> Except it was Apple who changed Itunes to lock out the Palm Pre, > so for your analogy to work, I'd say it's still Apple that the issue is with, not Palm.
This is off-topic, but you have it backwards. The Pre identified itself over USB as vendor "Palm" and model "iPod" and iTunes saw "iPod" and assumed "Apple iPod". That assumption is a legitimate software bug. Why assume "Apple" when the vendor ID is right there in the same USB data you are reading. Because everybody at Apple assumed all iPods are Apple iPods. iTunes 8.1.1 saw "iPod" and treated it as an Apple iPod, but iTunes 8.1.2 saw "Palm iPod" and did not treat the Pre as an iPod. Bug fixed. The newer iTunes now identifies the Palm Pre correctly, the previous iTunes did not. Get a CS guy to explain this to you if you don't understand. If earlier iTunes misidentifies Pre and later iTunes correctly identifies Pre, then that is a bug fixed. The fact that this does not fit in with Palm's desires is completely irrelevant.
There is no legitimate defense for Palm on this issue. You can't build devices that go around identifying themselves as other devices because that can only end in screwing over the user through an unexpected and spectacular disaster. If Apple were really going after the Pre, all they have to do is write firmware onto it as if it really were an iPod and they would probably brick all the Pre's that were attached to iTunes. What is the user going to do? Sue Apple? Should Apple take a PR hit for for applying iPod firmware to something that says it is an iPod? Should Apple have to rewrite iTunes with a bunch of Pre-detection routines so they can prevent themselves from writing firmware to it and bricking it? The thing says it's an iPod. Writing iPod/iPhone firmware is a major feature of iTunes.
The way 3rd party device sync with iTunes is clear, and Nokia and Blackberry already do this. You build simple Mac or PC software that reads the iTunes library off disk (it is stored as XML and ISO MPEG-4, both completely open, standardized, and well-documented formats) and the Nokia Mac/PC software then talks to the Nokia device, or the Blackberry Mac/PC software then talks to the Blackberry device. A key feature is that the desktop software knows what the device can support, so everything that gets copied over will work. Apple doesn't know what the Pre can play and doesn't want to know. This system is a much better system than Apple acting as a kind of caretaker of all media syncing for all devices in perpetuity. It's better than iTunes plug-ins because iTunes can be updated regularly and it doesn't affect your Blackberry media sync. The library belongs to the user, but iTunes belongs to the iPod/iPhone. Why hasn't Palm been building its own desktop software for all these years? Why are Palm alone so surprised by what time it is?
Keep in mind also that if you are tiny Palm, who has sold something like 400,000 Pre's in the US total, anything you can do to put the word "Palm" in the same sentence or headline as the word "iPhone", which is selling over 1,000,000 per week, is considered good PR. But even on that point, there are a lot of PR people scratching their heads over what Palm is doing here. Even if Apple were to announce that they were going to co-operate with Palm in every conceivable way, do whatever Palm wishes, the basic problem is still that Pre impersonates other devices. That can only lead to unexpected problems. The better way for Palm to serve their customers would be to follow RIM and Nokia's example. It is just bad practices to do otherwise.
Palm complaining to the USB forum is also important, because it shows that they are completely disingenuous. Of all the USB devices ever made, only 1 deliberately misidentifies itself: Palm Pre. If I made any kind of USB device, I would build in a feature to ignore every device from Palm because they can't be trusted. I wouldn't want my users to have something fail on them because a Palm device is pretending to be something more popular. And who are Palm anyway? Over t
> I'm pretty sure Apple didn't put much effort into making sure all the hardware drivers > worked anywhere near as well under Windows as they do in OSX.
It's XP that is not battery friendly. It's Windows that is not. Apple spent the past 10 years making OS X very, very battery friendly, and Microsoft spent the last 10 years selling people XP again and again. On the same hardware, you should EXPECT Windows to get much less battery life. Just running one extra daemon can kill your battery life. The whole operating system has to be battery-oriented in the same way that the Intel Core CPU is battery-oriented, it's natural state is totally asleep, and it wakes up only the transistors that are needed. When Windows XP shipped, we were in another era of Pentium4 and white boxes under your desk.
Microsoft has such a scam going. When you can't even talk about Windows being run on a Mac via BootCamp without all kinds of spurious blame being laid on Apple, I can see clearly why the number of generic PC vendors keeps going down and down and down. They are just whipping boys for Microsoft's complete lack of software quality.
> Apples used to be distinctive when they used 68000 or PowerPC
> but now that they use Intel CPUs
> they are really no different from a Dell or Gateway machine except that they > have an Apple logo attached. The hardware is so identical that now Apple > machines can run Intel Windows, or vice-versa Intel PCs run Apple OS X.
Outrageous bullshit. I saw Windows NT 3.1 running on a Mac in 1996, and it told me exactly nothing about how alike the Mac of 1996 was to the PC of 1996. Please attempt to install Windows on a Mac without using Apple BootCamp and get back to me about how well it doesn't go. I mean, think about it: why does BootCamp even exist? Where is HP's BootCamp if these systems are so alike?
There are many, many differences between Mac and PC hardware. Here are some:
* The EFI firmware alone makes a Mac a radically different system from other PC's, which use BIOS. When you boot into Mac firmware, not only is it modern and easy to use, it's also graphical and your wireless keyboard and mouse continue to work because they're paired with the machine, not the OS. You have much better power management, security, and many other modern features that are not part of any other PC you can buy today, because all the others use almost 30 year-old BIOS.
* The batteries are all Apple-designed, built-in, and give you 8 hours where you would get 4 from a PC. The firmware manages the batteries and puts unused hardware to sleep in the same way the Core CPU essentially sleeps all the time except for the individual transistors that are needed. The whole system is energy saver friendly.
* The displays are always all-digital connections (not true on many PC's which is outrageous) and all-LED backlighting.
* The motherboards are always made by Apple, not Intel or 3rd party like other PC's. The MacBook Air mobo is smaller than an iPod.
* Always Gigabit Ethernet, never the slow one (except on MacBook Air which does not have Ethernet) and always Wi-Fi n, never the slow one, and always the fast Bluetooth, never the slow one.
* Always a built-in, high-quality webcam and microphone and speaker.
* If there's an optical, it is always DVD-RW/CD-RW, you can't go wrong.
> they use > generic > sound cards
* No they do not use generic sound cards. There is literally no concept of "sound card" on the Mac. Mac users have no idea why you're calling it a card. For 25 years the Mac has had audio built-in. For the past 5 years or so it has been high-end audio hardware. The audio in and audio out on every Mac (except MacBook Air) is completely different from other PC's: both audio in and out are combination analog/digital-optical jacks (other PC's it's just analog) so you can record and play audio no matter what external audio connections you encounter, and the bit depth of the audio hardware in Macs is the full 32-bits that is used in pro audio and other media creation, not the 16-bit that is on other PC's and consumer gear. And, there is no buzzing and other artifacts in internal Mac audio, the components are properly shielded to prevent that, which is certainly not true of many PC's I have encountered. And the power supplies in all Macs are what you could call "analog audio safe" which means they do not introduce DC Offset into your audio recordings, which is a famous problem with generic PC's that you have to remove from all of your recordings with audio software. Next time you see a Mac other than MacBook Air, look inside the audio in or audio out jack, you will see a light in there. That's the optical digital connection you won't find on any other PC.
* The external display out on a Mac is always DisplayPort, which is not available yet on any other PC (as far as I know) and which has the advantage of being both very tiny and also hot-pluggable like USB and FireWire, so you can take your notebook up to a desk and plug on a display without rebooting and without risking frying your DVI port. You can easily turn DisplayPort into VG
> Macbooks are essentially the same hardware as Windows machines, down to battery capacity.
That is so stupid it hurts my head. MacBooks have built-in, Apple-designed, 8 hour batteries while other PC's have removable batteries that are much smaller and I can say for sure they're not Apple-designed. MacBooks have EFI firmware, not BIOS as in all other PC's, which is particularly relevant when you're talking power management. MacBooks all have Intel Core 2 Duo 45nm, there are no other processors used at all, and they all have modern NVIDIA GPU's, no other GPU's at all. The motherboard in an Apple system is always, always, always designed and built by Apple, while in other PC's they are often Intel or 3rd party boards.
You want to keep telling yourself that a Mac is the same as a PC to make your PC purchase feel better. Stop it. This information is available on the Internet or you can ask an Apple Genius or any graphic designer. Sheesh.
> It is unlikely that a "bloated codebase" would chew through the battery like nobody's > business on one x86 machine and suddenly become perfectly benign on a practically > identical x86 machine.
That is ridiculous. Battery life is not just bigger, badder batteries, there are hundreds of thousands of variables. It's also things like when you're not using audio on a Mac, the entire audio hardware is put to sleep by the firmware. Same with practically every other sub-system. I know for a fact that some of these optimizations do not carry over when you run Windows on the same machine because Windows can't handle it due to its age and lack of EFI compatibility. But the point is that beneath the OS layer, the firmware on a Mac is doing things to make the battery life for that machine better. The idea that you can make any comparison to another machine is just crazy. How fast you can run down an HP battery with Windows means absolutely nothing to how fast you can run down an Apple battery with Windows. You can't tell a thing from the comparison. The machines are dramatically different in battery and firmware.
