Constantly streaming video in multiple thumbnail size icons on taskbars...
Umm, I already have that in my OS X dock. What else have you got?
...stronger and more pervasive encryption on everything that enters or leaves the machine...
Hmm, I'm not sure we need much stronger, but it does not take much processing power now. Between and encrypted home dir, VPN, and SSL/SSH, everything is already pretty much encrypted at least once.
...smarter background filtering on multiple RSS sources...
Maybe a little, but again, not a lot CPU use here.
MUCH beefier JIT on virtual machines, on-the-fly JIT for dynamic languages, more complex client-side rendering of Web content (SVG, etc)
Yeah, that is likely.
Other things that we haven't even thought of because they're impactical now...
One core will be adding a wilderness backdrop and some little birds on my shoulder on the fly to the video chat image of myself I stream to my coworkers. Another will be adding bunny ears or devil horns on the video chat I'm receiving from a certain engineer who drives me nuts. Invest in the realtime video effects market now!
More like someone who is realistic and knows that all browsers have their quirks I would say personally.
There is a difference between a quirk and a complete failure to function in many circumstances. I develop content and Web interfaces as a small part of my job, although I have significant experience in Web design. When it came time to autogenerate Web data from other sources I simply followed the specs for CSS and XHTML to output clean and concise code that can have style changes that match the branding for a given version and is still flexible enough to be easily used to generate XML for other sources and printed copy. It was fairly easy and I made sure to follow best practices. Then comes the testing phase. Firefox... check. Opera... check, Safari... check. Konquerer... check. IE... no dice. Of all the browsers out there, only IE fails to properly read it. Because I followed best practices, it degraded gracefully and IE users get little or no formatting, making it a little harder to read and a lot less pretty. A quirk is when it screws up some element and you work around it. Completely failing to display any of the formatting written in a six year old standard is not a quirk.
Luckily, no one who would use our products is likely to be using IE to do it, so we just ignore IE. Most developers don't have that option so they have to either redesign their site to use even older standards or fill it full or workarounds.
If i want to remove safari from osX.. i go to the apps folder, drag it to the trash, empty the trash. whoo.. it's soo tightly bundled
I agree that this makes a difference, but I don't like your use of the word, "bundled." When "bundling" is discussed with regard to monopolies it has a very specific meaning. It is one form of tying specifically outlawed. Including a CD with Safari on it with every mac, even if it is not installed by default, would qualify as bundling according to the meaning given to it in antitrust laws. The thing is, bundling products is in no way illegal, unless one of the bundled products is a monopoly. Bundling two random products together has no adverse effects upon the market. Bundling a monopolized product and one form a separate market breaks the capitalist model and removes all the advantages it has over communist and other economic models.
A significant number of people on Slashdot do not understand monopolies and antitrust law and using the term "bundling" to mean something else simply confuses them more.
So in essence this is not a sticker to tell you a fruit is ripe, it's a sticker to tell you that it is not unripe.
Coincidentally, grocers would prefer you buy ripe or overripe fruit, since that is what they will have to throw out soonest. Since you'd prefer not to buy overripe fruit and they would prefer that you do, they have a vested interest in not letting you distinguish them from ripe fruit.
That's the problem, most artists have no business sense and thus get fleeced. My wife was watching Biography a couple weeks ago and it talked about Dolly Parton...
Things have changed a lot since Dolly had no reputation and no audience. For one, basically all the radio stations weren't owned by a single corporation. Second, the RIAA members had not consolidated their stranglehold on all major distribution channels. Right now the normal artist's main goal is to be heard. They want everyone to hear their music because they are an artist first and a businessman second. Very few people go into music because they think it is a path to wealth. Given the choice between possibly reaching a large audience, or being specifically stopped from reaching a large audience by a large cartel repeatedly convicted of collaborating to abuse their consolidated position, many choose the former. If they don't they will never sell a CD in a major store or be heard on the radio and most people will never, ever hear of them.
Sure there are counter examples of those few independent artists that won out against all odds, but they are the rare exceptions. Copyright law was designed to benefit artists and encourage them to make more works. It has been abused and morphed by powerful corporations so that it instead is a tool to control art and make sure artists in general make no money off their art. If copyright was abolished entirely it would be a boon to the average recording artist, since the RIAA would have no motivation to stop their distribution and they could still make money the way almost all of them do now, concerts and merchandise.
Come on! Why is it that when Microsoft tries to fix a problem with an upgrade that they the monopoly arguement comes along? Someone else brought up the example of how tightly integrated Safari is in OSX. But if Microsoft wants to reduce the number of unsecured machines; it's a monopolistic move.
Reread your statement and question. Why is it when a monopoly does something with their monopoly it is monopolistic, but when a company that does not have a monopoly does something it isn't? Just possibly because that is the definition of "monopolistic."
Sometimes it seems that if MS ever released a free "Office lite" to compete with a product like iLife that we would have people screaming bloody murder.
You obviously have no understanding of monopolies, antitrust law, or what is illegal and why. Please go read up on it before trying to argue it. If MS released a free "Office lite" to compete with iLife and did it legally, no one would have an issue. If, however, they bundled that new product which is competing (sort of) in an existing market with a product they have monopolized the market for (like Windows) it would be illegal and with good reason.
IE7 supports CSS and XHTML 100 times better than IE6 so sites can start using them
From my testing, not really. My plain vanilla XHTML+CSS degrades gracefully for IE7 just as IE6. They don't conform to the standards enough so that people can write to them and assume IE will work, so people won't.
It would be different if the IE7 list of supported standards, and testing of the Browser itself was not widescale. It has been available almost a full year before its release date, and if that is not enough time for web sites to rip out the crap IE6 kludge code, then maybe this will be a wake up call for them to do so.
When pressed for time I suspect most development houses that don't already write to Web standards and then gracefully degrade will do the same as they always have. They will load their site in IE7 and add some work around to get it to work as well. They still need to work with IE5 so they won't be having some epiphany that they can just write to the standards and expect it to work.
I guess I'm a lot more pessimistic than you.
So in the end, we can start using more advanced CSS and XHTML concepts in the next year without having separate coding to make it display properly in IE6.
From my testing, this just doesn't seem to be true. Luckily, no one who views my pages is likely to be using IE. There was a major problem with some of our Web interfaces (if not working around an IE bug is a problem) making some of the product unusable in IE and no one noticed for years until someone loaded it using an ancient Windows box in a testing lab somewhere.
If a pirate site sends an exe down my "pipe";) and I click Run, I become t3h pwn3d. If only people understood that allowing an AX IS effectively allowing its code to run free, we would have less trouble with it.
