"Will they take ownership of the issue, or continue to ask customers to pay for an entire new logic board when just the GPU fails?"
Seriously?
Apple has a history of acknowledging and providing free fixes for issues of this magnitude, if they're really affecting a significant percentage of the population. I've been the beneficiary of such a fix in the past myself.
Hell, that's even mentioned in the linked article:
Mid–2011 iMacs with AMD Radeon HD 6970 graphics cards experienced similar failures and in August of 2013, Apple initiated a Graphics Card Replacement Program for the computers, replacing the graphics cards of affected iMacs at no cost.
So with the MacRumors article having only come out yesterday, it seems pretty aggressively snide to be suggesting that Apple's going to ignore the issue.
I care what he thinks. Apple's existence is actually ruining other platforms and their diversity. Look at how much Unity sucks. That's Apple's fault. Windows 8? Apple!
Apple's existence is doing nothing of the kind.
The fact that other companies have no idea how to design things people want on their own, so all they can do is copy what Apple does, is what is harmful to the diversity of style in the market.
Just because you don't like Apple doesn't mean you get to blame them when everyone else rips off their designs.
Most of the things you mention are Office incorporating a new technology into it, not being entirely rewritten to be based on the new technology. It's way, way easier (IMNSHO) to bolt something like the ribbon onto Office than it is to port Office to a completely different UI paradigm.
All that said, you're totally right about the rest: Microsoft should have ported Office to Metro, however much effort it took to do so. It's not, after all, as though they don't have resources to throw at such a project.
Not even Microsoft themselves managed to port Office, their most important asset, to Metro, yet.
To be fair (which isn't something I often am to Microsoft), Office has got to be one of the most godawful pieces of spaghetti-code nightmare that anyone has ever tried to port to anything.
I don't think the phrasing should be "not even" Office has been ported.
"Give us what we want and we'll 'negotiate'" is not real negotiation.
"Put the gun down and we'll negotiate" is.
(And that's the great thing about arguments on the Internet: if you do come up with that snappy comeback hours later, you can actually reply with it;-) )
Wow. That's ultra liberal there. I like it. The fact that I'm fat is some corporation's fault! Twisted logic but beautifully done.
I know it's in vogue to blame everything on the individual, especially on the right, but you're getting bitten by reality's liberal bias here. There's lots and lots of stuff that individuals can't actually do to prevent corporations from polluting their environment in ways that have profound effects on their health.
Furthermore, the sooner we recognize that it is pretty much impossible that the marked upswing in obesity not only in people in the entire developed world (other countries do have some of the same problem, just to much lesser degrees), but also in laboratory animals in the US, could be caused entirely by a mysterious mass drop in personal responsibility over the past 40 years, the sooner we can actually start addressing the causes of the problem. You know, instead of just blaming the victim and hoping it will all go away.
Better for SOME individuals within that society - not all individuals.
Right, and that I agreed with: it's better for those who can afford to buy extremely expensive, extremely high-quality health care.
For the rest of us, it's crap.
I don't think saying that "This system that we have is better for some people than the other systems, which show clearly better results on average for dramatically lower costs" is a particularly useful thing to do. It's like saying, "People like having more money," or, "Political systems that actively discourage corruption have less corruption."
Sure, it's true, but it's also painfully obvious, and not very helpful.
I can argue that the average life expectancy is more a matter of lifestyle than health care. A lot of Americans, myself included, are obese. We live a sedentary lifestyle with food that's bad for us. We're victims of high living.
And why does the rest of the developed world not have the same problem to the same degree?
It's not "high living." A vastly disproportionate share of the obese are from lower-income Americans, not the wealthy.
We're not victims of our own success: we're victims of, in part, the agribusiness lobby's success. (Though from what I've been seeing lately, recent studies suggest that only part of the obesity epidemic can be traced to changes in diet. Some of it is from environmental causes, too—but they're also, by and large, due to big companies trying to make/save an extra buck at everyone else's expense.)
"Give us what we want and we'll 'negotiate'" is not real negotiation.
