It doesn't matter what codec a publisher likes. This is not an area where you get to express yourself. You publish in MP4 because it is the only universal video codec. Anything else might as well be encrypted and the user has no key. They are not going to see any video.
Yes. It is illegal to do this on BART. The ticket you use to enter the station is the same one you use as you exit the station.
The idea that trading tickets is some kind of “hacking” is absurd. It's basic fraud.
BART is a public transit system run by the people of the SF Bay Area. So even worse, you're defrauding your fellow citizens. You're not defrauding a Wall Street corporation or getting back at the man or something.
You got what you paid for: a disposable laptop. The way it works is you just buy another now. Or you get tired of it and get some Apple gear because that is the only manufacturer who hasn't switched to disposable laptops.
No, everybody should not learn to code. Instead, all coders should learn to dance. That will be more productive. Also, it will teach the coders to STFU about everybody else learning to code.
This is sad nerd semantics, even for Slashdot. A rational human can tell by the context that Phil Schiller was talking about “personal computers” when he said “computers.” Today, Ford makes “computers” but Ford has never made PC's. Same with HP in 1984.
Further, what was HP in 1984 was sold off around 2000 or so. Trying to say there is continuity between the 1984 HP and today's HP is a real stretch. It's like today's AT&T — same name, totally different company.
And the stupidest part of this is that Steve Wozniak used to work for HP, and offered the Apple II to HP and was turned down. HP took a pass on PC's and that didn't change until the 1990's when HP was just another Mac cloner.
We are much closer to transferring a human consciousness into a robot and sending that robot to Mars than we are to sending a human to Mars. The entire population of Mars is robots, and that will probably always be true. Each one that shows up is slightly more evolved than the last and that may go on for a long time.
When you combine the infinite opportunity of space with how badly we are treating our environment on Earth, there is a lot of evolutionary pressure for us to become robots. Notice the 21st century human doesn't travel in space like we thought they would many years ago, but instead we have a partial robot brain (we always have a certain number of gigaflops and gigabytes with them,) with partial robot senses (4G, Wi-Fi, GPS, etc.) We're closer right now to being robots than being spacemen.
You don't even have to look to space — just look at the dream of flying cars versus the reality of flying robots (aka drones.) Even just flying around in our own atmosphere is so foreign to us that robots are ahead at that, too.
Get a Mac. Or get dedicated hardware, like a mixer with an SD slot and basic recording. The Mac is the one and only general purpose system that is built for what you want to do. Not just at the application software level or user interface level, but in the OS subsystems and developer API's and hardware. Basically, I'm telling you to buy a computer with CoreAudio and CoreMIDI in it — you can't bolt those onto another system. A Mac comes out of the box doing what you want to do, and you can then optionally replace GarageBand with Logic (or Pro Tools or Performer or Ableton Live) and optionally replace the built-in (24/96) hardware with accessory hardware via USB, FireWire, or Thunderbolt. Even where you plan to run something like Ableton Live which is on both Mac and Windows, you will have a dramatically better experience on the Mac because you can do things like run AudioUnits plug-ins instead of VST to improve stability, and you can combine multiple audio interfaces into one, and you get reliable hardware connections through CoreAudio out-of-the-box.
Also, consider getting an iPad mini as a remote control. It runs MIDI mixer controls, pianos, drums, guitars — most of which can output MIDI over Wi-Fi to your Mac. Logic X has its own iPad app that runs it from the iPad and adds transport controls and mixer faders and so on and just works. The iPad will cost you $299, yet it will replace thousands of dollars of MIDI gear. And when you only have the iPad by itself, it becomes a complete pocket studio if you add an Apogee MiC or Jam. A7-based iPads can do 32 stereo tracks in GarageBand (earlier iPads do 8 stereo tracks.)
A big thing is that the Mac is where the user community is that is also doing what you want to do. So when you struggle with something, there will be someone who can help you dig out of that hole. But the struggles you have on the Mac will be creative, they will be musical, and there will be creative musicians who are fellow users and can help you out. The struggles on other platforms for musicians are often technical — you struggle just to get a timing or stability issue worked out and get the basic functionality that every single Mac user already has when the system comes out of the box. It is one of the most embarrassing things in computing — the lack of music and audio infrastructure in any operating systems other than Apple's. I wish it were not so — I would love to be able to tell you that any computer is good for music. But only Apple has ever made music and audio a priority on their systems. Only Apple built the infrastructure. Only Apple systems come out of the box as functioning music studios that you can then customize while maintaining that existing functionality.
Keep in mind that recording audio is a really high-stress computing task. You have to plug-in to audio interfaces with 96000 frames per second timing, you have to plug-in to 20 year old MIDI instruments, you have to run the CPU's under heavy load for hours and hours and hours without every crashing. There cannot be any crashes or you lose takes. No crashes at all can be tolerated. In many years in music, I've only ever seen Macs, iPads, iPhones do that amongst general purpose computers. To get that reliability otherwise, you need dedicated hardware.
I've worked at a few studio complexes where almost everybody is on Macs and a few guys for whatever reason are on PC's. It is embarrassing for Microsoft and PC hardware makers to see the difference side-by-side. You see a band of hardcore stoners who don't have a high school diploma between them and have barely ever touched a computer go into a room and successfully record their own original album with a $500 Mac mini, and next door to them is a guy who has a college degree who is paying another guy with a college degree $500 to get his $3000 Windows PC setup to stop crashing during recordings. Again and again, over and over, I've seen this. Don't be that guy. Don't bring a typewriter into a music studio and try to hook it up to a piano
You can put money into schools in Detroit and create Detroit-native high tech workers. That is actually the responsibility of the Detroit-area governments. No innovation is necessary.
> The strongest conceptually similarity between PCs and phones is that they both contain microprocessors
That is true only if you are talking about generic PC's and generic phones, not iOS devices, which are PC's, with PC heritage, from the oldest PC company, that run PC apps (native C/C++.)
The strongest conceptual similarity between PC's and iOS devices is that they both contain OS X — the xnu kernel, OS X subsystems and libraries — and they both run Cocoa apps, which are native C/C++, the standard for PC apps. iOS runs many of the exact same apps from the Mac, like Pages and GarageBand and iMovie, as well as PC apps from Windows, Unix, Xbox, PlayStation, and even DOS PC's. That is much more similarity than “has a microprocessor.”
