> I'd be interested (but too lazy to find out) to hear how many people ever replaced the batteries > in their phones too. I know that mine is dying (RAZR, needs to be charged every day and a half > or so these days) but I'm not going to replace it -- even though I can -- because I'm looking to > replace the whole phone shortly
Unless you buy spare batteries right when you buy the phone it is sometimes even hard to find the right one later. It is better for the manufacturer to just build a bigger battery into the device rather than have a swappable battery in there. There are accessories for the iPod that plug on the dock connector and provide days of power out of a larger battery, and charge the internal battery so if you are someone who does long hiking trips or something there are solutions for that without making every user screw around with batteries.
Also, if the user can take the battery out, then you have to have a backup battery in there and all kinds of other concerns. Who needs it? The iPod seems like it is just one thing, not made out of various parts or requiring any assembly.
> No way in hell am I going to pay $500 for something I'll have to replace in 2 years
These pocket devices all have one year warranties. The iPod battery is made to last for 18 months of everyday use and it typically does. You can get it replaced for $59.
I had a 2G iPod that lasted for 4 years but that is not typical.
2 years is a long time for a pocket device.
If $499 is too much for 2 years of iPhone use then you are probably not the market for this. Apple said right out that this is for people who right now today have a $299 smartphone in one pocket and a $199 iPod nano in the other and think the iPhone would be a better solution for them. It's not made to be cheap or for casual phone users. It's not even a phone... it's a smart phone... a phone with Internet and PDA features and the iPhone is doing desktop Web browsing also.
> Looks terrible to me for a variety of reasons -- locked application support,
The iPhone runs Web applications right out of the box. You go to images.google.com or whatever other URL and its browser has all the specs to run Web 2.0 same as Firefox. There is a lot of stuff that you pay for on other phones that you won't have to either buy or install on the iPhone because you'll just use the Web version.
Slashdot is in the iPhone already, for example, because iPhone has a full-scale modern Web browser. What more do you want, really? If ever there was a place to take advantage of lightweight, zero-maintenance applications it is your phone. It's always on a network so it makes sense that stuff runs off the network.
There are exceptions of course. But stuff that runs on the device itself is better managed through iTunes than on-the-go downloading and launching apps. Same as playlist management was built into MP3 players before the iPod but putting it in iTunes made it work.
> if Apple can integrate a GPS and EDGE/3G, I'd pay $1000 for it just on the interface alone.
Maybe there will be attachments for the iPod connector on the iPhone, or you may have accessories that you can interact with over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi from the iPhone so that you can leave the devices in a bag and just use the iPhone.
With the Nike attachment, Apple put the software into the iPod nano and then any user who buys the hardware and plugs it onto their nano already has the software so it just works. I think that is the model for accessories that Apple likes so it will probably be common for there to be hardware/software solutions where the entire software part is like a printer driver that's part of the system.
If you look at the Nike thing it is two little hardware items, and neither has any switches or interface of any kind. One part plugs onto the iPod and the other part attaches to the shoe and the iPod has the interface part ready to go for any user who needs it. Even if you just borrow a friend's Nike attachment to try it out, you can just use it with your iPod without having to go to the Web or get out a CD with what would be a very tiny software application compared to 4 GB or 8 GB storage.
So there will be a lot of ways to accessorize the iPhone to make it what you want other than the ways that current phones are doing it. It already will run all the iPod accessories out of the box.
If you are buying a $199 iPod nano you can simply pay $299 to upgrade to an iPhone and you've spent your $299 "luxury phone" budget and you got the state of the art. The iPod nano features are all there in the iPhone (plus video) except maybe the ability to strap it to your arm in the gym, but in that case there is the iPod shuffle only $79 that is only a $50 upgrade from a spare set of iPod headphones. These are all consumer prices. There is no unexplored territory here.
Jobs made the case for iPod sales cannibalization before he even announced the iPhone's price. He said people are paying $300 or more for a smartphone and then buying an iPod for another $199 but with the iPhone they get all that in one box for $499. It's very easy math. When you add in the desktop level Web browsing and Wi-Fi features you're reaching up to the plus $500 range and higher to get that feature. The iPhone can run full-scale modern Web applications because it's got the whole feature set, very similar to Firefox.
And once people are actually touching these things, then you get to measure the value of the interface and touch screen..
Why are their two Mac Blenders? It's a drag.
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Blender is awesome but wow it is such a drag to have to download two separate but identical-looking and identically-named Blenders and keep track of what CPU's are in which Macs and use the right Blender on each one. This bug is as classic as Y2K. To a Unix or Windows user, it seems like you are shipping two applications for two platforms, but what you are actually doing is shipping one Mac app broken into two parts. One part will run on all Macs, however it will suffer reduced performance on some compared to if it was shipped complete. The other part will run on some Macs, and fail to run on others where it would run fine if it was complete. It's a huge bug, especially because it is so rare for a Mac app to fail to run if you have either the current or previous OS version. I don't know that it's ever happened to me on Mac OS X.
