You're wrong. Neil was the Beatles' original roadie; he happened to be friends with Pete Best, and became the Beatles' roadie because he owned his own van. Mal was later hired when the job became too demanding for Neil to do alone. Later, when the Beatles became hugely successful, Neil and Mal went from being roadies to personal assistants/confidants. It was only when the Beatles decided to run their own affairs following the death of Brian Epstein that Neil assumed a management role. He was never the Beatles' press officer, that task being taken by Tony Barrow and Derek Taylor.
Apple doesn't want to make it too easy for you to run Windows. They want to keep people booted into OS X as much as possible; they want to make running Windows even more of a nuisance than it already is, so that after a few weeks, you find that you really can do without those last couple of Windows apps you were relying on.
And they're certainly not going to support virtualization. All the rumor sites claiming otherwise are full of it. Shitty-looking, lousy-UI-having Windows apps running as equal citizens on an OS X desktop? Over Steve Jobs' dead body. Not only would it completely degrade the Mac experience, it would jeopardize OS X's developer support. By keeping the environments strictly segregated, Apple helps ensure that Mac users continue to demand native Mac versions of all their apps.
People calling for Apple to kill the Shuffle -- or who simply shake their heads, baffled as to why Apple continues to make something with such little obvious appeal -- should keep in mind that the Shuffle makes a very good "starter" DAP for kids. Short of dunking it in a juice glass or leaving it on the bus, there's darn little a kid can do that will trash it. I know several kids who got low-tier MP3 players this past Christmas: two of them got Shuffles, and two others got SanDisks along with an explanation/apology that they would've got Apples, they were just "too expensive." With these price reductions, that will no longer be a factor. Each kid, as they get older and accumulate pocket money, is going to want to upgrade, and while the SanDisk kids could go either way, the Shuffle kids are almost certainly going to want to move up to another iPod (if for no other reason than to protect their iTMS investment); my niece, in fact, was promised a Nano for the summer if she took decent care of her Shuffle. As long as Apple isn't losing money on them, the Shuffle acts as a very good "gateway" into the iPod family, and it makes sense for them to keep it going as long as is feasible.
RTFA--this action is being taken to protect "nonprofit publishers of academic journals and scholarly books," not whoever the fuck wrote the Ya-Ya Sisterhood book. Academics don't subscribe to journals or buy monographs because their cousin or some internet nerd tells them it "changed their life;" they buy them because they know it will contain research important to their field. Original scholarship is costly and time-consuming to produce, and by its nature serves a very small market. A few lost sales can make a big difference. Those who publish it have the right -- indeed, the obligation -- to protect their own investment and the rights of their authors.
The review in the parent post (which orginally appeared on MacNETv2, BTW) was of a final candidate build, so it was much more finished than previously distributed developer betas.
People who want cheap ass computers. Are they even going to be doing any kind of content creation? If so they probably need a better computer anyway. The people buying these caliber computers are going to surf the web, send email, and play music.
The whole point of the Mac is that anyone can make music, movies, digital photos, and DVDs. This is no longer the domain of professionals or hobbyists with thousands of dollars to blow; the technology is ready now, today, and it's perfectly affordable and perfectly usable to the amateur. Now, a "cheap ass computer" is enough. Far from Apple being "on the chase," your own outlook is several years behind the times.
This shit just made me laugh:
However, Intel and Microsoft, if they were to set their minds to it, could crank out one hell of a little box.
How comforting to know that the two most dominant technology companies have yet to "set their minds" to making a superior product. Has it occurred to you that what you've seen thus far is actually the best they can do?
Since you're cutting and pasting the same reply all over this thread, I suspect you may simply be trolling, but what the hey...
There is one glaring flaw in Napster's business model: lack of lock-in.
Yes, I know, vendor lock-in is a Bad Thing, at least for us users. Call it, then, a longevity incentive: what is the benefit of staying with the service over a long period of time? In this case, for every track a user buys from iTMS, he has that much less incentive to switch to a competing model and that much more incentive to protect his download investment. The more they buy, the less incentive to switch.
The Napster model has nothing like that level of protection. You can subscribe to Napster for a year, then dump it with no penalty whatsoever. That is the biggest flaw in Napster's model: there is no incentive to stick with the service over time.
