The whole Apple/Samsung shitshow is now front-and-center on the tech blogs I read, and really, who cares? I have no doubt that the iPhone influenced Samsung’s design, just as the Xerox Star workstation influenced the design of MacOS back in the 80’s. If you want to apply Apple’s standard for what’s “original”, then the whole goddam Mac operating system is as big a rip off of Xerox as Samsung’s phone is a rip off of the iPhone. The only difference is that Xerox was notoriously poor at enforcing its patents, and Apple seems to have decided that the time of its top designers and engineers is better occupied by appearing in court and giving depositions than by designing products.
What’s unsettling about the whole thing, at least in my paranoid mind, is that Apple’s approach could really throttle innovation. Apple has more than $100 billion in cash sitting around. They can hire enough lawyers to bankrupt small companies who bring out products that Apple has decided infringe on their patents. I’m not worried about Samsung or the other giant phone makers–if they lose at trial this thing will drag on for another decade in the courts, ending with some kind of whimper-not-bang settlement that means nothing in the context of the technology of the day. I am worried about someone who, say, has a Kickstarter project to make an item that someone might think looks like an iPod nano. They will basically fold in the face of a billion dollar legal team, and that’s ugly behavior from a company that makes beautiful things.
Emma
I don’t have a single Apple product. My MP3 player is a Zen, from Creative. My tablet is a Kindle Fire. My phone is a Samsung. Apple products may be beautiful but Apple’s behavior has been ugly for a very long time.
Linda
A contest where you root for injuries.
Billy K.
Theft is theft. And mistermix, you know damn well the Apple/Xerox case was much more involved than that; Apple bought the technology it used. In the case of the iPhone, Apple outright invented half of the stuff in Android, and has chosen to exercise its legal control over their patents.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
Same here. I have iTunes installed on my DMZ machine only because of things available exclusively through the iTunes store.
Someguy
If I had written this comment on an Apple device, per the End User License Agreement, Apple would be able to assert a claim – and probably win – to the content in this comment. All their products come with that claim, and by purchasing one, you agree to the terms in the EULA.
Any time you buy an Apple product, you support this corporate fascism.
MattMinus
@Someguy:
The good news in that regard is that a lot of EULA claims are not enforceable.
jayackroyd
See Dean Baker’s The End of Loser Liberalism. http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/books/the-end-of-loser-liberalism
He argues, among other things, against the US idiotic (from a policy perspective) commitment to “intellectual property.” Dean also puts his money where his mouth is; the book is free to download.
Cassidy
Let’s be real here. Swap out Apple with any other name and you get the same story.
Walker
I am not picking a side in this legal battle. But everyone forgets to mention that Apple paid Xerox to “rip them off”.
Edit: Second time for moderation.
Robert Sneddon
@Walker: Xerox did in fact sue Apple for assorted patent infringements. The judge tossed the case on the basis that Xerox waited too long after the infringements they claimed had occurred (about six years if memory serves) before going to law to contest them. The legal case behind the purported infringements was never asked or answered.
It’s one reason the lawsuits are flying thick and fast these days, to prove diligence over protection of claims of design copyrights and patent infringements. If Apple or Samsung delayed a few years then they could be seen to be trolling, waiting until company X has committed itself to lots of expensive development, marketing and production before dropping the lawsuits on them to pressure them to settle on less favourable terms.
As for Apple producing “beautiful” things, you might want to look back at some of their design classics which have not stood the test of time — the semitransparent-cased iMacs, for example or the easy-break Anglepoise desktop. They produce fashionable items, not anything for the ages, the Nehru jackets and flared jeans of the computer industry.
Kristine
@jayackroyd:
Does this mean he has another source of income and doesn’t need to earn money from that particular book, or that he lives on air and the love of his fans?
dmsilev
Not commenting on the current lawsuit clusterfuck, but Apple paid Xerox quite a bit of money for access to Xerox’s GUI technology. That may not be the best historical example to refer to.
Doggie D
For the first time in my lifetime, ironically within the past 24 hours, I purchased an Apple product.
The iPod.
It should arrive within 5-8 business days with free shipping from a large on-line retailer. I just worry about if it will be loud enough, and about the conditions of the workers who fabricated it.
Walker
@Robert Sneddon:
You are mixing up two different things. Apple paid Xerox in stock for access to this technology ahead of time. Xerox got the short end of the deal and Apple arguable took more than they were supposed to. But there was a financial transaction.
weaselone
There isn’t really an outcome here that will be a boon to the little guy. Unless you have a billion dollar legal team in your back pocket, the deck is stacked against you as it regards protecting your intellectual property or preventing yourself from being sued out of existence. If Apple wins, it may make it more difficult to defend against similar claims. If Samsung wins, it may make it more difficult to defend intellectual property. Either way, the expense of the legal team and the likely duration of the court battle will probably preclude most cases being brought to a successful conclusion by small businesses prior to their bankruptcy.
J (reader)
I have never liked Appke products – stupid, senseless one button mouse, to start – and I have always found their whiny fanboys and Steve Jobs insufferable. Aside from, say, Chik Fil-a or Halliburton, not sure I dislike any company more.
Djshay12
Actually it’s come out now that Samsung had prototypes of phones that look similar to the iPhone. This was in 2006. Before iPhone.
amk
The koreans and the chinese are in the front and center of consumer electronics now. And they just don’t rely on one product either. And the range of phones & tablets they offer is staggering unlike apple. They really showed the world what a rip-off was the apple products. Didn’t a british judge recently laugh off a similar apple suit ?
Robert Sneddon
@Walker: Like I said the case was never examined in court — Xerox’ position was that Apple gained access to a lot of tech they appropriated without even asking or negotiating a price for actually using it. When called on it Apple pointed to the financial arrangements that Xerox claimed were basically a downpayment to see the tech in the first place and claimed this was full payment which permitted them to exploit what they learned from Xerox without further compensation.
It was a kinder, gentler time. Today lawyering up is the name of the game.
MikeJ
@MattMinus: The better news is that installers tend not to check the language of the EULA. I make a point of editing them before installing. If they can claim my clickthrough signifies acceptance, I can claim that their agent agree signifies their acceptance. This defence might work for somebody once, and then installers will start checksumming the eulas.
schrodinger's cat
@J (reader): Agreed about the useless one button mouse. I don’t have any Apple products either, too expensive, always found a similar product that cost at least one third less than the corresponding Apple product. Yes the products are aesthetically pleasing but is that enough to pay so much more. Well, not for me.
J (reader)
also, I should note that as an attorney who has practiced in the IP field, Apple’s claims are horseshit. Their whole lawsuit is anti-competitive and founded on ludicrous and mistakenly granted patents to obvious designs.
Mike in DC
@Robert Sneddon: I wonder if Xerox would have won if they brought the suit now. It appears they sued under copyright, not under patent law and patent law seems to be a broader tool. It also appears that Xerox was under a consent decree limiting the amount of technologies it was allowed to patent (haven’t read it yet, but here’s an older article about it:
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/40843504?uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21101115401361
Also (this was news to me), it appears that Apple only licensed “Smalltalk”, not the “Star” (which had the GUI). Strange, I never would have known that if I didn’t look the case up. Here’s the link if anyone is interested:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=3538913398421433687&hl=en&as_sdt=2&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr
But the entire software patent system is pretty hosed (a system which Apple has used/exploited for as long as the Macintosh has been around).
Robin G.
Change “Apple” to “Microsoft” and we’re back in 1998.
ericblair
The whole industry is a nest of patent trolls now. Welcome to the perfectly predictable result of allowing private ownership of every idea that comes down the pike: you can’t navigate your way to producing a decent product without stepping on somebody’s intellectual property, so if you don’t have a bunch of lawyers running interference you’re screwed. Nice way to keep out the little guy who can’t afford the lawyers, too.
Interrobang
@Robert Sneddon: Yes, this. I don’t understand people’s intense liking for Apple’s design aesthetic. Sure, it’s a design aesthetic, which is probably more than you can say about some companies, but “California shopping mall ca. 1993” is not my design aesthetic. I hate the rounded corners and bright candy colours; I want consumer electronics, not toddler toys.
An Apple fanboy of my acquaintance was profoundly hurt when I told him the PowerMac looked like a beer can crossed with a Nike shoe, but it does.
Granted, my boring beige PC box is kind of boring, but at least it’s not intrusive, and it has corners, so you can store it effectively in a rectilinear space.
mai naem
OT I hate the lime green Nike shoes of the Americans at the Olympics. And the grey jackets/trackies whatever they are? Grey? They look like they’re wearing outside jackets. What was Ralph Lauren thinking of? Also too, last time I checked it was red.white and blue not grey, grey and grey. We have a good palette of colors to start with. Why would one screw with them?
me
@J (reader): Any chance you can get a job at the Patent Office?
Xecky Gilchrist
Apple has always been like this.
schrodinger's cat
@mai naem: Yes the Ralph Lauren uniforms are full of FAIL. Never much liked the faux preppy aesthetic of RL any way.
jayackroyd
@Robin G.: worse, actually, because Apple is both smarter (in the sense of identifying litigation principles) and more ruthless (claiming really fundamental stuff, like the wipe) than MS ever was.
The idea of intellectual property (as opposed to limited patent and copyright) is killing innovation and technological change in this country. One more blow by the centrists aimed at the American project.
Robert Sneddon
@Interrobang: There are very few design classics in the computer biz that can withstand the test of time. Instead there’s a lot of bling and Shiny! (tm Apple) since it is an ephemeral business and what they design and sell is going to be landfill in a few years time.
