I use XP in VPC on a PowerBook G4 12-inch 867. It ain't fast. Win 98 is much faster. (NT and 95 are faster still, but I don't use them.) However, when XP shipped it was even worse, and some tweaks improved things. (These are from memory, so some of it might not be perfectly accurate.) - Right-click on the desktop, choose Properties, choose Themes, and go with the Windows classic desktop. Just giving it a solid blue desktop (part of the theme) seems to speed things up a lot. - Right click on My Computer and somewhere in there are performance settings which you can customize for UI prettiness. Turn them all off. - Right click on the Toolbar and find where it gives you the option for Classic style menus. This really seems to make a big difference.
Back in the OS 6/7/8/9 days, it was possible to make ZTerm (or most any serial app) work with Telnet by installing a telnet tool for the Communications Toolbox. This registered with the OS as a serial port, and if a program wanted to talk to it, it would make a telnet connection to wherever you had configured it to. (There were several of these; a popular free one is called "TGE TCP Tool" and it can be easily found. Info-Mac is also a good place to look.)
Essentially, all serial communications in the OS was abstracted, which was hugely advanced over the hard-mapping to COM ports in the DOS/Windows world -- this way, a serial app could connect by any means to anything, as long as there was a Comm Toolbox tool to do it. There were a couple of terminal apps -- Mark/Space had one and Aladdin also released SitCOMM -- which included a bunch of these tools for a variety of connection and download possibilities (YMODEM, anyone?).
Anyway, OS X has the same idea, though it's no longer called the Communications Toolbox. There are an arbitrary number of serial ports, and you can choose which one you want to talk to by holding down Shift as ZTerm launches or by looking in its "Modem Preferences." If you've ever set up a Bluetooth dialup connection, for example, you'll see multiple ports. Unfortunately, I doubt anyone has created a port extension which creates a telnet connection, as had been done for OS 9.
I was hoping, when I started typing this, that it would be possible to run ZTerm 1.0.1 in Classic and have it recognize and use a classic Telnet tool, but I checked it out and no dice. Nothing shows up in its port list. Oh well.
While there's nothing particularly good about the onboard audio, I'm not sure why it would benefit the average consumer, or pro, to pay the extra it would cost to have a card, and to lose the slot. If you just need your Mac to generate some kind of sound, like most people do, what it comes with is fine. If you can actually hear the difference, you can use the optical connectors on a G5, or buy an outboard USB D/A converter for as low as $40, such as Griffin Technology's iMic. While having onboard sound is certainly inferior to having it on a card, having it on a card is inferior to having it outside the box entirely.
The entire Mac audio subsystem is digital -- the line in/out are at the very end of the foodchain. Even when you play a CD, it is always being ripped -- there's nothing connected to the analog audio connectors on the drive. If you use Apple's "eyeball" speakers, they connect to a digital audio connector and do the D/A outside the box. Some models (many iBooks) don't even have line in, and one model (Cube) didn't even have line out. The expectation is that you'd want all the bits, in either direction, to be converted outside of the machine, for the reasons you mention.
Eventually they realized this was a nuisance for most customers, so they put analog line in and out back on the board, but with no expectation that audio pros would use them. So yes, I'll concede your point that it's a "shitty onboard soundcard," but I'm just not sure that it matters that much. I'd rather have the machine cost less, have the slot open, and do my D/A conversion outside of the box.
They've never really come down in price -- the original AirPort was $300, and it was a year before anything comparable was beneath $1000. After that first AirPort (man was that great) I have only bought sub-$100 routers, but I generally recommend AirPorts to Mac-based (or mixed-platform) clients, because they just work and are easier to configure than web-client based routers if you are running Mac OS X.
It also has some unique features, which admittedly I don't use often, but: There is the ability for multiple AirPorts to represent themselves as a single access point by linking together *wirelessly* to create a Wireless Distribution System (this is cool, believe me). The modem model can be a standalone dial-in PPP server to your LAN. The WAN port is autosensing, so it can be attached to any type of jack. It has a software control to be a dumb access point (bridges wireless to ethernet, no DHCP or NAT). The modem makes a nice fallback for the LAN if the DSL goes out. If you've got a Mac, firmware updates are announced and delievered periodically, and with these sometimes come new features. Also for Mac users, WPA and WEP passwords are handled seamlessly.
There's probably no reason for a tech-savvy person to buy it except maybe for WDS or PPP. But for a non-techie Mac user who wants it to Just Work, and knows where to go/call if it doesn't, it's a sure bet.
I was there. Copland overwhelmingly failed for technical reasons; the claim about MS refusing to do Word for it is silly. Apple tried to make an OS with memory protection and preemption and all that, but which could still remain code-compatible with existing apps without an internal emulation environment (which is what X and NT/2000/XP uses). The result was a dismal failure. It was an enormous, mismanaged project which had numerous separate development threads which literally could not be properly integrated. There was exactly one developer release (DR0, IIRC) that went out to like 25 developers. It required two machines just to run it, if I recall (the other to run a debugger). It did almost nothing without crashing. To suggest that Word was the big issue is just bogus.
