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Apple Businesses

OS X Won't Be Fully Functional On March 24th 262

Posted by timothy from the caveat-emptor dept.
mduell writes: "Just saw this over on MSNBC. It looks like Apple rushed OS X to meet the deadline, and that many key features (like DVD playing and burning) won't be functional when it ships on the 24th of this month. Also, there won't be a big splashy introduction, perhaps one in the summer when Puma (OS X 1.1) comes out." Which is not to say that Mac owners can't watch DVDs -- if they are dual-booting, at least. The article gets into a few other gripes as well, but none sounds earthshaking to me.
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OS X Won't Be Fully Functional On March 24th More

OS X Won't Be Fully Functional On March 24th

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  • BE? Why would they have done that?
  • That is because Apple turned off corn dumbs for the avagerage user.
  • Hrrm, let's look at this here... unsupported hardware that's become industry standard, numerous bugs and errors that can cause system hangs or freezes, those bugs are acknowledged by Apple, and they're saying that they really want people to just wait a few months for the real thing to come out.

    This sounds EXACTLY like a beta test, except they're charging money for it AGAIN, and will most likely charge for the OS X 1.0 to 1.1 upgrade. Good marketing plan guys, release a product you know doesn't fully work and then charge your most devout followers twice over for it. Apple needs to reexamine it's approach to its users, this is like a slap in the face.

    -Z

    Now I'm off to the store to get some food before that damn nor'easter hits and ruins my spring break

  • It's just typical Microsoft bashing. Because Microsoft has invested some money into NBC, all of the NBC journalists have lost all journalistic integrity! Yeah right. Besides, the story came from ZDNet and MSNBC must have some kind of redistribution agreement.
  • "We're going to let them grab it out of our hands," [jobs] told the employees, according to sources.

    See the CNet article [cnet.com]. Not very encouraging.

  • Printing support in the beta was great for Postscript and networked printers, but for "commodity" inkjets it was very weak, and since Apple was putting the burden on Epson, etc. to write their own drivers, it didn't happen and doesn't seem real likely to happen quickly, particularly for older inkjets. What is the incentive on the printer manufacturer's part? They'd rather sell a new printer instead of write a driver for a printer they sold 3 years ago for $100.
  • I'm waiting for OSX as fanatically as anybody, but here's why I can't use OSX on a daily basis:

    - I can't print
    - I can't use my external USB drives, USB scanner, or SCSI CD-RW
    - My 3rd-party mouse is barely functional.

    Yes, I love running emacs in term windows and so on, but I need access to my devices. On the other hand, my spankin' new TiBook is just a toy for playing Diablo on until I get Darwin, so I NEED OSX. Lack of DVD support sucks, because that was going to be the coup-de-grace killersexycool thing I showed off to my Windows-weenie friends (and brother). I didn't want to have two partitions, I wanted to go all-out OSX. Looks like I can't until summer. :(

    TomatoMan
  • The API for MP is part of Carbon, so go back into you hole. Another thing it is user friendly, just as much as pthreads is.
  • The things you couldnot use was for PB. We will not know if you can use them in 1.0 until it comes out. Don't listen to all these rumors from ZDNet, et. ceta.

  • With Jobs at the helm? I doubt it!

  • Actually, this sounds an awful lot like MS's introduction strategy for NT. NT 3.1 was strictly server software - All of the Win 3.1/3.11 software ran on it, but wasn't compiled for 32-bit. So for several years (late 92 to late 95), either you were a server developer, or you ran Win 3.11. After 3 years of porting "lessons learned" stuff from NT to the "desktop" OS, MS finally release Win95, which was their first real consumer-grade multi-tasking OS. NT 3.5/3.51 was a good OS update, but still was mostly aimed at servers. It wasn't until NT 4 (actually the 3.0 release...) that NT became useful for workstation/desktop-type stuff. And that was a year _after_ Win95 released.

    If you put Apple on the same curve, you can expect to see a _really_ useful multitasking Mac OS in about 2004-2005. If the compress the curve (which they probably will, since they don't have parallel-track desktop and server OS's, but rather a single-track GP OS), you can expect to shave 1 - 1 1/2 years off that. So you won't see a really full featured Mac OS X until about 10.5, which should release late in 2002.

  • If they can't finish OSX until July, they should name the March release 9.9, and name the July release as OSX, and do the big ads in July.
  • "slashdot consensus". Time to switch drugs, my man. =)
  • they not pushing it out the door early, the OS is done, whats late is stuff like the DVD player s/w. which sounds like an app to me. its like saying Microsoft release Windows X early because Office Y is not ready.
  • plan 9

    and hurd

    are claimed to be the most advanced OSes
    UNIX is old technology so heh !!

    anyway let wait and see windows XP

    cause if it dont crash , everything else will!!


  • maybe he, like the majority of mac users, doesn't have DVD drive in his mac?
  • Apple was putting the burden on Epson, etc. to write their own drivers, it didn't happen and doesn't seem real likely to happen quickly, particularly for older inkjets.

    OH! Well, yeah. I guess if there is no OSX driver they should rasterise the PDF stuff on their own (the existing Preview app can turn PDF into TIFF files -- which it can screw up about as badly as ghostscript) and hand it off to the print driver in Classic....

  • i thought OSX PB has colorsync already?
  • E. This article is a re-hash of an article that was on ZDNet and CNET last week. Notice the key bias words: inability, glitches, frustrate, annoying, frustrating, "not be able", "limit... usefulness", aggravation, lack. That's just in the headlines and first paragraph. Suspiciously like Linux reporting, eh?

    Hardly. Before moving over to corporate sibling ZDNet, Matthew Rothenberg was director of online content at Mac Publishing LLC (MacWeek, MaCentral and MacWorld), and before that he was Senior News Editor at MacWeek itself. I don't think those credentials suggest anti-Apple bias.

  • It orginaly came from ZDNet, so they are just copying.
  • Hey, I've got a DVD drive on my PowerBook, too, and I appreciate everyone's "I want it all now" stance, but only to the point of reasonableness. A DVD drive is not a fundamental part of the computing experience, included or not, advertised or not. If you bought a $5000 computer (or even $2000) primarily because it plays DVDs, then you're a pretty sad case. It's an extra. I use the CD-ROM capabilities far more, and that works find under OS X.

    And while appreciate, too, the frustrations of having to boot into OS 9, I'd like to toss out a gentle reminder that you don't have to upgrade right away. Wait a little. Let the cutting edge be dulled by others who will suffer for you, fill the message boards with their complaints and their bug reports and their whining, let them influence the next version with their wishes and their demands. You can wait until Mac OS X.II or X.IV or whatever and then get exactly what you want.

    Your Mac OS 9.x doesn't die and disappear the day Mac OS X is released.

