They had a Mac with a DSP built-in back in the day. The Quadra A/V! It blasted the shit out of most any other computer when it came to Photoshop - rivaling modern computers for some tasks.
They actually made two: the Quadra 660AV and the Quadra 840av (there was also a centris line without the fancy stuff). The 660 used a 25MHz 68040, and the 840 used a 40MHz 68040, and had a seperate DSP that you had to write specifically for.
Apple's thought was kinda ahead of the curve at the time, in that they were introducing speech recognition, were going to ditch the modem in favor of the geopod (just a jack, cost about half as much as a modem and you'd do the same stuff in software using the DSP). After it died (ver quickly) there were rumors that they'd be adding a phillips trimedia card later on, but that was dropped as they learned their lesson hopefully from the AV fiasco.
At no tasks could those computers hold their own with any "modern computer". The 840 held its own for awhile, but that was due to the fact that it had the fastest released 040 chip, there wasn't much PPC software for awhile and the fastest powermac (80MHz) released later on emulated 68K code at about the same speed as the 840 ran natively.
But honestly- and I did own one and loved it- they were a bad buy. Since you had to code specifically for the DSP, only a few photoshop filters and one or two 3D programs wrote any code for it... maybe a few things here and there, but nothing really of note. The telephony aspect of it sucked bad and never really worked well, so the DSP just sat there hanging out 99.9999999999% of the time as Apple themselves said they wouldn't be included in future machines a bit later as they weren't needed due to the speed of the PPC when using native code.
Sorry, just at no time did they rival modern computers- they were cool for what they were, and allowed voice recognition and playback at a time when it was unthinkable... but that's about it.
On the contrary, many web developers and web application programmers that are not familiar with installation of DB systems (on UNIX-ish systems or otherwise) are probably "smart enough" to use them. What makes them so incompetent in the first place? Cause they're Mac users? Thinly veiled elitism is so easy to identify.
I've often wondered how many Linuxen really want *nixes on the desktop for everyone, just due to the fact that it kinda destroys "street cred" in the same way that the cult following of bands suddenly dry up when the band hit the radio and everyone else seems to like them. I surely know mac users who would find something else to use if everyone used mac's...
There's street cred (or geek cred) in spending the hours going through documentation to get your *nix to install on your box- to get the newest drivers hacked on and working while the luddite IT intern is trying so hard to get their display driver to go higher than 8-bit.
There just ain't street cred when a 5 year old is able to start up a web server... mysql is already almost at the point and click stage to instal on OSX, what if Apple ships mysql with the system (or postgresql as mysql seems to get bashed for the oddest things now that it's very popular) and includes some sort of easy to write to API for developers and a filemaker-like interface upon it for everyone else? Should they be using it then...?
What happens if in 12 years Linux is really viable on the desktop, perhaps even becoming easier to install and use than Windows? Where what will the geek cred concious user use? Everything is just getting too damn easy. People should have to work to use the computer- it's a sign of respect, right?
I'm intrigued. What do you do that makes a 1.25GHz G4 feel slow? I'm still using a 1.33GHz Athlon and it feels quite fast. I keeps thinking about upgrading the CPU, but really can't see the point. I rarely use more than 20% of it as it is...
One thing to remember about Apple's machines is that while the G4 processor, if the code is really tuned can hold it's own with processors at a much higher clock speed on OSX not very much is very tuned and the overhead associated with running OSX demands a lot more horsepower for the same tasks compared to X86.
Some examples might be compiling- while the compiler in 10.2 made big strides, it's still no speed demon. Apple did move from 2.95 to 3.1 for 10.2, and while that does have better PPC support it's still *cough* really basic, especially compared to how tuned it is for X86. A ton of apps intensive apps either don't support altivec, or don't support dual-processors, or both. Got lots of windows going on a high-res display? QE helps with the compositing, but everything first has to be generated in software in order to be handed off to be composited... on my tibook it's not uncommon to see the windowmanager taking up 30-35%+ of the CPU to do its thing. Have a few apps open and depending on what they've been coded with (cocoa, carbon, etc) and how tuned they are you can easily see CPU cycles just draining away.
iTunes on a 667 G4 machine I have here hovers between 13-35% CPU, on my 733MHz P3 playing an MP3 in winamp is more like 3%... On my 500MHz iBook it hovers between 17-40%... no it doesn't skip, even while I'm doing semi-intensive stuff but the whole machine sure does slow down... even on my G4: with iTunes playing MP3's, something download in the background, and the sorry state of things like dreamweaverX, golive and photoshop I often feel like I'm using a 250MHz machine. It's getting better- Ie, with 10.2 and some updates to some apps I don't type faster than a stupid processor very much anymore but it still happens.
Then there's iCal, iPhoto... these things, while pretty, take more CPU power than you'd think if you're coming in from the x86 world.
The other thing to keep in mind is the gigantic speed-gaps that occur in Apple's product lines due to the processors not scaling up gracefully. IE, Unreal2003 tech demo was just released for OSX. It barely runs on any Apple machine well, you need a top-of-the-line G4 tower with a Geforce Ti (or close) to run it. I swear, why would they want to port any graphics-intensive games when only the multi-thousand dollar machines Apple sells will run them and even at that only the newest breed?
If you have oh, let's say a G4 867 or 1GHz that shipped with a crappier card Apple charges you $400+ to get the OEM Apple card of choice... Apple only sold 500MHz machines for a long time and there are tons and tons of those out there that people bought for $4k+. For iBooks and Powerbooks, Apple basically announced 10.2 and said "oh yeah, and here are new powerbooks and iBooks that will make QE work... sorry about what we just sold you a few weeks/month ago for a few thousand..."
Since they're so expensive and have a decent resale value, it can be easier to just sell it and use the money to get a decent PC plus a bunch of extras. Hell, get one plus a spare. In many cases it's just more cost-effective to get a PC. Not for a lot of what I do per se, but for the things I used to do... I've watched a ton of content professionals leave the mac due to the speed (either of the processor, or the apps they want not being optimized) even as I've watched a bunch of geeks migrate to it...
Eh? Aren't there much larger margins on software than HW? After it's been developed, it's like 95% margin.
Apple has a margin of on average 28%-30+% gross margins on hardware... obviously resellers and VARs don't have anywhere near that, but it's what Apple gets. We won't talk about their RAM where it is more like 400%...
Assuming 30% on average, for every $3k tower you buy, Apple makes $900. Buy that tower with a $700-$2.5 Apple display, Apple pockets $1.1k-$1650 on the deal... not even withstanding the $300 extended warranty which covers less and less. Even selling a mid-range iBook will get them ~550 when you add in AppleCare. Plus Apple can count on probably 2 OS upgrades per system it sells over the years on average, or for another $260... not to mention any other Apple peripherals you might pick up.
