Is Apple Doing All It Can to Beat Vista? 773
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."
Here's an idea: get newspapers to write free ads! (Score:4, Interesting)
As a lifelong Apple fanboy (all Apple since 1982, thanks), I can say without a doubt that there's not been a better time to be an Apple fanboy in 20 years. We actually have some street cred now. IT departments no longer laugh dismissively at the idea of perhaps a Mac in the office, maybe. (Though corporate America is a long way from embracing Macs. And Apple originally lost the PC war because most consumers bought what they had at work for home (and, hey, it was a little cheaper).) People are actually buying Macs. Sales are up; growth is up. The article makes a big deal of Apple not starting its relationship with Best Buy soon enough to gain a retail presence. Hello? NYT, two years ago Apple barely had the cred and was still working on retail presence for the iPod. I bought my iPod at Target; I've vowed never to buy so much as a blank CD at Best Buy after some of its shady business practices, and if Apple wanted to just make the Mac available to more people, it'd sell them everywhere the iPods are sold. How far away is that? Well, they'd have to be able to make enough Macs to put them there, but I bet we'll see it someday.
Re:world of hurt? (Score:3, Interesting)
How about buying a mac mini for work and multimedia and the game system of your choice for gaming? Wouldnt be more expensive and is way more fun.
Yours,
Somebody happy with a mac mini and a wiiRe:service pack (Score:1, Interesting)
Seriously, why would you want to buy a Mac if you can have Ubuntu, apart from Adobe/Macromedia products? Lower price, UI looks as funky (if not funkier), more available software, albeit most of it is OSS or free.
When people tell me they are fed up with Windows and particularly Vista (happens daily), I tell them to give Linux a chance, and when I can get them to overcome their "it's free so it must be s*it" reservations, people are positively surprised and generally go at least for a dual boot XP/Linux.
And yes, I know that there are ~better~, more hardcore distros of Linux than Ubuntu, but the article is about users who should move from Vista to Mac and I don't think those are particulary interested in compiling everything they need.
The only good thing about Macs is the look of the case, and even THAT is a matter of taste.
Love the Mac - PC's still rule in Corporate (Score:2, Interesting)
Just wondering out loud - do Blackberries work with OS X? Hmmm.... looks like you can synch with and Exchange server and OS X.
http://www.pocketmac.net/products/pmblackberry/ [pocketmac.net]
We currently have a consulting group that manages our Exchange server - they only support Blackberries with Outlook - no Entourage support.
Maybe the new release of an Office suite for OS X might help, but the only way I can see Apple gaining on HP, Dell, etc, is by ramping up production and selling Macs in all the major outlets - Circuit City, Walmart, etc, instead of the cool but boutique-type Apple stores.
If Joe and Mary Computer shopper don't see it as they wander the mega-store aisles, they cannot buy it. Visibility. Show the product!
Re:of course it's not (Score:3, Interesting)
Bingo, unfunk.
I would buy OSX in a second if I could run it on my hardware. That's why this article is sort of wide of the mark. Apple will never be able to really compete with Vista (or Microsoft) as long as they insist on being a hardware company before all. The fact that OSX seems to have taken a back seat in Cupertino to all the little consumer electronics does not bode well for the future of the mac platform or for those of us who would love to run an Apple OS on our hardware someday. I guess when you're making enough money to give people $100 rebates on iPhones, you don't have to worry about the arts, media and educational markets that made you in the first place and are waiting for something good to happen on the increasingly ignored computer side of Apple.
I was always one of the "early adopters" in the OS space before the release of Vista. I tried it on a brand new computer (bought specifically to run Vista), hated it, removed it and ran back to XP Pro like to an old lover (who used to abuse me a bit, TBH). Vista is so bad that it may have actually transformed me from someone who used to love getting the latest OS to someone who just wants to run his programs, thank you very much.
Most important, Vista is not only so bad, but it's so NOT what I want in an OS. So, until Microsoft reverses course and gives me a new OS that's actually better than XP, or Apple decides to release an "OSX for My Hardware", I'll stick with XP and pray for a well-funded third party to enter the commercial OS marketplace.
Plus, I've just installed Ubuntu Studio on my test system and I'm loving it. It even works with my USB and Firewire audio and video hardware. I've just got to figure out how to install the driver thing so it will play the DVD thing and watch movies.
