I can't wait for next month. It would be nice to have an updated Finder and maybe safari. And what was this talk about resolution independence? That would be nice since I have a 12" powerbook...not exactly huge screen real estate.
My understanding is that resolution independence will affect larger pixel displays, making everything appear bigger but using more pixels to draw things (think the icons when you resize them).
They'll be a minimum; you need a certain amount of pixels to be able to see things!!
For the second time in as many years, Apple Computer is looking to outshine rival Micrsoft Corp. in the inevitable battle between the two companies' software operating systems.
OK, this is what I don't get. Why does it have to be an "inevitable battle"? For christ' sake, these are operating systems, not political parties or countries at odds with each other.
Besides, if you want to make it a "battle", then Microsoft has already won on the only scoreboard that counts; market share.
Talk up Leopard's features all you want, compare them to Vista features if you must, but don't paint this as some great battle. Doing so only makes you look like a deluded Mac fanboy.
If these screenshots were real Apple Legal would have had their say by now.
I can't wait for next month. It would be nice to have an updated Finder and maybe safari. And what was this talk about resolution independence? That would be nice since I have a 12" powerbook...not exactly huge screen real estate.
And it would be nice to run a few windows apps for us engineers out here. Unless we can get a decent version of matlab (not the X11 version), maybe fluent, and of course solidworks, i'll take a virtualization solution.
-David
Woops, didn't read page 2 of the thread. it is fake.
OK, this is what I don't get. Why does it have to be an "inevitable battle"? For christ' sake, these are operating systems, not political parties or countries at odds with each other.
It's just AppleInsider trying to sound like the press. Sensationalism, inaccuracies and all the shizzle.
OK, this is what I don't get. Why does it have to be an "inevitable battle"? For christ' sake, these are operating systems, not political parties or countries at odds with each other.
Besides, if you want to make it a "battle", then Microsoft has already won on the only scoreboard that counts; market share.
Talk up Leopard's features all you want, compare them to Vista features if you must, but don't paint this as some great battle. Doing so only makes you look like a deluded Mac fanboy.
Welcome.
Stick around for awhile and you might understand...
Good faking. But yeah, DDR2 slip-up ended up being HUGE. Assuming "oh they're running on non-standard apple hardware then" would have been rubbish since almost all Intel stuff has gone DDR2 for a long time now. Like 6 months plus. Only AMD now uses DDR, soon to be phased out with Socket M2.
The faker hasn't been keeping up with examining all the new Intel hardware, Mac and non-Mac, otherwise would have realised the full DDR2 transition in place.
Still, admirable faking, and kudos to all the people that debunked it by the "pixel by pixel/ spacing" issues. Looking back on the fakes, I can't for the life of me see the pixel issues, really.
...The so-called 'readers' are not people that can contribute quality posts; they're mostly fanboys and the myspace crowd.
[QUOTE]Originally posted by Chucker
...Which may be a viable business model, but not a true service.
Whether AppleInsider is a real service is not that important in that there are several other news sites, it' just that for the most part we come to AI to see what they're conjuring up and we like the discussions here.
Even if the readers are mostly fanboys and myspace people and idiot savants like me (remember my 50Cent mockups yo), I think that overall AppleInsider is operating profitably and has, like you say, a viable business model.
Plus it's just plain fun, we have an intense networking debate, even going into discussing OSI layers, while at the same time a dissecting-the-fakes discussion.
I can understand though that some of you old-schoolers and much more knowledgeable people find some of the sillier posts a bit annoying at times, eg. Placebo and me (sorry Placebo, I named names ) Well, anyway, AppleTalk and stuff. Cool
For the second time in as many years, Apple Computer is looking to outshine rival Micrsoft Corp. in the inevitable battle between the two companies' software operating systems.
There's still over a month to go before Apple will take the wraps off Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X, but already the rumor mills are abuzz over a couple of purported screenshots that depict some long-rumored features of the software.
Leopard is due to hit the market about the same time as Microsoft's Vista, and sources say Apple has been keeping a close eye on the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant. They say the Mac maker has been developing a handful of features for Leopard that will specifically rival those available to Vista users -- some will make the cut for Leopard's release while others may not.
