Soon to come: sub $800 iBooks and $450 mid sized desktop cases built from good hardware at a good price with a good OS. That also run more software, since software makers will have an eaisier job of making their stuff portable.
Soon to come: The death of OS X specific coding, if they actually allow Windows applications to run natively. Assume for a moment that they achieve Rosetta-like compatibility and keep a reasonable speed for most applications. What, then, is the incentive for a large developer like Adobe to write separate version of their software when you can just run it in the emulation layer?
Also, as I'm sure has been pointed out here innumerable times, Apple would have to make one hell of a leap in software sales to make up for lost hardware if the OS is opened to commodity PC hardware. It's not like they were losing 30-40% of their marketshare back during the PowerPC cloning da... Oh, they were, weren't they?
Contrary to what many people claim, Apples largest revenue stream is still their hardware, and not iPods.
I remember quite a few compatibility systems that came along over the years, and Orange Micro was the one name that stuck in my head. I never bought one, never used one, but their ads used to festoon the pages of mac magazines.
Here's the first relevant result from Google, a posting to Applenews Belgium about the Cyrix-based 200mhz OrangePC 620 arriving. Furthing digginsg shows that the company's website appears defunct, going to a default hosting page.
Just what core clock is your G5, then? I'm running a dual 1.8 with the 9600XT card in it and the fans only ever rev up high at boot. Any other time it's just about as quiet as my eMac 700, barring some ridiculous and continuous load on both processors at once.
When fanatical North Koreans fly airplanes into American buildings then I'll start to worry about them more. Until then I'm worrying about the religious zealots that want to see me dead.
Uh, so you're worried about Saudi Arabia, then? I seem to recall that a majority of the hijackers were Saudi nationals, not Iranian.
The G5 is a bad tradeoff at the moment, but the G4 is bad as well. I agree G4s may be appropriate for iBooks, but these are PowerBooks, and the slow bus simply precludes their use in many applications. The Centrino platform from Intel has lower power usage and dramatically better performance (particularly with the FSB), and it's only going to get worse with Centrino II.
I guess it's a good thing that Freescale isn't using the traditional MPC74xx processors - AKA the "G4" - in their next generation. There will be a successor to the current line that will be pin-compatible with the older generation and bringing a slightly bumped frontside bus (200mhz instead of 167mhz) and clockspeed upwards of 1.8ghz on roughly 14 watts. Then, it starts getting interesting.
Back when Motorola spun off their chips division and Freescale was formed, they outlined a new product spread. There would be three new cores (the e300, e500, e700) and a modified 74xx (the e600) that would take over their current and future needs. So far, the e300 and e500 are shipping to embedded processor customers under the PowerQUIC trade name, with a number of variants that share many features. More interesting to the mac community, though, is the recently announced e600 core that's being listed under the MPC8641 part number.
What is it?
Well, for starters, it's binary-compatible with the 74xx and carries some enhanced instructions to do with the system on chip design. Gone is the traditional frontside bus, replaced with an on-die DDR and DDR2 memory controller (667mhz maximum), a PCI-e bridge, a RapidIO bridge, four hardware gigabit NICs with encryption acceleration, SATA and (it's rumored) SATA2 controllers, and some pretty snazzy other tricks. It comes in two flavors - single and dual core - and weighs in under 25 watts in either one, running at 1.5-1.6ghz per core. Each core has 1MB of L2 cache running at core frequency, linked and shared with branch prediction and other logics that allow the whole thing to basically act as 2MB of L2 for both chips if that would be beneficial. There's also the minor (ha!) inclusion of twin dual-precision 128-bit AltiVec units, which has traditionally been something Motorola/Freescale has done far, far better than IBM.
Oh, and to really make the nerds drool, the MPC8641D (for dual core) can boot a separate operating system on each core. In that mode, it would run as single processors independently executing for the system assigned to it.
Funny... Secunia claims that OS X "does not stand out as particularly more secure than the competition," and yet it had a quarter fewer advisories than XP Pro, out of which XP allowed system access half again as often (that's 50%, for the math challenged). There's also an odd bit of obfuscation where the Red Hat remote-exploit numbers are put in text (66%) and the OS X ones are put in numerical form (61%).
Digging into the Secunia site reveals OS X has 14 issues in 2004, for the entire year. I'm reading through them and it looks like most of these are things to do with apache, ssl, and other Open Source components. They're counting the libpng against Apple, for Christ's sake!
Also, the article is dead wrong on the number of "critical" issues. Secunia's own site only marks them as 8% for 2003-2004 rather than the story-claimed 19%. More shoddy reporting is revealed in the pie charts, which show OS X as having 26% system access attacks in the database instead of 32%.
I highly recommend that people go read the Secunia site for themselves. The Red Hat numbers are off, too, and worse than OS X's.