I have an iPad here that runs Pages most of the time, and it replaced a Mac that ran Pages most of the time. The microprocessor in the iPad is ARM and in the Mac it was Intel and I never cared at all about that. The first time I ran Pages, it was on a Mac with PowerPC microprocessor. So the microprocessors are not nearly as similar between my Mac PC's and iOS PC's as are the apps and operating system, which are the same.
> Apple's OS X and iOS are considered to be separate products
No. OS X and iOS are not products. MacBooks and iMacs and iPads and iPhones are products. OS X and iOS are components that are used in various products. MacBook and iMac both use OS X, while iPad and iPhone both use iOS.
OS X is Apple's operating system with a mouse-based user/app interface. iOS is Apple's operating system with touch-based user/app interface. Underneath the user/app interface, they are the same operating system, with the same kernel, libraries, and subsystems.
If you're saying that an iMac running Pages on OS X is a PC and an iPad running (the exact same) Pages on iOS is not, I think that is crazy talk.
Are you saying that Apple is closed and that Apple and Microsoft are both the same? Because neither of those ring true to me.
You *might* be able to argue that Google is open, Apple is less open, and Microsoft is closed. That has at least the ring of truth. However, a lot of Google's open source comes with strings that make it unusable by anybody but Google partners. Apple's open source stuff like LLVM and Clang and WebKit are truly open and we know that because they have all been used by Apple competitors, not just partners. Android includes Apple WebKit. I'm unaware of any Google open source that is inside iOS. Google also uses LLVM and Clang. Not to mention the entire interface paradigm of Android is from Apple.
I think you are just thinking “open good — closed bad” and then assigning open to your favorite platform and closed to the ones you don't like. Maybe you are not doing that. In that case, cite some examples of open source projects from all 3 companies and how they are relatively open and closed.
My experience has been that I have plugged hundreds of hardware accessories into my Mac, iPad, and iPhone and they all just worked. This includes electronic drum kits, which plug into a Mac or iOS device very easily and just work. MIDI-over-Wi-Fi between iOS devices and Mac devices just works.
My experience has been that I have run hundreds of apps on my Mac and they just worked, and hundreds of apps on my iPad and iPhone and they just worked. I can't remember ever attempting to run a Mac or iOS app and they didn't run.
Also I have run Perl and Python and PHP scripts on my Mac and they just worked. I have run Apache websites on the Web Sharing feature of my Mac and they just worked. And I've shared files with other Macs, Windows PC's, Unix systems over the network and they just worked. FTP sites — whatever. All just worked.
I have definitely opened a broad range of professional audio and video file formats on my Mac and they just worked. Even right-out-of-the-box with no additional software installed.
Rendezvous — zero configuration networking — just worked. AirPlay just works. AirPrint just works.
The Google ecosystem just works. The Yahoo ecosystem. Netflix, Xfinity, MLB, Qello — they all just work.
What am I missing out on? I don't know that I have time to use any more stuff.
Oh, right — VIRUSES. I can't run any viruses. I need to be “open” to run all the viruses.
* Apple is the PC and iPod manufacturer, and so their phones and tablets are tablet PC's with iPod features and iPod phones with tablet PC features * Samsung is a phone and TV manufacturer, and so their phones are phones with TV (media player) features and their tablets are TV's with phone features (Java apps)
duh.
Or are you saying I can do the exact same things with a stone tablet that I can do with an iPad? How about with an Advil tablet? Same features as an iPad?
> > My iPhone can do everything I can do on my workstation.
> No it can't. It can't even run CUPS
CUPS is there inside the core operating system of every iOS device since before iOS 5. Apple is the maintainer of CUPS.
Maybe his workstation can't run AirPrint, but his iOS device can run CUPS.
Maybe you are looking for a serial cable connection from an iOS device to a printer? That makes as much sense as an electric car with no battery that you plug into a very long AC cable. That is why iOS devices have AirPrint wireless printing. Which is based on CUPS and can be made to work with any CUPS printer if you like.
> Any apps it does have are scaled back "starter" versions compared to what's available for a real PC.
That is not true. The apps are not scaled back, and they are not starter versions. And many iOS apps have features that you can't get on any Mac or Windows software.
Pages/Keynote/Numbers have the same features whether running on the Mac, Web, iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch.
GarageBand for iOS has features that don't exist on any Mac or Windows music composition software. It's the best PC songwriting software, period.
iMovie is great on the Mac, but it really shines on iPad, which has a built-in movie camera, complete with the large viewfinder screen that is found on real movie cameras. So you see a real TV view of what you are shooting, then when you edit you can drag clips around with your finger, and before you know it, you are uploading to YouTube over 4G from the very location you were shooting. BETTER.
Photoshop on Mac/Windows may seem to be much bigger than any iOS app, but keep in mind that Photoshop for Mac/Windows is actually dozens if not hundreds of individual apps combined into one giant interface. Any particular user only uses some subset of that large suite of apps. The equivalent on iOS would be to run about 10 iOS apps, and that is what Photoshop experts do when they use an iPad. They choose the 10 iOS apps that match up to the parts of Photoshop for Mac/Windows that they actually use.
The size of apps is a ridiculous metric, anyway. I could just as easily say that Unix is not a real PC operating system because the typical iOS app is much bigger than diff or echo. You do realize that App Store (the iOS app) is much bigger than apt-get (the Unix app,) right? So what you are saying doesn't make any sense. Even if you were factually correct about anything, which you are not.
You also forgot to mention that Advil tablets outsell both Apple tablets and Samsung tablets. I bought 200 Advil tablets yesterday, and I only have one Apple tablet.
Yes, I know an Advil tablet is a pain reliever and has nothing to do with an Apple tablet which is a PC (aka “tablet PC,” it runs native C/C++ PC apps from the Mac and other PC class systems on a PC class OS) or a Samsung tablet which is a TV (aka “media player,” it plays video and has Java phone apps,) but if you want to lump all tablets together and pretend they are all one big market, I don't know why you would leave out the Advils.
Also there are stone tablets. Adding them in may also enable you to imply that iPad sales are dropping when they are not.
iPad has about 99% of tablet PC sales. All the other tablet PC's run Windows. Apple pretty much doubles their iPad sales every year, and then doubles them again the following year. Everybody should have such problems.
