It could also be argued that software benefits from regular bug fixes and feature enhancement releases. Are you trying to say XP was so good that it didn't need more than 3 SP updates in the last 8 years? Because that's a ridiculous thing to say.
It also sounds like you're tying to spin SPs as a collection of fixes that come down the pipe at regular intervals. Sure, Apple issues regular security patch updates outside of its minor updates; these are also rolled up into its minor releases, which serve as a the "benchmark minimum specification" for new Macs being sold. So I'm at a loss to see your point.
As as far as attacking my constructive arguemnt on the grounds that I've "already decided that Apple is better than Microsoft" in this regard, well yes, I've know this over the last eight years of experiencing the facts as both a Windows admin and a Mac user. But no, I didn't construct this argument out of "thin air" to support my bias, they're both based on my experiences.
See, some people construct opinions based on observable facts and research and then relate them with the supporting facts to bolster their assertions.
Apple certainly can improve, but if you want to talk about "glaring holes in Safari," perhaps you should take off your advocacy/imagination hat and look at the actual facts. Safari isn't the browser related to 99% of the world's spyware and adware infestations. That would be Internet Explorer.
Safari is the browser that pioneered the development of web standards, something IE is just now getting around to addressing after ruling the industry as a terrible monopolist.
I don't dislike Microsoft for its success, I have contempt for the company for using its success to spread failure.
Well obviously SL isn't going to enable 64-bit software on 32-bit hardware, but there is no requisite for multiple cores nor 64-bit CPUs for SL.
There are real and obvious reasons why Apple isn't supporting EOLed PPC machines that would benefit little from the new technologies in SL. Supporting 32-bit Core Solo is not the same as PPC, as there's not nearly the same amount of work in supporting the Intel family of CPUs than in optimizing everything to run on the very different PPC architecture.
Floating fear, uncertainty and doubt as a just wondering question is something people do. I hope you're not.
Perhaps while you were on Newegg you could have searched for Mac OS X Leopard and discovered that its available for $102.99.
Or you could ask Microsoft how much they want for the eight year old XP ($264.99) directly? Of course, MS really wants you to buy Vista and then Windows 7, neither of which do much beyond copying Apple's looks and compositing graphics engine.
"encourages developers to target 64-bit primarily (thus leaving out the pre-Core 2 machines)"
On Windows, targeting 64-bit might leave out 32-bit PCs, but Apple's Universal Binary architecture makes it easy to compile applications that support both 32/64-bit hardware in the same application package. And 64-bit Macs running OS X can run both natively. Windows requires a WOW emulation level to run 32-bit EXEs on the separate 64-bit version of XP/Vista. Which is part of the reason only a minority of Windows users have moved to 64-bits.
Since it shipped in 2001- 8 FREAKING YEARS AGO - WinXP has gotten three SP releases. Microsoft's SPs don't often add significant new features, they fix broken things. Although sometimes, things are so broken (such as USB, or Firewall/security, that an SP appears to "add new features").
Apple doesn't call it a service pack when they release a minor update to Mac OS X, but they deliver these far more often than Microsoft. Apple is gearing up to deliver its *seventh* significant free update to Leopard!
Since 2001, Apple has shipped 40 free updates to Mac OS X at regular intervals, compared to the three SPs you outlined for XP.
There's no way to dance your way out of that corner. Apple has consistently out-delivered Microsoft across the board in both paid upgrades with major new features (six major reference releases this decade, compared to Microsoft's 3 desktop OS releases- Win 5.1 (XP), 6 (Vista), and 6.1 ("7")) and 40 minor free releases compared to Microsoft's 5 SPs.
The MacBook Air is very popular, even though it costs a lot. People pay extra for "cool, sexy" Mac products (those are Microsoft's words used in its advertising about how cheap low end generic PCs are).
Actually I'm surprised by how many starving student types I see with an Air. I decided against buying one (which would have come in handy while traveling), but apparently the cool kids buy what they like, not what they "can afford."