> Bloat doesn't magically appear when you put an Apple logo on something.
It's only bloat compared to Mac OS. The comparison here is between battery life in Mac OS and battery life in Windows on the exact same machine, with the same exact battery. Yes, Windows is bloated compared to Mac OS. The OS X kernel, which is called xnu, has been optimized for portability and battery life for the past 10 years. It's been instantly sleeping and waking with very, very high reliability for a decade on the Mac, and for 2-3 years on iPhone and iPod touch (it is the exact same xnu kernel on all 3 devices, and the exact same core OS X system, below the top layer all 3 devices have the same OS X on there.
Knowing that Apple has made thousands and thousands of energy-saving optimizations to all of their hardware and software for the past 10 years while Microsoft shipped XP, failed to ship 2004, shipped Vista but only to 20% of Windows users, and talked about Windows 7, it does not surprise me at all that you get better battery life on the same hardware when running OS X instead of Windows. Knowing that when Windows is running on the Mac it is running on EFI firmware, and everywhere else it is running on BIOS, it doesn't surprise me one bit that Windows 7 performs differently vis a vis battery life on a Mac than on other PC. These things are obvious. The surprising thing would be if the battery life were the same. That would be an incredible coincidence.
> My pet theory is that the prospects of an actual sane and well received OS > release from Microsoft with Win7
Windows 7 is neither sane, nor well-received. There was some pretty good hype for a while, but that bubble burst when it came out that there is no upgrade in-place from XP, which cannot be described as anything other than insane, when 80% of the Windows user base is running XP. Please identify for me even one feature of Windows 7 (6.1) that is so dramatically different from Vista (6.0) that it will cause adoption of Windows 7 to be different from Vista. People are buying XP machines right this minute, in spite of Vista being 2 years old and Windows 7 being on the horizon. There is no upgrade for those machines, they have to be wiped. You have to kill off your old system just to consider upgrading to Windows 7.
Microsoft even explained that "pent-up demand" will cause Windows 7 to be a hit and have huge adoption. That is the exact same thing they said about Vista. Pent-up demand, if it even exists at all for Windows, is what causes excitement on launch day. It does not sell all-new operating systems or cause people to bite off a day of I-T work to destroy an XP computer and hopefully come out the other end with a Windows 7 system that is better.
If XP Mode was seamless (it has many seams), and if it were in all Windows 7 (instead of just Ultimate), and if the Windows 7 installer could lift up your current XP and run it in XP Mode after the install is complete, then maybe you would have something here in Windows 7. If people could run the Windows 7 installer in XP and afterwards essentially have both XP and Windows 7, that would be a way forward for Windows. As it is, Windows 7 is just an upgrade for Vista. It will kill off Vista but not XP.
What Microsoft is doing is very much like what Apple tried in 1997. They announced that Mac OS would soon be retired, and that Mac OS X would take its place. But the Mac OS X they were talking about did not have classic Mac compatibility and the user base and developers took a fit. Had Apple released that Mac OS X, Mac OS 9 would have competed with it endlessly, the same way Vista competed with XP (and lost), and the same way Windows 7 will compete with XP and lose. Instead, Apple created a different Mac OS X that could run Mac OS 9 simultaneously, enabling the entire platform to treat Mac OS X as if it were Mac OS 9 (you could sell one Mac OS 9 app to both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X users) and that acted as a bridge from old to new. Microsoft may be ready to do this for XP in a couple of years (2011) going by the current state of XP Mode, and XP will be 10 years old by then and still the majority of Windows installations.
Windows 7 is going nowhere. It's surprising you are buying into the idea that this Windows is finally the one people were asking for. They've never, ever come close to building that. Windows 7 is certainly not it. The primary feature people want is XP -upgradability and -compatibility, and it is not in there.
> Someone subscribed to TechNet or MSDN is not going to be running Windows 7 on a Mac.
Actually, I think you're 180 degrees wrong. If you're switching to the Mac for the hardware only, you're specifically running Windows, it's quite likely you're a Windows developer. There is MS Office Mac for business users, and creative people discover the Mac tools and never go back, and Web-oriented people get the real HTML 5 Web out-of-the-box on Mac OS, but if you program in C Sharp and.NET then you have to run Windows and Microsoft's tools. You can switch to Mac but you're keeping Windows.
I've heard from a few different developer types that they were at conferences and they'd be at a table with 10 developer nerds and 10 MacBook Pros, but if you go around and look it was actually like 4 Mac OS, 2 Linux, and 4 XP. I heard from at least one Windows developer that he switched to Mac hardware so he could reboot in Mac OS X and make iPhone/iPod apps in addition to booting into Windows to make Win32 apps as before. He can't be the only guy who had that idea, it is a great one. And there is a blog called.NET Addict that has a Mac Pro grille in the masthead, the guy is using MacBook Pro and Mac Pro to do his MSDN programming and not only loving it, but sharing that far and wide.
A key thing is that Apple has 90% market share in $1000+ PC's, they have taken the high-end PC market in the same way they took the music player market with iPod. Developers typically want high-end hardware because they're going to use it everyday and they want compiles to be fast and because they want to focus while they're working on the code they're writing, not troubleshooting their workstation (even if they have those skills.) And installing Windows from scratch is actually a feature for developers, they can install it all exactly how they want.
> IMO Apple would do well to open up their market a bit and offer MacBooks > preloaded with Windows. They would destroy Dell & HP in the high end market.
Apple already destroyed Dell and HP and everyone else in the high-end market. In US retail over $1000, the Mac has 90% market share. There is no need for a Windows pre-install on the Mac, and even if there was, which Windows would you preinstall? XP? Vista? Windows 7?
Also, Windows pre-installs are an advantage for Microsoft, but a disadvantage for the user, because they tie the Windows to one box and force the user to re-buy the same Windows every time they get a new PC. How many people bought XP 5 times over the past 8 years? Me, I'm still using the same Windows 98 I bought in 1998. I ran it in VirtualPC for Mac OS 9 in 1998, and now I run it in VirtualBox for Mac OS X and there are no features I need in XP or Vista or Vista 1.1. When I buy my next Mac, even though I may run Windows on there, I don't need a new Windows.
The difference between Mac and Windows is not a feeling of superiority, it's actual superiority. Same as the difference between anything else and Windows.
I know Linux has its appeal, but this is frankly ridiculous. At best it is a stunt. At worst it is a complete waste of time.
It's like recommending Windows for a Web server. Yes, you can get a Web server up and running on Windows. But why? You can get a free modern Linux or BSD for the same hardware and it is not only 98% set up for you already, but when you deploy it to the Web it will do the job much better. Thousands or perhaps millions of people were there in Linux or BSD land before you, optimizing those systems in innumerable ways to be a better Web server. When you set up a Web server on Linux, you stand on the shoulders of giants from the first moment. It's that way also when you set up a music and audio workstation using a Mac. It's not just that the hardware and software is optimized for the task over years and decades, it's that the relevant community is there now and has been there for many years. There are a million benefits to that. Enough music and audio -related technical problems have been solved already on the Mac that you can work on your musical problems and audio problems without having to stop to do technical or I-T work.
If you buy any stock Mac and add no 3rd party hardware and software, you already have a better music and audio system than anything you can build with Linux. You will get all these for free with the Mac, already setup and working: GarageBand (music and audio workstation based on Logic), CoreAudio (multichannel pro audio subsystem that supports simultaneous use of multiple 32-bit/192kHz audio hardware as well as multiple pro audio software apps), CoreMIDI (ultra low-latency MIDI subsystem with compatibility with all MIDI devices), QuickTime (backbone of digital media production for 20 years now and the basis of the MPEG-4 standard that replaced the CD and DVD), and iTunes (which is scriptable on the Mac, so you can, for example, create a script that stamps arbitrary tracks with all of your own artist info). The software you get with the Mac is worth the price of the Mac; the hardware is free. If you try and replicate this functionality on another system, you will spend the price of the Mac just attempting to do it. Further, every Mac except MacBook Air has built-in 24-bit optical digital audio in and out, as well as analog audio in and out. So you don't even have to buy audio hardware to make a decent 24-bit recording. A Mac mini is $599 and it has all of this already setup and working to very high specifications and can share the Linux system's display if you already have a Linux system. It's small enough to travel. It has a FireWire 800 port to hook onto an audio interface or fast hard disk. It backs up all your work automatically, including versioning, if you just give it access to a second disk. It can play 24-bit audio in any context, even within 3rd party apps such as MS Word that are not audio-related.
If you do want to add hardware or software to the Mac, there are about 10 digital audio workstations for the Mac, some of which go back to the 1980's (e.g. Logic Pro used to be called Notator back then) and you can run 2 or more simultaneously and share hardware also. You can not only plug in pretty much any pro audio interface, you can plug in 10 of them at once if you want and they will all work simultaneously. You can plug in any MIDI instrument. There are dozens of highly creative Mac-only music and audio apps like MetaSynth which simply don't exist on other platforms. And if you are doing any soundtrack work, the fact that the Mac is the best video editing platform will benefit you in many small and large ways.