One of the rumored features is said to be OS-level integration of a geographical mapping technology, similar to Microsoft's Virtual Earth. In recent months, Microsoft has made several acquisitions aimed at bolstering its Virtual Earth division, including a buyout of Vexcel Corp.
According to sources, Apple has been working on a similar approach, but modeled after Google's Maps feature. The technology will presumably allow Leopard users to scour the globe through satellite imagery and whisk up driving directions on the drop of a dime.
Another rumored feature of Leopard -- one which appears to be shown in the unauthenticated Leopard screenshots -- is the unification of Apple's Address Book and iCal applications into a single app. Interestingly, the two screenshots making the rounds on the Web this week indeed show a revised Address Book icon that also displays a date. This is coupled with the absence of the traditional iCal icon in the Mac OS X Dock.
Still, the juiciest rumors surround Apple's Boot Camp and where the company may or may not take the technology. Although sources did not explicitly say that Boot Camp would be transformed into a complete virtualization solution, they did say the technology is being groomed as a rival to Microsoft's Virtual PC Express.
In March, Microsoft released an "Early Release" of Virtual PC Express, saying it would allow users "to run an operating system as a host (such as Windows XP Professional) and run another operating system as a guest in the virtual machine (such as Windows 2000)."
"This Early Release does not support Windows Vista since Windows Vista has not yet been released," Microsoft said. "When Windows Vista Enterprise ships in late 2006, it will include Virtual PC Express, which will support Windows Vista as a host operating system (as well as additional enhancements such as support for 64-bit)."
Feature specifics aside, there have been some other rumblings about Leopard. In very much the same way Microsoft decided to market its next-generation OS under the name Vista (rather than its code-name "Longhorn"), Apple is also rumored to be mulling a "more marketable" name for its next-generation OS. However, it's unclear if Apple will ultimately go through with the change.
Apple plans to unveil Leopard for the first time at its World Wide Developers Conference, which runs from Aug. 7 - 11 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Calif. [ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]
The real question is will there really be a battle. If Mac OS X 10.5 is tied only to Apple's own hardware, it's going to remain in a small niche no matter how much better it is than Vista. In the open market, Apple can bring a level of innovation to the PC world that Microsoft isn't willing to. That being said, Mac OS X's existence on x86 chips is a threat to Microsoft and you better bet they'll be bringing their A-Game to the final release.
Apple's a wee bit too far behind to really be of any threat to Microsoft. As much as I want virtualization to be added to OS X I think that it's certainly not the time to do so for Apple.
Virtualization is a phenomenal technology. With today's hardware support I'd venture to say that VM is a Killer App. The ability to run multiple OS and thus applications and tasks concurrently is great. However if you're an OS vendor you have a problem if you happen to be the smaller platform as Apple is.
Microsoft has a cadre of applications, services and technologies that encourage that you stick with their applications or frameworks. It's not necessarily that MS Office is so good but rather it's ubiquitous and there are many supporting tools that people need that create the lockin.
Apple has chosen to focus their attention on creative applications and while that to me is funner than the drudgery of productivity applications it doesn't help to create the type lockin that is needed to really open up OS X to VM.
I do feel like developers will just say "buy Windows and run on the Leopard VM" if it existed. The Mac software echosystem is far more free and liberal than PC. But in a case of VM that becomes a potential liability because not all ISV have hitched their trailer to Apple beyond using OS X API.
I could be totally wrong but I'm just uneasy about this. VM hurts Microsoft far less than it hurts Apple. Microsoft knows this but I'm not sure Apple does.
Everyone assumes Apple is competing against MS. That's not totally right. Steve said so himself once or twice even. Apple is fighting Dell. For profits, not marketshare.
Insofar as virtualization and the death of Mac apps, Apple can just do what MS did with DirectX (Direct3D, technically). Make a vastly superior API. Make it easy to code against and do sweet things with. You don't need to cripple XP apps if OSX apps can do a lot more. Integration with e-mail, chat, spell-checking, web-browsing programs. If Apple adds enough features to Cocoa and pulls out all the stops, that'd mean a lot if Apple's marketshare went up at the same time. Ditto games. D3D beat OpenGL originally because it was easier and better "out of the box". If Apple or someone fiddles with OpenGL enough to retake that "ease of use" crown, then maybe companies will pay more attention to OpenGL, and thus Mac/Linux ports/games.
