> How is Apple Mail more "standards-compliant" than Outlook Express? > Is the mail storage format for Apple Mail easy to export to other mail programs on different platforms?
Yeah, they're stored as UTF-8 text with Unix line feeds. Do you think you can "port" that to another system?
Not only does Outlook want to store stuff in a proprietary format, it writes non-standard proprietary codes into the emails themselves. Even though the message may be plain text as it is sent, you need Outlook to actually decode all of the information in there.
> We are talking about Apple's proprietary apps here (like iLife).
Even iLife uses standard formats. For example, iTunes will convert your CD to MPEG-4, and iMovie will import DV from a camera and export MPEG-4.
> Besides the Core 2 Duo, I've got a dual Xeon that's all tricked out.
These are the same processors as in Macs. You are kidding yourself that you are saving money by ignoring the OS.
> I don't have great faith in Apple continuing to be a vibrant Operating System vendor
APPLE IS NOT AN OPERATING SYSTEM VENDOR.
At no time have they vended an operating system, especially not for home-built generic PC's. Not only have they not technically done that (produced such a product) but they are legally and definitively not in the "x86 operating systems" market, which is well understood and well-defined because it was ILLEGALLY DESTROYED by Microsoft in the 1990's. Microsoft is still paying people off for having destroyed their companies or their operating system businesses (IBM, BeOS).
The retail box of Mac OS X is an updater (only an updater) for Mac hardware from the past 5-7 years. It is not now and has never been a standalone software product. The changes that would have to be made to the retail box of Mac OS X in order to make it the product that you seem to think you might want are so extensive that it would be another product.
> It means one provider of operating systems chooses not to target me as a potential customer. It happens all the time.
Apple is not a "provider of operating systems". You are not a potential customer.
The retail box of Mac OS X is an upgrade for the software that ships on Apple hardware. It's a firmware update more than it is a commodity operating system.
In short, Apple is not ignoring you. You are ignoring Apple.
> I've got a great new Core 2 duo machine, and I've spent a lot of time and money creating a quiet cooling system > for it because I use the computer for music production.
> I'd like Apple to sell me a version of OSX that I could run on this new machine, too, but they've decided that I can't use > their OS unless I pay a premium for their hardware (which is basically either the same or inferior to what I've got).
You spent a lot of time and money creating a quiet and cool machine for music production, yet you are not willing to pay Apple any kind of premium to make you a quiet and cool machine for music production? Apple has specifically made "quiet" a feature since the 1980's. They put time and effort into that whereas others don't and then you have to.
In addition to making your machine quiet and cool, Apple will also include a complete multichannel digital audio subsystem with plug-in format and 32-bit 192 kHz support, it is a whole digital mixer in there. It takes me about 20 minutes to install MOTU drivers on a Mac and hook up through USB and FireWire and in no time I'm running Logic Pro and Ableton Live side-by-side and it all just works. It would be worth paying a premium for, but you don't because it is all the same Intel hardware. The software is essentially free.
> This is not an example of "giving the customer what they want".
In this you are 100% correct because you are not one of their customers. You bought a Windows PC.
> Free markets are supposed to be about choices. It's the lack of choices that has kept me from switching to Vista. After careful > consideration, and despite the fact that I admire much about OSX, I choose not to use Macs because I don't want to be limited > in such a way.
You bought a Windows PC with version 5.1 of the OS... Vista is version 6.0. You don't have a choice not to use it. You have to change to another computing platform to avoid Vista.
Complaining that you would rather run the PS3 operating system or the Mac operating system or the iPod operating system on your Windows computer is pointless.
Earlier you blamed Apple for "deciding" that in order to use their OS you have to buy their PC. It is you who decided to buy a commodity PC. It is you who is to blame for the fact that your operating system choices are limited to commodity operating systems. Apple is not the only company to build specific OS for specific hardware, in fact, this is the typical method. The only company that does it the OTHER way is PART of Microsoft. It is not even all of Microsoft, because with XBox and Zune they are using the typical method same as Apple and Sony.
> I'm less certain of the long-term viability of the Macintosh platform now than I've been at any time since 1998.
Apple is selling more Macs now than ever. You buy a really good computer and it comes with tons of world-class software, and if you have other uses for it you can run Windows or Unix on it or do as you please. It's hard to argue with that compared to other name brands.
However if you are doing music and you're not using a Mac I truly think you are a mad man. CoreAudio is worth buying a Mac just to use it. It takes me 20 minutes to turn a stock Mac into a digital audio workstation using a couple of MOTU boxes and a handful of software installers and then it just works. It is easy to swap a Mac out for a new one and get more CPU because the IT overhead is almost zero, even in a music studio.
> I don't see how the Unix base has anything to do with it.
I'm an artist and a Mac user, yet Apache and PHP are two of my must-have apps. I can't imagine why I would have a computer today and not be running both of those. That is thanks to the Unix base. If I want to get off the Mac I can take my Web server and Web server scripting language with me no problem. Even my configuration files. This goes for Perl and Ruby and all of the other fine Unix apps.
Also for any desktop app that I feel is trying to lock me into the Mac, I can always start up X-Windows (included) and run the generic word processor or whatever that I might want from any Unix system. There are usually one-click Mac installers for them also which makes them very easy to use.
> Which Unix systems can run typical OS X apps?
Here you ask an interesting question because the answer is: Windows. No, it is not a Unix. However, many Mac apps have been ported to it. For example: Word, Excel, Photoshop, Illustrator. If I want to get off the Mac then those are not an issue. I can be an Adobe user or a Microsoft user on various platforms.
Also the Web rendering in OS X is standards-based and open source. If I develop Web pages for Apple Safari in exactly the way that Apple recommends, all of those Web pages work in Firefox as-is because both support standards and WebKit is specifically made to act "like Gecko" wherever possible. So I could theoretically be the most "locked-in" Mac user on the planet, with nothing but Apple-supplied tools, and yet the Web content I create does not lock either me or my readers (the world) into using the Mac or Apple technologies. Also, for professional Web developers, you can test in Firefox and generally expect to work in Safari but you will have to get a copy of Explorer to test with because of its quirks even if you are a Unix user.
