Apple is Going Out of Business ... Again 824
gsfprez writes "Its been a while ... and strangely, the world almost seemed empty without the constant drumbeat of how Apple is on the verge of going out of business. If you're a fan like i am, then you're in luck, because this Canadian tech journalist didn't get the memo that Apple's been going out of business longer than most tech journalists have been in business. And besides, someone needs to let Robert Thomson know: when writing a story on how Apple is about to die,
you have to
call
them "beleaguered". Come on, that's Tech Journalism 101, people. In any case, he brings up no new points to bolster his argument: he confuses his personal inability to use third-party software that works fine for most of us with legitimate bad third-party support, and uses this to draw his illogical conclusion. Illogical because it's the same reasons/unrealized conclusions that were the staple of tech journalism from 1985-1999."
Great. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Great. (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry can't do that. The 17" Powerbook will not be available until late March. or early April according to this site [spymac.com]. This of course does not spell the doom of Apple.
Remember your Bible, kids... (Score:5, Funny)
Damn that iMac for being so irresistable!
-Mark
See? BSD is dead... (Score:3, Funny)
...and if you use it, it kills YOU!
(Especially in Soviet Russia.)
Imminent death of apple predicted! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Imminent death of apple predicted! (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, decreasing S/N ratios on Usenet may not have killed the Internet, but they have gone a long way to killing Usenet...
Re:Imminent death of apple predicted! (Score:5, Insightful)
I can see it now.... (Score:5, Funny)
Robert: I know, how about something about a really big company going under. That'll score big points.
Boss: Thats a good one. How about Sun Microsystems, or maybe Agilent?
Robert: Naw, I was thinking of the good old standby, Apple. I mean, most of the copy is already written and its bound to rile up the fanatics in both camps!
Boss: Good thinking, lets run it.
In a related story... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I can see it now.... (Score:5, Funny)
You aware of fanatics in any other camp?
I don't think so.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Also to boot the mac has way more software than people give it credit for. It doesn't have half the games as windows, but that's not it's strong point. And with fink and an X11 server i instantly have a BSD machine that can run thousands of qt/gtk apps.
Their desktops are probably loosing tons of market, but they still make the best laptops on the planet.
Re:I don't think so.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's important not to exaggerate when you're advocating something. In this case, exactly how many thousand of these Qt/GTK apps are useful, unique, and stable?
Re:I don't think so.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The argument goes both ways.
Re:I don't think so.. (Score:3, Funny)
I tried both of them and they didnt seem that impressive...
(It was a joke.. laugh!)
Re:I don't think so.. (Score:4, Funny)
I'm such a fucking retard.
Re:I don't think so.. (Score:5, Insightful)
WTF do we care about "Wise Installer"? That's like saying "yo, I got installshield on my PC man". Many mac apps don't even need an installer. If you're referring to a installer-making app, the OS X developer tools include a package making utility.
Visual Studio is a payed-for package. Mac OS X comes with a developer tools CD in the box, or you can download the stuff online, and it's based on GCC.
Out of curiosity, how big (physically) is that display? How long does your battery last? Do you have firewire built in? How about DVI?
I know nothing about video cards, so I won't compare the FireGL to the PowerBook G4's Radeon Mobility 9000 or NVIDIA GeForce4 420/440 Go with 32/64MB of video ram. I'll leave that to a video-card geek.
You sir/madam, are (most likely) a big fat troll. I bet you haven't even used a mac.
*Sigh of relief* Okay, now that I got that off my chest, let me state that I know I sound like a big fat troll myself, but unlike money_shot, I didn't make a blanket troll statement like "Seriously though, no one buys macs for 3D or business use, which is what most computers for businesses are bought for. That leaves a few flaky designers who are more interested in looking cool than getting work done."
One last thing: Video toaster is back, and guess what? It runs on windows.
He does call them "beleaguered" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:He does call them "beleaguered" (Score:5, Funny)
"I suppose at the time it was purchased, my beleaguered PowerMac was cutting edge, but in today's terms it was more powerful as a paperweight than a computer."
That's twice in one article. This guy is good.
Re:He does call them "beleaguered" (Score:5, Funny)
Versatility of OS X (Score:3, Informative)
I like the way it is based on UNIX (BSD) so that the *NIX gurus can use it comfortably, especially now with the addition of xfree86 with a quartz window manager.
The integration of the smb protocol allows easy integration into a windows environment. (or a *NIX environment running samba)
The programs are easy to use and the GUI is nice. The filemanager is certainly better than any GUI filemanager in *NIX that I've seen.
I've had many windows users ask me for help installing drivers that conflict with other drivers. While the mac typically doesn't work well with older hardware it usually works well with new things.
I got a powerbook G4 and I love it, it runs OS X well (not slow) and when I got a digital camera, I just plugged it into one of the USB ports, iPhoto opened, I hit the import button and it downloaded all my pictures.
However when I got a new scanner, the software that came with it was confusing and a little buggy. An update fixed most of the problems but it still isn't as userfriendly as most of the apple programs.
This has been my only bad experience with hardware/software on the mac so far. I primarily use Linux but I couldn't pass up the powerbook when I looked at laptops. While I wish I had a new one with a better resolution screen and the superdrive, I still like it. I also couldn't pass up getting an ipod as well. Now I wish I waited for the 20gb iPod, I didn't know it was coming and instead got the 4gb one. While iTunes doesn't have the nice skinning support that X11amp (or winamp) has, it's nice and the browse feature is really nice when you have a large collection of music and it integrates well with the iPod.
I haven't had any problems with the Palm Desktop software though I can't seem to sync it with the iCal program. (Though Palm Desktop works well and easily syncs my Palm 515)
-Chris
Re:Versatility of OS X (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you actually see this as a disadvantage? Apple has a set of UI guidelines which, if followed, result in a a consistent look and feel across the entire platform. My experience with skinable apps is that skinning is usually added as an excuse for poor UI design in the first place, and results in a more complicated and less consistent end user experience.
I use *nix a lot, and use a roughly equal mix of gtk1, gtk2 and qt apps. Each one of these toolkits applies its own theme to the apps. Add on OpenOffice, with its own widget set and the whole thing looks a mess. Windows is traditionally better at this, but looking at the apps I have open now, not one of them actually uses the standard windows widgets (yes, I'm running windows, so expect to be moderated as troll). Not being skinnable, but having a well designed UI to begin with is a point in iTunes' favour, as far as I can see.
Apple Computing, Dead at 55 (Score:5, Funny)
Canada (Score:5, Funny)
First, we never got the "Mullets aren't cool" memo.
Nor the, "Thou shalt not eat massive amounts of poutine" memo.
and now this, the "Apple doesn't really ever go out of business" memo.
When will this appaling double standard of memo-sending end? Canadians are just as worthy of memos as the rest of the world!
$9 billion? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:$9 billion? (Score:5, Funny)
Still, they better be careful. They need a new slogan. The "Think Different" campaign has reached its limit.
May we suggest "Apple: Proudly going out of business for 25 years."
Re:$9 billion? (Score:5, Informative)
Did you make that number up somewhere? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm going to pee.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if he is being paid by Microsoft as part of the new "UnSwitcher" campaign? I'd say he should take the fork he was going to stick in Apple, and...well...you get the idea.
In all actuality, I'm curious as to what Apple's market share is now? I don;t know that it has ever been as low as 3%. More like 5%. But I'd venture a guess that with OSX converting Linux users left and right that it'd be around 6-8% by now. Thoughts?
Re:I'm going to pee.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux users aren't switching to OS X left and right. A majority of Linux users run x86 architecture anyways, because it's cheap and plentiful. It's no hassle to throw together an x86 Linux desktop from free parts. Mac hardware is a little bit harder to come across. I use OS X, but I didn't stop using Linux or BSD for it. I simply used it where it fit best. There's nothing I can't do with it that I can do with Windows or Linux, but I still can't use the same application to get the same thing done b/w all of them. (at least not consistantly). I think it would be more to the point to say that the OSS community is embracing OSX as a truly unique member quite rapidly, but not as a replacement.
And we can only wish Linux had anywhere near 3% share. Perhaps in the server feild, but as a Desktop OS it's still probably behind MS-DOS in terms of market share.
