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News and Editorial: Apple Seeds New 10.4.2 Build


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I'm sure Dell and co. would be very wary...

Any PC company that has the guts to try this will be shunned by Microsoft. And believe me, that's not going to be very appealing.

In February, Steve Jobs told Fortune magazine that “three of the biggest PC makers” are trying to convince him to license OS X for use in their machines: http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000870031101/

 

Since that was before the x86 was even announced, I would suspect that PC manufacturers are now even more interested in licensing OS X. I can easily imagine being able to buy a Dell-Mac or an HP-Mac in five years, in fact that is what I think this switch to x86 is really all about.

 

Not to mention the Mac community's dependence on Office

Apple is not dependent on Microsoft Office any more than it is on IE or WMP, that is what iWork is for. Furthermore, not only is NeoOfficeJ, an OpenOffice for OS X, free but as far as I can tell it is better that the original: http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/index.php

 

Apple's real problem is penetrating the corporate market and the only way they are to do that is with using Dell or HP hardware. The whole widget model almost killed Apple in the mid-90's, it is in part a leftover from the dawn of personal computers where every machine had it's own unique operating system. Now Apple has a second chance to get the Macintosh business model right. As far as I am concerned they can start by sacrificing a few Mini Mac sales and sell a version of OS X for the Playstation 3 as Sony has requested.

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However, when we're talking about Apple in the year 2005, we're talking about a company that's been around for about 30 years now...

 

If Steve Jobs had been at the helm of Apple all this time I might agree with you, but that certainly is not the case.

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Apple is not dependent on Microsoft Office any more than it is on IE or WMP, that is what iWork is for. Furthermore, not only is NeoOfficeJ, an OpenOffice for OS X, free but as far as I can tell it is better that the original: http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/index.php

 

Apple's real problem is penetrating the corporate market and the only way they are to do that is with using Dell or HP hardware. The whole widget model almost killed Apple in the mid-90's, it is in part a leftover from the dawn of personal computers where every machine had it's own unique operating system. Now Apple has a second chance to get the Macintosh business model right. As far as I am concerned they can start by sacrificing a few Mini Mac sales and sell a version of OS X for the Playstation 3 as Sony has requested.

 

NeoOfficeJ is useless for businesses at this point. It is better than X11Office, but it is still buggy, outdated, and slow. There is no other spreadsheet option unless you're willing to compile Gnumeric or OpenOffice for X11, which are both slow too. OO in native Cocoa is coming, and that might be a better option.

 

Apple is probably going to hang around for a few more years, like IBM.

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Slightly offtopic, but: Stop whining. I pay $6.50 a gallon and it's ok.

 

Yeah, but prices for gasoline did not double in Germany over the last year. Furthermore, you are paying more because of tax, not gettting raped by {censored} Cheney & Co. Finally, people in the USA are much more dependant on oil.

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So how's that update?? where can it be obained??

Is the OS would be able to run or it will lock up? like some users have been reporting no boot after updating some apps.

 

Please @RideTheCliche, keep on-topic... your second post and is quite deviating the topic that Shard gently exposed.

 

First and second questions: it seems that it was marked. According to a reliable source, someone in a different community leaked it. Apple got their hands on the leak, found the unique mark, and identified the insider. He's out of the program and banned from meetings at this point. It's out there.

 

http://www.win2osx.net/forum/showpost.php?p=9619&postcount=7

 

You might want to look at that forum, and this thread too:

 

http://forum.osx86project.org/index.php?s=...indpost&p=21317

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Do you think that most software developers really want to write code for only 6% of the market? The point is that the Apple needs to unlease OSx86 to capture and maintain something like 30% for long term viabilty. Considering their marketshare rose by 50% in the last year largely thanks to the Mac Mini, it certainly is reasonable to expect that Apple could gain a lot more with OSx86.

 

 

"The real reason we're here is to drive market share, so we devote most of the space in the front of the store to our products and the experience of them, I'd love to see Apple get back to 15% market share someday." - Ron Johnson, Apple's vice president of retail.

 

http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2005/10/11/1495

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/78/jobs.html

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Key word: could. They could, or they could die. Apple has been using the whole-widget business model for over 24 years now, including the Apple series, when whole-widgets were commonplace. They haven't left the market yet.

 

The last time Apple tried the clones, they nearly went bankrupt. Why do you think a retail-box model would be more profitable? Sure, Dell or HP can come up to Apple and license their OS. Dell has a Linux PC out. Good luck finding it. MS is going to undercut over and over, because they know no one would dare sell a line of PCs without Windows.

 

Apple licenses it to a small manufacturer? Fine; they'll have no brand recognition and basically be in Apple's full control. This is 2005, not 1995. No one buys retail-box OSes anymore. Sure, you might get a few thousand buyers. That's hardly a 6-30% jump.

