And quite often it's the bands - typically the bands manager will ensure the publishing and distribution contracts are limited to specific territories. One reason behind that is that when you start out as an unknown in your home territory, it's difficult to negotiate a great contract, but once you've got success, you can get better deals in a second territory. Of course, these days the nature of the business has changed dramatically - but I think it would be wrong for Apple to force publishing companies (and therefore musicians) into global contracts, much as it may benefit US consumers.
Because we're scared of waiting for the spinning beachball to stop.
What I saw looked pretty much like a mobile version of Leopard, and it doesn't seem that unreasonable to me - OS X itself isn't a CPU hog on my Mac, and Apple are used to working with low-performance CPU's (well, according to their ctritics ..).
While the graphics have a real wow factor running on a phone in a way we've never seen before, you're talking a fairly small screen, and I would wager less power involved than decoding compressed video. The CoverFlow stuff is neat, but you're not going to be running it constantly. Not sure how people think it's achieved WITHOUT running OS X - esp. given that we're already talking an OS that runs on two CPU architectures of different endianness. If you told them it was Linux and GTK based people would believe you. Or perhaps a return to pedal to the metal assembly coding?
Anything needed to tweak the OS to run on a low-power/low-performance device is going to benefit the main code-base anyway.
See the internet features more as a projection of the future - I can't see myself paying my network at their data rates to use them, or even at most wifi hotspots, but I spend most of my day at work or home, within range of private WiFi networks, and I could see myself using a device like this for a lot of light browsing tasks (reading email, etc) - and using widgets and the Amazon / Ebay APIs, someone is bound to make a better scaled interface (the zooming in / out would get annoying - it's why I gave up the PSP as a web device after a brief experiment).
Going forward - you can already see the cross contracts for wifi hotspots with network providers - and people like Murdoch and NTL/Virgin going for combined mobile/TV/broadband/phone packages. The obvious thing is a 'one-stop shop' contract, which is what consumers want (even if they're better off shopping around).
You're right that about it being expensive though. I presume we'll see most of the UI re-used in the next full-size iPod revision, and to be honest just that with a wireless internet connection would keep me more than happy.
Good point - what I was really thinking of was the fact the console market seems to be able to support 3 players at any time, and XBox squeezed Sega out of third place (they chose not to pursue another hardware generation). Although that's all kind of regional (XBox was not so successful in Asian or European markets as the US market).
Never underestimate your enemy. At the end of the day, MS have not had to worry about the desktop for years, hence there has been no real pressure for innovation. The biggest competition for Vista is XP.
And don't look at what MS has failed to do, but look at what they have delivered - the majority of it is technologies for developers :
New versions of C# and.NET (you could argue Obj-C didn't need change, but Obj-C 2.0 shows it did) that have saved them losing the web app server market to Java.
New versions of SQL Server that have continued to close the gap on Oracle and DB2. It's gone from something that was a joke to database professionals to a valid option.
Declarative UI development (XAML) and web deployed apps (XBAP) - Next/Apple were ahead of the game on this - 10 years ago. They've stood still, while everyone else has announced XML based versions of the same idea (XUL, XAML, MXML) which makes it sound much better.
Prevented Sony dominating the living room, with the XBox, XBox 360 and Live, and killed Sega. People say GOOD things about XBox Live.
Killed Palm in the PDA market, and made huge inroads into the phone market.
Started the fight with Macromedia / Adobe - they are making a serious play for the space occupied by Dreamweaver and Flash, pushing the integration of design and development teams, while Adobe go in the other direction (turning Flash into a software development platform).
From my point of view, MS has invested it's energy and focus on the real threats to it's business. Apple's only just started to become an emerging threat again.
Apple have done well by capitalising on a blind spot with the iPod, and are finally getting the sales they deserve for OS X -but even if Apple took the whole desktop and laptop market, MS would still be a bigger company. (Realistically, Apple will never get bigger than 20-25% tops. OS X might, if they licensed it - which may happen once they're reached the limits of their own growth).
Apple doesn't strike me as offering anything really compelling in the web server space, which is the future - more and more functionality is moving away from the computer to other devices (hence the iTV and iPhone). That's a threat to Windows and OS X both, and so far I think MS have the lead in addressing it. I work in a Unix/Java house but I can see the real appeal of.NET to other companies. I can't think of a single reason to justify writing an OS X only server app - and Apple's server-side software like WebObjects or Quicktime streaming are x-platform. You might use OS X server to run a Ruby or Java based web app, but they are inherently x-platform too. In that space, all Apple can do is sell a better Unix server, rather than lock developers in to a programming language and APIs, as they are with desktop apps or.NET.
(Apple also have nothing like the XBAP technology or Flash, both of which will allow the delivery of zero-install, sand-boxed, applications over the web. Basically what Java applets can do already. or what Active-X should have been).