Even the iPod can do better than this Linux system when it comes to music. You can buy an iPod touch for $229, and an app called "FourTrack" for $9.99 more and you have a 4-track recorder and player with multitouch transport controls, pan pots, and faders. A key thing is that with multitouch, you are essentially working with a little hardware mixer. You can drag 2 sliders down at once, for example, so you can do an awful lot on stage with
If there is one thing that has been true throughout all of computing it's that computer scientists always, always, always overestimate the nerdiness of the average user.
The "configurability" that Microsoft attempts to provide for their users is seen by the users as "assembly", as in "IKEA". If I buy a system and then the first thing it does is ask me to pay more to turn on other software features, and then I have to buy a bunch of anti-virus and security software, and then I have to buy and install and configure even more software in order to do even basic things, that is not a luxury feeling. When the DVD burner stops working after the first OS patch, that is not a luxury feeling. Crashes and other misbehaviors are not luxury.
I could easily list 10 features that are worth the price difference between a PC and a Mac all on their own. Any one of these features is worth the extra few hundred on top of your HP/Dell to get a Mac. These are luxury PC features that prompt people to pay $1000+:
- Unibody (one-piece aluminum body) - Time Machine (completely automatic backup, restore, and versioning if the user just plugs in an external disk of any kind) - Quartz (OpenGL PDF compositing graphics layer on every system since 2001) - Unix (multitasking, networking, Apache2, PHP5, HTML 5, much more) - gorgeous typography (with letterforms shown as they were designed instead of shown on a simplified grid to make them easier to render with legacy technology) - ColorSync (accurate RGB color spaces system wide so you see the same colors on your Mac as you saw in your camera) - iLife (digital media creation suite) - 8 hour batteries (so easy) - UTF-8 system wide (no legacy text encodings to deal with as you work) - service (Apple Store and Apple Genius and Apple Care)
These are all things that simply aren't available on any Windows PC you can buy today, or will be able to buy for the foreseeable future. How are you going to sell me a $1500 Windows PC and the thing can't even back itself up? It doesn't even have Apache in there. It wants to store all my text as Windows-1252. It's not really even compatible with the Web. And it has a huge I-T burden attached to it, which Bill Gates sees as a feature but which users do not.
So now the price of a Windows PC is about $600 and for that you get a nightmare in plastic. It's pretty obvious that Apple is going to expand the iPod line upwards in size and features and fill up the whole spectrum from $79 to $999 with iPods. The "netbook" is basically a hardware Web browser, and the same philosophy is seen ing Chrome OS. But if you expand MobileSafari to work on a full-size screen, then you have something that really is worthy of the title of hardware Web browser. Flick to scroll, pinch zoom, advanced typography, HTML 5, 3D accelerated animations, and a UI that has the equivalent of big padded bumpers everywhere so anyone can use it.
I've been using an iPhone for many tasks over the past couple of years that before that would have required a PC or Mac. The only limiting factor has been the size of the display. With a bigger display you have something that consumers are going to lose their minds over. Especially when you consider the very low quality of keyboard and trackpad and display on a $600 PC... a big iPod will feel like a dream by comparison.
In short, luxury iPods up to $1000, and luxury Macs above that. On the PC side: kits for $600 or $700. Yuck.
Until the Fortune 500 and the military stop using Microsoft products, I won't lose a blink of sleep over them using Apple products. This guy had to have physical access to the iPhone to crack it, and even then the iPhone did not start sending its data out over the Internet along with a virus payload that formed a massive botnet that crippled Internet bandwidth.
My understanding is that the encryption in the 3GS is not meant to prevent a user with physical access to the device from accessing the data. It's to make Remote Wipe instant instead of taking 1 hour per gigabyte because the Remote Wipe only has to destroy the decryption keys, not every bit of data on the disk. When you Remote Wipe an iPhone 3G it takes 1 hour per gigabyte to destroy the data. With a 3GS, it takes a few seconds.
In this case, the hacker not only had the iPhone in his physical possession, but it was not Remote Wiped, so he also had the keys in his possession. How is it at all surprising that he was able to get in?
First, the guy should not be "dumping" his book into an iPhone app and trying to use the App Store as his own personal book store. There are actual book stores who are setup to publish your electronic book, dumbass. They have different requirements and procedures from the App Store, and yes they will seem to make more sense to you since you are publishing a book! The iPhone can only show the first 200 apps you install as icons (you can get at them all with search) so it is unrealistic to think that users are going to fill up their home screen with one book per app. There is Kindle.app and about 200 other big name book readers alone.
Secondly, I have no sympathy for complaints about native iPhone app development. If you don't like the end-to-end code-to-cash workflow of the CocoaTouch API, then you can make iPhone apps using the other API the iPhone supports: the totally open HTML 5. A bonus is that your app will also run on every other computing platform in the world except for Microsoft (and on Microsoft where the browser has been replaced with a modern browser.)
Bringing the above 2 points together: if you have a book to publish, publish it as HTML 5 you stupid idiot. No, Apple won't collect all the monies for you. Too bad. Stop whining.
There are many alternatives to iTunes on both Mac and PC. Palm should have licensed one of these alternatives the same as every other media player. Instead, they changed their device's USB ID to pretend to be a past Apple product. Lame.
Palm is $299 and iPhone is $99 and Apple is supposed to provide the media player software also? C'mon!
If Google is serious about Android and Chrome OS, then they will build something like Apple's Quartz. There is no substitute for doing this all in OpenGL.
Apple is an open source success story. OS X and WebKit are massive open source successes. The iPod is as good an Internet citizen as BSD Unix. The Mac is the easiest to use computer yet gets no viruses. The Web was created on an early OS X and ported easily to open source Unix as a result.
The people who should be learning from Apple are not open source coders who work on the many successful projects. Open source is at least 1 step further into behind-the-scenes than the consumer. It's HP, Dell, Sony, possibly Google and Microsoft, and maybe other manufacturers of consumer technology like car makers who should be studying Apple very closely. Not only to notice Apple's design chops, but also to notice their very successful engineering, including open source efforts.
You only have to say "What Microsoft can Learn from Apple" and contemplate how much better Windows XP would have been if the core OS was BSD-compatible. No viruses. No botnets. All of the engineering efforts that went into the failed Windows 2004 could have been used more productively in the user-facing features. All of the engineering efforts to redo that for Vista could have been used more productively. The typical Windows user installs more patches than apps, and the patches are for stuff they never see or use. Microsoft could be platform-independent through open source, so they could choose to run Windows on ARM right now, which they are not at all prepared for. If they had done their browser engine a la Gecko and WebKit, then they wouldn't have 4 wholly incompatible engines running in great numbers on the Web right now, which they analogized to puke in a recent ad and they were the last ones to admit it. Apple has none of these problems. Apple runs the same kernel on iPod, iPhone, Mac, and XServe and no crashes or viruses anywhere.
On the other hand, with Palm, in the Pre you have a Linux kernel and WebKit browser engine replacing Windows Mobile and IE Mobile from the Treo. Because of Apple. That is Palm learning from Apple about open source.
So it's Apple's competition that needs to learn both from Apple and from open source. Apple and open source are both very successful.
The API for Chrome OS is HTML 5, the same API for Safari and Firefox and every W3C-compatible Web browser. It has local storage and works offline and is much more than a new version of HTML 4.
> how much of the difference between commercial and OSS really is technical
If regular people are leaving IE for Safari or Chrome or Firefox in large numbers it is for technical reasons not political because even I don't understand WTF you are talking about. A recent poll showed only 8% of the public know what a "Web Browser" is. The fact that WebKit is BSD licensed and Firefox GPL probably has no meaningful impact on IE market share.
Safari, Chrome, and Firefox are all 2x-8x faster than the latest IE, and you can run the latest Safari and Chrome on mobiles also. You can run Firefox completely for free on almost any PC hardware because you just have to install Ubuntu and there you go. At the same time, IE is a disaster. An epic technical failure. The current mobile version is based on the 1998 PC version.
You don't need to look any further than technical as the IE users peel off. The contrast is extremely stark.
I'm consulting in an all-Microsoft shop right now and they have all 2003 stuff and what they want is to move to Web apps, so they are thinking of standardizing company-wide on Chrome, at first on Windows and then later on Linux or a Google client OS. Nobody talks about moving to whatever is coming out of Microsoft tomorrow or ever. Their conversation around Microsoft for years has been how to keep it all running without upgrading it any further, basically an I-T freeze. Now they can see Web apps and cheap PC clients and of course smart phones for all as the next steps, and Microsoft is 0/3 in those categories. Also, they are moving away from paper faster than ever and Word does not have a "Publish to Web" command, there is no enthusiasm for a new version of Office, which is why they're still using 2003.
Microsoft's technical problems surely come at least in part from their inability to accept that some software projects, like browser engines and operating system cores, are better done in a community way through open source and standardization. But at the end of the day if your stuff works, nobody cares how you made the sausage. IE is falling under its own weight right now, and just when Safari, Chrome, and Firefox are really shining. The new typography in Firefox 3.5 really impressed me, and I was happy to see good typography from someone other than Apple and Adobe. Safari is so easy to use and so fast, what a joy. Chrome is a great business browser that will replace IE in a lot of corporate environments over the next few years and everyone will be better for it.
