Palm sold 1 million PDA's last year while Apple sold 15 million iPods. Why should Apple make a whole new product instead of just more iPods?
The PDA made sense before Wi-Fi (1999). Since then it makes no sense. So far, nobody in the PDA market has picked up on this and redesigned the whole product from scratch.
If Apple has created a stripped-down "mobile" Mac OS X then it is more likely they would build their own hardware for it also, utilizing new chips from Intel.
Since Darwin runs on x86 and the whole x86-compatible hardware platform is shrinking in size rapidly it makes sense for Apple to concentrate on the above-Darwin part of their products, and let Darwin and x86 hardware be the unchanging foundation under everything else. Intel has said that over the next few years their new 65 nm line of chips (of which Core Duo is just one model) will include offerings for everything from servers down to handhelds.
Personally, I don't think there will be a "mobile" OS X. I think the hardware will just catch up to where it is routine for a handheld to have the power to run OS X and you'll run the full version with full applications and you'll understand that it's not quite as fast or full-featured as a big desktop machine and not quite a notebook either but that's OK because it runs iTunes and Safari and Address Book and Apache and whatnot.
Darwin runs on the same kinds of systems as BeOS. Out of all the companies in the world, Apple needs BeOS the least.
Right now the iPod interface runs on PortalPlayer. It could just as well run on Darwin in a few years, with an ultra low power Intel chip inside the iPod.
> why are they wasting all thsese oppurtunities is beyond me.
Maybe because it is harder to build a great computer when you are two companies, each of whom can only build half of a great computer. PalmSource finished a great new operating system and PalmOne chose Windows CE instead ha ha ha ha ha ha. Bill Gates probably wrote that one down in his diary.
Notice that Apple bought NeXT and merged the two companies in order to develop Mac OS X and the modern Mac platform as well as the iPod. On the other hand, Palm split into PalmOne and PalmSource in order to NOT develop the modern Palm platform. And where is the modern Microsoft/Dell platform? Somebody please tell me that Windows XP wasn't it.
The future is all about hardware/software integration that is so good that you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. Steve Jobs said in an interview recently that if Microsoft wants in on digital music they will have to make their own iPod. Microsoft sees the iPod as a platform for Microsoft software, but it is actually a platform for music. Today's phones all run software, but really they're a platform for phone calls. An Apple phone would probably get that right.
Poor Motorola. They suck and it's not their fault.
On the day the 100-song ROKR was released, of course Apple also released the 1000-song iPod nano. Everybody complained about the low song limit on the ROKR but Motorola's CEO famously said "screw the nano... who listens to 1000 songs anyway?" so he is obviously not suffering under the notion that 100 songs is too little. Sony has a "Walkman Phone" that has a whopping 256 MB of not-expandable RAM so again Apple is the exception in that they give you the storage that you need to have truly useful product. I think people who blame Apple for the ROKR are giving Motorola way way too much credit. The whole industry is like this... shipping stuff with no memory and wondering why they get no repeat sales and no iPod-type phenomenom from their crippled products. You end up paying $200 for something that doesn't really work when for $249 or $299 you would have had a very good product and that's what Apple ends up shipping is the $299 version and they get trounced for being "too expensive" and then those same critics wonder why everybody wants one, must be some kind of cult or something.
I can easily imagine an Apple engineer or designer or Steve Jobs himself saying to the ROKR team at Motorola "why would you want to put in less than 1 GB?" and the Motorola people going "one GIGABYTE!? what are you crazy?" because everybody knows phone have 256 MB in them and that's PLUSH. "There goes crazy Apple again, wants to put 1 GB in a phone for crying out loud!"
