They don't write viruses for MS because MS is easy, and easily exploitable, that just makes their job easy, they write them for MS because MS has the market share and they can infect more pcs and cause more damage by choosing MS. same with spyware.
I love how the Mac-bashers always trot out high-end systems to support the myth that Macs are so terribly expensive. Well, duh! You want to run things like Motion, Final Cut Pro, etc, you want a high end Mac and you're going to be willing to pay for it.
Now for consumers (since that IS what this is about) you can get a very respectable eMac for $800, brand new. Sure, you can get an eMachines for a couple hundred less, but we're not talking the enormous order-of-magnitude difference that people make it out to be.
Apple, the company that supported the Mac Plus through System 7.5.5? A computer released in 1986 could run the most recent OS version as late as 1997? Or, more recently, any Mac made in the last 7 years can run a version of Mac OS X? The window is shrinking (as supporting 11 year-old systems was a ludicrous waste of development resources), but it's stabilizing at about 5 years, to run the most recent whiz-bang OS. Where's the "king of planned obsolescence" there?
Once you turn off all of the eye candy, it will run Windows XP very similarly to Windows 2000. Not quite as fast, but losing a second here and there (compared to a reboot due to a lockup or dataloss) is nothing.
I have no experience on the Amiga, so I can't comment there.
Ultimately, if you tighten your code that much something will suffer - either maintainability/expandability, or feature-set. Sure, I can code amazing features into a tiny space using assembly, and be obsolesced very quickly (e.g. WriteNow), or I can scale back my features extensively (e.g. Mac System 5).
Please recall that in the days of the OS cramming into under 1MB of memory, the feature set was very different. On the Mac (using System 6 as a baseline), we had no virtual memory, no aliases, no networking other than Appletalk, no drag and drop, primitive Multifinder, no multiple user support, and by today's standards, really crappy functionality (I have a Mac Plus sitting on my desk).
Also, in those days you'd have 1MB of memory, of which say 300K would be used by the system. That's 30% or so. Today you have 256MB at least, which the system may use 64MB of or so - similar usage. Of course, today's systems have much more advanced memory management than the ones of yesteryear.
Not all progress is "bloat". Remember a variant on the 80/20 rule - people by and large only want 20% of the features in an app, but can never agree on what 20% (not like we ever see arguments about that here on Slashdot, no, never).
I still stand by System 7 fully. There were some compatibility issues, but of course there were going to be: it integrated MultiFinder permanently, added Virtual Memory, 32-bit addressing, Truetype, File sharing, more pervasive color, a completely redeisgned desktop database system, etc (and that's without going into the userland things like Balloon Help, Publish and Subscribe, etc). It's like criticizing Mac OS X for not being perfect. The fact of the matter is that it was a huge shift of the Mac OS and Apple pulled it off.
The article's reasoning is still very sound. In 1984, you could not replicate a Mac-like experience on common PC hardware. Nobody here has managed to refute that yet. People keep posting about 1987, 1988, or how this could be jury-rigged into 1984 with huge limitations - WHICH IS EXACTLY HIS POINT.
I mean what is the point of a crystal rearview mirror? It was historically inaccurate and full of wild guesses based on whim and conjecture.
That's sort of HIS original point, and this article gives some alternatives to the classic conjecture "Apple could have taken over the Universe and reigned forever and ever if they'd only licensed the OS".
Your system was a lot more than $700, as NO PC cost that little.
The Mac II was released in 1987, and supported 8-bit color on a variety of video cards and monitors, up to at least 1024x768. As of 32-bit QuickDraw in 1988, you had full 16.7 million colors with alpha channels. There was no "default" resolution to speak of, as it had no on-board video. It's capabilities were limited only by what card you put in it. Of course, if that wasn't enough you could hook up 6 monitors if you so desired. Yeah, we could do that in 1987. Windows was just figuring that out in Windows 2000... Linux is in the process of getting this right.
The original (back to 1984, or did you miss that?) Mac display at square pixels. All of the displays and resolutions on PC's prior to VGA were RECTANGULAR, or didn't you know that? Do the math on the various resolutions being posted, and you'll find that rather than have square pixels, they had very tall rectangular pixels. It's extraordinarily difficult to create a decent GUI with such a screen - witness GeOS. Mac displays were well known for being razor sharp at the time. I mean, go LOOK at one of those original displays from a PC of that era (many public schools are still stuck with them).