Re:world of hurt? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Love the Mac - PC's still rule in Corporate (Score:3, Interesting)
Another thing(coming from a 100+ user all Apple/Linux shop) that Apple does that doesn't work well with corporate environments is that they make it impossible to go back to previous OS X versions once a new one has been released. If history has anything to say, any new macs that come out after Leopard will not accept Tiger(well, there are no commercial Tiger discs for Intel machines anyway, only restore disks that are bound to the mac they came with). So say Apple releases Leopard and you find out that it doesn't work well with your environment for whatever reason(could be because you just haven't had enough time to rigorously test it). If you want one of those shiny new macs, you are screwed. You cannot install Tiger on it. We are going to purchase 100 new mac pros next real revision, and this may come back to bite us. That being said, Apple still does give security updates for its older OS products, there are still regular security updates for Jaguar(10.3) I do believe....
Now on the flip side of the coin, you can still install windows 2k or xp or almost any old version of linux, provided you are willing to risk not having 100% hardware support.
Lock-Ins and the All Might Dollar (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Portable stuff (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Steve picked the Phone over the PC (Score:5, Interesting)
How is that? Agreed, when I'm on the move I will naturally turn to handheld devices that can offer basic services (multimedia playing, communication, web browsing). But there's no way I'm going to resort to them when I need actual work done, or for serious entertainment purposes. They're good to keep you going from one place to another, but for productivity's sake I will need to sit at a desk, use a full size keyboard, a normal mouse, and enjoy a large screen and sensible performance. And if I want to watch movies or play games I will also require the kind of hardware that doesn't travel easily.
Furthermore, that desktop computer paradigm itself is very hard to surpass. There are specialized devices that offer niche services (multimedia players, game consoles, handhelds, laptops), and there are desktop computers, which can be used for anything. That versatility is very hard to throw aside. Niche devices come and go, but a universal purpose device like the desktop computer will be around for a lot of time.
The only possible change I foresee is extreme miniaturization, which would at some point reduce the desktop computer to something like a pen that you take out of your pocket, place on the desk and it expands to a full size interface (keyboard, mouse, display, or all in one). Perhaps using holography and motion sensors. But for all practical reasons that kind of thing is a long way from the mainstream.
Apple NEEDS a mid-range head less system and...... (Score:4, Interesting)
The mini is overpriced priced and the laptop hardware in it drives costs up and still has the real old gma 950 in it and all systems should have a super dr.
The imacs are not that much better while they do use a desktop HD, the laptop ram, cpu, slot loading DVD RW, and video push the price up. Also the smaller size of the new imacs mean that high-mid and high end video cards are out as well as more then one hd and you are stuck if it's build in screen.
The Macpro is over 1 and half years old and is still at the same price and same setup base system 7300 gt and only 1gb of ram and $300 to go to 2gb apples prices, OWC has it for $100. But still $100 a gig? Also the raid card for it is rip $1000 for a 4 port sata only raid card?
The mid-range system can replace the high end mini with on board video or a low end video card g33 / g35 chipset and pci-x 16 slot for video with x4 slot for other cards and desktop parts.
maybe have high end system for gameing with dual video cards x38 or NV chipset.
Or you can have a dual dual macpro with the low end xeon cpus and the new chip set with ecc ddr2 2/3 ram.
The mini can be dropped in price making it a very low end system.
Re:Portable stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
Because there are not enough standards in computing....Most business need a simple accounting package that will handle GL, AP and AR. They invest in let's say Accpac for DOS and they customize their reports for it. They have no need for Accpac for Windows. As the years advance and we find ourselves in 2007, the systems which run this software are no longer available. There is no productivity gain in any of the new software because it gives them nothing more.
Accounting has not changed. The needs of most small business is in collecting the cash, paying the bills and filling taxes. The productivity gains from manual ledgers to automated AP, AR and GL are significant and justifies the cost. The productivity gains from the above example which is Accpac for DOS and any other software are practically none existent.
The investment that will be required for this business to come up to "speed" will become legacy within a couple of years. The cost does not generate any new revenue for the business and no longer gives them a productivity advantage. They get that from there POS or ERP or PMS systems. That is why the OS must run legacy software, there are users out there who need it. Or in other words they don't care about the OS, they need there apps to run and will buy any OS which will allow them to continue operations.
Re:service pack (Score:2, Interesting)
A whole slew of audio, video, modeling, graphics, typesetting and printing (as in not your rgb inkjet) and media applications?
audio? There are whole buch of good to aparently good apps for Linux. As sound and music isn't my field, I can't really comment though. modeling? Blender, makeHuman , wings, k3d ... oh, and by the way, that's partly what I do for a living. Tried pretty much every modeler around, and after an admitedly frustrating steep learning curve, I must say that Blender is up there with the big names.
Typesetting and printing, yes ... indeed. Mostly because the used formats for print medias are PSD and PDF. NOT there are not alternatives, but people love to be Adobe's Whore.
