I fail to see how Apple's marketing of iPods and iPhones has anything to do with consumer safety.
What, we had one kid who speared his iPod battery with a screwdriver, and a guy who sat on his iPhone and cracked the screen and battery and you use that as an excuse to claim Apple is not concerned with consumer safety because they didn't issue a recall?
Whatever happened to common sense? Back in the old days if you did something silly like driving on a highway with the sliding door on your MPV in the "open" position and falling out you wouldn't sue the manufacturer because it doesn't say not to do that in the manual, or that the car should disable the ignition when the doors are open just in case. People would laugh at you.
This is a case of safety - the thing can melt the plastic when it fails, so they are recalling it. Apple did the same thing with its power adapters when they frayed at the connector and caused sparks and melted the insulation.
They even had a recall for faulty iBook logic boards, even though the GPU failing was not unsafe, just annoying.
Funny that.
I did wonder how many posts it would be before someone went after apple in this unrelated thread about Acer. I guessed 5. I was off by a bit, but not by much.
It will almost certainly run OS X, and I would wager that it's much closer to an Air than an iPhone, being a computer without a keyboard rather than a big smartphone. Flash works just fine under OS X.
(yes, I know the iPhone also runs OS X and does not have flash, but the reason is not technical).
(although, there;s no flash on the iPhone either and it's not really what you'd call "a flop"....)
Yes, but even though the law states you must yield to an emergency vehicle, if the driver of that vehicle just charges through the light, even with sirens and lights on, and takes out another vehicle or causes an accident there will be repercussions. Having an exception to pass a red light does not absolve you of responsibility if you cause an accident, hence all the driver training for emergency crews.
So yes, the law has these exceptions for emergency vehicles to standard traffic laws, but in that respect I would say that the emergency vehicle is just as bound by the law as the normal driver - they are just covered under different sections depending on whether they are "active". Under non-emergency conditions they must follow all the standard road laws.
They are bound by traffic laws, even during an emergency, but they have the ability to use their judgement and training if they choose to break those traffic laws in order to fulfil their job (for example, not wearing a seatbelt just before a sting, going through red traffic lights with sirens on, breaking the speed limit, overtaking in otherwise dangerous places).
At all times they are responsible for their actions though, and in the case of an accident would have to justify their exceptions to the traffic rules - they can't just plough through a red traffic light without looking and say "sorry, police car on emergency call" even if they do have the blues and twos on - the driver must ensure that it is reasonably safe for them to perform that manoeuvre without slowing them down too much. If they are reckless, the public can provide evidence against them if a case comes to court requiring witnesses.
So, they don;t have a blanket pass on traffic laws, but they can break them at their discretion, as long as they feel it is safe to do so, with consequences if they cause an accident.
You can apply for a trademark that covers all uses - like Woolworths Australia did for their new logo that looked a little bit like Apple's, who then sought legal protection to prevent them from obtaining the trademark in the computer sector since it may conflict with them.
Time Machine is a remarkable implementation and combination of ideas that have been around for a long time, and is one of these great examples of Apple doing something with pre-existing ideas and tech and making it work so well - it is so much more than mere system restore, in terms of how it performs, what it does and the ease of use it presents to the user.
If you have a Mac and an external HD, you're good to go. It's extremely fast (after the initial backup of everything of course, but it does that in the background) and does the incremental changes very quickly and unobtrusively.
Where the flashy UI comes in is when you are browsing your backup, since you can just fly through each window into the past (and select files and make it jump to the previous change, or a whole folder and ask it to fly backwards to the last change point). It doesn't need all the fancy graphics, but they do offer something of a visual indication of time (eg if you tell it to jump to the last change and it very obviously flies backwards really far in a motion that makes it instantly clear to your brain about time difference compared to looking at a window that just pops up with an earlier date on it with no animation).
It's not new by any means, but it is easy enough for anyone to use and navigate, and it promotes the creation and use of backups - something that really needs to be pushed more than ever now that computer use is really moving front and centre in the home.
Apple's page on it gives some idea: http://www.apple.com/macosx/what-is-macosx/time-machine.html but to really get a sense of just how seamless and intuitive it is, you really need to actually try it. It should be priority number 1 for porting to Ubuntu!
