[driven]

Check out this article:

Bashes Windows ... praises Apple ... from John Dvorak ...

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1840479,00.asp

[Millennium]

He's been doing that ever since Apple went for cheap-over-good, just as he always said they should do. I think he's in for a severe disappointment, personally,

[sek929]

I think he severely overestimates the Windows world switching to the Mac OS. Even with x86 behind it I still think the Mac OS will be tiny portion of the market. Vista may not be creating any buzz but everyone will just use it and adopt it anyways, probably because it'll be XP with a few "new" features.

But I do agree that the Mac OS is the best around. And if I could, say, build my own MP PC box and throw Tiger on it.... suhweeet.

[mitchell_pgh]

While I'm a MAJOR Mac fan, I see areas where Apple needs a considerable amount of work.

The iLife and iWork packages need more substance for the average users. As an average user, I'm using iPhoto and iTunes... and that's about it. iMovie, GarageBand and iDVD are very cool, but I just don't use them. Maybe 3-4 times a year.

iCal could be added to iWork and expanded CONSIDERABLY. There could be a whole "task tracking" component added to it with a great PDF export feature for those damn windows users.

A basic spreadsheet package could be created for Keynote... and ultimately expanded to a full blown application.

[sek929]

iCal has never been updated on my Mac. Who needs it with a Gary Larson desktop calendar?

iTunes and iPhoto are the only two I use, but they are way better than anything I've seen on the PC side.

The OS is damn solid now, even though I'm only on Panther. Its still makes my QS run like a new machine (new-ish). 10.1 did that for 10.0.4, 10.2 did it for 10.1, and so on and so forth.

The Mac OS seems like the only OS to steadily evolve into a much better amalgamation of itself. Instead of just slapping together new technology under the same damn Pinto-esque shell.

[mitchell_pgh]

Originally Posted by Millennium

He's been doing that ever since Apple went for cheap-over-good, just as he always said they should do. I think he's in for a severe disappointment, personally,

I wouldn't say Apple has chosen cheap over good. I feel Apple has chosen survival... I still run into people that say "Apple's hardware is SO expensive!" when in reality, it's now rather reasonable. The x86 switch is one more area where Apple is choosing survival. They will do very well with Intel CPUs in their computers.

[FulcrumPilot]

What if M$ buys Apple in a hostile take over?

[jasonsRX7]

Originally Posted by mitchell_pgh

I still run into people that say "Apple's hardware is SO expensive!" when in reality, it's now rather reasonable.

It is reasonable, especially considering what you get, but when someone gets their mind set on a Dell with 17" LCD for $449, it's hard to make them look at anything else.

[mitchell_pgh]

Originally Posted by jasonsRX7

It is reasonable, especially considering what you get, but when someone gets their mind set on a Dell with 17" LCD for $449, it's hard to make them look at anything else.

That's not what I'm up against. I'm fighting the people that are still stuck in the late 90's when the hardware was two or three times more expensive (if not more).

[ghporter]

John is a very "black and white" sort of person, at least in print. He sees things-or at least writes about them-in extremes. And he's usually wrong with his predictions, too. He gets the basic trends right, but not the timing nor the market penetration of anything. He's fun to read, and he comes up with some oddball gadgets sometimes, but don't consider him to have a guaranteed crystal ball.

But he brings up interesting and very valid points. What is Vista but a (rather late) attempt to make a Windows version of OS X? Not much...

[King Bob On The Cob]

Originally Posted by FulcrumPilot

What if M$ buys Apple in a hostile take over?

Doesn't Steve Jobs own enough Apple stock to prevent a hostile takeover unless he approved it?

[jasonsRX7]

Originally Posted by FulcrumPilot

What if M$ buys Apple in a hostile take over?

Why bother, they can already copy Apple for free

[greenamp]

Originally Posted by FulcrumPilot

What if M$ buys Apple in a hostile take over?

I wonder if the Feds would even allow that?

[Salty]

Holy frick... this is the same Dvorak? Creepy...

Anyway, I don't think once Apple switches to x86 we'll suddenly see unit sales triple over night. I think what we will see is a slow climb over the next few years up from the small percentage we are of the overall world wide user base to a much higher number, say 15 percent of all personal computers shipped to home users could be Apple computers in the near future. I don't know if I'd really wanna get any higher than that... after that Apple would probably become too Dell or HP like. But with that much in sales Apple could certainly afford to pump more money into things like iLife and iWork and what not.

