The command-line in Mac OS X is just a single application called Terminal. It's kept in the Utilities folder. Promoting its use over other applications that have more graphical interfaces is foolish. It's like you're saying, "stop using Photoshop and Pro Tools to edit your graphics and audio; you can use Terminal instead". Hello? No, you can't. The artist, director, songwriter, musician, etc. etc. are not going to find switching to a command line is all that advantageous. They require a graphical environment for their work anyway, so why not drag and drop files just the same way they drag and drop image objects or audio segments?
What you're also missing is that you love the consistency of the command line, and you've tried Windows and balked at all of its inconsitencies. On the Mac, the GUI has traditionally been just as internally consistent as your command line is. When I want to select two graphic objects in Fireworks, I hold down Shift and click on one and then the other and they are both selected; when I switch to Finder, I can hold down Shift and click on one file and then another and they are both selected. I can drag these selections into other apps and that works; I can drag selections to the Finder and they become files or clippings as required. The menus are consistent; the key commands are consistent. Just as you see the structure and beauty of the command line, we Mac users see the structure and beauty of a good GUI.
In a way, your argument identifies you as the perfect Mac OS X user. You can spend 80% of your time in the shell and find yourself happily using a consistent GUI for other things that make more sense there. Guys like you are buying iBooks and making iMovies while shell scripts do something in multiple translucent terminal windows in the background.
And recommending that a person boot their system without a GUI is like saying that they should ignore the bulk of the world's application software, even though their machine can run it. You don't have to choose CLI over GUI or GUI over CLI in Mac OS X. You can use what you want, in the way that you want. The UNIX subsystem is wide open for the UNIX power user to really do what they want. No reason not to access it through a graphical application.
> Don't those numbnuts at Apple know that this
> is the #1 most annoying and stupid thing about
> the OS, and has been since - oh, I dunno, 1987?
Then ignore it. It is the third method for doing things. The first two are menu command and key commands. So, ejecting a disk is File > Eject or Command+E. Very easy. Deleting files is also File > Move to Trash or Command+Delete. Burning a disc is File > Burn Disc. You can also put these kinds of things in the Finder toolbar or in the Dock if that's your preference. Or write a simple script to do them that you can save as an application.
Actually, in Mac OS X you can also eject removable disks with the F12/Eject key on the keyboard, so dragging to the Trash is like the fourth or fifth method now.
It's not as hard as it might sound. With a little instruction and a few months of practice, I bet even sulli could do it.
VirtualPC is less than $100. Add it to Mac OS X and you can run Carbon, Cocoa, Classic, Java2, and BSD apps natively, and run any PC OS and applications in VirtualPC. You can have a window open with DOS running, next to a window with Windows XP running.
The speed is obviously not as good as a native x86 processor, but it's plenty fast enough to use to run about 10% or 20% of your work.
However, you're not really going to get anything from all this if you don't also use the advantages of the Mac itself. If you edit video, then this would be a great plan, or work with any kind of graphics or rich media. If you just edit text files or do office work, then Windows or Linux will do fine for you. The point is, though, that if a Mac is in your best interest 80% of the time, then for $90 you can get VirtualPC and have access to everything you "left behind", albeit at last year's speeds.
I have a friend who traded in his 1999 PC for a 2001 Mac, put VirtualPC on it, imaged his old hard drive, and now he has his old computer running as an application on Mac OS X. It runs about the same speed for the few apps he hasn't migrated away from yet.
Also, VirtualPC is a whole lot of fun. My brother just installed Windows 3.11 in it last night and we had a tremendous nostalgic laugh. It was funny to see the Windows 3.11 desktop with an Aqua titlebar above it.
Mac OS X systems aren't as slow as all that. It's just that each OS and GUI has its slow parts and fast parts. When you switch over, you notice immediately if the new system has a slow part where your old system had a fast part, while you often miss the new system's fast parts because you are in the habit of waiting on the old system. As you work with the new system, though, you quickly learn its fast and slow parts and suddenly you are literally "back up to speed".
In Scot Hacker's case, he is obviously going to find the file system in Mac OS X slow, because that was Be's greatest strength. Windows users might find the file system slow because Mac OS X is writing a lot of stuff there so that it can make a bunch of things easier on you (Scot Hacker found this out when he renamed all his MP3's and iTunes could still find them through HFS+ node numbers). Mac OS 9 users find that the GUI is not as instantly responsive to their touch, but soon they notice that they don't have to wait for stuff to finish before they go on to the next thing, and you make up the speed with the multitasking.
Also, things don't just appear in Aqua, they fade in and fade out. Some people think this means the system couldn't have made the item appear instantly, and call it slow. Mac OS X also has five or six application environments and is working in full Unicode and can use almost any font file ever created (OpenType, TrueType, Type 1, even TrueType fonts that have been created in the Windows format). It's doing a lot of things for you that you may not be thankful for at first, but you will be later when you can just take a font file and put it in your Fonts folder and use it without getting a converter or whatever.
I have also read a few reviews where the guy is used to using a Pentium desktop machine, and he auditions Mac OS X on a PowerBook or iBook. While the PowerBook and iBook are very fast computers, they use notebook hard drives just like any other notebook, running at 4200rpm usually (except the 5400rpm 48GB drive in the high-end PowerBook). Hard drives are one of the big bottlenecks in today's computers, so the guy is going to notice something even if he was reviewing a Windows notebook. The fact that the PowerBook feels like a desktop machine in every other way only makes it easier to forget that the hard drive is a fact of life, not a Mac OS X thing.
My main point is that using Mac OS X is not like switching to last year's Windows machine or something. Some things are a little slower for no reason, some things are a little slower for good reason, some things are faster and you notice, and some things are faster and it takes you a while to notice.
Personally, I've found a really good rhythm in Mac OS X where I just keep working and working and the system generally never interrupts me or slows me down. When I do use Mac OS 9 occassionally, at first it feels faster, but then I notice that I have to wait on certain things that I'm not used to waiting on, and I end up thinking Mac OS 9 is slower.
It's so subjective. I recommend Macs to almost anybody who works with anything other than just text, but if they can get to an Apple Store, I tell them to go hang out there for a few hours or days and let their own feelings and observations be their guide. Most people who know nothing about Macs and then spend an hour in the Apple Store touching all these working, connected machines get a whole new idea about Apple's computers. Maybe you don't end up buying one, but at least you have expanded your true knowledge of the tech and the tech industry. Replace the old 1993 vintage Bill Gates FUD you "know" about the Mac with an honest 2001-2002 opinion about what Apple is offering you and your business. At the very least, it may make you demand more of your current vendor.