> Apple, allow me to use 3rd party app stores, give me a decent built in file manager, give me something like AirDroid(and not iTunes), > allow script languages, and let me customize the "desktop"(widgets, no Win95 like icon grid), and I will become a full fledged > Apple fanboy and shower you with money
Apple already has that product — it's called a Mac.
You can run apps from any developer on the Mac, or make your own. The Mac may have the only decent file manager, and there are 3rd party alternatives if you like. The Mac has the most music and audio support of any system, you can playback audio in any one of thousands of apps. The Mac has Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, and other scripting languages built-in. There is even a GUI app scripting language called AppleScript with which you can automate Mac GUI apps like Photoshop and BBEdit to work together as one app that runs like a player piano while you are at lunch or sleeping. The word “widget” (in the context you are using) comes from the Mac. By default, the widgets are confined to their own desktop space (called Dashboard) but if you like you can override that (with developer mode) and run them on any desktop space you like.
iOS is for the times when you don't want the power/complexity of a Mac. For some users, that means having an iOS device and no Mac (or Windows PC.) For you, it likely means having a Mac and also having iOS devices that act as accessories. For example, on my desk right now is a MacBook Pro that is running Web development tools and just to the right of the screen is an iPad on a vertical stand that is running a Web browser, showing me the consumer view of what I'm working on with the Mac.
This shouldn't be hard to grasp because it's the same thing as with the iPod. When you are walking around and want to listen to music, you don't want to use a Mac, because an iPod is better for that in every way. When you are sitting on the couch surfing the Web or watching Netflix, you don't want to use a Mac, because an iPad is better for that in every way. However, if you want to do some coding, you put down the iPad and the iPod and you open up a Mac. It's pretty straightforward.
Android devices != PC's. Java apps are not PC apps.
iOS devices == PC's. They run the same apps from the Mac, but with a touch interface, on top of the same operating system core from the Mac. If you say an iOS device is not a PC, you are saying a Mac is not a PC, and therefore Windows — a Mac/NeXT clone — is not a PC. To some extent, Windows 8 is also an iOS clone — is a Windows 8 PC not a PC?
You are thinking too literally and too office-centric and traditional PC -centric.
Yes, sometimes a general office worker gets an iPad and drops the Windows PC on the same day. Especially if they are very mobile or had very few traditional PC skills. But all the iOS device has to do is replace the user's main PC app and the user is mostly done with the traditional PC. For example, a writer who moves his word processor from a Mac to an iPad is now an iPad user who also has a Mac. The iPad is his main computer now, and the Mac is secondary.
But there are all kinds of other scenarios:
* a limo driver who used to keep trip notes on a paper clipboard, and at the end of the day go into an office full of Windows PC's and do data entry replaces the paper clipboard with an iPad and drops the office and the Windows PC immediately — other examples of this kind of workflow are car and real estate sales people, who can have an iPad with them at the actual point of sale (with the client at a new car or house) and don't need to go back to a desk
* people who used to use a desktop PC and a notebook PC have now often replaced the desktop PC with the notebook, and replaced the notebook with an iPad
* people who had one notebook PC they used 100% of the time and replaced every year are now using the notebook PC 25%–50% of the time and an iPad for the rest and replacing the notebook PC every 2–3 years, or ultimately replacing the notebook with a second or even third iPad
* users who have computers that run just one specific app all day — a salesperson who spends all day in Salesforce, a photographer who runs a photo viewer tethered to his or her camera during shoots — have now often replaced a big heavy notebook with 4 hour battery that begs them to be at a desk with a lightweight iPad that runs the same exact app for 10 hours on a charge
If you are a computer expert of some kind, you think in terms of a PC workflow. You try an iPad and you try to impose that same PC workflow on it. That is not what most users do. Most users are actually frustrated by the traditional PC most of the time. Most cannot grasp the file system hierarchy. Most try an iPad and they can do more with it, not less.
And keep in mind, it is not just 1 iOS device replacing 1 PC. I write music and lyrics, and I use an iPad for the lyrics and an iPhone for the music (with Apogee hardware) and I work for many hours without switching apps at all, it is a very focused and enjoyable and productive workflow that replaced a Mac that I had only for writing. Later, when the writing is done, the music and lyrics go to a Mac for editing, production, and publishing like they always did (the documents open right up in the Mac-based tools,) but I only have one Mac now, not two. I'm not letting go of the production Mac with tools like Logic that I have complete mastery of, but I recognize I'm in the minority of users. Most people, even if they have used traditional PC's extensively, have not mastered a single app, let alone mastered the Mac or Windows. The first time they feel the kind of mastery of a computer that you might have felt with some server software or the command line is when they get an iPad or iPhone.
Hamburgers also outsell iOS devices. What is your point?
We are talking here about the dominant PC class product — the Windows PC — being matched in installed base by the newest PC class product: the iOS device. We're talking about Apple and Microsoft PC products being on parity in installed base for the first time in decades. We're talking about OS X shipping in 2001 against a Windows installed base that looked insurmountable, and yet less than 15 years later, OS X -based systems are about to pass Windows in installed base.
Yes, that is news. Apple beats Microsoft in installed base is “man bites dog.” The licensing of DOS/Windows to generic hardware makers was the “deal of the 20th century” and Apple was ridiculed for years for not making it because it was thought that they would never reach parity with Windows by making all their own hardware.
Android has been extremely successful at doing what it was supposed to do: replace other phone systems on generic phones. Same as hamburgers are very popular. But Android is off-topic here because it is not PC class by any definition. PC apps are native C/C++, not Java. PC's have apps with full-size views. PC's have centralized system updates that patch bugs regularly. I know there is this thing where Android wants to pretend it is iOS, but it is not.
Yes, OS X and iOS are essentially the same system:
OS X (aka Mac OS) is a mouse-based user/app interface on top of the xnu kernel and OS X subsystems and libraries
iOS is a touch-based user/app interface on top of the xnu kernel and OS X subsystems and libraries
this is a key benefit of Apple's mobile strategy. Instead of using a baby system like iPod OS on iPhone, they put their PC class system onto iPhone. That has enabled, for example, apps like GarageBand (which depends on CoreAudio and CoreMIDI subsystems of OS X for a lot of its functionality) to be quickly ported from mouse/Intel Mac OS to touch/ARM iOS. That's why so many Mac apps arrived on iOS so quickly and with so much power.
