Funny enough, it was around the time that really, really multi-cored machines started showing up, so they wrote an open source library to make it easier for people and said "have at it".
If "marketing magic" is writing a webpage on their main site with some nice graphics and a description of how it works, then no wonder Linux is struggling for Desktop acceptance. I would just cal that "making a nice webpage". It's not sorcery. "Marketing? Do we need to compile that?"/tongue in cheek.
And a method patent is exactly what you have just described.
So, where's your problem? You said that method patents are trollish.
I don't agree with obvious software patents either, like one click shopping or "doing (some thing) but in the internet", but method patents are a different entity entirely.
The MPEG LA are hardly patent trolls. The term is so often applied to "anyone who has a patent and dares to enforce it" when it really doesn't mean that at all.
I agree (although I had an arguement on/. yesterday about whether the iPhone ran OS X at all), but the original assertion by the GP was that because the iPhone OS is all locked up, with single app purchase point that Apple will "likely" make the next version of OS X this way, which is just totally not going to happen.
On the second point, I agree - and jailbreaking is a pretty big community. Apple hasn't gone after people who jailbreak their phones, in the same way they haven't gone after (individual) people who make hackintoshes, or the people who promote the EFI tools that make it possible. I'm an enormous Apple fan, but I end run around them all the time - mostly by doing my own hardware work on their "welded shut" computers, and I'm sure they don;t mind. Sure they want me to send the powerbook back to them to have a bigger HD installed, but they're not really going to care if I do it myself.
Where I make the distinction is assertion that Apple's (or anyone else's) business model is somehow wrong because it doesn't match up with what the user wants to do from the outset. This was my beef with the FSF's protest about the iPad.
Obligatory car analogy: Ford doesn't sell a car in the particular shade I want, because it's not popular enough, but it doesn't stop me respraying it after I buy one. Apple don't offer an open, install from anywhere iPhone by default, but you can modify it afterwards.
No, I'm not making an objective or even subjective assessment of the quality of the system, just that people can choose to avoid it by not buying an iPhone.
My actual assessment of the one gatekeeper approach is that there really isn't a lot of benefit, beyond removal of the most obvious of scam/malware apps. There are a hundred "fart noise" apps, and "iPhone torch!" apps that just make your screen go white.
Even with those, however, Apple's system is working for them - the iPhone is selling like hot cakes, and people are downloading lots of apps.
I really wish it did have a more rigorous quality assurance system, to remove apps that really are useless - how many Torch apps do we really need, for example, or those apps you mention that are really just vehicles for advertising. I think a lot of the QA slipped when the store was faced with such a backlog of approvals to process.
Plus, one man's "awesome" fart app is another man's "total waste of time" - the store is filled with all manner of apps I personally find pointless, but some people love them.
I think the best we can hope for in the near future is for the approval process to go away. I don't think that the single point of access will disappear, at least not yet, but I think eventually you may see it become much easier for a developer to publish an app onto the store.
I think this is what both Apple and Google are doing. Apple could easily have released a tablet that ran retail OS X with some extra touch screen function built in, but they chose to scale up the iPhone/iPod Touch and go that way. I don;t know if it will be at all successful, but I think it has more of a chance than if it was a tablet with a desktop OS running on it - there are a fair number of those already, and they're hardly setting the world on fire. They are very useful in niche markets, but beyond that are pretty limited.
The iPhone has been a big success for Apple, and I imagine that the thinking went "people really like it but wish they had a bigger screen for reading the news or watching a film when they're at home on the couch, the iPhone is great for them on the train, but they want it bigger for casual browsing on the couch or in bed".
If they can make a market just for that (and I think it is a little expensive at the moment to really be the thing you pick up when your iPhone is just a little too small and you wished you had a bigger screen), then it will sell quite well. I don't think it will be quite as successful as the phone, but I really can't tell - people said the Kindle would be a huge flop too and that is doing pretty nicely.
If it only works for education then it will be a worthwhile product: I would love a device that I could put all my textbooks onto, including my huge Organic Chemistry one that I could use to beat a whale to death, and be able to buy a latest edition, or perhaps even incrementally update my old editions with small downloads, and have more detailed diagrams and perhaps even videos and animations. Buy one at the start of your university course and get all your textbooks on it - it would be fabulous, even if I never used it for anything else, ever. (note, that it would not replace a computer - it would supplement it - I'm not going to be typing reports on the thing.)