System 7.0 had bugs like any x.0. 7.1 was perfectly stable. 7.5 was a bit of a disaster, but as you said 7.5.3 and 7.5.5 were fine. This was during the dark days of the Copland era, pre-Amelio.
Of course a virus or worm can be written for the Mac - I never claimed it couldn't. However, there haven't been any, while we have hugely destructive (or at least time and bandwidth wasting) ones for Windows. This isn't just because of the software monoculture and a larger target audience - it's technically much more of a challenge to write a virus or worm for OS X.
Worms can't effectively spread on OS X - there are no default services running for them to attack. Viruses are hampered on OS X due to the permissions in place. If you're not an admin, you can attack a user's home folder - whoopie. If you're an admin there's a lot more, but you still can't touch any of the core OS (/etc,/bin,/System, etc). Or spyware - how many million places can it hide on Windows (look at AutoRuns for an example)? On OS X, there are precious few ways for software to autorun. Either it's a StartupItem (at/Library/StartupItems, which requires admin priveleges), or it's in your Login Items.
As for troubleshooting, RegEdit and TweakUI are my friends, make no doubt about it. However, I feel very safe in saying it's easier to get a grasp on all of the various UNIX fundamentals and OS X fundamentals than on the registry. The registry is the ultimate maze of settings that have next to no protection from any random program messing with them.
True - the NT/W2K/XP series have a lot of extra services running that are not on a 9x machine, and as a result can be hit by more worms. However, the stability of the newer Windows usually makes it worthwhile, especially if you have a firewall (or hardware router, or WinXP SP2).
Ah, so why didn't these masses jump on GEOS, or Windows couldn't do a decent GUI on screens like that. Forget resolution for a second - do you remember what those screens were like? How blurry they were? The rectangular "pixels"? Please stop trying to revise what you were actually using.
Meanwhile, if you want to use Windows 3.1 and 1991 hardware, then I get to use System 7 and a IIfx.
And what is in error here? The author said "typically used...320-by-240". No mention of CGA here. What he said was correct.
In 1984, yes, the Mac was the only place to get a great GUI. By 1986 as you mention, there were others. However, Apple was already on System 5.0, had Switcher, hard drives, built-in SCSI, 1MB of RAM (expandable to 4), a laser printer, and a large software base. Atari ST and Amiga did not (although the Amiga did have incredible multimedia features, well beyond the Mac at the time). The Mac had color in 1987 with the Mac II.
Windows 3.1 can be considered a vaguely usable GUI, if all you had was DOS, and by that measure, successful. Microsoft did not acheive such complete dominance of home and office until Windows 95 and its juggernaut.
And please, tell me what was wrong with System 7, which was arguably one of the best updates the Mac ever got until OS X? What, did you not have the 2MB of RAM required?
Windows XP is quite stable, but Mac's still win hands down in several relevant areas:
- Security
- Viruses (or lack thereof)
- Spyware (or lack thereof)
- Troubleshooting
Face it - you might pooh-pooh the GUI differences (which are major - I use both daily and there still is no comparison), but you don't have to deal with the mountains of crap you do on the PC side. No viruses, trojans, spyware, and minimal security patches (with NO exploits). No Slammer. No Blaster. No Beagle/Bagle.
And in an oft-overlooked area, what happens when things go wrong? Can you recover from them? If something goes funky in your regsitry, do you have any recourse other than to clean and rebuild? Look at the SP2 thread at all of the people saying they had to go back to XP clean and load SP2, then reload all of their apps.
On a Mac, partially due to its Mac heritage, partially due to its UNIX, you can fix pretty much anything in place. Permissions are the worst problem we deal with - one click and it's fixed. Meanwhile, the core OS (/System) is completely protected from the user or software mucking with it due to permissions. Not even an admin can get in there - only root (The Way It Should Be). Things just don't break very often, almost never break catastrophically, and even THEN, they can usually be fixed rather than resorting to blowing everything away (or absolute worst case - Archive and Install - keeps all your apps, preferences, settings, files, etc and reloads the core OS).
