That said, Apple puts more effort into laptop design than just about any other manufacturer I can think of.
They sure as hell do, although they can't seem to design a hinge to save their life, they pair their beautiful designs with $0.15 fans that are atrocious, and their rubber feet/display buffers can be gone in a week. They cut corners in the oddest places sometimes.
I seriously doubt they'd slap a G5 processor into a G4 design and call it done.
Well, yeah that'd be a bit scary. But they've come very, very close to that with some of their laptop models, starting with the tibook on up, specifically starting with the original 667 model.
Basically they just threw the newer G4's into the same case, although from time to time they might have modified some of the heat piping and the like. What you end up with in many cases is a computer that, under 20-30% sustained load, sounds like a hair dryer.
The 550MHz & 667MHz models were a good example of this- the 550MHz were fine, but the 667MHz were atrocious... they couldn't even speed-step down as newer models could. They'd just been slapped in.
However, I can think of so many other reasons why one specific jury may find reasonable doubt where there is none. In the US, that seems to be acceptable, but I think most other places it'd be seen as a flaw, if the evidence was in fact sufficient (another matter altogether if the evidence is insufficient, both of us use "innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt")
I would say that it is recognized here, but not considered to be a flaw as much as a necessary evil to stop people from being persecuted via prosecution. Not that it always succeeds (Um, how is it where if someone is aquitted by a criminal court for a crime they can then be sued for the crime civilly?). IE, there are cases where criminals are let go on "technicalities" where it's fairly obvious that the person was guilty.
It can suck in the individual example, as you want the guy to get his just deserts- but what would the ramifications be if they said "Yeah, this was done in a wrong way, but its obvious you're guilty, so you're going down".
I play a lot of chess and I can tell you I've never once in my life 'pruned a search tree.' Humans just don't play that way. When a human rejects the vast majority of possible moves he's not even considering them. Pruning a search tree--what a computer is doing--entails actually exploring each move on the tree as far as it can. Then it assigns it a numerical value and orders the moves.
Some would say that is exactly what you're doing, just that your brain does it in such a way that you aren't consciously aware of it.
IE, we know our brain looks for patterns in everything it sees, matching them up against our vast store of patterns we've come to recognize. You can see this when you look at a cloud, or a piece of wood's grain, and see shapes/people.
Your brain has actually been processing the pattern against it's knowledge store, trying to see what it references, but you just go "hey, that looks like an elephant" once it's found what it considers to be its closest match. You aren't consciously aware of it.
You can of course do the process consciously, just as you can do cause/effect scenarios. But when someone throws a ball at you, you are subconsciously working things through- trajectory, gravity, speed, all of which are handled in the dirty parts of your brain. You just catch it.
What makes you think that? Have you ever had a powerbook put its disk to sleep?
Well, I meant when you're actually DOING something. You can put your powerbook to sleep, but can't actually do a whole lot without it spinning up. IE, having users login... logs don't write themselves (/var/log), paging in/out memory... *nix's like fast disks.
This also explains why the hard drive on my iBook seems alot hotter since upgrading.
The only way this feature can do that is if you're writing small files continuously. That's very strange software behavior, and perhaps a worst case for this optimizer. Why would you be doing that?
Hmm. OSX itself writes lots of small files continuously in general, in general, don't most *nix's?
But you are missing my point, OS X is also gaining functionality, and taking advantage of the hardware (Expose is a prime example of this), yet the operating system runs FASTER than previous versions on the same machine. XP is way slower than 2000, which was slower than 98, etc. on the same machine. Obviously it is possible to improve the OS while also making it go faster (Apple can do it) but Microsoft has never done this.
Uh, that's because MS already has optimized the living daylights out of their OS for x86.
You do realize that almost every aspect of OSX getting faster with each release is because they sold you an incredibly unoptimized version to start? It's good that they further optimize it (and it will get much faster- just due to compiler improvements alone) but it ain't exactly something to brag about.
It's sorta like a 500lb guy bragging about getting thinner as the years go by, and laughing at the very thin guy who ads 10lbs per decade as he ages. Gawd.
