Apple is innovating in the iDevices department, nobody can say the contrary.
You're right: it's because shills who aren't paying attention tend to explode with absolute assertions without actually paying attention to those around them.
They own the market, everybody is rushing after them and so far, failing.
Everybody, except for everyone. You realize that iOS has had no improvements for many of their lackluster features in years, right? It's like a Time Capsule of software. Meanwhile, Android has surpassed iPhone in market share: when people's iPhones 'finally' die after 2 years of moderate use, they get an Android phone.
However a tablet is purely a consumer device.
Is it? I've got many Android applications would disagree. A TF101 (Asus Transformer) with Google Docs, Quickoffice, or Documents To Go seem to disagree, as do the terminals etc. available on the platform.
What about the developer market, the enterprise, and the innovators that have made Apple possible ?
Leaving in droves, I gather. When the hardware and OS don't support what you need to do to make a full-featured application and there's a likelihood that you won't be able to get distribution based on fickle rules, and then be unable to actually sell the app outside that distributor due to the distributor owning the device, there are legitimate reasons to look.
Which penny is that? The one where on one side you've got people complaining about shitty UIs, and on the other you've got people doing work, making everything function despite those UIs?
I'd love to see someone try to justify a technical job where they don't use the keyboard. "I work, just with my mouse." Um, yeah - and the possible combinations of clicks is fewer than the number of pieces of paper on my desk. Real technical.
I'm not aware of any technologists who buy Apple products preferentially, except a couple Sales types and web developers (and we all know web devs really don't usually fit the mold for technically inclined).
How could it be a copy? It's got a bigger display, thinner, with a different body design which is thinner by a bit. It has better battery life. It doesn't even have Apple's Rounded Curves, or whatever it is they have a patent on. Are you trying to say that Apple now should have an exclusive right on brushed metal designs (simply because the economy for machining and pouring aluminum became cheap enough to make it feasible, and they 'did it first')?
Judging by the actual support and bugfixes most Apple software seems to get (ie, none - they're worse than Microsoft in this regard, by a long shot),
Apple's MO is as follows:
* ignore the claims * deny the claims * blame the users when popular appeal brings large media attention (it rarely gets this far) * offer a weak consolation, still blaming the user.
Yes, and the US is currently not at war, all the troops have left Iraq, current government policies in the US have had a net positive effect on the economy (which is recovering!), Windows 8 is going to positively synergize your life, HIV is not an STD, and the jobless rate is only 8.2% in the US.
You can tell a lot of lies if you re-define words or loosely skirt by facts. Sure, you're technically correct, but you're still wrong by fact of omission.
Asus has been making superior hardware which Apple can only envy for at least several years now. Look at their Zenbook: it's basically a punch in Apple's face, being faster, lighter, thinner, and having better battery life than the Macbook Air - all while having a larger display (11-14" I think) and starting at about $950.
As for "nobody else does it": Apple hasn't done much which really stands out when compared objectively, it's only with the loud cloud of Sales and Marketing that anything they make seems like it's something. Ape Store? iTunes SaaS and software distribution channels weren't anything new then, either. Off the top of my head:
Pkgsrc and BSD Ports have been around for some time - mid 1990s, I imagine. Debian's APT has been around since 1998. I remember using it in a modified form for my Zaurus, via a GUI installer, in 2001. Granted, iTunes came about in 2001. It was several years behind Napster, offering music with a price tag and a brand name. Steam has been around since 2003 and was installed on pretty much every gamer's PC, and offered much more of a comprehensive unified store than App Store did at first. The App Store didn't debut until 2008. It basically does the same things as all the above do, but with more of an Amazon.com-meets-Walmart feel: a large inventory but you pay by the byte, with dollar ringtones, discount movies, and cheap shareware bins.
Apple is by no means a leader here. They're an integrator with strong marketing/sales proclivities. That leads to broken promises, people believing lies, and people accepting less due to false expectations.
If the iPad didn't exist, do you think the tablet market would look anything like it does today? No? Then Apple pretty much created a new market.
