Great FUD here. Fact is, even the white iMacs have a good resistance to tear&wear, and I'm not talking about the pretty much undestructible Mac Pro (formerly known as PowerMacs) cheesegraters.
They already do, Apple's machines are competitive with Dell's offering of the same price (depends of the rebates you grab though, but Apple's price are lower than equivalent Dell machines without rebates), and you get OSX + slick cases (versus ugly dell cases).
They just don't compete on the very low end stuff (dell goes much lower in price/configurations quality)
As GP said, they've had working x86 versions of OSX zipping along for a few years 'just in case', and you can be sure that somewhere in Cupertino they're running OSX versions for fully unsupported processors just in case they have to switch again one day.
AFAIK the Alto and Dorado machines were not 'proof-of-concept' designs but production and productive environments, on of the guys on the core Macintosh team (Jef Raskin maybe?) had been an intern at PARC for 2 or 3 years, working in Smalltalk on altos and dorados (and "being spoiled by the environment" by his own words).
Last time I checked, service packs were more or less major security patch bundles, every release of OSX introduces new tools, refinements to the core OS itself and new technologies.
Sure they come often, but upgrade W2k from SP3 to SP4 (hell, upgrade W2k from original version to SP4) and you still have Windows 2k, nothing new under the sun, maybe your calculator's been updated if you're lucky.
Update OSX from 10.3 (Panther) to 10.4 (Tiger) and you're in for major changes, upgrade OSX from 10.1 to 10.4 and you've basically got a different OS. Which is why Ars manages to do 15+ pages full text reviews for each new iteration of OSX. There's just no way to do that with service packs.
Much like many (not all) other vendors don't like putting 64bit processors in laptops currently.
God, how can you be so dense and keep on breathing? Have you realized that the only 64bits laptop processor available is AMD's Turion64, and that Intel and the Centrino platform have most of the laptop market share by a frigging huge margin?
And yet you can find dozens of Turion64 based laptops.
The only reason why most laptops use 32bits CPU is that Intel won't have 64bits mobile offerings before they release their Merom chips.
Vendors don't give a flying fuck about chips being 32 or 64bits (hell, if anything 64bits give them more marketting arguments), and they especially don't care if the new 64bits-able chip has at least equivalent perfs and at most equivalent power draw.
It's not a matter of them "not liking 64bits", it's a matter of them not being able to buy 64bits chips in the first place
I'm not sure, because of it's form factor the iMac behaves much as a laptop and doesn't leave more room for a desktop processor's heatspreaders and all.
60+W desktop processors (Conroes) require either big heatskinks or very fast fans. The iMac doesn't have the room for a big skin, and they just can't affort fast (and loud) fans, it just wouldn't fit the iMac's image.
Now while the iMac did use G5' I'm not sure Apple will switch the current iMacs to desktop chips.
I'd like to see this in an iMac. Yeah, I know -- "consumer model." How about a more expensive iMac Pro?
If macbooks and macbook pros switch to Merom, so will iMacs and Mac Minis, no need for any iMac Pro foolishness.
Intel's Core (Solo and Duo) weren't fated to live long, the goal was to get the new line started, show that intel had scrapped Netburst and make people eager to see Core 2's improvements
Sorry I was talking specifically about developers as in code writers (it's WWDC after all), graphic designers and their complete inability to accept that they need to use version control systems are the bane of my existence, Time Machine will indeed be a great tool in this case.
No. Volume Shadow Copy is a backup utility, it's not file-grained (it works at the volume level, even though you can restore individual files), it's hand-triggered (Time Machine will more than likely be automatic, just as VMS' filesystem was in 1975), and it only allows you to create 512 images.
Time Machine is either a copy of VMS' versioning filesystem, or a copy of 20 years old Source Version Control tools retrofit to the job by removing features useless to regular end-users (commit messages, blames,...) as it works on a per-file basis, saves full history and doesn't require user action to create new versions.
No it won't, developers use versioning systems already and Time Machine is centralized single machine. Not enough for development needs, especially since it automagically commits and doesn't allow commit messages, or blames, or anything.
It's a "Joe Six Pack" end user feature, but of no use whatsoever to a good developer, because there are already existing and much better tools for that job.