If someone were trying to say that iOS and OS X are different systems, they would be denying what is probably the greatest strategic move by a technology company in the 21st century.
The best analogy to understand what Apple did is to imagine that when you booted up Windows 8 on a notebook, it only showed the desktop interface and the desktop Win32 apps and purposefully hid the Metro interface and apps, and when you booted up a Windows 8 tablet, it did the opposite, showing Metro and hiding the desktop. Underneath, it is still Windows 8.
> Android devices still outnumber Apple in the phone/tablet world
iOS devices are replacing PC's, not phones. That is what you missed in this article, which is not about the phone market, but is actually about the PC market. Apple, BTW, is the oldest PC vendor. The phone features of an iOS device are essentially free, like the Web browser. Nobody pays for that. They are buying App Store and PC class native C/C++ apps — PC replacement features. These features are now available on devices that are not traditional PC's — that is the “post PC” thing.
Android is an operating system, not a device. Android is replacing other phone operating systems. Android runs Java apps and viruses, like other phones. Android devices replace other phones. They are better phones in many cases, but still just phones.
If you think about it for a second, if an iOS device is the same as an Android phone, then why would anyone buy an iOS device to make calls and send texts and visit websites if they can get a cheaper Android phone to do that? That is why you think Apple users were brainwashed into a cult. You're refusing to admit that the reason people buy iOS devices is their very real and practical need to run PC class apps, and their very reasonable preference to do so on a 600 gram, 10 hour battery iPad instead of a 3 kilo, 4 hour battery PC notebook.
From my own experience, my iOS devices spend most of their time running apps that were Mac-only until they came out on iOS. Literally 95% of the time, my iOS devices are replacing a Mac. That is why I only buy one Mac at a time these days, when I used to buy 2 at a time before iOS.
> Most meaningless statistic ever
Lumping 2 very different things like iOS devices and Android operating system software together is what is meaningless.
Noticing that people who would have bought a Mac or Windows PC in 2007 are now buying an iOS device to do that same work, and even to run the same exact native C/C++ apps, is actually quite meaningful. It explains why iOS devices are selling so well and why Mac sales growth has slowed and why Windows sales have really slowed. When people need powerful native C/C++ apps, they now have a choice of Mac, iOS, or Windows, not just Mac and Windows.
No, that is wrong. You are forgetting that most users use only 10% or less of the features of the Mac/Windows apps they use. You're forgetting that most users have been asking for *fewer* features for a long, long time, and have been terribly frustrated by the training time that is required just to do something like write a short document or make small edits to a photograph.
It is iOS that leads in the PC class software that users want, not Windows. The PC class software advantage is all iOS. And Android has nothing to do with it, because it has no PC class apps. You're mistakenly lumping iOS with Android when iOS goes with Windows and Mac OS. Android devices attempt to look like iOS devices, but they are just phones, running the same old voice calls, SMS texts, Java apps, and viruses as previous phone systems. iOS devices are PC's.
Also, you're underestimating the value of App Store on iOS. Windows software is much harder to install, and comes on CD/DVD or in untrusted Web downloads that most users don't know how to use. And App Store makes apps much cheaper. Apps that are $50 on Windows are $1.99 on iOS, and the iOS versions are equal or better. And any user can install an iOS app that they want/need as easy as buying music for an iPod. Windows software requires some I-T skills.
> Photoshop
I happen to be a Photoshop expert, and I can tell you, there are almost no consumers who use anything more than 1% of the features of Photoshop. In the past, they would run a cracked Photoshop because they didn't want to pay $599 for Photoshop because, again, they only want 1% of its features — they want to pay $5.99. Then they would struggle to workaround a forest of unwanted features as they used the one or 2 trees that were of interest to them. The consumer is much, much better off spending $5.99 on a handful of photo editing apps on iOS, and they get a focused, more-productive editing setup and much better security (no viruses, no malware-infested cracked software.)
The fact that iOS devices also have very high-quality photo/video cameras only makes the switch from Photoshop to iOS apps that much more natural and productive. Instead of importing a photo or video from a camera and struggling with formats and the file system, they shoot a photo or video with an iOS device and it appears like magic in an editing interface.
> MS Office
MS Office has been running on the Mac since 1985, yet over the past 3–5 years, Pages/Keynote/Numbers have become the dominant office software on the Mac because it is the version of MS Office that users (not CIO's) have been demanding for many years: focused on the 10% of features that users actually *use*, easier to use, faster to use, cheaper to buy, runs on smaller devices with 10 hour batteries, and makes better quality work output.
> but these are just toys,
Android apps may be toys, but the native C/C++ apps on iOS are not toys. The versions of Pages/Keynote/Numbers on iOS have the same features as the Mac versions, yet are much more mobile, so you can work anywhere that inspiration strikes. I used to have a second Mac that ran Pages most of the time, and it has been replaced with an iPad that runs Pages most of the time.
Further, GarageBand (songwriting tool) on iOS is actually better than GarageBand on Mac or similar Windows apps because it uses the touch interface to morph into hundreds of playable instruments as you write. It replaces not only a Mac, but the hundreds of MIDI instruments you'd have to plug into a Mac to be able to arbitrarily record any of them as you work. And the GarageBand documents open in Logic on the Mac for additional editing and mixing. Not a toy.
iMovie on iOS is better than any consumer video editing software on Windows. iOS also has a version of Avid that is better than any consumer video editing software on Windows. Even pro video editing people use iMovie or Avid on iOS as a scratch pad.
Why is iOS hosting these powerful apps and Android is not? iOS has the multimedia
He meant that most Windows devices were bought in lots of 10,000, chosen by CIO's (impersonal) and most iOS devices were bought 1-by-1, chosen by the user (personal) of the device. And even when a user bought a single Windows PC for their home, they were often buying it because that's what the CIO had chosen at work or at school. With iOS devices, it is the reverse: CIO's are buying iOS devices for workers because the workers bought them for themselves at home.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't matter what codec a publisher likes. This is not an area where you get to express yourself. You publish in MP4 because it is the only universal video codec. Anything else might as well be encrypted and the user has no key. They are not going to see any video.
