Err, yes... Apple has been making two button mice and input peripherals for some years now. I know this is slashdot, but how is this news to you?
The Mighty Mouse (with the terrible scroll ball that gunks up and stops working ) and Magic Mouse (with the touch sensitive top surface) both have right click without needing to use the control key. The touch sensitive controls on the surface can be disabled or tweaked easily in the settings if you find them too sensitive or just plain useless - I know people who have both reactions.
The trackpad (both the Magic Trackpad for desktop machines and the built in trackpads on laptops) also support right clicking without using the control key. You just click in the bottom right (or left, or triple tap, or tap and hold... fully customisable etc)
Or you could just plug in any USB mouse you choose. I use a Microsoft USB mouse with a scroll wheel alongside my Magic Trackpad because it's better for gaming.
My "logic" is that reality shows the "one button shitmouse" comment to be utterly, utterly false - not really sure what else to say?
Well, that's the crux of the whole argument - Apple doesn't seem to want to make iCloud into a Dropbox clone, because Dropbox already does it better although it obviously could if it wanted to. It used to have iDisk, but that flopped.
"One button shitmouse." Hah. I can almost ignore anything you just said, since it's clearly not based on facts, but basing my opinion on one clearly hilariously outdated piece of misinformation would be wrong. You're also ignoring all of the salient points about my PPC vs x86 argument, but whatever; it did contain some quite long words.
You question my assertion that "heavily locked down" applies to the hardware that Apple sells, then claim this article is about them banning the word jailbreak (hint: they didn't, they had a word censor, which is a different thing, but it was incorrectly applied in the store - a problem that was fixed on the same day it arose, not in response to negative feedback as the summary claims). They sell iOS devices that are locked down. We all know this. I did not question that. I questioned the original commenter's assertion "even on desktops" (go check, it's right there, I'll wait), and the proceeded to give a selection of arguments as to why that statement was incorrect.
I assume that you've simply failed to understand my post or that you lack reading comprehension. I suspect that you merely skimmed my post and then rushed to post a frothing reply designed to "own" me or something. I assume that's what you kids do on the internet, right? You should probably look at the points I am addressing before you come steaming in so that you don't look quite so silly.
Also, the word is "taboo", although you did use it correctly. I assume it's a word you've heard frequently but not seen written out very often.
"First they want to tell you what you can and cannot say. Then they want to tell you what you can and cannot do. Then they will want to tell you what you can and cannot think."
You realize this is Apple we're talking about, right? I think they followed that list exactly in reverse;
> Reality distortion field, army of fanboys ready to stand up for the stupidest decisions (I am still amazed at the instant turnover that was the end to the years of "PowerPC is better!" when Apple moved to iX86), heavy marketing to make you believe it is something it isn't.
> Walled garden that goes almost totally unquestioned by users. An unfortunate tendency for Apple to offer "official" (and mangled) versions of open source libraries, making use of the real ones more difficult. Heavily locked down hardware, even on desktops, compared to non-Apple computers.
> THEN censorship like this.
I am not really sure what they hoped to gain, making it quite possible this specific case was just a screwup of some middle-manager. However, that does not absolve Apple of their other sins; it simply illustrates how much unwarranted power Apple wields, with no oversight, over a growing segment of the computing world. Truly frightening.
Goodness me. Quite a bit to get to here.
"PowerPC is better! followed by switch to x86"
Yes, PowerPC *was* better at the time the commercials ran. They weren't quite as fast as Apple made them out (the Pentium had a snail on it) but at the time PPC did have an advantage. This advantage quickly evaporated, however, to an almost laughable degree - especially regarding memory bandwidth, and the brick wall that IBM ran into with the PPC970. In the meantime, Intel made enormous strides with x86 and left PPC in the dust, so Apple switched. The fact that the facts bore this out meant that people weren't still shouting about how PPC was better - they changed their opinion based on facts. How this is controversial to you is quite perplexing, unless you were expecting their heads to explode because "the Apple mothership" now held a contradictory position to one it had previously expressed.
Not sure how you can bash Apple or Apple users for that one, given that they did the exact opposite of what most of you haters claim Apple users do (blindly stick to things they a mindless fans of). x86 moves ahead of PPC so much that Apple went though a potentially painful total architecture switch - a non-trivial thing to do.
"Heavily locked down hardware, even on desktops"
Mhhmmm. People often trot this one out alongside the utterly diametrically opposed argument that Macs are just standard PC parts in a nice case. It's not really possible for both to be true. For the record, it's much closer to the latter.
