http://www.osnews.com/story/3877/Apple_on_WWDC_Innovation_or_Catch_Up_ Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:50:05 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Apple might have used benchmarks in a misleading way to make their products look better/faster than they actually are?


GCC is the WORST compiler available for Windows at this time, performance-wise that is. Also, which version of GCC did they use under Windows? MinGW, CygWin, or DJGPP? CygWin's compatibility layer introduces significant overhead, compared to MinGW

It lacks many of the optimizations that MSVC and ICC have, whereas Apple has been optimizing the hell out of the Mac version of GCC

Run your benchmarks against a compiler that commercial developers actually use and maybe I'll be more inclined to buy your benchmarks. I can't wait for objective benchmarks from an independent source. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 15:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The previous post was not a slam against GCC, it does it's job (being an excellent cross-platform, cross-language compiler suite) very very well. However, very few developers actually use it under Windows, with the exception of students and open source software developers, who can't afford/ideologically don't support/can't rely on commercial Windows compilers.

It was however, a slam against Apple...shame on them, no offense but I would never want them to be in control of the computer industry...I just can't trust them because they are constantly pulling crap like this Tue, 24 Jun 2003 15:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Well, lets be completely honest here. If you want to use the Microsoft compiler, it is available free of charge in the Windows SDK. The only downside is that you need to manuall tweak via switchs and there is no IDE.

On the otherside, GCC is crap on Windows for a reason, because the majority of the development effort doesn't go into Windows version but for the majority of people who use *NIX, also, one has to consider the fact that PE isn't the nicest thing to write for and from what I have heard, it is terribly documented vs the clean and standard ELF follows.

Anyway, back to this article, I agree with Eugenia Loli-Queru regarding the pricing of $1999 for the workstation, IMHO, if they priced their low end at around $1800 then they would really grab a market. To make it even more tempting, why not offer a monitor/PowerMac bundle. Who on earth DOESN'T buy a computer without a monitor? Tue, 24 Jun 2003 15:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I mostly agree with Eugenia. There's nothing really innovative or ground-breaking, but good steady progress.

Xcode looks really tempting, though. Compiling in the background and "zero-linking" (however that may work) promise faster development, I'm looking forward to that.

It was a relief to see Expose, as it looks like it could actually be useful. Ever since it came thought of QuartzGL as a nice piece of technology but couldn't quite figure out what it's actually good for.

The most impressive thing about the G5 is the case design. This time, someone really had airflow in mind, where most PC makers still restrict themselves to the ATX format. The CPU - so what. A new CPU is being introduced that is faster than the previous ones? Happens all the time, it's just been a while since Apple was able to do that.

Pixlet - cool for a developer's show and a few production houses. Will not be useful for the average home user for a while, though. Maybe when we have GBit ISPs. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Btw, that post was by me, and also it should be:

Who on earth buys a computer without a monitor? Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I was thoroughly impressed with everything that was announced. This was without a doubt the keynote i was waiting for, and not necessarily just for the G5, (although that really stole the show) but also for innovations in iChat/iSight and the huge innovations in Panther.

It seems to me that a lot of other PC-centric people are trying to do some damage control and spin this as a catch-up expo... (and in some ways it was), but in far more ways it was a session in which Apple excelled beyond the industry.

There's an old business adage which suggests that when a monopoly is present within an industry, a competitor has to be at LEAST 30% better to gain market share. Considering that Apple is competing against an illegal monopoly, their products probably have to be 60% better to gain market share.

If you ask me, I think they've done it. Their products are genuinely better IMHO, in both operating systems AND hardware now. Additionally the software that is coming out of Apple is without a doubt some of the best I've ever seen.

I've been a Windows PC user for over 10 years and barely gave a second look at Apple. I was near an Apple store when the keynote occurred and I ended up spending 2 hours seeing what Apple was up to. I never thought I would say this but Apple has made a switcher out of me. Immediately after the keynote, I placed an order for the dual 2GHz G5, a 23" cinema display, a 17" display and an iSight.

We need to swallow our pride people... and give Apple credit where it is due. They have DEFINITELY come around full circle. For the first time in my life, I can say that I find myself more interested in the technologies occurring in the Mac camp than what I am occurring in the Windows PC market place. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I agree with Eugenia Loli-Queru regarding the pricing of $1999 for the workstation, IMHO, if they priced their low end at around $1800 then they would really grab a market.

You can get it for less than $1800 if you order the low-end G5 without the super drive. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Pixlet - cool for a developer's show and a few production houses. Will not be useful for the average home user for a while, though. Maybe when we have GBit ISPs."

Don't forget the thousands of colleges around the world that run media courses. Also there are plenty of advanced amateur and semi-pro video and film makers.

Apple do right to target this market - these are people who spend money. The same applies to the music industry. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? " There's nothing really innovative or ground-breaking, but good steady progress."

Are you kidding me, the advancements in Panther alone were incredibly innovative and ground breaking.

The more I read the comments from my fellow computer users, the more I think that they simply have a chip on their shoulder and are afraid of having their egos bruised somehow. As I mentioned in my above post, we need to give credit where credit is due. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Yes, I agree that Panther isn't all that innovative, but same with 10.1 - but it was far better than 10.0 because it actually pushes OS X as far as it can go. I'm not sure about Panther, but I'm pretty optimistic about it. Meanwhile what I would suspect is that Panther was mostly being optimized for 970, as oppose to Jaguar. In other words, who knows - Panther may be a speed demon.

Besides, the highlight of the show is the G5s. Now, you complain about the speed of the RAM used in the machines, but frankly, the overall speed of the machines is very good for its price. Maybe not so in comparison with the highest end one. Surely I wouldn't recommend the cheapest, I would recommend mid-range or highest end. The lowest end has the least bang for the buck, and it is not because of the RAM. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? ">>>I agree with Eugenia Loli-Queru regarding the pricing of $1999 for the workstation, IMHO, if they priced their low end at around $1800 then they would really grab a market."

>>"You can get it for less than $1800 if you order the low-end G5 without the super drive."

Also, take the Super drive out of the lowest-end model and you're well whenin the appropriate price point that i think you're looking for. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >Are you kidding me, the advancements in Panther alone were incredibly innovative and ground breaking

If you actually read the article, you will see that they are not really. Last year's Jaguar was innovative, this year's Panther is just a build up upon Jaguar's technologies with no real NEW and unseen before features. Expose is a good feature though, I liked that one. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? With these new machines, Apple surpassed Wintels by a mile. Intel still has no desktop Itanium in the coming months.

It's too bad my iBook is too slow for the iSight. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >Apple surpassed Wintels by a mile

Re-read the article. Slowly. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:10:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Eugenia, I think you need to hold yourself to your own standards... if you are going to criticize the poor journalist sitting next to you because he was impressed by the Expose demo, and whine about how people are so easily impressed by things that would be obvious if only they knew how everything worked internally... then you shouldn't criticize Quartz Extreme for doing resizing less smoothly than BeOS. You know well that it's a case of comparing Apples and oranges (heh) -- BeOS is able to be so fast because it has a very simple, straightforward, low level rendering engine. No vector-based graphic transformations, no alpha blending, no composition layer, no non-rectangular windows. OS/X's screen renderer is an order of magnitude more ambitious regarding the features it supports, so of course it's going to take more CPU power than BeOS. Not that being slow is good, but that was a design tradeoff that Apple consciously decided, and IMHO it was the right one, since in another year of optimizations and hardware speedups, OS/X will be as fast as BeOS *and* have the cool features too. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? " There's nothing really innovative or ground-breaking, but good steady progress."

Are you kidding me, the advancements in Panther alone were incredibly innovative and ground breaking.

The more I read the comments from my fellow computer users, the more I think that they simply have a chip on their shoulder and are afraid of having their egos bruised somehow. As I mentioned in my above post, we need to give credit where credit is due.

Name some reallly innovative features in Panther? Things Linux, *BSD, and Windows haven't already had in some form for years? I can assure you the list is short

The PPC970 is nice, but it's not gonna be alone on the desktop for long, so Apple's still got a long way to go to be undisputed king-of-the-hill Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Yes, I agree that Panther isn't all that innovative, but same with 10.1 - but it was far better than 10.0 because it actually pushes OS X as far as it can go."

Rajan, give me a break. You must not have seen the expo. Exposé all by itsely was enough of an innovative technology in Panther to consider a truly innovative OS. Thankfully, there was so many more innovations. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? ... when someone would say that GCC is far more optimized for RISC that the x86. I guess there is one born every day, GCC is optimized teh #$@$ out of x86, it is far from optimal when it comes to the RISC backend. It is a known fact, there are far more developers in the gcc field working on the x86 than in other platform, and the risc backend has had endemic performance issues (when compared to the cisc, mostly x86 side of things).

... but please do not let that get in the way of the Apple bashing. Of course Apple is the ONLY company that publishes benchmarks that favor their products right? Of course Intel has never played around with spec stuff either, oh no siree bob those flags for benchmarks in their compiler suite are there just for fun? Almost every other commercial compiler product has benchmark specific optimizations where it schedules hand coded optimizations for the specific benchmark, is that somehow fairer?

And statements like these " while the vast majority of the C/C++ developers in the x86 Windows land actually use the much faster and much more optimized for P4/Xeons/HT Intel ICC compiler." Are plain wrong most code for intel is developed using MS tools. Oh, and all those x86 computers running linux/BSD/et al.... what compiler do they run? Just curious do they use the actual Intel compilers? no.

Not trying to defend apple, but trying to portrait them as the only thieve in a land of thieves is ridiculous. Welcome to industry.... Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "this year's Panther is just a build up upon Jaguar's technologies with no real NEW and unseen before features. Expose is a good feature though, I liked that one."

But Expose IS a REAL NEW and unseen feature. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? > since in another year of optimizations and hardware speedups, OS/X will be as fast as BeOS *and* have the cool features too.

Sorry, but OSX is out for 2-3 years now. If you are telling me that I had to wait FOUR years in order to get something as simple as smooth scrolling/resizing, then I find the Apple decision to go with vectors, BAD. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Eugenia is correct to point out where many of the "innovations" that are included in Panther have been included in other OS's in the past. However to be fair, no other OS contains the complete package of innovations in Panther. So while Panther might be evolutionary rather then revolutionary, it should be commended for including numerous "innovations" into such a compelling package.

I haven't been a Mac user for long(six months), but I find it interesting how people(mostly PC people) are willing to dismiss anything that Apple does so easily. Give credit where credit is due. Apple has put something together a great box.

Personally, I look forward to getting a G5 to go next to my numerous Linux boxes. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >But Expose IS a REAL NEW and unseen feature.

Yes, and I gave credit to it, didn't I? It is just a new way of dealing with windows clutter. Others are using virtual desktops, but Apple, because it has QE at hand, they use this way. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "The PPC970 is nice, but it's not gonna be alone on the desktop for long, so Apple's still got a long way to go to be undisputed king-of-the-hill"

They are the king of the hill now. And because IBM has said the 970 has a LOT of room to ramp up, I would certinly expect them to retain that lead. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >And because IBM has said the 970 has a LOT of room to ramp up

And so has Pentium4 and the new chip. Intel also has a lot of Mhz margins. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Are you kidding me, the advancements in Panther alone were incredibly innovative and ground breaking.

Sorry, my jaw did not drop on a single of Panther's feaure. I have seen all of them in one or the other form before, and a lot of the features are ones that users begged for since 10.0 (e.g. labels, fast searches, fax support, proper file dialogs). Other features like fast user switching, file system level encryption or video conferencting are standard in Windows XP. The most interesting thing is Expose, but as Eugenia wrote, that is almost trivially after QuartzGL which was introduced in 10.2. In this case, the credit goes to 10.2.

The most impressive thing about Apple's product presentations is Steve Jobs' ability to catch the audience's' attention. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I'd guess it's two catagories. First there are the Mac advocates who will buy whatever the top of the line is (even on thin credit), and then there are the commercial users who need $3000 systems.

The first catagory are already committed to the Mac.

How many of the second group will "Switch" based on these systems? I don't think many. Apple has had a performace edge in the past (with 604 chips at around 120MHz, old days) and it didn't make a big difference then. My judgement based on that (and other history like the failure of DEC's Alpha) is that fractional speed differences are not sufficient to change history. I think people will keep buying x86 (and its progeny) until something can beat them by _multiples_ ("twice as fast", "three times as fast") at the same price point.

So I think the bottom line is that even if this performance advantage is real, it is not at the right part of the market (the consumer desktop), and it isn't quite large enough anyway. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Sorry, but OSX is out for 2-3 years now. If you are telling me that I had to wait FOUR years in order to get something as simple as smooth scrolling/resizing, then I find the Apple decision to go with vectors, BAD."

OS X has been out for 2 years and you could have had smooth scrolling for quite some time now. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I would say that Apple did innovate with Panther. They pretty much always innovate, but on the cultural level. I mean really, who the hell uses that 3Ddesk manager thingie today? I know beos is big on osnews, but that's pretty much the only place where it is/was big. Apple merrit is that is does cultural innovation. An online music store isn't new. But Apple music store is the only one that actually makes an impact. Apple is a gateway from the technological interesting tidbits to something that is actually used by people.

I have no idea why you think rendez-vous is a big technological innovation. It's a cultural one. There are other, older network setups that allowed service discovery and so on. They just didn't have the impact like rendez-vous has. Sherlock 3? Forgotten Watson already? The point of sherlock 3 is that people are actually using it. I'm pretty sure that somewhere some obscure system used hardware accelerated graphics constantly.

Apples innovation lies in the fact that they are able to make obscure barely used technological features into mainstream functionality. Functionality that people are able to use (not way too complex), and actually use.

Btw, why are people constantly saying that GCC produces better code for ppc than for intel? It's not. In fact, the reverse is true. There are alot more and bigger companies that have invested time and money to optimise gcc for intel, than for ppc.
I think it's pretty fair to use the same compiler, and a similar system (unix) to do spec tests. Yeah, they could have used commercial compilers on intel, they also could have used commercial compilers for the G5.
Actual usefull and objective tests lie in the real application benchmarks (photoshop, mathematica, quake3,..). They will show you the importance of the entire system design (memory buses) Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Stew: exactly. Nice comment. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? first you say:

"We were also not told if these Mac apps were specifically optimized for the G5, e.g. if they were versions that will never see the light of day on a retail box"


and later

" Apple did the SPEC benchmarks using GCC 3.3 on both x86 and PPC, while the vast majority of the C/C++ developers in the x86 Windows land actually use the much faster and much more optimized for P4/Xeons/HT Intel ICC compiler. Then, you will probably find out that Apple's numbers are not really that fair"


So, what is fair ? If Apple uses an optimised version of Photoshop and Mathematica for the G5 it isnt a fair comparison because the windows applications arent the same? But if Apple doesnt use the optimised Intel compilers, then the benchmarks arent fair because intel processors can score higher?

you can twist any benchmark in any way you want, because they are arbitrary. Using optimised compilers or applications is as ARBITRARY as using non-optimised applications or compilers. It is just marketing and hype to release a product. IBM, Sun, Intel, AMD, etc do this benchmark bending all the time but, for some weird reason, Apple is singled out more. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I gotta say, I was impressed, just like that journalist, with the eye-candy of Exposé.

And. big fat DUH, of course it uses QE.

I was even more impressed, though, with the USEFULLNESS of this feature. It is not simply flash, but a nice visual feature to aid in PRODUCTIVITY, just like how the genie/scale minimize effect is more than just fancy-cause-I-can, but a visual confirmation to what is happening.

Get over the underlying tech and look at what your can DO with the tech, how it helps. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Your article did not talk about panther being a factor in speed. There can be an arguement made that the G5 and Panter optimization still needs to be worked out.

The benchmarks are as usual a pony show for the masses. And to be Honest I think Steve Jobs actually believs his hype at this point. While I am a MAC person, I do not like the phony benchmarks Steve uses.

As for the optimization of the softeare during the tests, it will all pan out after some people get there hands on the new G5's

The article had a negative tone toward the whole thing, and I think the objective look at where is was announced needs to be factored in. They are showing it to the developers to get them motivated. And with that you do not want to go on stage and say " we finally caight up"

And Apple has surpassed the x86 mnachines in some respects. Other than the CPU's it looks like Apple is heading down the right path. And it seems that is what the article was missing. The look at utilizations of new technology (hypertransport, ect) And if you consider the speed roadmaps of INTEL and IBM both increasing a GHz then that speed increases will infact favor IBM proportionally. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >So, what is fair ?

