There's a big difference between Macs and PCs you should take into consideration.
Most of PCs are sold for businesses, and the main user has few privileges on what to install and update. Tech services handle the big updates. In business, the rule is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and the same rule applied by contamination to many other PC users. When a PC is sold with XP, keep on using XP until the PC is broken, or when XP gets old, wait until Microsoft releases a new Windows version and we'll get new PCs with the new release. That's why XP survived that long and PC sales were in trouble during the Vista era. Many companies didn't want to get new PCs running Vista. They stuck to XP and harrassed Microsoft to keep on selling volume licenses of XP. When W7 was released, business eventually realized it was a significant improvement and renewed their computer stock with new models running Seven. But few personal users felt the need to buy the upgrade disk for their shop. It's not much part of the Windows culture.
The situation is quite different on the Mac. Most of Macs are home computers that are administered by their main user. From Mac OS X 10.0 to 10.6, there were significant progresses for features and performances (10.0 to 10.2 were slow and not very comfortable), and zero piracy protection, so most of the people decided to upgrade, legally or not, as we got a new and definitely release every year or every two years. Mac OS X 10.7 was some kind of a departure, and it's much slower on some models, but Apple has resumed their policy of refining and enhancing up the OS major releases, this time with a new release every year sold for a pittance (less than $20) on the Mac App Store. And that's why almost every Mac in use today runs on 10.6 (last satisfying release for early Intel Macs), 10.7 (for models that aren't fully 64 bit compliant) or, in majority, 10.8, while in the Windows world it took years for Seven to rise above XP. Mac users tend to take a chance on change and progress much more than their Windows counterpart, mostly as Windows is that much tied to businesses and businesses are usually on the safe side.
So, in the OS X developing world, nobody would care now for 10.5 Leopard, even less 10.4 Tiger. The oldest version commonly in use is 10.6 Snow Leopard, and it was released in August 2009 just a few weeks before Windows Seven. That's as if Microsoft could afford to drop all support on XP and Vista and introduce bigger changes in the architecture with a major release, knowing that developers and users would be quick to follow them. They actually attempted this with Windows 8 (and Windows RT) and it flopped badly.
On iOS, it's even simpler. 93 percent of the devices that go on the App Store run iOS 6. 6 percent are on iOS 5. If you want to develop on iOS, focus on the latest version, if you're on the cautious side, support the version that was released the year before, and you cover 99 percent of your users. No need for compatibility with older APIs. When new features and APIs get introduced with major releases, you won't lose anything for taking advantage of them. It will actually put you above your competitors.
I don't write this to say that Mac or iOS is better, especially for developers. It's just that the culture of upgrade on Mac and PC is significantly different due to their respective markets and traditions. If you want to develop (for OS X or iOS) on a Mac, you have to know how Mac users (and common developers) behave compared to their PC counterparts, and get an OS upgrade when the early bugs for a major release get eventually addressed.
Xcode is a pile of crap. I can't develop for iOS from Windows or Linux computers. I have to constantly buy new Macs just to keep up (My couple year old Mac Mini already can't be upgraded to a new enough Mac OS X to run the latest Xcode, so I basically dropped caring about iOS and stopped using the thing now), meanwhile any old XP, Win7, Linux, etc can run Eclipse just fine.
This is complete bullshit.
Even the Mac mini released in August 2007, almost seven year ago, can run OS X Lion, and thus Xcode 4.6.3, which is the latest version. The March 2009 model is compatible with Mountain Lion, and Mavericks, as Apple didn't discontinue any model for upgrade this time. Of course, there may not be enough RAM to run it comfortably, but the memory modules are standard and you can upgrade yourself.
Just for record, a "couple year old Mac Mini" would be a Penryn Core 2 Duo (2.4 or 2.66 GHz) sold between June 2010 or July 2011. It can be updated to Mountain Lion and Mavericks.
Looks like you didn't need to drop caring about developing on iOS. You just didn't start.