I find it amusing that you think anyone who is an Apple fan believes any of the things you just attributed to them. Not everyone who uses Apple products is a tech-clueless fashionista with a small dog in a handbag and impossibly stylish shoes.
Also, System Restore the same as Time Machine... oh my. They may do the same job, but have you ever compared the way they do that job?
Flashy UI is one thing, and your supposition that OS X is just an "expensive UI on a free OS" (because Apple haven't contributed anything to Darwin at all, right?) is interesting, but I would say that the UI is the primary experience for the end user, in the same way as driving a car (hey, I just had to use a car analogy). I know that you can buy a cheaper computer, and a more expensive OS (Vista) or a free OS (any Linux flavour), but I prefer using OS X.
In the same way will try out different cars, some of which cost more than others, until I find one I enjoy driving, I will use the OS and hardware combo I prefer.
I love that I can put my iMac into its original box in about 2 minutes if you include the time it takes to unplug it and carry it like a suitcase when I take it over to a friend's place. I love the way OS X works (mostly), so I keep using it. I don;t constantly think to myself "damn, this intel box with an Apple logo on the front cost me more than if I'd bought a dell or a whitebox machine" since it was worth the cost to me. It doesn't mean I think that the Apple machine I use has some special unique parts that make it cost more. It costs more because Apple sets the price and people still buy them. The price may not be worth it to you - and more power to you, I'm not judging you for your computer choices, but I'd ask that you extend the same courtesy to me and others like me.
Apple gets a lot of flak for popularising things - the iPod (mp3 music players) and iPhone (smartphones) are the two current ones - in no stretch of the imagination did they "invent" either technology, but they do seem to have a knack for marketing that annoys people who liked the tech before it was "cool".
I didn't mean to be quite so snippy, was just hugely annoyed that the way the summary was written made to infer that Windows 7 wouldn;t work at all in boot camp, in a clear Apple-bash article containing easily disprovable lies about boot camp itself.
It's not just aesthetics though - they really do take up very little space in a small office environment in a converted barn that serves as the admin part, and they are *silent* too (unless they're really taxed, but they very rarely are). The guy was going to replace all the screens on the old Dell boxes he had and he happened to see my iMac (I have a white intel, so previous gen) and thought he could kill two birds with one stone and get rid of the towers from under the desks.
I know Dell makes an "iMac-a-like" which is a screen with a box fitted onto the back, and he saw those, but thought they were ugly as hell, and still not as slim as an iMac, so he went for those. Bought a load of them in bulk.
The company builds and sells custom multi-way radio hardware on a huge scale.
Yes it is, but in general we are talking vendor boxes here, so Apple is an off the shelf vendor in much the same way as Dell is.
Sure you can get all the nice parts and build a machine for yourself, or you can cut out the hassle and just buy one right from Apple - in a form that will run Windows, Linux and OS X with very little fuss.
I'm sure there is "better" hardware, but any way you cut it, the hardware is pretty good.
Given that we are 2 days into 2010, I assume the i7 is in the development Macbook Pros at Apple that will be out this year - at the same time as Intel releases the low power versions of the i7 chip that would work better in a laptop computer than the ones that suck down 50W or more.
Yes, indeed. Powering the RAM and part of the logic board is really draining....
The last time I used hibernate on an XP machine it had to do that "preparing to hibernate" stuff beforehand, then it took time to come back up again afterwards. It was about the same time as just shutting it down.
With sleep I can just close the lid, or hit command+option+eject and it goes off right away. Even if you come back to it the next day, the tiny trickle on the battery is nothing.
Hibernate would be more useful on my desktop machine, where a power cut would cause the sleep mode to fail, requiring a cold boot, but even then if I'm leaving it for a while sleep is normally fine, and if I'm gone all night or for an extended period I just shut down.
If enough people request it, I'm sure Apple will include it.
It it totally accurate. The "facts" in the article are complete rubbish.
Anyone who has used bootcamp and Windows on a Mac would know that. I can only surmise that the person who wrote the article has never, ever used Windows on Bootcamp.
I know a guy that has an office full of Aluminium iMacs that only run Windows - he likes the design, especially the space saving and the quality of the screens. It was the best all-in-one machine he could find.
Virus protection issues - the lack of need to run a virus program. Same for malware.