(BTW, your calculations are bullshit. Apple has said its profit on each download is more like $.10 per track (about 1.2 million tracks a day according to Jobs, on track to grow to about 1.5), doubling the profit you estimate and instantly obliterating your comparison. Plus I'd like to know how you determine that Rhapsody keeps %40 of every subscriber dollar for itself.)
Most of these users will probably be switchers, so they will need a pile of information, that is not easy for the completely clueless to find. For example, many of them will have trouble getting software. In the past, they just picked it up at Walmart. Since Walmart carries few or no Mac titles, these people will be lost.
This makes no sense. These hypothetical folks have already bought the Mac--where do you suppose they would've done that? Probably from an Apple retail store, online at Apple.com, or from a dedicated computer vendor like Microcenter or CompUSA. All of which venues, needless to say, offer loads of Mac software. Any other brick-and-mortar retailer (your Best Buys, your Circuit Cities) that sold the unit would certainly offer a few major software titles to go with it--it just makes good business sense. Lastly, Apple already has a "Get Mac OS X Software..." link hardwired into the Apple menu.
Your other point about providing a software migration path for switchers is a good one, but it's not something Apple has a heck of a lot of control over.
Re:Private Contractual Agreements
on
Beatles vs Apple
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps AppleCorps' insistence on litigating these agreements is because its being puppeteered by a larger computer competitor. Perhaps in some backroom deal Sony offered partial control over the 159 of the 260 songs now controlled by Jackson-Sony.
Everyone assumes that owning the Beatles' publishing rights is like having the Beatles themselves by the balls, and it isn't true.
The Beatles' music publisher has the right to:
-- Collect a royalty from airplay, sales or live performances of the Beatles' Lennon-McCartney compositions; and
-- Negotiate royalty rates for artists wanting to record their own versions of the Lennon-McCartney songs.
That's it. The ownership of the Beatles' recordings is a completely separate issue, and while nothing is known for sure, I'm willing to bet that EMI can't so much as glance at the Beatles' masters without Apple Corps' permission. In other words, the Beatles can do whatever they want with the material they recorded; their publisher is entitled to collect a royalty payment, but they cannot bar the Beatles from releasing anything or from performing their own compositions.
McCartney was stung when Michael Jackson bought the song catalog, partly because he himself suggested to Jackson that he invest in music publishing. But apart from the humiliation of not owning their own compositions (a circumstance for which the business-savvy McCartney only has himself and John Lennon to blame), the Beatles have little to bemoan in another company owning their publishing.
I know I'm coming late to this discussion and no one will ever see this post, but I have to reply whenever I see this bit of gaming-industry propaganda thrown around as fact.
The actual statistic goes something like this: worldwide sales of all games (console as well as PC) has eclipsed the annual domestic box office receipts of Hollywood films. That's not counting foreign box office receipts, rentals, DVD sales, or tv and cable licensing, which collectively provide a great deal of money to the Hollywood studios. Gaming as an industry is nowhere near the financial clout of the movie industry.
The Apple Spotlight system instantly and on the fly indexes the metadata. It does so very quickly. The results are instantly available. You can save the query and add it to your sidebar so it's available from the main file manager (Finder). Click the smart folder (saved query) and it's always up-to-date with the latest data results. The Smart Folders idea was from iTunes, it's a way to represent a query.
Actually the Smart Folders idea is a remnant of Copland, Apple's aborted attempt to counter Windows NT with its own industrial-strength OS. Some of the UI innovations of Copland eventually dribbled into Mac OS 8, but saved searches was never one of them. Nice to see Apple going back and rescuing a good idea.
If the tables were turned, If Real had developed the iPod and FairPlay and Apple Reverse engineered them, these same people who are flaming Real would be singing Apple's prasises for being so innovative.
If Apple were so bereft of ideas and direction that it had to resort to reverse-engineering Real's products, it wouldn't have any devoted fans.
People like Apple precisely because it produces so much original technology that other companies try to copy.
2. Copy playlists: Another major issue with the above is that if I have 2 playlists that are 90% the same, I'd like to set the first one up, then just copy the list logic into a new one and only edit the 1 or 2 differences.
