How Sony, Intel, and Unix Made Apple's Mac a PC Competitor 296
smaxp writes In 2007, Sony's supply chain lessons, the network effect from the shift to Intel architecture, and a better OS X for developers combined to renew the Mac's growth. The network effects of the Microsoft Wintel ecosystem that Rappaport explained 20 years ago in the Harvard Business Review are no longer a big advantage. By turning itself into a premium PC company with a proprietary OS, Apple has taken the best of PC ecosystem, but avoided taking on the disadvantages.
Confusing (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, cannot understand summary.
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Sorry, cannot understand summary.
That's amusing, since the summary is nothing more than the last paragraph of the article copypasta'd.
English Comp 101 says it should be a concise summary of the preceding essay's main points.
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Sorry, cannot understand summary.
That's amusing, since the summary is nothing more than the last paragraph of the article copypasta'd.
English Comp 101 says it should be a concise summary of the preceding essay's main points.
At least this fluff piece was worth a good laugh...
Re:Confusing (Score:4, Insightful)
"MACS ARE SELLING LIKE PEECEEES! because apple so smart they use pc parts!"
clear enough for you? maybe too clear, since it's clearly bullshit - the blurb tries to imply that macs are selling in pc numbers.
it's not like apple had much choice. either sell shit or move to pc based parts.
Re:Confusing (Score:4, Interesting)
I read the whole thing and can safely say I gained absolutely nothing by reading it.
Re:What a wonderful article (Score:4, Informative)
Iphone development in 2007 driving Mac sales? Probably not. iPhone didn't even get an app store until 2008.
Boot Camp was a feature specific to Intel-based macs. People using Parallels was more common though. Prior to the Intel Mac, nobody in their right mind depended on Virtual PC, it was way too slow.
I think being able to run Windows software at acceptable performance levels was the safety net a lot of people needed to invest in a Mac. That ability was also critical to Mac adoption in the workplace. I also think the increasing prevalence of Windows malware helped convert some folks who were bitten too many times.
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What a wonderful article (Score:3)
Something tells me that UNIX compatibility had little to do with Mac OS X's growth in popularity. Most end users simply don't really care about the command line. Instead, I'd consider these to be the primary reasons why people started buying a lot more Mac's around 2007:
1) Windows Vista came out around this time, and many people didn't like it. Mac OS X looked like a good alternative in terms of both ease of use and better stability.
2) People were getting sick of seeing their Windows XP systems getting infe
Yawn... (Score:2, Informative)
Heavy on words and opinion, light on proof. Mostly just the authors "thoughts" on how Apple's PC growth came to be what it is today...
No idea why this has a Sony image with the post, the article is in large part about Apple and doesn't provide any proof of what exactly Apple consumed in Sony's supply chain.
1 out of 5. Would not read again.
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i'm pretty sure it refers to IBM's inability to deliver enough chips (powerPC), which caused problems for Sony, and was the reason Apple moved to Intel.
Being different was a boat anchor. (Score:5, Interesting)
PPC. Always a day late and a dollar too much. Apple wasn't a big enough customer to justify to IBM to spend more on making foundries and there were always supply problems.
By using the same intel chips as the competition, Apple shed one of it's biggest boat anchors around it's neck. The people who really care about which chips are in it are gamers and they stay with intel/MS since it's what they can play the most games on.
Other than that, the people don't pay attention unless it's a hindrance. Which PPC was but Apple thought it was being different back in the 90s for whatever reason. To the point that there were RISC vs CISC arguments in the 90s directed at end consumers, the last people in the world who should actually give a damn about it.
Apple woke up not too coincidentally when PPC had no viable path for mobile and it's probably one of the best moves Jobs ever made, and in hindsight, most common sense. Surprisingly it took him nearly a decade to shed that inherited weight.
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The main advantage of the PPC was supposed to be higher clock rate, and looking at press releases there were supposedly higher clock rates chips available for PPC over x86.
Yet at one point I took the time to track down the actual "shipping now" announcements for the main PC manufacturers and for Apple and almost invariably by the time computers came out the door speeds were comparable.
The fact that PPC wouldn't commit to a mobile low power version was the final straw.
Re:Being different was a boat anchor. (Score:4, Informative)
There was a time when the PPC was significantly better at multi-media processing tasks than most other processors. And Apple was historically a strong contender in graphic arts and video editing even before the PPC days. Those two things combined are why all those tatooed hippies were willing to pay so much for an Apple machine -- it actually *did* make them much more productive because the PPC hardware was good at media, the media apps were well done, and the connectivity to still and video cameras was much less hassle compared to the baling wire, bubble gum, and prayer it took to get video into a Windows machine.
