Re:Affect hardware sales?
on
OS X on x86?
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· Score: 2
> Give me a reason not to switch to OS X.
Right on, brother! This is exciting shit.
I switched from a PC to a Mac two years ago once the NeXTSTEP + Mac OS = Mac OS X thing was explained to me. In the meantime, I surprised myself by totally falling in love with Mac OS. It is just great except for the guts, and Mac OS X goes overboard in fixing that, as well as tightening up all kinds of little legacy things and adding new features.
This is a platform that's about to offer a $2500 full-featured notebook with 15.2" wide-screen, built-in 802.11 and antennaes, 1394, VGA out (for a second display or mirroring), TV out, Cardbus, IR, five-hour battery life, hot-swap batteries, slot-load DVD, Apache, Perl, iMovie, Mac OS X, Java2, BSD, Altivec. And the fucker is made out of titanium and is 1" thick! Damn right we better be excited. This is everything that Apple and NeXT ever promised and moreso. You can run Apache, Perl, Dreamweaver, and Photoshop side-by-side. Quake III already runs on Mac OS X and got the fastest frame rate ever at the recent Macworld SF on a G3/533 with an nVidia card (100+ frames per second). That's twice as many frames per second as the same machine can manage with Mac OS 9.
This is the notebook for the die-hard geek to code up his next embedded Linux set-top box or whatever. Run multiple installations of Linux in Virtual PC if you want to. Dual-boot with LinuxPPC if you want to. Very 21st century. And look, no Microsoft at all. None. Not a bit. Not a hint.
Re:Affect hardware sales?
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OS X on x86?
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· Score: 3
I'm one of the Mac-using media people you talk about. You're right that price is king, but Macs are cheaper than x86 PC's. Don't just do a CompUSA comparison of the hardware sticker-price, although Apple's notebooks, at least, will win that easily, and the desktops would surprise you if you added the comparable features to a PC. You have to evaluate what the machine will cost you over its lifetime, and what it will give you over its lifetime.
Support. There are almost zero IT costs related to Macs. Apple has an article on their site right now about a 150-user consulting firm that is a Mac-only shop and has only two IT guys, and they take care of the phone system, too. In many places, the "business people" use Windows PC's and the "creatives" use Macs, and the IT people only work on the PC's and the "creatives" take care of their own Macs (Microsoft gives this as the reason why their Mac apps are installed with a drag and drop of the folder from the CD to the hard disk, and their Windows apps have a complicated installer). If IT does support the Macs as well, they typically have a 10:1 Windows:Mac ratio on their support calls.
Productivity. The interface is better and makes users more productive, especially in media apps, which were all originally Mac-only and it shows. You only have to learn one set of key shortcuts and they work everywhere. You don't have to know or care about pathnames. You can move or rename apps and they keep working. You don't have to use filename extensions. You can mount drives formatted with HFS, FAT, UDF, and other formats. Mac OS 9 is more stable than any DOS-Windows version, and more stable than NT 4. It probably won't quite go head to head with Windows 2000, but Mac OS X does, easily (been using it for over a year and no crashes, and these are alphas and betas). These things really add up.
Hardware. Apple's hardware is high-quality, and components are optimized for each other and work well together. You can add RAM to any Mac in under a minute, because they all have easy-access doors, even the notebooks (the keyboard is a door). Their displays are all color-calibrated, and integrate with ColorSync in the OS. Towers have built-in gigabit Ethernet, and all other Macs have 10/100 built-in (for years now). All Macs have two built-in 802.11 wireless antennaes, and an internal slot for a $99 optional wireless networking card. They all have FireWire built-in (except for the low-end iMac, I believe). They all come with optical mouses and quality keyboards. The machines come with a bunch of stuff that you'd have to add yourself, otherwise.
Saving a few hundred bucks off the initial sticker price just doesn't help you in the long run. This is why Mac users are willing to pay a little extra. We don't pay much more, though. The $3499 G4 tower has a $995 CD/DVD-RW combo drive in it, as well as iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, iTools, DVD player, CD-RW burning built into the OS, internal antennaes, gigabit Ethernet, FireWire, an audio amplifier for external speakers, power and USB for the display through the video card, optical mouse, room for 1.5 GB RAM, room for two removable drives and four hard drives, four empty PCI slots, easy open case with the mobo on the door, nVidia graphics. That's an awful lot of features and capabilities right out of the box.
There are so many misconceptions about Apple, because all the other PC manufacturers are in bed with each other and not with Apple. It's worth actually checking into this stuff... it saves you money and makes your daily work easier. And they look cool and run Mac OS X. You can't beat that.
Re: NEXTSTEP and porting
on
OS X on x86?
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· Score: 2
> What I still don't understand is how Apple
> managed to turn NEXTSTEP (runs fine on my
> NeXTStation Turbo which is a 33Mhz 68040 with
> 32MB of RAM) into OSX (apparently only runs
> reasonably well on a XXXMhz PowerPC G4 with
> 128MB of RAM)?
Well, I can tell you how. The main thing is that there's a big difference between meeting the processing needs of a 1989 user and a 2001 user. People weren't playing MP3's in 1989, they weren't encoding DVD's, they weren't serving Web pages in the background. They also weren't running Microsoft's bloated apps. Also, the NeXTSTEP interface, while elegant and useful, did not do the kind of work that Aqua is doing with anti-aliasing and drop shadows. NeXTSTEP also didn't have the Carbon API in addition to Cocoa, and most of all, NeXTSTEP didn't run Mac OS 9 inside a simulated computer (not emulated, because the processor is real).