I was at Apple during the MkLinux/OpenDoc/CyberDog days, so let me offer some correction for the record. - A/UX was long dead before Jobs returned to Apple. The only Unix Apple was selling at that time was AIX, which drove their completely unsuccessful Network Server boxes -- but it wasn't Apple's Unix, it was IBM's, and it could not run Mac software in any way. It was pointless to keep. - OpenDoc was conceptually cool, but Apple did a poor job at deploying it. The few developers who had decided to adopt early were punished by finding their applications incompatible with each new OpenDoc release. Users were also confused; OpenDoc was never properly integrated into the OS, so the net effect was that the handful of apps which supported it had weird menus (a "Document" menu instead of a "File" menu, for example) and took forever to launch. By the time Jobs was on the scene, Apple was already in crisis, with years of OS development work scrapped, and OpenDoc was going nowhere, with few developers on board. I would have loved to have seen the technology evolve, but I couldn't blame any manager for deciding it wasn't the best place to use resources. - Cyberdog was not a real competitor; it was a nice proof of concept for OpenDoc, but it couldn't do half of what NS and IE could do, even back then. Most Mac users didn't even know it was there, and Apple never pushed it as a primary browser. - MkLinux was evolving at a snail's pace, if at all. By the time Jobs was around, most users who wanted Linux on their Mac were running Linux PPC, myself included.
And so now we have Darwin, which uses much of the same foundation as MkLinux. We've got a BSD Unix, like A/UX. We've got a high quality browser in Safari. And rather than three separate products, it's all in one well-integrated product. It's true don't have a document-oriented computing paradigm, and that is too bad. It is one of the many brilliant ideas and technologies Apple has developed and shelved. But to suggest that somehow A/UX, AIX, MkLinux and CyberDog were fantastic technologies which were superior to OS X is fantasy.
OGG vs AAC has nothing to do with principle or being able to copy from the iPod. It is not AAC that makes the iPod a one-way device; MP3's behave exactly the same way. There are about fifty shareware and freeware apps that will copy them off; they just live in an invisible folder. If Apple were to ever support OGG on the iPod, which they won't, I'm sure they would implement it the same way: can't copy the songs back from the iPod, at least out of the box.
Perhaps you are confusing the protected AAC's sold on the iTunes music store; the movement of those is indeed restricted. But those you rip yourself behave no differently than MP3 or OGG.
AIFF isn't the format used on CD's. CD's are Redbook audio, which is (iirc) a continuous stream of PCM samples with all track information stored in one TOC area for the whole disc. AIFF and WAV are similar, but each wrap their own unique header information around each track.
Mac OS X misrepresent CD tracks as AIFF files in the Finder, but it does make for a good user experience, since you can just drag and drop tracks off the CD without really having to know that the player is performing redbook audio extraction.
I don't understand what people are so worked up about here, other than looking for reasons to hate Microsoft. Obviously, the whole point of Safari is to compete with Internet Explorer, right? Microsoft currently gets Internet Explorer installed as the default browser on new Macs, which has been the case for five years now (since the famous "$150 million handshake"). Apple releases Safari. MS can see the writing on the wall: in 10.3, Safari will be the default browser. IE might not even be on the box. What's in it for them to keep updating it? Apple releases Safari, Microsoft goes "we quit." Hooray! Isn't this a good thing?
Note that this is a different situation than if MS pulled Office tomorrow -- Mac users need Office, because of the need for document interchange. IE has no such concerns -- and Mac users have no serious alternative to Office right now. If they pulled Office, it would be anticompetitive. If Apple releases a pro-level office suite with good MS compatibility, and then MS killed Office, it might be justified.
While it is (mostly) true that Java 1.4.1 is backwards compatbile with 1.3.1, it is not true that Apple Java 1.4.1 is backwards compatible with Apple Java 1.3.1, which is why both remain present for end users as well as developers. To wit, QTJava is different, JDirect no longer exists, the com.apple.mrj.* API's have all been deprecated or outright removed, a number of the environment properties have changed, etc. (this stuff is all documented in the Release Notes, which is required reading IMO). In addition, there are a very small number of incompatibilities between 1.3.1 and 1.4.1 in Sun Java itself, at least during compile time.
So if your 1.3.1 app uses any Mac-specific functions, you may need to rewrite them for 1.4.1 compatibility. However, if it is bundled as a Mac OS X app, it will (as stated above) get 1.3.1 by default, so end-users will have no problems with any existing applications (that's the Apple Way).
The rules for whether you get 1.3.1 or 1.4.1 are:
command line:
You get 1.4.1 by default. If you want 1.3, you need to execute:
(javac is in the same directory if you need the compiler or other tools)
btw I have no idea why there is a space in "Versions" above: if you see it, it shouldn't be there
double-clicked jar files:
You always get 1.4.1.
Mac OS X bundles:
You get 1.3.1 by default. How to specify 1.4.1 depends on whether the app was made with MRJAppBuilder (from the 1.3.1 Dev Tools) or Jar Bundler (from 1.4.1 Dev Tools). For MRJAppBuilder apps, add this line to YourApp.app/Contents/Resources/MRJApp.properties:
com.apple.mrj.application.JVMVersion=1.4*
For Jar Builder apps, in the YourApp.app/Contents/Info.plist file, in the Java section add a key called JVMVersion with a value of 1.4* (you can use the Property List Editor or a text editor).
All this and more is documented in the Release Notes.
If you have a ReplayTV 4xxx-5xxx, you can use DVArchive), which is certainly one of the best Java-written end-user apps I have ever seen. (Full disclosure: I packaged the Mac OS X version, but I did not write the app.)
Um, I know this argument can be argued from a thousand sides, but I'll try to offer something "intelligent".