    Why is it that some people who are willing enough to exist on the frontline of technology are unwilling to bear the small penalties of being there first?
  • Despite all the hype and the progress, OS X is a 1.0 release. I personally will buy OS X 1.0, because I'm not really affected by any of the issues (no DVD drive, desktop Mac, etc).

    But yes, I will dual-boot :)

  • Then they should rename it OS V or OS 9.999.
  • Every Mac I own has a DVD player. I've watched one DVD on a computer a year ago when my stereo was on the fritz. No big deal to me really. Unless of course the intent is to never offer support, which is something I haven't heard anywhere.

    It would be nice to see it by the end of May though since I've got to fly to San Hose for WWDC and the plain flight is boring without the PowerBook and in flight movies.

    OTOH It's funny to see major news outlets like MSNBC and CNet, etc... spewing more rumor and supposition than www.macosrumors.com.
  • I've been pondering this too.

    Gee, do I have too much time on my hands or what?

    Roman numerals have no sense of radix point so you really can't do a decimal there. Were they invented?

    Perhaps a fraction:

    Mac OS X I/X ??

    Not elegant.

    Maybe using lower case!

    Mac OS Xi

  • Microsoft not only owns a stake in MSNBC, but also in.. Apple..
    Maybe Apple is deliberately throwing the game, then?
    Maybe not though..
    --

  • They never learn (Score:4)

    by ruebarb ( 114845 ) <colorache AT hotmail DOT com> on Saturday March 03, 2001 @11:15PM (#386451)
    It's the same thing with every software development group rushing to meet a deadline - rush the product out the door, leave a few bugs in it, and pray the patience of your consumers doesn't give out before your programmers do

    I expected better of Apple, though. This isn't Windows, after all, this is a company that has prided itself on stability, innovation, and creativity. To just push this out the door when prudence demands a few more weeks is just an attempt to boost stock value...too bad

  • Re:No DVD playback? - probable technical reason (Score:5)

    by victim ( 30647 ) on Sunday March 04, 2001 @05:53AM (#386452)
    Got to the article too late to contribute, so I'll say it here.

    The DVD license prevents Apple from making a DVD player to allows the DVD frames to be captured off the screen. Previous DVD players from Apple break things like `screen snapshot' to prevent this.

    This makes a DVD player more complicated. Not only do you have to play a DVD, but you have to prevent a bunch of other unrelated features from working. Just the sort of cross functional integration that is difficult to perform during rapid development.

  • DVDs + Aqua (Score:5)

    by DzugZug ( 52149 ) on Saturday March 03, 2001 @11:16PM (#386453) Journal
    You can watch DVDs on Livid while running an Aqua Enlightenment theme although you will probably get sued six ways from Sunday.
  • just a small note - the word is

    no _native_ playback.

    they've got all the older os9 stuff still there, _including_ DVD playback. it's just not redone in carbon yet.
  • Good! Time for another group to experience shitty DVD support!
  • Something that we all need to keep in mind, is that there's nothing uncommon about this. At the risk of getting flammed, this is something that M$ does, Apple has a tradition, and the Linux/Open Source community does this as well. Take a look at the 2.4 kernel and you'll see that there are things that did not quite make the deadline for the first release, but did however get included in future releases, I can think of several right off the top of my head, namely ReiserFS. I am by no means an Apple/Macintosh fan, but before the bashing begins, this should be something to keep in mind.
  • "Which is not to say that Mac owners can't watch DVDs -- if they are dual-booting, at least."

    I thought that the whole point of running a Mac was NOT having to deal with crap like that. You know, having a PC that just works right out of the box? I guess Apple is finally giving up and falling in line with the rest of the industry when it comes to shipping a screwed up OS with missing features.

    What a shame.
  • I know its a long shot, but maybe classic 9 could use DVD software? I'm not much of a mac person but have become a big fan of the hardware.

  • Re:Apple should offer free MacOS X 1.1 upgrade (Score:3)

    by TWR ( 16835 ) on Sunday March 04, 2001 @12:28PM (#386459)
    Given that, I don't see why anyone would pay for OS X 1.0. The past suggests they will be charged for necessary bug fixes.

    Obviously you've never owned or upgraded a Mac.

    Apple just released the FREE update 9.1 for Mac OS 9, over a year after they released Mac OS 9 originally. Before 9.1, there was the 9.0.4 update, also free. For OS 8, there was the free 8.1 upgrade, and OS 8.5 had the free 8.5.1 and 8.6 upgrades. Back in the Dark Times, OS 7.5 has so many free upgrades, it was sad (7.5.5 was finally stable-ish).

    Apple has a "Software Update" control panel in the OS, to automagically download patches to OS components when they're released. How much does Apple charge for this service? NOTHING, you ignorant troll.

    Apple has a GREAT record of not charging for minor OS updates. It's the relatively big ones that are for-pay upgrades.

    -jon

  • Everyone has stomped on MacOS for years for being a cooperatively multitasked system, i.e. no pre-emption in the OS. However, there is an advantage to this sort of system that no one mentions: real time response from the application level; that is, an application can run for as long as it needs to run before giving up the CPU to the OS or to other apps.

    Real time program response is key to being able to burn CD-ROMs without creating coasters (gotta deliver the bits to the burner before its buffer runs dry), playing any kind of audio or video without jerking or dropouts (again, gotta deliver the data in time!). And so on.

    UNIX is a multiuser timesharing system down to its very core; all system resources are fairly allocated amongst the processes running on the system. Overload the system, and all processes slow down. Real time scheduling (e.g. letting one or more processes get a fixed size share of system resources without regard to the remaining load) has been anathema to the mindset of the typical UNIX Systems Programmer forever - after all, that means picking winners and losers in a resource allocation. It's not fair.

    For a multiuser system, this is a perfectly good attitude to take. However, UNIX systems are now used in other roles where this is exactly the wrong attitude to take; for example: the single user workstation.

    For the Single User Workstation, the user must be king: he decides what he wants to do with the system, and the system should respond as directed. This is what Apple calls "user centered design" and it has been part of their mindset for decades. This is why when the mouse stops moving in MacOS, you know that the system is dead; under UNIX, you might just be waiting for the X server to page back in.

    What we in the UNIX community have been getting away with is just being a little careful about what we ask the system to do at a given moment; we play with "nice" and making sure that memory or CPU intensive things just don't get run at the same time. We've also been lucky that Moore's Law keeps giving us faster hardware, and unlike most of the rest of the software world, our OS and its basic set of utilities have not changed fundamentally in over a decade, so they really do run twice as fast on hardware that is twice as fast.

    Unfortunately, this sort of system management is a geek's cheat; we can do it because we understand the system, and the consequences of various job mixes. Ma and Pa Kettle aren't as well educated as we, and so for them, it's high time that the applications and the OS begin to cooperate on questions of resource allocation.

    In other words, there needs to be an API wherein an application can request some level of resources to guarantee the user real time response, and if the OS can't provide it (resource overcommit would result), then the application can sanely inform the user why it can't be run right now.