The first tablets weren't made by Apple in this round. They copied the cheap tablets from China which copied the cheap 'netbooks'. Google was already moving (slowly) in that general direction with Android, with netbook support. Did Apple find (and set) the price point for tablets before anyone else? Yes. So in that regard, yes they created the market, but it's not like they made something which wasn't being conceived by almost everyone else at the time, already. (By using the exact same lackluster phone software on their tablets, Apple certainly got a leg up here. I wonder if Android 2.x on tablets would've gotten there first, if it hadn't been decided to make the software actually work well - superior - before pushing it out.)
The only innovator in the consumer electronics market I'm aware of right now is Asus, strongly powered by Google. From what I can tell, the Transformer is the end-all, be-all in that department, and a lot of the up and coming tech appears to pull more features from it than anything else.
Even if you are a geek, OS X is a very good choice, as it's pretty much what Linux on desktop should be.
Nope, but thanks for your assessment.
There's one thing OS X is lacking which I require my system to be, and that's "usable". It's got BSD binaries for the UNIX subsystem, which is fine, but then it doesn't present them with a proper package management system: they're just 'there'. Granted, I can download something like DarwinPorts and install/compile packages for my system like I could in 1998 on PC-BSD, but that's somewhat missing the point.
And the GUI? It's anathema. Any self-respecting Unix person who prefers mousing around to using the keyboard should flog themselves in shame - and that's pretty much what's required in OSX. Meanwhile, it's monolithic and doesn't interface with the traditional Unix shell: I've got to run an X server, too. At that point, I might as well run Windows, because I can at least truly maximize and resize windows as I chose then.
Like my brand new Galaxy Nexus for example had a glitch where the sound would randomly go up and down, then they fixed that and now the phones connection is intermittently lost, to top it off the camera and speakers suck both hardware and software wise in comparison to the 4s iphone's.
I call BS. Granted, it's anecdotal, but and maybe it's had problems, I can't say for certain. I can tell you this: my housemate has had a Nexus since the first day it was available. He gets an official ASOP update from Google every night (that is, he's running nightly builds, which I believe is a stock ROM option, and should by all means have more problems than any 'baked' ROM), and to the best of my knowledge, has never had such a problem as you describe. ICS is, from my subjective observation, pretty damn close to perfect in many regards.
Personally, as a PC-come-Unix guy who didn't get his first smartphone until last year, I am amazed by iOS - amazed anyone with any computing experience whatsoever can defend the phones and tablets it runs on. The hardware is consistently shiny, and Apple displays have always been nice. I love the keyboards on their laptops and desktops. But their phones are a travesty, they really are: they don't deserve the monicker of 'smartphone' yet, being as they lack many of the basic computer-like background functionality which has been present on every multipurpose computing device for the better part of 20 years: operating system multitasking. And the UI is simply garbage, pretty much defining inconsistent and awkward.
As for "polished"? They aren't. They are as polished as a 1980s Chevy Corvette with modern performance parts. They look good, they sound good, and by all means, they're fast. Just don't corner too tight, and the windows leak a bit, the upholstery is a bit ripped up but you'd never know it due to the seat covers, and that windshield is still a pain in the ass to see out of - because it's still the same car it was back then but with a different paint job and faster engine. That's the 'polished' you see in Apple products. They change the paint job in OSX and have decided that shuffling things around, ala Windows, is a superior means of 'upgrading' their OS than actually improving it is. The engineering - which is what I presume Woz was referring to, since he's an engineer - is embarassing compared to the competition. So many of the 'awesome' underpinning features, like signed binaries and OSX's integrated network stack/DHCP/driver bullshit, simply have weird ways of breaking which require something as inappropriate as a reinstall to fix.
Woz's biography (I don't remember which one it was, but it focused more on the early days leading up to the Apple II and Lisa and had Captain Crunch/Draper and Jobs' drug use and partying featured fairly prominently), as well as The Cuckoo's Egg (Cliff Stoll) and The Happy Hacker, were pivotal to my formative years as a technologist.