Simply select all the tracks in the source playlist and hit Cmd-Shift-N (New Playlist From Selection), and voila.
Very compelling and nicely reasoned. However, I don't think Adobe's victory in this area is nearly as well-assured as you do. Apple is already in the process of sewing up the DV market at the student level. School editing programs are expanding their curricula to include Final Cut, and FCP and Avid are fast becoming the 2 essential programs you need on your resumé to compete for jobs.
In other words, Adobe can try to undercut Apple all it wants--if these students need FCP to graduate, they're going to get it (and the Apple kit to run it on), no matter how sweet Adobe makes their prices. (Not to mention Apple can simply respond with even more generous student discounts than they already offer. Why not? They're already making money off the hardware; Adobe has no such consolation.) Apple has the momentum; everyone in the film and DV industries knows they're the company to watch right now. Adobe has a lot of ground to recover.
Not to say that your post wasn't good. I'm willing to wager that Apple has a keen eye on all their competition in this area, and has reached much the same conclusions you have--this is a market Jobs wants to own, and he's going to do everything he has to to make sure Apple owns it.
I'm not entirely sure about this. Apple releases a $100+ OS upgrade which most Mac users buy every 2 years or so.
Bzzt!!
Apple sold about 100K Jaguar boxes in its first weekend. For Apple, that's pretty damn good. Assuming, say, ten times that many have purchased it since, that makes a million users--or roughly 1/25 to 1/30 of their entire userbase. Most? Apple only wishes.
so software sales just from the OS are a big chunk of Apple's income, add in other Mac apps, and the percentage goes up... Another key source of income for Apple is their AppleCare package
According to Apple's last SEC filing, "Software and Other [Products]" accounted for $155 million out of $1.4 billion in revenue. That's around 10 percent. That's less than what Apple made ($218 mil) selling just peripherals (mice, keyboards, speakers). Given these lean times, every little bit helps, but Apple investors want to know the company is selling computers, not software.
Everyone assumes that. While the iMac surely did a lot to restore Apple's mindshare, in fact the company had already gone back into profitability with the G3 PowerMacs.
Precision CD Ripping. I can 100% automate the process of dual ripped and verified.wav files using exact audio copy (freeware) on windows and have them auto-encoded to OGGs. Nothing like this on OS X.
I'm not sure I understand this process exactly, or which functionality you're missing, but if it's the lack of automation that rankles, you need to start investigating AppleScript. It's a falling-off-a-log easy scripting language that allows you to hook into OS and 3rd-party apps to automate routine tasks. Like I said, I'm not sure I quite get what you're up to, but I'd be willing to wager that a script that tapped into the Finder and, say, Toast would do everything you needed.
Speaking of which, didn't the article say Omni is free? Wasn't last I knew.
It's donation-ware, which suits most folks' definition of "free" (useable at full capability for an unlimited time without paying), and it never cripples out or otherwise gets in your way. And the donation messages are actually pretty funny.
They'd need more than a nice GUI skin and clever marketing. They'd need to improve the latency of the core OS to match what Mac users are accustomed to getting now in ProTools or Bias. (NT doesn't cut it.) They'd need to give this non-Windows OS better font and color management tools to replace the Macs in print shops and service bureaus. And now that Mac OS X has come along and attracted a new crop of users, the OS would need to be Unix-compliant and come with a powerful, free suite of development tools.
Not saying MS couldn't do it if they really wanted to. They could build their own space shuttle if they wanted to. But the work involved would far outweigh the gain.
(Besides, Apple could very well go under without Microsoft doing anything; Apple's marketshare is declining in both the consumer space and in traditional strongholds like education and publishing. Could be that Bill Gates need do little more than sit back and wait.)
That was a great post. I would take issue with only a few very small aspects of it.
One thing that's pretty clear is that once you've bought a Mac, you're not going to just dump it, nobody just dumps something that cost over a thousand dollars after a few hours.
This to me assumes a hypothetical user who goes out and buys a machine with little firsthand experience, either because those Apple commercials are so darn clever or their one crazy friend who never shuts up about how cool OS X is. Switching cold from one platform to another is always a slightly shocking experience, and buyer's remorse is common even when you're mostly satisfied, so the cognitive dissonance as you describe it would naturally come into play here.
