For the follow-up to Leopard to focus on under-the-hood improvements without changing the UI and user experience dramatically has precedent in Mac OS X Tiger for Intel. Apple did Tiger with many new user features, then Tiger for Intel was made to look completely identical to the user, but it brought with it dramatic under-the-hood differences. Leopard and Snow Leopard are the same thing again.
With Tiger they said "come get Tiger" and with Tiger for Intel they said "come get Intel". With Leopard they're selling Leopard and with Snow Leopard they'll sell a larger number of processors and more memory than Leopard can support. One release they sell the software then one release they sell the hardware. They don't have to worry if Snow Leopard in-a-box doesn't sell all that well, because Snow Leopard in-a-Mac will sell really well, it'll be designed to drive new Mac sales. They already mentioned ungodly amounts of RAM in their first PR about Snow Leopard.
The actual goal is to sell the 10 millionth iPhone before the end of 2008, not to sell 10 million during 2008. An iPhone odometer that started at zero at launch in June 2007 is going to click over to 10,000,000 at some point. Apple's sales goal states that will happen before 2008 is done.
I remember thinking in 2001 that Microsoft would deliver something similar in 2011 and I thought what a disaster that will be for their users. And here it is, right on schedule. Well, OK, it will be in beta for the first couple of years, but basically you can see them finally getting the picture now.
Firefox on mobiles is total vapor. The realities of today's mobile industry are irrelevant in a discussion of Firefox on mobiles. By the time Firefox ships for mobiles, if it ever does, the industry will be very different.
Apple always pushed WebKit to be both smaller and faster in every way possible. Then last year they shipped it on a 400 MHz, 128MB RAM, 4GB storage device and it runs great. Obviously they had mobiles in mind from the start of the WebKit project. But even on Windows, Safari is twice as fast as Firefox, and Safari for Windows is an 8MB download (including Mac graphics libraries) while Firefox is 22MB. Mozilla has to get much faster and much smaller to go mobile, and that's going to take a while.
The only way to upgrade XP is to wrap a virtualizer around it as a prophylactic. You need to keep the top the same to run the apps and such, but the guts should not be touching the metal.
A Mac plus Parallels plus the XP you already own keeps all your old stuff working (XP apps on XP) while also opening up new stuff like iLife and Unix and uptime and 64-bit RAM access. XP needs to be frozen in time like a compatibility library, not improved or changed. If you can get by with a non-Mac Unix then that is an excellent solution for running your virtualized XP also.
Vista is different from XP, but not improved enough to make the switch worthwhile. If Vista had Win64 and a XP-in-a-window then that would be worth considering. No matter how much Microsoft wants to ignore it, the fact is you have to upgrade an old application platform to be compatible with a modern system. Win32 was created to run standalone or hooked onto a LAN where you trust everybody, and in 32-bits. Investing more money and time in that at this point is ridiculous.
If you want an iPhone in the US but don't want AT&T then your biggest problem is not Apple, it's the lack of a competing GSM network provider. You can hook your iPhone onto T-Mobile, but in most places T-Mobile is just reselling AT&T's network. The practical part of the Apple/AT&T deal is the iPhone has a GSM modem and AT&T has the only GSM network.
You're not supposed to use it on Ethernet, or any kind of desk-bound use. It's a "wireless notebook", you're supposed to use it wirelessly, sitting on your lap, where the missing weight matters, and take it with you anywhere because it's so small and light.
I missed the FireWire jack right away because I would want to plug in to a pro audio sampler, but if I'm going to tether the notebook to a sampler then I might as well get a MacBook Pro. If the notebook is sitting on a desk, plugged into stuff, then the extra 2 pounds is OK. The next evolution of the MacBook Pro may be to a docking station because they may want to make it thinner than the ports but we'll still need a pro notebook with all the ports until there is wireless that is faster than FireWire 800.
It's weird that there's a Mac without an Ethernet port or FireWire port, though. The array of ports on every Mac has been so consistently complete for so long I was wondering where they were going to go from there, but didn't expect them to go to almost no ports.
Once you write data to a disk you should never give it away to anyone. Period. If you're turning a machine in for servicing, take the disk out. If the disk itself is bad, then just replace it from your own pocket, which typically will cost less than $100 no matter what computer it is. Once you take the internal disk out of a computer, it becomes a generic item that you can safely service or replace.