Media Application? sure... what do you need? We have a few macs at work, along with some fanatic mac users. When we need to convert or edit TV ads, I end up being the one doing it on an old Toshiba Satelite with 256MB running Linux . The rest of the machine are running XP, Vista or are macs)
"Looks". Heh. It's never been about how the UI looks. The UI is more or less the same as it's been since System 7. It's about how the UI _works_, it's about how the UI acts and feels, it's about integration, simplicity and slickness. It's about doing what it does and doing it responsively with a minimal resources. I'll guarantee you that KDE won't be nearly responsive on a 233 G3 w/ 192mb ran as Tiger was.
hmm ... personally I use Gnome. it acts and feels great, even on the above mentioned Toshiba Laptop. It's also, for me, more intuitive to use on a regular basis than OSX, especially when used in an heterogeneous LAN. Of course, compiz doesn't work on it, but I have Beryl running on my home computer, and you know what? it's not just about eye candy. Some functions have been ported from OSX (the expose function for example), the 3D cube is actually very nice and handy, and even the, at first, useless but cool looking water effect is a great way to replace system beeps. OH .. Add to that the wonderfull zooming function, which is extremely usefull at times.
Again, it's fairly clear you've never actually used a Mac. Fink (apt for Darwin), and DarwinPorts offer the free software.
I'll confess I know neither fink nor DarwinPort. I try to avoid having to use the mac, as I really dislike the interface, and the fanboys at work apparenly never heard of it neither. But to be fair, I'll check it out. And ... true. Not much overpriced software on Linux.
SGI cases were prettier, but I digress.
I agree completely. Used to work with SGI in the early 90s, and those were real beauty.
If all you're doing is checking emails, word processing and some dev work, Ubuntu is fine. But once you get to any level of _serious_ creative work, Macintosh is the only viable option left with the demise of Irix. And let's not forget the bit about everything working with minimal hassle on the Mac. Ever tried using a graphics tablet as your core pointer in Ubuntu? Or using a KAOS pad? Or just about any higher end, vaguely exotic multimedia hardware, for that matter? Yeah, I didn't think so.
see .. the point is : the article wasn't about high end users able to spend a few thousand U$ on exotic hardware and then paying again as much on software. It was about John and Jane Doe. While I wouldn't count myself into THAT crowd, and I actually do "serious creative work" (whatever THAT may be), John and Jane only really want to check emails, use a word processor, chat, and then go on the internet to watch the latest youtube vids. If it happens with flashy grafics, no matter how useless they are to them, then the better. So my question stands : why a mac, and why not Linux?
Just as an FWI, I've used various Unices for the past 15 years (Irix, Solaris, AIX, Free/Open BSD, Interix, Linux, and Darwin/OSX) Linux for close to 10. But
Re:world of hurt? (Score:3, Interesting)
By its third year 98 had evolved into 98SE (where usb support was introduced), the peripherals that people had been using before 98 now largely were supported in 98 so it wasn't to shell out gobs of money to replace all of your hardware, and Office 97 and Works were both on the market and being viewed as usable AND useful by the marketplace.
Arguably the most significant changes by year 3 of 98/98SE were not with the OS but with society. In the three years since 98 was released there was a significant increase in the percentage of households that actually had home computers. They were making the transition from novelty to necessity, and 98 was the operating system with which most home users first learned to compute. At the same time the internet, had penetrated the national consciousness, and people were emailing their friends and families on a regular basis.
XP was also significantly different by its third year. SP1 and SP2 had both been released and significantly improved security, stability, and the ease of use of some key features like support for wireless networking and digital media.
These attributes dovetailed nicely with the public obsession with digital photography, the increasing penetration of laptops into the home market, and the increasing threat of identity theft.
Vista was seriously crippled by the delay-plagued XPSP2. Microsoft pulled many of the programmers working on Vista over to the SP2 team in order to finally get it to market. Several of the key features promised for Vista were pulled during this same period, most notably the new file system and a dramatically improved search feature. Third party products took huge leaps ahead of Windows in the area of digital media/digital home entertainment- another area that had been touted as a major advance to be found in Vista.
To be fair, no OS could have lived up to the unending publicity campaign that built around Longhorn/Vista. But the Vista that made it to market appeared to many home AND business users to be nothing more than a pretty (inter)face. And very few computers will even display Aero to its full capabilities. Full Aero requires a graphics card built around Microsoft's Direct X 10- and the first such cards have only made it to market in the last two months. Microsoft has announced that SP1 for Vista, slated for release in October, is only a compilation of all of the critical updates already released by MS via MicrosoftUpdate.
I don't see the perception of Vista changing radically in its first three years, if ever. Many in the tech press have dubbed it ME2, perhaps the ultimate insult. Microsoft has given pc manufacturers permission to continuing selling new machines with XP installed for another six months, minimum. Vista appears to lack any new features that will coincide with the masses embracing some new computer-related past time. The stars don't seem to have aligned in Vista's favor. It's telling that Vista SP1 and XP SP3 (which will allow for the activation of a huge number of new XP key codes- MS was literally within months of using up every code produced by their original algorithms) are being released with in a few months of each other.
