Are you saying that you can't push the left and right mouse buttons at the same time
Correct. There's only a single switch (the whole body of the mouse "clicks") - it uses proximity sensors to decide if you're clicking with your left or right finger. If you don't lift your left finger it counts as a left-click. Its probably OK for office work, but to use it in a game and you'll be pwn3d. Oh, and if you knock them into an obstruction on the desk it registers a click. Plus, I hate the shape:-)
...but then, who in their right mind plans on using the mouse that comes bundled with their system when they can stroll into their local PC superstore and pick one that matches your personal preference for size, shape, weight, number of buttons and price? For ages now, any standard 2 button+scroll mouse has worked fine on a Mac, and the main purveyors of button-encrusted monstrosities (Logitech and MS) support Mac (for a given value of "support").
I guess Apple also face a unique problem: they have to produce mice which look cool, but are completely symmetrical. If they shipped a right-handed mouse then the outcry would make Firewiregate look like a drop in the ocean...
Probably sounded like a good idea back when they were designing these puppies (that manufacturing line didn't build itself overnight):
Punter: No Firewire? No worries, my old camcorder's SO out of warranty, my external HD is only 250G (Oooh! 1TB time capsule!) and I'm pre-approved for a platinum MasterCard. Actually, what the hell, I'm refinancing next year and I've got equity so I'll get the MacBook Pro. Now... need DVI adaptor... mmm, but the new cinema display comes with the right lead anyway, how are my Morgan Stanley shares looking...
I think Apple need to re-think their marketing strategy for the new era:
Hi, I'm a PC. I listened to sound financial advice and invested all my money in a bank offering above-inflation interest, which has just gone bust.
Hi, I'm a Mac. I told my financial advisor to go short himself and gave all my money to Apple. Like PC I'm now broke - unlike PC I've got this really cool computer made out of glass and aluminum. I don't care that it hasn't got Firewire 'cos I can't afford the electricity to run it, but true beauty is without price.
There's probably 10# of copper in that box - take it to the recycling center. Or a scrapyard, if they'll pay you for it.
Its not that big, and its probably solid MS Word 5.1 manuals and System 7.1 floppies from half way down. Anyway, I suspect that a scrapyard would have to pay 3x the value of the copper to have the men in bunny suits remove all the evil lead-based solder from the connectors and strip off the nasty non-recyclable plastic. The recycling centre would probably ship it by air to Africa where 10-year old orphans would nibble off the solder, fly the copper back, incinerate it and use the clinker to build roads. Nope, better all round just to drive out to some site of outstanding natural beauty and chuck it out the window - or stick it in someone else's wheely bin* - where its not going to appear on anybody's quota of counter-productive environmental initiatives.
Fuck Yeah! Like, do you know how many ISA cards I have sitting in a box at home?
...you mean new PC motherboards don't have ISA slots any more? Fuck! Does that mean PS/2 ports are finally on the way out, too? My keyboards!!! My Soundblaster AWE32!!! Nooooooooo!!!
Seriously - motherboards came with a legacy ISA slot or two for some time after all new cards were PCI.
The problem with Firewire 400 is that it retained a "niche" in DV camcorders which are only just disappearing from the market. It was also popular amongst Mac users for external HD storage (consumer-grade, not just high-end FW800 stuff). Now, Apple are known for "tough love" when it comes to killing off legacy devices, but this one might just have been a bit too soon: lots of people will have <2-year-old Firewire kit.
(Looks wistfully at a big box full of chunky SCSI-1, co-ax Ethernet and - oh look - LocalTalk cables that I really should throw out).
I hope they fess up by putting it back in the next revision.
Actually, looking at those MacBook take-apart photos that were posted recently, they'd have a job finding space for the connector on the edge of the PCB that - with the new design - has to have alll the ports.
The internet was a government entity. How can you possibly state that it was "off the radar"?
Sorry. Perhaps I should have been more specific: The internet as a consumer/business product developed "off the radar" of the phone companies.
Yes, the military and universities set up the original internet, but it was small entrepreneurs (like Demon in the UK) who leased lines and started selling dial-up internet access to nerds using software hacked together by radio hams, and ended up creating a demand, from ordinary punters and non big-iron-IT businesses, for "the internet". The phone companies were late to the game, by which time the product - unrestricted, unmetered access to the whole series of tubes - had been pretty much defined for them.
