> I think their digital hub is a smash hit
> idea... for the geek who "just wants the
> mundane to work" so he can get on with
> the cool stuff.
FUCKING AMEN! It doesn't impress me anymore that a guy can install 802.11 drivers or open a box up and put another ATA drive in there. Yawn. Apple does that shit for you, or makes it so easy to do it that you don't notice it (compare hot-plugging an iPod into a FireWire port to installing an additional ATA drive inside a box). I'm more interested in whether the guy wrote a cool game that takes advantage of 802.11, or when someone comes up with a cool new use for FireWire (like a miniscule MP3 player). Time to get out of the boxes, people. Hard disks are not interesting anymore.
> aim for the miniscule graphic design
> market -sell your machines at a heavy
> discount to schools and universities
Somebody's got to make computers for artists and students.
> don't make a decent OS until it's too late
As opposed to Microsoft's "don't make a decent OS at all".
> all of the great innovations out of the Mac
> camp (many of which were lifted from
> Xerox, btw)
Many? The Mac platform is 20 years old and has shaped graphical computing. The Xerox stuff that Apple bought (bought, not lifted) didn't even have overlapping windows, pull-down menus, drag and drop, and many more things that you think it had simply because it "had a GUI". Some very talented people invented that stuff while they were working for Apple, and it's a shame that so many people keep giving Xerox the credit. Xerox' stuff culminated in being sold to Apple so that it would see the light of day at some point, so it would get out of their RESEARCH CENTER and make it into a product. Apple's stuff became a successful computer platform upon which such artworks as the entire Nine Inch Nails catalog were created. But, yeah, I guess you're right, we owe it all to Xerox, don't we?
> but then start these ill-concieved
> Apple Stores
At Macworld, Steve Jobs pointed out that the 80,000 people who were going to attend the four-day trade show were dwarfed by the 800,000 people who attended "mini-Macworld Expos" at Apple Stores in the month of December 2001 alone. The fact that they sold 40% of the systems out of the Apple Store to people who had never, ever owned a Mac before tells me that these stores will be long-term successes. The stores themselves almost broke even, in spite of the bad economy, world events, the cost of building them in the first place, and also the transition from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X (which is almost complete). Apple's core customers have not even weighed in yet, with Photoshop and Pro Tools and other staples not yet Mac OS X native. Apple has those upgrades and also iMac upgrades to look forward to, as well as more and more defectors from Microsoft.
> but don't get this level of attention
> because they don't have the marketing
> weight of Apple.
I guess when you really don't want to admit that something is good you can always say that the people who like it are idiots who have been hypnotized by marketing. I think iPod will be remembered 10 years from now as the first proper file-based walkman. The combination of features that it has, including an interface that people learn in five seconds without a manual, makes it a jukebox that you can fit in your shirt pocket, and that's going to be the form factor the same way that the PowerBook's form factor has become standard on portable computers (palm rest with a pointing device in the center, then a keyboard, then a display). The iPod interface may become the new "transport controls", replacing the tape-inspired ones on CD players. Track to track forward and back buttons is not the way to get around a collection of thousands of files.
I think what you're missing is that you have a LOT of music, so capacity is probably your key feature. Most people don't have enough music to fill an iPod, even at the 160kbs that Apple uses as a default (the 1000 songs number also assumes 160kbs), so they are much, much more interested in size, weight, connectivity, ease of use, fun, style, etc. in their music player.
I just read that Archos has a FireWire-based player coming out soon, so they will be second with that. I don't think they're doing it to be stylish, but rather because the keyboard port is not the right place to hook up a hard disk. Think about it. It's funny that so many Intel users like to know they have ATA/133 and whatever else and then turn around and defend USB for the hard disk in their music player. No, it's not the right way to do it.
The 10-12 hour battery in the iPod and charging over FireWire means you don't have to manage the battery at all, unless you are a really, really avid listener. You just plug the thing into your computer at the end of the day, and it will likely still have a lot of juice left. The next day it is ready to go with a full charge again. For many users, they will never, ever, run out of juice with their iPod. That's an intangible feature that's not easy to represent on spec sheets, but when you're using it, you realize that it is very, very liberating not to have to manage a device's battery life.
This is also why Palm continues to clean PocketPC's clock. Many people can run a grayscale Palm machine for weeks on a single charge, so they sync with their address book or back up data more often, which means, again, that they don't manage battery life, because the Palm charges in its cradle while it's sync'ing without them even thinking about it, rather than expiring unexpectedly because it has no juice.
If you think about it, any device that can't do one day's worth of normal use is buggy. You shouldn't have to feed a portable device more than once a day.
Also, iPod is really, really small and really, really light. I have most of my favorite albums on my PowerBook G4, which is 1" thick and 5 lbs and often travels with me, but an iPod hides in my jean jacket and can go with me everywhere.
I love how people pretend that their Windows PCs have unlimited future lives when they talk about the cost of a Mac. Like you will never, ever have to buy another computer. The $1200 that Apple expects you to pay for the computer that is compatible with your iPod is the $1200 that you would otherwise give Gateway or Dell for your next Microsoft system. If you are into digital music, then it may make sense for you to get a system that's designed for that, including such things as FireWire and iPod and whatever else. Same as things like iPhoto, true plug and play in Mac OS X, and ColorSync make Macs appealing to photographers. If you choose your system based on the right tool for the job, then the iPod is a feature you can take or leave as required. If you've got to have it, you'll be happier with a Mac anyway. What makes the iPod appealing is the same thing that makes Macs appealing.
> When Apple chose not to support
> Windows, they excluded 100 million
> potential customers in the US alone.
Most Windows computers don't even have FireWire, so they are not a potential market for iPods. I would venture that the potential market for iPods, just based on the requirement "personal computer with FireWire" is 75% Mac, at least. Sony is the biggest vendor of 1394-compatible Windows PC's, and their i.Link doesn't even have power, so it's no good for an iPod (or any of the portable FireWire hard drives, which are all powered by the FireWire port).
> Apple claims it sold 100,000 iPods
> in two months. I'm skeptical, but assume
> that's correct. That means a
> PC-compatible version could have
> sold a million
They couldn't have made a million of them if they wanted to. The iPod uses a very small 1.8" hard drive that is only available in limited quantity. At the iPod launch, Steve Jobs said they expected to sell "as many as we can make". At Macworld SF 2002, Steve Jobs said they sold 125,000 so far and had sold out in many places. In other words, they're already selling as many as they can make.
What you are missing here is that iPod is not meant to make PC's look bad; it's made to make Mac's look good. After inventing FireWire and then putting it on all of their computers a few years ago, Apple can now turn to their customers and say, "here's why you got rid of your SCSI peripherals," so you can hot-plug a miniature hard drive that is also an MP3 player and the computer itself takes care of powering and charging the device, and the software is all already there and well-tested and newbie-proof and ready to go.
