Is this a blessing for Apple, or simply a nuisance?
It's a nuisance. People are just going to pirate the fuck out of OS X without ever paying a cent to Apple, and concoct crazy reasons to justify it the way they do music piracy.
Damn, I guess I'd better move this Safari window over from my second monitor and back onto my iMac screen, then. Thanks for the heads up. I'll toss out this voodoo mini-DVI connector immediately.
Wow, so you can play The Sims 2, or another dark gray hallway in Doom 3 or F.E.A.R, at 3% higher framerates. I sure am missing out. Hold on while I unhook my high-end video editing and audio recording equipment so I can shoot some polygons, because that's what matters.
Besides, I dispute your claim that a Windows machine "will always" outperform a MacBook anyway, considering the Core Duo nearly matches the performance of an Athlon64 3800+ X2 according to Anandtech. Given the MacBook Pro's specs, it's actually the most powerful gaming laptop out there and probably will always outperform any Windows laptop.
Except who needs 64-bit in a laptop? There's no actual benefits beyond the endless hype from AMD. SSE-optimized 32-bit code removes a lot of the performance gap between it and 64-bit code anyway. Unless, of course, you need more than 4GB of RAM, but that's not available as an option in laptops anyway!
Microsoft LOVES 64-bit because it gives them another reason to try to persuade people to buy new hardware...which will happen to have Vista installed...
And the Core Duo matches the Athlon64 3800+ X2 in Anandtech benchmarks.
Besides, I wouldn't give a damn anyway if a modern Windows machine outperforms a MacBook in games. If you want waste $2,000 on computer hardware just to play videogames, buy a console and save the cash. Maybe Windows machines are only good for playing pitch-dark first-person-shooters all day along, I don't know.
Not to mention that the Core Duos in these MacBooks keep up performance-wise with an Athlon64 3800+ X2 according to Anandtech benchmarks. These truly are some excellent machines. I don't know what Apple-haters are smoking.
Several Apple representatives as well as Steve Jobs himself have said the battery life should be equivalent to the Powerbook G4. They haven't released an official number because they haven't officially rated it yet, given that it's a new battery technology.
For some laptops, the price of the Core Duo is the same as the Turion. And more importantly, what's wrong with comparing two of the latest products on the market? If the Core Duo is dual-core, then that's one of the features of that chip that the competitor doesn't have.
AMD and CryTek teamed up for Far Cry 64-bit Edition. They actually added newer textures and lighting effects to make it appear as though the engine looked better on the Athlon64 running in 64-bit mode, even though such a thing was entirely GPU-dependent and had nothing at all to do with being 64-bit.
Intel is refreshing itself with its new CEO. When Otellini came onboard, he reorganized the company by target markets instead of product models. The new logo and friendlier chip names are an attempt to show people this isn't the same old Intel.
With Intel kicking ass in the portable market (which outsells desktops now), Intel is well on its way to staying around far longer than AMD fans would like.:)
Your skepticism is understandable, but Merom/Conroe really is abandoning the old NetBurst architecture with something new, designed from the beginning with performance-per-watt in mind.
Care to cite any? Can you find a Windows-based PC with the entire computer integrated into the screen as elegantly as the iMac, with all the ports arranged neatly in a horizontal row, and a built-in camera and microphone as well as WiFi and Bluetooth? Are they dual-core and have DL DVD burners with Radeon x1600s? Along with a media center app and remote?
You're just not going to be able to match the iMac's specs and design. It is truly an integrated home appliance. I have seen some nice PC designs, but they're still bulky towers. Apple has been doing this right since the 1998 iMac's integrated design.
MS's first job is to cater to developers..NET happens to be a very elegant framework to program for and is fairly efficient. Outside the initial windows forms "draw" (that little graphics delay you first get when starting up a.NET app), all the.NET apps I've coded run like butta. The abstraction layer is worth it if it makes apps easier to code. I mean, what did you want to them to do? Keep MFC?