I'd also question "heavily locked down" when all of the various pieces are pretty standard - you can swap out pretty much all of the parts as you need to on most of their machines. They switched from fixed CPUs and GPUs on the iMac to socketed whitebox Intel CPUs (you can buy an i5 or i7 off newegg and drop it in), and MXM 3.0 for the GPU (you can buy an MXM graphics card and slot it in, although they are rare and expensive). RAM is standard, hard drives are standard, optical drives are standard, the logic board uses PCIe, USB, SATA, etc.
Honestly, other than the custom firmware they had on iMac hard drives to be able to read the temperature (that was factory designed to be switched back to "standard" SATA behaviour with a jumper setting if a non-Apple drive was installed), I'm having a hard time seeing how "heavily locked down" applies? Maybe if you gave me some examples?
I'm not sure that it was a case of listening to their customers so much as realising the mistake and reversing it. I saw this story a couple of days ago, and Apple had fixed it on the same day it was reported. I think it was a case of automated censorship gone awry. Whether they have totally eliminated the censorship or merely confined it back to the original box it was meant to operate in (the App Store one presumes), is another thing entirely.
Either way, censoring words really doesn't get you very far.
Surely just easier to install a bucket wheel on the side of the Foxconn plant that rotates as it catches a suicidal jumper. Connect output shaft to generator. Profit?
It's not just in NC for the power though - there's land prices, network links to the backbone, various tax breaks from the local city, etc all factored into the location.
I'm assuming they did their homework on where to build it given how much it cost.;)
Might be a good short term boost for the US economy though - I mean, now Apple needs 40MW of solar panels and the cost of the Chinese ones just got more expensive. Should be a few happy US workers tonight (although ultimately I think punitive import tariffs are something of a double edged sword, there's not much you can do against a determined dumping on the market).
Greenpeace didn't "get" Apple to do that though, Apple were doing that anyway.
Greenpeace just came along and accused them of lying about the numbers, then when Apple put out a press release gently correcting them, and also talking about a second data centre also targeted to be powered fully by renewable, Greenpeace can now sweep in and claim all the credit for "keeping Apple honest" and "making big companies think about being green" when really they were doing it anyway.
Much like the very low score Greenpeace gave Apple on their "greenness" chart thing (and much lower than other companies that were nowhere near as green as Apple) because they simply hadn't done the research. For example, HP scoring big green points for making a plan to decide on when to remove BFRs from their products, and Apple scoring very low for no plan... but they'd already eliminated use of BFRs in their products 2 years before. And the same with reduced use of lead, and expanded polystyrene, and PVC in cables etc. Then when Apple releases a press release all about this, Greenpeace claim that they are the ones making Apple behave responsibly.
Greenpeace are doing more to hurt the green cause than helping it. There's only so many times you can be a dick - like soliciting donations that will directly fun criminal damage - before people start getting turned off the message, which is the last thing we want.
I'm as pro-green as they come - my future doctoral work will be into sustainable energy and catalytic water splitting etc - but I want absolutely nothing to do with Greenpeace. They do not represent me.
Yes, the Mac Pro and its associated pieces are unnecessarily expensive. I already mentioned that. Apple also charge much more than the going rate for RAM.
It's an industrial revolution - it was no different in UK during ours. It's just easier to document in the 21st century. China is gradually creating a middle class, and will work itself out of the current boom. Regulations will come in, wages will increase, pollution will become more of an issue.
Well, OS X has been so named for a decade now, but the versions it's been though (10.0 > 10.7) are akin to Windows changing from 95, 98, 2k, XP, Vista, 7 etc so it wouldn't really mean much to say that the next version of Mac OS would be 11 - it would just be OS X 10.n+1
At this point the name "OS X" is just like the name "Windows". Despite having a number in the name, it doesn't necessarily mean than they'll go up to eleven just to be one louder.
Like you say, it's up to Apple how they offer iCloud, and it's definitively *not* Dropbox - I don't even think they're shooting in the same ballpark. I honestly think they want to eliminate the idea of the filesystem for the normal user, rather than paint iCloud as a Dropbox style service that extends the usefulness of your filesystem as a global network share.
Dropbox and Skydrive (and whatever Google's is called, Gdrive?) are going that way, and I think Apple have decided that simply copying those services isn't going to work for them. All they want to do is make it so that if you read a book on the iPad, your bookmark is updated on your Mac, or if you type a letter in Pages it'll be right there on your Mac without the user thinking about what's going on under the hood.
They tried the Dropbox model with iDisk and it flopped - I think it was just not ready for the internet speeds of the majority of users of the day.
If they were trying to do something like Skydrive or Dropbox with the ability to just store anything as if it's part of your own filesystem then I think the restriction to App Store apps would be foolish, but I just don't think it's that; I think it's just a conduit to join iOS apps to OS X desktop ones.