> What's really interesting is that Apple
> chose to make the iPod look like an
> HFS disk
It doesn't "look like" an HFS+ disk, it IS an HFS+ disk. If it weren't, you couldn't boot your Mac off it. While Mac OS X can boot off UFS, some apps don't support that yet, because UFS has FEWER features than HFS+ (such as Unicode and support for the metadata attached to the billions of files that have been created on the Mac platform over the last 20 years).
I'm sorry, man, but you are playing the arrogant Windows boob, here. Many of the iPods features are lost on you because you don't think about booting a Microsoft PC from any attached storage. People are putting their whole system, apps, and home folder on the iPod, even with only the 5GB size, and just booting any Mac they happen to be near from the iPod. When the iPod has 40GB or 100GB, it will be an even more popular feature.
And, aside from that, I would love to hear your argument for a different FS. FAT32 isn't even Microsoft's favorite file system anymore. Should Apple pay MS to use NTFS? Why? Why use UFS on a consumer MP3 player when it is not a mainstream personal computer FS? You are just bigoted against HFS+ because you don't know anything about it and Microsoft has never wanted to support it.
Compare the copy-protection features of iPod with ANY other MP3 player before you knock Apple, or you will have egg on your face later. It is the only MP3 player that lacks "digital rights management". Read the fine print, fellows.
> Apple's just trying to lock you into their
> hardware jail
Gimme a break! Windows PC's don't generally even have FireWire yet. Apache also doesn't run on Windows, but it's not because the Apache developers want to put you in UNIX jail, it's because Windows does not have the balls to support it.
When most Windows PC's have a) FireWire, b) music management software, c) CD burning hardware/software, d) plug and play hardware (not Plug 'n' Play(TM), but actual plug and play, like on Macs), and e) stability, then you can accuse Apple of elitism. As it is, Apple is just making a great product for the only platform that can currently support it. They said at the iPod launch that they put the product together from scratch in 8 months. How long do you think they should have delayed it so that they can patch Windows and test iPod with every strange combination of 1394 hardware/software that's out there on Windows PC's? (Sony's 1394 doesn't even have power, which the iPod requires.) It is much better for them if they vet it to run on their systems, and leave fixing Windows to either Microsoft or a third-party who will charge extra and answer the support calls.
Apple didn't complain to Richard Stallman that there was no emacs for Mac OS 9. Instead, they built UNIX compatibility into Mac OS X and now they ship emacs with the OS. They put Java2 in there so we can run Java2 apps. If the Windows PC platform can't support iPod, then complain to Microsoft, don't knock Apple or make up conspiratorial subplots about them to explain why your new Windows PC turns out to be a few years behind the curve.
> Aren't things like [iPhoto] mostly old
> hat with a nifty interface?
With most PC's, you get LE or Lite versions of apps with licensing restrictions and no upgrades. With Apple's bundled software, you get a real product that answers a real need with a full features set, complete with free future upgrades. The "iApps", as they are called, are worth buying the whole computer for, for many users. iTunes, iMovie, and iDVD are all at version 2, and are absolutely the BEST at what they do, bar none, Mac or PC. iPhoto does the things that average people want to do with their digital photos.
Also, these apps are all very easy to use, and lots of fun. People like to use them, and they get great results. These apps are operating a level up from other apps... you don't get lists of technical options... the apps are very smart and make complex tasks simple and easy. Often, they replace two or three other poorly-suited apps that you were using to get some simple task done the hard way.
The new iMac has the same Pro Keyboard and Pro Mouse that they've been shipping for a year or so, except that where the keyboard and mouse were previously black, they are white on the new iMac. They are both basically clear with either black or white accents.
The keyboard has, like, 70 buttons on it. It also has extra modifier keys that other computers don't have, so we can afford to use Control+click as a context click. You can also Command+click to do a lot of things (open a link in a new window in IE for example), and Shift+click, Option+click, etc. It's not hard, and the hand that stays on the keyboard while you use the TrackPad does the modifier keys.
It's actually easier for many people than a right-click on the mouse. A Shift+right-click is almost impossible for most people to use regularly (both hands are chording) so the spare-keyboard-on-the-mouse thing has limits.
AppleWorks (word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentations) is free with iMacs and iBooks and is really great. Plenty of people have used both AppleWorks and MS Office and choose AppleWorks. It's easier to just write a letter, or make a presentation with AppleWorks.
There are at least two pro level FireWire multichannel audio adapters out now. One is the MOTU 828, which is a rack-mount unit that Glyph makes a matching rack-mount storage unit for as well. There is another that is notebook-sized, but I can't remember the name. You can find it in a good music magazine, or through pro audio sites. With either of these adapters, you just hot-plug a FireWire cable between the adapter and the computer, and then install whatever software is necessary.
You can get a notebook with FireWire from Apple (any notebook from the past two years or so), Sony (some models), and a few others. Apple's machines also support mLAN, which is Yamaha's replacement for MIDI and optical digital cables, which also runs over FireWire. The content creation industries are standardizing on FireWire right now wherever they can. It's built to answer the problems that music and audio and video people face.
I don't know what the state of USB Audio is on Windows, but on the Mac you can get a small, cheap adapter like Griffin iMic ($25) and you get 24-bit stereo recording that's free of any internal computer noise. If you only need stereo, this is an easy solution. There are also some USB mic preamps, enabling you to plug a high-quality mic into USB and get good results.
I don't blame the worm writers. Blaming them is like blaming the rain. Rain is a feature of our planet and worms and viruses are a feature of Microsoft software. Writing a Word template, no matter how complex or unusual, is not a crime. Releasing email clients and operating systems that blow up or do really weird things when they encounter Word templates... that's questionable.
I'd rather have half as many Macs as PC's, or just one Mac every three years instead of a new PC every 18 months. You can play with the economics forever in this way, but the fact is, when I sit down to work at my Mac, I see my work (music and audio, graphics), not the computer. It's priceless. There is no price you can put on that. If not for the post-NeXT Apple, I would have already given up on computers. Seriously. My second choice to a Mac is a dedicated audio recording rig of some kind, or an easel and paints, not a Windows PC. Having to admin the thing would not be worth it. Having my workspace open to the world would not be worth it.
As for Linux, I have a server that runs Linux, and it has been a decent performer at a low, low cost. Very good stuff. Linux is good for anything that you want to set and forget, where you don't mind getting your hands dirty for a couple of days so that you can leave the box alone to do its thing for the next two years. Mac OS X is an answer to another problem altogether: you sit down, day-by-day, to do creative, desktop, user-oriented, one-on-one work with the computer. It has to work first time when I plug shit in or drag-and-drop some new software into place. If it doesn't work first time, it has to have a simple, non-technical GUI-oriented solution that I can apply and then get back to work immediately. I don't NEED Apple to hold my hand; I WANT them to take care of the technical shit so that I don't have to switch gears when I'm working.