This long time Linux user... (Score:5, Interesting)
Cheers,
--Maynard
Not switching, *adding* (Score:5, Insightful)
The combination of OS X + Linux is a pretty unbeatable work environment. I'd guess there are a lot of Linux "adders," maybe more than "switchers."
why do they NEVER get it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Market. Share. Is. Not. Necessarily. An. Indication. Of. A. Company's. Success.
Why can't people understand this? Why do they keep clinging to notions that have been disproved time and time again, are intuitively wrong, and yet people still believe them?
Apple doesn't have to beat PCs in market share. All they have to do is make a profit. That's it. And they don't even have to make a profit every quarter, as long as their cash reserves are large enough (and they are). They just have to over the long run bring in more money than they spend. It's so simple, why can't these people understand it? Why do they insist that "market share" has something to do with it? Enron had a sizeable market share. So did Worldcom. What they didn't have was profitability.
Re:why do they NEVER get it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why can't people understand this?
Maybe the suprefluous punctuation is confusing them?
More seriously, for the most part you are right. If marketshare were the only criterion for viable business, we'd only have one company in each market total. One building company, one flashlight company, one airline and so on. All those dotcoms frantically rushing for "eyeballs" and "first-mover advantage" believed this, and wanted to be the company in their market that built the most marketshare.
That said, relative market share does have _some_ importance (how much depends on the kind of market you are looking at). For stuff like computing platforms it is not negligble. The trick is of course to define a new market - a niche if you will. Apple has done this well. Their problem now lies in that they have to poke their heads out of that cozy niche if they want to grow, and that's what they've been doing for the past year or so. This, of course, makes them more exposed than they previously were.
Can YOU get it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why can't you understand this? If Apple loses all of its market, it will no longer be in business. Profit isn't some magical thing that comes from the profit fairy, it's produced by doing business. If Apple stops selling stuff, it will go under.
They can't make a profit otherwise. Furthermore, there is a limit to the minimum profit a company can have in the computer industry because expenditures aren't zero, so there is a minimum market share.
The question, as always, is how close Apple is coming to that line such that they will no longer have the funds to compete?
I personally think it's closer to
Also, there's the question of third-party support which is invariably tied to market share, except for in a few cases. Take Linux, for example. How many software manufacturers put out a Linux version? Very few because there is a negligable market share in Linux, but its usually the apps that make the system desirable.
Re:Can YOU get it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Market share is generally expressed as a percentage. Let's say Apple is assigned a 10% share in January of Year 1. Let's say they drop to a 9.8% share in January of Year 2.
They still may have sold more machines in that time. They may still be profitable. What's missing is the total size of the market. Perhaps the market was 1 million users in January 1, and thanks to a successful year by Dell acquiring some huge projects in a year, the Intel share spiked.
Apple had 100,000 in Y1. Let's say that they have 150,000 in Y2. Y2's Total Market Size? 1,530,612. Sure, Apple only increased a bit in comparison, but they still exist.
Third party support's investment in market share isn't really a concern either. They don't CARE about percentages unless they develop the same software for multiple platforms, and even then it just reflects on the number of people they have on the projects. What they DO care about is the profitability.
If the software product they're making is only for the Mac, and they can sell 25,000 a year and make a profit, and expand THEIR raw numbers every year, it makes good business sense.
Think about Ferrari. How much market share do they have?
Throw yourself on the floor (Score:3, Funny)
FreeBSD^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HApple is dying (Score:5, Funny)
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *Apple community when IDC confirmed that *Apple market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of any computer. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *Apple has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *Apple is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *Apple's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *Apple faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *Apple because *Apple is dying. Things are looking very bad for *Apple. As many of us are already aware, *Apple continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood (and when hasnt it?)
Apple is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Apple developers Some_Engineer#1 and Some_Engineer#2 only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Apple is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Apple leader Theo^H^H^H^HJobs states that there are 7000 users of Apple. How many users of Apple are there? Let's see. The number of Apple versus Wannabee posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Apple users. Apple posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Apple posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Apple. A recent article put Apple at about 80 percent of the *Apple market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Apple users. This is consistent with the number of Apple Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of nobody, abysmal sales and so on, Apple is going out of business and is being taken over by YetAnotherClone who sell another troubled OS. Now Apple is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *Apple has steadily declined in market share. *Apple is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *Apple is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *Apple continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *Apple is dead.
Fact: *BSD^H^H^HApple is dying
(baltantly ripped of the trolls
Not quite yet (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple and Java could also become a strong combination on the desktop. The Apple isn't rotten yet!
True Fandom (Score:4, Funny)
"If you're a fan like i am..."
Nice to see you've been so impressed with the iMac, iBook, iTunes, et al. that you've adopted similar punctuation in your everyday grammar.
Re:True Fandom (Score:4, Funny)
Article Summary (Score:5, Funny)
Good thing he wasn't writing about Windows 95 with the release of Internet Explorer, otherwise he'd be crowing about Microsoft going out of business.
Summary Correction and Commentary (Score:5, Insightful)
--No, author used old PowerMac until the day his iBook came in.
Author gets new iBook.
--Just so; very good!
Author can't run Palm 515 software on new iBoook.
--Correction: author can't get Palm 515 software to run properly on new iBooook. But he sees enough to know it doesn't "just work".
Author sees release of Safari. Author extrapolates that since Apple is releasing own web browser, Apple can't get decent third party software support.
--Actually, author sees that Apple can't get decent third-party support, considers Safari evidence that Apple sees same problem.
Author sees this as imminent demise of Apple.
--Right again! But it's only one man's opinion.
It's interesting that so many true believers rise to the bait yet again. Don't you people have any faith?
Yawn. (Score:5, Insightful)
apple is obviously iMortal (Score:4, Funny)
Response... (Score:5, Insightful)
As the owner of a Sony Clie, I do agree that sometimes hardware manufacturers forget about Mac owners. Of course, then someone steps in and creates the excelent program like TheMissingSync, which allows mac users to sync with their unsupported Clies.
Apple, in the meantime, realizes there is a problem with Palm support on the Mac, and creates iCal and iSync.
Imagine that - I have choices when syncing my Clie. I can use Palm Desktop (which I rather like) or I can use iCal/iSync.
Choices are good!
Some argue this is a result of Apple trying to ween itself off of its reliance on Microsoft. Imaging that - Apple big enough that it is willing to start taking on Microsoft. Keynote, which he ignores, can also be seen as a shot across Microsoft's bow. If nothing else, it can at least be seen as Jobs telling Bill to make sure and continue development on the Mac platform.
The Mac platform is a huge money-maker for Microsoft. Safari and Keynote are a win-or-win idea for Apple. Either it provokes competition from Microsoft and others in the field (competition being good for the consumer) or it eliminates some of the reliance Apple has on Microsoft right now. Both of these outcomes are good for Apple.
I notice that he conviniently neglected to give sales figures for all Macintoshes, and ignored Xserve and the Powerbook line, both of which are doing well for Apple. The computers he mentions are also nearing the end of their life cycle. The iBook is in need of an update, and the PowerMac line has not seen a huge jump since the first Quicksilver machines (yes, they have done things like dual optical drives and faster memory, but when it comes down to it, they are very similar). Only recently were the PowerMacs updated with Firewire800 and Bluetooth.
He also neglects to mention that, according to most analysts, Apple is weathering the recession a lot better than most other tech firms.
iSync (Score:4, Insightful)
But it doesn't seem like iSync is this guy's solution, he sounds like he's running OS 9. Yes, OS 9 is dying, but not Apple. By this same logic, Microsoft is dying because Windows 95 is losing market share.
it's software that matters (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with lacklustre third party development has prompted Apple to create its own browser, which it calls Safari.
pure FUD. apple has decided not to put its lot with m$. IE is full of holes, even on the mac. keynote is designed to take on powerpoint, and apple is even pushing OO.org/X on its site.