File Type is just an attribute like Creation Date. It's part of the HFS+ file system and has nothing to do with the fact that HFS+ also supports forked files. The Creator code (also called Application Signature) is also an attribute. As Scot Hacker pointed out, you don't have to use the Creator code as the primary method for determining how to open a document, but it is a great last-ditch bit of information to have. If all else fails when trying to open a document, it makes sense that the application that originally created it can open it.
Files on Windows have Creation Dates and other attributes, but the file type is put on the end of the name as a file name extension because there is no File Type attribute to use in FAT16/32.
> If you work at it, you can even get the Finder to
> open files using the old type/creator heuristic
You don't have to work at it. All you have to do is double-click a file that has a Creator and File Type attribute and no file name extension. That's billions of Mac files, created by millions of users over the last 20 years.
The issue is not whether it actually works in Mac OS X but what Apple recommends now to developers. Apple acknowledges that the Mac user runs into files all day long that came from non-Mac systems, and those files often have file name extensions and no File Type or Creator attribute, so they want Mac OS X to be able to adjust and work with a file that has only a file name extension on it. Since files are not guaranteed to have Creator and File Type attributes, Apple doesn't ask developers to always add them to files their apps create. This is so that you can bring a Java2 app over and it just works, so that Cocoa developers don't have to bother with Creator and File Type if they don't want to.
The real problem is that Apple's system for dealing with file name extensions didn't appear until Mac OS X 10.1, so most of your native apps don't use the same system when you go to save a file. Some do the right thing, totally hiding the extension from you; in Mac OS 9 you'd save a PNG file as "My Document" and it would invisibly get a PNGf File Type and you're done. In Mac OS X, you should save a PNG file as "My Document" and it will acutally be called "My Document.png" but the ".png" will be hidden by the Finder (just for that file). This only works with known extensions, and not if you have two extensions (file.jpg.vbs would never have its.vbs extension hidden). Most apps have the extension in the save box waiting for you, or have a checkbox "Add Extension" or "Hide Extension". We just traded one kind of extension management for another, instead of really getting rid of the need to manage extensions.
Apple is moving in the right direction, but it's unfortunate that this aspect of the transition hasn't gone a little better. It's nice now that in Mac OS X I can receive a Word file in email called "ch01.doc" and I can just rename it "Chapter 01" and work with it that way, and it is actually called "Chapter 01.doc" with the ".doc" hidden, so when I send the file away in email, it still works on any system. In Mac OS 9, the best I would have been able to do would be "Chapter 01.doc" because I wouldn't want to lose the Windows compatibility of the file.
NO NO NO he is not saying "I couldn't copy some text from one app and paste it in another", he is saying he couldn't use the clipboard to move sophisticated data around reliably on his Linux system. On a Mac, you can generally copy audio, video, pictures, whatever, and paste it into another app and it works. Vector graphics stay vector graphics, and so on.
They bought NeXT in 1996 and shipped Mac OS X Server 1.0 in January of 1999, roughly two development years later. It ran OpenStep, Mac, and BSD apps. Mac developers demanded Carbon, though, which is an updated Mac application environment that make porting Mac apps much easier. So, Apple went to a plan where they built Carbon for both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X and then merged the platform into Mac OS X 10.0 and now 10.1. As well as Carbon, the newest Mac OS X also has Java2 and the Quartz display engine, just to name a couple of things.
The short answer is that they shipped the original Mac OS X on time, but it didn't turn out to be quite enough to migrate the platform, so they kept at it. It isn't like they went into a room promising something right away and came out four years later with Mac OS X 10.0.
Also, Mac OS 9 is not Mac OS 8.1. In fact, Apple improved the old OS so much that there are still people who don't want to leave it. The quality of Mac OS 9 gave Apple a lot of breathing room that nobody thought they had in 1996.
> OS X does not have a journaled file system
> (although, to be fair, I have lost power on
> this machine and found that it booted back
> up in a normal time span without appearing
> to do anything special).
Mac OS X runs fsck on each and every boot, but because of the way the HFS+ file system is constructed, running fsck multiple times on an 80GB disk takes only a few seconds, so you don't notice it.
If you check a disk with Mac OS X's Disk Utility, it actually runs fsck, and you'll notice it is done in a blink. Same with formatting disks... takes a second or two to format an 80GB drive.
> The [long] filenames were truncated with garbage
> characters when viewed in the Finder.
They're not actually random garbage characters... it's some kind of node number or something that is unique to that file, and so keeps shortened file names from conflicting. This is one of the top two or three "it's not going to kill me, but I sure wish it wasn't the case" types of things with Mac OS X. All you can say that's positive about it is that Apple is dealing with this issue better than Microsoft did with the similar issue on Windows.
> I don't mind AppleScript. I wish the system
> were open to other languages, but
> AppleScript does a fine job, and is very powerful.
The system is open to other languages. What most people call "AppleScript" is actually called "Open Scripting Architecture (OSA)", and AppleScript is just the default language. You can already get a JavaScript plug-in for Mac OS X.
Once installed (drop it in/Library/Components for the whole machine or ~/Library/Components for just yourself), the Mac OS X Script Editor will now have a menu on the bottom left of its window where you can select the language you want to script in. Other languages are available for Mac OS 9 as well.
The Mac OS X Script menu also launches Perl and shell scripts in addition to OSA scripts.
> This is fairly minor, but it seems that some apps
> remember their window positions when closed
> and some do not. Mail.app and Internet Explorer
> do remember their exact size and position
> between runs, but Terminal and many
> others do not. This is another good candidate
> for consistency in the user experience.
Mac OS X can hosts apps with a number of different heritages, so it's definitely true that there is great inconsitency between apps than there was before. As time goes on this will probably get better, as the "Mac OS X way" emerges completely and developers are all familiar with it to some degree.
One of the things that the Apple Desktop Connector (ADC) doesn't get credit for is that it solves a real problem with DVI displays that involves AC grounding. I forget the exact details, but either the display has to be plugged into AC power before you connect the DVI plug to the graphics adapter, or else the display should NOT be plugged into AC power until after you connect the DVI cable. This can fry displays, apparently.
With ADC, power and DVI are together, and this apparently solves the problem and extends the life of the display. You can't plug them in the wrong order, so the display is grounded when it first gets a spark out of the DVI connector.
