budugu said:
I am pretty amazed at some damn corporation or an individual (taking the highest pay in the whole hitech sector)at the expense of "YOU" as a consumer is totally ok! I think Emperors of yester years would envy this. All Apple products are made in CHINA and sticking that they are designed in californa does not justify overpricing! And btw i donot think apple would ever volunteer to support your existence. I am not fighting apple's right to do waht ever they want nor your right to support it at any cost. All i was saying in response to some who asked what should apple do? i was just replying that rather than pulling such a stunt (if it were to be true),it will be better to give people more choice with the existing lines. May be i am one of those who does not care much about the platform (i regularly program in Win, OSX & Solaris).
Let's put it this way budugu, when it comes down to the entire PC industry, name me one computer company that has themselves tied to "MY" best interests. Okay... now that we've solidified that factoid, let us consider that I'm a Mac enthusiast. I don't entirely "AGREE" with everything Apple does, yet I do believe that Apple has every right as a business to return a profit by the visions of their executive staff and in a way that is conducted in a business-like approach. I'm not a Slashdot zealot drinking the Kool-aid expecting everything to be free or handed to me at such razor thin margins that every company croaks under the weight of inability to be profitable.
Beyond that... you do have a choice. Buy a PC. There you go... you can run Linux on your Mac, you can run Linux on your PC. You can run Darwin (BSD) on either/or, or any flavor of BSD on a PC box, or if you're savvy enough... port your favorite BSD to Mac based off of what is available in Darwin. Sun has Solaris for PC. If they wanted to they could likely bring Solaris to Mac if it made sense to them. Odds are no... but it's not up to Apple to make that happen if they don't care for it to happen, understand? Apple makes their own hardware roadmap, their own software roadmap, and they're entitled to do as they see fit to remain a profitable venture and don't have to make anyone else profitable if it doesn't benefit them as a company. If you dislike their approach... Jobs is not holding a gun to your head telling you to buy Apple. Pure and simple.
Also... as far as where the Mac is built. I'm sorry to say this... who really cares? I'm an American, but the Industrial revolution came about in our favor because we had the resources to become a manufacturing powerhouse when noone else had the resources.
We just came out of the Great Depression, there was tons of "CHEAP" labor working under less than desirable conditions. I'm not okaying anything... but the fact is, the world works in cycles and in America... that's where things are going. We're no longer going to be the superpower, and that's part of the passing of the guard. Tell everyone that buys at Wal Mart, Target, Best Buy, Circuit City, KMart, Sears, and other stores to quit buying Chinese goods and see what happens. Japanese and Korean cars and consumer goods. Want to throw up sanctions? Watch as the tarriffs come floating back in our face with more attached. Moral of the story... you aren't going to win, we've had our share in the spotlight. It's up to us as a country to find another way to bring profitability to manufacturing here. It's up to us as a country, our workforces, our executives, to find other profitable and capable methods to increase employment over here.
Taxes and Tarriffs?
It aiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiin't gonna work m'friend.
Apple does what they have to, to compete. At the razor thin margins that competition from Dell, HP/Compaq, Gateway, eMachines, and others exert by manufacturing their motherboards and other components overseas in China, Taiwan, Korea, etc. etc. or via subcontracting as Apple does and will continue to do (i.e. Foxconn, who also makes PC motherboards, I believe their optical drives come from overseas and have since the Mac was beige! What about the Toshiba drives in iPods? Didn't Samsung provide their LCD's for awhile? Tatung the old CRT's?)... it doesn't mean a hill of beans. You act like it changes anything? When GM is building cars in Canada, Mexico, Brazil (#1 mfg. in Brazil), and actually obtains engines for their Equinox and LaCrosse vehicles from GM factories in China. Kinda' makes the Toyota's from California and Kentucky, the Honda's from Ohio, the Isuzu and Subaru models from Indiana, and BMW and Mercedes from the Carolina's and Alabama look pretty dang good, eh? After all, the reason these companies elect to manufacture here is it's cheaper than doing so in their home markets. Hellfire to the bastions of non-nationalistic principles they are, eh?
It's a "GLOBAL" economy, it's a "GLOBAL" world, and I support Apple for being a company that makes a profit. That is after all... the American way... even if you have to go abroad to keep successful. Otherwise what is the flipping difference?!? If it's not someone working in a sweatshop overseas, it'll be an illegal alien on our shores building the machines in work environments that because of their lack of "legal" status, don't have to meet the ethical standards anyhow? Not like they'd want someone snooping into their factories to check anyhow, correct?
Given all this, unless OSX becomes stable and matured no one is going to adopt it in the industry that is for sure and they are not definitely inerested in whether apple survives or not. Even in our dept/univ there is a lot of code written for OS9 when we are trying to move to OSX, they release a new version of OSX that is not exactly compliant with the previous one and with tiger the things will again take a turn. Especially in univ like environments it is extremely painful to keep porting the code back and forth where it is not done completely professionally. At some point you donot care if it is the most prettiest thing, you want the damn thing to work. With tiger they want to go back HAL (hardware abstraction layer -win 2000 anyone?). OSX is a completely hacked version of FreeBSD and their rosy picture of interoperability with unixs is not all that true.
Once again... I care less about the industry, it is not my concern. That is Apple's concern, and if Apple wishes to reach and meet these markets then of course they will have to make it there by finding all of the necessary elements to make that happen. I'm merely looking at what is best for me... and that is I'm a Mac user, I like OS X, and OS X has Unix compatibility in some fashion. It's not to say that I really give a flying rat's tush whether or not I can run any unported BSD apps on my Mac. If someone ports it, I'll likely use it, but OS X in and of itself is merely using a UNIX foundation to build an OS off of. The fact that there's some semblance of a POSIX compliance (if there's even a laughable standard here) is merely an afterthought, and you *CAN* make it more compliant if you're savvy enough. Apple isn't in the UNIX market... they're in the Mac OS market. Get used to that idea. If it can run a Unix app... consider it a
bonus. Hellfire to the Unix-heads that weren't flipping out because OS 9 wasn't Unix compatible out of the box. Where were you then? LoL
As far as I'm concerned... comparing OS X to Windows... it's not only stable, it's mature, and quite empowering. Considering that Linux isn't on the desktop, doesn't have the breakthrough applications to get there... it's not even a consideration. BSD and others? Even less so. If someone makes a killer app. for Linux, expect Apple to exploit it (port it). Just as they did Apache. Apple merely has to look out for Apple... if it benefits me, then I'm for it. I don't care about the margins on their end as they're entitled to a profit as long as I'm not being gouged. If I feel like the pricings are out of my reach... I won't buy. Why do you think I'm on a beige 9600 with a Sonnet processor upgrade? Think about it. LoL
... after the enthusiasm and the blood rush settled down a bit... it is hard to think how this will pursuade people? ofcourse the there will be an initial knee jerk reaction, but more i think of it it will be the people who already have a mac (like us) that are going to buy it. The base model starting it at 500, any reasonable (minimum to run panther/tiger) would end up atleast at 600 (with out a monitor). There is no entry level monitor from apple anyway. I tried to hook up my powerbook with a cheap 200$ monitor, result was just hopeless graphics (worse than windows). With no way to upgrade, you are pretty much going to eat into imac and emac sales than get more people. no matter what ever 'wizardary' apple marketing can show, G4 is not a match for the P4. At 600 people get highend desktops (if you are lucky add a free flat panel), not an entry level computer.