Real design classics… hmmm, the only one I can think of right now would be the bento-box IBM Thinkpads, the charcoal-grey minimalist laptops that IBM/Lenovo have only recently abandoned after quite a long run. There are individual devices like the IBM Model M keyboard that have a fanatical following but they’re not stylish, they’re just so well-engineered and fit for purpose that twenty years after production stopped they’re still in demand by perfectionist typists and selling second-hand for premium prices.
Another Halocene Human
@Robert Sneddon: Isn’t the real karmic answer to the Xerox thing the lawsuit between Apple and Microsoft over Windows?
Apple and Microsoft had a contract that allow MSFT to use parts of their operating system to develop Office for the Mac. Gates then used this to rip off the UI of the Macintosh for his shitty Windows program and Apple sued. They might have had a case but the judge found that their contract was ambiguous and MSFT’s actions were allowable, thus paving the way for the office Macapocalypse, in which millions of office workers were riven from their Macs for a crash-happy first edition Win95 because the C-level PHBs had decided they were going to be an all-Windows environment.
Another Halocene Human
FYWP. Jobs’ karma came back when he lost the lawsuit against MSFT for ripping off the Mac UI when developing Windows.
Villago Delenda Est
Ferengis are just being Ferengi.
That’s what this is all about. Boundless, endless greed.
Villago Delenda Est
FYWP! Idiot damn program.
The Moar You Know
What did you think was going to happen once Apple got big money under their belt? That it was going to all be sunshine and unicorn farts?
Apple’s out to take the world or raze it. I’m fucking gobsmacked that people somehow came away with the impression that “think different” was anything other than a marketing slogan covering for the same business practices as everyone else.
Apple fanboys have always pissed me off and this is why – willful ignorance.
Square Squid
To be fair here, Samsung actually is ripping off Apple. Google and Microsoft have developed their own tablet technology, and Apple hasn’t gone after them at all. The reason they’re going after Samsung is because Samsung was hired by Apple to make parts of their iPads, and now they have incorporated the things they were hired to make, ripping them off for their own tablet, and then mimicking the look and feel of the iPad down to the last icon. As far as interface goes, it’s a complete knockoff. I’ve played with the Nexus and seen the design for the Surface as well as looked at the tablets that are currently out there with Microsoft, and they have been developed differently from the iPad. THAT’s innovation — when competing companies develop different technology in order to compete with one another. Samsung is NOT being innovative here, the product they are releasing is practically identical to Apple’s. If they were to actually develop their own shit, they wouldn’t get sued.
Another Halocene Human
@The Moar You Know: Apple’s been doing this forever. They sued Chinese ripoff manufacturers who copied the look of the iPad case to sell some junk device. I don’t know if this case has merit but it’s typical behavior in the industry.
This is how the tech industry works in the current patent hell. The USPTO doesn’t really review patents because their attitude is “we need the revenue–let the courts sort it out” so they have given up on acting like the government and are acting more like a business, thank you Congressional brainiacs. And the law allows too many things to be patented. Amazon’s “one-click” should not have been a patent. Software should not be patentable. Copyrightable, duh, patentable–mathematical formulae were never supposed to be patented.
Look at our leading tech industry–bio research. A ton of it happens on college campuses. At one time most of that was freely shared and research took leaps forward. Then they allowed patents on cells and shit and that is holding a lot of things up. And the university sector is trying to “act like a business” and is starting to cordon off the walls there too. It’s turned into prisoner’s paradox and guess what, unless you’re a commercial entity or political party paying for secret psych/marketing research, in general that research is worth less without the community of peers.
Our system is broken, is my point.
RSA
@ericblair:
This is a key observation. It’s not just Apple that’s the problem; it’s the enormous overreach possible given our software patent laws. (One-click ordering, anyone?)
And focusing on beauty or aesthetics isn’t the best way to understand why Apple products have been successful. The Human Interface Guidelines first developed by Apple back in the late 1970s, if I remember correctly, dominated how designers thought about user interfaces for decades, and on balance they were important in making computers widely usable by non-technical people. Aesthetics were part of the guidelines, but only part.
Soonergrunt
@Another Halocene Human: You’re funny! I’ll bet the sky in your world is pleasant chartreuse.
Apple products were never serious contenders for the office space. That was always held by IBM mainframes and terminal systems and later by IBM PCs and IBM PC clones.
Soonergrunt
@Villago Delenda Est: Cleared.
The Moar You Know
@Another Halocene Human: You’re talking to a patent holder who watched the courts allow a company with a lot more money than ours to take our product – just fucking take it – pay a token fine and left us holding an empty bag.
Believe me I know the system is broken. Patents are worthless unless you have billions to defend them. A pattern of behavior that seems to be prevalent in every sector of society these days. Billionaires play, everyone else can go suck it.
dmbeaster
The whole patent regime is nonsensical anymore, and litigation is the name of the game. And its not just small companies being victimized – there are small companies that specialize in threatening big ones over patents. The hold-up artist litigation strategy works when someone has already spent a fortune on development and buys off bogus claims to have a trouble free launch.
Apple has a long history of using litigation over patents. The classic one was the 90s lawsuit against Microsoft based on the claim that the look and feel of windows was an alleged ripoff. Apple lost.
Culture of Truth
test post
pseudonymous in nc
They’re probably not going to do that. Patents are nuclear weapons in a corporate arms race, and won’t be deployed by superpowers against non-superpowers.
Small companies have more to fear from patent trolls who don’t actually make products, but acquire patent portfolios and seek out royalties or judgements while sitting in Patentsville, Texas, where juries know that patent suits make their town rich.
The entire system is fucked, because patent offices really don’t know what they’re approving.
Comrade Carter
Aside from my distaste at being called a fanboy by people who are clearly fanboys, just of another party… You might want to rethink that “rip-off” of Xerox, and instead look at the real ripoffs that occurred… You can start with Microsoft “ripping off” Xerox, with the exception that Apple actually paid them, Microsoft just ripped them off.
Robert Sneddon
@Another Halocene Human: The reason MS made it big into business over Apple was because Apple weren’t interested in corporate business and especially networking. I used to support a couple of Mac-based companies with their networking back in the early 90s. One word — Banyan. ‘Nuff said. At the same time MS was selling and supporting NT 3.51 Server which worked perfectly fine over Token Ring as well as 10base2 and 10baseT Ethernet to NT Workstation boxes, and NT 4 a year or two later was a big step up. There was also Novell for third-party networking but it mostly carried and routed MS client traffic. Active Directory was just the cherry on the top.
Apple still aren’t really interested in corporate sales; they deep-sixed Xserve and Xsan a couple of years ago, and OS/X Server is, to be charitable, the Fisher-Price brightly-coloured plastic My Little ATM toy in data centre toolboxes. Apple can make it with the bling and “just one more thing” fashionista end of the market but if the marks ever figure out the Emperor Has No Clothes then it could be hard sledding for them.
Culture of Truth
“Apple’s approach could really throttle innovation”
I would submit this is not uniquely ‘Apple’s approach’, which matters from a public policy argument. In fact, Samsung’s lawyers are asking to recognized as a plaintiff in the current case, and not only a defendant. Which could make it Samsung’s approach.
Chyron HR
@Comrade Carter:
Yes, it is truly those who impugn the Earthly legacy of St. Jobs who are the REAL fanboys.
Cacti
@J (reader):
It takes a truly rare breed of prick to be a billionaire who had to be sued for child support.
Culture of Truth
some day the people will wise up and the Apple will be doomed… doomed!!!
catclub
@J (reader): I agree with this. The USPatent Office seems broken in regards to software.
(which is not to say that Europe is any better. I do not know.) But both sides are taking as given the broken USPTO
and going from there. Various big companies have at times hinted towards supporting changes to USPTO, but it has not happened.
Culture of Truth
If I have to judge the merits of every patent and child support case of businesses executives it’s going to make a trip to the grocery store even more of a nightmare than it already is.
r€nato
@J (reader): whiny fanboys? wow, you have a major-league case of projection there, time to go pro.
Apple fanboys might be arrogant, in the same way Yankees fans are arrogant. Apple, like the Yankees, fucking rules and deservedly so. (no, I don’t care for the NYY). You don’t have to like the Yankees to acknowledge that any team that’s won a world title an average of 1 out of every 4 seasons is pretty damned good.
“Whiny” is much better used to describe whiny PC fanbois who have to shit on anything Apple does, just like the unpopular kids in school just have to shit on anything the star quarterback who gets all the girls does.
mechwarrior online
Steve Jobs flat out admitted that he copied/stole virtually everything. He wasn’t even ashamed about it. He even advised others to borrow, copy, whatever as the key to apples success.
Apple doesn’t have a track record for innovation, even by their own admission. They do have a track record for taking other peoples inventions and ideas, dressing it up in a sexier design, making it less functional and weaker than the original, and then selling it as a life style product based off it’s asthetics and claiming that able to do less = easier to use.
This fiasco is not limited to samsung, they’ve gone after HTC as well and other android phone makers. Largely because android is crushing iOS in many places. apple has always made crappy computers but they are an OK consumer electronics maker. Android is a threat to their key market.
And don’t forget that when this whole fiasco started apple and google sat on each others boards. That isn’t uncommon and there is a ton of cross licensing that goes on the tech world since everybody is borrowing and copying things from others. But apple saw their cash cow in trouble and went ballistic.
Ben Franklin
‘Why can’t we all, just get along?’
catclub
@pseudonymous in nc: “Patents are nuclear weapons in a corporate arms race, and won’t be deployed by superpowers against non-superpowers.”
I think they WILL be used against smaller competitors who do not have nuclear weapons. Compare Iraq and N. Korea, which was invaded?
Cassidy
Squint Fight!