The other side of this is that Mac OS X is well supported by revenues from hardware. In other words, the software project that is Mac OS X has a constant source of funding, money coming directly from users and going directly to the OS development effort. This means that when Apple started building CD-RW's and DVD-RW/CD-RW's into Macs, they had a good reason to build the software support for those features into the OS and have done with it. They purchased a company that made disc burning software and they absorbed that into Mac OS X, and now working with writeable optical media is as easy as working with floppies used to be. And it's good, good stuff, not some cut-rate attempt to give you something that won't survive the next Windows rev and thus drive you back to a third-party solution just for basic data, audio, and MP3 CD's. That capability should come with the hardware (the drive) not be some add-on that you get so you can use the hardware.
> I AM a Mac zealot, but you're wrong here.
> The desktop Powermacs use the MPC 7450 CPU
> (or MPC 7451) whereas the mobile machines are
> fitted with the MPC 7440 (or MPC 7441). Thus far,
> the G4 series has seen the MPC 7400, 7410, 7450,
> 7440, 7451 and 7451 chips.
The guy's point is that a PowerBook G4 has a "real G4" in it, whereas Pentium Mobiles are seriously crippled. A desktop G4 runs about 15 watts, while a notebook G4 runs about 10 watts. A desktop PIII runs about 50 watts, while a notebook PIII runs about 20.
P4's are in the 60-70 watt range, same as Athlons. The low-power and heat of the G4 is why Apple's desktop boxes can power the display, FireWire, two independent USB busses, AirPort, and still have four empty PCI slots and room for four hard drives all on one power supply. With an Intel box, half your power supply and cooling is just for the CPU.
PowerBooks all have DVD/CD-RW ("Combo") standard, now. A combo drive that fits into the 1" enclosure was just released a couple of weeks ago by the OEM. Prior to that, there just wasn't a way to put one in there.
That's something that gets overlooked a lot in Mac vs PC notebook comparisons. The PowerBook and iBook are getting on for subnotebook size. The iBook is Apple's low-end, $1299 "kids and consumers" notebook, and it is 1.3 inches thick and 8x11 depth and width and weighs less than five pounds (including the 5-hour battery). An interesting comparison that I read once put it up against a 3 pound Sony subnotebook, and the Sony weighed more in total, because the "3 pounds" didn't include the battery, external optical drive, and the PC Cards you needed for Ethernet and modem and such, which weren't built-in.
Apple is kicking ass in notebooks. You really owe it to yourself to check them out very seriously before you make any future notebook purchase. You pay one price, put in some more RAM since it is so easy to do (user-accessible RAM doors on all Macs) and then you just go about your business for a couple of years with no worries at all.
> For most laptop uses having more than 256 megs
> of ram is useless.
Well, you just disqualified yourself from talking computers with most Mac users. I routinely create and access files that are much bigger than 256 MB, so naturally, I like my computers to have more than that in RAM. As another poster pointed out, you want as much RAM as possible in a notebook especially, because the hard drives are slower than desktop hard drives, and RAM uses less power than spinning hard drive platters.
You're just knee-jerk trying to sell us that the Dell is better, when it's not. It's WalMart, buddy. It's cheap and that's good when it does the job for the user, but if it doesn't do the job, it's a fucking curse. I know a lot of people (myself included) who got their first Macs in the last couple of years (post-NeXT) and we are all spoiled now for anything else. I would rather have one Mac every three years than a new PC every year. It's more productive, it's less admin work, and my Mac OS X box has NOT been open to anyone on the Internet for the past couple of months, like EVERY Windows XP box was, and still is until the user patches it. Apple's security patches are downloaded by the OS (it just asks for your permission to install them, and this can be disabled if you like), so even Grandma's iMac has the latest patches (not that there has been anything even remotely like the recent Windows XP holes).
You can pick on the price of Apple's desktops, even though they come with a ton of hardware and software included that you don't get with other PC's (FireWire, DVD-RW/CD-RW, Gigabit Ethernet, iMovie, iDVD, iTunes and much more), but it's ludicrous to pick on their notebooks. The PowerBook and iBook are a whole class ahead of any other notebook computer there is. Even if you only look at battery life and wireless capability (5 hours and built-in wireless card and antennaes vs. Dell's 2 hours and no built-in wireless card or antennaes) you are in a new world with the Mac. When you factor in other connectivity, there's no doubt (built-in Ethernet on iBook, built-in Gigabit Ethernet on PowerBook, built-in FireWire on both, built-in TV out on both, built-in REAL modems on both, built-in IrDA modem on PowerBook, built-in VGA out on both, plus both can act as FireWire hard drives for easy connection to a desktop computer).
Every once in a while I take a look at "what I'm missing" since I went Mac-only, and I honestly can't get past the fact that there are PC notebooks out there that don't have Ethernet built-in (my PowerBook has Gigabit Ethernet, and I use it all the time, connected to my PowerMac, which also has Gigabit Ethernet built-in). How can you call it a computer when it doesn't have an Ethernet port? That's not what PC Card slots are for (they're for occasional stuff like CF cards and unexpected stuff like Ricochet modems).
Which is slower or faster also depends on the kind of work you do. The G4's Altivec component was designed to do the kind of DSP stuff that lots of Mac users are doing in audio, video and graphics work. Final Cut Pro 3.0 on a PowerBook G4/667 is doing things that can't even be done on a desktop PC of any kind without a dedicated processing accellerator card. PowerMacs are routinely doing high-quality 1x software MPEG-2 encoding (making DVD's), and in fact, come with the software to do that out of the box. Encoding and encryption are also faster on Macs in general. My PowerBook can encode high-quality MP3's faster than the data can be read off the audio CD. Apple added Media Cleaner Pro Mac/Windows shootouts to their demos last year because of this, too. Encoding movies for the Web is twice as fast on Macs.
You can play with your SPECmarks and other questionable stuff, but I'm more impressed when I see Machine A (Mac) beat the pants of Machine B (other PC) at the desktop tasks that I do all day, with the same applications that are important to me, that affect my own business. Bring the machines out of the lab and let's see what they can actually DO. That's why all the machines at the Apple Store are up and running, on the Web, connected to peripherals, and you can use them to do stuff before you decide to buy one.
Unless there are people buying machines just to run SPECmarks all day long. In that case, Microsoft has a PC and the world's most insecure general purpose operating system ready, just for you.
