The underlying standards Apple uses are all MPEG family standards: MPEG-4, H.264, and AAC. Even with DRM, this helps the adoption and usage of open standards in general.
This is not the case with Windows Media, and any use of Windows Media - even without DRM - hurts open standards and assists Microsoft, which is already operating from a judicially-determined monopoly position. (To say nothing of Microsoft now officially providing a Windows Media Player only for Windows.)
Someone please tell me the big objection to WMA. I'm dying to know.
It's not an open standard[1], it's controlled by Microsoft, and any further use of it assists Microsoft.
I didn't say Windows Media 9 was a bad codec. In fact, it's rather damned good.
Apple may apply DRM to AAC, but at its heart, all of the content is still MPEG-4, H.264, and AAC. Also, Apple didn't and doesn't operate from a monopoly position.
[1] Microsoft submitted the Windows Media Video 9 codec to SMPTE as VC-1. There is currently a patent pool for VC-1 administered by MPEG LA. It is not yet an open standard, and won't be for some time, if ever.
Except for one thing: most paid-download music sites already use the Windows Media Audio format. And most non-Apple portable music players support DRM-protected.WMA files, too.
Google will have to either 1) support Apple's DRM-protected AAC format, 2) support Microsoft's DRM-protected WMA format, or 3) create its own DRM-protected format and convince portable music player makers to support Google's own format.
What evidence do you have of this? Other than AAC, Windows Media is the only other common format that supports DRM. Google would never be allowed to sell music without DRM of some kind so MP3 is ruled out.
Well, they're not using it for commercial TV on Google Video. You must have missed that Google has created its own DRM for Google Video. And since Google views itself as being in direct competition with Microsoft in many areas, and they're already not using Windows Media for their other copyrighted commercial offerings and indeed went out of their way to create their own DRM, I think it's safe to say they will not be using Windows Media for any future possible music service.
I welcome Google, if this analyst prediction (read: guess, at best an educated one) for what Google "may" be doing turns out to be true.
Why?
Because Google won't be using Windows Media.[1]
And any new player that doesn't use Windows Media is a good thing.
To expand a little bit, though, on why I doubt this is so, at least in the near term (aside from the fact it would be yet another music service in a sea of music services that are all dominated by the market leader): the thing that makes iTunes most attractive, aside from its own independent ease of use, is the seamless and transparent integration with the iPod, and the fact that everything is integrated into one application. There is no going to a web site here, downloading files there, and importing them into a music player here.
How is a web-based service going to accomplish this? Is Google going to write Windows (and Mac OS X) applications that bridge the service to a media player? Or perhaps standalone applications like Google Earth? I mean, yeah, savvy people here will say they don't mind downloading individual files, managing them in some other application, and/or manually dragging them to their music player and meticulously managing their own file and directory structures.
However, most normal people don't want to do this, and that's just yet another part of the many reasons why the iTunes/iPod combination is so successful, even in the face of intense attempts from other giants attempting to topple it.
[1] No, they won't be using Windows Media, just like they're not using it for Google Video, including the paid service.
How many stories can we have about the Intel-based iMac's benchmarks?
All of these "benchmarks" are true, as far as they go.
Apple's original SPEC benchmarks are "true".
Macworld's "real world" application benchmarks are "true".
And now, MacSpeedZone's further tests of various tasks also are "true".
I mean, obviously the new iMac isn't going to be 2 times faster for everything under the sun. In fact, Jobs even spoke to this fact in the keynote when he directly said that the tests were just for the CPU and that everything else, like disk I/O and other subsystems, weren't all twice as fast, but it was to illustrate the performance (and performance per watt) of the new Core Duo, which is indeed impressive by any measure.
I think it's safe to say that the new iMac running native applications is definitely faster - sometimes up to twice as fast, and sometimes even more - than the iMac it's replacing. And Rosetta is so impressive that while non-native applications will run slower, it's damned good until native versions of those applications come out, too.
And speaking of CmdrTaco's request for a WoW test on the new iMac...
"It's fast, fast as in a superlative and not a comparative sense. One wonders why Steve Jobs didn't blow the crowd away with the saturated colors and excessive frame rates of WoW on an iMac. It loaded fast, and when the first character popped up in town, the frame rate never dropped below 60, and this was pretty much going full tilt in the settings."
# FireWire usage across the industry is increasing, not decreasing
Not as a percentage of market it isn't. There's no evidence that its growth is outpacing that of alternatives in the same market, which is a critical factor in the market.
"Alternatives"? What alternatives? And all I said was that FireWire usage is increasing. It is. I don't have any figures on percentages. You also must have missed that fact that the High-Definition Audio-Video Network Alliance (HANA)has picked IEEE-1394b as its primary standard to clean up the home HD networking mess. This means more and more equipment that interact with HD equipment from both a video and audio perspective will feature FireWire.
# FireWire is featured on all currently shipping Intel-based Macs
Of the two PowerPC Mac models replaced by Intel versions, Firewire has been significantly downgraded in one of them from what it was in the PowerPC equivalent. The other is unchanged and was an older, seven year old, standard anyway.
Yes. And this was a tradeoff because:
1. One is a portable machine.
2. One is a consumer machine.
And if you call going from 1 FireWire 800 port and 1 FireWire 400 port to 1 FireWire 400 port a "significant downgrade", when we have a representative sample of 2 machines at that, we probably have a different definition of "significant downgrade".
This was also a tradeoff because none of Intel's chipsets have FireWire 800 support, and Apple is trying to stay as vanilla as possible in terms of usage of Intel processors and support chipsets. Yes, it could have added its own chipset for FireWire 800 support, at the sacrifice of price, heat, space, design cost, and other factors. And for what? The extremely small penetration that FireWire 800 has? FireWire is still there. That's what is important.