If you have ever watched a senior citizen work with one of today's cell phones, you know that market is ripe for Apple. If Apple did a phone that was to today's phones as the iPod is to yesterday's MP3 players they could sell a ton of them. I'm talking about a phone that has a keypad and some way to speed dial and that's it. Why did the phone have to get so complex? Because so far most people haven't adjusted to the fact that people will have more than one digital device. In the past it seemed like you would have to have a phone/PDA/music player all in one because it would be too expensive otherwise. However there is a vending machine with iPods in it at the Macy's here in SF it is easier to go buy an iPod nano for $149 with my debit/credit card than to try and get the music-playing features of my phone to work for me. Apple doesn't have to build a phone that is trying to be everything. If you want a PC or music player they have Macs and iPods already so they can just build you a nice handset that works reliably and remembers your phone numbers.
The battery in the iPod is not rectangular, hence the initial poster's characterization of it as "funny-shaped."
The battery appears to have been added last, and shaped to fit into the spaces between other stuff, like a foam.
Re:Perfect? Like Neck stretched over chopping bloc
on
Apple to Buy out Palm?
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· Score: 1
> handwriting recognition in Newton (presently in suspended animation known as InkWell)
Actually, Inkwell is not suspended animation. I use it all the time. It is very useful for graphics pros who are using a pen and tablet. For example, if you are working in Photoshop you may have to type a line of text every once in a while, either to fill in a text block or to name a layer, and to type with both hands on the keyboard you have to put down your stylus. With Inkwell you can just write the text into the little window and keep working. Most of the time it is only a word or two anyway. Steve Jobs said in a Macworld interview or somewhere that this is why they put Inkwell into Mac OS X in the first place. With graphics pros you not only have highly-sensitive tablets but most of the time good handwriting also so it is probably less challenging than the general-purpose user with a little handheld touchscreen and stylus. My point is that it's useful today and being used by a lot of Apple's users. Wacom has a huge line of tablets for both pros and consumers.
Tiger can run really well on a G3 500 (or Intel equivalent) with 256 MB of RAM, 8 MB of video RAM, and 10 GB storage. That is not a lot of oomph to fit into a handheld these days. Why mess with PalmOS or Windows Mobile at this late stage?
Or Apple could port the iPod interface and functionality to Darwin and run an Intel chip in a future iPod and utilize the Wi-Fi subsystems and such from Darwin, while still keeping the interface simple. Sort of like Mac OS X having two interfaces: Aqua and iPod.
I think it is more likely Apple would buy PortalPlayer (who make the iPod OS) than Palm. Palm sold 1 million handhelds last year while Apple sold 15 million iPods and 5 million Macs. I think Palm is running neck-and-neck with the sales of the iPod shuffle alone.
If you adjust the letter-spacing in Inkwell you may get the results you're looking for. What you are doing is writing two T's in the space of one letter, so if you tell lnkwell that you have tightly-spaced writing it may start to see them as two T's instead of one H.
The handwriting-recognition engine could be exactly the same but it may have very different defaults. Also keep in mind that a Wacom pen and tablet is maybe 100 or 1000 times more sensitive than a Newton stylus which may make a difference in your results also.
> so whatever changes they made since its [Rosetta's?] implementation on the ARM and the PPC they broke it.
Maybe the feature that provided two tt's instead of an H also caused users who were trying to write H's to get two tt's far too often. Maybe you are one in a million with your double tt's (I never do that). If the people who are getting false tt's are one in a hundred then they remove that feature and it is "fixing" it not "breaking" it.
Are there other examples where you write two letters simultaneously? I can't see the utility of that, myself.
At WWDC 2005 (June 2005) both Adobe and Microsoft pledged support for the new Intel-based Macs. However, in the discussions that followed the initial announcment, both companies warned users not to look for native apps from them until 2007. This is because both Adobe and Microsoft use CodeWarrior, and CodeWarrior cannot compile Mac OS X for Intel apps.
If you remember the initial Mac-Intel announcement, Steve Jobs pointed out that if developers are using Xcode (Apple development tools) then all they will have to do to make Intel apps is upgrade to v2.1.0 of Xcode and check "Intel" in addition to "PowerPC" before they compile their app. However, if a developer is using CodeWarrior (the "other" Mac development environment) then they first have to move their whole app to Xcode, and then when that is finished they can check "Intel". It is a much longer process.