Your example isn't really a fair comparison. You're talking about computers which are several years old as a parallel for what's available today. The Mac you are using is running Mac OS 9 or earlier, which even Mac fans admit is an antiquated, inefficient operating system on a par with Windows 98, which is the only OS it can be reasonably compared to. Your PC is running Windows NT, which is a modern operating system. On the other hand, NT 4.0 used to cost $$ and couldn't run many consumer applications of the time, so Microsoft sold a billion copies of 95 and 98, which were much slower and more unstable, but more compatible and more consumer-friendly. So you could as easily ask why anyone would buy a PC with 98 when they could use NT instead.
So if your question is "Why use Mac OS 9 instead of Windows NT," the answer might be "no good reason," or the answer might also be "to use a well-supported, consumer-oriented operating system which runs almost every title ever written for the platform."
If you want to ask why use Mac OS 9 over Windows 98, it's an easier question to answer: Windows 98, is in my experience, equivalently unstable, unreliable, slow, and bad at multitasking. Furthermore, it's harder to configure in many cases, especially when it comes to hardware matters. You just don't have hardware conflicts in the same way on a Mac. Some of the error messages are utterly incomprehensible. Some simple things (dial-up networking, for example) are needlessly cumbersome to configure. etc. The Mac experience is both smoother and more attractive, in my opinion.
If you want to compare current day Macs to current day PC's, meaning, why use Mac OS X versus Windows XP, it can be argued either way. It's close. They're both modern, stable, operating systems. (Mac OS X has as much in common with OS 9 as Windows XP does with Windows 3.1).
There's more software and more support for XP. But Mac OS X appeals to people for whom aesthetics matter more. The whole experience is more geared around the pleasure of using it. The hardware looks good. The software looks good. I realize these are frivolities in the eyes of many, but to me it's like "Why drive an ugly car if I really enjoy driving a nice one." "Why work in an ugly office if I can work in a nice one."
For programmers and techies, Mac OS X is all Unix, all the time, so there's really no end of low-level fun that can be had in Mac OS X, and Mac users are no longer on a software island, as the wealth of existing Unix software runs on OS X. Also, the hardware is cool. Apple was the first to introduce consumer wireless networking, and were by far the price and performance leader there for at least a year. They were the first to popularize USB, despite its being available on PC motherboards for a long time. The Ethernet ports on new Macs autosense, eliminating the need for a crossover cable. They have Gigabit ethernet in their laptops. Their wireless base station, which has a modem in it, can be a standalone PPP server. Their BIOS is an entire Forth programming environment (so that you can write preloaded drivers for your cards) in which you can perform two-machine debugging via Telnet. I can't even remember half the stuff they were first to market with in their machines. Even now, how many PC laptops integrate both Wireless antennas and bluetooth? Have you ever seen the quality of an Apple LCD display, such as those built into the new iMacs?
For consumers and creative people, the Mac has tools that are simply without parallel on the Windows side, such as the iApps, which are included with the OS.
As far as performance goes, I think XP probably has the edge, but not by much, and there's more to computing than performance alone. It's how well the computer works with you. It's seamlessly connecting and disconnecting from wired and wireless networks without you even knowing about it. (Getting wireless cards to work on a PC can be horrible.) It's little touches, details in the OS, that demonstrate that someone was really thinking about how people use a computer, both newbies and geeks. For YEARS now, from like Mac OS 7.5 days, you've been able to make a disc image of any volume, hard drive, floppy, CD, whatever, and then "mount" it as though it were actually inserted. You know how much more pleasant this makes multidisc CD-ROM games? Or to prepare a CD for mastering? Does it really make sense to have every volume married to a letter, as opposed to having a proper name of its own?
Anyway, I'm not trying to start a war either, but I'm trying to say that I think there are good reasons for choosing a Windows machine or choosing a Mac, depending on what's important to you. Neither is inherently the right computer to buy. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Personally, I think that Windows just simply doesn't make as much sense to me, and I spend more time having to figure things out. The fact that in 2003 the whole file system is filled with nonsensical 8.3 filenames seems insane to me. I find messages during software installation like "such and such component is older than the one you have installed on your system. Do you want to replace it?" to be entirely useless, since either answer could have serious consequences.
But at a minimum, I'd say you owe it to yourself to look at the latest versions of Windows and Mac OS on new hardware if you're going to challenge why it would be that someone would choose one over the other. A lot of these things I mention apply to Mac OS 9 as readily as Mac OS X -- you just have to deal with the instability headaches that are now thankfully gone. But the point is that there have STILL always been advantages to using a Mac, even if it meant sacrifices in other ways.
Ivan.
One thing people seem to forget is that there is a viable market of reasonably priced CPU upgrades for Macs, and always has been. If booting into OS 9 is required for you, AND you want to have the fastest machine out there, you can always go buy a first-generation G4 on eBay or from a reseller for not much money and stick a dual 1GHZ CPU in it, or whatever is current then. Then you can be nice and fast, and run OS 9 all you want to. What is the big deal here?
It would be easy to make new machines non-9 bootable if they wanted to. While obviously new machines don't yet exist to know what they will or won't do, all versions of Mac OS since 7.1check hardware doing bootup to see if they're supposed to load on that machine, and if they're not, they put up a message that says "get a newer version of the OS". If a newer version hadn't yet been released, the OS the system came with had a "System Enabler " file which permitted booting on that machine, but a vanilla version of the same system (which didn't have the enabler) would not. Often this enabler would contain important patches to support hardware on that machine.
Their latest machines evidently identify themselves to vanilla OS 9.2.2 as supported hardware, so it loads ok. Their future machines may not work so well. Or, as you say, they may simply not have OS 9 installed on them, but a 9.2.2 CD (if you already have one, since they're nearly unavailable as a new product even now) *might* install on them.
