> Is it unreasonable for me, an Apple customer and shareholder, to want this?
Yes.
The iPhone has like 10,000 features and you're complaining about the 3 it doesn't have. Suck it up.
When Apple introduced the iPhone it knocked people off their feet, and six months later they delivered the working product, all those features were not vaporware. Complaining about the 3 features that you really, really wanted and Apple didn't even promise is unseemly. It's looking a gift horse in the mouth. It's complaining about the wrong ketchup when you're eating a free meal.
Now you're comparing next year's vaporware Nokia and complaining. Get a fucking grip.
As for "open", I am really tired of people with software on the brain trying to monopolize the words "open" and "free". The iPhone uses the standard cell network (GSM), the standard wireless Internet (Wi-Fi), plays the standard music and movies (MPEG-4 H.264/AAC), reads standardized HTML+CSS+JS with its Web browser, standardized email (POP/IMAP), calendars (iCal), photos (JPEG), and communicates with peripherals through USB2 and Bluetooth. Compare to other phones and then STFU.
The first thing you should ask someone with an opinion about the iPhone is how they like theirs. Nine times out of 10 they don't have one, but they are steamed about how music and movies were included but not bits and bytes. Get used to it. Most people are not computer nerds. More people listen to music than give a shit about installing software. Most people are drowning in unwanted I-T chores. It is a huge selling feature of the iPhone that Apple acts as your I-T staff.
If you want to add all the iPhone's features to your Windows Mobile, it's cheaper to just buy an iPhone than to purchase all the third-party software you'll need. And once you install third-party software on any phone it starts crashing. Who needs that?
There will likely be an SDK for both iPhone and iPod touch next year at WWDC 2008 and it is likely the apps will have to be approved by Apple and installed by iTunes. Why? Because that's what Apple's customers want: somebody to put a fucking leash on hackers. Right here in this article we see that there are hundreds of phones you can write software for. So go write software for them. When did hackers become so fucking whiny?
Most hobbyist developers are Web developers today.
You can make HTML+CSS+JS with any Unix to W3C standards and test in Firefox and your work will display beautifully on the iPhone or iPod, which also has an excellent HTML+CSS+JS debugger and Bonjour networking. Very low cost of entry, especially if you were going to buy an iPod or iPhone anyway, and the stuff you make also works on every Web 2.0 system. You can also include ISO MPEG-4 H.264/AAC media and you're compatible with everything, even Flash as of v10.
There is very little you can do natively on mobiles anyway, the ones with native apps all have no memory and bad operating system software, that's why there is so much interest in native iPhone apps, because it's the first phone with the resources. Put that aside for now and you notice that many iPhone Web apps are better than native apps for other phones.
> All [iPod Touch] needs is to be open enough that people can develop programs for it.
There is a Web 2.0 browser in there. All the PDA stuff has long ago been done on the Web. You can install Wikipedia by typing "wikipedia.org" into Safari on the iPod and bookmarking it. Or if it's already bookmarked on your computer it will sync over to the iPod and all you have to do is click on it. You can run Slashdot on the iPod, the full Slashdot with all of the features running and with typography also, unlike on the majority of computers. The PHP Manual is on the iPod already, a link away. That is so much better to have than being able to install a card game.
With W3C Web 2.0 and ISO MPEG-4 H.264/AAC and iPod dock connector it is a really nice pocket platform. Apple will also fill up the screen with really awesome features over the next couple of years and when the accessories catch up to the iPhone/iPod touch that should be a lot of fun.
But if you need it to be "open enough that people can develop programs for it" then you want the Handspring Visor Deluxe of course, without question.
Yes the hardware will be cheaper and the software will be cheaper, just like it is today on the Mac and iPod and iPhone.
If I gave you a blank PC and asked you to make it as much like a MacBook as possible you could spend the $1100 cost of the MacBook just on software for the PC. For example, to replace the six iLife applications with Adobe products is $149 per application, $894 and no OS yet, and you will need two of those to replace Mac OS X: both Windows and Unix and you'll have to dual boot and you still won't have modern typography, color management, audio processing, and much more.
An empty PC for $250 is just not that great of a deal. Doesn't do anything at all until you add either a lot of expensive software or a lot of expensive I-T hours. A $250 PC with the exact same features as an iPod touch would do well, but no such thing exists. Nobody is even close to that.
Touch is coming to the Mac. Look at the glass on the new iMac, that thing is touchscreen ready.
It has nothing to do with the Newton, though. There will be no stylus and no handwriting and no soups. This is just the evolution of the mouse.