There is no way the iPhone app model will be used in OS X - just what evidence do you have that it will? Apple released a slew of new OSS features in Snow Leopard, with GCD and OpenCL being chief among them, and have encouraged developers to use them. Why do that if they are going to limit OS X?
The iPhone and iPad are designed around a different software model, to be more like appliances - it doesn't mean OS X will go this way, not even "likely" - I would put a [citation needed] response on that one, it is so absurd.
As to taking "many months" to get your app on the store... again, [citation needed].
How long does it take to get an app into the iTunes App Store? While we’ve seen some estimates of up to 20 days to have your app approved, we’ve had apps accepted in as few as five.
If you do not like Apple's model, you are free to *not buy into it* and instead buy an Android device, or some other competing product. It's not like Apple are the only player here. There are many ways to skin a cat, and Apple's "one gatekeeper" approach works extremely well for them, and no one is forcing you to take part (unless you want an iPhone, but want to do something else with it, but then... why buy the iPhone in the first place - buy a Nexus One or something).
Let me just repeat - Apple's model for OS X is totally, completely separate from the iPhone. They are not going to put iPhone OS on Macs and control the software you use on it. All evidence so far suggests they are in fact, opening up OS X a little more than before, starting at an OSS level for some of their new core technologies rather than opening them up later (or keeping them closed source), they support the installation of pretty much anything you can port over, and they don't make it difficult - the dev tools are free, and they provide an X window system if you don't want to (or can't due to various reasons) rewrite the UI to be native. They have a thriving third party commercial software industry going, much like Windows does, and there is no reason to change that.
By your logic, the Xbox OS is pretty locked up, so that must mean that "the next version of windows" is "likely" to be all closed up as well, with MS having to approve all software you install on it, and only being able to buy apps for Windows via Xbox Live, right? Seems very likely.
The iPhone multitasks right now. No need to "get it working".
Whether your primary apps can run simultaneously however, is up to Apple.
At least you didn't say "what happens when you want to listen to your music and browse the web at the same time?" and got +5 insightful, when the iPhone does actually do that already. heh.
(and I understand why the iPhone doesn't allow multiple concurrent third party apps to run, but I do think there should be a menu option to enable it if you understand what it means for a limited platform - I may be an Apple fan, but they're not above criticism. That way, the user experience is maintained, but you offer more flexibility for more savvy users).
So we're not having a technical discussion here? I'm not trying to sell you an iPhone here.
Everything you just said about Linux there can be applied to the OS that is running on the phone - (except the name, since the kernel is not called OS X), but there's more from OS X than just the Darwin system running on there.
The original GPP attempted to make a flippant, unresearched claim that OS X doesn't run on the iPhone, when the iPhone OS is clearly *heavily* based on OS X in the same way that the Linux kernel and services are modified to run on embedded devices of various sizes, shapes and varieties.
What's more this then gets modded informative.
It would be completely accurate to say "the iPhone runs iPhone OS, which is a modified version of OS X with a customised UI", but then how many people say "the OS that runs on Linksis routers is just the Linux kernel, though many people use the term interchangeably (accurately or not) with the desktop+kernel"
Well, Apple doesn't call it OS X - they initially did, but have rebranded it as the iPhone OS. It has its base in OS X though, in the same way that Linux routers do, or Linux DVRs.
It's not "spin" so much as a double standard, trying to support an initial statement from the GGGGP that was easily disproved by going to google and typing "what OS runs on the iPhone?".
So then those Linksys routers that run Linux really don't because the functionality isn't the same. Cool.
The software is a modified form of OS X that they have branded iPhone OS.
It has webkit, Safari, quicktime, multihthreading, multitasking, the BSD core bits etc etc. It just has a different UI. Just because certain features aren't accessible in the default configuration as suppled by Apple doesn't change what it is.
Essentially, the iPhone runs a scaled down version of MacOS X optimized for a handheld device -- although Steve Jobs is insistent that it runs "real OS X" (Specifically, crashlogs indicate that the original iPhone ran "OS X 1.0" build number 1A543a.) -- but no iPhone models can run MacOS X applications regardless. On March 17, 2009, upon unveiling a developer's preview of the third version of the operating system, Apple started referring to it as the "iPhone OS".