Requirements for Mac OS X Public Beta are any G3 or G4 equipped Mac (except the original PowerBook G3) and 128MB RAM. It runs quite well on any of these boxes, for a beta. More recent builds are flying in comparison to the Public Beta. The GUI, especially, has obviously been tuned quite a bit more (one Macworld writer said "this is the fastest GUI I've ever used, period.") This is Apple's OS for the next 10-15 years, according to Steve Jobs. Sure, they could tune it for machines that predate the iMac, but why do that when the original iMac is going to turn three in a few months? It will run on older machines just fine, but Apple are aiming the feature set at the machines they've been selling for the past three years, and the machines they will sell in the next three years.
Re:Reminds me of...A BIG mistake by Apple
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OS X on x86?
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· Score: 2
> Compare [the iMac G3/233] with a PII/233
> and you'll find [that the PC is] every bit equal
> to grandma's box... er, boxen.
No, that's just plain not true.
A couple of years ago, I switched from a very nicely equipped IBM PII 300 box to a Power Mac G3 350 with similar specs, and the Mac runs circles around the PC. I immediately got more than twice as many tracks and effects going simultaneously in a multitrack audio program, as well as having much, much lower latency. It also just feels faster when you use it. I used to keep PC's for a year or 18 months, max, and then give them away, but this Mac is still my main machine after two years and I will still have have lots of jobs for it once my new machine arrives this month (a Power Mac with the CD/DVD-RW combo drive). The G3 still has room for 1 GB more RAM, and the CPU can be unplugged and replaced with a faster one if I want to.
There are a wide assortment of online RAM dealers who will sell you chips for a "Rev. A iMac". You don't need to worry about what part they are or whatever, just tell them what computer you have and how much RAM you want. One that I can think of off the top of my head is:
Check some of the ads on Macintosh-related Web sites (you can find a bunch of them in Internet Explorer 5's default Favorites list) for more RAM dealers.
Since Steve Jobs return, Apple has moved to easy-access standard RAM on all of its machines. You have sort of an intermediate machine, though. It is a PowerBook from that era built into a case with a CRT, and that forced them to make some compromises as far as the placement of components. These days, even the notebooks can be RAM-upgraded in only a few seconds... you just pop-up the keyboard.
Re:Microsoft == bad partner, no multimedia savvy
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Live Streaming Video?
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· Score: 5
> Not using a piece of software just because it is
> from Microsoft just shows ignorance. Use what
> works.
No, it's not ignorance. Software is not a one-time purchase. If this guy sets up MS-based streaming video, he's estabilishing a relationship with Microsoft. Even if the MS solution has more features or is cheaper, you have to consider whose promises you're attempting to believe. Microsoft also has no multimedia savvy. Windows Media is ugly stuff to people who know better. It's unfun, and live streaming video ought to be fun.
I would go with QuickTime, myself, for the following reasons:
highest quality available
free, open source server software that runs on Darwin, Linux, NT, and Mac OS X, with NO per-stream cost
easy authoring features that will enable you to put a Flash front-end, titles, or links into your streams
integration with video authoring software
a player that's popular, easy to use, and unclutterd by blinking ads
Apple owns a big piece of Akamai.
Also, you can get a Mac with DVD-R, FireWire, and gigabit ethernet built-in as your broadcaster, and make a DVD after the live event is over, as well as create a DVD-ROM of the raw data, all on the same machine (and all the software is included). The other machines you involve (usually one or two more) can be Linux or NT if you like. With the money you save by having no per-stream cost, the machines are basically free, anyway.
QuickTime is easily the best quality, and there's no price-per-stream. You can run the QuickTime Streaming Server on Mac OS X, Darwin, or Linux. QuickTime 5 also has some new buffering features that make so much sense, you won't believe that Real and MS don't have them.
If you think of NeXT as Apple's research group, sort of like a Xerox PARC, the fact that Steve Jobs could come back, take over, and put ex-NeXT people in important positions makes more sense. The original NeXT computer started out as a project at Apple called "Big Mac". When Jobs left, he took the team and the project, which is why their was some talk of litigation. They did the majority of the work after that, don't get me wrong, but in a way, the Mac OS forked at that point, and the NeXT fork came back later to be reunited and fill in the gaps left by all the Pink/Copland/Gershwin bullshit that Apple had been trying to do in the early 1990's.
Not to dismiss NeXT and the actual products they shipped and the customers they served. Apple is just getting started with rolling this stuff out the door. They have a shit-load of technology under wraps that they are going to deploy once the Mac OS X era is underway. They own the best handwriting recognition in the world, for example... leftover from the Newton 2.0 (not the 1.0 that people made jokes about, but the 2.0 version that still blows people's minds when Newton users show it to them). They have years of research from that. No point in rebuilding this stuff on Mac OS 9, though. Think about what Apple will be doing when they don't have a huge part of the company consumed with writing a new OS and also making their software run on both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X for the time being. They just built CD-burning into the Mac OS 9 Finder, for example, and they have to build it into the Mac OS X Finder as well. When the integration of NeXT and Apple is complete, they'll be more efficient and productive.
> I mean they made firewire years ago, and what
> has it done since then?