I really like ADC. My PowerMac is in an equipment rack with music and audio gear, and all I have to do to set it up is plug the mouse into the keyboard, the keyboard into the display, and the display into the computer, which itself is already connected to AC power in the rack, and gets Internet over 802.11. I have almost zero setup with this rig. It takes no time at all to do, and you don't have cables going everywhere. The converter to turn ADC into plain DVI is only $20 or something, so you can still use a PowerMac with a plain DVI display if that's your preference, and VGA is on the back of PowerMacs, too (and all other Macs as well). But if you use an Apple display, you get the bonus of having one less power supply and USB hub to worry about.
It's a great connector. It saves me time and trouble again and again and again. My Cinema Display has basically just been a part of my PowerMac, with no configuration or calibration or controls needed, because it's always connected via USB as well (impossible to forget with everything on one cable). I just plugged it on there and it worked and has worked ever since.
> "doesn't have half the hardware at the same price"
> That's not trolling?
No, it's not trolling. The iBook is $1299 and has FireWire, TV out, VGA out, Ethernet, 56k modem (not Winmodem), 5-hour battery, 1024x768 display, built-in antennaes for 802.11, and you can add a $99 wireless networking card into a slot under the keyboard. Windows notebooks in that price range don't usually have built-in ethernet, never mind a real modem, antennaes, FireWire, and forget about the battery life (less than two hours on Dells, less than three on Compaq). iBooks generally run silent, too, with the fan coming on only in hot climates, and all the software you need to enjoy the hardware is already there and working.
That's part of the reason Macs seem expensive when you're used to looking at Wintel prices... ALL Macs include a lot of stuff that isn't standard on Windows machines, and then you look only at the specs you're familiar with and write-off the other stuff like it's useless extras. It's not useless extras when all of the machines on your platform have them, though, because developers build on them and users learn how to use them. From the Mac side, it's the reverse. We look at Wintel prices, think at first that they're low, then we start to say, "how much to add FireWire to that machine? where do I get drivers? will they work later if I upgrade Windows? will they work with a range of FireWire devices (storage, cameras, media devices)? who do I complain to if it doesn't work right?" and then we do the same for AirPort (802.11) and pretty soon the Wintel machine is looking a lot more expensive, in money but especially in admin time, especially later when you can't find drivers or a firmware update or whatever. Once you see a 2GHz P4 crawl through Photoshop filters and encoding jobs, the Wintel system definitely doesn't seem so cheap anymore. Those are some empty megahertz, man.
Mac OS X Server (Rhapsody) was released in January 1999, and could run NeXT apps natively and Mac apps in a compatibility environment and it fit the specs on the NeXT deal pretty perfectly (Mac OS 8 interface, protected memory, preemptive multitasking, runs Mac apps). Since then, Apple has just continued to add more and more cool stuff to Mac OS X, as well as dramatically improve their hardware, cutting all the legacy stuff and putting antennaes and FireWire in everything. Putting in digital flat-panels and gigabit ethernet is all the pro models. What's going on now is that the world is starting to catch up to Mac OS X... people are realizing what they can use it for, why they would use it. Developers are familiar with it and are starting to exploit it better. There are a lot of native apps now.
So, my point is that Mach and BSD probably have very little to do with Mac OS X's timelines. Legacy-free hardware and new application environments and display technologies are much bigger jobs. I can see waiting for USB and FireWire to mature (and for three years of hardware to be out there with those ports) and making Carbon and Aqua being much harder overall than the really low-level stuff, which is decades more mature in many cases.
You can use Apache for a million years and you are never forced to contribute code. SkepTech, you yourself may have used Apache and never contributed code. Apple has contributed code. End of story. You're confusing "forced to make your contributions public" with "forced to make contributions".
Jesus, man, just because it's on the Web doesn't make it true. Just because it's not on the Web doesn't make it untrue. Get a grip.
Apple has done fine by Linux. They contribute code to open projects, including GNU stuff, they are on their third or fourth UNIX OS now. Apple's (GUI) disk management utility has six or seven Linux-specific disk formatting and partitioning options you can choose and you're ready for your Linux install. Not to mention that you can boot a Mac from any attached storage (ATA, FireWire, iPod, USB, Zip, CD, etc) so it's easy to have Linux on a second drive or a tenth drive in addition to Mac OS or Mac OS X. Also, when you boot a Mac with the Option key held down, you get a boot loader from Open Firmware that will identify bootable Mac OS, Mac OS X, and Linux systems on attached storage. Volumes with Linux systems on them get a cute Penguin icon, it's really quite nice. People who run LinuxPPC are fucking in love with it, and good for them. These guys are like the happiest guys at Macworld Expo all the time, running around talking about it a mile a minute with other LinuxPPC users.
Personally, I hate when Linux is compared to anything else. To me, the strength of Linux is to provide a free, geeky alternative that follows a few years behind the commercial stuff and makes sure that they don't sit around and sell the same shit to people year after year. It's like, once Linux can do it, it's available for free to anybody with some time and smarts, so if we want to charge for it, we'd better add some serious value. Apple adds some serious value, while at the same time you don't lose the benefits of community software. The BSD heritage of Mac OS X is shouted out at Apple, while Windows uses the BSD TCP/IP stack and Microsoft doesn't want you to know that.
Finally, to the comment "Darwin isn't enough", I would have to say, "what have YOU contributed?" QuickTime Streaming Server is also out there for free and open source, and it's cutting edge stuff. Real and MS charge you a lot to get that functionality running on a closed Windows platform. Apple also developed QuickTime, TrueType, FireWire, and lots of other stuff that has benefited and will benefit community software developers and users.
No, there's no boot ROM (join us in THIS century) and Darwin x86 has been booting ("Welcome to Macintosh") on x86 for a long time. QuickTime's file format is the basis for MPEG-4, and it supports all kinds of standard media types.
What people miss on Apple is that they really do build the whole computer. It's not an OS, it's not hardware, it's a computer. A whole platform. There are all kinds of benefits to the leadership that Apple has shown on their platform. It's only just getting started with Mac OS X, they're just getting up to speed and they're already so far ahead of anybody else on many issues. They are the only game for low-cost and portable pro-level video editing. Final Cut Pro is like another Photoshop, taking over the industry. It's fantastic stuff.
Apple and Macs are about 10,000 times better for video than anything with an x86 in it. Apple wants to have the best video codec around be an exclusive part of the best computer video architecture and platform. Duh. Their customers demand it. They want Sorenson because it is fucking great. That's what people use when they are serious about content creation just like people run Apache when they're serious about Web servers.