They are talking about credit card PIN's, not debit card PIN's. All the debit cards in the US have PIN's.
Yes. It is illegal to do this on BART. The ticket you use to enter the station is the same one you use as you exit the station.
The idea that trading tickets is some kind of “hacking” is absurd. It's basic fraud.
BART is a public transit system run by the people of the SF Bay Area. So even worse, you're defrauding your fellow citizens. You're not defrauding a Wall Street corporation or getting back at the man or something.
There have never been quality user discussions on Slashdot. Not ever.
You got what you paid for: a disposable laptop. The way it works is you just buy another now. Or you get tired of it and get some Apple gear because that is the only manufacturer who hasn't switched to disposable laptops.
Same reason.
No, everybody should not learn to code. Instead, all coders should learn to dance. That will be more productive. Also, it will teach the coders to STFU about everybody else learning to code.
This is sad nerd semantics, even for Slashdot. A rational human can tell by the context that Phil Schiller was talking about “personal computers” when he said “computers.” Today, Ford makes “computers” but Ford has never made PC's. Same with HP in 1984.
Further, what was HP in 1984 was sold off around 2000 or so. Trying to say there is continuity between the 1984 HP and today's HP is a real stretch. It's like today's AT&T — same name, totally different company.
And the stupidest part of this is that Steve Wozniak used to work for HP, and offered the Apple II to HP and was turned down. HP took a pass on PC's and that didn't change until the 1990's when HP was just another Mac cloner.
We are much closer to transferring a human consciousness into a robot and sending that robot to Mars than we are to sending a human to Mars. The entire population of Mars is robots, and that will probably always be true. Each one that shows up is slightly more evolved than the last and that may go on for a long time.
When you combine the infinite opportunity of space with how badly we are treating our environment on Earth, there is a lot of evolutionary pressure for us to become robots. Notice the 21st century human doesn't travel in space like we thought they would many years ago, but instead we have a partial robot brain (we always have a certain number of gigaflops and gigabytes with them,) with partial robot senses (4G, Wi-Fi, GPS, etc.) We're closer right now to being robots than being spacemen.
You don't even have to look to space — just look at the dream of flying cars versus the reality of flying robots (aka drones.) Even just flying around in our own atmosphere is so foreign to us that robots are ahead at that, too.
Get a Mac. Or get dedicated hardware, like a mixer with an SD slot and basic recording. The Mac is the one and only general purpose system that is built for what you want to do. Not just at the application software level or user interface level, but in the OS subsystems and developer API's and hardware. Basically, I'm telling you to buy a computer with CoreAudio and CoreMIDI in it — you can't bolt those onto another system. A Mac comes out of the box doing what you want to do, and you can then optionally replace GarageBand with Logic (or Pro Tools or Performer or Ableton Live) and optionally replace the built-in (24/96) hardware with accessory hardware via USB, FireWire, or Thunderbolt. Even where you plan to run something like Ableton Live which is on both Mac and Windows, you will have a dramatically better experience on the Mac because you can do things like run AudioUnits plug-ins instead of VST to improve stability, and you can combine multiple audio interfaces into one, and you get reliable hardware connections through CoreAudio out-of-the-box.
Also, consider getting an iPad mini as a remote control. It runs MIDI mixer controls, pianos, drums, guitars — most of which can output MIDI over Wi-Fi to your Mac. Logic X has its own iPad app that runs it from the iPad and adds transport controls and mixer faders and so on and just works. The iPad will cost you $299, yet it will replace thousands of dollars of MIDI gear. And when you only have the iPad by itself, it becomes a complete pocket studio if you add an Apogee MiC or Jam. A7-based iPads can do 32 stereo tracks in GarageBand (earlier iPads do 8 stereo tracks.)
A big thing is that the Mac is where the user community is that is also doing what you want to do. So when you struggle with something, there will be someone who can help you dig out of that hole. But the struggles you have on the Mac will be creative, they will be musical, and there will be creative musicians who are fellow users and can help you out. The struggles on other platforms for musicians are often technical — you struggle just to get a timing or stability issue worked out and get the basic functionality that every single Mac user already has when the system comes out of the box. It is one of the most embarrassing things in computing — the lack of music and audio infrastructure in any operating systems other than Apple's. I wish it were not so — I would love to be able to tell you that any computer is good for music. But only Apple has ever made music and audio a priority on their systems. Only Apple built the infrastructure. Only Apple systems come out of the box as functioning music studios that you can then customize while maintaining that existing functionality.
Keep in mind that recording audio is a really high-stress computing task. You have to plug-in to audio interfaces with 96000 frames per second timing, you have to plug-in to 20 year old MIDI instruments, you have to run the CPU's under heavy load for hours and hours and hours without every crashing. There cannot be any crashes or you lose takes. No crashes at all can be tolerated. In many years in music, I've only ever seen Macs, iPads, iPhones do that amongst general purpose computers. To get that reliability otherwise, you need dedicated hardware.
I've worked at a few studio complexes where almost everybody is on Macs and a few guys for whatever reason are on PC's. It is embarrassing for Microsoft and PC hardware makers to see the difference side-by-side. You see a band of hardcore stoners who don't have a high school diploma between them and have barely ever touched a computer go into a room and successfully record their own original album with a $500 Mac mini, and next door to them is a guy who has a college degree who is paying another guy with a college degree $500 to get his $3000 Windows PC setup to stop crashing during recordings. Again and again, over and over, I've seen this. Don't be that guy. Don't bring a typewriter into a music studio and try to hook it up to a piano
You can put money into schools in Detroit and create Detroit-native high tech workers. That is actually the responsibility of the Detroit-area governments. No innovation is necessary.
> The strongest conceptually similarity between PCs and phones is that they both contain microprocessors
That is true only if you are talking about generic PC's and generic phones, not iOS devices, which are PC's, with PC heritage, from the oldest PC company, that run PC apps (native C/C++.)
The strongest conceptual similarity between PC's and iOS devices is that they both contain OS X — the xnu kernel, OS X subsystems and libraries — and they both run Cocoa apps, which are native C/C++, the standard for PC apps. iOS runs many of the exact same apps from the Mac, like Pages and GarageBand and iMovie, as well as PC apps from Windows, Unix, Xbox, PlayStation, and even DOS PC's. That is much more similarity than “has a microprocessor.”