Actually, I've heard much criticism that.NET is far too large, and now due to backwards compatibility, the APIs can't be pruned as much as they need to be. I still don't get the need for an intermediate binary layer when native speeds are faster. Vista will be full of a lot of version 1.0 APIs that didn't get the kind of testing they deserved due to the rushed schedule Vista is under right now to get out the door. The fact it's all in.NET just means it's going to be even slower. Even a graphics delay when starting an app is going to be annoying. On my Athlon, just running the.NET ATI Control Panel is a delay measured in seconds. It's ridiculous.
The idea of allowing any language to compile to MSIL is neat, but making the whole system rely on it is going to be painful. We now have another binary layer on top of Win32. Which apps do you think will come out faster in benchmarks, Cocoa-based apps or.NET-based apps?
As for Quartz, it's had it issues, too. Remember the "pre-Quartz Extreme" days, when genie effects ran like crap on the fastest video cards? When the windowing process would cause the spinning beachball of death? Heck, even the original version of Keynote tried to get around Quartz and write directly to the graphics hardware (causing kernel panics in the process).
Hey, you're right. Back then, OS X wasn't primetime yet, but I don't fault them since the technology was only a few years old. 10.2 was the real kicker for a lot of people.
By the way, I can't find any source that backs up your claim that Keynote was writing "directly to the graphics hardware."
By the way, I'm noticing a trend in your posts. I understand your points, but if you want people to take them seriously, you must at least make them more objective.
Fair enough, but I still think "walking MSDN brochure" is funny.:)
If you think that most graphic work is being done on Macs you are sadly mistaken.
This is totally insane. It's absolutely true that most graphic and publish work is done on Macs. It's such common knowledge that it's crazy for someone to suggest otherwise.
Professional graphics work and publishing is almost exclusively Mac thanks to built-in ColorSync and PDF display technologies in OS X (and it was exclusively Mac even in the pre-OS X days). 99% of your magazines are done in Quark and Photoshop on a Mac. Thanks to Quartz basing itself off PDF, what you see is exactly how it will layout when you print. Feature films and commercials get composited in Shake and edited in Final Cut Pro. 99% of the albums you hear are recorded in Pro Tools, possibly with Logic Pro as a MIDI front-end. I could go on and on here. Some morons mock Macs as toys for people drawing pictures, but all the hardcore data pushing is done by Macs.
I can't imagine anyone editing a feature film on Windows XP Professional. On the contrary, most people are using Windows to play The Sims or check their email. Businesses use it because their slow little Access/VB front-ends run on it. Kudos to them.
Lets see I believe Mac is down to 3% market share, if Vista has 35% it will out shine Mac by almost a factor of 12.
Mac is up to 4.5%. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, it may only be 4.5%, but it's the top 4.5%.:) By 2008, Macs could even reach the 10% with a lot of work. 35%, well hey, good for Microsoft, but most of those Vista computers will be secretaries' computers or grandmas' email/family picture boxes, as well as the hardcore MSDN-subscriber, early-adopter folk. The second most powerful supercomputer in academic institutions is the System X, built on XServe G5s. They ain't gonna use freakin' Windows Vista for that.
By the way, I can't believe you even mentioned SGI as a serious player!
This is NOT true, do the Slashdot editors even know people that are in the Vista Beta or have a MSDN subscription?
It IS true, but it's worded a little poorly--one in two PCs won't be able to run Aero Glass, which is the only reason most people would have ever used Vista. Not me, since Aero Glass is hideously ugly and has goofy translucent windows which Apple abandoned from Aqua years ago because it looks, well, hideous.
I'm not surprised someone with a name like "NetAvenger" is a walking MSDN brochure. Sheesh! Windows Presentation Foundation will always be slower than the native Quartz because WPF is running in Microsoft's completely arbitrary and pointless intermediate.NET layer and based on XML, so now all these great new dual-core processors we're getting will be slowed down again by Microsoft! It sucks that the first thing they do when we get faster chips is add another abstraction layer to slow it all down again.