Complaining that there's no Sorenson for Linux is like complaining that there's no Apache for Mac OS 9. If it was really needed there, it would be there. Somebody would bring it there to serve that need.
With all the shit that Microsoft is pulling, it's weird to see somebody knock Apple for continuing to innovate in the multimedia space. QuickTime is to multimedia what UNIX is to operating systems. The other shit comes and goes, but people who need power tools need UNIX and QuickTime. That's why Mac OS X is so fucking cool. UNIX and QuickTime, Apache and Dreamweaver, Final Cut Pro and Photoshop, Pro Tools and MetaSynth, iMovie and iDVD. It's a wet dream for creative people.
Mac OS X is going to have a big year. The apps are really coming now in native form. Actual "Mac users" are getting involved now, whereas a lot of the buzz until now has been a lot of geeks and developer types (Apple tripled the size of their developer program in the past year). We'll see a lot of cool new software coming out. A flat-panel iMac launch in the early part of the year won't hurt, either.
You don't know anything about Apple. Check out apple.com first, try out the machines, talk to the users, then you will have at least half a clue at least.
The reason Apple needs to have lawyers who are quick on the trigger is that they are one of the very few companies that really comes up with new stuff and makes it work. They're copied far and wide, most famously by Microsoft and Microsoft's hardware cartel. Get past a few FUD stories that you read on the Internet and check out what the real story is.
There's so much more to the Mac platform than what could be ported to Intel. I had a friend in my studio last night who was looking at the computers (a PowerMac G4 and a PowerBook G4) and he was totally blown away by the fact that I've been making data DVD's as easily as floppies, 4.5GB on a $6 disc in 20 minutes, for almost a year, and that our AirPort (802.11) base station is 18 months old. It was also his first time seeing FireWire in action, and seeing the notebook hard drive mounted on the PowerMac via Gigabit Ethernet also blew him away. All this stuff is just built-in and just works on Macs. It has so much to do with the hardware and not just the software. You can plug two Macs together via FireWire and use one of them as a FireWire hard drive for the other, enabling really, really easy admin work (just mount the target machine as a hard drive on your own notebook, and install or configure what you want to, then unplug the target machine and boot it up).
In short, the platform itself is really starting to show the benefits of a lot of good planning from Apple over the past few years. You can expect TV out, mirroring or second displays, gigabit ethernet, FireWire, AirPort. It's there and the OS makes it all just work. The commodity hardware model won't support a platform like this, even if MS disappeared tomorrow.
The first versions of Word and Excel ran on the Mac, and it's been running there for 10 uninterrupted versions, through 68k, PowerPC, and now Mac OS X. Worrying about Office is as pointless as worrying about Apple. Both seem to be in very good shape, so fire away, get the best kit that's out there for the job. The Apple stuff is dynamite and they're only just getting the "new Mac" going now, with all the traditional "Mac" software arriving native for Mac OS X week after week (Office, Illustrator, VirtualPC, ViaVoice, Final Cut Pro, After Effects, Commotion... all shipping in the last few weeks). Anyone who is shopping for a new computer really owes it to themselves to hit an Apple Store if at all possible before they commit to an XP box. There's so much interoperability now, and your USB and FireWire and PCI peripherals generally transfer over just fine, too. Even though you have to upgrade your software, you'd have to do that under XP, anyway. The best versions of many mainstream apps are on the Mac. Even Office is much better on the Mac. None of these ever-changing disappearing menus and no product activation watching your hardware for a chance to disable the product.
Can't wait for Dreamweaver to run native next to Apache, though. The Macromedia apps could be really good on Mac OS X, with good standards support (Fireworks' native format is PNG, for example). Fits in with a lot of the philosophies behind Mac OS X's design.
Photoshop "Classic" runs in Classic no matter what you do. It doesn't suck that much more in OS X than in OS 9. Although there's a bit of a disconnect from running the different application environments under OS X, if Photoshop or some Mac OS 9 element that it's dependent upon die then you don't lose your browser, email, and any other native apps (Illustrator, FreeHand, Final Cut Pro, After Effects, MS Office, etc). Photoshop is almost certainly coming out for Mac OS X in January, 2002, and a lot of the people who will use it already know that all of their other apps are already native.
Part of Photoshop's delay may be the plug-ins. They have to be recompiled, so the average user will want updates of all their plug-ins (many will be free upgrades, just carbonized versions with the same features). I heard that Adobe wanted a longer beta with Photoshop so that third part plug-in developers would be ready to ship alongside Photoshop. So they can release Photoshop for Mac OS X and say that it's ready to use today, right now.
> the only movies I can't play right now are the
> ones with Sorensen and other proprietary codecs.
> Were Apple and folks to stop using these, I would
> be able to play pretty much anything.
The other side of this is, "were the open formats able to achieve better quality than Sorenson, Apple and folks wouldn't have to use a proprietary codec to get the quality that they want."
I think they have been waiting on OS X. This will be an "iMac II" and they want it to boot up OS X by default, and I think they want to make OS X famous with this iMac the way they made USB famous with the original iMac. In other words, part of the story will be the flat-panel, part will be the new design, and part will be OS X by default. Developers will have to make sure their OS X shit is in order to keep selling to the iMac crowd.
- it can be a base station for other computers
- you can use it anywhere that has AC power, without having to run any other cables to it (most everybody has AC power jacks in every room, but only a few also have Ethernet or phone jacks in every room)
> Please tell all the writers that they'll have to rely
> on the hard drive to hold their work indefinitely,
> or at least until they can get to a network
> connection.
> Sorry, you're feeding us more Steve Jobs bullshit.
Holy shit, man! My two year-old MP3 player has 128MB of storage in it, and when I plug it into my Mac I can drag files onto it all day. There are USB key chains that have 128MB of storage. The new Palm machines have SD slots for 16MB "disks". These storage methods are ALL more reliable than floppy disks. Not to mention that you can get a CD burner inside any Mac if that's your preference, and keep writing 1.4MB sessions onto the same 49 cent CD-R hundreds of times! You can add a 1GB PC Card hard drive to a PowerBook, or use an iPod or other FireWire storage.
If you are a writer creating precious 1.4MB floppies, you will have no problem transitioning to a floppy-less Mac. This is not 1996.
