The iPhone was billed as a combination of phone, Internet communicator, and widescreen video iPod. It's a phone with a piece of the Mac and a piece of the iPod in it. The catch is that it's a piece of the next-generation Mac and next-generation iPod. It is OS X Leopard with zooming UI and iPod with widescreen and Wi-Fi.
I think you will see iPhone in June and then after that the entire Mac and iPod lines will be transformed to be more iPhone-like as quickly as Apple can possibly do it.
The iPhone does not have a hardware discount... they could sell it unlocked for $499/$599 so you can feel free to extrapolate what they would have to adjust to make a $399 iPod video with 100 GB disk in there. It is too easy but it can wait until October.
If only MS had instead done the hard work necessary to create an actual QuickTime competitor, then they would be in a position to actually compete.
All of Microsoft and Real's audio and video tools rely on QuickTime just like everybody else's. There is no content creator side to MS or Real tools. It is just a way to convert your standardized content (e.g. MPEG-4 H.264 AAC) into stuff that only plays on Windows or only streams from Real servers. There is no point to this other than Microsoft and Real exploiting the technical ignorance of their customers for fun and profit.
The iPod video that has been selling for US$349 for like a year now has an 80 GB disk in it. I know 100 GB sounds like a lot more, but it is not really. The 100 GB model will likely also be US$349. All iPod video have a video out, and there are a lot of accessories you can do it however you like.
> I've always thought that the iPod hasn't made any huge improvements over the years since it released the original iPod.
I had the first one, and also the 2G when it came out, and then the 2G lasted for four years of every day use, so I only recently retired it for a 2G iPod nano. It was a huge change. Everything is improved in every way.
The nano has about the same storage (8 GB instead of 10 GB) but it has no moving parts, its battery lasts about twice as long, it has a color screen, the controls are better (all on one control), it has a CD-quality voice recorder instead of AM-quality, it has way more accessories, and it is about 20% of the size and weight. The nano is also the cheapest iPod I ever had, it is $50 cheaper than 2G iPod and $150 cheaper than the original iPod. And it shows photos also which it will get out of iPhoto automatically.
> It seems to me that apple will resist having wi-fi in the ipod because it would break their grip on the interface to the ipod
No. Wi-Fi "n" is how you stream stuff from your Mac or iPod or iPhone to your AppleTV. Right now you can stream content from Macs or PC's but iPhone and Wi-Fi iPod will follow.
Wi-Fi is not going to be so much to replace the USB connection, because in the first place that is primarily the iPod's charger, the data connection piggybacks on there, and also the USB data connection is 4-8 times faster than Wi-Fi "n" under ideal conditions and the content files are getting bigger, not smaller. For loading your iPod or iPhone with media and charging its battery you will still be better with USB. However, when you drop by a friend's place and they have a 50 inch TV with AppleTV and you want to show them a 5 minute clip off your 100 GB iPod, then you will simply stream it over Wi-Fi that is exactly what you want.
> They have a great revenue stream with all of the third party gadgets that connect to the dock connector and if they gave > the ipod a meaningful wi-fi connection, it would be a lot easier to make such additions without paying a licensing fee to apple
The problem with this argument is that it does not hold technical water. The reason that iPod dock accessories are done through Apple is that 100% of the related software is distributed by Apple as part of the iPod's core software package. When you update your iPod to its newest firmware you are also getting the latest version of Nike iPod Sport Kit software and the latest voice recording software, even if you don't have matching iPod dock hardware. The reason for this is so that you or any iPod user can buy a Nike iPod Sport Kit and there is no CD/DVD or software installer in there, you can plug it on and use it right away, or loan it to a friend, or borrow one from a friend, there is no IT overhead to using iPod dock accessories.
If you get your head out of the PC market and into consumer audio then it is easy to see that the above is a technical feature way over and above any opportunity Apple might have for licensing fees. It is just not acceptable to ship stuff "some assembly required" in the consumer market.
> Well that obviously isn't the case given the number of subscription services which already exist, typically based on MS-DRM
Those services barely exist, and have no customers. They are not even on the level of the 8-track tape, they are less than a footnote in the history of recorded audio. Another attempt at subscription radio that failed miserably like all others.
There is this massive hubris in the tech industry in which someone like Bill Gates thinks that because music is digital and PC crapware is digital therefore Bill Gates knows something about music. He does not. People were recording, selling, buying, collecting, mixing music way before Bill Gates started building typewriters.
Nobody has ever made any money selling subscription content except maybe HBO and they have to generate a lot of original content to get this done. They have to have exclusive stuff that is not available anywhere else. People keep re-upping their HBO subscriptions to see the next season of the Sopranos when it is fresh. XM and Sirius have original content but they are trying to merge because the market for subscription audio is so small. And they are streaming dozens of channels to you in real-time by satellite, still people don't want to pay for radio.