FireWire is huge... huge. It's the standard method for moving digital video between devices, and is about to become the standard method for moving MIDI and digital audio, with Yamaha's mLAN, which uses FireWire. Every digital camcorder and VCR has FireWire. TiVo's and other set-top boxes have FireWire. All Macs have FireWire, except the bargain-basement iMac. The whole TV and movie industry is going digital, and they're doing it with FireWire and QuickTime. It's a tremendously successful technology.
You can drag and drop into a folder or onto the desktop to create a clipping. Then you can drag and drop that clipping into a million documents after that. Or, double-click the clipping and copy it to the clipboard and paste from there.
The combination of easy to hit menus that you can't overshoot, uniform key commands, and pervasive drag and drop is easy to use and becomes second nature. It's simplicity. It's Zen. You ought to try it before you criticize.
It's funny how a Linux guy would never stomach command-line tips from a Mac user, but Linux guys never hesitate to prounounce their own GUI theories to be much better than Apple's. A little humility... please. No, you don't know it all.
What is so hard about all this that you Unix guys can't get that the Mac user interface is designed from the ground up to use one mouse button? The menubar is at the top of the screen, and if you watch a Mac user work, you'll notice that they flick the mouse up to the File menu without looking, because the File menu never moves, and the hot area of the menu item extends to the top of the display, so you can't overshoot. You develop muscle memory. Same for the Edit menu. It's much faster to just go Edit > Copy than it is to right click, identify the option on the context menu, and target and click it.
In addition, the keyboard shortcuts on the Mac are very uniform between apps, so many, many Mac users know the keyboard shortcuts for New, Save, Open, Close, Quit, Print, Cut, Copy, Paste, Select All, Find, Find Again. These all work in all applications, uniformly. In Mac OS X, Command+Q (Quit) quits the current app, and Command+Shift+Q logs you out of the system. You just hold down the right shift and do the same Command+Q you're used to when quitting an app and you logout. It's easy to remember this stuff.
The Mac also uses more drag and drop than Windows or most other systems. You can drag a selection of text and drop it into a folder and it appears there as a text clipping that you can drag into another document to paste it there. Another reason not to use a right-click context menu.
Context menus are superfluous on the Mac UI, and if you like them, then buy a $15 USB 2-button mouse with scroller and that works just fine, too. This is not a big deal... people who haven't used Mac OS don't get it, is all.
When I switched from Windows to Mac OS, I bought a 2-button mouse right away, then replaced it with a 1-button later when I realized I wasn't using the second button. You can press the single button with two or three fingers, and that feels much healthier for my hand.
Microsoft is a poor example to model your business on. Name one other company that has been successful using the Microsoft model, and then maybe Apple can model themselves after that company.
Windows 95 was also a rip-off of the NeXT interface, as well as the Mac interface. Windows has gotten more NeXT-ish as time goes on.
When I saw recently that Mac OS X now has a cool customizable toolbar API that works just like the toolbars in IE 5 for Macintosh, I thought Apple had ripped of Microsoft, but then a NeXT user informed me that these toolbars were in NeXTSTEP as well. Big surprise, I guess.
> At the time Apple was shopping around, I wanted
> them to buy Be. Now I realize that if they would
> have, there would probably be no more BeOS for
> me to use. They would have ruined the Be
> community.
> There already was no more NeXT, so nobody
> looses out on that one.
Apple has sold more copies of Mac OS X Server (formerly OpenStep) than Be has of BeOS. There is, and always has been, a good community of people around the NeXT technologies, even after Apple bought them. They are pretty much at a fever pitch right now, with the upcoming release of Mac OS X.
> Steve Jobs is back, and right now he is cool. Let's
> see where is is in one year.
Have you read Steve Jobs' resume? He coined the term "personal computer" when the company he founded shipped the very first one. He's not exactly a one-hit wonder.
You don't have to reverse-engineer Mac hardware when the core of the Mac OS is open source. When there are additionally six open source Linux distributions that run on that hardware. Just admit to yourself that Be got it wrong on that one. The more you mention it, the less standing Be has in the eyes of the people listening to you.
Macs basically have the exact same hardware in them as Intel computers, except for the fact that they use a PowerPC CPU from Motorola or IBM, and have some additonal features like 802.11 wireless networking and antennae, IEEE 1394 (Apple calls it "FireWire") busses, and they use a DVI-3 connector (Apple calls it "Apple Display Connector") for digital video instead of the simpler and more common DVI-1. These things are all standard items. Even the firmware is open... it's called "Open Firmware".
It's interesting that you think Be is not dead now, but you think NeXT was dead in 1996. Be still has not matched NeXT's typical yearly revenue. There is a pretty good NeXT community... many of the same individuals and companies that used and supported the technologies when they were owned by NeXT have continued to do so now that the technologies are owned by Apple. Mac OS X Server was released two years ago. Previously, that OS was called OpenStep, and before that, NeXTSTEP. It's a Unix with the same object-oriented API's Tim Berners-Lee used to create the World Wide Web, as well as a Mac compatibility environment that runs Mac OS 8.6 full-screen. It's going to be retired on March 24 along with Mac OS 9. Apple will have a single OS for both workstations and servers when they release Mac OS X.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that Be wanted $180 million or so, and Apple balked at that (they're worth less than half that today, after their IPO). Steve Jobs wanted $400 million for NeXT, but Gil Amelio thought that NeXT was worth it because they had a full-featured, mature, OS, third-party applications, customers, and leading people like Steve Jobs and Avi Tevanian. Be's OS was a beta that couldn't print, no multiuser, and had poor networking. Be had no incoming revenue at the time, and no customers.