The programmers were probably thinking of an "application install" process, during which you are checking RAM allotment, you are familiar with the system you are installing Blender onto. It might be a once a year thing. However on the Mac there is no Blender installer, just a Blender application. Very few Mac apps use installers. So what you're actually asking the user to do when you ship an app this way is check what CPU is in the Mac they are using every time they LAUNCH Blender, which they may do hundreds of times per year on dozens of systems. If they are launching it from an iPod or network disk then which Blender it is has absolutely nothing to do with what CPU is in the Mac they are using.
Also, this is the second CPU transition for Macs... the last time, bandwidth was even more precious, and we went through the "split the app to save bandwidth" thing with even more gusto, and we found out that it doesn't even save bandwidth. So many users download both anyway, either because they actually need both, or because they don't know which one they need so they download both to be safe, that it completely negates the proposed bandwidth savings. Further, when they download each half of the app, they are getting all the non-binary parts TWICE, so no bandwidth savings. A Universal Blender would be a smaller download then the two split parts. There is no ultimate benefit to this.
Does anybody know if you can transplant the Intel binary into the PowerPC version (or other way around) and get on Universal Blender? Or are there further differences? Do I have to tell the app package it has both binaries now?
> One of the reasons I stick with Windows (for this task) is because one $80 package does it all and it does it well with a nice friendly interface.
I truly can't believe it when I hear someone say they are using Windows to do video or DVD, never mind saying that's why you stick with it.
On the Mac you get all this stuff built-in with iLife, and the integration is one of the major features. The whole iTunes thing is just one piece of iLife, ported to Windows to follow the iPod. The other apps are of the same depth and sophistication. You can work only in iMovie and yet access your entire digital photo library from iPhoto or any audio from iTunes, you can click a menu in iMovie and move your project to iDVD for menus and burning.
Just the benefits of QuickTime integration throughout the system are worth switching to Mac to do video and DVD, or pro audio similarly. All kinds of stuff you have to do manually on Windows or pay through the nose to get pro quality is just there on the Mac because the community of users includes a huge number of movie-makers and DVD authors, both pros and consumers, everyone needs DVD tools. DVD is like text editing on the Mac since 2001.
Tell them to get a Mac and Parallels ($80) and run their old XP inside a window on the Mac OS X desktop. All their old familiar stuff is in the XP window, and they can optionally utilize iLife and other Mac OS X features. If they use an iPod they can move their iTunes to the Mac desktop quite easily, if they use Firefox then use that in the Mac environment without even noticing, and over time they'll need XP less and less.
So many people switch from Windows to Mac this way. These days it is Parallels running full-speed on Intel CPU's but it used to be VirtualPC with an emulated Intel CPU and it was still really useful because you could just reach back into your old Windows system at any time and convert a file or whatever you need. Similarly, this is how Mac OS X replaced Mac OS 9, but running a virtual Mac with 9 in it on X.
PC vendors have been waiting for Vista for 2-5 years depending on how you count. Anyone who expects them to wait some more or offer consumers any kind of choice has not been paying attention to how things work in the Windows cartel.
> Why? Is saving as "Word 97-2003" document difficult?
Yeah, when you have hundreds or thousands of documents. Yeah, when you know from experience that every conversion that MS Office makes breaks every document in some way.
Compatibility pack?! You're killing me. You have to install an extra in order to make MS Office compatible with MS Office?
Word is only a little older than the Web, huh? Word is 1985 and the Web is 1990 and by now Word ought to be compatible with itself out of the box.
> People rarely talk about just how viral Office updates are. You save a doc in 2000 format, and suddenly 97 can no longer open it. > Save it in 2003 and 2000 can't open it. And so on. A customer/vendor/friend sends you a doc file, and you can't open it. Time to upgrade!
This is why the World Wide Web was invented almost 20 years ago, so that people could share documents without having to worry about what kind of computer the reader has. If you are still paying Microsoft to manage your memos at this point then you have no right to complain about the fine print. Pay up, sucker. You can't complain that nobody warned you when this has been going on forever.
It's like people who encoded their CD's into WMA complaining that they can't play the files on their iPod, which plays all the standard audio formats. Yeah, but it took me a long time to make all these WMA. So what? The time you spend encoding your data into Microsoft formats is wasted time. The formats themselves don't last more than a few years. Yet there are standard file formats for everything, you can put data into the right file format ONCE and put it on a server where it belongs and never have to fuck with it again and that is so much more valuable than hoping all your old Word documents will look right once they're opened in the new MS Office and saved in the new file format.
