$99 for the latest "stable" release (currently OS 9)
$30 for the latest "bleeding edge" release (currently Mac OS X Public Beta)
$30 is just high enough to deter people who aren't serious about installing it. You've got to make a $30 commitment. You can also get it for free, preinstalled along with Mac OS 9 on a new G4 Mac.
Look at the apps that are already running natively on Mac OS X (add iMovie, AppleWorks, and SoundJam to the above list). Stone Design is also offering free betas of all of their (Cocoa) apps until January. These are amazing tools. A lot of people will be quite productive with this $30 version of Mac OS X, even without using Classic.
> Oh, how I pine for the day when a NEW
> ULTRA-COOL GOTTA HAVE IT product
> meant _more_ than a new color.
This attitude is the mirror image to people who called the last PowerBook rev disappointing solely because it used the same casing as the one before it. They ignored the fact that the rev added FireWire, AirPort, more RAM, faster CPU, and a bigger hard drive.
The new iBooks have new colors, but also gained FireWire, a video out for presentations, twice as much video RAM, faster CPU, bigger hard drive, and a slightly modified keyboard. And they're $100 cheaper, too. What's to complain about?
For $1899, Apple will sell you a six-hour notebook with FireWire and iMovie 2.0, an AirPort card, and an AirPort base station that will serve at least 10 users and your grandmother could set it up. That's pretty amazing stuff. There isn't actually a competitive product out there except for the PowerBook. Nobody else is putting antennae into computers, and nobody else is doing six-hour battery life.
> What I'm curious is how you determine the "right"
> amount of base memory is to begin with.
You look at how much RAM Gateway, Dell, Compaq, and IBM are shipping in their products that compete with yours, and you put that much in, too, and try to have a competitive price point. Right now, this is 64MB on the base models, and 128MB on the higher-end models. RAM is an after-market "hidden cost" in the whole industry, and everybody's happy because it keeps the cost of it out of their price points.
Also, if Circuit City knows they can sell a 64MB chip to almost everybody who buys a computer with 64MB in it, they will push a Compaq with 64MB over a Mac with 128MB so that they can get the RAM sale. They are not happy to sell you just a box with a Mac in it and that's that.
Apple's machines can all take huge amounts of RAM compared to many of their Wintel counterparts, and every model has a door of some sort that the user can just open up and easily slot in more RAM without needing any tools or know-how, or paying somebody to do it. In addition, it's easy to shop for RAM for your Mac because there are many dealers that only ask you to pick the model of Mac that you have from a short list and then they send you the right chip, without charging the kind of premium that you pay a system vendor such as Apple or Dell. Apple is already going above and beyond the call with RAM, in my opinion.
Also, as somebody who once paid $1200 to put 16MB of RAM into a brand new 386/33 (and I am not an old man), I just don't balk at paying $250 to get a 256MB DIMM along with a new computer. Big deal.
Look into it a little further... the buttons all display glyphs when you mouseover any one of them, even if they are on a background window. The glyphs are plainer than Mac OS 9's or Windows' glyphs. If it takes you longer than three minutes to figure out how to use the window controls you have problems that Apple just can't fix.
To a userbase that knows the Web, the shape and mouseover glyphs make them very obviously buttons, whereas the glyphs on Mac OS 9 are sometimes not understood to be controls by first-time users. Personally, I'd like to see them put close on its own side of the window, like in Mac OS 9, but I have no problem with the look or action of the buttons.
The Classic environment has to fool older applications into thinking that they're accessing a typical Mac running Mac OS 9. When the computer is not doing anything else anyway, Classic.app is going to steal CPU cycles so that it can respond in timely fashion to the demands of all the apps that could potentially be running within it.
It's like the Shockwave player... it wants all the unused CPU cycles even when it's not doing anything, because it wants to be able to respond instantly to the demands of the presentations it runs.
The Mac OS X desktop looks reminiscent of the NeXT browser, and it definitely is NeXT-like in some ways, but the "Finder" in Mac OS X is a port of the "Finder" in Mac OS 9 (it's Carbon, in fact). It still feels like a Mac in many ways.
You can view folders in three ways: icons and list from Mac OS 9 (view as buttons is gone), and columns from NeXT. The columns feature is enhanced in that when you get to the file level (imagine clicking folder, folder, file as you go left to right) you get the contents of the file in the next pane. If it's a movie of any kind, it will appear with transport controls. If it's an image you see the image, etc. This is through QuickTime, so the movie could be QuickTime, AVI, MPEG, DV, Flash, animated GIF, etc. Images could be PDF, GIF, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, PICT, Targa, etc. Audio can be anything from AU to MP3, including 24-bit versions of AIFF used by us pro audio guys (supported already by QT 4 on Mac OS 9). The user can pretty much forget that there are different formats and just play with images, movies, and sounds.
StuffIt Expander on Mac OS 9 has an option where you make archives act like folders, so this will probably end up being used in the column view in Mac OS X, so that you can navigate to an archive and a list of the contents will appear in the next pane, ready to be dragged out or launched, at which point they will be decompressed.