Dunno about the US, but in the UK there were things like Telecom Gold and Prestel which were email/information systems set up by the phone company. I don't think they even lasted long enough to get pwn3d by the internet providers...
If someone really wants to produce a fully open, Four Freedoms-safe, Stallman-friendly cellphone, they'll have to set up a fully open, Four Freedoms-safe, Stallman-friendly network to run it on. Which probably means someone kindly donating a few squillion for the infrastructure.
The internet got close to that by starting off below the radar. The comms companies will not let that happen again.
Without a firewire interface, iMovie (and by extension iDVD) seems like it would be useless.
Well, as others have pointed out, newer camcorders have USB and/or record onto DVD or memory card. Apple have always been fairly ruthless about dropping technologies that the PC world would hang on to for another 5-10 years (are PS/2 ports dead yet?)
The slight fly in that ointment is whether the slot-loading DVD can take an 8cm mini-DVD...
Properly positioned, a glossy screen reflects most of the incident light from a window or a lamp away from your eyes.
With a matte screen, the incident light is scattered in all directions so however you position it, some of that gets into your eyes. You may not notice reflections so much but it knocks down the contrast.
I suspect some glossy screens have a bad rep because they're often pitched at the domestic market and have been designed produce vivid-but-unrealistic "Kodachrome gold" colours - but I'm not convinced that's anything to do with the screen.
If its a reputable journal, the evaluators assume that the articles have been thoroughly peer reviewed , and the quality can be taken as read.
The big assessment exercises (such as the 5-yearly RAE in the UK which determines the research ranking of universities) have to "assess" a metric shedload of papers - so they're not going to spend too much time on each one!
Of course, the reliability of this assumption is legendary.
I looked at scientific journals, and I honestly can't see much of an incentive to appear there. I mean sure, you might get published and that's got some merit...
Some merit? In many academic institutions, number of papers published in respectable journals is the preferred metric of performance, and will affect your promotion and the status/funding of your institution.
YMMV depending on the level of enlightenment and subject area of your institution - there are, of course, other aspects which can and should count - but number of papers is the "gold standard" and the safe bet.
If this were a scientific paper, I'd back that up with some references (but my institution definitely doesn't recognise/. karma and mod points, so I can't be arsed).
They've obviously been using Reason - no, not the virtual synth package, but the one described in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency:
Gordon's great insight was to design a program which allowed you to specify in advance what decision you wished to reach, and only then give it all the facts. The program's task, which it was able to accomplish with connsumate ease, was simply to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclusion...
...The entire project was bought up, lock, stock and barrel, by the Pentagon. Douglas Adams
Shesh... and the guy also predicted Wikipedia and Microsoft (or did he *cause* them?)
(Since DGHDA also contained a fair bit about computer music, I assume that the name of the synth package is no coincidence).
8. Anti-Apple Fanbois post on Slashdot sarcastically detailing the cycle.
9. Anonymous cowards attempt meta-sarcasm
10. ???
11. This page contains a thread which is taking an unusually long time to finish. To end this thread now, mention Hitler.
Rumours circulate of Apple developing flying cars (iFly) teleportation (iHopeTheresNoFly) and tabletop cold fusion (damn, MacFusion is taken!)
Apple announces press event
Mac fanbois approach orgasm. Badly photoshopped images of imagined products appear and are taken seriously.
More plausible photos of faster Macs with slightly bigger trackpads and new colour options for iPods appear and are dismissed by tumescent fanbois as badly photoshopped fakes.
Apple launches faster Macs with slightly bigger trackpads and new colours of iPods.
MacHaters proclaim the failure to deliver imaginary unannounced products as a sign that Apple is doomed. Fanbois are briefly disappointed, but this is dispelled by the comforting ritual of the unboxing ceremony when their new pink iPod arrives.
Rumours appear that Apple is developing holographic TV (iStrain), faster-than-light wormhole travel (iHole) and an intelligent pop-up toaster that actually works (iWatchTooMuchRedDwarf). Badly photoshopped pictures of perfectly browned bread products appear on macrumors.com...