Vista SP1 should have been in beta the day Vista shipped. Vista SP1 should have shipped no more than 3 months after Vista.
Leopard just came out last week, and there is already a service pack: v10.5.1 is already out. Most Mac users will never run v10.5.0, because it's already automatically updating itself to v10.5.1 and within six months v10.5.3 will come out on a new DVD and on all new Macs. So Leopard's first-release flaws were caught by early-adopter users and fixed right away by Apple, they are already history. That kind of platform management is completely missing from Microsoft's releases.
At one of the Web development shops I work at, 5 years ago the designers all had Macs, and everyone else had Windows. Then by 3 years ago all the coders had Macs also. Then in the last year all the business people traded in their ThinkPads for MacBooks and MacBook Pros, and a couple of them are already running Leopard. Absolutely zero interest in Vista by anyone, not even IT, who are using Macs also and managing Linux Web servers.
After all the problems with XP, everyone wanted an antidote to XP. It's clear that Mac OS X is the antidote to XP, not Vista. Microsoft definitely lost the second chance that Vista offered. They needed to come back with a very small, very stable core OS that they can patch very quickly and easily, in Internet time, not Bill Gates time.
Both Nokia and Google have announced iPhone-killers and neither of them is going to ship one unit before the second half of 2008. Microsoft will need at least that long to shrink Surface down to the size of a Zune.
Nokia is promising touchscreens and multimedia and Google is promising open source and the Web. Like we already have in our iPods. And they're going to get that to us real soon now. Like in another year from now.
It shows how miserable Palm has become that Google didn't even buy them. Not even for the name.
> The iPhone is screaming for awesome third party development.
The iPhone is overflowing with third-party development. In fact, one third-party app enables the iPhone home screen to have pages you can flip through solely so you can have room to hold more third-party apps. There were too many apps for this early version of the iPhone interface to accommodate. They overflowed. Some of the iPhone users I know have all the latest apps and tell each other what is new and fresh constantly. And there is an SDK coming in a few months along with iTunes distribution of third-party apps that will contribute further. Jobs already announced the iPhone is not closed, it is just unfinished.
In short, there are third-party apps now, and there will be third-party apps in the future. The hysteria can stop now. The iPhone is not screaming for anything.
It is quite obvious that HTML+CSS+JS is the standard electronic document format. It is even sharable over the Internets. These other formats are like finding old soldiers marooned on an island, they don't know the war is over. Once we have 8.5x11 300 dpi displays you won't want a print out anyway, the print out is just a photo of the page, not the real page, which can still grow and change.
The way MS Word handles HTML is very Web 1.0: you make a DOC and then you save a copy as a really badly stamped-out dead HTML document. For Web 2.0, you make a live HTML document. It's as plain as the browser window I'm typing in.
One way Macs are upgradable is the high resale value. You sell your current Mac and buy a new Mac, which comes with all the latest software also. Nobody had to get out any tools and now there are two happy Mac users with two complete and functioning Macs. It's a sensibly designed PC with a full array of ports and compatibility with Mac OS X, BSD, Linux, Solaris, Windows XP and Vista. What exactly are you going to fix about it? Just sell it whole and buy a new one, like a watch or a TV.
Some people just buy a new Mac when there is a new OS and sell the old system. That is a great way to fly. Not only do you always have the most current gear, you have zero recycling problems.
> You do realize that the majority of Windows machines are sold as a system, not as bits and pieces.
Yes, he realizes that. He is not talking about the end user building a system from parts, he's talking about PC vendors making PC's that look like end users built them from parts.
I have a very modest project studio and it is 64 channels of 24-bit 192kHz uncompressed audio. The CD is 2 channels of 16-bit 44kHz uncompressed audio. What is needed is not vinyl but simply higher-quality consumer audio playback. The last step of a digital audio workflow is to create a CD-quality copy of the actual audio program, because that's all consumers can handle. What will greatly enhance consumer audio quality is simply to listen to the entire recording, with the extra depth that comes from more bits and the complete harmonic structure captured by 192kHz.