That said, where iLife and iWork need to grow:
iLife:
iPhoto/iTunes for video, DON'T EXPAND iTUNES itself into video! Though I bet they will... with 4.8 they added the ability to have video in there... I don't mind that for things like music videos. But either they need to allow for a separate library for videos, or they need to come up with a new way of doing things.
Really though I would like to see an iBox office or something that'd let you watch your DVDs as well as potentially buy new ones, but I think that's coming anyway.
After that I'm not sure if this should be in iWork or iLife, but a light drawing app, yes we have a few available for the Mac most notably PS Elements, but to be honest lately that's looking more and more like a Windows clone all the time, and I don't trust Adobe... Actually what would be great is if Apple bought Fireworks off Macromedia before or after the merger with Adobe and fixed up it's interface, and tweaked the feature set. But I imagine that might take more time than just writing an app from scratch to do the same sort of thing. But anyway an app less designed upfront for Photo retouching, and more for drawing, or even animating something that'd work in an iMovie project.

iWork needs a spread sheet app, which I imagine is on it's way as I speak, Pages needs to continue to gain more features until it's at least somewhat genuinely competitive with Word, but looking at the way Apple software grows I have few worries. And Keynote is already awesome, they just need to continue to grow it's feature set and being to look at the companies outside of PowerPoint as their competition since there are still a few innovative presentation app houses out there.

After those are added I'm having trouble thinking of where Apple could expand their software offerings haha... which is nice to be able to say.

Which brings us to hardware!
Or rather distributed computing! With things like FCP, Logic, and other high power apps, Apple should look at a way to make networked hardware more useful.
As well I think the big feature for X.5 should be sync. Of couse I'm bias because I'm gona be having a PowerMac and an PowerBook soon. But the ability to keep multiple Macs in a house synced is going to be more and more useful/important to help Apple grow market share.
Fact is I should be able to have one music library across my whole house, be it a PowerMac, my kid (which I don't have but someone else might) should be able to use it on his iMac, and so on. Let's look at this from a family setup.

Dad has his work station at work,
PowerMac at home,
And perhaps an iBook for on the road,
Mom has an older iMac she uses for her stuff,
and the kids Suzy and Billy each share a Mac mini in the basement.
They're all connected by an AirPort network.

Billy and Suzy's iTunes libraries should be able to be viewed by each-other, and files should be able to be copied back and forth between the two libraries, though Suzy should be able to keep her brother from knowing everything that she has, for example she downloaded an Avril song that she's a bit ashamed of, she can put it on a black list that her brother can't see.
That said Dad should be able to check up on the kids and see what each of them are listening to, or be able to remotely be told what website Billy is on at the moment.

Mom should be able to log in to her own mail.app at the same time since her husband is phoning form a trip somewhere, she should be able to click through on her iMac and see if he has any new e-mails he should check on his iBook.

There should of course be a family photo album that only the admin/parents control what can be added or deleted from.
As well Dad's iBook and PowerMac will always keep in sync any graphic work or pages documents he's been doing, as well as photos, but will not sync the scratch disk from his Final Cut Pro work (unless he specifically asked it to which on a laptop's HD would be not done often I imagine).

And of course anyone can sync their iPod on any computer in the house.

What I'm saying is I think Apple should be doing their best to make the computer more like the real world. If you wanna borrow music to someone you can, if you wanna share your photos you can without much work. But with a few more places you can lock people out if you don't want them in.

[DeathMan]

Originally Posted by Salty

Holy frick... this is the

[about 10 pages of crap]

But with a few more places you can lock people out if you don't want them in.

you keep posting that much text, plus all this "i'm the coolest kid at my school" and you're getting on the ole' ignore list. So far its only link, benign, and budster, so if you're on my list, you know you're doing something wrong.

Just saying what everyone else is thinking.

[MacIntel]

Originally Posted by sek929

iTunes and iPhoto are the only two I use, but they are way better than anything I've seen on the PC side.

Well, at least one out of two.

[Sosa]

Originally Posted by DeathMan

you keep posting that much text, plus all this "i'm the coolest kid at my school" and you're getting on the ole' ignore list. So far its only link, benign, and budster, so if you're on my list, you know you're doing something wrong.

Just saying what everyone else is thinking.

I fail to see what is objectionable about his post. Yours however, I could do without.

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by mitchell_pgh

That's not what I'm up against. I'm fighting the people that are still stuck in the late 90's when the hardware was two or three times more expensive (if not more).

It's still like that many places (here, for instance).

A friend of mine is buying a P4, 3 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 80 GB HD, 15" widescreen PC laptop in a while, for about 8000 DKK; I paid 22.500 DKK for my 17" PB (1 GB RAM, 100 GB HD, 1.67 GHz, the rest of the specs are about the same). Adjust for the specs mine has on his, and you're still left with a machine that's at least twice as expensive as a PC.

Edit: More, actually: mine was bought with a 10% educational discount, his is standard price.

[olePigeon]

Originally Posted by Oisín

It's still like that many places (here, for instance).

A friend of mine is buying a P4, 3 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 80 GB HD, 15" widescreen PC laptop in a while, for about 8000 DKK; I paid 22.500 DKK for my 17" PB (1 GB RAM, 100 GB HD, 1.67 GHz, the rest of the specs are about the same). Adjust for the specs mine has on his, and you're still left with a machine that's at least twice as expensive as a PC.