Apple will announce that due to the financial crisis, they've been able to purcase Iceland.
Great! perhaps that means that Gordon Brown will use anti-terror legislation to seize control of all the Apple Stores in the UK and hand out free MacBooks to disgruntled savers.
(Apparently my money is safe, but its now in Holland - hope they don't put it all into tulip futures)
Teleportation? Did I miss something here? Has matter been teleported or is this just speculation?
Its about a trick that lets you transfer the "quantum state" of one particle to another particle (at a distance) without "measuring" it and therefore changing it.
If you want it in Star Trek terms, they haven't invented the transporter, but they have eliminated the need for the fictitious "Heisenberg compensator" which (as any Star Fleet cadet knows) allow the transporter to measure the exact state of every atom in your body without completely scrambling them in accordance with the uncertainty principle.
Don't count on beaming up anytime soon though - its one thing copying the quantum state of one elementary particle onto another (otherwise indistinguishable) particle and calling it "teleportation" but copying your quantum state onto (say) Lt Uhura would be a lot more complicated and wouldn't really have the desired effect (Disclaimer: your desires may vary).
Back in the (hopefully) real world, If I understand quantum cryptography correctly, the only thing "teleported" is a random number to use as an encryption key for a conventionally transmitted message - and even then only in the simplified "thought experiment" version. A practical implementation involves a dialogue (using conventional channels) to establish each bit of the key.
The USP is that if a man-in-the-middle intercepts the photons and "reads" them to determine the key, he can't generate new photons with the same quantum state to pass on to the recipient - so the recipient will know that the transmission has been compromised.
If you go and look up a detailed description of the protocol it all starts to sound a bit less magical (but no less clever).
"doesn't this mean we can communicate at the speed of light?"
Actually, it has been possible to communicate at the speed of light for some time using, er, light by (eg) sending up smoke signals or waving. I think you meant "faster than light"...
Simple really... it wouldn't do 80mph if it was going downhill with a tailwind.
My first car was a Citroen Dyane (minor variation on the 2CV "tin snail"). That would do 80mph or more downhill with a tailwind* but above that, a novel speed limiting system called "mortal terror" cut in...
Oh, sorry, were we trying to be responsible adults?
*(...and no, this didn't involve the car being spread across the front of a train. In fact, as long as it wasn't actually uphill with a headwind you'd get there, eventually).
Alternatively parents could try having a mature and trusting relationship with their teenage children...
Or, to put it another way, if you don't trust the little scrotes not to go tearing around at 90 mph with the traction control off, don't trust them with the car at all because there are plenty of dumb things you can do at 79mph.
I ask because there doesn't seem to be anything unusual about the mac pro.
Well, its quite power-hungry "server class" hardware (Xeons, FB-DIMM RAM etc.) with an extremely quiet cooling system - so maybe a bit different from your average PC. ISTR that FB-DIMMs knock out quite a bit of heat (the Apple-compatible versions specify souped-up heatsinks on the DIMMs c.f. the standard).
But, more likely, brand name recognition means that hacks think "Apple Mac Pro gives off toxic fumes" just sounds better than "GenericTech BeigeBox 2000 gives off toxic fumes" or even "Shock! Horror! All electronic devices contain nasty shit and give some of it off when they get warm!".
It most certainly is not. Regular laptops have bigger screens,
Define "regular" - the Air has a 13.3" screen, same size and res as the regular MacBooks, well within the range of other smaller "regular" laptops, such as the Sony Vaio S series. That also leaves room for a full-sized keyboard.
The "netbook" market didn't exist when Apple conceived the Air. The real, end-of-argument, unique selling point of the netbook concept, for my money, is that they are dirt cheap and worth considering as an internet phone/radio, dedicated web browser/"Frozen Bubble" game even if you already have a "proper" laptop. The Air was clearly designed as a premium-priced "boutique" laptop - a shuttlecraft for starship iMac.
The eMate was the closest they ever had to something that met the requirements of a netbook, and it was $800.
Which was probably considerably cheaper than a "proper" laptop back in the late 90s.
Major? Its only remotely of concern to people who want to build their own "hackintosh". If you actually buy a Mac, this is no restriction at all - c.f. the iPhone where Apple and the phone company do seem to reserve the right to tell you what you can use your iPhone for.