You don't read carefully. I am talking about special versions of apps in the demo that won't see themselves in RETAIL for people to duplicate these performances. The ICC is available for all. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? OS X has been out for 2 years and you could have had smooth scrolling for quite some time now.

What? I'm writing this on a Mac I bought this year, and scrolling in Safari is not nearly as fast as Net+ used to be on my 300MHz BeOS box. After all, if scrolling had never been an issue for OS X, why did Jobs make such a great deal out of the fast scrolling in Preview?

As I get from your comments, you have only seen the demo but never owned a MacOS X computer, is that assumption correct? If so, I'd recommend you to first spend a week with a current Mac (or better, one that's two years old) before praising the smooth scrolling of OS X. Things look a lot faster in demos because you don't notice how long it takes after a click until something happens. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Anonymous: Anyway, back to this article, I agree with Eugenia Loli-Queru regarding the pricing of $1999 for the workstation, IMHO, if they priced their low end at around $1800 then they would really grab a market. To make it even more tempting, why not offer a monitor/PowerMac bundle. Who on earth DOESN'T buy a computer without a monitor?

Most OEMs do that for workstations. Sony, Dell, HP, IBM, AlienWare, Gateway, etc. does that for higher end machines. And personally, I prefer it that way. For professionals, monitor preferences would differ from person to person. For example, I prefer CRTs in general. Most of my family prefer LCD, of varrying types - and they aren't even professionals! (neither am i either :-P).

Brian F.: Considering that Apple is competing against an illegal monopoly, their products probably have to be 60% better to gain market share.

The courts proved that Microsoft illegally maintained their OS monopoly by extending it to other markets, not optain their monopoly. In other words, Windows is a completely legal monopoly, IE isn't. And... oh wait, I promised not to enter the antitrust is evil debate again. Frankly, Microsoft is a rather easy target for the really low end market, and there is so little people actually realizing that.

Besides, you misunderstand marketing altogether. It is not how much better your are in real terms against your competitors, it is how much better consumers think you are better against your competitors. In other words, engineering plays little part in it.

Brian F.: Are you kidding me, the advancements in Panther alone were incredibly innovative and ground breaking.

Like fast user switching? Oh wait, dozens of OS's done that. Or live queries in Finder? Oh wait, BeOS. Like video conferencing? Oh wait, been there done that. Using UFS... wait, wasn't that lifted from another OS? Heck, probably the only think truly innovative is the desktop-wide "wallet" system - but that's not even a new idea, KDE have been working on it for months without any cue from Apple.

As I mentioned in my above post, we need to give credit where credit is due.

And credit is not due. Innovation doesn't determine the success of the product. So what if the product isn't innovative? As if that matters through out capitalism's history. Innovation is only useful if you have present it via marketing to your target audience. Otherwise, it is just plain useless. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with Apple being not innovative in this release.

Roland: With these new machines, Apple surpassed Wintels by a mile.

You mean prior to the machines, Wintels had been thousands of miles ahead of Apple? Man. :-P Even Apple's benchmarks don't show much of a performance gain Intel can't beat within months.

Jeremy Friesner: OS/X's screen renderer is an order of magnitude more ambitious regarding the features it supports, so of course it's going to take more CPU power than BeOS.

Consumers, if they are searching for those kind of responsiveness, couldn't care less how Apple's system is far more complex with that of BeOS and it's close relative Windows XP. But then again, how many consumers you know go into a Apple store and complain about it having slow scrolling speeds? Heck, if I was using a Mac, that would be the least of my problems :-P. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Re-read the article. Slowly

The article isn't that good.. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Not to sound like a troll, but Rendezvous isn't really innovative. Its just a renamed "ZeroConf" that has been on linux/bsd platforms for years.

Just saying...... Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I have read your article and Apple has surpassed Wintel by a mile. The Mac software not optimized for the PPC970, running on a GHz speed up and the Windows versions are.

Quote: "Apparently, the PC they tested with, it's not the fastest P4 money can buy."

The 3.06GHz Xeon is the fastest processor from Intel. Intel's website doesn't show any 3.2GHz Xeon processors. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? In terms of compilers and benchmarks, I think "fair" misses the point. What I want is information. Show me results with both the fastest and the most commonly used compilers on both platforms. I can balance them myself, against my wants and needs.

(Is GCC the most commonly used compiler on either platform right now, or the fastest? If it is neither, that makes it a somewhat arbitrary choice.) Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I'm with stew and rajan - an excellent article, Eugenia! Very balanced and fair. This gives a much more realistic look at the G5 and Panther than most of what I've seen.

As a side note, as Eugenia said, the high end model is the one worth getting. It's getting into workstation territory. Right now, there's something that may not come again for who knows when. Because the iMac's and eMac's are the consumer models, that leaves the current Power Macs in sort of a limbo. They're offering a dual 1.25 GHz model starting at $1500.00. Not a bad opportunnity! Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >The article isn't that good..

It is good if you happen to agree with it. It isn't good if you don't, possibly because the distortion field around you is too high. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? This is the thing that makes me chuckle the most when it comes to Mac users...when something new comes to a MAC they think it's amazing and innovative and they say...HA HA...we're the best we've got feature X now...

The problem is that Apple really has never come up with anything that is an incredibly dramatic departure from that which came before it...

Exhibit A... the Apple I and II computers...there were several computers of arguably superior capabilities available at their price point

Exhibit B... the MacOS interface...stolen from Xerox PARC...that's right, outright STOLEN

Exhibit C... MacOS X...BOUGHT from NeXT, yes NeXT was truly innovative, but 90% of MacOS X's innovation comes from NeXT technology

Exhibit D... the iPod...i have nothing else to say about that, MP3 players have been around since Napster!!!

There are only two reasons why Apple even APPEARS innovative, the amazing Steve Jobs reality distortion field and the fact that Apple's implementations are usually among the best of their kind, sometimes by a very wide margin. The second of these reasons is an excellent testament to Apple design and a reason to buy Apple products, however to call anything to come out of Apple particularly innovative is quite a stretch I would say. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I was even more impressed, though, with the USEFULLNESS of this feature

We'll see wether or not it's usable when we have used it. But until then, we can only speculate, nothing more. I remember the comments after Aqua was introduced for the first time and people were honestly convienced that Dock magnification (which is now turned off by default OS X) was a useful feature. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "I'd guess it's two catagories. First there are the Mac advocates who will buy whatever the top of the line is (even on thin credit), and then there are the commercial users who need $3000 systems.

The first catagory are already committed to the Mac.

How many of the second group will "Switch" based on these systems? I don't think many."

Apple said that their low-end system (which comes with a Super drive mind you) is $2,000. Take out the Super drive, and the price goes down a few more hundred. If thats not inexpensive-enough for you, its important to remember that they're still selling the G4s... now at a STEEP discount.


"Apple has had a performace edge in the past (with 604 chips at around 120MHz, old days) and it didn't make a big difference then."

They also had an edge with the G3s and and G4s (at the beginning of their lifetime. Unfortunately, there was still a mis-perceptions about speed because the public wasn't informed about the MHz myth. Now, with a more informed public, and a fantastic processor being released alongside Panther, I'd say Apple has a winner on their hands.


"My judgement based on that (and other history like the failure of DEC's Alpha) is that fractional speed differences are not sufficient to change history. I think people will keep buying x86 (and its progeny) until something can beat them by _multiples_ ("twice as fast", "three times as fast") at the same price point."

Yes, people WILL continue to buy PCs, but Apple is simply gunning for a few market share points at this time. I think their current offering will allow them to do this without a doubt.


"So I think the bottom line is that even if this performance advantage is real, it is not at the right part of the market (the consumer desktop), and it isn't quite large enough anyway."

As long as they grow and or remain profitable... thats all that matters most. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? So Brian, you named one. Anything else? Maybe folder encryption? Oh wait, my mistake, done that. Or how about, *gasp*, built in faxing? Oh, oh, oh, Font Book! Face it, Panther isn't as nearly as innovative as Jaguar. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? It is good if you happen to agree with it. It isn't good if you don't, possibly because the distortion field around you is too high.

Sure, it's "my" distortion field. Fact is that you based that article on very flakey arguments and not confirmed facts. "They used special versions of photoshop, and you won't be able to buy it" is an obvious implication you are trying to make.

But hey, pageviews are more important than good information right? Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Sorry, but OSX is out for 2-3 years now. If you are telling me that I had to wait FOUR years in order to get something as simple as smooth scrolling/resizing, then I find the Apple decision to go with vectors, BAD.

Microsoft waited till Win2K to bring stability to Windows. Although most people forget that Microsoft had two operating systems that were top notch in stability in the 80ies(MS Xenix and MS OS/2).

The resizing bit is important but it's not that serious of a problem. I don't resize my apps often I guess. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "I'm writing this on a Mac I bought this year, and scrolling in Safari is not nearly as fast as Net+ used to be on my 300MHz BeOS box."

you may need to get a newer machine.


"After all, if scrolling had never been an issue for OS X, why did Jobs make such a great deal out of the fast scrolling in Preview?"

Because it was an issue in earlier versions of OS X... especially so on earlier hardware.


"As I get from your comments, you have only seen the demo but never owned a MacOS X computer, is that assumption correct?"

I've never owned... but used them all the time. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Not to sound like a troll, but Rendezvous isn't really innovative. Its just a renamed "ZeroConf" that has been on linux/bsd platforms for years."

Ummmm... No. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Exhibit B... the MacOS interface...stolen from Xerox PARC...that's right, outright STOLEN

I don't know many thieves who pay for their stolen goods... Get your facts straight. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Apple said that their low-end system (which comes with a Super drive mind you) is $2,000. Take out the Super drive, and the price goes down a few more hundred. If thats not inexpensive-enough for you, its important to remember that they're still selling the G4s... now at a STEEP discount

But that's not the system that can beat Intel on price/peformance, is it?

Yes, people WILL continue to buy PCs, but Apple is simply gunning for a few market share points at this time. I think their current offering will allow them to do this without a doubt.

I figure (gut feel) that the $3000 system market is about 5% of less of the whole market. Will taking some small slice of that 5% be effective in actuall numbers.

My answer is no, on the other hand, it will keep advocates like you arguing ... which may be all the benefit Steve is after with his $3000 showpiece. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I know that Eugenia will probably mod me down for this, but this site has become into more and more of a Mac-bashing session. This isn;t helped by many of the news articles that Eugenia chooses... not to mention articles like this which cast a negative shaddow on a great day for Mac users and the computing industry.

I would leave I didn't feel the need to take all the trolls that Eugenia has manged to garner for her OS agenda. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Exhibit B... the MacOS interface...stolen from Xerox PARC...that's right, outright STOLEN

I don't know many thieves who pay for their stolen goods... Get your facts straight.

They paid because they were caught in the act. 'Nuff said.

And it's very telling that this was the only place in my argument that you found a (rather insignificant IMHO) weakness. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? That's right, Xerox got Apple stock in exchange for being able to take a peek at their innovations. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "But that's not the system that can beat Intel on price/peformance, is it?"

Steve showed a demo which detailed how the mid-range tower beat the P4 also. Simply take out the Super drive and you have a very cost-concious tower Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Hate to break it to you, but if it wasn't for OSNews we wouldn't be running an XServe and I wouldn't be considering getting an Apple to play around with at home.

They're not biased - I found Eugenia's recap to be very well-balanced. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Not to sound like a troll, but Rendezvous isn't really innovative. Its just a renamed "ZeroConf" that has been on linux/bsd platforms for years."

Ummmm... No.

Ummm... Yes. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Apple said that their low-end system (which comes with a Super drive mind you) is $2,000. Take out the Super drive, and the price goes down a few more hundred. If thats not inexpensive-enough for you, its important to remember that they're still selling the G4s... now at a STEEP discount.

Personally, at their "steep" discount (which is really a couple of hundred dollars) is not worth the price. Take the $1,600 Dual 1.25GHz G4. I would get far more with a AlienWare Hive-Mind with Pentium 4 @ 2.66GHz, 512MB DDR PC3200, NVIDIA GeForce™ FX 5600 256MB and Samsung combo drive for $59 less. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? @ raGan r

Roland: With these new machines, Apple surpassed Wintels by a mile.

You mean prior to the machines, Wintels had been thousands of miles ahead of Apple? Man. :-P Even Apple's benchmarks don't show much of a performance gain Intel can't beat within months.

Ahem. Well, Intel processors were faster before the arrival of these speed demons(G5). Apple benchmarks don't reflect the PPC970 processors entirely(os and apps aren't native 64-bits). It's like an i8086 DOS app running on a i80386 processor. It's gaining speed because of the increased MHz count. But the sofware running on the Xeon's where optimized. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Exhibit B... the MacOS interface...stolen from Xerox PARC...that's right, outright STOLEN"

Thats funny, considering the fact that Xerox was compensated for the intallectual property which Apple got... and radically changed. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Well, they don't earn anything from that. Why should they sell the machines cheaper? There is no reason for that, because there is no other stuff Apple could sell to the normal user. Everything else (software like Final Cut Pro, Emagic, etc.) is for the power user, and they will buy anyway (hardware and software). So, it is all about profit. And yes, the Panther release is not so innovative, but it shows nice progress of technology introduced with Jaguar. Well, and scrolling is fast enough! Who cares? I mean, if I scroll too fast, I can't read it anymore...where is the point to this discussion?
Interesting to see is the move from Steve to his former arch-enemy IBM (the new one seems to be Microsoft .

Greetings...
Vax (nice article by the way Eugenia....) Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? from what i've read on the net the version of GCC used by apple in their benchmarks doesn't support SSE this no doubt would have some affect on the benchmarks, also the fact that GCC is nowhere near as efficent a compiler as ICC.
When will the first of these G5's be in consumer's hands? it be interesting for someone then to run a series of benchmarking tests.

As for the future of the P4 well the 3.2GhZ model is the last of the Northwood CPU's. Prescot will be out on the market later on in the year and there is talk that Intel will remarket it as P5. From what i've read it can scale up to 5Ghz. Has 1meg L2 cache onboard as well as a new instruction set extension (PNI). As well as that supposely Intel have being doing some serious work on it to improve the Hyperthreading performance. Throw in the arrival of PCI-Express and SATA2 then next year to 18months is going to be an interesting time. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >>>>"Ummmm... No."

>>>"Ummm... Yes."

Ummmm... No. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I think the key to understanding Apple is to understand that they are further diverging from the market as a whole. Their showpiece systems lead them away from the center of the market, again.

If you look at Clayton Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma" you'll see some graphs that put it in sharp perspective. When faced with a too-competetive technology, existing suppliers may retreat "up market". They expand their functionality in the ways important to existing users, and raise their prices.

That strategy does give them longer life, and help the short term bottom line, but it doesn't fix the basic problem. They cannot touch the price performance of the newer (and more mass-market) competition. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Ummm... Yes.

Ummm, really, no. Apple was first to come out with a zeroconf implementation. Mandrake only since 9, other linux and bsd systems still don't have zeroconf support. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "I'm writing this on a Mac I bought this year, and scrolling in Safari is not nearly as fast as Net+ used to be on my 300MHz BeOS box."

Brian: you may need to get a newer machine.

So much for Macs lasting longer than PCs, I guess.

Brian: Because it was an issue in earlier versions of OS X... especially so on earlier hardware.

And the proof that Panther also doesn't have this problem is at....? And Eugenia reported that (IIRC) Jaguar on the G5 had slow scrolling and resizing. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? apple is offer a lot more performance. That is big news.

Apple now has a 64 bit processor with monster bandwidth. Also a big deal.

Apple now offers a desktop mini-tower for $1299 ($1270 sans analog modem). That is huge. that opens up the enterprise market

You can get the G5 for $1770 already, just lose the writable DVD and the analog modem.

