How will they be the envy of their windows friends? There have been at least 2 HD based MP3 players/data storage units out for windows for over a year. Today is the day that mac people stop envying windows users as far as I can tell...
Most of the portable MP3 solutions out there work on Macs as well, if not all of them. There is a Nomad Jukebox plug-in built into iTunes, at any rate, along with many more for Rio's and whatever else. I've been using a NomadII with my Mac for a long, long time.
What you have to understand, though, is that Windows or no Windows, my new PowerBook came with USB, FireWire (1394), Gigabit Ethernet, and AirPort (802.11). Why did I get a machine with that much connectivity to then sit down and plug a music player into the keyboard port and wait two hours to fill up 5GB? Because that's the only reliable method on Windows? Nah. Not good enough.
I actually have all my MP3's on an external FireWire drive already. What Apple has done is build a music player onto a drive. I can use an iPod just like I do the drive I have now, only when it's away from the computer, it's an MP3 player and a dessert topping. I won't have to sync a damn thing.
If you want a $250 portable music player with five or six glaring compromises, then you can choose from a wide range of models and manufacturers. Apple even sells six models at the Apple Store. If you want a $399 model with no compromises, then you buy Apple's music player. Duh.
Don't just compare it to music players, though, compare it also to FireWire hard drives. If you carry both of these, then you are wetting your pants over an iPod.
The problem with the Newton was that it was released way too soon. That's all. It got a bad name before they shook the bugs out. It was John Scully's thing, and he wanted to be first and he was first. The 2100 is a great device (I have one) but people are still surprised that it works right because they heard more about the first ones that didn't quite have it together.
With iPod, they obviously were willing to wait for a number of other elements to catch up. This thing makes all the other music players look like Newtons. Others are either too big or have too small a capacity, and they are ALL too slow to transfer files.
> But it certainly isn't "groundbreaking" in any
> real sense.
> cds won't be rippable... therefore... no mp3s.
I disagree with everything you said.
First, it's the first MP3 player I've seen that passes the Grandma test (similar to the Turing test, and almost as hard to pass). Regular, everyday people are making MP3 collections out of CD's on their iBooks and similar, and now they can take 1000 songs with them in a shirt pocket only 10 minutes after unwrapping the iPod box.
Second, this is a 128MB-sized player with 5GB, that can also transfer 5GB in the time it takes other players to transfer 128MB. The two disparate sections of the portable music player market are united.
Third, it's a music player from Apple that doesn't have copy protection (read: actually more pleasant and useful than the CD's it's replacing). Apple is showing everyone how to do this right. The RIAA can take a long detour into fascism if they want to, but iPod will always stand for the fact that the right solution was there in 2001.
Finally, who gives a fuck about the RIAA? Are they the only humans on the planet who can make music? NO. Are they the only humans on the planet that can lead us into a new age of digital music delivery? NO. If Madonna's music costs $9.95 and only comes in Microsoft format, then there will be a pseudo-Madonna with similar licks in cheap MP3 in no time. There is a market for digital music that works, and iPod is going to be one of the platforms for listening to that music in a human-centric way. It's positive motion that is much more important than RIAA press releases.
Besides, Mac OS X is going to create a new revolution in content creation, and a lot of great artists who are laboring away in clubs right now, or in rehearsal studios, are going to make great records with just a stock Mac and one add-on, like the MOTU FireWire audio interface that's already out. As easy as it's been to make music on a Mac, it's only been easy compared to Windows. Mac OS X promises to open things up for many, many more musicians to forgoe corporate tie-ins and just make the music they want and make it available to anyone, without having to learn Computer Science first. The revolution is still on.
I'm sorry, but the easiest interface for ripping CD's is not, unlike what one may think, that of the mac : It's KDE's !!
Simple : clic on the CD icon of konqy and poof! you get a view with the songs in MP3, OGG or WAV format in their respective subdirs, with the names fetched from freedb. just copy what you want. everything is transparent to the user. It simply doesn't get easier than that.
No... you can take an iBook out of the box, put in a CD, iTunes launches and the music just appears in your iTunes music library, with titles and tags. That's it. It is so nicely presented that anyone can learn it just by poking at it for a moment.
The music also appears as MP3 files in your Music folder, but you don't even need to know that. You don't have to know how to work with files and folders, even. There is nothing easier, especially when you consider that an iBook is ready to go out of the box, no software to install, and in many cases, the titles and tags are even coming over wireless Ethernet.
It's actually kind of sweet when a geek thinks their Linux based solution is the easiest... however, Apple is in a whole 'nother league. You say "look how easy it is to work with MP3 files" and Apple says "look how easy it is to listen to music." while bypassing any need to work with files at all, or know what MP3 means. The true beauty, though, is that if you want to hack, you can hack. The files are still MP3, still stored in folders, if you WANT to get in there. The iPod integrates with iTunes to make it easy, but is also a standard FireWire hard disk, so anyone can use it for anything. There will be a Linux solution for putting MP3 files on an iPod in no time. Maybe someone will boot Linux from it. Macs should certainly be able to boot from it.
All Apple did was invite some members of the press to a product launch of a "breakthrough digital device (hint: it's not a Mac)". They didn't promise to end world hunger or make the Internet obsolete.
The breakthrough is passing the Grandma test. A non-technical person can now ditch all of their CD players (home and portable) and have a better experience with an iBook and an iPod. You rip the songs off your CD's with the iBook, you listen to the whole collection from your shirt pocket with iPod.
What some Slashdot readers probably don't understand is that all the digital dreams of the past few years were based on the flawed assumption that the regular Joe would take a computer science course in order to use the Internet, listen to music, run a video recorder. He won't, and he didn't. You have to build an interface on top of the geek stuff to make non-geeks happy; and you can do this while leaving a backstage door for geeks to get through (the UNIX in Mac OS X, the FireWire hard drive aspect of the iPod).
Imagine for a second that you didn't know what FireWire is, or even that computers have different operating systems, or use different methods for transferring files. Imagine that you don't know the difference between MP3 and WMF. Wouldn't you like someone to offer you a product that just enabled you to put your CD collection into a box the size of a pack of cigarettes and listen to it anywhere? An iBook + iPod does that and it's only $1698 and the user won't even need an instruction book.
Geez, this is a nice story in the midst of stories about Windows Media Format files and new kinds of CD formats that only work under certain conditions. Apple knows content, people. Take a moment and ask yourself if this doesn't make more sense as a music playback platform than anything Microsoft is doing.
> Anyone notice how this form factor looks identical
> to Intel's now-cancelled MP3 player?