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The command-line in Mac OS X is just a single application called Terminal. It's kept in the Utilities folder. Promoting its use over other applications that have more graphical interfaces is foolish. It's like you're saying, "stop using Photoshop and Pro Tools to edit your graphics and audio; you can use Terminal instead". Hello? No, you can't. The artist, director, songwriter, musician, etc. etc. are not going to find switching to a command line is all that advantageous. They require a graphical environment for their work anyway, so why not drag and drop files just the same way they drag and drop image objects or audio segments?
What you're also missing is that you love the consistency of the command line, and you've tried Windows and balked at all of its inconsitencies. On the Mac, the GUI has traditionally been just as internally consistent as your command line is. When I want to select two graphic objects in Fireworks, I hold down Shift and click on one and then the other and they are both selected; when I switch to Finder, I can hold down Shift and click on one file and then another and they are both selected. I can drag these selections into other apps and that works; I can drag selections to the Finder and they become files or clippings as required. The menus are consistent; the key commands are consistent. Just as you see the structure and beauty of the command line, we Mac users see the structure and beauty of a good GUI.
In a way, your argument identifies you as the perfect Mac OS X user. You can spend 80% of your time in the shell and find yourself happily using a consistent GUI for other things that make more sense there. Guys like you are buying iBooks and making iMovies while shell scripts do something in multiple translucent terminal windows in the background.
And recommending that a person boot their system without a GUI is like saying that they should ignore the bulk of the world's application software, even though their machine can run it. You don't have to choose CLI over GUI or GUI over CLI in Mac OS X. You can use what you want, in the way that you want. The UNIX subsystem is wide open for the UNIX power user to really do what they want. No reason not to access it through a graphical application.
> Don't those numbnuts at Apple know that this
> is the #1 most annoying and stupid thing about
> the OS, and has been since - oh, I dunno, 1987?
Then ignore it. It is the third method for doing things. The first two are menu command and key commands. So, ejecting a disk is File > Eject or Command+E. Very easy. Deleting files is also File > Move to Trash or Command+Delete. Burning a disc is File > Burn Disc. You can also put these kinds of things in the Finder toolbar or in the Dock if that's your preference. Or write a simple script to do them that you can save as an application.
Actually, in Mac OS X you can also eject removable disks with the F12/Eject key on the keyboard, so dragging to the Trash is like the fourth or fifth method now.
It's not as hard as it might sound. With a little instruction and a few months of practice, I bet even sulli could do it.
VirtualPC is less than $100. Add it to Mac OS X and you can run Carbon, Cocoa, Classic, Java2, and BSD apps natively, and run any PC OS and applications in VirtualPC. You can have a window open with DOS running, next to a window with Windows XP running.
The speed is obviously not as good as a native x86 processor, but it's plenty fast enough to use to run about 10% or 20% of your work.
However, you're not really going to get anything from all this if you don't also use the advantages of the Mac itself. If you edit video, then this would be a great plan, or work with any kind of graphics or rich media. If you just edit text files or do office work, then Windows or Linux will do fine for you. The point is, though, that if a Mac is in your best interest 80% of the time, then for $90 you can get VirtualPC and have access to everything you "left behind", albeit at last year's speeds.
I have a friend who traded in his 1999 PC for a 2001 Mac, put VirtualPC on it, imaged his old hard drive, and now he has his old computer running as an application on Mac OS X. It runs about the same speed for the few apps he hasn't migrated away from yet.
Also, VirtualPC is a whole lot of fun. My brother just installed Windows 3.11 in it last night and we had a tremendous nostalgic laugh. It was funny to see the Windows 3.11 desktop with an Aqua titlebar above it.
Mac OS X systems aren't as slow as all that. It's just that each OS and GUI has its slow parts and fast parts. When you switch over, you notice immediately if the new system has a slow part where your old system had a fast part, while you often miss the new system's fast parts because you are in the habit of waiting on the old system. As you work with the new system, though, you quickly learn its fast and slow parts and suddenly you are literally "back up to speed".
In Scot Hacker's case, he is obviously going to find the file system in Mac OS X slow, because that was Be's greatest strength. Windows users might find the file system slow because Mac OS X is writing a lot of stuff there so that it can make a bunch of things easier on you (Scot Hacker found this out when he renamed all his MP3's and iTunes could still find them through HFS+ node numbers). Mac OS 9 users find that the GUI is not as instantly responsive to their touch, but soon they notice that they don't have to wait for stuff to finish before they go on to the next thing, and you make up the speed with the multitasking.
Also, things don't just appear in Aqua, they fade in and fade out. Some people think this means the system couldn't have made the item appear instantly, and call it slow. Mac OS X also has five or six application environments and is working in full Unicode and can use almost any font file ever created (OpenType, TrueType, Type 1, even TrueType fonts that have been created in the Windows format). It's doing a lot of things for you that you may not be thankful for at first, but you will be later when you can just take a font file and put it in your Fonts folder and use it without getting a converter or whatever.
I have also read a few reviews where the guy is used to using a Pentium desktop machine, and he auditions Mac OS X on a PowerBook or iBook. While the PowerBook and iBook are very fast computers, they use notebook hard drives just like any other notebook, running at 4200rpm usually (except the 5400rpm 48GB drive in the high-end PowerBook). Hard drives are one of the big bottlenecks in today's computers, so the guy is going to notice something even if he was reviewing a Windows notebook. The fact that the PowerBook feels like a desktop machine in every other way only makes it easier to forget that the hard drive is a fact of life, not a Mac OS X thing.
My main point is that using Mac OS X is not like switching to last year's Windows machine or something. Some things are a little slower for no reason, some things are a little slower for good reason, some things are faster and you notice, and some things are faster and it takes you a while to notice.
Personally, I've found a really good rhythm in Mac OS X where I just keep working and working and the system generally never interrupts me or slows me down. When I do use Mac OS 9 occassionally, at first it feels faster, but then I notice that I have to wait on certain things that I'm not used to waiting on, and I end up thinking Mac OS 9 is slower.
It's so subjective. I recommend Macs to almost anybody who works with anything other than just text, but if they can get to an Apple Store, I tell them to go hang out there for a few hours or days and let their own feelings and observations be their guide. Most people who know nothing about Macs and then spend an hour in the Apple Store touching all these working, connected machines get a whole new idea about Apple's computers. Maybe you don't end up buying one, but at least you have expanded your true knowledge of the tech and the tech industry. Replace the old 1993 vintage Bill Gates FUD you "know" about the Mac with an honest 2001-2002 opinion about what Apple is offering you and your business. At the very least, it may make you demand more of your current vendor.
