This is a Quicktime movie named “The Power of X” and a presentation on the state of Mac OS X. See Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing, Philip Schiller present Mac OS X v10.2 “Jaguar”. Especially watch the impressive QuartzExtreme demo among the interesting topics discussed. An interesting watch for people who are curious about OSX and want to learn more.
Presentation on the Power of X
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I agree, this is a good presentation on OSX. If you have not converted to OSX yet ( why haven’t you? ), then this is a good presentation to show the benefits of OSX over OS9.
I watched this on my broadband connection with my G3 iMac and it was just like being there. How did I ever live with just dial-up?
But how humble Linux user can view this? May somebody post a direct link?
http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/jan/osx_keynote/powerofx_ref.mov
“If you have not converted to OSX yet ( why haven’t you? ), then this is a good presentation to show the benefits of OSX over OS9.”
I’m still using my 8600 running 8.6 and I love it. However, I’m waiting for the G5 or PPC 970 before I upgrade.
Can’t wait to run OS X and X11…
– Mark
Thank you!
“I’m still using my 8600 running 8.6 and I love it. However, I’m waiting for the G5 or PPC 970 before I upgrade.”
Depending on who you believe, you may be waiting till this fall or later…
I used to run MacOS 8.1 on my emulator on PC. Worked pretty well, except if you wanted to play games (keyboard’s responsiveness was not good with the emulator).
After I was given this Cube (thanks David!) I booted to both OSX and OS9. After one week, and since May 2002, I only boot it to OSX. Now, I need a way to get rid of the OS9 partition I guess, as I am out of space on the OSX one.
really great job! Where did you get the direct link to the “Power of X” presentation? I looked for it a whole day and don’t found it. 🙁
Now I can download the mov-file.
Many thanks.
BTW: Is the a direct link for Job’s Keynote stream, too?
I get an error but then again i’m a windows user! Typical!
Okay… Am I the only one getting “requested data” until it times out? (QT6.1)
> Where did you get the direct link to the “Power of X” presentation?
I checked the source code of the page…
> Is the a direct link for Job’s Keynote stream, too?
http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/jan/macworld/live/mwsf_28_56_100…
Well, I checked the source code of the page too, but it didn’t worked when I tried it.
Maybe I had tomatoes before the eyes… or just was too stupid 😉
THX again!
the move is a stream. Quicktime’s default configuration for streaming is “UDP”. UDP does not work with many Internet service providers. I use T-Online, a big german ISP and UDP doesn’t work, too.
You have to switch to HTTP protokoll and port 80.
You can find this setting in quicktime->settings->connection->transport-settings.
I hope this helps.
Quartz Extreme is neat…
This presents to things that just pop out to me:
a.) If Apple can make the *nix platform so user-friendly, and heck, so pretty, far more than Windows (no matter how far you go with the themes, fake docks, and etc.), heck, the rest of the OSS community is still far behind it…
Something like QE would be amazing on a Linux rig.
b.) PORT THE DAMN THING! Apple’s current hardware of choice is limiting it’s user base. OSX on either an A64, P4, GFFX, Radeon9700, would be so much faster, and so much cheaper.
And heck, being UNIX/BSD or whatever based… it should be easy…
So APPLE! do it!
🙂
I was somewhat surprized to see them making degrading comments and comparisons with regard to their own previous Operating Systems. Instead of showing how advanced MacOS X is, for me it only demonstrated how lacking their previously heavily promoted OS solutions really were.
It’s not that a lot of people didn’t already know this, but I believe it is still a hit in the face for some of the most faithful MacOS advocates.
I also believe that the most important reason for many Mac users, not to upgrade to MacOS X is caused by the performance issues of MacOS X. MacOS X is a very powerful and wonderful OS, but IMO also pretty slow, inefficient and overall severely bloated. In the past I ran 68k MacOS on my Amiga faster than any real Mac could at the time, but yet compared to AmigaOS the difference in efficiency, performance and bloat was mind-boggling. (While offering far fewer features, including pre-emtive multitasking). Nowadays pre-MacOS X MacOSes seem fast in comparison!