They also buy expensive skinny jeans and $400 iPod touches and other stuff that Microsoft billionaires don't seem to think that they will. Of course, there are people who like to "save money," who go out and buy $700 PCs and then spend thousands of dollars putting GPU cards in them every six months to play the latest PC game.
And then there are those guys who saved money buying the Xbox 360 because it was so much cheaper than the PS3, except that it was only cheaper because it left off a lot of things like wireless and a hard drive. Plus they got a great deal on HD-DVD! And they ended up saving 80% on the Zune after it tanked and Microsoft dumped the extras on the market in a fire sale.
Microsoft is all about saving money! Except for the whole thing about Vista costing more than XP, and introducing a whole bunch of new licensing levels to force generic PC users to pay for features through software upgrades that "unlock" features for hundreds of dollars.
But yeah, your joke about there being two Zunes was funny stuff man, we should get together and play Halo in your mom's basement.
Apple's solution was to enable Remote DVD sharing, so that the "BIOS" (EFI) of the disc-less MacBook Air can install its OS from scratch via the DVD drive of another computer on the local network.
But yes, a generic PC would have a problem installing Windows without a local DVD drive, because generic PCs have a completely retarded, ancient BIOS firmware that rarely offers any functional network boot support, and Windows makes 70's-era assumptions about what CPM drive letters it is installing on.
The main feature of Snow Leopard is its 64-bit kernel and an upgrade across the board to 64-bit apps.
The problem for porting this to PowerPC is that the move to 64-bits only makes things slower on PPC because, as it is based on a modern 64-bit architecture with plenty of registers, it's already gained most of the benefits of 64-bits even when using 32-bit apps. Moving to 64-bit apps just means it has to move around more memory.
On the other hand, 32-bit Intel CPUs are register starved, so the additional memory overhead of the move to 64-bits is far outweighed by the improvement in moving to the 64-bit "Intel" architecture (developed by AMD).
So faced with spending twice the efforts to optimize SL for PPC machines that Mac users have known to be marked for death since 2006, resulting in a product that only runs 64-bit versions of PPC apps slower than Leopard, Apple decided to target its modern 2009 operating system to its modern hardware platform.
There are probably some G5 owners who might like the idea of being able to upgrade to SL, but they probably don't realize that it would only result in some new trim and slower overall performance. And if you compare the number of G5 machines Apple was selling in 2005-2006 with the number of Intel machines it has sold since, you'll see another reason why Apple is supporting Intel exclusively.
FYI:
Apple sold 0.8 to 1 million PPC Macs per quarter in 2005-2006. Apple sold 2.3 to 2.6 million Intel Macs per quarter in the last year.
Of course, Bungie has split from Microsoft, and Carmack has pushed efforts to develop games for the iPhone, so your quotes are entirely take out of context.
And of course there's little interest in games at Apple. There's little money in games that Apple can conceptually get. The market for serious games is entirely monopolized by Microsoft on the PC, and games consoles are a difficult business that Apple has little chance of successfully entering (especially compared to low hanging fruit such as smartphones that Apple can inhale far easier).
Casual gaming is entirely different. Apple already has bitch slapped the industry with the iPhone/iPod touch, and could do some very interesting things with Apple TV, without ever needing to directly compete with Microsoft's extremely well financed (and extremely unprofitable) gaming monopoly, and without really facing much direct competition from the DS or PSP.
Until Sony or Nintendo figure out how to sell music and video (one would think Sony could have figured this out, but no), Apple's mobile iPod/iPhones will continue to enter the mobile gaming market and take territory that will be impossibly difficult to win back. Look at how feeble Sony's attempts to reclaim its Walkman market have been.
Apple also has a strong position in bringing desktop features such as browsing and email to the smartphone and the mobile gaming market, making it even more difficult for Sony and Nintendo to keep up. Add in a proven software market place and a strong development platform that Apple has rolled out, and you have a blazed trail behind attractive products that leads competitors by several years.
