I've been hotplugging FireWire devices regularly since 1999 and have never had a problem. I've hot-plugged my MOTU 896HD many times and no problem. Also scores of hard drives, original iPod, Sony digital camcorders, a CF reader, FireWire hubs, and quite a few Macs, both desktop and portable. Probably 50 separate devices total and it always works and none of the devices has even failed at all.
The reason you are sometimes told not to hot-plug a FireWire device is that either Windows or the device's drivers can't deal with this. So the manufacturer wants you to power down your Windows system, plug in their device, and power up Windows so that it gets a look at the device at startup and loads their driver and the driver doesn't have to deal with the device being removed and neither does Windows. That will make their device more reliable on Windows systems.
The next generation of PC's will have USB 2.0 and FireWire 400/800. Now that 800 is cheaper and the cables are cheaper it will end up being the ubiquitous FireWire. You can plug 400 devices onto an 800 port with a cheap little adapter. This next generation of PC's will need both because for all the ubiquity of USB in some spaces, digital video is all FireWire, multichannel pro audio editing is all FireWire. And further, Apple is not dropping FireWire and Intel and Apple are the ones collaborating on the next generation PC design.
USB will be for slow stuff and small stuff. FireWire will be for fast stuff and big stuff, and stuff where real-time is really important (like digital video and multichannel audio editing). FireWire has all this extra stuff over USB when you are working in a studio.
When we all move from either PowerPC or x86 to the next thing which is Merom/Yahoh/whatever the codenames are... call it "G6" then I think the Intel mobos will have a new BIOS (more like OpenFirmware), USB 2.0, FireWire 800, Wi-Fi-g, Bluetooth 2.0, gigabit Ethernet. At this point it just makes sense to start out with all that stuff that Apple already includes now. If Intel is making mobos for Apple they'll have to make that stuff and it is getting to where leaving it out is more expensive because you want the economy of scale on the silicon and you want the uniformity of hardware for your software development.
Intel embarrassed itself pretty widely with the "concept PC's" they made after the iMac shipped and still years later look at the average Dell it is just a 1995 PC with some swoopy designs on the outside of the box. I'm pretty sure that they will be doing an Apple-like "moving the industry forward" move with this next generation of CPU's and silicon. I mean, they impressed Steve Jobs, didn't they?
I don't understand why you'd want to be the only guy doing USB video editing.
FireWire is not just about getting the video from the camera to disk. It also enables the computer and video editing software to control the camera so that it becomes a remote deck. With FireWire, you plug in your camera and you don't touch the camera again. You preview the tape before capturing, each cut in the camera can be captured as a separate clip, and when you're done editing you can dump a finished video back to tape, all from within your video editing environment, even if it is only iMovie.
Also FireWire can do real-time streams with very little CPU overhead so that I can work in Logic Pro on a movie soundtrack and the video track is sent out over FireWire so I can watch it on a TV hooked up to my camcorder.
There's a whole world of sophisticated digital video waiting for you if you just buy the FireWire cable.
USB 2.0 is generally slower than FireWire. If you plug USB 1.1 devices onto your USB 2.0 bus you drop the whole thing down to 1.1 speeds. FireWire has consistently moved digital video in real time for years and years... also multichannel uncompressed digital audio. It is fast and efficient. It is trivial to move a music collection over FireWire. It's like "gigabit Ethernet" tops out at 400 Mbits... the specs are how wide the pipe is, not how much water it really moves.
If Apple had to choose one interface for iPod it is obvious that it had to be USB 2.0. More computers feature USB, and even on Macs you generally have more USB ports then FireWire ports. All Apple machines have a left USB and right USB so you can plug your mouse where it makes sense (even iBook and PowerBook have this) so it is easy to plug the iPod into your "spare mouse port." Also I'm sure they want to just put one cable in the box, and the poor implementation of many PC FireWire ports is a hassle that iPod doesn't need. FireWire is not going anywhere... it's the only way you can hook a digital video camera to a computer. FireWire makes iMovie and Final Cut Pro possible because it turns the digital video camera into a remote control video deck.
The fact that Apple made the right decision for the iPod and chose USB rather than the right decision for Mac or the right decision for Apple with FireWire (since Apple developed FireWire) shows that Apple is pretty serious about the iPod being its own thing, not a Mac accessory. In the future they will likely do a set-top box and a video camera and maybe TV's and other things and they won't be hobbled by having to be Mac accessories.
I stopped using Microsoft products a few years ago and it has been a wonderful experience. The reason I stopped was to get away from the awful file formats that are pushed on you all the time, from Word to Windows Media they are awful. However the true pleasure has been getting away from the lousy software features that are always trying to guess what you're about to do and always guessing wrong... perhaps best signified by that paper clip from Office. I don't know what the reasons are to use Microsoft products but I have definitely seen the reasons NOT to use them. With other software, the experience is better and the results are better.