    MacOS X is fundamentally UNIX at its heart, with all the fair-share multiuser system attitude that implies. The NeXT people who are now in charge of Apple are UNIX people. Unfortunately, this means they've missed the point I'm making here, and the existing MacOS market is just about to give them a serious reality check.

    The biz about playing DVDs is not just about Hollywood wants for protection of their content; it's also about being able to do a real time thing in a fair-share scheduled OS.

  • Just checking: You do know that the Beta has an expirity sometime in May or June, right? Best to use your upgrade coupon to 1.0 when the time comes.

    ----
  • Processor speed is stuck at 500 MHz.

    Not. It's at 733 [apple.com]

    Motorola announced 10000 layoffs so far this year, 2/3 in their fabs.

    Every semiconductor supplier is suffering.

    http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/010227/2156.html

    Apple's stock is in the tank.

    So is Intel, Sun, Cisco, Dell, etc.


    MOVE 'ZIG'.

  • this is absolutely right. i'm running MacOS X build 4k73 right now and there are very few bugs i've found (and those are cosmetic things, not kernel crashes). it's true that MacOS X is being released feature incomplete, but it's certainly not buggy.

    really though, OS X as it stands now is considerably (like orders of magnitude) better than a Microsoft "final" release. sure DVD playback is missing, but really, that's a separate application. while it's very nice to have Apple ship their DVD player with their OS, it's hardly a core operating system issue. i miss some of the "important" features, like pop-up-folders, but the features that are "missing" from OS X hardly amount to anything.

    at any rate, i think the hardcore Mac users will enjoy having a stable and reasonably efficient operating system on their Mac. it had to be released sometime, and if it's anything like the recent betas, it should definitely fill that void.

    - j

  • God. MS-NBC is a freaking propaganda machine, not a news source.. look at this article on XP [msnbc.com]. "Goodbye Mac snobs" ?? The article has less tact and maturity than most trolls on here..

  • So they are crippling OSX and breaking commonly used features?

    when DVDs are playing, yes. right now if you take a screen shot in OS 9 while playing a DVD you get a magenta box where the DVD is playing. the OS isn't going to be "crippled" in normal use, but it is a requirement for the DVD application.

    yes, it's lame, but don't blame Apple, blame the MPAA.

    - j

  • No surprise here. Apple's new OS has been "Real Soon Now" for the last decade. Remember the Microkernel? Bedrock? Copland? How the NeXT merger was justified because it meant the new OS could ship faster than BeOS could be finished? We've heard this story so many, many times before. The general feeling in the developer community is "When you bozos ship the thing in volume, then we'll look at it. Maybe."

    Former Mac developer.

  • Re:MSNBC (Score:2)

    by iso ( 87585 )

    How much does Apple have in cash alone?

    according to their 2000 financials, they have about $1,191,000,000 in cash, but approximately $5,427,000,000 in cash and short-term investments (a few billion anyhow).

    Apple didn't need Microsoft's money when they invested, the cash was to settle some lawsuits (including the GUI-ripoff bit). for what it's worth, Apple should have got considerably more than the 150 Million, but they had to cave to get a promise from Microsoft that they'd continue developing Office for the Mac. because really, if the MacOS can't open Word documents, it would never have even the marketshare it has now.

    yeah, it sucks, but hey, aren't monopolies great!?!

    - j

  • Re:They never learn (Score:4)

    by AlphaGeek4017 ( 321872 ) on Sunday March 04, 2001 @06:21AM (#386492)
    The article brings up incomplete features--not bugs. The way I see it, Apple chose not to include such niceties as a DVD player and the ability to burn DVDs in favor of taking care of the bugs they discovered through users of the Public Beta. The only issue I was able to find in the article that came across as an actual bug was a problem with iBooks/PowerBooks waking from sleep. To the best of my knowledge, this is no longer an issue. There was a single demo months ago in which a PowerBook was unable to wake from sleep. Given the exposure that bug received, I'm sure it was at the top of the list of bugs to fix. I believe that demo was even back in the days of DP4 (the release before Public Beta).
  • You won't be able to play DVDs in Classic because the DVD player makes direct hardware calls to disable things like screenshotting, and to tell the video card to start decoding the DVD. Classic does not, and will not support this.
  • If you need DVD playback that badly, then don't upgrade on March 24. Let the rest of us be the Guinea pigs.

    DVD playback is important to me too. My computer is my only DVD player, and most of what I watch is on DVDs. However, I can handle the slight inconvenience of dual booting untill Apple has a player ready. Hell, for all we know they may actually have one ready and sitting on our iDisks by March 24 or very soon thereafter. Just because it probably won't make the shipping CD doesn't mean that it doesn't exist at all.

    And, btw, for the rest of the Slashdot FUD-mongers, it is only DVD playback that doesn't work. You can still use the drive. Hell, you can even read the file system of a DVD video. If you are willing to break the law (as crappy of a law it is, Apple won't break it), you can probably hack a way to watch DVDs without too much trouble. Apple just has to make sure they do it to the letter of the law.

    As for the other concerns of the article, I cannot comment on sleep issues because my computer never sleeps. However, there have been a lot of comments on the MacNN forums [macnn.com] stating that sleep works just fine. As for problems causing the system to hang, I doubt it. I personally was unable to crash the original PB, and I can only assume that stability has increased since then. IMNSHO, even the PB was better and more stable than any of the crap that Microsoft puts out, and the interface was much smoother than anything on any other *nix OS. It can only have gotten better since then. I don't know anything about the video stuff except that I am pretty sure that the Rage 128 pro cards (which are probably in 65%-70% of the G3 and G4 macs on the market, work just fine.

    A LOT of people are saying that Apple should not ship an "incomplete" OS on the 24th. Well, the OS is pretty much complete. There may be a few applications that are extra, that may not ship, but the OS is there. And Apple needs to ship this OS so that software companies (who have been holding off porting their apps until the OS is finished) will get off their buts and write their software for OS X.

    Anyway, most of this is old news. We already went through all of the FUD-mongering last week when c|net broke this "news". I'll tell you what. I'll make a deal with you. My copy of OS X is preordered, DVD or no DVD. I'll give you all a full report of what I think of it, what works, what doesn't, what is better than OS 9.1 or any other OS out there, and what is worse. I see MacOS X as a Good Thing(tm) and I will have it as soon as possible.

    Cheers. ^_^

  • The API for MP is part of Carbon, so go back into you hole. Another thing it is user friendly, just as much as pthreads is.

    Carbon has a MP API, or Carbon has the MP API that Classic did? It was my understanding that a MP OS9 porgam had things that ran on the "not the main CPU", and those things could NOT talk to the filesystem, and they could NOT talk to quickdraw and in fact could NOT a whole lot of stuff.

    Am I wrong? Is this some other past Mac MP API? Is this some wretched API I dreamed up on my own?

