> The ad where the PC buys the Mac that C++ reference manual that he secretly lusts after himself is just so much blatant false image > building it's ridiculous. Are they implying that Mac programmers live in a glorious world where technical manuals are unnecessary? > Or that every windows user is a technical programmer? It's ludicrous.
No, no, no. I'm a Mac user and I have technical manuals here on my desk. However they are all about graphics, not C++.
> The PC going in for surgery is another joke. At least he PC CAN be upgraded instead of simply requiring replacement for > a major OS update.
First of all, if you want internal upgradability in a personal computer, you can't do any better than a Mac Pro. It is easy to get in there, you can swap in and out SATA drives without cables, you can replace the CPU's, the RAM, and install PCI cards. The fact that you can also buy a Mac in a notebook or an all-in-one desktop doesn't stop you from choosing the Mac that is right for you.
Secondly, the ad is specifically about what could be called "forced Vista hardware upgrades" where the user wants to upgrade his or her Windows XP to Windows Vista and nothing else, but because of Vista's high hardware requirements, MUCH MUCH HIGHER than Mac OS X, the user has to purchase a new video card and have it installed so that after that they can upgrade to Vista. Compare to a Leopard upgrade even on a 5 year old Mac you don't have to upgrade the hardware and you can run ALL the features, even though many are more advanced than Vista. You can also see the direct Vista connection in this timely ad when when the PC goes off and says "if I don't come back you can have my peripherals" and the Mac goes "speaking of peripherals..." because the other big problem Vista users are having is that they're plugging in their peripherals and only half are working, and these things all work on the Mac. So the Mac is saying "when you get back, you might have more bad news."
> They're great ads. Seriously, they're billiant. But they lie.
I think the reason people like them is that they find the PC to be "in character"... the troubles he's having are the troubles you see a real PC out in the everyday world going through, except with less grace.
> I think Microsoft should fire back. With one man representing one game they should show the PC addressing a full concert hall. Then the > Mac should be addressing a hotel conference room with a bunch of empty seats. With five seats full of really old men, one should realize > he's in the wrong room and leave.
Ha ha ha that really represents the Mac community. It's five old guys, ha ha. Be sure to show the chains holding the PC's audience right there in their seats where they can be ready to answer the next little pop-up bubble "your PC may not be secure click here to find out why". Ha ha.
>Then show the PC calling in to some Microsoft-product-only connection and getting through, while the Mac gets, > "I'm sorry - we can't help you."
At first I didn't get this because I'm so used to a world where it is easy to communicate over wires in standardized ways and interoperability is easy. Then I realized that you're bragging about how Microsoft encodes everything into its own weird formats to lock you into using only their software. Not sure that's a selling feature.
Or is it that you think the Mac is a Microsoft-free ecosystem? Actually no. We have our own Silicon Valley Microsoft Mac Business Unit, which has been publishing Word for over 20 years straight. Also Apple has the best MS Office converters around if you want to open your Microsoft files in Apple's tools.
Once you get all your friends off of Windows, they stop calling with problems and start being enthusiastic about computers. You get movies and photos from them instead of questions about installing software.
> But I don't think the ads are really aimed at making people switch to Mac. The ads are really more designed > to make people who bought a Mac think they made the right decision
No, there's no way. Actual Mac users would like to see a commercial where Steve Jobs pisses on Bill Gates. Literally.
Actual Mac users want to see Apple stop being all humble and polite like the Mac guy in these ads and they want to see Apple call out Microsoft directly at every opportunity. Mac users LOVE it when Steve Jobs quotes Microsoft's head of Windows Vista development saying he wants a Mac. Mac users want these great conceptual battles to be waged and they want the rest of the world to come into the 21st century of computing and join the fun and also could you please stop spamming the fuck out of us with your botnets? Thank-you.
The thing is, Apple likes to talk about how much work they put into designing the hell out of their latest product and that is all. Here is product X, it is round, it has these features, it can cure your halitosis, it has a prominent Apple logo, obviously you will be moved to purchase and use it by its very fitness for the task if not your desire to lick it. Mac users all go "YES, YES, WE KNOW THAT... tell everybody how the Mac OS doesn't bug you all day like Windows, tell them how there are no viruses."
Notice that the virus-related Mac commercial was the most controversial. The MOAB guys cited it and others, as an example of Apple "crossing the line" because theoretically all computers can get viruses and Apple shouldn't say "bring it on" but I remember when that commercial came out it was like a cheer went across the Mac community, because we were all like "finally someone just fucking SAID IT!" In fact, the anthropomorphized PC with the hanky and the sneezes is not just saying it but acting it out.
Also, Mac users have all run both Mac and Windows so when we watch these commercials, we know they are going easy on the PC, and we see the Mac guys obvious humility. If it looks the other way around to you, you ought to run a Mac a bit and see what time it is. It is not 2001 even though that's what your Windows XP tells you.
> And if Mac wasn't so concerned about keeping OSX under a hardware monopoly
No, it's Windows that has the hardware monopoly. Even though the generic "PC" is supposedly an "open platform" and there are like 20 operating systems for it, the only OS I can buy pre-installed is Windows. And when I look at Windows I see it is all from one company, it is all Microsoft software. That is what people are buying day-in and day-out on your "open platform": Microsoft software and only Microsoft software.
On the other hand, Apple sells what you would probably call a "closed platform" and yet when I examine the software I find: - The Very Best Of The UNIX Community: BSD, Perl, Ruby, Python, PHP, Apache, X-Windows, vi, emacs, and all the greats - greatest hits of the Mac platform: OS X, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iWeb, GarageBand, QuickTime, Quartz, Aqua, Cocoa, and much more - Boot Camp: a single disc, provided by Apple, with all of your system's Windows drivers on it, no hunting around for them or getting them from third parties (more than one IT writer has said it is the best Windows support of any name-brand PC) - got a nice Java on there, not a Microsoft Java - got an industry standard Web browser on there by default... you boot up and you have HTML 4.01, CSS 2.1 (all of it, the only browser to do so yet), JS 1.5, DOM Level 1, PNG, JPEG, MPEG-4 which is a very round Web app spec, every bit as good as Firefox, they are like two strong open source brothers (compare to Explorer on your "open platform" it is not even a Web browser by proper definition and it fails both CSS Acid Tests, Explorer 7 included) - for many years the Mac has been able to boot from any attached disk, so there was a Linux that you bought on a FireWire disk and attached it to your Mac, start the system with Option held down, then choose the Linux icon (provided by Apple's firmware) and boot right from that disk, no partitioning or boot loaders and especially not fighting with Windows over who owns the machine - Parallels Desktop and VMWare run on the Mac desktop and host any x32 or x64 operating system right next to Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Final Cut Pro or other... VirtualPC does the same on PowerPC systems... so easy, so cheap ($59) and you never fuck up your already-functioning Mac to run a software-only operating system such as BSD or Linux
So we have sort of a weird situation where your "open platform" has software on it from ONE MEGA-CORPORATE MONOPOLISTIC COMPANY and the "closed platform" has like everything running on it already as well as various features to help the user run even more software if they choose.
> There's a problem here,
You bet there is. Enjoy your second-hand "open platform"... once you've stripped Windows off there, after paying Microsoft for the pleasure, your entire modern hardware PC is the equivalent of just one Parallels window on the Mac OS X Desktop. You could be doing all the same things on a Mac except you'd have iTunes lurking in the background and you would never want for fonts or codecs.
1) lower overall price 2) lower maintenance 3) more user-friendly 4) more reliable
Here are four great reasons to buy Windows Vista:
1) lower overall price 2) lower maintenance 3) more user-friendly 4) more reliable
Microsoft will tell you this with a straight face. Of course, they are leaving out the silent "than previous Windows versions."
They don't fool you and me because these are technical issues and we have technical experience. But many people completely lack technical experience. They are not going to be able to make head or tails of the above. And if it comes down to plain credibility, you and I know Bill Gates is a felon and Steve Jobs could actually design products at Apple if he wasn't CEO, but to many people all they know is Microsoft is the biggest company and nobody gets fired for buying it and that's what I have at work also, so they end up trusting Bill Gates, ha ha.
On the other hand, in the Apple ads you see a "PC" in the real world, struggling to get by in a world he isn't prepared for. That is a comment on Microsoft's products that cannot be made with technical specs. Users want to make DVD's and photo books and PC is crashed, or PC is getting upgraded, or PC suggests accounting or computer programming instead because that's all his software can do. That rings true to experience. It seems to me that non-technical users are watching these commercials and coming away with MORE REALISTIC ideas about what PC's can and can't do maybe only because they're finding out that they're not the only person who couldn't make a DVD with their PC. Users assume it is their fault, especially after Bill Gates tells them Windows is powerful and easy to use.
Even if the commercials only teach people that a Mac is different from a PC, that all PC's are not created equal, that is probably doing a service. At least they may be teaching people to compare what each PC they consider can actually DO rather than just thinking they are all the same so buy the one for $199.
> Moreover, don't know why, but I've always felt that any company that really has superior products > doesn't have to attack the competition this way.
Wow, right here we are discussing a Bill Gates interview in which he outright lies about Apple, up and down and all over, in ways that many here have described as being "shocking" and "disappointing" and that is from people who already hated Bill Gates. And you have a problem with playful commercials that explain very technical concepts to everyday people by comparing anthropomorphized versions of two PRODUCTS. The Apple commercials don't even mention a competitor by name... no Microsoft, no Dell, no HP, no Sony.