Yes, you're absolutely right. And that's what the Republicans were saying.
"Stop acting like fucking idiots and threatening our entire economy and way of life, and we'll be willing to negotiate" is more like what the Democrats were saying.
Again, this manufactured crisis was in no way a standard negotiating tactic or anything a reasonable person would have done, or even expected. Rather than negotiate in good faith, or even try to put together a compromise budget, the Republicans chose to hold first the civil service, then the entire economy hostage in hopes of blackmailing the Democrats into killing or weakening a piece of legislation that was already a huge compromise, which the Supreme Court found to be constitutional, and which the Republicans have been utterly and completely unable to repeal or reduce through any of the normal, proper legislative channels.
If you think Dave was unreasonable for not giving Rob any of his money, then you, like a truly disturbing number of Americans, have some serious problems with understanding the dangerous and unprecedented level of partisanship at work and what it actually means.
No thanks, I'll vote based on the individual's actual performance, not because some kind of sweeping generalization steeped in rhetoric.
There wasn't a single person in Congress, Democrat or Republican, who actually attempted to avert the shutdown.
That's a very simplistic—and somewhat wrongheaded—view of the way things actually happened.
Though it's not perfect, I liked this analogy I saw somewhere: Rob comes up to Dave and says, "Give me $100." Dave says no. Rob says, "All right, give me $50." Dave says no again. Rob says, "Come on, why can't you compromise with me?"
Suggesting that the Democrats should have "compromised" on this is little short of ludicrous. Holding first the civil service sector, then the entire economy hostage in an attempt to force through a measure that the Republicans want, but do not actually have the votes to achieve (even after they've tried dozens of times), is not a standard, or even sane, negotiating tactic. It is not "business as usual." The Democrats are not equally to blame for this as the Republicans.
I know we've been fed the idea for some time that the two sides of every issue are always equally valid, but you know what? That's total BS.
But, based on experience, you're probably just going to ignore and vilify me because I don't share your exact worldview.
For society as a whole, we single payer countries tend to see better results. But per person, the healthcare in the US is the best. Assuming you have a good health insurance plan.
So...for the 1-5% who can afford platinum-level insurance plans, the US is the best healthcare system in the world!!!!!
But then there's the rest of us shlubs, who apparently just aren't worthy of being cared for.
(Here's a tip for you: the US, overall, has worse health care than other developed countries. For instance, the average life expectancy is about 1.3 years lower. And we pay vastly more. It is simply not possible for a system to both be worse for society as a whole, and better for all the individuals within that society.)
What amazes me is that those people seriously considered a situation that could have had a devastating economical effect on the US.
You could say the very same thing about any big legislation. Many people myself included think this healthcare reform might have devastating long term economic effects on our nation yet it was considered and passed
No, that's really not true.
First of all, according to nonpartisan estimates, the ACA will reduce the deficit. But let's ignore that for the moment and assume that you're correct that it will raise the cost of government by a significant amount.
If that happens, how could we possibly solve such a problem? Could it be that we could...pass a law raising taxes? From their current historically low levels, particularly as a fraction of GDP? And particularly on the super-wealthy?
If I'm reading you right, what you're actually saying is that the ACA will cost money to implement, and cost money into the future as well. But you know what? Doing stuff for people costs money. Helping poor people costs money. Fixing the worst economic downturn and the worst economic inequalities in decades costs money. And I don't mean "costs money that we have to give to the super-wealthy, so they'll be even more super-wealthy." Trickle-down economics is a pretty solidly discredited theory by this point. Empirical evidence just doesn't bear it out.
And if you're one of the "all taxation is theft types," well, then, just screw you. You want to go live in a tax-free wilderness off the fruit of your own labour and no one else's, I suggest you up stakes and find some place in northern Canada without another soul for 50 miles in any direction, because anywhere in this country, you're already benefiting from the results of taxation. It was well over 100 years ago that Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr famously said, "I like taxes. With them, I buy civilization." And that's pretty much the way it works: If you want civilization, if you want to live as part of a society, particularly a modern society, you have no choice but to pay taxes to a central governing body of one sort or another. Because anything else is at least as much a theft from everyone else around you.