Eventually Intel added various kinds of SIMD and media instructions to boost media performance, IBM's development tempo on the PPC fell behind and they weren't releasing new chips often enough, and the IBM fab process made the PPC chips rather power hungry. (A friend of mine had a PPC laptop, and has a bad back. One night he tweaked his back, took some gnarly pain meds for it, fell asleep with a PPC laptop on his legs, and ended up in the emergency room for burn treatment. They were that hot.)
Apple put a lot of work into making OS X portable. That went on for a long time and the effort must not be discounted. The first pay-off was being able to switch away from PPC -- to anything they wanted. Intel won that one. But they can build for other chips quite easily, witness tablet/laptops. Apple could decide tomorrow to switch away from Intel, and it would be relatively pain-free. That is the real lesson here -- portability pays dividends. Apple was on PPC in part because they were chasing good media processing -- Apple went to Intel because they were still chasing good media processing. Apple's new A8/M8 chips in the iPhone 6 have good media processing. There's a theme here....
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There was a time when the PPC was significantly better at multi-media processing tasks than most other processors.
I never used a PPC mac for anything much. However, back in the '90s I used a PPC workstation running AIX. That seemed like a fast machine.
A brief history of the final days of PPC at Apple: (Score:4, Informative)
A brief history of the final days of PPC at Apple:
PPC. Always a day late and a dollar too much. Apple wasn't a big enough customer to justify to IBM to spend more on making foundries and there were always supply problems.
IBM was not concerned with power management at the time, and wanted to build bigger and bigger server class hardware. This was before people actually realized one of the huge costs in building an actual large data center was going to be a major cost compared to hardware and flooring (i.e. the 19 inch racks needed to hold the large iron). It wasn't until Enron emerged from bankruptcy in 2004 and started selling off pieces of itself, culminating with the sale of its last real non-debt instrument asset, Prisma, to Ashmore Energy, that the PG&E contract rate handwriting was on the wall, that energy prices were going to be high in California - where most of the data centers live - for the next 10 years to pay for the long term contracts for natural gas, from Texas, for the power generation plants.
By then, it was far too late for IBM to correct its miscalculation and start producing reasonably power efficient chips in time for Apple.
Apple woke up not too coincidentally when PPC had no viable path for mobile and it's probably one of the best moves Jobs ever made, and in hindsight, most common sense. Surprisingly it took him nearly a decade to shed that inherited weight.
I disagree. Apple had already been in talks with P.A. Semi over the PA6T processor to have a G5 class processor without massive liquid cooling requirements for use in mobile.
The G5 processors from IBM were already looking at massive cooling overhead so that they could survive being overclocked to desktop speeds, and P.A. Semi had the answer Apple needed, but the T.I. foundries were unable to accommodate the necessary feature size shrink to get them to where they needed to be in time.
It was either lose a product cycle (or two), while a willing foundry was being searched out and contracted - which likely meant IBM, at a premium cost, or Intel, which does foundries correctly - or jump ship to Intel. This was at a time Steve was in the middle of his Pancreatic cancer, and it looked like he wouldn't be able to push through to a legacy that would survive his death, without a radical change.
It's a testament to the belief of Apple in the P.A. Semi team that they still bought the company, even though the commitment to an Intel switch, meant that the PA6T and the PWRficient were effectively ruled out. At the time, there were massive problems in the memory bandwidth of ARM processors, and the iPhone was being worked on. So they set the P.A. Semi team, as an "acquihire" rather than a "bring the PPC design in house" play to solving that problem. The Apple CPU still beats the Tegra 4, which is the next closest CPU in memory bandwidth, by about a factor of 4 (8, if you count the 64 bit parts).
So it was a chain of events, and Steve's impending mortality, more than anything else, that killed the PPC at Apple, not that there wasn't a path forward into the mobile marketplace (and Apple had in fact built G4-based iPad prototypes, among other things), and not that Intel was a better path forward onto the supply chain. For Intel, it offered a technology demonstrator opportunity that they needed, because no one was pushing their top end tech until one release cycle behind, and for Steve it was a way to ensure his legacy, while getting back at both IBM and Motorola (it's no mistake that the Intel announcement happened so soon after FreeScale divested themselves of the Intel version of their CodeWarrior product), which he took.
Obviously, my view on some of the details is skewed by where I was in the company at the time; I'm certain other people saw other parts of the elephant, so to speak, but that's roughly how I remember the hallway discussion.
One of the great tragedies, I think, is that there was no Official Apple Historian, with Steve's confidence with regard to secrecy of projects, to document the history of Apple so that we could look at it in clear hindsight.
Even more than that (Score:3)
Want to know a big reason people have been getting Macs, that Apple doesn't like to admit? You can run Windows on them now. The Intel switch made it viable to run Windows on them, natively if you wanted, and good virtualization tech means it runs fast in OS-X. That lets people get their shiny status symbol, but still use the programs they need.