I have an iPad here that runs Pages most of the time, and it replaced a Mac that ran Pages most of the time. The microprocessor in the iPad is ARM and in the Mac it was Intel and I never cared at all about that. The first time I ran Pages, it was on a Mac with PowerPC microprocessor. So the microprocessors are not nearly as similar between my Mac PC's and iOS PC's as are the apps and operating system, which are the same.
> Apple's OS X and iOS are considered to be separate products
No. OS X and iOS are not products. MacBooks and iMacs and iPads and iPhones are products. OS X and iOS are components that are used in various products. MacBook and iMac both use OS X, while iPad and iPhone both use iOS.
OS X is Apple's operating system with a mouse-based user/app interface. iOS is Apple's operating system with touch-based user/app interface. Underneath the user/app interface, they are the same operating system, with the same kernel, libraries, and subsystems.
If you're saying that an iMac running Pages on OS X is a PC and an iPad running (the exact same) Pages on iOS is not, I think that is crazy talk.
Are you saying that Apple is closed and that Apple and Microsoft are both the same? Because neither of those ring true to me.
You *might* be able to argue that Google is open, Apple is less open, and Microsoft is closed. That has at least the ring of truth. However, a lot of Google's open source comes with strings that make it unusable by anybody but Google partners. Apple's open source stuff like LLVM and Clang and WebKit are truly open and we know that because they have all been used by Apple competitors, not just partners. Android includes Apple WebKit. I'm unaware of any Google open source that is inside iOS. Google also uses LLVM and Clang. Not to mention the entire interface paradigm of Android is from Apple.
I think you are just thinking “open good — closed bad” and then assigning open to your favorite platform and closed to the ones you don't like. Maybe you are not doing that. In that case, cite some examples of open source projects from all 3 companies and how they are relatively open and closed.
Apple is the “just works” company.
My experience has been that I have plugged hundreds of hardware accessories into my Mac, iPad, and iPhone and they all just worked. This includes electronic drum kits, which plug into a Mac or iOS device very easily and just work. MIDI-over-Wi-Fi between iOS devices and Mac devices just works.
My experience has been that I have run hundreds of apps on my Mac and they just worked, and hundreds of apps on my iPad and iPhone and they just worked. I can't remember ever attempting to run a Mac or iOS app and they didn't run.
Also I have run Perl and Python and PHP scripts on my Mac and they just worked. I have run Apache websites on the Web Sharing feature of my Mac and they just worked. And I've shared files with other Macs, Windows PC's, Unix systems over the network and they just worked. FTP sites — whatever. All just worked.
I have definitely opened a broad range of professional audio and video file formats on my Mac and they just worked. Even right-out-of-the-box with no additional software installed.
Rendezvous — zero configuration networking — just worked. AirPlay just works. AirPrint just works.
The Google ecosystem just works. The Yahoo ecosystem. Netflix, Xfinity, MLB, Qello — they all just work.
What am I missing out on? I don't know that I have time to use any more stuff.
Oh, right — VIRUSES. I can't run any viruses. I need to be “open” to run all the viruses.
None of this should be a surprise:
* Apple is the PC and iPod manufacturer, and so their phones and tablets are tablet PC's with iPod features and iPod phones with tablet PC features
* Samsung is a phone and TV manufacturer, and so their phones are phones with TV (media player) features and their tablets are TV's with phone features (Java apps)
duh.
Or are you saying I can do the exact same things with a stone tablet that I can do with an iPad? How about with an Advil tablet? Same features as an iPad?
> > My iPhone can do everything I can do on my workstation.
> No it can't. It can't even run CUPS
CUPS is there inside the core operating system of every iOS device since before iOS 5. Apple is the maintainer of CUPS.
Maybe his workstation can't run AirPrint, but his iOS device can run CUPS.
Maybe you are looking for a serial cable connection from an iOS device to a printer? That makes as much sense as an electric car with no battery that you plug into a very long AC cable. That is why iOS devices have AirPrint wireless printing. Which is based on CUPS and can be made to work with any CUPS printer if you like.
> Any apps it does have are scaled back "starter" versions compared to what's available for a real PC.
That is not true. The apps are not scaled back, and they are not starter versions. And many iOS apps have features that you can't get on any Mac or Windows software.
Pages/Keynote/Numbers have the same features whether running on the Mac, Web, iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch.
GarageBand for iOS has features that don't exist on any Mac or Windows music composition software. It's the best PC songwriting software, period.
iMovie is great on the Mac, but it really shines on iPad, which has a built-in movie camera, complete with the large viewfinder screen that is found on real movie cameras. So you see a real TV view of what you are shooting, then when you edit you can drag clips around with your finger, and before you know it, you are uploading to YouTube over 4G from the very location you were shooting. BETTER.
Photoshop on Mac/Windows may seem to be much bigger than any iOS app, but keep in mind that Photoshop for Mac/Windows is actually dozens if not hundreds of individual apps combined into one giant interface. Any particular user only uses some subset of that large suite of apps. The equivalent on iOS would be to run about 10 iOS apps, and that is what Photoshop experts do when they use an iPad. They choose the 10 iOS apps that match up to the parts of Photoshop for Mac/Windows that they actually use.
The size of apps is a ridiculous metric, anyway. I could just as easily say that Unix is not a real PC operating system because the typical iOS app is much bigger than diff or echo. You do realize that App Store (the iOS app) is much bigger than apt-get (the Unix app,) right? So what you are saying doesn't make any sense. Even if you were factually correct about anything, which you are not.
You also forgot to mention that Advil tablets outsell both Apple tablets and Samsung tablets. I bought 200 Advil tablets yesterday, and I only have one Apple tablet.
Yes, I know an Advil tablet is a pain reliever and has nothing to do with an Apple tablet which is a PC (aka “tablet PC,” it runs native C/C++ PC apps from the Mac and other PC class systems on a PC class OS) or a Samsung tablet which is a TV (aka “media player,” it plays video and has Java phone apps,) but if you want to lump all tablets together and pretend they are all one big market, I don't know why you would leave out the Advils.