Apple's software people are incredibly good... you have to see their stuff to believe it. Part of what makes them great is the open source stuff they're incorporating wherever possible and I'm very thankful for all the open source programmers. The standards, the interoperability, the parts of computing where it makes sense to collaborate widely and share thoroughly. I can't push Firefox enough even though I use Safari myself... it is great to develop for a Web with two big browsers that have two big open source rendering engines competing for who can be the Most Standard. It's like a dream I had once in 1998, actually. Lots of people had it... it's great to see it coming around now.
I've always liked Google but after I used Google Maps I really understood how great their work is. I used MapQuest for years and it hasn't really changed and then boom one day I used Google Maps and now I keep going back. The experience is better and the results are better.
It's interesting to see Apple, Google and Open Source cited as Microsoft's main competitors. If there are two companies who are using open source better than Apple and Google I don't know who they are. Apple and Google spend their time doing what they do best because they're building on an open source infrastructure.
I stopped using Microsoft products a few years ago and it has been a wonderful experience. The reason I stopped was that their software was so lousy, but getting away from their crappy file formats has also been great. I don't know what the reasons are to use Microsoft products but I have definitely seen the reasons NOT to use them. With other software, the experience is better and the results are better.
Apple's software people are incredibly talented... you have to see their stuff to believe it. Part of what makes them great is the open source stuff they're incorporating wherever possible and I'm very thankful for all the open source programmers. I can't push Firefox enough even though I use Safari myself... it is great to have two big browsers with two big open source rendering engines competing for who can be the Most Standard. It's like a dream I had once in 1998, actually. I've always liked Google but after I used Google Maps I really understood how great their work is. I used MapQuest for years and it hasn't really changed and then boom one day I used Google Maps and now I keep going back. The experience is better and the results are better.
It's interesting to see Apple, Google and Open Source cited as Microsoft's main competitors. If there are two companies who are using open source better than Apple and Google I don't know who they are. Macromedia comes to mind... now part of Adobe. I've been using Dreamweaver as my main "word processor" since v1.0 in 1998 and now I have years of HTML code to easily reuse and easily convert to UTF-8 XHTML. I shudder to think of all the Word documents I'd be fighting with if I had made those instead.
The "jukebox" part of a DVD-Audio disc also changed from Windows Audio (WMA) to MPEG-4 AAC after the success of iTunes. However it is not like it went from Microsoft's to Apple's format but rather it went from Microsoft's to an industry standard format. AAC is the successor to MP3 within the MPEG standard, and it is like 10 years newer and is much technically better.
H.264 video is also known as MPEG-4 Part 10. Apple has been fully behind MPEG-4, which for Slashdotters might be called "Open Source QuickTime". The MPEG-4 file format is a standardized multimedia container based on the QuickTime file format, and the MPEG-4 codecs in the audio and video tracks within the container are open and industry standard, such as H.264 and AAC. This means that MPEG-4 will play anywhere, however QuickTime will continue to be the best place to author media. Of course that drives Bill Gates nuts.
When you make Windows Media or Real Media all you do is convert QuickTime to Microsoft's format or Real's format. Apple is now offering the same thing only you convert QuickTime to MPEG-4.
The first DVD burners to ship in computers were (Pioneer) DVD-R drives in Apple's Power Macs. DVD-R is a real DVD spec, approved by the DVD consortium. With DVD-R you can write a DVD-ROM or you can burn a DVD-Video that will play in most consumer DVD players. The DVD+R is a PC variant that is mainly for storing data.
These days DVD burners support both recordable DVD types but DVD-R is still the better choice if you want to make DVD-Video discs to play in consumer players.
Yeah, Google has good marketing, but that only gets you so far... to be synonymous with a technical niche you have to actually have the goods also. Like Apple has good marketing but my first iPod actually was much, much better than the Creative Labs MP3 player it replaced. Google was smart to make a plain search portal that loaded fast and had the input field front and center, but their search also worked better than others. You could type stuff in and get good results even if you weren't skilled with keywords and search commands and AND and OR or whatever. There are smart people there at Google and they're making stuff. Over at Microsoft I have to say I wonder what the fuck is going on. There's no There there. If you try and explain them to somebody who doesn't have 20 years of PC history it comes out like they make a worse Mac than Apple and a worse UNIX than everybody else. OK they make a better typewriter than the typewriter except when it comes to reliability. How much further can that take them?
All these excuses for Microsoft's bad security sound flat to my ears.
The mainstream Internet is 10 years old. Nobody should know this better than Microsoft because it caught them completely by surprise and yet it made Windows 95 a huge success. And here we are people are still being told not to open email attachments because the Microsoft "operating system" can't handle it. It's like a crank call making your phone explode in your hands.
When you compare what little Microsoft has built since 1995 to what Apple has done since 1997 when they bought NeXT and Steve Jobs rejoined the company, it's a scandal. When Mac OS X was first released in early 2001 there was a question of will Apple be able to do this thing? Now we have seen regular releases every 12-18 months since then, getting inarguably better as well as faster on the same hardware, and on the Microsoft side once again people are waiting for an "oft-delayed update to Windows" that is leaking features and still no end in sight to the DOS-on-Internet malaise.
Microsoft has yet to release an operating system that hews to the most basic security practices, like closing unused ports by default. Their update system is a mess compared to Apple's and yet Microsoft systems need the updates even more.
