All FireWire Macs have target mode except the Power Mac G3. I'm sure the Xserve is no exception.
FireWire is not just for hard drives... in fact, that's the least of it. DV travels over FireWire, and pro audio and MIDI streams are starting to now. These servers won't just be for the Web and workgroups, but also a big part of Apple's new MPEG-4 solution. They know multimedia.
Storage is huge for Apple's current customers. Just me working alone on one Power Mac workstation, I can easily create 10GB of data in one day of work. That's why Power Macs and PowerBooks have Gigabit Ethernet standard, and why FireWire (add lots of hard disks easily) and SuperDrive (burn 4.2GB of data to a single cheap disc in a short time) are so important. I have a 50GB disk in my PowerBook and it is always full... I have FireWire drives lying around here like I used to have floppy disks.
I think the decision to go with ATA100 and one controller per drive is brilliant. I know my next RAID will be one of Apple's... no doubt. I am already using Western Digital 120GB ATA drives in my current (FireWire) RAID because I can get them for $160 each, and I would be happy to be able to put 14 in a 3u box next to a 1u PowerMac and take it with me. Great.
> The Altivec unit is nice for vectorizable single-precision operations, but this is > a _VERY_ limited subset of code in general.
That happens to include audio and video processing and encoding, 3D rendering, biotech computing, encryption, and other very hip tasks for which people want more computational power these days. And yes, Apple's customers do this on servers (eg. a Web server that creates graphical maps from a database, encodes live audio or video and streams it, or processes a master movie file into lower bitrate versions for certain clients, etc.) Will Altivec speed up Microsoft Word? No. Does it need speeding up on today's machines? Not usually. But Altivec is heavily used by apps that run on PPC and need juice and it shouldn't be discounted like it's Intel's MME or something. People who know Altivec love Altivec, let's put it that way.
I have to mention that even though a high number of the first generation of AirPort Base Stations failed after 13-15 months of use due to a bad capacitor in some component, even thought they were then out of warranty, Apple replaced them with no questions asked. I got a new one the next day after I called about mine dying after 14 months. We were literally only on wired connection for less than 24 hours.
Also, I used to have a PowerBook 190, whose case had a tendency to crack at the hinge, and Apple extended the warranty on those to 7 years. I got mine fixed after five years for free and it was as good as new. The 5300 is the other "crappy" PowerBook model, and it also got a 7 year warranty extension. Every year or so Apple also offers 190 and 5300 owners $500 off a new PowerBook if they trade in their old one.
My point is that Apple's reputation for reliability is not necessarily tarnished by certain failing models if they did something about it afterwards to make it right.
> an x86/Linux file server is all about maximizing TCO.
Spoken like a guy who is a full-time Linux admin. If you also factor in the cost-savings not having to hire a full-time Linux admin, then the TCO is much, much lower on the Xserve. The fact is that hardware for hardware, the Xserve is pretty competitive, but when you compare the additional support you'll need with Linux, or the additional cost and support you'd need with Windows, then Apple's got a great product here.
You have to understand that Apple can build things that plug in and just work. Now that Mac OS X is getting the same kind of auto-configuring networking that Macs have always had (except now it's over IP networks using industry standards), people are going to be plugging 10 Xserves together and they will suddenly have render farms, server farms, and really high-level interoperability and lots of great software that really knows its hardware, without compiling anything. The key is that if you have a support person who can work at the UNIX level, they can go ahead and do that, too, but you don't have to have that.
> but education? i would need to see the TCO numbers to buy into that one.
All Apple and many Mac users have been saying for years is "TCO, TCO, TCO!". It's always lower on the Mac. You pay Apple once and you get a system that can do three years easy and still have legs after that, because the software doesn't break, fall out of license, or whatever else. I have a three year old Power Mac here... you run Software Update and it updates itself to the most current version of its OS and included applications (browser, iTunes, etc.). It's painless to keep that machine running day-to-day. Nobody ever had to install an OS on it, or decide if they were going to use telnet or ssh or whatever. It does a certain job and it keeps on doing it.
Also, don't ignore the fact that Apple has great software on these things, too. With Remote Desktop, there is a Classroom tab where the teacher can look at any students desktop on their own desktop while they are all working... QuickTime Streaming Server is included and no per-stream tax... it can run UNIX, Java2, Carbon, Cocoa, and even Classic apps (basically, everything but Microsoft)... Apache starts with one button click, and so much more. So your x86 Linux has to have somebody setting up the equivalent software for x86 Linux, if that even exists in each case.
As time goes by, Apple will make all this stuff even easier, with apps for clustering and whatever else. They can build stuff in Cocoa that looks like a Mac app, acts like a Mac app, is as easy to use as a Mac app, yet leverages UNIX and Java2 tools that already exist. For example, when you run Mac OS X's Disk Utility and Verify a disk, it runs fsck for you. Apple is putting a good GUI on all of the server stuff now, using the best GUI tools in the business on their object-oriented, modern OS. It's what everybody thought Microsoft was going to do a few years ago, but Microsoft was not up to the task for a variety of reasons.
Look, man... these guys are running BLAST, you know? They are not benchmarking the theoretical performance of competing computing systems for the Wintel-dominated IT press, they are USING COMPUTERS TO COMPUTE. They used to run their app on Intel-based machines, then they ported it to the Mac in no time at all and it runs significantly faster. Some searches are 1.5x faster, some are 3x faster, some are 5x faster. Overall, it is fast enough that they are now buying Macs to run BLAST. Dell loses, you know? Get over it. Big biotech companies aren't buying Macs because they look good... they are saving money and getting more work done with Macs, just like creative industries have been for years and years and years.
But then you have to pay about $300 to rack it, and it will take up 6u of space. In audio and video it's common to have racks of gear around, and 1u computers with G4 performance and Apple reliability and support is excellent.
If you look at the very small sizes of the iBook, PowerBook, and new iMac compared to the Power Mac G4, then you get the idea that the next step from the Power Mac enclosure is to 1u or 2u racks. You could wrap an Xserve in a 1u rack enclosure made from translucent plastic with a stand on it and call that the new Power Mac, and if you order 50 you don't bother with the outside plastics and just rack them as usual.