Also, while I see your point regarding a developer who wants iCloud integration but also wants to distribute outside the App Store, I'm not sure that there will be many of those, if only because the only reason to use iCloud at all is to integrate with an iOS app. For pretty much every other use of cloud services then any other service like Dropbox would be a better solution given the limitations of iCloud (even beyond the App Store restriction). Even if you have an iOS app you could *still* use something like Dropbox, given that it works on iOS too.
My copy of Lion is using 222MB of Wired Memory as we speak (uptime 2 days), so not sure where you're getting 2GB from. Have you messed up your install?
Replaced GCC with some "in house brew" - that would be the open source Clang project, also adopted by FreeBSD.
Apple didn't just "not like" the licence for Samba, it went GPLv3 so they simply had to change to an alternate solution.
You don't need a credit card to get an AppleID (and thus use the App Store). A few seconds on google shows you that.
Command line tools don't install by default? If you are computer savvy enough to be using a shell then this is the most whiny complaint I've ever heard.
If you really can't get on with OS X then fair enough, but perhaps you should judge it based on facts? Either way, your machine will likely make a good Linux box if you decide to switch.
It takes less than a week to learn how to strip down an engine and rebuild it. Doesn't mean I want to do that.Ok, bad example since I can do that, but I had to go with a car analogy. Some people just want a computer that works and is simple to use.
You would be amazed at the number of people who, even after a couple of years using a computer, can't go more than one folder deep in a filesystem when organising it themselves. Not everyone is as au fait with computers as the users of slashdot.
No one is "fighting against" computers - people just want to be able to use them, and making them user friendly is only benefiting everyone.
The only people who complain are those who think that having an easy to use "dumbed down" walled garden is somehow a threat to their ego or something. The very fact that it exists (even though they are not forced to use it) is an affront to them for some reason. It doesn't affect them or their computer use at all, it just allows a larger user base to be able to use a computer on their own or with much reduced help from "techy" people.
Good for you, but not everyone is like you. In fact, the vast majority of people are not like you.
I use open source software where it suits my needs (XBMC, VLC, Ubuntu on an old Powerbook, etc) but it certainly can't replace everything I use.
I would wager that "having to pay FURTHER to run some apps" is very much the norm - most people buy software that they need rather than being able to find open source software to fill that need. The number that write their own software is smaller still. The number of people that build their own computer is also vanishingly small compared to those who buy their machines ready to run.
Also, I'm not sure that "double, triple" in terms of purchase price for equivalent hardware has been true for a very long time. Maybe the Mac Pro, but that's 2 years out of date with a pair of Xeons in it.
My definition of a "good" product is one that does everything I want it to do and represents good value for money for the price I paid for it. Using these criteria, I'm likely to come up with a different product to you, or the next person along. That's why choice is good. Not everyone is going to have the same opinions and values as you.
Yeah, connecting two jumper pins together is *so difficult*. I'm amazed that any human being can actually do it.
If you're good enough to get into the iMac, then you're good enough to be able to follow Apple's own method for installing drives that don't have the custom temperature sensing firmware and short the pins out.
So? Don't use it then. Apple offers it for free, but you're not obligated to use it.
I'd also argue that "hefty cut" is a tired old quip that has been thoroughly done to death by now - the 30% for hosting, store presence, bandwidth and payment processing is actually a very good deal for the developer. I think the in-app purchase cut is somewhat more debatable, but I believe it exists to prevent developers from giving away the app for free to dodge the initial 30% cut, only to then charge to unlock all the features.
The 30% cut for books and magazines etc I do think is a bit overboard, however.
How is it unethical to restrict access to your own servers for a cloud service for apps that are not sold through your own storefront?
Apple has the right to decide who gets access to their servers. They can set the terms of access, and setting them as "any app sold on the Mac App Store can store user data on our cloud servers" is not unethical or anticompetitive.
Especially since other cloud services still work just fine on both OS X and iOS. No one is forced to use iCloud.
iCloud is free to use, so however Apple chooses to implement it is their business.
App sandboxing is for security - not sure why you're trying to spin that as a negative, although it has already had some potential casualties (like apps that listen for specific keyboard shortcuts globally and perform actions while in the background).
And why would they be trying to get developers "in line" on the desktop? If they're already developing apps on the store then they now have the ability to add iCloud integration easily, and if they were developers making apps that aren't distributed through the store then they're exactly the same way off as they were before, still free to integrate with other cloud services if they want. If you're already a developer selling iOS apps then it's hardly a stretch to use the Mac App Store for your desktop app, assuming you want iCloud integration. If you really don't want to then you can just use something else like Dropbox.