Here you guys are saying well he's technically right... UNIX wasn't designed to be connected to everything right from the beginning either, but we're talking ancient history here. Even Windows is almost 20 years old now and there's no excuse for it not being safe to plug into the Internet. Oooh... the "Internet"... how fucking nouveau.
The 16% number is not market share, it's the percentage of Internet clients that are Macs. Market share is just "what percentage of computers sold this month are from Apple" which does not automatically tell you what percentage of all users have Apple systems. People typically use their Macs for twice as long because they don't go down to viruses and the OS is easy to upgrade yourself. So in any given few years Apple can sell 5% of the market and still easily represent 10% of users. When you also factor in that many PC's are bought as servers or specialized uses like milling machines then it is not surprising that 16% of everyday Internet clients are Macs.
The fallacy is that it's only Altivec that makes PPC worthwhile on the Mac.
The PPC architecture itself is new enough that it was designed with the idea that the computer is graphical and multimedia oriented in nature. So there are basic CPU functions for rotating graphics and doing things that video and audio rely on. PowerPC rotates bitmaps more efficientely and does other graphics manipulations more efficiently than the Intel architecture, so in turn it runs Photoshop faster and video editing is faster and Aqua is faster.
Nowadays we are getting to where the CPU's are just hugely fast in and of themselves but a few years ago this was a really big deal because it's only recently that computers are really fast enough for heavy graphics and video work. You can see this in the evolution of Aqua from sluggish on Mac OS X 10.0 to very fast now. The CPU's have caught up and the graphics processors have caught up.
If you ever see any of the old Photoshop shootouts that Apple used to do watch the PPC system pull ahead as soon as some layers of the graphic are rotated slightly or heavily transformed in size. That's what you do all day in Photoshop and the same calculations make video encoding fast.
Another big thing for PPC has been low-power chips. Even with no "portable" G5 it is still a much more sensible CPU than a Pentium4 from a power perspective and yesterday the G4 and G3 were even moreso as far as the power they draw. Five hours of battery life has been a standard on the Mac for many, many years.
So it isn't like Altivec was the only magic that made PPC worthwhile.
In this Intel transition Apple quite clearly is going for Intel's "next-generation" chips. The Centrino and the stuff that's evolving out of that are what Apple is interested in and these are Intel's most "PowerPC-like" chips with lower clock speeds, smaller size, and lower power consumption than the Pentium4. So as much as there is a win here for Intel it is not a win for yesterday's Pentium4 white box that uses 110 watts to reach 4 GHz and those of us who spent the last few years on PowerPC chips are not unhappy with the great systems we used to make graphics, video, and audio during that time.
> Since when has Apple typically taken the high-performance > road?
- gigabit ethernet standard on pro machines since 2000 - firewire standard since 1999 - firewire 800 standard on Power Macs since 2003 - first 802.11b wireless networking in 1999 - first 802.11g networking (AirPort Extreme) - gui running in the graphics processor since 2002 - all-digital LCD displays since 2001 - always the biggest, highest-contrast, truest color displays in the industry - optical mouses standard since 2001 - first 64-bit desktop systems and 8 GB RAM capacity - five hour battery life on notebooks standard since 1997 - 1+ GB RAM capacity typical on pro systems since 1999
The Apple Intel developer box is just a plain PC, and of course the development builds of Mac OS X have all been for plain PC's running in Apple's labs. However there is nothing stopping Apple and Intel from developing a new "Mactel" firmware/BIOS that eliminates some cruft, carries forware current Mac bootup features, and is necessary for running Mac OS X (preventing running Mac OS on plain white boxes.)
You have to be careful about speculating on what's coming in future Macs. Intel had obvious and public iMac envy in 1998, Mac OS X was running on Intel before the operating system was bought by Apple, and Apple and Intel have been working together for over a year now and there is still almost a year before the first Mactel systems even ship. These are Apple's "G6" systems and they're not afraid to drive stuff forward.
Once Apple systems have the same CPU's as Dell, HP, IBM, etc. then the difference between Apple and the rest of the industry shifts from "Mac vs. PC" to "Mac OS vs. Windows" and that is a fight that many people in the industry think Apple will do really well in. Especially when the new Mac buyer is told that they can always run Windows on their Apple system if they don't like the switch.
Many people right now think Apple is poised to take a huge chunk of the PC market. For example, John Dvorak of PC Magazine, who has never been accused of being a Mac person or Apple supporter, has written that he expects Apple to take more than 50% of the PC business over the next five years. On the one hand Mac OS X is roasting hot and UNIX secure and on the other hand Windows Vista is freezing cold and full of viruses.
So it is quite possible that Intel thinks Mac OS X is the best thing running on Intel chips now and going forward and are putting the effort in to support the "next generation PC" running a next generation OS. Imagine a bunch of Intel executives standing around a few years ago lamenting the fact that all their hard work ends up being crashed by MS Windows and running spyware and viruses and then Steve Jobs comes by from next door and tells them that by the way Mac OS X is also an Intel-compatible operating system. What do you guys think of building some great hardware products for us to run on?
Microsoft has had their decade of Windows 95, but that's over now.