His statements here don't really make sense, within the context of the autobiography. It was written in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and I read it right around when OSX was making its emergence (it's not on Amazon, afaik), so it didn't have the color of the iRevolution (gag) to falsely tinge things sepia.
Frankly, I can't help but think that the statements in the biography I read were right: something crucial in Woz's brain burnt themselves out when he made the Apple II. He obviously is not paying attention to the changing
Apple hasn't done anything "first" or creative since they first released the iPhone. Yes, the iPhone was quite a jump over what existed at the time, and it was precisely in the direction that people wanted to go. However, it wasn't as capable as many devices on the market at the time in both computing capabilities and audio capabilities (and the i* products still aren't, in any way, better).
Apple software in particular is lacking innovation (since at least 2007). We have osX which is still lackluster at best at context switches (still, after over a decade with negligible improvement) and is removing functionality in leaps and bounds (using a butchered and buggy Microsoft stack for SMB/CIFS and butchering the cups project? seriously, is that what passes for innovation?). This butchery will only be surpassed by Windows 8 in recent memory. iOS is positively crippled compared to Android, with some of the most frustrating UI inconsistencies and shortcomings in capabilities (eg. map navigation which is rivaled by a 7 year old in-car Garmin; killing downloads if you switch to something else). iTunes is now a fractured by platform as well, with tablets not being able to re-download games and apps someone has already paid for on their phones. The hell?
The hardware in the workstations is, admittedly, nice: but aside from the incrementalism of the 1990s which ultimately failed them until they switched to x86, how are they distinguishing themselves today in this department? Bigger, brighter, and more expensive displays with "Thunderbolt" technology - a technology which Apple (and Intel, for whatever reason) have let completely languished for the year and a half that it's been out, turning what has absolutely awesome potential into a completely proprietary display interface which offers nothing but cost over HDMI (or for that matter, DVI, really). The lackluster nature of iOS has done the same with the iPhone and iPad: no true multiprocessing? No contextual use with peripheral emphasis? No WiDi or similar?
("But Caimlas, you asshole", I'm sure someone will say. "We have jiggapixel retina displays!" Yes; yes you do - you also pay for that with horrendous battery life, despite the meager 3.5" display on the phones.)
Sorry. Woz has lost the plot and is not paying attention. Apple has done some absolutely fantastic things since 2000. They've made great progress, pushing other companies to innovate and copy, and have shown even greater potential. And then, the innovation stopped: they started to be litigious bastards at almost precisely the same time.
I would personally love for Apple to come back as the company they were in 2005, when they were kicking ass and taking names. We'd see a lot of cool things happening. But since roughly the time of iTunes, there hasn't been much other than market daring with the iPad to come out of their company I'd consider even remotely 'innovative'. The more I have to deal with Apple products in a support role, the more I feel like they're not even giving their hardware software enough development attention to keep them running stable, with some serious engineering problems that make Windows-self-clobbering-via-antivirus seem benign.
* large up-front per-person costs: 100Hz TV and $100 goggles for everyone. * the movies are also more expensive * differing technologies of differing quality and compatibility
In essence, it really is just an enthusiast and "1%" market, like the original LaserDisk. I hear rumors that the latest 3D tech isn't even being adopted by the porn industry to any significant degree, either.
For my part, the only "3D" technologies I've seen which are actually worth persuing are NVidia's and to a lesser degree, Sony's. Everyone else's seems to be jagged and lack proper depth.
Yeah, when you've got two older cars, they both remained intact and the occupants got jostled.
An older car vs. a new car, however, is a different story. I saw an old Mercedes (always built like tanks, granted) side-swipe a late model Toyota pickup recently (half ton weight class). It was fantastic: the entire front end of the truck was collapsed, and engine bay parts went everywhere. There was only a little bumper scuffing on the Mercedes. I've got a friend who's 80s Chevy truck has hit literal dozens of deer and a fully grown cow (at highway speeds) and you can't even tell except denting on the front bumper. Nowadays, it's almost every month during the fall and winter that I hear about someone's brand new pickup getting totaled by a deer in a front-on collision...