The iPod Photo will still, of course, sell well, because certain people will buy anything Apple produces no matter what it is. I think iPod Photo is way overpriced for its features, though the size of the hard drive might make it usable as a portable hard drive with a mp3/aac player.
--Hitcahi Travelstar 60GB 2.5" drive that is larger, more power consuming, and cheaper than the 1.5" drives used in iPods. - $130
--Macally 2.5" enclosure with bus-powered FireWire and USB2.0, which also doesn't have the embedded controls and audio decoder of an iPod. - $30
--Integration with iTunes Music Store, award winning interface and design, ability to act as mobile home directory for Apple Macintoshes, simplicity and ease of use, and attractive exterior... - Not available.
Sure, you can do some of the things the iPod does cheaper. Can you do them better, though? Apple's using tiny parts (the 1.5" microdrives probably aren't cheap) and doing things their usual way. You pay a premium, but it's for a nice, functional, easy to use device.
Go through that list: of the things that Apple releases in open source form, none are a regular part of BSD or Linux installations. The open source Apple has released is open source mainly of interest to Apple developers. That's rather self-serving.
I would have thought that would be self-evident, in that they're in this to make money and not just to write code. I'll return to this point in a moment, since it's important, but there's a better way to respond to your criticism. Someone else has already done it in a older topic, in fact:
As for Apple contributing back... I know for a fact that they do, and always have, throughout the history of NeXTSTEP/OpenStep/Mac OS X Server/Darwin/Mac OS X (including when it was formerly owned by NeXT). How could a sensible, breathing adult think that Apple would ever fix a bug in BSD and not contribute it back? Do they want to fix that bug again and again as they continue to sync their Unix-layer up with others? For years, Apple's disk utility has included partitioning schemes for various Linux distros. Note the steps it takes to turn a Microsoft PC into a Linux PC, and then note the steps it takes to turn an Apple PC into a Linux PC. Sooooo much easier on the Mac.
Also, consider that Apple developed almost all of the GUI features that we now take for granted, including overlapping windows, pull-down menus, and drag-and-drop. They also pioneered playing movies and audio on PC's, shipping the first CD-ROM drive, in fact. I mean, Microsoft copies Apple, Linux/Gnome/KDE copy Microsoft, and then a Linux guy has the temerity to write an article about how Apple has never done anything for Linux?
Amazing--it's GCC! And even more amazing still, it's GPL'd! Apple has already fulfilled its legal obligation to make publicly available its modifications to GCC under the GPL. Moreover, it is continually working on merging its changes back into GCC 3 and assigning the copyright to the FSF. This is a boon to Apple's customers (eventually being able to build the official GCC 3 "out of the box"), but even more importantly, other platforms like LinuxPPC and GNUstep will be able to use Apple's AltiVec auto-vectorization and improved Obojective C support out of the box as well. This is truly beneficial to the community at large (e.g. non-Apple customers and Darwin users).
Take a look at that list I gave of projects Apple makes use of. The GPL requires them to publish any modifications they make to them, so they're naturally contributing back to all kinds of things that might be in any distribution - gcc, tcsh, bash, emacs, vi. I'm not a professional programmer and I certainly don't work for Apple, but even I know that they're doing more than they have to for Open Source.
Giving something is more than giving nothing, after all.
Big parts of OS X are proprietary, including the GUI. Furthermore, Apple is working hard to keep it that way. For example, while Apple could easily and smoothly integrate X11 into the system, in the same way they integrated Classic and Carbon, enabling fully integrated X11 apps, they steadfastly refuse to. When asked why they tell people to port their apps to their proprietary GUI, Cocoa.
I can think of two reasons, right off the top of my head, for Apple not to include seamless integration of X11 (though they do let it run rootless, which isn't too far away). The first is that they have these things called human interface guidelines that they like to use in their designs. I've used X11 and it doesn't exactly adhere. The other reason is that, as someone before me has posted, there's absolutely no benefit to Appl
I'm sorry, but what? You're saying that OS X is a "relatively proprietary operating system?"
I suppose that's why the kernel is Open Source and compiled on a GNU platform (GCC is the default compiler for the BSD subsystem), hmmm? Maybe that explains why just about everything aside from the graphics layer and a handfull of other code can be - and often is - contributed back upstream to the FOSS community. Safari is an enhanced front-end for Konqueror, and Apple sends many of their bugfixes back up the pipe. There are other examples, but that's one that just about anyone will have heard of.
Standards that are part of OS X include LDAP,
Kerberos, OpenSSL, OpenSSH, 3DES (Triple Digital Encryption Standard), TLS (Transport Layer Security), S/MIME, X.509 Certificate Handling, L2TP (Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol), PPTP (Point to Point Tunneling Protocol), EAP (Extensible Access Protection), LEAP (Lightweight Extensible Access Protection), PEAP (Protected Extensible Access Protection), TTLS (Tunneled Transport Layer Security), VPN support for Microsoft and Cisco
RSA secureID, and IPFW (the BSD firewall).
