I think they kept the design the same to emphasize continuity and compatibility in the face of a dramatic change.
Time to market may have been a second factor. By keeping the older, well-liked designs, they were able to ship faster than they would if they did a major redesign.
There's also the risk that the new designs would not be accepted by the customers, which could be construed as a failure of the Intel Macs as a whole.
I think they'll get creative with the next few revisions.
I can just see him keeping the Lighthouse apps, and the rest, in mylar polybags in a longbox in his basement, along with ten copies of the "Death of Superman" issue.
The thing is, though, that the institutional investors who hold the next-largest stakes of Disney (after Jobs) are probably more inclined to go along with Jobs than to go along with Bob Iger, the Disney CEO who used to be a TV weather man, or George Mitchell, the Chairman of Disney who used to be a US Senator.
I figure any sensible fund manager has to look at Iger, Mitchell, and Jobs, and think that Jobs' ideas are the best bet at this point in time.
The rest of the board will likely think the same way, in addition to being subject to powerful, close-quarters application of the RDF.
So, basically, I wouldn't bet against Pixar. If anything, it's probably more likely that Jobs and Pixar will influence Disney to spin off some of their businesses and get back to their roots. The cruise line might find itself on the market, if it isn't just a trademark licensing deal that puts Disney's IP on someone else's boat.
I'd love to see a movie version of "Rise of the Underminer".
The character himself, and the scene from the first movie, was, I think, an homage to the Mole Man from the Fantastic Four. Only instead of the Mole Man's subterranean monsters, the Underminer uses robots and giant drilling machines.
I think they could do an excellent movie, avoiding the usual sequel dreck.
Note that if the MacBook's battery doesn't last as long as the PowerBook, one big reason may be the brighter screen rather than the Intel CPU. Apple claims the screen is 65% brighter. While some of that may come from a different material used to diffuse the backlight, most of it probably comes from increased power to the CCFL tube.
One good way to get at the heart of the difference between the iMac G5 and the iMac Core Duo would be to measure the time taken to simultaneously do some Quicktime encoding *and* iTunes ripping, rather than comparing each individually.
That'd help demonstrate the advantage of the second core, in a more real-world manner than SPECMark tests.
Some enterprising company should come up with a USB flash drive that has a built-in modem. Maybe something that'd snap onto an iPod shuffle, with a passthrough USB connector.
Or perhaps a replacement power brick with a built-in USB modem. Or maybe just a fabric power brick sleeve with a pocket for the modem.
Or maybe a 3rd-party replacement battery for the MacBook Pro with a compartment for the modem - give up some battery life, but you'd have the modem handy at all times.
"This means modems. Yeah some hotels have internet I can connect to via lan but that still isn't widespread, or should I say widespread in hotels some business will pay for. "
It's quite widespread, even at non-luxury hotels. And wireless is becoming even more common - I assume it's more attractive to hotels because they don't need to run wires and there's no equipment in the room that can be damaged.
The last few weeks I've been staying in a $69 a night budget extended-stay hotel, and there's wireless. And I'm in central Massachusetts, not the big city. (For rate comparison, the other hotels nearby are around $100/night). I've stayed in lots of hotels in the northeast in the last six months, and I don't think I've had a single hotel that lacked internet - the only question was whether it was wired or wireless, and how much it cost.
Anyway, if you're in your hotel, then the encumbrance of a wee small USB modem is inconsequential compared to all the rest of the baggage in your room. The case for a built-in modem is the situation where you're out in the field, backpacking or working away from your hotel, you're traveling light, and you need to connect someplace where there is only a phone.
For the modem, just buy the USB external from Apple and glue it to the power cable (in an appropriately convenient location so that both can plug in). That way you won't forget it.
"The big difference here is that before Steve Jobs BOUGHT his old company as CEO of his OLD, OLD company."
What?
Steve was not CEO of Apple when Apple bought NeXT. Steve did not become the CEO of Apple until well *after* Apple bought NeXT.