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The last time Apple tried the clones, they nearly went bankrupt.

That is not a fair characterization of what happened. It is more like Apple was going bankrupt and then tried clones. With the retail store chain pushing the premium Mactinosh line, Apple now can hope to maintain some hardware niche while working with Dell and HP to penetrate the corporate market. The corporate market simply will not buy Apple hardware and without it Apple will never regain enough marketshare to achieve stability as competition from Linux desktops in the long term.

 

Why do you think a retail-box model would be more profitable?

 

With the exception of OS X for Playstation 3, I am really advocating only a clone program not retail-boxes. Nonetheless, Microsoft has proved that selling software is more profitable than hardware. In particular, when manufacturing an ever increasing number of widgets, profit margins ultimately decrease. This is why Dell is having problems now. However, because software manufacturing costs are essentially zero and the development expense is fixed, as more and more copies are sold, profit margin approachs 100%. Then of course the market for OSx86 is about twenty times larger than than for Macintoshes (~5% versus 100% in computer units shipped).

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With the exception of OS X for Playstation 3, I am really advocating only a clone program not retail-boxes.

 

I highly doubt OS X will ever be for the ps3. The only time that I read OS X and PS3 in an article a spokes man was saying how the ps3 will or may have an operating system suck as OS X (or was capable of running it). He was just giving an example of an operating system and by using OS X as the example of what an OS is it created hype which is what they (sony) want. Trust me it wont happen.

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I certainly do not expect OS X for Playstation 3 to happen either (at least not officially :D), but it is very clear that Sony wants it as way to compete with XBox 360 and that Apple would greatly benefit from the increased number of people using OS X, not mention have a product with near 100% profit margin. In short, Apple would make as much profit per unit selling OS x for Playstation 3 as they do selling a Mac Mini, but likely make more profit because the Playstation 3 market is so much larger than that for Mac Minis.

 

One note about retail box OS X sales, in the last quarter Apple some $35M in Tiger sales, this corresponds to about 350,000 copies being sold. Assuming near 100% profit margin on OS X retail box sales, this would account for about one tenth of Apple's quarterly profits. Of course, we would expect more Tiger sales in the previous quarters and slightly less in the furture.

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Of course, you're forgetting that the PS3 is a video game console with a TV display, not another computer platform that everyone accesses the Web from. Displays are not TVs, and most of us don't have high-res flat-panel TVs in our living room.

 

Consoles are sold at a loss to make up for with game sales. If you could install one OS and run all sorts of games on it that aren't designed for it and have no royalty payments to Sony.. it wouldn't fly. Sony has the VAIOs, and OSX is not a DVR/gaming system.

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Sony has made it very clear that they intend the Playstation 3 to be more than just a game console. As opposed to the XBox 360 which will be locked down, Sony will official support at least Linux on the Playstation 3, just Sony has released a Playstation 2 Linux Kit: http://playstation2-linux.com/

 

The real problems with OS X on the Playstation 3 really come to down to hardware, only 256 MB of RAM, albeit it is XDR, you have to buy the harddrive kit for another $100 or so, and then OS X itself will not run that well on the Cell's single PPE core.

 

In sort, I think that OS X will be good enough on the Playstation 3 for a lot people who want just a taste, but be sufficiently handicapped not to undercut Mac Mini sales. By the time one purchase the hard drive kit and OS X itself, the total Playstation 3 bill will about $600-700, while we know that a Mini is only $500. I really do not see what Apple has to lose here.

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True. However, who wants to use OSX on a TV? :huh: The vast majority of TVs out there are not that high resolution. LCD TVs are being adopted, but they're not prevalent yet. There are various TVin > VGA/DVI adapters, but again, not too prevalent.

 

I doubt the gameconsole computer idea is going to take off, but that's a different argument.

 

It would be very simple to port (not even port, just adapt) OSX to the Playstation 3. Distribution costs may make this unlikely, though. Few people are willing to download OSX, so they will have to be sold in a locked fashion.

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OS X on every third PC?

 

Who should buy the OS? I don't see how that many people could be interested in it. Even if every geek on the planet bought OS X, I don't think that market shares would go significantly over 10, perhaps 15%.

 

In the mid-90s Microsoft dropped support of it's office suite for Mac, and Apple fell into a tail spin. A lot of us thought that the end of Apple was near, and a lot of people abandoned the platform. We would like to get back into the Mac arena. I however was a Mac owner in the mid-90s, and I hung on to Apple, clinging to the idea that OS X would bring Apple's market share up... I was wrong. Personally I LOVE the Mac OS X operating system -- far superior to Windows, but I feel a bit burned by my experiances with Apple, and while I hoped they would continue to grow in market share.

