> That means it's not running on an Intel (or PPC) core. > That means it's not running OS X in any meaningful sense > (Apple can brand toilet paper as running OS X if they like). > Darwin, the BSD based operating system that underlies what Apple has previously been calling OS X, does not run on ARM processors.
"OS X" refers to a set of user-features, not geek-features. The user does not give a shit whether it is Intel or ARM and if you are a geek and you don't know that yet, then you have simply not been listening. Every feature mentioned at the iPhone intro was a user feature.
The following is true of both the Mac and the iPhone:
- CoreGraphics provides a PDF-based, resolution-independent display layer with the highest quality and most features in the industry - WebKit provides standards-based Web rendering throughout the system - Web browser: Safari - email client: Mail - media playback: iTunes - address book: Address Book - calendar: iCal
These are the features that users know from Mac OS X, and they see them in "OS X" on the iPhone and they get the picture... they're going to see the same Web on the iPhone as they see on their Mac. Wow. The same movies and music, the same contacts and calendars, the same rich animated graphics, the same sharpness and high-quality, the same attention to the interface and the user.
It also works the other way. In the future, iPhone users who haven't used a Mac will see that it has the same Web from their iPhone, the same rich graphics, and they'll get that if they like their iPhone, they will like a Mac. It's the same.
The Mac OS X and the iPhone OS X are so much more similar than they are different, that it would be more confusing to call it something else. This will probably be more true in the future, not less, as the iPhone gets more powerful and the Mac gets smaller.
Look inside a Mac and you will see that the platform for OS X is a standardized personal computer with x64 and UNIX core OS, same as the competition. Everybody in the industry, no matter how humble, has access to a standardized personal computer with x64 and UNIX core OS. Theoretically, Apple could buy another PC manufacturer and keep using the same parts below OS X. The whole platform is not going to suffer from short supply of an exotic chip.
Break open an iPhone, and you will see that the platform for OS X is a standardized smart phone with ARM and proprietary core OS, same as the competition. Over 75% of smart phones are ARM/Symbian/S60 and the iPhone is similarly ARM/OS X/Safari. The S60 browser is also based on the Apple WebKit engine, same as Safari of course. The platform won't suffer from short supply of an exotic chip, and Apple can make as many of these as they can sell because these parts are being made right now to be put into tomorrow's smart phones, whether they are iPhones or other.
All the reasons that make a standardized x64 with UNIX the right choice under the Mac's OS X are the same reasons why ARM is right under the iPhone's OS X (at least for right now). Each is the "core platform" of that kind of device right now, and is what people who work in that industry know how to supply, sell, service, and support.
OK, so Apple didn't call the OS X on the iPhone "Phone OS X" to precisely match "Mac OS X"... big deal. The "Mac OS" part of "Mac OS X" is there to show heritage. No such concern on the iPhone. Besides, they would have to decide between "Phone OS X" and "Pod OS X" and maybe it is both.
Steve Jobs already offered free licenses for Mac OS X (Intel) for the one laptop per child project, which is committed to using totally open source software. However if Intel is doing a similar project, it's easy to imagine OS X being on there.
>> He was saying that Windows is screwed up because Microsoft is (more or less) trying to integrate everything into the same huge process.
> So is everyone else selling to the same market Windows is. Why ? Because that's what the customers in that market want.
Nobody is disputing that EVERYBODY wants more features included, more capabilities out of the box. That has nothing to do with software architecture. You can ship a box with one kernel and 1000 applications and it will have a lot of features, and one of those features will be you can use feature 23 and not crash feature 156. Another will be that the developer can update feature 455 without affecting feature 11. Or you can ship a box with one huge software application on it, and it will be a disasterous, unmanageable mess in short order because every time you change one little feature, you have destroyed the whole application and replaced it with a brand-new application.
Apple's all-in-one focus with the Mac led them to a Mac with one huge single software application running on it, and that was the main criticism of Mac OS 9. However, they fixed this over five years ago. Now the Mac is a modern system of interconnections that feels like one thing but is actually many modular components, including enough parts to be UNIX-compatible. That's the work that Gartner is recommending that Microsoft get started on sometime soon.
> Not from Apple, anyway. They gave up on a 'next generation MacOS' after spending millions and millions, and were acquired by NeXT.
The joke is that they were acquired by NeXT. However a lot of NeXT users were surprised at how much Mac OS there is in Mac OS X. There is no doubt that Apple built a "next generation Mac OS" from all of the technologies that they had in-house from the NeXT purchase onwards. I work with Photoshop, BBEdit, Finder, and AppleScript all day long on Mac OS X v10.4 and there is no doubt this is a Mac. Having Apache running also, there is no doubt that Apple did the right thing with the UNIX core OS.