The good news is that we know Apple hired someone last year to re-design Finder, because the job advert was public.
Whether all your issues will be addressed is another matter. I'm guessing that the focus will be on making a great tool for consumers - something more like iTunes, possibly with a Core Animation powered CoverFlow style visual file browser (keep up with Vista) as that would be quite flashy.
Not saying OS X is all flash and no substance (it's my OS of choice) but the 'out of the box' experience is definitely consumer oriented and they trust the rest of us will replace it with what we need. As you note, support of multi-session CDs is poor, but many Windows users don't 'get it' either, even where it is better supported (and memory sticks have thankfully bridged the 'capacity gap' we had between floppies and CDs).
From what I've read, with QT4 in place the KDE for OS X project may get a lot further, so Konqueror may be an option.
Either that, or like two people at work, you thought about the iPod but went for something cheaper for your kids. And then complain how difficult it is to use. Given the stealbality of ipods I fully applaud parents NOT buying their children such a high value/easy target electronic toy - but I am also amazed that working in IT, their are people in IT still confused over different players. (One guy bought a Creative player because he believed iPods ONLY played iTunes content, not MP3s. Good FUD on the part of the WMA salespeople).
I suspect there is an element of publicity here - targeting Apple makes more headlines than, say, Lenovo. On the other hand, Apple have traded for a long time on a cuddly 'computer for hippies' image - even if they've never actually been explicit about it, there's the implicit idea that Apple should somehow be more right-on than other computer firms.
Negative publicity also seems to be about the only way to achieve corporate accountability these days, given that governments everywhere have rescinded responsibility to 'market forces' - and market forces are rarely about facts. It does seem that the campaigns where Greenpeace has been less than scientifically accurate (Brent Spar being another case) attract more attention than the ones that are (perhaps because it's easier for people to get angry at a corporation for pollution, than change their own behaviour).
The downside of this is that it continues the slide that there are 'two sides to every story', 'scientists can prove anything they want', etc.
I think there's also the issue of lifespan - I buy music expecting that I might be listening to it in 15 years time, but the number of games in the same position is tiny.
Also, there's the fact that games are generally tied to specific hardware for genuine reasons, rather than just DRM (at least until emulation software / PC power catches up).
I'm waiting for emusic to overtake iTunes. While it's range is smaller, it also fits well with consumers who buy a lot of music by volume, and the prices on emusic are compelling enough to make me think twice about buying the CD.
Indeed - that is something a lot of techies don't seem to get - 'My iRiver can do X,Y and Z', why doesn't the iPod have Bluetooth, etc, when it is obviously something only a marginal group of people are interested in. See also Blackberry : I've seen executives with Blackberries who are also carrying mobile phones that can do email AND laptops that could use that mobile phone to retrieve email - historically, the trend seems to be from complex multi-function devices to simple single function ones.
However, I still like the idea of Widgets on the iPod (I am thinking more of static visual widgets like the Weather widget, rather than anything interactive, which is where I see the difference from a traditional PDA or a Smart Phone - I don't see Apple putting a keyboard into the iPod). If the screen gets any larger, it might even be viable to sync up RSS feeds as well as Podcasts (already achievable via hacks, but it's not exactly the best devices for reading text on). I'm thinking of 'iPod as commuter device'.
It would be a change in practice if Apple were going to start thinking about third parties. Historically they have never had a problem with incorporating software and hardware features into the Mac that have wiped out third party markets, and they've never been the best partner for retail stores (even before they had their own / own online store).
My favourite rumour (the one I hope is true) is the one about Dashboard widgets for iPods, of which there was some hint buried somewhere. Given that Nokia phones are using a WebKit based browser, it is not too fanciful to imagine a WebKit port to the iPod, and Widgets would provide a nice sandbox for third party applications on the iPod. With a wifi connection that would be even more useful than just 'sync' based. I'm sure power issues could be addressed there (i.e. don't keep WIfi powered on, until it's actually used). Web access via BT-enabled mobile phones seems a more 'mobile' solution. I can't see a fully fledged web browser yet, given the limitations of browsing on the PSP - but I'd love to have my basic set of widgets on a mobile device.
I can just see Jobs casually pulling out his 6G iPod and showing it tracking some ebay auctions, then the Weather widget, sports results, etc - that level of functionality seems to have the right 'fit' for mobile browsing, but the typical Dashboard widget looks far better than any WAP page or Java App I've seen on a mobile.
>Then again, maybe Steve thinks their doing well enough, and are stable enough, that they don't need this.
I think it may be commercially driven, in that as Apple move into a more mainstream market, there will be more resistance to a 12-18 month cycle. Tiger has had a massive adoption rate, but I don't think you can depend on that going forward. Apple are returning to the market of people who won't even know there IS an upgrade.