Re:Good luck to Steve J...
on
Disney Buys Pixar
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"In recent years they've made it pretty clear just how poorly animators and storytellers are regarded. Throwing money at the problem won't do a thing to change that."
No, but throwing Steve Jobs at it as the largest stockholder, would certainly change that.
I don't think Jobs would tolerate that kind of fuckwittedness in middle management. I wouldn't be surprised if Disney undergoes a significant purge.
They should have gone with the Cell. It's even better than Sparc.
NOTE FOR THE SARCASM-IMPAIRED: This comment is meant as a spoof of the unavoidable Cell comments that come up in any Apple CPU discussion. The anachronism is intentional.
How about if Rosetta can run them as fast as, say, a 1GHz G4 as is found in older Powerbooks?
I think the catch will be in the filters. The UI will be quite usable, but filter performance will degrade much more rapidly with increased complexity than when running natively.
If Adobe drags their feet in putting out a Photoshop universal binary, perhaps someone could put together some CoreImage-based filters to replace filters that perform poorly on Rosetta. The CoreImage-based filters would still run in Rosetta, but *I think* the actual calls to CoreImage would run as native code.
Have you joined the timecops? Can we cast time-travelling votes?
It seems a lot more important to deal with the present (and thus the future), than to point at events of decades ago to achieve some meaningless political balance.
"gee, I wonder why that didn't catch on. All this time I've been blaming MSFT anti-compete OEM licenses."
Well, considering how (if I'm not mistaken) Be tried giving their OS away at one point and that didn't work either, I'm not sure price was the whole problem. NeXTSTEP's hardware requirements were rather high compared to the median machine in the early years of the Intel port, which didn't help either. Before fast hardware could get cheap enough, Java came out and pretty much sucked all the air out of the Object-Oriented development space.
The $2995 for the development tools was in the ballpark for high-end corporate development tools of the time. I think Borland's Delphi Enterprise package cost $1995.
I tried BitTorrent, and didn't find it particularly easy to use to find and download something I wanted. Perhaps I missed a key piece of information, but there you go. And I'm speaking as someone who has configured UUCP and sendmail.
I'm sure that people with the right connections, who have good sources of information about torrents, who are plugged into the 'torrent culture' find BitTorrent convenient, but it's not exactly ideal for the casual computer user.
The other advantage of iTunes (for the casual user) is that the video itself is ready-to-play with the software you have. It's not done with some codec that you may or may not have installed.
"Developing for NeXTStep was actually quite expensive, if I remember... well, not horribly expensive"
Oh, it was quite expensive. The operating system cost $795, and the developer tools cost around $2000 or $3000. Per machine.
Intel NeXT software availability is a bit weird, though. There was software that wasn't available for x86, but for the most part that was because the developer had left the NeXT market completely, some before NeXT even stopped doing hardware.
The stalwarts who kept going after NeXT moved to Intel were pretty good about putting out fat binaries.
"It turns out that the iMac x86 runs this test at 67 frames per second. Which is quite consistent with some newer Apple technotes that tell you that screen updates are now coupled with the monitor's refresh rate. If you draw more frames per second then the monitor can display, you are just wasting your time. Seems that the other Macs tested run this test at several hundred frames per second."
That was added in 10.4, on PPC too, so it should effect both architectures - UNLESS the PPC version of the benchmark was built using 10.3, rather than being built on 10.4. Applications linked with versions 10.4 don't get the updated behavior.
The benchmark ought to be run again on Intel after using QuartzDebug to "Disable Beam Synchronization".
Something does seem to be screwy about that benchmark. Subjective reports about the Intel Macs have typically described the UI as being quite fast.
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I think they kept the design the same to emphasize continuity and compatibility in the face of a dramatic change.
Time to market may have been a second factor. By keeping the older, well-liked designs, they were able to ship faster than they would if they did a major redesign.
There's also the risk that the new designs would not be accepted by the customers, which could be construed as a failure of the Intel Macs as a whole.
I think they'll get creative with the next few revisions.
Is Jonathan Schwartz a comic book collector?