Apple Death Knell Counter (Score:5, Interesting)
They haven't yet updated the counter for this paper, so that makes it 23 times in 7 years.
http://www.macobserver.com/appledeathknell [macobserver.com]
Mac sucks (Score:5, Funny)
good story (Score:3, Interesting)
You know, I always thought it was kinda a funny thing. Long ago I was a Mac developer doing shrink-wrap stuff. Apple was at it's peak, and still people said they had 10% of the market share. They said that was pathetic. But, from my perspective it was always encouraging. Because (anecdotally, I know) when I looked around...schools, banks, businesses, friends' houses, etc... I almost never saw Macs. I would have guessed 2%.
I wonder where they are now? I know that a few years ago the flavored iMacs sold like hotcakes and yet did nearly nothing to bolster Apple's percentage. That's partly because each flavor had a different model # and the percentage stuff is tracked by model #. Apparently it was too difficult for IDC, or whoever it was, to add.
Projects like OpenOffice will keep Apple alive (Score:5, Insightful)
My parents paid $2000 for a new Dell PC because they were terrified that a new PowerMac or PowerBook would not have been compatable with my unversity's software requirements. Ironically, my PowerBook G3 which runs at 333mhz is a better development box for my school work than my PC. I know many geeks that want a Macintosh so badly they can't stand it.
Projects like OpenOffice will make the PC irrelevent as a platform. I predict that OpenOffice, Mono, Java and Mozilla will go a long way toward getting people off the Microsoft plantation. What I think will be the watershed moment for Apple's reemergence will be the first major roll-out of Palladium PCs. Microsoft is trying to force users to upgrade both the OS and the hardware, how is that __any__ different from what they say is the biggest problem with buying Apple? Apple doesn't fistfuck its users with concepts like Palladium which are blatantly anti-individual property rights.
My parents are perfect examples of users who "don't care" about technology. I described to them what Palladium is really about and asked them if they'd buy a PC like that to which they replied "Hell no!" Microsoft is seriously underestimating how much its users like their freedom. We have a whole generation of up-and-coming users who will have major purchasing power in the next few years. Microsoft would do well to remember that most of the Napster crowd is in college now, getting ready to leave college or has been out for a while. Those users believe, and rightly so, that it is their God-given right to listen to MP3s that they have. I wouldn't go so far as to say they have a right to get them for free, but I'll be damned if I'll give Valenti the time of day when he says that I can't view my movies and music anywhere and however I choose to.
Microsoft cannot and will not sell the average user on why they need DRM. If people really cared about audio quality they'd be using DVD-Audio over CD-Audio and would be ripping their own CDs at no less than 192kbps VBR. The content cartels and Microsoft as I said, will not be able to justify why the "sharecropper" model of IP ownership is better than the (Classical) Liberal system we currently enjoy where you have a de facto ownership of the IP in your possession.
The last time I checked, the CBDTPA was not even before a committee to vote on because it still has such an extreme taint of public hatred on it that makes most Congresscritters squeemish about even looking at it. Palladium is a voluntary enforcement of the CBDTPA. It won't keep aunt sally from getting Outlook worms because crackers are invariably more resourceful than their adversaries at Microsoft. And in all of this there is still one issue where Microsoft just doesn't get it. Hardware can have problems, look at some of the early Pentiums and some of Intel's PIII chipsets. You can't say "oh I'm sorry" and release a "service pack" for the hardware unless it's something like a ROM that needs patching. Palladium PCs will probably have hardware problems communicating with a wide-variety of peripherals and that will negate the biggest "advantage" PCs have: that you can buy components off the shelf and use them instead of buying from a select few vendors.
If anything Apple's star is getting brighter. I'm writing this from a box running OSX and I've used Linux for 4 years off and on. I recently used KDE 3.1 and RedHat 8.0 which anyone with a basic sense of reality knows are now for all intents and purposes the vanguard of Linux in the mainstream. KDE 3.1 can't hold a candle to OSX on the desktop. RPM and RedCarpet are jokes compared to Apple's updater. Java on Linux compared to OSX? Puhlease! Almost every UNIX geek I know locally now uses or plans to use OSX as their main OS. There is something irresistable about being able to run GCC in one window and WC3 in another. The nerds that think that blackbox, windowmaker and afterstep are real desktops aren't on Apple's radars and they shouldn't be. They're a waste of time for a company that makes a real desktop platform.
Linux desktop developers should quite frankly give up and ask the OpenBeOS team how they can help if they really want a good OSS desktop. Linux isn't faster than either OS X or WinXP on the desktop and only BeOS is arguably archetecturally superior to all of the above. All too often I've found that the only people who really think that Linux or BSD is the universal hammer fit for every nail mankind encounters are people whose boxes are running Mandrake, with graphical login and never touch the command line. Don't get me wrong, Linux is great for a lot of things, but it shouldn't even try against OS X. It's a battle Linux will lose before it even gets to the start line.
Analysis and rebuttal (Score:5, Insightful)
Err...yes, for some things a $1200 computer is insufficient. For other things, it's a very good deal. As a matter of fact, given the continuous and rapid increase in bang/buck, there's a reasonable argument that deviating too strongly from the increasing value curve (i.e. spending a relatively large amount of money on a computer when the value rapidly depreciates) is a bad idea.
Furthermore, simply because Apple does not cater to low-cost computer buyers (nothing wrong with that -- you don't hear me going after Porche or Rolex) does *not* imply that one cannot purchase a high-end x86 machine. There are very, very many systems builders that will be happy as a claim to throw as much money as you want to into a computer. Want three times as much power as you need, with redundant power supplies? Quad processors? A UPS? Hardware SCSI RAID, Firewire, 8 USB 2.0 ports, a GeForce 4, 2 gigs of RAM? Perhaps large plasma gas or projection display? Enormous speakers? Joysticks that are clones of their fighter-jet originals? Whatever demands you have can pretty much always be met.
Remember, computer usage is an alternate dimension unto itself where all of the basic economic rules like "you get what you pay for" don't apply. If you want quality hardware, tough luck getting it for less than a few grand off the shelf.
You know, "inexpensive" does not necessarily imply "shoddy".
My parents paid $2000 for a new Dell PC because they were terrified that a new PowerMac or PowerBook would not have been compatable with my unversity's software requirements. Ironically, my PowerBook G3 which runs at 333mhz is a better development box for my school work than my PC. I know many geeks that want a Macintosh so badly they can't stand it.
[shrug] So your parents made a choice that you feel was suboptimal for your situation. That may certainly be true, but it has little bearing on whether the product you want is ideal for everyone else.
Projects like OpenOffice will make the PC irrelevent as a platform.
You *do* mean Windows, not "the PC", where I'm assuming that "PC" refers to "x86-based machine", right?
OpenOffice will help level the playing field. And Microsoft will have to compete more on price, features, and service more than it did, and give up some reliance on "compatibility".
I don't think that you can simply claim that OS X is the end-all and be all of desktop environments, disregarding Linux, BSD, and yes, even Windows. Apple's always had some good ideas and some completely stupid ideas (stupidity ratio increasing in recent years with many of their UIs (think Quicktime) and Jobs' insistence that people were *still* sufficiently unfamiliar with two-button mice to be allowed to purchase machines equipped with them).
I predict that OpenOffice, Mono, Java and Mozilla will go a long way toward getting people off the Microsoft plantation.
I hope so. OTOH, let's break this down:
OpenOffice is a major jump, and the beginning of a war on features more than comptibility. However, the onus will be on the OpenOffice folks to prevent Microsoft from successfully creating format compatibility issues, which they are *sure* to start doing.
Mono is a nice idea, but a long, long way away from where Microsoft is. Microsoft purchased some very good languages and compilers people, started design well before everyone else, and has been putting resources into
Java is interesting (and certainly useful against Microsoft in some areas), but has long since turned out to not be what it once was billed as -- a write once run anywhere solution for all applications, including desktop computing. There is a very obvious lack of horizontal-market Java applications, stemming from issues with the Java standard itself, including a lack of templated container classes, and poor performance and memory footprint. Remember that Corel spent a *huge* amount of money porting their suite to Java, and at the end (and I'm *sure* that after that kind of resource expenditure, this was not done without much agonizing consideration) the entire thing was scrapped.
As for Mozilla -- Mozilla is very nice. It was pushed into a production a bit early, but still a major strike against Microsoft. However, it is *not* the impossible-to-quash piece of software that some other projects are turning out to be. AOL/TW is undergoing a lot of upheaval, and funding and support for Mozilla may not be around forever. Apple has already distanced themselves from the Mozilla project and gone the way of KHTML (the cynic in me wants to think that this necessity was a result of Apple wasting so much memory and so many cycles on the basic UI that they needed to cut corners in the area of their browser).
What I think will be the watershed moment for Apple's reemergence will be the first major roll-out of Palladium PCs.
Ridiculous. A lack of Palladium support makes zero difference to the end user in an environment where it exists at all. It can be disabled by the end user. You feel that content will *require* Palladium to be used, and that content distribution companies will be comfortable leaving Palladium-disabled users out of things, perhaps? The same goes for the Mac. If such costs are deemed acceptable by content distribution companies (and Palladium *is* such a crucial issue), then the DRM-less Mac runs precisely the same risk -- of being ignored by said content distribution companies.
Frankly, I don't think Palladium will ever take off -- that's essentially a placebo to allow Microsoft better political positioning in the lucrative content distribution and management field with a horde of increasingly desperate content distributors. It only takes a single break in a Palladium-enabled system for *all* content distributed up until them to be redistributed in a DRMless manner. x86 architecture hardware has never been designed around being particularly secure. We will, of course, see, but my bets are that Palladium is going to be primarily useful from a political standpoint, not a technological one.
Microsoft is trying to force users to upgrade both the OS and the hardware, how is that __any__ different from what they say is the biggest problem with buying Apple?
Well, resource requirements generally increase so much over new releases of Microsoft software that one is required to purchase new hardware anyway. Such is life. A major difference is that Apple charges much more for their hardware than x86 manufacturers.
Apple doesn't fistfuck its users with concepts like Palladium which are blatantly anti-individual property rights.
Do tell? Perhaps you'd like to explain the presence of the "Copy Protection" flag that Apple introduced *long* before MS was trying to do DRM. It was unpopular, and fell into disuse -- much as I feel Palladium will (and this is in a world where the company trying to impose DRM controls both the hardware and software platforms).
My parents are perfect examples of users who "don't care" about technology. I described to them what Palladium is really about and asked them if they'd buy a PC like that to which they replied "Hell no!"
Did you *really* explain this to them -- that by disabling Palladium, you have (at least from a DRM standpoint) nothing more and nothing less than a Mac? No?
Those users believe, and rightly so, that it is their God-given right to listen to MP3s that they have...I'll be damned if I'll give Valenti
Uh, huh. I don't see even the evil-mogul-looking Valenti trying to prevent *anyone* from listening to MP3s that they have. As a matter of fact, Phillips (frequently cited as a "good guy" in the DRM wars) did actually pursue this patch.
no less than 192kbps VBR.
Bit of a nitpick, but this makes no sense.
model of IP ownership is better than the (Classical) Liberal system we currently enjoy where you have a de facto ownership of the IP in your possession.
I'm sorry? The "classical liberal" system that you're talking about certainly does *not* give you ownership of said IP. Try running off 10,000 copies and selling them on the street tomorrow and see how far you get before getting handcuffed. That's nothing new at all.
It won't keep aunt sally from getting Outlook worms because crackers are invariably more resourceful than their adversaries at Microsoft.
Yes, yes. Microsoft is full of hype and deliberately misleading when it comes to DRM. This is nothing at all new. Microsoft does this with *all* of their new products, and has for years. Most software companies do--heck, most *companies* do, though not as much.
And in all of this there is still one issue where Microsoft just doesn't get it. Hardware can have problems, look at some of the early Pentiums and some of Intel's PIII chipsets. You can't say "oh I'm sorry" and release a "service pack" for the hardware unless it's something like a ROM that needs patching. Palladium PCs will probably have hardware problems communicating with a wide-variety of peripherals and that will negate the biggest "advantage" PCs have: that you can buy components off the shelf and use them instead of buying from a select few vendors.
I think you've got a few misconceptions. You can certainly use a non-Palladium-aware device in a system and use Palladium -- you just won't be able to use Palladium features with it. [shrug] Same was true for old PCI video cards (couldn't do AGP texturing), old sound cards (couldn't do digital output), old mice (no scrollwheel -- couldn't use scrollwheel features), yadda, yadda, yadda. This applies to every PC component I can think of.
If anything Apple's star is getting brighter.
Well...yeah. No kidding. They actually have a modern OS, after six years of false starts. They couldn't *possibly* be worse off than they were.
I'm writing this from a box running OSX and I've used Linux for 4 years off and on. I recently used KDE 3.1 and RedHat 8.0 which anyone with a basic sense of reality knows are now for all intents and purposes the vanguard of Linux in the mainstream. KDE 3.1 can't hold a candle to OSX on the desktop
I'm not a tremendous fan of KDE. I do like a few things about OS X, but I really don't see the overwhelming advantages you're claiming. OS X's primary interesting feature is a significant amount of eye candy. While once I was deeply impressed with the HCI strictures Apple laid on their platform, more recent ones (one-button-mice only, Quicktime's interface, etc) are less impressive.
RPM and RedCarpet are jokes compared to Apple's updater.
Mmm...Apple's bundle packaging system is kind of interesting, though retrofitting it onto UNIX would be ugly. I personally wouldn't give up RPM, which offers a wider array of analysis and ease of automating tasks, but I can see how many less technically adept users would prefer the simpler UI to their package system Apple exposes. You are certainly right that I'm not a tremendous fan of Red Carpet, but that's a Ximian thing, not a Red Hat thing -- I believe you're thinking of up2date, which sucks very, very much. However, apt for rpm is available (try Freshrpms), and the even better yum [duke.edu] is also available. And yum really *is* stupendously good.
Java on Linux compared to OSX?
I tend to feel that Apple's rather behind Linux in this field, actually. The best performing of all JRE/JDK implementations that I know of (*including* native code compilers, surprisingly) is IBM's JRE/JDK. This is not available for OS X, though it is freely downloadable for Linux. Cocoa is nice, though, I will give you that.
Almost every UNIX geek I know locally now uses or plans to use OSX as their main OS.
[shrug] I know a bunch of UNIX geeks, and none of them are particularly interested in switching to OS X. As a matter of fact, I know very few technically oriented people on OS X (though I certainly expect plenty exist, they aren't present where I live).
There is something irresistable about being able to run GCC in one window and WC3 in another.
Oh, for Chrissake. A *Windows* user can do that. That's not much of a metric.
The nerds that think that blackbox, windowmaker and afterstep are real desktops aren't on Apple's radars and they shouldn't be. They're a waste of time for a company that makes a real desktop platform.
Uh, huh. Aside from the "what about the actually *mainstream* WMs you left out like metacity and kwin (forget the current KDE WM)" argument, what then is your criteria for a "real desktop platform"? A "genie minimize"?
Linux desktop developers should quite frankly give up and ask the OpenBeOS team how they can help if they really want a good OSS desktop.
OpenBeOS is an interesting project. I kind of wish I had been able to play with BeOS at some point. It's also much, much farther away from being competitive than Linux native desktop environments.
Linux isn't faster than either OS X or WinXP on the desktop
Okay, now that is just ridiculous. From an application standpoint, and ignoring the fact that OS X generally runs on slower software, no, there is no hard restrictions. However, OS X has the heaviest GUI overhead of the three, in cycles and memory. If you're trying to sell OS X, resource usage is not a stance I'd try taking.
and only BeOS is arguably archetecturally superior to all of the above.
Uh, huh. Ignoring the question of exactly *what* the relationship is between "architectural superiority" and "end user appeal", why do you like BeOS so much?
It's a battle Linux will lose before it even gets to the start line.
Well, it stands to be interesting, atthethethe least.
Out of business SALE (Score:3, Funny)
It must their going out of business sale.
Wouldn't it be very funny if the whole market would follow the furniture store business model?
Dear Mr. Thompson (Score:5, Funny)
It seems natural to me that one would come to the conclusion that a beleaguered company was failing because they were having difficulty figuring out how to get their system to work.
Third party support for Apple's platform is of course, terrible. I mean, just look at Office X! It's clearly a horrible hack-job that Microsoft just tossed together in the middle of the night to shut up those whiney Apple zealots. Never mind those broken implementations of Photoshop, Illustrator, et al.
I commend your journalistic foresight, for despite the fact that Apple has forecasted a profit in the second quarter -- something pretty rare for this industry right now, they're apparently beleaguered, and going down in flames. The fact that they have become the world's largest provider of UNIX systems certainly tolls the bell for the beleaguered company. Who wants to use technology originally developed in the sixties? Those beleaguered Apple-hippies!
Your article has been noticed by the community, and it would seem they may not agree with us. They mentioned something about journalists predicting a beleaguered Apple's demise for the last fifteen years of the century past.
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/
I suggest that you switch platforms. I've discovered a far more durable, user friendly, and powerful computing platform. You may find information and an emulator to evaluate it's capabilities at the following URL. Unfortunately, I believe it lacks a thesaurus.
http://www.speaknspell.co.uk/
*sigh* Same old market share myth (Score:3, Informative)
sigh OK, he said, drawing a deep breath, let's try this one more time. The 3% figure is derived from a subset of PC pollsters polling PC sales outlets that also may or may not carry some Apple equipment. Of that subset of reality, 3% is quoted back, and journalists run with it ever since, causing PC fanboys to gleefully shout, "You Apple fanatics only got 3% of the market. Talk to the hand!"
What is reality? Not sure. But let's now add in sales from the Apple retail stores. Oh yeah, let's throw in Apple web sales. Oh, and don't forget that Apple users routinely keep their machines longer than the Windows Users Uh Oh A New Version Came Out and I Have to Upgrade crowd. That's right, if you want to figure market share, you need to figure what is actually out in the marketplace. Not just what was sold from CompUSA that month.
But I realize this requires imagination and independent thought, and thus most computer journalists are exempt.
----
A few reasons... (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Newer Apple stuff does run on older hardware
I think that basically anything with an older G4 might run OS X, though sometimes in an unsupported way and might be slow. But a lot of older slower users (like 333mhz users) seem fine with running OS X.
2) Hardware quality is high so components last longer
So the machine is probably going to be in a better condition to sell.
3) Early adopter (some would say driver) of new standards. Apple is a lot of times the first company to push new standards like USB and firewire in a big way. So even a mac from a few years ago will probably have decent options for interfacing with newer peripherals. In my opinion, that might even be the primary reason why older machines sell so well.
4) OS does not degrade much over time.
This might not be true of Windows 200 or XP so much, but older versions of Windows simply get more broken over time, as evidenced by my old Win98 box at home... I also have linux in it and that at least as remained usable over the years while the Win98 side is barely functioning. Sure you can reinstall and reimage, but as a seller why would you bother (if you can find the software) and as a buyer you are probably looking for something that works for you as-is.
People ignore the resale factor, but I find it nice to know that if I do decide to buy a newer Powerbook someday, I'd be able to sell my current one and not loose too much money... PC's depreciate at a worse rate than cars.
You could also probably learn something by examining the sales for other sorts of computers - a few years ago a friend of mine was lamenting she couldn't even give away an older 486 PC she had, while I was able to sell my old Atari Falcon for a few hundred bucks to a musician. And from the look [ebay.com] of things it seems to be selling for about the same price still!!
I have 10 digits for you beginning with a $ (Score:5, Insightful)
If you take the last few recession years, Apple has, overall not lost money, even though they've had small profits some quarters and small losses others. Even during the time they were investing heavily in research and development.
So how long does it takes a company with four billion dollars and no losses to go out of business? My calculator can't figure it out, but I'm off to use iMovie and Safari and iSync and AppleWorks and figure it out.
Re:Another person making up numbers! (Score:3, Insightful)
If you read the link you pointed us to, shows $2.6B in cash/cash equivalents and $1.9B in short-term investments. I apologize for conflating short-term investments and cash/cash equivalents. Short-term investments are categorized that way as there is little risk or cost in liquidating those positions.
If you want to avoid GAAP and look at overall short-term money and expenses it's about $6B plus and $2B minus.
How are you getting your numbers from that link? By ignoring everything you don't like?
The top 3 reasons Apple will NEVER cease to exist (Score:4, Interesting)
2) Intellectual Property and Brand Name recognition - Apple holds a magnitude of patent and liscensing rights. Firewire, Quicktime, FileMaker, PowerBook are just a few NAMES they make substantial money off of just liscensing the name, not to mention royalties they recieve for intellectual/distribution/use/etc. The brand name would ALWAYS exist if even if (doubtful) they ever decided to eliminate the computer hardware biz.
3) Apple has partners, advocates, millionares, billionares, maybe the largest support base of any company that has ever existed - this base would come to the rescue of Apple if the impossible happened.
Double standards anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, I'm mostly here for the comments. For tech journalism, see El Reg [theregister.co.uk]
That damn title... (Score:4, Interesting)
They better still have the sexy titanium powerbook line...and by then it'll be at least a G6.
IANAMU (Mac user) but... (Score:5, Insightful)
I really don't want to turn this into an anti-microsoft rant, but here goes.
The reason that Mac products don't bode well with Microsoft stuff is not because Macs have a problem dealing with Microsoft but because Microsoft has a problem with dealing with everything else.
Let me give you an example:
I recently finished a course in Software Engineering. As many of you who actually work in the field of Software Engineering, it's basically teaching you how to cover your tracks whilst your coding. In essence, building a system for a customer, which requires Status reports, estimations, schedules, meetings, prototyping, etc. etc. etc. etc. Basically, a whole bunch of business stuff.
Now, Our professor wasn't actually a professor but a sessional lecturer who regularily works as a Software Engineer with IBM. Great! No problems there.
The one thing that bugged us was his preoccupation with Microsoft formats. We were told our coding could be done in any format we wanted to... whatever language we wanted... In the interests of our team (consisting of 3 Windows users, 1 Mac user and 1 Linux user) we decided to develop in Java what with it being cross-platform and everything.
The catch was all our documents had to be handed in in Word format.
Now, in most cases, this shouldn't be a problem. The three windows users each had respective versions of Office, the Mac user had Office for Macs, and the Linux user could make do with OpenOffice and just send documents to the others to verify that it looked good on their comps.
Great, wonderful... no problem whatsoever.
So we get going into the term, and eventually the assignments (paper-deliverables in the Word format) get more and more complicated and demand more and more of Word's "features" to get the right look.
About halfway through the semester, the lecturer puts up an example for one of the assignments and says "Go at 'er"
So we download.
4 different versions of Office gave 4 completely different looks of the same document. The Mac version was different than Office2k, which was different from Office 7 (I think) which was different from OfficeXP... And apparently this was written in some version of office. The most annoying thing about it was the fact that nobody got a perfect representation of what the lecturer had originally intended. In fact, the closest to what was intended (and still not perfectly accurate) was the OpenOffice version.
What did we learn from this? Microsoft file formats bite because they don't like communicating with Microsoft products even well. We tried to configure some of our files to look nice despite the Office version, but the only program that would allow anything like that was in fact OpenOffice...
Now I'm not here to sing the praises of OpenOffice at all... The point I'm trying to make is that saying that a product is bad because it can't interface well with Microsoft products is like saying someone is a bad parent because their kid has down's syndrome.
Anyways. I'm sure I'll get a bunch of "Typical slashdotter Anti-Microsoft propoganda" flames, but this isn't based out of my pre-biases with Microsoft (of which I have many). This is very simply an experience I've had that was made ten times more difficult than it had to be thanks to Microsoft.
Re:IANAMU (Mac user) but... (Score:3, Interesting)
The reason that Mac products don't bode well with Microsoft stuff is not because Macs have a problem dealing with Microsoft but because Microsoft has a problem with dealing with everything else.
Hell! Microcost has a problem with itself!
You can't Microsoft Windows 95 box to share files with a New Microsoft Pocket PC!
And both products come from Microsoft!
Hell Windows 95 isen't even seven years old, and they doen't even suport it.
Consider The Source (Score:5, Interesting)
I wouldn't be too worried about yet another jump-to-conclusions inflammatory article from someone at the National Post.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Musicians and Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
If there's one group of people that would be especially sad to see Apple's demise, it's the music industry. Due to stability and management of multimedia, the vast majority of composers, producers, engineers, film scorers, and even wannabe dj's tend to choose Apple OS over anything else. Two of the most popular music sequencing programs - Mark of the Unicorn's Digital Performer and eMagic's Logic - are Mac-only. If you ever catch a live electronic band in action with laptops, chances are those laptops have a big blue piece of fruit on the front of them.
The big news about the music world this year is OS X, which included MIDI drivers built into the computer's capacity so that the consumer doesn't need to play with the bulky OMS (Open MIDI System) freeware commonly used by most programs. New MIDI-run synthesizers can be created with OS X in mind to optimize compatibility with sequencing programs. On the one hand, every company who wants to produce music software for the Mac has had to rewrite their best software to take advantage of this fact, but now that most of this software is coming out and running smoothly, most users are extremely pleased with the update. And Apple has solidified their support for the musician by purchasing the aforementioned eMagic, a company that makes several unique and useful products for the musician. Logic was one of the first major music programs to have an OS X upgrade produced.
The professional music world is a fairly small market in comparison to the standard consumer world that the PC dominates, but its a professional world that relies on Apple almost exclusively. There's gonna be a major outcry if Apple really starts going under.
Apple's market share: (Score:5, Funny)
2.8% market share and
and 10% [macworld.com]
Now, let us analyze these numbers in order to form an educated opinion on the matter.
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2003/01/19.1.s
roughly 1.5 million computers. Let us realistically look at this number.
Assume
that 1.5 million computers were shipped to 1.5 million unique customers, so there are
at least 1.5 million Apple customers for the year 2002.
The truth is, the way technical progress is going, most customers upgrade their computers
at least twice a year, so now we only have 500,000 unique customers. However, if you
spend some time on the apple use groups, you will realize that out of 7000 people registered
in those groups, four out of five users only pretend to be Apple users for the coolness factor.
So, applying the same logic, gives us 100,000 true Apple users out of 500,000. The number of shipped
computers does not reflect the simple reality, that about 20% of all bought computers are
returned back to the company, so that makes 80,000 unique customers left. The people who buy
Apple computers and actually use them is even lower. Only about 70% of all bought computers are
put to some real use, which leaves us with 56000 customers. Out of 56000 50% are constantly stoned,
you can confirm this with the Switch testimonials from the Apple site, just look at their faces,
listen to what they have to say.... Ellen Feis, need I say more?
28000 sober users is still a
large number, Apple should be proud of the numbers of their true followers. Of-course, you have to
take into account that about a third of all Apple computers are sold outside of the USA, which
makes it impossible to say anything reliable about the customers outside of the country, so lets just
discard these, and this leaves us with a healthy 20000 customer user base. About half of all
computers are connected to the web, which makes them the true computer users (the rest are superficial
and do not deserve our time) so 10000 still sound pretty darn good for a company named after a fruit.
About 10% of all Apple users leave in Texas and 10% in Utah, and since we do not consider these
people to be civilized enough to use anything more complicated than a toaster, let's only focus on
the true, sober 8000 power users. Out of these 8000 customers about 20% has switched to Microsoft
products after success that MS displayed with their innovative and pattented UnSwitch compain.
So
we still have 6400 users. In general, Apple users to be very vocal in expressing their opinions, which
puts their already fragile health in strenuous conditions, such that they seem to have a
disproportionaly high number of heart attacks and strokes when compared to the general population.
So, out of the surviving 400 users (which is still a great user base and a market share) 50% are
female, and seriously, seriously, can females be considered computer users? I mean they must do
something with the computers they bought, probably most females bought their Apples as gifts and
decoration items.
Out of the remaining 200 men, US-Statistics Office reports, 120 were charged with
criminal offences of varying gravity, 40 were found to be linked to Al-Qaeda and a group of 12 were
last seen four months ago going North.
28 people left to account for. I personally know 20 Apple
users, out of which I consider 10 to be total A-holes, so they don't count.
18 rock-solid, head-strong
Apple followers, of-course from this number we have to exclude the blacks, the atheists, the homos,
the vegetarians.
This leaves us with 1 user. We have identified this truly great, unique individual
who, on his tremendously powerful sholders carries gigantic burden of sustaining profitability of this
money making machine, who some of us love to hate and the rest call Apple corporation.
We are here
to conduct an interview with this incredible person, with this true follower. He gratiously accepted
our interviewer. The interview took place in the house of this incredible person, the spectacular
[goehner.com]
97,000,000 dollar mansion located on the shore of the lake
Washington.
-I really like Apple, I use iMac and PowerBook daily, they never failed me. - These are the customer's words from the interview. -The only thing I don't like about the Apple computers, is that their keyboard lacks the Windows button on it, everything else is great!
No market influence? (Score:5, Interesting)
After the success of the initial iMac, EVERY DAMN THING came in 5 plastic fruity colors that, oddly, matched the origional iMac colors. You could not escape Apple's market influence. Even now their design's are copied. XP looks like OS X if they just ass slacked on it (And has that edgy X in the name), Vaio's have tended to look like PowerBooks, and I'm sure it's only a matter of time before Tux gets a Aqua makeover... No, wait, to late [macdesktops.com].
This guy is an idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
He appears to be totally unaware that Apple is actually one of very computer makers that still turn a profit despite the recession, and draws his conclussion solely based on bad experiences with a Mac "built before the Internet" and the buggy Palm software.
I have been using Mac OS X on 2 iBooks for over 2 years now and can't remember when was the last crash. It's quiet, light, stable, cheaper than a similar Wintel portable, definitely the best system i have ever used.
I can see The Onion now... (Score:3, Funny)
Stable OS, user satisfaction sited in computer giant's demise
CUPERTINO, CA. -- Apple Computer, Inc., the company often credited with launching the personal computer revolution in 1979 with the Apple II, has gone out of business for the 478th time, according to a recent report from acclaimed jornalist Robert Thomson.
In his latest article for the National Post, Thomson states "Stick a fork in 'em -- this Apple is cooked." Upon reading this, long time Mac users across the world knew it was time to give up.
"I've been an Apple user since 1983," said Jason Haas. "Ever since our Apple II Plus with two Disk ][ drives, the green screen, and 48 kilobytes of RAM came into the house, I've been in love."
Haas, who once assisted in the development of the Linux operating system for the Mac before returning to the Mac OS, went on to say "They really took a chance going from ProDOS to the graphical system in 1984, and I guess that never caught on. That's a shame, as I guess I'll just have to go back to ProDOS. Fortunately I can emulate that on my Mac's dates PowerPC G3 processor. VisiCALC, here I come!"
Thomson agreed. "That makes it official. This user was so unsupported by Steve Jobs that he had to go back to an operating system made in the 1980s -- and made by Microsoft. Apple really is toast."
Apple CEO Steve Jobs could not be reached for comment at press to,e. ø
Well he might be stupid but... (Score:5, Interesting)
He inadvertantly brings up one decent point although he did this indirectly: The "average" person just cannot keep up with computer technology. I mean, we laugh at the fact that this guy can't even operate a Mac but there are a lot more of him than there are of us.
It is still not fair to pick on Apple for his ineptitude. I'd hate to see him try to run MS or Linux. I would sure hate to be his neighbor or pal he uses to fix his problems. He seems like a needy kind of PC guy
Mac is definately the closest thing that a consumer can get to easy to use. But when I talk to my elderly aunt she just wants something where she points at something and it works. She does not need the configuration options we techies want. When are the PC companies going to realise that there is a huge market out there of guys like this weiner who want a PC black box. Just a simpe to use, flip it on and go sort of machine. I would not even say this type of thing would be a computer. Rather more of a PDA style box that allows internet, word processing and maybe a few other things like picture and video viewers and allow him to Sync his Palm.
Maybe it sounds stupid to us but my aunt would buy it in a second.
I know there were things like the Audry but I guess I mean something with a little more beef than that. I am sure she wold like to write a few letters once in a while and put some pictures in it but not much more than that.
Maybe some thing like an embedded Linux set top box. But the interface is the main thing. I mean she can't even program her VCR and her DVD player has dust on it because she can't use it so this thing would need to just be turned on, have like 4 or 5 huge icons that told her what she could do, she pushes them and then it just does its thing.
Apple is innovating, not dying (Score:5, Insightful)
People are willing to pay extra for a Mac because it just works and makes you more productive. And now Macs are actually cheaper than many top brand Wintel machines.
For me, there is an ethical dimension: Apple has been contributed more to the world than companies that are 10 or 20 times bigger. In fact, Apple is probably the only computer maker left in the industry except perhaps IBM that is still actively innovating, often for the benifit of parasites like Dell. Just look around to see how many things are either invented or first adopted by Apple years before the Wintel crowd: GUI, mouse, color display, laser printer, plug-n-play, speech and hand writting recognition, PDA, digital camera, QuickTime, USB, Firewire, 802.11b, 802.11g, gigabit Ethernet, Rendezvous,
Compared to Microsoft, Apple has a 20 times smaller market share, probably makes 100 times less profit, and yet its software portofolio puts Microsoft to shame: Mac OS X - the best GUI with rock solid Unix, Darwin - the first open source OS by a main stream computer maker, QuickTime Player - grandad of multimedia players, Darwin Streaming Server - the only multiplatform open source media server, WebObjects - the first application server, FileMaker Pro - powerful and easy to use database software, AppleWorks - small and powerful office package, FinalCut Pro - the choice of Holywood movie editors, iLife - the best free software for managing music and photos and movies and DVDs, DVD Studio - professional DVD authoring tools, Shake - leading edge compositing software, Safari - faster and smaller than MS IE, Project Builder and Interface Builder - free and powerful IDE and GUI tool for developing Java or C/C++ or Objective C/C++ or AppleScript applications, and the list goes on.
Dell is a shameless parasite, and by its own admission relies on other companies R&D budgets and then undercut their prices. I will not spend my money to help a clueless box maker like Dell gaining more market and to produce another ruthless monster like MS that would eventually destroy the ecosystem in the computing industry.
Re:Beleaguered (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Anybody got a "BSD is dying" troll handy? (Score:3, Funny)
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Apple community when IDC confirmed that Apple market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all desktops. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Apple has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Apple is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by falling dead last [robgalbraith.com] in the recent Rob Galbraith comprehensive digital photography test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict Apple's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Apple faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Apple because Apple is dying. Things are looking very bad for Apple. As many of us are already aware, Apple continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
The PowerMac is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core users. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Apple developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Apple is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Apple leader Steve states that there are 7000 users of Apple iMacs. How many users of Apple PowerMacs are there? Let's see. The number of iMac versus PowerMac posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 PowerMac users. iPod posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of PowerMac posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of the iPod. A recent article put laptops at about 80 percent of the Apple market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 laptop users. This is consistent with the number of Apple Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of OS 9, abysmal sales and so on, Apple's OS division went out of business and was taken over by NeXT who sell another troubled OS. Now NeXT is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Apple has steadily declined in market share. Apple is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Apple is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Apple continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Apple is dead.
Fact: Apple is dying
Re:I don't understand (Score:5, Informative)
The public are mostly morons-- and since when have they ever done anything but look for the absolute cheapest of [product]? Quality and longevity are of little or no concern.
They don't realize that while the Mac costs twice as much, it also remains a viable computer twice as long (or longer) and in the long run provides a fraction of the aggravation that comes with dealing with computer problems (thanks to Windows not being in the equation). I'm a system integrator, and I've seen the ugly Windows problems that just occur out of nowhere, and dealt with the people who can't do more than turn their PCs on and type Word documents because the machine intimidates them.
I got more than six years out of the last brand new desktop Mac I bought (a Power Mac 7600, with a few modest upgrades sprinkled into it over the years to keep somewhat current), and could've gotten more but I wanted a machine that would run OS X capably and without me having to resort to any hacks to get it installed and make it work. Now I've got a G4/733, and it will likely last me just as long.
~Philly
Got suck? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, I've got news for you.
It _all_ sucks.
Everything.
Everything sucks. Macs, PC's, Linux, BeOS, Amiga, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, VMS, CMS, VM/ESA, IRIX, HPUX, TOPS andf MULTIX. C++, C#, C, FORTAN, ALGOL, PASCAL, Perl, Python, Java, Lisp and Prolog. Word, StarOffice, Openoffice, WordPerfect, Latex, Tex, and troff. Emacs, vi, pico, notepad, wordpad and pico.
It all sucks.
Athlons, PIIIs, P4's, Alpha, MIPS, SPARC, PowerPC and mainframes. RISC, CISC, VLIW. USB, PCI, AGP, SBUS, ISA, EISA, Firewire, SCSI, IDE, Fiberchannel, Microchannel.
They are all either overpriced, shoddy, bloated, underperforming, overpowered, hard to use, featureless, poorly designed, poorly executed, shoehorned, mis-marketed, non-compatible, rushed out the door, late or all of the above.
So stop arguing! It's all the same crap anyway, and they all of the same problems. They're all too expensive because they're all worthless. And they're all hard to use because they're designed and built by morons!
As far as I'm concerned the last decent piece of technology is the door stop. It's easy to use, always works, inexpenisve, and never gets stolen. And if by some wild chance it's not properly stopping doors, you need only get a heavier one. All this and they come in any variety of colors.
I bet you get even get one in friggin' translucent blue plastic.
Re:I don't understand (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand either. I'm currently looking for a notebook myself, and although people claim that a similarily configured PC is much cheaper then an Apple system I just am not finding those prices.
In fact, not only can I not find Windows based notebooks for half the price, but I'm not even finding them cheaper. I just priced a Dell for comparison. Even with Dell's rebates and free upgrades right now, their Inspiron 4150 sells for $1,813.00, compared to Apple's iBook for $1,728.00. And the iBook *still* has an extra 128 meg of RAM.
If you compare desktops the numbers are slightly in your favour. A comparetively priced Dimension 8250 is priced at $1,397 after all the rebates and free upgrades available. The G4 goes for $1,599. Although that's just a tad over $200, I would not consider that 'blatently overpriced.' Also, I would guess that the hardware that Apple uses is slightly higher-quality then Dell's hardware. Enough to make the $200 worthwhile anyways.
I'm not sure if I will buy an iBook, but based on price alone, Apple seems to stomp anything that the PC world can provide. I'd like to see Dell or someone massively undercut Apple, because I like good deals too, but until now I haven't seen it.
-BrentRe:Hrmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Funny)
Don't even start with the "Well mods should read comments at -1" argument.
Burp.
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hrmm (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Insightful)
"First of all, my iBook didn't like the software I needed to run my Palm M515. Crashes and screen seizures were regular occurrences. And the iBook doesn't play well with a lot of things that are part of the Microsoft world."
Errhm. He has one buggy Software from Palm (unless of course "Crashes and screen seizures" had nothing to do with the Palm software - then he had a broken machine and was too stupid to notice), and unnamed problems with "parts of the Microsoft world." - probably meaning something like this [bmwtechinfo.com].
Re:Kill the stupid BMW web designer! (Score:4, Funny)
-Clara Harris
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Practically nobody. The Mac is the Mercedes of computers.
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Informative)
I have the same iBook as the author - and have no problems doing what he claims he can't do. I didn't ignore his problem - i simply believe he is incompetent - like i said in my article post.
as for "The problem with lacklustre third party development has prompted Apple to create its own browser, which it calls Safari. Some industry watchers feel the development and release of Safari is an indication that Apple is being forced to become more actively involved in software development." - i'm not finding any comments from 1994 when Microsoft introduced their own browser, IE. I wonder if that was also because he thinks that Microsoft felt forced to make it. Asshat.
As for the lock-ups and crashes - i'm not Apple tech support, but i'm not about to tell anyone how rock solid Mac OS X is.. that's old news - so this guy either is a doorknob, or his machine is physically broken.
as for "In its latest numbers released in January for its fiscal first quarter of 2003, revenue fell from a year earlier and all of the company's major computer lines saw diminished numbers. PowerMac sales were down 20%, while iBook sales fell 8%. At the same time Apple's sales were falling, PC sales rose, though just slightly, according to figures from IDC released last month."
he says these things as if they matter. they don't.
its the profitability, stupid. He ignored Apple's profits for the last 4 years because out of the last 18 quarters - Apple has been the most consistent performer outside of Dell - batting 16/18 in the last 4+ years for profitable quarters and even the two losers were just recent, and a couple of millions. Apple has 4.3B in the bank. I'm also not a financial analyst... but waaah.
And the author seems to be saying that computers are commodity items like soybeans... because, again, he's got an iBook with all the great software and ease of use built in, and he totally ignored all of that. Apple has innovated (USB, 802.11b built-in, first flatpanel consumer all-in-one, 1" thick laptops, complete consumer video DVD burning solution out-of-the-box, Rendezvous, Easy to use 1U
Dell gave us... preloaded Windows XP machines and that asshat "dude" that isn't smart enough to hide his chronic.
Gateway gave us... uh....uh.... umm.. oh... uh....
Compaq/HP gave us... fugly monitors.
The the author wants to get a windows laptop - great - i don't care. One less whiny coputer user that will obvious be much happier running XP.
But his complaints are all sophormoric - and i did address them in a couple of words.
i posted this article because i thought it was hiralious that his article is a cut and paste job from any number of thousands of articles from the past
I posted this article because it almost feels "like home" to see one of these cookie-cutter "Apple's dead" articles... almost like a good gritty first post in soviet russia where ??? profits natalie portman.
so, i posted it because i thought it was funny that this guys seems to be at least 5 years behind the curve, and still has nothing new to whine about.
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, more likely, he's trying to use Mac OS 9.
Why else would he be installing any software for his Palm at all? I recently upgraded my girlfriend's iBook-- an original one in blueberry, with a 300 MHz G3-- from OS 9 to OS X. Under OS 9, she was using IE, Palm Desktop, and Microsoft Word most of the time, and it was locking up pretty regularly. That's just how life was under OS 9. Under OS X, she uses Safari, iCal/Address Book/iSync, and TextEdit. Her laptop is absolutely balls-out bulletproof now. You know something else? It's as fast running OS X as it was running OS 9, and in some ways faster. I put 10.1 on it some time ago, but it was too sluggish for her to be happy with. But 10.2.4 runs like a dream on 3-1/2-year-old hardware.
If this doorknob were using OS X instead of OS 9, and iCal/Address Book/iSync instead of Palm Desktop, he'd be in business.
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Informative)
Huge profit margins? They're still barely breaking even in this economy, but then all the PC manufacturers are having practically no profit margins, after Dell destroyed them with their low overhead business model. If Apple went the same way, they couldn't afford any R&D, and the only 'innovation' in the industry would be the new ways Microsoft dreams up to screw the customers and competition.
I'll gladly pay the premium for a better OS, better hardware software integration, and an almost complete lack of viruses and security problems. Or at least I will when I find a job and pay off my credit card debt...
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux is great at a lot of things but having every program conform to one set of user interface standards is not one of them.
Re:Hrmm (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, Apple is pretty darn far from perfect, but you're arguing that the entire concept of luxury goods is "ridiculous"? Armani, Porche and Rolex executives would probably chuckle a bit at that...
Re:Hrmm (Score:4, Insightful)
He might not be wrong about his personal experience but any productive thoughts he has about the business relevance or long term viability of Apple certainly didn't make it into the article.
Re:Has a point... (Score:5, Informative)
IE 5.x on the Mac is NOT the same as IE 5.x on Windows. There are pages that render significantly differently across the two. I've made some, quite by accident.
or clunky ports (Mozilla).
Since Mozilla was designed from the ground up to be fully cross-platform, I don't see how it can be called a "clunky port". IE for Mac OS X could be called a "clunky port", maybe (of IE for Mac OS 9, which was an elegant port of IE for Windows).
This makes the Macintosh feel substantially less consistent than Windows (which is an ironic turn of events).
I hear you there - it's pretty weird to select text in Mozilla, press Command-C to copy it, then paste it into xchat by middle-clicking.
Re:Has a point... (Score:5, Informative)
You, sir, are a troll.
Web designers can't test web pages properly because most of their users use a browser that doesn't exist for the Macintosh (IE 6.x)
As is well known, the Mac IE code base is completely different from the Windows IE code base. There is NO major feature that I am aware of that is present in the current version of Windows IE that is missing from the Mac version of IE. If I'm mistaken about this, please point me in the direction of something that references such a feature.
Of course, MS probably likes to perpetuate this myth by not bumping the version number of its Mac product....
The other browsers for the Mac are either immature (Chimera, Safari), obsolete (IE 5.x) or clunky ports (Mozilla).
Maybe Chimera and Safari are immature, but IE5 for Mac is certainly not obsolete, and the statement that Mozilla for Mac is a clunky port (but the Windows version isn't) is just silly. If you don't like those, there's also Opera or OmniWeb, both mature browsers that are also highly standards-compliant.
Microsoft Office is behind the Windows version and StarOffice only runs under X-windows.
MS Office for Mac is "behind" the Windows version how, exactly? Mac Office doesn't have Access, so if you need Access, then the Mac isn't for you. Other than that... No speech recognition? I don't consider that a problem. VBA support slightly behind in some areas? Ditto. What else is there?
And there most certainly IS a Mac version of OpenOffice [openoffice.org].
I'm not saying that Apple is going out of business but there is a problem with the fact that the Apple is always an afterthought for application developers.
For some developers, Apple is an afterthought, yes. But there are plenty of other developers for which Apple is not an afterthought, and believe it or not, Microsoft has been one of them. You make it out to sound like the state of software on the Mac is in the dark ages or something, but the truth is that in the two areas you mention, web browsers and office software, there are plenty of good choices out there. The only major area I can think of that is lacking on the Mac is gaming.
And besides, if you consider this such a problem, why not just get a Windows PC and be done with it? The rest of us will happily continue using our "obsolete" web browsers and office software.
(There. I've fed the troll. Now I feel better.
Re:Has a point... (Score:4, Funny)
I mean, I can't edit video in FC Pro / Premiere/ iMovie. Can't do Photoshop / Fireworks / Illustrator. Can't do databases with Filemaker / mySQL.
No good text editors like emacs/VI/BBEdit. And Excel isn't available on the Mac after all. Can't get my Epson / HP scanners to work or my Olympus / Epson / Kodak digital camera. Too bad there's nothing like iPhoto on the Mac.
No Toast for burning CDs, no support in OS X for CD burning. No DVD burning support - no Windows emulation.
And worst of all, there's no command line!
And don't even get me started on OS X LAG on my 500 mHz Powerbook G4. I mean, it takes at least 1 second for Safari to load! And I can only run ten apps concurrently before I start to notice performance degradation.
Need I go on?
Wrong! (Score:3, Insightful)
Newsflash: National Enquirer and Penthouse both have better journalists than the New York Times!
A columnist can say whatever he wants, but the best kind of journalist reports the FACTS. Too bad if it doesn't get read by the masses; more often than not the problem lies with the masses that anyway (proof: Joe Millionaire).
Re:So how is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple put out Safari to show the finger to Microsoft in not one but three ways: 1) It's not OS X that causes crappy IE performance. 2) We don't need you to make our browser for us. 3) BTW, it seems a vendor of proprietary software CAN INDEED benefit from using software released under GPL. I suppose the clueful may read in there something to the effect of M$ can't even write tight code on a good OS. Anyway, all three of these fingers are designed in a very calculated way to discredit Microsoft and send their PR guys scurrying back to their secret contingency regroup coordinates. That's the real story here.
Re:So how is this news? (Score:5, Informative)
And you can already play quicktime movies on Linux, just not the ones that use certain third-party codecs [sorenson.com].
Really, in the big picture, it'd be nice to see more companies adopting open source to the level that Apple has...
Re:So how is this news? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:But Microsoft Owns Apple... (Score:5, Informative)
Check you facts.
Re:Iyou Iknow Iwhat I Ihate? (Score:3, Insightful)
Honestly, I don't care for that naming technique either, but it's a lot less widespread and a the names end up being a lot more descriptive for Apple's iApps than k* for KDE programs or g* for all kinds of GNOME programs.