The reason you separate Mac OS and Mac OS X is that Mac OS X is a complete rewrite. It is a different GUI on top of a different core OS, and now runs on different CPU architecture also. The API's are also different... on Mac OS it is "Mac Toolbox" aka Classic and on Mac OS X you have Carbon, Cocoa, BSD. Apple very specifically left the past behind and so have third-party developers and users. If we examine the code on a 2001 Mac versus 2006 Mac it is radically different.
However on Windows 2001 and 2006 are the same fucking year. Windows XP came out only 5 years after Windows 95, and we all know how little Microsoft can get done in 5 years. Windows 95 did not have a TCP/IP stack or a Web browser, and Internet Explorer had not been developed yet, let alone released. Windows 95 also introduced the Win32 application platform, still in use five years later on Windows XP and then for five years after that on Windows XP and now on Windows Vista. Where is the rewrite? It is the same API and the same GUI and the same DOS/NT mix under there.
When you see Jobs interviewed, he's stiffer than in his presentations, but he's not robotic and the thing with Jobs is that he always shows up with PRODUCT. That makes a really big difference. He is also passionate about all Apple products, or they don't ship it. He said a few times over the past few years that they've tried something and not been able to meet their own standards and he shelved it before it shipped. He isn't going to go out in public and sell stuff that's not great. He's a product guy, not a sales guy.
Gates was on the Daily Show and they put a Windows Vista Ultimate box on the desk that Jon Stewart said "can I have this?" at one point, but what was it, really? A box. It has a disc in it. If it has the cure for aging in there it would still be hard to get people excited about it, because we all know that is only an ingredient. You have to install it and do some cooking before there will even be something to taste.
If Jobs goes on the Daily Show on the day that Leopard is launched, wouldn't he at least have a MacBook out on the desk? Wouldn't he show off a new Leopard feature or two, and wouldn't the audience go "wow I've never seen a computer do that before"? Probably an iPhone also.
In other words, it's not just personality or social skills, it's PRODUCT.
> Some guy found thirty places in software that comes with MacOS X
No, MOAB was 22 bugs, and it is not all software that comes with Mac OS X, but rather third-party software also. In other words, the 22 bugs are drawn not just from Mac OS X, not just from Apple software, but also from the 22,000 third-party Mac applications from developers large and small. Two developers I can think of off the top of my head were Panic and Unsanity, both shareware vendors whose only relationship with Apple is that they make software for Mac users. If you don't use Panic's FTP client or Unsanity's "Application Enhancer" then that brings MOAB down to 20 and there are many more questionable ones in there.
In short, the month of Apple bugs revealed only a handful of actual Apple bugs, and only one was serious enough that Apple had to patch it, which they did on Jan 23, 2007.
> The vast majority of Mac users I know are people who like them because they make a lot of money out of them > - in areas like publishing, music, photography and video.
Yeah, that is me.
I would definitely encourage all of my competitors in the multimedia arts to please buy Vista immediately and spend at least the first three weeks installing and troubleshooting it. After that, you can continue shipping out your usual shoddy workmanship, bad file formats, and virus-laden files as before, driving your clients into my much more productive arms.
I have worked for clients who when the project is over they ask me "how come I got 10x the work out of you as out of the other guy?" and I'll look at the other guy's work and there is no sensible file structure, files are named "newphoto4.psd" and similarly useless names, and there are Word documents in it of all things and I'm like "I don't know" but it is just that the guy is using Windows and I'm using Photoshop. It's very different.
The whole entire point of Mac OS X is that you get both the shiny and the strength. Before Mac OS X if you wanted shiny you had to get Mac OS 9 and if you wanted strength you had to get UNIX. Now you get both in one and it feels fucking awesome.
When I first saw these new Mac vs PC ads I was very disappointed that Apple was doing the whole "Mac vs PC" thing. That felt tired and still does.
However they have steadily won me over because they are communicating some really important technical stuff in a non-technical way. I know many of us here would rather see a 5 minute video where user A upgrades Tiger to Leopard and DONE! and user B gets started upgrading XP to Vista, he is still typing in a product code and user A is making a movie already. What they have done instead is anthropomorphize the computers themselves and therefore Mac goes "upgrade? isn't it just straightforward?" and PC goes "oh, no, you've got to do this and that and this and that" and he is in a hospital gown and scared about losing functionality. That's the actual fears of Windows users who are thinking of upgrading to Vista, and that is actually something that Apple should be telling its customers about its competitors' products. You have this guy George Ou who is an IT writer who knocks the Mac in a ridiculously inaccurate way, and he got Vista recently, and after a week of not being able to install it, he gave up and put XP back on his machine and put Vista on the shelf and this guy is an IT writer with a name-brand 2006 PC. You just don't have that on a Mac... you don't ever upgrade a Mac and lose your audio.
> It's telling that there have been over 20 apple vulns released and only a single patch from apple thus far. Ignorance must be bliss.
Yes, YOUR ignorance must be bliss. Apple has released a MOAB-related patch, on January 23rd to be precise.
The MOAB thing only released 22 "bugs" (not "exploits" not "vulnerabilities") and of these, many were for third-party developers whose only relationship with Apple is that they make Mac software. There are 22,000 Mac OS X applications, so the idea that you couldn't find 22 bugs in there would be really radical. And these are the best they could come up with? For example, one bug was in a shareware FTP client, another was in a shareware GUI enhancer that nobody uses. Only the very first bug from the very first day turned out to actually be both Apple-related and serious, and Apple patched it on the 23rd. All the systems I use are already patched... most patched themselves.
Also, some of the MOAB bugs required you to do stupid stuff like specifically skip the verification of a disk image before it is mounted. You have to go out of your way to do this, so why would you? For over 10 years we've been watching our Macs scan each disk image before it is mounted, and in that time we switched to a UNIX base and only got more serious about such verifications, so why would we download an image and then specifically say to the computer "attach this without checking if it really contains a disk and let's see what happens". That's the kind of stuff that has put a bad taste in people's mouths over MOAB, not to mention how they keep saying that they're "teaching Mac users a lesson" and such. Well, what they taught us was that things are pretty good on the Mac platform. If MOAB is the worst "month of bugs" you can find on our platform then things are pretty fucking A-OK.