Stability probably has something to do with it - 10.4 was the first release you didn't NEED to get, plus we can now see - retrospectively - Jobs plan for getting the business into a stable position. There is less need to generate cash and less urgency to push through the OS X migration (which has in turn, let them achieve the hardware migration).
Of course, there are other channels through which they can release 'upgrades' - i.e. Front Row and Photo Booth both seem more logically part of iLife than the core OS, but will help boost the feature count in Leopard.
OS XI - I do wonder if there is any thought going into it - what technologies would someone pick if they did a Jobs style 'walk in the wilderness' looking at University research? What programming language would they pick if they didn't already have Obj-C and the Cocoa framework? How much is Linux killing operating system research in Universities - i.e. who is funding it, other than Microsoft?
I thought Jobs said that after Leopard, they would be shifting to a 36 month timescale between OS releases? (That's the same timescale Ballmer hopes to achieve).
While there is a lot to be said for the big bang approach in terms of marketing, I think you do need to balance it against technical progress and changes in the market. 36 months would be a very long time between Safari 3 and 4, for instance. Not as long as IE6 to IE7 but possibly long enough to cause problems.
The thing that makes it complex is that Microsoft release new versions of Direct X and.NET out of sync with the operating system (and even IE when they can be bothered) - and to a degree these run on older versions of the OS.
With Apple it's the whole lot - end applications and programming APIs. I suspect this may start to change now that OS X is mature, and there is less need to generate cash from existing customers / more focus on new customers - i.e. we may see new APIs introduced in point releases at WWDC, rather than only with a major OS release.
Yes, it's always been a surprise to me that despite the evident interest in Mac software from the Linux community, so little effort has been put into the one project that would help (the fact that Obj-C is in high demand for developing Mac software is probably another factor).
At the very least it would make it easy to develop equivalent software - I won't pretend to know enough about the internals of MacOS to know whether you could run a Cocoa app over a different implementation, in the same way you could with OpenStep. but I suspect if the app was purely Obj-C you could - i.e. if everything is Obj-C extended from the original core NextStep classes, then you should be able to extend GnuStep in the same way (given that the classes are documented).
However a lot of apps have dependencies on other Apple APIs that have been wrapped in Obj-C. i.e. QTKit would be far more difficult as it's a mapping of QuickTime, rather than an extension of Obj-C. Something like CoreData would lie inbetween (it has a dependency on non Obj-C libraries, but a database is a database).
>Apple's established customers will just keep buying Macs. Well, established customers tend to have a software base they want to continue to use, and therefore we currently have little option in suppliers. You are correct that potential switchers are in a different position - they may be interested in trying a Mac, but have no attachment (financial or emotional) to the platform. Apple do very well at creating a good 'out of the box' experience - but it is easy to puncture that illusion and end up back in the 'all as bad as each other' world that beleaguers so many PC purchasers. (I know it's not true, but most consumers don't even know how to research a good brand / model, rather than whatever is getting the salesman the best commission).
>Then again, Apple's overall quality level is probably the same as any other computer manufacture Historically, this doesn't seem to be the case. i.e. they do seem to have had - historically - better (all round) quality than other manufacturers. The fact that they don't compete in the very low end of the market does, of course, help substantially - their quality level is probably the same as for machines at a similar spec/price point (minus 15% Apple tax).
What they have definitely had, historically, is problems with specific machines, particularly first versions. I guess that is something that is perhaps more noticeable with Apple machines in that they tend to have clearer revisions of their hardware (it may actually serve them well that quality problems get blamed on 'version 1' machines, rather than the firm as a whole, but that is very dependent on customer knowledge).
I think they have also rushed - let us hypothesise that the original plan was to develop machines that were going to be based on Intel's next-gen chips, all of which are supposed to have far lower power consumption, but instead they've ended up with something running at maybe double the expected temperature. Which is dumping problems on your customer.
I think it actually made a small number of people switch - Carbon and Aqua have always been proprietary and unavailable to Darwin developers. What it did do was create an enormous fuss amongst FOSS zealots who had no interest whatsoever in the Xnu kernel, but want to see Apple open source everything for their own benefit / the good of the world.
People like Doctorow and Mark Pilgrim - who are the two most public OS X to Linux switchers - have actually cited the closed nature of Apple's apps than their OS as their reason for switching. This strikes me as odd in Doctorow's case in that Apple's apps are no more closed than they ever were. It has just taken desktop Linux for this EFF advocate to realise this - in the past he was not willing to sacrifice usability for freedom, as the EFF often advocate.
Like a Windows user, I run OS X because it came with my computer and because there is a lot of OS X specific software. The apps were the reason I chose the OS.
Solaris, on the other hand, has no real killer Solaris-only applications - aside from powering proprietary Sun hardware. With Solaris x86 the competition is free and you have to do what the competition does. I would wager that lack of interest will eventually let Solaris x86 go the same way as most flavours of BSD. In their own way, Linux advocates are a fixated on the one true system as Windows or Mac fans, and generally show a lack of interest / disdain for developments in other operating systems.