There are not even any users in the commercials, we are simply watching two computers in their natural habitat like we could watch two fish in a tank. We learn the strengths and weaknesses of both computers as they are applied to various modern computing tasks, which they are either prepared for or not, as they undergo routine maintenance such as anti-virus or needing to be rebooted or not, and as they experience significant events in the "life" of a personal computer (e.g. OS upgrades, out-of-box experience). It's a simple way for a person to learn about the very different personalities of the two mainstream computer systems.
The thing to notice with Bill Gates is all his financial stuff is Bizarro. He didn't make a fortune by being competitive... but by being anti-competitive. It turns lots of his financial stuff upside-down. If you didn't earn your money honestly, it changes all of the assumptions.
If you serve the rest of society well by offering them a better product than your competitors at a fair price, then nobody denies you the right to a reasonable profit, or the right to invest that profit as you see fit... spend it, you earned it. Even if you completely refuse to do any charitable giving at all, at least while you were working you made the world a better place... you sold people a better product than your competitors at a fair price. People might not even notice that you're not giving to charity because you're so popular for making that great product, it helped so many people.
But what if you have a really shitty product and you know you can't compete with the rest of the industry, so you eliminate your competition through some illegal means, destroying that market and leaving your product to fill the vacuum, and then you charge everybody a higher price than they have ever paid in that market before, and keep in mind this is for a sub-standard product that could not compete on its own (or else why go to the trouble of all that law-breaking?) then you can make a lot of money. But you did it without doing any good. People are buying your product because it's the only one on their store shelves, not because they compared it to a competitor's product and found yours to be better. And they're paying more than ever and getting less. And the product only gets worse because there is no competition, no market. After a while you might become very rich and very unpopular.
What you have to do then is give a bunch of your money to charity. Buy a little good PR. If you have stolen billions by that point it is easy to give millions back. In fact, it might even feel good. Even if you give half of it away, it feels sort of like earning the other half also, and since you stole it, the earning part feels good, as long as it doesn't involve any real work like designing a product and taking it to market against your competitors. That you would not want to do. All that work and then you don't even know if a product is going to succeed and make money. Better to compete only in markets where there is no competition. For those you don't even need a real product. You can get paid for losing. Guys like Bill Gates would rather do that.
Bill Gates has the old problem that people have when they win a dishonest election where there was only one candidate. Yes, you won, yes you are the President, but nobody actually respects you like they would if you had run an honest campaign against a reasonable opponent and still come out ahead. Doing that is what people respect. Earning money by competing and winning and then giving that money away is what people respect. People who understand that Bill Gates stole everything he has and never worked a day in his life and simply has not contributed don't think it's all that special that he gives money to charity.
Oh, yeah, right... Microsoft Vista v1.0 should not be confused with Microsoft XP v1.0 or Microsoft 2000 v1.0 or Microsoft 95 v1.0 or 98 v1.0 or Me v1.0. They are totally unrelated products that just happen to have been created so perfectly that they need never be iterated upon.
One thing I've always liked about Windows 95 and 98 is that they have the Y2K bug right in their names.
Nothing has made me more sure of the quality of my Mac than MOAB. Thank-you MOAB!
Before MOAB, I knew intellectually that I was far safer than if I had chosen the "other" personal computer, but I didn't really FEEL it in my heart. Maybe I was just paranoid because of the daily horror stories I hear from Windows users.
Now, having seen the intellectually embarrassing collection of Mac hacking recipes that MOAB put together, even with all of their anti-Mac animus and shoulder chips, I really and truly KNOW that I am as safe as anybody can be when connected to a global network 24/7.
Looking forward to next year, MOAB! Let's do this every January. Next year you can show me how safe my iPhone is also.
It is bullshit to compare Vista to the first versions of Mac OS X. Are you just spotting Apple 5 years without even a fight? I guess you think very little of XP.
Windows XP was the Mac OS X -style Windows rewrite. IT WAS DONE FIVE YEARS AGO. Microsoft finally accomplished their long-talked-about goal of moving their user base off of DOS and onto NT. Similarly, with Mac OS X, Apple accomplished their long-talked-about goal of moving their user base off of Classic and onto X. Where do you think Microsoft got the idea? This has been going on since the late 1980's. When Steve Jobs left Apple he took a project with him called "Big Mac" which if you see a picture of it, it is a NeXT workstation prototype, big, black, running UNIX with a Mac GUI. Bill Gates criticized NeXT publicly and then started building what would become NT (you take the e and X out of NeXT, see?) Of course in 1996 Apple bought NeXT back to Apple where it became the future of the Mac again.
In 2000 it was an interesting year for operating systems. You could go to Apple and buy either a Mac OS 9 system or a Mac OS X Server system. The Mac OS 9 system could run EVERYTHING, but it was also old and crufty, while the Mac OS X Server systems could run only a subset of the application platform, yet were newer and more stable, definitely the future. On the Microsoft side, you had exactly the same thing: if you wanted to run EVERYTHING, you bought a DOS Windows like 98 or ME, but if you could get by without a plain subset of apps, you could run Windows 2000 and get something newer and more stable than DOS.
The worst part was when Microsoft renamed Windows 5.1 aka Windows 2001 to "Windows XP". At that point, the name "Mac OS X" was about two years old, and had already been used for a shipping product (Mac OS X Server in 1999). All people knew about Mac OS X at that point was that it was coming soon and would be a complete rewrite of the Mac OS on a new core operating system. Then Microsoft renamed its complete rewrite of DOS-Windows on a new core operating system "Windows X" (essentially) and it just felt awful because it was like the depths of un-originality.
When Windows XP came out a little after Mac OS X in 2001, the big thing from Microsoft was how they were welcoming their users into a new world of modern operating system security and stability. They made a big deal about how you could even run games and such on your NT now, while on the Mac side, Mac OS X was pretty much limited to running old Mac apps in the Classic layer which was a lot like running them on Mac OS 9 only subtly crappier. Microsoft was clearly ahead of the game because you could buy Photoshop and run it on Windows XP and you were a truly modern man. Pity the Mac user, stupid and effete as he is, having purchased colorful hardware the best he can do is run that antique Photoshop in the Classic layer, with limited memory protection and co-operative multitasking. YOU FOOL! DON'T YOU KNOW BILL GATES JUST REWROTE WINDOWS AND NOW IT IS EXCELLENT?
Remember in late 2001, Microsoft was seen as being WAY FAR AHEAD OF APPLE in operating systems. Only Apple thought differently. Microsoft's rewrite was so much further ahead of Apple's rewrite, how would Apple ever catch up? Would they even survive?
Then Mac OS X turned out to be awesome and Windows XP sucked in a way that had never been previously imagined. Suddenly you start hearing how Longhorn was going to be out any moment and clean Apple's clock but good. Sure Mac OS X Panther looks like it may have some nice features, but nothing that's not coming in Longhorn. Longhorn is going to be a "complete rewrite" you know? It's going to be the best Windows ever. Phew, that makes me feel so much better about spending so much time fucking with Windows all these years.
In short, the rewrites are already here for 5 years now. No "Longhorn Reset" or "Vista Rewrite" can change that. You can't make an excuse for XP and say, well that's the old generation, wait until Vista that is the real competitor for Mac OS X. No.
Leopard went out to developers in June 2006, as usual. Developers always have an OS revision a year early so they can develop apps for it.
Everything that is publicly known about Leopard was revealed at WWDC 2006, Steve Jobs showed off some features and gave out a beta to developers. All the Leopard sneak preview stuff on apple.com is from there.
They also promised that there would be many major features held back from the beta so that they surprise Microsoft when Leopard ships. The biggest feature that is just a rumor is that the GUI will get a new graphic look. The reasons this is expected is that all the graphics have to be redone for "resolution independence" anyway, that that is a major feature that was in beta in Tiger but will ship with Leopard. For example, icons should be 512x512 in Leopard, not 128x128 like they were in Mac OS X v10.0 through v10.4. Interface elements such as buttons in apps have to be redone at much larger sizes or multiple sizes or done with vectors in PDF. Since it is being redone, and since Vista is already out and looks like Mac OS X, it is not hard to imagine Leopard getting a new skin.
I haven't even heard the word "beige" and the word "Mac" in the same sentence for many years.
It is telling that people in this discussion have to go that far back to find systems that won't run Mac OS X Tiger.
The thing is, if you venture back before 2001 on the Mac platform you get funky really fast because in 2001 they released a complete rewrite of their OS that had been brewing for many years, there was built-up tension that got released there, and the whole platform shot forward like letting go of a rubber band. At this point, the platform is moving so fast that to Bill Gates, it looks like we are standing still.
I don't think it's a coincidence that on this weird year where Microsoft is actually releasing a product, and in January, that Steve Jobs Macworld Keynote was almost completely devoid of Mac stuff. He didn't even release iLife '07 on schedule. Leopard is a huge release for Apple even separate from Vista, because it is the first resolution-independent Mac OS, it is the first that runs on multiple processor architectures (Tiger is two separate systems, one for PowerPC, one for Intel... Leopard is just one system), it is the first that runs on non-Macs (a stripped-down Leopard is in three other Apple products: iPhone, AppleTV, and AirPort Extreme). In addition to that, Apple can release new surprise features in Leopard and Microsoft won't be able to even try to match them for 3-5 years. When you look at what Apple did against XP, and how weak Apple and Mac OS X were when XP came out, it is really something to imagine Leopard vs Vista.