You won't run a straight HDTV signal into your display the same way you don't run a straight MPEG-2 signal into your display today.
I can't watch "protected MPEG-2" (DVD) on my current display without using Apple's DVD Player application. In the future I won't be able to watch "protected HD" without some kind of player-decoder either. Same as I can't listen to "protected MPEG-4 audio" without iTunes.
However you will still be able to play (and author) all the HD you want, just like you can right now. Apple's computers all come with built-in HD editing and have for more than a year. You can also make DVD's and audio files with today's systems and tomorrow's systems. And you can choose whether to "protect" that content or not. I make DVD's and I leave the copy protection OFF and I make MPEG-4 audio and leave the copy protection OFF.
Think of a Mac mini with a Sony HDTV hooked onto it (both available right now) and that is a system that is HD capable in every way. The HDCP will come in a future version of iTunes through which you can download movies. Or you can choose not to, or the "protection" will be cracked or whatever, same as the great raging debates today over the same stuff.
In other words the copy-protection is a software layer. It has nothing to do with your display or your DVI pipes.
There are plenty of distinguishing features of OS X over MS Windows, especially if you consider them side-by-side running on the same CPU.
Mac OS X has zero viruses after five years in the wild; features UNIX multitasking, security, and applications such as Apache; wakes up instantly and consistently from sleep; utilizes international standards at every level; has applications that are easy to install and administer; much more.
The Microsoft operating system is a mess right now. It's a scandal what's happening with viruses and worms and their lack of network security. Most people don't realize that the viruses run only on Microsoft software. The spyware is running only on Microsoft software. It's a complete disaster and Microsoft has not offered a way out of it.
One of my Macs uses NVIDIA graphics and the other one uses ATI and it doesn't matter which is which. They both run Mac OS X just fine. Whether a system has PowerPC or Intel CPU's also is irrelevant if both are running Mac OS X. My information is secure, my uptime is tremendous, my applications are modern and easy to work with, there are many features that make me more productive.
The "gameplay" in the case of the old Mac OS was the GUI itself.
So, yeah, the co-operative multitasking horrified server people but if you were a Mac user in 1997 you had the whole computer focused on your interactive experience and you got a lot more "snap" than other systems of the day. You could draw with a graphics tablet in Photoshop even on a machine with a 200 MHz processor.
It's only just lately that computers are fast enough to both run a GUI and do a bunch of things in the background. Mac OS X has really great multitasking so now that we have CPU's measured in gigahertz you can run Apache in the background while you work in Dreamweaver and no problem.
The PC BIOS is so crufty it takes a team of IBM employees to replicate the combination of OpenFirmware and FileVault. Thank goodness Steve is saving Intel.
AppleCare is always worth it on a new Mac, because you get worry-free operation for three full years, but it's especially good on PowerBooks. They are small and thin and have a lot of delicate, portable components that you don't want to be paying to replace or repair.
A new PowerBook bought right now will give you a lot of service over the next three years so get the AppleCare and then work the computer hard.
There may be other items where you don't want the extended warranty, but if there is a display involved, like a Mac or a big TV, then it's worth it to let someone else be responsible to keep it working for multiple years.
Apple service is also good and worth paying to extend.
If you make a DVD Video disc with DVD-R it will play in most DVD players (90% or so), even old ones. I've been making DVD-R's in an Apple Power Mac for over two years and they have all played in every player I've tried them on (even some funky ones). If your older player is a name-brand then it should play DVD-R just fine unless it is really, really old.
The last I looked, DVD+RW only plays in about half of the DVD players out there. Dell's first DVD burners in their systems were notorious for making discs that people couldn't play on their home DVD player for this reason.
File system searches are better on the Mac than on Windows TODAY. They were better on the Mac than on Windows YESTERDAY. There is no reason to think file system searches won't be better on the Mac than on Windows TOMORROW.
Especially when tomorrow is 2003 on the Mac and 2005 on Windows.
The point of the article is that there is a new version of Mac OS coming this fall that MAY have all the features of Windows 2005. The panther animal tears up the longhorn animal (whatever that is).
Microsoft is working with an enormous monolithic codebase built rent-a-coder style. The main architects of Windows 95 and NT are long gone. They have no security, and poor reliability and a low-quality app platform. They have to interface with phones and TiVo's and all kinds of things and they don't have zero conf networking yet. Bluetooth is not done. Wi-Fi sucks on Windows (compare to the transparent Wi-Fi on the Mac). There are a lot of ways they can be seen to be behind.
Windows 95 was supposed to be when Microsoft overtook Apple FOR GOOD. Remember? Nobody was going to be able to catch up to mighty Microsoft. It took a while for Apple to rebuild their 20 year old system, but now they have done it, and they did it right and they are way out in front again and gaining. Microsoft looks so bad to Mac users right now. You have to try a new Mac to see how all this stuff that's hard on Windows is now easy on the Mac.
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I've been hotplugging FireWire devices regularly since 1999 and have never had a problem. I've hot-plugged my MOTU 896HD many times and no problem. Also scores of hard drives, original iPod, Sony digital camcorders, a CF reader, FireWire hubs, and quite a few Macs, both desktop and portable. Probably 50 separate devices total and it always works and none of the devices has even failed at all.
