Consider the market of the iBook. It is an average user's laptop. It doesn't have too much power, but it has enough to browse the web, listen to MP3s, and type documents quite comfortably. The G3 is much cheaper and it runs on a lot less power than the G4 or the 970. It's still a perfect fit for the iBook. IBM makes PPC 750FX chips whereas Motorola doesn't. The FX line consumes very little power and it is more than powerful enough for all of the tasks that I mentioned earlier. In fact, it seems that Apple is already using this line in the iBook.
The PowerBook, on the other hand, is the professional level laptop. It has the bleeding edge technology (gigabit Ethernet, FireWire 800, DVD burner, etc.) that professionals might need. It desperately needs a processor upgrade to remain competitive with x86 laptops. The best chip for the job right now is the 970. At the same power dissipation, it performs better than a G4 in all tasks that I've seen benchmarks for.
I see no reason whatsoever to upgrade the iBooks to G4s or move away from IBM. In fact, if they keep using the 750, they might be able to get the price below $800, and that would make for one attractive laptop. Now, if I were Steve Jobs, I would move away from the G naming convention for at least one of the processors. From an advertising standpoint, G3 and G5 are just too different without a G4 in between them. The G3 sounds old. So, why not just call the 970 the 970 instead of the G5?
What I really wonder is what they plan to do for the 20th anniversary Mac. I would love to see a cube with a 970 in it clocked just low enough to be passively cooled. Put some shock absorbing/sound dampening foam around the drives and you would have a silent computer. The original cube was a work of art and every Mac user I know wants one. Just imagine a cube with two of those gorgeous 23" cinema displays. Or perhaps something better since CMO can make those panels that IBM uses in their 22.2" UBER-LCD.
Well, that's cool. I had always heard that G4 performance didn't scale well at all. And I even heard that from Apple people at my school. Well, thank you for correcting me.
Hmm. I guess that's what I get for not reading the entire text before posting. I read all of the MacWhispers text a few days ago and that looked close enough that I didn't look any closer. Oh, well. Whatever.
Apple is moving away from Motorola chips entirely. IBM still makes the G3. In all likelihood, Apple is going to keep the G3 in the iBook and just start using IBM chips instead of Motorola ones.
I sure hope so.
Again, I really hope so. I've been itching to spend all of my money at the iTunes Music Store, but I don't have a Mac.
I would imagine that the Xserves would use the real thing. The Power4 uses more power and produces more heat than the 970, but it also has an insane MTBF. Besides, you wouldn't need a dual Power4 since it's already two cores on a single die. Pretty cool design, really.
They are comparing to a single G4. Due to the G4's bad architecture, putting two of them into a computer doesn't improve performance nearly as much as it should. IIRC, you only see roughly a 25%-50% improvement. Therefore, a single 970 is about on par with a dual G4 in integer based operations and it's much faster running Altivec code.
Robots with wheels certainly can go up and down stairs. They just have to use a strange arrangement of wheels. Specificaly, triangles of them with one wheel at each vertex. When one wheel encounters a pothole (or in this case the gab between two steps' edges), the entire assembly rotates. It works rather well. I've seen a robot designed like that climb about 20 stairs in the same time that it would take to go about 15 feet. The rotation slowed it down a bit, but really, it was pretty efficent.
And the robot from MIT that can do facial expressions is called Kismet. Quite a cool idea, but it can't do much without a mobile base. Right now, it just sits in a room and waits for people to interact with it.
In my opinion, Cog is much more impressive because it learns. They showed it how a toy car works and it learned how to move the car very quickly. Cog actually learned that the car would only move if it is pushed on the front or back, not the sides. Now that's an acomplisment.
OK. As long as they aren't flush with the surface, they should be much more useable. The pictures that I had seen of it seemed to indicate a totally flat face, and that would make it awfully hard to actually use the thing.
- the iPod unit - a set of second gen earbud headphones - two sets of grey covers for the earbuds - the wired remote control* - a 6-pin to 4-pin Firewire adapter - an AC adapter - a 2 meter 6-pin to 6-pin Firewire cable - a cloth carrying case* - a rigid carrying case* - a CD containing MusicMatch Jukebox and various other iPod related software
The * denotes items that only come with the 10/20GB units.
Well, with the second generation iPods, you don't NEED backlit buttons.