It is true if people understood that we would have less of a problem, but really not that much less. People don't understand that an exe file they run on their computer has free reign to anything it wants either. Most people assume all programs they run are in a sandbox (or the functional equivalent). If you ask Joe Sixpack if they screwed up by installing trojan that sends spam on their box they will tell you, "no, the computer did." What kind of computer will install a spamming engine and send hundreds of spam messages without telling the user that is what it is doing?
Java has a sandbox, AX doesn't, fine. Sandboxing is not the answer... Or I'd be surfing in a virtual machine and have a different system for every program.
If you look at the direction of OS security, that is where everyone is heading. Not necessarily a VM for everything, but a sandbox or control for the interactions with other programs, the OS, and resources strictly controlled and following some reasonable defaults.
The problem lies in turning the browser into a platform.
This is part of the problem, but it is really a hack to get around the limitations of modern networking and the Windows platform. People see the Web browser a lot like a TV. You use it to view content by switching pages, just like changing channels. The problem is, your TV can't do anything else of value to a third party and a computer can. This can be a good thing, since it adds more functionality. The problem with ActiveX is it does it silently, so people are not told their browser has stopped acting like a TV and has started erasing their family photos. You propose education, but it is a lot easier to make the computer conform to the expectations of the user than change user expectations.
For the (it just works) Ive also had the pleasure of fixing Macs that wont install GIMP or connect to our Novell network.
Macs just work, if you are doing things the recommended way. For example, if GIMP used the native UI and installed as a.app folder like most programs, there would be no problem. Since it installs in basically a Linux compatibility environment using a window server that is not even on the system by default, well that is a different story, just like getting Photoshop for Windows to install on a Linux box by installing WINE. I'm not sure what your Novell issue is, but I think OS X's networking in general needs some work, although their zeroconf is head and shoulders above everyone else's.
Apple has done some very good things to heaten up competition but im talking technically Apple has done some bad things.
I don't know about this. Apple has introduced features which were then copied by Windows and Linux, but more and more often Linux does not provide those features. I think this is because so many Linux desktop users and developers moved to OS X and no longer have an itch to scratch. I don't see Linux catching up anytime soon.
Ok, in that case, I read a series of article in Scientific American that had a lot of studies about your mother's number of genital warts.
Whatever turns you on...
You linked references to the data including numbers yourself. If you don't believe you, well I guess I don't care.
I should have said "value" instead of price.
Value is subjective. Price is not. Thus in a comparison we have to consider the latter, not the former.
You have a fundamental lack of understanding of the difference between qualitative and quantitative.
You know just because you don't understand something, doesn't mean someone else made a mistake.
All of the things you think make Apple worth more money are all qualitative.
How many digital audio ports on the mac? One. How many on the Dell? Zero. Are one and zero quantities or not? More important to this comparison, how much does each component cost in the market?
...factoring that in the difference between the two computers is still near $1000.
How many times will you assert this with no proof. Where can I buy a machine with all these built in for $1000 less than the macbook pro? Just send me a link. You won't because you can't. The market value of these features integrated and the whole thing built with the quality of parts that go into a pro grade notebook is more than you are guessing.
All of this "market" and "quality" bullshit you're spouting is irrelevant, because it is all qualitative.
Not at all. Higher grade parts cost more money. Money is quantitative. The market judges the quality and assigns a quantity.
Every consumer decides, individually, if the cost associated with it is warranted.
That is qualitative and has no place in an objective comparison. Otherwise, I can buy a broken macbook for $100 bucks and it looks cooler than any Dell on the market. Since that is the only feature that matters to me, the macbook is 1/10 or less the price of the Dell.
The hardware you've mentioned, at most, narrows the price difference from $1250 to $950.
Great, just show me where I can buy one at that price.
Take a stats class before you have to debate something important and really embarass yourself.
You're the one dredging up the same old crap that has been disproved over and over again for several years now. You still can't find a machine with the same features from a reputable company for significantly less. Until you can, you're just dancing around the issue.
Oh, you've got me all wrong. Linux still has rough edges that infuriate me. But Linux's stupidities can be fixed, unlike OS X's (or OS 9's) which can't. Or at least won't.
I use Linux every day, but not as my primary workstation. The reason for this is that Linux's stupidities are not fixed, at least not the ones I care about and not as many of them as on OS X.
I'd much rather my workstation OS were fully open source and more customizable, but the functionality and application availability is just not there. I spend less time maintaining my OS X workstation than I do some of my servers, who just serve a couple simple tasks that have not changed in years. Linux still does not have most applications available as easily portable folders with all the resources laid out neatly inside. Linux still does not have system services that let me use my spell checker and german translator in all my programs. Linux still cannot let me see previews of my photoshop files, or even run photoshop well. Moving all my files, programs, settings, certs, etc. from an old laptop to a new one under Linux is a huge pain compared to OS X. Linux is quite simply not there and I have a theory as to why. Most of the people that care about these features and want/need a workstation that just works out of the box have moved to OS X. They might like to have those features on their server, but not enough to put in the time when they can just use OS X.
Now OS X is behind in some areas. Some of the cutting edge features you can use on certain Linux distros are the way of the future. The problem is, they are still unpolished enough that they are not worth using much of the time anyway and when they are, they will probably already have been pulled into OS X.
Basically, the reason I'm using OS X is the same as why you're using Linux. The broken things and missing things in Linux are not being fixed and I want or need them to be.
I think the parent poster is looking at this a little wrong, but there is nothing fundamentally flawed in his assertion that application management and installation on the mac has some advantages over Linux. In truth, it has both advantages and disadvantages and I really wish both Apple and Linux maintainers would adopt a little more from one another. I'd love to see a major distro adopt OpenStep and package applications in such a way that they are portable and logical both internally to the package and within user space. The ability to IM an application to someone and know it will work, or install with a drag and drop is a great workstation feature that is underestimated until one becomes accustomed to it.
At the same time a single interface for installation, un-installation, discovery, downloading, and updates of software is also very powerful and useful. I'd like to see Apple adopt an integrated package manager that provides automated updates for third party software.
The previous poster may not be the most clueful, nor is it likely they take full advantage of the feature they are touting. Still, they have hit upon an area where Linux distros could use some improvement. I can take an installed application on my mac, drag it to a thumb drive, plug into another mac and run it, without worrying about installation or getting it to work. A year later, I can plug that thumb drive back into the same machine, and it will still have all my preferences set the way I left them. I'd love to be able to do this with my Linux boxes. This is not a useless feature.
performance wise a 6x PCI-X motherboard is rare and commodity computers are not built for the buses to independantly talk to each other without invoking cpu.
