> Well, that is of course overlooking their > QuickTime 4.0 movie player! Incidentally > hailed as one of the worst designs for a > program by UI experts worldwide.
I recently wrote an introduction to streaming media clients article comparing the clients for the three leading architectures: RealMedia, QuickTime and Windows Media (in that order). I did some screenshots of all three and when you look at them together, you would really, really have to question any criticism of the QuickTime Player's look or interface. RealPlayer is so full of ads and other distractions I can barely pick out the streaming video. There are so many buttons it's hard to find "play". I agree that QuickTime Player's buttons and sliders aren't in the best places - other than the Play button right front and center - but the newer version in the Mac OS X screenshots seems to have completely fixed this.
You have to realize that QuickTime itself is a faceless technology, and the older QuickTime Player 3 was just sort of a demo app that ran in a regular window and didn't look like much of anything. The 4 player needed to stick out because it competes in streaming media with RealPlayer now. It shocked a lot of Mac users going from no interface to a really distinctive interface, but the look literally gives it a face to market itself. Besides, it's not an application so much as a widget... a software TV. It's pleasant to watch video in it, much more so than the other players. The fact that you can hide a lot of the interface is nice when you're watching something long.
> the current MacOS GUI, which has no > funcitonal equivalent of the Task Bar.
If you drag the Application Menu off of the menubar, it becomes a floating icon bar with an icon for each running app. You can click or Shift-click or Option-click the little button on it to orient it vertically or horizontally, or change the icon size. Of course, you can place it anywhere you want on the screen and it stays on top.
If there's one criticism of Apple you will hear over and over again from long-time users, it's that they don't advertise their technology enough, and I guess that's why you think they don't have any. For Apple, it's about what you can do with the tool, not telling you how the tool works, but users still wish they'd do a little "for geeks only" marketing as well, to balance things out. IT departments are buying Windows machines for their desktop publishing and Web development people because they think there isn't a difference in the actual technologies involved. That may change after OS X ships if they do more enterprise stuff.
> gay iMacs
I guess you mean this as a criticism. I'm not sure what it is about an iMac that threatens some people, but it's allowed a lot of people to turn a little unused corner of their living space into an attractive little computer nook and discover the Internet, or play a game, or make a party invitation or something. What's wrong with that? A friend of mine has struggled with three successive Windows PC's on a big desk that takes up a lot of space in his little bachelor apartment. He replaced the huge desk and all the wires with an iMac on a little desk and now he's stopped calling me with questions about how to use his computer, and he's turning out better schoolwork and started making Web pages. He couldn't be happier. Not everybody is a computer hobbyist or a Linux geek. Not everybody is happy to have part of their living space look like their cubicle at work.
The MacAlly mouses are excellent, too, and much cheaper if that's what you're looking for. Two buttons plus a scroller/button, snap on accents to match them to your display/keyboard, and they're very high resolution, so you can use them on a big hi-res display without picking them up all the time. The Control Panel is really excellent, too. They're $24 at Outpost.
>Also, Macs can't have the colon (:) in a > filename. So URLs as filenames look like: > http-//www.dartmouth.edu > > which is dumb.
It's sort of a weird criticism considering the colon is the ONLY character you can't have in a filename on a Mac. The same filename under Windows wouldn't have the colon or the slashes, either.
If you look at the title bars in the Mac OS X screenshots they released, you see slashes in file names, like/~sjobs/ so the colons for pathnames seems like it's history.
> All this chrome (transparancy > etc.) eats CPU power
That's what people used to say about GUIs themselves. They couldn't believe that you'd use the CPU to draw bitmaps on the screen.
Really, if you look into Quartz, you see that transparency and graphic tricks are trivial in Mac OS X... things that are on the display are treated more like vectors than bitmaps, so resizing or altering the transparency of an object is easy. It's like resizing bitmap fonts vs TrueType fonts. Once you add TrueType fonts to an OS, why wouldn't you let the user resize the fonts under icons or in the menus? It's not like a current OS being burdened with more chrome, it's an entirely new way or working graphics at the system level.
The Web (UNIX Internet and a GUI developed on NeXT) brought computing to the masses, not Microsoft. Bill Gates wrote "The Road Ahead" in 1995 and mentioned the Internet once. He had a whole chapter about the coming CD-ROM era, though.