> eventually you will have to purchase a whole new Mac in order to run the latest OS release. I was pointing out that you can > upgrade a PC almost indefinitely to run the latest OS (Windows specifically, even more so with Linux) without ever having > to purchase a whole new system.
Yeah, but you have to keep purchasing Windows, and it will also complain when you upgrade components, and your PC hardware will last as long or less than a Mac. Hard disks fail, etc. These days you are often better to buy a new system regularly than fuck around with an old one.
Compare Windows Vista Ultimate at $399 and Mac mini at $599. With the Mac mini you bring your own display, keyboard, mouse. With Windows Vista you have to bring EVERYTHING. And you have to install it yourself at this point also. Yes, you can get an OEM version for cheaper, but you can get a used Mac mini for $300 also and again you've avoided the cardboard box with disk in it and got a real hardware device like an iPod or PS3... it does these 25 things well and you go to it.
> You won't see the fancy 3D interface, but it will run the OS.
Yeah, that's great and all, but you know that with Mac OS X you can see the fancy 3D interface at all times, even on systems from 2001? So he's saying "I can run the whole of Leopard on this machine just fine" and you're saying "hey, you could be running half of Vista on a Dell."
Thank-you for proving the Mac side of the argument.
The thing is, the reason OS 9 feels snappy is that you are watching the video buffer on the screen, warts and all, and it is just overlapping itself again and again, replacing stuff, bam. It's fast like sketching, but it's also rough and dirty like sketching.
On Mac OS X, you have double-buffered windows, so they are drawn off screen, composited with other windows, and then shown to the user. There is a little lag there if you are used to seeing stuff written right to the display in Mac OS 9 or Windows. However on the other hand, the objects on the screen are as real as a Pixar movie. You are obviously getting a greatly increased functionality. It is making a photorealistic painting for you instead of a sketch.
Also, I recall that in the early days of Mac OS X the graphics hardware was all suited for Mac OS 9 and Windows style stuff, but not suited to what Mac OS X was doing in software, so at first all of the Mac OS X graphics were using the CPU a lot, so you upgraded from Mac OS 9 to X and your display stopped being able to use the GPU at the same time as it started doing so much more graphics work, and until they fixed this with newer graphics hardware and Quartz Extreme (creating the GUI in the GPU with OpenGL) there was definitely a penalty to Mac OS X graphics. However since Quartz Extreme it just gets faster and richer and more animated because the hardware and the science is catching up to the new way of doing graphics.
Yes, and also comparing Windows to itself. Windows 6.0 (Vista) is not faster than the previous version, Windows 5.1 (XP) on the same hardware. Windows 5.1 (XP) is not faster than 5.0 (2000) on the same hardware. This covers 2000-2007 and includes only NT-based versions of MS Windows. How could that comparison be unfair in any way?
If you bought a Mac in 2001 and religiously upgraded it to each new major version of Mac OS X, it would get faster with each upgrade. It would be faster now than it was in 2001. I know this for a fact because I did this with a Titanium PowerBook, purchased in 2001 and recently running Tiger before a hard disk crash.
If you think there is some utility to talking about Mac OS 9 then I would encourage you to look up how many users there are. The last time I looked at stats was two years ago and the Mac OS 9 slice of the Mac community was less than 1% then. The transition to Mac OS X took place in 2001-2003. Since then the whole platform has switched processor architectures.
> they couldn't *possibly* expect anyone to update from OS9 to OSX without at least a RAM upgrade,
Actually, neither Apple nor anyone who has ever used a Mac expects anyone to upgrade any Mac OS 9 system to Leopard. If you have a Mac OS 9 system in the year 2006 it is very likely that Mac will die with OS 9 on it. The time and trouble to upgrade it would not be worth it. Why buy Leopard for $129 and install it on a 5+ year-old Mac when you can buy a Mac mini for $599 with Intel Core Duo in it and all the latest software? Why buy Leopard for $129 and install it on an old Mac when you can buy a used Tiger Mac mini with PowerPC in it for $300? It is 5x faster than your old OS 9 system anyway.
Again, you are years behind what's going on in the Mac community.
> You try running OSX with 256MB of RAM, which was a high-end machine back in 2001.
OS X runs fine in 256MB of RAM. However, Apple has been shipping systems that take 1-2 GB of RAM since 1999. My PowerBook from 2001 had 1 GB of RAM its whole life. But as recently as 2004 you could buy a Mac with only 256 MB in it and it runs fine but you can only run a handful of apps before you see things slow a bit. The reason people say OS X is "RAM-hungry" is that you can just go ahead and launch your whole Dock and it will all run for months, so users are doing that.
I just read a Vista review where the guy had 1 GB of RAM and said he could only run a few applications at a time.
The Vista upgrade in the Apple commercial is not one where the user says "gee, I need to get a really great video card, let's open the box and install one"... it's specifically referring to the WIDESPREAD CIRCUMSTANCE where a user bought a PC within the last 1-2 years that was a shit-hot box at the time, but it only has 128MB of video RAM in it and Vista wants 256MB for Aero (no shit). So to put Vista on your "Vista-Ready" PC you have to do major surgery first.
For the equivalent Mac user, you buy Leopard and it has system requirements that include all of the Macs sold in the past 3-5 years. The same GUI system that takes 256MB on Vista runs on 32MB on the Mac, and in a slower mode on Macs with 16MB, which you have to go back to 2001 to find. So you don't need to upgrade the computer's video system to do a Leopard upgrade. Yet after the Leopard upgrade you will have ALL of the features of Leopard, including fancy graphics.
Notice the comparison is between upgrading THE OS on a recent PC to Vista and upgrading THE OS on a recent Mac to Leopard. Microsoft cannot win this argument. The Mac will take under 15 minutes and it will work perfectly afterwards. Just figuring out whether your PC video needs to be replaced or not is a huge undertaking for most Windows users. There are IT writers who weren't able to upgrade their 2006 name-brand PC's to Vista and get it working (George Ou is one). I have been using Macs for many years and I never heard of a user who couldn't upgrade their OS X successfully.
Also, if you want to do a direct head-to-head how-do-we-upgrade-certain-components, with the Mac you just replace the whole box. That's what you do. An iMac or Mac mini is one device just like a router is one device or phone is one device. Not only are all the components well-matched, but everything is included already, and the model is known by a huge community and will have many future software upgrades, and the resale value is even quite high. So if you feel that the video in your Mac isn't cutting it, you sell that Mac on eBay, get an alarmingly good price oftentimes, it goes to a new user and continues to be useful, and you buy a new Mac.
Somewhere in the argument that you don't need Vista because Windows 2000 can run all of today's Windows apps is the fact that Windows is stuck at a standstill for the whole 21st century. Up until last week, the version that came out in 2001 was the current version. So the argument for saving money here is that there was nothing new to buy even if you wanted to.
> what I mean about "forced" upgrade is look at how much OS X software requires 10.4. A LOT.
Yeah, 10.4 has been out for almost 18 months. The people who pay for software are the ones who just bought computers. It is not surprising to see stuff wanting 10.4 right now.
However every time I see an ad or an article about Windows anti-virus or anti-malware it is always more than I pay for Mac OS X, and it is always recommended if you want to have even a chance at privacy and security. So somebody running Windows 2000 for the last six years but updating his anti-virus every year can pay much more than a Mac user who just buys a new Mac every three years and never ever pays for OS X and doesn't ever need anti-malware stuff.
Being forced to buy an OS update for an old machine so you can run the most current software doesn't feel nearly as bad to me as being forced to buy an anti-virus add-on for an old machine so you can patch gaping holes in its system software and keep running it for 5 years until there is finally a new revision.
Mac mini has a very simple upgrade path: get a new Mac mini.
Seriously, you pay $599 for a Mac mini right now and three years from now you pay $599 and Apple replaces every single component and gives you all new software also. That is less than $200 per year for a very respectable level of performance and best in class software. The features of a Mac mini read like Vista but with the computer included and the software is mature and tested.
When you look at how hard it is to open a Mac mini (or any very small computer) you have to be independently wealthy or totally hopeless out of a job to have the time to pull a component and replace it with another. Even if you replace the CPU, are you really going to see such a whole new Mac mini afterwards that it was worth even the small chance that you drop a screw into something and short it and make a non-functional Mac mini?
Where does it stop? When they put a whole Mac on one chip will you want to upgrade just some pins of that chip? Are you upgrading the Linux in your router? Mac mini is a little brick with ports running all around it so you can plug stuff into it. It's one thing.
This upgrade discussion exposes a clear distinction between upgrade philosophies. Most people will never ever touch a PCI card even if there is a good reason. I work in music and audio and when FireWire pro audio came in suddenly everybody had a PowerBook and they didn't ever want to see a PCI card again.
Also, when you can buy a Mac mini for $599 or Windows Vista Ultimate for $399 there is a pretty good argument for adding the Mac mini to your current XP setup with a KVM switch rather than paying $399 for Vista and using it to destroy your XP box.
