Ubuntu runs fine on Apple hardware - I run it on my PPC-based Powerbook G4. It runs even better on the Intel stuff.
If you don't like OS X, feel free to install it. "When the viruses start" - so far we have yet to see much penetration in this area. I'm sure that they are not immune, but so far OS X is showing very similar security to other Unix-based operating systems. Continued vigilance in this area from everyone concerned will be needed, but such is life.
Fair enough, I suppose I should have mentioned it. The fact that they are tagged this way discourages you from sharing them with the world, but doesn't do anything to prevent you sharing them with a friend which I think is a good compromise. It returns us to a state we were in when CDs were the only medium - you could rip a track and give it to your friend.
And you are completely omitting the fact that the products are different.
Apple aren't simply putting an Apple badge on a Dell and putting the price up, they are building a different computer.
Yes, the internal parts (HD, Ram, CPU etc) are indeed commodity parts - I am well aware of that (and in fact, use that fact to my advantage since I do a lot of upgrades and it's nice to be able to buy off the shelf parts). The box that they put them in, and the software supplied is where the added value comes in *to some people*.
You are being disingenuous that it's like putting a Ferrari badge on a Mustang - there are differences that separate the products.
I mentioned in my post that a Dell laptop and a Macbook Pro have very similar internal parts, but that the case of the Dell is injection moulded ABS plastic and the Macbook Pro case is made from a single piece of machined aluminium. The Macbook pro costs more - do you really think it's merely that they are charging more for the internal pieces?
Not to mention that the OS is different - buying a Mac is the only way to officially get OS X, and that is worth it for some people.
I think it is you who is blinded by Apple hate or some other misunderstanding of how a market works to see that for some people, the value of an item is not solely determined by how it is made up.
What if you took two products - a Mustang and a Ferrari 360 and melted both of them down in a giant furnace and recovered all the base elements from them and separated them out. Which one is worth more now? Presumably the heavier one - so likely the mustang, since you'll get a lot of steel out of it. The 360 has a lot of carbon fibre, so break that down and you get elemental carbon as a large potion of that, which is very cheap.
The value of products is not just about the parts it is made from. Commodity PC parts are part of Apple's products - this is not what makes them more expensive.
The cost of commodity parts from Apple is pretty standard - look at the price for extra RAM in BTO models. The costs are very similar to what other retailers are charging, even retailers like Crucial, who sell the same modules for almost the same price (within a few dollars/pounds). Their upgrade prices for hard drives are also similar.
I'm extremely glad Apple uses off the shelf parts. It was very handy when I put a new hard drive in my iMac.
They wanted DRM free from the start - it was a stated goal of Apple's that there be no DRM. Remember the "Rip, Mix, Burn" adverts? Their extension of that was to be able to buy music online as well as rip it from your CDs.
However, they had no choice - the labels had the content and would not allow it to be sold without DRM, so they had to add it. They made it as weak as they could get away with, and even included the ability to burn your tracks to Audio CD, stripping off the DRM.
In their later negotiations to remove DRM entirely, they reached a compromise with the labels that involved the introduction of tiered pricing for the removal of DRM.
Why does a Citroen C1 cost less than a Peugeot 107, despite being literally the same car (and I do mean literally), but with a different badge on the front?
Packaging makes a lot of difference, and the external design of the box that holds all those standard PC parts, as well as the OS that runs on it differentiates a Mac from a PC. It's really no surprise that they cost different amounts - they are priced at a point the market will bear, and clearly people buy them.
Whether the price is worth it to an individual consumer, however, is a personal decision.
For me the cost of my iMac was well worth it for the form factor of the machine itself. I could have built a hackintosh for a lot less, but then I would have been missing out on the iMac's form factor, which was a big part of the reason I bought it.
Not everything about buying a computer boils down to "what specific RAM does it have, and specific hard drive type, and specific CPU". There are other things that go into making a product.
It's also not a stretch to see why some things cost more - the MacBook Pro case is made from a single piece of machined aluminium - is it any wonder that costs more than the plastic case a Dell is made out of? I'm not saying the Dell is junk, but the fact of the matter is that it is literally cheaper to make the case, even if the internal parts are the same (like the Ram, HD and CPU).