The modern parts I really appreciate are that you can assume Unicode, 32-bit graphics, and full multimedia in everything you do and it is just there. BBEdit is a text editor, but if you ask it to open pictures or movies it doesn't go "hey, I'm a text editor" it just opens the pictures and movies like you asked. If you are doing Web development with BBEdit this is a really nice feature, to be able to pop open a movie or picture while coding and verify that it is the right media and everything. AppleScript and the file system are both Unicode.
> Unfortunately, I don't recall hearing of hundreds of incompetents at Apple being fired. All that 'Copeland' and 'Sagan' hype should > have ended with a bang.
Avi Tevanian was head of software for NeXT, and after being bought by Apple he was made head of software for Apple. He quite famously got all the software people together and told them that the bullshit was going to stop and that heads were going to roll. Apple turned over a lot of people in the late 1990's between the time that Steve Jobs rejoined Apple to the time he stopped being just the "interim" CEO.
> I'd still buy Apple hardware even if OS X were capable of running on generic boxes.
Even if you are a Windows user, the new Macs are much better boxes. You get one Windows driver disc for the whole box, and future driver updates all come from Apple, not from ATI or NVIDIA or any other component manufacturers. Many people have characterized Windows on a Mac as the easiest Windows install and maintenance ever.
Plus you have the option of running OS X, either now or in the future. A user could buy a system and run XP and then when Leopard comes out they pay $129 and switch over to that if they don't want Vista.
> As someone whose first Mac was an original 128K model, let me just say that this reputation > is more often undeserved than deserved.:P
All you have to do is take a job in a Windows shop for about three months and see how the other half lives.
If something actually ends up working on MS Windows, even after days of fucking with it first, then users celebrate. It is high fives all around. You are supposed to expect stuff not to work and once it's working you tell everyone involved that they are a righteous fucking genius.
The thing with the Mac is that there is this actually quite large community of very non-technical users who are doing amazing stuff. If you are getting help desk style calls from friends who have PC's and then they switch there will be a point where you will call THEM and say "hey, what's up are you still using your computer?" and they will point you to a Web site with a slideshow and five movies on it and tell you how much fun they are having now that they finally know how to share their digital photos and movies after they shoot them.
Every geek has their favorite Mac OS X bug that is haunting them, but on the whole what Apple has done in the past few years is amazing. They not only vindicated their own ideals of very tight system integration and ease of use and "computers for everyone!" but they also did a world of good for UNIX, especially "desktop UNIX". The fact that they could change their whole OS and since then their processor architecture and yet still have the easiest system speaks to the fact that they are designing their stuff right. No matter what technologies come along or how the industry changes we can expect Apple to still be making good products because their philosophies and execution are sound.
> I had built a better computer than the original Mac mini for $300 about the time the mini came out, without the price > advantages of integrated components, paying retail for everything. Faster CPU, more memory, more disk space, faster disk, > better video,... and it ran FreeBSD too.
- can you edit movies on it out of the box, including FireWire for my camera? - does it work with an iPod out of the box? - does it work with every digital camera on the planet out of the box, including photo management interface? - does it burn video DVD's out of the box? - does it do WYSIWYG blogs out of the box? - Wi-Fi and Bluetooth out of the box and so easy my grandmother can use them? - can it run Photoshop? - does it have a 10-foot interface (e.g. Front Row) and a remote? - does it have both analog and digital video out? - does it have both analog and digital audio out? - is it about the size of an external optical disc drive? - does it have a three-year all-inclusive warranty for an extra $150 so I can take it into any Apple Store any time in the next three years and they'll make it work right again if it stops? - does it have award-winning industry-leading design and style? - does it have a premium cutting-edge graphics and multimedia layer in addition to kickass UNIX guts? - is it so easy to use that anybody can use it?
> Right, which when compared to the 90%+ market-share of Windows is, frankly, squat.
Who gives a shit when all the fun is happening on the Mac?
So many Windows machines are just typewriters. So many have such short lives due to being so unreliable. The people who are buying Windows right now are the ignorant and the terminally foolish.
Time Machine is the best demo that Core Animation could have. I don't recall ever seeing a backup-restore interface that wasn't a complete disaster. With Time Machine you just use it once and it's pretty clear how you can "go back in time" and identify a lost file and "bring it back to the present". People will use this who couldn't possibly use Retrospect or even Apple's own Backup without losing their minds. The whole point was to make some backup software that people will actually use according to what was said at the Keynote about only a small percentage of people using automatic backups.
