All Apple Stores nationwide last night re-opened their doors at 8 PM for their queued Apple fans to enter. OSNews was present, so check inside for a write up of the event and some pictures.We arrived at around 7:45 PM and the queue outside the Apple Store in Palo Alto was already huge. The store employees, all with a black X t-shirts were having their final briefing at the time, and they were soon getting ready to welcome the crowds. The morale of the sales team –mostly consisted by youngsters– seemed very high-up, they were pretty playful with each other and in a good mood.
People crossing the street nearby were stopping and keep asking why there was a queue, they were all very curious as to why so many people outside the Apple Store.
At about 8 PM the doors opened and the first wave of people got in the store. And there was much rejoicing. Many people rushed to get a sit near the big screen at the end of the store, where the Mac OS X presentation would take place, showing the new features of Panther. Others would just rush to secure a copy of Panther and others would just buy other items, as all products were 10% off for the night.
The Store already had the new iBook G4 in the display which seemed much snappier than the previous iBook G3. The keyboard is now much better with nice-looking grey keys (previous iBook had very cheap-looking plastic keys), but the screen seems to be the same sub-standard quality as the G3’s iBooks. The iPod accessories were also in store, and many G5 machines too. All machines were upgraded with 10.3 and people were playing with them using the Rendezvous version of iChat and iSight to chat with other customers in the store.
We spoke with a number of Apple employees who were visiting for the night, including very friendly PR and marketing people, and also with Ken Bereskin. Ken spoke to us about the new features of Panther, how much work Apple has put into GCC and the XCode, about the G5 optimizations that developers can incorporate into their apps which can even compliment G4s, and also about how Apple is commited to open source and to deliver great enhancements back to the community. Asking Ken if Apple has any plans to develop a .NET implementation, Ken told us that he will leave this feature to the open source community and Mono for now. We suggested a 1-client free version for Apple Remote Desktop for the next Mac OS X and Ken kindly said he would follow up with the idea.
We stayed at the store about an hour and there was no Steve Jobs to be seen during that time. Last year both Jobs and his senior architect Avie Tevanian were present to the Jaguar event. Additionally, it seemed to be fewer people overall than last year; similarly journalists were not as many as last year either. Every visitor left with a military dog tag, free gift. Last year they had stickers and mousepads, this year only a few Apple Stores nationwide had those in, in addition to the dog tags.
Until next year then!
I’m wondering– is there an Apple Store in the Netherlands? Never saw one, anyway…
Nope, only US. I think there are some in Japan and Australia though, not sure.
http://www.apple.com/retail/
Not a very good move by Apple– Since Apple is kind of a synonym for ‘style’, you’d expect them to open shops in Europe… and no this isn’t chauvinism, it’s just that people always say Europe is more stylish.
Anyway, maybe they’ll change their policy… One day
Their retail shops are very new. They started them only 2-3 years ago. So it makes sense to start and put a business foot in the US first and then expand to other countries, as long the business is successful.
It’s interesting that Eugenia asked about an implementation of .NET on Mac. I’d seriously consider purchasing a Mac if there was a stable, mature implementation on Macs. The good news is that Ximian(now part of Novell) is hiring another JIT(Just in Time) programmer so that maybe the powerpc port will come along faster. IIRC, the powerpc/Mac version of mono can only Mint(the interpreter) at this time. Maybe, once the powerpc mono is more mature Apple will throw some resources behind it. Xcode looks nice(amazing that the previous IDE didn’t have intellisense before) and I’m sure writing c# code in it would be great.
I want to write cross-platform apps(I have no desire to write java) and since Mac development is done primarily in java and Objective-c, I can’t get excited about a mac purchase.
to the one in PA last nite, but not having the $$ to spend kind of sucks. Also, there appears to be a number of bugs that need resolving (check out macslash.org) and I would rather wait since that is the case.
a lot of Bugs seem to be on the Machines of People who upgraded from 10.1 to 10.2 then to 10.3
a lot of upgrading is never a good idea on any OS because there is always something hat is missed.
I have not read about any problems from a person who did a clean install.
I also here that Archive and instal has worked with out a hitch, so that might be the way to go.
Mono is the only client available right now that is not run by MS, and MS’s CLI only runs on Windows (there was supposed to be a BSD CLI but I have not seen nor heard anything about this)
plus, most of the Libraries in MS’s CLI are proprietary and cannot be ported over to other platforms unless MS makes a port or they are reverse engineered.
Java, Python, Perl, Ruby, etc. are much better cross platform tools and even ANSI/ISO C++ using wxWindows or QT is a good choice. you should do some stuff with system calls, but it makes porting harder which is why java is a good choice, the system calls are done by the VM.
As I stated before, I’m not interested in java. I pretty much believe that java is dead on the client. As far as python and ruby, I’ve done a very small amount of python work at it seems like a nice language, but I just don’t it’s really a good choice for large applications. I think there are performance issues with python as well as Ruby. I’ll just leave Perl alone. C++ and wxWindows is pretty nice for cross-platform work, but I do too much c++ programming the way things are.
[i]plus, most of the Libraries in MS’s CLI are proprietary and cannot be ported over to other platforms unless MS makes a port or they are reverse engineered.[i]
Most of the .NET framework is not in the ecmca spec, but these are just apis and don’t need to be reverse-engineered. Remember, mono is not using ROTOR as a reference, so the entire FCL has to be “engineered”. The only big problem is Windows Forms, which pinvokes into native libraries so mono is going to have a wine library to handle that. In DotGNU’s windows forms implementation, they took the approach of just using System.Drawing for the underlying drawing mechanism, so that a DotGNU binary will run on DotGNU and windows. On a related note, DotGNU’s runtime seems to be running on Macs fine. I think the difference is that they have some kind of hybrid JIT/interpretation going on for right now.
If Mac doesn’t get a .NET implementation, that’s fine. I’ll be happy with windows and linux.
Is it just me or does the general population at computer stores seem to weigh a little more than the normal population?
I was reading this and I’ve seen a few other things on the release of 10.3, but I was just wondering, does anyone know the codename for 10.4, or are the planning on going to 11 next, or what?
Just curious.
I don’t know the codename, but it is probably another cat. So, it could be “lynx” (or there was one already?), or Sabretooth (or is it sawtooth?
, Leopard, Cougar, Bobcat. More info: http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2003/07/20030724025054.shtml
my point about the CLI and the APIs is that you will have to have a mono port of APIs for windows for you to get cross-platform work done.
as far as Java client being dead…you sound like my friend. IMHO Java is not close to dead, but for consumer applications it sure is. custom made Business apps on the other hand are still strong because you can work from one code base for X number of platforms. it is cheaper to implement because of that.
but that is just My Opinion.
as for Python, dude, Python is totally capable of being used to make large apps (well, were are not talking FPS games here, but for most tasks, Python can handle it. besides, having a heap-dynamic allocation and dynamic binding of variables is nice 🙂
“The only big problem is Windows Forms, which pinvokes into native libraries so mono is going to have a wine library to handle that.”
Wine? Um, unless I’m missing something, that pretty much defeats the “cross-platformness” of .NET. Wine is obviously tied to the x86 architecture.
Nope, only US. I think there are some in Japan and Australia though, not sure.