How can you compare that kind of maintainability to Windows? Once again - It Just Works On A Mac.
With a Mac, you're stuck with the configurations Apple wants to give you - they'd be like a single PC maker in a sea of hundreds on the other side of the fence. Now, obviously this is working for them in some ways, as they're generally profitable of late, though mostly due to iPod. But I'm not sure that I buy this idea that they'd be less profitable if they'd continued licensing their OS. I understand the whole argument about diluting the brand name, yadda yadda yadda, so what? There's a tendency for people to believe that because of the way things turned out in the world, that that's the only way they could have turned out, and I don't believe it.
Insightful my ass - you're full of shit. They seem to have been profitable for three YEARS prior to the iPod, due to things like the iMac, iBook, Powerbook, etc. Gee, these are HARDWARE devices that they may not have sold if they'd licensed the OS. They tried the OS licensing idea - it was the clone years of the mid-90's. It was a flop - people didn't buy more Macs, people just bought cheap hardware from clone makers, killed Apple's profits, and saddled Apple with a huge support legacy.
If Apple's OS and the Apple user experience is so superior to the Windows experience, why does Apple have 3% market share? There has to be a reason, and it's not all because MS is a monopoly. MS was not always a monopoly. When I owned my Apple II, Apple had more than 50% of the PC market. The supposedly superior Mac line eventually dropped them to the 3% they have today. The market was Apple's to lose and they lost it. At some point, you have to stop blaming the rest of the world and look inward for the reasons why.
It's because of compatibility. If you want to move from one platform to another, companies move with the path of least resistance. Over time, CP/M gave way to DOS, which went to Windows 3.1, to Win 95, to 2000, to XP. Each time there was minimal pain in moving.
Meanwhile, Apple II users had NO upgrade path. They migrated sometimes to the Mac, sometimes to the PC. Why didn't they all go to the Mac? They bought into a platform (the Apple II) that cost them less than $1000, and were being asked now to buy into a platform that cost at least $2500, usually more, plus all new software.
That brings me to my final point - even if Mac OS X were available on generic x86 and Apple found a magical way outside everything we know of economics to survive, a lot of people STILL wouldn't migrate. They'd still have to buy all new SOFTWARE, and let me tell you - for a lot of people that can dwarf the cost of the hardware.
Nevermind that Apple does design its own CHIPSET, which the x86 crowd leaves to Intel. Sure, the things that plug into the motherboard are supplied by other vendors (graphics card, processor, hard drives, memory), but the various chips on the motherboard are Apple-designed. I don't know what you consider "designing the mainboard", but that sounds like it to me!
Apple never saw the Mac OS as "job done". Rather the opposite is what killed them - they didn't think the old codebase could be used at all, and spent billions and years on Copland. Copland went nowhere, and in the meantime Windows 95 hit the scene.
Which of course they could do, since they didn't have to ship the same volumes that Apple did. Not to mention their equipment fell to pieces a couple years later (I know several people whose equipment just went to hell in a variety of ways a few years out). They used the cheapest bargain components they could, and it caught up with their buyers.
Marketing my ass. It's called one IBMer among 400,000 (last count I saw) decided to submit an Intranet article to Slashdot. It was posted so that we wouldn't go and install SP2 and complain about internal apps not working - not so you could get your panties in a bunch.
No, we're a company with 400,000 machines (or more), and one build. However, many departments have special applications that others do not (not everyone needs Visio, or Project, etc). Meanwhile, there are thousands of web-based applications that changes to IE will affect.
Finally, another problem here is that SP2 duplicates a lot of functionality in our standard build - firewall, automatic updates, and "security center" in particular, and can cause some pretty bad conflicts *on initial install*. Right now we've been told that we'll get a "custom" version of SP2 soon that essentially just turns off the firewall by default, turns off automatic updates by default, and tweaks our antivirus and firewall to be properly detected by SP2.
Okay, try and make a DVD player without licensing the appropriate technology from the DVD consortium.