Also, it has to be noted that if you press vinyl today, your source will be a digital master. Probably a 24-bit 192kHz digital master. It's better just to get the digital master and customize the sound to taste with your playback system, e.g. tube amps or really good speakers. If you playback a lowly CD on a really high-end playback system it will blow your fucking mind. Most of the speakers and headphones in the world today suck ass.
So in short, get a better digital copy and better speakers if you want better sound.
All the stuff that Apple does for every iPhone user POST-SALE costs AT&T at least that much to do for themselves. AT&T is like a silent partner just printing money. You pay them every month but otherwise you deal with Apple. Over at Verizon they are doing all the Apple stuff themselves, but doing it badly.
The complaints about the iPhone never seem to come from iPhone users. The highest customer satisfaction in phones is iPhone at 82%, the next best is Blackberry at 51%, then ALL THE REST are below 50%. Everybody is paying a similar monthly carrier fee for their phone, but not everybody is getting the same value from it. So complaints about how much money Apple/AT&T are making while offering a single phone that has both the highest customer satisfaction and the most features really seem disingenuous to me. Complain about how much companies are making for selling phones that garner http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=iphone+customer+satisfaction&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
The hardware in OLPC can be used as a typewriter or adding machine in a business, like most PC's. It's hard to convince a country that has hardly any PC's in the first place that all the PC's should go to an education experiment. Parents want their kids to learn Excel. So the governments say to OLPC, we'll take it if it comes with Windows. Microsoft is going to get $3 per OLPC, that's why they're working on a Windows for it.
Apple offered OS X for free, right after Mac OS X shipped for Intel architecture. So don't feel bad for Linux or the OLPC software developers. Microsoft is the standard in typewriters and adding machines.
Microsoft has more software engineers than Apple has employees. Apple is not the problem here. Leopard is not the disappointment.
Tiger is already much better than Vista, nobody who is running Tiger is suffering. People who bought a new Mac after Tiger shipped and have been running it since were never bothered by Vista, their productivity and satisfaction are high. Mac sales are already up on the strength of the hardware, Tiger, and Intel-compatibility which gives a switcher a way to back out of Mac OS X if they want to return to Windows or Linux on the same hardware. If you have a Mac you are not switching to Vista. If you have Windows, Leopard is not preventing you from switching.
The only part this theory gets right is that Leopard will be huge. It has improvements for everyone in the community. It has more graphical sophistication, it's a better Unix, it has built-in automatic backup and versioning, it's fully 32/64-bit compatible and inherently multiprocessor. It's one DVD for the whole world that installs and runs full-featured on all Apple computers with a 1 GHz or faster processor and 512 MB or better of RAM, so it will be easy to upgrade from a previous Mac OS X and a lot of people will do that. It will be the only OS available on new Macs right away and many people will take that as a good opportunity to get either their first Mac or their first Intel Mac. Leopard also has a matching pocket version which starts at $299 and comes on a touchscreen iPod instead of a DVD. It's going to be popular.
Compare the $399 Vista Ultimate DVD with the $399 iPod touch 16GB for both technical merit and consumer excitement. Which of these should a Windows XP user spend their money on? Which will they get more value from. It's laugh out loud.
Apple already has a Mac and iPod version of OS X, what if they made a generic PC version of OS X and licensed it to Intel and it shipped with every compatible 64-bit Intel EFI motherboard for $50 extra? Then PC manufacturers would get the boom in sales that they wanted from Vista, and people would finally have a good reason to buy a new Sony or HP computer, to go instantly into next-generation processor, firmware, core OS, Web and audio/video standards, 3D interface, and enjoy the real Photoshop finally. What if Apple licensed it to Google? What if they offered it for sale to people who already have a PC? These are the opportunities for Leopard, not beating Vista to market.
Finally I have to say that delaying a PC operating system by a few months because you shipped the pocket version is about the best excuse ever. Hard to see the cloud for the silver lining with that one. This article was trying, though.
Apps will almost certainly not be able to access the phone or cell network so there is no need to involve the carrier, which in the case of AT&T is only in the US anyway.
Notice the Music Store in iPhone/iPod is Wi-Fi only, the apps does not access the phone. The SDK is a modern iPod SDK.
Anyone who is using a Microsoft product today deserves what they get. The cat is already out of the bag. What do they need to see to know it's over? Bill Gates giving up and giving the money back?