All of the standard UNIX utilities and scripting languages are included in Mac OS X: editors such as emacs, vim and pico; file management tools such as cp, mv, ls and gnutar; shell scripts including bash (the default shell), tcsh (csh) and zsh; and scripting languages such as Perl, PHP, tcl, Ruby and Python. Python users can also script the powerful Quartz compositing engine.
Here, you can find a complete list of Apple's ties to Open Souce.
So, while Apple may not be entirely free and open with everything they do, I think it's more than slightly hasty to write them off as just another corporate closed-source shop. There are some deep ties between OS X and its roots, especially with the BSDs. Perhaps you might want to read up on Apple's dabbling with Linux in the past before making such claims. More, and less of Apple's marketing, can be found here, if you're interested in how Mach and OS X came to be. This article is a subsection of a much larger history of Apple's operatings systems and the influences thereupon.
The short version is that Steve Jobs went off to found NeXT, where he and his teams created an operating system from the Mach 2.5 kernel. Just as Mach had been intended, it was a framework to create your own system around and not a whole OS in and of itself. Later, when he returned to Apple, it's fairly obvious that Jobs brought along his Mach love and, well... The rest is history.
Despite what some would have you believe, it's possible to patch whatever version of a given utility or program you're using through the terminal. I maintain a number of applications that aren't Apple's distrubted choice - or distributed with their products at all! - because I decided I wanted them. It's pretty simple, since I have access to dselect, apt-get, and fink to maintain my OSS library.
Between the power and stability of OS X and the design brilliance of Johnathan Ive, Apple's been reversing their death spiral rather handily. If one considers that they've been making consistent, year over year leaps since his return, the future looks pretty bright for the habitually "beleaguered" and "proprietary" inhabitant of Cupertino, California.
The place that OS X is now is where Linux needs to be - fast, stable, pretty, and usable. So far, the Linux community can manage three out of the four, but there are serious problems with the usability and appearance aspects. Until the day I can have my sister or grandmother be able to pop in a CD or DVD and just click through and have it work when they're done, the job just isn't over. Keep trying, though! I see Apple and the FOSS community as allies and not enemies, so I'd like to see what can be done on both fronts.
The Sager notebook you linked to is a Pentium 4 (hence a battery hog), and looks like it's going to be their replacement for the Sager NP8790 high-end. If you check their website, it seems that you're paying at least twice what you'd pay for an iBook.
The PowerBook, on the other hand, offers 128MB Radeon 9700 graphics as a BTO option for, as I recall, $50 to upgrade. Oh, and it gets more than an hours of battery life, what with drawing 12 watts instead of 105 for the processor. Perhaps a more fair comparison is the Sager NP1280, with a lower screen size, a Pentium M for battery consumption, and (gasps of shock, all around) shared-memory Intel Extreme 2 graphics. At least it's only $400 more than the iBook, right?
Could you point me to a major manufacturer's sub-$1000 notebook with a card that does support pixel shaders, perhaps? It'd look especially good if you could do it with a processor that remotely compares to the G4 in power consumption and a setup that mirrors the feature set.
Thanks in advance.
Re:Yeah, with Crolles2, the 7448 and the MPC7448
on
Apple Announces New iBooks
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· Score: 5, Informative
Then let me break it down for you, since this is apparently so difficult.
The processors that Apple dubbed the "G4" are various iterations of the Motorola 74xx core. Targetted at the embedded and low-power draw computing markets, originally, the highly efficient design was very competitive with anything else in the same price bracket for a while.
When Motorla spun off their semiconductor division, it took the name Freescale and began to ally itself with other technology firms. Right now, Freescale, Phillips, and STMicroelectronics are sharing fabrication space in a facility they built in France. This site, known as Crolles2, is intended to be a next-generation workhorse and research lab, where they can apply the lessons learned from the failing and lagging Motorola line. They'd had successfuly 90nm test runs as early as 2003, with engineering samples being produces in 2004, and a plan to start the sampling process for 65nm in 2005.
The product line for Freescale is one of legacy - older Motorla cores like the 74xx series, the 603e, and others - and some new designs. Among the new designs are the e300 and e500 embedded systems chips (shipping now), and the e600 and e700 designs. The first appearance of the once-e600 will be the MPC9461D, which is a dual-core enhanced 74xx chip that will have two 128-bit AltiVec SIMD units, 1 MB of L2 cache per processor, on-die memory control and access to DDR2 (up to 667mhz), four on-die MACs for networking, encryption protocol support on the chip, and the ability to scale past 1.5ghz (the current high-end for 74xx cores).