Once you use an iPhone or iPod touch for a while you want to touch the Mac's screen, you want to scroll Web pages with a flick. When I make a Web page now I can't wait to see it on my iPhone so I can touch it, move it around. Even a graphics tablet doesn't feel as intimate and real.
Also, the error correction on the iPhone is amazing. On a large screen you will be able to touch small targets.
Look at the knobs and sliders in Logic and Final Cut, they are begging for touch. DJ's are begging for touch.
The $299 iPod runs full Web 2.0 sites, same as the $399 iPhone. Everyone who is not named Apple is copying that approach right now.
The idea that there is a separate mobile Web is anachronistic in the extreme. Even before the iPhone it was a stretch to think we were going to create a shadow Web for mobiles. Once you use an iPhone you can clearly see that we don't have to.
The whole idea of Web 2.0 development is you don't have to make multiple sites, you can build one site that scales. If you close your eyes to IE you see we are already living in the future. Mobiles are full citizens on the Web now, if you have a full Web browser.
Always on broadband network connection and no Web 2.0 browser? Bullshit. An anachronism.
> You: I want to buy this house! *hands realtor a check for the full price of the property* > Realtor: Thanks. > You: Can I have the deed to my new property? > Realtor: Nope.
No, we're not talking about the deed. We're talking about the maintenance contract. It's quite common to buy a property such as an apartment and have to not only pay fees to keep the plumbing going but also have to abide by certain rules like you can't flush certain items. But I own this apartment you might say, I'll flush a hammer any time I please and I expect the maintenance people to fix it. Apple is saying if you flush a hammer you are on your own.
> This is bullshit by definition. The phones still work, so the software is not "damaged."
First of all, if the phone is unable to be updated to the next firmware reliably, then it does not "still work". Second, a cracked version of Photoshop that can do 100% of the image-editing functions but doesn't serialize is still damaged and Adobe won't upgrade it and nobody would expect them to.
Install one app on your Palm or Windows Mobile and kiss what little stability you had good-bye. Hack an iPhone and expect full warranty support and trouble-free firmware upgrades for life. Talk about a double standard.
> Apple isn't doing this because they dislike their customers; they are doing it because they don't respect their customers.
Apple is not even nearly big enough to fuck with anyone in the way you're implying. Get a grip. Apple respects their customers by making complete and finished products with a stable list of features that will work for the life of the product. Unlike every other phone, music player, and PC manufacturer. Unlike every single other one. That is why you hear Apple Monopoly, it is because they are working a full generation ahead of everyone else. Stop complaining about what you think they should do. Man up. Make your own music player, according to iSuppli you can do it for like $50 in parts. Should take you no longer than a weekend since you're a Slashdot reader.
The idea that there is a market for operating systems is a complete myth. It supports the myth that consumers choose Windows. They do not. There is a market for computing systems only, balls to browser.
The $299 iPod touch music player has a better Web browser than a $1299 Windows Vista PC. If there were a market for PC operating systems somebody would have eaten Microsoft's lunch before that could happen. The iPod touch is also more reliable than a Windows Vista PC.
The market is for applications, ways to customize the basic computer. For a Windows PC that means office tools. For an iPod touch it is music, movies, Web sites, Podcasts. Much higher-level stuff than the operating system.
If Apple published a CD with the iPod's operating system on it they would instantly have 100% of the "market" for iPod operating systems. That would just be Enron accounting, it's made-up. People aren't actually buying anything, there is no competition there, no supply and demand. The demand is for iPods. This is even more obvious now that CD/DVD/hard disk is giving way to more chips. The iPod is a chip. A CD with the iPod OS on it would soon enough be a chip. All you're doing is splitting the iPod into two non-functional halves so you can extort money out of the person who bought one half and needs the other. It's a waste of time because there is honest money to be made selling enhancements to a functioning iPod, or a functioning PC.
Microsoft has like a 70% profit margin on Windows, which on a technical level is a product that doesn't even work. How much better would Windows be if Microsoft had only taken a 25% profit on it? Why don't we ever hear complaints about that?
The cost-of-parts teardowns of Apple gear are tiresome. They don't take into account the cost of software development or product design, let alone warranty fulfillment and legal and localization, shipping, retail sales, demo units, so much else goes into a product like this other than just a bag of parts. Most of the work that brought us the new iPod nano happened inside heads at Apple. And being a publicly-traded company, you can plainly see what Apple's profits are, and they are always 25-30%. That includes really high-profit sales of software such as Final Cut Pro, and really low-profit sales such as personal computers. Yeah Dell wants that margin but they're not willing to work for it, they gave up all the high-profit software parts of their business to Microsoft. But when you combine Microsoft and Dell's profits on a PC purchased from Dell it matches up to Apple's profit on a Mac.