What do you think Apple should do? Enable iCloud access for free to any app, regardless of source? Is the requirement to have it distributed through the store to enable use of cloud storage on their servers really all that onerous?
I certainly could see it coming - I mean, iCloud is free to use, so it's only sensible that Apple allow the free storage and use of their servers to applications from developers that are part of the developer program and use the Mac App Store.
I suppose they could offer access for a fee if not using the App Store, but then they'd be bashed for daring to charge money to access their servers.
This is all a bit of a storm in a teacup. iCloud is aimed squarely at "normal" computer users so that they can do the sorts of things power users have been able to do for a while with services like Dropbox but without having to worry about setting up or managing it or even having to worry about the filesystem.
Slashdot users think the sky is falling and that the OS will become "100% App Store" or something. Can't it be both a curated system and an "old fashioned" regular OS at the same time? You don't have to use the Mac App store (as a developer or as a user), and you don't have to use iCloud.
Before iCloud existed in its current form we had Dropbox and other such services, then Apple announces it and everyone says "lol, why do I need that? I have Dropbox", and now that Apple has released information on the API and the various restrictions for the use of their free cloud service suddenly it's "Apple are evil! They're walling it all off! wahhh!"
I personally think the Mac App Store is a genius move by Apple to make the user experience much more streamlined for the average user, but I also don't see it as a threat to the way I use a computer - all of that stuff is exactly the same as it was, and I can't see it going anywhere any time soon. It's not broken, and doesn't need fixing (ok, Finder needs some fixing, but you get what I mean).
They are not gaining any new market share they are losing it
This is untrue. They have been increasing their marketshare in computers for the past 6 or so years consecutively, in an industry that is stagnating in growth or even shrinking in some years. In the smartphone arena their marketshare is pretty stagnant, but their real-world numbers are increasing (the size of the market is growing, but their new users are cancelling out that proportional change). They are currently trading share back and forth with all other Android handset makers combined (which mainly means Samsung, who have the lion's share of that). They're certainly not in a position where they're panicking over marketshare and needing to "milk the religiously dedicated apple addict base" because that assumes that the bulk of their products are bought by these addicts, but that brings us to...
The bulk of their products come from apple addicts who funnel a substantial portion of their digital recreational dollars through them, without making real world price comparisons.
That really depends on whether you consider someone an "addict" if they value something that you don't. Just because you think an Apple product is too expensive for what it is doesn't mean that anyone who buys one hasn't weighed up the other options. They may simply have different criteria than you.
It also depends what you mean by "bulk" - if you mean in terms of the different numbers of product lines, then possibly they are all bought by "addicts". If you mean where their money comes from, then you're wide of the mark since that is the iPhone, and it sells far more than the total number of other Mac products combined, so they can't all be being bought by "apple addicts". They've sold over 100 million iPhones, and the numbers keep going up. Far too many to be simply the same fans just buying the new one every time it comes out - they're growing their user base. A large majority of people with an iPhone are first time Apple users, purely through a numbers game (subtract the total number of Apple computers from the total number of iPhones sold). I'm sure a lot of them had iPods, but Macs? The numbers simply don't add up. Hardly a "religiously dedicated apple addict base" (although there will clearly be some of those).
You can't - it doesn't work like that. It's not DropBox.
Maybe it will have that sort of function in the future, but Apple have tried that before with iDisk and it was a failure, so I expect it will simply continue to work as it does now - as a system that links your apps together so you don't have to worry about the filesystem. This is obviously not aimed at power users.
I think that the PC industry is one of the very few market segments where "you get what you pay for" is ignored. Sure, you can buy a cheap Dell laptop (as opposed to an expensive Dell laptop - they do make higher end ones) and then you spend the rest of the machine's life cursing the poor build quality with the creaky plastic case and the poor cooling solution that is barely adequate for it, so that it spins up that tiny, noisy fan every 30 seconds, then eventually breaks due to the case flexing slightly so the heatsink comes away from the CPU... then someone says "you could buy a Macbook Pro, which has a case machined out of a block of aluminium, but otherwise very similar internal components".... "oh no, that's just *way* too expensive... I'll just buy another cheap Dell.
People don't seem to be capable of understanding that not everything costs the same amount of money, and that just because a computer has the same hardware specs (eg, 2GHz CPU, 4GB RAM) that it should cost exactly the same as another computer with those specs.
We don't do this for cars, or clothes, or power tools, or almost anything else with variable quality products, yet we always seem to race to the bottom with computers.
Slashdot Mirror
Err, yes... Apple has been making two button mice and input peripherals for some years now. I know this is slashdot, but how is this news to you?