For $3 a month Apple does a lot of things for iPhone customers that AT&T or other carriers have to do themselves for other phones. For example, if your iPhone needs service you call AppleCare not 611.
The exclusivity is so the phone companies don't get to rape iPhone customers financially. Before you get to carry the iPhone you have to agree to flat-rate data and reasonable voice plans. Even though the iPhone is by far the most popular smart phone, it has the cheapest device plans. Treo users can choose carriers but they always pay much more.
But then again it's easier just to parrot what you read on the Internet instead of thinking about it for like 10 minutes.
> The iPhone has the distinction of being the first phone to be explicitly named as "not approved for business use" by my company.
Awesome. That must be for all the reasons I like it so much.
One thing I really like about the USE of the iPhone (rather than just cataloguing model numbers) is that with a full modern Web browser in my pocket at all times, I'm eating the lunch of all the business people in your company who are either chained to the Web via PC or away from the Web, using the Internet for email only. They are standing still to me. Email is like 1950, the Web is 1990, and Web 2.0 is 2005 so I'm like 55 years ahead of the people who work at your company. Like I said, I'm eating their lunch. And at a broader selection of better restaurants because it's so easy to find them and make reservations with an iPhone.
Of course then one of them sees me reading an HTML email, or clicking a Web link in an email, or using some free video Podcast training (e.g. Adobe Creative Suite), or just finding and doing things tap-tap-tap with no effort and then they realize they are running a marathon in army boots and I'm wearing some smooth high-tech running shoes and it is over for your murderer's row of Treos and Blackjacks.
A senior guy at my office had a brand new iPhone with him today, gave his Blackjack back. Couldn't take it anymore. How long can you call the iPhone a cripple for? At some point you have to go to the other mobile makers and say WTF the iPod has a real Web browser and it is a children's toy! Same as why Microsoft and Linux deserve a ton of derision for being so outclassed by the Mac. There is a legitimate need for business computing and mobiles that is not being filled by the tinker toys coming out of everywhere but Apple.
> I wouldn't mind even a highly sandboxed environment, s long as there was some kind of local storage and "offline" functionality.
Your sandboxed apps are already in there, it's got a Web 2.0 browser, which is the best sandbox that Apple could develop in-house. What, you want another sandbox in the phone? No. That is insane. You already have a 3-headed dog named iTunes guarding the front door. Right now you can solve 90% of a user's application needs with a plain Unix Web server and a plain iPhone. Soon enough, with offline Ajax that will go up to 99% of the apps a user needs, and the Internet will just be used for a locally stored app to see if there is a patch update. Ajax is making a Web site of hundreds of pages seem like one page, to cache that page you have to have an Ajax-aware browser cache (e.g. Google Gears). This is obviously what's happening to the bulk of application development. Flash v10 will have ISO MPEG-4 H.264/AAC media and run on the iPhone, making a fool out of Flash Lite on other phones. There is plenty of sandbox in the iPhone already.
The other 1% will be provided by Apple in the OS X software and possibly with optional software you download through iTunes only. But all the native software will come from Apple, that is a basic security and management issue. It's a basic feature of the iPhone that it can die and you can get a replacement and plug it into your iTunes and with one sync you are right back where you were the last time iTunes saw your old phone. There are thousands of personal customizations in every iPhone: every contact, movie, song, photo, setting are all carried from OS version to OS version, from iPhone to iPhone, and with Leopard your Mac will backup iTunes automatically if you so much as show it a second fixed disk. Any optional software has to follow this model or else you'll impose I-T work on the user, they'll have to install or uninstall your apps, which is what makes software so unpopular and PC's in general so unpopular, a shadow of mobiles in number. With the iPhone and iPod, iTunes is the butler. All the other servants report to him.
But the iPhone is newer than Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux, you have to give Apple a break somewhere. Every feature that's not in the iPhone has a conspiracy theory attached. The truth is that Apple has really high standards, they have been sitting on a tablet Mac for 3 years according to Steve Jobs, because it isn't good enough yet. They can sit on native third-party development as long as they need to because they're the only phone with millions of Web apps and the only phone with so many world-class features built-in.
