Or stay on what has to be 40+ million PowerPC-based Macs in the world, or run on Wii or Xbox 360 (both also custom PowerPC-based cores).
I hope you're not fooling yourself that the PowerPC is now doomed, doooooomed. It's already been in embedded devices for ages, and it looks like it will be staying in consoles for the foreseeable future as well.
If you're remotely managing a machine, it's very often: a) not a laptop, b) through an entirely different user interface (say, some sort of lights-out management for servers or remote management for dozens of clients) or c) through the normal UI, but with extra options (say, VNC or Remote Desktop Connection, with things like "send ctrl+alt+delete", "send file" and so on). "Restart" wouldn't be hard to add here. Remote management is common, but it's not what the issue is about: usability for casual users. In this exact issue, optimizing for "system administrator managing things remotely" instead of "some guy trying to turn his computer off" isn't a good way to go.
You're right, though, that removing restart is overkill. Joel's two choices presents oversimplified compromise. Many previous options are degraded to the point of being useless. However, his core point is that he doesn't think that having 15 ways to turn off or log out your laptop is sane. It's not about the individual choices being hard to learn, it's about the fact that having 15 choices is ridiculous, and that there's probably a way to cut down on them and still keep most functionality and nuances intact. Everything after that is just a napkin implementation draft.
Synaptics make the sensor, correct, but the surface finish is still very much up to the manufacturer. ThinkPads and some newer HPs have better trackpad surfaces than most cheap brands and have been improving recently, but there's still a noticeable difference. I also just remembered how Mac OS X has quite a bit different physics for mouse movements. Acceleration means one thing in Windows and another thing in Mac OS X, and actually I probably can't be trusted to properly separate the two since I haven't used a desktop Mac for more than, say, 10 hours in the past two years. So scratch that. I know when I can't base my argument on properly separated facts, so I won't keep up this argument at all, other than to say that this doesn't change which one I personally prefer.
I really can't argue with the two button argument. In this day and age there's really no reason aside from fear of pissing off people who got drunk on "kool-aid" to still carry just one button. However, I will tell you that the two-fingers-on-trackpad-and-click-means-right-clic k has turned out to be a reasonable workaround in Apple's implementation (whereas it didn't in a third-party driver on one of the older, pre-scrolling trackpads).
As someone who by profession has used a lot of laptops, I can tell you that the trackpad on Mac laptops beats any other trackpad. It just feels a lot better, not glassy or slippery, and I'm enchanted by the trackpad scrolling (if you hold two fingers on the trackpad and move, it functions as a scroll wheel). I do use the "nipple" on PCs that have it (like ThinkPads and some HP models) since most trackpads out there suck, but I am *not* missing one on my MacBook.
I can't speak for your friend or his PowerBook, but my palm rests never get uncomfortably hot even with the energy saver setting "Better Performance". And for what it's worth, the MacBook Pro models now have the antennas in the hinge providing better wireless reception by far than the older "window in metal casing near top of screen" approach. (Not that it could get a lot worse from where it was, though.)
Your question is leading, and since I use one I probably can't give you an objective answer. But I seriously don't think they're aiming to lock you into their computers. I do think that they care about the experience and that this far, the platform is still too small to gain *anything* from allowing clones. They did it once and it almost killed their company for a variety of reasons.
As far as destroying the part that can readapt when something is destroyed goes:
Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong, but none of the supervising programs could tell what it was. At every level, vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing, were also missing. [..] Further investigation quickly established what it was that had happened. A meteorite had knocked a large hole in the ship. The ship had not previously detected this because the meteorite had neatly knocked out that part of the ship's processing equipment which was supposed to detect if the ship had been hit by a meteorite.
If all you ever play includes FPS games, you might be interested to hear that the Wii Metroid game includes some sort of 'advanced' control mode where you use both the Wiimote and the Nunchuk (the add-on controller with a traditional analog control stick that you can connect to the Wiimote) at the same time in a particular way. Not sure if that's going to come to more games, or if it even works that well, but it sounds like something that could reasonably work like the classic "look-and-strafe" keyboard-and-mouse setup.
And don't sweat it about there not being enough buttons. Four positions on the directional pad, one A button and one B button (on the opposite) still means effectively 6 buttons (that you can use in gameplay when waving; there are more) on the actual Wiimote, and the Nunchuk has two more.