If they couldn't be bothered to update their Creative apps to Cocoa until just now what makes you think they want to know about a future API? Why tell them about it, they'll just say "that's nice, but we're sticking with your deprecated API"
Not really - the same software-only-rendering Flash plugin on Windows is significantly better than the software-only-rendering Flash on OS X. Adobe is using the hardware decoding issue as a scapegoat.
Quicktime on OS X does not use hardware decoding and does just fine.
XBMC on Mac also did a great job on HD streams from BBC iPlayer (before the swf verification was added that broke it) - playing them with low CPU use and flawless performance. The same streams using the Flash plugin on the same hardware without rebooting cannot be played without dropping frames and severe CPU use. What makes XBMC so much better at playing the same streams? They were not using hardware decoding.
So, if that's the only reason Flash is dog slow on OS X, why is the (entirely software rendering) windows version so much better than the (entirely software rendering) Mac version?
It's not solely about the hardware decoding of H.264, which is only a small part of the whole performance issue. Even when there;s no H.264 to decode, Flash on OS X is *dog slow*.
For the record, even Quicktime on OS X was not using hardware decoding of H.264 video, and it was doing a much better job than Flash.
XBMC wasn't using it either, and it was doing a gorgeous job playing back the HD streams from BBC iPlayer on my Mac (before the BBC added the swf verification crap that broke it) - a job that the Flash plugin cannot do without dropping frames and pushing the CPU to the limit.
They wrote Nitro, the JS engine, and made that open too.
The "code bombs" were from the year or so worth of secret development Apple did with KHTML when they didn't have to release anything (since they weren't doing anything with the code yet, just hashing about with it to make Safari - they had no published app). They had a year's worth of changes, in a code repository that no one outside apple would have ben able to make sense of (or rather, just different to what most people use).
These code bombs came out when WebKit was released to the world, as required by the GPL, and since then they have switched to a more compatible repository system for Webkit. Many of the complaints by the original developers also stemmed from disagreements and design directions, and the fact that some changes were pretty Mac specific and hard to integrate.
Since the initial rocky start, Apple has put *an enormous amount* of work into WebKit and related technologies, including releasing open code that it wrote that it was not "legally obliged" to release. They completely overhauled the JS engine, and pushed Webkit from a small project into a serious mainstream rendering engine to rival Gecko and Trident (not that the KHTML guys couldn't have done it, but Apple was a major, major part of the success and rise of Webkit).
The Webkit history is the very definition of what makes OSS so great - a good project, selected by Apple for its merits (small, fast, efficient), that then grows into a seriously huge project that the entire OSS community (and software community as a whole) can benefit from.
Apple didn't invent it, but they did put a very large amount of work into making Webkit what it is today.
2Ghz Core2Duo iMac, 10.6.3. The first is Blizzard's Diablo 3 site, the second is an SD H.264 video stream from BBC iPlayer.
If flash was on the iPhone in its current state, it would be unusable.
Adobe simply do not care enough about the Mac platform. Just look at the debacle with the creative suite and Intel macs, and the severe feet-dragging on a 64 bit version of Photoshop. Hooray, in CS5, finally. Or the severe crash issues with some CS apps in OS X - solution 'buy newer version'.
They have made some improvements very recently - the 10.1 beta of Flash is a marked improvement, but they've had *years* to fix it with performance complaints being major. It's not even as if the platform itself is hard to work with or Apple's being "deliberately obtrusive" and "denying them access to underlying APIs" as some have claimed - other third party developers seem to be able to make decently-performing plugins and apps just fine, not to mention the extensive documentation on the graphics internals of OS X and how to program for them on Apple's dev site.
Even if Apple liked Flash, it would be woeful on the iPhone.
WebkitPluginHost is the process that deals with plugins in the new version of Safari, and Flash performance is just dog awful on OS X (and was before Safari changed the way plugins are controlled).
I am running the 10.1 beta release of Flash on this same machine and there have been significant improvements, but it is still very resource intensive to do something as simple as play an H.264 video stream - something that can be done by other apps (even third party stuff like VLC and XBMC etc) with considerably better performance than Flash.