Why do Be fans keep bringing this up? It's embarrassing to Be.
> yes Apple has just now started shipping faster
> mobile processors. How long until they are way
> behind again?
Have you ever shopped for a notebook?
Apple has always had the fastest notebooks and the longest-battery life. Intel cripples their 40 watt chips to make slow 15 watt chips that run at half speed on batteries, AMD doesn't have a mobile offering, and Transmeta is having a troubled time of it, to say the least. All that work that Transmeta has done with emulation and code morphing is solely to create an x86 chip that uses 3-5 watts... the PPC 7410 in the PowerBook G4 only uses 7 watts, and it gives desktop performance. The machines that preceded it were also faster than their competition, and had five hours battery life also (10 hours with both battery bays filled).
On the iBook side, try and find another notebook with six hour battery life and a $1499 price tag (including office suite, FireWire, movie editing software, and DVD drive).
> I believe that platform has been at 500Mhz for the
> entire year of 2000.
The G4 chip was stuck at 500MHz, but in mid-2000, Apple started to put two in each machine. A dual 500MHz Mac is as fast as a 1GHz PC for most tasks, and much faster for some tasks, like encoding video.
Do you have any idea how stupid you sound? Do you get how big the Mac platform is? Most of the art and music and movies you enjoy daily are made by people who use Macs. Something like 25 million users. Apple has 4 billion dollars in the bank, and this is their first unprofitable quarter in over three years. Compaq has had three or four unprofitable quarters since then.
I mean... you just sound like an idiot. You are saying that the sky is green.
You don't have to register it, and there are no serial numbers. You start the box, answer a few questions that are used to create an account for you, supply your Internet settings (or create a new Earthlink account if you don't have an ISP already) and start using it.
Mac OS X will be included with every mac, including the $799 iMac, so it's not exactly expensive. Windows 2000 is $200 or $300 by itself. It's not free like Linux, but not everybody has the time to dedicate to Linux, or can get their work done with Linux applications.
The 733MHz G4 in the SuperDrive PowerMac is a new PowerPC 7450. The original G4 was a 7400, and there is a low-power (same speed and features, though) version of the 7400 called the 7410, which is what's in the new PowerBook. The new 7450 has two Altivec units instead of one, and has an on-chip L2 cache (256k) that runs full-speed, as well as an off-chip L3 cache (1MB), wheras previous G4's had only an off-chip 1MB L2 cache. Considering that the 500MHz G4 7400 has held its own for most tasks against PIII's at 1 GHz and the 1.5 GHz P4, the new 733MHz G4 7450 probably compares quite favorably to the Thunderbird. The new PowerMacs also have a 133MHz bus and RAM, very fast new PCI controller, new nVidia cards, etc.
Worth noting that the PIII 1 GHz requires about 45 watts, and the Athlon 1.2 and P4 1.5 require over 50. The G4 7410 needs 7 watts at 500Mhz and the 7450 needs 10 watts at 733MHz. That's why Apple doesn't have to put fans in their boxes. These are really nice CPU's... small, cool, low-power, and designed with tasks like encoding and encryption in mind. When you take the power and cooling requirements into consideration, you can see why Apple doesn't want to switch to x86 anytime soon, even if it were easy to do so.
Re:OK but the 'See Also' is the Real Keeper
on
Jobs Plays It Frank
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· Score: 3
No. Right now, Office exists for the Win32 API, and the Mac Toolbox API. The Mac Toolbox version will be replaced with the (very, very similar) Carbon API (Carbon as in carbon copy of the Mac Toolbox) version for Mac OS X.
Office on OS X was always a no-brainer. Some in the media have tried to make an issue out of it, but it's not. Microsoft make a TON of money off of Mac Office. If they killed a very profitable product, they would have to give a reason why, and if that reason was to drive people to Windows, that's not good for them, legally.
A couple of years ago, MS dropped their program of trying to convert Mac users, and since then, have created some really good software for the Mac. IE 5 for the Mac is head-and-shoulders above the Windows version. It's really good. Office 2001 is much-improved from 98 as well. The extra time they're taking on the OS X version should pay off in it being a really well-behaved OS X app that follows all the conventions.
I think you're wrong about there not being much demand for DVD making. For $20,000, you can get six high-end Macs and replace your gang of beta decks.
Thing is, the video is already digital, and you edit it digitally, so going real-time to analog stuff is very, very un-hip. Once you've encoded the data, it's just a matter of loading in blank DVD's, or go to an outside service for that... just give them a master DVD to duplicate. The DVD's last longer, are easier to store, and easier to FedEx to someone.
Everybody I've talked to in creative media wants one NOW. I already ordered one. Jobs is right about it enhancing the utility of the digital video stuff you already own. Digital camcorder and DVD player are now united by a SuperDrive Mac, no outside help required. No expertise even required if iDVD fits your needs. I'm sure DVD Studio Pro will be pretty easy for anyone who knows video or multimedia, as well.
> For your pleasure, we will offer Planet of the Apes
> Trailers in QuickTime while you wait.
That is just so funny. I laughed a lot at that.
Many Slashdot readers won't know that there were movie trailers in the Mac OS X Public Beta install. The other one was Charlie's Angels, I think.
Yes, get OS X out there. I hope they offer it as an optional preinstall in March. Get with it. I know five or six people putting off a regular Mac purchase, waiting for OS X. No wonder their sales are down. They fucked up. They fucked up big time.