I can just see him keeping the Lighthouse apps, and the rest, in mylar polybags in a longbox in his basement, along with ten copies of the "Death of Superman" issue.
Someday, those are going to be worth MILLIONS!
But all those tawdry, exploitative paternity tests have paid for a nice big house on Flathead Lake in Montana.
The thing is, though, that the institutional investors who hold the next-largest stakes of Disney (after Jobs) are probably more inclined to go along with Jobs than to go along with Bob Iger, the Disney CEO who used to be a TV weather man, or George Mitchell, the Chairman of Disney who used to be a US Senator.
I figure any sensible fund manager has to look at Iger, Mitchell, and Jobs, and think that Jobs' ideas are the best bet at this point in time.
The rest of the board will likely think the same way, in addition to being subject to powerful, close-quarters application of the RDF.
So, basically, I wouldn't bet against Pixar. If anything, it's probably more likely that Jobs and Pixar will influence Disney to spin off some of their businesses and get back to their roots. The cruise line might find itself on the market, if it isn't just a trademark licensing deal that puts Disney's IP on someone else's boat.
I'd love to see a movie version of "Rise of the Underminer".
The character himself, and the scene from the first movie, was, I think, an homage to the Mole Man from the Fantastic Four. Only instead of the Mole Man's subterranean monsters, the Underminer uses robots and giant drilling machines.
I think they could do an excellent movie, avoiding the usual sequel dreck.
"He'd always be a poor second - a fucking poor second - to Ballmer in that role."
Riight. Checked Microsoft's stock chart lately? It hasn't broken 30 in almost four years and the 5 year max is about 36.
Note that if the MacBook's battery doesn't last as long as the PowerBook, one big reason may be the brighter screen rather than the Intel CPU. Apple claims the screen is 65% brighter. While some of that may come from a different material used to diffuse the backlight, most of it probably comes from increased power to the CCFL tube.
Oh, um, that's what they did to debunk MacWorld's test.
Nevermind.
One good way to get at the heart of the difference between the iMac G5 and the iMac Core Duo would be to measure the time taken to simultaneously do some Quicktime encoding *and* iTunes ripping, rather than comparing each individually.
That'd help demonstrate the advantage of the second core, in a more real-world manner than SPECMark tests.
Some enterprising company should come up with a USB flash drive that has a built-in modem. Maybe something that'd snap onto an iPod shuffle, with a passthrough USB connector.
Or perhaps a replacement power brick with a built-in USB modem. Or maybe just a fabric power brick sleeve with a pocket for the modem.
Or maybe a 3rd-party replacement battery for the MacBook Pro with a compartment for the modem - give up some battery life, but you'd have the modem handy at all times.
"This means modems. Yeah some hotels have internet I can connect to via lan but that still isn't widespread, or should I say widespread in hotels some business will pay for. "
It's quite widespread, even at non-luxury hotels. And wireless is becoming even more common - I assume it's more attractive to hotels because they don't need to run wires and there's no equipment in the room that can be damaged.
The last few weeks I've been staying in a $69 a night budget extended-stay hotel, and there's wireless. And I'm in central Massachusetts, not the big city. (For rate comparison, the other hotels nearby are around $100/night). I've stayed in lots of hotels in the northeast in the last six months, and I don't think I've had a single hotel that lacked internet - the only question was whether it was wired or wireless, and how much it cost.
Anyway, if you're in your hotel, then the encumbrance of a wee small USB modem is inconsequential compared to all the rest of the baggage in your room. The case for a built-in modem is the situation where you're out in the field, backpacking or working away from your hotel, you're traveling light, and you need to connect someplace where there is only a phone.
What can I buy so that I feel whole again?
Neuticles.
For the modem, just buy the USB external from Apple and glue it to the power cable (in an appropriately convenient location so that both can plug in). That way you won't forget it.
"The big difference here is that before Steve Jobs BOUGHT his old company as CEO of his OLD, OLD company."
What?
Steve was not CEO of Apple when Apple bought NeXT. Steve did not become the CEO of Apple until well *after* Apple bought NeXT.
