Is Apple Doing All It Can to Beat Vista?

aalobode writes "The New York Times is running an article on the narrowing window that Apple has for beating Microsoft's Vista. According the Times, not enough has been done to capitalize on the Mac user experience versus the 'world of hurt that is Vista'. It also points out that that restructuring of Apple leaves ambiguities about Apple's exact commitment to the computer end of its business. The article calls MS Vista's certified vendors, developers and driver writers a flywheel that takes a while coming up to speed - and then becomes unstoppable."

Re:Development

[nkh]

One issue with developing on the mac is that you have to use a strange language called Object-C if you want to develop cocoa applications

I used to write my GUIs with Qt or GTK but I now have a job writing Cocoa applications in Objective-C and I like it! I have to write less code than before, I have the bindings system and all the Cocoa framework for me so, yes, Objective-C is a PITA to learn when you begin but once you understand how to use it, it's a very powerful tool.

Re:Platform of choice.

[unfunk]

And now ask yourself, who of us had chosen Windows?? Right, nobody. It's the thing which came preinstalled.

I chose Windows. Yes, it came preinstalled on my Compaq Presario back in 1995, but I got rid of it as soon as I found out about Linux.
That lasted about six weeks before I got fed up with the lack of application support for it back then, and ever since, I've been hopping between a lot of different 'alternative' operating systems and Windows. Currently I'm multibooting between Windows XP, Ubuntu 7.01 and OSX.

Windows gets about 90% of the useage.

Re:Neither can compete with the cost of Ubuntu!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I play games like Call of Duty, the Sims 2 and Oblivion on WINE. Maybe you should try a more recent version if you're having problems. About a year ago they made some really big improvements, and a lot of my games that wouldn't run did start to work.

Re:Love the Mac - PC's still rule in Corporate

[mikael_j]

...there are no commercial Tiger discs for Intel machines anyway, only restore disks that are bound to the mac they came with

What are you talking about, you can buy yourself a copy of Tiger through The Apple Store [apple.com].

/Mikael

Re:Love the Mac - PC's still rule in Corporate

[robbieduncan]

Yes, for PPC machines. That will not run on an Intel Mac. Check the hardware requirements on the page you linked to "PowerPC G5, G4 or G3 processor"

Re:world of hurt?

[CandyMan]

You are not alone. Designer Joshua Davis works on a Mac Mini [apple.com]. He is hardly a casual user. He writes code that produces the final graphics, and runs memory-and-processor hogs like Photoshop and Illustrator all the time.

Re:world of hurt?

[Midnight Thunder]

Microsoft seems to use them too:

http://davidweiss.blogspot.com/2006/04/tour-of-microsofts-mac-lab.html [blogspot.com]

Sure it is their Mac labs, but to see 150 together is quite something.

Re:service pack

[wootest]

The only good thing about Macs is the look of the case, and even THAT is a matter of taste.

Bullshit. First of all: This is not about Linux not being all you make it out to be. Your depiction seems accurate, and desktop Linux distributions are continuously improving. This is about Macs being put down. I've used a Mac for a number of years now, sliding over to using it full time (in the place of Windows + Linux where I used Linux mostly for server stuff) and I can testament that it's not just about the look of the case.

The number one reason I use a Mac is not to get to act all "look at me, I'm special" or to pay more for my computers. It is because of the applications and the operating system. Some of the third party Mac applications are, in my opinion, unsurpassed in their genre on any platform. Like the app I'm writing this in - NetNewsWire, a feed reader (full disclosure: I'm a beta tester, but I'm not saying nice things because I'm a beta tester, I'm a beta tester because I like the app so much). Generalization is dangerous, but paying more attention to detail, especially in the user interface, seems more pervasive on Mac OS X than on any other OS.

I am a developer. I'll admit it: my bread-and-butter today is (and has been for the last year or so) .NET. I love Perl and Ruby and PHP, and I can use them as good on OS X as on any other OS (and significantly easier than on Windows). But I also really like Cocoa and Objective-C, and I believe it's a good example of what .NET could have become had they actively tried to keep the class count down. You can't really claim "marketing" or "RDF" on developer APIs - you start to notice as soon as you use it, and while Cocoa might seem eclectic at the start, it works really well.

There's also a level of chutzpah in the frequent OS updates that I appreciate, even if I have to shell out $129 before rebates every two years or so. When was the last time your OS added automatic backups with one-button setup (and easy full-disk restoration), a layer animation engine and resolution independence in an update? They're also following existing standards (like CalDAV, Open Directory and soon ZFS) - or creating extensions or new standards and publishing them and open source implementations (like HFS+ and launchd) - almost across the board (yes, except for anything possibly involving DRM where they have to deal with the **AAs; I don't like that any more than anyone else). I think the best thing I can say about the operating system and software is that I'd rather use Mac OS X in a regular PC than I would use Ubuntu or Vista in a MacBook.