Most folks I know who've switched to the Mac, however, did so after using one, not because of advertising or recommendations or hoping for some tech-hipster cachet. I was a staunch Windows user when I sat in front of my first Mac in 1996; Windows was all I knew, so I assumed that's just how computers were. Once I got over my initial discomfort and bitching and grousing, I realized that the Mac approach was simply better, for me at any rate. I didn't know who Steve Jobs was, what "megahertz" meant, or the difference between a SCSI and a parallel port; I didn't know Mac users were considered cultists and loonies. Yet even though it was years before I could afford my own Apple machine, I became a loyal Mac user that day. I felt I had finally used a computer that was designed for me.
I see a similar scenario playing out all the time today. You see it here on/. quite often. How many posts have we seen from folks who've attended a conference, sat down for 20 minutes with someone's PowerBook, and simply had to get one for themselves? I've read scores of stories like this. (That these anecdotes may not be indicative of Apple's true performance in the marketplace is irrelevant for our purposes.) In the majority of these cases, folks end up thinking much the same thing I thought: finally, a computer that was designed for me (the "me" in this case being a savvy *nix user looking for a good desktop OS rather than a clueless young Windows drone, but you get the point).
I think this sense of relief and "homecoming" is one of the most memorable aspects of the Mac experience for those of us who switched from Windows, and I don't think it can be explained away as mere cognitive dissonance to ward off buyer's remorse.
There is a high internal need for the purchase to be seen as a good one, so people adapt to the quirks of the platform etc.
I'm not sure what I think of this point. All platforms have quirks. Windows and Linux users adapt to their platform's quirks and hiccups as surely as Mac users do, even if they don't realize it. I don't see how this applies in any way uniquely to Mac users. I think you're being a little reductive in reducing the issue to cost and cost alone.
Windows users can be defensive about their platform because a) they resent people thinking they're tools for preferring Microsoft products, and b) admitting that Windows isn't working for them would compel them to investigate alternatives, which few people are inclined to do. Linux users may not have invested a lot of money in their operating system, but that doesn't mean they haven't invested time, and switching OSes is not something one wants to do routinely; you want to feel your decision was the right one, even if it cost you little in out-of-pocket cash.
Slashdot Mirror
Enlightenment's pager has provided a "live screen(s) snapshot" for a long, long time.
Does Enlightenment's desktop manager allow live dragging and dropping of programs/windows from one desktop into another, the way Leopard's does? j/c.
You're wrong. Neil was the Beatles' original roadie; he happened to be friends with Pete Best, and became the Beatles' roadie because he owned his own van. Mal was later hired when the job became too demanding for Neil to do alone. Later, when the Beatles became hugely successful, Neil and Mal went from being roadies to personal assistants/confidants. It was only when the Beatles decided to run their own affairs following the death of Brian Epstein that Neil assumed a management role. He was never the Beatles' press officer, that task being taken by Tony Barrow and Derek Taylor.
Apple doesn't want to make it too easy for you to run Windows. They want to keep people booted into OS X as much as possible; they want to make running Windows even more of a nuisance than it already is, so that after a few weeks, you find that you really can do without those last couple of Windows apps you were relying on.
And they're certainly not going to support virtualization. All the rumor sites claiming otherwise are full of it. Shitty-looking, lousy-UI-having Windows apps running as equal citizens on an OS X desktop? Over Steve Jobs' dead body. Not only would it completely degrade the Mac experience, it would jeopardize OS X's developer support. By keeping the environments strictly segregated, Apple helps ensure that Mac users continue to demand native Mac versions of all their apps.
People calling for Apple to kill the Shuffle -- or who simply shake their heads, baffled as to why Apple continues to make something with such little obvious appeal -- should keep in mind that the Shuffle makes a very good "starter" DAP for kids. Short of dunking it in a juice glass or leaving it on the bus, there's darn little a kid can do that will trash it. I know several kids who got low-tier MP3 players this past Christmas: two of them got Shuffles, and two others got SanDisks along with an explanation/apology that they would've got Apples, they were just "too expensive." With these price reductions, that will no longer be a factor. Each kid, as they get older and accumulate pocket money, is going to want to upgrade, and while the SanDisk kids could go either way, the Shuffle kids are almost certainly going to want to move up to another iPod (if for no other reason than to protect their iTMS investment); my niece, in fact, was promised a Nano for the summer if she took decent care of her Shuffle. As long as Apple isn't losing money on them, the Shuffle acts as a very good "gateway" into the iPod family, and it makes sense for them to keep it going as long as is feasible.