If you have a v2.0.0 PowerPC app from a vendor that uses Xcode, then it may be a very simple matter for them to ship a v2.0.1 with Intel support. It may be easy to make a patch that just places the additional executable file in the application's bundle. However, if you have a v2.0.0 PowerPC app from a vendor that uses CodeWarrior, you are going to have to wait for v3.0.0 and that is all there is to it. They are not going to move their v2.0.0 codebase into Xcode and ship v2 again just to please a handful of Mac OS X Intel users who want native software NOW instead of a year from now. For CodeWarrior-based developers Intel support is major-version work.
A friend of mine was telling me recently how the 64-bit MS Windows really flies compared to 32-bit Windows, because Microsoft cleared out so much cruft. But then again Win-64 has no drivers and is not the vendor's primary OS and who knows when it will be. Mac OS X Tiger is Mac OS without the old cruft, but Mac OS X has drivers, and it is the main operating system of the platform and has been for a few years now. So which would you really rather have? Microsoft is not so much supporting legacy stuff as they are just stuck in the mud.
Apple builds these bridges so that the application platform and the userbase can migrate to future technologies. The first Mac OS X had a built-in way of running legacy apps (Classic), and the first Mac OS X for Intel has a built-in way of running legacy apps (Rosetta), but for most users they never notice this. They just get a new system every few years and it comes with tons of great software and they add one or two major packages (Photoshop or MS Office) and they are remarkably happy with their computers.
Me, I bought some new PowerPC Macs late last year and so by the time I want to trade them in for newer Macs with Intel chips in them, the software will all have caught up and I'll have all-native versions on the first day.
Also, keep in mind that if you buy an Intel Mac today, it comes with all-native software on it. It has Mac OS X (of course) and all the apps that come with that, as well as iLife (iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand, iWeb) and some others. Many people can get everything done with just that and that is who these first Intel systems are for. They are six months ahead of schedule so it is not surprising the software is not all caught up, but even so you have some great applications already running natively.
Apple announced the change to Intel at WWDC June 2005 and then over the next six months, sales of PowerPC Macs were UP by 22%. Steve Jobs said "we're phasing out PowerPC" and yet sales of PowerPC systems went UP. This is because if you are using Photoshop (or similar Mac software) all day you need a PowerPC Mac now and for about another year or so.
I bought a new PowerPC Mac in late 2005. That is the hardware my software wants.
I was one of the people who got into Mac OS X a little too early in retrospect, so after this new transition was announced I got me some of the best of the last and now I'm going to hunker down for 18 months and then at that point I'll see where things are at. By then it is likely that all my software will be available in new versions, all of which are Intel-ready. I'll upgrade from G5-CS2 to Intel-CS3 and won't batt an eyelash.
Oh, man... you have got to use Apple Lossless MPEG-4, not AIFF. AIFF is an AUTHORING format. It's for editing. It's a pure stream of audio data so that you can cut a chunk out or make edits directly to the waveforms. It's murder on storage devices because it is not even data-compressed (like a Zip file). Also, AIFF has no proper tagging format like MP3 and MPEG-4. Even if Apple is working around that now in iTunes (they weren't the last time I checked) it is unlikely that you could play your AIFF's outside of iPod+iTunes and still see the artwork or tags. Finally, support for AIFF is sometimes lacking on non-Mac platforms.
With Apple Lossless, your audio is data-compressed, not perceptually encoded, so some songs shrink to a very small size, and some don't, depending on the complexity of their audio waveforms. However you will always have a file that is 50-75% of the size of an AIFF, and the bitstream that hits the decoder will be exactly the same. In other words, even though the file on disk is very different, AIFF vs Apple Lossless MPEG-4, the bits that the iPod "sees" and turns into audio for you to listen to are 100% identical. And you will be able to reliably put artwork and ID tags into your Apple Lossless file because it is just an MPEG-4. The sound will be exactly the same but you will reclaim 25-50% of your iPod's storage space using the same songs.