Well, his most memorable role was Ash of course, and prolly the thing that made me love that character so much was that he was "real" in the sense of "get. me. the. fuck. out. of. here. but. well. since. i. am. here. i. am. gonna. have. to. kick. ass. to. get. back. to. price. mart." You know, he just doesn't give up. He just keeps on trucking, as more and more and more shit comes his way, and things are never easy. But he keeps on trucking, and personally, that makes him likeable to me and makes you wanna root for him.
Bruce has never really hit it big, but he keeps on trucking and working. Little roles here and there, making him recognizable but never a star... which to me, sorta reminds me a lot of the Ash character, and hence makes me want to root for him.
IM is not owned by any company yet, let alone MSFT. An Open alternative has a good position to beat the proprietary opposition, especially as it is quite divided already. Open Standards are the "in" thing right now.
The concept is not owned... then again it isn't something you're necessarily entitled to either. Or rather, you arent entitled to their implimentation, but you can always roll your own. And there are open protocols like jabber and the like. The problem with IM seems to be most of the paradigms for wide-spread use are based upon a centralized server model, so someone has to run and pay for those servers.
Okay, this is not only a 12-year-old girl, but a 12-year-old girl LIVING IN THE PROJECTS. Her family is dirt poor. How exactly do you think this is going to play on the evening news?
And yet, I haven't seen one mention of it on the evening news, nor much spatter over it on sites where the userbase isn't already up in arms over this kinda thing.
I mean jesus, as a personal project I've been going back and trying to quantify what actually has been going on in afghanistan, the circumstances of the battles taking place there. Yeah, I could find it but I really had to look.
If it hits dateline or 60 minutes, sure joe sixpack (or joe geritol) might actually start getting rankled. Till then...
And why would you charge less than 99 cents for it? It's a dollar. Most people aren't so scroogish about their money that they will try to get a dollar back.
Uh, I know people who have already bought hundreds of songs from the itunes store, and you can also purchase entire albums. Selling either of those (part of their library) or a few albums would add up.
Egads, I've heard this statement from more undergrads throwing associations together. While mindsets within the two camps may seem analogous sometimes, the difference is pretty simple: Science is allowed to be _wrong_.
Of course, it sounds like Woz was inviting people to take it and change it, although that is not made clear.. making something public back then was not the same as giving everyone a right to change it for commercial purposes (unlike today's GPL world).
These were the days when there was actually very little commercial personal computer software, IE, when bill gates was writing letters to Byte (i think?) complaining about people pirating MS's implimentation of Basic or something along those lines. IE, most of the personal computer users were hobbyists who would get together to show off what they had done, their newest 'hack'.
Chances are Woz was just showing off his latest hack for geek cred with his homies, and would have loved the idea of others building other hacking his work. This is from what i remember of the book's I've read from that time.
..why Woz is so respected and admired by some people. Heck, this guy has what one could call, a following of fans. The more I learn about him, the more I feel he'd be my perfect role model - a talented hardware (actually systems) engineer that is also noble.
He'd be the perfect role model for just about anyone due to one simple fact- he's just good people.
Here's a guy who has a ton of stuff on his plate, but feels its a duty (probably a privilege) to reply to all the 3rd graders and such wanting to interview him for their school paper. We're not talking about basking in the attention (although I'm sure he has fun with it), as this guy has a LOT on his plate. We're talking about giving up evening hours here to make some kids day.
Here's a guy who still sees value in the world. Value in individuals, other's accomplishments, good music, even hot dogs. Not pie-in-the-sky optimism, ie he isn't unaware of the world. But he seems to look for the best in others and seems to get that if you treat others with respect & courtesy, it often sort of rubs off.
Empathy. This was probably the biggest thing I could boil it all down to. What made the first Apple's so cool? You could almost see him sitting there going "You know, I'd LOVE a computer that could do x & y. I bet others would too. Why don't I do that?" instead of "Acme computer is going to be releasing X which is Y amount better than ours. We should improve Y by Z so marketing can..."
