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Apple's New 27-Inch iMacs Experiencing Performance Issues?
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What's scarier is how much time anti-Apple zealots spend on Mac forums. Kind of sad, really.This superstitious nonsense is beginning to verge on delusional. Kind of scary, really.
So Microsoft is once again pressured into maintaining multiple languages and APIs, partly because of their own technical missteps, partly because most of their developers are IT drones incapable of learning anything new and partly because their latest preferred language still can't replace the old one for high performance applications. Apple, on the other hand, already has a single development tool chain that's equally well suited to high level and performance intensive apps. When you're lucky enough to have something as technically elegant as Objective C, Cocoa and the Mac developer tools and nearly all of your developers are already using them, it makes sense to retire the legacy alternatives. Microsoft is not so lucky, otherwise they would do the same thing.
"devalue the userbase"? Does that even mean anything?
I guess that would be the same "inferior OS" used to produce major motion pictures and most records these days. Given that playing a low res video is infinitely simpler than high end video editing and audio production, maybe the problem is with this particular video player rather than the platform.
At one point, IE was accepted by almost everyone as a standard. A lot of people thought all other browsers should emulate it. Those people were wrong.
Regarding your brilliant idea of emulating a PC on OS X, first, you can already do that if you like. You have lots of options (e.g. virtual box, parallels, VMware fusion). Second, if my favorite Mac-only applications (and there are tons of them) don't run on Windows, is it Microsoft's responsibility to do whatever it takes to make them work, even if it means emulating OS X?
On my Mac Pro, a flash video will peg the CPU at aver 100% for the duration of play. While a full screen 1080p movie trailer streamed from apple.com only user about 5% of the cpu. So, yeah, flash runs like ass. BTW that Mac Pro has the 7300GT, so it's not the GPU helping the 1080 video.
Tell that to the people switching to Windows x64 for Photoshop/CS4 in 64-bit....
Forcing your partners to do massive rewrites of their applications with little or no benefit to the partners' customers is not the Microsoft way. It does seem to be the way Apple works. (See How Apple dropped the ball on 64-bit pro apps, and how Apple stands to profit for another example.)
While it makes sense to drop the 32-bit kernel in 10.7 (I've argued that it would have been OK to drop it in 10.6), I doubt that either Carbon or the 32-bit application support will be touched.
So much stuff would not work on 10.7 without Carbon and 32-bit that it would make the Vista transition look as smooth as glass.
Tell that to the people switching to Windows x64 for Photoshop/CS4 in 64-bit....
Forcing your partners to do massive rewrites of their applications with little or no benefit to the partners' customers is not the Microsoft way. It does seem to be the way Apple works. (See How Apple dropped the ball on 64-bit pro apps, and how Apple stands to profit for another example.)
Did ya miss this part Aiden ?
"Blame Apple: If Apple had not discontinued the 64-bit port of Carbon, Adobe could have shipped Photoshop CS4 as a 64-bit Mac OS X application as planned. At WWDC 2006, there were many sessions about developing 64-bit Carbon applications. At WWDC 2007, 64-bit Carbon was canceled. Adobe found this out the same time everyone else did, at WWDC. By canceling 64-bit Carbon so suddenly, Apple screwed Adobe.
Blame Adobe: The death of Carbon was inevitable. Adobe should have seen it coming and planned accordingly. It's been clear for years that Cocoa offers many advantages to Mac application developers. Adobe should have started its Cocoa port of Photoshop years ago. By willfully ignoring Cocoa for so long, Adobe screwed Apple."
With the transition to Intel everybody should have seen this coming.
Not just Apple.
I'm glad you asked! Obviously, "technically elegant" is subjective, but I'll try to explain why most programmers who've used Objective C feel that way.
First, its Smalltalk-like syntax has some advantages over traditional C-like OO languages. For instance, method names describe their arguments unambiguously:
Code:
[myString stringByPaddingToLength:20 withString:myString startingAtIndex:10];
Code:
myString.stringByPaddingToLength(20, myString, 10);The second example is shorter, but you can't be certain which integer is which without looking up the method's signature. In the Objective C example, the meaning of each argument is clear.