But I doubt it. By ditching 9 support, they free themselves to make whatever architectural changes they like to the hardware without having to support it in both operating systems. It may be possible for someone to hack 9 to boot on new hardware, and they probably will. But if there are major changes on the board, it may not do much good.
By abandoning 9, they also are preparing people for a possible transition to another CPU at some point, which 9 certainly won't support (but Classic might be able to, if they add an instruction set emulator).
One final comment: while superficially similar to what Apple has always done when they introduce new hardware, it is worth considering that X is a completely different operating system than 9, and that has never happened before. Even with all of its changes, System 7 was still an evolution of System 6, and most software still ran on it -- probably ALL software that followed the rules. Not so here. In my experience, MOST things work in Classic, but some things simply do not. Astarte CD-Copy (which is out of production anyway, since Apple bought Astarte and rolled the technology into their iApps) is a great utility, but it touches hardware, so it can't work in Classic, and there's no equivalent. As many noted, many games simply don't perform well in Classic.
I'm not saying Apple shouldn't do this, while I'm suprised they're doing it this quickly, but it was obvious that it was coming some day. But I'm also just saying it's not a case of "They've always done this." I don't think there's been a case where they've introduced new hardware that is incompatible with the percentage of software that will not work correctly in Classic.
It has to do with Apple's marketing and business strategy. As anyone who has been following Apple since the Jobs coup knows, a very significant part of Apple's business strategy is having products whose designs are unique, cool, groundbreaking, beautiful, distinctive. This is the most salient way they distinguish themselves from the competition in the marketplace. It wouldn't matter what their features are; if they didn't continually introduce new and striking designs, they are just another beige box in the consumer's eyes. And this is one of the reason that Apple foundered in the mid-90's; once Windows 95 came out, the public no longer saw a distinction in the company's machines. While the company has brought out a new operating system, applications, and great hardware features, it is the LOOK of the machine that first gets people's attention, and contributes largely to the company's resurgence.
The old and new iMac, Cube, first iBook, PowerBook G4 (Titanium), iPod, these are all machines that completely stood out in their own right when they were released. Not every one of these machines were successful -- the Cube was physically cool but overpriced and overlapping in function with the desktops -- but even that vitally furthered Apple's goal of having their brand associated with trendsetting originality. The eMac, you will note, is not one of these machines. Its design is not distinctive (anymore).
The eMac offers features you can't get from any of their other products. It has a flat-tube CRT. It's an all-in-one with a 17" screen. It's got audio in, which no other desktop has. It's probably got other stuff. What this means is that of course there are going to be people who want it, because it does offer a combination of features not offered elsewhere in the lineup.
But it would be a marketing catastrophe to sell it generally. The new iMac is flying off the shelves and that's in part because of its wildly unique design. It has drawn attention. If they released the eMac INSTEAD of the new iMac (after all, it's the logical extension of what they already had), I bet they'd sell half as many despite similar features. Their brand is heavily invested in pushing the new iMac's unique design.
The eMac is a blob, basically a large version of the once trendsetting but now stale original iMac design. It is function over form -- and, as others have noted, it's extremely functional for a school, in that it's likely to withstand far more abuse than the new iMac. So they could sell it to all, and people might buy it for its feature set and attractive price, but they would be diluting the brand value. The brand stands for cutting edge design. The new iMac symbolizes that. The eMac does not.
Furthermore, to bring out the eMac would completely confuse the market in the way the Cube did. It fits somewhere in between the original iMacs, which they still sell, and the new iMacs, with some features from the G4 desktops! The price points even somewhat overlap.
Apple probably would have been happy to keep selling original iMacs to schools, but they have an aggressive competitor in the form of Dell. They had to come out with a competitive school offering. It had to be durable, it had to be powerful, it had to be cheap. But they don't want this machine to compete with the model they're trying to build their brand around; in fact the design demands of this machine are at odds with what they are currently building their brand around. You'll note that the eMac even has an entirely different font (quite similar to the Newton font actually...). They want it to be perceived as something unrelated to the consumer line.
The eMac IS Apple's beige box. It needs to be, for its market. But Apple is not a beige box company. They're a style company. The eMac is out of style even before it's released. For people who strictly want feature set and price point, there's the wide open world of Wintel. I know that there are those who just want the OS and the hardware features, and during the clone era you could have that -- and this was when Apple was struggling the most, and their brand meant the least.
By not introducing the eMac into their general line of computers, they don't stoop to yesterday's features either. They don't want to sell a computer with just a CD-ROM; they want to be able to say that their comptuers Rip, Mix and Burn. The eMac allows them the luxury of going cheap where they need to (and I'm willing to bet that the CD-ROM was a matter of cost rather than security, to bring it in at $999) to serve that market.
If you want to customize your computer with exactly what you want, that's why there are PC's. Apple's never been about giving you all the options possible; they've been about "this is what we think you should have." It's just what you have to accept about them. The orignal Mac, for all of its humanism, was also a kind of technological fascism: no slots, no expandability, no parallel port, Torx screws recessed in a 6-inch well just to deter Joe hobbyist. You don't need to open the computer. This is what you need. When the iMac was introduced, you got no serial and no floppy. People flipped. Jobs didn't care. They could give you the new iMac with just a CD-ROM, and sell it for cheaper, but they don't. It's not what they want their brand to be about. They want their brand to be about the future.
