Sometimes even car companies ship cars which were supposed to be concept. They aren't ordinary and doesn't have all features same class car has but people buy them.
Here is example for you. If you compare it to a WV Golf, you will ask "which moron would buy it?" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_TT They buy it and they are happy.
Macbook Air is for people with already working high end desktop and ordinary laptop having high end Apple 811N "time capsule". It costs a lot but it doesn't make buying or shipping one a crime.
Would I buy a Macbook Air? Hell no. I am not even a laptop user. Nokia E90 and Sony Ericsson P1i (which has FRACTION of Air CPU speed and RAM) is good for my usage. They cost more than laptop and I guess I am another guilty filthy rich.
Windows has better third party support since the companies coding those complex apps and drivers choose Windows over Apple. The Windows accessibility which is built in is a 'fallback' thing. Look to its help if you don't believe me. Blind people use way more advanced apps but... apps doesn't exist on OS X.
When they port to OS X using XCode or when they finally wake up and start porting does Apple refuse to support them? I bet they would even support them for free.
What will Apple do? Bribe them and make them code? Is there a more consistent and documented single user interface rather than OS X?
Macbook Air is a concept machine designed to fit a specific lifestyle and usage style.
If you have a "Mac Pro" or high end iMac running on top of line ISP line with 811.11N network installed at home and live in industrial city with top of line 3G coverage, you will buy and like Macbook Air.
See the Apple Japan store top 10 sellers if you don't believe me.
While speaking about Japan, Casio watches now even come with "atomic time sync" and they are cheaper than $200. Does it make Rolex a failure as it can only display time and date for $3000?
I suggest you act like/simulate that you are a top of line Mac Pro workstation owner and shopping for a new GPU (graphics card).
They run Intel right? Industry standard port too... Check how many GPU choices you have and their prices, support. Also simulate that you bought the device and have low FPS and look to ATI/NVIDIA support site. Don't waste so much time on that since they will eventually send you to Apple.
Sound is similar too...
This is a Wintel puppet IT scene and even having unheard (for Apple after '95) market share explosion doesn't matter. I also wonder what would happen if I installed a Realtek el cheapo NIC to this Quad G5 instead of Broadcom Apple installed. On P4 PC, it had 20% performance hit. I bought it because it had Windows driver and support. As Realtek geniuses can't download free XCode and code for OS X, we are saved.
Yes, as OS X Intel runs on same x86 CPU, it can work. No need to run a lab for that.
When will people understand that OS X and hardware in total gives "Apple experience" and FreeBSD 6 with WindowMaker/WINE is a way better choice for such portable?
OS X is not only a X86 OS. It becomes meaningful when hardware matches too.
I bet Sony Vaio can run OS X too but I would run Windows or Linux on that machine. It will work way better than a hacked OS.
Therotically as it runs same CPU and most of mobile chip manufacturers are common, my Nokia and Sony Ericsson smart phones can run iPhone OS rather than Symbian they come with. If someone spent needless time for such a hardcore hack and shipped, would I install? Hell no. iPhone experience is broken right when hardware part is gone and smallest hack has to be applied.
Can't they work on meaningful things such as enhancing the linux/bsd support and performance rather than making people joke with MSI?
What a big mistake... iPhone is a unique concept and while it made me stick to Symbian next 5 years, it is not about pretty graphics or animations, not even the multi touch... It is squeezing UNIX mentality and NeXT tradition to a tiny device. It can't be cloned especially by MS. The iPhone and Apple is exact opposite of MS. I am not saying one side is good or bad. It is a waste of time. Both MS and Symbian should stick to own model of doing things and enhance them.
No, I am not saying a word about Lotus Notes and its size. What I tell is, having Lotus Notes installed on OS X or not doesn't make slightest difference about how system performs.
I am talking about the architecture problem of Windows. You shouldn't need to remove "applications" to boost performance.
"Bloat" isn't in the software. It is how Windows works.
Unless MS finally gets rid of Registry and make a compatibility layer while actual settings are stored in plain XML files, they will have a problem with every single additional app installed or patched.
They steal everything from Apple but miss the good stuff:)
Currently there are 700 tiny.plist files in my ~/Library/Preferences (OS X). My system doesn't care, I don't care too.
I know many people (including me) sometimes hate the OS X mail.app but I didn't see anyone bitching about Mail.app inclusion on OS X.