If you look at Mac OS X, Apple has done everything they can to host every application that they can. If you have an app that's written for a UNIX, it is easy to port it; if you have an app that's written for any Mac API, it's easy to port it. Same with NeXT and Java2/Swing. Finally, they have a system for running the whole legacy OS and its applications side-by-side with all of that. VirtualPC has also been around forever on the Mac platform, and is native on OS X now, so all the PC stuff is available, too.
If an Intel OS vendor were to take that same attitude, they would want to build a UNIX with Win32, Java2/Swing, and maybe OS/2 or anything else from the Intel platform's past. DOS could also be supported somehow (maybe an emulator running actual DOS... modern machines are plenty fast so you can just confine your DOS to a truly virtual machine).
If an operating system's function is to host apps, then Intel OS vendors might want to consider not shunning all the apps that have been written for Microsoft operating systems on the Intel platform. Those are "PC" apps, and an Intel OS ought to host them.
Apple makes the hardware on their platform, too, and even then they couldn't get Mac developers to switch to a whole new API when the initial Mac OS X Server was released in 1999. Apple had to bring forward a modern version of the old Mac API in order to bring the apps forward. If you want to bring PC apps forward to an open source UNIX, then they will need a Win32 API to write to.
WINE and similar seem to be sensible projects. No wonder Lindows is getting hassled even when they maybe don't have a project. It's the same kind of way Compaq got into the IBM PC platform, by providing a clone of the hardware for the OS to run on. Now, Linux or BSD could provide a clone of the Win32 API for the apps to run on.
Somebody will eventually build this, probably on BSD, just like Mac OS X. You could also clone Mac OS X, just using the comparable x86 API's. Imagine BSD with built-in Apache and all the UNIX stuff, configured for easy operation like in Mac OS X, but also able to run thousands of Windows apps. Maybe some of the Be GUI stuff would be in on this, rather than X-Windows.
The system he has is under $3000, including flat panel display, and includes all kinds of things that he would have had to add to another system himself. Adding this to a Linux box would have worked against Linux in this comparison because he would have had to deal with FireWire (1394) or AirPort (802.11) drivers and hardware installs, when what he said he didn't like about Linux was dealing with drivers and hardware installs.
You pay one price with a Mac and get all the trimmings. It's a different approach. It works better for Scot than the do-it-yourself approach. It works better for most people. There are also COMPLETE Mac systems for $799 in a desktop and $1299 in a notebook. Many people are very happily running Mac OS X on these systems, and on $799 systems they purchased a year ago or more.
One of the frustrations of Mac OS X is that there are a few things where it does not yet match up to 9. It's funny to see guys come to Mac OS X fresh, knock Mac OS 9 with some old FUD, and then say that X needs a certain feature that is what is missing since 9. The Creator code is also caled "Application Signature". You can also call it "application that originally created this document". It's just information, and useful information if you can't figure out some other way to open a document. It is also easy to change with a script or utility, so a user has never been locked into one app with their documents. Apple still provides scripts to modify this, even scripts built specifically for Mac OS X.
It's like once here on Slashdot I read a post from a guy who said that the Mac was no good because you couldn't script it. Then he proposed that all GUI's SHOULD have a system where the user can record their actions and turn them into scripts, which they can then use or tweak as desired to speed up repetitive tasks. Ha ha. (For those of you who don't know, he described the Mac's Open Scripting Architecture aka AppleScript precisely.)
Mac OS 9 is a bunch of great software running amazingly well on a really antique core. If you like Mac OS X, you have to give up your old Mac OS 9 bashing FUD spreading ways. It's mostly the same stuff on a great new core. Sure, the core changes things for a lot of people, opening the Mac up to them, but it's a bit frustrating to see people like Scot (an admitted Mac-basher) amazed at DiskCopy and being able to rename or move files and have that not break aliases or dependencies, or liking iTunes or iMovie, or being able to plug in devices and they just work. Those things are core features of Mac OS going back a long way. The same people (post Steve Jobs return Apple) who brought us Mac OS 8.5, 8.6, 9.x are also responsible for Mac OS X. It's not like classic Mac OS stopped evolving while people waited for Mac OS X. The Carbon API is in both systems. A lot of stuff is the same, just rock-solid stable and more eye-catching.
Not to imply that I don't welcome each and every user to the platform, no matter what. Just think it's worth it for the new Mac OS X user to hold off on the Mac OS 9 bashing unless they also used that as well. There are so many ways that you can say "Mac OS X is better than 9 because..." and then put your foot in your mouth when you are told that the same feature is in both systems (of course, updated and running on a better core in Mac OS X).
> Then you should try imagemagick. Rocks your
> head off for ceratain tasks. Like converting
> beetween 100 different fileformats or adding
> logos to images. Far more easy than photoshop
> when dealing with lots of pictures.
I'm sorry, man, but that is just an asinine thing to say. Photoshop and Fireworks are totally recordable and scriptable. If you want to add a logo watermark to one billion images, you record yourself doing it once and apply the script (called an Action) to the other 999,999,999 images. All graphically. In Fireworks, any set of steps that you do can be saved as a Command, which can then be applied to a billion files using the Batch Processing dialog. If you need something really esoteric, you can edit these scripts by hand. Fireworks' scripts are just JavaScript. Once you've recorded an action once, you can use it again and again, right from where you're also painting and drawing and applying filters to images.
Honestly, Photoshop is to graphics what UNIX is to files. It's nice that there are command line tools for working with images in certain ways (obviously this scratches an itch for somebody) but to recommend that kind of thing to an artist is like telling Linux Torvalds to use Windows 3.1 because it has a command line, too. I see people marveling that Mac OS X supports "alpha channels" like it's some kind of amazing thing, when on the Mac, full support for 32-bit graphics is old, old hat. Even icons have been 32-bit since Mac OS 8.5. It's basic stuff for a platform of artists, video editors, and multimedia people.
We Mac users are not just sitting her poking around with a mouse cursor, wishing for the internal consistency and scriptability of the command line. Our GUI has been internally consistent forever, and has been recordable and scriptable for many years (8 or 9 or something). Don't make assumptions about the Mac, just go and see one at the Apple Store, or better yet, make a Mac friend online and find out what kinds of things they're doing and how and you'll get a greater picture of the diversity of general computing.
I can't believe I'm having a CLI vs GUI argument and it's almost 2002. The Mac has had a CLI built-in for almost a year now, and it has brought a few more users to the platform (although we won't really see that in numbers until the mass of traditional Mac users moves to Mac OS X fully as well). There is no more debate. You can have whatever you want from one box now, or use whatever other box has a subset of Mac OS X features that satisfies you (pure CLI guy just uses Linux on a 486, for example).
Slashdot Mirror
> I think their digital hub is a smash hit ... for the geek who "just wants the
> idea
> mundane to work" so he can get on with
> the cool stuff.