Apple will license FairPlay when and as it makes sense for them - witness Motorola. They have no incentive to work with a direct competitor who has a history of inferior products.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi? r4apple
Wrong: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=117377&cid=993 2392
I love how the Mac-bashers always trot out high-end systems to support the myth that Macs are so terribly expensive. Well, duh! You want to run things like Motion, Final Cut Pro, etc, you want a high end Mac and you're going to be willing to pay for it.
Now for consumers (since that IS what this is about) you can get a very respectable eMac for $800, brand new. Sure, you can get an eMachines for a couple hundred less, but we're not talking the enormous order-of-magnitude difference that people make it out to be.
Apple, the company that supported the Mac Plus through System 7.5.5? A computer released in 1986 could run the most recent OS version as late as 1997? Or, more recently, any Mac made in the last 7 years can run a version of Mac OS X? The window is shrinking (as supporting 11 year-old systems was a ludicrous waste of development resources), but it's stabilizing at about 5 years, to run the most recent whiz-bang OS. Where's the "king of planned obsolescence" there?
Once you turn off all of the eye candy, it will run Windows XP very similarly to Windows 2000. Not quite as fast, but losing a second here and there (compared to a reboot due to a lockup or dataloss) is nothing.
I have no experience on the Amiga, so I can't comment there.
Ultimately, if you tighten your code that much something will suffer - either maintainability/expandability, or feature-set. Sure, I can code amazing features into a tiny space using assembly, and be obsolesced very quickly (e.g. WriteNow), or I can scale back my features extensively (e.g. Mac System 5).
Please recall that in the days of the OS cramming into under 1MB of memory, the feature set was very different. On the Mac (using System 6 as a baseline), we had no virtual memory, no aliases, no networking other than Appletalk, no drag and drop, primitive Multifinder, no multiple user support, and by today's standards, really crappy functionality (I have a Mac Plus sitting on my desk).
Also, in those days you'd have 1MB of memory, of which say 300K would be used by the system. That's 30% or so. Today you have 256MB at least, which the system may use 64MB of or so - similar usage. Of course, today's systems have much more advanced memory management than the ones of yesteryear.
Not all progress is "bloat". Remember a variant on the 80/20 rule - people by and large only want 20% of the features in an app, but can never agree on what 20% (not like we ever see arguments about that here on Slashdot, no, never).
Well, something like that, yeah. :)
Actually, I was expecting based on your comment to have something on the various binary architectures on NeXT and how open dealt with it.
It was posted on the IBM Intranet so that we wouldn't go and install SP2 and complain about internal apps not working.
Not that getting our directions from Slashdot would be a bad thing...
I still stand by System 7 fully. There were some compatibility issues, but of course there were going to be: it integrated MultiFinder permanently, added Virtual Memory, 32-bit addressing, Truetype, File sharing, more pervasive color, a completely redeisgned desktop database system, etc (and that's without going into the userland things like Balloon Help, Publish and Subscribe, etc). It's like criticizing Mac OS X for not being perfect. The fact of the matter is that it was a huge shift of the Mac OS and Apple pulled it off.
The article's reasoning is still very sound. In 1984, you could not replicate a Mac-like experience on common PC hardware. Nobody here has managed to refute that yet. People keep posting about 1987, 1988, or how this could be jury-rigged into 1984 with huge limitations - WHICH IS EXACTLY HIS POINT.
I mean what is the point of a crystal rearview mirror? It was historically inaccurate and full of wild guesses based on whim and conjecture.
That's sort of HIS original point, and this article gives some alternatives to the classic conjecture "Apple could have taken over the Universe and reigned forever and ever if they'd only licensed the OS".
Your system was a lot more than $700, as NO PC cost that little.
The Mac II was released in 1987, and supported 8-bit color on a variety of video cards and monitors, up to at least 1024x768. As of 32-bit QuickDraw in 1988, you had full 16.7 million colors with alpha channels. There was no "default" resolution to speak of, as it had no on-board video. It's capabilities were limited only by what card you put in it. Of course, if that wasn't enough you could hook up 6 monitors if you so desired. Yeah, we could do that in 1987. Windows was just figuring that out in Windows 2000... Linux is in the process of getting this right.