Empathy was probably the quality that came across most as the key to what makes this guy have fans. User empathy (in what he's built) and personal empathy (in how he interacts & lives his life). If you asked him, I don't think he'd consider himself noble at all.
Screw all the massive technical accomplishments & great engineering mind... to myself those are of a lower priority to emulate than the fact that he's a guy that just about anyone would enjoy having a beer with.
They sent me a cease & desist over drunkenbatman.com, but backed off after I made it clear I wasn't just going to give it up, after a whole rigamarole it came down to "We're prepared to walk away from this as long as it isn't used commercially".
There's no minimum spec issue or doing your homework issue here- Apple made promises to sell machines, and didn't fulfill those promises- hence, had to pay for the lawsuit and some damages.
Simple as that. If Apple hadn't made the claims & promises they did, there'd be no issue.
This honestly isn't about the minumum specs on the side of the OSX box, it goes way far beyond that. If you step in the way back machine, you'll find:
Apple purchased Next not long before these new G3 machines came out: ie, the beige towers, the iMacs, etc. Before that they'd be working on the mythical Copland OS for a long, long time which was supposed to have shipped long before then.
When they started hyping OSX, it was rhapsody at the time, and were giving everyone the big picture, starting dev seeds, etc... even shipping rhapsody out for awhile. Basically they were making all kinds of public statements in interviews and the like, about how OSX (rhapsody) would leave OS9 in the dust performance wise, as you have to remember the classic macOS still had lots and lots of legacy, emulated 68K code in it. And openstep ran on pentiums & even 68K machines like a dream, so of course most people bought right into it.
So Apple is coming out with these brand new machines- and people were REALLY skitish about buying them, as OSX, or rhapsody, is just around the corner. REALLY skitish. So Apple comes out and says "Don't worry about buying these machines- they will be FULLY supported by our upcoming OS, and will run them perfectly fine". Of course the new OS was only supposed to be out in a bit.
Apple then hits a big snag- no one wants to develop all the big apps in cocoa, and windowsXP is looking a little too damn good. Like way too damn pretty. So they have to start the whole carbon project, porting all the old classic API's (hobbling cocoa in the process- at least short term), and creating a new super duper windowing engine named Quartz.
Rhapsody sort of gets released, but not really. OSX gets put way on the back burner to do all the new dev stuff they decide they have to add. To give you an idea of the timelines:
1997 - I bought a $3,000 beige G3 1997 - Rhapsody ships to developers 2000 - OSX gets released 2001 - 10.1 is released
Of course, when OSX is released, everyone is completely astonished at how poorly it runs on Apple's fastest machines shipping at the time. I mean just a fricking dog. When it first ships, it only allows DVD playback on certain machines, actually when it first shipped it didnt allow DVD playback on _any_ machines and later only on certain types of machines.
What the lawsuit was really about was Apple deciding that they had to legally support the older machines with the "new" OSX, but not really well. No DVD playback, in actuality they came out and said "it will run, but we won't be writing any real drivers for the cards they shipped with as it would be too difficult". And even then, it can be an absolute bitch to install on them if you aren't careful and don't learn the tricks.
I won't be going in for the rebate, but I was burned- as I would most certainly have held out on my purchase by a generation or two and used my 7500 longer.
Egh- the timelines aren't even remotely the same. The time between windows major OS upgrades and Mac major upgrades is much, much larger.
Apple charges you ~$129 every year or so for a new version, windows are more expensive but come much more rarely and are a larger jump. IE, look up the timelines between win95 & win98, or win98 & winXP, or winXP and longhorn.
Mac OS X automatically splits execution threads among multiple CPUs. Even something as basic as a progress bar or a network service daemon will run in separate threads.
Nitpick, but in my limited experience with OSX programming, something like a progress bar doesn't automatically spawn a new thread... the default is that it doesn't (I've used lots of OSX apps whose UI's have been blocked due to progress bars, etc) but I believe in 10.2 Apple introduced a new method whereby you could specifically call a progress indicator as a new thread.