As a stepping stone between the present and the future, Freescale is revising the existing MPC7447A processor. Breaking from the traditional upper limit of 167mhz on the MPX system bus, they're offering it at 200mhz on the bus, with a jump in core frequency to 1.8ghz. This compares to the previous high-end chips, the MPC7447A and older 7445/7455, with higher clocks and system access ability but lower power draw.
As has been pointed out numerous times, Core Image will support any machine that has even a remotely modern GPU. It will turn off the prettier eye candy so that it will still run, but the system won't at all be made unusable.
Core Image, like Core Audio, is an optional toolset for people who feel like adding on to their programs. It's not at all a requirement to use the enhancements in Tiger. Hell, if Apple keeps up their delivery on performance, Tiger will probably be even faster than previous iterations, depending on how they handle Spotlight and the other new features.
Actually, unless I missed a press release somewhere, the 200mhz bus isn't a factor until Freescale rolls out the MPC7448 chip sometime in the near future. That's the one that's ridiculously low power (Freescale claims 10 watts at 1.8ghz), with pin-compatibility to the older parts and the upgraded bus. These are likely MPC7445 or MPC7447A parts, which are slower, hotter, and not manufactured at 90nm like the new offerings will be.
I expect to see the 7448 as an incremental update to the PowerBooks, until apple can stick the MPC8461D dual-cores in their place later next year. Apple is, as usual, playing their cards close to their chest, but anyone that's been paying attention to Freescale's moves knows that Crolles2 is online and rolling out parts from the production lines. They've got functional 90nm production, the last I heard, and are working on tooling for samples at 65nm in 2005.
...I like the sound of my own voice (and I forgot to add something), so I figured that I'd come back here and mention it.
You can't install anything through an installer if you're not an administrator, either. Software installers are password locked to accounts at the admin level or higher.
Just to check, I swapped over to a non-admin account I keep for guests and tried both installers and drag-and-drop installations. The installers ask for an administrator password, and drag-and-drop to the applications folder says that it can't be modified. It seems that my permissions (which are mostly default) are working properly.
On a whim, I tried to drag the.app bundle into the user's home directory, which worked. However, thanks to the structure of OS X, the worst that any known exploit can do is wipe that directory and that's it. The proof of concept media trojan showed that a month or three back, and so we know it can happen, but really... Human stupidity is human stupidity, and even Apple can't account for all of the possibilities that brings in.
If you surf the web as an Administrator [Root] on OSX, or if you surf the web as an Administrator [Root] on Linux, you're every bit as prone to this stuff as any Microsoft user surfing the web as an Administrator [or you would be, if those operating systems had large enough market share for the spyware people to be bothered with writing spyware for them].
Wrong. I see this allegation all the time from people who never use the system in question, but OS X has this wonderful notion that you ought to consent to software being installed on your system. Even as administrator, there are some things you just can't do without authenticating (usually through a password dialog), and one of those is installing any software that uses a program to place it instead the old drag-and-drop method. If you want software to be put onto the system, you have to do it and that's all there is to it.
In order for spyware to work on OS X, it's going to have to be trojanized. There's not much you can do about the human factor, other than running as non-administrator, but that's a FAR smaller deal than it is for Windows.
Oh, and you prove your ignorance by comparing administrator status with root. There is no default root account on OS X, though you can enable it through NetInfo if you really get tired of using sudo. Why you'd do so, I can barely imagine, but there you go. Administrators are more priveleged than other users, but they're hardly root.
I'm not disagreeing with you or anything, but the opterons blow the snot out of my G5 in all the applications I run on them. the upshot here being that I can do the development for these apps on my mac, and they just *run* on my bsd servers. that's a huge plus for me, and is certainly worth the $5k the G5 box cost me.
Well, I'd be hard pressed to show that the Opteron doesn't win at some things, and perhaps even most things. Computers are tools and you ought to use the one that gets the job done, after all, so fielding a chip that does a better job for your particular task makes sense.
The only point I was making is that the Opteron isn't necessarily king at everything, so your original statement that it stomps the G5 was inaccurate at best. Also, as someone else points out, the use of GCC sometimes limits the performance in exchange for sticking with the FOSS solution. The use of IBM's apparently wonderful XCC C/C+ compiler lends some impressive speedup to most applications, to the tune of what I've anecdotally gathered is 30-200% performance increase for some routines.
Is it just me or would you take a 4% profit per machine instead of a 23% profit per machine on a deal like this if you were Apple? Which actually points out a small fact. Apple still makes an average of 12% on educational sales (even more if you factor in Applecare and service plans) I think if they are serious about enterprise and education, they'd take 3-4% profit. I also think that they don't realize how many of these workers would love them and buy them for home use.
It's just you, or you're not factoring in the most important aspect of Apple's hardware prices. They don't really make much money from anything else. No, really.
