i saw this on headline news last night, and wanted to post a thread, but you folks seem to have beaten me to the punch.
honestly, i don't see what is so incredibly "new" and "innovative" about this machine. yet bill kept telling the reporter that pc sales have remained steady because of "innovation" like athens. huh? does he think if he says it enough times, it'll actually come true? if so, let me try... "i am elmer j. fudd, millionaire. i own a mansion and a yacht. i am elmer j. fudd, millionaire. i own a mansion and a yacht. i am elmer j. fudd, millionaire. i own a mansion and a yacht...."
so the webcam is on the side of the monitor... instead of on my desk? is that the part i missed that's so incredible? tell me when i am supposed to go "oooooooh." the huge-ass monitor? i thought there were huge ass monitors out there already (crt and lcd). plus, i thought the tablet pc was their great innovation. have they already abandoned their ties to that and moved on? um, i guess the phone that turns down your volume is kinda cool. doesn't it also act as a remote, or is that a separate device? and didn't apple and ericcson start working script to allow their phones to do essentially the same things (or at least start to do those same things?)
i'm not saying apple doesn't do the same thing from time to time. but i cut them some slack, though, since i know they are firing back from a severe minority vantage point. hell, hire apple-branded ninjas and take out ballmer once and for all, i say. but you would think that a guy who owns every other sheet of $20's that comes off the presses could come up with something a little more amazingly stupendous than built-in video-conferencing on an imax.
I watched that last night and didn't see anything particularly inspiring. Which features blew your mind?
Particularly the integration between hardware and software. Sure, it's something that Apple has specialized in for years, but the way that, for instance, picking up the physical phone would mute your music and automatically set your status to "On the Phone," or how changing your status to "Busy" would relegate all incoming calls to the voice mail indicator on the top of the monitor and even change the color of the physical CPU... it was just all very cool.
It's not completely revolutionary, true, but neither is Sherlock, when you think about it. It's just a streamlined way to do certain things and now we're taking into account interaction with the hardware itself, not just manipulating it with software. It's neat for the same reasons that gliding the iMac display is neat. And Lord knows that was way overhyped.
If Apple made this machine, I'd be all giddy. I'm not going to pretend I'm not enthusiastic about the prospect because doesn't say "Made in Cupertino."
Heh, that's funny because I put the articulating iMac display way above Sherlock and the fact that MS/HP glommed a semi-intelligent phone onto a computer.
Then what, in your opinion, makes Apple's "convergence" of hardware and software so special? The fact that when you stick an Apple iPod into an Apple iBook, it automatically begins synching? Or a semi-intelligent lid on a laptop, so that it sleeps when you close the cover? Real innovation there...
Yawn. Of course Microsoft copies features from OS X. Big deal. Why this is news or interesting is beyond me.
"Hey, can you believe M$ stole ..."
"OMG, Bill Gate$ suck. He ugly too."
"How low can they go!"
"PeeCees, eww."
<insert funny photo here>
More complaints.... Zzzzzz.....
What about when Panther comes around? How about the rumored feature of more than allowing more than just one user logged in? XP has had it for a while. How about automatically establishing TCP/IP over Firewire? What if Jaguar features a version of the Terminal Service (VNC does not count, too slow). I am not trying to turn this into another trite MS vs Apple thread.
Sure, the design smacks of a clone of Apple circa 2001 and I readily admits that. Yes, OS X is one great OS and I love the Apple hardware design team (got to get all that our first). However, good OS's borrows from one another and take each other's strength. That''s a good thing.
All the stuff you note that XP does, has been there BEFORE XP, in form of third party software (and not developed by MS)...
Something like the cube was not there before, nor was the cinema display design or massive window effects.
Integrating cool stuff that has been around is good and the only thing to improve an OS. However, some choose to integrate stuff that doesn't directly come from the competition.
I think that's what makes people feel funny (that's what MAKES it funny).
What's so amazing is that if Apple came out with this, it would just be an evolution of there existing ideas, and would probably just seam like the obvious (if exciting) next step.