Maybe HTML5 is also bad, but Adobe have had a long time to fix flash on OS X and have barely done enough to keep it functional. It only seems to be now, with all the fanfare about leaving it off the iPad (I guess they didn't care for the iPhone) that big strides seem to be in the works. As it stands right now though, the 10.0 stable release is woeful for performance (and it's not about hardware decoding either, even with software decoding only the Windows version is considerably better).
Ha. Like a man in orthopaedic shoes, I stand corrected.
For an open standard, getting it to work on Windows is annoying - I usually just share my HFS drives over SMB rather than connecting them to windows for less hassle. You know it's annoying when you network share a mac formatted usb drive rather than simply plugging it into the XP box:)
Slashdot Mirror
Ubuntu runs fine on Apple hardware - I run it on my PPC-based Powerbook G4. It runs even better on the Intel stuff.
If you don't like OS X, feel free to install it. "When the viruses start" - so far we have yet to see much penetration in this area. I'm sure that they are not immune, but so far OS X is showing very similar security to other Unix-based operating systems. Continued vigilance in this area from everyone concerned will be needed, but such is life.
Fair enough, I suppose I should have mentioned it. The fact that they are tagged this way discourages you from sharing them with the world, but doesn't do anything to prevent you sharing them with a friend which I think is a good compromise. It returns us to a state we were in when CDs were the only medium - you could rip a track and give it to your friend.
Right, which is very much not "fair use".
And you are completely omitting the fact that the products are different.
Apple aren't simply putting an Apple badge on a Dell and putting the price up, they are building a different computer.
Yes, the internal parts (HD, Ram, CPU etc) are indeed commodity parts - I am well aware of that (and in fact, use that fact to my advantage since I do a lot of upgrades and it's nice to be able to buy off the shelf parts). The box that they put them in, and the software supplied is where the added value comes in *to some people*.
You are being disingenuous that it's like putting a Ferrari badge on a Mustang - there are differences that separate the products.
I mentioned in my post that a Dell laptop and a Macbook Pro have very similar internal parts, but that the case of the Dell is injection moulded ABS plastic and the Macbook Pro case is made from a single piece of machined aluminium. The Macbook pro costs more - do you really think it's merely that they are charging more for the internal pieces?
Not to mention that the OS is different - buying a Mac is the only way to officially get OS X, and that is worth it for some people.
I think it is you who is blinded by Apple hate or some other misunderstanding of how a market works to see that for some people, the value of an item is not solely determined by how it is made up.
What if you took two products - a Mustang and a Ferrari 360 and melted both of them down in a giant furnace and recovered all the base elements from them and separated them out. Which one is worth more now? Presumably the heavier one - so likely the mustang, since you'll get a lot of steel out of it. The 360 has a lot of carbon fibre, so break that down and you get elemental carbon as a large potion of that, which is very cheap.
The value of products is not just about the parts it is made from. Commodity PC parts are part of Apple's products - this is not what makes them more expensive.
The cost of commodity parts from Apple is pretty standard - look at the price for extra RAM in BTO models. The costs are very similar to what other retailers are charging, even retailers like Crucial, who sell the same modules for almost the same price (within a few dollars/pounds). Their upgrade prices for hard drives are also similar.
I'm extremely glad Apple uses off the shelf parts. It was very handy when I put a new hard drive in my iMac.
Yes, of course they can.
Although here it seems they wanted the billing technology that Lala uses.
iTunes files are "clean" too - just not free.
But then, perhaps that is part of it - you want something for nothing. For that, there's always filesharing sites.
There is also no DRM on the iTunes store for music any more either, not for the past few years.
They wanted DRM free from the start - it was a stated goal of Apple's that there be no DRM. Remember the "Rip, Mix, Burn" adverts? Their extension of that was to be able to buy music online as well as rip it from your CDs.
However, they had no choice - the labels had the content and would not allow it to be sold without DRM, so they had to add it. They made it as weak as they could get away with, and even included the ability to burn your tracks to Audio CD, stripping off the DRM.