Another advantage to Apple Lossless is that because it is an MPEG-4 file, you can convert an Apple Lossless MPEG-4 to an AAC MPEG-4 and the tags and artwork will come along just fine. And your AAC will be full-quality because it is encoded from the original audio bitstream. Apple Lossless makes a great "master" format for storing audio if you need to make various sizes of MP3 or MPEG-4 regularly.
I am an audio pro, and I use 24-bit AIFF all day long and it is like a dear friend to me, but it is not for sharing outside the studio. It's like shipping a dingy fully inflated.
You can't blame individual companies for the patent mess. If you are designing and building new technologies you have to patent just like you have to defend your trademark. If you don't, then you are asking to become a victim of an unscrupulous player whose only business is bad patents.
Consider reserving your anger for the one and two-man companies who keep patenting the steering wheel over and over and trying to extort licensing fees from organizations that are actually making stuff.
> As for the shell/IE integration, there are reasons why it is there. For example, > try to access a ftp:// url with IE, it will open in an explorer window.
When I click on an ftp:// url with Safari, it opens in a Finder window, and yet Safari is just a standalone application I can drop in the Trash at any time without modifying the system in any way. Apparently, Apple was able to pull of this amazing feat without welding a browser onto Finder.
> Hopefully by the time "Vienna" hits gold they will have their stuff together and it will have been built > from the ground up by security conscious programmers and not put thru a security review after > development is finished.
> As much as OpenBSD can harp about how secure they are can they harp about how they include > all the usability functions and features that XP does in the default install?
No, but Mac OS X has more usability functions and features than XP and has also been modernized from top to bottom and is really stable. That's the problem here... Microsoft continues to be huge, wealthy, powerful, and unable to make a good operating system. It's simply way past a joke. Mac OS X is the operating system for artists and musicians for crying out loud. Why is it I can run a 24-bit/192kHz multitrack audio session for days on end on a Mac and yet on Windows you can't keep a Web browser running for more than 20 minutes?
What Apple did was run the old operating system (Mac OS 9) inside a Mac OS X application called "Classic". So in a sense you have an application included with Mac OS X that runs Mac OS 9 applications inside it. The Classic application appears to be running on Mac OS X but really all of your old apps are running in that one process. It wasn't really fun to use but what you could do is move to Mac OS X and you'd get native updates of about half of your apps and run the old versions of the other half for about a year until the native updates came out. It was like a bridge between the old application platform and the new one.
Also, the bridge went the other way, because they adapted Mac OS 9 to run one kind of Mac OS X application, so there were some applictions that would run under OS 9 and OS X, natively in each place.
There are already a couple of ways to run Windows in a single window on Mac OS X, but on a PowerPC machine this requires emulating the Intel processor. It will be painless for somebody to make an app for the new Intel-based Macs that runs Windows in a box at full speed because there is a real Intel processor there (in fact, two). That is really the way forward for Windows users. You get an Intel Mac, you image your old Windows PC disk (with Disk Utility) and boot it in a window on the Mac OS X desktop. Now you have all of your old system running in a window surrounded by Aqua and all the modern Mac OS X applications and you can transition to using the Mac versions of your apps or their equivalents and then eventually you stop running Windows. Apple could easily include a DOS box on Mac OS X like there was on OpenStep and similar to how they include an X-Window manager now.
> OSX was in development for 5 years too. It's not like they could have incorporated it into OS9.
Actually, Apple did incorporate this feature into Mac OS 9. Mac OS X has had this feature since the early 1990's also in its ancestors NEXTSTEP and OpenStep.
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Palm sold 1 million PDA's last year while Apple sold 15 million iPods. Why should Apple make a whole new product instead of just more iPods?
The PDA made sense before Wi-Fi (1999). Since then it makes no sense. So far, nobody in the PDA market has picked up on this and redesigned the whole product from scratch.
If Apple has created a stripped-down "mobile" Mac OS X then it is more likely they would build their own hardware for it also, utilizing new chips from Intel.