A more defining characteristic of Objective C is its use of runtime message sending (vs. e.g. statically typed method invocations). Messages between objects are resolved at runtime based on their name and argument types rather than on the type of the receiving object. This provides a form of dynamic typing on par with high level scripting languages like JavaScript or Ruby, and, like those languages, gives you a tremendous amount of flexibility. You can also use static typing where appropriate, so you don't lose type-checking altogether like you do in JavaScript.
Unlike interpreted or VM-based languages, Obj C is compiled down to native code, so you pay only a very small price for its dynamic capabilities. Also unlike higher level languages, you have a choice to use garbage collection (and incur some extra CPU overhead) or manual memory management, which is appropriate for certain high performance apps and especially useful in memory-constrained environments (e.g. phones).
Objective C is also a strict superset of ANSI C, so it's much simpler than C++ and easy to drop into plain C when/if you need to. Like the choice of using garbage collection, the ability to use C transparently allows you to make tradeoffs as you see fit without having to switch to an entirely different language or infrastructure.
So a highly condensed answer to your question is that Objective C is technically elegant because it combines desirable aspects of both high and low level languages and is well suited for a wide variety of applications. An admittedly simplistic view is that while everyone else is arguing about the relative merits of compiled vs. managed code, Objective C is already giving you the best of both worlds along with dynamic features not found in Java/C# or C++.
Like any other language, you would have to actually write some apps in Objective C to judge its relative "technical elegance." If you own a Mac you already have all the dev tools for free, so get your hands dirty and see what you think! I highly recommend Aaron Hillegass' book if you're interested.
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The Stephen Kochan book is better if you dont know any C language.
I learnt that the hard way. D:
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Oh, are there a lot of them? Because it doesn't seem to have affected Mac sales.Tell that to the people switching to Windows x64 for Photoshop/CS4 in 64-bit....
"Not the Microsoft way", that's a joke, right? Microsoft screwed visual basic developers (not a small group of customers), they screwed their music hardware and content partners (with the Zune), they meant to screw their WinMo partners but ended up just screwing a bunch of T-Mobile Sidekick users and themselves, they screwed the entire PC industry through collusion with OEMs (weren't they convicted of that?), they almost screwed the entire internet (I know they were convicted of that) and they tried to screw the audio/video industry by pushing their proprietary, inferior ASF/WMV/WMA formats over MPEG4. And those are just off the top of my head.
By the way, the guy you linked to says this about his own post: "Baseless speculation? Of course." I agree with him. I also notice that his post is about a year and a half old. So I'm still waiting to hear about the droves of partners and developers complaining about the lack of 64 bit Carbon (as in, the present tense, not a year and a half ago).
Well it's a little late for the Vista transition to ever "look as smooth as glass". I think the half billion marketing dollars Microsoft flushed down the toilet when they dumped the Vista brand is a pretty good indication that it didn't go so well.
Apple and Adobe need to put their heads together and find a way to optimize the performance of Flash on Macs. Moreover, when will we be able to view Flash-enabled web sites on our iPhones? Can't believe they couldn't find a workable solution for all this time
Dang NSMonkey, you really are up Apple's behind on this stuff. But with a handle that features "NS" I guess that is to be expected.
As a user and programmer on each platform, I'd say both have their strengths and weaknesses. And I find Win7 to be far far more functional than OSX overall. Yes, people do use Macs to make studio albums and movies. But there are a bunch of studios switching over to PC based Avid and away from Logic in general as well. Apple's tight lipped never-tell-the-customer-what-is-coming method of doing things does NOT work well in the pro "whatever" industry. Companies want support, and they want to know what to expect. This isn't how Apple does things, and I think it will be interesting to see where they go with their computer line in the next few years. Same with the pro apps. Their handling of Logic has been nothing short of abysmal, going from a bug ridden 8.0.2 to (a bug ridden) version 9. Many users SWORE there was no way version 9 was coming out soon since Apple hadn't even fixed the two year old bugs from version 8. Yet some of those bugs still live on. FCP equally benefits from entrechment. It is behind the other software packages as well pretty much. I have to say, using OSX feels like doing what Steve Jobs wants me to do. There is very little choice, practically no customization, and you're pretty much plugged into the Apple ecosystem for apps, and a few other choices. Windows 7 feels quite liberating. It is fast, stable, and does many things nicer than OSX. Of course, I'm sure all you, and many others, will offer is a pejorative directed towards Windows such as "I would never touch that garbage!" even though you don't really know how well it works.