One thing I've heard about OS X development is that they are encouraged not to invent stuff that's already been invented, to use the open source implementation for example, and then add value by making it "easy to use" and "just work". They also have a lot of geniuses over there who wouldn't want to work anywhere else and I don't know if that can be said about Microsoft based on their product quality.
Your different teams argument only makes me think that there ought to be a special Windows team that DESIGNS each new version of Windows, and they would have finished their design work on XP sometime during 1999 and then as the coders take the ball and move it along eventually to marketing, then the design team would pass the new ball to the coders so they can work on the next version.
In other words, if there is a new Windows coming in 2009 then it should already have been designed by now. The spec should already be final, and a bunch of highly paid world-class designers at Microsoft ought to be taking each other out for martinis right now celebrating how good the Vienna spec turned out.
Or are they skipping the design step again? Hasn't hurt them in the past, right?
> with Vista coming out ahead on some features and OS X coming out ahead on others.
Which reviewer found which feature of Vista ahead of Tiger? I haven't seen that at all. The new features that Bill Gates touted were parental controls (Tiger, 2005), making DVD movies (Classic, 1999), using a pretty translucent UI (Cheetah, 2001) that is drawn by the 3D hardware (Panther, 2003), and using little mini-apps to check news feeds and weather and such (Tiger, 2005), and a desktop search menu (Tiger, 2005) with instant searches (Classic, 1999). Also in the news, the speech recognition (Classic, 1999) feature of Vista that lacks the password that the Mac's speech recognition has and so has already been demonstrated to enable a Flash movie in a Web page to trash all the user's desktop files and then empty the trash (George Ou, Windows apologist and IT writer discovered this one during the week it took him to fail to upgrade his PC to Vista).
The only thing I've found so far that the Mac doesn't already have is the thing where a USB key can be used as extra swap file cache. But since Macs typically have higher RAM capacity and I never notice the swap file working (even when it is) it is questionable whether we are missing this feature at all.
So what is the Vista feature that Mac users don't have or might want? Where is the argument for Vista? I don't see anybody making that argument very well at all. Even where you see people defending Vista against Tiger it is often with disinformation or ignorance. They didn't even check the Tiger spec sheet to make sure that wasn't in there, or they see it isn't in the Tiger spec sheet so they think it isn't in Mac OS but it turns out that feature was in an earlier revision or even in Classic.
You are smoking the same stuff as Redmond and it is not the good stuff we get down here in Northern California.
Nobody wants to buy all that shit you just described. There are very few people who even like the dream.
The only reason people like virtualization in the context of Windows is to take that pig of a software project and wrap it up in a cheap virtual PC that can contain it in the first place, so you can run it as a single application on a better operating system, to test Web sites in Explorer or whatever. When my Windows-in-a-box crashes and won't boot, I just throw out the disk image file and get a fresh one from storage and I'm back in business. When Windows crashes my iTunes doesn't even hiccup because it is not running in there.
> and if Vienna is so close, we could make it skipping Vista
What is so close about Vienna?
First of all, 2009 is NOT close in computing terms, especially with two very large transitions going on right now:
- single to parallel processing, with multicore systems being the rule - displays changing from "screen resolution" about 100 dpi today to "print resolution" 200-300 dpi over the next few years
These are huge changes that obliterate fundamental assumptions we've been making for the entire history of computing. You will require new software to take advantage of a 200 dpi display and it is coming soon.
If Vista is not ready for this stuff and other modern computing tasks right now, it isn't going to get any readier by 2009. If you don't like Vista you ought to be honest about your need to get a new platform. Vista is the best of the best of the best Microsoft can do.
> It's amazing just how bitter and defensive MS has become this last year in regards to OS X.
In that weird Newsweek interview, Bill Gates not only mentions Steve Jobs by name, he says "oh, sure, Steve Jobs invented the world!" in a sarcastic way and this is while doing PR for perhaps the latest and most "me-too" version of Windows ever and that is saying something.
I heard that iPods are banned on Microsoft property. That might explain why Vista can't run iTunes and why Microsoft sells so many Zunes to itself.
> Actually that is what vms and emulations are for, it would be easy to shift the entire old part of windows into a vm, > but the main problem is, the apis are so entangled in each other that even microsoft does not have a clue probably > if you pull an 8 or 16 bit dll out of windows if you do not crash the entire system!
That is how Apple got their users off of "Classic" Mac OS and onto Mac OS X. It took about two years to dump the virtual machine and most Mac users don't even realize they have it now. It isn't part of the Intel version and isn't missed.
> Windows will be broke till they do a "redo" form scratch...