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For the follow-up to Leopard to focus on under-the-hood improvements without changing the UI and user experience dramatically has precedent in Mac OS X Tiger for Intel. Apple did Tiger with many new user features, then Tiger for Intel was made to look completely identical to the user, but it brought with it dramatic under-the-hood differences. Leopard and Snow Leopard are the same thing again.
With Tiger they said "come get Tiger" and with Tiger for Intel they said "come get Intel". With Leopard they're selling Leopard and with Snow Leopard they'll sell a larger number of processors and more memory than Leopard can support. One release they sell the software then one release they sell the hardware. They don't have to worry if Snow Leopard in-a-box doesn't sell all that well, because Snow Leopard in-a-Mac will sell really well, it'll be designed to drive new Mac sales. They already mentioned ungodly amounts of RAM in their first PR about Snow Leopard.
The actual goal is to sell the 10 millionth iPhone before the end of 2008, not to sell 10 million during 2008. An iPhone odometer that started at zero at launch in June 2007 is going to click over to 10,000,000 at some point. Apple's sales goal states that will happen before 2008 is done.
I remember thinking in 2001 that Microsoft would deliver something similar in 2011 and I thought what a disaster that will be for their users. And here it is, right on schedule. Well, OK, it will be in beta for the first couple of years, but basically you can see them finally getting the picture now.
Firefox on mobiles is total vapor. The realities of today's mobile industry are irrelevant in a discussion of Firefox on mobiles. By the time Firefox ships for mobiles, if it ever does, the industry will be very different.
Apple always pushed WebKit to be both smaller and faster in every way possible. Then last year they shipped it on a 400 MHz, 128MB RAM, 4GB storage device and it runs great. Obviously they had mobiles in mind from the start of the WebKit project. But even on Windows, Safari is twice as fast as Firefox, and Safari for Windows is an 8MB download (including Mac graphics libraries) while Firefox is 22MB. Mozilla has to get much faster and much smaller to go mobile, and that's going to take a while.
Only Microsoft could make downloadable updates suck so bad that an update CD would be called "innovative".
The killer app of Linux is Unix, duh.
The only way to upgrade XP is to wrap a virtualizer around it as a prophylactic. You need to keep the top the same to run the apps and such, but the guts should not be touching the metal.
A Mac plus Parallels plus the XP you already own keeps all your old stuff working (XP apps on XP) while also opening up new stuff like iLife and Unix and uptime and 64-bit RAM access. XP needs to be frozen in time like a compatibility library, not improved or changed. If you can get by with a non-Mac Unix then that is an excellent solution for running your virtualized XP also.
Vista is different from XP, but not improved enough to make the switch worthwhile. If Vista had Win64 and a XP-in-a-window then that would be worth considering. No matter how much Microsoft wants to ignore it, the fact is you have to upgrade an old application platform to be compatible with a modern system. Win32 was created to run standalone or hooked onto a LAN where you trust everybody, and in 32-bits. Investing more money and time in that at this point is ridiculous.
If you want an iPhone in the US but don't want AT&T then your biggest problem is not Apple, it's the lack of a competing GSM network provider. You can hook your iPhone onto T-Mobile, but in most places T-Mobile is just reselling AT&T's network. The practical part of the Apple/AT&T deal is the iPhone has a GSM modem and AT&T has the only GSM network.
You're not supposed to use it on Ethernet, or any kind of desk-bound use. It's a "wireless notebook", you're supposed to use it wirelessly, sitting on your lap, where the missing weight matters, and take it with you anywhere because it's so small and light.
I missed the FireWire jack right away because I would want to plug in to a pro audio sampler, but if I'm going to tether the notebook to a sampler then I might as well get a MacBook Pro. If the notebook is sitting on a desk, plugged into stuff, then the extra 2 pounds is OK. The next evolution of the MacBook Pro may be to a docking station because they may want to make it thinner than the ports but we'll still need a pro notebook with all the ports until there is wireless that is faster than FireWire 800.
It's weird that there's a Mac without an Ethernet port or FireWire port, though. The array of ports on every Mac has been so consistently complete for so long I was wondering where they were going to go from there, but didn't expect them to go to almost no ports.