Also there are stone tablets. Adding them in may also enable you to imply that iPad sales are dropping when they are not.
iPad has about 99% of tablet PC sales. All the other tablet PC's run Windows. Apple pretty much doubles their iPad sales every year, and then doubles them again the following year. Everybody should have such problems.
> Apple, allow me to use 3rd party app stores, give me a decent built in file manager, give me something like AirDroid(and not iTunes),
> allow script languages, and let me customize the "desktop"(widgets, no Win95 like icon grid), and I will become a full fledged
> Apple fanboy and shower you with money
Apple already has that product — it's called a Mac.
You can run apps from any developer on the Mac, or make your own. The Mac may have the only decent file manager, and there are 3rd party alternatives if you like. The Mac has the most music and audio support of any system, you can playback audio in any one of thousands of apps. The Mac has Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, and other scripting languages built-in. There is even a GUI app scripting language called AppleScript with which you can automate Mac GUI apps like Photoshop and BBEdit to work together as one app that runs like a player piano while you are at lunch or sleeping. The word “widget” (in the context you are using) comes from the Mac. By default, the widgets are confined to their own desktop space (called Dashboard) but if you like you can override that (with developer mode) and run them on any desktop space you like.
iOS is for the times when you don't want the power/complexity of a Mac. For some users, that means having an iOS device and no Mac (or Windows PC.) For you, it likely means having a Mac and also having iOS devices that act as accessories. For example, on my desk right now is a MacBook Pro that is running Web development tools and just to the right of the screen is an iPad on a vertical stand that is running a Web browser, showing me the consumer view of what I'm working on with the Mac.
This shouldn't be hard to grasp because it's the same thing as with the iPod. When you are walking around and want to listen to music, you don't want to use a Mac, because an iPod is better for that in every way. When you are sitting on the couch surfing the Web or watching Netflix, you don't want to use a Mac, because an iPad is better for that in every way. However, if you want to do some coding, you put down the iPad and the iPod and you open up a Mac. It's pretty straightforward.
At least his or her bank account won't be cleaned out by Windows malware as they use Facebook.
Android devices != PC's. Java apps are not PC apps.
iOS devices == PC's. They run the same apps from the Mac, but with a touch interface, on top of the same operating system core from the Mac. If you say an iOS device is not a PC, you are saying a Mac is not a PC, and therefore Windows — a Mac/NeXT clone — is not a PC. To some extent, Windows 8 is also an iOS clone — is a Windows 8 PC not a PC?
You are thinking too literally and too office-centric and traditional PC -centric.
Yes, sometimes a general office worker gets an iPad and drops the Windows PC on the same day. Especially if they are very mobile or had very few traditional PC skills. But all the iOS device has to do is replace the user's main PC app and the user is mostly done with the traditional PC. For example, a writer who moves his word processor from a Mac to an iPad is now an iPad user who also has a Mac. The iPad is his main computer now, and the Mac is secondary.
But there are all kinds of other scenarios:
* a limo driver who used to keep trip notes on a paper clipboard, and at the end of the day go into an office full of Windows PC's and do data entry replaces the paper clipboard with an iPad and drops the office and the Windows PC immediately — other examples of this kind of workflow are car and real estate sales people, who can have an iPad with them at the actual point of sale (with the client at a new car or house) and don't need to go back to a desk
* people who used to use a desktop PC and a notebook PC have now often replaced the desktop PC with the notebook, and replaced the notebook with an iPad
* people who had one notebook PC they used 100% of the time and replaced every year are now using the notebook PC 25%–50% of the time and an iPad for the rest and replacing the notebook PC every 2–3 years, or ultimately replacing the notebook with a second or even third iPad
* users who have computers that run just one specific app all day — a salesperson who spends all day in Salesforce, a photographer who runs a photo viewer tethered to his or her camera during shoots — have now often replaced a big heavy notebook with 4 hour battery that begs them to be at a desk with a lightweight iPad that runs the same exact app for 10 hours on a charge
If you are a computer expert of some kind, you think in terms of a PC workflow. You try an iPad and you try to impose that same PC workflow on it. That is not what most users do. Most users are actually frustrated by the traditional PC most of the time. Most cannot grasp the file system hierarchy. Most try an iPad and they can do more with it, not less.
And keep in mind, it is not just 1 iOS device replacing 1 PC. I write music and lyrics, and I use an iPad for the lyrics and an iPhone for the music (with Apogee hardware) and I work for many hours without switching apps at all, it is a very focused and enjoyable and productive workflow that replaced a Mac that I had only for writing. Later, when the writing is done, the music and lyrics go to a Mac for editing, production, and publishing like they always did (the documents open right up in the Mac-based tools,) but I only have one Mac now, not two. I'm not letting go of the production Mac with tools like Logic that I have complete mastery of, but I recognize I'm in the minority of users. Most people, even if they have used traditional PC's extensively, have not mastered a single app, let alone mastered the Mac or Windows. The first time they feel the kind of mastery of a computer that you might have felt with some server software or the command line is when they get an iPad or iPhone.
Hamburgers also outsell iOS devices. What is your point?
We are talking here about the dominant PC class product — the Windows PC — being matched in installed base by the newest PC class product: the iOS device. We're talking about Apple and Microsoft PC products being on parity in installed base for the first time in decades. We're talking about OS X shipping in 2001 against a Windows installed base that looked insurmountable, and yet less than 15 years later, OS X -based systems are about to pass Windows in installed base.
Yes, that is news. Apple beats Microsoft in installed base is “man bites dog.” The licensing of DOS/Windows to generic hardware makers was the “deal of the 20th century” and Apple was ridiculed for years for not making it because it was thought that they would never reach parity with Windows by making all their own hardware.
Android has been extremely successful at doing what it was supposed to do: replace other phone systems on generic phones. Same as hamburgers are very popular. But Android is off-topic here because it is not PC class by any definition. PC apps are native C/C++, not Java. PC's have apps with full-size views. PC's have centralized system updates that patch bugs regularly. I know there is this thing where Android wants to pretend it is iOS, but it is not.