A final note: People seem to be saying "Why don't they sell these, I like their prices for the features you get." Apple's educational prices are ALWAYS cheaper than their retail prices. If they sold this machine generally it seems like the price point would be not far from the new iMac. And which would you rather have?
Ivan.
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I use XP in VPC on a PowerBook G4 12-inch 867. It ain't fast. Win 98 is much faster. (NT and 95 are faster still, but I don't use them.) However, when XP shipped it was even worse, and some tweaks improved things. (These are from memory, so some of it might not be perfectly accurate.)
- Right-click on the desktop, choose Properties, choose Themes, and go with the Windows classic desktop. Just giving it a solid blue desktop (part of the theme) seems to speed things up a lot.
- Right click on My Computer and somewhere in there are performance settings which you can customize for UI prettiness. Turn them all off.
- Right click on the Toolbar and find where it gives you the option for Classic style menus. This really seems to make a big difference.
Ivan.
Back in the OS 6/7/8/9 days, it was possible to make ZTerm (or most any serial app) work with Telnet by installing a telnet tool for the Communications Toolbox. This registered with the OS as a serial port, and if a program wanted to talk to it, it would make a telnet connection to wherever you had configured it to. (There were several of these; a popular free one is called "TGE TCP Tool" and it can be easily found. Info-Mac is also a good place to look.)
Essentially, all serial communications in the OS was abstracted, which was hugely advanced over the hard-mapping to COM ports in the DOS/Windows world -- this way, a serial app could connect by any means to anything, as long as there was a Comm Toolbox tool to do it. There were a couple of terminal apps -- Mark/Space had one and Aladdin also released SitCOMM -- which included a bunch of these tools for a variety of connection and download possibilities (YMODEM, anyone?).
Anyway, OS X has the same idea, though it's no longer called the Communications Toolbox. There are an arbitrary number of serial ports, and you can choose which one you want to talk to by holding down Shift as ZTerm launches or by looking in its "Modem Preferences." If you've ever set up a Bluetooth dialup connection, for example, you'll see multiple ports. Unfortunately, I doubt anyone has created a port extension which creates a telnet connection, as had been done for OS 9.
I was hoping, when I started typing this, that it would be possible to run ZTerm 1.0.1 in Classic and have it recognize and use a classic Telnet tool, but I checked it out and no dice. Nothing shows up in its port list. Oh well.
While there's nothing particularly good about the onboard audio, I'm not sure why it would benefit the average consumer, or pro, to pay the extra it would cost to have a card, and to lose the slot. If you just need your Mac to generate some kind of sound, like most people do, what it comes with is fine. If you can actually hear the difference, you can use the optical connectors on a G5, or buy an outboard USB D/A converter for as low as $40, such as Griffin Technology's iMic. While having onboard sound is certainly inferior to having it on a card, having it on a card is inferior to having it outside the box entirely.
The entire Mac audio subsystem is digital -- the line in/out are at the very end of the foodchain. Even when you play a CD, it is always being ripped -- there's nothing connected to the analog audio connectors on the drive. If you use Apple's "eyeball" speakers, they connect to a digital audio connector and do the D/A outside the box. Some models (many iBooks) don't even have line in, and one model (Cube) didn't even have line out. The expectation is that you'd want all the bits, in either direction, to be converted outside of the machine, for the reasons you mention.
Eventually they realized this was a nuisance for most customers, so they put analog line in and out back on the board, but with no expectation that audio pros would use them. So yes, I'll concede your point that it's a "shitty onboard soundcard," but I'm just not sure that it matters that much. I'd rather have the machine cost less, have the slot open, and do my D/A conversion outside of the box.
They've never really come down in price -- the original AirPort was $300, and it was a year before anything comparable was beneath $1000. After that first AirPort (man was that great) I have only bought sub-$100 routers, but I generally recommend AirPorts to Mac-based (or mixed-platform) clients, because they just work and are easier to configure than web-client based routers if you are running Mac OS X.
It also has some unique features, which admittedly I don't use often, but: There is the ability for multiple AirPorts to represent themselves as a single access point by linking together *wirelessly* to create a Wireless Distribution System (this is cool, believe me). The modem model can be a standalone dial-in PPP server to your LAN. The WAN port is autosensing, so it can be attached to any type of jack. It has a software control to be a dumb access point (bridges wireless to ethernet, no DHCP or NAT). The modem makes a nice fallback for the LAN if the DSL goes out. If you've got a Mac, firmware updates are announced and delievered periodically, and with these sometimes come new features. Also for Mac users, WPA and WEP passwords are handled seamlessly.
There's probably no reason for a tech-savvy person to buy it except maybe for WDS or PPP. But for a non-techie Mac user who wants it to Just Work, and knows where to go/call if it doesn't, it's a sure bet.
I was there. Copland overwhelmingly failed for technical reasons; the claim about MS refusing to do Word for it is silly. Apple tried to make an OS with memory protection and preemption and all that, but which could still remain code-compatible with existing apps without an internal emulation environment (which is what X and NT/2000/XP uses). The result was a dismal failure. It was an enormous, mismanaged project which had numerous separate development threads which literally could not be properly integrated. There was exactly one developer release (DR0, IIRC) that went out to like 25 developers. It required two machines just to run it, if I recall (the other to run a debugger). It did almost nothing without crashing. To suggest that Word was the big issue is just bogus.
I was at Apple during the MkLinux/OpenDoc/CyberDog days, so let me offer some correction for the record.
- A/UX was long dead before Jobs returned to Apple. The only Unix Apple was selling at that time was AIX, which drove their completely unsuccessful Network Server boxes -- but it wasn't Apple's Unix, it was IBM's, and it could not run Mac software in any way. It was pointless to keep.