I find all of the buttons on my iPod by feel alone. I probably wouldn't be able to use the new one nearly as effectively as I can use my Gen 2. Just yesterday, I was navigating my playlists in my pocket. I doubt that the new iPods have buttons that I could even feel through my pocket, let alone reliably press.
In my opinnion, the dock is just another port to clog with dirt. I haven't seen a new iPod in person yet, but if the dock port doesn't have a cover of some sort, I would expect it to fill with dirt rather quickly.
No way, man. My girlfriend deserves so much better than that. Calligraphy all the way! Nothing beats the look of good ink from a real pen on quality paper. None of that wimpy ballpoint stuff or pencil. Now THAT is an art form.
Note that even though I can do calligraphy, I still can't write well in cursive.
That's really weird. I've never even heard of someone else who has the whole fingernail thing.
I doubt that there is a relation. One trait is of the musculature of the hand whereas the other is of something completely different. However, we don't really have much of an idea of how different genes affect us, so they could be.
If you want to reply to this, you might as well do it over private E-mail. It will probably get a faster response. My username doesnâ(TM)t make any sense forwards or backwards. Itâ(TM)s rgdtad. The rest should be obvious from what I have showing.
Cool. I've seen (and made) far stranger mistakes before. I was just a bit surprised when you said that. I was thinking that it was OS9 only or something.
I would also expect Shake to be more optimized. Similarly, I expect Logic to be almost custom-fit to OSX since Apple owns that company now. I really need to try out some of this nifty software myself. Perhaps the local Apple store...
Well, coordination can be developed in other ways. There are all sorts of art that help manual dexterity. Sign language springs to mind. Even though I detest cursive and was never able to write it such that anyone other than me could read it, I can draw fairly well and I can do calligraphy with very little concentration.
Unfortunately, I'm one of the people who reads with his ears. My conscious thoughts take the form of me speaking to myself. If I speak while I'm writing, I have trouble keeping the two streams separate. It's kind of humorous, really. Sometimes, I write and speak about two different things just to see what comes out.
So what if this particular form of cursive is American? Writing is comparable to a dialect of a language. Our language is evolving. Saying that the modern generation needs to know cursive is like saying that they need to know Middle English. One has already died and been replaced. The other will do the same. It's inevitable. To expect otherwise is folly.
I use the first one, too and like you said, everything else simply feels wrong. I hold multimeter probes in the same way. Perhaps the two are somehow related? Probably not.
I've never been called weird because of the way in which I write. However, I have several other qualities for which I was insulted.
For instance, my fingernails grow inordinately quickly. To keep them where most people think they should be would mean cutting them every three days. That simply isn't enough time for the edge to wear down to a pleasant texture. Yes, I know, I can file them, but that leaves them feeling grainy and unpleasant.
In my school, they DID teach how the sliderule works. Of course, they didn't TELL people because that would have resulted in mass whining, but we got the principle of adding logs.
I actually know how to use a sliderule. I brought one to Calculus one day because I could. Everyone laughed at me for a while, but they changed their tune when they saw that I could do all sorts of nasty problems out to four significant digits by the time they had entered the first half into their calculators. Good times.
Calligraphy is beautiful. Cursive doesnâ(TM)t strike me as anything more than a half-baked imitation of calligraphy meant to take less time to write. If I want beauty, I use calligraphy and if I want speed, I use a sort of stylized printing.
I really donâ(TM)t see how writing or even cursive is âoea uniquely American form of expressionâ. We Americans are hardly the only ones who write and I think that we have a horribly ugly written language. Any oriental language that Iâ(TM)ve seen beats ours in terms of intricacy and beauty.
I couldn't write in cursive LONG before I ever touched a computer keyboard!
Seriously, I was never able to learn it to my teachers' satisfaction in grade school. They always told me that my writing was messy and hard to read and that they would take points off for not writing in cursive. Then when I wrote in cursive, they complained even more, so eventually, I went back to my current writing. If my writing is so hard to read, why can Tablet PCs that Iâ(TM)ve never used before get almost 95% of it? My Newton's HWR accuracy approaches 99% now that I've trained it.
I just don't see cursive as being a useful piece of knowledge. I can read it just fine, but I don't see any reason to write it. I can write in my script much faster than anyone I know can write in cursive. Everyone Iâ(TM)ve asked has no trouble whatsoever reading my handwriting; so maybe my teachers were just on crack.
I already use my thumb to ring doorbells and I have never used a mobile phone's keypad. Of course, I use the center of my thumb and they probably mean that the next generation will use their thumb tips, but I really wonder about the conclusions people reach sometimes.