# FireWire is increasingly used as the interface of choice on modern digital video and audio equipment
False. In the consumer market, modern digital video is moving to HDMI and was rarely, if ever, found in Firewire form. Modern digital audio has pretty much completely changed over to SPDIF. Firewire is pretty much only used for transfering video between DV cameras and computers outside of the commercial sector.
Nope. And I also should probably say "high end" in there, too. But again, you missed HANA. And since HANA's founding members include Charter Communications, Mitsubishi, NBC Universal, Samsung, Sun, ARM, Freescale, and Pulse-LINK, they'll definitely be a force in the industry.
And you also have forgotten that ALL HD set top boxes distributed to customers after July 1, 2005, MUST include a functional FireWire port, per FCC rulemaking. That's more and more FireWire out there every day, and FireWire is a transport that makes sense for simply handling data transport and control between many devices.
# FireWire is the transport mechanism used by all digital video (DV) and high definition digitial video (HDV) cameras and decks
The fact you said this means that you clearly didn't mean DV camera usage was to be included in the previous "fact". How many DVD players, video cassette recorders, high definition TVs, and TV receivers, available at regular chains like Best Buy, Circuit City, or even Radio Shack, have Firewire inputs or outputs again? This is the one fact that appears to be largely correct.
And DV/HDV cameras/decks is a fairly, um, huge marketplace, wouldn't you say?
And let's just pause here for a second - that so many people have settled for HDMI and S/PDIF is really unfortunate. I don't know if HANA will ultimately succeed, but they certainly have a lot of weight to throw behind fixing the current mess.
Even so, it ignores the move towards USB by many companies. Sony already treats Firewire as an option, not a standard feature
That may be true, but transferring video via USB is proprietary, and must be used in conjunction with software that knows how to receive video over USB. Of course, anything can be sent over USB within its bandwidth. But DV is a standard, and "DV"-proper travels over FireWire. That some low-end camcorders use USB for video transfer is only a response to the fact that almost all low-end PCs won't have FireWire. Perhaps this trend will continue. My only point was that FireWire is essentially the primary transport for DV, and HDV's only interface is FireWire, and it will remain that way for quite some time.
As long as all DV and HDV cameras and decks use FireWire for DV transport, FireWire isn't going anywhere on Macs, including "consumer" Macs, since half of iLife (iMovie, iDVD), and the continuing major selling point for the SuperDrive, rest on the ability to get DV into the machine.
And no, USB isn't a substitute on DV cameras. USB is only included to transfer things from the internal memory card, usually still images and crappy digital-still-camera-like video. To transfer DV, you must use FireWire. (Now, could the industry eventually agree upon a collective standard mechanism for DV video transfer via USB? Will something eventually replace FireWire? Sure. But that's not going to happen for a long time.)
MacBook Pro #4: FireWire 800 cards for ExpressCard/34 slot on the way
We previously reported that Apple has opted to omit the FireWire 800 port from its new MacBook Pro line. We also noted that various firms already offer ExpressCard FireWire 800 adapters, but there's a catch -- so far the cards are only available in the 54 mm ExpressCard standard, not the 34 mm standard Apple uses.
We've now received anonymous word from a major peripheral manufacturer indicating that FireWire 800 cards for the ExpressCard/34 slot are on the way.
The firm told MacFixIt:
"We do not have an estimated release date, but we are currently working on a couple of ExpressCard solutions (1394b being one of them). We, like other companies have an ExpressCard/54 cards and all we need to do is down-size them into the ExpressCard/34 form factor
"We expect to begin testing our cards within the next 2-3 weeks, and if all goes well, we could see production not long afterwards."
Over the past year, Apple has worked with six institutions to test the service: Brown, Duke, and Stanford Universities; the University of Michigan School of Dentistry, at Ann Arbor; the University of Missouri School of Journalism, at Columbia; and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Universities also have the option of integrating the with local directory and authentication systems, requiring users to authenticate before use. This way, content can be restricted only to people affiliated with the university, students taking a particular class, or the general public.
During the test phase, this project was codenamed "Indigo". The service also features tools for easily creating, aggregating, and deploying content to the iTunes "store" for each school. It's a very attractive service because it takes advantage of a service many students are already familiar with (iTunes and iPod), uses an emerging technology that is perfect for continuously updated audio or video broadcasts on a topic (podcasting), and makes it easy for participating institutions to publish their content without having to build a service themselves or maintain infrastructure.
So you're saying Apple should have used a 20+ year old technology (BIOS) instead of the new emerging boot firmware standard (EFI), just to make alternate OSes easier to install in the first couple weeks of the machines being out, instead of using the standard that the entire PC industry is moving toward?
Over time, all of the various bootloaders for Linux, *BSD, and so on, will support EFI, including Apple's EFI implementation.
While Apple is not using EFI solely to tie Mac OS X to Apple hardware, the general lack of use of EFI, EFI's TPM tie-ins, and so on, will definitely make it harder to run Mac OS X elsewhere, especially in the short term. I'm sure Apple is intensely aware of this, but that's not the exclusive reason it's using EFI. EFI is simply the future.
This is just another case of Apple being one of the first vendors to use a technology in a widespread fashion in the mainstream consumer marketplace.
Actually, to those people who think Apple is using TPM/Trusted Computing to actively *prevent* anything other than Mac OS X from booting on the Intel iMacs, you are categorically, one hundred percent wrong.
Apple has done NOTHING to prevent other OSes from booting, as long as there are booters that support Apple's EFI implementation.
There will be Linux distributions, BSD distributions, and Darwin distributions that will definitely run on Intel-based iMacs once EFI (and Apple's EFI implementation specifically) is properly supported in their bootloaders. And it will be.