Early digital equipment used by Philips actually used video tape (maybe V2000 as it was the video standard released by Philips around 1979). I remember an interview by Herbert von Karajan about his first experience with digital playback. He hadn't been warned and hadn't found anything suspicious with the VCR they had put in the studio until he went outside and believed that the orchestra was playing. (Of course, Karajan might have embellished the story for PR reasons).
Remember CD is a joint development by Philips and Pioneer. At the beginning, Philips was working alone but they had a big problem, as they hadn't been able to slim down playback equipment. It was still one cube meter large. That's why they got in touch with Sony, to begin with.
Sony, who had a similar but less advanced project, then took hands of the digital recording technology and was in charge of almost all the development. It was a nearly humiliating experience for Philips because, even if they had developed the principles of digital recording, their engineers were completely irrelevant when it came to making a commercial device based on the technology, compared to the Sony teams.
I have read that the 74 minutes/Ninth Symphony story is particularly humiliating. Some sources say that Sony chose this length because a poll had shown that the 9th Symphony was the most popular classical work in Japan. Officiously, they simply asked Akio Morita's wife what her favourite music was, then informed Philips of how they had picked this particular length.
I agree with you on almost all points. I'd just like to add a few details concerning the Apple/IBM situation.
From what I've understood, Apple wasn't an insanely great customer to IBM chip division and adopted a non-commitment policy. For instance, IBM had plans of a low-wattage version of the G5 for laptops but Apple wouldn't make a big initial order - that would have justified investment from IBM - even if this chip would have been a no-brainer for PowerBooks. They would just order something like a 10,000 sample. As Apple was IBM's main customer for this branch of PowerPC chips, it was pissing them off and they did only a half-baked job on the development of such a chip, as there was no proved marked outside of Apple for it. After the renewal of the vows that the tailor-made for Apple G5 chip was, they couldn't agree on a long-term common strategy.
Besides, development costs for chips still increase exponentially, even for specific versions of existing chips. Apple could have gotten a good G5 chip to put inside PowerBooks but they had no long-term guaranties that IBM could bring a competitive G6 or G7 series in time. The 3 GHz G5 failure (a promise originally made by IBM) proves they had legitimate reasons to doubt. IBM was certainly a more able chipmaker than Motorola/Freescale but the situation could have turned into another G4 fiasco, which had cost Apple hundreds of millions in delayed sales or switch to more powerful Windows PCs. Even if Apple sold twice as many computers as they did, and adopted a more cooperative attitude towards IBM, they might not have gotten much more competitive chips from them in due time, especially if costs for the next generation increase twofold.
Apple was indeed very lucky in switching to Intel chips at the right time, when the iPod cash cow was in full effect, Leopard was greeted favorably on its own terms and Intel beat its own development estimations for the Core series. It even took place in the middle of a slowdown in the industry caused by the Vista delays. The switch was caused by a reasonable estimation of the chip industry but the timing was mostly luck. The bastards...
I'd say that iTunes 7 is also a given:
- last year, iTunes 5 then iTunes 6 (iTunes 5.1 in all but name) were released within a month, mostly to make iTunes release version coincide with the business year. iTunes 6 = 2005-06. iTunes 7 = 2006-2007
- update of some core components to include the movie store
- need to address the competition, particularly WMP, whose ergonomy is improving with v. 11, especially concerning visual interface and the use of artwork.
iTunes is still well thought as a MP3 player but Apple needs to put some more buzz and hype into it as it hasn't much evolved for the last two or three years. It's the piece of Apple music strategy that has been the least covered by rumor sites for the last few months but it's determining none the less.
Actually, it's not a Rosetta chip. It's a Rosetta stone. For some reason, Apple decided to put a small engraved stone inside every Intel Mac. This stone is read by a very tiny scribe that lives inside the computer and translates instructions on the fly for the processor. The scribe gets bored after a couple of hours, hence the inclusion of the iSight camera on top of the screen of most of their new models to allow him to get a view of the outside world, like a periscope, and the lackluster performance of the Mac mini: the scribe can see nearly nothing, which makes him angry. He has to move to the IR receiver for the remote control to watch something else than a hard drive or his personal stone.