Media is another place where companies try to apply a lock-in. Instead of using QuickTime for iTunes, Apple used MPEG-4, which is a cross-platform international standardization of the QuickTime file format, using standard cross-platform codecs. If you have been dutifully ripping your CD's into iTunes for 5 years with the default settings you will have no problem playing your music collection on any other platform. Most iPod video users also have another MPEG-4 player even now, such as PS3, so this was unquestionably the right choice for the user.
> they made the switch to an OS that had memory protection > years before Apple did
No. Apple had a server line of operating systems in the 1990's just like Microsoft did. It doesn't have anything to do with Mac OS or with MS-DOS. That is what everybody used in the 1990's.
> though it wasn't until XP that they moved the home consumers away from the Windows 9x line
Windows XP was the rewrite of Windows on top of a modern core OS, just like Mac OS X was the rewrite of Mac OS on top of a modern core OS. Comparing the execution of both projects is extremely educational.
It's not just that both of these systems were the GUI moved to a new core, it's also that both companies advertised these systems as complete rewrites to fix ancient cruft, and finally, maybe most importantly, the MS-DOS and Mac OS users from 2000 all went on to become Windows XP and Mac OS X users respectively. That's the lineage.
The Vista problem is one of bad design, poor execution, and very low product quality. After 5 years of Mac OS X, Apple shipped Tiger. After 5 years of Windows XP, Microsoft shipped Vista. Compare.
> There are no "modern advanced OSs" out there that make today's Mac OS X/Windows look like yesterday's Mac OS/DOS.
Mac OS X makes XP look like DOS, and so far Vista looks a lot like XP. Basic networking stuff is still broken, basic user accounts stuff is still broken, basic security stuff is still broken.
>> 10.4 is a good OS and there's no rush to upgrade
> XP is a good (enough) OS and there's no rush to upgrade
No that is such bullshit. Nobody was saying it was "good enough" until Vista shipped. Before Vista shipped, XP was on fire, consuming computing and IT staff resources. XP pissed in the pool to such a degree that it is hard to remind people that the pool is not supposed to have piss in it. The core OS on a 21st century PC has to have at least the quality of a free Unix from 1990. If it does not then it is not surprising that you can fuck with it over the network.
> if 10.5 does ship with new features that really benefit the end-user, all is well and they are forgiven.
No features have been pulled from Leopard, and there are already announced features that will truly benefit the user. For example, Time Machine asks the user to provide a big external disk (cheap these days) and it does the rest to provide them with a complete backup and versioning system. That alone is plenty enough reason to recommend Leopard to any Mac user with a clear conscience. Time Machine recovers the computer automatically after a disk failure. How could you argue against that for every user?
> But if it is late because of the iPhone, and the iPhone turns out not to be a truly revolutionary product for the consumer,
All they have to do is ship a working iPhone and it is revolutionary. There is no such thing as a pocket Web browser right now and iPhone is about to fix this. It is also the first phone that is a real computer (first with significant storage, first with state-of-the-art computer OS, first with desktop-class developer frameworks and applications). It just has to work and it will be revolutionary.
> then they are no better than MS.
Almost every company in the tech industry is much better than MS just by virtue of having corporate officers who are not convicted felons.
If Vista had only been delayed by three months due to an XBox release, it would have been considered a major victory for Microsoft. I doubt people would have even had the heart to call Vista late if it was late by only 3 months. That would have had it shipping in 2003-2004 by the way, not 2007. Again, not the same.
Also, Apple sells hardware. iPhone is a hardware product. Macs are hardware products. The "Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard Upgrade" in a retail box with DVD in there is a really nice product for the current Mac user base but it is not the flagship product like Windows is for MS who declare themselves to be a "software company". This is more like a firmware upgrade for PS3 being delayed until after a new PSP line is launched. There is actual technical reasoning apparent in it, not just oops we didn't get it done yet.
> There are people in professional World who still has questions about OS X in their minds because of 10.0 horrible,incomplete release.
Yeah, but their numbers are so ridiculously small that they are completely inconsequential. The user base has grown so much since then that the 10.0 users are just not significant.
It's like monochrome iPod users. Not only are their iPods very elderly, but hardly any were even made compared to color iPods.
The reason this might be an exception to that rule is that iPhone runs OS X same as the Mac. It might be more like pulling some Mac Pro testers away to test MacBook Pros.
> The iPhone is about $350 too much to be a killer product
It is the same price as a $299 smart phone plus $199 iPod nano. At $299 that is a very cheap smart phone, and the iPhone has the whole nano built-in plus free video playback. The service will also be cheaper than other phones because there is no hardware discount as with other phones.
The thing that people keep skipping over is the Web browser. It's a full desktop Web browser with Web applications support in the palm of your hand. To get that kind of Web browsing you have to go to a MacBook at $1100. Maybe it is only current WebKit users who can appreciate how good this is.
The biggest thing is the software, though. Where other phones have Flash Lite the iPhone has OS X. They can add features painlessly that other phone and handheld computer manufacturers can only dream of.
> AppleTV is priced to sell a lot of units, but there's a hidden cost to it - most people will need to buy a new TV for it.
First, that hidden cost is the cost of TV in 2008. Everybody needs a new TV. It has nothing to do with AppleTV. If you buy a Blu-Ray or HD DVD you will need the same new TV.
> It needs to work well on regular screens without a hack to really take off
Second, it has component outs. These are "DVD era" video outputs, and they work on any TV that has component inputs, which is most everything from the 21st century. This is just downplayed because this kind of "old TV" picture looks so much worse than newer systems which are "computer-ready".
> Every time someone buys one of these digital lifestyle devices and find they work better on the Mac, they will consider > a Mac for their next computer.