So basically (obviously not hard numbers, but you get the idea) depending on the system sold, Apple is looking at $700-$2,600 in gross profit. If they sold MacOS X on X86 hardware for $199 they'd need to sell 25 million copies a year to to equal the gross revenue they pull in from selling ~1 million macs or so per year (bit over 5 billion).
Well, sure you say... they're making a lot of revenue but not a lot of profit. So if they only sold 1 million copies of x86 OSX at $199 for $199 million all they're doing is pressing the discs and distributing, so it's all gravy train... except Apple's development, support and other costs have gone up exponentially due to the nature of the x86 world. Thousands of models to support instead of a score, hundreds of thousands of configurations instead of thousands. And it's still gonna have to develop the tasty iApps, all pulled from that $199 a copy.
When you realize Apple can pretty much count on two OSX upgrades at $130 apiece over the life of every mac sold, or $260, the economics of Apple moving to a purely software model aren't very appetizing unless their new-fangled music thing really takes off and brings in a few billion per quarter.
Oh sure it could happen, but not without wiping out the stock and pairing Apple down to a shell of what it once was. The shareholders would end up making more money just selling everything, putting it in a bank and pulling 4% interest.
"with both batteries" doesn't cont.
I think it's closer to 5.5 for the powerbook and most pcs (at least as full-featured as the powerbook) aren't gonna last any 4 hrs.
That's what Apple advertises, but honestly, just read the reviews. I own a dual USB iBook, and a tiBook. Both were rated at ~5hrs (still are), and in actually the tiBook gets about 3 hours (dimmed screen, HD spinning down a lot) and the iBook gets ~3.5 hours (same config... low power mode).
Admittedly the PC laptops get nowhere near the rated spec, and on one batter my Dell laptop gets about 2 hours of charge in normal use.
But my buddy's new centrino laptop actually surprised me- it gets mad battery life for an x86 laptop... I didn't believe him when he said he got 3.5+ hours of charge with it till I saw it for myself. When you add in the fact that the centrino's CPU core is mad fast, it really puts the hurt on two of Apples core competitive advantages. Namely, better power consumption that x86 and better CPU competitiveness than mac desktops vs. pc desktops.
*sigh* And then we have the 17" monster (which I like) that really, really doesn't have a good battery life. I mean what the hell- with current battery technology, a 17" LC to power and a damn 1" profile there's just no way to have really usable battery life without carrying 3 batteries with you.
Why they don't go all-fucking-out with that model and give it a numeric keypad, 3" thick with dual-battery bays and dual G4's is beyond me. It's just hard for me to drop $4.5k+ (anyone who has bought an apple laptop knows you HAVE to have applecare) on a 17" screen with only 1440x900 resolution and a 1GHz G4. Now put two in there and we're talking. Bump the resolution up and we're really talking. Make it thick enough so that there's adequate cooling so the damn 0.5" whiney fans aren't scaring the shite out of me and the case isn't warming my boxers and I'm reaching for my wallet. Give it dual battery bays so I can pop two in while I'm out and about and can just keep it in a sleeve instead of carrying the bag and batteries around and my pants are getting damp from something other than the heat generated by my 15" powerbook. Give the $4k laptop a video card that isn't a generation behind and it's gone beyond lust and is perching on the cusp of love.
Give me damn usable and functional with aestetics as extras where appropriate. Damnit.
Quite to the contrary, there is ample evidence that Apple shareholders are positively thrilled.
No, there isn't.
I've made a tidy sum in the past month with my modest number of shares, and there are lots of folks out there who hold way more shares than I have.
You made most of that is less than a month- just a few weeks when Apple's price went from $13.8x to $18 due to the music service buzz. Let's compare that to the last few years...
If you just made a tidy sum, you just bought recently... And you are not the Apple shareholders mentioned or are who unhappy. Individual investors (well, 99.999% of them) move penny stocks. They don't move a stock with a market cap of 5.5+ billion. Any existing Apple shareholders mentioned in the article didn't sell 3.5 years ago at $60-$75/share, or buy at $13 and sell recently at $18. We're talking blocks of tens of thousands of shares... funds, institutions. Not you and I on tdwaterhouse or scottrade.
From 1990 to 2000 Apple stock hovered between the teens and the 20's. In late 1999 and 2000 there was a really fun spike and subsequent split. The stock split at around $50 in mid-2000, a 2-1 split... making each share worth ~$25. The stock jumped back to the very low 60's, then plummeted to the low-to-mid-teens in the span of a month or so. Not a big shock, lots of other stocks had the same thing happen... but many have shown actual recovery of their price and sequential growth. Not all have, but then again gateway shareholders aren't exactly happy either.
Since then it's been able to hit the mid-20's for a few months at a time, but always falls down to the low teens again... or hovers at the $15 mark. It stands to reason then that most who have bought have picked it up in the mid-20's or mid-teens (i'd have to go over transactions looking for large blocks, but that's what I'd guess) and over the last 2.5 years that doesn't translate into much growth. If they bought before the split or right after, they're still waiting for any growth.
So, over the last 2.5 years the stock has hovered in the low $20's twice, and in the low teens for the rest of it... usually with it's market cap at ~5.5 billion. Considering Apple generates 5.5x billion in revenue, and has 4.x billion in cash... basically all the analysts who have followed Apple's financials and make the big-stock-fun purchasing decisions have decided that Apples hardware and software business was worthless as it was usually operating at a loss with interest from its horde of cash making up the bulk (or all) of the profit.
So, don't count your chickens before they hatch- The stock price jump so far has been on the hope that the music store could turn into an actual revenue stream for a company which is seeing all of its others shrinking (except in very select areas, such as the iPod but the money made from them is a drop in the bucket). It could keep going up if there is continued exponential growth of the service, or it could drop right back, or hit the mid-20's again and die again as it seems prone to do.
For you and I (yep I made a bundle by buying at $13.x too... but still waiting on my $24 shares to pay off) that might be fine... for some huge mutual fund where Apple has been the under-performer of their fund quarter after quarter, they aren't happy with Apple's performance.
I mean look. If Apple's Mkt Cap is 5.5 billion, and they have 5 billion in cash, if you bought them chances are you could make a billion selling all their plants, contracts, intellectual property, etc and come out of the deal with half a billion in profit. When a company is in that situation they have to do something and lots of people (yes, large shareholders) feel that whatever Apple's been doing has either been ineffective or they just haven't been doing enough.
I don't see this as very likely. OSX is so good because it runs on very specific hardware. Since the hardware is so limited they can optimize a whole lot. The same reason video game consoles have better graphics than the pc even though the hardware is half as fast.