Billy G. here is trailing this as a revolution of the PC, when it contains almost no original ideas. (even the phone thing could probably be done with some clever Apple script and bluetooth)
A few years ago, when Steve Jobs introduced Apple's popular iMac computer, his archrival, Bill Gates, groused that Apple had reduced innovation in the personal computing world to translucent colored plastics.
"The one thing Apple's providing now is leadership in colors," Mr. Gates, the head of Microsoft, said at a conference for financial analysts at the time, News.com said. "It won't take long for us to catch up with that, I don't think."
Now Apple Computer is dissing back.
The centerpiece at Mr. Gates's annual Winhec computer hardware conference, held last week in New Orleans, was a futuristic prototype of an office computer Microsoft designed with the Hewlett-Packard Company. The prototype is the Athens PC.
Futuristic, that is, except to a number of computer industry veterans who said that Microsoft and Hewlett were leaning too heavily on industrial design ideas that had originated with Apple ? like a spacious flat-panel display the shape of a movie screen and a light-emitting-diode do-not-disturb feature embedded into the translucent plastic of the Athens's curvy case.
Not only has Apple been selling cinema-style flat panel displays for several years, but last year it filed patent application 20030002246, titled "active enclosure for computing device," which describes a machine that contains an array of rainbow-hued light-emitting diodes.
Apple executives took obvious glee last week in noting that the software centerpiece of the Microsoft conference, new graphics software that is scheduled to appear in "Longhorn," Microsoft's 2005 version of its Windows operating system, apes features that have been in Apple's OS X operating system since 2001.
"You don't have to look too far to see that this is almost a direct copy of Quartz," said Philip W. Schiller, Apple's vice president of marketing, referring to the Macintosh software that controls the computer's display.
Microsoft executives declined to take the bait. "We only showed glimpses of the future of Longhorn," said a Microsoft spokesman. "Wait until the fall when we'll go into more detail at the Professional Developers Conference."
Edit: FVCKING TOM's HARDWARE won't let me link the /img.
Lets see if this works
So, it's definitely NOT an AIO. Weird, it has the advantage that you can hide the guts, but with half the work done to hide the optical and ports behind the display, and the block itself rather thin, why not "glom" the rest on the back.
I'm not so opposed to glomming things on the back of the device if it frees up space. UNLESS, the brick itself were interchangeable! Then a Video cable standard with integrated USB and FIREWIRE could be used to attach different Display/hub/optical bays to a brick/cube/slab of your choosing. This is what ADC was supposed to be in the first place, DVI is in fact the video only segment of a standard (proposed?) that included both, Apple merely restored the USB part of it.
Instead of buying a monitor, you would buy a monitor with an array of ports and an optical bay built into it.
Still weird.
But that brick is veddy interesting. It is the near ideal consumer tower shape, phonebook, or brick sized. Just move the optical and ports back to it and your done. People can then hook up any standard display of their choosing. It's more than small enough to sit on the desk, and it fits conventions better than splitting ports and drives from the "CPU" module (though ports should be duplicated on the monitor or keyboard)
Small, cheap, flexible, easy upgrades. Apple still has a chance to make the cube what it should have been all along. Either they do it soon, or someone else will get it right for them.
What about when Panther comes around? How about the rumored feature of more than allowing more than just one user logged in? XP has had it for a while.
Unless I missed something, OS X is a BSD, and BSD has had that ability for over a decade. UNIX before it has had the capability for 30 years.
Actually, OS X supports multiple simultaneous users right now, because it's a BSD. There's just that one bit, the Quartz Window Manager, that can't handle multiple sessions yet. Everything else has been ready to go since before the Public Beta.
Given that OS X's capability will likely be a finished implementation of the system's longtime capability, rather than the hack that XP's is, it should be much more robust.
Quote:
However, good OS's borrows from one another and take each other's strength. That''s a good thing.
This is true. The main issue is that some give much more than they take, and some take much more than they give.