The Mighty Mouse (with the terrible scroll ball that gunks up and stops working ) and Magic Mouse (with the touch sensitive top surface) both have right click without needing to use the control key. The touch sensitive controls on the surface can be disabled or tweaked easily in the settings if you find them too sensitive or just plain useless - I know people who have both reactions.
The trackpad (both the Magic Trackpad for desktop machines and the built in trackpads on laptops) also support right clicking without using the control key. You just click in the bottom right (or left, or triple tap, or tap and hold... fully customisable etc)
Or you could just plug in any USB mouse you choose. I use a Microsoft USB mouse with a scroll wheel alongside my Magic Trackpad because it's better for gaming.
My "logic" is that reality shows the "one button shitmouse" comment to be utterly, utterly false - not really sure what else to say?
Well, that's the crux of the whole argument - Apple doesn't seem to want to make iCloud into a Dropbox clone, because Dropbox already does it better although it obviously could if it wanted to. It used to have iDisk, but that flopped.
My goodness, so much hate.
"One button shitmouse." Hah. I can almost ignore anything you just said, since it's clearly not based on facts, but basing my opinion on one clearly hilariously outdated piece of misinformation would be wrong. You're also ignoring all of the salient points about my PPC vs x86 argument, but whatever; it did contain some quite long words.
You question my assertion that "heavily locked down" applies to the hardware that Apple sells, then claim this article is about them banning the word jailbreak (hint: they didn't, they had a word censor, which is a different thing, but it was incorrectly applied in the store - a problem that was fixed on the same day it arose, not in response to negative feedback as the summary claims). They sell iOS devices that are locked down. We all know this. I did not question that. I questioned the original commenter's assertion "even on desktops" (go check, it's right there, I'll wait), and the proceeded to give a selection of arguments as to why that statement was incorrect.
I assume that you've simply failed to understand my post or that you lack reading comprehension. I suspect that you merely skimmed my post and then rushed to post a frothing reply designed to "own" me or something. I assume that's what you kids do on the internet, right? You should probably look at the points I am addressing before you come steaming in so that you don't look quite so silly.
Also, the word is "taboo", although you did use it correctly. I assume it's a word you've heard frequently but not seen written out very often.
"First they want to tell you what you can and cannot say. Then they want to tell you what you can and cannot do. Then they will want to tell you what you can and cannot think."
You realize this is Apple we're talking about, right? I think they followed that list exactly in reverse;
> Reality distortion field, army of fanboys ready to stand up for the stupidest decisions (I am still amazed at the instant turnover that was the end to the years of "PowerPC is better!" when Apple moved to iX86), heavy marketing to make you believe it is something it isn't.
> Walled garden that goes almost totally unquestioned by users. An unfortunate tendency for Apple to offer "official" (and mangled) versions of open source libraries, making use of the real ones more difficult. Heavily locked down hardware, even on desktops, compared to non-Apple computers.
> THEN censorship like this.
I am not really sure what they hoped to gain, making it quite possible this specific case was just a screwup of some middle-manager. However, that does not absolve Apple of their other sins; it simply illustrates how much unwarranted power Apple wields, with no oversight, over a growing segment of the computing world. Truly frightening.
Goodness me. Quite a bit to get to here.
"PowerPC is better! followed by switch to x86"
Yes, PowerPC *was* better at the time the commercials ran. They weren't quite as fast as Apple made them out (the Pentium had a snail on it) but at the time PPC did have an advantage. This advantage quickly evaporated, however, to an almost laughable degree - especially regarding memory bandwidth, and the brick wall that IBM ran into with the PPC970. In the meantime, Intel made enormous strides with x86 and left PPC in the dust, so Apple switched. The fact that the facts bore this out meant that people weren't still shouting about how PPC was better - they changed their opinion based on facts. How this is controversial to you is quite perplexing, unless you were expecting their heads to explode because "the Apple mothership" now held a contradictory position to one it had previously expressed.
Not sure how you can bash Apple or Apple users for that one, given that they did the exact opposite of what most of you haters claim Apple users do (blindly stick to things they a mindless fans of). x86 moves ahead of PPC so much that Apple went though a potentially painful total architecture switch - a non-trivial thing to do.
"Heavily locked down hardware, even on desktops"
Mhhmmm. People often trot this one out alongside the utterly diametrically opposed argument that Macs are just standard PC parts in a nice case. It's not really possible for both to be true. For the record, it's much closer to the latter.