Ooooo that is true in theory, but not in practice as the userbase isn't as limited as it sounds. The fact that they know every model that has shipped does give them an edge in quality assurance, but that really only assumes that they devote the manpower and resources ($$$) to really capitalize on it. Ie, look at the 10.2.5 bug that caused kernel panics and printing problems en-masse among the user base (all around USB)... to the point where they had to release an 4meg update within a few weeks. Apple could put the resources into checking to make sure that didn't happen.
Some would say that that isn't responsibility, it's the developers or creators of the products to test and give feedback to Apple... but we're talking about a boutique computer line and whereas it would just be astronomical for MS to test all the different video cards, hubs and printer drivers against it's OS and different computer models out there for Apple the cost is drastically reduced and the users would love them for it.
But anyways- as far as optimization... you're right, in that consoles can squeeze a huge amount of power out of a standard and non-changing platform. Carmack has said they can get a 50% performance improvement out of just coding for something like the Xbox as they can tune everything to the CPU, bus and vidcard.
But that just doesn't exist with Apple machines, there is already a wide disparity between different models capabilities (and it will get scary if something like the 970 is introduced). Practically OSX (from the kernel to the higher API routines) are inherently unoptimized. At it's basic level, without getting into subsystems and video cards just look at the two main CPU's: G3 versus G4. They both have different instruction capabilities, so while you could get a boon just by coding for the G4 Apple can't do that as a huge section (actually, most of it) isn't using a G4.
Then you have the biggest part of the G4, it's SIMD engine (altivec) which while it can really push up performance just isn't used very much except in specific instances. Ie, adobe photoshop? Only a few filters really support altivec. The OS barely has altivec in it, sure some windowing routines do (like the drop shadows, much snappier on a G4), but they can't just go all-out and optimize for altivec because if you do, you either have to have two code bases (one for G3, one for G4) or you have to have your altivec code be "emulated" by the G3 (this happens automatically) which gives dog-like performance.
Then you have things like caches: tons of mac models (including higher end models at different points) either don't have L3 caches or have differing sizes. If every Mac since OSX's release had a 1meg L3 cache they could really really target that and optimize routines for it across the board like what happens in the X86 world. They can't.
Then you hit the basic OS level... OSX is basically a re-porting of Openstep to PPC, but the kernel and loads of other stuff was never meant for or optimized for RISC but rather CISC (think about it... it went from moto's 68K to X86) and Apple has been more concerned with getting it up and running and working, moreso than optimization. You can find reference to this at unsanity.com's developer blogs.
Then you have the fact that Cocoa, while being around for a long time, never really had a huge developer base. Ie, it's like lasso... ever heard of it? Probably not, but it's been around for years... but only a few people use it (smaller all the time). If IBM decided it was only going to build stuff using lasso, none of their people would know how the hell to use it to the best of its ability and would have to be trained. After a few years they'd be putting out some decent s
How about we more thoroughly study and understand how human intelligence operates before we even presume to design something that imitates or rivals it in depth and complexity.
Obviously people are doing that. Part of the problem is that the human mind (and a fly's mind for that matter) is so complex that getting a handle on it has proved to be a very, very daunting task.
Researching AI may actually allow us insights into how we really think, instead of the other way around.
Mostly people bash the USPS because it's something they've heard others do, not because they've had bad experiences. Have you had trouble with your mail?
Actually, yeah I have... a ton. Never had a problem with stuff getting out, but I had huge problems getting stuff in- almost all of it was foreign correspondance though. It was literally a crap-shoot... it got to the point where it was a joke, they'd pay for this super-duper type of mail that had to be signed, and it would just never get here... call the post office and they'd say you were able to get a refund for the costs.
Lost some really important stuff that way- just wouldnt use them again for anything mildly important.
And finally, what good would an Opteron be to Mac users? Although Cocoa apps could probably be recompiled for a different CPU with minimal headaches, Carbon apps do not port well. Apple would have to create an emulation layer for Carbon apps. It would be a nightmare, it would take for ever to develop, there would be countless software incompatibilities at first, and Mac developers would throw a hissy fit. Shess, we're still coming out of a -major- OS migration.
Heh, with 10.1, and especially with 10.2 Apple put a lot of work into making it very, very hard to even have an all-cocoa app. A lot of the things you see that look like cocoa from a dev standpoint are really just cocoa wrappers for carbon routines...
The impression I got from some developers was that Apple did a bunch of the inter-mixing to appease a bunch of the bigger dev shops (Adobe, MS, etc) who were concerned that at some point Apple would just yank out carbon from underneath them, or let it stale out while improving cocoa. Intermingling them so much pretty much put that to rest, but has cost cocoa large parts of what made it so cool (ie, not going to see any quad-binaries anytime soon).
The most probable answer is that comparing what it takes for Apple to make a sweeping change compared to MS is like comparing what it takes for Sony to make sweeping changes in the console market to MS in the PC market. The constraints that each of them has to deal with is just night and day. Ie, Apple doesn't have to deal with 1,000+ OEM's and VAR's when it adds some new stuff to OSX server... it might have to deal with 5.
The fun answer is that MS does nothing with it's billions as it just has trouble hiring competent people with great ideas (ie, all those Apple people they've hired over the years go slackwit when they get there) and need someone to show them where they should be going (ie, Apple) and at that point they can turn loose their billions.
I get worried in that while I see Apple releasing lots of new stuff every once in awhile... not a whole lot of it gets followed through on or captilized to its full potential, probably just due to a lack of man-power and resources.
I worry that while Apple can have fits and starts of cool stuff, eventually they just aren't going to be in a place to capitalize on it... MS has a research and dev team, and they spend a hell of a lot more than Apple... and at some point they might be able to develop tech for their OS that took them $2 billion, with all sorts of patents. They then spend another billion marketing, making all the consumers want it.
Scarily enough, I could see them doing that to Linux too when it reaches a point where it meets "today's" needs fairly well.
Translucent windows is eyecandy and good for demonstrations, but that's pretty much it. Other than that, they're usability nightmares and harm productivity.
I couldn't agree more- I use OSX as my main desktop, and the translucent crap is not only slow, but for menu's just started driving me batty (contextual, menu bar, etc).
I installed a 3rd party theme awhile back, and the lack of transparency made things feel RIGHT again (ie, OS9 or Windows/Linux) and improved my ability to actually know what was going on with lots of windows open.
Getting rid of the pin-striping was a godsend for OSX too... try it, using theme changer (only one of them that really works) and OSX just gets alot more enjoyable. Text in menus and the menu bar and app windows is sooooo much easier to read.
Of course then the blinding aqua white kind of got to me, thought my eyes were going to burn in... happiest now with the cappucino theme. It has some rough spots, but it is a ton more usable than aqua.
I'm surprised Dell does this. They don't have the infrastructure to have a relationship like this with the customer - and they won't be able to get stores to stock yet another set of ink cartridges(also, this wouldn't be consistent with Dell's way of operating). So how are customers (especially consumers) going to get their parts in a cheap[1] and timely manner?