Set shortcut for hotcorner/screensaver and press it to lock screen. No need for script.
No hibernate on OS X, but sleep is virtually flawless and performs almost the same task - if you ever want to close down for long enough that a battery will run flat, why not just power off completely? Is it because it takes a week for windows to boot? No idea.
Also, define "forever" did Win 3.11 for Workgroups have hibernate? Did W95 have a (working) hibernate?
Right, so the server update combo - assuming you were to install 10.5.0 server on a slow internet connection, and then not patch it until 10.5.8 was current would be 978MB. (Not sure how many home users are running OS X server on a slow connection)
Similarly, 10.5.0 retail to 10.5.8 is 759MB if you never updated at all in the life cycle of the OS.
This is a long way from the GPP's original assertion that regular OSX updates were "800MB+". Maybe if you're running 10.5.0 Server on a dial up connection and you need to patch up to 10.5.8 server.
Normal OS X patches are not that large (ie, the incremental ones that most people use when they run software update).
Right, the advertising - one of the key things you need to make a product or service successful.
Apple is very good at it, and it is what turns an otherwise ordinary mp3 player (or lately, an ordinary smartphone) into a device that people really want.
The iTunes music store's userbase was small at the time - and it grew and grew, and continues to do so. Why didn;t mp3.com's user share do that if it was so successful? If it's still going (is it, I don't even know, where's the advertising), what is it that makes it different from the iTMS.
Tech products are not all about having the best product (although it helps) - everyone beats up on Apple for having "slick marketing" and "they're only successful because of good advertising" - I say why the hell are other people not doing that to sell their products?!
We just had a "top 10 terrible MS ads" article on slashdot too - what are MS doing wrong that Apple do so well? Marketing.
It goes a very long way to explaining why Apple are so successful.
Are you kidding? The iPod changed everything about portable music.
Yes, there were other mp3 players before the iPod, in the same way there were other smartphones before the iPhone - the iPod took the concept and made it popular for the people. Maybe *you* don't have an iPod, but millions of Americans (and other people in the world too by the way, there are other land masses on the planet too y'know) do. It changed the walkman/discman/minidisc idea and extended it. You don't just listen to headphones when you're a kid any more, or when you jog - now people do it everywhere - while commuting, while walking, at home. Your mum probably has an iPod and listens to it, where before she'd never bother with a walkman - the inconvenience of tapes and the size of the device make it not worth the hassle.
The iTunes store didn't come along until long after the iPod totally changed the landscape already, although if we're going there, the iTunes store was the first online music download service that was A GIGANTIC RUNAWAY SUCCESS, unlike almost any other download-based or even subscription-based online music store. DRM was mandatory at the behest of the content providers (no DRM, no content), but it was a stated goal from the very outset that Apple didn't want DRM but had no choice (if that choice meant no store). There is no longer DRM on the iTunes store for music.
Mp3 players were just another tech until the iPod came along - it wasn't the first, or even the best, but it was certainly the one that changed the portable music world.
I fly regularly. It's really not that bad. I've never had a problem at the checkpoints, even when I'm randomly selected for a detailed search. Even U.S. CBP has been courteous when I cross the border.
This last hour sitting bullshit is rather fresh, of course.... but the TSA's measures aren't much of a hassle to date.
Let me guess, you're a white male, with an American, British or Canadian passport with a name like "Bob Smith" or some other clearly western name.
That depends on your perspective - more Americans died in car crashes in September 2001 than died in the attacks. What about them?
Where's the fiery indignation for those deaths?
No one is claiming that individual lives are insignificant, but the response to 9/11 has just been silly.
So you lost some buildings and some citizens in a terrorist attack. The buildings are nothing - rebuild them, as we've been doing in Europe for decades in the face of terrorism on multiple fronts. The people clearly cannot be replaced and it is tragic, but the response to 9/11 really isn't the way you want to remember/avenge/retaliate in their memory.
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I fail to see how Apple's marketing of iPods and iPhones has anything to do with consumer safety.
What, we had one kid who speared his iPod battery with a screwdriver, and a guy who sat on his iPhone and cracked the screen and battery and you use that as an excuse to claim Apple is not concerned with consumer safety because they didn't issue a recall?