The machine is not ugly, and Apple has not created it yet, nor did they create it 3 years ago. However, if it is not an AIO, then it seems kinda dumb to put the optical up in the bezel like that.
The keyboard OTOH is very ugly, I'll give you that.
Yeah Apple hasn't created it. There may be some good ideas (small ideas, but sometimes those are the better ones)...
But DAMN it is ugly. For the record, I think some Apple products were ugly (windtunnel PMs, some parts of the cube, Timmy the Tooth mac). Maybe we need to start up a fund to pay for Matsu's eye surgery!
Athens eh? They trying to say they predated Apple's Spartacus?
Here is a summary of the responses this story will no doubt get when more people start commenting, for the benefit of those lacking time to read them all:
* Apple copies Microsoft
* Microsoft copies Apple
* Everyone copies the hell out of everyone else
* All of these features were in BSD/Linux/AIX/VMS/SysV since 1995/1990/1985/1930
* F--k you all, Apple rulez
* I know I'm going to get modded down for saying this, but Microsoft has innovated
* Give one example where Microsoft has innovated
* An example of Microsoft innovation
* Five examples of Apple's innovation
* Somebody screaming that all of these features were copied from an obscure OS from thirty years ago
* I use Multics! I love it, and you should too!
* F--k Linux
* F--k Microsoft
* Shaddap all of you, copying is part of innovation
* Imagine a Beowulf cluster of iMacs!
* The latest Microsoft PCs are copies of iMacs
* Here's a reg-free link to the article
* Steve Jobs hasn't had an original idea since 1990
* Bill Gates hasn't had an original idea since 1970
"You don't have to look too far to see that this is almost a direct copy of Quartz," said Philip W. Schiller, Apple's vice president of marketing, referring to the Macintosh software that controls the computer's display.
From this article @ the NYTimes, no registration required.
Quote:
Apple Tweaks Microsoft Over a New Computer
By JOHN MARKOFF
A few years ago, when Steve Jobs introduced Apple's popular iMac computer, his archrival, Bill Gates, groused that Apple had reduced innovation in the personal computing world to translucent colored plastics.
"The one thing Apple's providing now is leadership in colors," Mr. Gates, the head of Microsoft, said at a conference for financial analysts at the time, News.com said. "It won't take long for us to catch up with that, I don't think."
Now Apple Computer is dissing back.
The centerpiece at Mr. Gates's annual Winhec computer hardware conference, held last week in New Orleans, was a futuristic prototype of an office computer Microsoft designed with the Hewlett-Packard Company. The prototype is the Athens PC.
Futuristic, that is, except to a number of computer industry veterans who said that Microsoft and Hewlett were leaning too heavily on industrial design ideas that had originated with Apple ? like a spacious flat-panel display the shape of a movie screen and a light-emitting-diode do-not-disturb feature embedded into the translucent plastic of the Athens's curvy case.
Not only has Apple been selling cinema-style flat panel displays for several years, but last year it filed patent application 20030002246, titled "active enclosure for computing device," which describes a machine that contains an array of rainbow-hued light-emitting diodes.
Apple executives took obvious glee last week in noting that the software centerpiece of the Microsoft conference, new graphics software that is scheduled to appear in "Longhorn," Microsoft's 2005 version of its Windows operating system, apes features that have been in Apple's OS X operating system since 2001.
"You don't have to look too far to see that this is almost a direct copy of Quartz," said Philip W. Schiller, Apple's vice president of marketing, referring to the Macintosh software that controls the computer's display.
Microsoft executives declined to take the bait. "We only showed glimpses of the future of Longhorn," said a Microsoft spokesman. "Wait until the fall when we'll go into more detail at the Professional Developers Conference."
I'm surprised Apple would make any direct comment; well, they didn't, but I am surprised a vice president of marketing would stoop to this. I can't imagine Jobs was too pleased.