Actually, I can see it being fashionable to get an Xserve as a desktop and put it into its own dedicated rack... sort of like a case mod where the only component you have to enclose already has ears and a titanium faceplate. You do give up a lot over a regular desktop, though, with no ADC, SuperDrive, Pro Mouse, Pro Keyboard included.
Just recently there was a study saying that ATA was better than SCSI in almost every situation these days... it's very hard to overcome the huge cheap ATA drives. In this case, Apple is not really just using ATA... each ATA drive has its own controller all to itself... so instead of two SCSI drives on one controller giving you 140GB total, you have four ATA drives on four ATA controllers, giving you 480GB total, and the ATA stuff cost a lot less, too. Then you put in 10 1u servers each with four ATA drives and all hooked up with Gigabit Ethernet and you're probably getting some pretty good performance there.
Also, Apple can make optimizations to Mac OS X Server in order to gain more performance out of Xserve and ATA drives... they have flexibility to make that work where other companies might be using someone else's kernel, or running Windows and just taking whatever they get there.
Who cares what CPU is in it? It's running a very major variant of UNIX... the kind of UNIX that's most common on desktop computers, in fact. Their are ports of thousands of UNIX apps, it has the fastest Java2 JVM out there, it runs Mac Carbon and Cocoa applications, and it comes with a bunch of rich, easy-to-use, GUI-based administration tools. It plays nice with UNIX, Mac, and even Windows systems, and this will get even better in the next version of Mac OS X that's coming this summer.
In other words, you can run a lot of software on this puppy, and put it into a lot of different kinds of networks.
Anything written for PowerPC that requires heavy computation is already long-since using Altivec, by the way. It's not an occasional thing, and it provides real benefits, so it's not ignored like similar things that have been tried on Intel platforms. The first G4's came out in late 1999, and a good portion of the Mac application platform has moved from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X since then... developers have caught up to Altivec, you know? Also, PPC has some non-Altivec things that are good for graphics and media processing, such as when a server is streaming different movies or encoding live audio and serving it. When you watch one of Steve Jobs' Photoshop bake-offs, they run an idential script on two similar Photoshop workstations, one Apple, one Intel-based, and when you see the Mac pull ahead a long way for the first time is as soon as there is a big image being rotated... the Mac will do it in 3 seconds and it will take the Intel box a minute, by which time the Mac is usually most of the way to finishing out the workday... that CPU stuff counts on a media server, too... it's the same kinds of computing.
Another key reason that HFS+ is the default system is that it has features that many Carbon applications depend on that no other filesystem offers. What has always made the Mac easier to use is that while the user tracks their files by filename, the system and apps track files by both filename and HFS+ inode number. What this means is that a user can go ahead and move or rename their files, and the system and applications can still find them. For example, you create a catalog of your MP3 collection in iTunes, then you browse through the raw files in Finder and notice the filename "Sweat Emotion.mp3" which should be "Sweet Emotion.mp3", so you change it. Next time you start iTunes and try to listen to that song, iTunes will still know which file you mean, even though the filename of that file has changed since last time iTunes saw it. On other systems, you'd click on Sweet Emotion and the app would say "Can't find '~/Music/Aerosmith/Greatest Hits/Sweat Emotion.mp3'." On the Mac, HFS+ has got a lot of things that contribute to things "just working" in a desktop environment with a wide range of users. Another example of this is that developer previews of Mac OS X originally had all the Mac OS 9 -related files in a separate folder called "/Mac OS 9/"... you installed Mac OS X and your current Mac OS 9 system and applications were moved from "/" to "/Mac OS 9/" and still worked.
Also, HFS+ is fully Unicode, very modern, and you can fsck a 120GB disk in under 10 seconds. Can you have Japanese filenames in UFS? This stuff is important to Apple, because they have a big international market and lots of publishing people use different languages on one system. There is only one Mac OS X for the whole world, so it's got to be internationalized.
The way you distinguish directories from files is that the directories look like folders and the files look like pieces of paper. That's been going on for 20 years now.
Another company that will use these heavily is Apple themselves:
they did the biggest Webcast ever (Steve Jobs keynote) they did the biggest download ever (Star Wars trailers) over 4000 schools do all of their administration on Apple's PowerSchool software, which is hosted on servers at Apple Apple.com is in the top 5 or 10 most-visited computer Web sites Apple Store Online is in the top 5 e-tailers all the computers at each and every Apple retail store have their hard disks wiped and restored to default from a server at Apple every day Apple has been using Mac OS X Server internally for years and years (it was released in early 1999), and they have a lot of UNIX tradition in there, so their internal network is probably aching for these boxes Apple's iTools Web services are very popular... check them out and think about how many servers it takes to give every Mac user a free 20GB virtual disk and full-featured email and online apps such as HomePage Every Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X installation includes Apple's Software Update, which checks for updates to included software and automatically downloads and installs patches and updates (after getting the user's permission, of course) to keep the clients current
That's a lot of serving, you know? They're going to be able to show this stuff off on their own projects, show what it costs them to serve the biggest Webcast with Xserve and QuickTime Streaming Server and no per-stream fees, or how they keep millions of Mac clients up-to-date, and it's going to be a very compelling solution for any company that also does anything like the above list of things that Apple does with servers.
There are going to be a lot of places where a rack of these will be in a small room somewhere and everybody uses PowerBooks to access the server over Wi-Fi or Gigabit Ethernet.
All Power Macs and PowerBooks have Gigabit Ethernet... the Xserve is ready to plug and play with all those fast clients that Apple has been shipping out for quite some time now. Why would you get a Dell/Microsoft server with 10/100 when you have lots of 10/100/1000 clients around? Why would you want Windows at all when it costs so much and is so unreliable?
Also keep in mind that all the new stuff announced for Mac OS X "Jaguar" this summer will apply to these Xserves. Apple's Rendevous is ZeroConf networking, for example. And I don't get why so many Slashdot posts seem to think that having FireWire on your 1u server is a bad idea... FireWire is THE multimedia networking protocol... Apple is THE multimedia computer company. Macs route real-time audio and video streams and MIDI data through FireWire, so your server has to have it to do that stuff, especially this year as music and video moves over to Mac OS X. There will be a lot of Xserves and their matching RAID boxes in music studios next year.