Since Darwin runs on x86 and the whole x86-compatible hardware platform is shrinking in size rapidly it makes sense for Apple to concentrate on the above-Darwin part of their products, and let Darwin and x86 hardware be the unchanging foundation under everything else. Intel has said that over the next few years their new 65 nm line of chips (of which Core Duo is just one model) will include offerings for everything from servers down to handhelds.
Personally, I don't think there will be a "mobile" OS X. I think the hardware will just catch up to where it is routine for a handheld to have the power to run OS X and you'll run the full version with full applications and you'll understand that it's not quite as fast or full-featured as a big desktop machine and not quite a notebook either but that's OK because it runs iTunes and Safari and Address Book and Apache and whatnot.
Darwin runs on the same kinds of systems as BeOS. Out of all the companies in the world, Apple needs BeOS the least.
Right now the iPod interface runs on PortalPlayer. It could just as well run on Darwin in a few years, with an ultra low power Intel chip inside the iPod.
> why are they wasting all thsese oppurtunities is beyond me.
Maybe because it is harder to build a great computer when you are two companies, each of whom can only build half of a great computer. PalmSource finished a great new operating system and PalmOne chose Windows CE instead ha ha ha ha ha ha. Bill Gates probably wrote that one down in his diary.
Notice that Apple bought NeXT and merged the two companies in order to develop Mac OS X and the modern Mac platform as well as the iPod. On the other hand, Palm split into PalmOne and PalmSource in order to NOT develop the modern Palm platform. And where is the modern Microsoft/Dell platform? Somebody please tell me that Windows XP wasn't it.
The future is all about hardware/software integration that is so good that you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. Steve Jobs said in an interview recently that if Microsoft wants in on digital music they will have to make their own iPod. Microsoft sees the iPod as a platform for Microsoft software, but it is actually a platform for music. Today's phones all run software, but really they're a platform for phone calls. An Apple phone would probably get that right.
Poor Motorola. They suck and it's not their fault.
... who listens to 1000 songs anyway?" so he is obviously not suffering under the notion that 100 songs is too little. Sony has a "Walkman Phone" that has a whopping 256 MB of not-expandable RAM so again Apple is the exception in that they give you the storage that you need to have truly useful product. I think people who blame Apple for the ROKR are giving Motorola way way too much credit. The whole industry is like this ... shipping stuff with no memory and wondering why they get no repeat sales and no iPod-type phenomenom from their crippled products. You end up paying $200 for something that doesn't really work when for $249 or $299 you would have had a very good product and that's what Apple ends up shipping is the $299 version and they get trounced for being "too expensive" and then those same critics wonder why everybody wants one, must be some kind of cult or something.
On the day the 100-song ROKR was released, of course Apple also released the 1000-song iPod nano. Everybody complained about the low song limit on the ROKR but Motorola's CEO famously said "screw the nano
I can easily imagine an Apple engineer or designer or Steve Jobs himself saying to the ROKR team at Motorola "why would you want to put in less than 1 GB?" and the Motorola people going "one GIGABYTE!? what are you crazy?" because everybody knows phone have 256 MB in them and that's PLUSH. "There goes crazy Apple again, wants to put 1 GB in a phone for crying out loud!"
If you have ever watched a senior citizen work with one of today's cell phones, you know that market is ripe for Apple. If Apple did a phone that was to today's phones as the iPod is to yesterday's MP3 players they could sell a ton of them. I'm talking about a phone that has a keypad and some way to speed dial and that's it. Why did the phone have to get so complex? Because so far most people haven't adjusted to the fact that people will have more than one digital device. In the past it seemed like you would have to have a phone/PDA/music player all in one because it would be too expensive otherwise. However there is a vending machine with iPods in it at the Macy's here in SF it is easier to go buy an iPod nano for $149 with my debit/credit card than to try and get the music-playing features of my phone to work for me. Apple doesn't have to build a phone that is trying to be everything. If you want a PC or music player they have Macs and iPods already so they can just build you a nice handset that works reliably and remembers your phone numbers.