The Core stuff... Core Audio, Video, Image, Data, and Animation are libraries that "every developer should have" so they go in the system. In a sense they are owned by the user and developers utilize them. It's really good leadership because you give everybody a chance to do things both the easy way and the right way at the same time and it makes the whole community better.
Time Machine is a nice feature for the end user (especially nice to think of your "grandmother" having it) but the reason it is one of the 10 preview features for DEVELOPERS at the World Wide DEVELOPER Conference is that there is a Time Machine API with which DEVELOPERS can add Time Machine support to their own application.
The Time Machine demo at WWDC demonstrated the system-wide Time Machine being activated by the Finder (file browser) and by the Address Book. Those are just two Time Machine -enabled applications. DEVELOPERS now have about 8 months until Leopard ships to add Time Machine support to their apps. Us "ordinary folk" will have to wait that long also before we can see how cool Time Machine really is.
Similarly, the first feature "64-bit from top to bottom including the GUI frameworks" is not the kind of feature that Steve Jobs will lead off with this January at Macworld SF... it is feature #1 for DEVELOPERS.
Really, the first feature was "many features are Top Secret" and you'll also notice that for the first time, the Developer Preview of a new version of Mac OS X is using the same graphics as the current version. In other words, the Leopard Preview is dressed like Tiger. For example, the desktop picture is from Tiger, and Safari is still using brushed metal that is not going to ship in March 2007 like two years after iTunes dropped the metal. They are playing Leopard close to their chests and why not? With Vista shipping in early 2007 that will begin another Windows Epoch... a seven year period during which everybody looks forward to the next version. If Apple follows Vista with really good stuff then that's like saying to Windows users "here's the stuff you'll have to wait 5-7 years to get in your Windows".
> Apple playing off its fans' disdain for Microsoft is nothing new. I saw a bumper sticker mocking Windows 95's backward- > compatible long file name support reading "CNGRTLNS.W95" with an Apple logo. > In the end, the joke ended up being on Mac OS: 31 characters for a file name was fine for a while, > but many common MP3 file names went way beyond that, causing problems as late as Mac OS 9.
Fast forward 5+ years to today, and it's 2006 and Windows still has a 256-character limit on pathnames. The whole pathname has to be less than 256 characters. Now that is what you call a problem. A deep, systemic, architectural problem that is still not solved in Vista. Apple added 256-character filenames to their file system in 1998 and activated the feature system-wide in 2001 and shorter file names are history now.
And with MP3's, what you had was users on other platforms putting all of the metadata into the filename. Mac MP3 players had many more places to put that metadata (like, in the file's metadata) so it was not really that big of a problem. Glad all you iTunes for Windows users are enjoying SoundJam by the way.
That is fucking hilarious to read on Slashdot during a time when the only choice a consumer has in computers is a Mac or MS Windows on a PC and the Windows choice is a disaster of viruses and security and reliability issues. I have a young friend who can't load any tunes on her new iPod because her Windows is running like molasses on a one year old PC because it's crippled with malware. She doesn't know how to fix it, she doesn't have a geek friend who knows how to fix it (I am a Photoshop artist and Web developer but only know the Mac and Unix), and she doesn't have the money to pay someone to fix it because she is a student and the computer is not even paid off yet and it's useless right now. This is an 18 year old girl who is studying nursing. She should have given her $1000 of computer money to Apple one year ago instead of to Dell, but somebody told her that Macs are elitist. Ha ha ha ha.
So it's great that the average Slashdot reader can just wipe Windows off their new PC or keep it around for gaming while having a real digital life with whatever new hip Linux distro is getting them hard right now, but I'm really glad that ANYONE can go into an Apple Store and pay $1000 and get a MacBook and they will be a first-class digital citizen and they can excel at whatever it is that they do rather than having to take a minor in Computer Science just so they can record a song or make a Web page.
Look what you get for $1000 in a MacBook... the software alone is worth hundreds and hundreds of dollars, and Apple actually made it USABLE by EVERYONE, not just geeks, not just people with IT staffs.
If you're using MS Windows in 2006 then you are an idiot and you deserve to be talked down to by Apple.
If you're looking at next-generation Core-architecture computers and you're willing to go with Microsoft for yet another generation of systems then you are an idiot and you deserve to be talked down to by Apple.
There are more viruses for MS Windows than ALL OF THE COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS EVERY WRITTEN FOR ALL PLATFORMS.
It would be patronizing for Apple to pretend that there isn't a HUGE MASSIVE SOFTWARE PROBLEM IN THE PC INDUSTRY.