The same as removing DRM from music would "kill" the music industry?
Removing DRM probably will kill the music industry as we know it, and the world will be a better place for it - they've been stifling it for years.
OTOH, Apple's ability to tightly link its OS to its hardware, and to use sales of premium-priced hardware to bankroll software development, has led them to be a major source of innovation in an industry otherwise dominated by a fat, lazy monopolist. The only market for commercial "hackintoshs" would be customers who would otherwise have bought hardware from Apple - they'd be wiped out and take one of the few serious competitors to Windows with them.
Apple has entered this field; it's called the MacBook Air. It's expensive, it's heavy, and it has limited connectivity options.
For heaven's sake folks, the Air isn't a Netbook - its a regular 13.3" widescreen form-factor laptop (which is about the minimum size for a full-sized keyboard and better-than-XGA display) that's been made super-slim, and then made to look even slimmer by clever design. Its aimed squarely at well-off Mac users who want a small laptop to supplement their iMac, don't want a MacBook Pro (pretty, but relatively hefty) but fancy something a bit more "executive" than the regular MacBook. Its no power-house, but it has considerably more grunt than most netbooks. The connectivity is stripped out because it is assumed that you'll use WiFi and Bluetooth (there's a clue in the name). The seriously expensive SSD option is intended to give HD-equivalent capacity. Its main competitors would have been smaller, sexy and equally expensive ultra-compacts, and the killer features would have been the keyboard, and that it slipped into a briefcase designed for A4/Letter documents better than a smaller-but-thicker computer. Yet, somehow, the reviews always put the Air head-to-head with the $300 EEE PC 701, rather than $3000 worth of carbon-fibre bonsai from Sony.
Just for the record, I own 0 (zero) MacBook Airs and 1 (one) EEE PC 701 (and am tempted to upgrade to a 901) - but I just find the comparison bizzarre.
An Apple Netbook wouldn't be affordable and it would include the usual Apple restrictions and digital rights violations. No, thanks.
That would depend whether His Steveness envisioned it as a cut-down MacBook (i.e. a general purpose computer) or a souped-up iPod/iPhone (i.e. an appliance). The vast majority of those "restrictions and digital rights violations" bones of contention arise from the latter.
The only such issue I can think of with Macs is the restriction of OSX to Apple hardware - which nobody seemed worried about until the Intel switch and, IMHO, removing that would simply kill OS X.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you saying that you can't push the left and right mouse buttons at the same time
Correct. There's only a single switch (the whole body of the mouse "clicks") - it uses proximity sensors to decide if you're clicking with your left or right finger. If you don't lift your left finger it counts as a left-click. Its probably OK for office work, but to use it in a game and you'll be pwn3d. Oh, and if you knock them into an obstruction on the desk it registers a click. Plus, I hate the shape :-)
...but then, who in their right mind plans on using the mouse that comes bundled with their system when they can stroll into their local PC superstore and pick one that matches your personal preference for size, shape, weight, number of buttons and price? For ages now, any standard 2 button+scroll mouse has worked fine on a Mac, and the main purveyors of button-encrusted monstrosities (Logitech and MS) support Mac (for a given value of "support").
I guess Apple also face a unique problem: they have to produce mice which look cool, but are completely symmetrical. If they shipped a right-handed mouse then the outcry would make Firewiregate look like a drop in the ocean...
Probably sounded like a good idea back when they were designing these puppies (that manufacturing line didn't build itself overnight):
Punter: No Firewire? No worries, my old camcorder's SO out of warranty, my external HD is only 250G (Oooh! 1TB time capsule!) and I'm pre-approved for a platinum MasterCard. Actually, what the hell, I'm refinancing next year and I've got equity so I'll get the MacBook Pro. Now... need DVI adaptor... mmm, but the new cinema display comes with the right lead anyway, how are my Morgan Stanley shares looking...
I think Apple need to re-think their marketing strategy for the new era:
Hi, I'm a PC. I listened to sound financial advice and invested all my money in a bank offering above-inflation interest, which has just gone bust.