IE, OSX doesn't magically make your app into threaded code, you do have to do some work there. Hell, lots of the API's aren't even thread safe...
Re:Ugh! Another $129 x 2 Machines!
on
Jaguar is Over
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· Score: 1
I'll pay the extra, because I don't have to screw around with it to get stuff to work the way I want, like I did Linux and Windows.
I don't want to pay extra, because there are big gaping holes in what works now. IE, I have no problem with paying for upgrades, I have problems when the 'upgrade' fixes a feature that never worked correctly....call me when I know I'll be able to print reliably in OSX again, or my powerbook & ibook aren't constantly kernel panic'ing after being awoken from sleep.
Loss? Apple has been posting underwhelming but definite profits (almost) without fail for every quarter in the last three years. Name five other companies that have done that.
One thing to keep in mind is that while they've technically posted some very slim profits over the last few years, they were a little iffy. There's a reason why Apple's P/E and market cap is so low- wall street basically has said that Apple's hardware line is pretty much of no value right now.
Why? Because in many, many quarters they'd have posted a loss without the interest made from the $5billion in the bank. When interest rates dropped dramatically, Apple earned less interest on that money, and hence started bleeding.
The reason you saw the stock surge quickly from $14ish to $17ish was the music store, and the fact that it COULD be a decent source of revenue for Apple if things shake out well... but they have $5 billion in the bank, and their market cap is ~$5billion... their hardware just isn't doing that well, so Wall Street is essentially giving value only to the cash Apple has.
It's about the software... with x86 windows, you can get what you need anywhere. It all runs, you don't have to worry if the gas station down the street will be able to fill you up.
Sure, you have OS versions, but that's akin to regular, super, premium... with an apple machine, sure there might be a station where one person lives, but the hardest part of using them is filling up.
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That said, Apple puts more effort into laptop design than just about any other manufacturer I can think of.
They sure as hell do, although they can't seem to design a hinge to save their life, they pair their beautiful designs with $0.15 fans that are atrocious, and their rubber feet/display buffers can be gone in a week. They cut corners in the oddest places sometimes.
I seriously doubt they'd slap a G5 processor into a G4 design and call it done.
Well, yeah that'd be a bit scary. But they've come very, very close to that with some of their laptop models, starting with the tibook on up, specifically starting with the original 667 model.
Basically they just threw the newer G4's into the same case, although from time to time they might have modified some of the heat piping and the like. What you end up with in many cases is a computer that, under 20-30% sustained load, sounds like a hair dryer.
The 550MHz & 667MHz models were a good example of this- the 550MHz were fine, but the 667MHz were atrocious... they couldn't even speed-step down as newer models could. They'd just been slapped in.
However, I can think of so many other reasons why one specific jury may find reasonable doubt where there is none. In the US, that seems to be acceptable, but I think most other places it'd be seen as a flaw, if the evidence was in fact sufficient (another matter altogether if the evidence is insufficient, both of us use "innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt")
I would say that it is recognized here, but not considered to be a flaw as much as a necessary evil to stop people from being persecuted via prosecution. Not that it always succeeds (Um, how is it where if someone is aquitted by a criminal court for a crime they can then be sued for the crime civilly?). IE, there are cases where criminals are let go on "technicalities" where it's fairly obvious that the person was guilty.
It can suck in the individual example, as you want the guy to get his just deserts- but what would the ramifications be if they said "Yeah, this was done in a wrong way, but its obvious you're guilty, so you're going down".
What we need is a unified desktop that represents the real objects we work on, in a way that mirrors the manner in which we actually use them.
MS actually agrees with you! It was called Bob.
I play a lot of chess and I can tell you I've never once in my life 'pruned a search tree.' Humans just don't play that way. When a human rejects the vast majority of possible moves he's not even considering them. Pruning a search tree--what a computer is doing--entails actually exploring each move on the tree as far as it can. Then it assigns it a numerical value and orders the moves.
Some would say that is exactly what you're doing, just that your brain does it in such a way that you aren't consciously aware of it.