And Apple isn't standing still.
If you think polygon count has something to do how successful a console is, read up about the Dreamcast, Nintendo's products, Sony's PS3, and so on.
Probably, but Apple is working out parental controls for iPhone games (currently its only in place for music and video in iTunes and Apple's mobile devices), which is the rationale for not allowing adult content.
Once that is delivered in iPhone 3.0, Apple's objectionable content restrictions are likely to ease.
Apple isn't losing money on the Apple TV, and certainly hasn't pumped $8billion into it.
Second year sales have jumped 3X, and the company has only ever halfassedly marketed it as a hobby.
To draw a parallel between Apple TV, a slow selling device that supports the success of iTunes against other set top boxes and services (including Microsoft's feeble attempts to enter this market) and the Xbox, which has only sold devices at huge subsidies and rang up massive hardware bills for Microsoft while only doing little to maintain Microsoft's monopoly grip on games development, is fantastically ignorant.
The Bandai Pippin was not made or sold by Apple, which is why the Bandai brand is there.
Bandai (the Japanese company that licensed "Power Rangers") jumped on board when Apple offered to license Mac hardware designs to third parties, along with Panasonic and Motorola and a variety of companies that either did or did not actually bring a Mac clone to market.
Most of the Mac clones were just rebranded Mac models with more RAM or a faster CPU, but Bandai wrapped it up as a game console that was more of a web-centric device. That made it more powerful in some respects than a Playstation, but also more expensive. It was also not trying to be compatible with much Mac software, so it ended up being neither fish (a basic games console) nor fowl (a cheap desktop Mac), and instead joined the ranks of middling stuff that nobody saw a reason to buy.
Suggesting that Apple designed it 15 years ago, and that it has some bearing on what Apple would release today is fantastically ignorant.
It's like saying herpes and poking yourself in the eye are both pretty much the same thing, and there's nothing you can do about either.
Windows users have thousands of ways of getting herpes without realizing it because there is so much viral malware out there, and so few obvious and complete ways to protect yourself, and its so hard to recover after and infection.
There are a couple ways to poke yourself in the eye on the Mac, just as there is on any platform. Here, you download an obviously illegal piece of software from an unknown origin, then grant it rights to install on your system. That's not a virus, it's poking yourself in the eye.
If you were browsing a regular website and it installed this script without you knowing, then you'd have a serious problem that needs addressing.
Darwin is a hybrid kernel that uses low level elements of Mach paired with higher level elements of BSD, not two different kernels.
However, NeXT developed OpenStep as a universal operating system environment that actually ran in production on Solaris, the Win NT kernel + OS, as well as the Mach/BSD kernel ported to various hardware.
Apple planned to port that layer on top of the Mac OS too (providing a Yellow Box that could run like Java anywhere), then realized it made more sense to use Mach/BSD and port the Mac appearance on top of OpenStep, and ended up making enough modifications to kill any backward compatibility with the OpenStep specification.
While that's certainly true, OSS also benefits a lot from Apple. Without Mac OS X, BSD would have 25 million fewer users exercising its code.
Apple also owns CUPS and finances LLVM and WebKit and initiated Darwin Calendar Server and lots of other projects. Had the world not rejected NeXT and Unix to race after Microsoft's vaporware in the 90s, all the effort at reinventing BSD as Linux could have been united into a single OSS effort. So Apple has been working against the tide to return the world back to open, interoperable software.
I think open interoperability is more important that forcing companies to propagate an ideology that only hardware should be marketable.
Well you can say "I told you so" when Android reaches an installed base that is approaching that of the iPhone.
When that happens, we can talk about whether multi-vendor differentiation and platform fragmentation (different screen resolutions, missing hardware features, different peripheral connectors, etc) will render the Android platform cohesive enough to support the software sales volumes of the iPhone/iPod touch.