As you say, what remains to be seen is how well the "waving" will feel in any game in general and in games not highlighted to work well in particular. (I don't think a dismissal from the outset is the best option.)
I would make that colon a semi-colon: "It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along; it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions." making the two different sub-clauses.
It was like "Google in paperback form" because it had listings of everything you could imagine, thus the "Catalog" part of the name. I'm sure Jobs thinks the other stuff of Google too, but I don't think he meant to say that at that moment.
Sometimes it's not about "not being able to figure something out", it's about personal preference and ability to effectively collaborate with people in your own line of work. If someone runs Photoshop on a Mac instead of a PC, chances are they have a good reason for it, just like you might choose to run games in Windows instead of on Mac OS X or Linux. (That said, I wouldn't rule out that some people just can't figure Windows out, but based on what I've seen - my sister has worked in advertising for years - it's mainly not about that.)
Before the reply window closes here, I'd like to point out that according to Amit Singh (the writer of a book about Mac OS X and hardware), the newest Macs don't carry TPM chips anymore and in fact weren't even using them for much of anything in the models that had them. So much for the "they're about to launch Trusted Computing on all Macs, it's just a software update away!" theory.
Also note that he only perceived that phenomenon when Quartz Debug was running: that's a Mac Developer Tools utility that intercepts every API call related to display rendering and logs it to a GUI. Naturally it slows things down considerably, but it's nothing to do with Parallels exhibiting a problem in performance.
Quartz Debug does slow things down, but he didn't use it to see how fast it was but *which parts of the screen are being redrawn*.
I'll have to agree with the solution. I thrive in Mac OS X and like Xcode and Cocoa, but I also think that Visual Studio 2005 is a very slick and very customizable IDE with well-implemented features as far as the coding itself goes, and the IntelliSense (code completion and semantics) features and performance is just a grand slam. For bread-and-butter reasons I need to do some C#+ASP.net occasionally, and VS2005 on Parallels fits the bill even on a meek lower-end MacBook (when hopped up on 2GB RAM).
Apple is not above using DRM. I wish they were, but they're not above using it. No one's disputing that. However, there are tons of companies that have unshyly committed to the "Trusted Computing" bullshit, and Apple is not one of them, and I don't think that's because they just haven't gotten around to it, I think it's because they're going to make it a plan to stay out of it beyond what they need to support Blu-ray, HD-DVD (because you can't honestly say they'd survive without doing so) and their own OS-to-computer lock-in.
It may be perfectly true that TPM abuse is just a software update away, but that doesn't mean it's going to happen. It's speculation, and you don't have any more on this issue than I do. Being cynical doesn't prove a point beyond the fact that you can hand-wave just as much as I can. My thinking that they're not going to do it isn't based on blind faith in the company, it's based on the idea that they - contrary to other companies - are not viewed as a company that would do this. It'd be horrible for their business if they did, especially since they've been moving towards more open formats and that has attracted customers who wouldn't like this.
So let me get this straight. What you are basically saying is "Don't judge them by what they do, judge them by what they say!".
Not in the slightest. I know what they have done, and I know that it sucks, and I make it clear that I think it sucks, but I don't assume that it's a guarantee that they're going to exploit it in the way other companies will in the future. Apple could just as well have made their own chip for this purpose and no one would be the wiser. (This is an argument that could swing both ways, yes, but I think it was because they needed a good dongle, and this saved time and cost.)
Why is Microsoft (to take the most prominent actor in all this) doing this? Because one of the few legitimate excuses for the TPM initiative - and the one Microsoft pimps, naturally - is to restrain access to sensitive corporate data. (Nothing that couldn't be done in software with a number of other techniques, though, but they wouldn't tell you that.) Microsoft is already big in business and they want to anchor their position even more with this technology.
Then consider Apple. Not historically great within corporations but looking to expand, sure. The trouble is, they already launched their solution to the same problem. (Their solution is called FileVault and hardwires an encrypted disk image within the actual home folder to mount as the home folder.) What excuse would Apple use to promote the "trusted computing" features (note: the actual features, not the mere presence of the TPM chip) if they were to implement them? What upside would there be to customers? And perhaps the most important question: when this technology strikes on the Windows side of things, why wouldn't Apple want to say "come here, we don't serve their kind" and make it another argument for their platform?