You can also set your preferred icon size for each view, just like Mac OS 9, although you have more choices (16x16, 32x32, and then a sliding scale up to 128x128).
I love the Classic Mac OS user interface, but I think the Mac OS X interface tops it slightly, although in DP4, it was still less responsive than Mac OS 9. Not necessarily slower, just less responsive. Kind of like the way milliseconds can make a difference to a Quake player. Also, the Finder sounds are not there in DP4, and that makes a big difference (non-Mac users wouldn't think it does, but the sounds provide all kinds of useful feedback as you drag and drop that make you feel like you're picking up and putting down real items).
> software vendors need to make OS X native
> applications that take advantage of certain features.
There are a lot of native apps shipping with Mac OS X, including iMovie and AppleWorks that ship with most Macs, and are cheap to add ($49 and $99 respectively) if you didn't get them bundled. We've already seen demos of native Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Maya, Quake III, and more, as well. Even without native apps, Mac OS X runs most Classic apps better than Mac OS 9 as well... apps all think they have 1GB of RAM instead of being stuck with whatever the user allotted to them under Mac OS 9. Apple says that Classic apps don't benefit from Mac OS X's new features, but Classic.app itself (which simulates -- not emulates -- a Mac OS 9 machine) is a Mac OS X application, with access to Mac OS X's virtual memory, dual processors, etc.
> And then users have to wait for it to become stable.
I don't think this is really an issue. The final release of Mac OS X follows Mac OS X Server 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2, and Mac OS X DP1 through DP4, not to mention OpenStep and NeXTSTEP. The plumbing is good. The BSD and Mach stuff is mature. I would venture to say that the beta version will be more stable than Mac OS 9 for many users. In spite of the fact that it's a Unix, remember that Mac OS X will compete for most of its users with Windows ME, not Solaris or Windows 2000. There are a lot of former NeXTSTEP folks who have been running Mac OS X as their full-time OS since DP2 or DP3 (six months to a year).
> Nice selection of apps, although it has a bastard
> child of IE, but oh well, nothing's perfect.
Actually, Macintosh IE has a completely separate codebase from the Windows version, and has the most standards-compliant rendering of any shipping browser. It doesn't have VBScript, and includes a very standard JavaScript implementation, as well as full CSS 1 and some of 2. It was completely rewritten from the much poorer 4.0 version. It is actually pretty great. Mac IE 5 is basically Apple's browser, built under contract by Microsoft. Since Apple and MS did their famous deal a few years ago, MS has completely changed their Mac offerings from "Windows Lite" to full-on, quality Mac apps, and Mac Office 2001 certainly reflects this also. It's as though Apple is making the spec sheets, or at least contributing. IE 5 even looks like Mac OS X when you run it on Mac OS 9... translucent effects and 128x128 preview icons added to images you drag out of the browser (although you can only see them full size when you look at the file under Mac OS X).
And if you don't like IE on Mac OS X, you just have to drag the IE program file (it's actually a "bundle", but it looks like a file to the user) to the trash and it's gone.
OmniWeb looks like it will get quite a bit of use from Mac users as well. It's a Cocoa browser that really renders beautifully, with all the text fully anti-aliased. Running in Aqua, it looks like one of those no-jaggie browser mock-ups that you'll often see an actor "using" in the movies. Quite stunning.
Microsoft already announced that there will be two releases of Mac Office 2001: one Classic, one Cocoa. The Classic one is due any minute now, and the Cocoa one is due by mid-2001. The Classic one will run on Mac OS 8+ (including X), and the Cocoa one will be Mac OS X only.
Basically, they're doing a final release for the Classic OS, and then turning the page fully into Mac OS X, rather than taking the transitional approach offered by Carbon. MS has the coders, and ships enough units of Mac Office to make this practical. Building UI in Cocoa is very fast, and that's probably the bulk of what they'll have to do to do a true Cocoa port.
Still, the Cocoa version won't run on BSD or anything, unless Apple makes a Cocoa runtime available for other Unix flavors, like they used to do for Windows, or unless GnuStep can handle it.
There are still a lot of innovative apps that are Mac-only. For audio types, MetaSynth and Pluggo are two that come to mind immediately. Pro Tools is also light years ahead on the Mac compared to the Windows version.
Also, in this Internet age, I would consider BSD Unix networking and security to be a "killer app" when it comes in a CONSUMER OS. Mac OS X is in direct competition with Windows ME most of the time, not Windows 2000. Mac OS X doesn't have all the MS viruses or virus-like program features (same as Mac OS 9), plus it has a secure login, and Apache for a personal server. I have lots of Windows-using friends who are shell-shocked by all these viruses and black-hat hacker alerts. They feel like they have no privacy within their computers, and they're almost right. Having your computer hooked up to the outside world 24x7 demands something better than what MS is offering consumers.
