Mac OS X is 3D. The frontmost app's windows are closer to you than all the other windows. All the background windows are stacked on each other and everything casts a shadow of the right depth.
The key is that it's not a trick. It's not a mock up made by an artist in Photoshop, or a black line drawn along the bottom and right side of a window as a faux-shadow. The interface is drawn using OpenGL and the huge NVIDIA or ATI graphics processor in every Mac. The shadows and textures are done in real-time.
It's not 3D like zooming around in a video game; it's 3D like a trophy case. It's tall and wide and deep and it has objects in it. It's not infinitely deep; it's only a few inches deep. So your display may be 14" wide and 10" tall and 3" deep. You end up thinking of your desktop as a glass box. If you could reach in you would expect your hand to find the Dock right up against the glass, and the desktop a ways back from that.
Look at a Mac OS X display carefully and you'll see that the desktop itself is way behind everything else (note the huge shadow that the menubar casts on the desktop). The windows on the display are shuffled up and down between the desktop and the glass of the display.
Non rectangular windows are done right in Mac OS X. Since the image you see on the display is composited in real-time, when an app shows a round window (or any shape), what's behind the app shows through because it really is behind. You don't have to do any tricks.
Audion is one Mac app that has had funky windows forever. On Mac OS X it is just way easier for the developer because the system takes care of compositing your app with other apps that are open.
Also, there were many themes for the old Mac OS that used weird window shapes.
There used to be a product called "Yellow Box for Windows NT" which was basically the Mac's Cocoa API on Windows. There's no reason why the Cocoa API can't also run on Linux or whatever system Apple wants to release it for.
I would love to see IBM do a "PC 2.0" with Linux and Cocoa for Linux and a bunch of Lotus software. Sell them 10 at a time as basic business desktops and when one fails you swap in another and the user just logs in and doesn't care that they just got a whole new system.
Microsoft is so burdened with their own crappy software and short-sighted design mistakes or complete lack of design. There is a Microsoft bubble that will burst at some point soon when CTO's and such finally see how much work they don't have to do if they get rid of Windows.
Talk to anyone who switched from Windows to Mac OS X in the past year or so and they are the most rabid Mac fanatics because all this crappy stuff just dropped away when they ditched MS Windows, like re-installs and viruses and incompatibilities. Now they boot from FireWire, don't ever have to enter network settings, and the stuff just runs and runs and runs without quitting.
Yeah, stop with the "eye candy". Just because you've only seen OS X in screenshots doesn't mean that its features stop there.
It's more about what's under the skin... the stuff that the regular user doesn't interact with except that it works.
FireWire is always there and always works. Bluetooth is fully-functional. Wi-Fi(g) is done and I'm sending this over a g network now. Rendezvous is zero-configuration networking... our network here just configured itself, including the printer that's on the base station appearing on all the Macs, and music and photos that are shared show up for browsing on all the other Macs and also our TiVo. Mac OS X doesn't crash. It moves between networks transparently, even between Ethernet and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The whole GUI and many apps are scriptable. The file system is Unicode and can hold $ and ? and * in filenames. Searching for something takes milliseconds, and you can fsck a 120GB disk in 10 seconds. You can turn any folder into a virtual disk file, with optional AES-128 encryption. There is a complete 32-bit audio subsystem and full MIDI routing. Consumer-level movie editing and DVD creation is built-in. I could go on and on and on.
The eye candy is the least of it. Bill Gates complained at WinHEC that Windows apps look like crap and asked developers to take advantage of the 3D video cards that are only used for gaming on the PC. On the Mac, our video cards work just as hard as every other part of the complete system, and things that look like eye candy come with no performance penalty. Steve Jobs says something like, "we've got a 64MB NVIDIA card in there that can do amazing things with OpenGL, so why not use it?"
Also, all Macs are dual display and have TV out. These features really work for you when you have them all there at once and they are easy to use and work every time.
Developers are exploiting this stuff in new ways and users are loving it. You are missing out on so much if you haven't at least given a Mac a test drive at an Apple Store.
Apple is all about value. Macs are easier to use, do more out of the box, cost less to own, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts because somebody actually designed what features your computer has as a complete system.
So when I hooked my PowerBook up to my Power Mac I benefited from the fact that they both have Gigabit Ethernet, even though I may not have known that I would want that later (I typically move about 20GB of data between the two once or twice a week). You can also hook two Macs up with FireWire and they just network themselves. These features are worth paying for.
Not to mention iLife, which exploits your DVD drive and FireWire ports and Wi-Fi and all the other new stuff that's in computers now.
You have to add so much stuff to a Dell to make it a shadow of a Mac... Dells are cheap but not valuable.
You are supposed to think of an actual panther (the big animal) fighting with a longhorn bull or whatever a longhorn is. Both codenames are animals.
The reason these features are important is that application developers build on them. I plugged a new printer into our AirPort base station today and it just appeared in the printer lists on all of our Macs with no configuration, thanks to Rendezvous (ZeroConf networking). Also, our TiVo looks on the network for iTunes music and iPhoto albums and shows them on the TV. The music and photos can be on any Mac and they just show up on the TiVo automatically.
Until MS Windows has Rendezvous, MS Windows users are going to have to configure that stuff for themselves. Apps are going to be stupider on Windows just because Windows is missing that one feature.
So if Mac OS is so far ahead of Windows right now, and Panther is coming late 2003, while Longhorn is 2005, then what kind of apps will we be running on the Mac until 2005? What improvements are making our lives easier and our work better and faster between now and 2005?