Despite their higher numbers lately Apple is still a tiny tiny minority of the computing industry. Sure, they do some things well, but they also do other things extremely extremely poorly. In my mind they are a marketing company first, and a tech company second. I also view them similar to a nice looking girl with no brains. At first you like what you see and you can enjoy the company for awhile, but eventually it gets old and you need more substance, and things don't look quite so nice anymore. The fact that if your machine breaks you have to take it to teenagers at a mall, is pretty hilarious in and of itself. Hardly a "pro" company in that respect. Apple is quickly starting to emphasize the consumer product category over the computing category, and what's ironic about this is they NEED Windows to make the money they do on this stuff. Had they not opened it to Windows, the iPod and iPhone would never ever sell the numbers they have.
Anyway, we have a few interesting months ahead of us, to see what exactly each platform does. I know that I have moved BACK to Windows 7 and ditched Snow Leopard (because it, and the hardware choices that go along with it suck incredibly badly) as my primary desktop platform, and I am keeping my macbook pro for my OSX/iPhone programming. That's all I use it for now. It's really inferior for everything else, and I say that as someone who just goes to where the quality is. I used OSX for years back in the G5 days. It's simply been beaten overall. I'm pretty sure I won't be the only to to come to this conclusion.
As a user and programmer on each platform, I'd say both have their strengths and weaknesses. And I find Win7 to be far far more functional than OSX overall. Yes, people do use Macs to make studio albums and movies. But there are a bunch of studios switching over to PC based Avid and away from Logic in general as well. Apple's tight lipped never-tell-the-customer-what-is-coming method of doing things does NOT work well in the pro "whatever" industry. Companies want support, and they want to know what to expect. This isn't how Apple does things, and I think it will be interesting to see where they go with their computer line in the next few years. Same with the pro apps. Their handling of Logic has been nothing short of abysmal, going from a bug ridden 8.0.2 to (a bug ridden) version 9. Many users SWORE there was no way version 9 was coming out soon since Apple hadn't even fixed the two year old bugs from version 8. Yet some of those bugs still live on. FCP equally benefits from entrechment. It is behind the other software packages as well pretty much. I have to say, using OSX feels like doing what Steve Jobs wants me to do. There is very little choice, practically no customization, and you're pretty much plugged into the Apple ecosystem for apps, and a few other choices. Windows 7 feels quite liberating. It is fast, stable, and does many things nicer than OSX. Of course, I'm sure all you, and many others, will offer is a pejorative directed towards Windows such as "I would never touch that garbage!" even though you don't really know how well it works.
Despite their higher numbers lately Apple is still a tiny tiny minority of the computing industry. Sure, they do some things well, but they also do other things extremely extremely poorly. In my mind they are a marketing company first, and a tech company second. I also view them similar to a nice looking girl with no brains. At first you like what you see and you can enjoy the company for awhile, but eventually it gets old and you need more substance, and things don't look quite so nice anymore. The fact that if your machine breaks you have to take it to teenagers at a mall, is pretty hilarious in and of itself. Hardly a "pro" company in that respect. Apple is quickly starting to emphasize the consumer product category over the computing category, and what's ironic about this is they NEED Windows to make the money they do on this stuff. Had they not opened it to Windows, the iPod and iPhone would never ever sell the numbers they have.
Anyway, we have a few interesting months ahead of us, to see what exactly each platform does. I know that I have moved BACK to Windows 7 and ditched Snow Leopard (because it, and the hardware choices that go along with it suck incredibly badly) as my primary desktop platform, and I am keeping my macbook pro for my OSX/iPhone programming. That's all I use it for now. It's really inferior for everything else, and I say that as someone who just goes to where the quality is. I used OSX for years back in the G5 days. It's simply been beaten overall. I'm pretty sure I won't be the only to to come to this conclusion.
The Stephen Kochan book is better if you dont know any C language.
I'm sure you did.