There are more iPhone benefits than just that. The Mac is the development platform for iPhone and iPod and AppleTV... they are making a market for the MPEG-4 media that is generated on the Mac. The Web will become more compatible with WebKit faster due to the iPhone (another way of saying this is the Web will become less MS compatible and more W3C compatible). The fact that iTunes set the jukebox media standard to MPEG-4 instead of WMA benefits the Mac also. The fact that there isn't a non-Mac DRM out there shutting out the Mac instead.
> There are a heap of people out there holding off mac purchases until leopard is released.
That may be true, however Mac sales are the best they have ever been. There may be a case for delaying Leopard just simply to avoid rocking the boat.
In the same way that the first year of Mac OS X was all about Unix people, the first year of Intel Macs seems to be all "Intel people". More than 50% of Macs sold at the Apple Store for the past year were to people who had never bought a Mac. That is why there is such a buzz about Windows-on-Mac and Parallels and Fusion... lots of people right now with both an Intel Mac and a house full of Windows and Windows software.
> Only thing I really want to see is files and folders open with the Enter key, enough of this command-O bullshit!
Command+Down to go down on a file or folder.
Command+Up to come back up for air.
Command+O is a generic open, it works in this case but you are not navigating the Finder so much as just sending an Open command to that file. Like wearing work boots for a sprint it is no wonder you feel slow.
Also make sure to notice you can open multiple items at once which is much faster than opening things one at a time on Windows. In List view your selection can span multiple folders.
Another old school Finder feature is Command+click on a window's title bar to see a menu with the whole path.
Finder is also scriptable and recordable. You can use Script Editor to record yourself performing actions in Finder and it will write those actions out as AppleScript which you can run or modify. Everything you can get at in Finder is available as an object.
> Interesting point here. When Leopard comes out and you can buy an Intel native version of OSX quite legitmately > - it will be perfectly legal to run it on non-native hardware in pretty much every country other than the US.
No, you're wrong. The disc-in-a-cardboard-box is an updater only. To legally use it you have to already own Mac OS X. Same as I can buy Photoshop CS3 update for $199 quite legally because I own Photoshop CS2 but if you don't own CS2 you have to pay $649 to use Photoshop CS3 legally. It has nothing to do with reverse engineering. It's software licensing... it doesn't even have to make sense.
The "full version" of Mac OS X that is analagous to Windows Vista Ultimate ($399) is a Mac mini ($599) or any other Mac. Once you have that full version you can purchase the updater package and legally apply it to the previous version in order to update it. The reason there is a retail box at all is because Macs last 3-5 years and operating system releases are 2-3 years. The schtick is that an OS update takes 20 minutes and is like getting a whole new Mac. The reason it takes 20 minutes and works 99.99999% of the time is because it is more like a firmware update than what you expect if you are a Microsoft victim.
> I read in other articles and on Wiki that Leopard will run on x86 Intel style CPUs, and that this particular version > you're actually allowed to run on non-Apple specific hardware
No.
Leopard itself is "Apple-specific"... it is part of an Apple product.
There is a cardboard box with disc in it for Mac OS but it is an updater for a previous version of the OS only. It is like a firmware update for PlayStation3, it is not useful for other hardware, even if your hardware has some similar components.
Similarly, you cannot install Mac OS on an XBox even though its PowerPC CPU is also used in some Apple hardware. Other components are not the same.
> Will I be able to run Leopard on my OEM self-built AMD 64 3000+ based machine?
No.
You should use system software that is designed for that machine such as a Linux distribution or other off the shelf commodity OS.
> Microsoft delays Vista = Microsoft sucks! > Apple Delays anything = I'm glad they're taking the time to make it better.
It isn't a double standard because both are based on their reputations. Apple ships stuff that is very high quality, higher in quality than their competitors, so if they delay something, it is easy to believe that it is because they want to make sure something it up to their high standards. Microsoft sucks, and their products suck, their executive felons suck, so if they delay something, it is easy to believe that it is because they suck.
The iPhone is more of a priority because Mac sales are the very best they have ever been, while iPhone sales are zero. There is nothing at all broken on the Mac right now that needs fixing. Sales are up.
If for some reason this announcement did lead to a dip in Mac sales, Apple could offset with a Product: Red MacBook or iMac. Leopard is not just a disc in a box like Vista.
> And despite the progress, it still doesn't work as well as the Finder that came with OS 9 did. Seriously.
I'm sorry but that is just plain wrong.
I loved Mac OS 9 in the day but you are suffering from nostalgia related insanity.
If the only improvement in Mac OS X Finder was that it can't crash the whole box, that is enough.
However the X Finder also has packages/bundles, is more reliable when scripted, is able to identify arbitrary downloaded files better, you can easily open a folder with 10,000 files in it, or use 256 character file names, or Unix permissions, or multiple users. You can have an AppleScript app quietly driving Finder in the background, renaming files or whatever, and still work in another app.
The X Finder has its flaws but Mac OS 9 Finder was not ideal either. It's deep integration with the kernel felt good to the user until it's deep integration with the kernel caused it to crash the box so it was always a mixed bag. Finder purists will direct you to System 6 for a "real" Finder experience.
> clipping support
Text clippings on 9 or X use both a different text encoding and a different line break character, and they have a filename extension now also ("textClipping"), but in the Finder you can still refer to them as "clippings" in your AppleScripts so that is how the convenience was implemented, at the expense of someone with numerous old text clippings to convert. The free TextWrangler from Bare Bones can convert your clippings to new ones.
> Finder has many many problems, but the ones that bug me the most are the lack > of the "right click, new file", and "command prompt here"...
Both of these can be done with AppleScript, just using the built-in tools. A "command prompt here" script is available on Apple's site for many years now. It is easy to write that yourself though because both Finder and Terminal are scriptable.
The Finder is not only completely scriptable but also recordable. You can open Script Editor, press Record, switch to Finder, so a bunch of stuff, go back to Script Editor and hit Stop and what you did in the Finder will be written in the script.