Audio video codecs are outside the scope of HTML. Whatever it says in the HTML 5 spec about video codecs, that will not magically change the last 20 years of digital audio video away from MPEG to something else.
The current audio video standard is ISO MPEG-4 (2001) and the codecs are H.264/AAC. Supporting this standard is not an academic issue because the world is full of content as well as hardware and software players and authoring tools that conform to this standard. It's also the video in Flash and in YouTube, which is considered the de facto standard in "Web video". When people talk about Web video they usually mean YouTube or something very like it. They are talking about MPEG-4.
The MPEG-4 content that you find in the world and on the Web today includes:
- every song ever offered for sale in or purchased from iTunes Store - every song ripped from a CD by iTunes since 2002 - every video ever made on a cell phone (3GPP is part of MPEG-4) including the iPhone's recent shoot, edit, upload to YouTube feature which is H.264/AAC - every video on YouTube is stored as MPEG-4 (no matter what format you originally uploaded) - almost all of the video that runs in Adobe Flash, excluding 320x240 movies which may be the old codec - all of the consumer video shot on solid state storage, and most of it from a few years before that - all Podcast video is H.264 and most Podcast audio is AAC - Blu-Ray
Nobody has explained how all of this content would be transcoded to Ogg or other non-standard format in order to be published on the Web. Where would the computing time come from? How would it be practically done? What are you going to tell someone who wants to upload a video from their camera or phone directly to the Web? That they should transcode it into a non-standard audio video codec first?
The players are very important also, because they have H.264/AAC decoding HARDWARE, which enables them to work efficiently enough to run on batteries. You can't drop a new software codec into these, you have to drop in a replacement audio video decoder chip. These include:
- every iPod and all of their competitors, except for the ones that only play MP3 which is part of MPEG-2 - every PC with a recent NVIDIA GPU can decode H.264/AAC without breaking a sweat or busting its batteries because it happens in the GPU - Internet set-top boxes such as AppleTV and Netflix - PlayStation3 and other game boxes - even the Zune has MPEG-4 hardware in it, although somewhat underutilized from what I hear
Even software players cannot so easily be modified to support a non-standard codec, because of the scope of the MPEG-4 support. We're talking about every Mac and every PC in the world, because they all have one or both of these:
- every QuickTime/iTunes since 2002 is MPEG-4 - every Adobe FlashPlayer version 9 or 10 is MPEG-4
The reason those 2 match both each other and all the hardware players is because of the benefits of standardization, which took place almost a decade ago for MPEG-4 and goes back further to previous MPEG versions. If you, or Mozilla, or anyone, wants to make an audio video player, they only need to conform to the MPEG-4 standard to enable their player to play all of the content from QuickTime/iTunes and Flash. You can come along in 2009 and decide to get your feet wet in audio video players and simply by following a published ISO specification you can have instant equality with QuickTime and Flash and others. Again, the benefit of standardization.
A very important consideration that is often completely ignored by Web-centric people as they talk about audio video is the authoring tools! People who make audio and video all day long also want to publish their work on the Web. MPEG-4 is standardized QuickTime, so there is not just 8 years of MPEG-4 authoring tools right now, there is almost 18 years of digital audio video practice realized in MPEG-4. A key feature here is that these tools must not make content that has a "content tax" on it, like
Nobody has proved that anybody prefers Linux over OS X. There are more gray market iPhones in China than there are Android devices in the whole world. And going to Ubuntu from OS X is like going back in time at least 10 years. There is no need to sugar coat it. The Linux community has spent the last 10 years sniffing Microsoft's tailpipe, reinventing the Start menu over and over again. The business community is drowning in Microsoft's turn-of-the-century bilge and the Linux community has yet to meet the opportunity with an office platform that does for Windows what OS X did for Mac OS.
Where are the goods? Don't be boastful when the goods have not been delivered.
Like some fuck-nut analyst said today that the Palm Pre has an operating system that is better than iPhone OS. Based on what? Talk is cheap.
When I was a kid I was taught in school that Antartica is all ice. Basically, a continental iceberg. When we looked under there with sonar we discovered a lost continent submerged under a thousand feet of (frozen) water. When we mapped the coastline as it would be if you removed the ice, we found that same coastline on ancient maps.
What more do you need? How many lost continents do we have to find?
1) original iPhone camera is so bad it is just a placeholder... when Apple does this, the next step is to "leap-frog" everyone else with the best camera in the industry plus a novel new feature nobody else has that "just works" even for the non-technical user
2) the one communication thing the Mac still does way better than iPhone is videoconferencing, so this can be considered an iPhone feature in waiting, all the iPhone has to do is steal it, it's got about 5 years of maturity on the Mac
3) iSight camera in the MacBook Air is housed in only a few millimeters of thickness... it's obvious one can fit into an iPhone
4) jailbreakers have found the iPhone hardware is video-ready
This story is complete bullshit. The implication's that SEC rules have been broken is bullshit. The Bloomberg story that is referred to has already been widely debunked as complete and utter bullshit. Using a person's health as an investment talking point is bullshit... you have no idea what the state of his health is, you have no idea how that will affect the state of his health in the future, and further, you have no idea what the effect on Apple would be no matter what the outcome.
What makes this even worse is that any self-respecting nerd knows full well that Mr. Jobs above all other people in the tech industry has imbued his company with its own self-sustaining and unique culture. He could announce that he is taking up sailing like most billionaires and no longer has time to work at Apple and there will still be people at Apple trying to figure out how to remove more buttons from all of their products. There would still be customers because there will still be creative people who need fonts that work and color management you can rely on and a full pro audio subsystem, and Web developers who want to run Apache/PHP/Photoshop, and there would still be poseurs who buy only for the logo and teh shiny. In other words, you have to be truly ignorant of computing to think that Steve Jobs has been sitting in a room at Apple drawing up MacBook Airs on a napkin and that the whole thing would grind to a halt without him.
Plus, Apple has a huge lead in 21st century computing that everyone would love to have. Google, Nokia, Palm, and Blackberry all use Apple's WebKit as their Web rendering engine... MPEG-4 is a standardization of Apple's QuickTime format... the iPod has 75% market share. Right now many people outside Apple are just beginning to use stuff that Apple has been expert at for years. It is obvious they are the only organization with the technology and expertise to do a proper tablet, which is just an iPod touch HD. All that is required is to complete the resolution-independent user interface, which Mac OS X has had in developer preview mode since 2004.
The smart investor is buying Apple stock right now. They are so undervalued because investors don't understand how to read the subscription accounting that is done for the iPhone.
An iPod touch or iPhone or MacBook all wake from sleep instantly and don't need to be shutdown. So if you need a full PC then get a MacBook and you can just open it. By the time the lid is open it is ready for you to work. On the iPod touch or iPhone there is a built-in Notes app and Mail app or you can install SSH or WordPress. Again they are available instantly as soon as you want to use them.
Obviously, WebKit and Gecko are the Coke and Pepsi of browser engines. If you create Web content to the (large) subset of standards that are supported by both WebKit and Gecko then you have universally readable content, the work you do is not linked to any one software application or organization, like Flash development is. So you can make documents throughout 2008 and stamp them "HTML+CSS+JS" and 20 years from now reading those documents doesn't have to involve WebKit or Gecko or Mozilla or Apple or Google. If Gecko went away we would all be WebKit developers instead of Web developers.
Google Chrome does not suggest to me that Firefox should stop using Gecko, it suggests that Microsoft should stop using MSHTML. Google went to great pains to invent new stuff for Chrome (new UI conventions, sandboxing, the JavaScript compiler, Gears, Chromebot testing) yet they specifically chose not to create yet another renderer. Instead they chose the most-suitable open source one and improved it. If Microsoft put WebKit or Gecko into Internet Explorer they could spend all their development time on things that are specific to Windows, and Internet Explorer would be 100 times better. But of course we know that Internet Explorer is just pissing in the pool, that is its purpose, that is the result.
Ten years ago it was predicted that here in the future year of 2008 we would no longer be buying music CD's. Instead, we would be buying DVD-Audio discs with higher-fidelity multichannel sound. Blu-Ray is the same mistake again, but this time for movies.
The optical disc is just Sneakernet. You can't sell that to people who have the Internet. It's like selling a bucket brigade to a fire station that has a big pumping fire truck. Sony is like, "but they're really big buckets!" Doesn't matter. My CD's and DVD's are in storage... the content on my computer and the discs themselves in boxes in the basement. The last movie I watched was on my iPhone. How are you going to sell me a Blu-Ray plus 10 or 20 years of discs?
Also, right now directors are shooting with Reds, 4000 pixels wide. Is there going to be another, higher-definition Blu-Ray in a few years to display this content? No. So we are going to the Internet anyway, where the bandwidth and the pixel resolution can increase together until reality looks like it has fatbits.