OK, I apologize if you're just joking around, but I honestly don't get the joke.
Following Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1XGTmqMt1A
The first 28 seconds on Debian 64 bit Unstable with all the latest bells and whistles for codecs was choppy audio, and opening it up in Avidemux to test the integrity results in the following Error:
No audio decoder found for this file
Save (A+V) will generate bad AVI. Save audio will work.
Save (A+V) will generate bad AVI. Save audio will work.
The presenter encoded the audio/video incorrectly.
If the person is going to complain dare I say they know how to work with audio/video tools before hand?
I seriously think that SJ looks back in disgust at what Apple has become.
Apple does the programming side of things really well, they just cant seem to implement this in their own OS. XD But then we get what windows has, they implement their own frameworks in their OS really well but its just too bad that .Net is bloated.
Not really, I simply pointed out that dropping 64 bit Carbon makes sense for Apple while spending more resources on backwards compatibility makes sense for Microsoft. It says a lot about you to call that being "up Apple's behind". Instead of calling me names, you could have chosen to actually debate some of my points, but you didn't.
Same situation here, different conclusion. And I don't go to Windows forums to tell them about it. That would be absurd.
You have a source for that? Because it's the opposite of what I hear.
Well, again that differs with my own experience and knowledge. Logic 8 and 9 have been 100% solid for me. Based on discussions on GearSlutz and other audio recording sites, most people seem to prefer Logic. You can find nightmare stories about any DAW, but Logic is one of the more stable ones.
That is incredibly vague. How is it behind other packages "as well pretty much"? I can't site hard data, but I can at least offer an anecdote about the state of FCP (which is more than you're offering). My nephew is planning to apply to NYU film school. When he asked them what he should do to prepare, they told him (among other things, I'm sure) to learn Final Cut Pro because it already is or is quickly becoming the industry standard. But maybe you know something they don't.
Nice textbook anti-Apple rant. I especially like the part where you're sure I'll say something both condescending and ignorant, sort of like telling someone they're "up Apple's behind".
Which things exactly, besides not living up to your preconceived notions?
Wow, that's deep stuff. And very original. And not pejorative at all.
Apple has always viewed a computer as a "consumer product". It's something a lot of programmers don't seem to get.
The idea that Apple needs Microsoft in order to sell iPods would be truly hilarious if it wasn't so disturbingly delusional. Apple would have made iTunes for whatever OS most people happen to have. Most people happen to have Windows.
Well, obviously you'll stop programming for a doomed, inferior platform that you personally despise so, I guess you won't be spending much time at macrumors.com from now on. We'll miss your insightful commentary but, best of luck!
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)
That's not 100% true either, because every app he still can't get running doesn't work in "XP compatibility mode". If you read the rest of the thread, you'd know I got PS7 working by copying the contents of the cd over and running the .exe from there.
Scottsdale said:Since we're setting sail to anecdote-land, my dad just called and was telling me how many of his apps post 2000 do not run in Win7, even those from as late as 2005. Wow, that's awesome!
The problem exists on both sides of the fence.
That's just not true. Can run in app in backwards compatibility mode. They're all backwards compatible and you can even select which type of OS you want it to operate in XP/95 etc.
That's not 100% true either, because every app he still can't get running doesn't work in "XP compatibility mode". If you read the rest of the thread, you'd know I got PS7 working by copying the contents of the cd over and running the .exe from there.
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)
OK, but do explain why I've never experienced these issues across over a hundred machines? Seems a little weird, don't you think?
MorphingDragon said:
OK, but do explain why I've never experienced these issues across over a hundred machines? Seems a little weird, don't you think?
Well, your tests show that it is more than half-way reasonable to split the blame between Safari and Flash Player.
However, before we do that, you should make sure you don't have 64-bit Mac Safari loading the 32-bit flash plugin. (Something I don't think the other browsers can do.) There is significant overhead to that. If that's contributing to the high cpu usage numbers you are seeing then I'd blame Adobe because they should just come out with a 64-bit plugin.
Absolutely 100% untrue!
I use 802.11n myself and experience the same problems. Dog slow OSX all the way through, with or without flash. Only a reboot or refreshing / dis-enabling Airport will fix it for maybe an hour or so.