It would be bad business for Apple to spend the last 10 years making an OS for the 21st century and then just let Microsoft pretend that XP SP3 is the same damn thing.
> believe they're all 256 levels of pressure on the Wacom Tablet PCs, which is completely sufficient.
No. Wacom Intuos3 is 1024 pressure levels. The Intuous1 from 2001 had 512. I can tell you as someone who runs Photoshop and a Wacom Tablet 50 hours a week for the past 10 years that 256 levels of pressure is not going to cut it for pro work.
> Additionally, if apple is such a great hardware maker and artists really are a core part of their user base, > how come they haven't put out a tablet PC done right?
Because Apple doesn't make the little parts of stuff like the optical assembly in a mouse, or the pressure-sensitive screen of a tablet. They assemble systems from parts other people make. Right now the tablet PC technology is not as sophisticated as we would all maybe like.
The Wacom tablet with the built-in display is a tablet PC done right. It has the best specs of any tablet/display combination, including artist features that other tablet/display combinations don't have. It is fairly expensive. That's the reality. However there is nothing intrinsically broken about a great big quality display paired with a great big Wacom Tablet. It takes no time for the user to realize the 1:1 relationship between the stylus and the onscreen pointer and the tablet and the display and you can replace either tablet or display or repair either easily.
There's no doubt that eventually all digital artists will be painting directly on a display. However the idea of going to that today is a total joke. The compromises you would have to make today are just too much.
A tablet PC and Wacom Tablet are not the same thing.
A Wacom Tablet has high-resolution, wide range of sensitivity, tilt, and many artistically-oriented features. The typical Tablet PC has a much lower resolution and much fewer sensitivity levels and is made to be more of a business tool to enable you to check a bunch of onscreen boxes and fill in small strings of text on forms while you work on your feet. If Apple makes a tablet PC then a bunch of Photoshop people are going to want to paint with it and if it sucks for that it will be bad pub because Apple doesn't have a lot of business customers. There are no huge contracts with UPS or whatever to buy a gajillion tablets a year.
One feature of the Intel transition for Apple is that they now have access to a broader variety of CPU's, from very small ones to very big ones, and yet they slimmed their product line down to very few machines and countered that somewhat with more build-to-order options. Maybe there are now form factors coming.
Microsoft markets their products BEFORE they build them. Then they sign up some exclusive contracts with "partners" and finally they build something sort of like what they announced, drop a bunch of features, ship a bunch of crap.
At Apple, they invent, design, and build a product, and then they do the marketing AFTER.
It's very, very, very, very, different. The two methods lead to vastly different product lines.
One problem with tablets for Apple is that a lot of their customer base are using Photoshop and are familiar with the graphics pen-and-tablet. A professional graphics tablet has much higher resolution and accuracy and sensitivity than a typical business tablet PC. A tablet Mac would be looked at with suspicion by many in the Mac community if you couldn't paint with it in Photoshop, so maybe Apple would have to build either a really good tablet or not at all. Wacom has a combo tablet and display with professional specs that would be a tablet Mac if their was a MacBook built into it.
A plus for Apple is that you can navigate Mac OS X with a stylus and no buttons and not be lacking anything. My airbrush has a button but I have it set to double-click (a tap with the stylus is a single click). There's no need to use the context menus for anything because the menu bar is a huge context menu and it's easy to hit with a tablet because it's sitting across the top of the tablet surface at all times. And Exposé is fucking awesome with a tablet, dragging and dropping between all kinds of windows and stuff flying out of the way of the Desktop in an instant.
> closing of the XNU for Intel source which despite all the bullshit about new features and obsession > with the word "yet" from the apologists, I suspect is, actually, due to PHBish fears of OS X being ported > to non-Macintoshes
I think the consensus on this is that it is Rosetta-related. Rosetta is a proprietary technology that Apple licensed in order to do their Intel transition.
If you take the PowerPC kernel source and build it for Intel you get what you'd expect but no Rosetta.
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ARM is the CPU from the Newton. Apple is familiar with it and also with UNIX.
> That means it's not running on an Intel (or PPC) core.
... they're going to see the same Web on the iPhone as they see on their Mac. Wow. The same movies and music, the same contacts and calendars, the same rich animated graphics, the same sharpness and high-quality, the same attention to the interface and the user.
> That means it's not running OS X in any meaningful sense
> (Apple can brand toilet paper as running OS X if they like).
> Darwin, the BSD based operating system that underlies what Apple has previously been calling OS X, does not run on ARM processors.