So while the hardware may have merged, the software hasn't, and I think that's where too many people these days go wrong.
Well I would just refine that distinction in saying that the hardware and software have merged, but the interface hasn't. I foresee a possibility that we could each end up carrying around a computer that runs a single OS and a single set of applications, but where the interface conventions shift depending on the context. You dock it at a desk with a keyboard and mouse, and it behaves like a traditional desktop computer. You dock it in a laptop shell, and it expects you to use trackpad gestures. You dock it on a TV, and it lets you use some kind of remote control. You dock it in your car, and it expects you to use voice commands.
While that sounds awesome, I think one must remember that, while I'm sure Apple could (and would) do that well, you would also be depending on all the authors of the apps to program all the separate interfaces, and do so well, and not just say, "Ah, who cares about the car interface? I'll never want to use an app in the car, so why would anyone else!"
Dock the iPhone, you have a full computer. Undock it, and you have an iPhone with an appropriate UI. You could even develop the apps with a framework that runs the same app using a different UI depending on screen size. If you look at the developments and acquisitions Apple has made over the years, it seems like they're at least entertaining the idea of something like that.
If there is ever a convergence device like that, I'd buy the hell out of it:-)
That's definitely a possible way to move forward. I'm a little worried that we're starting to hit physical boundaries that hold back Moore's Law and may prevent something quite like that from being feasible, but if it does work out, I'd be more than pleased.
I think they key with that is, though, it still doesn't try to make "one UI to rule them all." It presents a full-touch UI when in "phone mode", and a traditional desktop UI when it "computer mode." So while the hardware may have merged, the software hasn't, and I think that's where too many people these days go wrong. They, like Microsoft, think that "convergence" means you have to have a single OS and single UI paradigm, even though you're dealing with two fundamentally different kinds of user interaction.
Everything Apple has been doing since the iPhone has come out has been moving in one direction: Two operating systems, built on a common core, which share various elements that make sense.
Apple is not Microsoft. They don't think you have to have "one OS to rule them all." Apple knows that what's good for a touchscreen device is not as good for a traditional laptop or desktop.
Yes, they have taken some features from iOS and moved them over to Mac OS X. However, they're almost universally optional and/or superficial. You never have to use Launchpad if you don't want, and all the autosaving features can be disabled if you prefer to work under the more traditional document management paradigm.
This idea is one that has been often proclaimed quite loudly by critics of Apple who say that everything's going to be locked down and if you buy a Mac, it'll be exactly like an iPad with a keyboard, but it doesn't have any real basis in reality.
I can't wait to hear how the pundits will spin this as yet more evidence that Apple is a has-been company. Probably something along the lines of, "See? Apple is nothing but a cult! This proves it, and thus they are propped up by the Apple-faithful, not real people," or maybe, "This shows that Apple has abandoned innovation to focus on profits." And then there's the old favourite, "This would never have happened while Steve Jobs was alive!"
If there is bad news about Apple, it means Apple's doomed.
If there is neutral news about Apple, it means Apple's doomed.
If there is amazingly fantastic news about Apple, it still means Apple's doomed.
Apple screws up and the "tech" press focuses on the positives and finds a way to spin the negatives into a positive.
Have you been reading the same tech press I have? The ones that have found ways to spin "Apple sells record 9 million iPhones on launch weekend" as "Apple is Doomed"?
The press—tech and otherwise—has been loudly heralding Apple's demise for years now, no matter what Apple actually does.
Except those of us old enough to remember the Microsoft bailout.... When Apple clearly didnt know what they were doing but instead were rehashing product lines over and over...
You mean...before Steve Jobs came back and restructured the entire company, not just changing the way they do everything, but proving both to Apple and the world that by doing things his way, they can make vast amounts of money?
You can worry about them all you want, but there hasn't been any indication so far that Apple's actually having any trouble. Every new iPhone released still tops the sales of the previous one. Their profits continue to grow.