FUCKING AMEN! It doesn't impress me anymore that a guy can install 802.11 drivers or open a box up and put another ATA drive in there. Yawn. Apple does that shit for you, or makes it so easy to do it that you don't notice it (compare hot-plugging an iPod into a FireWire port to installing an additional ATA drive inside a box). I'm more interested in whether the guy wrote a cool game that takes advantage of 802.11, or when someone comes up with a cool new use for FireWire (like a miniscule MP3 player). Time to get out of the boxes, people. Hard disks are not interesting anymore.
> aim for the miniscule graphic design
> market -sell your machines at a heavy
> discount to schools and universities
Somebody's got to make computers for artists and students.
> don't make a decent OS until it's too late
As opposed to Microsoft's "don't make a decent OS at all".
> all of the great innovations out of the Mac
> camp (many of which were lifted from
> Xerox, btw)
Many? The Mac platform is 20 years old and has shaped graphical computing. The Xerox stuff that Apple bought (bought, not lifted) didn't even have overlapping windows, pull-down menus, drag and drop, and many more things that you think it had simply because it "had a GUI". Some very talented people invented that stuff while they were working for Apple, and it's a shame that so many people keep giving Xerox the credit. Xerox' stuff culminated in being sold to Apple so that it would see the light of day at some point, so it would get out of their RESEARCH CENTER and make it into a product. Apple's stuff became a successful computer platform upon which such artworks as the entire Nine Inch Nails catalog were created. But, yeah, I guess you're right, we owe it all to Xerox, don't we?
> but then start these ill-concieved
> Apple Stores
At Macworld, Steve Jobs pointed out that the 80,000 people who were going to attend the four-day trade show were dwarfed by the 800,000 people who attended "mini-Macworld Expos" at Apple Stores in the month of December 2001 alone. The fact that they sold 40% of the systems out of the Apple Store to people who had never, ever owned a Mac before tells me that these stores will be long-term successes. The stores themselves almost broke even, in spite of the bad economy, world events, the cost of building them in the first place, and also the transition from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X (which is almost complete). Apple's core customers have not even weighed in yet, with Photoshop and Pro Tools and other staples not yet Mac OS X native. Apple has those upgrades and also iMac upgrades to look forward to, as well as more and more defectors from Microsoft.
> but don't get this level of attention
> because they don't have the marketing
> weight of Apple.
I guess when you really don't want to admit that something is good you can always say that the people who like it are idiots who have been hypnotized by marketing. I think iPod will be remembered 10 years from now as the first proper file-based walkman. The combination of features that it has, including an interface that people learn in five seconds without a manual, makes it a jukebox that you can fit in your shirt pocket, and that's going to be the form factor the same way that the PowerBook's form factor has become standard on portable computers (palm rest with a pointing device in the center, then a keyboard, then a display). The iPod interface may become the new "transport controls", replacing the tape-inspired ones on CD players. Track to track forward and back buttons is not the way to get around a collection of thousands of files.
I think what you're missing is that you have a LOT of music, so capacity is probably your key feature. Most people don't have enough music to fill an iPod, even at the 160kbs that Apple uses as a default (the 1000 songs number also assumes 160kbs), so they are much, much more interested in size, weight, connectivity, ease of use, fun, style, etc. in their music player.
I just read that Archos has a FireWire-based player coming out soon, so they will be second with that. I don't think they're doing it to be stylish, but rather because the keyboard port is not the right place to hook up a hard disk. Think about it. It's funny that so many Intel users like to know they have ATA/133 and whatever else and then turn around and defend USB for the hard disk in their music player. No, it's not the right way to do it.
The 10-12 hour battery in the iPod and charging over FireWire means you don't have to manage the battery at all, unless you are a really, really avid listener. You just plug the thing into your computer at the end of the day, and it will likely still have a lot of juice left. The next day it is ready to go with a full charge again. For many users, they will never, ever, run out of juice with their iPod. That's an intangible feature that's not easy to represent on spec sheets, but when you're using it, you realize that it is very, very liberating not to have to manage a device's battery life.
This is also why Palm continues to clean PocketPC's clock. Many people can run a grayscale Palm machine for weeks on a single charge, so they sync with their address book or back up data more often, which means, again, that they don't manage battery life, because the Palm charges in its cradle while it's sync'ing without them even thinking about it, rather than expiring unexpectedly because it has no juice.
If you think about it, any device that can't do one day's worth of normal use is buggy. You shouldn't have to feed a portable device more than once a day.
Also, iPod is really, really small and really, really light. I have most of my favorite albums on my PowerBook G4, which is 1" thick and 5 lbs and often travels with me, but an iPod hides in my jean jacket and can go with me everywhere.
I love how people pretend that their Windows PCs have unlimited future lives when they talk about the cost of a Mac. Like you will never, ever have to buy another computer. The $1200 that Apple expects you to pay for the computer that is compatible with your iPod is the $1200 that you would otherwise give Gateway or Dell for your next Microsoft system. If you are into digital music, then it may make sense for you to get a system that's designed for that, including such things as FireWire and iPod and whatever else. Same as things like iPhoto, true plug and play in Mac OS X, and ColorSync make Macs appealing to photographers. If you choose your system based on the right tool for the job, then the iPod is a feature you can take or leave as required. If you've got to have it, you'll be happier with a Mac anyway. What makes the iPod appealing is the same thing that makes Macs appealing.
> When Apple chose not to support
> Windows, they excluded 100 million
> potential customers in the US alone.
Most Windows computers don't even have FireWire, so they are not a potential market for iPods. I would venture that the potential market for iPods, just based on the requirement "personal computer with FireWire" is 75% Mac, at least. Sony is the biggest vendor of 1394-compatible Windows PC's, and their i.Link doesn't even have power, so it's no good for an iPod (or any of the portable FireWire hard drives, which are all powered by the FireWire port).
> Apple claims it sold 100,000 iPods
> in two months. I'm skeptical, but assume
> that's correct. That means a
> PC-compatible version could have
> sold a million
They couldn't have made a million of them if they wanted to. The iPod uses a very small 1.8" hard drive that is only available in limited quantity. At the iPod launch, Steve Jobs said they expected to sell "as many as we can make". At Macworld SF 2002, Steve Jobs said they sold 125,000 so far and had sold out in many places. In other words, they're already selling as many as they can make.
What you are missing here is that iPod is not meant to make PC's look bad; it's made to make Mac's look good. After inventing FireWire and then putting it on all of their computers a few years ago, Apple can now turn to their customers and say, "here's why you got rid of your SCSI peripherals," so you can hot-plug a miniature hard drive that is also an MP3 player and the computer itself takes care of powering and charging the device, and the software is all already there and well-tested and newbie-proof and ready to go.