It is good to see how Safari looks to have become an excellent low bloat webbrowser alternative, I hope they will be able to get the amount bloat of the whole OS down as well…. With regard to Safari I would prefer a non-popup browser button, instead of needing to go to the menus for enabling this feature (I currently use such a button, which I can easily hit to turn on or off popups).
The new Safari and X11 stuff has really boosted my confidence in MacOS X as a desktop OS. Probably the next laptop I buy will be an Apple!
Thanks Ralf =)
Thanks for the UDP/HTTP tip, it made it possible to stream, but it’s still not watchable… it buffers 10sec or so, shows it to me, then grinds to a halt for x sec, etc etc… is this because it’s been “OSNewsed” or…? Connection and hardware wise I should be able to stream 10 of these so that’s not it, but I’m eager to see it so are there any way to download it before viewing, or alternate link perhaps?
IT’S BASED ON UNIX. That’s at least 20 year old technology, no matter how many bells and whistles you slap on top of it. Unix is certainly very good, and BSD is very very stable, but a fresh lick of paint doesn’t make it “breakthrough” technology.
The Quartz guy (Chris) is a pretty weak speaker, definitely needs to go back to the workshop :>. It looks good though, but I don’t know how unique it is. The latest Nvidia drivers offer similar translucent effects on wintel (In fact winamp3 does it as well). Don’t know if those effects are through the cpu or the graphics card though, which I think is the main point he was making.
The secure disk imaging system is a nice idea, looks very easy to use as well. Haven’t actually tried, but I imagine that it wouldn’t be too hard to achieve something similar under linux. In fact I seem to remember an OSS project for encrypting partitions, in this case the partition would just be an image you mount via loopback.
Spam mail filter looks useful (Although I don’t know if it’s the movie, but the actual mail app looks horribly designed). Doesn’t really solve the problem though, and it’s not Apple’s fault, the spam mail is still hitting your mailbox. Spam mail needs a more coordinated effort from the IP companies to stop it ever getting that far.
Did the old browser not have ability to block cookies from specific domains? AFAIK Netscape and IE have had that for a while, only ask because the guy made such a big deal of it. The other thing is there seems to be something very odd with the rendering in Safari. Could be the movie, or the sites they’re visiting, but something just didn’t seem right.
So that’s the dock. I’ve been curious since I heard people going on about it. I notice that during the chemistry molecule demonstration when he moved to use the app’s control window (Near the bottom of the screen) the dock appeared to interfere with using the app. Does that happen often? Or is it not really a problem?
I don’t get his point about the 3d Quicktime being good for visualisation. Namely the “They don’t all need to have the same 3d application”. Yeah, but they all need Quicktime!
Just as a general impression the whole thing felt less like a commercial presentation and more like a class of students presenting their science projects. It’s just the impression I got, and perhaps the one they wanted to give out. Also the implied familiarity/smiley nature, genuine or not, got a bit forced and cloying after a while. Perhaps that’s the way all these presentations go, but it got irritating.
This is the first time I’ve actually seen a Mac running for a very long time (Which is why I don’t comment on them, this comment is about what was shown in the movie). It seemed pretty good from what was shown. I can’t of course comment on the graphics, or the feel, because a) It’s a quicktime movie (Anyone else notice how much better video compression is getting?) b) The pictures were coming off a projector, which explains the apparent low framerate. In general though it seems like quite a neat OS, with plenty of features. I haven’t checked a price on Macs any time recently, but unless they’ve dropped considerably I’m not sure neat features are enough to make up for it (They were quite expensive last I checked). Hard to make that kind of judgement without seeing more of what the hardware can actually do, a 1 hour presentation can’t possibly cover enough to make a considered opinion.
One for the zealots. How many times did the various speakers use the word “cool”?
One for music lovers. Sacrificing Hendrix to the gods of computing commerce, may that guy’s guitar burn to ashes.
Sorry if this comment is rambling, I was writing whilst watching. Not a good technique for clarity of thought :>
It’s a bit more thanthan a lick of fresh paint I would venture to say.
Mail is actually a very nicely designed app.
“I don’t get his point about the 3d Quicktime being good for visualisation. Namely the “They don’t all need to have the same 3d application”. Yeah, but they all need Quicktime! ”
His point is valid, because Quicktime is included (or is a part of) OS X. Not everyone has Maya installed!