So yeah, I'll take an older vehicle. I'll be safe, and be able to continue on to wherever it is I'm going in the event that I get rear-ended in traffic or someone ignores my vehicle as they try to merge illegally (which happened a month ago). I don't really care about the 'aesthetic' of the vehicle, so I didn't get it repaired - and I didn't need to, because it wasn't much more than body denting. I believe the other vehicle had a tire which popped on my bumper, their hood couldn't shut, the entire side panel was damaged, their bumper was exploded, and they were leaking fluid (probably gas). Excellent safety!
* 6 Android phones (2 old phones which aren't currently being used) * A Dell Streak used as a tablet * An Asus Transformer * Logitech Revue
Android already is getting built into most things: TVs, for instance. You can get a $40 'set top box' which does everything an Android phone from 2 years ago did, and much, much more. Everything new and exciting in the hardware department? It's running Android and/or Linux almost exclusively.
Actually, the price difference between the 16GB and 32GB Asus Transformer is exactly $100. That's about par for the course, and I have no idea why that would be a criticism (since it's not true). I suspect the 3G/4G addition is a bit high, but a quick froogle shows they start at about $50 for something from LG; your router comparison is a bit of a misdirection.
And yes, the poorly made but costly accessories are certainly a profit margin enhancer for Apple. This is not new information. "Works with iProduct" is a big selling point for people who don't know better, and they're lead to believe it'll work better because of the shiny white plastic finish. Apple has always had very high margins on their equipment due to image perception, this is nothing new.
In absolute power? No. But in fuel economy, many of them were. They offered a lot more utility than your average modern sedan, or whatever you want to call the Prius.
They're going to have a hard time controlling all the older vehicles, too, nevermind the ones which run without any electronics (other than the battery and coil).
Oh, right - that's why they wanted to get rid of all those highly efficient older and still serviceable vehicles from the 1980s via Cash for Clunkers: you can't chip or wirelessly control a vehicle which has no computer.
I don't understand how or why you think Wayland will prevent you from running X apps remotely. You can do this in Windows using Xming without a problem. What it might allow you to do is use the full desktop remotely without full bitmap transfer (ala RDP).
Network transparency is huge -- I often need to run graphical installers for commercial software, or run graphical diagnostic software, on systems that live in my machine room, and have fairly basic video cards, and in any case don't routinely have graphical displays attached.
I can run an X server on Windows and do this using Putty just as I can under Linux while running X 'natively'. I don't see how this would be a real problem.
On the other hand, Wayland will make Linux desktop use more capable. It'll be faster, and being able to do something like RDP will be more tenable. Additionally, Wayland is better suited to serve as a general display manager for all ranges of Linux, not just the desktop - this is something which X fails at due to its size and complexity, neither of which is needed or desirable on, say, Linux. The lack of a display manager like Wayland is why GTK did a frame buffer at one point for embedded use and why Android doesn't use X or its toolkits at all (in part), IIRC.
Yep, only in soft science fields (social sciences, like climate science, basically) does a 30% prediction inaccuracy get pushed about as "he was right because he was optimistic".
If he were 30% high, he'd be ignored because it doesn't suit the political agenda.
How is using Linux for telecommute any different than using it on a local network? It's not. Whatever works there (everything except for native Windows software) will work with telecommuting. It's one of those latent benefits of having a standardized networking stack.
So tell me, how often do you beat your wife?
(Aside from running Outlook or using a Microsoft graphical console, I haven't had a need for Windows or a Mac in the past two years - and I have to deal with Linux, Windows, and Macs on a daily basis for support and management. For that I've used vbox.)
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Apple is innovating in the iDevices department, nobody can say the contrary.
You're right: it's because shills who aren't paying attention tend to explode with absolute assertions without actually paying attention to those around them.
They own the market, everybody is rushing after them and so far, failing.