At least it is really, really good (I've run Public Beta and a couple of Developer Previews before that).
Slashdot Mirror
> Give me a reason not to switch to OS X.
Right on, brother! This is exciting shit.
I switched from a PC to a Mac two years ago once the NeXTSTEP + Mac OS = Mac OS X thing was explained to me. In the meantime, I surprised myself by totally falling in love with Mac OS. It is just great except for the guts, and Mac OS X goes overboard in fixing that, as well as tightening up all kinds of little legacy things and adding new features.
This is a platform that's about to offer a $2500 full-featured notebook with 15.2" wide-screen, built-in 802.11 and antennaes, 1394, VGA out (for a second display or mirroring), TV out, Cardbus, IR, five-hour battery life, hot-swap batteries, slot-load DVD, Apache, Perl, iMovie, Mac OS X, Java2, BSD, Altivec. And the fucker is made out of titanium and is 1" thick! Damn right we better be excited. This is everything that Apple and NeXT ever promised and moreso. You can run Apache, Perl, Dreamweaver, and Photoshop side-by-side. Quake III already runs on Mac OS X and got the fastest frame rate ever at the recent Macworld SF on a G3/533 with an nVidia card (100+ frames per second). That's twice as many frames per second as the same machine can manage with Mac OS 9.
This is the notebook for the die-hard geek to code up his next embedded Linux set-top box or whatever. Run multiple installations of Linux in Virtual PC if you want to. Dual-boot with LinuxPPC if you want to. Very 21st century. And look, no Microsoft at all. None. Not a bit. Not a hint.
I'm one of the Mac-using media people you talk about. You're right that price is king, but Macs are cheaper than x86 PC's. Don't just do a CompUSA comparison of the hardware sticker-price, although Apple's notebooks, at least, will win that easily, and the desktops would surprise you if you added the comparable features to a PC. You have to evaluate what the machine will cost you over its lifetime, and what it will give you over its lifetime.
... it saves you money and makes your daily work easier. And they look cool and run Mac OS X. You can't beat that.
Support. There are almost zero IT costs related to Macs. Apple has an article on their site right now about a 150-user consulting firm that is a Mac-only shop and has only two IT guys, and they take care of the phone system, too. In many places, the "business people" use Windows PC's and the "creatives" use Macs, and the IT people only work on the PC's and the "creatives" take care of their own Macs (Microsoft gives this as the reason why their Mac apps are installed with a drag and drop of the folder from the CD to the hard disk, and their Windows apps have a complicated installer). If IT does support the Macs as well, they typically have a 10:1 Windows:Mac ratio on their support calls.
Productivity. The interface is better and makes users more productive, especially in media apps, which were all originally Mac-only and it shows. You only have to learn one set of key shortcuts and they work everywhere. You don't have to know or care about pathnames. You can move or rename apps and they keep working. You don't have to use filename extensions. You can mount drives formatted with HFS, FAT, UDF, and other formats. Mac OS 9 is more stable than any DOS-Windows version, and more stable than NT 4. It probably won't quite go head to head with Windows 2000, but Mac OS X does, easily (been using it for over a year and no crashes, and these are alphas and betas). These things really add up.
Hardware. Apple's hardware is high-quality, and components are optimized for each other and work well together. You can add RAM to any Mac in under a minute, because they all have easy-access doors, even the notebooks (the keyboard is a door). Their displays are all color-calibrated, and integrate with ColorSync in the OS. Towers have built-in gigabit Ethernet, and all other Macs have 10/100 built-in (for years now). All Macs have two built-in 802.11 wireless antennaes, and an internal slot for a $99 optional wireless networking card. They all have FireWire built-in (except for the low-end iMac, I believe). They all come with optical mouses and quality keyboards. The machines come with a bunch of stuff that you'd have to add yourself, otherwise.
Saving a few hundred bucks off the initial sticker price just doesn't help you in the long run. This is why Mac users are willing to pay a little extra. We don't pay much more, though. The $3499 G4 tower has a $995 CD/DVD-RW combo drive in it, as well as iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, iTools, DVD player, CD-RW burning built into the OS, internal antennaes, gigabit Ethernet, FireWire, an audio amplifier for external speakers, power and USB for the display through the video card, optical mouse, room for 1.5 GB RAM, room for two removable drives and four hard drives, four empty PCI slots, easy open case with the mobo on the door, nVidia graphics. That's an awful lot of features and capabilities right out of the box.
There are so many misconceptions about Apple, because all the other PC manufacturers are in bed with each other and not with Apple. It's worth actually checking into this stuff
> What I still don't understand is how Apple
> managed to turn NEXTSTEP (runs fine on my
> NeXTStation Turbo which is a 33Mhz 68040 with
> 32MB of RAM) into OSX (apparently only runs
> reasonably well on a XXXMhz PowerPC G4 with
> 128MB of RAM)?
Well, I can tell you how. The main thing is that there's a big difference between meeting the processing needs of a 1989 user and a 2001 user. People weren't playing MP3's in 1989, they weren't encoding DVD's, they weren't serving Web pages in the background. They also weren't running Microsoft's bloated apps. Also, the NeXTSTEP interface, while elegant and useful, did not do the kind of work that Aqua is doing with anti-aliasing and drop shadows. NeXTSTEP also didn't have the Carbon API in addition to Cocoa, and most of all, NeXTSTEP didn't run Mac OS 9 inside a simulated computer (not emulated, because the processor is real).