Apple have the advantage, unlike Sun, that the vast majority of their customers do not give a fig about Unix. They aren't looking for a server to run an Oracle database or web server. For some of the apps their choice is Windows or Apple. For some apps they have to choose one system or another. Development of consumer level apps on Linux is years behind Apple, and will take an initiative on a scale comparable to Novell's SLED to achieve (just think how many millions of pounds of corporate investment from Sun (OpenOffice), IBM, Novell and Red Hat SLED represents). It's not just the programming, it's hiring artists to create themes for movie editing and DVD creation packages, etc, that distinguishes Apple's products. It is the side of the business volunteer projects are rarely good at implementing - good free programming talent is easy to find these days compared to design talent.
I'd also say that Windows is another reason why most OS today are open source - being free is often the only way to compete against Microsoft. Apple have managed to create enough value in their system that people will pay more than Microsoft based machines to use it. There would have to be a compelling business reason for them to throw that away, as they would need to justify it to their shareholders. The only one I can think of is if they actually started losing market share to Linux or Windows.
I should have been clearer - I was including OS X as a flavour of BSD.
What I meant was that XRay isn't going to work on Linux without DTrace also being ported. i.e. there are least two dependencies (Cocoa and DTrace) that don't exist on Linux.
As far as I can see it's still a Cocoa app, so while it's certainly possible (we know the Next frameworks would run on top of multiple kernels) it is unlikely unless Apple decided to open up the layers above Darwin (unlikely). Alternatively, resource could be put into the GnuStep project, but overall there seems very little interest in it. (The non-Apple Obj-C community is tiny).
DTrace is currently only on Solaris and BSD (at least last I knew).
I'd imagine there would be more hope in a project to add similar features to Eclipse, where you may at least encounter a pool of developer motivation (including Mac developers who don't want to work with XCode).
>I'd like to know why isn't ObjC more popular outside Apple (and NeXT) circles
Because it's 'a failed language'. If they could come up with a rebrand (AJAX) or take the concepts and give it a syntactic revamp (maybe based round Ruby) they'd be well away, but the predominant line has been C to C++ to Java (and now C-sharp) - and only recently have Java developers begun to demand the features of a true OO language.
To be fair, there were good performance reasons why C++ won over Smalltalk regardless of it's productivity benefits, but these have become less and less important for UI bound programs.
Not heavy gamers, but it would be nice to have the choice. Would also be nice to be able to ditch the machine we do keep around the house purely for occasional gaming - my wife gets it out every 2-3 months.
I also think it would help widen the appeal of the Mac as a family machine, if the kids could use it for gaming.
They lost full control of the distribution channels years ago, certainly with music. I think that is the main reason that the emphasis shifted so much towards marketing and promotion in the era after punk / post-punk. The one thing independent and self-funded artists can't do is throw millions of pounds in advertising at something to make it stick.
I think the game is still open with the web. While a lot of people use it to discover stuff, I suspect there is still life in the broadcast / bundle / channel model yet - the 'mainstream' will be a significant niche - and a lot of those people could probably be convinced to give up on the Internet for a 'safe internet' of carefully vetted shopping and media sites, just as they will give over their computers because trusted computing will mean that only authorised programs will run, so no more viruses.
The major aren't helping themselves by continually narrowing the range of what they offer, and spending more money on trying to get more customers to buy the same thing.
>Heck, if I see something that looks slick I'd avoid it on the simple premise that the product has a value in design as opposed to specifications and/or quality of parts.
An attitude you have in common with many people, but one that is not necessarily correct - or at least only partly correct. There is almost certainly a premium attached to design - at the very least there is the cost of employing a designer, along with likely higher manufacturing costs. On the other hand, good design can certainly add to the quality of a product (the USB slots on the back of the Mac mini are well-secured into the frame, which is more than I can say for my Acer laptop which cost the best part of $2000 but certainly fits into the 'no money spent on design/all on components' category).
I have luggage and shoes from luxury goods firms that have simply outlasted budget items, as well as looking better - and I've sampled enough top-end restaurants to know that yes, the food they produce is actually better than the mid-market, not just better presented. 'Presentation is the shop window' as one of my teachers often said.
There is also a slight insinuation here that Mac-purchasers are somehow technically ignorant because they don't prioritise 'specs'. I intentionally downgraded from a high-spec PC to a Mac mini, because I realised that 90% of what I needed a computer for was for web-browsing, music storage and light programming work, plus I fancied giving OS X a go. Having a near-silent and tiny machine in the study is a pleasure. It's taken a year to really start appreciating OS X itself (again a lot of people dismiss it on the grounds that it looks 'slick', suspecting this means it must be less 'powerful').