We've seen that at work (an Engineering college). Prior to the Intel conversion, there were almost no Mac users. The thing is engineering software just isn't written
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Most people using VMWare or Parallels use it to run a couple programs in "Unity Mode" while doing the rest with native apps. The students would need it to run those stupid-ass Windows-only CD's in the back of their textbooks.
They even have AutoCAD for OSX. And Eagle. So what was this mythical software everyone needed so badly they couldn't function without it?
It's also quite common to run a legacy OS environment using virtualization or emulation until native apps become available. Hell, being able to na
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I wouldn't expect the Acer to last two years....
Also, I've never seen an entry level laptop with an SSD....the MBA is comparable to an Ultrabook (which cost just as much last time I checked) and the MBP is competitive in price to the Dell Precision line.
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Right now, for the price of a Macbook Air you can get an Acer Aspire S7 with full hd and 8GB. That's the entry level one.
I'm not a fan of Acer, but that's the comparable and it has superior hardware specifications. So the only "disadvantage" that Apple avoided when they started to build PC clones is dealing with customers who don't joyfully bend over and pay for overpriced entry-level devices.
Short Article (Score:2)
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Yeah, I was pretty lost on Sony's part in the whole thing until I read the parts that mentioned it a second time.
Seems like a pretty weak link to them considering the time between the Powerbook 100 and this "2007" Renaissance.
Where's the premium? (Score:5, Insightful)
I say this not as a consumer, but a certified Apple technician.
There's no premium in Apple products anymore. Only Ive's obsession with "thin" devices, sacrificing tons of functionality and potential resources at every turn. Case in point, the original iMac G5 machines were wonderfully designed (yes, I'm aware of all the problems they had with the G5 and capacitors) internally. Totally modular, with a great deal being user serviceable. Today's iMac is sealed with foam around the LCD, the same foam you need to cut out and replace every time you open the machine. Likewise, the LCD is now fused to the front glass where before it used to sit just behind it, with the glass being attached to magnets so it was removable with a pair of Apple approved suction cups.
All the laptops are basically disposable now. Soldered in RAM, soldered CPU, soldered GPU, no optical drives, proprietary SSDs. We replace Retina logic boards on a weekly basis now due to failed RAM. A keyboard replacement requires swapping out the entire lower half of the chassis, and a web cam failure means replacing the entire LCD screen.
Apple products are overpriced disposable garbage. The only thing "premium" about them is their insistence on using milled aluminum for their chassis, but even that comes at a huge price- most of the systems aren't very structurally sound, which we've already seen with the iPhone 6 and 6+. They don't even have the "premium" software anymore- I can't tell you how many customers come in here complaining about perpetual updates that change everything (iOS 7), and more recently we've had a ton of complaints and downgrade requests from 10.10 because it's hard to look at.
IMHO; unless Apple smartens the fuck up in the next ~2 years, people are going to start losing interest in their products. This form-over-function thing has gone way too far on the hardware and their recent war on good user interfaces has turned their "premium" experience into a muddled bland mess of white space and blurry fonts.
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Apple needs to make OSX for all systems (remove the locks in it)
Re:Where's the premium? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The only thing "premium" about them is their insistence on using milled aluminum for their chassis, but even that comes at a huge price- most of the systems aren't very structurally sound
I'm guessing you've never had the pleasure of repairing an "aluminum"-era MBP? The case design that started back in the PPC era was flimsy as shit. Compared to that, the current models are built like tanks. And I also had a Pismo-era PowerBook, which was flimsier than that.
One major problem was that the optical drive would get out of alignment with the slot in front, and it would be unable to eject discs. Another problem was that the latch wouldn't close because dust or something clogged the little latch t
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http://training.apple.com/certification/acmt.html
You need it if you want to work at an AASP. I'm not sure where the "lol" comes from. Apple doesn't publish their service manuals anywhere except on websites private to ACMTs working for an AASP (these days they're all online only via GSX, rather then the PDF files you used to be able to get).
I'm not pretending it's a prestigious certification by any means, however I have been servicing Macintosh products going back to 1991. I still have my original TechStep h
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Wrong! Apple have been selling Macbook Pro with soldered RAM for two years, and they've recently launched desktops with soldered RAM. More than one model. That leaves only the 27" iMac and the Mac Pro if you
As for budget PCs, a desktop will last a decade if it has a good PSU.
Someone please translate the summary... (Score:2)
I don't understand the summary, and so I am scared to read the linked articles.
Can someone please translate the summary so I can make an informed decision whether to read the articles or not.
Stopped reading after two big errors (Score:4, Informative)
1. "In 1991, Andrew Rapport declared Microsoft the winner in the PC contest because Microsoft and Intel had harnessed the Asian supply chain and dramatically undercut the cost of the eccentric Steve Jobs’s Apple Mac." No, by 1991, it was John Scully's Mac, as Jobs was ousted in 1985.