RTFA--this action is being taken to protect "nonprofit publishers of academic journals and scholarly books," not whoever the fuck wrote the Ya-Ya Sisterhood book. Academics don't subscribe to journals or buy monographs because their cousin or some internet nerd tells them it "changed their life;" they buy them because they know it will contain research important to their field. Original scholarship is costly and time-consuming to produce, and by its nature serves a very small market. A few lost sales can make a big difference. Those who publish it have the right -- indeed, the obligation -- to protect their own investment and the rights of their authors.
A little learning truly is a dangerous thing ...
Be edified.
The review in the parent post (which orginally appeared on MacNETv2, BTW) was of a final candidate build, so it was much more finished than previously distributed developer betas.
People who want cheap ass computers. Are they even going to be doing any kind of content creation? If so they probably need a better computer anyway. The people buying these caliber computers are going to surf the web, send email, and play music.
The whole point of the Mac is that anyone can make music, movies, digital photos, and DVDs. This is no longer the domain of professionals or hobbyists with thousands of dollars to blow; the technology is ready now, today, and it's perfectly affordable and perfectly usable to the amateur. Now, a "cheap ass computer" is enough. Far from Apple being "on the chase," your own outlook is several years behind the times.
This shit just made me laugh:
However, Intel and Microsoft, if they were to set their minds to it, could crank out one hell of a little box.
How comforting to know that the two most dominant technology companies have yet to "set their minds" to making a superior product. Has it occurred to you that what you've seen thus far is actually the best they can do?
Since you're cutting and pasting the same reply all over this thread, I suspect you may simply be trolling, but what the hey ...
There is one glaring flaw in Napster's business model: lack of lock-in.
Yes, I know, vendor lock-in is a Bad Thing, at least for us users. Call it, then, a longevity incentive: what is the benefit of staying with the service over a long period of time? In this case, for every track a user buys from iTMS, he has that much less incentive to switch to a competing model and that much more incentive to protect his download investment. The more they buy, the less incentive to switch.
The Napster model has nothing like that level of protection. You can subscribe to Napster for a year, then dump it with no penalty whatsoever. That is the biggest flaw in Napster's model: there is no incentive to stick with the service over time.
(BTW, your calculations are bullshit. Apple has said its profit on each download is more like $.10 per track (about 1.2 million tracks a day according to Jobs, on track to grow to about 1.5), doubling the profit you estimate and instantly obliterating your comparison. Plus I'd like to know how you determine that Rhapsody keeps %40 of every subscriber dollar for itself.)
Most of these users will probably be switchers, so they will need a pile of information, that is not easy for the completely clueless to find. For example, many of them will have trouble getting software. In the past, they just picked it up at Walmart. Since Walmart carries few or no Mac titles, these people will be lost.
..." link hardwired into the Apple menu.
This makes no sense. These hypothetical folks have already bought the Mac--where do you suppose they would've done that? Probably from an Apple retail store, online at Apple.com, or from a dedicated computer vendor like Microcenter or CompUSA. All of which venues, needless to say, offer loads of Mac software. Any other brick-and-mortar retailer (your Best Buys, your Circuit Cities) that sold the unit would certainly offer a few major software titles to go with it--it just makes good business sense. Lastly, Apple already has a "Get Mac OS X Software
Your other point about providing a software migration path for switchers is a good one, but it's not something Apple has a heck of a lot of control over.
Perhaps AppleCorps' insistence on litigating these agreements is because its being puppeteered by a larger computer competitor. Perhaps in some backroom deal Sony offered partial control over the 159 of the 260 songs now controlled by Jackson-Sony.
Everyone assumes that owning the Beatles' publishing rights is like having the Beatles themselves by the balls, and it isn't true.
The Beatles' music publisher has the right to:
-- Collect a royalty from airplay, sales or live performances of the Beatles' Lennon-McCartney compositions; and
-- Negotiate royalty rates for artists wanting to record their own versions of the Lennon-McCartney songs.