Its not jobs that should be accused of using the reality distortion field this time, its the people that just can't accept that apple has executed. Moreover, i have no idea how you can really judge, that apple is still behind in performance when you have not even used the thing in real applications. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? you may need to get a newer machine.
You mean I need to replace my 4 month old Mac with a newer one just to match the UI performance of my old 300MHz Celeron?
And you still call that innovation?

was an issue in earlier versions of OS X... especially so on earlier hardware.

No, it's an issue on present versions, even with QuartzGL. Quartz' font rendering appears to be the bottleneck. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Eugenia, get your priorities straight. Is silky smooth scrolling / resizing so important to you? You can't do your work if you don't have these features, right?

I mean, at least Expose will mean a productivity boost. Better VPN support should ease the life of many. Font management seems to be a big thing for designers. Now, smooth resizing...............please! focus on something that is worth it.

I agree that Apple doctored the benchmarks, but so does Intel. It is no justfication, though....

Still, the Dual G5 should be one Kick-ass machine, and as Steve said, the architecture is there now to go to better computers, faster... Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? from what i've read on the net the version of GCC used by apple in their benchmarks doesn't support SSE this no doubt would have some affect on the benchmarks, also the fact that GCC is nowhere near as efficent a compiler as ICC.

Question is if GCC is as efficient as Codewarrior or another compiler on the ppc platform. As far as I have seen on the mailinglist apple engineers primarly optimised compile times of gcc. Not actual performace. (kind of sad really, gcc for ppc is even worse than gcc for x86) Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? According to the white paper published on the G5 vs Xeon vs P4 tests, they didn't use Windows at all. They used Red Hat Linux 9.0, and used GCC 3.3 as the compiler for both platforms. A seperate organization did the tests and I have a feeling nobody got hacked or facked numbers (think nVidia and ATI to consider how much benchmark numbers really matter). So the comparisson is quite accurate, and in fact probably favors the P4 and Xeon more than the G5 (since SPEC doesn't take into account technology in the G5 like AltiVec, and tends to favor x86 and its CISC design over a RISC PPC anyway). Real world tests will probably show an even greater advantage to the G5. The other thing to note for the G5 is its roadmap... it has a roadmap that as IBM had said, "will knock your socks off." It is expected to hit 3GHz in under 12 months, and shortly after that the PowerPC 980 will be coming out, which is based on the Power5 instead of the Power4 (which has huge advantages).

Eugenia: You made a comment about Exposé saying it's just Quartz Extreme, who cares? Well, no! It's not just Quartz Extreme. Apple may be building Quartz Extreme into most of its UI, but it's how it is used that matters. I'm sure Apple could make a bunch of useless but cool effects with QE that do nothing for the user. Exposé on the other hand is an impressive UI advancement that can be expected to improve efficiency for almost everyone that uses it. It's the innovation as a UI tool, not the use of QE, that made most developers gasp in astonishment. I think the fact that it used QE was obvious to anyone remotely knowledgable about Apple technology (a category I don't put journalists in).

This is an unbelievably impressive machine, and in classic Apple fashion not simply for the major announcements that were made, but for all the subtleties that you don't really notice as well. You did notice the searches and that was good... it wasn't even highlighted but it is an extremely impressive advance for Apple (albeit expected as you noted). These machines are being built like workstations, yet are being called personal computers. In one of the demos of a real world test it even showed it crunching out DNA Sequencing (up to 6 times faster than the dual Xeon 3.06GHz btw). Apple made a point of stressing all the RAM it could have too (8GB) and that it was 40 times faster than virtual RAM for exactly the same reason... this is a major workhorse. I've already heard several people comment that they're looking to replace $20,000-$30,000 Sun and HP workstations with $3000-$4000 Dual 2GHz G5's from Apple. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Now look ryan, compare this now with Apple's competitors and not with Apple's old products. Catch up or innovation? Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Eugenia, get your priorities straight. Is silky smooth scrolling / resizing so important to you? You can't do your work if you don't have these features, right?

Sure it important. To me, that is as disturbing as a screen flickering at 60Hz or a PSU with 70dB noise level. The basics must be done properly, as they will affect everything you do on that computer. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? It is good if you happen to agree with it. It isn't good if you don't, possibly because the distortion field around you is too high.

Not to be confused with the height of YOUR distortion field..... sheesh! Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? 1. Open two windows of the same folder
2. Press F3 in one window to show the search pane
3. Type your search keyword/s, then press Search
4. In the other window, create a file/folder that meets the same search configuration

Result: The search results in the first window automatically update to show the creation of the new file (or folder)

Isn't that what it's all about? Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >>>>>"Ummmm... No."
>>>>"Ummm... Yes."
>>>"Ummmm... No."
>>"Ummm... Yes."
>"Ummm, really, no."

I get a feeling that this converstion is going no where ;-)

"OS News = AntiMac"

lol.


apple is offer a lot more performance. That is big news.

This does seem like good news, but how much more performance are we really getting? Apple's benchmarks usualy can't be trusted.

I'd like to see a third party conduct tests using the shrinkwraped versions of cross platform applications. Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere, Avid XpressDV and Lightwave. Then we would have a clearer picture of how the G5s stack up to their windows competition.

Don't flame me - I'm not saying that the G5 is slower than a P4 or Xeon system, i'm saying I don't know and i'd like to be able to find out from reliable tests. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? A bit of a different question from your article, Eugenia: Can you explain why the DDR 333 RAM on the low-end model really slows down the machine compared to the DDR 400? I guess I don't understand why the CPU would be waiting for the RAM. Thanks! Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Rendezvous = Zeroconf = not-innovation for Apple

Don't believe me...

http://www.zeroconf.org/

Maybe I'm ignorant, but was Rendezvous even thought of in 1999? Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Where are the folder tabs and the keyboard app launch like I had in OS9? damnit ---- I wont hold euginia's comments against her cause she's a cool greek like the rest of us greeks, but I did find some of her article biased. There is nothing wrong with incorporating things into your OS that other OSes have, makes the user experience better. Also, take into consideration that even if you have a kickass system, without the proper OS it wont run optimally. jaguar is NOT optimized for 64bit operations therefore it will take its sweet time with things.


When 10.3 comes out, along with a top of the line G5, that machine will scream....now if only we had a few more additions like the ones I mentioned before Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? It's d e f i n i t e l y, not d e f i n a t e l y.

How do you get "definately"? Even if i spelled it alpha-phonetically, I wouldn't get that mutated
spelling, it would look more like d e f i n e t e l y,
but it's not, mind you, it's d e f i n i t e l y.

And so you say you're a techie and spelling and grammar
are of little concern to you, but what you don't realize
is that it only takes several passes through a trained eye (i.e. reading) to reveal the truths about the English language. That which you have not accomplished yet it seems, so one might also infer the level of your knowledge, or lack of. They say ignorance is bliss, but I like to take it a bit further and say that ignorance destroys your reputation and that I can't agree with someone that can't even spell definitely.

And who said innovation needs to take place every year?? Apple is innovating in that they're the first to bring a consumer based desktop/workstation of 64 bit caliber to the grander market. Oh forget the alpha workstations, I never had the chance to buy one of those at a local shop. Measuring apple by their new os features is ridiculous, they're still innovative even if they don't come out with anything new. Innovation takes place over a vast time period and is not driven by marketing desires.

I'm getting tired of all you bloggers with nothing interesting to say. The web is thy enemy. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? IIRC it's the work of an Apple engineer. There was an interesting video on Rendez-Vous on the Apple Developer Connection member site in the 'View ADC TV' section. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I'm getting tired of all you bloggers with nothing interesting to say. The web is thy enemy.

And I'm getting sick of spelling trolls like you. If you don't like how we spell...see the article above this one about becoming an OSNews member and pay to have them add a spelling checker.

Just because things aren't spelled correctly doesn't invalidate the entire point of a statement, even you, a great spelling god I'm sure, makes typos once in awhile, correct?

Get a life, or go become an English teacher if you hate how we spell. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? To the 'owner' of this website and her friends,
Why keep referring to BEOS. It's dead. D.E.A.D. Stop comparing every other OS to it. Of course, you might not agree, but it's dead. Just too damn stubborn. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Sorry, I'm not willing to wade through all the comments, but the first page has people under the impression that gcc was used on Windows. It was not. In fact, the PC was running Linux and the compiler used was gcc. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? That was an excellent review, it is simply the truth minus all of the recent trolling and the Steve Jobs Patented "Reality Distortion Field." I think they certainly did go overboard on calling the dual 2Ghz G5 the "Fastest PC in the World." But for me, it's about more than speed... it's about the overall quality and for that reason, I probably will be buying a G5 when my finaces allow. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I would buy one!
I bought my Blue and White G3 when it first came out, chose a middle-line model, added some RAM, and I still run perfectly well, and I have not made ANY upgrades to it since I bought it! These machines are made to last, not like the no name (or brand for that matter) x86 machines that you need to replace, or update, every 2 years. I expect my mac to last me another 2-3 years. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Rendezvous = Zeroconf = not-innovation for Apple

Don't believe me...

http://www.zeroconf.org/

Maybe I'm ignorant, but was Rendezvous even thought of in 1999?

Yeah, but Apple was the first one to actually use it in their system.. By the way, it was an Apple engineer that started the zeroconf comittee. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? You mean prior to the machines, Wintels had been thousands of miles ahead of Apple? Man. :-P Even Apple's benchmarks don't show much of a performance gain Intel can't beat within months.

rajan r, you continually proport that IBM will not be able to remain competative in terms of clock speeds with Intel. What advantage does Intel have over the world's largest manufacturer of integrated circuits which makes this so? Please tell me, as from my perspective IBM has a radically superior core design than the P4 and a moderate advantage in terms of manufacturing processes.

Your assumption seems to be that Intel will roll out with a new processor in a few months while IBM sits on their hands and does nothing to increase the speed of the PPC970. Yet IBM has announced a 3GHz PPC970 before the end of the year... can they deliver? Well they sure as hell delivered on PPC970 to begin with... I remember naysayers like you claiming (without any evidence) that PPC970 would not be available in 2003. Well, it's June, and it's available. Don't expect IBM to stand idly by while Intel ramps up the P4's clock speed. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? they know everything about computer performance and OS inovation...

Stop reading the site you have nothing to learn. There are some people who are really interrested in hearing what other people think and contributing to the discussion.

There are people who know a lot more about these computers then you do. And you might learn from them if you stop spewing emotional stuff about your favorite computer all over the screen.
I have a tibook, I2(800,1GHz,1.5Ghz), Xeon, P4, sledgehammer, Alpha Marvel, SGI altix and a power 4 all with in about 20 feet of me. They are all good for different things. If you quite down you might learn something from the other people on this site.

I guess I will just have to stop reading the comments.

Thanks for a reasonable article. Apple has entered the workstation market. Can they replace SGI and Sun? Can they get the real $$ apps ported? Can they keep compatiblity with M$ while they do so?

What do people think of the architecture slides on the web site? They are similar to 7505 and I2 chipsets.

The sledgehammer desktop chips sets and server chips are less exciting the apples and intels. Do people agree?

Will IBM really ship a Linux desktop based on a 970? Will they use the same chipset as Apple?

When are these boxes going to ship in quanitity?

Can apple compete with the Linux desktop market?

I don't know but it is more interresting then people flaming people because they have a different opinion. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I would buy one!
I bought my Blue and White G3 when it first came out, chose a middle-line model, added some RAM, and I still run perfectly well, and I have not made ANY upgrades to it since I bought it! These machines are made to last, not like the no name (or brand for that matter) x86 machines that you need to replace, or update, every 2 years. I expect my mac to last me another 2-3 years.

You've got it bad, man. ;-).

I say that as a long-time (since the 70's) computer user, and long-time Mac user (1984-1995).

Macs have strengths, but you should recognize that Apple is geared to selling to people just like you. People who will pop a thousand or two extra to have a Mac. The up-market migration works as long as there are enough of you. But if enough people are like me (we stay with the Mac until the price of PCs become just _too_ good), they'll hit trouble.



We'll see how the market breaks out.

I think it's "fat city" with tons of capable PCs for less than a grand ... YMMV. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? It's amazing to me how all the Windows/BeOS/Linux fanboys and fangirls come out of the woodwork immediatly after Apple announces a new hardware or software product and start to hammer it into the ground. I've worked on Windows, Linux and BeOS boxes. I switched to Macs 3 years ago (prior to OS X) and started to really understand what using a computer was about. I wasn't just geeking out, I was getting real work done.
It's not about the MHZ or the benchmarking for me, it's about how comfortable I feel with the device, it's about how I interact with the OS and hardware. That takes a certain level of craftsmanship that Linux/Microsoft or BE have never had and that's what Apple is all about. The speed arguments are irrelevant to me. They have also been irrelevant to Apple for the most part, unfortunatly they have answer to it. I would rather spend $3k on a Mac that's going to be rock soild, reliable and beautifully made then $1k on some slapped together PC from Dell or one built by myself (and I've built quite a few in my time)

Apple will always be king of the hill to me and approx 5 million other folks...and that's cool with me. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? First: Exhibit B... the MacOS interface...stolen from Xerox PARC...that's right, outright STOLEN

AFAIK Steve Jobs paid the managers of XEROX 20.000 shares to have a look at the XEROX PARC operating system. The developers didn't want to show it to Jobs but the managers made a deal with Jobs. XEROX made some good money out of those shares.

NEXT: The spec test was done on Linux (RH9). So no crying about GCC is not optimized for Windows. And I think this trick has shown that GCC is not as fast as some people say. A few months ago it was all GCC is so fast its now almost as fast ICC. Well this has shown it isn't.

Also have a look at this site for view on the whole show from a AMD side of the fence: http://www.amdzone.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1296

NEXT: For me that new Apple G5 looks good and so does OSX. Its just what I need or would want to have. An stable and nice looking OS with a lot of functionality and fast hardware. But I can't afford it. I'm still using a PIII 550MHZ with a (pci) Voodoo III. But then even if I could I wouldn't as Wintel has just a lot more software and hardware.

What if this new piece of killa hardware comes out, like for instance the 3D addon from 3dfx back in the days. Do you think they will have OSX drivers? Heck no and the only chances of it coming on the Mac is if Steve Jobs finds it usefull. I think Apple is not driven consumers (x86) but by Steve Jobs. I mean the rate of new features and stuff. Steve decides whats good for you.

So for me speed, software and support for 3rd party hardware are very imporant. More then looks and hype. But pure speed is not what I need as I'm still contend with my PIII. However I want to play C&C Generals and want to run an OS in VMWARE / VPC as if I was running it on a system I'm running now. So if I would have a PIV the VMWARE guest OS should run like on a native PIII 800 mhz (at least).

I don't understand why they are selling the 1.6 version anyway. And I would go whooh if Apple had introduced a 6 GHZ system or did more then just increase the FSB speed. Like a hardware quicktime encoder / decoder or anything that will decrease the CPU load for tasks that are used a lot. Like what 3D video has done.

Overall I think this is a winner for people who only want to use macs. For more down to earth people, it doesn't really matter how fast Apple machines are, you could even buy one of those top 500 servers. Its the software that counts for the general population and where you can get it and at what price. In europe you will have to realy look for a shop that sells apple's and software. For most people this is to much fuzz. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Can you explain why the DDR 333 RAM on the low-end model really slows down the machine compared to the DDR 400? I guess I don't understand why the CPU would be waiting for the RAM. Thanks!

ok, the CPU runs at 1600MHz, the bus runs at 800MHz, and the RAM runs at 333MHz (all numbers in market-droid-speak, as I'm not sure whether the 800MHz is some DDR number like the 333 is). Will the 400MHz really make a big difference? Maybe, maybe not, as either way the CPU is going to be able to perform 2 operations in the time it takes the bus to get data to it, and the bus can cycle twice in the time it takes the RAM to do anything with it. In other words, the CPU is running at 4 times the speed of the DDR 400 RAM, so why undercut that further by cutting the RAM's speed by ~20%?

and heaven forbid they even think about using 800 MHz RDRAM for their 800-1000MHz system bus with their 1600-2000MHz processors. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? My god, again with the BS. Payment for IP aside, why was Apple innovative on the interface side? The Xerox PARC was a $100K workstation, the first attempt at the modern GUI for PC's was made by Apple in a $10K, that's an order of magnitude less, then a $3K machine. Get it yet? Apple's solution was innovative because it brought it into the realm of personal computing. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Its nice to see that Apple is making these G5s available for less than 2 grand and Apple now making its G4s available for only slightly more than 1 grand.