When I upgrade my computer, I unplug the cables from the back of the Mac, remove it from the desk, and replace it with another Mac. The computer is one independent device that I can pull and replace. The computer has Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth, FireWire, and USB so you don't need to put stuff inside of it. Also when my desktop was out for repair I put my notebook in its place and everything worked. The computer is swappable within the whole studio setup.
About every three years AppleCare is up, so I pull the Mac, sell it on eBay for half of what I paid for it three years ago, then buy a new Mac, stick it on the desk and plug the same cables into it, install a few apps, and within a couple of hours I feel like I'm using the same old Mac only of course it is faster.
I've been doing it this way for a while now and I'm down to just a few hours per year of IT work. Even installing my third-party applications is very fast and easy because only two of them have installers (Photoshop and Logic Pro) and the rest all just drag and drop into place. I only have three drivers and they each install in under a minute it is painless.
Ha Ha if Microsoft supports a system for 5 years it will still be the current system. Up until just a week ago XP was the current system and over 5 years old. One way to keep legacy support is to just not upgrade anything.
> Apple is pretty pricy about charging for each bug fix
BULLSHIT. You just look stupid saying such ridiculous stuff.
OS X is free with your computer purchase. If you want to upgrade just the OS and not the computer later, then it costs $129 for a single license, or $199 for a 5-pack and there is no key, no authorization, no bullshit. It will never pop up and say "am I running on the right hardware, maybe I should go into reduced functionality mode?" It comes on a DVD and includes developer tools. It installs in only a few minutes and just works. Each new release is faster on the same hardware than the previous release. Each new release starts at 10.x.0 and is updated automatically for free every couple of months or so 10.x.1, 10.x.2, etc. until the next full release. There is no other way to pay for OS X. There are no paid bug fixes or anything like that. You get it with a system, or you get a newer version in a box. Software Update is an included feature and it runs automatically and during the life of your operating system it will probably download and install about 20-30 items, all for free.
> Anyone have a daylight saving fix for OS 9? 10.0? 10.1? 10.2? How about OS 8?
First of all, you are engaging in FUD because the bug you are talking about is man-made, government-created over just the last year or so, and it not only affects all operating systems but all digital devices, and there is no way for you to know whether these patches will be forthcoming from Apple or from a third-party. Either way, the possibility is more likely than Microsoft patches because with OS X the core OS is open source and not a black box. Also all but OS 8 have Software Update, so Apple could release a patch through there and patch every affected system overnight. Or, Apple could make an offer that any user who brings a computer running one of these systems into an Apple Store or authorized reseller can have a free copy of Leopard. Since we are talking about a minimum number of users that might be the best way.
Second, you're assuming that anybody is actually using these old systems. The newest one you mention was replaced by 10.3 in the year 2003. That is about the time that Microsoft scrapped Longhorn and did a "reset" of the project based on Windows Server 2003. Just yesterday for Windows users, but an eternity in the Mac world.
Third, you are assuming that there aren't any workarounds, when there clearly are.
One fix is to turn on "set date and time automatically" which is always off by default because it "phones home" to Apple to get the right time off their time server. With this setting engaged (it is in the Date and Time System Preference) your Mac's clock will sync to Apple's time server and the time will be correct.
Another fix is to use the International System Preference to disable Daylight Savings Time.
Another fix is to set your location to somewhere that doesn't observe Daylight Savings Time, like Arizona.
Another fix would be to install a third-party clock application that "knows" about this problem and can change the system time as appropriate to keep it right. It is just math... it is a computer.
It's worth noting that Windows is famous for fucking up DST. There is one big version of Windows that would "fall back" and then one hour later it would "fall back" again. I think it was Windows 98. My cell phone always fucks up DST also.
Really, they should abolish DST it is a stupid anachronism and not worth the time we waste on it.
> Gates was comparing the 30 remote code execution bugs from MOAB to these
MOAB was 22 bugs, and none of them involved remote code execution. At least half of them you had to be sitting at the computer logged in as an administrator. At least a quarter of them were in third-party software that is not even included with a Mac.
The net result of MOAB was it back-fired. The guys who did it said they were going to do it to teach the Mac community that they were not invulnerable but only one of the bugs was serious and Apple patched it before the month was out. The total pickings of 22 bugs are so slim and drawn from the entire platform of 22,000 applications that it has actually caused Mac users to feel MORE SAFE with their choice of Mac as their personal computer. Even if you happened to use all of the third-party shareware featured in MOAB then you were still so much better off than any Windows user that it is like MOAB said "Congratulations on your Mac purchase."
It was weird he went all Xerox PARC when the question with Vista is the skin. The Windows logo has been ensconced in glassy bubble that is such a Mac OS X wannabe that it's a self-parody... the very Windows logo has been made to look Mac-like. The swoopy desktop pictures are too much just by themselves, although I heard them defend that by saying that they got all the desktop pictures from third-parties... so it is not actually Microsoft that did the off ripping. And the "parental controls" feature he keeps saying is a first is in Tiger, released in 2005. It is really weird to hear him say they are first with these things when they are clearly not.
Apple not only hired people from PARC and gave them a chance to make real products out of their ideas, Apple also paid Xerox with pre-IPO Apple stock. When Apple went public, Xerox made millions and millions and that was what Xerox wanted. The very reason they had the CEO of Apple and his computer design team touring around the Palo Alto Research Center was because they didn't know how to make any money from the stuff they had there. They were like a motorcycle company who came up with a cool concept car and didn't know what to do so they called the local car company CEO to come down and see if they couldn't get him to take the car project forward. He said, yeah, I like this, I'll hire the team and compensate you with stock and everybody was happy.
When you read the list of GUI features that were developed AFTER that, solely by Apple, at Apple, and for Apple products, it is embarrassing to think about anyone trying to take Apple down a notch with the Xerox PARC story. Just in the 1980's Apple invented and shipped drag and drop, the clipboard cut/copy/paste, the double-click, the pull-down menu, overlapping windows, marquee selections (marching ants), the little box of painting tools like you see in Photoshop, files-and-folders, proportional fonts, WYSIWYG, the Trash, keyboard shortcuts for menus, File-Edit-View, a system menu full of shortcuts (Apple menu/Start menu), little hardware controls in the corner of the screen. The other day I saw a screenshot of System 6 and I was stunned at how much like Mac OS X it looked.
The only stuff I know that Microsoft has contributed to GUI science is the little curly arrow they put on shortcuts, which is a classic innovation in that you see that on every system now... the soft links or aliases or shortcuts have the little curly arrow. Also, using a modifier key plus Tab to cycle through running applications started on Windows and is everywhere else now. That's not much for 20 years of MS Windows.
> Certainly it is unfair to laden Vista with all the bugs/exploits associated with previous versions of Windows
The original poster did not put all Windows bugs on Vista. The point was that Bill Gates essentially dared the world to find one serious flaw in Windows Vista every month, so it is informative to look back on the history of Windows and ask ourselves how many bugs per month one would find in previous versions of Windows. In other words, what happens if you apply "The Vista Bug Standard" to previous versions of Windows... you find many more than one per month. That is informative. Notice I'm not saying compare Vista to previous versions of Office or something unrelated, but the previous versions of the Windows software product. Just because they renamed it "Vista" does not mean it's not Windows. It is built on, contains, and deserves the reputation of past Windows. I truly hope it is as secure as a Mac because that's what every user needs, but you have to be an idiot or insane to trust Microsoft when they say they fixed something in Windows because they say that every time and it is always still broken.
Further, the metafile bug that was found recently was in all versions of Windows. It was in the Vista beta and in XP and XP2 and Windows 2000 which are all on NT, and it was in 98 and Me which are on DOS.
> You might also argue that Vista, as a bottom-up re-write
NO, Vista is not a rewrite. Neither was XP, although it was also sold as "a rewrite". Windows is known to have such poor quality that it is always a selling feature to tell people it has been scrapped and rebuilt anew. However, they never actually do that. Even moving from a DOS to NT core OS, they managed to do that so slowly and in such a commingled way that they never left the past behind.
In 2001, Apple released a "bottom-up re-write" of their OS. Not only did they change the core OS from Mac to UNIX, they also changed the GUI from Platinum to Aqua, and changed the API from Classic to Carbon/Cocoa/BSD, and recently, as a result of that rewrite, they changed the processor architecture from PowerPC to Intel. They changed the Mac so much in the past five years that people started debating the ethics of head transplants... once you replace the head is it still the same person? We are having an identity crisis in the Mac community over how much change happened. But in Vista we have the same core OS as XP and Windows 2000, the same old GUI from 95 forward is there along with a new one that requires 256MB of video RAM to run (Quartz runs in 32MB, but can run a bit slower in 16MB and a lot slower in 8MB), and the API is Win32, same as XP, same as Windows 2000/Me/98/95. Where is the rewrite?
I will bet you that fileman.exe (the file manager from Windows 3) is somewhere in Vista.
Slashdot Mirror
> The ad where the PC buys the Mac that C++ reference manual that he secretly lusts after himself is just so much blatant false image
..." because the other big problem Vista users are having is that they're plugging in their peripherals and only half are working, and these things all work on the Mac. So the Mac is saying "when you get back, you might have more bad news."
... the troubles he's having are the troubles you see a real PC out in the everyday world going through, except with less grace.