Apple is doing NOTHING to actively prevent (or allow) the booting of alternate operating systems, period. Including Windows.
Now, you might say, accurately, that Apple is doing nothing to help, either. But it has no need for legacy BIOS, and EFI is the firmware of the (foreseeable) future on PC platforms as well. It's just that Apple is really on the cutting edge here, and is, again, the first manufacturer to deploy a technology in a widespread, mainstream way. In this case, it's EFI.
Can a novice or recreational user easily get it to boot other OSes without some further development of, e.g., bootloaders? No. But that will happen, and it's only a matter of time.
I just wanted to clarify this point, because Apple is certainly not going to disallow Linux, *BSD, Darwin, OpenDarwin and other UNIX variants from booting on Intel-based Macs, and it's not doing anything specific to prevent Windows from booting, either. It's also not doing anything specific - indeed, anything at all - to SUPPORT Windows booting on these machines.
Apple knows full well that people will be running Windows in virtualization on these things, and that will be *far* more useful to *far* more people than dual booting, and it's certainly not going to be stopping that, so why would they stop people from booting Windows and only Windows natively? Think for a second, people.
Now, the REVERSE is true, however: Apple IS using TPM to tie Mac OS X to Apple hardware. But it is NOT using TPM to *prevent* other OSes from being run on Apple hardware.
When I buy a boxed/retail set of software, and I buy a one-for-one matching to the hardware, why do I further need to obtain a license?
Well, you can't buy Mac OS X for Intel as a standalone product.
And someday, when you can (say, with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard), you don't own Mac OS X. You are buying a license for it, and the license stipulates how it may be used.
After all, if you own it and think you can do whatever you want with it, why should you even follow the one-to-one principle? You should be able to do whatever you want to do with it, and install it on as many machines as you want, right?
If not, why not? Why buy multiple copies for multiple machines?
The point was that it is "legal" and allowed by the Windows license agreement - and a Microsoft representative even commented for a ZDnet article about this very issue - to purchase a full copy of Windows (XP, Vista when it ships, whatever) and install it natively on an Intel-based Mac (assuming technical hurdles are overcome).
It is not "legal", or at the very least not allowed by the Mac OS X license agreement, to install Mac OS X on a non-Apple computer.
This is an important distinction, and the general reason why this is correct in the context of operating systems is very generically summarized in my closing statement: Microsoft makes money by licensing/selling software, and Apple makes money by selling hardware (in this case, computers, but this is even true in the context of iPod/iTunes: Apple has said numerous times that the iTunes Music Store is a driver to sell iPods).
It's perfectly appropriate in a general sense to say that Microsoft is a software company and Apple is a hardware company. Of course they do other things. But either you wish to split hairs for the sake of doing so, or you missed the point I was attempting to make.
As for booting Windows XP in particular, it may in fact be possible. There ultimately may be some way to cajole Windows XP into booting directly on these machines by doing some tricks. As for the people giving money to the winxponmac.com guy, they know perfectly well what they're doing, and they've made a judgement call to do so. Delicious Monster - an group of very experienced Mac OS X software engineers and programmers - even gave $1000. They chose to trust the guy, and that's their choice. And if anything, the pot so far and the discussion of it is indicative of just how many people want to run Windows directly on the hardware (as opposed to in VM) for various reasons.
Also, the articles (I'm assuming it's the bounty you're referring to) on Digg were never "debunked". No one knows for certain whether or not it will or won't be possible to, for example, load a Compatibility Support Module (CSM) in Apple's EFI implementation, and perhaps get Windows XP to boot that way. Note when I say "no one", I mean no one who has commented on it so far. I certainly don't know. Perhaps the engineers who implemented Apple's EFI know. Perhaps some EFI developers at Intel know. But we don't have anything definitive that tells us this is not possible, period. It's clear that a 32-bit version of Windows that actually supports EFI will probably be the way to go in the future, but Vista isn't shipping yet, and frankly, people do want to run Windows now. There are reasons people might want to do this, and I hope they get their wish.
After you plug in the iMac while holding the power button (at this time that appears to be the equivalent of the old PMU/motherboard reset) and zap the NVRAM (probably not required after the reset, but I included it because that was in the series of steps I performed), you can reconnect the hard disk. You can then boot from the DVD installation media, reformat the drive, and restore the OS.
You don't disconnect or reconnect the hard disk while the machine is running.
Please directly me to any place I've ever been against booting Windows. Second, I don't "host a site on how to do it". Nakfull Propaganda is not my blog. winxponmac.com is not my site. If you're referring to appleintelfaq.com, that is not a site about "how to run Windows on a Mac". It's a FAQ addressing the Apple/Intel transition. Once Windows is able to be installed directly on an Intel-based Mac, there definitely will be a FAQ entry about it, since that is indeed, well, a "Frequently Asked Question".
In fact, all of my posts here (and on the blog) on the topic are specifically FOR booting Windows on Intel-based Apple hardware, or using Windows in a virtual machine:
I've also been trying to install Windows directly on Intel-based Macs since the first day we were able to begin testing. Anyone can see the log of the various tries here:
And finally, even though some of the EFI testing rendered the iMac unbootable (after someone else already had the same issue), I then posted my steps for recovering both in the story here and in the above blog entry's comments.
Um, I'm one of the people who originally was left with an Intel-based iMac that would no longer boot. Both the blog's owner (Nakfull Propaganda) and one of the other posters in the comments also had the exact same issue when attempting to load EFI modules that presumably were unsupported by, or otherwise disagreed with, Apple's EFI implementation.
The steps I posted apparently reset something related to the NVRAM or firmware in the machine, and allow the machine to be revived (albeit after formatting the hard disk). Considering my contact information is everywhere, and I posted all of my contact details in every blog post I made, it's ridiculously easy for people to contact me and/or see who I am and what I do.