I don't think it'd make business sense to implement "trusted computing" features for Apple, and I certainly don't think it'd make business sense for them not to exploit the fact that they don't have it when it starts appearing as a fixture in the pedestrian PC a few years into the future. I don't deem it completely impossible for Apple to sneak in "trusted computing" into the Mac platform, but I do think it's very unlikely (especially when taking into account the image Apple wants their computers to project), and I don't think you'll be worse off on a platform that has the chip but doesn't use it than you'd be on a platform that's planning to integrate the chip and use it but hasn't gotten around to it yet.
One last thing: Apple is not in the list of members or adopters on the Trusted Computing Group's web site, even though they carry the chip. I take this to be in favor of my "it's just a dongle" theory.
The funny thing is that Apple made a big deal about rewriting the Finder in one of the releases... I think 10.3. But all they did is get the existing crappy Finder and ported it to Cocoa without fixing any of the stuff that made it crappy in the first place.
They ported nothing. They stuck a (handy) sidebar to the left edge, married it with the brushed metal interface and provided "dual booting" into the normal plain interface with the toolbar button (which also removes the toolbar and the sidebar). It's still Carbon (albeit in 10.4 it's not using PowerPlant anymore), and most of it still sucks.
People thinking everyone who posts here are Mac shills need to tune in to the FTFF ("Fix The Fucking Finder") discussions at times. Apple do a lot of things right, but the downside is that when they're wrong they tend to stay wrong.
Apple uses it for locking Mac OS X (their OS) to the computer if that's what you mean by DRM (since the iTunes DRM works on any Mac or PC without the chip), and I don't like it one bit, but there is absolutely no sign that they're planning to lock down your own data with it. Despite having such a chip, Apple's probably one of the vendors on the market that's the most philosophically distanced from using the chip the way you fear. They haven't indicated that they're going to do that. Other vendors have. The logical thing seems to be to attack them instead.
The new iPods last month brought rejiggered earbuds. I haven't tried them, and I'm not an audiophile in any way, but I hear they are nicer and has rubber in them so you won't need the black cover that came with the old ones.
That said, yes, they could probably be much better. You get them bundled for free with an MP3 player. Deal with it.:)
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Lots of people have told me that. I can't understand why they don't keep their axes locked up, or how the cat would use it, for one.
Or, you know, axes.
Actually, true hackers don't have machines at all! They just fix it in software.
Or stay on what has to be 40+ million PowerPC-based Macs in the world, or run on Wii or Xbox 360 (both also custom PowerPC-based cores).
I hope you're not fooling yourself that the PowerPC is now doomed, doooooomed. It's already been in embedded devices for ages, and it looks like it will be staying in consoles for the foreseeable future as well.
If you're remotely managing a machine, it's very often: a) not a laptop, b) through an entirely different user interface (say, some sort of lights-out management for servers or remote management for dozens of clients) or c) through the normal UI, but with extra options (say, VNC or Remote Desktop Connection, with things like "send ctrl+alt+delete", "send file" and so on). "Restart" wouldn't be hard to add here. Remote management is common, but it's not what the issue is about: usability for casual users. In this exact issue, optimizing for "system administrator managing things remotely" instead of "some guy trying to turn his computer off" isn't a good way to go.
You're right, though, that removing restart is overkill. Joel's two choices presents oversimplified compromise. Many previous options are degraded to the point of being useless. However, his core point is that he doesn't think that having 15 ways to turn off or log out your laptop is sane. It's not about the individual choices being hard to learn, it's about the fact that having 15 choices is ridiculous, and that there's probably a way to cut down on them and still keep most functionality and nuances intact. Everything after that is just a napkin implementation draft.
Synaptics make the sensor, correct, but the surface finish is still very much up to the manufacturer. ThinkPads and some newer HPs have better trackpad surfaces than most cheap brands and have been improving recently, but there's still a noticeable difference. I also just remembered how Mac OS X has quite a bit different physics for mouse movements. Acceleration means one thing in Windows and another thing in Mac OS X, and actually I probably can't be trusted to properly separate the two since I haven't used a desktop Mac for more than, say, 10 hours in the past two years. So scratch that. I know when I can't base my argument on properly separated facts, so I won't keep up this argument at all, other than to say that this doesn't change which one I personally prefer.
c k has turned out to be a reasonable workaround in Apple's implementation (whereas it didn't in a third-party driver on one of the older, pre-scrolling trackpads).