They ought to be a huge hit Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Panther does look nice.. but this time around I'm definitely not thrilled that it's another $130 upgrade. Last time Jaguar offered quite a bit to make me wanna go out and get it asap, but this actually does feel like a mere point release for the most part.

... and am I the only one severely unfond of a brushed metal Finder? Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? it looks like apple has closed the performancegap between x86 and powerpc, although they're not ahead from an overall picture like they claim to be.

the price/performance-ratio of the biggest new model is-if compared to a 64 bit dual-opteron-system-similar or maybe just a bit worse.
on the other hand, if you compare it to a dual-athlon mp sytem, the situation is very different, while realworld performance of the latter one won't likely be much worse-so that leaves me undecided.

the smaller modells seem to be overpriced, because a single p4 or athlon pc has a much better ppr although not 64 bit, but that will change with the athlon64 in autumn (and if true yamhill), so apple has to improve much those offers pricewise, i guess (question is if they are able to)-it's also the question if ibm will be able to scale up clockspeed to stay competitve to intel and amd in the future, means if apple won't fall behind again.

regarding the latest osx-upgrade: somehow i have the feeling that apple uses its customers as betatester while even letting them pay for the upgrades which make osx that what it was promised to be from the beginning, so if i would be a macuser, i would feel ripped-off having to pay for such minor upgrades.

so is this all enough to stop apples downhillride-to be honest, don't know-depends what cool new features and programs will be delivered for the new g5.
but what i'm missing from apple is a 1000€-pc (+100-200€ apple-design-lifestyle-bonus) with comp. performance and features to the standard-upperclass-pc-guess that would be the real breakthrough imo, but seems not to be possible for apple, otherwise i guess they would've done so since a long time. maybe they should allow clones again (the taiwanese would surely make an apple-pc in that pricerange happen, and maybe apple could buy in parts cheaper as well-whatever...)

all in all, you'd better keep running fast, apple...! Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? My god, again with the BS. Payment for IP aside, why was Apple innovative on the interface side? The Xerox PARC was a $100K workstation, the first attempt at the modern GUI for PC's was made by Apple in a $10K, that's an order of magnitude less, then a $3K machine. Get it yet? Apple's solution was innovative because it brought it into the realm of personal computing.

That's innovation in marketing, something which i never denied Apple was good at...but it's not innovation in TECHNOLOGY which is what my arguments were based on. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Its nice to see that Apple is making these G5s available for less than 2 grand and Apple now making its G4s available for only slightly more than 1 grand.

They ought to be a huge hit

If Apple had thought they could take the fight to the mainstream, they would have at the keynote.

Look, it's fine if individuals out there choose to spend their dime on a Mac (or anything else). I don't have any argument with that. The only reason I'm typing here is that I think the unrealistic expectation that this will radically change thigns shows an terrible disregard for history.

A "huge hit" would be targetting the mainstream, it would be (like the original iMac was) something that could play on TV to the average buyer. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? This guy read the veritest PDF and has comments on it.
http://www.haxial.com/spls-soapbox/apple-powermac-G5/

So for all who want to know: They didn't use SSE nor hyperthreading in the tests. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? This guy read the veritest PDF and has comments on it.
http://www.haxial.com/spls-soapbox/apple-powermac-G5/

So for all who want to know: They didn't use SSE nor hyperthreading in the tests.

You didn't read the posted article I see.

BTW they didn't use native 64-bits optimized Mac applications too. They did use optimized Windows application though. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Rendezvous = Zeroconf = not-innovation for Apple

Don't believe me...

http://www.zeroconf.org/

Maybe I'm ignorant, but was Rendezvous even thought of in 1999?

you are correct rendevous = zeroconf = not-inovation for apple

but

stuart cheshire the guy who "invented" zeroconf and co-chairs the IETF zeroconf working group did base his idea on apple's previous work

the plan for zeroconf was to make TCP/IP work as easily as appletalk

if you look at the recomendations for zeroconf it isnt all that complicated there is nothing special there but if apple hadnt made appletalk it would never have happened

stuart cheshire's rant's on TCP service descovery is archived on his site
http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/NBPIP.html

some quote's

In the Stanford CS department I pull down the Chooser on my Mac,
click on a printer from the list, print on it, walk over and pick up
my printout.

---

>> Can anybody offer a critique of SLP from the perspective of what we
>> already have in AppleTalk? It looks a little complicated to me.

It is horribly complicated. You don't just ask it for a list of printers,
like in the Chooser. You give it a special query string.

he just wanted to print and as he was a student at the time it seems he had a lot of free time on his hands

now stuart works at apple (and hasnt updated bolo in years damn him) and he is the reason we have zeroconf does this precarious series of events lead us to confidently state that zeroconf is a result of inovation from apple

yes.

zeroconf is inspired by apple
financed by apple (partly)
inplemented by apple
evangelised by apple

but really the only reason I posted this is because you obviously dont know what zeroconf is or why it was created. your opinion on this subject is invalid. in short

shut up Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? OH man if they released a G5 laptop that would be sooooo amazing!!!! Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? An SMP 64 bit system, with huge bus speeds. An operating system which updates it's tools/libraries/relevant kernel pieces to the ones of FreeBSD 5. X11 included. Some Linux apis added. More security and better integration in corporate networks.

A couple of weeks ago there was an article on ThinkSecret saying that Apple is asking unix-shops which unix software they are using. Then they go to the unix software vendors, and push to get the software ported to macosx.

It's pretty obvious that the powermac g5 is going against traditional Unix workstations. A blade 2000 costs allot fucking more than a powermac G5.

One of the obvious alternatives is a 4000$ Dual Xeon with Redhat Linux. In this respect it makes every bit of sense to do spec tests with GCC and on Linux. It also makes sense to test Mathematica and motion capturing for example, instead of ripping an audio cd or something like that. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? if a moderator could fix the broken /B tag in that post I would be greatful Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? 1) the G5 will enable apple to steal share from Sun, HP, SGI, etc in the scientific, creative, engineering market.
2) G5 will expand Apple's lead in digital audio and video
3) the $1299 G4 mini-tower will provide a slight boost in volumes and correspondingly market share.
4) Phase two will see greater G5 price/performance improvements and more competitively priced consumer/general office mini-towers, leading to additional market share gains
5) apple's market share goes up. By 2008 it will run between 20 and 30% of the pc market. Linux will also hit around the same and windows takes the remainder.
6) PC-Zealots will cry an ocean of tears and drown themselves in it, sorry couldn't resist that one.

If you'd take your head out of the SPEC ratings and the pointless is it a evolution or revolution arguments you'd see that Apple now has a fully rounded product line that will lead to market share and sales gains without killing margins.

Come on folks did you really think that IBM would sit back and just watch intel dominate the PC CPU business forever. ha ha ha ha ha ha. Do you think that IBM would invest in this little venture while apple priced itself out of the market. Please look at their track record. We are talking about big blue not motorola. You know the company that actually retains people over the age of 40, unlike intel, especially R&D personel. the company that executes. Do you really think that this is it? No no no. This is act one. Just wait til you see the following acts.

Apple and IBM are back and poised to do what counts, gain market share. Watch it cause you can't stop it. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? XFS does not have the live queries feature, at least not the Irix version. Got any proof to the contrary ?

The G5 systems do look like a good deal, especially the dual 2Ghz. I just don't happen to like Macs, otherwise I'd have seriously considered buying one. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Prediction 7) Movie will be released "Pirates of Sillicon Valley - Reloaded" with subtitle "Microsoft fucked and raped IBM and Apple. Now it's payback time" Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The preview of Panther showed some very nice features (the very cool Exposé, the much improved-looking Finder with live-searching and slicker design, Fast User Switching, much improved PDF rendering, and some welcome look & feel adjustments chief among them) and nice built-in functionality (font management app, faxing) but not quite as exciting as the Jaguar preview.

However, I also got the impression that this preview was somewhat muted as there's still more work to do. Whether this is because Panther is a smaller upgrade, or there's still yet more to come (as promised on http://www.apple.com/macosx/panther, and the "100 features" line) I guess we'll just have to wait and see... Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I could be wrong, but I believe that SPEC as an organization has strict rules about reporting results. If they are not submitting "official" results to SPEC, they are only allowed to quote "estimated" results. From this, I would assume that Apple plans to submit official SPEC results to the website. These results would be audited to ensure that they meet the strict rules for compile flag usage. In addition, results reported must be based upon a system (hardware, OS, and compiler) which ships to customers within 3 months of benchmark publication.

So, will they or won't they be publishing official results on www.spec.org??!

If they don't, it seems to me that Apple violated SPEC's rules for using their benchmark... Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >>You mean I need to replace my 4 month old Mac with a newer one just to match the UI performance of my old 300MHz Celeron?


Are you comparing an old Celeron with Win98 to OSX 10.2? Of course Win98 is faster! It's also painfully ugly to look at and had very minimal visual feedback/effects. IMO the eye candy/effects are worth the overhead. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I'm amazed at all these people who would trust the SPEC times of a closed source compiler.

Compilers have replaced benchmark code with handcrafted assembler before, and I would imagine they still do. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? LOL !!! It's nice to see x86 lamers to uknowledge that their hyped machines are actually a lot slower in benchmarks life unless tweaked to death. Expect even less performace in real life usage.

At $3000 the new PowerMac is the BEST desktop system money can buy. Theodore Gray said it best: "why would you buy anything else ?" Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >>Just because things aren't spelled correctly doesn't >>invalidate the entire point of a statement, even you, a >>great spelling god I'm sure, makes typos once in awhile, >>correct?

I don't call it a typo when it happens more than once, that's called plain ignorance. It's a duty to educate the uneducated, otherwise, you will just bitch and complain about how you got laidoff even though you actually have technical talent. Even 2nd graders can spell 'definitely'. And this is a public service, do you realize how most people learn to spell? By reading, and what is osnews filled with? Text. That's right, so you, as a community are an influence on the future generation, or is it that you want a bunch of george w. bush's running the world when you're older? Let's not get off on that rant...

Don't be foolish, education is a necessity, don't mistake it for an option. I have offered more than you can offer with your foolish flaming and un-original opinions. Besides, what good are you if I have both technical talents and literacy skills far above and beyond what you have? Maybe you can ask me if I want fries with that, somebody's got to do it. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? rendezvous:
I am not a big propoponent of Apple, but throuth is that initially zeroconf was started on network programmers' mailing list called net-thinkers in 1997. It was not so new however. First implementation of automatic net config goes to MS I belive. See Windows ME UPnP (not enabled by default though it was easy to enable through control panel). The difference lies in the implementation: Zeroconf/rendezvous uses small DNS packets for service location, UPnP relies on HTTP and XML and tries to define exactly how those services are accessed.
Personally I think that rendezvous/upnp is still highly unsafe (unintended sharing happened to both implementations)
So the first thing to do is to disable service.
benchmarks:
Seen that before: supposely first incarnation of OS X was already faster that intel... but only on Apple web pages. That makes apple quite unreliable in terms of benchmark results.
Panther:
hopefully better as server that previous version. I had stability issues and I did not liked the fact that tools worked only partially:
for example Apache failing around 150-200 on virtual web servers. Directory Services hogging system with higher number of sites.

In general Apple is still in defense. This is why it allways compares Mac hardware to intel (never seen opposite as Intel does not care about Apple) same goes with OS comparisons: Apple against MS, Apple against UNIX (the add with dev/null was really stupid)
As as server is a toy for home users. As a desktop/workstation is as good as Windows (including price)so no specific reasons to switch one way or another.
For now I will stay with FBSD workstation/servers (or unix (not linux) in general) Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Those who can, do. Those who can't become critics and write reviews like this one. If you can do better than you have the right to criticize but I have never heard one...not one...original idea from this reviewer. All she ever does is look at one OS and say how Apple lacks this or that as if it is just a snap to code in every thing you like about other OSes and how Apple is so terrible for not doing so. Apple seems to me to be very aware of the problems in their OS and they are forever improving and addressing those issues on their platform as well as innovating new features/products. To say you were underwhelmed or to say they should have been at this point a long time ago is just naive. What other company listens to their users to this extent and addresses their products deficiencies in the manner that Apple does? It is so easy to point out what someone else is doing wrong but much tougher to do better or what is right or to do it "instantly" as the author seems to think is so easily done. WWDC was great for Apple. They have addressed yet again many of the things they needed to as well as announcing new innovative stuff. How much innovation can you even keep up with? They ditched motorola as they needed to and with the easiest migration path and best overall looking future. They have addressed a lot of those complaints about OS X clearly in the upcoming Panther. They also have kicked out a few good ideas. Not impressed Eugenia? You are a clear product (victim) of the internet age. You have heard about all this technology in advance so it doesn't impress you when it comes out. Apple could never live up to your standards. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I like your style. Tell it like it is!

Luigi Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Somehow (and please be not offended) Apple's way of going on reminds me of a drag show. There is not much performance here, but a lot of glamour, light, colors and presentation. And yes, attitude and bravery. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? it's already apparent apple can do nothing to impress osnews, so just stop writing about them. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I'm sorry for your nostic view on Apple Eugenia, like we are "really supposed to find out" what really went on or secretly went on yesterday when it showcased its new G5 machine.

Just take deap breath, Apple has passed Wintel with IMB. It's not Apple's distortion field, its your own. You have been distorted by Gate's Windows or whatever else you buddy too. Risc is good!

It's not Apples fought that wintel challenges them and they have to turn around and beat them with OS X(unix), 970, 64 bit, Final Cut,etc. Find that on Windoz, you won't. I'm using a Dull right now and I don't see any of that on here. But it did come with Pinball...

Eugenia your the same as the others on here. You complain no matter what Apple does or doesn't. Or there is always a but to every good thing you say about Apple,,,but.. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? apple is relevant again. people that didn't consider apple an option 4 days ago will probably become customers. The G5 and price reductions are part of that. the ongoing software products and improvements and integration are the rest. Osnews does not get this. The world is about sales not benchmarks. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Don't be foolish, education is a necessity, don't mistake it for an option. I have offered more than you can offer with your foolish flaming and un-original opinions. Besides, what good are you if I have both technical talents and literacy skills far above and beyond what you have? Maybe you can ask me if I want fries with that, somebody's got to do it.

You arrogant little prick!!!

How can you say you have skills above mine? Do you know me? Have I revealed what technical skills I have to you in any comprehensive way?

And why is it your job to educate the "inferior" readers of OSNews?

Go become a F*CKING ENGLISH TEACHER!!!

Sorry to the rest of you that I had to stoop to this level to answer an annoying spelling troll. GRRRRRR Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I think its really funny how everybody always talks about speed and how an Intel machine is faster than a Mac. I for one don't care. I have never had the "Fastest computer" because it is always a moving target. I use a Mac, PC with Windows XP and various Linux and *BSD machines and they all have good points and bad points.

I agree with the Anonymous poster above about finding deficiencies in everything and how staying on top of technologies causes us all to want this feature and that.

The best computer is the one that you are most comfortable and efficient with. If you were to use a Mac exclusively for 30 or 60 days you would find the UI to be the best out there. This is something that the Linux UI developers need to study and build on for it to be a desktop OS. It really doesn't matter if you have the fastest computer in the world running Linux or BSD if you cant do simple things like cut and paste from one program to another or run a popular program on it.

OS X is only in it's second version and Panther will be thee third release, I think they have done more in the last few years then any other OS Developer.

Sorry to sound like a Mac zealot. I am just tired of hearing arguments going nowhere.

Cheers,

Sweetsdream Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? GCC PPC traditionaly lagged behind the x86 version. x86 fanatics insisting that we should put Apple/GCC vs Dell/Intel C++ are idiots. That speaks about SPEC "benchmark", let alone comparing different CPU architectures.
The issue here is how can Dell tells us that has a 1089 SPECint result, when it manages only 836 using GCC (the same compiler Apple used).

But I don't really care about benchmarks. I come from a creative background unlike most x86 users who gather into lame sites spending hours of running/analysing meaningless benchmarks. The next PowerMac seems ideal for me and I'll buy it. And CPU SPEC performance is hardly the decision maker. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? http://www.amdzone.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1296

A very interesting read, its abit of an eye opener esp. if you believe what Steve Jobs says about the new G5's.