> Mac users don't have to spend unneeded time and money for installing and maintaining special anti-virus programs.
I remember a couple of years ago reading an interview with the Intel CEO and he said he personally spent two hours every weekend removing malware from his daughter's PC. You never, ever see this with a Mac.
I bet she has a Mac by now after the Intel switch.
> Maybe it IS the low market share. So WHAT! It is the bottom line: Macs and their OSX are MUCH more secure that > Windows PCs. Apple can truthfully advertise that fact.
I don't think it is market-share related, because at any one time there are enough Macs to do damage, especially if they are as easy to "own" as Bill Gates says. I think it has to do with the fact that Mac OS X has always been a moving target.
From the very first Mac OS X v10.0 (and even before in Mac OS 9) there has been a feature called Software Update. Every Mac checks a server at Apple for important security updates, as well as regular maintenance updates for the OS. It is a well-designed system and easy to use and so people really do use it, and as a result the entire Mac user base quietly movies from 10.4.0 to 10.4.1 to 10.4.2 to 10.4.3 and so on. Tiger is over a year old now, but we are all running the 9th version of it. If you created an exploit that ran on 10.4.2 but was fixed in 10.4.3 then you only had a month or two to use it. Every Mac OS X machine out there typically replaces its own kernel every couple of months. This is in addition to security updates.
On the other hand, if we go to any random XP machine from the last five years, it will either be either 5.1 or 5.1 SP2. That PC may be running the same OS for many years, even its whole life. Even if Windows had industry-standard UNIX security and networking, sitting still for that long is just asking for it. And to make it worse, XP has no security, and Microsoft doesn't play well with others and they have executive felons and monopolistic practices and lie all the time.
Mac OS X v10.5.0 "Leopard" will be the around the 45th shipping version of Mac OS X... during that time we've had Windows 5.1, 5.1 SP2, and 6.0... three versions. Going back further you have 5.0 (2000) and 4.1 (98) and then 4.0 (95) which predates Internet Explorer and did not have a built-in TCP/IP stack. That is too fucking slow for the Internet.
> Ditto for Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, respectively...
No, Steve Wozniak is an accomplished design engineer and Steve Jobs is an accomplished product designer. They are both successful separately from their business concerns such as being founders or CEO. If Steve Jobs didn't want to be any kind of business man he could still work at Apple on their product design team. Similarly at Google you find the CEO is a technologist, not a sales guy. This is how it's supposed to work in Silicon Valley.
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are sales guys. They design pyramid schemes, not products. Their innovations are in software licensing, pricing, marketing. One of the big things they innovated was putting a disk in a big empty box and selling it for a lot of money to people who had never before paid for software. Another innovation was taking the cost and responsibility of system integration away from "system integrators" and putting it onto the consumer. Instead of buying a personal computer that just worked, you bought computer "hardware" and computer "software" and you "installed Windows" and you began troubleshooting. If it doesn't work it is the consumer's fault. If they complain to Dell it is Microsoft's fault... if they complain to Microsoft it is Dell's fault, but ultimately it is the consumer holding the legal and technical responsibility. That's a really big moneymaker there, because you're taking retail money from the consumer but you're only shipping them wholesale parts.
> What I see is that nearly every review of Vista is written by a Mac user.
No, I think what you are noticing is that every IT writer in existence in 2007 has run a Mac at least a little bit, whereas in 2001 when Windows XP came out, Mac OS X was just a few months old, and it was rare that any IT press knew anything existed other than Microsoft. Especially over the last couple of years the combination of iPod success and Apple-Intel switch has created a situation where many IT writers are writing about Windows all day then going home to their Macs. You can't put a new Windows with a Mac skin and Mac features in front of these guys and they don't notice. These are also the same guys who were chatting up WinFS and now have to explain why certain dialog boxes in Windows still look like NT 3.1.
When Windows 95 came out, very few people noticed that the way the UI looked was a complete rip-off of NeXT, because hardly anybody had run a NeXT system, or even seen a screenshot from a NeXT system. The Vista skin is similarly very much like Mac OS X, but the problem for Bill Gates is that everybody in IT knows that. You can't just wink about it anymore. The Mac is running the same 64 bit Core chips as everyone else and there are even 4-way Xeon 1U servers so it is really disingenuous to play the same old game that Bill Gates plays of pretending Apple doesn't exist. IT used to play along but like you say, they seem to all be Mac users now.
The idea with the iLife stuff is that they are "gateway" apps instead of "trial" apps. Because they are rich, full-featured, world class applications that are a joy to use, people actually use them and learn new skills and then a few versions later they buy a pro app that they would never have otherwise wanted or needed or know how to use.
Also it is a complete toolkit. From day one you have one of everything, so even if you replace a tool in your own professional discipline, for example a photographer replacing iPhoto with Aperture, you still have all the other tools working for you as easy to use accessories.
> You only need to be creative regardless of the hardware/OS. > I still use the "amazing" combination of pencil and paper
This is bullshit because you're saying that because the Mac is hardware/OS and Windows is hardware/OS then therefore you can be equally creative with each one. The problem with this is that Mac and Windows are so fundamentally different, and include so many different tools, that they are not at all for the same job. A set-top box may also be hardware/OS but it may not make a good creative workstation, it may not replace paper and pencil.
Paper and pencil is good and creative because it gets out of your way. You can draw a house, person, office hierarchy, map, a portrait of your lover, write a poem, whatever. I use Photoshop and a Wacom Art Tablet (digital airbrush) all day on a Mac and the experience is the same... everything I do is directly related to pushing pixels, the Mac gets out of my way, and I can focus on the work I'm doing. There is almost no IT overhead, just like paper and pencil (you have to sharpen the pencil from time to time) or an iPod. There is no downside over paper and pencil because the Mac is as reliable as paper and pencil.
Windows on the other hand is still way too much like cooking your own paper, whittling your own pencil, and then in the end it is not reliable, and it wants to chat about IT all day with you, which is fucking stupifying.