- there is no legal way to do it (there is also currently no way to buy a standalone copy of Mac OS X for Intel, even if you choose to ignore the license agreement)
- the Mac OS X license agreement specifically states that Mac OS X can only be installed on a single Apple-branded computer
However,
- the Windows license agreement allows for this
- it is legal to purchase a license for Windows and use it on any machine desired, including an Intel-based iMac
Microsoft is a software company. Apple is a hardware company.
Hello. Just to give a bit of an update on this issue...
The iMacs in question were rendered unbootable by trying to load additional modules from Intel's EFI Sample Implementation. It is not known which module is at fault currently.
Once the iMac is unbootable, it doesn't chime, boot, attempt to access media, or display an image on the screen. Attempts to zap NVRAM (cmd-opt-P-R is still supported for this task on Intel-based Macs), remove the motherboard battery and leave the AC power disconnected for an extended period of time, and disconnecting the hard disk do not resolve the issue.
At present, we seem to have a number of difficult situations that prevent the installation of Windows directly on Intel-based Macs:
2. Apple's EFI implementation does not include CSM (Compatibility Support Module), the BIOS backward compatibility layer necessary for booting 32-bit versions of Windows (pre-Vista), such as Windows XP.
3. 32-bit versions of Windows do not currently support booting an EFI machine. (And the Gateway Media Center machine with EFI people keep talking about boots Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 in BIOS compatibility mode, not with EFI.)
4. Windows XP 64-bit and Windows Server 2003 64-bit support EFI, but the Intel Core Duo is a 32-bit architecture.
5. Windows Vista does support EFI, but the EFI booter (cdboot.efi) currently does not appear to be functioning, and/or it is looking for, and not finding, information that it is looking for on the installation DVD. It does display the typical Windows "Please press any key to boot from the CD..." message. However, the DVD does not appear to contain the necessary EFI boot partition, and EFI does not support UDF volumes and El Torito booting. (Yes, this is a DVD obtained via official channels.)
6. Mac OS X's startup disk control panel presents a Windows Vista installation on a FAT/FAT32 volume as a valid bootable volume, but Windows Vista does not support booting from a FAT/FAT32 partition, only NTFS. Mac OS X can read NTFS volumes, but not write to them. This is currently the stage we're at now. No, I haven't tried "just hooking up a drive with Vista installed" (as many have asked elsewhere) or forcibly creating an NTFS partition whose contents are an already-installed instance of Vista.
7. grub, elilo, etc., all do not work on the Intel-based Macs at this time.
Eventually, whatever method boots Windows natively will have to have a nice wrapper put around it to make it easy for a normal person to do so, and easily dual boot in addition.
To regurgitate what I've said a bit elsewhere, the real benefit to most people will come from running Windows alongside Mac OS X in a "virtual machine" environment, in a window or even full screen, with, for example, a hotkey to switch back and forth between Mac OS X and Windows. To many users who prefer Mac OS X, particularly in enterprise, academic, and research environments, but who also have the occasional applications (usually administrative) that require Windows, this configuration would be a holy grail of sorts. And in this configuration, Windows wouldn't be running in emulation, but it would be running at essentially the native speed of the underlying hardware (with the exception of graphics and disk I/O performance). It will be *much* faster than any emulation ever has been, and there will no doubt be several open source (qemu, xen, wine) and commercial (vmware, Virtual PC) that will allow running Windows (or Windows software) in various capacities. Intel's Virtualization Technology (VT), allowing multiple operating systems to run in separate hardware "partitions" on one
When the iMac is in this broken state, it doesn't boot, chime, show anything on the screen, or read from media.
Can't exactly "reinstall from the 10.4.4 media".;-)
Zapping NVRAM (still supported with cmd-opt-P-R), removing the motherboard battery and letting it sit with AC for an extended period, and disconnecting the hard drive all do not revive the machine.
I have *never* seen a DV camcorder that was USB-only, and most of them only have USB for transfer of still images and some for static (non-realtime) transfer of archived video. Most DV and HDV cameras are, in fact, FireWire only and have no USB at all.
1. Um, the units at Macworld essentially represent the final shipping product. They will look, act, and perform the same in all ways that matter. They may not have their final agency approvals and that sort of thing, but the specs, speeds, parts, case, appearance, screen, and so on, all represent the shipping units.
2. Apple - and other vendors - have preannounced products and shown pre-production units before they have shipped many, many, many times in the past. This is NOT new.
3. What if Apple had preannounced the MacBook Pro the same exact way they did, and still said "shipping in mid-February", and then didn't show anything at all at Macworld, even though the product is essentially done? How would that be better?
I'd love an explanation as to how this is anything new, much less "irresponsible".
Slashdot Mirror
The underlying standards Apple uses are all MPEG family standards: MPEG-4, H.264, and AAC. Even with DRM, this helps the adoption and usage of open standards in general.
This is not the case with Windows Media, and any use of Windows Media - even without DRM - hurts open standards and assists Microsoft, which is already operating from a judicially-determined monopoly position. (To say nothing of Microsoft now officially providing a Windows Media Player only for Windows.)
That's the difference.
Someone please tell me the big objection to WMA. I'm dying to know.
It's not an open standard[1], it's controlled by Microsoft, and any further use of it assists Microsoft.
I didn't say Windows Media 9 was a bad codec. In fact, it's rather damned good.
Apple may apply DRM to AAC, but at its heart, all of the content is still MPEG-4, H.264, and AAC. Also, Apple didn't and doesn't operate from a monopoly position.
[1] Microsoft submitted the Windows Media Video 9 codec to SMPTE as VC-1. There is currently a patent pool for VC-1 administered by MPEG LA. It is not yet an open standard, and won't be for some time, if ever.
