If Apple is worried about losing money from clone competition, the solution is easy: raise liscencing fees. Apple could have easily done this and recouped any losses from cannibalized sales.
They tried that at the time and the clone makers complained the fee was too high. I bought a PowerComputing clone at the time because it was cheaper than an Apple.
Funny thing is that even though they all used Apple designed mother boards, the clones were not as reliable as the Apple Macs. PowerComputing was able to squeeze out a little more speed, because they could get the faster chips, since they didn't have to build as many machines as Apple, but the quality wasn't there either. I had my hard drive die, lost the floppy drive, and had to replace the CD-ROM drive, as well as one of the fans. I have much older Macs that still have all the original parts.
Apple could do it though if the included an "Apple Only" bios
First, Macs don't have BIOS, you are thinking of the Mac ROMs. Second, that's only true for "Old World" architecture machines. This was how it was for the Mac Clones. The "New World" machines, like all the G4s and iMacs, use a "ROM in RAM" scheme, where the ROM is a file on the hard drive that gets read as the machine boots.
Macs don't have "BIOS" but use OpenFirmware during the bootstrap. OpenFirmware is hardly proprietary. There is a version of OpenStep/NeXTSTEP for x86, and Apple did have Rhapsody running on x86, so it would be fairly easy to do. But don't hold your breath waiting!
And don't forget, IBM never licensed their BIOS...Compaq reverse engineered it.
Don't get me wrong, I mean OSX IS pretty sweet and it DOES run on top of Unix. But I don't think they should've released it without some kind of hardware accelerated graphics if it's going to be so slow and unusable.
It doesn't run on top of UNIX, it is UNIX.
As far as accelerated graphics...unless you are on a mac with no drivers for your graphics card (like some older G3s), it does have hardware accelerated graphics.
I have a low end G4 (466 MHz with ATI Rage 128 Pro) and it runs just fine. It's not slow at all. I do have 896 MB of RAM however...
What exactly is a chord keyset? To me it looked as if the gentleman was using it to issue commands. I wish that something similar had been introduced into the PC. I know that I find it hard to remember keyboard shortcuts. Having a separate tool for this that had 5 or 6 keys would make a great addition the the PC platform and would make it easier for me to remember which buttons to push. Or maybe I'm just crazy.
On the old Xerox systems you kept your one hand on the mouse and the other hand on the chord keyset. It was a keyboard with fewer keys, and you would press the keys in combinations... or chords, just like playing a chord on a piano.
Yes, somebody should tell Bill G. to stop using Macintosh at his office...
This is true, according to his ex girlfriend that wrote a book about him. I even have a photo somewhere showing him at his desk with an old Mac Plus on it.
But, seriously, I don't get the Mac 1-button mouse, unless for impaired people use.
At the time Apple did some studies and found people preferred the one button mouse. Plus the other buttons didn't do what they do now... not on the Xerox Star or Alto anyway. You didn't have a "right-click" to pop up a menu. And Macs didn't have that until a few years ago anyway. On the Xerox systems you needed to right-click so you could type in the X/Y coordinates to move your window!
And I'm sure you have heard this before... but Macs can use any multi-button mouse. My old ADB Mac that I run Linux on has a three button MouseSystems mouse, and my G4/OS X has an MS Intellimouse Optical, and I can program all the extra buttons using USB Overdrive.
Or the Mac users. Remember MacWrite? It changed the world.
Yes, and the Apple Lisa before that. And don't forget MacDraw, which introduced the now familiar Toolbar as seen in Photoshop et al. BTW MacWrite was written by Quark.
(Mac user since 1991, owns a 512k, 2- Pluses, MacPortable w/backlight, 2- Mac II fx's, 2 Mac II ci's, Centris 610, PowerCenter 132, PowerMac G4/466 running OS X)
Futurama, I would miss, except that Fox never really showed it after the first few episodes. It was always baseball, or some movie they would start early, or whatever.
That's the problem... wasn't the ratings, they just kept putting it on at bad times, or not showing it at all. I read an interview with Matt Groening, and he said Fox never liked Futurama... they thought it was "too dark." And for anyone who thinks that no one likes the show, do a search and see how many Futurama web sites there are!
It didn't sell because it couldn't get into OEM preloads.
This was also the reason Apple dropped the idea of the Mac OS (they didn't call it that back then, it was Macintosh System 7, not MacOS 7) on Intel.
The story goes that Apple went to Gateway and showed System 7 running on Intel hardware. The head of Gateway said "this is great, and we'd love to bundle it, but you would have to give it to us for free, because we pay for a copy of Windows, for every PC we sell, even if we dont install it on the PC."