> building it's ridiculous. Are they implying that Mac programmers live in a glorious world where technical manuals are unnecessary?
> Or that every windows user is a technical programmer? It's ludicrous.
No, no, no. I'm a Mac user and I have technical manuals here on my desk. However they are all about graphics, not C++.
> The PC going in for surgery is another joke. At least he PC CAN be upgraded instead of simply requiring replacement for
> a major OS update.
First of all, if you want internal upgradability in a personal computer, you can't do any better than a Mac Pro. It is easy to get in there, you can swap in and out SATA drives without cables, you can replace the CPU's, the RAM, and install PCI cards. The fact that you can also buy a Mac in a notebook or an all-in-one desktop doesn't stop you from choosing the Mac that is right for you.
Secondly, the ad is specifically about what could be called "forced Vista hardware upgrades" where the user wants to upgrade his or her Windows XP to Windows Vista and nothing else, but because of Vista's high hardware requirements, MUCH MUCH HIGHER than Mac OS X, the user has to purchase a new video card and have it installed so that after that they can upgrade to Vista. Compare to a Leopard upgrade even on a 5 year old Mac you don't have to upgrade the hardware and you can run ALL the features, even though many are more advanced than Vista. You can also see the direct Vista connection in this timely ad when when the PC goes off and says "if I don't come back you can have my peripherals" and the Mac goes "speaking of peripherals
> They're great ads. Seriously, they're billiant. But they lie.
I think the reason people like them is that they find the PC to be "in character"
> I think Microsoft should fire back. With one man representing one game they should show the PC addressing a full concert hall. Then the > Mac should be addressing a hotel conference room with a bunch of empty seats. With five seats full of really old men, one should realize > he's in the wrong room and leave.
Ha ha ha that really represents the Mac community. It's five old guys, ha ha. Be sure to show the chains holding the PC's audience right there in their seats where they can be ready to answer the next little pop-up bubble "your PC may not be secure click here to find out why". Ha ha.
>Then show the PC calling in to some Microsoft-product-only connection and getting through, while the Mac gets,
> "I'm sorry - we can't help you."
At first I didn't get this because I'm so used to a world where it is easy to communicate over wires in standardized ways and interoperability is easy. Then I realized that you're bragging about how Microsoft encodes everything into its own weird formats to lock you into using only their software. Not sure that's a selling feature.
Or is it that you think the Mac is a Microsoft-free ecosystem? Actually no. We have our own Silicon Valley Microsoft Mac Business Unit, which has been publishing Word for over 20 years straight. Also Apple has the best MS Office converters around if you want to open your Microsoft files in Apple's tools.
> At least those would sort of represent reality.
Sort of is right.
Once you get all your friends off of Windows, they stop calling with problems and start being enthusiastic about computers. You get movies and photos from them instead of questions about installing software.
> But I don't think the ads are really aimed at making people switch to Mac. The ads are really more designed
... tell everybody how the Mac OS doesn't bug you all day like Windows, tell them how there are no viruses."
> to make people who bought a Mac think they made the right decision
No, there's no way. Actual Mac users would like to see a commercial where Steve Jobs pisses on Bill Gates. Literally.
Actual Mac users want to see Apple stop being all humble and polite like the Mac guy in these ads and they want to see Apple call out Microsoft directly at every opportunity. Mac users LOVE it when Steve Jobs quotes Microsoft's head of Windows Vista development saying he wants a Mac. Mac users want these great conceptual battles to be waged and they want the rest of the world to come into the 21st century of computing and join the fun and also could you please stop spamming the fuck out of us with your botnets? Thank-you.
The thing is, Apple likes to talk about how much work they put into designing the hell out of their latest product and that is all. Here is product X, it is round, it has these features, it can cure your halitosis, it has a prominent Apple logo, obviously you will be moved to purchase and use it by its very fitness for the task if not your desire to lick it. Mac users all go "YES, YES, WE KNOW THAT
Notice that the virus-related Mac commercial was the most controversial. The MOAB guys cited it and others, as an example of Apple "crossing the line" because theoretically all computers can get viruses and Apple shouldn't say "bring it on" but I remember when that commercial came out it was like a cheer went across the Mac community, because we were all like "finally someone just fucking SAID IT!" In fact, the anthropomorphized PC with the hanky and the sneezes is not just saying it but acting it out.
Also, Mac users have all run both Mac and Windows so when we watch these commercials, we know they are going easy on the PC, and we see the Mac guys obvious humility. If it looks the other way around to you, you ought to run a Mac a bit and see what time it is. It is not 2001 even though that's what your Windows XP tells you.
> And if Mac wasn't so concerned about keeping OSX under a hardware monopoly
... you boot up and you have HTML 4.01, CSS 2.1 (all of it, the only browser to do so yet), JS 1.5, DOM Level 1, PNG, JPEG, MPEG-4 which is a very round Web app spec, every bit as good as Firefox, they are like two strong open source brothers (compare to Explorer on your "open platform" it is not even a Web browser by proper definition and it fails both CSS Acid Tests, Explorer 7 included) ... VirtualPC does the same on PowerPC systems ... so easy, so cheap ($59) and you never fuck up your already-functioning Mac to run a software-only operating system such as BSD or Linux
... once you've stripped Windows off there, after paying Microsoft for the pleasure, your entire modern hardware PC is the equivalent of just one Parallels window on the Mac OS X Desktop. You could be doing all the same things on a Mac except you'd have iTunes lurking in the background and you would never want for fonts or codecs.
No, it's Windows that has the hardware monopoly. Even though the generic "PC" is supposedly an "open platform" and there are like 20 operating systems for it, the only OS I can buy pre-installed is Windows. And when I look at Windows I see it is all from one company, it is all Microsoft software. That is what people are buying day-in and day-out on your "open platform": Microsoft software and only Microsoft software.
On the other hand, Apple sells what you would probably call a "closed platform" and yet when I examine the software I find:
- The Very Best Of The UNIX Community: BSD, Perl, Ruby, Python, PHP, Apache, X-Windows, vi, emacs, and all the greats
- greatest hits of the Mac platform: OS X, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iWeb, GarageBand, QuickTime, Quartz, Aqua, Cocoa, and much more
- Boot Camp: a single disc, provided by Apple, with all of your system's Windows drivers on it, no hunting around for them or getting them from third parties (more than one IT writer has said it is the best Windows support of any name-brand PC)
- got a nice Java on there, not a Microsoft Java
- got an industry standard Web browser on there by default
- for many years the Mac has been able to boot from any attached disk, so there was a Linux that you bought on a FireWire disk and attached it to your Mac, start the system with Option held down, then choose the Linux icon (provided by Apple's firmware) and boot right from that disk, no partitioning or boot loaders and especially not fighting with Windows over who owns the machine
- Parallels Desktop and VMWare run on the Mac desktop and host any x32 or x64 operating system right next to Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Final Cut Pro or other
So we have sort of a weird situation where your "open platform" has software on it from ONE MEGA-CORPORATE MONOPOLISTIC COMPANY and the "closed platform" has like everything running on it already as well as various features to help the user run even more software if they choose.
> There's a problem here,
You bet there is. Enjoy your second-hand "open platform"
You gave four great reasons to buy a Mac:
1) lower overall price
2) lower maintenance
3) more user-friendly
4) more reliable
Here are four great reasons to buy Windows Vista:
1) lower overall price
2) lower maintenance
3) more user-friendly
4) more reliable
Microsoft will tell you this with a straight face. Of course, they are leaving out the silent "than previous Windows versions."
They don't fool you and me because these are technical issues and we have technical experience. But many people completely lack technical experience. They are not going to be able to make head or tails of the above. And if it comes down to plain credibility, you and I know Bill Gates is a felon and Steve Jobs could actually design products at Apple if he wasn't CEO, but to many people all they know is Microsoft is the biggest company and nobody gets fired for buying it and that's what I have at work also, so they end up trusting Bill Gates, ha ha.
On the other hand, in the Apple ads you see a "PC" in the real world, struggling to get by in a world he isn't prepared for. That is a comment on Microsoft's products that cannot be made with technical specs. Users want to make DVD's and photo books and PC is crashed, or PC is getting upgraded, or PC suggests accounting or computer programming instead because that's all his software can do. That rings true to experience. It seems to me that non-technical users are watching these commercials and coming away with MORE REALISTIC ideas about what PC's can and can't do maybe only because they're finding out that they're not the only person who couldn't make a DVD with their PC. Users assume it is their fault, especially after Bill Gates tells them Windows is powerful and easy to use.
Even if the commercials only teach people that a Mac is different from a PC, that all PC's are not created equal, that is probably doing a service. At least they may be teaching people to compare what each PC they consider can actually DO rather than just thinking they are all the same so buy the one for $199.
> Moreover, don't know why, but I've always felt that any company that really has superior products
... no Microsoft, no Dell, no HP, no Sony.
> doesn't have to attack the competition this way.