Note that Windows Mobile and Java ME haven't achieved a cohesive platform that developers can really expect to target that is even now (after a decade) as large as Apple has created on the iPhone in the last year and a half.
* 30 million iPhone+iPod touch, pretty much all identically compatible. * 50 million WinMo licenses (many now obsolete), fractured into touchscreen-lacking "Windows Smartphones" with tiny displays, Pocket PC PDAs, Treo-like button phones, and HTC style mini-puter mobile devices, all with different connectors and hardware features. * 100s mlllion JavaME, fractioned into hundreds phones with incompatible runtimes that make successfully targeting the "platform" with significantly complex software virtually impossible
By "opposite" you mean that developers wouldn't be making a decent cut for their software (like the Xbox), or that Microsoft wouldn't be selling enough similarly equipped hardware to create a viable market (like Windows Mobile)?
Is there any evidence that there is any real volume of software being returned through the Apple App Store, or is the conversation just a theoretical, fear mongering bunch of sensationalism?
Sounds like complaining about sand getting in your shorts while laying on the beach.
I bet you're not selling quantities of mobile software comparable with the iPhone App Store. I also bet you have far more piracy of your work than iPhone developers.
An alternative to eBay offering lower fees wouldn't be at all competitive if it also failed to offer eBay's audience.
What the OP was addressing is that fact that in most industries, including most retail software, the original work makes only a fraction of the profits. Apple isn't running the App Store like a store, it's running it as a software seeding practice that happens to run cash positive.
All retailers have to deal with product returns, and most take a loss when a product is returned. When you return a Mac, Apple refurbs it and resells it at a used price. There's no profit in that.
Why should Apple absorb the costs involved in processing developer's returns, given that those returns are likely directly related to the developer's product quality?
If your product returns are even approaching anything more than a small fraction of your total sales, the problem isn't your merchandizer, its your product. This story is ridiculous: developers are going to lose money because most of their software is being returned? Remember that Apple preferred to drop the "I am rich" app rather than profit from the developer's returns, given that most users would take advantage of the return policy for such a stupid product.
Again, Apple isn't doing this to profit from returns, it is simply passing along its costs to push developers to build products that won't get returned.
Having the American CIA monitoring elections in other countries during the Bush Administration is like Microsoft looking for security vulnerabilities in Linux and Mac OS X.
Yes, have you used the Wii store? It's a steaming pile of shit compared to iTunes.
Nintendo knows how to make fun gameplay, not how to market software or develop interfaces.
Ever play a Wii game?
"Hello!" Press A! "I'm a cute star creature!!" Press A! "I can give you a powerup!" Press A! "Feed me star bits!" Press A! "Do you want this or that type?" Select A or B on screen. "Here you go!!!!!!" (animated delay) Press A!
If PocketPC wasn't shit, people would shell out money for it.
If the annual, major updates in features for the iPod touch weren't worth $10, people wouldn't pay. But a fucking fancy drink is $10, so get over it already.
You can go off on your petty jerkoff fantasies and call me names, but the facts speak for themselves. You are wrong, and crying about it doesn't change that.
Slashdot Mirror
It could also be argued that software benefits from regular bug fixes and feature enhancement releases. Are you trying to say XP was so good that it didn't need more than 3 SP updates in the last 8 years? Because that's a ridiculous thing to say.
It also sounds like you're tying to spin SPs as a collection of fixes that come down the pipe at regular intervals. Sure, Apple issues regular security patch updates outside of its minor updates; these are also rolled up into its minor releases, which serve as a the "benchmark minimum specification" for new Macs being sold. So I'm at a loss to see your point.
As as far as attacking my constructive arguemnt on the grounds that I've "already decided that Apple is better than Microsoft" in this regard, well yes, I've know this over the last eight years of experiencing the facts as both a Windows admin and a Mac user. But no, I didn't construct this argument out of "thin air" to support my bias, they're both based on my experiences.
See, some people construct opinions based on observable facts and research and then relate them with the supporting facts to bolster their assertions.