Where are you going to find the music artists who want to have all of their music be exclusive downloads at the Zune store? It is to laugh. And Microsoft is not even competent in their core business, where they have almost zero consumer customers, and have demonstrated their incompetence in music and audio at least twice with PlaysForSure and Zune, not to mention Windows Media. With Windows Media they copied MP3 so precisely that they infringed patents and had to pay billions and the irony is that MP3 was 10 years obsolete at that time, they should have licensed AAC like EVERYBODY ELSE IN THE WORLD and they would have had better audio quality, better compatibility, and it would have been much cheaper for their users, and they wouldn't have had to go to court yet again because they copied someone else's technology. So they are not just seen as incompetent in the music industry, but also as bozos. And nobody in music and audio needs them one bit.
Even if you use a Microsoft or Real streaming server, the content is ultimately stored in QuickTime. MPEG-4 is the open standardization of the QuickTime file format, and using the standard H.264 video codec and AAC audio codec you can make a movie that plays everywhere. Not just on a personal computer, but also on iPod or PlayStation. This kind of movie is the successor to the DVD, whether you play it off a next-generation optical disc format such as Blu-Ray or not. The MPEG-4 container this movie is wrapped in is identical to the QuickTime file format and can hold any kind of media QuickTime can hold, including Flash and Java. So there is no question how you can include multimedia content in the media players of today and the future. These standards are years old.
The problem with Silverlight is if it only plays on a personal computer it is already obsolete. Even if it played on Windows, Mac and Linux personal computers, still no good. There are too many phones and iPods and various other devices that have the ability to play audio and video (not to mention TV's), and these devices all have H.264/AAC decoders in them. There is no room for multiple codecs and no general purpose CPU to decode them. These are DVD players which are data-storage agnostic.
People say why doesn't AppleTV let you watch YouTube in addition to streaming movie trailers from Apple.com? Because the AppleTV decodes H.264 video in its GPU and YouTube is not H.264. The CPU in the AppleTV is under clocked to stay cool, it would have to run all the time to decode YouTube and it would have to be 2-3x the speed also. YouTube is not iPod-ready, not handheld-ready, not living room -ready by any stretch. It's very PC-oriented.
If MS can't sell WMA then how can they sell Silverlight? It is foolish. Even if every iPod user didn't already have QuickTime on their Mac or PC it would be a really hard sell to content creators to be bothered with multimedia content that is personal computer only. There are two billion phones that all need to be replaced in the next two years and the iPhone is kicking off the true handheld Web by reading actual Web pages plus MPEG-4 audio video. It is way too late for you if you are talking about what format audio and video is going to be stored and streamed in. It is also way too late for MS to get a fair chance with content creators when their greatest contribution so far has been to fuck with QuickTime at every chance they get.
That kind of thinking is pointless. The iPhone is every bit the computer that the Mac is. Pissing on it because it is a "phone" is like pissing on the Mac because it is easy to use. Says nothing about how good it is.
Apple did not remove "computer" from their name in order to start making non-computers. It is because "computer" means NOTHING today just as "cyber" means nothing, just like "electro" means NOTHING. Everything today is a computer, everything is online, everything is electrical.
In 1999 I bought a Power Mac G3:
G3/300 MHz 256 MB RAM 6 GB disk No UNIX!
The iPhone has better specs in the computer department than a Mac workstation from less than 10 years ago. So we should not look down our noses at iPhone as if it is not actually a Mac.
> At MacWorld 2007, not a single Mac product was announced.
If iPhone was called "MacPhone" then would that make it all OK? The phone with a Mac in it?
> Sony has DVD players + movie rights. Apple has iTunesDRM/ipod + music rights
Apple doesn't have any music rights.
FairPlay DRM is only in iTunes Store, and technically only on video. The audio is sold either without DRM, or with DRM that it is both easy and legal to crack (you burn an audio CD). Over 90% of the music on iPods comes from CD which has no DRM. There are also Podcasts, which are free and have no DRM.
> Apple loves it protected DRM formats
They love them so much that Steve Jobs came out against them, and you have always been able to burn FairPlay to CD to break it.
> and is currently selling a media box that wont even play xvid/divx. Thats incredible.
Those are not standardized codecs. The only purpose these serve is to enable you to avoid paying for standardized encoders. However, an entire collection of standard encoders costs $29 from Apple. Then the movies you make can be shared across many platforms and will be playable for many years to come also.
The QuickTime file format has been standardized as MPEG-4. The MPEG-4 container is a QuickTime container. However if you fill it with non-standard codecs you have defeated the purpose of the standardization. The standard video codec is H.264 and the standard audio codec is AAC. This kind of movie is the replacement for the MPEG-2 movies you find on DVD. Not Apple's replacement, the WORLD'S replacement. This happened a long time ago. The AppleTV is a Blu-Ray or HD DVD with the optical disc replaced by Wi-Fi "n" and iTunes integration. Therefore it prefers the same standard codec that Blu-Ray and HD DVD prefer, the same one that plays on iPod and PSP, the same one that plays on Mac and PC and Wii and many phones also.
The sooner you get on board MPEG-4 the sooner you will stop wasting CPU cycles making throwaway movies.
It's important to note that since video encoding is lossy you lose quality each time you encode or transcode, so it is damaging to the overall quality of your movie collection to encode it into weird formats. Going DVD to something weird and then later transcoding the weird movie to MPEG-4 is going to be much lower quality than going DVD to MPEG-4.