Whatever happened to common sense? Back in the old days if you did something silly like driving on a highway with the sliding door on your MPV in the "open" position and falling out you wouldn't sue the manufacturer because it doesn't say not to do that in the manual, or that the car should disable the ignition when the doors are open just in case. People would laugh at you.
This is a case of safety - the thing can melt the plastic when it fails, so they are recalling it. Apple did the same thing with its power adapters when they frayed at the connector and caused sparks and melted the insulation.
They even had a recall for faulty iBook logic boards, even though the GPU failing was not unsafe, just annoying.
Funny that.
I did wonder how many posts it would be before someone went after apple in this unrelated thread about Acer. I guessed 5. I was off by a bit, but not by much.
It will almost certainly run OS X, and I would wager that it's much closer to an Air than an iPhone, being a computer without a keyboard rather than a big smartphone. Flash works just fine under OS X.
(yes, I know the iPhone also runs OS X and does not have flash, but the reason is not technical).
(although, there;s no flash on the iPhone either and it's not really what you'd call "a flop"....)
Yes, but even though the law states you must yield to an emergency vehicle, if the driver of that vehicle just charges through the light, even with sirens and lights on, and takes out another vehicle or causes an accident there will be repercussions. Having an exception to pass a red light does not absolve you of responsibility if you cause an accident, hence all the driver training for emergency crews.
So yes, the law has these exceptions for emergency vehicles to standard traffic laws, but in that respect I would say that the emergency vehicle is just as bound by the law as the normal driver - they are just covered under different sections depending on whether they are "active". Under non-emergency conditions they must follow all the standard road laws.
They are bound by traffic laws, even during an emergency, but they have the ability to use their judgement and training if they choose to break those traffic laws in order to fulfil their job (for example, not wearing a seatbelt just before a sting, going through red traffic lights with sirens on, breaking the speed limit, overtaking in otherwise dangerous places).
At all times they are responsible for their actions though, and in the case of an accident would have to justify their exceptions to the traffic rules - they can't just plough through a red traffic light without looking and say "sorry, police car on emergency call" even if they do have the blues and twos on - the driver must ensure that it is reasonably safe for them to perform that manoeuvre without slowing them down too much. If they are reckless, the public can provide evidence against them if a case comes to court requiring witnesses.
So, they don;t have a blanket pass on traffic laws, but they can break them at their discretion, as long as they feel it is safe to do so, with consequences if they cause an accident.
You don't get to call the USA civilised until it fixes its healthcare system so it doesn't exclude a very large percentage of its own population.
You can apply for a trademark that covers all uses - like Woolworths Australia did for their new logo that looked a little bit like Apple's, who then sought legal protection to prevent them from obtaining the trademark in the computer sector since it may conflict with them.
Trademark applications are not always specific.
Time Machine is a remarkable implementation and combination of ideas that have been around for a long time, and is one of these great examples of Apple doing something with pre-existing ideas and tech and making it work so well - it is so much more than mere system restore, in terms of how it performs, what it does and the ease of use it presents to the user.
If you have a Mac and an external HD, you're good to go. It's extremely fast (after the initial backup of everything of course, but it does that in the background) and does the incremental changes very quickly and unobtrusively.
Where the flashy UI comes in is when you are browsing your backup, since you can just fly through each window into the past (and select files and make it jump to the previous change, or a whole folder and ask it to fly backwards to the last change point). It doesn't need all the fancy graphics, but they do offer something of a visual indication of time (eg if you tell it to jump to the last change and it very obviously flies backwards really far in a motion that makes it instantly clear to your brain about time difference compared to looking at a window that just pops up with an earlier date on it with no animation).
It's not new by any means, but it is easy enough for anyone to use and navigate, and it promotes the creation and use of backups - something that really needs to be pushed more than ever now that computer use is really moving front and centre in the home.
Apple's page on it gives some idea: http://www.apple.com/macosx/what-is-macosx/time-machine.html
but to really get a sense of just how seamless and intuitive it is, you really need to actually try it. It should be priority number 1 for porting to Ubuntu!
I find it amusing that you think anyone who is an Apple fan believes any of the things you just attributed to them. Not everyone who uses Apple products is a tech-clueless fashionista with a small dog in a handbag and impossibly stylish shoes.