2. "When Apple’s first notebook, the Macintosh 100, wasn’t embraced by consumers because it was two big, too heavy, and too expensive" No, that would have been the original Mac Portable (1989), which was all of those things. The Powerbook (not Macintosh) 100 was actually a very light ultra-portable.
Since author Steven Max Patterson and his editors couldn't be bothered to perform basic fact-checking, I stopped reading at that point...
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Macintosh 100? Terrible article. (Score:3)
There's no Macintosh 100.
There were two Mac Portables before the MacBook 100/140/170 came out.
Indeed both were enormous, each even had a lead-acid battery! The first one didn't even have a backlight.
The Sony-designed MacBook 100 was actually designed to just be a smaller version of the original Macintosh Portables, which is why it also was based upon the much slower 68000 processor (the 140/170 used 68030 processors).
The Powerbook 100 was well designed and small, but it wasn't really a big seller. The PowerBook 140 and PowerBook 170 took most of the sales. The later Powerbooks (145b, 160, 180, etc.) were all nearly identical to the 140/170 and not Sony's 100. This seemed to show that Apple didn't really take all that much from Sony's PowerBook 100.
unix my backside (Score:2)
If memory serves me well, the appeal of OS X to unix pros became a selling point quite late in the Apple revival and shift to Intel CPUs. Back then, Windows XP was clearly too old, ugly, clunky and misused to be part of *any* high end PC offering. In my opinion, the OEM attempts to improve the Windows XP experience by way of pre-installed utilities were even worse.
The elegant UI and experience that OS X offered was way ahead of what Windows XP and most contemporary Linux distros could offer and that's what
Hackintosh (Score:2)
I was planing on doing some development with the Unity/Unreal engine and unfortunately it does not support Linux (for development). Since I don't want to replace my (powerful) pc and I would kill myself if I had to develop in windows, I have considered installing a hackintosh. My top priority is getting the video card and wifi supported without any problems.
Also I have never used Mac OSX for more than 5 minutes, the main feature I can not live without is customizability of shortcuts (specially the shortcut
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They took a great OS (freebsd) closed it down
Last I checked, I could get the FreeBSD source still, has that changed? In fact, last I checked I could even get it from Apple (including a bunch of their modifications), has that changed? In fact last I checked, Apple pay rolled writing an entire new compiler tool chain that is now FreeBSD's default compiler, and opened it under the BSD license.
Why is it that people think Apple is somehow a company set against open source?
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...except no one really uses the FreeBSD part.
All of the relevant end user interactions are with the proprietary non-FreeBSD part. MacOS is much like Windows in that it's a proprietary subsystem riding on top of some other core OS. Apple benefits from the generous free work of the FreeBSD developers while presenting what is pretty much a completely proprietary system.
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And? Is there a problem with that, morally? If so, can you please articulate it?
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Japan drowned in it's own marketshare is everything corporate view a while back - there will always be someone that comes along that offers it cheaper. Customers ain't loyal and monopoly lockdown in a previously open market is frowned upon.
But you're right in the sense that this is just a small part of Apple's business now. Still, they make a decent buck on each one they sell, which at the end of the day, isn't bad business.
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Too bad it is such a pain to actually get *NIX software installed and running on OS-X.
You can poke fun at the stability of the Linux desktop all you want, but Linux package management for distro-managed libraries is a breeze. On OS-X it is like pulling teeth from a hungry tiger.
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Re:Lol... (Score:5, Interesting)
But please... Don't go pretending that apple created something really good or unique with this rebranding of intel cpu's and freebsd.
Actually, they did -- they created a Unix based OS that I can buy off-the-shelf/mainstream/commercial software for. Previously, I could either use a decent OS (*nix) with very few available applications, or a Godawful OS (Windows) but with lots of applications. With MacOS/X I get the best of both worlds.
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And you can also run Windows on it (via Bootcamp, Parallels, or both), so you also have access to all Win applications if you want.
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My wife's daily driver is a MacBook Pro. All the stuff she needs for home is readily available on OSX as easily as on Windows, e.g., Quicken; work is a non-issue because the products she supports are on iOS. Even if the vendors sometimes treat their OSX ports as second-class citizens, it's rare that any basic feature we care about is missing. It's just the latest bling that's usually not ported right away.
OTOH, I wouldn't be able to use a Mac for my job, because my employer requires us to use things incl
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MacOS remains more like Linux in this regard.
Uhhh.... no. I would bet the Amiga still has a larger desktop user base than Linux.
*MOST* major software packages have OSX versions available. Look around, Google is your friend.
Now, are there more packages available for Windows? Absolutely. Does that make Winblows a better OS? Hell no. Does that mean that you won't find a piece of Mac software to do just about anything you want? No.