Dave Trowbridge
It was long fashionable to call Microsoft the “Evil Empire,” but in reality, it is Apple that phrase more accurately describes. When you take the behavior of their founders into account, the difference is even more striking. Bill Gates has given billions to good causes; Steve Jobs gave nothing. I will never buy an Apple product.
Cassidy
Personal experience: I’ve owned a Samsung phone that had Android and it was garbage. My Iphone? Amazing. I enjoy using it. I’m evene getting used to using Siri. I’m not gonna go out and buy a bunch of Apple crap. My 4 y/o Compaq does just fine. But I also know I won’t be buying a Samsung phone again and it makes me question any of there other products.
r€nato
@mechwarrior online:jesus, another case of Apple Derangement Syndrome.
Apple isn’t first to market. What they do is come up with something that fucking works, and is intuitive to figure out. My parents had never used anything Apple until 3 years ago. I was constantly having to provide PC tech support.
Then they bought a MacBook. They love that thing, and three years later it still works like a champ. They haven’t had a single PC that didn’t become a useless, slow, frustrating hunk of junk sooner than that. Now they have an iPad, MacBook Air, Airport Express, Airport Extreme, and they kind of want an iPhone even though they don’t really need it.
Multiply that experience by millions and it’s easy to figure out why Apple will become the first trillion dollar company. But sure, go ahead and repeat that tired old shit about how Apple products are all flash and style and people who buy Apple are stupid sheep and the iPad is a fad that will fade away… just like the iPod and iPhone did.
God this thread is pissing me off. There’s more abject stupidity here than the typical Free Republic thread. I’m outta here, this is no way to start humpday.
magurakurin
whatever. apple smapple, windows smindows. it’s fucking toaster. Buy it, use it, end of story.
James Hare
@Billy K.: That and Apple played nice when Microsoft outright stole ideas from the Mac OS. They’ll fight this kind of thing to death because they remember what happens when you allow a competitor to steal your ideas.
RP
The only thing worse than apple fanboys are people b***hing and moaning about apple fanboys and apple’s “terrible” products.
You’re funny.
Cacti
@Dave Trowbridge:
Steve Jobs fought the unionization of the janitorial staff at Apple’s silicon valley offices.
It’s embarrassing how many “liberals” lionize this guy because he made cool, shiny, toys for the upper middle class.
Skippy-san
I was a avid I-Phone user until the Samsung Galaxy 3 came out. I needed a new cell phone to use here in Germany, and I decided to get one. I have been very happy with it-and I think its actually better than the I-Phone.
That said-I was also a die hard Windows user and had never bought an apple computer -till now. I just bought a Mac Book and I am really happy with it.
liberal
@Billy K.:
Wrong. Violation of government-granted monopolies is not “theft.”
liberal
@r€nato:
Yeah. Like moving an icon to the Trash in order to eject a floppy disk.
LOL.
kindness
Wow, lotta fail here.
With all due respect Mistermix, Apple did not get it’s whole GUI (graphic user interface) from Xerox. At most Xerox gave the world the mouse. When you look at the actual operating system Apple’s current system owes much more to NEXT than anyone else and NEXT was Steve Job’s baby which Apple eventually bought.
Now I will agree the current patent system sucks and many things should not be patentable.
liberal
@Kristine:
Yawn. Who’s the greatest writer of all time, in any language?
liberal
@kindness:
Right, and they built the NEXT OS from scratch, bottom up.
Not.
Neddie Jingo
Fixed.
One-button mouse haters: Apple has supported contextual menus (the main use of the right-click) since MacOS 8.6. That is to say, for the last 14 years. This is getting a little old.
Here’s a 7-year-old essay explaining why Apple deprecated the multiple-button mouse for so long. The reasoning is arcane but irrefutable.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
In the 80’s Apple would sue anyone who even dared service one of their computers. But I guess since the fan bois like it’s alright and Bill Gates is evil.
liberal
@Dave Trowbridge:
In fairness, the issue here is the behavior of (quasi-)monopolists, not the personality of the guys who run them.
Cacti
@Neddie Jingo:
Now throw on your white shirt and tie, your name tag with “The Church of STEVEN JOBS of Latter Day Saints,” hop on your bike, and go spread the good news of your Lord and Saviour door to door.
burnspbesq
@Doggie D:
It will be plenty loud enough to destroy your hearing if you stick to low-impedance headphones.
There’s nothing unique about the working conditions in factories that make stuff for Apple. You’d have the same issues if you bought any of the crappy iPod imitators.
James Hulsey
@Soonergrunt: Apple II’s running the Visicalc spreadsheet program were starting to make their way into corporate offices in 1980-1. This led IBM into the panic project that became the IBM PC, where they made Microsoft and Intel very rich.
Neddie Jingo
@liberal:
Or selecting the disk icon and hitting “Command-E.” Or “Eject” from the File menu.
And when was the last time you ejected a floppy disk, anyway? 1990, or thereabouts?
Neddie Jingo
@Cacti:
Sorry. UI designer here by trade.
The guy kinda pretty much invented my job.
The Moar You Know
@kindness: Thanks for the warning, wish everyone here would be as courteous.
You post was, as promised, full of fail.
burnspbesq
@Interrobang:
Are you still living in the year 2001 in other aspects of your life?
mechwarrior online
@burnspbesq:
You know the ipod is famous for having just about the worst sound quality possible in an MP3 player right? It’s a very low end device.
Also not all consumer electronics use non unionized chinese slave labor. Apple uses just about the most abusive facilities there are to boot, and viciously fought unionization for their US employee’s.
You can actually get consumer electronics made by union shops in Europe or made in South Korea and Japan at factories that don’t abuse people. You do have to pay for them, and that’s the catch. Because let’s be honest, most people only care about “unionization” for blue collar people up until their goods begin to cost more, and then they stop caring completely.@James Hare:
MS didn’t steal shit from apple, apple and MS both ripped off Xerox. Apple has stolen more from MS over the years anyways, Jobs even bragged about it. And let’s not forget that MS had to bail out apple.
OSX is just a crappier version of free BSD anyways, they stole their entire OS!
Fwiffo
True story – back in the BBS days, I knew a guy with the last name of “Newton” who ran a BBS called “The Newtonian”. Apple (which had a product at the time called “The Newton”) shut him down for trademark infringement.
mechwarrior online
@Neddie Jingo:
Floppy disks are very common on high end servers and other items. The reason is simple, floppy disks are still the safest way to flash a BIOS, UEFI, or firmware. All other methods have problems with them.
Of course, there is no such thing as a high end apple product so they don’t bother with them. But as someone who works in IT, yeah we use them all the time.
Doug Danger
You’re missing the fact that Apple paid Xerox in stock for the ‘preview’ of the Star. No one from Samsung offered anything to Apple to make a product that looks exactly like an iPhone.
RSA
@Neddie Jingo:
Almost all computer users (including tech-savvy people–perhaps especially tech-savvy people) tend to conflate “This design doesn’t work for me” with “This is a bad design.” For software developers it’s often the converse: “This design works for me” is interpreted as “This design will work for everyone.” The real story is more complicated, of course.
Cacti
@mechwarrior online:
Burnsie’s accustomed to playing apologist for large, abusive, authoritarian entities.
It’s almost second nature for him.
burnspbesq
@liberal:
If you’re ever dumb enough to make that argument in front of a Federal judge, bring your checkbook, because you’ll be paying sanctions.
Gus
Didn’t Apple learn from their long legal battle with Microsoft over Windows thefts from the Mac OS? Apple then turned around and stole a bunch of shit from Windows.
kindness
@liberal:
So you are implying the current operating system owes more to Xerox? No, I do not think you really are implying that but what is your point really? Does someone have to invent their own alphabet & number system to be ‘true inventors’? No they don’t. They build on others stuff.
My point was that Xerox had very little to do with the current Mac operating system. Now did Samsung (which I own several of their products) rip off the iphone & ipad in creating their own device? Duh! You can’t touch either of those things without thinking you are using an iphone or ipad. Samsung didn’t do enough of their own work and borrowed more than they should have if they expect to win lawsuits.
What is it with the Apple hate? How does this make you a better person? It doesn’t. So why put so much energy into something that doesn’t really pay it back in some manner other than as ego or self richeousness? That is a value judgement I can never quite figure.
Doug Danger
“Actually it’s come out now that Samsung had prototypes of phones that look similar to the iPhone. This was in 2006. Before iPhone.”
Which is kind of cute, since Apple had been working on a tablet/prototype for the iPhone/iPad since 2001. If you’d bothered to look (or had Mistermix) a the discovery paperwork for the suit, you’d have known that – as well as knowing that mistermix’s Xerox example was a red herring – Apple _paid_ to license smalltalk and for the ‘tour’ of PARC in stock. You can look it up – but that would be easier than demonizing Apple and posting lies about their Chinese workforce.
Can someone point me to Motorola or Samsung’s supplier responsibility web site? Because Apple has one. They audit their suppliers in China and produce reports once a month. Show me where other electronics suppliers have done this.
burnspbesq
@mechwarrior online:
Easy to assert, but note the complete absence of links or other evidence. If you’ve got it, let’s see it.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@Billy K.:
(Picks up his iPhone, pokes around the interface…)
I had Buttons in Windows Mobile, 6 years ago.
I had picker-menus on my Palm V, 12 years ago.
And the ‘new’ system for Notifications in iOS? Looks a lot like the one in my old Android phone, 2 years ago. A good call on Apple’s part, adapting someone else’s superior solution for their own OS (a common practice in the software industry for five decades now).
What did Apple ‘invent’, exactly? (And I’m saying this as a great fan of the iPhone and iOS in general).
MMx is right here: Software patents are stupid. IMO, the Look and Feel of user interface elements should be covered by Trademark and Copyright, not patents. Blatant knock-offs meant to fool consumers should of course be prosecuted, but you need to let the software industry evolve common interface elements and practices, just like any other industry.