Also: iMovie. I watched an almost completely computer-illiterate person pick up a digital camcorder for the first time, shoot twenty minutes of footage, plug a FireWire cable between the camera and a PowerBook, run iMovie, and emerge one hour later with a very enjoyable five minute QuickTime movie that they edited, added sound, titles, and transitions to, and had already put on the Web using HomePage (part of Apple's free iTools). I mean, in two hours, he went from nothing to having a really good five minute streaming video on the Web! With effects, and nice cuts between scenes. And they give that app away free with desktop Macs, and sell it for $49 otherwise. It's pretty incredible. Mac OS X also has a complete HTML editor called "HTMLEdit". Between the Unix features, Apache, HTMLEdit, QuickTime Pro, iMovie and iTools, Mac OS X is a great machine for the amateur Web designer even if you don't add any more apps.
Sometime in the next year or 18 months, broadband will explode and the Web is going to get a lot more video on it. It's nice that the average Joe can express him or herself that way with software like this, rather than the Web just turning into one-way TV at some point.
It's standard practice in the computer industry to ship your boxes RAM-hungry, so that your overall price seems lower, and the reseller can sell another RAM chip to the buyer and make a little more profit from the sale (in other words, Apple doesn't get a cut of the after-market RAM, the reseller gets the whole profit from it). Very, very few people buy a Mac with 64MB and leave it that way, so people are not going to be left out in the cold wholesale. All of the Mac users that I know have at least 160 or 192 installed (32 or 64 standard plus a 128MB DIMM added on). I have 192 in my iBook and 320 in my PowerMac.
Besides, if they do need to add more RAM, it's a matter of choosing your Mac model at an online RAM dealer like transintl.com and then opening a door on your Mac and plugging in the DIMM. iMacs have a special RAM access door, the keyboards on PowerBooks and iBooks are also pop-up doors that expose the RAM slots, Cubes come out of their shell and the whole mobo comes out when you open the door on PowerMacs. Adding more RAM takes only a few minutes on any model. You certainly don't need to pay Circuit City to install a chip or anything like that.
> The problem is not that I don't have 128M... the
> problem is that I don't think any OS should require
> that much.
That's pretty arbitrary, like saying "nobody will ever need more than 640k of RAM". Maybe a better example is that in 1984, almost everybody thought that the GUI was a ridiculous waste of computer power. Mac OS X does a lot of work for the user that other systems aren't doing, like keeping track of a ton of meta-information so that the user doesn't have to wonder what can be dragged onto what, or what app can open what document. It also has to run a simulator that makes Classic Mac OS apps think they're running on Mac OS 9. It has all kinds of built-in services like spell checking, graphic format translation, and icon previews that any app can access, so apps themselves will need less RAM to do the same job. Read the feature list... this stuff doesn't come for free.
It may be that AirPort is actually supported, but they say "no AirPort" because the whole AirPort software package with its wizard and software base station may not be up and running yet. I'll be surprised if the slightly technical user can't manually get it working.
Actually, the iBook definitely doesn't have a fan, and it runs very quietly. When the hard drive spins down, it is silent. I've heard that the PowerBook does have a small fan, but my wife has a new one and when the hard drive spins down, it is also completely silent. I certainly didn't see any fan when I put in the AirPort card and RAM.
Fans are definitely the loudest part of a computer, though. I do notice the difference when I use a PowerMac as opposed to an iBook, even though the PowerMac has a much quieter fan than the IBM PC I used to use (which actually had two fans).
IBM makes copper G3's and G4's, as well as their Power4 series of PowerPC-based chips.
The PPC market is pretty big, actually. PPC chips are in cameras, set-top boxes, the new Nintendo Game Cube, and lots of other things. Anything where power is an issue, because these chips all use a fraction of the power (and generate a fraction of the heat) of the other chips they're compared to (that's why the iBook gets 5-6 hours of battery life).
I bet there are two or three PowerPC chips in your home right now, but you just don't know it.
> I guess I was overzealous in my attack on
> Apple. Hehe.
It's even worse. With the Mac, you also got:
Gigabit Ethernet
FireWire
two separate USB busses
iMovie 2.0
an optical mouse
ColorSync (and Photoshop plug-ins)
Altivec (and Photoshop plug-ins)
AppleScript
space for up to 2GB of RAM
an easy open case for when you add more RAM, or another hard drive (you still have space for two more).
Not to mention that Type 1 font support and the ability to open almost any image type are built into Mac OS.
People who don't need or want that stuff (most Slashdotters) are happy with a generic PC, and think Macs are expensive by comparison, but if those "extras" make an artist or musician twice as productive, or enable a beginner to do DV editing instead of not, then a Mac doesn't seem expensive anymore.
When he talks about software and hardware integration, he's not talking about dongles. When you push the setup button on an Apple display, for example, you get the Mac OS Monitors Control Panel, customized for that display, including ColorSync, and an assistant that helps you to calibrate your display correctly. If you use that same Apple display with a PC, the setup button brings up a simple on-screen display from the display itself. You don't have access to ColorSync or anything. That kind of thing is a feature that people pay Apple the extra money for. Take that stuff away and you might as well run Windows, because the experience will be similar.