The reason you are sometimes told not to hot-plug a FireWire device is that either Windows or the device's drivers can't deal with this. So the manufacturer wants you to power down your Windows system, plug in their device, and power up Windows so that it gets a look at the device at startup and loads their driver and the driver doesn't have to deal with the device being removed and neither does Windows. That will make their device more reliable on Windows systems.
The next generation of PC's will have USB 2.0 and FireWire 400/800. Now that 800 is cheaper and the cables are cheaper it will end up being the ubiquitous FireWire. You can plug 400 devices onto an 800 port with a cheap little adapter. This next generation of PC's will need both because for all the ubiquity of USB in some spaces, digital video is all FireWire, multichannel pro audio editing is all FireWire. And further, Apple is not dropping FireWire and Intel and Apple are the ones collaborating on the next generation PC design.
... call it "G6" then I think the Intel mobos will have a new BIOS (more like OpenFirmware), USB 2.0, FireWire 800, Wi-Fi-g, Bluetooth 2.0, gigabit Ethernet. At this point it just makes sense to start out with all that stuff that Apple already includes now. If Intel is making mobos for Apple they'll have to make that stuff and it is getting to where leaving it out is more expensive because you want the economy of scale on the silicon and you want the uniformity of hardware for your software development.
USB will be for slow stuff and small stuff. FireWire will be for fast stuff and big stuff, and stuff where real-time is really important (like digital video and multichannel audio editing). FireWire has all this extra stuff over USB when you are working in a studio.
When we all move from either PowerPC or x86 to the next thing which is Merom/Yahoh/whatever the codenames are
Intel embarrassed itself pretty widely with the "concept PC's" they made after the iMac shipped and still years later look at the average Dell it is just a 1995 PC with some swoopy designs on the outside of the box. I'm pretty sure that they will be doing an Apple-like "moving the industry forward" move with this next generation of CPU's and silicon. I mean, they impressed Steve Jobs, didn't they?
I don't understand why you'd want to be the only guy doing USB video editing.
FireWire is not just about getting the video from the camera to disk. It also enables the computer and video editing software to control the camera so that it becomes a remote deck. With FireWire, you plug in your camera and you don't touch the camera again. You preview the tape before capturing, each cut in the camera can be captured as a separate clip, and when you're done editing you can dump a finished video back to tape, all from within your video editing environment, even if it is only iMovie.
Also FireWire can do real-time streams with very little CPU overhead so that I can work in Logic Pro on a movie soundtrack and the video track is sent out over FireWire so I can watch it on a TV hooked up to my camcorder.
There's a whole world of sophisticated digital video waiting for you if you just buy the FireWire cable.
USB 2.0 is generally slower than FireWire. If you plug USB 1.1 devices onto your USB 2.0 bus you drop the whole thing down to 1.1 speeds. FireWire has consistently moved digital video in real time for years and years ... also multichannel uncompressed digital audio. It is fast and efficient. It is trivial to move a music collection over FireWire. It's like "gigabit Ethernet" tops out at 400 Mbits ... the specs are how wide the pipe is, not how much water it really moves.
... it's the only way you can hook a digital video camera to a computer. FireWire makes iMovie and Final Cut Pro possible because it turns the digital video camera into a remote control video deck.
If Apple had to choose one interface for iPod it is obvious that it had to be USB 2.0. More computers feature USB, and even on Macs you generally have more USB ports then FireWire ports. All Apple machines have a left USB and right USB so you can plug your mouse where it makes sense (even iBook and PowerBook have this) so it is easy to plug the iPod into your "spare mouse port." Also I'm sure they want to just put one cable in the box, and the poor implementation of many PC FireWire ports is a hassle that iPod doesn't need. FireWire is not going anywhere
The fact that Apple made the right decision for the iPod and chose USB rather than the right decision for Mac or the right decision for Apple with FireWire (since Apple developed FireWire) shows that Apple is pretty serious about the iPod being its own thing, not a Mac accessory. In the future they will likely do a set-top box and a video camera and maybe TV's and other things and they won't be hobbled by having to be Mac accessories.
Competition is when you try to be the very best figure skater in the world by outperforming the other figure skaters.
Anti-competition is when you hit a better figure skater in the knee with a lead pipe.
Microsoft has done too much of the latter.
I stopped using Microsoft products a few years ago and it has been a wonderful experience. The reason I stopped was to get away from the awful file formats that are pushed on you all the time, from Word to Windows Media they are awful. However the true pleasure has been getting away from the lousy software features that are always trying to guess what you're about to do and always guessing wrong ... perhaps best signified by that paper clip from Office. I don't know what the reasons are to use Microsoft products but I have definitely seen the reasons NOT to use them. With other software, the experience is better and the results are better.
... you have to see their stuff to believe it. Part of what makes them great is the open source stuff they're incorporating wherever possible and I'm very thankful for all the open source programmers. The standards, the interoperability, the parts of computing where it makes sense to collaborate widely and share thoroughly. I can't push Firefox enough even though I use Safari myself ... it is great to develop for a Web with two big browsers that have two big open source rendering engines competing for who can be the Most Standard. It's like a dream I had once in 1998, actually. Lots of people had it ... it's great to see it coming around now.