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> Except it was Apple who changed Itunes to lock out the Palm Pre,
> so for your analogy to work, I'd say it's still Apple that the issue is with, not Palm.
This is off-topic, but you have it backwards. The Pre identified itself over USB as vendor "Palm" and model "iPod" and iTunes saw "iPod" and assumed "Apple iPod". That assumption is a legitimate software bug. Why assume "Apple" when the vendor ID is right there in the same USB data you are reading. Because everybody at Apple assumed all iPods are Apple iPods. iTunes 8.1.1 saw "iPod" and treated it as an Apple iPod, but iTunes 8.1.2 saw "Palm iPod" and did not treat the Pre as an iPod. Bug fixed. The newer iTunes now identifies the Palm Pre correctly, the previous iTunes did not. Get a CS guy to explain this to you if you don't understand. If earlier iTunes misidentifies Pre and later iTunes correctly identifies Pre, then that is a bug fixed. The fact that this does not fit in with Palm's desires is completely irrelevant.
There is no legitimate defense for Palm on this issue. You can't build devices that go around identifying themselves as other devices because that can only end in screwing over the user through an unexpected and spectacular disaster. If Apple were really going after the Pre, all they have to do is write firmware onto it as if it really were an iPod and they would probably brick all the Pre's that were attached to iTunes. What is the user going to do? Sue Apple? Should Apple take a PR hit for for applying iPod firmware to something that says it is an iPod? Should Apple have to rewrite iTunes with a bunch of Pre-detection routines so they can prevent themselves from writing firmware to it and bricking it? The thing says it's an iPod. Writing iPod/iPhone firmware is a major feature of iTunes.
The way 3rd party device sync with iTunes is clear, and Nokia and Blackberry already do this. You build simple Mac or PC software that reads the iTunes library off disk (it is stored as XML and ISO MPEG-4, both completely open, standardized, and well-documented formats) and the Nokia Mac/PC software then talks to the Nokia device, or the Blackberry Mac/PC software then talks to the Blackberry device. A key feature is that the desktop software knows what the device can support, so everything that gets copied over will work. Apple doesn't know what the Pre can play and doesn't want to know. This system is a much better system than Apple acting as a kind of caretaker of all media syncing for all devices in perpetuity. It's better than iTunes plug-ins because iTunes can be updated regularly and it doesn't affect your Blackberry media sync. The library belongs to the user, but iTunes belongs to the iPod/iPhone. Why hasn't Palm been building its own desktop software for all these years? Why are Palm alone so surprised by what time it is?
Keep in mind also that if you are tiny Palm, who has sold something like 400,000 Pre's in the US total, anything you can do to put the word "Palm" in the same sentence or headline as the word "iPhone", which is selling over 1,000,000 per week, is considered good PR. But even on that point, there are a lot of PR people scratching their heads over what Palm is doing here. Even if Apple were to announce that they were going to co-operate with Palm in every conceivable way, do whatever Palm wishes, the basic problem is still that Pre impersonates other devices. That can only lead to unexpected problems. The better way for Palm to serve their customers would be to follow RIM and Nokia's example. It is just bad practices to do otherwise.
Palm complaining to the USB forum is also important, because it shows that they are completely disingenuous. Of all the USB devices ever made, only 1 deliberately misidentifies itself: Palm Pre. If I made any kind of USB device, I would build in a feature to ignore every device from Palm because they can't be trusted. I wouldn't want my users to have something fail on them because a Palm device is pretending to be something more popular. And who are Palm anyway? Over t
> I'm pretty sure Apple didn't put much effort into making sure all the hardware drivers
> worked anywhere near as well under Windows as they do in OSX.
It's XP that is not battery friendly. It's Windows that is not. Apple spent the past 10 years making OS X very, very battery friendly, and Microsoft spent the last 10 years selling people XP again and again. On the same hardware, you should EXPECT Windows to get much less battery life. Just running one extra daemon can kill your battery life. The whole operating system has to be battery-oriented in the same way that the Intel Core CPU is battery-oriented, it's natural state is totally asleep, and it wakes up only the transistors that are needed. When Windows XP shipped, we were in another era of Pentium4 and white boxes under your desk.
Microsoft has such a scam going. When you can't even talk about Windows being run on a Mac via BootCamp without all kinds of spurious blame being laid on Apple, I can see clearly why the number of generic PC vendors keeps going down and down and down. They are just whipping boys for Microsoft's complete lack of software quality.
> Apples used to be distinctive when they used 68000 or PowerPC
> but now that they use Intel CPUs
> they are really no different from a Dell or Gateway machine except that they
> have an Apple logo attached. The hardware is so identical that now Apple
> machines can run Intel Windows, or vice-versa Intel PCs run Apple OS X.
Outrageous bullshit. I saw Windows NT 3.1 running on a Mac in 1996, and it told me exactly nothing about how alike the Mac of 1996 was to the PC of 1996. Please attempt to install Windows on a Mac without using Apple BootCamp and get back to me about how well it doesn't go. I mean, think about it: why does BootCamp even exist? Where is HP's BootCamp if these systems are so alike?
There are many, many differences between Mac and PC hardware. Here are some:
* The EFI firmware alone makes a Mac a radically different system from other PC's, which use BIOS. When you boot into Mac firmware, not only is it modern and easy to use, it's also graphical and your wireless keyboard and mouse continue to work because they're paired with the machine, not the OS. You have much better power management, security, and many other modern features that are not part of any other PC you can buy today, because all the others use almost 30 year-old BIOS.
* The batteries are all Apple-designed, built-in, and give you 8 hours where you would get 4 from a PC. The firmware manages the batteries and puts unused hardware to sleep in the same way the Core CPU essentially sleeps all the time except for the individual transistors that are needed. The whole system is energy saver friendly.
* The displays are always all-digital connections (not true on many PC's which is outrageous) and all-LED backlighting.
* The motherboards are always made by Apple, not Intel or 3rd party like other PC's. The MacBook Air mobo is smaller than an iPod.
* Always Gigabit Ethernet, never the slow one (except on MacBook Air which does not have Ethernet) and always Wi-Fi n, never the slow one, and always the fast Bluetooth, never the slow one.
* Always a built-in, high-quality webcam and microphone and speaker.
* If there's an optical, it is always DVD-RW/CD-RW, you can't go wrong.
> they use
> generic
> sound cards
* No they do not use generic sound cards. There is literally no concept of "sound card" on the Mac. Mac users have no idea why you're calling it a card. For 25 years the Mac has had audio built-in. For the past 5 years or so it has been high-end audio hardware. The audio in and audio out on every Mac (except MacBook Air) is completely different from other PC's: both audio in and out are combination analog/digital-optical jacks (other PC's it's just analog) so you can record and play audio no matter what external audio connections you encounter, and the bit depth of the audio hardware in Macs is the full 32-bits that is used in pro audio and other media creation, not the 16-bit that is on other PC's and consumer gear. And, there is no buzzing and other artifacts in internal Mac audio, the components are properly shielded to prevent that, which is certainly not true of many PC's I have encountered. And the power supplies in all Macs are what you could call "analog audio safe" which means they do not introduce DC Offset into your audio recordings, which is a famous problem with generic PC's that you have to remove from all of your recordings with audio software. Next time you see a Mac other than MacBook Air, look inside the audio in or audio out jack, you will see a light in there. That's the optical digital connection you won't find on any other PC.
* The external display out on a Mac is always DisplayPort, which is not available yet on any other PC (as far as I know) and which has the advantage of being both very tiny and also hot-pluggable like USB and FireWire, so you can take your notebook up to a desk and plug on a display without rebooting and without risking frying your DVI port. You can easily turn DisplayPort into VG
> Macbooks are essentially the same hardware as Windows machines, down to battery capacity.
That is so stupid it hurts my head. MacBooks have built-in, Apple-designed, 8 hour batteries while other PC's have removable batteries that are much smaller and I can say for sure they're not Apple-designed. MacBooks have EFI firmware, not BIOS as in all other PC's, which is particularly relevant when you're talking power management. MacBooks all have Intel Core 2 Duo 45nm, there are no other processors used at all, and they all have modern NVIDIA GPU's, no other GPU's at all. The motherboard in an Apple system is always, always, always designed and built by Apple, while in other PC's they are often Intel or 3rd party boards.
You want to keep telling yourself that a Mac is the same as a PC to make your PC purchase feel better. Stop it. This information is available on the Internet or you can ask an Apple Genius or any graphic designer. Sheesh.
> It is unlikely that a "bloated codebase" would chew through the battery like nobody's
> business on one x86 machine and suddenly become perfectly benign on a practically
> identical x86 machine.
That is ridiculous. Battery life is not just bigger, badder batteries, there are hundreds of thousands of variables. It's also things like when you're not using audio on a Mac, the entire audio hardware is put to sleep by the firmware. Same with practically every other sub-system. I know for a fact that some of these optimizations do not carry over when you run Windows on the same machine because Windows can't handle it due to its age and lack of EFI compatibility. But the point is that beneath the OS layer, the firmware on a Mac is doing things to make the battery life for that machine better. The idea that you can make any comparison to another machine is just crazy. How fast you can run down an HP battery with Windows means absolutely nothing to how fast you can run down an Apple battery with Windows. You can't tell a thing from the comparison. The machines are dramatically different in battery and firmware.