> What's really interesting is that Apple
> chose to make the iPod look like an
> HFS disk
It doesn't "look like" an HFS+ disk, it IS an HFS+ disk. If it weren't, you couldn't boot your Mac off it. While Mac OS X can boot off UFS, some apps don't support that yet, because UFS has FEWER features than HFS+ (such as Unicode and support for the metadata attached to the billions of files that have been created on the Mac platform over the last 20 years).
I'm sorry, man, but you are playing the arrogant Windows boob, here. Many of the iPods features are lost on you because you don't think about booting a Microsoft PC from any attached storage. People are putting their whole system, apps, and home folder on the iPod, even with only the 5GB size, and just booting any Mac they happen to be near from the iPod. When the iPod has 40GB or 100GB, it will be an even more popular feature.
And, aside from that, I would love to hear your argument for a different FS. FAT32 isn't even Microsoft's favorite file system anymore. Should Apple pay MS to use NTFS? Why? Why use UFS on a consumer MP3 player when it is not a mainstream personal computer FS? You are just bigoted against HFS+ because you don't know anything about it and Microsoft has never wanted to support it.
Compare the copy-protection features of iPod with ANY other MP3 player before you knock Apple, or you will have egg on your face later. It is the only MP3 player that lacks "digital rights management". Read the fine print, fellows.
> Apple's just trying to lock you into their
> hardware jail
Gimme a break! Windows PC's don't generally even have FireWire yet. Apache also doesn't run on Windows, but it's not because the Apache developers want to put you in UNIX jail, it's because Windows does not have the balls to support it.
When most Windows PC's have a) FireWire, b) music management software, c) CD burning hardware/software, d) plug and play hardware (not Plug 'n' Play(TM), but actual plug and play, like on Macs), and e) stability, then you can accuse Apple of elitism. As it is, Apple is just making a great product for the only platform that can currently support it. They said at the iPod launch that they put the product together from scratch in 8 months. How long do you think they should have delayed it so that they can patch Windows and test iPod with every strange combination of 1394 hardware/software that's out there on Windows PC's? (Sony's 1394 doesn't even have power, which the iPod requires.) It is much better for them if they vet it to run on their systems, and leave fixing Windows to either Microsoft or a third-party who will charge extra and answer the support calls.
Apple didn't complain to Richard Stallman that there was no emacs for Mac OS 9. Instead, they built UNIX compatibility into Mac OS X and now they ship emacs with the OS. They put Java2 in there so we can run Java2 apps. If the Windows PC platform can't support iPod, then complain to Microsoft, don't knock Apple or make up conspiratorial subplots about them to explain why your new Windows PC turns out to be a few years behind the curve.
> Aren't things like [iPhoto] mostly old
... you don't get lists of technical options ... the apps are very smart and make complex tasks simple and easy. Often, they replace two or three other poorly-suited apps that you were using to get some simple task done the hard way.
> hat with a nifty interface?
With most PC's, you get LE or Lite versions of apps with licensing restrictions and no upgrades. With Apple's bundled software, you get a real product that answers a real need with a full features set, complete with free future upgrades. The "iApps", as they are called, are worth buying the whole computer for, for many users. iTunes, iMovie, and iDVD are all at version 2, and are absolutely the BEST at what they do, bar none, Mac or PC. iPhoto does the things that average people want to do with their digital photos.
Also, these apps are all very easy to use, and lots of fun. People like to use them, and they get great results. These apps are operating a level up from other apps
The new iMac has the same Pro Keyboard and Pro Mouse that they've been shipping for a year or so, except that where the keyboard and mouse were previously black, they are white on the new iMac. They are both basically clear with either black or white accents.
The keyboard has, like, 70 buttons on it. It also has extra modifier keys that other computers don't have, so we can afford to use Control+click as a context click. You can also Command+click to do a lot of things (open a link in a new window in IE for example), and Shift+click, Option+click, etc. It's not hard, and the hand that stays on the keyboard while you use the TrackPad does the modifier keys.
It's actually easier for many people than a right-click on the mouse. A Shift+right-click is almost impossible for most people to use regularly (both hands are chording) so the spare-keyboard-on-the-mouse thing has limits.
AppleWorks (word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentations) is free with iMacs and iBooks and is really great. Plenty of people have used both AppleWorks and MS Office and choose AppleWorks. It's easier to just write a letter, or make a presentation with AppleWorks.
There are at least two pro level FireWire multichannel audio adapters out now. One is the MOTU 828, which is a rack-mount unit that Glyph makes a matching rack-mount storage unit for as well. There is another that is notebook-sized, but I can't remember the name. You can find it in a good music magazine, or through pro audio sites. With either of these adapters, you just hot-plug a FireWire cable between the adapter and the computer, and then install whatever software is necessary.
You can get a notebook with FireWire from Apple (any notebook from the past two years or so), Sony (some models), and a few others. Apple's machines also support mLAN, which is Yamaha's replacement for MIDI and optical digital cables, which also runs over FireWire. The content creation industries are standardizing on FireWire right now wherever they can. It's built to answer the problems that music and audio and video people face.
I don't know what the state of USB Audio is on Windows, but on the Mac you can get a small, cheap adapter like Griffin iMic ($25) and you get 24-bit stereo recording that's free of any internal computer noise. If you only need stereo, this is an easy solution. There are also some USB mic preamps, enabling you to plug a high-quality mic into USB and get good results.
I don't blame the worm writers. Blaming them is like blaming the rain. Rain is a feature of our planet and worms and viruses are a feature of Microsoft software. Writing a Word template, no matter how complex or unusual, is not a crime. Releasing email clients and operating systems that blow up or do really weird things when they encounter Word templates ... that's questionable.
I'd rather have half as many Macs as PC's, or just one Mac every three years instead of a new PC every 18 months. You can play with the economics forever in this way, but the fact is, when I sit down to work at my Mac, I see my work (music and audio, graphics), not the computer. It's priceless. There is no price you can put on that. If not for the post-NeXT Apple, I would have already given up on computers. Seriously. My second choice to a Mac is a dedicated audio recording rig of some kind, or an easel and paints, not a Windows PC. Having to admin the thing would not be worth it. Having my workspace open to the world would not be worth it.
As for Linux, I have a server that runs Linux, and it has been a decent performer at a low, low cost. Very good stuff. Linux is good for anything that you want to set and forget, where you don't mind getting your hands dirty for a couple of days so that you can leave the box alone to do its thing for the next two years. Mac OS X is an answer to another problem altogether: you sit down, day-by-day, to do creative, desktop, user-oriented, one-on-one work with the computer. It has to work first time when I plug shit in or drag-and-drop some new software into place. If it doesn't work first time, it has to have a simple, non-technical GUI-oriented solution that I can apply and then get back to work immediately. I don't NEED Apple to hold my hand; I WANT them to take care of the technical shit so that I don't have to switch gears when I'm working.