A good Mac OS X solution for virtual desktops are all but lusted after by many developers.
Not really, there are at least two already, and they're fairly good. While having it nicely integrated in the OS with Apple's UI polish will be a very nice progress, anyone lusting for virtual desktops on OSX can get that already.
Do your homework, geek, both Apple and Microsoft "borrowed" contextual menus (be them accessible via right-click, CTRL+Click or whatever other shortcut you may want) from Xerox' Alto computer (the pop-up menus of the Smalltalk environment that ran on Altos at the time).
And NEXTSTEP walked the next step by opening the contextual menu at the location of the mouse, creating what's now known as "right-click menus".
Microsoft did create the submenu notion (for Microsoft Word) though.
Time Machine would be instantaneous, just as regular Version Control Systems such as Subversion are more or less instantaneous in a local or LAN environment
Not only did they release a nice guide, but the guide is actually good: while the first XML library they talk about in XML parsing is xml.dom.minidom, they also explain how to use the XML API with effbot's ElementTree (and link to both ElementTree and cElementTree), which is more than likely the best Python XML library. And the recommend UFP (Universal Feed Parser) for RSS parsing.
The worst thing you can say about them is that they did their homework, kudos to the Yahoo guys.
They should offer it as one of the few handhelds that let you make your own games and share them with friends.
Duh, there are like 3 handhelds on the market (and that's including the 4 years old GBA), and all 3 of them let you make and play homebrews (it's only slightly easier/cheaper to do on the PSP).
Hell, you can even run linux on a frigging GBA if you wish to.
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Great FUD here. Fact is, even the white iMacs have a good resistance to tear&wear, and I'm not talking about the pretty much undestructible Mac Pro (formerly known as PowerMacs) cheesegraters.
They already do, Apple's machines are competitive with Dell's offering of the same price (depends of the rebates you grab though, but Apple's price are lower than equivalent Dell machines without rebates), and you get OSX + slick cases (versus ugly dell cases).
They just don't compete on the very low end stuff (dell goes much lower in price/configurations quality)
No you weren't, and if you were you either don't know what Volume Shadow Copy is or you don't realize what Time Machine is poised to do.
As GP said, they've had working x86 versions of OSX zipping along for a few years 'just in case', and you can be sure that somewhere in Cupertino they're running OSX versions for fully unsupported processors just in case they have to switch again one day.
AFAIK the Alto and Dorado machines were not 'proof-of-concept' designs but production and productive environments, on of the guys on the core Macintosh team (Jef Raskin maybe?) had been an intern at PARC for 2 or 3 years, working in Smalltalk on altos and dorados (and "being spoiled by the environment" by his own words).
Last time I checked, service packs were more or less major security patch bundles, every release of OSX introduces new tools, refinements to the core OS itself and new technologies.
Sure they come often, but upgrade W2k from SP3 to SP4 (hell, upgrade W2k from original version to SP4) and you still have Windows 2k, nothing new under the sun, maybe your calculator's been updated if you're lucky.
Update OSX from 10.3 (Panther) to 10.4 (Tiger) and you're in for major changes, upgrade OSX from 10.1 to 10.4 and you've basically got a different OS. Which is why Ars manages to do 15+ pages full text reviews for each new iteration of OSX. There's just no way to do that with service packs.
God, how can you be so dense and keep on breathing? Have you realized that the only 64bits laptop processor available is AMD's Turion64, and that Intel and the Centrino platform have most of the laptop market share by a frigging huge margin?
And yet you can find dozens of Turion64 based laptops.
The only reason why most laptops use 32bits CPU is that Intel won't have 64bits mobile offerings before they release their Merom chips.
Vendors don't give a flying fuck about chips being 32 or 64bits (hell, if anything 64bits give them more marketting arguments), and they especially don't care if the new 64bits-able chip has at least equivalent perfs and at most equivalent power draw.
It's not a matter of them "not liking 64bits", it's a matter of them not being able to buy 64bits chips in the first place
I'm not sure, because of it's form factor the iMac behaves much as a laptop and doesn't leave more room for a desktop processor's heatspreaders and all.