Hi, I'm a Mac. I told my financial advisor to go short himself and gave all my money to Apple. Like PC I'm now broke - unlike PC I've got this really cool computer made out of glass and aluminum. I don't care that it hasn't got Firewire 'cos I can't afford the electricity to run it, but true beauty is without price.
There's probably 10# of copper in that box - take it to the recycling center. Or a scrapyard, if they'll pay you for it.
Its not that big, and its probably solid MS Word 5.1 manuals and System 7.1 floppies from half way down. Anyway, I suspect that a scrapyard would have to pay 3x the value of the copper to have the men in bunny suits remove all the evil lead-based solder from the connectors and strip off the nasty non-recyclable plastic. The recycling centre would probably ship it by air to Africa where 10-year old orphans would nibble off the solder, fly the copper back, incinerate it and use the clinker to build roads. Nope, better all round just to drive out to some site of outstanding natural beauty and chuck it out the window - or stick it in someone else's wheely bin* - where its not going to appear on anybody's quota of counter-productive environmental initiatives.
(* that's English for dumpster, by the way).
Fuck Yeah! Like, do you know how many ISA cards I have sitting in a box at home?
...you mean new PC motherboards don't have ISA slots any more? Fuck! Does that mean PS/2 ports are finally on the way out, too? My keyboards!!! My Soundblaster AWE32!!! Nooooooooo!!!
Seriously - motherboards came with a legacy ISA slot or two for some time after all new cards were PCI.
The problem with Firewire 400 is that it retained a "niche" in DV camcorders which are only just disappearing from the market. It was also popular amongst Mac users for external HD storage (consumer-grade, not just high-end FW800 stuff). Now, Apple are known for "tough love" when it comes to killing off legacy devices, but this one might just have been a bit too soon: lots of people will have <2-year-old Firewire kit.
(Looks wistfully at a big box full of chunky SCSI-1, co-ax Ethernet and - oh look - LocalTalk cables that I really should throw out).
How about everyone take a deep breath and Google for 'Macbook Firewire card'.
How about going to the MacBook specs and checking if it actually does have an ExpressCard slot (clue: no it doesn't)?
The Mac Book Pro does, but it also has a Firewire port so that's kinda moot.
I hope they fess up by putting it back in the next revision.
Actually, looking at those MacBook take-apart photos that were posted recently, they'd have a job finding space for the connector on the edge of the PCB that - with the new design - has to have alll the ports.
The internet was a government entity. How can you possibly state that it was "off the radar"?
Sorry. Perhaps I should have been more specific: The internet as a consumer/business product developed "off the radar" of the phone companies.
Yes, the military and universities set up the original internet, but it was small entrepreneurs (like Demon in the UK) who leased lines and started selling dial-up internet access to nerds using software hacked together by radio hams, and ended up creating a demand, from ordinary punters and non big-iron-IT businesses, for "the internet". The phone companies were late to the game, by which time the product - unrestricted, unmetered access to the whole series of tubes - had been pretty much defined for them.
Dunno about the US, but in the UK there were things like Telecom Gold and Prestel which were email/information systems set up by the phone company. I don't think they even lasted long enough to get pwn3d by the internet providers...
If someone really wants to produce a fully open, Four Freedoms-safe, Stallman-friendly cellphone, they'll have to set up a fully open, Four Freedoms-safe, Stallman-friendly network to run it on. Which probably means someone kindly donating a few squillion for the infrastructure.
The internet got close to that by starting off below the radar. The comms companies will not let that happen again.
Without a firewire interface, iMovie (and by extension iDVD) seems like it would be useless.
Well, as others have pointed out, newer camcorders have USB and/or record onto DVD or memory card. Apple have always been fairly ruthless about dropping technologies that the PC world would hang on to for another 5-10 years (are PS/2 ports dead yet?)
The slight fly in that ointment is whether the slot-loading DVD can take an 8cm mini-DVD...
Why?
Better contrast in bright light.
Properly positioned, a glossy screen reflects most of the incident light from a window or a lamp away from your eyes.
With a matte screen, the incident light is scattered in all directions so however you position it, some of that gets into your eyes. You may not notice reflections so much but it knocks down the contrast.
I suspect some glossy screens have a bad rep because they're often pitched at the domestic market and have been designed produce vivid-but-unrealistic "Kodachrome gold" colours - but I'm not convinced that's anything to do with the screen.
