Apple Archive

Apple Computer has kept itself busy of late creating new recipes for marketing and sales. The company recently cooked up a public preview of QuickTime 6. To get a taste of Apple's future, CNET News.com sits down with Steve Jobs and bites into the issues. The interview is about the MPEG-4 issues, the iMac, while you will also find an article about eMac, now being sold to everyone, and not just to educational institutes and students.

"Microsoft plans to release on Monday the first significant update to the Mac OS X version of Office and will also introduce a version of its instant messaging program designed for the latest Mac operating system." Read the report at ZDNews. On other Mac news, both DigiTimes and TheRegister are reporting that new iMacs, with larger LCD monitors will debut on the 3rd quarter this year.

"Recent word from sources close to Motorola confirm that a significant speed bump will be timed for MacWorld Expo in July, raising current bus speeds, and seeing new 7470-based G4s raise frequencies to as high as 1.5Ghz. What of the G5? That's still on course for volume production early next year, in the form of what's codenamed the 7500. Public Motorola roadmaps describe this as a processor that conforms to the e500 Book E G5 spec, and it's been rated stable at 2.4GHz internally at Motorola. But to get a handle on this it's worth paying attention to the internals, as this indicates an important rethink in the Megahertz wars." Read the report at TheRegister.

The release of Apple's latest hardware offerings this month has caused quite a stir among Apple loyalists. This is only Apple's second foray into creating a truly dedicated server machine, the first of which being the "Network Server 500/700", which Apple sold in 1995 running AIX. The question on everyone's mind now is going to be what this means for Apple's prospects as a server platform. Certainly everyone agrees that the new machine looks nice, but how will it on the duties it will be required to perform. Furthermore, what kind of price/performance ratio is Apple offering when compared to the current group of servers.

The first big news today from the WWDC 2002 is that Apple now officially stops the MacOS 9 development and goes full speed with OSX. Steve Jobs calls the next step "X only. It's time to drop OS 9," he said. "We can do things in X that we just can't do in 9... a hundred percent of what we're doing is X only." He cited Microsoft as an example of companies that are going X only. Apple expects to see 5 million MacOSX users by the end of the year. "These are the guys buying the application software," he said. "MacOS 9 isn't dead for our customers, but it is for you . Today we say goodbye to MacOS 9 for all future development," said Jobs. Stay tuned for more news from WWDC. Update: "Quartz Extreme" will probably force most of the Mac users to upgrade. Read on. Update 2: Read on.

In this first part of a two-part series, Simson Garfinkel and Michael Mahoney explain why Cocoa and Mac OS X aren't nearly as revolutionary as they are evolutionary -- and still in the process of refinement. The story begins with Apple's genesis in the 1970s and takes you through key events up through 1993, when NeXTSTEP began to flounder. In Part Two (Friday, May 10), Simson and Michael pick up the story with the Star Trek project and bring you to the current iteration of Mac OS X. Update: Apple has released a "Kernel Programming" online book, which has a wide and diverse audience like the set of potential system software developers for MacOSX, including the following sorts of developers: device-driver writers, network-extension writers, file-system writers, developers of software that modifies file system data on-the-fly, system programmers familiar with BSD, Linux, and similar OSes, developers who want to learn about kernel programming.

OSNews reader Henrik "rain" Petersson writes: "In a drafty shed in rural northern California is perhaps the rarest Macintosh ever made: an electronically shielded Mac used by a spy or military agency. The machine appears to be unique, and is so secret, no one knows anything about it." Part I and Part II of the article at Wired.

"They're here, they're slow, get used to it. At least for now. One of Apple's top goals for its new flat-panel iMacs is to get home consumers to switch from Windows PCs. But some who rushed to order the attractive new computer sight unseen say they have been disappointed: For Web browsing -- still the biggest time use of home computers after e-mail -- the new iMacs are notably slower than a PC. Yep, even an older, cheaper one." Get the story at Wired. Some G4 benchmarks against the PCs and commentary can be found here.

ZDNews editor David Coursey concludes his series of articles describing his switch to the Mac platform. Read his editorial at ZDNews.

"Compared with Mac OS 9, running under OS X feels like someone smeared Vaseline all over my monitor. I have uncorrected vision, and I'd like to keep it that way as long as possible. But prolonged exposure to Mac OS X--particularly its anti-aliased text--really peeves my eyeballs. The abundant anti-aliasing is just one of the many problems I have with the Aqua interface. The gratuitous shadows around windows eat up screen real estate that I would rather keep to myself. I'm greedy with my pixels and don't like it when Aqua absconds with them." The editorial is at ZDNews, while OSNews reader Doug Gruber submitted the news for the second part of the story "Why I don't own a Mac".

This editorial at Rush Magazing talksback to Apple's request to hear from PC users. The author has a problem with the speed, price and "complete hardware" solution Apple is providing. On the pros, the auhor lists the way the machines look and the fact that underneath you are dealing with a BSD UNIX. On a similar editorial at ZDNews: "But as it turns out, our reviews team recently did a hands-on with the fastest Power Mac on the market, equipped with dual 1GHz PowerPC G4 processors. Though it's obviously the fastest Power Mac yet, it's interesting to look at what you get compared with a high-end PC. The system's P133 SDRAM, 80GB hard drive, 64MB Nvidia GeForce4 MX video card, and not-so-SuperDrive all look pretty pedestrian next to the Dimension 8200 and Pavilion 950, yet the Power Mac costs $3,000 without a monitor."

"Remember Steve Jobs' "sand" concept for the creation of personal computers? About the time he lent his star power to the creation of the original Macintosh back in the early '80s, Apple's founder famously described his dream factory: an oceanfront site that would haul raw beach sand in one end, cook up its own silicon and deliver fully configured PCs out the other end. This vision of vertical integration and rugged self-sufficiency is a cornerstone of Apple's culture that has informed the company's every move during Jobs' two tenures there. (It's telling that the only time Apple ever seriously toyed with opening up its hardware and software specs - porting the Mac OS to Intel processors and allowing a short list of third-party vendors to create a tightly controlled roster of hardware "clones" - was during Jobs' exile in the late '80s and early '90s.)" Read the rest of the editorial at ExtremeTech.

"Apple has two performance headaches right now: the processor and the OS. Apple's director of core engineering Brett Halle last month promised us that OS X performance was a paramount concern, and to be fair, his division need take no blame. The BSD he inherited has the industry's best respected IP stack, for example. The problem is, one former Apple engineer told us, in serializing the twenty five year old BSD layer with the fifteen year old code of the extensions NeXT began to add in the mid 1980s." Read TheRegister's analysis of the G4 SPEC benchmarks Heise reported last week.

"For those who aren't familiar with OS X, it is a full implementation of BSD Unix with a Macintosh front end, which is to say world class inside and out. OS X is faster, smarter, prettier, and easier to use than any version of Windows. In short, it is exactly the competitor Microsoft needs. And the timing couldn't be better." Very interesting and easy-reading article, but I would not say "faster" in the above excerpt. Robert Cringely is at it again, this time discussing how the best thing for Apple, for users, and even for Microsoft, would be an Intel version of OSX.