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And quite often it's the bands - typically the bands manager will ensure the publishing and distribution contracts are limited to specific territories. One reason behind that is that when you start out as an unknown in your home territory, it's difficult to negotiate a great contract, but once you've got success, you can get better deals in a second territory. Of course, these days the nature of the business has changed dramatically - but I think it would be wrong for Apple to force publishing companies (and therefore musicians) into global contracts, much as it may benefit US consumers.
Because we're scared of waiting for the spinning beachball to stop.
.).
What I saw looked pretty much like a mobile version of Leopard, and it doesn't seem that unreasonable to me - OS X itself isn't a CPU hog on my Mac, and Apple are used to working with low-performance CPU's (well, according to their ctritics .
While the graphics have a real wow factor running on a phone in a way we've never seen before, you're talking a fairly small screen, and I would wager less power involved than decoding compressed video. The CoverFlow stuff is neat, but you're not going to be running it constantly. Not sure how people think it's achieved WITHOUT running OS X - esp. given that we're already talking an OS that runs on two CPU architectures of different endianness. If you told them it was Linux and GTK based people would believe you. Or perhaps a return to pedal to the metal assembly coding?
Anything needed to tweak the OS to run on a low-power/low-performance device is going to benefit the main code-base anyway.
See the internet features more as a projection of the future - I can't see myself paying my network at their data rates to use them, or even at most wifi hotspots, but I spend most of my day at work or home, within range of private WiFi networks, and I could see myself using a device like this for a lot of light browsing tasks (reading email, etc) - and using widgets and the Amazon / Ebay APIs, someone is bound to make a better scaled interface (the zooming in / out would get annoying - it's why I gave up the PSP as a web device after a brief experiment).
Going forward - you can already see the cross contracts for wifi hotspots with network providers - and people like Murdoch and NTL/Virgin going for combined mobile/TV/broadband/phone packages. The obvious thing is a 'one-stop shop' contract, which is what consumers want (even if they're better off shopping around).
You're right that about it being expensive though. I presume we'll see most of the UI re-used in the next full-size iPod revision, and to be honest just that with a wireless internet connection would keep me more than happy.
Good point - what I was really thinking of was the fact the console market seems to be able to support 3 players at any time, and XBox squeezed Sega out of third place (they chose not to pursue another hardware generation). Although that's all kind of regional (XBox was not so successful in Asian or European markets as the US market).
Never underestimate your enemy. At the end of the day, MS have not had to worry about the desktop for years, hence there has been no real pressure for innovation. The biggest competition for Vista is XP.
.NET (you could argue Obj-C didn't need change, but Obj-C 2.0 shows it did) that have saved them losing the web app server market to Java.
.NET to other companies. I can't think of a single reason to justify writing an OS X only server app - and Apple's server-side software like WebObjects or Quicktime streaming are x-platform. You might use OS X server to run a Ruby or Java based web app, but they are inherently x-platform too. In that space, all Apple can do is sell a better Unix server, rather than lock developers in to a programming language and APIs, as they are with desktop apps or .NET.
And don't look at what MS has failed to do, but look at what they have delivered - the majority of it is technologies for developers :
New versions of C# and
New versions of SQL Server that have continued to close the gap on Oracle and DB2. It's gone from something that was a joke to database professionals to a valid option.
Declarative UI development (XAML) and web deployed apps (XBAP) - Next/Apple were ahead of the game on this - 10 years ago. They've stood still, while everyone else has announced XML based versions of the same idea (XUL, XAML, MXML) which makes it sound much better.
Prevented Sony dominating the living room, with the XBox, XBox 360 and Live, and killed Sega. People say GOOD things about XBox Live.
Killed Palm in the PDA market, and made huge inroads into the phone market.
Started the fight with Macromedia / Adobe - they are making a serious play for the space occupied by Dreamweaver and Flash, pushing the integration of design and development teams, while Adobe go in the other direction (turning Flash into a software development platform).
From my point of view, MS has invested it's energy and focus on the real threats to it's business. Apple's only just started to become an emerging threat again.
Apple have done well by capitalising on a blind spot with the iPod, and are finally getting the sales they deserve for OS X -but even if Apple took the whole desktop and laptop market, MS would still be a bigger company.
(Realistically, Apple will never get bigger than 20-25% tops. OS X might, if they licensed it - which may happen once they're reached the limits of their own growth).
Apple doesn't strike me as offering anything really compelling in the web server space, which is the future - more and more functionality is moving away from the computer to other devices (hence the iTV and iPhone). That's a threat to Windows and OS X both, and so far I think MS have the lead in addressing it. I work in a Unix/Java house but I can see the real appeal of
(Apple also have nothing like the XBAP technology or Flash, both of which will allow the delivery of zero-install, sand-boxed, applications over the web. Basically what Java applets can do already. or what Active-X should have been).
The good news is that we know Apple hired someone last year to re-design Finder, because the job advert was public.