Apple certainly can improve, but if you want to talk about "glaring holes in Safari," perhaps you should take off your advocacy/imagination hat and look at the actual facts. Safari isn't the browser related to 99% of the world's spyware and adware infestations. That would be Internet Explorer.
Safari is the browser that pioneered the development of web standards, something IE is just now getting around to addressing after ruling the industry as a terrible monopolist.
I don't dislike Microsoft for its success, I have contempt for the company for using its success to spread failure.
Why Windows 7 is Microsoft's next Zune
Well obviously SL isn't going to enable 64-bit software on 32-bit hardware, but there is no requisite for multiple cores nor 64-bit CPUs for SL.
There are real and obvious reasons why Apple isn't supporting EOLed PPC machines that would benefit little from the new technologies in SL. Supporting 32-bit Core Solo is not the same as PPC, as there's not nearly the same amount of work in supporting the Intel family of CPUs than in optimizing everything to run on the very different PPC architecture.
Floating fear, uncertainty and doubt as a just wondering question is something people do. I hope you're not.
Perhaps while you were on Newegg you could have searched for Mac OS X Leopard and discovered that its available for $102.99.
Or you could ask Microsoft how much they want for the eight year old XP ($264.99) directly? Of course, MS really wants you to buy Vista and then Windows 7, neither of which do much beyond copying Apple's looks and compositing graphics engine.
Why Windows 7 is Microsoft's next Zune
This is wrong:
"encourages developers to target 64-bit primarily (thus leaving out the pre-Core 2 machines)"
On Windows, targeting 64-bit might leave out 32-bit PCs, but Apple's Universal Binary architecture makes it easy to compile applications that support both 32/64-bit hardware in the same application package. And 64-bit Macs running OS X can run both natively. Windows requires a WOW emulation level to run 32-bit EXEs on the separate 64-bit version of XP/Vista. Which is part of the reason only a minority of Windows users have moved to 64-bits.
Road to Mac OS X Snow Leopard: the future of 64-bit apps
Since it shipped in 2001- 8 FREAKING YEARS AGO - WinXP has gotten three SP releases. Microsoft's SPs don't often add significant new features, they fix broken things. Although sometimes, things are so broken (such as USB, or Firewall/security, that an SP appears to "add new features").
Apple doesn't call it a service pack when they release a minor update to Mac OS X, but they deliver these far more often than Microsoft. Apple is gearing up to deliver its *seventh* significant free update to Leopard!
Ten Myths of Leopard: 2 It's Only a Service Pack!
Since 2001, Apple has shipped 40 free updates to Mac OS X at regular intervals, compared to the three SPs you outlined for XP.
There's no way to dance your way out of that corner. Apple has consistently out-delivered Microsoft across the board in both paid upgrades with major new features (six major reference releases this decade, compared to Microsoft's 3 desktop OS releases- Win 5.1 (XP), 6 (Vista), and 6.1 ("7")) and 40 minor free releases compared to Microsoft's 5 SPs.
No you're thinking of the Zune.
The MacBook Air is very popular, even though it costs a lot. People pay extra for "cool, sexy" Mac products (those are Microsoft's words used in its advertising about how cheap low end generic PCs are).
Actually I'm surprised by how many starving student types I see with an Air. I decided against buying one (which would have come in handy while traveling), but apparently the cool kids buy what they like, not what they "can afford."
They also buy expensive skinny jeans and $400 iPod touches and other stuff that Microsoft billionaires don't seem to think that they will. Of course, there are people who like to "save money," who go out and buy $700 PCs and then spend thousands of dollars putting GPU cards in them every six months to play the latest PC game.
And then there are those guys who saved money buying the Xbox 360 because it was so much cheaper than the PS3, except that it was only cheaper because it left off a lot of things like wireless and a hard drive. Plus they got a great deal on HD-DVD! And they ended up saving 80% on the Zune after it tanked and Microsoft dumped the extras on the market in a fire sale.