So, yeah, you can be creative regardless of what tools you're using, but if you're trying to be creative with ART then get ART tools, and if you're trying to be creative with MUSIC, then get MUSIC tools. If you want to be creative with IT, then get IT tools, get Windows or Linux or a breadboard kit but don't pretend to be making art and music with that pile of shit. If you were serious about art or music you would not be running Windows, you'd have some conte and a newsprint pad before that, you'd run a dedicated audio recorder before you'd be running Norton trying to get your audio mixer back up and running.
In professional art and music it is not acceptable to have any crashes because if you lose the afternoon's painting or the killer vocal take you may lose your month's pay. You can't say to the 12 piece band that they should come back tomorrow because you have a virus in your Win Win.
And if you're not a professional, then your weekend art or music or creative time is maybe even more precious. You shouldn't have to look like a complete asshole in front of your kids to work the digital photography, for example. Blow $500 on a Mac if you want to do the digital shit... iLife is at version 7 any moment now and very sophisticated, they've been building on iLife since before OS X.
Compare Windows Vista Ultimate $399 with Mac mini $599. Mac mini has all the same OS features and INCLUDES THE HARDWARE. It's very hard to promote Windows as some kind of cheap option that you make do with because you can't afford a Mac.
This really adds a new chapter to the Apple vs Microsoft product design debate. In the past we could compare Apple and Microsoft products, and also compare the process and methodology that both companies use to design products. But, fools that we were, we were comparing shipping products only. Of course if Bill Gates decided that Windows should have Parental Controls in 2002 and Apple shipped Parental Controls in 2005, and Microsoft in 2007, then it is actually Apple that is three years behind not Windows that is two years behind. Thanks for clearing that up, Bill.
Also I like how he says that the only reason why Apple has been shipping all these new features and iterating upon them again and again regularly is that Apple has been leaving out security. Isn't that classic projection? This is like when the town's biggest drunk picks on the town's workaholic by calling him a "drunk". It's like the workaholic may have problems, but you're the town drunk, buddy.
Also, even if the Vista DRM only applies to HD content, that is still significant.
It seems a bit hard right now to imagine, but HD is not really very big. Screens in general are increasing in size but the number of dots is still paltry.
If you print a single full-quality 1920x1080 HD image at the 200 dpi resolution of a typical drug store photo print it is only 10x6 inches and it will look blurry. At 300 dpi it is no longer blurry because most of the time that matches the best your eye can do, but now your HD image is only 7x4 inches. A 6x4 is probably the smallest photographic print most people have ever seen. Below that you go to a "wallet" size. In-between is a business card.
Screens will be 300 dpi in no time, especially measured against the adoption of a new optical disc format and TV technologies as being recommended for example by Sony. On a 300 dpi screen, your HD picture is 7x4 but your standard definition DVD picture is only 2.5x2 inches (smaller than iPod screen). 300 dpi is a sweet spot, because most people, most of the time, can't tell the difference between 300 and 400, but they can tell the difference between 300 and 200. Once you get to 300 dpi you start making screens bigger again instead of trying to pack in more dots.
In other words, DVD will look like YouTube does today in no time. There is a huge psychological component to this that is the reason why your 2 megapixel digital photos used to look "amazing" but now that you've been taking 6 megapixel images with a much-improved color capture system for a year, your old photos look brittle and washed out and not sharp. DVD is going to look so old so fast.
What's next after HD will be multi-HD, so there is no stopping. You make a camera with 8 HD capture chips and you edit on a system that shows you all 8 HD streams as one combined stream. Then you publish to either a multi-HD system or downres to a single HD system or SD system. Then consumers are going to want a multi-HD for the den and on you go. Might be only four screens in the first version.
In photography everyone thought 8 megapixels would be the end and of course it was meaningless. Even if that is enough pixels for your final product, again you want more for when you're editing, and for use in future higher-res publishing.
> Here is an example: Add/Remove programs seems too cumbersome? Then don't just rename it and mess with it...GET RID OF IT COMPLETELY. > You already have a menu of programs in the start menu...just put at the bottom of the list "Install new program...".
That would just be another band-aid on top of the problems with the application platform.
On the Mac, if you want to "install" a program, you _put it somewhere on your computer_ and then you use it. If you want to "uninstall" it, then you _put it in the Trash_. Even if you don't empty the Trash, code won't run from there, but all you have to do to be sure is go Finder > Secure Empty Trash and the Finder will write random bits over what's in the Trash. You can also run all your apps over a network or off your iPod, wherever you want to keep them.
(A small minority of apps use an installer, but even then, it is usually the actual Mac OS X Installer, the app that installs Mac OS X itself guides you through the application installation and leaves ridiculously good logging behind.)
Apple has been doing application administration like this for 23 years and they didn't even blink when they incorporated UNIX. So why is it so hard on Windows again?
The problem with Microsoft is that they are not even getting that the very reason to have a universal from-everyday-life "Trash" metaphor in your UI is so you don't have to say "uninstall a program?"... there is no metaphor there, that is an actual engineering description of bits being placed into the system in such a way that a new feature has been installed, like installing a new fuel pump in a car. It makes sense to engineers and other people who "install" stuff, but that is so few of us. Yet we have all seen a Trash bin and it can receive and remove anything digital, not just programs. I can put anything in there.
If you evaluate every string of text in the Windows interface, and ask yourself "Why would you put that language in front of every doctor, artist, lawyer, nurse, accountant, political science student, or grandmother that wants to simply access the Web and be part of the digital age?" then it becomes clear that not only was Apple right all along, but they're righter than ever right now.
The usability problems of MS Windows are exposed in the UI, but that's not where you fix the problem. Good UI will follow naturally if they build a decent operating system and application platform. Microsoft is just building mazes randomly and selling people maps so they can run around in there pointlessly while feeling empowered. Then they modify the maze and sell you a new map and everyone is all hurt.
>> So MS tried to move to another paradigm (am I using this properly?) to help more non-technical people >> understand how to find "basic" information.