Except for one thing: most paid-download music sites already use the Windows Media Audio format. And most non-Apple portable music players support DRM-protected .WMA files, too.
Google will have to either 1) support Apple's DRM-protected AAC format, 2) support Microsoft's DRM-protected WMA format, or 3) create its own DRM-protected format and convince portable music player makers to support Google's own format.
I agree. And since Google has already created its own DRM format...
What evidence do you have of this? Other than AAC, Windows Media is the only other common format that supports DRM. Google would never be allowed to sell music without DRM of some kind so MP3 is ruled out.
Well, they're not using it for commercial TV on Google Video. You must have missed that Google has created its own DRM for Google Video. And since Google views itself as being in direct competition with Microsoft in many areas, and they're already not using Windows Media for their other copyrighted commercial offerings and indeed went out of their way to create their own DRM, I think it's safe to say they will not be using Windows Media for any future possible music service.
I welcome Google, if this analyst prediction (read: guess, at best an educated one) for what Google "may" be doing turns out to be true.
Why?
Because Google won't be using Windows Media.[1]
And any new player that doesn't use Windows Media is a good thing.
To expand a little bit, though, on why I doubt this is so, at least in the near term (aside from the fact it would be yet another music service in a sea of music services that are all dominated by the market leader): the thing that makes iTunes most attractive, aside from its own independent ease of use, is the seamless and transparent integration with the iPod, and the fact that everything is integrated into one application. There is no going to a web site here, downloading files there, and importing them into a music player here.
How is a web-based service going to accomplish this? Is Google going to write Windows (and Mac OS X) applications that bridge the service to a media player? Or perhaps standalone applications like Google Earth? I mean, yeah, savvy people here will say they don't mind downloading individual files, managing them in some other application, and/or manually dragging them to their music player and meticulously managing their own file and directory structures.
However, most normal people don't want to do this, and that's just yet another part of the many reasons why the iTunes/iPod combination is so successful, even in the face of intense attempts from other giants attempting to topple it.
[1] No, they won't be using Windows Media, just like they're not using it for Google Video, including the paid service.
How many stories can we have about the Intel-based iMac's benchmarks?
1 2/2478
All of these "benchmarks" are true, as far as they go.
Apple's original SPEC benchmarks are "true".
Macworld's "real world" application benchmarks are "true".
And now, MacSpeedZone's further tests of various tasks also are "true".
I mean, obviously the new iMac isn't going to be 2 times faster for everything under the sun. In fact, Jobs even spoke to this fact in the keynote when he directly said that the tests were just for the CPU and that everything else, like disk I/O and other subsystems, weren't all twice as fast, but it was to illustrate the performance (and performance per watt) of the new Core Duo, which is indeed impressive by any measure.
I think it's safe to say that the new iMac running native applications is definitely faster - sometimes up to twice as fast, and sometimes even more - than the iMac it's replacing. And Rosetta is so impressive that while non-native applications will run slower, it's damned good until native versions of those applications come out, too.
And speaking of CmdrTaco's request for a WoW test on the new iMac...
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2006/1/
"It's fast, fast as in a superlative and not a comparative sense. One wonders why Steve Jobs didn't blow the crowd away with the saturated colors and excessive frame rates of WoW on an iMac. It loaded fast, and when the first character popped up in town, the frame rate never dropped below 60, and this was pretty much going full tilt in the settings."
# FireWire usage across the industry is increasing, not decreasing
Not as a percentage of market it isn't. There's no evidence that its growth is outpacing that of alternatives in the same market, which is a critical factor in the market.
"Alternatives"? What alternatives? And all I said was that FireWire usage is increasing. It is. I don't have any figures on percentages. You also must have missed that fact that the High-Definition Audio-Video Network Alliance (HANA) has picked IEEE-1394b as its primary standard to clean up the home HD networking mess. This means more and more equipment that interact with HD equipment from both a video and audio perspective will feature FireWire.
# FireWire is featured on all currently shipping Intel-based Macs
Of the two PowerPC Mac models replaced by Intel versions, Firewire has been significantly downgraded in one of them from what it was in the PowerPC equivalent. The other is unchanged and was an older, seven year old, standard anyway.
Yes. And this was a tradeoff because:
1. One is a portable machine.
2. One is a consumer machine.
And if you call going from 1 FireWire 800 port and 1 FireWire 400 port to 1 FireWire 400 port a "significant downgrade", when we have a representative sample of 2 machines at that, we probably have a different definition of "significant downgrade".
This was also a tradeoff because none of Intel's chipsets have FireWire 800 support, and Apple is trying to stay as vanilla as possible in terms of usage of Intel processors and support chipsets. Yes, it could have added its own chipset for FireWire 800 support, at the sacrifice of price, heat, space, design cost, and other factors. And for what? The extremely small penetration that FireWire 800 has? FireWire is still there. That's what is important.
# FireWire is increasingly used as the interface of choice on modern digital video and audio equipment
False. In the consumer market, modern digital video is moving to HDMI and was rarely, if ever, found in Firewire form. Modern digital audio has pretty much completely changed over to SPDIF. Firewire is pretty much only used for transfering video between DV cameras and computers outside of the commercial sector.
Nope. And I also should probably say "high end" in there, too. But again, you missed HANA. And since HANA's founding members include Charter Communications, Mitsubishi, NBC Universal, Samsung, Sun, ARM, Freescale, and Pulse-LINK, they'll definitely be a force in the industry.
And you also have forgotten that ALL HD set top boxes distributed to customers after July 1, 2005, MUST include a functional FireWire port, per FCC rulemaking. That's more and more FireWire out there every day, and FireWire is a transport that makes sense for simply handling data transport and control between many devices.