Hmmm, I'm not sure this is a large impediment. Getting some custom hardware to run your open source router on is not all that hard and companies can certainly use this software to sell the hardware, while someone profits from the support and custom dev (yeah tiny market, I know).
feature wise you Have to have a RTOS or bad things happen when you try to implement QOS.
In the midrange market, I'm not sure this is really true.
...speaking of features they have libraries full of books that talk about the *thousands* of features technologies that real routers implement...
I'm curious about the feature set as well. Some places really don't use anything but the basics, but a a significant number do. I'm not sure what all this software is supposed to be providing. Also, a lot of the market has moved to management tools that require NetFlow or the like and beating Cisco and Juniper for integration with this is going to be hard. Still, there are a lot of routers out there from other companies that provide a subset of features and they do alright.
...implementing a few protocols/nat/firewall does not a router make.
Having worked in the routing industry, I can tell you some of the big players were very concerned about open source routing, to the point of hiring the developers just to get them to stop working on it. I think it could be a viable business strategy. I guess time will tell.
Your original assertion was that "...the pricing difference between the MB and MBP and comparably eqipped PC laptops aren't really so far off" is "not true at all." Thus, you claimed the pricing difference between a Macbook pro and was very far off. You then provided two machine listing with abbreviated feature sets as "proof." Except, because you did not take into account the quality of the components used in the machines or the quality of the engineering in integrating them or even the complete specifications of the machine in question, your proof was flawed.
...they don't technically make "PCs"...
It is irrelevant what names you want to call them. We're talking about comparing a Mac laptop to other laptops based upon the hardware, service, and price.
Sony is right there next to Dell in this year's report.
For this year, which does not indicate long term reliability and only for desktops, not laptops, which is of course what we're talking about. More important to our core point, Apple scores and 82 and Dell only a 56 for laptops. That is a pretty clear indication that there is a significant difference. You can tell because 82 is bigger than 56.
You provide me links...
What part of "pay service" did you not understand?
If "repairs" constitutes virus removal and spyware cleanup, then it has absolutely no reflection on the quality of the machine, and is instead a reflection on the Windows OS.
Since one includes OS X and the other Windows, how does it matter? Do you not think the included and paid for OS is part of what you're buying in each case and makes up part of the value?
You have yet to mention all of the supposed "features" I've missed that are actually reflective of the machine. If we're talking about hardware, I didn't leave anything out.
Please a half dozen people already replied to your post pointing out all the hardware and features you failed to take into account. They include better RAM in the Mac, a pro OS instead of a crippleware one, GigE, firewire, DVI support, graphics card, microphone, webcam, digitial audio ports, light sensors, and backlight. More importantly, you fail to take into account the quality of the parts. Did Apple use the cheapest hard drive they could buy that week or did they use the same one they have been using for testing right along and which has held up to those tests? What about every other part?
Dell and Apple uses are any different when it comes to base hardware--they get the same chips, motherboards, and RAM as everyone else.
This is garbled but I think I get the gist. Dell and Apple do not have the same process for selecting hardware. Dell doesn't even have just one process for selecting hardware. A maxtor drives and a seagate drives may have the same size and theoretically are interchangeable, but that does not mean Apple would use one of them or even that Dell would in their pro laptops, while they almost certainly do in their bottom of the line machines like you provided as an example.
I took two machines with equivalent hardware...
Wrong. You took two machines with very different hardware, designed for different markets, but with some specifications in common and other specifications completely different. That does not make for equivalent hardware.
You are making a qualitative argument, and I am not... Price is a purely subjective thing.
Price is a number. It is quantitative, not subjective. You can compare the price of an Apple laptop and non-Apple laptops with very similar hardware in both spec and quality. You did not do that. You compared two very different laptops and tried to imply that the differences did not matter because they don't matter to you. The problem is, that contradicts your original assertion that they are comparably equipped.
It's like Microsoft opensourcing the NT kernel and keeping Win32, DirectX, COM,.NET*, etc closed. It's fairly meaningless.
Maybe having a large part of the OS open sourced is useless to you, but certainly not to everyone. I know a number of people who would be using OpenBSD if they did not have the ability to make modifications to the open parts of OS X. The mix of open and closed source software in OS X makes it much less useful for some tasks (like re-implementing the OS) but still provides useful functionality to people who need to know exactly how something works in the OS X implementation or is looking to make certain kinds of modifications. It is also useful when tracking down bugs.
Not true on both counts. Unlike you, who decided to reference a study and then not provide a material link to it, I actually did your work for you and found the latest Consumer Reports statistics here and here. And you'll note in both studies that Dell is either at the top, or neck-and-neck, with all of the other major players in the PC arena., with regards to their technical support.
I can't link to the consumer reports numbers, since they are a pay service. You linked to an article that quotes them, which you apparently did not bother to read. In just the tech support category for laptops we have Apple (82), Lenovo (69), and at Dell (56). You're claiming this supports your assertion that Dells don't have inferior tech support statistics as compared to Apple? If you do pay for the consumer reports for the last several years you will see that Dell has been near or at the bottom of the heap consistently for support, reliability, and customer satisfaction, well behind Apple, Sony, and Lenovo/IBM. They have occasionally had a number similar to HP for their consumer models, or Gateway, but in general have lagged behind overall.
I have worked for Dell as a hardware technician, and I know for a fact that their techs get called to do "repair" on software-related issues all the time.
So do all computer manufacturers, what is your point?
This does not prove Apple machines fail less--it proves that for whatever reason, Apple machines are sent in for repairs less frequently. I'm glad you know little enough about statistics that you think the two are equivalent, but they are not.
Sigh. So you have no numbers that support your belief, but you'd like to try to pick at the numbers that do exist and try to figure out a way they could be interpreted to not be damning to your beliefs so you have to change your mind. Okay, enjoy that.
Apple hardware is more expensive than the equivalently-configured PC, in almost all cases, end of story.
Except they're not. Claiming that how many features are highlighted in marketing materials is a good way to judge all aspects of two different products is foolish. This argument has played out here on Slashdot and other places dozens of times over the last few years. Apple has fewer configurations than all other PC manufacturers combined, thus you're more likely to be able to find a system that is exactly what you need at a lower price elsewhere. However, if you build a machine from another vendor with exactly the same hardware as an Apple machine, from a quality vendor, with even close to the same levels of support and reliability, even ignoring the software, you get very similar prices in the range plus or minus 15%. Your half-assed comparison of two very different machines, which you tried to foist upon others as some sort of proof that Apple machines cost double what a comparable PC does are misleading in the extreme. Your methodology was sloppy and because of your ego, you can't admit that you were wrong.