The form factor is identical to many other devices, that's not the point. The point is that it will work. It will really work, it will work reliably, and it will be fun to use. It won't try to squeeze gigabytes of data through USB, in the first place.
The knocks on this device here on Slashdot stink of envy. Intel's mobos don't have FireWire yet and the whole x86 platform is suffering for it. Blame Intel and Microsoft, not Apple. Apple put FireWire ports on Macs well over two years ago. So Mac users who now find themselves wanting to move multiple gigabytes of data to a music player are much better off with iPod and FireWire. It has been trivial to attach and even boot from a FireWire hard disk on the Mac for a long, long time. I have had three different brands of external FireWire storage and one of those drives is semi-retired because it's "only" 16GB. It's old news.
The complaints about the iPod's price are embarrassing, given that the same hard drive that is in iPod is available for the same price as just a standalone FireWire hard drive. Yesterday, you could pay $399 for a super-slim, one-of-a-kind 5GB FireWire hard drive (smaller than a notebook hard drive) that you can hide in your hand. Today, you can pay $399 and get the same FireWire hard drive with music playback built-in. That is where you see whether the thing is overpriced, not by comparing it to a $250 device that is three times the size, twice the weight, has 1/30 of the connectivity bandwidth, and is also not as easy or as much fun to use.
I mean, do you non-Apple users get that you can boot a Mac off an iPod? It's not a prettier Nomad... if you think of it that way, you will continue to be mystified as to why people flock to Apple's products. It's about building a device the way it wants to be built. Your 6GB Nomad Jukebox doesn't WANT to hook up through USB... no device with that much storage will ever make sense hooking up through the keyboard port.
Also, remember that this is the first generation of a new type of device. This is the baseline... small enough, high enough capacity, fast enough connectivity, excellent integration with PC's (especially Macs). People who ignored MP3 players will now get it. You put all of your favorite songs on here in a few minutes and listen to them whenver you want. From now on, people will measure these things against iPods, just like PC's are measured against Macs (which is why Windows XP looks like bizarro Mac OS X).
Geez, man... the Apple that made the 5300 bears almost no resemblance to the Apple of today. I would wager that not even 50% of their workforce is the same. Certainly, their board and upper management are almost entirely different... I think only their CFO is the same from those days. A new PowerBook probably doesn't have even one port in common with the 5300, never mind the fact the new ones run a completely rewritten OS that now qualifies as a UNIX.
Besides, they made up for the 5300 by extending its warranty to 7 years, and also offering trade-ins for new PowerBooks on more than one occassion.
> Apple will have to do a lot more than come out
> with a flashy product now and then to earn back
> my business.
Well, they are opening up retail stores throughout the US in an effort to earn back your business. All you have to do is go to one and you can work with their products all day, all plugged in and ready to go, with software on them and camcorders and other peripherals attached. To me, that says that they're pretty proud of their products, and not just the way they photograph. Check it out and then you can make criticisms based on THIS geological era of computer technology.
Re:A waste of time. Probably OEMed by someone else
on
Apple releases iPod
·
· Score: 2
> They would have to be incredibly stupid
> not to include Windows support for this device.
I think the opposite. They will have plenty of demand from the half million people who just bought iBooks in the past six months already, simply because it matches so well (in other words, the iBook's quality and ease of use is an iPod advertisement). It is also the Apple Store's first holiday season (brick and mortar, anyway). Come in and spend $1698 and get a brand new iBook and a brand new iPod and they work seamlessly together.
As for Windows, it is not enough for Windows to just support the iPod. The machine also has to have working FireWire ports and software drivers and mass storage support and whatever else. Perhaps a Windows MP3 software vendor will build in iPod support, and then bundle that software on compatible HP or Sony PC's that include the right hardware and software to enable that. If that happens, then iPods will sell themselves to Windows users. If not, then Apple can look at building something like that if it makes sense, and if they can cajole their engineers into putting down their work on elegant Mac OS X so they can foray into Windows, and Windows-style support ("do you have FireWire ports?", "huh?").
For $399, the iPod is the same price as a FireWire drive that has the same super-slim 5GB disk in it. The music features are free. Windows users who want this have a reason to work to get it... to get their own vendors supporting it, or at least supporting the systems that it requires (FireWire mass storage).
A high-quality, all-digital LCD display is S W E E T. Don't look at a crappy VGA monitor with an LCD bolted onto it and make a judgement on all LCD's. Apple's displays are from-the-ground-up digital-digital-digital (digital graphics adapter output, digital cable, digital display) flat panels... they are plenty fast for gaming and video editing, and ideal for graphics. I mean... think about Apple's core customers... news organizatons are buying PowerBooks just to run Final Cut Pro.
I know the CRT's out there are the best they've ever been, but we got rid of our last CRT almost two years ago and we haven't missed them at all. The power, the heat, the noise, the radiation, the glass, the weight, the size... I don't miss it, not when Apple's displays are just so easy on the eyes. You get used to the display being totally flat and when I use a CRT now I feel like I should be on Captain Nemo's sub or Flash Gordon's ship or something, surrounded by vacuum tubes.
Think about the kinds of calculations Photoshop does... displaying, resizing, filtering images. These kinds of calculations are COMMON in today's software. A Web browser has to be able to display and resize images as quickly as possible. A GUI needs to be able to display and resize images as quickly as possible. Also, when you wait for Photoshop, you really wait. You don't set something up and go away while it renders or encodes or compiles. You watch a progress bar. Cutting down that progress bar is much more important than a higher MHz stamp on the CPU... real performance counts.
Even if you're not using Photoshop, it is a good benchmark.
Besides, there are much greater bottlenecks in Windows than there are in any hardware. Strap a 4GHz CPU to Windows and it will still slow you down.
Umm, easy access cases were available for PC's long before Apple ever incorporated them. I remember buying a case for a 486DX-33 that had a hinged door built into the side.
ALL of Apple's machines are easy-access, not just one particular desktop box. The iMac has a little door that opens with a quarter and exposes the RAM slots, the notebook keyboards are also pop-up doors that expose the internals.
The idea that you have to trade hackability for ease of use is antiquated. All of Apple's stuff is like this... the iPod syncs easily with iTunes for a non-technical user, but is a standard FireWire drive that anyone can write files to with any system that supports FireWire. Mac OS X has a killer GUI, but you can treat it like BSD if you want to, as well.
LPT and USB ports are extremely useful, easy to use and have been around on PC's before FireWire was on Macs.