- OpenDoc was conceptually cool, but Apple did a poor job at deploying it. The few developers who had decided to adopt early were punished by finding their applications incompatible with each new OpenDoc release. Users were also confused; OpenDoc was never properly integrated into the OS, so the net effect was that the handful of apps which supported it had weird menus (a "Document" menu instead of a "File" menu, for example) and took forever to launch. By the time Jobs was on the scene, Apple was already in crisis, with years of OS development work scrapped, and OpenDoc was going nowhere, with few developers on board. I would have loved to have seen the technology evolve, but I couldn't blame any manager for deciding it wasn't the best place to use resources.
- Cyberdog was not a real competitor; it was a nice proof of concept for OpenDoc, but it couldn't do half of what NS and IE could do, even back then. Most Mac users didn't even know it was there, and Apple never pushed it as a primary browser.
- MkLinux was evolving at a snail's pace, if at all. By the time Jobs was around, most users who wanted Linux on their Mac were running Linux PPC, myself included.
And so now we have Darwin, which uses much of the same foundation as MkLinux. We've got a BSD Unix, like A/UX. We've got a high quality browser in Safari. And rather than three separate products, it's all in one well-integrated product. It's true don't have a document-oriented computing paradigm, and that is too bad. It is one of the many brilliant ideas and technologies Apple has developed and shelved. But to suggest that somehow A/UX, AIX, MkLinux and CyberDog were fantastic technologies which were superior to OS X is fantasy.
OGG vs AAC has nothing to do with principle or being able to copy from the iPod. It is not AAC that makes the iPod a one-way device; MP3's behave exactly the same way. There are about fifty shareware and freeware apps that will copy them off; they just live in an invisible folder. If Apple were to ever support OGG on the iPod, which they won't, I'm sure they would implement it the same way: can't copy the songs back from the iPod, at least out of the box.
Perhaps you are confusing the protected AAC's sold on the iTunes music store; the movement of those is indeed restricted. But those you rip yourself behave no differently than MP3 or OGG.
AIFF isn't the format used on CD's. CD's are Redbook audio, which is (iirc) a continuous stream of PCM samples with all track information stored in one TOC area for the whole disc. AIFF and WAV are similar, but each wrap their own unique header information around each track.
Mac OS X misrepresent CD tracks as AIFF files in the Finder, but it does make for a good user experience, since you can just drag and drop tracks off the CD without really having to know that the player is performing redbook audio extraction.
I don't understand what people are so worked up about here, other than looking for reasons to hate Microsoft. Obviously, the whole point of Safari is to compete with Internet Explorer, right? Microsoft currently gets Internet Explorer installed as the default browser on new Macs, which has been the case for five years now (since the famous "$150 million handshake"). Apple releases Safari. MS can see the writing on the wall: in 10.3, Safari will be the default browser. IE might not even be on the box. What's in it for them to keep updating it? Apple releases Safari, Microsoft goes "we quit." Hooray! Isn't this a good thing? Note that this is a different situation than if MS pulled Office tomorrow -- Mac users need Office, because of the need for document interchange. IE has no such concerns -- and Mac users have no serious alternative to Office right now. If they pulled Office, it would be anticompetitive. If Apple releases a pro-level office suite with good MS compatibility, and then MS killed Office, it might be justified.
So if your 1.3.1 app uses any Mac-specific functions, you may need to rewrite them for 1.4.1 compatibility. However, if it is bundled as a Mac OS X app, it will (as stated above) get 1.3.1 by default, so end-users will have no problems with any existing applications (that's the Apple Way).
The rules for whether you get 1.3.1 or 1.4.1 are:
command line:
You get 1.4.1 by default. If you want 1.3, you need to execute:(javac is in the same directory if you need the compiler or other tools)
btw I have no idea why there is a space in "Versions" above: if you see it, it shouldn't be there
double-clicked jar files:
You always get 1.4.1.
Mac OS X bundles:
You get 1.3.1 by default. How to specify 1.4.1 depends on whether the app was made with MRJAppBuilder (from the 1.3.1 Dev Tools) or Jar Bundler (from 1.4.1 Dev Tools). For MRJAppBuilder apps, add this line to YourApp.app/Contents/Resources/MRJApp.properties: For Jar Builder apps, in the YourApp.app/Contents/Info.plist file, in the Java section add a key called JVMVersion with a value of 1.4* (you can use the Property List Editor or a text editor).
All this and more is documented in the Release Notes.
Ivan.
If you have a ReplayTV 4xxx-5xxx, you can use DVArchive), which is certainly one of the best Java-written end-user apps I have ever seen. (Full disclosure: I packaged the Mac OS X version, but I did not write the app.)
Ivan.
Sorry about the formatting. Dammit. Like it said, I should have previewed.