MS should think about why they feel forced to remove Outlook Express from Windows. For better performance? So how can Outlook Express hurt System performance? That is the real thing.
At one point I was running 5-6 mail clients (thanks to IMAP) and trying to choose one of them on OS X. There wasn't a slightest performance/compatibility or any other issue as result. There are several people who uses Mail.app to read/reply their mails and use Eudora to organise them.
Instead of thinking WHY they feel forced to remove a very important part (for some, business etc) of system, they just remove it.
I am almost sure OS X Snow Leopard's mail.app will even have MORE features and size. You won't see anyone complaining since Apple will be doing the real hard job of actually enhancing system performance, getting rid of old compatibility frameworks, move to pure 64bit etc.
It is not the size of Mail application (Lotus notes is 400 MB or something), it is something else.
A GUI appears, "Which Browser do you prefer?", gigantic icons of IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari appears... OS downloads it and sets it up.
Of course, removal of MSHTML.dll isn't really possible anymore. They took every step to make sure system won't function without it. It is not realistic because thousands of software relies on their HTML rendering framework, even their rivals.
It is all up to the company. DejaNews guys made hell of a better job than multi billion Google managing the web usenet and remember they started it while Usenet was hot, really hot.
Currently, besides real newbies looking for help (So I don't filter yet), Google sourced posts are like:
1) Posted via Google, using Gmail address as return 2) Advertises a pirate forum (which also runs thanks to Google adwords)
It is like a joke. Reporting Abuse sends back a template saying they are collecting those abuse reports for statistical something. So, the real admins like the single person maintaining the entire news.ibm.net which was open and configured to every ibm.net customer must get medal? We didn't see a single spam on ibm.net while the text traffic alone was 80MB/day.
As Google won't kill-file itself, people trying to access/see Usenet via Google Groups may be getting a horrible false impression I think.
There is no filtering on Usenet, it is up to individual (ignore,kill file etc.). That is my point. No moderation, meta moderation, gangs abusing them, a single medium with established standards and guaranteed freedom of speech.
You know how tiny "MicroSD" cards are right? Did you see one of those? I can't dare to carry them without their case, they are that small.
Lets agree to Apple that "lack of changeable battery" was part of design.
What about lacking of that tiny MicroSD slot? The reason? Think about the reason and you will understand it is not very different from lack of interchangeable battery and will understand why some of us, using only Apple computers stay away from the device.
Other phones have ActiveSync as option too, free in most cases.
If SyncML wasn't available on regular/smart phones, iSync would have 10-12 phones supported at most. Apple, somehow lost its mind in phone department even forgot how important the standards of syncing are.
If they actually think companies who sometimes manage thousands of phones from single terminal will convert to iPhone just because it has "ActiveSync", they are really in a dream...
Companies look for standards support. If they look for Windows Standards (!), they buy HTC or HP running Windows Mobile.
MS can change ActiveSync protocol overnight with one of their usual excuses (security etc) and all Apple iPhone "ActiveSync" support can render obsolete, because of a single byte added.
The only place which you can help Mac newbies and actually discuss your Mac issues (after killing couple of trolls) for me is Usenet comp.sys.mac tree.
The Scientific groups are very active too and they are in fact thanking the lack of mainstream (clueless idiots). Mainstream is busy with their "Web 2.0" sites and censoring every single opinion they don't like.
Google didn't pay $500M to Deja for "porn" you know. They bought the real Usenet which consists of ASCII characters.
Well, the guy who says "Usenet is still relevant" got modded down to "troll", as a way of saying "I don't agree" I think. If another disagreeing guy who really doesn't understand what "Troll" means mods him down -1 one more time, he his "0", the AC level which means his opinion will be effectively censored as most people browses at "1+".
The abuse on his post alone proves why Usenet must live on.
The non binary groups doesn't have that much traffic as they are only serving to Usenet's original purpose: Free speech in text without control.
Stuffit have concentrated to usability and archive management after OS X had built in ZIP. Also they do things like "multi core ZIP archiving", "encrypted zip archives" along with their own formats enhancements. The people you see who buys Stuffit aren't exactly "tricked", they like commercial and supported software and some really need encryption in archives. If one has thousands of ZIP or other archives, managing them could become necessary too.
They also seem to notice the lack of good 7zip GUI so they added 7zip decompression (not compression) to their recent version 13 release.