Why do the vast majority of all music players ever made suck so much if all you have to do to make an iPod is buy $85 in parts and hire someone to put it together? Why didn't the iPod nano with video come from Microsoft six months ago as Zune 2 while Apple was doing the iPhone? $85 is less than what Microsoft pay per unit to fix each Xbox.
And calling Apple a monopoly in music players conveniently ignores not only that there are hundreds of brands of music players but that every large manufacturer other than Apple is part of an anti-consumer cartel led by Microsoft, a convicted abusive monopolist. All the other music player manufacturers have tied one of their hands behind their backs and chained the other one to Microsoft. They are a failed monopoly that left one honest competitor with a exponentially better product.
The FUD that is going around today is just amazing. For the same US$149 as an iPod nano with video, you can buy a remaindered overstock Zune, one year old, sitting in a box with the battery aging, and from a two year old design, and requiring you to BUY another Microsoft product (Windows) just to make it work, and man that thing is HUGE.
You bought your PC for the operating system, because if you were buying the right OS for Adobe apps you'd have bought a Mac. Instead you're using Mac key shortcuts on software that was ported from the Mac, and you're missing color management and workflow integration just to name two things. And you gained viruses and worms and you have to dual boot to get at Unix. You're not hurting Adobe, you're hurting yourself.
At Photoshop conferences I always get asked by PC users "how long does Photoshop take to start up on the Mac?" and I'm like "I don't know, I just leave it running all the time" and one guy asked me once what "lightweight image editor" do I use when Photoshop is not running. Again, it's always running. Why would it not be running? "System resources" was the answer. If Photoshop is not running and you need an image editor, why wouldn't you run it? "Takes a long time to start up." Meanwhile at those same conferences, the Photoshop+Mac users are talking about airbrush techniques and color correction philosophies. Guess who is really getting work done?
> Seriously, why would you want to buy a Mac if you can have Ubuntu, apart from Adobe/Macromedia products?
That is crazy talk.
If your main application, the core of your computing, is a text editor, then Ubuntu is a gift because you can run your text editor on an entirely free stack and have a much better experience than Windows. For a Web engineer for example, the text editor, Apache, PHP, Firefox, and Unix are killer apps and all free.
But if your main application is anything with graphics or publishing or audio or video you are so much better on the Mac. That's where the tools are for that stuff. In the same way that Ubuntu makes your text editor better by adding Apache, PHP, Firefox, and Unix, the Mac adds all kinds of stuff to your Photoshop, or publishing tools, or music or audio tools. Your 32 channels of 24-bit 96kHz digital audio don't glitch on the Mac, and your 24-bit mixes play in all of your apps, and your virtual effects and instruments work in all of your apps, and you can run two Digital Audio Workstations at once (e.g. Logic and Live, which I do) and they share your pro audio hardware automatically and everything just works. You make music you don't do any IT, that is done at the factory. They spent the last 20 years building in support for pro audio, how long has Ubuntu been working in music and audio?
Photoshop and an Art Tablet and a Mac and a visual artist is on top of the world, takes above 20 minutes to set that all up from scratch, the majority of the time you are watching the Photoshop installer run. When you're done it all just works, even RGB color spaces are managed for you. And you can fly around the interface with the one-button Art Pen and no mouse. The Art Tablet is $299 and includes a coupon for the full Photoshop for $299 more, and a MacBook is $1200 and you want for nothing. That's the full pixel airbrush nirvana. If you have to take a second job to make up the difference from an Ubuntu system then do it. Even if you are a beginner, if you apply yourself for three years with that $1800 art toolkit you'll be working professionally with them somewhere for real money. The $1800 you paid will make your friend's college loans look ridiculous.
It's way past time to get over the idea that all computers are the same. They're more different than ever. Offering Ubuntu as an alternative system for media work, music and audio, video, graphics, publishing, that is just doing a huge disservice to those users, pretending Ubuntu has something to offer them. It's also doing a disservice to the Ubuntu project who are offering a really good system to an entirely different set of users.
This is just a cheaper clone of HD DVD, it still has all the same problems that make it very unattractive to content creators. For example, a per disc license fee paid to Microsoft.
Blu-Ray is way ahead of HD DVD, orders of magnitude, right now. Microsoft is the only one still truly behind HD DVD.
> The big question with the Treo is whether there are enough people who need more than a PDA but less than a full laptop
No, the smartphone IS the new notebook. The notebook is the new desktop. The desktop is the new workstation. The Treo is just way behind the curve because it still doesn't have a Unix OS and Web 2.0 browser or a UI that works on a tiny screen. It was supposed to start being a real computer about 2-3 years ago.