Ok.. here's a coupel of tiid bits on the G5 and its comparision to the Athlon/operton:

"Back to the G5/PowerPC 970. There is no doubt that IBM has done a great job with the CPU that is a close relative to their server chips. The funny thing is how Jobs claimed that Apple had worked with IBM for years to design the CPU. Unlikely. While Motorola was stalling PowerPC production and dragging Apple along IBM was doing their own PowerPC thing aimed squarely at servers. Apple is not a CPU design firm. IBM is. IBM designed this CPU, and I'm doubtful that Apples input was significant. The PowerPC 970 is impressive though. Up to a 2GHz clock speed, 64 bit support, a 512KB L2 cache, and a 64 KB L1 cache, GHz bus. Contrasted to the available Opteron at 1.8GHz, 64 bit support, 1MB L2 cache, 128KB L1 cache, and 800MHz bus the two seem fairly evenly matched. So let's take a bit of a look at Apple's performance claims."

"....Without specs for the machines they tested it is hard to tell, and the benchmarks can not be validated. Here the Athlon 3200+ smacks the G5 handily, and the Opteron blows it out of the water. Of course so do the other CPUs, and in particular the G5's cousin the Power4 smacks around the fastest workstation masquerading as a desktop on the planet."

Regards the case design, I really liked the G4 tower, but the G5 is just ugly. Is it just me or does the case of the new mac look like a fridge freezer from the front ??

Nice article Eugenia !!

;o)>

Harjtt Tue, 24 Jun 2003 19:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I too tire of hearing this same mythology repeated. What PARC has was good and what Apple was doing was good. PARC's reality would not have been realizable without the inputs of Apple's engineers. One of the critical aspects of this was QuickDraw. Raskin and others were working on this with "windows" and "menus" BEFORE Apple visited PARC. What they saw at PARC confirmed what they were doing and provided some new ideas to there system. Jef Raskin has defended this chronology numerous times - most recently (last three months) on MacinTouch website. What else did Apple bring for innovation- to name a few:
True Plug and Play during the NuBus days
SCSI
Simple file sharing through AppleTalk
Overlapping windows (something PARC didn't have)!
floppy less computers
FireWire

But this is history. I happen to agree with Eugenia that Panther is more evolution than revolution. I would have liked to see Piles, better or new use of InkWell, System use of metadata (like BeOS), and saved/updating searches.

cheers
twocents Tue, 24 Jun 2003 19:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? That AMD site has there own spin on things. Yes AMD is the almighty chipmaker.

The fact is Hypertransport is linking parts of the G5 watch the video again.

While I think this is splitting hairs JOB's and Apple keep refering the G5 as a Personal Computer. All the AMD 64 bit chips are in servers right now and going into wroksations.

Like I said that is splitting hairs mind you. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 19:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? AMDZone is really lame site and very biased to Macs. They were really upset when their rumours of Apple using Opteron for their NG PowerMacs were trashed by reality. You should'nt really believe anything they say. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 19:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? You arrogant little prick!!!

How can you say you have skills above mine? Do you know me? Have I revealed what technical skills I have to you in any comprehensive way?

And why is it your job to educate the "inferior" readers of OSNews?

Go become a F*CKING ENGLISH TEACHER!!!

Sorry to the rest of you that I had to stoop to this level to answer an annoying spelling troll. GRRRRRR

Muhahahhahhahaa!! This is too funny!

Nobody said osnews readers were inferior, that's your own insecurity. Calm down, they're just words, no? Muhahah, case in point, the correct usage of them can kick some serious ass. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 19:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? That's innovation in marketing, something which i never denied Apple was good at...but it's not innovation in TECHNOLOGY which is what my arguments were based on.

Stopping talking out your butt. Marketing has nothing to do with the technological innovation that Apple put into giving your standard desktop user a GUI. Along with the cleaned up user interface, if you haven't seen an Alto screenshot, they again were innovative in providing it into a consumer PC. The Alto was a veritable mini-computer which still required a trained operator to manage. The Lisa and Mac were PC's which everyday users were able to work with. PARC, and their Alto, were revolutionary. The Mac and Lisa were very innovative, and revolutionary from a desktop perspective, not an all encompassing computer perspective. Again their innovation was making it fit into a relatively affordable and easy to use desktop computer, not the underlying concept of a GUI itself.

If you want some more info on the Alto, I suggest you go here:

http://www.spies.com/~aek/alto/index.html

You'll see that the "stolen" technology and "no Apple innovation in GUI design" argument vaporizes before your very eyes. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 19:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? (IP: ---.ztay.compaq.com)

AHAH!!! That explains why you're such an arrogant prick

Sorry to all the other compaq employees I'm lumping in with ya, stevo

Oh wait, I just used ya...better come hunt me down grammar Nazi.

Your comments and unfortunately, now my replies lend no value to this discussion, good day sir, this is my last reply to you, no matter how arrogant or insulting your reply to this comment is. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 19:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? http://veritest.com/clients/reports/apple/default.asp?visitor=X


This is the only verified benchmarks I have found. Anyone have others that are VERIFIED BECHMARKS? Tue, 24 Jun 2003 20:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10086

Ok this is a seriously long article but check it out.

"... What's interesting to note here is how Opteron scales from two-way to four-way. For the two-way result, the 1.8 GHz Opteron platform bettered the 2.8 GHz Xeon system by 12%. The four-way result shows the same Opteron processor competing against a 2 GHz Xeon MP system that has over twice the on-die cache, yet it still trails Opteron by 18%"

Harjtt

: o )> Tue, 24 Jun 2003 20:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? http://www.macbidouille.com/article.php?id=119

* A more refined aqua (no stripes in window bar, more subtle color differentiations in a window, better looking tabs,..)
* The return of the sheduled boot and shutdown.
* Secure file deletion
* Return of folder actions (without the trip to Applescript) Tue, 24 Jun 2003 20:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? That's a poor choice of options, ain't it?

What happened to solid progress?

Let's see what we've got: a machine that IS in fact competitive with the best Wintel (and company) offerings. Whether that's slightly behind or slightly ahead. It's still competitive.

The fastest FSB on the market. A controller that is extremely impressive (point to point, birectional for every component).

A chipset that includes tech that is available, but ABSOLUTELY will not be mainstream in the PC world for months to come or much longer -- S-ATA, PCI-X, optical digital I/O, FW800, GigE, etc...

A machine that is competitive on price with most comparable offerings (Nix stations, Opterons, dual Xeon boxes, etc...)

In terms of OS, we have a strategy that means Apple may be able to deliver a solid offering of new features (whether or not they exist in other OSes) every year. (I can name many features MacOS has that others don't).

We haven't even seen much of Panther. I do not believe we are seeing a complete feature list. (In fact, with Apple pushing back the date from Sept. to year end, I suspect they are definitely hiding a few things.)

In terms of simple progress, Apple has incorporated FreeBSD 5.0 in a short span, refined the UI, added Linux APIs, UFS support (although I still haven't heard confirmation if it's the new filesystem or if HFS+ has been improved), VPN support, further improvements to QT, better thread support.

It's added a new UI concept/feature/tool in Expose. It's not fair to say it's just QE--QE is a graphics engine. Expose is a feature meant to handle an issue--window clutter and navigation.

It's 64 bit.

So rather than ask: innovative (which is a retarded standard anyway) or catch up (which is fine: some features weren't even on the wishlist of former Mac users; some features only OS X has), let's ask: did Apple make substantial progress in a year?

The answer: YES. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 20:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Apple has done an incredible good job. It has to fight against the most corrupt/abusive kartel in the world (Wintel). Along with the manipulation of the market and the many IT companies they sabotage (or plot with) systematic. Given these facts and comparing the sizes cq resources of Wintel against Apple most critics towards Apple seem very unjust and unfair.
Apple is the only real innovative 'PC' company in the world, both in hard- and software. I do Windows trouble-shooting for a living, and for people who love a good OS design it is very frustrating that such a poor design as all the windows versions are, has such a great market share and that has nothing to do with quality. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 20:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? If you use Windows and MacOS daily you realize that MacOS always lacked a taskbar to control your windows. Expose is nothing more than a fancy/eye-candy loaded taskbar. MacOS was always about window clutter on the desktop and they never really solved this usability issue. Try try to find a specific window if you have 10 apps open. On Windows/KDE/Gnome this is a breeze. On MacOS it is/was just plain annoying.

Personally I am more of a task switcher person, e.g. I keep my windows always maximized and switch between them. I guess that habit comes from my AmigaOS days. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 20:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? (maybe they'll be readily available by then


...but i'm not a gamer or DV guy; i make music with logic and pro tools, which are, practiacally speaking, mac apps. the floating point operations *are* more important in that context, and all that potential memory is a real boon (some sample libraries can easily chew up a gig of ram).

it may not be the fastest desktop computer ever, but it's definitely the fastest mac ever, and for anyone who's tied to apps like logic or pro tools, that's great news. they're finally catering to the market that supported them for so many years again. that integrated optical s/pdif's a nice touch, as well.

i liked eugenia's article, though i found the haxial one altogether more damning of apple and jobs than panther and g5, which is as it should be.

i'll still buy one of these when i really need and can comfortably afford one. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 21:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "If you use Windows and MacOS daily you realize that MacOS always lacked a taskbar to control your windows."

It sounds like: If you are use to using the Windows metaphor, you are confused about how to manage windows on a Mac and don't know what you are talking about.

Mac had app switcher for quite a while; it now has the Doc. It's easy to cycle between windows within an app, and between app windows. It is extremely easy to hide the foremost app or all apps.

"I keep my windows always maximized and switch between them." You could do this on a Mac if you wanted to. What's your point? That you don't use the spatial strengths of the Mac. That you do not see the advantage to not having an app window (which is why Window and other users are "used to" fully maxed windows and alt-tabbing: because you usually cannot see another app or doc beneath the foreground. Most Mac users are comfortable and familiar with working with different docs and apps at the same time, particularly graphic designers. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 21:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Eugenia, market share is not user base. Apple can have lower market share but increased user base.

Market share is a hype too. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 21:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? ... it isn't necessarily unique. I seem to remember some sort of window shrinking feature in some of those Longhorn UI videos from way back (or was it just MS Research stuff) that I now suspect was something very similar to Expose.

Apple does get kudos though for bringing it to the users first.

Quartz Extreme and the Longhorn equivalent (when it eventually arrives) are going to spur some very interesting UI ideas over the next several years. I look forward to the competition.

PS: Can 3rd parties get at QE at the levels needed to implement features like Expose (ie: manipulate the windows of other apps)? Tue, 24 Jun 2003 21:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Apple doesn't need "market share" to succeed. And it does not try to "survive" as lame AmdZone insists. Apple right now is strong, VERY strong. On the other hand, Dell, Intel, AMD loose market share and they are as good as dead. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 21:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? http://www.jefraskin.com/forjef2/jefweb-compiled/published/holes.ht...

RTFM Tue, 24 Jun 2003 21:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Expose is kind of a first step towards (or maybe a more practical subset, depending on your POV) of Jef Raskin's zoomable UI concepts. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 21:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Leave it to OSNews to put a negative spin on a good show. Everything they showed was good.

New features in Panther are good. granted these are not new OS features but new MacOSX features so I don't understand the negative spin. iSight and iChatAV were conveniently dismissed as useless.

" Just made me think how people get easily excited over a few visual effects, without understand what's what and where they come from, and how much or how little engineering might these features really needed. "

Not everyone sits in front of their computer all day figuring stuff out nor do they want to. Just because something is easily explained or dismissed doesn't mean it is easy to do. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 22:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I mean, here is an articel on Apple's software developer conference, and two (or tree) paragraphs of this 8 paragraph article is spent on How BeOS did this, How BeOS did that what my husband (a BeOS employee) did when using BeOS, what former BeOS engineers I waved at, what are current BeOS engineers doing .... blah blah blah. Oh' c'mon Egunia. I really like your website, I really like your articles, and I find myself agreeing with most of what you say, but when can we see an article from you, with less focus on BeOS?

I mean, the way I see it, BeOS lacked 20,000 important features, but had smooth scrolling. Mac OS X currently doesn't match BeOS when it comes to scrolling but has got 20,000 more important features. Is this scrolling thing really that much a great deal? Apple here is changing an architecture, introducing new high-end systems, introducing new operating system, introducing new applications, and all you can say is why it doesn't scroll smoothly. Duh! Tue, 24 Jun 2003 22:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I guess scrolling is the metric used by OSNews to gauge overall system performance. At least it can be done in a minute. Scrolling on a G4 is fine, I don't see the unnecessary drama here. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 22:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "It sounds like: If you are use to using the Windows metaphor, you are confused about how to manage windows on a Mac and don't know what you are talking about."

I have been using MacOS for more than 10 years now, professionally and private as a developer. I also own a iBook.

Sure, there are shortcuts to everything. That said, I am not a fan of emacs either. I do not use alt-tab either on windows or any other platform. I simply want a graphical way to select my active window in a centralized place. And a taskbar does exactly that job. Or lets rather call it a tabbed interface to sound less Windows centric.

Keeping you windows maximized is close to impossible in MacOS. Most applications will not correctly respect maximized window mode. That includes CodeWarrior where I spent 90% of my time to deal with Carbon programming. Maybe I just do not like MacOS UI in general, that is simply a matter of taste and habit.

I also just tried the new Finder, after I got the Panther CD at the WWDC today. It's improved but still no match to something like the file managment konqueror or nautilus provides (again to avoid mentioning Explorer, which I replaced with Directory Opus on my PC anyway). Tue, 24 Jun 2003 22:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I'm not saying you have a problem, or that I have a problem with you. I'm just saying that the limitation YOU perceive on the Mac, I and others do not. The wonder of the taskbar that you enjoy, I do not. I do not like application windows, and to this day, no one can explain the need for them to me. Maybe this is m personal interpretation as well.

But... to say that Expose doesn't count as a good or new edition for the Mac because it solves a problem that is not present on the PC is bullsh!t.

The Mac OS provides more options for navigating windows that Windows (Go menu and shortcuts, Dock, app-tabbing, Hide (All)/Show (All), keyboard shortcuts for these actions, cycling through doc windows within an app, navigating through hierarchies using window bars, etc...) Now there is expose. And the Taskbar sucks in Windows... in my personal opinion. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 23:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Peter Glaskowsky, editor-in-chief of Microprocessor Report, said a company could get better benchmark results using a Dell machine with Intel and Microsoft compilers than with a Linux machine and GCC compiler. However, he also noted that Intel's chips perform disproportionately well on SPEC's tests because Intel has optimized its compiler for such tests."

This makes me wonder if perhaps the "bogus" SPEC results are the ones on the SPEC website, not the ones VeriTest produced. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 23:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? On User Change{
Using Quartz Extreme{
Simulate Cube{
Rotate through deg(90)
}
Swap old user
Activate new user
}
}

Yes, it's great how easily Apple can use Quartz Extreme to do just about anything these days Eugenia. You show great wisdom and insight in your article. If only Apple could introduce a machine that could levitate, that might surely warrant a raised eyebrow from you. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 23:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I fail to see how anything more than a casual examination of the benchmarks would lead to the "Apple cheated" claim. As many times many others have pointed out, when you benchmark you compare both the compiler AND the hardware. And, even if you can't get your head around that idea, there are always the PS and Logic tests--unless you'd like to claim that Apple was able to recompile both of those with gcc as well. Finally, as for HT, read Ars Technica's review--basically, HT is of little or no help for these types of tasks, as it's all a question of bandwidth--which the G5 has in spades.

Eugenia, I usually like your articles, but this (as evidenced by the number of comments) is nothing but flamebait.

KOMPRESSOR Tue, 24 Jun 2003 23:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? In Mac OS X just right click (control click) the application hosting the window and a list of all it's windows will appear as a contextual menu.

In Mac OS 9 in apple-tab to the application in question and look under thw Window menu.

Personally, I need to see my desktop when I'm working... Working with a fully maximized window is like working with one arm tied behind my back.