Laptops like the PowerBook and iBook have eclipsed desktop computers, accounting for 53 percent of all hardware sales. IDC's Kay notes Apple's portables are particularly strong in the education market, where Apple holds a 15 percent share.
http://www.macminute.com/2004/07/14/q3highlights # 876,000 Macs shipped
# Mac-based revenue grew 19%
# 243,000 iMacs and eMacs shipped, down 15% ($235 million in revenue)
# 240,000 iBooks shipped, up 26% ($261 million)
# 173,000 Power Macs shipped (including 13,000 Xserves), up 30% ($332 million)
# 220,000 PowerBooks shipped, up 37% ($435 million)
# $219 million "Peripherals & Other" sold
# $210 million worth of software sold
Any one of their hardware lines outsells their software. And, as a footnote for the people who say Apple's only alive thanks to the iPod's success, I'd like to point out that $249 million in the quarter is little more than half the money made on PowerBook sales alone.
I understand people getting mad and being biased because apples ARE very expensive, compared to a similar windows box. and they really aren't easy to compare, because things just don't work the same.
Feature for feature, function for function, you will be hard pressed to find a company that isn't propped up by either electronics sales (Sony, HP, etc.) or other computing markets (IBM, HP, Toshiba, etc.) that is more than moderately competitive with the modern-day Macintosh. I've done the comparisons, I have spent the time on it, and there's basically no argument outside of building the machine yourself.
Unless you're just itchy for bleeding edge parts in certain specialized applications, the offerings from Apple are quite competitive anywhere but in gamming. Also, depending on what you're doing with them, Opterons can lose to the G5. Don't believe me? It's in more than one test, too. I'll go ahead and admit, right now, that they need the newer Opterons to test against, but it's one guy who does his best to wrangle systems out of vendors.
"What I would like to see would be a ~ 1.5Ghz G5 laptop with a 1Ghz bus and a 7200rpm disk and a good video card. They could do that right, and not have heat problems. But it wouldn't be cheap...:) The common 7200 RPM drives and high end video use a lot of power and generate a lot of heat..."
So you want the 8461D dual-core, then?
What Freescale announced today is that they'd be at least 1.5ghz, with an on-die memory controller than can access up to 667mhz RAM (replacing the "bus" in roughly the same way the G5 has), four Ethernet MACs built into the chip and speeding up networking processes, dual AltiVec units, 1MB of L2 per chip, on-chip PCI-Express, on-chip RapidIO, and a thermal guideline of 15-25 watts at full usage.
As I recall, the Pentium M 1.5ghz parts that people were crowing about being so amazing were in that same temperature range for a single core. That's probably changed since they've been moving to 90nm, but the new Freescale part is in the same fab size.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, as I'm sure has been pointed out here innumerable times, Apple would have to make one hell of a leap in software sales to make up for lost hardware if the OS is opened to commodity PC hardware. It's not like they were losing 30-40% of their marketshare back during the PowerPC cloning da... Oh, they were, weren't they?
Contrary to what many people claim, Apples largest revenue stream is still their hardware, and not iPods.
I remember quite a few compatibility systems that came along over the years, and Orange Micro was the one name that stuck in my head. I never bought one, never used one, but their ads used to festoon the pages of mac magazines. Here's the first relevant result from Google, a posting to Applenews Belgium about the Cyrix-based 200mhz OrangePC 620 arriving. Furthing digginsg shows that the company's website appears defunct, going to a default hosting page.
Just what core clock is your G5, then? I'm running a dual 1.8 with the 9600XT card in it and the fans only ever rev up high at boot. Any other time it's just about as quiet as my eMac 700, barring some ridiculous and continuous load on both processors at once.
Back when Motorola spun off their chips division and Freescale was formed, they outlined a new product spread. There would be three new cores (the e300, e500, e700) and a modified 74xx (the e600) that would take over their current and future needs. So far, the e300 and e500 are shipping to embedded processor customers under the PowerQUIC trade name, with a number of variants that share many features. More interesting to the mac community, though, is the recently announced e600 core that's being listed under the MPC8641 part number.
What is it?
Well, for starters, it's binary-compatible with the 74xx and carries some enhanced instructions to do with the system on chip design. Gone is the traditional frontside bus, replaced with an on-die DDR and DDR2 memory controller (667mhz maximum), a PCI-e bridge, a RapidIO bridge, four hardware gigabit NICs with encryption acceleration, SATA and (it's rumored) SATA2 controllers, and some pretty snazzy other tricks. It comes in two flavors - single and dual core - and weighs in under 25 watts in either one, running at 1.5-1.6ghz per core. Each core has 1MB of L2 cache running at core frequency, linked and shared with branch prediction and other logics that allow the whole thing to basically act as 2MB of L2 for both chips if that would be beneficial. There's also the minor (ha!) inclusion of twin dual-precision 128-bit AltiVec units, which has traditionally been something Motorola/Freescale has done far, far better than IBM.