> Having to hit apple-i to find out how big a file/directory is smokes pole, too.
Set the window to List View and in View Options make sure that the Size column is showing, and click "calculate all folder sizes" or whatever it is called.
Another approach is to select an item and press Command+Option+I and a context-sensitive file inspector will be displayed that will stay on top and show you info for everything you touch in Finder as you work.
> Tiger is at 10.4.9 because of bug fixes, not features......
The Mac versions numbers go major.minor.bugfix so by definition 10.4.9 is the 9th bug fix for Tiger. That's why the third number is there... to track bug fixes. Wall Street does all their accounting every quarter, and about once a quarter Apple updates their OS. After a couple of years, v10.4.0 gives way to v10.4.9.
On the Microsoft side you have bug fixes coming out every Tuesday, and they have a show-stopper bug every month or so that you simply don't see on other platforms. It is so grim on the Microsoft side that many of the people involved are completely despaired, they don't see a solution. There is really no comparison, and no excuse for the low product quality at Microsoft.
> Indeed. This is one more reason to hate iPhone. I have a Core 2 Duo MacBook.
The iPhone is not to blame. They just wanted to say "iPhone NOT delayed" at the same time as they announce that Leopard is delayed. The first thing I thought when I saw Leopard in October was does that mean iPhone in October, also? It is running OS X Leopard one would assume, not Tiger. So they are saying don't worry you'll get your iPhone.
You could more easily make the case that the Intel switch caused the Leopard delay. Didn't releasing an entirely separate clone of Tiger on Intel architecture tax their Mac OS X team and QA resources more than building software for the iPhone?
Anyway, iPhone is going to be nothing but good for OS X. It may double the user base in five years leading to more development money and also greater compatibility. For example, every iPhone user is a WebKit user, so if CEO's are demanding iPhone compatibility from their corporate Web sites then they are demanding Mac compatibility and indeed W3C compatibility also. Right now they want to see it run in Explorer that is not good for anyone.
> BTW: anyone think this is a way to head off the "Mac nano" aka Apple TV running Mac OS X?
The CPU in the AppleTV is an Intel Pentium M 1 GHz that has been under clocked so it runs cool because it is the GPU that does all the work in AppleTV, displaying swoopy graphics and decoding an H.264 video stream. You also can't upgrade the RAM, there are many other problems with making this into a Mac. It is only half a Mac at best.
If you have a copy of Mac OS X and all you have in your Mac hardware budget is $300 then you are better on eBay. Any Power Mac G4 is a faster Mac with many other features also, like Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire 400/800, multiple USB busses, PCI, optical drive, 2 GB or more RAM capacity, space for four hard disks.
Most of the 100,000,000 iPods are minis and nanos. Those models are only a few years old. The way the sales took off during the 4G and mini time and then exploded with 5G and nano, most of the iPods ever sold were just sold in the last 2-3 years. The monochrome ones are just a drop in the bucket.
This ODF stuff is just another shitty typewriter document to go with Word documents. Ugh. You might as well call it SHITHTML it is another useless HTML replacement. Think of how useless XHTML has been and it at least attempted to be as similar to HTML as it could be. ODF is more shit that has to be converted into something else before it can even do something useful. It is like you are saving your word processor's cache file to disk and then expecting someone else to do the rest of the job to make something that is sharable, and you excuse that by saying that you'll publish the cache file spec. Ugh.
What is the point of unleashing countless office workers to make countless documents that are not even sharable? The Web is 17 years old. The standardized Web is 7 years old. I can generate sharable documents just by going to Flickr, but with Word or ODF, no. It is painless to generate HTML 4.01 programmatically using DOM methods or manage word processing styles with CSS. There are two mature open source Web browser engines that can be used in a word processor product and countless other developer resources. It is not a programming problem.
At the UI level a word processor should do all the little tricks that people want. At the data storage level, it should be generating ISO HTML with CSS and JavaScript that can be either natively displayed on the Web or reliably converted to PDF for printing. You can store that and you can always read it. In other words you are storing something finished, not just the arbitrary bullshit that some word processor uses for pseudo-synaptic function. As people work, instead of generating unmanageable "word processor documents", users generate manageable Web content.
It's ridiculous to suggest that the typing of office workers should be stored as anything other than HTML. Microsoft Word is not the king of the making and sharing of documents, that is the Web. Base your new word processor standard on the Web and it will be successful. Ignore the Web and you are just being another Microsoft, stuck in time.
Look how hard it is to get a programmer to use UTF-8 instead of Latin-1 and the same programmer expects the office worker to use ODF instead of HTML it is crazy.
Audio apps are also ready for this for a long time. The original approach five years or so ago was to put the audio engine on one CPU and the rest of the app on the other and it has evolved from there.
There are CPU meters in audio production apps to show you your computational headroom and you're not supposed to go over it. Seriously, we are waiting for more CPU's. Everything is real-time and in layers while you work and you are running between 44.1 and 192 kHz sample rate which is like video frame rate (per second) except order of magnitude faster and you can't drop frames or it is audible as a pop.
I saw a Logic Pro demo a few years ago on a dual G5 where they ran dozens of EQ's and pegged the system and then they turned the second CPU on and ran hundreds and hundreds more EQ's and EQ is just one thing in Logic Pro. There is a reverb in Logic Pro called Space Designer. To run just one instance requires a G5 or better system, but you can run as many as you have real-time CPU for. I always run 32 stereo channels so without even trying I can run 32 of those puppies but not until I get a 32-way Xeon.
Also audio mixers have what's called bussing so that you can share a single effects device amongst many channels of audio. It was originally because you would only have a limited number of actual hardware effects devices, but now with software effects we are using bussing to save CPU, in order to run fewer instances of a software device. With more CPU we can drop bussing and create better workflows or new sounds.
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> How is Apple Mail more "standards-compliant" than Outlook Express?