Also, System Restore the same as Time Machine... oh my. They may do the same job, but have you ever compared the way they do that job?
Flashy UI is one thing, and your supposition that OS X is just an "expensive UI on a free OS" (because Apple haven't contributed anything to Darwin at all, right?) is interesting, but I would say that the UI is the primary experience for the end user, in the same way as driving a car (hey, I just had to use a car analogy). I know that you can buy a cheaper computer, and a more expensive OS (Vista) or a free OS (any Linux flavour), but I prefer using OS X.
In the same way will try out different cars, some of which cost more than others, until I find one I enjoy driving, I will use the OS and hardware combo I prefer.
I love that I can put my iMac into its original box in about 2 minutes if you include the time it takes to unplug it and carry it like a suitcase when I take it over to a friend's place. I love the way OS X works (mostly), so I keep using it. I don;t constantly think to myself "damn, this intel box with an Apple logo on the front cost me more than if I'd bought a dell or a whitebox machine" since it was worth the cost to me. It doesn't mean I think that the Apple machine I use has some special unique parts that make it cost more. It costs more because Apple sets the price and people still buy them. The price may not be worth it to you - and more power to you, I'm not judging you for your computer choices, but I'd ask that you extend the same courtesy to me and others like me.
Apple gets a lot of flak for popularising things - the iPod (mp3 music players) and iPhone (smartphones) are the two current ones - in no stretch of the imagination did they "invent" either technology, but they do seem to have a knack for marketing that annoys people who liked the tech before it was "cool".
I didn't mean to be quite so snippy, was just hugely annoyed that the way the summary was written made to infer that Windows 7 wouldn;t work at all in boot camp, in a clear Apple-bash article containing easily disprovable lies about boot camp itself.
It's not just aesthetics though - they really do take up very little space in a small office environment in a converted barn that serves as the admin part, and they are *silent* too (unless they're really taxed, but they very rarely are). The guy was going to replace all the screens on the old Dell boxes he had and he happened to see my iMac (I have a white intel, so previous gen) and thought he could kill two birds with one stone and get rid of the towers from under the desks.
I know Dell makes an "iMac-a-like" which is a screen with a box fitted onto the back, and he saw those, but thought they were ugly as hell, and still not as slim as an iMac, so he went for those. Bought a load of them in bulk.
The company builds and sells custom multi-way radio hardware on a huge scale.
Yes it is, but in general we are talking vendor boxes here, so Apple is an off the shelf vendor in much the same way as Dell is.
Sure you can get all the nice parts and build a machine for yourself, or you can cut out the hassle and just buy one right from Apple - in a form that will run Windows, Linux and OS X with very little fuss.
I'm sure there is "better" hardware, but any way you cut it, the hardware is pretty good.
Given that we are 2 days into 2010, I assume the i7 is in the development Macbook Pros at Apple that will be out this year - at the same time as Intel releases the low power versions of the i7 chip that would work better in a laptop computer than the ones that suck down 50W or more.
Yes, indeed. Powering the RAM and part of the logic board is really draining....
The last time I used hibernate on an XP machine it had to do that "preparing to hibernate" stuff beforehand, then it took time to come back up again afterwards. It was about the same time as just shutting it down.
With sleep I can just close the lid, or hit command+option+eject and it goes off right away. Even if you come back to it the next day, the tiny trickle on the battery is nothing.
Hibernate would be more useful on my desktop machine, where a power cut would cause the sleep mode to fail, requiring a cold boot, but even then if I'm leaving it for a while sleep is normally fine, and if I'm gone all night or for an extended period I just shut down.
If enough people request it, I'm sure Apple will include it.
And that is what sleep mode is for....
Sure, hibernate would be nice, just never needed it.
Instant wake from sleep is more than enough.
I just rebooted my iMac. Came back to full working desktop in 2 minutes.
Ok, that was a warm boot, but a reboot nonetheless. Also first time I've restarted it since I patched it.
Yes, yes you are missing a huge amount.
Best not to worry about it though - doesn't seem like you'd understand the issue anyway.
It it totally accurate. The "facts" in the article are complete rubbish.
Anyone who has used bootcamp and Windows on a Mac would know that. I can only surmise that the person who wrote the article has never, ever used Windows on Bootcamp.
Games and good hardware.