Requirements for Mac OS X Public Beta are any G3 or G4 equipped Mac (except the original PowerBook G3) and 128MB RAM. It runs quite well on any of these boxes, for a beta. More recent builds are flying in comparison to the Public Beta. The GUI, especially, has obviously been tuned quite a bit more (one Macworld writer said "this is the fastest GUI I've ever used, period.") This is Apple's OS for the next 10-15 years, according to Steve Jobs. Sure, they could tune it for machines that predate the iMac, but why do that when the original iMac is going to turn three in a few months? It will run on older machines just fine, but Apple are aiming the feature set at the machines they've been selling for the past three years, and the machines they will sell in the next three years.
> Compare [the iMac G3/233] with a PII/233 ... er, boxen.
> and you'll find [that the PC is] every bit equal
> to grandma's box
No, that's just plain not true.
A couple of years ago, I switched from a very nicely equipped IBM PII 300 box to a Power Mac G3 350 with similar specs, and the Mac runs circles around the PC. I immediately got more than twice as many tracks and effects going simultaneously in a multitrack audio program, as well as having much, much lower latency. It also just feels faster when you use it. I used to keep PC's for a year or 18 months, max, and then give them away, but this Mac is still my main machine after two years and I will still have have lots of jobs for it once my new machine arrives this month (a Power Mac with the CD/DVD-RW combo drive). The G3 still has room for 1 GB more RAM, and the CPU can be unplugged and replaced with a faster one if I want to.
There are a wide assortment of online RAM dealers who will sell you chips for a "Rev. A iMac". You don't need to worry about what part they are or whatever, just tell them what computer you have and how much RAM you want. One that I can think of off the top of my head is:
Trans International
Check some of the ads on Macintosh-related Web sites (you can find a bunch of them in Internet Explorer 5's default Favorites list) for more RAM dealers.
Since Steve Jobs return, Apple has moved to easy-access standard RAM on all of its machines. You have sort of an intermediate machine, though. It is a PowerBook from that era built into a case with a CRT, and that forced them to make some compromises as far as the placement of components. These days, even the notebooks can be RAM-upgraded in only a few seconds ... you just pop-up the keyboard.
> Not using a piece of software just because it is
> from Microsoft just shows ignorance. Use what
> works.
No, it's not ignorance. Software is not a one-time purchase. If this guy sets up MS-based streaming video, he's estabilishing a relationship with Microsoft. Even if the MS solution has more features or is cheaper, you have to consider whose promises you're attempting to believe. Microsoft also has no multimedia savvy. Windows Media is ugly stuff to people who know better. It's unfun, and live streaming video ought to be fun.
I would go with QuickTime, myself, for the following reasons:
highest quality available
free, open source server software that runs on Darwin, Linux, NT, and Mac OS X, with NO per-stream cost
easy authoring features that will enable you to put a Flash front-end, titles, or links into your streams
integration with video authoring software
a player that's popular, easy to use, and unclutterd by blinking ads
Apple owns a big piece of Akamai.
Also, you can get a Mac with DVD-R, FireWire, and gigabit ethernet built-in as your broadcaster, and make a DVD after the live event is over, as well as create a DVD-ROM of the raw data, all on the same machine (and all the software is included). The other machines you involve (usually one or two more) can be Linux or NT if you like. With the money you save by having no per-stream cost, the machines are basically free, anyway.
QuickTime is easily the best quality, and there's no price-per-stream. You can run the QuickTime Streaming Server on Mac OS X, Darwin, or Linux. QuickTime 5 also has some new buffering features that make so much sense, you won't believe that Real and MS don't have them.
Live Delivery
If you think of NeXT as Apple's research group, sort of like a Xerox PARC, the fact that Steve Jobs could come back, take over, and put ex-NeXT people in important positions makes more sense. The original NeXT computer started out as a project at Apple called "Big Mac". When Jobs left, he took the team and the project, which is why their was some talk of litigation. They did the majority of the work after that, don't get me wrong, but in a way, the Mac OS forked at that point, and the NeXT fork came back later to be reunited and fill in the gaps left by all the Pink/Copland/Gershwin bullshit that Apple had been trying to do in the early 1990's.
... leftover from the Newton 2.0 (not the 1.0 that people made jokes about, but the 2.0 version that still blows people's minds when Newton users show it to them). They have years of research from that. No point in rebuilding this stuff on Mac OS 9, though. Think about what Apple will be doing when they don't have a huge part of the company consumed with writing a new OS and also making their software run on both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X for the time being. They just built CD-burning into the Mac OS 9 Finder, for example, and they have to build it into the Mac OS X Finder as well. When the integration of NeXT and Apple is complete, they'll be more efficient and productive.
Not to dismiss NeXT and the actual products they shipped and the customers they served. Apple is just getting started with rolling this stuff out the door. They have a shit-load of technology under wraps that they are going to deploy once the Mac OS X era is underway. They own the best handwriting recognition in the world, for example
> I mean they made firewire years ago, and what
... huge. It's the standard method for moving digital video between devices, and is about to become the standard method for moving MIDI and digital audio, with Yamaha's mLAN, which uses FireWire. Every digital camcorder and VCR has FireWire. TiVo's and other set-top boxes have FireWire. All Macs have FireWire, except the bargain-basement iMac. The whole TV and movie industry is going digital, and they're doing it with FireWire and QuickTime. It's a tremendously successful technology.