That's it. The ownership of the Beatles' recordings is a completely separate issue, and while nothing is known for sure, I'm willing to bet that EMI can't so much as glance at the Beatles' masters without Apple Corps' permission. In other words, the Beatles can do whatever they want with the material they recorded; their publisher is entitled to collect a royalty payment, but they cannot bar the Beatles from releasing anything or from performing their own compositions.
McCartney was stung when Michael Jackson bought the song catalog, partly because he himself suggested to Jackson that he invest in music publishing. But apart from the humiliation of not owning their own compositions (a circumstance for which the business-savvy McCartney only has himself and John Lennon to blame), the Beatles have little to bemoan in another company owning their publishing.
Gaming, which has eclipsed Hollywood in revenues
I know I'm coming late to this discussion and no one will ever see this post, but I have to reply whenever I see this bit of gaming-industry propaganda thrown around as fact.
The actual statistic goes something like this: worldwide sales of all games (console as well as PC) has eclipsed the annual domestic box office receipts of Hollywood films. That's not counting foreign box office receipts, rentals, DVD sales, or tv and cable licensing, which collectively provide a great deal of money to the Hollywood studios. Gaming as an industry is nowhere near the financial clout of the movie industry.
The Apple Spotlight system instantly and on the fly indexes the metadata. It does so very quickly. The results are instantly available. You can save the query and add it to your sidebar so it's available from the main file manager (Finder). Click the smart folder (saved query) and it's always up-to-date with the latest data results. The Smart Folders idea was from iTunes, it's a way to represent a query.
Actually the Smart Folders idea is a remnant of Copland, Apple's aborted attempt to counter Windows NT with its own industrial-strength OS. Some of the UI innovations of Copland eventually dribbled into Mac OS 8, but saved searches was never one of them. Nice to see Apple going back and rescuing a good idea.
If the tables were turned, If Real had developed the iPod and FairPlay and Apple Reverse engineered them, these same people who are flaming Real would be singing Apple's prasises for being so innovative.
If Apple were so bereft of ideas and direction that it had to resort to reverse-engineering Real's products, it wouldn't have any devoted fans.
People like Apple precisely because it produces so much original technology that other companies try to copy.
2. Copy playlists: Another major issue with the above is that if I have 2 playlists that are 90% the same, I'd like to set the first one up, then just copy the list logic into a new one and only edit the 1 or 2 differences.
Simply select all the tracks in the source playlist and hit Cmd-Shift-N (New Playlist From Selection), and voila.
Very compelling and nicely reasoned. However, I don't think Adobe's victory in this area is nearly as well-assured as you do. Apple is already in the process of sewing up the DV market at the student level. School editing programs are expanding their curricula to include Final Cut, and FCP and Avid are fast becoming the 2 essential programs you need on your resumé to compete for jobs.
In other words, Adobe can try to undercut Apple all it wants--if these students need FCP to graduate, they're going to get it (and the Apple kit to run it on), no matter how sweet Adobe makes their prices. (Not to mention Apple can simply respond with even more generous student discounts than they already offer. Why not? They're already making money off the hardware; Adobe has no such consolation.) Apple has the momentum; everyone in the film and DV industries knows they're the company to watch right now. Adobe has a lot of ground to recover.
Not to say that your post wasn't good. I'm willing to wager that Apple has a keen eye on all their competition in this area, and has reached much the same conclusions you have--this is a market Jobs wants to own, and he's going to do everything he has to to make sure Apple owns it.
Apple needs to admit that their machines aren't as fast as the fastest Intel has to offer.
Yep, that'll sell more Macs all right.
Er, I thought the Pentium 4 isn't SMP capable ..?
Apple Records controls the use of the Beatles' names and likenesses, while EMI owns the Beatles' recordings and Sony the Beatles' publishing rights.
I'm not entirely sure about this. Apple releases a $100+ OS upgrade which most Mac users buy every 2 years or so.
... Another key source of income for Apple is their AppleCare package
Bzzt!!