That's funny. On Apple's website, it says that Combustion IS available for OSX.
[Blockquote]
System Requirements:
* The following list describes the minimum working system required for Combustion 2.1.
* PowerPC G3 or G4 CPU, 266MHz or higher
* Mac OS 9.x or X v10.x
* QuickTime 4.0, 5.0 or 6.0
* 2GB main hard drive with ~120MB free space (70MB for the software, 45MB for help)
* 256MB of RAM
* A video display card with 4MB of VRAM (1024x768 display with 24-bit color minimum required)
[/Blockquote]
This is from the www.apple.com Store's Software section under Pro Design.
Now, I do agree that Shake rules, but Combustion certainly is available for those who want to use it. Unfortunately, I don't know nearly as much as I want to about either.
Well, you've got Golden Sun, which is easily the best handheld RPG that I've ever played. Then there's Metroid Fusion, which is a game worthy of the Metroid name. Last, but not least, Advance Wars, which is the most addictive game that I have ever played.
Any one of those is worth getting at least the original GBA.
The original GBA's speaker was far better than the GBC's, though. It's almost as good as the speaker on the original GameBoy! I haven't tried the SP, so I don't know where its speaker stands yet.
And IIRC, Nintendo released a translucent green GameBoy Pocket in Japan that had a light. It was called the GameBoy Light or something similar.
Apache is available for download straight from Apple's website. It takes a bit of looking to find it, but it's there. Also, I'm pretty sure that it comes with the OS. I've never installed OSX myself, so I don't know if it's installed by default or what, but jo ham says that it is.
You do have a good point about how the software tends to be pretty high dollar stuff. However, it lets you do some amazing things. Mostly my point there was that Macs have plenty of professional quality software for just about every form of content authoring or editing.
Macs have all sorts of drivers built-in. You can plug in just about any USB device and it will detect it. I've had them recognize mice, keyboards, graphics tablets, USB hard drives, memory card readers, printers, scanners, and digital cameras with no driver instalation whatsoever. It was certainly cool to just plug any USB device that I could find in and have it work. Fortunately, Windows xp is almost as good as OSX in that regard, but Macs had it first.
The people at the Apple Store near me know their stuff. Perhaps the staff at the store near you just wasn't as knowledgable as they could have been.
Well, by "intuitive", you probably mean "like Windows". Mac OS is far more intuitive to people who have never used computers before.
Similarly, you're used to having the Windows right-click. Apple thought about adding that and decided that it would make more sense to have a single mouse button and give it modifier key support. Think about the mouse as having a key instead of a button. I know, it doesn't seem to make much sense, but I find that the Windows way makes much less sense to new users.
Also, remember that the Mac OS has built-in support for something like twelve mouse buttons. You just have to get a mouse with more than one.
As for hosting a web site, surely you don't use IIS for that, do you? OSX has all sorts of great server software like Apache. You just have to install them and turn them on.
For surfing, OSX has easily the coolest browser that I've ever seen. Safari beats Mozilla hands down in speed and it's more standards compliant than IE. Essentially, it's everything that Mozilla Firebird is, but it's built by the people who made the OS.
Macs are widely acknowledged to be the best computers for all sorts of multimedia stuff. If you want to edit video, there's iMovie, CinePaint, Final Cut, After Effects, and loads of other tools. For stills that could be used on a website, you have all of the standard tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Page Maker, Painter, and CorelDRAW, and the myriad Macromedia applications and quite a few that I've never seen for Windows such as Combustion. For audio creation and editing, you can use Logic, Deck, Cubase, Peak, Reason, and Spark, just to name a few. For 3D modeling, Maya is the only one that I know about, but I don't exactly research that.
If you just meant playing multimedia, I have found that QuickTime and iTunes do a far better job of that than Windows Media Player.
I really wish that I had a Mac, but I'm WAY to cheap to actually buy one new.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider the market of the iBook. It is an average user's laptop. It doesn't have too much power, but it has enough to browse the web, listen to MP3s, and type documents quite comfortably. The G3 is much cheaper and it runs on a lot less power than the G4 or the 970. It's still a perfect fit for the iBook. IBM makes PPC 750FX chips whereas Motorola doesn't. The FX line consumes very little power and it is more than powerful enough for all of the tasks that I mentioned earlier. In fact, it seems that Apple is already using this line in the iBook.