Macs sell at the same price points as computers from other major manufacturers... go to Dell, Gateway, or Apple for a flat-panel all-in-one with a DVD-RW/CD-RW and they will all ask you to pay $1700-$1800... ask for their low end, and they'll give you a half-decent machine for $699-$799... ask for a high-end workstation and they all want $3000. What makes Macs appear more expensive is that they always sit right at the top of the price point, because they have more included stuff... you can't get a Mac without FireWire (1394), without AirPort (802.11), without a digital display, without an optical mouse, without a great software bundle. What little inconvenience this might be to some people is made up for by how good it is for the platform, because developers can exploit that hardware, as Apple has done with iPod, taking advantage of ubiquitous FireWire.
The hardware is almost totally the same. Look down the spec list for any PC and you will see terms like USB, PCI, DRAM, ATA, CD-RW, DVD-RW/CD-RW, LCD, DVI, VGA, etc. whether you're shopping with Dell, Gateway, or Apple.
There are multiple operating systems you can install on Apple hardware, just as you can on any PC... there are even multiple separate Linux distributions. You can download Darwin (the core of Mac OS X) and install it in minutes if you only want a straight UNIX (with a lot of cool NeXT and Mac stuff in it as well). Still, it's hard to beat the capabilities you get out-of-the-box with Mac OS X. VirtualPC is cheap and is also very mature on the Mac, and you can run any x86 OS in there as well.
It's not about identity, it's about an 12 hour Windows workday vs an 8 hour Mac workday where you do twice as much work, and it's better work, too, and you enjoyed it instead of hating it. It's about a computer that gets out of your way and lets you continue to be an artist or whatever IN SPITE of the fact that you are using a computer. You don't have to learn Computer Science because you already learned art, and the computer science is left to Apple.
Apple's share of the market right now is 5%, and Dell's is 10%. They're not that far away from Dell.
Also, for the last year or so, it seems to me like Apple is selling to everyone BUT graphic designers and their other core markets. Mac OS X doesn't have its very own Photoshop, Pro Tools, etc. and only just got Final Cut Pro. Lots and lots of pro Macs run ONLY Photoshop, or ONLY Pro Tools, or ONLY Final Cut Pro, so those systems are not getting upgraded right now while they wait on Mac OS X native software.
Seems like this past year Apple has mostly sold Mac OS X iBooks to Slashdot readers, O'Reilly Network people, and former NeXT users and other UNIXy folks. I think that was definitely part of Apple's strategy for the transition... the first day that Mac OS X shipped it was already a pretty complete UNIX workstation, but not yet quite a Mac. The UNIX software was ported in a blink, but the Mac stuff has to take a while longer. Makes sense to satisfy the UNIX guys now, and with the new iMac, they are obviously ready to go after the iMac crowd. Graphics pros will come with the next tower release, alongside Photoshop for Mac OS X, hopefully.
The Tweak Films demo in Avie Tevanian's recent "Power of X" presentation (on Apple's QuickTime site) was a really good example of Altivec's power. At Apple's request, the Tweak Films people ported a 3D modeling UNIX app to Mac OS X (Aqua, not X-Windows) in just one week, and it ran faster on the Mac than on their UNIX workstations. The guy who did the presentation was obviously still reeling from this. Then they hooked into QuickTime to get access to all kinds of 2D media, and added reflections from a QuickTime VR to make the real-time model easier to see and better looking. The can also hook into QuickTime for rendering, and render out any format that they want to.
Myself, when I switched from a G3 to a G4 I was totally blown away by how many tracks and plug-ins I could get going at once in Cubase 5, where I do my writing. People will knock it by saying that not all apps are Altivec-optimized, but the real story is that if you have a computationally-intensive app that runs on the Mac, you have long-since Altivec-optimized it, because your performance goes through the roof, at least double and often more than that. And it's not hard to optimize it, in some cases it's just checking a box in your development tool. The Web browser or email client doesn't need the supercomputer-style vector ops and gets by just fine with traditional stuff, but all my music/audio apps are doing amazing things on the Mac. It may be that the P4 is capable of that kind of stuff on paper, but the Windows systems are just not doing the same speed as the Macs are doing. When you've seen Final Cut Pro 3 running in OS X on a PowerBook, doing real-time effects and transitions without accellerator hardware that's necessary even in desktop PC's, and when you've seen iDVD 2 encode high-quality MPEG-2 in realtime on a PowerMac, you have to wonder how the PC pundits can excuse the fact that they haven't just gone into an Apple Store and seen it for themselves. To read a tech writer today saying that Macs are slower than PC's is really, really misleading. I think it hurts the whole industry, because the a P4/2GHz-based system is NOT twice as fast as a P3/1GHz-based system. Maybe you can find some benchmark that makes it appear so, but when the end user sits down at their new machine, having moved their data, reinstalled their apps, fought with Windows, registered with Microsoft, etc. they are expecting to at least get their hair blown back by the improvement, and it's just not there. Too many other components (including the software) are the same or only marginally faster, too many design compromises were made with the P4 (20 pipelines!) just to get the clock speed up, rather than increase performance. MHz is a like a statistic these days.
> I can fire up UAE, load Photogenics 1.0
> (1995), and load a PNG file into
> photogenics.. when it was released,
> photogenics had no idea what the png
> format was.. but thanks to datatypes, any
> application can read and write the format.
I can fire up BBEdit 3 (1995), drop a PNG or an MPEG movie on it and it will display them just fine. It doesn't know about PNG or MPEG, but the QuickTime media layer in Mac OS does know about them. BBEdit is a text editor by the way.
So... the Mac has this, too. QuickTime (not the player, but the media architecture) "knows" about something like 85 media types and variations. All an app has to do to support those types is hook into QuickTime. Mac-only apps pretty much all do this, but if an app is Mac/Windows, then the developer usually builds their own media support for a handful of formats and includes it in both versions of the app. If Windows had traditionally had a media layer like QuickTime included by default, then it would be standard practice to let the OS do the file formats. Unfortunately, that's not the case.