> Is the mail storage format for Apple Mail easy to export to other mail programs on different platforms?
Yeah, they're stored as UTF-8 text with Unix line feeds. Do you think you can "port" that to another system?
Not only does Outlook want to store stuff in a proprietary format, it writes non-standard proprietary codes into the emails themselves. Even though the message may be plain text as it is sent, you need Outlook to actually decode all of the information in there.
> We are talking about Apple's proprietary apps here (like iLife).
Even iLife uses standard formats. For example, iTunes will convert your CD to MPEG-4, and iMovie will import DV from a camera and export MPEG-4.
QuickTime itself has been standardized as MPEG-4.
> Besides the Core 2 Duo, I've got a dual Xeon that's all tricked out.
These are the same processors as in Macs. You are kidding yourself that you are saving money by ignoring the OS.
> I don't have great faith in Apple continuing to be a vibrant Operating System vendor
APPLE IS NOT AN OPERATING SYSTEM VENDOR.
At no time have they vended an operating system, especially not for home-built generic PC's. Not only have they not technically done that (produced such a product) but they are legally and definitively not in the "x86 operating systems" market, which is well understood and well-defined because it was ILLEGALLY DESTROYED by Microsoft in the 1990's. Microsoft is still paying people off for having destroyed their companies or their operating system businesses (IBM, BeOS).
The retail box of Mac OS X is an updater (only an updater) for Mac hardware from the past 5-7 years. It is not now and has never been a standalone software product. The changes that would have to be made to the retail box of Mac OS X in order to make it the product that you seem to think you might want are so extensive that it would be another product.
> It means one provider of operating systems chooses not to target me as a potential customer. It happens all the time.
Apple is not a "provider of operating systems". You are not a potential customer.
The retail box of Mac OS X is an upgrade for the software that ships on Apple hardware. It's a firmware update more than it is a commodity operating system.
In short, Apple is not ignoring you. You are ignoring Apple.
> I've got a great new Core 2 duo machine, and I've spent a lot of time and money creating a quiet cooling system
... Vista is version 6.0. You don't have a choice not to use it. You have to change to another computing platform to avoid Vista.
> for it because I use the computer for music production.
> I'd like Apple to sell me a version of OSX that I could run on this new machine, too, but they've decided that I can't use
> their OS unless I pay a premium for their hardware (which is basically either the same or inferior to what I've got).
You spent a lot of time and money creating a quiet and cool machine for music production, yet you are not willing to pay Apple any kind of premium to make you a quiet and cool machine for music production? Apple has specifically made "quiet" a feature since the 1980's. They put time and effort into that whereas others don't and then you have to.
In addition to making your machine quiet and cool, Apple will also include a complete multichannel digital audio subsystem with plug-in format and 32-bit 192 kHz support, it is a whole digital mixer in there. It takes me about 20 minutes to install MOTU drivers on a Mac and hook up through USB and FireWire and in no time I'm running Logic Pro and Ableton Live side-by-side and it all just works. It would be worth paying a premium for, but you don't because it is all the same Intel hardware. The software is essentially free.
> This is not an example of "giving the customer what they want".
In this you are 100% correct because you are not one of their customers. You bought a Windows PC.
> Free markets are supposed to be about choices. It's the lack of choices that has kept me from switching to Vista. After careful
> consideration, and despite the fact that I admire much about OSX, I choose not to use Macs because I don't want to be limited
> in such a way.
You bought a Windows PC with version 5.1 of the OS
Complaining that you would rather run the PS3 operating system or the Mac operating system or the iPod operating system on your Windows computer is pointless.
Earlier you blamed Apple for "deciding" that in order to use their OS you have to buy their PC. It is you who decided to buy a commodity PC. It is you who is to blame for the fact that your operating system choices are limited to commodity operating systems. Apple is not the only company to build specific OS for specific hardware, in fact, this is the typical method. The only company that does it the OTHER way is PART of Microsoft. It is not even all of Microsoft, because with XBox and Zune they are using the typical method same as Apple and Sony.
> I'm less certain of the long-term viability of the Macintosh platform now than I've been at any time since 1998.
Apple is selling more Macs now than ever. You buy a really good computer and it comes with tons of world-class software, and if you have other uses for it you can run Windows or Unix on it or do as you please. It's hard to argue with that compared to other name brands.
However if you are doing music and you're not using a Mac I truly think you are a mad man. CoreAudio is worth buying a Mac just to use it. It takes me 20 minutes to turn a stock Mac into a digital audio workstation using a couple of MOTU boxes and a handful of software installers and then it just works. It is easy to swap a Mac out for a new one and get more CPU because the IT overhead is almost zero, even in a music studio.
> I don't see how the Unix base has anything to do with it.
I'm an artist and a Mac user, yet Apache and PHP are two of my must-have apps. I can't imagine why I would have a computer today and not be running both of those. That is thanks to the Unix base. If I want to get off the Mac I can take my Web server and Web server scripting language with me no problem. Even my configuration files. This goes for Perl and Ruby and all of the other fine Unix apps.
Also for any desktop app that I feel is trying to lock me into the Mac, I can always start up X-Windows (included) and run the generic word processor or whatever that I might want from any Unix system. There are usually one-click Mac installers for them also which makes them very easy to use.
> Which Unix systems can run typical OS X apps?
Here you ask an interesting question because the answer is: Windows. No, it is not a Unix. However, many Mac apps have been ported to it. For example: Word, Excel, Photoshop, Illustrator. If I want to get off the Mac then those are not an issue. I can be an Adobe user or a Microsoft user on various platforms.
Also the Web rendering in OS X is standards-based and open source. If I develop Web pages for Apple Safari in exactly the way that Apple recommends, all of those Web pages work in Firefox as-is because both support standards and WebKit is specifically made to act "like Gecko" wherever possible. So I could theoretically be the most "locked-in" Mac user on the planet, with nothing but Apple-supplied tools, and yet the Web content I create does not lock either me or my readers (the world) into using the Mac or Apple technologies. Also, for professional Web developers, you can test in Firefox and generally expect to work in Safari but you will have to get a copy of Explorer to test with because of its quirks even if you are a Unix user.