Imagine if Henry Ford had patented the steering wheel/accelerator pedal user interface for the automobile, forcing every other car maker to create a new solution from scratch.
Imagine if the builders of the Golden Gate bridge in SF had patented the physics of the suspension bridge.
gene108
@Square Squid:
If Apple could build up a case directly against Google it would. From the Apple v. HTC lawsuit circa last December.
NY Times Link
Apple’s basically trying to sue Android phones out of the market and indirectly screwing Google in the process.
FormerSwingVoter
I haven’t gone through the almost 100 comments, so I apologize if this has been brought up already, but… As someone who has worked at a couple of small businesses and has poked around a little bit in IP law (not a lawyer, though!), this is exactly how it works.
If you are a small company with a patent and a company like Apple simply copies you, suing them will put you out of business, let alone being sued by Apple.
Cassidy
An MP3 player is a MP3 player. You plug something into it and add music, plug something else into it and listen to music. Sometimes you plug it into your car stereo or some other system and listent to it louder. If you pay full price, you’re a sucker as people love to pawn them.
Roy G.
There is no daylight between Apple, MSFT, Google and Samsung. They are all giving you something with their right hand, and taking something from you with the left. And, they are all using the same Chinese factories.
OS X is the best Desktop OS by far, because it’s built on top of UNIX, and is much more polished and feature rich than any of the Linux desktops. Apple’s hardware is also the best. The problem is this: they learned that the name of the game is Monopoly, and essentially moved the Plaform Wars into the mobile space, and they are only about keeping people inside the walled garden. iOS is essentially AOL for mobile devices.
Xecky Gilchrist
@liberal: Yeah. Like moving an icon to the Trash in order to eject a floppy disk.
Hee hee, they do have some stuff that fucking worked for a very strange definition of “fucking works.”
That said, I applaud their willingness to take risks. Their smugness and litigiousness, I don’t.
Culture of Truth
@liberal: I would say Shakespeare but he didn’t pay child support so Dr. Seuss.
burnspbesq
@mechwarrior online:
ALL portable music players sound like crap if you just stick a bad pair of headphones into the headphone jack and fill them with mp3 files. The iPods win on storage capacity, ability to accommodate higher resolution files, ease of use, and ease of sucking a bit-perfect digital stream out through the dock connector and routing it to a proper DAC and amp.
Someday you will know what you’re talking about on some subject. Alas, audio is not that subject and today is not that day.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@mechwarrior online:
The older iPods were better, probably because Moore’s law doesn’t apply to audio-quality analog electronics. As the devices got thinner, there was less room for ‘good’ analog electronics to drive the actual sound.
My old iPod 3G’s sound was so superior to that of the modern HD-based ones that it was worth it to buy the battery replacement kit and crack it open, just to get a few more years out of it.
That said, if you’re expecting audiophile quality from something you can hold in your hand, using compressed MP3/AAC files as your audio source… don’t.
Maude
@Cassidy:
This is like an aspirin is an aspirin. I agree.
The Red Pen
@Billy K.:
It’s hard to argue with a tautology and nobody should defend theft.
The issue is people patenting things that have no business being patented.
Patent Trolling is stifling innovation and Apple has become one of the biggest patent trolls on the planet.
Culture of Truth
I’d love to know which companies could sure for billions but don’t out of the goodness of their corporate hearts.
LanceThruster
@J (reader):
x2
Amanda in the South Bay
@Roy G.:
Okay, this is where I have a problem.
Seriously, once you get past the fanboyism, whatever works for you works for you. I’ve pretty much reached the state of nirvana where I’m happy in whatever OS I’m the most productive in. OS X is more polished than Windows 7? Please. I’m pretty productive developing and coding in 7, and I guarantee that the overwhelming majority of Mac users don’t have a fucking clue what the command line is, much less basic knowledge of *nix utilities, shell scripting, etc.
The Red Pen
@Roy G.:
…unless you understand what open source is, and then there’s a humongous difference.
No, it’s not.
UNIX is built on top of UNIX. OS X is built on top of Mach, originally*. OS X looks UNIX-y thanks to open source software. A MacIntosh is basically an expensive dongle that allows you to run FreeBSD.
Apple has a desktop system that is designed to look really nice and operate at a level designed for people who are confused by more than one mouse button. That’s great for what it is, but “the best” is a relative term.
* Mach was developed by Carnegie Mellon, not Apple, BTW.
Amanda in the South Bay
@burnspbesq:
Jesus fucking Christ, do you always have to act like an arrogant asshole?
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Cassidy:
That’s an outright lie. There is no EULA stemming from my hardware or my OS that says this comment belongs to anyone other than me (and maybe BJ?). That nonsense is purview of Apple.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Amanda in the South Bay:
D-K E
He doesn’t know as much about Audio, or mp3 players as he thinks he does, and that leads to his arrogance. It’s really quite comical.
Also, it’s just another in his laundry list of gross character defects.
Doug Danger
@Doggie D:
You can worry a lot less if you actually do your homework.
Go to Apple’s supplier responsibility web site. Go try to find the same detail and frequency of audits done on Chinese suppliers by any single other manufacturer, foreign or domenstic.
Anyone carping about Apple “abusing” chinese workers has zero idea what they’re talking about. Foxconn, for all it’s horribleness, has the fear of God when they consider Apple cutting and running to another supplier due to human rights abuses. And having been in the belly of the beast, I can assure you that people within Apple are just as horrified as you at what Foxconn was up to. And they’ve put a stop to it by auditing (and publishing all the audits) on their web site.
So – show me the same supplier responsibility detail from Dell, Creative, etc. Go ahead. unfortunately, China is where electronics are made. Apple is spending a lot of money to make sure their Chinese workers are treated well. So quit with the five-year-old Greenpeace-approved corporate extortion.
Google can’t even build their “Q” because it was so ill-conceived and marketing driven (Made in America…really expensively, and with features no one wants) that it can’t be shipped in it’s current form.
The Red Pen
@Amanda in the South Bay:
If it makes you feel better, I am a digital audio expert and he is mostly talking out of his butt.
iPod may have the most storage, and the quality of the speakers has a large effect. That pontificating about DACs and docking bays… I don’t know where he’s going with that.
Doug Danger
@The Red Pen: Mach was developed at Carnegie Mellon by _Avie Tevanian_ Apple’s head of software development for nearly a decade, and an original NeXTie.
So, really, Mach was conceived at CMU, then developed by NeXT and Apple, right?
I swear, Apple haters can be very much like Republicans when it comes to leaving out important facts.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@The Red Pen: He’s talking out of his arse, as is par for the course coming from him.
Two things:
I’ll take a Sansa over his iPod any day. It has this innovative feature called (strangely enough) an SD reader, which means it’s storage space is expandable, and I can keep my various playlists on different cards.
Not only that, nearly EVERY mp3 player can also play redbook audio. That means uncompressed, 44.1k PCM wav – which is the very same format they cut to CD when they master. Upsampling from there has an arguably negligible effect on quality, and reripping to 96k/24bit or even 48k/16 can lead to aliasing problems.
So for that, and other reasons, yeah.
Then again, WTF do I know? I’ve only been mastering and recording for a decade and a half.
mistermix
@Amanda in the South Bay: It’s not an act.
accidentalfission
@Billy K.:
Examples please?
Doug Danger
@danah gaz (fka gaz): That’s awesome for you. Enjoy the Sansa. My iPod works no less well because you’re happy. And it plays 44.1/48kHz 16 bit too. Ooooh.
Vlad
@Robert Sneddon: I have one of those “Anglepoise desktops,” and outside of a CD burner that went bad two years ago, I’ve never had a day of trouble with it.
Soonergrunt
@Cassidy: See, I go the exact other way. I had to use an iPhone and I hated the closed ecosystem on something that the customer pays for.
My Samsung Mesmerize (the US Cellular version of the Galaxy S Fascinate) OTOH is pretty awesome. I will getting the Galaxy S III on USCC when we get 4G service here in OKC in the next couple of months.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@The Red Pen:
UNIX is built around a POSIX based architecture, and so is MachOS.
The Unixy feel of both is not due to Open Source, but rather due to POSIX architecture.
I may be being pedantic here, I admit. The nerd in me can’t let it go.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Doug Danger: “And it plays 44.1/48kHz 16 bit too. Ooooh.” To be clear, I wasn’t denying that your Apply can play redbook or other PCM formats. As I said, nearly every player will.
The only criticism I made of the iPod is it’s lack of SD reader (last I checked). To be fair, I’d also quibble with the price, but I didn’t bring that up in my last post.
Anyway, the thrust of my post wasn’t about criticizing iPod. It was about criticizing arrogant assholes who talk about shit they don’t understand while condescending other people.
kilo
Could somebody explain to me how Apple saying “Don’t copy our stuff” prevents Google/Android/Samsung from going and inventing new stuff?
Because I can’t see how this prevents them from, you know, inventing and innovating. Copying Apple’s icons, packaging, graphics, and behaviours, yes. Independently developing original isn’t impacted AFAICS.
iLarynx
@liberal:
“CTL-ALT-DEL” – Now THAT is shear genius!