Still, more than half the people in America don't use a computer. I have lots of friends who sit down at Windows machines and can't make them work. They have uncountable problems. The sound card stops working, documents suddenly have a different icon and open with a different application, they can't get on the Web all of a sudden. It's a nightmare for "the masses". They only buy it because that's all there is in the commodity market... all the major vendors except Apple stopped bothering. That's why a lot of people are more interested in things that circumvent that dead market: set-top boxes, PDA's, etc.
If not for Microsoft, maybe we'd be accessing the Web on Macs, Amigas, Ataris, etc. which would be more reliable, easier to use, and ironically, make sharing information easier because many platforms would have to stick to standards like HTML in order to survive in a multi-platform world. Who knows what benefits competition over the last few years would have brought?
> Now you name one from apple (not any of > the Xerox stuff please)
You're joking right? Apple gave shares to Xerox for the PARC research. PARC's GUI was very basic and they built on that extensively.
Apple invented pull-down menus, for chrissake (and File Edit View). The Xerox stuff had context menus under the mouse.
And the Start button is a bad ripoff of the Apple menu. Amazingly bad, in fact. In the Apple menu, clicking on a folder instead of an application opens that folder. Objects are still objects, even in the menu.
>> realtime spell checking (wiggly red lines >> in word)
> Err... no? "Thunder" on the Atari ST had > that WAY before MS.
WordPerfect 3 for Macintosh has this feature, too. It's ancient.
MS "innovation" is a pretty sad subject, really. I mentally congratulated them when I heard about ClearType. Hearing a little later that Wozniak's patents had just expired from the same thing on the Apple II was a major disappointment. Sort of like when I saw a NeXT machine from 1989 after thinking Windows 95 had a bold new look.
I don't even use Windows anymore, but for a company to be around this long and have such market and mindshare and not have contributed something... it's just sad. Through it all, Apple has made their own stuff, or bought tech from Xerox, bought tech from NeXT.
> Like our beloved Gates, he was > at the right place at the right > time. More talented technically, > but I must wonder how competitive > he'd really be these days when > there's quite a bit more competition > in his field. Perhaps Woz could > join forces with one of the optimistic > little PowerPC/CHRP system companies > and show us again how it's done.
Yeah, let's see if the ghost of Thomas Edison can compete with today's power companies. No? He must suck, then.
There is more competition in Woz' field today than there was in the 70's because he and Steve Jobs INVENTED the field! The personal computer industry simply didn't exist.
In the DP2 install you have icons for PowerMac G3/G4, iMac and PowerBook, so it went around the Web that older systems were out of luck, but there is a menu item called "Unsupported Install" or something that lets you install it on older systems.
If you're creating or viewing content on the thing, though, you'll probably appreciate that the symbols aren't visible unless you need them. Part of what makes the current Mac OS UI more pleasing than Windows to me is that there's less distracting clutter and the UI just takes up less space. The animations in Aqua scared me at first for this reason, but I'm sure I'll be able to turn them off, while many users (especially newbies) will probably find them helpful and enjoyable. I don't like close being right next to minimize/maximize, but maybe that's customizable. It is in Mac OS 9. Also, I would assume that the single button on the right was close. Small quibbles on a system with the heaviest graphics imaginable, a solid UNIX base and very cool hardware.
Lombard is also a street in San Francisco that is the curviest in the world, so they chose that as the codename for the curviest PowerBook. People refer to Macs by their codenames because Apple keeps naming them all the same names... there are like four different models all called "PowerBook G3".
He wasn't talking about microkernels or technical details. If you were trying to explain Darwin to a reporter from CNN, you'd use the word "Linux", too. It's the most famous example of open source, and the most famous open source operating system. There's no bandwagon jumping involved in using a common example to get your point across.
I'm sure there will be a preference to live with smaller icons most of the time. I'm sure that it's not going to scale the 32x32 icons of Classic apps up to 128x128 all the time. The current Mac OS has 16x16 and 32x32 icons for everything, and you can choose to use only the 16 if you want, or even a smaller generic icon.
When Photoshop saves files on the Mac, it makes a 32x32 copy of the document and makes it the document's icon, so you have a preview of the file before you open it. There are utilities that do this for any image or movie file on the Mac. I use this all the time, and I'm sure many artists do. The 128x128 icons are actually referred to by Apple as "previews" and the idea is that when you store images or movies you get a very good-looking, easy to see preview.
I know a lot of people who have computers that can do 1600x1200 but they use 800x600 because they find the icons too small for them at 1600x1200. For them, 128x128 icons system-wide would mean they could bump their resolution up and keep the icons the same size but have them be clearer and better looking. Why the hell not? As Steve pointed out in the demo, the original Mac had a 512x384 9" display and 32x32 icons. Wouldn't you build bigger icons into a mostly-from-scratch OS today?