Digidesign is similar to Apple in this way. Rather than offer separate audio hardware and software, Pro Tools is an all-in-one thing. They take the current PowerMac and they add both hardware and software and turn it into a world-class digital audio workstation. They do the same for one particular high-end model of IBM PC running Windows NT. They don't support installing their stuff onto a generic PC because the increase in variables destroys their ability to add value. If you're going to have to troubleshoot glitches, you might as well just run the cheapest box and Windows and Cubase (nothing against Cubase, which I also use).
Both of these companies serve markets that are willing to pay a little more for somebody to go the extra mile. That is not the x86 PC market.
Adobe is like the second or third biggest software maker in the world. Everybody competes with them on something. They sell a billion dollars worth of Mac software per year, though... they can stand a little competition from Apple in DV editing.
Apple bought Final Cut Pro from Macromedia, so the thing was going to come out from somebody at some point. It wasn't even like somebody at Apple started Final Cut Pro.
> I think it's a little presumptuous to assume that
> the success of Paypal in the US is any indicator of
> whether this is actually useful in the real world. By
> that, I mean, the entire world.
It's an American company... of course it offers its services first in the US alone. Do you know how many miserable laws stand between them and operating their business in YOUR country? Gimme a break. Should their home page just say "PayPal coming soon (pending regulatory approval and commencement of business in all 185 countries worldwide)."
If you have another company (perhaps a non-US one) in mind, then let us know about it. If you want to define the way this industry will work, then start your own micropayment company.
I've only lived in the US for a few years, and I can tell you, whining to Americans about the state of affairs in YOUR country is a waste of time. They don't care (and why should they). Go whine to your gov't representative. Nine times out of 10 you'll find that the people who are really holding things up are just down the street from you.
They may still have flavors, but the Seybold crowd is a pro crowd, and this was something for them. At the Paris show where they release the beta they may show off other colors.
Then again, there are about 15 different colors that Apple has used over the past couple of years, including a few different reds that were all called Strawberry. Maybe they gave this a shot and it was a mess. They stopped coloring the keyboards and mouses recently (they're all gray and clear now) so maybe that sort of goes together.
Not only are they feasible, but they are not that much different from Mac OS 9. The widgets are all the same size, the formatting of the resources is very similar. It shouldn't be too hard to port over all the Mac OS 9 themes (there are thousands and thousands). I read somewhere about somebody already using a Mac OS 9 theme file with Mac OS X and it worked, although it was buggy and looked like shit.
Once the dust settles, you'll see themes for sure.
When you mouseover ANY window control, whether it's the foreground window or a background window, glyphs appear in all three widgets. They are (in my opinion) easier-to-understand glyphs than the ones in Mac OS 9 (where all the widgets are gray as well, but only two have glyphs).
If these were buttons on a button bar, or some kind of control that the user only occassionally sees, then this might be a problem. As it is, people will learn the widgets in their first minute with the OS. The fact that they mouseover also shows that they are buttons... action items... not just a cute decoration.
A background window in Mac OS 9 loses its scrollbars and other visual clutter. This is just an extension of that.
IE for Macintosh is a Carbon application, so it will run on Mac OS 8, 9, and X only. Maybe you're confusing it with Office 2001, which will come in Classic versions for Mac OS 8 and 9, and a Cocoa version for Mac OS X.
MS really shocked a few folks with the Cocoa announcement, given Bill Gate's famous "develop for it? I'll piss on it" quote about NeXTSTEP, and the fact that Cocoa apps are decidedly cross-platform, and decidedly Unix. Apple has the tech to run Cocoa apps on NT if they want, but it's been end-of-lifed to keep MS happy.
DP4 could be installed on the same partition with Mac OS 9, but I never tried that. Don't know if there are issues or what.
If you do want to use a separate drive or partition, for older machines, you can use BootX to switch between Mac OS 9 and X, but if you have one of the following machines:
you just hold down the Option key while you boot the machine, and you'll get a special screen with an icon for each bootable drive the system can find. Just click on the drive you want to boot from and then click on the right-facing arrow. The icons for the drives will even have the icon of the OS.
If you don't have space for another internal drive and you have a FireWire port (any of the above machines except the iBook or the lowest-end iMac), you can get an IDE to FireWire case for about $80 and use almost any IDE drive in it and put Mac OS X on that. Or spring a little more cash for an already-assembled FireWire drive. I'm not sure if you can boot from USB yet, though.
There's an assumption in your post that Apple is in need of some help. Not sure why you think that.
Steve Jobs always says "the world doesn't need another Compaq" when somebody suggests splitting the software and hardware at Apple. The software company would compete directly with Microsoft and the hardware company would compete directly with Intel. That is not something the Apple shareholders are going to stand behind. It's only because Apple does both that they're still around at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Does it help Slashdotters to think of it as:
$30 is just high enough to deter people who aren't serious about installing it. You've got to make a $30 commitment. You can also get it for free, preinstalled along with Mac OS 9 on a new G4 Mac.
Look at the apps that are already running natively on Mac OS X (add iMovie, AppleWorks, and SoundJam to the above list). Stone Design is also offering free betas of all of their (Cocoa) apps until January. These are amazing tools. A lot of people will be quite productive with this $30 version of Mac OS X, even without using Classic.
> Oh, how I pine for the day when a NEW
> ULTRA-COOL GOTTA HAVE IT product
> meant _more_ than a new color.
This attitude is the mirror image to people who called the last PowerBook rev disappointing solely because it used the same casing as the one before it. They ignored the fact that the rev added FireWire, AirPort, more RAM, faster CPU, and a bigger hard drive.
The new iBooks have new colors, but also gained FireWire, a video out for presentations, twice as much video RAM, faster CPU, bigger hard drive, and a slightly modified keyboard. And they're $100 cheaper, too. What's to complain about?
For $1899, Apple will sell you a six-hour notebook with FireWire and iMovie 2.0, an AirPort card, and an AirPort base station that will serve at least 10 users and your grandmother could set it up. That's pretty amazing stuff. There isn't actually a competitive product out there except for the PowerBook. Nobody else is putting antennae into computers, and nobody else is doing six-hour battery life.
> What I'm curious is how you determine the "right"
> amount of base memory is to begin with.
You look at how much RAM Gateway, Dell, Compaq, and IBM are shipping in their products that compete with yours, and you put that much in, too, and try to have a competitive price point. Right now, this is 64MB on the base models, and 128MB on the higher-end models. RAM is an after-market "hidden cost" in the whole industry, and everybody's happy because it keeps the cost of it out of their price points.
Also, if Circuit City knows they can sell a 64MB chip to almost everybody who buys a computer with 64MB in it, they will push a Compaq with 64MB over a Mac with 128MB so that they can get the RAM sale. They are not happy to sell you just a box with a Mac in it and that's that.
Apple's machines can all take huge amounts of RAM compared to many of their Wintel counterparts, and every model has a door of some sort that the user can just open up and easily slot in more RAM without needing any tools or know-how, or paying somebody to do it. In addition, it's easy to shop for RAM for your Mac because there are many dealers that only ask you to pick the model of Mac that you have from a short list and then they send you the right chip, without charging the kind of premium that you pay a system vendor such as Apple or Dell. Apple is already going above and beyond the call with RAM, in my opinion.
Also, as somebody who once paid $1200 to put 16MB of RAM into a brand new 386/33 (and I am not an old man), I just don't balk at paying $250 to get a 256MB DIMM along with a new computer. Big deal.
Look into it a little further ... the buttons all display glyphs when you mouseover any one of them, even if they are on a background window. The glyphs are plainer than Mac OS 9's or Windows' glyphs. If it takes you longer than three minutes to figure out how to use the window controls you have problems that Apple just can't fix.
To a userbase that knows the Web, the shape and mouseover glyphs make them very obviously buttons, whereas the glyphs on Mac OS 9 are sometimes not understood to be controls by first-time users. Personally, I'd like to see them put close on its own side of the window, like in Mac OS 9, but I have no problem with the look or action of the buttons.
The Classic environment has to fool older applications into thinking that they're accessing a typical Mac running Mac OS 9. When the computer is not doing anything else anyway, Classic.app is going to steal CPU cycles so that it can respond in timely fashion to the demands of all the apps that could potentially be running within it.
... it wants all the unused CPU cycles even when it's not doing anything, because it wants to be able to respond instantly to the demands of the presentations it runs.
It's like the Shockwave player
The Mac OS X desktop looks reminiscent of the NeXT browser, and it definitely is NeXT-like in some ways, but the "Finder" in Mac OS X is a port of the "Finder" in Mac OS 9 (it's Carbon, in fact). It still feels like a Mac in many ways.
You can view folders in three ways: icons and list from Mac OS 9 (view as buttons is gone), and columns from NeXT. The columns feature is enhanced in that when you get to the file level (imagine clicking folder, folder, file as you go left to right) you get the contents of the file in the next pane. If it's a movie of any kind, it will appear with transport controls. If it's an image you see the image, etc. This is through QuickTime, so the movie could be QuickTime, AVI, MPEG, DV, Flash, animated GIF, etc. Images could be PDF, GIF, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, PICT, Targa, etc. Audio can be anything from AU to MP3, including 24-bit versions of AIFF used by us pro audio guys (supported already by QT 4 on Mac OS 9). The user can pretty much forget that there are different formats and just play with images, movies, and sounds.
StuffIt Expander on Mac OS 9 has an option where you make archives act like folders, so this will probably end up being used in the column view in Mac OS X, so that you can navigate to an archive and a list of the contents will appear in the next pane, ready to be dragged out or launched, at which point they will be decompressed.
You can also set your preferred icon size for each view, just like Mac OS 9, although you have more choices (16x16, 32x32, and then a sliding scale up to 128x128).
I love the Classic Mac OS user interface, but I think the Mac OS X interface tops it slightly, although in DP4, it was still less responsive than Mac OS 9. Not necessarily slower, just less responsive. Kind of like the way milliseconds can make a difference to a Quake player. Also, the Finder sounds are not there in DP4, and that makes a big difference (non-Mac users wouldn't think it does, but the sounds provide all kinds of useful feedback as you drag and drop that make you feel like you're picking up and putting down real items).
> software vendors need to make OS X native
... apps all think they have 1GB of RAM instead of being stuck with whatever the user allotted to them under Mac OS 9. Apple says that Classic apps don't benefit from Mac OS X's new features, but Classic.app itself (which simulates -- not emulates -- a Mac OS 9 machine) is a Mac OS X application, with access to Mac OS X's virtual memory, dual processors, etc.
> applications that take advantage of certain features.
There are a lot of native apps shipping with Mac OS X, including iMovie and AppleWorks that ship with most Macs, and are cheap to add ($49 and $99 respectively) if you didn't get them bundled. We've already seen demos of native Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Maya, Quake III, and more, as well. Even without native apps, Mac OS X runs most Classic apps better than Mac OS 9 as well
> And then users have to wait for it to become stable.
I don't think this is really an issue. The final release of Mac OS X follows Mac OS X Server 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2, and Mac OS X DP1 through DP4, not to mention OpenStep and NeXTSTEP. The plumbing is good. The BSD and Mach stuff is mature. I would venture to say that the beta version will be more stable than Mac OS 9 for many users. In spite of the fact that it's a Unix, remember that Mac OS X will compete for most of its users with Windows ME, not Solaris or Windows 2000. There are a lot of former NeXTSTEP folks who have been running Mac OS X as their full-time OS since DP2 or DP3 (six months to a year).
> Nice selection of apps, although it has a bastard
... translucent effects and 128x128 preview icons added to images you drag out of the browser (although you can only see them full size when you look at the file under Mac OS X).
> child of IE, but oh well, nothing's perfect.
Actually, Macintosh IE has a completely separate codebase from the Windows version, and has the most standards-compliant rendering of any shipping browser. It doesn't have VBScript, and includes a very standard JavaScript implementation, as well as full CSS 1 and some of 2. It was completely rewritten from the much poorer 4.0 version. It is actually pretty great. Mac IE 5 is basically Apple's browser, built under contract by Microsoft. Since Apple and MS did their famous deal a few years ago, MS has completely changed their Mac offerings from "Windows Lite" to full-on, quality Mac apps, and Mac Office 2001 certainly reflects this also. It's as though Apple is making the spec sheets, or at least contributing. IE 5 even looks like Mac OS X when you run it on Mac OS 9
And if you don't like IE on Mac OS X, you just have to drag the IE program file (it's actually a "bundle", but it looks like a file to the user) to the trash and it's gone.
OmniWeb looks like it will get quite a bit of use from Mac users as well. It's a Cocoa browser that really renders beautifully, with all the text fully anti-aliased. Running in Aqua, it looks like one of those no-jaggie browser mock-ups that you'll often see an actor "using" in the movies. Quite stunning.
Microsoft already announced that there will be two releases of Mac Office 2001: one Classic, one Cocoa. The Classic one is due any minute now, and the Cocoa one is due by mid-2001. The Classic one will run on Mac OS 8+ (including X), and the Cocoa one will be Mac OS X only.
Basically, they're doing a final release for the Classic OS, and then turning the page fully into Mac OS X, rather than taking the transitional approach offered by Carbon. MS has the coders, and ships enough units of Mac Office to make this practical. Building UI in Cocoa is very fast, and that's probably the bulk of what they'll have to do to do a true Cocoa port.
Still, the Cocoa version won't run on BSD or anything, unless Apple makes a Cocoa runtime available for other Unix flavors, like they used to do for Windows, or unless GnuStep can handle it.
There are still a lot of innovative apps that are Mac-only. For audio types, MetaSynth and Pluggo are two that come to mind immediately. Pro Tools is also light years ahead on the Mac compared to the Windows version.
Also, in this Internet age, I would consider BSD Unix networking and security to be a "killer app" when it comes in a CONSUMER OS. Mac OS X is in direct competition with Windows ME most of the time, not Windows 2000. Mac OS X doesn't have all the MS viruses or virus-like program features (same as Mac OS 9), plus it has a secure login, and Apache for a personal server. I have lots of Windows-using friends who are shell-shocked by all these viruses and black-hat hacker alerts. They feel like they have no privacy within their computers, and they're almost right. Having your computer hooked up to the outside world 24x7 demands something better than what MS is offering consumers.
Also: iMovie. I watched an almost completely computer-illiterate person pick up a digital camcorder for the first time, shoot twenty minutes of footage, plug a FireWire cable between the camera and a PowerBook, run iMovie, and emerge one hour later with a very enjoyable five minute QuickTime movie that they edited, added sound, titles, and transitions to, and had already put on the Web using HomePage (part of Apple's free iTools). I mean, in two hours, he went from nothing to having a really good five minute streaming video on the Web! With effects, and nice cuts between scenes. And they give that app away free with desktop Macs, and sell it for $49 otherwise. It's pretty incredible. Mac OS X also has a complete HTML editor called "HTMLEdit". Between the Unix features, Apache, HTMLEdit, QuickTime Pro, iMovie and iTools, Mac OS X is a great machine for the amateur Web designer even if you don't add any more apps.