> [Apple's] money comes from hardware
The other side of this is that Mac OS X is well supported by revenues from hardware. In other words, the software project that is Mac OS X has a constant source of funding, money coming directly from users and going directly to the OS development effort. This means that when Apple started building CD-RW's and DVD-RW/CD-RW's into Macs, they had a good reason to build the software support for those features into the OS and have done with it. They purchased a company that made disc burning software and they absorbed that into Mac OS X, and now working with writeable optical media is as easy as working with floppies used to be. And it's good, good stuff, not some cut-rate attempt to give you something that won't survive the next Windows rev and thus drive you back to a third-party solution just for basic data, audio, and MP3 CD's. That capability should come with the hardware (the drive) not be some add-on that you get so you can use the hardware.
> I AM a Mac zealot, but you're wrong here.
> The desktop Powermacs use the MPC 7450 CPU
> (or MPC 7451) whereas the mobile machines are
> fitted with the MPC 7440 (or MPC 7441). Thus far,
> the G4 series has seen the MPC 7400, 7410, 7450,
> 7440, 7451 and 7451 chips.
The guy's point is that a PowerBook G4 has a "real G4" in it, whereas Pentium Mobiles are seriously crippled. A desktop G4 runs about 15 watts, while a notebook G4 runs about 10 watts. A desktop PIII runs about 50 watts, while a notebook PIII runs about 20.
P4's are in the 60-70 watt range, same as Athlons. The low-power and heat of the G4 is why Apple's desktop boxes can power the display, FireWire, two independent USB busses, AirPort, and still have four empty PCI slots and room for four hard drives all on one power supply. With an Intel box, half your power supply and cooling is just for the CPU.
PowerBooks all have DVD/CD-RW ("Combo") standard, now. A combo drive that fits into the 1" enclosure was just released a couple of weeks ago by the OEM. Prior to that, there just wasn't a way to put one in there.
That's something that gets overlooked a lot in Mac vs PC notebook comparisons. The PowerBook and iBook are getting on for subnotebook size. The iBook is Apple's low-end, $1299 "kids and consumers" notebook, and it is 1.3 inches thick and 8x11 depth and width and weighs less than five pounds (including the 5-hour battery). An interesting comparison that I read once put it up against a 3 pound Sony subnotebook, and the Sony weighed more in total, because the "3 pounds" didn't include the battery, external optical drive, and the PC Cards you needed for Ethernet and modem and such, which weren't built-in.
Apple is kicking ass in notebooks. You really owe it to yourself to check them out very seriously before you make any future notebook purchase. You pay one price, put in some more RAM since it is so easy to do (user-accessible RAM doors on all Macs) and then you just go about your business for a couple of years with no worries at all.
> For most laptop uses having more than 256 megs
> of ram is useless.
Well, you just disqualified yourself from talking computers with most Mac users. I routinely create and access files that are much bigger than 256 MB, so naturally, I like my computers to have more than that in RAM. As another poster pointed out, you want as much RAM as possible in a notebook especially, because the hard drives are slower than desktop hard drives, and RAM uses less power than spinning hard drive platters.
You're just knee-jerk trying to sell us that the Dell is better, when it's not. It's WalMart, buddy. It's cheap and that's good when it does the job for the user, but if it doesn't do the job, it's a fucking curse. I know a lot of people (myself included) who got their first Macs in the last couple of years (post-NeXT) and we are all spoiled now for anything else. I would rather have one Mac every three years than a new PC every year. It's more productive, it's less admin work, and my Mac OS X box has NOT been open to anyone on the Internet for the past couple of months, like EVERY Windows XP box was, and still is until the user patches it. Apple's security patches are downloaded by the OS (it just asks for your permission to install them, and this can be disabled if you like), so even Grandma's iMac has the latest patches (not that there has been anything even remotely like the recent Windows XP holes).
You can pick on the price of Apple's desktops, even though they come with a ton of hardware and software included that you don't get with other PC's (FireWire, DVD-RW/CD-RW, Gigabit Ethernet, iMovie, iDVD, iTunes and much more), but it's ludicrous to pick on their notebooks. The PowerBook and iBook are a whole class ahead of any other notebook computer there is. Even if you only look at battery life and wireless capability (5 hours and built-in wireless card and antennaes vs. Dell's 2 hours and no built-in wireless card or antennaes) you are in a new world with the Mac. When you factor in other connectivity, there's no doubt (built-in Ethernet on iBook, built-in Gigabit Ethernet on PowerBook, built-in FireWire on both, built-in TV out on both, built-in REAL modems on both, built-in IrDA modem on PowerBook, built-in VGA out on both, plus both can act as FireWire hard drives for easy connection to a desktop computer).
Every once in a while I take a look at "what I'm missing" since I went Mac-only, and I honestly can't get past the fact that there are PC notebooks out there that don't have Ethernet built-in (my PowerBook has Gigabit Ethernet, and I use it all the time, connected to my PowerMac, which also has Gigabit Ethernet built-in). How can you call it a computer when it doesn't have an Ethernet port? That's not what PC Card slots are for (they're for occasional stuff like CF cards and unexpected stuff like Ricochet modems).
Which is slower or faster also depends on the kind of work you do. The G4's Altivec component was designed to do the kind of DSP stuff that lots of Mac users are doing in audio, video and graphics work. Final Cut Pro 3.0 on a PowerBook G4/667 is doing things that can't even be done on a desktop PC of any kind without a dedicated processing accellerator card. PowerMacs are routinely doing high-quality 1x software MPEG-2 encoding (making DVD's), and in fact, come with the software to do that out of the box. Encoding and encryption are also faster on Macs in general. My PowerBook can encode high-quality MP3's faster than the data can be read off the audio CD. Apple added Media Cleaner Pro Mac/Windows shootouts to their demos last year because of this, too. Encoding movies for the Web is twice as fast on Macs.
You can play with your SPECmarks and other questionable stuff, but I'm more impressed when I see Machine A (Mac) beat the pants of Machine B (other PC) at the desktop tasks that I do all day, with the same applications that are important to me, that affect my own business. Bring the machines out of the lab and let's see what they can actually DO. That's why all the machines at the Apple Store are up and running, on the Web, connected to peripherals, and you can use them to do stuff before you decide to buy one.
Unless there are people buying machines just to run SPECmarks all day long. In that case, Microsoft has a PC and the world's most insecure general purpose operating system ready, just for you.