IE, we know our brain looks for patterns in everything it sees, matching them up against our vast store of patterns we've come to recognize. You can see this when you look at a cloud, or a piece of wood's grain, and see shapes/people.
Your brain has actually been processing the pattern against it's knowledge store, trying to see what it references, but you just go "hey, that looks like an elephant" once it's found what it considers to be its closest match. You aren't consciously aware of it.
You can of course do the process consciously, just as you can do cause/effect scenarios. But when someone throws a ball at you, you are subconsciously working things through- trajectory, gravity, speed, all of which are handled in the dirty parts of your brain. You just catch it.
What makes you think that? Have you ever had a powerbook put its disk to sleep?
Well, I meant when you're actually DOING something. You can put your powerbook to sleep, but can't actually do a whole lot without it spinning up. IE, having users login... logs don't write themselves (/var/log), paging in/out memory... *nix's like fast disks.
This also explains why the hard drive on my iBook seems alot hotter since upgrading.
The only way this feature can do that is if you're writing small files continuously. That's very strange software behavior, and perhaps a worst case for this optimizer. Why would you be doing that?
Hmm. OSX itself writes lots of small files continuously in general, in general, don't most *nix's?
But you are missing my point, OS X is also gaining functionality, and taking advantage of the hardware (Expose is a prime example of this), yet the operating system runs FASTER than previous versions on the same machine. XP is way slower than 2000, which was slower than 98, etc. on the same machine. Obviously it is possible to improve the OS while also making it go faster (Apple can do it) but Microsoft has never done this.
Uh, that's because MS already has optimized the living daylights out of their OS for x86.
You do realize that almost every aspect of OSX getting faster with each release is because they sold you an incredibly unoptimized version to start? It's good that they further optimize it (and it will get much faster- just due to compiler improvements alone) but it ain't exactly something to brag about.
It's sorta like a 500lb guy bragging about getting thinner as the years go by, and laughing at the very thin guy who ads 10lbs per decade as he ages. Gawd.
Well, his most memorable role was Ash of course, and prolly the thing that made me love that character so much was that he was "real" in the sense of "get. me. the. fuck. out. of. here. but. well. since. i. am. here. i. am. gonna. have. to. kick. ass. to. get. back. to. price. mart." You know, he just doesn't give up. He just keeps on trucking, as more and more and more shit comes his way, and things are never easy. But he keeps on trucking, and personally, that makes him likeable to me and makes you wanna root for him.
Bruce has never really hit it big, but he keeps on trucking and working. Little roles here and there, making him recognizable but never a star... which to me, sorta reminds me a lot of the Ash character, and hence makes me want to root for him.
IM is not owned by any company yet, let alone MSFT. An Open alternative has a good position to beat the proprietary opposition, especially as it is quite divided already. Open Standards are the "in" thing right now.
The concept is not owned... then again it isn't something you're necessarily entitled to either. Or rather, you arent entitled to their implimentation, but you can always roll your own. And there are open protocols like jabber and the like. The problem with IM seems to be most of the paradigms for wide-spread use are based upon a centralized server model, so someone has to run and pay for those servers.
Yeah, MacOS had to go through this learning phase too. Search for the "early bird" worm. It really f'd up prepress shops.
lol, right. Even superior to the screens on the windows side that use the _exact_ same components? Apple's magic fairy dust?
Okay, this is not only a 12-year-old girl, but a 12-year-old girl LIVING IN THE PROJECTS. Her family is dirt poor. How exactly do you think this is going to play on the evening news?
And yet, I haven't seen one mention of it on the evening news, nor much spatter over it on sites where the userbase isn't already up in arms over this kinda thing.
I mean jesus, as a personal project I've been going back and trying to quantify what actually has been going on in afghanistan, the circumstances of the battles taking place there. Yeah, I could find it but I really had to look.
If it hits dateline or 60 minutes, sure joe sixpack (or joe geritol) might actually start getting rankled. Till then...
And why would you charge less than 99 cents for it? It's a dollar. Most people aren't so scroogish about their money that they will try to get a dollar back.