Vlad
@Gus: Samsung probably doesn’t have anything worth stealing.
kindness
Audio capability. Curious. I bought a new i-pod last year (classic w/ 160G) and found I was only using a fifth of the memory with my playlist, mostly ripped from my cds. I looked and saw I was importing cd’s @ 128 kbs which I thought I had set it to a higher rate as I am kind of geeky where sound is concerned. So, I went about updating my itunes library by re-importing most my cds at the Apple lossless setting figuring if I have 5x more space and lossless uses around 1000 kbs I’d still have room to fit it all in my i-pod. Not! I got it all in there and found my new library was 240G. Shit on a cracker, why the f@@k didn’t I look at the memory storage before I finished the whole damn thing? No clue. Soooo, I’ve spent the last week re-importing the less significant stuff at 256 kbp so that I can fit the whole library in on the i-pod and not have to set up playlists. The lesson? Can’t say I’ve learned but I see my own nerdiness is sometimes trumped by my dorkiness-not-paying-attention-ness. So, I hope to get the whole thing down to 150G so that I can add new discs as I get them & hope it will be done this week.
I am curious to see what the sound difference will be between the 128 kbs & the lossless tracks. I know the difference between an uncompressed CD and the i-pod. We’ll see.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@kilo: I’d say let the courts do the hard work of parsing the IP restrictions.
I’m not saying I trust the end result will be fair (look at what IBM to effectively nullify Gottschalk v. Benson). I’m just saying we’ll have to live with whatever the result is. Just don’t expect it to make any sense, or resemble fairness.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@kindness:
It depends on the track. Generally speaking, one of the easiest “tells” is if you have stuff with a lot of very high frequency sounds in it, they’ll be crisper when lossless. For this kind of thing, there are some electronic tracks that fit this category, but even some classical with heavy strings might qualify (violin).
The other thing is that some people (although rare) can always hear the difference between MP3 compressed sound and lossless. This does not mean they have a better ear (necessarily), but it does mean they process sound in such a way that the difference is notable to them. If you are one of these (IMO) unfortunate souls, lossless will always sound better. For your sake, I hope you’re not.
PeterJ
Who knew that Apple’s 1984 commercial actually was a hint to what it would become?
The Red Pen
@Doug Danger:
Mach wasn’t “conceived” at CMU, it was created at CMU. NeXT and Apple did take it from there, yes. The point is that it’s not Apple’s invention.
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
Newbie. When I started, musicians had to play very slowly so we could write the bits down by hand.
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
True, but OS X lives and breathes thanks to tons of POSIX-compliant OSS. For example, the basic operation of printing uses CUPS — the same CUPS I have on Linux. All the command-line tools are are GNU OSS etc. etc.
The Red Pen
@Vlad:
Market share.
Cassidy
@Soonergrunt: Please do not assum any subject mastery on my part or anything resembling it. I had an iPod because I paid $30 for it in a pawn shop (Gen 2 Nano). I have a 4 y/o Compaq that does what I meed it to do. My iPhone has replaced my iPod because I don’t need two devices. It does exactly what I need. I know enough tech to turn things on and off, use freeware programs that work better than some you buy, and not crash my shit. lol
I also know audio enough to know that most people can’t distinhgish between low end, Ipods, and high end MP3 players, especially someone like me who has some hearing loss due to things going boom.
@danah gaz (fka gaz): Um, just referring to corporate douchebaggery.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@The Red Pen: “When I started, musicians had to play very slowly so we could write the bits down by hand.”
LOL. =) . I used to use Mod trackers so I know where you are coming from. I owned an Amiga once.
“True, but OS X lives and breathes thanks to tons of POSIX-compliant OSS”
Yes, yes it does. I was splitting hairs, and we’re both correct. POSIX underpins it, so that the OSS stuff will even run in the first place, and the OSS stuff does provide core features (although the OSS stuff half the time is a rewrite of preexisting commercial posix stuff). Anyway, as I said, we’re both correct, and I was being pedantic.
cackalacka
cough cough iTunes Store cough cough
Popasmuerf
@Billy K.:
The hell they did, I and challenge you provide evidence that Apple “invented” half of what is found in Android. I also happen to be a mobile app developer, so you may be want to think hard if you are feeling froggy.
jamie
@Kristine: Dean Baker works for a think tank, which pays him. In the future where no one is able to enforce copyright on creative works, the only people who would be able to make a career as an artist would be trust funders, and the employees of the wealthy subsisting on various flavors of wingnut welfare (be that left wingnut, right wingnut, propertarian wingnut, civil lib wingnut, whatever).
Of course the Internet makes it “free” to disseminate creative works (if you can pay for broadband), but the question of how you find creative works in the first place is mainly in the hands of the people who run the Apples, Googles and Facebooks — they, and their advertisers, aren’t able to censor (at least in the US), but they are in a position to decide what’s popular and what has access to the revenue streams that do exist. Meanwhile the Amazons of the world provide the actual infrastructure for moving media on the Internet, and have demonstrated a willingness to censor, or even refuse to carry on paid hosting, material deemed hazardous to their bottom line. The Internet’s just a bunch of private companies in the end, your rights on the Internet are approximately your rights in Disneyland, and people should keep this in mind when they’re formulating extravagant claims about a future where anyone would be free to create and distribute whatever they please, for anyone to see.
I don’t think the Apple lawsuit is an awesome thing or very productive. On the other hand, Free Content is a different issue, and Free Content advocates aren’t very honest about the complete upheaval that would be wrought by killing commercial art, where everyone pays to see what they want, and replacing it with patronage art, where the patron pays to see only what he wants, and art simply becomes the crumbs off his table. Western civilization has been there and done that, thanks.
trollhattan
@kindness:
I feel your pain. I don’t use lossless but I do rip at a higher than basic rate, as you can still compress when actually loading it onto the ipod. I use full-size files on my Classic because all gazillion files fit, but compress for the Nano to fit more on.
Now my rant. itunes randomly corrupts music files–adding a sort of digital “hash” that wanders back and forth across the soundstage during certain songs, rendering them unlistenable. It affects entire albums out of the blue and to correct it, I must delete the album on the computer, synch the ipods to delete the album from them, re-rip the CD, then re-synch the ipods. (If I don’t delete the albums from the ipods the clean files don’t load.) I don’t have the foggiest idea why or how this occurs, but it assures I won’t be buying my music w/o physical media. I know, how last-century.
The Other Chuck
@kilo: It’s hard to independently invent rounded corners, isn’t it?
Touchwiz is actually a pretty blatant L&F ripoff, I say that as an owner of a Samsung phone. But rounded fucking corners? Really?
kindness
@danah gaz (fka gaz): See and I find the difference between i-pod & cd is the compression, the S/N difference. The notes are mostly there but the body of the sound is compressed and less life like. I’m hoping I get more S/N because the actual frequency response isn’t bad now.
@trollhattan: yes. You are correct there. I went to a place in Berkeley (Music Lovers) looking at a new receiver and the guy was trying to sell me on a whole house network where all the data is uncompressed and available to be played which ever room you want. I think that is the way of the future, but not mine yet.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Neddie Jingo:
After a quick perusal of that essay, it just confirmed my suspicions. The reason is not arcane, and is hardly irrefutable – it just has to do with demographics.
Apple’s target audience is users who don’t know the difference between left and right.
More power to them.
trollhattan
@The Red Pen:
Between that tactic and Disney and their cohort, trying to extend copyright to infinity plus one year, it’s an increasingly difficult landscape for those not already on top of the mountain. Nice parallel to our many discussions of the American plutocracy.
Doug Danger
@The Red Pen:
Nice selective quoting. I mentioned Avanian, CSA at NeXT and VP of Software at Apple. He was a co-creator of Mach at CMU. You’re splitting some very thin hairs, and my point stands. NeXT and Apple carried Mach forward from it’s ‘failure’ at 3.0 from CMU.
trollhattan
@trollhattan:
Also, too, my itunes library became corrupted a couple years ago and I had to re-rip the entire thing. 13k+ songs.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@kindness: I suppose if you are ripping at 128k that would happen. I rip at 320kbps and have always ripped at at least 256kbps since I began using mp3s. The exception is stuff like audiobook type stuff, like Jello Biafra’s spoken word stuff.
FTR, I do not care for OGG, WMA or FLAC, but only because I don’t need yet-another-format.
trollhattan
@kindness:
I’ve been to Music Lovers! It was years back and even then, the wallet had a sad but wow, do they have some nice gear. Our two-channel specialty shops are all gone, so it’s the Bay Area or nothing at this point, which is okay (the wallet thing, again).
iLarynx
@Doug Danger:
BINGO!
If you like Samsung or Android or Windows, great. Have fun. But stick to the facts please and be aware that when you shovel horsesh!t in a vain attempt to bolster your case (yeah, I’m lookin’ at you Mech IT dude) it only makes you look like an ignoramus. Or a liar. (Or like many Republicans, a combo of both). From outright BS to “facts” that may have applied to Mac OS8 or OS9, but have not been true for over a decade – it’s a great way to show your ignorance on a subject. It didn’t help matters that the author of the story started off with that old chesnut of a zombie lie that Apple stole from Xerox.
The PARC engineers and managers had fierce internal arguments over the Apple deal prior to it being completed. The argument was that they were giving away the store. Arguably, Xerox made more money with their Apple stock as a result of this transaction than they ever would have themselves. They were notorious for not capitalizing on their ideas both before and after this deal. Bottom line: Xerox knew what they were doing with their stock deal with Apple.
But like GOP zombie lies I’m sure the Apple-stole-from-Xerox zombie lie will continue to eat the brains of all unsuspecting victims in its path.
In other news, did you hear that Steve Jobs never held his hand over his heart during the national anthem? Shocking!
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@kindness:
The future of this is DLNA. If he wasn’t schilling DLNA to you he can go soak his head – as the network he’s selling will be obsolete soon.
DLNA handles Photos, Music, and Videos. It’s already supported by several systems, including the PS3, the XBox360, several “smart” bluray gadgets, and higher end TV’s.
Soon, you’ll find it in wifi enabled picture frames, mobile devices, and your dedicated home audio hardware.