Yes, OS X and iOS are essentially the same system:
OS X (aka Mac OS) is a mouse-based user/app interface on top of the xnu kernel and OS X subsystems and libraries
iOS is a touch-based user/app interface on top of the xnu kernel and OS X subsystems and libraries
this is a key benefit of Apple's mobile strategy. Instead of using a baby system like iPod OS on iPhone, they put their PC class system onto iPhone. That has enabled, for example, apps like GarageBand (which depends on CoreAudio and CoreMIDI subsystems of OS X for a lot of its functionality) to be quickly ported from mouse/Intel Mac OS to touch/ARM iOS. That's why so many Mac apps arrived on iOS so quickly and with so much power.
If someone were trying to say that iOS and OS X are different systems, they would be denying what is probably the greatest strategic move by a technology company in the 21st century.
The best analogy to understand what Apple did is to imagine that when you booted up Windows 8 on a notebook, it only showed the desktop interface and the desktop Win32 apps and purposefully hid the Metro interface and apps, and when you booted up a Windows 8 tablet, it did the opposite, showing Metro and hiding the desktop. Underneath, it is still Windows 8.
> Android devices still outnumber Apple in the phone/tablet world
iOS devices are replacing PC's, not phones. That is what you missed in this article, which is not about the phone market, but is actually about the PC market. Apple, BTW, is the oldest PC vendor. The phone features of an iOS device are essentially free, like the Web browser. Nobody pays for that. They are buying App Store and PC class native C/C++ apps — PC replacement features. These features are now available on devices that are not traditional PC's — that is the “post PC” thing.
Android is an operating system, not a device. Android is replacing other phone operating systems. Android runs Java apps and viruses, like other phones. Android devices replace other phones. They are better phones in many cases, but still just phones.
If you think about it for a second, if an iOS device is the same as an Android phone, then why would anyone buy an iOS device to make calls and send texts and visit websites if they can get a cheaper Android phone to do that? That is why you think Apple users were brainwashed into a cult. You're refusing to admit that the reason people buy iOS devices is their very real and practical need to run PC class apps, and their very reasonable preference to do so on a 600 gram, 10 hour battery iPad instead of a 3 kilo, 4 hour battery PC notebook.
From my own experience, my iOS devices spend most of their time running apps that were Mac-only until they came out on iOS. Literally 95% of the time, my iOS devices are replacing a Mac. That is why I only buy one Mac at a time these days, when I used to buy 2 at a time before iOS.
> Most meaningless statistic ever
Lumping 2 very different things like iOS devices and Android operating system software together is what is meaningless.
Noticing that people who would have bought a Mac or Windows PC in 2007 are now buying an iOS device to do that same work, and even to run the same exact native C/C++ apps, is actually quite meaningful. It explains why iOS devices are selling so well and why Mac sales growth has slowed and why Windows sales have really slowed. When people need powerful native C/C++ apps, they now have a choice of Mac, iOS, or Windows, not just Mac and Windows.
No, that is wrong. You are forgetting that most users use only 10% or less of the features of the Mac/Windows apps they use. You're forgetting that most users have been asking for *fewer* features for a long, long time, and have been terribly frustrated by the training time that is required just to do something like write a short document or make small edits to a photograph.
It is iOS that leads in the PC class software that users want, not Windows. The PC class software advantage is all iOS. And Android has nothing to do with it, because it has no PC class apps. You're mistakenly lumping iOS with Android when iOS goes with Windows and Mac OS. Android devices attempt to look like iOS devices, but they are just phones, running the same old voice calls, SMS texts, Java apps, and viruses as previous phone systems. iOS devices are PC's.
Also, you're underestimating the value of App Store on iOS. Windows software is much harder to install, and comes on CD/DVD or in untrusted Web downloads that most users don't know how to use. And App Store makes apps much cheaper. Apps that are $50 on Windows are $1.99 on iOS, and the iOS versions are equal or better. And any user can install an iOS app that they want/need as easy as buying music for an iPod. Windows software requires some I-T skills.
> Photoshop
I happen to be a Photoshop expert, and I can tell you, there are almost no consumers who use anything more than 1% of the features of Photoshop. In the past, they would run a cracked Photoshop because they didn't want to pay $599 for Photoshop because, again, they only want 1% of its features — they want to pay $5.99. Then they would struggle to workaround a forest of unwanted features as they used the one or 2 trees that were of interest to them. The consumer is much, much better off spending $5.99 on a handful of photo editing apps on iOS, and they get a focused, more-productive editing setup and much better security (no viruses, no malware-infested cracked software.)
The fact that iOS devices also have very high-quality photo/video cameras only makes the switch from Photoshop to iOS apps that much more natural and productive. Instead of importing a photo or video from a camera and struggling with formats and the file system, they shoot a photo or video with an iOS device and it appears like magic in an editing interface.
> MS Office
MS Office has been running on the Mac since 1985, yet over the past 3–5 years, Pages/Keynote/Numbers have become the dominant office software on the Mac because it is the version of MS Office that users (not CIO's) have been demanding for many years: focused on the 10% of features that users actually *use*, easier to use, faster to use, cheaper to buy, runs on smaller devices with 10 hour batteries, and makes better quality work output.
> but these are just toys,
Android apps may be toys, but the native C/C++ apps on iOS are not toys. The versions of Pages/Keynote/Numbers on iOS have the same features as the Mac versions, yet are much more mobile, so you can work anywhere that inspiration strikes. I used to have a second Mac that ran Pages most of the time, and it has been replaced with an iPad that runs Pages most of the time.
Further, GarageBand (songwriting tool) on iOS is actually better than GarageBand on Mac or similar Windows apps because it uses the touch interface to morph into hundreds of playable instruments as you write. It replaces not only a Mac, but the hundreds of MIDI instruments you'd have to plug into a Mac to be able to arbitrarily record any of them as you work. And the GarageBand documents open in Logic on the Mac for additional editing and mixing. Not a toy.
iMovie on iOS is better than any consumer video editing software on Windows. iOS also has a version of Avid that is better than any consumer video editing software on Windows. Even pro video editing people use iMovie or Avid on iOS as a scratch pad.
Why is iOS hosting these powerful apps and Android is not? iOS has the multimedia
He meant that most Windows devices were bought in lots of 10,000, chosen by CIO's (impersonal) and most iOS devices were bought 1-by-1, chosen by the user (personal) of the device. And even when a user bought a single Windows PC for their home, they were often buying it because that's what the CIO had chosen at work or at school. With iOS devices, it is the reverse: CIO's are buying iOS devices for workers because the workers bought them for themselves at home.