Whether all your issues will be addressed is another matter. I'm guessing that the focus will be on making a great tool for consumers - something more like iTunes, possibly with a Core Animation powered CoverFlow style visual file browser (keep up with Vista) as that would be quite flashy.
Not saying OS X is all flash and no substance (it's my OS of choice) but the 'out of the box' experience is definitely consumer oriented and they trust the rest of us will replace it with what we need. As you note, support of multi-session CDs is poor, but many Windows users don't 'get it' either, even where it is better supported (and memory sticks have thankfully bridged the 'capacity gap' we had between floppies and CDs).
From what I've read, with QT4 in place the KDE for OS X project may get a lot further, so Konqueror may be an option.
Souls for Arioch, old chap.
Either that, or like two people at work, you thought about the iPod but went for something cheaper for your kids. And then complain how difficult it is to use. Given the stealbality of ipods I fully applaud parents NOT buying their children such a high value/easy target electronic toy - but I am also amazed that working in IT, their are people in IT still confused over different players. (One guy bought a Creative player because he believed iPods ONLY played iTunes content, not MP3s. Good FUD on the part of the WMA salespeople).
I suspect there is an element of publicity here - targeting Apple makes more headlines than, say, Lenovo. On the other hand, Apple have traded for a long time on a cuddly 'computer for hippies' image - even if they've never actually been explicit about it, there's the implicit idea that Apple should somehow be more right-on than other computer firms.
Negative publicity also seems to be about the only way to achieve corporate accountability these days, given that governments everywhere have rescinded responsibility to 'market forces' - and market forces are rarely about facts. It does seem that the campaigns where Greenpeace has been less than scientifically accurate (Brent Spar being another case) attract more attention than the ones that are (perhaps because it's easier for people to get angry at a corporation for pollution, than change their own behaviour).
The downside of this is that it continues the slide that there are 'two sides to every story', 'scientists can prove anything they want', etc.
Who can forget the years when every .1% gain was seized on as evidence!
Still good enough that I bought the re-issue for the PSP.
I think there's also the issue of lifespan - I buy music expecting that I might be listening to it in 15 years time, but the number of games in the same position is tiny.
Also, there's the fact that games are generally tied to specific hardware for genuine reasons, rather than just DRM (at least until emulation software / PC power catches up).
I'm waiting for emusic to overtake iTunes. While it's range is smaller, it also fits well with consumers who buy a lot of music by volume, and the prices on emusic are compelling enough to make me think twice about buying the CD.
Indeed - that is something a lot of techies don't seem to get - 'My iRiver can do X,Y and Z', why doesn't the iPod have Bluetooth, etc, when it is obviously something only a marginal group of people are interested in.
See also Blackberry : I've seen executives with Blackberries who are also carrying mobile phones that can do email AND laptops that could use that mobile phone to retrieve email - historically, the trend seems to be from complex multi-function devices to simple single function ones.
However, I still like the idea of Widgets on the iPod (I am thinking more of static visual widgets like the Weather widget, rather than anything interactive, which is where I see the difference from a traditional PDA or a Smart Phone - I don't see Apple putting a keyboard into the iPod). If the screen gets any larger, it might even be viable to sync up RSS feeds as well as Podcasts (already achievable via hacks, but it's not exactly the best devices for reading text on). I'm thinking of 'iPod as commuter device'.
It would be a change in practice if Apple were going to start thinking about third parties.
Historically they have never had a problem with incorporating software and hardware features into the Mac that have wiped out third party markets, and they've never been the best partner for retail stores (even before they had their own / own online store).
My favourite rumour (the one I hope is true) is the one about Dashboard widgets for iPods, of which there was some hint buried somewhere.
Given that Nokia phones are using a WebKit based browser, it is not too fanciful to imagine a WebKit port to the iPod, and Widgets would provide a nice sandbox for third party applications on the iPod. With a wifi connection that would be even more useful than just 'sync' based. I'm sure power issues could be addressed there (i.e. don't keep WIfi powered on, until it's actually used). Web access via BT-enabled mobile phones seems a more 'mobile' solution. I can't see a fully fledged web browser yet, given the limitations of browsing on the PSP - but I'd love to have my basic set of widgets on a mobile device.
I can just see Jobs casually pulling out his 6G iPod and showing it tracking some ebay auctions, then the Weather widget, sports results, etc - that level of functionality seems to have the right 'fit' for mobile browsing, but the typical Dashboard widget looks far better than any WAP page or Java App I've seen on a mobile.
>Then again, maybe Steve thinks their doing well enough, and are stable enough, that they don't need this.
I think it may be commercially driven, in that as Apple move into a more mainstream market, there will be more resistance to a 12-18 month cycle. Tiger has had a massive adoption rate, but I don't think you can depend on that going forward. Apple are returning to the market of people who won't even know there IS an upgrade.