Apple has always been a "niche product." They never had a dominant marketshare in smartphones, so you can't say that that's something they've lost, and people still see their products as being "cool" and worth the premium price they have traditionally commanded.
Apple has shown time and again that, as far as the public is concerned, they know what they're doing.
But because they don't bring out something as amazing as the iPhone and the iPad were when they were first announced every single month, everything they do do gets panned as "not revolutionary enough," "more proof that without Jobs, Apple is DOOOOMED," etc.
So, in the minds of most of the pundits today, yes, Apple made a mistake by releasing two new iPhones. They also would have made a mistake if they had released one new iPhone, or three, or a smartwatch, or a smart TV, or a bloody time machine. No matter what Apple does, the tech press have to find ways to make it fit the narrative of "Apple is Doomed." That's pretty much all there is to it.
If you read the Macalope column over at MacWorld (and read it with a grain or two of salt, of course, because it's primarily intended to be humorous...but it still cuts deep a lot of the time), you can see him point out a lot of the glaring inconsistencies and habitual methods of trying to twist reality to make Apple's successes sound like failures. (Like the old favourite, "compare Apple's current products to hypothetical future products from its competitors.")
I believe mythbusters showed how trivial it was to bypass fingerprint protections by making your own "finger" from said prints? (This time on an electronic door lock).
Except that various people have already been investigating the fingerprint reading technology Apple is using, and they seem to think that it's really not that easy, because they're using a more robust technique than the classic scan-the-surface-optically method.
Obviously we don't have the data for the iPhone 5S and 5C yet, but based on every single previous iDevice release ever, I don't think Apple has a problem with people not being excited. People have been buying their products in ever-increasing numbers for over a decade now.
The people who are vocally un-excited are the pundits. You know, the ones who, in order to keep money coming in, have to keep writing about something amazing and new that gets people excited—or about some scandal. The ones who are quite happy to compare existing Apple products to rumoured or vaguely announced future Samsung, Google, or Microsoft products—and compare their own straw-man versions of rumoured future Apple products to current and rumoured future products from competitors—and in all cases, find Apple's products wanting, no matter how many convolutions and fabrications they have to go through to achieve that.
I'm honestly not sure whether to believe the more paranoid people who have alleged it to be deliberately orchestrated, but there has certainly been a smear campaign targeting Apple...approximately since it failed to produce the iHolodeck on schedule the day people stopped being interested in reading about the release of the iPad. If you pay any attention to it—and read it without a raging anti-Apple prejudice—it's pretty obvious that there is a huge volume of "Apple is DOOOOOOMED" articles being written with practically no evidence to back up any of the (often quite wild) claims made in them.
And yes, I realize that one of the factions on Slashdot right now does, in fact, have a raging anti-Apple prejudice, but come on, people; this is supposed to be a site for smart people. Turn on your brains a little, quit the knee-jerk reactions, and actually apply a little critical thinking when you see someone writing about how the smartphone that Apple will not even announce for months has already failed and doomed the company, or other similar such ridiculous notions.
I've been using Parallels over VMWare Fusion for a few years now (there has been some good bundle pricing on it, and there were some features it had that VMWare lacked at the time when I was deciding, though I don't recall what those were now).
Unless this turns out to be a tempest in a teacup or otherwise invented or overblown, I won't be doing that anymore, and VMWare will have gained back a customer.
Dan Aris
Why not just use VirtualBox? Or are you not touching that due to Oracle having their fingers in it?
I've used it, but as MightyYar says, it doesn't do as much as VMWare Fusion or Parallels on the Mac. It 3D support, for instance, still leaves a lot to be desired.
Slashdot Mirror
"Will they take ownership of the issue, or continue to ask customers to pay for an entire new logic board when just the GPU fails?"
Seriously?
Apple has a history of acknowledging and providing free fixes for issues of this magnitude, if they're really affecting a significant percentage of the population. I've been the beneficiary of such a fix in the past myself.