Once you write data to a disk you should never give it away to anyone. Period. If you're turning a machine in for servicing, take the disk out. If the disk itself is bad, then just replace it from your own pocket, which typically will cost less than $100 no matter what computer it is. Once you take the internal disk out of a computer, it becomes a generic item that you can safely service or replace.
Vista SP1 should have been in beta the day Vista shipped. Vista SP1 should have shipped no more than 3 months after Vista.
Leopard just came out last week, and there is already a service pack: v10.5.1 is already out. Most Mac users will never run v10.5.0, because it's already automatically updating itself to v10.5.1 and within six months v10.5.3 will come out on a new DVD and on all new Macs. So Leopard's first-release flaws were caught by early-adopter users and fixed right away by Apple, they are already history. That kind of platform management is completely missing from Microsoft's releases.
At one of the Web development shops I work at, 5 years ago the designers all had Macs, and everyone else had Windows. Then by 3 years ago all the coders had Macs also. Then in the last year all the business people traded in their ThinkPads for MacBooks and MacBook Pros, and a couple of them are already running Leopard. Absolutely zero interest in Vista by anyone, not even IT, who are using Macs also and managing Linux Web servers.
After all the problems with XP, everyone wanted an antidote to XP. It's clear that Mac OS X is the antidote to XP, not Vista. Microsoft definitely lost the second chance that Vista offered. They needed to come back with a very small, very stable core OS that they can patch very quickly and easily, in Internet time, not Bill Gates time.
Both Nokia and Google have announced iPhone-killers and neither of them is going to ship one unit before the second half of 2008. Microsoft will need at least that long to shrink Surface down to the size of a Zune.
Nokia is promising touchscreens and multimedia and Google is promising open source and the Web. Like we already have in our iPods. And they're going to get that to us real soon now. Like in another year from now.
It shows how miserable Palm has become that Google didn't even buy them. Not even for the name.
> The iPhone is screaming for awesome third party development.
The iPhone is overflowing with third-party development. In fact, one third-party app enables the iPhone home screen to have pages you can flip through solely so you can have room to hold more third-party apps. There were too many apps for this early version of the iPhone interface to accommodate. They overflowed. Some of the iPhone users I know have all the latest apps and tell each other what is new and fresh constantly. And there is an SDK coming in a few months along with iTunes distribution of third-party apps that will contribute further. Jobs already announced the iPhone is not closed, it is just unfinished.
In short, there are third-party apps now, and there will be third-party apps in the future. The hysteria can stop now. The iPhone is not screaming for anything.
It is quite obvious that HTML+CSS+JS is the standard electronic document format. It is even sharable over the Internets. These other formats are like finding old soldiers marooned on an island, they don't know the war is over. Once we have 8.5x11 300 dpi displays you won't want a print out anyway, the print out is just a photo of the page, not the real page, which can still grow and change.
The way MS Word handles HTML is very Web 1.0: you make a DOC and then you save a copy as a really badly stamped-out dead HTML document. For Web 2.0, you make a live HTML document. It's as plain as the browser window I'm typing in.
One way Macs are upgradable is the high resale value. You sell your current Mac and buy a new Mac, which comes with all the latest software also. Nobody had to get out any tools and now there are two happy Mac users with two complete and functioning Macs. It's a sensibly designed PC with a full array of ports and compatibility with Mac OS X, BSD, Linux, Solaris, Windows XP and Vista. What exactly are you going to fix about it? Just sell it whole and buy a new one, like a watch or a TV.
Some people just buy a new Mac when there is a new OS and sell the old system. That is a great way to fly. Not only do you always have the most current gear, you have zero recycling problems.
> You do realize that the majority of Windows machines are sold as a system, not as bits and pieces.
Yes, he realizes that. He is not talking about the end user building a system from parts, he's talking about PC vendors making PC's that look like end users built them from parts.
I have a very modest project studio and it is 64 channels of 24-bit 192kHz uncompressed audio. The CD is 2 channels of 16-bit 44kHz uncompressed audio. What is needed is not vinyl but simply higher-quality consumer audio playback. The last step of a digital audio workflow is to create a CD-quality copy of the actual audio program, because that's all consumers can handle. What will greatly enhance consumer audio quality is simply to listen to the entire recording, with the extra depth that comes from more bits and the complete harmonic structure captured by 192kHz.