File Type is just an attribute like Creation Date. It's part of the HFS+ file system and has nothing to do with the fact that HFS+ also supports forked files. The Creator code (also called Application Signature) is also an attribute. As Scot Hacker pointed out, you don't have to use the Creator code as the primary method for determining how to open a document, but it is a great last-ditch bit of information to have. If all else fails when trying to open a document, it makes sense that the application that originally created it can open it.
Files on Windows have Creation Dates and other attributes, but the file type is put on the end of the name as a file name extension because there is no File Type attribute to use in FAT16/32.
> If you work at it, you can even get the Finder to
.vbs extension hidden). Most apps have the extension in the save box waiting for you, or have a checkbox "Add Extension" or "Hide Extension". We just traded one kind of extension management for another, instead of really getting rid of the need to manage extensions.
> open files using the old type/creator heuristic
You don't have to work at it. All you have to do is double-click a file that has a Creator and File Type attribute and no file name extension. That's billions of Mac files, created by millions of users over the last 20 years.
The issue is not whether it actually works in Mac OS X but what Apple recommends now to developers. Apple acknowledges that the Mac user runs into files all day long that came from non-Mac systems, and those files often have file name extensions and no File Type or Creator attribute, so they want Mac OS X to be able to adjust and work with a file that has only a file name extension on it. Since files are not guaranteed to have Creator and File Type attributes, Apple doesn't ask developers to always add them to files their apps create. This is so that you can bring a Java2 app over and it just works, so that Cocoa developers don't have to bother with Creator and File Type if they don't want to.
The real problem is that Apple's system for dealing with file name extensions didn't appear until Mac OS X 10.1, so most of your native apps don't use the same system when you go to save a file. Some do the right thing, totally hiding the extension from you; in Mac OS 9 you'd save a PNG file as "My Document" and it would invisibly get a PNGf File Type and you're done. In Mac OS X, you should save a PNG file as "My Document" and it will acutally be called "My Document.png" but the ".png" will be hidden by the Finder (just for that file). This only works with known extensions, and not if you have two extensions (file.jpg.vbs would never have its
Apple is moving in the right direction, but it's unfortunate that this aspect of the transition hasn't gone a little better. It's nice now that in Mac OS X I can receive a Word file in email called "ch01.doc" and I can just rename it "Chapter 01" and work with it that way, and it is actually called "Chapter 01.doc" with the ".doc" hidden, so when I send the file away in email, it still works on any system. In Mac OS 9, the best I would have been able to do would be "Chapter 01.doc" because I wouldn't want to lose the Windows compatibility of the file.
NO NO NO he is not saying "I couldn't copy some text from one app and paste it in another", he is saying he couldn't use the clipboard to move sophisticated data around reliably on his Linux system. On a Mac, you can generally copy audio, video, pictures, whatever, and paste it into another app and it works. Vector graphics stay vector graphics, and so on.
They bought NeXT in 1996 and shipped Mac OS X Server 1.0 in January of 1999, roughly two development years later. It ran OpenStep, Mac, and BSD apps. Mac developers demanded Carbon, though, which is an updated Mac application environment that make porting Mac apps much easier. So, Apple went to a plan where they built Carbon for both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X and then merged the platform into Mac OS X 10.0 and now 10.1. As well as Carbon, the newest Mac OS X also has Java2 and the Quartz display engine, just to name a couple of things.
The short answer is that they shipped the original Mac OS X on time, but it didn't turn out to be quite enough to migrate the platform, so they kept at it. It isn't like they went into a room promising something right away and came out four years later with Mac OS X 10.0.
Also, Mac OS 9 is not Mac OS 8.1. In fact, Apple improved the old OS so much that there are still people who don't want to leave it. The quality of Mac OS 9 gave Apple a lot of breathing room that nobody thought they had in 1996.
> OS X does not have a journaled file system
... takes a second or two to format an 80GB drive.
... it's some kind of node number or something that is unique to that file, and so keeps shortened file names from conflicting. This is one of the top two or three "it's not going to kill me, but I sure wish it wasn't the case" types of things with Mac OS X. All you can say that's positive about it is that Apple is dealing with this issue better than Microsoft did with the similar issue on Windows.
S A/ jsDownload.html
/Library/Components for the whole machine or ~/Library/Components for just yourself), the Mac OS X Script Editor will now have a menu on the bottom left of its window where you can select the language you want to script in. Other languages are available for Mac OS 9 as well.
> (although, to be fair, I have lost power on
> this machine and found that it booted back
> up in a normal time span without appearing
> to do anything special).
Mac OS X runs fsck on each and every boot, but because of the way the HFS+ file system is constructed, running fsck multiple times on an 80GB disk takes only a few seconds, so you don't notice it.
If you check a disk with Mac OS X's Disk Utility, it actually runs fsck, and you'll notice it is done in a blink. Same with formatting disks
> The [long] filenames were truncated with garbage
> characters when viewed in the Finder.
They're not actually random garbage characters
> I don't mind AppleScript. I wish the system
> were open to other languages, but
> AppleScript does a fine job, and is very powerful.
The system is open to other languages. What most people call "AppleScript" is actually called "Open Scripting Architecture (OSA)", and AppleScript is just the default language. You can already get a JavaScript plug-in for Mac OS X.
http://www.latenightsw.com/freeware/JavaScriptO
Once installed (drop it in
The Mac OS X Script menu also launches Perl and shell scripts in addition to OSA scripts.
> This is fairly minor, but it seems that some apps
> remember their window positions when closed
> and some do not. Mail.app and Internet Explorer
> do remember their exact size and position
> between runs, but Terminal and many
> others do not. This is another good candidate
> for consistency in the user experience.
Mac OS X can hosts apps with a number of different heritages, so it's definitely true that there is great inconsitency between apps than there was before. As time goes on this will probably get better, as the "Mac OS X way" emerges completely and developers are all familiar with it to some degree.
One of the things that the Apple Desktop Connector (ADC) doesn't get credit for is that it solves a real problem with DVI displays that involves AC grounding. I forget the exact details, but either the display has to be plugged into AC power before you connect the DVI plug to the graphics adapter, or else the display should NOT be plugged into AC power until after you connect the DVI cable. This can fry displays, apparently.
With ADC, power and DVI are together, and this apparently solves the problem and extends the life of the display. You can't plug them in the wrong order, so the display is grounded when it first gets a spark out of the DVI connector.