The PowerBook, on the other hand, is the professional level laptop. It has the bleeding edge technology (gigabit Ethernet, FireWire 800, DVD burner, etc.) that professionals might need. It desperately needs a processor upgrade to remain competitive with x86 laptops. The best chip for the job right now is the 970. At the same power dissipation, it performs better than a G4 in all tasks that I've seen benchmarks for.
I see no reason whatsoever to upgrade the iBooks to G4s or move away from IBM. In fact, if they keep using the 750, they might be able to get the price below $800, and that would make for one attractive laptop. Now, if I were Steve Jobs, I would move away from the G naming convention for at least one of the processors. From an advertising standpoint, G3 and G5 are just too different without a G4 in between them. The G3 sounds old. So, why not just call the 970 the 970 instead of the G5?
What I really wonder is what they plan to do for the 20th anniversary Mac. I would love to see a cube with a 970 in it clocked just low enough to be passively cooled. Put some shock absorbing/sound dampening foam around the drives and you would have a silent computer. The original cube was a work of art and every Mac user I know wants one. Just imagine a cube with two of those gorgeous 23" cinema displays. Or perhaps something better since CMO can make those panels that IBM uses in their 22.2" UBER-LCD.
OK, well, I meant that it would run on the 970s. My mistake.
Well, that's cool. I had always heard that G4 performance didn't scale well at all. And I even heard that from Apple people at my school. Well, thank you for correcting me.
Hmm. I guess that's what I get for not reading the entire text before posting. I read all of the MacWhispers text a few days ago and that looked close enough that I didn't look any closer. Oh, well. Whatever.
The 970 is already being produced en masse. Because of Apple's contract with IBM, they get a bunch of them pretty early.
According to ThinkSecret, Panther is going to launch sometime in September. They also say that a special 64-bit version of Jaguar called 'Sméagol' is being built for the new PowerMacs (known internally as Q37). It could be finalized as early as WWDC. Why would they have a special version of Jaguar if they didn't have the 970's rolling off the production lines already? Seriously. If Apple thought that they couldn't get them to people quickly, they wouldn't bother recompiling the entire OS for them. They would just wait a month to release them. They don't want a repeat of the bad publicity they got as a result of the 17" slowness.
Apple is moving away from Motorola chips entirely. IBM still makes the G3. In all likelihood, Apple is going to keep the G3 in the iBook and just start using IBM chips instead of Motorola ones.
I sure hope so.
Again, I really hope so. I've been itching to spend all of my money at the iTunes Music Store, but I don't have a Mac.
I would imagine that the Xserves would use the real thing. The Power4 uses more power and produces more heat than the 970, but it also has an insane MTBF. Besides, you wouldn't need a dual Power4 since it's already two cores on a single die. Pretty cool design, really.
They are comparing to a single G4. Due to the G4's bad architecture, putting two of them into a computer doesn't improve performance nearly as much as it should. IIRC, you only see roughly a 25%-50% improvement. Therefore, a single 970 is about on par with a dual G4 in integer based operations and it's much faster running Altivec code.
Poor MacWhispers doesn't have a single ad on the linked site. Let's not destroy their servers when the article text is here.
Robots with wheels certainly can go up and down stairs. They just have to use a strange arrangement of wheels. Specificaly, triangles of them with one wheel at each vertex. When one wheel encounters a pothole (or in this case the gab between two steps' edges), the entire assembly rotates. It works rather well. I've seen a robot designed like that climb about 20 stairs in the same time that it would take to go about 15 feet. The rotation slowed it down a bit, but really, it was pretty efficent.
And the robot from MIT that can do facial expressions is called Kismet. Quite a cool idea, but it can't do much without a mobile base. Right now, it just sits in a room and waits for people to interact with it.
In my opinion, Cog is much more impressive because it learns. They showed it how a toy car works and it learned how to move the car very quickly. Cog actually learned that the car would only move if it is pushed on the front or back, not the sides. Now that's an acomplisment.
OK. As long as they aren't flush with the surface, they should be much more useable. The pictures that I had seen of it seemed to indicate a totally flat face, and that would make it awfully hard to actually use the thing.
The touch-wheel iPods are the second generation.
The second gen iPods came with
- the iPod unit
- a set of second gen earbud headphones
- two sets of grey covers for the earbuds
- the wired remote control*
- a 6-pin to 4-pin Firewire adapter
- an AC adapter
- a 2 meter 6-pin to 6-pin Firewire cable
- a cloth carrying case*
- a rigid carrying case*
- a CD containing MusicMatch Jukebox and various other iPod related software
The * denotes items that only come with the 10/20GB units.