Wow, right here we are discussing a Bill Gates interview in which he outright lies about Apple, up and down and all over, in ways that many here have described as being "shocking" and "disappointing" and that is from people who already hated Bill Gates. And you have a problem with playful commercials that explain very technical concepts to everyday people by comparing anthropomorphized versions of two PRODUCTS. The Apple commercials don't even mention a competitor by name
There are not even any users in the commercials, we are simply watching two computers in their natural habitat like we could watch two fish in a tank. We learn the strengths and weaknesses of both computers as they are applied to various modern computing tasks, which they are either prepared for or not, as they undergo routine maintenance such as anti-virus or needing to be rebooted or not, and as they experience significant events in the "life" of a personal computer (e.g. OS upgrades, out-of-box experience). It's a simple way for a person to learn about the very different personalities of the two mainstream computer systems.
The thing to notice with Bill Gates is all his financial stuff is Bizarro. He didn't make a fortune by being competitive ... but by being anti-competitive. It turns lots of his financial stuff upside-down. If you didn't earn your money honestly, it changes all of the assumptions.
... spend it, you earned it. Even if you completely refuse to do any charitable giving at all, at least while you were working you made the world a better place ... you sold people a better product than your competitors at a fair price. People might not even notice that you're not giving to charity because you're so popular for making that great product, it helped so many people.
If you serve the rest of society well by offering them a better product than your competitors at a fair price, then nobody denies you the right to a reasonable profit, or the right to invest that profit as you see fit
But what if you have a really shitty product and you know you can't compete with the rest of the industry, so you eliminate your competition through some illegal means, destroying that market and leaving your product to fill the vacuum, and then you charge everybody a higher price than they have ever paid in that market before, and keep in mind this is for a sub-standard product that could not compete on its own (or else why go to the trouble of all that law-breaking?) then you can make a lot of money. But you did it without doing any good. People are buying your product because it's the only one on their store shelves, not because they compared it to a competitor's product and found yours to be better. And they're paying more than ever and getting less. And the product only gets worse because there is no competition, no market. After a while you might become very rich and very unpopular.
What you have to do then is give a bunch of your money to charity. Buy a little good PR. If you have stolen billions by that point it is easy to give millions back. In fact, it might even feel good. Even if you give half of it away, it feels sort of like earning the other half also, and since you stole it, the earning part feels good, as long as it doesn't involve any real work like designing a product and taking it to market against your competitors. That you would not want to do. All that work and then you don't even know if a product is going to succeed and make money. Better to compete only in markets where there is no competition. For those you don't even need a real product. You can get paid for losing. Guys like Bill Gates would rather do that.
Bill Gates has the old problem that people have when they win a dishonest election where there was only one candidate. Yes, you won, yes you are the President, but nobody actually respects you like they would if you had run an honest campaign against a reasonable opponent and still come out ahead. Doing that is what people respect. Earning money by competing and winning and then giving that money away is what people respect. People who understand that Bill Gates stole everything he has and never worked a day in his life and simply has not contributed don't think it's all that special that he gives money to charity.
Oh, yeah, right ... Microsoft Vista v1.0 should not be confused with Microsoft XP v1.0 or Microsoft 2000 v1.0 or Microsoft 95 v1.0 or 98 v1.0 or Me v1.0. They are totally unrelated products that just happen to have been created so perfectly that they need never be iterated upon.
One thing I've always liked about Windows 95 and 98 is that they have the Y2K bug right in their names.
Nothing has made me more sure of the quality of my Mac than MOAB. Thank-you MOAB!
Before MOAB, I knew intellectually that I was far safer than if I had chosen the "other" personal computer, but I didn't really FEEL it in my heart. Maybe I was just paranoid because of the daily horror stories I hear from Windows users.
Now, having seen the intellectually embarrassing collection of Mac hacking recipes that MOAB put together, even with all of their anti-Mac animus and shoulder chips, I really and truly KNOW that I am as safe as anybody can be when connected to a global network 24/7.
Looking forward to next year, MOAB! Let's do this every January. Next year you can show me how safe my iPhone is also.
It is bullshit to compare Vista to the first versions of Mac OS X. Are you just spotting Apple 5 years without even a fight? I guess you think very little of XP.
Windows XP was the Mac OS X -style Windows rewrite. IT WAS DONE FIVE YEARS AGO. Microsoft finally accomplished their long-talked-about goal of moving their user base off of DOS and onto NT. Similarly, with Mac OS X, Apple accomplished their long-talked-about goal of moving their user base off of Classic and onto X. Where do you think Microsoft got the idea? This has been going on since the late 1980's. When Steve Jobs left Apple he took a project with him called "Big Mac" which if you see a picture of it, it is a NeXT workstation prototype, big, black, running UNIX with a Mac GUI. Bill Gates criticized NeXT publicly and then started building what would become NT (you take the e and X out of NeXT, see?) Of course in 1996 Apple bought NeXT back to Apple where it became the future of the Mac again.
In 2000 it was an interesting year for operating systems. You could go to Apple and buy either a Mac OS 9 system or a Mac OS X Server system. The Mac OS 9 system could run EVERYTHING, but it was also old and crufty, while the Mac OS X Server systems could run only a subset of the application platform, yet were newer and more stable, definitely the future. On the Microsoft side, you had exactly the same thing: if you wanted to run EVERYTHING, you bought a DOS Windows like 98 or ME, but if you could get by without a plain subset of apps, you could run Windows 2000 and get something newer and more stable than DOS.
The worst part was when Microsoft renamed Windows 5.1 aka Windows 2001 to "Windows XP". At that point, the name "Mac OS X" was about two years old, and had already been used for a shipping product (Mac OS X Server in 1999). All people knew about Mac OS X at that point was that it was coming soon and would be a complete rewrite of the Mac OS on a new core operating system. Then Microsoft renamed its complete rewrite of DOS-Windows on a new core operating system "Windows X" (essentially) and it just felt awful because it was like the depths of un-originality.
When Windows XP came out a little after Mac OS X in 2001, the big thing from Microsoft was how they were welcoming their users into a new world of modern operating system security and stability. They made a big deal about how you could even run games and such on your NT now, while on the Mac side, Mac OS X was pretty much limited to running old Mac apps in the Classic layer which was a lot like running them on Mac OS 9 only subtly crappier. Microsoft was clearly ahead of the game because you could buy Photoshop and run it on Windows XP and you were a truly modern man. Pity the Mac user, stupid and effete as he is, having purchased colorful hardware the best he can do is run that antique Photoshop in the Classic layer, with limited memory protection and co-operative multitasking. YOU FOOL! DON'T YOU KNOW BILL GATES JUST REWROTE WINDOWS AND NOW IT IS EXCELLENT?
Remember in late 2001, Microsoft was seen as being WAY FAR AHEAD OF APPLE in operating systems. Only Apple thought differently. Microsoft's rewrite was so much further ahead of Apple's rewrite, how would Apple ever catch up? Would they even survive?
Then Mac OS X turned out to be awesome and Windows XP sucked in a way that had never been previously imagined. Suddenly you start hearing how Longhorn was going to be out any moment and clean Apple's clock but good. Sure Mac OS X Panther looks like it may have some nice features, but nothing that's not coming in Longhorn. Longhorn is going to be a "complete rewrite" you know? It's going to be the best Windows ever. Phew, that makes me feel so much better about spending so much time fucking with Windows all these years.
In short, the rewrites are already here for 5 years now. No "Longhorn Reset" or "Vista Rewrite" can change that. You can't make an excuse for XP and say, well that's the old generation, wait until Vista that is the real competitor for Mac OS X. No.
Leopard went out to developers in June 2006, as usual. Developers always have an OS revision a year early so they can develop apps for it.
Everything that is publicly known about Leopard was revealed at WWDC 2006, Steve Jobs showed off some features and gave out a beta to developers. All the Leopard sneak preview stuff on apple.com is from there.
They also promised that there would be many major features held back from the beta so that they surprise Microsoft when Leopard ships. The biggest feature that is just a rumor is that the GUI will get a new graphic look. The reasons this is expected is that all the graphics have to be redone for "resolution independence" anyway, that that is a major feature that was in beta in Tiger but will ship with Leopard. For example, icons should be 512x512 in Leopard, not 128x128 like they were in Mac OS X v10.0 through v10.4. Interface elements such as buttons in apps have to be redone at much larger sizes or multiple sizes or done with vectors in PDF. Since it is being redone, and since Vista is already out and looks like Mac OS X, it is not hard to imagine Leopard getting a new skin.
> 300MHz Beige Mac
... Leopard is just one system), it is the first that runs on non-Macs (a stripped-down Leopard is in three other Apple products: iPhone, AppleTV, and AirPort Extreme). In addition to that, Apple can release new surprise features in Leopard and Microsoft won't be able to even try to match them for 3-5 years. When you look at what Apple did against XP, and how weak Apple and Mac OS X were when XP came out, it is really something to imagine Leopard vs Vista.
... it does these 25 things well and you go to it.
I haven't even heard the word "beige" and the word "Mac" in the same sentence for many years.
It is telling that people in this discussion have to go that far back to find systems that won't run Mac OS X Tiger.
The thing is, if you venture back before 2001 on the Mac platform you get funky really fast because in 2001 they released a complete rewrite of their OS that had been brewing for many years, there was built-up tension that got released there, and the whole platform shot forward like letting go of a rubber band. At this point, the platform is moving so fast that to Bill Gates, it looks like we are standing still.