I’m not saying you should run out and buy that stuff, but when you ARE looking at purchasing home entertainment equipment, game consoles, etc, be on the lookout for DLNA compliance. You’ll save money in the long run, rather than throwing good money after bad.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@kindness: oops. Here’s a link. http://www.dlna.org/
don’t be fooled by the fact that the TV is front and center. It’s for all kinds of media.
Popasmuerf
@kindness:
Actually I have been using an Android device for close to 4 years now, and not once did I EVER think I was, or was reminded of using an iOS based device…namely because I wasn’t.
Doug Danger
@iLarynx: Thanks for the links and authoritative information about Apple/Xerox, which pretty much destroy’s mistermix’s entire premise for the post.
I wonder if we’ll see an addendum to his post? Probably not. But then again, people think Microsoft “saved” Apple in 1997 with a $150 million dollar restricted stock buy. You never hear about the fact that the QuickTime IP theft case against Microsoft was settled quietly at the same time – because Microsoft had been caught dead to rights stealing entire chunks of code from Apple. They got off light, and at the time, Apple still had a Billion in the bank, but the public and investor confidence after Microsoft’s ‘investment’ helped put Apple on the road to recovery.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Doug Danger:
On Apple:
PROS:
Pretty. Tightly integrated. Extensive Usability testing.
Also, finally putting some pressure on the boneheaded X-Windows model that doesn’t provided a consistent unified Window Manager. ETA: Lowest latency, highest optimized core std OS libs on the market. memcpy for example, is just faster on an apple.
CONS:
Expensive. No user serviceable parts. Beholden to the closed-loop cycle – the same cycle that gives them a win in the integrated dept.
IMO, the best move apple made in their PCs was switching their OS to something they didn’t create themselves, and switching their hardware to a more standarized Intel based architecture.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Doug Danger: Oh, another con. I was the sad owner of a $2000 Apple IIgs back in the day when Scully was in charge. Long story short, they screwed me over.
That coupled with the extra expense of apple stuff, and the fact that I like to tinker will keep me from buying anything of theirs for the foreseeable future.
kindness
Is there anyone who claims Apple products aren’t expensive? I haven’t seen it. Even fanbois like me admit Apple will take all your money if you let them. I owned a Mac IIci back in the day and found it so much better than the 80286/80386 PC’s out there at the time. It was significantly better both hardware & software. After that though I bought a PC. Then another PC and when it came time to re-up I got a Mac desktop. Yes it costs twice the price of what ever PC I could have gotten. But….(you know there is going to be a but there) I have loved that thing to the ends of the intertubes. Not once has a new piece of software made the machine chock or die. Not once has a new board or peripheral screwed it up. Not once have I ever had a virus. I did finally buy a virus protection software about 3 months ago and even that is wonderful as it doesn’t hog all the machines cpu efforts. Can’t say any of that about my PC’s.
So yea, resent them for their cost. That part sucks. But I paid for my lack of giving a shit and knowing it will work. Best money I ever spent. btw – I still have the PC too. It still runs Windows 95 and I turn the beast on when I need to pull up data files I didn’t transfer over to the Mac. So again, the resentment and (dare I say it) hate some foster on Apple and Apple users….wasting your time on me folks.
Martin
People participating in this debate don’t really understand what they’re saying.
Innovation isn’t invention – innovation is using existing technology in better ways – and Apples patents are quite narrow in those particular ways. The patents don’t prohibit the use of the technology, just in the narrow application that Apple has documented. Apple didn’t patent the capacitive touchscreen, they made it cost effective and solved a host of problems around the screens to make them usable in the market. Anyone else could have solved those same problems in other ways and not run afoul of Apple here – and many of Apple’s competitors have done that. Apple isn’t stifling innovation because the innovation exists – in Apple products. You can buy them, use them, and the innovation exists. This isn’t patent trolling where some solution is tied up in a hypothetical, with no product to buy. If you want the innovation, just go buy it. And that’s how the market ought to work.
And Samsung didn’t just run afoul of Apple’s functional patents but their design patents as well. And there’s simply no excuse for that. And that’s not some edge component of patent law either – automakers file design patents for their auto body components, so you can’t come out with a GT-R knockoff car. In isolation, none of these would be problematic. Apple would likely have looked the other way, or negotiated a solution, but in aggregate it’s a real problem. Samsung copied Apple’s icons pixel for pixel inside their stores. They copied Apple down to the box design. Their Chromebox uses a screw-off round cover on the bottom of the unit to access the components, just like the Mac Mini. Now, I don’t think anyone would say that a round access opening to a square computer is ‘obvious’.
Samsung does many innovative things, but this isn’t innovation. This is pretty shameless, actually, for a company as large as Samsung. Yeah, there will be accidental overlaps and similarities, but there’s a distinct pattern here that doesn’t occur with any of Apple’s other competitors.
Travis
@liberal:
…or going to the “Start” icon to shut down. LOLx2
Seebach
I have no idea why people are so willing to run to the defense of a corporation.
Jobs told Obama he was too anti-business and he would lose in 2012.
So this really isn’t like an anti-Republican thing.
Christ.
The Red Pen
@Doug Danger:
The irony of this assertion cannot be measured by terrestrial instruments.
Cassidy
I like my 4 year old Compaq laptop.
The Red Pen
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
I hope so. It disturbs me that Sony is a major player in DLNA, yet the PS/3 is quite possibly the worst DLNA media client you can buy. Yeah, I know that PS/3’s are for playing Skyrim et al, but I use mine almost exclusively for video playback (until Skyrim 2 comes out or whatever).
The Red Pen
@Martin:
Wow. This list of offenses got to the comically-trivial pretty quickly.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@The Red Pen: I take it that your blockquote was unintentional.
Sony is more than a major player in DLNA. They practically invented it, a couple of decades ago, in japan w/ the PSX media stuff. I say practically, because it’s an industry conglomeration, but sony spearheaded it long before anyone else was paying attention.
This isn’t to be read as a ringing endorsement of Sony. I have innumerable problems with them and their products, but that’s neither here nor there.
And frankly, taken in it’s entirety, I quite like my PS3 thanks.
For starters, it was one of the earliest widely commercially available DLNA compliant media appliances available in the US. First to market generally means problems, but mine works well enough for bridging my old TV’s to work on my DLNA network. Secondly, for quite some time, the PS3 was the ONLY 100% certified DivX compliant media appliance on the market.
You may not care for your PS3 (and skyrim was a piss poor choice as an example game, since it’s broken on the PS3, BTW) but I quite like mine. I use it almost exclusively as a media appliance, not a game machine.
Also, so does my friend who is in his 50’s and has NEVER put a game on it. He uses it for bluray, and DLNA and is utterly computer illiterate.
Offered FWIW
burnspbesq
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Nor do we need to. We turn it on, it does what we want it to do, we are happy. Period, full stop.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@The Red Pen: Regarding the PS3’s DLNA problems.
From experience, three things:
1. Wifi 802.11G is NO WAY to run video via DLNA. It’s just not reliable enough, and yet the ps3 is 802.11G, not N. meh. Use ethernet.
2. Firmware updates. Keep it up to date. Post 4, the DLNA has gotten much more reliable.
3. Choose your server wisely. I really wish WMP/Win7 streaming would detect and transcode better than it does, but sadly, that’s not the case. You may have better luck with TVersity+FFshow on windows, or mediatomb on linux. Despite it’s popularity, and the name, PS3 Media Server sucks. Probably because it was written in java. Anyway, the server is the single most important choice you can make to improve your PS3 dlna experience. I’d suggest trying a few (if not just the ones I mentioned). I think you’ll find that it improves your experience greatly.
ETA: Considering that DLNA is still a baby, it’s not for the faint of heart, and it takes some sweat to get it running smoothly. That of course, will change as it matures.
burnspbesq
@Amanda in the South Bay:
People who live in glass houses etc. See comment 107.
burnspbesq
@The Red Pen:
To not relying on the internal audio circuitry in any digital audio player, which all suck because they are engineered to meet a price point. If you’re an actual expert, then you know about this.
http://cypherlabs.com/product
Roy G.
@Amanda in the South Bay: LOL – i’m a developer. I use Apple hardware as a dev, and prefer OS X, but i’m far from a fanboy, as I actually work across platforms and devices. Even though I have an iPhone and a Samsung Note, I prefer my Nokia Lumia Windows Phone (too bad you missed out on the freebies at the dev conference!). I’m running Windows 7, Windows 8 preview and Ubuntu as VMs on my Mac. And au contraire, I use the Terminal as much as the Finder, so i’m not here speaking as a fanboy.
I do speak from daily experience working inside The Beast, and switching back and forth. It’s a great generalization to say ‘whatever tool works for you is best,’ and I do generally agree with that. However, I’ve personally switched over devs on my team from Win7 to OS X, and watched their comprehension of the system radically improve and their productivity soar. The Unixy goodness of OS X makes it so much more interoperable, and there’s no comparison for trying to install and run things like say Apache on localhost. There is simply a lot more overhead and drag on Windows.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
I think it should go without saying that “audio experts” have better things to do than masturbate over portable MP3 players, which all suck compared to some nicely balanced Mackie active/active monitors plugged into some pro sound gear.
Anytime you take it on the road, you are going to compromise something. No amount of breakout augmentation will make a shitty compressed track played on portable gear (through HEADPHONES, no less) sound as good as you’ll get in a pro setup, with good monitors and balanced quarter inch.
Audio experts don’t sit around in a room masturbating over the latest cheap gadget to try to eeck a tiny amount of additional clarity and dynamic range out of a fundamentally inferior (read: portable) device. The RF noise alone from all the circuitry packed into one of those gadgets undercuts the quality anyway, just for starters. In short, it’s like debating the merits of $4000 rims for your $1500 geo metro.