"OS X" refers to a set of user-features, not geek-features. The user does not give a shit whether it is Intel or ARM and if you are a geek and you don't know that yet, then you have simply not been listening. Every feature mentioned at the iPhone intro was a user feature.
The following is true of both the Mac and the iPhone:
- CoreGraphics provides a PDF-based, resolution-independent display layer with the highest quality and most features in the industry
- WebKit provides standards-based Web rendering throughout the system
- Web browser: Safari
- email client: Mail
- media playback: iTunes
- address book: Address Book
- calendar: iCal
These are the features that users know from Mac OS X, and they see them in "OS X" on the iPhone and they get the picture
It also works the other way. In the future, iPhone users who haven't used a Mac will see that it has the same Web from their iPhone, the same rich graphics, and they'll get that if they like their iPhone, they will like a Mac. It's the same.
The Mac OS X and the iPhone OS X are so much more similar than they are different, that it would be more confusing to call it something else. This will probably be more true in the future, not less, as the iPhone gets more powerful and the Mac gets smaller.
Look inside a Mac and you will see that the platform for OS X is a standardized personal computer with x64 and UNIX core OS, same as the competition. Everybody in the industry, no matter how humble, has access to a standardized personal computer with x64 and UNIX core OS. Theoretically, Apple could buy another PC manufacturer and keep using the same parts below OS X. The whole platform is not going to suffer from short supply of an exotic chip.
... big deal. The "Mac OS" part of "Mac OS X" is there to show heritage. No such concern on the iPhone. Besides, they would have to decide between "Phone OS X" and "Pod OS X" and maybe it is both.
Break open an iPhone, and you will see that the platform for OS X is a standardized smart phone with ARM and proprietary core OS, same as the competition. Over 75% of smart phones are ARM/Symbian/S60 and the iPhone is similarly ARM/OS X/Safari. The S60 browser is also based on the Apple WebKit engine, same as Safari of course. The platform won't suffer from short supply of an exotic chip, and Apple can make as many of these as they can sell because these parts are being made right now to be put into tomorrow's smart phones, whether they are iPhones or other.
All the reasons that make a standardized x64 with UNIX the right choice under the Mac's OS X are the same reasons why ARM is right under the iPhone's OS X (at least for right now). Each is the "core platform" of that kind of device right now, and is what people who work in that industry know how to supply, sell, service, and support.
OK, so Apple didn't call the OS X on the iPhone "Phone OS X" to precisely match "Mac OS X"
Steve Jobs already offered free licenses for Mac OS X (Intel) for the one laptop per child project, which is committed to using totally open source software. However if Intel is doing a similar project, it's easy to imagine OS X being on there.
The CPU upgrade you are looking for is called a Mac mini. Dual "G6" CPU's and everything you need to slot them right into your G4 system.
> The GUI is not in the kernel. Your example is broken.
NT's graphics are in the kernel for performance reasons.
Vista will be the first version of MS Windows with graphics outside the kernel.
MS famously put the NT graphics in the kernel in v4.0.
>> He was saying that Windows is screwed up because Microsoft is (more or less) trying to integrate everything into the same huge process.
> So is everyone else selling to the same market Windows is. Why ? Because that's what the customers in that market want.
Nobody is disputing that EVERYBODY wants more features included, more capabilities out of the box. That has nothing to do with software architecture. You can ship a box with one kernel and 1000 applications and it will have a lot of features, and one of those features will be you can use feature 23 and not crash feature 156. Another will be that the developer can update feature 455 without affecting feature 11. Or you can ship a box with one huge software application on it, and it will be a disasterous, unmanageable mess in short order because every time you change one little feature, you have destroyed the whole application and replaced it with a brand-new application.
Apple's all-in-one focus with the Mac led them to a Mac with one huge single software application running on it, and that was the main criticism of Mac OS 9. However, they fixed this over five years ago. Now the Mac is a modern system of interconnections that feels like one thing but is actually many modular components, including enough parts to be UNIX-compatible. That's the work that Gartner is recommending that Microsoft get started on sometime soon.
> Not from Apple, anyway. They gave up on a 'next generation MacOS' after spending millions and millions, and were acquired by NeXT.
The joke is that they were acquired by NeXT. However a lot of NeXT users were surprised at how much Mac OS there is in Mac OS X. There is no doubt that Apple built a "next generation Mac OS" from all of the technologies that they had in-house from the NeXT purchase onwards. I work with Photoshop, BBEdit, Finder, and AppleScript all day long on Mac OS X v10.4 and there is no doubt this is a Mac. Having Apache running also, there is no doubt that Apple did the right thing with the UNIX core OS.