Troll on. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 23:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I once bought a $3,000 system, many many years ago. However I find that price unreasonable today. Just because a VCR used to cost $300, doesn't mean I would pay that much for one now. As far as a PC (or Mac) goes, $1,000 is as much as I would consider, and for a VCR, about $50-$75. Unfortunately most of Apple's systems are above the $1,000 limit which puts them out of reach of today's consumers. Apple needs more at the low-end than just the eMac, because while I would LOVE to have an Apple G4 for $800, I don't want that big heavy monitor stuck in it. I already have a nice 17-inch flat panel and would gladly part with $800 to attach it to a low-end headless Mac. I do not want a CRT (so the eMac is out), and I don't want to buy another 17-inch flat panel (so the iMac is out). Come on apple, please, please, PLEASE put out a low end monitorless system. You're missing out on a HUGE market, I think, because I have heard my exact sentiments echoed from friends and family as well as in forums like these. Tue, 24 Jun 2003 23:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? if even Slashdot offers articles from 2 different angles (they cheated on benchmarks vs no they did not), where osnews well, is very single minded. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 00:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I think it is the largest strategic failure of Apple management to not make available a headless 1Ghz G4 system at price that is in the $400 to $650 range.

Much of OS X Panther is designed to require at least 1 Ghz G4 to work well.

Apple absolutely needs to deliver an affordable G4 system. An eMac is not what most people want. And outside of an eMac, nothing is affordable.

I think the G5 is a stunning system for the high-end and will likely purchase one later this year after the bugs are worked out.

However, I would have much rather seen a 1Ghz G4 "iBox" at a reasonable price and an iBook upgrade to a 1Ghz G4. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 00:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? will beos or yellow dog linux run on the new g5s? Wed, 25 Jun 2003 00:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Who on earth buys a computer without a monitor?

Um, me?

When I bought a Mac I already had a 21" Viewsonic that is quite nice.

And IMO the real place that Apple is missing on the low end isn't the eMac but rather the cheap headless Mac. The iMac is quite innovative but monitors don't need to be bundled in.... Wed, 25 Jun 2003 00:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? will beos or yellow dog linux run on the new g5s?

Yellow dog Linux will run on it.

As for BeOS.. I hate to break this to you, but it's dead.. The alternative projects have more important things to worry about (like being usable :-)) Wed, 25 Jun 2003 00:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Name some reallly innovative features in Panther?

I'd say Expose is at least. Yeah, that was written off because it used QE. And it's not even vaguely like that 3-d desktop utility. Supposedly QE was innovative in Jaguar. But was it really? (using this tough standard) I mean, QE is just a trick to speed up Quartz using the graphics card. And Quartz is old news. It wasn't even innovative in 10.0.

Something doesn't have to be earth-shattering and jaw-dropping to be innovation. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 00:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? And so has Pentium4 and the new chip. Intel also has a lot of Mhz margins.

Yeah, Intel will just keep adding pipeline stages until they can reach 10 GHz!!!
LOL Wed, 25 Jun 2003 00:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? So I think the bottom line is that even if this performance advantage is real, it is not at the right part of the market (the consumer desktop), and it isn't quite large enough anyway.

Here is they key:

Speed used to be a reason NOT to switch. That reason has been removed.

Games used to be a reason NOT to switch. That reason is being removed. (I have too many games to play now and too little time!!)

People who considered Apple but didn't switch for various reasons are having many of those reasons removed. This can and will lead to switchers (as evidenced by comments in this and other threads) Wed, 25 Jun 2003 00:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? What? I'm writing this on a Mac I bought this year, and scrolling in Safari is not nearly as fast as Net+ used to be on my 300MHz BeOS box. After all, if scrolling had never been an issue for OS X, why did Jobs make such a great deal out of the fast scrolling in Preview?


I didn't see this part of the demo - but I actually switched my PDF viewer to Acrobat Reader because Preview is SUCH A DOG! Switching from page to page takes forever......

But that's totally different from safari scrolling. That's smooth and instantaneous for me on a 2x867. Resizing is another matter but I honestly don't do that often. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 00:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I think it's amazing how everyone can be so humdrum about Apple's tech nowadays. Can someone please tell why every new incarnation of Windows is received like a gift from heaven while Apple is the perpetual subject of FUD? How "innovative" have the last few incarnations of Windows been? The Windows GUI is still horrendous; virtually every major feature in it has been a rip-off of some other OS. Yet, Apple's OS, which is superior to Windows in virtually every PRACTICAL manner is treated like "ho Hum." Unbelievable. Apple comes out with a PC crammed with almost EVERY new PC tech and generally outperforms anything on the x86 side and the only thing anyone has to say is "Wait til the 4GHz P4 come out." Gig for gig, the 970 is superior to the P4 but that's still not enough. What is it going to take? Apple has come out with a true workstation for a max price of $3000 and THAT'S NOT IMPRESSIVE? I guess nothing Apple does will satisfy people whose minds are already closed. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 00:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? i've got 4 monitors already. so shaddupa your face. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 00:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The courts proved that Microsoft illegally maintained their OS monopoly by extending it to other markets, not optain their monopoly. In other words, Windows is a completely legal monopoly, IE isn't. And... oh wait, I promised not to enter the antitrust is evil debate again. Frankly, Microsoft is a rather easy target for the really low end market, and there is so little people actually realizing that.


While Microsoft has not been found guilty of breaking any laws in the creation of its monopoly it wouldn't be a stretch to argue that it was created illegally. The original consent decree with Microsoft happened because it was operating using highly anticompetitive practices that many considered illegal. These practices directly led to the monopoly.

Microsoft obtained their monopoly legally just like OJ Simpson performed whatever actions he did on that particular night legally....
:D Wed, 25 Jun 2003 00:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? and what is even worse, is to see people who constantly bash Microsoft for their monopolistic behavior then praise and hype Intel (a very aggresive company in their business practices. Ask AMD about it) and bash the smaller competitors like Apple~IBM. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 01:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? here:

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/24/2154256&mode=... Wed, 25 Jun 2003 01:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Greg Joswiak, vice president of hardware product marketing at Apple, in a phone interview today, defended Apple's performance claims for its upcoming Power Mac G5, after they came under fire in the wake of yesterday's announcement.

Joswiak went over the points in turn, but first said that they set out from the beginning to do a fair and even comparison, which is why they used an independent lab and provided full disclosure of the methods used in the tests, which would be "a silly way to do things" if Apple were intending to be deceptive.

He said Veritest used gcc for both platforms, instead of Intel's compiler, simply because the benchmarks measure two things at the same time: compiler, and hardware. To test the hardware alone, you must normalize the compiler out of the equation -- using the same version and similar settings -- and, if anything, Joswiak said, gcc has been available on the Intel platform for a lot longer and is more optimized for Intel than for PowerPC.

He conceded readily that the Dell numbers would be higher with the Intel compiler, but that the Apple numbers could be higher with a different compiler too.

Joswiak added that in the Intel modifications for the tests, they chose the option that provided higher scores for the Intel machine, not lower. The scores were higher under Linux than under Windows, and in the rate test, the scores were higher with hyperthreading disabled than enabled. He also said they would be happy to do the tests on Windows and with hyperthreading enabled, if people wanted it, as it would only make the G5 look better.

In the G5 modifications, they were made because shipping systems will have those options available. For example, memory read bypass was turned on, for even though it is not on by default in the tested prototypes, it will be on by default for the shipping systems. Software-based prefetching was turned off and a high-performance malloc was used because those options will be available on the shipping systems (Joswiak did not know whether this malloc, which is faster but less memory efficient, will be the default in the shipping systems).
As to not using SSE2, Joswiak said they enabled the correct flags for it, as documented on the gcc web site, so that SSE2 was enabled (the Veritest report lists the options used for each test, which appears to include the appropriate flags). Wed, 25 Jun 2003 02:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I watched the keynote via satellite here at home so maybe I didn't have the distractions you did.

"We were not told of the specifics of the Dell Xeon machine, nor if HT was properly turned on in the BIOS. We were also not told if these Mac apps were specifically optimized for the G5, e.g. if they were versions that will never see the light of day on a retail box, but built specifically for the demo. Anyhow, on all instances, the dual 2 GHz G5 had much-much better performance than the Dell machine."

The specs for the Dell were given at the beginning of the demos. Dual Xeon 3.06 with comparable RAM and HD.

Further, the SPEC tests were done with GCC so that it was a level playing field. How can you post that here, on OSNews and ignore all the evidence that Intel's compilers artificially inflate benchmarks? Wed, 25 Jun 2003 02:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? > ignore all the evidence that Intel's compilers artificially inflate benchmarks?

Excuse me, but this is laughable. Where did you hear that?

>the SPEC tests were done with GCC so that it was a level playing field

I am sorry, but Apple GCC vs RedHat9 GCC is not level field. This is not what Apple's competition runs. Apple's competition runs Windows and VC++. This is what it should have been tested with. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 02:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? It's a pity IBM no longer make PPC ThinkPads.

Still the Pentium-M looks like a reasonable chip. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 02:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >Other features like fast user switching, file system level encryption or video conferencting are standard in Windows XP<

Yeah.. I am stilll trying to get Windows video to work properly. IChatAV worked beautifully first time no configuration. THAT is revolutionary! Well, not for most Mac users. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 02:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? While Microsoft has not been found guilty of breaking any laws in the creation of its monopoly it wouldn't be a stretch to argue that it was created illegally. The original consent decree with Microsoft happened because it was operating using highly anticompetitive practices that many considered illegal. These practices directly led to the monopoly.

No wrong. Even with antitrust laws which I have extreme dislike of, it would be a long stretch to prove that Microsoft made their monopoly illegally. For example, with the OEMs - their control and pricing over it is significantly looser than of IBM and Apple. Nothing wrong there, every other potential antitrust ligitation causing factors to it have been practices also by the market dominators then. Pricing would be one area where the courts can question Microsoft, for charging less than their competitors, but if that can become the case, the same would for just about every Linux company making a free or near-free Linux distribution. Now would you say that those Linux companies are illegal?

Which really does show the problem with antitrust laws... Wed, 25 Jun 2003 03:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? WHO THE HECK CARES WHAT THEY RUN!!!!

they are not doing a test to see what compiler and hardware mixture gives the best results. they were not showing that GCC compiles faster on apple thatn VC++ on windows. they used an application that is as close to the same on each platform as you can get. why? so tehy can show you how the PROCCESSOR performs, NOT the OS.

it was a hardware comparison. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 03:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I am sorry, but Apple GCC vs RedHat9 GCC is not level field. This is not what Apple's competition runs. Apple's competition runs Windows and VC++. This is what it should have been tested with.

No, that's what application benchmarks are for. Those are for measuring system-specific enhancements, etc... Wed, 25 Jun 2003 04:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? You're obviously thinking of something other than the consent decree.

The consent decree only indirectly had to do with pricing. The consent decree was a result of Microsoft requring OEMs that wanted to sell DOS/Windows to pay for each computer sold rather than each computer sold with DOS or Windows. This was an anti-competitive business practice which had the direct effect of freezing all other OSes out of most of the major manufacturers.

There is disagreement over whether this is illegal, but a case can be made. This is why the case was brought against Microsoft. The government decided to negotiate a settlement where Microsoft agreed not to do certain things rather than go through years and years of court appeals. Obviously that plan didn't work very well.

The thing that made the government's case this last time around was the confiscated emails. Who knows what would have happened the first time if they had access to such a goldmine of information. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 04:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Apple has one problem. People like big numbers. They are going to look and go 'oh, this one is 2.4ghz (P4) and it's cheaper than this other 2ghz one (Mac).' It doesn't matter if the Apple is faster, people care about numbers. They have been taught all their lives bigger is better. Even when it's not, they think it is. And let's face it, while lots of us know better, the majority of people buying computers at this point in time are still going to be new computer buyers that don't. Maybe someday in the future this will change, but I don't forsee that for some time, if ever. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 04:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I like your style. Tell it like it is!

I think it's more like, "Tell it just the way she sees it". Sometimes she's right. Sometimes, she's wrong.

I don't mind her as a poster, but I normally expect a little bit more neutral view from a stie maintainer. Sometimes, she is too defensive about her opinion, in my opinion.

I don't think she hates Mac or something. More like she is irritated by the way Mac fans see things mostly in favor of Mac and Apple. But that's what fans do. You don't really need to enlighten them about everything .

Anyway, although it is a great way to generate traffic , I normally feel uncomfortable with the style of Euginia's posts and articles. They are too aggresive for my taste, although I found a lot of information from her very useful and insightful. But considering she is a real journalist and this is just her hobby, I really can blame her for being just herself.



And Byte256, what computer do you have in mind whe you said there were other computers like Apple I in similar price point? I can't think of any. Altair was not really a personal computer, so what was you were talking about?

And you said MacOS X is basically NEXT technology. You are right. But who runs Apple now, they are all NEXT people, and who found Apple? Steve Jobs, and he was alos the founder of NEXT.

I won't touch about XEROX, because you are not the only one who is misinformed.

And lowering price sometimes requires technological innovation. It might not ture that Apple used exactly same technology and could lower the price simply by mass marketing. I don't know for sure, and I think you don't either.

And what did you say... yes, iPod. Sony's walkman was innovative when it was introduced. And you don't think it was the first cassete player in the marke, do you? So declaring that it's not innovative becaue MP3 players were around before that is not so compelling argument, don't you think so? Wed, 25 Jun 2003 04:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Im amazed at how quickly you guys were to gloss over this... Several comments were suddenly rendered meaningless withing the following interview:

http://www.apple.com/powermac/performance/
http://www.veritest.com/
http://www.veritest.com/clients/reports/apple/apple_performance.pdf

Greg Joswiak, vice president of hardware product marketing at Apple, in a phone interview today, defended Apple's performance claims for its upcoming Power Mac G5, after they came under fire in the wake of yesterday's announcement.

Joswiak went over the points in turn, but first said that they set out from the beginning to do a fair and even comparison, which is why they used an independent lab and provided full disclosure of the methods used in the tests, which would be "a silly way to do things" if Apple were intending to be deceptive.

He said Veritestused gcc for both platforms, instead of Intel's compiler, simply because the benchmarks measure two things at the same time: compiler, and hardware. To test the hardware alone, you must normalize the compiler out of the equation -- using the same version and similar settings -- and, if anything, Joswiak said, gcc has been available on the Intel platform for a lot longer and is more optimized for Intel than for PowerPC.

He conceded readily that the Dell numbers would be higher with the Intel compiler, but that the Apple numbers could be higher with a different compiler too.

Joswiak added that in the Intel modifications for the tests, they chose the option that provided higher scores for the Intel machine, not lower. The scores were higher under Linux than under Windows, and in the rate test, the scores were higher with hyperthreading disabled than enabled. He also said they would be happy to do the tests on Windows and with hyperthreading enabled, if people wanted it, as it would only make the G5 look better.

In the G5 modifications, they were made because shipping systems will have those options available. For example, memory read bypass was turned on, for even though it is not on by default in the tested prototypes, it will be on by default for the shipping systems. Software-based prefetching was turned off and a high-performance malloc was used because those options will be available on the shipping systems (Joswiak did not know whether this malloc, which is faster but less memory efficient, will be the default in the shipping systems).

As to not using SSE2, Joswiak said they enabled the correct flags for it, as documented on the gcc web site, so that SSE2 was enabled (the Veritest report lists the options used for each test, which appears to include the appropriate flags). Wed, 25 Jun 2003 04:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I think I might have a unbiased solution to this debate. I have before me a dual Xeon 2.8 533 FSB system, a Dual Opteron 1.8, and on its way a dual 2GHZ G5 Mac. I plan to load Linux Gentoo on all three systems and do a performance test of common linux benchmarks for my clients 2003 hardware updates. I also plan on testing my own signal processing apps. Over the years I have developed scientific libraries for both the altivec and SSE(1/2) style units. Since Intels IPP seems to lack in some areas I decided to do my own. I will be using gcc 3.3 and yes folks gcc is slightly more optimized for x86 but the ppc is not at that much of a disadvantage. Remember alot of cPCI and VMe systems use ppc hardware and gcc compilers. If Apple is polite enough I will try there improved gcc compiler if they provide me with source to gcc. I have benched stuff on the power4 so I'm looking forward to checking this hardware out. On the desktop scene I could really care less what eye candy each OS has. Both OsX and WinXP have their strengths and weaknesses, I'm just a Linux and Beos nut. If there are any suggestions on corresponding libraries for each system then drop me an line. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 04:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "If Apple is polite enough I will try there improved gcc compiler if they provide me with source to gcc."