I've always wondered if the Mighty Mouse doesn't violate a lot of Apple's user design principles.
I think their design principals are well represented in this mouse. By default it is a simple one-button mouse anyone can use with no training and which encourages app designers to behave properly. With a small bit of knowledge (for more advanced users) it can be a five button mouse. Simple by default, more complex and powerful for those who want it. The best part about this design is on a multi user system a grandmother and the kids can have a single button mouse, while the more advanced users can have multi button mice, without swapping out any hardware. Of course I don't have kids and am addicted to trackballs, so I'm not going to use this anyway, but it sounds great for other people.
I really miss school. Now, all anybody wants is results.
You obviously had a different school experience than I. We were a top notch engineering university where companies outsourced all sorts of research disguised as grants and donations with strings. I worked on a number of class projects where the profs were more concerned about results than teaching. One of the best EE profs was voted teacher of the year for his exemplary teaching abilities and was canned the same year for pulling in $10K under his agreed upon grant money numbers. This was years ago, so I'm guessing the situation has not been getting better.
irst you tell me I'm wrong and I should find out how wrong by using Google, and then when I say what little is available on Google says I'm right, you demand citations? Well fine, here you go, ya' lazy bum...
The first is economic freedom, which I'm not sure qualifies as a human right and certainly does not correspond to human rights in general. You second citation places the US in the top 25% or so, but is not specific as to where (as you mention). The last shows the US as barely in the top 90%. I'll have to see if I can dig up the research I did back in the day. There were a lot more resources with "grades" easily available when last I looked. Perhaps the US has changed rankings or perhaps it is no longer kosher to be so statistical about abstracts.
I have a Dell 600m that I've owned for two years...blah blah
Anecdotal evidence is mostly worthless. If you want anecdotes, my 7 year old mac tower is still my PVR and we had a RMA rate of 18% a year on the hundreds of Dell towers I bought at a previous job.
Dell is in line with the rest of the market.
Not really. Consumer reports buys laptops every year, anonymously, without any donations and tests them. They also perform random surveys. They may not be 100% the best methodology ever, but they are the most impartial and reliable numbers I've been able to find. Dell ranks near the bottom for customer satisfaction, support surveys, and hardware reliability almost every year, significantly worse than even HP or Gateway. You can buy 100 of the same machine from them and find a wide variety of parts in them because they buy whatever is cheapest at the time with no regard for compatibility or reliability. Their vaunted supply chain lets them undercut many competitors, but it comes at the expense of reliability. Apple ranks near the top of these rankings alongside other, professional grade manufacturers. To try to compare a bottom of the barrel machine from a company that specializes in cheap, unreliable machines to a higher end one from a more credible manufacturer is to ignore the evidence.
But until I can see numbers on MFT, I'm not really inclined to believe Apple computers are built to this mythical higher standard.
Independent testing and surveys from a company who makes it their only business and whose reputation is their only real asset say Apple machines are better quality. I'll put that above your random guess.
If it's worth an extra $1250 to you, great.
The reliability, longevity, and the dozens of hardware elements that were missing from your comparison are certainly worth that to me. For those of us in front of a machine 8-14 hours a day and who lose that much money in time saving every day our machine are nonfunctional, yeah it makes a lot of monetary sense.
But to act like it should naturally be worth the same to everyone else is to be very naive.
You can do a general comparison of two pieces of hardware taking all factors into account or you can do a focused evaluation for a specific purpose like (just the tasks I do daily). Your comparison purported to be the former, but now you're claiming it is the latter. For the former, the comparison was junk because it neglected quality, reliability, and dozens of features. For the latter it might be wonderful. I don't know because I don't know what you do, but neither do I care, since that information is pretty useless to anyone but you.
It's a rather misleading description, though. More accurately: UNIX/Windows NT/OS X
Umm, the memory management issues changed long before OS X existed and this predates even Windows NT for the most part. I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to describe, but you fail to describe either the state of the art now, or the situation as it existed in the past, but rather have presented a muddled, mix of both, while leaving out most of the concepts of modern memory management. "if there is no more memory to give, the program is terminated" is certainly not the case with any modern UNIX or with OS X, as it jumps to swap and then frees memory from other systems according to how they are "niced" among other things.
Repeat ad infinitum, all the while gritting your teeth and reciting the mantra "this is better than Windows, this is better than Windows" until you almost believe it.
The first computer I ever personally owned was dual motherboard, dual processor 66mhz ppc and 486/66 simultaneously running both Windows 3.11 and MacOS 7.x (with a cool key combo to swap the input and display and some nifty utilities to copy and paste between them). I'm about as close to an impartial observer at the time as you could have ever had. The fact was, Windows memory allocation was in theory, much better than MacOS, but in practice was so unstable that it caused an even bigger problem than it solved. If you don't remember this than you either never ran both side by side or you are looking at the past with rose tinted glasses.
Sigh, why do you even bother? This has been done to death. No a pro laptop from Apple with a dozen features you neglect to match up will not be the same price as the cheapest piece of junk you can get from Dell. I think we all know that. Now go get the full specs for the Macbook and try to build it at a reputable computer company (you know not Dell, the one consumer reports rates has having the worst reliability and customer service in the industry). Apple consistently ranks at the top of that list, usually with Sony and IBM/Lenovo. Others have already pointed out the point by point failures to match up features, but really that is less important than overall quality. Dell builds cheap junk. You have to not only compare the same features, but make sure it is from a reputable vendor, not one where companies keep 15% extra gear so they can swap out all the failures they have.
With all of that said, do you really think one Macbook Pro is worth two Dell E1505s?
To me it certainly is, because I won't be constantly dreading when the Apple laptop will die and I don't have to carry a spare with me all the time.
If someone is already willing to break the law to get what they want, making new laws probably won't stop them either.
The law acts, but very slowly especially when big money is involved. In this case MS was stopped after most of the damage was done. Changing the licensing may give them an opportunity to do it again. With the current licensing, the courts have already spoken and doing it would result in immediate punishment for violating the court order.
Usually this is because they have some old version of Microsoft's Java Runtime installed, which only supports Java 1.1 (badly). What a mess! I can't really see how opening it up will make it any worse than it already is today.
Okay so MS broke the law and released an intentionally broken JVM to try and kill Java as a dev platform. The courts stopped them, but you're still dealing with the mess with a few remaining legacy systems from that time. You don't see how giving MS an opportunity to bundle a new broken version on every computer sold in the world could make things worse?