> Bloat doesn't magically appear when you put an Apple logo on something.
It's only bloat compared to Mac OS. The comparison here is between battery life in Mac OS and battery life in Windows on the exact same machine, with the same exact battery. Yes, Windows is bloated compared to Mac OS. The OS X kernel, which is called xnu, has been optimized for portability and battery life for the past 10 years. It's been instantly sleeping and waking with very, very high reliability for a decade on the Mac, and for 2-3 years on iPhone and iPod touch (it is the exact same xnu kernel on all 3 devices, and the exact same core OS X system, below the top layer all 3 devices have the same OS X on there.
Knowing that Apple has made thousands and thousands of energy-saving optimizations to all of their hardware and software for the past 10 years while Microsoft shipped XP, failed to ship 2004, shipped Vista but only to 20% of Windows users, and talked about Windows 7, it does not surprise me at all that you get better battery life on the same hardware when running OS X instead of Windows. Knowing that when Windows is running on the Mac it is running on EFI firmware, and everywhere else it is running on BIOS, it doesn't surprise me one bit that Windows 7 performs differently vis a vis battery life on a Mac than on other PC. These things are obvious. The surprising thing would be if the battery life were the same. That would be an incredible coincidence.
> My pet theory is that the prospects of an actual sane and well received OS
> release from Microsoft with Win7
Windows 7 is neither sane, nor well-received. There was some pretty good hype for a while, but that bubble burst when it came out that there is no upgrade in-place from XP, which cannot be described as anything other than insane, when 80% of the Windows user base is running XP. Please identify for me even one feature of Windows 7 (6.1) that is so dramatically different from Vista (6.0) that it will cause adoption of Windows 7 to be different from Vista. People are buying XP machines right this minute, in spite of Vista being 2 years old and Windows 7 being on the horizon. There is no upgrade for those machines, they have to be wiped. You have to kill off your old system just to consider upgrading to Windows 7.
Microsoft even explained that "pent-up demand" will cause Windows 7 to be a hit and have huge adoption. That is the exact same thing they said about Vista. Pent-up demand, if it even exists at all for Windows, is what causes excitement on launch day. It does not sell all-new operating systems or cause people to bite off a day of I-T work to destroy an XP computer and hopefully come out the other end with a Windows 7 system that is better.
If XP Mode was seamless (it has many seams), and if it were in all Windows 7 (instead of just Ultimate), and if the Windows 7 installer could lift up your current XP and run it in XP Mode after the install is complete, then maybe you would have something here in Windows 7. If people could run the Windows 7 installer in XP and afterwards essentially have both XP and Windows 7, that would be a way forward for Windows. As it is, Windows 7 is just an upgrade for Vista. It will kill off Vista but not XP.
What Microsoft is doing is very much like what Apple tried in 1997. They announced that Mac OS would soon be retired, and that Mac OS X would take its place. But the Mac OS X they were talking about did not have classic Mac compatibility and the user base and developers took a fit. Had Apple released that Mac OS X, Mac OS 9 would have competed with it endlessly, the same way Vista competed with XP (and lost), and the same way Windows 7 will compete with XP and lose. Instead, Apple created a different Mac OS X that could run Mac OS 9 simultaneously, enabling the entire platform to treat Mac OS X as if it were Mac OS 9 (you could sell one Mac OS 9 app to both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X users) and that acted as a bridge from old to new. Microsoft may be ready to do this for XP in a couple of years (2011) going by the current state of XP Mode, and XP will be 10 years old by then and still the majority of Windows installations.
Windows 7 is going nowhere. It's surprising you are buying into the idea that this Windows is finally the one people were asking for. They've never, ever come close to building that. Windows 7 is certainly not it. The primary feature people want is XP -upgradability and -compatibility, and it is not in there.
> Someone subscribed to TechNet or MSDN is not going to be running Windows 7 on a Mac.
Actually, I think you're 180 degrees wrong. If you're switching to the Mac for the hardware only, you're specifically running Windows, it's quite likely you're a Windows developer. There is MS Office Mac for business users, and creative people discover the Mac tools and never go back, and Web-oriented people get the real HTML 5 Web out-of-the-box on Mac OS, but if you program in C Sharp and .NET then you have to run Windows and Microsoft's tools. You can switch to Mac but you're keeping Windows.
I've heard from a few different developer types that they were at conferences and they'd be at a table with 10 developer nerds and 10 MacBook Pros, but if you go around and look it was actually like 4 Mac OS, 2 Linux, and 4 XP. I heard from at least one Windows developer that he switched to Mac hardware so he could reboot in Mac OS X and make iPhone/iPod apps in addition to booting into Windows to make Win32 apps as before. He can't be the only guy who had that idea, it is a great one. And there is a blog called .NET Addict that has a Mac Pro grille in the masthead, the guy is using MacBook Pro and Mac Pro to do his MSDN programming and not only loving it, but sharing that far and wide.
A key thing is that Apple has 90% market share in $1000+ PC's, they have taken the high-end PC market in the same way they took the music player market with iPod. Developers typically want high-end hardware because they're going to use it everyday and they want compiles to be fast and because they want to focus while they're working on the code they're writing, not troubleshooting their workstation (even if they have those skills.) And installing Windows from scratch is actually a feature for developers, they can install it all exactly how they want.
> IMO Apple would do well to open up their market a bit and offer MacBooks
> preloaded with Windows. They would destroy Dell & HP in the high end market.
Apple already destroyed Dell and HP and everyone else in the high-end market. In US retail over $1000, the Mac has 90% market share. There is no need for a Windows pre-install on the Mac, and even if there was, which Windows would you preinstall? XP? Vista? Windows 7?
Also, Windows pre-installs are an advantage for Microsoft, but a disadvantage for the user, because they tie the Windows to one box and force the user to re-buy the same Windows every time they get a new PC. How many people bought XP 5 times over the past 8 years? Me, I'm still using the same Windows 98 I bought in 1998. I ran it in VirtualPC for Mac OS 9 in 1998, and now I run it in VirtualBox for Mac OS X and there are no features I need in XP or Vista or Vista 1.1. When I buy my next Mac, even though I may run Windows on there, I don't need a new Windows.
The difference between Mac and Windows is not a feeling of superiority, it's actual superiority. Same as the difference between anything else and Windows.
I know Linux has its appeal, but this is frankly ridiculous. At best it is a stunt. At worst it is a complete waste of time.
It's like recommending Windows for a Web server. Yes, you can get a Web server up and running on Windows. But why? You can get a free modern Linux or BSD for the same hardware and it is not only 98% set up for you already, but when you deploy it to the Web it will do the job much better. Thousands or perhaps millions of people were there in Linux or BSD land before you, optimizing those systems in innumerable ways to be a better Web server. When you set up a Web server on Linux, you stand on the shoulders of giants from the first moment. It's that way also when you set up a music and audio workstation using a Mac. It's not just that the hardware and software is optimized for the task over years and decades, it's that the relevant community is there now and has been there for many years. There are a million benefits to that. Enough music and audio -related technical problems have been solved already on the Mac that you can work on your musical problems and audio problems without having to stop to do technical or I-T work.
If you buy any stock Mac and add no 3rd party hardware and software, you already have a better music and audio system than anything you can build with Linux. You will get all these for free with the Mac, already setup and working: GarageBand (music and audio workstation based on Logic), CoreAudio (multichannel pro audio subsystem that supports simultaneous use of multiple 32-bit/192kHz audio hardware as well as multiple pro audio software apps), CoreMIDI (ultra low-latency MIDI subsystem with compatibility with all MIDI devices), QuickTime (backbone of digital media production for 20 years now and the basis of the MPEG-4 standard that replaced the CD and DVD), and iTunes (which is scriptable on the Mac, so you can, for example, create a script that stamps arbitrary tracks with all of your own artist info). The software you get with the Mac is worth the price of the Mac; the hardware is free. If you try and replicate this functionality on another system, you will spend the price of the Mac just attempting to do it. Further, every Mac except MacBook Air has built-in 24-bit optical digital audio in and out, as well as analog audio in and out. So you don't even have to buy audio hardware to make a decent 24-bit recording. A Mac mini is $599 and it has all of this already setup and working to very high specifications and can share the Linux system's display if you already have a Linux system. It's small enough to travel. It has a FireWire 800 port to hook onto an audio interface or fast hard disk. It backs up all your work automatically, including versioning, if you just give it access to a second disk. It can play 24-bit audio in any context, even within 3rd party apps such as MS Word that are not audio-related.
If you do want to add hardware or software to the Mac, there are about 10 digital audio workstations for the Mac, some of which go back to the 1980's (e.g. Logic Pro used to be called Notator back then) and you can run 2 or more simultaneously and share hardware also. You can not only plug in pretty much any pro audio interface, you can plug in 10 of them at once if you want and they will all work simultaneously. You can plug in any MIDI instrument. There are dozens of highly creative Mac-only music and audio apps like MetaSynth which simply don't exist on other platforms. And if you are doing any soundtrack work, the fact that the Mac is the best video editing platform will benefit you in many small and large ways.