Remember, Apple didn't choose the gcc compiler because it performed better on their machines and worse on Intel's (as everyone here has so freequently said) but chose the gcc compiler because, to test the hardware alone, you must normalize the compiler out of the equation -- using the same version and similar settings.

If you're going to use a different compiler on the Intel side, (one which will make the Intel scores look better, it is EQUALLY important to use the compiler which Apple would claim would produce the best numbers for it too.

Bet then again, if you did that, it wouldn't be a truly accurate test now would it. To get the most accurate results, you must use a compiler that is available for both platforms. THIS is the reason why the gcc compiler was used for both.

If you want a truly accurate benchmark, you should compare with the gcc compiler. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 05:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Eugenia,

Great review. I was at WWDC in 2000 and can certainly relate to the 'hype' that is generated there. And yes, he was wearing the same clothes then too.

=)

Thanks again.

Simon. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 05:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Simon,

I take issue with your use of the word "hype" as it implies that it was somehow over the top.

While yes, I would probably agree that if one factors in the amount of chatter and anticipation before the keynote, then the term "over the top", would be a good adjective to describe the show.

However, because the tone of discussion on this thread has repeatedly implied that the speed benchmarks were miscalculated (or a blatent lie) and thus "over the top" (I.E. hype), some might misunderstand your comment to imply that the speed benchmarks were "hype".

Lest anyone misunderstand, I thought I would take this quick time-out to help clarify the statement for those that are less savvy. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 05:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Can we please just stfu about BeOS this and BeOS that?

Look at the amount of software and hardware apple has introduced in the last year. It's quite remarkable.

Don't get hung up on whether things are 'innovative.' I could give less than 2 shits if an application is innovative, I just want applications that do things that are useful and let me do my work faster. 'Innovative' implies neither of these necessarily.

Panther is basically OS X refined. It has added a few new neat features, the one which I find coolest (maybe because it is both innovative AND useful) is Expose.

To me the most exciting thing was XCode which I am looking forward to trying out, though I admit I am a bit doubtful about the nitty gritty of how it will perform. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 06:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Well, I'm a bit surprised that they did a comparison with Logic on the PC and the Mac. AFAIK Logic 6 doesn't exist and won't exist on PC. Did Steve Jobs compared older versions of the software both machines ? Or Logic (Apple) 6 on Mac recompiled with best compiler options possible and Logic (5) on PC (with whatever compilations) ???

I really fail to see how they can make a real comparison with Logic... Wed, 25 Jun 2003 08:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? As far as PARC goes, XEROX actually *invited* people from apple to look at their designs. XEROX was working towards dumping the ALTO since they really hadn't found a market for it. Certainly several people at XEROX thought that this was madness, and I cannot say that I blame them. Yes, the idea of the GUI desktop was not an apple innovation. What was an apple innovation was WYSIWYG printing -- yet another thing that XEROX abandoned. I only wish that apple would have seen fit to bring along a 3 button mouse -- heck, Jobs even makes reference to using a 3 button mouse in his keynote speech. Yes I know that you can use a 3 button mouse on a mac, I'm doing it right now. It should be standard IMO. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 09:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? All I have to say to iWhiners out there is that you people never know when to quit...

Apple always saying that Dual G4/1.42 was faster than P4/3GHz and you never did the noise that currently are doing! Damn! Apple must doing something right, this time around!

And I bet all those Photoshop, Mathematica, eMagic, Luxology, Blast, etc real world tests are fake too! Or the Adobe, Luxology, Mathematica, et al guys supporting Jobs hype on stage at the keynote were fake too!

Damn! We are talking about the same Adobe which recently created that PC Preferred fiasco for crying out loud!

Grow up iWhiners! This G5 eats your silicon for breakfast without even breaking sweat and is lower in price too!

Boom! Wed, 25 Jun 2003 10:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I take issue with your use of the word "hype" as it implies that it was somehow over the top.

Sure, let me be more clear. I'm not referring to the CPU benchmarks (although it's interesting that some people interpret hype that way) by rather the feeling that I had as a member of the audience that watched Steve Jobs in action. He's an amazing presenter, and if you don't watch your reactions you can get swept up in the "hype" that he generates in the room. He really knows how to work the crowd, and developers, although a relatively logical bunch, can also be swept up in technilogical 'goodies' that removes all sense of logic, replacing it with elation and "hype" (i.e. felling hyper)

Reading Eugenias review I was taken back to the 2000 WWDC and the 'hype' that it generated. It was very cool of her to cut through that and present the REAL content of the conference from a more sober prespective. I agree with everything she said about the technology.

It's a good point to be aware of these marketing phenomenon so that we as consumers, voters, and members of a PR invasive society can make choices that are based on the issues and facts, rather than Hype. That's what I was congratulating Eugenia on.

Again, good job !

Simon Wed, 25 Jun 2003 11:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? How can you not get excited about getting a free firewire iSight camera, a preview CD of Panther, XCode and its features and the fact that your apps will still run on a 64bit processor with little to no modification. As a developer this is a lot to get excited anout and we haven't even gotten to the G5 system yet.

I guess having a press pass is not as exciting as having the developer pass at WWDC and in a way you can kind of see how someone gets miffed that someone right next to them gets all excited from all this free stuff they are getting. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 11:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I shall echo another compliment for Eugenia for an accessible article even though I disagree with her on some points. I just like to point out that Eugenia began the article by commenting on Steve Job's attire by saying that for women it is an important subject of discussion. She then ends the article by saying that we should be aware of the "Steve Distortion Field" (SDF) effect on our judgement. So if you think that appearance is important, why should it be surprising that the reporter next to you be awed at Quarks' prowness in showing off Exposé? Technically speaking, it might not be earth shatering, but hey it caught my attention without iDad wearing a Dolce Gabbana suit. My point is that packaging is important and an attire and Exposé are basically the same concept.

I'm a Macophile, I don't understand why neither. The SDF seems to be clouding my shopping logics, but it is not enough to trick me into thinking that Apple is faster than Wintels. But I don't care if my PB 12" is slow, because when you sit on the many "terrasses" of Parisian cafes with your PB, you get more attention than your neighbour with his ugly Dell notebooks. Furthermore I can watch a DVD while I'm fiddling with my GROMACS codes (GROMACS is a MD Simulation program) under Apple's X11 WITHOUT rebooting between Linux/Windows!

Yeah I'm a Fashion Victim Geek, and I'm proud of it :-) Wed, 25 Jun 2003 12:10:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? .. it is possible to control the iSight-Cam via iMovie or FCP or whatever?
Any Experience?

s@cgo Wed, 25 Jun 2003 12:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? sing with me;

I have a pc and I'm;

JEALOUS
JEALOUS
JEALOUS

I like to tinker and leech and I'm;

JEALOUS
JEALOUS
JEALOUS

XP is oh so stable and never reboots, but hey I'm;

JEALOUS
JEALOUS
JEALOUS

A virus don't bug me and yes I'm;

JEALOUS
JEALOUS
JEALOUS

The RIAA can't sew me but hey I'm;

JEALOUS
JEALOUS
JEALOUS

Maybe I should bite the APPLE so I don't have to be;

JEALOUS
JEALOUS
JEALOUS Wed, 25 Jun 2003 13:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Real mature, reeeeeeeeeeeeeeal mature.

Apple's are nice, but for a lot of reasons I don't want one...

Yeah i'm reeeal jealous...

I hate being able to choose which manufacturer I buy my hardware from

And boy does it ever suck being able to take almost any piece of hardware off the shelf and put it into my machine

And ya know what I really hate? Being able to run Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Solaris all on the same box, without buying emulator software. It'd be so much nicer having to buy VirtualPC, or just deal with only running MacOS, Linux, and NetBSD.

Yeah damn it sucks having a CHOICE. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 13:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? - Exposé's F9 functionality is something new, F10 and F11 aren't. Somehow I wasn't really touched by being able to switch between applications visually by means of temporary tiling, as the good old taskbar is the best tool for the job. Too bad apple is missing one. BTW, you can do switch by tiling in KDE with two mouse clicks instead of a single keypress if you are son inclined.
- leveling compilers with gcc is a complicated beast actually. many compilers, including icc, do spec-only optimizations. gcc doesn't; neither on x86 nor on PPC. OTOH x86 and PPC code generators are completly independent. It is outright lying to say using gcc on two different platforms is "using the same compiler"
- 970 is a very nice CPU with a lot of potential. However as far as I can tell it is not the fastest one *right now* and will nowhere be the fastest one *in september*. Fastest P4, Xeon and Opterons are faster now and Opterons scale better than everything else in MP configurations. It is not a big deal, that 970 isn't the fastes as 970 *is* fast but I'd hate to educate MAC zealots for years to come about the fact. Such is life... Wed, 25 Jun 2003 14:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Xerox is being credited for many things it has not developed by itself alone. Some people want to believe that while PARC was doing all the onnovations out there the rest of the world was just partying around. It is incredible how easy the history is written/changed when a few decades pass, especially when you have money to spend in lawyers and governmental support. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 14:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? It seems to me that the Dual G5 would be faster in some cases and not in others. I don't think it's the worlds fastest personal computer..but for someone like me who is a filmmaker..that extra 4 GB of ram will come in handy. I also think that for people in Biotech and other sciences the G5 will prove to be "faster" than the current comp (manely because of the bandwith).

I've priced dual xeon systems and the G5 is CHEAPER and probably FASTER for the type of work I do. It is definatley cheaper than a lot of UNIX workstations I've priced.

I'm really curious as to what Intel will do with the IA-64 and if this will put pressure on Wintel developers to starting making more 64-bit apps for the AMD opteron. I have spoken to several devoplers and they pretty excited about making 64-bit Apps for the G5 (mostly film related stuff)

I'm also happy to see Apple still has their "old" G4's for sale at greatly reduced prices..the 1.25 Ghz starting at 1,299

***on a side note.....

If Apple/IBM do plan on scaling as fast as possible to 3Ghz...I'm pretty sure that the PPC970 will make it's way into iMacs and eMacs early next year... Wed, 25 Jun 2003 15:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I won't go over all 195 comments so I think you've been told several times already, but I think you were a bit "too much" biased against Apple just by style you wrote that column.

I think what your article was trying to show us is "Look I've seen many OSes and I am expert". But I need not to read this sort of stuff for more reasons(I know that "you are" but also "i am" and also "other's are" etc.).

I think you didn't quite understood what a leap apple did. When BeOS(a dead OS btw like in moderated down comment mentioned) does insignificant thing, you praise it. When Apple finally introduce really fast(i mean fc%$ing fast, faster than my current pretty fast PC) machine which is to tell the truth around P4C 2.6Ghz speedlike but more usefull due to it's architecture, you are saying it's beeing ONLY cathing up. When Apple finally integrates(but heck what a fine integration) all that awesome features into really stable and working OS, you are saying it's ONLY beeing cathing up(because some "student" Gnome project on sourceforge already existed?). When Apple introduce(among other things) very usefull and strong PDF previewer, and you should read some more info on this, you are noticing it as insignificant feature(just imagine enviroment witout postscript printer using this feature) and Apple only catching UP. When Apple catches up other's commercial compilers but gives it to you for free you are saying it's only catches up. Hmm I don't understand your attitude towards Apple.

You know it's not that far away(only 3-4 months) when "professional" journalists were claiming Apple is dead/Apple must switch to (ugly btw)x86, Apple is this Apple is that. Apple those times were really slow(and clear wine on this), about 2.5times slower that available x86PC. Now Apple did many great things(and I am not counting massive desktop 64bit movement) and you are writing your article in a mood like that: "Apple isn't worth it, it didn't conquered the world".

But I am saying, Apple need not. It's strenght is elsewhere...


P.S. Intel won't have 4Ghz(nor 3.8 and likely even not 3.6Ghz) processor this year, nor will it have 1Ghz FSB sooner as to Q2 of 2004.

P.S.2 I am not apple fun(far from it) but also not PC zealot. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 15:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? As a Mac/ Windows user, I will say the article was very fair Eugenia.

I think it's hilarious that the Apple defenders are saying "it's OK for one OS to use the features of another" or "borrow innovation." There's about 15 or so of those statements in here. That just takes the cake.

Personally I have no problem with it, since each platform has innovated considerably and it helps the evolution of desktop systems as a whole. Sure Apple may be borrowing ideas from others and there are probably no actually innovative ideas in the new Panther, but it's the polish that Apple puts on the products that makes them so nice. As Eugenia said, the iChat & iSight aren't doing anything MSN Messenger 6 hasn't done. However, I've never thought of using Messenger.

I like the way separate user spaces (profiles) became a standard feature in all OSes, and now Fast User Switching is becoming a standard feature. When something makes sense, it becomes commonplace. Encrypted file systems, integrated browser, media players, thumbnail viewers, TCP/IP, CD/ DVD burning, etc. Linux and Apple are both reinforcing MS's decision to integrate "extra functionality" into the OS. Some don't like that, most do. When Longhorn comes out with resizable icons on the fly, I will be very happy. I really love the Expose feature - it's something I've wanted forever. It's almost as important as the menu bar. That'll be in Longhorn/ KDE/ Gnome I bet because it just makes sense.

I wish to God the PC would get a menu bar-like functionality with a separate window for each open instance of an app (and no, the Stardock version doesn't cut it). Those who've never used a Mac do not comprehend how this smooths workflow, like multi-monitors. It's like using Windows KB-only if your mouse dies for 2 weeks, but then you finally buy a new mouse. It's THAT BIG of a deal. Working in Photoshop or multiple documents on a PC is a pain.

As far as smooth scrolling/ resizing, this is a big deal. For those that say it isn't, you absolutely DO NOT use OS X. I can't see anyone who uses OS X saying it isn't a big deal. It's the single thing that keeps me from replacing my OS 9 box at home. It's a deal killer it's that bad. People who say it isn't a problem have masked it/ adapted which translates into making excuses for poor design. There is no hardware config that is immune. IT'S MISERABLE. Since I have to use OS X and W2K at work and XP and OS 9 at home, I can't get the habit of scrolling in small increments to form like full-time users.


As far as why "PC users" are hacking The Steve's benchmarks, it's because he's such an egregious liar. NVidia, Intel, AMD, ATi, etc may screw benchmarks some. But absolutely NO ONE screws them to the degree The Steve does. He turns benchmarks into such outright fabrications I'm surprised Apple hasn't been fined under the Truth in Advertising Act. For the Mac only users, grow up. Look at the specs published at SPEC. The figures the Steve puts up are almost half the standard P4 3.0 specs. Stop defending the jerk and hold his feet to the fire. I want faster now!! It's the zealots swinging from his n***s that holds OUR whole platform back.

The critics aren't raining on OUR parade, they are calling The Steve out on his lies. If The Steve had said, "these new slowest are twice as fast as our old fastest" or some other internal comparison, the PC crowd wouldn't have blinked. But he put up the benchmarks and said this is how it compares. He brought it on himself.

Mac users are such cows. They accept him constantly screwing 3rd party developers (the UI tweak crowd esp). They accept him screwing over everyone in his retail chain so that everyone hates selling Macs. Microsoft doesn't treat it's fanboy sites the way Apple does - it's like the once-a-month lawsuit threat if you run a Mac site. They accept him charging for Service Packs. They don't mind the 20% profit margin on each machine sold, when the PC crowd pays only razor thin margins. That's the difference in cost folks - not quality of the work.

The PC tech crowd is like rabid piranhas "60,000 bugs in Windows 2000!" "NVidia cheats benchmarks!" "P3 1.3G is broken." "AMD has severe cooling problems." "Linux has more security flaws than Windows!!" We have our share of problems too, but Mac users make excuses instead of demanding fixes. Mac users need to turn into wolves and start dictating to him, instead of biting the critics. "The customer is always right." Fix my scroll you lazy SOBs! And don't make me pay for it either. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 16:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? wow, sorry for the long post... Wed, 25 Jun 2003 16:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? > The figures the Steve puts up are almost half the standard P4 3.0 specs.