The first wave of successful USB peripherals all came in translucent blue for a reason. I had a USB PC in 1996, too, but the ports didn't work with Windows. NT didn't get USB support until Windows 2000. You plug a USB printer into a Mac and it is auto-detected and ready to go... we've been doing USB printers for years. iTunes comes with Mac OS X and it works with 35 third-party USB CD burners, and six or seven brands of USB MP3 player, without installing anything.
Digital video editing software comes with Window ME. You can also pick up a copy of Personal Studio for relatively cheap (and in my case, I get the Windows version free because I bought the BeOS version).
Windows ME comes with Windows Movie Maker for editing movies, NotePad for editing text, and MS-DOS for giving commands to the computer. Mac OS X comes with iMovie2 for editing movies, emacs and vi for text, and BSD UNIX. There is no comparison. How many emacs users want to switch to NotePad? iMovie2 is really useful software and Windows Movie Maker is a sad joke on the people who are struggling to use it. I feel sad when I think about people trying to do audio or video on Windows... I've seen all the solutions, and it is just sad.
Modern optical mice really aren't much better than your standard ball mouse.
Funny, I was thinking the opposite last night while I ran my Apple Pro Mouse over the sofa with my PowerBook in my lap and it works just fine! Haven't had to clean this mouse, either, and there are no pieces to break off, not even buttons. I don't even carry a mousepad anymore. This mouse has been a pleasure to use.
Windows ME comes with MicroSoft Works, which IMHO is a pretty full featured productivity suite. If I need more, I can just download StarOffice for free.
Bah! Works always breaks with the next Windows update, and there are no upgrades. AppleWorks is a real application. You get AppleWorks 6 included with your iMac or iBook and it is just as good as the AppleWorks you can buy separately. Nothing is missing and you can upgrade it later. It is scriptable and has a decent community around it.
My Pentium 4 PC at work came with both a 50X CD-ROM drive and also a DVD-R/CD-RW combo drive as standard.
Is that a DVD-RW/CD-RW drive or a DVD/CD-RW ("combo") drive? The SuperDrive in the PowerMacs reads DVD's and CD's, and writes DVD-R's, DVD-RW's, CD-R's, and CD-RW's, and does it from the Finder. Also, iDVD is included, which enables you to make DVD video discs, including the interface, encoding, and burning. The key is that there is software included that makes it easy for the user to make the drive do everything it's capable of.
CRT's are still being used by Apple though. Besides, there isn't an LCD screen to date that can match the screen redraw speed of a CRT. If I'm watching a fast action movie, or playing a fast action game I don't want it to get blurry on me.
Blurring is mainly a result of using an analog interface (VGA), which are still common. Apple has been shipping all-digital LCD displays for years. I play games on LCD's just fine... I haven't used a CRT for over two years. An analog LCD means you are taking a digital signal, turning it into analog, sending it to the display, where it is turning the analog signal into digital, and the displaying it. It takes time and it makes analog LCD's slow. Get a digital one with decent quality and you're fine. All of Apple's displays fit this bill... no worries.
> the lack of two buttons on the iBook is one of
> the things that's keeping me from buying one
Macs have an extra keyboard modifier key... that is the second button. Instead of clicking the right Trackpad button, you hold down Ctrl with your keyboard hand and click the single mouse button with your mouse hand (if you know what I mean). You also Command+click for other things, or Shift+click for other things, or Option+click for other things. It isn't hard, because the mouse only has one button... it's not Option+click with the left hand and right-click with the right which is where it would get complex.
I used Windows for years, doing desktop publishing, graphic design, and some music and audio (which it really, really, really wasn't suited for). I always used a two-button mouse, of course, and could get around with the best of them. I put a two-button mouse on my first Mac right away, but went back to the one-button mouse after a couple of months because I realized that I had stopped using the right mouse button in favor of the menu bar, which is always available, and is, itself, context-sensitive.
If you don't like the Apple optical mouse, you can sell it for $40 on eBay, which is more than you paid for it with your system.
When you cross platforms, you realize that there are a lot of inherant assumptions in each platform. If you use your right mouse button all day long, it's hard to imagine a system where it's not needed. The Mac has a pervasive, context-sensitive, "infinitely-deep" menu bar (you can't overshoot it since it's at the edge of the display). It's easy to slam your cursor up there and hit any particular menu in no time at all. If the menu bar were smaller, and sitting between a row of buttons and a window title bar, then there would be more utility in context menus. It's just a different approach. Windows users go "right-click / New Folder" and Mac users go "File > New Folder". The Mac user will be faster, I guarantee it, if they have used a Mac for more than a week. And if you want to work the Windows way, that is available too. Plug the same USB mouse from your Windows machine into a Mac and it works just fine, with scroller and multiple buttons and context menus.
I love the Apple mouse I got with my PowerMac G4, and I just bought an identical mouse for $59 to use with my PowerBook G4. They are great mouses. Good to the hands, easy to use, easy to travel with because there are no pieces to fall off (the only moving part is an internal hinge).
> especially with high prices that Apple is
> already charging them
Check out today's Mac prices... they are not high. You just have to realize that Apple doesn't have any low-end machines. They all have 802.11 antennaes and slots (the high-end PowerBook has the $99 card included, too), they all have FireWire, they all have Mac OS X (equivalent to Windows XP Pro, not Home), they all have iMovie and iTunes software (best-of-breed software, not LE stuff), they all have TV out (except the PowerMac), they all have the best-quality displays. They all have Software Update, which is system software that checks once a day/week/user's-choice with Apple and updates everything that came with the box automatically, just asking the user for permission and an administrative password, including drivers, security updates, bundled apps. There are 10 other features like that, too, like CD/DVD burning in the Finder (4.5GB to a $6 DVD-R in 20 minutes in the background), or DiskCopy, which images any kind of disc to a file you can mount as if it were still a disk, so you can take game CD's with you on the road as a 300MB compressed file on your monster hard disk ($99 for a Windows software that does this). When you are looking to get all that stuff included and have a complete system that can do a lot of things out of the box, you will pay less in the end and do more with a Mac. If you are looking for a bare-bones system to run Linux, then yes, Macs look expensive. Saying that "Macs are expensive", though... it doesn't take into account "value" as opposed to just "sticker price".
That's why Apple is opening stores where all the display products are plugged-in, working, even with third-party software installed and ready to use, so you can try it out before buying... they want people to come in and see what you get for your money, to see that the PowerPC chips are very high performance, even though they are small, low-power, and low-clock-speed. It's a pleasure to buy and work with their stuff.