Get a grip.
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On the flip side, I've loved every Mac that I've owned. I had a PPC 603 for a while (running OS 8.6), a G3 Powerbook (Clamshell), then a G4 (running 10.1 and later 10.4), which would later be replaced by a 2006 MBP (that I bought at a Hamfest in 2011 for $200, not bad). They did most of what I wanted them to do, and I usually had a Windows desktop that the gaming took place on (with the exception of the 603 that was my only computer at that time....oh the hours of Starcraft, Diablo II, and MechWarrior....
Re:Lol... (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, Apple sold 5.5 million intel-pc's.... It's nothing on total pc sales.
It's enough to put them in the top five PC makers, worldwide. If you count iPads as computers, Apple is the largest computer manufacturer in the world [appleinsider.com] with a 14% share.
Re:Lol... (Score:4, Informative)
Seriously, Apple sold 5.5 million intel-pc's.... It's nothing on total pc sales. They took a great OS (freebsd) closed it down, put huge payed-garden-walls around it and made it idiot-proof and dumb enough for a 2 button mouse.... Of course there will be a couple million idiots buying it... Even including the apple-tax, for their customers, it's either paying up or learning to handle 3 mouse buttons. I don't think we can expect the intellectual effort of understanding 3 buttons, let alone a terminal, from someone who is paying for this. And that is just fine. It's good to see that the 'special' people also can use a 'computer'. But please... Don't go pretending that apple created something really good or unique with this rebranding of intel cpu's and freebsd.
I'm assuming this was a trolling attempt but I'll take the bait.
OSX is *NOT* rebranded FreeBSD. It's rebranded NeXTStep/OpenStep where they updated the userland w/ the FreeBSD userland to replace the ancient 4.2BSD underpinnings. It is a direct descendent of quite possibly one of the greatest workstation OS's of all time. And your comment on 2 vs. 3 buttons is so retarded I'm not going to even bother. Grow up and actually learn something before you spout off about things you know nothing about.
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Right... Then you should be happy that you can still sell your Mac for some $$ which will cover your next windows laptop.
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Huh... a high end Windows Laptop will set you back the same or more than an equivalent Mac laptop.
I looked around for better part of a year for a good Windows laptop to replace my ageing Acer Timeline. Finally just bought a MacBook Pro and installed Windows 8.1 on it.
IMHO Apple makes some of the best Windows laptops in the world.
Re:It helps to actually use the thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
While the premise of TFA is incorrect, Apple certainly has created a quality product - at least as good as upper end offerings from most mainstream manufacturers. Yes, it has a marketing cachet that, to most of us, is kind of annoying, but that is the real world.
You don't need 'a great deal of money' to get into OS X either as user or developer (remember, the development system is free). No, you cannot scrape the components for a Wintel supercomputer out of a dumpster but there apparently is a large enough population with enough money to actually pay for things they use.
Re:It helps to actually use the thing. (Score:5, Informative)
You don't need 'a great deal of money' to get into OS X either as user or developer
How dare you bring silly things like facts into Apple bashing. Pay no attention to the fact that Apple has sold an entry-level Mac Mini for $499 for the last 9 years. Even Dell's lowest-end desktops only sell for $100 less.
Re: It helps to actually use the thing. (Score:2, Interesting)
So a 20% premium over a PC at the low end, with the gap widening as you move up the performance curve.
That's a pretty big premium for what seems like an intangible benefit.
Re: It helps to actually use the thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
So a 20% premium over a PC at the low end
Amusing goalpost shifting. The claim was that there was a "high barrier to entry" which is plainly false as their entry-level Mac Mini is not much more than the very lowest-end i3 desktops from other companies. Also, the Mac Mini does have an i5 vs i3 which gives you a faster CPU and GPU. So you do get something for the "premium" of a whopping $100.
That's a pretty big premium for what seems like an intangible benefit.
Maybe so, but irrelevant to what I was being responded to. $499 is not a high barrier to entry. Unless one is going to claim that Dell's prices are a high barrier to entry when 31 of their 35 current desktops cost $499 or more as well.
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$500 is a lot of money just to try some other OS out.
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Or, you can install the free (for noncommercial use) VMware Player, and in about an hour of googling and not-too-difficult hacking, plus the time to legally download the installation media, you can try out OSX on your existing Windows or Linux machine.
It won't let you know what a low-end Mac Mini feels like as a daily driver, and it's not what I'd recommend for an HTPC, but if you wanted to try cobbling together a small app to see what it's like to develop on OSX compared to Windows or Linux, it's about as
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$500 is a lot of money just to try some other OS out.
People don't try OSes out. People buy a computer and the OS is incidental. The end result is you either use the OS you have or install another one. Nothing is forcing you to use OSX once you buy a Mac.