I don't think it's a coincidence that on this weird year where Microsoft is actually releasing a product, and in January, that Steve Jobs Macworld Keynote was almost completely devoid of Mac stuff. He didn't even release iLife '07 on schedule. Leopard is a huge release for Apple even separate from Vista, because it is the first resolution-independent Mac OS, it is the first that runs on multiple processor architectures (Tiger is two separate systems, one for PowerPC, one for Intel
> eventually you will have to purchase a whole new Mac in order to run the latest OS release. I was pointing out that you can
> upgrade a PC almost indefinitely to run the latest OS (Windows specifically, even more so with Linux) without ever having
> to purchase a whole new system.
Yeah, but you have to keep purchasing Windows, and it will also complain when you upgrade components, and your PC hardware will last as long or less than a Mac. Hard disks fail, etc. These days you are often better to buy a new system regularly than fuck around with an old one.
Compare Windows Vista Ultimate at $399 and Mac mini at $599. With the Mac mini you bring your own display, keyboard, mouse. With Windows Vista you have to bring EVERYTHING. And you have to install it yourself at this point also. Yes, you can get an OEM version for cheaper, but you can get a used Mac mini for $300 also and again you've avoided the cardboard box with disk in it and got a real hardware device like an iPod or PS3
> You won't see the fancy 3D interface, but it will run the OS.
Yeah, that's great and all, but you know that with Mac OS X you can see the fancy 3D interface at all times, even on systems from 2001? So he's saying "I can run the whole of Leopard on this machine just fine" and you're saying "hey, you could be running half of Vista on a Dell."
Thank-you for proving the Mac side of the argument.
Yeah, I think he's talking about teh snappy.
The thing is, the reason OS 9 feels snappy is that you are watching the video buffer on the screen, warts and all, and it is just overlapping itself again and again, replacing stuff, bam. It's fast like sketching, but it's also rough and dirty like sketching.
On Mac OS X, you have double-buffered windows, so they are drawn off screen, composited with other windows, and then shown to the user. There is a little lag there if you are used to seeing stuff written right to the display in Mac OS 9 or Windows. However on the other hand, the objects on the screen are as real as a Pixar movie. You are obviously getting a greatly increased functionality. It is making a photorealistic painting for you instead of a sketch.
Also, I recall that in the early days of Mac OS X the graphics hardware was all suited for Mac OS 9 and Windows style stuff, but not suited to what Mac OS X was doing in software, so at first all of the Mac OS X graphics were using the CPU a lot, so you upgraded from Mac OS 9 to X and your display stopped being able to use the GPU at the same time as it started doing so much more graphics work, and until they fixed this with newer graphics hardware and Quartz Extreme (creating the GUI in the GPU with OpenGL) there was definitely a penalty to Mac OS X graphics. However since Quartz Extreme it just gets faster and richer and more animated because the hardware and the science is catching up to the new way of doing graphics.
> You're comparing OSX to itself
Yes, and also comparing Windows to itself. Windows 6.0 (Vista) is not faster than the previous version, Windows 5.1 (XP) on the same hardware. Windows 5.1 (XP) is not faster than 5.0 (2000) on the same hardware. This covers 2000-2007 and includes only NT-based versions of MS Windows. How could that comparison be unfair in any way?
If you bought a Mac in 2001 and religiously upgraded it to each new major version of Mac OS X, it would get faster with each upgrade. It would be faster now than it was in 2001. I know this for a fact because I did this with a Titanium PowerBook, purchased in 2001 and recently running Tiger before a hard disk crash.
If you think there is some utility to talking about Mac OS 9 then I would encourage you to look up how many users there are. The last time I looked at stats was two years ago and the Mac OS 9 slice of the Mac community was less than 1% then. The transition to Mac OS X took place in 2001-2003. Since then the whole platform has switched processor architectures.
> they couldn't *possibly* expect anyone to update from OS9 to OSX without at least a RAM upgrade,
Actually, neither Apple nor anyone who has ever used a Mac expects anyone to upgrade any Mac OS 9 system to Leopard. If you have a Mac OS 9 system in the year 2006 it is very likely that Mac will die with OS 9 on it. The time and trouble to upgrade it would not be worth it. Why buy Leopard for $129 and install it on a 5+ year-old Mac when you can buy a Mac mini for $599 with Intel Core Duo in it and all the latest software? Why buy Leopard for $129 and install it on an old Mac when you can buy a used Tiger Mac mini with PowerPC in it for $300? It is 5x faster than your old OS 9 system anyway.
Again, you are years behind what's going on in the Mac community.
> You try running OSX with 256MB of RAM, which was a high-end machine back in 2001.
OS X runs fine in 256MB of RAM. However, Apple has been shipping systems that take 1-2 GB of RAM since 1999. My PowerBook from 2001 had 1 GB of RAM its whole life. But as recently as 2004 you could buy a Mac with only 256 MB in it and it runs fine but you can only run a handful of apps before you see things slow a bit. The reason people say OS X is "RAM-hungry" is that you can just go ahead and launch your whole Dock and it will all run for months, so users are doing that.
I just read a Vista review where the guy had 1 GB of RAM and said he could only run a few applications at a time.
The Vista upgrade in the Apple commercial is not one where the user says "gee, I need to get a really great video card, let's open the box and install one" ... it's specifically referring to the WIDESPREAD CIRCUMSTANCE where a user bought a PC within the last 1-2 years that was a shit-hot box at the time, but it only has 128MB of video RAM in it and Vista wants 256MB for Aero (no shit). So to put Vista on your "Vista-Ready" PC you have to do major surgery first.
For the equivalent Mac user, you buy Leopard and it has system requirements that include all of the Macs sold in the past 3-5 years. The same GUI system that takes 256MB on Vista runs on 32MB on the Mac, and in a slower mode on Macs with 16MB, which you have to go back to 2001 to find. So you don't need to upgrade the computer's video system to do a Leopard upgrade. Yet after the Leopard upgrade you will have ALL of the features of Leopard, including fancy graphics.
Notice the comparison is between upgrading THE OS on a recent PC to Vista and upgrading THE OS on a recent Mac to Leopard. Microsoft cannot win this argument. The Mac will take under 15 minutes and it will work perfectly afterwards. Just figuring out whether your PC video needs to be replaced or not is a huge undertaking for most Windows users. There are IT writers who weren't able to upgrade their 2006 name-brand PC's to Vista and get it working (George Ou is one). I have been using Macs for many years and I never heard of a user who couldn't upgrade their OS X successfully.
Also, if you want to do a direct head-to-head how-do-we-upgrade-certain-components, with the Mac you just replace the whole box. That's what you do. An iMac or Mac mini is one device just like a router is one device or phone is one device. Not only are all the components well-matched, but everything is included already, and the model is known by a huge community and will have many future software upgrades, and the resale value is even quite high. So if you feel that the video in your Mac isn't cutting it, you sell that Mac on eBay, get an alarmingly good price oftentimes, it goes to a new user and continues to be useful, and you buy a new Mac.
Somewhere in the argument that you don't need Vista because Windows 2000 can run all of today's Windows apps is the fact that Windows is stuck at a standstill for the whole 21st century. Up until last week, the version that came out in 2001 was the current version. So the argument for saving money here is that there was nothing new to buy even if you wanted to.
> what I mean about "forced" upgrade is look at how much OS X software requires 10.4. A LOT.
Yeah, 10.4 has been out for almost 18 months. The people who pay for software are the ones who just bought computers. It is not surprising to see stuff wanting 10.4 right now.
However every time I see an ad or an article about Windows anti-virus or anti-malware it is always more than I pay for Mac OS X, and it is always recommended if you want to have even a chance at privacy and security. So somebody running Windows 2000 for the last six years but updating his anti-virus every year can pay much more than a Mac user who just buys a new Mac every three years and never ever pays for OS X and doesn't ever need anti-malware stuff.
Being forced to buy an OS update for an old machine so you can run the most current software doesn't feel nearly as bad to me as being forced to buy an anti-virus add-on for an old machine so you can patch gaping holes in its system software and keep running it for 5 years until there is finally a new revision.
Mac mini has a very simple upgrade path: get a new Mac mini.
Seriously, you pay $599 for a Mac mini right now and three years from now you pay $599 and Apple replaces every single component and gives you all new software also. That is less than $200 per year for a very respectable level of performance and best in class software. The features of a Mac mini read like Vista but with the computer included and the software is mature and tested.
When you look at how hard it is to open a Mac mini (or any very small computer) you have to be independently wealthy or totally hopeless out of a job to have the time to pull a component and replace it with another. Even if you replace the CPU, are you really going to see such a whole new Mac mini afterwards that it was worth even the small chance that you drop a screw into something and short it and make a non-functional Mac mini?
Where does it stop? When they put a whole Mac on one chip will you want to upgrade just some pins of that chip? Are you upgrading the Linux in your router? Mac mini is a little brick with ports running all around it so you can plug stuff into it. It's one thing.
This upgrade discussion exposes a clear distinction between upgrade philosophies. Most people will never ever touch a PCI card even if there is a good reason. I work in music and audio and when FireWire pro audio came in suddenly everybody had a PowerBook and they didn't ever want to see a PCI card again.
Also, when you can buy a Mac mini for $599 or Windows Vista Ultimate for $399 there is a pretty good argument for adding the Mac mini to your current XP setup with a KVM switch rather than paying $399 for Vista and using it to destroy your XP box.