I'd also question "heavily locked down" when all of the various pieces are pretty standard - you can swap out pretty much all of the parts as you need to on most of their machines. They switched from fixed CPUs and GPUs on the iMac to socketed whitebox Intel CPUs (you can buy an i5 or i7 off newegg and drop it in), and MXM 3.0 for the GPU (you can buy an MXM graphics card and slot it in, although they are rare and expensive). RAM is standard, hard drives are standard, optical drives are standard, the logic board uses PCIe, USB, SATA, etc.
Honestly, other than the custom firmware they had on iMac hard drives to be able to read the temperature (that was factory designed to be switched back to "standard" SATA behaviour with a jumper setting if a non-Apple drive was installed), I'm having a hard time seeing how "heavily locked down" applies? Maybe if you gave me some examples?
"Official "mangled' versions of OS libraries"
Examples?
I'm not sure that it was a case of listening to their customers so much as realising the mistake and reversing it. I saw this story a couple of days ago, and Apple had fixed it on the same day it was reported. I think it was a case of automated censorship gone awry. Whether they have totally eliminated the censorship or merely confined it back to the original box it was meant to operate in (the App Store one presumes), is another thing entirely.
Either way, censoring words really doesn't get you very far.
Surely just easier to install a bucket wheel on the side of the Foxconn plant that rotates as it catches a suicidal jumper. Connect output shaft to generator. Profit?
It's not just in NC for the power though - there's land prices, network links to the backbone, various tax breaks from the local city, etc all factored into the location.
I'm assuming they did their homework on where to build it given how much it cost. ;)
Might be a good short term boost for the US economy though - I mean, now Apple needs 40MW of solar panels and the cost of the Chinese ones just got more expensive. Should be a few happy US workers tonight (although ultimately I think punitive import tariffs are something of a double edged sword, there's not much you can do against a determined dumping on the market).
Greenpeace didn't "get" Apple to do that though, Apple were doing that anyway.
Greenpeace just came along and accused them of lying about the numbers, then when Apple put out a press release gently correcting them, and also talking about a second data centre also targeted to be powered fully by renewable, Greenpeace can now sweep in and claim all the credit for "keeping Apple honest" and "making big companies think about being green" when really they were doing it anyway.
Much like the very low score Greenpeace gave Apple on their "greenness" chart thing (and much lower than other companies that were nowhere near as green as Apple) because they simply hadn't done the research. For example, HP scoring big green points for making a plan to decide on when to remove BFRs from their products, and Apple scoring very low for no plan... but they'd already eliminated use of BFRs in their products 2 years before. And the same with reduced use of lead, and expanded polystyrene, and PVC in cables etc. Then when Apple releases a press release all about this, Greenpeace claim that they are the ones making Apple behave responsibly.
Greenpeace are doing more to hurt the green cause than helping it. There's only so many times you can be a dick - like soliciting donations that will directly fun criminal damage - before people start getting turned off the message, which is the last thing we want.
I'm as pro-green as they come - my future doctoral work will be into sustainable energy and catalytic water splitting etc - but I want absolutely nothing to do with Greenpeace. They do not represent me.
Yes, the Mac Pro and its associated pieces are unnecessarily expensive. I already mentioned that. Apple also charge much more than the going rate for RAM.
It's an industrial revolution - it was no different in UK during ours. It's just easier to document in the 21st century. China is gradually creating a middle class, and will work itself out of the current boom. Regulations will come in, wages will increase, pollution will become more of an issue.
Well, OS X has been so named for a decade now, but the versions it's been though (10.0 > 10.7) are akin to Windows changing from 95, 98, 2k, XP, Vista, 7 etc so it wouldn't really mean much to say that the next version of Mac OS would be 11 - it would just be OS X 10.n+1
At this point the name "OS X" is just like the name "Windows". Despite having a number in the name, it doesn't necessarily mean than they'll go up to eleven just to be one louder.
Like you say, it's up to Apple how they offer iCloud, and it's definitively *not* Dropbox - I don't even think they're shooting in the same ballpark. I honestly think they want to eliminate the idea of the filesystem for the normal user, rather than paint iCloud as a Dropbox style service that extends the usefulness of your filesystem as a global network share.
Dropbox and Skydrive (and whatever Google's is called, Gdrive?) are going that way, and I think Apple have decided that simply copying those services isn't going to work for them. All they want to do is make it so that if you read a book on the iPad, your bookmark is updated on your Mac, or if you type a letter in Pages it'll be right there on your Mac without the user thinking about what's going on under the hood.
They tried the Dropbox model with iDisk and it flopped - I think it was just not ready for the internet speeds of the majority of users of the day.
If they were trying to do something like Skydrive or Dropbox with the ability to just store anything as if it's part of your own filesystem then I think the restriction to App Store apps would be foolish, but I just don't think it's that; I think it's just a conduit to join iOS apps to OS X desktop ones.
