Plug in a thumbdrive and...nothing.
The pundits did ask for an iMac without the monitor, and that's what the mini was.
No, it wasn't. The first Mac Mini was a 1.25Ghz G4, released at the beginning of 2005. The base-level iMac at the time was a 1.6Ghz G5. Further, in all areas - hard disk, RAM, video, network, etc - the iMac eclipsed the Mac Mini (and was replaced only a few months later with the 1.9 and 2Ghz G5 iMacs, widening the gap even further).
In no way, shape, or form has the Mac Mini ever been a "headless iMac". It is the red-headed stepchild of the Apple lineup and, quite frankly, I'm amazed it's still available.
When it arrived, they hailed it as something that would redefine computing, even though Apple never really pushed that.
Rubbish. No-one outside of Apple fanbois were hailing the Mac Mini as anything of the sort. PC users were laughing at its low-end specificatons (and/or price, depending on their perspective).
The iMac hasn't ever really been a prosumer desktop, so your redefinition of things doesn't make reality "specious."
I never said the iMac was a "prosumer" desktop. I said a machine that would fit in between the iMac (being "consumer") and the Mac Pro (being "pro") would be "prosumer".
The Mac Pro is the beginning of what could be called prosumer.
Uh, no. The Mac Pro is well and truly into professional workstation territory (at least in the context of "personal computers", and *especially* in the context of Apple's product lineup, given it's at the absolute top end).
The iMac is very much a consumer machine like the mini, with more room to provide somewhat better parts. You can quibble about names, but describe what you are actually talking about in real numbers. A $1000 mini with specs like a high end PC? A $1500 mini that looks like a gamer PC, waiting for a $1500 video card, all set to play the PC Games that aren't available on the Mac? Perhaps a Windows PC sold by Apple, with no reason to buy it from Apple whatsoever?
Half a Mac Pro. A single CPU socket, room for two 3.5" drives, a replaceable video card, one or two (unused) PCIe expansion slots, 4 memory slots. Pricing should be in the ballpark of US$1000 - US$1200. In no way is that a "high end PC" - indeed, it's a pretty bog standard PC.
The target of such a machine is, of course, the "prosumers". The "enthusiasts", if you will. People who will spend most of their time in OSX, but dual boot to Windows to play games. People who need (/want) more than an iMac has to offer (eg: dual DVI outputs, a pair of drives in a RAID0 or RAID1), but for whom a Mac Pro is expensive overkill. People like me. People like the average Slashdot reader. People like our office full of radiologists, or the other one full of developers. People who buy all those Dell PCs that aren't bottom-end Optiplexes or high-end Precisions.
If Apple lowered the low end of the Mac Pro, they'd end up with two products, a cheap iPro and the existing Pro, and that would funnel sales of Mac Pros to a cheaper box that cheap-pro users would be less happy with.
Uh, what ? While the machine I'm talking about would certainly slaughter Mac Pro sales (hence Apple's disinterest in creating it), because of the large number of customers for whom a Mac Pro is overkill, it's difficult to see why anyone buying it would be disappointed after consciously choosing it in lieu of a a Mac Pro.
The number of people in your boat is too small to matter to Apple. If you're rather get a PC, do so and stop complaining.
I don't want a PC. I want a Mac - but I want a Mac that *ALSO* lets me do all the stuff I can do with a (fairly basic) PC.
Does Apple owe every person on the planet a custom designed system to fit their particular needs?
Of course not, nor am I asking for anything close to that. What I want is for Apple to fill the gaping hole in their product lineup with what is, ultimately, a fairly mundane PC. "Prosumers" are about the
I would say Microsoft is not ready for 4GB+ memory configurations in consumer devices. It may work in servers, but it's not working on the desktop. Conversely, my wife upgraded her Mac from 1GB to 5GB for Leopard the same day. Her Mac Pro is working flawlessly.
You appear to have conflicting definitions of "consumer device".
Recall that in 2000-2002, everyone was insisting that Apple should sell a "headless iMac," but when they released the decently priced mini, it wasn't a top seller despite the pundits who insisted it would be shortly after its arrival. What makes you think you have more market data available than Apple? Have you seen the business shape of Dell and HP, or the shrinking market for the PC of the 90s?