> I wouldnt be surprised if they stopped making computers in 10 years or just sold vanity windows laptops like Sony does with the VAIO line.
I would be very surprised by this. The Mac is the development environment for iPod and iPhone. Even before iTunes and iPod took over consumer audio, the Mac has always been the pro audio computer. There is nothing on other systems like CoreAudio on the Mac. Suggesting that a music and audio person switch to Windows is like recommending Linux to a typographer.
Also the Mac is the one and only computer ever that consumers can use. I have friends who use Macs to do all kinds of computing tasks, including making movies and DVD's, yet they will ask me to install an app on their Mac because they've never done it. It's drag and drop but they just don't know how. Yet they are able to do photos, music, movies just like everybody wants to do today rather than DLL Hell or BSOD.
Right now, I am more inclined to say that 10 years from now, 50% of personal computers will be Macs, instead of saying there will be no Mac.
My bet for top secret feature is new Macs with Leopard and multi-touch screens to go with their new zoomable interfaces.
If you have ever seen Apple Logic it is crying out for a touch screen. Acres of on screen knobs, sliders, buttons, switches. It is not the same UI as 1984. A multi-touch Mac would be very hip with DJ's and it is something that other PC makers can't match because Windows development is going nowhere.
> These are very exciting times in the OS world. We are *finally* beginning to get an OS that really lives up to everything > an OS should be: stable, secure, great UI, intuitive, pleasant.
And ships working and tested inside hardware instead of on a $400 optical disc.
> Darwin/Mac OS X is more a descendant of NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP than of MacOS.
That is a foolish thing to say for many reasons.
First, even if it were true, so what? NeXT began with a project called "Big Mac" at Apple which Steve Jobs liberated as a severance package. It was the future of the Mac from the very beginning.
Second, NeXT users have already gotten tired of complaining about how little NeXT was left in Mac OS X. If they didn't judge Mac OS X to be "more NeXT than Mac" then who the fuck are you to say?
Third, NeXT-based Mac OS X development is 1988-1996 (8 years) and in 1996 the OS was even behind in keeping the Unix tools up to date because of a couple of years of uncertainty preceding the Apple merger. Apple-based Mac OS X development since then is 1996-2007 (11 years) plus throw in 12 years of Mac OS development Apple brought with them, including little things like QuickTime and an API that runs Photoshop.
> If you want to count all the service packs, MS made around 12 major+minor releases, Apple almost 40. But that's not very significant, > since Microsoft packs more into each service pack than Apple does
That is such a thing that you can only say if you're willing to pull stuff out of your ass. There is no rational human being who can compare the patching situation on Mac or Windows and come out saying Microsoft has got it right. Macs patch themselves every three months and it just works and there are no viruses or malware. Windows is so hard to patch it is an issue with IT staff, and your box can be owned so easily.
You also missed the fact that Tiger is two systems. There is one for Intel and one for PowerPC, shipped at separate times and on separate discs, for different computing architectures, different firmware, different low-level disk format.
> Am I supposed to be impressed by Apple or something?
If you are going to list service packs, then you should list the Apple equivalent, which is released every 2-3 months and adds a minor-minor version. For example, three months ago I was running "v10.4.8" and now I'm running "v10.4.9". The computers update themselves automatically in this way. There have been well over 50 Mac OS X versions and it has only existed since March 2001.
Also if you are going to list server operating systems, you should include Mac OS X Server releases, which are 1:1 to the client OS (so add 50) and extend also back to 1999.
And Tiger is actually two operating systems: "Tiger (PowerPC)" and "Tiger (Intel)" which shipped at separate times and on separate discs. So there were 20 Tiger releases, not 10. In Leopard we are back to one system for both architectures.
> Well, they kind of have to with how they stop offering support for software over three years.
You have it backwards. They support the hardware with new OS releases for 5-7 years. So you can buy a new OS update from Apple, e.g. Leopard, and install it on any Mac from the past 5-7 years. Typically it will be notebooks from the past 5 years and you get a little extra with desktops.
In other words, the point is not to enable you to run one version of software on different hardware for many years, but to provide many current software versions for the same hardware for many years. When you think about it, the software should change more than the hardware, don't you think? It is the soft part.
> It may be more that the iPhone is a new flagship product, and Leopard needs to be consistent with any new UI elements > introduced in the iPhone. It wouldn't do for the iPhone to usher in a new generation of eye candy, followed by a Leopard > with the old look. But that wouldn't be a technical reason for such a big delay.
Actually, interface graphics are just as technical as anything else in the system.
Leopard is the first Mac OS where resolution-independent display is the default, so all of the interface graphics had to be redone. This is also true for third-party apps. This would be a very good reason for things to be delayed. It is really significant because the display becomes more like a print device than a display in this model.
One example of the kind of work that this involves is that icons are 512x512 pixels on Leopard. If you don't replace the 128x128 pixel icon on your Mac app with a new one your icon is going to be upscaled and look like shit. Same with all your toolbar icons and custom graphics, they all have to be "print" resolution now, not screen resolution.
> Adding developers and QA towards the end of a project lifecycle usually means disaster.
No, this is the opposite situation, the exception that proves the rule.