One thing that Microsoft doesn't get, and they're not alone, is that the split that is killing most of the industry right now is not between "technical" and "non-technical" people... it's between engineers and non-engineers. Being a doctor is a very technical field, and when doctors use computers they are thinking about very technical things (radius of bone at point of amputation) and they are pretty smart people, but not only are device drivers uninteresting they are distracting.
It isn't just that an engineer mentality and metaphors are being forced upon the rest of the population who doesn't want them, it is happening during our daily work, when we can tolerate the distraction the least. Everybody has technical issues in every field already, and cannot tolerate taking on additional one from the computer industry. If the PC is general purpose, it can become anything, then it has to also pretend it's not a PC to some extent, step behind the curtain, wear an all-black outfit and a little headset and make sure the show runs smoothly, whether it's a business presentation or a video conference or an audio recording session or a 10 year-old's homework.
If Microsoft was doing a good job, nobody would know who they were. They sell parts for typewriters.
I saw pictures of the interface patents like six months or a year ago. Now that we've seen the whole device and how impressive certain features are (multi-touch, real Web browsing) it is easy to forget that this was maybe the least secret Apple Keynote ever. In addition to iPhone you have AppleTV which was already introduced under a code name last year, and AirPort Extreme Base Station which is just a rev to an existing product. The biggest surprise with iPhone was that it is the "widescreen iPod with touch controls" that we already KNEW was coming, not just the phone that we knew was coming.
Macworld was definitely the last chance for Steve to pretend it was secret. The media coverage that they got that day was amazing.
AirPort Extreme Base Station is the rev 3 at least of the product. It was originally introduced in 1999 along with the always-Wi-Fi iBook. This new version has new features (like OS X on a flash disk) but it is the same product. iPhone is a new product and has at least three kinds of wireless that you're carrying around with you everywhere (like on planes).
That seems disingenuous to me because it has many unique features which are obviously the right way to do it. For example, real Web browsing and multi-touch screen. There is nothing like the real Web as opposed to a cut-down version, and we have 10 fingers so something where you can touch it multiple times rather than having a single mouse pointer or single stylus is very interesting. Nobody else has this.
I haven't seen any handheld device that excited me as a Web developer. In this case, the user has the real Web. You don't write "handheld" style sheets to turn off features that the device can't handle. You target this device with "screen" just like a desktop system. It's the same Web browsing from the Mac, even down to the best typography in a Web browser.
We're so used to making apologies for these little devices, but if they can't surf the Web then they are in a different class than iPhone, Mac OS X, and other "real" computing systems that can act as full-fledged Web clients.
> The entire iPhone keynote was a Leopard demonstration.
The other two products that were introduced were also running Leopard: AppleTV and AirPort Extreme Base Station. Both have "OS X" on a flash disk which leads to interesting features. Like you can plug a USB disk onto AirPort Extreme and it is shared over the network.
> The iPhone, despite its many media-oriented virtues and its sweet design, will do far less than most existing smart phones
Two words: "Pocket-W3" and "iPod-connector".
First, "Pocket-W3"...
The iPhone does a lot more than any other smart phone because the iPhone has the actual World Wide Web in it. When you point it at amazon.com or any other site on the Web, there are no compromises. WebKit is world class desktop browsing, not smart phone class browsing. Your iPhone has complete (COMPLETE!) support for HTML 4.01, CSS 2.1, JavaScript 1.8, DOM Level 1, PNG 1.0, JPEG 1.0 and also there will probably be some MPEG-4 in there, as much as has been created yet (MPEG-4 is the standardization of QuickTime). It has the best typography you will see on a screen anywhere other than Mac OS X. (Typography is kind of an old science to completely forgo just because of digital, wouldn't you say? Shouldn't the Web have typography? Shit.) Also this is the third major version of WebKit (Panther, Tiger, Leopard) and it is open source... you will be schooled in its quality if you haven't been already. So you don't have to run a Java app to play MineSweeper... you can play it off the Web. You don't have to run some proprietary software to download ring tones... you just download them from the Web. Lots of the stuff that is on smart phones today is completely negated if you add the real Web.
The reason the Google CEO was there joking about merging with Apple is that this is the device that Google wants people to have to correspond to their massive "cloud" servers. You aren't supposed to run Google Maps on a PC... you're supposed to run it out of your pocket. Same for everything Google, ultimately. The reason so much of Google's stuff is in beta is that Google sees the whole Internet as being in beta. The iPhone probably represents some significant point in Google's business plans... they've been waiting for it. The iPhone is the real "Pocket Web" in the same way that the iPod was the first real "Pocket Music".
Second, "iPod-connector"...
The iPhone does a lot more than any other smart phone because it has an iPod dock connector which enables you to use something like 3000+ accessories just by plugging them in, or easily synchronize with iTunes to get music or movies or other data. There is no software to install, or drivers to install. You just plug stuff in and it works. iTunes manages the device in the same way as with iPods and other devices.
There will probably be over 100 iPhone-specific accessories by the June. They're designing and building them right now, wherever fine iPod accessories are made. If some kind of "missing" thing is identified, there will be a number of solutions that you can plug on in no time.
Finally, do not underestimate the value of the thing actually being oriented towards making calls as its number one app. The contacts list, the ability to conference with a single button push, even the ringer turning down music playback when you have a call, are all reasons why people will buy this just to use as a phone and everything else really will be extra. Although being able to go to the actual Web while on a call is a great calling-feature in its own right.
> What really seems to be pissing everyone off is it's a computer under the hood
It really isn't, though. It really is a typical smart phone under there.
One big difference is that you have a much smaller CPU along with specialized coprocessors like MPEG-4 decoding. It isn't a general-purpose device but rather is has a small range of special purposes.
Trying to turn it into a general purpose computer would be like using Windows CE as an iPod. You have to work 10x as hard to get 1/10th of the experience with 1/10th of the battery life. This is why people with so many other gadgets still bought iPods.
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The reason you separate Mac OS and Mac OS X is that Mac OS X is a complete rewrite. It is a different GUI on top of a different core OS, and now runs on different CPU architecture also. The API's are also different ... on Mac OS it is "Mac Toolbox" aka Classic and on Mac OS X you have Carbon, Cocoa, BSD. Apple very specifically left the past behind and so have third-party developers and users. If we examine the code on a 2001 Mac versus 2006 Mac it is radically different.