Your comparison is specious - but, then again, considering the source, that's hardly surprising - the Mac Mini is not a "headless iMac", not in a literal, figurative, spiritual, or any other, sense.
When people say they want a "headless iMac" (and they have been saying it pretty much the introduction of the iMac), what they _mean_ is they want a mid-range "prosumer" desktop that is a scaled down version of high-end Macs. Something that sites squarely between the iMac and the Mac Pro. They want a _replaceable_ (not just discrete) video card, room for two hard disks and one (ideally, two) expansion slots. In short, figuratively speaking, half a Mac [G4|G5|Pro|whatever-the-next-one-is].
Of course, Apple have little interest in providing such a machine (at least at a reasonable price - the Cube sort of tried it at an unreasonable price) because they know it will absolutely slaughter high-end Mac sales (where all the profit is) - most people who want more than an iMac don't need a Mac Pro. The "prosumer" section of the market has been asking for a machine to fit into this segment for nigh-on a decade now and been completely ignored by Apple.
It is ludicrous that because I want to run a pair of LCDs and have a replaceable video card (hardly unreasonable or unusual requirements today - even outside of the relatively small "prosumer" market), that the minimum buy-in is a US$2500 Mac Pro. *Especially* when a PC at less than half the price can deliver those capabilities.
Microsoft has to create an INCENTIVE for people to use Vista; the reality today is that almost everyone removes even pre-installed Vista and loads XP. So a year from now.... 2 years after Vista has been launched; there will be hardly anyone using Vista; bcos XP is much better at getting things done and needs much lesser hardware.
This is senseless. The hardware requirements of Vista, in the context of contemporary machines, are not signficant.
If Microsoft withdraws XP from the market in July 2008 and makes fresh sales of XP illegal; then non-corporate-licensed users looking for additional PCs will be forced to choose Vista or Mac or Linux. I doubt they will go in for Vista, because the effort to change from XP to Vista is about the same as XP to Linux or Mac.
Utter tripe. Even for the typical home user, the difference between using XP (or even Windows 95, FFS) and Vista is minimal. For a business, which then has to also reimplement much of the supporting infrastructure, where the difference between going from XP to Vista is non-trivial, it pales into insignificant compared to going from XP to OSX or Linux. Even in a relatively ideal situation, where you have no dependencies on Windows-only applications and a smallish, nimble company, such a migration would still be a massive undertaking.
In short, Microsoft has to release a new OS (not Vista... Vista has to be abandoned) before XP goes out of sale. In fact I think it's already too late... it takes atleast 2 years for the market to warm up to anything new.
Vista's reception is little different to XP's, and the same result will occur. It might take a bit longer, because XP has a much higher "it's good enough" rating than Windows 98 did, but it'll happen eventually.
MS will make some drastic changes to boost Vista. Like remove DRM
FFS, give it up already. DRM is a non-argument. The only people who consider it important are zealots and the ignoramuses they've convinced with their FUD.
If you don't have DRM-encumbered media, it's irrelevant because it never activates. If you *do* have DRM-encumbered media, Vista isn't applying any more restrictions than any other device capable of playing it, and the alternative is not being able to play said media at all. Either way, the Vista's DRM support simply does not matter, because you either never see it, or have to use it.
Not owning a computer doesn't stop anyone from being exposed to them.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here.
The web wasn't that popular back then.
It was at least as popular as "text editors" (unless you want to disingenuosly lump in things like word processors and layout tools into that).
To surf the web, they don't have to edit the HTML. In text editors you edit text.
And the difference is...? Both applications are being used for their designed purpose.
Well, another factor was that IE was free. Netscape Navigator was not.
Very, very few people paid for Navigator. Certainly few enough for that to have been a negligible - if not completely irrelevant - factor. Further, Navigator was released free of charge about 3 months after IE4 came out (and while it still had majority marketshare).
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I don't want iTunes, don't want Quicktime, don't want a broken browser and i certainly wouldn't support an OS that meant upgrades to a media player could potentially break your purchased apps functionality with the only recourse being a re-install. Thats so WIN NT 4 which is so TEN YEARS AGO.
Quicktime is more than just a media player (just like IE is more than just a web browser).
Why is Apple able to deliver an OS that is faster instead of slower? It's got as much eye candy as vista.