Apple didn't take "Final Cut developers" and assign them to the iPhone... they took "Quartz developers" and moved them from Mac Quartz to iPhone Quartz. Quartz is CoreGraphics, the PDF-based resolution-independent display layer of OS X. They may not even have "moved them"... they may have just delayed them from leaving iPhone to work on Mac, meaning the Mac side had to be delayed also.
The "beta" of resolution-independence is part of Mac OS X Tiger. As much as the iPhone benefits from it, I think the 30 inch display benefits more. With the iPhone, you could cheat because you are almost always scaling things down, so you could just throw pixels away and still have high quality, but on the Mac we need to scale things up. Core Animation is also the next obvious evolution of the OS X display layer, they just added layers and a way to animate them to enable every developer to do something like Exposé in their app.
I don't know that specific features coming to OS X will be the main benefit of iPhone to the Mac.
I think there will be more benefit from simply adding more OS X users and development funds. For example if you're selling 1:1 iPhones and Macs then you have double the user base for OS X.
Also, people will start to want their Web sites to be "iPhone compatible" which means WebKit compatible which means Mac compatible as well as W3C compatible and of course that means that it is not built solely to run in Explorer.
The iPhone also uses Cocoa as its API so a popular iPhone could mean more Cocoa developers. However, apps that you install are not the point of iPhone at all compared to Web apps or iPod accessories.
There is already a program where if you buy a new Mac and Apple ships a new OS within a certain time period you get the new OS for free. That goes back a long time. At no time does Apple want you to delay a Mac purchase for an OS update.
> The rush for Leopard is based primarily upon the fact that it will make Apple far more money than the iPhone can ever hope to bring in.
No, I don't think that's the case. You could say that "OS X" is a more important project for Apple than the iPhone, because OS X is a significant part of the iPhone and also the Mac. There is no iPhone without OS X because there is no other system that can provide the features. However, I don't think you can say that "Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard Upgrade For Existing Systems" is more important than the iPhone, and that is really what is being delayed. We are talking about existing Mac OS X users having to wait three months for their updater, and about new Macs shipping with Tiger for three months longer than expected. It is very little impact.
However, after showing the iPhone in January to hundreds of millions of people and with hundreds of millions of dollars in free publicity (think 100 Super Bowl commercials worth), and then saying "wait until June", they really do have to show up in June with an iPhone to sell. If they don't that casts doubt on the whole project and voids some of that free publicity. Also with a product that has this many new features that have not ever been shipped to consumers you don't want to cast that kind of doubt.
> The phone as announced lacks a good number of the features that the majority of phone users use. Contrast that to the iPod.
SAME. The iPod is famous for "missing features" such as voice recorder and FM tuner. I had a Creative Nomad in 1999 that had voice recorder, FM tuner and was sized like an iPod mini. In 2001 I replaced it with an iPod that did not have those things.
Phones suck and everybody knows it. A computer maker is about to give the phone business a good ass-kicking. Over a billion phones shipped and no pocket Web browser yet that is ridiculous.
> Two-thirds of the people in my office drop kicked their PCs and bought Macs in the last couple of years. That's a trend I'm watching > first hand.
The first Intel-based Macs are going to "Intel users" in the same way the first year of Mac OS X was all about Unix users. I see lots of your traditional Mac users still running G5's and happy to do so until they buy a new system with Leopard on it.
Also, Photoshop CS2 is faster on a G5 right now than on an Intel Mac, so until Photoshop CS3 there is actually a technical reason holding Mac users back from going Intel, and yet Apple is selling more machines than ever, even with a new OS on the horizon since it was announced June 2006.
> Indeed, if you were really talking about hardware, I'm curious why you said "Windows machine"?
The "Windows machine" is the generic PC. Yes, a really, really, really small number of users run another OS on there, but on the other hand, ALL name-brand vendors are under controversial contracts with Microsoft to sell Windows with every machine whether the customer wants it or not. Lots of court cases here of course.
MS used to have an exclusive contract with IBM and then Compaq cloned the PC and so MS recreated their exclusive contract with Compaq and Dell and HP and everyone else to keep the status quo. However they had to break a lot of laws to do this and changed the market dramatically. Everyone pretends that it is a generic PC upon which the highly technically savvy user of course DEMANDS the right to install whatever operating system he or she should find immediately suitable to their computing tasks, but the reality is that it is a Windows box. That's what Bill Gates calls it and he calls it.
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The iPhone was billed as a combination of phone, Internet communicator, and widescreen video iPod. It's a phone with a piece of the Mac and a piece of the iPod in it. The catch is that it's a piece of the next-generation Mac and next-generation iPod. It is OS X Leopard with zooming UI and iPod with widescreen and Wi-Fi.
... they could sell it unlocked for $499/$599 so you can feel free to extrapolate what they would have to adjust to make a $399 iPod video with 100 GB disk in there. It is too easy but it can wait until October.
I think you will see iPhone in June and then after that the entire Mac and iPod lines will be transformed to be more iPhone-like as quickly as Apple can possibly do it.
The iPhone does not have a hardware discount
If only MS had instead done the hard work necessary to create an actual QuickTime competitor, then they would be in a position to actually compete.