Microsoft added a 48x48 icon to Windows a while back for the same reason, but never really did anything with it, so if you choose large icons, you just get a really bad scaled up 32x32.
No, hung is definitely penis size, as in "hung like a horse". (Most male horses are castrated and don't have testicles to compare.) Also, I think the penis is stored at a large size and is scaled down by Mac OS X on the fly, not stored small and scaled up. A scaled up penis would suffer loss of quality and perhaps the jaggies.
What are you talking about with the "OS/Xpensive" and "$uper expensive OSes" remarks? Mac OS is $99. Mac OS X Server is $499 for a 5-machine license ($99) and there's no client-access license. Mac OS X doesn't have a price yet, but it's rumored to be the same as Mac OS 9 was, and Mac OS 8 was, etc. etc. - $99. Is that expensive? Even Red Hat costs like $60 with a box and manual. The upgrade from Windows 98 to 2000 is $239.
Rhapsody isn't a G3 only product. It's not even a product. You might as well complain that Microsoft's Cairo won't run on your Pentium 200... it never shipped either. Sure, they'll use a lot of the technology from Rhapsody in Mac OS X, but it will be quite a different beast.
One, there won't be any revenues from those $3,500 G4-500's. Sales of $3,500 G4-450s will probably be lower.
Aren't the people who ordered a 500 getting either the 450 model at its original price, or the 500 with a 450 chip for $350 less (the customer's choice)? This article was unclear about what "its original price" referred to, but I think it means you can get the 450 model for its original price. The original "we'll honor the orders for the Apple Store" press release said $350 off your 500 if it has a 450 chip. It's the original build-to-order price on that model if you selected a 450 instead of 500.
I'd like to trade up from my Pentium, but I won't choose an Apple box for some time due to policies like these.
Is that one of the Pentiums with the arithmetic bug? How did you get treated on that? Are you running Windows 98 Special Edition, or the long-lasting W2K beta? How were you treated on that?
Don't believe the hype. Apple screws up, but they usually fix it, and over the past couple of years, they usually learn from their mistakes. Plus, Mac users are overwhelmingly happy with their computers. That counts for a lot. I'd rather have a company that makes great products and sometimes fucks up in business and marketing than the reverse.
Not delivering a product because of a bug in a supplier's key component and/or a severe earthquake under your major manufacturing is a little different than what went on a few years ago.
What are you talking about? This is hardly Apple's death knell. The problem is that they are too popular. Huge numbers of orders, plus unexpected Motorola supply problems, plus unexpected Taiwan supply problems. They simply got to a point where they couldn't fill the orders.
I don't want to seem like I'm defending them too much on this issue, because I think they handled it atrociously, but this is hardly the end of them. Their market share is huge, their stock is hot, their CEO is on the cover of TIME, they're selling over 100,000 iMacs per week, IBM is going to start making G4 chips soon. They're not going anywhere. Even the mass media isn't writing them off anymore. The "it's finally over for Apple" thing is so tired.
You make easy-to-copy bits and sell them for hundreds of dollars then you have to expect that some people are going to copy them without paying. It's a cost of doing business. For the most part, the people who are your core market are happy to pay because they need and use your software and so they don't question its value. Take the money and run, don't stand around complaining that somebody's running Office in their basement 10 times a year to do things they would have done with Wordpad or something if they hadn't got a copy of Office from Joe.
For some people, a particular app is worth $20, and for others it's worth $1000. If you price it at $200, you're just not going to get any sales from the guy who only thinks it's worth $20, whether he uses it or not. You can't count those folks and say you lost $200 for each one.
Where did I see a chart that showed this kind of thing? ESR's site?
Even the best Y2K estimates predict that there will be lots of annoying little problems. Add those to the lots of annoying little problems Windows has already made computers famous for, combine with the fact that the gov't is suing the biggest and best known shrinkwrap maker for allegedly being the biggest assholes ever to take a meeting and you'd think that the software industry would really want to avoid getting into anyone's face right now.
This is like the "no lending" clause that appeared on CD's a while back. You just make yourself look like a greedy bastard in a situation where goodwill and a dialog with your users will get you much greater returns. If you please them, they will pay.
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> Well, that is of course overlooking their
... a software TV. It's pleasant to watch video in it, much more so than the other players. The fact that you can hide a lot of the interface is nice when you're watching something long.
> QuickTime 4.0 movie player! Incidentally
> hailed as one of the worst designs for a
> program by UI experts worldwide.
I recently wrote an introduction to streaming media clients article comparing the clients for the three leading architectures: RealMedia, QuickTime and Windows Media (in that order). I did some screenshots of all three and when you look at them together, you would really, really have to question any criticism of the QuickTime Player's look or interface. RealPlayer is so full of ads and other distractions I can barely pick out the streaming video. There are so many buttons it's hard to find "play". I agree that QuickTime Player's buttons and sliders aren't in the best places - other than the Play button right front and center - but the newer version in the Mac OS X screenshots seems to have completely fixed this.
You have to realize that QuickTime itself is a faceless technology, and the older QuickTime Player 3 was just sort of a demo app that ran in a regular window and didn't look like much of anything. The 4 player needed to stick out because it competes in streaming media with RealPlayer now. It shocked a lot of Mac users going from no interface to a really distinctive interface, but the look literally gives it a face to market itself. Besides, it's not an application so much as a widget
> the current MacOS GUI, which has no
> funcitonal equivalent of the Task Bar.
If you drag the Application Menu off of the menubar, it becomes a floating icon bar with an icon for each running app. You can click or Shift-click or Option-click the little button on it to orient it vertically or horizontally, or change the icon size. Of course, you can place it anywhere you want on the screen and it stays on top.
If there's one criticism of Apple you will hear over and over again from long-time users, it's that they don't advertise their technology enough, and I guess that's why you think they don't have any. For Apple, it's about what you can do with the tool, not telling you how the tool works, but users still wish they'd do a little "for geeks only" marketing as well, to balance things out. IT departments are buying Windows machines for their desktop publishing and Web development people because they think there isn't a difference in the actual technologies involved. That may change after OS X ships if they do more enterprise stuff.
> gay iMacs
I guess you mean this as a criticism. I'm not sure what it is about an iMac that threatens some people, but it's allowed a lot of people to turn a little unused corner of their living space into an attractive little computer nook and discover the Internet, or play a game, or make a party invitation or something. What's wrong with that? A friend of mine has struggled with three successive Windows PC's on a big desk that takes up a lot of space in his little bachelor apartment. He replaced the huge desk and all the wires with an iMac on a little desk and now he's stopped calling me with questions about how to use his computer, and he's turning out better schoolwork and started making Web pages. He couldn't be happier. Not everybody is a computer hobbyist or a Linux geek. Not everybody is happy to have part of their living space look like their cubicle at work.
The MacAlly mouses are excellent, too, and much cheaper if that's what you're looking for. Two buttons plus a scroller/button, snap on accents to match them to your display/keyboard, and they're very high resolution, so you can use them on a big hi-res display without picking them up all the time. The Control Panel is really excellent, too. They're $24 at Outpost.
>Also, Macs can't have the colon (:) in a
/~sjobs/ so the colons for pathnames seems like it's history.
> filename. So URLs as filenames look like:
> http-//www.dartmouth.edu
>
> which is dumb.
It's sort of a weird criticism considering the colon is the ONLY character you can't have in a filename on a Mac. The same filename under Windows wouldn't have the colon or the slashes, either.
If you look at the title bars in the Mac OS X screenshots they released, you see slashes in file names, like
> All this chrome (transparancy
... things that are on the display are treated more like vectors than bitmaps, so resizing or altering the transparency of an object is easy. It's like resizing bitmap fonts vs TrueType fonts. Once you add TrueType fonts to an OS, why wouldn't you let the user resize the fonts under icons or in the menus? It's not like a current OS being burdened with more chrome, it's an entirely new way or working graphics at the system level.
> etc.) eats CPU power
That's what people used to say about GUIs themselves. They couldn't believe that you'd use the CPU to draw bitmaps on the screen.
Really, if you look into Quartz, you see that transparency and graphic tricks are trivial in Mac OS X
The Web (UNIX Internet and a GUI developed on NeXT) brought computing to the masses, not Microsoft. Bill Gates wrote "The Road Ahead" in 1995 and mentioned the Internet once. He had a whole chapter about the coming CD-ROM era, though.
... all the major vendors except Apple stopped bothering. That's why a lot of people are more interested in things that circumvent that dead market: set-top boxes, PDA's, etc.
Still, more than half the people in America don't use a computer. I have lots of friends who sit down at Windows machines and can't make them work. They have uncountable problems. The sound card stops working, documents suddenly have a different icon and open with a different application, they can't get on the Web all of a sudden. It's a nightmare for "the masses". They only buy it because that's all there is in the commodity market
If not for Microsoft, maybe we'd be accessing the Web on Macs, Amigas, Ataris, etc. which would be more reliable, easier to use, and ironically, make sharing information easier because many platforms would have to stick to standards like HTML in order to survive in a multi-platform world. Who knows what benefits competition over the last few years would have brought?
>> Okay. QuickTime. That's a pretty major one.
> AVI
> Quicktime a major one, oh please, it's
> just a video playback system.
You know nothing about QuickTime.
> Start-button
> Now you name one from apple (not any of
> the Xerox stuff please)
You're joking right? Apple gave shares to Xerox for the PARC research. PARC's GUI was very basic and they built on that extensively.
Apple invented pull-down menus, for chrissake (and File Edit View). The Xerox stuff had context menus under the mouse.
And the Start button is a bad ripoff of the Apple menu. Amazingly bad, in fact. In the Apple menu, clicking on a folder instead of an application opens that folder. Objects are still objects, even in the menu.
>> realtime spell checking (wiggly red lines
... no? "Thunder" on the Atari ST had
... it's just sad. Through it all, Apple has made their own stuff, or bought tech from Xerox, bought tech from NeXT.
>> in word)
> Err
> that WAY before MS.
WordPerfect 3 for Macintosh has this feature, too. It's ancient.
MS "innovation" is a pretty sad subject, really. I mentally congratulated them when I heard about ClearType. Hearing a little later that Wozniak's patents had just expired from the same thing on the Apple II was a major disappointment. Sort of like when I saw a NeXT machine from 1989 after thinking Windows 95 had a bold new look.
I don't even use Windows anymore, but for a company to be around this long and have such market and mindshare and not have contributed something
> Like our beloved Gates, he was
> at the right place at the right
> time. More talented technically,
> but I must wonder how competitive
> he'd really be these days when
> there's quite a bit more competition
> in his field. Perhaps Woz could
> join forces with one of the optimistic
> little PowerPC/CHRP system companies
> and show us again how it's done.
Yeah, let's see if the ghost of Thomas Edison can compete with today's power companies. No? He must suck, then.
There is more competition in Woz' field today than there was in the 70's because he and Steve Jobs INVENTED the field! The personal computer industry simply didn't exist.
In the DP2 install you have icons for PowerMac G3/G4, iMac and PowerBook, so it went around the Web that older systems were out of luck, but there is a menu item called "Unsupported Install" or something that lets you install it on older systems.
If you're creating or viewing content on the thing, though, you'll probably appreciate that the symbols aren't visible unless you need them. Part of what makes the current Mac OS UI more pleasing than Windows to me is that there's less distracting clutter and the UI just takes up less space. The animations in Aqua scared me at first for this reason, but I'm sure I'll be able to turn them off, while many users (especially newbies) will probably find them helpful and enjoyable. I don't like close being right next to minimize/maximize, but maybe that's customizable. It is in Mac OS 9. Also, I would assume that the single button on the right was close. Small quibbles on a system with the heaviest graphics imaginable, a solid UNIX base and very cool hardware.
Lombard is also a street in San Francisco that is the curviest in the world, so they chose that as the codename for the curviest PowerBook. People refer to Macs by their codenames because Apple keeps naming them all the same names ... there are like four different models all called "PowerBook G3".
He wasn't talking about microkernels or technical details. If you were trying to explain Darwin to a reporter from CNN, you'd use the word "Linux", too. It's the most famous example of open source, and the most famous open source operating system. There's no bandwagon jumping involved in using a common example to get your point across.
I'm sure there will be a preference to live with smaller icons most of the time. I'm sure that it's not going to scale the 32x32 icons of Classic apps up to 128x128 all the time. The current Mac OS has 16x16 and 32x32 icons for everything, and you can choose to use only the 16 if you want, or even a smaller generic icon.
When Photoshop saves files on the Mac, it makes a 32x32 copy of the document and makes it the document's icon, so you have a preview of the file before you open it. There are utilities that do this for any image or movie file on the Mac. I use this all the time, and I'm sure many artists do. The 128x128 icons are actually referred to by Apple as "previews" and the idea is that when you store images or movies you get a very good-looking, easy to see preview.
I know a lot of people who have computers that can do 1600x1200 but they use 800x600 because they find the icons too small for them at 1600x1200. For them, 128x128 icons system-wide would mean they could bump their resolution up and keep the icons the same size but have them be clearer and better looking. Why the hell not? As Steve pointed out in the demo, the original Mac had a 512x384 9" display and 32x32 icons. Wouldn't you build bigger icons into a mostly-from-scratch OS today?
Microsoft added a 48x48 icon to Windows a while back for the same reason, but never really did anything with it, so if you choose large icons, you just get a really bad scaled up 32x32.
No, hung is definitely penis size, as in "hung like a horse". (Most male horses are castrated and don't have testicles to compare.) Also, I think the penis is stored at a large size and is scaled down by Mac OS X on the fly, not stored small and scaled up. A scaled up penis would suffer loss of quality and perhaps the jaggies.
What are you talking about with the "OS/Xpensive" and "$uper expensive OSes" remarks? Mac OS is $99. Mac OS X Server is $499 for a 5-machine license ($99) and there's no client-access license. Mac OS X doesn't have a price yet, but it's rumored to be the same as Mac OS 9 was, and Mac OS 8 was, etc. etc. - $99. Is that expensive? Even Red Hat costs like $60 with a box and manual. The upgrade from Windows 98 to 2000 is $239.
> I'll lend your arguments more credence
> if you can tell me how to take a standard
> iMac with a 15" monitor and upgrade it to 19".
The same way you put a 10" screen in your PalmPilot, or a 20" screen in your ThinkPad.
Give us a break.
Rhapsody isn't a G3 only product. It's not even a product. You might as well complain that Microsoft's Cairo won't run on your Pentium 200 ... it never shipped either. Sure, they'll use a lot of the technology from Rhapsody in Mac OS X, but it will be quite a different beast.
One, there won't be any revenues from those $3,500 G4-500's. Sales of $3,500 G4-450s will probably be lower.
Aren't the people who ordered a 500 getting either the 450 model at its original price, or the 500 with a 450 chip for $350 less (the customer's choice)? This article was unclear about what "its original price" referred to, but I think it means you can get the 450 model for its original price. The original "we'll honor the orders for the Apple Store" press release said $350 off your 500 if it has a 450 chip. It's the original build-to-order price on that model if you selected a 450 instead of 500.
I'd like to trade up from my Pentium, but I won't choose an Apple box for some time due to policies like these.
Is that one of the Pentiums with the arithmetic bug? How did you get treated on that? Are you running Windows 98 Special Edition, or the long-lasting W2K beta? How were you treated on that?
Don't believe the hype. Apple screws up, but they usually fix it, and over the past couple of years, they usually learn from their mistakes. Plus, Mac users are overwhelmingly happy with their computers. That counts for a lot. I'd rather have a company that makes great products and sometimes fucks up in business and marketing than the reverse.
Not delivering a product because of a bug in a supplier's key component and/or a severe earthquake under your major manufacturing is a little different than what went on a few years ago.
What are you talking about? This is hardly Apple's death knell. The problem is that they are too popular. Huge numbers of orders, plus unexpected Motorola supply problems, plus unexpected Taiwan supply problems. They simply got to a point where they couldn't fill the orders.
I don't want to seem like I'm defending them too much on this issue, because I think they handled it atrociously, but this is hardly the end of them. Their market share is huge, their stock is hot, their CEO is on the cover of TIME, they're selling over 100,000 iMacs per week, IBM is going to start making G4 chips soon. They're not going anywhere. Even the mass media isn't writing them off anymore. The "it's finally over for Apple" thing is so tired.
You make easy-to-copy bits and sell them for hundreds of dollars then you have to expect that some people are going to copy them without paying. It's a cost of doing business. For the most part, the people who are your core market are happy to pay because they need and use your software and so they don't question its value. Take the money and run, don't stand around complaining that somebody's running Office in their basement 10 times a year to do things they would have done with Wordpad or something if they hadn't got a copy of Office from Joe.
For some people, a particular app is worth $20, and for others it's worth $1000. If you price it at $200, you're just not going to get any sales from the guy who only thinks it's worth $20, whether he uses it or not. You can't count those folks and say you lost $200 for each one.
Where did I see a chart that showed this kind of thing? ESR's site?
Even the best Y2K estimates predict that there will be lots of annoying little problems. Add those to the lots of annoying little problems Windows has already made computers famous for, combine with the fact that the gov't is suing the biggest and best known shrinkwrap maker for allegedly being the biggest assholes ever to take a meeting and you'd think that the software industry would really want to avoid getting into anyone's face right now.
This is like the "no lending" clause that appeared on CD's a while back. You just make yourself look like a greedy bastard in a situation where goodwill and a dialog with your users will get you much greater returns. If you please them, they will pay.