In their later negotiations to remove DRM entirely, they reached a compromise with the labels that involved the introduction of tiered pricing for the removal of DRM.
You can also burn that DRM'ed audio to CD, stripping off the DRM using iTunes.
Apple even strongly encouraged you to do so when you bought it - displaying a suggestion when you downloaded it.
It's clearly not ideal (format shift) but it's not like the option is "pay money" or "be stuck with DRM tracks".
Why does a Citroen C1 cost less than a Peugeot 107, despite being literally the same car (and I do mean literally), but with a different badge on the front?
Packaging makes a lot of difference, and the external design of the box that holds all those standard PC parts, as well as the OS that runs on it differentiates a Mac from a PC. It's really no surprise that they cost different amounts - they are priced at a point the market will bear, and clearly people buy them.
Whether the price is worth it to an individual consumer, however, is a personal decision.
For me the cost of my iMac was well worth it for the form factor of the machine itself. I could have built a hackintosh for a lot less, but then I would have been missing out on the iMac's form factor, which was a big part of the reason I bought it.
Not everything about buying a computer boils down to "what specific RAM does it have, and specific hard drive type, and specific CPU". There are other things that go into making a product.
It's also not a stretch to see why some things cost more - the MacBook Pro case is made from a single piece of machined aluminium - is it any wonder that costs more than the plastic case a Dell is made out of? I'm not saying the Dell is junk, but the fact of the matter is that it is literally cheaper to make the case, even if the internal parts are the same (like the Ram, HD and CPU).
Some things cost more, some things cost less.
So a 64 bit version of Photoshop wouldn't be a "noticeable benefit"?
WTF!
If they couldn't be bothered to update their Creative apps to Cocoa until just now what makes you think they want to know about a future API? Why tell them about it, they'll just say "that's nice, but we're sticking with your deprecated API"
Not really - the same software-only-rendering Flash plugin on Windows is significantly better than the software-only-rendering Flash on OS X. Adobe is using the hardware decoding issue as a scapegoat.
Quicktime on OS X does not use hardware decoding and does just fine.
XBMC on Mac also did a great job on HD streams from BBC iPlayer (before the swf verification was added that broke it) - playing them with low CPU use and flawless performance. The same streams using the Flash plugin on the same hardware without rebooting cannot be played without dropping frames and severe CPU use. What makes XBMC so much better at playing the same streams? They were not using hardware decoding.
I'm curious, what browser is?
I mean, totally - more than Webkit and Mobile Safari.
In the same way that the H.264 is - but somehow when talking about that being an open standard it's somehow not, because it's controlled and patented.
It doesn't cut both ways.
(I believe both are open, but slashdot Apple bashers need to pick one or the other)
Join the club:
http://img690.imageshack.us/img690/2258/osxflashiplayerapr10.jpg
http://img696.imageshack.us/img696/4771/flashosxperformance.jpg
2.16Ghz Core 2 Duo.
So, if that's the only reason Flash is dog slow on OS X, why is the (entirely software rendering) windows version so much better than the (entirely software rendering) Mac version?
It's not solely about the hardware decoding of H.264, which is only a small part of the whole performance issue. Even when there;s no H.264 to decode, Flash on OS X is *dog slow*.
For the record, even Quicktime on OS X was not using hardware decoding of H.264 video, and it was doing a much better job than Flash.
XBMC wasn't using it either, and it was doing a gorgeous job playing back the HD streams from BBC iPlayer on my Mac (before the BBC added the swf verification crap that broke it) - a job that the Flash plugin cannot do without dropping frames and pushing the CPU to the limit.
This is not just about the H.264 decoder.
You think Cocoa is Apple's version of Flash?
Goodness me. I thought I was browsing youtube comments there for a second.
They wrote Nitro, the JS engine, and made that open too.
The "code bombs" were from the year or so worth of secret development Apple did with KHTML when they didn't have to release anything (since they weren't doing anything with the code yet, just hashing about with it to make Safari - they had no published app). They had a year's worth of changes, in a code repository that no one outside apple would have ben able to make sense of (or rather, just different to what most people use).