I really can't argue with the two button argument. In this day and age there's really no reason aside from fear of pissing off people who got drunk on "kool-aid" to still carry just one button. However, I will tell you that the two-fingers-on-trackpad-and-click-means-right-cli
As someone who by profession has used a lot of laptops, I can tell you that the trackpad on Mac laptops beats any other trackpad. It just feels a lot better, not glassy or slippery, and I'm enchanted by the trackpad scrolling (if you hold two fingers on the trackpad and move, it functions as a scroll wheel). I do use the "nipple" on PCs that have it (like ThinkPads and some HP models) since most trackpads out there suck, but I am *not* missing one on my MacBook.
I can't speak for your friend or his PowerBook, but my palm rests never get uncomfortably hot even with the energy saver setting "Better Performance". And for what it's worth, the MacBook Pro models now have the antennas in the hinge providing better wireless reception by far than the older "window in metal casing near top of screen" approach. (Not that it could get a lot worse from where it was, though.)
Your question is leading, and since I use one I probably can't give you an objective answer. But I seriously don't think they're aiming to lock you into their computers. I do think that they care about the experience and that this far, the platform is still too small to gain *anything* from allowing clones. They did it once and it almost killed their company for a variety of reasons.
As far as destroying the part that can readapt when something is destroyed goes:
If all you ever play includes FPS games, you might be interested to hear that the Wii Metroid game includes some sort of 'advanced' control mode where you use both the Wiimote and the Nunchuk (the add-on controller with a traditional analog control stick that you can connect to the Wiimote) at the same time in a particular way. Not sure if that's going to come to more games, or if it even works that well, but it sounds like something that could reasonably work like the classic "look-and-strafe" keyboard-and-mouse setup.
And don't sweat it about there not being enough buttons. Four positions on the directional pad, one A button and one B button (on the opposite) still means effectively 6 buttons (that you can use in gameplay when waving; there are more) on the actual Wiimote, and the Nunchuk has two more.
As you say, what remains to be seen is how well the "waving" will feel in any game in general and in games not highlighted to work well in particular. (I don't think a dismissal from the outset is the best option.)
I'm not sure I'd want to be the subject of a fork. I hear that can get you admitted.
I would make that colon a semi-colon: "It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along; it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions." making the two different sub-clauses.
It was like "Google in paperback form" because it had listings of everything you could imagine, thus the "Catalog" part of the name. I'm sure Jobs thinks the other stuff of Google too, but I don't think he meant to say that at that moment.
Not for another 5 months or so, no.
Sometimes it's not about "not being able to figure something out", it's about personal preference and ability to effectively collaborate with people in your own line of work. If someone runs Photoshop on a Mac instead of a PC, chances are they have a good reason for it, just like you might choose to run games in Windows instead of on Mac OS X or Linux. (That said, I wouldn't rule out that some people just can't figure Windows out, but based on what I've seen - my sister has worked in advertising for years - it's mainly not about that.)
Top right corner.
Yes, because nothing great has ever been accomplished with Javascript and PHP.
Before the reply window closes here, I'd like to point out that according to Amit Singh (the writer of a book about Mac OS X and hardware), the newest Macs don't carry TPM chips anymore and in fact weren't even using them for much of anything in the models that had them. So much for the "they're about to launch Trusted Computing on all Macs, it's just a software update away!" theory.
Quartz Debug does slow things down, but he didn't use it to see how fast it was but *which parts of the screen are being redrawn*.
I'll have to agree with the solution. I thrive in Mac OS X and like Xcode and Cocoa, but I also think that Visual Studio 2005 is a very slick and very customizable IDE with well-implemented features as far as the coding itself goes, and the IntelliSense (code completion and semantics) features and performance is just a grand slam. For bread-and-butter reasons I need to do some C#+ASP.net occasionally, and VS2005 on Parallels fits the bill even on a meek lower-end MacBook (when hopped up on 2GB RAM).