Even the iPod can do better than this Linux system when it comes to music. You can buy an iPod touch for $229, and an app called "FourTrack" for $9.99 more and you have a 4-track recorder and player with multitouch transport controls, pan pots, and faders. A key thing is that with multitouch, you are essentially working with a little hardware mixer. You can drag 2 sliders down at once, for example, so you can do an awful lot on stage with
If there is one thing that has been true throughout all of computing it's that computer scientists always, always, always overestimate the nerdiness of the average user.
The "configurability" that Microsoft attempts to provide for their users is seen by the users as "assembly", as in "IKEA". If I buy a system and then the first thing it does is ask me to pay more to turn on other software features, and then I have to buy a bunch of anti-virus and security software, and then I have to buy and install and configure even more software in order to do even basic things, that is not a luxury feeling. When the DVD burner stops working after the first OS patch, that is not a luxury feeling. Crashes and other misbehaviors are not luxury.
I could easily list 10 features that are worth the price difference between a PC and a Mac all on their own. Any one of these features is worth the extra few hundred on top of your HP/Dell to get a Mac. These are luxury PC features that prompt people to pay $1000+:
- Unibody (one-piece aluminum body)
- Time Machine (completely automatic backup, restore, and versioning if the user just plugs in an external disk of any kind)
- Quartz (OpenGL PDF compositing graphics layer on every system since 2001)
- Unix (multitasking, networking, Apache2, PHP5, HTML 5, much more)
- gorgeous typography (with letterforms shown as they were designed instead of shown on a simplified grid to make them easier to render with legacy technology)
- ColorSync (accurate RGB color spaces system wide so you see the same colors on your Mac as you saw in your camera)
- iLife (digital media creation suite)
- 8 hour batteries (so easy)
- UTF-8 system wide (no legacy text encodings to deal with as you work)
- service (Apple Store and Apple Genius and Apple Care)
These are all things that simply aren't available on any Windows PC you can buy today, or will be able to buy for the foreseeable future. How are you going to sell me a $1500 Windows PC and the thing can't even back itself up? It doesn't even have Apache in there. It wants to store all my text as Windows-1252. It's not really even compatible with the Web. And it has a huge I-T burden attached to it, which Bill Gates sees as a feature but which users do not.
So now the price of a Windows PC is about $600 and for that you get a nightmare in plastic. It's pretty obvious that Apple is going to expand the iPod line upwards in size and features and fill up the whole spectrum from $79 to $999 with iPods. The "netbook" is basically a hardware Web browser, and the same philosophy is seen ing Chrome OS. But if you expand MobileSafari to work on a full-size screen, then you have something that really is worthy of the title of hardware Web browser. Flick to scroll, pinch zoom, advanced typography, HTML 5, 3D accelerated animations, and a UI that has the equivalent of big padded bumpers everywhere so anyone can use it.
I've been using an iPhone for many tasks over the past couple of years that before that would have required a PC or Mac. The only limiting factor has been the size of the display. With a bigger display you have something that consumers are going to lose their minds over. Especially when you consider the very low quality of keyboard and trackpad and display on a $600 PC ... a big iPod will feel like a dream by comparison.
In short, luxury iPods up to $1000, and luxury Macs above that. On the PC side: kits for $600 or $700. Yuck.
Until the Fortune 500 and the military stop using Microsoft products, I won't lose a blink of sleep over them using Apple products. This guy had to have physical access to the iPhone to crack it, and even then the iPhone did not start sending its data out over the Internet along with a virus payload that formed a massive botnet that crippled Internet bandwidth.
My understanding is that the encryption in the 3GS is not meant to prevent a user with physical access to the device from accessing the data. It's to make Remote Wipe instant instead of taking 1 hour per gigabyte because the Remote Wipe only has to destroy the decryption keys, not every bit of data on the disk. When you Remote Wipe an iPhone 3G it takes 1 hour per gigabyte to destroy the data. With a 3GS, it takes a few seconds.
In this case, the hacker not only had the iPhone in his physical possession, but it was not Remote Wiped, so he also had the keys in his possession. How is it at all surprising that he was able to get in?
First, the guy should not be "dumping" his book into an iPhone app and trying to use the App Store as his own personal book store. There are actual book stores who are setup to publish your electronic book, dumbass. They have different requirements and procedures from the App Store, and yes they will seem to make more sense to you since you are publishing a book! The iPhone can only show the first 200 apps you install as icons (you can get at them all with search) so it is unrealistic to think that users are going to fill up their home screen with one book per app. There is Kindle.app and about 200 other big name book readers alone.
Secondly, I have no sympathy for complaints about native iPhone app development. If you don't like the end-to-end code-to-cash workflow of the CocoaTouch API, then you can make iPhone apps using the other API the iPhone supports: the totally open HTML 5. A bonus is that your app will also run on every other computing platform in the world except for Microsoft (and on Microsoft where the browser has been replaced with a modern browser.)
Bringing the above 2 points together: if you have a book to publish, publish it as HTML 5 you stupid idiot. No, Apple won't collect all the monies for you. Too bad. Stop whining.
There are many alternatives to iTunes on both Mac and PC. Palm should have licensed one of these alternatives the same as every other media player. Instead, they changed their device's USB ID to pretend to be a past Apple product. Lame.
Palm is $299 and iPhone is $99 and Apple is supposed to provide the media player software also? C'mon!
If Google is serious about Android and Chrome OS, then they will build something like Apple's Quartz. There is no substitute for doing this all in OpenGL.
Apple is an open source success story. OS X and WebKit are massive open source successes. The iPod is as good an Internet citizen as BSD Unix. The Mac is the easiest to use computer yet gets no viruses. The Web was created on an early OS X and ported easily to open source Unix as a result.
The people who should be learning from Apple are not open source coders who work on the many successful projects. Open source is at least 1 step further into behind-the-scenes than the consumer. It's HP, Dell, Sony, possibly Google and Microsoft, and maybe other manufacturers of consumer technology like car makers who should be studying Apple very closely. Not only to notice Apple's design chops, but also to notice their very successful engineering, including open source efforts.
You only have to say "What Microsoft can Learn from Apple" and contemplate how much better Windows XP would have been if the core OS was BSD-compatible. No viruses. No botnets. All of the engineering efforts that went into the failed Windows 2004 could have been used more productively in the user-facing features. All of the engineering efforts to redo that for Vista could have been used more productively. The typical Windows user installs more patches than apps, and the patches are for stuff they never see or use. Microsoft could be platform-independent through open source, so they could choose to run Windows on ARM right now, which they are not at all prepared for. If they had done their browser engine a la Gecko and WebKit, then they wouldn't have 4 wholly incompatible engines running in great numbers on the Web right now, which they analogized to puke in a recent ad and they were the last ones to admit it. Apple has none of these problems. Apple runs the same kernel on iPod, iPhone, Mac, and XServe and no crashes or viruses anywhere.
On the other hand, with Palm, in the Pre you have a Linux kernel and WebKit browser engine replacing Windows Mobile and IE Mobile from the Treo. Because of Apple. That is Palm learning from Apple about open source.
So it's Apple's competition that needs to learn both from Apple and from open source. Apple and open source are both very successful.
The API for Chrome OS is HTML 5, the same API for Safari and Firefox and every W3C-compatible Web browser. It has local storage and works offline and is much more than a new version of HTML 4.
> how much of the difference between commercial and OSS really is technical
If regular people are leaving IE for Safari or Chrome or Firefox in large numbers it is for technical reasons not political because even I don't understand WTF you are talking about. A recent poll showed only 8% of the public know what a "Web Browser" is. The fact that WebKit is BSD licensed and Firefox GPL probably has no meaningful impact on IE market share.
Safari, Chrome, and Firefox are all 2x-8x faster than the latest IE, and you can run the latest Safari and Chrome on mobiles also. You can run Firefox completely for free on almost any PC hardware because you just have to install Ubuntu and there you go. At the same time, IE is a disaster. An epic technical failure. The current mobile version is based on the 1998 PC version.
You don't need to look any further than technical as the IE users peel off. The contrast is extremely stark.
I'm consulting in an all-Microsoft shop right now and they have all 2003 stuff and what they want is to move to Web apps, so they are thinking of standardizing company-wide on Chrome, at first on Windows and then later on Linux or a Google client OS. Nobody talks about moving to whatever is coming out of Microsoft tomorrow or ever. Their conversation around Microsoft for years has been how to keep it all running without upgrading it any further, basically an I-T freeze. Now they can see Web apps and cheap PC clients and of course smart phones for all as the next steps, and Microsoft is 0/3 in those categories. Also, they are moving away from paper faster than ever and Word does not have a "Publish to Web" command, there is no enthusiasm for a new version of Office, which is why they're still using 2003.
Microsoft's technical problems surely come at least in part from their inability to accept that some software projects, like browser engines and operating system cores, are better done in a community way through open source and standardization. But at the end of the day if your stuff works, nobody cares how you made the sausage. IE is falling under its own weight right now, and just when Safari, Chrome, and Firefox are really shining. The new typography in Firefox 3.5 really impressed me, and I was happy to see good typography from someone other than Apple and Adobe. Safari is so easy to use and so fast, what a joy. Chrome is a great business browser that will replace IE in a lot of corporate environments over the next few years and everyone will be better for it.