Sometime in the next year or 18 months, broadband will explode and the Web is going to get a lot more video on it. It's nice that the average Joe can express him or herself that way with software like this, rather than the Web just turning into one-way TV at some point.
It's standard practice in the computer industry to ship your boxes RAM-hungry, so that your overall price seems lower, and the reseller can sell another RAM chip to the buyer and make a little more profit from the sale (in other words, Apple doesn't get a cut of the after-market RAM, the reseller gets the whole profit from it). Very, very few people buy a Mac with 64MB and leave it that way, so people are not going to be left out in the cold wholesale. All of the Mac users that I know have at least 160 or 192 installed (32 or 64 standard plus a 128MB DIMM added on). I have 192 in my iBook and 320 in my PowerMac.
... this stuff doesn't come for free.
Besides, if they do need to add more RAM, it's a matter of choosing your Mac model at an online RAM dealer like transintl.com and then opening a door on your Mac and plugging in the DIMM. iMacs have a special RAM access door, the keyboards on PowerBooks and iBooks are also pop-up doors that expose the RAM slots, Cubes come out of their shell and the whole mobo comes out when you open the door on PowerMacs. Adding more RAM takes only a few minutes on any model. You certainly don't need to pay Circuit City to install a chip or anything like that.
> The problem is not that I don't have 128M... the
> problem is that I don't think any OS should require
> that much.
That's pretty arbitrary, like saying "nobody will ever need more than 640k of RAM". Maybe a better example is that in 1984, almost everybody thought that the GUI was a ridiculous waste of computer power. Mac OS X does a lot of work for the user that other systems aren't doing, like keeping track of a ton of meta-information so that the user doesn't have to wonder what can be dragged onto what, or what app can open what document. It also has to run a simulator that makes Classic Mac OS apps think they're running on Mac OS 9. It has all kinds of built-in services like spell checking, graphic format translation, and icon previews that any app can access, so apps themselves will need less RAM to do the same job. Read the feature list
It may be that AirPort is actually supported, but they say "no AirPort" because the whole AirPort software package with its wizard and software base station may not be up and running yet. I'll be surprised if the slightly technical user can't manually get it working.
Actually, the iBook definitely doesn't have a fan, and it runs very quietly. When the hard drive spins down, it is silent. I've heard that the PowerBook does have a small fan, but my wife has a new one and when the hard drive spins down, it is also completely silent. I certainly didn't see any fan when I put in the AirPort card and RAM.
Fans are definitely the loudest part of a computer, though. I do notice the difference when I use a PowerMac as opposed to an iBook, even though the PowerMac has a much quieter fan than the IBM PC I used to use (which actually had two fans).
IBM makes copper G3's and G4's, as well as their Power4 series of PowerPC-based chips.
The PPC market is pretty big, actually. PPC chips are in cameras, set-top boxes, the new Nintendo Game Cube, and lots of other things. Anything where power is an issue, because these chips all use a fraction of the power (and generate a fraction of the heat) of the other chips they're compared to (that's why the iBook gets 5-6 hours of battery life).
I bet there are two or three PowerPC chips in your home right now, but you just don't know it.
> I guess I was overzealous in my attack on
> Apple. Hehe.
It's even worse. With the Mac, you also got:
Gigabit Ethernet
FireWire
two separate USB busses
iMovie 2.0
an optical mouse
ColorSync (and Photoshop plug-ins)
Altivec (and Photoshop plug-ins)
AppleScript
space for up to 2GB of RAM
an easy open case for when you add more RAM, or another hard drive (you still have space for two more).
Not to mention that Type 1 font support and the ability to open almost any image type are built into Mac OS.
People who don't need or want that stuff (most Slashdotters) are happy with a generic PC, and think Macs are expensive by comparison, but if those "extras" make an artist or musician twice as productive, or enable a beginner to do DV editing instead of not, then a Mac doesn't seem expensive anymore.
When he talks about software and hardware integration, he's not talking about dongles. When you push the setup button on an Apple display, for example, you get the Mac OS Monitors Control Panel, customized for that display, including ColorSync, and an assistant that helps you to calibrate your display correctly. If you use that same Apple display with a PC, the setup button brings up a simple on-screen display from the display itself. You don't have access to ColorSync or anything. That kind of thing is a feature that people pay Apple the extra money for. Take that stuff away and you might as well run Windows, because the experience will be similar.