Windows 2000 was Windows v5.0 and it was advertised as a complete rewrite of Windows to get it off of DOS (4.0 and 4.1 were both on DOS) and into the future. However it was not ready for home users until Windows v5.1 aka XP. That is your rewrite, though. When Microsoft announced the name "Windows XP" I remember being very disappointed because Apple's much-talked-about rewrite of Mac OS had been named Mac OS X in 1999 (two years before) and now that Microsoft's much-talked-about rewrite of Windows was ready they added an X to it also, albeit with a P. Then it turned out that they ported DOS security to NT and shipped it out onto the Internet with the firewall missing or off and it got worms and everybody forgot how this was the rewrite that was supposed to be the foundation for the world of tomorrow.
The only viable Windows rewrite I have seen so far would be a Linux-based system. I've been using Mac OS X these past 5 years and there were many times when Apple seemed to do something magic and it turned out that it was even possible only because of all the open source stuff they use. It benefits Apple for the speed and quality of development, but it also benefits the users directly for example I appreciate that Apache and PHP are part of the Mac OS because I use them every day along with Photoshop and BBEdit and QuickTime and other traditional Mac tools.
Mac OS X came out in March, 2001, huh? It's not recent. It predates Windows XP by six months, and Apple shipped about 10 unique versions before your Longhorn Alpha Preview (whatever that is) was available in November 2002. At that time Apple was hard at work getting ready to SHIP Mac OS X v10.3 Panther, with the GUI done entirely in OpenGL, and Microsoft's MacBU was running betas of it so they could develop MS Office Mac for it.
Further, instant desktop search was a feature of Mac OS 9, which is about 1999 and predates Mac OS X. Every day since then I have asked a Mac for a file and get it back instantly. Get your information straight at least. Find a Panther system and go to the Finder and choose File > Find and type a word and BOOM.
What happened with search in Tiger was they made the index real-time... it is created by the kernel with each file write so it is always up-to-date, rather than being updated in the background overnight, and they continued to add features consistent with a new iteration of an existing software. And they added a "search" system menu to go with the one for scripts and Wi-Fi and displays and such, and they gave it a new name: Spotlight. However it isn't that on previous Mac OS X before Tiger you couldn't do an instant search.
> Apple adds search, widgets, some API improvements, and ships Tiger, which is welcomed as a big upgrade. > Microsoft adds search, gadgets, multiple new APIs, major kernel changes, entirely new driver systems (audio, USB, video), > tons of new security features (UAC, Defender, etc.), a whole new installation system, speech recognition, and hundreds > of other features, and suddenly it's a "retread of Windows 2003".
One new feature of Tiger that you forgot to mention is Intel compatibility, both x32 and x64, single and multiple cores, with all the same features as the PowerPC version except the Classic environment is replaced by Rosetta doing basically the same thing. As far as under-the-hood changes, I think Apple has Microsoft beat there. All previous versions of Mac OS X ran on PowerPC only.
Apple's major system releases all feature a 50/50 split of under-the-hood stuff and in-your-face lickable user features. You don't have to tell a graphic designer about the kernel to get him to be excited about a new system release from Apple. There will be something font or graphics-related that will do that. There are a lot of features that don't have equivalents on other platforms, like the pro audio subsystem or the ridiculously sophisticated typography.
> I honestly think that what would help Microsoft more is if they didn't focus on releasing huge new, completely revamped > operating systems every few years and instead focused on providing updates to the current products.
That is what they are doing. There aren't any new features in Vista.
Last year when Apple released a beta of Leopard (Mac OS X v10.5 due later this Spring) they gave developers a feature called Time Machine that is the kind of feature that users pay for a retail box upgrade to get. I already know I will buy Leopard for the Time Machine feature. When Leopard ships, Mac users will be able to buy a Leopard box and a typical USB or FireWire hard disk, and that is a complete backup solution for Mac OS X that anyone can use. You have to see it in action to understand. It's versioning made easy and automated backup made easy and both file and disk restores made easy. It's the exact software you would want right now to take advantage of a 500 GB USB disk for $150. That is just one feature of Leopard, and they already said they are holding the best features secret until launch. And it will be very easy to upgrade your Mac yourself. It always takes 20 minutes and works great.
Over in Vista they have done a lot of renaming stuff and moving it around and their improvements to their display layer software are really behind and have ridiculous hardware requirements and they added even more DRM and it can turn itself off now at Microsoft's request and there isn't anything that you can say is going to change the way you use a computer.
They have not been following software design principles. They don't iterate on their own stuff to take advantage of what they built previously because what they built previously is all crap, and all in one big ball that they're afraid to untangle in some cases. And the worms, that is awful.