The original (back to 1984, or did you miss that?) Mac display at square pixels. All of the displays and resolutions on PC's prior to VGA were RECTANGULAR, or didn't you know that? Do the math on the various resolutions being posted, and you'll find that rather than have square pixels, they had very tall rectangular pixels. It's extraordinarily difficult to create a decent GUI with such a screen - witness GeOS. Mac displays were well known for being razor sharp at the time. I mean, go LOOK at one of those original displays from a PC of that era (many public schools are still stuck with them).
System 7.0 had bugs like any x.0. 7.1 was perfectly stable. 7.5 was a bit of a disaster, but as you said 7.5.3 and 7.5.5 were fine. This was during the dark days of the Copland era, pre-Amelio.
Bzzzt. You lose on the facts, wanker.
So many trolls, in just one message.
/bin, /System, etc). Or spyware - how many million places can it hide on Windows (look at AutoRuns for an example)? On OS X, there are precious few ways for software to autorun. Either it's a StartupItem (at /Library/StartupItems, which requires admin priveleges), or it's in your Login Items.
Of course a virus or worm can be written for the Mac - I never claimed it couldn't. However, there haven't been any, while we have hugely destructive (or at least time and bandwidth wasting) ones for Windows. This isn't just because of the software monoculture and a larger target audience - it's technically much more of a challenge to write a virus or worm for OS X.
Worms can't effectively spread on OS X - there are no default services running for them to attack. Viruses are hampered on OS X due to the permissions in place. If you're not an admin, you can attack a user's home folder - whoopie. If you're an admin there's a lot more, but you still can't touch any of the core OS (/etc,
As for troubleshooting, RegEdit and TweakUI are my friends, make no doubt about it. However, I feel very safe in saying it's easier to get a grasp on all of the various UNIX fundamentals and OS X fundamentals than on the registry. The registry is the ultimate maze of settings that have next to no protection from any random program messing with them.
True - the NT/W2K/XP series have a lot of extra services running that are not on a 9x machine, and as a result can be hit by more worms. However, the stability of the newer Windows usually makes it worthwhile, especially if you have a firewall (or hardware router, or WinXP SP2).
If you thought you were running them in 1984, then yes.
Ah, so why didn't these masses jump on GEOS, or Windows couldn't do a decent GUI on screens like that. Forget resolution for a second - do you remember what those screens were like? How blurry they were? The rectangular "pixels"? Please stop trying to revise what you were actually using.
Meanwhile, if you want to use Windows 3.1 and 1991 hardware, then I get to use System 7 and a IIfx.
And what is in error here? The author said "typically used...320-by-240". No mention of CGA here. What he said was correct.
In 1984, yes, the Mac was the only place to get a great GUI. By 1986 as you mention, there were others. However, Apple was already on System 5.0, had Switcher, hard drives, built-in SCSI, 1MB of RAM (expandable to 4), a laser printer, and a large software base. Atari ST and Amiga did not (although the Amiga did have incredible multimedia features, well beyond the Mac at the time). The Mac had color in 1987 with the Mac II.
Windows 3.1 can be considered a vaguely usable GUI, if all you had was DOS, and by that measure, successful. Microsoft did not acheive such complete dominance of home and office until Windows 95 and its juggernaut.
And please, tell me what was wrong with System 7, which was arguably one of the best updates the Mac ever got until OS X? What, did you not have the 2MB of RAM required?
Windows XP is quite stable, but Mac's still win hands down in several relevant areas:
- Security
- Viruses (or lack thereof)
- Spyware (or lack thereof)
- Troubleshooting
Face it - you might pooh-pooh the GUI differences (which are major - I use both daily and there still is no comparison), but you don't have to deal with the mountains of crap you do on the PC side. No viruses, trojans, spyware, and minimal security patches (with NO exploits). No Slammer. No Blaster. No Beagle/Bagle.
And in an oft-overlooked area, what happens when things go wrong? Can you recover from them? If something goes funky in your regsitry, do you have any recourse other than to clean and rebuild? Look at the SP2 thread at all of the people saying they had to go back to XP clean and load SP2, then reload all of their apps.