Why buy a Core 2 Duo in a big white box when you can have it in a MacBook for $1100? Very few reasons.
Once you have an iPhone (or similar future competitor with Unix and Web 2.0 and zooming UI) you look at a PC, even a notebook, as a workstation. You use it to run Photoshop, you use it to make stuff, but you don't take it everywhere with you, you don't open it up to do email when you're on the road, you don't open it up to look up something in Google or get a map or refer to some notes. You only get the notebook out to do a real computing session, like an hour or more of real work.
> Release details of a proposed product. Watch for reactions. See poor reactions and shelve product.
Look like incredible fools in front of the whole frickin' world.
Show your very poor hand to everyone so there's no need to bluff anymore.
Associate your brand with outrageous failure.
My iPhone is so good all by itself that I don't even go into the next room to do an email or look up a Web page. Palm should have spent time creating the iPhone first instead of apologizing for the Treo with the Folio. I can remember the demand for an "Apple PDA" back in 1999 and Apple didn't deliver on that for 8 years. An 8 year head start for Palm and the iPhone caught them flat-footed. Three months before the iPhone announcement Palm said don't look for anything special from Apple, smartphones are HARD, it will take Apple many years of trying to make something "decent". Way to have your head up your ass.
The fact that Palm is fucking around with shit like this when they have yet to even put a Unix core OS and Web 2.0 browser on their smartphone is pretty incredible. That's the Internet and the Web, two little trends that most people think are here to stay.
This is a bullshit article written to publish the idea that a BlackBerry can show up an iPhone. It cannot, even if you love your push email you are lacking so much other stuff you need a notebook just to read the Web.
Why doesn't BlackBerry put a real Web browser in there to avoid the iPhone showing them up? When you consider necessary features, a Web 2.0 browser comes in way ahead of GPS let's be real. Even audio/video Podcasts are more important than GPS. That gives you radio, TV, training courses.
The lack of GPS in the iPhone is something hardcore nerds complain about so they can keep carrying their antique smart phones. It's not something that most people even know exists let alone need. Never mind that any moment there will be a plug-on GPS for the iPod dock connector and then what? Can you plug Firefox into a BlackBerry?
Over the same time a million plus HTML documents were added to the Web and we can actually read them. Both ODF and OOXML are completely and utterly obsolete and useless. If the user's work is stored by their tools as HTML+CSS+JS then that would enable the user, that would be something other than software programmers wanking away for their visions of world domination.
Even in 1993 there were plenty of boxes around with no Windows. It wasn't until Windows 95 that new PC's started up a GUI. So a new PC in 1993 started into DOS. You had to go out of your way to run Windows and it was controversial because most software was DOS anyway, so you gave up a lot of performance running the shifty 3.1 GUI.
There are two different AppleWorks. The old one ran on Apple II, the current one which was just retired is the Mac one, formerly known as Claris Works. Old means back to Claris Works 1.0 not to Apple II.
The OS should always be hardware-integrated like the Mac because for 99% of users the entire hardware is useless without it. Users see the OS as part of their PC. When the OS fails they want it repaired and they don't want to pay because they already had an OS. Cracking Windows is seen like a restore from backup. They never for a moment consider that naked is the natural state of their PC. Same as turned off is not seen as the natural state.
As we go to no moving parts the OS is going to disappear into the hardware like firmware, it will come on a chip on the mobo, and it will finally be where users want it instead of how Bill Gates and Richard Stallman think it should be done. Ubuntu should not come on a DVD, it should come on a PC. When the PC is one chip what will be the rationale for selling it with some assembly required?
Music is recorded in 24-bits and then dithered for CD. With file-based music there is an upgrade path to get the full 24-bit audio to the listener within a few years from now. With CD you have been listening to less than half the music for years now. I have a small project studio and it is 24-bit 192 kHz not 16-bit 44.1 kHz like CD. What about AM radio? Or even FM you are missing a lot. What about the horrendous scratches on LP's? How about the music you miss when a CD skips?
An MPEG-4 AAC 256 kbit/s track aka iTunes Plus is the single best consumer audio format ever. It has the fidelity of a CD without the skips. We got used to the skips so much that people often ignore them in a direct comparison bit that is bullshit. Go into an arbitrary CD collection and play a CD and it will skip at least once almost certainly. Every CD collection always has a song in it somewhere that won't play because of scratches. That is no damn good once you get used to an iPod. Another way the MPEG wins is in the amount of music a listener hears compared to CD. People turn on music and leave it... with CD you get 60 minutes while an iPod goes all night and you hear 10 albums. In general the iPod user simply hears much more music every day than the CD user.
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> Is it unreasonable for me, an Apple customer and shareholder, to want this?