Sure you can buy iMac for 800 bucks if you don't mind 128 megs of ram, only a 500mhz cpu, and crappy ati rage 128 video, but if you want a *decent* iMac with a half ass video card (nvidia gf2 mx:P), 800mhz cpu, still only 256 megs of ram, it'll be $1800 since that's the only way to get the top cpu, that does include a flatpanel, but still that's quite a difference pricewise.
Or for $1599 you get the 800MHz G4 tower, with 256K L2 cache, 256MB SDRAM memory, 40GB Ultra ATA drive, CD-RW drive, ATI Radeon 7500, 56K internal modem.
And of course OS X and 9, iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie 2, Mac OS X Mail, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Acrobat Reader 5.0, Art Director's Toolkit, FAXstf 10.0 Preview, FileMaker Pro 5.5 Trial, Graphic Converter, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, PCalc, PixelNhance, Snapz Pro X
I figured most of the sluggishness was due to Aqua. It's a slick interface (way to brightly colored for my liking), but a little heavy as well. BeOS was meant for multimedia and it didn't need anything like Quartz or Aqua to look good.
No it's because the Finder is not optimized at all. Applications run fast in OS X, but the desktop file functions seem slow.
You don't think that yellow window title bar in BeOS was brightly colored? I liked Be OS a lot, used to run it on my PowerComputing clone.
When you can get an iMac for $799, an iBook for $1199, and then have to pay $550 for MS Office X who wants to buy it? When you can get at least the basic MS Office bundled with almost all x86 brand name hardware for almost nothing!
Well that's part of why MS is in trouble with the Feds...but the new iMac does come with a bunch of software... iTunes 2, iMovie 2, iPhoto, iDVD 2 (on SuperDrive-equipped systems only), QuickTime, AppleWorks 6, Mail, Microsoft Internet Explorer, AOL, Quicken 2002 Deluxe, World Book Mac OS X Edition, Otto Matic, Mac OS X Chess, PCalc, Acrobat Reader and FAXstf 10.0 Preview.
My poor old father got suckered into buying a Presario two years ago on which he can't run anything other than Win98. It's utterly unstable with anyting NT-based, and don't even try linux/*BSD on it. This SUCKS!!
We have an old Compaq at work from 1997 that runs NT 4 with no trouble at all... why can't the 2 year old Presario?
One nice thing about Macs... my old Mac clone from 1997 (updated to a 500 MHz G3) runs Mac OS 9.1 with no problems at all.. and LinuxPPC
This is the closed mind line of thought that has been the ruin of many a company.
Just look at where apple and Micro$oft were 10 years ago (about the same size)
Actually Apple was much bigger than MS for a long time. But MS is not a computer maker. Don't companies like Dell and Compaq make profits from hardware? And all the companies that make the parts you buy to build your own PC?
Why is that closed minded? Sure, Apple could have started selling the OS for PCs (Gates wanted to help...) But they didn't.
Does anybody know how much OS X can be optimized? Are there still significant speed improvements to be made?
From what I hear it's not very optimized at all. It doesn't run bad on my G4 466 with 896 MB, but OS 9.2.2 runs noticeably faster.
But the classic OS's were the same way... each new version was faster than the last, with 8.6 really seeing speed improvements over 8, etc.
So from my experience using Macs (since 1993...System 7.1) I would say there is a lot of room for speed improvements down the road. Apple is working on compatibility and stability now. Plus a lot of the low level stuff is not finished... like the Core Audio and MIDI.
Companies line NeXT and Be, had in the past both abandoned their hardware businesses in favor of software as a last corporate gasp - a struggle to remain viable, so if Apple were to take this path, it would be viewed in the context of the past, as if the company were struggling, which for the moment they really are not.
Exactly. Apple makes its money selling hardware. NeXT made money selling Web Objects for 10k (Now Apple sells that much cheaper). And let's not forget that NeXT was Steve Job's company, so he's not going to go down this road again! So now he has NeXTSTEP running on Apple hardware again (OS X). He even had the NeXT Cube reincarnated for a while as the G4 Cube!
well hey if you're happy with a tiny 15" screen, tiny keyboard and mouse that's your choice. Many of us like to think big.
The keyboard is a standard size... you are thinking of the old iMac keyboards... they have been shipping with the newer Apple Pro keyboard and ProMouse (not the stupid round one) for a while now. Its a very nice keyboard too... I'm typing on one now.
As far as the 15" monitor... well I'm using a 19" on my G4 Tower, so I agree, but the resolution and the fact that LCDs have more viewing space than CRTs makes it closer to a 17". Hopefully Apple comes out with a 17" model.