Everyone assumes Apple is competing against MS. That's not totally right. Steve said so himself once or twice even. Apple is fighting Dell. For profits, not marketshare.
Insofar as virtualization and the death of Mac apps, Apple can just do what MS did with DirectX (Direct3D, technically). Make a vastly superior API. Make it easy to code against and do sweet things with. You don't need to cripple XP apps if OSX apps can do a lot more. Integration with e-mail, chat, spell-checking, web-browsing programs. If Apple adds enough features to Cocoa and pulls out all the stops, that'd mean a lot if Apple's marketshare went up at the same time. Ditto games. D3D beat OpenGL originally because it was easier and better "out of the box". If Apple or someone fiddles with OpenGL enough to retake that "ease of use" crown, then maybe companies will pay more attention to OpenGL, and thus Mac/Linux ports/games.
While I've only done DirectX 7, and OpenGL... I found OpenGL WAY easier than directX. The classes were more organized and made sense to me. Along with that other people in the Softwrae Engineering program at OIT agreed with me. They all prefered OpenGL over DirectX. I really think it's a matter of preference. I think DirectX won because Microsoft gave support for it. They could have cared less about OpenGL... and why should they have? OpenGL was competing against something they created. That's the main key, they supported one and not the other (technically).
Apple's competing with Microsoft regardless of what Steve says. If Dell died tomorrow that would not mean an Apple victory it would simply mean more sales for HP, Lenovo, Acer and Sony amongst others.
While I think Apple has the talent to develope a nice software strategy replete with integration they haven't actually executed all that well.
I think the company has had a bit of analysis paralysis because they can't decide on what type of company the want to be. Is it a media company or education or business? Thank God for the iPod because without it I don't know where Apple would be.
Comments
Originally posted by dmwogan
I can't wait for next month. It would be nice to have an updated Finder and maybe safari. And what was this talk about resolution independence? That would be nice since I have a 12" powerbook...not exactly huge screen real estate.
My understanding is that resolution independence will affect larger pixel displays, making everything appear bigger but using more pixels to draw things (think the icons when you resize them).
They'll be a minimum; you need a certain amount of pixels to be able to see things!!
Originally posted by AppleInsider
For the second time in as many years, Apple Computer is looking to outshine rival Micrsoft Corp. in the inevitable battle between the two companies' software operating systems.
OK, this is what I don't get. Why does it have to be an "inevitable battle"? For christ' sake, these are operating systems, not political parties or countries at odds with each other.
Besides, if you want to make it a "battle", then Microsoft has already won on the only scoreboard that counts; market share.
Talk up Leopard's features all you want, compare them to Vista features if you must, but don't paint this as some great battle. Doing so only makes you look like a deluded Mac fanboy.
Originally posted by dmwogan
If these screenshots were real Apple Legal would have had their say by now.
I can't wait for next month. It would be nice to have an updated Finder and maybe safari. And what was this talk about resolution independence? That would be nice since I have a 12" powerbook...not exactly huge screen real estate.
And it would be nice to run a few windows apps for us engineers out here. Unless we can get a decent version of matlab (not the X11 version), maybe fluent, and of course solidworks, i'll take a virtualization solution.
-David
Woops, didn't read page 2 of the thread. it is fake.
Originally posted by UnnDunn
OK, this is what I don't get. Why does it have to be an "inevitable battle"? For christ' sake, these are operating systems, not political parties or countries at odds with each other.
It's just AppleInsider trying to sound like the press. Sensationalism, inaccuracies and all the shizzle.
Originally posted by UnnDunn
OK, this is what I don't get. Why does it have to be an "inevitable battle"? For christ' sake, these are operating systems, not political parties or countries at odds with each other.
Besides, if you want to make it a "battle", then Microsoft has already won on the only scoreboard that counts; market share.
Talk up Leopard's features all you want, compare them to Vista features if you must, but don't paint this as some great battle. Doing so only makes you look like a deluded Mac fanboy.
Welcome.
Stick around for awhile and you might understand...
Originally posted by Chucker
It's just AppleInsider trying to sound like the press. Sensationalism, inaccuracies and all the shizzle.