The tearing up is what Mac users are doing to Windows users right now and will do at a faster pace from now on. My Macs have all crashed once in the past two years. That kind of stuff is a huge advantage and as the gap gets wider the advantage grows.
Also, all pro Mac hardware for the past few years has shipped with Gigabit Ethernet, and all Macs since 1999 have AirPort (Wi-Fi). There is a lot of hardware out there for new versions of Mac OS to do interesting things with that Windows really can't expect to find in every machine. Making DVD's is old, old news on the Mac. Kids make DVD Video discs on iMacs and it's easy and the results are great.
If you look at past history, Apple has used a new G4 every year, and a new G3 every year.
The G4 in the original Power Mac G4 was a 7400, I believe. The G4 in the original PowerBook G4 was a 7410. There are also 7450's and a few others. The 7400 may have come only in 300, 400, 500 MHz, while the 7410 came in 500, 600, 700 MHz. The 7450 used less power than previous G4's and also had more Altivec units.
So it's not out of the question to see 970's this year and see 980's or whatever follows next year.
We're not talking about the 970 being the G5 and the 980 being the G6. The G5 moniker will cover the whole generation of chips, which in this case will be very much defined by 64-bitness. If it's a PowerPC desktop/notebook chip that's 64-bits, it will ship in G5 machines.
The brushed metal in OS X is drawn with OpenGL. It's a texture. In fact, the option that a developer selects to get the brushed metal look on their app is called "Textured Window".
My point is that it's not drawn pixel by pixel but just sort of a wrapper around an object.
Microsoft's eye candy is all kludged onto older stuff that was built without any forethought for the future. You have to turn it off to get back to what's practical for MS Windows.
Quartz is not as snappy yet as plain-bitmap interfaces (at least on my 2 year-old Power Mac and 1 year-old PowerBook) but it is doing things right. A lot of the stuff that looks like eye candy in screenshots is "real" stuff being drawn by the graphics adapter. So a drop shadow is a real drop shadow on a 3D object, not a picture of a drop shadow that's placed in such a way as to appear like the proper item.
VST system link is garbage. Read up on how it's supposed to work and it will amaze you that they built it. It's an end-run around the lack of clustering in MS Windows. Also, Steinberg are second only to Microsoft in making buggy software.
On the Mac side, Apple's Shake sends jobs out over the network using Rendezvous to find more compute power. Logic and Final Cut Pro will start doing this soon. This kind of stuff is easy to do right on Mac OS X.
You benefit especially in PowerBooks where you do these massive computations on a low-power CPU.
Altivec apps (off the top of my head): Pro Tools, Logic, Cubase, Performer, iTunes, Final Cut, Avid, iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, QuickTime, Mac OS X (Quartz, CoreAudio, Disk Copy, more), Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, FreeHand.
You have to run an Intel chip at 70 watts to get it to brute force these computations as fast as a 15 watt chip with Altivec. Get the picture?
On the Intel side, you guys pay zero attention to power management. Multiple fans in a big noisy box on the desktop, and stripped-down "mobile" CPU's in the notebooks that just don't perform. Put a PowerBook side by side with the best Intel notebook and the Intel stuff is a joke.
Altivec is much, much, much faster than you think it is.
If you're thinking of an Intel/AMD SIMD that gives you a 1% improvement then it would make sense to drop it from a next-gen chip that is 100% faster.
Altivec often gives double or more performance, though. Since the CPU-intensive Mac apps all use it, it makes sense to keep it in there and just make it faster, too.
Altivec is also exactly what you'd want if you are doing DSP and encryption and encoding MPEG. We do a lot of that on the Mac. All you have to do is make one DVD Video disc on a Mac and then do the same job on any Intel machine and you'll see the difference. What's encoded in an hour on the Mac will take 8 hours on the PC.
Many Mac users know and love Altivec because as our apps were updated to use it (a few years ago) we would see tremendous performance gains without burning holes in our laps. So one day you can run 30 effects in your Digital Audio Workstation and then you get a small update that includes Altivec-optimizations and now you can run 60 effects at once. You don't have to get out the meters and testing suites to see the benefit.
Altivec is used by hundreds of Mac apps. It is not there for marketing or benchmarks.
When an app is updated to use Altivec, you typically see double the performance. So you can run 40 effects in real-time and then you get the Altivec version of your app and you can run 80 effects in real-time.
Photoshop filters are the least of Altivec's uses. Encoding MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, encryption of any kind, Digital Signal Processing... these are what Altivec is used for.
Mac users are doing heavy audio, video, encoding... these are things that can be sped up dramatically by Altivec without having to build a great big chip power-hungry chip to brute force these calculations.
Slagging Altivec in favor of Intel just makes you look like an idiot. It shows you haven't seen it in action. There are jobs my PowerBook does faster than the biggest, hungriest P4 desktop with a CPU that takes 10x the power.
I mean, go into an Apple Store and see this stuff in action before you shoot your mouth off.
Motorola uses "G4" and "G5", but Apple doesn't have to mimic that with its own "G4" and "G5". This is the Mac equivalent to "P3", and "P4"... as a user you know that you are moving up a generation.
The Motorola G5 is a much smaller and lower-power chip than it was originally going to be. As a result, Apple obviously asked IBM to make a next-generation PowerPC to be the heart of their G5 computers.
The G designations are just code-names, or marketing names. The Power Mac G4 has had a number of different CPU models, same with the PowerBook G4. The full model numbers (7500, etc) are only of interest to hardware geeks.