Uh, I know people who have already bought hundreds of songs from the itunes store, and you can also purchase entire albums. Selling either of those (part of their library) or a few albums would add up.
Yeah, you have to "reset" it, which isn't that hard... basically removing a stick of RAM if I remember correctly to let it know something's changed.
Or as I have often put it, science is a religion.
Egads, I've heard this statement from more undergrads throwing associations together. While mindsets within the two camps may seem analogous sometimes, the difference is pretty simple: Science is allowed to be _wrong_.
Of course, it sounds like Woz was inviting people to take it and change it, although that is not made clear.. making something public back then was not the same as giving everyone a right to change it for commercial purposes (unlike today's GPL world).
These were the days when there was actually very little commercial personal computer software, IE, when bill gates was writing letters to Byte (i think?) complaining about people pirating MS's implimentation of Basic or something along those lines. IE, most of the personal computer users were hobbyists who would get together to show off what they had done, their newest 'hack'.
Chances are Woz was just showing off his latest hack for geek cred with his homies, and would have loved the idea of others building other hacking his work. This is from what i remember of the book's I've read from that time.
..why Woz is so respected and admired by some people. Heck, this guy has what one could call, a following of fans. The more I learn about him, the more I feel he'd be my perfect role model - a talented hardware (actually systems) engineer that is also noble.
He'd be the perfect role model for just about anyone due to one simple fact- he's just good people.
Here's a guy who has a ton of stuff on his plate, but feels its a duty (probably a privilege) to reply to all the 3rd graders and such wanting to interview him for their school paper. We're not talking about basking in the attention (although I'm sure he has fun with it), as this guy has a LOT on his plate. We're talking about giving up evening hours here to make some kids day.
Here's a guy who still sees value in the world. Value in individuals, other's accomplishments, good music, even hot dogs. Not pie-in-the-sky optimism, ie he isn't unaware of the world. But he seems to look for the best in others and seems to get that if you treat others with respect & courtesy, it often sort of rubs off.
Empathy. This was probably the biggest thing I could boil it all down to. What made the first Apple's so cool? You could almost see him sitting there going "You know, I'd LOVE a computer that could do x & y. I bet others would too. Why don't I do that?" instead of "Acme computer is going to be releasing X which is Y amount better than ours. We should improve Y by Z so marketing can..."
Empathy was probably the quality that came across most as the key to what makes this guy have fans. User empathy (in what he's built) and personal empathy (in how he interacts & lives his life). If you asked him, I don't think he'd consider himself noble at all.
Screw all the massive technical accomplishments & great engineering mind... to myself those are of a lower priority to emulate than the fact that he's a guy that just about anyone would enjoy having a beer with.
They sent me a cease & desist over drunkenbatman.com, but backed off after I made it clear I wasn't just going to give it up, after a whole rigamarole it came down to "We're prepared to walk away from this as long as it isn't used commercially".
There's no minimum spec issue or doing your homework issue here- Apple made promises to sell machines, and didn't fulfill those promises- hence, had to pay for the lawsuit and some damages.
Simple as that. If Apple hadn't made the claims & promises they did, there'd be no issue.
This honestly isn't about the minumum specs on the side of the OSX box, it goes way far beyond that. If you step in the way back machine, you'll find:
Apple purchased Next not long before these new G3 machines came out: ie, the beige towers, the iMacs, etc. Before that they'd be working on the mythical Copland OS for a long, long time which was supposed to have shipped long before then.
When they started hyping OSX, it was rhapsody at the time, and were giving everyone the big picture, starting dev seeds, etc... even shipping rhapsody out for awhile. Basically they were making all kinds of public statements in interviews and the like, about how OSX (rhapsody) would leave OS9 in the dust performance wise, as you have to remember the classic macOS still had lots and lots of legacy, emulated 68K code in it. And openstep ran on pentiums & even 68K machines like a dream, so of course most people bought right into it.