If its a reputable journal, the evaluators assume that the articles have been thoroughly peer reviewed , and the quality can be taken as read.
The big assessment exercises (such as the 5-yearly RAE in the UK which determines the research ranking of universities) have to "assess" a metric shedload of papers - so they're not going to spend too much time on each one!
Of course, the reliability of this assumption is legendary.
I looked at scientific journals, and I honestly can't see much of an incentive to appear there. I mean sure, you might get published and that's got some merit...
Some merit? In many academic institutions, number of papers published in respectable journals is the preferred metric of performance, and will affect your promotion and the status/funding of your institution.
YMMV depending on the level of enlightenment and subject area of your institution - there are, of course, other aspects which can and should count - but number of papers is the "gold standard" and the safe bet.
If this were a scientific paper, I'd back that up with some references (but my institution definitely doesn't recognise /. karma and mod points, so I can't be arsed).
They've obviously been using Reason - no, not the virtual synth package, but the one described in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency:
Gordon's great insight was to design a program which allowed you to specify in advance what decision you wished to reach, and only then give it all the facts. The program's task, which it was able to accomplish with connsumate ease, was simply to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclusion...
...The entire project was bought up, lock, stock and barrel, by the Pentagon.
Douglas Adams
Shesh... and the guy also predicted Wikipedia and Microsoft (or did he *cause* them?)
(Since DGHDA also contained a fair bit about computer music, I assume that the name of the synth package is no coincidence).
8. Anti-Apple Fanbois post on Slashdot sarcastically detailing the cycle.
9. Anonymous cowards attempt meta-sarcasm
10. ???
11. This page contains a thread which is taking an unusually long time to finish. To end this thread now, mention Hitler.
Apple will announce that due to the financial crisis, they've been able to purcase Iceland.
Great! perhaps that means that Gordon Brown will use anti-terror legislation to seize control of all the Apple Stores in the UK and hand out free MacBooks to disgruntled savers.
(Apparently my money is safe, but its now in Holland - hope they don't put it all into tulip futures)
Teleportation? Did I miss something here? Has matter been teleported or is this just speculation?
Its about a trick that lets you transfer the "quantum state" of one particle to another particle (at a distance) without "measuring" it and therefore changing it.
If you want it in Star Trek terms, they haven't invented the transporter, but they have eliminated the need for the fictitious "Heisenberg compensator" which (as any Star Fleet cadet knows) allow the transporter to measure the exact state of every atom in your body without completely scrambling them in accordance with the uncertainty principle.
Don't count on beaming up anytime soon though - its one thing copying the quantum state of one elementary particle onto another (otherwise indistinguishable) particle and calling it "teleportation" but copying your quantum state onto (say) Lt Uhura would be a lot more complicated and wouldn't really have the desired effect (Disclaimer: your desires may vary).
Back in the (hopefully) real world, If I understand quantum cryptography correctly, the only thing "teleported" is a random number to use as an encryption key for a conventionally transmitted message - and even then only in the simplified "thought experiment" version. A practical implementation involves a dialogue (using conventional channels) to establish each bit of the key.
The USP is that if a man-in-the-middle intercepts the photons and "reads" them to determine the key, he can't generate new photons with the same quantum state to pass on to the recipient - so the recipient will know that the transmission has been compromised.
If you go and look up a detailed description of the protocol it all starts to sound a bit less magical (but no less clever).
"doesn't this mean we can communicate at the speed of light?"
Actually, it has been possible to communicate at the speed of light for some time using, er, light by (eg) sending up smoke signals or waving. I think you meant "faster than light"...
Simple really ... it wouldn't do 80mph if it was going downhill with a tailwind.
My first car was a Citroen Dyane (minor variation on the 2CV "tin snail"). That would do 80mph or more downhill with a tailwind* but above that, a novel speed limiting system called "mortal terror" cut in...
Oh, sorry, were we trying to be responsible adults?
*(...and no, this didn't involve the car being spread across the front of a train. In fact, as long as it wasn't actually uphill with a headwind you'd get there, eventually).
Alternatively parents could try having a mature and trusting relationship with their teenage children...