Fringe system? Five million (15%) worldwide users is fringe? OS X is used to make all the music you hear, all the graphics you see, all the books and magazines you read, and close to editing all the feature films you see. And on and on. Plus, the new ones will run Windows in a dual-boot fashion anyway.
Vista is going to be far more fringe for many years, according to analysts, who say only 35% of users will have adopted Vista by 2008!
Quartz has supported resolution-independence since its beginnings in the late 90s. It's never been enabled until now (developers can enable it in Quartz Debug in time for the transition to OS X Leopard). Today, Quartz composites using the GPU but still draws in software, but Quartz 2D Extreme moves the full drawing path onto the GPU much like Vista's display system.
When people say Aero glass is based on developments seen in OS X, it's talking about the vector-based resolution-independent interface, the visual effects, etc. Printing has always been a joke in Windows because OS X uses the PDF drawing model in Quartz meaning what you see is exactly what you'll get, so accurately you can measure it on the screen and it will be the same measurement on paper. Microsoft is attempting the same using XPS, but I have no experience with it other than knowing it's XML-based like Avalon is (shudder). Quartz will always have a leg up in that department since it will be fully native and not running in a goofy.NET virtual machine to slow it down and hog RAM.
Yes, a PC will be cheaper, but a cheap PC won't be able to run Vista's Aero Glass interface anyway. The new iMac is price competitive with equivalent PCs now.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this a blessing for Apple, or simply a nuisance?
It's a nuisance. People are just going to pirate the fuck out of OS X without ever paying a cent to Apple, and concoct crazy reasons to justify it the way they do music piracy.
So replace your Powerbook's obviously dying battery.
1.) Of course it deserves an article. Apple is shipping upgraded computer specs at no extra charge. Tell me the last time Dell did that.
2.) If you don't like it, you didn't have to click "Read More," click "Reply," and actually type out a post.
3.) The Apple-bashing price argument has been disproved time and time again.
Damn, I guess I'd better move this Safari window over from my second monitor and back onto my iMac screen, then. Thanks for the heads up. I'll toss out this voodoo mini-DVI connector immediately.
Wow, so you can play The Sims 2, or another dark gray hallway in Doom 3 or F.E.A.R, at 3% higher framerates. I sure am missing out. Hold on while I unhook my high-end video editing and audio recording equipment so I can shoot some polygons, because that's what matters.
Besides, I dispute your claim that a Windows machine "will always" outperform a MacBook anyway, considering the Core Duo nearly matches the performance of an Athlon64 3800+ X2 according to Anandtech. Given the MacBook Pro's specs, it's actually the most powerful gaming laptop out there and probably will always outperform any Windows laptop.
Except who needs 64-bit in a laptop? There's no actual benefits beyond the endless hype from AMD. SSE-optimized 32-bit code removes a lot of the performance gap between it and 64-bit code anyway. Unless, of course, you need more than 4GB of RAM, but that's not available as an option in laptops anyway!
Microsoft LOVES 64-bit because it gives them another reason to try to persuade people to buy new hardware...which will happen to have Vista installed...
And the Core Duo matches the Athlon64 3800+ X2 in Anandtech benchmarks.
Besides, I wouldn't give a damn anyway if a modern Windows machine outperforms a MacBook in games. If you want waste $2,000 on computer hardware just to play videogames, buy a console and save the cash. Maybe Windows machines are only good for playing pitch-dark first-person-shooters all day along, I don't know.
Not to mention that the Core Duos in these MacBooks keep up performance-wise with an Athlon64 3800+ X2 according to Anandtech benchmarks. These truly are some excellent machines. I don't know what Apple-haters are smoking.
The most likely reason for that is Blizzard doesn't want to go through the trouble of porting an old game from Codeweaver to XCode.
Just like this is a cheap way to generate hype over Skype on Intel chips, that was a cheap way to generate hype over Far Cry on 64-bit Athlon64s.