Also, it has to be noted that if you press vinyl today, your source will be a digital master. Probably a 24-bit 192kHz digital master. It's better just to get the digital master and customize the sound to taste with your playback system, e.g. tube amps or really good speakers. If you playback a lowly CD on a really high-end playback system it will blow your fucking mind. Most of the speakers and headphones in the world today suck ass.
So in short, get a better digital copy and better speakers if you want better sound.
All the stuff that Apple does for every iPhone user POST-SALE costs AT&T at least that much to do for themselves. AT&T is like a silent partner just printing money. You pay them every month but otherwise you deal with Apple. Over at Verizon they are doing all the Apple stuff themselves, but doing it badly.
The complaints about the iPhone never seem to come from iPhone users. The highest customer satisfaction in phones is iPhone at 82%, the next best is Blackberry at 51%, then ALL THE REST are below 50%. Everybody is paying a similar monthly carrier fee for their phone, but not everybody is getting the same value from it. So complaints about how much money Apple/AT&T are making while offering a single phone that has both the highest customer satisfaction and the most features really seem disingenuous to me. Complain about how much companies are making for selling phones that garner http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=iphone+customer+satisfaction&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
The hardware in OLPC can be used as a typewriter or adding machine in a business, like most PC's. It's hard to convince a country that has hardly any PC's in the first place that all the PC's should go to an education experiment. Parents want their kids to learn Excel. So the governments say to OLPC, we'll take it if it comes with Windows. Microsoft is going to get $3 per OLPC, that's why they're working on a Windows for it.
Apple offered OS X for free, right after Mac OS X shipped for Intel architecture. So don't feel bad for Linux or the OLPC software developers. Microsoft is the standard in typewriters and adding machines.
Microsoft has more software engineers than Apple has employees. Apple is not the problem here. Leopard is not the disappointment.
Tiger is already much better than Vista, nobody who is running Tiger is suffering. People who bought a new Mac after Tiger shipped and have been running it since were never bothered by Vista, their productivity and satisfaction are high. Mac sales are already up on the strength of the hardware, Tiger, and Intel-compatibility which gives a switcher a way to back out of Mac OS X if they want to return to Windows or Linux on the same hardware. If you have a Mac you are not switching to Vista. If you have Windows, Leopard is not preventing you from switching.
The only part this theory gets right is that Leopard will be huge. It has improvements for everyone in the community. It has more graphical sophistication, it's a better Unix, it has built-in automatic backup and versioning, it's fully 32/64-bit compatible and inherently multiprocessor. It's one DVD for the whole world that installs and runs full-featured on all Apple computers with a 1 GHz or faster processor and 512 MB or better of RAM, so it will be easy to upgrade from a previous Mac OS X and a lot of people will do that. It will be the only OS available on new Macs right away and many people will take that as a good opportunity to get either their first Mac or their first Intel Mac. Leopard also has a matching pocket version which starts at $299 and comes on a touchscreen iPod instead of a DVD. It's going to be popular.
Compare the $399 Vista Ultimate DVD with the $399 iPod touch 16GB for both technical merit and consumer excitement. Which of these should a Windows XP user spend their money on? Which will they get more value from. It's laugh out loud.
Apple already has a Mac and iPod version of OS X, what if they made a generic PC version of OS X and licensed it to Intel and it shipped with every compatible 64-bit Intel EFI motherboard for $50 extra? Then PC manufacturers would get the boom in sales that they wanted from Vista, and people would finally have a good reason to buy a new Sony or HP computer, to go instantly into next-generation processor, firmware, core OS, Web and audio/video standards, 3D interface, and enjoy the real Photoshop finally. What if Apple licensed it to Google? What if they offered it for sale to people who already have a PC? These are the opportunities for Leopard, not beating Vista to market.
Finally I have to say that delaying a PC operating system by a few months because you shipped the pocket version is about the best excuse ever. Hard to see the cloud for the silver lining with that one. This article was trying, though.
Apps will almost certainly not be able to access the phone or cell network so there is no need to involve the carrier, which in the case of AT&T is only in the US anyway.
Notice the Music Store in iPhone/iPod is Wi-Fi only, the apps does not access the phone. The SDK is a modern iPod SDK.