Which is what atracts the so-called readers. And that means more clicks on ads and that in turn means more revenue.
Originally posted by Gene Clean
Which is what atracts the so-called readers. And that means more clicks on ads and that in turn means more revenue.
Which may be a viable business model, but not a true service.
Originally posted by Gene Clean
Which is what atracts the so-called readers. And that means more clicks on ads and that in turn means more revenue.
Do it too much and you turn your readership away though. Or at least the non-fanboys anyway.
Edit: And it's going to be the longest 7 weeks....
Originally posted by Chucker
Which may be a viable business model, but not a true service.
aegis:
Do it too much and you turn your readership away though. Or at least the non-fanboys anyway.
And that's precisely my point. The so-called 'readers' are not people that can contribute quality posts; they're mostly fanboys and the myspace crowd.
Originally posted by Gene Clean
And that's precisely my point. The so-called 'readers' are not people that can contribute quality posts; they're mostly fanboys and the myspace crowd.
Perhaps exaggerated and one-sided, but not untrue. Can't say I disagree.
The faker hasn't been keeping up with examining all the new Intel hardware, Mac and non-Mac, otherwise would have realised the full DDR2 transition in place.
Still, admirable faking, and kudos to all the people that debunked it by the "pixel by pixel/ spacing" issues. Looking back on the fakes, I can't for the life of me see the pixel issues, really.
...The so-called 'readers' are not people that can contribute quality posts; they're mostly fanboys and the myspace crowd.
[QUOTE]Originally posted by Chucker
...Which may be a viable business model, but not a true service.
Whether AppleInsider is a real service is not that important in that there are several other news sites, it' just that for the most part we come to AI to see what they're conjuring up and we like the discussions here.
Even if the readers are mostly fanboys and myspace people and idiot savants like me (remember my 50Cent mockups yo), I think that overall AppleInsider is operating profitably and has, like you say, a viable business model.
Plus it's just plain fun, we have an intense networking debate, even going into discussing OSI layers, while at the same time a dissecting-the-fakes discussion.
I can understand though that some of you old-schoolers and much more knowledgeable people find some of the sillier posts a bit annoying at times, eg. Placebo and me (sorry Placebo, I named names
Originally posted by AppleInsider
For the second time in as many years, Apple Computer is looking to outshine rival Micrsoft Corp. in the inevitable battle between the two companies' software operating systems.
There's still over a month to go before Apple will take the wraps off Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X, but already the rumor mills are abuzz over a couple of purported screenshots that depict some long-rumored features of the software.
Leopard is due to hit the market about the same time as Microsoft's Vista, and sources say Apple has been keeping a close eye on the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant. They say the Mac maker has been developing a handful of features for Leopard that will specifically rival those available to Vista users -- some will make the cut for Leopard's release while others may not.
One of the rumored features is said to be OS-level integration of a geographical mapping technology, similar to Microsoft's Virtual Earth. In recent months, Microsoft has made several acquisitions aimed at bolstering its Virtual Earth division, including a buyout of Vexcel Corp.
According to sources, Apple has been working on a similar approach, but modeled after Google's Maps feature. The technology will presumably allow Leopard users to scour the globe through satellite imagery and whisk up driving directions on the drop of a dime.
Another rumored feature of Leopard -- one which appears to be shown in the unauthenticated Leopard screenshots -- is the unification of Apple's Address Book and iCal applications into a single app. Interestingly, the two screenshots making the rounds on the Web this week indeed show a revised Address Book icon that also displays a date. This is coupled with the absence of the traditional iCal icon in the Mac OS X Dock.
Still, the juiciest rumors surround Apple's Boot Camp and where the company may or may not take the technology. Although sources did not explicitly say that Boot Camp would be transformed into a complete virtualization solution, they did say the technology is being groomed as a rival to Microsoft's Virtual PC Express.
In March, Microsoft released an "Early Release" of Virtual PC Express, saying it would allow users "to run an operating system as a host (such as Windows XP Professional) and run another operating system as a guest in the virtual machine (such as Windows 2000)."
"This Early Release does not support Windows Vista since Windows Vista has not yet been released," Microsoft said. "When Windows Vista Enterprise ships in late 2006, it will include Virtual PC Express, which will support Windows Vista as a host operating system (as well as additional enhancements such as support for 64-bit)."