Media is another place where companies try to apply a lock-in. Instead of using QuickTime for iTunes, Apple used MPEG-4, which is a cross-platform international standardization of the QuickTime file format, using standard cross-platform codecs. If you have been dutifully ripping your CD's into iTunes for 5 years with the default settings you will have no problem playing your music collection on any other platform. Most iPod video users also have another MPEG-4 player even now, such as PS3, so this was unquestionably the right choice for the user.
> they made the switch to an OS that had memory protection
> years before Apple did
No. Apple had a server line of operating systems in the 1990's just like Microsoft did. It doesn't have anything to do with Mac OS or with MS-DOS. That is what everybody used in the 1990's.
> though it wasn't until XP that they moved the home consumers away from the Windows 9x line
Windows XP was the rewrite of Windows on top of a modern core OS, just like Mac OS X was the rewrite of Mac OS on top of a modern core OS. Comparing the execution of both projects is extremely educational.
It's not just that both of these systems were the GUI moved to a new core, it's also that both companies advertised these systems as complete rewrites to fix ancient cruft, and finally, maybe most importantly, the MS-DOS and Mac OS users from 2000 all went on to become Windows XP and Mac OS X users respectively. That's the lineage.
The Vista problem is one of bad design, poor execution, and very low product quality. After 5 years of Mac OS X, Apple shipped Tiger. After 5 years of Windows XP, Microsoft shipped Vista. Compare.
> There are no "modern advanced OSs" out there that make today's Mac OS X/Windows look like yesterday's Mac OS/DOS.
Mac OS X makes XP look like DOS, and so far Vista looks a lot like XP. Basic networking stuff is still broken, basic user accounts stuff is still broken, basic security stuff is still broken.
>> 10.4 is a good OS and there's no rush to upgrade
> XP is a good (enough) OS and there's no rush to upgrade
No that is such bullshit. Nobody was saying it was "good enough" until Vista shipped. Before Vista shipped, XP was on fire, consuming computing and IT staff resources. XP pissed in the pool to such a degree that it is hard to remind people that the pool is not supposed to have piss in it. The core OS on a 21st century PC has to have at least the quality of a free Unix from 1990. If it does not then it is not surprising that you can fuck with it over the network.
> if 10.5 does ship with new features that really benefit the end-user, all is well and they are forgiven.
No features have been pulled from Leopard, and there are already announced features that will truly benefit the user. For example, Time Machine asks the user to provide a big external disk (cheap these days) and it does the rest to provide them with a complete backup and versioning system. That alone is plenty enough reason to recommend Leopard to any Mac user with a clear conscience. Time Machine recovers the computer automatically after a disk failure. How could you argue against that for every user?
> But if it is late because of the iPhone, and the iPhone turns out not to be a truly revolutionary product for the consumer,
All they have to do is ship a working iPhone and it is revolutionary. There is no such thing as a pocket Web browser right now and iPhone is about to fix this. It is also the first phone that is a real computer (first with significant storage, first with state-of-the-art computer OS, first with desktop-class developer frameworks and applications). It just has to work and it will be revolutionary.
> then they are no better than MS.
Almost every company in the tech industry is much better than MS just by virtue of having corporate officers who are not convicted felons.
If Vista had only been delayed by three months due to an XBox release, it would have been considered a major victory for Microsoft. I doubt people would have even had the heart to call Vista late if it was late by only 3 months. That would have had it shipping in 2003-2004 by the way, not 2007. Again, not the same.
Also, Apple sells hardware. iPhone is a hardware product. Macs are hardware products. The "Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard Upgrade" in a retail box with DVD in there is a really nice product for the current Mac user base but it is not the flagship product like Windows is for MS who declare themselves to be a "software company". This is more like a firmware upgrade for PS3 being delayed until after a new PSP line is launched. There is actual technical reasoning apparent in it, not just oops we didn't get it done yet.
> There are people in professional World who still has questions about OS X in their minds because of 10.0 horrible,incomplete release.
Yeah, but their numbers are so ridiculously small that they are completely inconsequential. The user base has grown so much since then that the 10.0 users are just not significant.
It's like monochrome iPod users. Not only are their iPods very elderly, but hardly any were even made compared to color iPods.
The reason this might be an exception to that rule is that iPhone runs OS X same as the Mac. It might be more like pulling some Mac Pro testers away to test MacBook Pros.
> The iPhone is about $350 too much to be a killer product
It is the same price as a $299 smart phone plus $199 iPod nano. At $299 that is a very cheap smart phone, and the iPhone has the whole nano built-in plus free video playback. The service will also be cheaper than other phones because there is no hardware discount as with other phones.
The thing that people keep skipping over is the Web browser. It's a full desktop Web browser with Web applications support in the palm of your hand. To get that kind of Web browsing you have to go to a MacBook at $1100. Maybe it is only current WebKit users who can appreciate how good this is.
The biggest thing is the software, though. Where other phones have Flash Lite the iPhone has OS X. They can add features painlessly that other phone and handheld computer manufacturers can only dream of.
> AppleTV is priced to sell a lot of units, but there's a hidden cost to it - most people will need to buy a new TV for it.
First, that hidden cost is the cost of TV in 2008. Everybody needs a new TV. It has nothing to do with AppleTV. If you buy a Blu-Ray or HD DVD you will need the same new TV.
> It needs to work well on regular screens without a hack to really take off
Second, it has component outs. These are "DVD era" video outputs, and they work on any TV that has component inputs, which is most everything from the 21st century. This is just downplayed because this kind of "old TV" picture looks so much worse than newer systems which are "computer-ready".