That's actually part of their thinking- that people will buy more than they need, simply because they can't run out to Best Buy and pick one up when theirs runs out.
The thought is that when you can run to a local store, you just buy one cartridge, and when that runs out you go buy another. If you hate having to do that, you buy 2... which is good for the manufacturer, as now you've bought something from them that you aren't immediately going to use... more money in their pocket for the quarter.
Those who buy Dell printers will most likely buy 2-5, just so they don't have to deal with the hassle and shipping costs. It's usually pretty difficult for a business to get you to pay up front for services you don't immediately need, but they love it when you do.
Actually, this is far more likely to cause Apple to start working on The Gimp and adding the features that Photoshop has that The Gimp lacks.
It isn't that easy, or the Gimp project would have added a lot of the features. The strength of Photoshop at this point isn't for general graphics, such as for the web (RGB) but rather CMYK. Adobe has a ton of patents and expertise on the algorithms needed for RGB --> CMYK in general, making it very hard for any any other player to move into that space.
Look at the image app space, and look at how many RGB apps there are, but the relative dearth of anything that touches CMYK. Do the patents and long code buildup, the barrier to entry is just too high.
The biggest for me was the firewire bug and sound bugs- they were known problems and fixed in 10.2, but they were known since 10.1.1.
Basically, with the firewire bug it was prone to hang the machine if you were copying large amounts of data to a firewire drive. It had the unintended consequence of really messing up the drive, and while there were some workarounds with diskwarrior most people just ended up reformatting over and over and over.
The sound bugs plagued titanium powerbooks and dually machines to no end- basically, after the machine went to sleep once, sound would never wake up and you would have to reboot just to get sound out. Also fun things were kernel panics when you simply plugged in your headphones, etc.
I could go on and on about network instability with remote servers, etc.
And not to mention... Mozilla is only as bloated as you want it. Either use the installer and don't install anything but the browser, or use the source and do the same. Aren't we supposed to be nerds here? Doesn't that mean we should all be capable of installing a fucking browser properly?
Good point. If I had to guess at their view point (can only go by my own, extrapolate and hope it lines up) much of the criticism comes out of them wanting Mozilla to move beyond and be accepted from communities that aren't nerd-based. They recognize it's not there, but want it to be. Mozilla having taken so long to get to where it is just adds to it, as when they see how long it took to get where it was, and where they want it to be, they are probably going to be waiting a long time, which is frustrating?
What a curious statement... I bet they had a lot of fun creating it and learned a ton in the process. Since when does hacking something have to be useful?:)
It didn't exist before, and they made it exist, even if all it will ever do is show the penguin logo. Kudos to them.
At the same time, you could fit a lot of iPods in a server rack...
i'm kind of curious about the size of my pipe... ie, i've put up a 30 meg movie of zooming around in OSX's accessibility features for a friend, how many people would have to hit it to really hurt the server? It's at:
If you've got a decent connection and don't mind curling/downloading it, it'll give me a better idea of the load it can handle before i start putting up different.mov tutorials for people over the next month.
Nice thought, but it ain't gonna happen! Too many graphi designers have spent too many years of their lives learning how to use all of the features of Photoshop.... they're not goning to convert just because GIMP is suddenl available for OSX. If they wanted GIMP, they would have installed Linux on their Mac years ago and used it then.
One thing you have to keep in mind is that adobe has really lost a lot of share in web graphics to macromedia (fireworks, etc) and others. It is untouchable as far as print graphics go, and that is where GIMP, TIFFany, etc all fall down. Adobe has honed its algorithms (and has patents on) for RGB>CMYK conversion, to the point where the barrier for entry for another competitor would just be too much.
But the completely blew it when it comes to RGB/web work. Completely. At one point photoshop probably had 80% of the market for web work, now i'd estimate that it is at ~35%, and most of the ones who use it for web use it as they also do print work (such as myself). Part of it has to do with them dropping the ball with a good web-app, and handling their purchase of golive so badly... dreamweaver ate their lunch, and fireworks integrates nicely with dreamweaver and flash and costs 1/3 of photoshop... so why buy photoshop?
So there is a lot of upside potential for something like gimp in the mac market, just not in print work.
Actually, he's not wrong, you just don't understand what he's saying. Most modern video cards have two components, which is why a card can have good 2d quality but awful 3d performance, and vice versa.
Windows has used the 2d hardware accelleration capabilities of current video cards for years, as has the mac via quickdraw. But the 3d portion of your geforceTi just sits there doing nothing unless you're doing something 3D.
What OSX does differently is to use the 3D hardware for its display layer- the calculations it has to perform for quartz (compositing of windows, shadows, transparency, etc) are highly CPU intensive as modern cards don't have any capability to accellerate those in 2d. You can get those for your PC via stardock's software, but your CPU has to do all the work to calculate them.
With quartz extreme it pipes all the compositing stuff into openGL layers which can do it a lot faster- so all of a sudden having a 128meg screaming video card actually helps when you're actually working.
Get it? I don't think i can break it down any simpler.
I don't understand why they don't just make Virtual PC a part of their base software configuration and go out into the world as a perfect Mac/PC hybrid, so as to lessen the xenophobia from current PC users
Because supporting two platforms is expensive for a developer, even if you think about it before hand so that the dev process is marginal you still have tech support, etc.
If mac users could run all the windows apps via virtual pc, there would be no motivation for a company to make a native port, and within 1-3 years there would be no new mac software whatsoever and the platform would die... because if all your software runs on windows, why not just buy a wintel box and run it full-speed?
I agree with pretty much all of what you say... but you're leaving the largest part of the problem out- the client.
The client wants flash intro's, the client wants lots of javascript, the client for one reason or another wants to use this and that, or wants it to fit THEIR monitor, etc, etc... and yes, as a professional web designers it's part of my job to "save the client from themselves" but you can only do so much.
I've lost count of the amount of times that I had to just say, "ok, get the job done and forget about the site, it's not one for the portfolio."
Just keep in mind that while there are some awful web designers out there, many times their advice/opinions are ignored, and what you see as the final product is not something they are happy with in the least. I'm sure programmers have to go through the same things.
When they sell a few hundred thousand of these things and Steve Jobs pulls one of his patented 'oh and one more things' and announces a firmware update that upgrades the iPod to a full-feature PDA, will it be breakthrough and innovative enough for you?
Yes, that will be such a breakthrough PDA with a 2" screen. *can't wait*
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They had a Mac with a DSP built-in back in the day. The Quadra A/V! It blasted the shit out of most any other computer when it came to Photoshop - rivaling modern computers for some tasks.