# FireWire is the transport mechanism used by all digital video (DV) and high definition digitial video (HDV) cameras and decks
The fact you said this means that you clearly didn't mean DV camera usage was to be included in the previous "fact". How many DVD players, video cassette recorders, high definition TVs, and TV receivers, available at regular chains like Best Buy, Circuit City, or even Radio Shack, have Firewire inputs or outputs again? This is the one fact that appears to be largely correct.
And DV/HDV cameras/decks is a fairly, um, huge marketplace, wouldn't you say?
And let's just pause here for a second - that so many people have settled for HDMI and S/PDIF is really unfortunate. I don't know if HANA will ultimately succeed, but they certainly have a lot of weight to throw behind fixing the current mess.
Even so, it ignores the move towards USB by many companies. Sony already treats Firewire as an option, not a standard feature
That may be true, but transferring video via USB is proprietary, and must be used in conjunction with software that knows how to receive video over USB. Of course, anything can be sent over USB within its bandwidth. But DV is a standard, and "DV"-proper travels over FireWire. That some low-end camcorders use USB for video transfer is only a response to the fact that almost all low-end PCs won't have FireWire. Perhaps this trend will continue. My only point was that FireWire is essentially the primary transport for DV, and HDV's only interface is FireWire, and it will remain that way for quite some time.
And FireWire is going to be around for quite some time.
As long as all DV and HDV cameras and decks use FireWire for DV transport, FireWire isn't going anywhere on Macs, including "consumer" Macs, since half of iLife (iMovie, iDVD), and the continuing major selling point for the SuperDrive, rest on the ability to get DV into the machine.
And no, USB isn't a substitute on DV cameras. USB is only included to transfer things from the internal memory card, usually still images and crappy digital-still-camera-like video. To transfer DV, you must use FireWire. (Now, could the industry eventually agree upon a collective standard mechanism for DV video transfer via USB? Will something eventually replace FireWire? Sure. But that's not going to happen for a long time.)
And indeed, ExpressCard/34 FireWire 800 cards are on the way, for people who really need FireWire 800:
MacBook Pro #4: FireWire 800 cards for ExpressCard/34 slot on the way
We previously reported that Apple has opted to omit the FireWire 800 port from its new MacBook Pro line. We also noted that various firms already offer ExpressCard FireWire 800 adapters, but there's a catch -- so far the cards are only available in the 54 mm ExpressCard standard, not the 34 mm standard Apple uses.
We've now received anonymous word from a major peripheral manufacturer indicating that FireWire 800 cards for the ExpressCard/34 slot are on the way.
The firm told MacFixIt:
"We do not have an estimated release date, but we are currently working on a couple of ExpressCard solutions (1394b being one of them). We, like other companies have an ExpressCard/54 cards and all we need to do is down-size them into the ExpressCard/34 form factor
"We expect to begin testing our cards within the next 2-3 weeks, and if all goes well, we could see production not long afterwards."
The article in the Chronicle of Higher Education notes the six schools involved:
Over the past year, Apple has worked with six institutions to test the service: Brown, Duke, and Stanford Universities; the University of Michigan School of Dentistry, at Ann Arbor; the University of Missouri School of Journalism, at Columbia; and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Universities also have the option of integrating the with local directory and authentication systems, requiring users to authenticate before use. This way, content can be restricted only to people affiliated with the university, students taking a particular class, or the general public.
During the test phase, this project was codenamed "Indigo". The service also features tools for easily creating, aggregating, and deploying content to the iTunes "store" for each school. It's a very attractive service because it takes advantage of a service many students are already familiar with (iTunes and iPod), uses an emerging technology that is perfect for continuously updated audio or video broadcasts on a topic (podcasting), and makes it easy for participating institutions to publish their content without having to build a service themselves or maintain infrastructure.
So you're saying Apple should have used a 20+ year old technology (BIOS) instead of the new emerging boot firmware standard (EFI), just to make alternate OSes easier to install in the first couple weeks of the machines being out, instead of using the standard that the entire PC industry is moving toward?
Over time, all of the various bootloaders for Linux, *BSD, and so on, will support EFI, including Apple's EFI implementation.
While Apple is not using EFI solely to tie Mac OS X to Apple hardware, the general lack of use of EFI, EFI's TPM tie-ins, and so on, will definitely make it harder to run Mac OS X elsewhere, especially in the short term. I'm sure Apple is intensely aware of this, but that's not the exclusive reason it's using EFI. EFI is simply the future.
This is just another case of Apple being one of the first vendors to use a technology in a widespread fashion in the mainstream consumer marketplace.
First of all, this has been around at Stanford since October 2005. This was covered at Ars Technica a month and a half ago (including the Stanford on iTunes site and store).
Second, this is also available at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, as well as other schools, such as UC Berkeley.
What's actually "new" here is that Apple has productized this service for educational institutions in the form of iTunes U, announced yesterday.
Though those who haven't heard of it before may be interested in Steve Jobs' 2005 commencement address at Stanford.
Please note that iTunes U operates on a different server (deimos.apple.com) than the normal music store (phobos.apple.com).
Actually, to those people who think Apple is using TPM/Trusted Computing to actively *prevent* anything other than Mac OS X from booting on the Intel iMacs, you are categorically, one hundred percent wrong.
Apple has done NOTHING to prevent other OSes from booting, as long as there are booters that support Apple's EFI implementation.
There will be Linux distributions, BSD distributions, and Darwin distributions that will definitely run on Intel-based iMacs once EFI (and Apple's EFI implementation specifically) is properly supported in their bootloaders. And it will be.
Apple is doing NOTHING to actively prevent (or allow) the booting of alternate operating systems, period. Including Windows.