Edit: More, actually: mine was bought with a 10% educational discount, his is standard price.

I haven't seen a PC laptop that's as slick as a PowerBook. Nor does any PC laptop run OS X. Sure, I wouldn't mind a cheaper Mac, but I think the higher costs are justified (but there is a markup because of market.)

You know why PCs are cheap? We got some Gateways for work. 3.4GHz, 1GB of RAM, flat panel, etc. for something like $400. Seems like a great price. A little less than half of the LCD displays had 1 to 4 dead pixels (minimum of 7 to replace it.) The PCs didn't come with any CDs or software, it comes with a flyer telling you to BUY CD-R disks and burn a Windows Restore CD. They don't give you any OS or software disks. Some of the PCs only have CD-ROMs (they were the bargain bin for admin...) so that makes it somewhat impossible to make Windows Recovery CDs.

The worse part is that that means you HAVE to backup all the extra CRAP that's installed by vendors. So every time you restore your PC, you have delete all that AOL, Prodigy, Real, etc. from the computer.

No only that, but the keyboard an mouse feel like they're made of cheapass plastic and are gonna break any second.

On top of that, they ship in brown boxes with inflatable packaging. It just looks like sh*t.

I don't mind paying the extra money (of course, it may just be the graphic designer in me) because I actually enjoy the top-notch packing materials and design. Not too many companies put just as much thought into the packaging of their products as they do in the products themselves.

F*ck Gateway and Dell. I like my Macintoshes. I like the style. It's fun when people stare at my PowerBook, whisper, and smile. I also think it's kinda cool that when another Mac user comes up and you start talkin' about your Mac gear, you pretty much have an instant friend. You just don't see people with Dells doing that.

[Oisín]

Don't get me wrong—I willingly pay the extra money too. I was merely pointing out that from a purely economical perspective, Macs are generally almost twice as expensive as PC's are, over here anyway.

[ghporter]

Mac laptops wipe the floor, walls and ceilings with PC laptops. There is no comparison! We got my wife an iBook for school because it was the best bang for the buck. It still is. PowerBooks are far better "performance" laptops than any "performance" PC laptop I've ever seen, particularly when you factor in that those PC laptops weigh a ton (my Inspiron 8200 weighs about 8 pounds WITHOUT the charger).

Further, the phrase "you get what you pay for" is very much applicable to "inexpensive" PCs. If you buy a complete PC for $800, you get a CHEAP PC. If you spend that much to build one yourself, you can get a decent machine, but then you have to buy all the software, and of course do all the support yourself. I've done that several times-I'm using my home-built AMD 2400-based PC right now. For the typical consumer, it's far better to pay more for a higher end PC machine and get a good quality product than to save some money up front and then bleed $50-100 at a time to get the darn thing fixed. (I will not go anywhere near the issue of users being able to easily hose up their PCs because they think they know far more than they do about them.)

[Salty]

I just convinced a friend to get an iBook... I feel warm inside

[Salty]

Originally Posted by DeathMan

you keep posting that much text, plus all this "i'm the coolest kid at my school" and you're getting on the ole' ignore list. So far its only link, benign, and budster, so if you're on my list, you know you're doing something wrong.

Just saying what everyone else is thinking.

Wow... after 6000 something posts you decide to put me on your ignore list? And by the way... I wasn't the coolest guy on campus, I was the loudest and one of the best known. And in a small school being an outspoken, well dressed, Mac using, large person... it's kinda hard not to get well known.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by DeathMan

you keep posting that much text, plus all this "i'm the coolest kid at my school" and you're getting on the ole' ignore list. So far its only link, benign, and budster, so if you're on my list, you know you're doing something wrong.

Just saying what everyone else is thinking.

Speak for yourself, SuperChicken/Salty is okay in my book.

He has been polite, civil, and big hearted. Sometimes he takes people's bait and responds emotionally (and people often respond with "that isn't very Christian of you, which is really unfair and complete BS), but at least he isn't mean-spirted and rude.

I hope you feel better announcing to him that he's been put on your ignore list, and in the process possibly hurting his feelings. Would it have been a problem to quietly put him on your ignore list, or do you expect him to cater to what you consider a proper posting methodology?

I'm able to live blissfully ignorant of all of the ignore lists I'm on, so can he.

[driven]

besson was just saying what some others were thinking.

[Salty]

Originally Posted by besson3c

Speak for yourself, SuperChicken/Salty is okay in my book.

He has been polite, civil, and big hearted. Sometimes he takes people's bait and responds emotionally (and people often respond with "that isn't very Christian of you, which is really unfair and complete BS), but at least he isn't mean-spirted and rude.

I hope you feel better announcing to him that he's been put on your ignore list, and in the process possibly hurting his feelings. Would it have been a problem to quietly put him on your ignore list, or do you expect him to cater to what you consider a proper posting methodology?

I'm able to live blissfully ignorant of all of the ignore lists I'm on, so can he.

Why thank you kind sir