What's even more boring are these stories posted by people who switched to the Mac a few months ago.
Then those boring reports about increasing sales of Macs.
Who could have guess that Apple would turn so boring?
Steve Jobs has little to no creative input concerning Pixar: John Lasseter is in charge. The last time Jobs tried to interfere with the filmmakers choices was just after the first private screening of a finished "Toy Story". Jobs hated the score by Randy Newman and wanted to replace it. Lasseter and the other guys stood by the Newman score and songs, which brought "Toy Story" an Oscar nomination and Newman four additional scores for Pixar.
Jobs has an office at Pixar but he's never there. A documentary about the old Pixar headquarters around the "Monsters Inc." release (2001) showed an empty office with just a desk and a PC, not a Mac. Lasseter even jokes about the room, the least crowded area at Pixar. As a sidenote, this footage about the office could be seen on videos part of the original EPK: the "Monsters, Inc." DVD includes the same documentary but the footage is missing. (The explanation for the PC is that Jobs, after his return to Apple, didn't use a Mac running Mac OS 8 or 9 for himself. He still had a PC running OpenStep instead. When Mac OS X became the system of choice, he switched to the Mac.)
On the other hand, Jobs plays the main part concerning business deals with Disney and other partners (Intel for the rendering part, for instance) and his input has been more than valuable to Pixar. Jobs and Pixar both run the company. If a deal is closed with Disney, Lasseter must be a part of it, because Pixar wouldn't be Pixar without him. So, I guess a term of the deal would be to grant Lasseter artistic direction of the whole departmetn. Else, there's no guarantee that Pixar future projects won't suck as much as most of Disney releases.
Before editing, there was a large section in which Chuck Norris and Suzanne Somers both praised Microsoft for giving them muscles and a perfect bone structure. Otherwise, the infomercial is spot on.
Published: June 6 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/06/technology/06app le.html Apple Plans to Switch From I.B.M. to Intel for Chips The authors seem to have received confirmation from "industry executives informed of [Jobs']decision but there's little new info compared to the previous reports.
Anyway, Jayson Blair is not on the NYT's payroll anymore, so there must be some truth.
The funny thing is that Apple was previously a co-owner of ARM, along with Acorn and VLSI. These were the chips they used in the Newton PDA. When the Newton was shelved (it was an "old Apple" product sacrificed by Jobs to keep the Mac alive), ARM shares were gradually sold every three months.
Otherwise, I don't believe for a second that Apple would migrate its main computers architecture to x86. For instance, without any leak (due to the required extensive beta testing) of Tiger on Intel, the whole story seems entirely implausible.
The fact that the site is called winsupersite.com should give you some hint of bias from its owner. Of course, it's not iluvwindozecuzitskool.com but it's getting there. I wouldn't call Thurrot an "experienced reviewer". The first paragraphs about how he claims to be a Mac fan because he had at some time an Apple IIgs are particularly laughable.
The fields that Thurrot covered in his review concern generally the GUI. And, apart from Spotlight, there is little revolution in this area from Panther to Tiger, merely refinements. Most of the people that will upgrade won't notice a big difference in their habits.
There are two points where Thurrot isn't particularly convincing. One is his endless comparision between Mac OS X and what Microsoft offers, that ranges from "It's some kind of imitation of Windows" to "They're the first to implement it but MS had certainly already thought about this feature before and their version will be better". The other point is the new set of APIs brought by Tiger, much welcomed by developers and overlooked by Thurrot.
In the end, many people will be ready to spend $129, not only because they're "Apple fans" or because they expect a revolution but because they feel that 10.4 will be an improvement in many fields (especially speed) and that future exciting apps for Mac OS X will require this release.
For instance, I'll pay for the new version and I see the relative lack of major redesign in Tiger as a sign that major architecture choices for Mac OS X have turned out to be valid. Apple is currently expanding what their OS can do instead of spending time to correct a big flaw. Which is a rather new notion for Apple users. And Apple users love to pay for something new.
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There's a big difference between Macs and PCs you should take into consideration.
