Steve Ballmer's annual letter to shareholders makes it very clear Microsoft is at a point of no return - and in the middle of a transition into a hardware company. "This is a significant shift, both in what we do and how we see ourselves - as a devices and services company. It impacts how we run the company, how we develop new experiences, and how we take products to market for both consumers and businesses." Line. Sand.
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Member since:2007-02-18
Member since:2006-06-12
I have to disagree on that. Some features still come first to the Mac, but take less time to be copied by other manufacturer (not complaining about it, this is actually a good thing from my POV).
-"Ultrabook" form factor since 2008 (differ from previous ultra portable effort)
-Multitouch touchpad. OSX is still the king there, other OS integration is "there" but lacking in term of application adoption and use.
-Backlit keyboard, while I am not sure if it was unique, it was the first mainstream use of it I saw.
-Highres display. Older Macs used to trail behind, but the new Retina effort is quickly giving Apple the top position for _mainstream_ laptops.
-Sensors, they had most of them first, then everybody else followed.
-Remote control. Well, that was useless and there was an old hack dating to the 90's to add it to any laptop by forking the internal RS232 connector, Apple supported it until the new Retina MBP.
-OpenCL. Apple was quite an early adopter of it as a core part of the OS
-Modern compositing. While Amiga has it, it was not until Apple implemented it that it became as essential as it is today in modern OS/DE (kudo to the KDE devs not to require it, but I am referring to OSX, Win and iOS).
-Metal chassis. Again, not new, but done in a new way.
That said, many OEM (as in non-Apple) innovate too, against usually Apple fanboy thinking, the dented fruit giant is not the greatest innovator of all time. But saying MBP are just usual laptop is still a bit wrong. They definitively have an unjustified premium on the price, but are the best laptop if you want the latest and hottest gadget.
/Flames on I guess, but it is not my intention. I just share my opinion as mostly a Linux user, but getting Apple laptop from time to time as they make, in my opinion, the best. I had some Apple, Toshiba, Acer, Asus, Compaq (pre-HP), Hp, IBM and Lenovo too. The old Compad Armada E500, both Mac, the IBM thinkpad and the first Asus EeePC survived. all other died before their time. I managed to _MELT_ the Acer to death when rendering a video, I hope they got better by now. The Toshiba "lived" 9 months out of the 3 years warranty period, it was in repair (shipped) the rest of the time. It just could not survive more than 3 month without an internal cable broke, chip unsoldered off the motherboard or the HDD needle got stuck (no, it was not stationary, since when laptop are supposed to be). Even the plastic case had a recall.
So, my tendency to pay the premium may come from those bad experiences, I may have a bias here.
Member since:2005-08-09
This is completely wrong. Apple designing cpu cores now and I don't even speak of custom SOC design.
Just look at teardowns. Everything is custom except for common components like memory chips, connectors, etc.
Unibody cases Apple uses are very expensive to manufacture and not nearly a commodity.
Even glass panels in Apple Store required custom equipment to be made.
Member since:2008-04-08
Member since:2005-08-18
The third and final WWDC product I want to talk about is - of course - OS X 10.9 Mavericks. While iOS 7 was clearly the focus of this year's WWDC, its venerable desktop counterpart certainly wasn't left behind. Apple announced OS X 10.9 Mavericks, the first OS X release not to carry the name of a big cat.
We already talked about iOS 7 yesterday (after a night of sleep, it's only looking worse and worse - look at this, for Fiona's sake!), so now it's time to talk about the downright stunning and belly flutters-inducing new Mac Pro. As former owner and huge, huge, huge fan of the PowerMac G4 Cube - I haven't been this excited about an Apple product since, well, I would say the iMac G4. This is the Apple I used to love.
Apple held its big keynote event thing at WWDC earlier this evening, but since I was away with friends I've had to read up on it later in the evening. The company announced iOS 7, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, and they gave a preview of the new Mac Pro. Especially the Mac Pro impressed me, and while iOS 7's new Holo/Metro-inspired theme looks messy and garish to me, I do commend Apple for finally breaking the mold. This news item will focus on iOS 7 - I'll dive into the Mac Pro and OS X 10.9 tomorrow (it's late here now).
And yes, the PRISM scandal is far, far from over. More and more information keeps leaking out, and the more gets out, the worse it gets. The companies involved have sent out official statements - often by mouth of their CEOs - and what's interesting is that not only are these official statements eerily similar to each other, using the same terms clearly designed by lawyers, they also directly contradict new reports from The New York Times. So, who is lying?This story is getting bigger and bigger. Even though most Americans probably already knew, it is now official: the United States government, through its National Security Agency, is collecting the communications and data of all American citizens, and of non-Americans using American services, through a wide collaboration with the large companies in technology, like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and so on. Interestingly enough, the NSA itself, as well as the US government, have repeatedly and firmly denied this massive spying on Americans and non-Americans took place at all.Ah, patents - the never-ending scourge of the technology industry. Whether wielded by companies who don't actually make any products, or large corporations who abuse them because they can't compete in the market place or because they're simply jerks, they do the industry a huge disservice and are simply plain dangerous. According to The Wall Street Journal (circumvention link), president Obama is about to take several executive actions to address patent trolls - which may seem like a good idea, but I am very worried that all this will do is strengthen the positions of notorious patent system abusers such as Apple and Microsoft.
With version 13.05, the developers of the Genode OS Framework take measures to ensure that Genode continues to scale well with a growing number of users and the steadily broadening platform coverage. Further highlights are the improved SoC support for Exynos 5, OMAP4, Raspberry Pi, i.MX, and new components for realizing headless systems.At the D11 conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook once again took the stage to be interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. While most of the interview can be replicated by picking and reading 10 random Apple fanblog stories - there were still a number of very interesting things that warrant some closer scrutiny.
So, the Xbox One disaster continues. Microsoft's policy for dealing with the used games market has reportedly leaked - and it's a clear and direct attack to destroy the used games market. Prices for used games will be set at the retail value of a new game, and retailers have to hook into Microsoft's computer systems and comply with Microsoft's terms and conditions.At an event earlier today, Microsoft unveiled the next Xbox - the third model, but confusingly named Xbox One. The big focus was TV, integrated Kinect, and all the other stuff we all expected to be forced down our throats. I think it took them 25 minutes to actually come to what should be the core of the story: gaming. Nothing groundbreaking in the gaming department, except for how Microsoft intends to handle the used games market and borrowing games from friends: pay up, buddy!
Member since:
2005-08-18
iPhone
iPad
iPod
Macbook
...etc...
That's a lot of hardware for a software company.