Audio video codecs are outside the scope of HTML. Whatever it says in the HTML 5 spec about video codecs, that will not magically change the last 20 years of digital audio video away from MPEG to something else.
The current audio video standard is ISO MPEG-4 (2001) and the codecs are H.264/AAC. Supporting this standard is not an academic issue because the world is full of content as well as hardware and software players and authoring tools that conform to this standard. It's also the video in Flash and in YouTube, which is considered the de facto standard in "Web video". When people talk about Web video they usually mean YouTube or something very like it. They are talking about MPEG-4.
The MPEG-4 content that you find in the world and on the Web today includes:
- every song ever offered for sale in or purchased from iTunes Store
- every song ripped from a CD by iTunes since 2002
- every video ever made on a cell phone (3GPP is part of MPEG-4) including the iPhone's recent shoot, edit, upload to YouTube feature which is H.264/AAC
- every video on YouTube is stored as MPEG-4 (no matter what format you originally uploaded)
- almost all of the video that runs in Adobe Flash, excluding 320x240 movies which may be the old codec
- all of the consumer video shot on solid state storage, and most of it from a few years before that
- all Podcast video is H.264 and most Podcast audio is AAC
- Blu-Ray
Nobody has explained how all of this content would be transcoded to Ogg or other non-standard format in order to be published on the Web. Where would the computing time come from? How would it be practically done? What are you going to tell someone who wants to upload a video from their camera or phone directly to the Web? That they should transcode it into a non-standard audio video codec first?
The players are very important also, because they have H.264/AAC decoding HARDWARE, which enables them to work efficiently enough to run on batteries. You can't drop a new software codec into these, you have to drop in a replacement audio video decoder chip. These include:
- every iPod and all of their competitors, except for the ones that only play MP3 which is part of MPEG-2
- every PC with a recent NVIDIA GPU can decode H.264/AAC without breaking a sweat or busting its batteries because it happens in the GPU
- Internet set-top boxes such as AppleTV and Netflix
- PlayStation3 and other game boxes
- even the Zune has MPEG-4 hardware in it, although somewhat underutilized from what I hear
Even software players cannot so easily be modified to support a non-standard codec, because of the scope of the MPEG-4 support. We're talking about every Mac and every PC in the world, because they all have one or both of these:
- every QuickTime/iTunes since 2002 is MPEG-4
- every Adobe FlashPlayer version 9 or 10 is MPEG-4
The reason those 2 match both each other and all the hardware players is because of the benefits of standardization, which took place almost a decade ago for MPEG-4 and goes back further to previous MPEG versions. If you, or Mozilla, or anyone, wants to make an audio video player, they only need to conform to the MPEG-4 standard to enable their player to play all of the content from QuickTime/iTunes and Flash. You can come along in 2009 and decide to get your feet wet in audio video players and simply by following a published ISO specification you can have instant equality with QuickTime and Flash and others. Again, the benefit of standardization.
A very important consideration that is often completely ignored by Web-centric people as they talk about audio video is the authoring tools! People who make audio and video all day long also want to publish their work on the Web. MPEG-4 is standardized QuickTime, so there is not just 8 years of MPEG-4 authoring tools right now, there is almost 18 years of digital audio video practice realized in MPEG-4. A key feature here is that these tools must not make content that has a "content tax" on it, like
Nobody has proved that anybody prefers Linux over OS X. There are more gray market iPhones in China than there are Android devices in the whole world. And going to Ubuntu from OS X is like going back in time at least 10 years. There is no need to sugar coat it. The Linux community has spent the last 10 years sniffing Microsoft's tailpipe, reinventing the Start menu over and over again. The business community is drowning in Microsoft's turn-of-the-century bilge and the Linux community has yet to meet the opportunity with an office platform that does for Windows what OS X did for Mac OS.
Where are the goods? Don't be boastful when the goods have not been delivered.
Like some fuck-nut analyst said today that the Palm Pre has an operating system that is better than iPhone OS. Based on what? Talk is cheap.
When I was a kid I was taught in school that Antartica is all ice. Basically, a continental iceberg. When we looked under there with sonar we discovered a lost continent submerged under a thousand feet of (frozen) water. When we mapped the coastline as it would be if you removed the ice, we found that same coastline on ancient maps.
What more do you need? How many lost continents do we have to find?
This is pretty obvious, because:
1) original iPhone camera is so bad it is just a placeholder ... when Apple does this, the next step is to "leap-frog" everyone else with the best camera in the industry plus a novel new feature nobody else has that "just works" even for the non-technical user
2) the one communication thing the Mac still does way better than iPhone is videoconferencing, so this can be considered an iPhone feature in waiting, all the iPhone has to do is steal it, it's got about 5 years of maturity on the Mac
3) iSight camera in the MacBook Air is housed in only a few millimeters of thickness ... it's obvious one can fit into an iPhone
4) jailbreakers have found the iPhone hardware is video-ready
This story is complete bullshit. The implication's that SEC rules have been broken is bullshit. The Bloomberg story that is referred to has already been widely debunked as complete and utter bullshit. Using a person's health as an investment talking point is bullshit ... you have no idea what the state of his health is, you have no idea how that will affect the state of his health in the future, and further, you have no idea what the effect on Apple would be no matter what the outcome.
What makes this even worse is that any self-respecting nerd knows full well that Mr. Jobs above all other people in the tech industry has imbued his company with its own self-sustaining and unique culture. He could announce that he is taking up sailing like most billionaires and no longer has time to work at Apple and there will still be people at Apple trying to figure out how to remove more buttons from all of their products. There would still be customers because there will still be creative people who need fonts that work and color management you can rely on and a full pro audio subsystem, and Web developers who want to run Apache/PHP/Photoshop, and there would still be poseurs who buy only for the logo and teh shiny. In other words, you have to be truly ignorant of computing to think that Steve Jobs has been sitting in a room at Apple drawing up MacBook Airs on a napkin and that the whole thing would grind to a halt without him.
Plus, Apple has a huge lead in 21st century computing that everyone would love to have. Google, Nokia, Palm, and Blackberry all use Apple's WebKit as their Web rendering engine ... MPEG-4 is a standardization of Apple's QuickTime format ... the iPod has 75% market share. Right now many people outside Apple are just beginning to use stuff that Apple has been expert at for years. It is obvious they are the only organization with the technology and expertise to do a proper tablet, which is just an iPod touch HD. All that is required is to complete the resolution-independent user interface, which Mac OS X has had in developer preview mode since 2004.
The smart investor is buying Apple stock right now. They are so undervalued because investors don't understand how to read the subscription accounting that is done for the iPhone.
An iPod touch or iPhone or MacBook all wake from sleep instantly and don't need to be shutdown. So if you need a full PC then get a MacBook and you can just open it. By the time the lid is open it is ready for you to work. On the iPod touch or iPhone there is a built-in Notes app and Mail app or you can install SSH or WordPress. Again they are available instantly as soon as you want to use them.
Obviously, WebKit and Gecko are the Coke and Pepsi of browser engines. If you create Web content to the (large) subset of standards that are supported by both WebKit and Gecko then you have universally readable content, the work you do is not linked to any one software application or organization, like Flash development is. So you can make documents throughout 2008 and stamp them "HTML+CSS+JS" and 20 years from now reading those documents doesn't have to involve WebKit or Gecko or Mozilla or Apple or Google. If Gecko went away we would all be WebKit developers instead of Web developers.
Google Chrome does not suggest to me that Firefox should stop using Gecko, it suggests that Microsoft should stop using MSHTML. Google went to great pains to invent new stuff for Chrome (new UI conventions, sandboxing, the JavaScript compiler, Gears, Chromebot testing) yet they specifically chose not to create yet another renderer. Instead they chose the most-suitable open source one and improved it. If Microsoft put WebKit or Gecko into Internet Explorer they could spend all their development time on things that are specific to Windows, and Internet Explorer would be 100 times better. But of course we know that Internet Explorer is just pissing in the pool, that is its purpose, that is the result.
Ten years ago it was predicted that here in the future year of 2008 we would no longer be buying music CD's. Instead, we would be buying DVD-Audio discs with higher-fidelity multichannel sound. Blu-Ray is the same mistake again, but this time for movies.
The optical disc is just Sneakernet. You can't sell that to people who have the Internet. It's like selling a bucket brigade to a fire station that has a big pumping fire truck. Sony is like, "but they're really big buckets!" Doesn't matter. My CD's and DVD's are in storage ... the content on my computer and the discs themselves in boxes in the basement. The last movie I watched was on my iPhone. How are you going to sell me a Blu-Ray plus 10 or 20 years of discs?
Also, right now directors are shooting with Reds, 4000 pixels wide. Is there going to be another, higher-definition Blu-Ray in a few years to display this content? No. So we are going to the Internet anyway, where the bandwidth and the pixel resolution can increase together until reality looks like it has fatbits.