Oh, and to really make the nerds drool, the MPC8641D (for dual core) can boot a separate operating system on each core. In that mode, it would run as single processors independently executing for the system assigned to it.
So... How is the Centrino better, again?
Funny... Secunia claims that OS X "does not stand out as particularly more secure than the competition," and yet it had a quarter fewer advisories than XP Pro, out of which XP allowed system access half again as often (that's 50%, for the math challenged). There's also an odd bit of obfuscation where the Red Hat remote-exploit numbers are put in text (66%) and the OS X ones are put in numerical form (61%).
Digging into the Secunia site reveals OS X has 14 issues in 2004, for the entire year. I'm reading through them and it looks like most of these are things to do with apache, ssl, and other Open Source components. They're counting the libpng against Apple, for Christ's sake!
Also, the article is dead wrong on the number of "critical" issues. Secunia's own site only marks them as 8% for 2003-2004 rather than the story-claimed 19%. More shoddy reporting is revealed in the pie charts, which show OS X as having 26% system access attacks in the database instead of 32%.
I highly recommend that people go read the Secunia site for themselves. The Red Hat numbers are off, too, and worse than OS X's.
--Hitcahi Travelstar 60GB 2.5" drive that is larger, more power consuming, and cheaper than the 1.5" drives used in iPods. - $130
--Macally 2.5" enclosure with bus-powered FireWire and USB2.0, which also doesn't have the embedded controls and audio decoder of an iPod. - $30
--Integration with iTunes Music Store, award winning interface and design, ability to act as mobile home directory for Apple Macintoshes, simplicity and ease of use, and attractive exterior... - Not available.
Sure, you can do some of the things the iPod does cheaper. Can you do them better, though? Apple's using tiny parts (the 1.5" microdrives probably aren't cheap) and doing things their usual way. You pay a premium, but it's for a nice, functional, easy to use device.
I would have thought that would be self-evident, in that they're in this to make money and not just to write code. I'll return to this point in a moment, since it's important, but there's a better way to respond to your criticism. Someone else has already done it in a older topic, in fact:
Anonymous Coward said:
Similarly, disarray had this to say:
Take a look at that list I gave of projects Apple makes use of. The GPL requires them to publish any modifications they make to them, so they're naturally contributing back to all kinds of things that might be in any distribution - gcc, tcsh, bash, emacs, vi. I'm not a professional programmer and I certainly don't work for Apple, but even I know that they're doing more than they have to for Open Source.
Giving something is more than giving nothing, after all.
I can think of two reasons, right off the top of my head, for Apple not to include seamless integration of X11 (though they do let it run rootless, which isn't too far away). The first is that they have these things called human interface guidelines that they like to use in their designs. I've used X11 and it doesn't exactly adhere. The other reason is that, as someone before me has posted, there's absolutely no benefit to Appl
I suppose that's why the kernel is Open Source and compiled on a GNU platform (GCC is the default compiler for the BSD subsystem), hmmm? Maybe that explains why just about everything aside from the graphics layer and a handfull of other code can be - and often is - contributed back upstream to the FOSS community. Safari is an enhanced front-end for Konqueror, and Apple sends many of their bugfixes back up the pipe. There are other examples, but that's one that just about anyone will have heard of.
Standards that are part of OS X include LDAP, Kerberos, OpenSSL, OpenSSH, 3DES (Triple Digital Encryption Standard), TLS (Transport Layer Security), S/MIME, X.509 Certificate Handling, L2TP (Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol), PPTP (Point to Point Tunneling Protocol), EAP (Extensible Access Protection), LEAP (Lightweight Extensible Access Protection), PEAP (Protected Extensible Access Protection), TTLS (Tunneled Transport Layer Security), VPN support for Microsoft and Cisco RSA secureID, and IPFW (the BSD firewall).
Read it for yourself!
Apple even has this to say:
Here, you can find a complete list of Apple's ties to Open Souce.
So, while Apple may not be entirely free and open with everything they do, I think it's more than slightly hasty to write them off as just another corporate closed-source shop. There are some deep ties between OS X and its roots, especially with the BSDs. Perhaps you might want to read up on Apple's dabbling with Linux in the past before making such claims. More, and less of Apple's marketing, can be found here, if you're interested in how Mach and OS X came to be. This article is a subsection of a much larger history of Apple's operatings systems and the influences thereupon. The short version is that Steve Jobs went off to found NeXT, where he and his teams created an operating system from the Mach 2.5 kernel. Just as Mach had been intended, it was a framework to create your own system around and not a whole OS in and of itself. Later, when he returned to Apple, it's fairly obvious that Jobs brought along his Mach love and, well... The rest is history.