Hell, that's even mentioned in the linked article:
Mid–2011 iMacs with AMD Radeon HD 6970 graphics cards experienced similar failures and in August of 2013, Apple initiated a Graphics Card Replacement Program for the computers, replacing the graphics cards of affected iMacs at no cost.
So with the MacRumors article having only come out yesterday, it seems pretty aggressively snide to be suggesting that Apple's going to ignore the issue.
Dan Aris
I care what he thinks. Apple's existence is actually ruining other platforms and their diversity. Look at how much Unity sucks. That's Apple's fault. Windows 8? Apple!
Apple's existence is doing nothing of the kind.
The fact that other companies have no idea how to design things people want on their own, so all they can do is copy what Apple does, is what is harmful to the diversity of style in the market.
Just because you don't like Apple doesn't mean you get to blame them when everyone else rips off their designs.
Dan Aris
Most of the things you mention are Office incorporating a new technology into it, not being entirely rewritten to be based on the new technology. It's way, way easier (IMNSHO) to bolt something like the ribbon onto Office than it is to port Office to a completely different UI paradigm.
All that said, you're totally right about the rest: Microsoft should have ported Office to Metro, however much effort it took to do so. It's not, after all, as though they don't have resources to throw at such a project.
Dan Aris
Not even Microsoft themselves managed to port Office, their most important asset, to Metro, yet.
To be fair (which isn't something I often am to Microsoft), Office has got to be one of the most godawful pieces of spaghetti-code nightmare that anyone has ever tried to port to anything.
I don't think the phrasing should be "not even" Office has been ported.
Dan Aris
"Give us what we want and we'll 'negotiate'" is not real negotiation.
"Put the gun down and we'll negotiate" is.
(And that's the great thing about arguments on the Internet: if you do come up with that snappy comeback hours later, you can actually reply with it ;-) )
Dan Aris
Wow. That's ultra liberal there. I like it. The fact that I'm fat is some corporation's fault! Twisted logic but beautifully done.
I know it's in vogue to blame everything on the individual, especially on the right, but you're getting bitten by reality's liberal bias here. There's lots and lots of stuff that individuals can't actually do to prevent corporations from polluting their environment in ways that have profound effects on their health.
Furthermore, the sooner we recognize that it is pretty much impossible that the marked upswing in obesity not only in people in the entire developed world (other countries do have some of the same problem, just to much lesser degrees), but also in laboratory animals in the US, could be caused entirely by a mysterious mass drop in personal responsibility over the past 40 years, the sooner we can actually start addressing the causes of the problem. You know, instead of just blaming the victim and hoping it will all go away.
Dan Aris
Better for SOME individuals within that society - not all individuals.
Right, and that I agreed with: it's better for those who can afford to buy extremely expensive, extremely high-quality health care.
For the rest of us, it's crap.
I don't think saying that "This system that we have is better for some people than the other systems, which show clearly better results on average for dramatically lower costs" is a particularly useful thing to do. It's like saying, "People like having more money," or, "Political systems that actively discourage corruption have less corruption."
Sure, it's true, but it's also painfully obvious, and not very helpful.
Dan Aris
I can argue that the average life expectancy is more a matter of lifestyle than health care. A lot of Americans, myself included, are obese. We live a sedentary lifestyle with food that's bad for us. We're victims of high living.
And why does the rest of the developed world not have the same problem to the same degree?
It's not "high living." A vastly disproportionate share of the obese are from lower-income Americans, not the wealthy.
We're not victims of our own success: we're victims of, in part, the agribusiness lobby's success. (Though from what I've been seeing lately, recent studies suggest that only part of the obesity epidemic can be traced to changes in diet. Some of it is from environmental causes, too—but they're also, by and large, due to big companies trying to make/save an extra buck at everyone else's expense.)
Dan Aris
"Give us what we want and we'll 'negotiate'" is not real negotiation.
Yes, you're absolutely right. And that's what the Republicans were saying.
"Stop acting like fucking idiots and threatening our entire economy and way of life, and we'll be willing to negotiate" is more like what the Democrats were saying.