> has it done since then?
FireWire is huge
> drag and drop isnt copy and paste
... please. No, you don't know it all.
You can drag and drop into a folder or onto the desktop to create a clipping. Then you can drag and drop that clipping into a million documents after that. Or, double-click the clipping and copy it to the clipboard and paste from there.
The combination of easy to hit menus that you can't overshoot, uniform key commands, and pervasive drag and drop is easy to use and becomes second nature. It's simplicity. It's Zen. You ought to try it before you criticize.
It's funny how a Linux guy would never stomach command-line tips from a Mac user, but Linux guys never hesitate to prounounce their own GUI theories to be much better than Apple's. A little humility
What is so hard about all this that you Unix guys can't get that the Mac user interface is designed from the ground up to use one mouse button? The menubar is at the top of the screen, and if you watch a Mac user work, you'll notice that they flick the mouse up to the File menu without looking, because the File menu never moves, and the hot area of the menu item extends to the top of the display, so you can't overshoot. You develop muscle memory. Same for the Edit menu. It's much faster to just go Edit > Copy than it is to right click, identify the option on the context menu, and target and click it.
... people who haven't used Mac OS don't get it, is all.
In addition, the keyboard shortcuts on the Mac are very uniform between apps, so many, many Mac users know the keyboard shortcuts for New, Save, Open, Close, Quit, Print, Cut, Copy, Paste, Select All, Find, Find Again. These all work in all applications, uniformly. In Mac OS X, Command+Q (Quit) quits the current app, and Command+Shift+Q logs you out of the system. You just hold down the right shift and do the same Command+Q you're used to when quitting an app and you logout. It's easy to remember this stuff.
The Mac also uses more drag and drop than Windows or most other systems. You can drag a selection of text and drop it into a folder and it appears there as a text clipping that you can drag into another document to paste it there. Another reason not to use a right-click context menu.
Context menus are superfluous on the Mac UI, and if you like them, then buy a $15 USB 2-button mouse with scroller and that works just fine, too. This is not a big deal
When I switched from Windows to Mac OS, I bought a 2-button mouse right away, then replaced it with a 1-button later when I realized I wasn't using the second button. You can press the single button with two or three fingers, and that feels much healthier for my hand.
Microsoft is a poor example to model your business on. Name one other company that has been successful using the Microsoft model, and then maybe Apple can model themselves after that company.
Windows 95 was also a rip-off of the NeXT interface, as well as the Mac interface. Windows has gotten more NeXT-ish as time goes on.
When I saw recently that Mac OS X now has a cool customizable toolbar API that works just like the toolbars in IE 5 for Macintosh, I thought Apple had ripped of Microsoft, but then a NeXT user informed me that these toolbars were in NeXTSTEP as well. Big surprise, I guess.
> At the time Apple was shopping around, I wanted
> them to buy Be. Now I realize that if they would
> have, there would probably be no more BeOS for
> me to use. They would have ruined the Be
> community.
> There already was no more NeXT, so nobody
> looses out on that one.
Apple has sold more copies of Mac OS X Server (formerly OpenStep) than Be has of BeOS. There is, and always has been, a good community of people around the NeXT technologies, even after Apple bought them. They are pretty much at a fever pitch right now, with the upcoming release of Mac OS X.
> Steve Jobs is back, and right now he is cool. Let's
> see where is is in one year.
Have you read Steve Jobs' resume? He coined the term "personal computer" when the company he founded shipped the very first one. He's not exactly a one-hit wonder.
You don't have to reverse-engineer Mac hardware when the core of the Mac OS is open source. When there are additionally six open source Linux distributions that run on that hardware. Just admit to yourself that Be got it wrong on that one. The more you mention it, the less standing Be has in the eyes of the people listening to you.
... it's called "Open Firmware".
Macs basically have the exact same hardware in them as Intel computers, except for the fact that they use a PowerPC CPU from Motorola or IBM, and have some additonal features like 802.11 wireless networking and antennae, IEEE 1394 (Apple calls it "FireWire") busses, and they use a DVI-3 connector (Apple calls it "Apple Display Connector") for digital video instead of the simpler and more common DVI-1. These things are all standard items. Even the firmware is open
It's interesting that you think Be is not dead now, but you think NeXT was dead in 1996. Be still has not matched NeXT's typical yearly revenue. There is a pretty good NeXT community ... many of the same individuals and companies that used and supported the technologies when they were owned by NeXT have continued to do so now that the technologies are owned by Apple. Mac OS X Server was released two years ago. Previously, that OS was called OpenStep, and before that, NeXTSTEP. It's a Unix with the same object-oriented API's Tim Berners-Lee used to create the World Wide Web, as well as a Mac compatibility environment that runs Mac OS 8.6 full-screen. It's going to be retired on March 24 along with Mac OS 9. Apple will have a single OS for both workstations and servers when they release Mac OS X.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that Be wanted $180 million or so, and Apple balked at that (they're worth less than half that today, after their IPO). Steve Jobs wanted $400 million for NeXT, but Gil Amelio thought that NeXT was worth it because they had a full-featured, mature, OS, third-party applications, customers, and leading people like Steve Jobs and Avi Tevanian. Be's OS was a beta that couldn't print, no multiuser, and had poor networking. Be had no incoming revenue at the time, and no customers.
Why do Be fans keep bringing this up? It's embarrassing to Be.
