Revenge is sweet for Apple, now savoring the rise of Mac OS X and Xserve in the lab, but this is still the planting. A difficult growing season lies ahead.
A Perfect 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
Ease of management is mentioned in the article
Generally anyone running a 100+ node cluster ought to be able to engineer their own management solutions…
Revenge on whom?
I’m not going to speak for anyone else, but for me it’s revenge against every single person who ever sneered when you mentioned the Mac and derided your Mac as a “toy” that couldn’t do anything useful.
They say the best revenge is living well, and Apple is living very well these days.
If they looked at an I-Mac, sneered and called it a toy, then I would have to say they are justified. It looks like a toy.
However if they did the same to a PowerMac then I guess you could just stare at them with a confused and cross look on your face till they spouted excuses and left the room.
I cringed everytime I had to read the word Copeland. COPLAND NOT COPELAND!
I think that would only apply to the original iMac. Ugliest computer I’ve ever seen and it did look like a toy. So did the iBooks back then. If you struggled to take anyone who used any of those systems seriously, I wouldn’t blame you.
However, the current range does look more professional.
The second imac did look a bit toy-ish – although as has been said many a time, more desklampy. I still prefer it to the newer one though – it’s a lot more interesting and unique. Plus I prefer the idea of keeping the computer itself a little away and the monitor more in-the-face; the newer ones look like a strangely oversized LCD.
The new Powerbooks are very nice machines, no argument there.
Nor will I argue about the first imacs – at least they weren’t beige I guess…
Anytime Apple does anything MS will follow. They will have a special edition windows written for this kind of thing. I hope Apple gets enough momentum, to sustain themselves.
Funny thing is, Steve Jobs wanted to do this kind of thing about 10 years ago! Geez Apple, where were you for that decade!!!
Hmm. What’s wrong with toys? Besides, looks can be deceiving. My two gum-drop iMacs are still going strong and running Panther quite respectably. I can’t remember ever witnessing a system crash on either one. Let’s see, they run everything I require: Macromedia Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, Propellerhead’s Reason, Ableton Live, iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie. So, what’s the problem?
I have Macromedia studio running on my powerbook 1.33ghz and 768 meg of RAM. The interface is actually a little slow, especially Fireworks. I could not imagine running those programs on a G3. I have installed the Macromedia updates.
It runs other apps quite nicely (Mail, Safari, iTunes, skEdit)
Just waiting for the PowerBook G5, before i’ll buy one. Hope they’ll release it soon, Mac’s are realy sexy..
http://bitsofnews.com
Are you running MX Studio? My two oldest iMacs barely meet Macromedia’s recommended requirements, but the products run reasonably well. I agree that the interfaces run a bit slow, but they also run a bit slow on my iMac G5 as compared to my Pentium 4 XP machine at work. Some PC fanatics might say it’s because I’m running it on a Mac, but I attribute it to Macromedia’s less than efficient coding for OS X. The point is, I have no problem getting work done. I think the responsiveness of these programs would be similar, or worse, on a 5 year old WinTel PC, however. It is telling that the pentium II processors aren’t even supported in Studio MX while the G3 is.
The G5, not OS X.
umm… the G5 AND xGrid which is part of OS X server installs. OS X makes it really easy to set up a cluster, so please do not make it as if the G5 is the only reason that Bioinformatics labs and other research institutes are not thinking about the easy of use OS X offers them when they purchase these systems.
The point is that many people now are considering an Apple solution where they would not have only a few years ago. From the article it’s safe to say that nodes are being installed all over the place. And it is because they’re solving people’s problems and not because they happened to buy an iPod…
This will make more apps available on the platform, which will trigger more interest which will sell more machines… Given their market position, I’d say there’s plenty of potential for growth
. As an initial investment I still believe they’re just a -tad- on the expensive side [I’m not arguing with the people who manage to install a 10-blade server running Ubuntu with 1960s technology inside a Weaties box for a tenth of the price of a six-pack of condoms, Apple will never be able to be THAT good] but the overall experience gives a very agreeable return on investment.
The key to continued success is going to be delivering solutions for corporate/research/education/home user’s needs.
I hope these developments open up a bigger share of the market to Apple. Microsoft is in dire need of some quality competition and I’m curious to see if the cow will have as much nice things as Tiger has. Rather, I think there’ll be another major overhaul -before- the barn door opens in Redmond [that is, if they make the 2006 release date, otherwise it’s at least 2 new editions].
Imagine: Virtual Longhorn…
Someone wrote:
“Generally anyone running a 100+ node cluster ought to be able to engineer their own management solutions…”
I think that’s the wrong attitude. Computing should always move towards simplicity.