But still as far as price, the towers start at $1500, which isn't so bad for the quality you get. Nice things are expensive.
As a side note, I went through TWO MS optical mice before the cords died. Each died after only 3 or so months. The mouse itself was nice - lotsa buttons - but the cables dying that fast it totally unacceptable.
You know I thought it had something to do with the cord! It has that RF choke on the end and always feels like the wire inside is pinched. I'm thinking of trying to replace the wire on mine, because it stops working every so often. I read once if you call MS and complian they will send you a new one.
I use an MS Intellimouse Optical in Mac OS X (using USB Overdrive to map out the extra buttons).
I like the mouse as far as the scroll wheel and extra buttons, but I don't care for the shape, it is too arched, and a lot of these mice have a bad problem when they freeze up after a while, forcing me to unplug it for a while. Sometimes this doesn't even work and I have to switch back to the Apple Pro mouse.
I like the feel of the Apple mouse better... tracks good too, but I miss the scroll wheel and right button, and the MS mouse does creak if you squeeze it! Feels cheap.
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They tried that at the time and the clone makers complained the fee was too high. I bought a PowerComputing clone at the time because it was cheaper than an Apple.
Funny thing is that even though they all used Apple designed mother boards, the clones were not as reliable as the Apple Macs. PowerComputing was able to squeeze out a little more speed, because they could get the faster chips, since they didn't have to build as many machines as Apple, but the quality wasn't there either. I had my hard drive die, lost the floppy drive, and had to replace the CD-ROM drive, as well as one of the fans. I have much older Macs that still have all the original parts.
My PowerCenter came with Be OS too!
First, Macs don't have BIOS, you are thinking of the Mac ROMs. Second, that's only true for "Old World" architecture machines. This was how it was for the Mac Clones. The "New World" machines, like all the G4s and iMacs, use a "ROM in RAM" scheme, where the ROM is a file on the hard drive that gets read as the machine boots.
Macs don't have "BIOS" but use OpenFirmware during the bootstrap. OpenFirmware is hardly proprietary. There is a version of OpenStep/NeXTSTEP for x86, and Apple did have Rhapsody running on x86, so it would be fairly easy to do. But don't hold your breath waiting!
And don't forget, IBM never licensed their BIOS...Compaq reverse engineered it.
It doesn't run on top of UNIX, it is UNIX.
As far as accelerated graphics...unless you are on a mac with no drivers for your graphics card (like some older G3s), it does have hardware accelerated graphics.
I have a low end G4 (466 MHz with ATI Rage 128 Pro) and it runs just fine. It's not slow at all. I do have 896 MB of RAM however...
On the old Xerox systems you kept your one hand on the mouse and the other hand on the chord keyset. It was a keyboard with fewer keys, and you would press the keys in combinations... or chords, just like playing a chord on a piano.
This is true, according to his ex girlfriend that wrote a book about him. I even have a photo somewhere showing him at his desk with an old Mac Plus on it.
At the time Apple did some studies and found people preferred the one button mouse. Plus the other buttons didn't do what they do now... not on the Xerox Star or Alto anyway. You didn't have a "right-click" to pop up a menu. And Macs didn't have that until a few years ago anyway. On the Xerox systems you needed to right-click so you could type in the X/Y coordinates to move your window!
And I'm sure you have heard this before... but Macs can use any multi-button mouse. My old ADB Mac that I run Linux on has a three button MouseSystems mouse, and my G4/OS X has an MS Intellimouse Optical, and I can program all the extra buttons using USB Overdrive.
Yes, and the Apple Lisa before that. And don't forget MacDraw, which introduced the now familiar Toolbar as seen in Photoshop et al. BTW MacWrite was written by Quark.
(Mac user since 1991, owns a 512k, 2- Pluses, MacPortable w/backlight, 2- Mac II fx's, 2 Mac II ci's, Centris 610, PowerCenter 132, PowerMac G4/466 running OS X)
That's the problem... wasn't the ratings, they just kept putting it on at bad times, or not showing it at all. I read an interview with Matt Groening, and he said Fox never liked Futurama... they thought it was "too dark." And for anyone who thinks that no one likes the show, do a search and see how many Futurama web sites there are!
I agree Family Guy sucks
This was because the Mac OS was running in 68k emulation... it was the OS that was slow on PPC
This was also the reason Apple dropped the idea of the Mac OS (they didn't call it that back then, it was Macintosh System 7, not MacOS 7) on Intel.
The story goes that Apple went to Gateway and showed System 7 running on Intel hardware. The head of Gateway said "this is great, and we'd love to bundle it, but you would have to give it to us for free, because we pay for a copy of Windows, for every PC we sell, even if we dont install it on the PC."