Um, I know this argument can be argued from a thousand sides, but I'll try to offer something "intelligent". Your example isn't really a fair comparison. You're talking about computers which are several years old as a parallel for what's available today. The Mac you are using is running Mac OS 9 or earlier, which even Mac fans admit is an antiquated, inefficient operating system on a par with Windows 98, which is the only OS it can be reasonably compared to. Your PC is running Windows NT, which is a modern operating system. On the other hand, NT 4.0 used to cost $$ and couldn't run many consumer applications of the time, so Microsoft sold a billion copies of 95 and 98, which were much slower and more unstable, but more compatible and more consumer-friendly. So you could as easily ask why anyone would buy a PC with 98 when they could use NT instead. So if your question is "Why use Mac OS 9 instead of Windows NT," the answer might be "no good reason," or the answer might also be "to use a well-supported, consumer-oriented operating system which runs almost every title ever written for the platform." If you want to ask why use Mac OS 9 over Windows 98, it's an easier question to answer: Windows 98, is in my experience, equivalently unstable, unreliable, slow, and bad at multitasking. Furthermore, it's harder to configure in many cases, especially when it comes to hardware matters. You just don't have hardware conflicts in the same way on a Mac. Some of the error messages are utterly incomprehensible. Some simple things (dial-up networking, for example) are needlessly cumbersome to configure. etc. The Mac experience is both smoother and more attractive, in my opinion. If you want to compare current day Macs to current day PC's, meaning, why use Mac OS X versus Windows XP, it can be argued either way. It's close. They're both modern, stable, operating systems. (Mac OS X has as much in common with OS 9 as Windows XP does with Windows 3.1). There's more software and more support for XP. But Mac OS X appeals to people for whom aesthetics matter more. The whole experience is more geared around the pleasure of using it. The hardware looks good. The software looks good. I realize these are frivolities in the eyes of many, but to me it's like "Why drive an ugly car if I really enjoy driving a nice one." "Why work in an ugly office if I can work in a nice one." For programmers and techies, Mac OS X is all Unix, all the time, so there's really no end of low-level fun that can be had in Mac OS X, and Mac users are no longer on a software island, as the wealth of existing Unix software runs on OS X. Also, the hardware is cool. Apple was the first to introduce consumer wireless networking, and were by far the price and performance leader there for at least a year. They were the first to popularize USB, despite its being available on PC motherboards for a long time. The Ethernet ports on new Macs autosense, eliminating the need for a crossover cable. They have Gigabit ethernet in their laptops. Their wireless base station, which has a modem in it, can be a standalone PPP server. Their BIOS is an entire Forth programming environment (so that you can write preloaded drivers for your cards) in which you can perform two-machine debugging via Telnet. I can't even remember half the stuff they were first to market with in their machines. Even now, how many PC laptops integrate both Wireless antennas and bluetooth? Have you ever seen the quality of an Apple LCD display, such as those built into the new iMacs? For consumers and creative people, the Mac has tools that are simply without parallel on the Windows side, such as the iApps, which are included with the OS. As far as performance goes, I think XP probably has the edge, but not by much, and there's more to computing than performance alone. It's how well the computer works with you. It's seamlessly connecting and disconnecting from wired and wireless networks without you even knowing about it. (Getting wireless cards to work on a PC can be horrible.) It's little touches, details in the OS, that demonstrate that someone was really thinking about how people use a computer, both newbies and geeks. For YEARS now, from like Mac OS 7.5 days, you've been able to make a disc image of any volume, hard drive, floppy, CD, whatever, and then "mount" it as though it were actually inserted. You know how much more pleasant this makes multidisc CD-ROM games? Or to prepare a CD for mastering? Does it really make sense to have every volume married to a letter, as opposed to having a proper name of its own? Anyway, I'm not trying to start a war either, but I'm trying to say that I think there are good reasons for choosing a Windows machine or choosing a Mac, depending on what's important to you. Neither is inherently the right computer to buy. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Personally, I think that Windows just simply doesn't make as much sense to me, and I spend more time having to figure things out. The fact that in 2003 the whole file system is filled with nonsensical 8.3 filenames seems insane to me. I find messages during software installation like "such and such component is older than the one you have installed on your system. Do you want to replace it?" to be entirely useless, since either answer could have serious consequences. But at a minimum, I'd say you owe it to yourself to look at the latest versions of Windows and Mac OS on new hardware if you're going to challenge why it would be that someone would choose one over the other. A lot of these things I mention apply to Mac OS 9 as readily as Mac OS X -- you just have to deal with the instability headaches that are now thankfully gone. But the point is that there have STILL always been advantages to using a Mac, even if it meant sacrifices in other ways. Ivan.
One thing people seem to forget is that there is a viable market of reasonably priced CPU upgrades for Macs, and always has been. If booting into OS 9 is required for you, AND you want to have the fastest machine out there, you can always go buy a first-generation G4 on eBay or from a reseller for not much money and stick a dual 1GHZ CPU in it, or whatever is current then. Then you can be nice and fast, and run OS 9 all you want to. What is the big deal here?
It would be easy to make new machines non-9 bootable if they wanted to. While obviously new machines don't yet exist to know what they will or won't do, all versions of Mac OS since 7.1check hardware doing bootup to see if they're supposed to load on that machine, and if they're not, they put up a message that says "get a newer version of the OS". If a newer version hadn't yet been released, the OS the system came with had a "System Enabler " file which permitted booting on that machine, but a vanilla version of the same system (which didn't have the enabler) would not. Often this enabler would contain important patches to support hardware on that machine.
Their latest machines evidently identify themselves to vanilla OS 9.2.2 as supported hardware, so it loads ok. Their future machines may not work so well. Or, as you say, they may simply not have OS 9 installed on them, but a 9.2.2 CD (if you already have one, since they're nearly unavailable as a new product even now) *might* install on them.
But I doubt it. By ditching 9 support, they free themselves to make whatever architectural changes they like to the hardware without having to support it in both operating systems. It may be possible for someone to hack 9 to boot on new hardware, and they probably will. But if there are major changes on the board, it may not do much good.