Now, you might say, accurately, that Apple is doing nothing to help, either. But it has no need for legacy BIOS, and EFI is the firmware of the (foreseeable) future on PC platforms as well. It's just that Apple is really on the cutting edge here, and is, again, the first manufacturer to deploy a technology in a widespread, mainstream way. In this case, it's EFI.
Can a novice or recreational user easily get it to boot other OSes without some further development of, e.g., bootloaders? No. But that will happen, and it's only a matter of time.
I just wanted to clarify this point, because Apple is certainly not going to disallow Linux, *BSD, Darwin, OpenDarwin and other UNIX variants from booting on Intel-based Macs, and it's not doing anything specific to prevent Windows from booting, either. It's also not doing anything specific - indeed, anything at all - to SUPPORT Windows booting on these machines.
Apple knows full well that people will be running Windows in virtualization on these things, and that will be *far* more useful to *far* more people than dual booting, and it's certainly not going to be stopping that, so why would they stop people from booting Windows and only Windows natively? Think for a second, people.
Now, the REVERSE is true, however: Apple IS using TPM to tie Mac OS X to Apple hardware. But it is NOT using TPM to *prevent* other OSes from being run on Apple hardware.
When I buy a boxed/retail set of software, and I buy a one-for-one matching to the hardware, why do I further need to obtain a license?
Well, you can't buy Mac OS X for Intel as a standalone product.
And someday, when you can (say, with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard), you don't own Mac OS X. You are buying a license for it, and the license stipulates how it may be used.
After all, if you own it and think you can do whatever you want with it, why should you even follow the one-to-one principle? You should be able to do whatever you want to do with it, and install it on as many machines as you want, right?
If not, why not? Why buy multiple copies for multiple machines?
That's really not the point I was trying to make.
The point was that it is "legal" and allowed by the Windows license agreement - and a Microsoft representative even commented for a ZDnet article about this very issue - to purchase a full copy of Windows (XP, Vista when it ships, whatever) and install it natively on an Intel-based Mac (assuming technical hurdles are overcome).
It is not "legal", or at the very least not allowed by the Mac OS X license agreement, to install Mac OS X on a non-Apple computer.
This is an important distinction, and the general reason why this is correct in the context of operating systems is very generically summarized in my closing statement: Microsoft makes money by licensing/selling software, and Apple makes money by selling hardware (in this case, computers, but this is even true in the context of iPod/iTunes: Apple has said numerous times that the iTunes Music Store is a driver to sell iPods).
It's perfectly appropriate in a general sense to say that Microsoft is a software company and Apple is a hardware company. Of course they do other things. But either you wish to split hairs for the sake of doing so, or you missed the point I was attempting to make.
As for booting Windows XP in particular, it may in fact be possible. There ultimately may be some way to cajole Windows XP into booting directly on these machines by doing some tricks. As for the people giving money to the winxponmac.com guy, they know perfectly well what they're doing, and they've made a judgement call to do so. Delicious Monster - an group of very experienced Mac OS X software engineers and programmers - even gave $1000. They chose to trust the guy, and that's their choice. And if anything, the pot so far and the discussion of it is indicative of just how many people want to run Windows directly on the hardware (as opposed to in VM) for various reasons.
Also, the articles (I'm assuming it's the bounty you're referring to) on Digg were never "debunked". No one knows for certain whether or not it will or won't be possible to, for example, load a Compatibility Support Module (CSM) in Apple's EFI implementation, and perhaps get Windows XP to boot that way. Note when I say "no one", I mean no one who has commented on it so far. I certainly don't know. Perhaps the engineers who implemented Apple's EFI know. Perhaps some EFI developers at Intel know. But we don't have anything definitive that tells us this is not possible, period. It's clear that a 32-bit version of Windows that actually supports EFI will probably be the way to go in the future, but Vista isn't shipping yet, and frankly, people do want to run Windows now. There are reasons people might want to do this, and I hope they get their wish.
Um, you don't.
Sorry the instructions weren't more specific.
After you plug in the iMac while holding the power button (at this time that appears to be the equivalent of the old PMU/motherboard reset) and zap the NVRAM (probably not required after the reset, but I included it because that was in the series of steps I performed), you can reconnect the hard disk. You can then boot from the DVD installation media, reformat the drive, and restore the OS.
You don't disconnect or reconnect the hard disk while the machine is running.
Please directly me to any place I've ever been against booting Windows. Second, I don't "host a site on how to do it". Nakfull Propaganda is not my blog. winxponmac.com is not my site. If you're referring to appleintelfaq.com, that is not a site about "how to run Windows on a Mac". It's a FAQ addressing the Apple/Intel transition. Once Windows is able to be installed directly on an Intel-based Mac, there definitely will be a FAQ entry about it, since that is indeed, well, a "Frequently Asked Question".
4 554554 835274 91243
5 43786
d cid=407&entryid=407 (Note: that is NOT my blog)
In fact, all of my posts here (and on the blog) on the topic are specifically FOR booting Windows on Intel-based Apple hardware, or using Windows in a virtual machine:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=173774&cid=14
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=174115&cid=14
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=174203&cid=14
At the end of this post, I even enumerate the reasons why people might want to run Windows directly, as opposed to in a VM:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=174845&cid=14
I've also been trying to install Windows directly on Intel-based Macs since the first day we were able to begin testing. Anyone can see the log of the various tries here:
http://nak.journalspace.com/?cmd=displaycomments&
And finally, even though some of the EFI testing rendered the iMac unbootable (after someone else already had the same issue), I then posted my steps for recovering both in the story here and in the above blog entry's comments.
Nice try, though!
Um, I'm one of the people who originally was left with an Intel-based iMac that would no longer boot. Both the blog's owner (Nakfull Propaganda) and one of the other posters in the comments also had the exact same issue when attempting to load EFI modules that presumably were unsupported by, or otherwise disagreed with, Apple's EFI implementation.