    I'm totally willing to beleve that OSX has a MP API. I would be shocked if it didn't at least have the mach MP API, which was both better and worse then the POSIX one. I was talking about the OS9 API.

  • If you need DVD playback that badly, then don't upgrade on March 24. Let the rest of us be the Guinea pigs.

    No thanks. I'm allready running OSX. It is way way more stable then OS9. I have no use for an OS that crashes multiple times a day. I'm not thrilled that OSX panic'ed or otherwise hung three times in two months (as opposed to FreeBSD, zero times in the same time span), but that isn't too bad.

  • Dual-Booting will not be a big issue for me to watch a DVD because watching a DVD is not a regular application -- meaning, you don't just up-and-run it.

    Why not? Why don't you up and run it? Take a break from coding to watch the "smash the FAX machine" bit of Office Space? Or if you are making a comercial rewatch bits of the movie you are imitationg?

    And even if it isn't a breif run of the player, why should you have to log out of five servers, bookmarke half a dozen web pages and tie up other work and play bits just so you can reboot and run the DVD player? That sucks.

    And as someone said, maybe it will be sitting there on our idisks on the 24th - who knows?

    I hope so. I'm allready sick of OS9. It makes my skin crawl to to have to boot it to do anything.

  • I think the only way Apple is going to prevent being read the riot act when MacOS X is released is to offer a free MacOS X 1.1 Upgrade on CD-ROM to anyone who sends in their registration cards for the OS.

    That way, when MacOS 1.1 (code-named Puma) becomes available in July 2001 end users will be sent a full update disc without having to jam Apple's servers trying to download the upgrade.
  • It seems like this is the pattern for all OS releases. I went to a Whistler presentation, and the half of the Q&A session was people asking, "What about this feature?" and the MS guy saying, "In the next next version".

    An OS is always an unfinished project, you just periodically release the results every now and then. The trick is figuring out when to release. Linux has placed stability ahead of features, and it's nice to see Apple getting that right too.
  • However, said other group has the option to boot back to a more primitive OS, although one that can play DVDs.

    Hey, wait a minute... ;)

  • No DVD playback? (Score:5)

    by JoeShmoe ( 90109 ) <askjoeshmoe@hotmail.com> on Saturday March 03, 2001 @11:20PM (#386534)
    Geez, you'd think someone at Apple had seen the css-auth/decss code floating around, wouldn't you?

    [/tongue in cheek]

    - JoeShmoe
  • Apple charges for a new OS about once a year. So the upgrade this summer will be free, and then the version next year will cost ~$100 again.
  • I thought that DVD writing on the new MACs was crippled anyway, at least to the point that it didnt have access to certain CSS related regions of the disk. I heard, from elsewhere on slashdot, no less, that Apple had bent over backwards to get DVD Consortium support for dvd writing and authoring. I personally dont trust Apple's claims about the functionality of the new DVD features. All the important details are misssing, and it smells to me mostly of marketing hype.

    Even if I completely trusted Apple not to mess up OS/X and the new macs, I would still be very leery of being an early adopter of a rushed product. Would you run out and buy a new computer from Compaq or Gateway with the latest beta build of Windows ME on it, in addition to never-before-seen hardware features?

    Exactly.

  • Nice subject there, eh? I could write for some big-deal news source like MSNBC with catchy title like that.

    Anyway. I'm as excited about MacOS X as I am about Windows XP, which is to say, not at all.

    Wow, MacOS is Mach-based and runs a modified FreeBSD kernel. Wow, look at Aqua. Wow, I can run Apache and Squid on a Mac now. Good for Apple.

    But I don't care. I've got my FreeBSD box, and I'm not about to dump it for a proprietary solution like MacOS, especially since they've completely rearranged and gutted the standard FreeBSD system.

    People say things like, "Good, now my grandmother can use UNIX!" Why is it so important that she use UNIX? My grandmother doesn't even use a computer. And you know what? She couldn't be happier.

    Computers aren't nearly as pervasive in today's society as geeks like to think. I'm a network admin and a semi-professional programmer, so my life is based on computers. I'm not the average person, though. The average person doesn't need UNIX, and many people don't even need computers.

    Society may run on computers, but individuals don't need to. Giving everybody UNIX (even if it's MacOS) isn't the solution to all our problems, and it won't change the lives of everybody you give it to.

    In fact, giving people access to things like Apache can be a bad thing. There's already enough shit on the web right now. Do we really need every idiot who can say MacOS putting up more pointless content?

    A new year calls for a new signature.

  • This OS won't go mainstream for another year, at least.

    The plan is to ship OS X (whatever build) INSTALLED on all new Macs starting in the Summer of this year. That's about as mainstream as you can get!
    Of course, it'll include full 9.1 for the Classic box, so it might be possible to just de-install X and boot 9.1 only.
    No one will know until we get there.

    Pope

    Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
  • Limited support for MP, and broken graphics acceleration for the Radeon, which is over a year old now.

    Pure FUD. The Public Beta already has SMP support in the kernel. See this forum [xlr8yourmac.com] where an ATI engineer confirms that Radeon 2d and 3d acceleration is in place.

  • Before moving over to corporate sibling ZDNet, Matthew Rothenberg was director of online content at Mac Publishing LLC (MacWeek, MaCentral and MacWorld), and before that he was Senior News Editor at MacWeek itself. I don't think those credentials suggest anti-Apple bias.

    Maybe anti-OSX bias, then?

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday March 04, 2001 @10:16AM (#386568)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Apple representatives have already confirmed that the initial release will not support DVD playback. It will read DVD filesystems just fine, so we're talking about a single application not being ready. Also, it's worth pointing out that were it not for the DMCA's criminalization of decrypting DVD content without a license, this situation would not exist.

    The more serious allegations of lacking SMP support and graphics acceleration are completely false.

  • How many times are you going to post this same message, AC? I first saw this message contents posted at least a month and a half ago.

    - Scott
    --
    Scott Stevenson
    WildTofu [wildtofu.com]

  • MSNBC (Score:3)

    by redragon ( 161901 ) <.moc.cam. .ta. .llennodoc.> on Saturday March 03, 2001 @11:30PM (#386576) Homepage
    I'm not saying it isn't the case, they may very well be correct, but I think it needs to be said:

    Consider the source...MSNBC.

    As I said, might be totally valid, however one must also consider that MS probably has a bonus for every article bashing a competative OS.

    C - OUT

  • I find this, on top of the lack of DVD support to be hugely funny.

    The DVD playback thing is confirmed by Apple. The level of video driver support is pure speculation. Not the "may" and "source said" qualifications on this statement. There is a thread raging on OmniGroup's Mac OS X Talk list about how misleading this article is.

    Apple drops the ball again and again and again, then delievers something as dumb as a computer in a colored case and their fans have their own Mardi Gras to celebrate the "innovation."

    You've mastered flamebait!

    How's this for innovation: incomplete SMP support

    This is probably the most ridiculous claim of the article.