"In recent years they've made it pretty clear just how poorly animators and storytellers are regarded. Throwing money at the problem won't do a thing to change that."
No, but throwing Steve Jobs at it as the largest stockholder, would certainly change that.
I don't think Jobs would tolerate that kind of fuckwittedness in middle management. I wouldn't be surprised if Disney undergoes a significant purge.
They should have gone with the Cell. It's even better than Sparc.
NOTE FOR THE SARCASM-IMPAIRED: This comment is meant as a spoof of the unavoidable Cell comments that come up in any Apple CPU discussion. The anachronism is intentional.
"Apple is in the habit of compiling for size, not for performance "
The rationale being that smaller code is more likely to fit within the CPU cache, making it run faster.
How about if Rosetta can run them as fast as, say, a 1GHz G4 as is found in older Powerbooks?
I think the catch will be in the filters. The UI will be quite usable, but filter performance will degrade much more rapidly with increased complexity than when running natively.
If Adobe drags their feet in putting out a Photoshop universal binary, perhaps someone could put together some CoreImage-based filters to replace filters that perform poorly on Rosetta. The CoreImage-based filters would still run in Rosetta, but *I think* the actual calls to CoreImage would run as native code.
"Will you condemn that as well?"
To what end, exactly?
Have you joined the timecops? Can we cast time-travelling votes?
It seems a lot more important to deal with the present (and thus the future), than to point at events of decades ago to achieve some meaningless political balance.
"gee, I wonder why that didn't catch on. All this time I've been blaming MSFT anti-compete OEM licenses."
Well, considering how (if I'm not mistaken) Be tried giving their OS away at one point and that didn't work either, I'm not sure price was the whole problem. NeXTSTEP's hardware requirements were rather high compared to the median machine in the early years of the Intel port, which didn't help either. Before fast hardware could get cheap enough, Java came out and pretty much sucked all the air out of the Object-Oriented development space.
The $2995 for the development tools was in the ballpark for high-end corporate development tools of the time. I think Borland's Delphi Enterprise package cost $1995.
But iTunes is more convenient.
I tried BitTorrent, and didn't find it particularly easy to use to find and download something I wanted. Perhaps I missed a key piece of information, but there you go. And I'm speaking as someone who has configured UUCP and sendmail.
I'm sure that people with the right connections, who have good sources of information about torrents, who are plugged into the 'torrent culture' find BitTorrent convenient, but it's not exactly ideal for the casual computer user.
The other advantage of iTunes (for the casual user) is that the video itself is ready-to-play with the software you have. It's not done with some codec that you may or may not have installed.
"Developing for NeXTStep was actually quite expensive, if I remember... well, not horribly expensive"
Oh, it was quite expensive. The operating system cost $795, and the developer tools cost around $2000 or $3000. Per machine.
Intel NeXT software availability is a bit weird, though. There was software that wasn't available for x86, but for the most part that was because the developer had left the NeXT market completely, some before NeXT even stopped doing hardware.
The stalwarts who kept going after NeXT moved to Intel were pretty good about putting out fat binaries.
Don't these people watch Mythbusters?
(The falling elevator episode gave my Dad the willies - he worked in elevator service & service management at Otis for 45 years)
Whoops, "linked with versions 10.4" should be "linked with versions before 10.4"
"It turns out that the iMac x86 runs this test at 67 frames per second. Which is quite consistent with some newer Apple technotes that tell you that screen updates are now coupled with the monitor's refresh rate. If you draw more frames per second then the monitor can display, you are just wasting your time. Seems that the other Macs tested run this test at several hundred frames per second."
That was added in 10.4, on PPC too, so it should effect both architectures - UNLESS the PPC version of the benchmark was built using 10.3, rather than being built on 10.4. Applications linked with versions 10.4 don't get the updated behavior.
The benchmark ought to be run again on Intel after using QuartzDebug to "Disable Beam Synchronization".
Something does seem to be screwy about that benchmark. Subjective reports about the Intel Macs have typically described the UI as being quite fast.