> Titanium is expensive.
Sorry, time for me to move on to a new thread with an Apple antagonist who has a clue.
> yes Apple has just now started shipping faster
... the PPC 7410 in the PowerBook G4 only uses 7 watts, and it gives desktop performance. The machines that preceded it were also faster than their competition, and had five hours battery life also (10 hours with both battery bays filled).
> mobile processors. How long until they are way
> behind again?
Have you ever shopped for a notebook?
Apple has always had the fastest notebooks and the longest-battery life. Intel cripples their 40 watt chips to make slow 15 watt chips that run at half speed on batteries, AMD doesn't have a mobile offering, and Transmeta is having a troubled time of it, to say the least. All that work that Transmeta has done with emulation and code morphing is solely to create an x86 chip that uses 3-5 watts
On the iBook side, try and find another notebook with six hour battery life and a $1499 price tag (including office suite, FireWire, movie editing software, and DVD drive).
> I believe that platform has been at 500Mhz for the
> entire year of 2000.
The G4 chip was stuck at 500MHz, but in mid-2000, Apple started to put two in each machine. A dual 500MHz Mac is as fast as a 1GHz PC for most tasks, and much faster for some tasks, like encoding video.
Do you have any idea how stupid you sound? Do you get how big the Mac platform is? Most of the art and music and movies you enjoy daily are made by people who use Macs. Something like 25 million users. Apple has 4 billion dollars in the bank, and this is their first unprofitable quarter in over three years. Compaq has had three or four unprofitable quarters since then.
... you just sound like an idiot. You are saying that the sky is green.
I mean
You don't have to register it, and there are no serial numbers. You start the box, answer a few questions that are used to create an account for you, supply your Internet settings (or create a new Earthlink account if you don't have an ISP already) and start using it.
Mac OS X will be included with every mac, including the $799 iMac, so it's not exactly expensive. Windows 2000 is $200 or $300 by itself. It's not free like Linux, but not everybody has the time to dedicate to Linux, or can get their work done with Linux applications.
The 733MHz G4 in the SuperDrive PowerMac is a new PowerPC 7450. The original G4 was a 7400, and there is a low-power (same speed and features, though) version of the 7400 called the 7410, which is what's in the new PowerBook. The new 7450 has two Altivec units instead of one, and has an on-chip L2 cache (256k) that runs full-speed, as well as an off-chip L3 cache (1MB), wheras previous G4's had only an off-chip 1MB L2 cache. Considering that the 500MHz G4 7400 has held its own for most tasks against PIII's at 1 GHz and the 1.5 GHz P4, the new 733MHz G4 7450 probably compares quite favorably to the Thunderbird. The new PowerMacs also have a 133MHz bus and RAM, very fast new PCI controller, new nVidia cards, etc.
... small, cool, low-power, and designed with tasks like encoding and encryption in mind. When you take the power and cooling requirements into consideration, you can see why Apple doesn't want to switch to x86 anytime soon, even if it were easy to do so.
Worth noting that the PIII 1 GHz requires about 45 watts, and the Athlon 1.2 and P4 1.5 require over 50. The G4 7410 needs 7 watts at 500Mhz and the 7450 needs 10 watts at 733MHz. That's why Apple doesn't have to put fans in their boxes. These are really nice CPU's
No. Right now, Office exists for the Win32 API, and the Mac Toolbox API. The Mac Toolbox version will be replaced with the (very, very similar) Carbon API (Carbon as in carbon copy of the Mac Toolbox) version for Mac OS X.
Office on OS X was always a no-brainer. Some in the media have tried to make an issue out of it, but it's not. Microsoft make a TON of money off of Mac Office. If they killed a very profitable product, they would have to give a reason why, and if that reason was to drive people to Windows, that's not good for them, legally.
A couple of years ago, MS dropped their program of trying to convert Mac users, and since then, have created some really good software for the Mac. IE 5 for the Mac is head-and-shoulders above the Windows version. It's really good. Office 2001 is much-improved from 98 as well. The extra time they're taking on the OS X version should pay off in it being a really well-behaved OS X app that follows all the conventions.
I think you're wrong about there not being much demand for DVD making. For $20,000, you can get six high-end Macs and replace your gang of beta decks.
... just give them a master DVD to duplicate. The DVD's last longer, are easier to store, and easier to FedEx to someone.
Thing is, the video is already digital, and you edit it digitally, so going real-time to analog stuff is very, very un-hip. Once you've encoded the data, it's just a matter of loading in blank DVD's, or go to an outside service for that
Everybody I've talked to in creative media wants one NOW. I already ordered one. Jobs is right about it enhancing the utility of the digital video stuff you already own. Digital camcorder and DVD player are now united by a SuperDrive Mac, no outside help required. No expertise even required if iDVD fits your needs. I'm sure DVD Studio Pro will be pretty easy for anyone who knows video or multimedia, as well.
> For your pleasure, we will offer Planet of the Apes
> Trailers in QuickTime while you wait.
That is just so funny. I laughed a lot at that.
Many Slashdot readers won't know that there were movie trailers in the Mac OS X Public Beta install. The other one was Charlie's Angels, I think.
Yes, get OS X out there. I hope they offer it as an optional preinstall in March. Get with it. I know five or six people putting off a regular Mac purchase, waiting for OS X. No wonder their sales are down. They fucked up. They fucked up big time.
At least it is really, really good (I've run Public Beta and a couple of Developer Previews before that).