They actually made two: the Quadra 660AV and the Quadra 840av (there was also a centris line without the fancy stuff). The 660 used a 25MHz 68040, and the 840 used a 40MHz 68040, and had a seperate DSP that you had to write specifically for.
Apple's thought was kinda ahead of the curve at the time, in that they were introducing speech recognition, were going to ditch the modem in favor of the geopod (just a jack, cost about half as much as a modem and you'd do the same stuff in software using the DSP). After it died (ver quickly) there were rumors that they'd be adding a phillips trimedia card later on, but that was dropped as they learned their lesson hopefully from the AV fiasco.
At no tasks could those computers hold their own with any "modern computer". The 840 held its own for awhile, but that was due to the fact that it had the fastest released 040 chip, there wasn't much PPC software for awhile and the fastest powermac (80MHz) released later on emulated 68K code at about the same speed as the 840 ran natively.
But honestly- and I did own one and loved it- they were a bad buy. Since you had to code specifically for the DSP, only a few photoshop filters and one or two 3D programs wrote any code for it... maybe a few things here and there, but nothing really of note. The telephony aspect of it sucked bad and never really worked well, so the DSP just sat there hanging out 99.9999999999% of the time as Apple themselves said they wouldn't be included in future machines a bit later as they weren't needed due to the speed of the PPC when using native code.
Sorry, just at no time did they rival modern computers- they were cool for what they were, and allowed voice recognition and playback at a time when it was unthinkable... but that's about it.
drunkenbatman
On the contrary, many web developers and web application programmers that are not familiar with installation of DB systems (on UNIX-ish systems or otherwise) are probably "smart enough" to use them. What makes them so incompetent in the first place? Cause they're Mac users? Thinly veiled elitism is so easy to identify.
I've often wondered how many Linuxen really want *nixes on the desktop for everyone, just due to the fact that it kinda destroys "street cred" in the same way that the cult following of bands suddenly dry up when the band hit the radio and everyone else seems to like them. I surely know mac users who would find something else to use if everyone used mac's...
There's street cred (or geek cred) in spending the hours going through documentation to get your *nix to install on your box- to get the newest drivers hacked on and working while the luddite IT intern is trying so hard to get their display driver to go higher than 8-bit.
There just ain't street cred when a 5 year old is able to start up a web server... mysql is already almost at the point and click stage to instal on OSX, what if Apple ships mysql with the system (or postgresql as mysql seems to get bashed for the oddest things now that it's very popular) and includes some sort of easy to write to API for developers and a filemaker-like interface upon it for everyone else? Should they be using it then...?
What happens if in 12 years Linux is really viable on the desktop, perhaps even becoming easier to install and use than Windows? Where what will the geek cred concious user use? Everything is just getting too damn easy. People should have to work to use the computer- it's a sign of respect, right?
drunkenbatman
I'm intrigued. What do you do that makes a 1.25GHz G4 feel slow? I'm still using a 1.33GHz Athlon and it feels quite fast. I keeps thinking about upgrading the CPU, but really can't see the point. I rarely use more than 20% of it as it is...
One thing to remember about Apple's machines is that while the G4 processor, if the code is really tuned can hold it's own with processors at a much higher clock speed on OSX not very much is very tuned and the overhead associated with running OSX demands a lot more horsepower for the same tasks compared to X86.
Some examples might be compiling- while the compiler in 10.2 made big strides, it's still no speed demon. Apple did move from 2.95 to 3.1 for 10.2, and while that does have better PPC support it's still *cough* really basic, especially compared to how tuned it is for X86. A ton of apps intensive apps either don't support altivec, or don't support dual-processors, or both. Got lots of windows going on a high-res display? QE helps with the compositing, but everything first has to be generated in software in order to be handed off to be composited... on my tibook it's not uncommon to see the windowmanager taking up 30-35%+ of the CPU to do its thing. Have a few apps open and depending on what they've been coded with (cocoa, carbon, etc) and how tuned they are you can easily see CPU cycles just draining away.
iTunes on a 667 G4 machine I have here hovers between 13-35% CPU, on my 733MHz P3 playing an MP3 in winamp is more like 3%... On my 500MHz iBook it hovers between 17-40%... no it doesn't skip, even while I'm doing semi-intensive stuff but the whole machine sure does slow down... even on my G4: with iTunes playing MP3's, something download in the background, and the sorry state of things like dreamweaverX, golive and photoshop I often feel like I'm using a 250MHz machine. It's getting better- Ie, with 10.2 and some updates to some apps I don't type faster than a stupid processor very much anymore but it still happens.
Then there's iCal, iPhoto... these things, while pretty, take more CPU power than you'd think if you're coming in from the x86 world.
The other thing to keep in mind is the gigantic speed-gaps that occur in Apple's product lines due to the processors not scaling up gracefully. IE, Unreal2003 tech demo was just released for OSX. It barely runs on any Apple machine well, you need a top-of-the-line G4 tower with a Geforce Ti (or close) to run it. I swear, why would they want to port any graphics-intensive games when only the multi-thousand dollar machines Apple sells will run them and even at that only the newest breed?
If you have oh, let's say a G4 867 or 1GHz that shipped with a crappier card Apple charges you $400+ to get the OEM Apple card of choice... Apple only sold 500MHz machines for a long time and there are tons and tons of those out there that people bought for $4k+. For iBooks and Powerbooks, Apple basically announced 10.2 and said "oh yeah, and here are new powerbooks and iBooks that will make QE work... sorry about what we just sold you a few weeks/month ago for a few thousand..."
Since they're so expensive and have a decent resale value, it can be easier to just sell it and use the money to get a decent PC plus a bunch of extras. Hell, get one plus a spare. In many cases it's just more cost-effective to get a PC. Not for a lot of what I do per se, but for the things I used to do... I've watched a ton of content professionals leave the mac due to the speed (either of the processor, or the apps they want not being optimized) even as I've watched a bunch of geeks migrate to it...
drunkenbatman
Eh? Aren't there much larger margins on software than HW? After it's been developed, it's like 95% margin.
Apple has a margin of on average 28%-30+% gross margins on hardware... obviously resellers and VARs don't have anywhere near that, but it's what Apple gets. We won't talk about their RAM where it is more like 400%...
Assuming 30% on average, for every $3k tower you buy, Apple makes $900. Buy that tower with a $700-$2.5 Apple display, Apple pockets $1.1k-$1650 on the deal... not even withstanding the $300 extended warranty which covers less and less. Even selling a mid-range iBook will get them ~550 when you add in AppleCare. Plus Apple can count on probably 2 OS upgrades per system it sells over the years on average, or for another $260... not to mention any other Apple peripherals you might pick up.
So basically (obviously not hard numbers, but you get the idea) depending on the system sold, Apple is looking at $700-$2,600 in gross profit. If they sold MacOS X on X86 hardware for $199 they'd need to sell 25 million copies a year to to equal the gross revenue they pull in from selling ~1 million macs or so per year (bit over 5 billion).