Yes, that was an important feature to me, but even without the circular logic (say I had found the ideal PC case setup and decided to compromise and deal with the hackintosh setup), it just doesn't exist. Probably because people in the PC world are just not looking for what the iMac offers, and if they are they can just run windows on an actual iMac (and I know a guy that does just that on several iMacs in his office - they run XP 99.9% of the time they are on, only booting to OS X if any bootcamp changes are needed).
I'd love to - and the reason that you don;t tend to see many Ferrari owners trying to "prove" their car is good value is that people don;t spend time trying to prove that it's worthless.
I'm sure there are some who will say "that car is just a waste of money, buy a Corolla instead!" like you see people saying "Apple Macs are just overpriced toys and anyone who uses one is just trying to look hip and cool and values image over actually wanting to do any work"
Not everyone, but you won't need to look very far to find several of those type of posts in any Apple thread, so you will naturally see people attempting to defend it in response.
I am very much a "right tool for the job" guy, and the iMac happens to be that tool for me - I'm not a zealot or anything (and dual boot windows for some tasks). I'm not going to begrudge anyone their choice of machine or OS - but I spend a lot of time browsing/. and running across posts that criticise my choice of computer because they have a person axe to grind, or believe that anyone who doesn't make exactly the same computer choices as them is totally clueless and stupid.
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Funny enough, it was around the time that really, really multi-cored machines started showing up, so they wrote an open source library to make it easier for people and said "have at it".
If "marketing magic" is writing a webpage on their main site with some nice graphics and a description of how it works, then no wonder Linux is struggling for Desktop acceptance. I would just cal that "making a nice webpage". It's not sorcery. "Marketing? Do we need to compile that?" /tongue in cheek.
And a method patent is exactly what you have just described.
So, where's your problem? You said that method patents are trollish.
I don't agree with obvious software patents either, like one click shopping or "doing (some thing) but in the internet", but method patents are a different entity entirely.
It's only the same as all the flip side arguments about blatantly false or pure opinion-posted-as-fact from people who hate the iPhone.
The truth is, of course, somewhere in the middle.
Ha! So, what you really mean is "any patent/company/organisation I do not agree with is trollish"
The H.264 patents are not software patents.
The MPEG LA are hardly patent trolls. The term is so often applied to "anyone who has a patent and dares to enforce it" when it really doesn't mean that at all.
Why don't I get invited to all the koolaid drinking parties?
iPhone OS shares a good 70% of its codebase with OS X, so it is the same in all but name really, although it's obviously stripped down.
I agree (although I had an arguement on /. yesterday about whether the iPhone ran OS X at all), but the original assertion by the GP was that because the iPhone OS is all locked up, with single app purchase point that Apple will "likely" make the next version of OS X this way, which is just totally not going to happen.
On the second point, I agree - and jailbreaking is a pretty big community. Apple hasn't gone after people who jailbreak their phones, in the same way they haven't gone after (individual) people who make hackintoshes, or the people who promote the EFI tools that make it possible. I'm an enormous Apple fan, but I end run around them all the time - mostly by doing my own hardware work on their "welded shut" computers, and I'm sure they don;t mind. Sure they want me to send the powerbook back to them to have a bigger HD installed, but they're not really going to care if I do it myself.
Where I make the distinction is assertion that Apple's (or anyone else's) business model is somehow wrong because it doesn't match up with what the user wants to do from the outset. This was my beef with the FSF's protest about the iPad.
Obligatory car analogy: Ford doesn't sell a car in the particular shade I want, because it's not popular enough, but it doesn't stop me respraying it after I buy one. Apple don't offer an open, install from anywhere iPhone by default, but you can modify it afterwards.
No, I'm not making an objective or even subjective assessment of the quality of the system, just that people can choose to avoid it by not buying an iPhone.
My actual assessment of the one gatekeeper approach is that there really isn't a lot of benefit, beyond removal of the most obvious of scam/malware apps. There are a hundred "fart noise" apps, and "iPhone torch!" apps that just make your screen go white.
Even with those, however, Apple's system is working for them - the iPhone is selling like hot cakes, and people are downloading lots of apps.