Steve and Steve wrote the game "Breakout" for Atari. Versions of the game have been hidden as easter eggs in one or two Apple softwares, including either System 6 or 7.
They offered the Apple II to both Atari and HP and were laughed at. So they sold it themselves and now we have home computers.
The whining about the $19 handling fee for 10.1 upgrade packages (3 CD's and a manual) is really embarrassing to me as a Mac user.
Users of other platforms, please understand that this attitude is not representative of most of Apple's users. Most people were very pleased to get a free license and a choice of either a $19 upgrade kit by courier or a free one at Apple Stores and CompUSA's. You can use one of these kits to upgrade any number of 10.0 machines.
As for whether this is worse than what Linux offers, it's easy to pay $19 for a distro with 3 CD's and a manual and telephone and other support. Mac OS X 10.1 is a much bigger and better upgrade than Windows 98 to Windows 98SE, which was $69 in most parts of the world, but free in the UK because the small number of new features were deemed to be too little a change to charge for by the courts!
On the Mac, you can run x86 stuff inside of VirtualPC. It runs great and it's the best way to test Web sites, because you can keep a whole room full of testing machines on one hard drive and even run them side by side in separate windows. When I use it full screen it's easy to forget that I'm not on an actual Windows box, at least on a G4. You get decent speeds on a G3, too. It's only about $50 + Windows as well.
Linux on an iBook or PowerBook is great if you're into Linux. You get long battery life and really nice machines with lots of connectivity. Kudos to all of the Linux on PPC developers for enabling more people to use great Apple hardware.
There was a study that came out recently from some University folks that compared Mac OS X and Linux for audio work, specifically latency. Linux was a close second to Mac OS X when not under load, but under load Mac OS X's latency stayed at 1ms and Linux went from 2ms to 4ms or something along those lines.
> Yes, I use Pro Tools which works just as well
> on the Mac as on the PC
Actually, Pro Tools is missing features on the PC, which means that it runs better on the Mac than on the PC. Not surprising, since 85% of Digidesign's customers are using Macs, including 99% of their pro customers (Pro Tools, not Pro Tools LE or Free).
Windows users have such big heads about their platform. Tech sites moan all day about Apple having a 5% market share and it makes Windows users assume that there's nothing Windows can't do, or isn't the best choice for.
When a guy shows up in Hollywood and is all Windows-this and Windows-that and pissing on the Mac and spouting five year old myths, it is not professional. People in the industry know whose tools have buttered their bread over the years. PowerBooks abound.
Using a PC for audio because you already had it is a fine excuse for kids or hobbyists, but not for professionals.
Really, you have to see the point of view of the people who know the music and audio field here. What if this article read like this:
"Recently a friend of mine who is head of Information Technology at a medium size ISP has become increasingly unhappy with Windows (and would like to stay away from UNIX/Linux) and has asked me if there is any sort of professional Web server solution for Macs. Has anybody, anywhere ever tried this? Is it possible to buy a redundant power supply with Mac drivers and just run Internet Information Server in VirtualPC or do you need an entirely native package?"
To this guy, I say: I tried to use Windows to do audio work as well, then after a year of pain I gave up and got a Mac. I swallowed all the pride I had about how I was going to stick it to the man (how I ever thought Apple was the man is beyond me) and cook up a home-brew, cheap as shit Windows-based audio solution in between sessions. I realized that I had been cooking things up in between takes, and during takes, and after takes, and while other people were getting dinner, or whatever else. You have to hold its little hand and even then it can't pump out audio consistently, or with good timing. Consider just giving up on that PC and starting from scratch and doing it right. Of course, this is the worst time to switch to a Mac... wait a few months until your favorite apps are updated for Mac OS X. Especially if you are into Cubase... it runs so good on Altivec and dual CPU's... sweet.
I know the above might sound a bit ranty, but I'm telling you, I'm speaking plainly from experience. Windows Everywhere is as much a myth as the dot-com bubble. I really feel like you do someone a disservice when you don't give them the straight shit on Windows or PC's because "everybody uses them" and anyway, you want to "allow them to make their own choice". Of course they can make their own choice, but do them the favor of at least telling them that they're going out on a rope there.
Anyway, a few years ago, I would have said "to each his own", but now, Mac OS X is standing about 10 miles taller than everything else for music and audio. Yamaha's mLAN is in there, next-generation MIDI routing, Downloadable Sounds, 5.1 audio and more channels if you want them, object-oriented drivers that enable you to share hardware in new and interesting ways, routing of 32-bit floating point audio between apps... this is huge, huge stuff. The best part is that all the apps on the platform can use this stuff. It's like a Digital Audio Workstation is in the OS and developers can utilize it whenever.
MetaSynth and Reaktor are two more apps that would appeal to someone who likes MAX. MetaSynth works with sonograms, which you can paint on with painting tools, and then run through different samples, synths, and filters. Mac-only. Reaktor is Mac/Windows, and is a modern synth construction kit that comes with hundreds of ready-made synths, and of course you can build your own. It sounds great.
Cycling '74 also have a set of 74 VST Plugins called "Pluggo", that retails for $74. Incredible bargain, and lots of fun... sort of like a play-only "MAX Lite". These plugs don't try to be all pretty and audiophile... they'll surprise you a lot. Mac only.
If he really thinks that, please post his name and the studio he works at so I can make sure not to work with him. I mean, he might as well show up to a session with a pinball machine because he happened to have one around. Or a cash register, or a typewriter.
> What I am saying is that Apple is being
> hipocritical about their "Think Diferent" marketing
> campaign. If they really wanted people to do that,
> then why stop people from doing what that desktop
> theme group was doing? Isn't what they were
> doing, "Thinking Diferent"?
Copying something is not "thinking different".
Thousands of people spending five years locked away at Apple so that they can create an OS to compete with Microsoft Windows... now THAT is "thinking different".
> So, you're basically saying 'The Mac does it now,
> stop trying to do it any other way.'
I think the point is that it's a much bigger job than the layman might think for another system to replace the Mac in the audio industry. It's not just the OS, but also the user's knowledge, the diverse and mature and interoperable apps, the consistent hardware and drivers. The styling and low power consumption and heat dissipation are also good benefits. All the other gear in the studio is also hot... you can run two Macs on the juice that one PC needs, easy.
I have a friend who still uses a 1985 Mac for MIDI sequencing in his studio. It has been sitting on top of a music keyboard for all these years, pumping out MIDI. There is a lot of history for music and audio on the Mac platform.