Again, this manufactured crisis was in no way a standard negotiating tactic or anything a reasonable person would have done, or even expected. Rather than negotiate in good faith, or even try to put together a compromise budget, the Republicans chose to hold first the civil service, then the entire economy hostage in hopes of blackmailing the Democrats into killing or weakening a piece of legislation that was already a huge compromise, which the Supreme Court found to be constitutional, and which the Republicans have been utterly and completely unable to repeal or reduce through any of the normal, proper legislative channels.
If you think Dave was unreasonable for not giving Rob any of his money, then you, like a truly disturbing number of Americans, have some serious problems with understanding the dangerous and unprecedented level of partisanship at work and what it actually means.
Dan Aris
No thanks, I'll vote based on the individual's actual performance, not because some kind of sweeping generalization steeped in rhetoric.
There wasn't a single person in Congress, Democrat or Republican, who actually attempted to avert the shutdown.
That's a very simplistic—and somewhat wrongheaded—view of the way things actually happened.
Though it's not perfect, I liked this analogy I saw somewhere: Rob comes up to Dave and says, "Give me $100." Dave says no. Rob says, "All right, give me $50." Dave says no again. Rob says, "Come on, why can't you compromise with me?"
Suggesting that the Democrats should have "compromised" on this is little short of ludicrous. Holding first the civil service sector, then the entire economy hostage in an attempt to force through a measure that the Republicans want, but do not actually have the votes to achieve (even after they've tried dozens of times), is not a standard, or even sane, negotiating tactic. It is not "business as usual." The Democrats are not equally to blame for this as the Republicans.
I know we've been fed the idea for some time that the two sides of every issue are always equally valid, but you know what? That's total BS.
But, based on experience, you're probably just going to ignore and vilify me because I don't share your exact worldview.
Dan Aris
For society as a whole, we single payer countries tend to see better results. But per person, the healthcare in the US is the best. Assuming you have a good health insurance plan.
So...for the 1-5% who can afford platinum-level insurance plans, the US is the best healthcare system in the world!!!!!
But then there's the rest of us shlubs, who apparently just aren't worthy of being cared for.
(Here's a tip for you: the US, overall, has worse health care than other developed countries. For instance, the average life expectancy is about 1.3 years lower. And we pay vastly more. It is simply not possible for a system to both be worse for society as a whole, and better for all the individuals within that society.)
Dan Aris
What amazes me is that those people seriously considered a situation that could have had a devastating economical effect on the US.
You could say the very same thing about any big legislation. Many people myself included think this healthcare reform might have devastating long term economic effects on our nation yet it was considered and passed
No, that's really not true.
First of all, according to nonpartisan estimates, the ACA will reduce the deficit. But let's ignore that for the moment and assume that you're correct that it will raise the cost of government by a significant amount.
If that happens, how could we possibly solve such a problem? Could it be that we could...pass a law raising taxes? From their current historically low levels, particularly as a fraction of GDP? And particularly on the super-wealthy?
If I'm reading you right, what you're actually saying is that the ACA will cost money to implement, and cost money into the future as well. But you know what? Doing stuff for people costs money. Helping poor people costs money. Fixing the worst economic downturn and the worst economic inequalities in decades costs money. And I don't mean "costs money that we have to give to the super-wealthy, so they'll be even more super-wealthy." Trickle-down economics is a pretty solidly discredited theory by this point. Empirical evidence just doesn't bear it out.
And if you're one of the "all taxation is theft types," well, then, just screw you. You want to go live in a tax-free wilderness off the fruit of your own labour and no one else's, I suggest you up stakes and find some place in northern Canada without another soul for 50 miles in any direction, because anywhere in this country, you're already benefiting from the results of taxation. It was well over 100 years ago that Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr famously said, "I like taxes. With them, I buy civilization." And that's pretty much the way it works: If you want civilization, if you want to live as part of a society, particularly a modern society, you have no choice but to pay taxes to a central governing body of one sort or another. Because anything else is at least as much a theft from everyone else around you.