Everybody, except for everyone. You realize that iOS has had no improvements for many of their lackluster features in years, right? It's like a Time Capsule of software. Meanwhile, Android has surpassed iPhone in market share: when people's iPhones 'finally' die after 2 years of moderate use, they get an Android phone.
However a tablet is purely a consumer device.
Is it? I've got many Android applications would disagree. A TF101 (Asus Transformer) with Google Docs, Quickoffice, or Documents To Go seem to disagree, as do the terminals etc. available on the platform.
What about the developer market, the enterprise, and the innovators that have made Apple possible ?
Leaving in droves, I gather. When the hardware and OS don't support what you need to do to make a full-featured application and there's a likelihood that you won't be able to get distribution based on fickle rules, and then be unable to actually sell the app outside that distributor due to the distributor owning the device, there are legitimate reasons to look.
Which penny is that? The one where on one side you've got people complaining about shitty UIs, and on the other you've got people doing work, making everything function despite those UIs?
I'd love to see someone try to justify a technical job where they don't use the keyboard. "I work, just with my mouse." Um, yeah - and the possible combinations of clicks is fewer than the number of pieces of paper on my desk. Real technical.
I'm aware of AlwaysInnovating. They failed for other reasons than being a "tiny startup":
* too expensive
* underspec'd
* not running software which people desired
* too small
* the display implementation was lacking
I'm not saying they weren't there first. I wanted one badly. But they didn't even bring it to market (at least anywhere I could find to buy it).
Yep. I don't even own one and I can see that it stands way ahead of the pack.
I'm not aware of any technologists who buy Apple products preferentially, except a couple Sales types and web developers (and we all know web devs really don't usually fit the mold for technically inclined).
How could it be a copy? It's got a bigger display, thinner, with a different body design which is thinner by a bit. It has better battery life. It doesn't even have Apple's Rounded Curves, or whatever it is they have a patent on. Are you trying to say that Apple now should have an exclusive right on brushed metal designs (simply because the economy for machining and pouring aluminum became cheap enough to make it feasible, and they 'did it first')?
Judging by the actual support and bugfixes most Apple software seems to get (ie, none - they're worse than Microsoft in this regard, by a long shot),
Apple's MO is as follows:
* ignore the claims
* deny the claims
* blame the users when popular appeal brings large media attention (it rarely gets this far)
* offer a weak consolation, still blaming the user.
Yes, and the US is currently not at war, all the troops have left Iraq, current government policies in the US have had a net positive effect on the economy (which is recovering!), Windows 8 is going to positively synergize your life, HIV is not an STD, and the jobless rate is only 8.2% in the US.
You can tell a lot of lies if you re-define words or loosely skirt by facts. Sure, you're technically correct, but you're still wrong by fact of omission.
Asus has been making superior hardware which Apple can only envy for at least several years now. Look at their Zenbook: it's basically a punch in Apple's face, being faster, lighter, thinner, and having better battery life than the Macbook Air - all while having a larger display (11-14" I think) and starting at about $950.
As for "nobody else does it": Apple hasn't done much which really stands out when compared objectively, it's only with the loud cloud of Sales and Marketing that anything they make seems like it's something. Ape Store? iTunes SaaS and software distribution channels weren't anything new then, either. Off the top of my head:
Pkgsrc and BSD Ports have been around for some time - mid 1990s, I imagine. Debian's APT has been around since 1998. I remember using it in a modified form for my Zaurus, via a GUI installer, in 2001. Granted, iTunes came about in 2001. It was several years behind Napster, offering music with a price tag and a brand name. Steam has been around since 2003 and was installed on pretty much every gamer's PC, and offered much more of a comprehensive unified store than App Store did at first. The App Store didn't debut until 2008. It basically does the same things as all the above do, but with more of an Amazon.com-meets-Walmart feel: a large inventory but you pay by the byte, with dollar ringtones, discount movies, and cheap shareware bins.
Apple is by no means a leader here. They're an integrator with strong marketing/sales proclivities. That leads to broken promises, people believing lies, and people accepting less due to false expectations.