The battery in the iPod is not rectangular, hence the initial poster's characterization of it as "funny-shaped."
The battery appears to have been added last, and shaped to fit into the spaces between other stuff, like a foam.
> handwriting recognition in Newton (presently in suspended animation known as InkWell)
Actually, Inkwell is not suspended animation. I use it all the time. It is very useful for graphics pros who are using a pen and tablet. For example, if you are working in Photoshop you may have to type a line of text every once in a while, either to fill in a text block or to name a layer, and to type with both hands on the keyboard you have to put down your stylus. With Inkwell you can just write the text into the little window and keep working. Most of the time it is only a word or two anyway. Steve Jobs said in a Macworld interview or somewhere that this is why they put Inkwell into Mac OS X in the first place. With graphics pros you not only have highly-sensitive tablets but most of the time good handwriting also so it is probably less challenging than the general-purpose user with a little handheld touchscreen and stylus. My point is that it's useful today and being used by a lot of Apple's users. Wacom has a huge line of tablets for both pros and consumers.
Tiger can run really well on a G3 500 (or Intel equivalent) with 256 MB of RAM, 8 MB of video RAM, and 10 GB storage. That is not a lot of oomph to fit into a handheld these days. Why mess with PalmOS or Windows Mobile at this late stage?
Or Apple could port the iPod interface and functionality to Darwin and run an Intel chip in a future iPod and utilize the Wi-Fi subsystems and such from Darwin, while still keeping the interface simple. Sort of like Mac OS X having two interfaces: Aqua and iPod.
I think it is more likely Apple would buy PortalPlayer (who make the iPod OS) than Palm. Palm sold 1 million handhelds last year while Apple sold 15 million iPods and 5 million Macs. I think Palm is running neck-and-neck with the sales of the iPod shuffle alone.
If you adjust the letter-spacing in Inkwell you may get the results you're looking for. What you are doing is writing two T's in the space of one letter, so if you tell lnkwell that you have tightly-spaced writing it may start to see them as two T's instead of one H.
The handwriting-recognition engine could be exactly the same but it may have very different defaults. Also keep in mind that a Wacom pen and tablet is maybe 100 or 1000 times more sensitive than a Newton stylus which may make a difference in your results also.
> so whatever changes they made since its [Rosetta's?] implementation on the ARM and the PPC they broke it.
Maybe the feature that provided two tt's instead of an H also caused users who were trying to write H's to get two tt's far too often. Maybe you are one in a million with your double tt's (I never do that). If the people who are getting false tt's are one in a hundred then they remove that feature and it is "fixing" it not "breaking" it.
Are there other examples where you write two letters simultaneously? I can't see the utility of that, myself.
At WWDC 2005 (June 2005) both Adobe and Microsoft pledged support for the new Intel-based Macs. However, in the discussions that followed the initial announcment, both companies warned users not to look for native apps from them until 2007. This is because both Adobe and Microsoft use CodeWarrior, and CodeWarrior cannot compile Mac OS X for Intel apps.
If you remember the initial Mac-Intel announcement, Steve Jobs pointed out that if developers are using Xcode (Apple development tools) then all they will have to do to make Intel apps is upgrade to v2.1.0 of Xcode and check "Intel" in addition to "PowerPC" before they compile their app. However, if a developer is using CodeWarrior (the "other" Mac development environment) then they first have to move their whole app to Xcode, and then when that is finished they can check "Intel". It is a much longer process.
If you have a v2.0.0 PowerPC app from a vendor that uses Xcode, then it may be a very simple matter for them to ship a v2.0.1 with Intel support. It may be easy to make a patch that just places the additional executable file in the application's bundle. However, if you have a v2.0.0 PowerPC app from a vendor that uses CodeWarrior, you are going to have to wait for v3.0.0 and that is all there is to it. They are not going to move their v2.0.0 codebase into Xcode and ship v2 again just to please a handful of Mac OS X Intel users who want native software NOW instead of a year from now. For CodeWarrior-based developers Intel support is major-version work.