Or, to put it another way, if you don't trust the little scrotes not to go tearing around at 90 mph with the traction control off, don't trust them with the car at all because there are plenty of dumb things you can do at 79mph.
I ask because there doesn't seem to be anything unusual about the mac pro.
Well, its quite power-hungry "server class" hardware (Xeons, FB-DIMM RAM etc.) with an extremely quiet cooling system - so maybe a bit different from your average PC. ISTR that FB-DIMMs knock out quite a bit of heat (the Apple-compatible versions specify souped-up heatsinks on the DIMMs c.f. the standard).
But, more likely, brand name recognition means that hacks think "Apple Mac Pro gives off toxic fumes" just sounds better than "GenericTech BeigeBox 2000 gives off toxic fumes" or even "Shock! Horror! All electronic devices contain nasty shit and give some of it off when they get warm!".
It most certainly is not. Regular laptops have bigger screens,
Define "regular" - the Air has a 13.3" screen, same size and res as the regular MacBooks, well within the range of other smaller "regular" laptops, such as the Sony Vaio S series. That also leaves room for a full-sized keyboard.
The "netbook" market didn't exist when Apple conceived the Air. The real, end-of-argument, unique selling point of the netbook concept, for my money, is that they are dirt cheap and worth considering as an internet phone/radio, dedicated web browser/"Frozen Bubble" game even if you already have a "proper" laptop. The Air was clearly designed as a premium-priced "boutique" laptop - a shuttlecraft for starship iMac.
The eMate was the closest they ever had to something that met the requirements of a netbook, and it was $800.
Which was probably considerably cheaper than a "proper" laptop back in the late 90s.
Yeah, that's a pretty major restriction there.
Major? Its only remotely of concern to people who want to build their own "hackintosh". If you actually buy a Mac, this is no restriction at all - c.f. the iPhone where Apple and the phone company do seem to reserve the right to tell you what you can use your iPhone for.
The same as removing DRM from music would "kill" the music industry?
Removing DRM probably will kill the music industry as we know it, and the world will be a better place for it - they've been stifling it for years.
OTOH, Apple's ability to tightly link its OS to its hardware, and to use sales of premium-priced hardware to bankroll software development, has led them to be a major source of innovation in an industry otherwise dominated by a fat, lazy monopolist. The only market for commercial "hackintoshs" would be customers who would otherwise have bought hardware from Apple - they'd be wiped out and take one of the few serious competitors to Windows with them.
Apple has entered this field; it's called the MacBook Air. It's expensive, it's heavy, and it has limited connectivity options.
For heaven's sake folks, the Air isn't a Netbook - its a regular 13.3" widescreen form-factor laptop (which is about the minimum size for a full-sized keyboard and better-than-XGA display) that's been made super-slim, and then made to look even slimmer by clever design. Its aimed squarely at well-off Mac users who want a small laptop to supplement their iMac, don't want a MacBook Pro (pretty, but relatively hefty) but fancy something a bit more "executive" than the regular MacBook. Its no power-house, but it has considerably more grunt than most netbooks. The connectivity is stripped out because it is assumed that you'll use WiFi and Bluetooth (there's a clue in the name). The seriously expensive SSD option is intended to give HD-equivalent capacity. Its main competitors would have been smaller, sexy and equally expensive ultra-compacts, and the killer features would have been the keyboard, and that it slipped into a briefcase designed for A4/Letter documents better than a smaller-but-thicker computer. Yet, somehow, the reviews always put the Air head-to-head with the $300 EEE PC 701, rather than $3000 worth of carbon-fibre bonsai from Sony.
Just for the record, I own 0 (zero) MacBook Airs and 1 (one) EEE PC 701 (and am tempted to upgrade to a 901) - but I just find the comparison bizzarre.
An Apple Netbook wouldn't be affordable and it would include the usual Apple restrictions and digital rights violations. No, thanks.
That would depend whether His Steveness envisioned it as a cut-down MacBook (i.e. a general purpose computer) or a souped-up iPod/iPhone (i.e. an appliance). The vast majority of those "restrictions and digital rights violations" bones of contention arise from the latter.
The only such issue I can think of with Macs is the restriction of OSX to Apple hardware - which nobody seemed worried about until the Intel switch and, IMHO, removing that would simply kill OS X.