All of Microsoft and Real's audio and video tools rely on QuickTime just like everybody else's. There is no content creator side to MS or Real tools. It is just a way to convert your standardized content (e.g. MPEG-4 H.264 AAC) into stuff that only plays on Windows or only streams from Real servers. There is no point to this other than Microsoft and Real exploiting the technical ignorance of their customers for fun and profit.
The iPod video that has been selling for US$349 for like a year now has an 80 GB disk in it. I know 100 GB sounds like a lot more, but it is not really. The 100 GB model will likely also be US$349. All iPod video have a video out, and there are a lot of accessories you can do it however you like.
> I've always thought that the iPod hasn't made any huge improvements over the years since it released the original iPod.
I had the first one, and also the 2G when it came out, and then the 2G lasted for four years of every day use, so I only recently retired it for a 2G iPod nano. It was a huge change. Everything is improved in every way.
The nano has about the same storage (8 GB instead of 10 GB) but it has no moving parts, its battery lasts about twice as long, it has a color screen, the controls are better (all on one control), it has a CD-quality voice recorder instead of AM-quality, it has way more accessories, and it is about 20% of the size and weight. The nano is also the cheapest iPod I ever had, it is $50 cheaper than 2G iPod and $150 cheaper than the original iPod. And it shows photos also which it will get out of iPhoto automatically.
> It seems to me that apple will resist having wi-fi in the ipod because it would break their grip on the interface to the ipod
No. Wi-Fi "n" is how you stream stuff from your Mac or iPod or iPhone to your AppleTV. Right now you can stream content from Macs or PC's but iPhone and Wi-Fi iPod will follow.
Wi-Fi is not going to be so much to replace the USB connection, because in the first place that is primarily the iPod's charger, the data connection piggybacks on there, and also the USB data connection is 4-8 times faster than Wi-Fi "n" under ideal conditions and the content files are getting bigger, not smaller. For loading your iPod or iPhone with media and charging its battery you will still be better with USB. However, when you drop by a friend's place and they have a 50 inch TV with AppleTV and you want to show them a 5 minute clip off your 100 GB iPod, then you will simply stream it over Wi-Fi that is exactly what you want.
> They have a great revenue stream with all of the third party gadgets that connect to the dock connector and if they gave
> the ipod a meaningful wi-fi connection, it would be a lot easier to make such additions without paying a licensing fee to apple
The problem with this argument is that it does not hold technical water. The reason that iPod dock accessories are done through Apple is that 100% of the related software is distributed by Apple as part of the iPod's core software package. When you update your iPod to its newest firmware you are also getting the latest version of Nike iPod Sport Kit software and the latest voice recording software, even if you don't have matching iPod dock hardware. The reason for this is so that you or any iPod user can buy a Nike iPod Sport Kit and there is no CD/DVD or software installer in there, you can plug it on and use it right away, or loan it to a friend, or borrow one from a friend, there is no IT overhead to using iPod dock accessories.
If you get your head out of the PC market and into consumer audio then it is easy to see that the above is a technical feature way over and above any opportunity Apple might have for licensing fees. It is just not acceptable to ship stuff "some assembly required" in the consumer market.
> Well that obviously isn't the case given the number of subscription services which already exist, typically based on MS-DRM
Those services barely exist, and have no customers. They are not even on the level of the 8-track tape, they are less than a footnote in the history of recorded audio. Another attempt at subscription radio that failed miserably like all others.
There is this massive hubris in the tech industry in which someone like Bill Gates thinks that because music is digital and PC crapware is digital therefore Bill Gates knows something about music. He does not. People were recording, selling, buying, collecting, mixing music way before Bill Gates started building typewriters.
Nobody has ever made any money selling subscription content except maybe HBO and they have to generate a lot of original content to get this done. They have to have exclusive stuff that is not available anywhere else. People keep re-upping their HBO subscriptions to see the next season of the Sopranos when it is fresh. XM and Sirius have original content but they are trying to merge because the market for subscription audio is so small. And they are streaming dozens of channels to you in real-time by satellite, still people don't want to pay for radio.
Where are you going to find the music artists who want to have all of their music be exclusive downloads at the Zune store? It is to laugh. And Microsoft is not even competent in their core business, where they have almost zero consumer customers, and have demonstrated their incompetence in music and audio at least twice with PlaysForSure and Zune, not to mention Windows Media. With Windows Media they copied MP3 so precisely that they infringed patents and had to pay billions and the irony is that MP3 was 10 years obsolete at that time, they should have licensed AAC like EVERYBODY ELSE IN THE WORLD and they would have had better audio quality, better compatibility, and it would have been much cheaper for their users, and they wouldn't have had to go to court yet again because they copied someone else's technology. So they are not just seen as incompetent in the music industry, but also as bozos. And nobody in music and audio needs them one bit.
If your Web site is "IE only" then you are not actually on the Web. You are just using the Internet to deploy your client/server Windows application.
Sometime next month the Movielink CEO will buy an iPhone and be surprised that Movielink does not show up on it.