Stability probably has something to do with it - 10.4 was the first release you didn't NEED to get, plus we can now see - retrospectively - Jobs plan for getting the business into a stable position. There is less need to generate cash and less urgency to push through the OS X migration (which has in turn, let them achieve the hardware migration).
Of course, there are other channels through which they can release 'upgrades' - i.e. Front Row and Photo Booth both seem more logically part of iLife than the core OS, but will help boost the feature count in Leopard.
OS XI - I do wonder if there is any thought going into it - what technologies would someone pick if they did a Jobs style 'walk in the wilderness' looking at University research? What programming language would they pick if they didn't already have Obj-C and the Cocoa framework? How much is Linux killing operating system research in Universities - i.e. who is funding it, other than Microsoft?
I thought Jobs said that after Leopard, they would be shifting to a 36 month timescale between OS releases? (That's the same timescale Ballmer hopes to achieve).
While there is a lot to be said for the big bang approach in terms of marketing, I think you do need to balance it against technical progress and changes in the market. 36 months would be a very long time between Safari 3 and 4, for instance. Not as long as IE6 to IE7 but possibly long enough to cause problems.
The thing that makes it complex is that Microsoft release new versions of Direct X and .NET out of sync with the operating system (and even IE when they can be bothered) - and to a degree these run on older versions of the OS.
With Apple it's the whole lot - end applications and programming APIs. I suspect this may start to change now that OS X is mature, and there is less need to generate cash from existing customers / more focus on new customers - i.e. we may see new APIs introduced in point releases at WWDC, rather than only with a major OS release.
Yes, it's always been a surprise to me that despite the evident interest in Mac software from the Linux community, so little effort has been put into the one project that would help (the fact that Obj-C is in high demand for developing Mac software is probably another factor).
At the very least it would make it easy to develop equivalent software - I won't pretend to know enough about the internals of MacOS to know whether you could run a Cocoa app over a different implementation, in the same way you could with OpenStep. but I suspect if the app was purely Obj-C you could - i.e. if everything is Obj-C extended from the original core NextStep classes, then you should be able to extend GnuStep in the same way (given that the classes are documented).
However a lot of apps have dependencies on other Apple APIs that have been wrapped in Obj-C. i.e. QTKit would be far more difficult as it's a mapping of QuickTime, rather than an extension of Obj-C. Something like CoreData would lie inbetween (it has a dependency on non Obj-C libraries, but a database is a database).
>Apple's established customers will just keep buying Macs.
Well, established customers tend to have a software base they want to continue to use, and therefore we currently have little option in suppliers.
You are correct that potential switchers are in a different position - they may be interested in trying a Mac, but have no attachment (financial or emotional) to the platform. Apple do very well at creating a good 'out of the box' experience - but it is easy to puncture that illusion and end up back in the 'all as bad as each other' world that beleaguers so many PC purchasers.
(I know it's not true, but most consumers don't even know how to research a good brand / model, rather than whatever is getting the salesman the best commission).
>Then again, Apple's overall quality level is probably the same as any other computer manufacture
Historically, this doesn't seem to be the case. i.e. they do seem to have had - historically - better (all round) quality than other manufacturers. The fact that they don't compete in the very low end of the market does, of course, help substantially - their quality level is probably the same as for machines at a similar spec/price point (minus 15% Apple tax).
What they have definitely had, historically, is problems with specific machines, particularly first versions. I guess that is something that is perhaps more noticeable with Apple machines in that they tend to have clearer revisions of their hardware (it may actually serve them well that quality problems get blamed on 'version 1' machines, rather than the firm as a whole, but that is very dependent on customer knowledge).
I think they have also rushed - let us hypothesise that the original plan was to develop machines that were going to be based on Intel's next-gen chips, all of which are supposed to have far lower power consumption, but instead they've ended up with something running at maybe double the expected temperature. Which is dumping problems on your customer.
I think it actually made a small number of people switch - Carbon and Aqua have always been proprietary and unavailable to Darwin developers. What it did do was create an enormous fuss amongst FOSS zealots who had no interest whatsoever in the Xnu kernel, but want to see Apple open source everything for their own benefit / the good of the world.
People like Doctorow and Mark Pilgrim - who are the two most public OS X to Linux switchers - have actually cited the closed nature of Apple's apps than their OS as their reason for switching. This strikes me as odd in Doctorow's case in that Apple's apps are no more closed than they ever were. It has just taken desktop Linux for this EFF advocate to realise this - in the past he was not willing to sacrifice usability for freedom, as the EFF often advocate.
Like a Windows user, I run OS X because it came with my computer and because there is a lot of OS X specific software. The apps were the reason I chose the OS.
Solaris, on the other hand, has no real killer Solaris-only applications - aside from powering proprietary Sun hardware. With Solaris x86 the competition is free and you have to do what the competition does. I would wager that lack of interest will eventually let Solaris x86 go the same way as most flavours of BSD. In their own way, Linux advocates are a fixated on the one true system as Windows or Mac fans, and generally show a lack of interest / disdain for developments in other operating systems.