Well, sure you say... they're making a lot of revenue but not a lot of profit. So if they only sold 1 million copies of x86 OSX at $199 for $199 million all they're doing is pressing the discs and distributing, so it's all gravy train... except Apple's development, support and other costs have gone up exponentially due to the nature of the x86 world. Thousands of models to support instead of a score, hundreds of thousands of configurations instead of thousands. And it's still gonna have to develop the tasty iApps, all pulled from that $199 a copy.
When you realize Apple can pretty much count on two OSX upgrades at $130 apiece over the life of every mac sold, or $260, the economics of Apple moving to a purely software model aren't very appetizing unless their new-fangled music thing really takes off and brings in a few billion per quarter.
Oh sure it could happen, but not without wiping out the stock and pairing Apple down to a shell of what it once was. The shareholders would end up making more money just selling everything, putting it in a bank and pulling 4% interest.
drunkenbatman
"with both batteries" doesn't cont. I think it's closer to 5.5 for the powerbook and most pcs (at least as full-featured as the powerbook) aren't gonna last any 4 hrs.
That's what Apple advertises, but honestly, just read the reviews. I own a dual USB iBook, and a tiBook. Both were rated at ~5hrs (still are), and in actually the tiBook gets about 3 hours (dimmed screen, HD spinning down a lot) and the iBook gets ~3.5 hours (same config... low power mode).
Admittedly the PC laptops get nowhere near the rated spec, and on one batter my Dell laptop gets about 2 hours of charge in normal use.
But my buddy's new centrino laptop actually surprised me- it gets mad battery life for an x86 laptop... I didn't believe him when he said he got 3.5+ hours of charge with it till I saw it for myself. When you add in the fact that the centrino's CPU core is mad fast, it really puts the hurt on two of Apples core competitive advantages. Namely, better power consumption that x86 and better CPU competitiveness than mac desktops vs. pc desktops.
*sigh* And then we have the 17" monster (which I like) that really, really doesn't have a good battery life. I mean what the hell- with current battery technology, a 17" LC to power and a damn 1" profile there's just no way to have really usable battery life without carrying 3 batteries with you.
Why they don't go all-fucking-out with that model and give it a numeric keypad, 3" thick with dual-battery bays and dual G4's is beyond me. It's just hard for me to drop $4.5k+ (anyone who has bought an apple laptop knows you HAVE to have applecare) on a 17" screen with only 1440x900 resolution and a 1GHz G4. Now put two in there and we're talking. Bump the resolution up and we're really talking. Make it thick enough so that there's adequate cooling so the damn 0.5" whiney fans aren't scaring the shite out of me and the case isn't warming my boxers and I'm reaching for my wallet. Give it dual battery bays so I can pop two in while I'm out and about and can just keep it in a sleeve instead of carrying the bag and batteries around and my pants are getting damp from something other than the heat generated by my 15" powerbook. Give the $4k laptop a video card that isn't a generation behind and it's gone beyond lust and is perching on the cusp of love.
Give me damn usable and functional with aestetics as extras where appropriate. Damnit.
Quite to the contrary, there is ample evidence that Apple shareholders are positively thrilled.
No, there isn't.
I've made a tidy sum in the past month with my modest number of shares, and there are lots of folks out there who hold way more shares than I have.
You made most of that is less than a month- just a few weeks when Apple's price went from $13.8x to $18 due to the music service buzz. Let's compare that to the last few years...
If you just made a tidy sum, you just bought recently... And you are not the Apple shareholders mentioned or are who unhappy. Individual investors (well, 99.999% of them) move penny stocks. They don't move a stock with a market cap of 5.5+ billion. Any existing Apple shareholders mentioned in the article didn't sell 3.5 years ago at $60-$75/share, or buy at $13 and sell recently at $18. We're talking blocks of tens of thousands of shares... funds, institutions. Not you and I on tdwaterhouse or scottrade.
From 1990 to 2000 Apple stock hovered between the teens and the 20's. In late 1999 and 2000 there was a really fun spike and subsequent split. The stock split at around $50 in mid-2000, a 2-1 split... making each share worth ~$25. The stock jumped back to the very low 60's, then plummeted to the low-to-mid-teens in the span of a month or so. Not a big shock, lots of other stocks had the same thing happen... but many have shown actual recovery of their price and sequential growth. Not all have, but then again gateway shareholders aren't exactly happy either.
Since then it's been able to hit the mid-20's for a few months at a time, but always falls down to the low teens again... or hovers at the $15 mark. It stands to reason then that most who have bought have picked it up in the mid-20's or mid-teens (i'd have to go over transactions looking for large blocks, but that's what I'd guess) and over the last 2.5 years that doesn't translate into much growth. If they bought before the split or right after, they're still waiting for any growth.
So, over the last 2.5 years the stock has hovered in the low $20's twice, and in the low teens for the rest of it... usually with it's market cap at ~5.5 billion. Considering Apple generates 5.5x billion in revenue, and has 4.x billion in cash... basically all the analysts who have followed Apple's financials and make the big-stock-fun purchasing decisions have decided that Apples hardware and software business was worthless as it was usually operating at a loss with interest from its horde of cash making up the bulk (or all) of the profit.
So, don't count your chickens before they hatch- The stock price jump so far has been on the hope that the music store could turn into an actual revenue stream for a company which is seeing all of its others shrinking (except in very select areas, such as the iPod but the money made from them is a drop in the bucket). It could keep going up if there is continued exponential growth of the service, or it could drop right back, or hit the mid-20's again and die again as it seems prone to do.
For you and I (yep I made a bundle by buying at $13.x too... but still waiting on my $24 shares to pay off) that might be fine... for some huge mutual fund where Apple has been the under-performer of their fund quarter after quarter, they aren't happy with Apple's performance.
I mean look. If Apple's Mkt Cap is 5.5 billion, and they have 5 billion in cash, if you bought them chances are you could make a billion selling all their plants, contracts, intellectual property, etc and come out of the deal with half a billion in profit. When a company is in that situation they have to do something and lots of people (yes, large shareholders) feel that whatever Apple's been doing has either been ineffective or they just haven't been doing enough.
drunkenbatman
I don't see this as very likely. OSX is so good because it runs on very specific hardware. Since the hardware is so limited they can optimize a whole lot. The same reason video game consoles have better graphics than the pc even though the hardware is half as fast.
Ooooo that is true in theory, but not in practice as the userbase isn't as limited as it sounds. The fact that they know every model that has shipped does give them an edge in quality assurance, but that really only assumes that they devote the manpower and resources ($$$) to really capitalize on it. Ie, look at the 10.2.5 bug that caused kernel panics and printing problems en-masse among the user base (all around USB)... to the point where they had to release an 4meg update within a few weeks. Apple could put the resources into checking to make sure that didn't happen.