So you can thank MS for that.
Or for $1599 you get the 800MHz G4 tower, with 256K L2 cache, 256MB SDRAM memory, 40GB Ultra ATA drive, CD-RW drive, ATI Radeon 7500, 56K internal modem.
And of course OS X and 9, iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie 2, Mac OS X Mail, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Acrobat Reader 5.0, Art Director's Toolkit, FAXstf 10.0 Preview, FileMaker Pro 5.5 Trial, Graphic Converter, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, PCalc, PixelNhance, Snapz Pro X
And 4 PCI slots, room for extra drives, etc.
No it's because the Finder is not optimized at all. Applications run fast in OS X, but the desktop file functions seem slow.
You don't think that yellow window title bar in BeOS was brightly colored? I liked Be OS a lot, used to run it on my PowerComputing clone.
Well that's part of why MS is in trouble with the Feds...but the new iMac does come with a bunch of software... iTunes 2, iMovie 2, iPhoto, iDVD 2 (on SuperDrive-equipped systems only), QuickTime, AppleWorks 6, Mail, Microsoft Internet Explorer, AOL, Quicken 2002 Deluxe, World Book Mac OS X Edition, Otto Matic, Mac OS X Chess, PCalc, Acrobat Reader and FAXstf 10.0 Preview.
We have an old Compaq at work from 1997 that runs NT 4 with no trouble at all... why can't the 2 year old Presario?
One nice thing about Macs... my old Mac clone from 1997 (updated to a 500 MHz G3) runs Mac OS 9.1 with no problems at all.. and LinuxPPC
This is the closed mind line of thought that has been the ruin of many a company.
Just look at where apple and Micro$oft were 10 years ago (about the same size)
Actually Apple was much bigger than MS for a long time. But MS is not a computer maker. Don't companies like Dell and Compaq make profits from hardware? And all the companies that make the parts you buy to build your own PC?
Why is that closed minded? Sure, Apple could have started selling the OS for PCs (Gates wanted to help...) But they didn't.
From what I hear it's not very optimized at all. It doesn't run bad on my G4 466 with 896 MB, but OS 9.2.2 runs noticeably faster.
But the classic OS's were the same way ... each new version was faster than the last, with 8.6 really seeing speed improvements over 8, etc.
So from my experience using Macs (since 1993...System 7.1) I would say there is a lot of room for speed improvements down the road. Apple is working on compatibility and stability now. Plus a lot of the low level stuff is not finished... like the Core Audio and MIDI.
Exactly. Apple makes its money selling hardware. NeXT made money selling Web Objects for 10k (Now Apple sells that much cheaper). And let's not forget that NeXT was Steve Job's company, so he's not going to go down this road again! So now he has NeXTSTEP running on Apple hardware again (OS X). He even had the NeXT Cube reincarnated for a while as the G4 Cube!
The keyboard is a standard size... you are thinking of the old iMac keyboards... they have been shipping with the newer Apple Pro keyboard and ProMouse (not the stupid round one) for a while now. Its a very nice keyboard too... I'm typing on one now.
As far as the 15" monitor... well I'm using a 19" on my G4 Tower, so I agree, but the resolution and the fact that LCDs have more viewing space than CRTs makes it closer to a 17". Hopefully Apple comes out with a 17" model.
But still as far as price, the towers start at $1500, which isn't so bad for the quality you get. Nice things are expensive.
Not really. They make Office and IE 5.1 for OS X. That's about it. Adobe makes a lot more software for Macs than M$ does.
But it's true that applications would have to be recompliled to run on an x86 version of OS X.
BTW, there is an x86 version of NeXTSTEP... even Steve Jobs used an IBM Thinkpad running NeXTSTEP 5 (I think) to do the slide shows at MacWorld Expo.
You know I thought it had something to do with the cord! It has that RF choke on the end and always feels like the wire inside is pinched. I'm thinking of trying to replace the wire on mine, because it stops working every so often. I read once if you call MS and complian they will send you a new one.
I like the mouse as far as the scroll wheel and extra buttons, but I don't care for the shape, it is too arched, and a lot of these mice have a bad problem when they freeze up after a while, forcing me to unplug it for a while. Sometimes this doesn't even work and I have to switch back to the Apple Pro mouse.
I like the feel of the Apple mouse better... tracks good too, but I miss the scroll wheel and right button, and the MS mouse does creak if you squeeze it! Feels cheap.
I think the amount of tech support involved in running BeOS x86 killed them off!
they didnt have as much on either the BeBox or PowerMacs.
(Former BeOS user)
That was the first thing I thought... a color classic with speakers.
Ha! That was funny... was that Windows 93? ;-)