Logic Studio (Score:3, Interesting)
The stability of the audio playback justifies the purchase of a Mac alone. Not to mention that Logic Studio is immensely powerful and only costs a few hundred dollars when it used to be a thousand.
Those who like to be creative and not mess around with techie issues all day would be wise to forget Vista, you'll never get it working reliably as a music composition and recording workstation. Especially considering Microsoft throttle the network bandwidth to favour audio playblack, so that totally throws out the possibility of using gigabit networking and node software (where you use an additional computer for more processing power).
Re:service pack (Score:4, Interesting)
The point with Compiz is that is is a compositing window manager platform. Compiz isn't the effects. Compiz is the platform. Even GUI people seem to miss this.
You cannot hail OS X GUI and dismiss Compiz in the same sentence. Compiz is what brings things like Exposè, window grouping, "live" thumbnail preview etc. to the OSS world. Those things are doubtless useful in the sense that they let you do your work more efficiently. If you get stuck on viewing Compiz as the "spinning cube that nerds take screenshots of", you'll be missing the point. Of course, one has to drill down through the configuration and disable all those flashy no-good effects such as flaming windows and windows that pop up on cube rotation, water, snow, etc. etc. Such things will happen when you have a bunch of talented people working on a software product that lets you do cool stuff; you can't expect everybody to focus on usability only. Still, usability is what lies at the core of Compiz.
The most important thing about Compiz, for the GUI people at least, is that it is an open architecture which you can use to design and usability-test different GUI paradigms. We shouldn't be afraid of trying out new things, even if we are aware that they may never become mainstream. Many GUI paradigms never became "mainstream"; heck, even Mac's "one-menu-bar-at-the-top-of-the-screen" paradigm is not mainstream, if you count its occurrences in the entire population of desktop/laptop computers worldwide! And yet it is considered more usable. Therefore, GUI people should be happy that they now have a toy to try out new paradigms for themselves.
Re:service pack (Score:5, Interesting)
You say that no matter what you did, you couldn't get to mount NFS shares on her Macintosh. Did you try the following steps:
1. Go to the Finder.
2. Select the "Mac Help" item in the "Help" menu.
3. Type in "NFS share" into the search box and hit the return key.
4. Follow the instructions given?
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:service pack (Score:5, Interesting)
God bless you.
Slashdot is full of people who type plaintext for a living and seem to think that that is all anyone does with their computers. As long as there's a working keyboard driver, they're happy. The suggestion that I (or my friends who do design, or my parents who use enterprise software, or my colleagues who do stats) could make do with Linux is laughable. In my case, I have a very hard time even using a Mac, because of the statistical packages I use, only SPSS (which I use infrequently, but is essential) has a Mac version, and it doesn't even run on Intel (yet). I have all these packages running on XP in VMware Fusion on my Mac laptop (which I have been extremely impressed by).
Further, I'd like to point out that those "pointless Linux distro reviews" never explain how to get, say, your nVidia card to spit out more than 640x480 (the problem which stymied me last time I tried Linux), or how to get wifi to work, or any of the real problems you actually have after install.
Bah. My sig is sufficient to communicate my basic opinion.
Re:service pack (Score:4, Interesting)
In the OGG situation, think of it this way: everyone can use OGG. EVERYONE. Apple, Microsoft, everyone. The reason they don't? Because they can just support MP3 (which at some point may decide to charge out the ass for its use), WMA, whatever. If we could get the majority of consumers using OGG, Microsoft and Apple would have to jump on board and we are guaranteed interoperability from any platform be it free or not. You will never get that with proprietary patent-encumbered formats. That's a darn good reason to encourage the use of OGG if you ask me.
As far as OSX goes - I own a mac mini. I used OSX, and it frustrated me. I did not appreciate the way many decisions were made for me and many options were hidden. It took me a lot longer to get simple things done. I installed Ubuntu on it and appreciated having full power to do what I want.
So no, it doesn't always boil down to "a mac costs too much, blah blah" - I bought a mac, it frustrated the shit out of me, I stuck Linux on it and I've never looked back.
You're right that the open source community has a lot of zealotry, but believe it or not it also has a lot of legitimate fans won over by time saved and problems solved.
Re:Unfortunately (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How the "Desktop Era" will end (Score:3, Interesting)
I can connect my camera to a TV and show the pictures and movies I've made. I can connect an MP3 player to a sound system.
Why would I want a bastard "smart" system like the one you describe? It's just a waste of processing power.