Apple's software people are incredibly good
I've always liked Google but after I used Google Maps I really understood how great their work is. I used MapQuest for years and it hasn't really changed and then boom one day I used Google Maps and now I keep going back. The experience is better and the results are better.
It's interesting to see Apple, Google and Open Source cited as Microsoft's main competitors. If there are two companies who are using open source better than Apple and Google I don't know who they are. Apple and Google spend their time doing what they do best because they're building on an open source infrastructure.
I stopped using Microsoft products a few years ago and it has been a wonderful experience. The reason I stopped was that their software was so lousy, but getting away from their crappy file formats has also been great. I don't know what the reasons are to use Microsoft products but I have definitely seen the reasons NOT to use them. With other software, the experience is better and the results are better.
... you have to see their stuff to believe it. Part of what makes them great is the open source stuff they're incorporating wherever possible and I'm very thankful for all the open source programmers. I can't push Firefox enough even though I use Safari myself ... it is great to have two big browsers with two big open source rendering engines competing for who can be the Most Standard. It's like a dream I had once in 1998, actually. I've always liked Google but after I used Google Maps I really understood how great their work is. I used MapQuest for years and it hasn't really changed and then boom one day I used Google Maps and now I keep going back. The experience is better and the results are better.
... now part of Adobe. I've been using Dreamweaver as my main "word processor" since v1.0 in 1998 and now I have years of HTML code to easily reuse and easily convert to UTF-8 XHTML. I shudder to think of all the Word documents I'd be fighting with if I had made those instead.
Apple's software people are incredibly talented
It's interesting to see Apple, Google and Open Source cited as Microsoft's main competitors. If there are two companies who are using open source better than Apple and Google I don't know who they are. Macromedia comes to mind
The "jukebox" part of a DVD-Audio disc also changed from Windows Audio (WMA) to MPEG-4 AAC after the success of iTunes. However it is not like it went from Microsoft's to Apple's format but rather it went from Microsoft's to an industry standard format. AAC is the successor to MP3 within the MPEG standard, and it is like 10 years newer and is much technically better.
H.264 video is also known as MPEG-4 Part 10. Apple has been fully behind MPEG-4, which for Slashdotters might be called "Open Source QuickTime". The MPEG-4 file format is a standardized multimedia container based on the QuickTime file format, and the MPEG-4 codecs in the audio and video tracks within the container are open and industry standard, such as H.264 and AAC. This means that MPEG-4 will play anywhere, however QuickTime will continue to be the best place to author media. Of course that drives Bill Gates nuts.
When you make Windows Media or Real Media all you do is convert QuickTime to Microsoft's format or Real's format. Apple is now offering the same thing only you convert QuickTime to MPEG-4.
The first DVD burners to ship in computers were (Pioneer) DVD-R drives in Apple's Power Macs. DVD-R is a real DVD spec, approved by the DVD consortium. With DVD-R you can write a DVD-ROM or you can burn a DVD-Video that will play in most consumer DVD players. The DVD+R is a PC variant that is mainly for storing data.
These days DVD burners support both recordable DVD types but DVD-R is still the better choice if you want to make DVD-Video discs to play in consumer players.
Yeah, Google has good marketing, but that only gets you so far ... to be synonymous with a technical niche you have to actually have the goods also. Like Apple has good marketing but my first iPod actually was much, much better than the Creative Labs MP3 player it replaced. Google was smart to make a plain search portal that loaded fast and had the input field front and center, but their search also worked better than others. You could type stuff in and get good results even if you weren't skilled with keywords and search commands and AND and OR or whatever. There are smart people there at Google and they're making stuff. Over at Microsoft I have to say I wonder what the fuck is going on. There's no There there. If you try and explain them to somebody who doesn't have 20 years of PC history it comes out like they make a worse Mac than Apple and a worse UNIX than everybody else. OK they make a better typewriter than the typewriter except when it comes to reliability. How much further can that take them?
All these excuses for Microsoft's bad security sound flat to my ears.
... UNIX wasn't designed to be connected to everything right from the beginning either, but we're talking ancient history here. Even Windows is almost 20 years old now and there's no excuse for it not being safe to plug into the Internet. Oooh ... the "Internet" ... how fucking nouveau.
The mainstream Internet is 10 years old. Nobody should know this better than Microsoft because it caught them completely by surprise and yet it made Windows 95 a huge success. And here we are people are still being told not to open email attachments because the Microsoft "operating system" can't handle it. It's like a crank call making your phone explode in your hands.
When you compare what little Microsoft has built since 1995 to what Apple has done since 1997 when they bought NeXT and Steve Jobs rejoined the company, it's a scandal. When Mac OS X was first released in early 2001 there was a question of will Apple be able to do this thing? Now we have seen regular releases every 12-18 months since then, getting inarguably better as well as faster on the same hardware, and on the Microsoft side once again people are waiting for an "oft-delayed update to Windows" that is leaking features and still no end in sight to the DOS-on-Internet malaise.