Anyone who is using a Microsoft product today deserves what they get. The cat is already out of the bag. What do they need to see to know it's over? Bill Gates giving up and giving the money back?
For $3 a month Apple does a lot of things for iPhone customers that AT&T or other carriers have to do themselves for other phones. For example, if your iPhone needs service you call AppleCare not 611.
The exclusivity is so the phone companies don't get to rape iPhone customers financially. Before you get to carry the iPhone you have to agree to flat-rate data and reasonable voice plans. Even though the iPhone is by far the most popular smart phone, it has the cheapest device plans. Treo users can choose carriers but they always pay much more.
But then again it's easier just to parrot what you read on the Internet instead of thinking about it for like 10 minutes.
> The iPhone has the distinction of being the first phone to be explicitly named as "not approved for business use" by my company.
Awesome. That must be for all the reasons I like it so much.
One thing I really like about the USE of the iPhone (rather than just cataloguing model numbers) is that with a full modern Web browser in my pocket at all times, I'm eating the lunch of all the business people in your company who are either chained to the Web via PC or away from the Web, using the Internet for email only. They are standing still to me. Email is like 1950, the Web is 1990, and Web 2.0 is 2005 so I'm like 55 years ahead of the people who work at your company. Like I said, I'm eating their lunch. And at a broader selection of better restaurants because it's so easy to find them and make reservations with an iPhone.
Of course then one of them sees me reading an HTML email, or clicking a Web link in an email, or using some free video Podcast training (e.g. Adobe Creative Suite), or just finding and doing things tap-tap-tap with no effort and then they realize they are running a marathon in army boots and I'm wearing some smooth high-tech running shoes and it is over for your murderer's row of Treos and Blackjacks.
A senior guy at my office had a brand new iPhone with him today, gave his Blackjack back. Couldn't take it anymore. How long can you call the iPhone a cripple for? At some point you have to go to the other mobile makers and say WTF the iPod has a real Web browser and it is a children's toy! Same as why Microsoft and Linux deserve a ton of derision for being so outclassed by the Mac. There is a legitimate need for business computing and mobiles that is not being filled by the tinker toys coming out of everywhere but Apple.
> I wouldn't mind even a highly sandboxed environment, s long as there was some kind of local storage and "offline" functionality.
Your sandboxed apps are already in there, it's got a Web 2.0 browser, which is the best sandbox that Apple could develop in-house. What, you want another sandbox in the phone? No. That is insane. You already have a 3-headed dog named iTunes guarding the front door. Right now you can solve 90% of a user's application needs with a plain Unix Web server and a plain iPhone. Soon enough, with offline Ajax that will go up to 99% of the apps a user needs, and the Internet will just be used for a locally stored app to see if there is a patch update. Ajax is making a Web site of hundreds of pages seem like one page, to cache that page you have to have an Ajax-aware browser cache (e.g. Google Gears). This is obviously what's happening to the bulk of application development. Flash v10 will have ISO MPEG-4 H.264/AAC media and run on the iPhone, making a fool out of Flash Lite on other phones. There is plenty of sandbox in the iPhone already.
The other 1% will be provided by Apple in the OS X software and possibly with optional software you download through iTunes only. But all the native software will come from Apple, that is a basic security and management issue. It's a basic feature of the iPhone that it can die and you can get a replacement and plug it into your iTunes and with one sync you are right back where you were the last time iTunes saw your old phone. There are thousands of personal customizations in every iPhone: every contact, movie, song, photo, setting are all carried from OS version to OS version, from iPhone to iPhone, and with Leopard your Mac will backup iTunes automatically if you so much as show it a second fixed disk. Any optional software has to follow this model or else you'll impose I-T work on the user, they'll have to install or uninstall your apps, which is what makes software so unpopular and PC's in general so unpopular, a shadow of mobiles in number. With the iPhone and iPod, iTunes is the butler. All the other servants report to him.
But the iPhone is newer than Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux, you have to give Apple a break somewhere. Every feature that's not in the iPhone has a conspiracy theory attached. The truth is that Apple has really high standards, they have been sitting on a tablet Mac for 3 years according to Steve Jobs, because it isn't good enough yet. They can sit on native third-party development as long as they need to because they're the only phone with millions of Web apps and the only phone with so many world-class features built-in.