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How will they be the envy of their windows friends? There have been at least 2 HD based MP3 players/data storage units out for windows for over a year. Today is the day that mac people stop envying windows users as far as I can tell...
Most of the portable MP3 solutions out there work on Macs as well, if not all of them. There is a Nomad Jukebox plug-in built into iTunes, at any rate, along with many more for Rio's and whatever else. I've been using a NomadII with my Mac for a long, long time.
What you have to understand, though, is that Windows or no Windows, my new PowerBook came with USB, FireWire (1394), Gigabit Ethernet, and AirPort (802.11). Why did I get a machine with that much connectivity to then sit down and plug a music player into the keyboard port and wait two hours to fill up 5GB? Because that's the only reliable method on Windows? Nah. Not good enough.
I actually have all my MP3's on an external FireWire drive already. What Apple has done is build a music player onto a drive. I can use an iPod just like I do the drive I have now, only when it's away from the computer, it's an MP3 player and a dessert topping. I won't have to sync a damn thing.
If you want a $250 portable music player with five or six glaring compromises, then you can choose from a wide range of models and manufacturers. Apple even sells six models at the Apple Store. If you want a $399 model with no compromises, then you buy Apple's music player. Duh.
Don't just compare it to music players, though, compare it also to FireWire hard drives. If you carry both of these, then you are wetting your pants over an iPod.
The problem with the Newton was that it was released way too soon. That's all. It got a bad name before they shook the bugs out. It was John Scully's thing, and he wanted to be first and he was first. The 2100 is a great device (I have one) but people are still surprised that it works right because they heard more about the first ones that didn't quite have it together.
With iPod, they obviously were willing to wait for a number of other elements to catch up. This thing makes all the other music players look like Newtons. Others are either too big or have too small a capacity, and they are ALL too slow to transfer files.
> But it certainly isn't "groundbreaking" in any
... therefore ... no mp3s.
> real sense.
> cds won't be rippable
I disagree with everything you said.
First, it's the first MP3 player I've seen that passes the Grandma test (similar to the Turing test, and almost as hard to pass). Regular, everyday people are making MP3 collections out of CD's on their iBooks and similar, and now they can take 1000 songs with them in a shirt pocket only 10 minutes after unwrapping the iPod box.
Second, this is a 128MB-sized player with 5GB, that can also transfer 5GB in the time it takes other players to transfer 128MB. The two disparate sections of the portable music player market are united.
Third, it's a music player from Apple that doesn't have copy protection (read: actually more pleasant and useful than the CD's it's replacing). Apple is showing everyone how to do this right. The RIAA can take a long detour into fascism if they want to, but iPod will always stand for the fact that the right solution was there in 2001.
Finally, who gives a fuck about the RIAA? Are they the only humans on the planet who can make music? NO. Are they the only humans on the planet that can lead us into a new age of digital music delivery? NO. If Madonna's music costs $9.95 and only comes in Microsoft format, then there will be a pseudo-Madonna with similar licks in cheap MP3 in no time. There is a market for digital music that works, and iPod is going to be one of the platforms for listening to that music in a human-centric way. It's positive motion that is much more important than RIAA press releases.
Besides, Mac OS X is going to create a new revolution in content creation, and a lot of great artists who are laboring away in clubs right now, or in rehearsal studios, are going to make great records with just a stock Mac and one add-on, like the MOTU FireWire audio interface that's already out. As easy as it's been to make music on a Mac, it's only been easy compared to Windows. Mac OS X promises to open things up for many, many more musicians to forgoe corporate tie-ins and just make the music they want and make it available to anyone, without having to learn Computer Science first. The revolution is still on.
I'm sorry, but the easiest interface for ripping CD's is not, unlike what one may think, that of the mac : It's KDE's !! Simple : clic on the CD icon of konqy and poof! you get a view with the songs in MP3, OGG or WAV format in their respective subdirs, with the names fetched from freedb. just copy what you want. everything is transparent to the user. It simply doesn't get easier than that.
No ... you can take an iBook out of the box, put in a CD, iTunes launches and the music just appears in your iTunes music library, with titles and tags. That's it. It is so nicely presented that anyone can learn it just by poking at it for a moment.
The music also appears as MP3 files in your Music folder, but you don't even need to know that. You don't have to know how to work with files and folders, even. There is nothing easier, especially when you consider that an iBook is ready to go out of the box, no software to install, and in many cases, the titles and tags are even coming over wireless Ethernet.
It's actually kind of sweet when a geek thinks their Linux based solution is the easiest ... however, Apple is in a whole 'nother league. You say "look how easy it is to work with MP3 files" and Apple says "look how easy it is to listen to music." while bypassing any need to work with files at all, or know what MP3 means. The true beauty, though, is that if you want to hack, you can hack. The files are still MP3, still stored in folders, if you WANT to get in there. The iPod integrates with iTunes to make it easy, but is also a standard FireWire hard disk, so anyone can use it for anything. There will be a Linux solution for putting MP3 files on an iPod in no time. Maybe someone will boot Linux from it. Macs should certainly be able to boot from it.
You should be able to install a full Mac OS X system on an iPod and boot from it, just like any FireWire hard drive.
All Apple did was invite some members of the press to a product launch of a "breakthrough digital device (hint: it's not a Mac)". They didn't promise to end world hunger or make the Internet obsolete.
The breakthrough is passing the Grandma test. A non-technical person can now ditch all of their CD players (home and portable) and have a better experience with an iBook and an iPod. You rip the songs off your CD's with the iBook, you listen to the whole collection from your shirt pocket with iPod.
What some Slashdot readers probably don't understand is that all the digital dreams of the past few years were based on the flawed assumption that the regular Joe would take a computer science course in order to use the Internet, listen to music, run a video recorder. He won't, and he didn't. You have to build an interface on top of the geek stuff to make non-geeks happy; and you can do this while leaving a backstage door for geeks to get through (the UNIX in Mac OS X, the FireWire hard drive aspect of the iPod).
Imagine for a second that you didn't know what FireWire is, or even that computers have different operating systems, or use different methods for transferring files. Imagine that you don't know the difference between MP3 and WMF. Wouldn't you like someone to offer you a product that just enabled you to put your CD collection into a box the size of a pack of cigarettes and listen to it anywhere? An iBook + iPod does that and it's only $1698 and the user won't even need an instruction book.
Geez, this is a nice story in the midst of stories about Windows Media Format files and new kinds of CD formats that only work under certain conditions. Apple knows content, people. Take a moment and ask yourself if this doesn't make more sense as a music playback platform than anything Microsoft is doing.