I know a guy that has an office full of Aluminium iMacs that only run Windows - he likes the design, especially the space saving and the quality of the screens. It was the best all-in-one machine he could find.
Virus protection issues - the lack of need to run a virus program. Same for malware.
Set shortcut for hotcorner/screensaver and press it to lock screen. No need for script.
No hibernate on OS X, but sleep is virtually flawless and performs almost the same task - if you ever want to close down for long enough that a battery will run flat, why not just power off completely? Is it because it takes a week for windows to boot? No idea.
Also, define "forever" did Win 3.11 for Workgroups have hibernate? Did W95 have a (working) hibernate?
Right, so the server update combo - assuming you were to install 10.5.0 server on a slow internet connection, and then not patch it until 10.5.8 was current would be 978MB. (Not sure how many home users are running OS X server on a slow connection)
Similarly, 10.5.0 retail to 10.5.8 is 759MB if you never updated at all in the life cycle of the OS.
This is a long way from the GPP's original assertion that regular OSX updates were "800MB+". Maybe if you're running 10.5.0 Server on a dial up connection and you need to patch up to 10.5.8 server.
Normal OS X patches are not that large (ie, the incremental ones that most people use when they run software update).
No kidding, NetBSD runs on all my ammo, so that netcraft can officially confirm when the deer dies while I'm out hunting.
Right, the advertising - one of the key things you need to make a product or service successful.
Apple is very good at it, and it is what turns an otherwise ordinary mp3 player (or lately, an ordinary smartphone) into a device that people really want.
The iTunes music store's userbase was small at the time - and it grew and grew, and continues to do so. Why didn;t mp3.com's user share do that if it was so successful? If it's still going (is it, I don't even know, where's the advertising), what is it that makes it different from the iTMS.
Tech products are not all about having the best product (although it helps) - everyone beats up on Apple for having "slick marketing" and "they're only successful because of good advertising" - I say why the hell are other people not doing that to sell their products?!
We just had a "top 10 terrible MS ads" article on slashdot too - what are MS doing wrong that Apple do so well? Marketing.
It goes a very long way to explaining why Apple are so successful.
Are you kidding? The iPod changed everything about portable music.
Yes, there were other mp3 players before the iPod, in the same way there were other smartphones before the iPhone - the iPod took the concept and made it popular for the people. Maybe *you* don't have an iPod, but millions of Americans (and other people in the world too by the way, there are other land masses on the planet too y'know) do. It changed the walkman/discman/minidisc idea and extended it. You don't just listen to headphones when you're a kid any more, or when you jog - now people do it everywhere - while commuting, while walking, at home. Your mum probably has an iPod and listens to it, where before she'd never bother with a walkman - the inconvenience of tapes and the size of the device make it not worth the hassle.
The iTunes store didn't come along until long after the iPod totally changed the landscape already, although if we're going there, the iTunes store was the first online music download service that was A GIGANTIC RUNAWAY SUCCESS, unlike almost any other download-based or even subscription-based online music store. DRM was mandatory at the behest of the content providers (no DRM, no content), but it was a stated goal from the very outset that Apple didn't want DRM but had no choice (if that choice meant no store). There is no longer DRM on the iTunes store for music.
Mp3 players were just another tech until the iPod came along - it wasn't the first, or even the best, but it was certainly the one that changed the portable music world.
I fly regularly. It's really not that bad. I've never had a problem at the checkpoints, even when I'm randomly selected for a detailed search. Even U.S. CBP has been courteous when I cross the border.
This last hour sitting bullshit is rather fresh, of course.... but the TSA's measures aren't much of a hassle to date.
Let me guess, you're a white male, with an American, British or Canadian passport with a name like "Bob Smith" or some other clearly western name.
That depends on your perspective - more Americans died in car crashes in September 2001 than died in the attacks. What about them?
Where's the fiery indignation for those deaths?
No one is claiming that individual lives are insignificant, but the response to 9/11 has just been silly.
So you lost some buildings and some citizens in a terrorist attack. The buildings are nothing - rebuild them, as we've been doing in Europe for decades in the face of terrorism on multiple fronts. The people clearly cannot be replaced and it is tragic, but the response to 9/11 really isn't the way you want to remember/avenge/retaliate in their memory.