Motorola's G5 is smaller and lower-power than it was originally going to be. IBM has basically taken over making Mac CPU's over the past few years. They make G3's and G4's and the PowerPC 970 is going to be Apple's G5.
> The Win95 shell imitates NeXTStep in its appearance > far more than it does MacOS, and its behavior is > Motif-like. (Or vice-versa depending on who you ask.)
Yeah, but NeXTSTEP (1989) also imitates Mac OS (1984).
Files as little pages, directories as folders, drag-and-drop, icons, overlapping windows, self-contained applications, a trash to drop things you don't want anymore, a pervasive menu you drill down in to get at stuff. These are all Mac things and were mostly invented at Apple for Lisa and Macintosh.
As of 10.2.6, if you don't have IE on your system (because you trashed it), then Safari creates an alias of itself named "Internet Explorer" in the Applications folder. Some ISP software just runs "Internet Explorer" rather than going through the system to get the default browser.
It's like IE can't ever really die. It's like a stink you can't get off all the way.
Anyone who has an iPod knows that there have been numerous firmware updates for them. You might not notice because Mac OS X's Software Update downloads the iTunes update and then iTunes updates the iPod the next time they sync. It's very easy.
The first and second generation iPods are now at firmware 1.3, which added MP4/AAC support.
The third generation iPod is at 2.0. Yes, you can now make a playlist on your iPod if you buy a new one.
iPod has always been paired with iTunes. It is so easy to make a bajillion playlists in iTunes that I never even thought of making one on the iPod before. You can make a smart playlist in iTunes and tell it "just songs from 1969 that are Blues and less than 10 minutes" and a 200 song playlist is made for you instantly and it is self-updating.
The on-the-go playist is cool in the new iPod, but it is not the kind of feature that will have older iPod users complaining. We've been carrying around iPods for a year now. We have nothing to complain about.
USB doesn't have as much power as FireWire. The power in FireWire was meant specifically to power high-speed storage devices and cameras and media converters. USB power is for keyboards and mouses and it's quite a bit less.
USB (even 2.0) doesn't have enough power to charge the iPod. It could probably power an iPod-type hard disk, but not also charge a Lithium-Polymer battery that takes a 12-hour charge in about an hour.
What a USB 2.0 MS Windows user does with the new iPod is plug the USB into their computer and plug the FireWire into the little FireWire-AC adapter that comes with the iPod. Even though it looks like the iPod Windows dock has both USB and FireWire what it really ends up being is USB and AC once you attach the little FireWire-AC apapter block. If you see one of these it is obvious.
One nice thing with iPod power is the $39 travel kit. It's like a bunch of new heads for the iPod power adapter that enables you to plug it in almost anywhere in the world. You pop off the current head and put on "Australia" and you're ready to charge and use your iPod in Australia. It's very smart design using really basic parts to make something very simple and small that works wonders.
Man, that's lame. You explain that the Creative 1394 is not standard and even note the "SB1394" label instead of "IEEE 1394" and you think that the fact that iPod doesn't want to work well with it is the iPod's fault in even a small way?
FireWire is such old news at Apple. I have a March 1999 PowerMac here with FireWire on it. I have a 1999 digital camcorder with FireWire on it.
Me and about 10 of my friends have iPods and Macs and we are united in how absolutely problem-free the whole thing is. Macs don't even crash anymore, never mind not being able to hook up to a FireWire network. The idea of a non-functioning FireWire port is... I have never seen or used one and I have at least 20 FireWire devices here in the room with me right now and have been using this stuff constantly for four years.
Your problem is Creative and Microsoft's culture of low, low quality and good enough to last six months attitude.
Apple's Music Service is also AOL's new music service. AOL is owned by one of the big 5 record companies that are part of the Apple Music service.
A Wal-Mart subset of the iTunes Music Store will be in the next AOL client.
Please don't say "death" and "Apple" in the same sentence unless it is something that actually has happened and is a fact. I mean, we've heard it all before.
Also, the service is already successful. They sold more songs in the first day than all the other paid download services ever built COMBINED. That was just halfway through the first day, actually. And the new 3rd generation iPod sold 250,000 pre-orders in the four days between announcement and release date.
The numbers on Apple's stuff here are music business size numbers, not dot-com size numbers like all the other stuff out there.
There are only three (3) important music playback formats so far. MP4, MP3, and CDDA audio tracks. All the rest are a way, way, way distant fourth and really don't matter in 2003. This is speaking not from the perspective of someone who makes music players or hardware, but from the perspective of someone who makes music albums, so please consider humility if this isn't how Microsoft or Real or Creative explained music to you. The people who make the music are one step before the people who make the players in this process, because ultimately, what comes out of the tools we use to make music is MP4, MP3, and CDDA, just like iDVD spits out DVD Video discs. Step 2, you want a player to play them.
(You will probably also want an MP4 and MP3 encoder for CDDA that you already own, but that is optional.)
1) AAC audio track (2002 - present)
- a.k.a. "MP4" or "MPEG-4" or "MPEG-4 Audio" or "DVD Audio"
- 16-bit 44.1kHz stereo
- lossy-compressed with Dolby AAC encoding
- 128kbs is agreed to be "CD quality"
- all MPEG-4 players respect the OPTIONAL "protected" flag which is set at encoding time and then not unset by players (you might think of unprotected MP4's as "files" and protected MP4's as "streams")
2) MP3 audio track (1990's - present)
- a.k.a. "MPEG-2 Audio Layer 3", "MP3 CD"
- 16-bit 44.1kHz stereo
- lossy-compressed with Fraunhofer MP3 encoding
- 160kbs is agreed to be "CD quality"
3) CDDA audio track (1980's - present)
- early 1980's to present
- a.k.a. "audio CD", "CD-DA", "Compact Disk Digital Audio", "AIFF"
- 16-bit 44.1kHz stereo
- uncompressed
- the 20Hz to 20kHz frequency range, 90dB dynamic range and low noise defines "CD quality"
THAT IS ALL. The others are superfluous. If you have MP4 in addition to MP3 in addition to CDDA in 2003 then that is like having vinyl, Compact Cassette and 8-track Cassette in your livingroom in 1982.
The only solution that is up-to-date with all of this is Apple's Macs and iPods. In pro audio we work with 24-bit and 32-bit depths and super high sample rates and the Mac plays those because it's built for audio people. It makes sense Apple would have the playback stuff ready for MP4, MP3, CDDA before anyone else.
The other audio formats you see out there exist not for technical reasons but instead for Licensing, Marketing, DRM, Legacy, or Future.
Windows Media = Licensing, Marketing, DRM, legacy Real = Licensing, Marketing, DRM, legacy Ogg = Licensing, Marketing NVF = DRM
Recording at 48kHz = DRM
Playing 48kHz, 22kHz, 11kHz = Legacy Playing 4-bit, 8-bit, 20-bit = Legacy
Playing 24-bit = Future Playing 96kHz = Future Play 5.1 or 7.1 Surround = Future
You know what's funny is that I was shocked to read above that a top guy at Creative wouldn't know what is up with MPEG-4 and especially AAC, and not even know that everything Apple (Mac OS X, QuickTime, all Mac apps, iPod, iTunes) are all fully MPEG-4 and AAC.
Then the next question the Creative guy goes to is about 48kHz sample rates! The CEO of Creative wants you to use Windows Media and he doesn't even realize that 48kHz is itself like the Windows Media format of the 1980's.
The 48kHz sample rate was chosen by the RIAA for "consumer" digital audio recording (DAT, MiniDisc, Hi8) so as to make it harder to make CD's from those recordings.
The small increase in quality you get by sampling at 48kHz instead of 44.1kHz does not pay for the HUGE decrease in audio quality you get by a Sample Rate Reduction from 48kHz to 44.1kHz. It's more destructive than converting to analog and then back to digital with good converters.
To still be talking 48kHz in 2003 is abysmal. The next rate that's useful above 44.1 is 96kHz, which is high up enough and done at 24-bit or 32-bit and gains you so much quality that you can then come down to 44.1 right at the end and you're better than if you stayed there through the whole process.
Creative's stuff is sub-par. It's good PC gear but it's not good audio gear. iPod is both good PC gear and good audio gear.
In short, iPod and Apple are MUSICAL ALREADY. Creative are not as creative as Apple.
I think they mean that these benchmarks are really for PC users. If you are about to buy a new P4 and do MS Windows all over again then they are saying to you "wait a tick and see how the G5 looks first". There is a widespread feeling in the Mac community that the G5 will be something special because it will be from top-to-bottom all New Apple (post NeXT purchase). There won't be anything at all left from the pre-1997 Mac, basically, that hasn't been completely rebuilt (OS, form factors) or replaced (ADB with USB, A/V with FireWire, CRT with LCD). Also, there is a feeling that IBM made the PowerPC 970 just for Steve and Avi and John, so whatever they wrap around it will take really good advantage of it, and basically blow the doors off Wintel for all you guys who are still stuck with 1990's-era computer systems. The idea is that if you bristled reading the previous sentence they hope to show you that it is really true, with 64-bits and system design that goes from the tiniest hardware element all the way to single pixels on the 3D alpha-composited display.
If you are a Mac user you probably don't care about bar graph benchmarks. I am one and I don't. I just buy a new Mac every three years when my AppleCare is up and sell the old one for half what I paid for it originally and just laugh and laugh.
Mac users are more interested in feature lists like Rendezvous (zero conf networking), FireWire (hook up lots of disks and cameras real fast and easy), CoreAudio (flexibly utilize pro audio interfaces, applications, effects, and instruments simultaneously in real-time), CoreMIDI (route MIDI performance data between applications in real-time), SuperDrive (read and write CD and DVD), Unicode typography throughout, one-crash-per-year stability, etc. And of course I want it in an enclosure that is 50% of the volume of the last one, too.
Bar graphs of a particular render or a particular step or action are fairly useless in creative work. You get a better idea by just using the machine you plan to purchase for 20 minutes at an Apple Store or similar dealer. As long as it has all the necessary features (some noted above) and it feels good then you are set. Apple's Photoshop shoot-outs are not so bad because they run numerous day-long scripts on Photoshop on both platforms. These are scripts that it literally takes an artist all day to record in Photoshop, and you can play them back as fast as the machine can manage, so if you play back 20 scripts on both machines and one is consistently faster then that might be interesting. Not enough to make me ignore how much I don't want to run Windows, though. It's not worth if for so many reasons, not the least of which is the dearth of good creative software on MS Windows.
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Mac OS X is 3D. The frontmost app's windows are closer to you than all the other windows. All the background windows are stacked on each other and everything casts a shadow of the right depth.
The key is that it's not a trick. It's not a mock up made by an artist in Photoshop, or a black line drawn along the bottom and right side of a window as a faux-shadow. The interface is drawn using OpenGL and the huge NVIDIA or ATI graphics processor in every Mac. The shadows and textures are done in real-time.
It's not 3D like zooming around in a video game; it's 3D like a trophy case. It's tall and wide and deep and it has objects in it. It's not infinitely deep; it's only a few inches deep. So your display may be 14" wide and 10" tall and 3" deep. You end up thinking of your desktop as a glass box. If you could reach in you would expect your hand to find the Dock right up against the glass, and the desktop a ways back from that.
Look at a Mac OS X display carefully and you'll see that the desktop itself is way behind everything else (note the huge shadow that the menubar casts on the desktop). The windows on the display are shuffled up and down between the desktop and the glass of the display.
Non rectangular windows are done right in Mac OS X. Since the image you see on the display is composited in real-time, when an app shows a round window (or any shape), what's behind the app shows through because it really is behind. You don't have to do any tricks.
Audion is one Mac app that has had funky windows forever. On Mac OS X it is just way easier for the developer because the system takes care of compositing your app with other apps that are open.
Also, there were many themes for the old Mac OS that used weird window shapes.
There used to be a product called "Yellow Box for Windows NT" which was basically the Mac's Cocoa API on Windows. There's no reason why the Cocoa API can't also run on Linux or whatever system Apple wants to release it for.
I would love to see IBM do a "PC 2.0" with Linux and Cocoa for Linux and a bunch of Lotus software. Sell them 10 at a time as basic business desktops and when one fails you swap in another and the user just logs in and doesn't care that they just got a whole new system.
Microsoft is so burdened with their own crappy software and short-sighted design mistakes or complete lack of design. There is a Microsoft bubble that will burst at some point soon when CTO's and such finally see how much work they don't have to do if they get rid of Windows.
Talk to anyone who switched from Windows to Mac OS X in the past year or so and they are the most rabid Mac fanatics because all this crappy stuff just dropped away when they ditched MS Windows, like re-installs and viruses and incompatibilities. Now they boot from FireWire, don't ever have to enter network settings, and the stuff just runs and runs and runs without quitting.
Yeah, stop with the "eye candy". Just because you've only seen OS X in screenshots doesn't mean that its features stop there.
... the stuff that the regular user doesn't interact with except that it works.
... our network here just configured itself, including the printer that's on the base station appearing on all the Macs, and music and photos that are shared show up for browsing on all the other Macs and also our TiVo. Mac OS X doesn't crash. It moves between networks transparently, even between Ethernet and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The whole GUI and many apps are scriptable. The file system is Unicode and can hold $ and ? and * in filenames. Searching for something takes milliseconds, and you can fsck a 120GB disk in 10 seconds. You can turn any folder into a virtual disk file, with optional AES-128 encryption. There is a complete 32-bit audio subsystem and full MIDI routing. Consumer-level movie editing and DVD creation is built-in. I could go on and on and on.
It's more about what's under the skin
FireWire is always there and always works. Bluetooth is fully-functional. Wi-Fi(g) is done and I'm sending this over a g network now. Rendezvous is zero-configuration networking
The eye candy is the least of it. Bill Gates complained at WinHEC that Windows apps look like crap and asked developers to take advantage of the 3D video cards that are only used for gaming on the PC. On the Mac, our video cards work just as hard as every other part of the complete system, and things that look like eye candy come with no performance penalty. Steve Jobs says something like, "we've got a 64MB NVIDIA card in there that can do amazing things with OpenGL, so why not use it?"
Also, all Macs are dual display and have TV out. These features really work for you when you have them all there at once and they are easy to use and work every time.
Developers are exploiting this stuff in new ways and users are loving it. You are missing out on so much if you haven't at least given a Mac a test drive at an Apple Store.
Apple is all about value. Macs are easier to use, do more out of the box, cost less to own, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts because somebody actually designed what features your computer has as a complete system.
... Dells are cheap but not valuable.
So when I hooked my PowerBook up to my Power Mac I benefited from the fact that they both have Gigabit Ethernet, even though I may not have known that I would want that later (I typically move about 20GB of data between the two once or twice a week). You can also hook two Macs up with FireWire and they just network themselves. These features are worth paying for.
Not to mention iLife, which exploits your DVD drive and FireWire ports and Wi-Fi and all the other new stuff that's in computers now.
You have to add so much stuff to a Dell to make it a shadow of a Mac
You are supposed to think of an actual panther (the big animal) fighting with a longhorn bull or whatever a longhorn is. Both codenames are animals.
The reason these features are important is that application developers build on them. I plugged a new printer into our AirPort base station today and it just appeared in the printer lists on all of our Macs with no configuration, thanks to Rendezvous (ZeroConf networking). Also, our TiVo looks on the network for iTunes music and iPhoto albums and shows them on the TV. The music and photos can be on any Mac and they just show up on the TiVo automatically.
Until MS Windows has Rendezvous, MS Windows users are going to have to configure that stuff for themselves. Apps are going to be stupider on Windows just because Windows is missing that one feature.
So if Mac OS is so far ahead of Windows right now, and Panther is coming late 2003, while Longhorn is 2005, then what kind of apps will we be running on the Mac until 2005? What improvements are making our lives easier and our work better and faster between now and 2005?
The tearing up is what Mac users are doing to Windows users right now and will do at a faster pace from now on. My Macs have all crashed once in the past two years. That kind of stuff is a huge advantage and as the gap gets wider the advantage grows.
Also, all pro Mac hardware for the past few years has shipped with Gigabit Ethernet, and all Macs since 1999 have AirPort (Wi-Fi). There is a lot of hardware out there for new versions of Mac OS to do interesting things with that Windows really can't expect to find in every machine. Making DVD's is old, old news on the Mac. Kids make DVD Video discs on iMacs and it's easy and the results are great.
If you look at past history, Apple has used a new G4 every year, and a new G3 every year.
The G4 in the original Power Mac G4 was a 7400, I believe. The G4 in the original PowerBook G4 was a 7410. There are also 7450's and a few others. The 7400 may have come only in 300, 400, 500 MHz, while the 7410 came in 500, 600, 700 MHz. The 7450 used less power than previous G4's and also had more Altivec units.
So it's not out of the question to see 970's this year and see 980's or whatever follows next year.
We're not talking about the 970 being the G5 and the 980 being the G6. The G5 moniker will cover the whole generation of chips, which in this case will be very much defined by 64-bitness. If it's a PowerPC desktop/notebook chip that's 64-bits, it will ship in G5 machines.
The brushed metal in OS X is drawn with OpenGL. It's a texture. In fact, the option that a developer selects to get the brushed metal look on their app is called "Textured Window".
My point is that it's not drawn pixel by pixel but just sort of a wrapper around an object.
Microsoft's eye candy is all kludged onto older stuff that was built without any forethought for the future. You have to turn it off to get back to what's practical for MS Windows.
Quartz is not as snappy yet as plain-bitmap interfaces (at least on my 2 year-old Power Mac and 1 year-old PowerBook) but it is doing things right. A lot of the stuff that looks like eye candy in screenshots is "real" stuff being drawn by the graphics adapter. So a drop shadow is a real drop shadow on a 3D object, not a picture of a drop shadow that's placed in such a way as to appear like the proper item.
VST system link is garbage. Read up on how it's supposed to work and it will amaze you that they built it. It's an end-run around the lack of clustering in MS Windows. Also, Steinberg are second only to Microsoft in making buggy software.
On the Mac side, Apple's Shake sends jobs out over the network using Rendezvous to find more compute power. Logic and Final Cut Pro will start doing this soon. This kind of stuff is easy to do right on Mac OS X.
A HUGE number of Mac apps use Altivec.
You benefit especially in PowerBooks where you do these massive computations on a low-power CPU.
Altivec apps (off the top of my head): Pro Tools, Logic, Cubase, Performer, iTunes, Final Cut, Avid, iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, QuickTime, Mac OS X (Quartz, CoreAudio, Disk Copy, more), Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, FreeHand.
You have to run an Intel chip at 70 watts to get it to brute force these computations as fast as a 15 watt chip with Altivec. Get the picture?
On the Intel side, you guys pay zero attention to power management. Multiple fans in a big noisy box on the desktop, and stripped-down "mobile" CPU's in the notebooks that just don't perform. Put a PowerBook side by side with the best Intel notebook and the Intel stuff is a joke.
Altivec is much, much, much faster than you think it is.
If you're thinking of an Intel/AMD SIMD that gives you a 1% improvement then it would make sense to drop it from a next-gen chip that is 100% faster.
Altivec often gives double or more performance, though. Since the CPU-intensive Mac apps all use it, it makes sense to keep it in there and just make it faster, too.
Altivec is also exactly what you'd want if you are doing DSP and encryption and encoding MPEG. We do a lot of that on the Mac. All you have to do is make one DVD Video disc on a Mac and then do the same job on any Intel machine and you'll see the difference. What's encoded in an hour on the Mac will take 8 hours on the PC.
Many Mac users know and love Altivec because as our apps were updated to use it (a few years ago) we would see tremendous performance gains without burning holes in our laps. So one day you can run 30 effects in your Digital Audio Workstation and then you get a small update that includes Altivec-optimizations and now you can run 60 effects at once. You don't have to get out the meters and testing suites to see the benefit.
Altivec is used by hundreds of Mac apps. It is not there for marketing or benchmarks.
... these are what Altivec is used for.
... these are things that can be sped up dramatically by Altivec without having to build a great big chip power-hungry chip to brute force these calculations.
When an app is updated to use Altivec, you typically see double the performance. So you can run 40 effects in real-time and then you get the Altivec version of your app and you can run 80 effects in real-time.
Photoshop filters are the least of Altivec's uses. Encoding MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, encryption of any kind, Digital Signal Processing
Mac users are doing heavy audio, video, encoding
Slagging Altivec in favor of Intel just makes you look like an idiot. It shows you haven't seen it in action. There are jobs my PowerBook does faster than the biggest, hungriest P4 desktop with a CPU that takes 10x the power.
I mean, go into an Apple Store and see this stuff in action before you shoot your mouth off.
Motorola uses "G4" and "G5", but Apple doesn't have to mimic that with its own "G4" and "G5". This is the Mac equivalent to "P3", and "P4" ... as a user you know that you are moving up a generation.
The Motorola G5 is a much smaller and lower-power chip than it was originally going to be. As a result, Apple obviously asked IBM to make a next-generation PowerPC to be the heart of their G5 computers.
The G designations are just code-names, or marketing names. The Power Mac G4 has had a number of different CPU models, same with the PowerBook G4. The full model numbers (7500, etc) are only of interest to hardware geeks.
Motorola's G5 is smaller and lower-power than it was originally going to be. IBM has basically taken over making Mac CPU's over the past few years. They make G3's and G4's and the PowerPC 970 is going to be Apple's G5.
> The Win95 shell imitates NeXTStep in its appearance
> far more than it does MacOS, and its behavior is
> Motif-like. (Or vice-versa depending on who you ask.)
Yeah, but NeXTSTEP (1989) also imitates Mac OS (1984).
Files as little pages, directories as folders, drag-and-drop, icons, overlapping windows, self-contained applications, a trash to drop things you don't want anymore, a pervasive menu you drill down in to get at stuff. These are all Mac things and were mostly invented at Apple for Lisa and Macintosh.
As of 10.2.6, if you don't have IE on your system (because you trashed it), then Safari creates an alias of itself named "Internet Explorer" in the Applications folder. Some ISP software just runs "Internet Explorer" rather than going through the system to get the default browser.
It's like IE can't ever really die. It's like a stink you can't get off all the way.
Anyone who has an iPod knows that there have been numerous firmware updates for them. You might not notice because Mac OS X's Software Update downloads the iTunes update and then iTunes updates the iPod the next time they sync. It's very easy.
The first and second generation iPods are now at firmware 1.3, which added MP4/AAC support.
The third generation iPod is at 2.0. Yes, you can now make a playlist on your iPod if you buy a new one.
iPod has always been paired with iTunes. It is so easy to make a bajillion playlists in iTunes that I never even thought of making one on the iPod before. You can make a smart playlist in iTunes and tell it "just songs from 1969 that are Blues and less than 10 minutes" and a 200 song playlist is made for you instantly and it is self-updating.
The on-the-go playist is cool in the new iPod, but it is not the kind of feature that will have older iPod users complaining. We've been carrying around iPods for a year now. We have nothing to complain about.
USB doesn't have as much power as FireWire. The power in FireWire was meant specifically to power high-speed storage devices and cameras and media converters. USB power is for keyboards and mouses and it's quite a bit less.
USB (even 2.0) doesn't have enough power to charge the iPod. It could probably power an iPod-type hard disk, but not also charge a Lithium-Polymer battery that takes a 12-hour charge in about an hour.
What a USB 2.0 MS Windows user does with the new iPod is plug the USB into their computer and plug the FireWire into the little FireWire-AC adapter that comes with the iPod. Even though it looks like the iPod Windows dock has both USB and FireWire what it really ends up being is USB and AC once you attach the little FireWire-AC apapter block. If you see one of these it is obvious.
One nice thing with iPod power is the $39 travel kit. It's like a bunch of new heads for the iPod power adapter that enables you to plug it in almost anywhere in the world. You pop off the current head and put on "Australia" and you're ready to charge and use your iPod in Australia. It's very smart design using really basic parts to make something very simple and small that works wonders.
Man, that's lame. You explain that the Creative 1394 is not standard and even note the "SB1394" label instead of "IEEE 1394" and you think that the fact that iPod doesn't want to work well with it is the iPod's fault in even a small way?
... I have never seen or used one and I have at least 20 FireWire devices here in the room with me right now and have been using this stuff constantly for four years.
FireWire is such old news at Apple. I have a March 1999 PowerMac here with FireWire on it. I have a 1999 digital camcorder with FireWire on it.
Me and about 10 of my friends have iPods and Macs and we are united in how absolutely problem-free the whole thing is. Macs don't even crash anymore, never mind not being able to hook up to a FireWire network. The idea of a non-functioning FireWire port is
Your problem is Creative and Microsoft's culture of low, low quality and good enough to last six months attitude.
That's not actually MPEG-4.
It's Microsoft-brand MPEG-4.
The whole Mac and iPod platforms are real, unadulterated MPEG-4.
You are throwing away money on an Archos. You're better with a CD/MP3 CD discman and saving for an iPod.
History of music formats:
old analog friends:
- vinyl
- compact cassette
- 8-track cassette
digital:
- CDDA (audio CD)
- MP3
- AAC
Note that the iPod plays all 3 important digital formats and that iTunes also converts your current CDDA into both MP3 and MP4 at all bitrates.
There is no complete solution other than iPod right now.
Apple's Music Service is also AOL's new music service. AOL is owned by one of the big 5 record companies that are part of the Apple Music service.
A Wal-Mart subset of the iTunes Music Store will be in the next AOL client.
Please don't say "death" and "Apple" in the same sentence unless it is something that actually has happened and is a fact. I mean, we've heard it all before.
Also, the service is already successful. They sold more songs in the first day than all the other paid download services ever built COMBINED. That was just halfway through the first day, actually. And the new 3rd generation iPod sold 250,000 pre-orders in the four days between announcement and release date.
The numbers on Apple's stuff here are music business size numbers, not dot-com size numbers like all the other stuff out there.
There are only three (3) important music playback formats so far. MP4, MP3, and CDDA audio tracks. All the rest are a way, way, way distant fourth and really don't matter in 2003. This is speaking not from the perspective of someone who makes music players or hardware, but from the perspective of someone who makes music albums, so please consider humility if this isn't how Microsoft or Real or Creative explained music to you. The people who make the music are one step before the people who make the players in this process, because ultimately, what comes out of the tools we use to make music is MP4, MP3, and CDDA, just like iDVD spits out DVD Video discs. Step 2, you want a player to play them.
(You will probably also want an MP4 and MP3 encoder for CDDA that you already own, but that is optional.)
1) AAC audio track (2002 - present)
- a.k.a. "MP4" or "MPEG-4" or "MPEG-4 Audio" or "DVD Audio"
- 16-bit 44.1kHz stereo
- lossy-compressed with Dolby AAC encoding
- 128kbs is agreed to be "CD quality"
- all MPEG-4 players respect the OPTIONAL "protected" flag which is set at encoding time and then not unset by players (you might think of unprotected MP4's as "files" and protected MP4's as "streams")
2) MP3 audio track (1990's - present)
- a.k.a. "MPEG-2 Audio Layer 3", "MP3 CD"
- 16-bit 44.1kHz stereo
- lossy-compressed with Fraunhofer MP3 encoding
- 160kbs is agreed to be "CD quality"
3) CDDA audio track (1980's - present)
- early 1980's to present
- a.k.a. "audio CD", "CD-DA", "Compact Disk Digital Audio", "AIFF"
- 16-bit 44.1kHz stereo
- uncompressed
- the 20Hz to 20kHz frequency range, 90dB dynamic range and low noise defines "CD quality"
THAT IS ALL. The others are superfluous. If you have MP4 in addition to MP3 in addition to CDDA in 2003 then that is like having vinyl, Compact Cassette and 8-track Cassette in your livingroom in 1982.
The only solution that is up-to-date with all of this is Apple's Macs and iPods. In pro audio we work with 24-bit and 32-bit depths and super high sample rates and the Mac plays those because it's built for audio people. It makes sense Apple would have the playback stuff ready for MP4, MP3, CDDA before anyone else.
The other audio formats you see out there exist not for technical reasons but instead for Licensing, Marketing, DRM, Legacy, or Future.
Windows Media = Licensing, Marketing, DRM, legacy
Real = Licensing, Marketing, DRM, legacy
Ogg = Licensing, Marketing
NVF = DRM
Recording at 48kHz = DRM
Playing 48kHz, 22kHz, 11kHz = Legacy
Playing 4-bit, 8-bit, 20-bit = Legacy
Playing 24-bit = Future
Playing 96kHz = Future
Play 5.1 or 7.1 Surround = Future
You know what's funny is that I was shocked to read above that a top guy at Creative wouldn't know what is up with MPEG-4 and especially AAC, and not even know that everything Apple (Mac OS X, QuickTime, all Mac apps, iPod, iTunes) are all fully MPEG-4 and AAC.
Then the next question the Creative guy goes to is about 48kHz sample rates! The CEO of Creative wants you to use Windows Media and he doesn't even realize that 48kHz is itself like the Windows Media format of the 1980's.
The 48kHz sample rate was chosen by the RIAA for "consumer" digital audio recording (DAT, MiniDisc, Hi8) so as to make it harder to make CD's from those recordings.
The small increase in quality you get by sampling at 48kHz instead of 44.1kHz does not pay for the HUGE decrease in audio quality you get by a Sample Rate Reduction from 48kHz to 44.1kHz. It's more destructive than converting to analog and then back to digital with good converters.
To still be talking 48kHz in 2003 is abysmal. The next rate that's useful above 44.1 is 96kHz, which is high up enough and done at 24-bit or 32-bit and gains you so much quality that you can then come down to 44.1 right at the end and you're better than if you stayed there through the whole process.
Creative's stuff is sub-par. It's good PC gear but it's not good audio gear. iPod is both good PC gear and good audio gear.
In short, iPod and Apple are MUSICAL ALREADY. Creative are not as creative as Apple.
I think they mean that these benchmarks are really for PC users. If you are about to buy a new P4 and do MS Windows all over again then they are saying to you "wait a tick and see how the G5 looks first". There is a widespread feeling in the Mac community that the G5 will be something special because it will be from top-to-bottom all New Apple (post NeXT purchase). There won't be anything at all left from the pre-1997 Mac, basically, that hasn't been completely rebuilt (OS, form factors) or replaced (ADB with USB, A/V with FireWire, CRT with LCD). Also, there is a feeling that IBM made the PowerPC 970 just for Steve and Avi and John, so whatever they wrap around it will take really good advantage of it, and basically blow the doors off Wintel for all you guys who are still stuck with 1990's-era computer systems. The idea is that if you bristled reading the previous sentence they hope to show you that it is really true, with 64-bits and system design that goes from the tiniest hardware element all the way to single pixels on the 3D alpha-composited display.
If you are a Mac user you probably don't care about bar graph benchmarks. I am one and I don't. I just buy a new Mac every three years when my AppleCare is up and sell the old one for half what I paid for it originally and just laugh and laugh.
Mac users are more interested in feature lists like Rendezvous (zero conf networking), FireWire (hook up lots of disks and cameras real fast and easy), CoreAudio (flexibly utilize pro audio interfaces, applications, effects, and instruments simultaneously in real-time), CoreMIDI (route MIDI performance data between applications in real-time), SuperDrive (read and write CD and DVD), Unicode typography throughout, one-crash-per-year stability, etc. And of course I want it in an enclosure that is 50% of the volume of the last one, too.
Bar graphs of a particular render or a particular step or action are fairly useless in creative work. You get a better idea by just using the machine you plan to purchase for 20 minutes at an Apple Store or similar dealer. As long as it has all the necessary features (some noted above) and it feels good then you are set. Apple's Photoshop shoot-outs are not so bad because they run numerous day-long scripts on Photoshop on both platforms. These are scripts that it literally takes an artist all day to record in Photoshop, and you can play them back as fast as the machine can manage, so if you play back 20 scripts on both machines and one is consistently faster then that might be interesting. Not enough to make me ignore how much I don't want to run Windows, though. It's not worth if for so many reasons, not the least of which is the dearth of good creative software on MS Windows.