i find it ironic that this thread is in response to a Jobs quote that says basically, "while i was gone, they worried about profits and not market share, so they almost failed" and then most of these threads are saying "Well, they may not have marketshare now, but at least they have profits!"
Microsoft is nothing close to complacent. They are just huge. I've seen in the last 6 months 4 separate "builds" of longhorn's GUI, and some of the underlying features look potentially pretty revolutionary.
The xBox is holding a LOT of their attention, and the whole Media PC thing (where is apple on this market???), not to mention MS is waiting patiently for 3rd party developers to flesh out the latest stuff on DirectX so they can see safely where to focus in DX9. They are waiting for BTX and PCI X-16 and 64-bit to all become truly standardized and to gain some marketshare of their own.
Demanding users drive the market. The most demanding computer users are Creative professionals and gamers. "Serious" gamers outnumber the creative professionals (i am both) about 10 to 1, and as a result, the competition and hardware innovation in PCs (because mac gaming is, let's face it, pretty sad), is extremely aggressive by comparison. My home box (a hand-built 800 dollar PC) had 240GB of SATA RAID 0 and 7.1 surround, dual 100/T, the REAL 9600 Pro (128mb), 1.5GB of PC 3200 (overclocked to ~3800), and a load of other crap when I built it in May of last year. My benchmarks in every single dual-platform game are consistently 20-200% higher than those posted by Dual G5 players.
I appreciate OS X a great deal, and I'm glad it is finally working properly, but why did I have to pay for Jaguar? 10.1 was to put it mildly, beta software.
The most useful thing about Panther is Expose, which is about 6 years overdue (the windows button that shows the desktop appeared in Win98). The only other useful change is that they made the Finder windows less friggin' retarded. hardly 130 dollars worth of innovation.
Apple has a good chip with the G5, but they need to let go of the reigns. If you let the 3rd party hardware world get their hands on a mobo schematic and give them free reign to work on the G5, you'd see 1.6 Ghz boxes that could actually keep up with P4 gaming machines. And if you want to know the truth, all the system resources that graphic designers and professional musicians use are the same ones that gamers use. We need constant, reliable through-put, quick access times and fast drive read/write, and we need flexible, fast, and consistent data processing, and we need a stable environment. We also need the cutting edge, and Apple is currently at the mercy of 2 companies when it comes to that. ATI and IBM. So far, they have held up the deal pretty well, but i question how much true support a 2% market is going to maintain for ATI, when they are chipping heavily into nVidia's market on the PC side. They secured the next xBox already, and the 9X00 series has dominated the FX5 series across the price-board. If ATI decided that the ACD display connection was too much trouble, what would Apple do? They can't really force their hand with a 2% marketshare, now can they?
AMD is pushing fast, and whatever Apple's selected benchmark test may say, the FX single processor is on par with the G5 dual, and it's cheaper if you get it anywhere other than Alienware (the world's most overpriced PCs). Commercially available overclocking solutions already have the 2.2 GHz FX-51 running at a stable 2.8 GHz, which figures in at about a Pentium 4.5 Ghz in 32 bit mode and God-knows-how-fast in 64 bit mode.
In short, I wish I could run OS X on a PC, because I could do some incredible things for a lot less money than Apple wants to force me to pay.
My 8,000 dollar UMAX scanner (the PL 3000) still doesn't work with OS X as of Panther, even though it's worked in windows XP for almost 3 years now...I must keep an old G3 booting 9.2.2 just to get a decent scan done.
By the way, last week I bought a great new cordless mouse and keyboard, and to check it out i plugged it in on my PC at home, and it worked (even all the "extra" buttons on the keyboard) without even needing a restart or inserting a driver disc or anything. It just started working.
I took it here to work, and found myself needing to not only install drivers for OS X, but also to download additional drivers for the scroll wheel on the mouse to work. I don't want to hear about that crap ever again. I use a Mac every day, and I want to, but I'm making so many concessions with it that I shouldn't be. I'm "right down Apple's ally" because I spend all day in Adobe programs building pages and graphics, even cutting some music on the side, but I need to use my PC for the audio stuff because none of my cards work in a G5.