The modern parts I really appreciate are that you can assume Unicode, 32-bit graphics, and full multimedia in everything you do and it is just there. BBEdit is a text editor, but if you ask it to open pictures or movies it doesn't go "hey, I'm a text editor" it just opens the pictures and movies like you asked. If you are doing Web development with BBEdit this is a really nice feature, to be able to pop open a movie or picture while coding and verify that it is the right media and everything. AppleScript and the file system are both Unicode.
> Unfortunately, I don't recall hearing of hundreds of incompetents at Apple being fired. All that 'Copeland' and 'Sagan' hype should
> have ended with a bang.
Avi Tevanian was head of software for NeXT, and after being bought by Apple he was made head of software for Apple. He quite famously got all the software people together and told them that the bullshit was going to stop and that heads were going to roll. Apple turned over a lot of people in the late 1990's between the time that Steve Jobs rejoined Apple to the time he stopped being just the "interim" CEO.
> I'd still buy Apple hardware even if OS X were capable of running on generic boxes.
Even if you are a Windows user, the new Macs are much better boxes. You get one Windows driver disc for the whole box, and future driver updates all come from Apple, not from ATI or NVIDIA or any other component manufacturers. Many people have characterized Windows on a Mac as the easiest Windows install and maintenance ever.
Plus you have the option of running OS X, either now or in the future. A user could buy a system and run XP and then when Leopard comes out they pay $129 and switch over to that if they don't want Vista.
> As someone whose first Mac was an original 128K model, let me just say that this reputation :P
> is more often undeserved than deserved.
All you have to do is take a job in a Windows shop for about three months and see how the other half lives.
If something actually ends up working on MS Windows, even after days of fucking with it first, then users celebrate. It is high fives all around. You are supposed to expect stuff not to work and once it's working you tell everyone involved that they are a righteous fucking genius.
The thing with the Mac is that there is this actually quite large community of very non-technical users who are doing amazing stuff. If you are getting help desk style calls from friends who have PC's and then they switch there will be a point where you will call THEM and say "hey, what's up are you still using your computer?" and they will point you to a Web site with a slideshow and five movies on it and tell you how much fun they are having now that they finally know how to share their digital photos and movies after they shoot them.
Every geek has their favorite Mac OS X bug that is haunting them, but on the whole what Apple has done in the past few years is amazing. They not only vindicated their own ideals of very tight system integration and ease of use and "computers for everyone!" but they also did a world of good for UNIX, especially "desktop UNIX". The fact that they could change their whole OS and since then their processor architecture and yet still have the easiest system speaks to the fact that they are designing their stuff right. No matter what technologies come along or how the industry changes we can expect Apple to still be making good products because their philosophies and execution are sound.
> I had built a better computer than the original Mac mini for $300 about the time the mini came out, without the price ... and it ran FreeBSD too.
> advantages of integrated components, paying retail for everything. Faster CPU, more memory, more disk space, faster disk,
> better video,
- can you edit movies on it out of the box, including FireWire for my camera?
- does it work with an iPod out of the box?
- does it work with every digital camera on the planet out of the box, including photo management interface?
- does it burn video DVD's out of the box?
- does it do WYSIWYG blogs out of the box?
- Wi-Fi and Bluetooth out of the box and so easy my grandmother can use them?
- can it run Photoshop?
- does it have a 10-foot interface (e.g. Front Row) and a remote?
- does it have both analog and digital video out?
- does it have both analog and digital audio out?
- is it about the size of an external optical disc drive?
- does it have a three-year all-inclusive warranty for an extra $150 so I can take it into any Apple Store any time in the next three years and they'll make it work right again if it stops?
- does it have award-winning industry-leading design and style?
- does it have a premium cutting-edge graphics and multimedia layer in addition to kickass UNIX guts?
- is it so easy to use that anybody can use it?
You get a lot in a Mac mini for around $500.
Your margins are way too high.
... ha ha ha.
Hardware is always razor-thin.
Also keep in mind that Apple has to support the whole box even if it is a software problem, whereas Dell
> Right, which when compared to the 90%+ market-share of Windows is, frankly, squat.
Who gives a shit when all the fun is happening on the Mac?
So many Windows machines are just typewriters. So many have such short lives due to being so unreliable. The people who are buying Windows right now are the ignorant and the terminally foolish.
Time Machine is the best demo that Core Animation could have. I don't recall ever seeing a backup-restore interface that wasn't a complete disaster. With Time Machine you just use it once and it's pretty clear how you can "go back in time" and identify a lost file and "bring it back to the present". People will use this who couldn't possibly use Retrospect or even Apple's own Backup without losing their minds. The whole point was to make some backup software that people will actually use according to what was said at the Keynote about only a small percentage of people using automatic backups.