Even if you use a Microsoft or Real streaming server, the content is ultimately stored in QuickTime. MPEG-4 is the open standardization of the QuickTime file format, and using the standard H.264 video codec and AAC audio codec you can make a movie that plays everywhere. Not just on a personal computer, but also on iPod or PlayStation. This kind of movie is the successor to the DVD, whether you play it off a next-generation optical disc format such as Blu-Ray or not. The MPEG-4 container this movie is wrapped in is identical to the QuickTime file format and can hold any kind of media QuickTime can hold, including Flash and Java. So there is no question how you can include multimedia content in the media players of today and the future. These standards are years old.
The problem with Silverlight is if it only plays on a personal computer it is already obsolete. Even if it played on Windows, Mac and Linux personal computers, still no good. There are too many phones and iPods and various other devices that have the ability to play audio and video (not to mention TV's), and these devices all have H.264/AAC decoders in them. There is no room for multiple codecs and no general purpose CPU to decode them. These are DVD players which are data-storage agnostic.
People say why doesn't AppleTV let you watch YouTube in addition to streaming movie trailers from Apple.com? Because the AppleTV decodes H.264 video in its GPU and YouTube is not H.264. The CPU in the AppleTV is under clocked to stay cool, it would have to run all the time to decode YouTube and it would have to be 2-3x the speed also. YouTube is not iPod-ready, not handheld-ready, not living room -ready by any stretch. It's very PC-oriented.
If MS can't sell WMA then how can they sell Silverlight? It is foolish. Even if every iPod user didn't already have QuickTime on their Mac or PC it would be a really hard sell to content creators to be bothered with multimedia content that is personal computer only. There are two billion phones that all need to be replaced in the next two years and the iPhone is kicking off the true handheld Web by reading actual Web pages plus MPEG-4 audio video. It is way too late for you if you are talking about what format audio and video is going to be stored and streamed in. It is also way too late for MS to get a fair chance with content creators when their greatest contribution so far has been to fuck with QuickTime at every chance they get.
> OS X version -1 was OPENSTEP 4.2.
> drove a 1120x832 display with 4K colours
You don't even have to go that far back, though. The iPhone is equivalent to a notebook computer from around 2000 in the typical specs.
> Now OS X is delayed to work on a phone.
That kind of thinking is pointless. The iPhone is every bit the computer that the Mac is. Pissing on it because it is a "phone" is like pissing on the Mac because it is easy to use. Says nothing about how good it is.
Apple did not remove "computer" from their name in order to start making non-computers. It is because "computer" means NOTHING today just as "cyber" means nothing, just like "electro" means NOTHING. Everything today is a computer, everything is online, everything is electrical.
In 1999 I bought a Power Mac G3:
G3/300 MHz
256 MB RAM
6 GB disk
No UNIX!
The iPhone has better specs in the computer department than a Mac workstation from less than 10 years ago. So we should not look down our noses at iPhone as if it is not actually a Mac.
> At MacWorld 2007, not a single Mac product was announced.
If iPhone was called "MacPhone" then would that make it all OK? The phone with a Mac in it?
> Sony has DVD players + movie rights. Apple has iTunesDRM/ipod + music rights
Apple doesn't have any music rights.
FairPlay DRM is only in iTunes Store, and technically only on video. The audio is sold either without DRM, or with DRM that it is both easy and legal to crack (you burn an audio CD). Over 90% of the music on iPods comes from CD which has no DRM. There are also Podcasts, which are free and have no DRM.
> Apple loves it protected DRM formats
They love them so much that Steve Jobs came out against them, and you have always been able to burn FairPlay to CD to break it.
> and is currently selling a media box that wont even play xvid/divx. Thats incredible.
Those are not standardized codecs. The only purpose these serve is to enable you to avoid paying for standardized encoders. However, an entire collection of standard encoders costs $29 from Apple. Then the movies you make can be shared across many platforms and will be playable for many years to come also.
The QuickTime file format has been standardized as MPEG-4. The MPEG-4 container is a QuickTime container. However if you fill it with non-standard codecs you have defeated the purpose of the standardization. The standard video codec is H.264 and the standard audio codec is AAC. This kind of movie is the replacement for the MPEG-2 movies you find on DVD. Not Apple's replacement, the WORLD'S replacement. This happened a long time ago. The AppleTV is a Blu-Ray or HD DVD with the optical disc replaced by Wi-Fi "n" and iTunes integration. Therefore it prefers the same standard codec that Blu-Ray and HD DVD prefer, the same one that plays on iPod and PSP, the same one that plays on Mac and PC and Wii and many phones also.
The sooner you get on board MPEG-4 the sooner you will stop wasting CPU cycles making throwaway movies.
It's important to note that since video encoding is lossy you lose quality each time you encode or transcode, so it is damaging to the overall quality of your movie collection to encode it into weird formats. Going DVD to something weird and then later transcoding the weird movie to MPEG-4 is going to be much lower quality than going DVD to MPEG-4.
> I wouldnt be surprised if they stopped making computers in 10 years or just sold vanity windows laptops like Sony does with the VAIO line.
I would be very surprised by this. The Mac is the development environment for iPod and iPhone. Even before iTunes and iPod took over consumer audio, the Mac has always been the pro audio computer. There is nothing on other systems like CoreAudio on the Mac. Suggesting that a music and audio person switch to Windows is like recommending Linux to a typographer.