Slashdot Mirror
Constantly streaming video in multiple thumbnail size icons on taskbars...
Umm, I already have that in my OS X dock. What else have you got?
Hmm, I'm not sure we need much stronger, but it does not take much processing power now. Between and encrypted home dir, VPN, and SSL/SSH, everything is already pretty much encrypted at least once.
Maybe a little, but again, not a lot CPU use here.
MUCH beefier JIT on virtual machines, on-the-fly JIT for dynamic languages, more complex client-side rendering of Web content (SVG, etc)
Yeah, that is likely.
Other things that we haven't even thought of because they're impactical now...
One core will be adding a wilderness backdrop and some little birds on my shoulder on the fly to the video chat image of myself I stream to my coworkers. Another will be adding bunny ears or devil horns on the video chat I'm receiving from a certain engineer who drives me nuts. Invest in the realtime video effects market now!
More like someone who is realistic and knows that all browsers have their quirks I would say personally.
There is a difference between a quirk and a complete failure to function in many circumstances. I develop content and Web interfaces as a small part of my job, although I have significant experience in Web design. When it came time to autogenerate Web data from other sources I simply followed the specs for CSS and XHTML to output clean and concise code that can have style changes that match the branding for a given version and is still flexible enough to be easily used to generate XML for other sources and printed copy. It was fairly easy and I made sure to follow best practices. Then comes the testing phase. Firefox... check. Opera... check, Safari... check. Konquerer... check. IE... no dice. Of all the browsers out there, only IE fails to properly read it. Because I followed best practices, it degraded gracefully and IE users get little or no formatting, making it a little harder to read and a lot less pretty. A quirk is when it screws up some element and you work around it. Completely failing to display any of the formatting written in a six year old standard is not a quirk.
Luckily, no one who would use our products is likely to be using IE to do it, so we just ignore IE. Most developers don't have that option so they have to either redesign their site to use even older standards or fill it full or workarounds.
If i want to remove safari from osX.. i go to the apps folder, drag it to the trash, empty the trash. whoo.. it's soo tightly bundled
I agree that this makes a difference, but I don't like your use of the word, "bundled." When "bundling" is discussed with regard to monopolies it has a very specific meaning. It is one form of tying specifically outlawed. Including a CD with Safari on it with every mac, even if it is not installed by default, would qualify as bundling according to the meaning given to it in antitrust laws. The thing is, bundling products is in no way illegal, unless one of the bundled products is a monopoly. Bundling two random products together has no adverse effects upon the market. Bundling a monopolized product and one form a separate market breaks the capitalist model and removes all the advantages it has over communist and other economic models.
A significant number of people on Slashdot do not understand monopolies and antitrust law and using the term "bundling" to mean something else simply confuses them more.
So in essence this is not a sticker to tell you a fruit is ripe, it's a sticker to tell you that it is not unripe.
Coincidentally, grocers would prefer you buy ripe or overripe fruit, since that is what they will have to throw out soonest. Since you'd prefer not to buy overripe fruit and they would prefer that you do, they have a vested interest in not letting you distinguish them from ripe fruit.
That's the problem, most artists have no business sense and thus get fleeced. My wife was watching Biography a couple weeks ago and it talked about Dolly Parton...
Things have changed a lot since Dolly had no reputation and no audience. For one, basically all the radio stations weren't owned by a single corporation. Second, the RIAA members had not consolidated their stranglehold on all major distribution channels. Right now the normal artist's main goal is to be heard. They want everyone to hear their music because they are an artist first and a businessman second. Very few people go into music because they think it is a path to wealth. Given the choice between possibly reaching a large audience, or being specifically stopped from reaching a large audience by a large cartel repeatedly convicted of collaborating to abuse their consolidated position, many choose the former. If they don't they will never sell a CD in a major store or be heard on the radio and most people will never, ever hear of them.
Sure there are counter examples of those few independent artists that won out against all odds, but they are the rare exceptions. Copyright law was designed to benefit artists and encourage them to make more works. It has been abused and morphed by powerful corporations so that it instead is a tool to control art and make sure artists in general make no money off their art. If copyright was abolished entirely it would be a boon to the average recording artist, since the RIAA would have no motivation to stop their distribution and they could still make money the way almost all of them do now, concerts and merchandise.
Come on! Why is it that when Microsoft tries to fix a problem with an upgrade that they the monopoly arguement comes along? Someone else brought up the example of how tightly integrated Safari is in OSX. But if Microsoft wants to reduce the number of unsecured machines; it's a monopolistic move.
Reread your statement and question. Why is it when a monopoly does something with their monopoly it is monopolistic, but when a company that does not have a monopoly does something it isn't? Just possibly because that is the definition of "monopolistic."
Sometimes it seems that if MS ever released a free "Office lite" to compete with a product like iLife that we would have people screaming bloody murder.
You obviously have no understanding of monopolies, antitrust law, or what is illegal and why. Please go read up on it before trying to argue it. If MS released a free "Office lite" to compete with iLife and did it legally, no one would have an issue. If, however, they bundled that new product which is competing (sort of) in an existing market with a product they have monopolized the market for (like Windows) it would be illegal and with good reason.
Security is much higher than IE6
True, I hope.
IE7 supports CSS and XHTML 100 times better than IE6 so sites can start using them
From my testing, not really. My plain vanilla XHTML+CSS degrades gracefully for IE7 just as IE6. They don't conform to the standards enough so that people can write to them and assume IE will work, so people won't.
It would be different if the IE7 list of supported standards, and testing of the Browser itself was not widescale. It has been available almost a full year before its release date, and if that is not enough time for web sites to rip out the crap IE6 kludge code, then maybe this will be a wake up call for them to do so.
When pressed for time I suspect most development houses that don't already write to Web standards and then gracefully degrade will do the same as they always have. They will load their site in IE7 and add some work around to get it to work as well. They still need to work with IE5 so they won't be having some epiphany that they can just write to the standards and expect it to work.
I guess I'm a lot more pessimistic than you.
So in the end, we can start using more advanced CSS and XHTML concepts in the next year without having separate coding to make it display properly in IE6.
From my testing, this just doesn't seem to be true. Luckily, no one who views my pages is likely to be using IE. There was a major problem with some of our Web interfaces (if not working around an IE bug is a problem) making some of the product unusable in IE and no one noticed for years until someone loaded it using an ancient Windows box in a testing lab somewhere.
If a pirate site sends an exe down my "pipe" ;) and I click Run, I become t3h pwn3d. If only people understood that allowing an AX IS effectively allowing its code to run free, we would have less trouble with it.