    Newsflash everyone -- just because major sites carry a story doesn't mean it's accurate.

    - Scott
    --
    Scott Stevenson
    WildTofu [wildtofu.com]
  • The only way that Apple can ever make a comeback to be used by people that are NOT in the graphics industry is to license their OS to be run on any hardware.

    Ignoring for a second the user experience consequences of that, there's a basic question of how they're going to make money. The company generally brings in $6-8 billion a year, the vast majority of which is from the ~5 million hardware units they ship each year. If they're decide to sell software at $129 a pop, what's going to make up from the loss in revenue? Do you actually believe they would selling anything close to 50 million copies of OSX a year?

    Remember, what you're suggesting is exactly what NextStep did. Look how well that turned out. One of Apple's core value propositions is that they make the whole package. This creates a seamless user experience for the customer. This is why many people like Macs in the first place.

    That's the ONLY reason that Windows took off so many years ago, and Apple withered.

    Things have changed a lot since then. How is Apple going to magically crack the grip that Microsoft has on all the hardware manufacturers as well as on itself?

    If I could buy OS X to run it on my cheap-o generic Intel-based (actually, AMD based) hardware, I'd use it! In a heartbeat!

    Great, but how many would use it as their exclusive OS if it couldn't run on the architecture-dependent Mac apps? You'd mostly get the NextStep apps. You sure as heck wouldn't get Office.

    - Scott

    --
    Scott Stevenson
    WildTofu [wildtofu.com]
  • Once you're trapped inside you'll witness the power of this fully armed and operational OS...

  • Gross Misrepresentation (Score:4)

    by TheInternet ( 35082 ) on Sunday March 04, 2001 @11:27AM (#386588) Homepage Journal
    Hrrm, let's look at this here... unsupported hardware that's become industry standard

    The article doesn't talk at all about unsupported hardware. The DVD drive works, as do all the video cards. The only thing that doesn't work is DVD video playback, and some mysterious "sources" talk about that OSX won't initially take full advantage of Radeon and GeForce 3. This is obviously a short-term issue, since Carmack's GeForce 3 demo was running on OSX.

    numerous bugs and errors that can cause system hangs or freezes, those bugs are acknowledged by Apple, and they're saying that they really want people to just wait a few months for the real thing to come out.

    Come again? Please point out these "numerous bugs and errors that can cause system hangs or freezes." The only thing that sounds anything like this in the article is the author's "sources" saying there are crashing bugs in the Setup Assistant -- not the OS. There are a number of qualifications on the statement in question, by the way.

    This sounds EXACTLY like a beta test

    If bugs are the qualification for a beta test, then every major OS in wide distribution is in beta.

    How many people using Windows 2000 or Linux have a dual boot back into Windows ME or 98 so that they can run certain things better?

    most likely charge for the OS X 1.0 to 1.1 upgrade

    Highly unlikely if you look at the history of such things.

    - Scott

    --
    Scott Stevenson
    WildTofu [wildtofu.com]
  • From the tone of disbelief from the crowd, it seems that Macs are the only computers that do this. Aren't PCs crippled this way? Is seems a bit futile to plug the 3% hole and leave the rest open.

  • Not What You Think (Score:5)

    by MoNickels ( 1700 ) on Saturday March 03, 2001 @11:36PM (#386591) Homepage
    A. Dual-booting has always been an expected obligation until new versions of all the traditional Mac software are ported specifically OS X. Nobody but hack journalists are surprised. Most savvy Mac users consider this a real boon, as a kind of long-term protection measure for expensive software and years of skill investment. It eases the transition into the new Unix world.

    B. As of the latest build, sleep functions on PowerBooks work perfectly, with two-second wake-up times. That's right: two seconds.

    C. DVD playing is hardly a "key feature." DVD burning was *never* a key feature, nor was CD-RW. Until only recently this was always a third-party software opportunity.

    D. That certain extra features will not be included is not a secret. Apple's been saying this for weeks: employees with real names and titles--not "sources"-- have been going on the record to point this out. Always interesting how much crappy information sounds like a real scoop if you conveniently can't dig up other places where Apple reps have gone on the record. Too easy just to accept the PR department's "no comment" without, say, reading stories on the exact same subject written elsewhere.

    E. This article is a re-hash of an article that was on ZDNet and CNET last week. Notice the key bias words: inability, glitches, frustrate, annoying, frustrating, "not be able", "limit... usefulness", aggravation, lack. That's just in the headlines and first paragraph. Suspiciously like Linux reporting, eh?

  • The beta is good enough (Score:3)

    by Temporal ( 96070 ) on Saturday March 03, 2001 @11:40PM (#386595) Journal
    I am posting this from OSX beta. As far as I am concerned, what I have here is a fully functional (and beautiful!) operating system. I would use it full time if there were a few more apps available for it, but the OS itself does everything I need it to do. If the 1.0 release that lands on my doorstep on the 25th is as good as this or better, I will be happy. So, I don't see what the problem is...

    BTW, my current main OS is Debian Linux w/KDE2.1.

    ------

  • xine on powerpc linux (Score:3)

    by tobyjaffey ( 132850 ) on Saturday March 03, 2001 @11:40PM (#386597)
    Apparently xine [sourceforge.net] now runs on PowerPC linux systems. The latest CVS version seems to have PowerPC targets, but only having X86 machines, I can't test it out. Grab the CVS with,
    export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs.xine.sourceforge.ne t:/cvsroot/xine
    cvs login
    cvs -z3 co -P xine

    I know that for X86 systems, I'm getting pretty much perfect (as far as I can tell) playback. It's better than WinDVD/PowerDVD anyway.

  • Wow, MacOS is Mach-based and runs a modified FreeBSD kernel.

    That's sort of a contradiction in terms. Mach is the kernel. FreeBSD is used for core networking, process model, and some other low-level things.

    "Good, now my grandmother can use UNIX!" Why is it so important that she use UNIX?

    So she doesn't end up having to use Windows?

    There's already enough shit on the web right now. Do we really need every idiot who can say MacOS putting up more pointless content?

    Yes. Imagine if you had access to the things that all of those people know.

    - Scott

    --
    Scott Stevenson
    WildTofu [wildtofu.com]

  • Mac OS X 1.1? (Score:5)

    by logiceight ( 187269 ) on Saturday March 03, 2001 @11:40PM (#386602)
    Shouldn't it be Mac OS X.I?
  • Ahhh, the old troll about evil Intel coaxing Be into dropping PPC support. Be still supports the older PowerMacs which they have the hardware specs to. They don't support any newer Mac's because Apple won't release the specs.

    Yes, I am quite aware that the LinuxPPC folks have maintained decent compatability. But, Linux has (unfortunately) always had to deal with hardware whose vendors are either neutral or hostile towards providing Linux developers with the needed information. That's fine. Linux users understand that that is part of the bargain if you want to run it. WinModems, decent 3D accelleration, decent sound support. The list of x86 hardware with poor support is significant.

    Be, however, is shipping a commercial product for which they offer support. They had to make a business decision about whether or not it was worth their while to support hardware for which they did not have access to the specs. Had they chosen to support it, they would want to be able to know that they could support this years G4's. Something which LinuxPPC doesn't know yet. Hardware wise: "Any models with and ATI RADEON ... are currently incompatabile with Linux", "The dual processor model are currently somewhat unstable", "We are still waiting for information about the 2001 G4 models", "current kernels don't handle more memory than 660MB", 2000 PowerBook has no sound support.

    So you can troll away with your lie that "the LinuxPPC guys have had NO problem keeping up", but the simple fact is that they have had problems. Be made the choice to avoid the support headaches that go along with trying to support undocumented hardware. Maybe the Intel investment did play a part in their decision, but the fact is that Apple made it clear to Be that they were not wanted and had Be stayed on the PPC they would almost certainly be facing the same hardware problems that the LinuxPPC folks are facing.
  • I'm getting an 8x DVD player so that I can watch that movie in 12 minutes. That makes the 5 minutes a much bigger deal :)
  • Processor speed is stuck at 500 MHz

    ahem. [apple.com]

    Hell, iMacs are 600 MHz these days.

    Not a bad troll otherwise, but getting the obvious stuff wrong is a pretty clear tipoff...
  • Hey, I've hung FreeBSD three times. No, wait. That's linux. No, wait, that's total. 1 FreeBSD and 2 Linux :)

    Of course, it's taken me 4 years to do this . . .

  • Re:And the big deal is? (Score:4)

    by -Harlequin- ( 169395 ) on Sunday March 04, 2001 @12:01AM (#386620)
    Fuck off troll.

    I don't think it's trolling to note Apple's crippling of the first consumer DVD writer. It might not be entirely on topic, but I think it is VERY important that this kind of crippleware shit doesn't become acceptable practise in the industry. And the first step to preventing acceptance of hardware designed to erode civil rights is having people know what the glossy brochures won't tell you.
    The cripples are going beyond what is necessary for "piracy prevention". The drive in question is designed to prevent its owners and users from doing things they have every right to do - legally and morally - but which would not be in the interests of major content owners.

    I'm starting to fear the day when court-confirmed consumer rights of timeshifting, fair use, etc, mean nothing because the devices on the market are designed to restrict such activities when not in the interests of content owners. This drive is by no means the first step taken on this road, but as the first consumer DVD writer, it is an important step, and any true Apple fan should be nervous (if not utterly disgusted) that Apple has decided that its user's artistic and creative freedoms are less important than wooing MPAA members and the like.

    Sure, movies on my computer are nice, but the reason I buy computers is to create, and I don't like the smell of a future where my own creations are deemed pirated by my own hardware.

    (Which brings with it a whiff of conspiracy theory: if you're the MPAA and want to maintain your captive buyers (rather than have to compete with free (or low cost) home-grown broadband-distributed content 5 years from now, a bit like M$ now having to compete with Linux), then having consumer gear automatically deem amature productions as "pirated" and so impede their reproduction might be killing two birds with one stone. It doesn't exactly seem all that accidental...)
  • ...I'd just like to be able to print! The Beta had no real support at all....

    Printing support seems to be really sorely lacking. I've not heard HP say anything (yet) about releasing carbonised or X native drivers, so it looks like that dual boot is going to be very well used.

    Chance are that I'll install it and not touch it much until sufficient support comes my way.

    M.

  • Did anybody really expect that, beginning March 24, 2001, every Mac user would be using Mac OS X?

    Come on, now. This OS won't go mainstream for another year, at least.
    --

  • Ahhh, the old troll about evil Intel coaxing Be into dropping PPC support. Be still supports the older PowerMacs which they have the hardware specs to. They don't support any newer Macs because Apple won't release the specs.

    Well, that's mostly true. When I worked at Be, I was told that I could write the stuff to support the newer machines on my own time if I wished -- and if it was deemed stable enough, it would be rolled in. I was starting to evaluate it. But, basically, they focused their energy on the non-PPC platform, which, imho, is a shame.

    _Deirdre

  • From the article:

    Among the other problems with the March release, sources said, is that it won't take full advantage of multiprocessing systems or new video accelerators, such as Nvidia's recently announced GeForce 3 or ATI's Radeon.

    Limited support for MP, and broken graphics acceleration for the Radeon, which is over a year old now.

    Hmm... Wasn't MP identified as a critically important feature a few months ago when The Pentium and Athlon doubled the clock speed of the fastest G4? Weren't Mac users overjoyed that their favourite tools were no longer going to require application-level support to run on more than one processor?

    And can you imagine the new UI without video acceleration? Can you imagine doing realtime 3D at all without video acceleration?

  • This is assuming that DVD player development and OS development have to happen in in series.

    The important point is that completing the OS doesn't depend on DVD player completion. Whether the DVD player development was done in parallel or series (or a bit of both) doesn't matter if it's not done.


    MOVE 'ZIG'.
  • First: is this true? I mean, MSNBC isn't my first stop for Apple-related news, but you'd think they'd be more credible than sites like MacOS Rumours and SteveJobsLivesInMyClosetAndTellsMeThings.com.

    If it's true, then normally I'd be inclined to say that there is no such thing as "bad publicity", and minor complaints such as these might even make more average users aware of OS X.

    But, because this is an Apple product, things are different. Lack of DVD support may not sound like a big deal to the few Linux users and hoards of Linux-wannabes on Slashdot, but to the Mac-crowd, it is a big fucking deal. The only thing they've ever had to be proud of is excellent multimedia, and Apple will take a lot of heat if OS X ships without DVD. This may also turn away a lot of Windows users who are thinking of trying it out... I know a Windows (and sometimes Unix) user at the office who is really psyched about getting a Titanium G4 Powerbook when OS X is released, but I'd bet money that if he hears OS X can't play DVDs, he'll put off buying it. (And why shouldn't he? The wide-screen DVD player functionality is one of the most-hyped cool things about the Titanium G4 Powerbook.) I'd also bet money that if he puts-off buying it, he'll end up losing the excitement and he'll never buy it.

    Some of you also seem to think that very few Mac users are even interested in using OS X so soon. Not so. I know several Mac users, and knowing their clannish nature and love of "shiny things", they'll all want to be the first on their block to have the latest MacOS. Something missing as basic as DVD support will be a huge turn-off. They'll think, "Hey, I guess everyone was right about how archaic Unix is after all! Apple let us down and backed a shitty technology." Once the press hears that even die-hard Mac zombies are unimpressed, there will be even less Windows users interested in taking it for a spin.

    If Apple is smart (and I'm not holding my breath), they will not release OS X until it's really done. DVD support can't wait for the first service pack.

    Personally, I'm a Sun guy. (And my Blade 100 will be joining the LAN next week, baby!) But... OS X really had me hoping that the Holy Grail (Unix with a pretty face) had finally arrived. I'll admit it; the hardware is dead sexy, and if they had software to match, I'd order a G4 Cube tomorrow. I think it'd be a crying shame if Apple started following Microsoft's practice of releasing software that needs a year's worth of service packs to be usable.

    --

  • They should just licence Ghostscript or use the GPL version and be done with it.
  • And don't forget, you can always watch DVDs even without a player. Most people don't appreciate the beauty of small shiney objects. But you can see your reflection on the playing side, and I always find that really excititng.
  • I love my PowerBook and all, but this has got me kinda edgy. DVD is a pretty big thing and I can understand why the press is reporting this. What I want to know is how many seemingly little things wont make it in this first release. Something like ColorSync may be of little use to a home user, but graphic artists depend on it. How much else will be missing from the initial release? I'm sure DVD support isn't the only thing.

    In a related note, I still can't help but think about Copland. At first it was most likely going to support even my IIfx (68030 @ 40 MHz). Then it was going to require a PowerMac. Then it was canceled. Rhapsody/OS X was announced and would probably require a PPC 603 or 604 Mac. Now it's going to require a G3.

    BTW, I know that Copland != Rhapsody/OS X, but did ya know that Copland, even with debug code, used less than 8 MB RAM in the DR0 release?
  • Just some friendly grammar help from the friendly grammar nazi:

    va-por-ware:
    1. New software that has been announced or marketed but has not been produced.
    2. Products announced far in advance of any release (which may or may not actually take place). The term came from Atari users and was later used by Infoworld to Microsoft's continuous lying about Microsoft Windows.
    3. Products announced far in advance of any release (which may or may not actually take place). See also brochureware.

    Brochureware:
    Planned but non-existent product like vaporware, but with the added implication that marketing is actively selling and promoting it (they've printed brochures). Brochureware is often deployed as a strategic weapon; the idea is to con customers into not committing to an existing product of the competition's. It is a safe bet that when a brochureware product finally becomes real, it will be more expensive than and inferior to the alternatives that had been available for years.

    letdown:
    1.A decrease, decline, or relaxation, as of effort or energy.
    2.A disappointment: The cancellation of the game was a real letdown.
    3.The descent made by an aircraft in order to land.

    Hype, slang
    .Excessive publicity and the ensuing commotion: the hype surrounding the murder trial.
    2.Exaggerated or extravagant claims made especially in advertising or promotional material: "It is pure hype, a gigantic PR job" (Saturday Review).
    3.An advertising or promotional ploy: "Some restaurant owners in town are cooking up a $75,000 hype to promote New York as `Restaurant City, U.S.A.'" (New York).
    4.Something deliberately misleading; a deception: " [He] says that there isn't any energy crisis at all, that it's all a hype, to maintain outrageous profits for the oil companies" (Joel Oppenheimer).

    lust (to describe my feeling for a Ti Powerbook running OS X):
    To have an intense or obsessive desire, especially one that is sexual.

    I'm as dissappointeed at the ballyhoo as anybody, because I am waiting for OS X to come out and then I'm going to buy a Ti PowerBook. After 4 years away from the Mac OS, I was finally going to switch back..

  • No, Apple did not kill off BeOS for their platform. BeOS killed off their OS for the Macintosh platform.

    Oddly enough, this dropping of support came just a short while after a big investment by Intel.

    The LinuxPPC guys have had NO problem keeping up with the Motorola chips and the Apple motherboards. Why should Be? Why, for that matter, couldn't they just look at how LinuxPPC handles all that stuff and reimplement for themselves?

    Be perpetuates this little lie on and on, but make no mistake, JLG decided to go wholly Intel. Apple may not have been very cooperative with him, but he made the decision.

    So Xenex, why don't you ask JLG why he doesn't want to run BeOS on the Mac platform? Why don't you ask JLG why they can't/won't keep up with Apple equipment when LinuxPPC and some BSD teams HAVE NO PROBLEM?

    But let go of the idea that Apple killed BeOS on Macs. Apple didn't.

  • Re:Sure, leave out the important stuff (Score:5)

    by DrWiggy ( 143807 ) on Sunday March 04, 2001 @01:58AM (#386657)
    SMP is not as important as you think, because there aren't very many multi-processor systems available right now. In fact, it's almost impossible to get one. By the summer, the machines will be more commonly available, and THEN it gets important as to what the OS does with it. At the moment with 9.1, SMP just isn't going to work. With OS X, it'll work, just not as well as they know they can make it.

    The video support stuff is troll. I'm running OS X right now besides me on an original first-generation iBook. It has no fancy card, no fancy drivers, just straight out of the box Public Beta code. The interface runs just fine. I'm not using it to try and get 32645256 fps so it's just fine. Seeing as there probably won't be any real major game releases until later in the Spring/early Summer, the accelerated video is not as important as you think it is.

    At the end of the day, Apple has seen the light (for they have found the Love of Unix). They have also made a realisation that MS hasn't - at the consumer level, all the gizmos and tweeks don't matter, because they aren't competeing with MS or Linux, or anybody else in that market. Jobs has already stated Apple's biggest competitor from here on in is Sony. Go figure. Plus, they're not going to do what MS did with various OS releases and pretend everything is fine only to let users and OEMs realise it isn't.

    People are seeing this as them releasing an "unfinished" OS, but I really have to say - when was the last time you saw a finished OS? Would people get really upset if Linus turned around one day and said "OK, we're going to go to kernel 3.0 within the year and it's going to have 'X', 'Y' and 'Z' in it" and then a few weeks before launch he turns around and says "look, Z is a bit screwed right now, and we really want to get X and Y working properly first"? What if X and Y were going to completely redefine Linux, the computing market as a whole, and take everybody off into a new direction, and Z was support for a particular grpahics card?

    All of this seems to me like overplaying the lack of some features that don't need to be there right now in a poor FUD campaign. Pity. Undermines the integrity of people like MSNBC (as if I ever believed they had any integrity).
  • A. Dual-booting has always been an expected obligation until new versions of all the traditional Mac software are ported specifically OS X. Nobody but hack journalists are surprised. Most savvy Mac users consider this a real boon, as a kind of long-term protection measure for expensive software and years of skill investment. It eases the transition into the new Unix world.

    No. Some applications starting up clasic under OSX for you, and running there is expected. Having to reboot into OS9 is not expected, and IMHO not acceptable. MacDraw 0.8 for the 68000 runs in the compatability box for crying out loud, why can't the DVD player at least do as well as software Apple wrote over 15 years ago for a diffrent CPU!

    B. As of the latest build, sleep functions on PowerBooks work perfectly, with two-second wake-up times. That's right: two seconds.

    Seems to be faster then that. Normally faster then I can open the lid enough to see the screen. They might be playing a trick and repainting a saved screen beofre getting the apps live though.

    C. DVD playing is hardly a "key feature." DVD burning was *never* a key feature, nor was CD-RW. Until only recently this was always a third-party software opportunity.

    It is when Apple targets the video market (makers of comercials, and movies). Plus I payed Apple to get a DVD player on a portable, I expect them to make it work. Even if it has to run in the compatibility box.

    I'll give you D and E though.

  • Old news. (Score:3)

    by sordid ( 322222 ) on Sunday March 04, 2001 @02:41AM (#386660) Homepage
    This news is over a week old. Firstly it came from Maccentral.com .. then moved onto cnet (which is actually the article M$NBC used). I'm not supprised MSNBC would run this on behalf of M$'s request. After all, I'm sure that M$ aren't happy that Apple claim OSX to be the most advanced operating system in the world, amoungst other reasons. From a critical analysis point of view, the article is poor and only highlights weaknesses in the product (if they are even weaknesses comparitively) and does not give a rounded opinion of any strengths. Such articles can in all probability be dismissed as biased. The operating system can only be really judged on its success once it has been released.

  • Re:Not What You Think (Score:3)

    by Syberghost ( 10557 ) <syberghost@nOsPaM.syberghost.com> on Sunday March 04, 2001 @04:17AM (#386661)
    C. DVD playing is hardly a "key feature."

    On any model with a DVD drive it certainly is. I'm curious as to your reasoning behind this statement.

    -
  • SMP is not as important as you think, because there aren't very many multi-processor systems available right now. In fact, it's almost impossible to get one. By the summer, the machines will be more commonly available, and THEN it gets important as to what the OS does with it. At the moment with 9.1, SMP just isn't going to work. With OS X, it'll work, just not as well as they know they can make it.

    Lots of high end PhotoShop users have multiprocessor systems. I think most are 3rd party (sort of supported by Apple through a really unfriendly API -- one of the few not available in Carbon).

    It is also really really odd that a MACH kernel won't multitask, that was one of the key research areas for MACH. I wonder if they mean there is no fine-grained SMP (i.e. not much better then a "one big lock kernel") -- if so it is way better then OS9's multi-CPU support (one CPU is limited to a tiny handful of kernel calls *ever*, and that is user visable, threads are bound to CPUs, and any CPU other then the primary one can baiscally only send messages to threads on the other CPUs to ask them to do OS calls).

  • ...I'd just like to be able to print! The Beta had no real support at all....

    Eh? I've been using all the printers at work just great. Granted they are all PostScript LPRNG printers, but it was super-trivial to set them up.

  • Did anybody really expect that, beginning March 24, 2001, every Mac user would be using Mac OS X?

    Of corse not. Not without most of their applications running naitave (outside of the Clasic box). I did expect everything the devlopers needed to do ports to be there. That the apps could be rolled out on that release (or minor patches thereof), and users could move when their apps got moved.

    I didn't expect Apple to still be dicking with the UI in January. I didn't expect major peripherals to be unsupported. In short I didn't expect Apple to blow the release date a 5th (or so) time. I guess I'm pretty dumb.

  • Re:Prepare for crash dive (Score:4)

    by rfsayre ( 255559 ) on Sunday March 04, 2001 @07:31AM (#386674) Homepage
    Apple's stock is in the tank. Fire on all sides.

    Apple's stock is near it's 52-week low, but so are a lot of companies since the bubble hath burst. It's better to take a longer view [yahoo.com].

    Preliminary indications are that Apple users are not particularly interested in the complexity and sluggishness of Apple's latest operating system.

    When are "users" ever interested in an OS? Pretty much the only time that ever happened was with Windows 95, and that was because of the press sucking of the teets of M$'s PR flacks.

    Processor speed is stuck at 500 MHz.

    Wrong [apple.com].

    Alternative architectures and software are killing Apple on features, price, and performance.

    What you really mean is that generic boxen are killing apple on price. True. Features and performance, that's really, um, apples and oranges.

    There are legions of corporations and individuals who have been disrespected by Apple...

    This is true about any company, especially one that doesn't incorporate legacy hardware.

    The main provider of Apple's microprocessor, Motorola, is hurting and hopes to leave the desktop processor business. Motorola announced 10000 layoffs so far this year, 2/3 in their fabs.

    Most of Motorola's layoffs [yahoo.com] are in the cell phone hand-set sector. Secondly, it's hard to peg problems on Motorola's "Semiconductor Products Segment", because they provide parts to many other Motorola divisions (Iridium comes to mind). Also, remember that Motorola has about 130,000 employees.

    Everyone does GUI and mice nowadays. Apple is left marketing decor. The most reasonable solution would be for Apple to open up. Open up its hardware specs and software so that where now exists little more than a corporate cult, there might exist a vibrant autonomous industry of developers, hackers, and hardware vendors.

    You mean a vibrant, autonomous, industry like this one [wired.com]? Guess what? There are plenty of developers and hardware vendors for Macintosh, and almost everything they make works. Apple has already "opened up" where it counts, in Darwin.

  • Damm, I really hoped SteveJobsLivesInMyClosetAndTellsMeThings.com was a real site.

    OS X really had me hoping that the Holy Grail (Unix with a pretty face) had finally arrived. I'll admit it; the hardware is dead sexy, and if they had software to match, I'd order a G4 Cube tomorrow.

    Yeah, I'm a long time Unix guy also. I got a G3 PowerBook and OSX PB. I'm pretty damm happy with it for a beta. It is missing DVD support, and iMovie seems not to work right. I can live with that (it makes a rocking wireless web and ssh and mail client -- the internal 802.11 and antenna rocks). As a Unix head the missing features are only an irratation. A pretty big one. But I still like the G3 beter then the Viao 505JS I had before.

  • DVD support can't wait for the first service pack.

    I would much rather have MacOS X now and wait for DVD functionality. I have to deploy this thing, and want to do a lot of testing first. And if it's like the DVD functionality in the current Mac OS it isn't that good anyway.

    Also, Apple doesn't do service packs. They issue updates to various packages between OS updates.


    MOVE 'ZIG'.
  • Processors are stuck at 733mhz, not 500...
    considering the recent leap to 733, I'd have to say that processor speeds are not stuck at all.
    Behind your Intel-driven expectations, perhaps, but not stuck.

    You only concern yourself with Motorola's processor woes, ignoring the fact that IBM is taking over Apple's processor supply, in iBook, North American iMac, and later this year (don't ask me how I know, I can't tell you), the PowerMac and PowerBook.

    Your reasonable suggestion isn't really that reasonable- you just want everything to open up, regardless of the impact.

    IBM has opened up several valuable ideas, developed and contributed to open-source and free software technologies, and yet they don't open up *everything.*

    Your argument is flawed and to see your incorrect statement of facts moderated at Informative only reveals the lack of your knowledge and the lack of the Moderator's knowledge on the subject.

    A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close

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