Because OS has historically been so mind-bogglingly slow (even on the fastest hardware of the day), they haven't had anywhere to go but up.
Windows has never suffered this problem. Pretty much every version has been usable on hardware anywhere up to 5-7 years old (assuming that hardware was top of the line in its day).
FYI: Single processor G4 with only 784 meg of ram, and a crappy laptop video card.
If you're happy with 10.5 on that, you should be equally as happy with Vista on a similarly-aged PC, because it sure as hell isn't any slower.
If you want to make a multitasking, multithreading OS with an interface similar to XP, I would say one year is a reasonable time frame.
Rrrrrright. And your example of this happening is ReactOS ?
"The system is very responsive, using barely 480MB of memory after boot."
Statements like this are a sure sign the person making them knows nothing about operating systems and that their opinions on same can safely be ignored.
Your probably one
Ugh. Should be "you're".
(How embarrassing.)
Huh? Each one of Apple's point releases brought as much utility to the user as Vista brings over XP.
Rubbish. The change from XP to Vista is more comparable to the change from NeXTSTEP to OS X (and version 10.5 as well, not 10.0).
You're probably one of those folks who thinks that Shadow Volume Copy and/or rsync is "basically the same" as Time Machine, too, aren't you? Or that batch files and Automator are basically the same? Don't believe what the Windows (super)sites tell you on this stuff.
Your probably one of these people who thinks Vista is just XP with a new theme, aren't you ? Don't believe what Slashdot and The Register tell you about this stuff.
Save for the fact that a full release of OS X is only $130.00 retail.
Retail versions of OS X are priced as upgrades and should be compared to upgrade prices for Windows.
No, the sad thing is that their server OS has a filesystem where regular defragmentation is a necessity.
It's not. The scale and impact of fragmentation on NTFS is *vastly* overstated, initially by people trying to sell defragmentation software, then subsequently by the usual lineup of Microsoft-bashers.
i am also glad that they updated the documentation from nt4 to w2k under defragment.. i will never forget reading that in the nt4 manual.. the recomended procedure for disk defragmentation was to back up the drive to tape.. format the drive and restore from tape.. just sadly funny for a server OS..
Huh ? That's historicaly been the accepted way for "defragmenting" on *most* OSes (and especially "server" ones like, say, UNIX).
Unless VMware gets its act together it's going to lose market share pretty quickly. The documentation is awful. Just. Fucking. Awful. There's tons of it to be sure, but it's contradictory, badly written, confusing and downright wrong in places.
Maybe so, but it's streets ahead of the documentation of the Linux-based offerings (to say nothing of the UI and management tools). VMWare have a long, long way to fall before any of the current alternatives knock them off (through either fair means _or_ foul).
Evidence ?
There should be no possible way for a failure of application-level code to bring the OS down. Any system where this can happen is mindblowingly broken, and shouldn't be let loose on production systems.
And there is no reliable information suggesting this is what happened.
But thinking about the infamous Windows for Warships I couldn't resist
You mean when a bady written application crashed ?
The point back then was that the Imac was the Internet Mac. Anything small enough to fit on a floppy was sent via email. Napster was all the rage at the time. People weren't adverse to downloading files of that size.
Bollocks. When the iMac was released, Napster was still a year away from even existing and 3 years away from the peak of its popularity. Back then, internet connections were *far* from ubiquitous and even for those that had them, a 56k dialup was likely to be it.
(This is before even getting into the whole "backups" and "have it with you all the time" aspect.)
If you needed something bigger, Zip drives were very prevalent and CD-R was coming into it's own.
Which was, you know, my point. Removing the the floppy disk was a good idea, lack of a replacement was not.
I used a 4 MB USB flash drive.
Highly unlikely. The first USB flash drives weren't commercially available until late 2000 (and cost a hell of a lot more than a stack of floppy disks).
I'm fairly certain your parent post was pointing out how people bitched up a fit about the iMac not having that piece of junk back in 1998, not when the major PC builders finally dropped them from their standard configuration within the last 2 years.
Of course, back then the complaint was perfectly valid because Apple didn't replace it with anything.
Had the iMac shipped with a CDRW drive, they would have actually been "innovative", rather than "cheap".
And please stick to the faith, not some interpreted interpretation of some historic event.
Why do you believe these are different things ?