When I upgrade my computer, I unplug the cables from the back of the Mac, remove it from the desk, and replace it with another Mac. The computer is one independent device that I can pull and replace. The computer has Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth, FireWire, and USB so you don't need to put stuff inside of it. Also when my desktop was out for repair I put my notebook in its place and everything worked. The computer is swappable within the whole studio setup.
About every three years AppleCare is up, so I pull the Mac, sell it on eBay for half of what I paid for it three years ago, then buy a new Mac, stick it on the desk and plug the same cables into it, install a few apps, and within a couple of hours I feel like I'm using the same old Mac only of course it is faster.
I've been doing it this way for a while now and I'm down to just a few hours per year of IT work. Even installing my third-party applications is very fast and easy because only two of them have installers (Photoshop and Logic Pro) and the rest all just drag and drop into place. I only have three drivers and they each install in under a minute it is painless.
Mac OS X is free with a system purchase, and if you want to upgrade an old system, then it is $129 or a 5-pack is $199.
Mac mini is $599 and includes all of the OS features of Windows Vista, plus THE HARDWARE. Not expensive to get Mac OS X.
Try plugging a display and keyboard and mouse into a Windows Vista Ultimate box it is $399 just to get the DVD.
Ha Ha if Microsoft supports a system for 5 years it will still be the current system. Up until just a week ago XP was the current system and over 5 years old. One way to keep legacy support is to just not upgrade anything.
... it is a computer.
> Apple is pretty pricy about charging for each bug fix
BULLSHIT. You just look stupid saying such ridiculous stuff.
OS X is free with your computer purchase. If you want to upgrade just the OS and not the computer later, then it costs $129 for a single license, or $199 for a 5-pack and there is no key, no authorization, no bullshit. It will never pop up and say "am I running on the right hardware, maybe I should go into reduced functionality mode?" It comes on a DVD and includes developer tools. It installs in only a few minutes and just works. Each new release is faster on the same hardware than the previous release. Each new release starts at 10.x.0 and is updated automatically for free every couple of months or so 10.x.1, 10.x.2, etc. until the next full release. There is no other way to pay for OS X. There are no paid bug fixes or anything like that. You get it with a system, or you get a newer version in a box. Software Update is an included feature and it runs automatically and during the life of your operating system it will probably download and install about 20-30 items, all for free.
> Anyone have a daylight saving fix for OS 9? 10.0? 10.1? 10.2? How about OS 8?
First of all, you are engaging in FUD because the bug you are talking about is man-made, government-created over just the last year or so, and it not only affects all operating systems but all digital devices, and there is no way for you to know whether these patches will be forthcoming from Apple or from a third-party. Either way, the possibility is more likely than Microsoft patches because with OS X the core OS is open source and not a black box. Also all but OS 8 have Software Update, so Apple could release a patch through there and patch every affected system overnight. Or, Apple could make an offer that any user who brings a computer running one of these systems into an Apple Store or authorized reseller can have a free copy of Leopard. Since we are talking about a minimum number of users that might be the best way.
Second, you're assuming that anybody is actually using these old systems. The newest one you mention was replaced by 10.3 in the year 2003. That is about the time that Microsoft scrapped Longhorn and did a "reset" of the project based on Windows Server 2003. Just yesterday for Windows users, but an eternity in the Mac world.
Third, you are assuming that there aren't any workarounds, when there clearly are.
One fix is to turn on "set date and time automatically" which is always off by default because it "phones home" to Apple to get the right time off their time server. With this setting engaged (it is in the Date and Time System Preference) your Mac's clock will sync to Apple's time server and the time will be correct.
Another fix is to use the International System Preference to disable Daylight Savings Time.
Another fix is to set your location to somewhere that doesn't observe Daylight Savings Time, like Arizona.
Another fix would be to install a third-party clock application that "knows" about this problem and can change the system time as appropriate to keep it right. It is just math
It's worth noting that Windows is famous for fucking up DST. There is one big version of Windows that would "fall back" and then one hour later it would "fall back" again. I think it was Windows 98. My cell phone always fucks up DST also.
Really, they should abolish DST it is a stupid anachronism and not worth the time we waste on it.
> Gates was comparing the 30 remote code execution bugs from MOAB to these
MOAB was 22 bugs, and none of them involved remote code execution. At least half of them you had to be sitting at the computer logged in as an administrator. At least a quarter of them were in third-party software that is not even included with a Mac.
The net result of MOAB was it back-fired. The guys who did it said they were going to do it to teach the Mac community that they were not invulnerable but only one of the bugs was serious and Apple patched it before the month was out. The total pickings of 22 bugs are so slim and drawn from the entire platform of 22,000 applications that it has actually caused Mac users to feel MORE SAFE with their choice of Mac as their personal computer. Even if you happened to use all of the third-party shareware featured in MOAB then you were still so much better off than any Windows user that it is like MOAB said "Congratulations on your Mac purchase."
It was weird he went all Xerox PARC when the question with Vista is the skin. The Windows logo has been ensconced in glassy bubble that is such a Mac OS X wannabe that it's a self-parody ... the very Windows logo has been made to look Mac-like. The swoopy desktop pictures are too much just by themselves, although I heard them defend that by saying that they got all the desktop pictures from third-parties ... so it is not actually Microsoft that did the off ripping. And the "parental controls" feature he keeps saying is a first is in Tiger, released in 2005. It is really weird to hear him say they are first with these things when they are clearly not.
... the soft links or aliases or shortcuts have the little curly arrow. Also, using a modifier key plus Tab to cycle through running applications started on Windows and is everywhere else now. That's not much for 20 years of MS Windows.
Apple not only hired people from PARC and gave them a chance to make real products out of their ideas, Apple also paid Xerox with pre-IPO Apple stock. When Apple went public, Xerox made millions and millions and that was what Xerox wanted. The very reason they had the CEO of Apple and his computer design team touring around the Palo Alto Research Center was because they didn't know how to make any money from the stuff they had there. They were like a motorcycle company who came up with a cool concept car and didn't know what to do so they called the local car company CEO to come down and see if they couldn't get him to take the car project forward. He said, yeah, I like this, I'll hire the team and compensate you with stock and everybody was happy.
When you read the list of GUI features that were developed AFTER that, solely by Apple, at Apple, and for Apple products, it is embarrassing to think about anyone trying to take Apple down a notch with the Xerox PARC story. Just in the 1980's Apple invented and shipped drag and drop, the clipboard cut/copy/paste, the double-click, the pull-down menu, overlapping windows, marquee selections (marching ants), the little box of painting tools like you see in Photoshop, files-and-folders, proportional fonts, WYSIWYG, the Trash, keyboard shortcuts for menus, File-Edit-View, a system menu full of shortcuts (Apple menu/Start menu), little hardware controls in the corner of the screen. The other day I saw a screenshot of System 6 and I was stunned at how much like Mac OS X it looked.
The only stuff I know that Microsoft has contributed to GUI science is the little curly arrow they put on shortcuts, which is a classic innovation in that you see that on every system now
> If you're interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is.
Isn't that the guy who said "if I didn't work for Microsoft right now, I'd buy a Mac" about a year ago?
> Certainly it is unfair to laden Vista with all the bugs/exploits associated with previous versions of Windows
... you find many more than one per month. That is informative. Notice I'm not saying compare Vista to previous versions of Office or something unrelated, but the previous versions of the Windows software product. Just because they renamed it "Vista" does not mean it's not Windows. It is built on, contains, and deserves the reputation of past Windows. I truly hope it is as secure as a Mac because that's what every user needs, but you have to be an idiot or insane to trust Microsoft when they say they fixed something in Windows because they say that every time and it is always still broken.
... once you replace the head is it still the same person? We are having an identity crisis in the Mac community over how much change happened. But in Vista we have the same core OS as XP and Windows 2000, the same old GUI from 95 forward is there along with a new one that requires 256MB of video RAM to run (Quartz runs in 32MB, but can run a bit slower in 16MB and a lot slower in 8MB), and the API is Win32, same as XP, same as Windows 2000/Me/98/95. Where is the rewrite?
The original poster did not put all Windows bugs on Vista. The point was that Bill Gates essentially dared the world to find one serious flaw in Windows Vista every month, so it is informative to look back on the history of Windows and ask ourselves how many bugs per month one would find in previous versions of Windows. In other words, what happens if you apply "The Vista Bug Standard" to previous versions of Windows
Further, the metafile bug that was found recently was in all versions of Windows. It was in the Vista beta and in XP and XP2 and Windows 2000 which are all on NT, and it was in 98 and Me which are on DOS.
> You might also argue that Vista, as a bottom-up re-write
NO, Vista is not a rewrite. Neither was XP, although it was also sold as "a rewrite". Windows is known to have such poor quality that it is always a selling feature to tell people it has been scrapped and rebuilt anew. However, they never actually do that. Even moving from a DOS to NT core OS, they managed to do that so slowly and in such a commingled way that they never left the past behind.
In 2001, Apple released a "bottom-up re-write" of their OS. Not only did they change the core OS from Mac to UNIX, they also changed the GUI from Platinum to Aqua, and changed the API from Classic to Carbon/Cocoa/BSD, and recently, as a result of that rewrite, they changed the processor architecture from PowerPC to Intel. They changed the Mac so much in the past five years that people started debating the ethics of head transplants
I will bet you that fileman.exe (the file manager from Windows 3) is somewhere in Vista.