No, it's that x86 perform half of what the lame sites have made to you believe.


> They accept him charging for Service Packs.

"Service Pack" is a Micro$oft TM ;-). OSX updates are free but you are expected to pay for 10.1->10.2 and 10.2->10.3
That's nothing compared to what you have to pay to M$ for downgrading from Win2000 to WinXP. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 16:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Exhibit D... the iPod...i have nothing else to say about that, MP3 players have been around since Napster!!

Oh come on!
Sure mp3 players were around before that, but the ipod was the first (still only?) to use firewire rather than USB, this makes a HUGE difference in speed when loading it with music, or whatever else you want because it's also a sweet portable FAST external hard drive. Also at the time it had a relatively huge capacity of 5GB, all in something the size of a deck of cards with a battery that lasted 10 hours and could be charged to 80% in 1 hour.

Today, I have the 30GB model, with about 25 Gigs of music on it, the extra 5 gigs lets me move files around much faster than my 100Mbit network.

Your comparison is like comparing the stealth fighter to the Wright brother's first plane. So please, enlighten us, what innovations have you come up with, or do you simply sit around and whine? Wed, 25 Jun 2003 19:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I have to admit they look like neat littel creatures. A few friends of mine have them, and they seem like sweet little MP3 players. However, I will not be buying one at those price points until they feature some sort of PDA OS. I'm not saying that they aren't "kickass" (to use a Jobsism) -- I'm saying that I have no use for a $250 MP3 player.

Price is, without a doubt, apple's largest stumbling block. Apples cost too much, period. This is from a person who has been using macintosh since before it was released to the public. A few days ago there were wild claims that the G5 was going to enter the market at the current G4 price point and then drive the prices of the rest of the stuff down. Well, all I can say is that entry level G3 iBooks are still $1500 -- way too much. I have been a huge fan since the release of OSX, and especially since x.2.3 -- at home I never even use my windows machine anymore. That being said, I'm in the market for a laptop, I *REALLY* want to run OSX on it, but there's simply no way in hell that I'm paying half again as much for 5 year old technology.

And people who are claiming that there's extra quality in the hardware are mistaken -- the over all designs might be excellent, and I do not own an iMac, but the components in my 900MHz G4 are strictly OEM x86 parts. I don't have a problem with that, but it certainly isn't super high quality that you cannot find anywhere else.

The OS on the other hand R-O-C-K-S. I have more or less stopped using my linux boxen for anything besides serving music. I absolutely love OSX. I wasn't drooling over the hardware (partly because there's no way in hell I can afford a $3k box). I was drooling over Panther. I use SuSE, Redhat, Win98/2k/XP/OSX, and I would rather use OSX than any of the others. The new features apple is including by default simply rock. I never had a problem with 'windows explorer' -- in fact I found it a convenient way to browse the file tree, but it always bothered me that I coudn't add a few 'virtual root' folders. Though people have complained that the new look of the finder is iTuneslike, I love it. I HATED the old 3 window finder -- talk about a PITA.

I really wish I could understand all of the foaming at the mouth going on around here. Sure, I like Mac, but I'm not a blind follower of anyone's OS. I used to LOVE linux, but sysconfig sucks. I 've never loved windows, and I use it daily. Being the industry standard makes life so much easier. Mac pre-OSX was finished. I simply hated OS9. OSX.2.3 made all the difference -- but I'm still not about to call someone who can't spend the cash and doesn't like UNIX an idiot for not wanting to buy a home PC for $2k. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 20:10:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Well, all I can say is that entry level G3 iBooks are still $1500 -- way too much.

Actually they start at $999. I have an ibook and it's no G5 or P4, but it works great for my development needs. The battery lasts far longer than any PC laptop I have seen, and having 802.11b without having to be careful with the pc card sticking out (I ruined 2 this way) is great. I'm still shocked everytime I see how fast it can go to sleep and recover.

I've only been using apple for a little over 3 months now... before that I was a die-hard linux fan...all the way back to Slackware's first release. Within a month of having the iBook I grabbed a used G4 tower, and I'm very close to ordering the dualG5. My iBook can dual boot debian, but once Panther is released I'll get rid of that partition, I have 4 other linux machines at home...

And I know I'm not alone, I can't begin to count the posts I've read on /. and other sites of people just like me, switching to OSX after years of never considering an apple. And unless you're running a server, I honestly can't think of a single thing you could do with Linux that can't be done is OSX. I'm not talking about the opensource aspect of it, I don't want to go down that road, I AM talking about getting work done. Whether you code in Java,C++,PHP/MySQL, etc. etc. it's all essentially the same as my experience in linux. And as much as I respect KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice, etc. etc. the simple fact is they don't work as well as MS Office on OSX. Sure I can do "almost" everything, but when I get an excel or word file from a client, "almost" doesn't do it. Once OpenOffice is no longer "almost" I'll be the first in line to switch.

And don't even get me started about Photoshop vs. The Gimp I guess my main point of all this is nothing is perfect but apple is as close as I've found for a lot of areas (programming, design, film, music, etc).

Maybe I'm just getting old, but tinkering to just get my sound card working isn't my idea of fun... just as cutting my hand to install a new motherbard isn't fun.

As for the marketing being over the top... what company out there doesn't take the same approach? I learned when I was very young that the pictures on the McDonald's menu were not what I had on my tray, the movie is rarely as good as the trailer makes you believe, etc.

Sorry for the long rambling post, I'm the last person I ever expected to sing praises of Apple. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 20:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Anyone who thinks Macs are as fast as PCs does not use Premier or do 3D rendering. Working on a Mac is much better, but you gotta be deluding youself if you think a Mac is twice as fast. Clock for clock, we beat Intel and maybe even AMD Athlon, but not fastest on fastest and not with second-tier video card offerings. We cannot get into a discussion on speed with PC users. That's not subjective like working environments.

To Floyd Lloyd - the extra quality isn't necessarily in the hardware, it's in selection and tuning. Instead of being a cobbled together assemblage of parts, a Mac is a tested, tuned and standardized whole. You can say the same thing about Dell, et al, but my Macs do seem to be a much more integrated package than a PC. Maybe just a holdover from the old days, when it was more true.

My Alienware WinXP machine was top-notch 2 years ago. Everything primo, $2800. I hate this damn thing. Hardware & overheating problems out the wazoo. Alienware's support is horrible. The Dells and Microns at work are fairly problem-free though, but they're just terminals realy.

Jobs should compare against boutique vendors like Voodoo or Falcon NW since they are in the same niche market. Let's rack a $3k Voodoo against a $3k G5. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 21:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? You are correct, but I meant usable laptops. I simply cannot use a 12" monitor. I have switched for all the reasons you mention. I am SOOO sick of dealing with driver issues on linux. I LOVED linux for a long time, but I am getting really tired of having to relearn how to admin my box with each new release. As I mentioned, the move to sysconfig sucks -- it should be an option, but it should not be mandatory. Give me rc.conf anyday. Also, I used to love to tinker with my boxen. I have a job, have just had a son, and am currently enrolled in 3 classes. I simply do not have time to read 500 pages of howto, scour sourceforge, and scour other various bugfix sites to discover that, oh say, the autoconfig is set to use PCMCIAKernel instead of External, and now every boot my laptop hangs. I need things to work *NOW* -- I don't have the luxoury, nor the impetus of time to dick around with my machines just to get them on the air.

Again, I cannot afford $1500 for a 15" laptop running 5 year old technology. I have no problem with the G3, in fact I like the layout of the iBook better than the titanium, but the current price scale fot the iBook is one place that I really, REALLY cannot fathom what Jobs and associates are thinking. The only reason I'm even considering it is because of the OS. Unfortunately, I'm guessing that the iBook is just going to be dropped from production rather than come down into the realms of reality pricing. Oh, and whole 1 button mousepad deal sucks.

Apple really should implement some sort of "never obsolete" policy. That would justify their price point in my mind. If in a year, I could trade in my G4 for a portion of its original retail value towards a new G5, I'd be happy. As it is, apple is essentially asking all of us to buy a new $2k+ box a year. I'd be 'insanely pissed' if I'd just purchaced a new top-o-the-line g4 box. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 21:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The thing that NOBODY has questioned is Apple's REAL WORLD benchmarks. People who used the G5s side by side with the Dells saw that the G5s were up to two times faster for media intensive tasks. Most analysts, regardless of the stance on benchmarks, agree that the real world difference between the x86 platform and the G5s were indeed REAL.

Call Jobs a liar or whatever but the real truth is that the Macs at the very least are on par with PCs performance wise. When the apps are optimized for 64-bit, we're talking TRUE WORKSTATION class performance for $3000. Anyone who doesn't think that is amazing is ridiculous.

If Apple wanted to really screw the x86 community, the could have tested the 1.6, 1.8 Gig, and 2.0 x 2 Gig systems against 1.6, 1.8, and 2.0 x 2 Gig PCs and watched the Apples completely OBLITERATE them gig for gig. No compiler in the world would have been able to save the x86 platform then. I think Apple has actually been very generous with its tests because, gig for gig, nothing on the x86 side can compete with the 970. When the 3GHz 970 comes out it will likely STOMP any 3+ gig P4, Xeon, Athlon, Opteron, Megatron, Optimus Prime, whatever. The bottom line is that the Mac platform is more than a match now for x86. Wed, 25 Jun 2003 22:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Anyone who thinks Macs are as fast as PCs does not use Premier or do 3D rendering.

No, because sensible Macintosh users will be using Final Cut Pro instead of Premiere, as Final Cut Pro is significantly more optimized on Mac and is an all-around better program.

Working on a Mac is much better, but you gotta be deluding youself if you think a Mac is twice as fast.

No Mac users except the ones huffing paint are going to say this. If you read through this entire thread you will see that Mac users are simply saying that the new G5 systems are on par with or faster than the fastest PCs.

Clock for clock, we beat Intel and maybe even AMD Athlon, but not fastest on fastest and not with second-tier video card offerings.

It's really hard to say which system is "fastest". The vector unit on the G5 is its greatest advantage, but only for applications that utilize it. However, one must keep in mind that this is the case for the majority of CPU-bound applications the average Mac user will use.

As for the raw integer and floating point scores, it looks like PCs are definitely higher in these areas for UP systems (thanks to the 3.2GHz Pentium 4) and probably marginally higher for SMP systems.

And the Radeon 9800 is a "second-tier video card offering"? Please, spare me... Wed, 25 Jun 2003 23:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Apple has always had strong roots in education, taking your trade-in idea even further...

Trade in your old mac for a reasonable discount, and Apple could then donate the used hardware to school systems... this is a tax rightoff for them, and would be a great PR move as well.

Now there would have to be some threshold for obsolete products, because some things you simply can't give away. But the threshold wouldn't have to be that limiting. Here in Brooklyn I know there are dozens of schools that would be perfectly happy getting an old powerpc... but an Apple ][e wouldn't cut it.

My biggest complaint about Apple isn't the cost, I think of it like I would a luxury car or a nice bottle of wine... sure it's expensive but you're paying for quality. My biggest complaint is no discounts offered when you buy more than one item. I can justify the $3K for the dual G5, but come one... give me some sort of discount if I want to add a flat monitor or an iPod!

Now if I could get that discount AND trade in my Quicksilver AND know that somewhere students would be benefiting from it, I'd be much happier, as would tons of other mac users, and little Johnny at that school wouldn't be complaining that it's no G5! Thu, 26 Jun 2003 00:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Well, I didn't really mean that you would be able to trade up a crappy old box that no one wants, or necessarily that you should be able to walk in off the street with a G3 iMac and trade up for a G5. It would be a nice addition to their Apple Care policy or something like that. I have a 1/5 year old G4 quicksilver 900MHz. I'm fine with it for right now, but in another year I'd probably like to be able upgrade to a similar or even better G5. That's the sort of thing I had envisioned.

Oh, and I hear you about bundling offers -- it sucks to be looking at a $2-3k box and then have to look at their $1500 monitors too. I'd live an apple monitor, but they are yet another thing of apple's that I simply cannot afford. Apple does offer some student discounts that include various bundling offers. The Software discounts rock, the laptop discounts suck. $50 off a $1500 laptop doesn't really cut it for a student. Now, the discounts on the G5s are really nice, something like $200 off. Unfortunately, I have 4 towers already, and have no room for another. If they could drop the price of the 14" iBook to $1k, I think they'd sell several of them -- I'd certainly buy one at that price. Thu, 26 Jun 2003 02:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? that should read 1.5 year old, not 1/5 year old. Thu, 26 Jun 2003 02:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Although, Eugenia's article sounds negative, I understand her very well. She wants to show that there are some misunderstandings with regard to what Apple claims and what some people want to believe. What she says is absolutely true, and of course that's part of the problem. Some people will never understand that. However I like what Apple showed. Although it is funny to see some Mac fans to cheer up, it is actually a catch-up. I really appreciated many things Apple did. I think Quartz Extreme is a good decision, overall. G5 is a nice suprise, though I don't think it will be significantly faster than pentiums, however mac users can also enjoy high speed CPUs as PC users do already. Thu, 26 Jun 2003 02:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? ********""""And ya know what I really hate? Being able to run Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Solaris all on the same box, without buying emulator software. It'd be so much nicer having to buy VirtualPC, or just deal with only running MacOS, Linux, and NetBSD. """"******


I have respect for you if it is through that you have all these Operating Systems running on one pc ( not at the same time ). Not many people I know have succeeded in dual booting Solaris x86.

Are all the different syntaxes and commands not confusing you?

You are not a normal user, you are a Free OS freak (did you pay for XP? ha ha ha), and you probably don't have a budget for an Apple as it sounds...

Thanks Steve for bringing computer heaven back!

Thanks Steve for being a TRUE innovator!

Thanks Steve for switching to Unix!

Thanks Steve for the 64bit!

Thanks Steve for lowering prices! Thu, 26 Jun 2003 12:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I think I am pretty much through coming to this web site. Not a big loss to you actually... as it was low on my list of visited sites to begin with. But with this article the author really alienated me with her condensending tone, her 'look how smart I am' swagger, and some of her reponses to the posts: "Re-read the article. Slowly."

It must be really nice to be so smart (or cynical) that you can no longer simply give credit for the thoughful and purposeful evolution of a product. Steve Jobs' gig is to market and sell Apple stuff! Are you really offended by his hyperbole? Really? Are you equally critical when Gates or Tolvalds (sp?) speak in such grand terms? Of course Panther is an evolution of the OS! Thanks for belaboring the obvious in an attempt to intellectually separate yourself from the plebian masses. When was the last time Microsoft or the Open Source Linux folks produced something both revolutionary and accessible to average computer user?

I bored quickly of what could be concered akin to a school-girl showing off for the guys in the playground. Mostly because I read this article expecting analysis of the ramifications of the integration of the technologies announced. Apple is not an OS company, neither is it a hardware company; it is unique in that it is a company concerned with the whole computer user experience. And your infantile essay does not take that into account, as you failed to review(?) the whole of the announcements as they affect the user -- through the seemless integration of hardware and software. In short, what do these technologies mean for consumers, prosumers, and professionals dealing with productivity demands.

Thanx for nothing... but at least I can come away knowing that you are, without a doubt, harder to impress than we all are. Oh.. and that you know EXACTLY what Apple could charge for their products. (must be that special insight into their product supply chain)

See ya.

Charley Thu, 26 Jun 2003 16:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? As far as Premiere/ Final Cut - how many people work in a professional house where you have to have cross-platform compatiblity?

And the Radeon 9800 is a "second-tier video card offering"? Please, spare me...

A 9800 isn't FireGL, QuadroFX, Oxygen or Wildcat. 9800's a consumer grade video card not professional. On the AMDZone article someone linked up above touting benchmarks, the writer wonders why the new Macs aren't being released as "workstations." It's because they aren't, otherwise, we'd have professional grade cards. Igniter is the only top of the line workstation card I know for the Mac that continually supports the Mac (even G5!). Igniter is pretty sweet, don't get me wrong, but our selection is rather limited in the $500-$2000 range.

We have Pinnacle's stuff and Kona/ BM for narrow applications. Appian won't support Mac anymore. RTMac is still stuck on 9.1. Thu, 26 Jun 2003 16:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments