Did you actually read what you typed before you posted it? So you want them to release a version of 10.5 that can detect a "Lesser Machine" as you call it. Then it loads but it disables anything that might require a "Greater Machine" as I'll call it for comparison. Now they have to support multiple code bases within the same code. The developers have to write their apps to allow for both cases and if you honestly think that they could do this by "adding a few more lines of code" as you put it, they you have no clue what goes into writing code. Sure in days of old they did quite a bit with 64k or less, hell my first taste of computing was was a TRS-80 which came with 4k. But let's not forget that the UI at that time was an ASCII interface and not graphical such as today's. The processor of that particular machine ran at a whopping 4Mhz and not today's GHz levels and the pipeline was a damn site shorter all of which meant that keeping the data you needed handy was not near as difficult, not to mention the fact that waiting a minute or two for a bubble sort to run was more than acceptable. I'm not saying that there aren't sloppy programers today or that they don't write less than streamlined code because there is so much power to spare today, but to think that they could just drop a few lines of code in and support anything you'd like them to well, pass me whatever you're smoking cause I've not had a buzz like that in ages. I've got a better idea how about I'll just do a res hack on tiger so it displays 10.5 and you'll have pretty much what you want, Lesser hardware compatability with the new wizz bang features disabled and still have it show 10.5 Once you get Apple to meet this request for you, how about having a talk with MS and have them do the same thing with Vista.
Another thing that this poster failed to look at was the value of the dollar then and now. The $2700 price tag for the 7300 new in 1997 would be roughly $3370 of todays dollars. A new $1199 iMac would be roughly $960 in 1997 dollars. The cost of computing is hardly going up. There was also a time when 6K would get you a top of the line luxury car but hardly anyone could afford them. Today people don't bat an eye at spending 30K and up for a car. I could work on that 6K car but today couldn't even think about doing half the work I did back then without having to dump a fortune into diagnostic machines. So I guess using the original posters logic we should be ripping the auto manufacturers a new one for dropping support for our old LTD Broughms. Damn it why can't I have an airbag in my old LTD or antilock brakes, or........ Well you get the picture. IF what you have works for you today it will still work for you tomorrow. If you want the latest bells and whistles then face the facts sooner or later you are going to have to pony up to play. This is not an Apple specific condition, it happens in most all markets.
Actually Tachyon Fields and Phasers did not come from the minds of the Creators of Star Trek. While they were used in a science fiction program they were taken from real science.
Tachyon: A tachyon (from the Greek ?????,???????? (takhús), meaning "swift, fast") is any hypothetical particle that travels at superluminal velocity. The first description of tachyons is attributed to German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, but it was George Sudarshan, Olexa-Myron Bilaniuk[1][2] and Gerald Feinberg[3] (who originally coined the term) in the 1960s who advanced a theoretical framework for their study. Tachyonic fields have appeared theoretically in a variety of contexts, such as the Bosonic string theory.
While at this time Tachyons and Tachyon fields are still theoretical it is a real term and real science, well unless you don't consider physics to be real science.
Likewise a Phaser is a device which alters sound waves by changing their phase.
So while thier use in Star Trek was science fiction, both exist in real science. Also because something hasn't been discovered or invented today does not mean that it's not real. When Demokritos proposed the idea of the Atom in roughly 500 BC everyone thought him mad. The atom is not something real. In 1808 when J. Dalton proposed atomism science had advanced and this theory was better received and by the mid to late 1800s the atom was an accepted unit of matter.
Some of today's science fiction will one day be science fact others may never be and other may never be in OUR lifetime. While I was never myself a fan of Star Trek, (watching it occasionally though because Kirk always seemed to hook up with some hot, scantily dressed, for the time, women). I believe the prior poster was not saying Star Trek was a road map of the future, but rather that what once seemed futuristic has become common place. Yesterday's future is today's present and tomorrow's past.
As to who they are trying to sell this to, I would say a much larger market than you may be thinking of. Look at just about every new wiz bang phone that any manufacturer releases. They all start out in the several hundred dollar range with contract and typically they move well. Not one to date can come close to the feature set that the iPhone lists. It's new is shiney and regaurdless of the price a boat load of people are going to want it.
As to being locked down, well what cell phone isn't? Most of the time for the sole reason of creating a revenue stream for the carrier. While I'm sure to some extent that still holds true in the case of the iPhone however you'll still have more latitude with it than you will with other cells. More importantly it's locked down because it's running OS X and while quite stable we all know it's still quite possible to bring OS X to it's knees be that intentional or not. Now were Apple/Cingular to allow Joe User as you call them, the ability to do as they will with their brand new cell phone how long do you think it would be before people start calling saying I was playing Grand Theft Auto on my phone and I got a kernel panic. Now my phone won't do anything. At that point should Apple be resoponsible for support? Should Cingular? From the customers standpoint however someone should fix their phone because now they can't take/make any calls. Or perhaps there should be an emergency image in flash somewhere that can reload the phone to factory settings in this event. But again are the customers going to be happy that they ahd to reload their phone and have now lost all their tunes, their phonebook, their nice little apps that they spent so much time adding in. While it will do a lot of other things first and foremost this is a PHONE and as such it's expected to just work, no reboots, no reloads, no reimage, just work. Sure down the road it's likely that Apple will release additional apps for the phone and may even permit third parties to develope for it but I'm sure those apps will need to pass very tight QC from Apple and or Cingular before they ever make it to your iPhone.
While I have had more than my share of support nightmares, try getting Antec Tech support to replace a power suppy in a rack server case in timely fassion, or just getting them to return your call in the same day you placed it. One company's tech support has always shined in my experience, CISCO. Sure you pay a premium for their support, and I do mean a premium. However when you log a support case with CISCO, either via phone or from the CCO website, you know that depending on the severity of your case, you will be intouch with an ENGINEER, not some lacky off the street, in a very timely maner. Depending on the time of day that you open your case you could be speaking with someone in the US, Europe, Australia or just about anywhere else in the world. Each and every time that I have had to contact support, the person that I spoke with was pleasant, sympathetic, and very knowledgeable. Issues have always been resolved quickly, and on a few occasions the engineers have gone beyond what was required by my support contract. Cisco from my experience seems to be one company that understands that a customer with a resolved problem will likely remain a customer. I dread the day that I need to contact TAC, not because I fear an unpleasnt outcome, but because I know that my users are going to be climbing down my back because of a network outage. I take comfort in knowing that while there is an issue that will put the heat on me, I have the wonderful people at CISCO's TAC to save my bacon.
Remember, tech support has to be one of the most thankless jobs on earth. Dealing day in and day out with people with problems and quite a few of them not the most pleasant, or with the most realistic expectations. We all have a right to gripe when support fails us, and quie often it does. On the opposite side of that coin though, remember to thank the support person who has done a good job, resolved your problem for you, and on that rare occasion gone above and beyond. A simple "Thank You" costs you nothing, but goes a long way for the poor soul who has to listen to bitching and moaning all day long, no matter what their pay scale.
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Did you actually read what you typed before you posted it? So you want them to release a version of 10.5 that can detect a "Lesser Machine" as you call it. Then it loads but it disables anything that might require a "Greater Machine" as I'll call it for comparison. Now they have to support multiple code bases within the same code. The developers have to write their apps to allow for both cases and if you honestly think that they could do this by "adding a few more lines of code" as you put it, they you have no clue what goes into writing code. Sure in days of old they did quite a bit with 64k or less, hell my first taste of computing was was a TRS-80 which came with 4k. But let's not forget that the UI at that time was an ASCII interface and not graphical such as today's. The processor of that particular machine ran at a whopping 4Mhz and not today's GHz levels and the pipeline was a damn site shorter all of which meant that keeping the data you needed handy was not near as difficult, not to mention the fact that waiting a minute or two for a bubble sort to run was more than acceptable. I'm not saying that there aren't sloppy programers today or that they don't write less than streamlined code because there is so much power to spare today, but to think that they could just drop a few lines of code in and support anything you'd like them to well, pass me whatever you're smoking cause I've not had a buzz like that in ages. I've got a better idea how about I'll just do a res hack on tiger so it displays 10.5 and you'll have pretty much what you want, Lesser hardware compatability with the new wizz bang features disabled and still have it show 10.5 Once you get Apple to meet this request for you, how about having a talk with MS and have them do the same thing with Vista.
Another thing that this poster failed to look at was the value of the dollar then and now. The $2700 price tag for the 7300 new in 1997 would be roughly $3370 of todays dollars. A new $1199 iMac would be roughly $960 in 1997 dollars. The cost of computing is hardly going up. There was also a time when 6K would get you a top of the line luxury car but hardly anyone could afford them. Today people don't bat an eye at spending 30K and up for a car. I could work on that 6K car but today couldn't even think about doing half the work I did back then without having to dump a fortune into diagnostic machines. So I guess using the original posters logic we should be ripping the auto manufacturers a new one for dropping support for our old LTD Broughms. Damn it why can't I have an airbag in my old LTD or antilock brakes, or........ Well you get the picture. IF what you have works for you today it will still work for you tomorrow. If you want the latest bells and whistles then face the facts sooner or later you are going to have to pony up to play. This is not an Apple specific condition, it happens in most all markets.
Actually Tachyon Fields and Phasers did not come from the minds of the Creators of Star Trek. While they were used in a science fiction program they were taken from real science.
Tachyon: A tachyon (from the Greek ?????,???????? (takhús), meaning "swift, fast") is any hypothetical particle that travels at superluminal velocity. The first description of tachyons is attributed to German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, but it was George Sudarshan, Olexa-Myron Bilaniuk[1][2] and Gerald Feinberg[3] (who originally coined the term) in the 1960s who advanced a theoretical framework for their study. Tachyonic fields have appeared theoretically in a variety of contexts, such as the Bosonic string theory.
While at this time Tachyons and Tachyon fields are still theoretical it is a real term and real science, well unless you don't consider physics to be real science.
Likewise a Phaser is a device which alters sound waves by changing their phase.
So while thier use in Star Trek was science fiction, both exist in real science. Also because something hasn't been discovered or invented today does not mean that it's not real. When Demokritos proposed the idea of the Atom in roughly 500 BC everyone thought him mad. The atom is not something real. In 1808 when J. Dalton proposed atomism science had advanced and this theory was better received and by the mid to late 1800s the atom was an accepted unit of matter.
Some of today's science fiction will one day be science fact others may never be and other may never be in OUR lifetime. While I was never myself a fan of Star Trek, (watching it occasionally though because Kirk always seemed to hook up with some hot, scantily dressed, for the time, women). I believe the prior poster was not saying Star Trek was a road map of the future, but rather that what once seemed futuristic has become common place. Yesterday's future is today's present and tomorrow's past.
As to who they are trying to sell this to, I would say a much larger market than you may be thinking of. Look at just about every new wiz bang phone that any manufacturer releases. They all start out in the several hundred dollar range with contract and typically they move well. Not one to date can come close to the feature set that the iPhone lists. It's new is shiney and regaurdless of the price a boat load of people are going to want it. As to being locked down, well what cell phone isn't? Most of the time for the sole reason of creating a revenue stream for the carrier. While I'm sure to some extent that still holds true in the case of the iPhone however you'll still have more latitude with it than you will with other cells. More importantly it's locked down because it's running OS X and while quite stable we all know it's still quite possible to bring OS X to it's knees be that intentional or not. Now were Apple/Cingular to allow Joe User as you call them, the ability to do as they will with their brand new cell phone how long do you think it would be before people start calling saying I was playing Grand Theft Auto on my phone and I got a kernel panic. Now my phone won't do anything. At that point should Apple be resoponsible for support? Should Cingular? From the customers standpoint however someone should fix their phone because now they can't take/make any calls. Or perhaps there should be an emergency image in flash somewhere that can reload the phone to factory settings in this event. But again are the customers going to be happy that they ahd to reload their phone and have now lost all their tunes, their phonebook, their nice little apps that they spent so much time adding in. While it will do a lot of other things first and foremost this is a PHONE and as such it's expected to just work, no reboots, no reloads, no reimage, just work. Sure down the road it's likely that Apple will release additional apps for the phone and may even permit third parties to develope for it but I'm sure those apps will need to pass very tight QC from Apple and or Cingular before they ever make it to your iPhone.
While I have had more than my share of support nightmares, try getting Antec Tech support to replace a power suppy in a rack server case in timely fassion, or just getting them to return your call in the same day you placed it. One company's tech support has always shined in my experience, CISCO. Sure you pay a premium for their support, and I do mean a premium. However when you log a support case with CISCO, either via phone or from the CCO website, you know that depending on the severity of your case, you will be intouch with an ENGINEER, not some lacky off the street, in a very timely maner. Depending on the time of day that you open your case you could be speaking with someone in the US, Europe, Australia or just about anywhere else in the world. Each and every time that I have had to contact support, the person that I spoke with was pleasant, sympathetic, and very knowledgeable. Issues have always been resolved quickly, and on a few occasions the engineers have gone beyond what was required by my support contract. Cisco from my experience seems to be one company that understands that a customer with a resolved problem will likely remain a customer. I dread the day that I need to contact TAC, not because I fear an unpleasnt outcome, but because I know that my users are going to be climbing down my back because of a network outage. I take comfort in knowing that while there is an issue that will put the heat on me, I have the wonderful people at CISCO's TAC to save my bacon.
Remember, tech support has to be one of the most thankless jobs on earth. Dealing day in and day out with people with problems and quite a few of them not the most pleasant, or with the most realistic expectations. We all have a right to gripe when support fails us, and quie often it does. On the opposite side of that coin though, remember to thank the support person who has done a good job, resolved your problem for you, and on that rare occasion gone above and beyond. A simple "Thank You" costs you nothing, but goes a long way for the poor soul who has to listen to bitching and moaning all day long, no matter what their pay scale.
Just my two cents worth.