 

Market share gives you strength on your platform. Compare the products developed for Wintel to what is developed for Mac. Personally I think there are a lot of former Mac fans who would like a way back in, along with a lot of Linux users who are attracted to the Unix based OS, with the awesome desktop, and the windows user that is fed up with Windows and it's viruses. I think if Apple made OS X work on as many Intel systems as they can, that would give them 20 - 30% market share. At that level, Developer's will take you seriously.

 

Right now Apple is a hardware company that makes software, when they need to be a software company that makes hardware. They've been sitting on an OS that has the Power of BSD behind the most user friendly Aqua interface for six or seven years, and have gained nothing in Market share. Apple may do what it has to to make money, but this will be short lived. If they don't gain market share they will go out just like the Amiga, Atari, Commodore, Sinclair etc. etc.

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There's a big difference between the Windows 95 days and now, however. While you make some good points, 20% of the market in 1996 is probably, at most, 2-5% today. Thanks to the WWW, computer usage has exploded.

 

UNIX GUI is horrible, even when compared to Windows. Sure, it's ugly, but it's slow and unresponsive, and way too flexible. X11 is too layered. You have X, a DE, and an app. Sounds simple, but you have ninety thousand different toolkits, including Qt and GTK+, which are each used by 40% of Linux users. And Qt is dual-licensed, and there's all this useless politics between X implementations.

 

Since everything is flexible (actually, it's more non-standardized), nothing is compatible. There are awesome apps for GNOME and KDE. Every interoperability project is a hack, unless you install some obscure, untested component.

 

Mac OS users try to avoid X11 whenever possible. That's why OpenOffice has few users outside of the UNIX migrators. Windows, at least, has a standard widget set and desktop which every app uses.

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The xbox 360 will not be that locked down. ipods sync perfectly with it allowing you to controll your ipod through the 360 and play music through your home theater set up. It also syncs with the PSP allowing you to play movies through the 360, and if you have a hard drive it will function as a media PVR and can pull files from your network.

http://www.1up.com/flat/News/Videos/3142843_video2.html

 

 

EDIT: fixed link

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True. However, who wants to use OSX on a TV? :huh: The vast majority of TVs out there are not that high resolution. LCD TVs are being adopted, but they're not prevalent yet. There are various TVin > VGA/DVI adapters, but again, not too prevalent.

 

In addition to analog TV video outputs, the PS3 has two HDMI outputs, each of which can drive HDTV 1080p which is 1920 × 1080 at 30 frames per second. Sure, you will have to get an adapter to go from HDMI to VGA or DVI but that will be a $20 item given the volumes associated with the PS3.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3

 

Really, I think that there are only two compelling reasons why Apple will not release OS X for Playstation 3. First, they are worried about undercutting Mac sales, even though that reallly should not be a serious problem here. Second, releasing OS X for Playstation 3 would effectively be a declaration of war against Microsoft, and I am not sure if Apple is ready to do that yet, especially when being in the middle of a tricky hardware transition.

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That's just it - only "HD-ready" TVs can handle that resolution. It's going to be useless on that CRT TV that no one plans to replace.

 

How much of the market is willing to buy that adapter and use it? And, for that matter, how exactly do consoles factor in PC market share?

 

I don't understand why everyone is obsessed with this video console as computer idea. For portability, it does make sense to have one device, but game consoles are for gaming. Computers are for computing. I doubt we'll see a massive mental shift in public perception of consoles that will make this feasible.

 

The two reasons you state are obvious. Microsoft doesn't manufacture a desktop OS for the Xbox, anyway. They seem to be fairly against this concept.

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That's just it - only "HD-ready" TVs can handle that resolution. It's going to be useless on that CRT TV that no one plans to replace.

I guess I really do not understand what the problem is, no matter what kind of display you have there is a simply way to use it. On a normal CRT TV, you can go with composite video and some kind of an adapter (80 ohm coaxial or whatever one needs).

 

I don't understand why everyone is obsessed with this video console as computer idea.

Well, I do not hear many people talking about it, but while we are on the subject, I think that gaming continues to be a major flaw in Apple's strategy. From the iPod to Mac Mini to the higher end, I think that Apple should present some kind of unified gaming platform and if necessary partner with Sony on it. I mean from what I can tell, the real competition with the iPod is the PlayStationPortable, and now it is clear that both are converging on video.

 

Otherwise, if we look back to the early '80s, we can see that the dual-use computer/gaming console is a viable niche. Even the Apple ][ was such a device when it comes down to it, let alone the likes of Commodore and Atari. Now given that new game consoles are already setup for network play and some people want a low cost web surfer, not to mention a digitial hub, I think we may see history repeat.

 

Certainly, HDTV's will be much better computer displays than the normal TV's that were used in the '80s. Microsoft is headed in this direction with the XP Media Center edition, so is Apple to the extent that Mac Mini is a video console without games, and today we saw Apple announce the FrontRow remote control system with new iMac. Even the iPod is a video console, it is designed to drive a TV.

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