Some would say that that isn't responsibility, it's the developers or creators of the products to test and give feedback to Apple... but we're talking about a boutique computer line and whereas it would just be astronomical for MS to test all the different video cards, hubs and printer drivers against it's OS and different computer models out there for Apple the cost is drastically reduced and the users would love them for it.
But anyways- as far as optimization... you're right, in that consoles can squeeze a huge amount of power out of a standard and non-changing platform. Carmack has said they can get a 50% performance improvement out of just coding for something like the Xbox as they can tune everything to the CPU, bus and vidcard.
But that just doesn't exist with Apple machines, there is already a wide disparity between different models capabilities (and it will get scary if something like the 970 is introduced). Practically OSX (from the kernel to the higher API routines) are inherently unoptimized. At it's basic level, without getting into subsystems and video cards just look at the two main CPU's: G3 versus G4. They both have different instruction capabilities, so while you could get a boon just by coding for the G4 Apple can't do that as a huge section (actually, most of it) isn't using a G4.
Then you have the biggest part of the G4, it's SIMD engine (altivec) which while it can really push up performance just isn't used very much except in specific instances. Ie, adobe photoshop? Only a few filters really support altivec. The OS barely has altivec in it, sure some windowing routines do (like the drop shadows, much snappier on a G4), but they can't just go all-out and optimize for altivec because if you do, you either have to have two code bases (one for G3, one for G4) or you have to have your altivec code be "emulated" by the G3 (this happens automatically) which gives dog-like performance.
Then you have things like caches: tons of mac models (including higher end models at different points) either don't have L3 caches or have differing sizes. If every Mac since OSX's release had a 1meg L3 cache they could really really target that and optimize routines for it across the board like what happens in the X86 world. They can't.
Then you hit the basic OS level... OSX is basically a re-porting of Openstep to PPC, but the kernel and loads of other stuff was never meant for or optimized for RISC but rather CISC (think about it... it went from moto's 68K to X86) and Apple has been more concerned with getting it up and running and working, moreso than optimization. You can find reference to this at unsanity.com's developer blogs.
Then you have the fact that Cocoa, while being around for a long time, never really had a huge developer base. Ie, it's like lasso... ever heard of it? Probably not, but it's been around for years... but only a few people use it (smaller all the time). If IBM decided it was only going to build stuff using lasso, none of their people would know how the hell to use it to the best of its ability and would have to be trained. After a few years they'd be putting out some decent s
How about we more thoroughly study and understand how human intelligence operates before we even presume to design something that imitates or rivals it in depth and complexity.
Obviously people are doing that. Part of the problem is that the human mind (and a fly's mind for that matter) is so complex that getting a handle on it has proved to be a very, very daunting task.
Researching AI may actually allow us insights into how we really think, instead of the other way around.
Mostly people bash the USPS because it's something they've heard others do, not because they've had bad experiences. Have you had trouble with your mail?
Actually, yeah I have... a ton. Never had a problem with stuff getting out, but I had huge problems getting stuff in- almost all of it was foreign correspondance though. It was literally a crap-shoot... it got to the point where it was a joke, they'd pay for this super-duper type of mail that had to be signed, and it would just never get here... call the post office and they'd say you were able to get a refund for the costs. Lost some really important stuff that way- just wouldnt use them again for anything mildly important.
And finally, what good would an Opteron be to Mac users? Although Cocoa apps could probably be recompiled for a different CPU with minimal headaches, Carbon apps do not port well. Apple would have to create an emulation layer for Carbon apps. It would be a nightmare, it would take for ever to develop, there would be countless software incompatibilities at first, and Mac developers would throw a hissy fit. Shess, we're still coming out of a -major- OS migration.
Heh, with 10.1, and especially with 10.2 Apple put a lot of work into making it very, very hard to even have an all-cocoa app. A lot of the things you see that look like cocoa from a dev standpoint are really just cocoa wrappers for carbon routines...
The impression I got from some developers was that Apple did a bunch of the inter-mixing to appease a bunch of the bigger dev shops (Adobe, MS, etc) who were concerned that at some point Apple would just yank out carbon from underneath them, or let it stale out while improving cocoa. Intermingling them so much pretty much put that to rest, but has cost cocoa large parts of what made it so cool (ie, not going to see any quad-binaries anytime soon).
Why is MS so much slower than Apple?
The most probable answer is that comparing what it takes for Apple to make a sweeping change compared to MS is like comparing what it takes for Sony to make sweeping changes in the console market to MS in the PC market. The constraints that each of them has to deal with is just night and day. Ie, Apple doesn't have to deal with 1,000+ OEM's and VAR's when it adds some new stuff to OSX server... it might have to deal with 5.
The fun answer is that MS does nothing with it's billions as it just has trouble hiring competent people with great ideas (ie, all those Apple people they've hired over the years go slackwit when they get there) and need someone to show them where they should be going (ie, Apple) and at that point they can turn loose their billions.
I get worried in that while I see Apple releasing lots of new stuff every once in awhile... not a whole lot of it gets followed through on or captilized to its full potential, probably just due to a lack of man-power and resources.
I worry that while Apple can have fits and starts of cool stuff, eventually they just aren't going to be in a place to capitalize on it... MS has a research and dev team, and they spend a hell of a lot more than Apple... and at some point they might be able to develop tech for their OS that took them $2 billion, with all sorts of patents. They then spend another billion marketing, making all the consumers want it.
Scarily enough, I could see them doing that to Linux too when it reaches a point where it meets "today's" needs fairly well.
Translucent windows is eyecandy and good for demonstrations, but that's pretty much it. Other than that, they're usability nightmares and harm productivity.
I couldn't agree more- I use OSX as my main desktop, and the translucent crap is not only slow, but for menu's just started driving me batty (contextual, menu bar, etc).
I installed a 3rd party theme awhile back, and the lack of transparency made things feel RIGHT again (ie, OS9 or Windows/Linux) and improved my ability to actually know what was going on with lots of windows open.
Getting rid of the pin-striping was a godsend for OSX too... try it, using theme changer (only one of them that really works) and OSX just gets alot more enjoyable. Text in menus and the menu bar and app windows is sooooo much easier to read.
Of course then the blinding aqua white kind of got to me, thought my eyes were going to burn in... happiest now with the cappucino theme. It has some rough spots, but it is a ton more usable than aqua.
Well, I had an AOL account in 1993...
Do you one better (or more embarrassing). I had an eWorld account. Then delphi. But yeah, eWorld. Think AOL, but castrated.
I'm surprised Dell does this. They don't have the infrastructure to have a relationship like this with the customer - and they won't be able to get stores to stock yet another set of ink cartridges(also, this wouldn't be consistent with Dell's way of operating). So how are customers (especially consumers) going to get their parts in a cheap[1] and timely manner?