60+W desktop processors (Conroes) require either big heatskinks or very fast fans. The iMac doesn't have the room for a big skin, and they just can't affort fast (and loud) fans, it just wouldn't fit the iMac's image.
Now while the iMac did use G5' I'm not sure Apple will switch the current iMacs to desktop chips.
While this may be paper for you, Anandech found Core 2 Duos to perform 10 to 15% better than Core Duos on average with exactly the same power draw (and therefore autonomy)
Duh... no it doesn't, the only reason why 64bits laptop had a small battery life is that they used desktop processor instead of notebook processors
The reason for that may be ... I don't know... that PPC laptops used G4s and 64bit was only available on G5 chips?
If macbooks and macbook pros switch to Merom, so will iMacs and Mac Minis, no need for any iMac Pro foolishness.
Intel's Core (Solo and Duo) weren't fated to live long, the goal was to get the new line started, show that intel had scrapped Netburst and make people eager to see Core 2's improvements
Uh i'd say that 1Gb of RAM is pretty much a baseline requirement nowadays if you're either running XP SP2 or OSX Tiger, with 2Gb the "sweet spot".
You'll be able to run 64bits OS/softwares on Core2 macbooks too.
Sorry I was talking specifically about developers as in code writers (it's WWDC after all), graphic designers and their complete inability to accept that they need to use version control systems are the bane of my existence, Time Machine will indeed be a great tool in this case.
I'm sorry that VirtueDesktop crashes on you... Have you tried the other alternative? (DesktopManager)
No. Volume Shadow Copy is a backup utility, it's not file-grained (it works at the volume level, even though you can restore individual files), it's hand-triggered (Time Machine will more than likely be automatic, just as VMS' filesystem was in 1975), and it only allows you to create 512 images.
Time Machine is either a copy of VMS' versioning filesystem, or a copy of 20 years old Source Version Control tools retrofit to the job by removing features useless to regular end-users (commit messages, blames, ...) as it works on a per-file basis, saves full history and doesn't require user action to create new versions.
No it won't, developers use versioning systems already and Time Machine is centralized single machine. Not enough for development needs, especially since it automagically commits and doesn't allow commit messages, or blames, or anything.
It's a "Joe Six Pack" end user feature, but of no use whatsoever to a good developer, because there are already existing and much better tools for that job.
Not really, there are at least two already, and they're fairly good. While having it nicely integrated in the OS with Apple's UI polish will be a very nice progress, anyone lusting for virtual desktops on OSX can get that already.
This is completely and utterly wrong.
Do your homework, geek, both Apple and Microsoft "borrowed" contextual menus (be them accessible via right-click, CTRL+Click or whatever other shortcut you may want) from Xerox' Alto computer (the pop-up menus of the Smalltalk environment that ran on Altos at the time).
And NEXTSTEP walked the next step by opening the contextual menu at the location of the mouse, creating what's now known as "right-click menus".
Microsoft did create the submenu notion (for Microsoft Word) though.
Time Machine would be instantaneous, just as regular Version Control Systems such as Subversion are more or less instantaneous in a local or LAN environment
No, something can be "nice" (well written or easy to understand) and awfully bad technically (using crappy code, the wrong libs, bad style, ...)
Not only did they release a nice guide, but the guide is actually good: while the first XML library they talk about in XML parsing is xml.dom.minidom, they also explain how to use the XML API with effbot's ElementTree (and link to both ElementTree and cElementTree), which is more than likely the best Python XML library. And the recommend UFP (Universal Feed Parser) for RSS parsing.
The worst thing you can say about them is that they did their homework, kudos to the Yahoo guys.
You should get a DS Lite anyway, if only for the screen, comparing the DS Fat and the DS Lite' screens is like night and day.
Duh, there are like 3 handhelds on the market (and that's including the 4 years old GBA), and all 3 of them let you make and play homebrews (it's only slightly easier/cheaper to do on the PSP).
Hell, you can even run linux on a frigging GBA if you wish to.
Didn't you mean DS here?
And from the feedbacks I gathered, friends found two interresting (and original) games on the PSP, namely Loco Roco and Lumines. Have you tried them?
Your website doesn't list the sales of Metroid Prime: Hunters, do you know them?