However on Windows 2001 and 2006 are the same fucking year. Windows XP came out only 5 years after Windows 95, and we all know how little Microsoft can get done in 5 years. Windows 95 did not have a TCP/IP stack or a Web browser, and Internet Explorer had not been developed yet, let alone released. Windows 95 also introduced the Win32 application platform, still in use five years later on Windows XP and then for five years after that on Windows XP and now on Windows Vista. Where is the rewrite? It is the same API and the same GUI and the same DOS/NT mix under there.
Gates: "There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on."
When you see Jobs interviewed, he's stiffer than in his presentations, but he's not robotic and the thing with Jobs is that he always shows up with PRODUCT. That makes a really big difference. He is also passionate about all Apple products, or they don't ship it. He said a few times over the past few years that they've tried something and not been able to meet their own standards and he shelved it before it shipped. He isn't going to go out in public and sell stuff that's not great. He's a product guy, not a sales guy.
Gates was on the Daily Show and they put a Windows Vista Ultimate box on the desk that Jon Stewart said "can I have this?" at one point, but what was it, really? A box. It has a disc in it. If it has the cure for aging in there it would still be hard to get people excited about it, because we all know that is only an ingredient. You have to install it and do some cooking before there will even be something to taste.
If Jobs goes on the Daily Show on the day that Leopard is launched, wouldn't he at least have a MacBook out on the desk? Wouldn't he show off a new Leopard feature or two, and wouldn't the audience go "wow I've never seen a computer do that before"? Probably an iPhone also.
In other words, it's not just personality or social skills, it's PRODUCT.
> Some guy found thirty places in software that comes with MacOS X
No, MOAB was 22 bugs, and it is not all software that comes with Mac OS X, but rather third-party software also. In other words, the 22 bugs are drawn not just from Mac OS X, not just from Apple software, but also from the 22,000 third-party Mac applications from developers large and small. Two developers I can think of off the top of my head were Panic and Unsanity, both shareware vendors whose only relationship with Apple is that they make software for Mac users. If you don't use Panic's FTP client or Unsanity's "Application Enhancer" then that brings MOAB down to 20 and there are many more questionable ones in there.
In short, the month of Apple bugs revealed only a handful of actual Apple bugs, and only one was serious enough that Apple had to patch it, which they did on Jan 23, 2007.
> The vast majority of Mac users I know are people who like them because they make a lot of money out of them
> - in areas like publishing, music, photography and video.
Yeah, that is me.
I would definitely encourage all of my competitors in the multimedia arts to please buy Vista immediately and spend at least the first three weeks installing and troubleshooting it. After that, you can continue shipping out your usual shoddy workmanship, bad file formats, and virus-laden files as before, driving your clients into my much more productive arms.
I have worked for clients who when the project is over they ask me "how come I got 10x the work out of you as out of the other guy?" and I'll look at the other guy's work and there is no sensible file structure, files are named "newphoto4.psd" and similarly useless names, and there are Word documents in it of all things and I'm like "I don't know" but it is just that the guy is using Windows and I'm using Photoshop. It's very different.
The whole entire point of Mac OS X is that you get both the shiny and the strength. Before Mac OS X if you wanted shiny you had to get Mac OS 9 and if you wanted strength you had to get UNIX. Now you get both in one and it feels fucking awesome.
When I first saw these new Mac vs PC ads I was very disappointed that Apple was doing the whole "Mac vs PC" thing. That felt tired and still does.
... you don't ever upgrade a Mac and lose your audio.
However they have steadily won me over because they are communicating some really important technical stuff in a non-technical way. I know many of us here would rather see a 5 minute video where user A upgrades Tiger to Leopard and DONE! and user B gets started upgrading XP to Vista, he is still typing in a product code and user A is making a movie already. What they have done instead is anthropomorphize the computers themselves and therefore Mac goes "upgrade? isn't it just straightforward?" and PC goes "oh, no, you've got to do this and that and this and that" and he is in a hospital gown and scared about losing functionality. That's the actual fears of Windows users who are thinking of upgrading to Vista, and that is actually something that Apple should be telling its customers about its competitors' products. You have this guy George Ou who is an IT writer who knocks the Mac in a ridiculously inaccurate way, and he got Vista recently, and after a week of not being able to install it, he gave up and put XP back on his machine and put Vista on the shelf and this guy is an IT writer with a name-brand 2006 PC. You just don't have that on a Mac
> It's telling that there have been over 20 apple vulns released and only a single patch from apple thus far. Ignorance must be bliss.
... most patched themselves.
Yes, YOUR ignorance must be bliss. Apple has released a MOAB-related patch, on January 23rd to be precise.
The MOAB thing only released 22 "bugs" (not "exploits" not "vulnerabilities") and of these, many were for third-party developers whose only relationship with Apple is that they make Mac software. There are 22,000 Mac OS X applications, so the idea that you couldn't find 22 bugs in there would be really radical. And these are the best they could come up with? For example, one bug was in a shareware FTP client, another was in a shareware GUI enhancer that nobody uses. Only the very first bug from the very first day turned out to actually be both Apple-related and serious, and Apple patched it on the 23rd. All the systems I use are already patched
Also, some of the MOAB bugs required you to do stupid stuff like specifically skip the verification of a disk image before it is mounted. You have to go out of your way to do this, so why would you? For over 10 years we've been watching our Macs scan each disk image before it is mounted, and in that time we switched to a UNIX base and only got more serious about such verifications, so why would we download an image and then specifically say to the computer "attach this without checking if it really contains a disk and let's see what happens". That's the kind of stuff that has put a bad taste in people's mouths over MOAB, not to mention how they keep saying that they're "teaching Mac users a lesson" and such. Well, what they taught us was that things are pretty good on the Mac platform. If MOAB is the worst "month of bugs" you can find on our platform then things are pretty fucking A-OK.
> Mac users don't have to spend unneeded time and money for installing and maintaining special anti-virus programs.