So Apple is coming out with these brand new machines- and people were REALLY skitish about buying them, as OSX, or rhapsody, is just around the corner. REALLY skitish. So Apple comes out and says "Don't worry about buying these machines- they will be FULLY supported by our upcoming OS, and will run them perfectly fine". Of course the new OS was only supposed to be out in a bit.
Apple then hits a big snag- no one wants to develop all the big apps in cocoa, and windowsXP is looking a little too damn good. Like way too damn pretty. So they have to start the whole carbon project, porting all the old classic API's (hobbling cocoa in the process- at least short term), and creating a new super duper windowing engine named Quartz.
Rhapsody sort of gets released, but not really. OSX gets put way on the back burner to do all the new dev stuff they decide they have to add. To give you an idea of the timelines:
1997 - I bought a $3,000 beige G3
1997 - Rhapsody ships to developers
2000 - OSX gets released
2001 - 10.1 is released
Of course, when OSX is released, everyone is completely astonished at how poorly it runs on Apple's fastest machines shipping at the time. I mean just a fricking dog. When it first ships, it only allows DVD playback on certain machines, actually when it first shipped it didnt allow DVD playback on _any_ machines and later only on certain types of machines.
What the lawsuit was really about was Apple deciding that they had to legally support the older machines with the "new" OSX, but not really well. No DVD playback, in actuality they came out and said "it will run, but we won't be writing any real drivers for the cards they shipped with as it would be too difficult". And even then, it can be an absolute bitch to install on them if you aren't careful and don't learn the tricks.
I won't be going in for the rebate, but I was burned- as I would most certainly have held out on my purchase by a generation or two and used my 7500 longer.
Egh- the timelines aren't even remotely the same. The time between windows major OS upgrades and Mac major upgrades is much, much larger.
Apple charges you ~$129 every year or so for a new version, windows are more expensive but come much more rarely and are a larger jump. IE, look up the timelines between win95 & win98, or win98 & winXP, or winXP and longhorn.
Mac OS X automatically splits execution threads among multiple CPUs. Even something as basic as a progress bar or a network service daemon will run in separate threads.
Nitpick, but in my limited experience with OSX programming, something like a progress bar doesn't automatically spawn a new thread... the default is that it doesn't (I've used lots of OSX apps whose UI's have been blocked due to progress bars, etc) but I believe in 10.2 Apple introduced a new method whereby you could specifically call a progress indicator as a new thread.
IE, OSX doesn't magically make your app into threaded code, you do have to do some work there. Hell, lots of the API's aren't even thread safe...
I'll pay the extra, because I don't have to screw around with it to get stuff to work the way I want, like I did Linux and Windows.
...call me when I know I'll be able to print reliably in OSX again, or my powerbook & ibook aren't constantly kernel panic'ing after being awoken from sleep.
I don't want to pay extra, because there are big gaping holes in what works now. IE, I have no problem with paying for upgrades, I have problems when the 'upgrade' fixes a feature that never worked correctly.
Loss? Apple has been posting underwhelming but definite profits (almost) without fail for every quarter in the last three years. Name five other companies that have done that.
One thing to keep in mind is that while they've technically posted some very slim profits over the last few years, they were a little iffy. There's a reason why Apple's P/E and market cap is so low- wall street basically has said that Apple's hardware line is pretty much of no value right now.
Why? Because in many, many quarters they'd have posted a loss without the interest made from the $5billion in the bank. When interest rates dropped dramatically, Apple earned less interest on that money, and hence started bleeding.
The reason you saw the stock surge quickly from $14ish to $17ish was the music store, and the fact that it COULD be a decent source of revenue for Apple if things shake out well... but they have $5 billion in the bank, and their market cap is ~$5billion... their hardware just isn't doing that well, so Wall Street is essentially giving value only to the cash Apple has.
It's about the software... with x86 windows, you can get what you need anywhere. It all runs, you don't have to worry if the gas station down the street will be able to fill you up.
Sure, you have OS versions, but that's akin to regular, super, premium... with an apple machine, sure there might be a station where one person lives, but the hardest part of using them is filling up.