It is true if people understood that we would have less of a problem, but really not that much less. People don't understand that an exe file they run on their computer has free reign to anything it wants either. Most people assume all programs they run are in a sandbox (or the functional equivalent). If you ask Joe Sixpack if they screwed up by installing trojan that sends spam on their box they will tell you, "no, the computer did." What kind of computer will install a spamming engine and send hundreds of spam messages without telling the user that is what it is doing?
Java has a sandbox, AX doesn't, fine. Sandboxing is not the answer... Or I'd be surfing in a virtual machine and have a different system for every program.
If you look at the direction of OS security, that is where everyone is heading. Not necessarily a VM for everything, but a sandbox or control for the interactions with other programs, the OS, and resources strictly controlled and following some reasonable defaults.
The problem lies in turning the browser into a platform.
This is part of the problem, but it is really a hack to get around the limitations of modern networking and the Windows platform. People see the Web browser a lot like a TV. You use it to view content by switching pages, just like changing channels. The problem is, your TV can't do anything else of value to a third party and a computer can. This can be a good thing, since it adds more functionality. The problem with ActiveX is it does it silently, so people are not told their browser has stopped acting like a TV and has started erasing their family photos. You propose education, but it is a lot easier to make the computer conform to the expectations of the user than change user expectations.
For the (it just works) Ive also had the pleasure of fixing Macs that wont install GIMP or connect to our Novell network.
Macs just work, if you are doing things the recommended way. For example, if GIMP used the native UI and installed as a .app folder like most programs, there would be no problem. Since it installs in basically a Linux compatibility environment using a window server that is not even on the system by default, well that is a different story, just like getting Photoshop for Windows to install on a Linux box by installing WINE. I'm not sure what your Novell issue is, but I think OS X's networking in general needs some work, although their zeroconf is head and shoulders above everyone else's.
Apple has done some very good things to heaten up competition but im talking technically Apple has done some bad things.
I don't know about this. Apple has introduced features which were then copied by Windows and Linux, but more and more often Linux does not provide those features. I think this is because so many Linux desktop users and developers moved to OS X and no longer have an itch to scratch. I don't see Linux catching up anytime soon.
Ok, in that case, I read a series of article in Scientific American that had a lot of studies about your mother's number of genital warts.
Whatever turns you on...
You linked references to the data including numbers yourself. If you don't believe you, well I guess I don't care.
I should have said "value" instead of price.
Value is subjective. Price is not. Thus in a comparison we have to consider the latter, not the former.
You have a fundamental lack of understanding of the difference between qualitative and quantitative.
You know just because you don't understand something, doesn't mean someone else made a mistake.
All of the things you think make Apple worth more money are all qualitative.
How many digital audio ports on the mac? One. How many on the Dell? Zero. Are one and zero quantities or not? More important to this comparison, how much does each component cost in the market?
How many times will you assert this with no proof. Where can I buy a machine with all these built in for $1000 less than the macbook pro? Just send me a link. You won't because you can't. The market value of these features integrated and the whole thing built with the quality of parts that go into a pro grade notebook is more than you are guessing.
All of this "market" and "quality" bullshit you're spouting is irrelevant, because it is all qualitative.
Not at all. Higher grade parts cost more money. Money is quantitative. The market judges the quality and assigns a quantity.
Every consumer decides, individually, if the cost associated with it is warranted.
That is qualitative and has no place in an objective comparison. Otherwise, I can buy a broken macbook for $100 bucks and it looks cooler than any Dell on the market. Since that is the only feature that matters to me, the macbook is 1/10 or less the price of the Dell.
The hardware you've mentioned, at most, narrows the price difference from $1250 to $950.
Great, just show me where I can buy one at that price.
Take a stats class before you have to debate something important and really embarass yourself.
You're the one dredging up the same old crap that has been disproved over and over again for several years now. You still can't find a machine with the same features from a reputable company for significantly less. Until you can, you're just dancing around the issue.
Oh, you've got me all wrong. Linux still has rough edges that infuriate me. But Linux's stupidities can be fixed, unlike OS X's (or OS 9's) which can't. Or at least won't.
I use Linux every day, but not as my primary workstation. The reason for this is that Linux's stupidities are not fixed, at least not the ones I care about and not as many of them as on OS X.
I'd much rather my workstation OS were fully open source and more customizable, but the functionality and application availability is just not there. I spend less time maintaining my OS X workstation than I do some of my servers, who just serve a couple simple tasks that have not changed in years. Linux still does not have most applications available as easily portable folders with all the resources laid out neatly inside. Linux still does not have system services that let me use my spell checker and german translator in all my programs. Linux still cannot let me see previews of my photoshop files, or even run photoshop well. Moving all my files, programs, settings, certs, etc. from an old laptop to a new one under Linux is a huge pain compared to OS X. Linux is quite simply not there and I have a theory as to why. Most of the people that care about these features and want/need a workstation that just works out of the box have moved to OS X. They might like to have those features on their server, but not enough to put in the time when they can just use OS X.
Now OS X is behind in some areas. Some of the cutting edge features you can use on certain Linux distros are the way of the future. The problem is, they are still unpolished enough that they are not worth using much of the time anyway and when they are, they will probably already have been pulled into OS X.
Basically, the reason I'm using OS X is the same as why you're using Linux. The broken things and missing things in Linux are not being fixed and I want or need them to be.
You've made a totally unreasoned comparison.
I think the parent poster is looking at this a little wrong, but there is nothing fundamentally flawed in his assertion that application management and installation on the mac has some advantages over Linux. In truth, it has both advantages and disadvantages and I really wish both Apple and Linux maintainers would adopt a little more from one another. I'd love to see a major distro adopt OpenStep and package applications in such a way that they are portable and logical both internally to the package and within user space. The ability to IM an application to someone and know it will work, or install with a drag and drop is a great workstation feature that is underestimated until one becomes accustomed to it.
At the same time a single interface for installation, un-installation, discovery, downloading, and updates of software is also very powerful and useful. I'd like to see Apple adopt an integrated package manager that provides automated updates for third party software.
The previous poster may not be the most clueful, nor is it likely they take full advantage of the feature they are touting. Still, they have hit upon an area where Linux distros could use some improvement. I can take an installed application on my mac, drag it to a thumb drive, plug into another mac and run it, without worrying about installation or getting it to work. A year later, I can plug that thumb drive back into the same machine, and it will still have all my preferences set the way I left them. I'd love to be able to do this with my Linux boxes. This is not a useless feature.
performance wise a 6x PCI-X motherboard is rare and commodity computers are not built for the buses to independantly talk to each other without invoking cpu.