I really wish it did have a more rigorous quality assurance system, to remove apps that really are useless - how many Torch apps do we really need, for example, or those apps you mention that are really just vehicles for advertising. I think a lot of the QA slipped when the store was faced with such a backlog of approvals to process.
Plus, one man's "awesome" fart app is another man's "total waste of time" - the store is filled with all manner of apps I personally find pointless, but some people love them.
I think the best we can hope for in the near future is for the approval process to go away. I don't think that the single point of access will disappear, at least not yet, but I think eventually you may see it become much easier for a developer to publish an app onto the store.
I think this is what both Apple and Google are doing. Apple could easily have released a tablet that ran retail OS X with some extra touch screen function built in, but they chose to scale up the iPhone/iPod Touch and go that way. I don;t know if it will be at all successful, but I think it has more of a chance than if it was a tablet with a desktop OS running on it - there are a fair number of those already, and they're hardly setting the world on fire. They are very useful in niche markets, but beyond that are pretty limited.
The iPhone has been a big success for Apple, and I imagine that the thinking went "people really like it but wish they had a bigger screen for reading the news or watching a film when they're at home on the couch, the iPhone is great for them on the train, but they want it bigger for casual browsing on the couch or in bed".
If they can make a market just for that (and I think it is a little expensive at the moment to really be the thing you pick up when your iPhone is just a little too small and you wished you had a bigger screen), then it will sell quite well. I don't think it will be quite as successful as the phone, but I really can't tell - people said the Kindle would be a huge flop too and that is doing pretty nicely.
If it only works for education then it will be a worthwhile product: I would love a device that I could put all my textbooks onto, including my huge Organic Chemistry one that I could use to beat a whale to death, and be able to buy a latest edition, or perhaps even incrementally update my old editions with small downloads, and have more detailed diagrams and perhaps even videos and animations. Buy one at the start of your university course and get all your textbooks on it - it would be fabulous, even if I never used it for anything else, ever. (note, that it would not replace a computer - it would supplement it - I'm not going to be typing reports on the thing.)
There is no way the iPhone app model will be used in OS X - just what evidence do you have that it will? Apple released a slew of new OSS features in Snow Leopard, with GCD and OpenCL being chief among them, and have encouraged developers to use them. Why do that if they are going to limit OS X?
The iPhone and iPad are designed around a different software model, to be more like appliances - it doesn't mean OS X will go this way, not even "likely" - I would put a [citation needed] response on that one, it is so absurd.
As to taking "many months" to get your app on the store... again, [citation needed].
How long does it take to get an app into the iTunes App Store? While we’ve seen some estimates of up to 20 days to have your app approved, we’ve had apps accepted in as few as five.
from my first google hit: http://mashable.com/2009/06/10/build-iphone-app/
If you do not like Apple's model, you are free to *not buy into it* and instead buy an Android device, or some other competing product. It's not like Apple are the only player here. There are many ways to skin a cat, and Apple's "one gatekeeper" approach works extremely well for them, and no one is forcing you to take part (unless you want an iPhone, but want to do something else with it, but then... why buy the iPhone in the first place - buy a Nexus One or something).
Let me just repeat - Apple's model for OS X is totally, completely separate from the iPhone. They are not going to put iPhone OS on Macs and control the software you use on it. All evidence so far suggests they are in fact, opening up OS X a little more than before, starting at an OSS level for some of their new core technologies rather than opening them up later (or keeping them closed source), they support the installation of pretty much anything you can port over, and they don't make it difficult - the dev tools are free, and they provide an X window system if you don't want to (or can't due to various reasons) rewrite the UI to be native. They have a thriving third party commercial software industry going, much like Windows does, and there is no reason to change that.
By your logic, the Xbox OS is pretty locked up, so that must mean that "the next version of windows" is "likely" to be all closed up as well, with MS having to approve all software you install on it, and only being able to buy apps for Windows via Xbox Live, right? Seems very likely.
Well, Walt Disney was no saint either, although he didn't invade Poland.
The iPhone multitasks right now. No need to "get it working".
Whether your primary apps can run simultaneously however, is up to Apple.
At least you didn't say "what happens when you want to listen to your music and browse the web at the same time?" and got +5 insightful, when the iPhone does actually do that already. heh.