I really like ADC. My PowerMac is in an equipment rack with music and audio gear, and all I have to do to set it up is plug the mouse into the keyboard, the keyboard into the display, and the display into the computer, which itself is already connected to AC power in the rack, and gets Internet over 802.11. I have almost zero setup with this rig. It takes no time at all to do, and you don't have cables going everywhere. The converter to turn ADC into plain DVI is only $20 or something, so you can still use a PowerMac with a plain DVI display if that's your preference, and VGA is on the back of PowerMacs, too (and all other Macs as well). But if you use an Apple display, you get the bonus of having one less power supply and USB hub to worry about.
It's a great connector. It saves me time and trouble again and again and again. My Cinema Display has basically just been a part of my PowerMac, with no configuration or calibration or controls needed, because it's always connected via USB as well (impossible to forget with everything on one cable). I just plugged it on there and it worked and has worked ever since.
> "doesn't have half the hardware at the same price"
... ALL Macs include a lot of stuff that isn't standard on Windows machines, and then you look only at the specs you're familiar with and write-off the other stuff like it's useless extras. It's not useless extras when all of the machines on your platform have them, though, because developers build on them and users learn how to use them. From the Mac side, it's the reverse. We look at Wintel prices, think at first that they're low, then we start to say, "how much to add FireWire to that machine? where do I get drivers? will they work later if I upgrade Windows? will they work with a range of FireWire devices (storage, cameras, media devices)? who do I complain to if it doesn't work right?" and then we do the same for AirPort (802.11) and pretty soon the Wintel machine is looking a lot more expensive, in money but especially in admin time, especially later when you can't find drivers or a firmware update or whatever. Once you see a 2GHz P4 crawl through Photoshop filters and encoding jobs, the Wintel system definitely doesn't seem so cheap anymore. Those are some empty megahertz, man.
> That's not trolling?
No, it's not trolling. The iBook is $1299 and has FireWire, TV out, VGA out, Ethernet, 56k modem (not Winmodem), 5-hour battery, 1024x768 display, built-in antennaes for 802.11, and you can add a $99 wireless networking card into a slot under the keyboard. Windows notebooks in that price range don't usually have built-in ethernet, never mind a real modem, antennaes, FireWire, and forget about the battery life (less than two hours on Dells, less than three on Compaq). iBooks generally run silent, too, with the fan coming on only in hot climates, and all the software you need to enjoy the hardware is already there and working.
That's part of the reason Macs seem expensive when you're used to looking at Wintel prices
Mac OS X Server (Rhapsody) was released in January 1999, and could run NeXT apps natively and Mac apps in a compatibility environment and it fit the specs on the NeXT deal pretty perfectly (Mac OS 8 interface, protected memory, preemptive multitasking, runs Mac apps). Since then, Apple has just continued to add more and more cool stuff to Mac OS X, as well as dramatically improve their hardware, cutting all the legacy stuff and putting antennaes and FireWire in everything. Putting in digital flat-panels and gigabit ethernet is all the pro models. What's going on now is that the world is starting to catch up to Mac OS X ... people are realizing what they can use it for, why they would use it. Developers are familiar with it and are starting to exploit it better. There are a lot of native apps now.
So, my point is that Mach and BSD probably have very little to do with Mac OS X's timelines. Legacy-free hardware and new application environments and display technologies are much bigger jobs. I can see waiting for USB and FireWire to mature (and for three years of hardware to be out there with those ports) and making Carbon and Aqua being much harder overall than the really low-level stuff, which is decades more mature in many cases.
You can use Apache for a million years and you are never forced to contribute code. SkepTech, you yourself may have used Apache and never contributed code. Apple has contributed code. End of story. You're confusing "forced to make your contributions public" with "forced to make contributions".
Jesus, man, just because it's on the Web doesn't make it true. Just because it's not on the Web doesn't make it untrue. Get a grip.
Apple has done fine by Linux. They contribute code to open projects, including GNU stuff, they are on their third or fourth UNIX OS now. Apple's (GUI) disk management utility has six or seven Linux-specific disk formatting and partitioning options you can choose and you're ready for your Linux install. Not to mention that you can boot a Mac from any attached storage (ATA, FireWire, iPod, USB, Zip, CD, etc) so it's easy to have Linux on a second drive or a tenth drive in addition to Mac OS or Mac OS X. Also, when you boot a Mac with the Option key held down, you get a boot loader from Open Firmware that will identify bootable Mac OS, Mac OS X, and Linux systems on attached storage. Volumes with Linux systems on them get a cute Penguin icon, it's really quite nice. People who run LinuxPPC are fucking in love with it, and good for them. These guys are like the happiest guys at Macworld Expo all the time, running around talking about it a mile a minute with other LinuxPPC users.
Personally, I hate when Linux is compared to anything else. To me, the strength of Linux is to provide a free, geeky alternative that follows a few years behind the commercial stuff and makes sure that they don't sit around and sell the same shit to people year after year. It's like, once Linux can do it, it's available for free to anybody with some time and smarts, so if we want to charge for it, we'd better add some serious value. Apple adds some serious value, while at the same time you don't lose the benefits of community software. The BSD heritage of Mac OS X is shouted out at Apple, while Windows uses the BSD TCP/IP stack and Microsoft doesn't want you to know that.
Finally, to the comment "Darwin isn't enough", I would have to say, "what have YOU contributed?" QuickTime Streaming Server is also out there for free and open source, and it's cutting edge stuff. Real and MS charge you a lot to get that functionality running on a closed Windows platform. Apple also developed QuickTime, TrueType, FireWire, and lots of other stuff that has benefited and will benefit community software developers and users.
No, there's no boot ROM (join us in THIS century) and Darwin x86 has been booting ("Welcome to Macintosh") on x86 for a long time. QuickTime's file format is the basis for MPEG-4, and it supports all kinds of standard media types.
What people miss on Apple is that they really do build the whole computer. It's not an OS, it's not hardware, it's a computer. A whole platform. There are all kinds of benefits to the leadership that Apple has shown on their platform. It's only just getting started with Mac OS X, they're just getting up to speed and they're already so far ahead of anybody else on many issues. They are the only game for low-cost and portable pro-level video editing. Final Cut Pro is like another Photoshop, taking over the industry. It's fantastic stuff.
Apple and Macs are about 10,000 times better for video than anything with an x86 in it. Apple wants to have the best video codec around be an exclusive part of the best computer video architecture and platform. Duh. Their customers demand it. They want Sorenson because it is fucking great. That's what people use when they are serious about content creation just like people run Apache when they're serious about Web servers.