Hmmm, I'm not sure this is a large impediment. Getting some custom hardware to run your open source router on is not all that hard and companies can certainly use this software to sell the hardware, while someone profits from the support and custom dev (yeah tiny market, I know).
feature wise you Have to have a RTOS or bad things happen when you try to implement QOS.
In the midrange market, I'm not sure this is really true.
I'm curious about the feature set as well. Some places really don't use anything but the basics, but a a significant number do. I'm not sure what all this software is supposed to be providing. Also, a lot of the market has moved to management tools that require NetFlow or the like and beating Cisco and Juniper for integration with this is going to be hard. Still, there are a lot of routers out there from other companies that provide a subset of features and they do alright.
Having worked in the routing industry, I can tell you some of the big players were very concerned about open source routing, to the point of hiring the developers just to get them to stop working on it. I think it could be a viable business strategy. I guess time will tell.
This is what I said...
Your original assertion was that "...the pricing difference between the MB and MBP and comparably eqipped PC laptops aren't really so far off" is "not true at all." Thus, you claimed the pricing difference between a Macbook pro and was very far off. You then provided two machine listing with abbreviated feature sets as "proof." Except, because you did not take into account the quality of the components used in the machines or the quality of the engineering in integrating them or even the complete specifications of the machine in question, your proof was flawed.
It is irrelevant what names you want to call them. We're talking about comparing a Mac laptop to other laptops based upon the hardware, service, and price.
Sony is right there next to Dell in this year's report.
For this year, which does not indicate long term reliability and only for desktops, not laptops, which is of course what we're talking about. More important to our core point, Apple scores and 82 and Dell only a 56 for laptops. That is a pretty clear indication that there is a significant difference. You can tell because 82 is bigger than 56.
You provide me links...
What part of "pay service" did you not understand?
If "repairs" constitutes virus removal and spyware cleanup, then it has absolutely no reflection on the quality of the machine, and is instead a reflection on the Windows OS.
Since one includes OS X and the other Windows, how does it matter? Do you not think the included and paid for OS is part of what you're buying in each case and makes up part of the value?
You have yet to mention all of the supposed "features" I've missed that are actually reflective of the machine. If we're talking about hardware, I didn't leave anything out.
Please a half dozen people already replied to your post pointing out all the hardware and features you failed to take into account. They include better RAM in the Mac, a pro OS instead of a crippleware one, GigE, firewire, DVI support, graphics card, microphone, webcam, digitial audio ports, light sensors, and backlight. More importantly, you fail to take into account the quality of the parts. Did Apple use the cheapest hard drive they could buy that week or did they use the same one they have been using for testing right along and which has held up to those tests? What about every other part?
Dell and Apple uses are any different when it comes to base hardware--they get the same chips, motherboards, and RAM as everyone else.
This is garbled but I think I get the gist. Dell and Apple do not have the same process for selecting hardware. Dell doesn't even have just one process for selecting hardware. A maxtor drives and a seagate drives may have the same size and theoretically are interchangeable, but that does not mean Apple would use one of them or even that Dell would in their pro laptops, while they almost certainly do in their bottom of the line machines like you provided as an example.
I took two machines with equivalent hardware...
Wrong. You took two machines with very different hardware, designed for different markets, but with some specifications in common and other specifications completely different. That does not make for equivalent hardware.
You are making a qualitative argument, and I am not... Price is a purely subjective thing.
Price is a number. It is quantitative, not subjective. You can compare the price of an Apple laptop and non-Apple laptops with very similar hardware in both spec and quality. You did not do that. You compared two very different laptops and tried to imply that the differences did not matter because they don't matter to you. The problem is, that contradicts your original assertion that they are comparably equipped.
Apples are more expensive.
This is an empty assertion and you'v
It's like Microsoft opensourcing the NT kernel and keeping Win32, DirectX, COM, .NET*, etc closed. It's fairly meaningless.
Maybe having a large part of the OS open sourced is useless to you, but certainly not to everyone. I know a number of people who would be using OpenBSD if they did not have the ability to make modifications to the open parts of OS X. The mix of open and closed source software in OS X makes it much less useful for some tasks (like re-implementing the OS) but still provides useful functionality to people who need to know exactly how something works in the OS X implementation or is looking to make certain kinds of modifications. It is also useful when tracking down bugs.
Not true on both counts. Unlike you, who decided to reference a study and then not provide a material link to it, I actually did your work for you and found the latest Consumer Reports statistics here and here. And you'll note in both studies that Dell is either at the top, or neck-and-neck, with all of the other major players in the PC arena., with regards to their technical support.
I can't link to the consumer reports numbers, since they are a pay service. You linked to an article that quotes them, which you apparently did not bother to read. In just the tech support category for laptops we have Apple (82), Lenovo (69), and at Dell (56). You're claiming this supports your assertion that Dells don't have inferior tech support statistics as compared to Apple? If you do pay for the consumer reports for the last several years you will see that Dell has been near or at the bottom of the heap consistently for support, reliability, and customer satisfaction, well behind Apple, Sony, and Lenovo/IBM. They have occasionally had a number similar to HP for their consumer models, or Gateway, but in general have lagged behind overall.
I have worked for Dell as a hardware technician, and I know for a fact that their techs get called to do "repair" on software-related issues all the time.
So do all computer manufacturers, what is your point?
This does not prove Apple machines fail less--it proves that for whatever reason, Apple machines are sent in for repairs less frequently. I'm glad you know little enough about statistics that you think the two are equivalent, but they are not.
Sigh. So you have no numbers that support your belief, but you'd like to try to pick at the numbers that do exist and try to figure out a way they could be interpreted to not be damning to your beliefs so you have to change your mind. Okay, enjoy that.
Apple hardware is more expensive than the equivalently-configured PC, in almost all cases, end of story.
Except they're not. Claiming that how many features are highlighted in marketing materials is a good way to judge all aspects of two different products is foolish. This argument has played out here on Slashdot and other places dozens of times over the last few years. Apple has fewer configurations than all other PC manufacturers combined, thus you're more likely to be able to find a system that is exactly what you need at a lower price elsewhere. However, if you build a machine from another vendor with exactly the same hardware as an Apple machine, from a quality vendor, with even close to the same levels of support and reliability, even ignoring the software, you get very similar prices in the range plus or minus 15%. Your half-assed comparison of two very different machines, which you tried to foist upon others as some sort of proof that Apple machines cost double what a comparable PC does are misleading in the extreme. Your methodology was sloppy and because of your ego, you can't admit that you were wrong.