Also the Mac is the one and only computer ever that consumers can use. I have friends who use Macs to do all kinds of computing tasks, including making movies and DVD's, yet they will ask me to install an app on their Mac because they've never done it. It's drag and drop but they just don't know how. Yet they are able to do photos, music, movies just like everybody wants to do today rather than DLL Hell or BSOD.
Right now, I am more inclined to say that 10 years from now, 50% of personal computers will be Macs, instead of saying there will be no Mac.
My bet for top secret feature is new Macs with Leopard and multi-touch screens to go with their new zoomable interfaces.
If you have ever seen Apple Logic it is crying out for a touch screen. Acres of on screen knobs, sliders, buttons, switches. It is not the same UI as 1984. A multi-touch Mac would be very hip with DJ's and it is something that other PC makers can't match because Windows development is going nowhere.
> These are very exciting times in the OS world. We are *finally* beginning to get an OS that really lives up to everything
> an OS should be: stable, secure, great UI, intuitive, pleasant.
And ships working and tested inside hardware instead of on a $400 optical disc.
> Glad you could read my post, my typing really sucks lately (Slashdot needs a spelling check). ;-)
Use Safari on a Mac or iPhone and you get real-time spell checking in Slashdot.
> It's a problem for schools and universities though, since it won't be ready in time for the new school year.
No, that's a feature for schools and universities who are always behind.
> Darwin/Mac OS X is more a descendant of NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP than of MacOS.
That is a foolish thing to say for many reasons.
First, even if it were true, so what? NeXT began with a project called "Big Mac" at Apple which Steve Jobs liberated as a severance package. It was the future of the Mac from the very beginning.
Second, NeXT users have already gotten tired of complaining about how little NeXT was left in Mac OS X. If they didn't judge Mac OS X to be "more NeXT than Mac" then who the fuck are you to say?
Third, NeXT-based Mac OS X development is 1988-1996 (8 years) and in 1996 the OS was even behind in keeping the Unix tools up to date because of a couple of years of uncertainty preceding the Apple merger. Apple-based Mac OS X development since then is 1996-2007 (11 years) plus throw in 12 years of Mac OS development Apple brought with them, including little things like QuickTime and an API that runs Photoshop.
> If you want to count all the service packs, MS made around 12 major+minor releases, Apple almost 40. But that's not very significant,
> since Microsoft packs more into each service pack than Apple does
That is such a thing that you can only say if you're willing to pull stuff out of your ass. There is no rational human being who can compare the patching situation on Mac or Windows and come out saying Microsoft has got it right. Macs patch themselves every three months and it just works and there are no viruses or malware. Windows is so hard to patch it is an issue with IT staff, and your box can be owned so easily.
You also missed the fact that Tiger is two systems. There is one for Intel and one for PowerPC, shipped at separate times and on separate discs, for different computing architectures, different firmware, different low-level disk format.
> Hm, since 2000, Microsoft's equilivant "intermediate releases" were:
> Win2k SP1, WinXP, Win2k SP2, WinXP sp1, Win2k SP3, Win2k3, WinXP SP2, Win2k3 sp1, Win2k SP3, win2k3 sp2, WinVista etc.
> Am I supposed to be impressed by Apple or something?
If you are going to list service packs, then you should list the Apple equivalent, which is released every 2-3 months and adds a minor-minor version. For example, three months ago I was running "v10.4.8" and now I'm running "v10.4.9". The computers update themselves automatically in this way. There have been well over 50 Mac OS X versions and it has only existed since March 2001.
Also if you are going to list server operating systems, you should include Mac OS X Server releases, which are 1:1 to the client OS (so add 50) and extend also back to 1999.
And Tiger is actually two operating systems: "Tiger (PowerPC)" and "Tiger (Intel)" which shipped at separate times and on separate discs. So there were 20 Tiger releases, not 10. In Leopard we are back to one system for both architectures.
> Well, they kind of have to with how they stop offering support for software over three years.
You have it backwards. They support the hardware with new OS releases for 5-7 years. So you can buy a new OS update from Apple, e.g. Leopard, and install it on any Mac from the past 5-7 years. Typically it will be notebooks from the past 5 years and you get a little extra with desktops.
In other words, the point is not to enable you to run one version of software on different hardware for many years, but to provide many current software versions for the same hardware for many years. When you think about it, the software should change more than the hardware, don't you think? It is the soft part.
> It may be more that the iPhone is a new flagship product, and Leopard needs to be consistent with any new UI elements
> introduced in the iPhone. It wouldn't do for the iPhone to usher in a new generation of eye candy, followed by a Leopard
> with the old look. But that wouldn't be a technical reason for such a big delay.
Actually, interface graphics are just as technical as anything else in the system.
Leopard is the first Mac OS where resolution-independent display is the default, so all of the interface graphics had to be redone. This is also true for third-party apps. This would be a very good reason for things to be delayed. It is really significant because the display becomes more like a print device than a display in this model.