Yes.
The iPhone has like 10,000 features and you're complaining about the 3 it doesn't have. Suck it up.
When Apple introduced the iPhone it knocked people off their feet, and six months later they delivered the working product, all those features were not vaporware. Complaining about the 3 features that you really, really wanted and Apple didn't even promise is unseemly. It's looking a gift horse in the mouth. It's complaining about the wrong ketchup when you're eating a free meal.
Now you're comparing next year's vaporware Nokia and complaining. Get a fucking grip.
As for "open", I am really tired of people with software on the brain trying to monopolize the words "open" and "free". The iPhone uses the standard cell network (GSM), the standard wireless Internet (Wi-Fi), plays the standard music and movies (MPEG-4 H.264/AAC), reads standardized HTML+CSS+JS with its Web browser, standardized email (POP/IMAP), calendars (iCal), photos (JPEG), and communicates with peripherals through USB2 and Bluetooth. Compare to other phones and then STFU.
The first thing you should ask someone with an opinion about the iPhone is how they like theirs. Nine times out of 10 they don't have one, but they are steamed about how music and movies were included but not bits and bytes. Get used to it. Most people are not computer nerds. More people listen to music than give a shit about installing software. Most people are drowning in unwanted I-T chores. It is a huge selling feature of the iPhone that Apple acts as your I-T staff.
If you want to add all the iPhone's features to your Windows Mobile, it's cheaper to just buy an iPhone than to purchase all the third-party software you'll need. And once you install third-party software on any phone it starts crashing. Who needs that?
There will likely be an SDK for both iPhone and iPod touch next year at WWDC 2008 and it is likely the apps will have to be approved by Apple and installed by iTunes. Why? Because that's what Apple's customers want: somebody to put a fucking leash on hackers. Right here in this article we see that there are hundreds of phones you can write software for. So go write software for them. When did hackers become so fucking whiny?
Most hobbyist developers are Web developers today.
You can make HTML+CSS+JS with any Unix to W3C standards and test in Firefox and your work will display beautifully on the iPhone or iPod, which also has an excellent HTML+CSS+JS debugger and Bonjour networking. Very low cost of entry, especially if you were going to buy an iPod or iPhone anyway, and the stuff you make also works on every Web 2.0 system. You can also include ISO MPEG-4 H.264/AAC media and you're compatible with everything, even Flash as of v10.
There is very little you can do natively on mobiles anyway, the ones with native apps all have no memory and bad operating system software, that's why there is so much interest in native iPhone apps, because it's the first phone with the resources. Put that aside for now and you notice that many iPhone Web apps are better than native apps for other phones.
> All [iPod Touch] needs is to be open enough that people can develop programs for it.
There is a Web 2.0 browser in there. All the PDA stuff has long ago been done on the Web. You can install Wikipedia by typing "wikipedia.org" into Safari on the iPod and bookmarking it. Or if it's already bookmarked on your computer it will sync over to the iPod and all you have to do is click on it. You can run Slashdot on the iPod, the full Slashdot with all of the features running and with typography also, unlike on the majority of computers. The PHP Manual is on the iPod already, a link away. That is so much better to have than being able to install a card game.
With W3C Web 2.0 and ISO MPEG-4 H.264/AAC and iPod dock connector it is a really nice pocket platform. Apple will also fill up the screen with really awesome features over the next couple of years and when the accessories catch up to the iPhone/iPod touch that should be a lot of fun.
But if you need it to be "open enough that people can develop programs for it" then you want the Handspring Visor Deluxe of course, without question.
Yes the hardware will be cheaper and the software will be cheaper, just like it is today on the Mac and iPod and iPhone.
If I gave you a blank PC and asked you to make it as much like a MacBook as possible you could spend the $1100 cost of the MacBook just on software for the PC. For example, to replace the six iLife applications with Adobe products is $149 per application, $894 and no OS yet, and you will need two of those to replace Mac OS X: both Windows and Unix and you'll have to dual boot and you still won't have modern typography, color management, audio processing, and much more.
An empty PC for $250 is just not that great of a deal. Doesn't do anything at all until you add either a lot of expensive software or a lot of expensive I-T hours. A $250 PC with the exact same features as an iPod touch would do well, but no such thing exists. Nobody is even close to that.
Touch is coming to the Mac. Look at the glass on the new iMac, that thing is touchscreen ready.
It has nothing to do with the Newton, though. There will be no stylus and no handwriting and no soups. This is just the evolution of the mouse.
Once you use an iPhone or iPod touch for a while you want to touch the Mac's screen, you want to scroll Web pages with a flick. When I make a Web page now I can't wait to see it on my iPhone so I can touch it, move it around. Even a graphics tablet doesn't feel as intimate and real.