... Core Audio, Video, Image, Data, and Animation are libraries that "every developer should have" so they go in the system. In a sense they are owned by the user and developers utilize them. It's really good leadership because you give everybody a chance to do things both the easy way and the right way at the same time and it makes the whole community better.
The Core stuff
> "ordinary folk"
... it is feature #1 for DEVELOPERS.
... a seven year period during which everybody looks forward to the next version. If Apple follows Vista with really good stuff then that's like saying to Windows users "here's the stuff you'll have to wait 5-7 years to get in your Windows".
It's a DEVELOPER conference.
Time Machine is a nice feature for the end user (especially nice to think of your "grandmother" having it) but the reason it is one of the 10 preview features for DEVELOPERS at the World Wide DEVELOPER Conference is that there is a Time Machine API with which DEVELOPERS can add Time Machine support to their own application.
The Time Machine demo at WWDC demonstrated the system-wide Time Machine being activated by the Finder (file browser) and by the Address Book. Those are just two Time Machine -enabled applications. DEVELOPERS now have about 8 months until Leopard ships to add Time Machine support to their apps. Us "ordinary folk" will have to wait that long also before we can see how cool Time Machine really is.
Similarly, the first feature "64-bit from top to bottom including the GUI frameworks" is not the kind of feature that Steve Jobs will lead off with this January at Macworld SF
Really, the first feature was "many features are Top Secret" and you'll also notice that for the first time, the Developer Preview of a new version of Mac OS X is using the same graphics as the current version. In other words, the Leopard Preview is dressed like Tiger. For example, the desktop picture is from Tiger, and Safari is still using brushed metal that is not going to ship in March 2007 like two years after iTunes dropped the metal. They are playing Leopard close to their chests and why not? With Vista shipping in early 2007 that will begin another Windows Epoch
> Apple playing off its fans' disdain for Microsoft is nothing new. I saw a bumper sticker mocking Windows 95's backward-
> compatible long file name support reading "CNGRTLNS.W95" with an Apple logo.
> In the end, the joke ended up being on Mac OS: 31 characters for a file name was fine for a while,
> but many common MP3 file names went way beyond that, causing problems as late as Mac OS 9.
Fast forward 5+ years to today, and it's 2006 and Windows still has a 256-character limit on pathnames. The whole pathname has to be less than 256 characters. Now that is what you call a problem. A deep, systemic, architectural problem that is still not solved in Vista. Apple added 256-character filenames to their file system in 1998 and activated the feature system-wide in 2001 and shorter file names are history now.
And with MP3's, what you had was users on other platforms putting all of the metadata into the filename. Mac MP3 players had many more places to put that metadata (like, in the file's metadata) so it was not really that big of a problem. Glad all you iTunes for Windows users are enjoying SoundJam by the way.
Elitest?
... the software alone is worth hundreds and hundreds of dollars, and Apple actually made it USABLE by EVERYONE, not just geeks, not just people with IT staffs.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
That is fucking hilarious to read on Slashdot during a time when the only choice a consumer has in computers is a Mac or MS Windows on a PC and the Windows choice is a disaster of viruses and security and reliability issues. I have a young friend who can't load any tunes on her new iPod because her Windows is running like molasses on a one year old PC because it's crippled with malware. She doesn't know how to fix it, she doesn't have a geek friend who knows how to fix it (I am a Photoshop artist and Web developer but only know the Mac and Unix), and she doesn't have the money to pay someone to fix it because she is a student and the computer is not even paid off yet and it's useless right now. This is an 18 year old girl who is studying nursing. She should have given her $1000 of computer money to Apple one year ago instead of to Dell, but somebody told her that Macs are elitist. Ha ha ha ha.
So it's great that the average Slashdot reader can just wipe Windows off their new PC or keep it around for gaming while having a real digital life with whatever new hip Linux distro is getting them hard right now, but I'm really glad that ANYONE can go into an Apple Store and pay $1000 and get a MacBook and they will be a first-class digital citizen and they can excel at whatever it is that they do rather than having to take a minor in Computer Science just so they can record a song or make a Web page.
Look what you get for $1000 in a MacBook
If you're using MS Windows in 2006 then you are an idiot and you deserve to be talked down to by Apple.
If you're looking at next-generation Core-architecture computers and you're willing to go with Microsoft for yet another generation of systems then you are an idiot and you deserve to be talked down to by Apple.