Several Apple representatives as well as Steve Jobs himself have said the battery life should be equivalent to the Powerbook G4. They haven't released an official number because they haven't officially rated it yet, given that it's a new battery technology.
For some laptops, the price of the Core Duo is the same as the Turion. And more importantly, what's wrong with comparing two of the latest products on the market? If the Core Duo is dual-core, then that's one of the features of that chip that the competitor doesn't have.
AMD and CryTek teamed up for Far Cry 64-bit Edition. They actually added newer textures and lighting effects to make it appear as though the engine looked better on the Athlon64 running in 64-bit mode, even though such a thing was entirely GPU-dependent and had nothing at all to do with being 64-bit.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2627&p=1
All the AMD fanboys here are going to scream "antitrust!" while ignoring all the AMD exclusive 64-bit game deals like with CryTek. Sigh.
Intel is refreshing itself with its new CEO. When Otellini came onboard, he reorganized the company by target markets instead of product models. The new logo and friendlier chip names are an attempt to show people this isn't the same old Intel.
:)
With Intel kicking ass in the portable market (which outsells desktops now), Intel is well on its way to staying around far longer than AMD fans would like.
Your skepticism is understandable, but Merom/Conroe really is abandoning the old NetBurst architecture with something new, designed from the beginning with performance-per-watt in mind.
Not in the laptop or console space. It's Intel and IBM nearly exclusively.
The Core Duo holds its own against an Athlon64 3800+ X2 while consuming less power at 100% then the Athlon at idle. Intel isn't behind anymore.
According to his profile at OSNews, the kid is only 15, which explains a lot.
Basically, Slashdot accepted a pro-Linux/anti-Microsoft blog post from a 15-year-old. Ha.
Care to cite any? Can you find a Windows-based PC with the entire computer integrated into the screen as elegantly as the iMac, with all the ports arranged neatly in a horizontal row, and a built-in camera and microphone as well as WiFi and Bluetooth? Are they dual-core and have DL DVD burners with Radeon x1600s? Along with a media center app and remote?
You're just not going to be able to match the iMac's specs and design. It is truly an integrated home appliance. I have seen some nice PC designs, but they're still bulky towers. Apple has been doing this right since the 1998 iMac's integrated design.
MS's first job is to cater to developers. .NET happens to be a very elegant framework to program for and is fairly efficient. Outside the initial windows forms "draw" (that little graphics delay you first get when starting up a .NET app), all the .NET apps I've coded run like butta. The abstraction layer is worth it if it makes apps easier to code. I mean, what did you want to them to do? Keep MFC?
.NET is far too large, and now due to backwards compatibility, the APIs can't be pruned as much as they need to be. I still don't get the need for an intermediate binary layer when native speeds are faster. Vista will be full of a lot of version 1.0 APIs that didn't get the kind of testing they deserved due to the rushed schedule Vista is under right now to get out the door. The fact it's all in .NET just means it's going to be even slower. Even a graphics delay when starting an app is going to be annoying. On my Athlon, just running the .NET ATI Control Panel is a delay measured in seconds. It's ridiculous.
.NET-based apps?
:)
Actually, I've heard much criticism that
The idea of allowing any language to compile to MSIL is neat, but making the whole system rely on it is going to be painful. We now have another binary layer on top of Win32. Which apps do you think will come out faster in benchmarks, Cocoa-based apps or
As for Quartz, it's had it issues, too. Remember the "pre-Quartz Extreme" days, when genie effects ran like crap on the fastest video cards? When the windowing process would cause the spinning beachball of death? Heck, even the original version of Keynote tried to get around Quartz and write directly to the graphics hardware (causing kernel panics in the process).
Hey, you're right. Back then, OS X wasn't primetime yet, but I don't fault them since the technology was only a few years old. 10.2 was the real kicker for a lot of people.
By the way, I can't find any source that backs up your claim that Keynote was writing "directly to the graphics hardware."
By the way, I'm noticing a trend in your posts. I understand your points, but if you want people to take them seriously, you must at least make them more objective.