Microsoft is all about saving money! Except for the whole thing about Vista costing more than XP, and introducing a whole bunch of new licensing levels to force generic PC users to pay for features through software upgrades that "unlock" features for hundreds of dollars.
But yeah, your joke about there being two Zunes was funny stuff man, we should get together and play Halo in your mom's basement.
Apple's solution was to enable Remote DVD sharing, so that the "BIOS" (EFI) of the disc-less MacBook Air can install its OS from scratch via the DVD drive of another computer on the local network.
But yes, a generic PC would have a problem installing Windows without a local DVD drive, because generic PCs have a completely retarded, ancient BIOS firmware that rarely offers any functional network boot support, and Windows makes 70's-era assumptions about what CPM drive letters it is installing on.
The main feature of Snow Leopard is its 64-bit kernel and an upgrade across the board to 64-bit apps.
The problem for porting this to PowerPC is that the move to 64-bits only makes things slower on PPC because, as it is based on a modern 64-bit architecture with plenty of registers, it's already gained most of the benefits of 64-bits even when using 32-bit apps. Moving to 64-bit apps just means it has to move around more memory.
On the other hand, 32-bit Intel CPUs are register starved, so the additional memory overhead of the move to 64-bits is far outweighed by the improvement in moving to the 64-bit "Intel" architecture (developed by AMD).
So faced with spending twice the efforts to optimize SL for PPC machines that Mac users have known to be marked for death since 2006, resulting in a product that only runs 64-bit versions of PPC apps slower than Leopard, Apple decided to target its modern 2009 operating system to its modern hardware platform.
There are probably some G5 owners who might like the idea of being able to upgrade to SL, but they probably don't realize that it would only result in some new trim and slower overall performance. And if you compare the number of G5 machines Apple was selling in 2005-2006 with the number of Intel machines it has sold since, you'll see another reason why Apple is supporting Intel exclusively.
FYI:
Apple sold 0.8 to 1 million PPC Macs per quarter in 2005-2006.
Apple sold 2.3 to 2.6 million Intel Macs per quarter in the last year.
Why Windows 7 is Microsoft's next Zune
Of course, Bungie has split from Microsoft, and Carmack has pushed efforts to develop games for the iPhone, so your quotes are entirely take out of context.
And of course there's little interest in games at Apple. There's little money in games that Apple can conceptually get. The market for serious games is entirely monopolized by Microsoft on the PC, and games consoles are a difficult business that Apple has little chance of successfully entering (especially compared to low hanging fruit such as smartphones that Apple can inhale far easier).
Casual gaming is entirely different. Apple already has bitch slapped the industry with the iPhone/iPod touch, and could do some very interesting things with Apple TV, without ever needing to directly compete with Microsoft's extremely well financed (and extremely unprofitable) gaming monopoly, and without really facing much direct competition from the DS or PSP.
Until Sony or Nintendo figure out how to sell music and video (one would think Sony could have figured this out, but no), Apple's mobile iPod/iPhones will continue to enter the mobile gaming market and take territory that will be impossibly difficult to win back. Look at how feeble Sony's attempts to reclaim its Walkman market have been.
Apple also has a strong position in bringing desktop features such as browsing and email to the smartphone and the mobile gaming market, making it even more difficult for Sony and Nintendo to keep up. Add in a proven software market place and a strong development platform that Apple has rolled out, and you have a blazed trail behind attractive products that leads competitors by several years.
And Apple isn't standing still.
If you think polygon count has something to do how successful a console is, read up about the Dreamcast, Nintendo's products, Sony's PS3, and so on.
Probably, but Apple is working out parental controls for iPhone games (currently its only in place for music and video in iTunes and Apple's mobile devices), which is the rationale for not allowing adult content.
Once that is delivered in iPhone 3.0, Apple's objectionable content restrictions are likely to ease.