Most of PCs are sold for businesses, and the main user has few privileges on what to install and update. Tech services handle the big updates.
In business, the rule is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and the same rule applied by contamination to many other PC users. When a PC is sold with XP, keep on using XP until the PC is broken, or when XP gets old, wait until Microsoft releases a new Windows version and we'll get new PCs with the new release.
That's why XP survived that long and PC sales were in trouble during the Vista era. Many companies didn't want to get new PCs running Vista. They stuck to XP and harrassed Microsoft to keep on selling volume licenses of XP. When W7 was released, business eventually realized it was a significant improvement and renewed their computer stock with new models running Seven. But few personal users felt the need to buy the upgrade disk for their shop. It's not much part of the Windows culture.
The situation is quite different on the Mac. Most of Macs are home computers that are administered by their main user. From Mac OS X 10.0 to 10.6, there were significant progresses for features and performances (10.0 to 10.2 were slow and not very comfortable), and zero piracy protection, so most of the people decided to upgrade, legally or not, as we got a new and definitely release every year or every two years. Mac OS X 10.7 was some kind of a departure, and it's much slower on some models, but Apple has resumed their policy of refining and enhancing up the OS major releases, this time with a new release every year sold for a pittance (less than $20) on the Mac App Store.
And that's why almost every Mac in use today runs on 10.6 (last satisfying release for early Intel Macs), 10.7 (for models that aren't fully 64 bit compliant) or, in majority, 10.8, while in the Windows world it took years for Seven to rise above XP. Mac users tend to take a chance on change and progress much more than their Windows counterpart, mostly as Windows is that much tied to businesses and businesses are usually on the safe side.
So, in the OS X developing world, nobody would care now for 10.5 Leopard, even less 10.4 Tiger. The oldest version commonly in use is 10.6 Snow Leopard, and it was released in August 2009 just a few weeks before Windows Seven. That's as if Microsoft could afford to drop all support on XP and Vista and introduce bigger changes in the architecture with a major release, knowing that developers and users would be quick to follow them. They actually attempted this with Windows 8 (and Windows RT) and it flopped badly.
On iOS, it's even simpler. 93 percent of the devices that go on the App Store run iOS 6. 6 percent are on iOS 5. If you want to develop on iOS, focus on the latest version, if you're on the cautious side, support the version that was released the year before, and you cover 99 percent of your users. No need for compatibility with older APIs. When new features and APIs get introduced with major releases, you won't lose anything for taking advantage of them. It will actually put you above your competitors.
I don't write this to say that Mac or iOS is better, especially for developers. It's just that the culture of upgrade on Mac and PC is significantly different due to their respective markets and traditions. If you want to develop (for OS X or iOS) on a Mac, you have to know how Mac users (and common developers) behave compared to their PC counterparts, and get an OS upgrade when the early bugs for a major release get eventually addressed.
Xcode is a pile of crap. I can't develop for iOS from Windows or Linux computers. I have to constantly buy new Macs just to keep up (My couple year old Mac Mini already can't be upgraded to a new enough Mac OS X to run the latest Xcode, so I basically dropped caring about iOS and stopped using the thing now), meanwhile any old XP, Win7, Linux, etc can run Eclipse just fine.
This is complete bullshit.
Even the Mac mini released in August 2007, almost seven year ago, can run OS X Lion, and thus Xcode 4.6.3, which is the latest version.
The March 2009 model is compatible with Mountain Lion, and Mavericks, as Apple didn't discontinue any model for upgrade this time.
Of course, there may not be enough RAM to run it comfortably, but the memory modules are standard and you can upgrade yourself.
Just for record, a "couple year old Mac Mini" would be a Penryn Core 2 Duo (2.4 or 2.66 GHz) sold between June 2010 or July 2011. It can be updated to Mountain Lion and Mavericks.
Looks like you didn't need to drop caring about developing on iOS. You just didn't start.
Early digital equipment used by Philips actually used video tape (maybe V2000 as it was the video standard released by Philips around 1979). I remember an interview by Herbert von Karajan about his first experience with digital playback. He hadn't been warned and hadn't found anything suspicious with the VCR they had put in the studio until he went outside and believed that the orchestra was playing. (Of course, Karajan might have embellished the story for PR reasons).