I've always wondered if the Mighty Mouse doesn't violate a lot of Apple's user design principles.
I think their design principals are well represented in this mouse. By default it is a simple one-button mouse anyone can use with no training and which encourages app designers to behave properly. With a small bit of knowledge (for more advanced users) it can be a five button mouse. Simple by default, more complex and powerful for those who want it. The best part about this design is on a multi user system a grandmother and the kids can have a single button mouse, while the more advanced users can have multi button mice, without swapping out any hardware. Of course I don't have kids and am addicted to trackballs, so I'm not going to use this anyway, but it sounds great for other people.
I really miss school. Now, all anybody wants is results.
You obviously had a different school experience than I. We were a top notch engineering university where companies outsourced all sorts of research disguised as grants and donations with strings. I worked on a number of class projects where the profs were more concerned about results than teaching. One of the best EE profs was voted teacher of the year for his exemplary teaching abilities and was canned the same year for pulling in $10K under his agreed upon grant money numbers. This was years ago, so I'm guessing the situation has not been getting better.
irst you tell me I'm wrong and I should find out how wrong by using Google, and then when I say what little is available on Google says I'm right, you demand citations? Well fine, here you go, ya' lazy bum...
The first is economic freedom, which I'm not sure qualifies as a human right and certainly does not correspond to human rights in general. You second citation places the US in the top 25% or so, but is not specific as to where (as you mention). The last shows the US as barely in the top 90%. I'll have to see if I can dig up the research I did back in the day. There were a lot more resources with "grades" easily available when last I looked. Perhaps the US has changed rankings or perhaps it is no longer kosher to be so statistical about abstracts.
I have a Dell 600m that I've owned for two years...blah blah
Anecdotal evidence is mostly worthless. If you want anecdotes, my 7 year old mac tower is still my PVR and we had a RMA rate of 18% a year on the hundreds of Dell towers I bought at a previous job.
Dell is in line with the rest of the market.
Not really. Consumer reports buys laptops every year, anonymously, without any donations and tests them. They also perform random surveys. They may not be 100% the best methodology ever, but they are the most impartial and reliable numbers I've been able to find. Dell ranks near the bottom for customer satisfaction, support surveys, and hardware reliability almost every year, significantly worse than even HP or Gateway. You can buy 100 of the same machine from them and find a wide variety of parts in them because they buy whatever is cheapest at the time with no regard for compatibility or reliability. Their vaunted supply chain lets them undercut many competitors, but it comes at the expense of reliability. Apple ranks near the top of these rankings alongside other, professional grade manufacturers. To try to compare a bottom of the barrel machine from a company that specializes in cheap, unreliable machines to a higher end one from a more credible manufacturer is to ignore the evidence.
But until I can see numbers on MFT, I'm not really inclined to believe Apple computers are built to this mythical higher standard.
Independent testing and surveys from a company who makes it their only business and whose reputation is their only real asset say Apple machines are better quality. I'll put that above your random guess.
If it's worth an extra $1250 to you, great.
The reliability, longevity, and the dozens of hardware elements that were missing from your comparison are certainly worth that to me. For those of us in front of a machine 8-14 hours a day and who lose that much money in time saving every day our machine are nonfunctional, yeah it makes a lot of monetary sense.
But to act like it should naturally be worth the same to everyone else is to be very naive.
You can do a general comparison of two pieces of hardware taking all factors into account or you can do a focused evaluation for a specific purpose like (just the tasks I do daily). Your comparison purported to be the former, but now you're claiming it is the latter. For the former, the comparison was junk because it neglected quality, reliability, and dozens of features. For the latter it might be wonderful. I don't know because I don't know what you do, but neither do I care, since that information is pretty useless to anyone but you.
It's a rather misleading description, though. More accurately: UNIX/Windows NT/OS X
Umm, the memory management issues changed long before OS X existed and this predates even Windows NT for the most part. I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to describe, but you fail to describe either the state of the art now, or the situation as it existed in the past, but rather have presented a muddled, mix of both, while leaving out most of the concepts of modern memory management. "if there is no more memory to give, the program is terminated" is certainly not the case with any modern UNIX or with OS X, as it jumps to swap and then frees memory from other systems according to how they are "niced" among other things.
Repeat ad infinitum, all the while gritting your teeth and reciting the mantra "this is better than Windows, this is better than Windows" until you almost believe it.
The first computer I ever personally owned was dual motherboard, dual processor 66mhz ppc and 486/66 simultaneously running both Windows 3.11 and MacOS 7.x (with a cool key combo to swap the input and display and some nifty utilities to copy and paste between them). I'm about as close to an impartial observer at the time as you could have ever had. The fact was, Windows memory allocation was in theory, much better than MacOS, but in practice was so unstable that it caused an even bigger problem than it solved. If you don't remember this than you either never ran both side by side or you are looking at the past with rose tinted glasses.
Memory protection used to be explained in the following way:
For all practical purposes this was the state of things for many years.
Sigh, why do you even bother? This has been done to death. No a pro laptop from Apple with a dozen features you neglect to match up will not be the same price as the cheapest piece of junk you can get from Dell. I think we all know that. Now go get the full specs for the Macbook and try to build it at a reputable computer company (you know not Dell, the one consumer reports rates has having the worst reliability and customer service in the industry). Apple consistently ranks at the top of that list, usually with Sony and IBM/Lenovo. Others have already pointed out the point by point failures to match up features, but really that is less important than overall quality. Dell builds cheap junk. You have to not only compare the same features, but make sure it is from a reputable vendor, not one where companies keep 15% extra gear so they can swap out all the failures they have.
With all of that said, do you really think one Macbook Pro is worth two Dell E1505s?
To me it certainly is, because I won't be constantly dreading when the Apple laptop will die and I don't have to carry a spare with me all the time.
If someone is already willing to break the law to get what they want, making new laws probably won't stop them either.
The law acts, but very slowly especially when big money is involved. In this case MS was stopped after most of the damage was done. Changing the licensing may give them an opportunity to do it again. With the current licensing, the courts have already spoken and doing it would result in immediate punishment for violating the court order.
Usually this is because they have some old version of Microsoft's Java Runtime installed, which only supports Java 1.1 (badly). What a mess! I can't really see how opening it up will make it any worse than it already is today.
Okay so MS broke the law and released an intentionally broken JVM to try and kill Java as a dev platform. The courts stopped them, but you're still dealing with the mess with a few remaining legacy systems from that time. You don't see how giving MS an opportunity to bundle a new broken version on every computer sold in the world could make things worse?