Microsoft has yet to release an operating system that hews to the most basic security practices, like closing unused ports by default. Their update system is a mess compared to Apple's and yet Microsoft systems need the updates even more.
Here you guys are saying well he's technically right
The 16% number is not market share, it's the percentage of Internet clients that are Macs. Market share is just "what percentage of computers sold this month are from Apple" which does not automatically tell you what percentage of all users have Apple systems. People typically use their Macs for twice as long because they don't go down to viruses and the OS is easy to upgrade yourself. So in any given few years Apple can sell 5% of the market and still easily represent 10% of users. When you also factor in that many PC's are bought as servers or specialized uses like milling machines then it is not surprising that 16% of everyday Internet clients are Macs.
The fallacy is that it's only Altivec that makes PPC worthwhile on the Mac.
The PPC architecture itself is new enough that it was designed with the idea that the computer is graphical and multimedia oriented in nature. So there are basic CPU functions for rotating graphics and doing things that video and audio rely on. PowerPC rotates bitmaps more efficientely and does other graphics manipulations more efficiently than the Intel architecture, so in turn it runs Photoshop faster and video editing is faster and Aqua is faster.
Nowadays we are getting to where the CPU's are just hugely fast in and of themselves but a few years ago this was a really big deal because it's only recently that computers are really fast enough for heavy graphics and video work. You can see this in the evolution of Aqua from sluggish on Mac OS X 10.0 to very fast now. The CPU's have caught up and the graphics processors have caught up.
If you ever see any of the old Photoshop shootouts that Apple used to do watch the PPC system pull ahead as soon as some layers of the graphic are rotated slightly or heavily transformed in size. That's what you do all day in Photoshop and the same calculations make video encoding fast.
Another big thing for PPC has been low-power chips. Even with no "portable" G5 it is still a much more sensible CPU than a Pentium4 from a power perspective and yesterday the G4 and G3 were even moreso as far as the power they draw. Five hours of battery life has been a standard on the Mac for many, many years.
So it isn't like Altivec was the only magic that made PPC worthwhile.
In this Intel transition Apple quite clearly is going for Intel's "next-generation" chips. The Centrino and the stuff that's evolving out of that are what Apple is interested in and these are Intel's most "PowerPC-like" chips with lower clock speeds, smaller size, and lower power consumption than the Pentium4. So as much as there is a win here for Intel it is not a win for yesterday's Pentium4 white box that uses 110 watts to reach 4 GHz and those of us who spent the last few years on PowerPC chips are not unhappy with the great systems we used to make graphics, video, and audio during that time.
> Since when has Apple typically taken the high-performance
> road?
- gigabit ethernet standard on pro machines since 2000
- firewire standard since 1999
- firewire 800 standard on Power Macs since 2003
- first 802.11b wireless networking in 1999
- first 802.11g networking (AirPort Extreme)
- gui running in the graphics processor since 2002
- all-digital LCD displays since 2001
- always the biggest, highest-contrast, truest color displays in the industry
- optical mouses standard since 2001
- first 64-bit desktop systems and 8 GB RAM capacity
- five hour battery life on notebooks standard since 1997
- 1+ GB RAM capacity typical on pro systems since 1999
The Apple Intel developer box is just a plain PC, and of course the development builds of Mac OS X have all been for plain PC's running in Apple's labs. However there is nothing stopping Apple and Intel from developing a new "Mactel" firmware/BIOS that eliminates some cruft, carries forware current Mac bootup features, and is necessary for running Mac OS X (preventing running Mac OS on plain white boxes.)
You have to be careful about speculating on what's coming in future Macs. Intel had obvious and public iMac envy in 1998, Mac OS X was running on Intel before the operating system was bought by Apple, and Apple and Intel have been working together for over a year now and there is still almost a year before the first Mactel systems even ship. These are Apple's "G6" systems and they're not afraid to drive stuff forward.
Once Apple systems have the same CPU's as Dell, HP, IBM, etc. then the difference between Apple and the rest of the industry shifts from "Mac vs. PC" to "Mac OS vs. Windows" and that is a fight that many people in the industry think Apple will do really well in. Especially when the new Mac buyer is told that they can always run Windows on their Apple system if they don't like the switch.
Many people right now think Apple is poised to take a huge chunk of the PC market. For example, John Dvorak of PC Magazine, who has never been accused of being a Mac person or Apple supporter, has written that he expects Apple to take more than 50% of the PC business over the next five years. On the one hand Mac OS X is roasting hot and UNIX secure and on the other hand Windows Vista is freezing cold and full of viruses.
So it is quite possible that Intel thinks Mac OS X is the best thing running on Intel chips now and going forward and are putting the effort in to support the "next generation PC" running a next generation OS. Imagine a bunch of Intel executives standing around a few years ago lamenting the fact that all their hard work ends up being crashed by MS Windows and running spyware and viruses and then Steve Jobs comes by from next door and tells them that by the way Mac OS X is also an Intel-compatible operating system. What do you guys think of building some great hardware products for us to run on?