Remember CD is a joint development by Philips and Pioneer. At the beginning, Philips was working alone but they had a big problem, as they hadn't been able to slim down playback equipment. It was still one cube meter large. That's why they got in touch with Sony, to begin with.
Sony, who had a similar but less advanced project, then took hands of the digital recording technology and was in charge of almost all the development. It was a nearly humiliating experience for Philips because, even if they had developed the principles of digital recording, their engineers were completely irrelevant when it came to making a commercial device based on the technology, compared to the Sony teams.
I have read that the 74 minutes/Ninth Symphony story is particularly humiliating. Some sources say that Sony chose this length because a poll had shown that the 9th Symphony was the most popular classical work in Japan. Officiously, they simply asked Akio Morita's wife what her favourite music was, then informed Philips of how they had picked this particular length.
I agree with you on almost all points. I'd just like to add a few details concerning the Apple/IBM situation.
From what I've understood, Apple wasn't an insanely great customer to IBM chip division and adopted a non-commitment policy. For instance, IBM had plans of a low-wattage version of the G5 for laptops but Apple wouldn't make a big initial order - that would have justified investment from IBM - even if this chip would have been a no-brainer for PowerBooks. They would just order something like a 10,000 sample. As Apple was IBM's main customer for this branch of PowerPC chips, it was pissing them off and they did only a half-baked job on the development of such a chip, as there was no proved marked outside of Apple for it. After the renewal of the vows that the tailor-made for Apple G5 chip was, they couldn't agree on a long-term common strategy.
Besides, development costs for chips still increase exponentially, even for specific versions of existing chips. Apple could have gotten a good G5 chip to put inside PowerBooks but they had no long-term guaranties that IBM could bring a competitive G6 or G7 series in time. The 3 GHz G5 failure (a promise originally made by IBM) proves they had legitimate reasons to doubt. IBM was certainly a more able chipmaker than Motorola/Freescale but the situation could have turned into another G4 fiasco, which had cost Apple hundreds of millions in delayed sales or switch to more powerful Windows PCs. Even if Apple sold twice as many computers as they did, and adopted a more cooperative attitude towards IBM, they might not have gotten much more competitive chips from them in due time, especially if costs for the next generation increase twofold.
Apple was indeed very lucky in switching to Intel chips at the right time, when the iPod cash cow was in full effect, Leopard was greeted favorably on its own terms and Intel beat its own development estimations for the Core series. It even took place in the middle of a slowdown in the industry caused by the Vista delays. The switch was caused by a reasonable estimation of the chip industry but the timing was mostly luck. The bastards...
When you go Mac, you don't go back.
I'd say that iTunes 7 is also a given:
- last year, iTunes 5 then iTunes 6 (iTunes 5.1 in all but name) were released within a month, mostly to make iTunes release version coincide with the business year. iTunes 6 = 2005-06. iTunes 7 = 2006-2007
- update of some core components to include the movie store
- need to address the competition, particularly WMP, whose ergonomy is improving with v. 11, especially concerning visual interface and the use of artwork.
iTunes is still well thought as a MP3 player but Apple needs to put some more buzz and hype into it as it hasn't much evolved for the last two or three years. It's the piece of Apple music strategy that has been the least covered by rumor sites for the last few months but it's determining none the less.
Actually, it's not a Rosetta chip. It's a Rosetta stone. For some reason, Apple decided to put a small engraved stone inside every Intel Mac. This stone is read by a very tiny scribe that lives inside the computer and translates instructions on the fly for the processor. The scribe gets bored after a couple of hours, hence the inclusion of the iSight camera on top of the screen of most of their new models to allow him to get a view of the outside world, like a periscope, and the lackluster performance of the Mac mini: the scribe can see nearly nothing, which makes him angry. He has to move to the IR receiver for the remote control to watch something else than a hard drive or his personal stone.
What's even more boring are these stories posted by people who switched to the Mac a few months ago.