And to the rest of ur comments,the mac is a very different animal than it was a couple of years ago.
And to your other misc comments-everyones a critic! : )
I enjoyed the demo (On a sidenote, I was impressed by the quality of the streaming video. Not sure if that was MP4 but that looked very good.).
IMHO the coolest part was the X11 demo, quite impressive to have xfree quartz accelerated and “aquaized”.
I watched the keynote in the background on my dualg 1ghz mac, while compositing 2k animation in animo, with a few 150 meg photoshop layers opened, itunes streaming music, Safari browsing during the previews, and animo background rendering as part of a render cluster. I would not dare throwing a third of these processes on a NT station. I really enjoy what apple has accomplished with OSX.
The Quartz guy (Chris) is a pretty weak speaker, definitely needs to go back to the workshop :>. It looks good though, but I don’t know how unique it is. The latest Nvidia drivers offer similar translucent effects on wintel (In fact winamp3 does it as well). Don’t know if those effects are through the cpu or the graphics card though, which I think is the main point he was making.
Errrr. The translucent effects are nice, for sure, and of course, works in Windows too… But ooh. Wait…
Still a hell load buggy in Windows… If you ever used a program like MSN Messenger, watch what happens when a new message pops up, and etc…
And try waving a translucent window over a streaming file… errr. doesn’t work to well.
You’ll have to use MAC OSX to actually SEE why it’s such a good desktop OS… If you’re into eye candy and all, it’s quite nice when you notice all the little things that OSX offers, that neither Windows or XFree86 offer.
As for the dock… There are settings for it too ya know, it doesn’t always have to be on top, just like any damn panel or taskbar.
I agree with what was said above, the bashing os OS9 was a surprise. That may cause people to upgrade but at the same time your telling people “yes the product we said was great when we were selling it to you does indeed suck, buy this now, it doesn’t suck, honest” . But I think apple isn’t very good with people in this respect. They try to get people to buy there stuff by saying what they have now sucks and they are dumb for using it. Much like they make those who use os9 feel dumb. And they make their users look like people who couldn’t operate a fork. I guess this is the way to go for some people, but for myself and i think many others it’s a quick way to backfire. Same goes for when looking through their product pages, if they just gave the specs and some info on it all would be well. But their rambabling trying to make a 1 ghz laptop be more powerful than a 3 ghz desktop and so forth make me not want to have anything to do with them.
With the new 17 inch powerbooks they are one step closer to getting me to bite, and this presentation did show some very nice stuff. Just being able to see osx run was great. Before now I had only seen it breifly. One of Apple’s problems. No one (mostly) is going to buy a mac without playing with one first. But thats near impossable for most people. I live a few hundred miles from any store that carries them, and it’s not like I live in the middle of no where. And trying to find someone that owns a mac is near impossable. I have only ever seen 6 people with one since coming to college. And the uni macs are crap and run os9. Apple needs to work on this, they need to advertise actualy using it and showing a mac at work, not people BS’ing stuff in a commercial. I think the only shot of OSX in a commercial is the iMac that sticks it’s drawer out. They don’t even have commercials for actual product. Their not MS they don’t have the advantage of their OS being everywhere. This it one of the things that killed BeOS, unless you were using it you never heard of it.
One for the zealots. How many times did the various speakers use the word “cool”?
Erm… Have you ever been to a tech show, of even seen videos of presentation.
Whether it is Microsoft, Motorola, Sony, IBM, or etc…
They seem to love the word… So stop picking on Apple, because most of the accusations you make against apple, can be made against Microsoft (heck, you probably can make so many more accusations, true or false with these guys), and others.
Ah well… I still hate the fact that OSX is only available on their systems… PORT IT ALREADY!!
I’m sure there’s a bunch of the population out there ready to jump the M$ ship, yet are not too keen on Linux.
Apple seems to care about the little things, I mean… very little picky things that seem to really make their niche market happy.
Until you use it, you won’t notice all the little things that make your experience that much more enjoyable, and using another OS… errr… Feel weird.