Comments
honestly, i don't see what is so incredibly "new" and "innovative" about this machine. yet bill kept telling the reporter that pc sales have remained steady because of "innovation" like athens. huh? does he think if he says it enough times, it'll actually come true? if so, let me try... "i am elmer j. fudd, millionaire. i own a mansion and a yacht. i am elmer j. fudd, millionaire. i own a mansion and a yacht. i am elmer j. fudd, millionaire. i own a mansion and a yacht...."
so the webcam is on the side of the monitor... instead of on my desk? is that the part i missed that's so incredible? tell me when i am supposed to go "oooooooh." the huge-ass monitor? i thought there were huge ass monitors out there already (crt and lcd). plus, i thought the tablet pc was their great innovation. have they already abandoned their ties to that and moved on? um, i guess the phone that turns down your volume is kinda cool. doesn't it also act as a remote, or is that a separate device? and didn't apple and ericcson start working script to allow their phones to do essentially the same things (or at least start to do those same things?)
i'm not saying apple doesn't do the same thing from time to time. but i cut them some slack, though, since i know they are firing back from a severe minority vantage point. hell, hire apple-branded ninjas and take out ballmer once and for all, i say. but you would think that a guy who owns every other sheet of $20's that comes off the presses could come up with something a little more amazingly stupendous than built-in video-conferencing on an imax.
Originally posted by Eugene
I watched that last night and didn't see anything particularly inspiring. Which features blew your mind?
Particularly the integration between hardware and software. Sure, it's something that Apple has specialized in for years, but the way that, for instance, picking up the physical phone would mute your music and automatically set your status to "On the Phone," or how changing your status to "Busy" would relegate all incoming calls to the voice mail indicator on the top of the monitor and even change the color of the physical CPU... it was just all very cool.
It's not completely revolutionary, true, but neither is Sherlock, when you think about it. It's just a streamlined way to do certain things and now we're taking into account interaction with the hardware itself, not just manipulating it with software. It's neat for the same reasons that gliding the iMac display is neat. And Lord knows that was way overhyped.
If Apple made this machine, I'd be all giddy. I'm not going to pretend I'm not enthusiastic about the prospect because doesn't say "Made in Cupertino."
Originally posted by sc_markt
(I wonder if Apple had named it's new NeXT based OS, OS Z, would microsoft XP be ZP?)
I believe so. I think they would have called it a Z Box instead of an X Box as well.
Originally posted by onlooker
I believe so. I think they would have called it a Z Box instead of an X Box as well.
zBoz, Microzoft Offize ZP
"Hey, can you believe M$ stole ..."
"OMG, Bill Gate$ suck. He ugly too."
"How low can they go!"
"PeeCees, eww."
<insert funny photo here>
More complaints.... Zzzzzz.....
What about when Panther comes around? How about the rumored feature of more than allowing more than just one user logged in? XP has had it for a while. How about automatically establishing TCP/IP over Firewire? What if Jaguar features a version of the Terminal Service (VNC does not count, too slow). I am not trying to turn this into another trite MS vs Apple thread.
Sure, the design smacks of a clone of Apple circa 2001 and I readily admits that. Yes, OS X is one great OS and I love the Apple hardware design team (got to get all that our first). However, good OS's borrows from one another and take each other's strength. That''s a good thing.
All the stuff you note that XP does, has been there BEFORE XP, in form of third party software (and not developed by MS)...
Something like the cube was not there before, nor was the cinema display design or massive window effects.
Integrating cool stuff that has been around is good and the only thing to improve an OS. However, some choose to integrate stuff that doesn't directly come from the competition.
I think that's what makes people feel funny (that's what MAKES it funny).
G-news
Billy G. here is trailing this as a revolution of the PC, when it contains almost no original ideas. (even the phone thing could probably be done with some clever Apple script and bluetooth)
..and Winblows shoeHorn is gonna be mega crap too..
A few years ago, when Steve Jobs introduced Apple's popular iMac computer, his archrival, Bill Gates, groused that Apple had reduced innovation in the personal computing world to translucent colored plastics.