I've always used the one on the keyboard. However I guess this isn't available if you are using the wireless one, but you should be aware of that tradeoff.
How ? They're unpowered (or, at least, the ones on my Mum's G5 iMac are). Plug in a thumbdrive and...nothing.
MS went to 64 bit in Windows NT3 for the DEC Alpha back in 1992, thanks.
NT wasn't 64 bit on Alpha until Windows 2000 (and that was never actually released, despite making it to Release Candidate status).
The pundits did ask for an iMac without the monitor, and that's what the mini was.
No, it wasn't. The first Mac Mini was a 1.25Ghz G4, released at the beginning of 2005. The base-level iMac at the time was a 1.6Ghz G5. Further, in all areas - hard disk, RAM, video, network, etc - the iMac eclipsed the Mac Mini (and was replaced only a few months later with the 1.9 and 2Ghz G5 iMacs, widening the gap even further).
In no way, shape, or form has the Mac Mini ever been a "headless iMac". It is the red-headed stepchild of the Apple lineup and, quite frankly, I'm amazed it's still available.
When it arrived, they hailed it as something that would redefine computing, even though Apple never really pushed that.
Rubbish. No-one outside of Apple fanbois were hailing the Mac Mini as anything of the sort. PC users were laughing at its low-end specificatons (and/or price, depending on their perspective).
The iMac hasn't ever really been a prosumer desktop, so your redefinition of things doesn't make reality "specious."
I never said the iMac was a "prosumer" desktop. I said a machine that would fit in between the iMac (being "consumer") and the Mac Pro (being "pro") would be "prosumer".
The Mac Pro is the beginning of what could be called prosumer.
Uh, no. The Mac Pro is well and truly into professional workstation territory (at least in the context of "personal computers", and *especially* in the context of Apple's product lineup, given it's at the absolute top end).
The iMac is very much a consumer machine like the mini, with more room to provide somewhat better parts. You can quibble about names, but describe what you are actually talking about in real numbers. A $1000 mini with specs like a high end PC? A $1500 mini that looks like a gamer PC, waiting for a $1500 video card, all set to play the PC Games that aren't available on the Mac? Perhaps a Windows PC sold by Apple, with no reason to buy it from Apple whatsoever?
Half a Mac Pro. A single CPU socket, room for two 3.5" drives, a replaceable video card, one or two (unused) PCIe expansion slots, 4 memory slots. Pricing should be in the ballpark of US$1000 - US$1200. In no way is that a "high end PC" - indeed, it's a pretty bog standard PC.
The target of such a machine is, of course, the "prosumers". The "enthusiasts", if you will. People who will spend most of their time in OSX, but dual boot to Windows to play games. People who need (/want) more than an iMac has to offer (eg: dual DVI outputs, a pair of drives in a RAID0 or RAID1), but for whom a Mac Pro is expensive overkill. People like me. People like the average Slashdot reader. People like our office full of radiologists, or the other one full of developers. People who buy all those Dell PCs that aren't bottom-end Optiplexes or high-end Precisions.
If Apple lowered the low end of the Mac Pro, they'd end up with two products, a cheap iPro and the existing Pro, and that would funnel sales of Mac Pros to a cheaper box that cheap-pro users would be less happy with.
Uh, what ? While the machine I'm talking about would certainly slaughter Mac Pro sales (hence Apple's disinterest in creating it), because of the large number of customers for whom a Mac Pro is overkill, it's difficult to see why anyone buying it would be disappointed after consciously choosing it in lieu of a a Mac Pro.
The number of people in your boat is too small to matter to Apple. If you're rather get a PC, do so and stop complaining.
I don't want a PC. I want a Mac - but I want a Mac that *ALSO* lets me do all the stuff I can do with a (fairly basic) PC.
Does Apple owe every person on the planet a custom designed system to fit their particular needs?
Of course not, nor am I asking for anything close to that. What I want is for Apple to fill the gaping hole in their product lineup with what is, ultimately, a fairly mundane PC. "Prosumers" are about the
I would say Microsoft is not ready for 4GB+ memory configurations in consumer devices. It may work in servers, but it's not working on the desktop. Conversely, my wife upgraded her Mac from 1GB to 5GB for Leopard the same day. Her Mac Pro is working flawlessly.
You appear to have conflicting definitions of "consumer device".