One example of the kind of work that this involves is that icons are 512x512 pixels on Leopard. If you don't replace the 128x128 pixel icon on your Mac app with a new one your icon is going to be upscaled and look like shit. Same with all your toolbar icons and custom graphics, they all have to be "print" resolution now, not screen resolution.
> Adding developers and QA towards the end of a project lifecycle usually means disaster.
... they took "Quartz developers" and moved them from Mac Quartz to iPhone Quartz. Quartz is CoreGraphics, the PDF-based resolution-independent display layer of OS X. They may not even have "moved them" ... they may have just delayed them from leaving iPhone to work on Mac, meaning the Mac side had to be delayed also.
No, this is the opposite situation, the exception that proves the rule.
Apple didn't take "Final Cut developers" and assign them to the iPhone
The "beta" of resolution-independence is part of Mac OS X Tiger. As much as the iPhone benefits from it, I think the 30 inch display benefits more. With the iPhone, you could cheat because you are almost always scaling things down, so you could just throw pixels away and still have high quality, but on the Mac we need to scale things up. Core Animation is also the next obvious evolution of the OS X display layer, they just added layers and a way to animate them to enable every developer to do something like Exposé in their app.
I don't know that specific features coming to OS X will be the main benefit of iPhone to the Mac.
I think there will be more benefit from simply adding more OS X users and development funds. For example if you're selling 1:1 iPhones and Macs then you have double the user base for OS X.
Also, people will start to want their Web sites to be "iPhone compatible" which means WebKit compatible which means Mac compatible as well as W3C compatible and of course that means that it is not built solely to run in Explorer.
The iPhone also uses Cocoa as its API so a popular iPhone could mean more Cocoa developers. However, apps that you install are not the point of iPhone at all compared to Web apps or iPod accessories.
There is already a program where if you buy a new Mac and Apple ships a new OS within a certain time period you get the new OS for free. That goes back a long time. At no time does Apple want you to delay a Mac purchase for an OS update.
> The rush for Leopard is based primarily upon the fact that it will make Apple far more money than the iPhone can ever hope to bring in.
No, I don't think that's the case. You could say that "OS X" is a more important project for Apple than the iPhone, because OS X is a significant part of the iPhone and also the Mac. There is no iPhone without OS X because there is no other system that can provide the features. However, I don't think you can say that "Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard Upgrade For Existing Systems" is more important than the iPhone, and that is really what is being delayed. We are talking about existing Mac OS X users having to wait three months for their updater, and about new Macs shipping with Tiger for three months longer than expected. It is very little impact.
However, after showing the iPhone in January to hundreds of millions of people and with hundreds of millions of dollars in free publicity (think 100 Super Bowl commercials worth), and then saying "wait until June", they really do have to show up in June with an iPhone to sell. If they don't that casts doubt on the whole project and voids some of that free publicity. Also with a product that has this many new features that have not ever been shipped to consumers you don't want to cast that kind of doubt.
> The phone as announced lacks a good number of the features that the majority of phone users use. Contrast that to the iPod.
SAME. The iPod is famous for "missing features" such as voice recorder and FM tuner. I had a Creative Nomad in 1999 that had voice recorder, FM tuner and was sized like an iPod mini. In 2001 I replaced it with an iPod that did not have those things.
Phones suck and everybody knows it. A computer maker is about to give the phone business a good ass-kicking. Over a billion phones shipped and no pocket Web browser yet that is ridiculous.
> There is nothing proprietary about the hardware in Macs other than the DRM they put in to try to identify it as a Mac to OSX.
Actually, it's called "firmware" and in Macs it is EFI now which is proprietary to Intel.
PowerPC Macs use an open firmware standard called "OpenFirmware" also used by Sun.
> Two-thirds of the people in my office drop kicked their PCs and bought Macs in the last couple of years. That's a trend I'm watching
> first hand.
The first Intel-based Macs are going to "Intel users" in the same way the first year of Mac OS X was all about Unix users. I see lots of your traditional Mac users still running G5's and happy to do so until they buy a new system with Leopard on it.
Also, Photoshop CS2 is faster on a G5 right now than on an Intel Mac, so until Photoshop CS3 there is actually a technical reason holding Mac users back from going Intel, and yet Apple is selling more machines than ever, even with a new OS on the horizon since it was announced June 2006.
> If you look around at Mac applications, most of them require atleast 10.2. A good portion of them require 10.3
Yeah, but you can get OS v10.3 on eBay for $20.
> Indeed, if you were really talking about hardware, I'm curious why you said "Windows machine"?
The "Windows machine" is the generic PC. Yes, a really, really, really small number of users run another OS on there, but on the other hand, ALL name-brand vendors are under controversial contracts with Microsoft to sell Windows with every machine whether the customer wants it or not. Lots of court cases here of course.
MS used to have an exclusive contract with IBM and then Compaq cloned the PC and so MS recreated their exclusive contract with Compaq and Dell and HP and everyone else to keep the status quo. However they had to break a lot of laws to do this and changed the market dramatically. Everyone pretends that it is a generic PC upon which the highly technically savvy user of course DEMANDS the right to install whatever operating system he or she should find immediately suitable to their computing tasks, but the reality is that it is a Windows box. That's what Bill Gates calls it and he calls it.