"The one thing Apple's providing now is leadership in colors," Mr. Gates, the head of Microsoft, said at a conference for financial analysts at the time, News.com said. "It won't take long for us to catch up with that, I don't think."
Now Apple Computer is dissing back.
The centerpiece at Mr. Gates's annual Winhec computer hardware conference, held last week in New Orleans, was a futuristic prototype of an office computer Microsoft designed with the Hewlett-Packard Company. The prototype is the Athens PC.
Futuristic, that is, except to a number of computer industry veterans who said that Microsoft and Hewlett were leaning too heavily on industrial design ideas that had originated with Apple ? like a spacious flat-panel display the shape of a movie screen and a light-emitting-diode do-not-disturb feature embedded into the translucent plastic of the Athens's curvy case.
Not only has Apple been selling cinema-style flat panel displays for several years, but last year it filed patent application 20030002246, titled "active enclosure for computing device," which describes a machine that contains an array of rainbow-hued light-emitting diodes.
Apple executives took obvious glee last week in noting that the software centerpiece of the Microsoft conference, new graphics software that is scheduled to appear in "Longhorn," Microsoft's 2005 version of its Windows operating system, apes features that have been in Apple's OS X operating system since 2001.
"You don't have to look too far to see that this is almost a direct copy of Quartz," said Philip W. Schiller, Apple's vice president of marketing, referring to the Macintosh software that controls the computer's display.
Microsoft executives declined to take the bait. "We only showed glimpses of the future of Longhorn," said a Microsoft spokesman. "Wait until the fall when we'll go into more detail at the Professional Developers Conference."
Edit: FVCKING TOM's HARDWARE won't let me link the /img.
Lets see if this works
So, it's definitely NOT an AIO. Weird, it has the advantage that you can hide the guts, but with half the work done to hide the optical and ports behind the display, and the block itself rather thin, why not "glom" the rest on the back.
I'm not so opposed to glomming things on the back of the device if it frees up space. UNLESS, the brick itself were interchangeable! Then a Video cable standard with integrated USB and FIREWIRE could be used to attach different Display/hub/optical bays to a brick/cube/slab of your choosing. This is what ADC was supposed to be in the first place, DVI is in fact the video only segment of a standard (proposed?) that included both, Apple merely restored the USB part of it.
Instead of buying a monitor, you would buy a monitor with an array of ports and an optical bay built into it.
Still weird.
But that brick is veddy interesting. It is the near ideal consumer tower shape, phonebook, or brick sized. Just move the optical and ports back to it and your done. People can then hook up any standard display of their choosing. It's more than small enough to sit on the desk, and it fits conventions better than splitting ports and drives from the "CPU" module (though ports should be duplicated on the monitor or keyboard)
Small, cheap, flexible, easy upgrades. Apple still has a chance to make the cube what it should have been all along. Either they do it soon, or someone else will get it right for them.
Originally posted by klinux
What about when Panther comes around? How about the rumored feature of more than allowing more than just one user logged in? XP has had it for a while.
Unless I missed something, OS X is a BSD, and BSD has had that ability for over a decade. UNIX before it has had the capability for 30 years.
Actually, OS X supports multiple simultaneous users right now, because it's a BSD. There's just that one bit, the Quartz Window Manager, that can't handle multiple sessions yet. Everything else has been ready to go since before the Public Beta.
Given that OS X's capability will likely be a finished implementation of the system's longtime capability, rather than the hack that XP's is, it should be much more robust.
However, good OS's borrows from one another and take each other's strength. That''s a good thing.
This is true. The main issue is that some give much more than they take, and some take much more than they give.
Originally posted by Matsu
The machine is not ugly, and Apple has not created it yet, nor did they create it 3 years ago. However, if it is not an AIO, then it seems kinda dumb to put the optical up in the bezel like that.
The keyboard OTOH is very ugly, I'll give you that.
Yeah Apple hasn't created it. There may be some good ideas (small ideas, but sometimes those are the better ones)...