By abandoning 9, they also are preparing people for a possible transition to another CPU at some point, which 9 certainly won't support (but Classic might be able to, if they add an instruction set emulator).
One final comment: while superficially similar to what Apple has always done when they introduce new hardware, it is worth considering that X is a completely different operating system than 9, and that has never happened before. Even with all of its changes, System 7 was still an evolution of System 6, and most software still ran on it -- probably
ALL software that followed the rules. Not so here. In my experience, MOST things work in Classic, but some things simply do not. Astarte CD-Copy (which is out of production anyway, since Apple bought Astarte and rolled the technology into their iApps) is a great utility, but it touches hardware, so it can't work in Classic, and there's no equivalent. As many noted, many games simply don't perform well in Classic.
I'm not saying Apple shouldn't do this, while I'm suprised they're doing it this quickly, but it was obvious that it was coming some day. But I'm also just saying it's not a case of "They've always done this." I don't think there's been a case where they've introduced new hardware that is incompatible with the percentage of software that will not work correctly in Classic.
"There's a DB9 port on it. First for a Mac, AFAIK."
Actually the Mac 128 and 512 (and Lisa 2/Mac XL, if you really want to be picky) had DB-9's on them before they switched to MiniDIN-8 on the Mac Plus.
It has to do with Apple's marketing and business strategy. As anyone who has been following Apple since the Jobs coup knows, a very significant part of Apple's business strategy is having products whose designs are unique, cool, groundbreaking, beautiful, distinctive. This is the most salient way they distinguish themselves from the competition in the marketplace. It wouldn't matter what their features are; if they didn't continually introduce new and striking designs, they are just another beige box in the consumer's eyes. And this is one of the reason that Apple foundered in the mid-90's; once Windows 95 came out, the public no longer saw a distinction in the company's machines. While the company has brought out a new operating system, applications, and great hardware features, it is the LOOK of the machine that first gets people's attention, and contributes largely to the company's resurgence. The old and new iMac, Cube, first iBook, PowerBook G4 (Titanium), iPod, these are all machines that completely stood out in their own right when they were released. Not every one of these machines were successful -- the Cube was physically cool but overpriced and overlapping in function with the desktops -- but even that vitally furthered Apple's goal of having their brand associated with trendsetting originality. The eMac, you will note, is not one of these machines. Its design is not distinctive (anymore). The eMac offers features you can't get from any of their other products. It has a flat-tube CRT. It's an all-in-one with a 17" screen. It's got audio in, which no other desktop has. It's probably got other stuff. What this means is that of course there are going to be people who want it, because it does offer a combination of features not offered elsewhere in the lineup. But it would be a marketing catastrophe to sell it generally. The new iMac is flying off the shelves and that's in part because of its wildly unique design. It has drawn attention. If they released the eMac INSTEAD of the new iMac (after all, it's the logical extension of what they already had), I bet they'd sell half as many despite similar features. Their brand is heavily invested in pushing the new iMac's unique design. The eMac is a blob, basically a large version of the once trendsetting but now stale original iMac design. It is function over form -- and, as others have noted, it's extremely functional for a school, in that it's likely to withstand far more abuse than the new iMac. So they could sell it to all, and people might buy it for its feature set and attractive price, but they would be diluting the brand value. The brand stands for cutting edge design. The new iMac symbolizes that. The eMac does not. Furthermore, to bring out the eMac would completely confuse the market in the way the Cube did. It fits somewhere in between the original iMacs, which they still sell, and the new iMacs, with some features from the G4 desktops! The price points even somewhat overlap. Apple probably would have been happy to keep selling original iMacs to schools, but they have an aggressive competitor in the form of Dell. They had to come out with a competitive school offering. It had to be durable, it had to be powerful, it had to be cheap. But they don't want this machine to compete with the model they're trying to build their brand around; in fact the design demands of this machine are at odds with what they are currently building their brand around. You'll note that the eMac even has an entirely different font (quite similar to the Newton font actually...). They want it to be perceived as something unrelated to the consumer line. The eMac IS Apple's beige box. It needs to be, for its market. But Apple is not a beige box company. They're a style company. The eMac is out of style even before it's released. For people who strictly want feature set and price point, there's the wide open world of Wintel. I know that there are those who just want the OS and the hardware features, and during the clone era you could have that -- and this was when Apple was struggling the most, and their brand meant the least. By not introducing the eMac into their general line of computers, they don't stoop to yesterday's features either. They don't want to sell a computer with just a CD-ROM; they want to be able to say that their comptuers Rip, Mix and Burn. The eMac allows them the luxury of going cheap where they need to (and I'm willing to bet that the CD-ROM was a matter of cost rather than security, to bring it in at $999) to serve that market. If you want to customize your computer with exactly what you want, that's why there are PC's. Apple's never been about giving you all the options possible; they've been about "this is what we think you should have." It's just what you have to accept about them. The orignal Mac, for all of its humanism, was also a kind of technological fascism: no slots, no expandability, no parallel port, Torx screws recessed in a 6-inch well just to deter Joe hobbyist. You don't need to open the computer. This is what you need. When the iMac was introduced, you got no serial and no floppy. People flipped. Jobs didn't care. They could give you the new iMac with just a CD-ROM, and sell it for cheaper, but they don't. It's not what they want their brand to be about. They want their brand to be about the future. A final note: People seem to be saying "Why don't they sell these, I like their prices for the features you get." Apple's educational prices are ALWAYS cheaper than their retail prices. If they sold this machine generally it seems like the price point would be not far from the new iMac. And which would you rather have? Ivan.