Digidesign is similar to Apple in this way. Rather than offer separate audio hardware and software, Pro Tools is an all-in-one thing. They take the current PowerMac and they add both hardware and software and turn it into a world-class digital audio workstation. They do the same for one particular high-end model of IBM PC running Windows NT. They don't support installing their stuff onto a generic PC because the increase in variables destroys their ability to add value. If you're going to have to troubleshoot glitches, you might as well just run the cheapest box and Windows and Cubase (nothing against Cubase, which I also use).
Both of these companies serve markets that are willing to pay a little more for somebody to go the extra mile. That is not the x86 PC market.
Adobe is like the second or third biggest software maker in the world. Everybody competes with them on something. They sell a billion dollars worth of Mac software per year, though ... they can stand a little competition from Apple in DV editing.
Apple bought Final Cut Pro from Macromedia, so the thing was going to come out from somebody at some point. It wasn't even like somebody at Apple started Final Cut Pro.
> I think it's a little presumptuous to assume that
... of course it offers its services first in the US alone. Do you know how many miserable laws stand between them and operating their business in YOUR country? Gimme a break. Should their home page just say "PayPal coming soon (pending regulatory approval and commencement of business in all 185 countries worldwide)."
> the success of Paypal in the US is any indicator of
> whether this is actually useful in the real world. By
> that, I mean, the entire world.
It's an American company
If you have another company (perhaps a non-US one) in mind, then let us know about it. If you want to define the way this industry will work, then start your own micropayment company.
I've only lived in the US for a few years, and I can tell you, whining to Americans about the state of affairs in YOUR country is a waste of time. They don't care (and why should they). Go whine to your gov't representative. Nine times out of 10 you'll find that the people who are really holding things up are just down the street from you.
> Why give grandma a OS X when you have to pay
> $400-$600 more than the equivalently priced
> Intel/AMD box with linux?
Because a Linux box will make your grandmother feel like an ignorant twit. She will stop using it after the third help-me call she makes to you.
$400-$600 is a ridiculous stretch, too, considering the cheapest iMac is $799 and comes with a $99 office suite and an optical mouse.
They may still have flavors, but the Seybold crowd is a pro crowd, and this was something for them. At the Paris show where they release the beta they may show off other colors.
Then again, there are about 15 different colors that Apple has used over the past couple of years, including a few different reds that were all called Strawberry. Maybe they gave this a shot and it was a mess. They stopped coloring the keyboards and mouses recently (they're all gray and clear now) so maybe that sort of goes together.
Not only are they feasible, but they are not that much different from Mac OS 9. The widgets are all the same size, the formatting of the resources is very similar. It shouldn't be too hard to port over all the Mac OS 9 themes (there are thousands and thousands). I read somewhere about somebody already using a Mac OS 9 theme file with Mac OS X and it worked, although it was buggy and looked like shit.
Once the dust settles, you'll see themes for sure.
When you mouseover ANY window control, whether it's the foreground window or a background window, glyphs appear in all three widgets. They are (in my opinion) easier-to-understand glyphs than the ones in Mac OS 9 (where all the widgets are gray as well, but only two have glyphs).
... action items ... not just a cute decoration.
If these were buttons on a button bar, or some kind of control that the user only occassionally sees, then this might be a problem. As it is, people will learn the widgets in their first minute with the OS. The fact that they mouseover also shows that they are buttons
A background window in Mac OS 9 loses its scrollbars and other visual clutter. This is just an extension of that.
IE for Macintosh is a Carbon application, so it will run on Mac OS 8, 9, and X only. Maybe you're confusing it with Office 2001, which will come in Classic versions for Mac OS 8 and 9, and a Cocoa version for Mac OS X.
MS really shocked a few folks with the Cocoa announcement, given Bill Gate's famous "develop for it? I'll piss on it" quote about NeXTSTEP, and the fact that Cocoa apps are decidedly cross-platform, and decidedly Unix. Apple has the tech to run Cocoa apps on NT if they want, but it's been end-of-lifed to keep MS happy.
DP4 could be installed on the same partition with Mac OS 9, but I never tried that. Don't know if there are issues or what.
If you do want to use a separate drive or partition, for older machines, you can use BootX to switch between Mac OS 9 and X, but if you have one of the following machines:
iBook
iMac (with slot-load drive)
PowerMac G4
PowerBook (FireWire)
you just hold down the Option key while you boot the machine, and you'll get a special screen with an icon for each bootable drive the system can find. Just click on the drive you want to boot from and then click on the right-facing arrow. The icons for the drives will even have the icon of the OS.
If you don't have space for another internal drive and you have a FireWire port (any of the above machines except the iBook or the lowest-end iMac), you can get an IDE to FireWire case for about $80 and use almost any IDE drive in it and put Mac OS X on that. Or spring a little more cash for an already-assembled FireWire drive. I'm not sure if you can boot from USB yet, though.
There's an assumption in your post that Apple is in need of some help. Not sure why you think that.
Steve Jobs always says "the world doesn't need another Compaq" when somebody suggests splitting the software and hardware at Apple. The software company would compete directly with Microsoft and the hardware company would compete directly with Intel. That is not something the Apple shareholders are going to stand behind. It's only because Apple does both that they're still around at all.