Dan Aris
So while the hardware may have merged, the software hasn't, and I think that's where too many people these days go wrong.
Well I would just refine that distinction in saying that the hardware and software have merged, but the interface hasn't. I foresee a possibility that we could each end up carrying around a computer that runs a single OS and a single set of applications, but where the interface conventions shift depending on the context. You dock it at a desk with a keyboard and mouse, and it behaves like a traditional desktop computer. You dock it in a laptop shell, and it expects you to use trackpad gestures. You dock it on a TV, and it lets you use some kind of remote control. You dock it in your car, and it expects you to use voice commands.
While that sounds awesome, I think one must remember that, while I'm sure Apple could (and would) do that well, you would also be depending on all the authors of the apps to program all the separate interfaces, and do so well, and not just say, "Ah, who cares about the car interface? I'll never want to use an app in the car, so why would anyone else!"
Dan Aris
Of course it does. Never heard the expression "racing towards the ground"?
No...but I have heard the expression "race to the bottom", which I suspect is what you're going for. :-)
Dan Aris
Dock the iPhone, you have a full computer. Undock it, and you have an iPhone with an appropriate UI. You could even develop the apps with a framework that runs the same app using a different UI depending on screen size. If you look at the developments and acquisitions Apple has made over the years, it seems like they're at least entertaining the idea of something like that.
If there is ever a convergence device like that, I'd buy the hell out of it :-)
That's definitely a possible way to move forward. I'm a little worried that we're starting to hit physical boundaries that hold back Moore's Law and may prevent something quite like that from being feasible, but if it does work out, I'd be more than pleased.
I think they key with that is, though, it still doesn't try to make "one UI to rule them all." It presents a full-touch UI when in "phone mode", and a traditional desktop UI when it "computer mode." So while the hardware may have merged, the software hasn't, and I think that's where too many people these days go wrong. They, like Microsoft, think that "convergence" means you have to have a single OS and single UI paradigm, even though you're dealing with two fundamentally different kinds of user interaction.
Dan Aris
Everything Apple has been doing since the iPhone has come out has been moving in one direction: Two operating systems, built on a common core, which share various elements that make sense.
Apple is not Microsoft. They don't think you have to have "one OS to rule them all." Apple knows that what's good for a touchscreen device is not as good for a traditional laptop or desktop.
Yes, they have taken some features from iOS and moved them over to Mac OS X. However, they're almost universally optional and/or superficial. You never have to use Launchpad if you don't want, and all the autosaving features can be disabled if you prefer to work under the more traditional document management paradigm.
This idea is one that has been often proclaimed quite loudly by critics of Apple who say that everything's going to be locked down and if you buy a Mac, it'll be exactly like an iPad with a keyboard, but it doesn't have any real basis in reality.
Dan Aris
I can't wait to hear how the pundits will spin this as yet more evidence that Apple is a has-been company. Probably something along the lines of, "See? Apple is nothing but a cult! This proves it, and thus they are propped up by the Apple-faithful, not real people," or maybe, "This shows that Apple has abandoned innovation to focus on profits." And then there's the old favourite, "This would never have happened while Steve Jobs was alive!"
If there is bad news about Apple, it means Apple's doomed.
If there is neutral news about Apple, it means Apple's doomed.
If there is amazingly fantastic news about Apple, it still means Apple's doomed.
Dan Aris
Apple screws up and the "tech" press focuses on the positives and finds a way to spin the negatives into a positive.
Have you been reading the same tech press I have? The ones that have found ways to spin "Apple sells record 9 million iPhones on launch weekend" as "Apple is Doomed"?
The press—tech and otherwise—has been loudly heralding Apple's demise for years now, no matter what Apple actually does.
Dan Aris
Except those of us old enough to remember the Microsoft bailout.... When Apple clearly didnt know what they were doing but instead were rehashing product lines over and over...
You mean...before Steve Jobs came back and restructured the entire company, not just changing the way they do everything, but proving both to Apple and the world that by doing things his way, they can make vast amounts of money?