> Anyone notice how this form factor looks identical
... if you think of it that way, you will continue to be mystified as to why people flock to Apple's products. It's about building a device the way it wants to be built. Your 6GB Nomad Jukebox doesn't WANT to hook up through USB ... no device with that much storage will ever make sense hooking up through the keyboard port.
... small enough, high enough capacity, fast enough connectivity, excellent integration with PC's (especially Macs). People who ignored MP3 players will now get it. You put all of your favorite songs on here in a few minutes and listen to them whenver you want. From now on, people will measure these things against iPods, just like PC's are measured against Macs (which is why Windows XP looks like bizarro Mac OS X).
> to Intel's now-cancelled MP3 player?
The form factor is identical to many other devices, that's not the point. The point is that it will work. It will really work, it will work reliably, and it will be fun to use. It won't try to squeeze gigabytes of data through USB, in the first place.
The knocks on this device here on Slashdot stink of envy. Intel's mobos don't have FireWire yet and the whole x86 platform is suffering for it. Blame Intel and Microsoft, not Apple. Apple put FireWire ports on Macs well over two years ago. So Mac users who now find themselves wanting to move multiple gigabytes of data to a music player are much better off with iPod and FireWire. It has been trivial to attach and even boot from a FireWire hard disk on the Mac for a long, long time. I have had three different brands of external FireWire storage and one of those drives is semi-retired because it's "only" 16GB. It's old news.
The complaints about the iPod's price are embarrassing, given that the same hard drive that is in iPod is available for the same price as just a standalone FireWire hard drive. Yesterday, you could pay $399 for a super-slim, one-of-a-kind 5GB FireWire hard drive (smaller than a notebook hard drive) that you can hide in your hand. Today, you can pay $399 and get the same FireWire hard drive with music playback built-in. That is where you see whether the thing is overpriced, not by comparing it to a $250 device that is three times the size, twice the weight, has 1/30 of the connectivity bandwidth, and is also not as easy or as much fun to use.
I mean, do you non-Apple users get that you can boot a Mac off an iPod? It's not a prettier Nomad
Also, remember that this is the first generation of a new type of device. This is the baseline
Geez, man ... the Apple that made the 5300 bears almost no resemblance to the Apple of today. I would wager that not even 50% of their workforce is the same. Certainly, their board and upper management are almost entirely different ... I think only their CFO is the same from those days. A new PowerBook probably doesn't have even one port in common with the 5300, never mind the fact the new ones run a completely rewritten OS that now qualifies as a UNIX.
Besides, they made up for the 5300 by extending its warranty to 7 years, and also offering trade-ins for new PowerBooks on more than one occassion.
> Apple will have to do a lot more than come out
> with a flashy product now and then to earn back
> my business.
Well, they are opening up retail stores throughout the US in an effort to earn back your business. All you have to do is go to one and you can work with their products all day, all plugged in and ready to go, with software on them and camcorders and other peripherals attached. To me, that says that they're pretty proud of their products, and not just the way they photograph. Check it out and then you can make criticisms based on THIS geological era of computer technology.
> They would have to be incredibly stupid
... to get their own vendors supporting it, or at least supporting the systems that it requires (FireWire mass storage).
> not to include Windows support for this device.
I think the opposite. They will have plenty of demand from the half million people who just bought iBooks in the past six months already, simply because it matches so well (in other words, the iBook's quality and ease of use is an iPod advertisement). It is also the Apple Store's first holiday season (brick and mortar, anyway). Come in and spend $1698 and get a brand new iBook and a brand new iPod and they work seamlessly together.
As for Windows, it is not enough for Windows to just support the iPod. The machine also has to have working FireWire ports and software drivers and mass storage support and whatever else. Perhaps a Windows MP3 software vendor will build in iPod support, and then bundle that software on compatible HP or Sony PC's that include the right hardware and software to enable that. If that happens, then iPods will sell themselves to Windows users. If not, then Apple can look at building something like that if it makes sense, and if they can cajole their engineers into putting down their work on elegant Mac OS X so they can foray into Windows, and Windows-style support ("do you have FireWire ports?", "huh?").
For $399, the iPod is the same price as a FireWire drive that has the same super-slim 5GB disk in it. The music features are free. Windows users who want this have a reason to work to get it
A high-quality, all-digital LCD display is S W E E T. Don't look at a crappy VGA monitor with an LCD bolted onto it and make a judgement on all LCD's. Apple's displays are from-the-ground-up digital-digital-digital (digital graphics adapter output, digital cable, digital display) flat panels ... they are plenty fast for gaming and video editing, and ideal for graphics. I mean ... think about Apple's core customers ... news organizatons are buying PowerBooks just to run Final Cut Pro.
... I don't miss it, not when Apple's displays are just so easy on the eyes. You get used to the display being totally flat and when I use a CRT now I feel like I should be on Captain Nemo's sub or Flash Gordon's ship or something, surrounded by vacuum tubes.
I know the CRT's out there are the best they've ever been, but we got rid of our last CRT almost two years ago and we haven't missed them at all. The power, the heat, the noise, the radiation, the glass, the weight, the size
Think about the kinds of calculations Photoshop does ... displaying, resizing, filtering images. These kinds of calculations are COMMON in today's software. A Web browser has to be able to display and resize images as quickly as possible. A GUI needs to be able to display and resize images as quickly as possible. Also, when you wait for Photoshop, you really wait. You don't set something up and go away while it renders or encodes or compiles. You watch a progress bar. Cutting down that progress bar is much more important than a higher MHz stamp on the CPU ... real performance counts.
Even if you're not using Photoshop, it is a good benchmark.
Besides, there are much greater bottlenecks in Windows than there are in any hardware. Strap a 4GHz CPU to Windows and it will still slow you down.
Umm, easy access cases were available for PC's long before Apple ever incorporated them. I remember buying a case for a 486DX-33 that had a hinged door built into the side.
ALL of Apple's machines are easy-access, not just one particular desktop box. The iMac has a little door that opens with a quarter and exposes the RAM slots, the notebook keyboards are also pop-up doors that expose the internals.
The idea that you have to trade hackability for ease of use is antiquated. All of Apple's stuff is like this ... the iPod syncs easily with iTunes for a non-technical user, but is a standard FireWire drive that anyone can write files to with any system that supports FireWire. Mac OS X has a killer GUI, but you can treat it like BSD if you want to, as well.
LPT and USB ports are extremely useful, easy to use and have been around on PC's before FireWire was on Macs.