Also, while I see your point regarding a developer who wants iCloud integration but also wants to distribute outside the App Store, I'm not sure that there will be many of those, if only because the only reason to use iCloud at all is to integrate with an iOS app. For pretty much every other use of cloud services then any other service like Dropbox would be a better solution given the limitations of iCloud (even beyond the App Store restriction). Even if you have an iOS app you could *still* use something like Dropbox, given that it works on iOS too.
How do you mean? As in, the successor to OS X?
I'm not sure what need that would be addressing?
My copy of Lion is using 222MB of Wired Memory as we speak (uptime 2 days), so not sure where you're getting 2GB from. Have you messed up your install?
Replaced GCC with some "in house brew" - that would be the open source Clang project, also adopted by FreeBSD.
Apple didn't just "not like" the licence for Samba, it went GPLv3 so they simply had to change to an alternate solution.
You don't need a credit card to get an AppleID (and thus use the App Store). A few seconds on google shows you that.
Command line tools don't install by default? If you are computer savvy enough to be using a shell then this is the most whiny complaint I've ever heard.
If you really can't get on with OS X then fair enough, but perhaps you should judge it based on facts? Either way, your machine will likely make a good Linux box if you decide to switch.
It takes less than a week to learn how to strip down an engine and rebuild it. Doesn't mean I want to do that.Ok, bad example since I can do that, but I had to go with a car analogy. Some people just want a computer that works and is simple to use.
You would be amazed at the number of people who, even after a couple of years using a computer, can't go more than one folder deep in a filesystem when organising it themselves. Not everyone is as au fait with computers as the users of slashdot.
No one is "fighting against" computers - people just want to be able to use them, and making them user friendly is only benefiting everyone.
The only people who complain are those who think that having an easy to use "dumbed down" walled garden is somehow a threat to their ego or something. The very fact that it exists (even though they are not forced to use it) is an affront to them for some reason. It doesn't affect them or their computer use at all, it just allows a larger user base to be able to use a computer on their own or with much reduced help from "techy" people.
Good for you, but not everyone is like you. In fact, the vast majority of people are not like you.
I use open source software where it suits my needs (XBMC, VLC, Ubuntu on an old Powerbook, etc) but it certainly can't replace everything I use.
I would wager that "having to pay FURTHER to run some apps" is very much the norm - most people buy software that they need rather than being able to find open source software to fill that need. The number that write their own software is smaller still.
The number of people that build their own computer is also vanishingly small compared to those who buy their machines ready to run.
Also, I'm not sure that "double, triple" in terms of purchase price for equivalent hardware has been true for a very long time. Maybe the Mac Pro, but that's 2 years out of date with a pair of Xeons in it.
My definition of a "good" product is one that does everything I want it to do and represents good value for money for the price I paid for it. Using these criteria, I'm likely to come up with a different product to you, or the next person along. That's why choice is good. Not everyone is going to have the same opinions and values as you.
Yeah, connecting two jumper pins together is *so difficult*. I'm amazed that any human being can actually do it.
If you're good enough to get into the iMac, then you're good enough to be able to follow Apple's own method for installing drives that don't have the custom temperature sensing firmware and short the pins out.
So? Don't use it then. Apple offers it for free, but you're not obligated to use it.
I'd also argue that "hefty cut" is a tired old quip that has been thoroughly done to death by now - the 30% for hosting, store presence, bandwidth and payment processing is actually a very good deal for the developer. I think the in-app purchase cut is somewhat more debatable, but I believe it exists to prevent developers from giving away the app for free to dodge the initial 30% cut, only to then charge to unlock all the features.
The 30% cut for books and magazines etc I do think is a bit overboard, however.
How is it unethical to restrict access to your own servers for a cloud service for apps that are not sold through your own storefront?
Apple has the right to decide who gets access to their servers. They can set the terms of access, and setting them as "any app sold on the Mac App Store can store user data on our cloud servers" is not unethical or anticompetitive.
Especially since other cloud services still work just fine on both OS X and iOS. No one is forced to use iCloud.
Well, you can use Dropbox on iOS too.
iCloud is free to use, so however Apple chooses to implement it is their business.
App sandboxing is for security - not sure why you're trying to spin that as a negative, although it has already had some potential casualties (like apps that listen for specific keyboard shortcuts globally and perform actions while in the background).
And why would they be trying to get developers "in line" on the desktop? If they're already developing apps on the store then they now have the ability to add iCloud integration easily, and if they were developers making apps that aren't distributed through the store then they're exactly the same way off as they were before, still free to integrate with other cloud services if they want. If you're already a developer selling iOS apps then it's hardly a stretch to use the Mac App Store for your desktop app, assuming you want iCloud integration. If you really don't want to then you can just use something else like Dropbox.