It’d also be nice to have something, well… Faster and, heck, just plain better than XFree86 for free or just already there… All the commercial products that are out right now as another X Windowing System just seem… too…
urgh…
It would just be great if Apple ports OSX to x86, or provide a nice free, downloadable version of Quartz, QE, Aqua, for the OSS community to enjoy.
With the new 17 inch powerbooks they are one step closer to getting me to bite, and this presentation did show some very nice stuff. Just being able to see osx run was great. Before now I had only seen it breifly. One of Apple’s problems. No one (mostly) is going to buy a mac without playing with one first. But thats near impossable for most people. I live a few hundred miles from any store that carries them, and it’s not like I live in the middle of no where. And trying to find someone that owns a mac is near impossable. I have only ever seen 6 people with one since coming to college. And the uni macs are crap and run os9. Apple needs to work on this, they need to advertise actualy using it and showing a mac at work, not people BS’ing stuff in a commercial. I think the only shot of OSX in a commercial is the iMac that sticks it’s drawer out. They don’t even have commercials for actual product. Their not MS they don’t have the advantage of their OS being everywhere. This it one of the things that killed BeOS, unless you were using it you never heard of it.
Funny why you mention that… People know who apple is, and know like, errr, 2 of their products. It’s nice to see all those people in those switch ads, rambling about BSOD’s on their old Windows 98/ME systems.
But heck… why not show to goodies as opposed to Ellen Feiss making weird beeping noise, trying to imitate her PC dying after trying to do a project of some sort, on some very important project I guess (www.apple.com/switch, if you’re curious).
Yeah, it would be better if they display all the neat features OSX can do by default as opposed to those ugly Windows XP pre-built boxes you can get @ the local computer store.
It be nice if they showed something else than those ugly iMacs (why not flash out some of the real goodies, PPC’s, PowerBooks, as opposed to iBook).
Instead of attacking M$ on faults of the Windows of years ago, display what OSX can really do…
And heck… Just for kicks…
PORT THE DAMN THING!
I liked that screensaver they showed and downloaded it
but yeah they didnt show much, when people talk about reality distortion feild jobs puts off, I think it might just be his charisma as a speaker, those 3 on that show sucked.
Im just biding my time till I find the desktop systems worth the price. Might consider the 17″ powerbook next year though.
Aside from the mountain of 3rd party software that would have to be ported, since PPC emulation is very difficult…
What other processor family, economically scaled to fit the consumer space yet powerful enough for pros, has the kind of future that the PowerPC has?
Any future developments of x86 are going to be hacks on top of hacks, and the transition to 64 bit addressing is going to be both rocky and expensive. The PowerPC is a clean, scalable design with potential in both directions. Motorola at least is developing low-power modular processors that could conceivably be at the heart of even more compact laptops or other small devices. On the other hand, IBM is developing the 970, which will smoothly run the old 32-bit code, since PPC32 is just a subset of PPC64(for the most part… I think there are some small quirks involved in transitioning between assembly code for 32 and equivalent code for 64).
The PowerPC is a good platform for Apple to stick with well into the future.
The transition to 64-bit, even though might be a little rocky, won’t be “expensive”, if you’re mentionning this in Apple terms. But the hardware, not just the CPU itself, seems to be ways behind…
Apple only adopted DDR, way after it was introduced. Apple was on ATA66 drives when ATA133 were out, and now SATA150 drives a available…
Sure, items like the SuperDrive are great, but in terms of the best bang for the buck, Apple is just not there.
It could be the simple fact that porting it could really cut down on its revenues. Heck, Apple makes a load of money selling those really overpriced systems, (especially Dual G4 PPC’s and PowerBook’s).
I’m not sure what they really want, because they might not get the best of both worlds… But I do know that I want to be able to run OSX on more hardware platforms than just PPC.
I guess it’s all about the risk now… Risk going deeper into a market that is dominated by Microsoft, and possibly have hefty market share gains, or stick to what they are doing now, and their little niche market, as the penguin goes strolling along, from 3 to 2.
I kinda agree with this, instead of showing people just talking about it, why not show the OS in action.
When I talk to other tech people I know, a lot of them have no idea what OSX is–they think macs are still running on the old “cutesy toy” os–no idea that the GUI has changed or of the bsd underpinnings. Most of them ignore the news of Macs because they still think of them as the “weird, alternative os that graphics people use”.