I hope you like waiting
My guess will be that you’ll be waiting for a fair chunk of time. I hope I’m wrong though and Apple does a double whammy and release OS X 10.4 and G5 PowerBooks on the same day. If it’s any consolation, I too was going to wait for a G5 PowerBook but now own a G4 version and am very happy. The only thing I wish I had was a full gig of RAM.
Funny thing is, Steve Jobs wanted to do this kind of thing about 10 years ago! Geez Apple, where were you for that decade!!!
Well, not 10 years, almost 20. The very first NeXTCube, introduced in 1988 and being in development since 1986, was targeting academia market exclusively at first, at least according to Job’s personal saying back then.
i have a friend who is a staunch winzealot, and has been since 3.1. the thing is, he never really did the adjustment to getting the state of things from the net rather then magazines, and he hasnt even really been keeping up on magazines since he started a family. so you tend to get these arguments from him that are a few years old, it alwas brings me back whenever we talk.
for example, i told him how much mozilla was rocking it a year or so ago, and he went on and on about how ie is better then netscape. i then got him to install firefox (or firebird back then) without telling him where it came from, and he got hooked within the week.
i have also tried talking to him about macs, and he likes arguments like “one button mice are dumb”, or “the mac is only good for newbies, not for people who want to get serious work done”. ive shown him vids of osx in action, explained why it is technologically superior in virtually every way to xp, how it is fully based on unix with a far more robust commandline interface then dos, etc, etc, etc. STILL he says that all that junk is eyecandy. ive even tried explaining that windows has been working towards that for awhile now, and i dont think he fully believes me. its like, “Mac sucks, i dont know why, but i made a choice years ago to learn windows and i couldnt have been wrong in choosing the place to invest my energies. no matter how many people tell me differently, no matter how many user testimonials i hear, or whitepapers i read, it still sucks. why? because it does.” his first reaction to my ipod was that it had to be an expensive piece of crud. its a frustrating mentality, that is only so noticable because his arguements are so out of date.
when my finances stablize a bit, im planning on buying him a mac mini. my hypothesis is that his head will explode, but we will see 😉
Holy crap… I think I would slap him for being a mindless moron.
it is one thing to like the platform because of various reasons, but to not like a platform because of out of date talking points?
This is actually more of a dissapointment for SGI since Irix could have been what OS X is today.
The trend tends to be more that desktop and commodity software and hardware is moving into big iron more so than big iron is moving into the desktop. The reason is simple: volume.
The G5, not OS X.
Um, no. There are special math libraries to take full advantage of the G5 in MOSX that don’t exist in any of the PPC linuxes (sp?). So depending on what you’re doing with it–you do need Mac OS X.
I read today where Torvplds was given a mac and uses it as his main machine.
He runs Linux on it, though.
Point is, he likes the hardware.
It is only to give IBM PowerPC a poster child that (and give Apple a discount on the chips) that Apple is even spending time on servers and labs and all that.
Apple doesn’t have enough volume to get a good deal on PowerPC chips so they have to do funny stuff for IBM.
It just makes me laugh.
PowerPC is just so over. Apple is the only company that uses the IBM PowerPC. Apple could have had 10X the sales if they had gone with Opteron.
Oh well. No one ever accused Apple of being smart. Greedy, yes. Innovative, yes. Smart, no.
It is only to give IBM PowerPC a poster child that that Apple is even spending time on servers and labs and all that.
I would argue but anyone who thinks IBM needs Apple to make servers for them is probably to clueless to read big words like OpenPower.
uhmmmm… are you clueless or what? PPC is used in more places than the x86.
“PowerPC is just so over. Apple is the only company that uses the IBM PowerPC. Apple could have had 10X the sales if they had gone with Opteron.”
Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo all plan on or are currently using PowerPC.
So what was your point?
“Apple doesn’t have enough volume to get a good deal on PowerPC chips so they have to do funny stuff for IBM.”
Like buy them in volume. Yeah thats really funny.
“uhmmmm… are you clueless or what? PPC is used in more places than the x86. ”
Are we talking videogame consoles here?
“PowerPC is just so over. Apple is the only company that uses the IBM PowerPC. Apple could have had 10X the sales if they had gone with Opteron.”
Its probably because IBM MADE the 970 specifically for Apple. What other IBM processor has a SIMD like Altivec?
Opteron? HAHA no thanks. You could never have an Opteron fit in a two inch vertical form factor like the iMac G5 and sure they sell 1U Opteron servers but I bet they don’t stay as cool as the G5s.