Apple hints App Store rules may loosen with iPhone OS 3.0
Apple isn't losing money on the Apple TV, and certainly hasn't pumped $8billion into it.
Second year sales have jumped 3X, and the company has only ever halfassedly marketed it as a hobby.
To draw a parallel between Apple TV, a slow selling device that supports the success of iTunes against other set top boxes and services (including Microsoft's feeble attempts to enter this market) and the Xbox, which has only sold devices at huge subsidies and rang up massive hardware bills for Microsoft while only doing little to maintain Microsoft's monopoly grip on games development, is fantastically ignorant.
The death of Microsoft's Xbox 360
The Bandai Pippin was not made or sold by Apple, which is why the Bandai brand is there.
Bandai (the Japanese company that licensed "Power Rangers") jumped on board when Apple offered to license Mac hardware designs to third parties, along with Panasonic and Motorola and a variety of companies that either did or did not actually bring a Mac clone to market.
Most of the Mac clones were just rebranded Mac models with more RAM or a faster CPU, but Bandai wrapped it up as a game console that was more of a web-centric device. That made it more powerful in some respects than a Playstation, but also more expensive. It was also not trying to be compatible with much Mac software, so it ended up being neither fish (a basic games console) nor fowl (a cheap desktop Mac), and instead joined the ranks of middling stuff that nobody saw a reason to buy.
Suggesting that Apple designed it 15 years ago, and that it has some bearing on what Apple would release today is fantastically ignorant.
The iPhone isn't coming to Verizon.
well no, it's not at all.
It's like saying herpes and poking yourself in the eye are both pretty much the same thing, and there's nothing you can do about either.
Windows users have thousands of ways of getting herpes without realizing it because there is so much viral malware out there, and so few obvious and complete ways to protect yourself, and its so hard to recover after and infection.
There are a couple ways to poke yourself in the eye on the Mac, just as there is on any platform. Here, you download an obviously illegal piece of software from an unknown origin, then grant it rights to install on your system. That's not a virus, it's poking yourself in the eye.
If you were browsing a regular website and it installed this script without you knowing, then you'd have a serious problem that needs addressing.
Kaspersky Sells Mac AntiVirus Fear Using Charlie Miller
Darwin is a hybrid kernel that uses low level elements of Mach paired with higher level elements of BSD, not two different kernels.
However, NeXT developed OpenStep as a universal operating system environment that actually ran in production on Solaris, the Win NT kernel + OS, as well as the Mach/BSD kernel ported to various hardware.
Apple planned to port that layer on top of the Mac OS too (providing a Yellow Box that could run like Java anywhere), then realized it made more sense to use Mach/BSD and port the Mac appearance on top of OpenStep, and ended up making enough modifications to kill any backward compatibility with the OpenStep specification.
That's what Mac OS X is.
Why OS X is on the iPhone, but not the PC
While that's certainly true, OSS also benefits a lot from Apple. Without Mac OS X, BSD would have 25 million fewer users exercising its code.
Apple also owns CUPS and finances LLVM and WebKit and initiated Darwin Calendar Server and lots of other projects. Had the world not rejected NeXT and Unix to race after Microsoft's vaporware in the 90s, all the effort at reinventing BSD as Linux could have been united into a single OSS effort. So Apple has been working against the tide to return the world back to open, interoperable software.
I think open interoperability is more important that forcing companies to propagate an ideology that only hardware should be marketable.
Well you can say "I told you so" when Android reaches an installed base that is approaching that of the iPhone.
When that happens, we can talk about whether multi-vendor differentiation and platform fragmentation (different screen resolutions, missing hardware features, different peripheral connectors, etc) will render the Android platform cohesive enough to support the software sales volumes of the iPhone/iPod touch.
Note that Windows Mobile and Java ME haven't achieved a cohesive platform that developers can really expect to target that is even now (after a decade) as large as Apple has created on the iPhone in the last year and a half.
* 30 million iPhone+iPod touch, pretty much all identically compatible.