In fact, the kind of offloading of common functions to the OS that you're after is a theme of Mac OS X, especially the Cocoa environment and tools. There is a pretty complete audio/MIDI sequencer built into Mac OS X itself, so that any app that wants to work with pro audio automatically has a full 32-bit, 96kHz, multichannel, pro-level audio plumbing that supports audio plug-ins and can import and export almost any file through QuickTime. So, the only coding you do with your app is the stuff that's specific to your app, not reinventing the wheel all the time. There is also a PostScript interpreter, the graphics layer (Quartz) knows PDF so you don't have to, and Quartz can also take anything onscreen and format it for printing, without the app having to do this stuff itself. Support for every known font is there (even the Windows format TrueType fonts - Apple invented TrueType so why not?).
There's an app for Mac OS X called Watson, that is basically a new kind of Web browser. Instead of showing you the MovieFone Web page, it gets the actual data and combines it into an application-style interface, bringing together the movie locations and times and also preview clips and info. It works with about 15 different kinds of Web services (looking up Zip codes, that kind of thing) and it was all built by one guy over the past six months using Cocoa. He didn't have to code any of the interface, or teach his app how to display movies, because Mac OS X already has objects built in for this.
Anyway, I guess overall I would say that you're sitting there using Windows or Linux and longing for a similar experience to the Amiga, and it's out there in Mac OS X. The elegance is not immediately apparent, because Mac OS X is very developer-flexible and fairly new. The stuff is there if the app wants to use it, but you can also port your UNIX app in one day with almost no modifications, or bring a Mac app to Mac OS X using the traditional Mac toolbox type of methods (now called Carbon). If you want it, though, there's a pretty good chance it's there in Mac OS X. This OS incorporates the best of Mac, the best of NeXT, the best of UNIX, and the best of Java. Don't assume it's missing something.
Mac OS X is amazingly reliable
Mac OS X updates itself over the Internet automatically
Mac OS X is secure
you only have to plug the iMac into AC power, so you can plug it anywhere, and get Internet over 802.11, no cables to run (great for the home)
iMac is small and attractive
iMac is quiet
the power button has moved over the last while from the keyboard to the back of the unit because Mac OS X just goes to sleep and then wakes up instantly when you need it
$249 buys you three years of AppleCare, so if you have a problem, they just take care of it (I have had excellent results with Apple's support, and they are consistently in the top one or two companies in this regard)
comes with all the software you need to do both common and sexy tasks (office suite with MS compatibility, MP3 music, digital movies, digital photos, support for a huge range of printers, cameras, and other peripherals without driver installs, burning CD's and DVD's, making DVD video discs, etc.)
iMac is at the same price points as all-in-one flat panel machines from both Gateway and Dell, but is a better overall value and much sexier.
I don't know what else you'd want in an "appliance" today.
Also there is the old "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" attitude. Computers have generally been very unreliable. When a Windows 98 PC crashes, people go "well, that's computers for you", but if you are in the next office and your Mac crashes, people go "well, serves you right for having a Mac". Microsoft has benefited by being generic. Apple knows this, and they've reacted by creating the most reliable PC ever, with the coolest style, the easiest interface, and the most user-friendly application platform. It's the perfect computer for today.
I have friends who have gone to Macs after trying mine, but since the new iMac came out, I have people who tried my Mac and were non-committal call me up and go, "OK, tell me about this new iMac... I want to get one." It is so much better than Microsoft's offering in its space that you can't argue with it.
How about "first consumer computer"? Many feel the Apple II is the first personal computer ever, because it was the first with the familiar keyboard and display (in other words, the Altair doesn't count). Steve Jobs is credited with inventing the term "personal computer". People laughed at him all over the place for that in 1976. Even if it was not the first PC, it was the first consumer PC for sure.
Also, first with color graphics, and Apple has also pushed all-digital flat panels. They are the biggest vendor of DVI computers, the largest vendor of UNIX, the biggest vendor of FireWire.
The power switch is on the back of the new iMac, because recently Apple changed the power switch to be a sleep switch and rolled out Mac OS X's instant-on wake from sleep. They have essentially modified the hardware considering what's required if your OS doesn't crash, and Mac OS X really is that reliable.
Plenty of people will just plug these things in and turn them on and use them reliably for years. The CPU's only take 7-14 watts... the internal components are not sitting next to some 50-70 watt Athlon or P4 monster... good for component life. Apple also has a three year extended warranty where you call and they fix it.
The appliance computer is closer than you think. The iMac looks like a lamp and is UNIX compatible. How much more applicance are you going to get?
Apple have been shy so far with their marketing, hiding Mac OS 9 in the back room and focusing on the outside in their advertisements. I think this is changing now, though. Mac OS X is here and in full swing, and their systems have never been better. Now they have some ads and Web pages that debunk Mac myths for Windows users, so they are starting to ramp it up. The Apple Stores are also all about trying a machine, so they are obviously showing off software down there.
I have a friend who almost gave up computers entirely after getting his second Windows PC a couple of years ago. He couldn't figure out how to get his old data to the new one, he was always have little mysterious hardware glitches, and he just generally felt uninspired and put upon by the machine. He called me two or three times per week with different problems and I walked him through it as best as I could. Then I got a Mac and after a short while I told him he either had to learn to use Windows on his own or get a Mac. I wasn't going to keep my Windows knowledge up-to-date and spend hours helping him to get his Windows box back up when I was totally enjoying my Mac. He got an iMac solely because he wanted to be on the same platform as me, so I could continue to install his software updates and help him with problems.
The funny thing is, though, that he got the iMac and then I didn't hear from him for two weeks and I thought he was unhappy with the thing and had just turned it off and gone ahead with his plan to drop out of computers. Turns out that he had just simply been working away, catching up on stuff, trying out new softwares, having a blast.
Now, it's two years later and we have talked computer troubleshooting only once or twice, and I had a fix for him in a second because it was never anything complex. He is going to get a notebook and he doesn't even consider to look at anything but an iBook or PowerBook. For him, he's been totally liberated by Apple, free to focus on his work and get things done instead of admining a computer all day.
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All FireWire Macs have target mode except the Power Mac G3. I'm sure the Xserve is no exception.
... in fact, that's the least of it. DV travels over FireWire, and pro audio and MIDI streams are starting to now. These servers won't just be for the Web and workgroups, but also a big part of Apple's new MPEG-4 solution. They know multimedia.