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If you don't like it, run Windows or Linux on the damn thing. It's a *PC*.
Or if you just want to try OSX out and learn more about its internals, build a hackintosh or play with a virtualized install of OSX w/ VirtualBox or VMWare.
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That STARTING AT $499 is a laughing fucking joke at 1.43 GHz when the Pentium N3540 quad core is pretty much the same thing at $125 cheaper in an HP laptop at HALF the power draw and 2.1GHz, and the HP laptop comes with an optical drive, remote control, a quick-launch OS for easy access to media and such without needing to boot Windows, and a bunch of other shit the Mac Mini won't come with, including A SCREEN and a webcam - STARTING AT $329.
Give. Me. A. Fucking. Break.
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A "girly" UI? What, are you eight and stuck in a playground where that's actually a cutting insult? Grow up.
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Hell, the magsafe connector is worth that. One Labrador Retriever puppy and one Dell XPS power connector = one damaged motherboard - even though the Dell connector is pretty robust as these things go.
Nothing intangible about that. Sometimes you get what you pay for.
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Bah. The magsafe connector is a gimmick. The advantage of the magsafe connector was supposed to be that it would release easily from the laptop in the event of a snag. This does work most of the time. Not always, but most of the time.
What is falsely implied is that other laptop connectors don't come out under such conditions. In my experience, this is not true - I've had two other laptops where the connector slipped out easily under a relatively small amount of force.
On the other hand, the magsafe conn
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Bah. The magsafe connector is a gimmick. The advantage of the magsafe connector was supposed to be that it would release easily from the laptop in the event of a snag. This does work most of the time. Not always, but most of the time.
What is falsely implied is that other laptop connectors don't come out under such conditions. In my experience, this is not true - I've had two other laptops where the connector slipped out easily under a relatively small amount of force.
The magsafe connector has saved my laptop a trip to the floor on several occasions when a kid or dog tripped on it. Generally you won't have USB cables strung across the floor.
I've repaired MANY HP, Dell, and Toshiba laptops with broken power connectors. Not a gimmick, this is/was a serious problem. Even now that I don't turn screws for a living, most of the laptop repairs I do involve soldering in a new power jack. The others are typically LCD panel replacements which are a 5-minute job.
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My cat has learned to pull the magsafe connector off and play with it. :-)
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Pay no attention to the fact that Apple has sold an entry-level Mac Mini for $499 for the last 9 years.
They have sold the entry-level Mac Mini for $499 for 1 week. Before that, it was $599 [arstechnica.com].
Re:It helps to actually use the thing. (Score:5, Informative)
Pay no attention to the fact that Apple has sold an entry-level Mac Mini for $499 for the last 9 years.
They have sold the entry-level Mac Mini for $499 for 1 week. Before that, it was $599 [arstechnica.com].
It used to be $499, then went up to $599 for a few years, now back to $499. Which is all beside the original point: there is not a high barrier to entry for the Mac. And it has a lot of additional value to a lot of people: simple for the beginner, and an entire open-source UNIX for the advanced user, combined with high-quality parts and great service, a big ecosystem of software and services, and almost no viruses or threats to worry about, and a lot of folks (me included) think life is too short to deal with Windows at home.
Re:It helps to actually use the thing. (Score:5, Interesting)
High quality parts? Quit swimming in the Kool-Aid.
They use generic PC parts the same as the rest of the industry. Sometimes the same exact quirks exist between Apple's and Dells. They are impacted by the same bad engineering choices.
Except there are more options with PCs. You can avoid an inherently problematic form factor with Dell. There's something else to choose.
Been there. Done that. Not impressed at all.
You're just repeating the same nonsense as the original article which was marketing masquerading as journalism to begin with.
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And even if you (like me) simply run Windows on it, being able to buy it at the local Apple store or be able to get it fixed at the local Apple store, by a company I trust to fix things is a win.
None of the other suppliers of Windows laptops have a local store where I can do that.
OS-X cost $499 more than Linux (Score:2)
That is a fact too. Linux also works much better as a *NIX development environment and you can run it on pretty much any hardware you already have.
Also, just as a hardware point of comparison, a Mac Mini is almost 200% more expensive than a compatible Intel NUC and about infinite times less upgradable.
5x more people use OSX than Linux (Score:2)
That's also a fact.
Re:OS-X cost $499 more than Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
If you are just trying to develop the next Unix clone of telenet or ftp, this argument might make some sense. If you are working in any sort of commercial environment, the cost of the PC is just a rounding error.
This entire subthread about the putative costs of a generic x86 box vs. something from Apple is absurd - nobody cares about these sorts of costs except poor hobbyist programmers -- and none of the companies, Apple included, gives a tinker's damn about this demographic.