... during that time we've had Windows 5.1, 5.1 SP2, and 6.0 ... three versions. Going back further you have 5.0 (2000) and 4.1 (98) and then 4.0 (95) which predates Internet Explorer and did not have a built-in TCP/IP stack. That is too fucking slow for the Internet.
I remember a couple of years ago reading an interview with the Intel CEO and he said he personally spent two hours every weekend removing malware from his daughter's PC. You never, ever see this with a Mac.
I bet she has a Mac by now after the Intel switch.
> Maybe it IS the low market share. So WHAT! It is the bottom line: Macs and their OSX are MUCH more secure that
> Windows PCs. Apple can truthfully advertise that fact.
I don't think it is market-share related, because at any one time there are enough Macs to do damage, especially if they are as easy to "own" as Bill Gates says. I think it has to do with the fact that Mac OS X has always been a moving target.
From the very first Mac OS X v10.0 (and even before in Mac OS 9) there has been a feature called Software Update. Every Mac checks a server at Apple for important security updates, as well as regular maintenance updates for the OS. It is a well-designed system and easy to use and so people really do use it, and as a result the entire Mac user base quietly movies from 10.4.0 to 10.4.1 to 10.4.2 to 10.4.3 and so on. Tiger is over a year old now, but we are all running the 9th version of it. If you created an exploit that ran on 10.4.2 but was fixed in 10.4.3 then you only had a month or two to use it. Every Mac OS X machine out there typically replaces its own kernel every couple of months. This is in addition to security updates.
On the other hand, if we go to any random XP machine from the last five years, it will either be either 5.1 or 5.1 SP2. That PC may be running the same OS for many years, even its whole life. Even if Windows had industry-standard UNIX security and networking, sitting still for that long is just asking for it. And to make it worse, XP has no security, and Microsoft doesn't play well with others and they have executive felons and monopolistic practices and lie all the time.
Mac OS X v10.5.0 "Leopard" will be the around the 45th shipping version of Mac OS X
> Ditto for Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, respectively...
... if they complain to Microsoft it is Dell's fault, but ultimately it is the consumer holding the legal and technical responsibility. That's a really big moneymaker there, because you're taking retail money from the consumer but you're only shipping them wholesale parts.
No, Steve Wozniak is an accomplished design engineer and Steve Jobs is an accomplished product designer. They are both successful separately from their business concerns such as being founders or CEO. If Steve Jobs didn't want to be any kind of business man he could still work at Apple on their product design team. Similarly at Google you find the CEO is a technologist, not a sales guy. This is how it's supposed to work in Silicon Valley.
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are sales guys. They design pyramid schemes, not products. Their innovations are in software licensing, pricing, marketing. One of the big things they innovated was putting a disk in a big empty box and selling it for a lot of money to people who had never before paid for software. Another innovation was taking the cost and responsibility of system integration away from "system integrators" and putting it onto the consumer. Instead of buying a personal computer that just worked, you bought computer "hardware" and computer "software" and you "installed Windows" and you began troubleshooting. If it doesn't work it is the consumer's fault. If they complain to Dell it is Microsoft's fault
> What I see is that nearly every review of Vista is written by a Mac user.
No, I think what you are noticing is that every IT writer in existence in 2007 has run a Mac at least a little bit, whereas in 2001 when Windows XP came out, Mac OS X was just a few months old, and it was rare that any IT press knew anything existed other than Microsoft. Especially over the last couple of years the combination of iPod success and Apple-Intel switch has created a situation where many IT writers are writing about Windows all day then going home to their Macs. You can't put a new Windows with a Mac skin and Mac features in front of these guys and they don't notice. These are also the same guys who were chatting up WinFS and now have to explain why certain dialog boxes in Windows still look like NT 3.1.
When Windows 95 came out, very few people noticed that the way the UI looked was a complete rip-off of NeXT, because hardly anybody had run a NeXT system, or even seen a screenshot from a NeXT system. The Vista skin is similarly very much like Mac OS X, but the problem for Bill Gates is that everybody in IT knows that. You can't just wink about it anymore. The Mac is running the same 64 bit Core chips as everyone else and there are even 4-way Xeon 1U servers so it is really disingenuous to play the same old game that Bill Gates plays of pretending Apple doesn't exist. IT used to play along but like you say, they seem to all be Mac users now.
The idea with the iLife stuff is that they are "gateway" apps instead of "trial" apps. Because they are rich, full-featured, world class applications that are a joy to use, people actually use them and learn new skills and then a few versions later they buy a pro app that they would never have otherwise wanted or needed or know how to use.
Also it is a complete toolkit. From day one you have one of everything, so even if you replace a tool in your own professional discipline, for example a photographer replacing iPhoto with Aperture, you still have all the other tools working for you as easy to use accessories.
> You only need to be creative regardless of the hardware/OS.
... everything I do is directly related to pushing pixels, the Mac gets out of my way, and I can focus on the work I'm doing. There is almost no IT overhead, just like paper and pencil (you have to sharpen the pencil from time to time) or an iPod. There is no downside over paper and pencil because the Mac is as reliable as paper and pencil.
... iLife is at version 7 any moment now and very sophisticated, they've been building on iLife since before OS X.
> I still use the "amazing" combination of pencil and paper
This is bullshit because you're saying that because the Mac is hardware/OS and Windows is hardware/OS then therefore you can be equally creative with each one. The problem with this is that Mac and Windows are so fundamentally different, and include so many different tools, that they are not at all for the same job. A set-top box may also be hardware/OS but it may not make a good creative workstation, it may not replace paper and pencil.
Paper and pencil is good and creative because it gets out of your way. You can draw a house, person, office hierarchy, map, a portrait of your lover, write a poem, whatever. I use Photoshop and a Wacom Art Tablet (digital airbrush) all day on a Mac and the experience is the same
Windows on the other hand is still way too much like cooking your own paper, whittling your own pencil, and then in the end it is not reliable, and it wants to chat about IT all day with you, which is fucking stupifying.