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> I'd be interested (but too lazy to find out) to hear how many people ever replaced the batteries
> in their phones too. I know that mine is dying (RAZR, needs to be charged every day and a half
> or so these days) but I'm not going to replace it -- even though I can -- because I'm looking to
> replace the whole phone shortly
Unless you buy spare batteries right when you buy the phone it is sometimes even hard to find the right one later. It is better for the manufacturer to just build a bigger battery into the device rather than have a swappable battery in there. There are accessories for the iPod that plug on the dock connector and provide days of power out of a larger battery, and charge the internal battery so if you are someone who does long hiking trips or something there are solutions for that without making every user screw around with batteries.
Also, if the user can take the battery out, then you have to have a backup battery in there and all kinds of other concerns. Who needs it? The iPod seems like it is just one thing, not made out of various parts or requiring any assembly.
> No way in hell am I going to pay $500 for something I'll have to replace in 2 years
... it's a smart phone ... a phone with Internet and PDA features and the iPhone is doing desktop Web browsing also.
These pocket devices all have one year warranties. The iPod battery is made to last for 18 months of everyday use and it typically does. You can get it replaced for $59.
I had a 2G iPod that lasted for 4 years but that is not typical.
2 years is a long time for a pocket device.
If $499 is too much for 2 years of iPhone use then you are probably not the market for this. Apple said right out that this is for people who right now today have a $299 smartphone in one pocket and a $199 iPod nano in the other and think the iPhone would be a better solution for them. It's not made to be cheap or for casual phone users. It's not even a phone
H.264 is the video codec for MPEG-4 so yes iPhone has H.264 decoding just like iPods.
> Looks terrible to me for a variety of reasons -- locked application support,
The iPhone runs Web applications right out of the box. You go to images.google.com or whatever other URL and its browser has all the specs to run Web 2.0 same as Firefox. There is a lot of stuff that you pay for on other phones that you won't have to either buy or install on the iPhone because you'll just use the Web version.
Slashdot is in the iPhone already, for example, because iPhone has a full-scale modern Web browser. What more do you want, really? If ever there was a place to take advantage of lightweight, zero-maintenance applications it is your phone. It's always on a network so it makes sense that stuff runs off the network.
There are exceptions of course. But stuff that runs on the device itself is better managed through iTunes than on-the-go downloading and launching apps. Same as playlist management was built into MP3 players before the iPod but putting it in iTunes made it work.
> if Apple can integrate a GPS and EDGE/3G, I'd pay $1000 for it just on the interface alone.
Maybe there will be attachments for the iPod connector on the iPhone, or you may have accessories that you can interact with over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi from the iPhone so that you can leave the devices in a bag and just use the iPhone.
With the Nike attachment, Apple put the software into the iPod nano and then any user who buys the hardware and plugs it onto their nano already has the software so it just works. I think that is the model for accessories that Apple likes so it will probably be common for there to be hardware/software solutions where the entire software part is like a printer driver that's part of the system.
If you look at the Nike thing it is two little hardware items, and neither has any switches or interface of any kind. One part plugs onto the iPod and the other part attaches to the shoe and the iPod has the interface part ready to go for any user who needs it. Even if you just borrow a friend's Nike attachment to try it out, you can just use it with your iPod without having to go to the Web or get out a CD with what would be a very tiny software application compared to 4 GB or 8 GB storage.
So there will be a lot of ways to accessorize the iPhone to make it what you want other than the ways that current phones are doing it. It already will run all the iPod accessories out of the box.
If you are buying a $199 iPod nano you can simply pay $299 to upgrade to an iPhone and you've spent your $299 "luxury phone" budget and you got the state of the art. The iPod nano features are all there in the iPhone (plus video) except maybe the ability to strap it to your arm in the gym, but in that case there is the iPod shuffle only $79 that is only a $50 upgrade from a spare set of iPod headphones. These are all consumer prices. There is no unexplored territory here.
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Jobs made the case for iPod sales cannibalization before he even announced the iPhone's price. He said people are paying $300 or more for a smartphone and then buying an iPod for another $199 but with the iPhone they get all that in one box for $499. It's very easy math. When you add in the desktop level Web browsing and Wi-Fi features you're reaching up to the plus $500 range and higher to get that feature. The iPhone can run full-scale modern Web applications because it's got the whole feature set, very similar to Firefox.
And once people are actually touching these things, then you get to measure the value of the interface and touch screen
Blender is awesome but wow it is such a drag to have to download two separate but identical-looking and identically-named Blenders and keep track of what CPU's are in which Macs and use the right Blender on each one. This bug is as classic as Y2K. To a Unix or Windows user, it seems like you are shipping two applications for two platforms, but what you are actually doing is shipping one Mac app broken into two parts. One part will run on all Macs, however it will suffer reduced performance on some compared to if it was shipped complete. The other part will run on some Macs, and fail to run on others where it would run fine if it was complete. It's a huge bug, especially because it is so rare for a Mac app to fail to run if you have either the current or previous OS version. I don't know that it's ever happened to me on Mac OS X.