Also, the error correction on the iPhone is amazing. On a large screen you will be able to touch small targets.
Look at the knobs and sliders in Logic and Final Cut, they are begging for touch. DJ's are begging for touch.
The $299 iPod runs full Web 2.0 sites, same as the $399 iPhone. Everyone who is not named Apple is copying that approach right now.
The idea that there is a separate mobile Web is anachronistic in the extreme. Even before the iPhone it was a stretch to think we were going to create a shadow Web for mobiles. Once you use an iPhone you can clearly see that we don't have to.
The whole idea of Web 2.0 development is you don't have to make multiple sites, you can build one site that scales. If you close your eyes to IE you see we are already living in the future. Mobiles are full citizens on the Web now, if you have a full Web browser.
Always on broadband network connection and no Web 2.0 browser? Bullshit. An anachronism.
> You: I want to buy this house! *hands realtor a check for the full price of the property*
> Realtor: Thanks.
> You: Can I have the deed to my new property?
> Realtor: Nope.
No, we're not talking about the deed. We're talking about the maintenance contract. It's quite common to buy a property such as an apartment and have to not only pay fees to keep the plumbing going but also have to abide by certain rules like you can't flush certain items. But I own this apartment you might say, I'll flush a hammer any time I please and I expect the maintenance people to fix it. Apple is saying if you flush a hammer you are on your own.
> This is bullshit by definition. The phones still work, so the software is not "damaged."
First of all, if the phone is unable to be updated to the next firmware reliably, then it does not "still work". Second, a cracked version of Photoshop that can do 100% of the image-editing functions but doesn't serialize is still damaged and Adobe won't upgrade it and nobody would expect them to.
Install one app on your Palm or Windows Mobile and kiss what little stability you had good-bye. Hack an iPhone and expect full warranty support and trouble-free firmware upgrades for life. Talk about a double standard.
> Apple isn't doing this because they dislike their customers; they are doing it because they don't respect their customers.
Apple is not even nearly big enough to fuck with anyone in the way you're implying. Get a grip. Apple respects their customers by making complete and finished products with a stable list of features that will work for the life of the product. Unlike every other phone, music player, and PC manufacturer. Unlike every single other one. That is why you hear Apple Monopoly, it is because they are working a full generation ahead of everyone else. Stop complaining about what you think they should do. Man up. Make your own music player, according to iSuppli you can do it for like $50 in parts. Should take you no longer than a weekend since you're a Slashdot reader.
The idea that there is a market for operating systems is a complete myth. It supports the myth that consumers choose Windows. They do not. There is a market for computing systems only, balls to browser.
The $299 iPod touch music player has a better Web browser than a $1299 Windows Vista PC. If there were a market for PC operating systems somebody would have eaten Microsoft's lunch before that could happen. The iPod touch is also more reliable than a Windows Vista PC.
The market is for applications, ways to customize the basic computer. For a Windows PC that means office tools. For an iPod touch it is music, movies, Web sites, Podcasts. Much higher-level stuff than the operating system.
If Apple published a CD with the iPod's operating system on it they would instantly have 100% of the "market" for iPod operating systems. That would just be Enron accounting, it's made-up. People aren't actually buying anything, there is no competition there, no supply and demand. The demand is for iPods. This is even more obvious now that CD/DVD/hard disk is giving way to more chips. The iPod is a chip. A CD with the iPod OS on it would soon enough be a chip. All you're doing is splitting the iPod into two non-functional halves so you can extort money out of the person who bought one half and needs the other. It's a waste of time because there is honest money to be made selling enhancements to a functioning iPod, or a functioning PC.
Microsoft has like a 70% profit margin on Windows, which on a technical level is a product that doesn't even work. How much better would Windows be if Microsoft had only taken a 25% profit on it? Why don't we ever hear complaints about that?
The cost-of-parts teardowns of Apple gear are tiresome. They don't take into account the cost of software development or product design, let alone warranty fulfillment and legal and localization, shipping, retail sales, demo units, so much else goes into a product like this other than just a bag of parts. Most of the work that brought us the new iPod nano happened inside heads at Apple. And being a publicly-traded company, you can plainly see what Apple's profits are, and they are always 25-30%. That includes really high-profit sales of software such as Final Cut Pro, and really low-profit sales such as personal computers. Yeah Dell wants that margin but they're not willing to work for it, they gave up all the high-profit software parts of their business to Microsoft. But when you combine Microsoft and Dell's profits on a PC purchased from Dell it matches up to Apple's profit on a Mac.