Apple have the advantage, unlike Sun, that the vast majority of their customers do not give a fig about Unix. They aren't looking for a server to run an Oracle database or web server. For some of the apps their choice is Windows or Apple. For some apps they have to choose one system or another. Development of consumer level apps on Linux is years behind Apple, and will take an initiative on a scale comparable to Novell's SLED to achieve (just think how many millions of pounds of corporate investment from Sun (OpenOffice), IBM, Novell and Red Hat SLED represents). It's not just the programming, it's hiring artists to create themes for movie editing and DVD creation packages, etc, that distinguishes Apple's products. It is the side of the business volunteer projects are rarely good at implementing - good free programming talent is easy to find these days compared to design talent.
I'd also say that Windows is another reason why most OS today are open source - being free is often the only way to compete against Microsoft. Apple have managed to create enough value in their system that people will pay more than Microsoft based machines to use it. There would have to be a compelling business reason for them to throw that away, as they would need to justify it to their shareholders. The only one I can think of is if they actually started losing market share to Linux or Windows.
I should have been clearer - I was including OS X as a flavour of BSD.
What I meant was that XRay isn't going to work on Linux without DTrace also being ported. i.e. there are least two dependencies (Cocoa and DTrace) that don't exist on Linux.
What's the new architecture it runs on?
As far as I can see it's still a Cocoa app, so while it's certainly possible (we know the Next frameworks would run on top of multiple kernels) it is unlikely unless Apple decided to open up the layers above Darwin (unlikely). Alternatively, resource could be put into the GnuStep project, but overall there seems very little interest in it. (The non-Apple Obj-C community is tiny).
DTrace is currently only on Solaris and BSD (at least last I knew).
I'd imagine there would be more hope in a project to add similar features to Eclipse, where you may at least encounter a pool of developer motivation (including Mac developers who don't want to work with XCode).
>I'd like to know why isn't ObjC more popular outside Apple (and NeXT) circles
Because it's 'a failed language'. If they could come up with a rebrand (AJAX) or take the concepts and give it a syntactic revamp (maybe based round Ruby) they'd be well away, but the predominant line has been C to C++ to Java (and now C-sharp) - and only recently have Java developers begun to demand the features of a true OO language.
To be fair, there were good performance reasons why C++ won over Smalltalk regardless of it's productivity benefits, but these have become less and less important for UI bound programs.
Not heavy gamers, but it would be nice to have the choice. Would also be nice to be able to ditch the machine we do keep around the house purely for occasional gaming - my wife gets it out every 2-3 months.
I also think it would help widen the appeal of the Mac as a family machine, if the kids could use it for gaming.
They lost full control of the distribution channels years ago, certainly with music. I think that is the main reason that the emphasis shifted so much towards marketing and promotion in the era after punk / post-punk. The one thing independent and self-funded artists can't do is throw millions of pounds in advertising at something to make it stick. I think the game is still open with the web. While a lot of people use it to discover stuff, I suspect there is still life in the broadcast / bundle / channel model yet - the 'mainstream' will be a significant niche - and a lot of those people could probably be convinced to give up on the Internet for a 'safe internet' of carefully vetted shopping and media sites, just as they will give over their computers because trusted computing will mean that only authorised programs will run, so no more viruses. The major aren't helping themselves by continually narrowing the range of what they offer, and spending more money on trying to get more customers to buy the same thing.
>Heck, if I see something that looks slick I'd avoid it on the simple premise that the product has a value in design as opposed to specifications and/or quality of parts.
An attitude you have in common with many people, but one that is not necessarily correct - or at least only partly correct. There is almost certainly a premium attached to design - at the very least there is the cost of employing a designer, along with likely higher manufacturing costs. On the other hand, good design can certainly add to the quality of a product (the USB slots on the back of the Mac mini are well-secured into the frame, which is more than I can say for my Acer laptop which cost the best part of $2000 but certainly fits into the 'no money spent on design/all on components' category).
I have luggage and shoes from luxury goods firms that have simply outlasted budget items, as well as looking better - and I've sampled enough top-end restaurants to know that yes, the food they produce is actually better than the mid-market, not just better presented. 'Presentation is the shop window' as one of my teachers often said.
There is also a slight insinuation here that Mac-purchasers are somehow technically ignorant because they don't prioritise 'specs'. I intentionally downgraded from a high-spec PC to a Mac mini, because I realised that 90% of what I needed a computer for was for web-browsing, music storage and light programming work, plus I fancied giving OS X a go. Having a near-silent and tiny machine in the study is a pleasure. It's taken a year to really start appreciating OS X itself (again a lot of people dismiss it on the grounds that it looks 'slick', suspecting this means it must be less 'powerful').