... the last time, bandwidth was even more precious, and we went through the "split the app to save bandwidth" thing with even more gusto, and we found out that it doesn't even save bandwidth. So many users download both anyway, either because they actually need both, or because they don't know which one they need so they download both to be safe, that it completely negates the proposed bandwidth savings. Further, when they download each half of the app, they are getting all the non-binary parts TWICE, so no bandwidth savings. A Universal Blender would be a smaller download then the two split parts. There is no ultimate benefit to this.
The programmers were probably thinking of an "application install" process, during which you are checking RAM allotment, you are familiar with the system you are installing Blender onto. It might be a once a year thing. However on the Mac there is no Blender installer, just a Blender application. Very few Mac apps use installers. So what you're actually asking the user to do when you ship an app this way is check what CPU is in the Mac they are using every time they LAUNCH Blender, which they may do hundreds of times per year on dozens of systems. If they are launching it from an iPod or network disk then which Blender it is has absolutely nothing to do with what CPU is in the Mac they are using.
Also, this is the second CPU transition for Macs
Does anybody know if you can transplant the Intel binary into the PowerPC version (or other way around) and get on Universal Blender? Or are there further differences? Do I have to tell the app package it has both binaries now?
> One of the reasons I stick with Windows (for this task) is because one $80 package does it all and it does it well with a nice friendly interface.
I truly can't believe it when I hear someone say they are using Windows to do video or DVD, never mind saying that's why you stick with it.
On the Mac you get all this stuff built-in with iLife, and the integration is one of the major features. The whole iTunes thing is just one piece of iLife, ported to Windows to follow the iPod. The other apps are of the same depth and sophistication. You can work only in iMovie and yet access your entire digital photo library from iPhoto or any audio from iTunes, you can click a menu in iMovie and move your project to iDVD for menus and burning.
Just the benefits of QuickTime integration throughout the system are worth switching to Mac to do video and DVD, or pro audio similarly. All kinds of stuff you have to do manually on Windows or pay through the nose to get pro quality is just there on the Mac because the community of users includes a huge number of movie-makers and DVD authors, both pros and consumers, everyone needs DVD tools. DVD is like text editing on the Mac since 2001.
Tell them to get a Mac and Parallels ($80) and run their old XP inside a window on the Mac OS X desktop. All their old familiar stuff is in the XP window, and they can optionally utilize iLife and other Mac OS X features. If they use an iPod they can move their iTunes to the Mac desktop quite easily, if they use Firefox then use that in the Mac environment without even noticing, and over time they'll need XP less and less.
So many people switch from Windows to Mac this way. These days it is Parallels running full-speed on Intel CPU's but it used to be VirtualPC with an emulated Intel CPU and it was still really useful because you could just reach back into your old Windows system at any time and convert a file or whatever you need. Similarly, this is how Mac OS X replaced Mac OS 9, but running a virtual Mac with 9 in it on X.
PC vendors have been waiting for Vista for 2-5 years depending on how you count. Anyone who expects them to wait some more or offer consumers any kind of choice has not been paying attention to how things work in the Windows cartel.
The ribbon is the new menu bar. One context-sensitive menu across the top of the screen is the newest Microsoft innovation.
> Why? Is saving as "Word 97-2003" document difficult?
Yeah, when you have hundreds or thousands of documents. Yeah, when you know from experience that every conversion that MS Office makes breaks every document in some way.
Compatibility pack?! You're killing me. You have to install an extra in order to make MS Office compatible with MS Office?
Word is only a little older than the Web, huh? Word is 1985 and the Web is 1990 and by now Word ought to be compatible with itself out of the box.
> People rarely talk about just how viral Office updates are. You save a doc in 2000 format, and suddenly 97 can no longer open it.
> Save it in 2003 and 2000 can't open it. And so on. A customer/vendor/friend sends you a doc file, and you can't open it. Time to upgrade!
This is why the World Wide Web was invented almost 20 years ago, so that people could share documents without having to worry about what kind of computer the reader has. If you are still paying Microsoft to manage your memos at this point then you have no right to complain about the fine print. Pay up, sucker. You can't complain that nobody warned you when this has been going on forever.
It's like people who encoded their CD's into WMA complaining that they can't play the files on their iPod, which plays all the standard audio formats. Yeah, but it took me a long time to make all these WMA. So what? The time you spend encoding your data into Microsoft formats is wasted time. The formats themselves don't last more than a few years. Yet there are standard file formats for everything, you can put data into the right file format ONCE and put it on a server where it belongs and never have to fuck with it again and that is so much more valuable than hoping all your old Word documents will look right once they're opened in the new MS Office and saved in the new file format.