(and I understand why the iPhone doesn't allow multiple concurrent third party apps to run, but I do think there should be a menu option to enable it if you understand what it means for a limited platform - I may be an Apple fan, but they're not above criticism. That way, the user experience is maintained, but you offer more flexibility for more savvy users).
After about 2 minutes of googling, it looks like the answer is still "yup, but modified" (as I initially said).
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2007/07/13/iphone-os-x-architecture-the-mach-kernel-and-ram/
So we're not having a technical discussion here? I'm not trying to sell you an iPhone here.
Everything you just said about Linux there can be applied to the OS that is running on the phone - (except the name, since the kernel is not called OS X), but there's more from OS X than just the Darwin system running on there.
The original GPP attempted to make a flippant, unresearched claim that OS X doesn't run on the iPhone, when the iPhone OS is clearly *heavily* based on OS X in the same way that the Linux kernel and services are modified to run on embedded devices of various sizes, shapes and varieties.
What's more this then gets modded informative.
It would be completely accurate to say "the iPhone runs iPhone OS, which is a modified version of OS X with a customised UI", but then how many people say "the OS that runs on Linksis routers is just the Linux kernel, though many people use the term interchangeably (accurately or not) with the desktop+kernel"
Well, Apple doesn't call it OS X - they initially did, but have rebranded it as the iPhone OS. It has its base in OS X though, in the same way that Linux routers do, or Linux DVRs.
It's not "spin" so much as a double standard, trying to support an initial statement from the GGGGP that was easily disproved by going to google and typing "what OS runs on the iPhone?".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DD-WRT
There are some gaps in that table. It is stripped down somewhat for the purposes of the router - same as OS X for the iPhone.
So then those Linksys routers that run Linux really don't because the functionality isn't the same. Cool.
The software is a modified form of OS X that they have branded iPhone OS.
It has webkit, Safari, quicktime, multihthreading, multitasking, the BSD core bits etc etc. It just has a different UI. Just because certain features aren't accessible in the default configuration as suppled by Apple doesn't change what it is.
Yes it does.
Essentially, the iPhone runs a scaled down version of MacOS X optimized for a handheld device -- although Steve Jobs is insistent that it runs "real OS X" (Specifically, crashlogs indicate that the original iPhone ran "OS X 1.0" build number 1A543a.) -- but no iPhone models can run MacOS X applications regardless. On March 17, 2009, upon unveiling a developer's preview of the third version of the operating system, Apple started referring to it as the "iPhone OS".
http://www.everyipod.com/iphone-faq/iphone-runs-os-x-not-macos-x-cannot-run-macos-x-applications-skype-or-ipod-games.html
The iPhone and iPad run OS X right now, just a modified form.
Well that part was my second point - the same is true for my iMac - there is nothing in the PC world that compares to what it provides.
Yes, that was an important feature to me, but even without the circular logic (say I had found the ideal PC case setup and decided to compromise and deal with the hackintosh setup), it just doesn't exist. Probably because people in the PC world are just not looking for what the iMac offers, and if they are they can just run windows on an actual iMac (and I know a guy that does just that on several iMacs in his office - they run XP 99.9% of the time they are on, only booting to OS X if any bootcamp changes are needed).
I'd love to - and the reason that you don;t tend to see many Ferrari owners trying to "prove" their car is good value is that people don;t spend time trying to prove that it's worthless.
I'm sure there are some who will say "that car is just a waste of money, buy a Corolla instead!" like you see people saying "Apple Macs are just overpriced toys and anyone who uses one is just trying to look hip and cool and values image over actually wanting to do any work"
Not everyone, but you won't need to look very far to find several of those type of posts in any Apple thread, so you will naturally see people attempting to defend it in response.
I am very much a "right tool for the job" guy, and the iMac happens to be that tool for me - I'm not a zealot or anything (and dual boot windows for some tasks). I'm not going to begrudge anyone their choice of machine or OS - but I spend a lot of time browsing /. and running across posts that criticise my choice of computer because they have a person axe to grind, or believe that anyone who doesn't make exactly the same computer choices as them is totally clueless and stupid.
Yes, if you don't need or want the Apple case, then there really is no point buying it.