So, yeah, you can be creative regardless of what tools you're using, but if you're trying to be creative with ART then get ART tools, and if you're trying to be creative with MUSIC, then get MUSIC tools. If you want to be creative with IT, then get IT tools, get Windows or Linux or a breadboard kit but don't pretend to be making art and music with that pile of shit. If you were serious about art or music you would not be running Windows, you'd have some conte and a newsprint pad before that, you'd run a dedicated audio recorder before you'd be running Norton trying to get your audio mixer back up and running.
In professional art and music it is not acceptable to have any crashes because if you lose the afternoon's painting or the killer vocal take you may lose your month's pay. You can't say to the 12 piece band that they should come back tomorrow because you have a virus in your Win Win.
And if you're not a professional, then your weekend art or music or creative time is maybe even more precious. You shouldn't have to look like a complete asshole in front of your kids to work the digital photography, for example. Blow $500 on a Mac if you want to do the digital shit
Compare Windows Vista Ultimate $399 with Mac mini $599. Mac mini has all the same OS features and INCLUDES THE HARDWARE. It's very hard to promote Windows as some kind of cheap option that you make do with because you can't afford a Mac.
This really adds a new chapter to the Apple vs Microsoft product design debate. In the past we could compare Apple and Microsoft products, and also compare the process and methodology that both companies use to design products. But, fools that we were, we were comparing shipping products only. Of course if Bill Gates decided that Windows should have Parental Controls in 2002 and Apple shipped Parental Controls in 2005, and Microsoft in 2007, then it is actually Apple that is three years behind not Windows that is two years behind. Thanks for clearing that up, Bill.
Also I like how he says that the only reason why Apple has been shipping all these new features and iterating upon them again and again regularly is that Apple has been leaving out security. Isn't that classic projection? This is like when the town's biggest drunk picks on the town's workaholic by calling him a "drunk". It's like the workaholic may have problems, but you're the town drunk, buddy.
Everybody seems to think that iTunes is so huge that it's bigger than record companies and countries, but that's not the case (yet).
Also, even if the Vista DRM only applies to HD content, that is still significant.
It seems a bit hard right now to imagine, but HD is not really very big. Screens in general are increasing in size but the number of dots is still paltry.
If you print a single full-quality 1920x1080 HD image at the 200 dpi resolution of a typical drug store photo print it is only 10x6 inches and it will look blurry. At 300 dpi it is no longer blurry because most of the time that matches the best your eye can do, but now your HD image is only 7x4 inches. A 6x4 is probably the smallest photographic print most people have ever seen. Below that you go to a "wallet" size. In-between is a business card.
Screens will be 300 dpi in no time, especially measured against the adoption of a new optical disc format and TV technologies as being recommended for example by Sony. On a 300 dpi screen, your HD picture is 7x4 but your standard definition DVD picture is only 2.5x2 inches (smaller than iPod screen). 300 dpi is a sweet spot, because most people, most of the time, can't tell the difference between 300 and 400, but they can tell the difference between 300 and 200. Once you get to 300 dpi you start making screens bigger again instead of trying to pack in more dots.
In other words, DVD will look like YouTube does today in no time. There is a huge psychological component to this that is the reason why your 2 megapixel digital photos used to look "amazing" but now that you've been taking 6 megapixel images with a much-improved color capture system for a year, your old photos look brittle and washed out and not sharp. DVD is going to look so old so fast.
What's next after HD will be multi-HD, so there is no stopping. You make a camera with 8 HD capture chips and you edit on a system that shows you all 8 HD streams as one combined stream. Then you publish to either a multi-HD system or downres to a single HD system or SD system. Then consumers are going to want a multi-HD for the den and on you go. Might be only four screens in the first version.
In photography everyone thought 8 megapixels would be the end and of course it was meaningless. Even if that is enough pixels for your final product, again you want more for when you're editing, and for use in future higher-res publishing.
It's worth noting that on the Mac you turn the computer on or off using the power button. That's all you do. Go try it.
> Here is an example: Add/Remove programs seems too cumbersome? Then don't just rename it and mess with it...GET RID OF IT COMPLETELY.
... there is no metaphor there, that is an actual engineering description of bits being placed into the system in such a way that a new feature has been installed, like installing a new fuel pump in a car. It makes sense to engineers and other people who "install" stuff, but that is so few of us. Yet we have all seen a Trash bin and it can receive and remove anything digital, not just programs. I can put anything in there.
... it's between engineers and non-engineers. Being a doctor is a very technical field, and when doctors use computers they are thinking about very technical things (radius of bone at point of amputation) and they are pretty smart people, but not only are device drivers uninteresting they are distracting.
> You already have a menu of programs in the start menu...just put at the bottom of the list "Install new program...".
That would just be another band-aid on top of the problems with the application platform.
On the Mac, if you want to "install" a program, you _put it somewhere on your computer_ and then you use it. If you want to "uninstall" it, then you _put it in the Trash_. Even if you don't empty the Trash, code won't run from there, but all you have to do to be sure is go Finder > Secure Empty Trash and the Finder will write random bits over what's in the Trash. You can also run all your apps over a network or off your iPod, wherever you want to keep them.
(A small minority of apps use an installer, but even then, it is usually the actual Mac OS X Installer, the app that installs Mac OS X itself guides you through the application installation and leaves ridiculously good logging behind.)
Apple has been doing application administration like this for 23 years and they didn't even blink when they incorporated UNIX. So why is it so hard on Windows again?
The problem with Microsoft is that they are not even getting that the very reason to have a universal from-everyday-life "Trash" metaphor in your UI is so you don't have to say "uninstall a program?"
If you evaluate every string of text in the Windows interface, and ask yourself "Why would you put that language in front of every doctor, artist, lawyer, nurse, accountant, political science student, or grandmother that wants to simply access the Web and be part of the digital age?" then it becomes clear that not only was Apple right all along, but they're righter than ever right now.
The usability problems of MS Windows are exposed in the UI, but that's not where you fix the problem. Good UI will follow naturally if they build a decent operating system and application platform. Microsoft is just building mazes randomly and selling people maps so they can run around in there pointlessly while feeling empowered. Then they modify the maze and sell you a new map and everyone is all hurt.
>> So MS tried to move to another paradigm (am I using this properly?) to help more non-technical people
>> understand how to find "basic" information.