A friend of mine was telling me recently how the 64-bit MS Windows really flies compared to 32-bit Windows, because Microsoft cleared out so much cruft. But then again Win-64 has no drivers and is not the vendor's primary OS and who knows when it will be. Mac OS X Tiger is Mac OS without the old cruft, but Mac OS X has drivers, and it is the main operating system of the platform and has been for a few years now. So which would you really rather have? Microsoft is not so much supporting legacy stuff as they are just stuck in the mud.
Apple builds these bridges so that the application platform and the userbase can migrate to future technologies. The first Mac OS X had a built-in way of running legacy apps (Classic), and the first Mac OS X for Intel has a built-in way of running legacy apps (Rosetta), but for most users they never notice this. They just get a new system every few years and it comes with tons of great software and they add one or two major packages (Photoshop or MS Office) and they are remarkably happy with their computers.
Me, I bought some new PowerPC Macs late last year and so by the time I want to trade them in for newer Macs with Intel chips in them, the software will all have caught up and I'll have all-native versions on the first day.
Also, keep in mind that if you buy an Intel Mac today, it comes with all-native software on it. It has Mac OS X (of course) and all the apps that come with that, as well as iLife (iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand, iWeb) and some others. Many people can get everything done with just that and that is who these first Intel systems are for. They are six months ahead of schedule so it is not surprising the software is not all caught up, but even so you have some great applications already running natively.
Apple announced the change to Intel at WWDC June 2005 and then over the next six months, sales of PowerPC Macs were UP by 22%. Steve Jobs said "we're phasing out PowerPC" and yet sales of PowerPC systems went UP. This is because if you are using Photoshop (or similar Mac software) all day you need a PowerPC Mac now and for about another year or so.
I bought a new PowerPC Mac in late 2005. That is the hardware my software wants.
I was one of the people who got into Mac OS X a little too early in retrospect, so after this new transition was announced I got me some of the best of the last and now I'm going to hunker down for 18 months and then at that point I'll see where things are at. By then it is likely that all my software will be available in new versions, all of which are Intel-ready. I'll upgrade from G5-CS2 to Intel-CS3 and won't batt an eyelash.
The original iPod is 4 GB ($299), just like the iPod nano 4 GB ($249). That is "1000 songs" ... 1000 four minute songs encoded at 160 kbs.
So five years later you can pay $50 less to get the same iPod, except that it is like 10% of the size, 10x as rugged, and has twice the battery life.
It is a good deal. Time to get a nano.
Is your original iPod still working?
I retired mine for a 2G when the 2G was fairly new, but when I turned on the original one recently it said "where's the disk?" and then shut off.
Five years is a long time, especially considering the original iPod had many more moving parts and obviously less technological maturity.
Oh, man ... you have got to use Apple Lossless MPEG-4, not AIFF. AIFF is an AUTHORING format. It's for editing. It's a pure stream of audio data so that you can cut a chunk out or make edits directly to the waveforms. It's murder on storage devices because it is not even data-compressed (like a Zip file). Also, AIFF has no proper tagging format like MP3 and MPEG-4. Even if Apple is working around that now in iTunes (they weren't the last time I checked) it is unlikely that you could play your AIFF's outside of iPod+iTunes and still see the artwork or tags. Finally, support for AIFF is sometimes lacking on non-Mac platforms.
With Apple Lossless, your audio is data-compressed, not perceptually encoded, so some songs shrink to a very small size, and some don't, depending on the complexity of their audio waveforms. However you will always have a file that is 50-75% of the size of an AIFF, and the bitstream that hits the decoder will be exactly the same. In other words, even though the file on disk is very different, AIFF vs Apple Lossless MPEG-4, the bits that the iPod "sees" and turns into audio for you to listen to are 100% identical. And you will be able to reliably put artwork and ID tags into your Apple Lossless file because it is just an MPEG-4. The sound will be exactly the same but you will reclaim 25-50% of your iPod's storage space using the same songs.