The steps I posted apparently reset something related to the NVRAM or firmware in the machine, and allow the machine to be revived (albeit after formatting the hard disk). Considering my contact information is everywhere, and I posted all of my contact details in every blog post I made, it's ridiculously easy for people to contact me and/or see who I am and what I do.
- there is no legal way to do it (there is also currently no way to buy a standalone copy of Mac OS X for Intel, even if you choose to ignore the license agreement)
- the Mac OS X license agreement specifically states that Mac OS X can only be installed on a single Apple-branded computer
However,
- the Windows license agreement allows for this
- it is legal to purchase a license for Windows and use it on any machine desired, including an Intel-based iMac
Microsoft is a software company. Apple is a hardware company.
By following these steps, the iMacs that had difficulty with certain EFI modules appear to have been restored to a functioning state:
1. Disconnect the internal hard disk
2. Disconnect the iMac from AC power
3. Plug in AC while holding the power button
4. Power up the iMac and zap NVRAM (cmd-opt-P-R)
The hard disk can be reformatted and the operating system restored.
I should note that a colleague is also tracking these issues on his site, the same one noted in the submission. Sooner or later, and with a bounty now offered for anyone who gets Windows XP booting on a Mac, I've no doubt something interesting will be accomplished.
Hello. Just to give a bit of an update on this issue...
The iMacs in question were rendered unbootable by trying to load additional modules from Intel's EFI Sample Implementation. It is not known which module is at fault currently.
Once the iMac is unbootable, it doesn't chime, boot, attempt to access media, or display an image on the screen. Attempts to zap NVRAM (cmd-opt-P-R is still supported for this task on Intel-based Macs), remove the motherboard battery and leave the AC power disconnected for an extended period of time, and disconnecting the hard disk do not resolve the issue.
At present, we seem to have a number of difficult situations that prevent the installation of Windows directly on Intel-based Macs:
1. Apple did not include its own EFI shell or other tools to access the EFI with the Intel-based Macs, so the tools used have consisted of Intel's EFI Sample Implementation, and Tianocore's EFI Developer Kit.
2. Apple's EFI implementation does not include CSM (Compatibility Support Module), the BIOS backward compatibility layer necessary for booting 32-bit versions of Windows (pre-Vista), such as Windows XP.
3. 32-bit versions of Windows do not currently support booting an EFI machine. (And the Gateway Media Center machine with EFI people keep talking about boots Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 in BIOS compatibility mode, not with EFI.)
4. Windows XP 64-bit and Windows Server 2003 64-bit support EFI, but the Intel Core Duo is a 32-bit architecture.
5. Windows Vista does support EFI, but the EFI booter (cdboot.efi) currently does not appear to be functioning, and/or it is looking for, and not finding, information that it is looking for on the installation DVD. It does display the typical Windows "Please press any key to boot from the CD..." message. However, the DVD does not appear to contain the necessary EFI boot partition, and EFI does not support UDF volumes and El Torito booting. (Yes, this is a DVD obtained via official channels.)
6. Mac OS X's startup disk control panel presents a Windows Vista installation on a FAT/FAT32 volume as a valid bootable volume, but Windows Vista does not support booting from a FAT/FAT32 partition, only NTFS. Mac OS X can read NTFS volumes, but not write to them. This is currently the stage we're at now. No, I haven't tried "just hooking up a drive with Vista installed" (as many have asked elsewhere) or forcibly creating an NTFS partition whose contents are an already-installed instance of Vista.
7. grub, elilo, etc., all do not work on the Intel-based Macs at this time.
Eventually, whatever method boots Windows natively will have to have a nice wrapper put around it to make it easy for a normal person to do so, and easily dual boot in addition.
To regurgitate what I've said a bit elsewhere, the real benefit to most people will come from running Windows alongside Mac OS X in a "virtual machine" environment, in a window or even full screen, with, for example, a hotkey to switch back and forth between Mac OS X and Windows. To many users who prefer Mac OS X, particularly in enterprise, academic, and research environments, but who also have the occasional applications (usually administrative) that require Windows, this configuration would be a holy grail of sorts. And in this configuration, Windows wouldn't be running in emulation, but it would be running at essentially the native speed of the underlying hardware (with the exception of graphics and disk I/O performance). It will be *much* faster than any emulation ever has been, and there will no doubt be several open source (qemu, xen, wine) and commercial (vmware, Virtual PC) that will allow running Windows (or Windows software) in various capacities. Intel's Virtualization Technology (VT), allowing multiple operating systems to run in separate hardware "partitions" on one
When the iMac is in this broken state, it doesn't boot, chime, show anything on the screen, or read from media.
;-)
Can't exactly "reinstall from the 10.4.4 media".
Zapping NVRAM (still supported with cmd-opt-P-R), removing the motherboard battery and letting it sit with AC for an extended period, and disconnecting the hard drive all do not revive the machine.
I have *never* seen a DV camcorder that was USB-only, and most of them only have USB for transfer of still images and some for static (non-realtime) transfer of archived video. Most DV and HDV cameras are, in fact, FireWire only and have no USB at all.
1. Um, the units at Macworld essentially represent the final shipping product. They will look, act, and perform the same in all ways that matter. They may not have their final agency approvals and that sort of thing, but the specs, speeds, parts, case, appearance, screen, and so on, all represent the shipping units.
2. Apple - and other vendors - have preannounced products and shown pre-production units before they have shipped many, many, many times in the past. This is NOT new.
3. What if Apple had preannounced the MacBook Pro the same exact way they did, and still said "shipping in mid-February", and then didn't show anything at all at Macworld, even though the product is essentially done? How would that be better?
I'd love an explanation as to how this is anything new, much less "irresponsible".