Complaining that there's no Sorenson for Linux is like complaining that there's no Apache for Mac OS 9. If it was really needed there, it would be there. Somebody would bring it there to serve that need.
With all the shit that Microsoft is pulling, it's weird to see somebody knock Apple for continuing to innovate in the multimedia space. QuickTime is to multimedia what UNIX is to operating systems. The other shit comes and goes, but people who need power tools need UNIX and QuickTime. That's why Mac OS X is so fucking cool. UNIX and QuickTime, Apache and Dreamweaver, Final Cut Pro and Photoshop, Pro Tools and MetaSynth, iMovie and iDVD. It's a wet dream for creative people.
Mac OS X is going to have a big year. The apps are really coming now in native form. Actual "Mac users" are getting involved now, whereas a lot of the buzz until now has been a lot of geeks and developer types (Apple tripled the size of their developer program in the past year). We'll see a lot of cool new software coming out. A flat-panel iMac launch in the early part of the year won't hurt, either.
You don't know anything about Apple. Check out apple.com first, try out the machines, talk to the users, then you will have at least half a clue at least.
The reason Apple needs to have lawyers who are quick on the trigger is that they are one of the very few companies that really comes up with new stuff and makes it work. They're copied far and wide, most famously by Microsoft and Microsoft's hardware cartel. Get past a few FUD stories that you read on the Internet and check out what the real story is.
There's so much more to the Mac platform than what could be ported to Intel. I had a friend in my studio last night who was looking at the computers (a PowerMac G4 and a PowerBook G4) and he was totally blown away by the fact that I've been making data DVD's as easily as floppies, 4.5GB on a $6 disc in 20 minutes, for almost a year, and that our AirPort (802.11) base station is 18 months old. It was also his first time seeing FireWire in action, and seeing the notebook hard drive mounted on the PowerMac via Gigabit Ethernet also blew him away. All this stuff is just built-in and just works on Macs. It has so much to do with the hardware and not just the software. You can plug two Macs together via FireWire and use one of them as a FireWire hard drive for the other, enabling really, really easy admin work (just mount the target machine as a hard drive on your own notebook, and install or configure what you want to, then unplug the target machine and boot it up).
In short, the platform itself is really starting to show the benefits of a lot of good planning from Apple over the past few years. You can expect TV out, mirroring or second displays, gigabit ethernet, FireWire, AirPort. It's there and the OS makes it all just work. The commodity hardware model won't support a platform like this, even if MS disappeared tomorrow.
Are you really running Apache for Windows?
The first versions of Word and Excel ran on the Mac, and it's been running there for 10 uninterrupted versions, through 68k, PowerPC, and now Mac OS X. Worrying about Office is as pointless as worrying about Apple. Both seem to be in very good shape, so fire away, get the best kit that's out there for the job. The Apple stuff is dynamite and they're only just getting the "new Mac" going now, with all the traditional "Mac" software arriving native for Mac OS X week after week (Office, Illustrator, VirtualPC, ViaVoice, Final Cut Pro, After Effects, Commotion ... all shipping in the last few weeks). Anyone who is shopping for a new computer really owes it to themselves to hit an Apple Store if at all possible before they commit to an XP box. There's so much interoperability now, and your USB and FireWire and PCI peripherals generally transfer over just fine, too. Even though you have to upgrade your software, you'd have to do that under XP, anyway. The best versions of many mainstream apps are on the Mac. Even Office is much better on the Mac. None of these ever-changing disappearing menus and no product activation watching your hardware for a chance to disable the product.
Can't wait for Dreamweaver to run native next to Apache, though. The Macromedia apps could be really good on Mac OS X, with good standards support (Fireworks' native format is PNG, for example). Fits in with a lot of the philosophies behind Mac OS X's design.
Photoshop "Classic" runs in Classic no matter what you do. It doesn't suck that much more in OS X than in OS 9. Although there's a bit of a disconnect from running the different application environments under OS X, if Photoshop or some Mac OS 9 element that it's dependent upon die then you don't lose your browser, email, and any other native apps (Illustrator, FreeHand, Final Cut Pro, After Effects, MS Office, etc). Photoshop is almost certainly coming out for Mac OS X in January, 2002, and a lot of the people who will use it already know that all of their other apps are already native.
Part of Photoshop's delay may be the plug-ins. They have to be recompiled, so the average user will want updates of all their plug-ins (many will be free upgrades, just carbonized versions with the same features). I heard that Adobe wanted a longer beta with Photoshop so that third part plug-in developers would be ready to ship alongside Photoshop. So they can release Photoshop for Mac OS X and say that it's ready to use today, right now.
> the only movies I can't play right now are the
> ones with Sorensen and other proprietary codecs.
> Were Apple and folks to stop using these, I would
> be able to play pretty much anything.
The other side of this is, "were the open formats able to achieve better quality than Sorenson, Apple and folks wouldn't have to use a proprietary codec to get the quality that they want."
I think they have been waiting on OS X. This will be an "iMac II" and they want it to boot up OS X by default, and I think they want to make OS X famous with this iMac the way they made USB famous with the original iMac. In other words, part of the story will be the flat-panel, part will be the new design, and part will be OS X by default. Developers will have to make sure their OS X shit is in order to keep selling to the iMac crowd.
The AirPort cards in iMacs are there so:
- it can be a base station for other computers
- you can use it anywhere that has AC power, without having to run any other cables to it (most everybody has AC power jacks in every room, but only a few also have Ethernet or phone jacks in every room)
Very handy.
> Please tell all the writers that they'll have to rely
> on the hard drive to hold their work indefinitely,
> or at least until they can get to a network
> connection.
> Sorry, you're feeding us more Steve Jobs bullshit.
Holy shit, man! My two year-old MP3 player has 128MB of storage in it, and when I plug it into my Mac I can drag files onto it all day. There are USB key chains that have 128MB of storage. The new Palm machines have SD slots for 16MB "disks". These storage methods are ALL more reliable than floppy disks. Not to mention that you can get a CD burner inside any Mac if that's your preference, and keep writing 1.4MB sessions onto the same 49 cent CD-R hundreds of times! You can add a 1GB PC Card hard drive to a PowerBook, or use an iPod or other FireWire storage.
If you are a writer creating precious 1.4MB floppies, you will have no problem transitioning to a floppy-less Mac. This is not 1996.