The first wave of successful USB peripherals all came in translucent blue for a reason. I had a USB PC in 1996, too, but the ports didn't work with Windows. NT didn't get USB support until Windows 2000. You plug a USB printer into a Mac and it is auto-detected and ready to go ... we've been doing USB printers for years. iTunes comes with Mac OS X and it works with 35 third-party USB CD burners, and six or seven brands of USB MP3 player, without installing anything.
Digital video editing software comes with Window ME. You can also pick up a copy of Personal Studio for relatively cheap (and in my case, I get the Windows version free because I bought the BeOS version).
Windows ME comes with Windows Movie Maker for editing movies, NotePad for editing text, and MS-DOS for giving commands to the computer. Mac OS X comes with iMovie2 for editing movies, emacs and vi for text, and BSD UNIX. There is no comparison. How many emacs users want to switch to NotePad? iMovie2 is really useful software and Windows Movie Maker is a sad joke on the people who are struggling to use it. I feel sad when I think about people trying to do audio or video on Windows ... I've seen all the solutions, and it is just sad.
Modern optical mice really aren't much better than your standard ball mouse.
Funny, I was thinking the opposite last night while I ran my Apple Pro Mouse over the sofa with my PowerBook in my lap and it works just fine! Haven't had to clean this mouse, either, and there are no pieces to break off, not even buttons. I don't even carry a mousepad anymore. This mouse has been a pleasure to use.
Windows ME comes with MicroSoft Works, which IMHO is a pretty full featured productivity suite. If I need more, I can just download StarOffice for free.
Bah! Works always breaks with the next Windows update, and there are no upgrades. AppleWorks is a real application. You get AppleWorks 6 included with your iMac or iBook and it is just as good as the AppleWorks you can buy separately. Nothing is missing and you can upgrade it later. It is scriptable and has a decent community around it.
My Pentium 4 PC at work came with both a 50X CD-ROM drive and also a DVD-R/CD-RW combo drive as standard.
Is that a DVD-RW/CD-RW drive or a DVD/CD-RW ("combo") drive? The SuperDrive in the PowerMacs reads DVD's and CD's, and writes DVD-R's, DVD-RW's, CD-R's, and CD-RW's, and does it from the Finder. Also, iDVD is included, which enables you to make DVD video discs, including the interface, encoding, and burning. The key is that there is software included that makes it easy for the user to make the drive do everything it's capable of.
CRT's are still being used by Apple though. Besides, there isn't an LCD screen to date that can match the screen redraw speed of a CRT. If I'm watching a fast action movie, or playing a fast action game I don't want it to get blurry on me.
Blurring is mainly a result of using an analog interface (VGA), which are still common. Apple has been shipping all-digital LCD displays for years. I play games on LCD's just fine ... I haven't used a CRT for over two years. An analog LCD means you are taking a digital signal, turning it into analog, sending it to the display, where it is turning the analog signal into digital, and the displaying it. It takes time and it makes analog LCD's slow. Get a digital one with decent quality and you're fine. All of Apple's displays fit this bill ... no worries.
> the lack of two buttons on the iBook is one of
... that is the second button. Instead of clicking the right Trackpad button, you hold down Ctrl with your keyboard hand and click the single mouse button with your mouse hand (if you know what I mean). You also Command+click for other things, or Shift+click for other things, or Option+click for other things. It isn't hard, because the mouse only has one button ... it's not Option+click with the left hand and right-click with the right which is where it would get complex.
> the things that's keeping me from buying one
Macs have an extra keyboard modifier key
I used Windows for years, doing desktop publishing, graphic design, and some music and audio (which it really, really, really wasn't suited for). I always used a two-button mouse, of course, and could get around with the best of them. I put a two-button mouse on my first Mac right away, but went back to the one-button mouse after a couple of months because I realized that I had stopped using the right mouse button in favor of the menu bar, which is always available, and is, itself, context-sensitive.
You won't miss the second button on an iBook.
If you don't like the Apple optical mouse, you can sell it for $40 on eBay, which is more than you paid for it with your system.
... they are not high. You just have to realize that Apple doesn't have any low-end machines. They all have 802.11 antennaes and slots (the high-end PowerBook has the $99 card included, too), they all have FireWire, they all have Mac OS X (equivalent to Windows XP Pro, not Home), they all have iMovie and iTunes software (best-of-breed software, not LE stuff), they all have TV out (except the PowerMac), they all have the best-quality displays. They all have Software Update, which is system software that checks once a day/week/user's-choice with Apple and updates everything that came with the box automatically, just asking the user for permission and an administrative password, including drivers, security updates, bundled apps. There are 10 other features like that, too, like CD/DVD burning in the Finder (4.5GB to a $6 DVD-R in 20 minutes in the background), or DiskCopy, which images any kind of disc to a file you can mount as if it were still a disk, so you can take game CD's with you on the road as a 300MB compressed file on your monster hard disk ($99 for a Windows software that does this). When you are looking to get all that stuff included and have a complete system that can do a lot of things out of the box, you will pay less in the end and do more with a Mac. If you are looking for a bare-bones system to run Linux, then yes, Macs look expensive. Saying that "Macs are expensive", though ... it doesn't take into account "value" as opposed to just "sticker price".
... they want people to come in and see what you get for your money, to see that the PowerPC chips are very high performance, even though they are small, low-power, and low-clock-speed. It's a pleasure to buy and work with their stuff.
When you cross platforms, you realize that there are a lot of inherant assumptions in each platform. If you use your right mouse button all day long, it's hard to imagine a system where it's not needed. The Mac has a pervasive, context-sensitive, "infinitely-deep" menu bar (you can't overshoot it since it's at the edge of the display). It's easy to slam your cursor up there and hit any particular menu in no time at all. If the menu bar were smaller, and sitting between a row of buttons and a window title bar, then there would be more utility in context menus. It's just a different approach. Windows users go "right-click / New Folder" and Mac users go "File > New Folder". The Mac user will be faster, I guarantee it, if they have used a Mac for more than a week. And if you want to work the Windows way, that is available too. Plug the same USB mouse from your Windows machine into a Mac and it works just fine, with scroller and multiple buttons and context menus.
I love the Apple mouse I got with my PowerMac G4, and I just bought an identical mouse for $59 to use with my PowerBook G4. They are great mouses. Good to the hands, easy to use, easy to travel with because there are no pieces to fall off (the only moving part is an internal hinge).
> especially with high prices that Apple is
> already charging them
Check out today's Mac prices
That's why Apple is opening stores where all the display products are plugged-in, working, even with third-party software installed and ready to use, so you can try it out before buying
Steve and Steve wrote the game "Breakout" for Atari. Versions of the game have been hidden as easter eggs in one or two Apple softwares, including either System 6 or 7.