Microsoft has had their decade of Windows 95, but that's over now.
Obviously you are referring to Flash.
You won't run a straight HDTV signal into your display the same way you don't run a straight MPEG-2 signal into your display today.
I can't watch "protected MPEG-2" (DVD) on my current display without using Apple's DVD Player application. In the future I won't be able to watch "protected HD" without some kind of player-decoder either. Same as I can't listen to "protected MPEG-4 audio" without iTunes.
However you will still be able to play (and author) all the HD you want, just like you can right now. Apple's computers all come with built-in HD editing and have for more than a year. You can also make DVD's and audio files with today's systems and tomorrow's systems. And you can choose whether to "protect" that content or not. I make DVD's and I leave the copy protection OFF and I make MPEG-4 audio and leave the copy protection OFF.
Think of a Mac mini with a Sony HDTV hooked onto it (both available right now) and that is a system that is HD capable in every way. The HDCP will come in a future version of iTunes through which you can download movies. Or you can choose not to, or the "protection" will be cracked or whatever, same as the great raging debates today over the same stuff.
In other words the copy-protection is a software layer. It has nothing to do with your display or your DVI pipes.
There are plenty of distinguishing features of OS X over MS Windows, especially if you consider them side-by-side running on the same CPU.
Mac OS X has zero viruses after five years in the wild; features UNIX multitasking, security, and applications such as Apache; wakes up instantly and consistently from sleep; utilizes international standards at every level; has applications that are easy to install and administer; much more.
The Microsoft operating system is a mess right now. It's a scandal what's happening with viruses and worms and their lack of network security. Most people don't realize that the viruses run only on Microsoft software. The spyware is running only on Microsoft software. It's a complete disaster and Microsoft has not offered a way out of it.
One of my Macs uses NVIDIA graphics and the other one uses ATI and it doesn't matter which is which. They both run Mac OS X just fine. Whether a system has PowerPC or Intel CPU's also is irrelevant if both are running Mac OS X. My information is secure, my uptime is tremendous, my applications are modern and easy to work with, there are many features that make me more productive.
The "gameplay" in the case of the old Mac OS was the GUI itself.
So, yeah, the co-operative multitasking horrified server people but if you were a Mac user in 1997 you had the whole computer focused on your interactive experience and you got a lot more "snap" than other systems of the day. You could draw with a graphics tablet in Photoshop even on a machine with a 200 MHz processor.
It's only just lately that computers are fast enough to both run a GUI and do a bunch of things in the background. Mac OS X has really great multitasking so now that we have CPU's measured in gigahertz you can run Apache in the background while you work in Dreamweaver and no problem.
The PC BIOS is so crufty it takes a team of IBM employees to replicate the combination of OpenFirmware and FileVault. Thank goodness Steve is saving Intel.
Cheers.
If this rumor has any truth at all it will result in Intel manufacturing PowerPC chips for Apple, not Apple using x86 chips.
AppleCare is always worth it on a new Mac, because you get worry-free operation for three full years, but it's especially good on PowerBooks. They are small and thin and have a lot of delicate, portable components that you don't want to be paying to replace or repair.
A new PowerBook bought right now will give you a lot of service over the next three years so get the AppleCare and then work the computer hard.
There may be other items where you don't want the extended warranty, but if there is a display involved, like a Mac or a big TV, then it's worth it to let someone else be responsible to keep it working for multiple years.
Apple service is also good and worth paying to extend.
If you make a DVD Video disc with DVD-R it will play in most DVD players (90% or so), even old ones. I've been making DVD-R's in an Apple Power Mac for over two years and they have all played in every player I've tried them on (even some funky ones). If your older player is a name-brand then it should play DVD-R just fine unless it is really, really old.
The last I looked, DVD+RW only plays in about half of the DVD players out there. Dell's first DVD burners in their systems were notorious for making discs that people couldn't play on their home DVD player for this reason.
File system searches are better on the Mac than on Windows TODAY. They were better on the Mac than on Windows YESTERDAY. There is no reason to think file system searches won't be better on the Mac than on Windows TOMORROW.
Especially when tomorrow is 2003 on the Mac and 2005 on Windows.
The point of the article is that there is a new version of Mac OS coming this fall that MAY have all the features of Windows 2005. The panther animal tears up the longhorn animal (whatever that is).
Microsoft is working with an enormous monolithic codebase built rent-a-coder style. The main architects of Windows 95 and NT are long gone. They have no security, and poor reliability and a low-quality app platform. They have to interface with phones and TiVo's and all kinds of things and they don't have zero conf networking yet. Bluetooth is not done. Wi-Fi sucks on Windows (compare to the transparent Wi-Fi on the Mac). There are a lot of ways they can be seen to be behind.
Windows 95 was supposed to be when Microsoft overtook Apple FOR GOOD. Remember? Nobody was going to be able to catch up to mighty Microsoft. It took a while for Apple to rebuild their 20 year old system, but now they have done it, and they did it right and they are way out in front again and gaining. Microsoft looks so bad to Mac users right now. You have to try a new Mac to see how all this stuff that's hard on Windows is now easy on the Mac.