Just having something in core OS doesn't mean the commercial alternative should be dead. Windows built in compression has always been problematic thanks to their method of doing things. At least Apple does call a separate core utility to do things. If I told you the Windows "zip" is actually rundll32 calling a dll , you can imagine the issues:)
What makes me sad is, the company doing the excellent concept of "ZIP Folders" got acquired by MS and their excellent product/concept has become that junk coming with Windows.
You forget one thing. Nazi empire or any police state wouldn't happen without public support. Did you read Mac fan sites lately?
I don't know why would Apple pay money to lawyers or PR department while the bunch called "fanboys" already does both police job (censor down comments) and PR job (apologise) for them.
These days, I started to get ashamed for saying it in public but I am a OS X/Apple user for 5 years now. Not for long actually. f they have really decided to become Microsoft ever wanted to be but couldn't because of DOJ, I am abandoning the ship for other x86 OS.
There are people in IT World and sane people at Apple public actually saying "So that minority market share was in fact fortunate for personal computing history." I actually get questions about whether Leopard will allow any Apple un approved apps and what will happen when Sandbox is in action.
It is like a bad nightmare. All of this for a God damn phone and some market share which will never, ever surpass Nokia. I hate them for making Nokia and even Microsoft good look on portable market.
It is a horrifying and sad sight just seeing those MS-DOS path names on the creator of UNICOS site. I don't say they should run their site on a UNICOS powered supercomputing cluster but yet...
Guess which vendor uses OpenGL functionality extensively, offloading whatever possible to GPU when possible? Even including text drawing. Apple OS X, since early 10.2
I have a serious question of the real power benefit of running a complete CPU powered junk rather than a low power Nvidia/ATI optimised for portable devices. If your machine draws a window causing 40% percent of CPU peak, you aren't saving power, you are wasting it since a GPU could do it almost requiring fraction of power.
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Sometimes even car companies ship cars which were supposed to be concept. They aren't ordinary and doesn't have all features same class car has but people buy them.
Here is example for you. If you compare it to a WV Golf, you will ask "which moron would buy it?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_TT
They buy it and they are happy.
Macbook Air is for people with already working high end desktop and ordinary laptop having high end Apple 811N "time capsule". It costs a lot but it doesn't make buying or shipping one a crime.
Would I buy a Macbook Air? Hell no. I am not even a laptop user. Nokia E90 and Sony Ericsson P1i (which has FRACTION of Air CPU speed and RAM) is good for my usage. They cost more than laptop and I guess I am another guilty filthy rich.
I am a Symbian user. I am not defending their scheme of doing things but one gotta admit it is a unique concept in smart phone and can't be copied.
It is mix of hardware and software. In fact it is hardware designed by a software company to run their software.
Windows has better third party support since the companies coding those complex apps and drivers choose Windows over Apple. The Windows accessibility which is built in is a 'fallback' thing. Look to its help if you don't believe me. Blind people use way more advanced apps but... apps doesn't exist on OS X.
When they port to OS X using XCode or when they finally wake up and start porting does Apple refuse to support them? I bet they would even support them for free.
What will Apple do? Bribe them and make them code? Is there a more consistent and documented single user interface rather than OS X?
Macbook Air is a concept machine designed to fit a specific lifestyle and usage style.
If you have a "Mac Pro" or high end iMac running on top of line ISP line with 811.11N network installed at home and live in industrial city with top of line 3G coverage, you will buy and like Macbook Air.
See the Apple Japan store top 10 sellers if you don't believe me.
While speaking about Japan, Casio watches now even come with "atomic time sync" and they are cheaper than $200. Does it make Rolex a failure as it can only display time and date for $3000?
I suggest you act like/simulate that you are a top of line Mac Pro workstation owner and shopping for a new GPU (graphics card).
They run Intel right? Industry standard port too... Check how many GPU choices you have and their prices, support. Also simulate that you bought the device and have low FPS and look to ATI/NVIDIA support site. Don't waste so much time on that since they will eventually send you to Apple.
Sound is similar too...
This is a Wintel puppet IT scene and even having unheard (for Apple after '95) market share explosion doesn't matter. I also wonder what would happen if I installed a Realtek el cheapo NIC to this Quad G5 instead of Broadcom Apple installed. On P4 PC, it had 20% performance hit. I bought it because it had Windows driver and support. As Realtek geniuses can't download free XCode and code for OS X, we are saved.