One thing I've heard about OS X development is that they are encouraged not to invent stuff that's already been invented, to use the open source implementation for example, and then add value by making it "easy to use" and "just work". They also have a lot of geniuses over there who wouldn't want to work anywhere else and I don't know if that can be said about Microsoft based on their product quality.
Your different teams argument only makes me think that there ought to be a special Windows team that DESIGNS each new version of Windows, and they would have finished their design work on XP sometime during 1999 and then as the coders take the ball and move it along eventually to marketing, then the design team would pass the new ball to the coders so they can work on the next version.
In other words, if there is a new Windows coming in 2009 then it should already have been designed by now. The spec should already be final, and a bunch of highly paid world-class designers at Microsoft ought to be taking each other out for martinis right now celebrating how good the Vienna spec turned out.
Or are they skipping the design step again? Hasn't hurt them in the past, right?
> with Vista coming out ahead on some features and OS X coming out ahead on others.
Which reviewer found which feature of Vista ahead of Tiger? I haven't seen that at all. The new features that Bill Gates touted were parental controls (Tiger, 2005), making DVD movies (Classic, 1999), using a pretty translucent UI (Cheetah, 2001) that is drawn by the 3D hardware (Panther, 2003), and using little mini-apps to check news feeds and weather and such (Tiger, 2005), and a desktop search menu (Tiger, 2005) with instant searches (Classic, 1999). Also in the news, the speech recognition (Classic, 1999) feature of Vista that lacks the password that the Mac's speech recognition has and so has already been demonstrated to enable a Flash movie in a Web page to trash all the user's desktop files and then empty the trash (George Ou, Windows apologist and IT writer discovered this one during the week it took him to fail to upgrade his PC to Vista).
The only thing I've found so far that the Mac doesn't already have is the thing where a USB key can be used as extra swap file cache. But since Macs typically have higher RAM capacity and I never notice the swap file working (even when it is) it is questionable whether we are missing this feature at all.
So what is the Vista feature that Mac users don't have or might want? Where is the argument for Vista? I don't see anybody making that argument very well at all. Even where you see people defending Vista against Tiger it is often with disinformation or ignorance. They didn't even check the Tiger spec sheet to make sure that wasn't in there, or they see it isn't in the Tiger spec sheet so they think it isn't in Mac OS but it turns out that feature was in an earlier revision or even in Classic.
You are smoking the same stuff as Redmond and it is not the good stuff we get down here in Northern California.
Nobody wants to buy all that shit you just described. There are very few people who even like the dream.
The only reason people like virtualization in the context of Windows is to take that pig of a software project and wrap it up in a cheap virtual PC that can contain it in the first place, so you can run it as a single application on a better operating system, to test Web sites in Explorer or whatever. When my Windows-in-a-box crashes and won't boot, I just throw out the disk image file and get a fresh one from storage and I'm back in business. When Windows crashes my iTunes doesn't even hiccup because it is not running in there.
> and if Vienna is so close, we could make it skipping Vista
What is so close about Vienna?
First of all, 2009 is NOT close in computing terms, especially with two very large transitions going on right now:
- single to parallel processing, with multicore systems being the rule
- displays changing from "screen resolution" about 100 dpi today to "print resolution" 200-300 dpi over the next few years
These are huge changes that obliterate fundamental assumptions we've been making for the entire history of computing. You will require new software to take advantage of a 200 dpi display and it is coming soon.
If Vista is not ready for this stuff and other modern computing tasks right now, it isn't going to get any readier by 2009. If you don't like Vista you ought to be honest about your need to get a new platform. Vista is the best of the best of the best Microsoft can do.
> It's amazing just how bitter and defensive MS has become this last year in regards to OS X.
In that weird Newsweek interview, Bill Gates not only mentions Steve Jobs by name, he says "oh, sure, Steve Jobs invented the world!" in a sarcastic way and this is while doing PR for perhaps the latest and most "me-too" version of Windows ever and that is saying something.
I heard that iPods are banned on Microsoft property. That might explain why Vista can't run iTunes and why Microsoft sells so many Zunes to itself.
> Actually that is what vms and emulations are for, it would be easy to shift the entire old part of windows into a vm,
> but the main problem is, the apis are so entangled in each other that even microsoft does not have a clue probably
> if you pull an 8 or 16 bit dll out of windows if you do not crash the entire system!
That is how Apple got their users off of "Classic" Mac OS and onto Mac OS X. It took about two years to dump the virtual machine and most Mac users don't even realize they have it now. It isn't part of the Intel version and isn't missed.
> Windows will be broke till they do a "redo" form scratch...