I really like EphPod. It's much better than MMJB.
Well, with the second generation iPods, you don't NEED backlit buttons.
I find all of the buttons on my iPod by feel alone. I probably wouldn't be able to use the new one nearly as effectively as I can use my Gen 2. Just yesterday, I was navigating my playlists in my pocket. I doubt that the new iPods have buttons that I could even feel through my pocket, let alone reliably press.
In my opinnion, the dock is just another port to clog with dirt. I haven't seen a new iPod in person yet, but if the dock port doesn't have a cover of some sort, I would expect it to fill with dirt rather quickly.
No way, man. My girlfriend deserves so much better than that. Calligraphy all the way! Nothing beats the look of good ink from a real pen on quality paper. None of that wimpy ballpoint stuff or pencil. Now THAT is an art form.
Note that even though I can do calligraphy, I still can't write well in cursive.
That's really weird. I've never even heard of someone else who has the whole fingernail thing.
I doubt that there is a relation. One trait is of the musculature of the hand whereas the other is of something completely different. However, we don't really have much of an idea of how different genes affect us, so they could be.
If you want to reply to this, you might as well do it over private E-mail. It will probably get a faster response. My username doesnâ(TM)t make any sense forwards or backwards. Itâ(TM)s rgdtad. The rest should be obvious from what I have showing.
Cool. I've seen (and made) far stranger mistakes before. I was just a bit surprised when you said that. I was thinking that it was OS9 only or something.
...
I would also expect Shake to be more optimized. Similarly, I expect Logic to be almost custom-fit to OSX since Apple owns that company now. I really need to try out some of this nifty software myself. Perhaps the local Apple store
Well, coordination can be developed in other ways. There are all sorts of art that help manual dexterity. Sign language springs to mind. Even though I detest cursive and was never able to write it such that anyone other than me could read it, I can draw fairly well and I can do calligraphy with very little concentration.
Unfortunately, I'm one of the people who reads with his ears. My conscious thoughts take the form of me speaking to myself. If I speak while I'm writing, I have trouble keeping the two streams separate. It's kind of humorous, really. Sometimes, I write and speak about two different things just to see what comes out.
So what if this particular form of cursive is American? Writing is comparable to a dialect of a language. Our language is evolving. Saying that the modern generation needs to know cursive is like saying that they need to know Middle English. One has already died and been replaced. The other will do the same. It's inevitable. To expect otherwise is folly.
I use the first one, too and like you said, everything else simply feels wrong. I hold multimeter probes in the same way. Perhaps the two are somehow related? Probably not.
I've never been called weird because of the way in which I write. However, I have several other qualities for which I was insulted.
For instance, my fingernails grow inordinately quickly. To keep them where most people think they should be would mean cutting them every three days. That simply isn't enough time for the edge to wear down to a pleasant texture. Yes, I know, I can file them, but that leaves them feeling grainy and unpleasant.
In my school, they DID teach how the sliderule works. Of course, they didn't TELL people because that would have resulted in mass whining, but we got the principle of adding logs.
I actually know how to use a sliderule. I brought one to Calculus one day because I could. Everyone laughed at me for a while, but they changed their tune when they saw that I could do all sorts of nasty problems out to four significant digits by the time they had entered the first half into their calculators. Good times.
Calligraphy is beautiful. Cursive doesnâ(TM)t strike me as anything more than a half-baked imitation of calligraphy meant to take less time to write. If I want beauty, I use calligraphy and if I want speed, I use a sort of stylized printing.
I really donâ(TM)t see how writing or even cursive is âoea uniquely American form of expressionâ. We Americans are hardly the only ones who write and I think that we have a horribly ugly written language. Any oriental language that Iâ(TM)ve seen beats ours in terms of intricacy and beauty.
I couldn't write in cursive LONG before I ever touched a computer keyboard!
Seriously, I was never able to learn it to my teachers' satisfaction in grade school. They always told me that my writing was messy and hard to read and that they would take points off for not writing in cursive. Then when I wrote in cursive, they complained even more, so eventually, I went back to my current writing. If my writing is so hard to read, why can Tablet PCs that Iâ(TM)ve never used before get almost 95% of it? My Newton's HWR accuracy approaches 99% now that I've trained it.
I just don't see cursive as being a useful piece of knowledge. I can read it just fine, but I don't see any reason to write it. I can write in my script much faster than anyone I know can write in cursive. Everyone Iâ(TM)ve asked has no trouble whatsoever reading my handwriting; so maybe my teachers were just on crack.
I already use my thumb to ring doorbells and I have never used a mobile phone's keypad. Of course, I use the center of my thumb and they probably mean that the next generation will use their thumb tips, but I really wonder about the conclusions people reach sometimes.
That's funny. On Apple's website, it says that Combustion IS available for OSX.
.
[Blockquote]
System Requirements:
* The following list describes the minimum working system required for Combustion 2.1
* PowerPC G3 or G4 CPU, 266MHz or higher
* Mac OS 9.x or X v10.x
* QuickTime 4.0, 5.0 or 6.0
* 2GB main hard drive with ~120MB free space (70MB for the software, 45MB for help)
* 256MB of RAM
* A video display card with 4MB of VRAM (1024x768 display with 24-bit color minimum required)
[/Blockquote]
This is from the www.apple.com Store's Software section under Pro Design.
Now, I do agree that Shake rules, but Combustion certainly is available for those who want to use it. Unfortunately, I don't know nearly as much as I want to about either.
Well, you've got Golden Sun, which is easily the best handheld RPG that I've ever played. Then there's Metroid Fusion, which is a game worthy of the Metroid name. Last, but not least, Advance Wars, which is the most addictive game that I have ever played.
Any one of those is worth getting at least the original GBA.
The original GBA's speaker was far better than the GBC's, though. It's almost as good as the speaker on the original GameBoy! I haven't tried the SP, so I don't know where its speaker stands yet.
And IIRC, Nintendo released a translucent green GameBoy Pocket in Japan that had a light. It was called the GameBoy Light or something similar.
Apache is available for download straight from Apple's website. It takes a bit of looking to find it, but it's there. Also, I'm pretty sure that it comes with the OS. I've never installed OSX myself, so I don't know if it's installed by default or what, but jo ham says that it is.
You do have a good point about how the software tends to be pretty high dollar stuff. However, it lets you do some amazing things. Mostly my point there was that Macs have plenty of professional quality software for just about every form of content authoring or editing.
Macs have all sorts of drivers built-in. You can plug in just about any USB device and it will detect it. I've had them recognize mice, keyboards, graphics tablets, USB hard drives, memory card readers, printers, scanners, and digital cameras with no driver instalation whatsoever. It was certainly cool to just plug any USB device that I could find in and have it work. Fortunately, Windows xp is almost as good as OSX in that regard, but Macs had it first.
The people at the Apple Store near me know their stuff. Perhaps the staff at the store near you just wasn't as knowledgable as they could have been.
Nor can anyone claim that PPC was designed for Mac OS.
Well, I suppose that you can claim it all you want, but it's still wrong.
Well, by "intuitive", you probably mean "like Windows". Mac OS is far more intuitive to people who have never used computers before.
Similarly, you're used to having the Windows right-click. Apple thought about adding that and decided that it would make more sense to have a single mouse button and give it modifier key support. Think about the mouse as having a key instead of a button. I know, it doesn't seem to make much sense, but I find that the Windows way makes much less sense to new users.
Also, remember that the Mac OS has built-in support for something like twelve mouse buttons. You just have to get a mouse with more than one.
As for hosting a web site, surely you don't use IIS for that, do you? OSX has all sorts of great server software like Apache. You just have to install them and turn them on.
For surfing, OSX has easily the coolest browser that I've ever seen. Safari beats Mozilla hands down in speed and it's more standards compliant than IE. Essentially, it's everything that Mozilla Firebird is, but it's built by the people who made the OS.
Macs are widely acknowledged to be the best computers for all sorts of multimedia stuff. If you want to edit video, there's iMovie, CinePaint, Final Cut, After Effects, and loads of other tools. For stills that could be used on a website, you have all of the standard tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Page Maker, Painter, and CorelDRAW, and the myriad Macromedia applications and quite a few that I've never seen for Windows such as Combustion. For audio creation and editing, you can use Logic, Deck, Cubase, Peak, Reason, and Spark, just to name a few. For 3D modeling, Maya is the only one that I know about, but I don't exactly research that.
If you just meant playing multimedia, I have found that QuickTime and iTunes do a far better job of that than Windows Media Player.
I really wish that I had a Mac, but I'm WAY to cheap to actually buy one new.