FireWire is not just for hard drives
Storage is huge for Apple's current customers. Just me working alone on one Power Mac workstation, I can easily create 10GB of data in one day of work. That's why Power Macs and PowerBooks have Gigabit Ethernet standard, and why FireWire (add lots of hard disks easily) and SuperDrive (burn 4.2GB of data to a single cheap disc in a short time) are so important. I have a 50GB disk in my PowerBook and it is always full ... I have FireWire drives lying around here like I used to have floppy disks.
... no doubt. I am already using Western Digital 120GB ATA drives in my current (FireWire) RAID because I can get them for $160 each, and I would be happy to be able to put 14 in a 3u box next to a 1u PowerMac and take it with me. Great.
I think the decision to go with ATA100 and one controller per drive is brilliant. I know my next RAID will be one of Apple's
Interactive QuickTime movies are pretty old-hat. Like, 8 years ago.
> The Altivec unit is nice for vectorizable single-precision operations, but this is
> a _VERY_ limited subset of code in general.
That happens to include audio and video processing and encoding, 3D rendering, biotech computing, encryption, and other very hip tasks for which people want more computational power these days. And yes, Apple's customers do this on servers (eg. a Web server that creates graphical maps from a database, encodes live audio or video and streams it, or processes a master movie file into lower bitrate versions for certain clients, etc.) Will Altivec speed up Microsoft Word? No. Does it need speeding up on today's machines? Not usually. But Altivec is heavily used by apps that run on PPC and need juice and it shouldn't be discounted like it's Intel's MME or something. People who know Altivec love Altivec, let's put it that way.
> first Airports [were unreliable]
I have to mention that even though a high number of the first generation of AirPort Base Stations failed after 13-15 months of use due to a bad capacitor in some component, even thought they were then out of warranty, Apple replaced them with no questions asked. I got a new one the next day after I called about mine dying after 14 months. We were literally only on wired connection for less than 24 hours.
Also, I used to have a PowerBook 190, whose case had a tendency to crack at the hinge, and Apple extended the warranty on those to 7 years. I got mine fixed after five years for free and it was as good as new. The 5300 is the other "crappy" PowerBook model, and it also got a 7 year warranty extension. Every year or so Apple also offers 190 and 5300 owners $500 off a new PowerBook if they trade in their old one.
My point is that Apple's reputation for reliability is not necessarily tarnished by certain failing models if they did something about it afterwards to make it right.
> an x86/Linux file server is all about maximizing TCO.
... you run Software Update and it updates itself to the most current version of its OS and included applications (browser, iTunes, etc.). It's painless to keep that machine running day-to-day. Nobody ever had to install an OS on it, or decide if they were going to use telnet or ssh or whatever. It does a certain job and it keeps on doing it.
... QuickTime Streaming Server is included and no per-stream tax ... it can run UNIX, Java2, Carbon, Cocoa, and even Classic apps (basically, everything but Microsoft) ... Apache starts with one button click, and so much more. So your x86 Linux has to have somebody setting up the equivalent software for x86 Linux, if that even exists in each case.
Spoken like a guy who is a full-time Linux admin. If you also factor in the cost-savings not having to hire a full-time Linux admin, then the TCO is much, much lower on the Xserve. The fact is that hardware for hardware, the Xserve is pretty competitive, but when you compare the additional support you'll need with Linux, or the additional cost and support you'd need with Windows, then Apple's got a great product here.
You have to understand that Apple can build things that plug in and just work. Now that Mac OS X is getting the same kind of auto-configuring networking that Macs have always had (except now it's over IP networks using industry standards), people are going to be plugging 10 Xserves together and they will suddenly have render farms, server farms, and really high-level interoperability and lots of great software that really knows its hardware, without compiling anything. The key is that if you have a support person who can work at the UNIX level, they can go ahead and do that, too, but you don't have to have that.
> but education? i would need to see the TCO numbers to buy into that one.
All Apple and many Mac users have been saying for years is "TCO, TCO, TCO!". It's always lower on the Mac. You pay Apple once and you get a system that can do three years easy and still have legs after that, because the software doesn't break, fall out of license, or whatever else. I have a three year old Power Mac here
Also, don't ignore the fact that Apple has great software on these things, too. With Remote Desktop, there is a Classroom tab where the teacher can look at any students desktop on their own desktop while they are all working
As time goes by, Apple will make all this stuff even easier, with apps for clustering and whatever else. They can build stuff in Cocoa that looks like a Mac app, acts like a Mac app, is as easy to use as a Mac app, yet leverages UNIX and Java2 tools that already exist. For example, when you run Mac OS X's Disk Utility and Verify a disk, it runs fsck for you. Apple is putting a good GUI on all of the server stuff now, using the best GUI tools in the business on their object-oriented, modern OS. It's what everybody thought Microsoft was going to do a few years ago, but Microsoft was not up to the task for a variety of reasons.
Look, man ... these guys are running BLAST, you know? They are not benchmarking the theoretical performance of competing computing systems for the Wintel-dominated IT press, they are USING COMPUTERS TO COMPUTE. They used to run their app on Intel-based machines, then they ported it to the Mac in no time at all and it runs significantly faster. Some searches are 1.5x faster, some are 3x faster, some are 5x faster. Overall, it is fast enough that they are now buying Macs to run BLAST. Dell loses, you know? Get over it. Big biotech companies aren't buying Macs because they look good ... they are saving money and getting more work done with Macs, just like creative industries have been for years and years and years.
> for $1000 less you can get a G4 tower.
... sort of like a case mod where the only component you have to enclose already has ears and a titanium faceplate. You do give up a lot over a regular desktop, though, with no ADC, SuperDrive, Pro Mouse, Pro Keyboard included.
But then you have to pay about $300 to rack it, and it will take up 6u of space. In audio and video it's common to have racks of gear around, and 1u computers with G4 performance and Apple reliability and support is excellent.
If you look at the very small sizes of the iBook, PowerBook, and new iMac compared to the Power Mac G4, then you get the idea that the next step from the Power Mac enclosure is to 1u or 2u racks. You could wrap an Xserve in a 1u rack enclosure made from translucent plastic with a stand on it and call that the new Power Mac, and if you order 50 you don't bother with the outside plastics and just rack them as usual.
Actually, I can see it being fashionable to get an Xserve as a desktop and put it into its own dedicated rack
Just recently there was a study saying that ATA was better than SCSI in almost every situation these days ... it's very hard to overcome the huge cheap ATA drives. In this case, Apple is not really just using ATA ... each ATA drive has its own controller all to itself ... so instead of two SCSI drives on one controller giving you 140GB total, you have four ATA drives on four ATA controllers, giving you 480GB total, and the ATA stuff cost a lot less, too. Then you put in 10 1u servers each with four ATA drives and all hooked up with Gigabit Ethernet and you're probably getting some pretty good performance there.
... they have flexibility to make that work where other companies might be using someone else's kernel, or running Windows and just taking whatever they get there.
Also, Apple can make optimizations to Mac OS X Server in order to gain more performance out of Xserve and ATA drives
Who cares what CPU is in it? It's running a very major variant of UNIX ... the kind of UNIX that's most common on desktop computers, in fact. Their are ports of thousands of UNIX apps, it has the fastest Java2 JVM out there, it runs Mac Carbon and Cocoa applications, and it comes with a bunch of rich, easy-to-use, GUI-based administration tools. It plays nice with UNIX, Mac, and even Windows systems, and this will get even better in the next version of Mac OS X that's coming this summer.
... developers have caught up to Altivec, you know? Also, PPC has some non-Altivec things that are good for graphics and media processing, such as when a server is streaming different movies or encoding live audio and serving it. When you watch one of Steve Jobs' Photoshop bake-offs, they run an idential script on two similar Photoshop workstations, one Apple, one Intel-based, and when you see the Mac pull ahead a long way for the first time is as soon as there is a big image being rotated ... the Mac will do it in 3 seconds and it will take the Intel box a minute, by which time the Mac is usually most of the way to finishing out the workday ... that CPU stuff counts on a media server, too ... it's the same kinds of computing.
In other words, you can run a lot of software on this puppy, and put it into a lot of different kinds of networks.
Anything written for PowerPC that requires heavy computation is already long-since using Altivec, by the way. It's not an occasional thing, and it provides real benefits, so it's not ignored like similar things that have been tried on Intel platforms. The first G4's came out in late 1999, and a good portion of the Mac application platform has moved from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X since then
Another key reason that HFS+ is the default system is that it has features that many Carbon applications depend on that no other filesystem offers. What has always made the Mac easier to use is that while the user tracks their files by filename, the system and apps track files by both filename and HFS+ inode number. What this means is that a user can go ahead and move or rename their files, and the system and applications can still find them. For example, you create a catalog of your MP3 collection in iTunes, then you browse through the raw files in Finder and notice the filename "Sweat Emotion.mp3" which should be "Sweet Emotion.mp3", so you change it. Next time you start iTunes and try to listen to that song, iTunes will still know which file you mean, even though the filename of that file has changed since last time iTunes saw it. On other systems, you'd click on Sweet Emotion and the app would say "Can't find '~/Music/Aerosmith/Greatest Hits/Sweat Emotion.mp3'." On the Mac, HFS+ has got a lot of things that contribute to things "just working" in a desktop environment with a wide range of users. Another example of this is that developer previews of Mac OS X originally had all the Mac OS 9 -related files in a separate folder called "/Mac OS 9/" ... you installed Mac OS X and your current Mac OS 9 system and applications were moved from "/" to "/Mac OS 9/" and still worked.
Also, HFS+ is fully Unicode, very modern, and you can fsck a 120GB disk in under 10 seconds. Can you have Japanese filenames in UFS? This stuff is important to Apple, because they have a big international market and lots of publishing people use different languages on one system. There is only one Mac OS X for the whole world, so it's got to be internationalized.
The way you distinguish directories from files is that the directories look like folders and the files look like pieces of paper. That's been going on for 20 years now.
Another company that will use these heavily is Apple themselves:
... check them out and think about how many servers it takes to give every Mac user a free 20GB virtual disk and full-featured email and online apps such as HomePage
... the Xserve is ready to plug and play with all those fast clients that Apple has been shipping out for quite some time now. Why would you get a Dell/Microsoft server with 10/100 when you have lots of 10/100/1000 clients around? Why would you want Windows at all when it costs so much and is so unreliable?
... FireWire is THE multimedia networking protocol ... Apple is THE multimedia computer company. Macs route real-time audio and video streams and MIDI data through FireWire, so your server has to have it to do that stuff, especially this year as music and video moves over to Mac OS X. There will be a lot of Xserves and their matching RAID boxes in music studios next year.
they did the biggest Webcast ever (Steve Jobs keynote)
they did the biggest download ever (Star Wars trailers)
over 4000 schools do all of their administration on Apple's PowerSchool software, which is hosted on servers at Apple
Apple.com is in the top 5 or 10 most-visited computer Web sites
Apple Store Online is in the top 5 e-tailers
all the computers at each and every Apple retail store have their hard disks wiped and restored to default from a server at Apple every day
Apple has been using Mac OS X Server internally for years and years (it was released in early 1999), and they have a lot of UNIX tradition in there, so their internal network is probably aching for these boxes
Apple's iTools Web services are very popular
Every Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X installation includes Apple's Software Update, which checks for updates to included software and automatically downloads and installs patches and updates (after getting the user's permission, of course) to keep the clients current
That's a lot of serving, you know? They're going to be able to show this stuff off on their own projects, show what it costs them to serve the biggest Webcast with Xserve and QuickTime Streaming Server and no per-stream fees, or how they keep millions of Mac clients up-to-date, and it's going to be a very compelling solution for any company that also does anything like the above list of things that Apple does with servers.
There are going to be a lot of places where a rack of these will be in a small room somewhere and everybody uses PowerBooks to access the server over Wi-Fi or Gigabit Ethernet.
All Power Macs and PowerBooks have Gigabit Ethernet
Also keep in mind that all the new stuff announced for Mac OS X "Jaguar" this summer will apply to these Xserves. Apple's Rendevous is ZeroConf networking, for example. And I don't get why so many Slashdot posts seem to think that having FireWire on your 1u server is a bad idea
The matching RAID unit was also announced today and will ship in Q4. It has fourteen hot-swappable drives in a 3u enclosure.
The only problems with your argument:
... go to Dell, Gateway, or Apple for a flat-panel all-in-one with a DVD-RW/CD-RW and they will all ask you to pay $1700-$1800 ... ask for their low end, and they'll give you a half-decent machine for $699-$799 ... ask for a high-end workstation and they all want $3000. What makes Macs appear more expensive is that they always sit right at the top of the price point, because they have more included stuff ... you can't get a Mac without FireWire (1394), without AirPort (802.11), without a digital display, without an optical mouse, without a great software bundle. What little inconvenience this might be to some people is made up for by how good it is for the platform, because developers can exploit that hardware, as Apple has done with iPod, taking advantage of ubiquitous FireWire.
... there are even multiple separate Linux distributions. You can download Darwin (the core of Mac OS X) and install it in minutes if you only want a straight UNIX (with a lot of cool NeXT and Mac stuff in it as well). Still, it's hard to beat the capabilities you get out-of-the-box with Mac OS X. VirtualPC is cheap and is also very mature on the Mac, and you can run any x86 OS in there as well.
Macs sell at the same price points as computers from other major manufacturers
The hardware is almost totally the same. Look down the spec list for any PC and you will see terms like USB, PCI, DRAM, ATA, CD-RW, DVD-RW/CD-RW, LCD, DVI, VGA, etc. whether you're shopping with Dell, Gateway, or Apple.
There are multiple operating systems you can install on Apple hardware, just as you can on any PC
It's not about identity, it's about an 12 hour Windows workday vs an 8 hour Mac workday where you do twice as much work, and it's better work, too, and you enjoyed it instead of hating it. It's about a computer that gets out of your way and lets you continue to be an artist or whatever IN SPITE of the fact that you are using a computer. You don't have to learn Computer Science because you already learned art, and the computer science is left to Apple.
Apple's share of the market right now is 5%, and Dell's is 10%. They're not that far away from Dell.
... the first day that Mac OS X shipped it was already a pretty complete UNIX workstation, but not yet quite a Mac. The UNIX software was ported in a blink, but the Mac stuff has to take a while longer. Makes sense to satisfy the UNIX guys now, and with the new iMac, they are obviously ready to go after the iMac crowd. Graphics pros will come with the next tower release, alongside Photoshop for Mac OS X, hopefully.
Also, for the last year or so, it seems to me like Apple is selling to everyone BUT graphic designers and their other core markets. Mac OS X doesn't have its very own Photoshop, Pro Tools, etc. and only just got Final Cut Pro. Lots and lots of pro Macs run ONLY Photoshop, or ONLY Pro Tools, or ONLY Final Cut Pro, so those systems are not getting upgraded right now while they wait on Mac OS X native software.
Seems like this past year Apple has mostly sold Mac OS X iBooks to Slashdot readers, O'Reilly Network people, and former NeXT users and other UNIXy folks. I think that was definitely part of Apple's strategy for the transition
The Tweak Films demo in Avie Tevanian's recent "Power of X" presentation (on Apple's QuickTime site) was a really good example of Altivec's power. At Apple's request, the Tweak Films people ported a 3D modeling UNIX app to Mac OS X (Aqua, not X-Windows) in just one week, and it ran faster on the Mac than on their UNIX workstations. The guy who did the presentation was obviously still reeling from this. Then they hooked into QuickTime to get access to all kinds of 2D media, and added reflections from a QuickTime VR to make the real-time model easier to see and better looking. The can also hook into QuickTime for rendering, and render out any format that they want to.
Myself, when I switched from a G3 to a G4 I was totally blown away by how many tracks and plug-ins I could get going at once in Cubase 5, where I do my writing. People will knock it by saying that not all apps are Altivec-optimized, but the real story is that if you have a computationally-intensive app that runs on the Mac, you have long-since Altivec-optimized it, because your performance goes through the roof, at least double and often more than that. And it's not hard to optimize it, in some cases it's just checking a box in your development tool. The Web browser or email client doesn't need the supercomputer-style vector ops and gets by just fine with traditional stuff, but all my music/audio apps are doing amazing things on the Mac. It may be that the P4 is capable of that kind of stuff on paper, but the Windows systems are just not doing the same speed as the Macs are doing. When you've seen Final Cut Pro 3 running in OS X on a PowerBook, doing real-time effects and transitions without accellerator hardware that's necessary even in desktop PC's, and when you've seen iDVD 2 encode high-quality MPEG-2 in realtime on a PowerMac, you have to wonder how the PC pundits can excuse the fact that they haven't just gone into an Apple Store and seen it for themselves. To read a tech writer today saying that Macs are slower than PC's is really, really misleading. I think it hurts the whole industry, because the a P4/2GHz-based system is NOT twice as fast as a P3/1GHz-based system. Maybe you can find some benchmark that makes it appear so, but when the end user sits down at their new machine, having moved their data, reinstalled their apps, fought with Windows, registered with Microsoft, etc. they are expecting to at least get their hair blown back by the improvement, and it's just not there. Too many other components (including the software) are the same or only marginally faster, too many design compromises were made with the P4 (20 pipelines!) just to get the clock speed up, rather than increase performance. MHz is a like a statistic these days.
> I can fire up UAE, load Photogenics 1.0
... the Mac has this, too. QuickTime (not the player, but the media architecture) "knows" about something like 85 media types and variations. All an app has to do to support those types is hook into QuickTime. Mac-only apps pretty much all do this, but if an app is Mac/Windows, then the developer usually builds their own media support for a handful of formats and includes it in both versions of the app. If Windows had traditionally had a media layer like QuickTime included by default, then it would be standard practice to let the OS do the file formats. Unfortunately, that's not the case.
> (1995), and load a PNG file into
> photogenics.. when it was released,
> photogenics had no idea what the png
> format was.. but thanks to datatypes, any
> application can read and write the format.
I can fire up BBEdit 3 (1995), drop a PNG or an MPEG movie on it and it will display them just fine. It doesn't know about PNG or MPEG, but the QuickTime media layer in Mac OS does know about them. BBEdit is a text editor by the way.
So
In fact, the kind of offloading of common functions to the OS that you're after is a theme of Mac OS X, especially the Cocoa environment and tools. There is a pretty complete audio/MIDI sequencer built into Mac OS X itself, so that any app that wants to work with pro audio automatically has a full 32-bit, 96kHz, multichannel, pro-level audio plumbing that supports audio plug-ins and can import and export almost any file through QuickTime. So, the only coding you do with your app is the stuff that's specific to your app, not reinventing the wheel all the time. There is also a PostScript interpreter, the graphics layer (Quartz) knows PDF so you don't have to, and Quartz can also take anything onscreen and format it for printing, without the app having to do this stuff itself. Support for every known font is there (even the Windows format TrueType fonts - Apple invented TrueType so why not?).
There's an app for Mac OS X called Watson, that is basically a new kind of Web browser. Instead of showing you the MovieFone Web page, it gets the actual data and combines it into an application-style interface, bringing together the movie locations and times and also preview clips and info. It works with about 15 different kinds of Web services (looking up Zip codes, that kind of thing) and it was all built by one guy over the past six months using Cocoa. He didn't have to code any of the interface, or teach his app how to display movies, because Mac OS X already has objects built in for this.
Anyway, I guess overall I would say that you're sitting there using Windows or Linux and longing for a similar experience to the Amiga, and it's out there in Mac OS X. The elegance is not immediately apparent, because Mac OS X is very developer-flexible and fairly new. The stuff is there if the app wants to use it, but you can also port your UNIX app in one day with almost no modifications, or bring a Mac app to Mac OS X using the traditional Mac toolbox type of methods (now called Carbon). If you want it, though, there's a pretty good chance it's there in Mac OS X. This OS incorporates the best of Mac, the best of NeXT, the best of UNIX, and the best of Java. Don't assume it's missing something.
It sounds like the new iMac to me.
Mac OS X is amazingly reliable
Mac OS X updates itself over the Internet automatically
Mac OS X is secure
you only have to plug the iMac into AC power, so you can plug it anywhere, and get Internet over 802.11, no cables to run (great for the home)
iMac is small and attractive
iMac is quiet
the power button has moved over the last while from the keyboard to the back of the unit because Mac OS X just goes to sleep and then wakes up instantly when you need it
$249 buys you three years of AppleCare, so if you have a problem, they just take care of it (I have had excellent results with Apple's support, and they are consistently in the top one or two companies in this regard)
comes with all the software you need to do both common and sexy tasks (office suite with MS compatibility, MP3 music, digital movies, digital photos, support for a huge range of printers, cameras, and other peripherals without driver installs, burning CD's and DVD's, making DVD video discs, etc.)
iMac is at the same price points as all-in-one flat panel machines from both Gateway and Dell, but is a better overall value and much sexier.
I don't know what else you'd want in an "appliance" today.
Also there is the old "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" attitude. Computers have generally been very unreliable. When a Windows 98 PC crashes, people go "well, that's computers for you", but if you are in the next office and your Mac crashes, people go "well, serves you right for having a Mac". Microsoft has benefited by being generic. Apple knows this, and they've reacted by creating the most reliable PC ever, with the coolest style, the easiest interface, and the most user-friendly application platform. It's the perfect computer for today.
... I want to get one." It is so much better than Microsoft's offering in its space that you can't argue with it.
I have friends who have gone to Macs after trying mine, but since the new iMac came out, I have people who tried my Mac and were non-committal call me up and go, "OK, tell me about this new iMac
How about "first consumer computer"? Many feel the Apple II is the first personal computer ever, because it was the first with the familiar keyboard and display (in other words, the Altair doesn't count). Steve Jobs is credited with inventing the term "personal computer". People laughed at him all over the place for that in 1976. Even if it was not the first PC, it was the first consumer PC for sure.
Also, first with color graphics, and Apple has also pushed all-digital flat panels. They are the biggest vendor of DVI computers, the largest vendor of UNIX, the biggest vendor of FireWire.
The power switch is on the back of the new iMac, because recently Apple changed the power switch to be a sleep switch and rolled out Mac OS X's instant-on wake from sleep. They have essentially modified the hardware considering what's required if your OS doesn't crash, and Mac OS X really is that reliable.
... the internal components are not sitting next to some 50-70 watt Athlon or P4 monster ... good for component life. Apple also has a three year extended warranty where you call and they fix it.
Plenty of people will just plug these things in and turn them on and use them reliably for years. The CPU's only take 7-14 watts
The appliance computer is closer than you think. The iMac looks like a lamp and is UNIX compatible. How much more applicance are you going to get?
Apple have been shy so far with their marketing, hiding Mac OS 9 in the back room and focusing on the outside in their advertisements. I think this is changing now, though. Mac OS X is here and in full swing, and their systems have never been better. Now they have some ads and Web pages that debunk Mac myths for Windows users, so they are starting to ramp it up. The Apple Stores are also all about trying a machine, so they are obviously showing off software down there.
I have a friend who almost gave up computers entirely after getting his second Windows PC a couple of years ago. He couldn't figure out how to get his old data to the new one, he was always have little mysterious hardware glitches, and he just generally felt uninspired and put upon by the machine. He called me two or three times per week with different problems and I walked him through it as best as I could. Then I got a Mac and after a short while I told him he either had to learn to use Windows on his own or get a Mac. I wasn't going to keep my Windows knowledge up-to-date and spend hours helping him to get his Windows box back up when I was totally enjoying my Mac. He got an iMac solely because he wanted to be on the same platform as me, so I could continue to install his software updates and help him with problems.
The funny thing is, though, that he got the iMac and then I didn't hear from him for two weeks and I thought he was unhappy with the thing and had just turned it off and gone ahead with his plan to drop out of computers. Turns out that he had just simply been working away, catching up on stuff, trying out new softwares, having a blast.
Now, it's two years later and we have talked computer troubleshooting only once or twice, and I had a fix for him in a second because it was never anything complex. He is going to get a notebook and he doesn't even consider to look at anything but an iBook or PowerBook. For him, he's been totally liberated by Apple, free to focus on his work and get things done instead of admining a computer all day.