Windows 2000 was Windows v5.0 and it was advertised as a complete rewrite of Windows to get it off of DOS (4.0 and 4.1 were both on DOS) and into the future. However it was not ready for home users until Windows v5.1 aka XP. That is your rewrite, though. When Microsoft announced the name "Windows XP" I remember being very disappointed because Apple's much-talked-about rewrite of Mac OS had been named Mac OS X in 1999 (two years before) and now that Microsoft's much-talked-about rewrite of Windows was ready they added an X to it also, albeit with a P. Then it turned out that they ported DOS security to NT and shipped it out onto the Internet with the firewall missing or off and it got worms and everybody forgot how this was the rewrite that was supposed to be the foundation for the world of tomorrow.
The only viable Windows rewrite I have seen so far would be a Linux-based system. I've been using Mac OS X these past 5 years and there were many times when Apple seemed to do something magic and it turned out that it was even possible only because of all the open source stuff they use. It benefits Apple for the speed and quality of development, but it also benefits the users directly for example I appreciate that Apache and PHP are part of the Mac OS because I use them every day along with Photoshop and BBEdit and QuickTime and other traditional Mac tools.
Mac OS X came out in March, 2001, huh? It's not recent. It predates Windows XP by six months, and Apple shipped about 10 unique versions before your Longhorn Alpha Preview (whatever that is) was available in November 2002. At that time Apple was hard at work getting ready to SHIP Mac OS X v10.3 Panther, with the GUI done entirely in OpenGL, and Microsoft's MacBU was running betas of it so they could develop MS Office Mac for it.
... it is created by the kernel with each file write so it is always up-to-date, rather than being updated in the background overnight, and they continued to add features consistent with a new iteration of an existing software. And they added a "search" system menu to go with the one for scripts and Wi-Fi and displays and such, and they gave it a new name: Spotlight. However it isn't that on previous Mac OS X before Tiger you couldn't do an instant search.
Further, instant desktop search was a feature of Mac OS 9, which is about 1999 and predates Mac OS X. Every day since then I have asked a Mac for a file and get it back instantly. Get your information straight at least. Find a Panther system and go to the Finder and choose File > Find and type a word and BOOM.
What happened with search in Tiger was they made the index real-time
> Apple adds search, widgets, some API improvements, and ships Tiger, which is welcomed as a big upgrade.
> Microsoft adds search, gadgets, multiple new APIs, major kernel changes, entirely new driver systems (audio, USB, video),
> tons of new security features (UAC, Defender, etc.), a whole new installation system, speech recognition, and hundreds
> of other features, and suddenly it's a "retread of Windows 2003".
One new feature of Tiger that you forgot to mention is Intel compatibility, both x32 and x64, single and multiple cores, with all the same features as the PowerPC version except the Classic environment is replaced by Rosetta doing basically the same thing. As far as under-the-hood changes, I think Apple has Microsoft beat there. All previous versions of Mac OS X ran on PowerPC only.
Apple's major system releases all feature a 50/50 split of under-the-hood stuff and in-your-face lickable user features. You don't have to tell a graphic designer about the kernel to get him to be excited about a new system release from Apple. There will be something font or graphics-related that will do that. There are a lot of features that don't have equivalents on other platforms, like the pro audio subsystem or the ridiculously sophisticated typography.
>> Surely it is better to wait and see what they come up with next.
l e.com/macosx/
If you want to see what Microsoft will come up with next, say around 2010, history tells us you can go here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20050731002116/www.app
> I honestly think that what would help Microsoft more is if they didn't focus on releasing huge new, completely revamped
> operating systems every few years and instead focused on providing updates to the current products.
That is what they are doing. There aren't any new features in Vista.
Last year when Apple released a beta of Leopard (Mac OS X v10.5 due later this Spring) they gave developers a feature called Time Machine that is the kind of feature that users pay for a retail box upgrade to get. I already know I will buy Leopard for the Time Machine feature. When Leopard ships, Mac users will be able to buy a Leopard box and a typical USB or FireWire hard disk, and that is a complete backup solution for Mac OS X that anyone can use. You have to see it in action to understand. It's versioning made easy and automated backup made easy and both file and disk restores made easy. It's the exact software you would want right now to take advantage of a 500 GB USB disk for $150. That is just one feature of Leopard, and they already said they are holding the best features secret until launch. And it will be very easy to upgrade your Mac yourself. It always takes 20 minutes and works great.
Over in Vista they have done a lot of renaming stuff and moving it around and their improvements to their display layer software are really behind and have ridiculous hardware requirements and they added even more DRM and it can turn itself off now at Microsoft's request and there isn't anything that you can say is going to change the way you use a computer.
They have not been following software design principles. They don't iterate on their own stuff to take advantage of what they built previously because what they built previously is all crap, and all in one big ball that they're afraid to untangle in some cases. And the worms, that is awful.
> Come now, predictions of Microsoft's demise are so... mid to late 90s!
Yes, here in the 21st century we are actually witnessing the demise.