For mid to upper range laptops*, Apple is very competitive with everybody else. If you like the tight hardware / software integration that MacBooks offer, then great. If you don't care or really want to run Windows, go get something else. I do wish that Apple had a few more choices - I'd love for them to resurrect the 17" MBP, but I'd also like Dell to have English speaking customer facing employees, for HP to make keyboards worth a damn and for Toshiba to simply go away.
But life is hard....
* The Mac Pro, especially the Darth Vader's ashtray version, is really a niche product
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For mid to upper range laptops*, Apple is very competitive with everybody else.
I'm very very far from being a mac fanboi (I really don't like OSX), but this is true, as far as I have looked. On the thin and light end of things (e.g. the Mac Air), matching specs and build quality gives about the same price.
Generally the cheapest per spec in that case is whoever has most recently released a laptop. The one with the newest tech generally is a bit better for the price.
At that point it's a "premium" for a laptop
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I thought that too until I started adding up the optional stuff I had to add in to make it equivalent to to a Mac Mini. The Mac Mini (like Apple laptops) makes a great Windows system.
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You have to spend a great deal of money and have already swallowed all the Kool-Aid.
You've been able to buy an entry-level Mac Mini for $499 since 2005 [bbc.co.uk]. That's only $100 more than Dell's lowest cost Inspiron.
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and $170 more than HP's cheapest laptop which still competes on features, hardware, and usability versus the Mac Mini.
You're just an uninformed Apple Shill. Ever since Apple went Intel, I've ALWAYS been able to find the same or better hardware combinations CHEAPER from other manufacturers. And I used to be an Apple repair tech at Flextronics while Apple was still using G3 and G4 processors in their iBook series laptops.
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That amount of money would have brought some pretty beastly desktop PCs. Any reason they all chose laptops instead of a PC with a large hi res CRT?
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Since OSX 10.4 or so, it has been relatively easy to install OSX on any PC. So if one is curious and wants to try the ecosystem, one can do it at a very low cost, that of one already existing, partitioned PC, or a virtual machine. This does require some technical skills, for sure. In recent years it has become easier, not harder, to do so.
This usually is a fairly smart move on Apple's part. This test will usually convince people who try it that they can trust Apple to be their provider for their next laptop
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Macs are a mythical product that most people are unfamiliar with because the whole platform has a high barrier to entry.
I got a brand new Black MacBook (2006) for $1,300 USD that gave me eight years of useful life before the CPU fan died this summer. Since it has a 32-bit CPU and most software coming out in 64-bit only, I didn't bother to get it repaired. After owning Toshiba and Dell laptops, this is the best laptop I ever owned.
For the price of the new Mac mini with AppleCare and sales tax (~$650), I'm going to pimp out a used White MacBook (2010) with a 120GB SSD (from the Black MacBook), 250GB hard drive and 16GB RAM to
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The "specs" on RAM limits usually under-represent the maximum possible. The reason is that when the specs are released, the chip sizes needed for that maximum likely do not exist, and Apple doesn't want to advertise something it can't test. If you check the lowendmac page [lowendmac.com] (assuming I found the right one), it says there's a 16GB limit.
I vaguely recall that the reason Apple is pretty strict about this is because of the Mac SE/30, which didn't have 32-bit clean ROMs, limiting it to 8MB. The physical limitatio
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Re:It helps to actually use the thing. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nearly all of the development tools of Linux are available on OSX via ports, brew or simply compiling oneself. Even fairly advanced stuff like valgrind [valgrind.org]. There is no shortage of cross platform GUI toolkit like Qt.
In what way is OSX crippled as a dev box ?
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Reinforcing your point, I find my MBP to be an excellent dev box, with all the bells, whistles and software vendor support I could want. Bonus points for being lightweight and high performance with a great battery life, especially compared to the regular (HP, Toshiba, LG) "high performance" employer-issue dev laptops which seem to be either slow or not very portable.
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I find my MBP to be an excellent dev box, with all the bells, whistles and software vendor support I could want.
I've tried developing on macs before. I found it a fairly mediocre experience compared to Linux.
Getting libraries is an exercise in pulling teeth. I tried macports and fink. Compared to Linux they were slow, unrelaible and too often required nuking and redoing from scratch. Compared to OpenBSD they were merely unrelaiable and required nuking and redoing from scratch.
It was a toss up between that
Re:It helps to actually use the thing. (Score:5, Funny)
Nearly all of the development tools of Linux are available on OSX via ports, brew or simply compiling oneself. Even fairly advanced stuff like valgrind [valgrind.org]. There is no shortage of cross platform GUI toolkit like Qt.
In what way is OSX crippled as a dev box ?
Well, obviously the lack of systemd.