On a Mac, partially due to its Mac heritage, partially due to its UNIX, you can fix pretty much anything in place. Permissions are the worst problem we deal with - one click and it's fixed. Meanwhile, the core OS (/System) is completely protected from the user or software mucking with it due to permissions. Not even an admin can get in there - only root (The Way It Should Be). Things just don't break very often, almost never break catastrophically, and even THEN, they can usually be fixed rather than resorting to blowing everything away (or absolute worst case - Archive and Install - keeps all your apps, preferences, settings, files, etc and reloads the core OS).
How can you compare that kind of maintainability to Windows? Once again - It Just Works On A Mac.
Insightful my ass - you're full of shit. They seem to have been profitable for three YEARS prior to the iPod, due to things like the iMac, iBook, Powerbook, etc. Gee, these are HARDWARE devices that they may not have sold if they'd licensed the OS. They tried the OS licensing idea - it was the clone years of the mid-90's. It was a flop - people didn't buy more Macs, people just bought cheap hardware from clone makers, killed Apple's profits, and saddled Apple with a huge support legacy.
If Apple's OS and the Apple user experience is so superior to the Windows experience, why does Apple have 3% market share? There has to be a reason, and it's not all because MS is a monopoly. MS was not always a monopoly. When I owned my Apple II, Apple had more than 50% of the PC market. The supposedly superior Mac line eventually dropped them to the 3% they have today. The market was Apple's to lose and they lost it. At some point, you have to stop blaming the rest of the world and look inward for the reasons why.
It's because of compatibility. If you want to move from one platform to another, companies move with the path of least resistance. Over time, CP/M gave way to DOS, which went to Windows 3.1, to Win 95, to 2000, to XP. Each time there was minimal pain in moving.
Meanwhile, Apple II users had NO upgrade path. They migrated sometimes to the Mac, sometimes to the PC. Why didn't they all go to the Mac? They bought into a platform (the Apple II) that cost them less than $1000, and were being asked now to buy into a platform that cost at least $2500, usually more, plus all new software.
That brings me to my final point - even if Mac OS X were available on generic x86 and Apple found a magical way outside everything we know of economics to survive, a lot of people STILL wouldn't migrate. They'd still have to buy all new SOFTWARE, and let me tell you - for a lot of people that can dwarf the cost of the hardware.
Nevermind that Apple does design its own CHIPSET, which the x86 crowd leaves to Intel. Sure, the things that plug into the motherboard are supplied by other vendors (graphics card, processor, hard drives, memory), but the various chips on the motherboard are Apple-designed. I don't know what you consider "designing the mainboard", but that sounds like it to me!
What like this?
HISTORY
First appeared in NextStep.
That's it?
Apple never saw the Mac OS as "job done". Rather the opposite is what killed them - they didn't think the old codebase could be used at all, and spent billions and years on Copland. Copland went nowhere, and in the meantime Windows 95 hit the scene.
Which of course they could do, since they didn't have to ship the same volumes that Apple did. Not to mention their equipment fell to pieces a couple years later (I know several people whose equipment just went to hell in a variety of ways a few years out). They used the cheapest bargain components they could, and it caught up with their buyers.
Marketing my ass. It's called one IBMer among 400,000 (last count I saw) decided to submit an Intranet article to Slashdot. It was posted so that we wouldn't go and install SP2 and complain about internal apps not working - not so you could get your panties in a bunch.
No, we're a company with 400,000 machines (or more), and one build. However, many departments have special applications that others do not (not everyone needs Visio, or Project, etc). Meanwhile, there are thousands of web-based applications that changes to IE will affect.
Finally, another problem here is that SP2 duplicates a lot of functionality in our standard build - firewall, automatic updates, and "security center" in particular, and can cause some pretty bad conflicts *on initial install*. Right now we've been told that we'll get a "custom" version of SP2 soon that essentially just turns off the firewall by default, turns off automatic updates by default, and tweaks our antivirus and firewall to be properly detected by SP2.
Unfortunately, the reason we know of these cases is that they are the exceptions that prove the rule.
Okay, try and make a DVD player without licensing the appropriate technology from the DVD consortium.
Apple will license FairPlay when and as it makes sense for them - witness Motorola. They have no incentive to work with a direct competitor who has a history of inferior products.