Why do the vast majority of all music players ever made suck so much if all you have to do to make an iPod is buy $85 in parts and hire someone to put it together? Why didn't the iPod nano with video come from Microsoft six months ago as Zune 2 while Apple was doing the iPhone? $85 is less than what Microsoft pay per unit to fix each Xbox.
And calling Apple a monopoly in music players conveniently ignores not only that there are hundreds of brands of music players but that every large manufacturer other than Apple is part of an anti-consumer cartel led by Microsoft, a convicted abusive monopolist. All the other music player manufacturers have tied one of their hands behind their backs and chained the other one to Microsoft. They are a failed monopoly that left one honest competitor with a exponentially better product.
The FUD that is going around today is just amazing. For the same US$149 as an iPod nano with video, you can buy a remaindered overstock Zune, one year old, sitting in a box with the battery aging, and from a two year old design, and requiring you to BUY another Microsoft product (Windows) just to make it work, and man that thing is HUGE.
You bought your PC for the operating system, because if you were buying the right OS for Adobe apps you'd have bought a Mac. Instead you're using Mac key shortcuts on software that was ported from the Mac, and you're missing color management and workflow integration just to name two things. And you gained viruses and worms and you have to dual boot to get at Unix. You're not hurting Adobe, you're hurting yourself.
At Photoshop conferences I always get asked by PC users "how long does Photoshop take to start up on the Mac?" and I'm like "I don't know, I just leave it running all the time" and one guy asked me once what "lightweight image editor" do I use when Photoshop is not running. Again, it's always running. Why would it not be running? "System resources" was the answer. If Photoshop is not running and you need an image editor, why wouldn't you run it? "Takes a long time to start up." Meanwhile at those same conferences, the Photoshop+Mac users are talking about airbrush techniques and color correction philosophies. Guess who is really getting work done?
> Seriously, why would you want to buy a Mac if you can have Ubuntu, apart from Adobe/Macromedia products?
That is crazy talk.
If your main application, the core of your computing, is a text editor, then Ubuntu is a gift because you can run your text editor on an entirely free stack and have a much better experience than Windows. For a Web engineer for example, the text editor, Apache, PHP, Firefox, and Unix are killer apps and all free.
But if your main application is anything with graphics or publishing or audio or video you are so much better on the Mac. That's where the tools are for that stuff. In the same way that Ubuntu makes your text editor better by adding Apache, PHP, Firefox, and Unix, the Mac adds all kinds of stuff to your Photoshop, or publishing tools, or music or audio tools. Your 32 channels of 24-bit 96kHz digital audio don't glitch on the Mac, and your 24-bit mixes play in all of your apps, and your virtual effects and instruments work in all of your apps, and you can run two Digital Audio Workstations at once (e.g. Logic and Live, which I do) and they share your pro audio hardware automatically and everything just works. You make music you don't do any IT, that is done at the factory. They spent the last 20 years building in support for pro audio, how long has Ubuntu been working in music and audio?
Photoshop and an Art Tablet and a Mac and a visual artist is on top of the world, takes above 20 minutes to set that all up from scratch, the majority of the time you are watching the Photoshop installer run. When you're done it all just works, even RGB color spaces are managed for you. And you can fly around the interface with the one-button Art Pen and no mouse. The Art Tablet is $299 and includes a coupon for the full Photoshop for $299 more, and a MacBook is $1200 and you want for nothing. That's the full pixel airbrush nirvana. If you have to take a second job to make up the difference from an Ubuntu system then do it. Even if you are a beginner, if you apply yourself for three years with that $1800 art toolkit you'll be working professionally with them somewhere for real money. The $1800 you paid will make your friend's college loans look ridiculous.
It's way past time to get over the idea that all computers are the same. They're more different than ever. Offering Ubuntu as an alternative system for media work, music and audio, video, graphics, publishing, that is just doing a huge disservice to those users, pretending Ubuntu has something to offer them. It's also doing a disservice to the Ubuntu project who are offering a really good system to an entirely different set of users.
This is just a cheaper clone of HD DVD, it still has all the same problems that make it very unattractive to content creators. For example, a per disc license fee paid to Microsoft.
Blu-Ray is way ahead of HD DVD, orders of magnitude, right now. Microsoft is the only one still truly behind HD DVD.
> The big question with the Treo is whether there are enough people who need more than a PDA but less than a full laptop
No, the smartphone IS the new notebook. The notebook is the new desktop. The desktop is the new workstation. The Treo is just way behind the curve because it still doesn't have a Unix OS and Web 2.0 browser or a UI that works on a tiny screen. It was supposed to start being a real computer about 2-3 years ago.
Why buy a Core 2 Duo in a big white box when you can have it in a MacBook for $1100? Very few reasons.