Microsoft is nothing close to complacent. They are just huge. I've seen in the last 6 months 4 separate "builds" of longhorn's GUI, and some of the underlying features look potentially pretty revolutionary.
The xBox is holding a LOT of their attention, and the whole Media PC thing (where is apple on this market???), not to mention MS is waiting patiently for 3rd party developers to flesh out the latest stuff on DirectX so they can see safely where to focus in DX9. They are waiting for BTX and PCI X-16 and 64-bit to all become truly standardized and to gain some marketshare of their own.
Demanding users drive the market. The most demanding computer users are Creative professionals and gamers. "Serious" gamers outnumber the creative professionals (i am both) about 10 to 1, and as a result, the competition and hardware innovation in PCs (because mac gaming is, let's face it, pretty sad), is extremely aggressive by comparison. My home box (a hand-built 800 dollar PC) had 240GB of SATA RAID 0 and 7.1 surround, dual 100/T, the REAL 9600 Pro (128mb), 1.5GB of PC 3200 (overclocked to ~3800), and a load of other crap when I built it in May of last year. My benchmarks in every single dual-platform game are consistently 20-200% higher than those posted by Dual G5 players.
I appreciate OS X a great deal, and I'm glad it is finally working properly, but why did I have to pay for Jaguar? 10.1 was to put it mildly, beta software.
The most useful thing about Panther is Expose, which is about 6 years overdue (the windows button that shows the desktop appeared in Win98). The only other useful change is that they made the Finder windows less friggin' retarded. hardly 130 dollars worth of innovation.
Apple has a good chip with the G5, but they need to let go of the reigns. If you let the 3rd party hardware world get their hands on a mobo schematic and give them free reign to work on the G5, you'd see 1.6 Ghz boxes that could actually keep up with P4 gaming machines. And if you want to know the truth, all the system resources that graphic designers and professional musicians use are the same ones that gamers use. We need constant, reliable through-put, quick access times and fast drive read/write, and we need flexible, fast, and consistent data processing, and we need a stable environment. We also need the cutting edge, and Apple is currently at the mercy of 2 companies when it comes to that. ATI and IBM. So far, they have held up the deal pretty well, but i question how much true support a 2% market is going to maintain for ATI, when they are chipping heavily into nVidia's market on the PC side. They secured the next xBox already, and the 9X00 series has dominated the FX5 series across the price-board. If ATI decided that the ACD display connection was too much trouble, what would Apple do? They can't really force their hand with a 2% marketshare, now can they?
AMD is pushing fast, and whatever Apple's selected benchmark test may say, the FX single processor is on par with the G5 dual, and it's cheaper if you get it anywhere other than Alienware (the world's most overpriced PCs). Commercially available overclocking solutions already have the 2.2 GHz FX-51 running at a stable 2.8 GHz, which figures in at about a Pentium 4.5 Ghz in 32 bit mode and God-knows-how-fast in 64 bit mode.
In short, I wish I could run OS X on a PC, because I could do some incredible things for a lot less money than Apple wants to force me to pay.
My 8,000 dollar UMAX scanner (the PL 3000) still doesn't work with OS X as of Panther, even though it's worked in windows XP for almost 3 years now...I must keep an old G3 booting 9.2.2 just to get a decent scan done.
By the way, last week I bought a great new cordless mouse and keyboard, and to check it out i plugged it in on my PC at home, and it worked (even all the "extra" buttons on the keyboard) without even needing a restart or inserting a driver disc or anything. It just started working.
I took it here to work, and found myself needing to not only install drivers for OS X, but also to download additional drivers for the scroll wheel on the mouse to work. I don't want to hear about that crap ever again. I use a Mac every day, and I want to, but I'm making so many concessions with it that I shouldn't be. I'm "right down Apple's ally" because I spend all day in Adobe programs building pages and graphics, even cutting some music on the side, but I need to use my PC for the audio stuff because none of my cards work in a G5.