If the iPad didn't exist, do you think the tablet market would look anything like it does today? No? Then Apple pretty much created a new market.
The first tablets weren't made by Apple in this round. They copied the cheap tablets from China which copied the cheap 'netbooks'. Google was already moving (slowly) in that general direction with Android, with netbook support. Did Apple find (and set) the price point for tablets before anyone else? Yes. So in that regard, yes they created the market, but it's not like they made something which wasn't being conceived by almost everyone else at the time, already. (By using the exact same lackluster phone software on their tablets, Apple certainly got a leg up here. I wonder if Android 2.x on tablets would've gotten there first, if it hadn't been decided to make the software actually work well - superior - before pushing it out.)
The only innovator in the consumer electronics market I'm aware of right now is Asus, strongly powered by Google. From what I can tell, the Transformer is the end-all, be-all in that department, and a lot of the up and coming tech appears to pull more features from it than anything else.
Even if you are a geek, OS X is a very good choice, as it's pretty much what Linux on desktop should be.
Nope, but thanks for your assessment.
There's one thing OS X is lacking which I require my system to be, and that's "usable". It's got BSD binaries for the UNIX subsystem, which is fine, but then it doesn't present them with a proper package management system: they're just 'there'. Granted, I can download something like DarwinPorts and install/compile packages for my system like I could in 1998 on PC-BSD, but that's somewhat missing the point.
And the GUI? It's anathema. Any self-respecting Unix person who prefers mousing around to using the keyboard should flog themselves in shame - and that's pretty much what's required in OSX. Meanwhile, it's monolithic and doesn't interface with the traditional Unix shell: I've got to run an X server, too. At that point, I might as well run Windows, because I can at least truly maximize and resize windows as I chose then.
What the...?
Like my brand new Galaxy Nexus for example had a glitch where the sound would randomly go up and down, then they fixed that and now the phones connection is intermittently lost, to top it off the camera and speakers suck both hardware and software wise in comparison to the 4s iphone's.
I call BS. Granted, it's anecdotal, but and maybe it's had problems, I can't say for certain. I can tell you this: my housemate has had a Nexus since the first day it was available. He gets an official ASOP update from Google every night (that is, he's running nightly builds, which I believe is a stock ROM option, and should by all means have more problems than any 'baked' ROM), and to the best of my knowledge, has never had such a problem as you describe. ICS is, from my subjective observation, pretty damn close to perfect in many regards.
Personally, as a PC-come-Unix guy who didn't get his first smartphone until last year, I am amazed by iOS - amazed anyone with any computing experience whatsoever can defend the phones and tablets it runs on. The hardware is consistently shiny, and Apple displays have always been nice. I love the keyboards on their laptops and desktops. But their phones are a travesty, they really are: they don't deserve the monicker of 'smartphone' yet, being as they lack many of the basic computer-like background functionality which has been present on every multipurpose computing device for the better part of 20 years: operating system multitasking. And the UI is simply garbage, pretty much defining inconsistent and awkward.
As for "polished"? They aren't. They are as polished as a 1980s Chevy Corvette with modern performance parts. They look good, they sound good, and by all means, they're fast. Just don't corner too tight, and the windows leak a bit, the upholstery is a bit ripped up but you'd never know it due to the seat covers, and that windshield is still a pain in the ass to see out of - because it's still the same car it was back then but with a different paint job and faster engine. That's the 'polished' you see in Apple products. They change the paint job in OSX and have decided that shuffling things around, ala Windows, is a superior means of 'upgrading' their OS than actually improving it is. The engineering - which is what I presume Woz was referring to, since he's an engineer - is embarassing compared to the competition. So many of the 'awesome' underpinning features, like signed binaries and OSX's integrated network stack/DHCP/driver bullshit, simply have weird ways of breaking which require something as inappropriate as a reinstall to fix.
Precisely.
Woz's biography (I don't remember which one it was, but it focused more on the early days leading up to the Apple II and Lisa and had Captain Crunch/Draper and Jobs' drug use and partying featured fairly prominently), as well as The Cuckoo's Egg (Cliff Stoll) and The Happy Hacker, were pivotal to my formative years as a technologist.