That's actually part of their thinking- that people will buy more than they need, simply because they can't run out to Best Buy and pick one up when theirs runs out.
The thought is that when you can run to a local store, you just buy one cartridge, and when that runs out you go buy another. If you hate having to do that, you buy 2... which is good for the manufacturer, as now you've bought something from them that you aren't immediately going to use... more money in their pocket for the quarter.
Those who buy Dell printers will most likely buy 2-5, just so they don't have to deal with the hassle and shipping costs. It's usually pretty difficult for a business to get you to pay up front for services you don't immediately need, but they love it when you do.
Actually, this is far more likely to cause Apple to start working on The Gimp and adding the features that Photoshop has that The Gimp lacks.
It isn't that easy, or the Gimp project would have added a lot of the features. The strength of Photoshop at this point isn't for general graphics, such as for the web (RGB) but rather CMYK. Adobe has a ton of patents and expertise on the algorithms needed for RGB --> CMYK in general, making it very hard for any any other player to move into that space. Look at the image app space, and look at how many RGB apps there are, but the relative dearth of anything that touches CMYK. Do the patents and long code buildup, the barrier to entry is just too high.
The biggest for me was the firewire bug and sound bugs- they were known problems and fixed in 10.2, but they were known since 10.1.1.
Basically, with the firewire bug it was prone to hang the machine if you were copying large amounts of data to a firewire drive. It had the unintended consequence of really messing up the drive, and while there were some workarounds with diskwarrior most people just ended up reformatting over and over and over.
The sound bugs plagued titanium powerbooks and dually machines to no end- basically, after the machine went to sleep once, sound would never wake up and you would have to reboot just to get sound out. Also fun things were kernel panics when you simply plugged in your headphones, etc.
I could go on and on about network instability with remote servers, etc.
And not to mention... Mozilla is only as bloated as you want it. Either use the installer and don't install anything but the browser, or use the source and do the same. Aren't we supposed to be nerds here? Doesn't that mean we should all be capable of installing a fucking browser properly?
Good point. If I had to guess at their view point (can only go by my own, extrapolate and hope it lines up) much of the criticism comes out of them wanting Mozilla to move beyond and be accepted from communities that aren't nerd-based. They recognize it's not there, but want it to be. Mozilla having taken so long to get to where it is just adds to it, as when they see how long it took to get where it was, and where they want it to be, they are probably going to be waiting a long time, which is frustrating?
Hell, as a mac user I can identify.
And this is useful, how?
:)
What a curious statement... I bet they had a lot of fun creating it and learned a ton in the process. Since when does hacking something have to be useful?
It didn't exist before, and they made it exist, even if all it will ever do is show the penguin logo. Kudos to them.
At the same time, you could fit a lot of iPods in a server rack...
i'm kind of curious about the size of my pipe... ie, i've put up a 30 meg movie of zooming around in OSX's accessibility features for a friend, how many people would have to hit it to really hurt the server? It's at:
.mov tutorials for people over the next month.
OSX_zoom
If you've got a decent connection and don't mind curling/downloading it, it'll give me a better idea of the load it can handle before i start putting up different
Nice thought, but it ain't gonna happen! Too many graphi designers have spent too many years of their lives learning how to use all of the features of Photoshop .... they're not goning to convert just because GIMP is suddenl available for OSX. If they wanted GIMP, they would have installed Linux on their Mac years ago and used it then.
One thing you have to keep in mind is that adobe has really lost a lot of share in web graphics to macromedia (fireworks, etc) and others. It is untouchable as far as print graphics go, and that is where GIMP, TIFFany, etc all fall down. Adobe has honed its algorithms (and has patents on) for RGB>CMYK conversion, to the point where the barrier for entry for another competitor would just be too much.
But the completely blew it when it comes to RGB/web work. Completely. At one point photoshop probably had 80% of the market for web work, now i'd estimate that it is at ~35%, and most of the ones who use it for web use it as they also do print work (such as myself). Part of it has to do with them dropping the ball with a good web-app, and handling their purchase of golive so badly... dreamweaver ate their lunch, and fireworks integrates nicely with dreamweaver and flash and costs 1/3 of photoshop... so why buy photoshop?
So there is a lot of upside potential for something like gimp in the mac market, just not in print work.
Actually, he's not wrong, you just don't understand what he's saying. Most modern video cards have two components, which is why a card can have good 2d quality but awful 3d performance, and vice versa.
Windows has used the 2d hardware accelleration capabilities of current video cards for years, as has the mac via quickdraw. But the 3d portion of your geforceTi just sits there doing nothing unless you're doing something 3D.
What OSX does differently is to use the 3D hardware for its display layer- the calculations it has to perform for quartz (compositing of windows, shadows, transparency, etc) are highly CPU intensive as modern cards don't have any capability to accellerate those in 2d. You can get those for your PC via stardock's software, but your CPU has to do all the work to calculate them.
With quartz extreme it pipes all the compositing stuff into openGL layers which can do it a lot faster- so all of a sudden having a 128meg screaming video card actually helps when you're actually working.
Get it? I don't think i can break it down any simpler.
I don't understand why they don't just make Virtual PC a part of their base software configuration and go out into the world as a perfect Mac/PC hybrid, so as to lessen the xenophobia from current PC users
Because supporting two platforms is expensive for a developer, even if you think about it before hand so that the dev process is marginal you still have tech support, etc.
If mac users could run all the windows apps via virtual pc, there would be no motivation for a company to make a native port, and within 1-3 years there would be no new mac software whatsoever and the platform would die... because if all your software runs on windows, why not just buy a wintel box and run it full-speed?
the main problem is that the community in general does nothing but take and in reality only a few individuals actually do the giving.
I wonder how long it will take the open source community to learn the lessons of why communism in general doesn't work?
I agree with pretty much all of what you say... but you're leaving the largest part of the problem out- the client.
The client wants flash intro's, the client wants lots of javascript, the client for one reason or another wants to use this and that, or wants it to fit THEIR monitor, etc, etc... and yes, as a professional web designers it's part of my job to "save the client from themselves" but you can only do so much.
I've lost count of the amount of times that I had to just say, "ok, get the job done and forget about the site, it's not one for the portfolio."
Just keep in mind that while there are some awful web designers out there, many times their advice/opinions are ignored, and what you see as the final product is not something they are happy with in the least. I'm sure programmers have to go through the same things.
When they sell a few hundred thousand of these things and Steve Jobs pulls one of his patented 'oh and one more things' and announces a firmware update that upgrades the iPod to a full-feature PDA, will it be breakthrough and innovative enough for you?
Yes, that will be such a breakthrough PDA with a 2" screen. *can't wait*