Fair enough, but I still think "walking MSDN brochure" is funny.
If you think that most graphic work is being done on Macs you are sadly mistaken.
:) By 2008, Macs could even reach the 10% with a lot of work. 35%, well hey, good for Microsoft, but most of those Vista computers will be secretaries' computers or grandmas' email/family picture boxes, as well as the hardcore MSDN-subscriber, early-adopter folk. The second most powerful supercomputer in academic institutions is the System X, built on XServe G5s. They ain't gonna use freakin' Windows Vista for that.
This is totally insane. It's absolutely true that most graphic and publish work is done on Macs. It's such common knowledge that it's crazy for someone to suggest otherwise.
Professional graphics work and publishing is almost exclusively Mac thanks to built-in ColorSync and PDF display technologies in OS X (and it was exclusively Mac even in the pre-OS X days). 99% of your magazines are done in Quark and Photoshop on a Mac. Thanks to Quartz basing itself off PDF, what you see is exactly how it will layout when you print. Feature films and commercials get composited in Shake and edited in Final Cut Pro. 99% of the albums you hear are recorded in Pro Tools, possibly with Logic Pro as a MIDI front-end. I could go on and on here. Some morons mock Macs as toys for people drawing pictures, but all the hardcore data pushing is done by Macs.
I can't imagine anyone editing a feature film on Windows XP Professional. On the contrary, most people are using Windows to play The Sims or check their email. Businesses use it because their slow little Access/VB front-ends run on it. Kudos to them.
Lets see I believe Mac is down to 3% market share, if Vista has 35% it will out shine Mac by almost a factor of 12.
Mac is up to 4.5%. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, it may only be 4.5%, but it's the top 4.5%.
By the way, I can't believe you even mentioned SGI as a serious player!
This is NOT true, do the Slashdot editors even know people that are in the Vista Beta or have a MSDN subscription?
.NET layer and based on XML, so now all these great new dual-core processors we're getting will be slowed down again by Microsoft! It sucks that the first thing they do when we get faster chips is add another abstraction layer to slow it all down again.
It IS true, but it's worded a little poorly--one in two PCs won't be able to run Aero Glass, which is the only reason most people would have ever used Vista. Not me, since Aero Glass is hideously ugly and has goofy translucent windows which Apple abandoned from Aqua years ago because it looks, well, hideous.
I'm not surprised someone with a name like "NetAvenger" is a walking MSDN brochure. Sheesh! Windows Presentation Foundation will always be slower than the native Quartz because WPF is running in Microsoft's completely arbitrary and pointless intermediate
Fringe system? Five million (15%) worldwide users is fringe? OS X is used to make all the music you hear, all the graphics you see, all the books and magazines you read, and close to editing all the feature films you see. And on and on. Plus, the new ones will run Windows in a dual-boot fashion anyway.
Vista is going to be far more fringe for many years, according to analysts, who say only 35% of users will have adopted Vista by 2008!
Quartz has supported resolution-independence since its beginnings in the late 90s. It's never been enabled until now (developers can enable it in Quartz Debug in time for the transition to OS X Leopard). Today, Quartz composites using the GPU but still draws in software, but Quartz 2D Extreme moves the full drawing path onto the GPU much like Vista's display system.
.NET virtual machine to slow it down and hog RAM.
When people say Aero glass is based on developments seen in OS X, it's talking about the vector-based resolution-independent interface, the visual effects, etc. Printing has always been a joke in Windows because OS X uses the PDF drawing model in Quartz meaning what you see is exactly what you'll get, so accurately you can measure it on the screen and it will be the same measurement on paper. Microsoft is attempting the same using XPS, but I have no experience with it other than knowing it's XML-based like Avalon is (shudder). Quartz will always have a leg up in that department since it will be fully native and not running in a goofy
Yes, a PC will be cheaper, but a cheap PC won't be able to run Vista's Aero Glass interface anyway. The new iMac is price competitive with equivalent PCs now.