Re:OSX is a hammer without a handle (Score:5, Insightful)
OS-X is a hammer without a handle. It technically still is Unix, just like a hammer-head technically is a hammer. It is just badly crippled and requires inordinate amounts of research, trial and error, or experience to use as a proper Unix box.
So it doesn't act like your favorite pet Linux distro out of the box and you consider it crippled? It's no more crippled than Solaris or Tru64 was out of the box. No, compilers and X11 are not part of the default install. Neither is a package manager 90% of Mac users will never touch. And no, it doesn't come with your favorite package manager out of the box. There's a couple to choose from, both MacPorts and Fink work pretty well.
Personally, I found dealing with OSX much easier from a UNIX standpoint than Solaris. There's differences for certain, but if you're too lazy to learn anything new, go back to installing Ubuntu and living without commercial desktop software.
And if you're wanting to use KATE, why the hell are you using a Mac anyway? There's much better native options that don't require that antiquated stale windowing system.
"It don't werkz lik3 uBuntu or Windows so OSX is teH SuXorz" Chances are you aren't a seasoned Linux admin either, you just got tired of your latest activator for your pirated copy of Windows failing and thought running Linux would make you an er33t H@x0R D00d.
BTW, both FINK *AND* Macports both deal with dependencies. You are trolling. If you don't REALLY know what you're talking about, STFU.
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And if you're wanting to use KATE, why the hell are you using a Mac anyway? There's much better native options that don't require that antiquated stale windowing system.
Such as?
X11 is neither antiquated or stale. Sure, it has a long history having started in 1987. However MacOS also has a long history, starting in 1976 with BSD (from which it's derived) and 1982 for ObjectiveC.
If mere age of the original relases is a problem, then OSX is far more stale and antiquated than X11.
Clearly that's a silly argument
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X11 is neither antiquated or stale
Which is why the Linux world is so eagerly jumping on the wayland/Mir bandwagon, right?
Such as?
Textmate would be one fine example that I use, you also have Sublime (granted, it's multiplatform) and Coda if web development is your cup of tea.
And then you can have pretty much ANY of the Linux text editors if you wish, as GP said.
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Which is why the Linux world is so eagerly jumping on the wayland/Mir bandwagon, right?
Are they? I've not seen either deployed in the wild yet. Also, what the distro makers do (*cough* systemd *cough*) is hardly representative of what people actually want and what's actually better.
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If you want to tinker with the hardware... well Apple hasn't produced a "tinker-ready" mac since the last Mac Pro tower.
True, but since 10.4 you've been able to build a hackintosh with slots quite cheap. So the people whining about Macs costing to much while posting from their pirated copy of Windows could just as easily have a Mac clone if they learned how to read.
Nobody, zero people out there... runs Linux as a desktop.
Not quite true but close. I ran FreeBSD on my primary desktop for years until OSX 10.6 was released. Was actually quite capable and did what I needed it to do. Eventually I got more heavily into audio recording and Ardour doesn't compare to Logic. I also got
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Most of this applies to Google Apps and Chromebooks... Except the price part.
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You're looking at it from a very technical perspective, which is valid for the few who have the time and knowledge to dick around with a UNIX system to make it things. Apple's user-base isn't that sector, despite the fanboi protests (cue accusations of trolling). Apple shines brightest for people who want to get other things done without worrying about how they get done. For someone in the humanities, there's no better machine for putting together a fast, smooth workflow with an amazingly small learning curve. [....]
I'm regularly attending conferences in the field of theoretical computer science and AI, and about 70% of laptops there are MacBooks. 25% are Linux, and then there are a few researchers paid by Microsoft Research ;-). But Macs are not just for humanities people - a significant draw is "a UNIX box that just works". With Fink or MacPorts, package management is nearly as good as on the best Linux distributions, and the hardware integration is totally trouble-free. And the hardware is nice from a purely physica
Re:Troll much? (Score:5, Funny)
AC's seem to have the worst luck with computers. Maybe you should log in and see if things change.
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are you using a really old ipad or something? I run ios8 on an ipad 4 (~2 years old), and it is smooth like butter. I've never had the problems you describe. I will say that I agree that some websites can be a bit wonky, but I don't think that's necessarily a deficiency on Apple's end, just an artifact of this weird transition to mobile.
I don't know I've had similar problems (Score:2)
It might be the app but it happens several times a day with my ~2 year old Mac mini when using VLC (pretty much all I use it for). Might very well be the app itself but since it was updated (think when iOS 8 came out it is weird. First off opens up shows that the media library is empty for about 1-2s then "realizes" I always have 5-100 TV show rips in it. Then I can't scroll/interact with the app for about another 5-10s. It seems to remember things I did just doesn't actually start interacting (not respondi
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Funny how I have never seen anyone hate Apple computers who could afford one.
I could afford to replace every computer I own with a brand new Apple product, but they don't appeal to me in the least.