Once you have an iPhone (or similar future competitor with Unix and Web 2.0 and zooming UI) you look at a PC, even a notebook, as a workstation. You use it to run Photoshop, you use it to make stuff, but you don't take it everywhere with you, you don't open it up to do email when you're on the road, you don't open it up to look up something in Google or get a map or refer to some notes. You only get the notebook out to do a real computing session, like an hour or more of real work.
> Release details of a proposed product. Watch for reactions. See poor reactions and shelve product.
Look like incredible fools in front of the whole frickin' world.
Show your very poor hand to everyone so there's no need to bluff anymore.
Associate your brand with outrageous failure.
My iPhone is so good all by itself that I don't even go into the next room to do an email or look up a Web page. Palm should have spent time creating the iPhone first instead of apologizing for the Treo with the Folio. I can remember the demand for an "Apple PDA" back in 1999 and Apple didn't deliver on that for 8 years. An 8 year head start for Palm and the iPhone caught them flat-footed. Three months before the iPhone announcement Palm said don't look for anything special from Apple, smartphones are HARD, it will take Apple many years of trying to make something "decent". Way to have your head up your ass.
The fact that Palm is fucking around with shit like this when they have yet to even put a Unix core OS and Web 2.0 browser on their smartphone is pretty incredible. That's the Internet and the Web, two little trends that most people think are here to stay.
An iDisk set to sync does exactly this. Any work you do locally syncs in the background whenever there is a network connection.
This is a bullshit article written to publish the idea that a BlackBerry can show up an iPhone. It cannot, even if you love your push email you are lacking so much other stuff you need a notebook just to read the Web.
Why doesn't BlackBerry put a real Web browser in there to avoid the iPhone showing them up? When you consider necessary features, a Web 2.0 browser comes in way ahead of GPS let's be real. Even audio/video Podcasts are more important than GPS. That gives you radio, TV, training courses.
The lack of GPS in the iPhone is something hardcore nerds complain about so they can keep carrying their antique smart phones. It's not something that most people even know exists let alone need. Never mind that any moment there will be a plug-on GPS for the iPod dock connector and then what? Can you plug Firefox into a BlackBerry?
Over the same time a million plus HTML documents were added to the Web and we can actually read them. Both ODF and OOXML are completely and utterly obsolete and useless. If the user's work is stored by their tools as HTML+CSS+JS then that would enable the user, that would be something other than software programmers wanking away for their visions of world domination.
Even in 1993 there were plenty of boxes around with no Windows. It wasn't until Windows 95 that new PC's started up a GUI. So a new PC in 1993 started into DOS. You had to go out of your way to run Windows and it was controversial because most software was DOS anyway, so you gave up a lot of performance running the shifty 3.1 GUI.
There is an image-based scripting component you can use to do Preview stuff from AppleScript or script Photoshop or other third party app.
There are two different AppleWorks. The old one ran on Apple II, the current one which was just retired is the Mac one, formerly known as Claris Works. Old means back to Claris Works 1.0 not to Apple II.
The OS should always be hardware-integrated like the Mac because for 99% of users the entire hardware is useless without it. Users see the OS as part of their PC. When the OS fails they want it repaired and they don't want to pay because they already had an OS. Cracking Windows is seen like a restore from backup. They never for a moment consider that naked is the natural state of their PC. Same as turned off is not seen as the natural state.
As we go to no moving parts the OS is going to disappear into the hardware like firmware, it will come on a chip on the mobo, and it will finally be where users want it instead of how Bill Gates and Richard Stallman think it should be done. Ubuntu should not come on a DVD, it should come on a PC. When the PC is one chip what will be the rationale for selling it with some assembly required?
Music is recorded in 24-bits and then dithered for CD. With file-based music there is an upgrade path to get the full 24-bit audio to the listener within a few years from now. With CD you have been listening to less than half the music for years now. I have a small project studio and it is 24-bit 192 kHz not 16-bit 44.1 kHz like CD.
What about AM radio? Or even FM you are missing a lot. What about the horrendous scratches on LP's? How about the music you miss when a CD skips?
An MPEG-4 AAC 256 kbit/s track aka iTunes Plus is the single best consumer audio format ever. It has the fidelity of a CD without the skips. We got used to the skips so much that people often ignore them in a direct comparison bit that is bullshit. Go into an arbitrary CD collection and play a CD and it will skip at least once almost certainly. Every CD collection always has a song in it somewhere that won't play because of scratches. That is no damn good once you get used to an iPod. Another way the MPEG wins is in the amount of music a listener hears compared to CD. People turn on music and leave it
This article is so much bullshit.