What do you think Apple should do? Enable iCloud access for free to any app, regardless of source? Is the requirement to have it distributed through the store to enable use of cloud storage on their servers really all that onerous?
I certainly could see it coming - I mean, iCloud is free to use, so it's only sensible that Apple allow the free storage and use of their servers to applications from developers that are part of the developer program and use the Mac App Store.
I suppose they could offer access for a fee if not using the App Store, but then they'd be bashed for daring to charge money to access their servers.
This is all a bit of a storm in a teacup. iCloud is aimed squarely at "normal" computer users so that they can do the sorts of things power users have been able to do for a while with services like Dropbox but without having to worry about setting up or managing it or even having to worry about the filesystem.
Slashdot users think the sky is falling and that the OS will become "100% App Store" or something. Can't it be both a curated system and an "old fashioned" regular OS at the same time? You don't have to use the Mac App store (as a developer or as a user), and you don't have to use iCloud.
Before iCloud existed in its current form we had Dropbox and other such services, then Apple announces it and everyone says "lol, why do I need that? I have Dropbox", and now that Apple has released information on the API and the various restrictions for the use of their free cloud service suddenly it's "Apple are evil! They're walling it all off! wahhh!"
I personally think the Mac App Store is a genius move by Apple to make the user experience much more streamlined for the average user, but I also don't see it as a threat to the way I use a computer - all of that stuff is exactly the same as it was, and I can't see it going anywhere any time soon. It's not broken, and doesn't need fixing (ok, Finder needs some fixing, but you get what I mean).
I can't tell if this is satire.
They are not gaining any new market share they are losing it
This is untrue. They have been increasing their marketshare in computers for the past 6 or so years consecutively, in an industry that is stagnating in growth or even shrinking in some years. In the smartphone arena their marketshare is pretty stagnant, but their real-world numbers are increasing (the size of the market is growing, but their new users are cancelling out that proportional change). They are currently trading share back and forth with all other Android handset makers combined (which mainly means Samsung, who have the lion's share of that). They're certainly not in a position where they're panicking over marketshare and needing to "milk the religiously dedicated apple addict base" because that assumes that the bulk of their products are bought by these addicts, but that brings us to...
The bulk of their products come from apple addicts who funnel a substantial portion of their digital recreational dollars through them, without making real world price comparisons.
That really depends on whether you consider someone an "addict" if they value something that you don't. Just because you think an Apple product is too expensive for what it is doesn't mean that anyone who buys one hasn't weighed up the other options. They may simply have different criteria than you.
It also depends what you mean by "bulk" - if you mean in terms of the different numbers of product lines, then possibly they are all bought by "addicts". If you mean where their money comes from, then you're wide of the mark since that is the iPhone, and it sells far more than the total number of other Mac products combined, so they can't all be being bought by "apple addicts". They've sold over 100 million iPhones, and the numbers keep going up. Far too many to be simply the same fans just buying the new one every time it comes out - they're growing their user base. A large majority of people with an iPhone are first time Apple users, purely through a numbers game (subtract the total number of Apple computers from the total number of iPhones sold). I'm sure a lot of them had iPods, but Macs? The numbers simply don't add up. Hardly a "religiously dedicated apple addict base" (although there will clearly be some of those).
You can't - it doesn't work like that. It's not DropBox.
Maybe it will have that sort of function in the future, but Apple have tried that before with iDisk and it was a failure, so I expect it will simply continue to work as it does now - as a system that links your apps together so you don't have to worry about the filesystem. This is obviously not aimed at power users.
I think that the PC industry is one of the very few market segments where "you get what you pay for" is ignored. Sure, you can buy a cheap Dell laptop (as opposed to an expensive Dell laptop - they do make higher end ones) and then you spend the rest of the machine's life cursing the poor build quality with the creaky plastic case and the poor cooling solution that is barely adequate for it, so that it spins up that tiny, noisy fan every 30 seconds, then eventually breaks due to the case flexing slightly so the heatsink comes away from the CPU... then someone says "you could buy a Macbook Pro, which has a case machined out of a block of aluminium, but otherwise very similar internal components".... "oh no, that's just *way* too expensive... I'll just buy another cheap Dell.
People don't seem to be capable of understanding that not everything costs the same amount of money, and that just because a computer has the same hardware specs (eg, 2GHz CPU, 4GB RAM) that it should cost exactly the same as another computer with those specs.
We don't do this for cars, or clothes, or power tools, or almost anything else with variable quality products, yet we always seem to race to the bottom with computers.