* 50 million WinMo licenses (many now obsolete), fractured into touchscreen-lacking "Windows Smartphones" with tiny displays, Pocket PC PDAs, Treo-like button phones, and HTC style mini-puter mobile devices, all with different connectors and hardware features.
* 100s mlllion JavaME, fractioned into hundreds phones with incompatible runtimes that make successfully targeting the "platform" with significantly complex software virtually impossible
Apple's Jailbroken iPhone Patent Outrage: Really?
By "opposite" you mean that developers wouldn't be making a decent cut for their software (like the Xbox), or that Microsoft wouldn't be selling enough similarly equipped hardware to create a viable market (like Windows Mobile)?
Apple's Jailbroken iPhone Patent Outrage: Really?
Is there any evidence that there is any real volume of software being returned through the Apple App Store, or is the conversation just a theoretical, fear mongering bunch of sensationalism?
Sounds like complaining about sand getting in your shorts while laying on the beach.
Apple's Jailbroken iPhone Patent Outrage: Really?
I bet you're not selling quantities of mobile software comparable with the iPhone App Store. I also bet you have far more piracy of your work than iPhone developers.
An alternative to eBay offering lower fees wouldn't be at all competitive if it also failed to offer eBay's audience.
What the OP was addressing is that fact that in most industries, including most retail software, the original work makes only a fraction of the profits. Apple isn't running the App Store like a store, it's running it as a software seeding practice that happens to run cash positive.
All retailers have to deal with product returns, and most take a loss when a product is returned. When you return a Mac, Apple refurbs it and resells it at a used price. There's no profit in that.
Why should Apple absorb the costs involved in processing developer's returns, given that those returns are likely directly related to the developer's product quality?
If your product returns are even approaching anything more than a small fraction of your total sales, the problem isn't your merchandizer, its your product. This story is ridiculous: developers are going to lose money because most of their software is being returned? Remember that Apple preferred to drop the "I am rich" app rather than profit from the developer's returns, given that most users would take advantage of the return policy for such a stupid product.
Again, Apple isn't doing this to profit from returns, it is simply passing along its costs to push developers to build products that won't get returned.
Engadget didn't "report" this, they blogged Boy Genius, which blogged an original story by AppleInsider.
Another successful linkjack promoted by slashdot.
Having the American CIA monitoring elections in other countries during the Bush Administration is like Microsoft looking for security vulnerabilities in Linux and Mac OS X.
Kaspersky Sells Mac AntiVirus Fear Using Charlie Miller... Mac AntiVirus Foe
Neither suggestion makes any sense on the iPhone. How would you drag and drop text from Safari to Mail on it?
The point is that copy and paste isn't as simple when you have security issues to deal with. Palm OS, WiMo, Android etc simply don't bother.
Yes, have you used the Wii store? It's a steaming pile of shit compared to iTunes.
Nintendo knows how to make fun gameplay, not how to market software or develop interfaces.
Ever play a Wii game?
"Hello!" Press A!
"I'm a cute star creature!!" Press A!
"I can give you a powerup!" Press A!
"Feed me star bits!" Press A!
"Do you want this or that type?" Select A or B on screen.
"Here you go!!!!!!" (animated delay) Press A!
The big 3.0: How iPhone will shift peripheral devices
Hey frustrated bitch-
It was the market decided, not "my opinion."
If PocketPC wasn't shit, people would shell out money for it.
If the annual, major updates in features for the iPod touch weren't worth $10, people wouldn't pay. But a fucking fancy drink is $10, so get over it already.
You can go off on your petty jerkoff fantasies and call me names, but the facts speak for themselves. You are wrong, and crying about it doesn't change that.
Supply and demand. HP's Pocket PC isn't worth $10.
If iPhone 3.0 isn't worth $10, don't buy it, but your insufferable bitching bout it is beyond tiresome.
It's ten fucking bucks you cheapskate. For a significant mobile OS update. Vote with your wallet and shut up.