There are more viruses for MS Windows than ALL OF THE COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS EVERY WRITTEN FOR ALL PLATFORMS.
It would be patronizing for Apple to pretend that there isn't a HUGE MASSIVE SOFTWARE PROBLEM IN THE PC INDUSTRY.
It would be bad business for Apple to spend the last 10 years making an OS for the 21st century and then just let Microsoft pretend that XP SP3 is the same damn thing.
No, it's a Picasso quote that Steve Jobs famously used in the early 1980's.
> believe they're all 256 levels of pressure on the Wacom Tablet PCs, which is completely sufficient.
No. Wacom Intuos3 is 1024 pressure levels. The Intuous1 from 2001 had 512. I can tell you as someone who runs Photoshop and a Wacom Tablet 50 hours a week for the past 10 years that 256 levels of pressure is not going to cut it for pro work.
> Additionally, if apple is such a great hardware maker and artists really are a core part of their user base,
> how come they haven't put out a tablet PC done right?
Because Apple doesn't make the little parts of stuff like the optical assembly in a mouse, or the pressure-sensitive screen of a tablet. They assemble systems from parts other people make. Right now the tablet PC technology is not as sophisticated as we would all maybe like.
The Wacom tablet with the built-in display is a tablet PC done right. It has the best specs of any tablet/display combination, including artist features that other tablet/display combinations don't have. It is fairly expensive. That's the reality. However there is nothing intrinsically broken about a great big quality display paired with a great big Wacom Tablet. It takes no time for the user to realize the 1:1 relationship between the stylus and the onscreen pointer and the tablet and the display and you can replace either tablet or display or repair either easily.
There's no doubt that eventually all digital artists will be painting directly on a display. However the idea of going to that today is a total joke. The compromises you would have to make today are just too much.
A tablet PC and Wacom Tablet are not the same thing.
A Wacom Tablet has high-resolution, wide range of sensitivity, tilt, and many artistically-oriented features. The typical Tablet PC has a much lower resolution and much fewer sensitivity levels and is made to be more of a business tool to enable you to check a bunch of onscreen boxes and fill in small strings of text on forms while you work on your feet. If Apple makes a tablet PC then a bunch of Photoshop people are going to want to paint with it and if it sucks for that it will be bad pub because Apple doesn't have a lot of business customers. There are no huge contracts with UPS or whatever to buy a gajillion tablets a year.
One feature of the Intel transition for Apple is that they now have access to a broader variety of CPU's, from very small ones to very big ones, and yet they slimmed their product line down to very few machines and countered that somewhat with more build-to-order options. Maybe there are now form factors coming.
Microsoft markets their products BEFORE they build them. Then they sign up some exclusive contracts with "partners" and finally they build something sort of like what they announced, drop a bunch of features, ship a bunch of crap.
At Apple, they invent, design, and build a product, and then they do the marketing AFTER.
It's very, very, very, very, different. The two methods lead to vastly different product lines.
One problem with tablets for Apple is that a lot of their customer base are using Photoshop and are familiar with the graphics pen-and-tablet. A professional graphics tablet has much higher resolution and accuracy and sensitivity than a typical business tablet PC. A tablet Mac would be looked at with suspicion by many in the Mac community if you couldn't paint with it in Photoshop, so maybe Apple would have to build either a really good tablet or not at all. Wacom has a combo tablet and display with professional specs that would be a tablet Mac if their was a MacBook built into it.
A plus for Apple is that you can navigate Mac OS X with a stylus and no buttons and not be lacking anything. My airbrush has a button but I have it set to double-click (a tap with the stylus is a single click). There's no need to use the context menus for anything because the menu bar is a huge context menu and it's easy to hit with a tablet because it's sitting across the top of the tablet surface at all times. And Exposé is fucking awesome with a tablet, dragging and dropping between all kinds of windows and stuff flying out of the way of the Desktop in an instant.
> closing of the XNU for Intel source which despite all the bullshit about new features and obsession
> with the word "yet" from the apologists, I suspect is, actually, due to PHBish fears of OS X being ported
> to non-Macintoshes
I think the consensus on this is that it is Rosetta-related. Rosetta is a proprietary technology that Apple licensed in order to do their Intel transition.
If you take the PowerPC kernel source and build it for Intel you get what you'd expect but no Rosetta.
> I have my command key mapped to control (to stay consistent between my Mac and PC)
So you're turning your Mac into a PC in every way you can and you say the Mac is just as unintuitive as the PC?
As long as you're using MS Windows it is your MIND that is being made less intuitive. You can't drop all kinds of broken concepts.