They offered the Apple II to both Atari and HP and were laughed at. So they sold it themselves and now we have home computers.
The whining about the $19 handling fee for 10.1 upgrade packages (3 CD's and a manual) is really embarrassing to me as a Mac user.
Users of other platforms, please understand that this attitude is not representative of most of Apple's users. Most people were very pleased to get a free license and a choice of either a $19 upgrade kit by courier or a free one at Apple Stores and CompUSA's. You can use one of these kits to upgrade any number of 10.0 machines.
As for whether this is worse than what Linux offers, it's easy to pay $19 for a distro with 3 CD's and a manual and telephone and other support. Mac OS X 10.1 is a much bigger and better upgrade than Windows 98 to Windows 98SE, which was $69 in most parts of the world, but free in the UK because the small number of new features were deemed to be too little a change to charge for by the courts!
On the Mac, you can run x86 stuff inside of VirtualPC. It runs great and it's the best way to test Web sites, because you can keep a whole room full of testing machines on one hard drive and even run them side by side in separate windows. When I use it full screen it's easy to forget that I'm not on an actual Windows box, at least on a G4. You get decent speeds on a G3, too. It's only about $50 + Windows as well.
Linux on an iBook or PowerBook is great if you're into Linux. You get long battery life and really nice machines with lots of connectivity. Kudos to all of the Linux on PPC developers for enabling more people to use great Apple hardware.
There was a study that came out recently from some University folks that compared Mac OS X and Linux for audio work, specifically latency. Linux was a close second to Mac OS X when not under load, but under load Mac OS X's latency stayed at 1ms and Linux went from 2ms to 4ms or something along those lines.
> Yes, I use Pro Tools which works just as well
> on the Mac as on the PC
Actually, Pro Tools is missing features on the PC, which means that it runs better on the Mac than on the PC. Not surprising, since 85% of Digidesign's customers are using Macs, including 99% of their pro customers (Pro Tools, not Pro Tools LE or Free).
Windows users have such big heads about their platform. Tech sites moan all day about Apple having a 5% market share and it makes Windows users assume that there's nothing Windows can't do, or isn't the best choice for.
When a guy shows up in Hollywood and is all Windows-this and Windows-that and pissing on the Mac and spouting five year old myths, it is not professional. People in the industry know whose tools have buttered their bread over the years. PowerBooks abound.
Using a PC for audio because you already had it is a fine excuse for kids or hobbyists, but not for professionals.
... wait a few months until your favorite apps are updated for Mac OS X. Especially if you are into Cubase ... it runs so good on Altivec and dual CPU's ... sweet.
... this is huge, huge stuff. The best part is that all the apps on the platform can use this stuff. It's like a Digital Audio Workstation is in the OS and developers can utilize it whenever.
Really, you have to see the point of view of the people who know the music and audio field here. What if this article read like this:
"Recently a friend of mine who is head of Information Technology at a medium size ISP has become increasingly unhappy with Windows (and would like to stay away from UNIX/Linux) and has asked me if there is any sort of professional Web server solution for Macs. Has anybody, anywhere ever tried this? Is it possible to buy a redundant power supply with Mac drivers and just run Internet Information Server in VirtualPC or do you need an entirely native package?"
To this guy, I say: I tried to use Windows to do audio work as well, then after a year of pain I gave up and got a Mac. I swallowed all the pride I had about how I was going to stick it to the man (how I ever thought Apple was the man is beyond me) and cook up a home-brew, cheap as shit Windows-based audio solution in between sessions. I realized that I had been cooking things up in between takes, and during takes, and after takes, and while other people were getting dinner, or whatever else. You have to hold its little hand and even then it can't pump out audio consistently, or with good timing. Consider just giving up on that PC and starting from scratch and doing it right. Of course, this is the worst time to switch to a Mac
I know the above might sound a bit ranty, but I'm telling you, I'm speaking plainly from experience. Windows Everywhere is as much a myth as the dot-com bubble. I really feel like you do someone a disservice when you don't give them the straight shit on Windows or PC's because "everybody uses them" and anyway, you want to "allow them to make their own choice". Of course they can make their own choice, but do them the favor of at least telling them that they're going out on a rope there.
Anyway, a few years ago, I would have said "to each his own", but now, Mac OS X is standing about 10 miles taller than everything else for music and audio. Yamaha's mLAN is in there, next-generation MIDI routing, Downloadable Sounds, 5.1 audio and more channels if you want them, object-oriented drivers that enable you to share hardware in new and interesting ways, routing of 32-bit floating point audio between apps
MetaSynth and Reaktor are two more apps that would appeal to someone who likes MAX. MetaSynth works with sonograms, which you can paint on with painting tools, and then run through different samples, synths, and filters. Mac-only. Reaktor is Mac/Windows, and is a modern synth construction kit that comes with hundreds of ready-made synths, and of course you can build your own. It sounds great.
... sort of like a play-only "MAX Lite". These plugs don't try to be all pretty and audiophile ... they'll surprise you a lot. Mac only.
Cycling '74 also have a set of 74 VST Plugins called "Pluggo", that retails for $74. Incredible bargain, and lots of fun
> #1 he's already got a PC
> #1 is good enough
If he really thinks that, please post his name and the studio he works at so I can make sure not to work with him. I mean, he might as well show up to a session with a pinball machine because he happened to have one around. Or a cash register, or a typewriter.
> What I am saying is that Apple is being
... now THAT is "thinking different".
> hipocritical about their "Think Diferent" marketing
> campaign. If they really wanted people to do that,
> then why stop people from doing what that desktop
> theme group was doing? Isn't what they were
> doing, "Thinking Diferent"?
Copying something is not "thinking different".
Thousands of people spending five years locked away at Apple so that they can create an OS to compete with Microsoft Windows
> So, you're basically saying 'The Mac does it now,
... you can run two Macs on the juice that one PC needs, easy.
> stop trying to do it any other way.'
I think the point is that it's a much bigger job than the layman might think for another system to replace the Mac in the audio industry. It's not just the OS, but also the user's knowledge, the diverse and mature and interoperable apps, the consistent hardware and drivers. The styling and low power consumption and heat dissipation are also good benefits. All the other gear in the studio is also hot
I have a friend who still uses a 1985 Mac for MIDI sequencing in his studio. It has been sitting on top of a music keyboard for all these years, pumping out MIDI. There is a lot of history for music and audio on the Mac platform.