Recall that in 2000-2002, everyone was insisting that Apple should sell a "headless iMac," but when they released the decently priced mini, it wasn't a top seller despite the pundits who insisted it would be shortly after its arrival. What makes you think you have more market data available than Apple? Have you seen the business shape of Dell and HP, or the shrinking market for the PC of the 90s?
Your comparison is specious - but, then again, considering the source, that's hardly surprising - the Mac Mini is not a "headless iMac", not in a literal, figurative, spiritual, or any other, sense.
When people say they want a "headless iMac" (and they have been saying it pretty much the introduction of the iMac), what they _mean_ is they want a mid-range "prosumer" desktop that is a scaled down version of high-end Macs. Something that sites squarely between the iMac and the Mac Pro. They want a _replaceable_ (not just discrete) video card, room for two hard disks and one (ideally, two) expansion slots. In short, figuratively speaking, half a Mac [G4|G5|Pro|whatever-the-next-one-is].
Of course, Apple have little interest in providing such a machine (at least at a reasonable price - the Cube sort of tried it at an unreasonable price) because they know it will absolutely slaughter high-end Mac sales (where all the profit is) - most people who want more than an iMac don't need a Mac Pro. The "prosumer" section of the market has been asking for a machine to fit into this segment for nigh-on a decade now and been completely ignored by Apple.
It is ludicrous that because I want to run a pair of LCDs and have a replaceable video card (hardly unreasonable or unusual requirements today - even outside of the relatively small "prosumer" market), that the minimum buy-in is a US$2500 Mac Pro. *Especially* when a PC at less than half the price can deliver those capabilities.
Microsoft has to create an INCENTIVE for people to use Vista; the reality today is that almost everyone removes even pre-installed Vista and loads XP. So a year from now.... 2 years after Vista has been launched; there will be hardly anyone using Vista; bcos XP is much better at getting things done and needs much lesser hardware.
This is senseless. The hardware requirements of Vista, in the context of contemporary machines, are not signficant.
If Microsoft withdraws XP from the market in July 2008 and makes fresh sales of XP illegal; then non-corporate-licensed users looking for additional PCs will be forced to choose Vista or Mac or Linux. I doubt they will go in for Vista, because the effort to change from XP to Vista is about the same as XP to Linux or Mac.
Utter tripe. Even for the typical home user, the difference between using XP (or even Windows 95, FFS) and Vista is minimal. For a business, which then has to also reimplement much of the supporting infrastructure, where the difference between going from XP to Vista is non-trivial, it pales into insignificant compared to going from XP to OSX or Linux. Even in a relatively ideal situation, where you have no dependencies on Windows-only applications and a smallish, nimble company, such a migration would still be a massive undertaking.
In short, Microsoft has to release a new OS (not Vista... Vista has to be abandoned) before XP goes out of sale. In fact I think it's already too late... it takes atleast 2 years for the market to warm up to anything new.
Vista's reception is little different to XP's, and the same result will occur. It might take a bit longer, because XP has a much higher "it's good enough" rating than Windows 98 did, but it'll happen eventually.
MS will make some drastic changes to boost Vista. Like remove DRM
FFS, give it up already. DRM is a non-argument. The only people who consider it important are zealots and the ignoramuses they've convinced with their FUD.
If you don't have DRM-encumbered media, it's irrelevant because it never activates. If you *do* have DRM-encumbered media, Vista isn't applying any more restrictions than any other device capable of playing it, and the alternative is not being able to play said media at all. Either way, the Vista's DRM support simply does not matter, because you either never see it, or have to use it.
But the version game is unacceptable.
Uh, why ? It's not like price discrimination is an uncommon market phenomenon...
Not owning a computer doesn't stop anyone from being exposed to them.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here.
The web wasn't that popular back then.
It was at least as popular as "text editors" (unless you want to disingenuosly lump in things like word processors and layout tools into that).
To surf the web, they don't have to edit the HTML. In text editors you edit text.
And the difference is...? Both applications are being used for their designed purpose.
Well, another factor was that IE was free. Netscape Navigator was not.
Very, very few people paid for Navigator. Certainly few enough for that to have been a negligible - if not completely irrelevant - factor. Further, Navigator was released free of charge about 3 months after IE4 came out (and while it still had majority marketshare).