His statements here don't really make sense, within the context of the autobiography. It was written in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and I read it right around when OSX was making its emergence (it's not on Amazon, afaik), so it didn't have the color of the iRevolution (gag) to falsely tinge things sepia.
Frankly, I can't help but think that the statements in the biography I read were right: something crucial in Woz's brain burnt themselves out when he made the Apple II. He obviously is not paying attention to the changing
Apple hasn't done anything "first" or creative since they first released the iPhone. Yes, the iPhone was quite a jump over what existed at the time, and it was precisely in the direction that people wanted to go. However, it wasn't as capable as many devices on the market at the time in both computing capabilities and audio capabilities (and the i* products still aren't, in any way, better).
Apple software in particular is lacking innovation (since at least 2007). We have osX which is still lackluster at best at context switches (still, after over a decade with negligible improvement) and is removing functionality in leaps and bounds (using a butchered and buggy Microsoft stack for SMB/CIFS and butchering the cups project? seriously, is that what passes for innovation?). This butchery will only be surpassed by Windows 8 in recent memory. iOS is positively crippled compared to Android, with some of the most frustrating UI inconsistencies and shortcomings in capabilities (eg. map navigation which is rivaled by a 7 year old in-car Garmin; killing downloads if you switch to something else). iTunes is now a fractured by platform as well, with tablets not being able to re-download games and apps someone has already paid for on their phones. The hell?
The hardware in the workstations is, admittedly, nice: but aside from the incrementalism of the 1990s which ultimately failed them until they switched to x86, how are they distinguishing themselves today in this department? Bigger, brighter, and more expensive displays with "Thunderbolt" technology - a technology which Apple (and Intel, for whatever reason) have let completely languished for the year and a half that it's been out, turning what has absolutely awesome potential into a completely proprietary display interface which offers nothing but cost over HDMI (or for that matter, DVI, really). The lackluster nature of iOS has done the same with the iPhone and iPad: no true multiprocessing? No contextual use with peripheral emphasis? No WiDi or similar?
("But Caimlas, you asshole", I'm sure someone will say. "We have jiggapixel retina displays!" Yes; yes you do - you also pay for that with horrendous battery life, despite the meager 3.5" display on the phones.)
Sorry. Woz has lost the plot and is not paying attention. Apple has done some absolutely fantastic things since 2000. They've made great progress, pushing other companies to innovate and copy, and have shown even greater potential. And then, the innovation stopped: they started to be litigious bastards at almost precisely the same time.
I would personally love for Apple to come back as the company they were in 2005, when they were kicking ass and taking names. We'd see a lot of cool things happening. But since roughly the time of iTunes, there hasn't been much other than market daring with the iPad to come out of their company I'd consider even remotely 'innovative'. The more I have to deal with Apple products in a support role, the more I feel like they're not even giving their hardware software enough development attention to keep them running stable, with some serious engineering problems that make Windows-self-clobbering-via-antivirus seem benign.
Very disappointing statements from the Woz.
And it will probably still "lose" the studio money.
There are many parts of the problem:
* large up-front per-person costs: 100Hz TV and $100 goggles for everyone.
* the movies are also more expensive
* differing technologies of differing quality and compatibility
In essence, it really is just an enthusiast and "1%" market, like the original LaserDisk. I hear rumors that the latest 3D tech isn't even being adopted by the porn industry to any significant degree, either.
For my part, the only "3D" technologies I've seen which are actually worth persuing are NVidia's and to a lesser degree, Sony's. Everyone else's seems to be jagged and lack proper depth.
Yeah, when you've got two older cars, they both remained intact and the occupants got jostled.
An older car vs. a new car, however, is a different story. I saw an old Mercedes (always built like tanks, granted) side-swipe a late model Toyota pickup recently (half ton weight class). It was fantastic: the entire front end of the truck was collapsed, and engine bay parts went everywhere. There was only a little bumper scuffing on the Mercedes. I've got a friend who's 80s Chevy truck has hit literal dozens of deer and a fully grown cow (at highway speeds) and you can't even tell except denting on the front bumper. Nowadays, it's almost every month during the fall and winter that I hear about someone's brand new pickup getting totaled by a deer in a front-on collision...