> Every time someone buys one of these digital lifestyle devices and find they work better on the Mac, they will consider
... they are making a market for the MPEG-4 media that is generated on the Mac. The Web will become more compatible with WebKit faster due to the iPhone (another way of saying this is the Web will become less MS compatible and more W3C compatible). The fact that iTunes set the jukebox media standard to MPEG-4 instead of WMA benefits the Mac also. The fact that there isn't a non-Mac DRM out there shutting out the Mac instead.
> a Mac for their next computer.
There are more iPhone benefits than just that. The Mac is the development platform for iPhone and iPod and AppleTV
> There are a heap of people out there holding off mac purchases until leopard is released.
... lots of people right now with both an Intel Mac and a house full of Windows and Windows software.
That may be true, however Mac sales are the best they have ever been. There may be a case for delaying Leopard just simply to avoid rocking the boat.
In the same way that the first year of Mac OS X was all about Unix people, the first year of Intel Macs seems to be all "Intel people". More than 50% of Macs sold at the Apple Store for the past year were to people who had never bought a Mac. That is why there is such a buzz about Windows-on-Mac and Parallels and Fusion
> Only thing I really want to see is files and folders open with the Enter key, enough of this command-O bullshit!
Command+Down to go down on a file or folder.
Command+Up to come back up for air.
Command+O is a generic open, it works in this case but you are not navigating the Finder so much as just sending an Open command to that file. Like wearing work boots for a sprint it is no wonder you feel slow.
Also make sure to notice you can open multiple items at once which is much faster than opening things one at a time on Windows. In List view your selection can span multiple folders.
Another old school Finder feature is Command+click on a window's title bar to see a menu with the whole path.
Finder is also scriptable and recordable. You can use Script Editor to record yourself performing actions in Finder and it will write those actions out as AppleScript which you can run or modify. Everything you can get at in Finder is available as an object.
> Interesting point here. When Leopard comes out and you can buy an Intel native version of OSX quite legitmately
... it doesn't even have to make sense.
> - it will be perfectly legal to run it on non-native hardware in pretty much every country other than the US.
No, you're wrong. The disc-in-a-cardboard-box is an updater only. To legally use it you have to already own Mac OS X. Same as I can buy Photoshop CS3 update for $199 quite legally because I own Photoshop CS2 but if you don't own CS2 you have to pay $649 to use Photoshop CS3 legally. It has nothing to do with reverse engineering. It's software licensing
The "full version" of Mac OS X that is analagous to Windows Vista Ultimate ($399) is a Mac mini ($599) or any other Mac. Once you have that full version you can purchase the updater package and legally apply it to the previous version in order to update it. The reason there is a retail box at all is because Macs last 3-5 years and operating system releases are 2-3 years. The schtick is that an OS update takes 20 minutes and is like getting a whole new Mac. The reason it takes 20 minutes and works 99.99999% of the time is because it is more like a firmware update than what you expect if you are a Microsoft victim.
> I read in other articles and on Wiki that Leopard will run on x86 Intel style CPUs, and that this particular version
... it is part of an Apple product.
> you're actually allowed to run on non-Apple specific hardware
No.
Leopard itself is "Apple-specific"
There is a cardboard box with disc in it for Mac OS but it is an updater for a previous version of the OS only. It is like a firmware update for PlayStation3, it is not useful for other hardware, even if your hardware has some similar components.
Similarly, you cannot install Mac OS on an XBox even though its PowerPC CPU is also used in some Apple hardware. Other components are not the same.
> Will I be able to run Leopard on my OEM self-built AMD 64 3000+ based machine?
No.
You should use system software that is designed for that machine such as a Linux distribution or other off the shelf commodity OS.
> Microsoft delays Vista = Microsoft sucks!
> Apple Delays anything = I'm glad they're taking the time to make it better.
It isn't a double standard because both are based on their reputations. Apple ships stuff that is very high quality, higher in quality than their competitors, so if they delay something, it is easy to believe that it is because they want to make sure something it up to their high standards. Microsoft sucks, and their products suck, their executive felons suck, so if they delay something, it is easy to believe that it is because they suck.
The iPhone is more of a priority because Mac sales are the very best they have ever been, while iPhone sales are zero. There is nothing at all broken on the Mac right now that needs fixing. Sales are up.
If for some reason this announcement did lead to a dip in Mac sales, Apple could offset with a Product: Red MacBook or iMac. Leopard is not just a disc in a box like Vista.
> And despite the progress, it still doesn't work as well as the Finder that came with OS 9 did. Seriously.
I'm sorry but that is just plain wrong.
I loved Mac OS 9 in the day but you are suffering from nostalgia related insanity.
If the only improvement in Mac OS X Finder was that it can't crash the whole box, that is enough.
However the X Finder also has packages/bundles, is more reliable when scripted, is able to identify arbitrary downloaded files better, you can easily open a folder with 10,000 files in it, or use 256 character file names, or Unix permissions, or multiple users. You can have an AppleScript app quietly driving Finder in the background, renaming files or whatever, and still work in another app.
The X Finder has its flaws but Mac OS 9 Finder was not ideal either. It's deep integration with the kernel felt good to the user until it's deep integration with the kernel caused it to crash the box so it was always a mixed bag. Finder purists will direct you to System 6 for a "real" Finder experience.
> clipping support
Text clippings on 9 or X use both a different text encoding and a different line break character, and they have a filename extension now also ("textClipping"), but in the Finder you can still refer to them as "clippings" in your AppleScripts so that is how the convenience was implemented, at the expense of someone with numerous old text clippings to convert. The free TextWrangler from Bare Bones can convert your clippings to new ones.
> Finder has many many problems, but the ones that bug me the most are the lack
> of the "right click, new file", and "command prompt here"...
Both of these can be done with AppleScript, just using the built-in tools. A "command prompt here" script is available on Apple's site for many years now. It is easy to write that yourself though because both Finder and Terminal are scriptable.
The Finder is not only completely scriptable but also recordable. You can open Script Editor, press Record, switch to Finder, so a bunch of stuff, go back to Script Editor and hit Stop and what you did in the Finder will be written in the script.
> Having to hit apple-i to find out how big a file/directory is smokes pole, too.
Set the window to List View and in View Options make sure that the Size column is showing, and click "calculate all folder sizes" or whatever it is called.
Another approach is to select an item and press Command+Option+I and a context-sensitive file inspector will be displayed that will stay on top and show you info for everything you touch in Finder as you work.
> Tiger is at 10.4.9 because of bug fixes, not features......
... to track bug fixes. Wall Street does all their accounting every quarter, and about once a quarter Apple updates their OS. After a couple of years, v10.4.0 gives way to v10.4.9.
The Mac versions numbers go major.minor.bugfix so by definition 10.4.9 is the 9th bug fix for Tiger. That's why the third number is there
On the Microsoft side you have bug fixes coming out every Tuesday, and they have a show-stopper bug every month or so that you simply don't see on other platforms. It is so grim on the Microsoft side that many of the people involved are completely despaired, they don't see a solution. There is really no comparison, and no excuse for the low product quality at Microsoft.
> Indeed. This is one more reason to hate iPhone. I have a Core 2 Duo MacBook.
The iPhone is not to blame. They just wanted to say "iPhone NOT delayed" at the same time as they announce that Leopard is delayed. The first thing I thought when I saw Leopard in October was does that mean iPhone in October, also? It is running OS X Leopard one would assume, not Tiger. So they are saying don't worry you'll get your iPhone.
You could more easily make the case that the Intel switch caused the Leopard delay. Didn't releasing an entirely separate clone of Tiger on Intel architecture tax their Mac OS X team and QA resources more than building software for the iPhone?
Anyway, iPhone is going to be nothing but good for OS X. It may double the user base in five years leading to more development money and also greater compatibility. For example, every iPhone user is a WebKit user, so if CEO's are demanding iPhone compatibility from their corporate Web sites then they are demanding Mac compatibility and indeed W3C compatibility also. Right now they want to see it run in Explorer that is not good for anyone.
> BTW: anyone think this is a way to head off the "Mac nano" aka Apple TV running Mac OS X?
The CPU in the AppleTV is an Intel Pentium M 1 GHz that has been under clocked so it runs cool because it is the GPU that does all the work in AppleTV, displaying swoopy graphics and decoding an H.264 video stream. You also can't upgrade the RAM, there are many other problems with making this into a Mac. It is only half a Mac at best.
If you have a copy of Mac OS X and all you have in your Mac hardware budget is $300 then you are better on eBay. Any Power Mac G4 is a faster Mac with many other features also, like Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire 400/800, multiple USB busses, PCI, optical drive, 2 GB or more RAM capacity, space for four hard disks.
Most of the 100,000,000 iPods are minis and nanos. Those models are only a few years old. The way the sales took off during the 4G and mini time and then exploded with 5G and nano, most of the iPods ever sold were just sold in the last 2-3 years. The monochrome ones are just a drop in the bucket.
This ODF stuff is just another shitty typewriter document to go with Word documents. Ugh. You might as well call it SHITHTML it is another useless HTML replacement. Think of how useless XHTML has been and it at least attempted to be as similar to HTML as it could be. ODF is more shit that has to be converted into something else before it can even do something useful. It is like you are saving your word processor's cache file to disk and then expecting someone else to do the rest of the job to make something that is sharable, and you excuse that by saying that you'll publish the cache file spec. Ugh.
What is the point of unleashing countless office workers to make countless documents that are not even sharable? The Web is 17 years old. The standardized Web is 7 years old. I can generate sharable documents just by going to Flickr, but with Word or ODF, no. It is painless to generate HTML 4.01 programmatically using DOM methods or manage word processing styles with CSS. There are two mature open source Web browser engines that can be used in a word processor product and countless other developer resources. It is not a programming problem.
At the UI level a word processor should do all the little tricks that people want. At the data storage level, it should be generating ISO HTML with CSS and JavaScript that can be either natively displayed on the Web or reliably converted to PDF for printing. You can store that and you can always read it. In other words you are storing something finished, not just the arbitrary bullshit that some word processor uses for pseudo-synaptic function. As people work, instead of generating unmanageable "word processor documents", users generate manageable Web content.
It's ridiculous to suggest that the typing of office workers should be stored as anything other than HTML. Microsoft Word is not the king of the making and sharing of documents, that is the Web. Base your new word processor standard on the Web and it will be successful. Ignore the Web and you are just being another Microsoft, stuck in time.
Look how hard it is to get a programmer to use UTF-8 instead of Latin-1 and the same programmer expects the office worker to use ODF instead of HTML it is crazy.
8 will do for now.
Audio apps are also ready for this for a long time. The original approach five years or so ago was to put the audio engine on one CPU and the rest of the app on the other and it has evolved from there.
There are CPU meters in audio production apps to show you your computational headroom and you're not supposed to go over it. Seriously, we are waiting for more CPU's. Everything is real-time and in layers while you work and you are running between 44.1 and 192 kHz sample rate which is like video frame rate (per second) except order of magnitude faster and you can't drop frames or it is audible as a pop.
I saw a Logic Pro demo a few years ago on a dual G5 where they ran dozens of EQ's and pegged the system and then they turned the second CPU on and ran hundreds and hundreds more EQ's and EQ is just one thing in Logic Pro. There is a reverb in Logic Pro called Space Designer. To run just one instance requires a G5 or better system, but you can run as many as you have real-time CPU for. I always run 32 stereo channels so without even trying I can run 32 of those puppies but not until I get a 32-way Xeon.
Also audio mixers have what's called bussing so that you can share a single effects device amongst many channels of audio. It was originally because you would only have a limited number of actual hardware effects devices, but now with software effects we are using bussing to save CPU, in order to run fewer instances of a software device. With more CPU we can drop bussing and create better workflows or new sounds.
So bring on the CPU's.