Apple is not above using DRM. I wish they were, but they're not above using it. No one's disputing that. However, there are tons of companies that have unshyly committed to the "Trusted Computing" bullshit, and Apple is not one of them, and I don't think that's because they just haven't gotten around to it, I think it's because they're going to make it a plan to stay out of it beyond what they need to support Blu-ray, HD-DVD (because you can't honestly say they'd survive without doing so) and their own OS-to-computer lock-in.
It may be perfectly true that TPM abuse is just a software update away, but that doesn't mean it's going to happen. It's speculation, and you don't have any more on this issue than I do. Being cynical doesn't prove a point beyond the fact that you can hand-wave just as much as I can. My thinking that they're not going to do it isn't based on blind faith in the company, it's based on the idea that they - contrary to other companies - are not viewed as a company that would do this. It'd be horrible for their business if they did, especially since they've been moving towards more open formats and that has attracted customers who wouldn't like this.
Not in the slightest. I know what they have done, and I know that it sucks, and I make it clear that I think it sucks, but I don't assume that it's a guarantee that they're going to exploit it in the way other companies will in the future. Apple could just as well have made their own chip for this purpose and no one would be the wiser. (This is an argument that could swing both ways, yes, but I think it was because they needed a good dongle, and this saved time and cost.)
Why is Microsoft (to take the most prominent actor in all this) doing this? Because one of the few legitimate excuses for the TPM initiative - and the one Microsoft pimps, naturally - is to restrain access to sensitive corporate data. (Nothing that couldn't be done in software with a number of other techniques, though, but they wouldn't tell you that.) Microsoft is already big in business and they want to anchor their position even more with this technology.
Then consider Apple. Not historically great within corporations but looking to expand, sure. The trouble is, they already launched their solution to the same problem. (Their solution is called FileVault and hardwires an encrypted disk image within the actual home folder to mount as the home folder.) What excuse would Apple use to promote the "trusted computing" features (note: the actual features, not the mere presence of the TPM chip) if they were to implement them? What upside would there be to customers? And perhaps the most important question: when this technology strikes on the Windows side of things, why wouldn't Apple want to say "come here, we don't serve their kind" and make it another argument for their platform?
I don't think it'd make business sense to implement "trusted computing" features for Apple, and I certainly don't think it'd make business sense for them not to exploit the fact that they don't have it when it starts appearing as a fixture in the pedestrian PC a few years into the future. I don't deem it completely impossible for Apple to sneak in "trusted computing" into the Mac platform, but I do think it's very unlikely (especially when taking into account the image Apple wants their computers to project), and I don't think you'll be worse off on a platform that has the chip but doesn't use it than you'd be on a platform that's planning to integrate the chip and use it but hasn't gotten around to it yet.
One last thing: Apple is not in the list of members or adopters on the Trusted Computing Group's web site, even though they carry the chip. I take this to be in favor of my "it's just a dongle" theory.
They ported nothing. They stuck a (handy) sidebar to the left edge, married it with the brushed metal interface and provided "dual booting" into the normal plain interface with the toolbar button (which also removes the toolbar and the sidebar). It's still Carbon (albeit in 10.4 it's not using PowerPlant anymore), and most of it still sucks.
People thinking everyone who posts here are Mac shills need to tune in to the FTFF ("Fix The Fucking Finder") discussions at times. Apple do a lot of things right, but the downside is that when they're wrong they tend to stay wrong.
Apple uses it for locking Mac OS X (their OS) to the computer if that's what you mean by DRM (since the iTunes DRM works on any Mac or PC without the chip), and I don't like it one bit, but there is absolutely no sign that they're planning to lock down your own data with it. Despite having such a chip, Apple's probably one of the vendors on the market that's the most philosophically distanced from using the chip the way you fear. They haven't indicated that they're going to do that. Other vendors have. The logical thing seems to be to attack them instead.
Not that it's actually used that way in reality.
We get sign- oh, screw it.
The new iPods last month brought rejiggered earbuds. I haven't tried them, and I'm not an audiophile in any way, but I hear they are nicer and has rubber in them so you won't need the black cover that came with the old ones.
:)
That said, yes, they could probably be much better. You get them bundled for free with an MP3 player. Deal with it.
So *that's* where those coats come from.