Yes, as OS X Intel runs on same x86 CPU, it can work. No need to run a lab for that.
When will people understand that OS X and hardware in total gives "Apple experience" and FreeBSD 6 with WindowMaker/WINE is a way better choice for such portable?
OS X is not only a X86 OS. It becomes meaningful when hardware matches too.
I bet Sony Vaio can run OS X too but I would run Windows or Linux on that machine. It will work way better than a hacked OS.
Therotically as it runs same CPU and most of mobile chip manufacturers are common, my Nokia and Sony Ericsson smart phones can run iPhone OS rather than Symbian they come with. If someone spent needless time for such a hardcore hack and shipped, would I install? Hell no. iPhone experience is broken right when hardware part is gone and smallest hack has to be applied.
Can't they work on meaningful things such as enhancing the linux/bsd support and performance rather than making people joke with MSI?
What a big mistake... iPhone is a unique concept and while it made me stick to Symbian next 5 years, it is not about pretty graphics or animations, not even the multi touch... It is squeezing UNIX mentality and NeXT tradition to a tiny device.
It can't be cloned especially by MS. The iPhone and Apple is exact opposite of MS. I am not saying one side is good or bad.
It is a waste of time. Both MS and Symbian should stick to own model of doing things and enhance them.
Some of players they support and "rescue" from Vendor firmware/lock-in costs like $300 and even more.
Dare to ask the amount of donations they get? I don't ;) I can guess, that is why.
No, I am not saying a word about Lotus Notes and its size. What I tell is, having Lotus Notes installed on OS X or not doesn't make slightest difference about how system performs.
I am talking about the architecture problem of Windows. You shouldn't need to remove "applications" to boost performance.
"Bloat" isn't in the software. It is how Windows works.
Unless MS finally gets rid of Registry and make a compatibility layer while actual settings are stored in plain XML files, they will have a problem with every single additional app installed or patched.
They steal everything from Apple but miss the good stuff :)
Currently there are 700 tiny .plist files in my ~/Library/Preferences (OS X). My system doesn't care, I don't care too.
Did you see "Web 2" "Ajax" editions of Yahoo mail, Hotmail? They make MS Outlook/Lotus Notes look "light" :)
Most people love to use IMAP support of Google etc. For IMAP, they need a real client.
Apple certainly includes cURL in OS X by default for some reason. If you think about it, it could be lifesaver in some situations.
I know many people (including me) sometimes hate the OS X mail.app but I didn't see anyone bitching about Mail.app inclusion on OS X.
MS should think about why they feel forced to remove Outlook Express from Windows. For better performance? So how can Outlook Express hurt System performance? That is the real thing.
At one point I was running 5-6 mail clients (thanks to IMAP) and trying to choose one of them on OS X. There wasn't a slightest performance/compatibility or any other issue as result. There are several people who uses Mail.app to read/reply their mails and use Eudora to organise them.
Instead of thinking WHY they feel forced to remove a very important part (for some, business etc) of system, they just remove it.
I am almost sure OS X Snow Leopard's mail.app will even have MORE features and size. You won't see anyone complaining since Apple will be doing the real hard job of actually enhancing system performance, getting rid of old compatibility frameworks, move to pure 64bit etc.
It is not the size of Mail application (Lotus notes is 400 MB or something), it is something else.
A GUI appears, "Which Browser do you prefer?", gigantic icons of IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari appears... OS downloads it and sets it up.
Of course, removal of MSHTML.dll isn't really possible anymore. They took every step to make sure system won't function without it. It is not realistic because thousands of software relies on their HTML rendering framework, even their rivals.
It is all up to the company. DejaNews guys made hell of a better job than multi billion Google managing the web usenet and remember they started it while Usenet was hot, really hot.
Currently, besides real newbies looking for help (So I don't filter yet), Google sourced posts are like:
1) Posted via Google, using Gmail address as return
2) Advertises a pirate forum (which also runs thanks to Google adwords)
It is like a joke. Reporting Abuse sends back a template saying they are collecting those abuse reports for statistical something. So, the real admins like the single person maintaining the entire news.ibm.net which was open and configured to every ibm.net customer must get medal? We didn't see a single spam on ibm.net while the text traffic alone was 80MB/day.
As Google won't kill-file itself, people trying to access/see Usenet via Google Groups may be getting a horrible false impression I think.