Apple sold about 100K Jaguar boxes in its first weekend. For Apple, that's pretty damn good. Assuming, say, ten times that many have purchased it since, that makes a million users--or roughly 1/25 to 1/30 of their entire userbase. Most? Apple only wishes.
so software sales just from the OS are a big chunk of Apple's income, add in other Mac apps, and the percentage goes up
According to Apple's last SEC filing, "Software and Other [Products]" accounted for $155 million out of $1.4 billion in revenue. That's around 10 percent. That's less than what Apple made ($218 mil) selling just peripherals (mice, keyboards, speakers). Given these lean times, every little bit helps, but Apple investors want to know the company is selling computers, not software.
The original iMac may have saved Apple.
Everyone assumes that. While the iMac surely did a lot to restore Apple's mindshare, in fact the company had already gone back into profitability with the G3 PowerMacs.
Precision CD Ripping. I can 100% automate the process of dual ripped and verified .wav files using exact audio copy (freeware) on windows and have them auto-encoded to OGGs. Nothing like this on OS X.
I'm not sure I understand this process exactly, or which functionality you're missing, but if it's the lack of automation that rankles, you need to start investigating AppleScript. It's a falling-off-a-log easy scripting language that allows you to hook into OS and 3rd-party apps to automate routine tasks. Like I said, I'm not sure I quite get what you're up to, but I'd be willing to wager that a script that tapped into the Finder and, say, Toast would do everything you needed.
Speaking of which, didn't the article say Omni is free? Wasn't last I knew.
It's donation-ware, which suits most folks' definition of "free" (useable at full capability for an unlimited time without paying), and it never cripples out or otherwise gets in your way. And the donation messages are actually pretty funny.
They'd need more than a nice GUI skin and clever marketing. They'd need to improve the latency of the core OS to match what Mac users are accustomed to getting now in ProTools or Bias. (NT doesn't cut it.) They'd need to give this non-Windows OS better font and color management tools to replace the Macs in print shops and service bureaus. And now that Mac OS X has come along and attracted a new crop of users, the OS would need to be Unix-compliant and come with a powerful, free suite of development tools.
Not saying MS couldn't do it if they really wanted to. They could build their own space shuttle if they wanted to. But the work involved would far outweigh the gain.
(Besides, Apple could very well go under without Microsoft doing anything; Apple's marketshare is declining in both the consumer space and in traditional strongholds like education and publishing. Could be that Bill Gates need do little more than sit back and wait.)
This to me assumes a hypothetical user who goes out and buys a machine with little firsthand experience, either because those Apple commercials are so darn clever or their one crazy friend who never shuts up about how cool OS X is. Switching cold from one platform to another is always a slightly shocking experience, and buyer's remorse is common even when you're mostly satisfied, so the cognitive dissonance as you describe it would naturally come into play here.
Most folks I know who've switched to the Mac, however, did so after using one, not because of advertising or recommendations or hoping for some tech-hipster cachet. I was a staunch Windows user when I sat in front of my first Mac in 1996; Windows was all I knew, so I assumed that's just how computers were. Once I got over my initial discomfort and bitching and grousing, I realized that the Mac approach was simply better, for me at any rate. I didn't know who Steve Jobs was, what "megahertz" meant, or the difference between a SCSI and a parallel port; I didn't know Mac users were considered cultists and loonies. Yet even though it was years before I could afford my own Apple machine, I became a loyal Mac user that day. I felt I had finally used a computer that was designed for me.
I see a similar scenario playing out all the time today. You see it here on
I think this sense of relief and "homecoming" is one of the most memorable aspects of the Mac experience for those of us who switched from Windows, and I don't think it can be explained away as mere cognitive dissonance to ward off buyer's remorse.
I'm not sure what I think of this point. All platforms have quirks. Windows and Linux users adapt to their platform's quirks and hiccups as surely as Mac users do, even if they don't realize it. I don't see how this applies in any way uniquely to Mac users. I think you're being a little reductive in reducing the issue to cost and cost alone.
Windows users can be defensive about their platform because a) they resent people thinking they're tools for preferring Microsoft products, and b) admitting that Windows isn't working for them would compel them to investigate alternatives, which few people are inclined to do. Linux users may not have invested a lot of money in their operating system, but that doesn't mean they haven't invested time, and switching OSes is not something one wants to do routinely; you want to feel your decision was the right one, even if it cost you little in out-of-pocket cash.