Another advantage to Apple Lossless is that because it is an MPEG-4 file, you can convert an Apple Lossless MPEG-4 to an AAC MPEG-4 and the tags and artwork will come along just fine. And your AAC will be full-quality because it is encoded from the original audio bitstream. Apple Lossless makes a great "master" format for storing audio if you need to make various sizes of MP3 or MPEG-4 regularly.
I am an audio pro, and I use 24-bit AIFF all day long and it is like a dear friend to me, but it is not for sharing outside the studio. It's like shipping a dingy fully inflated.
The battery on your iPod will die long before you wear out the flash memory by read/writing it.
> Will an iPod really assuage anyone's feelings at being left out of Valentine's Day?
Yes.
However then they will start wearing their iPod all day long rather than engaging in social interactions, causing them to feel left out again.
You can't blame individual companies for the patent mess. If you are designing and building new technologies you have to patent just like you have to defend your trademark. If you don't, then you are asking to become a victim of an unscrupulous player whose only business is bad patents.
Consider reserving your anger for the one and two-man companies who keep patenting the steering wheel over and over and trying to extort licensing fees from organizations that are actually making stuff.
> As for the shell/IE integration, there are reasons why it is there. For example,
> try to access a ftp:// url with IE, it will open in an explorer window.
When I click on an ftp:// url with Safari, it opens in a Finder window, and yet Safari is just a standalone application I can drop in the Trash at any time without modifying the system in any way. Apparently, Apple was able to pull of this amazing feat without welding a browser onto Finder.
> Hopefully by the time "Vienna" hits gold they will have their stuff together and it will have been built
> from the ground up by security conscious programmers and not put thru a security review after
> development is finished.
See you in 2011!
> At one time, IBM had 100% of the PC market
No, IBM never had 100% of the PC market. In 1984 when the first Mac shipped, Apple and IBM each had about 50% of the PC market.
> As much as OpenBSD can harp about how secure they are can they harp about how they include
... Microsoft continues to be huge, wealthy, powerful, and unable to make a good operating system. It's simply way past a joke. Mac OS X is the operating system for artists and musicians for crying out loud. Why is it I can run a 24-bit/192kHz multitrack audio session for days on end on a Mac and yet on Windows you can't keep a Web browser running for more than 20 minutes?
> all the usability functions and features that XP does in the default install?
No, but Mac OS X has more usability functions and features than XP and has also been modernized from top to bottom and is really stable. That's the problem here
It's a scandal.
Windows 3.1 did not have hardware abstraction.
What Apple did was run the old operating system (Mac OS 9) inside a Mac OS X application called "Classic". So in a sense you have an application included with Mac OS X that runs Mac OS 9 applications inside it. The Classic application appears to be running on Mac OS X but really all of your old apps are running in that one process. It wasn't really fun to use but what you could do is move to Mac OS X and you'd get native updates of about half of your apps and run the old versions of the other half for about a year until the native updates came out. It was like a bridge between the old application platform and the new one.
Also, the bridge went the other way, because they adapted Mac OS 9 to run one kind of Mac OS X application, so there were some applictions that would run under OS 9 and OS X, natively in each place.
There are already a couple of ways to run Windows in a single window on Mac OS X, but on a PowerPC machine this requires emulating the Intel processor. It will be painless for somebody to make an app for the new Intel-based Macs that runs Windows in a box at full speed because there is a real Intel processor there (in fact, two). That is really the way forward for Windows users. You get an Intel Mac, you image your old Windows PC disk (with Disk Utility) and boot it in a window on the Mac OS X desktop. Now you have all of your old system running in a window surrounded by Aqua and all the modern Mac OS X applications and you can transition to using the Mac versions of your apps or their equivalents and then eventually you stop running Windows. Apple could easily include a DOS box on Mac OS X like there was on OpenStep and similar to how they include an X-Window manager now.
> OSX was in development for 5 years too. It's not like they could have incorporated it into OS9.
Actually, Apple did incorporate this feature into Mac OS 9. Mac OS X has had this feature since the early 1990's also in its ancestors NEXTSTEP and OpenStep.