There is no filtering on Usenet, it is up to individual (ignore,kill file etc.). That is my point. No moderation, meta moderation, gangs abusing them, a single medium with established standards and guaranteed freedom of speech.
You know how tiny "MicroSD" cards are right? Did you see one of those? I can't dare to carry them without their case, they are that small.
Lets agree to Apple that "lack of changeable battery" was part of design.
What about lacking of that tiny MicroSD slot? The reason? Think about the reason and you will understand it is not very different from lack of interchangeable battery and will understand why some of us, using only Apple computers stay away from the device.
Other phones have ActiveSync as option too, free in most cases.
If SyncML wasn't available on regular/smart phones, iSync would have 10-12 phones supported at most. Apple, somehow lost its mind in phone department even forgot how important the standards of syncing are.
If they actually think companies who sometimes manage thousands of phones from single terminal will convert to iPhone just because it has "ActiveSync", they are really in a dream...
Companies look for standards support. If they look for Windows Standards (!), they buy HTC or HP running Windows Mobile.
MS can change ActiveSync protocol overnight with one of their usual excuses (security etc) and all Apple iPhone "ActiveSync" support can render obsolete, because of a single byte added.
The only place which you can help Mac newbies and actually discuss your Mac issues (after killing couple of trolls) for me is Usenet comp.sys.mac tree.
The Scientific groups are very active too and they are in fact thanking the lack of mainstream (clueless idiots). Mainstream is busy with their "Web 2.0" sites and censoring every single opinion they don't like.
Google didn't pay $500M to Deja for "porn" you know. They bought the real Usenet which consists of ASCII characters.
Well, the guy who says "Usenet is still relevant" got modded down to "troll", as a way of saying "I don't agree" I think. If another disagreeing guy who really doesn't understand what "Troll" means mods him down -1 one more time, he his "0", the AC level which means his opinion will be effectively censored as most people browses at "1+".
The abuse on his post alone proves why Usenet must live on.
The non binary groups doesn't have that much traffic as they are only serving to Usenet's original purpose: Free speech in text without control.
Stuffit have concentrated to usability and archive management after OS X had built in ZIP. Also they do things like "multi core ZIP archiving", "encrypted zip archives" along with their own formats enhancements. The people you see who buys Stuffit aren't exactly "tricked", they like commercial and supported software and some really need encryption in archives. If one has thousands of ZIP or other archives, managing them could become necessary too.
They also seem to notice the lack of good 7zip GUI so they added 7zip decompression (not compression) to their recent version 13 release.
Just having something in core OS doesn't mean the commercial alternative should be dead. Windows built in compression has always been problematic thanks to their method of doing things. At least Apple does call a separate core utility to do things. If I told you the Windows "zip" is actually rundll32 calling a dll , you can imagine the issues :)
What makes me sad is, the company doing the excellent concept of "ZIP Folders" got acquired by MS and their excellent product/concept has become that junk coming with Windows.
You forget one thing. Nazi empire or any police state wouldn't happen without public support. Did you read Mac fan sites lately?
I don't know why would Apple pay money to lawyers or PR department while the bunch called "fanboys" already does both police job (censor down comments) and PR job (apologise) for them.
These days, I started to get ashamed for saying it in public but I am a OS X/Apple user for 5 years now. Not for long actually. f they have really decided to become Microsoft ever wanted to be but couldn't because of DOJ, I am abandoning the ship for other x86 OS.
There are people in IT World and sane people at Apple public actually saying "So that minority market share was in fact fortunate for personal computing history." I actually get questions about whether Leopard will allow any Apple un approved apps and what will happen when Sandbox is in action.
It is like a bad nightmare. All of this for a God damn phone and some market share which will never, ever surpass Nokia. I hate them for making Nokia and even Microsoft good look on portable market.
It is a horrifying and sad sight just seeing those MS-DOS path names on the creator of UNICOS site. I don't say they should run their site on a UNICOS powered supercomputing cluster but yet...
Guess which vendor uses OpenGL functionality extensively, offloading whatever possible to GPU when possible? Even including text drawing. Apple OS X, since early 10.2
I have a serious question of the real power benefit of running a complete CPU powered junk rather than a low power Nvidia/ATI optimised for portable devices. If your machine draws a window causing 40% percent of CPU peak, you aren't saving power, you are wasting it since a GPU could do it almost requiring fraction of power.