These code bombs came out when WebKit was released to the world, as required by the GPL, and since then they have switched to a more compatible repository system for Webkit. Many of the complaints by the original developers also stemmed from disagreements and design directions, and the fact that some changes were pretty Mac specific and hard to integrate.
Since the initial rocky start, Apple has put *an enormous amount* of work into WebKit and related technologies, including releasing open code that it wrote that it was not "legally obliged" to release. They completely overhauled the JS engine, and pushed Webkit from a small project into a serious mainstream rendering engine to rival Gecko and Trident (not that the KHTML guys couldn't have done it, but Apple was a major, major part of the success and rise of Webkit).
The Webkit history is the very definition of what makes OSS so great - a good project, selected by Apple for its merits (small, fast, efficient), that then grows into a seriously huge project that the entire OSS community (and software community as a whole) can benefit from.
Apple didn't invent it, but they did put a very large amount of work into making Webkit what it is today.
Stagnating in the market?
Their last quarter results show they sold more iPhones than ever before. So not only "not stagnating" but "growing".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IPhone_sales_per_quarter.svg
Because H.264 is an open standard.
It may be patented, but it is an open standard.
I didn't realise the iPhone was the World Wide Web.
Don't tell me you're one of those people who call the big blue E "the internet"?
Have you seen flash performance on OS X (and by extension, OS X based devices)?
http://img696.imageshack.us/img696/4771/flashosxperformance.jpg
http://img690.imageshack.us/img690/2258/osxflashiplayerapr10.jpg
2Ghz Core2Duo iMac, 10.6.3.
The first is Blizzard's Diablo 3 site, the second is an SD H.264 video stream from BBC iPlayer.
If flash was on the iPhone in its current state, it would be unusable.
Adobe simply do not care enough about the Mac platform. Just look at the debacle with the creative suite and Intel macs, and the severe feet-dragging on a 64 bit version of Photoshop. Hooray, in CS5, finally. Or the severe crash issues with some CS apps in OS X - solution 'buy newer version'.
They have made some improvements very recently - the 10.1 beta of Flash is a marked improvement, but they've had *years* to fix it with performance complaints being major. It's not even as if the platform itself is hard to work with or Apple's being "deliberately obtrusive" and "denying them access to underlying APIs" as some have claimed - other third party developers seem to be able to make decently-performing plugins and apps just fine, not to mention the extensive documentation on the graphics internals of OS X and how to program for them on Apple's dev site.
Even if Apple liked Flash, it would be woeful on the iPhone.
You should try Flash on Mac (and as the iPhone is based on OS X, the comparisons are quite neat).
http://img690.imageshack.us/img690/2258/osxflashiplayerapr10.jpg
This screenshot was taken on a Core2Duo 2.1Ghz iMac, running 10.6.3 with the 10.0 release version of Flash. That is a 862x468 1500kbps SD H.264 video stream from BBC iPlayer.
http://img696.imageshack.us/img696/4771/flashosxperformance.jpg
This screenshot is the same computer sitting idle on the Diablo 3 main page.
WebkitPluginHost is the process that deals with plugins in the new version of Safari, and Flash performance is just dog awful on OS X (and was before Safari changed the way plugins are controlled).
I am running the 10.1 beta release of Flash on this same machine and there have been significant improvements, but it is still very resource intensive to do something as simple as play an H.264 video stream - something that can be done by other apps (even third party stuff like VLC and XBMC etc) with considerably better performance than Flash.
Maybe HTML5 is also bad, but Adobe have had a long time to fix flash on OS X and have barely done enough to keep it functional. It only seems to be now, with all the fanfare about leaving it off the iPad (I guess they didn't care for the iPhone) that big strides seem to be in the works. As it stands right now though, the 10.0 stable release is woeful for performance (and it's not about hardware decoding either, even with software decoding only the Windows version is considerably better).
Ha. Like a man in orthopaedic shoes, I stand corrected.
For an open standard, getting it to work on Windows is annoying - I usually just share my HFS drives over SMB rather than connecting them to windows for less hassle. You know it's annoying when you network share a mac formatted usb drive rather than simply plugging it into the XP box :)