Feature specifics aside, there have been some other rumblings about Leopard. In very much the same way Microsoft decided to market its next-generation OS under the name Vista (rather than its code-name "Longhorn"), Apple is also rumored to be mulling a "more marketable" name for its next-generation OS. However, it's unclear if Apple will ultimately go through with the change.
Apple plans to unveil Leopard for the first time at its World Wide Developers Conference, which runs from Aug. 7 - 11 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Calif.
[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]
The real question is will there really be a battle. If Mac OS X 10.5 is tied only to Apple's own hardware, it's going to remain in a small niche no matter how much better it is than Vista. In the open market, Apple can bring a level of innovation to the PC world that Microsoft isn't willing to. That being said, Mac OS X's existence on x86 chips is a threat to Microsoft and you better bet they'll be bringing their A-Game to the final release.
Virtualization is a phenomenal technology. With today's hardware support I'd venture to say that VM is a Killer App. The ability to run multiple OS and thus applications and tasks concurrently is great. However if you're an OS vendor you have a problem if you happen to be the smaller platform as Apple is.
Microsoft has a cadre of applications, services and technologies that encourage that you stick with their applications or frameworks. It's not necessarily that MS Office is so good but rather it's ubiquitous and there are many supporting tools that people need that create the lockin.
Apple has chosen to focus their attention on creative applications and while that to me is funner than the drudgery of productivity applications it doesn't help to create the type lockin that is needed to really open up OS X to VM.
I do feel like developers will just say "buy Windows and run on the Leopard VM" if it existed. The Mac software echosystem is far more free and liberal than PC. But in a case of VM that becomes a potential liability because not all ISV have hitched their trailer to Apple beyond using OS X API.
I could be totally wrong but I'm just uneasy about this. VM hurts Microsoft far less than it hurts Apple. Microsoft knows this but I'm not sure Apple does.
Insofar as virtualization and the death of Mac apps, Apple can just do what MS did with DirectX (Direct3D, technically). Make a vastly superior API. Make it easy to code against and do sweet things with. You don't need to cripple XP apps if OSX apps can do a lot more. Integration with e-mail, chat, spell-checking, web-browsing programs. If Apple adds enough features to Cocoa and pulls out all the stops, that'd mean a lot if Apple's marketshare went up at the same time. Ditto games. D3D beat OpenGL originally because it was easier and better "out of the box". If Apple or someone fiddles with OpenGL enough to retake that "ease of use" crown, then maybe companies will pay more attention to OpenGL, and thus Mac/Linux ports/games.
Originally posted by ZachPruckowski
Everyone assumes Apple is competing against MS. That's not totally right. Steve said so himself once or twice even. Apple is fighting Dell. For profits, not marketshare.
Insofar as virtualization and the death of Mac apps, Apple can just do what MS did with DirectX (Direct3D, technically). Make a vastly superior API. Make it easy to code against and do sweet things with. You don't need to cripple XP apps if OSX apps can do a lot more. Integration with e-mail, chat, spell-checking, web-browsing programs. If Apple adds enough features to Cocoa and pulls out all the stops, that'd mean a lot if Apple's marketshare went up at the same time. Ditto games. D3D beat OpenGL originally because it was easier and better "out of the box". If Apple or someone fiddles with OpenGL enough to retake that "ease of use" crown, then maybe companies will pay more attention to OpenGL, and thus Mac/Linux ports/games.
While I've only done DirectX 7, and OpenGL... I found OpenGL WAY easier than directX. The classes were more organized and made sense to me. Along with that other people in the Softwrae Engineering program at OIT agreed with me. They all prefered OpenGL over DirectX. I really think it's a matter of preference. I think DirectX won because Microsoft gave support for it. They could have cared less about OpenGL... and why should they have? OpenGL was competing against something they created. That's the main key, they supported one and not the other (technically).
While I think Apple has the talent to develope a nice software strategy replete with integration they haven't actually executed all that well.
I think the company has had a bit of analysis paralysis because they can't decide on what type of company the want to be. Is it a media company or education or business? Thank God for the iPod because without it I don't know where Apple would be.