If you are an expert, that generally means you get PAID to do what you do, and wasting time in meaningless and masturbatory fanboi bullshit doesn’t add value.
If you are going for a portable player, it’s simple: Get one with the features you like and an acceptable level of quality given the device’s inherent limitations. Trying to achieve the BEST SOUND EVAH ZOMG!! on a portable device is like pissing up a rope.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Roy G.:
That’s a pretty subjective argument. I’m not disagreeing with some of your arguments, as they are fairly sound (unix stuff being what it is, is both a boon and can be a curse as well though, as you probably know being a dev yourself)
But then you go and mention apache. I don’t have a problem with apache, per se – but considering that PHP is the platform of choice for most devs on apache that statement made me raise an eyebrow. While php is fine for doing simple sites, or sites based on wordpress – it tend to be crippled by the fundamental lack of higher level structural things that help combat complexity. Try managing a 10 million line codebase that must integrate with various XML infosets, databases, web platforms and RPC interfaces in PHP and you’ll often wish you were using ASP.NET, for example.
My point being, is that your comments are subjective, and again, while general, the Right Tool For The Job(TM) really does apply here, too.
I’m glad your shop found greater productivity with OSX. More power to you. Clearly for what you are doing, that was the right choice. But your situation is not everyone’s situation. There’s a time and a place for everything.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Roy G.:
MSFT sent me a free Lumia 800 earlier this year :D
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Amanda in the South Bay: Are you a developer? Have you used devstudio 11 yet? it almost makes me want to code again.
And C++11 is amazing. =)
Amanda in the South Bay
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
Yeah, I dabble a bit in it :P
On my own I do a lot of C#, and some JS and PHP.
I have the Win 8 RP on a separate partition, haven’t really gotten around to poking at it a lot.
I also do WP7 development, got a couple of apps published. Pondering doing what all the cool kids in Silicon Valley are doing, starting RoR.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Amanda in the South Bay: I like C#, but C++11 has begun to eclipse that for me.
For starters, as you probably know (and Bjarne has said as much) C++ has historically been too “expert friendly”. They’re fixing that.
Secondly, they’ve added type-inference and automatic memory management (though not built in garbage collection) to the language. (For more on this, see the now re-purposed “auto” keyword)
And finally (and arguably – most awesomely) they’ve added Lambda expressions to the language. WIN. WIN. WIN.
Oh, and in Devstudio 11, the IDE for C++ is no longer the red-headed stepchild of visual studio. Massive overhaul.
Since you like C# (arguably my favorite managed language), you might like C++11 since it now fills many of the same niches. Also, MS is now pushing an “Unmanaged Renaissance” so it’s going to be a much bigger part of deving on the MS platform. Herb Sutter said is much, and he’s a guy that’s worth listening too. MS certainly does. =)*
*A big part of the reason for this new push is that CPU’s have already topped out GHz wise, and so there’s no more “free lunch”. Now we’re just adding more cores, which means parallel programming. Also we’re back to efficiency being king. =)
Amanda in the South Bay
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
Yeah, admittedly it seems like an exciting time to be a C++ dev on Windows8 /Win Phone 8. I’ve had an aversion to C++ since learning it in school, but I’m possibly willing to give it a chance with the latest versions of Windows and VS.
Amanda in the South Bay
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
Yeah, admittedly it seems like an exciting time to be a C++ dev on Windows8 /Win Phone 8. I’ve had an aversion to C++ since learning it in school, but I’m possibly willing to give it a chance with the latest versions of Windows and VS.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Amanda in the South Bay: I’m sorry that school inflicted their “knowledge” of C++ on you during your formative years. They are ill-equipped to teach it properly, and they generally confuse and ruin C++ developers.
Setting aside C++11 for a minute, there’s a way to learn C++ and it’s nothing like anything you’ve ever been taught:
Accelerated C++ by Andrew Koenig and Barbara Moo
It’s a small book, and it’s groundbreaking. It teaches C++ PROPERLY. I’ve recommended it to everyone that’s ever wanted to grapple with C++. It’s a different sort of text, and it will make you look at the language in a whole different way. What’s funny is that happens to be the way C++ was intended to be taught, but not a single academic institution has been able to figure that out. Bjarne weeps.
ETA: The first thing to know is that C++ has NOTHING to do with C. I know that sounds strange. Even though they intersect, C++ is best learned having never encountered C, and C++ code looks nothing like C code, (note also that if your C++ code looks object-oriented you are probably doing it wrong).
Anyway. I can’t recommend that book enough. C++ BTW, is about *generic programming*. It’s not C with classes.
Amanda in the South Bay
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
Ah, interesting. My C++ class built on a foundation of C that is was assumed all students had-taking a C program, then adding OOP and C++ features to it. This book appears to skip all of that and just sticks with C++.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Amanda in the South Bay: Yes. It sounds like your class was full of nonsense.
That’s the wrong way to learn C++.
Templates are the name of the game in C++. While objects exist, they are not first class. They take a backseat to templates. Templates allow you to do funny things. Among the stranger things you can do is use them to convince the COMPILER to compute prime numbers (at COMPILE TIME, mind you). That’s just a weird example. Grasping templates, and how to use them is a fundamental paradigm shift – that’s generic programming, and yeah C# supports “generics” but they are really limited compared to C++. In C++ they are the alpha and the omega. Objects are essentially just shims.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Amanda in the South Bay: I should add, when I say it’s nonsense, and the “wrong way”, I’m not directing that at you. I reserve my ire for your professor, who did you a great disservice. Probably because he or she never properly learned C++ themselves. This problem is an epidemic in academic institutions. grrrr!
Martin
@The Red Pen:
This is why DLNA will never succeed. If you can make a ‘bad implementation’ then the standard has failed in the only place where it matters. The whole point of DLNA is that consumers can trust it to work reliably across devices. DLNA doesn’t pass that test. If you get the right combination, it works great, but if it “takes some sweat to get it running smoothly” then it’s failed miserably.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Martin:
Man, computers were a bitch to get working at the beginning. No wonder they failed.
Same with cars.
Same with cellphones.
And the internet.
See you in five years.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Martin: The real driver behind whether a technology succeeds or fails is money and momentum.
On one hand, you’ve got this: http://www.dlna.org/dlna-for-industry/about-dlna/member-companies
On the other hand, you’ve got coax, RCA cables, and… crickets.
Good luck to you sir. I’ve used DLNA quite happily for years, and will continue to do so while you continue to wrestle with 1970’s analog cables and the rest of home entertainment has passed you by. Good luck with that.
Martin
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
The real driver behind a standard is enforcement of the standard. The whole point of developing a standard is that you won’t have incompatible implementations, which DLNA suffers from far more than it should.
This isn’t a technical limitation – there’s nothing magical about DLNA. It’s simply a matter of competent implementation across the standard – and it lacks that. Ultimately, it’ll get replaced with something else (as MS has proposed) that addresses the problem.
FWIW, I have no analog cables. I quite easily move video, photos, music around the 10 or so devices (including TVs) in my house, most of it hosted off of a Synology NAS. I tried using DLNA and it mostly worked, but I couldn’t trust a new device added to the mix would work and sometimes is just wouldn’t work at all. I went with a better solution. I’ve got nothing but a few HDMI and optical audio cables, gigabit ethernet and dual band wifi.
I’d wager you’ve got some work to catch up to me, most likely.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Martin: “The real driver behind a standard is enforcement of the standard.”
Money and momentum lead to that.
When Plug and Play was introduced, it didn’t work very well and devices often didn’t implement the standard.
When USB was introduced, it was years before even the majority of vendors got on board and actually implemented the spec – namely putting their driver code in the USB gadget itself instead of forcing you to run a platform specific installer.
If I apply your estimation, neither of these would have survived. As it happens, they did. One thing they both had in common was money and momentum behind them. Enforcement of the standard FOLLOWED, it didn’t lead.
However, you seem sure that it won’t. I’ll see you when the dust settles, as I believe I’ve made my case. You’ve got no alternative to DLNA that has any traction or wide adoption, nor wide support of vendors, and history is against you.
I’ll see you in five years.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Martin:
LOL. Putting a PC in every area of your house to bridge your NAS is so mid nineties.
Unless of course you are talking about the TV interface for some of Synology’s NAS products. It’s DLNA. whoops!
Martin
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
No. AppleTV is the TV interface. Subsonic (running on the Synology) does music/video streaming to all of our devices even outside of the house. We can all pull from one collection and push from any device (including the collection) to any tv, stereo, or portable speaker. Basically no configuration off of the NAS.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Martin: It’s a success for sure. Apple TVs are bound to be in every home everywhere. It’s a forgone conclusion, amirite?
LULZ
Or did I just hear you say *every* TV, because last I checked, apple’s protocol is supported by apple TVs. When you said every TV, stereo, or portable device, you really meant, any TV stereo, or portable device that happens to be an apple. And last I checked they hadn’t exactly captured a majority marketshare.
If you think that’ll ever happen, you’re a fool.
If you know better, well – all I can say is enjoy your walled garden.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
I mean don’t get me wrong. Apple’s got a good thing going with their streaming, so long as you are willing to be locked into apple products.
But if you think for A SECOND that I’d ever recommend something that locks someone down to a single vendor – that will never happen.
Furthermore, your dismissal of DLNA is only valid if you accept apple purity as an alternative. For most people, that’s no alternative at all.
Martin
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
Uh, no. AppleTV is a little $99 box that you hook to your TV with an HDMI cable that you connect to via WiFi or ethernet. You can hook it up to any TV with HDMI or any stereo with an optical audio cable. There’s also a number of receivers, portable speakers, sound bars, and so on that support Airplay directly as well, though I just use the AppleTV to hook to devices that don’t have it.