One thing that Microsoft doesn't get, and they're not alone, is that the split that is killing most of the industry right now is not between "technical" and "non-technical" people
It isn't just that an engineer mentality and metaphors are being forced upon the rest of the population who doesn't want them, it is happening during our daily work, when we can tolerate the distraction the least. Everybody has technical issues in every field already, and cannot tolerate taking on additional one from the computer industry. If the PC is general purpose, it can become anything, then it has to also pretend it's not a PC to some extent, step behind the curtain, wear an all-black outfit and a little headset and make sure the show runs smoothly, whether it's a business presentation or a video conference or an audio recording session or a 10 year-old's homework.
If Microsoft was doing a good job, nobody would know who they were. They sell parts for typewriters.
I saw pictures of the interface patents like six months or a year ago. Now that we've seen the whole device and how impressive certain features are (multi-touch, real Web browsing) it is easy to forget that this was maybe the least secret Apple Keynote ever. In addition to iPhone you have AppleTV which was already introduced under a code name last year, and AirPort Extreme Base Station which is just a rev to an existing product. The biggest surprise with iPhone was that it is the "widescreen iPod with touch controls" that we already KNEW was coming, not just the phone that we knew was coming.
Macworld was definitely the last chance for Steve to pretend it was secret. The media coverage that they got that day was amazing.
AirPort Extreme Base Station is the rev 3 at least of the product. It was originally introduced in 1999 along with the always-Wi-Fi iBook. This new version has new features (like OS X on a flash disk) but it is the same product. iPhone is a new product and has at least three kinds of wireless that you're carrying around with you everywhere (like on planes).
> It's not innovative
That seems disingenuous to me because it has many unique features which are obviously the right way to do it. For example, real Web browsing and multi-touch screen. There is nothing like the real Web as opposed to a cut-down version, and we have 10 fingers so something where you can touch it multiple times rather than having a single mouse pointer or single stylus is very interesting. Nobody else has this.
I haven't seen any handheld device that excited me as a Web developer. In this case, the user has the real Web. You don't write "handheld" style sheets to turn off features that the device can't handle. You target this device with "screen" just like a desktop system. It's the same Web browsing from the Mac, even down to the best typography in a Web browser.
We're so used to making apologies for these little devices, but if they can't surf the Web then they are in a different class than iPhone, Mac OS X, and other "real" computing systems that can act as full-fledged Web clients.
> The entire iPhone keynote was a Leopard demonstration.
The other two products that were introduced were also running Leopard: AppleTV and AirPort Extreme Base Station. Both have "OS X" on a flash disk which leads to interesting features. Like you can plug a USB disk onto AirPort Extreme and it is shared over the network.
> The iPhone, despite its many media-oriented virtues and its sweet design, will do far less than most existing smart phones
...
... you will be schooled in its quality if you haven't been already. So you don't have to run a Java app to play MineSweeper ... you can play it off the Web. You don't have to run some proprietary software to download ring tones ... you just download them from the Web. Lots of the stuff that is on smart phones today is completely negated if you add the real Web.
... you're supposed to run it out of your pocket. Same for everything Google, ultimately. The reason so much of Google's stuff is in beta is that Google sees the whole Internet as being in beta. The iPhone probably represents some significant point in Google's business plans ... they've been waiting for it. The iPhone is the real "Pocket Web" in the same way that the iPod was the first real "Pocket Music".
...
Two words: "Pocket-W3" and "iPod-connector".
First, "Pocket-W3"
The iPhone does a lot more than any other smart phone because the iPhone has the actual World Wide Web in it. When you point it at amazon.com or any other site on the Web, there are no compromises. WebKit is world class desktop browsing, not smart phone class browsing. Your iPhone has complete (COMPLETE!) support for HTML 4.01, CSS 2.1, JavaScript 1.8, DOM Level 1, PNG 1.0, JPEG 1.0 and also there will probably be some MPEG-4 in there, as much as has been created yet (MPEG-4 is the standardization of QuickTime). It has the best typography you will see on a screen anywhere other than Mac OS X. (Typography is kind of an old science to completely forgo just because of digital, wouldn't you say? Shouldn't the Web have typography? Shit.) Also this is the third major version of WebKit (Panther, Tiger, Leopard) and it is open source
The reason the Google CEO was there joking about merging with Apple is that this is the device that Google wants people to have to correspond to their massive "cloud" servers. You aren't supposed to run Google Maps on a PC
Second, "iPod-connector"
The iPhone does a lot more than any other smart phone because it has an iPod dock connector which enables you to use something like 3000+ accessories just by plugging them in, or easily synchronize with iTunes to get music or movies or other data. There is no software to install, or drivers to install. You just plug stuff in and it works. iTunes manages the device in the same way as with iPods and other devices.
There will probably be over 100 iPhone-specific accessories by the June. They're designing and building them right now, wherever fine iPod accessories are made. If some kind of "missing" thing is identified, there will be a number of solutions that you can plug on in no time.
Finally, do not underestimate the value of the thing actually being oriented towards making calls as its number one app. The contacts list, the ability to conference with a single button push, even the ringer turning down music playback when you have a call, are all reasons why people will buy this just to use as a phone and everything else really will be extra. Although being able to go to the actual Web while on a call is a great calling-feature in its own right.
It has a wireless Web browser in it, huh?
... like Firefox but with better text rendering and complete CSS 2.1.
You can write Web apps and they will work not only on the iPhone but on other Web clients also.
What kind of app would you write for the iPhone that you couldn't do as a Web app?
Remember it is a full Web browser
I would really like to hear what kinds of apps people are being prevented from writing for the iPhone. Music players? Contact managers?
> What really seems to be pissing everyone off is it's a computer under the hood
It really isn't, though. It really is a typical smart phone under there.
One big difference is that you have a much smaller CPU along with specialized coprocessors like MPEG-4 decoding. It isn't a general-purpose device but rather is has a small range of special purposes.
Trying to turn it into a general purpose computer would be like using Windows CE as an iPod. You have to work 10x as hard to get 1/10th of the experience with 1/10th of the battery life. This is why people with so many other gadgets still bought iPods.