Dan Aris
Except Apples profits are falling
IIRC (I don't have the figures in front of me), it is their profit growth that is falling, not their profits themselves.
Dan Aris
You can worry about them all you want, but there hasn't been any indication so far that Apple's actually having any trouble. Every new iPhone released still tops the sales of the previous one. Their profits continue to grow.
Apple has always been a "niche product." They never had a dominant marketshare in smartphones, so you can't say that that's something they've lost, and people still see their products as being "cool" and worth the premium price they have traditionally commanded.
Dan Aris
Apple has shown time and again that, as far as the public is concerned, they know what they're doing.
But because they don't bring out something as amazing as the iPhone and the iPad were when they were first announced every single month, everything they do do gets panned as "not revolutionary enough," "more proof that without Jobs, Apple is DOOOOMED," etc.
So, in the minds of most of the pundits today, yes, Apple made a mistake by releasing two new iPhones. They also would have made a mistake if they had released one new iPhone, or three, or a smartwatch, or a smart TV, or a bloody time machine. No matter what Apple does, the tech press have to find ways to make it fit the narrative of "Apple is Doomed." That's pretty much all there is to it.
If you read the Macalope column over at MacWorld (and read it with a grain or two of salt, of course, because it's primarily intended to be humorous...but it still cuts deep a lot of the time), you can see him point out a lot of the glaring inconsistencies and habitual methods of trying to twist reality to make Apple's successes sound like failures. (Like the old favourite, "compare Apple's current products to hypothetical future products from its competitors.")
Dan Aris
That your fingerprints are all over your phones.
I believe mythbusters showed how trivial it was to bypass fingerprint protections by making your own "finger" from said prints? (This time on an electronic door lock).
Except that various people have already been investigating the fingerprint reading technology Apple is using, and they seem to think that it's really not that easy, because they're using a more robust technique than the classic scan-the-surface-optically method.
Dan Aris
Obviously we don't have the data for the iPhone 5S and 5C yet, but based on every single previous iDevice release ever, I don't think Apple has a problem with people not being excited. People have been buying their products in ever-increasing numbers for over a decade now.
The people who are vocally un-excited are the pundits. You know, the ones who, in order to keep money coming in, have to keep writing about something amazing and new that gets people excited—or about some scandal. The ones who are quite happy to compare existing Apple products to rumoured or vaguely announced future Samsung, Google, or Microsoft products—and compare their own straw-man versions of rumoured future Apple products to current and rumoured future products from competitors—and in all cases, find Apple's products wanting, no matter how many convolutions and fabrications they have to go through to achieve that.
I'm honestly not sure whether to believe the more paranoid people who have alleged it to be deliberately orchestrated, but there has certainly been a smear campaign targeting Apple...approximately since it failed to produce the iHolodeck on schedule the day people stopped being interested in reading about the release of the iPad. If you pay any attention to it—and read it without a raging anti-Apple prejudice—it's pretty obvious that there is a huge volume of "Apple is DOOOOOOMED" articles being written with practically no evidence to back up any of the (often quite wild) claims made in them.
And yes, I realize that one of the factions on Slashdot right now does, in fact, have a raging anti-Apple prejudice, but come on, people; this is supposed to be a site for smart people. Turn on your brains a little, quit the knee-jerk reactions, and actually apply a little critical thinking when you see someone writing about how the smartphone that Apple will not even announce for months has already failed and doomed the company, or other similar such ridiculous notions.
Dan Aris
I've been using Parallels over VMWare Fusion for a few years now (there has been some good bundle pricing on it, and there were some features it had that VMWare lacked at the time when I was deciding, though I don't recall what those were now).
Unless this turns out to be a tempest in a teacup or otherwise invented or overblown, I won't be doing that anymore, and VMWare will have gained back a customer.
Dan Aris
Why not just use VirtualBox? Or are you not touching that due to Oracle having their fingers in it?
I've used it, but as MightyYar says, it doesn't do as much as VMWare Fusion or Parallels on the Mac. It 3D support, for instance, still leaves a lot to be desired.
Dan Aris