Then those boring reports about increasing sales of Macs.
Who could have guess that Apple would turn so boring?
Steve Jobs has little to no creative input concerning Pixar: John Lasseter is in charge. The last time Jobs tried to interfere with the filmmakers choices was just after the first private screening of a finished "Toy Story". Jobs hated the score by Randy Newman and wanted to replace it. Lasseter and the other guys stood by the Newman score and songs, which brought "Toy Story" an Oscar nomination and Newman four additional scores for Pixar. Jobs has an office at Pixar but he's never there. A documentary about the old Pixar headquarters around the "Monsters Inc." release (2001) showed an empty office with just a desk and a PC, not a Mac. Lasseter even jokes about the room, the least crowded area at Pixar. As a sidenote, this footage about the office could be seen on videos part of the original EPK: the "Monsters, Inc." DVD includes the same documentary but the footage is missing. (The explanation for the PC is that Jobs, after his return to Apple, didn't use a Mac running Mac OS 8 or 9 for himself. He still had a PC running OpenStep instead. When Mac OS X became the system of choice, he switched to the Mac.) On the other hand, Jobs plays the main part concerning business deals with Disney and other partners (Intel for the rendering part, for instance) and his input has been more than valuable to Pixar. Jobs and Pixar both run the company. If a deal is closed with Disney, Lasseter must be a part of it, because Pixar wouldn't be Pixar without him. So, I guess a term of the deal would be to grant Lasseter artistic direction of the whole departmetn. Else, there's no guarantee that Pixar future projects won't suck as much as most of Disney releases.
Before editing, there was a large section in which Chuck Norris and Suzanne Somers both praised Microsoft for giving them muscles and a perfect bone structure. Otherwise, the infomercial is spot on.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/06/technology/06ap
Apple Plans to Switch From I.B.M. to Intel for Chips
The authors seem to have received confirmation from "industry executives informed of [Jobs']decision but there's little new info compared to the previous reports.
Anyway, Jayson Blair is not on the NYT's payroll anymore, so there must be some truth.
The funny thing is that Apple was previously a co-owner of ARM, along with Acorn and VLSI. These were the chips they used in the Newton PDA. When the Newton was shelved (it was an "old Apple" product sacrificed by Jobs to keep the Mac alive), ARM shares were gradually sold every three months. Otherwise, I don't believe for a second that Apple would migrate its main computers architecture to x86. For instance, without any leak (due to the required extensive beta testing) of Tiger on Intel, the whole story seems entirely implausible.
The fact that the site is called winsupersite.com should give you some hint of bias from its owner. Of course, it's not iluvwindozecuzitskool.com but it's getting there. I wouldn't call Thurrot an "experienced reviewer". The first paragraphs about how he claims to be a Mac fan because he had at some time an Apple IIgs are particularly laughable.
The fields that Thurrot covered in his review concern generally the GUI. And, apart from Spotlight, there is little revolution in this area from Panther to Tiger, merely refinements. Most of the people that will upgrade won't notice a big difference in their habits.
There are two points where Thurrot isn't particularly convincing. One is his endless comparision between Mac OS X and what Microsoft offers, that ranges from "It's some kind of imitation of Windows" to "They're the first to implement it but MS had certainly already thought about this feature before and their version will be better". The other point is the new set of APIs brought by Tiger, much welcomed by developers and overlooked by Thurrot.
In the end, many people will be ready to spend $129, not only because they're "Apple fans" or because they expect a revolution but because they feel that 10.4 will be an improvement in many fields (especially speed) and that future exciting apps for Mac OS X will require this release.
For instance, I'll pay for the new version and I see the relative lack of major redesign in Tiger as a sign that major architecture choices for Mac OS X have turned out to be valid. Apple is currently expanding what their OS can do instead of spending time to correct a big flaw. Which is a rather new notion for Apple users. And Apple users love to pay for something new.
Try "java -version" through the terminal. When I did this, I got a segfault, then I reinstalled Security Update 2005-002 http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/securityupd ate2005002macosx1034orlater.html.
Everything seems to be working now.