Despite what some would have you believe, it's possible to patch whatever version of a given utility or program you're using through the terminal. I maintain a number of applications that aren't Apple's distrubted choice - or distributed with their products at all! - because I decided I wanted them. It's pretty simple, since I have access to dselect, apt-get, and fink to maintain my OSS library.
Between the power and stability of OS X and the design brilliance of Johnathan Ive, Apple's been reversing their death spiral rather handily. If one considers that they've been making consistent, year over year leaps since his return, the future looks pretty bright for the habitually "beleaguered" and "proprietary" inhabitant of Cupertino, California.
The place that OS X is now is where Linux needs to be - fast, stable, pretty, and usable. So far, the Linux community can manage three out of the four, but there are serious problems with the usability and appearance aspects. Until the day I can have my sister or grandmother be able to pop in a CD or DVD and just click through and have it work when they're done, the job just isn't over. Keep trying, though! I see Apple and the FOSS community as allies and not enemies, so I'd like to see what can be done on both fronts.
No, no. This one's for Bill O'Reilly!
The Sager notebook you linked to is a Pentium 4 (hence a battery hog), and looks like it's going to be their replacement for the Sager NP8790 high-end. If you check their website, it seems that you're paying at least twice what you'd pay for an iBook.
The PowerBook, on the other hand, offers 128MB Radeon 9700 graphics as a BTO option for, as I recall, $50 to upgrade. Oh, and it gets more than an hours of battery life, what with drawing 12 watts instead of 105 for the processor. Perhaps a more fair comparison is the Sager NP1280, with a lower screen size, a Pentium M for battery consumption, and (gasps of shock, all around) shared-memory Intel Extreme 2 graphics. At least it's only $400 more than the iBook, right?
Could you point me to a major manufacturer's sub-$1000 notebook with a card that does support pixel shaders, perhaps? It'd look especially good if you could do it with a processor that remotely compares to the G4 in power consumption and a setup that mirrors the feature set.
Thanks in advance.
Then let me break it down for you, since this is apparently so difficult.
The processors that Apple dubbed the "G4" are various iterations of the Motorola 74xx core. Targetted at the embedded and low-power draw computing markets, originally, the highly efficient design was very competitive with anything else in the same price bracket for a while.
When Motorla spun off their semiconductor division, it took the name Freescale and began to ally itself with other technology firms. Right now, Freescale, Phillips, and STMicroelectronics are sharing fabrication space in a facility they built in France. This site, known as Crolles2, is intended to be a next-generation workhorse and research lab, where they can apply the lessons learned from the failing and lagging Motorola line. They'd had successfuly 90nm test runs as early as 2003, with engineering samples being produces in 2004, and a plan to start the sampling process for 65nm in 2005.
The product line for Freescale is one of legacy - older Motorla cores like the 74xx series, the 603e, and others - and some new designs. Among the new designs are the e300 and e500 embedded systems chips (shipping now), and the e600 and e700 designs. The first appearance of the once-e600 will be the MPC9461D, which is a dual-core enhanced 74xx chip that will have two 128-bit AltiVec SIMD units, 1 MB of L2 cache per processor, on-die memory control and access to DDR2 (up to 667mhz), four on-die MACs for networking, encryption protocol support on the chip, and the ability to scale past 1.5ghz (the current high-end for 74xx cores).
As a stepping stone between the present and the future, Freescale is revising the existing MPC7447A processor. Breaking from the traditional upper limit of 167mhz on the MPX system bus, they're offering it at 200mhz on the bus, with a jump in core frequency to 1.8ghz. This compares to the previous high-end chips, the MPC7447A and older 7445/7455, with higher clocks and system access ability but lower power draw.
There... Just as geeky, but now more informative.
As has been pointed out numerous times, Core Image will support any machine that has even a remotely modern GPU. It will turn off the prettier eye candy so that it will still run, but the system won't at all be made unusable.
Core Image, like Core Audio, is an optional toolset for people who feel like adding on to their programs. It's not at all a requirement to use the enhancements in Tiger. Hell, if Apple keeps up their delivery on performance, Tiger will probably be even faster than previous iterations, depending on how they handle Spotlight and the other new features.
Actually, unless I missed a press release somewhere, the 200mhz bus isn't a factor until Freescale rolls out the MPC7448 chip sometime in the near future. That's the one that's ridiculously low power (Freescale claims 10 watts at 1.8ghz), with pin-compatibility to the older parts and the upgraded bus. These are likely MPC7445 or MPC7447A parts, which are slower, hotter, and not manufactured at 90nm like the new offerings will be.
I expect to see the 7448 as an incremental update to the PowerBooks, until apple can stick the MPC8461D dual-cores in their place later next year. Apple is, as usual, playing their cards close to their chest, but anyone that's been paying attention to Freescale's moves knows that Crolles2 is online and rolling out parts from the production lines. They've got functional 90nm production, the last I heard, and are working on tooling for samples at 65nm in 2005.
...I like the sound of my own voice (and I forgot to add something), so I figured that I'd come back here and mention it.
.app bundle into the user's home directory, which worked. However, thanks to the structure of OS X, the worst that any known exploit can do is wipe that directory and that's it. The proof of concept media trojan showed that a month or three back, and so we know it can happen, but really... Human stupidity is human stupidity, and even Apple can't account for all of the possibilities that brings in.
You can't install anything through an installer if you're not an administrator, either. Software installers are password locked to accounts at the admin level or higher.
Just to check, I swapped over to a non-admin account I keep for guests and tried both installers and drag-and-drop installations. The installers ask for an administrator password, and drag-and-drop to the applications folder says that it can't be modified. It seems that my permissions (which are mostly default) are working properly.
On a whim, I tried to drag the
Wrong. I see this allegation all the time from people who never use the system in question, but OS X has this wonderful notion that you ought to consent to software being installed on your system. Even as administrator, there are some things you just can't do without authenticating (usually through a password dialog), and one of those is installing any software that uses a program to place it instead the old drag-and-drop method. If you want software to be put onto the system, you have to do it and that's all there is to it.
In order for spyware to work on OS X, it's going to have to be trojanized. There's not much you can do about the human factor, other than running as non-administrator, but that's a FAR smaller deal than it is for Windows.
Oh, and you prove your ignorance by comparing administrator status with root. There is no default root account on OS X, though you can enable it through NetInfo if you really get tired of using sudo. Why you'd do so, I can barely imagine, but there you go. Administrators are more priveleged than other users, but they're hardly root.
Well, I'd be hard pressed to show that the Opteron doesn't win at some things, and perhaps even most things. Computers are tools and you ought to use the one that gets the job done, after all, so fielding a chip that does a better job for your particular task makes sense.
The only point I was making is that the Opteron isn't necessarily king at everything, so your original statement that it stomps the G5 was inaccurate at best. Also, as someone else points out, the use of GCC sometimes limits the performance in exchange for sticking with the FOSS solution. The use of IBM's apparently wonderful XCC C/C+ compiler lends some impressive speedup to most applications, to the tune of what I've anecdotally gathered is 30-200% performance increase for some routines.
It's just you, or you're not factoring in the most important aspect of Apple's hardware prices. They don't really make much money from anything else. No, really.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/97
Sixty percent of the more than $2 billion in revenue Apple reported in its third quarter came from hardware products, according to Apple spokesman Bill Evans.
Laptops like the PowerBook and iBook have eclipsed desktop computers, accounting for 53 percent of all hardware sales. IDC's Kay notes Apple's portables are particularly strong in the education market, where Apple holds a 15 percent share.
http://www.macminute.com/2004/07/14/q3highlights
# 876,000 Macs shipped
# Mac-based revenue grew 19%
# 243,000 iMacs and eMacs shipped, down 15% ($235 million in revenue)
# 240,000 iBooks shipped, up 26% ($261 million)
# 173,000 Power Macs shipped (including 13,000 Xserves), up 30% ($332 million)
# 220,000 PowerBooks shipped, up 37% ($435 million)
# $219 million "Peripherals & Other" sold
# $210 million worth of software sold
Any one of their hardware lines outsells their software. And, as a footnote for the people who say Apple's only alive thanks to the iPod's success, I'd like to point out that $249 million in the quarter is little more than half the money made on PowerBook sales alone.
Unless you're just itchy for bleeding edge parts in certain specialized applications, the offerings from Apple are quite competitive anywhere but in gamming. Also, depending on what you're doing with them, Opterons can lose to the G5. Don't believe me? It's in more than one test, too. I'll go ahead and admit, right now, that they need the newer Opterons to test against, but it's one guy who does his best to wrangle systems out of vendors.
http://www.barefeats.com/g5op.html
http://www.barefeats.com/pentium4.html
"What I would like to see would be a ~ 1.5Ghz G5 laptop with a 1Ghz bus and a 7200rpm disk and a good video card. They could do that right, and not have heat problems. But it wouldn't be cheap... :) The common 7200 RPM drives and high end video use a lot of power and generate a lot of heat..."
So you want the 8461D dual-core, then?
What Freescale announced today is that they'd be at least 1.5ghz, with an on-die memory controller than can access up to 667mhz RAM (replacing the "bus" in roughly the same way the G5 has), four Ethernet MACs built into the chip and speeding up networking processes, dual AltiVec units, 1MB of L2 per chip, on-chip PCI-Express, on-chip RapidIO, and a thermal guideline of 15-25 watts at full usage.
As I recall, the Pentium M 1.5ghz parts that people were crowing about being so amazing were in that same temperature range for a single core. That's probably changed since they've been moving to 90nm, but the new Freescale part is in the same fab size.