But DAMN it is ugly. For the record, I think some Apple products were ugly (windtunnel PMs, some parts of the cube, Timmy the Tooth mac). Maybe we need to start up a fund to pay for Matsu's eye surgery!
Athens eh? They trying to say they predated Apple's Spartacus?
Originally posted by kikaida
Athens eh? They trying to say they predated Apple's Spartacus?
it is kinda odd for MS to be athens
athens being the source for ideas and wisdom you think would be apple and the brute force and power of MS would be closer to sparta
Originally posted by G-News
All the stuff you note that XP does, has been there BEFORE XP, in form of third party software (and not developed by MS)...
The exact same things can be said about OS X as well.
For your amusement, a Slashdotter said it the best.
Lifted from http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl...d=109&tid=187:
***********
Here is a summary of the responses this story will no doubt get when more people start commenting, for the benefit of those lacking time to read them all:
* Apple copies Microsoft
* Microsoft copies Apple
* Everyone copies the hell out of everyone else
* All of these features were in BSD/Linux/AIX/VMS/SysV since 1995/1990/1985/1930
* F--k you all, Apple rulez
* I know I'm going to get modded down for saying this, but Microsoft has innovated
* Give one example where Microsoft has innovated
* An example of Microsoft innovation
* Five examples of Apple's innovation
* Somebody screaming that all of these features were copied from an obscure OS from thirty years ago
* I use Multics! I love it, and you should too!
* F--k Linux
* F--k Microsoft
* Shaddap all of you, copying is part of innovation
* Imagine a Beowulf cluster of iMacs!
* The latest Microsoft PCs are copies of iMacs
* Here's a reg-free link to the article
* Steve Jobs hasn't had an original idea since 1990
* Bill Gates hasn't had an original idea since 1970
* ...plus the standard trolls
"You don't have to look too far to see that this is almost a direct copy of Quartz," said Philip W. Schiller, Apple's vice president of marketing, referring to the Macintosh software that controls the computer's display.
From this article @ the NYTimes, no registration required.
Apple Tweaks Microsoft Over a New Computer
By JOHN MARKOFF
A few years ago, when Steve Jobs introduced Apple's popular iMac computer, his archrival, Bill Gates, groused that Apple had reduced innovation in the personal computing world to translucent colored plastics.
"The one thing Apple's providing now is leadership in colors," Mr. Gates, the head of Microsoft, said at a conference for financial analysts at the time, News.com said. "It won't take long for us to catch up with that, I don't think."
Now Apple Computer is dissing back.
The centerpiece at Mr. Gates's annual Winhec computer hardware conference, held last week in New Orleans, was a futuristic prototype of an office computer Microsoft designed with the Hewlett-Packard Company. The prototype is the Athens PC.
Futuristic, that is, except to a number of computer industry veterans who said that Microsoft and Hewlett were leaning too heavily on industrial design ideas that had originated with Apple ? like a spacious flat-panel display the shape of a movie screen and a light-emitting-diode do-not-disturb feature embedded into the translucent plastic of the Athens's curvy case.
Not only has Apple been selling cinema-style flat panel displays for several years, but last year it filed patent application 20030002246, titled "active enclosure for computing device," which describes a machine that contains an array of rainbow-hued light-emitting diodes.
Apple executives took obvious glee last week in noting that the software centerpiece of the Microsoft conference, new graphics software that is scheduled to appear in "Longhorn," Microsoft's 2005 version of its Windows operating system, apes features that have been in Apple's OS X operating system since 2001.
"You don't have to look too far to see that this is almost a direct copy of Quartz," said Philip W. Schiller, Apple's vice president of marketing, referring to the Macintosh software that controls the computer's display.
Microsoft executives declined to take the bait. "We only showed glimpses of the future of Longhorn," said a Microsoft spokesman. "Wait until the fall when we'll go into more detail at the Professional Developers Conference."
I'm surprised Apple would make any direct comment; well, they didn't, but I am surprised a vice president of marketing would stoop to this. I can't imagine Jobs was too pleased.