If you look at Mac OS X, Apple has done everything they can to host every application that they can. If you have an app that's written for a UNIX, it is easy to port it; if you have an app that's written for any Mac API, it's easy to port it. Same with NeXT and Java2/Swing. Finally, they have a system for running the whole legacy OS and its applications side-by-side with all of that. VirtualPC has also been around forever on the Mac platform, and is native on OS X now, so all the PC stuff is available, too.
... modern machines are plenty fast so you can just confine your DOS to a truly virtual machine).
If an Intel OS vendor were to take that same attitude, they would want to build a UNIX with Win32, Java2/Swing, and maybe OS/2 or anything else from the Intel platform's past. DOS could also be supported somehow (maybe an emulator running actual DOS
If an operating system's function is to host apps, then Intel OS vendors might want to consider not shunning all the apps that have been written for Microsoft operating systems on the Intel platform. Those are "PC" apps, and an Intel OS ought to host them.
Apple makes the hardware on their platform, too, and even then they couldn't get Mac developers to switch to a whole new API when the initial Mac OS X Server was released in 1999. Apple had to bring forward a modern version of the old Mac API in order to bring the apps forward. If you want to bring PC apps forward to an open source UNIX, then they will need a Win32 API to write to.
WINE and similar seem to be sensible projects. No wonder Lindows is getting hassled even when they maybe don't have a project. It's the same kind of way Compaq got into the IBM PC platform, by providing a clone of the hardware for the OS to run on. Now, Linux or BSD could provide a clone of the Win32 API for the apps to run on.
Somebody will eventually build this, probably on BSD, just like Mac OS X. You could also clone Mac OS X, just using the comparable x86 API's. Imagine BSD with built-in Apache and all the UNIX stuff, configured for easy operation like in Mac OS X, but also able to run thousands of Windows apps. Maybe some of the Be GUI stuff would be in on this, rather than X-Windows.
> Quite frankly, neither XP or OSX offers the
> desktop I want. Both are too inflexible and
> lacking in power.
What's inflexible about Mac OS X? What's not powerful enough?
The system he has is under $3000, including flat panel display, and includes all kinds of things that he would have had to add to another system himself. Adding this to a Linux box would have worked against Linux in this comparison because he would have had to deal with FireWire (1394) or AirPort (802.11) drivers and hardware installs, when what he said he didn't like about Linux was dealing with drivers and hardware installs.
You pay one price with a Mac and get all the trimmings. It's a different approach. It works better for Scot than the do-it-yourself approach. It works better for most people. There are also COMPLETE Mac systems for $799 in a desktop and $1299 in a notebook. Many people are very happily running Mac OS X on these systems, and on $799 systems they purchased a year ago or more.
One of the frustrations of Mac OS X is that there are a few things where it does not yet match up to 9. It's funny to see guys come to Mac OS X fresh, knock Mac OS 9 with some old FUD, and then say that X needs a certain feature that is what is missing since 9. The Creator code is also caled "Application Signature". You can also call it "application that originally created this document". It's just information, and useful information if you can't figure out some other way to open a document. It is also easy to change with a script or utility, so a user has never been locked into one app with their documents. Apple still provides scripts to modify this, even scripts built specifically for Mac OS X.
..." and then put your foot in your mouth when you are told that the same feature is in both systems (of course, updated and running on a better core in Mac OS X).
It's like once here on Slashdot I read a post from a guy who said that the Mac was no good because you couldn't script it. Then he proposed that all GUI's SHOULD have a system where the user can record their actions and turn them into scripts, which they can then use or tweak as desired to speed up repetitive tasks. Ha ha. (For those of you who don't know, he described the Mac's Open Scripting Architecture aka AppleScript precisely.)
Mac OS 9 is a bunch of great software running amazingly well on a really antique core. If you like Mac OS X, you have to give up your old Mac OS 9 bashing FUD spreading ways. It's mostly the same stuff on a great new core. Sure, the core changes things for a lot of people, opening the Mac up to them, but it's a bit frustrating to see people like Scot (an admitted Mac-basher) amazed at DiskCopy and being able to rename or move files and have that not break aliases or dependencies, or liking iTunes or iMovie, or being able to plug in devices and they just work. Those things are core features of Mac OS going back a long way. The same people (post Steve Jobs return Apple) who brought us Mac OS 8.5, 8.6, 9.x are also responsible for Mac OS X. It's not like classic Mac OS stopped evolving while people waited for Mac OS X. The Carbon API is in both systems. A lot of stuff is the same, just rock-solid stable and more eye-catching.
Not to imply that I don't welcome each and every user to the platform, no matter what. Just think it's worth it for the new Mac OS X user to hold off on the Mac OS 9 bashing unless they also used that as well. There are so many ways that you can say "Mac OS X is better than 9 because
> Then you should try imagemagick. Rocks your
> head off for ceratain tasks. Like converting
> beetween 100 different fileformats or adding
> logos to images. Far more easy than photoshop
> when dealing with lots of pictures.
I'm sorry, man, but that is just an asinine thing to say. Photoshop and Fireworks are totally recordable and scriptable. If you want to add a logo watermark to one billion images, you record yourself doing it once and apply the script (called an Action) to the other 999,999,999 images. All graphically. In Fireworks, any set of steps that you do can be saved as a Command, which can then be applied to a billion files using the Batch Processing dialog. If you need something really esoteric, you can edit these scripts by hand. Fireworks' scripts are just JavaScript. Once you've recorded an action once, you can use it again and again, right from where you're also painting and drawing and applying filters to images.
Honestly, Photoshop is to graphics what UNIX is to files. It's nice that there are command line tools for working with images in certain ways (obviously this scratches an itch for somebody) but to recommend that kind of thing to an artist is like telling Linux Torvalds to use Windows 3.1 because it has a command line, too. I see people marveling that Mac OS X supports "alpha channels" like it's some kind of amazing thing, when on the Mac, full support for 32-bit graphics is old, old hat. Even icons have been 32-bit since Mac OS 8.5. It's basic stuff for a platform of artists, video editors, and multimedia people.
We Mac users are not just sitting her poking around with a mouse cursor, wishing for the internal consistency and scriptability of the command line. Our GUI has been internally consistent forever, and has been recordable and scriptable for many years (8 or 9 or something). Don't make assumptions about the Mac, just go and see one at the Apple Store, or better yet, make a Mac friend online and find out what kinds of things they're doing and how and you'll get a greater picture of the diversity of general computing.
I can't believe I'm having a CLI vs GUI argument and it's almost 2002. The Mac has had a CLI built-in for almost a year now, and it has brought a few more users to the platform (although we won't really see that in numbers until the mass of traditional Mac users moves to Mac OS X fully as well). There is no more debate. You can have whatever you want from one box now, or use whatever other box has a subset of Mac OS X features that satisfies you (pure CLI guy just uses Linux on a 486, for example).