So yeah, I'll take an older vehicle. I'll be safe, and be able to continue on to wherever it is I'm going in the event that I get rear-ended in traffic or someone ignores my vehicle as they try to merge illegally (which happened a month ago). I don't really care about the 'aesthetic' of the vehicle, so I didn't get it repaired - and I didn't need to, because it wasn't much more than body denting. I believe the other vehicle had a tire which popped on my bumper, their hood couldn't shut, the entire side panel was damaged, their bumper was exploded, and they were leaking fluid (probably gas). Excellent safety!
Our house of 4 has a total of:
* 6 Android phones (2 old phones which aren't currently being used)
* A Dell Streak used as a tablet
* An Asus Transformer
* Logitech Revue
Android already is getting built into most things: TVs, for instance. You can get a $40 'set top box' which does everything an Android phone from 2 years ago did, and much, much more. Everything new and exciting in the hardware department? It's running Android and/or Linux almost exclusively.
Actually, the price difference between the 16GB and 32GB Asus Transformer is exactly $100. That's about par for the course, and I have no idea why that would be a criticism (since it's not true). I suspect the 3G/4G addition is a bit high, but a quick froogle shows they start at about $50 for something from LG; your router comparison is a bit of a misdirection.
And yes, the poorly made but costly accessories are certainly a profit margin enhancer for Apple. This is not new information. "Works with iProduct" is a big selling point for people who don't know better, and they're lead to believe it'll work better because of the shiny white plastic finish. Apple has always had very high margins on their equipment due to image perception, this is nothing new.
In absolute power? No. But in fuel economy, many of them were. They offered a lot more utility than your average modern sedan, or whatever you want to call the Prius.
They're going to have a hard time controlling all the older vehicles, too, nevermind the ones which run without any electronics (other than the battery and coil).
Oh, right - that's why they wanted to get rid of all those highly efficient older and still serviceable vehicles from the 1980s via Cash for Clunkers: you can't chip or wirelessly control a vehicle which has no computer.
I don't understand how or why you think Wayland will prevent you from running X apps remotely. You can do this in Windows using Xming without a problem. What it might allow you to do is use the full desktop remotely without full bitmap transfer (ala RDP).
Network transparency is huge -- I often need to run graphical installers for commercial software, or run graphical diagnostic software, on systems that live in my machine room, and have fairly basic video cards, and in any case don't routinely have graphical displays attached.
I can run an X server on Windows and do this using Putty just as I can under Linux while running X 'natively'. I don't see how this would be a real problem.
On the other hand, Wayland will make Linux desktop use more capable. It'll be faster, and being able to do something like RDP will be more tenable. Additionally, Wayland is better suited to serve as a general display manager for all ranges of Linux, not just the desktop - this is something which X fails at due to its size and complexity, neither of which is needed or desirable on, say, Linux. The lack of a display manager like Wayland is why GTK did a frame buffer at one point for embedded use and why Android doesn't use X or its toolkits at all (in part), IIRC.
Yep, only in soft science fields (social sciences, like climate science, basically) does a 30% prediction inaccuracy get pushed about as "he was right because he was optimistic".
If he were 30% high, he'd be ignored because it doesn't suit the political agenda.
How is using Linux for telecommute any different than using it on a local network? It's not. Whatever works there (everything except for native Windows software) will work with telecommuting. It's one of those latent benefits of having a standardized networking stack.
So tell me, how often do you beat your wife?
(Aside from running Outlook or using a Microsoft graphical console, I haven't had a need for Windows or a Mac in the past two years - and I have to deal with Linux, Windows, and Macs on a daily basis for support and management. For that I've used vbox.)
This. I've been irritated by the idiotic and poorly disguised 'slashvertisements' to the point of possibly not coming back.