There's tons of valid points of criticism for Apple, for their computers and for Mac OS X. None of this passes me by unnoticed. QuickTime Pro and .Mac upsell offers are persistent and horrible, for one thing. They're not perfect. But putting off Macs and Mac OS X by the blanket statement "The only good thing about Macs is the look of the case" is simply unfair.

Re:service pack

[darthflo]

Ever tried using a graphics tablet as your core pointer in Ubuntu?

I did. Ubuntu Gutsy Tribe 5 detected and configured my Wacom touchscreen (which, from a driver/config PoV, is equal to a Wacom graphics tablet) without me having to even press a button or anything to that avail. And with just a few more clicks in The Gimp, Inkscape and Xournal, pressure sensitivity, eraser tip and everything else worked perfectly fine (as an XInput instead of CorePointer device).

Re:service pack

[Gr8Apes]

That's because the HD doesn't need to spin up to "wake up" from standby.

On my MBP, it's literally open case, 1..2.. type in password and off I go. It doesn't matter if I have external keyboards, mice, and monitors hooked up or not.

My XP Pro Dell, after a wonderful round of 3 weeks of figuring out that the power management setting on the built in wireless adapter needed to be set to off as it regularly hung the OS during the switch to power saving mode still goes through conniptions. Sometimes the screen comes up right (I have nVidia's Dualview enabled) sometimes not. Sometimes the dock keyboard/mouse come on line, sometimes not, even though the dock's video is always used, yet almost always reverses itself in sequence to the laptop screen position (An annoyance I haven't figured out yet).

Re:Neither can compete with the cost of Ubuntu!

[Mongoose]

It takes more effort, sure. However you can run about any game under Linux now. You might need to have a special patched version of Wine for a certain game ( eg QuakeWars and Eve ), but often you just need to tune 'off-the-shelf' versions ( Oblivion and Morrowwind ).

It's not for everyone, but I like the flexibility and the cost. I don't have to buy Windows to play the game for example, or boot out of my main OS either. I should disclose I'm the guy that wrote a few patches and HOWTOs for Wine games. If you can follow simple instructions and have an Nvidia GPU that supports OpenGL 2.1+ you're set for the most part. I'm waiting for reports from AMD ( ATi ) users to see if the new drivers have any effect on the dismal performace and support of OpenGL and more specifically GLSL. The more choice for GPUs on Linux the better.

Re:service pack

[pikine]

I second your opinion, but I also want to point out the hard work done by Linux Audio Developers.

For one, they pushed the development of preemptible and low-latency Linux kernel to make it possible to do low-latency stuff, even on relatively aged hardware. Mac OS X's micro-kernel architecture is potentially superior in this regard because you can easily go hard real-time with micro-kernels (Linux is a monolithic kernel), but Linux kernel is more suitable than Windows XP for running audio applications because of these improvements.

They also obsoleted OSS (open sound system) and came up with ALSA [alsa-project.org], which makes it easier to support new sound devices from the developer's point of view. ALSA supports a range of consumer to professional sound cards, just like CoreAudio. It just works.

Another notable framework, JACK [jackaudio.org], goes beyond CoreAudio by providing audio routing between applications, like ReWire. JACK is also available on Mac OS X, except it is less robust than on Linux. Thrashing can cause audio drop-out because Mac OS X kernel can't lock pages in real memory.

Finally, if you ever considered audio production work on Linux, you definitely know about Ardour [ardour.org] at some point. It's the hard work of Paul Davis, working on it unemployeed and full-time for many years. Ardour also runs on Mac OS X, by the way, because of the generous nature of Linux developers for offering you a choice.

If you do mostly recording, then you can get by on Linux quite sufficiently. If you do a lot of synthesized stuff like Reason or NI, then you'll be disappointed. There is simply no comparable app on Linux.

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On the other hand, Linux has a lot of architecture catch-up on the graphics stack. Cairo [cairographics.org] recently has some talk about supporting more color spaces than RGB. However, the lack of end-to-end color management is a serious issue. Colors you see on the screen simply will look different when printed out. The colors are also not even consistent from monitor to monitor.

One thing I'm really impressed with Mac OS X is its monitor calibration. It lets you fine tune gamma by inspecting the monitor response in highlight, mid-tone and shadow for red, green and blue. I can easily color-match two monitors by different manufacturers.

Mac OS X also has superior built-in typesetting support, completely unparalleled by any operating system, and this is available in any application even TextEdit. In TextEdit, you can already turn on common ligatures like "fi" and "fl" as you type. In comparison, you must insert ligature glyphs manually when using Microsoft Word. Mac OS X supports more typesetting feature than that. For example, the Hoefler font has an archaic font variant with a "long s" (so congress looks more like congrefs where the f has shorter middle bar---the s at the end of the word remains the usual form because the long s is a contextual ligature that happens only in the middle of a word) and the "st ligature" (there is a small hook that goes from the top end of s to the top stem of t). Needless to say, contextual ligature is a crucial feature to support scripts like Arabic.

Mac OS X definitely has received a lot of attention in the aesthetics that goes way beyond eye candy.