And there’s 400 million devices that connect to it. It’s a rather big market. Nothing walled about the garden – the music is MP3, the video H264. I can shove it off the NAS with DLNA if I want (and I’ve had it working sometimes well, sometimes not well over DLNA). The only two Apple products I’m dependent on are the 2 $99 AppleTVs which are no more expensive than a Roku or other box. And Subsonic isn’t an Apple product, nor is the NAS, nor is the TV the AppleTV hooks to. The audio stuff is just routing optical audio and the portable speakers also support Bluetooth streaming. There are DLNA clients for the iOS devices just as there’s a Subsonic client, so no limitation there. There are Airplay clients for Android and other devices, so I’m good there too. And the best part of Airplay is that I can send video or audio from almost any app, any website, or send the whole display or audio from a Mac or an iPhone to any of these devices. CNN video? Just push the button and it’s on the TV. Video emailed to me? Same thing. Kids want to show me what they built in Minecraft? One click and it’s on the TV. Wife wants to show off some design ideas out of houzz? Same. Friend comes over – so long as they’re on my guest network, they can push anything to the TV or stereo without configuration. So I can move more variety of content than I’ve ever seen done with DNLA.
What am I locked into here other than $198 in devices?
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Martin: “Uh, no. AppleTV is a little $99 box that you hook to your TV with an HDMI cable that you connect to via WiFi or ethernet.”
Umm yes. You need a damned apple device to bridge it. The more devices you have, the more of these $99 bridges you need. Apparently you have two. It would cost me closer to $396 dollars, and that’s not including any mobile devices I may want to add, which that box won’t let you do. Android supports DLNA btw.
Also, the extra remote is annoying. Especially compared to a TV that has DLNA built in.
“And there’s 400 million devices that connect to it. It’s a rather big market. ”
Bullshit. Unless you ignore the fine print. First of all, 400 million devices do NOT act as client devices for Apple’s streaming. You need a bridge.
DLNA Device Shipments are expected to rise to over one billion units as of 2014. I’d love to see a count of actual devices that support DLNA directly, but while I haven’t found one, I know damned well that it dwarfs apples. And it will continue to do so. These are DIRECTLY DLNA capable devices. Not a count of TVs that can plug into them.
Enjoy your walled garden. I said before, and I’ll say it again. DLNA is the future of home entertainment inter-connectivity. If you want to argue that it’s not, that’s fine, but if you want to argue that Apple’s is, anyone with two brain cells to rub together would laugh in your face.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
Regarding that device count. While I haven’t found a solid count, or even a ballpark estimate there are at least 230 different device vendors that produce DLNA devices.
Apple, not so much.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
After a lengthy product search, I uncovered well over 11,000 unique devices capable of DLNA video playback. These are not simply DLNA compliant, but DLNA certified. As much as I’d like to limit the search to televisions, the engine didn’t let me. my source is dlna.org product search.
Roy G.
@Amanda in the South Bay: I was just playing you – i’m glad you got one because the Lumias are the only phones that run Metro well.
@danah gaz (fka gaz): Apache was just an example, and I could have as easily said Python and Twisted, because we just did a little project with those. To put a finer point on it, I think MSFT imposes their way, and it’s harder to integrate non-msft technologies, and does a lot of things just because they are the opposite of the standard ( \ instead of / etc). You and Amanda are both doing things at a high (or really low) enough level where this argument doesn’t really hold true for you, so i’ll gladly tip my hat.
I still maintain that Apple hardware is superior, and the best Windows laptop is…
a Mac Book Pro running Windows as a VM. :()
Thanks for the info on DLNA – that’s good information, though you may be coming on a bit too strong with it, lol. Let the Apple folk do what they want (i’ve got some of those pieces, and tend to agree with you) – doing it right yourself is its own reward.
Roy G.
@Amanda in the South Bay: I was just playing you – i’m glad you got one because the Lumias are the only phones that run Metro well.
@danah gaz (fka gaz): Apache was just an example, and I could have as easily said Python and Twisted, because we just did a little project with those. To put a finer point on it, I think MSFT imposes their way, and it’s harder to integrate non-msft technologies, and does a lot of things just because they are the opposite of the standard ( \ instead of / etc). You and Amanda are both doing things at a high (or really low) enough level where this argument doesn’t really hold true for you, so i’ll gladly tip my hat.
I still maintain that Apple hardware is superior, and the best Windows laptop is…
a Mac Book Pro running Windows as a VM. :()
Thanks for the info on DLNA – that’s good information, though you may be coming on a bit too strong with it, lol. Let the Apple folk do what they want (i’ve got some of those pieces, and tend to agree with you) – doing it right yourself is its own reward.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Roy G.: My point about the DLNA is and continues to be – it’s what’s for dinner. This is what home entertainment systems will be working with. Both devices that are currently new, and down the road. Warts and all.
Anyone that is dismissive of that, well – point me to what the future looks like. It’s certainly not coax and RCA, and it’s not Apple. Apple has NEVER been committed to producing widely adopted standards. Their IP is too restricted and closed to allow for that. They are closed vendor, closed loop shop, and nothing indicates that this is changing. The closest thing they’ve managed is Firewire, and we all see how that panned out. They are not the future of interconnected home entertainment. They are a boutique one-off luxury market item, that ropes you in to purchasing ever more Apple (and pretty much exclusively apple) products if you want to play. That won’t fly on a large scale. If they are fine with that, and their customers are fine with that, then so am I.
But to sit there and pretend otherwise is stupid. And to baldfaced lie about the product support count (400 million is absolute bullshit) is just insulting.
Apple will not dictate the direction of digital home entertainment systems, now or in the future. They will capture a minority of the market as they always have. Every other vendor is going DLNA. Period. Full Stop.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Roy G.: I’d be willing to shell out extra money for that haswell ultrabook that’s supposed to be released at some point in 2014 or so, but only because Intel is spinning a one-off haswell chip just for that. (at least according to rumors)
Admittedly, I don’t buy laptops anymore. I used to use them exclusively, (and pretty high-end ones, it wasn’t unusual for me to shell out over $4k for one) but after enough thefts and damage from being schlepped around all the time, I finally gave up on them in favor of cheap netbooks, and a performance oriented desktop. The Ultrabook would be purely for the geek factor of it. =) I’d be afraid to take it out of my home.
That said, I’ve been somewhat disappointed with Apple’s PCs in terms of CPU availability. All told, I can get faster configurations on a non-mac if I am willing to spend the money. Plus I like to over clock them, even going so far as liquid cooling which I’ve built and sold for others, but I don’t have one myself just because they are noisy (RF noise, not just audible noise). My current machine has no motors in it and is convection cooled at 2 cores and 3.1ghz. I don’t even know if mac offers that.
Anyway, I’m fine with apple products so long as people don’t pretend they are something they are not. I probably won’t buy one in the forseeable future, although that future ultrabook tempts me a bit. If I really want to run OSX I’d probably build the machine myself anyway.
iLarynx
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
After a quick perusal of that essay, it just confirmed my suspicions. The reason is not arcane, and is hardly irrefutable – it just has to do with demographics.
After a full reading of the essay it’s clear that the logic behind the single button mouse is simplicity. Demographics isn’t even mentioned in the article, much less that it’s the primary reason for the single button mouse. At work I use a 2-button trackball and at home I use a 1-button mouse. I like both and don’t see any detriment to using either one.
I use both regularly and don’t see a problem with either. If your only experience with a 1-button mouse was to see the Apple logo on it and recoil in panic, that would explain a lot.
iLarynx
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
Re: Plug-And-Play & USB implementation
My experience is that Apple’s implementation of Plug-And-Play just worked. When Microsoft tried to emulate this with their version on PCs, they weren’t very successful for quite a while. As for USB, again the peripherals for the Macs just worked. My experience with Windows machines dropped off a lot during this period (turn of the century) so I really can’t speak to the problems with Windows USB peripherals during this time.
iLarynx
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
Apple has NEVER been committed to producing widely adopted standards. Their IP is too restricted and closed to allow for that.
I’m not sure of your definition of “widely adopted standards” but how many PCs had USB before the original iMac? The 3.5″ floppy? WiFi? Have you even bothered to use an Apple product anytime in the 21st century? Your arguments against them all seem to be coming from 10-20 years ago and for the most part just don’t apply any more and haven’t for years.
They are a boutique one-off luxury market item, that ropes you in to purchasing ever more Apple (and pretty much exclusively apple) products if you want to play.
And THEN the issue of “bald-faced lies” is brought up. Brilliant. There are few things more pathetic than a wire-pulling code-monkey pontificating on that which he knows not. That, and scorned Flash developers.
I’ve worked with some very good people in IT departments and they are generally not only willing to investigate things outside their area of knowledge, but are eager to do so. I’ve also worked with some who are lacking in skills and thus get hyper-defensive about their cloistered area of knowledge. I prefer working with the first group.
The Red Pen
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
I love my PS/3 and also use it almost exclusively as a media device. In fact, I have one attached to each TV.
And I thought Skyrim was great, despite being better on PCs.
And they are all networked via hardline Ethernet.
@burnspbesq:
That makes some sense, but the technology of audio DACs has been mastered to the point where you don’t really have to spend much to get a really, really good one. After that, there is some minimal contribute to sound quality from the amplifier and transmission interconnect and then it’s really up to the speakers to produce good-sounding output.
The main benefit of digital transmission is that you don’t lose fidelity over long distances or when passing through switches and routers. That’s not really an issue when you’re plugged into a docking station.
Per Amanda’s comment, the problem might be that my DLNA source is a Windows 7 machine. Any rec’s for a Linux DLNA server? MythTV has too much “I want to take over your whole box” to it…