I show them this movie: http://www.apple.com/macosx/theater/dock.html . They freak when the minimized Monsters, Inc movie starts playing in the dock. Then I tell them that it has unixy roots and a command line and they start to get interested. Unfortunately for Apple, when they look at the processor speeds, it’s a killer. Hopefully this will change (summer, fall?).
Maybe in the commercials they could start off by showing the desktop, then show the mouse cursor navigating to the dock, starting a QuickTime movie, then zoom into the movie which turns into the actual commercial.
Since a lot of you have made comments about wishing to see Mac OS X running, and also that this was the first time you ever saw OS X, check out the quite wast amount of Quicktime demos available at:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/theater/
and
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/
I think OSNews is taking the “criticism” of bias from a small but vocal minority a bit too much on board – why does an advert for Apple warrant the front page? This isn’t news, it’s marketing!
For those who haven’t used or seen OS X but think it looks cool from screenshots or videos, I can tell you it’s massively overrated. I’ve used it, and half the things said about it are exaggurations or false.
In particular, the usability argument tends to be quite biased. OS X is a doghole with respect to usability, they sacrifice it to the alter of good looks. The whizzy animations and translucency slow the whole thing down, and reduce usability at the same time – genius!
Really, I think half the hype about MacOS comes from people who haven’t actually used it much, perhaps tried it at a store for 5 minutes, and think it’s cool. In reality, it’s 20% cool and 80% hype.
People should get real, MacOS is going nowhere fast, it’s held back by the ridiculous hardware and even if it wasn’t it still wouldn’t go anywhere. People are going goo goo over it because it’s presently the only alternative to Windows on the desktop, so it’s got novelty value, not because it’s actually better.
OK, rant over.
“Erm… Have you ever been to a tech show, of even seen videos of presentation.
Whether it is Microsoft, Motorola, Sony, IBM, or etc…
They seem to love the word… So stop picking on Apple, because most of the accusations you make against apple, can be made against Microsoft (heck, you probably can make so many more accusations, true or false with these guys), and others.”
Ok, two things.
a) It was intended as humour. Yes, amazingly enough, not every post ever created in the history of the web has been designed simply to irritate you. Of course just because it was meant to be funny doesn’t mean it actually was *shrugs*.
b) This article/movie was about APPLE, I was commenting on APPLE’S commercial presentation. I’m pretty sure I didn’t see Bill Gates stand up on stage and give another cheesy XBox presentation, and until such times as I do I’ll restrict my comments to what I saw.
egilDOTnet, thanks for the extra links. The extra clarity really made a few things easier to see working especially the dock and mail app.
This isn’t news, it’s marketing!
Here’s a shocker: everything written about a company and its products is marketing, whether good, bad, intentional, or not. People around here complain to Eugenia if she posts too much news articles on this, posts too much on that. Here’s a simple solution for all of these people: if you don’t like the post, why not click the up arrow on your scrollbar to skip it–it’s a lot less effort than whining or posting something negative that really doesn’t help anyone.
The rest of your post is a bit silly. Lots of people are having the opposite reaction that you are. Maybe people can make up their own minds?
> I think OSNews is taking the “criticism” of bias from a small but vocal minority a bit too much on board – why does an advert for Apple warrant the front page? This isn’t news, it’s marketing!
IF this news item was about Linux or FreeBSD, you WOULD NOT SAY that! Think about it. IT IS news. It is a presentation of an OS and in fact, I CLEARLY indicated what is the most interesting part in the whole presentation: The QuartzExtreme demo. You don’t get that everyday. 😉
posting this story. it’s a story, it’s interesting, it’s newsorthy.
Be open minded.
>apple isn’t very good with people in this respect. They try to get people to buy there stuff by saying what they have now sucks and they are dumb for using it
that differs from microsoft how?
“Microsoft Corp. has told beta testers of Office 11 that the product will only work with the Windows 2000, Windows XP and later desktop releases. Microsoft said that this decision was, in part, for security reasons. “Windows 9x is inherently insecure” Sloan Crayton of Microsoft said.”