> So by changing the definition of "win", Apple can "win." Meanwhile, back in reality, as long as there are hundreds of millions more > machines being sold that run only Linux and Windows and can't run MacOS X, there's no way for Apple to "win" the desktop market.
It isn't that the definition of winning should change, so much as the way that score is being kept.
If Gateway has 6% of the market but is losing money and Apple has 5% of the market but is very profitable, then the market share numbers do not tell the whole story. The CEO of Gateway is not going to be going around saying "ha ha we got 1% more market share than Apple" because he has no profits.
> because Microsoft had already locked up the desktop business market by 1990
Microsoft locked up the desktop business market earlier than that, along with IBM. However by 1990 people wanted a GUI. It has been over 5 years since the Mac, and 4 years since the first MS Windows and people were still running WordPerfect or Lotus on DOS with all the funky key commands and no graphics.
In 1990 the Mac was doing really modern stuff. Photoshop was released that year. In 1990 Tim Berners-Lee wrote WorldWideWeb.app on a NeXT box.
So, no Microsoft was not seen as invulnerable or almighty in 1990. Notice you said WordPerfect and Lotus not Word and Excel which is what was running on the Mac at that time for business software. It wasn't until Windows 3.0 that anybody believed in Windows. The success of it even surprised Microsoft. However it was still seen as a joke until Windows 95, which blew everybody away. Nobody thought Microsoft had that much progress in them.
> That's just not how it works in a free market.
What free market? Ha ha ha. You're killing me. Did you miss the anti-trust trials?
Steve won't license Mac OS X because that has already been tried and failed TWICE:
- Apple licensing Mac OS 7 to Motorola, PowerComputing, and others in early 1990's - NeXT licensing OpenStep to Sun, HP, IBM and others in early 1990's
Those two failures were also what lead directly to Steve Jobs taking over at Apple 10 years ago which brings us to today.
There is no market for operating systems sold outside of the boxes that run them. Microsoft created a false market when it pulled away from IBM and started selling DOS to IBM cloners, then it cornered that market with exclusive contracts and charging PC makers for one Windows for every PC sold whether the user wanted Windows or not.
Windows Vista Ultimate is a $400 plastic case with a DVD in it that contains a Windows installer. A Mac mini is a $600 plastic case with a DVD burner and a whole computer in it, that contains a functioning install of Mac OS X. How Apple can sell more Mac minis by taking out all the components and knocking $200 off the price, only Microsoft knows. Truly. Only Microsoft knows that. It is not about competing or markets, it's about middleware and licensing and illegal business practices.
You completely missed the point of the article. Going head to head with Microsoft on their own terms is suicide. There is no market there. There is just Microsoft holding much of the industry by the balls.
All the same components in any PC are in a Mac. The only difference between a Mac and PC today is who owns the bottom software layer. In a Mac that is Apple and the bottom layer is all open source. In a PC the bottom layer is Microsoft and it is a black box.
So enjoy your non-proprietary stack. Good luck to you.
It's also interesting to look up the stack on a Mac and find BSD, Apache, PHP, mySQL, X-Windows, Python, Perl, even emacs and vi and also a really nice Java and I haven't mentioned any Apple software yet.
On a PC the only part of the software stack that's not made by Microsoft is the craplets the system vendor puts on there and the viruses and malware that installs automatically.
> Apple would be in serious trouble if Microsoft gave even less support to Office on the Mac, and both of them know that.
Oh, puleeeeeeze. I like how the Mac can be simultaneously a) not a business computer, and b) doomed if MS Office won't run on it.
There are two versions of Microsoft Office. One of them runs on Windows, but BOTH of them run on a Mac. If you are a Mac user and you choose the Windows version of Office you will also have to get Windows and a PC virtualizer, but because MS Office Mac is so overpriced it is about the same price either way. The Windows Office is far uglier but Mac Office is ugly also, and the Windows version includes Windows so if you bought Office for compatibility with Windows users then you get your money's worth with the Windows version. The virtualizer software is like $70.
Some Mac users would also be happy to see MS Office Mac go so that the pretense of MS being a cross-platform company can be finally put to rest, and so competitive apps would get out from under that shadow. And so people like you would stop saying "the Mac is doomed without MS Office" ha ha.
It is Linux that lusts after Office right now, not the Mac. Word and Excel are 1980's Mac apps that were ported to Windows in the 1990's. Yawn. More Mac users are Mac users because of iPhoto ("iTunes for photos") than MS Office.
Also, just a few years ago people would say "the Mac will be doomed if MS kills Internet Explorer Mac" and then Apple released Safari and it was better than Internet Explorer in every single way and IE just faded away.
Now, iTunes for PS3. That is something interesting to think about.
> The argument seems to be that one of the most significant trends in computing that I have seen in my lifetime, the decoupling > of hardware and software buys, and the increasing "modularity" of computer hardware and software, will be reversible. > I don't believe it.
What's happening is that the built-in operating software for all hardware will soon be free with the hardware. Only Microsoft is trying to do it the other way. That is why they have to fight everyone else so hard to keep the status quo. It is not the natural state of things. Saying it is would be saying that the natural state of digital technology is to be in need of repair.
If software is free there is no need to "decouple it" from the hardware in order to sell it more efficiently. Decoupling is also the opposite of integrating, and people want more integration, not less. Also there are more devices than ever and more non-technical users than ever, so "recoupling" stuff once it arrives is more problematic and expensive than ever. In other words, the money I save buying "decoupled" hardware/software is not as much as I lose "recoupling" it.
The assumption that all computer users are nerds is right there in the center of your argument but the evidence that this is not so is equally plain. You are also assuming that operating software is something that people are willing to pay for. So far nobody but Microsoft has been able to make that work, and they had to do all kinds of illegal shit to make that happen, they had to maintain an adversarial relationship with their customers in order to make that happen.
> but the closest, single-supplier monolithic platforms are all but extinct, a process that started with MS-DOS
On the one hand, for your hardware/software split you have the IBM PC running DOS or Windows. The famous Microsoft-IBM contract where Bill Gates steals IBM's balls starts it all, and various anti-trust activities by Microsoft perpetuate it for many years.
On the other hand, for integrated hardware/software you have the Apple II (the first PC), the Mac, the PlayStation (1, 2, 3), the Wii, the iPod, the DVD player, the CD player, over 1,000,000,000 mobile phones, the NTSC television, the HD television, the GameBoy, the VCR, the iPhone, the AppleTV, Wi-Fi base stations, routers, NAS, building security systems, HVAC, watches, those UPS clipboards, the classic Hasbro game "Operation", the pocket calculator, the printer, cars, trucks, planes, ships, the little Mars rovers, digital cameras, camcorders, La-Z-Boys, medical systems of all kinds, military systems of all kinds.
Oh yes, and the Microsoft XBox, Microsoft Zune, and also forthcoming promised Zune Phone, announced two days after iPhone. Integrated hardware and software just like everybody else who has to compete and therefore must ship devices that work.
> Customers, consumers or corporate, would have to be pretty stupid to return to a situation in which they will lose every time
So many assumptions.
A few years ago in pro audio you would never have speakers in your studio that had built-in amplifiers. Amps were huge separate things with very different technology. Then amplifier technology evolved and amps got really small, and some speaker makers started experimenting with putting the amps inside the speakers themselves. Noses were raised in response throughout the industry at the idea. But what manufacturers found was that because they were building the amp into the speaker, they could match the components precisely and then "tune" the whole system, such that a $500 speaker with built-in amp sounded better than a $2000 speaker with a $2000 external amp.
Now all the pro audio monitors have amps in them. Everybody pays less than they did before, and everybody's speakers sound better also. Win-win. The smaller, cheaper, better-sounding speakers also enabled a new kind of smaller studio to flourish that wouldn't have otherwise. Speaker cabling is now low-voltage, cheap, easy instead of high-voltage, exp
> Where is the option to set the default web browser? Why, it's in the Safari control panel!
Similarly, the option to set Firefox as the default Web browser is in Firefox.
If you don't like Safari, follow these steps:
1) drag the Safari icon to the Trash 2) optionally, empty the Trash 3) no step 3
Compare to "uninstalling IE" on Windows.
> Just like similar options -- email client, HTML editor, etc -- are on the "Internet Options" control panel on Windows > -- but that is actually in Control Panel, not just in IE.
On the Mac, this is decentralized. Rather than tell the system what is your default editor for files that end in ".html", you tell the actual files. So if you want to always open ".html" files with Dreamweaver, then select an ".html" file and choose File > Get Info and in the inspector that appears, under Open With you can choose Dreamweaver and then click the button right next to that: "use this application to open all documents like this".
When you open a document on the Mac, the document tells the system what app to use. This enables you to have the freedom to set different HTML files to open in different applications. For example you could have the files on your Web server all set to open in BBEdit for editing, but the files that are floating around your Desktop could be set to Firefox for viewing.
> And look at how they are handling the iPhone. NO third-party apps, the end
You are wrong in a number of ways:
1) third-party apps will be available for purchase through iTunes just like iPod games, Steve said this himself the day of the announcement, the main point regarding third-party apps is that the user will not be able to download-and-install on the iPhone itself as a security measure... everything executable gets onto the iPhone through iTunes, same as iPod
2) iPhone has a standard Web browser in it with HTML 4, CSS 2.1, JavaScript 1.5 therefore it runs every application on the Web right out of the box with no installing, e.g. you have Flickr and eBay ready to go instead of being able to install Tic Tac Toe
3) most of the third-party apps for current smart phones are either built into the iPhone (e.g. audio/video player) or the iPhone doesn't need them (e.g. memory optimizers that help you get more out of your 128 MB)
4) iPhone has an iPod dock connector, therefore it runs over 3000 iPod accessories and more to come... rather than "installing software" with iPod accessories you just hook them on and they work because the software part is already in the iPod like a driver... imagine if hardware makers gave their drivers to Microsoft and you the user just plugged stuff in and it works... that's how Apple does it
So the iPhone is not going to be empty at all. You are going to have Web applications, you are going to have all kinds of stuff coming over from your iTunes (your audio/video, iPhone apps, Contacts, etc.) and you are going to have iPod accessories. And with 8 GB of storage it is going to make the "freedom" of other smart phones look ludicrous.
> Apple controls the hardware, and prevents anyone from making other hardware on which to run Mac OS X.
No, they don't. Mac OS X itself requires Apple hardware because that is what it was designed for. Apple is not under any obligation to imitate Microsoft's business practices or licensing customs. Now that HP has destroyed its own OS projects it does not have a right to Apple's OS on the same terms it made with Microsoft.
> Once OS X becomes untied from specific hardware, we might actually see this happen. > > But will it? Until then, I doubt it.
You totally missed the point of the article.
The article is proposing that iPod and iPhone are better competition for Microsoft than a Mac OS X for generic PC's would be. That in fact the very reason why Apple MAY be able to compete with Microsoft on the desktop is because they are specifically NOT going head-to-head.
The iPod prevented Microsoft from extending its Windows monopoly into consumer audio/video and made Windows Media Player into a footnote in audio/video history. It showed that Apple can beat Microsoft in a fair fight. It is a much bigger victory over MS than taking 10% of Windows sales. The iPod is banned on Microsoft property by billg himself. No wonder Vista can't work with it.
Similarly, the iPhone has a full desktop-level, standards-based Web browser in it. It's the first real handheld Web browser and it is Tim Berners-Lee approved, unlike Explorer. Many people who today think that Explorer is the only Web browser are going to be writing nasty emails from their iPhones to various sites saying WTF why don't you work in iPhone like most everybody else and the response "use Explorer" is not going to cut it like it used to. It's the same argument that makes Firefox relevant even if it is a minority of the Web. With the iPhone it is going to be CEO's and plain consumers using the standards-based rendering out of the box and this just continues to demonstrate the impracticality of MS-only solutions.
The same site that this article came from (RDM) has a comparison of Windows Home Server vs Apple AirPort Extreme and Windows Media Center vs AppleTV and you notice the Apple stuff wins hands down but also notice that while the Microsoft stuff is Windows, the Apple stuff is not Mac. AppleTV runs OS X but just the parts you need so it is $700 cheaper than the Microsoft solution. AppleTV is also standards-based unlike the MS solution.
In other words, people are not just choosing Macs over PC's, they're choosing iPods, iPhones, and AppleTV's over PC's.
What is happening is that technology is moving on from Microsoft. The idea that Microsoft will be around until there is a new commodity OS and new commodity office suite is ridiculous. The technology world is so much bigger than that, and nobody has even proven yet that it makes any technical sense to split the hardware/software the way MS does. I don't think they will be replaced by another monopolist but rather they will just seem to get smaller and smaller as the rest of the world expands until they are so small we will step on them like a bug.
Notice that iPhone is THRILLING people and it has no MS technologies in it at all. It is more MS-free than the Mac, which runs Microsoft software. It is more MS-free than Linux, which attempts to integrate with Microsoft technologies. The iPhone is like a huge neon sign reminding people that Microsoft is no longer the center of the technology universe: the Internet is the center now, and it does not run DOS.
> The reality is that operating system licenses don't cost the Dells of this world that much.
In terms of the dollars they pay for them or the customers they lose because of them?
The author points out that Dell has to acquire many more customers than Apple just to make the same profit. The only way Dell can compete is by slashing prices and quality on the same old Windows box, whereas Apple can acquire new customers by building a new feature like Time Machine into the Mac. I saw Time Machine last June and they sold Leopard to me right then and there. There isn't a single feature like that in Vista.
> It is NOT because "they are not beholden to Microsoft" - they could do the same thing with a high-spec PC like > Alienware do (ironically part of Dell now)
No, that's not true. Dell and HP and such cannot do better than Windows. They are committed to selling you whatever MS makes no matter how shitty it is. There is no competition and no differentiation. Sticking colored panels on it will not protect you from Microsoft viruses.
Remember that weird incident about 3 years ago where the Intel CEO was being interviewed in the IT press and the interviewer wanted to bust his balls about malware and such, and the Intel CEO admitted he spends over an hour a week using his daughter's PC just to clean the malware off, and the interviewer said "what is Intel's solution, right now, to malware?" and the CEO said "get a Mac" and this was well before the Apple Intel switch, however later we found out it was after Apple had talked to Intel. In other words, at the time of that interview, it was not possible to buy a secure Intel system from anyone. The CEO of Intel had to recommend a computer platform that at the time did not use Intel CPU's.
According to Microsoft dogma, he should have been able to recommend AlienWare for "gaming PC's running MS Windows" or recommend IBM for "business PC's running MS Windows" or recommend another particular PC maker for "secure PC's running MS Windows" but in reality everybody sells the same "Windows Box".
> To be sure, Apple is gaining ground, but they're so far from even being a significant threat to Microsoft in terms of OSes > that it's almost laughable.
The key thing you said is "in terms of OSes"... the author of this article is saying that doesn't matter.
Let Microsoft own the commodity PC market. Apple doesn't want it. They don't need it. Apple has diversified into consumer devices and the influence (not even dominance) of the standards-based iPod music player and the standards-based iPhone Web browser makes the world safe for standards-based computing, whether that is a Mac or other Unix. The music industry is not centered around Windows Media, and the Web is not centered around Internet Explorer. The world is not centered around the PC.
Yes, Microsoft continues to dominate "PC Operating Systems" and "Office Productivity Software"... yawn.
> all Microsoft has to do to kill Apple is stop producing Office for OS X.
It's weird how people will say "Macs don't exist in business" and then turn around and say "Apple would be dead without MS Office".
Since the Mac went to Intel processors this is immaterial. It costs the same to buy either of these solutions:
- MS Office for Mac - PC virtualizer for Mac, MS Windows, MS Office for Windows
What if Apple released iTunes for Linux? That is a much more interesting question. That is the dynamic that this article is trying to introduce you to.
I think you are mostly right except for the part about us all going to Web apps. That is the kind of prediction that never happens. You will want to run most of your apps on the Web, but you'll want to run your Web browser locally. Duh. You will want your encryption to happen locally, you will want your stuff to work when the Internet is unavailable for whatever reason, even if only to listen to music or check the time.
It's like saying that once you have always-on high-speed networking you won't need local storage. But even the iPhone has 8 GB of local storage to go with its three wireless networks and iPod dock connector high-speed serial connection to iTunes. The high-speed networking enables you to collect more stuff. The local storage just becomes more cachey than it was in the past. With iPhone you also have a Web browser that can do any Web application, yet there is also Cocoa on there and Unix, and the Cocoa and Unix are making the Web browsing better.
In the future, I think the Web/local split will be even more pronounced than ever. It will be more important for the local system to be the opposite of the Internet. It will be and more important in the future that you TRUST your local system. It will be more important that your OS internals be open source, not a black box, and that your local system default to NOT running applications unless you give it explicit permission.
In other words, to get back to the current discussion, the future is more iPhone-like and less Windows-like. What is the point of the untrustworthy, unprivate, unstable, Windows when the Web is already untrustworthy, unprivate, unstable? You need the opposite from your hardware so that it can be a good platform for the Web.
Apple is specifically NOT competing with Microsoft in the following areas:
- PC operating systems, both OEM and retail - "office" productivity software
You get Mac OS X either on an Apple system, or in a retail box that is an upgrade for an existing Apple system. There is no competitor to retail Windows, and no competitor to OEM Windows. When Apple promotes an office suite, it is MS Office. The trial version is included on every Mac.
The very good reason Apple doesn't compete in PC operating systems or office productivity is that those are the two MS monopolies, gained and held illegally. You can't compete in those two markets simply by making a better product.
Instead, where Apple is hurting Microsoft today is by taking sales away from Microsoft's partners, and by competing well in markets which Microsoft ASPIRES to own. So Apple is hurting Dell, HP, Internet Explorer (attempted Web monopoly), Windows Media Player (attempted audio/video monopoly).
Apple and Microsoft also espouse completely different design philosophies, so when Apple executes successfully and MS doesn't it calls the whole MS pyramid scheme into question. It's harder than ever for Microsoft to excuse their lack of quality by saying "tech is hard" when people see the stuff working on the Mac.
> The thing is with Apple you only have one supplier, Apple, and one price, what they say is what you pay
Yes, but they have a variety of price points, and each price point gets you a complete system. Whether it is an iMac or Mac Pro or whatever it has all the ports that you'll need, it has the fastest CPU in its class, it has all of its drivers built-in.
And when you look on the disk you will see software from a broad variety of sources. For example, you will find iLife on there, but you will also find Apache and PHP. Out of the box you can run Mac apps, Java, BSD, X-Windows, or standard Web applications featuring HTML 4, CSS 2.1, JavaScript 1.5. To get that much choice out of a PC you have to be a very technical user. You have to know how to get around the Microsoft stuff and get at the rest of the world.
> you can't shop around at all. With PC's you have dozens of supplier to choose from.
Who will all sell you basically the same system with exactly the same crappy Microsoft software. You fell right into their trap. It only LOOKS like choice. No matter whose box you buy you will look on there and see Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft. What kind of choice is that for most people?
> So finding a PC maker that is selling a system at a similar price to a similar Apple system is not difficult.
Finding a PC maker who is selling a system with a similar VALUE to Apple is unfortunately impossible for most users. The exception would be a Unix nerd who can do just fine on an AMD box they built from parts and compiled all the software themselves. For those people, I heartily recommend today's PC industry if they can find someone who won't charge them the Microsoft Tax. For almost everyone else you are better to pick the price point that suits you and get a complete system for that and get down to work or play. Spend your "video driver time" writing code that is more productive.
> The author claims that the ipod and iphone are going to be major factors in killing the windows monopoly.
No, not "killing", but "preventing the extension of". In other words, the iPod has prevented Microsoft from extending its PC operating systems monopoly into audio/video. It has not killed the PC operating systems monopoly itself.
In audio/video, around 2000, the future was described as being all Microsoft all the time. For example, the DVD-Audio spec had WMA (Windows Media Audio) in its "jukebox" folder so that the disc could be played on portable players and save battery life. The CSS on DVD's was going to give way to Microsoft's DRM, which was going to be on everything, but even where there was no DRM you were going to use Windows Media.
However, since the iPod, the entire audio/video industry has passed Microsoft right by. The DVD-Audio jukebox spec was changed to ISO MP4 because iPod only plays standardized audio files, no WMA. The non-standard video codecs are giving way to standard MP4 H.264/AAC because that plays in iTunes+iPod (and also it's the right thing to do technically). The "Windows-only CD/DVD" is not possible right now because of the iPod and the iPod alone. If it is audio/video related and it doesn't work with iPod then consumers will not buy it whether it is content or accessories. Even just Podcasts alone are bigger than Windows Media, ha ha. Not the way billg wanted it, which is why iPods are banned on Microsoft property.
The way this same thing works with the iPhone is that just as the iPod only plays standard audio/video files, not Microsoft audio/video files, the iPhone Web browser has a standards-based rendering engine, not a Microsoft-based one. Web pages that are authored specifically for Microsoft Explorer, which is not a standard Web browser, are like the Windows Media of the Web. However, once pretty much every CEO in America has an iPhone, he or she will want to know why the hell the corporate Web site doesn't work on my iPhone? ActiveX? WTF? I have already heard a couple of people ask their Web guy if the corporate Web site will work on the iPhone. If they built it to standards, then yes, automatically, for free. If they built it for Explorer, then no.
Consumers are going to want flikr and eBay to work on their "iPod phone" and people are going to complain to MS that they couldn't get MS Support to work on their iPhone, but that was all they had because their Windows PC was down with a virus and MS will have to deal with that. In other words, the iPhone is going to make it much harder to sell your Microsoft-only Web applications, just like iPod has made it harder to sell your Microsoft-only audio and video and accessories.
Apple is not competing with Windows or Office. Those are the two Microsoft monopolies, and that's where MS makes ALL of their money. Apple is knocking down the ways that MS is trying to extend their monopolies. With iTunes+iPod they erased Windows Media Player and everything associated with it from any relevance at all. With iPhone they are putting another knife into Explorer, making it bleed in places that Firefox and the Mac can't.
Most humans do not believe in god. It is ridiculous to say that belief in god is universal. It is ignorant and bigoted also.
Even if you add up all the Christians, Jews, and Muslims (who apparently believe in the same god) you only get to half the population of the world. And many of them do not believe, it is a mistake to count the heads of those who self-identify as Christian/Jewish/Muslim and assume 100% Believers. Some will tell you quite frankly that they are simply following the faith of their fathers. Some will tell you they want to believe but they don't. Some will tell you that's just fine. So even among "the religious" the true believers may be a minority, even a small minority.
Buddhism by definition does not allow for a supreme being. It is antithetical to Buddhism to equate the original Buddha with a supreme being.
When you say "are we hard-wired to believe in God?" you don't have to delve deep into the science of the brain to find out. You can just ask people. You can answer that question by simply looking at the statistics. Very few of us do. Therefore, no.
All of the god talk in this article is extra. It is totally bolted on to what little science there is in it. Further it is politically suspicious when someone says "God" and "Darwin" in the same breath. When in the next breath they tell you god is universal, then you know what kind of science you are getting.
> While the speed with which a browser renders a Web page is an important measure, the difference between browsers is usually a matter > of a few seconds at most.
That is a few seconds for every page. Here is a casual suggestion to lose a minute of your life for every 20 Web sites you visit, so that you can make background tasks go faster.
I'm glad you're satisfied with Vista, but the problem is that your wish list there looks like something to celebrate in 2000, but in 2007 it is very faint praise to say "video drivers don't crash the system anymore".
> Those are some of the things that I think are pretty compelling. No, there isn't an "uberfeature". But, then again, such a thing > cannot exist in a relatively mature OS
You are exactly wrong, you have it exactly backwards. It is only in a mature OS that you can start to see uberfeatures emerge.
When Mac OS X shipped in 2001, the uberfeature was that it didn't crash, that it had Unix compatibility, that it had a modern display architecture, that stuff was in place to build on for the future. Even the fancy graphics were a bit hard to get excited about because they were different and they were slow at first. By v10.2 (Jaguar) which was the third version (fourth if you count the public beta), the main feature was that the GUI was fast by then, and there was a complete application platform and a broad range of software to choose from. That is all basic stuff in a way.
However in v10.3 (Panther) suddenly you get Expose, which are window animations that enable you to get at all your windows (like the flip 3D in Vista) and CoreAudio took a big step up to where you could just plug in pro audio interfaces and the system would combine them and share them amongst applications as required, which maybe you have to be an audio pro to appreciate but call it "zero config pro audio" and there was also Bonjour, which is literally "zero config networking". These were great features that are at least a level up from "multitasks" and "has apps".
In the Leopard Preview, which is 6-8 months old now, the Time Machine feature is system-wide backup, restore, and versioning, with an animated interface that is done by a system feature called CoreAnimation that is like "fonts for animations". When you sort a list in a Leopard app, sometimes the icons will animate into place instead of all disappearing and appearing sorted, and this will be done by the UI layer not by the app itself. These features are building on solid Mac and Unix features that are expected to just work by now. It's been years since Mac users even talked about memory management or multitasking unless they specifically are involved with that stuff at a technical level.
With all the yawns for Vista and Dell spiraling downward for a moment there I thought Dell was actually going to start serving the needs of its customers.
I'll remember this next time somebody tells me how the PC is "an open platform". Sure it is.
When the Newton came out, you had to explain to people what it was and why they wanted one.
When iPhone ships, it will be after about 3 years of iPod users demanding that Apple make an "iPod phone". Everybody knows what a phone is. It also has an iPod built in, and everybody knows what that is. Then you get desktop Web and email, which people are quite familiar with, and similarly Wi-Fi. That is a whole lot of stuff and you haven't even gotten to the Newtony parts yet, which are free. The stuff you bought a Newton for -- calendar, contacts, note-taking -- is all free on iPhone.
The iPhone is also sold differently than other phones... you pay full price for the hardware and the service is going to be discounted. So the service will seem to be cheaper than the competition.
And LG's phone is $700 and runs a Flash UI so how is that competition for Apple's $499 phone that includes an iPod and Wi-Fi Web browser in addition to phone features?
> Most of the time the kids are just researching (Google), or typing (Google Docs), the rest of the time they can go to a lab
iPhone. It has the full Web, including modern Web applications, and it has rich HTML email with styles and photos. It replaces the PC the school wants them to have, the phone their parents want them to have, and the iPod that the kid themselves wants to have.
How much work are you going to do to put Google and text-editing in front of a kid? That is ridiculous when we have the CPU power of a 1999 computer and a wireless network connection in any phone you can buy today. Even the so-called free ones. What's required is to add the true Web and Email to the kid's phone, as well as audio video so they can access educational Podcasts, enough storage to keep the files they're working on, and easy PC attachment so they can use the lab effectively. Enough battery to get through the day, easy recharging between uses, easy to add a second battery just like an iPod for power users.
Kids are mobile. That's what we forget. They are ultra-mobile. If you want them to use this stuff you will be more successful adding it to the pocket computer(s) that kids already have, rather than the PC they don't.
The only complaint you can make is the price, but there are many economies. The price will go down as manufacturing ramps up, the Apple Store for Education will sell iPhone cheaper still. There is very little administration because Apple manages the software through iTunes. It replaces a phone and iPod also not just a PC, so you can find the money for it from different pockets so to speak. And you can expect them to run for 2 years with only user admin, no IT help, just like iPods and Macs.
Further reading:
The Diamond Age or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1996) by Neal Stephenson
> How about mandating a level of efficiency rather than assuming that innovation can't happen?"
The reason people assume innovation can't happen is that it hasn't happened in incandescent light bulbs.
Anyway, twice as efficient is bullshit. Incandescent light bulbs are so outrageously inefficient that you are still wrecking the planet even with these new vaporware bulbs.
Banning incandescent bulbs will only spur innovation in LED and other modern solutions. Complaints about the quality of light are very valid, but when you have an LED bulb that is generating the same brightness as an incandescent and the LED is using 1% of the power and has 1000x the lifespan then it is time to get the incandescent bulbs out. You can replace an incandescent with an LED and still have power left over for a notebook computer with dual processors.
These new incandescent bulbs make me think of a non-hybrid gasoline car that ekes out 50 mpg so "you don't need a hybrid" but the point of the hybrid is not just to double the gas mileage today... it's also to uncouple the gasoline from the drive train so that the car becomes agnostic about its energy source and the gasoline part can be replaced more easily with a fuel cell or battery or whatever other technology. The hybrid has room to grow and improve whereas a non-hybrid car getting great mileage is still stuck on gasoline. It's just a band-aid to cling to an old technology like gasoline or incandescent bulbs.
Yeah but with iPhone the monthly service is supposed to be discounted rather than some money knocked off the hardware. You pay full price for the hardware and get a discount on the monthly contract. With other phones it is reversed, you get discounted hardware and pay full price for the network access.
The iPhone is so good that people are going to show up ready to pay $500 plus a typical wireless contract and the monthly service is going to look like a steal because in a sense AT&T is going to keep your hardware discount and pay it back to you over the course of the contract. Eventually wireless companies will compete for iPhone users because we'll pay the same price for our iPhone no matter what networks we join.
The coolest part of this is that there is no question that a user owns their phone.
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> So by changing the definition of "win", Apple can "win." Meanwhile, back in reality, as long as there are hundreds of millions more
> machines being sold that run only Linux and Windows and can't run MacOS X, there's no way for Apple to "win" the desktop market.
It isn't that the definition of winning should change, so much as the way that score is being kept.
If Gateway has 6% of the market but is losing money and Apple has 5% of the market but is very profitable, then the market share numbers do not tell the whole story. The CEO of Gateway is not going to be going around saying "ha ha we got 1% more market share than Apple" because he has no profits.
> because Microsoft had already locked up the desktop business market by 1990
Microsoft locked up the desktop business market earlier than that, along with IBM. However by 1990 people wanted a GUI. It has been over 5 years since the Mac, and 4 years since the first MS Windows and people were still running WordPerfect or Lotus on DOS with all the funky key commands and no graphics.
In 1990 the Mac was doing really modern stuff. Photoshop was released that year. In 1990 Tim Berners-Lee wrote WorldWideWeb.app on a NeXT box.
So, no Microsoft was not seen as invulnerable or almighty in 1990. Notice you said WordPerfect and Lotus not Word and Excel which is what was running on the Mac at that time for business software. It wasn't until Windows 3.0 that anybody believed in Windows. The success of it even surprised Microsoft. However it was still seen as a joke until Windows 95, which blew everybody away. Nobody thought Microsoft had that much progress in them.
> That's just not how it works in a free market.
What free market? Ha ha ha. You're killing me. Did you miss the anti-trust trials?
Steve won't license Mac OS X because that has already been tried and failed TWICE:
- Apple licensing Mac OS 7 to Motorola, PowerComputing, and others in early 1990's
- NeXT licensing OpenStep to Sun, HP, IBM and others in early 1990's
Those two failures were also what lead directly to Steve Jobs taking over at Apple 10 years ago which brings us to today.
There is no market for operating systems sold outside of the boxes that run them. Microsoft created a false market when it pulled away from IBM and started selling DOS to IBM cloners, then it cornered that market with exclusive contracts and charging PC makers for one Windows for every PC sold whether the user wanted Windows or not.
Windows Vista Ultimate is a $400 plastic case with a DVD in it that contains a Windows installer. A Mac mini is a $600 plastic case with a DVD burner and a whole computer in it, that contains a functioning install of Mac OS X. How Apple can sell more Mac minis by taking out all the components and knocking $200 off the price, only Microsoft knows. Truly. Only Microsoft knows that. It is not about competing or markets, it's about middleware and licensing and illegal business practices.
You completely missed the point of the article. Going head to head with Microsoft on their own terms is suicide. There is no market there. There is just Microsoft holding much of the industry by the balls.
... proprietary.
All the same components in any PC are in a Mac. The only difference between a Mac and PC today is who owns the bottom software layer. In a Mac that is Apple and the bottom layer is all open source. In a PC the bottom layer is Microsoft and it is a black box.
So enjoy your non-proprietary stack. Good luck to you.
It's also interesting to look up the stack on a Mac and find BSD, Apache, PHP, mySQL, X-Windows, Python, Perl, even emacs and vi and also a really nice Java and I haven't mentioned any Apple software yet.
On a PC the only part of the software stack that's not made by Microsoft is the craplets the system vendor puts on there and the viruses and malware that installs automatically.
So, yeah
> Apple would be in serious trouble if Microsoft gave even less support to Office on the Mac, and both of them know that.
Oh, puleeeeeeze. I like how the Mac can be simultaneously a) not a business computer, and b) doomed if MS Office won't run on it.
There are two versions of Microsoft Office. One of them runs on Windows, but BOTH of them run on a Mac. If you are a Mac user and you choose the Windows version of Office you will also have to get Windows and a PC virtualizer, but because MS Office Mac is so overpriced it is about the same price either way. The Windows Office is far uglier but Mac Office is ugly also, and the Windows version includes Windows so if you bought Office for compatibility with Windows users then you get your money's worth with the Windows version. The virtualizer software is like $70.
Some Mac users would also be happy to see MS Office Mac go so that the pretense of MS being a cross-platform company can be finally put to rest, and so competitive apps would get out from under that shadow. And so people like you would stop saying "the Mac is doomed without MS Office" ha ha.
It is Linux that lusts after Office right now, not the Mac. Word and Excel are 1980's Mac apps that were ported to Windows in the 1990's. Yawn. More Mac users are Mac users because of iPhoto ("iTunes for photos") than MS Office.
Also, just a few years ago people would say "the Mac will be doomed if MS kills Internet Explorer Mac" and then Apple released Safari and it was better than Internet Explorer in every single way and IE just faded away.
Now, iTunes for PS3. That is something interesting to think about.
> The argument seems to be that one of the most significant trends in computing that I have seen in my lifetime, the decoupling
> of hardware and software buys, and the increasing "modularity" of computer hardware and software, will be reversible.
> I don't believe it.
What's happening is that the built-in operating software for all hardware will soon be free with the hardware. Only Microsoft is trying to do it the other way. That is why they have to fight everyone else so hard to keep the status quo. It is not the natural state of things. Saying it is would be saying that the natural state of digital technology is to be in need of repair.
If software is free there is no need to "decouple it" from the hardware in order to sell it more efficiently. Decoupling is also the opposite of integrating, and people want more integration, not less. Also there are more devices than ever and more non-technical users than ever, so "recoupling" stuff once it arrives is more problematic and expensive than ever. In other words, the money I save buying "decoupled" hardware/software is not as much as I lose "recoupling" it.
The assumption that all computer users are nerds is right there in the center of your argument but the evidence that this is not so is equally plain. You are also assuming that operating software is something that people are willing to pay for. So far nobody but Microsoft has been able to make that work, and they had to do all kinds of illegal shit to make that happen, they had to maintain an adversarial relationship with their customers in order to make that happen.
> but the closest, single-supplier monolithic platforms are all but extinct, a process that started with MS-DOS
On the one hand, for your hardware/software split you have the IBM PC running DOS or Windows. The famous Microsoft-IBM contract where Bill Gates steals IBM's balls starts it all, and various anti-trust activities by Microsoft perpetuate it for many years.
On the other hand, for integrated hardware/software you have the Apple II (the first PC), the Mac, the PlayStation (1, 2, 3), the Wii, the iPod, the DVD player, the CD player, over 1,000,000,000 mobile phones, the NTSC television, the HD television, the GameBoy, the VCR, the iPhone, the AppleTV, Wi-Fi base stations, routers, NAS, building security systems, HVAC, watches, those UPS clipboards, the classic Hasbro game "Operation", the pocket calculator, the printer, cars, trucks, planes, ships, the little Mars rovers, digital cameras, camcorders, La-Z-Boys, medical systems of all kinds, military systems of all kinds.
Oh yes, and the Microsoft XBox, Microsoft Zune, and also forthcoming promised Zune Phone, announced two days after iPhone. Integrated hardware and software just like everybody else who has to compete and therefore must ship devices that work.
> Customers, consumers or corporate, would have to be pretty stupid to return to a situation in which they will lose every time
So many assumptions.
A few years ago in pro audio you would never have speakers in your studio that had built-in amplifiers. Amps were huge separate things with very different technology. Then amplifier technology evolved and amps got really small, and some speaker makers started experimenting with putting the amps inside the speakers themselves. Noses were raised in response throughout the industry at the idea. But what manufacturers found was that because they were building the amp into the speaker, they could match the components precisely and then "tune" the whole system, such that a $500 speaker with built-in amp sounded better than a $2000 speaker with a $2000 external amp.
Now all the pro audio monitors have amps in them. Everybody pays less than they did before, and everybody's speakers sound better also. Win-win. The smaller, cheaper, better-sounding speakers also enabled a new kind of smaller studio to flourish that wouldn't have otherwise. Speaker cabling is now low-voltage, cheap, easy instead of high-voltage, exp
> Where is the option to set the default web browser? Why, it's in the Safari control panel!
... everything executable gets onto the iPhone through iTunes, same as iPod
... rather than "installing software" with iPod accessories you just hook them on and they work because the software part is already in the iPod like a driver ... imagine if hardware makers gave their drivers to Microsoft and you the user just plugged stuff in and it works ... that's how Apple does it
Similarly, the option to set Firefox as the default Web browser is in Firefox.
If you don't like Safari, follow these steps:
1) drag the Safari icon to the Trash
2) optionally, empty the Trash
3) no step 3
Compare to "uninstalling IE" on Windows.
> Just like similar options -- email client, HTML editor, etc -- are on the "Internet Options" control panel on Windows
> -- but that is actually in Control Panel, not just in IE.
On the Mac, this is decentralized. Rather than tell the system what is your default editor for files that end in ".html", you tell the actual files. So if you want to always open ".html" files with Dreamweaver, then select an ".html" file and choose File > Get Info and in the inspector that appears, under Open With you can choose Dreamweaver and then click the button right next to that: "use this application to open all documents like this".
When you open a document on the Mac, the document tells the system what app to use. This enables you to have the freedom to set different HTML files to open in different applications. For example you could have the files on your Web server all set to open in BBEdit for editing, but the files that are floating around your Desktop could be set to Firefox for viewing.
> And look at how they are handling the iPhone. NO third-party apps, the end
You are wrong in a number of ways:
1) third-party apps will be available for purchase through iTunes just like iPod games, Steve said this himself the day of the announcement, the main point regarding third-party apps is that the user will not be able to download-and-install on the iPhone itself as a security measure
2) iPhone has a standard Web browser in it with HTML 4, CSS 2.1, JavaScript 1.5 therefore it runs every application on the Web right out of the box with no installing, e.g. you have Flickr and eBay ready to go instead of being able to install Tic Tac Toe
3) most of the third-party apps for current smart phones are either built into the iPhone (e.g. audio/video player) or the iPhone doesn't need them (e.g. memory optimizers that help you get more out of your 128 MB)
4) iPhone has an iPod dock connector, therefore it runs over 3000 iPod accessories and more to come
So the iPhone is not going to be empty at all. You are going to have Web applications, you are going to have all kinds of stuff coming over from your iTunes (your audio/video, iPhone apps, Contacts, etc.) and you are going to have iPod accessories. And with 8 GB of storage it is going to make the "freedom" of other smart phones look ludicrous.
> Apple controls the hardware, and prevents anyone from making other hardware on which to run Mac OS X.
No, they don't. Mac OS X itself requires Apple hardware because that is what it was designed for. Apple is not under any obligation to imitate Microsoft's business practices or licensing customs. Now that HP has destroyed its own OS projects it does not have a right to Apple's OS on the same terms it made with Microsoft.
> So, Commodore/Amiga, BBC, Atari, Sinclair/spectrum, Amstrad, etc were all monopolistic bastards too?
Don't forget the PlayStation 1, 2, 3 and over 1,000,000,000 mobile phones. Also XBox and Zune.
> Are you denying that Apple prevents any other company from making compatible hardware>
Apple doesn't PREVENT anybody from doing anything.
> Once OS X becomes untied from specific hardware, we might actually see this happen.
>
> But will it? Until then, I doubt it.
You totally missed the point of the article.
The article is proposing that iPod and iPhone are better competition for Microsoft than a Mac OS X for generic PC's would be. That in fact the very reason why Apple MAY be able to compete with Microsoft on the desktop is because they are specifically NOT going head-to-head.
The iPod prevented Microsoft from extending its Windows monopoly into consumer audio/video and made Windows Media Player into a footnote in audio/video history. It showed that Apple can beat Microsoft in a fair fight. It is a much bigger victory over MS than taking 10% of Windows sales. The iPod is banned on Microsoft property by billg himself. No wonder Vista can't work with it.
Similarly, the iPhone has a full desktop-level, standards-based Web browser in it. It's the first real handheld Web browser and it is Tim Berners-Lee approved, unlike Explorer. Many people who today think that Explorer is the only Web browser are going to be writing nasty emails from their iPhones to various sites saying WTF why don't you work in iPhone like most everybody else and the response "use Explorer" is not going to cut it like it used to. It's the same argument that makes Firefox relevant even if it is a minority of the Web. With the iPhone it is going to be CEO's and plain consumers using the standards-based rendering out of the box and this just continues to demonstrate the impracticality of MS-only solutions.
The same site that this article came from (RDM) has a comparison of Windows Home Server vs Apple AirPort Extreme and Windows Media Center vs AppleTV and you notice the Apple stuff wins hands down but also notice that while the Microsoft stuff is Windows, the Apple stuff is not Mac. AppleTV runs OS X but just the parts you need so it is $700 cheaper than the Microsoft solution. AppleTV is also standards-based unlike the MS solution.
In other words, people are not just choosing Macs over PC's, they're choosing iPods, iPhones, and AppleTV's over PC's.
What is happening is that technology is moving on from Microsoft. The idea that Microsoft will be around until there is a new commodity OS and new commodity office suite is ridiculous. The technology world is so much bigger than that, and nobody has even proven yet that it makes any technical sense to split the hardware/software the way MS does. I don't think they will be replaced by another monopolist but rather they will just seem to get smaller and smaller as the rest of the world expands until they are so small we will step on them like a bug.
Notice that iPhone is THRILLING people and it has no MS technologies in it at all. It is more MS-free than the Mac, which runs Microsoft software. It is more MS-free than Linux, which attempts to integrate with Microsoft technologies. The iPhone is like a huge neon sign reminding people that Microsoft is no longer the center of the technology universe: the Internet is the center now, and it does not run DOS.
> The reality is that operating system licenses don't cost the Dells of this world that much.
In terms of the dollars they pay for them or the customers they lose because of them?
The author points out that Dell has to acquire many more customers than Apple just to make the same profit. The only way Dell can compete is by slashing prices and quality on the same old Windows box, whereas Apple can acquire new customers by building a new feature like Time Machine into the Mac. I saw Time Machine last June and they sold Leopard to me right then and there. There isn't a single feature like that in Vista.
> It is NOT because "they are not beholden to Microsoft" - they could do the same thing with a high-spec PC like
> Alienware do (ironically part of Dell now)
No, that's not true. Dell and HP and such cannot do better than Windows. They are committed to selling you whatever MS makes no matter how shitty it is. There is no competition and no differentiation. Sticking colored panels on it will not protect you from Microsoft viruses.
Remember that weird incident about 3 years ago where the Intel CEO was being interviewed in the IT press and the interviewer wanted to bust his balls about malware and such, and the Intel CEO admitted he spends over an hour a week using his daughter's PC just to clean the malware off, and the interviewer said "what is Intel's solution, right now, to malware?" and the CEO said "get a Mac" and this was well before the Apple Intel switch, however later we found out it was after Apple had talked to Intel. In other words, at the time of that interview, it was not possible to buy a secure Intel system from anyone. The CEO of Intel had to recommend a computer platform that at the time did not use Intel CPU's.
According to Microsoft dogma, he should have been able to recommend AlienWare for "gaming PC's running MS Windows" or recommend IBM for "business PC's running MS Windows" or recommend another particular PC maker for "secure PC's running MS Windows" but in reality everybody sells the same "Windows Box".
> To be sure, Apple is gaining ground, but they're so far from even being a significant threat to Microsoft in terms of OSes
... the author of this article is saying that doesn't matter.
... yawn.
> that it's almost laughable.
The key thing you said is "in terms of OSes"
Let Microsoft own the commodity PC market. Apple doesn't want it. They don't need it. Apple has diversified into consumer devices and the influence (not even dominance) of the standards-based iPod music player and the standards-based iPhone Web browser makes the world safe for standards-based computing, whether that is a Mac or other Unix. The music industry is not centered around Windows Media, and the Web is not centered around Internet Explorer. The world is not centered around the PC.
Yes, Microsoft continues to dominate "PC Operating Systems" and "Office Productivity Software"
> all Microsoft has to do to kill Apple is stop producing Office for OS X.
It's weird how people will say "Macs don't exist in business" and then turn around and say "Apple would be dead without MS Office".
Since the Mac went to Intel processors this is immaterial. It costs the same to buy either of these solutions:
- MS Office for Mac
- PC virtualizer for Mac, MS Windows, MS Office for Windows
What if Apple released iTunes for Linux? That is a much more interesting question. That is the dynamic that this article is trying to introduce you to.
I think you are mostly right except for the part about us all going to Web apps. That is the kind of prediction that never happens. You will want to run most of your apps on the Web, but you'll want to run your Web browser locally. Duh. You will want your encryption to happen locally, you will want your stuff to work when the Internet is unavailable for whatever reason, even if only to listen to music or check the time.
It's like saying that once you have always-on high-speed networking you won't need local storage. But even the iPhone has 8 GB of local storage to go with its three wireless networks and iPod dock connector high-speed serial connection to iTunes. The high-speed networking enables you to collect more stuff. The local storage just becomes more cachey than it was in the past. With iPhone you also have a Web browser that can do any Web application, yet there is also Cocoa on there and Unix, and the Cocoa and Unix are making the Web browsing better.
In the future, I think the Web/local split will be even more pronounced than ever. It will be more important for the local system to be the opposite of the Internet. It will be and more important in the future that you TRUST your local system. It will be more important that your OS internals be open source, not a black box, and that your local system default to NOT running applications unless you give it explicit permission.
In other words, to get back to the current discussion, the future is more iPhone-like and less Windows-like. What is the point of the untrustworthy, unprivate, unstable, Windows when the Web is already untrustworthy, unprivate, unstable? You need the opposite from your hardware so that it can be a good platform for the Web.
Apple is specifically NOT competing with Microsoft in the following areas:
- PC operating systems, both OEM and retail
- "office" productivity software
You get Mac OS X either on an Apple system, or in a retail box that is an upgrade for an existing Apple system. There is no competitor to retail Windows, and no competitor to OEM Windows. When Apple promotes an office suite, it is MS Office. The trial version is included on every Mac.
The very good reason Apple doesn't compete in PC operating systems or office productivity is that those are the two MS monopolies, gained and held illegally. You can't compete in those two markets simply by making a better product.
Instead, where Apple is hurting Microsoft today is by taking sales away from Microsoft's partners, and by competing well in markets which Microsoft ASPIRES to own. So Apple is hurting Dell, HP, Internet Explorer (attempted Web monopoly), Windows Media Player (attempted audio/video monopoly).
Apple and Microsoft also espouse completely different design philosophies, so when Apple executes successfully and MS doesn't it calls the whole MS pyramid scheme into question. It's harder than ever for Microsoft to excuse their lack of quality by saying "tech is hard" when people see the stuff working on the Mac.
> The thing is with Apple you only have one supplier, Apple, and one price, what they say is what you pay
Yes, but they have a variety of price points, and each price point gets you a complete system. Whether it is an iMac or Mac Pro or whatever it has all the ports that you'll need, it has the fastest CPU in its class, it has all of its drivers built-in.
And when you look on the disk you will see software from a broad variety of sources. For example, you will find iLife on there, but you will also find Apache and PHP. Out of the box you can run Mac apps, Java, BSD, X-Windows, or standard Web applications featuring HTML 4, CSS 2.1, JavaScript 1.5. To get that much choice out of a PC you have to be a very technical user. You have to know how to get around the Microsoft stuff and get at the rest of the world.
> you can't shop around at all. With PC's you have dozens of supplier to choose from.
Who will all sell you basically the same system with exactly the same crappy Microsoft software. You fell right into their trap. It only LOOKS like choice. No matter whose box you buy you will look on there and see Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft. What kind of choice is that for most people?
> So finding a PC maker that is selling a system at a similar price to a similar Apple system is not difficult.
Finding a PC maker who is selling a system with a similar VALUE to Apple is unfortunately impossible for most users. The exception would be a Unix nerd who can do just fine on an AMD box they built from parts and compiled all the software themselves. For those people, I heartily recommend today's PC industry if they can find someone who won't charge them the Microsoft Tax. For almost everyone else you are better to pick the price point that suits you and get a complete system for that and get down to work or play. Spend your "video driver time" writing code that is more productive.
> The author claims that the ipod and iphone are going to be major factors in killing the windows monopoly.
No, not "killing", but "preventing the extension of". In other words, the iPod has prevented Microsoft from extending its PC operating systems monopoly into audio/video. It has not killed the PC operating systems monopoly itself.
In audio/video, around 2000, the future was described as being all Microsoft all the time. For example, the DVD-Audio spec had WMA (Windows Media Audio) in its "jukebox" folder so that the disc could be played on portable players and save battery life. The CSS on DVD's was going to give way to Microsoft's DRM, which was going to be on everything, but even where there was no DRM you were going to use Windows Media.
However, since the iPod, the entire audio/video industry has passed Microsoft right by. The DVD-Audio jukebox spec was changed to ISO MP4 because iPod only plays standardized audio files, no WMA. The non-standard video codecs are giving way to standard MP4 H.264/AAC because that plays in iTunes+iPod (and also it's the right thing to do technically). The "Windows-only CD/DVD" is not possible right now because of the iPod and the iPod alone. If it is audio/video related and it doesn't work with iPod then consumers will not buy it whether it is content or accessories. Even just Podcasts alone are bigger than Windows Media, ha ha. Not the way billg wanted it, which is why iPods are banned on Microsoft property.
The way this same thing works with the iPhone is that just as the iPod only plays standard audio/video files, not Microsoft audio/video files, the iPhone Web browser has a standards-based rendering engine, not a Microsoft-based one. Web pages that are authored specifically for Microsoft Explorer, which is not a standard Web browser, are like the Windows Media of the Web. However, once pretty much every CEO in America has an iPhone, he or she will want to know why the hell the corporate Web site doesn't work on my iPhone? ActiveX? WTF? I have already heard a couple of people ask their Web guy if the corporate Web site will work on the iPhone. If they built it to standards, then yes, automatically, for free. If they built it for Explorer, then no.
Consumers are going to want flikr and eBay to work on their "iPod phone" and people are going to complain to MS that they couldn't get MS Support to work on their iPhone, but that was all they had because their Windows PC was down with a virus and MS will have to deal with that. In other words, the iPhone is going to make it much harder to sell your Microsoft-only Web applications, just like iPod has made it harder to sell your Microsoft-only audio and video and accessories.
Apple is not competing with Windows or Office. Those are the two Microsoft monopolies, and that's where MS makes ALL of their money. Apple is knocking down the ways that MS is trying to extend their monopolies. With iTunes+iPod they erased Windows Media Player and everything associated with it from any relevance at all. With iPhone they are putting another knife into Explorer, making it bleed in places that Firefox and the Mac can't.
Most humans do not believe in god. It is ridiculous to say that belief in god is universal. It is ignorant and bigoted also.
Even if you add up all the Christians, Jews, and Muslims (who apparently believe in the same god) you only get to half the population of the world. And many of them do not believe, it is a mistake to count the heads of those who self-identify as Christian/Jewish/Muslim and assume 100% Believers. Some will tell you quite frankly that they are simply following the faith of their fathers. Some will tell you they want to believe but they don't. Some will tell you that's just fine. So even among "the religious" the true believers may be a minority, even a small minority.
Buddhism by definition does not allow for a supreme being. It is antithetical to Buddhism to equate the original Buddha with a supreme being.
When you say "are we hard-wired to believe in God?" you don't have to delve deep into the science of the brain to find out. You can just ask people. You can answer that question by simply looking at the statistics. Very few of us do. Therefore, no.
All of the god talk in this article is extra. It is totally bolted on to what little science there is in it. Further it is politically suspicious when someone says "God" and "Darwin" in the same breath. When in the next breath they tell you god is universal, then you know what kind of science you are getting.
> While the speed with which a browser renders a Web page is an important measure, the difference between browsers is usually a matter
> of a few seconds at most.
That is a few seconds for every page. Here is a casual suggestion to lose a minute of your life for every 20 Web sites you visit, so that you can make background tasks go faster.
I'm glad you're satisfied with Vista, but the problem is that your wish list there looks like something to celebrate in 2000, but in 2007 it is very faint praise to say "video drivers don't crash the system anymore".
> Those are some of the things that I think are pretty compelling. No, there isn't an "uberfeature". But, then again, such a thing
> cannot exist in a relatively mature OS
You are exactly wrong, you have it exactly backwards. It is only in a mature OS that you can start to see uberfeatures emerge.
When Mac OS X shipped in 2001, the uberfeature was that it didn't crash, that it had Unix compatibility, that it had a modern display architecture, that stuff was in place to build on for the future. Even the fancy graphics were a bit hard to get excited about because they were different and they were slow at first. By v10.2 (Jaguar) which was the third version (fourth if you count the public beta), the main feature was that the GUI was fast by then, and there was a complete application platform and a broad range of software to choose from. That is all basic stuff in a way.
However in v10.3 (Panther) suddenly you get Expose, which are window animations that enable you to get at all your windows (like the flip 3D in Vista) and CoreAudio took a big step up to where you could just plug in pro audio interfaces and the system would combine them and share them amongst applications as required, which maybe you have to be an audio pro to appreciate but call it "zero config pro audio" and there was also Bonjour, which is literally "zero config networking". These were great features that are at least a level up from "multitasks" and "has apps".
In the Leopard Preview, which is 6-8 months old now, the Time Machine feature is system-wide backup, restore, and versioning, with an animated interface that is done by a system feature called CoreAnimation that is like "fonts for animations". When you sort a list in a Leopard app, sometimes the icons will animate into place instead of all disappearing and appearing sorted, and this will be done by the UI layer not by the app itself. These features are building on solid Mac and Unix features that are expected to just work by now. It's been years since Mac users even talked about memory management or multitasking unless they specifically are involved with that stuff at a technical level.
Notice that it is "Windows" that is "using this program" not the user. However, Windows "needs your permission" to use it.
It's like Windows is asking for a "get out of jail free card" before it does whatever mysterious thing that it wants.
UAC has the same purpose as EULA.
With all the yawns for Vista and Dell spiraling downward for a moment there I thought Dell was actually going to start serving the needs of its customers.
I'll remember this next time somebody tells me how the PC is "an open platform". Sure it is.
When the Newton came out, you had to explain to people what it was and why they wanted one.
... you pay full price for the hardware and the service is going to be discounted. So the service will seem to be cheaper than the competition.
When iPhone ships, it will be after about 3 years of iPod users demanding that Apple make an "iPod phone". Everybody knows what a phone is. It also has an iPod built in, and everybody knows what that is. Then you get desktop Web and email, which people are quite familiar with, and similarly Wi-Fi. That is a whole lot of stuff and you haven't even gotten to the Newtony parts yet, which are free. The stuff you bought a Newton for -- calendar, contacts, note-taking -- is all free on iPhone.
The iPhone is also sold differently than other phones
And LG's phone is $700 and runs a Flash UI so how is that competition for Apple's $499 phone that includes an iPod and Wi-Fi Web browser in addition to phone features?
Stupid, stupid article.
> Most of the time the kids are just researching (Google), or typing (Google Docs), the rest of the time they can go to a lab
iPhone. It has the full Web, including modern Web applications, and it has rich HTML email with styles and photos. It replaces the PC the school wants them to have, the phone their parents want them to have, and the iPod that the kid themselves wants to have.
How much work are you going to do to put Google and text-editing in front of a kid? That is ridiculous when we have the CPU power of a 1999 computer and a wireless network connection in any phone you can buy today. Even the so-called free ones. What's required is to add the true Web and Email to the kid's phone, as well as audio video so they can access educational Podcasts, enough storage to keep the files they're working on, and easy PC attachment so they can use the lab effectively. Enough battery to get through the day, easy recharging between uses, easy to add a second battery just like an iPod for power users.
Kids are mobile. That's what we forget. They are ultra-mobile. If you want them to use this stuff you will be more successful adding it to the pocket computer(s) that kids already have, rather than the PC they don't.
The only complaint you can make is the price, but there are many economies. The price will go down as manufacturing ramps up, the Apple Store for Education will sell iPhone cheaper still. There is very little administration because Apple manages the software through iTunes. It replaces a phone and iPod also not just a PC, so you can find the money for it from different pockets so to speak. And you can expect them to run for 2 years with only user admin, no IT help, just like iPods and Macs.
Further reading:
The Diamond Age or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1996)
by Neal Stephenson
> How about mandating a level of efficiency rather than assuming that innovation can't happen?"
... it's also to uncouple the gasoline from the drive train so that the car becomes agnostic about its energy source and the gasoline part can be replaced more easily with a fuel cell or battery or whatever other technology. The hybrid has room to grow and improve whereas a non-hybrid car getting great mileage is still stuck on gasoline. It's just a band-aid to cling to an old technology like gasoline or incandescent bulbs.
The reason people assume innovation can't happen is that it hasn't happened in incandescent light bulbs.
Anyway, twice as efficient is bullshit. Incandescent light bulbs are so outrageously inefficient that you are still wrecking the planet even with these new vaporware bulbs.
Banning incandescent bulbs will only spur innovation in LED and other modern solutions. Complaints about the quality of light are very valid, but when you have an LED bulb that is generating the same brightness as an incandescent and the LED is using 1% of the power and has 1000x the lifespan then it is time to get the incandescent bulbs out. You can replace an incandescent with an LED and still have power left over for a notebook computer with dual processors.
These new incandescent bulbs make me think of a non-hybrid gasoline car that ekes out 50 mpg so "you don't need a hybrid" but the point of the hybrid is not just to double the gas mileage today
Yeah but with iPhone the monthly service is supposed to be discounted rather than some money knocked off the hardware. You pay full price for the hardware and get a discount on the monthly contract. With other phones it is reversed, you get discounted hardware and pay full price for the network access.
The iPhone is so good that people are going to show up ready to pay $500 plus a typical wireless contract and the monthly service is going to look like a steal because in a sense AT&T is going to keep your hardware discount and pay it back to you over the course of the contract. Eventually wireless companies will compete for iPhone users because we'll pay the same price for our iPhone no matter what networks we join.
The coolest part of this is that there is no question that a user owns their phone.